Lost Creators Expected The Final Twist To Be Purgatory

The creators of ABC’s hit series Lost fully expected the show’s final twist to be some kind of purgatory. When Lost first premiered in 2004, it completely reshaped the television landscape with its ambitious storytelling and expansive cast. At the beginning, Lost had a very basic premise: An airplane crashes onto a deserted island, and the survivors must learn to adapt to their new situation. However, the island soon proved to hold countless mysteries, and Lost’s story began to twist into something far more complex. For much of its run, Lost was regarded as one of the best shows on television, a distinction that, in some cases, still holds to this day.

However, Lost also carries another important distinction: Its series finale was very divisive among fans. Lost came to an end in 2010 with its sixth season, and while many fans expected the finale to properly answer all of the questions they had about the island, it took things in another direction. In addition to being more character-driven, Lost‘s finale concluded with all of its characters in some kind of in-between place, or purgatory. Fans were confused; were all the characters they’d known and loved dead the whole time? That wasn’t the case, as it was later explained that the in-between place somehow existed in an entirely separate space. Somehow.

While revisiting Lost on the ten-year anniversary of its finale with Observer, executive producers Jean Higgans and Jeff Pinkner reflected on how that purgatory ending came to be. It wasn’t always set in place, though Lost‘s writers sought to create some kind of framework from the beginning. Eventually, the actual ending took shape in their minds, and according to Higgans, “it was pretty obvious to all of us that it was some form of purgatory.”

They ended up sticking with it because shrowunners Damen Lindelof and Carlton Cuse “didn’t feel like they had anyplace else to go with it.” Also, that far into the show‘s run, Lindelof considered himself to be tapped out creatively after spending seasons working out Lost‘s dense mythology. Therefore, the purgatory ending stuck, and to this day, fans still argue over whether it was a brilliant conclusion or a terrible one. Both sides have their fair share of supporters.

Divisive series finales aren’t anything new (see Game of Thrones, which recently celebrated an anniversary of its own), and Lost certainly sticks out as one of the biggest. The polarizing reception to Lost’s final episode hasn’t diminished the show’s overall legacy, which is quite the feat. There’s a good chance people will still argue about Lost‘s ending ten more years from now. At least now, however, they have more explanations for how it all came to be.

Source: Observer

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Rachel Labonte
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Rachel LaBonte is a news, feature, and movie review writer for Screen Rant with a deep passion for film and television. A graduate of Emerson College, she majored in Media Arts Production while specializing in screenwriting. She’s been a writer ever since high school when she realized she was rather good at it and joined as many entertainment news clubs as she could while in school. Most notably, she wrote for Emerson’s website Emertainment Monthly, and one of her film reviews won an Evvy (Emerson’s student awards) for Best Review. Her deep love of movies led to her working at a movie theater for five years, which she loved despite the angry customers. An avid reader who constantly buys books before reading the ones she already owns, Rachel is a huge fan of superheroes (especially of the Marvel variety) and wizards and will likely never be able to catch up on all the movies/TV shows she longs to watch.

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