I just assume that the ancestors of the Others (the ones we saw with MIB in “Across the Sea” went through an Egyptian architecture phase. The timeframe we were witnessing wasn’t clear; it could very well have been 3000 BC and the people we saw might’ve been colonists from Egypt.
Where did Henry Gale and his balloon come from? Not that this mattered much in the long run, but it was kind of jarring at the time.
Except that they all got massacred by Jacob and MIB’s “foster mother.”
Ah. Hmm. Yes, there’s that.
I wonder if one were to rewatch the series all in quick succession after completing with a notepad how many contradictory/unexplained/etc. oddities you could find with the series. I would guess you could get into dozens of important ones and hundreds of minor ones.
Why didn’t Danielle Rousseau get her daughter back in those 16 years? She must have known where she was being raised.
How did Desmond push that damn button ever 108 minutes for how many years? Wouldn’t lack of sound sleep have driven him crazy?
This was answered pretty definitively in the negative. However, that just raises the question of what exactly happened in the cabin that time. What was the voice whom Locke heard saying “help me,” why did the cabin start to shake, why was Ben thrown across the room, who was the man we caught a dark single-frame glance of?
Others:
How and why did the Dharma food drops keep occuring after the Purge?
How was Jacob able to travel off-island?
How were the Others able to travel off-island, seemingly with more convenience and speed than the sub would allow? (In that season when Tom visited Michael in New York, someone calculated that, given the known timing of that meeting and of his surrounding on-island appearances, he had about 3 days to get to NYC [where he evidently had time to stay in a hotel with his gay lover savoring some fine food and drink], meet Michael, and get back to the island. Was this possible using the sub?)
Where did the Others get the resources to maintain their off-island presence? (Ben’s passports, all that money he had, etc.)
Yeah, I know some of these aren’t real mysteries but merely the result of overanalyzing things the writers themselves never really cared about.
I really want to know this one too. I guess we just have to assume that Jack’s dad is a ghost on the island and that the ghosts can appear to people off-island.
When MIB told Jack that he had appeared to him that first day as Christian, he was either lying, or, more likely, it really was him that time but some of Christian’s appearances were ghost-Christian too.
Why were Dharma food drops still happening when the mainland wouldn’t have heard from the the island team since the 70’s?
If Desmond was special, how did Jack make it down there and survive? Or was that only because the cork was uncorked?
As to the question of what was plotted out from the beginning, it was readily apparent by season two, definitely by S4, that very little of it was, for why cast an 11 year-old boy for a long-term drama in which the first 4 years of the show is plotted to take place over a mere 108 days (of in-show time)? Given how the story played out, the character of Walt was a huge mistake which is why the writers quickly made him become an invisible McGuffin for his father.
Desmond had a partner with him for most of the time (the same guy who had Sayid start torturing people). One day, his partner went to kill himself, and Desmond chased after him. When he made it back to the Hatch, he was too late to push the button, and Oceanic 815 crashed. So, he only had what? 2 or 3 months of solo button pushing? And by time they opened the Hatch, he was a little off-kilter.
Or am I mis-remembering things?
What this guy said. LOST itself was a long con, and you can’t even say that theme wasn’t prominent in the series itself. But you had fun, and that was what mattered – it was better than Happy Days for suresies, even if you didn’t see the shark until the very end.
According to Lostpedia, Jack and Locke open the Hatch 44 days after the plane crash. So not even two months.
The Egyptian group that came before Jacob. It has four toes because it’s based on an animal, like many real Egyptian statues.
Most of that is explained by the Valenzetti stuff in the ARG. They ended up being Hurley’s numbers because the dude in the mental institute he heard them from had long ago heard the numbers being transmitted by the island radio tower.
Supposedly they’ll address that somehow on the DVD.
Well Eko saw him later and he said he was a fraud, so it’s not entirely clear the prophecy was correct. It might have just been a ploy to get Claire on the plane. Maybe Jacob told him what to say. OTOH if you look at what happened when Claire lost her kid, she lost her connection to humanity and became a pawn of the MIB. So maybe that was the reason.
No, but we saw a guy with an eye patch in the Flame station so draw your own conclusions about that.
It was strongly implied that Ben was losing favor with the island due to bad decisions. At least, some of the Others were using that as an excuse to groom Locke for possible take over.
All the weird things and people we saw there were the MIB, according to Kristen dos Santos talking to behind the scenes people. Ben was just conning Locke. The ash circle was a way to keep smoky out, and breaking it meant he could get in. Jacob must have been in the cabin at some point because he left a clue there for Illana. Ben never spoke to Jacob directly, he only got notes through Richard.
Don’t know. Apparently they stop working if the leader of the Temple (Dogon) gets killed. Maybe it was one of Jacob’s rules.
It seems like it was a misinterpretation of what happens if you get corrupted by the MIB. It might also have been mistakingly thought to be related to the pregnancy issues. I don’t think they ever explained it very well. What happened to Claire and Sayid seems a bit different than what happened to Danielle’s husband.
They could and did until the Incident, so I guess it was the ongoing release of energy from the Swan after the Incident. I’m guessing that since the failsafe destroyed the Swan, people can have babies again.
I think originally he just wanted to be in charge, and Ben managed to get him banished from the island due to his off-island liason. After that he wanted to get back, destroy Ben, and be in charge again. Later, Jacob visited him, and convinced him to see the error of his ways and help out by bringing Desmond to the island.
I don’t think we got an answer to that. Obviously she could have gleaned a lot of information from Daniel’s notebook which contained all sorts of future info. But I don’t think his notebook would have told her about the death of the guy in the red shoes. The Lamppost was Dharma, and built to find the island. They knew about the island from the soldiers that went there (we see the soldier’s photo of the island on the bulletin board).
The Egyptians.
I don’t think the light per se needed protection. Rather the device that combined water and the object underneath the island to create the light. When it went out, we saw earthquakes until it was turned back on.
My guess is it’s some kind of exotic material meteor, whose dangerous properties are transformed into positive ones by adding water. Sort of like grounding a downed electrical wire and then feeding it back into the grid to power stuff.
Don’t know. Either because he was the Protector, or because he left before it returned to full power.
I think the energy on the island made it impossible for him to leave. He thought it was just Jacob keeping him there, but actually it was the island’s energy. By turning the energy off he was able to escape. If he had been able to leave without turning out the light he probably would have. And in fact originally it seems he thinks just killing the protector is all it will take and tries that first. Before he became MIB I think he could have left the island, except that leaving the island requires a mode of transport and the proper heading, so he tried to leave by making the donkey wheel transporter device. But Mother didn’t want him messing around with that shit so she broke his toy.
It could scan their memories.
He had to impersonate the leader of the Others, otherwise Richard wouldn’t have let him into the temple.
I think it ends up being noone… the producers have said that they knew who was in the raft, but they never managed to fit it into an episode. So I’m guessing whoever it was supposed to be are dead by this point lol.
What was the huge bird that croaked “Hurley” and flew off in Season 2 or 3? What the heck was that?
I figure Kansas, and that he’s a nod to The Wizard of Oz, in that he comes in from wherever in a balloon, and he has Dorothy Gale’s last name.
Here’s an awesome video that covers many of the unsolved mysteries of Lost. God, the more I think about how the show ended, the angrier I am.
1992–the Dharmassacre was (stupidly) moved to 1992 from the last '70s in one episode. Yeah, makes no sense to me either.
- The statue. Who built it? Why did it only have four toes?
Someone who’d been brought to the island previously, then wiped out. What difference does it make? And why are people more hung up on the four toes than the crocodile face?
- The numbers. Why were Jacob’s numbers used for The Swan’s computer? Why were they broadcast by a crazy scientist? Why did they end up being Hurley’s lottery numbers?
Jacob had a thing for numbers.
- What’s the deal with Walt? Why was he special?
He wasn’t really special in the end. Speculation, the Others really just wanted him because they couldn’t have kids.
- The creepy Aaron prophecy. Why was it so important that he wasn’t raised by another / an Other?
Because it drove Claire mad.
- What was the significance of the glass eye? Did we ever find out who it belonged to?
I don’t even remember a glass eye, guess it wasn’t significant.
- Why did the island heal Locke and Rose? Why did it not heal Ben?
The island healed people in general, not just Locke and Rose. Look at how much it took to kill Mikhail. Just part of the light, I guess. Why didn’t it heal Ben? Because not healing Ben got Jack to where Jack needed to be to eventually kill the MiB.
- Who was using Jacob’s cabin? Was Ben really talking to Jacob? Why was the ash circle broken, and what does that mean?
MiB was using the cabin. Ben flat out said he never talked to Jacob (before he stabbed him in S5 anyway). The ash circle was broken so MiB could come and go from the cabin.
- Why did the ashes repel the monster? What/who were the ashes of?
Why does salt repel demons on Supernatural? I dunno, gotta repel evil black cloudy things somehow.
- The sickness. Why did it infect people like Sayid and Claire? Was it the same sickness that the hatch people were worried about? What causes it?
There was no “sickness” per se. Sayid was just fucked up by his near death experience. Claire was just driven nuts like Rousseau. The hatch sickness was either a Dharma fucking with them experiment, or precaution against the poison the hostiles used to wipe out most of the Dharmites.
- Why couldn’t women give birth on the island?
WAG, Jacob did that because he needed to get Juliet to the island.
- What was Widmore’s motivation? What did he want from the island?
He was the leader, he got deposed. He wanted HIS island back because it was HIS, not some punk kid like Ben’s.
- Why was Eloise so omniscient? What did she know? What was the lamppost station, and who built it?
Eloise had Daniel’s notebook, which spelled out a lot. She also flat out stated the lamppost was built by Dharma, IIRC.
- Who occupied the island before Jacob’s mother? Who built the cork?
Previous guardians of the island. This has been going on a long time.
- What was the light, and why did it need to be protected?
The source of life perhaps? Is the island the garden of Eden? I dunno, fits as well as anything. It needs to be protected because bad things happen when it’s not. The island’s a cork, keeping Hell/evil at bay, remember.
- Why didn’t Jack turn into a monster when he bathed in the magic light water?
Because he was like Jacob, perhaps.
- What was the monster’s motivation? Did he want to leave the island? If so, why couldn’t he? Or did he want to get to the light? Or did he want to destroy it?
Yes, he wanted to leave the island. He couldn’t because “mother” made it so he couldn’t. He only wanted to get to the light so he could pull the plug, destroy the island, and sail away.
- Why did people see flashes of their lives in the monster’s smoke?
That’s how smokey learns about them.
- Why did the monster need Locke’s body? Why couldn’t he use Christian’s?
He didn’t need Locke’s body, Locke’s body was in a box, then in the ground. He needed Locke’s form, though, so he could pose as the leader and gain access to Jacob and get Ben to stab him. What good would Christian’s form do there?
When was it ever established as being in the 70’s? The incident was in the 70’s, the massacre was always later, after Ben had reached adulthood.