'Lost' Finale Extended By 30 Minutes, Producers React To 'The Candidate'
The series, which comes to a close on Sunday, May 23rd, will now air its final episode from 9 PM to 11:30 PM. The thirty minute addition will push back local news and the previously announced 'Jimmy Kimmel Live: Aloha to Lost' special to 12:05 AM. The network is also devoting a major chunk of its weekend to the island drama with an 'enhanced' version of the show's original two-hour pilot on May 22 and a two-hour retrospective titled 'Lost: The Final Journey' before the finale. Meanwhile, producers have given their first interview about last night's emotional episode titled 'The Candidate'. "Because now you know this show is willing and capable of killing anyone," Damon Lindelof says of why Sayid, Gin and Sun had to die last night. "In many ways, the season was structured as a long con on behalf of the Man In Black," explains Lindelof. "Once we revealed that Locke was the Monster, we knew the audience would immediately mistrust him, and we would have to spend at least a dozen episodes of Locke trying to convince the audience that he did not have malevolent intention, that all he wanted to do was get off The Island." "But everything he was doing was leading up to one moment, which was trying to get the candidates in one fell swoop. He knew if he killed just one of them, everyone would know what he was up to." "There will be very little debate at the end of this episode that Man In Black is evil and bad and has to be stopped. There is no ambiguity. He is evil and he has to be stopped. The main narrative reason for him killing our main characters is to establish how much of a bad guy he is and to clearly identify him as the antagonist rolling into the end of the series." If it's any consolation, the two say "when we watched the death scenes ourselves, it was brutal, but the story always comes first. At least they got to die in each other’s arms, so they’d have some sense of victory." As for Sayid, "His entire season-long arc has basically been, if you tell him that he is evil, you can convince him he is evil," says Lindelof. "But if you tell him he is good, maybe you can convince him he is good. We basically decided that in a moment of pure instinct, if he did something, if he sacrificed his own life in favor of saving the other people’s lives, that would convey to the audience, 'This guy was actually a good guy.'" There are now just two episodes left before 'Lost' comes to an end on May 23.
ABC has extended the 'Lost' finale by an extra half-hour.
May 5, 2010 | |
