This has been making the rounds:
So, in order, my attempt at as many plausible explanations as possible:
1.) Why did the smoke monster kill the pilot? Pick one: killing off potential authority figure to create more confusion amongst survivors/killing pilot because he was in a bad mood.
2.) What did Locke see when he saw the smoke monster? A smoke monster isn’t scary enough on its own now?
3.) What’s with the polar bear in Walt’s comic? Green Lantern and the Flash have to fight it. Coincidences happen, you know.
4.) Where’s Christian Shepherd’s body if it’s not in the casket? Smokie took human form and tossed it somewhere it wouldn’t be found so when he assumed Christian’s form Jack would question it less.
5.) Why did the psychic insist that Claire fly on Oceanic 815 and why did he insist that Claire had to raise him? Jacob told him to do it in advance, having already identified Claire as a potential candidate.
6.) Why did the Others want Walt so bad? For the same reason Widmore wanted Desmond so bad.
7.) Who sent Kate the letter about her mother being treated for cancer? Jacob.
8.) Why does Walt appear to warn Locke about the hatch and how does he know about it? Because Walt is psychic and can’t control his abilities or even know when he’s using them, causing people to “see” Walt but instead of him telling them things, he merely echoes back their own worries.
9.) Why does the smoke monster make mechanical sounds? Look, if you want to complain about how the totally imaginary smoke monster doesn’t sound like all the other smoke monsters, go right ahead.
10.) How does Walt apparate before Shannon? See question 8.
11.) How does Walt communicate with Michael using the Swan computer? That was Ben, or someone Ben told to do something.
12.) What was the deal with Kate and that horse? The Island is a weird place, and Jacob has weird powers. That should be enough.
13.) Why are supplies still being dropped on the island after the purge and by who? The whole takeaway from the Dharma Initiative plotline is that they’re a bunch of well-meaning techno-hippies who are fairly brilliant scientists and totally balls at everything else, particularly organizational logistics. I mean, these are guys who literally made some guy who just showed up one day their chief of security. Is it really too hard to imagine them setting up supply drops with third parties, the drops paid for by trust funds, and those drops continuing long after the organization went defunct?
14.) What triggered the lockdown, and who on earth would design black lights to light up showing secret thingies during the lockdown? See question 13.
15.) What happened to the original Henry Gale Who the fuck cares?
16.) What happened to Libby in between the mental hospital and getting on the tail section of flight 815? She got better, mostly.
17.) Who built the four-toed statue? Probably the ancient whoever-they-weres at a much, much earlier point in time.
18.) Why does only one specific bearing get you off the Island? See question 12.
19.) What are the heiroglyphics on the Swan countdown timer about? Paranoid Dharma scientists decided to use a non-base-10 signature for certain elements and the heiroglyphics are the non-base numbers.
20.) Why does Tom feel the need to wear a fake beard? He thinks they’re stylish. No, I’m kidding: because the Others didn’t want the survivors to know how comfortable their lives were.
21.) Who was Libby’s previous husband who gave her a boat to give to Desmond? Henry Gale. Happy now? Christ.
22.) Why were there skeletons in the polar bear cave? Bears get hungry.
23.) Where did the toy truck come from? Anybody with kids knows that their toys get absolutely everywhere.
24.) How did Locke and Eko escape the hatch implosion? They got really lucky.
25.) Why couldn’t Locke talk after the hatch implosion? But not that lucky.
26.) Why did the smoke monster kill Mr. Eko and why didn’t they just do it the first time they met? Because Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje decided he wanted to leave the show after one season and sometimes writers have to cheat.
27.) What did Mr. Eko mean when he said “you’re next” after he died? He was trying to warn Locke that Locke was a person of interest to the smoke monster and wrongly concluded that, since the monster had killed him, it would similarly wish to kill Locke.
28.) How disgusting was it when Hurley was eating from that tub of ranch dressing? Fairly.
29.) Why did Yemi’s body disappear? Because the smoke monster likes to take away corpses to freak people out. It’s been there for millennia: it has to get its kicks somehow.
30.) Why does Danny say that Jack wasn’t on the list when he was? Because sometimes people are wrong about things. This goes doubles for underlings of Ben, who probably lied to them twice a day just to stay sharp.
31.) Why can’t women on the island have babies and what does that have to do with anything? Another of Jacob’s rules. He has weird powers, you know.
32.) What was that Russian letter in Mikhail’s typewriter? “Dear Mom. How are you? I am fine. I liked the borscht you sent me last month. It was very tasty…”
33.) Why is the supply drop menu hidden behind a game of computer chess? See question 13. (Admit it: if you could get away with putting something important behind a game of computer chess, you would be tempted to do it.)
34.) Why did Ben give Juliet that weird mark as a punishment? What was that about? Ben has a lot of issues.
35.) What’s the deal with Jack’s tattoos? They say “I boned your mother” in Thai.
36.) Desmond knew a monk? How did that monk know Eloise? It’s a small world.
37.) Why did Ben see his dead mother? See question 12.
38.) Who decided it was time to kill the Dharmites in a purge? Probably Ben. See question 34.
39.) What happened to Ben’s childhood friend? She moved off the island, got married to an accountant named Henry Gale, had three children, and then got divorced when it turned out Henry was sleeping with his secretary (who was not Libby). She now works as an associate professor at the University of Chicago. She likes cats.
40.) Why did Desmond have a false vision of Claire and Aaron leaving the island on a helicopter? Desmond’s future-sight was only accurate while it was still active; once it went dormant, his loss of ability to observe the state of the future meant that the future could now be changed. Basically, think that whole thing with the cat in the box with the poison, but in reverse.
41.) How does Mikhail keep coming back to life? Smoke monster killed him a looooooong time ago and nobody knows.
42.) Why does Walt tell Locke that he still has work to do? Because Locke is hallucinating.
43.) Whose eye appeared in the cabin? Good question! Although it should be noted that we don’t know it was the smoke monster, because although that silhouette looks like Christian, it was never confirmed to be. Hey, maybe it’s Christian’s corpse and the eye is the smoke monster! That’s scary! The smoke monster is fucking with people!
44.) Where did Miles get that picture of Ben? Dharma records, which were kept in a dusty, unlocked warehouse in Iowa (see question 13).
45.) Who’s the R.G. on Naomi’s bracelet? Royce Gale, Henry’s half-brother and her secret lover. Aren’t you glad you asked?
46.) Why is there a difference between the times? See question 12.
47.) Who is “the economist” and why did Ben want him dead? Ben wants lots of people dead.
48.) Why was Ben so surprised that they could kill Alex? For god’s sake, I don’t even have to make anything up here: Ben explicitly said that he had thought he knew all the rules of the Island and that it turned out that he didn’t.
49.) If the smoke monster can’t leave the island and Christian Shepherd is the smoke monster, how did Christian appear in LA and on the freighter? See question 12.
50.) How did the monster get into Jacob’s cabin? You mean the cabin that Ben called “Jacob’s cabin” when in fact we would eventually learn that he’d never met or seen Jacob and was just bullshitting? Perhaps this question should be “how did the smoke monster get into a perfectly normal run-down cabin?”
51.) Why ask Locke not to tell anybody that he saw Claire in the cabin? Because if Locke had told, say, Kate that he’d seen Claire, then maybe more of the candidates would have stayed on the island, which just makes the smoke monster’s job of “kill or remove all the candidates” more difficult.
52.) Why did Ghost Horace direct Locke to the cabin and tell him Jacob was waiting there? Because Smoke Monster lies to get his way.
53.) Why did the Oceanic Six name Charlie, Boone and Libby as the other three survivors? What’s the logic in that? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two can’t rhyme with “those three people were definitively dead, as opposed to others who might escape the island and disprove the Six’s story.”
54.) Why does Miles decide to stay on the island? Because he gets hunches about where might be a bad place to be – and is often correct – and he tends to follow them. Amazingly, he avoided going to a ship which then blew the fuck up.
55.) What is the deal with the frozen wheel? Heat gets absorbed from the room in the energy transfer which allows teleportation.
56.) Why does Ben insist that the Oceanic Six, as well as Locke, must return to the island? Because at that point he was still taking orders from Jacob (via Richard), who had planned this thing out well in advance.
57.) Why don’t the rules of time travel apply to Desmond? Huge bursts of electromagnetic energy will do that to you.
58.) Who were the people trying to kill Sayid and Hurley? Pawns of Ben trying to frighten them into doing what Ben wanted.
59.) Ben asked his butcher friend, who was holding Locke’s body, if Gabriel and Jeffrey had checked in yet – who are any of these people? Sayid killed Gabriel and Jeffrey one question ago, and “these people” are Jacob’s network of people he’s done favors for off the Island (Ilana being the most notable).
60.) What was Ben hiding when he took something out of the vent and put it in his bag? C4 to crash the plane if necessary. Alternately, his porn stash.
61.) When the gang was unstuck in time, who was that shooting at them from the outrigger? The rest of Rousseau’s band, gone crazy via smoke monster, before she managed to kill them.
62.) Who sent Sun a gun and pictures of Jack and Ben? Widmore.
63.) Who attacked Sayid at the hospital and why did he have Kate’s address? Another one of Ben’s flunkies, and because Ben gave it to him.
64.) Why was the smoke monster at the temple? Because.
65.) When did the temple become like an anti-smoke monster fortress? When Dogen moved the remaining Others there and did the ritual thingies Jacob taught him to do.
66.) How did the producers of the hit TV show “Expose” deal with the death of their two lead actors? They killed off both characters and then elevated existing characters in importance to compensate. Ironically, when the show ended after a hit six-year run, some dork put up a video of “one hundred unanswered questions about Expose,” which included things like “why did Steven drink an entire bottle of hot sauce? What was the point of that?”
67.) How did Eloise come to run the lab? Because she’s smart and a scientist and amazingly, sometimes qualified people get jobs in their field.
68.) Who figured out that a pendulum set up that way could predict the island’s movements? Who figured that out? Daniel Faraday, back in the 1970s.
69.) Why did those returning to the island need to recreate the circumstances of their first arrival? Because it’s easier to tell people to do the same thing they did last time than it is to do it a different way, and Eloise isn’t exactly patient.
70.) Why did Jack, Kate and Hurley go from that Ajira flight to the 70s, and why didn’t Sun? See, that’s a good question.
71.) How did Richard bypass the sonic death fence? Because the Dharmites assumed Richard was like the smoke monster. Interestingly, Richard is not a smoke monster, and can do things like, say, “tinker with controls on a sonic death fence” or “put up a ladder next to the sonic death fence and then go over it.”
72.) How did Ethan go from the Dharma Initiative to a member of the Others? The Others are pretty famous for trying to spare/recruit children. Ethan was a child at the time, if you recall.
73.) What’s with all the heiroglyphics under the temple? Presumably the ancient whoevers built the temple. And they like heiroglyphics. Did you really need this explained, Questions Person?
74.) Why did Widmore tell Ben to kill Rousseau and the baby, and then let Ben keep the baby anyway? Because Widmore was and is a power junkie and likes to be considered ruthless, but is not quite so actually ruthless that he can kill a baby in cold blood on his own.
75.) Why did Daniel leave the Island in the 70s, and why does he tell Jack that he doesn’t belong there? See question 68, and also remember that Daniel died precisely because he got a specific detail very, very wrong.
76.) Why does Richard think he saw everyone in the 1977 Dharma picture die? Because he saw the blast from far off and made an assumption.
77.) Who broke the circle of ash around Jacob’s cabin? A boar did it.
78.) Why can Jacob leave the island, but the smoke monster can’t? Because they aren’t Superman Red and Superman Blue. They have different powers. Yeesh.
79.) Jacob uses his last breath to say “they’re coming,” but who are they? Pick one of: the 1977 candidates and friends, or Widmore and his flunkies.
80.) What’s the deal with the pool bringing people back to life? See question 12.
81.) Why did it bring back Sayid with an English accent? Because Naveen Andrews is English and sometimes actors slip up.
82.) What is the infection? How did Claire get infected? How did Sayid get infected? Why did Sayid need to take a poison pill when all it took to uninfect Sayid was a simple argument from Desmond? Dogen is a mysticist who has trouble realizing post-traumatic stress disorder and others forms of mental illness for what they are. (Which is not unreasonable given that crazy people tend to end up allying with the smoke monster.)
83.) Why was the smoke monster surprised that Sawyer could see young Jacob? Because most people aren’t supposed to see dead people that easily and Jacob was already manifesting himself, as he did in the penultimate episode; the younger Jacobs were the “larval stages,” if you will, of Jacob’s final manifestation.
84.) What’s the magic lighthouse about? See question 12.
85.) How does Dogen being alive keep the smoke monster out? See question 12.
86.) What happened to the flight attendant Cindy? And the kids? Either they got killed in that mortar strike or they fled into the jungle and eventually Hurley saw to it that they got home safely.
87.) Why didn’t Sun tell Jin to leave so their daughter wouldn’t be an orphan? Because sometimes people don’t think clearly when they are in the middle of a sinking submarine, oddly enough.
88.) Where did Jacob and Smokie’s mother come from? A boat! Presumably a Roman one.
89.) Where did Jacob and Smokie’s other mother come from? The West Wing.
90.) Who finished the magic wheel that combines “water and light” and when did it freeze up? Somebody who came along later. (At a certain point these “nitpicks” just become a child going “why? Why? Why?” over and over again.)
91.) What is the nature of the light? It’s the magic at the heart of the world that binds us all. If that’s not good enough, you should probably just avoid fantasy literature altogether.
92.) Magic wine? Seriously? The water/wine isn’t itself magical; it’s just a binding ritual to tie the two people together that works well on the newer party who doesn’t understand the nature of the magic yet and needs a bit of sideshow.
93.) Why did Zoe want an electromagnetic map of the island? Because they needed to set up the electromagnetic fence without it exploding.
94.) Why did electromagnetism send Desmond into the afterlife? Because it nearly killed him.
95.) Wasn’t Sayid’s solemate Nadia? I did that one already.
96.) Why weren’t Michael, Walt, Lapidus, Eko, or any of the other characters at the church? Because they, like Ana Lucia, weren’t ready to leave yet.
Seriously: beyond the problems of Walt and Eko, and the time-travel split of question 70 which smacks of writer fiat? Most of these aren’t really huge, important questions, or even really minor questions; they can be answered by a little bit of handwaving and a few basic assumptions, and then they’re just fine. A couple (like Mikhail) probably could have been stood to be answered during the series proper with one or two sentences and it would have been similarly just fine, but as it is aren’t crippling. Most of the rest are just “why does this show like to create an atmosphere of mysterious weirdness” and if you keep asking that maybe you should have been watching, I dunno, Desperate Housewives.
The big problems with the show’s enduring mysteries mostly stem from casting issues. The show’s creators admitted long ago that Walt was a mistake, made mostly because they initially assumed and pitched the show as happening over a number of years on the island, but hey whoops over the first thirteen episodes they realized that, no, this couldn’t be a “over the course of years” show when their narrative demanded one-right-after-the-next episodic continuity pretty much all the time. So they wrote Walt out. Better shows have done worse. The other casting fubars – Eko, Ana Lucia, Libby, Shannon, et cetera – stem from things the writers couldn’t have foreseen (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje suffering from depression/homesickness and being genuinely unhappy in his job, Maggie Grace being unreasonable about her salary demands and the network insisting on her being fired, Maggie Rodriguez and Cynthia Watros getting caught in a DUI incident and ABC getting puritanical) and they dealt with them as best they could.
This happens with serial television. it’s not all planned from the beginning. The writers left Sam Seaborn’s status open on The West Wing after his departure because they wanted to keep his slot open if his new show tanked and he wanted to come back (it did; he didn’t) and then just had to kind of shove it off to one side because it didn’t make sense to address the fate of a character half a season later when they had so many storylines that needed the time. Willow was never originally intended to be a lesbian on Buffy, and indeed they only decided to go that route halfway through season four practically as it was happening. Generally, the writers of Lost did a bang-up job mostly keeping a lot of disparate plot threads more or less in check, and most of the complaints come down to, as said, fans complaining that the writers weren’t explaining the creepy mysterious atmosphere enough.
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Now, imagine if Vincent had been Rex the wonder dog…they would have been off the island in the pilot.
Seriously, though, I think these couple posts on LOST you’ve written are just great. It’s nice to see someone using some logic and common sense answer these “questions” people have.
With regards to question #70 (Why didn’t Sun transport to the 1970s) aside from it being another chance for the writers to separate her and Jin, I’ve always viewed that as one of two things (which are almost the same thing): Jacob made a choice and picked Jin as the Kwon candidate, or Jin was actually the Kwon candidate since Kwon is Sun’s married name (i.e., not her true name). Of course, that doesn’t address why Kate went if we’re basing the argument solely on candidate status…but she was a candidate at one point, and who can understand Jacob’s motivations, right?
31. I was thinking maybe it was due to the electromagnetism breach, since babymaking worked right through the mid ’70s, then suddenly stopped.
70. All of the candidates ended up in the 70s, so maybe that was the way of demonstrating which Kwon was the right one?
Isn’t #12 just saying “A wizard did it”? And #13 suggests a contractor can find and arrive at the island at will for 30 years?
I have no problem with unanswered questions, but I do have problems with inconsistency in the narrative. Serial television breeds this, but isn’t that why serial shows typically have ?
I wish they had addressed why women can’t both conceive and give birth on the island, since it’s a major plot point for Claire, Sun, Roussou, Ben, and especially Juliet, since her whole purpose for being on the island is to figure out why women don’t survive pregnancy.
You could handwave that the Purge poisoned the air (since women can give birth back in 1977) but you’d think Ben could have figured that out without Juliet’s help.
If it was Jacob or Smokey, I would have liked one of them to explain why having kids was suddenly a no no.
This comes across as just a teensy bit defensive, you know. The Lost finale really has created the most extraordinary phenomenon of fans aggressively insisting how satisfied and happy they are with the whole thing, and you can hear their teeth grinding while they type. I assume it’s a post-BSG thing.
Great. Bring calm, rational thinking into this…
Minor quibble about question #96: Michael wasn’t in the church because his soul was stuck on the Island with the whispering dead as punishment (and presumably, penance) for having killed Libby and Ana Lucia.
Walt, on the other hand, didn’t show up in the church because he had no reason to. The reason for the afterlife construct was so that everyone would be brought together to the people whom they spent the most important part of their lives with, which ended up shaping them and their futures. Walt, after getting off the island, never went back.
It’s safe to say that as HE was concerned, the Island was a 50 day experience with a father he barely knew and not something that ended up shaping him as much as the remaining 60+ years of his life, especially if he was as high-powered a psychic as he was implied to be.
Andrew: except the Lost finale was the end result of consistent storytelling that, while obviously having been altered by circumstance and evolution of the plot over time, had been fairly consistant throughout.
The BSG finale was the metaphorical cherry on the “Well, we had no idea where we were going so we just improv’d it all” form that Moore et. al were following.
Lost was internally consistant; it’s easier to accept supernatural elements when they’ve been included from episode 1. BSG consistently implied that the supernatural elements were either illusory, had a scientific basis behind them or were the machinations of individuals or beings yet unseen. And then decided that the way of wrapping up all of their unanswered questions was to throw their hands up and say “A wizard did it.”
Additionally, Lost provided emotional closure, something BSG was lacking.
Lost fans are divided on the finale, yes. Some of ’em are gritting their teeth about it because they don’t think we received enough answers, true. But the differences between the LOST and BSG finales are night and day.
thank you for this – my wife and i started to do the very same thing when we saw this stupid, stupid video but we weren’t nearly as funny as this. thank you!
Great list MGK! Personally, I think your #12 answer and related issues is satisfactory in more than just an ‘A wizard did it’ way. There were enough clues about the island’s properties to continue to hand-wave why certain events happened, if one wants, without the show explaining everything. For example, we know the magical light at the heart of the island produces strange electromagnetic, spatial, biological and temporal anomalies. Locke and others heal, Jacob can see distorted light from all over the world, and the island can only be found and approached with bad math. When things get disrupted, as in the swan/hatch explosions, things get worse. Thus, the island is simply several minutes outside normal time and then is completely dislodged in time. The island has healing properties, but these get corrupted to damage the birthing process. Etc. None of this requires a “the light is the heart of a dead spaceship” explanation.
Lost was internally consistent
No, not even close.
BSG consistently implied that the supernatural elements were either illusory, had a scientific basis behind them or were the machinations of individuals or beings yet unseen.
Considering that the major plot points in Season One happened because they were reading and following *Scripture*, I’d say that the supernatural was always part of BSG.
I seems reasonable that the lock down in the hatch was to keep mysterious the source of the supply drop. I also think the supply drop was from a source on the island with old Dharma stockpiles. No outside agency required, just more weird psych experiments from your friendly neighborhood mad scientists.
Oh, and I figure Kelvin rigged the blacklights himself to keep his secrets. Invisible ink on a door only visible at all during the lockdown. Just extended paranoia. Not really unreasonable in his situation.
Another thing to consider in regard to question 12 is that the light that binds people together that gives off electromagnetism is probably going to have residual hallucinogenic properties. The horse, the Hurley bird, and the fact that it converted an entire being made of Smoke that can physically manifest these properties at will can go a long way to explain why weird shit happens on the island. The horse alone could be a way to remind Kate of her youth, a happier more pleasant time when she was with people she cared about. The Hurley bird? It’s all green and Hurley is obviously a Green Lantern fan.
I seems reasonable that the lock down in the hatch was to keep mysterious the source of the supply drop. I also think the supply drop was from a source on the island with old Dharma stockpiles. No outside agency required, just more weird psych experiments from your friendly neighborhood mad scientists.
Another explanation (on a show that was labeled by its creator as a mystery, by the way) could be that the island hadn’t moved in years and was something the Dharma Initiative never considered to really be a possibility. Sure, the island was hard to find due to the electromagnetism screwing up everyone’s guidance systems and what not, but it’s not like it moving ever really came up in the discussions about getting supplies dropped.
Huh. Can’t we all agree that cult TV shows NEVER have endings that satisfy fans? LOST, BSG, The Soparanos, Evangelion, Twin Peaks, etc.
Cult shows are usually cult shows because they’re weird and/or obtuse. They shouldn’t have neat endings. They leave questions behind.
True on Willow not being a lesbian. That never rang true to me (I always held out hope they’d run with the magic-as-an-addiction plot element to the logical end that Tara was her addiction, not her true love).
No, the show’s problems were because the writers never made much effort to explain anything. Just go ooooh, let’s do something weird here. And because the cast’s uncurious response runs along the lines of “Hmm, that’s impossible. Okay, let’s have dinner now.”
Overall, I think Lost would have been more fun as a miniseries. Certainly chopping out a season or two wouldn’t have hurt.
Not only did Jacob tell Malkin what to tell Claire, he brought the psychic’s daughter back to life after her drowning as a reward for this service (cf. Dogen and his son).
The supply drop and Faraday’s rocket experiment explain each other. There are chronal anomalies around the island because of its unique electromagnetic properties. The food was dropped at some indeterminate time in the past but didn’t land on the island until later. (cf. the Kahana’s doctor washing up on shore before he left the freighter.)
As for the Swan’s hieroglyphics and the blacklight lockdown, Radzinsky was already a paranoid nut before the Incident. During the station’s later construction, he was probably even further around the bend. These questions assume the Swan was built and designed by a rational person according to a a comprehensible plan.
There’s no real evidence for this, but I’d like to think that Libby’s dead husband David is the same “Dave” that Hurley sees at the mental hospital and later on the island (but on the island it was Smokey and not a “real” ghost).
@John Klima – I think you’re right about #70 – additional evidence is that in the alternaverse, she’s Sun Paik.
The whole thing with baby Aaron and Baby Kwon in the church makes perfect sense if you posit that neither baby, like Jack’s stepford son (there to let Jack work out his daddy issues by being one), were real.
For Claire, the most important pre-crazy time of her life came when she was pregnant on the island. She was important. People kept trying to kidnap her. She had someone who loved her and who she loved. After the birth, it was all pretty much downhill to crazy town.
As for Jin and Sun, they died before Jin could ever see their beloved daughter. She was a prop of the afterlife so that Jin could feel the joy and responsibility of being a parent and do so with the other love of his life, Sun.
Seems like as good an explanation as any. Especially considering that I don’t want to think about someone living to a ripe old age, dying and then awakening in the afterlife as a fetus. ick
Actually Joss said that he intended to take a supporting character and make him/her gay after a couple of seasons; he just wasn’t sure if it was to be Xander or Willow. There’s foreshadowing for both. (Willow’s vampire form, for example, is “kind of gay.”) I guess it would have made more sense for Willow to have been bisexual, because she did seem genuinely attracted to men.
I don’t watch Lost, I got nothing to say.
I don’t think it’s true that the writers “never made any effort to explain anything” at all. Rather, I see it that they made roughly an 80% effort to explain everything.
Why are the Numbers special? Because Jacob was looking for candidates and each candidate has a number based on their Lighthouse angle, and so that specific set of numbers has power because…?
Who were Adam and Eve? Well, the bodies of Jacob’s brother and faux-mother. The faux-mother was really…? and the brother became the smoke monster after Jacob threw him into the Source cave, because…?
Why do some characters seem to come back from the dead on the island? Ah, you see, it’s because the recently dead can be “claimed” by some sinister force which throws off their personal soul-scale, and that force is….?
So the fact that every question seems to have at least 80% of an answer (and sometimes 100%) suggests that the writers DO have some kind of master whiteboard somewhere where everything’s figured out, and it’s up to us to assemble that last 20%. I personally would have favoured more of a 90%-10% ratio, or even 95%-5%, but hey.
My favourite unanswered question is, why did Jacob say “You finally found a loophole” to Fake Locke before Ben killed him? It can’t have been “get someone else to kill him,” because FL had already tried that at least once (with Alpert.) Plus it seems that Jacob was basically mortal when it came to violent death; he bothered to fight Alpert, he had bodyguards, and his predecessor died from being stabbed with a knife. My only explanation is that Ben must have been a candidate; by “the rules,” neither Jacob nor his brother could harm the candidates, so Jacob couldn’t fight back against Ben.
Have you seen this? http://designwoop.com/2010/05/lost-finale-explained-well/ – a Bad Robot staffer’s explanation of the finale. It actually answers quite a few of these questions pretty satisfactorily.
seriously, half your answers are “a wizard did it” and “who cares.” that’s not because the show is internal consistent, that’s being really generous toward writers who obviously wrote themselves into a hole by trying to be too mysterious without answering the mysteries. these aren’t casting problems, either, they’re problems with writing mysterious clues that you don’t have a plan for.
a better summation is “sometimes you think you’ll work it all out down the road, and sometimes that doesn’t happen. thankfully, the show was pretty good anyway – ‘some ancient egyptians did some shit back in the day’ plot holes notwithstanding.”
Wouldn’t a real Bad Robot staffer realize that there were five season-two characters in the church at the end?
Strike that – four season-two characters plus Juliet, who didn’t appear until season three.
The “im a staff” member wreaks “fake” or some intern using that as an excuse to push his fan theory.
Wizard did it is about the best we will get. I had sort of steeled myself to no definitive explanations in the last couple of seasons, as that seemed to be where it was going. The creation and solution of the purgatory/sideways mystery makes the show feel more complete, its a half decent thing.
Also, 5.) – Actually Jacob discounts Kate as a candidate due to being a mother, so bringing one and insisting she be a mother doesnt make sense from him. Psychic as a fraud and its a coincidence makes more sense.
Though I dont entirely agree with it, I think theres a pretty solid argument for smokey not being the clear cut bad guy or Jacob the good guy and the light not being as important as its made out. Smokey has clearly become an evil dick, worthy of killing and with his powers its a good thing he was. But it certainly seems possible he is not a great world ending evil, except in the mind of Jacob, an idea passed down by his very unreliable and insane mother. If anything jacobs mother and smokey are characters with a lot in common, when she destroyed the village of men I thought it was going to be a twist that she herself was a smoke monster like creature (explaining how she did that) and that was what the protector is meant to be… only Jacob accidentally sent Smokey in so the power of protector was actually divided between them, Jacob getting to make the rules but Smokey with the powers of the island which is why Jacob made such a massive fuckup of bringing in a replacement and lost so many. Or something.
Certainly theres room for theories and you can (if you want) come up with answers to everything in the show, if you want.
Willow is bisexual, no matter how’s she’s been written since Oz left. She was clearly wildly love in love with (and sexually attracted to) him.
Of course, she may not have realized that yet.
MKG: some of your answers (particularly to #27) are quite good, and have actually made me say, “Oh. Oh! Well, that does make sense.”
But I think comparing this show to any other is a mistake. Lost’s producers said they wanted this show to ask more from its audience. The narrative structure, especially in the early seasons, lend significant importance to some of these questions. The fact that you, or I, need to supply the answers “Jacob did it,” or “whatever, it’s a weird island,” I think is what gets to me. The show was creative enough and sophisticated enough that it could have done a better job of addressing some of the random mysteries while still remaining true to the mystery and feeling of “otherness” the show was so good at establishing.
The Whidmore (Whitmore?) write-off, was, I found, particularly insulting, considering that the Ben vs. Whidmore conflict had really been set up to be something much more important in the final analysis than it turned out to be. I refuse to believe there wasn’t a more elegant answer than what was given.
91) Just because that’s an explanation, doesn’t mean that it’s a good one, nor an internally consistent one. In a show where time travel operates via quantum mechanics and even a fantasy creature like the smoke monster has specific limitations by which it can operate, “Happy-Clappy Light” isn’t quite up to snuff.
I personally look forward to hearing a counterpoint of Flapjack’s answers to these questions.
As I felt there were a few answers you were handwaving away when they were more earnestly answered, I wrote up a reply/sequel/addendum/total bite:
http://www.thestoryverse.com/grebok/?p=562
Thanks for writing this out, after doing it myself I realized how much of a haul it was.
Re: 30.) Why does Danny say that Jack wasn’t on the list when he was?
Different lists. The list on the wall was the list of candidates; the list that Danny was referring to was the list of NON-candidates that were being taken to the temple (presumably for their protection). Note that this included the kids, as well as Cindy (who would serve as their maternal figure – remember Jacob’s comment about removing Kate from his wall when she became a mother?).
Thus, the Others were kidnapping non-candidates and taking them to the Temple for their safety. When Danny says that Jack wasn’t on this list, he’s correct – Jack is supposed to run the gauntlet of trials that the island will throw at him to see if he will take over for Jacob. However, Ben kidnaps him anyway, because he selfishly wanted to to use his surgical skills. This is Danny’s objection – they are working outside of Jacob’s will by kidnapping Jack.
RE: 70: Because Sun did not take the place of anybody on the original flight. Sayid, now a fugitive, took Kate’s place. Hurley, with guitar, took Charlie’s place. Jack, with Locke’s body, took his own place. Kate, with young child, took Michaels. Ben, Sun, Frank and Ilana did not replace anybody, and Locke’s body stayed behind because he was dead.
I used to have a better reason for who Jack and Kate replaced but I cannot remember what those were.
one last question – why is Claire a candidate AT ALL if Kate can’t be one since she “became a mother” raising Claire’s baby?
I love this. Well done. I was disappointed by Season 6, generally, but Lost remains among the best TV series ever. I wasn’t disappointed by the end of the series. They wrapped it up nicely and sure there are loose threads but, as you illustrate so well here, most of the threads are nitpicky, pointless, or just shit that results from the business of television. I’ve been hating the complaints people have made about how they didn’t answer *vital questions.* I mean there’s plenty I would like them to have explained that they didn’t but in the end that stuff didn’t matter to the story as much as to my own curiosity.
Again, great. Well done.
Erica: That seems kind of obvious. Claire was giving up her baby, right?
MGK, thanks for posting this. I was having trouble keeping up with the questions, and really didn’t want to have to watch it more than once.
A few of my own answers to questions:
7.) Who sent Kate the letter about her mother being treated for cancer? Couldn’t this have been done by Kate’s father (the one from the military, not the one she killed), or the doctor friend who got shot trying to help her and just happened to be working at the hospital where her mother was being treated?
9.) Why does the smoke monster make mechanical sounds? Wouldn’t the better question be “Why do all these mechanical items sound like the smoke monster that clear predates them in existence?
12.)What was the deal with Kate and that horse? Considering that there were polar bears, cows and (I believe I saw) chickens, wouldn’t it be plausible that a horse looking very much like the one Kate saw existed on the island? It’s not exactly a distinctive looking horse.
13.)Why are supplies still being dropped on the island after the purge and by who? Isn’t it possible that supplies hadn’t been being dropped until the first time we saw them in season 2? Given that, Eloise had control of the Lamppost, which meant she could have easily ordered Dharma goods be sent to the island at that point in time. She knew the survivors would be there, and figuring out that somewhere around that time they could start using care packages, off they went.
18.) Why does only one specific bearing get you off the Island? Due to the electromagnetic interference, going on any other bearing would lead to interference with your navigational tools and you would end up back at the island. For whatever reason, there was a break in the EM interference, but only along a path or bearing. Either that or it didn’t matter, and Ben just wanted Micheal to follow that bearing because it would lead him directly to rescue.
20.) Why does Tom feel the need to wear a fake beard? Tom was told that he could attend a family wedding, but only if he brought a beard. Being a gay man, a beard would be considered your fake female love-interest. Having (presumably) little exposure to life off the island, Tom was unaware of what “beard” actually meant in this context and not having time to grow a real one, made a fake one. Liking the look so much, Tom took to wearing it to any special occasion, including meeting new people.
26.) Why did the smoke monster kill Mr. Eko and why didn’t they just do it the first time they met? Smokey needs a new body. He begins investigating his to main choices. First is Locke, a middle-aged bald man with a god complex and pasty skin who was until recently crippled. The other is a tall, strong scary black man. Both are good with a knife, but Eko has the better body for chasing down and killing candidates. Hmm…short, bald and aging, or strong, younger, and not prone to suddenly lose the ability to walk. Then Eko goes and decides that he really has nothing to feel guilty about anymore, nothing to make him feel inadequate, and Smokey loses any kind of control he could have had through manipulating those feelings, as he would go on to do with Locke. And that makes him disposable.
30.) Why does Danny say that Jack wasn’t on the list when he was? As someone else pointed out, the last Danny was referring to wasn’t Jacob’s list. It was Ben’s. It had Jack, Hurley, Kate, and Sawyer on it. Hurley was used to go back and warn the crash survivors to leave the others alone or bad things will happen. Jack was needed for his medical skills. Kate was needed to manipulate Jack. Sawyer, in turn, was needed to manipulate Kate. Ben is a smart cookie. Annnnd, we got to see them building the runway that the Ajira airplane would later crash on (for those who think that there was absolutely no plan from the writers.)
31.) Why can’t women on the island have babies and what does that have to do with anything? When Juliet set off the bomb, combined with the energy released at the drill site, it released a long lasting toxin in the air through molecular bonding. When the Others released the toxin killing all the people at Dharmaville, it added the final ingredient needed to stop people from having children. Ironic, because Juliet is a direct cause of the problem that she would get trapped on the island trying to fix.
34.) Why did Ben give Juliet that weird mark as a punishment? What was that about? Given that the Others are an old tribe so to speak, they would have many old tribal customs. One of which is to brand traitors, so that those who see it will forever know she betrayed her people.
39.) What happened to Ben’s childhood friend? Questions like this amaze me. A complete throw away character and someday, someone will write a series of books to tell us of the great adventures had by Henry Gale, the daughter of the fake psychic and this girl. All because they couldn’t just throw her away like they were supposed to. It couldn’t be that her parent’s just left the island and she went with, could it?
56.) Why does Ben insist that the Oceanic Six, as well as Locke, must return to the island? He had learned this from Eloise, as he met her before he started contacting anyone else (aside from Locke, who told him where to find her), and wanting to get back to his island, he went along with it.
64.) Why was the smoke monster at the temple? At which point? When he took out the French team he was there because there are a system of underground tunnels or “vents” running under the island, which we’ve seen, and on just happened to let out under the temple. Wanting to kill the new candidate on the island (Roussaue…Yeah, I can’t spell it…or possible her unborn child), he infected the rest of the team so they could kill her. It didn’t work, but given that she was able to survive in the smoke monster’s forest for a very long time for no other reason, I’d guess she was a candidate.
66.) How did the producers of the hit TV show “Expose” deal with the death of their two lead actors? Nikki had filmed her last episode before leaving for the island. She was no longer a lead actor. Paolo was never an actor on the show, but was in fact hired to be the writer/director/producer/old guy’s cook. That was explained…
79.) Jacob uses his last breath to say “they’re coming,” but who are they? Absolutely nobody. Jacob, with his dying breath, decided to just fuck with the smoke monster and Ben’s minds a little.
82.) What is the infection? How did Claire get infected? How did Sayid get infected? Why did Sayid need to take a poison pill when all it took to uninfect Sayid was a simple argument from Desmond? As you are dying, there are two chances to be saved. One is through Jacob. His methods leave you just the same as you were before. He (possibly) saved Locke when he fell and cured cancer for people of the island (Juliet’s sister, Kate’s mom) and Rose on the island. The other method is the smoke monster. A little bit of what corrupted him gets into you, and it corrupts you. You can recover, but never completely, much like Ben was probably corrupted when he was taken to the Temple to be healed (probably in the same pool they used on Sayid, and probably corrupted the same way it was when Sayid was put in). That’s the reason the smoke monster can’t be let off the island. Imagine the entire world be completely amoral and…well, insane. Sayid was infected because of his wounds, and Claire was in a house that was blown up. She was probably pretty messed up herself, though they may not have had time to realize it.
84.) What’s the magic lighthouse about? It was built by the same people who built the donkey wheel, in order to help Jacob protect the island. The wheel to help hide it, the lighthouse to find a Jacob 2.0 (or C.J. Craig 3.0). As for it’s being magic, well, this is a show that really does embrace the idea that supernatural and magical items do exist.
96.) Why weren’t Michael, Walt, Lapidus, Eko, or any of the other characters at the church? Ok, this is the one that gets me. It’s pretty well spelled out that the people in the church were there because the island was the most important moment of their lives. Michael wasn’t there because the most important moment in his life was when his son was born (not on the island), Walt wasn’t there because he was on the island for just a few weeks/months and had the entire rest of his life for big important things to happen. Eko wasn’t there, because his important moment was his brother dying and his taking over the position in the church. Anna Lucia was there because she never really felt connected to anyone or anything on the island. Her most important moment was when she was raped, and when she killed the guy who did it. Penny was there because Desmond was the most important thing that happened to her, and everything important that happened to Desmond in his life (outside of meeting and losing Penny) was on the island. There are two questions for me. First, why is Boone there? He was there for a few weeks and died. He didn’t have any big revelations/redemption while he was there. If the most important thing in Boone’s life happened on the island, that’s kind of sad. But given his devotion to Shannon, I guess I can see it. The bigger question for me is, why weren’t any of the others (like Tom)there? I’m guessing that they created their own afterlife that looked remarkably like the Island.
All told, the writers didn’t write in any mystery that cannot be solved by the viewer (even under their own interpretations), so long as the viewer is willing to put forth at least a tiny bit of effort. They underestimated some of their viewers though. Given the number of people who have said that the island was purgatory/that the entire thing was a dream on Jack’s part/everyone died when the plane crashed, and completely ignored the fact that there was an entire conversation between Jack and Christian stating that the island was real, this is the land of the dead, we are all dead, we all died at different times, I think it’s clear the DVD release needs a special scene added where Christian uses power point diagrams and actually spells it out for the viewers.
I’ve been holding this in for a few days now. I’m sorry to hijack the board and post this rant, but good lord! Almost every question can be answered if you just think about it for a few minutes.
And to those who say that we’re just fans who realize the ending was terrible and are gritting our teeth while defending the show, I’m sorry, but you’re just wrong. The ending wasn’t perfect, but I thought it was fantastic. I’m gritting my teeth because of the people who insist that they were right all along that the island was (insert meaning/idea) and just ignore huge chunks of the answers that were given, while fixating on answers that didn’t really need to be given. These are the people who expect that everything in a story just has to be handed to them, and will, as mentioned earlier, go on to write dozens of books to explain them, taking away some of the best things about this show and the story it had to tell. People over-simplify things (“I’ve always said this show was about Jack, and this just proves it. The entire show was just a dream sequence as he lay dying. Just look, it ended the same way it began [Except it didn’t. It ended in exactly the opposite way. Beginning: Jack in suit and tie opening his eye to see a clear sky, a dog run up that runs away, and a cut on his left side on his back and discovering a wrecked plane. Ending: Jack in t-shirt and jeans, looking up at a clear sky with a wound on his right front side, having the dog come up and lay next to him while he sees a completely different plane make it safely over the island. Do you see the beautiful differences?]), or they over-complicate with conspiracy theories (“I’ve said all along that the island was purgatory, and because I figured it out, the writer’s changed it by making the side-world purgatory!”). That’s why I’m gritting my teeth!
Ok, thanks for the great post MGK. I’ve loved what you’ve had to say about the finale over the last few days. Highly entertaining. Sorry for the rant.
Okay, but can you answer #101: How is it that, thousands of miles from civilization on an island with extremely poor supplies and heavy demands of time, all of the female characters manage to keep their legs and armpits completely smooth-shaved? Including, Rousseau, who was both (1) Crazy and (2) French?
Regarding the whole ‘unanswered mysteries thing’ I honestly think that had the last three seasons been a bit longer, like 3 to 4 episodes or so, they probably would have had enough time to actually give satisfactory answers to most of them.
Personally, the last three seasons kind of felt like they ended abruptly to me. With a few more episodes, they could have each had a bit of a deeper seasonal arc, and have provided more insight, if not outright answers.
Also, there’s a serious question missing from that list: What happens to people that die in the Sideways world before remembering their lives, like Mikhail or Rousseau’s husband?
I agree that a few more episodes each season would have been lovely. Just because I would have liked to watch them, not because I think they would answer more questions.
As for what happens to people who die in the flash-sideways world before realising what it is, that is a good question. But what if that can’t happen? We saw Mikhail and Keemy, but what if they were just constructs made to resemble threats the main characters were familiar with? The characters themselves may have gone to a different afterworld. Mikhail to whatever place all of the others we didn’t see went to (Which could mean Dr. Ethan and Dogun were also just constructs of familiar people filling obvious rolls while the actual characters were in another place entirely), and Keemy and Rousseau’s husband are in the place meant for them. After all, while the island and Ben were important to Rousseau and Alex, they wouldn’t have been to Rousseau’s husband.
I hardly think Twin Peaks counts as a cult show with an unsatisfying ending int he same sense – it’s like grouping Firefly with Buffy in terms of endings – one got axed and one played to it’s end in a way writers intended.
Also, Sun going to the present while the others went to the past is because unlike Kate at the time, she hadn’t given up being a mother – all the candidates jumped back to 1970s ville (along with the rest of the island)
Also I might have to call bs on that “writer” blog piece – smokey existed before Jacob killed his brother – who was whispering sweet nothings in said brother’s ear otherwise?
I’m pretty sure the outrigger shootout occurred while the Ajira plane was on the island. The producers said they knew who was on the other side, but it would basically take an episode of moving people around just to make it happen. I tend to assume someone who wanted to shoot Clair was shooting at Juliet. It makes just as much sense to blame Whidmore’s goons or Illana’s coworkers.
Regarding #2, when Locke first saw the smoke monster, his expression was one of amazement and wonder, not of fear.
Knowing the Man in Black appeared to Alpert as his dead wife, I guess one can assume the smoke monster took on a more pleasant aspect the first time he saw Locke, perhaps trying to twist Locke to his side the way he tried with Alpert?
Re; the BSG comment from way above, I think somewhere around the time that multiple characters wound up having exactly the same vision, in which they interacted with each other, and were able to verify in waking life that they were sharing those visions, then if you though the series wasn’t working in a supernatural universe you weren’t watching the show the producers were writing. I get why people didn’t like the way BSG concluded, but I don’t get how people watching from the beginning could have missed the heavy weight towards the existence of Something else. The series didn’t explain the apparently supernatural elements away, Baltar did, and eventually he gave up trying.
An extension of Jack’s explanation of #56 … Ben demands that they all go back because Eloise said it had to be, but Eloise knows that they all have to go back because she met them in the past … she met Kate and Jack right after she shot Daniel, and Sayid in the jungle a bit later when he killed her bodyguard. Not sure if she heard about the others or not, but she’d have known that they were on the plane that took them back in time, so would have insisted that they get on the Ajira flight.
“All told, the writers didn’t write in any mystery that cannot be solved by the viewer (even under their own interpretations), so long as the viewer is willing to put forth at least a tiny bit of effort. They underestimated some of their viewers though.”
The evidence that the logic gaps and loose ends are the fault of the viewers rather than the writers is non-existent.
As someone who’s spent much of his life as a comics geek coming up with retcon explanations for inconsistencies and plot holes, I’ve never succumbed to the idea that since I can think of an explanation, the inconsistency or plot hole didn’t exist.
I agree that some consideration of fantasy genre “givens” is needed. I’m a lifelong fantasy reader and I’m just bemused when some people insist on having “answers.” Sometimes things just are.
Not to say that this kind of explanation means plotholes *don’t exist* or that it works for every question. A balance IS called for; there’s a difference between suspension of belief and plain sloppy writing. But a fair number of the questions MGK covers are pretty silly and nitpicky.
I read as many as I could stand (got to about #55).
I remember when I gave up LOST in the first season. It was after Ethan came back (and died) and Locke had a kidney stolen by his dad in a flashback and then he discovered the shaft and week after week he just looked at it while everyone wondered if Walt and the pregnant woman’s baby were psychic and I came to the conclusion that it simply didn’t matter and that no answer would be worth all the build up. Yes, they are psychic. No, they are not psychic. Yes and no and it’s all a dream factory. Nothing was interesting me in the slightest and none of the characters drew enough emotional investment for me to continue. I liked Hurley, but that was it. And I hated, hated, hated, Jack, Sawyer, and Kate, and if you hate the three main characters of a show, I suppose it doesn’t matter if it’s Shakespeare: you’re not going to have a good time. (But then, I suppose Shakespeare wouldn’t write characters that people would hate.)
As my friends and the internet continued to discuss LOST I’d pick up tidbits here and there, but I never watched an episode (except the one with Nathan Fillion) again because I just could tell that it was a bad mystery, tolerable only if you liked the characters (which a lot of people did, but I didn’t; even Locke got annoying for me after his second flashback).
Now that LOST is over, every site and forum I go to is mentioning it, and here’s this list of all the plot points that weren’t/were resolved and I’m reading the questions and the answers and I have yet to find one plot point that is even remotely interesting.
The explanations I read seem to fall into one of these categories: “the island is weird”, “a stroke of luck”, and, “a wizard did it”.
LOST spent every episode talking about how terribly important everything in it was and then it either handwaves them away, ignores them, or deus ex machina’s its way out if it with psychic-spirtualistic oddities.
LOST and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA were very similar, really. Both had a refugee/survivalist bent that “arced” and continued over the seasons that was rather interesting, and both decided to fill that show with nonsense. 10 years ago, sci-fi did it with technobabble, now it is religibabble where they use spiritualism as magic to have anything happen and ‘tie things together’ even though they have no meaning. Shows about their own made-up mythology. Geordi using the phase-inducers to fix the dilithium core is exactly the same as having someone use some vague cryptic quasi-religious symbol that could mean anything in the first few episodes as “foreshadowing” and then have those things happening as an excuse for Lady Destiny to have any damn thing she wants happen. (Seriously; compare the foreshadowing and mystery-build-up in HEROES, LOST, and BSG to DAMAGES or BABYLON 5. They don’t even compare.)
But they’re not the first; THE X-FILES did it too (and while it made sense, it was never satisfactory). And while BSG really pissed me off, I stuck with it longer simply because I liked the characters (well, some of them…). If you like the characters you’ll stick with anything. Look at CSI.
I suppose all this LOST talk wouldn’t aggravate me so much if it hadn’t been on the air for 6 years while FIREFLY, MY NAME IS EARL, and DEADWOOD got cancelled and every “Top 10 TV Shows of the 2000s” list forgot that THE WIRE existed.
Apparently Eko was cool, though.
“One last chance to set things right.” Thanks for this list, MGK. I’m not ready to let go and move on yet.
#13. This was actually explained in-canon: on the Season 5 DVD set is included the ABC-produced “Mysteries of the Universe” fake Eighties TV show that, among other things, explicitly says that Eloise is still paying for the food drops.
#14. 1. Radzinsky built the Swan. 2. Radzinsky’s a paranoid bastard. 3. Radzinsky went mad and eventually blew his brains out trapped inside the Swan. Making multiple failsafes and hidden maps with crazy theories is entirely in-character.
45.) I heard a pretty plausible theory somewhere that “R” stands for “Regina”.
Yeah, I know, the sickness. But maybe…
Where’d it go… ah, here!
http://www.movieline.com/2010/05/rebutting-losts-questions.php
Movieline did the same thing, answering the questions. They took a few more serious approaches, but I think overlapping yours and theirs makes for a good combination of answers.
You’re right – there’s some questions that are actually resolved that people seemed to have missed, or not been able to think through at all. There are also some legitimate unanswered questions (my real one: Why did the Others react to the Losties the way that they did?) but also a number that were answered but some viewers seemed to miss it.
And, yeah, the Jin/Sun thing is I think easily answered by the candidate being Jin. The reason Kate went with them into the past? Because by coming back to the island to get Claire back to be Aaron’s real mother showed she was willing to give up her motherhood role for something more important.
And I love your explanation for Eko’s death that goes beyond the actor’s leaving, because they made a point of the character being pushed towards accepting the island as special, which makes his outright rejection of that and any attempts to manipulate him a perfect reason for the Monster to kill him.
Questions 1-96: God works in mysterious ways.
“2.) What did Locke see when he saw the smoke monster? A smoke monster isn’t scary enough on its own now?”
That’s not the point. After seeing Smokey, Locke said that he looked into “the heart of the island, and it was beautiful.”
My best guess is that it took the form of Helen. But like much of the show, the writers left us to guess and make assumptions because they didn’t bother trying to write it in a way that was clear.
Still, I admire your hard work. You put a lot of thought into this. Good job!
My answer to question 70 is that Sun was not a candidate, everyone who ended up in the 70s was a candidate, yes, even Vincent (who obviously went on to run the island after Hurley, and the most important time of his life was then he was running the show, which is why he wasn’t in the church).
It also answers the question of which Kwon was a candidate, for people interested in that.
/my theories.
Your answers are all good, but honestly, I don’t really care what you think the answers are. In fact, I don’t really care what I think the answers are. I care about the answers that the writers should have provided (not to say that all of these questions were equally important). All of these things, especially in the early seasons, were brought up as important things in the show. And they are in fact why I liked watching the show, the mysteries of the island, the dharma initiative, the others, Walt, etc.. The ending provided by the writers basically tells us that none of that stuff really mattered, in fact none of the characters even mattered, because it was just one cycle in the ongoing cycle of people protecting or exploiting the island. What did Jack’s sacrifice really mean, he stopped something BAD from happening. But we never really know what, just ominous warnings of everyone we love being gone. After Jack put the cork in and died, Hurley and Ben went on to protect the island from the next set of castaways (maybe even the Harlem Globetrotters!). And then they died, and someone else took over Without a deeper explanation of what it all meant, what was the point of their lives, of their sacrifice?
davekan, I think the real question you’re asking is “What was the point of making a tv show about it?”
I am so tired of these types of flippant posts. If you’re just going to answer all the questions with “that’s just the way it is” then why bother writing anything at all? At least be a little helpful. For example: why does the smoke monster make mechanical sounds? Since we heard the monster a whole lot before we ever got to see it, one could assume that the producers avoided revealing its true nature in order to extend the mystery. So one might assume that the sounds it makes were a jumble of organic and inorganic so as to keep the viewer confused as to what it really was and amplify the idea that this was something no one had ever seen before. Furthermore, it’s also very possible that the producers/writers didn’t even know what the monster was going to be until they finally decided to show it, so they made it sound as ambiguous as possible. Or, maybe it was all just “island magic!” Yeah, that’s it.