Re:Don't understand the hate
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Did you even watch the show?
The island was not purgatory. Again, the show runners kept saying that from day 1. It wasn't a retcon, because that was one of the very first answers the show runners gave in interviews.
Christian Shepherd explicitly said it in the finale to to hammer it home. Everything that happened, happened. It was all real.
It order for it to be a retcon, it would had to been a part of continuity to begin with.
Show me one place where it was ever established as continuity that everyone was dead, especially when the exact opposite had been established the show runners.
I don't think retcon means what you think it means.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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The mysteries were important.
Both the larger mythology and the individual character stories were equally important.
Some of the details however begin to descend into minutia.
For instance, if you can't enjoy the show because you don't understand how the Dharma food drops continued (even though there is an answer for that) then you're not seeing the forest for the trees.
McDonalds didn't become #1 by making the best hamburger. McDonalds became #1 through marketing.
Apple has the best marketing. Don't count them out. And this is coming from a guy who owns precisely one Apple product, that I both love and hate.
Re:Don't understand the hate
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This isn't BSG. That is a show that created a bunch of mysterious elements that never ultimately meant anything. Nothing was explained and the finale made zero sense.
Lost however was not retconned because the statements from day 1 held true when the finale aired, except for a few small exceptions that were dictated by real life.
Walt was to play a large role as a primary character, but the actor aged too fast, and there were some rumblings that his mother didn't want him acting forever, which took away from his ability to attend school normally. Eko was to play a larger role, and the actor wanted off the show. He refused to read lines as they were written, and had some family issues, so he couldn't continue to live in Hawaii.
Aside from that, there is no retcon.
You listed questions that you didn't know the answers. I provided the answers. If you have more questions, I'll happily answer them. Let me know what your problems are, and I bet you I can explain them.
This is a rare instance where a larger story really did make sense in the end, as opposed to Dark Tower, Neon Genesis Evangelion, BSG, Alias, Prisoner, etc.
Re:The Force not explained?
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All that is said is that the Force is created by life and binds us together.
How is that vastly different from saying the "light" is within every living thing?
Both are ubiquitous life energies. If you're suggesting one was not adequately explained, your suggesting neither was adequately explained.
Re:Don't understand the hate
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No, I outlined many places those elements popped up. I'm certainly not unaware of them.
I never suggested they were trivial. I said it was up to you to decide if they were coincidence or destiny. You can't seem to understand that.
If you really absolutely have to have an answer, here it is.
42 has massive geek connotations. 23 is a number associated with curses. The rest of the numbers were picked randomly, so much as the total added up to 108, a number with religious significance in multiple religions.
There are those who strongly subscribe to numerology, such as Kabbalahists.
The show demonstrates that Jacob watched each of these individuals from the time they were children. He was with them in very specific moments of need and distress.
It is suggested that the moment he drank the water, he was given preternatural knowledge. I suspect that deep down, he did know what was going to happen and that he used those numbers to call people to the island specifically to aid them because the troubles in their lives were smaller pieces of a larger picture given that there is an afterlife in this show.
If you believe (as is canon in this show) that this life is a subset of a larger afterlife, than this reality is likely malleable. What we perceive to be as magic is simply altering the rules that govern what we assume to be static reality.
The simple preternatural awareness of the water was the realization that the rules can be altered. Jacob was able to "create" rules to trap MIB, when it reality no one is ultimately bound by those rules because reality is malleable.
Hurley believed he was cursed, and thusly he redefined his reality, bringing about bad luck. The numbers, and the curse have as much power as we assign to them with their beliefs.
Don't believe me? Check out the comments from the show creators some time, who touch on some of these points. Once you see the show as a larger allegory, every piece falls into place.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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Fair enough. The show isn't for everyone.
Re:So, my only question regarding Lost is
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No, ESB had very specific cliffhangers. If those weren't answered, I imagine people would be pissed.
Lost didn't end on a cliffhanger. They answered every major question.
Lost was a show about duality, on MANY layers. Part of that duality is layering character drama with a larger mythology. The finale resolved both.
What questions did you have? I suspect the answers exist. In fact, I bet I can answer all of them myself, and I wasn't one of the most obsessive fans writing wikis and such.
Re:Don't understand the hate
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No, Hurley believed he was cursed.
You're confusing the opinion of a character with explicit exposition from a narrator. The opinions of one character in a show do not necessary equate to gospel for that show.
Did the show creators ever say Hurley was in fact cursed?
Did anyone who knew absolutely anything for a fact say they knew he was cursed?
The show in many ways was a larger allegory for science vs faith, and free will vs destiny. Part of that allegory was often demonstrating amazing coincidences.
The viewer was asked them to decide how they wanted to perceive them. You can decide to believe they are part of destiny and a larger scheme, or merely coincidences.
The numbers were picked for a code. Those numbers were repeated. Someone hear the repeated transmission, and Hurley head it from that guy. He played the lottery with those numbers.
Actual real life lottery coincidences happen all the time.
I've seen the same set of numbers win two days in a row for instance.
Jacob assigned numbers to a lot of people on his wheel in the lighthouse, and respectively his cave scribblings. Most of those got scratched out. It doesn't seem that even Jacob knew who the final candidates would be. The numbers pop up here. Why?
Again, you get to decide if it was destiny or coincidence.
Re:As someone who has not watched and is proud of
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Check my Twitter feed. I've loved Lost from the very first episode, and I really loved the finale last night.
I don't really watch other TV shows because they tell incomplete stories. Writers just want to get picked up for another season, and they never know how long they're going. They are told that episodes can't require viewers to have seen previous seasons.
(A friend of mine was talked into finally watching Big Bang Theory, and the first episode he watched was basically a flashback episode that filled in gaps in the backstory. Every joke required you to know everything that came before it. Because of that, he was decided to never watch the show again. And before the internet, DVRs, etc. you could never do that sort of thing).
Most shows also aren't serialized at all. Everything needs to be wrapped up from episode to episode with largely no growth or development.
Lost is the antithesis of that. It takes all the flaws of the television model, and spins it on its head. It is weird how people complain about Lost, assuming it must follow the same model. They assume it too must be made up as they went along. They assume it too was dragged out by the network.
Like Babylon 5, this is a rare exception where a specific concept was negotiated for a specific number of seasons. We should be celebrating the insight of a network to agree to tell a complete story like this.
Re:So, my only question regarding Lost is
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But the Force is pretty critical to Star Wars on the whole. Explaining it with midichlorians actually takes away from your enjoyment of the story.
Star Wars is a traditional hero's journey tale tying into a lot of archetypes, but is really a morality tale of generic good vs evil. Luke even wore white, while Vader was dressed in black.
Lost is pretty much the same. And the "light" plays largely the same role as the Force.
Lucas never explained Force ghosts, or how people found eternal life in the Force. Lost never explained specifically how the light killed MIB and turned him into some undead smoke monster.
The reason that Lost and Star Wars are behind held to two different standards is that Star Wars was goofy, pulp entertainment. We expect more from Lost. That speaks to Lost's credit, not against it. So many other reveals were so incredible that we seem to want more answers. I enjoyed the ride. I enjoyed the answers I got. In the end, I feel like the story ended perfectly. I don't feel the remaining minutia would add to the story.
Re:So, my only question regarding Lost is
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I did wonder about this myself when watching the finale. MIB goes into the cave and is subjected to this massive life energy. Jacob's mother said that if anyone went in, something worse than death would happen to them. But she also suggested that people going in would only do so to try and steal that energy. Jack went in to fix it.
If the energy itself was sentient, or representative of a higher power, perhaps it judged Jack and realized he wasn't trying to seize or use the power to his own ends, and thusly did not punish him.
Re:So, my only question regarding Lost is
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Actually while "Darlton" said you never needed any knowledge of anything outside the show to appreciate it, I think this is one of the rare occasions where the answer only exists in one of the ARGs they ran between seasons.
The Hanson Foundation (massive, very rich super corporation) funded the Dharma Initiative. The Hanso Foundation sent supplies. It was established in the show that Mikhail Bakunin (the guy with the patch) continued to operate the Dharma compound that maintained communication with the outside world. He still wore a Dharma outfit and pretended to still work for Dharma. I believe the assumption here is that he lied to Hanso so that Hanso wouldn't find out all the Dharma guys were murdered. It kept Hanso from coming to the island to check up on them.
The show did make tons of money for ABC, but the show runners negotiated a specific end date so they could plan out the entire run of the show. They had a contract guaranteeing a certain number of seasons and episodes so ABC could not force them to drag things out.
The show does tell a complete and consistent story that pays off well.
But in this thread, most of the complaints seem to be from people who watched part of it, or apparently never watched it. The only way to appreciate Lost is to watch it from beginning to end. It is a complex story that does require you to watch it all in order.
Re:Don't understand the hate
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What are the numbers and how are they magic? - The show creators said in interviews over and over again they randomly picked numbers and they had no major significance, unless you want to subscribe to the idea of destiny. But the numbers themselves never once do anything magical. Someone won the lottery with them. Someone used them as a code. Coincidence or destiny perhaps, but no magic. What is the black smoke - An undead creature. When MIB died, he left his actual body behind. His soul seemed to be trapped in an undead state as punishment. What is the magic light - The Force. Did you sit for 30 years complaining that the Force was never explained? It is magical life energy. You can make the argument that the fountain it pours from it supposed to represent the Fountain of Youth, or the Garden of Eden, but I think it is supposed to pull from similar archetypes without specifically referencing any of them. What was the disease that Rouseau and the hatch guy were talking about? Kelvin in the hatch was clearly lying about the disease. They explicitly state that he lied about it. It never existed. He used it to keep Desmond in the hatch. Rousseau was pretty crazy. She got in an argument with her husband and shot him. She blamed a disease, but as we saw with Claire later, it seems it was just the MIB/Smokie manipulating her with lies, which gave the appearance of her being crazy. I suspect MIB/Smokie was also lying to Rousseau or her husband. He often turned people against each other to prove Jacob wrong.
No one ever got sick or died from any disease because it never existed. Just because a character (who was shown to be lying) claims it existed, doesn't mean it did.
The answers were explicitly stated. You're just looking to bitch.
Re:What about for those who haven't seen it?
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It was the best show I've ever watched.
Most every arc does pay off, and pay off well. There are people griping about minutia, because they want more. They want more because every other reveal was so incredible, but they fail to realize that pulling back the curtain too far is generally a bad idea.
Everyone I know personally absolutely loves it. Anonymous strangers on the internet have been bitching for six years, yet seem to tune in for every episode. Make of that what you will.
Re:This was the ONLY episode I watched
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No. They said from day 1 that they did not die in the crash. Christian Shepherd even very specifically lays out repeatedly that everything on the island happened. It was real. He said that was the most important part of their lives.
Sideways land however, was in fact an afterlife. You see specifically when most of the characters die, and those deaths weren't from the plane crash.
Re:Do you want more religion with your scifi?
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None of the characters are shown to subscribe to a specific religion or set of beliefs other than Eko. The "church" is a multi-faith church that shows symbols from a variety of religions, and even it is a fictional construct.
The show has nothing to do with a specific religion, or religious beliefs. The epilogue suggests the characters found peace in a vague afterlife. That is it.
Re:Babylon 5 / Firefly / Star Blazers
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Babylon 5 is probably the closest comparison to Lost. He went in with a 5 season arc and stuck to it. Firefly is very entertaining, but Whedon has never once demonstrated that he can stick to a very specific arc for an entire run of a show.
Lost really was planned from the beginning and it shows. It treads water a bit in Season 2 because they didn't have an end date. The moment they pegged the end date, it took off running again.
Re:As someone who has not watched and is proud of
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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.
Are you aware that JJ Abrams pretty much had nothing to do with Lost? He directed a pilot, but the concept of the show, and the execution of the show for all 6 years was "Darlton".
You might as well suggest that Reaper was all Kevin Smith, even though someone else came up with a concept, he directed the pilot, and had nothing to do with the show ever again.
Re:The writers did have a plan
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Did you even watch the show?
Fucking haters
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For six years I've heard people bitch incessantly about how this show will never reveal answers. They said you wouldn't see the monster for six-seven years. Then you see the monster in season 1.
The show provided answer after answer after answer.
Still people bitched and said they hated the show. But for some crazy reason they continued to watch for years.
Lost had the most perfect finale I've ever seen for a show (topping ST:TNG). This was a rare case in which they did have a clear idea for a story from the beginning. So many concepts hinted at early had massive reveals later. They told the story they wanted to tell. If you truly hated it, then no one forced you to watch it for six years. Not a soul.
So why did you watch it? I suspect deep down you did really love it. And if you think you were cheated, then you're not really thinking clearly. What more did you want? Did you want "midichlorian" explanations?
"Across The Sea" demonstrated how simply spoon-feeding you answers isn't particularly entertaining. If you didn't enjoy the show, you should have stopped watching. But personally, I thoroughly enjoyed the fuck out of it. It was the most intelligent and in depth story I've ever seen told. The problem with so many other complex stories of this scope is that they fall off the deep end and don't end well (Dark Tower, Neon Genesis Evangelion, The Prisoner). Lost broke the mold is actually giving you coherent answers and a great finale. Seriously, name another story on this scale that was told better.
Re:Mod parent way up - "succumbed to its own succe
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You could not be more wrong.
"Darlton" wanted to tell a sci-fantasy story set on this island about good battling evil. It started to drag in season 2 because they didn't know how long they had to go, and felt they needed to stretch things out. They negotiated a specific end date because they didn't want to pad the story. And from the moment they negotiated that end date, the pace picked up.
The best thing about Lost is that they struck a deal to remove the filler and focus on telling a very specific story with a very specific end date.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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"Darlton" said several times over again that the writers were often torn. Some were convinced the entire purpose of the show was to tell this larger story of mythology. The other half of the writers were convinced the purpose of the show was to tell a smaller character drama about these people's lives. It is quite appropriate that a show so dedicated to duality straddled those two camps of writers.
It was always both. From the first season on where many fans complained about flashbacks, because they detracted from the island story, they failed to realize that the story is worthless without both parts.
You wouldn't care about those characters if not for the circumstances on the island. At the same time, the specific character arcs solidified by their flashbacks gave gravity to the action on the island so it wasn't some stupid Michael Bay film.
The finale addressed both of these things. Every character on the island was flawed, terrified, and alone. They had issues they ran from and weren't ready to address. In the end, they all came to peace with their lives. Similarly, the island was a place of conflict for THOUSANDS OF YEARS due to Jacob and the MIB. Jack ended that conflict.
What more did you really want?
Would the show be better if aliens invented some nanotechnology that explained the smoke monster? And before you answer that question, let me say "midichlorians".
Slashdot Mirror
Did you even watch the show?
The island was not purgatory. Again, the show runners kept saying that from day 1. It wasn't a retcon, because that was one of the very first answers the show runners gave in interviews.
Christian Shepherd explicitly said it in the finale to to hammer it home. Everything that happened, happened. It was all real.
It order for it to be a retcon, it would had to been a part of continuity to begin with.
Show me one place where it was ever established as continuity that everyone was dead, especially when the exact opposite had been established the show runners.
I don't think retcon means what you think it means.
The mysteries were important.
Both the larger mythology and the individual character stories were equally important.
Some of the details however begin to descend into minutia.
For instance, if you can't enjoy the show because you don't understand how the Dharma food drops continued (even though there is an answer for that) then you're not seeing the forest for the trees.
McDonalds didn't become #1 by making the best hamburger. McDonalds became #1 through marketing.
Apple has the best marketing. Don't count them out. And this is coming from a guy who owns precisely one Apple product, that I both love and hate.
This isn't BSG. That is a show that created a bunch of mysterious elements that never ultimately meant anything. Nothing was explained and the finale made zero sense.
Lost however was not retconned because the statements from day 1 held true when the finale aired, except for a few small exceptions that were dictated by real life.
Walt was to play a large role as a primary character, but the actor aged too fast, and there were some rumblings that his mother didn't want him acting forever, which took away from his ability to attend school normally. Eko was to play a larger role, and the actor wanted off the show. He refused to read lines as they were written, and had some family issues, so he couldn't continue to live in Hawaii.
Aside from that, there is no retcon.
You listed questions that you didn't know the answers. I provided the answers. If you have more questions, I'll happily answer them. Let me know what your problems are, and I bet you I can explain them.
This is a rare instance where a larger story really did make sense in the end, as opposed to Dark Tower, Neon Genesis Evangelion, BSG, Alias, Prisoner, etc.
All that is said is that the Force is created by life and binds us together.
How is that vastly different from saying the "light" is within every living thing?
Both are ubiquitous life energies. If you're suggesting one was not adequately explained, your suggesting neither was adequately explained.
No, I outlined many places those elements popped up. I'm certainly not unaware of them.
I never suggested they were trivial. I said it was up to you to decide if they were coincidence or destiny. You can't seem to understand that.
If you really absolutely have to have an answer, here it is.
42 has massive geek connotations. 23 is a number associated with curses. The rest of the numbers were picked randomly, so much as the total added up to 108, a number with religious significance in multiple religions.
There are those who strongly subscribe to numerology, such as Kabbalahists.
The show demonstrates that Jacob watched each of these individuals from the time they were children. He was with them in very specific moments of need and distress.
It is suggested that the moment he drank the water, he was given preternatural knowledge. I suspect that deep down, he did know what was going to happen and that he used those numbers to call people to the island specifically to aid them because the troubles in their lives were smaller pieces of a larger picture given that there is an afterlife in this show.
If you believe (as is canon in this show) that this life is a subset of a larger afterlife, than this reality is likely malleable. What we perceive to be as magic is simply altering the rules that govern what we assume to be static reality.
The simple preternatural awareness of the water was the realization that the rules can be altered. Jacob was able to "create" rules to trap MIB, when it reality no one is ultimately bound by those rules because reality is malleable.
Hurley believed he was cursed, and thusly he redefined his reality, bringing about bad luck. The numbers, and the curse have as much power as we assign to them with their beliefs.
Don't believe me? Check out the comments from the show creators some time, who touch on some of these points. Once you see the show as a larger allegory, every piece falls into place.
Fair enough. The show isn't for everyone.
No, ESB had very specific cliffhangers. If those weren't answered, I imagine people would be pissed.
Lost didn't end on a cliffhanger. They answered every major question.
Lost was a show about duality, on MANY layers. Part of that duality is layering character drama with a larger mythology. The finale resolved both.
What questions did you have? I suspect the answers exist. In fact, I bet I can answer all of them myself, and I wasn't one of the most obsessive fans writing wikis and such.
No, Hurley believed he was cursed.
You're confusing the opinion of a character with explicit exposition from a narrator. The opinions of one character in a show do not necessary equate to gospel for that show.
Did the show creators ever say Hurley was in fact cursed?
Did anyone who knew absolutely anything for a fact say they knew he was cursed?
The show in many ways was a larger allegory for science vs faith, and free will vs destiny. Part of that allegory was often demonstrating amazing coincidences.
The viewer was asked them to decide how they wanted to perceive them. You can decide to believe they are part of destiny and a larger scheme, or merely coincidences.
The numbers were picked for a code. Those numbers were repeated. Someone hear the repeated transmission, and Hurley head it from that guy. He played the lottery with those numbers.
Actual real life lottery coincidences happen all the time.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/WhosCounting/story?id=97845&page=1
I've seen the same set of numbers win two days in a row for instance.
Jacob assigned numbers to a lot of people on his wheel in the lighthouse, and respectively his cave scribblings. Most of those got scratched out. It doesn't seem that even Jacob knew who the final candidates would be. The numbers pop up here. Why?
Again, you get to decide if it was destiny or coincidence.
Check my Twitter feed. I've loved Lost from the very first episode, and I really loved the finale last night.
I don't really watch other TV shows because they tell incomplete stories. Writers just want to get picked up for another season, and they never know how long they're going. They are told that episodes can't require viewers to have seen previous seasons.
(A friend of mine was talked into finally watching Big Bang Theory, and the first episode he watched was basically a flashback episode that filled in gaps in the backstory. Every joke required you to know everything that came before it. Because of that, he was decided to never watch the show again. And before the internet, DVRs, etc. you could never do that sort of thing).
Most shows also aren't serialized at all. Everything needs to be wrapped up from episode to episode with largely no growth or development.
Lost is the antithesis of that. It takes all the flaws of the television model, and spins it on its head. It is weird how people complain about Lost, assuming it must follow the same model. They assume it too must be made up as they went along. They assume it too was dragged out by the network.
Like Babylon 5, this is a rare exception where a specific concept was negotiated for a specific number of seasons. We should be celebrating the insight of a network to agree to tell a complete story like this.
But the Force is pretty critical to Star Wars on the whole. Explaining it with midichlorians actually takes away from your enjoyment of the story.
Star Wars is a traditional hero's journey tale tying into a lot of archetypes, but is really a morality tale of generic good vs evil. Luke even wore white, while Vader was dressed in black.
Lost is pretty much the same. And the "light" plays largely the same role as the Force.
Lucas never explained Force ghosts, or how people found eternal life in the Force. Lost never explained specifically how the light killed MIB and turned him into some undead smoke monster.
The reason that Lost and Star Wars are behind held to two different standards is that Star Wars was goofy, pulp entertainment. We expect more from Lost. That speaks to Lost's credit, not against it. So many other reveals were so incredible that we seem to want more answers. I enjoyed the ride. I enjoyed the answers I got. In the end, I feel like the story ended perfectly. I don't feel the remaining minutia would add to the story.
I did wonder about this myself when watching the finale. MIB goes into the cave and is subjected to this massive life energy. Jacob's mother said that if anyone went in, something worse than death would happen to them. But she also suggested that people going in would only do so to try and steal that energy. Jack went in to fix it.
If the energy itself was sentient, or representative of a higher power, perhaps it judged Jack and realized he wasn't trying to seize or use the power to his own ends, and thusly did not punish him.
Actually while "Darlton" said you never needed any knowledge of anything outside the show to appreciate it, I think this is one of the rare occasions where the answer only exists in one of the ARGs they ran between seasons.
The Hanson Foundation (massive, very rich super corporation) funded the Dharma Initiative. The Hanso Foundation sent supplies. It was established in the show that Mikhail Bakunin (the guy with the patch) continued to operate the Dharma compound that maintained communication with the outside world. He still wore a Dharma outfit and pretended to still work for Dharma. I believe the assumption here is that he lied to Hanso so that Hanso wouldn't find out all the Dharma guys were murdered. It kept Hanso from coming to the island to check up on them.
This couldn't be further from the truth.
The show did make tons of money for ABC, but the show runners negotiated a specific end date so they could plan out the entire run of the show. They had a contract guaranteeing a certain number of seasons and episodes so ABC could not force them to drag things out.
The show does tell a complete and consistent story that pays off well.
But in this thread, most of the complaints seem to be from people who watched part of it, or apparently never watched it. The only way to appreciate Lost is to watch it from beginning to end. It is a complex story that does require you to watch it all in order.
What are the numbers and how are they magic? - The show creators said in interviews over and over again they randomly picked numbers and they had no major significance, unless you want to subscribe to the idea of destiny. But the numbers themselves never once do anything magical. Someone won the lottery with them. Someone used them as a code. Coincidence or destiny perhaps, but no magic.
What is the black smoke - An undead creature. When MIB died, he left his actual body behind. His soul seemed to be trapped in an undead state as punishment.
What is the magic light - The Force. Did you sit for 30 years complaining that the Force was never explained? It is magical life energy. You can make the argument that the fountain it pours from it supposed to represent the Fountain of Youth, or the Garden of Eden, but I think it is supposed to pull from similar archetypes without specifically referencing any of them.
What was the disease that Rouseau and the hatch guy were talking about? Kelvin in the hatch was clearly lying about the disease. They explicitly state that he lied about it. It never existed. He used it to keep Desmond in the hatch. Rousseau was pretty crazy. She got in an argument with her husband and shot him. She blamed a disease, but as we saw with Claire later, it seems it was just the MIB/Smokie manipulating her with lies, which gave the appearance of her being crazy. I suspect MIB/Smokie was also lying to Rousseau or her husband. He often turned people against each other to prove Jacob wrong.
No one ever got sick or died from any disease because it never existed. Just because a character (who was shown to be lying) claims it existed, doesn't mean it did.
The answers were explicitly stated. You're just looking to bitch.
It was the best show I've ever watched.
Most every arc does pay off, and pay off well. There are people griping about minutia, because they want more. They want more because every other reveal was so incredible, but they fail to realize that pulling back the curtain too far is generally a bad idea.
Everyone I know personally absolutely loves it. Anonymous strangers on the internet have been bitching for six years, yet seem to tune in for every episode. Make of that what you will.
No. They said from day 1 that they did not die in the crash. Christian Shepherd even very specifically lays out repeatedly that everything on the island happened. It was real. He said that was the most important part of their lives.
Sideways land however, was in fact an afterlife. You see specifically when most of the characters die, and those deaths weren't from the plane crash.
None of the characters are shown to subscribe to a specific religion or set of beliefs other than Eko. The "church" is a multi-faith church that shows symbols from a variety of religions, and even it is a fictional construct.
The show has nothing to do with a specific religion, or religious beliefs. The epilogue suggests the characters found peace in a vague afterlife. That is it.
Babylon 5 is probably the closest comparison to Lost. He went in with a 5 season arc and stuck to it. Firefly is very entertaining, but Whedon has never once demonstrated that he can stick to a very specific arc for an entire run of a show.
Lost really was planned from the beginning and it shows. It treads water a bit in Season 2 because they didn't have an end date. The moment they pegged the end date, it took off running again.
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.
Are you aware that JJ Abrams pretty much had nothing to do with Lost? He directed a pilot, but the concept of the show, and the execution of the show for all 6 years was "Darlton".
You might as well suggest that Reaper was all Kevin Smith, even though someone else came up with a concept, he directed the pilot, and had nothing to do with the show ever again.
Did you even watch the show?
For six years I've heard people bitch incessantly about how this show will never reveal answers. They said you wouldn't see the monster for six-seven years. Then you see the monster in season 1.
The show provided answer after answer after answer.
Still people bitched and said they hated the show. But for some crazy reason they continued to watch for years.
Lost had the most perfect finale I've ever seen for a show (topping ST:TNG). This was a rare case in which they did have a clear idea for a story from the beginning. So many concepts hinted at early had massive reveals later. They told the story they wanted to tell. If you truly hated it, then no one forced you to watch it for six years. Not a soul.
So why did you watch it? I suspect deep down you did really love it. And if you think you were cheated, then you're not really thinking clearly. What more did you want? Did you want "midichlorian" explanations?
"Across The Sea" demonstrated how simply spoon-feeding you answers isn't particularly entertaining. If you didn't enjoy the show, you should have stopped watching. But personally, I thoroughly enjoyed the fuck out of it. It was the most intelligent and in depth story I've ever seen told. The problem with so many other complex stories of this scope is that they fall off the deep end and don't end well (Dark Tower, Neon Genesis Evangelion, The Prisoner). Lost broke the mold is actually giving you coherent answers and a great finale. Seriously, name another story on this scale that was told better.
You could not be more wrong.
"Darlton" wanted to tell a sci-fantasy story set on this island about good battling evil. It started to drag in season 2 because they didn't know how long they had to go, and felt they needed to stretch things out. They negotiated a specific end date because they didn't want to pad the story. And from the moment they negotiated that end date, the pace picked up.
The best thing about Lost is that they struck a deal to remove the filler and focus on telling a very specific story with a very specific end date.
"Darlton" said several times over again that the writers were often torn. Some were convinced the entire purpose of the show was to tell this larger story of mythology. The other half of the writers were convinced the purpose of the show was to tell a smaller character drama about these people's lives. It is quite appropriate that a show so dedicated to duality straddled those two camps of writers.
It was always both. From the first season on where many fans complained about flashbacks, because they detracted from the island story, they failed to realize that the story is worthless without both parts.
You wouldn't care about those characters if not for the circumstances on the island. At the same time, the specific character arcs solidified by their flashbacks gave gravity to the action on the island so it wasn't some stupid Michael Bay film.
The finale addressed both of these things. Every character on the island was flawed, terrified, and alone. They had issues they ran from and weren't ready to address. In the end, they all came to peace with their lives. Similarly, the island was a place of conflict for THOUSANDS OF YEARS due to Jacob and the MIB. Jack ended that conflict.
What more did you really want?
Would the show be better if aliens invented some nanotechnology that explained the smoke monster? And before you answer that question, let me say "midichlorians".