I Finally Watched “Lost,” And I’m Baffled By The Amount Of People Who Truly Believe They Were “Dead The Whole Time”
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Is this the biggest Mandela Effect in TV history? I think so!
BuzzFeed Staff
🚨 While they weren’t “dead the whole time,” this article does contain spoilers about how Lost actually ends — you’ve been warned!
I got clarity in the days that followed, when almost every conversation that I had about me finally finishing Lost led to a wide-eyed friend leaning in and asking: “So, what did you make of the ending? Them being dead the whole time?” To my surprise, every Google search in relation to the show was similarly misguided.
For a moment, I thought that it was me who had somehow wildly misinterpreted what I thought was a very “Explain Like I’m 5” monologue from Jack’s dad, Christian Shephard, in the final episode.
As somebody who just binged the entire six seasons in as many months, I’m genuinely baffled by how this happened, and I’m here to set the record straight — even if it is, admittedly, several years too late.
To do this, we need to address the fact that throughout Lost’s entire run, each episode normally follows two different time periods. The majority of the time, this is life on the island peppered with flashbacks to each character’s life before they boarded that fateful flight.
However, instead of the plane going down, it manages to overcome the turbulence and smoothly continue its journey for a safe arrival at LAX.
For the rest of the season, storylines that follow the characters in LA after avoiding the crash are interspersed with scenes on the island, which pick up where Season 5 — and all of the seasons that came before it — left off.
It soon becomes clear that all isn’t as it seems in LA, with each of the characters seemingly destined to cross paths with one another, crash or no crash. Eventually, it also becomes evident that there is some level of crossover between the two timelines as everybody inexplicably begins to remember life on the island, despite the plane not crashing.
As all of the Oceanic 815 passengers find one another in the flash-sideways, there is discussion of them all heading to a pre-arranged meeting point, which is where everything comes to a head in the season finale.
Jack asks how he got there, being dead and all, and Christian pointedly replies: “How are you here?” to which Jack realizes: “I died too.”
(Sidenote, but I genuinely can’t comprehend how Christian can explicitly say: “Everything that’s ever happened… is real,” and so many people’s response be: “Huh, I guess none of it was real!” but we move.)
As Island Jack closes his eyes to die, LA Jack is swallowed by a white light at the church.
Here, they are given the time to overcome their pasts before moving on.
This is why all of the characters in this timeline are seemingly living a better life to the one they had before the crash, such as John Locke having a close relationship with his father, and Sawyer working as a police officer instead of being a criminal.
Regardless of when they died, their spirits, or their souls, or whatever you want to call it, exist in this space together until they are all ready to move on to the afterlife as one.Christian even explains why not all of the past characters are in the church, making it clear that this is only a space for the people whose “most important part” of their life was the time they spent together on the island.
But for better or for worse, it was always clear that Jack was the main protagonist of the show, so his death would be an obvious place for it to end.
As for how this conclusion was so widely misinterpreted by the masses, I don’t really have an answer.
People who watched the show as it aired back in the '00s have told me that from as early as Season 2, viewers had started to speculate that all of the characters were dead and the island was purgatory. This theory may have become so widespread that everyone simply continued to think that this is what actually happened.
There is also evidence that viewership gradually declined over the course of the show but jumped back up for the finale, suggesting that people tuned in for the final episode despite not having watched for a while.
This is obviously not the way to approach any TV series, but definitely not one as intricate and multi-layered as Lost. It’s perhaps understandable that if they missed entire seasons of the show, then the distinction between the Season 6 flash-sideways being purgatory could muddle into everything else being purgatory, too.
But my ultimate theory? Typically speaking, the people who are wrong about something are usually the loudest. If we’re being honest, it probably only took a handfull of very loud people who didn’t properly pay attention to the show to dominate the overall narrative and create some kind of mass Mandela Effect.
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