Top Five Answers We Want From The LOST Epilogue
Lost may have finished, but will it ever truly be over? After the series finale The End, message boards and podcast are still trying to decipher what happened. As controversial as the finale was on wide variety of issues, some questions and the answers we seek are still elusive. On the DVD release of the complete sixth season, there is a sort of epilogue that takes place after the final scene of Jack closing his eyes and prior to the church scene. Jorge Garcia and Michael Emerson, Hurley and Ben respectively, have said that there is a deleted scene between the two, that examines the immediate aftermath of The End. So I will give a list of five questions we would like to be answered in, what the two actors have said, is about a fifteen minute deleted scene. So let’s just get into it.
Number 5
The Dharma Food Drop
In the season 2 episode Lockdown, Kate and Jack find a large pallet of provisions that seemingly came out of nowhere. There was a parachute attached and a tracking beacon, with all the food labeled with the Dharma Initiative logo. This was in 2004 and the best estimates for the date of the Purge are December 19, 1992. Why would those running the Dharma initiative still have scheduled supply drops to a program in which all the participants have been dead, or at the very least missing, for over 12 years. The other point of contention, being how it actually got there. The Losties did not hear a plane or helicopter to confirm the assumption that the supplies came from the sky. Lockdown would not be the only reference to the supply drop. In The Flame station Sayid found a supply drop protocol in a binder and Ben mentioned in his journal that they had not received a batch of new provisions. Even the extended Lost universe mentions the supply drop. In the ARG The Lost Experience, Alvar Hanso mentions to those who are joining the initiative that supply drops will be made periodically and in the Mysteries of the Universe mock show, it is stated that a village in Tonga received a crate weighing 1-ton which was full of provisions. Fans have wanted this question answered for a while and although it is not high on my personal list, it is one that continues to crop up. I do have my own theories to this particular mystery and if your curious just leave a comment and I will get back to you.
Number 4
The Fertility Issue
Why couldn’t pregnant women carry children to birth, or more importantly why did they die while carrying? Juliet was brought to the island because she was a fertility doctor that had successfully artificially inseminated her sister while she had cancer and could not conceive (first draft I wrote impregnate, but that maybe from a later night show). Ben brought her to the island in hopes of replicating her research. In the episode Not in Portland, Juliet is shown by Alpert that the island degrades the uterus of women well before they become pregnant. Many believed that the problem was tied to the statue but, we will get to that later. So we know that the earliest birth on the island was Jacob and the Man in Black's mother Claudia, at what was aproximately two thousand years ago. She was pregnant before she got to the island and, besides the ‘mother’ murdering her right after, there seemed to be no complications. Furthermore, in the episode Across the Sea, there is a camp with children in it who must have been born in the years between Jacob and MIB's childhood to when they were Adults. Clair also gave birth to Aaron on the island, but once again, she was pregnant before her arrival. The only birth in-between, was when Olivia gave birth to Ethan in 1977 Dharma Initiative. Horace however, made a remark that it is custom for pregnant women to leave the island before birth, this may show a knowledge of the issue. During the three years Juliet was on the Island prior to the Losties, we are shown a woman dying in childbirth and we get the feeling that this is not the first attempt by Juliet to fix the problem. What happen after the events of Across the Sea that caused these pregnancy problems?
Number 3
Walt
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALT!!!!!!!!! OK your right, that ones too easy and has been done to death. Walt crashed on the island with the rest of Oceanic flight 815. He was only ten years old and found himself under the care of his estranged father and we are shown through flashbacks, that Walt always seemed to have some special abilities. For example, in the episode Special, his stepfather Brian Porter told Michael that “There’s something about him. Sometimes, when he’s around, things happen. He’s different somehow”. In the same episode, we are lead to believe that he compelled a bird to kill itself by flying into a glass window; the bird was the same as the one he was reading about and his anger appears to influence it. At the end of season one when he accompanied Michael, Sawyer and Jin on the raft, the others take Walt and destroy everything else. They obviously didn’t mind killing the others (on a side note how many times has Jin survived just floating in the middle of the ocean?), but not Walt. We are also lead to believe that it was revealed to him the Others true identity.
In the time that he was taken, we see him before both Shannon and Sayid in Abandoned, soaking wet and speaking in tongues, but as soon as they look away for a second, he disappears. Normally, we could say it was the Man in Black taking his form, but Walt is not dead and in order for MIB to be able to do so. This same must also be true when we see Walt talk Locke into climbing out of the mass grave in Through the Looking Glass. Locke described Walt’s appearance in Confirmed, as “Walt, only taller”. Even Ben told Michael, when the two were reunited in Live Together, Die Alone 2, that Walt was “more than we bargained for”. We assumed that Walt was put in room 23 and in the movisode Room 23, we see the Others appear to be afraid of Walt and a pile of dead birds, that we are lead to believe he is responsible for. After Walt left the Island, he took on a different identity and cut off communications with his father. We see Walt in Later seasons talking to both Locke and Hurley on different occasions. Is Walt special? It would seem pretty apparent that he is, but how so? More importantly, he really is not a major player in the events of the story, which poses the question of why was so much time was devoted to making him appear, only for his story to stop. The last we saw of Walt, he was going to school living a normal life but what we really want to know is who Walt really is and what makes him so special.
Number 2
The Statue and Ruins
The first time I knew I was sold on LOST, was when John Locke was shown in a wheelchair before the crash. That scene at the end of Walkabout is still my favorite of the show. The scene which provoked a growth in scale for the show arrived when when Sayid, Jin, and Sun see the remains of the four toed statue. Only the leg was present, but it alone highlighted how massive it would have once been. It wasn’t until season 5 that we saw the entirety of the statue. In LaFleur, when some of our Losties are traveling through time, they stop at a point in history where they can see the back of the statue. The Egyptian imagery is strong, but we experience a more complete look in both The Incident and Ab Aeterno. We also learn that Jacob lives in the statue and that it was Richard's boat that caused its collapse in these two episodes respectively. In of all places, ABC.com, we find out that the statue was of Taweret the Egyptian goddess of childbirth and fertility. Before we discovered that Richard's boat brought it down, we were all giddy about the possibility that 'the incident' was what caused the statue to fall. This would have meant that the fertility problem was most likely connected to Juliet hitting the bomb, which would have meant that she was on the island in order to cause the problem that necessitated her assistance (Who likes paradoxes?).
With the destruction of Taweret we may be closer to the answer of the fertility problem. Oh and it is probably worth mentioning the fact that it has only it has only four toes.... The Ruins have been in the background throughout the series. They seem to be spread throughout the island, which leads us to believe that those who came before, had complete control. While we have been given more information on the Egyptians a definitive answer is needed, at least for me. This question leads me to number one….
Number 1
The Island
OK, so I am kind of cheating on this one because I have lumped a lot of mysteries into one. We have gotten many different answers as to what the Island 'is', but what we have gotten has been too vague and hokey. The first one is the metaphorical ‘cork’ that holds in all the evil in the world. In The End, we see that it wasn’t a cleaver metaphor but that there actually was a stone cork in the chamber below the light. That’s another thing, just what exactly was the light? Many are fine with it simply representing ‘good’, which if extinguished, evil will spread throughout the world. However, I find this too simplistic. Don’t get me wrong, I will roll with it, but I just cant help feel there’s something we don’t know yet.
Harking back to the statue, who were the islands original inhabitants? Ben mentions them when while explaining the Purge to Lock in The Man Behind the Curtain, but as far as we can tell, none of the Others were originally from the island.
Where do the Island's healing properties come from and why are they so selective? Locke and Ross were healed, yet Ben, Jack, and Shannon were not. Jacob has been shown to have the ability to heal, but does the ability extend to the Island?
Who built the statue, ruins, temple, and cork? I want to know how it all started. In Across the Sea, Mother states that any question she answered would just lead to more questions and many saw this as the writers way of saying, “yeah there’s always going to be more to answer so this is what you get”. While there may be some truth to that statement, a simple 'this is how it started' would work wonders for our ability to fill in the blanks.
No one seems to worry much about the Island after the Finale, so I guess they are fine with the answers given, but I for one am not. This show is said to have always been about the characters, but I would have to disagree. Yes, the characters drove the show, but it was really about their time on the weirdest island ever. An Island that seems forever destined to remain a mystery. That's the funny thing about Lost, it seems that even when we're found, we're ultimately...
