Un/answered Lost Questions

[Arpy]

*WARNING* Series Ending Spoilers Ahead *WARNING*
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I finished the 6th season of Lost recently but haven't seen the second half of season 5. A couple questions remain for me and wonder if they'll be addressed in those episodes. Still, I want some spoilers.

1) Do we ever find out why Hurley is so lucky other than just being lucky?

2) Is it just coincidence that the numbers that won him the lottery are also those on the island?

3) The series ends in a very different place than an insane asylum. When we saw him in one in earlier, was it actually in that end-of-series place or was it a dream or what?

BTW, the series was beautiful and so American circa start of the 21st century. They should save it for future pop-culture historians.

 

[Arpy]

Anyone?

 

[Shurik]

As far as I remember:
1. No.
2. Coincidence.
3. He was in the asylum after he got back to the mainland and before he got back to the island. IIRC, he was in the asylum also before the flight 815.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Actually, it's not a coincidence. He got the numbers from Leonard Simms who heard them being broadcast by the Dharma initiative. Hurley got them from the island, essentially.

As for why they did what they did. That just seems to be the strangeness of the island. Perhaps the numbers themselves are significant, but it just seems to me they took on significance by virtue of being broadcast.

 

[Seven of Five]

Yeah I agree with that. They were just numbers at first, but via Leonard, Hurley won the lottery and they became significant. Of course they originated on the island anyway, so by the time Hurley starts noticing them they increased in significance again.

I want to know if Jacob's use of numbers for the candidates was just a coincidence. How would he know that candidates 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 would be left by the end?

To answer the OP's third question, Hurley was in the insane asylum prior to his arrival on the island. He was out by the time he won the lottery, before ending up on flight 815. Starting in season 4 we saw a flashforwards, where amongst other things we see Hurley in the asylum again. This was set after the Oceanic 6 made it back home, but before they come back to the island again i.e. in the intervening three years.

I love Lost too because I can write things like I just did and they make more sense to me than the real world does!

 

[Sindatur]

To expand a bit on what's been said already.

S1-3 -> Flashbacks to before arriving on the island mixed in with the characters' present on the island.
S4-5 -> Flashforwards and Flashbacks mixed in with the Characters' present
S6 -> Island was the present for characters, and the mainland stuff was Purgatory, waiting until everyone had died so they could all move on together.

S6 showed us Jacob had "A thing" for numbers, so he used the numbers to manipulate the lives of the "candidates" to eventually bring them to the island.

 

[Aeon]

I really have to buy all the DVD sets and watch the show again from the beginning to the end because I'm not sure if I was disappointed by the finale or not. After a year or so the last season certainly feels very disjointed from the rest of the show.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I want to know if Jacob's use of numbers for the candidates was just a coincidence. How would he know that candidates 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 would be left by the end?

He knew about them from before the beginning. They were, in a way, protected. Besides, not all of them were there at the end. And, iirc, Kate wasn't even one of the numbers and she did survive (and was told if she wanted to, she could still be a candidate).

 

[Mike Farley]

I thought Kate was one of the numbers, but was removed later when she became a mother to Aaron.

 

[Seven of Five]

Yeah she was now that I think about it, though Jacob said that it was just chalk and his job was hers if she wanted. It's just funny that the final candidates corresponded with the numbers - Jacob had 360 candidates at least according to 'The Lighthouse,' where lots of names are written on that wheel. Surely, then, it's a coincidence that the final six are the numbers? I suppose in alternate television land if Nikki and Paulo had made it to the final showdown, they would be a number/candidate too.

As for season six, I really enjoyed it at the time. I loved the final episode, and was moved to tears when Jack of all people died. However the revelation that the season's alternate timeline was really an afterlife (or pre-afterlife depending on your view) left me a bit cold. I was planning to watch the show all the way through again and never did, until last month, which is about a year since the finale aired.

Fortunately, I ended up enjoying it so much more knowing what was coming up. I love that the characters are all all fighting with issues that caused problems during their lives, and they need to resolve these things in order to move on. There are small moments throughout the season that take on an extra meaning knowing the ending. Rose telling Bernard that she missed him whilst he was in the bathroom during LA X, indicating they are aware of what's going on.

I think people have trouble looking back on season six because this timeline had no bearing on the present day plot, and ended up taking up so much time away from other things. I feel now, however, that it's an excellent final season in the way that it allows characters to tackle the issues we've seen them suffer through throughout the entire series, as opposed to wallowing in them for the first three seasons in the flashbacks.

 

[DevilEyes]

I'm the opposite. I loved the 'flashsideways' purgatory story, that's my favorite part of season 6, but the island story disappointed me. In the end the made it all about Good vs Evil, even though MIB and Jacob didn't really fit those roles in their origin/flashback episode; some of the character journeys, like Sayid's, ended quite lamely, and a bunch of new characters were introduced as big players and then quickly killed off; and interesting storylines such as Dharma ended up unexplored. (So many questions about Dharma, and all we got was the Horace family drama in S5?!)

 

[Seven of Five]

Yeah Jacob vs. MIB was a bit simplistic for Lost. I was expecting some sort of twist, maybe an evil or more sinister Jacob, but besides him creating Smokey, nothing came of it. I know black and white had been hinted at throughout different points of Lost's run, but something bigger was missing maybe. Perhaps it's storylines like this and Sayid's that suffered with so much with all the time spent on the sideways/afterlife timeline.

Sayid became infected and was sort of just there until his heroics in Across the Sea.

But there was a lot of other things to enjoy. NotLocke/MIB/whatever was very interesting. Jack's growth into the role Locke used to play, essentially. Sawyer struggling to come to terms with Juliet, and then playing NotLocke by making an escape attempt. Poor Clare needed her hair washing.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I thought Kate was one of the numbers, but was removed later when she became a mother to Aaron.

Kate was number 51. She was a candidate, was removed when she "became a mother," and could have become one again if she wanted to.