Lost

Damon Lindelof made both and has talked at length about the second as his answer to the criticism of the first. Lost trained an audience to expect that a mystery would be explained and then could not deliver; The Leftovers opens by telling you the central event will never be explained, and makes that refusal the subject. The machinery carries over intact, an ensemble revealed through single-character episodes and a community organised around an inexplicable event, with the promise removed on purpose.

Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese have talked about Lost as the show that made this kind of series possible, and Dark is built out of its machinery: an ensemble whose secrets are revealed by shuffling time, an episode that belongs to one character's backstory, a hatch in the ground, and a mythology released in pieces. The difference is the one they have emphasised, that they wrote the ending first, which is the criticism Lost attracted answered in advance.

Lindelof has described The Stand as one of the books the writers' room kept returning to.

• Strangers who survive a catastrophe and have to build a society out of it
• Flashback chapters that give each survivor a past before the crisis
• A final contest between a figure of good and a figure of evil for the survivors, which Lost gives to Jacob and the Man in Black

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have both cited Twin Peaks as the network drama that showed them a mystery could run for seasons. Lost takes its shape from it: a large ensemble, each member keeping a secret that an episode opens, in a place that is itself the central enigma, with the supernatural let in gradually rather than announced.

Lost names Carroll in its own structure. Episode titles include "White Rabbit" and "Through the Looking Glass", the season three finale, and the underwater station in that finale is the Looking Glass. The debt is the one those titles point at: castaways who fall into a place where the rules keep changing and have to work out what they are. Filed LOW: an allusion the writers chose, not a model for the plot.