Damon Lindelof explains why he feels done with Watchmen -- and why he worries about reaction to the finale

Rolling Stone

"I think it probably has more to do with the culture than it has to do with my feelings about the episode personally," Lindelof tells Rolling Stone of his anxiety over reaction to Sunday's finale. "Putting aside anything that relates to my own work, the Lost finale, or The Leftovers finale, I feel like we’ve moved into this space of, the only part of the game that matters is the final 30 seconds of the fourth quarter. It doesn’t matter if you had an undefeated season. If you lose in the Super Bowl on a missed field goal, that’s all anyone cares about. I don’t think this is paranoid delusion on my part. I’ve seen multiple pieces, people I really respect who have embraced Watchmen, have said things like, 'If they stick the landing…' or 'I’m not sure they can stick the landing.' For someone who has experienced a fair amount of finale trauma, I think I would be insane to approach this final episode of Watchmen with anything other than a high degree of trepidation and anxiety, just on general principal. Secondary to that, I wanted to design the season of Watchmen to feel like it had a beginning, a middle, and end, just like the original 12 issues did." Asked if it's fair to say he's done telling a Watchmen story, Lindelof responds: "I don’t think that’s fair. I think that it would be foolish to say 'never.' And to say 'done.' Because every great heist movie is borne on the back of a character who is out of the game. If Clint Eastwood was done, then we never would have gotten Unforgiven. I know that it’s hubris to say, 'I’m done with Watchmen,' and I wouldn’t want to wake up two years from now with divine interv— I mean inspiration. Interesting that I almost said 'intervention.' If that were to happen, I would probably go for it. But I am comfortable saying, 'Every single idea that we had is onscreen and presented in these nine episodes. And there isn’t anything that occurred to us that was like, '"Oh, that would be a good Season Two. We should save that."' Everything that we wanted to do, we did. So I feel like the plate is empty. There’s nothing rattling around in my brain right now that feels like a compulsion to do more. That said, I feel like Watchmen is bigger than me. Of course it is. It survived without me and endured as one of the greatest pieces of storytelling for 30 years before I had anything to do with it. So I got my turn at the wheel — just like I had a turn at the helm of Star Trek, and then I stepped back, and now others have taken it. I do have a desire for there to be more Watchmen. Maybe these nine episodes have demonstrated that the playing field is a little bit larger than previously thought. It may inspire someone else to tell a Watchmen story. But right now, I don’t have any more ideas."

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• Damon Lindelof says "there’s always going to be space for more Watchmen": "I feel like this world is so expansive — hopefully more expansive now than it was before," he tells EW. "You could call something Watchman and not even feature any of the characters who were in the original or in this season as long as they all occupy the same world.”
• Lindelof on Watchmen's season finale: "It's a bit apples and oranges, or egg whites and egg yolks"
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• Watchmen's ending was so good it would be a shame to make more -- and it exorcized the ghost of Lost's polarizing ending: "No one knows better than Lindelof, the co-creator of Lost, that finales matter," says Willa Paskin.  "(Watchmen may continue for future seasons, but Lindelof has said he won’t be a part of them: For him, this was the only finale there will be.) The furious reaction to Lost’s hooey-bologna finale hit Lindelof hard, as he expressed in any number of soul-searching, shirt-rending interviews and pieces he wrote in the years immediately following. His most productive response by far though was just to make another TV show."
• The finale didn’t feel like a cliffhanger — it feels like an ellipsis at the end of the sentence, rather than a question mark
• Watchmen’s finale derives its greatest emotional impact from its cautious optimism
• The most surprising thing about the Watchmen finale was how conventional it was
• Overall, the finale was an apt finish to an incredibly promising first season
• What Angela Abar's storyline means for a potential Season 2
• James Wolk weighs in on the finale surprise
• Tim Blake Nelson on how Detective Looking Glass "simply became irresistible"
• Yahya Abdul-Mateen II describes the Watchmen makeup process