In September 2004, Oceanic Flight 815, flying from Sydney to Los Angeles, broke apart in midair and fell onto an uncharted island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Of course, me living under a rock, I didn’t find out about this epic crash until sometime in 2008. And that’s when my obsession started.
I crammed 4 years’ worth of episodes into a few weeks, watching “Lost” literally every waking hour, staying up all night most nights because I was just that hooked.
So many questions; how did the “Losties” survive such a crash, who are these people — “The Others,” The DHARMA Initiative, The Freighties, Magnus Hanso, Charles Widmore, Richard Alpert — where did The Black Rock come from, what is the black smoke, what is The Island? The list goes on.
As far as I can figure, everything really did happen. From Jacob and The Man in Black being born, to Magnus Hanso’s Black Rock smashing its way through the four-toed statue of Taweret, to Widmore’s expeditions of The Island and the DHARMA Initiative being slaughtered by The Others, to Flight 815’s fateful crash and everything that followed. The Island’s history is really far too epic to list. But all that did indeed happen. They were not dead, and The Island was not purgatory, limbo, hell, nirvana, Valhalla, heaven, what have you. They all died when they died, on or off the island.
Now, why it all happened? I really don’t know. I don’t know why it was necessary to enter “4 8 15 16 23 42” every 108 seconds to prevent a massive electromagnetic incident, there was no real clarification as to why The Island had such intense magnetic properties, or why on The Island it was possible to jump through time. Though, we did discover that there is a really pretty golden glow coming from the middle of The Island that necessitated a protector. But again, it wasn’t made clear what it was, where it was coming from.
And we did get an explanation as to what the “flash sideways” were. Those were glimpses of their afterlives. Of them meeting again, though it took emotional events — births, near deaths, falling in love — to make them realize their souls have touched once before, and for the memories of their previous life to come flooding back. And once they did come back, once everyone was back together, when they all came to the church, ready to let go, they were ready to move on.
The series began with an eye, an opening eye, and it quickly became a common theme, much like light and dark. And to be sure, you can’t have opening without closing. As Christian Shepherd walked up the church’s aisle, opening the doors and allowing a warm glow to flood the room, we see Jack Shepherd — lying in presumably the same bamboo forest he woke up in, in the pilot episode — closing his eyes.
See you in another life, Brother.
