WHAT WENT WRONG - Lost (Part 2)

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

What took a fake wedding, a real knife, and a willingness to literally die for the shot to pull off? The end... of LOST! This week, Chris & Lizzie close the books on the divisive series, exploring how it could have gone on much longer, recent allegations of a toxic work environment, and how even President Obama knew not to mess with the LOST fan base.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next?*CORRECTIONS: Chris mispronounced writer/producer Monica Owusu-Breen's name. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and sometimes television shows and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one. As always, I'm Chris Winterbauer, and I am here with Lizzie Bassett. How you doing tonight, Lizzie? I'm good. So far, I've really enjoyed the at least one hateful message we've gotten about doing a TV show. Yes.

From someone whose handle involves embracing change. Yes. Yeah. They then said, What the hell is this movie podcast doing, covering television shows? That's right. Don't you dare change. Well, it's not going to be a common occurrence, but I have really enjoyed learning about this.

It's been a nice little detour. I agree. I think there's some other shows that we could cover as well. But let's get into it. Sounds good. So tonight is the second and final episode covering Lost, one of the seminal television shows of the 21st century. In case you missed it,

make sure to check out our first episode in which we dived into the germination of the show and the production of the show's pilot. Now, before we get on with it, I do have a couple of corrections I need to issue. I thought this might be our first corrections corner because a lot of people love this show. No, it's good. It's good.

We got a very nice email from a gentleman who made a documentary about The Lost Pilot, and he sent along a few notes for us to include in this episode. Many thanks to Stefan Lenza, or Stefan Lenza. I'm not sure how to pronounce your name, for the kind and informative email.

First off, and these are pretty small, we did a good job. Carlton Cues, not Damon Lindelof, said that Braun Greenlit lost as a final you to the studio. Damon, hire me. Though Braun himself has never characterized the decision to Greenlight to show as being driven by anything other than the desire to see it get made. Second, the cost of the airplane itself was actually far less than a million dollars. That million dollar figure was the cost of buying it, chopping it up,

and getting it to Hawaii. So I believe they actually only spent like $50 to $100,000 on the plane itself, Lizzie. So we should go get a plane. Bargain basement airplane. Okay. Yeah. Finally, I guess it wasn't just Howard Stern that leaked that it was Lloyd Braun as the voice of previously On Lost.

It apparently was leaked as early as 2005, according to someone named Tony 5-870 on a message board and was formally released by revealed by Bill Carter in his 2006 book, Desperate Networks. And that was it. So we did a pretty solid job, I would say. I don't know that you needed to include those. I wanted to. Because he sent a very nice email.

Yes, he did. He did. I wanted to plug his documentary. It is called 815, the story of the lost pilot. Obviously, 815, the flight number, Oceanic. So you can check it out on YouTube. Again, search for 815, the story of the lost pilot by. Stefan Lenza. Thanks so much.

Awesome. And just a couple of very quick things before we get into what I'm assuming today is going to be the mess behind the production and eventual finale, which I'm very excited to talk about. I've done a lot of rewatching. We have some exciting merch that's available now. So if you go to our website, check out the merch page and buy some stuff and then wear it around. And then when people ask you, what is that? Tell them about your favorite podcast because it's us. And it's, you're paying to advertise for us is what I'm saying. So if you'd like to do that, we'd really appreciate it. But we have some great stuff. We have some mugs that I really like. Shout out to Chris Winterbauer, who designed everything. It looks really great.

We have a tote bag, some mugs, and I think that's it for right now. We have a hoodie coming. We have a T-shirt coming. We have a couple things coming. We're just getting test prints next week. That's right. So check that out. We're excited.

All right. Without further ado, it's Lost Time. Previously on Lost on What Went Wrong. The year was 2003. ABC was in a free fall. Lloyd Brom decided to make Castaway meet Survivor to save it. He commissioned a pilot. He hated it.

He didn't give up. He wrote in J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, they'd do it, but only if they could make it really, really weird. He said, okay, but don't make it too weird. They said, don't worry, we'll make it extra weird. They started the pilot without a script, flew by the seat of their pants and made something awesome. But given the extra weirdness, they never thought it would survive.

Lloyd Braun got fired. Abrams went off to make Mission Impossible Three. The show got released to record ratings, leaving Damon Lindelof, wondering what the hell he'd gotten himself into. Hell yeah. If the beginning of Lost was the story of Lloyd Braun attempting to bring the show to life, the end of Lost is the story of Damon Lindelof trying to figure out a way to kill it. Oh, no.

Figuratively, of course. Now, in case you were unawares, Lost became a cultural phenomenon across its six seasons. To illustrate its hold on the zeitgeist, I would like to read you a tweet sent three weeks prior to the scheduled show finale. per CBS's Mark Nuller. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs assures Obama won't preempt three-hour premiere of final season of Lost

by doing the State of the Union. So yes, Obama did move the State of the Union in order to avoid coinciding with the finale of Lost. Wow, should I say, thanks Obama? Thanks, Obama! Yes, when the Lost fans heard the president planned to a lot of loss, address these United States during the finale time slot, they let their displeasure be heard from

C to shining C, Obama two years into the worst recession in nearly a century was like, that's fine. I don't care. I don't need to talk to the people right now. But what the audience really wanted were answers. Answers, of course, to the tantalizing questions that Damon Lindeloff and the many talented writers of lost had posed over the past few years. Answers that when given, the audience had often found unsatisfying, opinions that they were not shy about sharing with the show's creators. Lindelof and Company had been put in an impossible position to create a show on the fly that generated mysteries so compelling an audience would have to return, and then somehow fit those puzzle pieces together after the fact, as if the show hadn't been conceived by an executive while

vacationing in Hawaii and then written during prep. Yeah, that is the craziest thing about this, is that, like, I'd always heard that, oh, you know, loss goes off the rails because they didn't, like they didn't plan it beyond a certain point. And it's like, yeah, they didn't give them any time to plan it. It also goes off the rails at a specific moment for a different reason that we'll get into as well. Okay. I think... Do you want me to hold my feelings on the finale until later?

Yeah, let's hold for a moment. I think the structure of this, we're going to talk about how we ended up with the number of seasons that we did, some issues, especially that plagued the actors, and then kind of the legacy of lost for better and worse. So I'll cue you in. Don't worry. All right. This is the story of the consequences of beginnings, of the double-edged sword that is giving the audience what they want,

of Damon Lindelof escaping the show he never thought he would. This is the story of the end, which is what the episode's called. Despite Lindelof's assertions that the show needed to end, which he was apparently saying quite loudly as early as the first season, Oh, no. The studio needed it to continue. They had a bona fide hit on their hands, and unlike the 10 or 12 episode season orders

that are common with streaming today, the Lost team was delivering an absurd amount of story per season. As Liz Sarnoff, who might be one of the most talented writers on the planet, her credits include Deadwood, Lost, and Barry, three of my faves, told Vulture in their oral history on the Lost finale, quote, the first three seasons, we did so many episodes,

I mean, we did like 22 to 25 a season. There wasn't a lot of time to speculate on the few, it was more like, what are we shooting next week? But there were certain images I know that Damon always had in the beginning. Certainly one of them was Jack's eye closing. Lest ye have not watched the ending of lost spoilers ahead, turn off your podcast now. All right, Lizzie. Indeed, sometime between the end of the first and the beginning of the second season, Lindeloff apparently told his fellow writers how the show would end. it began with Jack's eye opening, it would end with Jack's eye closing.

The character who had at one time been destined to die as a misdirect midway through the pilot would serve as the coda to the entire show. Of course, the end of loss came much earlier than the end of lost for much of its cast. In January of 2005, roughly four months after the show's Bonanza premiere, Ian Summerholder, who played Boone, if you'll remember from the first season. Oh, I remember. Most handsome man on the island.

He's high up there. They had to get rid of him. I was a fan of Boom. Boone. Yeah. Boom. Freudian slip. He was wine tasting on the coast of California.

His big episode had finally been released, revealing that, yes, he and Shannon had gone a bit cruel intentions in their past lives. And the 26-year-old actor model was feeling good. That was until he received a phone call from the show's producers. Boone was going to take. die toward the end of the first season. Yeah. The first main cast death.

I was pretty bummed about that. As he told Entertainment Weekly in 2005, the week before I got the call, I started looking for a house in Hawaii. Now I'm looking for a house in Venice Beach, which, I mean, world's smallest violin, but yes. He also, like, immediately went on to the vampire diary, so he was fine. Yes, yeah. I guess this is TV history, huh?

The first main character to be killed on Lost, which that's true. Maggie Grace's Shannon followed in season two killed by newcomer Analucia, played by Michelle Rodriguez. Michelle Rodriguez. Walt only showed up intermittently during the second season. Mr. Echo, who was like,

for a brief period, my favorite character. He's great. Yeah, he was played by the wonderful Adewali Akhenouye Agbaji. I'm pretty sure I got that right. We're short-lived. He ultimately died at the hands of the smoke monster. was very pissed about that death.

The rationale for departures varied, of course. Boone's death was deemed, quote, narratively necessary to push Locke and Jack Ford. I think that makes sense. Shannon died because of her hair. Yeah, as Lizzie knows. Yes. Mr. Echo was actually written off

because Adewale wanted to go direct a film of his own in the UK, and apparently he was homesick and didn't like living on Hawaii to shoot the show. Oh, wow. I think he's directed a couple of films, actually. Yeah. Paolo and Nikki, two characters you've already forgotten about. I literally, I read about them three times today.

I could not tell you who they were. I think one is Rodrigo Santoro. I'm not positive. Yeah, it is. And the other is the female version of Rodrigo Santor. They were literally buried alive because the audience found them too annoying to live. So they were actually, they were killed because of audience reaction and they were killed in like the cruelest way. It's like a really dark chapter in the lost history.

No, of course not. It has nothing to do with that. They're both so attractive. Why would you do that? They are. The actors quickly realized that their success was far more perilous than they'd initially understood. As Josh Holloway told USA Today in September of 2005, quote, it's painful and nerve-wracking. He said when speaking of the producer's, quote, secret hit list.

He was about to purchase a boat with Summerhalder when Boone was killed, quote, it has changed the dynamic. And to say it hasn't is a lie. Before it was all love and family, and now there's fear. It created a negative thing that wasn't there before. We're all watching our backs now. Whoa. No boat for Boone. Sorry. Keep this quote in mind later in the episode

when we dive into a few of the less than sterling revelations that have come out about the show in recent years. Between the first and second seasons, Daniel Day Kim went to the producers to ask if it would be unwise for him to buy a house on the island, which is such a polite way of asking. I just wanted to say, Daniel Dick, Kim. You have my heart forever.

All they would tell him was that the decision was entirely up to him. Oh, my God. So brutal. Perhaps most unusual and unsettling was the handling of Harold Perrinos, Michael, and Malcolm David Kelly's Waltz. Yeah. At the end of the second season,

Michael was effectively written off the show, and did not show up during the third season. He then returned for a short-lived stretch of the fourth season only to be killed. It was strange both in structure and due to the fact that, if you remember our first episode, Peronaut was one of the show's biggest, if not the biggest, established stars upon being cast. Remember, the Matrix trilogy had just released, and he was a big actor in Oz, which is kind of the, like, HBO show. right before the Golden Age of Television started.

Also, Romeo and Juliet, he's Mercutio in that, and he's amazing. And I just want to point out, they are both notably and weirdly absent from the finale. We'll get to that too. Okay. After being written off for the second time, so this interview is after the fourth season, Perino gave an unexpectedly candid interview to TV Guide that apparently miffed a lot of fans. I'll read a bit of it now. TV Guide.

Did you know Michael was being killed off when you returned? meaning for season four. Parano. I had no idea. It's like, what the hell I came back for that? TV Guide. You're laughing as you say that,

but you don't sound particularly pleased. Parano. I'm disappointed, mostly because I wanted Michael and Walt to have a happy ending. I was hoping Michael would get it together and actually be a father to his kid and try to figure out a way to get back home.

But this is the producer's story. If I were writing it, I would write it differently. TV Guide, so when did you get the news? Parano. The producers, meaning Lindelof and Carlton Cues, called before the finale scripts were out. They said they weren't going to continue with Michael. TV Guide. And what did you say to that? Peronaut. At this point, I'd been on the island,

off the island, back on the island. So I just went, oh, okay. This is their show. And they know what they can or cannot write. I thought it was disappointing and a waste to come back, only to get beat up a few times and killed. TV Guide, were you disappointed Michael and Walt didn't reconnect before your character died? Parano. Listen, if I'm being really candid, there are all these questions about how they respond to black people on the show. Saeed gets to meet Nadia again, and Desmond and Penny hook up again, but a little black boy and his father hooking up,

that wasn't interesting. Instead, Walt just winds up being another fatherless child. It plays into a really big, weird stereotype, and being a black person myself, that just wasn't so interesting. End quote. We'll return to this interview later in the episode. Mr. Pernau wasn't the only one with complaints,

public complaints. Naveen Andrews, who plays psychics, Heid openly criticized the writing of the show during the second and third seasons, saying that it failed to live up to the Sterling precedent set in the first season. He did later state that things improved in the fourth season. Now, Lizzie, that's for a very specific reason, which is, during the second and third season, Lindelof and Q's were fighting with the studio on how long this show was going to be.

According to Lindelof, he pushed to keep the show short from the beginning. He had an interview with Collider in which he said, quote, all this time when ABC would be like, why do you want to end the show? We'd say, these flashbacks are finite. You can do like three flashbacks of Jack getting drunk and being self-destructive. Yeah. Or Charlie relapsing or Kate running away and the marshals that is chasing her. But ultimately, the first one feels like an origin story because you're learning about that person for the very first time.

But all of the other ones feel like you're treading water. So we're going to have to swole. We can introduce new characters who have new backstories, but people are invested in the old ones. We're seeing about eight chess moves ahead, and it ain't going to end pretty. Yeah. And they just didn't agree with us. So Lindelof says things came to ahead with the studio at the beginning of the third season.

Quote, the beginning, and I don't know if you remember this at the time, Lizzie, but season three was split into two sections, and they actually dropped six episodes first. I believe that's where Nikki and Powell were introduced, or at least they were eventually killed off following this. And it was like the swoon of Lost was that stretch of season three, basically. So, quote, the beginning of season three happens. Those six episodes air because ABC decides that they're going to split the season into two parts. After those six episodes of season three aired, they finally understood,

we're not phoning it in or trying to spike the show. We always did our best, but it became clear that we were working so hard to keep the characters on the island. and it was starting to be immensely frustrating. The flashbacks weren't as good anymore. Other than the addition of Michael Emerson as a regular, Henry Ian Cusick as a regular and Ade Wale as a regular, Michelle Rodriguez, Cynthia Watros, the tail section, some of that stuff was working, but everything else wasn't.

Then they finally came back to the table and we had a real conversation. They were like, we have agreed to let you end the show. I just said to ABC President Steve McPherson, thank you. This is what's best for the show. And Lizzie, guess how many seasons he recommended that they go before they end it?

Seven. We were thinking 10 seasons. No, you guys. No. Continuing the quote, mind you, we're halfway through season three. So first off,

how do you even think we're going to get to 10? They just had to kill Nikki and Paolo in the cruelest way possible to keep the fans from like, rating the studio and eating Damon Lindelof. Continuing the quote, that's really the same as saying, we're not going to let you end the show because how many drama series even get to 10 seasons. So Lindelof countered with how he envisioned ending the show,

which is, I was thinking more like four seasons, not because I was in a negotiation, but because we had actually already worked out the oceanic story to some degree. We knew that a number of the characters were going to get off the island, they were going to have a very miserable time when they were off the island, and then they were going to come back for the finale. We felt like we could do that starting in the back half of season three and then have one more season, season,

season, which would have been a full season of television, 20-some-odd episodes, to do it all. So I really think this starts to show why the mythology, I think, spins out a little bit in the fifth and six seasons. Yep. Because they just had to fill more stuff whole-class. cloth that wasn't necessarily tied to the emotional arc of the existing characters that Lindelof had already worked out with the writers. Right. Well, and also, I mean, we'll get to this, I'm sure,

but season six you discover is basically just a retread of that to a certain degree. It's like almost a different... The flash sideways stuff. It's almost a different way of exploring the same emotional arc. Yeah, and we can actually talk about that now. So he basically described it as like a bardo. Like it was basically this creative free space that they made up. so they could just give the characters any interactions that they wanted to. And he was like, it was really liberating as a writer, but I don't know how it felt for the audience. Pretty frustrating.

Yeah, I think some people found it very confusing or frustrating. And it does play into why a number of people believe that they were dead the entire time, and we'll get to the cherry on top of that conspiracy theory later in this episode. No, they're not. Lindeleaf has been explicit. Okay. According to Carlton Q's Linnelof's co-showrunner and remember former Nash Bridge's boss,

they went back to ABC. No, we can't, but we needed to know when it would end. It was impossible to move forward without a clear sense of what the rest of the journey was. The best we could do was get six seasons. At least we were able to end the show on our timetable. That was something that hadn't been done before. So this is an important point. He's saying it hadn't been done before.

within television. So shows ended when studio said shows ended. Lost would actually become something of a test run that would prove that this formula works better and would enable shows like Breaking Bad, for example, to run the exact length that the creators initially intended them to. Exactly. It's perfect. You get a perfect art. And it's what Lindelof would go on to do

I mean, one season of Watchmen, three seasons of The Leftovers. Excellent television. Yeah, there's so much particularly in Watchmen that I think is corrections for lost. And I think that one season of that show is like one of the best seasons of TV ever. It's great, great. Now, Lizzie, why was ABC pushing so hard for nine or ten seasons? Money. Well, yes, despite Nevin Andrews and many audience members' complaints,

viewership had grown in the third season. Yeah, I kept watching. Yeah, reaching a new show. record average audience size of nearly 18 million across the entire season. So that's like holding the numbers of the premiere, basically. It was good enough to make it the 10th most popular scripted drama on the air. It was the third most popular ABC drama on the air behind Gray's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives. Oh, of course, of course. Both screen lit by Lloyd Brunt. Those were actually numbers two and three in terms of Nielsen readings for scripted television.

at the time. Six was the agreed-upon number, and with an ending to work toward and an unexpected complication slash perhaps a blessing in disguise from the writer's strike of 2007-2008, which limited the number of episodes for season four to 14

and season five to 17, Lindelof, Cues, and the writers got to work on figuring out how to figuratively land this plane. Of course, as Lindelof and the other writers began to create more questions and then answer them to fill out the next seasons,

audience members were often left less than satisfied, as is the case with so many things, the questions are often more interesting than the answers. Q's said of writing the final season and the finale, quote, there was no way to answer all the open questions that existed across the prior 119 episodes of the show. In fact, an attempt to do that would just be didactic. We sort of tried a version of that with the episode

that was a couple before the end, across the sea, which was this very mythological episode about the origins of Jacob and the man in black. That was sort of what answers looked like, and I don't think it was great. Yeah, that episode was a snoozer. Tough sit. And I'm a fan.

So I agree. I agree with that assessment. Is that where Allison Janie just shows up randomly as the mom in the... I believe so, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Lindelof explained it well in a 2022 interview with Vulture.

So the interviewer asks, are you making it up as you go along? And Lindelof says, the fans want the answer to that question to be absolutely not. We have a plan. We are executing that plan and understanding that not everything

is going to work, but we're sticking to the plan. Then the fans ask, well, what input do we have? Are you listening to us? Here's the thing. They want the answer to be, we listen to everything you say

and it affects the outcome of what we write. But then that would suggest that we don't have a plan and everything that we're doing, it's like the band that finishes the song and asks, what do you want us to play next? But we have a set list, so you can't win.

And he's absolutely right. It's like, when people say, are you making it up as you go along? That's what storytelling is at the end of the day. So it's a loose-loose. Viewership drops, Lizzie, going into the fourth season. That's my favorite episode in the whole series in it, I believe. Which one?

The constant. I think that's in season four. Yes, it's the fifth episode of the fourth season. It's such a good episode. And so the fourth season, even though it was a course correction, the show was still a cultural force to be reckoned with, even in its declining fifth and six seasons, Again, even I think season six, it's hitting about 11 million viewers on average.

Those numbers, even streamers would be thrilled to have those numbers. So the writers feel the pressure to create something that's a capstone on the legacy of lost. And once the finale is written, they had to make sure that it wasn't leaked, an issue that had occasionally plagued the show. Jorge Garcia, who plays Hurley, told Vulture of Scripts Security, quote, the scripts got more and more secretive as the series' progressed. I had to even purchase a special mailbox that had a lock on it so that they would be able to leave the scripts for me. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to deliver a script unless I was home.

We just kind of strapped it to a bench in front of my house. If somebody really wanted, they could just steal the whole bench. In fact, scripts were printed on red paper, according to Michael Emerson, who played Ben, to make them more difficult to photocopy. So that's true of black and white photocopier. So the contrast between the red ink and the black ink is so low. It's hard to photocopy. Yeah, also a nightmare to read, sure. Yeah, exactly. It also makes your eyes bleed. Eugene Kim elaborated further, saying that across the sixth season, the scripts she received

did not have every scene. Henry Ian Cusick was so confused by the finale script that he called Lindelof and Cues to have them explain his character motivation, which couldn't be parsed from the scenes he was given. They said they didn't want to tell him the ending, at which point he told them, I need to know why I'm trying to get everyone into a church, I don't know what's going on. The secrecy didn't stop there. According to Cues, we were really concerned about anybody figuring out what was going to be happening in the big church scene.

So during production, we hired two extras that looked like Sun and Jin, and we put them in wedding clothes and put them outside the church. And we were taking them in and out in a way that any paparazzi or people that were trying to figure out what's going on would think that we were staging Sun and Jin's wet. wedding. Okay, makes sense. Junjin Kim didn't know this was happening. But apparently Jorge Garcia did verify that he saw this extra and he was always just like,

huh, she looks a lot like, like, sun, like coming in and out in a wedding dress. Okay. The last couple of episodes did feature some big stunts, some daunting physical tasks for the cast, including a full-out brawl between Terry O'Quinn's lock or the, the man in black at that point, and Matthew Fox's Jack, still whiny Jack at that point, as Lizzie would call him. He's good in the finale, but yes. He's good. Listen, I got a lot of shit for saying that I think he's whiny. I'm going to stand by it, but it's not his fault. Josh Holloway and Evangeline Lily's stunt doubles jumped off a 70-foot cliff. Holloway had a very funny story about

Mike Tristler, who jumped off as his double, quote, this ex-fricken special forces guy. So he's like, okay, let's do this. I'm going to die. And I'm like, don't die, bro. It's like 70 feet high. Just jump, you know. He's like, no, it's cool. It's cool if I die.

You're fucking crazy, Holloway says. And he went ahead, 70 feet off that cliff. They have plaques on that cliff with the people who have died. So it's pretty major. I remember being on top of that thing and doing the fake run-up, like you're going to do it. You've got to get pretty close to that edge. Oh, shit. That was scary.

So he's talking about just the fake run-up to the edge of the clip was terrifying. Also, I want to point out when you watch that, his stunt double goes head first. You did not need to go head first off the 70-4 clip. Oh, yes, he did. It's cool, bro. It's cool if I die, though. Wild. Tragedy did nearly strike when Matthew Fox and Terry O'Quinn were filming a fight scene that involved the use of a knife.

There were two knives used in the scene, a doled knife. that was the, quote, picture knife to be used when the stabbing was not happening, and then a rubber knife that was supposed to be used when O'Quinn stabbed Matthew Fox in the side. Unfortunately, toward the end of the shoot, O'Quinn grabbed the wrong knife and stabbed Fox with the real one. Luckily, Fox was wearing a pad under his shirt that stopped the doled blade. What? Terry? What's going on, Terry? Was that...

Come on now. Terry was like, fuck this guy. Yeah. How do you? I feel like a rubber blade looks different. Apparently, apparently, like, he was like immediately stood up and was just like, oh my God, hold on, you know, and like looked at the knife, but the pad blocked it. So everyone was fine. Oh, my God.

And they went again. Michael Emerson, who played Ben, was not so lucky. Three episodes or so before the finale, he stood up from a cross-legged position and tore his meniscus. Oh, no. He had to act the final episodes with the injury and fight his way through it. Okay. So, Lizzie, let's talk about the content of the finale a little bit. So the finale finds the entire cast in a church.

They're basically ushering Jack into the afterlife. Well, I mean, so my understanding of the two-part, very long finale, is that the sort of sideways flash forward-ish things, that is the sort of limbo or purgatory, not necessarily in a bad way. A barto, a purgatory, a limbo. Yes, exactly. It's a space for them all to find each other again

before they then ascend to the afterlife. And the one who is sort of the hardest to get to wake up and be ready for the journey is Jack. And when they finally get him, that is when they open the door. and all ascend to the Great Beyond. Right. But they were not dead the whole time.

No. I'm not going to get into the lore of the island, the cork, the man in black. You mean the little island tampon? I was watching this and I was like, what's happening? And how did he get out of that well? I mean, I remembered being confused, but good Lord. Yeah, there's a bunch of good explainer videos on YouTube guys. Check them out.

You need visuals. Yeah. We're not going to go into it here. Okay. So after dealing with last minute studio, requests and the emotions of letting it all go, they were finally ready to put the show to bed. But notably, missing from the scene, as you mentioned, Lizzie, were Malcolm David Kelly's Walt and Harold Peron's Michael.

So Lindelof and Kews told Vulture in this retrospective that the issue is that Malcolm David Kelly had grown so much since the beginning of the show, which had become an issue after the first season. He apparently hit a growth spurt, and he was changing really rapidly. And so the flashback structure was no way. longer working apparently. And so they decided that if they put him in the scene, they were concerned that for a character who was also only in the show kind of intermittently across, meaning six seasons, the audience might be confused about who he was. Because if you think about that, this is the

difference between, I believe, like a 12-year-old boy and an 18- or 19-year-old young man. Yeah, that makes sense. They then said that without Walt, it didn't make sense for Michael to be there either. Yeah. I mean, to be honest, in fairness, if they were together, like, you know, who Michael is, so I think you probably could ID Walt. Yeah. I agree. So they filmed the scene. Josh Holloway says they got a little drunk for it. And of course, because it's television, Lizzie, they had eight days to edit the two-hour finale. Oh my God. Composer Michael Giacchino had three days to compose and orchestrate the music, and on the fourth day, they recorded it. Everyone cried during editing. Post-production supervisor Raouf Glasgow only left the mix when his wife

wife's water broke. Quote, I drove home and got home in time for him to be born. He was born at home. I slept a few hours and came a couple hours late to the mixed stage, but went straight back to the mixed stage the next morning. And several days later, my wife killed me, and I deserved it. Several days later, I died. Go home, sir.

Yeah. The studio loved the episode, but had one last request. Barry Josson, head of ABC at the time, a couple regime changes, called Carl, Alton Cues after seeing the finale edit and said, you know, I'm worried that we're going to come out of this incredibly emotional ending of this show and then slam into a Procter & Gamble commercial and that isn't going to be good. Is there any way to soften or ameliorate that?

Is there any footage that exists that we could put at the end to just kind of ease the audience out of the show and into commercials? So Cues and Lidloff put their heads together. They called Jossin back with an idea, quote, I talked to Damon, we think it's a really cool idea. It's the wreckage of the plane and the different props and the beach and the water and it's all beautiful. And we've always loved the photos.

And I've always thought, like, wow, wouldn't it be cool to find something to do with that? So what we find is maybe what we'll do is cut a montage of these photos and put them at the end of the episode. So these photos had been shot before that set had been deconstructed on the beach.

The impact, Lizzie, of showing the crash at the very, after they go into the afterlife. Oh, is that they all die in the crash. They were dead the whole time. Yeah, I forgot about that. Many months to finale. and took it as proof that the characters had been dead the entire time. This is a theory that had been long popular within certain segments of lost fanbase.

Of course, that was not the intention, but it was the effect. It even confused the cast, as Josh Holloway later said, quote, I'm still confused. I'll be honest with you. I think that's one theory. We could have all been dead, or we could have been in this like purgatory thing. I always thought that and still do kind of really think it was more that.

Then they kind of sidestepped it with the parallel life at the end, but I don't know, because they always said, no, it's not purgatory. There's a very funny quote about the flash sideways scenes that he's doing with the actress who plays Juliet, his name is escaping me right now. And he just, he said like she's the only reason he could do the scenes because she would keep him grounded in the moment because he would just keep being like, what the fuck is going on? I love him.

I wish he would do more stuff. He's great. He was in one season of Yellowstone and didn't get to do as much fun as I had hoped that he would. I like him when he gets to be kind of cheeky, self-aware, funny. He's got a great sense of humor. He had that brief cameo in one of the Mission Impossible. He gets assassinated very early. Bring him back.

Josh Holloway. Yeah. By the way, if you watch it, it's streaming on Hulu right now. And let me tell you, they don't give you that buffer at the end of the episode with the pictures. And instead, what they do is you see it's very beautiful. It's very moving. I was crying. You see Jack's eye close.

And then it cuts to the lost logo and... Yeah, exactly. I was like, oh my God. This is horrible. He was like, go find something else to watch right now. I was like, ah, this can't be how they designed this. This is not intended. Okay.

Lindelof, again, they were not dead the whole time. He's explicit. In fact, he even says, like, if that's really what you think you clearly didn't watch the show and like you don't know who Daniel Faraday is, et cetera. Right. Okay. In the end, regarding the end, lost left some fans elated, some crushed,

and many wondering long after about the unanswered questions that the finale left hanging. I'll leave it to you, dear listeners, to dive as deep down those rabbit holes as you'd like because the biggest secrets that lost departure from the airwaves nearly took with it had less to do with the narrative it crafted and more with the environment in which it was made. Yes, let's get into it.

All right, so as some of you, you may know, on May 30th, 2020, Vanity Fair published an excerpt from film and television critic, Maureen Ryan's forthcoming book, Burn It Down, Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood. Yes. Which I really recommend. Yeah, I recommend you read it.

If you haven't read it, it's pretty scathing. Although I would argue even-handed in its approach, and she's a good writer, and it's a kind of disturbing book to read in a lot of ways. The excerpt that Vanity Fair published was pulled from a chapter which highlighted Lost specifically, and kind of its position in the golden era of television, it brought to light previously undisclosed allegations of a toxic work environment enabled by the halo of protection that having a hit show during that era provided. I recommend reading the book. It was released in June of 2023. It covers a whole lot more than lost.

And for the purposes of this episode, I pulled some quotes, I'm going to paraphrase a few sections. I can't hit every single thing that she talks about here, guys. Again, check out the article. There's a lot to it, and it's complicated. But let's get into it. So according to Ms. Ryan, she spoke to over a dozen people who worked on the show, spanning at six seasons, including Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cues.

She interviewed Lindelhoff directly and cues through written questions and responses. As she wrote, quote, by all accounts, people with lost on their resumes worked very hard on a job that could be quite grueling and scarring, end quote. So featured heavily in Ms. Ryan's reporting is Minka Ousupreen. She's a writer and a producer.

She worked on alias, lost, fringe, and many more shows, including the recently released and raved about Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Also, I love fringe. Sliper hit. Fringe is great. Yes, fringe was very fun. J.J. Abrams, again.

So, Missou-Subriene told Maureen, quote, all I wanted to do was write some really cool episodes of a cool show. That was an impossibility on that staff. There was no way to navigate that situation. Part of it was they really didn't like their characters of color. She elaborates later on. Of the writer's room, quote, I can only describe it as hazing. It was very much middle school and relentlessly cruel.

And I've never heard that much racist commentary in one room in my career. End quote. Ms. Ryan provides a litany of examples of such language in her book. I'm not going to repeat it here, but I encourage you all to go read it. Among these examples, writers describe the show as cutthroat and nakedly hostile. Again, one example that was written about an example of openly racist language being used, quote, the only Asian American writer was called Korean, as in Korean Take the Board. We discussed the show's initial commitment to diversity in our first episode on Lost. The show had actually long been criticized for not servicing its minority characters with the same weight as its white characters. So there were smaller incidents, including photo shoots, which featured core white characters at the center of the spread. Of course, notably Jack, Kate, and Sawyer, and then secondarily lock. You can see these.

They're released, you know, in online promotional materials for the show. These often push the non-white characters to the margins. Michael Walt Saeed, Jin Sun, the one Latin character until the arrival of Analucia was also the only overweight character, something that had become such a big joke both inside the show and out, that in 2006, there were dozens of articles written about the biggest mystery of loss being, why can't Hurley lose any weight. I know. Some examples.

In 2006, the Chicago Tribune published an article titled, Biggest Lost Mystery, Why is Hurley still fat? As I said, they're not alone. There are similar articles I was able to find in the LA Times, New York Post, the Arizona Daily Star, Entertainment Weekly, and of course, basically every message board about loss. In an attempt to give an explanation, I guess, I don't know if this was planned from the beginning,

Hurley's, if you notice, his entire storyline and backstory kind of become entirely food-focused. Like his mental health issues, everything's based around, you know, compulsive eating and the, you know, manifestation of that, literally, with Dave, David, the character represents, like, his worst impulses.

This is something that, again, from what I've gathered online, many people find to be, at best, annoying and at worst, pretty deeply offensive as a portrayal of an overweight person. Another note here, if you find yourself shaming people for being fat, go fuck yourself. Yeah, maybe just don't. Yeah, the show continued a very simplistic and lazy association between being overweight and being lazy or immoral.

And that, like, association is both lazy and immoral. And also think about it, free will doesn't exist. The entirety of your essence is determined by a set of factors entirely out of your control, namely who your parents are, where you're born. So get off your high horses. And who cares? Because also it's a television show. No, we don't need to explain why this character is not losing weight in the same way that you don't need to explain why nobody grows a beard,

why Maggie's hair doesn't change? Because it's all made up at the end of the day. Why isn't he losing weight? Because he's a human. And they're not going to give him bariatric surgery to make a plot line work. It doesn't make any sense. Okay, back to Ms. Ryan's book. So based on our interviews, the issues were not limited to the writer's room.

Lizzie, I will point us back to that quote from Josh Holloway about how fear entered the cast when they realized this was a hit, and therefore they were not as secure as they thought. According to Ms. Ryan, the ensemble cast was initially very tight-knit. They had apparently even come together early on to stand firm as a group and demand equal pay. This is something that the cast of friends had done a decade earlier and succeeded in doing, and so this coalition apparently crumbled very quickly. It resulted in a series of pay tiers that, according to Harold Perino,

and another actress who was only identified as Sloan in the writing. This resulted in the highest tier being occupied only by white actors, and I believe that would be Jack, Sawyer, and Kate. Perrinos said that despite assertions during the recruiting process for the show, that they were going to push for a level of egalitarian diversity that hadn't yet been seen on TV, it was mostly white characters who were getting the lion's share of storytelling attention. Again, Perrinot, along with Dominique Moynihan,

was the biggest movie star that the show had cast. So his expectation was like, I should be a pretty big part of this show. Well, he's also positioned as a very big part of the show in the first season. Yes. So, quote, this is a perineau. It became pretty clear that I was the black guy. Daniel DeKim was the Asian guy. And then you had Jack, Kate, and Sawyer.

Another writer, Ms. Ryan interviewed, said, quote, the writing staff was told repeatedly who the hero characters were, Locke, Jack, Kate, and Sawyer, all of whom were white. It's not that they didn't write stories for, Syed or Son and Jin, but they were very explicit that those four characters, meaning Locke, Jack, Kate, and Sawyer needed to get serviced more than anybody else. And they were the fan favorite characters. Now again, it could certainly be argued that Locke, Kate, Sawyer, and Jack are the main characters, and that's why they need the attention. But of course,

that's downstream of a decision to cast white actors in those roles and then focus on the way that you triangulate the drama, such that the Love Triangle persists between three of those characters, for example. And then Jack and Locke kind of end up oppositional to one another, for example, in the story. So let's remember the strange arc of Michael. So he's core cast, as he said, in season one and season two. He's absent in season three. He's back in season four, gets killed off.

I think Disney show up, like, briefly in six. I don't remember. Anywho, he's basically gone. So apparently, Mr. Peronaut raised his concerns about the lack of attention being given to characters of color, again, with the understanding that he was. wasn't one of the main characters. He told Ms. Ryan that he apparently told the writers or producers, quote, I don't have to be the first. I don't have to have the most episodes, but I'd like to be in the mix. It seems like this is now a story about Jack, Kate, and Sawyer.

He says that he was then told that their characters were simply, quote, the most relatable. He says that he took that to mean effectively, so you're saying me and Walt are unrelatable because we're black. Things came to a head for Peronaut and the production at the beginning of filming season two. He read the second episode. And remember, at the end of the first season, his son, Walt, was taken by the others. Right, we're going to have to take the boy. Yeah, exactly. So he's dragged onto the raft by Sawyer.

And this episode now is about Michael and Sawyer on the raft. So it's called Adrift. Pera now recalled his character only asks Sawyer about his son once. And the rest of the episode was actually originally built around flashbacks for Sawyer's character. Quote, Michael's asking Sawyer questions about his past about how he feels, but he never again mentions Walt. I don't think I can do that. I can't just be another person who doesn't care about missing black boys, even in the context of fiction, right?

This is just furthering the narrative that nobody cares about black boys, even black fathers, end quote. Peronow then apparently spoke with Lindelof and Q's over the phone about his concerns. He also raised the broader issue of on-screen representation. Cues and Lindelof simply said, this episode's not about your character. He said that's fine. He pushed for some added lines in the present to experience,

to express his concern for his son. He said that no such lines were added. He said that then when they filmed on the raft, he did ad-lib some lines that he had been pushing for. And then apparently, a few weeks later, he received a revised script that now included flashbacks about Michael's pre-island life. And so the aired episode of Drift is about Michael's backstory.

If you watch it now, it's not about Sawyers. According to Perenow, though, he had only two days to shoot his flashbacks as opposed to the few days, I would guess four or five, based on the wording, devoided to Sawyer's flashbacks, and these, I believe, were pushed to the episode 13 of the season, The Long Con. Now, regarding two days versus four or five, that's probably because they too late realized, oh, we should do this flashback, and then they'd run out of time, and so they had, you know, to squeeze it.

So I don't seem certainly reasonable that there was nothing nefarious behind the scheduling. Just they messed up and were too late to realize it. So two weeks before filming of the second season finale began, Peronaut was informed by Cues that Michael would not be returning for season three. He described his reaction, quote, I was like, wait a minute, what's happening? Q's said, well, you know, you said to us, if we don't have anything good for you, you want to go. Parano, I was just asking for equal depth. According to Peronow, the response from Q's was, quote, well, you said you don't have enough work here, so we're letting you go. end quote.

Again, that's not a Q's quote. That's Parano, his side of the conversation with Q's. So in retrospect, his subsequent interview following season four and his, you know, return and kill makes a lot more sense with TV guy. At the time, a lot of people were like, oh, he's just salty for getting kicked off, you know, getting written off the show. And I think it was much more complicated than that. So apparently he and ABC after that TV guide interview went back and forth a bunch. ABC was pushing him for an apology. Here's Parano on that process.

Quote, me mentioning the color of my skin that just sent everybody off the rails. We came up with something, but it took weeks because I was like, I didn't say anything wrong, and she didn't report anything wrong. Nobody did anything wrong. But societally, people loved the show. They couldn't hear one thing against it. Now, again, I'm reading from Ms. Ryan's book, and you'll hear Linda Lof's response to these allegations in a moment.

According to Owusu Breen and other unnamed sources from the writer's room, Lindelof had said that Peronaut had, quote, called me racist, so I fired his ass, end quote. Things came to a head for Miss Owsu Breen and her writing partner after they were assigned the task of killing off Mr. Echo. Again, he had requested to leave the show. This is normal. According to Ousoo Breen, quote, Carlton, Cues, said something to the effect of, I want to hang him from the highest tree. God, if we could only cut his dick off and shove it down his throat, at which point I said, you may want to temper the lynching imagery lest you offend. And I was very clearly angry. Ms. Ousubreen did follow up to say that it's possible that

Q's unintentionally brought up lynching imagery in trying to think of a, quote, painful death for the character. And Carlton Q's, in response to these allegations, denied them through written statements to Ms. Ryan, along with any allegations that they had knowingly fostered toxic work environment. Now, Ms. Ryan didn't speak. to Mr. Hughes in person. Again, he responded in written word, and so you can read those quotes in her book or in the variety article,

but I would like to pull out some sections of her interview with Mr. Lindelof. And Damon Lindelof is a writer who I think is a remarkable talent, and I do think it's important to remember, and he'll explain that here, that this was a huge show for him coming into it. That's not to excuse anything,

but just to provide some perspective. So she spoke to him in 2021 as she was writing her book. In response to the stories she'd gathered, Linda Lof said, quote, my level of fundamental inexperience as a manager and a boss, my role as someone who was supposed to model a climate of creative danger and risk-taking, but provides safety and comfort inside of the creative process. I failed in that endeavor, end quote.

He went on to say, quote, that's what I saw in the business around me. And so I was like, okay, as long as there are one or two writers who don't look and think exactly like me, then I'm okay. I came to learn that that was even worse, meaning tokenism. For those specific individuals, forget about the ethics or the morality involved around that decision, but just talking about the human effect of being the only woman or the only person of color and how you are treated and othered, I was a part of that, a thousand percent, end quote. Now, one person who could certainly understand the pressure he was under, Ms. Owu-Subrine, who has also been a showrunner. Of the job, she said, quote, it brings out the worst in you.

The person I was in my first show-running gig is not the person I am now. I have apologized to people because the stress is hard, end quote. Of the reporting that Lindelof had fired Peronaut for accusing him of being racist, Lindelov said he could not ever recall saying that, but, quote, what can I say other than it breaks my heart that that was Harold's experience? And I'll just see that the events that you're describing happened 17 years ago, and I don't know why anybody would make that up about me, end quote. Lindelof did state that Malcolm David Kelly's growth spurt after season one was the driving factor

and how they did approach Michael and Walt moving forward. And it does seem reasonable. Yeah. Cues gave the same reasoning via written replies to Ms. Ryan's questions. In response to Perrinos comments, however, about how the storyline used racist stereotypes about black families, Lindelof said, there was a high degree of insensitivity towards all the issues that you may as it relates to Harold, end quote.

He did add that by the second season, quote, every single actor had expressed some degree of disappointment that they weren't being used enough. That was kind of part and parcel for an ensemble show. But obviously, there was a disproportionate amount of focus on Jack and Kate and Locke and Sawyer, the white characters. Harold was completely and totally right to point that out. It's one of the things that I've had deep and profound regrets about in the two decades since. He goes on to say, I do feel that Harold was legitimately and professionally conveying

concerns about his character and how significant it was that Michael and Walt, with the exception of Rose, were really the only black characters on the show. Good for Damon Lindelof. So I'd like to just read a brief section directly from Ms. Ryan's book, because I think her writing's really good and I think she ends it really nicely. She basically created a word cloud of the most common words said about the writing room from the writers she interviewed, and it was less than flattering. Again, please read her book.

It's really good. She read it to Lindelof. This is Ms. Ryan writing now. He finally answered referring to his behavior in the present. The way that I conduct myself and the way that I treat other humans who I am responsible for and a manager of is a byproduct of all the mistakes that were made. I have significantly evolved and grown, and it shouldn't have come at the cost and the trauma of people that I hurt on lost.

Lindelof asked, would it shock you to learn or believe that despite the fact that I completely and totally validate your word cloud that I was oblivious, largely oblivious to the adverse impacts that I was having on others in that writer's room during the entire time that the show was happening. He also asked, do you feel like I knew the whole time and just kept doing it? Ms. Ryan then writes, Lindelof and Cues were adults when the show began, and both had been in the industry for years. They were the two people within that workplace who had power, and they bear the responsibility for the culture you read about here, one that endured for six seasons. Nothing that happens consistently across the making of more than 100 episodes of television happens by

accident. Whether or not Lindelof and cues were present for every damaging incident, the workplace environment at loss was created, rewarded, and reinforced by them. I said as much to Lindelof. Lindelof then responded, of course, yeah, full stop. Of course, you're right. They then have a brief conversation where Lindelof says, I will say this. I would trade every person who told you that I was talented. I would rather they say I was untalented but decent rather than a talented monster." End quote. Ms. Ryan then writes, that is a false binary. People can be talented and decent. Lindelof's framing is one I encounter a lot, and it belies, or at least hints at the fundamental belief that if you're a genius, you're more or less required to be a monster. But at

its heart, and at its best, it has a palpable beating heart. Lost tries to say that none of us have to be defined by our past. We're at the beginning of the entertainment industry's shift to better models and to make the necessary changes, a lot of people must work hard on a number of fronts for a long time. But what choice do we have as the lost saying goes, live together, die alone? Yeah. Check out Ms. Ryan's book. It's very good. And I think obviously Mr. Lindelof has gone on to apply so many of these lessons in the work that he has done, not excusing that it happened in the first place, but we talked about Watchmen and some of the other things that he's done. And I really appreciate that he, you know, the easy thing to do is just sort of categorically deny it because there's no way to prove a lot of this. He didn't do that.

No. Which I do think is, I mean, that is the correct way to handle that. I really like what she points out there about how it's not mutually exclusive that you be extremely talented and also a good person because that's something I've certainly come across. as well, you know, including people, listening to people, being attentive to what the people who work for you and who you work with need, again, will not make a worse end product. It may, in fact, make a better end product. And that's something I think we keep coming across over and over again on this show. Yeah, it's certainly a system, and it's what Ms. Owusu-Breen says as well, that sets you up to be the worst version of yourself if you're not. careful. A hundred percent. The amount of pressure that's in those rooms, particularly the way that

those were built at that time. I mean, and, you know, the longstanding idea, which is still true in a lot of places that, you know, like, as long as you have this minority or subset represented, even if it's just one person, then you've done your job. And that's not true. Like, you need to be listening to them, you need to not just have one person. I mean, it all matters. Having been the only woman in a writer's room before, it's not fun. And we've talked about, too, you know, obviously not just television, but directors that continue to work despite pretty awful filmed. Looking at you, David O. Russell, you know, incidents of abusive behavior on set. And it's, oh, but he's a genius. it's okay, don't disagree, very talented.

That's also horribly inappropriate for the workplace and should never be allowed. You don't yell at your employees. You don't call him the C word. You don't call Lily Tomlin the C word. And if you're not familiar with that video, go look up to quote. Go look up David O. Russell, I heart Huckabees.

You can find it. Yeah. So, Lizzie, what is the legacy of lust? I think, like most things, it's very complicated. I think it is a show that is at times brilliant, at other times frustrating, at other times about Nikki and Paolo,

and nobody knows why. Barry I'm alive. I think it is a show that was very much ahead of its time, while at the same time, very much of its time. It hinted at where things could go without fully committing to those ideas. both on and behind the camera. I think in many ways it paved the way

wonderfully for closed narratives like Breaking Bad or the leftovers, but it also perhaps continued to enable the kind of autotur as forgivable tyrant behavior that, of course, does continue to exist to this day. But I would like to read that quote from Ms. Ryan one more time at its heart and at its back, it has a palpable beating heart.

Lost tries to say that none of us have to be defined by our pasts. On that note, that concludes our coverage of Lost. Guys, there is so much more about this show out there and available for you to peruse. Just, it's endless, Lizzie. I had to stop myself from going down so many rabbit holes. It's really fascinating. It's one of the most highly documented shows out there, I believe, because of the type of fan, which is somebody that loves a mystery.

that the show cultivated. Lizzie, as always, we end with our segment, What Went Right. So I kick it to you, What Went Right? With the lot, well, let's, it could be lost, but maybe like the finale. Let's just say the finale. Okay.

I think what went right with the finale for me was not avoiding this sort of cheesy satisfaction that people who had invested six plus years in that show wanted. I actually found the second part of the finale to be pretty beautiful. And I loved when they all got together at the end in the church. And I actually ended up liking the device that the sort of flashed sideways. I didn't love watching those, but I liked the reveal of what those were.

And I guess I liked not downplaying the importance of the island. So that's my what went right, I think. that, you know, the thing that Jack's dad says to him is that this was the most important time of your life on this island and you've all found each other again. So I liked the cheeseball elements of it and I thought it was great.

I'm very glad that they said, you know what, this is going to be sentimental for people. Let's make it sentimental. I think that it's so easy to run away from earnestness and be ironic or postmodern or snarky. Yeah, I was glad they did not do that. I would like to throw my what went right to Matthew Fox.

He is great in the finale. And his performance in this episode. Yeah, I think this was, I think you'll look back and this was certainly the kind of capstone of his career. I mean, of course, his career's not over.

Maybe something bigger will come along. He might be tired. He made a lot of money. Yeah, he might want to live out of his days in Hawaii and we should leave him alone, if so. Yeah. But I think the, his performance in this episode is really great.

I think it's emotional, but overall understated. I think the scene with him and his father is really surprisingly moving. It's great. So I'll just give him, I mean, to the whole ensemble cast, I will just say, again, seeing them all together and thinking, wow, what a ride, you know, from getting picked up onto a pilot at the last minute to six, seven years later, you're all here in this church, you know,

ending it together. Apparently, basically everyone was ready for the show to end, except for Henry Ian Cusick, who was like, come on, we got another season in us. No, sir. Yeah. But everyone else was like, no, we're good, man. We've all been here since season one. No, Desmond.

You came in two. On that note, I would like to end our episode. I hope you enjoyed last week's below the line episode drop. We'll have more of those coming your way. Of course, watch the Oscars. Let's see how many Killers of the Flower Moon racks up. And Lizzie, would you like to read out our full. Stop patrons?

Well, I certainly will. I also want to say, let us know what other below-the-line roles you would like to hear about. We're very interested in booking some more people and bringing you more of those in the feed in the coming months. We also will be coming back in two weeks with a special episode on The Fifth Element, highly requested. And now, without further ado, we have to say thank you to the people who support us

unconditionally. Just kidding. It is conditional. You can leave it anytime, but we would love if you didn't because it's really amazing. So our full stop patrons, thank you so, so much to Jewishry Samant, Lachlan Morrow, Scott Gurwin, Sadie, Chris Leal, Matthew Pelton, Steve Winterbauer, Rosemary. What up, Dad? Rosemary Southward. What up, mother-in-law? There we go. Tom Kristen, not Chris's mother-in-law.

Hannah Tripp. What up, Mother-in-Lah. also not Chris's mother-in-law. Solman Shainani, Michael McGrath, Nathan Orloff, and Don Shibyl. Thank you so, so much. It really does mean the world to us. Last thing before we go,

we have a poll that I believe is open right now. Chris, this is for one of your episodes. If you want to read off what you've got on there. I would love to. So we have four amazing films from black filmmakers within our gates, Malcolm X, Shaft, and Boys in the Hood. guys, get in there, make your voice heard.

You can't go wrong with this one. I've done preliminary research on all of them, and it's going to be a great episode no matter what. So get in there and vote. And reminder, if you would like to vote, all you have to do is join the Patreon at the $1 tier, and then you have voting rights. Isn't that thrilling?

So vote in the election that counts, which is Chris's next episode poll. This one. Yeah, exactly. And thank you very much for these two episodes on Lost, Chris. I think that about wraps it up. Vote in the election that's not too old white guys. That's right.

This is not that election. Oh, they're so old. All right. Well, we'll see you back here in two weeks. Thanks, everybody. And thanks, Chris. Bye. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong.

And check out our website at what went wrong. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing Music by David Bowman.