"The End" came to LOST ten years ago tonight (plus: some personal theories)

It seems like an entirely other world ago now.  When the wait between new episodes could be not just weeks but months away.  There was no "binging" a series on a regular basis.  And streaming television was still yet to come.

I was in a different place also.  Still reeling from a divorce.  Wrestling with the worst symptoms of manic depression.  Alone.  Confused.  And, well... lost.  Looking for a purpose, as John Locke was.

There had never been a television series like Lost.  And there never will be again, ever.  At least, there never can be for me.

The medium has changed too drastically.  Viewer expectations have become too impatient.  The audience demands definitive answers, when once upon a time such a thing as "exercise for the reader" was a treasured virtue.  To be sure, some series - such as The Walking Dead and Game Of Thrones - followed admirably in the wake of Lost.  But those are basic and premium cable, absent the restraints of broadcast network television.

And as frustrating as "The Iron Throne" was to many Game Of Thrones fans, it only remotely approached the level of controversy as did Lost's final season leading up to "The End".

Always live together, and you'll never die alone.

Lost's series finale came ten years ago tonight.  It capped off six years of a phenomenon that had engrossed millions, fueled so many classroom and workplace discussions on the mornings after, and unleashed countless online forums where fans dissected everything from the sounds of the Smoke Monster to Egyptian hieroglyphics.  From those frantic first moments of Oceanic Flight 815's wreckage on the beach of an uncharted island Lost was mythology painted with a broad, broad brush.  And it was going somewhere, was set to give us closure.  Right?  Right?!? 

But here we are, ten years later, and the fans seemingly more galvanized than ever about "The End" and what preceded it.

Me?  I thought "The End" was not a perfect episode, but it didn't have to be.  It was as fitting a conclusion to Lost as there was likely to be.  And while we will forever be debating whether there was some master plan that was followed - with every element having an appropriate reason and backstory behind it - it must be admitted, however begrudgingly, that "The End" was pure Lost.  And really, would we have wanted it to be any different?

Others will have already written with more eloquence about "The End".  But on this occasion, I thought it might be fun to share some of the theories I've had over the years about Lost.  A series that we will forever be theorizing and conjecturing about.  Why not add my own into the mix?

First off...

WHERE was the Island?  How can it move?

I don't believe the Island was something "movable".  It had a solid geological basis somewhere and we can know that because of its volcanic origin.  But I do think that access to the Island was something fluid and malleable.  It's the approach to the Island that is constantly moving.  Going back to the quantum physics that the DHARMA Initiative boffins were messin' around with, the Island is somewhat "superpositioned" in the real world.  It might be geologically located in the midst of the Pacific, but the access points to it change from time to time so that someone flying over the Atlantic might come upon one of the "windows" that Eloise described.  Or arrive at the Island by boat in the Mediterranean (as Claudia and her people did).  So think of the Island as a fixed point, with spacetime warped around it seemingly haphazardly.  Going back again to what Eloise told Jack and his friends however, the windows through the warp could be calculated (with the help of an Apple II computer and that really strange Foucault's pendulum down at The Lamp Post station).

So no, the Island itself was not moving.  But how you came to the Island certainly was!

How old is the Island?  When did the Egyptians, the Romans etc. get there?

The Island itself is probably a few million years old, give or take an eon.  But we're wondering how long people have been coming there.

A major clue comes in "The End", when Desmond enters the Heart of the Island.  See those characters carved in the walls and on the "cork"?  Those are Phoenician: predating ancient Egypt.  It can be surmised that the Heart of the Island was primarily the work of this earlier culture.  As for what purpose: who knows.  But they're the ones who are ultimately responsible for all of the crazy on the Island.

The Egyptians came some time after, and they built the statue of Taweret, the wheel chamber, etc.

Then came the Roman castaways of which Claudia was one.  And who gave birth to Jacob and his brother.

Wait... it was the Man in Black and the Romans who built the wheel, right?

The Man in Black and his compatriots were building a wheel, not THE wheel.  Not the one that we see Ben Linus turning in the fourth season finale.

The evidence?  The Egyptian hieroglyphics on the wall of the chamber.  The fact that Mother destroyed the Man in Black's own chamber before he could finish his wheel.

Are you saying that Jacob and the Man in Black came after the Egyptians were on the Island?

Yup. 

That's impossible!  The Egyptians had the Smoke Monster in their wall carvings.  So the Man in Black was before they came!

The Man in Black and the Smoke Monster were two different entities.

Work with me here.  We ARE theorizing after all...

The Smoke Monster has long, long been part of the Island's place in the scheme of things.  Way before the birth of Jacob and his brother.  The Smoke Monster is a tangible representative of evil itself and that evil must always be contained.  Just as Jacob told Richard when he was showing him that bottle of wine: the Island is a "cork" keeping the bottled-up darkness from spilling out.  And for a time, whether by the Phoenician culture or the Egyptians, that representative was held back.

Until Jacob threw his brother into the Heart of the Island.  Which was the catalyst for everything that came after.

Entering the Heart killed Jacob's brother.  We can know this after the tearful farewell that Jacob gave his brother and the Mother.  Jacob didn't treat the Smoke Monster as if it were a new incarnation of the Man in Black.  But what happened at the Heart did free the Smoke Monster from captivity.  And Jacob would spent the next two thousand years trying to make up for his mistake.

What would happen if the Smoke Monster got off the Island?

Hell would come to the world.

We got a glimpse of it with Sayid, after he was resurrected in the corrupted water at the Temple.  It was "the sickness" that had been spoken of before, and now we know what it did: it darkened the heart of the infected.  As Lennon translated from Dogen, Sayid had been "claimed" by the darkness.  And later on Sayid described how he couldn't feel anything: that he had become emotionally deadened.

Now imagine that same deadening happening to millions, if not billions of people across the face of the Earth.

Jacob was right: the Island was a cork and it was holding back something that if it became free, it would spread.

Maybe "The End" didn't make it clear enough but those were REALLY high stakes that Jack was playing for when he fought the Smoke Monster's Locke form. 

What is the meaning of "the numbers"?

Ahhhh yes: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42.  And how mad we did get trying to figure those out.

The answer is at once ridiculously mundane and metaphysical.  And it helps to bear in mind the Valenzetti Equation that was written about on the blast-door map.  In The Lost Experience real-life game at the time, it was revealed that the numbers are factors in the Valenzetti Equation: a formula calculating how long manking has before driving itself into extinction.  One of the purposes of the DHARMA Initiative was to change at least one of the factors, and thus stave off that extinction.

Basically, the numbers are intrinsic to the fabric of the universe.  THAT is why they keep showing up.  They surface because... well, it's their nature.  And DHARMA is trying to change the numbers and consequently, the universe itself.

So the numbers are at once pretty boring and also utterly fascinating.

Who was that in Jacob's cabin?

My gray matter has discombobulated itself a zillion ways from Sunday trying to figure out who it was we briefly saw in that chair when Ben took Locke to the cabin.  And later the same figure apparently appeared very briefly when Hurley found the cabin. 

It wasn't the Smoke Monster-as-Christian Shepherd, we can disregard THAT possibility by process of elimination.  And it obviously wasn't Jacob himself.  Even though it seems that Jacob was using the cabin at some time or another, given the dialogue when Ilana and Bram arrived with their group.

I've no idea who it is and the showrunners probably never knew who it's supposed to be either.  It's almost a disappointment, albeit an intriguing one.

What DID happen at the Swan site?

Basically, Daniel screwed up with his calculations.  And the Island proved him wrong: changing the variables did not affect the past.  Jack, Kate, Sawyer etc. had to be on the Island in the present day, and the Island brought them there.  That's the best that I can come up with.

What about the polar bears, the "Hurley-bird", the source of the DHARMA food shipments, some other stuff?

Those got answered in "The New Man In Charge": the eleven minute "mini-episode" that was included in Lost's home release.  Here it is if you've never seen it.  It's pretty much the very last moments of the Lost mythos that were produced.

Who was David?  Jack never had a son in life.  Why does he have a son in the "flash-sideways" afterlife?

Of all of my theories, this is my most favorite.  Because not once have I ever, ever seen anyone who has come up with this...

David Shepherd is the son of Jack and Kate.

Dylan Minnette was perfectly cast as David.  I mean, just look at the features he shares with Jack and Kate.  Especially Kate's eyes.  And Jack's hair.

But how and when did David come about?  Ahhhhh... now that IS an interesting question and the answer is an astounding one.

Before leaving for the Ajira Airlines flight, Kate came to Jack's home and was pretty adamant about the two of them making love.  I believe now that doing so was part of the plan: that Kate had to become pregnant

Because... what did Eloise tell Jack, Kate and the rest?  That they had to replicate, as closely as possible, the conditions of the original Oceanic 815 flight.  Which, among other things, had a pregnant young woman aboard.

Kate was proxying for Claire, who was nine months along with Aaron at the time of the Oceanic crash.  Locke's dead body was proxying for that of Christian and now it was Kate who was a stand-in for Claire.

Nine months later, after Kate and the other survivors returned home, she gave birth to David.  And it was in the flash-sideways that Jack got to be the father he never had the chance to become in life, to his own son.

That is where David came from.  He wasn't some "figment" of the flash-sideways.  He was flesh and blood, and presumably lived a long life and then was united with the father he never knew.

That's my VERY longtime theory about David Shepherd.  And I'm quite proud of it.

And the voices?

The Island's mega-electromagnetic qualities "trap" the souls of some.  The ones who can't "move on".  But as "The New Man In Charge" implies, such people are not beyond the realm of helping.  And that's the very best that I can come up with.
 
Okay smartie pants, what about...

I would love to be able to figure out the reason for the Egyptian characters on the Swan Station's countdown clock: the one that turns red and black if the numbers aren't entered in time (some have translated it to mean "cause to die").  Why did women who conceived on the Island die during pregnancy (a fate Sun avoided after escaping and giving birth in the outside world)?  How exactly did that lighthouse - the thing that spied on more people than Alexa - work?  Who was...

Look, I am not going to attempt to answer ALL of the mysteries about Lost!  That's for others to work out on their own.  Who am I to deprive others of intellectual exercise?  Just watch the show and suss it out for yourself!  Besides, it's more fun that way.

Anyhoo, here's saluting you, Lost.  Gone, but NEVER to be forgotten.

Categories: lost, science fiction, television