Be warned, there are spoilers for Lost ahead. When Lost reached its conclusion in 2010, it generated quite a lot of heated opinion surrounding the final episode, with some despising it and others doing all they could to defend it, but according to Lost show-runners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, the events of the finale could have been much bigger with the addition of a giant volcano. During Lost's third season, Cuse and Lindelof introduced the presence of a volcano with the intention of keeping it as an option for the series' end-game, but the pair told Entertainment Weekly that once preparations began for Lost's final season, the network put the kibosh on the volcano-based finale.
ABC was like, ‘Guys, we love you, and we’re letting you end the show; we can’t let you bankrupt the network in the process.’
You mean ABC wasn't willing to send their cast and crew up the side of a volcano and spend millions more for visual effects? My goodness. The writers had envisioned the island as a cork bottling up all of the evils of the world and Damon Lindelof said that "the question was always, how do you basically visualize and dramatize the idea that the island itself is all that separates the world from hellfire and damnation? And the answer was the volcano." Although the volcano would have featured prominently in the finale, it would have been properly introduced in Across The Sea, the series' third-to-last episode which told the origin story of Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) and his unnamed brother, The Man in Black (Titus Welliver). After The Man in Black killed his adoptive mother, a furious Jacob would have dragged him up the slopes of the volcano and tossed him into the crater, prompting his transformation into the smoke monster.
The finale then would have found Jack (Matthew Fox) and The Man in Black (Terry O'Quinn) battling over the fate of the island atop the volcano, with Lindelof adding that there was going to be "lots of seismic activity, and ultimately, there was going to be this big fight between the forces of good and the forces of evil, which ended up in the series manifesting as Jack and The Man in Black, in the midst of magma. Magma spewing everywhere!" After ABC decided that this wasn't exactly realistic for the budget, the location of the source of the island's power was then changed to the cave of light and the final battle took place on the cliffs of Oahu. A little less impressive visually, but Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof came to accept that the decision was for the best, partly because they remembered STAR WARS: REVENGE OF THE SITH and that the "big epic battle between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi" would have made whatever they did "look Mickey Mouse next to it."
What are your thoughts on the finale of Lost all these years later, and would it have been improved (or hindered) by setting the climatic battle on a volcano?