The Man in Black is angry... over last night's episode. (Image from ontd_lost)
While half the internet complaining about how last night's episode answered barely anything and what it did answer seemed kind of cop-out-y, the other half is smugly calling themselves the minority and saying that the writers can do whatever they want. I apologize if I sound a little biased; I'm a member of the former. To be honest though, I was kind of okay with it until I read an interview by Alan Sepinwall with the LOST producers (and the figureheads to be blamed for everything) Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. In which they are kind of complete jerks. Some highlights:
on not giving the Man in Black a name:
Okay, you've now said at a couple of points here that you're not going to reveal the name of the Man in Black. Is there a significance to that, or you've just decided you prefer the air of mystery it gives the character to not give him a name?
CC: I think for us to explain why we're not giving him a name veers too far into the territory of explaining things that we don't feel the need to explain.
on the famous "outrigger scene" from episode 5x04, "The Little Prince:"
Okay, finally, I have to ask, simply because it's been driving me nuts for a year and a half: what's going on with showing the other half of the outrigger shootout?
CC: The outrigger shootout is not something we're bending around in gyrations so we can solve it. In the grand scheme of the show, that is a fairly obscure piece of the show. It is your particular obsession...
DL: ...and you're not alone in it.
CC: You're not alone in it. And yes, it would have been great if we had had the opportunity to close the time loop. But you can't get everything done and keeping the narrative going in a straight line. This is one of those things where we made a very conscious choice to ask, "What are the big questions? And most importantly, what are the paths of these characters? Where do they lead?" And we followed those paths and tried not to trip ourselves up getting too diverted from that. We felt that that's the thing that's ultimately going to make the finale work or not work. We got to the point where we made the finale we wanted to make, that was our approach, and I think it was the only approach we could take. We sat here in my office, had breakfast every day for six years, talked about the show, and we used this gut check methodology, where if we both loved something and thought it was cool, that would go in. We applied that same methodology to the finale, and that was the only way we could do it. We came up with a finale that we thought was cool, that was emotional and one we really liked. That's the best we could do.
DL: When we wrote that scene and somebody started shooting at them, we knew exactly who was shooting at them. That is not a dangling thread that we don't know the answer to. That being said, as we started talking about paying that off this season, it felt like the episode was at the service of closing the time loop, as opposed to what the characters might actually be doing in that scenario. It never felt organic. We decided we would rather take our lumps from the people who couldn't scratch that itch than to produce an episode that was in service of putting people in an outrigger and getting shot at.
and on something that particularly bothered me:
You've said many times that when people find out who Adam and Eve are, we'll all realize just how long you've been planning the mythology. Well, I went back and watched the "House of the Rising Sun" scene, and Jack says that the clothing looks like it's 50 years old. Is he just not very good at calculating the rate of decay on fabric?
CC: Jack is not really an expert in carbon dating.
DL: He's not really a forensic anthropologist. We need to bring in Bones.
CC: Or Charlotte. She's an anthropolgist.
DL: The other theory that I would like to throw out there is that Jacob and his mother were just expert craftsmen. They made those clothes on that loom so well, it would appear that they were only 50 years old in decomposition, when in fact it's several thousand.
CC: Or perhaps the fabric is magic. A lot of theories there, Alan.
Besides the obvious point that Charlotte wasn't really a forensic anthropologist either, just someone who could identify polar bear bones in Tunisia, what really grinds my gears is how jerk-y they are being about some of these things. How smug they say that they know information and are just choosing not to give it out. Way to get cocky guys!
Way to get opinionated, author.
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