Hollywood Reporter says the producers of Lost have asked ABC for an extra hour in the final season. This brings the total hours to 18. Obviously, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof have mapped out the season and decided that they needed an extra hour to fill in a little more story. The final season starts filming later this summer.



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At a Bafta event, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse said they owed it to US network ABC and the fans for the sixth series to tie up as many loose ends as possible.

Lindelof said: “We won’t be vague and ambiguous – there will be a lot of answers. We feel that if we hold anything back in the final season, it would be bad. Everyone’s come this far and they want a conclusion to the story. We’ve no plans to continue the story of Lost beyond series six. My wife says ‘never say never’. I say ‘never’.”

Talking about the pressures facing them as they prepared to enter production on the sixth and final series, they promised it would not feature the complex time travel elements of series five. Instead, it would feel “more like series one”, Cuse promised, adding: “There’s a circularity to the show.”

No happy ending

The pair have also ruled out a happy ending. “Bittersweet comes with the territory,” said Lindelof. “The ending we’re aspiring to is fair. As a viewer, whenever you have five minutes left, there’s an intense sadness. The ending of series six will be different from other finales because there will be no cliffhanger.”

Despite fans’ largely unsuccessful attempts to tease plotlines from the notoriously tight-lipped executive producers, Cuse let slip that the mysterious ‘smoke monster’ would become “an interesting character in and of itself”.

“Too weird”

During pre-production on series three, Lindelof and Cuse took the unusual step of demanding a fixed number of series from ABC so that they could map out the plotlines.

Jack Bender, who directs episodes and also oversees the production team in Hawaii where much of the show is filmed, revealed that only once did ABC describe a scene as “too weird”.

The scene featured the character Hurley opening a cabin supposedly inhabited by the mysterious character of Jacob – only to see himself in there, sitting in a rocking chair.

Lindelof added: “The network was always nervous about Jacob, but when we got these notes, we were like, ‘Are you watching this show? You’ve just seen a giant pillar of smoke pick up a man and slam him against a tree!’ They don’t really intervene any more.”

The Lost team begin writing the final 18-part series on 13 July ahead of filming on 24 August. It will air from January to May next year, with filming due to wrap in April.

Sky 1 will again show the final series, though it has yet to confirm whether it will again be screened in the UK within days of the US broadcast.
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ABOVE: Broadcastnow out of the UK has an interesting article on comments from Producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse:

Sounds like it's going to be a heckuva lot more well-thought out than the BSG finale this year. The "bittersweet" element to the ending is intriguing. As long as it evolves naturally from the plot and the characters, it should be fine.

If anyone has read the Dark Tower series by Steven King I think Jacob is very similar to Roland. And when you take into fact what happened in the final book of the series to Roland and his "journey" and how Jacob and the other guy have conversations about "I'm going to kill you this time", it seems pretty close to me.

Sorry to be vague, the ending of that book threw me for a loop in a good and bad way and how the writers are saying it will be a bittersweet ending it just has me thinking.

Lost: Season Six will premiere Tuesday, February 2nd at 9:00 pm ET. The premiere will be two hours.

Man I can't wait. I'm really hoping they wrap this up nicely and give a big pay off for the fans. It's been a long time coming.

I'm looking forward to this, for sure.

The Hollywood Reporter has a new interview with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse about the upcoming season.

Here are some highlights:
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About the ending: But the one area we're in agreement is there will be a short-term reaction to the ending and then a legacy reaction that comes six months, a year down the road, looking at the show as a whole. Carlton and I were trying yesterday to remember what the final season of "The Sopranos" even was about -- we couldn't remember much about the finale itself except Anthony Jr. was going to go into the Army and crashed his car and changed his mind. But we remember every frame of the diner scene. What people take away from our finale is going to be based purely on that two-hour episode, but our hope is they'll be able to connect that experience to the six years that preceded it.

The only question that's ever mattered to us is what is going to happen to these people. What is the character resolution? That the audience feels like the characters had an arc -- a beginning, middle and end. And I'm satisfied with that. All the crazy island mythology stuff, we love it, but it's like terrorists attacking Jack Bauer -- it's stuff that happens in order to tell cool character stories.

About the tone of Season 6: We feel tonally it's most similar to the first season of the show. We're employing a different narrative device, which we feel is creating some emotional and heartfelt stories, and we want the audience to have a chance in the final season to remember the entire history of the show. So we have actors coming back like Dominic [Monaghan] and Ian [Sommerhalder]. We're hoping to achieve a circularity of the entire journey so the ending is reminiscent of the beginning.

We ended with Juliet pounding on this atomic warhead. There's Jack's prediction that the bomb will reset events and the plane will never crash. There's the possibility that it doesn't work. We want the audience to be pondering what is the consequence of Juliet hitting that bomb. Our cliffhangers are designed to frame the question that we want audience thinking about.

Jack vs. Locke: Jack and Locke have always been at the center of the show, that dilemma of faith vs. reason, and the conflict between those two characters has been there since the beginning. It's very exciting to bring that relationship to its conclusion, and we can't really be any less vague about that.

Their personal favorite seasons: Lindelof says Season 1. Cuse says Season 5.

J.J. Abrams (co-creator and director of the pilot) involvement: We're going to invite him to the party. He's got about 10 different plates spinning. His contribution will be what is has been the last five years or so -- as an incredible supportive fan, which is pretty cool for us.

On who is involved in the making of the finale: Damon and Cuse will write, Jack Bender will direct (This is the same as almost every finale and premiere except for the Pilot).

Lost after Season 6:

Cuse: The Walt Disney Co. owns "Lost." It's a franchise that's conservatively worth billions of dollars. It's hard to imagine "Lost" will rest on the shelves and nothing will ever be made with "Lost." Eventually somebody will make something under the moniker of "Lost" -- whether we do it or not. We just made a commitment to this group of characters whose stories are coming to a conclusion this May.

Lindelof: Somebody made a sequel to "Gone With the Wind." Sometimes the franchise transcends the storyteller. The definitive edition of "Lost" ends this May on ABC, and that is the story that we have to tell. It has a beginning, middle and end. That ending will not have cliffhangers, or be set up in such a way that people will be saying, "Clearly they're going to make more of these." We don't have any connection to another TV series or movie, but there's a new "A-Team" movie coming out, for god's sake. This is a business that thrives on known commodities. "Tron" is the most buzzed-about Disney movie for next year, and it has been gathering dust for 20 years. I cannot imagine there will not be something with "Lost" on it involving smoke monsters and polar bears and time travel.
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Thanks for that. Good stuff. I thought this was the most telling statement: "We're hoping to achieve a circularity of the entire journey so the ending is reminiscent of the beginning."

The new final season promo makes me roll my eyes at the lack of creativity, in that they essentially ripped off Battlestar Galactica's own take of the Last Supper painting with divided sides.

Just like I rolled my eyes at the lack of creativity of Battlestar Galactica ripping off MASH, That 70's Show and The Sopranos with The Last Supper photo. The Last Supper wasn't for the first time used in BG. I heard the first person that used it was some guy named Leonardo. A ninja turtle I believe....

if you'll read my post, you'll see I mentioned that it was 's own take. I'm curious, do you have examples of how ripped off those three shows?

@ BSG having some kind of "definitive" take on the whole concept. suddenly-last-supper.html, the-lost-supper-20

Wow, that's very interesting to see. Thanks for sharing that.
What I will give them, is it looks a hell of a lot better than the other awful photoshopped group promos they've done.

BSG obviously put a lot of thought into their version. And one does have to wonder about Lost doing the same thing just one year after BSG. But it's not like Lost hasn't had a wide-angle shot of its characters before. *shrug* Here's hoping Lost's final season is better than BSG's.

What I thought would of made a cool promo is the meeting/blending of the different periods that the characters are in.

I'm curious about the Divided sides comment. Since I've never seen BG I wouldn't know about the divides in the groups or the plot but in the Lost Picture I don't see a true divide since everyone in the picture seems to be looking at John (although a case can be made that Frank and Ilana are looking at one another. But how do you determine there are sides?

Also about BG ripping off other Last Supper portrayals it seemed as though you were counting BG as being the first to ever employ the Last Supper for creative reasons and I was just pointing out the other times I have seen it used before BG used it.

My main reason for arguing about this is that Lost has used religious images MANY times over the course of the series to get a point across (two main examples are the Season 2 episode Fire+Water and Season 5 episode This Place is Death).



This is being reported in a few different places but I'll link to where I first read it here

[spoil]This adds to an already crowded final season of former characters including Boone, Charlie, Ana Lucia, Juliet, Faraday, Charlotte, Keamy, Mikhail, Arzt and Pilot Seth Norris[/spoil]

Harold Perrineau (Michael Dawson) and Cynthia Watros (Libby) will appear in the final season.

My thoughts on the first two episodes "LA X" Parts 1 & 2:

I loved it. At the end of last season Jughead was either going to give us a reboot where 815 was never going to crash on the island or it didn't change a thing. What did we get? BOTH! I can't decide what part I liked better. And anything involving Fake-Locke in this episode was amazing. The scenes between him and Ben were outstanding especially when Flocke was telling Ben what Locke was feeling when Ben killed him.

I can't wait to see the rest of this season. Spoilers are hidden below. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!

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• The finale will be named "The End"

• Michelle Rodriguez will appear at some point as Ana Lucia

• Mr. Eko will absolutely not be back.
• Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje leaving the show in Season three was obviously not a very amicable separation and the producers do not want him back.

• The Producers have said that water and storms are very important in the final half of this season. Tsunami anyone?

• I've heard rumors of possibly many deaths in an explosion on the submarine.
• This could be false info thrown out by the producers to throw off people.
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Lost has 7 more Tuesday one hour episodes left before the May 23rd two hour finale.

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• "Congratulations on pulling off an amazing show,"

• "Don't tell anyone... but when Star Wars first came out, I didn't know where it was going either. The trick is to pretend you've planned the whole thing out in advance. Throw in some father issues and references to other stories - let's call them homages - and you've got a series."

• "You managed to span both time and space, and I don't think I'm alone in saying that I never saw what was around the corner"

• "Now that it's all coming to an end, it's impressive to see how much was planned out in advance and how neatly you've wrapped up everything. You've created something really special. I'm sad that the series is ending, but I look forward to seeing what you two are going to do next."

Well barely over 24 hours from now, LOST will be over. But will it be complete? I look forward to what is going to happen and yet DREAD the possibility that the producers will get it wrong somehow. I'm not expecting an ending that will sum everything up, because that's not what the show is about yet at the same point if we get some bullshit ending like the Sopranos BLACK SCREEN! Then i will be thoroughly upset.

All in all, this season has lived up to my expectations and overall this is still my favorite show on TV, maybe of all time for me.

However I'm ready to pregame this thing and have already made preparations for LOST Sunday, and will be drinking early in the morning among other activities.

Anyone else have plans for tomorrow night? And what are your thoughts about the finale?

i've never suffered through a single episode. lets hear a synopsis of the final one, spoilers and all. here's a prediction: it was all a mind control experiment

After the season premiere this year, I predicted that the final scene would be a funeral for Jack's father in the Sideways world.

[spoil][align=left]So in the end, the majority of the main characters make it to Nirvana. I consider that a happy ending.[/align][/spoil]
I was pretty damn close.

so what basically was explained? was there a big twist? what was the big hairy deal about this series?? they were in purgatory the entire time of the series? everyone died from the plane crash and spent the entire series "lost" in the nether world??

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[align=left]No, the plane crash was real as was everything that happened on the island. Jack dies on the island by sacrificing himself to save it. The sideways world we saw all this year (taking the place of flashforwards and flashbacks) was actually purgatory. So after Jack died on the island he went to this purgatory and could only move on after finding the people most important in his life (i.e., the rest of the people that were on the island). They didn't realize they were in purgatory until they found each other.[/align]
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Even though many questions were left unanswered (which we may get some answers for on the DVD. ABC says 20 minutes of answers will come with it) I loved the finale. It wrapped up the characters story and left no doubt about what happened to them.

eh, I watched Celebrity Apprentice instead. I remember watching Shawn Michaels wrestle all the time. good times.

Here is the epilogue from the complete series DVD set: (waywaw.tumblr.com, slashfilm.com)

Also, if you hadn't heard by now, the smoke monster's name is Samuel.