Shaun of the Dead star Simon Pegg has said he “loved” ABC’s 2000s TV show Lost, but he’s got at least one idea that he thinks would fix its ending.
The Mission: Impossible and Star Trek actor gave his thoughts on the classic – and controversial – series during an appearance on the food-focused podcast, Dish. Toward the end of the episode, the crew had a question for Pegg: “If you could rewrite the end of a film or TV series, what would you choose, and how would you rewrite it?”
Judging by his quick response, he’s put a lot of thought into Lost and its divisive ending.
Warning! Spoilers for Lost follow.
“I would rewrite the end of Lost, and I’ll tell you why,” he replied. “I loved Lost. In fact, when (director and executive producer) J.J. Abrams called me about (Mission: Impossible 3), he had just finished the first season of Lost, and he sent me the whole season on individual DVDs, before it was on TV, to watch it, to see his stuff, to check him out as a director.
“But at the end of it, it just… spoiler alert if you haven’t seen Lost, but, you know, they were dead all along. I was like, ‘But that’s what everyone thought in the first series?'”
Lost premiered in 2004 and was quickly hailed as one of the all-time great TV shows before its increasingly complex final seasons started to draw criticism from fans. Time travel, resurrected characters, and tattoo explanations had many tuning out as Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, and the rest of the marooned gang’s story came to an end, but few moments caused a stir quite like its ending.
Flash-sideways plotlines and a credits sequence showing abandoned plane wreckage had many viewers convinced that every character was actually dead the whole time. Despite its prominence as an accepted explanation, there’s quite a bit of evidence to back up that this is not the case.
Showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have outright denied the “they were dead the whole time” theory ever since the finale premiered in 2010. Dialogue within Lost itself also backs up the idea that the passengers of Oceanic 815 really did survive that original plane crash (and the second one, too).
Losties have spent the 16 years fighting back against this misconception. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like Pegg got the memo.
“What they started to do toward the end was they had this weird thing where they’d flash sideways,” he continued. “They’d always flash back to the characters in the real world, off the island, and you’d learn about them as people, and that would reflect how they were on the island. But then, they did this thing where they started flashing sideways into an alternative universe.
Pegg then shared his idea to fix Lost’s ending: “I thought it would have been really good if, in order to get off the island, they had to die on the island, and then they would be transported to the alternative universe. So, there’d be this amazing dramatic irony, because they’d be desperately trying to survive, but we’d know that you’ve got to die to make it.
“And then, eventually you’d end up with Jack, you know, Mattew Fox, and he would be fighting for survival, but then he’d die. Then, they’d all be in this alternative universe in different roles. I just felt like there was something interesting there. That’s the bad version of that idea, but instead, it was just like, ‘Meh, dead all along.’
“I was like, ‘This was seven years of my life, and it’s that?!'”
Comments on the video have, of course, already filled with those who wish Pegg believed that they weren’t dead the whole time. Others who still follow the theory, however, quite like his idea.
IGN gave Lost Season 6 a 9/10 review when it arrived back in 2010. For more, you can see Michael actor Harold Perrineau spill the beans about the co-star who still won’t talk to him. You can also check out our list of the eight most divisive series finales in history.
Photo by John Nacion/Variety via Getty Images.
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
