'Lost' brain trust speaks at Comic-Con

A number of excellent questions were asked at Thursday’s “Lost” panel at the annual San Diego Comic-Con, the yearly gathering for lovers of all things geeky at the San Diego Convention Center. Who’s in the coffin seen in the Season 3 finale? Who’s on that freighter out there in the ocean and what do they want from the people on the island? Did anyone aside from Kate and Jack ever get off the island? And what about Nikki and Paolo – are they really dead? OK, that last question was a joke. Actually, all the questions were jokes, or things designed to drive “Lost’s” most hardcore fans a little batty. Because the questions actually came from “Lost” executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, who arrived on the Comic-Con stage to rapturous applause, but who placed little bells on the table in front of them – the better to shut each other up in case too many secrets started to get spilled. Not too many secrets did get spilled, and truth be told, isn’t that how we sort of want it – most of the time, that is? After all, the Internet which giveth spoilers can also taketh away suspense.  But when it comes to “Lost,” we have to know – the show lives to plant questions deep in the grey matter of our brains, questions that go off like time-lapse grenades, so that months after the finale, we’re still wondering about Penny and Desmond and Rousseau and why Claire still appears to have access to sunscreen. So we ask, because the “Lost” writers make us. It’s their fault! Isn’t it? I mean, heck, even ABC president Stephen McPherson was giving away “Lost” spoilers on Wednesday – he revealed that actor Harold Perrineau, who plays Michael, will be back in Season 4. The fact that the professional journalists at the Television Critics Association press tour had to badger that information out of McPherson on Wednesday during his panel with the Fourth Estate caused many snits at TCA in Beverly Hills. How dare McPherson imply that it would be a better strategy for ABC to toss that exclusive to the assembled horde at Comic-Con on Thursday? But, er, what if ABC has a point? After all, there’s a reason that most of the new network shows for fall are doing Comic-Con presentations, and that the networks are spending big bucks to do presentations on returning shows such as “Lost,” “24” and “Heroes.” I’m a big believer in the best that the mainstream press has to offer – and yes, we have blogs too – but maybe, as far as the TV honchos are concerned, the 130,000 attendees of Comic-Con are just as important in building buzz as the 150 critics that McPherson tangled with on Wednesday.

The networks all want another “Heroes,” after all – a show that got a great reception at Comic-Con in 2006. And we all know how that worked out.

I will say this for the mainstream press – their questions for people like Cuse and Lindelof are (usually) a little more probing (as we saw from an interesting TCA session the producers did at a winter press tour in January).

At Comic-Con, the questions ranged from the procedural (Was the man whom Hurley saw fall from a building in Season 1 Locke? Answer: “No.”) to the thematic, as in, why was there so much violence in Season 3?

Answer: There wasn’t. You just may have thought there was, because it was perpetrated by the less-pretty Others, according to Lindelof.

“When Sawyer is, like, punching you in the face, you’re like, ‘More, please. You’re just so attractive. Do you want to take your shirt off while the beating continues?,’” Lindelof said to riotous laughter from the crowd.

When an Other is beating someone, however, the reaction is “Oh, this is brutal violence,” Lindelof said. So in future, the violence on the show will be “perpetrated by people who are catastrophically good-looking.”

Still, the series of softballs that the super-“Losties” served up made Lindelof nervous.

“The questions are so nice this year,” he said. “I know you are somewhere in that line -- that special someone who’s going to make me wake up in a cold sweat for the next half a year, trying to make you happy. I can never make you happy, can I?,” he said with a laugh. 

Eventually one fan served up a crafty query, the open-ended but useful question that is the old trusty standby of desperate journalists everywhere: “What questions are we not asking that we ought to be?”

An “oooh” that clearly meant, “Well played, madam!” rolled over the room. 

Lindelof called it a “Mobius strip” of a question, but then he and Cuse served up the list of questions noted above – and then said they wouldn’t answer any of them. 

But still, you have to think that those are topics that will come up in the next season or two of “Lost,” whose journey among the Comic-Con-going, “Lost”-obsessing, message-board-lurking fandom of late has been more eventful than Michael, Jin and Sawyer’s eventful journey on the raft. You know, the raft that sank in Season 1.

Critics and fans really beat up on the show during a rollercoaster of a third season. There was the great stuff (Hurley in the VW van, Ben in the Shrieking Shack, etc.) and the not-so-great (Jack’s tattoo holiday. Ecchhh).

Cuse and Lindelof did say at the Comic-Con panel that it was frustrating for them not to be able to roll out some of the cooler things they had always planned on – such as Jack’s flash-forward, which we saw in the Season 3 finale. But once they got the go-ahead to wrap things up in 48 episodes, they felt emboldened to start, well, kicking out the jams.

“We had all these things in play, but as long as we were sort of proceeding without knowing what the finish line was, we had to delay stuff that we would like to have done sooner and push it off later, because it became about tapdancing,” Lindelof said.

Fans and critics did notice the tapdancing – and they complained about it loud and long during Season 3. Hence Cuse and Lindelof’s push to get a definite end date, which was announced by ABC in May which will occur after three more seasons of 16 episodes each.

That end date “gave us license to basically execute that” flashforward idea, Cuse said.

Speaking of tapdancing, enough of that from me. Here are a few more tidbits from the hourlong “Lost” session:

• I think this may be the most interesting news from the panel: “What you saw with Kate and Jack [in the season finale] is not the end of the show,” Cuse said. Hmmmm…
• Another big tidbit for fans concerned “flash-forwards”: Lindelof said the show would, in coming seasons, use a mixture of flashforwards and flashbacks. 
• The “Lost” producers elaborated a bit about Perrineau: He won’t be back for just a quick, one-episode visit – the actor is a series regular once again. The producers didn’t say where and when he’d be back, of course. But they did say that his season-long absence was “part of a grander design,” according to Lindelof.
• Perrineau joined Lindelof and Cuse on the stage midway through the presentation, and said to fans, “Man, I’ve missed you all.” He also guessed at the identity of the person in the coffin in the Season 3 finale. Since a newspaper article about the dead person appeared to say that he or she had a teenage son, “my guess is … it’s probably Locke,” Perrineau joked. But why, pray tell, was Perrineau so conspicuously asked at the session about that coffin? Hmmmm….
• Fans asked about the character of Libby (Cynthia Watros), whom some have speculated may have been working for the Dharma Initiative. “It is our intention to get to the Libby story this year, and we think you will be very happy with it when we do,” Cuse said. “And you’re not barking up the wrong tree,” with the Internet speculation about her Dharma connection, Lindelof added.
• There will also be an episode devoted to Rousseau (Mira Furlan), either this season or next. “There are important things revealed in that story, and they have to kind of sync up with something else,” Lindelof said.
• Someone asked if Jack (Matthew Fox) and Claire (Emilie de Ravin) would find out that they are brother and sister. Lindelof began to answer, “I would say…” but then Cuse rang the bell in front of him insistently, cutting off Lindelof’s reply. So… who knows?
• After Cuse and Lindelof were done speaking, a short, jokey, black-and-white “Dharma Initiative” orientation film was shown. It starred Dr. Marvin Candle (Francois Chau) and he spoke of the “Orchid Station,” which I believe he said was “Station 6” and which he explained is not really a “botanical research unit.” He was holding a rabbit with the number 15 on its side. He spoke of the “Casimir effect” and the “highly volatile” studies that apparently the Dharma Initiative has carried out. Another bunny suddenly appeared in the room, perched on a shelf, and Candle appeared alarmed. The whole thing was done in the herky-jerky, strangely spliced style that we’ve come to expect from the Dharma Film Collection. It was only a couple of minutes long.
• The producers said that Ben Linus did not purposefully get caught in Rousseau’s trap at the beginning of Season 2; but we will find out why he was headed across the island when he got caught by her.
• Lindelof and Cuse said that there was no “Lost Experience” this year because it just got too hard to juggle all the show’s various ancillary elements and the “mothership” as well. But now that they’re only doing 16 episodes a year, there may be mobisodes this fall, they’re also working on the show’s official game, which comes out in February, and kicking around book ideas too.
• Lindelof on fan feedback: “Sometimes it can get a little brutal, but sometimes it helps us write the show.”
• Cuse repeated what both men have said elsewhere – that at the end of the show, there will be some mysteries left. But they’ll do their best not to give fans “10 seconds of black tape,” Cuse said. “It’s going to be 20 seconds of black tape,” Lindelof joked. “Twice as mysterious.”
• They “may be limited” in how much they can use Nestor Carbonell, who plays Richard Alpert on the show. But Carbonell is in the fall CBS series “Cane,” so we might not see him much on “Lost” unless “Cane” tanks.
• Regarding spoilers and such in general, “I think the reason that all of you guys came here today is because you want to know ahead of time what’s coming up,” Lindelof said. And he said they’ll try to keep hardcore fans informed via podcasts and events such as Comic-Con (and they’ll no doubt dole out a few clues via press interviews as well). But things will also get leaked without their permission, they lamented.

  “You can find out what the first 10 episodes are about online before you even tune into the first episode of ‘Lost,’” Lindelof said; Cuse cited the “500 people” that have access to leakable information about “Lost.” 

  “Of course there are always want to turn to the last page of the book and people who [don’t], and it’s our job to try to make sure the people who don’t want to get spoiled don’t get spoiled…. We err on the side of not giving away too much,” Lindelof said.   

  “We’re incredibly grateful to the fan community,” for policing those tried to reveal that the season finale involved a flash-forward, Cuse said. “We will count on you, our most avid fans, with policing spoilers. … you guys can help us in terms of keeping spoilers away from people who don’t want to see them.”

  The Comic-Con audience – many of them bloggers and LiveJournalers and message-board posters – heartily applauded this idea. And I’d be willing to bet more than a few of them went online Thursday night to post their thoughts about how and when Michael will come back, to speculate about what’s up with that freighter, and to wonder whether Nikki and Paulo are really most sincerely dead.