With 30 ROCK, THE OFFICE and SCRUBS being unceremoniously replaced by DEAL OR NO DEAL and THE APPRENTICE tonight, 2008 is not off to a shining start.
Thankfully, there’s still that one little show about a group of mysterious and good-looking castaways to fan the flames of our television addiction until the WGA and the AMPTP inevitably reach an agreement.
That show — SURVIVOR, umm… we mean LOST. And courtesy of the this TV Addict’s favorite magazine Entertainment Weekly, we thought we’d share what star Matthew Fox has to say about the much anticipated fourth season.
ON THE EIGHT EPISODE FOURTH SEASON:
“I think the show’s going to be better in its last three seasons than it was in the first three, There’s going to be some huge mind-blowing s—.”
ON THE FLASH FORWARD:
I’m not sure I ever thought that people were going to get off the island. Damon [Lindelof, who co-wrote the finale with fellow exec producer Carlton Cuse] did such an amazing job of orchestrating something that when you’re looking at it for the first time it feels like a flashback, but there’d be little things that are a little odd—like why Jack seems so ridiculously messed up. You think it’s in relationship to his marriage falling apart, and then boom, you go, “Oh, my God, this is a leap forward in time. What does that mean? Why is he suicidal?” I just think that’s great.”
ON WHO’S DYING NEXT:
“That’s the question for the first part of this year, for sure,” says Fox. “Jack gets people off that island, [and] suddenly he and the other people are very well known— it becomes this massive story because everybody thought that every person on this plane was lost…. Who are they? What is everybody else doing? Jack’s mission was to get all of them off. It’s the overriding force behind him. So, the fact that he ends up getting off and doesn’t get that accomplished—I’m very curious to find out how that all goes down…. If I start giving you words about what I think it’s really about, I’m going to be honing in on some stuff that I’m not sure I’m authorized to talk about. A truck might pull up and a bunch of dudes in suits get out and mow us down with Uzis. [Laughs] Seriously.”
ON JACK AND KATE:
There’s no question. People are like, ‘Well, it’s not going to be Jack or Kate for a while.’ We have to get from the island to that point in the future before it can become a real threat again. But it can become a threat again – and it will. When Jack Shephard goes, “We have to go back,” that means he’s f—ing going back. And if there’s 48 episodes [left], you know that Jack is going back on that island for a certain section of episodes. That means that he could die.”
ON THE DIRECTION OF THE SERIES:
“Yes…Last year, we find out that Jack and Kate are off the island. How the f— did that happen? And why does he want to go back? In answering those questions, you have to start addressing the bigger, epic scope of the show. In doing that, you’re going to get into questions about the show that the audience is just dying to start finding out. What is this island? Where is this island? When is this island?”
ON NIKKI AND PAULO:
“Those characters didn’t work for me from the very beginning. I was part of the camp that was like, ‘What? Huh?’ That was one of those experiments where [the producers] were like, ‘Can we suddenly introduce characters that were part of the crash victims but we’ve never seen them before, and have them become characters on the show?’ And the answer to that question is…no.”
For more on LOST and an expanded Q&A, check out ew.com/matthewfox 
