LAYERED PLOT LINE

In "Power Play," a Star Trek:TNG episode, the Enterprise encounters a old distress signal coming from a lifeless moon. They trace the signal to a 172 year old lost star ship. The counselor feels that there is life on the surface. The moon's surface is covered by violent ionic storms. So the crew cannot transport down to the surface. The shuttle craft crash lands. The landing party sees a strange electromagnetic storm coming upon them. Just as they are getting rescued, energy beings invade three members of the crew before they are beamed to safety.

In this one hour story, we have various elements of mystery and science fiction intertwined in physics properties:
1. A lost star ship must have crashed on a foreboding, stormy moon.
2. A landing party trapped in the midst of a strange, electromagnetic storm.
3. A strange electromagnetic energy invades a human host and suppresses their character and memories with a new personality.
4. Once returned to the Enterprise, the EM hosts take hostages and try to seize control of the ship. They claim they are the conscious minds of the lost star ship bridge crew who seek to rescue their fellow ghost crew members to take them back to earth "to rest."

This quick and simple story "fact" structure is easily understandable and in sci-fi terms, reasonably believable. This is the base line for the character interactions, violent interactions,
and the ultimate climax twist of unraveling of the true identities of the EM beings as being prisoners exiled on the moon penal colony.

What LOST lacks in end game analysis is an initial, simple story "fact" structure from the beginning of Season 1 which would be reasonably believable through to the ending story climax.

Did the EM burst from the hatch that Desmond forgot to press the Numbers actually "cause" the crash of Flight 815 or actually "save" the souls by entrapping their spirits in EM beings to re-inhabit their bodies post-crash? The latter could be the jumping off point to tie the Light Cave and energy source of the Frozen Donkey Wheel Cave as life-giving EM, whether as a physical property or as its own intelligent being. If the island EM was combining its life force and intertwine its intelligence with dead souls who came within contact with the island, whether as an experiment, or to stop boredom of a trapped being, that would make a sound sci-fi base.

It could also explain why Desmond and the others who should have been blown away by massive EM energy bursts (from the Hatch and the Widmore experiment) did not die because if they were already part EM energy, the EM would not "kill" itself.

Throughout the series, many people thought the island was its own "character." But in the end, the island was merely an island with unique properties. Nothing in the final episodes told that the island had any controlling influence over the characters. Which is probably a shame since that could have easily bridged to the sideways world "holding tank" created not by the characters (human beings) but a higher intelligence in a EM created world (like program bytes running on a computer hard drive).

From a writing perspective, TPTB could have created a known sci-fi "fact" base early on in the series, and layered conflict and twists to come to a reasonable explanation that would have tied the island events and sideways world together. But for whatever belief, they decided to keep everyone in the dark.