Featured Image Credit: ABC
Topics: TV and Film, Entertainment
Lucy Devine
A major question from the last episode of Lost has finally been answered, 20 years on from the show first airing.
More people have been re-watching the show - and even discovering it for the first time - after all six seasons were added to Netflix last month.
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The series was first released back in 2004 and ran for six years until 2010. Set on a remote tropical island, it followed the survivors of commercial plane Oceanic Flight 815, after it crashed while flying from Sydney to Los Angeles.
The show, created by J. J. Abrams, gripped millions of viewers with its addictive storyline - and many fans were gutted when it eventually came to an end after six seasons.
However, the final episode, aptly named, 'The End' left some viewers divided. It was pretty controversial at the time, thanks to some mind-boggling unanswered questions.
For example, were the characters really dead the whole time?
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The reason why so many fans have questioned this is partly down to a shift in the timeline which occurred in the final season.
The 'flash sideways' showed what could have happened if the plane hadn't crashed.
Eventually, viewers learn that the new timeline is basically an 'afterlife' in which the characters come together.
If you watched the final season of Lost, you'll know that the entire season flicks between the island and the alternate timeline.
However, the final shot of the show added to the confusion, with Jack lying on the ground, mirroring the very first scene in the pilot of the show.
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This hugely significant moment led some viewers to wonder if the characters all perished in the plane crash and were dead from the beginning.
Jorge Garcia, who played Hugo 'Hurley' Reyes, told The Independent: “It’s definitely true that 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.’"
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So there you have it, despite the flash sideways timeline being a sort of afterlife, the island is real and the characters didn't all die in the plane crash.
Still confused? Well, at Dragon Con in 2018, Evangeline Lilly, who played Kate Austen, said: “Art is supposed to, every time without fail, turn the question back on you, and asks you to look at what you’re seeing, listen to what you’re hearing, experience it, and then look at it in the mirror of your soul, and figure out what it means to you."
So, essentially, it's up to you to work out what the hell was going on.
You can catch all seasons of Lost on Netflix now.