L O S T Answers

Greetings, LOST-lover. I understand your pain, I just don’t feel it. These are all mostly valid questions, and it’s good that we’re getting into them right away, because they are part of an important, much larger issue that should hopefully help us all calm down a little bit about LOST. And that issue is…

SCIENCE VERSUS FAITH: WHO WON?

But, yeah. Questions…

1. Why was Zoe a character?

This is kind of a tough question to answer directly, because my immediate response is “Because she was.” Why is anyone a character in anything, ever? But I’ll assume you’re more wondering about what purpose she provided to the story and why she showed up, was generally obnoxious, and then died. In a straightforward sense, Zoe was hired by Charles Widmore to study and possibly manipulate the island’s special electromagnetic properties. If you need something more specific and “science-talky” than that, then you probably should have watched a much more boring show.

All of that said, she was a character for another reason, one that spoke to the larger themes of the show as well as to one of the general purposes of the 6th season, which was to confirm the spiritual nature of the series. Since the beginning of LOST, we heard a lot of talk about science vs. faith.

“We were brought here for a reason.” - John Locke, every conversation he has ever had.

“Nuh-uh.” - Jack Shepherd, trying his hardest to give John Locke the business.

This conversation played out every season, and the “winner” always seemed to change.  We were shown miracles and then hatches; ghosts, then scientists.  Season 5 went totally balls out sci-fi and seemed to point to “Science” as the ultimate winner.  Then season 6 came, and the question was put to rest. Faith won, and science L O S T. I guess this disappointed and surprised some people, even though they had spent 6 years watching “The Magic Island Show.”

“Faith Rules, Science Drools” had been shown to us quite a lot during the run of the show, via the destruction and perceived weakness of scientific symbols. The hatch imploded; doctors failed to fix the island’s pregnancy problem; the DHARMA Initiative was wiped out; an atomic bomb went off to fix everything, but failed; and King Scientist, Daniel Faraday, was shot and killed by his own mother who, through all of her equations and pendulum church calculations, could not stop her past self from doing so. Zoe was the final instance of this, reinforcing once and for all that things on LOST are more “magic” than not. Zoe, a scientist on a quest for answers and reason, got her throat slit open by a pillar of black smoke. She was ultimately not a character there to drive the plot and to answer questions concerning electromagnetism, but a symbol of the notion that science can not answer all of your questions. More on that later.

Also, I guess she did help bring Desmond back to the island, so if you like that answer better, there you go.

2. Why did our Losties never stumble across the Temple or the Lighthouse when both were pretty close to the cave where Jack found his dad’s coffin?

Well, first of all, I’m not so sure about how close all of these things were to the caves. Yes, at one point they were at the temple and then later they were at the caves, but that just means we didn’t watch an hour-long scene of characters walking. And up until the temple was destroyed by the Smoke Johnster, it was the only safe haven on the Island. The Temple was designed and built to be hard to find if you did not know where it was.

In regards to the Lighthouse, I’ll point you to a quote from Hurley in the episode titled “The Lighthouse”:

“Guess we just weren’t looking for it.”

If this is not good enough for you, then in the long run, LOST was not for you. Again, this was a show that took place on Magic Island: The Magic Island.  Demigod Jacob built that lighthouse, and it was a mirror gateway into hundreds of people’s off-island lives. The lighthouse was a part of the magical, spiritual, faith-based aspect of the show. If you didn’t know it was there, and you weren’t looking for it, it would not appear to you.

3. [The quote from the comic in question refers to Smokey building the frozen donkey wheel and is: “I’m going to connect this wheel to a contraption that harnesses the power of water and also magic light because that’s how science works.”]

The sarcasm in this comic is correct. That’s not how science works. That’s how magic works. It even says in the comic “and also magic light.” Maybe people aren’t happy with that, but that is how it is. There is magic and there are elements of the show that do not have a scientific explanation, because that’s not the show we were all watching.

It may sound like a cop-out saying something akin to “because of magic,” but, you know, sorry. Sorry, science, you were not the star of the show. LOST wasn’t a sci-fi show. It was a sci-fi fantasy mystery adventure mythological drama. Faith, spirituality, religion, whatever you want to call it, was a huge part of it. And when you get down to it, religion can most easily be described as “magic.”

Instances like this (and I assume a lot of instances to come) can’t be described as “they didn’t answer my questions.” What it comes down to is “I did not like the answers I was given.”

That’s a different blog.