They intentionally made it ambiguous so u and your buddy would argue about. But whoever came up with the idea probably had a definitive answer that he would give...given u know...he created world/construct.

So u and your buddy can argue till you are blue in the face but there is no way to say who is right and who is wrong given the information available.

I kind of thought the skeletons might have been of people who built the system behind the donkey wheel. but technically i think the only people who could go in there were those that could find the cave....the fact the water didnt run straight to the pool was a bit odd too.

Agree, but the writers don't get the ultimate say.

If Lindelof and Cuse showed up at my work tomorrow and said the answer is X, I'm allowed to disagree with them. It's out in the world now, they are critics like anybody else. Saying they know the answer is wrong. They know their answer, sure, but so do I.

Their opinion is obviously more noteworthy and interesting than mine in the circumstances, but it isn't *the* answer.

Speaking of which, I need another beer.

OK that's a worthless post. Post saver!



OK this is way better.

agree, and I think that's how they prefer it and why they don't want to give concrete answers, thus after ATS -"this is what answers on LOST look like".

They have said that they have often read theories that are way more interesting and creative than what they believed the answer to be.

Exactly. Nobody talks about the end of the Star Wars saga imo.

IMO this is where poor writing has left a pretty questionable plothole...

Christian does clearly state that the losties created this "place" so they could meet up and move on together.

however Ben is very deliberately aware, he clearly has flashbacks when desmond pummels him. he even has a moment of reflection with Hurley and makes final peace with Locke, if he was just a construct why would he do this and then decline to enter the church?

So if you examine closely what is said by Christian and what is visually shown to happen in the "sideways," you have 2 contradictory conclusions you could draw. i personally cant believe that sideways Ben was only a construct, and ceased to exist when the other walked into the light and just wouldnt make sense to have him interact the way he did with Hurley/Locke, on top of having the flashbacks that all the others had on top of having island awareness. add Eloise to the mix being aware and not wanting to lose Faraday and we really have ourselves a wtf?

Perhaps it is a final red herring left by the showrunners as one constant theme of the show was Christian saying/doing things that skewed perceptions or in some cases were deceptive(depending on if it was actually Christian or MIB posing as Christian) and didnt really make sense.

examples...Christian scolds young Jack for standing up to bullies, saying he doesnt have what it takes...Asking Jack to lie to the medical board...telling Locke he is gonna have to die...some others that are escaping my grasp at the moment.

/end ramble

Good ramble.

i try...

I'm not sure he means just those people in the room...he may also mean daniel, charlotte, miles, ben, alex, etc etc. Desmond technically could have helped awaken Miles, or Daniel etc...but he chose not to.
He chose to kind of awaken Ben when he started beating him out of anger, even though it seemed like that wasn't part of his plan - Ben just got in the way.

just watched finale.

I remember watching seasons 1-4, and I got addicted pretty quick to this show. I watched LOST nonstop in succession over Christmas break. After that point I started to care less and less. New plots, new characters, and so many interesting things in previous seasons were left unanswered. The hatch, the others and kate/sawyer/jack were all intriguing characters and concepts that I cared a lot about early on. By the end of this show I didn't really care about any of these characters. I would constantly be thinking....who cares if they die at this point? The show can bring them back via another reality. All the characters have experienced events that are theoretically impossible, but they never seem to take into account how meaningless their decisions actually are. So I felt as if many of the problems that the characters faced were filler because the writers needed more storyline to extend the show.

By the time I reached season 6 I had lost a lot of interest. I still tuned in to watch every week (with my college roommates) and it held my attention but it lost so much of that spark that this show initially had.

If there is anything I would like to tell the LOST writers, its F U.

and heres where it gets confusing again...how does one "awaken" in the sideways/purgatory?

it seems to be widely assumed that desmond himself awakens the losties via some un-stated skill, but lets take a closer look...

at first glance it appears that desmond knows how to awaken the losties, he does so by way of matchmaking and also by physically assaulting ben. he begins match-making by connecting ppl who were previously in love, himself/penny and hurley/libby. the key seems to be physical touch.

but lets take a closer look

charlie, from what we're shown/told, is the first one to begin the awakening process. he does so via a near-death experience in the sideways. he actually is the first to trigger an awakening via a near-death with desmond that closely mirrors an on-island event.

Jin and Sun are together through-out the sideways, are clearly in love, have sex, and Sun is even shot and experiences a near death, somehow they do not awaken and remember the island until juliet gives them an ultrasound. you would think jin and sun would have been the first to awaken so i think the writers just decided there are no rules to waking up, and we're gonna do whatever we want.

sayid is also with the person he loved most, and im talking about Nadia, for extended periods of time and never awakens, he also encounters Jin, Keamy, and Sawyer but apparently their bonds were not strong enough to trigger an awakening? so the love of his life and 2(3 lets count Hurley) of his very closest friends could not trigger an awakening but shannon the girl he knew for a couple months and banged for a week is his key(LOL ok)...lets add Kate and Sawyer to the mix who clearly have one of the biggest connections on the show(regardless of her love declaration to jack in the finale) and at various times were/are in love with eachother meet not once, but twice and have physical contact, but still no awakening, not even a flash...same with jack and juliet, faraday/charlotte, sawyer/miles etc.

basically, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to why or how one is woken up, no rules, besides perhaps encountering desmond i guess(which would be trouble for anyone else needing to be woken up since des has moved on), but it really just appears as a plot device the writers used to conveniently wake everyone up on time for the last scene. which is too bad, could have been interesting/clever and in line with the lost mythos/themes of their being certain rules applying to certain circumstances.

How the hatersgonnahate.jpg has not been posted in this thread yet is unfathomable to me.

Seriously, haters gonna hate. I've seen one TV show better than this in my life, and it's called The Wire.

charlie is saved by Jack which is similar to how Jack saved him in season 1.
So it could be in part because of Jack.

Maybe because Sayid was never meant to be with Nadia (I think this in part is why in the sideways world not only is Nadia with his brother, but he makes things worse to the point that he can never see her again.)

I don't think they made any hard fast rules( though Sawyer/Juliette and Jack/Kate, Sayid/Shannon, and Charlie/Claire were never together until the island..Jin and Sun were already a couple prior). It does kind of seem that if 1 person is awake...it is easy for them to help someone else do the same.

But I get the feeling when Daniel eventually kisses Charlotte...it's gonna cause a little flashback lol.

Except that at the end we learned everything they did mattered. They couldn't change things by detonating the H-bomb. There was no other reality. Their decisions weren't meaningless, their decisions save the world.

I just can't even rebuttal to people who disliked the finale, because they're so wrong. Really, what did you want? I just don't get it.

Yeah lol.
I love people that say the final season proved everything before it was meaningless...except for you know Jack, Kate, Sun, Jin, Sawyer, etc helping defeat the MIB(evil) and protecting the light and finding a new Jacob (you can debate what the light represents but given the same light fills the church as the Losties transcend it seems like a pretty blatant clue) which seems kind of important.

But no, the mystery of the hatch and the Others was waaaay more interesting and important.

One minor complaint - I hated that Boone was sitting next to Juliet and Sawyer.
Seemed to make perfect sense that he would sit next to Locke. I mean he was even seated next to him in the plane for god sakes.
Especially since Juliet doesn't even know who the **** he is.


Also interesting idea why Ben needed to stay from Doc Jensen's EW column
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,2031...388269,00.html

Once again I didn't make myself clear.

I'll take the Widmore-Ben rivalry since you agree that there were shortcomings there. Think back to all the stuff that happened off island with Ben, Widmore, Sayid and whoever else where people were getting killed and picked up by the van with the whole "you're on the wrong side" (team? I can't remember exactly which is fine because none of this mattered!) It wasn't exactly boring but the main thing that made that part interesting for us to watch was that it seemed like there was a lot more to the conflict than we knew. Whatever it was, it was sure to be good. In retrospect, all of that stuff between Ben/Sayid and Widmore is pretty meh. With their method of storytelling they made it a lot more interesting by deceiving into thinking there was more to what was going on when it was really just a pissing contest between two arrogant dicks. Now that we know that those episodes aren't going to be compelling at all if we watch them again.

The same goes for some of the battles between the losties and others. We (or our wives perhaps) might have cared a bit about how Sawyer and Kate would get out of the cages and away from the others, but what made it somewhat watchable (that was in a bad stretch) was that we didn't know what the deal was with the others. As above, it seemed like there was a lot more to the conflict than we knew. Whatever it was, it was sure to be interesting. As it turned out, apparently they were doing that **** for no reason other than that they were power hungry and bloodthirsty - completely ordinary bad-guy stuff. So again, their method of storytelling made the conflict look much more interesting than it turned out to be in retrospect.

Aaron is probably the best example of this. Sure, babynapping drama isn't boring or anything but that whole storyline was hugely amplified because the writers strongly implied that they had weird reasons for wanting him so badly. That they didn't makes it pretty dull. I don't want to rewrite the show, but if Aaron turned out to have an important role in protecting or saving the island then it would make that part of the early plot very good going back through.

For the opposite, look at last summer. We found out more about the smoke monster and that made it a lot of fun to go back and watch the old scenes with the monster and apparitions. Same goes for the scenes with what we thought was Locke in season 5. All of those scenes got a lot more interesting - what we learned added to them. Unfortunately, with the all of the conflicts from the first 4 seasons what we learned this season took a lot away from them.

It is way more interesting than the fairytale nonsense the writers ended up turning this show into in the final half of season 6.
If the writers wanted to leave things to talk about with your friends they failed miserably at that too. Everyone I know that loved the first 4 seasons either hated the ending or had already dropped out mid way through season 6.
Internet fan boys are the only people I've seen that liked the ending.

The fact the Sopranos ending is a more a head **** than the Lost ending is pretty comic and really gave me a new appreciation for the balls David Chase had to go for that(and I HATED that ending when it happened). The Lost writers caved in to sugar, spice and everything nice cliche for the typical dumb ass average viewer.

I don't think you can compare Lost though to The Wire or Sopranos...the writers themselves said they were influenced by Twin Peaks though. I just started watching Twin Peaks again last night to forget about the train wreck we just watched this week. It doesn't have the twists and turns of Lost, but is just better because it was canceled before it could get stupid. As far as the characters its not even close, Twin Peaks by a mile. If you want to wash your mouth of the bad taste then go get Twin Peaks ASAP.

hatersgonnahate.jpg

also days of our lives

This is the point though you kept saying it and saying it, and clearly you were going to like the ending come what may, but the fact is that it didnt fit into the story at all. All it was was a self indulgent way of doing a final little curtain call to all the characters from the previous seasons, get the audience to give a little cheer when their old fave comes on, have a little cry with the flashbacks as we remember all the good times the characters had. Gets them all together for the bow as the final curtain goes down. Its panto 101 and I wanted more from it than that.

Yes I agree it worked on its own merit and it was entertaining, but the reality is that they dedicated half a season to somthing that had no bearing or relevance to the story that had been told previously. After the big reveal there is no reason to go back and watch the flash sideways, somthing that the defenders were saying might well be the case.

I do think people are putting to much into the island being sunk there though it was clearly just a diversion to help hide the reality of the flash sideways.

The on Island stuff had its own problems as well, yes Jacks completing the circle last few minutes was nicely done, but the meat of the story was a huge anti climax. Lets face it the culmination of the 6 seasons with hundreds of deaths and untold misery all round that the final battle was pulling out a plug and putting it back in.

On top of that there was no sense of jeapordy in any of it, if the plug stayed out was it the island destroyed or the world, if smokie left the island was it really the end of eveyone we know and love or just people like Penny who was in danger as Widmores daughter. That was more the failure of Over the Sea because it didnt really flesh out the Mythology, the power of the source or even Jacob and MIB enough to make us as an audience really care and didnt really know what the stakes were that were being played out.

Also those maintaining it always was a character driven show and are searching Lostpedia to give answers to some of the unanswered questions, do you really think Lostpedia would exist today and be so comperehensive is the mystery elements were not so important to a huge part of the audience.

Haven't made it through the whole thread to see if this has been answered, but IMO, I think she was talking about unplugging the vending machine and the Apollo bar falling out, not the nuke.....