After entering the Cave and setting the Island straight, the mortally wounded (from a knife fight injury and electromagnetism) Jack crawls into the jungle and peacefully closes his eyes for the last time. As he does, he sees a plane take off from the Island carrying home Kate (Evangeline Lilly), Sawyer (Josh Holloway), Claire (Emilie de Ravin), Richard (Nestor Carbonell) Miles (Ken Leung), and Frank (Jeff Fahey).
Why Do People Think The Characters Were Dead The Whole Time?
So…were the characters dead the whole time? The answer to that question is conclusively, definitively, unambiguously: No. The characters of Lost were not dead the whole time. The Island wasn’t heaven, hell, purgatory, or any other celestial plane. To borrow from the show’s own lexicon: whatever happened, happened. There is a reason, however, why some people mistakenly believe that the characters were dead the whole time. That’s because the big twist of the final episode is that they were indeed dead some of the time. Pull up a chair, this may take a minute.
First, we have to go back(!) to Lost‘s penultimate season. Season 5 features many of the central characters time traveling to 1977 and embedding with the beginning of the DHARMA Initiative’s research on The Island. Believing they’ve been sent back in time to undo all the tragedy they’ve experienced thus far, some of the temporally-displaced castaways form a plan.
On the Island, there happens to be a hydrogen bomb called “Jughead” left behind by the U.S. army in the ’50s. Jack and others theorize that if they detonate the bomb on the construction site of a future DHARMA station known as “The Swan,” they will be sent back to their original lives as if none of this ever happened. After all, they know from their present day knowledge that The Swan once experienced something called “The Incident.” Perhaps they are that Incident.
Following the detonation of Jughead in the season 5 finale, season 6 takes place in two timelines. In one of them, Jughead succeeded in only getting the characters back to their present (2007) on the Island. The other, however, initially appears to have proven Jack’s theory right. Most episodes of Lost feature a flashback to a certain character’s life before the Island. Season 4 and 5 then introduced “flash-forwards” of their lives after they left the Island. The “flash-sideways” of season 6 depict an alternate universe in which Oceanic Flight 815 never crashed and the castaways never made it the Island.
As characters like Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Locke go about their day-to-day lives outside the Island, viewers naturally conclude that this flash-sideways timeline is the intended consequence of The Incident. The detonation of Jughead didn’t just get Jack and co. back to the present, it also created an alternate universe – something that the comic fan writers of Lost would surely be familiar with.
