Lost Writer Reveals Show's Complicated Creation

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'There, now you know. Go with God.'

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Former Lost writer and producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach has written a highly informative essay looking back on the conception of the show and what it was like to be in the writers' room for the first two seasons. He also has a lot to say about the question of whether the show’s creators were "making it up as they went along," noting the answer is a complicated one, as is often the case for TV. With Lost, many notable elements fans would come to know as the series progressed were conceived very early on, even as the nature of doing an ongoing TV show also led to new elements being added all the time.

“The idea that there is a simple truth about the creation of Lost also begs to additional questions,” Grillo-Marxuach says in the lengthy and very detailed post on hiswebsite. “Did we ever know what the island was? And was it purgatory?”

“There was definitely a sort of ‘operational theory’ for what the island would be,” he writes, adding that there were strong differences of opinions on the concepts for the island. However, Grillo-Marxuach backs up Lost executive producer Carlton Cuse’s statement from the reunion last year that the characters were not in purgatory the whole time, despite some reading the ending as saying that.

Further into the post, Grillo-Marxuach addresses the world-building for Lost as production began on the pilot episode. The writers built a world, an ensemble of “flawed but interesting characters,” and placed them in situations where the characters would “bond and solve problems.” After those concepts were in place, the writers created pasts for the characters to provide a comparison of who they were before and after reaching the island.

Grillo-Marxuach goes into great detail about Jack’s character and the original plan to kill him off in the show's pilot episode - and how the network wouldn't allow it. As has been mentioned before, co-creator J.J. Abrams wanted Michael Keaton to play Jack, pretending to be a series regular (including doing promotion for the show), only to be killed in the show's first hour.

As Grillo-Marxuach notes, the network was also always scared of the show being too overtly sci-fi and serialized, which lead to the writers and producers initially doing all they could to disguise the sci-fi elements - even from their own corporate bosses. Walt, for instance, was a character who caused a lot of disagreements between the writers and the network and studio, who didn't want him to have psychic powers, even while the Lost writers felt he should.

There's also a lot of information on the process of how they would add new elements to the show and how Abrams' famous "mystery box" approach interweaved with Damon Lindelof wanting to hold off on introducing any new question until they had at least some idea what the answer to it could be. One notable example of this is the Hatch, which Abrams came up with the idea for and wanted to put into the series immediately. Instead, they waited until halfway through the first season because Lindelof (who was initially the sole showrunner, before Carlton Cuse then partnered with him) wanted to wait until they had some angles on what exactly was inside that hatch.

Grillo-Marxuach, who was first hired as part of a "think tank" for the show while Abrams and Lindelof were working on the pilot, writes, “We created an entire 747s worth of ideas, notions, fragments, complications, and concepts that would yield enough narrative fiction to last as long as our corporate overlords would demand to feed their need for profit and prestige. And then we made it all up as we went.”

Last year was a 10-year Lost reunion, in which Cuse, Lindelof and the cast looked back on the show. IGN also ranked all 133 episodes, spanning six seasons of the popular and polarizing TV show.

The complete essay by Grillo-Marxuach (who also created The Middleman and just joined the writing staff of The 100 for Season 3) is an engrossing read for both fans and critics of Lost, with a lot of new info on the show's conception and the roles J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse and many others -- including Paul Dini, David Fury and Grillo-Marxuach himself -- played in those early days.

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