'Cause I know you'll love this question even more than I do. [Carlton laughs] "TonyStark2000", by the way, I don't know if you know this, Carlton, but Tony Stark is Iron Man's alter ego. Billionaire Tony Stark has built the "Iron Man armor" so he can go out and fight crime. "TonyStark2000" asks, "How many seasons do you have the plot mapped out for?" Which is, a question we never get asked.
Carlton Cuse: [Laughs] No, we never get asked that question.
Damon Lindelof: Everyone just has a very
Via con dios approach to the show. They don't really know what we're up to.
Carlton Cuse: Well, "TonyStark2000", we know what we're doing next week on the show, I'll say that. No, we do have … the metaphor we like to use is that we know we're taking a road trip from Los Angeles to Boston, and we get up everyday and Damon and I come into the office, and we don't know on a given day if we're gonna take a rural highway or we're gonna take the interstate or whether our car's gonna break down and we're gonna hitchhike, but we know we have a plan to go to certain cities. We're gonna go to Omaha, we're gonna go to St. Louis, we're gonna go to Minneapolis, we're gonna go to
Wall Drug in South Dakota.
Damon Lindelof: I don't wanna go to Minneapolis.
Carlton Cuse: See? So, if Damon says he doesn't want to go to Minneapolis, then we decide, well, screw that, we'll go to Evanston instead. We do have a general plan as to where we're going, but what keeps the show organic and real is the fact that we write the episodes episode-by-episode, and we feed a lot on what the show tells us, we feed a lot on relationships, we see that develop between the characters, we see what kind of dynamics and what sort of pairings work between certain characters, certain pieces of mythology the audience really respond to, and then we decide to spend more time on those aspects of the mythology. And so it's kind of an organic thing. We guide the show, we also listen to the show a lot, in terms of it telling us what it wants to be.
Damon Lindelof: And then, obviously the LA to Boston analogy is a season-by-season analogy. J.J. and I created the show, for those of you who do have the DVD, very much on the fly. It was over a course of very few weeks, designing exactly what the pilot was going to be. Carlton came on very shortly after that. And obviously all of us started talking about the bigger picture, in terms of—if we're starting in Los Angeles, how are we gonna end up in Minsk?
Carlton Cuse: Minsk?!
Damon Lindelof: Yeah, exactly. [Carlton laughs] It's hard to get to Minsk. Season 3 we report out of Boston and cross the Atlantic and land somewhere in Europe, and we're gonna have to figure out that. Gradually. There's a big picture within the bigger picture, so it's always in service of that. So, I feel, obviously, with fans …
Carlton Cuse: You're not going to tell them about the time travel, are you?
Damon Lindelof: No, no, I'm not going to. In fact, I'm going to go back in time and prevent you from having said that. [Laughs]
