One less 'Lost' mystery

SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t seen the “Lost” finale, you probably don’t want to read this.


When the moving, suspenseful series finale of “Lost” ended Sunday night, there were a lot of unanswered questions.

What exactly was the light that Jacob, then Jack, were trying to protect? Where did the Others/Hostiles come from? What was Smokie’s real name? Why wasn’t Mr. Eko in the church? And how did Hugo Reyes get the nickname Hurley?

What the finale did make abundantly clear, however, was that the mysterious island was the setting of a story not about the island itself, but about the people who through strange twists of fate — and the time-space continuum — came to populate it.

So I can live without knowing every single why and wherefore. A lot of times those answers aren’t as satisfying as the mystery anyway.

But while there is bound to be debate for weeks, months, even years about certain elements of “Lost,” one debate has arisen that I didn’t see coming.

Some folks are still wondering whether the characters were dead for the entire run of the series (barring flashbacks).

Yes, the show ended with a gathering of the characters in the “sideways” world that turned out to be something like purgatory. One of the theories that arose in the early days of “Lost” was that the island was purgatory and everyone on Oceanic Flight 815 had died in the crash.

The producers publicly said at some point that that was not the case, even though they played with the idea a bit toward the end of season three. That the sideways world we were introduced to this year — in which the plane never crashed and the characters landed in Los Angeles, some leading surprisingly different lives — turned out to be that limbo-esque setting seemed, to me, an interesting nod to the fans that still fit with the story (even if I didn’t quite agree with all the theology).

But some people came away from the finale thinking the characters had been dead ever since the beginning. I thought it was pretty clear when Jack’s father (who was dead before the plane ever landed on the island) said everything that ever happened to him was real.

Unless I missed something (which is hardly impossible), everybody died when they died on the show, and not before then. Boone died on the island in season one. Locke died in season five off the island, although we didn’t realize that at first. Jack died at the end of the finale. Folks like Kate and Sawyer died sometime later, possibly of old age.

Is that what you got? And what did you think of the finale?