Maybe I was a little too hard on JJ Abrams in my last post. After all, he is telling stories for television, and television requires viewers to keep watching. On network television, shows that keep viewers watching stay on as long as they can continue doing that. It is rare for a show on one of the major networks to end just because the story has been told.

The creators of Lost have maintained that they have known the entire story since the pilot episode. This is utter nonsense. In 2005, the first season, Damon Lindeloff, one of the producers/writers said in an interview:

Every mystery that we present on the show? What is the monster? Where does Ethan come from? Why hasn’t Claire had her baby yet?? All those are questions that we know the answers to.

He follows that up by saying

As the show progresses it won’t venture too far into science fiction as its mysteries unfold. We’re still trying to be … firmly ensconced in the world of science fact. I don’t think we’ve shown anything on the show yet … that has no rational explanation in the real world that we all function within. We certainly hint at psychic phenomena, happenstance and … things being in a place where they probably shouldn’t be. But nothing is flat-out impossible. There are no spaceships. There isn’t any time travel.

Anyone who watched last season knows they’ve tossed that out the window. Which of course means that he could not have known how the past season ended at the time of the interview. Which means they didn’t know the whole story while they were telling it.

In a group interview for Nightline in 2006 Abrams as much as admits this.

And we kept getting these calls: “You have to shoot an ending so we can air this as a movie.” And we asked, “Well, what’s the end? How do you end it?” It’s sort of the beginning of something. We didn’t know how to wrap it up. How do you do it?

These guys are good enough storytellers to know all of this. They know they needed an end. Stringing out the story will only frustrate the audience. The third member of the team, Carlton Cuse said in the same interview,

Certainly Twin Peaks was a cautionary tale in terms of basically frustrating an audience by never giving any answers and/or by also focusing on one central mystery and putting so much emphasis on that mystery that once that mystery is solved — in that case “Who killed Laura Palmer?” — then everyone’s interest in the show goes away.

And, in fairness to these guys, they understand all of this. They know you cannot have a good multi-season arc unless you know when and how it ends. As Lindeloff said in the New York Times,

We didn’t know whether the mythology we constructed had to last two more seasons or seven more seasons. And that was driving us crazy because we didn’t know how fast it was going to play out…. the pragmatic reality of the network television business is we don’t own the show. We don’t get to decide when the show ends.

And, Carlton Cuse said

It’s time for us to find an endpoint to the show. It’s a struggle for us, because we don’t know if we have three years, four years or more to go. If we had an endpoint, then we could figure out where everything goes.

Well, they now have that endpoint. ABC announced that the 2009-2010 season will be the last for Lost. I’ve started watching again, because it means they know how many episodes are left, and can write out the rest accordingly.

They had a beginning, which they nailed. They tried to tell the middle, and started to flag. They now have an end and we can all watch as the whole story gets told.

Lets just hope that Abrams and crew know how to show us what’s in the box. Otherwise they’re all box and no gift.