Damon Lindelof: Alright, I've got a question for you Carlton. This is from Acejace. As an avid U.K. follower of Lost I would like to thank you for the quality entertainment that you've helped produce over the last four years, I can't wait to see what you've got in store for us over the next few seasons. My question is regarding antipodes, or the regions which lie on opposite sides of the globe. Um, if you put a needle through uh, Tunisia it ends up coming out in the South Pacific; Interestingly enough.

Carlton Cuse: Hmmm...

Damon Lindelof: So, as we know, Ben and possibly a DHARMA polar bear appear to have warped from the island to Tunisia. Unfortunately the bear's Bedouin ambushing skills weren't as up to scratch as Mister Linus's. However; does this mean that the transportation from or to the island via antipodal points on the globe is the Lost teleportation transport some sort of journey through the center of the earth? And if that's the case, could it also be possible that Yemi's light aircraft - this is the yellow drug smugglers' plane featured prominently in seasons one and two -

Carlton Cuse: Right.

Damon Lindelof: ... ended up going through this antipodal wormhole to the island on its way from Nigeria to Europe, via Tunisia? Anyway thanks again and continue the good work with the show, Jason.

Carlton Cuse: Wow. That is an excellent question, and uh, I would say that the antipode part of that theory is very intriguing; however some of the conclusions derived regarding the application of antipode theory might not be exactly correct.

Damon Lindelof: Good answer.

Carlton Cuse: Ok.

Damon Lindelof: Very thorough, and completely vague.

EW: Lost has always walked this balance between being a character-driven survival show that everyone can appreciate and being a sci-fi/fantasy show best appreciated by fans of that genre. This season, you’ve really pushed the sci-fi/fantasy angle. Does this approach come with risk?

CARLTON CUSE: We’re trying to be bold. We realized we were going to shed some viewers by being more overtly [sci-fi] this season perhaps, but that we would reward the viewers who have stuck around for the turn in the show with some really good and interesting storytelling.

DAMON LINDELOF: But the show has gotten to that point now where it had to let its freak flag fly. It kind of needed to begin to announce, “You wanna know what the island is? You wanna know why these people were brought to the island? You wanna know what their purpose in being brought there is? It might be a little weirder than you would’ve hoped.” In addition, there’s always been this risk of what happens when you start giving people answers. You know, once you start telling people who the last Cyclon is, they all start whining about it. Now, the one thing that we didn’t ever want to do was not give our audience the answers. At the same time, it was really important to us this significant part of our show — the history of The Island — through the first-person perspective of characters that the audience cares about. Hence, time travel. And that’s what informed our storytelling this year. We hope that once you’ve sort of swallowed the bitter pill of skipping through time, you’ll really like it.

CC: I wouldn’t call it a bitter pill. I like to think of it as a good tasting piece of candy.

DL: It’s like one of those Lemonheads — it’s really sour in your mouth at first, but if you leave it there for a minute…

CC: It’s ultimately pretty sweet.

DL: Either way, we hope the audience is patient enough to get to the tasty part, because we’re trying to bridge this gap of what happened between the time the Oceanic 6 left The Island — and when John Locke left The Island — to when the Oceanic 6 decide to come back. The audience got a sneak peek of what the resolution to all this is last season, which is that Locke is going to die. We’ve seen him in the coffin. We know that his death triggered Jack to want to jump off a bridge and catalyzed him to get everyone back together to go to the island. Now we’re bridging the remaining gaps. By the seventh episode of this year [i.e., by next week’s episode, “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham”], the audience will have all the pertinent data that bridges these events. And then we move into phase two of the season, and with phase two comes a new sense of sort of excitement and anxiety for us as writers because we’re changing the game again.

CC: I think that each season of the show has had a different flavor to it, but we’re not going to deny [that sci-fi] is in the DNA of the show. Look, this is a genre show. We’re very happy that it has attracted a big audience, we pay a lot of attention to the character stories, but we are not running from the fact that it’s a genre show. I think, in the same way that when you get to the end of an Indiana Jones movie and someone’s face melts off, the journey from A to Z in Lost is going to require that it get weirder and more overtly genre as it goes along. When you start asking questions like “What is The Island?” and “What is the smoke monster?”, the answers to those questions are probably not completely rooted in natural science.

DL: But honestly, the non-genre answer is just boring and not that interesting. How can Locke walk around on the island? The non-genre answer is his injury was primarily psychosomatic. He actually had the ability to walk for several years, but for some reason, crashing on the island psychologically freed him to walk again. That’s one answer to the mystery. If we gave that answer, people would throw their television sets out the window and then kill us. The actual answer is a genre answer, because if you’ve been in a wheelchair for four years and suddenly you’re doing jumping jacks, the natural world does not have a good response to that….Still, while this is indeed a genre show, we don’t feel like it’s weird or too science fictiony. I think if you think about a movie like Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, for some reason that doesn’t feel like it’s devoutly sci-fi because you’re treating it through this prism: “If Richard Dreyfuss really saw a UFO, and was sort of profoundly affected by it, what would happen? Let’s really treat this in a very real way.” We try to hold the show to the same standards. We don’t want to be putting out there a show that just gets weirder and weirder. We needed to do this story this year in order to set up where we need to go in Season 6, which although will still have genre elements, becomes much more grounded and character centric than it is this year. This year is a lot of setup, putting all the pieces on the chessboard where they need to be so that we can hopefully mate. And Carlton and I are mating right now.

CC: Please, put that metaphor out there into the world.

Christian has been a bad dude while alive.