Doctor Who According to Rory Williams:
Season Five:
1. Rory Williams and That Time My Girlfriend’s Imaginary Friend Turned Out to Be Real
2. Rory Williams and That Time It Was The Night Before My Wedding
3. Rory Williams and That Time It Was The Night Before My Wedding
4. Rory Williams and That Time It Was The Night Before My Wedding
5. Rory Williams and That Time It Was The Night Before My Wedding
6. Rory Williams and That Time My Girlfriend’s Imaginary Friend Jumped Out of a Cake That Was Supposed To Have a Stripper In It
7. Rory Williams and That Time I Cut Off My Ponytail and Died
8. Rory Williams and That Time The Ground Ate My Girlfriend
9. Rory Williams and That Time I Was Erased From History
10. Rory Williams and That Time I Didn’t Exist
11. Rory Williams and That Time I Didn’t Exist
12. Rory Williams and That Time I Was Made Out of Plastic
13. Rory Williams and That Time I Guarded a Box for 2,000 Years and Then Got Married
Season Six:
1. Rory Williams and That Time My Wife Made Me Fly Across The Atlantic Ocean Because of Instructions In An Unsigned Envelope
2. Rory Williams and That Time “Fell Out of the Sky” Was a Figure of Speech, Which Was Misleading Since There’s This Other Dude That Did Literally Fall Out of the Literal Sky So It’s Not Like You Can Blame Me For Being Freaked Out
3. Rory Williams and That Time I Drowned
4. Rory Williams and That Time My Wife and I Were Terrorized by Corridors
It’s not purgatory…
…it’s a shared near-death experience, created by the timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly powers of electromagnetism (yes, I know that’s from a different show). Kind of like a reunion for the old veterans who saved the world.
Books referenced in the show: Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge; VALIS; The Third Policeman. Other possible references: Alice in Wonderland, Narnia, The Wizard of Oz. People create an imaginary world or alternate universe or travel in time, but not really, but it has a profound impact on them anyway.
Maybe the Incident caused it. Jack and Juliet wanted to help everyone fix their lives by un-doing the crash, but all Jughead did was pop them back into 2007. Maybe their good intentions interacted with the energy to create a little pocket universe they could all tap into when their consciousness was altered by being near death.
Or maybe Desmond figured out how to create it, with Hurley’s help. Or maybe it was just the power of love. Whatever, dude.
Forget the numbers and the Hurleybird…
… the only question I still want answered is:
What would have happened if Smokey had escaped and/or the (surprisingly literal) cork hadn’t been replaced? What did they save the world from, exactly?
The moral of Lost
Those statue-building, temple-living, jungle-dwelling people? They didn’t know what was going on. They just made their best guess about how things work. Unfortunately, their insistence on tradition and rules messed up their lives and relationships.
Those well-digging, bunny-numbering, hatch-building scientists? They didn’t know what was going on either. They were trying to figure it out by measuring it and testing it, but they only uncovered tiny parts of what was going on. They messed up their relationships too, often by having too narrow an idea of what was important.
Your toga-wearing, notebook-giving, kidney-stealing, Dharma-joining, alcoholic-surgeon parents? They had no fucking clue what was going on. They were just muddling through their lives as best they could, trying to give you a better life and often failing miserably.
An intelligent, curious person can have a fun, amazing, educational life exploring the weird parts of the world to find out how it works. But we can’t possibly know everything about our mysterious universe, there’s just too much for one lifetime.
The only thing that can make you truly happy and satisfied with life is your relationships with other people: helping them, letting them help you, sharing your sorrows and joys as you try to figure out what’s going on. Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll make the world a better place for your kids.
Lindelof and Cuse weren’t talking about the show, they were telling us the theme all along: “We can’t give you all the answers; and it’s about the relationships anyway.”
