If you think “Lost” is mind-bending to watch, try making it.
As the anticipation about tonight’s season five finale (at 9 p.m. on WCVB, Ch. 5) crests (Will Jack nuke the island? Will Kate steal Sawyer from Juliet? Will Hurley’s “The Empire Strikes Back” script see the light of day?), executive producer Carlton Cuse is hoping to keep the spoilers to a minimum.
For years, Harvard grad Cuse and partner Damon Lindelof have been engaging in all sorts of subterfuge to keep would be-spoilers from outing the hallmark twists.
“We write fake scenes for actors that audition for us and create fake call sheets about who is shooting with whom in what scene,” Cuse said from his Los Angeles office. “Last season, we shot three different actors in Locke’s coffin. We shot Josh Holloway and we shot Desmond to keep people guessing.”
This year, Cuse and crew employed similar tactics for the coda. Of course, Cuse won’t leak his tricks lest they, well, leak.
If shooting alternate endings and penning phony plots isn’t tough enough, Cuse has make sure the actual show makes sense.
Which it doesn’t.
Or at least it doesn’t if you’re not willing to embrace time travel, ghosts, reincarnation and Kate’s unflappable angelic ringlets – still tangle-free after a plane crash, weekly jungle shootouts and a romp with Sawyer in a soiled bear cage.
Finally embracing its nature as science-fiction epic, “Lost” has become more complex and wonderfully geeky then ever. But it’s also shed millions of casual viewers: Season five is on track to be the lowest-rated yet.
“This season was all about time travel, and time travel is a very tricky thing,” said Cuse. “It’s like quicksand, and all season was about not getting dragged down in the quicksand. The balancing act comes in places like the season debut when you have Daniel Faraday talking about the time travel thing and Sawyer walking around with his shirt off the whole time.”
Cuse maintains, as he has for years, that the mythology (the mysteries, magic and smoke monster) is the icing on a cake of compelling character relationships. Maybe a shirtless Sawyer is the glass of cold milk to wash it all down.
It’s in this character-driven vein that he leaks the slightest of spoilers.
“Last time we saw Bernard and Rose, they were under attack by flaming arrows,” he said. “As a viewer, I’d be pretty disappointed if the finale didn’t let me know something about their whereabouts.”
It’s not a “Who is Jacob?” or “What lies in the shadow of the statue?”-level reveal, but it’s a morsel to chew on until tonight.
If it’s not enough, take solace in Cuse’s reassurance that your mind will be sufficiently bent by night’s end.
“Like every ‘Lost’ finale, this is going to be a cliffhanger,” he said. “We do each season like a book in a series, almost like the Harry Potter books, and finale is another milepost that we have known we’ve been heading toward since the beginning of the season. It’s the moment we’ve been building to.”
