I noticed Richard was not in the church, in fact I don't recall seeing him in the flash sideways at all. So... does he ever die? They did drop one line in there, with the gray hair, that Richard could age again. I think it would have been more interesting if they left Richard's aging post-show a mystery.

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
My real problem is all the stuff that was made out to be important (sometimes for whole seasons), and then dropped. An incomplete list:

It would seem that you're not comfortable with red herrings and the like.

Some of the questions you asked were answered in the lead up recap show.

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
* The numbers--what is their significance? And what does it have to do with pressing the button?

The numbers represented each of the final candidates. The hatch was built on top of a pocket of electromagnetic radiation emanating from the island. This was explained in one of the later seasons and paved the way for the "bomb" episode that I described as "delicious" in my initial post.

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
* On that note, if pressing the button actually was averting disaster, why didn't someone build a freaking machine to push it? Wouldn't that be a little more reliable than a crazy guy under quarantine?

1970's tech! The show demonstrated what would happen when the button wasn't pushed and the result paved the way towards reaching the sideways universe.

Quote:
* What was the Dharma initiative there for, and how did they find the island without crashing and dying?

The 1970's utopianism of the Dharma Initiative was always obvious. The later seasons explained most of it.

Quote:
* How did Ethan have superhuman strength and speed if he was just another dude from the Dharma leftovers?

He might have been the smoke monster. His speed might have been an illusion because he was more familiar with the island than the Oceanic 815 people were.

Quote:
* Why did everyone decide to come back to the island after they got out the first time?

They all had their reasons. They were covered in the later seasons.

Quote:
* What was up with the human monkey cages back in season... 3?

Those were bear cages and they were explained, along with the presence of polar bears on the island, in the later seasons.

Quote:
* Why did pregnant women always lose their babies on the island?

That was never fully explained. It might have something to do with Jacob's back story. It might have something to do with the notion that the island was the gateway to hell. It might have something to do with the electromagnetic properties of the island. It might be due to a Dharma science experiment gone wrong.

Quote:
* Why was Jacob so supernaturally elusive for so long, then just start hanging out with people after 2000 years?

Maybe that was Jacob's way of testing the candidates. Maybe that was due to interference from the smoke monster.

It would seem that you stopped watching after the third season.

Lost fans in Australia are angry that they have to wait until Wednesday to watch the finale.

'Lost' finale broadcast live in eight countries, but Australians outraged

Spoilers Ahead...

Quote: Original post by Rattrap

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
They sort of just copped out with the "everyone was just dead" device, but really what they were saying all of season 6 was "they're all going to die, and get this bizarre afterlife". The end of the actual island story arc is... wait for it... Everyone dies while fighting over the island.

But they weren't just all dead. They all just ended up together after they died, whenever that was. That is why Christian told Jack, some died before you and some died after you. The "Purgatory" they ended up in existed outside of time.

This is where I disagree with most people. I personally am in the group that the island was purgatory all along, and that they all died in the original plane crash. The people who died before were the others, Desmond, etc. The people who died after were the new group, or other additions to the island. It's even hinted about that they're all dead from Richard, Locke's father, etc. (Locke's father who was in an accident, and then just suddenly appeared on the island...).

Why did the pregnant women always lose their babies? Well, if it's purgatory, it makes perfect sense. Everyone on the island had issues with their previous life. But the unborn don't.

And as for the first escape, they never really did escape. It just seemed like they got off the island. But it's also why they were drawn back. The sideways universe was just another branch of purgatory.

Viewing it this way, a lot of Lost makes much more sense than trying to believe that they survived a plane crash onto an island which can change locations, and has a sister island which suddenly appears a few months later out of the blue after they had explored the island, and that time travel, immortality, turning into smoke (but can't kill certain people), etc. is possible.

But I have to say I was disappointed with the ending. During the first few seasons when other people had come up with this hypothesis, we heard from the creator and writers about how it wasn't purgatory, how there would be a scientific explanation for everything, etc., and in the end they were like "Well, it's too complicated for us to figure out how to come up with a rational ending, so let's just surprise everyone with the they're all dead and in purgatory ending. No one ever thought of that!"

Quote: Original post by ukdeveloper
I've only ever seen one episode of Lost and that was back in 2006, but judging by some comments made it appears that the show has got too convoluted and has been running too long...

Sortof, but even so, it's still much better than many other TV shows. Even though I didn't like the ending, the rest of the show is absolutely worth watching.

Watch all the seasons in order, with someone who hasn't seen it before, and enjoy hours of conversation and debate about what's going on. 90% of the fun of the show, is not knowing what's going on, and trying to come up with reasonable theories with a friend.

If you have Netflix, the first 5 seasons are instant-play (that's what I did), and by the time you get up to it, the 6th season probably will be instant-play as well.

Quote: ...to the extent that it's got totally out of hand and they had to come up with a truly dreadful ending to try and kludge as much of it together as they could.

They did wrap up alot of it, and did a good job with it - it's the things they didn't wrap up at all, or wrapped up poorly, that we're griping about. [smile]
Read the thread carefully - as much as we're complaining, not one person said they hated the show, even those complaining about the ending said they loved the show as a whole.

Quote: Original post by programmermattc
I think you are all avoiding the real question on everybody's mind...

Why wasn't Vincent in the church?

[grin]

Quote: I haven't seen it yet, but I've heard the polar bears were made captive by the initiative, that might explain the big cages. Although one of the questions that many brought up then was, were the polar bears brought there or were they natively on the island?

Yeah, the initiative definitely was doing physcological experiments with the polar bears. In the episode where Saywer and Kate were in the cages, Saywer got the little fish biscuit thing, and one of the 'others' walked by and said something like, "Good job... it only took the bears 15 minutes."

I've settled on the opinion that the bears were imported. I doubt they could've fit on the Dharma submarine though, so I guess that they were brought in on a frieghter or something, along with all the building supplies used to build all the stations, and all the vehicles like the 4+ vans and the 2 jeeps they have.

Quote: Original post by programmermattc
@Servant of the Lord, I think I heard from someone that the actor that played Echo wanted like tons of money for appearing so it wasn't worth the 2-3 minutes he would be seen in the background with maybe 1 or 2 main screen shots.

Ah, that'd explain it. That, and Michael apparently can't leave the island, being a 'lost soul' (but Boone can? Oh well). A pity, I liked Mr. Echo.

Quote: Original post by LessBread

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
* The numbers--what is their significance? And what does it have to do with pressing the button?

The numbers represented each of the final candidates. The hatch was built on top of a pocket of electromagnetic radiation emanating from the island. This was explained in one of the later seasons and paved the way for the "bomb" episode that I described as "delicious" in my initial post.

Naw, the numbers only represented the final candidates because "Jacob has a thing for numbers" (Man in black's explanation).
All the candidates, including the crossed out ones, had those numbers, repeated over and over. It never really explained the numbers, or the person who originally radioed the numbers (which made their way to Hurley, and which brought Danielle Rousseau's team to the island). My lame explanation is, the Man in Black probably used the Dharma's radio tower to lure people to the island, to get them to kill Jacob, since he wasn't able to do it himself.

But according to Wikipedia, the significance of the numbers was partly explained outside of the series.

Quote:

Quote:
* What was the Dharma initiative there for, and how did they find the island without crashing and dying?

The 1970's utopianism of the Dharma Initiative was always obvious. The later seasons explained most of it.

Also, the Dharma Initiative was funded by Daniel Whitmore and Eloise Hawking (Faraday's mother), who were on the Island back in the 1950s with The Others, but were exiled from the island (Whitmore was at least), just as Ben is later exiled. They wanted to get back, and since they knew of the island's existance, they were able to use scientific methods to calculate where the island was going to appear at next, and what bearing to use to aproach it. That's how the frieghter with the military troops got near the island, and how they were able to ferry people back and forth using a helicopter (with a 30 minute delay when crossing the event horizon of the island due to time distortions).

The machinery used for measuring where the island will be, was in Los Angelos, and is the only non-island station the Dharma people built, at least that the show mentions. The station is called the "Lamppost Station", an obvious reference to the Chronicles of Narnia.

(Speaking of which, I loved the fact that they had charactors reading "A wrinkle in time" and "Watership Down")

Quote:

Quote:
* How did Ethan have superhuman strength and speed if he was just another dude from the Dharma leftovers?

He might have been the smoke monster. His speed might have been an illusion because he was more familiar with the island than the Oceanic 815 people were.

He wasn't the smoke monster, Juliet explained why Ethan kidnapped Claire. He just knew the island extremely well, and as for his strength/speed, Jack got in at least one good hit, even being a doctor who doesn't get out much. Charlie was in withdrawel at the time, and Claire was pregnant. All he had to do, was keep a knife to Claire's through and Charlie would've stayed in line. Getting Claire to keep moving, while pregnant and potentially having birth pangs, was the only real difficulty.

I watched all seasons, and to me the whole last season seemed rushed together and as if they had given up trying to actually put all pieces together and give us a coherent, logical end result, because they realized they messed up too much / things were too ambitious for the time they still had.

So I'm not really satisfied, but since I saw it coming, I'm personally not that much disappointed. Many people on the net expressed how they felt cheated, after all these years, I can see why.

Overall it was a more creative show than many others, though. And since it's the only TV show I watched for the last couple years (my TV is unplugged for years and I downloaded this as an exception ^^ ), they must have done *something* right, for a while at least, heh.

There wan an interesting article on CNN the other day about some answers to the questions people were having after the finale.

http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/25/geek-out-five-unanswered-lost-finale-questions/

Obviously some of it is opinionated perception by the writer but it pretty much follows the ideas that one stream of people also have. Of course there are some crazy groups out there that think all of it was death or something :p

[Edited by - programmermattc on May 28, 2010 8:42:35 AM]

Quote: Original post by Nytegard
This is where I disagree with most people. I personally am in the group that the island was purgatory all along, and that they all died in the original plane crash. The people who died before were the others, Desmond, etc. The people who died after were the new group, or other additions to the island. It's even hinted about that they're all dead from Richard, Locke's father, etc. (Locke's father who was in an accident, and then just suddenly appeared on the island...).

Actually due to the scenes at the end of the episode led many to believe this was the case, ABC did come out and say they weren't dead the entire time. - Lost: No, They Weren't Dead the Whole Time!

And it sounds like there will be about 15 minutes of video on the complete collection that does show Hurley and Ben during their tenure as the keepers of the island. - Lost DVD Extra: The Hurley/Ben Years?

Quote: Servant of the Lord
It never really explained the numbers, or the person who originally radioed the numbers (which made their way to Hurley, and which brought Danielle Rousseau's team to the island). My lame explanation is, the Man in Black probably used the Dharma's radio tower to lure people to the island, to get them to kill Jacob, since he wasn't able to do it himself.

See my post above, the numbers themselves seemed to correspond to the compass degrees on Jacob's mirror in the lighthouse. They seemed to be his quick reference to dial them up and see them.

I thought the NYT review of the finale was pretty good: No Longer ‘Lost,’ but Still Searching

Quote:
As the last two and a half hours of “Lost” unspooled on Sunday night, Desmond and Jack walked into a cave for the final showdown with evil, and Desmond said, “This doesn’t matter, him destroying the island, you destroying him.” Jack, serious to the end, replied, “All of this matters.”

It was the sort of thesis-antithesis, drama-of-ideas moment that the show had always specialized in. The problem was that several hours later, after the show’s mystical, walk-into-the-white-light ending, it was Desmond who would be proved more right.
...
But when the entire island story line we had been following for six seasons turned out not to matter very much within the internal organization of the show’s narrative — to be largely disconnected from that final quasi-religious resolution of the plot — it was deflating, despite the warm feelings the finale otherwise inspired.
...
“The End” exemplified how pedestrian the action in “Lost” became over the years, a falloff that began even in Season 1. There was nothing to make you tense up in the scenes of Jack and Locke fighting on the cliff or of boulders rolling around as the island threatened to disintegrate. (One exception: Kate telling Sawyer, “I’ll see you at the boat,” and leaping off the cliff into the ocean. But that’s a hard scene to mess up.)

Now let’s get back to the ending of “The End,” in which the big reveal was that Jack Shephard, to all appearances a divorced father and successful surgeon in the sideways universe, was in fact dead. So were all the other Losties who had gathered in the church. The scenario was cleverly constructed to remove the possibility that they had been dead all along (a possibility I erroneously considered, and blogged about, before rewatching the scene), or that any of the events on the island or in the off-island lives of the Oceanic 6 had been other than real.
...
Now, beyond some future expiration date, they had all died and gathered because, as Christian Shephard told Jack: “This is the place that you all made together so that you could find one another. The most important part of your life was the time that you spent with these people.”

So that was the answer: the island was college, or home, or Outward Bound. The sideways reality was the former passengers of Oceanic 815, plus selected guests like Desmond and Penny, gathering for a self-affirming reunion before heading off into whatever sort of afterlife the swelling white light symbolized. (The producers hedged their bets by placing symbols of various religions inside the church.)

Rendered insignificant, in this scenario, were the particulars of what they had done on the island. Pushing buttons, building rafts, blowing up hatches, living, dying — all the churning action and melodrama that made “Lost” so addictive in its early seasons — none of it was directly connected to this final outcome, beyond that it constituted “the most important part” of all their lives.

The exception might have been Jack’s defeat of the smoke monster, though it was unclear if even that had been necessary for this beatific gathering to take place. If life on the island had been a test, everyone who mattered (or who wasn’t busy filming somewhere else) had been destined to pass. Except for Ben, who took an incomplete by staying out in the parking lot. The ending felt contrived and disappointing, which was probably inevitable. After years of insane complication of plot and character, no ending could have “explained” the show in a wholly satisfying way, and it might have been better not to try.
...
And on the other hand: the ending was also elegiac and beautiful, with its stately pace, its elegant cross-cutting between Jack’s death on the island and his awakening in the present, its long shot of the cast arrayed in the church pews like passengers in an airplane. The actors seemed relaxed and genuinely happy, and Matthew Fox, as Jack, underplayed nicely (in a scene where shot after shot was ripe for overacting). The final image of Jack’s eye closing, a reversal of the show’s opening moment six seasons ago, was just right.

As it so often had been, “Lost” was shaky on the big picture — on organizing the welter of mythic-religious-philosophical material it insisted on incorporating into its plot — but highly skilled at the small one, the moment to moment business of telling an exciting story. Which is to say, the picture that actually fit on the television screen.

In the spirit of "Spock with a beard" Star Trek, they should have made a version where the smoke-monster succeeded at getting off the island, a truly sideways alternate reality.