The Man Who Makes Sense Of ‘Lost’

WHAT ever happened to the four-toed statue? Why do some inhabitants of the island never seem to age? What is the Smoke Monster? And, as one of the time-traveling survivors of the crash of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 asks in the premiere of the new season of “Lost,” Wednesday on ABC, “When are we now?”

With 34 episodes to go in its two final seasons, the stories of nearly 100 characters to wrap up, several Dharma stations to keep track of and a whole lot of time traveling going on, the writers of “Lost” are doing anything but winding down. Yet their task — untangling the seemingly impenetrable mass of plotlines that have become addictive to some viewers of the show and alienating to others — is relatively simple compared with that of Gregg Nations.

A co-producer and the show’s longtime script coordinator, Mr. Nations has become the keeper of what has been found on “Lost,” charged with tracking everything that has happened and will happen to the characters on and off the island, in addition to charting the many mysterious characteristics of the island itself.

While most television series maintain a so-called bible — a guide to characters and plotlines that are developed by the creators but revealed over multiple seasons — few if any shows have twists and turns as byzantine as those on “Lost.”

And unlike many jobs, which get easier as the material becomes more familiar, this one has become exponentially more complicated and challenging with each new episode. That will be particularly true this season, when the island itself starts moving through time as the people who seem to be the guardians of its secrets try to protect it from a shadowy conspirator who could have darker uses for its powers.

Before the show’s premiere in September 2004, the producers were unsure that “Lost” would last beyond a few episodes. They therefore spent little time keeping track of the interlocking, overlapping and often confounding story lines that began to emerge even in the first episode.

But when the series proved to be an out-of-the-gate hit, “we quickly realized we needed some system to keep track of all the details, that we weren’t going to be able to do that by memory,” said Carlton Cuse, one of the show’s executive producers.

Enter Mr. Nations, who has now compiled an archive that, were he ever to print it out, might — as he put it in an interview at the “Lost” production offices on Disney’s Burbank studio lot — give “War and Peace” a run for its money.

Just how long the entire document is he does not know; he has never printed it out in full, in part because he and his secretive bosses do not want copies falling into the wrong hands. But he has multiple electronic copies, which he keeps in undisclosed locations.

In addition to charting story arcs and tracking characters, Mr. Nations has noted each character’s sojourns on and off the island, mapped the research stations established by the mysterious Dharma Initiative and recorded the appearances and disappearances of polar bears, Smoke Monsters and an unhealthy array of guns.

“It didn’t take us very long to learn to rely on Gregg when we had to check out an issue of continuity,” Mr. Cuse said. “He had timelines, charts, dossiers. He took it into a dimension that exceeded anything that we could imagine.”

Keeping those details straight is likely to be increasingly important as the series speeds toward its climax, jumping both off and back onto the island and among the past, present and future. If Mr. Eko shows up alive or Jack’s chest hair reappears at an inappropriate time, for example, viewers will notice.

Many have abandoned the show already. After it drew an average of 16 million viewers per episode in its first season, its audience has steadily decreased, to an estimated 13.5 million per episode last season, according to Nielsen Media Research. Some of that decline undoubtedly reflects a drop in overall network television viewership, but it can also be traced to a feeling among onetime fans that the series has left them behind without a good re-entry point.

ABC points out that even while losing viewers the series has held steady in the program rankings, and that its remaining viewers are among the most loyal. The audience as measured by Nielsen increases by about 20 percent when viewers who tape the show and watch it later are included. (That might not make sponsors happy, however, since those viewers tend to skip commercials.)


As script coordinator for “Lost,” Gregg Nations is responsible for keeping the show’s many story lines straight.

And many fans are rabid. Pirated copies of call sheets from the set or breakdowns of a day’s shooting often appear on Web sites devoted to the show, where viewers dissect plot summaries as fervently as Kremlinologists would pore over photos of May Day parades.

Late last year a promotional video featured Mr. Cuse and Damon Lindelof, a creator and executive producer of the series, giving a tour of the writers’ offices. It did not take long before stills from the video were blown up and posted online to show the walls of the writers’ workroom, where pictures of the cast were divided between sections titled “alive,” “undead” and “R.I.P.” Visitors to one such site commented that the character Jin appeared to be on the “alive” wall, even though he was aboard the freighter that blew up in last season’s finale.

Mr. Nations acknowledges that he sometimes monitors those sites. “The fans present their theories, and it’s fun to read, but I usually don’t comment on that,” he said. “When I do I’m sort of known for giving very vague answers. It drives them crazy.”

Born in Texas and raised in Missouri, Mr. Nations, 41, graduated with an accounting degree from Southwest Missouri State University before attending film school at the University of Southern California. Like many who follow that path, he found that a master’s degree qualified him in Hollywood to work as a low-paid writers’ assistant on short-lived series on minor broadcast networks — specifically “Pig Sty” on the UPN network and “Sister, Sister” on WB.

Those experiences, however, put him in position to fill an opening for a script coordinator on “Nash Bridges,” where Mr. Cuse was a writer and executive producer. A few years later, when Mr. Cuse was looking for someone to fill a similar position on “Lost,” he remembered Mr. Nations.

Had he a background in computer science, Mr. Nations now says, he might have approached the “Lost” project differently. “The best thing would have been to create a database where everything’s linked, and if we’re talking about Jack and what was established in his first flashback episode, you could click on something that takes you there,” he said. But as an accountant, he was more inclined just to make notes in a ledger. “I’ve just created these Word documents, and I just write everything down.”

For the most part Mr. Nations does not dwell on what is to come, and in that respect he is sometimes as much in the dark as any other fan.

While he participates in the mini-camps each year when the writers sketch out the story lines for the coming season, Mr. Nations does not regularly sit with the writers. He is often the first reader of a completed script, however, so that he can advise the show’s production staff, based in Hawaii, on what it will need to shoot the next episode.

(Mr. Nations has had his own small hand in determining some outcomes of the series; he wrote, with Elizabeth Sarnoff, the fourth episode of Season 4, “Eggtown,” in which viewers learned that Kate, one of the crash survivors, is raising Aaron, the baby born to Claire on the island.)

But being sometimes privy to writing sessions has created a few complications in terms of maintaining the bible. “Sometimes I remember things from the writers’ room that went through the script stage, that went through various rewrites that they shot, that made it to the editing room but didn’t make it to the final cut,” Mr. Nations explained. “That becomes an issue. Do we consider that canon? Is that part of the mythology? Is that part of the makeup of that character — or because it didn’t air, do we take that away now?”

The answer, he said, depends. “Sometimes Damon will say: ‘Oh yeah, that’s part of what is going on. Even though we didn’t say it in the script, we all know it and that’s going to be dealt with sometime down the road.’ So I have to be aware of those things too.”

No one is infallible, of course, and fans of “Lost” have created extended lists online of continuity errors and bloopers. Mr. Nations admits that without his database he would have trouble remembering everything about the series.

That was evident when a reporter asked him a question that had been suggested by a colleague: What became of the body of Naomi, who in Season 4 was one of the rescuers from the freighter sent to search for the island? She died after Locke threw a knife into her back.

“She died in the jungle,” Mr. Nations said. “So she must still be on the island.”

But wait — didn’t Sayid insist on taking Naomi’s body back to the ship?

“You know, you’re right,” Mr. Nations said. “She was on the ship and the ship exploded. I guess she’s fish food. You found something that I wasn’t tracking. Now I guess I had better.”

Source: nytimes