LOST: One Year Later, So Many Questions

It has been one year since the LOST Series finale aired, leaving many fans unsatisfied as they struggled with massive amounts of unanswered questions. For those people, I can only say what did you expect? Here is what LOST was about in the most condensed version possible.

A bunch of people crash on an island that has a smoke monster, is filled with hatches and people called “The Others.” They deal with all that for a few seasons, then some more people come to the island to kill everybody and six of the original people make it off the island. The people go home, miss the island and decide to come back. They come back but end up in 1977 and then blow up an atom bomb to get back into the present. After a little while we learn some dude named Jacob brought them all there to keep “evil” on the island and not let it escape to the whole world. They manage to kill “evil” which was also the smoke monster and a few escape. During the last season, we also saw flashes of them in purgatory, which is where they all meet up in the end before going to heaven. Boom. The end. LOST.

Did you really expect most of that to be explained in any type of rational way? You watch LOST because the first season was awesome and it sucked you in. It then kept you around with a few other great moments, a collection of interesting characters and some wacky cliffhangers. You can’t get all worked up because they never explained the sickness, or what the deal was with Walt or Aaron. You can’t even get mad that Jacob’s and Smoke Monster’s master plans were so convoluted and spoken out in generalities that they really made no sense. You should just enjoy the ride and worry about these more important issues.

Why is Matthew Fox such a bad actor and why is he always yelling so much?

A big part of LOST consisted of the lead character Jack Sheppard — played angrily by Matthew Fox — yelling at Kate not to follow him into the jungle, responding to simple questions by laughing to himself and then irrationally screaming, or taking out his hate for his dad by you guessed it… yelling.

Forget about what Walt’s magical powers actually were, why did his dad have to say his name so many times?

Harold Perrineau is a pretty good actor, so it was a shame the majority of his time on screen was spent chasing after his son and repeatedly saying or yelling his name. Why couldn’t Walt just stay in one place? He was always getting taken by The Others, randomly appearing in the jungle while talking backwards, and then growing too tall to be kept in the script.

Why were the writers so damn hard on Desmond and why did he still manage to remain calm enough to call everybody “brother”…?

This poor guy with his awesome Scottish accent was hated so much by his girlfriend’s father that he had to attempt a race around the world to win his respect, subsequently crashed on the island where he lived alone in a hatch for three years pushing a button every 108 minutes, then got shocked with electromagnetism so he could see repeating images of his best friend dying, then watched him die because his girlfriend’s boat didn’t show up, after which he got nosebleeds from traveling through time, only to finally get off the island just to get dragged back by his girlfriend’s father, so he could climb down a cave to pull a big cork out of a water fountain and nearly die…

And in the end, he was just a soccer fan who still managed to be polite to everybody.

Will there ever be a more beloved Iraqi torturer on an American television show than Sayid?

You wouldn’t expect a professional torturer from Tikrit to be such a sympathetic character, but who wasn’t rooting for Sayid to get his life back on track? All the guy did was pick up hot chicks on and off the island and manage to fix everything that ever broke, all the while still finding time to snap people’s necks with his legs.

Why does Michael Emerson have the ability to make any combination of words sound as creepy as possible?

Benjamin Linus was arguably the best portrayed character in the entire series, as he was played brilliantly by Michael Emerson. Ben terrorized the survivors for a couple of seasons before getting all buddy buddy with everybody by the end. Yet, throughout the entire series nobody could consistently creep you out more than Ben. Why isn’t this guy on another TV show or in a major movie by now?

In the end, LOST was one of the best shows on network television in the past few decades. You certainly won’t see a show like it anytime soon, considering most networks won’t put up so much money for a show that consistently declined in viewer ratings. It was complicated, convoluted at times, and never answered all the questions. But don’t we all miss those people running aimlessly around a island floating through time and space?