this is a paragraph out of a much longer post, which I'll link for context. It's a good post and worth reading. A 'Lage poster called Kurgan posted this tonight. It's just something for consideration, and I'm not posting it as any kind of proof or Aha!, just for those who are interested in the writers' process. And if you don't like it, don't shoot the messenger please (i.e. me).
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Kurgan:
"I can share some info with you that will, sadly, explain why you didn't get all those answers, but if you're still a fan of Darlton to any degree, I'd urge you to just skip my post entirely. I assure you, you're really not gonna like this particular reveal.You may already know this, since it's not really a secret, but since I haven't seen anyone commenting about it, I'll push on and explain. My own suspicions started back around the end of season 2, beginning of season 3. The whole "lost experience" especially had me scratching my head. We kept seeing clues that were later contradicted, ignored, or superseded by different clues. Things started to make no sense.
The more you paid attention, the more the show seemed just random and off-the-cuff, as if the clues where all planted just for the sake of giving the audience something to chew on. It began to look like things weren't actually planned out in advance, and the writers were just winging it as they went. I kept watching, since I was invested by then, but I grew more and more frustrated, and convinced this was exactly what was going on.
Then the stories began doing things that the writers had specifically said would never happen, and major subplots began to vanish (Claire's mystical baby; Walt's powers; the Others' need to kidnap people because of some unexplained criteria; the disease, etc). Even the original multi-clue hinted explanation for the smoke monster (ie. it being Cerberus, the security system merged with the weather control and PSI experiments that went berserk after the "incident") got dropped and forgotten.
And then, about a year ago, maybe a little longer, we got confirmation. Darlton had dropped a few hints in interviews and podcasts about how they wrote their stories, so I'm sure many of us had already put the pieces together and figured out the worst of it, but they finally came out and said it over dinner with a fellow writer. I forget who it was now, some writer behind a show I really liked that ended up being canceled, but they were out at some restaurant having dinner together, and the writer wanted some advice.
He'd assumed they were planning it all out ahead of time, and knew the answers, and wondered how they went about it (structure, keeping things straight, --something like that). Their reply shocked the hell out of him.
They admitted to him that they didn't have it all mapped out, that they only knew what was happening at any given time up to three episodes ahead. Note that this isn't talking about the fluff stuff, or "filler" story material, they're talking about the mythology (which is what he'd been asking about specifically, because he wanted to replicate the method).
Anyway, he was so appalled at this that he wrote about it on his blog, and went out of his way to promise fans of his own show that he'd never do that, that he felt it was just awful to do and basically unfair to the viewers. I'm thinking it was either Traveler or Journeyman, but I could be wrong. I was heavy into Middleman about the same time, but that show doesn't fit the architecture, so probably not that one.
So yeah, it's not a big surprise then that any given clue wouldn't mean much of anything unless one of them happened to remember it or write it down so they could integrate it into the show later and give it meaning. "
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post continues ... nice reference to Melrose Place.
http://forum.thefuselage.com/showthread.php?t=122366&goto=newpost