Except that mommy told Jacob directly, “never ever go into the light cave”… fate worse than death and all that.
Absolutely, 100% total agreement. A truly great job. It will be a sad day if he doesn’t win one.
My take on this is… first, it confirms Daniel’s “whatever happened, happened” rules of time travel. Meaning that “The Incident”, as it always happened, is what we saw. And what our Losties learned about first on the Swan orientation film, then later experienced from their own perspective. It always happened that way – they just saw/experienced it from a different perspective (out of order) in their own personal timelines.
Given that, it means that clearly Radzinsky and Pierre Chang were still around afterwards, alive (but Chang with the busted arm, as seen in the Swan orientation vid) – so they survived “The Incident”.
So to me the possibilities are:
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the bomb went off, and was always part of The Incident. But either the blast was so far underground that its effects didn’t reach Chang, Radzinsky, etc on the surface – or the electromagnetic energy in that pocket somehow negated the “bomb” and radioactive effects of the blast, enough so that the surface folks weren’t hurt. Juliet and our Losties jumped forward in a time flash, perhaps triggered by the combination of the bomb and the energy pocket fighting it out?
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or the bomb didn’t go off, and our Losties jumped forward in a time flash, related to the pocket of energy.
Either way, our Losties jump forward (which includes all Losties from the original time jumps – like Rose and Bernard), the Dharmites seal up the site with concrete underneath, build the Swan, and change its intended purpose from research to the button-pushing protocol (perhaps they weren’t able to seal it up completely, hence the need to release the energy build-ups).
Another thing that just occurred to me is imagine how much time people that followed the show spent sitting and thinking about what it all meant… People talked around water coolers at work, people wrote the Lostpedia, people wrote countless articles, blogs, and Straight Dope threads trying to figure it out. Probably thousands and thousands of hours… and it didn’t matter because there are no answers. The actual writers of the show didn’t think of any. Mega-bummer.
Desmond was special, apparently immune to the electromagnetic energy beneath the island, which undoubtedly was abundant in the big light plug cave. Desmond probably acquired this nature when he was the guy to turn the failsafe key in the Swan, before the “sky turned purple”.
Yep, that’s the one that doesn’t seem consistent to me. He should have become smokified.
Lost finale draws only 13.1 million. http://blog.zap2it.com/frominsidethebox/2010/05/tv-ratings-lost-finale-takes-off-for-abc-sunday.html
That’s the unders.
But that was* her* rules. Maybe Jacob changed them.
Yeah I got nothin.
That Jimmy Kimmel special was exactly what I needed. Can’t wait for Josh Holloway in Snakes on a Plane 2:Electric Boogaloo!
I would watch a spin-off set during the three years Sawyer, Miles, Jin, and Juliet spent at the Dharma Initiative in the 70s. Sawyer as LaFleur, head of security with Miles as his trusted deputy (we can kill off Phil in the pilot episode).
They should call it “Dharma Police.”
what I noticed in that last shot of the wreckage on the beach was the obviously sorted piles of clothes, and the footprints leading away from the plane.
It seemed like a clear message that they had survived the crash, and that the island stuff was real. Confirmation that only the flash sideways stuff was afterlife.
For their ability to craft an entertaining, dramatic hour (42 min) of TV, I give the creators a B+.
For their ability to tell a story, they get a huge ugly F. As detailed by Improvisor, storyteller0910, and so many others here. I don’t feel cheated as much as embarrassed for them. Re: storyteller’s comments, my gripe is not just with the over-the-top not-naming of MIB, but that style throughout the whole thing.
Overall, I would not recommend this series to anyone else.
Is anyone else anxiously awaiting the re-imagined Lost series, due out on 4-D retinal holovisors in ~2042 ?
So, bear with me a moment…
Those on the duct-taped plane - Lapidus, Miles, Kate, Sawyer - flew from the island, back to civilization, and went on to lead (relatively) normal lives? Say, for another 40-50 years or so?
Is there a semi-consensus on this statement?
And when the usual suspects were all gathered at churcheaven awaiting Jack’s appearance, does this indicate he was the last to die?
If the above is to be accepted (and I’m asking, more than stating), what did Jack do, lay on the riverbank, dog-side, for decades before he joined the ranks of the pulse-less?
mmm
No – he was in the sideways flashes throughout, just as long as the others were. And in the afterlife, time has no meaning anyways. In fact, his dad said as much – some died before him, some long after. Perhaps Jack was just the last of that immediate group that was ready to “let go”, or perhaps the last to realize where he was.
His father told him that they were outside of time in Heaven’s lobby. He specifically said many died before and many later but the area they were in, the ATL was the same for all of them.
This is a question that I have pondered many times regarding works of fiction.
People sit around trying to “figure it out” as if it is some grand secret of the universe with an empirical truth to be gotten at, and that somehow, someday, we will find out the truth and see if we were right. But fiction has no truth. As you sit around trying to figure it out, you’re just doing the same thing the writers do. Someone is just dreaming all this shit up. So all you’re really doing is seeing if your imagination syncs up with the minds of the writers. You can dream it up too, and have the story however you want it in your own head. There’s nothing that says that the writers’ explanation of events is any better than your water-cooler version. Your answers are as good as theirs. Or, according to your post, their non-answers. Create your own alternate reality 
Yes, but we know what that fate was… it turns you into a smoke monster, and appears to keep you trapped on the island, as evidenced by MiB. Perhaps for her, that was a fate worse than death? In any event, I presumed she knew from experience.
Many people have deflected the suckitude of the second half of this season - episodes that covered territory where there should’ve been real answers and meaning and there wasn’t, the most obvious case being Across The Sea and explained that they trusted that the finale would make up for it. Nope, turns out that those episodes just sucked, there was never any sort of consistent idea by anyone, etc. The finale was basically the last chance to make the series into some sort of sensical story and failed.
I mean - even the most basic question… imagine you just watched the (very good) season 1, and the show was cancelled. But you had the chance to ask the writers one question. It would be “so what was the island?”, right? And then you watched 5 more years of this show and still don’t know. That is just… silly.
I mean - did we learn anything in this episode? Sure, stuff happened - but did we actually learn anything? We learned that the ATL was actually just a group hallucination and we about a third of the screen time this season on something that was inconsequential since nothing actually happened. Otherwise, did we learn one single thing?
I mean, really - I don’t even know where to start with the criticism. And I probably won’t. I’ll probably save it for the “so, let’s look back at LOST as a series” threads rather than this episode thread.
What debris on the beach? Maybe I’m seeing something different to you, but what I saw was Jack’s eye closing, fade to black, Lost logo, then Bad Robot. No closing credits, no plane debris, except as part of Jack’s flashback.
The ghost of Michael is whispering in the jungle.