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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.

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.

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.