(Mario Perez/ABC)
You can stop with your conspiracy theories. The missing footage (around 18 minutes worth) of Lost’s series finale didn’t disappear inside the baffling universe of the TV show when you rewatched it on Netflix. The current hypothesis is Netflix may have gotten a version cut down for syndication. But they plan to rectify this problem. The show’s creator Damon Lindelof expressed his “beffudlement” over the issue during an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“Something tells me that this isn’t Netflix’s fault … that it’s an honest mistake and something got miscommunicated — I seem to remember ABC had to make an edit for rerun airings that tightened the show into ‘format’ (42 minutes to accommodate commercials), and somehow that [version] mistakenly got sent to Netflix," Lindelof said. "This sometimes happened with our finales—we’d ask for extra time and ABC would agree to air, but then we had to do another tighter version for subsequent airings and/or international [markets]. We usually left these (painful) cuts to the discretion of our editors… but as the show lives on in DVD form and on Netflix, there is ZERO reason to have the shorter version out there.” So, just hold off watching the finale again until Netflix fixes the issue.
Source: Entertainment Weekly + TV Guide