The Alamo Village shows Heroes, Lost and Battlestar Galactica for free on the big screen. Of course, when it came to the season finale, I could not resist the call of this venue and its sweet promise of Losty goodness. Watching the Losties up there on a big screen in a theater packed with die hard fans is an experience not to be missed.
My faith in the show had been shaken earlier this season, what with all the filler and no real answers to anything. But after the finale, I was ready to pronounce it the savior of dramatic television. Though I had guessed the twist almost instantly, the game-changing final scene was up there with the BSG finale. Five seconds after the Bad Robot logo appeared, the internet erupted with speculation. I have heard incredibly smart theories and have cast my lot in with the more ambitious ones, hoping the writers are truly driving the bus out to the fringe.
This wait is going to be more agonizing than the hatch, so I will simply put it from my mind and pretend the show does not exist, a selective amnesia that served me well while waiting for Lord of the Rings to come out.
So, what’s your favorite theory? We just saw the finale last night — they did manage to pull it out of the fire after very nearly losing me for good in the first half of the season.
Right now I’m on board with the splintered timeline/parallel reality theory. The island is within a space/time distortion, which is why the natives have not aged very much. The Others are trying to break out of a time loop which so far always ends with the world being destroyed. The station that blew up was used to broadcast the numbers to a monitoring station off island. If the numbers changed, it meant that the Hanso foundation had been successful in averting the end of the world (this was all explained in the “Lost Experience”). Desmond is the only Lostie aware of the loop because he traveled back in time earlier this season. The Losties are simultaneously alive on the island and dead in the parallel reality in which the plane crashed in the ocean. Leaving the island merges the two timelines.
Ok, that makes some sense. But is the time loop a deliberate creation of the Hanso Foundation — i.e. they put the DHARMA Initiative on the island to save the world and put them on repeat play until they got it right?
But didn’t Rousseau override the numbers broadcast 16 years ago? Seems like somebody would have noticed.
Also: it would appear that the Others are not the DHARMA Initiative since they did kill them off. Why would they have the same lofty goals? On the other hand, this makes sense because they’re still getting airdrops and funding from outside.
Hmmm. But why transmit the numbers from the island if some people are able to leave and return (eg Richard)?
I’m guessing that after the natives’ purge of the initiative, they realized that they were left with the fallout of a bunch of unfinished experiments. They may have realized they had made a mistake and now they are trying to correct it.
Not counting the Losties, there are three factions: the natives, the Dharma Initiative and the Others. Ben was part of the Initiative, but he defected to the natives. He then started recruiting people from off the island, forming the Others.
I’m assuming Dharma fell apart after the purge, which happened before Rousseau overrode the transmission. The offsite monitoring station may not have been too far away (maybe it was a ship). It could have been destroyed or Ben came up with a clever lie for them.
I think the time loop was either a natural event or the result of an experiment gone wrong. It could be that the island was “normal” at one time and then the distortion occurred and that is why it is now hard to find.