I haven’t watched a single episode, but somehow I’ve absorbed a bonanza of Lost factoids from the collective pop unconscious. There was a polar bear, and a weird company that built tunnels, and some of the people on the island didn’t like the other people. That’s about it though.
So spoil the whole shebang for me. What are all those things and what other stuff happened. Also, if possible (I know it’s hotly debated) what does it all mean?
The second any of us know any of those things, we’ll let you know.
Wow.
I’m really glad I never got into this show.
Or you could read this, which is from the original script. Things would have been over far more quickly had they used this version.
In case it’s not obvious, reading the link will spoil all sorts of plot points.
Funny this thread should come up because I had to get my SO into Lost, so my friend & I (both fans) laid out a template on how to get people into Lost who missed it. Here’s the pitch:
So the show starts with a bunch of people on a plane. The plane experiences some turbulence, then breaks apart midair. The front section of the plane crashes on a beach and the survivors dont have time to question how they survived, because there are injured people and explosions from debris, etc. Very quickly, it becomes clear that this island is weird. On one of the first nights, they hear odd sounds in the jungle and trees getting knocked down. The encounter (& kill) a polar bear. One of the passengers on the plane was a paraplegic when he boarded. Upon waking on the island, his legs were healed.
They encounter many strange things on the island, but towards the end of the first season they encounter a hatch which appears to lead to some sort of underground bunker. One of the survivors, Hurley, was in a mental institution years ago. While there, an inmate kept repeating the numbers “4 8 15 16 23 42”. After Hurley left the institution, he played the lottery using those #s and won $150 million. However, after winning he hit a string of bad luck (including winding up on the island), leading him to think the #s were cursed. Hurley discovers those #s engraved on the hatch.
That gets you basically to the end of season one. Things get more interesting from there but that should get you started. We also went through each season and cherry picked the episodes that we thought both were very good and revealed information about the mythos:
pilot 1&2(part 1 kinda sux, part 2 is awesome)
exodus 1&2
man of science/faith
adrift
two for the road
?
live together die alone
A Tale of Two Cities
not in portland
the man from talahassee
the man behind the curtain
through the looking glass
The Beginning of the End
Confirmed Dead
The Constant
Meet Kevin Johnson
The Shape of Things to Come
Cabin Fever
There’s No Place Like Home
All you need to know in 4 words:
Vincent is the Key.
Having given up television (network and cable) years ago, I get to see series like LOST in their (near) entirety. Last year I watched seasons 1, 2, and 3 over a few nights time. I’d recommend that approach highly.
I’m currently watching *Arrested Development * the same way.
Aside from the fact it’s not possible to spoil something when you don’t know what the hell’s going on, I can’t think of a more complicated show to have to summarize.
Seriously? After all this time no one still has any idea what’s going on? How can you stand to watch a show about a million mysterious events with no explanation?
And how many seasons did the X-files go on? 
And given that shows get cancelled all the time, no guarantee there will ever be an explanation!
This was a concern of many including the writers. It has become less of one since the network and writers have agreed on an ending point to the show (6 seasons).
That leaves two more (16?) episode seasons to wrap up the details.
An airplane goes down over the south pacific. The survivors are on an island and very early on, they encounter strange happenings on this island. There are central characters and their backstories are interspersed into the what’s going on on the island. We gradually learn that some of these people are loosely connected to one another. Most importantly, we discover there are hostile inhabitants already on the island.
As a result of one of the main character’s weird “connection” to the island, he/we discover a hatch that leads to an (almost) abandoned scientific research station, the first of many we will encounter. This scientific research group arrived on the island decades ago and their true motives haven’t completely come to light, and was apparently kept secret even from some of it’s members, but it appears that their ulterior mission had something to do with “saving the world” and the space and time travel abilities of the island. This research group was eventually decimated years ago by the aforementioned group of hostile inhabitants.
The history of these hostiles is shrouded in mystery, as is the nature of the island. These include:
A mysterious “security system” in the form of a scary black smoke moster that makes mechanical sounds. This entitiy is able to take the form of people from it’s “victim’s” past. It can be summoned by unknown means but cannot cross a giant sonic fence erected on a portion of the island.
People have either hallucinated or actually encountered deceased people from their past.
The island has been suggested to either being sentient or at least permeated with sentient forces that can alleviate longstanding injuries or diseases and disabilities even of people who have left the island, but, curiously fetuses concieved on the island die midway through pregnancy.
There is an old slave ship that somehow came aground far, far, far inland on the island.
There is evidence of a previous civilization on this now-deserted-appearing island, evidenced by a giant 4-toed statue and a weird cold subterranean wheelhouse that can apparently move the island. Possibly through time as well as space.
The “hostiles” or “Others” are refer to themselves as the “good guys” and are —or were, until recently — led by Benjamin Linus, a master-manipulator. These others have lots of resources at their disposal and were able to leave the island at will. They use the homes built by the scientific research group and are able to learn/know a great deal about the castaways. It is being suggested that they are in a struggle against a rich and powerful man named Widmore to keep him finding the island.
Several of our main characters have recently made it back to civilization, but there has been some strange phenomena in their lives that are alternately driving them crazy or suicidal. They are apparently driven to return to the island.
J.J. Abrahms has mentioned that one of his goals with the show is to keep things shrouded in mystery until the very end. He was inspired by this “Box of Magic” he got as a child and has never opened, citing that the possibilities of what might be in the box is itself a thrilling experience.
Thus, anyone looking for instant gratification as to what the hell is going on is going to be aggravated with this show. People who think getting there is half the fun and enjoy the ride and like to hypothesize based on the clues that are gradually doled out love this show.
ABC has agreed to a specific number of seasons to tell the story. The writers/producers vow that they’re not making it up as they go along (and have even placed items in the first season that will demonstate this retroactively).
I always hate such things – I don’t get excitement about something always potential, but never opened. All too often I see cases where there’s nothing in the damned box. They may say that there’s a real explanation at the end, but I;m mightily skeptical. The bits and pieces I’ve seen (my wife watches the show) don’t fill me with confidence that there is a coherent whole to this story – it looks too much as if they keep pulling rabbits out of their hat to keep audience interest, rather than to slowly reveal pieces of a coherent whole.
Six, maybe seven. And you’ll never convince me otherwise.
other reasons to love it - really good acting (and hot actors)
PS - did anyone above link to the McSweeneys summary noted in another thread? That was funny, and a good update.
Seasons 5 and 6 will be 17 episodes to make up for the two we lost this year.
I can completely see how you could get sucked in from the beginning, so I’m not being truly critical of the show or the fans, but to some one whose never seen it, just from watching that YouTube synopsis, the show sounds really really really stupid.