It’s hard to believe that it’s been two years since LOST ended, on a note that disappointed and confused many viewers. Mostly, that’s because the discussion around the show never ended, with showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse defending their ending against the fan backlash. Indeed, of everyone involved in LOST, Lindelof has had the most to say on this topic, but we’ve never seen him address it as calmly and candidly as he does in a new episode of The Verge’s tech news show, On the Verge.
“As obnoxious and entitled as this sounds, I also have no regrets about it,” Lindelof tells host Joshua Topolsky, who confesses he didn’t like the finale. “I take responsibility and authorship for LOST 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.” Although he does wish he hadn’t made so many promises early on that LOST‘s big questions would be answered, Lindelof maintains that by the time the series’ trajectory had been entirely sketched out, in Season 3, he had begun telling fans, “If you are watching the show for the answers to your mysteries, you are not gonna like the ending.”
Lindelof also corrects Topolsky’s misapprehension that none of what we see on the island really happened. “At the end of the show, the last frame of the show, Matthew Fox closes his eye and dies — that happened, in our context of ‘happening.’ That’s all real. From the moment he closed his eye, all that other stuff we did in the sixth season of the show, the flash sideways, where nobody knows each other and the plane never crashed — that is… what you would define as not having happened. But everything that we ever showed you, anything that takes place on the island in LOST, happened.” Watch the entire 25-minute interview — and learn what Hurley, Ben, and Walt are all up to now — here. [via Collider]