Counting Down On Lost

Going into tonight's episode, there are 4.5 hours of Lost left to be broadcast. However, that figure is somewhat misleading because it counts commercial time, which is useless at best and distracting at worst. Since a typical one-hour show on network TV actually contains about 42 minutes of true programming content, what we really have is 42 x 4.5 or 189 minutes of Lost left. Let's be generous to ourselves and round that up to 190 minutes. That's still not very much time in which to resolve or otherwise put to rest a whole lot of unanswered questions. How many? Well, I wouldn't pretend to be able to list a complete set, but here are just a few of the ones rolling around in my head (in no particular order, as should become amazingly obvious as you read it over):

• What is the "Sideways" (alternate) world that we began to see vignettes of in Season 6?
• Was the Man in Black (MIB) playing the part of every dead person shown on Lost (except for the ones Hurley sees), including those like Christian Shepherd who appeared off of the island?
• If MIB was all those dead people, what was his motivation in appearing as each and how does he know what they knew (in order to impersonate them)?
• Who was in Jacob's cabin all those years (as viewed by Locke and Hurley), how did he get trapped there, and if it was MIB then how was he able to wreak havoc as the black smoke at the same time?
• What are Charles Widmore's true intentions, and why (if he's good) does he seem to do so many evil things (including sending a mercenary death squad to the island)?
• If Benry thought he was following Jacob all the time that he was with the Others, and Widmore is fighting the MIB (Jacob's arch nemesis), then why are Benry and Widmore enemies?
• Did the Dharma Initiative/Hanso people just stumble upon the island by accident, or did Jacob "bring" them there, and if so, for what purpose?
• If the people on the island are so important (candidates), then why did Jacob allow something as potentially dangerous as "the incident" to happen in the first place, such that someone had to push a button every 108 minutes to avoid catastrophe?
• Was Desmond "special" before he was exposed to the effects of the whiteout event (end of Season 2), and if not, then why did Widmore (or whoever) arrange for him to receive Libby's boat in order to get him to the island (had someone seen the future?)?
• Was "the list" that was mentioned by the Others way back in Season 2 supplied by Jacob, taken off the cave wall, or something else?
• Why was Kate's name crossed off the cave wall?
  
• If Anthony Cooper (Locke's dad) is "good" in the Sideways world (i.e. not a con man), then who swindled Sawyer's mother back when he was a child, resulting in both of his parents' deaths?
• What the heck was Sideways Desmond doing running over Locke with his car?
  
• How did the Others know to build a runway in 2004 that would be needed in 2007 for the Ajira flight?
• What brought Saiyid back to life in the temple after the Healing Pool failed?
• In the island version of history, what happened in 1977 when Juliet banged on the bomb at the bottom of the hole? If it went off (sending the castaways forward into 2007), why weren't the people at the site killed (including Dr Chang, who went on to make Dharma videos afterward, with a prosthetic arm replacing the one he lost at the site)?
• Where the heck have Benry, Richard and Miles been for the last few episodes? And isn't Desmond getting pretty hungry and thirsty down in that well all this time?
• If Jacob can appear to Hurley, why isn't he helping more? Is that against the rules, or is he really just so laid back that he'd let everything go to Hell rather than interfere?
• If MIB gets his wish (all candidates dead), does he really get off the island, or does reality end, or what?
• If MIB believes that mankind simply corrupts (as he told Jacob), then what does Jacob believe? For hundreds of years, it seems like neither of them was capable of proving their point-of-view on the island, so why is now any different?
• Who built the giant 4-toed statue on the island?
• Is the island really "alive"/"sentient", or has everything that's been attributed to the island since the first episode really been the work of Jacob or MIB?
• Who constructed the "frozen donkey wheel" (turned by Locke, and then Benry), and for what purpose?
• Who's the boy (or boys) seen haunting MIB twice so far this season?
• Was the lighthouse mirror array (destroyed by Jack this season) really looking into the past, or the present, or into the Sideways world? What was its purpose?
• What's the real story with Eloise Hawking, and why does she always seem to exist outside of time and space somehow (as seen when Desmond was time traveling and she knew that fact, or in the Sideways world where she appeared to realize that that reality was manufactured for a specific purpose)?
• What happened to Christian Shepherd's body, both on the island (where it disappeared from its coffin) and in the Sideways reality (where body and coffin disappeared or were lost by Oceanic)?
• What happened to the Dharma Initiative back in Ann Arbor, Michigan, such that they never sent anyone to the island after Benry and the Others wiped out the island group? What have they been up to in the years since then?
• Was the psychic who warned Claire about letting her baby be raised by the wrong people (suggesting it would be calamitous if it happened) just running a scam on her, and if so, why was he so freaked out when he saw her later?
• Why did Walt have special, seemingly supernatural abilities (not including the ability to keep the actor playing him from aging, unfortunately)? Was that just a coincidence, or was he supposed to go to the island in order to play some important role?
• Why did all the women (after 1977, anyway) always die in their second trimester if they got pregnant on the island?
• What grand plan did Benry really think he was helping to orchestrate if he'd never actually had any contact with Jacob, and Richard Alpert wasn't even aware of Jacob's end game?
• Why did Locke become so super-competent (hunter, tracker, master planner, etc) once he got to the island? He seemed to be a mess before that (according to the flashbacks).
• What was the significance of the numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42)? Why did they "curse" Hurley when he used them to win the lottery? What do they mean?
• Who were the pair of skeletons found in the cave early in Season 1?
• Why did Juliet think "It worked" when she died (as reported by Miles shortly thereafter)?

OK, I could actually go on and on and on, but we all know that many of these mysteries are unlikely to be dealt with in the short time left. There are probably already websites devoted to capturing every puzzle from the show, and presumably new ones have been added just in the last couple of weeks. As Vicki says, maybe the show's creators will eventually realize they have to make a theatrical release or two just to put some of the head-scratchers to bed. We can only hope.