Amidst The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Dexter, there was Lost – a worthy entry into the pantheon of box set TV shows, but for entirely different reasons. The premise intrigued fans – a downed plane on a tropical island, with mysterious goings on. But soon the 6-season epic moved into the realms of spirituality, and more than polarized its fan base with its notoriously ambiguous ending.

Lost

This has become the stuff of Internet folklore, to the point where people don’t care about spoilers, and will happily mock the ‘it was all a dream’ ending without fully realizing what it actually meant. The trouble is, no one really knew what Lost’s ending meant, until now. Damon LIndelof and Carlton Cuse – the show’s big bosses – finally faced fans following that final episode back in 2010.

"Very early on we had decided that even though Lost is a show about people on the island, really, metaphorically, it was about people who were lost and searching for meaning and purpose in their lives. And because of that, we felt the ending really had to be spiritual, and one that talks about destiny,” explained Cuse on the finale of the controversial show. “We would have long discourses about the nature of the show, for many years, and we decided it needed to mean something to us and our belief system and the characters and how all of us are here to lift each other up in our lives." (E! News)

Early seasons of Lost were hailed as some of the best-written TV in history, even making it into the Writers Guild of America’s top 101 shows, at 27. But when more questions than answers were finding their way into scripts, seasons 5 and 6 become muddles in comparison to the 4 thrilling seasons that preceded them. One of the biggest criticisms was the idea that the characters were dead the whole time, and the much-clichéd ‘it was all a dream’ ending was used as a cop out.

"No, no, no. They were not dead the whole time," insisted Cuse. "At the end of the series finale, [an ABC exec] thought it would be good to have a buffer between when you have the end of the show and when they cut to say, a Clorox commercial," Cuse explained.

"We didn't have a lot of extra footage lying around, but we had footage of the plane wreckage on the beach," which they shot when the plane needed to be moved or it would have been washed out to sea. "We thought, let's put those shots at the end of the show and it will be a little buffer and lull. And when people saw the footage of the plane with no survivors, it exacerbated the problem."

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