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More Than 23 Questions About The Lost Series Finale, Answered!

Previously on Lost: A plane crashes on a mysterious island. Six years later, here we are.

By jetliner, VW bus, yellow Hummer, unmarked BMW, outrigger canoe, sailboat or submarine, please join us as we Answer the Final Set of Questions offered up by our last, constantly commercial-interrupted moments with our favorite group of merry castaways. (It should go without saying that a frank discussion of the Lost finale will be a long string of spoilers. Beware, those who sat out this searingly important cultural moment!)

"Oh, what a long, strange island it's been!"

-Driveshaft

So?

So.

Can we get on with it?

Yes, sure. Of course. We just have so many feelings.

While you get yourself together, how is Damon Lindelof holding up?

All things considered, he seems to be doing OK.

It's got to be tough for him. His Kimmel schedule is going to wind down to practically nothing, and soon the giddy 4 AM texts from Carlton about a great philosopher name for a new character will cease. Life will move on. But nothing will be the same. He welcomes the change, but at the same time, he fears it.

Christian Shephard. Christian. Shephard. Seriously?

Oh, shut up, Kate. You don't suddenly get to be wise-assy at this point. Now take your generic TV character name, squeeze into this hot dress, and wait for your Wake-Up without all the needless sarcasm.

Who can tell Kate why she's here?

No one can tell her why she's here. Not in a here here way. Like here, in this car. Obviously, she's in the car. We're talking in a larger way, like in regards to the purpose of her life. She'll have to figure that out later, maybe by reuniting with her true love, or staring down the business end of a birth canal as a screaming, placenta-drenched payload of Big Answers hurtles towards her.

So Jack really went through with the whole "new Jacob" deal?

He did. He even held his own Campfire Answers Summit with the gang, around the smoldering embers of Old Jacob, for symbolic purposes. (And Cuselindedamonton never met a neat parallel they could resist.) Among the subjects discussed, as requested by Sawyer: sights seen on the mountaintop, minutes of his conversation with the burning bush, why Smokey didn't extinguish the Light himself (ain't got what he needs, i.e., Desmond, the magic leprechaun).

Better guyliner: Richard Alpert or Dissolute Flash-Sideways Charlie?

While Richard had the more consistent, natural-looking application, Charlie seems like he told a Beverly Center MAC makeup artist to "I wanna look like Liza Minnelli after a week-long crying bender."

Why did Jack take the Jacob gig?

Because he was supposed to. Because the island's the only thing he's got left, the only thing he's never ruined. He makes an excellent point. He's ruined a lot of things, and he desperately needs to complete a character arc that will somewhat unsurprisingly serve as the arc for the entire series.

When Kate tells Jack that "nothing is irreversible," did that sound very familiar?

You may remember "nothing is irreversible" from episode 604, when Jack offers to fix Sideways Locke's paralysis.

When Ben joined up with Smokey, should he have gotten some clarification about what exactly Smokey meant when he said he was going to "destroy the island"?

There was a time when everything Ben did seemed perfectly calculated. But now he's switching sides willy-nilly, grasping for an angle, and not finding out in advance whether or not his smoke monster confederates intend to literally or figuratively destroy the island he's been promised as a reward for his assistance in potentially bringing about the end of existence as we know it. Ben is slipping. Maybe he just needs some more time to reflect upon how he's lived his life...

Hey, did you hear that? That really obvious walkie-talkie sound?

Hmm, no idea what you're talking about! There are definitely no walkie-talkies here that someone is using to communicate with a ghost-whisperer trying to fix an airplane that we plan on using to escape the island! [Fumbles with volume knob on walkie-talkie, hopes secret escape plan has not been foiled by an incredibly stupid lapse in volume-knob adjustment.]

What does Richard's gray hair mean?

It quite obviously is meant to indicate that Richard can now age, having been released from his hell of immortality. (It also means that Miles stares way too intently at Richard's head.) If you have previously noted the presence of gray-shaded bits of stubble on Richard's face (because you stare way too intently at Richard's head, perhaps drawn there by the natural charcoal highlights encircling his eyes), this is probably a continuity or makeup department error, or those scenes were shot long before they came up with the idea for the Gray Hair Of Aging. Sometimes you just have to take an unexpected, organic Miles man-crush and run with it, you know?

How was Richard released from his hell of immortality?

1) Jacob's death?

or

2) The cork being taken out of the bottle, which hadn't happened yet, but which soon proves to have other mortality-restoring effects;

but maybe

3) Miles's love, the likes of which Richard hasn't experienced since what's her name died, the hot Spanish ghost-wife, because medicine was very expensive back in the 1800s.

When Smokey pulled that knife on Rose and Bernard after tracking Desmond back to their secret settlement, did you hold your breath, expecting him to cut Rose's throat and stab Bernard in the gut?

Thanks to the quick-thinking, semi-big-picture-aware Desmond, we were spared from having to witness that unacceptable spectacle. The Jin-and-Sun drowning was bad enough, we didn't need to see our other favorite couple messily dispatched with Smokey's pig-sticker.

Was the following the greatest scene in the history of this show?

Smokey and Jack "New Jacob" Shephard meet in a field.

Smokey: So it's you?

Jack: Yup.

Smokey: I thought I'd be surprised. You're sort of the obvious choice.

Oh, the giddy yelps of knowing meta-laughter!

How is Jack going to kill Smokey?

It's a surprise. Which means: He'll figure it out once they all get to the Secret Cave Of The Magic Lifelight. But Desmond is involved. There's gotta be a reason Smokey's taken a shine to him, right?

Who is Jack's ex-wife and David's mother?

You knew who it was. Stop.

More meta in its commentary on the entire Lost-watching experience: The above-referenced scene with Jack and Smokey, or this one?

Hurley and Sayid sit in a car.

Sayid: Where are we?

Hurley: I'm not allowed to tell you.There are rules, dude.

Sayid: Whose rules?

Hurley: Don't worry about it. Just trust me.

Sayid: OK, I trust you.

We'll have to go with this one.

What would be some possible album names for a recording of Daniel Widmore's collaboration with Driveshaft?

The Great Wake-Up

Love Is My Constant

Daniel Widmore's Rising Force

Waking Up The Bass Player For The Show

Is This Music Pretty Awful? Yeah, It Is. Hey, It's Just Background, We Weren't Going To Like Pay A Ton Of Money For John Tesh And Metallica To Whip Up Something Memorable.

Does the rock stopping up the Lightdrain look a lot like a giant cork?

That cork-in-the-bottle metaphor just gets more and more apt. p>

When Desmond pulled the Rockcork out of the Lightdrain, and all the Magic Water Of Immortality rushed out through the Hole Of Island-Destroying Earthquake-Making, Jack and Smokey just became normal dudes again, right?

This was such a raw deal for Jack. He got, what, an hour of immortality? Yes, we know it was all part of his Greater Purpose and whatever, but he didn't even get a chance to deflect any bullets.

Where did Smokey learn to smash heads with a rock like that?

A frowning Mother approaches her Boy in Black holding a large, bloodied stone in her hand. The Boy bursts into tears. "I learned it by watching you!" The look in Mother's eyes tells us she knows that perhaps she hasn't been an ideal parent, but as a single mom charged with protecting the Light, she did the best she could.

In your rush to anoint "You were the obvious choice" as the greatest Lost scene ever, were you perhaps overlooking "Jack and Smokey fight with everything on the line atop a crumbling cliff"? It was the climactic action scene of the entire series, you know.

There were many, many wonderful scenes within the first two hours and twenty minutes of the finale. But you're probably right, this was the best of them. Knifeplay! Fisticuffs! The Clash Of The No Longer Immortal Titans! There could be only one, and we think we all knew who that had to be.

[RIP Smokey, aka, The Man In Black, aka Mother's First Choice, aka The Smoggy Fist Of Death ???-2007]

Jack's "appendix" scars: The stigmata of a Shephard who sacrificed all so that his flock could be free, or just a fleshy souvenir of a pretty epic knife fight?

We generally err on the side of obvious symbolism.

When Jack kicked Smokey off the cliff, what might have been a bad-ass thing to say?

"Remember when I said I'd kill you last? I lied. This makes no sense in context, because all of the other people I've killed have more or less been accidental, I was kind of stumbling my way through this leadership and self-sacrifice thing, but any kind of acknowledgment of the gravity of this moment would be better than just my heavy breathing."

Which of the Flash Sideways Losties had the best wake-up?

We're going with Juliet and Sawyer's combination Apollo bar heist/tearful kiss goodbye in the Jughead bombhole. But how they didn't immediately lock themselves in an empty hospital room for a round of Detective Ford Interrogates The Naughty OB-GYN About Her Role In Stealing His Heart Back On The Island is beyond us. Maybe figuring out you're dead extinguishes your sex drive?

How did ABC not pick up Detective Ford, LAPD to series?

The schedule started to feel a little cop-heavy with the premiere of Rookie Blue just around the corner. But they loved the backdoor pilot.

Can you explain Miles's belief system in a single sentence?

"I don't believe in a lot of things, but I do believe in duct tape."

Now you can drink your Protector Of The Light Initiation Sacrament out of an old plastic water bottle? Have we no Magic Water drinking standards anymore?

You're not going to be happy to learn that Protector Hurley, an even more liberal light-guardian than Jack, passed on his sacred post to his successor by having him gulp immortality from a dirty Chuck Taylor.

Inappropriate receptacles aside, on a scale of 4 to 42, how moving was Jack's passing on of his briefly held Protector status to the humbled, overwhelmed goofball who idolized him?

42, plus an unexplained Egyptian glyph we hope means "times infinity."

Holy crap, why haven't you mentioned that LAPIDUS IS ALIVE? Gloriously, improbably alive?

Because we never doubted it*, nor did we doubt that he'd get that cranky old Ajira bird in the air somehow, no matter how many rolls of duct tape and random sh*t welded to the fuselage with an acetylene torch it took to get 'er up.

[*This is a lie. How the hell did he survive? He definitely died on that sub.]

Why doesn't Claire want to leave the island?

She doesn't want to say it, because she already fears the stigma of mental illness, but she now prefers the skullbaby to Aaron. The crazy heart wants what it wants.

Where's Walt? Didn't Carltamon Dacuse promise us Walt would be in the finale?

We like to think that Walt's spirit assumed the form of Vincent the dog, Smokey-style, as he comforted Jack in the moments before The Final Eye-Closing. That way we don't have to feel like we were lied to about getting a last WAAAALLLLLLT moment.

What are the six major world religions represented on the Stained Glass Window of Spiritual Inclusion in the Church Of Going Toward the Nondenominational Afterlife Light?

Clockwise, from upper left: Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Seventh Day Donkeywheelism, Hinduism.

How is Shannon Sayid's true love, and not Nadia, the soulmate he's been chasing across time/space for six seasons?

Scheduling conflict?

Why did Kate change out of her slinky cocktail dress for the funeral/wake/purgatorial going-away party?

A sexy look wasn't appropriate for the occasion of celebrating your boyfriend's dramatic realization and acceptance of his own death.

So here we go: After much executive producer protestation that the island was not, in fact, a Purgatory -- the first guess most people made about the big mystery early on in season one -- the Flash Sideways turns out to be a Purgatory, and, just to rub some salt in your stigmata, it had no effect on what happened on the island?

It is what it is. You're either down with the Flash Sideways as a place where our beloved characters connected for the last time before their posthumous Wake-Ups allowed them to move on to the Very Well-Lit Next Place together, or you feel betrayed by a spiritual non-answer of a final answer. Or perhaps you feel both of these things, or neither. There's some very complicated emotional sh*t happening within all of us right now, okay, as we stare into a television set that now deprives us of a mythology-heavy serial that we can endlessly debate on the internet.

OK, yeah, great, but wasn't the island under water in the Flash Sideways?

Ssssh!

Why bother with that if nothing there was "real"?"

Enough. Purgatory!

Why no Walt and Michael at the party?

[Plugs ears.]

What was up with that final-final shot of the seemingly undisturbed Oceanic crash site over the end credits?

It was just a pretty picture!

Was that inserted so that we could could think, if we reall
y wanted an alternate mindf*cky ending, that maybe no one survived the initial crash, and the whole show was afterlife?

No. No!

Then why was it there?! They already showed Jack closing his eye in the "final image"!

We hate you so much right now.

These questions could go on forever, couldn't they?

Endings are really, really hard.