We’ve just caught up with the outstanding episodes of the final season of Lost, and it looks like the writers are actually going to explain what’s been going on over six seasons of interconnecting characters, events, timelines and realities.  Now, we really like Lost.  It’s full of interconnected characters, linked in unexpected ways, and there’s a mystery at the heart of it that has yet to be unraveled - remind you of anything?  And because we like it so much, we really, really hope they can end the whole thing in a satisfying way.

The cast of Lost

The question, given the enormous amount of continuity baggage that Lost is dragging towards the finish line, is just how satisfying that conclusion can possibly be.  To our way of thinking, it’s entirely unfeasible that anything all the outstanding questions - lostpedia.com lists 170 of them - can be answered in the remaining episodes.

Obfuscation is the natural order of things in Lost.  From the viewpoints of the protagonists, and therefore from our viewpoint, Something Very Weird is going on, but the few characters who appear to know what it is certainly aren’t telling us.  The promise of answers to come leads us on and keeps us watching.  The point of Lost is not that the fun is in getting the answers, it’s that the fun is in not knowing.  The word itself, “Lost”, doesn’t just refer to the characters, it also refers to us, the audience, and our confusion over the events unfolding on the screen.

Once you accept this, realise that the show is yanking your chain, and are prepared to have your chain yanked, there is an awful lot of fun to be had with it.

Frankly, we hope Lost doesn’t try too hard to give us the answers.  Most of the important stuff we’ve already figured out, at least to whatever extent that it matters.  Meanwhile, the troubling suspicion remains that surely, something, somewhere in the six years of the show has no logical explanation: perhaps a plot thread that never got resolved, or something the writers wrote that contradicted something from earlier that they’d forgotten.  In fact, rather than explain everything, I’d rather they went with the “it was all a dream!” ending.  At least that’d be funny.

So our wish for the finale of Lost: don’t give us the answers, we don’t need them.  To remain true to the entire spirit of the show, it needs to leave the major mysteries unanswered.

That, by the way, is not the fate that awaits Army Of Zero. There are answers, and they’ll be revealed on this web site in just over a month!

I haven’t written much recently, but it’s largely because there’s not much to say at this point!  There’s 54 days left before the Army Of Zero competition closes, and I know there’s a few of you who are pretty close to a solution.  So I’m not about to start giving out any more big hints, because it’s not fair on those participants who have put a lot of head-scratching into the puzzles to start chucking out big clue-grenades at this stage.

So just a couple of pointers for new readers. There are clues here in the blog, and on our Twitter account too (particularly in the tweets in our “clue week”, January 11th to January 15th).  That extra information might be useful, and might give you a nudge in the right direction, but you don’t actually need any of it: the puzzles are solvable with just what comes in the game box.

One you realise what the clues are leading up to, the final pieces should start to fall into place more easily.  This turns out to be the hardest part of the whole puzzle, but it’s well worth getting this figured out, because it’s key to the whole thing.  There’s a clue that relates to this amongst the clue posts here on the blog.