In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lost writer Carlton Cuse spoke about the finale of the show, as well as his thoughts on if the show will come back in the future. Here are highlights:
On the methods to keep the finale a secret: "ABC had this retired FBI guy who was our security consultant… Most significantly, for the whole end church scene, we were concerned that people would figure out what was going on, so we hired two extras who looked like Sun [Yunjin Kim] and Jin [Daniel Dae Kim]. We put them in wedding clothes, and we had them walk around outside of this church we'd rented for the finale and so photographers who were across the way taking shots would think that we were staging a version of Sun and Jin's wedding. These [people] spent several days just sitting around, walking in plain sight enough so that people would think that 'Oh, it's Sun and Jin's wedding!'"
On if the show could be revived one day: "We absolutely made no contingency for a sequel or a spin-off. We so definitively had decided that this was the end of our journey with the Lost franchise. We wanted to tell a story that was ending, and with our ending, and it's called "The End" for that reason. It is the end of the story that we wanted to tell and we had no plans to go back and revisit it. I think it's likely that at some point, ABC will want to reboot Lost because it's a valuable franchise, and there will be some young, bright writer or writers who will come up with a great idea that the network responds to, and that'll be great. I do not begrudge ABC the opportunity to do something more with the franchise. But we told the story we wanted to tell, and I think there's kind of a wonderful sense of closure for us. I feel like there's not a moment where I certainly say, "Oh, hey, I wish we had told this story" or "I regret that we didn't get to do this or that." I feel like we had ample opportunity to tell all the stories that we wanted to tell."
On if there is too much pressure on finales: "There's this almost crazy expectation about finales. Somebody might say to you, "Well, I love Breaking Bad but the finale wasn't the best episode of the show." Like, really? It has to be the best episode of the show? This idea that you can watch a show like True Detective, and it was awesome, but is it really ruined for you if the finale is not your favorite episode of it? It's just odd to me. I feel like if you enjoyed the 119 hours that precede the finale of Lost, is that whole experience ruined by the fact that you might not agree with everything that we did in the finale? I would hope not! I would hope that you would appreciate the fact that you were entertained for 119 hours even if you didn't love the finale. Certain shows are harder than others — if you're doing a show like Lost which is a mystery and everything about the show is mysterious, the expectation is just much higher in terms of what you have to do…. Social media has created this bell curve effect around finales that is really overblown. I can't say that the ending of a story is always the best part of the story, and yet there's sort of this implicit idea that the finale is somehow supposed to be the mind-blowing best episode of a show. The question is: Why is that? Why do people make that assumption? I don't know why the expectation is that it should be…. For both Damon and me, "The Constant" is our favorite episode. The finale of The Sopranos is not my favorite episode, as much as I love that show. I would name a number of episodes before that — notably the episode where Tony takes Meadow to college and strangles that dude. Breaking Bad, I would say "Ozymandias" was an episode I liked better than the finale. The finale is an ending but somehow there's this idea that it needs to be topping everything that's come before it and I think that those expectations can only lead to disappointment."
