Quick reference to everything Lost. Lost in a nutshell.

Explanation: This is a personal project; It's my attempt to summarize the mysteries of Lost in as few words as possible, while still including every mystery or question I've ever thought while watching Lost. (These two ideas are contradictory, since I'll be including even silly mysteries like 'Who stole the bottled water?') I'm posting this online because I'm hoping people will read it. But, I'm writing it for myself, just to see if I can. So if you read it, good on you, let me know how I'm doing. Feel free to point out any mistakes I've made. Or don't. If you do I'll fix them.

Basics: An airplane travelling from Sydney to LA crashes onto a mysterious tropical island. Out of 324, only 71 people survive the crash. Even though there are 71 survivors, 'Lost' follows only the more-interesting of the survivors as they explore the magical island's jungle, bond with eachother, squabble over supplies, scavenge for food, face mortal peril, perish, and search for a way to get off the island.

Not including the two-part pilot, each episode is character-centered, and the main plot will focus on one single character (such as Claire, Locke, or Sawyer) or two related characters (such as Jin and Sun, or Michael and Walt). The character(s) will have a flashback plot about them before they came to the island, as well as a current plot taking place on the island. More recently, the flashback plots have been replaced with flashforward plots to a time when several characters get off the island, with the focus on one or two main characters.

As the seasons progress, the castaways discover many things about the island. For instance: -the island is a semi-retired testing area for scientific experiments. -there have been A Lot of people stranded on this island. -there is an isolationist tribe of scientists and natives still living on the island. The castaways also learn about eachother, and discover that several characters were actually connected before arriving on the island.

Each additional season adds new characters to the show. The second season added 4 survivors from the tail section, the third season added several of The Others. Currently, in season 4, the Lost characters are dealing with the freighties; 5 characters who recently arrived on the island from a freighter, but don't seem very eager to rescue the planecrash survivors. New characters are added every season because new and old characters keep dying.