Note: I’m on vacation this week. While I’m gone, I’ve set up a week of discussion posts revisiting the Lost finale in time for the Lost series DVD set, out Aug. 24. In other words, this is a recording; you cannot press 0 to speak to a real live person.
I’ll keep this one simple: now that Lost is all said, done and epilogued, has it answered the questions you wanted it to answer?
OK, I can’t keep it that simple. I don’t think Lost answered everything it should have, or that I wanted it to. But there’s a difference between “Lost never answered this” and “Lost never answered this in a manner that was satisfactory to me.”
Over the last three months, when I’ve asked people which specific answers Lost didn’t give, one of the most common responses has been, “The numbers.” The numbers? Really? The numbers were Jacob’s co-ordinates on the Lighthouse compass for the six Candidates he brought to the Island. They were also, if you followed Lost mythology in the online Lost Experience material, involved in the Valenzetti equation, which the Hanso Foundation believed to be scientifically significant.*
*[Sidebar: this is one of the little things about season 6 that I found really cool–the doubling effect by which phenomena had two explanations, one rooted in the spiritual mythology of the Island, and one that echoed it in the physical world. So the numbers were both Jacob’s compass headings and part of an equation. Women’s dying in pregnancy on the Island was the aftermath of the Incident, but also an echo of The Mother murdering Jacob and MIB’s birth mother, and so on.]
In short: the numbers were significant and powerful because they represented the Candidates. Now, this may not have been a good answer. It may not have been a cool answer. But I’m pretty sure it was an answer—one with more bearing on the actual show than the Dharma pallet drops (which got saved for the DVD epilogue.)
That said, there were things the series never really answered, and moreover, the finale ended up raising some new questions, especially about how the Flash Sideways worked: Were the other people in it real? What happened when people died in this world? Is it not horrible that Jack never says goodbye to his not-real son? Or does Jack just stop remembering/caring for him once he knows this is not his real life?
Also: do we ever find out definitively what Smokey intends to do when he leaves the Island? To destroy the world? Why? Why doesn’t he kill Jack when he has the chance? (Or is he prevented by the rules?) If the glowing chamber fries anyone but Desmond, how did anyone manage to build it? Who made the plug? (Did anyone make the plug?) Why, in the end, was Eloise aware of Desmond’s future and his state of mind when he flashed around in the past? Why did it matter where Aaron was raised and by whom?
I’m guessing that some of these questions actually were answered, and I was just too dense to notice, so tell me. And again: which (if any) were the most significant questions that you thought “The End” left unanswered?