Lost Wednesdays

The Blot is starting a new feature today, “Lost Wednesdays” in which I talk about my latest Lost theories before the week’s new episode airs and I’ll post any late breaking Lost news circulating around the web. I chose to go with Wednesday to honor the day Lost used to air on and the day it will presumably go back to airing on once all of ABC’s other scripted shows go back into production.


To kick off The Blot Says…’ Lost Wednesdays I’ve got two theories to discuss and one pretty exciting piece of news from Lost’s Executive Producers/Showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof.

Both of these theories have been mentioned on a few different sites and they’ve really stuck with me over the past week as I’ve tried to digest them. Since they are really opposing theories I thought I should share both of them and see what all of you think. The first theory combines scenes from the first two episodes of this season. In “Confirmed Dead” we learned that Matthew Abbadon put together the crew of Freighties to find the island, and we know from the Flash Forwards that the Oceanic 6 did eventually make it off the island. What we’re not sure yet is who else, if anyone, makes it off the island.

The theory floating around on the web right now is that no one else makes it off the island, because in “The Beginning of The End” Abbadon visits Hurley in the mental ward and asks him “Are they still alive?” You’d have thought if any of the Freighties made it off of the island they would have reported everything they had learned to Abbadon and he would know that there are still people alive on the island. This begs the question who is still alive on the island and what fait awaits the freighter's crew!?! Because as well all know from Charlie’s final message to Hurley, someone on the island “needs you.”

The second theory I’ve read recently that is really interesting and could be really plausible if not for Abbadon’s question to Hurley in Season 4, Episode 1 is that in “Confirmed Dead” what we thought were all Flash Backs to the Freighties lives before coming to the island are in fact Flash Forwards. This would explain why Daniel Faraday was crying while watching the news report that Oceanic flight 815 had been found, why Charlotte Lewis had been reading every newspaper article in multiple languages about the Oceanic crash, and why she was so excited to find the Dharma polar bear collar. I have no idea which of these theories is correct or if either of them are, but both are really interesting and lead to tons of possibilities for upcoming episodes. If I had to guess, I’d go with the first theory but that could all change after watching tomorrow night’s episode.

And now on to some great news! Lost C0-Executive Producer Carlton Cuse has been talking to just about anyone that would listen about his and Co-Executive Producer Damon Lindelof’s plans for Lost now that the Writers strike is over. (link, link) According to these interviews, Lost will resume production immediately with 5 new episodes to be aired this season bringing Season 4’s grand total to 13 episodes. With the season being 3 episodes shorter than originally planned, Cuse admits that “we will have to condense some stories” to fit the entire Season 3 story into the additional 5 episodes. (link) I wonder who’s Flash Backs or Flash Forwards we’ll be missing out on now that those 3 episodes are gone for this season, hopefully it wasn’t vital to the legend of Lost.

Cuse went on to tell TV Guide’s Michael Ausiello that “we had eight episodes of story planned, and we're going to try to fit that into five hours of the show. Even though it's going to be very hard to execute, we felt like any less would be doing a disservice to the story we had planned. We really want to give the fans the best possible experience and ending... to Season 4.” (link) When Ausiello asked Cuse if those final three episodes were lost forever or would they be combined with future seasons, Cuse said “Damon and I remain committed to producing the 40 additional hours of the show that we promised. We haven't figured out exactly when we'll put those other three on, but we're not eliminating them from the show. You will get those three episodes downstream.” (link)