Spoiler warning: If you haven’t seen any of Lost’s third season yet, this post will contain spoilers.  If you are caught up but prefer to not know anything about season 4, even if it comes from the writers and is vague, you might consider this post to contain spoilers.  Read at your own risk.

I think I am now a new level of nerd.  I am blogging about something that happened at Comic-Con.

Lost creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse held a panel discussion at Comic-Con, and you can download the audio of the event, if you are interested.  There is probably video of it out there on your tubes, if you prefer.  In any case, I’ll outline some of the things I found intriguing.

• The show doesn’t start till February, but runs for sixteen straight episodes without reruns.  This isn’t new information, though.

• The filming for season 4 starts in a few weeks, giving them a lot more time to work on each episode.  This also means most of the season will be written, and a good deal of it filmed, before the first episode airs.

• Harold Perrineau (Michael) will be returning to the show in season 4, as an actual cast member (i.e. you won’t just see him in flashbacks).  Michael was never one of my favorite characters, but I am hoping this means Walt will be back in some form.  This leaves one to wonder if Michael actually got off the island and is now returning (with help?), or if Ben lied and Michael will, like Desmond, somehow crash back into the island.

• There will be more flashforwards in the final three seasons.  Starting around 22:30 in the audio, they say:

  At the end of season 1 we sat down and said ... this flashback device is not going to work forever.  The minute that we stop showing the audience revelatory moments from these people’s lives, and the minute that it starts feeling like we’re making it up as we go along, ... we knew that we were going to have to switch gears, and the way that we would be switching gears would be with flashforwards.

• The season 3 DVDs come out in December.

• At some point we’ll find out why Ben was heading across the island when he got trapped in Rousseau’s net (which was indeed an accident, not a plot to invade the survivors’ camp).

• They hope to get to Libby’s story in season 4 at some point (they’ll tell it in flashbacks).

• They haven’t told us about Rousseau’s story yet, because they’ll have to reveal other things that they haven’t gotten to.  We should learn about her in season 4 or 5.

After the discussion, they showed a new Dharma Initiative orientation film, for a new station, “The Orchid.”  This can now be seen on the official website.  You can find some discussion of the video, including screen caps of the frame jumps, by navigating your web browser to the destination of this hyperlink.

Nearly a year ago I blogged about the schedule for Lost season 3.  Now the producers have announced that there will be exactly three more seasons of Lost before it ends, each of which will air only in the spring, for 16 consecutive weeks.  I think this is a great step in the right direction for the show.  After the craptacular mini-season aired last fall, Lost lost a lot of viewers.

Reading between the lines, it seems that the show’s writers always knew where they wanted to take the show to end it, but the networks would (naturally) like to keep the show on the air until it stops bringing in money.  And that might be the best thing for the networks, but it’s certainly not good for the fans or for the show’s story.  To extend the show, the writers would have two basic courses of action: 1) write filler material to go in the middle of the story, to delay the ending; or 2) write the ending, then make up stuff after that ending that you never planned to write.  For a show with lots of mysteries, option 1 is really the only choice, and it seems the network was pushing the writers to stretch out the plot and forget about some things that were introduced in season 1.

The last ten episodes or so of this season have (in my opinion) gotten way better, and I’m looking forward to the next three seasons.

I found this to be rather interesting: Lost will be airing without reruns next season.  Another article (can’t find a link, sorry) said they will air six episodes in a row, starting in October, finishing up in November with some kind of mini cliffhanger.  Then they’ll start back in early February and continue to the end of the season without reruns.  I think that’s pretty cool.  I think 24 did something like this too.. but I don’t watch 24 so I’m not really sure.