Q. The question I get most from readers and friends, beyond what it all means, is: How much did the writers and the creators know going in about how things were going to end?

LINDELOF In answering that question you have to bifurcate the creative construct of the mythology of the show and the series as a whole into two periods. The first period is where we didn’t know how long the show was going to go for. So there’s a certain degree of wheel spinning that Carlton and I have talked about ad nauseam in the Season 2, Season 3 period, where you could only do middle. We did have extensive conversations about certain mythological elements of the island: why these people couldn’t be discovered; that we would do time-travel-related storytelling; and, most importantly, the Others on the island and their relationship with this character named Jacob and who he might be and what his relationship was with the island. Who would end up with who, who would live, who would die, who would make sacrifices. But none of those things could be implemented or talked about in any real way until we negotiated an end date.

CUSE The literal last scene of the show was something that we concocted very early on in the first season of the show. But the last episode is an amalgam of ideas that started with our first mythology conversations in the first season when we realized after the pilot came out and the ratings were huge that the show was going to go a long time.

At the end of each season we would sit down and we would have these writers minicamps for a month, where we would think in much more detail about what the sort of structure of the next season was, and then during the year we built the thing. And just like if you’re building a house, there’s a lot of change orders. We were testing various relationships out on the show, one of which was we had this idea: What if we put Sawyer and Juliet together? And we were very unsure, most of the other writers were unsure and the actors themselves were very dubious about whether there would be any success to this relationship, but our opinion was: Let’s try it. And lo and behold, this thing blossomed forth that no one was expecting, which was there was sort of a mature kind of love between these two characters.

CUSE On the other hand, we had all these fantastic intentions for this character Mr. Eko, played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. But the guy got down to Hawaii, his whole crew that he rolled with was in London, he was 8,000 miles away, and he hated being there. So we were forced to completely cut bait on Mr. Eko. It’s not like J. K. Rowling; we don’t control every aspect of our world. We work and collaborate with many other artists, and he didn’t want to be on the show. Now, by pruning that branch, that ended up giving us room and space to do more with Michael Emerson’s character, and so suddenly Ben sort of blossomed forth, perhaps sooner and maybe to a greater degree than he would have had we been servicing Mr. Eko. So, those are the kinds of things that we’re kind of rolling with. We’re kind of steering this ship towards these demarcation points, but the journey of that ship is completely influenced by our reaction to watching things we see and then real-world issues like actors and their happiness quotient or all sorts of other things.

Q. Michael Emerson was originally just signed for three episodes. Did you always have in mind that there was a leader of the Others and then, when he was doing so well, you made him the leader?