It also answers the question of which Kwon was a candidate, for people interested in that.

/my theories.

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!

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.

Yeah, I know, the sickness. But maybe…

#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.

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.

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.

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.