Secrets Of ABC's "Lost" Finally Revealed

(Note: This is my 100th post!!! Let's celebrate. Vote for your favorite blog post of all time - written by The Mill, of course. If anyone actually votes, I'll tally the results next week. And even if people don't vote, I'll still make something up. So you win either way.)

.....or not.

In any case, “Lost” has officially taken the entertainment world by storm.

This is nothing new. Fans have voraciously devoured every crumb of the impossibly complicated plotline for the last 3.5 years or so.

Personally, I’ve been a fan for just over a year. I guess that doesn’t qualify me for an entire blog about the show (there already seem to be 1000’s of those out there anyway) but I think I can get away with writing a post on the topic every now and then.

For those of you who aren’t too familiar with “Lost,” please allow me to sum it up as succinctly as possible:

A plane crashes on a remote tropical island. There are a number of survivors who are mostly good-looking – several are quite hot. The survivors begin to notice all kinds of crazy shit happening on the island – and the shit keeps getting more and more unusual. Ghosts, polar bears, floating monsters made from smoke, some crazy technological shit that blocks any signals coming to or from the island. The list of weird stuff goes on and on. And then there’s another group of folks who aren’t as good looking (none are particularly hot), but who were already living on the island. They seem evil. But we don’t know for certain. We also learn about numerous past connections between various survivors of the plane crash, and it seems as if they were brought to the island on purpose. Now, they’re trying to get off the island, but some of the survivors want to stay. We don’t know why.

An important point to mention is that many fans have been watching the show for 3 years, and actually know less now about what the hell’s going on than when they were born – 20, 30, 40 years before the show first aired. If that doesn’t blow your mind, I don’t know what will.

And yet, we keep watching. It’s addictive, and I’ve tried to figure out why.

The show is a brilliant combination of science fiction, fantasy, action-adventure, mystery, drama, and horror. It’s not particularly funny. Maybe that’s the only thing it’s missing. If “Lost” were also funny, J.J. Abrams (the creator of the show) would be President. Or maybe he’d be king - of the world. As long as he kept making “Lost,” world peace and prosperity would be assured.

A huge part of the show’s allure is the fact that no one really knows what’s going on, but everyone wants to figure it out. You can find countless theories and analyses littering the internet like so many empty Doritos bags washed up along the Jersey shore. But why do so many people attempt to decode and predict the unpredictably labyrinthine plot of the show?

To correctly predict the storyline of “Lost” is to know the unknowable – to guess the next words out of the police officer’s mouth as he cuffs you and takes you downtown for being a know-it-all asshole. It’s like theorizing what David Blaine’s next magic trick will be (will he ride, in nothing but his underwear, on the outside of the space shuttle during re-entry?), or predicting the actions of a dog faced with a choice between a hamburger, a ham sandwich, a rack of bbq ribs, or a turkey leg. What does he eat first?

My point, of course, is nobody can know.

You can’t. And that’s why, in many ways, “Lost” fans are wasting their time. We can’t know what’s going to happen next - just like you can’t know what I’m going to write next.

ALCOHOLIC LEPRECHAUNS RUIN SUPERMARKET GRAND OPENING BY URINATING ON POTENTIAL PATRONS FROM HELICOPTER.

Did you see that coming? Probably not.

Even so, I can’t help but hotch my own car to the “Lost” theory train. I’ve been racking my brain – literally racking the gray, spongy thing – in an attempt to get to the bottom of “Lost.”

What’s it all about? Are the “survivors” of Oceanic Flight 815 actually living in a dream world, or some type of purgatory? Who is Jacob? Why is Ben so creepy? How does Sawyer keep his beard so uniform – and so damn cool looking?

I believe the island is a real island. They're not living in some dream state, or a supernatural netherworld. The island is located in the Pacific somewhere, but it's cloaked by some crazy-ass technology and/or the Earth's magnetic field (think Bermuda Triangle).

Jacob was once a living human being, but now represents the hopes and fears of everyone on the island. He's no longer a real person, but what little remains of his presence manifests itself in visions of dead people, seemingly sentient smoke monsters, and spooky noises. Make sense? Yeah, it's all bullshit.

As for Ben being creepy, it's all in the eyes. They're permanently bugged out like Barbara Bush's. She has something called Graves Disease - a thyroid disorder - resulting in her slightly buggy eyes. Ben, however, is constantly surprised by the stupidity of those around him. His thyroid is shipshape, but he constantly sees stupid people, both real and imagined. I'd probably look the same way if I went to a monster truck show or a Scientology rally.

Thyroid disorder, or surrounded by stupid people?

As for Sawyer's beard, this one really stumped me for a while. After all, in order to keep the facial hair in perfect order, one needs a mirror, an electric razor, and a manual razor. One also needs a lot of time not spent foraging for food and water while stranded on a remote island, and escaping from monsters and guys mean guys with guns. As far as I can tell, Sawyer only has maybe a mirror and a regular razor.

His beard is as finely crafted as a German engineered car, or a Swiss timepiece.

The answer to the Sawyer Beard Conundrum, or the Sawyer Hair Uncertainty Principle (SAWHUP) lies in his hair's ability to preen itself - whenever any hot ladies are in the vicinity. The individual hairs can sense a hot lady's pheromones and/or hotness, and automatically grow or retract in unison. This genetic mutation occurs in less than 0.01% of men, and makes them look approximately 75% cooler, on average, than normal dudes.

Other well-known examples include Tom Selleck, Colin Farrell, and Martin van Buren.

A "Magnum" of a moustache

A splendid Irish beard - as thick as the moss on the walls of Dublin Castle.

His legendary mutton chops put Lincoln's beard to shame; make Al Gore's beard look like a 13 year-old boy's peach fuzz.

I think that's all the mystery-solving I can handle right now. But I promise to revisit the mind-boggling world of "Lost" in the not-so-distant future.