TV Fan Theories That Turned Out To Be True

Over its six seasons on the air, “Lost” generated a plethora of fan theories. Of those, none was as prevalent as the theory that everyone is dead. Many fans meant that to be taken to the extreme. That is, everything we saw, from the moment the plane crashed to the last frame of the show, was happening in the afterlife. That theory ended up not being exactly true, but it’s kind of close!

In the final season, we find the characters occupying a flash-sideways, an alternative timeline that’s nothing like any of their flash-forwards or flashbacks. In the finale, we find out why. According to Jacob Stolworthy in The Independent, the flash-sideways is the place created for them to find each other after they die.

So the characters in the show were not dead on the island. But whenever they died, whether it was on the island or years later, they came to the flash-sideways, a kind of limbo, until they all located one another and moved on as a unit to “whatever comes next.” In this way, they did die, and we saw the aftermath of that. Still, the island, and what happened on it, was very real.