"Lost" Explained: Were They Really Dead the Whole Time?

What really happened at the end of "Lost"?

In season 6's "flash-sideways," the characters are dead. Lost is famous for its flashbacks (prevalent throughout seasons 1–3), "flash-forwards" (which began at the end of season 3), and, more chaotically, its "flash-sideways," which started in season 6. We see the characters landing safely in LA in episode one of the season and going on to live…well, kind of normal (but different) lives. The flash-sideways seem, at first, like an alternate reality in which the plane never crashed, but by the end of the season, we realize the characters have actually been in some sort of purgatory: a place between heaven and earth where they seemingly get the chance to overcome or correct the unique traumas and mistakes that haunt them all. So what happened at the end of season 5? Back in the 1970s, Daniel Faraday explains that the DHARMA Initiative tapped into a giant pocket of energy that will one day cause Oceanic Flight 815 to crash on the island. Jack attempts to prevent this by exploding a hydrogen bomb in the energy pocket. The explosion that the season 5 finale ends on is sort of a red herring meant to make viewers believe the flash-sideways in season 6 are an alternate timeline in which the plane never crashes, but in reality, the timeline was never changed, and the plane was never prevented from crashing. In fact, the bomb probably only contributed to the electromagnetic energy that eventually caused the plane crash.

The island scenes throughout season 6 are really happening. Let's get this straight: everything that happened on the island really happened. And in season 6, even as we see the characters grappling with their inner demons and getting to do life over in the flash-sideways, everything that happens to them on the island is real. On the island, at Jack's insistence, Hurley takes over as the island's protector, but invites Ben to be his second-in-command. In the final moments of the finale, a mortally wounded Jack lies down in the same bamboo patch we began the series in and watches with satisfaction as the plane carrying Kate, Sawyer, and Claire soars overhead. As church-Jack fades into white light, island-Jack closes his eyes—an exact reversal of the way the series opened.

The church where the characters finally meet is the bridge to the afterlife. Throughout the final season, the LA characters slowly begin to recollect their "real" lives on the island. There is discussion throughout the season of meeting up at a pre-arranged location, which turns out to be a church. Jack believes he's there for his father, Christian Shephard's, funeral, but when Christian himself shows up at the church, Jack realizes he, too, is dead, and he and his friends cross over into the afterlife together. Christian explains: "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." Remember the ending of Titanic, where (spoilers ahead) Rose and Jack are reunited on the ship with everyone who died in the tragedy? The ending of Lost is sort of like that: the characters—all of whom died or will die at different times, in different ways—are able to reunite in a sort of spiritual halfway point of their own making: the church. (It's a little heavy-handed—I mean, Christian? Shephard? In a church? But whatever. It still guts us, every single time.)

So…they weren't dead the whole time?

No, the characters in Lost weren't dead the entire time. Christian doesn't really beat around the bush here. After Jack asks him if he's real, he replies, "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." In other words, everything that happened on the island actually happened. It's only after the characters die that they go through the flash-sideways of season 6, ultimately meeting one another again in the church. But how come some of the characters in the church didn't die in the show? Christian also says, "Everyone dies sometime, kiddo. Some of them before you, some long after you." What we can take from this is that the church the characters meet in exists outside of time, and while many of the characters we see here did die in the TV show, some (like Kate or Claire) never did—but they will eventually, and when they do, they'll cross over into the afterlife here, in the church, with their friends. (If it's confusing, that's because metaphysics is…well, confusing.) As Lost co-creator J. J. Abrams explains, "[Lost] was very much about faith versus science, and the notion of who has had a profound impact on your life and how these characters form a kind of tapestry."

Why is the ending of "Lost" so controversial?

Fans who believed the characters were dead the whole time were disappointed. If you believed you'd watched over 120 episodes of a whole cast of characters' fever dreams only to learn they were secretly dead the whole time, you'd probably feel like you'd been led on a wild goose chase. But if you really pay attention to what's happening throughout the series—especially season 6 (though it was, admittedly, a pretty weak season)—you'll realize the widely accepted theory that the characters were dead the whole time (à la Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense) is just a misconception. Why do so many people think they were dead the whole time? It's hard to say. We do know the show lost viewers over its 6-season run, so it's possible that some fans of the early seasons skipped the final few seasons and only tuned in for the finale; missing season 6, they probably wouldn't understand that the characters weren't always dead, and might think, based on the finale, that they were dead for the entire series. Then again, there were theories that the characters were really dead starting in, like, season 2 of the show (Sayid tells Ana Lucia, "What good would it be to kill you if we're both already [figuratively] dead?" in episode 8), so it's possible some viewers adopted that theory as fact for the rest of the series and ignored indications that this wasn't the case. As Jorge Garcia (who plays Hurley) reflected in 2020, "[A] lot of people misread the ending and thought they were dead the whole time. I think there were a lot of things that contributed to that. One of the things they thought might have been the reason was that, after it ended, during the closing credits—in the US, at least—they had some B-roll of the original crash site, which was just kind of meant as a thing for people to sit and decompress with as they watched the closing credits. But some people read that as, 'Oh, we've been at that crash site this whole time.'"

Many viewers felt like the finale didn't answer enough questions. Let's be real: it really didn't. Lost is a show of intricate unsolved mysteries that we expected, early on, we'd get a clever answer to, but we never did. (That said, the overarching plot of the show does make sense, we promise.) Abrams doesn't seem to feel any remorse, though: "I loved the ending," he says, "I thought it definitely provided an emotional conclusion to that show. There may have been specific technical things people felt they wanted to understand, like what the island was exactly or why it was. But it’s like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. If you show me what’s in there, I promise you it will disappoint me." For co-showrunner and writer Damon Lindelof, it just seems like it was a matter of priorities: "I was like, 'Everybody’s talking about polar bears, hatches, the DHARMA Initiative, Jacob, and the Man in Black, but let’s answer the mystery of what happens when you die and the process that you go through in order to achieve some fundamental level of grace.' A portion of the audience was like, 'Oh, that wasn’t on my list, I’m not interested in that.' But we were." Co-showrunner and writer Carlton Cuse seemed to think trying to tie up all the loose ends wasn't worth it: "Early on, we arrived at the fact that trying to answer all the unanswered questions was a recipe for disaster. It was didactic and uninteresting, and actually, just as Damon has said, not true to life." We'll explore some of the most common questions viewers have in the next section, and we'll do our best to answer them—or at least validate your frustration that we never got closure.

Some people just thought the ending was schmaltzy. We're a bunch of softies and we weep at the series finale every time…but we can see how a show that leaves dozens of niggling questions unanswered and instead concludes with only a "wimpy, phony, quasi-religious, white-light [and] huggy-bear" ending (to quote Baltimore Sun reviewer David Zurawik) might make some viewers throw up their hands in exasperation. Schmaltzy it may have been, but the schmaltz was genuine—according to Sam Anderson (who played Bernard), the actors didn't realize they were in for a reunion in the finale: "[T]hey kept us away from each other so our trailers were all spread around. I didn’t see anyone. I had this little slip of paper that said, 'You're going to a very nice event where you’re going to meet people who are meaningful to you, and that's all we’re going to say.’ Then we get on the set and there really were those people, who really were meaningful to us, who we hadn't seen in two or three years in some cases. So the feelings were very genuine." Despite disgruntled viewers' opinions, in 2023, Lindelof doubled down on the controversial finale: "'What would I change' or 'Do I have any regrets' is one of the questions that I get asked the most often. It seems arrogant to say I would change nothing, but it’s the truth." Have you ever had post-TV show depression? We certainly have. Check out our article on "How to Cope When Your Favorite TV Show Ends" for advice on moving on.

FAQs About the Ending to "Lost"

Why wasn't Michael in the church in the finale? We can't say for sure. We do know that according to season 6, episode 12 ("Everybody Loves Hugo"), Michael became a "whisper" on the island after killing Ana Lucia and Libby, seemingly doomed to wander the island for eternity, so it's possible he wasn't "allowed" to move on—but this doesn't explain why other (mostly white…) characters who also committed heinous crimes were able to move on.

What about Walt? Why wasn't he in the church? As for why Michael's son doesn't make it to the church, we've got some ideas: for starters, Christian's spiel to Jack includes the caveat that Jack is there because "the most important part of your life was the time that you spent with these people," suggesting that some characters—like Walt, perhaps, who was the only child on the island and wasn't really there very long—don't consider their time on the island the "most important part" of their lives. Walt's afterlife, therefore, may be someplace else; we hope that wherever it is, Michael is there. If you haven't watched "The New Man in Charge"—a 12-minute epilogue that follows Hurley and Ben's life on the island post-finale—it also suggests Walt could end up becoming the next caretaker of the island.

Why was Penny in the church? If what Christian says is true—about how for everyone in the church, the time spent with the other characters on the island was the most important part of their lives—then why would Penny be there? We can only assume Penny's in the church because Desmond is, and they're very important to one another. Who knows? Maybe there are overlapping churches, and in another one, Penny is crossing over into the afterlife alongside a bunch of her friends and family. We literally cannot say.

What's up with the special abilities some characters have? Walt and Hurley are a few characters with special powers—but they're never fully explained. It's likely their special powers set them up to be good guardians of the island eventually, but in any case, the origins of their powers are never revealed. Alternately, other characters, like John Locke, cling to the notion of their inherent specialness, despite being…well, pretty ordinary. But maybe the elusiveness of the label "special," and the danger in clinging too much to the idea of fulfilling the hero's journey, are, themselves, the point.