Lost: “If there’s one word that we keep coming back to, it’s redemption”

From a NYT interview with the Lost overseers:

Q. Your show traffics in a lot of big themes — fate versus free will, good versus evil, faith versus reason, how often Sawyer should be shirtless. Ultimately, what were the most important themes for you in this series?

DAMON LINDELOF: If there’s one word that we keep coming back to, it’s redemption. It is that idea of everybody has something to be redeemed for and the idea that that redemption doesn’t necessarily come from anywhere else other than internally. But in order to redeem yourself, you can only do it through a community. So the redemption theme started to kind of connect into “live together, die alone,” which is that these people were all lone wolves who were complete strangers on an aircraft, even the ones who were flying together like Sun and Jin. Then let’s bring them together and through their experiences together allow themselves to be redeemed.

It’s a shame they feel that “redemption doesn’t necessarily come from anywhere else other than internally”—quite the opposite of the Christian redemption story. But thumbs-up for the necessity of community in the search for redemption.

There’s more in the interview, including their acknowledgement that the show “is a mash-up/remix of our favorite stories, whether that’s Bible stories from Sunday school or ‘Narnia’ or ‘Star Wars’ or the writings of John Steinbeck.”