Explaining everything about LOST in 3 minutes

This explanation of Lost was approved by creator of the show Damon Lindelof. So there is an island and there are two men who live on that island.

There were people before those men but we don't need to go into that. So one of these men is the man in black and the other one is Jacob. More on those in a moment.

So those two men lived on this island for years and in the heart of the island there's this light and this light represents life and goodness.

All of goodness and all of humanity, this is the source of it. So if this light goes out, goodness and life ceases to exist everywhere.

Now, the man in black is not very nice. He is essentially evil in human form, although not always human form because sometimes he's a smoke monster and other times he takes the form of dead people.

But basically he is bad and he wants to spread his evil throughout the entire world, but he can't because he's trapped on the island.

He can never leave because the light is keeping him there. So Jacob, the other man, has one job and that is to keep the light on in the island which stops the man in black from escaping.

Now obviously these two want very opposite things so they want each other dead, but they can't hurt each other.

They need other people to do that for them, which is where the characters from Lost come in.

Jacob is confident that the man in black will eventually find a loophole and kill him, so he needs to find people to take over his job when and if he dies.

So he finds these people at some point in their life and he makes sure they are on Oceanic Flight 815 and then he makes sure that plane crashes on the island, and then Lost sort of happens.

And it's not that Lost is just a series of trials so the last one standing becomes the next Jacob, but a lot of people do die.

The man in black kills some of them, Some of them kill each other or themselves, and eventually the man in black manipulates one of them into killing Jacob.

So with Jacob dead and nobody left to protect the island, the man in black puts out the light, and that breaks all of the island's magical powers, including the one that kept the man in black imprisoned here, so he can escape now.

But without the magical powers of the island, he's also now just a mortal man, which means he can die.

And that's what happens in the finale, before he can leave the island, the remaining candidates manage to kill him.

So then Jack, our main character sacrifices himself to turn the light of the island back on. Hurley agrees to be the new Jacob to make sure none of this ever happens again.

And then the final part of the last episode is what seems to confuse everyone, because they're all in this church, and then they go on to the afterlife so everyone's like, oh, they were just dead the whole time.

No they weren't. So all through the final series there were these flash sideways where these characters would be living like a parallel life than the one they lived in the show, except they wouldn't really remember the island, it's like it never happened.

But then one by one they would uncover these suppressed memories of it all. And it turns out these flash sideways were sort of like a purgatory state. But that's just a flash sideways.

The actual story of Lost and everything that happened on the island was real, actually happened, they weren't dead the whole time.

So Lost suggests that when people die they wait in this parallel universe, sort of like a waiting room, for everybody else they shared their most important moments of their life with to also die so they can all move on to the afterlife together.

And for the characters of Lost that meant they waited in purgatory for all the

other passengers of flight 815 and the other people they interacted with on the island, like Desmond, to also die and join them in this waiting room, and only then can they move on to what's next together.