10 Movie Characters Who Discovered That Their Universe Didn’t Exist

I’m not sure if the title of this show refers to the status of the main characters or the status of the audience throughout its entire run. No matter how hard you try to establish a coherent explanation for this series, no one really understands it. Not even J.J. Abrams! Seriously, my wife and I wrote out all 246 questions generated by this show, and only 172 of them were answered! That leaves 74 questions still up in there air! Yes, math. I’m keeping your interest now, eh?

So I can’t take the time to try and explain the show other than to say “people on an island… sort of.” But in a show filled with flashbacks and flashforwards and then time travel and parallel universes, the plot becomes a tangled web whose final episode teases the possibility of a false reality. As the cast all gathers in a church except for fan-favorite Ben, a wide vista of interpretative possibilities opens up.

Are the characters in a purgatory working through their issues? Are they all hallucinating a dream-world that’s superior to the world they left behind? Are two realities converging on top of each other, with dopplegangers merging into single people with duplicate memories? It’s up to each individual watcher to decide, but the idea that the island itself was only a false reality, or that it created a false reality, is an intriguing one to consider.