This morning a friend of mine e-mailed me, knowing I had been keeping up with Lost and asked me to explain how it ended. He had only watched Seasons 1 and 2. So here’s what I wrote:
I’ll see if I can sum it up. At the end of last season they nuked the magnetic source and seem to have created an alternate reality where the plane doesn’t crash and everybody ends up getting reunited in that alternate universe. When they are together they will suddenly remember they were on the island together. So Sawyer ends up with Juliette, Hurley with the girl that got shot, Sayid with the blonde chick that got shot, and Jack with Kate.
The island was being run by two immortal type guys and has a cork in the bottom that if you pull it out, all of the good things in the universe will drain out. So Jacob (good) is one of the guys and the smoke monster is the other guy (evil) but he can take a human form and ended up taking the form of Locke who had died (he was also all of the other dead people that showed up on the island). Jacob gets killed by Ben and then Jack takes Jacob’s place and kills Smokey Locke [whoops, Kate actualy kills Locke], but not before Desmond pulls the plug (not realizing the consequences) and the island starts to sink. So Jack goes in and puts the stopper back in place and saves the universe.
In the very last scene Jack crawls out of the stopper place, dying, and then collapses on the ground. The dog comes up and lies down next to him and the camera focuses on his eye, which closes (the series started with his eye opening) just as an airplane with Sawyer, Kate, Claire, Miles, Eyeliner Dude, and Lapidas flies off. With Jack’s death, Hurley is in charge of keeping the island safe. Also remaining on the island are Ben (who has become good, probably), Desmond (who will probably return somehow to Penny), and the older black and white couple who have been living the good life separate from everyone else (with the dog) the whole time.
A lot was not expalined, like what Dharma was doing (just studying magnetic fields I guess),what Whitmore was trying to do (he wound up getting shot on the island), who the immortal type guys were, who built the 3-toed statue, or why the island could disappear or appear invisible.
It was nice seeing people in the alternate universe run into each other and then suddenly get that moment where they remember. And Jack was able to help Locke walk again.
Also everyone in the alternate universe was revealed to be dead or would be dead someday and this was an afterlife they had created for themselves even though some of the people in the afterlife weren’t dead yet.
re: “some of the people in the afterlife weren’t dead yet.”
But to quote Jack’s Dad, “there is no ‘now’ here.” So there is no “yet here” either. Kathy and I think the sideways storyline was like purgatory, where this group of tightly bound spirits needed to work out things unfinished. The first clue for me was when the newly aware John said very adamantly, “You don’t have a son, Jack.” That was something Jack needed to deal with.
That’s why Ben stayed. Of all the cast, he had the most to redeem, and needed to spend more time with his newly forming family that he so screwed up in life. (I gather he made some progress in life as Hurley’s #2.)
All other events in flash forwards, flash backs, and island time were real… although not all explained.
I liked this season and the final show a lot.
Ben waiting outside kind of implies that in time he will be redeemed, but if there’s no time be accounted for . . . ?
Is the world outside the church real? Or was it all a Matrix built for the Losties by the Losties? What about Daniel and Ana Lucia then?
I liked the finale, but they lost me with the whole afterlife thing (and the tunnel of light was so lame visually). I would rather have it remain an alternate universe and just had them live happily ever after. The island survivors could stay on the island. Or they could have had them absorbed into their alternate universe selves at the awakening moment and just disappear off the island (like being teleported; unless they were dead already in which case their spirit would just be absorbed).