Lost: The Beginning of the End

Lost first graced our television sets (and wormed its way into the very core of our collective being) in 2004. Throughout its five painfully-suspenseful seasons, the ABC series has managed to maintain a rabid following while breaking all the rules of conventional TV, with a storyline that darts back and forth between place and time, drifting somewhere between the improbable and the downright absurd.

Those innocent first-season days—when the only thing those crazy, mixed up plane crash survivors had to worry about was a monster eating the pilot—feel like a bygone era. Those were much simpler times. Times before philosophy and literature became integral to understanding and parsing the meaning out of every word, every symbol, every palm frond on that damned island. And even the most devout followers can’t seem to agree on a single theory or a fully-formed explanation for all the time-traveling, baby-snatching shenanigans going on between the beach, the jungle and Dharmaville. The questions haunt you to no end: Why were so many taken from us so soon? Charlie, Shannon, Boone, Libby, Anna Lucia, Mr. Eko, Charlotte, et al., may you all rest in peace in your sandy graves. (Or not, since no one ever really dies on the island.) How does Richard maintain that youthful look? Will any of us ever find a love as true as that of Penny and Desmond?

For answers to these questions and to explore the deeper philosophical messages of Lost, many viewers turn to online forums for discussion and debate. Popular topics of discussion explore the beliefs of John Locke and Rousseau’s philosopher name sakes, and that the conflict between Locke and Jack represents the great ideological battle between science and faith. And while these and many other proposed theories can find support in the show, all that analyzing can get a little tedious. Good thing there’s Previously on Lost, the recap-rock duo that’s been turning Lost into a party since season four.

For season six, Previously on Lost will host weekly gatherings at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn including show screenings, recap performances and what they call therapy sessions. According to Adam Schatz of the Brooklyn duo, fans can come to these meetings to discuss and explore their deep personal feelings through the lens of Lost, “and then we get drunk and watch the show.”

Schatz and POL better half Jeff Curtin have some revolutionary predictions and theories regarding the show’s final season. According to Schatz, “Time travel doesn’t matter, Jack and Locke don’t matter, because the bomb went off and everyone’s dead.” So the first episode will “just be tumbleweeds,” he says. “Episode two, we’ll see undead hands breaking through the earth,” and by episode five, Schatz foresees “a full on zombie luau.” To be fair, crazier things have happened on that island.

As for Schatz and Curtin’s personal Lost theories, they believe time-travel guru Daniel Farraday is the central character and the key to unlocking all the island’s secrets. “He’s the best looking, best sounding and he knows more than anyone,” Schatz says. “And he’s not a slut, which is nice.”

And what about Jacob, the elusive island puppet master? Schatz believes that the never-seen, always-obeyed Jacob “is a a two-headed monster, and its name is Rose and Bernard.”

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