"Lost" is truly lost

Have you been frustrated by Lost‘s endless parade of mysteries and loose ends?

Have you tried to convince yourself that J.J. Abrams knows where it’s all headed, and how all the mysteries tie together?

Have you been yearning to believe it’s all part of “intelligent design”?

Abandon all hope.

This may be nothing new to you, but it’s disappointing to me. Like Alias, this show’s indications that there’s a grand design, meaning to the madness, now appears to be just a bunch of hooey, and the only reason to keep wondering about the loose ends is to imagine who will improvise the cleverest excuses for the chaos.

Aren’t you glad life isn’t like that?

“There was absolutely no master plan on Lost,” insists David Fury, a co-executive producer last season who wrote the series’ two best episodes and is now a writer-producer on 24. “Anybody who said that was lying.” “On a show like Lost, it becomes a great big shaggy-dog story,” he continues cheerily. “They keep saying there’s meaning in everything, and I’m here to tell you no — a lot of things are just arbitrary. What I always tried to do was connect these random elements, to create the illusion that it was all adding up to something.” Many plot elements were concocted on the fly, Fury says; for example, they didn’t know Hurley won the lottery until it came time to write his episode. “I don’t like to talk about when we come up with ideas,” Lindelof demurs. “It’s a magic trick. But we planned that plot: We seeded references to it in earlier episodes.” Fury disagrees. He says scenes with those references were filmed much later and inserted into earlier yet-to-air episodes: “It’s a brilliant trick to make us look smart. But doing that created a huge budget problem.”