Firstly, hello Adam! Big Lost fan here, obviously. The questions I'm going to pose are meant with the utmost respect for you, even though they may sound somewhat, well, harsh?

Elsewhere on these boards, a debate is taking place regarding which writers give us the 'good' episodes, and which ones give us 'filler' episodes.

As I scanned the list of all of the episodes, and who wrote them, I couldn't help but notice that it seems that Damon and Carlton and David Fury wrote all of the 'meaty' episodes, in terms of island mystery and plot progression. An initial reaction to this might be 'eh, well, some writers are better than others', but a few posters pointed out that perhaps it has less to do with who is writing the episode and more to do with what they are told they can convey.

Are you, as a frequent writer, explicitly told what you can and cannot reveal? Are you privy to the grand, overall plot direction and planned-out plot elements of Lost? When you are selected to write an episode, are you confined by anything, or do you honestly not know the 'big secrets', and therefore can't address them in any episode you write?

Or there's the third possibility - that you know it all, but keep getting the bad luck of the draw to write some of the less exciting (I suppose that's subjective, so I'll put that in the context of my opinion only) episodes.

How much do you, as a writer, know about what's going on and what you can address?

Thanks,
A big Lost fan - Vertical