Here's something I found interesting, is that it took until writing the third episode of the series before they came up with the Flashback narrative idea, which of course is the absolute soul of LOST and what made it so iconic. I would have thought that they came up with that concept within 10 minutes of first thinking about the show, not months after filming the Pilot.

quote:
As we waited to find out our fate, we began to fully beat out what would eventually become episode 2 of the series, "Tabula Rasa." This early attempt at a full story break was an interesting test of our premises of what the show was and could be. While we knew that we would have eventually unpack such series-wide elements as the provenance of the polar bear and the French Woman's broadcast, the true meaning of the "Black Rock" (that one we would not figure out until well into season one) and the Medusa Corporation and The Others (as of the May 5th document, they had officially been renamed from the far more Sid and Marty Krofft-sounding "jungle creeps"), we were under strict orders to deliver a solid island A. story that had nothing to do with the science-fictional elements of the show so as to prove to the network that it was possible to be Lost without being all about the smoke monster.

The truly gripping notion of having to euthanize a dying castaway became the center of this episode break -- and made for an outstanding A story with a lot of self-evident scene possibilities. As we tried to graft to that a spine-tingling runner about digging latrines, and a destined-for-must-see-TV discussion about the funeral procedure for those who died in the plane crash, one undeniable truth kept coming up, a truth that we kept skirting for three months of brainstorming but had never embraced...

If the pilot featured flashbacks to the plane before the crash -- and the context they provided for the island story was such a great source of contrast and revelation -- and if we spent so much time developing the backstories of these characters -- why not make that a part of the series?

Wouldn't it be great if we could see Kate's arrest by the marshal, and maybe their previous Kimble/Gerard relationship as a contrast to her trying to pretend that she didn't know him?

It is difficult to imagine that for so long -- when they were part of the pilot, and frequently discussed in the think tank, and when they were so clearly the pivotal thematic lever of the series -- the flashbacks were not considered as being of the essence to the show. Instead, the device was sort of tacitly agreed to have been a thematic grace note that would remain unique to the pilot and not be used in series.

Now, however, as we truly tried to put our ideas into practice, the episodic format finally took shape around the notion that “flashbacks are there to demonstrate what you are in the island is a contrast to what you were in your other life." This conceit became the theme of Lost, our central concern in the development of the stories, and the glue that held seasons of the show together.

We had been so concerned about how much sci-fi we could or couldn't get into the stories, and about whether or not the series could be serialized or not, that we didn't stop to consider that the stories we had created for our characters could not only carry the freight of our narrative, but also create a crucial thematic counterpoint. Equally importantly we didn't realize until very late that the flashbacks would provide visual opportunities different from the dust and grime of a survival existence. And, yes, by that, I mean "flashbacks allowed us to put the characters in clean, fashionable clothes and spectacular hair."

It's shocking, in hindsight, that it took so long for us to get there, but thank YHWH that we did.