Pelican Parts Forums

More if anyone's interested... from an EW.com email subscription I signed up for a coupla years ago, but don't read any more:
________________________
Confused by the 'Lost' premiere? Never fear! Damon and Carlton explain a few things about the start of Season 6 (SPOILERS AHEAD)
by Jeff Jensen

:::Excerpted:::

...If you’ve seen the season premiere of Lost (final SPOILER ALERT now!), you now know the hush-hush new storytelling device for the final season is this whole notion of parallel worlds. We were presented with two of them: one in which Oceanic 815 never crashed; and another that keeps continuity with the past five years of Lost having all the characters trapped in the Dharma Initiative past magically uploaded to the Island present of 2007 where the Jacob-Fake Locke-Ben drama is all going down. I’ll have a lot more to say on this tomorrow AM in my recap. But before then, I bring you news from two guys who you probably MOST want to hear from right now: Lost exec producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof. My “Totally Lost” partner Dan Snierson and I sat down with them to talk about the year’s”flash-sideways” storytelling device. Jokes Damon Lindelof: “You [had] all these fundamental mysteries going into season 6. What’s the Monster? What’s the Island? Why is Richard Alpert not able to age? But here’s this new mystery. How dare they! How dare they present us with a new mystery at this late stage in the game!”

Fortunately, here are the producers to offer some assurance of answers and provide some helpful context for season 6.

EW: The whole idea of flash-sideways and the plan to use season 6 to show us a world where Oceanic 815 never crashed — how long has that been in the works? Why did you want to do it?

DAMON LINDELOF: It’s been in play for at least a couple of years. We knew that the ending of the time travel season was going to be an attempt to reboot. And as a result, we [knew] the audience was going to come out of the “do-over moment” thinking we were either going start over or just say it didn’t work and continue on. [We thought] wouldn’t it be great if we did both? That was the origin of the story.

CARLTON CUSE: We thought just doing one [of those options] would inherently not be satisfying. Since the very beginning of the show, characters started crossing through each other’s stories. Part of our desire [in season 6] is to show that there’s still this kind of weave, that these characters still would have impacted each other’s lives even without the event of crashing on the Island. Obviously, the big question of the season is going to be: How do these [two timelines] reconcile?

Confused by the 'Lost' premiere? Never fear! Damon and Carlton explain a few things about the start of Season 6 (SPOILERS AHEAD) | EW.com
________________________
'Lost' recap: What's Your Worldview?
The season 6 premiere addresses both reboot enthusiasts and opponents, and even has a few answers
By Jeff Jensen

:::Excerpted:::

...we need to spend a few minutes wrapping our minds around the season's high concept storytelling conceit, which the producers are calling ''flash-sideways.'' The premiere presented us with ''a separate reality,'' to borrow the title of the Carlos Castaneda book Lost name-dropped last season, a world where Oceanic 815 never crashed and the Island rests at the bottom of the Pacific, the cabins of Dharmaville and the Four Toed Statue now a sprawling industrial park for carp. Was there a Dharma logo branded on that shark? Help me out, readers, because I couldn't quite tell.

The introduction of this perplexing new world was preceded by a lengthy recap of the season 5 finale cliffhanger, culminating with Juliet's attempt to detonate a bomb called Jughead with a rock. The time-traveling castaways' intention was to reboot their post-Oceanic 815 lives. They wanted to prevent the Hatch (aka the Swan) from being built, thus preventing the plane from being tractor beamed out of the sky by Death Star Island. They also wanted no memory of their ordeal or each other, no memory of what they had gained or lost during their odyssey together. Lost encouraged us to believe they had gotten their wish. But why did Jack only get one secret bottle of booze from Cindy instead of two? Why was Desmond Hume on the plane? Why was Shannon absent? Why did Hurley consider himself the world's luckiest man instead of its most cursed? We had been trained last season to think that only everything after that point of the crash would be different. But in this world, the pre-Oceanic 815 timeline is subtly and radically different, too.

Last season also wanted us to think that the castaways were facing a choice between reboot or death. While we didn't fall for that bogus distinction, there were some of us (or just me) that then assumed season 6 could only really be about a reboot. Which genuinely interested me, provided somehow, someway the characters could retain the memories of their Island ordeal. I wanted continuity with past. Clean slate castaways would have negated our investment in their redemption. Well, I got what I asked for, but in a way I wasn't expecting. Namely: Lost's other ''other world,'' one where the castaways stuck in 1977 — Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Jin, Miles, Sayid and Juliet — were brought back to the Island present of 2007 by means of... what? Time travel hot flash? (That was Jin's theory.) The course correcting work of paradox-policing fate? The will of now-dead Island deity Jacob?

'Lost' recap: What's Your Worldview? | Totally 'Lost' Recap | EW.com