Headlocked writer Mike Kingston examines Lost's many unanswered questions.

After six seasons, it’s finally over. Jack died. Hurley is the new Jacob. Ben is the new Richard. Richard is screwed without a social security number. And all the white people went to heaven (more on that later).

However, there is a one great mystery left to discover when it comes to Lost. And like any Lost fanatic worth his autographed copy of “The Bad Twin”, I’ve got a theory.

Before we begin, you should now that I was in love with this series for five full seasons. Not enough to host parties with homemade Dharma Initiative labeled foodstuffs, mind you, but I was drinking the Cuselof Kool-Aid with no reservations. Season six ended up being a little love/hate for me. While I still loved all these characters, I wasn’t too hot on where they had decided to take the story.

Jacob. The Smoke Monster. The Big Stone Cork. The Mysterious Light. It was all a little much.

Now in the series aftermath, there seems to be two general opinions. People who were there for the characters overwhelmingly loved it. And I think on that front, Lost succeeded in spectacular fashion.

However, I also appreciate continuity and some sort of rational thinking in my storytelling. And to be honest, I do think Lost dropped the ball there. This brings me to the second prevailing opinion.

People who were there for the mystery, tended to hate it.

Here's the thing about mysteries. From writer to viewer, a mystery is very much like a sexual relationship. The writer gets off on making the fans wonder "whoodunit?" or "what does it all mean?" For the viewer, the payoff is in seeing that mystery solved (generally in a way that they could've figure out had they arranged the pieces the right way).

In my opinion, writing a mystery without intending to pay it off is masturbatory writing at its finest. 

Lost had so many dangling plotlines and unexplained mysteries that once Jack's eye closed, I felt like I had taken a money shot from Cuselof right in the ear.

I won't even get into any of the mysteries about the nature of the island or the mysterious light because that's a given for everyone. But there are an alarming number of disregarded plotlines and stories that were either dropped or changed sharply in mid-series.

What the hell happened with Walt? (I don't buy that its just because the kid grew up because he could have been replaced. It would've been weird for two episodes at most.)

Why did they spend 3/4 of the show making Charles Widmore this total bad ass villain with unlimited resources and then have him suddenly turn into a good guy "off camera" and then have him killed while hiding in a closet?

At one point there were rules preventing Ben from killing Widmore but then he did. Shot him. Multiple times. Huh? Why didn't he just do that when he snuck into his bedroom?  

Why can't babies be born on the island other than Aaron and Alex?  This bit of canon was seemingly altered with the birth of Ethan on the island in Season 5.

If the Smokey couldn’t leave the island but was also Christian Shepard’s apparition, how was he able to appear to Michael on the freighter and to Jack in LA after escaping?

Why didn't Smokey just tell Sawyer that Jacob was Anthony Cooper in Episode 2? Why didn't he turn into a big bag of heroin and get Charlie to do it? Why did he need to wait 5 seasons to turn into Locke so he could trick Ben into killing Jacob? Seems like a convoluted plan to say the least. (Although who am I to question a man who grew up on a beach with his crazy mother and figured out how to bend the laws of time and space with water, light, and a donkey wheel?)

If the island was real, then how is Michael's "soul" stuck in the island? Does the island have a sense of good and evil? Why didn't other castaways who killed people end up there? 

Why did The Others need to disguise themselves as weird seafaring hillbillies for two seasons? 

If Sayid had picked Nadia instead of some spoiled white girl as his soul mate would they have let him in Church at the end? Or would he have to go to purgatory somewhere else with Michael, Walt, Ana Lucia, Ilana, Mr. Eko, and anyone else with dark skin that wasn't smart enough to shack up with the white folk? (I'm kidding about this but it’s somewhat amusing when you think about it)

Maybe I’m one of those people but I don't think that character development is an excuse to ignore continuity. (Although just for the record, if I had to pick, I'd definitely go with characters over plot. Want to see the opposite? Watch Flash Forward. Better hurry though.)

So what happened?

The character work was top notch. The suspense was off the charts. There were at least ten awesome little Easter eggs that had been stuffed into every episode of Lost over the course of the series. It’s obvious that Cuse and Lindelof are neither lazy nor untalented. I would in fact argue quite the opposite. Masturbatory? Maybe. But certainly not lazy or untalented.

So what's the deal with all these dangling plotlines and unsolved mysteries? It hardly seems like the hallmark of writers that are so detail oriented.

All of these seeming contradictions got me thinking. And I think I’ve uncovered the last great Lost conspiracy theory!

In my estimation, at some point between Season 3 and Season 4 (maybe between 2 and 3), there became a conscious decision by the writers to have a surprise ending at the expense of having a coherent overarching mythology. So they made up some stuff that no one could've ever guessed, largely because it made no sense, wasn't going to be explained, and was based very little on what had come before. 

I think the original plan was to have the island itself be purgatory. The Smoke monster would be the judging mechanism (see Mr. Eko's death and life flashing before his eyes once he found peace with himself). Richard Alpert would've been the "Jacob" character as the immortal watchman for the island and The Others would've been it’s protectors (although I don't think they would be conscious of what they were doing). 

No mysterious light. No big stone cork. No crazy cabin. No Jacob. No Man in Black. We'd still have Nikki and Paulo but you can't win em all. 

That would explain why babies couldn't be born on the island (except Aaron because he was brought there). The "whispers" make a ton more sense in this context. And the neither the ending or any of the character development would really have had to change much.

Think about it. Most of the dangling and unresolved plotlines happened earlier in the series. And most of the unanswered questions are all centered around Jacob, Smokey, super light, and the big stone cork. And quite honestly, this theory just makes more sense in the context of what they presented.

So why did this happen?

I feel this decision was made largely because the "the island as purgatory" theory had been gaining some steam online and rather than be found out early, they decided to deny it, only to attempt to shoehorn it back in later with the final season's "flash-sideways" concept. 

So who’s to blame here?

I understand why the writers would feel a need for a surprise ending given the nature of the show and their insane fan base. I'm not sure how fans would've taken it had they not delivered a surprise ending because I think that is what everyone was expecting. I also think given how intense the Losties were, I think any logical ending would've eventually been guessed (there were some amazing theories out there) so they had to pull some mythology out of left field that no one would be able to figure it out and then sneak the purgatory deal in through the back door so they could finish up they way they needed to. 



Do I blame the writers? A little. But what else could they have done?

In the end, Lost's continuity was undone by it’s own rabid fan base. A fan base that simultaneously would not have accepted anything less than a surprise ending but at the same time seemed desperate to figure out it out before the finale. And in my view, it definitely took Season six down a few notches because of it.

But goddamn it if they still didn't almost make me lose it when Vincent came out and lay next to Jack at the end. 

Michael Kingston is the writer/creator of the critically acclaimed wrestling series Headlocked and has never been accused of being masturbatory…at least as a writer. Follow him on twitter at headlockedcomic.