Ryan: As far as the whole time travel of last season, I got to the point a couple of times where I wondered how necessary it all was. Last year, you talked about your cherry pie analogy [as he explained in an interview conducted just before Season 5 began, Lindelof used to buy TV dinners just to get the cherry-pie dessert] -- that as long as everyone eventually gets their favorite dish in the "Lost" buffet, they'll be OK. So in the grand buffet of Lost, time travel is not the dish that I like the best. And I walk up to the buffet and, boy, theres a lot of it. Was it all necessary to flesh out certain character moments and set up certain decisions and tell stories that would affect the rest of the show?
LOSTmilesboat Lindelof: We look at it in a lot of different ways, but the first reason that we did it was that, if you were going to make this huge deal out of moving the island in the Season 4 finale, there had to be a lasting ramification in the price that our characters would pay well into the fifth season. But also, we had already set so many things in motion -- for example, the fact that Locke was going to leave the island to try to assume the alias of Jeremy Bentham. We had already shown him in the coffin. We were already so committed to a lot of that stuff.
But the real reason that we wanted to do time travel was, were not fans of expositional downloads where basically characters talk about the history of the island. We wanted to show it to people. We dont want someone to say, "There used to be a huge statute here of an Egyptian god," we want to see it. And you dont want to find Jughead and [have someone] basically say, This must have been brought here by guys during World War II. You want to see that. You dont want Widmore to say, I used to be an Other. You want to see him as a 16-year-old kid saying, My name is Charles Widmore."
The biggest reason that we had to do time travel was setting up what were doing this year. All of it was leading toward [exploring] this idea of [whether] you can change your fate. And that played into the overriding theme of the show from the word go. So it did have to be that much, in our opinion. And we make no apologies for it. Some people said it was their favorite season. Like, all they want to eat is that cherry pie.
