To be clear, the producers are not heartless bastards. They’re only semi-heartless bastards. They knew fans would be devastated (and angry) about the deaths and were pretty broken up themselves about offing three beloved creations. “When we watched the death scenes ourselves, it was brutal,” says Cuse. “[But] the story always comes first.” Lindelof elaborates: “In many ways, the season was structured as a long con on behalf of the Man In Black. Once we revealed that Locke was the Monster, we knew the audience would immediately mistrust him, and we would have to spend at least a dozen episodes of Locke trying to convince the audience that he did not have malevolent intention, that all he wanted to do was get off The Island. But everything he was doing was leading up to one moment, which was [trying to] get the candidates in one fell swoop. He knew if he killed just one of them, everyone would know what he was up to.’”
Says Cuse: “There will be very little debate at the end of this episode that [Fake Locke] is evil and bad and has to be stopped. The main narrative reason for him killing our main characters is to establish how much of a bad guy he is and to clearly identify him as the antagonist rolling into the end of the series.”
Lindelof recognizes that there’s something “brutal” about killing Jin and Sun just one episode after their long-awaited reunion — which, he says, is exactly what made the lovers such an apt choice for making a statement about Fake Locke’s malevolence. “At least they got to die in each other’s arms, so they’d have some sense of victory,” he says. And Sayid? Lindelof explains: “Sayid’s entire season-long arc has basically been, if you tell him that he is evil, you can convince him he is evil. But if you tell him he is good, maybe you can convince him he is good. We basically decided that in a moment of pure instinct, if he did something, if he sacrificed his own life in favor of saving the other people’s lives, that would convey to the audience, ‘This guy was actually a good guy."
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