Thought so Nathan - thanks! Here are two new TV Guide Lost articles:
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Ausiello Report
by Michael Ausiello
Why Lost Killed Libby
It's confession time again: I've known for weeks that Lost was going to send Libby (Cynthia Watros) off to the big island in the sky at the end of last night's episode, and, just like with Ana Lucia, I kept my big, spoiler-obsessed trap closed. And once again, my restraint has yielded a pretty nifty reward — an exclusive postmortem courtesy of exec producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse!
Ausiello: Why did you kill off Libby?
Carlton Cuse: We felt like we had run out of story for her. It happens. While we did develop the romance with her and Hurley, we didn't see enough in the way of avenues for where to go with that character. And we were starting to think about what sort of stories we were going to be telling for the characters in Season 3, and we just didn't have enough for Libby that we were excited about. That was on one side. On the other side, we thought, well, shooting Ana Lucia is going to be dramatic, but what will really make it incredible for the audience is that it'll be completely surprising if we shoot Libby, too. And it would be enhanced by the fact that Ana Lucia is not a particularly sympathetic character. But if we added Michael shooting Libby also, who is a very sympathetic character, that would really ratchet up the emotional stakes of the rest of the season.
Damon Lindelof: And all of this was obviously, first and foremost, the idea that Libby's got this mysterious backstory, of which we've only given you the tip of the iceberg. We know she's spent some time in the mental institution with Hurley, and the idea of killing her before she had an opportunity to explain how she got there, and letting the audience... we have a master plan for how we're going to tell that story, but it's all posthumous. You'll start to learn Libby's moves through flashbacks over the course of the next season. So we're not done with Cynthia, but Libby is dead.
Ausiello: So we'll see Cynthia next season?
Damon: You'll see her in the [May 24] finale, in fact.
Ausiello: But will we see her next season?
Damon: That's our plan.
Ausiello: Were you pissed off that news of her CBS pilot leaked? It seemed like a repeat of what went on last summer when the trades speculated that Maggie Grace might do X-Men 3, and then she was killed off a couple of months later.
Carlton: We were trying to be helpful to Cynthia as an actress, because she is a wonderful person and we wanted her to have a chance at a job on another show. And an unfortunate side effect of that was that people [interpreted that as], "Well, obviously that means something is up about her time on Lost." It's unfortunate, but I guess at the end of the day, hopefully it didn't get too spoiled in the press, and, more importantly, we gave the actress a fighting chance to get a role on a show for next year. It was important to us that, if we were going to kill her off, we also try to support her, just as her friends and [out of respect] for her desire to get another job.
Damon: It's the price you pay as a producer 'cause you have a choice, and the choice is, essentially, you can force an actor to sit out an entire season...
Carlton: ... by exercising our exclusivity.
Damon: Yeah, by saying, "You're not allowed to go out for other stuff until we formally tell you that we're not picking you up," or you can be a human being about it. And although we anticipated the possibility of this getting out, it seemed like a no-brainer. At the end of the day, a story running in The Hollywood Reporter is one thing, but once they start talking about it on Entertainment Tonight and in TV Guide, which have much [broader audiences], then it's officially spoiled. Like, if my mom calls me and says, "I heard Cynthia is leaving the show," then I know that it's been spoiled. You have a readership that reads Ask Ausiello on the Web that is vastly different — those are people who are seeking spoilers. As opposed to someone who picks up USA Today and reads, "Cynthia Watros got a CBS pilot! What does that mean for Lost?" Then it's like, now suddenly 10 million people know.
Ausiello: How did Cynthia take the news?
Carlton: She was sad. I think it's really hard. When we make those calls they're incredibly hard calls to make. I think, obviously, people like working on the show. It's not a bad job to be living in Hawaii and working on a successful television series. Truthfully, she did take it kind of hard, which motivated us to help her get another job.
Damon: And also, it happened at a time when we were really writing to her. She was stepping up her game. We had just put the script out for "Dave," in which she was heavily featured and that relationship with Hurley was starting to develop, and in response to the awesome work she was doing, that sort of made us feel even more emboldened to go ahead and execute the double murder because we thought her death would really resonate with the audience.
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Lost, by Angel Cohn
May 10, 2006: Ask A Simple Question...
get a convoluted answer. But I would expect nothing less from Lost. Mr. Eko has a dream where Ana and his brother want him to help John by getting him to find the location of the ? mark hatch from the blacklight map. I slow-mo'd the funky little flash sequence from Eko's dream, but it didn't seem to be anything new, just images of his brother, the plane, the crash, the dharma logos, the bible... all the stuff that Eko's dealt with in previous episodes. Together the island's oddest couple set out into the jungle under the guise of searching for Henry Gale. Instead they found the Pearl station, and another one of those creepy orientation tapes. Basically it said that they were at a monitoring station and that they were tasked with watching the every movement of the people in another station who had no idea they were under observation and that they had only been told that their job was of the utmost importance. So while John takes this the way that most rational people would — that it is stupid to continue pushing the button as the Hanso people are just experimenting on them — Eko has a different take and says their job is more important than ever. Still not quite sure I get his rationale, but if his dead priest brother told him that in a dream then it must be true.
Interesting facts about the Pearl hatch: There were nine monitors, does that indicate that there are nine other hatches?; the message was copyrighted 1980; the film was all wonky so there are missing moments for sure; Locke sent his sketch up one of those pneumatic tubes... who is going to get that, and is that going to lead to trouble? I guess it depends if Locke and Eko are still considered good by the Others.
In Eko's flashback he was tasked with proving or disproving a miracle. The father of the miracle child was the weird psychic who told Claire she had to raise her own baby. But then he basically admitted to Eko that he was a fraud. How did he know to put Claire on that plane? Oh, and is anyone else thinking that the spooky-eyed back from the dead girl who told Eko that his dead brother had faith in him, might be Jack's half-sister? Her mom was a blonde and could have been the Australian woman fighting with the elder Doctor Shepherd.
Meanwhile in the swan hatch, Michael looked all freaked out when Libby spewed blood. Not because it was gross, but because she might survive to reveal his secret. That parting shot of him against the wall was just downright ominous. Was that supposed to make me think that there was more to Michael's actions than just his desire to get Walt back? Poor Libby, she never even got a backstory. Will we find out why she was in that mental institution in another Hurley flashback? Cynthia Watros does deserve some praise for her dying sequence, her one line of dialogue, "Michael", packed a punch especially with the pained and terrified look on her face. Glad that Sawyer decided not to let her suffer, but Kate knowing where the guns are might not be such a good thing. How funny was it when Kate asked how Ana got the gun from him? But then Hurley went and made me so misty-eyed with his innocent question, "Hey guys... you seen Libby around?" and then his final words to his dying almost-girlfriend, "I'm sorry I forgot the blankets." Sniff. I did find it was a little bit of a slight that Ana's death seemed to be just glossed over by her fellow islanders.
Some other random little things:
— Eko is in amazing shape the way he worked his way up that cliff.
— Eko's fake passport had his birthday as August 23. It seemed to have an issued date of April 16, 2004 and an expiration date of April 15, 2014.
— The number of the house that the psychic guy and his family lived in was 2001.
If you are playing the game, the new Hanso commercial (which was paid for by Sprite... in really tiny letters) offered up a new link. Sublymonal.com. Yeah, I fell for it and the "Lymon" was in cap letters and the Obey command was right out of the "Obey Your Thirst" slogan combined with nice yellow and green designs. I did get the new code, though I could now go for a cool refreshing Sprite now. At first I was annoyed, but then decided I was impressed by the ingenuity of it all. If you want to talk with others playing along with the game, click here.
