What was lost spoiler

For years, the creators stayed silent—refusing to over-explain the ending. Eventually they caved and confirmed that : 1 no, not everyone was dead the whole time, 2 yes, that was a "heaven-esque" setting in the church where all the characters met, and 3 the purpose was to tell a story about people lost and searching for answers. There were official plans for a volcano hell scene. There were also unfounded theories that everyone was dead. But the big rub? Lost left a lot of viewers dumbfounded.

That finale, man. That finale busted a fandom wide open, pitting the logical against the emotional. As more answers have been revealed from showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, opinions have shifted a bit over the years. Still, I anticipated on this rewatch that I might fall into that pessimist camp. But the thing is, the finale remains nearly perfect to me.

I think a big part of that is because I always invested in the series because it was about flawed people who using my best Barbra Streisand voice need people. And if that's not how you watched it, sure, I can see the point.

The problem, in that respect, is that Lost kept stepping in piles of shit it on its way to the ending: Eloise Hawking, and Katey Sagal's random episode, and being stuck in the '70s. But Lost 's finale was a beautifully simplistic finish to an often convoluted series.

It asked viewers to imagine that nothing matters but people, and that, in its own way, is unimaginably perfect. To accurately assess that finale, you kind of have to go back to the beginning of Season Five. At this point, the Oceanic Six Sun, Kate, Jack, Hurley, Sayid, and Baby Aaron have escaped the island and are attempting to lead normal lives while being haunted by the fact that they've abandoned the rest of the castaways on the island, which has been thrown into a time loop.

Locke manages to escape the island through death, reappearing before the Oceanic Six and begging them to return. Throughout the series, one of Lost 's most enduring mysteries is the nature of the smoke monster, a seemingly sentient column of black smoke that occasionally attacks and even kills people on the island. And it turns out that the smoke monster is another form of the Man in Black, Jacob's immortal twin brother.

So how did that come about? Well, after killing their mother, the Man in Black is transformed when Jacob throws him into the Heart of the Island. For the next years, Jacob and the Man in Black oppose one another, as the Man in Black searches for a way around the supernatural law that keeps him from killing Jacob.

As the smoke monster, he can't be killed, but he also can't leave. Over the years, he assumes his smoke monster form in order to kill the candidates Jacob brings to the island, hoping that if Jacob dies and leaves no successor, the Man in Black can finally leave. Ultimately, though, the Man in Black's immortality is linked to the Heart of the Island, so when Desmond temporarily shuts it down in the finale, he's made mortal and killed by Kate and Jack, ending the smoke monster forever.

After Jack is appointed as Jacob's successor as protector of the island, he promptly gets into a knife fight with the Man in Black, where he's mortally wounded. Realizing he's dying, Jack volunteers to go replace the cork at the center of the island, and tells Hurley that he needs to take over as protector. Hurley agrees , and drinks from the water that's come from the Heart of the Island, making his new role official.

After Jack leaves to restore the Heart, Ben also suggests to Hurley that he doesn't have to "protect" the island in the same way that Jacob did, and that maybe Hurley will find a better way. Hurley considers this, then asks Ben if he'll consider staying on as his second-in-command, to which Ben responds that he'd be honored.

While Jacob lived for years, Hurley doesn't have the dark counterpart in the Man in Black that made it so hard for Jacob to find a replacement protector. So although Hurley likely lives for many years following the finale, it's very possible that retirement will prove much easier for him than it did for Jacob. The DHARMA Department of Heuristics and Research on Material Applications Initiative first came to the island in the s, with the objective of studying the unique properties of the island and harnessing them in the name of scientific advancement.

While DHARMA conducted research across all fields including studies involving polar bears , attempting to uncover the island's secrets, they never fully understood what they were dealing with when it came to the supernatural Heart of the Island.

However, that didn't stop them from trying, and they constructed stations all over the island in an attempt to make sense of the bizarre phenomena they were witnessing. At the end of "The End," after regaining their memories of their time together on the island, the main characters make their way to a church, where they see the symbols of a number of different faiths. Christian Shephard then explains to Jack that the flash-sideways was constructed by and for the Oceanic survivors, to help them find one another, let go of the baggage of their lives, and move on together.

And according to Christian, once they were all ready to do so, they each showed up at the church, one by one. When Jack first arrives at the church, he sees his father's coffin, and seems to think he's there for Christian's funeral.

But the coffin is empty, and the funeral that he'd expected is replaced by a reunion with his loved ones and hope for a new future together. The church seems to symbolize that all of the Lost characters have said their goodbyes to their past lives, and they're finally ready to be at peace with one another. When Christian opens the doors at the end of the episode and light floods the church, it's safe to assume that signifies "moving on," whatever that means. Even though Ben's presence in the flash-sideways seems to indicate that the Oceanic survivors were indeed the most significant people in his life, he elects not to enter the church with them.

Before Hurley returns to the church, he tells Ben that he was a "real good number two," and Ben replies that Hurley was a "great number one," which seems to indicate that Ben and Hurley worked together on the island for a long time after the end of the series, never turning against each other like Jacob and the Man in Black.

That Ben was drawn to the church with the rest of them may be an indication that, cosmically at least, his service to the island was enough to redeem him for the horrible things he'd done in life, and that he could move on with the others.

However, Ben opting not to enter the church could mean that he isn't ready to move on yet. Perhaps Ben still has more people to find in the afterlife before he can let go, or maybe, despite having been forgiven by some of the people he wronged, he still has to come to terms with what he did.

Another possibility is that he just can't bring himself to move on and leave his adopted daughter, Alex Tania Raymonde , behind. It's never clarified what happens to Ben after he decides to stay outside, but we can only hope that, eventually, he finds peace. While Christian Shephard explains to Jack that the church exists to help all of the Oceanic survivors "move on" with the people who'd been most significant to them in their lives, that doesn't explain what Christian himself is doing there, along with infants Aaron and Ji Yeon.

None of them lived on the island or at least, not for long , so it couldn't possibly have been the most important time in any of their lives. Surely Christian's "most significant" period would've occurred well before his death, while Aaron's and Ji Yeon's would've likely been once they were adults.

The simplest explanation for their presence is that, like all of the other people in the flash-sideways who weren't survivors of the crash, those weren't the real Christian, Aaron, and Ji Yeon. They were merely manifestations of something the Oceanic survivors needed in order to move on. While the flash-sideways was created exclusively for the survivors of Oceanic , perhaps Christian, along with the adult versions of Aaron and Ji Yeon, are out there in their own versions of the afterlife, searching for their own most significant people before they can move on for themselves.

And sure, their presence raises some interesting questions, but it doesn't take away from Lost 's powerful ending. Lost had no shortage of ongoing mysteries that arose throughout its run, perhaps none greater than the enigmatic numbers that seem to follow the characters around like a curse.

Lost never definitively addressed the nature of the Numbers, but implied that, like so many other things on Lost , the explanation behind the ascending string of figures was more mystical than scientific. Jacob assigned a number to each of the candidates he drew to the island, and the final six candidates each synced up perfectly with one of the numbers: Locke was 4, Hurley was 8, Sawyer was 15, Sayid was 16, Jack was 23, and 42 referred to either Sun or Jin Kwon.

Before arriving on the island, Hurley noticed the pattern recurring in his life and associated it with bad luck, while the other candidates remained oblivious to the numbers until well after they were already on the island. It's worth noting that Hurley ultimately became the candidate chosen to become the new guardian of the island, suggesting that the numbers may have been tied into the idea of fate and inevitability — a prominent theme on Lost. Without the fateful crash of Oceanic flight in the pilot episode, there would've been no Lost at all.

Like most of the other strange occurrences on the show, it turns out that the circumstances leading to the crash were more complex than it initially appeared.

For a long time, it seemed likely that Oceanic merely suffered some sort of tragic yet mundane technical malfunction. But as the series went on, it became clear that the plane crash was yet another circumstance that had been cosmically engineered by Jacob to serve his own millennia-long agenda. But likely the most significant single piece of the equation was the arrival on the island of Desmond Hume, and the subsequent three years he spent pushing — and becoming increasingly disillusioned about — a button.

Eventually, Desmond accidentally killed his companion in the Swan station and allowed the timer to run down to zero, resulting in a system failure. Desmond was able to fix it, but not before the system unleashed an immense electromagnetic charge, which in turn caused Oceanic to break apart while passing over the island.

So in a way, Desmond caused the crash of Flight , but considering that Jacob was the one who brought Desmond to the island, arranged the circumstances that required him to push the button, and carefully selected the passengers on the flight, the electromagnetic surge and the subsequent plane crash were all part of his plan.

Lost was the very definition of an ensemble show, with a large cast of characters who each received their own well-developed arc and fleshed-out backstory. However, even though the series had dozens of "main" characters throughout its run, most viewers would probably agree that if you had to pick a single main character for the show, it was Jack Shephard.

The first episode opened on a shot of Jack's eye opening, and the series ended on a similar shot of his eyes closing, bookending the series on Jack's point of view. And all throughout Lost , Jack served as a leader and central figure for the survivors of Oceanic Ultimately, of course, all of the Oceanic survivors wound up reconnecting in the afterlife in the final episode of Lost, including Jack.

However, the afterlife narrative wound up confusing many viewers due to the show presenting it as an alternate reality for the entire last season. So it's understandable to be uncertain about what really happened to Jack and Lost' s other central characters by the end of the series. Jack may have died in the final episode, bleeding to death of stab wounds inflicted by the Man in Black, but he made some hugely significant actions in his final hours.

He briefly agreed to take over from Jacob as the protector of the Island, after which he immediately fought the Man in Black to the death. Here, I sum up what I think are the 5 worst mistakes the writers and producers have ever made.

Not having Rose and Bernard promoted to series regulars Rose and Bernard were a great couple and interesting characters, but their appearances were very random. One day they would all be involved in the action and the next day they were gone for months.

I know that was mostly due to Caldwell and Anderson's unavailability and the writers didn't want them as regulars because it would mean some other characters were shuffled to the background. While that certainly would have been true, I would have liked to take the chance and see how it played out. Also, while we did get an episode centered on the two, it would have been nice to see them before they met one another. Would it have added much to their characters? Probably not, but it might have made for some more shocking twists and pre-island character crossovers.

Rose and Bernard's separate backstories would certainly have been much more interesting than seeing how Jack got his tattoos! The Sayid and Shannon romance Putting together and an Iraqi communications officer read: torturer and a spoiled girl never really works out. Sayid and Shannon could not be further apart from one another as their lives were very different. On the island, he was very useful but Shannon not so much.

Sayid might have really loved her, but I'm still not sure about Shannon. Maybe she was just having some fun with Sayid before ultimately jumping to another guy. I also still have the idea that Sayid is twice Shannon's age, but that age difference is probably not as big as I think it is. Seeing the two together in the afterlife was also wrong in my opinion, as Sayid should have been with Nadia.

Juliet and Eko. But unlike others, Libby's death was a deliberate decision made by the writers and not the actor or actress.

Everything about this death is so wrong. Killing off Ana Lucia was great, but apparently the writers noticed how bad that character was received. So they decide to add Libby for, you know, some extra shock value.

Why Libby? I liked her very much and would have loved to get her complete backstory in a flashback episode. The fact that we got bits and pieces later, doesn't make up for that. Introducing Nikki and Paulo Theoretically, I'm sure it sounded like a good idea. The story focussed on only 15 or so of the survivors of Oceanic , so why not introduce some new characters that were also on the plane?

It sounds good, but somewhere along the lines something went wrong. Was it bad writing? Bad casting? Maybe a bit of both, but the primary objective was the lack of a storyline. We weren't given any reason to care about Nikki and Paulo. They had a couple of scenes here and there but didn't add much to the story. Then they got an entire episode built around them, and the writers force us to believe they have already explored the island on their own. Their deaths were gruesome, but it's not like I cried for "Nina and Pablo" because, like Sawyer, I didn't really know them.

I don't think so and certainly not to LOST. It dragged down their characters, only Juliet was mostly spared. Especially Kate suffered, as she was put down as a woman who apparently couldn't choose between the two men. It was one of my issues with season 3, and sadly it continued through seasons 4 and 5. Love triangles are bad enough already in real life, so there's no need for them in TV series.

Recently gotten into LOST which he really loves. Recent Reviews by Daniel All Reviews. You can find specific show content by clicking the menu system at the top of the screen. We scour the Internet for spoilers as well as posting our own exclusive spoilers Scripts, Casting Calls, Set Photos etc as well as recaps and other fun articles and polls. We hope you enjoy your stay. Need Help? Misc Shows. Feature List Below is a full list of all the features, special articles and other key links.

Need some help? If you require any help with SpoilerTV, please don't hesitate to contact us but please check the links below to see if they will help you first. Looking for TV Ratings? Below you will find some key links to our Ratings Articles. Amazon Shows. HBO Max Shows. Netflix Shows.

What's HOT! Photo Gallery. Pilot Watch. Ratings News. Premiere Calendar. Episode Database. Cancellation Table. Continuing the trend of prior seasons, the last season of "Lost" came up with the idea of "flash-sideways" peeks at what initially appeared to be an alternate universe where the bomb's detonation actually had accomplished the job and Oceanic Flight never crashed. The present-day events on the island had never been more confused or shockingly boring as they were here, leading the remaining cast on an oftentimes wheel-spinning journey that ultimately led to Jack and John Locke who died but became reanimated by the island's original and malevolent deity.

Again, it's a lot! As much as fans scoffed at this underwhelming reveal as to what purpose the show's main setting served all along, the final season drives home the fact that these characters were never more vibrant, alive, and truly themselves until they met each other after the crash. Remember the depths that Jack, Kate, Sayid, and others sink to after they actually escaped the island and left the others stranded there in season 5?

That speaks to just how integral a part they played in each other's lives, with audiences uncovering layer upon layer as we got to know each character at the same time that they got to know each other. The final reveal that the flash-sideways interludes were actually a glimpse into the shared afterlife that the survivors created for each other well after their deaths — some in previous episodes, some long after the events of the finale — may have been too much to throw at audiences at the time.

It was easy to mistake the admittedly vague explanation of how the action on the island took place before the events of the seemingly alternate universe, which is how the "They were dead the whole time!