The Lost Year & Season 2 Secrets

[Sydney]

Here is the complete transcript of "The Lost Year" coverage by Shawna Malcolm in the May 29 edition of TV Guide.

Note: Includes some spoilers for the finale and next season.

For our special season wrap-up, Lost producers J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof give us the inside scoop on the finale and Season 2, choose their favorite episodes - and answer th questions you have been dying to ask.

After eight months of questions, we finally started getting some answers. The mysterious Black Rock? It's a ship. (Raise your hand if you saw that coming.) The freaky French lady named Rousseau? Her psyche's messier than her perpetually uncombed hair. What the quartet of castaways found after setting sail on the raft? It just may have cost them their lives.

Of course, the castaways-and maybe some cast members- arent' the only ones who will have one very nerve-racking summer. Viewers who have followed every twist , turn and shocker will have to wait until the fall to get an explanation for Lost's oh-no-they-didn't cliff-hanger, which aired May 25. Let's just say we feel your pain.

But TV Guide's got just the thing to help ease the withdrawal: Exclusive dish from teh show's cast and producers on what went on behind the scenes of the explosive final episode and - are you sitting down? - an early sneak peek at Season 2. And all you have to do is turn this page.

Finale Secret No.1
Producers resorted to drastic measure to keep detalis from leaking out. For starters, the actor were given only the parts of the script in which they appeared, which meant that the raft riders - Josh Holloway (Sawyer), Harold Perrineau (Michael), Daniel Dae Kim (Jin), and Malcolm David Kelley (Walt) - were the only ones to receive the highly anticipated final pages. And even they didn't get them until the night before shooting. "I was like, 'I don't know the lines," Perrineau remembers telling producers. "And since it's my job to know the lines, somebody might want to give me a script."

Producers were just as paranoid with one another. Whenever they discussed the cliffhanger, they used a code name:"the bagel." That way, says executive producer Carlton Cuse, "you could talk about the production realities of 'the bagel' or what preceded 'the bagel' without revealing too much."

Finale Secret No.2
Shooting the scenes on the raft was about as pleasant as being chased through a jungle by a man-eating monster. "Let's just say I would prefer to be hung from a cliff," Holloway says of the week he and the other three actors spent filming on the Pacific. Thirteen-year-old Kelley got seasick, while Perrineau was routinely forced to face one of his biggest fears. "I don't swim," he says. Only Kim, an experienced divver, seems to have had a good time. "We'd sing songs between takes," he says. "It was strangely bonding."

Season 2 Secret No.1
Will every cast memeber return next season? Not necessarily. After all, the cliff-hanger left many characters' fates, er, hanging. After reading the last few pages of the script, Perrineau laughingly says his reaction was, "Is this so we don't renegotiate [our contracts]? We're all in peril. It's nuts. Just bananas." Kim, however, seems confident he'll return. "And I think Jin is going ot be speaking more English," he reveals.

Season 2 Secret No. 2
Producers have been plotting the show's new episodes for months. "You have to get out ahead of it as much as possible," explains executive producer Damon Lindelof. "If you start making it up as you go along, you're in Doomstown." By the end of April, he'd already begun initiating new writers: "You bring them into a room, close the door and say, 'It's time you found out what the monster is. And here's what's inside the hatch.'" And the scribes better have good memories. "You have to [mentally] download all the mythology because I don't let anybody put it in writing," Lindelof says. "I feel like once it's on a computer, it's accessable, and that makes me nervous."

Season 2 Secret No. 3
Expect to see some new faces. Dr. Arzt (Daniel Roebuck), the high school physics teacher and resident explosives expert who first appeared in the May 11 episode, will be back. And executive producer J.J. Abrams hints he won't be the only actor packing his bags for a lengthy stay in Hawaii. "We'll begin to open up [the world of the island] in a little bit," he says. "You'll be meeting a number of other people who survived."

Just as we thought. This is going to be one long summer.

Episodes to Remember
Producers J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof pick their top five.

J.J. Abrams:
"Pilot"
"Walkabout"
"Outlaws"
"... In Translation"
"Do No Harm"

Damon Lindelof:
"Walkabout"
"White Rabbit"
"Confidence Man"
"... In Translation"
"Exodus, Parts 1 and 2"

You Asked, They Answered (If a bit cryptically)
Lost creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof respond to reader questions. Ok, you didn't really think they'd explain the hatch, did you?

What the heck did the voice on the radio say to Boone? In the promos, it sounded like, "There were not survivors of Flight 815." But on the show it sounded like"We're the survivors of Flight 815."
Lindelof: That's actually very frustrating to me, and I'd like to set the record straight: the promos were just wrong. The words that Boone heard are definitely, "We're the survivors of Flight 815." That's also what Boone said, so it's up to the extrapolation as to whether or not his own words were being bounced back to him. Or is that transmission coming from somebody else claiming to be a survivor of Flight 815? There are things that happen in the finale that, if you're a loyal viewer, you might begin to extrapolate certain facts from that information.

Will Boone be back next season?
Abrams: That would be wonderful. I'd love that.

In the episode that aired May 18, Jack said he was no longer married [to Sarah, played by Julie Bowen]. Should we trust him?
Lindelof: I think at a certain level, you have to take characters at their word.

There are rumors flying around that more characters will be dying. How many?
Lindelof: I'm issuing a blackout on commenting on who's going to die and when. The effect it has on the morale of the cast is actually very damaging. But there are people who are in very dire circumstances by the end of the finale, and their fate is not determined. You'll have to wait over the course of the summer to see if they're going to make it. That's just good television.

Can you get Keri Russel to do a guest spot?
Abrams: I'm trying to get her to be in "Mission: Impossible 3," so I don't know if she'd be available. There's a role [in "MI3", to be directed by Abrams] that we're talking about. I'm dying to work with her agian.

Is it true there's going to be an episode told from the perspective of the dog?
Lindelof: Anything's possible.

How will you deal wiht the fact that Malcolm David Kelley (Walt) will age and grow much faster than is reasonable considering the time line of the show?
Lindelof: We are building a Malcolm David Kelley robot.

Is Michelle Rodriguez - who appeared in the May 18 episode as a passenger on Flight 815 - joining the cast next season?
Abrams: I've been a fan of hers for a long time. I think she's incredibly talented.

Will we find out more about the monster in the finale?
Lindelof: Oh yea. The monster's fairly active in the finale episode. We will finally be showing a piece of the monster.

Is Greg Grunberg repirsing his role as the piolt in the finale?
Lindelof: He is. He has a scene with Claire at the airport.

What's in store for Season 2?
Lindelof: If the season finale is about what they do to open up the hatch, I think it'd be fair to say that Season 2, at least in the beginning, functions on the axis of what they find inside. And how that revelation changes things.