The Lost Cast And Crew Agree On The Biggest Mistake In The Controversial Finale

If you stop any random person on the street and ask about the worst ending to a television show ever made, chances are you'll be met with withering disdain directed towards "Game of Thrones" or even a sitcom like "How I Met Your Mother" — but years before either of those divisive finales ever aired, "Lost" lived up to its reputation as one of those most talked-about series throughout the aughts with a final episode that we're still talking about to this day. Even those who've never watched a single hour of "Lost" couldn't have missed the controversy surrounding how showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof chose to conclude their saga about survivors of a plane crash stranded on a deserted island. What may be surprising, however, is that the cast and crew have pinpointed exactly where things went wrong ... and it's probably not what you're thinking.

Almost 15 years after it left the airwaves, "Lost" is right back where it belongs — at the forefront of the pop culture conversation — following its recent move to Netflix earlier this July. Naturally, that also means fans are eager to relitigate that polarizing series finale, while certain newcomers may want to prepare themselves before wading into the fray. But for those who've somehow managed to avoid specific details on what ultimately goes down and would prefer to keep it that way, here's your spoiler alert and your cue to read no further until you finish your binge watch. For everyone else, we'll meet up again after the image below.

Still here? Okay, so contrary to conventional thought, the ending doesn't imply that they were dead the whole time! But one distracting addition, which represented the last images we ever saw of "Lost," might be to blame for that common misreading. For years, the ABC series had conditioned viewers to expect episodes to end on mind-shattering cliffhangers, followed by a smash-cut to that familiar "Lost" title card appearing out of a field of black and accompanied by composer Michael Giacchino's creepy score. That remained (mostly) unchanged until the very last episode, which switched things up by ditching the score altogether and superimposing the ending credits on a background of eerily solitary reels of the wreckage of Oceanic Flight 815 washed up on the beach, originally filmed back during production of season 1. For a series that constantly courted fan-theories and mystery boxes (and even featured a supernatural resurrection or three), well, many took this to mean something very different.

In a lengthy oral history published by Vulture back in 2021, many of the cast and crew commented on how that artistic choice — which is perfectly effective in a vacuum — had the unintended side effect of convincing viewers that the cast had been dead the whole time. Cuse admitted his regrets over this, saying:

"The problem was that the audience was so accustomed on 'Lost' to the idea that everything had meaning and purpose and intentionality. So they read into that footage at the end that, you know, they were dead. That was not the intention. The intention was just to create a narrative pause. But it was too portentous. It took on another meaning. And that meaning, I think, distorted our intentions and helped create that misperception."

By the time the cast and crew realized what damage had been done, it was already far too late. Only days after the finale aired, series network ABC attempted to set the record straight with the LA Times and announce that those clips of the crashed plane were not meant to be interpreted as part of the actual show. In a statement, they claimed that:

"The images shown during the end credits of the 'Lost' finale, which included shots of Oceanic 815 on a deserted beach, were not part of the final story but were a visual aid to allow the viewer to decompress before heading into the news."

This is backed up by the Vulture article, in which Cuse explains that this decision came as a result of a conversation with former ABC Studios head Barry Jossen, who expressed his concerns that the delicate mood constructed in the finale's ending moments would feel disrupted if viewers immediately cut to a jarring commercial and a segment of the nightly news. As Lindelof puts it, he never anticipated that the audience would read into this to such an extent. "It never even occurred to us that looking at the wreckage of the plane on the beach over the end titles would be perceived as some sort of massive reveal." His cast agrees. Jorge Garcia, who portrayed fan-favorite character Hugo "Hurley" Reyes throughout the series, approved of this end-credits coda:

"I thought that was a nice bit to decompress at the end of it. Then I found out the next day how people started interpreting it as a thing and I was like, 'Oh, okay.' And people still say it. People still talk about it the same way."

Ultimately, those involved understand that "Lost" was always going to lend itself to misinterpretation and rampant conjecture. For six seasons, an increasing amount of mysteries and unexpected, even controversial plot twists tossed into the story went a long way towards creating the type of fan culture that's now prevalent today — one in which viewers constantly hunt for Easter eggs, hints, and subtle references that might support grand conspiracy theories and other guessing games. To his credit, Cuse sums up this catch-22 rather succinctly when he notes that:

"I think we could have done some things to make it clear that that wasn't what you were supposed to take away. But one of the big intentions of the show was intentional ambiguity and giving people the opportunity to digest and interpret 'Lost' as they want to if they wanted to. And at some level, you know, you can't have it both ways."

All these years later, however, this renewed (and occasionally heated) discussion has gone a long ways towards bringing about a reappraisal of "Lost," as noted here by former /Film editor Hoai-Tran Bui. While it's always tempting to pin an entire show's reputation on how it ends, the truth is always more complex than that. Henry Ian Cusick, who played Desmond Hume, put it best:

"The show is not about the ending. The show is the entirety of the six seasons that you had and trying to remember all the emotions that you had when you couldn't wait to find out what was in the hatch. That was the show. It was a time when there was no binge-watching, so you had to wait until next week, which is infuriating, you know? And yet so delicious."

"Lost" is currently streaming on Netflix and Hulu.