'Lost': The Final Word

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EW Perhaps one reason that they didn't guess the secret is because back in the first two seasons of the show, you pretty vociferously ruled out purgatory as a theory of the Island.
CUSE I agree with you. Because we said the Island was not purgatory, people extrapolated that to mean that a concept that resembled it couldn't even exist within the entire show.
LINDELOF The question that has dominated my mind over the past couple months is this: What if Carlton and I had just kept our mouths shut? What if we'd said, ''We don't talk about the show, the show speaks for itself''? I've come to the conclusion that we would have been worse off. We don't live in a media culture anymore where you can write a show like Lost, where the people who care about it really care about it, and then say to them: ''We're not going to talk to you about it.''

EW Those last moments of the finale polarized the fan base, particularly when Jack reunites with his Island friends and they get swallowed up in the light that takes them into the afterlife. That's what happened, right?
CUSE We're not going to get into explaining or justifying the ending that we wrote other than to say we were able to do what we wanted to do, and we stand by it. We don't have any regrets about it. We had our story, and we were fortunate enough to get to do it exactly the way we wanted to do it.

EW There were some fans who felt leaving things open to interpretation wasn't a choice, but rather a cop-out.
CUSE It's not a cop-out. We did not want to take away from the audience that one thing that was such a vital part of the community of the show, which was the ability to debate it. For us to come out and say, ''Your theory sucks, you're wrong'' — it's deflating. It seems that the people who embraced the show as a journey and were not fixated on answers probably had the better experience with the show.
LINDELOF I personally believe that there was no ending of Lost that would not have been open to interpretation. Even if you cut to Carlton and I sitting behind a desk, and for half an hour we monologued very specifically about what we intended, there would still be people saying, ''Did you see Damon's fingers? They were kinda crossed when he was talking — that means everything he was saying was not the truth.'' The thing about Lost is that the show we were writing is not necessarily the show people were watching. There's nothing wrong with that. People who watched Lost loved to interpret it.

EW Over the years, the major theme of Lost has been the conflict between faith and reason. Given how the show ended, was Lost ultimately resolving that debate in favor of faith?
CUSE Getting into that in detail gets too much into interpreting what the end of the show is. But I think it's plain to see from the end of the show that we care about spirituality and that we were trying to be uplifting.
LINDELOF I know people had lists of questions they wanted answers to. What did the numbers mean? Where were the Dharma food drops coming from? What was up with the polar bears? But the list of questions we wanted to explore included: What happens when you die? What is the nature of man — good or evil?

EW How do you feel about those fans who really hated the finale?
LINDELOF To be clear, we are not indifferent to fan reaction. We care about what they think. A lot. And the hardest part for me about the end of Lost has been the people who are so angry at the show. To read that I personally have wasted the last six years of your life, or to read that people think we lied to them — it's very hurtful. It sucks to hear that.
CUSE It was never going to be possible for us to fulfill everyone's expectations or desires for the show. But the fact that there seems to be a significant amount of people for whom the finale was very meaningful is gratifying.

EW What's the one episode of Lost you would like to be remembered for?
CUSE The finale. I think there are other episodes that are really good, but we poured our souls into the finale.
LINDELOF It's every writer's worst nightmare — and greatest dream — to say to 20 million worldwide, ''I'm taking off all my clothes and standing on the stage, what do you think?'' The fact that 20 million people even wanted to see that was great. The fact that there's a very large probability that a large portion of that audience is going to laugh at you? Not so great. But at least we did it.