For Lost fanatics and Lost bashers alike, conversations in the years after the hit series’finale have been largely negative, with relatively few walking away from the show without complaints. (Much applause if you’re one of them.) Scorpion creator Nick Santora told a monster of a story about the show’s writing that, if true, could prove that the show’s intentionally bonkers mysteries weren’t ever meant to be answered. It was all a plot from Big Pharma to drive up the sale of headache-relievers.
Seriously, though, Santora appeared on the Nerdist Writers Panel podcast and talked about a lot of things, including series that end badly, and it all turned truly hilarious when he brought up Lost. What begins with talk about Prison Break's serialized storytelling turned into this.
I had friends who were writing on Lost. I can’t say who they were – Season 1. I was watching football with some of them, telling one of them how much I love the show’s Season 1…and I’m like, ‘How are you gonna pay all this stuff off?’ And he looked and me and he goes, ‘We’re not.’ And this is Season 1. I go, ‘What do you mean, you’re not?’ And he’s like, ‘We don’t know what any of this shit…We just literally think of the weirdest most fucked up thing and write it, and we’re never gonna pay it off.’”
At which point, Santora says he called the friend out for messing with audiences’ heads. We take this story with a grain of salt, of course, since it’s of such a creatively inflammatory nature. More interesting, perhaps, is the complete lack of surprise that this story inspires, since it (allegedly) confirms something that people have been saying for years. And something that writer Damon Lindelof has sometimes alluded to.
Regardless of whether or not the mysteries of the show were built on solidly written ground or just monstrous smoke, Lost still made the craziness fun and unique for a few amazing seasons. (At which point it arguably should have wrapped it all up.) While my post-Season 6 feelings were on par with Santora’s in which he jokingly says he wants to start a class-action lawsuit on behalf of people who followed the show for its entire run, I don’t really feel that way anymore. I’ve allowed myself to remember the good ol’ days, as it were. Before the temple. Always before the temple.
You can find Santora’s entire spiel in the Nerdist podcast below. It all starts at 56:40.
Do you guys think Lost put together plotlines that were as tightly constructed as Prison Break, or do you think the writers just threw everything out there to see what stuck?
