“Oh, so they were all dead from the beginning!” Every fan of Lost, the cult series that aired between 2004 and 2010 on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), has heard this phrase at least once. It must be said that the epilogue of the six-season American soap opera is particularly controversial.
Now that the series has been added to Netflix in the United States, The Independent deciphers the last episode of Lost and aims to put an end to this false idea according to which all the characters would have in fact died in the crash of the first episode. Warning, spoilers.
The British daily is not afraid to say it: this is the “most misunderstood” final episode of all time. The 121-episode series opens with the explosion of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815, flying from Sydney to Los Angeles, which crashes on an uncharted Pacific island. As the survivors learn to live together and survive, they realize that they are not alone on this piece of land, the scene of strange events.
A representation of the afterlife
One hundred and twenty episodes later, the final scenes of the fiction imagined by JJ Abrams are interspersed with events on the island and an alternative timeline known as “flashsideways” – scenes that replace flashbacks (returns to the main time of the story, here the lives of the characters before the accident) and flashforwards (or “prolepsis” in French, i.e. elements of the story supposed to take place in a future time, here the lives of the protagonists after they have managed to escape from the island).
These scenes come after Juliet (played by Elizabeth Mitchell), stuck in the 1970s, detonates a hydrogen bomb in the final moments of the fifth season, in an attempt to prevent the construction of…
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