ie, the stuff most of us have been telling most of you from jump:

>Deciding how many answers to put in each episode isn't part of the recipe, Lindelof says:

"We start from saying, `This is a Sawyer episode' or `This is a Sun and Jin episode, and this is the flashback story we want to tell. Now, what's happening on the island that will emotionally sort of activate the telling of this story?'

"And then we say, `Is that a story in the context of which we can answer or advance, like, a mythological question?' So some mythological questions are expressly character-related, like `What is it that Kate did?' or `How did Locke get in a wheelchair?' or `How did Jack get his tattoos and why?'

"Those answers are not satisfying to the audience that is on the message boards. They want to know what the monster is, what the island is and where The Others come from."

But those can't be told all at once, he says. And it isn't part of the plan for this season.


>And in the return episode Feb. 7, "we answer a very significant mystery about Juliet, at least in terms of how she came to the island and why. And that begins to posit sort of new questions, some of which will be answered by the end of the season and some of which won't."

Not that they're being coy, Cuse says. But because you really don't want to know everything right away. "If we started really giving answers about what is the nature of this island, what is the sort of innate underlying meaning of the numbers - those things are sort of series-ending questions. I think once the mythology of those is made explicit, I think the mystery goes out of the show."


>The producers are often asked if they had planned every second of "Lost" so they'd know they'd be where they are now and, more important, where it will end.

But Lindelof says, "without rehashing the ugly story, `Lost' came together very, very quickly. During that period of time it was all we could do to write the outline, write the pilot, put the cast together and begin to have preliminary conversations about: What is this island? Who are these people?

The obvious concentration this season is on the Others - the group whose existence was first hinted in the seventh episode, Lindelof says, "when they first realized this guy Ethan was not on the plane with them."


>"To say we know everything we're going to do in advance would be completely disingenuous and probably stupid as a writer/producer because you have to be able to adapt to sort of the changing currents."

One way to really give the narrative shape, Cuse says, is by setting an end point for the series...

"I think that once we do that, a lot of the anxiety and a lot of these questions like, `We're not getting answers,' a lot of those will go away," says Cuse.

Such concerns, he says, "represent an underlying anxiety that this is not going to end well or that we don't know what we're doing."

Among TV shows, Cuse cites "The X-Files" as "a cautionary tale for us in that it was a great show that probably ran two seasons too long."

"`Lost' has broken a lot of rules of television in its run," Cuse says. "It's set a standard for the way shows that could be made that were different large, sprawling cast complicated, complex storytelling.
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We'll cast some light
and you'll be alright