First Post on The End

You will likely see a number of posts over the next couple weeks from Carol, Brian, and me. There's just no putting this finale into one post. And the three of us have very differing opinions! So, we thought it be interesting to have a running stream of our takes over a period of time. I'm kicking things off...

So many people seem to be confused about what happened on LOST. I don't understand why. I don't think there was any confusion about what happened. The Island timeline was real. They all lived and died as they did - "whatever happened, happened." Much, much later, possibly at the end of time, when they all had died, they reconnected in an afterlife - the Sideways timeline. We saw how most of them died - the people who died on the island (e.g. Jack, Locke, Sayid, Charlie, Libby, Kwons, etc). They had to wait for the death of the rest to reconnect in the Sideways timeline. There are others that we don't know how they eventually die (e.g. Kate, Sawyer, Claire, Miles, Lupidus, Alpert, Hurley, and Ben), but they presumable live out their lives and die at some later time. So profoundly sad... everyone who lived to make it off the island (so few!) had to live out their lives without their loved ones. And Ji Yeon without her parents. I guess Rose, Bernard, and Ben were the only winners in life. Rose and Bernard got to live our their lives together on the island. Ben got to have his island (as #2, but still).

The Island was NOT purgatory... they were NOT dead the whole time. The producer debunked that theory years ago. And there's nothing in the final episode that even suggests they were dead the whole time. They were just dead in the Sideways timeline, which was their afterlife.

Christian and Jack tell us this is what happened. Jack realized "I died too" after he finally sees all of his Island memories --- which would include his death in the bamboo forest. Then, Christian tells him "everything that has ever happened to you is real." He goes on to explain that "everyone dies sometime, kiddo. Some of them before you [e.g. Locke and Sayid], some long after you [e.g. Hugo, Kate, and Sawyer]." He then explains that the Sideways timeline is a timeless place ("there is no now here") that our characters made together so that they could find one another after their deaths. Christian confirms that they WERE alive on the Island when he says "the most important part of your *life* was the time that you spent with these people."

One thing that intially really confused me in finding out that the Sideways timeline was a much-later afterlife: hadn't Juliet told us that the nuke worked (as interpreted by Miles in hearing her dying thoughts)? Her dying thought was "it worked," which lead me (and many others) to believe that sideways world was a parallel universe in which our heros had succeeded in resetting future events. But, no... they played a joke on us! When she said "it worked," she wasn't talking about the nuke. She was just talking about unplugging the stupid candy machine. I can't believe I was so fully duped by an off-handed remark about a vending machine!

Hugo "ruled" on the island for a long time, I'm guessing. Our clue to that is Ben and Hugo's brief conversation outside the church: H: "You were a good number 2." B: "You were a great number 1, Hugo." You sensed a relationship there, and that they worked together on the Island a long time. Maybe thousands of years, like Jacob. What I am left most confused about is the image of the sunk island that we were shown at the beginning of this season. Does the sunk island mean someone finally defeated the Protector of the Island (Hugo), put out the light, and destroyed the island? I'm thinking yes. Although it could be hundreds, thousands, or millions of years after our story. Perhaps it was when this finally happened, and the last Protector, Hugo, was defeated and killed, and the Island light put out, that the world ended and they joined each other in the Sideways timeline.

I'm still left with a lot of questions about outstanding mysteries throughout the course of the show. But, overall, I'm satisfied with the ending. But feeling very, very sad that what happened happened and that the Sideways timeline was not a way to redeem and bring back to life our beloved characters. I am so sad that they were only able to reconvene in death.