Gadgetory

so getting back to the ambiguity point I think the danger there and for what's frustrating for people and I think that with lost I think a lot of people feel this way is that it ambiguities can sometimes come off as not like hey here's something for discussion but you didn't know sure or like you didn't have the answer right right it's very frustrating to feel when you when you're very attached and I think alien is franchise obviously people are very very attached to lost obviously people are very attached to and it's frustrating when you when you love something and you really care for it and you want there to be real answers you know especially for comic book fans and like like fanboys mm-hmm getting the answers is really important sure and so I think that the the fine line you have to walk it with it with being ambiguous is was it ambiguous because the person you know doesn't have the answer or is it ambiguous because they want you to ask the question right and and I think that that that's what's that can be that's what can be frustrating I mean I I told you I was going to ask you about this I might as well just get into it now I miss you I'm a person who watched lost all the way through again and thought the ending was extremely disappointing okay disappointing because it felt like if I felt like the praat there was a promise of something much more and not profound maybe not more moving certainly not more moving in my opinion but something smarter right and it felt like it ended on this in this way that was like well so what was the point uh-huh and so there the ambiguity was not I mean there was there stuff that was specific and stuff that was ambiguous but I think there was it felt like well they didn't have the answer right this was the neatest way to wrap it up share without having to answer any of the questions or you know avoiding some of the question right do you does that now haunt you like that kind of sense of people being of needing the answer and not getting it and you having to answer for it i mean i know you tweeted about mass effect the end of Mass Effect 3 sure you said I wasn't involved in the ending of rewrite has people been disappointed with some of its ambiguity and sure does that feel like it's haunting you and does it haunt you with this I think haunt is probably not as accurate a word as I think haunt sort of implies like it's it's it's something that creates a tremendous amount of stress and sadness and fear for me as much as it is something that I accept as a part of the legacy of that show and do I embrace it I embrace it in the same way that Matt Damon embraces Robin Williams and Good Will Hunting like under duress and wanting to punch it too so like it is a it is a it is a deeply conflicted ongoing battle that I have but I have is obnoxious and entitled as the sounds I also have no regrets about it like so in order to be haunted by it like I think regret is part of haunting where it's sort of like you know I if I could go back in time I would do it differently and for me I just sort of feel that and again my own authorship and lost I have to say there were a bunch of other writers on the show there was Jay Jay at its inception that was Carlton all the way through there were amazingly talented writers in the writers room but I take responsibility an authorship for lost in in terms of my own feelings about the ending and I make no apologies for it I do feel like that was the ending that I wanted to do and I was always comfortable with the ambiguity of the show and I think that that there were times over if there was one regret that I had there there were times over the course of the show where in interviews I said the answers are coming but if you I challenge you to look at any interview that I gave post the middle of season three which was the turning point when they said we you can we can now give you an end date to the show because up until then there was there was a degree of improvisation that had to occur because we didn't know how many of these things we were going to do or how long we were going to be around to be doing them once we said there's going to be 48 episodes left at that point a firm plan had to come into motion then from that point on I think that I started saying publicly if you are watching the show for the answers to your mysteries you're not going to like the ending and I will I will pull you know at least ten instances of Carlton and I saying this in interviews and major publications in on television and I'll say hey you know if if you didn't do your due diligence and listen to what we had to say you were warned right and I just it's not that I didn't care about the mythology of the show I just feel like many shows have come and gone that are very focused on their mysteries and their mythologies and their ambiguity and there is no were seen in the history of genre then the architect explaining to neo everything that happened in the matrix I wasn't in touch that with a ten-foot pole that is a particularly awful instance of over explanation of like feeling like you owe it to the audience right okay so we have the architect and then we have lost and the lost lost is not enough and the architect is too much and somewhere in between is just right and I'm going to always be closer to lost than I am to the architect because that is just not interesting to me right and I think like I my own storytelling the things that capture my imagination and make me want to re-engage are sometimes frustrating and challenging but for lost it was like by the way I will actually answer any questions that you have about the show but I won't say oh here's what it was I will actually refer you I'll give you the required reading if you're worried about what the numbers were all about or what was Walt's purpose or those aren't the things that actually bothered me I was sitting here I've just been sitting here listening you talk about it I realize I wasn't disappointed with like with lost not giving me answers at the end what I was actually disappointed with the answer gave which it felt like the answer was all the things that just happened didn't really mean anything they kind of didn't happen that was that my takeaway from it what do you mean they didn't it was like all the things that happened all these things that were set up as you know you've got to stop the man in black because X Y & Z sure uh it didn't matter right Willy because it wasn't real is it was well but not really and it was like it was like a shared fantasy I mean it didn't seem like there was like I mean what No so so so the things that were gone on the island were happening in the actual world yes I cannot believe we're talking about this by the way because I had no plans to get into a detailed conversation about it so they were happen in like our timeline correct I mean yes I mean there's no oceanic Airlines in our no no I mean but but in the real world not in it's like kind of like moment before death fan they say world where everybody's trying to find each other so they can go to heaven know correct um so at the end of the show the last frame of the show Matthew Fox closes his eyes closes his eye and dies you know that happened like in our context of happening like that happened that's all so it's then from the moment that he closed his eye all that other stuff that we did in the in the sixth season of the show the flash sideways where nobody knows each other and the plane never crashed that is whatever your interpretation is I'm not going to talk about what our intention is but that's what you would define is not having happened or happening but everything that we ever showed you anything that takes place on the island and lost happened you know absolutely 100% the plane crash those people survived everything that you saw throughout those six seasons like some the whole struggle between good and bad that's like a really meaningful thing that actually occurred yes that would have threatened the universe had not been the Dharma Initiative Israel the island is real all those Hurley right now right now at this moment in time Hurley and ban and with helps them with with some help from Walt are actually running things on the island maintaining it this is the or the ending good thing about this for the for the movie that could have potentially happened no I mean I what well look III again I don't want to ruin the mystery and ambiguity of the show in terms of talking about our intention but I do feel like one of the things that we always wanted to do and we're very passionate about doing was exploring the idea of purgatory both figuratively and literally and this was so obvious to the audience that within three or four episodes of the of the first season of the show they were like it's purgatory right they're all dead and we kept saying we swear to god they are not all dead this is really happening but the audience is telling us that they really want some sort of clinical evaluation of an afterlife right and purgatory is about judgment and this show has never really offered up what I would call Christian Judeo judgment in terms of there's a deity it's always about self judgment so the idea of like and you know does Jack think that he's worthy or Sawyer can Sawyer forgive himself for his sins or did Kate kill her stepfather justifiably so I always felt like if the characters can forgive themselves then they can then then the show's over show is called lost it's not because they're on an island it's because they're lost so right so how are we going to creatively demonstrate that self forgiveness we're going to we're going to do this idea and so there was an interpretation I think largely a large part of it came from ABC's decision to run footage of the plane wreckage over the end credits of the finale and we publicly got out and said oh my god that was not our idea right don't don't it that was kind of like well it did almost a race a lot I think that that was the feeling but we also anticipated your reaction in terms of and here's the thing is I can't logic anyone who is disappointed in the finale and is suddenly being undisciplined with it right you have a visceral reaction to things you either like them or you don't like them and I honor your your your feedback among and the feedback of other dissenters that is to say though that in the fun I think that in the final scene of the show that proceeds the church where basically Jack's father Christian Shepherd says some things to Jack one of the things that Jack says is like wait a minute hold on is this is this real like did any of this happen like because josh is going to be busting Damon's balls about this and Jamie's going to near eight years after the famines gonna need to say something we edited that part out because it would have been weird for you uh-huh like you would have been like oh my god this is strange but then his father says it's all real it all happened everything happened you know and so I was like that's going to make it pretty clear but yeah I wasn't clear enough I have to say it's been so it's been I mean when did the show and how many years ago was it two years two years ago which seems like a long time lost exactly like it ended yeah it ended May 23rd of 22 the 2009-2010 sorry I I mean I am distant from it now but I just remember that that had that feeling of going well this nothing matters that's interesting now I want to go back and watch it having heard this from you let me now that I've got you on the couch they'll be here I've actually I've actually got you on the couch but that's fine I find this refreshing because I am actually really interested in in gate few people will engage me on their level of disappointment because it's an uncomfortable thing to do yeah well it's like telling somebody works out so I yeah but I like it and what I would say to you is coming into the finale the night that the finale is going to air like before you even sit down to watch it can you honestly tell me that you felt optimistic that at the end of those two and a half hours you would be satisfied or were you already like this no I think that something could have happened rather than really satisfied right you up until that point in the show you were like I love my because you guys had been your faith had not wavered prior to oh no no my faith had wavered plenty and there were three whole seasons that I was like this is why am I wasting my time watching this show because it was just very disappointed I have a quest and I actually want to ask about that because I feel like to me lost felt like a show that was meant to be fewer seasons than it actually was and you even said there was some filler there oh my god sure I mean to me it felt like and this actually gets to it so let me be before I get into this question and we will talk about prometheus at some point I was look if you guys had had revealed that the entire thing was some thereof in space it was part of an alien experiment had been going on with thousands of other groups of humans that they'd been plucking off the planet yeah I was riffing by the way I just I've been like okay this is like some weird philip k dick stuff that's how it's going to end it's going to be like slaughterhouse-five and I could get totally behind that right because it was like it would have made sense to me that a lot of things didn't make sense and it would have also been a really upsetting ending share sort of a nada I feel like the onion was almost like a happy ending mm-hmm which to me I didn't see coming or kind of didn't want right by the way I'm one man amongst millions and millions or shows people I mean admit I know there are millions of people who love the end and are very satisfied by it sure but but yeah there were things that I think that going into and I felt like if there had been I wasn't my mind wasn't set against there being a conclusion that I would have been happy with if Bob Newhart had woken up and it had all been a dream that he was having which I talked about for years as a ninja with my wife I would have been completely satisfied with that ending and would have thought it was the most brilliant thing that was ever put on television sure we wouldn't be having this conversation right now yeah I mean I guess I'd be I we resigned ourselves either correctly or incorrectly fairly early on to the idea that whatever mythological construct we came up with for what the ultimate ending of the show was and I feel personally speaking like one of the most unsuccessful episodes of lost is this one across the sea which basically tells the origin story of Jacob and the man in black and it's just kind of rife with like fundamental explanation it's as close to the architect scene as we got and it also needed to set up like here's where the end the end game of the island is going to play out that that's sort of like I wasn't really emotionally invested in that episode because it didn't feature any of the people that I had been told to care about in the preceding hundred and fifteen episodes it wasn't that Jacob and the man in black weren't interesting characters they were but it was sort of like wait a minute I thought the show was about any time you say to people what's lost about it starts with like well there's this plane crash and therefore that they don't say like well centuries and centuries ago in fact millennia ago if they say that you go like I'm out so I always just felt like the the show that the ending that we were shooting for was going to be one that the dealt with sort of the emotional reality of the characters and gave some fundamental explanation for why what did these people get out of Flint this plane crash right and the answer as corny as it sounds was the one that appealed to me the most which is each other that's what they got they were all up sad individuals who were lost in their own lives and hated themselves and somehow they found some fundamental community amongst each other if they hadn't met each other and spent all that time on the island then they would never have been able to forgive themselves for their past sins and break through to some sort of level of self awakening and forgiveness it is new agey it is cocaine but it's the story that I wanted to tell it's interesting because I feel like now my the alien ending that I just talked about seems very cynical and mean-spirited in comparison to what you were talking about you like I wanted to find each other and be happy well what's my eyes like they are doomed in space to go through alien experiments but the thing is went when you go for anything there's going to be some fundamental polarization so that like life on Mars for example the American version I will not spoil the ending for anybody who wants to embark on it but the concept of life on Mars is that basically a detective played by Jason O'Mara and the British in the American version basically he he he is without explanation suddenly finds himself in the 70s as a cop and so the series is asking he gets in a car crash and then he wakes up in the 70s as a cop and so the series starts to ask the question of like well how is this possible and they did 13 episodes the show was cancelled but they did resolve the the ending of the show well there was a resolution it was an explanation for how that happened and I would say that it is very much in the wheelhouse of what what your solution was and there were some people who said that that was great and clever and there were a lot of people who said that they didn't like it right and if there is a perfect ending out there for a long form sort of mythology serious the Newhart ending doesn't apply because it was a sitcom they just did a very clever last scene right the entire series but well that's extreme that one is really like but there are no more question right but it's almost like saying elsewhere like they did the crazy snow globe ending but this but it was just a hospital show it didn't even require that right if I said to you like let me ask you something do you like the x-files are you asking me that round asking out I love it what happened at the end of the x-files in the last episode I'm just anything that happened so loose you remember Airy last episode yeah I'm trying to think it's been years uh I don't remember right so it's at least um I have I remember the universe I kind of remember with the resolution like what happened to the warring alien fat boy ler alert whoever's watching yeah it's been long enough screw you you should have seen it yes uh you know I remember that you know what happens the smoking man oh is he is he I don't know I feel like I am go spoil it for people but I kind of remember what happens but you have a question here what is your question it wasn't a question it was at least you remember being really disappointed in the way Lost ended and you have very specific memories of why you were disciplined - right but you know it's it's what had an ending that was very clear yeah I will say that it wasn't anything that I particularly liked yes but it had an ending it had an ending yes it definitely had and something you could you know say specifically happened to the characters right and I feel like at the very least no matter what your interpretation is you do know that everyone that you ever cared about died and and that you got treated to some version of an epilogue how it is they died and how that all fits together discuss amongst yourselves I feel like we were pretty clear in it but one of the things that I didn't want people to do is like well when's the movie coming out right sort of like when the Sopranos ended and people were like I hope there's a Sopranos movie I'm like if they do a movie it completely nullifies the brilliance of the cut to black yeah and there were people who didn't like the cut to black because they felt like they wanted more resolution or that there was a promise of more resolution and at the end of the day like they didn't even understand that a movie would completely and totally erase the boldness of that decision it's just like that's it like that's the last time you ever will see Tony Soprano is eating onion rings in that diner with his family that's you get I also imagine that ends by the way that's an alien experiment yes I know some and guess what spaceship no one can prove you wrong that's right even David chances well that's why it's so brilliant right perfect so so so actually let's bring this back around to what you're seeing right we're talking about alien space alien spaceships but but the the creating something that goes on for six seasons or longer seems like a kind of a challenge to on the creative process of telling a story I mean it seems like a finite you know a book I mean you do have books like you know the game of Thrones books that are obviously they're going on and on right and that works yes but it does often feel like in the creative process you want to have some you want to know there's a finite amount that you can you can say right I feel like dark shows that work really well because they're like you know the office the British office for instance yes they said we're gonna do two seasons and we're done yep and it isn't special and a Christmas special right where they answer a bunch of questions wrap ups and absolutely we finally understand we know what happened with made the operands KITT yeah yeah sure uh is it more satisfying to you in some ways to work on something like Prometheus where you have you're like look I've got two hours to deal with this thing there's not going to be any filler I've got to tell the story succinctly and answer questions in a relatively short amount of time is that more satisfying them to you now you you know you've obviously done both things what do you get more satisfaction out of and do you think it's actually I mean because I I'm sorry I'm gonna let you answer that question but I have a follow-up good yeah I mean it is very satisfying to to do a movie that has a beginning middle and end and you know exactly what you're getting into when you start the job television you don't know what you're getting into you don't know how many years it's going to be on for you don't its hubris to say I have a plan for the entire second season of the show because no one's even watching it yet they have to like it for you to get to that point so they're you know and I talk about this often so I won't belabor the point but the two things that sort of came up all the time during lost where question number one are you making it up as you go along and the answer to that question is no like that's what people want you to say no we absolutely have a firm plan and there's a binder over there and that's where our plan is and we've got it and you're in good hands mommy and daddy know where we're going don't worry about you a map that's question number one question number two how much input does the audience have and the answer to that question is a lot we listen to you guys all the time we want to know what you like and what you don't like and we will adjust accordingly are these your actual answers these are the answers that people want these are the answers that people want yeah you know nobody wants to be told you don't matter like the audience like we don't care what you have to say about the show we're doing it the way we want to do it and nobody wants to hear we don't have a plan we're kind of winging it and whatever feels right we're going to do like the true those the real answers they are not the real answers the real answers I've given an is politic as they may sound the real answers are there is a plan and when the plan doesn't work we change the plan and the other answer is yes we really listen to what you have to say but norm like 98% of the time we agree with you before you've said it because the episode that you've just hated we hated six months ago when we first wrote it and we started fixing already so there's a space between the seasons where you're where it matters a lot because we haven't started writing the next season of the show yet but while the show is on it's we can see the iceberg that you are telling us to not hit but we can't turn off the ship we can't turn off the engines in time to not hit it we've already written those episodes so those are the those are the true answers but the bit the inherent contradiction between those two ideas of you you you want to listen to us but at the same time listening to us would require you to deviate from the plan that we want you to have it feels like it's a catch-22 which is exactly what it is but I love being in that catch-22 like I love doing that dance and I do feel like I there's a lack of safety and television that's so exciting to me and that's why I watch TV because I sort of feel like anything can happen it can sort of go off a cliff and the more fast and loose and dangerous you play the more exciting it is to watch and sometimes that means creatively and I I I sort of embraced that idea