We Finally Understand The Ending Of Lost

Since airing its two-part finale in May 2010 on ABC, the polarizing ending of the landmark television series "Lost" has been a point of fierce contention among fans. For years, those who tuned in every week to check in with the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 have wrestled with the implications of the feature-length final episode — aptly titled "The End" — which was jam-packed with mind-bending twists and ambiguous answers that only seemed to set up more questions. 

From its very first episode, "Lost" made no attempt to hide its fondness for perplexing mysteries. But while the series' first season was mostly focused on the Oceanic survivors simply trying to stay alive in their new tropical home, subsequent seasons became increasingly more convoluted as the show delved into the bizarre history of the island, its strange electromagnetic properties, and the mysteriously intertwined histories of the survivors themselves. By the final season, the show had thrown time travel, alternate realities, and immortal beings into the mix. Suffice it to say, wrapping it all up over the course of two hours was a tall order, and fans came away with all sorts of different interpretations of exactly what the finale meant. 

So make sure your carry-on luggage is stowed, your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position, and that your seat belt is properly fastened because we're about to take a deep dive into the ending of "Lost," and it may be a bumpy ride.

From very early on in the show's run, fans worried "Lost" would end with a "they were dead the whole time" twist. Sure, creator J.J. Abrams and showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse repeatedly denied speculation that the characters died in the crash, and that the island was a form of purgatory. Still, some thought the finale's church-set ending confirmed that Abrams, Lindelof, and Cuse had been lying the whole time and that the entire show had taken place in the afterlife. Further evidence used to support this claim was footage of the original plane crash that aired over the closing credits, showing empty beaches, which some fans thought meant there'd been no survivors. 

But it turns out that the crash footage at the end was never meant to be considered as part of the finale. Instead, it was included so fans could decompress, readjust, and collect themselves as the show transitioned to the 11 PM news. ABC network executives never imagined that viewers would consider this part of the show's narrative. Further, "The End" takes pains to explicitly clarify that all the events that took place on the island were, in fact, real. During the church scene, Christian Shephard (John Terry) explains to Jack (Matthew Fox) that everything on the island did indeed come to pass. In fact, it was "the most important period" in the Oceanic survivors' lives.

After five seasons filled with flashbacks and, eventually, flash-forwards, the first episode of Season 6 included something "Lost" fans were totally unprepared for — a flash-sideways, exploring an alternate reality in which Oceanic Flight 815 doesn't crash and the plane lands safely at LAX. However, the plane crash isn't the only thing different about the two realities. Instead of being a con man, Sawyer (Josh Holloway) is a cop. Instead of the strained marriage they had in the pilot, Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and Sun (Yunjin Kim) are secret lovers. And the childless Jack suddenly has a teenage son whose mother is none other than Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell), a woman he met on the island. 

But is this all a dream? Is it maybe a parallel dimension created by the wonky powers of the island? Or is this the true timeline, and maybe the island is just an elaborate "what if" scenario? Well, in "The End," the flash-sideways is revealed to be the afterlife, where all the Oceanic survivors are brought back together following their deaths. In a way, it is a sort of purgatory where they each have to make peace with the struggles of their lives before they can recognize one another and move on together.

This is where the "Lost" finale tripped up many of its viewers, who reasonably assumed that in order for all of the characters on the show to have arrived in the afterlife at the same time, they had to have died at the same time. But as logical as this reasoning appears at first glance, it doesn't hold up under close scrutiny. Not only does it fail to explain the presence of characters like Juliet and Ben (Michael Emerson), who weren't on board Oceanic 815, but it doesn't account for all of the shared memories they recover once they recognize each other. After all, if they all died in the crash, how would Kate (Evangeline Lilly) remember delivering Claire's (Emilie de Ravin) baby, or how could Sayid (Naveen Andrews) recall falling in love with Shannon (Maggie Grace)?

The explanation given in "The End" is that they all died at different times, some way back in Season 1 and others many years after the end of Season 6. But time works differently in the afterlife. To the characters, it feels as though they all arrived around the same time, even if their actual deaths were many decades apart. The only thing they all had in common was that none of the characters in the flash-sideways died during the plane crash. 

While we'd be here all day if we tried to list every death that ever occurred on "Lost," here's what we know about the deaths of the people in the church. Boone (Ian Somerhalder) dies in Season 1, succumbing to his injuries after a fall. Shannon dies early in Season 2 after being accidentally shot by Ana Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez), and Libby (Cynthia Watros) dies toward the end of the second season after being shot by Michael (Harold Perrineau). 

Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) dies in Season 3, drowning after warning Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) that the boat outside is "not Penny's boat." Locke (Terry O'Quinn) is strangled by Ben in Season 5. Juliet dies at the beginning of Season 6 after falling down a shaft and detonating a bomb. Sayid dies midway through Season 6 saving his friends from a bomb, and Sun and Jin die later in the same episode, drowning together in a sinking submarine. And Jack dies at the end of the series finale, after being stabbed by the Man in Black (Titus Welliver). 

There are also a good number of deaths that are left up to our imaginations. Kate, Sawyer, Desmond, Claire, Rose (L. Scott Caldwell), Bernard (Sam Anderson), and Penny (Sonya Walger) all survive the finale and presumably die at some point in the years afterward. And as the new protectors of the island, Hurley (Jorge Garcia) and Ben likely outlive the other survivors by quite a wide margin, but at some point, they must eventually die as well. 

A good portion of the finale focuses on the question of who will fill Jacob's (Mark Pellegrino) role as the protector of the Heart of the Island, which turns out to be a magical, glowing pool at the island's center. This pool is supposedly the source of all life, death, and rebirth, and according to Jacob, it's the cork holding back a malevolent force that could destroy the world. In the finale, this is revealed to be a literal cork, which Desmond pulls to drain the pool, nearly getting everyone killed. 

The Heart of the Island also emits a strong electromagnetic field and can manipulate space and time, as evidenced by the relocation of the island and the time travel in earlier episodes. It's also implied to have a form of consciousness, or at least self-preservation, granting immortality to the humans who are willing to take on the responsibility of keeping it safe. 

While some of the earlier mysteries of "Lost" were revealed to have at least moderately plausible sci-fi explanations, the Heart of the Island requires viewers to accept some elements of the supernatural as well. No details are ever given about the origins of the Heart of the Island, but it's said that a piece of its light is inside every living thing, and if it goes out, so do we. 

Throughout the series, we see that many of the characters on the show have some sort of connection before ever getting on the plane, implying that they were always predestined to board the same doomed flight and end up on the island together. However, in the final season of "Lost," we learn more about the way that Jacob has been pulling strings for years, traveling around the world in order to bring a group of potential "candidates" to the island, in the hopes of finding someone capable of taking over for him as the island's protector. He knew his brother, the Man in Black, was searching for a way to kill him and would eventually succeed. Jacob's intent was to find a successor before that happened. 

Jacob chose people who reminded him of himself — individuals who were alone and flawed and who'd come to depend on the island as much as it would rely on them to keep it safe. All of the survivors of Oceanic 815 fit this criteria, and as the series progressed and he was able to observe their interactions on the island, Jacob began slowly whittling down his list of candidates. None of the connections we saw between the characters in flashbacks were fated or accidental. All of them were engineered by Jacob.  

Throughout "Lost," one of the show's most enduring mysteries is the nature of the smoke monster, a seemingly sentient column of black smoke that occasionally attacks and even kills people on the island. And it turns out that the smoke monster is another form of the Man in Black, Jacob's immortal twin brother. So how did that come about? Well, after killing their mother, the Man in Black is transformed when Jacob throws him into the Heart of the Island.

For the next 2,000 years, Jacob and the Man in Black oppose one another, as the Man in Black searches for a way around the supernatural law that keeps him from killing Jacob. As the smoke monster, he can't be killed, but he also can't leave. Over the years, he assumes his smoke monster form in order to kill the candidates Jacob brings to the island, hoping that if Jacob dies and leaves no successor, the Man in Black can finally leave. Ultimately, though, the Man in Black's immortality is linked to the Heart of the Island, so when Desmond temporarily shuts it down in the finale, he's made mortal and killed by Kate and Jack, ending the smoke monster forever. 

After Jack is appointed as Jacob's successor as protector of the island, he promptly gets into a knife fight with the Man in Black, where he's mortally wounded. Realizing he's dying, Jack volunteers to go replace the cork at the center of the island and tells Hurley that he needs to take over as protector. Hurley agrees, and he drinks from the water that's come from the Heart of the Island, making his new role official. 

After Jack leaves to restore the Heart, Ben also suggests to Hurley that he doesn't have to "protect" the island in the same way that Jacob did and that maybe Hurley will find a better way. Hurley considers this, then asks Ben if he'll consider staying on as his second-in-command, to which Ben responds that he'd be honored. While Jacob lived for 2,000 years, Hurley doesn't have the dark counterpart in the Man in Black that made it so hard for Jacob to find a replacement protector. So although Hurley likely lives for many years following the finale, it's very possible that retirement will prove much easier for him than it did for Jacob.

The DHARMA (Department of Heuristics and Research on Material Applications) Initiative first came to the island in the 1970s, with the objective of studying the unique properties of the island and harnessing them in the name of scientific advancement. While DHARMA conducted research across all fields (including studies involving polar bears), attempting to uncover the island's secrets, they never fully understood what they were dealing with when it came to the supernatural Heart of the Island. However, that didn't stop them from trying, and they constructed stations all over the island in an attempt to make sense of the bizarre phenomena they were witnessing. 

DHARMA was eventually wiped out by a group of people living on the island who were devoted to Jacob, known to the "Lost" characters as the Others. By the time Oceanic 815 crashed, DHARMA was long gone, leading the plane survivors to wonder whether DHARMA might've been responsible for some of the strange happenings on the island. But the DHARMA Initiative didn't create any of the island's "powers." Those already existed long before DHARMA showed up and were, in fact, the reason why they came in the first place.

At the end of "The End," after regaining their memories of their time together on the island, the main characters make their way to a church, where they see the symbols of a number of different faiths. Christian Shephard then explains to Jack that the flash-sideways was constructed by and for the Oceanic 815 survivors to help them find one another, let go of the baggage of their lives, and move on together. And according to Christian, once they were all ready to do so, they each showed up at the church, one by one.

When Jack first arrives at the church, he sees his father's coffin and seems to think he's there for Christian's funeral. But the coffin is empty, and the funeral that he'd expected is replaced by a reunion with his loved ones and hope for a new future together. The church seems to symbolize that all of the "Lost" characters have said their goodbyes to their past lives, and they're finally ready to be at peace with one another. When Christian opens the doors at the end of the episode and light floods the church, it's safe to assume that signifies "moving on," whatever that means.

Even though Ben's presence in the flash-sideways seems to indicate that the Oceanic survivors were indeed the most significant people in his life, he elects not to enter the church with them. Before Hurley returns to the church, he tells Ben that he was a "real good number two," and Ben replies that Hurley was a "great number one," which seems to indicate that Ben and Hurley worked together on the island for a long time after the end of the series, never turning against each other like Jacob and the Man in Black. That Ben was drawn to the church with the rest of them may be an indication that, cosmically at least, his service to the island was enough to redeem him for the horrible things he'd done in life and that he could move on with the others.

However, Ben opting not to enter the church could mean that he isn't ready to move on yet. Perhaps Ben still has more people to find in the afterlife before he can let go, or maybe, despite having been forgiven by some of the people he wronged, he still has to come to terms with what he did. Another possibility is that he just can't bring himself to move on and leave his adopted daughter, Alex (Tania Raymonde), behind. It's never clarified what happens to Ben after he decides to stay outside, but we can only hope that, eventually, he finds peace.

While Christian Shephard explains to Jack that the church exists to help all of the Oceanic 815 survivors "move on" with the people who'd been most significant to them in their lives, that doesn't explain what Christian himself is doing there, along with infants Aaron and Ji Yeon. None of them lived on the island (or at least, not for long), so it couldn't possibly have been the most important time in any of their lives. Surely Christian's "most significant" period would've occurred well before his death while Aaron's and Ji Yeon's would've likely been once they were adults. 

The simplest explanation for their presence is that, like all of the other people in the flash-sideways who weren't survivors of the crash, those weren't the real Christian, Aaron, and Ji Yeon. They were merely manifestations of something the Oceanic survivors needed in order to move on. While the flash-sideways was created exclusively for the survivors of Oceanic 815, perhaps Christian, along with the adult versions of Aaron and Ji Yeon, are out there in their own versions of the afterlife, searching for their own most significant people before they can move on for themselves. And sure, their presence raises some interesting questions, but it doesn't take away from "Lost's" powerful ending.

"Lost" had no shortage of ongoing mysteries that arose throughout its run, perhaps none greater than the enigmatic numbers that seem to follow the characters around like a curse. 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 popped up in all sorts of places over the course of the series, from Hurley's winning lottery ticket and Kate's trial number to the sequence that Desmond spent two years punching into a computer every 108 minutes.

"Lost" never definitively addressed the nature of the numbers, but implied that, like so many other things on the show, the explanation behind the ascending string of figures was more mystical than scientific. Jacob assigned a number to each of the candidates he drew to the island, and the final six candidates each synced up perfectly with one of the numbers: Locke was 4, Hurley was 8, Sawyer was 15, Sayid was 16, Jack was 23, and 42 referred to either Sun or Jin Kwon. Before arriving on the island, Hurley noticed the pattern recurring in his life and associated it with bad luck, while the other candidates remained oblivious to the numbers until well after they were already on the island. It's worth noting that Hurley ultimately became the candidate chosen to become the new guardian of the island, suggesting that the numbers may have been tied into the idea of fate and inevitability — a prominent theme on "Lost."

Without the fateful crash of Oceanic Flight 815 in the pilot episode, there would've been no "Lost" at all. Like most of the other strange occurrences on the show, it turns out that the circumstances leading to the crash were more complex than it initially appeared. For a long time, it seemed likely that Oceanic 815 merely suffered some sort of tragic yet mundane technical malfunction. But as the series went on, it became clear that the plane crash was yet another circumstance that had been cosmically engineered by Jacob to serve his own millennia-long agenda.

Many factors contributed to the crash of Oceanic 815, most of which had been manipulated by Jacob, from the DHARMA Initiative building the Swan station in the first place to the careful arranging of circumstances that led to DHARMA's eventual departure from the island. But likely the most significant single piece of the equation was the arrival of Desmond Hume and the subsequent three years he spent pushing — and becoming increasingly disillusioned about — a button.

Eventually, Desmond accidentally killed his companion in the Swan station and allowed the timer to run down to zero, resulting in a system failure. Desmond was able to fix it, but not before the system unleashed an immense electromagnetic charge, which in turn caused Oceanic 815 to break apart while passing over the island. So in a way, Desmond caused the crash of Flight 815, but considering that Jacob was the one who brought Desmond to the island, arranged the circumstances that required him to push the button, and carefully selected the passengers on the flight, the electromagnetic surge and the subsequent plane crash were all part of his plan.

"Lost" was the very definition of an ensemble show, with a large cast of characters who each received their own well-developed arc and fleshed-out backstory. However, even though the series had dozens of "main" characters throughout its run, most viewers would probably agree that if you had to pick a single main character from "Lost," it was Jack Shephard. The first episode began with a shot of Jack's eye opening, and the series ended on a similar shot of his eyes closing, bookending the series on Jack's point of view. And all throughout "Lost," Jack served as a leader and central figure for the survivors of Oceanic 815.

Ultimately, of course, all of the Oceanic 815 survivors wound up reconnecting in the afterlife in the final episode of "Lost," including Jack. However, the afterlife narrative wound up confusing many viewers due to the show presenting it as an alternate reality for the entire last season. So it's understandable to be uncertain about what really happened to Jack and "Lost's" other central characters by the end of the series.

Jack may have died in the final episode, bleeding to death of stab wounds inflicted by the Man in Black, but he made some hugely significant actions in his final hours. He briefly agreed to take over from Jacob as the protector of the Island, after which he immediately fought the Man in Black to the death. In his final moments, he said goodbye to Kate and Sawyer, appointed Hurley as the island's new protector, and replaced the cork in the Heart of the Island that temporarily turned the Man in Black mortal while also threatening to sink the island and destroy the world. After Jack saved the island and everyone he loved, he finally succumbed to his wounds and died.

As part of "Lost's" central love triangle — at least for the first few seasons — Kate was one of the few Oceanic survivors who made it all the way through the final episode more or less unscathed (at least physically). After helping Jack lead the survivors on the Island, Kate managed to escape the island along with Jack and the Oceanic Six in Season 4, along with Claire's infant son, Aaron. Since Claire was still on the island, Kate raised Aaron as her own. She was also tried for the crimes she committed before the crash and was sentenced to 10 years probation on the condition that she didn't leave California.

However, Kate ultimately realized that she couldn't abandon Aaron's biological mother on the island, and she left him with Claire's mother so she could return to the island with Jack and the rest of the Oceanic Six on an Ajira flight. After being transported by the island to 1977 and participating in the events that led to the infamous electromagnetic "Incident," Kate returned to 2007 with the rest of the survivors, where she finally found Claire. After helping Jack defeat the Man in Black once and for all, she convinced Claire to join her in escaping on the Ajira plane, which a small group used to escape the island. Before leaving, she told Claire she would help her raise Aaron, although we never learn what sort of co-parenting situation they eventually worked out or whether Kate suffered any legal consequences for breaking her parole.

After serving as "Lost's" resident ally-antagonist for the first season, the vengeance-driven James "Sawyer" Ford gradually shed most of his bad boy persona and eventually became an integral member of the group, forming deep friendships with a number of the other 815 survivors and even falling in love with Dr. Juliet Burke during the years they spent in the 1970s. Like many of the Oceanic 815 passengers, Sawyer had a dark past before boarding the fateful flight and was fleeing from the memory of murdering a man he'd been tricked into believing was responsible for his parents' deaths.

On the island, after pursuing Kate romantically for the first few seasons, Sawyer gave up his chance to escape the island in order to allow Kate and the rest of the Oceanic Six to leave. He subsequently was transported to 1974 with a group of other survivors, where they wound up joining the DHARMA Initiative, and he and Juliet fell in love. However, after Juliet was killed in their attempts to prevent the "Incident" and Sawyer was transported back to 2007, he became determined to leave the island by any means necessary. Sawyer was instrumental in uncovering the Man in Black's plan to destroy the island and in helping Jack figure out a way to defeat him. Realizing Jack was dying, Sawyer persuaded Kate to leave the island, and they escaped together on the Ajira plane. We never learn just how long Sawyer lived after escaping the island or if he was held legally responsible for the crimes he committed before the 815 crash, but we at least know that he left the island a much better person than he was when he arrived.

While the nature of the flash-sideways is at least partially addressed by the end of the show, "Lost" still leaves us with more questions than answers about its origins. What we know is that Christian Shepherd (whose true identity is itself left pretty ambiguous) tells Jack that the flash-sideways is "the place you all made together so you could find one another." Exactly how this works is left open to interpretation, including whether this sort of in-between afterlife exists for everyone who dies or just the people who lived on the island at some point.

Considering that the island also has some sort of unspecified tie to all life and death on Earth, it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibilities that the island itself created the flash-sideways. But since the island's light is said to be in everyone all around the world, not just the people on the island, that doesn't necessarily mean that its version of the afterlife is limited to the island's inhabitants. Perhaps all humans get some version of a flash-sideways in order to reconnect with the significant people from their lives or perhaps they all even share the same flash-sideways, but different people shape different sections according to who they're drawn to. It's a complex question with no clear answers, but given how many other supernatural abilities the island seems to possess, it's not out of the question that it has its fingers in the afterlife too.

Although "Lost" gives us a pretty definitive explanation about what happens to the main characters from the show in the flash-sideways — or at least, as definitive as it gets whenever TV tries to tackle the afterlife — it's much less clear what happens to all of the minor and background characters who are there ... or whether they were even real at all. For example, take Jack and Juliet's son David, who of course didn't exist in real life. Was he just an illusion created by Jack or Juliet, or was he another real person tossed into a fictional afterlife scenario, who also needed to awaken to his real-world memories?

Then there are characters like Nadia (Andrea Gabriel), who had significant interactions with the main "Lost" characters during their lives but who only play a minor role in the flash-sideways and never enter the church. We know that some people who don't recall their real lives and don't enter the church, such as Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies), were definitely the "real" versions of those people. So is everyone real and just not "awake" yet, or are most people in the flash-sideways illusions, and the real versions are in their own flash-sideways somewhere else? The series never gives us a satisfying answer to this. The closest we get is Christian telling Jack that the people on the island created the flash-sideways together, rather than it just being a universal purgatory where they were cosmically drawn together. So while the true nature of the other characters in the flash-sideways is left mostly ambiguous, our guess is that most of them weren't actually real.

While most of the main cast members of "Lost" who reconnect in the flash-sideways get closure when they head into the light at the church, there are others who were most likely real but never woke up, such as Daniel Faraday, Charles Widmore (Alan Dale), Miles Straume (Ken Leung), and Charlotte Lewis (Rebecca Mader). In Daniel's case, his mother, Eloise Hawking (Fionnula Flanagan), specifically asked Desmond not to help him remember his life so that Daniel would stay with her in the flash-sideways instead of deciding to move on. Others, such as Eloise herself and Ben Linus, opted to remain in the flash-sideways rather than entering the church.

So what happens next for them? Like many of the more existential questions surrounding the ending of "Lost," the show isn't really clear. However, there are some subtle hints that the church will be there as long as there are still characters left in the flash-sideways who may someday decide to move on. When he opts not to enter the church, Ben says he'll stay "for a while," indicating that it's not a permanent decision. And when Eloise asks Desmond if he's going to take Daniel, Desmond answers, "Not with me, no," implying that Daniel may still leave on his own eventually. So although they missed the mass exodus of the main group, our best guess is that the others who remained in the flash-sideways will still have the opportunity to wake up and move on at some point in the future, whenever they're ready.

Although most of the significant characters on "Lost" appeared in the flash-sideways either as people who regained their memories and moved on or people who weren't yet ready to remember (or weren't ready to move on) and stayed behind, there are two notable exceptions. Michael Dawson (Harold Perrineau) and his son Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) were both main characters for "Lost's" first couple of seasons before escaping the island at the end of Season 2.

However, Michael returned to the island in Season 4, posing as a worker on Charles Widmore's freighter and ultimately sacrificing himself for his friends, making amends for his earlier betrayal. Later, his ghost appears to Hurley, who realizes Michael is now tied to the island and can't move on. Walt is later approached by Ben and Hurley (in the unaired epilogue included with the sixth season DVD box set) after they become the island's protectors, offering him a job and saying he can help his father if he agrees to return to the island. Yet neither appears in the flash-sideways. Perhaps Hurley gave Walt immortality, similar to Richard Alpert (Néstor Carbonell), in order to allow him to stay with his father, or perhaps they both ended up tethered to the island indefinitely. Sadly, their ultimate fates are never addressed by the end of the show, so we can only hope that wherever they wound up, they're at peace.

After "Lost" revealed that the vast majority of its characters had been drawn to the island through Jacob meddling in their lives, it's reasonable to question how much autonomy those characters actually had to make their own decisions. It definitely seemed as though they were all free thinkers with their own agency, but if Jacob was pulling the strings behind the scenes the whole time, how can we know that their free will wasn't all an illusion? Could it be possible that all of the conflicts on the island — the struggles for power, the shifting loyalties, the surprising love stories — were actually engineered?

Well, most likely, yes and no. There's no denying that Jacob was a significant factor in everyone's lives, and his influence directly impacted many of the choices they made, often significantly. But if absolutely everything was fate, Jacob never would have had any need for "candidates" at all. He would simply have brought his successor to the island, along with the people who needed to influence that successor in order for them to choose to take over for him as Protector, and he wouldn't have needed to narrow down a list of possibilities at all. Jacob's lists of candidates — with many of their names crossed off as though they were once under consideration but weren't anymore — serve as hard evidence that while Jacob was indisputably powerful, he wasn't ultimately the one in control.

Bear with us here, because this one may get a little confusing. Among the most perplexing elements of the "Lost" mythology are the ubiquitous numbers that recur throughout the series. Not only do the numbers make up the factors of the Valenzetti Equation, which was developed in order to predict the precise date that humans would eventually go extinct, but the numbers also appeared in many more places and contexts than that during the show's run, including being the numbers Jacob assigned to each of his six final candidates. Although he started with over a hundred candidates, by the time the show ended, all that remained were candidates 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42.

This begs the question — did Jacob realize the significance of the numbers when he was assigning them to candidates, and if so, why did he consider any of those other people at all? Put plainly, if he already knew that these six people (Locke, Hurley, Sawyer, Sayid, Jack, and Sun or Jin) were going to be the finalists, why bother with the rest of the competition? While it is certainly possible that Jacob had no idea what the numbers were and there was a larger hand of fate at work of which he was completely unaware, it seems unlikely that Jacob wouldn't have come across the numbers during his millennia of life. The only explanation that makes sense is that although Jacob knew those six would be significant, he didn't necessarily know how, and he still needed to let events play out in order to narrow the field down to his final candidates.

What started as a seemingly straightforward show about groups of strangers surviving on an island together gradually evolved into something much weirder the longer the series went on. Eventually, "Lost" became a series about time travel, with characters being transported several decades back and forth in time. Ultimately, it was made clear through several storylines (such as discussions of "the Incident" in 1977, which wound up being largely caused by the Oceanic survivors trying to get back to the future) that there really was no original timeline or altered timeline. There was simply one timeline that had always existed, which certain people experienced in a nonlinear way.

But how did the time travel work, and how does it factor into the ending of "Lost?" We never get a clear answer about its mechanics, although it's implied that it has something to do with the island's powerful electromagnetic energy. As with so many other things, the island's ability to move through time and space appears to be partly a defense mechanism through which it keeps itself from being discovered on a large scale. But it also seems to have an element of fate to it, which may or may not be tied to the supernatural powers of the island. However it works, none of the characters would have wound up where they did by the end of the series without time travel — particularly Sawyer and Juliet, whose romantic reunion in the final episode would never have happened if they hadn't been thrown into the past together.

Ever the enigma, Desmond Hume's earthly fate is left pretty open-ended by the end of the series. The last we see of Desmond, he's unconscious after being pulled out of the Heart of the Island cave by Hurley and Ben, after the Ajira plane has already carried off the other survivors. Ben suggests to Hurley that the first thing he could do as the island's new protector is get Desmond home, although Hurley laments that the task is impossible since no one can leave the island. "That's how Jacob ran things," Ben muses. "Maybe there's another way. A better way."

They leave it at that; we never see Desmond again while he's alive. Presumably, Hurley and Ben did figure out a way to get him back home, although how they would've done it remains a mystery. After all, without the plane, they don't have a lot of resources for intercontinental travel. Yet we do get confirmation in the show's DVD epilogue that Hurley and Ben do eventually make it off the island, so there's no reason to believe they wouldn't have been able to take Desmond with them, especially with Hurley making the rules. But whether Desmond made it home right away or whether it took a while for Hurley and Ben to figure out how travel on and off the island works, we'll never know.

Although it's true that by the flash-sideways ending of "Lost," literally every character we've ever met is dead, there are a lucky few number of characters that at least make it to the end of the earth-bound narrative still alive. While many members of the show's original cast die by the time the Ajira plane makes its final flight away from the island, several remain behind, at least for a short time. In addition to Desmond, Rose and Bernard also end their "Lost" journey on the island, although unlike the time-traveling Scotsman, they actually choose to stay there. We don't know what happens to them after the Ajira plane takes off, but odds are that with Hurley in charge of the island, they're allowed to live out the remainder of their days in peace.

As for those on that Ajira plane — Frank (Jeff Fahey), Kate, Claire, Richard, Sawyer, and Miles — we don't really know much about what happens to them. It seems likely that they probably all lived for a long while after leaving the island, since otherwise their final escape would ring a little hollow, but the details of their post-island lives are mostly left up to the viewers' imaginations. Still, it seems safe to assume that Kate helped Claire reunite with Aaron, and that they went on to co-parent him together. The fact that both Claire and Kate regain their memories in the flash-sideways during Aaron's birth could subtly nod to the idea that they were both his mothers when they were alive.

Born in the mid-1800s, Richard Alpert was granted immortality by Jacob in exchange for acting as a liaison between Jacob and the outsiders who would come to the island. After that, Richard spent over a century doing Jacob's bidding. In the finale, he makes it off the island with the others in the Ajira plane, which is the last time we see him since he never appears in the flash-sideways. At a glance, this might seem to indicate that Richard continued to live long after everyone else died, but that's probably not the case. In the "Lost" finale, Miles observes that Richard has gotten his first gray hair, which is a subtle indication that he's started to age.

Since Jacob was the one who granted Richard his immortality, it seems likely that his long life was actually tied to Jacob's, and that when Jacob died, his magic left with him. The gray hair hints that once Richard leaves the island with the others, he will continue to age and eventually die like a normal person. But if that's the case, where did he go when he died since he's not in the flash-sideways? While we'll never know for sure, we'd like to think that Richard was finally reunited in the afterlife with his wife Isabella, who died shortly before Richard was arrested and sold into slavery, which is how he came to be on the island in the first place.