I'm not sure it's exactly that harsh, but yeah it's close. the entire resolution of the show, the last season, and the series finale ended up having not all that much to do with the island mystery and mythology, which is what drew people in in the first place and was the main thrust of seasons 1-5.

now, they did make cursory attempts at showing us who Jacob is and candidates and all that, but really we don't know all that much than we did in Season 3 or 4. what Smoky is, for example, is a giant answer...but in actuality we really don't know. it's just that God did it, stupid.

people just don't realize it this morning b/c the ending was warm and fuzzy and we saw a bunch of happy people at the end in heaven. the writers are genius at trickery, misdirection, and 3 Card Monte - that's really what I've learned

ChrisV, lots of fanboys will immediately come on here and defend it to the death. However, as someone who's watched it all but didn't care enough to do lots of other reading or discussing of the show, that is exactly my overarching impression of the show as a whole.

I think a big thing that wasn't discussed until the finale - the battle between Jacob and MIB -

MIB wanted to kill Jacob so that he could leave the island (and as a smoke monster, who was evil, do bad things).

Jacob wanted to correct - find redemption for the major error in his life - beating his brother senseless and intentionally assigning him a 'fate worse than death' (per his mother).

So their goals were to kill each other - and Jacob essentially won - since he was perfectly willing to sacrifice himself in order to achieve his goal.

I wouldn't say they dismissed the island mysteries in the finale - to the extent they were ever going to get explained, they got explained weeks ago (i.e., for whatever reason the island had some mystical energy source that was being defended by one dude against another dude who wanted to leave the island with it. Somehow these guys have supernatural powers.) The purgatory stuff was limited to the sideways timeline.

The plot does have a conclusion; it's just not aesthetically satisfying to many people, and any claims Cuse and Lindelof had of knowing the entire master plot from the beginning are obviously bull****. There are all sorts of dead-ends and misdirections along the way that are hard to explain unless you either grant a) they were just picking and choosing locally based on what seemed best at the time, or b) they thought it made for a more effective show to try to continuously operate at level Maximum Mind**** and threw a bunch of nonsense in to keep people busy. I think both a) and b) are true.

Anyway, the conclusion and lack of "real" explanation does not bother me much, because it was apparent a long time ago that those were effectively impossible. "Science fiction" that uses language gleaned from science in a facile way is generally just mysticism in respectable garb When you're introducing time travel and smoke monsters and immortals in a way where the rules of your universe are not consistently laid out for a long time, almost any ending is going to look like a deus ex machina.

EDIT: To beat a dead horse, I am completely befuddled by (and somewhat contemptuous of) people who watched this show for 6 years, didn't receive Real Ultimate Truth in the last 2.5 hours, and have decided "man, what a waste of my time this show was."

the journey was very satisfying of course. but if I had a time machine, I would go back to my old self and probably just tell him to not spend so much time trying to figure out what was going on, and just be more of a casual viewer

the complainers are all hardcore mythology people, that is pretty clear.

Agree 100%. The "it's a character driven show" is a giant cop out. The whole plot of the show was fundamentally changed due to the need to drag it out and make as much money as possible. If they knew after season 1 they only had 1 or 2 seasons left to do the show I would bet that they would have found some other explanation for what the island is.

The finale sucked, but to be fair so did most of what I sat through for the last three seasons.

FYP

I'm right with you.

If they just wanted a story about characters, their lives, their mistakes, the afterlife, etc - why throw in a mythical island at all if that island mythology doesn't tie into anything? They could have just as easily all met on a Club Med vacation.

I don't have a problem with any ending where Ultimate Truth is not delivered. In fact, I love the book Ubik, by Philip K. Dick, which you should read if you enjoy mind****s. Without giving too much away, the book develops as a mystery, appears to answer itself, but then there is a twist such that the events of the book become impossible to explain completely.

But (and again, this is from my limited understanding of what happened in Lost) that is not what the Lost writers did. They didn't say the answers are ambiguous or unclear. They said that the questions themselves don't matter. That seems like a slap in the face to everyone who has followed the show.

Take the smoke monster. That's been a huge mystery for the whole run of the show. From what I understand (again could be wrong here, if so you'll still get the point and there's other examples I can use) the answer is "Oh well it's some random supernatural evil thing, I dunno I guess God did it lol HEY GUYS CONCENTRATE ON THE CHARACTERS". This is very different from an answer like "Well the smoke monster could be thing X, or then again it could be thing Y, it's really not clear". While both answers deliver ambiguity, the first has contempt for the importance of the question in the first place. Don't you feel like an idiot for spending time thinking about and debating with other fans what the smoke monster was, when it's clear the writers didn't have a clue either?

imo - because there had to be a 'cause' bigger than them - there had to be some kind of a cause that would be worth sacrificing yourself for (several people made that sort of sacrifice - or were willing to).

and in a real world setting - that sort of a cause is hard to come by.

I was disappointed we didn't see Kate arrive back in the real world.

Oceanic 6 survivor, gets on another plan with 5 other O6 survivors, crashes again, week later they fly the plane out. Sick life girl.

fyp

Jacob brought people to the island because he needed their help to kill MiB, and MiB was trying to use those people to help him escape the island.

MiB was NOT evil, but he only cared about leaving the island. The reason he had to be killed is because the only way for him to leave was destroying the island, which would release the evil it was holding in. Jacob and MiB were not representations of good and evil. Jacob was protecting the island to stop the evil; MiB just didn't care, and would do anything he had to to get off.

They did a pretty good job answering the major mysteries of the show. They didn't spell it out, because two people standing their talking for 15 minutes of exposition to explain all the details is boring as hell. They didn't give technical explanations of, for example, how the smoke monster worked, but they showed his origin.

Once you accept that there's an island that's protecting the world from some ultimate evil, and people that crash there can be cured of cancer and paralysis, getting all nitty about how a smoke monster "works" is a bit silly.

No offense, but since you didn't watch the show, it's pretty hard for you to comment on this.

I mean, they did say where it came from, and why, even if they didn't spell it out in excruciating detail

I can't believe how many people over at lostpedia forums believe that everyone died in the original flight 815 - and the whole show was purgatory....

Interesting theory I just read on another site: That the Flash-sideways world was created by Hurley so his friends could all see each other again, and live out some happier version of their lives (Jack gets a family, Kate's not a murderer, etc). Way better explanation than some purgatory thing.

ya - that could have been an interesting option for an ending -


don't see it as a theory though (since it's not plausible, really) - Hurley didn't remember until Libby approached him - and Desmond pushed him to go with his gut and meet Libby for a date - then she kissed him - helping him 'let go' or remember or whatever

Interesting theory except Christian tells Jack that "it's a place you all created".

They were not really at all the same.

With Roseanne, it was all serious, and they actually went back and changed events, some of them into tragedy, and sitcoms should never end with tragedy.

With Newhart, it was a joke. He woke up in bed next to his wife from a previous series he had been on like 10 years before. Kind of like if Charlie had woken up at the end of LOST and told Frodo he had an amazing dream. It wasn't meant to be a serious ending, it didn't actually erase large chunks of the show like Roseanne did, it was just a joke and funny, and that's great for a sitcom.

It's all about context. I think in this case, the naturalism of the flashbacks early on (and Cuse and Lindelof's proclamations that "EVERYTHING CAN BE EXPLAINED BY SCIENCE," which I think was just genius promotional work) led people to want to perceive the universe as one where naturalistic explanations should be needed. By contrast, people don't read The Lord of The Rings and ask "****ing Gandalf, how does he work?"

So, in response to this . . .

. . . I would say no, because it's been a very long time since I've engaged the show in a fashion that expected that questions like that would have real answers.

Picking other examples of big unanswered questions (e.g. Ben vs. Widmore and their rules, how people keep finding an island that is almost impossible to leave, etc.) is fair, in the sense that the show threw these questions up and then ultimately discarded them as tangential. As I alluded earlier, I think the permanent aura of mystery is what gave the show much of its charm, and so I think a lot of that ended up being just atmospherics. Complaining about misdirections (which connotes a degree of intentionality to it that they may not have had) is certainly reasonable.

yeah, I was wondering too why Libby wasn't there with Hurley at the end.

i may be wrong - but my memory tells me that Libby was in the church at the end.

She was

My interpretation of what happened in LOST:

Jacob needs a replacement. He touches the lives of many people to be candidates. Those candidates are set up to be on oceanic 815 and crash and die. They are then sent to purgatory, which is an actual island, you can visit it in real life, although almost impossible to find. The 'oceanic 6' actually come back from the dead. This is the power that Charles Whidmore wants to harness and understand.

The flash sideways was the alternate reality if 815 didn't crash.

I thought it was good, but I do not think it justified the lameness of the alt universe through the rest of the season.