From that church scene to the fate of the island, here’s everything to know about the finale of ‘Lost,’ which aired in 2010
Warning: Lost spoilers ahead!
It’s one of the most talked-about finales ever. When ‘Lost’ aired its last episode on May 23, 2010, it left fans with mixed feelings about its complicated conclusion.
The final episode of ABC’s beloved fantasy series left many wondering about the true fate of the passengers on Oceanic Flight 815. Were they dead the entire time through all of Lost’s 121 episodes?
In the Emmy-winning show, which debuted in September 2004, a flight from Sydney to Los Angeles crashes on a remote island. The survivors struggle to stay alive and find a way home, only to discover they’re not alone on the island. “The Others,” the island’s mysterious inhabitants, aren’t exactly welcoming. Eventually, the characters learn the island has supernatural qualities—it can heal, grant immortality, and serves as a barrier against evil.
The show’s deepening mysteries and mythologies, including the enigmatic number sequence 4 8 15 16 23 42, made ‘Lost’ one of the first true internet sensations. Fans dissected every tiny detail, with some hoping for every loose end to be neatly tied up by the finale.
That wasn’t exactly the case. Instead, the ending focused on the bonds between the characters, offering a somewhat vaguer, happier conclusion. PEOPLE magazine reviewed the finale as “emotional and frustrating,” with critic Tom Gliatto writing, “I won’t spoil it for you, except to say that it was so mistily open-ended as to be pointless.”
Over the years, as the show’s creators have explained more about the final episodes, many viewers have come to understand and appreciate the ending better than they initially did.
Even late-night host and superfan Jimmy Kimmel defended the show, telling Vulture in 2021, “The point of ‘Lost’ was the fun, the mystery, and trying to figure out what was going on. And maybe that’s still part of the fun, that we still haven’t exactly figured out what was going on.”
How did Lost end?
By the final season, the show was juggling multiple timelines. In season 5, Sawyer (Josh Holloway), Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell), Hurley (Jorge Garcia), and Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) find themselves in the 1970s with The Dharma Initiative, a group researching the island’s mysteries.
Meanwhile, Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), Sayid (Naveen Andrews), and Sun (Yunjin Kim) are off the island in the present day, trying to return to help the others. They’re joined by John Locke (Terry O’Quinn) and Ben (Michael Emerson), who have their own agendas for getting back to the island.
In the sixth and final season, most characters reunite on the island, including a reluctant Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick). The lingering mysteries start to unravel, revealing Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) as the island’s protector and introducing his nemesis, the Man in Black, who appears as the Smoke Monster.
Two parallel timelines unfold: one with survivors on the island, and another where the plane never crashes. The “flash sideways,” as producers called it, show the survivors’ interconnected lives despite not crashing.
In these flash sideways, Locke becomes the Smoke Monster and attempts to destroy the island by removing a crucial rock in a sacred well. Jack, who has taken over for Jacob as the island’s protector, defeats Locke but needs to replace the rock to save the island, knowing this will kill him.
Jack appoints Hurley as the new protector before sacrificing himself. In a twist, Hurley enlists Ben to help care for the island. When Jack replaces the rock, he saves the island but is mortally wounded. He finds himself in a church in the flash sideways, greeted by the spirit of his father, who tells him he’s dead. The church is filled with the show’s main characters, both alive and deceased, from the island timeline.
Locke shakes Jack’s hand and says, “We’ve been waiting for you.” On the island, Jack dies as a plane flies overhead. In the church, Jack sits next to Kate, smiling as the scene fades to white.
Were all the Lost passengers dead the whole time?
Because of the church scene, which was strongly suggestive of all the characters going to the afterlife, many viewers assumed that all the passengers on Oceanic 815 had been dead the whole time. Further support for that theory was the final credits of the finale, which showed the plane fuselage on the beach as it appeared in the first-ever episode; many interpreted that as cementing the idea that they had all died in the crash.
The showrunners, though, were adamant that the survivors weren’t dead the whole time. They chose to use that footage as a way to ease viewers out of the show so the transition to a commercial wouldn’t be as abrupt.
“We put that footage at the end of the show and I think that the problem was that the audience was so accustomed on Lost to the idea that everything had meaning and purpose and intentionality,” executive producer Carlton Cuse told Vulture in 2021.
“So they read into that footage at the end that, you know, they were dead. That was not the intention,” he continued. “The intention was just to create a narrative pause. But it was too portentous. It took on another meaning. And that meaning I think, distorted our intentions and helped create that misperception.”
Why were fans so divided about the Lost finale?
The finale focused heavily on character resolutions rather than solving the island’s mysteries, leaving many questions unanswered. Some were puzzled by plot twists, like a new faction of The Others and Claire’s (Emilie de Ravin) sudden reappearance.
“There was no way to answer all the open questions from the show’s previous 119 episodes,” Cuse said to Vulture. “We tried a version of that in the episode ‘Across the Sea,’ but it wasn’t great.”
The “flash sideways” further confused viewers with their spiritual undertones, which seemed out of place. Years later, writer Liz Sarnoff explained that they were based on a concept from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the afterlife teaches the deceased to realize they’re dead.
The flashes also served to resolve character arcs, reuniting couples like Jack and Kate, Desmond and Penny, and Sawyer and Juliet. In the church, viewers saw reunions like Sun and Jin, who had died escaping the island, and Sayid with Shannon.
“We cared more about the characters’ journey and what happened to them,” Cuse said during a PaleyFest panel in 2014, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Fans were emotional and invested, which made the ending even more impactful and divisive.
What did the showrunners say about the Lost finale?
According to Sarnoff, the producers always prioritized characters finding each other over solving mysteries. “Mystery shows are tricky because nobody wants the mystery to end, but they want answers,” she told Vulture in 2021.
Though Cuse and Lindelof stand by the finale, they admit some choices were heavy-handed. Lindelof told Vulture, “If we didn’t have that damn stained-glass window, we would’ve gotten a full letter grade higher on the finale.”
Cuse said in a 2016 Lost reunion concert, “Ultimately, is there anything I would change? The answer is no.”
The theory that everyone was dead all along still bothers Lindelof. “That idea negates the whole show,” he told Vulture.
Director Jack Bender preferred a more subtle approach, saying, “The thing that I loved about the finale is that ‘Lost’ was ultimately about how we live our lives, who we live them with, and how we die.”
