Lost producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse held their panel at ComicCon in San Diego yesterday. I hear from TIME’s Rebecca Winters Keegan, who’s on-site, that after the TV critics forced Harold Perrineau’s return from Steve McPherson on pain of torture at press tour, there was little in the way of actual news from the session. There were, rather, the sort of hints, teases, and not-quite-actual-disclosures that can keep Lost fans wildly theorizing for months, which is probably actually better.
You can find blow-by-blows at The Tail Section, ComingSoon and BuddyTV, but here are some of the more tantalyzing bits of nearly-news:
* Perrineau will be returning as a regular, not in occasional guest spots.
* Hints were evidently dropped that Lost may move in February to Friday[!], a night when the network TV audience consists of five senior citizens and a cat, and a very bad idea should ABC implement it. That said, any talk about a network’s February schedule in July is even more theoretical than your average Lost speculation.
* The Lost Experience may return next summer. [Ed. note: Which is fine if you like that sort of thing. Likewise the Ubisoft videogame, which was previewed. Personally, as a TV critic and not a full-time Lost critic, I have only so much time to spend down those rabbit holes, but feel free to discuss among yourselves.]
* There will be more flash forwards. When? Wouldn’t you like to know!
* Libby will return. When? See above.
* You should be wondering about the skeletons from season one. Not, you know, that they are going to tell you anything about them.
* They screened a cryptic Dharma video (to be posted later at abc.com) with Marvin Candle, a.k.a. “Edward Hourwax,” that introduced a station called The Orchid, which involves the utilization of something called a Casimir Effect and, quite possibly, the cloning of bunnies. That’s for all of you Anya fans out there.
[Update: By the way, I’m not sure yet how seriously to take the Orchid video, if at all. Some of the reports from ComCon said it had a “jokey” or parodistic tone. (Then again, many of the serious things about Dharma are also pretty funny or campy, like the microbuses.) According to Lostpedia as of this writing, The Orchid’s “canonicity is in doubt”!
Wow, I really just wrote that last sentence, didn’t I? Sometimes I think Time.com named the wrong blog Nerd World.]
[Update 2: Here’s some shaky video of the video from ComCon. Hopefully, there’ll be better-quality video soon at abc.com, but for now, watch and discuss. My take: totally real, despite the laughter. I mean, as I said in the Comments–a white rabbit? Through the looking glass? But you be the judge:]