Season 4 of Lost finished screening in Singapore in August. Pretensions was out during the finale and finally got round to viewing the 2-parter a couple of weeks ago. She's decided that the show's title aptly describes the state of the average viewer as afterwards she felt a little like Desmond after his time-travel jaunts aka stunned and bleeding out her nose.

Where are the scriptwriters going with this?

P has been a faithful fan of Lost since the stellar first episode, but she's beginning to wonder if the show actually has a trajectory or has been conceived after smoking a stash of hash. So far, we have a movable/disappearing island, reappearing dead people, an incorporeal telekinetic Jacob, spooky bad luck numbers, summonable smoke monsters and weirdo experiments by the Dharma Intiative. We're assuming that JJ Abrams and Damon Lindeloff were actually trying to create something logical with all this but what if they're standing back and going "Cool man, let's make Claire appear to a sane character after we've seen her get killed off; that'll really fox the viewers and it might raise our ratings!". Ok, that's a little cynical and P wouldn't continue watching if she didn't like the show, but sometimes it's like watching very good actors improvise when given a dead cat and a polo mint.

Entertainment Weekly ran an article in 2006 listing the top 5 Lost theories. They are listed below with amendments in light of what we now know 2 seasons later.

1. Purgatory.

Everyone in Oceanic Flight 815 died in the crash. The island is Purgatory. This one doesn't hold up in Season 4, since we know the Oceanic 6 returned to the world; also the freighter was able to reach the island by some very mundane steering.

2. Hallucination

Only one of the characters is real and everything else (rest of the characters, animals, island etc) only exist in his or her mind. This one is still possible but doesn't really solve anything - it's equivalent to the "it's all a dream" scripwriter copout.

3. Mutant Hothouse

The Dharma Intiative created a group of telepathic superhumans (Jacob?) who are messing with our heroes' minds. Also possible

4. Apocalypse

Humanity has been wiped out - the island is an attempt to preserve the remainder of humanity. This one doesn't hold water in the light of season 4.

5. Lab Rats

The castways are lab rats brought to the island for experiments by mad scientists (Ben and the Others or pple we haven't met yet).

Plenty of other theories abound on the net. After season 4, if P had to pick a theory, she would go with the Time Loop theory. This one is brilliantly put forward by Jason Hunter at his page here.

6. Time Loop Theory

It's quite a long read, but essentially, the idea is that the Dharma Intiative's ancestors were on the Black Rock freighter which was shipwrecked on the island due to its unique magnetic properties. These people were the first to discover the island's pecularities, but they kept it to themselves and formed the Dharma as a secret society to discover more about the island. In the 1960s, the Dharma had a breakthrough and managed to create a functional time machine that could send individuals and the whole island back in time to when the machine was first created. Diseased and wounded individuals are cured when sent back in time to before they were wounded. The smoke monster is the physical manifestation of the timeline correcting itself. People alive in alternate timelines can actually appear to people who have seen them die in "their" timeline. See, the scriptwriters were giving us all a clue when Desmond starting have his flashbacks on the freighter!

The island was originally kept in a time-loop bubble set up by Ben to prevent anyone from reaching it. The machine with the button activated the time machine every 108 minutes to send it back in time by that period. This is why Oceanic 815 only crashed on the island when Desmond stopped pressing the button. However, the castways land on the island a decade before they took the flight. According to Hunter, it's 1996 on the island and 2004 outside it and crossing that time boundary does crazy things to navigational equipment (remember the helicopter's troubles)?

There are a few inconsistencies (like day and night appearing on an island that gets reset every 108 minutes), but the theory seems to have less holes than the other ones floating around at the moment.

What do you think?