He lied.

The topic before him had no bearing on his words: he deceived in matters large, in details small.  The consequences of dishonesty figured into his thoughts only to the extent of laying the groundwork for the next deception, which in turn would provide the foundation for subsequent misdirection.  He manipulated facts and fabricated stories to suit his purpose, to frame conditions to his liking, to cause those he controlled to believe he was advancing their agenda so that he could nefariously implement his own well-engineered plans.

He manipulated, coerced, forced those under him to commit the worst offences.  When lying was insufficient to his ends, he murdered.  He killed with his bare hands or with weapons, with guns, gas, or rope.  He actively participated in mass murder.  A reasonable jury of his peers would be obliged to find him guilty on all charges and pass down the severest of sentences.

Benjamin Linus was arguably the most villainous, hateful character on the Island.  But we found ourselves liking him.  Ilana, who knew his crimes, was never taken in my his tricks, pardoned him.  The man who was his opposite, who endeavoured never to fabricate an untruth, took him on as advisor.   At Ben’s own death he was found worthy to make the voyage to the Church of the Holy Lamp Post, having served well as Hurley’s faithful consigliere.

It is appropriate to ask what might reasonably be considered the greatest unanswered question in the six years of LOST:  Who was Benjamin Linus?

Original Innocence

The circumstances of his youth were most similar to those of his future nemesis, John Locke.  Both men were born several months premature to a woman named Emily.  Both endured a tortured childhood of neglect and abuse without the care of a mother.   Each of them later in life would methodically engineer his own father’s death.

At some point their paths diverged.  Locke never seemed to grow up.  He insisted that the world around him conform to his understanding, that those in charge allow him to be the person he believed himself to be.  Locke’s innocence was so integral to his being that he could not conceive of the notion of deception.  Even after fifty years of navigating the real world, he never figured out that at every turn people had been taking advantage of his trust in them.  His gullibility would be his undoing.  He lost his money, lost a kidney, lost the use of his legs, and finally lost his life.  Every bit of suffering in his sad life was the bitter outcome of his own innocent trust in the good will of others.

We don’t know which events in Ben’s early years led to his adoption of deceit and manipulation as a default modus operandi.  The example of John Locke indicates we cannot blame a motherless childhood or the capricious vagaries of life that placed more than a boy’s fair share of suffering in their paths.  Apparently neither of these conditions was sufficient to induce either life-long innocence or habitual deceit.  Every generation provides examples of children neglected and abused who become sterling examples of trustworthy industry and responsibility in their adult years.  We must look to some other cause of Ben’s manipulative lifestyle.

Both men came to hate their fathers, but at different times, and for different reasons.  It is in the Darltonian expression of malignant fatherhood that we see the most vivid contrast between Ben and Locke.

Anthony Cooper, like Ben and James Ford after him, earned his livelihood from a keen facility with manipulation.  But a lifetime of seducing women and conniving to take their husbands’ savings made him too busy to check in on young John Locke, even once.

Sins of the Fathers

Roger Linus was a very different kind of father.

Roger might have left his son, if he’d had the opportunity to do so.  But on a janitor’s wages, and with most of his meagre income dedicated to nightly rounds of liquid amnesia, he would never get off the Island.  So he took the time-honoured path of many men in the same situation:  he ignored his son.  Child neglect was not a punishable offence in the Dharma Initiative, and besides, these were the disco-drenched 70s; no one was sober enough to figure out what anyone else was doing.

The situation was sad for young Ben, but many boys have grown up under similar situations without becoming psychopathic liars.  But few boys under such conditions were exposed to the species of psychological abuse that Ben suffered on a nightly basis.  Roger planted in his son’s heart an idea of the kind that should never be expressed to a child, even in a fit of anger.  Especially not in a fit of anger.  Roger told his son that he, Ben, was responsible for his own mother’s death.

Perhaps this was the unbearable burden of undeserved guilt that caused Ben’s visions of his dead mother.  He didn’t question her apparition, but others did.  When he entered the deactivation code for the sonic fence and slipped into the Hostiles’ territory, he came upon Richard Alpert.  When Ben explained he was looking for his dead mother, Richard’s interest in the boy increased immediately.

RICHARD: Did she die here, on the Island?
BEN: No. When I was a baby.
RICHARD: Did you see her, out here, Ben, in the jungle?
BEN: She talked to me.
RICHARD: What did she say?
BEN: That I couldn’t come with her. She said it wasn’t time yet.

In hindsight we know that the apparition of someone who had not died on the Island would be taken as unusual by any of the Others, and especially by the one member of the League of Jacob who lived through the ages.  What did the apparition of Emily Linus mean to Ben?  To the Others?  Was Ben possibly among those being groomed by Jacob for Island leadership?  Did Ben’s visions point to some other “special” aspect of his character that would have significance for Jacob’s band?

Roger’s frequent refrain that Ben had caused his own mother’s death was the inexcusable ranting of a man entirely unfit for the care of a child.  I don’t imagine there is any way to accurately calculate the deep psychological damage that must have been inflicted by Roger’s deplorable contempt for his own son’s mental health.  The wounds to Ben’s soul must have been painful beyond anything a human being should have to endure.

I don’t believe, though, that Roger’s thoughtlessness and his unsuitability for parenting were sufficient to have caused Ben’s manipulative temperament and his comfort in deception.  I believe going to the root of Ben’s character requires that we spend time contemplating a concrete object in Richard’s possession at the time of his meeting with Ben.  If we understand this object, we will understand Ben.

The Compass

We saw this compass for the first time in Lost 4.11 (“Cabin Fever”).  It was one of the six items Richard showed to young John Locke in 1961, asking the boy, “Which of these things belong to you already?”  The compass was one of the items Locke identified as belonging to him.

The boy was correct.  The adult John Locke gave the compass to Richard in 1954 during the period of erratic time travels as a proof that he was from the future.  Richard kept the compass for the next 53 years.  He surrendered the compass to the wounded, time-traveling John Locke in 2007, instructing Locke to give the compass back to him the next time Locke saw him.  That next meeting turned out to be their short conversation in 1954, since that was Locke’s next stop on his time-travel tour.  Richard accepted the compass, showed it to young Locke in 1961, and returned it to Locke in 2007, who transported it back to 1954, gave it to Richard, who…

With most of the human players in Jacob’s two-thousand-year-old game of backgammon, the compass was caught in an endless time loop.  The compass existed in concrete form, but it was never created.  The compass had no possible entry point into the loop.  It had no beginning, it would never have an end.  It just was.

The Man in Black, posing as John Locke just before the real Locke’s time-travel appearance in 2007, asked Richard about the compass Locke had given him in 1956.  “A little rusty,” Richard said, “but she can still find north.”  Perhaps it was a manifestation of the MIB’s sense of humour, perhaps it was a deeper intention to control people, events, and time itself, but it was the Smoke Monster who told Richard to give the compass back to Locke during that critical rendez-vous in 2007.  By instructing Richard to return the compass to Locke, Smokey was ensuring the perpetuation of an endless time loop.  If nothing else, the endless circularity through time of people, events, and objects supported the MIB’s understanding of human behaviour.  ” They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.”

If all the important events on the Island were captured in endless loops, the Smoke Monster would always turn out to be correct.  If every occurrence of any importance was relegated to a time loop, Jacob’s vision of human progress finally ending the loops would never come to pass.  Perhaps by controlling all the defining events in this manner he could gain the upper hand over Jacob and make the final move that would end their perpetual game of senet to his advantage.

Destroying the Loop

We were witness to the end of all time loops.  The selfless heroism of Boone, Charlie, Locke, Sayid, Kate, and the greatest hero, Jack Shephard, ended for all time the eternal, circular game of senet.  The destruction of time loops was the final grand objective of Lost.  By accepting Jacob’s gauntlet, these men and women not only showed their mettle and proved their valour, but demonstrated for all the stuff of which humans are truly made.

Those who were “special” were the immortal heroes, the women and men who did not shirk the call of destiny, even when the Island called them to self-sacrifice.  “You were special, John,” Ben told Locke outside the Church of the Holy Lamp Post.  Indeed.  Locke’s heroism was the most magnificent demonstration of the divinity of his soul, for he knew his mission had to end in his own death.

Jack’s mission was the single most important calling anyone had received since Biblical times.  Everything else had to be put on hold, even the reconciliation of Jack with his own father.  How fitting it was, then, that the Island summoned not Kate, not Sarah, not his sister, Claire, but Christian Shephard, to bring his son back to consciousness after the crash.  “I need you to go find my son,” Christian told the yellow Labrador Retriever, Vincent.  “He’s over there in that bamboo forest, unconscious.  I need you to go wake him up…. He has work to do.”

Ray Shephard never had faith in his son, Christian.  Christian never had faith in his son, Jack.  Jack ended the cruel, circular Shephard heritage of father-son enmity by raising a fine son, David, and connecting with him.  Jack was allowed this final resolution not in his life on earth, but in the life after his heroic act.

Ben’s Loop

Ben was a tragic figure.  For many years he thought himself “special”.  Perhaps Richard, knowing of Ben’s visions of his mother, considered him “special”, too.  Perhaps most or all of the Others considered their leader somehow different from themselves.  He had inherited the Island from Charles Widmore, after all.  But Jacob didn’t grant him even a perfunctory audience, not a word of gratitude for his long service.  Ben never was special.  Finally grasping the truth of that fact must have hurt Ben to the very depths of his being.

I believe the tragedy of Ben, the endless, almost unbearably monotonous quality of his grand deceptions and fabrications, and the genesis of his flawed character were all wrapped into a single momentous event in 1977 that captured him forever into a great time loop.

In Season Five, Sayid gave us his understanding of Benjamin Linus:

“He’s a liar, a manipulator…a man who allowed his own daughter to be murdered to save himself…A monster responsible for nothing short of genocide.”

In Sayid Jarrah’s mind, Ben Linus was of the same ilk as Adolf Hitler.   Sayid brought young Ben into his confidence, allowing Ben to believe he was one of the hallowed “Hostiles”.  The adolescent Ben trusted Sayid so much he engineered an elaborate jail break for the man.  Alone with Ben far away from the Dharma barracks, Sayid saw the chance he had been waiting for.  He aimed the gun directly at the boy’s heart and fired.  Ben fell to the ground, apparently dead.

The waters of the Temple eventually saved Ben.  Richard claimed Ben would not remember anything that happened before the immersion in the waters, but he would be changed forever.  He would no longer have the innocence of youth.

I believe it was not Jacob’s healing waters that robbed young Ben of his innocence.  I believe it was Sayid’s betrayal of Ben’s trust that forever removed any possibility of trust from the boy’s range of conceivable dispositions.  After he had placed complete faith in a man he believed a “Hostile”, one of the “good guys” in the boy’s mind, only to become the object of the man’s unjustified but complete hatred, how could he ever again trust anyone?  How could he tell anyone the truth ever again?  If the only person he ever found worthy of his trust could shoot him in the chest, fully intending to murder him with a single shot, how could he ever place even a modicum of faith in anyone’s professed intentions?

In spite of what Richard claimed, I believe Ben could never have forgotten this event.  Perhaps he didn’t remember Sayid, but how could he have forgotten a bullet to the chest?  A wound that very nearly killed him?  No amnesia-inducing waters would carry a force sufficient to overcome a reality that strong and dark and full of corruption.  Ben remembered.  Those memories made him into the man he became.  And what he became was another tragic loop, just another example the Smoke Monster could point out as proof of his thesis regarding the most enduring and contemptible qualities of the corrupt and rotten human soul.

Redemption of a Soul Lost

Charles Widmore’s instructions to Ben in 1988 could not have been any clearer:  Ben was to find Danielle Rousseau’s camp, murder the woman, and kill her child.  The young man had wanted to join the Others since his arrival on the Island fifteen years before.  He must have been a constant pain in Widmore’s side, this young man who thought himself “special”.  A young man who even then must have been using every waking moment of his life trying to discover the means by which he might wrest control of the group from Widmore’s hands.  Did Widmore send young Ethan Rom on the mission to ensure Ben’s faithful execution of the gruesome task?

I don’t believe Ben refused Widmore’s orders in an attempt to amass political power.  I don’t think he saved Danielle and baby Alex to spite Widmore or usurp his authority.  I think his decision to spare baby Alex’s life was the only response Ben could have made in the situation.  Just as life experience had turned him into a psychopathic liar, I believe the earlier and even more painful events of life–beginning with separation from his own mother–instilled in Ben Linus a natural affinity for children and an unquenchable desire to ensure the fulfillment of their needs.  Roger Linus was the worst father one could imagine.  Ben must have had such a deep desire to correct the evils his father had wrought that the prospect of raising a girl with the full intensity of a father’s love must have driven him more than any consequences Widmore might have chosen to mete out for Ben’s insubordination.  Baby Alex’s life must have meant as much to him as his own life.  When he looked into the little baby’s eyes, he must have seen only one possible outcome.

The Final Blow

Perhaps raising a child to adulthood could have made up for Ben’s earlier genocide.  In the Richard Attenborough film, “Gandhi”, one of the most moving scenes occurs near the end of the movie.  A Hindu man, Nahari, rushes up to the Great Mahatma, who is weak from the nearly month-long food fast he began in response to Muslim/Hindu bloodshed.  The man’s eyes are wide in sheer terror.

Nahari:  I’m going to Hell! I killed a child! I smashed his head against a wall.
Gandhi:  Why?
Nahari:  Because they killed my son! The Muslims killed my son!
Gandhi:  I know a way out of Hell. Find a child, a child whose mother and father have been killed and raise him as your own.  Only be sure that he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one.

Ben almost fulfilled the self-imposed assignment.  Sixteen-year-old Alex had grown into a beautiful young woman, capable in many ways, but still a child, still in need of a father’s care.  Ben took a gamble when Widmore’s thug, Keamy, held a gun to Alex’s head.  The gamble was almost sure to succeed.  Ben and Widmore both knew the rules, and those rules prevented either of them from assassinating family members.

“I stole her as a baby from an insane woman,” Ben said.  ”She’s a pawn, nothing more. She means nothing to me. I’m not coming out of this house. So if you want to kill her, go ahead and–”

Ben didn’t get to finish his statement.  Keamy put a bullet in the girl’s brain and her lifeless body dropped to the ground.

Final Reckoning

He was a sad and lonely figure seated on the marble bench outside Our Lady of the Foucault Pendulum.

Perhaps he could have entered the church, Alex or Danielle accompanying him as his Constant.  He had served admirably as Number Two to the Protector of the Island, Hurley.  He was a sad man because he realised the enormity of his crimes.  But more than anything, he continued to suffer the devastation of Alex’s death.   Sadness and devastation kept him outside, alone, spiritually unable to cross the threshold to the final antechamber before… moving on.

But he was there.  Charles never made it anywhere near the church.   Keamy died in a place where everyone was already dead–his soul forever expunged from the rolls of those who could call themselves human beings.

Ben was there.

Ben, despite a life of lies, tortures, and murders, mass murder, the cold-blooded execution of his own father–in spite of everything, Ben sat outside the church.

We might think of it as an instance of undeserved grace.  I find myself believing something else entirely.  Possibly none of us, other than the great heroes–the Jack Shephards and Kate Austens and John Lockes–could be said to deserve the grace that allows us admittance to the final antechamber.  Perhaps that grace is extended even to those among us, undeserving as we are, who nevertheless think ourselves somehow a cut above, that in spite of our foibles we somehow deserve redemption.  Perhaps even arrogant fools such as these are extended an undeserved and unappreciated grace.

Ben is not among these delusional fools.  The pain in his soul is real.  He is lonely, devastated, aching in the deepest recesses of his spirit.  He stays on in his purgatory because to do otherwise would be to deprive himself of the single honest objective of his life:  Raising a helpless girl he was supposed to have murdered, teaching her everything that is good and noble and true in the hearts of women and men, and seeing his helpless baby turn into a capable and beautiful and trusting young woman.

Benjamin Linus was allowed this grace, not because he begged for it or deserved it or thought himself worthy.  He was allowed this final grace precisely because he knew himself unworthy, and because the death of Alex forever marked him a sad and lonely and pained man.

In Ben’s pain and humility he found pardon and redemption.  And someday, someday soon, taking Alex’s hand or Danielle’s hand in his own, he will cross the threshold, sit with his beloved Constant in a pew, surrounded by the Rousseau family friends and relatives and those cherished and adored, those Ben trusted, and experience the bright light that will carry them to a happier and eternal destiny.

PM

Related posts:

1. White Rabbit: The Cultural and Symbolic Significance of Christian Shephard in LOST by Pearson Moore
2. Principal Purpose: Culture and Meaning in LOST 6.07 “Dr. Linus” by Pearson Moore
3. So You Could Find One Another: Cultural Perfections in LOST 6.17-6.18 “The End” by Pearson Moore

Spoiler Alert: this interview contains minor spoilers.

So there are limits to what Ben will do to get what he wants, at least in the Sideways?
Yes, Ben was presented with a parallel choice — a smaller one, but an echo of a bad choice he made in the island world — and he made a different call, a softer call that we’re happy about.

Was it nice to play Ben’s softer side?
I’ll tell you what was fun: When Ben tries to play his card with the principal but he hasn’t the confidence that his alter ego has. He trembles a little when he makes his big play because he knows he’s out of his depth. It was fun to find that shakiness because that’s a color they’ve never asked of me on the show before. It’s almost like I’m playing a different character this season.

Now that Widmore’s back, will Ben’s battle with him resume?
You’d think. [The producers] went to such pains to establish it. But there are three episodes still to film and that’s something that hasn’t been shot yet. I suppose it’s possible that the characters’ [conflict] can be resolved without facing off against one another, maybe through the agency of some third party.

Would that be disappointing?
I’m just a passenger on this ride. But I am anxious for answers that don’t seem to be coming in a rush. I think it’s partly my own personal misunderstanding of the narrative of the show and an over-expectation of climactic answering.

Some fans feel a similar frustration.
I think the answering is coming in a subtler way than many of us expected. But the writers’ agenda may not yet be clear to us.

When will you get the finale script?
Two days before we shoot it. If I get a complete one. You know with the finale of all finales, there are gonna be blank scenes in it that only the actors involved are privy to. I hope I’m on the show long enough that I’m in one of those secret scenes.

Wait — could Ben really not make it to the end?
There have been some casualties. Pretty soon, there’s only gonna be a few standing.

Head over to People.com to read the rest of the interview.

Related posts:

1. Michael Emerson Teases New Revelations About Ben
2. Michael Emerson Teases LOST’s Final Season
3. Michael Emerson Teases A “Dark, Violent” Finale

Source: Sky.com/Lost

Related posts:

1. The LOST Initiative – “The Little Prince” – Midweek Edition
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3. The LOST Initiative – 01/25 Video Podcast

Thanks to Jack and Cynthia for the heads up!

In this interview with “Lost” co-creator Damon Lindelof, we look back on some of the behind-the-scenes decisions for season four, why some fans may be troubled by season five’s emphasis on time travel, and why the worst episode in “Lost” history was also the most important episode in “Lost” history (from a production standpoint, anyway).

What material did you have to leave out because of the strike that you won’t be able to get back to?

I don’t think that there’s anything that just got basically junked. There’s stuff that got truncated, so you’re getting the Cliff’s Notes version of the story. Whereas there might have been an entire episode that was Charlotte’s flashbacks if there hadn’t been a strike, now you get the story but not the flashbacks. I think the complete jettisoning of a story plan would take the whole Jenga tower down. We have to do all that stuff to get to where we’re going. Nothing was so expendable that you could just say we couldn’t get to do this. The show would suffer for it. But the Michael story, we wanted to do something that was more redemptive for him than staying with the bomb and allowing Jin to get to the deck as he was spraying liquid nitrogen onto it. But it ended up having to be that, as opposed to something that was probably more heroic, more emotional, by virtue of the fact that we had to collapse our time frame. Originally, we were going to do an hour less than we wound up doing, and we had to beg for that. We were still rolling film, like, 11 days before it was on the air. It was all we could do to cram everything in there, and you go, “What are the major story points you can play?” and you need to connect the dots. The primary story focus was on the Oceanic Six, and everyone else had to defer. We had to explain how Jin died, and so that gave us less time for Michael’s redemptive arc, and we regret that.

One of the things you and Carlton talk about a lot, and I never quite understood until we got to “There’s No Place Like Home,” is that you’re always afraid of doing these episodes where people stand around and explain stuff and you give a lot of answers at once. Those three hours answered most of the questions of that season, and while it was good, it definitely felt like, “Okay… okay… alright…” It was not as thrilling as the hours leading up to it.

Sure. For us, we always think the reason that the show is a water cooler show, or still generates the audience it does and the Internet culture that it does is the audience wants to talk about the show. If the characters are talking about the show, you basically have a scenario where they’re so interested in catching each other up that you can’t propel the story forwards. Now if they need to share info for the purposes of story, then you have to write the scene. But the season four finale was really about bringing everything together. The drama of knowing, “How are these guys going to get off the island?,” well, you’ve known that they did get off since the end of season three, so now we’re just going back and showing you things you didn’t already know about it, like that Penny picked them up. It’s a big reveal, but everything else is, “Oh, they’re in a helicopter… the helicopter’s going into the water… is Demond going to survive because he’s not one of the Oceanic Six?” So you can kind of do these things, but things like the press conference, Kate having dreams about Claire, you need to do them, but they’re more about filling in blanks than moving forward. That’s the nature of the year. You’re telling a story out of sequence, and so the finale wound up being a lot of middle.

Let’s get back to the question that I asked at the summer tour: Watching last season and seeing the Oceanic Six in the present, I start building up scenarios in my head. “Why these six? Why do they have to be so secretive?” And in the end it just turned out that those happened to be the ones who were on the helicopter, and Jack, for whatever reason, gets into his head that they need to tell this specific lie to avoid the wrath of Widmore. Did you know that was how it was going to play out going in?

We knew that the season was going to start with Locke and Jack splitting up, Locke taking a group of people with him, Jack a group with him, Jack group’s mission was to get off the island, Locke’s group mission was to stay on, and when we got to the end of the season, Jack and Locke would have one more scene. And in that scene, Locke would basically say to Jack, “We’re supposed to be here, it’s our destiny, you’ve gotta stay.” And Jack would say, “(Bleep) you, I’m leaving.” And Locke would say to Jack, “If you’re gonna leave, you have to lie.” So the idea to lie is Locke’s. That we knew with great specificity. We also knew for over a year that Locke was in the coffin and that all the actions Jack is going through in the season three finale, reading the obituary, suicide attempt, are in the wake of Locke’s death. The Jack/Locke of it all was incredibly mapped out in detail. The intricacies of the lie were, Jack is lying because Locke told him to, and there’s a part of him that realizes maybe Locke was right. He’s not consciously ready to accept that yet, so the lie’s going to be sloppy, and he’s making that up on the fly…

I pitched to the DVD team that it might be fun to have a documentary crew poke holes in how (bleepy) the lie is, on every level. You see those things about the WTC, on that trajectory. I thought it would be fun, but these guys came back with the film and I was, like, “Wow, the lie’s even worse than I thought.” It’s one of those things where you basically say, if this really happened, if these six people showed up on some island in the South Pacific and said, “Here’s what happened,” no one would ever think to question the story. If there’s any conspiracy, you have to start with the premise, “Why did they lie?”

How did you choose the Oceanic Six?

We basically looked at it as a very simple equation first, which is, “Who would want to leave the island, and who would not want to leave the island?” and that’s what the whole season’s about. Kate kind of waffles, Sawyer doesn’t want to leave the island, and leaps off the chopper when he has a chance to do so. He’s perfectly fine where he is. And clearly someone like Juliet would want to leave the island, so we had to figure out geographically, where people would want to be, and present a lifeboat situation where Billy Zane’s running around the Titanic with a gun, and it’s whoever can get on the chopper in time. Jack and Kate we had committed to, obviously, but when we talked about who the Six would be, we realized the majority of storytelling in season four would involve those people. But we were also setting things up for the ultimate endgame of the show which will hopefully reveal some more specificity about, “Why them?”

I’ve wondered about the team from the freighter, Faraday and those people. When we initially see them being put together, Naomi’s supposed to lead them, they have some specific mission that apparently requires a mercenary, a physicist, a medium and an anthropologist and a chopper pilot. Are we still going to find out what that was? Did that get left by the wayside by the events of season four?

The intent was that their mission was to find Benjamin Linus, then call the mercs and they’ll show up and remove Ben. But Faraday and Charlotte are both there for personal reasons. He’s doing time/space experiments while he’s there, Faraday has a lot of story yet to reveal. As does Charlotte, as does Miles. But the mission they’ve been tasked with to find Ben.

And this particular combination is the best Widmore could put together?

One would assume Miles was selected for his unique abilities. As to why Faraday comes, I think that the strategic thinking in sending those guys over first is, Faraday is the one who can figure how to get from the freighter to the island safely. Charlotte’s an expert in anthropology and dead languages, and Widmore thinks that skill-set would be useful for locating Ben for some reason. Hopefully, once you have all the information from season five, that will not be as much of an unanswered question, and you’ll have a little information as to why those people.

Time travel plays a big part in this season… This gets back to what I’m always asking you about: long-term planning. Obviously, some things get changed on the fly depending on what’s working and what isn’t, but did you know from the start how important time travel would be to the show, or is that something that evolved?

We were being asked, certainly as far back in season two, “Are you guys ever going to do time travel on the show?” And we responded, “Who says we haven’t already?” The time travel elements of the show have been built into the DNA of the show all along.

Obviously, the big question going into this year is this idea of, there’s only two fundamental approaches to time travel. There’s the “Back to the Future”/”Heroes” approach where you can go back and change things, that stepping on a butterfly, suddenly, there’s a different president, people have anetnna, George McFly’s a best-selling author. And the other way is, if you went back in time and tried to kill Hitler, you would fail, because Hitler wasn’t assassinated. What would happen if you were in the past and tried to change the present as you knew it, would you A)Fail, or B)Succeed, or C)Cause the thing you were trying to prevent. And that’s really interesting to us, because there’s no (do-over’s).

You’ve been covering the show since the very beginning. There’s been this very interesting thing for me, in terms of certain audience’s members to grasp the idea that they’re not watching a genre show. To them, I’m like, “What show were you watching? When the big column of smoke is in Eko’s face in season two and he stares it down and it retracts into the jungle, that’s not a genre show?” And they say, “No, it’s not.” And it makes you go, “Okay, this is how there can be both evolutionists and creationists.” You can take the same data and apply it to your own spectrum. You can go, “Oh, it’s not a genre show, because I don’t like genre shows, but I like ‘Lost.’ Therefore, ‘Lost’ is not a genre show.” That’s the logic they apply. Well, we’ve been writing a genre show from the word go. We’re sorry that it’s getting more genre.

The biggest audience that ever watched the show was the premiere of season two, where we revealed that Desmond was down in the hatch pushing the button every 108 minutes because he’s told the world will end. The show had a critical mass at that point, we’d just won the Emmy, people were talking about it, and they tuned in to see, ‘What is this thing?” And they saw that, and went, “Alright, it is exactly what I thought it was. No thank you. Not for me.”

But there’s been a steady attrition over the years, because the show demands that you watch every episode. And Lord knows, I wish there was a way we could do the show where the casual viewer could come along, but once you start writing for those people, the long-term fans will (bleeping) kill you, as well they should. We always thought it would be a cult show, and that’s the show we’ve been writing. But the fundamental strength of the characters — and our ability to say, “Nobody’s perfect, we’ve made mistakes, we’ll continue to make them” — as long as everyone’s acting in a way that makes sense, even when the story doesn’t entirely make sense, you can understand why they’re behaving the way they are. If you introduce a time travel element on the show, maybe one character will say, “I don’t want to be on the time travel show. I don’t like time travel.” That might make it more palatable to those viewers who don’t like it, either.

And the other thing is, nothing on “Lost” lasts forever. These are books in a series of six books. If season five gets a bit too far out there in terms of its genre for you, it’s just 17 hours in the grand mosaic of the show. Our hope is that, I feel like the greatest achievement that the show could have in terms of its legacy value, is that, 10 years from now, there’ll be an active debate about what were the best and worst seasons of the show, and two people will be able to say to each other, “My favorite season was this season,” and the other would say, “That’s my least favorite season! It was terrible!” And they’d still be fans of the show as a whole.

Let me put it to you this way, then: Up until the time you cut the deal to end the show (after season six), you and Carlton had to write not knowing when you could move certain stories forward. If you’d somehow known going in that it would be six years and out, what things would you have done differently in those first three years?

It’s a question that’s impossible to answer, because that wasn’t the condition of it. I think there probably would have been less internal pressure to introduce new characters into the show, but at the same time, new characters make it fresh. What would the show be without Ben and Juliet as series regulars? I think many shows that are on the air for a long time require a certain degree of cast turnover. We were certainly going to be killing people off and you then need to bring new people in.

But I think there would have been a lot more confidence in the storytelling, particularly in season’s two and three. There’s a stutter-step feel to season two and the first part of season three where you’d take two steps forward and one step back and one step forward. Even though the storytelling was emotionally-based, we’d realize that we didn’t need to do 25 episodes in a year, we only needed to do 17. For us, the big win wasn’t just setting an end date; it was also that the remaining seasons would have a reduced episodic order, so you could never get to a point where you’re like, “Wow, we really want to activate the endgame of the season, but we’re seven episodes away from that, so we need to just do a rollicking boar-hunting episode.”

That being said, some of my favorite episodes of the show are ones like Hurley in the van. Which doesn’t advance the plot in any way at all, except that they find Ben’s dad, that’s cool, but did you really need any of it?

No, but it’s a really good episode.

A good episode of “Lost” is not necessarily one that gives you major plot revelations. It’s one that works emotionally and kind of justifies its own existence. And there’s some episodes that never needed to have existed.

I think that’s what would have been different. If we’d known we could be six and out, we wouldn’t have done 25-pisode seasons, the narrative would have been a lot tighter, but I wonder if those episodes like finding the Dharma bus would have existed. So I don’t know that I would go back and change it.

Not only was it a good episode, but it sets up that wonderful moment in “Through the Looking Glass” where Hurley saves the day with the magic bus.

That’s right. That was all (Edward) Kitsis and (Adam) Horowitz (who wrote “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead”), that pitch. They were saying, “Well, Hurley finds this bus and then uses it to save them in the finale.”

What’s interesting is, it’s almost a time travel conundrum, which is, if I could go back in time and be more convincing about saying, ‘I will write this pilot, but we need to be six years and out,’ and therefore those episodes don’t get written, would I do it? The answer is no. The journey is the journey. But more importantly, if “Stranger in a Strange Land” — which, universally, is (considered) the worst episode we ever produced — had not been produced, we would not have been able to convince the network that, “This is the future of the show: how Jack got his tattoos. Everything we’ve been saying for two years about what’s to come, is now all here on the screen. You argued that an hour of Matthew Fox in emotionally-based conflicts, it doesn’t matter what the flashback story is, it’ll be fine. But now that we’re doing his ninth flashback story, you just don’t care.”

We can’t go back and apologize for the creative mistakes that we made, because we had to make them. If that episode hadn’t been made, we weren’t able to get a notes call that said, “We don’t like this episode,” and where we could then say, “We don’t like it, either, but it’s the best we can do if we’re not moving the story forward. And we’re now at a point, guys, where we can’t move the story forward.” And they asked, “Well, what would you do if we allowed you an end date?” And we said, “Give us an end date, and we’ll tell you what we’ll do.” And the conversations then reached a new pitch.

Everything has to happen the way it happened.

You brought up the introduction of Ben before, and people who are agnostic to atheistic about the idea of a master plan will say, “Well, geez, they hired (Michael) Emerson to be a day player for an episode or two, and now he’s the fulcrum of the show.” Could you clarify?

We have plans, but the big plans have trap doors. Basically, the plan on the table was Rousseau captures the leader of The Others, but doesn’t know who he is. She turns him over to Sayid, Sayid tortures him, he claims he’s a balloonist, it’s a case of mistaken identity, and it becomes a David E. Kelley story of “Will Sayid believe him or will he not?” It’ll be a three-episode arc, at the end they’ll realize he was lying all along and he’ll escape. That was the plan all along. The trap door of the plan is that, once it’s revealed that he’s an Other, he’ll admit to it and talk about the leader of The Others being a great man, in the third person. So if the actor is awesome, he’s referring to himself. But if the actor is not awesome, he’ll just be a lieutenant. He’ll go running off, or get killed, and we’ll meet the actual leader of The Others in the finale of this season when Jack and Kate and Sawyer and Hurley are double-crossed by Michael. We already had the spinal surgery story in our back pocket, and that’s where the story was going. Emerson basically, not quite guaranteed, that the story ballooned from a three-episode arc to a six-episode arc that tied into Michael’s return and the killing of Ana-Lucia.

At the beginning of the year, we have all these ideas, but we’re writing a script every eight days. I love that people think we’re smart enough — I understand why there are atheists and agnostics out there, because they believe in a subjective reality of it. They believe that JK Rowling outlined all seven Harry Potter books because she had unlimited time, nobody to answer to and an unlimited budget. She could make her characters do whatever she wants. WE can’t make our characters do whatever we want; our characters are played by actors. if we were just writing a novel, “Lost” would be uncompromised in its vision, and probably a lot worse than it’s been for being realized by a cast and crew of 500 who helped realize it in their own separate ways. The idea that Michael Emerson, the way he played Ben, is more Napoleonic — when you had thought of the leader of The Others, you thought of a big scary dude, and the fact that it’s him is fascinating. Which was our thinking when we cast him. We cast the leader of The Others, but we didn’t commit to it until Michael said, “You guys got any milk?”

Okay, lightning round. The story keeps moving forward, and therefore there are certain things you might never get back to. You don’t have to tell me what the answer is to any of these mysteries, just whether they’ll come up again

Okay

The four-toed foot?

You will see it again.

Why Libby was in the hospital with Hurley?

Hopefully, but contingent on factors beyond our control.

What happened between Alex and Rousseau during the brief period between their reunion and their deaths? Or was that another casualty of the episodes you lost to the strike?

Nope. Casualty.

Will we ever find out why Dharma (or someone else) is still making supply drops to the island?

I sure hope so.

Will the superpowers (or lack thereof) of Others like Ethan (superstrong and/or healing factor?) and Richard (immortal?) ever be clarified or explained?

Ethan works out a lot. And everyone heals fast on the island. Hasn’t Sawyer been shot like, fourteen times by now?

Source: NJ.com

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2. Producers Lindelof and Cuse Give a New Q&A on LOST
3. Damon and Carlton Comment Fans’ Favorite Episodes

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Michael Emerson Talking About Ben In Flashforwards.

What makes Lost different to other shows?

You can watch the other two videos after the jump.

The Island Backlot: Lost In Hawaii.

Lost On Location: The Shape Of Things To Come.

Video 1 | YouTube

Video 2 | YouTube

Video 3 | YouTube

Video 4 | YouTube

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Video | DailyMotion

Source: Bycarlost

Click here to pre-order the Season 4 DVD.

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Two months ago we asked you to vote for your favorite couple. Here are the results of the votation:

Congratulations, Jack and Kate!

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Which of these questions are going to be answered before the season ends, in your opinion?

1) Is Aaron’s mummy going bye-bye? With Aaron now living with Kate and calling her mama, one could assume that Claire is either a) dead or b) back on the island wielding the least effective Amber Alert ever. Is a tender sign-off in her future?

2) How did Alex end up with Ben? Poor Alex grew up thinking Ben was her father. How did that “happen”? And isn’t it a little strange that it took a hardcore jungle survivalist like Rousseau 16 years to find her?

3) Why does Hurley see dead people? Is there more to these visions than just a mental disorder? Hurley’s imaginary pal Dave helped him overcome his shyness and the reappearance of Charlie kick-starts Hurley’s desire to return to the island.

4) How did Michael and Walt get back to New York? Desmond’s storyline has shown that leaving the island is not a simple process. “Meet Kevin Johnson” revealed that the pair made it back to New York, but how?

5) Are you buying this “constant” nonsense? Stuck in a time travel loop, Desmond is headed for a Minkowski-style aneurysm, but after a little chit-chat with Penny, his “constant,” he’s fine? Does this make sense?

6) How does Sayid end up working for Ben? What — or who — could Ben possibly have in his corner that would make the forthright military man end up gunning-for-hire for His Otherness?

7) Will we ever learn all of Jack’s father’s secrets? We know that he’s both Jack and Claire’s dad, but is there more to the late Dr. Shephard Sr. (John Terry)? For example, is he maybe not dead? Is he maybe — oh, I don’t know — Jacob?

Is Jin really dead? We saw Sun bring her newborn daughter to Jin’s grave, a grave that showed Jin’s date of death as September 22, 2004, the date of the crash. Did he really die, or is it some elaborate Oceanic Six cover-up?

9) Where is Penny’s boat? OK, now that we know what is NOT PENNY’S BOAT, where is her dang rescue party? Surely not still poking around the Arctic, right?

10) What is Smokey the Monster? Rousseau called it a security system that protects the island. We learn something new about Smokey every time we see him. So far he has made some noises and attacked and/or killed people. What’s next?

11) Can Juliet be trusted? At this point, Juliet has double-, triple-, and quadruple-crossed nearly every character on the island. We know she wants to leave the island. We know she hates Ben and loves Jack. Or do we?

12) Who are the bad guys? Ben is fond of saying that he’s one of the good guys. More recently, he’s pointed an accusatory finger at Charles Widmore (Alan Dale, pictured), Penny’s dad, as the guy who faked the crash of Oceanic 815.

13) How did the island cure Locke and Rose? Locke was paralyzed and Rose had cancer before they boarded Oceanic 815. But now they’re both cured. That’s some talented electromagnetism they got there, ay?

14) Who is in the coffin? It seems to be of smaller than average size. The funeral parlor appears to be in an African-American neighborhood. Nobody shows up for the funeral. Who is it? And why does Jack take his or her passing so hard?

Source: TV Guide

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