Kurtzman: You know what’s funny about that, though? That was the episode where it felt like we were going back to the Alias template, in a way. That was the kind of thing we would have done on Alias.

Lindelof: Well, you had no Sloane, on Fringe, until then. There was conflict to play, in the Fringe Division, but you always had to manufacture it from outside. So like some FBI guy would come in and say "What are you guys up to?" or whatever. But from Broyles to Walter to Peter to Olivia and Astrid—they all kind of get along with each other. By having Sloane in Alias as a regular from the word "Go," you had built-in antagonism.

Kurtzman: That’s true.

Lindelof: Not to make this about Lost, but when we introduced Ben Linus in the middle of Season 2—I can’t imagine the show without that.

Cuse: We were struggling, because we didn’t have any force of antagonism. It wasn’t the tenth iteration of a cop show, or a law show, or a medical show—and that was a real struggle, at the beginning of the show, to figure out every week, "What is the force of antagonism?"

Abrams: That’s why I think your instinct, so early on, to bring the Others in sooner…

Lindelof: That was always the issue—when are we going to bring them in?

Cuse: And then once we’d brought in Benjamin Linus and established him as the leader of the Others, it kinda helped kick things into a higher gear. Because we were kind of out of the natural-disaster-of-the-week zone at that point. It’s funny, because the networks always make you write out synopses of possible stories, and try to get you to pitch things out, and it’s a completely ridiculous and ludicrous ercise. The only way to basically find a show is to make it. And hopefully, somewhere during the first season of the show, you start to figure out what the show is. But it’s a process of trial and error. You do certain things and they work, you do certain things and they don’t work. You have to treat the show organically, and the show will sort of tell you what’s working and not working, and eventually you’ll figure out, "Okay, this is what we need to make an episode." So now we have a paradigm for Lost episodes. We kind of know what the elements are that it takes to put together the cocktail that is a Lost episode.

Lindelof: It’s like saying to a pregnant woman, "So you’re having a girl—would you like to sign her up for soccer, or ballet?" And you go, "I don’t know, all things being equal, ballet sounds great, I like ballet"—but you haven’t had the baby yet. Until you get to know your kid, you can’t really make any plans whatsoever. It’s a farce. But you do it every time. My favorite story is that those guys who do 24 had to basically do this same ercise. Because 24 is a premise that everybody thought would never work in a million years, myself included. Like, how do you do a real-time show? And the pilot promises—someone is threatening to assassinate this presidential candidate, David Palmer, and Jack Bauer, Keifer Sutherland, has to stop the assassination, and the plan that they pitched the network was, in episode 24, he stops the assassination. And then they got into the writing of it, and they realized, "Because it’s a real-time show, we have to move up our entire timetable." So he stops Palmer from being assassinated in episode 5 or 6. And then they had to wing it! They were only a quarter of the way through. That’s why the Others thing is so interesting. Because the first day that Bryan and JJ and myself, and a couple other guys—Jeff Pinkner and [Lost co-ecutive producer] Jesse Alexander were there too—were talking about Lost, JJ pitched the Hatch. He said, "They find a hatch." We talked about the Others. We talked about Rousseau. We talked about all that, in the very first meeting. It’s like you’re a football coach, and you have these plays, but you don’t know when to run the play. You’re basically like, "Okay, when is the right time? When should they find the hatch? When do we need to bring the Others in? And how do we bring them in?" So the compromise was, Ethan starts farting around with Claire, and you realize he wasn’t on the plane. Where did he come from? But that’s all you get in Season 1. It isn’t until the end of Season 2, or midway through Season 2, that you start to see the faces of these indigenous people.