Mr. Paik used intimidation, violence and murder to enforce his business contracts, which is what gangsters do. They have been historically associated with the business of unions, and we see Paik order Jin to “send a message” about ending a strike and reopening a factory. Charles Widmore is equally as ruthless. The Lost Experience even suggests that the two men’s companies have collaborated in business dealings. As for your other question, Sun and Jin’s rift isn’t over Michael directly. It’s over their many marital issues, namely Jin’s bullying behaviour and Sun’s secret life.

I think “the holes” were more to do with retcons and the needs of the story from season to season. However, I disagree with you about the writers intending for Keamy being hired to torch the island, as that was not what we saw him do. The mercenaries were there for Ben. And we see them leaving once they have him. They are not blowing up the island or burning anything down. They are literally marching to the chopper with their mission accomplished. Secondary Protocol was only to be activated by Keamy in agreement with Captain Gault, who had been frozen out by an increasingly deranged Keamy. That protocol was exclusively about preventing Ben from moving the island at The Orchid, not killing everyone. Gault didn’t even understand what Keamy meant by “torch the island”. The man was losing it and it is strongly implied that he was suffering from the same effects of “island fever” that had plagued other members of the crew. Proximity to the island’s barrier of time dilation was causing all sorts of dementia. Anyway, all of this is articulated or presented in Season Four, it’s just that Season Five needed to clarify some of these points because fans kept asking about them or were still confused. I actually think some of the clunkiest parts of the series were a result of the writers worrying too much about what the audience wanted and overcompensating for those demands and clarifications within the narrative.

@LOSTEXPLAINED108 you might be right on that but there are many points where the writers clearly changed things, wasn't the smoke monster originally a robot and then later when he was a smoke monster they mentioned that he was a security system. I don't think the monster was ever supposed to be the man in black. I also think that there might have been plans to actually have fake locke be the real lock and tell a Jesus resurrection story. This is backed up when they bring up the story of Thomas the apostle, Jack mirroring Thomas, always doubting Locke, going from non-believer to believer after the time traveling. I feel like that was the original plan when they all went back home and became the oceanic 6, but it got changed. I enjoy the series as it is but I can't help but wonder what it could have been if they let the real Locke live, and had the smoke monster continue to just be a security system for the island. They died Lockes character arc dirty by just killing him and not bringing him back, and further besmirching his character by dwindling it down to being a scared old man. I feel like some of the writers had a grudge over the audiences' love towards Locke and Sawyer, and how the audience ended up disliking jack in later seasons. This is just speculation though.

I made a two-part video all about the way the show was written that delves into the retcons and plot changeups that came along. You might enjoy checking them out as I get deep into some of these issues/speculations in more detail: The Truth About LOST Parts 1 & 2: kzbin.info/aero/PL5iTj9psbPrMlATx597dsa-7urhfqImJw

Ethan was born before the incident, which was what caused the pregnancy crisis. We don’t know if Karl was born on the island or if he just was brought there from a young age. Alex could be born without complication because Rousseau didn’t conceive on the island and was well into her pregnancy by the time she arrived, just like Claire with Aaron. Only women who actually conceived on the island were at risk.

Oh wow, that’s a very high compliment indeed! Thank you 🙏

Ben was trying to stop Widmore from giving away Jacob’s game plan but he disguised it as petty vengeance to the MiB. Obviously, he had no problem killing Widmore since they had so much bad blood between them, especially surrounding the murder of Alex. But killing Widmore was much more about preventing him from telling MiB everything.

Yes, this is a theory that many fans share, but I think the show presents us with much evidence to the contrary. There are too many to list here but the best evidence to reach for is Jacob’s explanation of the smoke monster to the candidates in the penultimate episode of the series. He tells them the following: “You call him “the monster”. But I’m responsible for what happened to him. *I made him* that way. And ever since then he has been trying to kill me.” Jacob says he turned his brother into the smoke monster. And even the Man in Black tends to agree since he told Richard the same thing in ‘Ab Aeterno’: “Jacob betrayed me. He took my body. My humanity.” You see, what gets spat out of that cave is the darkness of The Man in Black’s soul. The body is dead but his soul lives on, minus the humanity that made him good. There are many other established narrative facts and connections that demonstrate the smoke monster is the Man in Black’s soul untethered from his mortal body. Remember how Mother tells Jacob that a person entering the light in the cave would be a fate worse than death? Becoming a smoke monster is what she meant. If the MiB simply died when he was thrown into the light then her statement makes no sense. How was that a fate worse than death if he just died lol. A lot of other statements made throughout the show also make no sense if you believe the smoke monster always existed and was simply roleplaying as The Man in Black. When Ben asks why The Man in Black as Fake Locke chooses to walk around the island rather than just turn into flying smoke, Fake Locke tells him: “I like the feel of my feet on the ground. It reminds me that I used to be human once.” Jacob's disciple Dogen describes Claire as being "under the influence of a very angry man. For years, he has been trapped, but now Jacob is gone, he's free. This man will not stop until he has destroyed every living thing on this island." There are many other lines and moments that tell us what’s up here, all of which challenge this idea that the smoke monster was not really the MiB.

Yes it's a blink and you'll miss it easter egg! There are a few of them in the series, like the girls soccer team at the airport. In my episode guide (I'm currently going through the show episode by episode) I point out anytime the numbers pop up in the show in some way, either as a complete sequence or as individual values. So many episodes reference them, it's great!

It’s tricky. KZbin places them automatically now. I can place ad markers on specific parts of the video where I would prefer them to play but KZbin ultimately decides the number and frequency. And I think the frequency of the ads is a result of several factors, including the length of the video. However, Google also gave me this on the subject: “Factors like your viewing history, targeted advertising based on your Google account information, and the increasing demand from advertisers, all contribute to the number of ads you see on the platform.” For example, if there is some KZbin user who rarely logs on to watch anything, they will probably be able to watch multiple videos and get no ads at all, or only get a few ads during a two hour video like this one! It’s crazy really but it varies wildly like that. Either way, the ad revenue helps me to keep making videos, so there is a bit of give and take going on there too.

There are many channels and videos dedicated to explaining and exploring the lore of things like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Game of Thrones, Battlestar Galactica, and so on. Stories with worlds and mythologies that are deeply complex and full of moving parts. Do you take issue with any of them? Do you take issue with Christopher Nolan movies being too complicated for people to follow first time and that some require multiple viewings? Do you take issue with any story that aims to make the audience do some work to understand it? LOST is no different. It has a deep, complex mythology spread across 120+ episodes of TV, including dozens upon dozens of main characters, supporting characters, core plots, subplots, grand themes, subthemes, supplementary materials, external media and creator interviews, etc. You can't unpack and explain all of that in one single video and be done with it. That is unrealistic and unfair to expect. It is very easy to miss the answers in this show because so many were given that some viewers didn't even realise they had missed them. The explanation about the pregnancy crisis in this video being a great example.

I never made the case that a story is better because of diversity. Also, don’t confuse diversity now with diversity back then. For the time, the cast in this show was unusually diverse in that it was not commonplace to see that on TV, but it also wasn’t some kind of mass industry pandering to left wing ideals. Because the culture war as we know it today didn’t really exist back then in 2004. If anything, media was far more conservative leaning in general. Most American TV shows represented traditional Judeo-Christian values, with only mild pushes for increasing under-represented groups in media such as LGBT people. Friends and Buffy come to mind as shows that made a conscious choice to portray gay relationships for mainstream audiences, and they were considered controversial at the time. While the industry was certainly more liberal, the general ethos of studios and companies was more apolitical, which is why staunch Republicans like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger could be the biggest most highest paid stars in the world and awards ceremonies like the Oscars would punish people from being actively political on stage with bans, as happened to Richard Gere or Michael Moore getting booed off stage. It was a different time and the metric for measuring “progress” was not only different but far smaller. In terms of LOST, it was simply an attempt to make a show with an international cast. After all, it’s about a plane crash and there are usually people from all over the world travelling on international flights, therefore it made practical sense for the story. And I think that was what lent the idea to such a diverse cast. It wasn’t politically motivated in the sense that ABC or Bad Robot were trying to push a specific agenda. No one outside of academia had even heard of the terms we throw around today. Anyway, all of this to say that what you are saying about the culture war issues of today doesn’t t apply to LOST or any media from the past. It was ahead of its time in terms of making efforts to portray differences and incorporating those differences into the drama itself without forcing things or making it into a lecture.

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The Man in Black was punished for killing Mother by an angry, grieving Jacob. It wasn’t about right or wrong. Both men were manipulated into their roles by Mother. The Man in Black wasn’t evil when he went into the cave, but what came out of it was the darkness within him, which is the result of a person’s inner light being extinguished.

The smoke monster is bound by a whole bunch of rules. It couldn’t go over the fence anymore than it could go over the ash circles. We never find out the mechanics of that but we can assume it is related to being repelled by an electromagnetic force. Hence Smokey hitting the barrier like a brick wall and instantly being repelled.

Not assumptions, deductions based upon various points of information. The show is full of direct exposition as well as context clues drip-fed across the seasons. 1. Miles says that when a person dies their body becomes simply meat. Who they were is gone. 2. Mother says a piece of this elemental light is inside every person and that this light returns for rebirth in death. Reinforcing the idea that Miles put forward that bodies become empty vessels. 3. We see that the soul lives on elsewhere, which is demonstrated with both ghosts that linger behind and the sideways universe where souls go for that “rebirth”. 4. The Man in Black tells Jack that a person has to be dead before he can look like them. Ergo, they have to be an empty vessel. Their light/soul has to be gone.

@LOSTEXPLAINED108 it's still your theory,it's not explained like that in the show. The way you talk in the video is like everything you're saying was explained in the show,when it isn't. Don't get me wrong,I really enjoyed this video! But lots of it is assumption or deduction,as you say, and deductions can be wrong.

Sure, there is enough ambiguity within the series and there were parts of the mythology that were intentionally left to be abstract or interpretative, but I’m not pulling these answers out from thin air or making any details up. The explanations can be corroborated using information directly from the text itself. Assumption and deduction are not synonymous, they are different and should be treated as such. Whenever I do enter into total speculation territory, that has no direct evidential basis within the text, I say so. I would argue that the context clues are there for anyone to work out for themselves, it just requires some thought, time and effort. When an answer is given in LOST it is quite often teased out across multiple episodes in different seasons - so something gets established in Season Two, followed by more reveals in Seasons Three and Four, then two big pieces of the puzzle in Seasons Five and Six give context to what came before, allowing us to understand the big picture. Here is a great example: The Incident in 1977 was the cause of the pregnancy crisis and Juliet was ironically responsible for the problem. Most first time viewers never get that because of the way Season Six presents the flash sideways initially as an alt timeline, which throws off their understanding of what happened at the end of Season Five. However, when we go back through the series it becomes clear. Before the incident we are shown that babies could be born up to Ethan’s birth in 1977, but after the incident the pregnancy crisis begins, which will in turn force Eloise to leave The Island to give birth to Faraday safely and hand over the reigns to Charles. Eventually, Charles purges DHARMA and is then overthrown by Ben, who takes over leadership of The Others. Under Ben’s leadership (and due to his obsession with pregnancy because of his own traumatic birth) he will seek out a fertility doctor named Juliet Burke to help them solve the crisis that Charles ignored. Juliet will try for years to correct the problem and fail. Then she will travel back in time to live amongst DHARMA, and she will see that babies were being born fine in the 70s. Sawyer suggests to her that maybe whatever caused the pregnancy crisis to happen hasn’t happened yet. Hmm, what could that event be, I wonder? Within a couple of days, the incident happens and she detonates Jughead. Boom. The problem begins. This is never spelled out to us. No one ever says: “Hey man, it was totally the incident that caused pregnant women to die for the next 30 years.” The writers wanted us to figure that out for ourselves through very specific context clues. This is the answer to that question: why were pregnant women dying? There is no assumption in that, it is narrative fact. It is there in the text. And those who read the text can find the answers. That is 80% of what I do on this channel. I’m glad you enjoyed the video. I would recommend watching The Theory of Everything series that I made (as they are improved versions of these old videos) and contain much more detail. Also, you will see where narrative fact ends and theories begin more clearly in those videos.

They couldn’t take the risk of doing nothing. Because if they did nothing then maybe Faraday will never travel back in time and tell them to bury the bomb in 1954 then use the bomb in 1977, therefore no Jughead to stop the incident from destroying The Island. They felt that they had to work towards these events, to ensure fate. But that’s the catch of determinism. Whatever you do (or don’t do) is ultimately what will lead to the outcome you are either trying to create or avert. Our Losties learn that lesson too. They try to prevent The Swan from being built but their actions to avert the future are what ensure the future. Rather than The Swan not being built at all, they inadvertently guarantee that it does get built and that their plane will crash 25 years later. Widmore and Eloise understand that there is no use in trying to fight fate, they have a duty to help fulfil it. So doing nothing was never an option for them.

@ so what you are trying to say is that the outcome would have been the same even if they decided to do nothing?

No, what I am saying is that there could have been no other outcome than what we saw happen. They could never have simply decided to do nothing because the causality of their choices in the future (that shepherded the lives of people like Faraday and Desmond towards time travel events) was already baked into the historical timeline of the past as a result of those future choices that they make. The future has influenced past events, which leads to the future again. It’s called a causality loop. Future Widmore and Future Eloise had already made their choices to help make fate happen *before* their past selves in 1977 even knew they had these choices in the first place. They couldn’t have chosen to do nothing after 1977 because they *didn’t* choose to do nothing.

@ so what happened happened. If they didn’t do anything then the time travelers wouldn’t even be on the island to begin with. But hypothetically speaking, is it possible to disrupt the loop somehow?

The show demonstrates that the past cannot be changed. Whatever the time travellers do, no matter how much they try to change things, they always play into the hands of fate. They try to detonate a hydrogen bomb to change the course of the future but that decision is actually what guarantees their future. Jack doesn’t realise that by trying to change the timeline he is inadvertently going to make it all happen. That’s the irony of it all. The loop cannot be changed nor disrupted because from the POV of the future of 2004, it has all already happened. Fate has already made up its mind about history. Team Jack just didn’t know how they would be part of that history until they lived through it.