Breaking News: 5 Additional Episodes to Air!

TV Guide's Ausiello Report broke the story a few hours ago: the plan is for Lost to air five additional episodes this season for a total of 13 episodes. The first of the final five will air about a month after the eighth episode.

Check it out for yourselves:

What came out of your meeting with ABC today?
Cuse: Damon [Lindelof] and I are going to try and make five more episodes before the end of May, which is ambitious. But, we've found ourselves in situation where we had eight episodes of story planned, and we're going to try to fit that into five hours of the show. Even though it's going to be very hard to execute, we felt like any less would be doing a disservice to the story we had planned. We really want to give the fans the best possible experience and ending that we can to Season 4.
Any chance that the first of the five episodes will air the week after that last pre-strike episode— thus eliminating any scheduling gap?
Cuse: No, there's probably going to be four weeks between the airing of the first batch of episodes and our new episodes.

What will happen to the three "lost" episodes? Will they roll over into next season's 16, or will they vanish forever?
Cuse: Damon and I remain committed to producing the 40 additional hours of the show that we promised. We haven't figured out exactly when we'll put those other three on, but we're not eliminating them from the show. You will get those three episodes downstream.

It's worth clarifying that they're not just holding three planned episodes until a later season - they're condensing the originally planned eight down to five, and also planning on adding three additional episodes sometime in the future.

Cuse also cautioned that there's still a lot to be worked out - it hasn't been decided what exactly will get cut from this season's arc in order to condense everything down to five episodes, and it's unclear whether some guest actors they had been eyeing, such as Andrea Roth, are still available.

Personally I still don't really see the problem with just extending the season into the summer in order to make all eight episodes, but old habits die hard for TV studios, apparently. Regardless, this is good news - it means we actually get to end the season with a season finale!

TAGS: Season4, Strike
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