'Lost' Won't End 'Sopranos'-Style

[Brian Damage]

Three days after the controversial finale of The Sopranos, the two creators of Lost on Wednesday promised that their hit ABC drama would not conclude in similarly murky fashion.

"We will not be ending with a blackout," said Carlton Cuse, referring to the black screen that delivered an unresolved ending to HBO's mob drama.

He and Damon Lindelof told electronic-media professionals at the annual Promax/BDA conference that they fleshed out a plan for the last three seasons of Lost during a recent writers' "minicamp."

Lost will end in spring 2010 after 48 hourlong episodes, 16 per season. Lindelof said Lost has to move from asking more questions to answering the questions posed during the series' run.

"Obviously, we can't wait to the 48th hour to say, 'Here are all the mysteries of the show,"' Lindelof said. But Cuse also noted the reality of the sometimes vociferous and heavily engaged viewership of the show, which uses the Web to advance theories and post explanations and even freeze-frames to parse further meaning.

"I'm not sure there is any ending that will satisfy everyone," Cuse said. "Our hope is that the ending will be ... the logical conclusion of the story."

Cuse said the first season was about the Oceanic Flight 815 survivors landing on the island and realizing they weren't going to get rescued. The second season was about the hatch, and the third season was about the Others.

"Next season, well, we'll talk about that later," Cuse said.

While Lost viewers will have to wait till next year to see the next TV episodes, Cuse and Lindelof said in the fall there will be a series of Lost mobisodes featuring the entire cast and rolling out first on Verizon Wireless and then probably appearing on ABC.com. They said they're keenly aware of the eight-month gap between last month's finale and the return of Lost at the beginning of next year.

"How do you keep the show alive in the minds of the audience in that time?" Cuse asked. They're also planning to go back to San Diego's Comic-Con International, where the show was launched in 2004, to address May's Season 3 finale and what they had in mind.

Cuse said the mobisodes, about 90 seconds each, will give hardcore Lost viewers more information that they probably weren't going to get through the show itself. What it won't be, they said, was a mini version of Lost.

"It needs to be interesting enough and well produced enough that people feel they're getting enough bang for their buck, even if it's free, the bang for their time," Lindelof said.

Lindelof said the negotiations for the talent took a long time, but they wanted to make sure that all of them were involved in the mobisodes.

"Nobody wanted to see two people sitting on a beach that we've never heard of talking and saying, 'Hey, did you hear what Jack and Kate did today?' You want to see Jack and Kate. It's taken us three years to get those deals in place," Lindelof said.

Cuse said there are 37 ancillary parts to the Lost brand from T-shirts to mobile phone applications to a planned video game. It led to a discussion of several missteps, including the tie-in novel Bad Twin that Cuse said didn't meet their bar and the introduction of two previously unseen survivors, Nikki and Paulo.

The characters came out of Lost viewers' questions about why the show focused only on the same 12 characters and not the "socks," the unnamed survivors who provide the background around the camp. Cuse said "socks" comes from the term "sock puppets," which the writers call the extras.

"We're like, 'Trust us, you don't care about those guys,"' Lindelof joked.

They said they realized almost immediately that adding Nikki and Paulo was a mistake, even before the viewer outcry. Many of the scenes they shot would get cut on the editing room floor, not because of the actors but because they were concerned about how they fit into the story. Lindelof said that it was a lesson for the writers to stay true to the show's vision even if the viewers don't seem to like it.

"We buried them alive," Cuse said of Nikki and Paulo. "OK, you guys don't like Nikki and Paulo--there."