In attendance last night were series executive producers Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse, Eddy Kitsis, Adam Horowitz, and Elizabeth Sarnoff as well as cast members Terry O'Quinn (Locke), Michael Emerson (Ben), Zuleikha Robinson (Ilana), and Nestor Carbonell (the seemingly ageless Richard).
Highlights of the panel included some teases of what's ahead for the series and its characters, as well as some insight into what might've been different had the creators not run into certain actor availability issues while shooting the series.
“We’re not writing a novel where the characters will do whatever we ask them to”, explains Damon Lindelof. “When we write something, the actors give so much back [so] we’re sort of interested in not making off-the-rack suits [but] tailoring suits. The fun part is doing the alterations constantly.”
So have how have these unforeseen circumstances affected the initial narrative of LOST that Cuse and Lindelof had planned years earlier?
“We’ve talked in the past about the fact that Eko would’ve had a much more prominent role in the series beyond the beginning of season three when we killed him off – primarily because Adewale didn’t want to be on the show anymore”, begins Lindelof. “That definitely changes the initial plan but sometimes it happens in a positive way where you bring an actor on for 2 or 3 episodes, like Ben, and Michael [Emerson] comes in and does what he did and then you know, that guy’s going to be in the finale.”
When asked how intentional things like the names of characters or the books seen on the show were, Lindelof set some limits to the Easter Eggs the writers regularly place within the series.
“We obviously try to name the characters with some degree of intention and we pick books on the show for very specific reasons and there are some Easter Eggs that we hide but the minute we start feeling like we’re really smart…well, down that path lies destruction.” Admitting, “we’ve had to accept that the audience is infinitely smarter than us and they’ve proven to be, so anything we include, we want them to get.” A character’s name that might have historical, philosophical, or culture relevance is “not an accident”, but “the reality of our lives is that every ten days we have to generate a 55-page script” so regularly including some of the extreme “Easter Eggs” fans have hypothesized about” (like the Jack Bender painting for instance) is not an option.
Relating the question of character names to the new season, Carlton Cuse admitted that the naming of ‘Dogen’ (played by ) “was an intentional choice”. “We felt like that’d be a cool piece of Japanese history to attach to the character.”
“All I have to say”, joked Lindelof, “was that when I was taking Intro to Philosophy 101 I was like, I’m never going to use this - I was wrong.”
In one section of the panel, the producers were asked to respond to a series of questions with a ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘Pass’ and the results were quite revealing:
Have we already met the person Jack was married to in his flash-sideways? YES.
Was Jacob telling the truth, is somebody coming to the Island? YES.
Did the Smoke Monster manifest itself as the bus that killed Juliet’s ex-husband in “Not In Portland”? NO.
Will we get an answer to why women can’t give birth on the Island? PASS.
Will get answers about Libby and her connection with Hurley? YES.
And perhaps the most pressing of all: Will we ever get Vincent’s back story? Choosing to ignore the aforementioned rules of the section, Lindelof sarcastically chimed “Talk about daddy issues”. Clarifying things a little, Cuse promised that, “we will see Vincent again”.
Other tibdits of the panel included an 'N-O' to the series ever being released in chronological form and a baffling ambiguous clue about the series' final three episodes, from Lindelof himself - the singular word of 'water' will no doubt lend itself to thousands of varied fan responses in the coming weeks.
But before the panel came to a close, Darlton were able to finally answer one of the more pressing questions in the fan community:
With LOST being such a diverse show - why the lack of LGBT characters? The sole LGBT character featured on the series being that of Tom Friendly, played by M.C. Gainey, whose sexuality wasn't revealed until almost a year after the character's death!
Beginning his response to the heavy question on a much lighter note, Lindelof joked: “I think we’ve definitely killed more straight characters than gay”. After laughter from the packed-audience, Lindelof addressed the question in greater detail. "One question we get asked all the time is - what are you guys going to do with the love triangle in the final season? There are these inherently romantic concepts [on the show] but it's also a very chaste show. The fact that the characters are thinking sexually or acting sexually is not something that very often manifests itself in the writing unless it's very specific to the Sawyer/Juliet dynamic or whatever. We haven't paired off a lot of the other characters and there might be other characters on the show who are gay or lesbian or bi, it just hasn't been us getting up on our soapbox and saying so."
This is not to say the producers are without their regrets, however. "This is certainly one of the regrets we have in terms of saying, looking back at the broad base of the show, should we have had more lesbian and gay characters? Should we have had more African American characters? Should we have had more arabic characters? Absolutely but you know this is what we did and this is our best shot. So we apologize but at the same time, that's what it is."
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