I Finally Watched 'Lost,' And I'm Baffled By The Amount Of People Who Truly Believe They Were 'Dead The Whole Time'

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13-03-2025

🚨 While they weren't 'dead the whole time,' this article does contain spoilers about how Lost actually ends — you've been warned!
As Jack Shephard's eye gently fluttered shut and the Lost closing credits began to fill my screen, I couldn't help but feel like I had missed something major. After all, isn't this the show that has divided fans over its controversial ending for almost 15 years? Where was the controversy? Where did all of the subsequent theories and think pieces and outrage stem from?
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I got clarity in the days that followed, when almost every conversation that I had about me finally finishing Lost led to a wide-eyed friend leaning in and asking: 'So, what did you make of the ending? Them being dead the whole time?' To my surprise, every Google search in relation to the show was similarly misguided.
For a moment, I thought that it was me who had somehow wildly misinterpreted what I thought was a very 'Explain Like I'm 5' monologue from Jack's dad, Christian Shephard, in the final episode.
Thankfully, it didn't take long to confirm that this wasn't the case at all, and for me to realize that Lost's ending is perhaps one of the most widespread misconceptions in TV history, with the lore of the Oceanic 815 survivors 'being dead the whole time' somehow transcending the show and becoming a go-to example of bad TV endings as a whole.
As somebody who just binged the entire six seasons in as many months, I'm genuinely baffled by how this happened, and I'm here to set the record straight — even if it is, admittedly, several years too late.
To do this, we need to address the fact that throughout Lost's entire run, each episode normally follows two different time periods. The majority of the time, this is life on the island peppered with flashbacks to each character's life before they boarded that fateful flight.
However, at the start of Season 6, this switches to life on the island and a so-called "flash-sideways" timeline that seemingly shows what would have happened to the characters if Oceanic 815 never crashed. The first introduction that we get to this timeline is in the first episode of the season, where we see Jack waking up on the flight seconds before it crashed in the first episode of Season 1, with all the other characters in their positions as fellow passengers.
However, instead of the plane going down, it manages to overcome the turbulence and smoothly continue its journey for a safe arrival at LAX.
For the rest of the season, storylines that follow the characters in LA after avoiding the crash are interspersed with scenes on the island, which pick up where Season 5 — and all of the seasons that came before it — left off.
It soon becomes clear that all isn't as it seems in LA, with each of the characters seemingly destined to cross paths with one another, crash or no crash. Eventually, it also becomes evident that there is some level of crossover between the two timelines as everybody inexplicably begins to remember life on the island, despite the plane not crashing.
As all of the Oceanic 815 passengers find one another in the flash-sideways, there is discussion of them all heading to a pre-arranged meeting point, which is where everything comes to a head in the season finale.
While Island Jack is in the throes of sacrificing his life to protect the island, LA Jack is the only one yet to recall his alternate reality with the rest of the characters when he is lured to the meeting spot by Kate, who he thinks is a total stranger. The location is revealed to be a church, where Jack believes his father's funeral will be taking place. However, when he opens the coffin in a private room, he discovers it is empty, then Christian appears behind him.
Jack asks how he got there, being dead and all, and Christian pointedly replies: 'How are you here?' to which Jack realizes: 'I died too.'
After an emotional embrace, Jack asks if Christian is real, to which Christian explains: 'Yeah, I'm real. You're real; everything that's ever happened to you is real. All those people in the church... They're real, too.'
When Jack asks if this means that everybody in the church is dead, Christian drops another key bit of information: 'Everyone dies sometime, kiddo. Some of them before you, some long after you.'
As for why they're all together now? There's an answer for that, too! Christian says: 'This is the place that you all made together, so that you could find one another. The most important part of your life, was the time that you spent with these people. That's why all of you are here. Nobody does it alone, Jack. You needed all of them, and they needed you… To remember, and to let go.'
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Christian then explains that everybody has come together to 'move on,' and when they join the others in the main part of the church, Jack enjoys emotional reunions with them all. As this happens, we dip in and out of the island, where Jack is shown lying on the ground and smiling as he sees the plane carrying Frank, Kate, Sawyer, Richard, Miles, and Claire successfully take off.
Now, if this wasn't clear enough for you, then my only comparison would be that the church is akin to the Titanic at the end of Titanic after Rose dies. You know, where she reunites with all of her fellow passengers, namely Jack Dawson, in the afterlife. It's basically the exact same concept.
While the entire series wasn't purgatory for the characters, the flash-sideways timeline that is only seen in Season 6 is. The entirety of the last five seasons, as well as everything seen on the island in Season 6, actually happened. But when each character died, they woke up in a type of afterlife where the plane didn't crash.
Here, they are given the time to overcome their pasts before moving on.
This is why all of the characters in this timeline are seemingly living a better life to the one they had before the crash, such as John Locke having a close relationship with his father, and Sawyer working as a police officer instead of being a criminal.
And no, this doesn't mean that they all entered the purgatory state at the same time. As Christian says, some of them died before Jack — like Boone, Charlie, and all of the other characters who died throughout the show. Others passed 'long after' he did, which we can assume is a reference to the people we saw safely evacuate the island as Jack died.
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Regardless of when they died, their spirits, or their souls, or whatever you want to call it, exist in this space together until they are all ready to move on to the afterlife as one.
Christian even explains why not all of the past characters are in the church, making it clear that this is only a space for the people whose 'most important part' of their life was the time they spent together on the island.
Now, is this a perfect ending? Absolutely not. It's kind of clunky, kind of underwhelming, and it definitely leaves you wanting to know more — like what happened to Kate and Claire, etc., when they got off the island, and how long Hurley and Ben remained on the island as its protectors.
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But for better or for worse, it was always clear that Jack was the main protagonist of the show, so his death would be an obvious place for it to end.
As for how this conclusion was so widely misinterpreted by the masses, I don't really have an answer.
People who watched the show as it aired back in the '00s have told me that from as early as Season 2, viewers had started to speculate that all of the characters were dead and the island was purgatory. This theory may have become so widespread that everyone simply continued to think that this is what actually happened.
In addition, I would argue that Lost is the kind of show that was made for binge-watching before binge-watching was even a thing. I know that if I had to wait a year for each season, and a week for each episode, I wouldn't have kept up with the storyline and all of its surrounding mysteries at all — let alone the explanations. Binging means that you are able to keep track of everything that is going on, and maybe that equates to a more seamless viewing experience.
There is also evidence that viewership gradually declined over the course of the show but jumped back up for the finale, suggesting that people tuned in for the final episode despite not having watched for a while.
This is obviously not the way to approach any TV series, but definitely not one as intricate and multi-layered as Lost. It's perhaps understandable that if they missed an entire three seasons of the show, then the distinction between the Season 6 flash-sideways being purgatory could muddle into everything else being purgatory, too.
But my ultimate theory? Typically speaking, the people who are wrong about something are usually the loudest. If we're being honest, it probably only took a handfull of very loud people who didn't properly pay attention to the show to dominate the overall narrative and create some kind of mass Mandela Effect.
Personally, I think it's a shame that this Mandela Effect has had a lasting impact on Lost's legacy, because when you don't limit the entire show to the fake conclusion that 'they were dead the whole time,' it's actually a really incredible watch from beginning to end. But if you're still choosing to stick with this misconception then, well, it's your loss.