Lost executive producer Damon Lindelof isn’t quite ready to clear away the black smoke surrounding the much-anticipated final season of the series, but he did bring some of the big picture details into shaper focus for TV Guide Magazine at the "Star Trek" DVD launch party, where he also talked about locking phasers on target for the screenplay of a second “Trek” film.

What are you able to say about Lost and what you can put out there about it at this point?
All I can say is that we've spent the last five years answering the question “Were you guys making it up as you go along? Do you know what you're doing?” It's a great comfort to know that in about six months people will stop asking us that question. They'll basically say “You were making it up it as you went along –“ Or they'll go “Wow, you really had a plan.”

Is it safe to say, though, that it's really going to definitively end?
There will not be a cut to black. It is not all in the dog's brain. I think the one thing that we're saying is that we're not leaving things open for a Lost movie. We are conclusively ending the story that we started. It would've been very easy to say “Oh, let’s just do a seventh season or an eighth season. People are still watching the show.” The whole reason that we asked for an end date was so that we could end it. So that's what we're going to do.

What can you announce about actors appearing in the next season? New actors, guest stars, castmembers to return – anything?
I think there's been a lot of speculation on a lot of fronts about who's coming back. I've heard rumors that Ian Somerhalder is coming back even though he's working on The Vampire Diaries. I've heard Dominic Monaghan is coming back. He appeared at ComicCon, so that would be kind of misleading if we invited him onto the stage with us and he's not in, but I do think it's safe to say that that final season of the show in a lot of ways is a curtain call for all the actors who kind of made these iconic performances and we're hoping that a lot of them come back for one final appearance. But you never know who will turn up.

Will Regis Philbin's determined theory that the smoke creature is a dinosaur be disproved at this point?
I think it's safe to say that Regis's theory will either be proven or disproven in the season premiere of Lost. If you do not see a dinosaur by the end of the season premiere of season six I think it will be safe to conclude that the monster is not a dinosaur. But that's not to say that you won't see one. I'm just saying you will know.

After Lost ends will you be focusing your efforts on “Star Trek” or do you have another TV show that you're ready to start digging into?
I definitely think that “Trek 2” is going to be a big priority once Lost ends. I love television and it's just a matter of sort of figuring out what the next show is going to be. I feel like I have no immediate desire to immediately dive back into “Hey, here's another six-year-long project that has a complex mythology and seventeen characters to write for every week.”

How far are you, J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci into breaking the “Star Trek” sequel story, and what's the timeline in terms of when you hope to have it all done?
I think as is mostly the case with us we go from a sort of state of relaxed, kicked back-attitude, informal conversations and then the next thing we know everything has to happen instantly and you realize that all those relaxed conversations you were having you were actually getting a tremendous amount of work done. So I think we've started in earnest, having a lot of talks about what we don't want to do and what we do want to do. Now we've entered the phase of conversations where we're talking about how we're exactly going to pull that off, because I think with sequels sometimes the temptation is just sort of overload the buffet with every single kind of food imaginable. You can only get so much food on the plate, I think. So we have to figure out what story we want to tell because the thing coming out of the first one is that there's a real desire to do more. More of Uhura and Spock. More of Scotty. I want to learn more about Sulu. Who's going to be the bad guy in the next one? What about Kirk's relationship with Pike? We're basically like “Yes, that too. Yes, that and that.” But I think that you have to kind of talk about it all and find your focus and sort of save something for three, I guess.

Have you been looking at the classic series again for references, a checklist of elements from the original that sound cool to you conceptually?
I think a lot of that stuff has sort of permeated into our psyche. We watched a lot of the original series when we were working on this one. There are a lot of cool ideas that they did that we want to infuse it with but I think one of the reasons that people really responded to the new movie is that it felt like it was true to “Trek” but it also felt fresh and innovative. I think that we don't want to do, nor do the people who did everything before us want us to rip them off. So it's basically about what that fine line is between being inspired by and actually trying to duplicate and we don’t want to be on the wrong side of that line.