On JKL, when they replayed the first scene from S06:Ep1 when Jack experiences the turbulence on the flight, Rose said to Jack "You can let go now. It's Ok, you can let go". I thought that was a neat line of dialog given the ending, even if it was not intended.
I don't know, I was def one of those viewers that loved how Lost started out, and then felt everything started to go pear-shaped. Originally it seemed to be both about the characters AND about the mysteries which is why it was appealing to everyone. The show encouraged detailed viewing and thinking and re-watching certain scenes frame-by-frame, but as time went on, the deeper you thought about the stories, the less all sorts of stuff made sense.
That was probably the point where some of the viewers decided "****it, I'm just going to switch off and watch, no more deep thinking", which probably made the show enjoyable again. I really struggled with doing this, and I def felt cheated at different points in the series.
But I really enjoyed the finale (up until the last 5 minutes when I was thinking wtf is all this ****? but I remembered "stop thinking!", and I was able to appreciate it on a more shallow level!). I remembered how much I loved Jack's character, how he was the hero for the entire show. It helped soften the sharp edges such as
- what happened to "the game" between MiB and Jacob? We were lead to believe that there was something going on between them about man's corruptibility, and that's why Jacob brought people to the island, to prove something. But that doesn't tie in at all with what Jacob said at the campfire to Jack, that it was all about protecting the island from MiB.
- Jacob seemed to be doing a fine job protecting the island for hundreds (or thousands) of years, in fact it wasn't until after he started to bring people to the island that things got messed up!
- When we first learned that MiB just wanted to leave the island, it sounded like a completely reasonable position to take, and if Jacob would stay behind, why couldn't he leave and see what was out there?
- I'm happily convinced that the "it worked" and "we can go dutch" conversation between Juliet and Sawyer was repeating what Juliet said as she died. I liked that scene for that fact actually. I was a little surprised to even see Juliet appear (because of V), but she did make the most sense to be Jack's ex.
- It's not very clear to me why it was important for the other characters to discover their link to the past, if the flash sideways was Jack's own purgatory (or whatever it was). But I'm Ok with Sayid hooking up with Shannon since he essentially decided that he was not good enough for Nadia, but the short-lived romance with Shannon was a pretty good second. But wtf at the "it was difficult convincing her to come over from Australia" line though?
For me, the bottom line is that Lost had the potential to be much much more, but it was still amazing and groundbreaking in what it did accomplish (like, isn't there a show called FlashForward, with half the Lost cast in it?!). How often does a TV show create this much emotion, both positive and negative?
The open-ended period around the middle is probably what created a ton of the problems, not knowing how much time was left the writers introduced enough extra stuff to write about, some of which the viewers really wanted conclusions for.
I'm going to miss it, even if a lot of S06 sucked