Monster of the Week: People who don’t understand the ending of Lost

Linear television is dead. At least, what used to be linear television is dead. The years of 22-episode series that would have everyone sitting around the TV watching live seem to be a thing of the past. Therefore, when Netflix decided to purchase the streaming rights for ABC’s massive hit show Lost in 2024, it seemed an unusual purchase.

Having cliff-hangers and mysteries in the streaming age is still common, but making people turn up next week, not just clicking the button for the next episode, is much more of an ask. The huge influx of new eyes the Netflix deal brought to the show also brought with it a somewhat critical re-evaluation of the show. To many, Lost was that show that started off brilliantly and eventually got weighed down under too many characters, plotlines, and mysteries that it was never going to be able to answer.

And that ending! I won’t spoil the actual ending of the show here, but if you haven’t heard, the main (completely false) thing people say about Lost is this: They were dead the whole time.

They were not. And this lie was enough for me to almost not watch the show, as I felt it made it all a pointless dream sequence, where nothing really matters because, well, everyone is dead.

The ending is far from perfect, of course

I still remember in secondary school my RE teacher supposedly spoiling the ending for me by comparing a concept in Christianity to the ending of the show (‘It’s like the ending of Lost guys’, surely a reference lost on 12-year-olds). And then telling us not to bother watching it as they were dead the whole time.

Again, they were not dead the whole time.

The ending is far from perfect, of course. Co-creator of the show, JJ Abrams, has made his whole career off of a storytelling device he named the ‘mystery box’. This is when a TV show presents central mysteries to the audience, as an attempt to keep them coming back to try to find the answer to what is inside of it. The premise of Lost creates many of these ‘mystery boxes’, which only grow as the show goes on, such as the introduction of the infamous ‘hatch’ in season one, and the group known only as ‘the others’. The hatch worked almost as a physical mystery box, with it designed to create speculation and intrigue over what was hidden beneath it.

The way JJ Abrams uses mystery boxes is different from the typical writer, though, as he does not come up with the answers to the questions he asks. Instead, he likes to either see if the answer appears to him later on, or (as in the case with Lost), leave them for someone else to answer.

Lost was a show perhaps cursed from the beginning to have an unpopular ending

That man was Lost co-creator and future showrunner Damon Lindelof, who has gone on to make a range of acclaimed shows from HBO’s Watchmen to the criminally underrated The Leftovers. These both employ the same ‘mystery box’ technique to varying levels of importance. The Leftovers is about a world recovering from 2% of the population vanishing, and immediately, the audience are tuning in every week to try and find out how the show is going to solve this premise. The Leftovers received praise for its ending, but then again, it was written alongside the author of the book the show is based on, Tom Perrotta, who knew where the story was heading and was therefore able to create a satisfying ending.

With Lost, JJ Abrams created these mystery boxes when writing season one but was then sniped by Tom Cruise to direct Mission Impossible 3 shortly after Lost’s pilot was picked up, leaving Lindelof to deal with the various strands and ideas he had been putting together.

This inevitably meant the show was never going to be able to create the ending it deserved, and therefore leave people disappointed. It’s undoubtable that Lost did get slightly lost in its own sauce and found it difficult to balance both giving satisfying answers to questions whilst simultaneously asking new ones to keep people coming back. Do not let this detract from a truly incredible show, whose influence is still being felt today. The fact that it proved a big success for Netflix surely proves it has stood the test of time.

Lost was a show perhaps cursed from the beginning to have an unpopular ending. A show that was at one point pulling over 23 million viewers per episode in the US alone was never going to make everyone happy. But maybe a few more people could have realised what was actually going on.