DOC JENSEN: You've certainly picked some interesting names for your freighter folk. How should we be interpreting them?
DAMON LINDELOF: With Miles Straum, we just thought it would be cool if his name sounded like ''maelstrom.'' Charlotte Lewis was an obvious reference to C.S. Lewis and an important clue to places we're going at the end of the season.
CARLTON CUSE: And an important clue to Charlotte's own, as-yet-untold important backstory.
LINDELOF: One of our producers, Eddie Kitsis, has been pitching to us ''Frank Lapidus, Helicopter Pilot'' for years. Daniel Faraday is an obvious shout-out to Michael Faraday, scientist and physicist.
CUSE: As is Minkowski, who's on the freighter. Those names are clues related to the space-time issues that will become more significant downstream.
For the record, is the official lingo here ''the freighter folk''?
LINDELOF: I like ''freighter folk'' because you wonder if there's an album cover out there somewhere with all of them, and they have the Mamas and the Papas outfits on.
CUSE: ''Freighter folk'' is more benign. And they're not the only people on that freighter. You're going to meet some other people on the freighter who have another name, and in contrast to those folks these freighter folk are very...uh, folkish.
How about Matthew Abbaddon?
LINDELOF: ''Abaddon,'' we dug that one out of Wikipedia. When we name people, we often do Web searches on certain verbiage or if we want to pull something out of Greek mythology or Native American mythology, like, ''Who was the god of wheat?''
CUSE: I can't believe you're telling Jeff about the god of wheat now! The entire second half of the fourth season is about the god of wheat!
LINDELOF: Wasn't your nickname at Harvard ''the god of wheat?''
CUSE: No, it was god of rye.
LINDELOF: You see how I get confused.
[Sigh.]
Until next week, friends — namaste!
As always, send me your questions and theories at JeffJensenEW@aol.com.
