NYCC: ‘Lost’ showrunners Lindelof and Cuse on the one mystery they will never reveal about the show

“Fan questions about Lost, what possibly could go wrong, right?” joked moderator Josh Horowitz at the beginning of New York Comic Con’s Lost Q&A panel with showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. The virtual event, which was pre-recorded on September 22 — the date that Oceanic flight 815 also crashed into the sea! — was a lighthearted look back on the beloved series, which ended ten years ago.

Lost fans are a dedicated bunch, and many have very strong opinions about the show. The questions fans sent in videos of or posted on social media, however, varied from fun, to serious, to deep nitty-gritty inquiries about certain scenes and characters. Interested in seeing the 45-minute panel in its entirety? You can check it out here:

One question that often comes up in Lost fan circles that Cuse and Lindelof have refused to answer involves an outrigger chase from Season 5, where Sawyer and some other survivors are pursued by an unknown group on another boat. Fans for years have wanted to know who was chasing the survivors, and the showrunners have remained silent. During the panel, however, Lindelof finally gives us the reason why they’ve refused to answer:

“David Chase refuses to talk about the ending of The Sopranos. He’s basically like, ‘I’m not going to tell.’ Our finale was not about not telling. In fact, we feel like we told you everything. And so the idea that there are unanswered questions about Lost, I continue to challenge any fan to ask us a question, and we’ll answer it or provide you a roadmap to get the answer the show provides," Lindelof explained. "Except for one, which is the outrigger. And that, we will take to our graves. We did write the scene that answered the question. And other people outside of our writers’ room have seen the scene and been sworn to secrecy. So should Carlton and I die and our memory be maligned, as if we didn’t know and that’s why we didn’t tell, those individuals can come forward and say, ‘Now that they are dead, I will tell you who was on the outrigger,’ but we will have maintained our personal integrity.”

Even though the outrigger question remains a mystery, Cuse and Lindelof did provide some fun answers to other questions. What, for example, would Hurley — a hardcore Star Wars fan — think of the recent films? “He didn’t need to leave the island to watch those movies. He has connections, we’ll just say,” joked Lindelof. “As to whether or not he liked them — Hurley is a fan. And as all fans are, he loved all three movies and also wrote very lengthy essays on how deeply flawed they were.”

At the end of the panel, Cuse and Lindelof also touched on whether they’ll ever return to the world of Lost: “We’ve told the story we wanted to tell,” Cuse said. “If somebody else comes along who has a great idea to do something set in the Lost universe and sells that to the Walt Disney Company, they will have our blessings to do that. But we see no reason to do it, it doesn’t feel like there is anything that we have left to say that’s worth saying. We did it.”

All six seasons of Lost are currently streaming on Hulu.

Click here for SYFY WIRE's full coverage of New York Comic Con Metaverse 2020.