'Lost' Ending Explained, 15 Years Later: Were the Passengers of Oceanic 815 Dead the Whole Time?

After six seasons, Lost aired its finale episode in 2010
Fifteen years later, it remains one of the most controversial endings in TV history, with some people theorizing that the passengers had been dead the whole time
The showrunners claimed that viewers read too much into the final scene and that it was more important to reunite the characters than solve every mysteryWarning: spoilers ahead!
Few TV finales have sparked as much debate as Lost's.
Appropriately titled "The End," the final episode aired on May 23, 2010, and left fans sharply divided over its ambiguity. Even 15 years later, people are still asking what happened to the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 — and if they were really dead this whole time?
In the Emmy-winning show, which premiered in September 2004, a flight from Sydney to Los Angeles crashes on a remote island, and the survivors attempt to stay alive while they search for a way home. They soon discover they're not alone on the island, and 'The Others' — the people who call it their home — are not exactly friendly or welcoming to outsiders.
Viewers, and the Oceanic Six, later learn that the island has supernatural powers: it can heal people and give them immortality, and it acts as a barrier between evil and the earth.
However, instead of wrapping up storylines neatly, the series' final episode created more questions, and left many feeling cheated of a firm resolution.
Here's everything to know about Lost's ending.
By the final season, there were multiple timelines happening on the show. In season 5, Sawyer (played by Josh Holloway), Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell), Miles (Ken Leung) and Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) were all in the 1970s, living with The Dharma Initiative, a group of scientists attempting to understand the island's elements.
Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), Sayid (Naveen Andrews) and Sun (Yunjin Kim) were off the island in the present day, trying to get back to help their friends — with the self-interested encouragement of John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) and Ben (Michael Emerson), who wanted to get back to the island because of their desire to rule the place and tap its power.
In the sixth and final season, most of the characters are reunited on the island, including a reluctant Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), and the lingering mysteries start to unfold. Viewers finally learn who Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) is — he's the protector of the island — and more is revealed about his relationship with his nemesis, the Man in Black, who wants to destroy the island and unleash the evil it's holding at bay. At various times, when he wasn't in corporeal form, the Man in Black also appeared as the Smoke Monster.
All the while, there are still two timelines happening. In one, the remaining survivors are on the island: some are trying to escape, some are hoping to be chosen as the next protector and some want to destroy the island. In the other timeline — which showrunners described as a 'flash sideways' — the plane never crashed, but the survivors' lives are still deeply intertwined.
'The fundamental mystery of season 6 is, why are we showing you these two stories and what is their relationship to each other?' executive producer Damon Lindelof told PEOPLE in 2010. 'The audience is gonna have to be very patient.'
It turns out that Locke became the Smoke Monster embodied, who continued his quest to destroy the island, and removed a rock at the bottom of a sacred well, which was the stopper for the island's power. The final battle came down to him fighting Jack, who had replaced Jacob as protector of the island.
Jack defeats him, but to save the island, he has to replace that rock, even though he knows going into the well will kill him. Before he descends, Jack taps Hurley to be the island's protector. In one of the show's biggest twists, Hurley enlists Ben, the survivors' longtime foe and leader of The Others, to help him care for it.
Jack replaces the rock and saves the island, but is grievously wounded. As he's taking his final steps towards death, he finds himself in his sideways timeline, in a room with the spirit of his dead father, who tells Jack he's died. Jack opens the door to that room to find he's in a church, with almost all of the show's main characters there — even some who are still alive in the island timeline, and some who died in previous seasons, like Boone (Ian Somerhalder) and Charlie (Dominic Monaghan).
They're all hugging and greeting each other. Locke walks up to Jack, shakes his hand and says, 'We've been waiting for you.' On the island, Jack dies as a plane flies overhead. In the church, he's sitting next to Kate, his longtime would-be partner, and smiling as the scene fades to white.
Because of the church scene, which was strongly suggestive of all the characters going to the afterlife, many viewers assumed that all the passengers on Oceanic 815 had been dead the whole time. Further support for that theory was the final credits of the finale, which showed the plane fuselage on the beach as it appeared in the first-ever episode; many interpreted that as cementing the idea that they had all died in the crash.
The showrunners, though, were adamant that the survivors weren't dead the whole time. They chose to use that footage as a way to ease viewers out of the show so the transition to a commercial wouldn't be as abrupt.
'We put that footage at the end of the show and I think that the problem was that the audience was so accustomed on Lost to the idea that everything had meaning and purpose and intentionality,' executive producer Carlton Cuse told Vulture in 2021.
'So they read into that footage at the end that, you know, they were dead. That was not the intention,' he continued. 'The intention was just to create a narrative pause. But it was too portentous. It took on another meaning. And that meaning I think, distorted our intentions and helped create that misperception.'
Because the ending focused so much on character resolution, leaving the show very far from its intriguing starting point with a lot of the island's mysteries unsolved, like why no babies could be born on the island. There were also some questionable 11th-hour plot twists, like the sudden presence of another faction of The Others, who lived in a never-before-mentioned temple in the jungle, and the reappearance of Claire (Emilie de Ravin) who had unceremoniously disappeared in season 4.
'There was no way to answer all the open questions that existed across the prior 119 episodes of the show,' Cuse told Vulture. 'We sort of tried a version of that with the episode that was a couple before the end, 'Across the Sea,' which was this very mythological episode about the origins of Jacob and the Man in Black. That was sort of what answers look like. And I don't think it was great.'
There was also no clear explanation of what those 'flash sideways' were, other than they added spiritual overtones at the end, which seemed out of character for the previous episodes of the show. Years later, executive producer and writer Liz Sarnoff explained it in Vulture's oral history of the Lost finale.
'From a writerly standpoint, it's impossible for me to convey to you in words what the rules of the sideways were, other than to say we called it a bardo in the writers' room, which was largely based on a construct in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is this idea that when you die, you experience an afterlife where you do not know that you are dead, and the entire purpose of that afterlife is for you to come to the awareness that you have died," she said.
The flashes sideways did a lot of the work of the characters' resolutions, too. The couples who were separated in the show — like Jack and Kate, Desmond and Penny and Sawyer and Juliet — all reunited in those flashes. In the final scene in the church, viewers also see Sun and Jin reunited (they had both died escaping the island) as well as Sayid and Shannon.
"We [preferred] to tell an emotional story about what happened to the characters," Cuse said during a PaleyFest panel in 2014, per Entertainment Weekly. "I cared more about the characters' journey and what happened to them."
According to Sarnoff, the show's producers always wanted the characters to find each other again and prioritized that over answering questions.
'Our feelings about the finale were always, always, that it was going to have to be very emotional and character-based because we found when we gave answers to mysteries and stuff like that, the audience would normally reject them,' she told Vulture in 2021. 'Mystery shows like that are so tricky because nobody wants the mystery to end, but they want answers.'
While showrunners Cuse and Lindelof stand by what they did in the finale, they admit that some choices were heavy-handed. 'There's stuff that makes me grimace a bit,' Lindelof told Vulture. 'Like it's not quite a regret, but I think that if we didn't have that damn stained-glass window, we would've gotten a full letter grade higher on the finale. The literalness of the window — that's a part that made me grit my teeth a little bit.'
'Damon and I accept that the show is what it is, warts and all,' Cuse said at a 2016 Lost reunion concert, according to The Hollywood Reporter. 'Everything is a part of it. So ultimately, is there anything I would change? The answer is no.'
Read the original article on People

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