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Headscratchers: LOST
"You know, it seems to me like you're just making it up as we go along!"

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     Weight/Beards on the island. 
  • Having being stranded on the island for several months, shouldn't the men have beards by now?
    • you'd think Hurley would've slimmed down a bit too.
      • They found razors and shaving cream in the hatch—Locke is shown shaving with a knife in one episode, too—and Hurley says in the first season that he's gone down a notch in his belt. It's just that every time Hurley starts losing weight, something gives them an assload of food—hatch, helicopter, etc.
      • Also, Hurley is large enough that it'd take a pretty significant amount of weight loss for it to be anything but subtle. A 300 pound man and a 350 pound man look an awful lot alike...
      • It was addressed in 'There's No Place Like Home' during the press conference. Obviously a snag in the Lie.
      • He was only on the island for about three and a half months, and from about day 48 on he had a lot of food from the hatch. Seriously. Asking whether Hurley should have slimmed down should hit the Fandom Berserk Button.
      • Really? 48 days on dwindling plane supplies, fish, and fruit, and walking around a hilly island all the time? And after the food from the hatch, he still did quite a bit of work. No, he still should've lost plenty of weight.
      • Assuming Hurley was 350 pounds at time of crash, that he was working his tail off for that first 48 days (which didn't seem to be the case, he was more moderately active but for the sake of argument lets say he did) and that he was only getting about a thousand calories a day, he could have lost a maximum of about 50 to 55 pounds (using BMR with the very active multiplier which is normally associated with guys who live in the gym after work hours.) Again, a 350 pound guy and a 300 pound guy do not look all that different. Hurley more likely lost about 25 to 30 pounds being forced to limit his activity due to lack of food.
      • Not as alike as a 350 pound guy and a 350 pound guy, which is the comparison we viewers were treated to. Also, I think you're overestimating his calories and underestimating his workload.
    • You can get used to shaving without shaving cream especially if you stay on top of it.
      • Yeah but why would you stay on top of it in that situation? There were much more important things to worry about.
      • While Ben was lying he provided a pretty valid reason when he was posing as Henry Gale, to maintain a sense of normalcy. It takes about 5 to 10 minutes a day to keep a face clean shaven (might be a couple of times a day for particularly hirsute men), time you can easily find even in survival situations.
      • Similarly, the women seemed to have no problem finding time to shave their legs/armpits and pluck their eyebrows. Personally was laughing during the entirety of Kate and Sawyer's bear cage sexploits, because we got a very clear shot of Kate's perfectly shaved underarms, despite her being locked in a bare cage for who-knows-how-long without a razor.

     Desmond and the button 
  • If Desmond had to press the button every 108 minutes, how did he get enough sleep? Tiny cat naps could only get you so far and would be to dangerous. And he had to do it for years. Eventually it would catch up to him. Sure he is a bit raddled when the cast meet him, but he is really lucid for a guy in such a situation.
    • You've obviously never been the parent of a newborn. That is pretty much your sleep schedule for the first 6-12 months.
    • In the season 2 finale, we see Desmond accidentally kill his button-pushing partner in the hatch on the day that the plane crashed about two months before the cast discovers him. Two months is still a stretch, but not as badly as three years.
      • Well he was hardly of sound mind when they found him. He was about to off himself before he heard Locke banging on the hatch door, so he definitely was more than 'raddled'.
      • Might wanna check this out while we're on the subject.
      • While the benefits of polyphasic sleep are debatable, a person can at least function on such a schedule and pressing a button is a simple task. If timed correctly, he wouldn't necessarily go mad. Isolation is the bigger issue.

     Jin and the freighter 
  • A lot of Lost is a mystery and i can accept that i don't know everything, or eventually the show will explain it, but the most egregious of 'are you kidding me' scenarios is Jin's survival/time-traveling along with the rest of the island. To explain: I can believe that he survived getting blown up on the freighter because he was on deck, and the blast could have thrown him overboard. But how in the world does Jin, unconscious or not, get closer to the island than a helicopter hovering over the freighter as it exploded? The fact that Jin got enveloped by the "bubble" that took the island and the helicopter didn't is what screws with me the most, and i really want to know how it happened.
    • Explained [ here]
    • Keep in mind the term you are using is "bubble" which suggests a sphere, not a cube. The island is at the center of the bubble. The bubble extends to the surrounding air and water with a curve, not a right angle. As altitude increases, the radius of the bubble decreases. So Jin just makes it inside of the bubble/curve, but the helicopter above him is outside of the curve.

     MIB's plan 
  • Also, how ludicrously complex was the plan by Jacob's enemy? "Let's see: I am a shapeshifter with supernatural powers and I need someone to kill this Jacob guy - not a terribly difficult task, since a 5'5'' guy wielding a knife can walk in front of him and calmly stab him in the chest, although for some arbitrary reason I can't do it myself? Very well, I'll have a plane crash on the island, and I'll appear to the survivors taking the appearance of people who have died - I'll also kill some of them myself whenever I feel like it. Then, with a series of labyrinthine twists (and I doubt even the writers will ever explain exactly which ones of them were caused by me, and which by Jacob), I'll make some of them leave the island, while causing the death of the adoptive daughter of the guy who is supposed to be the leader of the followers of Jacob - although that other guy who doesn't age is actually the one who can talk to Jacob - then I'll send this silly bald dupe, whose reputation as "special" I have planted myself, on a trip to recover the survivors who have left the island (something Jacob too wants, apparently - what the fuck, do we have the same agenda after all?), so the guy whose daughter is dead will murder him, so the bald guy will come back as a corpse and I will take his shape and I'll then manipulate the guy who killed the bald guy into killing Jacob, and my plan will include also the machinations of the other rich guy who is off the island for some reason, and the guy who can change the future, and the traitor who shot two women to get his WAAALT! back who needed to come back on the freighter, and the woman who shot her son in the past, and also all this time-traveling BS, and in the meantime I think I'll fix myself a cocktail and wait. Good thing he is probably some sort of deity - you have to be both immortal and all-powerful for a plan so side-splittingly absurd to actually work.
    • Considering the fact that Jacob physically touched several of the main characters back when they were on the mainland and that Jacob's enemy appears to be strongly opposed to people coming to the island, it seems more likely that Jacob was responsible for their coming to the island.
    • The way it looks now is that it seems that Jacob brought all these people to the island, then his enemy decided to take advantage of the situation and use it for his own purposes to cause John to leave the island, die, then get put in a coffin and on a plane. Are we at all certain that Jacob's Enemy IS a shapeshifter with supernatural powers? I mean, yes. The way the episodes have run thus far, it seems to suggest that the smoke monster is Jacob's Enemy. But you could easily point the clues out as the smoke monster being Richard Alpert.
    • It also makes even less sense when the implication from recent episodes is that the island itself, if not Jacob in his Obi-Wan Kenobi form, seems to be able to overleap laws of physics to prevent things from happening, like extinguishing dynamite fuses for no apparent reason. The very fact the island and/or Jacob seem to be capable of astonishing feats like this seems to be right against the idea that it can't stop a regular human stabbing Jacob in the heart. Theyre Just Making It Up As They Go Along, people!
    • There's a difference between stopping a chemical reaction and stopping someone with full intention of stabbing somebody from doing so. Also, you're forgetting the possibility that Jacob wanted to die; if that was the case, he could probably remove his immortality, since he's the appointed guardian of the Island and all.
    • As for the initial point about why Smokey didn't just get anyone to try and stab Jacob, he did just that with Richard. He manipulated him in his dispair to thinking that killing Jacob was the only way he could save his wife from hell and sent him off to kill the man. And Jacob promptly beat the hell out of him. He probably can be killed by mortal means, and he knows he can be killed by mortal means, so he takes great care to avoid putting himself into situations where he could be killed so easily, on account of spending most of his time either hiding out in a statue few people even realise there's a secret chamber for, or away from the island where the Man in Black holds no influence over. As for the initial tropers idea this was all one massive Xantos Gambit, I doubt Man in Black actually planned most of it out. He was just taking advantage of situations as they came along like he did with Richard. His plan seems to consistant of "Convince Locke he needs to kill himself, then take his form and use that to get the Other's loyalty so I can bring Ben in with me to kill Jacob." Not that particularly complicated, just taking advantage of the way the wind was already blowing.
    • The gaming symbolism is not a coincidence. The main thrust of the show is that Jacob and the Mi B are playing an incredibly complex game through time and space, trying to outmaneuver each other. Jacob relies on bringing people who will naturally do the right thing together, whereas the Mi B is trying to corrupt and tempt the game pieces (AKA the characters) through deceptive visions and trickery. Another thing about games is that they have rules: one of which is that the pieces can't self-terminate. It's not a conscious decision of Jacob or the Island, it's a rule of the game. Another rule is that only the leader of the Others can see Jacob, meaning Ben's the only one who can kill him, and Ben's not going to kill him without being seriously tempted by the Mi B, and what better way than having the man who usurped his place mysteriously resurrected? We can see the Mi B changing his plan in the show already: he was trying to use Mr. Eko as his Trojan Horse to induce Locke to kill Jacob (the original plan for the show) but after Mr. Eko refused to be manipulated (i.e. Adewale wanted to leave) the Mi B got rid of him.

     Jack's skill with guns and the other's skills in general. 
* Yet another Jack JBM: every other character that is good with firearms has a logical back-story to provide experience (military, hunting, criminal activity, etc.). So how the hell is Jack good with guns? I'd be willing to overlook this, but in The Variable there's a moment where it's pointed out that Daniel doesn't know how to use a gun, who would be just as likely as a doctor to have firearm experience.
  • Because Jack is good at everything.
  • Jack's reaction to hearing Kate's story of how her father would take her hunting endlessly as a child in "All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues" strongly implies that he relates, so he's probably hunted with his father a lot in his youth.
  • Also, the same is true for Juliet, who is also a doctor and yet shoots like a sniper (and is also quite competent with judo). Possibly she was trained by the Others, although this troper does not recall any scene in which such training is even implied - her transition from the mousy, meek researcher of "Not in Portland" to her confident, badass persona of the island was never explained.
    • Juliet was with the Others for several years. She can speak Latin like an Other, sneak around the jungle like an Other, and shoot like an Other. That certainly implies training in the useful skills of an Other, no?
    • Which also Headscratchers. Somewhere along the line, just about every member of the Others, no matter how weedy or ineffectual, managed to get a Charles Atlas Superpower and become a ninja. It does work while you're watching the show, but in between seasons, Fridge Logic kicks in.
    • I always figured that the Others simply had the home field advantage and therefore knew how to sneak around more effectively than even the most experienced of the Losties.
  • Not to mention the fact that the desperate Juliet seen in "A tale of two cities" seemed in a completely different emotional place than the merry lover who was sleeping with Goodwin in "The Other Woman" .
    • Explained in "One of Us." She'd been a merry lover for some time. Then the day before the crash, she learned that Ben had cancer, which meant he had no method of curing cancer. So she realized he'd presumably lied about curing her sister's cancer, her sister was probably dead, Juliet had missed her death, she had given up the last three years of her life for nothing and was now imprisoned on the island by liars.

     Season 3's finale 
* This is something that bugs me about Charlie's death, because he was pretty much the coolest character in the show. When he saw Mikhail with the grenade outside the window, why doesn't he leave the room, and then close the door? We saw that it could have withstood the water pressure, and even if it didn't, it would have bought enough time for he and Desmond to swim through the moon pool.
  • Fridge Logic: Charlie has been persuaded by Desmond that the vision of Claire getting on the helicopter and leaving the island will come true only if everything else goes according to that vision (= Charlie drowns). A bit forced, but they did try to explain it.
  • A Seeing at the base was clearly air-tight (seeing as there was a big open pool in the floor) the room shouldn't have flooded. No, seriously, it would be physically impossible. The room, being airtight, would only fill up to the top of the porthole. The air in the room must exit for the water to enter, once the porthole was sealed, the water wouldn't fill in anymore. Charlie could calmly take a deep breath and swim out.
  • Plus, there's the fact that if the room did fill up with water with Charlie still in there, he is skinny enough to easily fit through a porthole that has recently been blown open wide by a grenade. I mean, come on!

     How did Ben fall for Rousseau's trap? 
* This keeps bugging me. If Ben's such a crafty evil genius, how did he get caught by Rousseau's trap way back in season two in the first place? He's been on the island longer than she has and he hadn't gotten caught in all of the sixteen years she's been there setting up her traps. The only thing I can attribute it to is that when the character was first introduced the writers didn't yet have his character established and didn't intend for him to be as much of a Magnificent Bastard as he is, or possibly just a mistake caused by overconfidence on his part. Perhaps he was getting lazy about watching for traps, and didn't think he would be caught? Still, even before that the Others had been established as very smart and almost supernatural in ability, as Ana Lucia comments, and Ben is their leader, you'd think that he'd know better.]]
  • He got caught on purpose, of course.
    • Perhaps I'm remembering wrong, but I don't think there's any evidence that he got caught on purpose. Getting caught doesn't really do anything for him besides getting him shot with a crossbow, tortured and locked up. Plus, if getting caught was part of his plan, why did he need Micheal to rescue him?
    • "Now, Dreznik stepped into the trap he knew was there. This may seem strange, but that is the trap he was most likely to spring. He was that sort of man." — Alexei Panshin, THE THURB REVOLUTION.
    • I believe Word of God says that it was an accident. Now, that doesn't make a lot of sense... unless you remember the fact the his captor was Rousseau, who is known to bait her traps with dolls. And his childhood friend Annie seemed to have an affinity for dolls as well...
    • Wait, are you saying that Annie is Rousseau? But, er, what, who - * explode*
    • Word of God says it was an accident? Not that I know of. And we all know how fluctuating the trustworthiness of the Word of God on this show has been so far anyway. I think it's apparent that he wanted to scope out the situation and learn about the Losties face-to-face. There's only so much you can know by reading (possibly vague and illegally obtained) profiles. His life was in danger and he needed to know more about Jack and his relationship with the other folks so as to learn the best way to eventually manipulate Jack into helping him with his spine. Had his ruse worked, he might conceivably have even been able to do it sooner than later, using some "accident" or contrivance or trick to get them to a place where the surgery could be performed. And in the meantime he could learn things as a spy.
    • A better question is what would he have done if he wasn't caught? He's the Almighty Leader of the Others, alone, checking up on the Survivors? The truth is that it sounds better if he planned it all, since he got to know and read them during this time, and even make a couple of mind screws with some of them, like with Jack/Locke leadership issue.
    • This was his life we're talking about: he wasn't going to entrust such critical info-gathering to anyone but himself with that at stake. Not as egocentric and egotistical as he is. And if he happened to be killed by the Losties, well, he would have died otherwise, wouldn't he?
  • Meta reason: They cast him as Henry, the unlucky balloon-traveler (Or possibly "Random Other nr. 12"); fell in love with Michael Emerson and re-tooled him into the Magnificent Bastard we all know and love.
  • Don't know if this has been mentioned, but I have another related question. Why didn't Rousseau recognize him when she caught him as the man who took her baby? I know it was a long time ago, and she's half-mad, but she's so fixated on it that you think she'd remember, especially since he looks exactly the same except with a ridiculous hairdo. I guess I'm willing to accept that she wouldn't remember, and it actually goes into Fridge Brilliance if you consider that maybe she recognized him on some subconscious level and therefore knew he wasn't trustworthy.
    • I would argue that she did remember him. After all, she was completely and utterly convinced that he was an Other.

     "This island is hell." 
* If Richard thought the island was hell, where the heck did he think people who died there were going? What, did Boone, Ana Lucia, Juliet, etc. all just POOF DISAPPEAR?!
  • I don't think he meant that literally (in the present at least, he did believe it when he first arrived), he was just overcome by the apparent hopelessness of his situation. He has left the island in flashbacks so he must know he's still on Earth.
    • My impression was that Jacob outright told him that he wasn't dead or in hell, right before making him live forever.
    • It seemed like the stress of recent events had driven him a little crazy during that episode, so maybe he'd regressed back to his initial opinion of the island thinking it was true.

     Rousseau's distress call 
  • This is a minor thing, but why didn't any of the Dharma people, or Richard's people, or Jacob or the MIB or any of the many people it turns out were on the island in Season 1 turn off Rousseau's distress call? It seems like they wouldn't exactly want to make it easier for people to find the island, and definitely not that there were Weird Things going on there.
    • Maybe nobody was scanning that frequency? Or alternatively its range and/or the weird electromagnetic shit that goes on across the island was such that it was unlikely anyone would respond to it who wasn't already present on the island. Personally, this troper thinks the transmission was intended by Jacob and/or the Island itself. The numbers being transmitted correspond to the current crop of candidates. Jacob seems to have precognition such that he can make Gambit Roulette against his own demise, hence the current crop of candidates on the island.
    • The underwater station jammed all radio signals. Why bother turning it off when it did nothing but placate the insane woman?
      • Not so. Ben only began jamming transmissions of the Island following the implosion of the Swan. The tower's transmissions are also hearable from off the Island. Sam Toomey and Leonard Sims both heard the numbers broadcast from off he Island. So did Rousseau's team before they crashed. What's truly baffling is that DHARMA didn't turn it off. They were still around for 4 years before the Purge, and i was their equipment.

     The Looking Glass 
* I'm a few years late, but they never had to swim down to the Looking Glass at the end of season 3, they could have just cut the cable they found on the beach!
  • They had little way of being sure that that would be effective. The cable could have been more of an anchor than anything, or there may have even been an additional power source down there that would delay anything cutting the cable would have done. Swimming down through the looking glass was a better plan than chopping the cable without knowing the variables.
  • Actually its kind of funny that before even knowing about the looking glass they didn't cut the cable. Cut the cable - eventually a maintenance crew will show up, if it's important enough. But they don't, and all it would have done is brought the others anyway.

     Questionable decay on the island. 
  • You would think the bodies in the Dharma mass grave would have been more decayed, and the van would have been inoperable after 30 years sitting around in a tropical climate, but no. Heck, on an island where it seems to rain torrentially few times a day the survivor's beach camp with its bamboo lean-tos seems to have held up like a champ!
    • Jack estimated that the "Adam and Eve" skeletons were about 40-50 years old, but Across the Sea reveals that they died in Classical Roman times. Decay seems to happen very slowly on the island, possibly because of the healing powers.
      • It's worth noting that Jack being a medical doctor doesn't make him fantastic at carbon dating or forensics - that's why they have forensic pathologists. It might've just been the best guess he had, and even then he's way off. Or possibly the skeletons are well-preserved because spacetime itself operates a little strangely on the island. It took a rocket fired from a boat off the island half an hour to arrive on the island.
      • I'm no anthropologist but it seems to me that a pair of bodies left in a warm, humid climate for 1500-2500 years would leave a lot less than even a pair of more or less intact skeletons remaining. It wouldn't be anything like the Adam and Eve we saw. But the island skips through time and the bodies may have too, so Jack's analysis could have proved ironically accurate in a weird sort of way.

  • Uh, Jin? Hi. Look, I know your last scene with Sun was tragic and all, but why did you completely forget about your daughter? Yes, I know you love your wife and all, but why leave your daughter without either of her parents? Why didn't you or Sun think about her before you both died? You even had that scene earlier in the episode where you talked about her.
    • But her Mom was looking after the kid, so I guess it's totally okay to just suicide by default like that.
    • They said on the podcast that Sun and Jin had a few seconds in which to act and they acted on their love for each other in the heat of the moment, focused on the crisis directly at hand as people often will, quite understandably. Or maybe it's not so understandable, but that's one of the basic facts of life: that its always when you're outside of the heat of the moment, hearing about someone else's actions, that you can scoff and take the cerebral high road. But none of us knows for sure how we'll act in an unexpected crisis until it happens. Also, the overriding element of the couple is and has almost always been that they are The Determinator of couples, bound to stay together no matter what. For better or worse, it is very much in character.
      • It could have also just been translated for our convience. In Across the Sea they start off talking in Latin but then just switch over to English mid-conversation.
  • What is the deal with Sun and Jin speaking English after they reunite? It was kind of lame sending off the characters speaking English to each other after only conversing in Korean the whole show.
    • This was, most likely, intended to show that Sun had gotten her English back via The Power of Love. Losing the ability to speak English in the first place, on the other hand, was totally bizarre.
    • I think it's also for the English speaking audience to relate better instead of just reading subtitles and trying to assume they know the emotions. It happened in the episode where Jin knows Sun speaks English, she tells him she couldn't leave him because of her love <i>in English</i> even though Jin doesn't speak it.
    • Unfortunately, speaking Korean is what set Jin apart from the community on the Island. It may sound Anglo-centric, but then again so is the cast. It's a choice symbolic of doing what you need to do to come together.
  • I just thought of something rather odd. In "The Candidate", Sayid is able to run off with the time bomb in order to save some of the rest of the group. If he wanted them all dead, why did he have the bomb continue the countdown in the first place rather than just explode? After all, Sawyer had to pull the wires from the bomb anyway, already fulfilling the requirement for "killing themselves". Why give the group a chance to react afterwords and thus give them a chance to survive? Now Un-Locke has to find a new way to kill the surviving candidates except he apparently cannot do so himself and the candidates now know for sure that he's trying to kill them.
    • It was explained how MIB was unable to kill the Candidates directly, and even after Sawyer removed the wires, this troper believes that the bomb wouldn't have detonated when the timer hit zero. The only reason that the bomb did detonate was because Sayid ran with it, taking the bomb out of range of directly killing the Candidates where it was then able to explode. This raises the interesting question of whether the trigger for the bomb was actually Sayid, who had been constantly manipulated by MIB and implied to have gotten sick from drinking his Kool-Aid. By taking the bomb he was accepting its explosion and his impending death and perhaps on some level he even wanted the bomb to explode, to atone for a life filled with guilt. MIB could have been counting on this the whole time, succeeding in his mind and he actually ended up taking out two Candidates in the aftermath of the blast (Sun and Jin). Supporting this was the fact that MIB did not react overly shocked by the fact that they had survived. Also, MIB apparently had the ability to see others memories, judging from the flashes shown to be inside the smoke monster. If he looked at Sayids, he'd know that Sayid had manipulated his friend into blowing himself shortly before boarding the plane. Interestingly enough, that being the same way Sayid ends up going...
    • There's still a few potential solutions that allow the writers to wriggle out of this one. First: Un-Locke hates Jacob and his Candidates. Detonating the bomb instantly would achieve his purpose, but it wouldn't let the Candidates understand they were about to die. With this option, they do. Un-Locke didn't realise Sayid had turned back, or that he'd sacrifice himself to save some of the others. Other possibilities: if Un-Locke had set up the bomb to immediately explode on the wires being pulled out, the Island/whoever probably would have interpreted it as a direct attempt by him to kill a Candidate, which would autofail. Another possibility is that Un-Locke [i]did[/i] set the bomb up to explode on tampering, the mechanism being to instantly count the clock down to 0:00 — but that the Island is interfering, thus giving enough of a delay for the Candidates to try something else.
      • un-Locke wants to make sure that they're really killing each other, and Jack said that involves turning them against each other. So intent matters according to The Rules. No accidental slip knocking the wires loose, no one person finding the bomb and plucking a wire immediately in a blind panic to get it to stop. He needs to make sure that there's tension. He wants the bases covered. An instant kill bomb would leave too many "if's", and there are too many of those to begin with. The way he sees it, a quick Hope Spot followed by a sudden, rapid countdown is the closest thing to sure bet that he has.
  • Wait, so Kate was no longer considered a candidate because she became a mother? I guess Sun and Jin's child doesn't mean anything, then.
    • Perhaps because the person who protects the island can't be bothered with raising a child and protecting the island at the same time. Too much work, perhaps? Or they have to remain focused on being the island's protector.
    • Jacob said something to the effect that he chose the candidates because they were all looking for something that was missing in their lives. Kate becoming a mother must have been what see was looking for... and Jin and Sun finally reuniting as a happy couple was what THEY were looking for.
      • That still doesn't explain why their names weren't crossed off when they had their daughter. If they were looking for each other so they could be a normal family again, becoming the permanent protector of the island would have been the last thing they would have wanted to do. The point was that the island was supposed to fill the hole in their hearts. Sun and Jin already had something else to fill it, and thus didn't need the island. Thus their names not being crossed out while Kate's was still doesn't make sense.
      • Sawyer was a father too, but he had abandoned that role. And Sun and Jin were not wholly dependent on it emotionally the way that Kate had become at the time when her name was crossed off. Remember what Jacob said: she still had the choice. It's just lines over a name. That doesn't make it etched in stone.
      • "Kwon" was the name on the wall. "Kwon" could have just been Jin. In which case, him still being on the island, away from Sun would be enough for him not to have had what he was looking for until Sun came back and they were together. Just saying...
      • This troper always took the "Kwon" reference as meaning both Sun and Jin — the implication was that neither's life could be complete unless the other was in it. Hence, if they were up for consideration as candidates, they could only be considered together as one candidate.
    • Well, it was only referring to one "Kwon". Sun was a mother. However, Jin could've still been a candidate. After all, Jacob never said anything about fathers not being candidates. On a side note, this explains why mothers never survived on the island... they couldn't be candidates anymore.
  • Jacob said he chose people who were flawed and unhappy as his candidates so that he wouldn't be pulling anyone away from a happy life, but half the time their problems arose in the first place from his manipulations. He set Kate down the path of crime by preventing her from being punished for shoplifting; he set Sawyer down a life of revenge by handing him a pen; Sayid was happy with Nadia until Jacob showed up and distracted him, allowing Nadia to be run over; and so on and so forth. In fact, before Jacob even met Sayid personally to do that, Sayid was on his way to finally reunite with Nadia when 815 went down - and Jacob certainly wasn't helping the hundreds of people who were killed on impact, some of whom surely had happy lives. (This could be saved if the finale reveals that Jacob was being less-than-honest.)
    • Jacob doesn't cause those life choices, he merely makes them more possible. Taking the examples, Kate and Sawyer still had free will - they could have chosen pretty much any path in their lives even with Jacob's touch, but they chose to do what they did. Or quite possibly the courses of their lives were already set and Jacob was merely doing something to give them a "helping hand" along the way to the Island if they did choose to go down the dark path, as it were. Sayid and Locke, on the other hand, are a bit different given Jacob's intervention actually saves their lives — Sayid couldn't have stopped the car that killed Nadia, but it might have killed him, and Locke had just been thrown out of a window. On the other hand, the fact that Jacob's conversation with Richard on the beach was all about Jacob trying to say "I want to prove people are good by watching them make their own decisions, yo" after basically acting as a Fate Magnet for them is kind of amusing.
    • He gave them the choice. Remember that he believes people capable of good and the Man in Black thinks that they always end up doing the wrong thing. He picked people with a dark past and a flawed existence because this was necessary for them to be an example to "prove him wrong".
  • "Hey Ben, if you work for me, you can have the island all to yourself." "Okay." "By the way, I'm going to destroy the island." I'm sorry, what?
  • Several minor JBM's with the finale: how did Jack end up far outside the "light of the island" cavern laying on a rock? If the core group of main characters are "moving on", presumably to Heaven, why is Kate (a woman who's risked many lives, killed a relative, taken people hostage, run away from her husband, and other decidedly un-Christian values) moving on with them? Why is it that Sayid's month-long relationship with Shannon means more to him after he's dead than all the time he spent pining for (and being with) Nadia? Why did Charlotte and Daniel not have an "unflashing" when they touched each other? What did Juliet's remark that Jughead "worked" in the sixth season premiere mean if it meant that she (and every other main cast member) had died/would eventually die anyway? And why was Walt so goddamn spec-BOOM. LOST.
    • I can't answer all of these, but here's what I CAN answer:
      • Moving on isn't about Christian values, it's about being at peace with oneself. Kate was; Ben wasn't yet.
      • Even so, in Christianity you can enter heaven if you are truly repentant for your sins and Kate's actions and motives on the island were positive, as she legitimately risked her life to help people. She certainty appeared to be on the path to redemption, even still in the later seasons when she gave up Aaron to go back to the island to find Claire.
      • The Man in Black's body was found a ways down the stream after Jacob chucked him in the source too, so I'm guessing one of it's many properties is the ability to transport dead/dying bodies a few metres downstream so a movie montage can be played as they die or are buried.
      • I was under the impression that Ben didn't move on because Alex had finally accepted him as a father figure.
      • Ben isn't ready to move on because he has to find Annie.
      • In Sayid's case, his relationship with Shannon was important because they were brought together by the Island and "destined" to be together. Even so, she is only half the answer. The key thing in the afterlife was that the Losties in it seemed to have to let go of the relationships keeping them from "moving on" - Locke and his father, Jack and his father, and so on. Sayid, in life, was almost always obssessed with being with Nadia - a dead relationship, one that is the opposite of Shannon in the sense it seems it was never "meant to be". Consider: although the afterlife was a place, according to Desmond, where "you could have anything you want", Sayid didn't wish himself married to Nadia. She was married to his brother instead. Now, it's unclear where Nadia had a separate existence in the afterlife or whether she was created by Sayid in the way Jack's Son was created, but either way Sayid was unconsciously setting events up for himself so he would end up with Shannon — because he not only loves her, but he needed to move on from his relationship with Nadia because it was holding him back. On the Island, his being 'on the dark side' was always related to his obssession with Nadia. I'd lay decent odds, in-universe, that if Sayid had stayed "bad to the end" he would've wound up as a whisper on the Island as well for these very reasons.
      • Charlotte and Daniel weren't ready to "move on" yet.
      • Watch Eloise and Desmond's conversation again, she's definitely a factor in Daniel's remaining in the sideways world (remember she's the one who shot him).
      • Juliet flashed to the "purgatory" timeline as she was dying. Notice that she said the exact same lines when she met Sawyer in the flash-sideways as she did when she was dying.
    • Jack reappearing outside the Source was just what the island does; it did the same thing to the Man In Black in "Across The Sea".
      • It's a pretty dick thing for the Island to do to the guy who basically saved it, though. Jack apparently wasn't dead, and he had two guys — Hurley and Ben — waiting for him right outside the cave. What, the Island waited a couple of hours until they'd wandered off and then teleported Jack out to stumble/crawl in agony to die on a beach somewhere? I know there's a theory the Island itself is a Magnificent Bastard, but damn, dude...
      • Well, there is a running theme of Due to the Dead in the show, Boone Hill and the closing-of-eyes thing mentioned on the main page, for starters, and obviously the Flash Sideways verse. Perhaps the island was just giving the body back to the people who were waiting for it, so they could perform the proper rites, which is kind of sweet.
      • The Island just shunted him through space a little. The source is massively electromagnetic, and it can do that. In fact, what killed Jack might've been the giant knife wound, not going into the source. Rhetorically speaking, does going into the Source actually do anything, or is that just Mother's mind games? She says 'a fate worse than death', which is highly ambiguous when taking into account that the source is both life AND death. The Mi B was an exception to the natural order, because he glitched due to the Rules about Jacob not being able to kill his brother.
    • My theories: Sayid was chasing Nadia long exactly? When he was on the island he claimed Nadia was dead, most likely because she was dead to him. He thought he was going to be trapped on the island, so he moved on to Shannon and she helped him let go of his past. And she definitely loved him, so I think that works. As for Juliet...well she was inches away from a bomb and didn't die, so I'd assume that it worked if I was in her shoes. But maybe the above theory is just as accurate. Also, Lost never says they move on to heaven, just they move on together, maybe having no more memories, maybe going to heaven? who knows. But the question is, why shouldn't Kate go with them? Surely she had redeemed herself by that point anyways.
      • Sayid is actually following the Four Noble Truths: 1) He suffers. 2) He suffers because he craves Nadia. 3) He eliminates suffering by letting go (only slightly important to the show) of Nadia and embracing the hot blonde making eyes at him. Unfortunately, he doesn't get all the way before she's killed, and he has to start from the beginning. Though Lost is deliberately meant to be open to interpretation, this one is officially on the table, what with all the Buddhist symbolism, including "dharma". And one part of dharma is....following the Four Noble Truths! And that leads you to liberation from a repeated cycle of rebirth....just like the flash-sideways! The problem with demanding "answers" from Lost is that it's deliberately set up to have multiple interpretations, ranging from scientific (well, pseudo-scientific) to Christian to Buddhist to Gnostic, but it can't pick one as the truth without alienating the others. The Four Noble Truths could just as easily be Sayid's search for gnosis, or his search for redemption, or a psychological journey to find himself. The show doesn't answer, it lets the viewer pick and choose. But in the end, what was intended as a call for people to embrace their own personal interpretation becomes "Where my answers at?!"
    • As for Walt ... argh. Best wild guess I got for an in-universe explanation is that Walt is special in that unlike every other character, the Island cannot affect him supernaturally, just as Jacob and MIB couldn't kill one another — kind of like Sparkhawk in The Elenium, the Island has no power over him. His presence on Ajira 316 was optional just as Desmond's presence on the Island was technically optional; he's not bound to the Island's existence in the way the candidates are.
      • When the producers realized they were idiots for not realizing a ten-year-old would grow really quickly, they scrapped Walt's storyline and gave it to Hurley. Notice how Hurley doesn't have any special powers until long, long after Walt is off the main cast. But of course, the producers couldn't answer why Walt was special without spoiling the show up to the sixth season. It's answered on the DVD, at any rate.
    • I saw Walt's implied importance as a sign that Walt was also a potential Candidate for Jacob. I came to this conclusion by evaluating Walt's relationship with Locke. Soon after the crash, Walt identifies with Locke more than any other character, also happening to be the only other person on the island with the exception of Locke who doesn't want to leave. The similarities between the Walt and Locke are convincing; both are considered "special", both sabotage the other survivors to prevent attempts to get rescued and both were not raised by their actual fathers. Their connection caused repeated conflicts with Michael, who Walt was rejecting. Walt and Locke shared the same commitment to the island, but as Walt began to respect and love his father, he changed. His connection with Locke was broken, and he developed a strong desire to leave the island. At the moment his father entered his life, he ceased to fit Jacob's Candidate criteria, namely, being incomplete and looking for something. Where Michael had swayed Walt's destiny away from the island, Locke's father did the opposite for Locke at the time that he was looking for the connection to give his life meaning. His father betrayed him proceeding to con Locke out of a kidney and kick him through a window, paralyzing him, directly leading to the events that took Locke to Sidney and then to the Island. Locke had the chance Walt had to have his life go in a different direction, but instead the devastating rejection made his faith to find that connection in the island stronger than any of the other Candidates.

  • How did Jack have a kid in Purgatory? I don't remember him in the main timeline. He couldn't have had him after the series, for obvious reasons.
    • David wasn't real, he was an invention of Jack's in the sideways world so as to deal with his father issues.
      • Not necessarily. Remember, this Purgatory has people at the most important time of their lives, and it's a place where anything you want can happen. Perhaps this was the sort of life David wanted? Of course, this raises the question of who his real parents were in his life.
    • On of the Lost Answer blogs made a good point: Neither Jack nor Juliet has freckles, yet David does. A lot, in fact. Hmm....
  • Right, so lovely emotional ending and all but...what actually happened on the island? What was the plug thing stopping? What was the light? What happened after Hurley became Number 1? What parts of the actual mythology of the show was even answered?
    • (1) "What happened on the island" is a vague question that needs to be specified further. If it means, "What happened to it once Hurley became the new protector?" his exchange with Ben in the hereafter strongly implies that things went well. (2) The plug thing was plugging up a tiny volcanic lip. (3) See #1. (4) Most of them, though certain things like the origin and significance of the statue of Tawaret (yes, of Tawaret, so please don't edit that part out again, whoever you are, but look it up at Lostpedia instead—the show's makers revealed the clue in a magazine) were not truly explained.
      • Well, THAT was awfully dismissive. The plug and the light, somehow the origin of all the weirdness on the island, were definitely NOT explained. There's no possible way the plug was physically holding back a volcano - if it was light enough for a person to lift, it was light enough for a volcano to push it out. The show only answered side questions without answering the central ones.
      • Exactly, unless I'm missing something, the light, which was a fairly important part of the mythology of the Island was never even approached with anything resembling an explanation. And no mention of a volcano at all within the show. Okay, maybe I can accept the Hurley run island, as something that "went well" but I'd still have liked to have seen some of it.
      • Dismissive my ass. You ask vague questions, you get incomplete answers. The plug was just some sort of totem or talisman placed there as an island-centric version of a Cosmic Keystone for the island's energies. The object itself clearly wasn't holding back the volcano (which was too mentioned in the show before, in the episode "The Man Behind the Curtain"). It was the energy. Remember that the magic E word, "electromagnetism", is the all-purpose Applied Phlebotinum on the show for everything, much like radioactivity was in old comic books. One must have some sort of fantasy or pseudo-science element or another, and it may as well be consistent. As for elements of island history/mythology and future events being left unseen, the whole idea of the island is its mystery and timelessness. Its history stretches back far beyond what we'll ever see and far ahead of what we'll ever see. I'd never prefer it any other way; otherwise it wouldn't seem timeless. It appears that after the last few episodes we've got half the Lost fans bitching about too much of the mystique being taken away and the other half griping about not enough being explained. Truly, we are one Unpleasable Fanbase.
      • We didn't see Hurley running the island because by that point the story was over and the cycle had begun again. Unnamed Woman probably wasn't the first guardian, and Hurley won't be the last, but the focus of the story was on the survivors of Flight 815 and Jacob's search for a successor.
    • 2) The plug was an early iteration of the Swan station, i.e. the Sumarians drilled too close, threatened the source, and plugged it up. The last season strongly hinted the events of the show aren't a beginning, but a neverending cycle that repeats itself constantly, sort of like how each character has daddy issues. We know why Jack acts the way he does (because of daddy), but why does Christian's father act the way he did to create Christian's personality? It just keeps going back and back, all the way to before recorded time. 3) The Light is deliberately open to interpretation. If you take the Christian hints to heart, it's Heaven. If you believe in Gnosticism, it's the Pleroma, the divine realm of light. If you're a Buddhist, it's the pure land that exists when you reach enlightenment. If you believe in science, it's a pocket of exotic matter/electromagnetism that captures the muted electrical signals from our brains when we die. It's set up this way becaaaause....5) To explain the Light as any one of these is to deny the others, and Lost isn't interested in that. It's interested in the character's, and by extension the audience's, personal interpretations of events, not authorial dogma. It's about the Nietzschean idea of "perspectivism", that there is no objective reality, only subjective interpretations informed by the circumstances that made us who we are (hence the flashbacks). This goes all the way back to episodes like "Outlaws", from season 1. To paraphrase Julius Caesar, "The fault is not in the show, but in ourselves", because we want objectivity from a show that has no interest in being so closed-minded.
  • Jack and Desmond entered the cave, unplugged, replugged, all of that. Why didn't they turn into smoke monsters? Isn't it what happens to you when you enter there, a fate worse than death?
    • See my "Wild Mass Guessing" entry near the top of that page, on "exactly what happened inside that cave". Short answer: the conditions were unique when the Man in Black was thrown into it, since he could not technically be killed by Jacob, who had thrown him in there.
    • Desmond is immune to the electromagnetic effects of the light. As for Jack, the light was switched off when he went down, and probably didn't immediately shoot up to full power after he fixed it. The circumstances were different enough from MIB that it wouldn't necessarily affect him in the same way.
    • There were other skeletons down there, so other people died by entering the Source without turning into monsters. My guess is that it had to do with Jacob's mother and how she made it so Jacob and MIB could not kill each other. Since Jacob's actions would have killed MIB, the rules of the island made it so something else had to happen rather than him just dying. Perhaps when one dies the soul immediately leaves the body, but it couldn't here, and thus with the soul being exposed to the Source, it becomes the Monster. Uh... did I just make a WMG in the JBM section?
  • Both Ben and Richard were responsible for a) killing all members of the Dharma Initiative on the island who didn't defect to the Others, including people that Sawyer & co. had worked with for three years and b) a plot to kidnap all female Oceanic survivors for experimentation. Upon returning, no one bothers to ask them their rationales for such behavior or even criticize their past behavior. Apparently when you're siding together to fight the main threat to the island you're standing on, everything is forgivable.
    • Well, it is the Island, it is protecting the source of all life on the planet that's at stake, and the Losties did have other things on their mind at the time. Also, neither Ben or Richard ultimately move on with the rest of the gang at the end — although Ben at least seems to have atoned for his misdeeds with arguably centuries of serving under a "good" protector of the Island.
  • How did Jacob know that Desmond was going to not hit the button the day the plane crashed? He arranged for the people for come, but it was an accident that they came there in the first place.
    • It's possible Jacob had some way of making Kelvin leave.
    • Or Desmond and Daniel were simply wrong in thinking that it was Desmond's error that crashed the plane. That creates the delicious irony that even if the H-bomb plan had worked, it still wouldn't have prevented almost anything it was supposed to prevent. (EDIT: No wait, the enhanced version of the pilot confirmed in its annotation that it was Desmond's error. Well, Jacob's touch was said to course correct people's destinies, in a manner of speaking, so he probably touched Kelvin. In fact, it was implied that most people who came to the island were brought there by him. Dharma folks are possibly ordinarily exceptions but Kelvin obviously would be a special case then. Or maybe it was Desmond Jacob touched. Probably both. You come to the island: you were summoned. Like Aslan and Narnia.)
    • Jacob summoned the plane, intending for it to crash land or land in the water. Desmond failed to press the button, splitting it in mid-air and killing hundreds.
      • My interpretation on the series, judging mostly from his talk to Richard in his flashback episode, is that Jacob doesn't plan out the specifics, he just wants certain people to show up on the island and the island makes it happen by altering circumstances to make them come to it.
    • Jacob manipulates people like Billiard balls: he lines up the shot and watches them all bounce off each other. He planned for Desmond to press the button at that exact moment, through some ineffable design of his.

  • I may be missing something, because I can't exactly remember/be bothered with trying to figure out the timeline of Ben's flashbacks, but it seems to me that he took Alex before the purge happened, which doesn't make any sense at all. How could he have been living in Dharmaville with his father and raised a child he'd kidnapped from the jungle at the same time? For that matter, did the Dharma people ever know about the French team?
    • Pretty sure some of the other Others helped take care of her for a while before the purge happened.
      • Okay, but...didn't the Others want to kill the child? So Ben convinced them to let him keep her, only to be like "hey, will you watch her for me while I pretend to have a whole other life with my jerkwad dad and a bunch of hippie scientists"?
  • When the Man in Black became mortal, shouldn't he have reverted back to his original form? He shouldn't have been able to transform.
    • Smokey hasn't been able to transform all season, he's been stuck in Locke's form ever since Jacob died. When he became mortal, it only continued.
      • A better question would be why he was stuck in that form after Jacob died.
      • Just one more of their "rules".
      • Smokey's powers are clearly tied to the light - it was the source of his power and when the plug got pulled out he lost his powers completely. When Jacob died the light weakened (it was much dimmer in the final episode than in Across the Sea), which may have led to Smokey going down a level.
  • How did Christian appear before Locke in the wheel room in statue time? Even if we would assume that Smokie exist above linear time and can remember the future (which isn't very likely) it still won't explain how he took Christian form before Christian died (or even existed).
    • Well, not all visions are the Monster. Christian there could have been a ghost, or the Island, or who knows. I do agree that it is a little confusing though.
    • The Monster had already assumed Christian's form as its favorite (for whatever reason) in the future, and then time traveled, like Locke himself did, to the past. Nowhere does it say that only the normal humans ever get caught up in flashes. In fact, were it not for those things, the Monster wouldn't really have any way of working out such a temporal arabesque of a plan in the first place. (The same goes, perhaps, for Jacob sometimes knowing the immediate future of people. When Jacob happens to get caught in a flash and it takes him to the future and he has that mirror machine, he's likely to take advantage of it and learn what's coming for the potential candidates he's been watching before another flash takes him back. Well, wouldn't you?)
    • Actually, now that I think about it, the Wheel Chamber is actually dislodged in time, because when Locke went down there in the era of the statue, the wheel was still off its axis (something that didn't occur until 2004), so really, Christian/Smokey can be there because the wheel chamber has no set place in time.
  • So what was the deal with the real Henry Gale? No one comes to the island just by fluke. Was he a candidate? And if so, how did Jacob end up letting him get hanged as soon as he arrived? Surely he wouldn't have been able to hang himself, as he wouldn't have been capable of suicide.
    • I think it was hinted that The Others killed him.
      • Some people might have come to the island unintentionally without anyone calling them there. Jacob and MIB's (adoptive) mother didn't intend for any of the other people to show up, so maybe it's just something that happens from time to time.
      • We don't know Mother didn't call the Romans there. She needed a replacement, after all. As for Henry Gale, whether Jacob is a massive dick or not depends on your interpretation. He could've called him to the Island simply because he knew Ben needed to assume his identity in the future.
  • The Smoke Monster has existed since the "everything has a rational explanation" days. Five years later, we know that 1) it used to be a man and 2) he had a lot of feelings. We learned almost nothing in the way of how it did all of the stuff it did. It might as well have been a wizard.
    • The numerous comic book references and cross-references on the show are not an accident any more than the literary ones. It's in many ways a comic book-ish show, and "Across the Sea" was the Origin Story (note my caps) of the major Big Good and archvillain of the saga. The whole thing played, therefore, in comic book logic: the future supervillain got thrown into the electromagnetic core of the island (and the whole planet, really) and ended up absorbing its energies and gaining inexplicably specific superpowers from them (shapeshifting, invulnerability, memory scanning, and maybe some others) just as he was transformed by them at the same time into a monster made of the darkness inside him. You have to look at it on the level of comic book logic and appreciate it that way or you can't appreciate it at all.
    • The Mi B becoming the smoke monster is no different than the idea of the Light itself: it's a big swirling ball of electromagnetic energy that contains the electromagnetic signatures/souls/subtle bodies the dead. The Mi B is similar, only the portion of the Light that is "him" is clouded and corrupted. He can only take the form of the dead because he's connected to the afterlife, the flashsideways, and he can read people's minds because it's part of the electromagnetic energy/soul/subtle body within them, not to mention the memories of everyone who's died, ever. The "how" isn't really something the show has any interest in, as it's primarily a character study about how people interpret mysterious events in their lives and react to them. There are hints, like talking about "strange matter", but the consequences are what the show is really interested in, and everything else is left vague so as not to contradict any other viewer's personal interpretation or worldview.

  • In the sideways timeline, Daniel has supposedly spent his whole life raised by two Brits. Why doesn't he have an accent?
    • Actually a bit of Truth in Television. If he lived in America his whole life, he wouldn't only speak to his parents. It's very common for children of immigrants to have their parents' accents as kids, but lose them to some degree after spending more time with their peers.
    • For that matter, why is his last name Faraday when his parents' names are Hawking and Widmore?
      • This was actually lampshaded in a piece of supplementary material in the season 5 DVD, Mysteries of the Universe.
      • Slightly altered in the flash-sideways world, where his name is Daniel Widmore.
      • Eloise obviously married some guy named Hawking, who at some point probably died or divorced or abandoned her/was abandoned by her.
    • How is that sailboat moving without the sail raised?
      • Ocean currents? They've established the currents around the island are rather strong.
    • I can't quite decide whether to call this Fridge Logic or Fridge Brilliance, but it just occurred to me, three days after watching the finale, that the Big Bad's plan is basically to make the Island sink by pulling out the plug.
  • If the sideways timeline was really supposed to be purgatory all along, then why bother showing the sunken island at the beginning of the season to establish that it had been destroyed? Why have Juliet saying cryptically that it worked? Seriously, if it was really purgatory then why did it matter if the nuke had gone off? Showing that it had only serves to establish it as an alternate timeline. In fact everything about the last season points to it being an alternate timeline until about the last three or four episodes. Am I the only one who's thoroughly convinced the writers had intended it to be an alternate timeline and then changed their minds at the last minute when they decided that that wouldn't be mysterious/vague/spiritual enough?
    • It's called misleading the audience to believe one thing so that they would be surprised when the actual answer was revealed. The Island was destroyed because they wanted this other world to be a place where they never had to worry about the island again (as Desmond says in the finale). Juliet's "it worked" was a line straight from the ALT. It was foreshadowing to their scene, people just interpreted it differently. It's actually quite clever.
    • I fully believe that they intended it all along. The true nature of the flash-sideways was not only foreshadowed before the flash-sideways showed up, it was foreshadowed all the way back in season one. Nadia's note said she would see Sayid in the next life, if not in this one. And then you had all those times Desmond said, "I'll see you in another life, brutha," which made absolutely no sense at all any other way, and yet he kept saying it and saying it. There are only two things I don't grasp: 1. What happened to those guys among Keamy's party who were shot down? They couldn't have actually died. 2. What was the deal with Ji-Yeon? Was she conscious as a ghost-fetus? Did she have to "let go" of something? Had she yet been born in the church? I didn't see. With Aaron maybe it was overattachment to his mother caused by separation anxiety, and when he let go of that it was indicated by his being born from her again. But what about Ji-Yeon?
    • In the case of Ji-Yeon, I think that she ended up being born to a purgatory duplicate of Sun who's no more real than David is. Of course, that means that she still would not be raised by her real parents.
      • The characters all ended up in the same Purgatory because their time together on the island was the most important part of their lives. Ji-Yeon (and Aaron) was an embryo at the time, and so this doesn't really hold in her case. She probably got a completely different Purgatory or just went straight on to the main afterlife.
    • And in the case of Keamy and his men, it seemed pretty deliberate that the villains of the Alt-Timeline (Keamy and Mikail) were specifically two of the most sinister bastards in the show's history. Thinking about this further and the absurd idea of dying after death, this troper thought of the Ancient Egyptian belief in the demon Ammit, a.k.a. the "Devourer of Souls". After the heart of a dead person was weighed against Maat's feather of truth and found to be heavy with guilt/sin (Sayid's "test" in the Temple, anyone?), their soul was handed over to the monster to be consumed and annihilated. Given the obvious connections in the show between Egypt, the Island, etc., it doesn't seem like a far stretch that the worst of bad people we've encountered on the show are destroyed in the same manner.
      • What about Anthony Cooper? He's still "alive" in the flash-sideways, but very much a vegetable. How does he fit in?
      • Anthony, Mikhail, Keamy, etc. All of those people are just figments of their minds, designed to help propel them to where they are supposed to be ("waking up"). It's the same idea as the Jack's Son.
      • It's debatable which ones are fignments of their imaginations and which ones aren't. Those that come out of nowhere like Jack's Son probably have a stronger argument that they're not real. Ana-Lucia is in the Purgatory, too, but isn't ready to move on, nor Ben, which suggests it has an existence independent of the Losties. I'd say there's a decent possibility that some people in the Purgatory are being punished for what they did: Keamy winds up dead again in a case of live by the sword, die by the sword (and possibly might 'reincarnate' so he can get shot again and again), and quite possibly Anthony Cooper is there as a vegetable to pay for his sins as well — he truly can't move on until his mind believes his body has given out from old age.
      • Literally EVERYTHING from the purgatory is debatable because it doesn't really seem to make any sense. Lots of the people there were pretty happy with their lot in life upon their deaths so there doesn't seem to be much of a plausible reason for a mind wipe with a side helping of personality regression. Charlie, for example, worked pretty hard to stop being a junkie and earn the affections of Claire, so why bother being his old terrible self again instead of simply being aware from the get go? Hurley anyone? Heck the stated purpose in-show of the purgatory which it's said THEY THEMSELVES created is to serve as a meet-up point for all of them to remember the "most important part of their lives." And what's that part they are all so reminiscent about? That would be the Island they all jammed at the bottom of the ocean in the world they created to celebrate it's impact on their lives. My head hurts.
      • The essence of the afterlife is that the characters are starting over, but THIS TIME carrying the knowledge they gained from their past life with them (similar to the ending of the Stephen King series The Dark Tower, though in that case Roland hasn't yet gained the knowledge and is doomed to keep cycling for a while), i.e. Sawyer is a cop because of the three years he spent working security for the DHARMA Initiative . And dharma is a major clue to understanding the finale. One of the goals of Buddhist enlightenment is to remember the knowledge from your past incarnations, which frees you from the repeated cycle of rebirth. And it also has an analogue in Platonic philosophy, Anamnesis or the loss of forgetfulness, where knowledge is described as coming from the source, a divine realm beyond the world that our consciousness returns to when we die. Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once had an experience of what he believed was anamnesis while under the influence of psychotropic drugs, and this experience later served as the basis of VALIS, the book Locke hands to Ben in season 4.
  • So you need to be on the right bearing to enter/leave the island by sea or air, or else Timey-Wimey Ball happens. So how come the Ajira flight can just take off, or for that matter Oceanic 815 and Ajira 316 were both able to fly to the Island without time travelling?
    • Basicaly the Timey-Wimey Ball is one of the affects of getting too close to any of the pockets of electromagnatism, which are spaced all around the island and inside it. It's not that you need to follow a right bearing to get on/off the island, it's that you need to avoid certain spots or else get hit with the full force of whatever the electronmagnatism will do with you. Between the beach and the frieghter happened to be one such pocket, so Faraday was trying to make sure the helicopter avoided it. Ajira 316 didn't go anywhere near that particular pocket and was relatively safe.
    • Well, there are several different explanations. Since the source was off at the time, perhaps the electromagnetic field was down. Or maybe the Island being hard to find was a Jacob thing. Maybe Hurley let them go. Maybe Miles, who can sense electromagnetic fields, is able to guide them out through one of the very narrow corridors.
  • What happened to the polar bears, and the Dharma experiments? What was the point in focusing so much on the Dharma experiments (especially with the web games during the off-season) if they turned out to be really inconsequential to the plot? WHY does the smoke monster give Rousseau's party the strange 'sickness' or craziness or whatever it is that makes them turn on each other? And what ever happened to Ben's friend Annie?
    • "How's Annie...? *giggle* HOW'S ANNIE?"
      • Polar bears went back to bear village, the only real focus on these experiments was in the web-games which was just for more detail, not relating to the main plot. Smokey did to Rousseau's party the same thing he did to Sayid, to try and get more pawns to kill Jacob with. Annie died in the purge or got sent off the Island. Either way, she's been out of Ben's life long enough for him to move on.
    • Not sure what you mean by "inconsequential to the plot". Not only was Jack dropping a nuclear bomb into the Swan drill site important for his character development, it caused the Incident that caused the crash of Oceanic 815, and also played right into the same thematic territory the flashbacks did, about characters dwelling on their past to the detriment of their present and future. But beyond that, philosophically speaking, the DHARMA Initiative is another instance of how, throughout history, mankind has interpreted the perennial philosophy that the Heart of the Island embodies, only this time using science instead of spirituality. As for the Smoke Monster, it's revealed in Across the Sea that every human being has a fragment of the electromagnetic Light within themselves. The Man in Black corrupted the infected peoples' fragments, so that all the good emotions in them the Light engenders (love, unity, joy etc) were suppressed.
  • Headscratcher on a Lost joke commercial they made: Connect Four Million. There is NO WAY you can do four million diagonally NOR vertically on the board presented - never mind the smoke monster can't cross water so most of the shown board is unplayable for him.
    • Okay, I'm biting: Asume that they modified the rules to be "4 million in a undistubed sequence".
  • The HELL is with Kate's horse?!
    • A manifestation of her guilt over killing her father.
  • Why did Jacob have such a strong American accent for so long (centuries before any such thing as an American English accent existed), and why did he and his brother use phrases that only cropped up in the last few decades in English back when Ricardo Alperto showed up? I'm not counting the Translation Convention scenes, that would be ridiculous, just the scenes in the present and in Ricardo's time when they used English.
    • Acceptable Breaks from Reality. Logically Jacob would have a really unusual accent by account of spending his life on a island. Chalk it up to a Translation Convention making their conversation understandable to viewers; speaking authentic english at the time of Jacob's and Richard's first conversation would have been difficult for people to understand due to the amount of change the English language has gone through in the centuries since then.
  • IDK what episode it was in. All I remember was that un locke was leading Jack through the jungle, and he sees this little boy and freaks out. Who the hell was that boy to scare the smoke monster? My dad was so confused he thought it might have been God.
    • If the kid was blond, it was kid!Jacob.
  • A minor one about Nikki and Paulo - if Paulo was bitten by the spiders first, then surely by the time Nikki opens her eyes in the grave, Paulo should have been able to move more than that and draw some attention. I don't know much about paralysing venom/poisons - do they affect people for different time-spans? I realise the meta reason is because the creators wanted to bin them both off.
    • The short answer is that different body types would have different reactions to the poison. Nikki's body just processed the poison faster than Paulo's.
    • Or alternatively, maybe the poison wears off very gradually, and the small head start Paulo had still wasn't enough for him to do anything to save himself.
  • In season 2, Mr. Eko visits Ben (Henry Gale) in the room in the hatch and tells him a story. Great, but why does he cut off his beard right after? What was THAT about?
    • I think it was... his... beard of penance? He grew it because of the two men he killed? Or maybe he just wanted to freak "Henry" out and make him more susceptible to questioning.
  • In season 2, how did Mr. Eko know the prisoner in the hatch was a man when he just saw the room?
    • "A father and son get in a car crash which kills the father. Upon arriving at the hospital, the doctor declares 'I can't operate on this boy because he's my son!' How was this possible?" Plain sexist assumptions.
  • In "Catch-22", Desmond has a vision that leads him into the jungle. He arranges for Hurley, Jin, and Charlie to go with him, because they were a part of the vision. His excuse is that he wants to take them camping. Uh... isn't camping how they live on the Island? Ramshackle tents, little food, outdoors a lot?
  • In one episode, Hurley tricked Sawyer into thinking he was going to be exiled. Ok fine. But Sawyer needed Hurley's help to figure out how to engender good will. How is it that such a skilled con artist and manipulator wouldn't understand how to make people happy?
  •      Dharma Food Drop 
    Why was the food drop to the Swan still going on? How was it sent to the Island without the Purge interrupting anything, like supply lines/delivery or pay flow? If the Others provided the necessary upkeep to send mysterious food drops to Radzinsky, Kelvin, and (possibly unknowingly) Desmond and the Losties, why bother?
         "I've been off-island three times since then, twice to see Locke." 
    If Richard has only been off the island three times since Locke showed up decades in the past ("The Incident: Part 1"), and only one of those times (when he and Ethan hired Juliet) was not to confirm and test their future leader, how freaking important was Juliet? I get that it was important that they hire a prenatal internist, but they've hired dozen of people (or so i thought) since the Purge. Was there a reason that Juliet was important enough to get Richard off the island? From a Doylist point of view, did they not expect Richard's presence in off-island procedures to be uncommon back when Juliet's hiring process was shown? Heck, was there any sign that Richard lied about leaving the island so rarely (and was there any reason for him to do so)?
         How big were the Oceanic settlements, or how cheap was Paik's company? 
    Paik's company was one of the most influential companies in Korea. I know part of that was its mob connections, unless that was just their SOP and it wasn't actually the Korean mafia, but is it still realistic that 2/8 of a plane crash settlement should have allowed her to buy most of the shares in her father's company? Is the correlation between total share prices and the company's worth less strong than I thought (and I already thought that share prices were an indicator of how much people thought a company would be worth in the very near future)? Unless Oceanic was a megalithic Goliath compared to Paik Industries, which I thought was quite large and profitable itself, AND airliners have a lot more profit margin than international industrial companies, four times that kind of money should have crippled Oceanic even with the bonus "free flights forever" non-monetary portion of the settlement (which Sun may have refused in exchange for more cash, although that's yet another "is that even a thing that could have happened?").

    Look Around YouHeadscratchers/Live-Action TVLost Girl

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