The Lost Finale Was Incredibly Dumb

Anyone who watched even one episode past season #1 is a complete and total victim of a show biz joke. Go sit with the fans of “Twin Peaks” and hang your heads.

Twin Peaks lost a lot of its audience through seemingly pointless meandering. The resolution of that series was rushed by the impending doom of its cancellation.

Lost suffered mightily from the Chris Carter Effect, namely a creative head leading on the audience that the story line, or at least its longest running mysteries, were all worked out. Fat chance. Carter was lying about it and it became clear as the X Files got ever more convoluted and featured only a few implausible pay offs that ultimately left even its fans largely indifferent to the demise of the series.

Lost went through the same thing, Abrams and company assuring us that the story was all worked out way ahead of time. B.S.

Lost was seemingly created to appeal to two different audiences, science fiction/fantasy fans who'd delight in trying to figure out the nature and purpose of the island, and the typical drama audience who'd get hooked on character driven stories, love triangles, rivalries, etc.

That first crowd got shafted last night. The emos got their pay-off, but the lack of any convincing pay-off on the deeper mystery behind the island as a place, and the slapdash supernatural bent hastily adopted in Season Six is frankly an affront.

Intellectually, I can come to grips with the "acceptance of death" angle that was ultimately adopted, and how that could serve to make so many points of the larger subplots largely irrelevant details. Nevertheless, such an approach would be much more satisfying for those coming at the show from the sci-fi angle had not most suspected something along these lines from the beginning. My wife said to me last night, "You pretty much guessed this to be the case in the first season." I won't go so far to say I feel cheated because the ride was entertaining, but the ending was lame in the main because it really only tried to appeal to the mawkishness of the emo crowd who mostly disdained any attempts to try and tease a self-consistent explanation out of the overall plot. They defend this ending as magnificent today and deride the critics s nitpickers.

I wasn't that disappointed by the idea that they all died in the original crash

Not the case. What happen, happened.

The shot during the credits was just a rusting hulk on the beach. A new 'Black Rock"...if you will.

So then, based on what you guys just said here is the twist.

Since the series ender nullified much of what we learned, does that then nullify our 6 years of enjoyment? Was watching the show all for nothing? Was the show even real? I’m so confused.

Did you guys see this alternate ending where Hurly was the black smoke monster? It’s only 56 seconds long but it might suprise you.

HURLY IS THE BLACK SMOKE MONSTER, ALTERNATE ENDING
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ui1uGlBHy8

The questioning of reality was there from the very first minutes of the very first episode. When we have all these highly improbably survivors of a plane crash, a plane mysteriously and for no apparent reason way off course, a crippled guy that can suddenly walk, a cancer patient suddenly cured, Jack’s dead dad walking in the jungle, a polar bear on a tropical island, a smoke monster. And that’s all before we get the magnetic anomaly, Dharma, Jacob, Richard, and the temples. This wasn’t a sci-fi show really, they were dealing with the supernatural not high-tech. That’s right in the series bible. If you were expecting a hyper rational SF resolution then you weren’t paying enough attention to Locke, he was always the clue that this trip was going to be weird.

To get from the people they were at the time they set off the bomb to the people they were in pocket heaven wasn’t a jump. The jump is that in pocket heaven they were that way before ever getting on the plane, they were all at the end of their story arcs, instead of at the beginning. In the real plane Hurley was an unlucky guy whose lottery winnings had ruined his life, in the post bomb plane Hurley was a happy guy who’d turned that lottery winning into a way to make anybody and everybody around him a happier person. In the real plane Jack was a borderline alcoholic stuck in the shadow of his father, in the post bomb plane Jack was suitably mourning fora father he didn’t loathe and getting back to a properly functioning life. In the real plane Sawyer was a con-man who’d taken on the identity, personality and career of the man responsible for the deaths of his parents; in the post bomb plane he was a cop, still wanting revenge, but able to function in society under his own name. Broken people at the beginning of their story arcs on the real plane, whole people near the end of their story arcs on the post bomb plane. Yes they still had some problem, but they were doing a hell of a lot better than they had been.

I’m not claiming anything about any need for happy endings. I’m just pointing out that there were strong clues that the flash “sideways” was not to the same versions of the people that should have existed just because the Island was gone. That they were emotionally much closer to the characters we were seeing on the Island at the end of the show than what we saw at the beginning, which in theory is what they should have been.

And again you go off the deep end with silly assumption, funny for a person calling them selves question_assumptions to be so addicted to assumptions. There’s a lot more to it than that. There’s the whole nature of reality thing still going on with the Island. We don’t know how long Hurley was protecting it, what happened under his time, who he put in charge when it was time for him to go. There’s a whole lot going on that you’re deliberately ignoring to be underwhelmed.

ohfercryinoutloud I wish I'd never commented on this thread...

It was significant that Jack was told before the final resolution that he didn't have a son. Maybe you felt the need for more resolution, but I think it all happened there (unspoken) with Jack's "awakening" in the room with his father. It's TV. I can live with that. I think it would be the same for Juliet. I guess in that sense I can join Mr. Locke and be a man of faith, not of science.

I don't know that I've said that I was "completely" satisfied with the ending. I'm still going back and forth on what I think about the final resolution. Sure, the finale left questions. We've known for some time now that the producers said not all questions would be answered.

I have no problem if folks didn't like the show, or have issues with the ending. All I'm doing is tell you why I didn't.

I do get bothered by the buttheadedness of those who come on the thread to trash a show they never watched, or of which they only saw one season, or one episode. They really have no room to comment. I have little tolerance for that kind of @$$hattery.

well said!

I don't think that anyone who was along for the entire run was looking for a hard scientific resolution. However, with all of the faux-Egyptian hieroglyphs, the timelessness of certain aspects of the island's own back story, the introduction of a nuclear warhead, and on and on, going somewhat towards a coherent explanation of some of these details, even if ultimately they were all the constructs of a dying man in a direct rip-off of the movie Jacob's Ladder, would have made the finale not seem so much like a hastily penned conclusion that was merely interested in paying off the character story arcs.

In my view, Lost was like a three legged stool. The entire story, the seating platform, was held up by three legs of storytelling. The first leg was the major character development. The second leg was the mystery of the island itself. The third leg was the faux scientific smattering upon what was apparently some amorphous cosmology. That third leg was really poorly developed in relation to the amount of detail and craftsmanship that went into the first two.

Apparently at least one person in this discussion thought there should be a rational SF ending. Everybody brings their own baggage to a show. Me, when I’m watching a show that starts playing with the nature of reality I always pay extra close attention to the “mystic seeker” character, they’re the guys that are usually dropping the big hints from the writers.

I think Lost was always about the characters. The mystery of the island and the faux scientific stuff were MacGuffins from the start. While they poked and prodded the plot along by giving the characters new stuff to react to and a way to declare the story over. Maybe that’s why I’m perfectly happy with the ending, it was about the characters, which is what the story was always about, and I’ve been hoping since the defined ending was announced that the Falcon would be fake.

Most of the Others got killed by the smoke monster, so any interest they had in Walt died with them.

And any interest that the audience might have had in Walt was killed by the smoke monster, too?

Aaron's most important time to Claire was probably the late pregnancy early birth, the time period when she decided to keep him, and he was a focal point for developing her relationship with Charlie. Far Kate the important part of Aaron was the personal growth he caused, personal growth which eventually led her to go back to the Island just so she could get Claire and give Aaron to her. And remember in the "real" world she was going with Claire to help her adapt to parenthood. Aaron mattered a lot, he was a driving force in the arc of 3 characters right through the whole plot.

You then accuse me of being "way too addicted to the word prop", yet you've just described Aaron as a prop. He doesn't matter as a distinct person. He's not a character in his own right. He's a prop to help Clarie bond with Charlie and to help Kate find herself. He's important the same way the hatch was a driving force in the story, but not important the same way a Hurley, Kate, or Sawyer was. And my point is that they pretty much treat him as a prop in the end.

You're way too addicted to the word prop and you make way too many assumptions about the structure of the pocket heaven. For all we know Jack's kid was actually Jack as a kid, giving Jack an opportunity to see their relationship from both sides.

You are missing the point. It doesn't matter whether Jack's son David was really Jack as a kid, a fantasy, an an angel pretending to be Jack's son, or whatever. The point is that Jack's son is not, in fact, a real person who is Jack's child and that any thoughts, emotions, hopes, or dreams that Jack might have had for his fake son were meaningless. It's like a parent suddenly finding out that their son or daughter isn't really their biological son or daughter was switched at birth. While people can react in different ways to such revelations, indifference is not a normal reaction.

Let me put this a different way. Why is it important to say that what happened on the island really happened but OK to dismiss what happened in the parallel world as unreal? Would it have worked for you had it been the other way around, that Jughead erased the first several seasons, the parallel world was the real world, and the characters still on the island were simply playing out a pointless drama in a dead-end parallel universe?

By the time they're in the sinking sub I don't think Jin or Sun thought they were getting off the Island alive. I mean we know Sun isn't, and Jin's probably pretty sure he's just picking where to die on that Island. And again we don't know what else is said.

Sure, but the writers showed us what they thought was important and, as with the other examples I gave, the children just didn't rate caring about on screen.

It's the old "they never go to the bathroom" part of story telling, the water wasn't going up as quickly as they drowned. No they're "real" people, but it is all part of a story, and the story of Jin and Sun is the story of separation and re-unification, they're separated at first by their stations in life, then by Sun's father, then by Jin's job, then by Sun's infidelity, then the raft, then the freighter; finally, in the end, both dieing in the sub and in the pocket heaven they are permanently re-united. It's really quite romantic if you look at it through eyes that aren't desperate to find fault.

Please spare me the accusation that I'm desperate to find fault. That's no more fair than me dismissing your arguments as someone who is simply desperate to make excuses. I'll mention here that my undergraduate degree is in English literature, have worked in publishing, and I have read many books on writing stories. I get that there were themes with the various characters but what I felt happened at the end was that they were reduced to a one dimensional theme rather than being three dimensional characters. And, yes, romances where the only thing that matters in the universe is each other are very romantic when dealing with a young childless couple but a couple that continues to behave that way once they have children is not all that admirable.

It's as real as Ben wants it to be. He's there, he's there with his "adopted" kid, and her mother, with positive friendly and possibly loving relationships. Maybe they're the souls of the real people from the Island, maybe they're not, but it doesn't really matter. Given all the horrible things Ben did, especially to those two people, a chance to be with them, and be a nice person, and be loved by them, even if it's pretend them, would have to be a huge temptation. And since he's in a timeless place with no aging, why not hang around and be a nice person with the one person he ever really cared about.

Which would put him on par with Hurley playing Connect Four with an imaginary friend at the asylum.

The Star Trek movie didn't fork reality into two lines, it shot the old highly screwed up, convoluted to the point of being completely useless to writers, "continuity" which never really had any continuity, in the head to get a nice clean chalkboard to work with.

Abrams specifically rebooted the original series as a forked timeline with the understanding that both could exist side-by-side. It's why he went through all of that trouble to have Leonard Nimoy in the movie and why they talked about the other timeline in the movie. There are interviews where Abrams specifically talks about this.

And the end of Lost isn't all pure symbolism, if it was what you're saying I wouldn't be impressed either, the good news is you've got it wrong.

Well, I'm still waiting for an explanation of what it was that I might find satisfying. And if you are satisfied, by all means stay satisfied by it.

I agree with you that the show was about the characters. I am just saying that for me the sheer amount of McGuffins and lantern hanging rose to nearly offensive levels.

A much better effort regarding the cosmology of Lost would have squelched a lot of the criticism from sci-fi/fantasy quarters.

It's one thing for the electromagnetic timeshifting island to become a red herring filled prelude to a supernatural making of whole persons out of broken people, but the story telling efforts underpinning Jacob & fLocke, and to a lesser extent, Desmond, made for a weaker overall ending for their brevity and lack of depth over the course of this season.

If I serve you a wonderful meal and end with a desert, and upon tasting the desert you find out that it tastes like crap, is that going to negate the fact that the rest of the meal was wonderful? Of course not. But what are you going to take away from the meal? Very likely, the desert tha tasted like crap. And I suspect you'd be very wary the next time I serve you a meal, if you'd even trust me to do so ever again.

I think, on balance, I'd still recommend that someone watch Lost but I would suggest they enjoy the trip and not expect to much from the ending. Part of the problem is that the writers created expectations for the ending that, for quite a few people, didn't live up to their expectations, which is always a danger of building up expectations.

Scenes / clues from the final episode of LOST.

Smile

BTW, wouldn't that have to be purgatory rather than limbo?

The key question is: were they in purgatory... or was it the audience?

If I serve you a wonderful meal and end with a desert, and upon tasting the desert you find out that it tastes like crap, is that going to negate the fact that the rest of the meal was wonderful?

Your analogy is a bit off IMO. From what I saw it was more like an incredibly sumptuous meal that was placed if front of everyone, but was constantly out of reach. From week to week they would even add tempting components to the plate. Week after week people would tune in - they were just able to barely brush that plate with their finger tips - thinking they would get to taste something.

THEN everyone is given that desert you mentioned...

Maybe not the audience, but he no longer was connected to the plot. The people who wanted his telepathy were dead, his dad was dead. Time to move on.

I did not describe Aaron as a prop. I pointed out why the Aaron that went across with the group, which might or might not have any relation to how Aaron is on the “other side” was the age he was. The gathering in the church was about the people who were important to each other, at the time of most importance to each other. If Aaron was a prop then they were all props.

Jack’s son was a thingy in a fake world that, according to Jack’s dad, they created to get together and cross over together. Jack’s feelings for his fake son are no less important than his feelings for Kate, they’re part of HIM and HIS journey. And as for Jack’s “indifference” he had some pretty big issues he was dealing with at the time, like seeing his dead dad in front of him and being dead himself. I think it’s kind of silly to think the biggest thought that should have been running through his head was about the son that turned out to not be real.

It’s important to say what happened on the Island is real because there’s been a question from day one as to whether or not the Island was real, and a lot of that speculation has focused on the Island being a halfway station between life and death. Basically there’s been a big crowd in the audience that’s been saying for 6 years that the Island is what the alternate timeline turned out to be. So by bringing that concept in for the alternate timeline you need to establish as a story teller that the Island was not that. Otherwise there’s the possibility of both the Island and the alternate timeline being way stations for the soul on the way to death and that gets really weird.

You’re alternate way wouldn’t have worked, if all the conflict happens in the fake world, then the real world version of the people are way too stable to be earning that conflict. A big part of why the Island stuff works is because the characters start the show nuts. People with the lack of emotional baggage of the post bomb characters just aren’t as trigger happy as they were on the Island.

The writers didn’t just show what they thought was important, they showed what they could write their way out of. If you go throwing in the kid the whole death scene falls apart, you either have Jin preferring his wife to his kid, or you have him trying to leave and dieing, or you have him succeeding in leaving and separating from Sun permanently which completely blows their story arc to pieces. All those alternatives kind of suck, so they don’t mention the kid, and the two of them die together, forever entombed in the sub, and it’s sweet and romantic along with being sad.

Nothing wrong with being Hurley playing Connect Four with the imaginary person for a while. If that what Ben wants to do he can do that, the great beyond will be there when he’s ready.

Abrams specifically left Paramount an option to go back to that horribly screwed up old Star Trek continuity if some future writer was dumb enough to want to. It also gave him the convenient out with the nutty part of the Trekker crowd of not “ruining” their favorite story, it still “exists” he didn’t touch, if they still like it they can keep it. A lot of Trekkers are extremely possessive of “their” story, and the ones that identify with Klingons tend to be well armed, best not to make them mad if you don’t have to.

You’ll never get a satisfactory explanation, because you want the unimportant part explained. Here’s the real explanation: the Island was a MacGuffin, this was a character drama.

More effort wouldn’t have squelched criticism, it just would have changed it. The problem with trying to explain things is 3/4 of your audience is guaranteed to hate any explanation. In another part of this thread I refer to the awful remake of The Prisoner. The original was one of the biggest no explanations shows ever, not only did the finale not explain a damn thing, it actually doubled the amount of hanging questions. The remake explained everything, and the explanation was stupid, and now all the Prisoner fans hate it.

People say they want explanations, but the truth is they want whatever explanation they came up with, so any other explanation is rejected. And since people are all different, you know most of your audience came up with a different explanation than the writers, so they’re going to hate it. Best to leave it open, that way whatever explanation you like best is still available to you, and the one I like best is there for me.

It’s not that the Island was a red herring filled prelude. It’s that it was the playground for the character to play. Characters always need a stage, but in the end it really doesn’t matter if the stage is oak or pine. Why the Island exists, how it does what it does really doesn’t matter, the Island is there, a whole bunch of interesting characters got there, they did a whole lot of interesting stuff while there, and then eventually they all died like people are wont to do.

I think Jacob and fake Locke got tons of depth this season, they got a whole episode which gave them more camera time than they’d had for the entire rest of the series before hand. And by season six Desmond was pretty thoroughly gone over, we knew who he was, the only “new” thing there was for him was the electromagnetic resistance.

The questioning of reality was there from the very first minutes of the very first episode. When we have all these highly improbably survivors of a plane crash, a plane mysteriously and for no apparent reason way off course, a crippled guy that can suddenly walk, a cancer patient suddenly cured, Jack's dead dad walking in the jungle, a polar bear on a tropical island, a smoke monster. And that's all before we get the magnetic anomaly, Dharma, Jacob, Richard, and the temples. This wasn't a sci-fi show really, they were dealing with the supernatural not high-tech. That's right in the series bible.

I have yet to see a science fiction show, even attempts at relatively hard science fiction shows like Virtuality and Defying Gravity, not have reality problems. All speculative and fantastic fiction requires you to accept certain conceits for the story to work. It's called "the willing suspension of disbelief". That is, the audience chooses to suspend their disbelief in what seems unreal and accept it as real for the purpose of the story. And while magical healing fields and mental powers are definitely toward the soft end of science fiction, such tings are not unknown in science fiction.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the writers either provided science fiction answers or hinted at science fiction answers for many of the mysteries (e.g., Walt's abilities suggested the psionics were part of the setting, the polar bears were explained by the Dharma experiments, when the Others in the Dharma village see the plane break up Ben sends people out to find survirors as if he expected them, etc.). I don't think anyone was expecting a real hard true science explanation but I think they were at least expecting some more technobabble like that surrounding the hatch and button and electromagnetism.

If you were expecting a hyper rational SF resolution then you weren't paying enough attention to Locke, he was always the clue that this trip was going to be weird.

Have I said i was expecting a hyper-rational SF resolution? No. What bothers me is less the technical particulars of the ending but how the characters responded to them. OK, so Jack's son David isn't real. Let's see him show -- something, some emotion -- that he believed he had a son who he'd talked to and seen in concert and then suddenly that son isn't real.

To get from the people they were at the time they set off the bomb to the people they were in pocket heaven wasn't a jump. The jump is that in pocket heaven they were that way before ever getting on the plane, they were all at the end of their story arcs, instead of at the beginning.

Oh, I agree everything was better but that could just as easily be explained by Jacob not messing around with their lives. Wings of a butterly causing hurricanes and all of that. For example, Hurley's lottery problems were related to the numbers which were related to the Island.

I do think you are correctly identifying what the writers were trying to do but I think all of that was undermined by making the alternate reality unreal, just as making the island reality unreal would have undermined the rest of the story. They could have had their cake and eaten it, too, by making them both real.

I'm not claiming anything about any need for happy endings. I'm just pointing out that there were strong clues that the flash "sideways" was not to the same versions of the people that should have existed just because the Island was gone. That they were emotionally much closer to the characters we were seeing on the Island at the end of the show than what we saw at the beginning, which in theory is what they should have been.

I think that depends on how much of an influence one assumes Jacob and the Island had on people's lives. We know Jacob visited Sawyer as a child, for example, and gave him advice. Maybe Jacob not giving Sawyer advice let him become a copy rather than a con man. We know Hurley played the Island's numbers and that seemed related to his bad luck. No Island. No bad luck. People who died on the island didn't die because they weren't there. A lot of the other details remained the same. Kate was still a fugitive, for example. I personally felt that all of that could plausibly be the fallout of the Island being at the bottom of the ocean.

And again you go off the deep end with silly assumption, funny for a person calling them selves question_assumptions to be so addicted to assumptions.

My screen name is "question_assumption", not "don't_have_assumptions". We all have assumptions. If they are wrong, feel free to show me how they are wrong.

There's a lot more to it than that. There's the whole nature of reality thing still going on with the Island. We don't know how long Hurley was protecting it, what happened under his time, who he put in charge when it was time for him to go. There's a whole lot going on that you're deliberately ignoring to be underwhelmed.

How can I ignore something that the show was silent about? There is nothing there to ignore, unless you are accusing me of ignoring the gaping whole in information under the assumption that those unknows are, themselves, impressive and should satisfy me. Given that I expected Hurley to become the keeper of the Island, that was one of the few things I expected that turned out the way I expected it.

Lost wasn’t a sci-fi show, Lost was a supernatural (fantasy) show, it was a supernatural show that had scientific characters in it that were trying for scientific explanations, but it was a supernatural show. It was Legend of the Seeker with an airplane.

The writers didn’t provide an answer to any of the mysteries. We had a show with two different characters that talked to the dead and had two completely different methods and impetuses for that contact. Walt had some sort of telepathy but again we don’t know why, how, or what the limits were. They just threw stuff out there, and the rare occasion there was an answer it was like the polar bear, which basically turned out to be just like the canned food, stuff left over from the Dharma guys. There really wasn’t much technobabble at all, even the hatch and button basically boiled down to “there’s a whole bunch of electromagnetism there, we don’t know why, the Dharma guys were trying to get to it, they screwed up, now bad things will happen if not adjusted every 108 minutes”.

You asked for a rational science fictiony explanation. This was the wrong show for that. Your obsession with Jack’s fake son is really getting weird. Jack had other things to deal with at the time, he MOVED ON, you should to.

I don’t see how any of it could be explained by Jacob not interfering in their lives. For one thing Jacob really didn’t interfere with their lives, for another none of the EVENTS of their lives had changed, only how they were DEALING with them was different. Jack was still the son of a supersurgeon who fooled around and drank too much and managed to drink himself to death in a foreign country, the only change was Jack no longer hated his father and feared his shadow. Hurley still managed to win the lottery with those numbers, Jacob never caused any of those problems, for all we know he didn’t even cause the numbers to be a big deal, but Hurley could handle the situation which he couldn’t before.

I don’t think any of it was undermined by showing the alternate reality wasn’t really an alternate reality. The clues were there that it wasn’t just any old alternate reality all along. I didn’t start picking up on them until Tuesday’s ep, but it was always there, I hadn’t figured out the pocket heaven thing, but I did figure out this was not just “life without the Island”. That’s the fun part of this kind of show, it’s all about when you pick up on the clues. I’m betting when I go back and rewatch I’ll see stuff that shows it’s the afterlife, I’m going to pay more attention to Hurley, I think he’s the key to understanding pocket heaven because he’s the one who seems to be enjoying it the most. And yes they could have made them both real, but I’m betting when they saw the audience theories that the Island was a way station on the way to dead they decided that was way too fun an idea not to play with.

Initially I was with you, until I noticed how happy most of the characters were. That’s when I decided the alternate reality was more alternate than just their lives without the Island.

The show wasn’t silent about it. Christian explicitly told Jack (and us) that the people present died at various times and some were “long after” Jack died, that the reality they were in now was of their own unconscious creation, and that the focus was people important to Jack while he was on the Island. Hurley told Ben he was a great Number 2, and Ben said Hurley was a great Number 1, so we know Hurley did something interesting enough to be called great, and to leave both of them feeling happy with their time there. they didn’t delve into the details, but these things were clearly not ignored.

I did not describe Aaron as a prop. I pointed out why the Aaron that went across with the group, which might or might not have any relation to how Aaron is on the "other side" was the age he was. The gathering in the church was about the people who were important to each other, at the time of most importance to each other. If Aaron was a prop then they were all props.

The difference is that, as an infant, Aaron isn't a full actor in that scene. In other words, everyone there is "of most importance to each other" but in Aaron's case, he's only there in that form because he's important to Claire and Charlie that way but he's not in the form that would be most important to Kate and, as an infant, nobody else there is consciously important to him. He's in that form because he's important to Kate and Charlie's story in that form. He's not there in that form because it's important to Aaron to be in that form. Aaron is not a character in the story. He's a prop in someone else's story and his role in Kate's story has been reset to the beginning.

Jack's son was a thingy in a fake world that, according to Jack's dad, they created to get together and cross over together. Jack's feelings for his fake son are no less important than his feelings for Kate, they're part of HIM and HIS journey. And as for Jack's "indifference" he had some pretty big issues he was dealing with at the time, like seeing his dead dad in front of him and being dead himself. I think it's kind of silly to think the biggest thought that should have been running through his head was about the son that turned out to not be real.

Are you a parent? If I found myself talking to my dead mother who told me that I was dead and my daughters didn't really exist, the last revelation is the only revelation that would really matter to me after I was told it. And it's not as if these children weren't shown to be the most important thing in the world to their parents earlier in the show.

It's important to say what happened on the Island is real because there's been a question from day one as to whether or not the Island was real, and a lot of that speculation has focused on the Island being a halfway station between life and death. Basically there's been a big crowd in the audience that's been saying for 6 years that the Island is what the alternate timeline turned out to be. So by bringing that concept in for the alternate timeline you need to establish as a story teller that the Island was not that. Otherwise there's the possibility of both the Island and the alternate timeline being way stations for the soul on the way to death and that gets really weird.

And why was it important that they prove the part of the audience that's been saying for six years that the island was just a way-station for lost souls wrong?

You're alternate way wouldn't have worked, if all the conflict happens in the fake world, then the real world version of the people are way too stable to be earning that conflict. A big part of why the Island stuff works is because the characters start the show nuts. People with the lack of emotional baggage of the post bomb characters just aren't as trigger happy as they were on the Island.

Here's what I would have preferred. Island is a real place. The alternate reality is a real place. Everything through Jughead exploding was real. When Jughead explodes, the universe is forked into two parallel timelines, with the Island detached from the rest of reality and the alternate timeline being the world that would have existed without the interference of Jacob or the Island, at least after the bomb exploded. But because of people like Desmond and possibly Farady, the people become aware of the alternate reality like what we were seeing leading up to the end. Thus the true happy ending is a byproduct of the passions and adventure of the Island experience and the boring less messed up lives they would have had without the Island and it's influences on their lives, which leads to a happy ending (financed by Hurley's fortune, if necessary). Meanwhile, the other universe could go several different intersting ways, including the MIB winning only to find out that the Island is now a pocket reality no longer attached to the rest of the world and that Jacob had one as soon as Jughead went off.

The writers didn't just show what they thought was important, they showed what they could write their way out of. If you go throwing in the kid the whole death scene falls apart, you either have Jin preferring his wife to his kid, or you have him trying to leave and dieing, or you have him succeeding in leaving and separating from Sun permanently which completely blows their story arc to pieces. All those alternatives kind of suck, so they don't mention the kid, and the two of them die together, forever entombed in the sub, and it's sweet and romantic along with being sad.

The problem is that they wrote their way into the problem by introducing the kid in the first place. In fact, I get the distinct impression that they wrote themselves into several kid-related messes (Aaron, Walt, Ji Yeon, Charlie, David) that they couldn't really write themselves out of so they just punted and ignored the kids as real people and had their parents essentially act indifferent to what happened to them, hence my disappointment. Don't give characters kids and then have them be indifferent to them. That's bad writing.

And I would also argue that having Sun convince Jin to leave her to take care of their daughter would not have blown their story arc to pieces because they would have gotten to be together in the alternate reality, even if nothing else had changed, and in the end. After all, that's the deal that Hurley got and if their story is really about being forced apart by forces against their control, there is no reason they couldn't have been forced apart again, only a few episodes before the finale where they'd get a final resolution. There is no reason why Sun couldn't convince Jin, yet again, to leave her for the sake of their daughter and he could have flown off with Lapitus, getting his chance to escape the Island.

Nothing wrong with being Hurley playing Connect Four with the imaginary person for a while. If that what Ben wants to do he can do that, the great beyond will be there when he's ready.

The subject of that sort of self-delusion is covered in quite a few science fiction and fantasy stories and it's generally not depicted as ending well for a reason.

Abrams specifically left Paramount an option to go back to that horribly screwed up old Star Trek continuity if some future writer was dumb enough to want to. It also gave him the convenient out with the nutty part of the Trekker crowd of not "ruining" their favorite story, it still "exists" he didn't touch, if they still like it they can keep it. A lot of Trekkers are extremely possessive of "their" story, and the ones that identify with Klingons tend to be well armed, best not to make them mad if you don't have to.

Sure, but regardless of the reason, it shows that Abrams understand how to fork reality so he can have his cake and eat it, too, which Lost could have done.

You'll never get a satisfactory explanation, because you want the unimportant part explained. Here's the real explanation: the Island was a MacGuffin, this was a character drama.

And I'll again point out that my primary disappointment was with how the characters behaved in the last episode(s) and some of the explanations that were given, not the lack of explanations that were not given. I'm actually pretty good with that, though I can understand why it's driving some other fans nuts.

People go into stories with expectations and assumptions and plenty of writing books talk about that as a contract between writer and reader, that the reader will trust the writer and the writer will pay off that trust with a satisfactory story. When people don't feel the writer has lived up to that end of the bargrain, they feel cheated. In many cases, it's the reader's (or watcher's) fault for having unrealistic expectations and assumptions (and I've started enjoying movies and TV shows a lot more by purposely lowering my expectations) but in the case of Lost, I think the writers fed a lot of those expecations by making promises and claims so they deserve at least some of the blame for that disappointment.

It sucked. Period. End of story. (and I'm a huge fan of the show) Newhart still reigns as having the best ending ever.

This season sucked as a whole. Seasons 4 and 5 were great.

The “heaven” they’re in... Jack’s dad said that “the time these people spent together where the happiest days of their lives so that’s why they are here together”.

Ok, so if the time on the island is the real time, these folks, with a few exceptions, spent 90 days together. The only ones who spent 3 years together were Sawyer, Miles, Jin and Julilette. The rest spent 90 days. Those were the best days of their lives????