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Lost Ends
Unless you live in a hatch somewhere, you are probably aware that Lost has ended. If you want a simple, clear explanation of exactly how the series resolved, Lost Untangled will do nothing to clarify things for you. For everyone else, I provide this discussion thread for you to complain/revel in the most spoiler-laden manner you desire.
Note: what follows is my own opinion. Many viewers that were more attentive than I were very satisfied with and emotionally moved by the ending.
... just unexplainable U-turns in morality and logic.
I've always been bicuriously Lost as the show would sometimes give me a feeling that something more was going on that would eventually be revealed. So, having caught a number of episodes early on, I started watching Season Five religiously in order to prepare myself for the ending. But at the end of Season Five with no end in sight and only more questions and more characters (and a freaking reset button that later turned out to be a multiverse splitting mechanism), I gave up. Until I watched the last episode last night in hopes that the island would have some greater meaning. It didn't. Well, it tried to I guess but everyone's got their own interpretation of what they saw last night.
So many questions I have went completely unanswered. Questions about Walt, why Faraday never recognized Desmond (the guy that unexpectedly gave him the constants to time travel one day) when Faraday landed on the island, the properties of the multiverses (some people seem to care about the futures of the other multiverse even though they shouldn't know about it until they're dead), why the black cloud killed who it did and left others (especially now that we know more about the black cloud), the list goes on and on. The worst of it is if you take each character individually and reassemble their timelines in sequential order that the episodes slowly piecemeal it out to you -- everyone is a goddamn psychotic sociopath. No rhyme or reason to the actions of half the characters. And it's not even Lord of the Flies neurosis
The show started out very concrete, real and physical and slowly absolved into symbolism with last night being such pure symbolism that you cannot say for sure when they died or what the afterlife was or what the church represented or where they went at the end when the doors were opened. It reminded me of a few anime series I watched in this respect where the shows digress into absolving themselves of anything earthly or logical in some sort of ethereal climax of visual and auditory sequence or cues. Problem was that none of Lost's resolutions sat well with me.
I sympathize with the writers as they had no idea how many seasons they would get but in the end I must admit I found the writing to be more or less utter drivel. Designed only to get you to keep watching with little if any satisfactory explanations. Everyone was a chaotic actor in the past, present and alternate multiverse. Writing that many flash sideways scenes as plot devices is -- quite frankly -- juvenile at best. Also the lead writer had refuted the theory that everyone was dead, in purgatory, in heaven or in hell. Yet, at the end they're clearly in some sort of afterlife.
The series offered closure on what happened eventually to everyone but no closure whatsoever as to what the island was and how its mechanations functioned -- even on a magical fantasy level. I was intrigued with Donnie Darko when the ending was left open to interpretation but Lost takes it to a whole new (unbearable for me) level. I hope other people enjoyed the ending but for me it was a complete indication not to devote anymore time to this series or these writers. Still better than 85% of what you'll find on TV but that isn't saying much.
They could have done a lot of neat things with tying down loose ends, explaining the island and completing their work. Instead they gave us this. And finally I see no further point in discussing it because there's no hope of ever explaining anything. Unlike a finely crafted classic novel, the grand symbolism and allusions are too abstract to nail down. So what's the point? Everyone's going to experience the series differently and for me it was just some guys writing a seria
My work here is dung.
Jacobs Ladder
Don't care, too stupid
The subject lines, they just write themselves.
It was just ok. Given that Battlestar was the last finale I watched, it handled similar material in a much better way. Given the terrible ways it could have ended, it was good enough. Some people will be mad that some questions were never answered, and I would have been happier if the last episode focused more on the island than the survivors, but really, given how they didn't have an ending written when they started the series, they did a fairly good job of cleanup.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
If you want a simple, clear explanation of exactly how the series resolved, Lost Untangled will do nothing to clarify things for you.
If you were expecting answers... you have been watching the wrong show for the last 6 years.
I'm tired of hearing you people constantly talk about this steaming pile of ass. Lost is, quite possibly, the most overrated show that has ever been on television.
And yes, I've watched it...a friend of mine convinced me to watch the first two seasons, and even that was almost impossible. How people obsess over this show completely eludes me.
Living With a Nerd
Mumbo perhaps, Jumbo perhaps not.
I am not much of a TV watcher but a coworker loaned me the DVDs to watch on the bus during my commute in the Fall of 2008 and I kept up with the show ever since. For the first two seasons I was riveted. The cliffhangers, the mystery, etc, etc, etc. With the first half of Season 3 the show started to fall apart. They came back with a clear vision in the second half, supposedly, but I never saw it materialize.
Yesterday I sat down with my wife (who only started watching it in Season 5) and we watched as nothing in the final episode answered any questions. No, the fucking light at the center of the island didn't tell us shit and that stupid fucking ending with some sort of allusion to the afterlife was absolutely stupid. People had been suspecting that all along and knowing that many people did you would have thought the writers, being paid as much as they were, would have come up with something more shocking than that--but they didn't.
I am glad that I only wasted two years of my life watching that show rather than the 6 many others did. It started with a plane wreck and it ended with one. We were all duped. The least they could have done was provide everyone watching with some of that Dharma beer in rusty cans to help ease the pain.
Can we all agree that most t.v. just sucks big sweaty donkey balls?
Most TV? Certainly. But there are the occasional gems that make it worthwhile. A few examples of current, excellent shows include Better Off Ted (sadly canceled), Dexter, and Gravity (weird show on Starz about a suicide group).
That's just a drop in the bucket. There are plenty of excellent shows if you know how to filter out the noise.
I remember the producers of Lost saying at some point either during or at the end of the first season that the mysteries of the island would all end up being explainable scientifically. Not necessarily pure science, but at least the sort of semi-plausible science-like stuff most sci-fi is built on. For most of the first two or three seasons they were flailing around, but for the most part it still seemed there could be a plausible explanation for everything. The introduction of Faraday and all of his scientific mumbo jumbo lent credence to that idea.
Then, over the past two seasons, the show took a sharp turn into religious territory and it became increasingly obvious they were going to take the easy way out and make it all into some ridiculous religious/spiritual allegory of some kind, albeit one so confused that no one would ever be able to make any real sense out of it. It reminded me of the Matrix, where the first movie was more sci-fi and the second and third were all a bunch of confused pseudo-religious nonsense.
I was primarily disappointed with their complete abandonment of any attempt to explain anything scientifically, and instead lean on a literal Deus Ex Machina by making the whole thing into a spiritual "God (or some other spiritual entity) did it". That sort of thing has been done to death. Hell, Battlestar Galactica was explicitly a religious allegory from the very beginning, and even it explained more stuff pseudo-scientifically than Lost did. Regardless of what they may say now, I think the Lost creators started out with a show that would have been much more scientifically based, but ended up having to extend it beyond what they thought they would. After wandering in the wilderness for much of seasons 2 through 4, they were backed into a corner and took the easy way out by waving the magic religion wand to "explain" everything away.
I gave up on "lost", it seemed to be a meandering plot with hints but no resolutions. I am about to give up on "flash forward" for the same reason.
From what I understand they had their own internal Wiki which became where they hashed out a lot of the mythos. That is no way to write a narrative that you can tie together into coherent story arc.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The writing in the earlier seasons seemed to have much more intellectual integrity. Not sure what changed. Did someone leave the show or something? Some auditor or other writer?
Me, too. Another show that infurated me was I Dream of Jeannie. I mean, under the laws of physics and rational human reason, there's just *no way* that Barbara Eden could fit into that tiny little bottle. The only explanation possible was supernatural mumbo jumbo, which was an insult to Larry Hagman and the rest of the scientific community at NASA.
What the hell was that black smoke thing in the first series? You didn't see it at all through two or three, and I got so bored by then that I gave up.
So, black smoke monster; What was it?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I don't understand how being an athiest would deter you from watching a work of fiction. Clearly the imagery suggested in the show had nothing to do with a particular type of religion that exists. Also, nothing about this series would imply that there was going to be a rational ending to this show. I don't ever recall a scientific or rational explanation to anything.
I think the most revealing part was during the closing credits when they showed the wreckage on the beach with no people. My interpretation is that the entire series existed entirely in Jack's mind as the plane crashed and all passengers died on impact. Similar to the common cliche of one's "life flashing before their eyes" during a near-death experience, but in this case the result was actual death.
Many people who have a near-death experience describe comfort and moving toward a white light. This has been explained by science as the brain flooding itself with dopamine and other pleasure chemicals because it knows that it is dying and might as well go out feeling good. I think the series was an interpretation of that phenomenon - realizing that he had but seconds to live, Jack's brain created this vivid melodrama based on the wishful thinking that he'd actually survive the crash. The islands electromagnetic properties explain the crash, and the hope of reversing the crash and sending his life on a more fulfilling path (flash-sideways with Jack finding love, having a son, etc.) provides comfort.
With that being said, I think the writers took the easy way out and I'm quite disappointed having invested a significant amount of time in the series. I'm sure there will be plenty of post-game analysis and people will find tons of symbolism that was intended and even more that wasn't, so at least the discussion and speculation may fill my need for closure.
I have never seen a single episode, it the whole series worth watching, now that it is over?
In a word, no. The show barely made sense watching it over the past 6 years as it was released. We continually got some hints that things might make sense eventually, but they never did. Inconsistencies from vaguely remembered episodes of 2 or 3 years ago kept popping up and giving this little feeling in the back of one's mind that the writers had no idea what they were doing. I suspect if you watched it all back to back it would make even less sense because the inconsistencies and utter nonsense would be that much more obvious.
I watched it from beginning to end, but I have absolutely no desire to watch it again, and I certainly won't be wasting money on the DVDs.
I don't understand why other Lost fans haven't liked the last season of the show. The big questions were answered, but they seem not to like the answers provided. I've been a fan since the beginning, and I thought the end was beautiful.
The one part that left me wondering was the shot of the fuselage in the credits. The best explanation I read was that it's the final remains of the 815 crash after all the Losties died. It's the mystery that other people brought to the island in the future will wonder about, like we wondered about the hatch, the statue, Henry Gale's balloon, and so on.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
It wasn't all a dream. After the Losties died (after the very real events on and off the island), they went to purgatory, aka the flashsideways. Then, realizing that they were holding on to their fantasy about what life would have been like without the island, they accepted what happened to them and were set free.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Never heard of such a thing, but sounds appealing. Anyone know where I can get one?
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Both The X-Files and Twin Peaks used this formula of just throwing more and more weird riddles and sci-fi mysteries at the viewer with answers always seemingly to come in just a few more episodes. I never saw Lost, but it sounds like a repeat of that. The Matrix series was a condensed movie version of this phenomenon. I wish writers would just come up with a story that has an ending and tell it. Joss Whedon seems to be the only TV writer who can actually manage to do that.
Lost is merely the logical continuation of the "Gilligan's Island / Seven deadly sins" theory. I mean, let's look at the evidence:
-Purgatory: The Island. (Duh.)
-The fat lovable guy ends up in charge.
-Since Gilligan is of course Satan, and the island's personification of evil is the "magic smoke", and we all know that Bob Denver, aka Gilligan, was a fan of, ahem, 'Magic Smoke' himself, we can draw the logical conclusion that The Smoke Monster is the spirit of Gilligan himself, keeping people on the island permanently....
Feel free to continue the argument ad nasuem.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Breaking Bad.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
generic "mysticism"**
How is it generic, the guy who opened the door for them was "Christian Shepard", for fuck's sake!
Watch season one, and then pretend that it was canceled. Curse the network executives for doing so.
There you go, you got a better Lost experience than most of us who gave up on it later. Watching the rest is like volunteering to watch your neighbor's father as Alzheimer makes him lose his mind, and become a husk of himself.
I can safely say the only episode I've ever watched, and will watch was last night's finale.
My take...
They all died in the crash,
The island was purgatory.
Removing the rock from the island was akin to "pulling the plug" on the series and would send them to hell and cancel all hopes of future syndication.
The multi-religion church at the end was symbolizing a positive afterlife which we all know means eternal life in syndication.
Personally, I'm just glad this shit is over. Now we can get back to watching reality TV, b/c using actors is overrated.
For some reason USA is soo obsesed with religion, that has to add a (final) religion layer to everything. What could look fun in politics (with a president thanking Cron or Thor or Kratos or other god ), is really out-of-character in science-fiction.
My particular pet theory is that a good % of the USA residents have supernatural feelings. Since is something that is shared by a soo big group of people, summining a supernatural concept in a vague way, can get you credits. Something like fanservice, but for a broad number of people. Of course, It also excluse these withouth supernatural feelings, but that seems a minor-minority even on science-fiction (?) and fantasy.
I make me angry to have supernatural entities like ESPers in Star Trek, or in Silverberg books, but I have learned to live with it. If you want to read the production from USA, you have to tolerate some intense level of supernatural feelings. At least is somewhat vague... is not like Iran, that probably have a urgency real about how you must think and what you have to wear.
-Woof woof woof!
It seems to me that a series is *so* much better when the writers KNOW what the ending will be BEFORE the series airs. This way, the entire series can work towards the ending, with the result being much more satisfying.
The subject above lists three series I felt were fucking epic, because the ending matched what the series was all about from the very first episode. It wasn't just "make shit up as you go along", and then after you've run out of material stringing your audience along for as long as you can, write up some mish-mash of an ending that really doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the series.
The Star Force got the Cosmo DNA and got back to Earth, The Alliance accidentally created the Reavers by trying to make paradise, and Sheridan kicked some Shadow ass (and paid the ultimate price, twice!).
I've never watched LOST, but I knew from the begining they had no plan to really end the series, so, I never bothered to even try to get into it. I'm sorry if you did. Next time, choose more wisely.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
No. The show is an empty promise, leading people on without any plan to resolve it. If you watch the first 3 seasons, you'll see weird things that you assume get explained later, but it never happens, and then in the 4th-6th seasons they're clearly just making stuff up as they go, and hoping that you'll forget prior mysteries. The show is all setup and every time you think it has gotten to Act 2 or even Act 3, the writers lose interest in the plot and decide you're in Act 1 again.
Lost is bad.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The term we're looking for here is Willing Suspension of Disbelief, which itself is quite dependant on the fact that while the author's work may not be realistic, it is at least internally consistent.
However, if you break this internal consistency, turning your work into a mashed goop of misdirected literary intent, convoluted cross reference, stretched idioms, and outright lameness, you end up with a Wall Banger. It's my understanding that this is precisely what happened to Lost. It also happened to BSG. It will basically happen to any story arc centric show in which the writers make shit up as they go along. For some reason, TV producers seem to think this is a good idea. Personally, I would have fired the writers and cancelled Lost in pre-production the moment I found out the writers did not have even a basic narrative plan from day one.
An example of a show this didn't happen to was Babylon 5. Apparently the writer had a good outline of the entire series mapped out before any shooting began. That's how you tell a long story in television, or anywhere else for that matter. This is pretty basic stuff, usually figured out by most people at around age six when their favourite make believe fairy tale world of swords and sorcery is finally ruined by someones suggestion that the party destroy the orbiting space dreadnought by sabotaging its reactor core. The Lost writers need to take a basic course in how to a) write and b) how to be a GM.
May the Maths Be with you!
are those who have to show up in a thread about lost and bash the show
i never got the show, but obsession with the show is completely harmless. i don't hold it against anyone
what bother me is people who don't like the show... but have to come in and shit all over someone else's harmless enjoyments
we all have our quirky likes and dislikes that are easy to ridicule or put down. so what? most socially well-adjusted folk don't have an irrational need to pick on others. if you do have such a need, this reveals nothing about lost, it reveals something about yourself: a poverty of character and some sort of unresolved self-hatred and self-loathing. lose your pathetic need to go out of your way to menace other people's harmless hobbies
oh who am i kidding... this is the internet. mindless negativity seems like that's what the internet was created for
carry on then, aggressively ultranegative losers. the internet is yours, unfortunately
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Parent is absolutely right. Shows like these succumb to their own success.
This is the problem that faced Lost from season 2 onward. It was never -meant- to be as many seasons long as it ended up being. But when you get such high ratings, the stations pretty much force you to produce more content (read:filler), dragging the story on and on, and eventually you end up having so much going on in the show, that the ending you had envisioned by the time you wrote the pilot, that the ending will no longer work and you've got just a few shows (if being abruptly canceled. Hi, Heroes) to try and tie things up - which is, invariably, a mess.
( Let's see how Heroes fares with their cancellation. )
Sadly, hardly any station would allow you to specify in the contract that the show will be N seasons or episodes long with key plot elements from the pilot to the finale, with little room in other (filler) episodes for the station managers to get their egotripping time. The only way to get -that- is with a miniseries.. 2-4 episodes ..which aren't well-suited for shows designed as a series.
I stopped watching mid-way through season 3.. don't bother telling me it gets better in season 4; after reading the short summary in the top post here, it could be the most brilliant made-for-TV work of our generation.. and I still wouldn't care to see it.
Does any one else think that the writers were making up even the finale as they went along? Personally, I think the explanation of the flash sideways = limbo was something they tacked on at the very last minute. In fact, if you re-examine the last season, I think it’s clear that the flash sideways was originally intended to be a true parallel reality of sorts.
1. A submerged/sunken version of the island was shown in the flash sideways world.
2. Kima, a murderer that everyone on the island hated, was present in the flash sideways world.
3. In the beginning on the flash sideways, it was implied that it took something like a near-death-experience to catch glimpses of the other timeline. By the end though, apparently any strong emotion was enough.
4. Faraday in the flash sideways specifically thought that the flash sideways was the result of something they had done with a nuclear bomb.
5. When Widmore put Desmond in the magnet shack, the impression was given that Desmond was able to jump between both realities.
6. Some of the Lostaways had pretty harsh and painful lives in the flash sideways which would seem weird for a group created dream world.
7. When fake-Locke cut Jack's neck on the island, his neck in the flash sideways began to bleed as well.
8. Eloise didn't want Desmond messing with things in the flash sideways.
Now, I'm sure if you try hard enough, all of the above can be explained away, but taken as a whole, I think its obvious that the writers created the ending of the flash sideways world completely on the fly, and I would go so far as to say there's good evidence that they didn't even figure out what they were going to do until quite a ways into the finale itself. In fact, it’s entirely possible that even during the concert in the finale the writers still hadn't figured out how they were going to end things. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't figure out what to do until the point when they were trying to figure out what Jack would find inside his dad's coffin.
P.S. And I get so sick of people defending the show by saying "Its about the characters." That's like defending a Michael Bay movie by saying "Its about the FX." A good show should be about the story, of which characters, plot, and presentation are all a part.
I knew from the begining they had no plan to really end the series, so, I never bothered to even try to get into it. I'm sorry if you did. Next time, choose more wisely.
You knew nothing of the sort. We were told time and time again that there was a plan, it was all plotted out, and it would all come together and questions would be answered. We were lied to.
Oh christ, you again?
Thought for sure that in the last episode they would find Gilligan.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
I too am very dissatisfied with LOST. Some things were just badly written. To me this goes back at least to when Charlie died, even though water physically could not have filled the room above the broken port hole, and continued through the final episode, where suddenly Jack, Kate and the rest were traveling across vast stretches of the island in hours or minutes when it had previously taken days to cover so much ground. And even things that were supposedly explained this season made no sense if you look at the whole story. The smoke monster was revealed to have caused the appearance of several deal people, including Jack's father. But we also know that smokey could not leave the island. Yet Jack also saw his dead father manifested while he was in L.A., before returning to the Island. How can a viewer even hope to figure out anything in a story when they do stuff like that?
There were many many story holes, far too many for me to list here. But one that really needed some sort of explanation was the Darma food drop that happened shortly after the crash and saved Hurley from a much needed diet. Why was there a Darma food drop if all of Darma had been killed years earlier? Who did it, and what else are they doing? How did they even make a food drop on the Island, the mysterious nature of the Island should have made it unreachable by air, Darma had to use a sub to get there other times. But the message to viewers who were trying to actually figure out the story and make some sense of it was "screw you, the writers don't care about such things, we just want to have melodramatic deaths and church scenes with the major cast (but curiously none of the extras who also died).
And the ending made no sense at all taken with the departure of Kate, Sawyer and Clair on the plane. How does Kate end up at the funeral dead if she managed to fly off the island alive? Why even bother to get that group to the plane, if it is meaningless if they reached it or not?
The writers of Lost promised that they had a full story in mind when the series started, that they were not just making it up as they went along. That either wasn't true or they were some of the worst writers in history.
Some shows are just entertainment. The viewer knows not to spend any time trying to figure out much of anything, because it would be time wasted. But Lost presented itself as something different. It claimed to have an underlying logic behind it. Viewers were encouraged to try to understand the riddles of the island. In the end the loyal viewers were betrayed.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
So you're an expert on a show that you never watched?
You're offended by people acting smug? Look in the mirror.
This was not X-Files or BSG. This really was the exact opposite. This was amazingly enough a well thought out show that didn't drag on too long. They had a specific arc for X number of episodes and told the story they wanted to tell in that time. They had the end planned from the beginning, and it really shows. It is amazing how consistent the show is, and how well everything paid off that they set up earlier.
Don't try and judge something you know nothing about.
Third stage, rationalization.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The shots of the fuselage camp on the beach were simply nice reminders from the producers and/or ABC of where the story began. In nerd-speak, they're not "canon." The story of Lost ended when Jack's eye closed.
The best explanation I read was that it's the final remains of the 815 crash after all the Losties died. It's the mystery that other people brought to the island in the future will wonder about, like we wondered about the hatch, the statue, Henry Gale's balloon, and so on.
If you watched the show from the beginning you'll remember that in the story, most of the fuselage camp washed away from an unusually high tide a few weeks after the crash. So it won't be around for future island inhabitants to wonder about.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
"It claimed to have an underlying logic behind it" != "There will be answers to everything mostly spoonfed to you." Being a sci-fi nut, I'm painfully aware of unintended plot holes and inconsistencies. Every show has them. Well, every show that networks let last longer than three episodes. But just because a few things aren't explained or even (gasp!) don't make sense over the course of six years doesn't make it a terrible show. It makes the writers human and (gasp!) sometimes a little overambitious.
If you want, you can sit there and dwell on every single nitpicky little inconsistency, and yes, if you choose to do so, the show will likely suck for you. Or you could accept that there will probably be some things that you're going to have to imagine some rational explanations for yourself and even some (gasp!) continuity goofs and enjoy the show for the things that do make sense.
For the record, this was one of the things that was explicitly explained. It's been explained here. If you still don't understand, that's not the writers' fault; you must have missed it somehow.
...Or they're just like almost every other writer that has ever existed. They knew how they wanted the story to start, they knew how they wanted the story to end, they had some major plot points in mind along the way, and they knew in detail some key elements of the story. The rest was just filling in the spaces, fleshing out the details. Sometimes in doing so, some minor details got escalated and merited their own development. Sometimes in doing so, some minor continuity errors were introduced.
Any writer who tells you that they know the "full story" six years in advance is exaggerating, and not necessarily in a bad way. I'm pretty sure what I'm going to be doing at work next week, but stuff comes up and plans change, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot based on interaction with others (e.g. the writers think of something new and interesting to pursue) or outside influences (e.g. a old writer leaves and a new writer is hired).
I once heard that The Unit switched attention away from the military operations of the men to the lives of the women left behind at home, as a result of focus group studies. Soon thereafter, it tanked in ratings and was canceled.
I can't help but feel something similar must have happened to Lost somewhere within the last 6 years. When the show first started out, I got the distinct feeling that the many mysteries had meaning and rational explanations. (I believe that the writers themselves even said so.) Sure, the Dharma Initiative was a peculiar operation, but it explained some things. But this ending, I don't know... It smells as if the ending that was originally planned was scrapped because it offended too many focus groups. Perhaps the original story promoted that all mysteries are only a lack of scientific understanding? (Sufficiently advanced technology, and all that) Perhaps it promoted predestination? I don't know.
All I can say is that with this ending, something changed somewhere. The carpet doesn't match the drapes.
I believe they had a limited story in season 1 and it was different enough that people said "Hey, way cool!"
Season 1: Hey lets make this island no one understands with WAY bizzare STUFF and see what the audience thinks. And oh yeah, we should do things like throw in a polar bear, some "other" people (well come up with a name later), and make the whole jungle shake to get people really scared and give them a purpose to stay together.
Season 2: Hey it WORKED, were still employed... Now what, lets do it again. Add some more weird stuff, the audience imagination is going wild. We might even be able to skype an idea or two.
Season 3: We should really start to try and tie some of this together. Lets do the easy ones.
Season 4: Im starting to get dry, anybody got an idea where this going yet? Ive got so many loose threads my mind is like an angora sweater. Lets hit the web for some weird ideas.
Season 5: Hmmm... looks like its going end next season. Lets just blow the whole thing up and then we can do what we want next season.
Season 6: Anyone know how to tie this ball of yarn together? Hmmm... me neither. Lets do some weird dream/purgatory/lifeanddeath stuff and the audience will make some stuff up and tie it together for us. Just remember we need to sing kumbayaa at the end OK?
And for me that about sums up the what the writers were thinking about as they drank beer in group think sessions.