HOW LOST IS PERCEIVED TODAY

In the top of some search news pages, there is usually generalized questions and "answers."

Recently, during a scroll down the page the headline "7 Worst TV Show Endings of All Time."

Of course it was click bait, but the first item on the slide show was LOST:

The Answer stated:

After six seasons of intricate plot build-up and a never-ending series of loose ends and questions about the true nature of the island and its inhabitants, the writers revealed they had written themselves into somewhat of a corner.

Instead of answering the audience's questions, the two hour finale "The End" ended up smoothing over most of the show's most important and unresolved problems by explaining that they all were in purgatory, though if they had really been there the whole time, no one knew.

Ask a "Lost" fan about the finale and you're sure to summon rage and frustration years later.

THE END AS WE KNOW IT

The BBC ponders this:

Don't panic, but our planet is doomed. It's just going to take a while. Roughly 6 billion years from now,the Earth will most likely be vaporized when the sun dies and expands into a red giant that engulfs Earth.

But the Earth is just one planet in the solar system, the Sun is just one of hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe. What's in store for all of that? How does the universe end?

There was The Big End Question asked in LOST when the alleged motivation to stop Flocke was that if he escaped the island, the world would be destroyed.  But what world?

We assumed it was Earth. But how? 

Flocke was a smoke monster, an intelligent being that could shape shift matter, take human form and steal human memories. It may have lived on fear. It had emotions that anger, rage to violence.

If the island was its prison, a containment field of electromagnetic energy, would Flocke's release into the universe or solar system expand its smoke powers to levels that would destroy the vacuum of space as we understand it?

We were told that Flocke escaping would destroy the planet. Could Flocke's mere presence in the atmosphere or orbit could shape shift, change or destroy the planet? If it had that much power to begin with, how could the tiny island contain it?

Of course, the destruction of the universe could have been a lie. A con. A reason Jacob had to recruit and keep his candidates at bay. But it seemed that there was a real possibility that Flocke would harm anyone or anything to get his way. But we never really knew where Flocke wanted to go.

Some rationalize that Smokey could be Satan, a fallen angel, whose only goal was to leave his personal hell on Earth to return to Heaven. But if he is not welcome in Heaven, then the disruption of the afterlife world would happen. Could that be the ripple in time and space (between dimensions) that the island's "cork" was really trying to keep steady? A parallel universe could collapse or engulf our present universe like a dying sun? If that was spelled out clearly in the series, we could probably get a greater purpose in the final showdown between the candidates and Flocke. This seems to be an important plot point that should have been explained to the viewers.

So we don't know if the "death" of Flocke was really the end of danger or merely the trigger to switch planes of parallel universes. If one believes in parallel universes, each of us has a doppelganger in that other world. But through experience, chance, free will and personal decisions, our doppelgangers can be different people. If the release of energy (memories) from one universe to another could be just as catastrophic, the sideways world view becomes clearer. If the main characters began to "awake" with memories from the wrong universe - - - that could destroy the belief system in their universe. It could disrupt the natural flow of energy, time and space that separates universes much like the different currents in the layers of an ocean.

We don't know if the awakening of the characters in the afterlife was just the end of a journey, or the actual cause of destruction of an entire universe.

THE UNLUCKY ANSWER

As today is Friday, the 13th, a superstitious day of bad luck, we focus on the one character who could have answered all the LOST questions, Daniel Faraday.

Poor Daniel. He was doomed from the start.

His back story was as hazy as his science.

Daniel was born on the mainland (as there is a birth certificate for him) and was the son of Eloise Hawking and Charles Widmore,  although he did not know the identity of his father (that was left blank on the birth certificate). This is the first unsolved mystery of this character: who was Daniel's real father?

We know that young Eloise and Widmore were co-leaders of a small Others fraction on the Island. Widmore wanted control of "his" island against any outsider, and Eloise seemed to be more focused on survival. How they both got to the island was unknown. But it seems they were both quite protective of it.

During their early adulthood, the time traveling Daniel appears on the island. Eloise shoots and kills "her son" then realizes her mistake. This sets off one of the most important background characters into action.

We know that both Eloise and Widmore left the island before the Purge. Widmore was banished by Ben because Widmore "violated the rules" by having a child (Penny) with an off-islander. Eloise's departure was not told. (She could have been part of the evacuation, or she may have left after killing her son in the time travel arc.)

It would seem that Eloise's sole goal in the series was to protect Daniel. After Eloise and Widmore's relationship soured, Eloise also changed Daniel's last name to Faraday so Charles could not find him. But we know how powerful Widmore was; he knew and found Daniel.

One could speculate that the falling out between Eloise and Widmore was about Daniel and his special abilities. Daniel had "time traveled" to the island. Widmore wanted to get back to the island and seize it as his own. What better means to do so than "time travel." Likewise, Eloise would want to save the time traveling Daniel from her own actions of killing him. As a result, Eloise may have needed to find a man who was a scientific genius. (Clue to last name: Stephen Hawking.)

Eloise needed to unlock the elements of space-time in order to correct Daniel's destiny. So she forced Daniel to give up music to study extreme theoretical science. So Daniel studied at Oxford, earning his doctorate at the youngest age on record. At that time, his girlfriend Teresa Spencer, was deemed to be a distraction. Soon after, Daniel started unauthorized experiments (funded by Widmore) involving time travel. He created a machine in 1996 that allowed a living creature's consciousness to travel through time. He tested it on a lab rat he named Eloise, which signifies an open hostility toward his mother and her constant pressure on him to succeed in this science.

During that same year, Daniel was visited by a stranger named Desmond Hume. Desmond claimed to know about the machine, Daniel initially believed that a colleague was playing a practical joke on him, but when Desmond mentioned "Eloise,"  Daniel's lab rat, he believed Desmond. In his lab, Daniel tested "the Numbers" Desmond supplied to him. He used the machine on Eloise, enabling her to unerringly complete a maze that she would not be taught how to run for another hour. Daniel's blackboard revealed his interest in the Kerr metric as part of his theory of time-transported consciousness. According to Daniel's theory, a being that undergoes time-transported consciousness must identify a "constant,"  something existing in both periods of time travel that can serve as an anchor for the being's consciousness; failure to find a constant results in instability of consciousness, and the resulting stress can lead to brain aneurysm and eventual death. 

Daniel's success led him to ramp up his experiments.  The experiment apparently resulted in Theresa becoming permanently mentally 'unstuck' in time, with her condition deteriorating to the point that she became permanently bedridden, in a coma-like state as a result of his experiments. (Widmore funded her care for her parents silence.) Soon after this accident, Daniel went to America. Daniel began to study at  DHARMA. It seemed that Daniel started to experiment on himself, which wrecked his ability to connect with his own memory. He constantly wrote notes in his leather journal to remember. 

But while in the United States, Daniel's mental state deteriorated to the point in 2004 where he is under the care of a woman (caretaker or some initially assumed a girlfriend or wife). When the news of Flight 815's crash, with film footage of the wreckage shown on the television, Daniel had a mental breakdown which he could not explain. When Widmore arrived, he told him that the wreckage was a fake. He told Daniel that the real Flight 815 had crashed on a "miraculous island," and offered him the chance to go there, promising that it would "cure" him. Several days later, Daniel was playing piano at his home, trying to remember the Chopin piece he was playing when he was ten, when he was visited by his mother. She persuaded him to accept Widmore's offer and go to the Island, assuring him that she would be proud of him if he did so. Daniel agreed to accept the offer.

Daniel brought several critical (we thought) elements to the LOST mythology. First, he brought with him science explanations for the island's mysteries. Second, he brought with him a window to the people pulling the strings behind the curtain (Eloise and Widmore, shadow villains). Third, he brought in intellectually naive character in the mix of amateur action heroes.

But Daniel's story is really messed up.

First, there are the paradoxes that cannot be put in their places. Young Eloise "kills" her adult yet unborn son on the island. This is a classic time travel problem that should have had radical results. Since Eloise has a son in the future, but kills him in the past, why would she "re-live" this pain by actually conceiving him in the future? Some could argue that an adult traveling back into time to meet their death is not a conventional paradox since Daniel was destined to die "someday," and this was the means of his own demise. But a secondary issue is that if Eloise knew Daniel was going to die on the island, why did she do everything in power after killing him to get him to study time travel and go on the trip to the island?

It would seem that Eloise "needed" Daniel to become a brilliant scientist in order to kill him on the island so her own fantasy sideways world dream family situation would come true. In Daniel's death on the island, Eloise could lead a normal, but rich life in the after life. It sounds insane, but that seems to be the whole motivation for the Eloise manipulation of both Daniel and Widmore.

So Daniel had a bounty on his head before he was even born. He was never going to have a real, normal, human life.

Second, if Daniel's theory of mental consciousness time travel is to be believed, was his research adopted by DHARMA to create the full transformation of physical time travel as demonstrated by the turning of the frozen donkey wheel? When Ben turned it, the island began "time skipping" but only with a few individuals. The idea of someone having a "constant" in real and skip times seems to be moot because people have connections in those worlds (i.e. parents, close friends, spouses, children, etc.). If the salvation key is consciously putting a mental image of a person in both time periods in your mind before you time jump, then that seems superficially a magic chant or spell and not science. (The ancient Egyptians Book of the Dead contained various chants and spells to help souls travel through the dangers of the underworld; perhaps Daniel's theory is like these spells.)

If Daniel was already mentally time tripping in the U.S., then why did he need to go to the island? The only explanation was that he needed to "die" on the island in order for his consciousness (some would call it his soul) to reach Eloise in the after life, so she could repress his memories and not "move on" through the next level of existence. This would presuppose that the island is actually an inter-dimensional gateway between the worlds of the living and the dead. For some unknown reason, people dying on the island have their memories repressed when their souls reach the after life. It is sort of a dream state in the sideways world where people, like in dreams, try to subconsciously work out real world problems through various fantasies. 

If the island allowed full body and mind time travel, then there should be no "mental" only time travel side effects, such as the nose bleeds and death that happened to Charlotte. Daniel was nose bleeding before he was shot, so he was going to also die even though his "constant," Desmond, was on the island and in his original time period. So, since there are two sets of rules at play in one time travel sequence, no clear conclusion could be made on what is truly happening on the island. If Daniel's theory is the control, then everyone on the island was time tripping, in a dream like state, in a forehell to the sideways world. If DHARMA and the island's FDW full time travel machine was the control, then only when you met yourself in both time frames could you be paradoxically removed from existence. But that did not happen to Charlotte or Daniel. In face, some time trippers were reincarnated. 

So it gets back to the big mystery of why, throughout all the trauma and manipulation of Daniel's life, did Eloise want, need, desire or demand Daniel to be on the freighter, come ashore, and be killed by her younger self? The only viable answer was that guilt was making Eloise dream up these actions.

For the symbolism of a young woman killing her "adult" child could represent a psychological trauma of Eloise's young life, such as an abortion. If she aborted "Daniel" or lost him during pregnancy on the island, then the series could evolve around a troubled young woman's lost mental state of delusions and fantasies of having the perfect life with her dead fetus. Eloise could have been haunted by her actions so that she could have been institutionalized as a mental patient. As creepy as that may seem, it allows for the fact that science, sci-fi and any other rational explanations for series events be immaterial and irrelevant. The sole factor was keeping her dead child from realizing that his own mother killed him.

DEAD ENDS & VERSES

How does one get one's self out of a painted corner?

The LOST writers continually put themselves into mystery corners without an explanation to free themselves from their own dead ends.

And there were too many such instances of huge plot inconsistencies to understand let alone explain.

Here are few of the nagging writing problems:

1. If Aaron was born on the island; why was he not born already in the sideways world?
2. If Ben was shot as a boy in the chest by Sayid, why didn't Ben remember him when 815 crashed?
3. Generally, why did so many characters fail to ask basic questions to their fellow castaways?

Here is a possible deux es machina explanation for the writing inconsistencies: multiverses.

Science is still trying to grapple with the workings of the cosmos. The discovery of the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Trying to put math to the known quantum pieces yields a result that none of us should be in our universe. Instead, there has to be another theory to explain our place in space.

Leading cosmologists like Alan Guth and Stephen Hawking envision our universe as one of countless bubbles in an eternally frothing sea. This infinite “multiverse” would contain universes with constants tuned to any and all possible values, including some outliers, like ours, that have just the right properties to support life. In this scenario, our good luck is inevitable: A peculiar, life-friendly bubble is all we could expect to observe.

Many physicists loathe the multiverse hypothesis, deeming it a cop-out of infinite proportions. But as attempts to paint our universe as an inevitable, self-contained structure falter, the multiverse camp is growing.

The problem remains how to test the hypothesis. Proponents of the multiverse idea must show that, among the rare universes that support life, ours is statistically typical. The exact dose of vacuum energy, the precise mass of our underweight Higgs boson, and other anomalies must have high odds within the subset of habitable universes. If the properties of this universe still seem atypical even in the habitable subset, then the multiverse explanation fails.

When a science fiction show can tap a real scientific theory (however unproven), it can free itself of the dead end badness of a misplayed plot line.

 Our characters were not jumping around in time travel when the island shifted, but our characters were jumping between multiverse bubbles, different parallel dimensions.

Instead of seeing a bubble, the LOST explanation is clear with a deck of cards analogy. In each island time skip, the deck was shuffled and a new card would be the "current" universe while the characters would continue on unknowingly in the other 51 parallel story verses. For example, boarding the plane in Sydney is Universe 1. When the plane hits turbulence, we are not shown a continuation of Universe 1 but a switch to Universe 2. As such, Universe 1's time line may continue the plane to LA (as seen in the sideways flashbacks). But then, when the island goes critical when Locke trips the numbers computer for a lockdown, Universe 2 switches to a different but similar Universe 3. When Ben turns the FDW, he triggers a series of multiverse quakes shifting through several different universes. This may be why we see Locke's paralysis come back on the island, for in a different universe he did not recover. When Locke vanishes the island with his FDW turn, this may be the clearest evidence of the multiverse concept: the shift to Universe X meant that the island was not in that X location.

After enough shuffling of multi-dimensions, a few individuals who can remember the "constants" in each plane of existence have a great advantage to control other people and events (such as Eloise Hawking and Desmond). One can guess more accurately if they had experienced an event generator of possible outcomes before making a final decision.

The multiverse explanation can help cushion the frustration of so many plot dead ends in the series, but it is still a trick to skip to a happy ending.

STUBBORN NEGLECT

LOST's show runners continue to stonewall fans about even the simplest of story plot points. At the Paley Center reunion event, TPTB said the script showed who shot Sawyer in the time travel outrigger scene, but it was deleted from the actual filming. Asked what happened, TPTB said it was better to leave it a mystery than give the fans the answer.

Well, that is plain lame.

Why is this one plot point so important to keep it a mystery? It makes no sense, since Sawyer getting shot in the outrigger scene had no lasting effect or change in the rest of the story line (from what we can tell).

There can only be a few reasons for this stubborn stonewalling:

1) TPTB are lying when they said there was an explanation in the script.

2) If they tell us what they wrote, it would open them up to fan criticism over the scene and the whole time travel paradoxes that were also never explained by the show.

3) They neglected to fully think out the ramifications of the "action" sequences and red herrings to keep fan interest as to paint themselves into a writer's corner they could not get out of . . . which would confirm the criticism that the writers and producers did not have a coherent finished story when they started the series.

4) They have convinced themselves that unanswered mysteries are more important story telling than the standard mystery series which solves the issues with clues, deduction, and reasonable explanations. It goes along the line that they perceive themselves as the smartest guys in the room and we, the public, don't get their genius.

5) They cannot explain the outrigger event without triggering a cascade of questions about other plot points which had little to no bearing on the finale. If fans were told that the writers were merely throwing strange, unrelated but shocking twists into scripts willy-nilly, then the "greatest" show on television would be a fraud, a bait and switch, a major disappointment.

DEAD ENDS

The problem with time travel science fiction is that you have to get it right or it is a mess.

Time travel was a recurring theme of the series, and referenced in different ways such as the Island "moving" and teleportation of the user of the ancient frozen donkey wheel under the Orchid station.  It was said that the electromagnetic power on the Island allows the inhabitants to travel through time. However, the narrative changed when characters began to consciously time travel (not physically)  which often end with death, due to the inability to find a "constant."

Here were the writer's various explanations for time travel during the series:

1.  Faraday says the island is like a spinning record on a turntable, but now the record is skipping after Ben's turn of the FDW. He said it may have "dislodged" us from Time.

2.  In the Orchid orientation film, it was stated that Dharma was "to conduct unique experiments of both space and time." Candle placed rabbit number 15 inside a device he called the "vault", which was constructed adjacent to "negatively charged exotic matter." He explained how the rabbit would travel 100ms ahead of four dimensional spacetime - three consisting of space and one of time.

3.  When Desmond had time skipped into the past, he went to Oxford to find Faraday. Faraday demonstrated to Desmond that he could transport a lab rat's consciousness forward in time. He did that by using a machine he designed which emitted an unknown radiation, set to 2.342 and oscillating at eleven hertz. Once exposed, the rat was able to move directly from one end of a maze to another.  Faraday explained that he was not going teach the rat to run the maze for another hour. Later, however, the rat died of what Faraday said was likely a brain aneurysm.

4.  Desmond's  consciousness randomly traveled through time between December 24, 2004 and an unknown date in 1996. Faraday stressed that for a mind to survive the continued transitions of temporal displacement, and to make it stop, it needs to find a "constant," or anchor, to focus on. This constant must be something that means a great deal to the person, and it has to be present in both time periods. For his constant, Desmond chose Penny.

5.  When Desmond first encountered Eloise Hawking, she explained there are rules for time travel: that "the universe has a way of course correcting or fate may intervene to any changes. If a man was supposed to die in an accident but survived, fate would create another event in which the man would die.

6.  The effects of time travel on the traveler seem to be similar whether the travel is physical, or where just the consciousness travels. In both cases, temporal displacement causes nose bleeds, headaches, forgetfulness, and in the worst cases, death by apparent brain aneurysm. However, the severity of the effects appears to differ from person to person. However, people right next to a time skipping person, such as Danielle with Jin, were unaffected by the time displacement.

So which explanation of LOST's time travel is correct?

One would have to conclude that none are the correct answer. The conclusion is based upon the fact that each alleged time travel rule was inconsistently applied through the story line. If one person is affected by physical or mental time travel, but the person standing right next to him (under the same conditions) does not have any time travel affects, the explanation is a nullity.

If the island was Faraday's conscious time machine but in a scaled up version, then everyone on the island would have been affected with mental time skips. But that did not happen. The same is true with the physical time travel: only a few of the 815 survivors were teleported back to the Dharma 1970s while the others were stuck in the present.

But the most egregious violations of time travel rules occurs during the physical skips. When Locke skips in front of Alpert, it makes little sense considering that Alpert had been on the island longer than Locke. Common sense would state that Alpert should have skipped along with Locke. In addition, when Faraday is killed by his mother in 1977, how could he have been born later? The same is true for Charlotte, who claimed to have returned to the island but died during time travel. Lastly, when Juliet is trapped in the hole with the atomic bomb, she is in the 1970s Dharma era. When there is the final time flash, she blurts out "it worked," but we still don't know what she is talking about. She dies in the rebooted present. Is that course correction at work? And did this change Juliet's past life, i.e. in the sideways world ending she had no contact with her sister, her closest friend, who would have been her "constant."

In fact, the whole notion of needing a constant was ridiculous. Under the definition of a constant ("something that means a great deal to the person"), everyone has multiple constants in their lives to focus upon, including parents, spouses, children, family, friends and even favorite sports teams. Minkowski had a family; Charlotte had her "work." Therefore, neither should have died as a result of failing to have a constant in their lives.

The physical time travel story arc led to a dead end, since the alleged explosion of the atomic bomb did not change anything. Desmond's mental time skipping to the past or future did not change anything - - - people still died. In fact, all these time story lines led to dead ends.

In show biz that is called "filler." The principle is to throw new tangents in order to keep the audience engaged. But adding filler tied to science concepts without a reasonable explanation of how things are applied to all the characters is poor execution. You could cut out all the time travel story plot lines from the series and viewers would not miss anything.

We cannot even say the time skipping created any alternative universe. TPTB continue to claim that all the island events were "real," but one can question in what "reality?"  The notion that the numerous time skips did not cause massive changes in the course of non-island events is also hard to believe if the island was the source for life, death and rebirth (in essence the creator of time and space itself). But the writers never tackled that concept or the unintended consequences of throwing in time travel into an adventure-survival story.

Some fans still believe the time travel arcs in LOST were the most disappointing feature of the series. It is even more so when the character "experts" in the show itself, were wrong in their explanation of events. Time travel in the series was like white noise, TV static or a blank box.