- How could they move the island? Like, how? Turning an ancient wooden wheel in a stone grotto causes an entire island to teleport randomly through space and time to a new location that no one will ever find... until they find it.
- In whose image was the colossal 4-toed statue? Egyptians just getting wacky?
- So the numbers ultimately were of no significance?
- Sam Toomey and Hurley’s bad luck? Hurley is cursed and everyone he loves dies after he wins the lottery - but then he’s not cursed, forget about it.
- Who was Jacob? He's a regular kid, then immortal, then maybe the smoke monster, then maybe god.
- Kate’s magical horse? The horse from her childhood appears on the island. I think she even feeds it.
- How was Libby taking care of Hurley in the mental ward and then forgot about it (both of them)?
- Whither David Shephard? Jack finds out he has a kid (who is about 15) and not 30 seconds later, he is overcome/brought to tears by his love for a kid he never knew existed?
- Polar bears. [***see below]
- Invisible monster. They have an invisible monster attack the plane in the first episode, then never again. Thereafter, the invisible monster is a smoke monster. They claim it's supposed to be the same monster. Were the smoke VFX not completed in time?
- Walt’s “special” psychic powers are never explained. Then a bunch of other people find out they have psychic powers, but none are the same. But they are supposed to be really important.
- Smokey aka Christian Shephard and his multitude of assumed forms? He's dead, he's not dead. He appears to Jack on the island. He appears on the freighter.
- What is the sickness that infects people who are brought back from the dead in the Temple, but only when the waters do not run clear? And then there's the vaccine -- that doesn't actually work, although sometimes it does.
- Ben Linus breaking into Charles Widmore’s bedroom back in the real world and talking about "...allowing mercenaries to come to the island and kill Alex was 'breaking the rules' and would be punished." What rules? Whose rules? Charles Widmore himself is a McGuffin. Ben flits to and from the island with no problem.
- The supply drops delivered by the Guam branch of Dharma, even though the location of the island is impossible to predict (plus the fact the Guam people didn’t know the people on the island were dead for 20 years)? “feck, these cnuts are going to starve to death and/or die of bacterial infections, what do we do? I know! Mysterious supply drops filled with 1970s Dharma goods!”
- The giant birds who cried “Hurley!” at Hurley? The writers said later it only sounded like the birds said Hurley.
- The Magic Heart of the Island room and its magic cork? This set looked like it was straight out of Sid n Marty Kroft.
- Who is Mother? Why does she kill Claudia and raise Claudia's sons as her own? How did she get to the island? She’s immortal, steals two kids, they became immortal, one became Jacob/the smoke monster, and one became the Man In Black????
- Why do pregnant women die at day 100 of their pregnancies?
- The Man In Black? He's evil? He's a kid? He's the smoke monster? He's the island? He's evil personified?
- Horace Goodspeed’s cabin that flies around the island and objects within move via telekinesis?
- How could Rousseau forget Ben stole her daughter? Why did Rousseau try to steal Claire’s baby?
- Why was Libby in the same mental ward as Hurley? Why did neither remember?
- Richard Malkin (the psychic) warns Claire that only she can raise Aaron, and if the Others raise him it will be an unmitigated disaster. Then they try to kidnap Aaron before they forget about Aaron altogether?
- How did the Looking Glass Station prevent the outside world from hearing Rousseau’s distress call for 16 years?
- Why are some people healed on the island and others are not? You get your legs back, you get your cancer cured, you don’t - sorry.
- How did the Man In Black appear to Christian on the freighter if the MIB can never leave the island? I know! It wasn’t really Christian but the smoke monster in disguise!
- What killed all of the other members of Rousseau’s team? Got them in a week, and it didn’t kill Rousseau with 16 years to achieve the goal?
- How did Dharma make a robotic sentry shark in the 1970s, with Atari technology, that is autonomous and with limitless power, still chugging along 25 years later? Yes the shark has a fecking Dharma logo on its tail.
- Why were the Others unable to give birth on the island?
- What are the Whispers? How do voices of the dead stay on the island? How did Walt become a Whisper?
- How/why is the Island the “source of the light in all of mankind, circulating ‘life, death, and rebirth’”?
- What were Walt’s magical powers? Remember he was key to everything until the actor grew a foot in one year and couldn’t play a 10 year old anymore. Then Walt was only seen at a great distance.
- Why did Hurley not realize until season 4 that he can talk to the dead? "Oh, I didn't think you guys wanted to know."
- How could the Numbers be both two-digit degree settings for the Lighthouse, and the Swan hatch serial number, and the winning lottery numbers? Plus the girls' volleyball team had the shirts in that order. Coincidence!
- How did Ajita flight 316 hear the Numbers on the island if Rousseau had already erased them?
- How did the drug smugglers’ tiny plane take off from Nigeria and crash in the Pacific? Answer: the island moved magically so that when the plane crashed, instead of crashing into the sea it crashed into the island. Or maybe the island was near Nigeria, and then moved to the Pacific after the plane crashed?
- If it’s impossible to find the island or predict where it will be, why does traveling in a submarine get around that problem?
- How was the giant statue destroyed? They say a tidal wave. ("what tidal wave?")
- How did the Black Rock - a slave ship from the 1700s - end up in the middle of the island? This was explained (in interviews) as having been caused by "a tidal wave".
- Egyptian hieroglyphics in the Wheel room? Egyptians. In. The. Pacific. Or maybe they were near Nigeria, too.
- How/why did turning the Wheel at the Orchid cause the person turning it to to skip through time?
- How in feck did Romans discover the island?
- Why was the Wheel frozen in ice on a tropical island?
- How did Sun get pregnant if Jin was sterile? Just like Locke got his legs back, so Jin suddenly was made fertile again. But they don't "explain" it. You have to reason that one yourself.
- What caused Desmond’s psychic flashes?
- The guitar case with the wooden ankh with the survivors’ names written on it? Wtf? The guitar case is the mirror to Charlie's guitar case on the original flight? Now we're concerned with symmetry?
- Hydra Island and Room 23??
- Resetting the time. A meal is made out of this idea that the timer has to be reset every 108 (?) minutes, or else the entire universe is destroyed (or something). The timer has mechanical numbers that flip over, like the old destination numbers at a train station. On the backs of these numbers are hieroglyphics. What? (in NoHo Hank's voice). Little what leads to big what. Then we see on the hatch, when things feck up and the world is almost destroyed, that one of the original researchers has written a whole series of clues and secrets on the blast door of the hatch. It shows the Dharma group's plan, it shows other Dharma stations on the island, and it's all written in something that only shows up in black light. And only shows up when they are in danger of exceeding the 108 limit. So whoever wrote it, exceeded the limit dozens of times to get this secret message written, ostensibly to work against the interests of Dharma, but they are never discovered. You see in a flashback that the person at the controls was guarded by Dharma people with guns. AND THEN the show uses this as a cliffhanger for the season. You see the writing on the hatch for a split second, making everyone screen shot the fecking thing and dissect it at length, waiting for the explanation. This is emblematic of the writers' approach. None of it mattered.
- The "tail" survivors. They ran out of steam and decided that hey, the plane broke in two, so let's start with a whole new bunch of survivors (aka the TAILIES). Neither group saw each other, their fires, ran into each other hunting, footprints, nothing.
- Then they came up with the "Others", a group of adults living on the island in a quasi-military cult. They are bad. They attack both regular LOSTIES and the TAILIES. Then they kidnap people and demand hostages. Then they are revealed to be naturalized Dharma employees (?) I don't actually remember.
- Then they come up with another fecking island.
- Then they come up with a submarine. See? This is how we get to and from the island. Now if everyone will kindly step aboard... never mind. Then they destroy the submarine.
- Then Penny is hearing Desmond's signals through time and is somehow finding the island through hearing the numbers, but then it's "not Penny's boat" as the hobbit dies. The boat the boat the boat is the fecking key. It's going to save them. But it's not Penny, it's Charles Widmore -- Penny's father. Also the head of Dharma. Or not. Maybe Ben was the head of it. Or not. Ben was secretly one of the Others and sent over as a spy. Or not.
and so on. There’s more, I just can’t be bothered to go through every episode. It’s pointless.
Some things were “explained” retroactively, in materials that accompanied the show like books and unofficial guides, or the writers answered things in interviews, or you could infer “explanations” from things like “magic”, “time travel”, “an immortal being able to assume anyone’s form”, “psionic powers”, “the island floats all over the world”, “they were lied to”, “the mystical electromagnetic force willed it”, but they weren’t
explained in the show, organically, with any sense. They might as well have said "electromagnetism can make anything happen anywhere at any time." So while some things had an explanation, half the time those explanations were either implausible, ridiculous, or just dumb. It was furious ret-conning for 5 seasons.
This doesn’t touch on things like deciding in season 5 (4?) that Lost was going to suddenly be about a secret, global cabal with Ben as the leader handing out assassination orders to Said, like it was a reboot of “Alias”. JJ Abrams doing an homage to JJ Abrams. It also doesn’t touch on the logic of suddenly thinking having Sawyer and Said as a mismatched buddy cop LAPD detective team was a good idea. Maybe that was one episode. I was so angry with this show when the final season rolled around, that I couldn't think straight.
This show had about 2 seasons of plausible actions, and after that they threw everything at the wall to see what would stick. As actors got fed up and asked to be written out, (Ian Somerhalder, Dominic Monaghan), or bit players came back for more (Ben), the show lost focus and coherence. It was a shaggy dog story, but at the end, even they didn’t understand their own bullshit.
They resorted to time travel, magic powers, and a sentient island that could move anywhere in the world it wanted to, to shore up their logic. The revealing that certain characters were dead the whole time, or were in fact not the characters but the mysterious smoke monster impersonating them, was fecking silly, and lazy. They have all these characters intersecting with other characters in the real world, but never make anything of it. The person who killed Sawyer's parents was Locke's dad? Jack's dad was involved with Dharma? Kate killed her father, but actually it was her stepfather, because she's a bank robber, and... I forget.
They get around their timeline feckups by making characters suddenly immortal without explanation. They do flashbacks, flash forwards, and then at the end of the show, flash "sideways". They send the characters back in time to the island. They send the characters to alternate realities. They resurrect characters. Thye show characters doing things then reveal them to have been dead the whole time. They claim it's purgatory, or something like it. Then they all go to their own versions of heaven? Together? Or not?
An example of this is the polar bears***. “Hey, what would you never expect to see in Hawaii? Polar bears!” So they put in polar bears. I think there’s one more episode where someone fights a polar bear, then they forget all about them. That is, until they decide to have characters go back in time 20 years, in season 5?, and show the bears in cages, and they say “polar bears are smart and adaptable, so we are going to do studies on them”. Yes, the polar bears’ presence was
explained, but in a ham-handed laughable manner. Initially the polar bears were to show the viewer this was no ordinary tropical island, and like the robotic shark, were meant to be deterrents to people trying to escape the island. Then they said
feck it. Also, these two bears are either the same bears from 1970 - and they are now geriatric bears - or the original bears had offspring. If so, where are the rest of the bears?
Another example is moving the island. They wrote themselves into a corner, belatedly realized having Penny and/or others show up opened a can of worms about other people finding the island, then came up with this asinine idea that they could just move the island. They move the island by showing some stone grotto with a wooden wheel, a magical pool of water, a dash of salt, and presto! The island has teleported to a new mystical location, Penny and her boat (or not her boat) can get rekt. But HOW? How does turning a wheel plus clear water move an entire island to a new location?
How do you keep a moron in suspense? No one knows, no one cares, “it’s Lost-town, Jake.”
its actually from world of warcraft where if you were alliance, opposition faction orks saying "lol" would appear as "kek", or as was also said at the time the continuation for emphasis olololol would be ekekeke. But Lost was from a similar time so it could have been to do with that. He was one of my favourite characters while he was in it.
