I am – Hercules!! Do you think “Lost” showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse knew from season one that Hurley, Kate, Jin, Miles, Juliet and Sawyer would wind up in 1977? Do you think they knew a month after the series premiered that the lady in Desmond’s time-hops and Penny Widmore’s angry dad had a time-scientist son named Daniel Faraday? That the nameless characters played by Alison Janney and Titus Welliver were the cave skeletons wearing decades-old clothing? That the Others were something different from the Dharma Intiative? That there were a couple of hot girls guarding a James Bond-y Dharma underwater station? That the folks behind those Dharma grocery drops were purged from the island in 1992? That Jack Shephard would keep running into his fellow 815 passengers in the hereafter? That Latin-speaking Europeans lived on the island 1,000 years before the birth of Marco Polo? That John Locke would be impersonated by Smokezilla, that Desmond Hume would develop an immunity to electromagnetism, that the fat guy who fainted when Jack operated on the U.S. marshal would become the island’s chief magical protector? My guess is if you could travel back to the "Lost" writers room of October 2004, a month after the series started airing on ABC, and put these questions to the series masterminds, you might discover they'd not yet worked very much of it out. "There was a big, mythic architecture which included a lot of what's in the finale, in terms of where we end the show, that we knew way back in the beginning,” Cuse tells SciFiWire in a post-finale interview. "And then, before each season, we'd have a writers' mini-camp and spend a month without any pressure of writing other scripts, figuring out the architecture of the upcoming season. That'd sort of take the artists' rendering and turn it into blueprints, and then, during the season, episode by episode, we built the structure. We allowed ourselves a lot of flexibility to change things around as we were doing construction. It was impossible to have everything planned out, and so it was kind of built in stages." We know the Swan Station “hatch” (perhaps subconsciously or jokingly inspired by original “Survivor” champ Richard Hatch?) was discussed in some of the earliest 2004 conversations between Lindelof and series co-creator J.J. Abrams, though what lie beneath that hatch was unknown in those earliest days. We know Lindelof -- back in mid-August 2004 (well before the series’ Sept. 22 premiere and back when Lindelof was still identifying J.J. Abrams and himself as series’ only showrunners) – was at least toying with the idea of The Others:

HERC: Beyond the plane’s pilot, and discounting flashbacks, will we meet during the first 13 hours any human beings beyond the 48? DAMON LINDELOF: I will not comment on whether or not we'll be meeting any other human beings on the island who were NOT on the plane. But I will posit this -- Who's to say we haven't already?

On the other hand, Lindelof also hinted that something “probably not another airliner” would “certainly” crash into the island:

HERC: I’m guessing the crash, and the location of the crash, was dictated by something more than happenstance. Moreover, I theorize the plan is to make another airliner crash into the island before season four. Am I nuts? DAMON: Neither the crash, nor anything else, is dictated by happenstance. As to ANOTHER major crash before season four? Hmmmm. Well, probably not another AIRLINER... but certainly something...

Maybe he was thinking about the small plane that killed Boone? I asked first-season writer-producer Jesse Alexander several months ago whether – when he was working on the series – he was aware Hurley would spend time in 1977. His answer? “Fuck no!” I seem to remember Lindelof and Cuse saying they weren't certain at the end of season five that they would even pursue the flashsideways. And so what? I’m pretty sure pretty much ALL series TV works this way: The creators have some vague idea of how their series will eventually end (Bill reaches Earth, Tony dies suddenly, Jack’s eye closes) and they get together at the beginning of each season and work out as best they can what’ll happen in the next 22 episodes (though they’re probably have more details on the first 11 than the last 11). Sometimes changes are dictated by what happens with casting. We know Ben was originally going to stick around three episodes and Eko was supposed to stick around till season five. I'd wager that if CBS' "Cane" proved a bigger hit, we'd have seen a lot less of Richard Alpert in the last two seasons. Who knows what else changed along the way?

Here’s a timeline that may or may not help you decide what the showrunners knew and when they knew it: 1.9 First appearance of first “Other,” Ethan “Rom” Goodspeed. (Also first appearance of Cuse’s name in the opening titles.) 1.11 First appearance of “the hatch.” 1.24 First appearance of Other leader Tom Friendly. 1.24 First appearance of Smokezilla. 1.24 First glimpse inside The Swan. 2.3 First mentions of Dharma founders Gerald & Karen De Groot and Alvar Hanso and first appearance of Pierre Chang. 2.14 First appearance of Ben Linus. 2.23 First appearance of Charles Widmore. 2.23 First appearance of Taweet's foot. 3.6 First mention of Jacob. 3.7 First appearance of Richard Alpert. 3.8 First appearance of Eloise Hawking. 5.3 Revelation that all Others speak Latin. Find all of SciFiWire’s interview with Cuse and Lindelof here. Follow Herc on Twitter!! Follow Evil Herc on Twitter!!

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