I have given up looking for answers. Answers lead us astray. I don't need, I don't want LOST to try to answer anything for me, and the day the last episode airs I would be perfectly satisfied to be left with as many mysteries as the show has piled up over its four seasons. And I think the new addition of flash-fowards really gives me hope that this will be case. The flashbacks that were a regular part of the first three seasons helped to inform the show's "present" by revealing things about the characters' pasts, but now the inclusions of the flash-fowards helps to undermine the actions of the "present" and I love how it complicates everything, and reveals that there will be no happy endings or easy wrap-ups to this show even if some people get off the island. Hurley will still struggle with madness and Jack will crumble, becoming a version of the wreck his father was when he first went searching for the elder Shepherd in Australia. I don't know (and I don't care) what the "secret" is that the Oceanic Six might carry about their "escape," because there is no escaping. As I said, we drift from mystery to mystery, and from joyful cannonballs to confrontations with death, and we make choices in the dark never sure of the outcome, and with the dread that even with the desired outcome come countless unforeseen consequences that undermine any success.
'LOST' is a perfectly apt name for the show, not only because of their physical displacement, but because all the characters were already lost before they ever got on that plane, before they crashed on that island, just as they will be when they get off it, just like we all are.
