Season VI, Deep Thoughts - The Finale

Just a quick FYI, the official recap of the show is the next blog entry down, so just keep scrolling down before reading this. As I said at the end of the recap, I plan on doing a few more blog entries to discuss the immense amount of questions that were left unanswered, and I will do my best to find resources to provide some sort of closure for each question. Plus, I love doing this, so it will help with my LOST withdrawal over the next few weeks.

So here’s what I think all went down in the finale. Once Juliet detonated the bomb in the season 5 finale, the intense amount of energy surged our friends from 1977 back to the present. I am still trying to grasp if the bomb explosion WAS the incident that killed a lot of the Dharma folks, or if it was the massive amount of electromagnetic energy that was released from the bottom of the drill rig. Regardless, the bomb was nothing more than a Flux Capacitor.

We are led to believe throughout this final season that the explosion of the atomic bomb actually created an alternate sideways time line where the characters are all well and good, living their lives and fulfilling their desires. However we all got the impression that something was missing in their lives. As my brother Dave had commented a while back, Desmond wanted approval from Widmore. He has it, but he is alone and doesn't know Penny. Charlie is still playing in Drive Shaft, but he is still a junky. Claire is going to raise Aaron herself, but she is all alone. Hurley has the best luck in the world, but has no luck with women. Locke is married to Peg Bundy and has a relationship with his dad, but he is still paralized. Jin and Sun are in America to start their lives together, but Sun's dad wants Jin dead. Sawyer didn't grow up to be a conman, but his dad still killed his mom and himself and "Sawyer" is still out there. Jack has a son, but he is divorced and his dad is still dead. Kate has escaped her past and the law, but she is still on the run.

I believe that Oceanic Flight 815 did crash on the island, and all of the survivors' experiences, interactions with the Others and the island we viewed over the past 6 years to the point where Jack dies in the bamboo garden really did happened. Whatever happened, happened. The sideways time line of Season 6 was thought to be an alternate reality, when it actually was a place, some call it purgatory, between our life on Earth and the afterlife.

Matthew Fox said it best on the “Aloha to LOST” special when he said, “After you die you go to a place, and this place can last a nanosecond or an extended period of time where you eventually have to remember your own death, and remember all the people that were instrumental in your life. The people you loved and were important to you, and in remembering them, you can let go and move on to the next after life (whatever that might be).” It was a great interpretation and I completely agree with him.

We were given clues throughout the final season that the sideways timeline was, indeed, a staging area before moving on to the afterlife or heaven. Rose told Jack in the season premiere (after all the turbulence on the plane), “you can let go now…you can let go.” These clues were consistent throughout the season. So Jack died in 2007, for all we know Kate could have died in 2077. Since the most important time of her life was spent on the island, when she died her spirit moved on to this ‘spiritual plane’ that looked a lot like Los Angeles in 2004. There is no NOW here, so time is indefinite in this purgatory state.


Christian Shephard eluded to the fact that some of his Oceanic friends died before him, and some long after him. The trials and tribulations that the characters experienced forever connected them. This show has been built off of connections from day 1. They always focused on relationships, like how Jack was connected to Christian, whom was connected to Claire, and so on and so forth.

When Desmond was exposed to the catastrophic EM (Electromagnetic) Field Power Test earlier this season, he actually died for a brief moment and his spirit/consciousness moved on to purgatory, not the 2004 alternate timeline. At some point Desmond figured out that he was dead, and was able to help the other Oceanic 815 passengers figure it out as well by putting them into situations that would recreate their most dramatic and emotionally driven times on the island. Kate helping Claire give birth to Aaron. Locke wiggling his toes for the first time after they crashed. Sun’s ultrasound experience with Juliet. These all helped them relive their life experiences and ultimately, relive their impending death.

By the end, they all remembered their island experience, their lives, deaths, and connections to each other. I kind of feel the writers stole this idea from Titanic. After Rose Dewitt dies as an old woman, she moves on to that spiritual place and joins Jack Dawson, and everyone else that has died (at one time or another) and shared in the tramatic experience of the Titanic sinking. That time was the most significant part of Rose’s life. Even though she died years and years later, her spirit took on the physical form of a young woman during the time in her life that was most significant to her.

So once everyone realized that they were dead by sharing in the emotionally intense experiences, they were able to let go, and move on. Michael was not there because his spirit was still trapped on the island as a lost soul. Walt was not there because the actor is 6’5” with facial hair and he’s only supposed to be 11 years old on the show. I get the impression that Ben did not want to move on because he was still repenting for his sins once he realized that he was dead. I am still on the fence if the spirits of Alex and Rousseau were also actually part of this collective purgatory, or were they just the figment of Ben’s imagination and past life placed there. It appears that Jack ‘created’ a son named David with his imagination so that he could be the father that he never had. It still boggles me why the writers sold out and made Juliet his ex-wife. It would have been ever so more astute to use my idea of Harper Stanhope as his ex-wife.

In the end, I was pleased that they could all remember their lives, and were able to move on to the next life together. No one does it alone.

I started watching LOST the summer after the first season. I always heard good things about it, but never had time due to the fact that we had a new born baby in the house. On a ‘dude, you’ll love it’ Hurley-type of recommendation, I started watching it. ABC was brilliant enough to re-air the entire first season during the summer leading right into Season II in the fall of 2005. I was immediately hooked with all of the plot twists, revelations, and classic Holy S-! moments. It’s been a blast to try and figure this show out along the way with all of you.

This whole blog started as an email between the Oceanic 6 (Joe, Dave, Bill, Andre, Dante and myself). I guess you could say Charlie Boo and Mike Mazz were Oceanic 7 and 8. We would just toss around theories and had fun with it. In Season III, I started emailing a brief recap of the show around, and we’d all ‘reply to all’ with questions and thoughts. It was basic, but germane… From 8 people it expanded to 23 to 42 to the weekly blog you are reading right now. Thank you for taking the time to read it. It’s hard to gauge how many people read it on a regular basis (I still haven’t figured that out with the website), so I never really knew if anyone was reading it at all…until this Monday morning when I got around 15 mutually exclusive emails asking “when are you going to post the blog…my brother’s uncle’s cousin’s former roommate is waiting for your recap”. I’ve heard that we actually have people from London reading this…crazy.

It truly has been a great ride with this show, and I wonder if when I eventually move on to the next spiritual plane, I’ll end up in a my living room typing away on the computer while my beautiful wife glares at me patiently waiting to check her facebook account... Just kidding Angela!

I hope that this blog was helpful to you as we experienced the show together. I know it helped me to remember what happened in past episodes, and get a better understanding of what in the hell was going on. It truly was a priveledge to share this with you.

See you in another life, brotha.

-Slice