Lost actress Evangeline Lilly has revealed how she always thought the series would end, and her theories about Kate’s ultimate fate.

Everyone who’s ever had access to the internet knows that the series finale of Lost is one of the most heavily debated and criticized endings to a television series of all time.

To many fans, the spiritual tabula rasa all the main characters received in a purgatory-like afterlife felt like a cop-out and a way to avoid solving the big mysteries the show had set up over its six seasons.

But on the other hand, you have almost as many fans ready to argue that the ending perfectly summed up Lost‘s underlying message: that it is all about the journey, not the destination.

On the third anniversary of the finale (May 23, 2010), Evangeline Lilly (Kate) held a small Twitter celebration for the series, where she answered a few fan questions and shared her thoughts about the ending.

Lilly is very happy with the way the show ended, writing:

Her character Kate Austen was one of the few who made it off the island alive, and now Lilly has revealed what she believes happened to her after the fact:

Lost fans who watched the show when it was on the air will remember the heavy pressure the writers and actors were under, both from the press and the fanbase, to reveal the show’s closely guarded secrets.

Lilly also felt the additional pressure from the groups of fans who wanted Kate to end up with either Jack or Sawyer, and was very careful never to pick a side in the love triangle or reveal whom she thought Kate would/should end up with.

But now that Lost is over, she shares the theory she developed while working on the show, which (while correctly predicting Kate’s final choice) was very different from what ended up happening:

My own personal prediction while we were filming was always that the whole thing would end with Jack and Kate alone on the island with the black and white stones in that little pouch in Jack’s front pocket. I thought they would end up being “Adam and Eve,” the skeletons they found at the beginning, and that Kate would be pregnant with his baby…hence the “first father and first mother” of the island. And the whole cycle begins anew. …That’s what I thought it would be.

Of course in the final season of Lost, we found out that the Adam and Eve skeletons (first discovered by Jack and Kate in the season 1 episode “The Moth”) actually belonged to Man in Black and his mother.

But having Kate and Jack end up as the Island’s Adam and Eve would certainly have brought it all neatly full circle, and those early moments (like Jack taking the black and white stones and Kate saying “I don’t want to be Eve”) would have been a lot more significant in retrospect.

(We also have to point out the similarity between Lilly’s predicted ending and the ending of Abrams’ previous show Alias. We bet she was a fan.)

Now that we know what endgame she had in mind while filming the series, perhaps we can go back and look at some of Kate’s scenes in a different light – particularly those in which she was conflicted about her feelings for Sawyer and Jack.

Would you have liked to see Lost end the way Lilly had imagined it? Or were you happy with the events of the finale episode “The End”?