Lost is back for its fifth season this weekend - and with just 34 episodes now remaining, the pieces of the puzzle are starting to fit together. Not without some more questions along the way, of course. Tube Talk's LA correspondent Adam Tanswell brings us a Q&A with enigmatic execs Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, direct from the Winter TCA Tour.

It’s been suggested that Season Five is the season of Sawyer… Is that true?
Damon: "Last year, because of the Oceanic Six storyline, a lot of the focus was on Kate, Jack, Hurley, Sun, Aaron and Sayid – and there wasn’t as much focus on Sawyer. This year, we tried to make up for lost time. Josh [Holloway] has been doing amazing work. We’re currently writing the 13th episode of this season, so we’re three or four episodes shy of the end – and he's been great."

Carlton: "Sawyer has a lot to do this year. We had him take his shirt off for the first episode to make sure that people who might not be huge fans of time travel would still be interested in Lost. It was a very calculated balancing act."

Are we going to be seeing a lot more of Nestor Carbonell (Richard Alpert) this season?
Carlton: "You will."

Can you ask your make-up department to cut down on the eye make-up for Nestor? It looks like he’s got more than the rest of the cast put together…
Damon: "Do you want to hear something shocking? And this is the honest truth. When we first saw dailies of Nestor, we said that someone has got to talk to him about the eyeliner situation – but he does not wear any eyeliner or mascara. He is completely sans make-up. That’s the truth."

Does it bother you when fan sites publish Lost spoilers?
Carlton: "We don’t like it. People who went to spoiler sites and learned that the end of Season Three was a flash forward were greatly disappointed in the journey of that episode. It wrecked it for them. We want to respect the journey that the fans have watching the show. The fact that you don’t know what’s going to happen when you watch a Lost episode is a big part of what we try to do, but certain sites are out there to try and use Lost spoilers to make money for themselves. It’s hard to have respect for that."

You have so many secondary characters in Lost. Are the actors under contract? And how much does their availability impact your storytelling? For example, if Nestor Carbonelli wasn’t available, did you have back-up storylines?
Damon: "Well, now that we have the end date for the show, we can pre-plan a lot more. In the case of Nestor, he was on Cane last year and we were in a position where if Cane had been picked up, then you probably wouldn’t have seen Richard Alpert again on Lost. We had to have a plan B, which would’ve been catastrophic for us because we’d weaved Richard Alpert into the story in such a significant way. However, once Cane wasn’t picked up for a full season, we made a deal with Nestor to secure his services until the end of Season Six. When you have secondary characters who are essential to the plot, like Charles Widmore or Richard Alpert, we try to lock those actors down so that we’re not in a situation where we’re waiting around for them to be available. The other good news is that we shoot from July through to March and the show premieres in January. Someone might not be available for the episode we want them for, but we can try to slot them into a later episode."

Will time-hopping feature heavily this season?
Damon: "Well, the show has been a time travel show for the last four years. We’re just making it more apparent in the storytelling now. You’ll realise that time travel has been in the DNA of the show for quite some time – but we think the audience is now prepared to go on that journey with us."

If you didn’t have your end date, would you still be telling the same story?
Carlton: "No, I think the end date has completely liberated us. We didn’t know if the mythology was going to last for two seasons or nine seasons, which was paralysing. Now that we know exactly how many episodes we have left, we’re really able to plan and do this with confidence that we know how much of the journey is left."

Do you think that the storylines are so complicated that they scare new viewers away from the show?
Damon: "The network and the studio have been enormously gracious. Normally you would expect a tremendous amount of pressure to do a lot of recapping in every episode, with characters talking about what happened last week – but they accept Lost is a serialised adventure. We love to hear stories of how people tell their friends about Lost and these friends consider the show too weird and too impenetrable – but then they watch the Season One DVD and they get really into it. I remember hearing about the Harry Potter series around the time that the third book came out. As a result of getting caught up in the buzz of Prisoner Of Azkaban, I went back and bought the first Harry Potter book. By the time JK Rowling released the seventh book, they had picked up a lot of people along the way."

Why do you think Lost is so successful?
Carlton: "I think it’s different to other shows out there. We can make the show complicated and challenging – and people like the fact that the storytelling is complicated. It makes you sit forward."

Without giving storylines away, can you hint as to what might happen in the new season?
Carlton: "You will see more of Widmore and you will get a greater sense of the island’s history. People have a lot of questions, but we’ll learn exactly what has happened on the island in the past."

Is that a new logo?
Carlton: "In the past, the Lost logo used to grow out of the island – but now you can see the cityscape in the letters of Lost. That illustrates that the fact that the season is split between the people who are home and the people who are left behind on the island."

Why can’t we see more episodes of Lost this season? Why hold back?
Damon: "We agreed to do 48 more hours and we could’ve done that over two seasons, which we would be finishing now – but we chose to divide them over three seasons. We wanted to be thoughtful about writing the scripts and figuring out how to tell the stories. Figuring out these time travel stories is enormously complicated, so we calculated exactly how many episodes we felt we could do and still tell the story well and get to an ending. We asked for three seasons to do this because we wanted to keep the quality bar high. They agreed to that and here we are now."