The fact that two years on, a 25-minute YouTube video in which the creator of Lost, Damon Lindelof, lays bare the reasoning behind that season 6 finale is being passed around the internet like a well-thumbed copy of Forever at an 1980s high school, is a reminder of just how strongly fans still feel about Lost’s send-off.
Interviewed for On The Verge about upcoming Ridley Scott film Prometheus, Lindelof was confronted about fan disappointment with the Lost finale, and engaged in almost half an hour of tussling about his reasons for writing the ending.
“I take responsibility and authorship for Lost, and in terms of my own feelings about the ending, I make no apologies for it”, Lindelof says, adding later “It’s the story I wanted to tell".
“It’s not that I didn’t care about the mythology of the show, it’s just like, many shows have come and gone that are very focused on their mysteries and their mythologies and their ambiguity and there is no worse scene in the history of genre than the Architect explaining to Neo everything that happened in The Matrix, and I wasn’t going to [rude word] touch that with a ten foot pole.”
It's a detailed discussion that takes in the controversial endings of other hit TV shows, the “filler” episodes that came as a result of network indecision about when Lost would end, Lindelof’s least favourite episode, and why he’s unlikely to ever do Lost: The Movie. It is, in short, the interview that Lost fans have been waiting for since 2010.
