Outrageous

From a recent interview with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse:

Okay, finally, I have to ask, simply because it's been driving me nuts for a year and a half: what's going on with showing the other half of the outrigger shootout?

[...]

DL: When we wrote that scene and somebody started shooting at them, we knew exactly who was shooting at them. That is not a dangling thread that we don't know the answer to. That being said, as we started talking about paying that off this season, it felt like the episode was at the service of closing the time loop, as opposed to what the characters might actually be doing in that scenario. It never felt organic. We decided we would rather take our lumps from the people who couldn't scratch that itch than to produce an episode that was in service of putting people in an outrigger and getting shot at.

You put people in a lot of outriggers this season. It feels, frankly, like you're taunting me.

DL: We can't entirely deny that we're taunting you.

CC: Honestly, though, the logistics of getting all the participants in the outriggers in the configuration that was on the A-side of the time loop was actually really daunting.

DL: Considering half of them had been killed off

CC: It's not like we didn't want to do it. Like Damon says, it was just too much of a narrative deviation to do it.

So they know all about the outrigger and they won't tell us? This is ridiculous. You don't set up something like that just to drop it because it's inconvenient. You make it work. I only hope they're joking around, but it doesn't sound like it.

P.S. Let me recommend the latest Entertainment Weekly, with a cover feature on Lost. I read it in my local library (where they replaced comfortable chairs with hard ones--why?). Nothing that new, and certainly no spoilers, but a nice overview of the series. There are a bunch of special edition covers--the one I read had Sawyer up front.