I don't have much of a problem with how they ended it. There were two parallel stories the whole time: the characters' attempt to become "found" in their lives (they were lost long before they got to the island) and then the literal story of the island and the mysteries.
The writers did a great job with the ending to the character-based story. It was harsher than I expected. Some characters were never "found" during their entire mortal lives, even if they lived a full lifespan (Kate and Sawyer) and might have died at age 101, bitter and lost as ever, a cruel sentence but honest, considering that they were the most messed up of the whole bunch. The writers pulled off a happy ending without cheating or being mawkish about it.
The mystery based plotline is what people are complaining about. The writers did kinda botch that one. It got too video-gamey at the end, all about capping something with a stone...? WTF? Stupid.
But overall,
Lost was still an incredible achievement, especially considering it was on broadcast and not cable.
make the final season about getting the answers to the main mystery of the show - what is the island and why and how does letting the MiB out of it will be bad for the outside world.
What if the answers were unsatisfying and dumb? Maybe there were no answers that would be as good as leaving some things a mystery. I thought the "whispers" were cool until they came up with an answer, and then the whole thing fell flat. Every answer given takes that risk.
And the flash-sideways wasn't for solving the mysteries, it was for concluding the character-based plotline. Without the flash-sideways, the character plotline would also have lacked a satisfactory conclusion, without any guarantee of a good conclusion to the other plotline.
What is it these days with good series all having crappy endings?
I'm looking at you BSG.
Same problem as
Lost - trying to create a huge, multi-season storyline that juggles the plotlines of a large number of characters, do it all on the fly under the merciless gaze of network (or even cable) ratings needs, and then tie it all up with a nice bow at the end.
To turn it around, name a serialized series that has run for four or more years and does have a good ending. I can't think of one.
However, the
BSG writers made a more obvious, singular mistake than the
Lost writers ever did: not figuring out what the motivation of the villains was, from the first. The need to keep revising the Cylons on the fly so they would keep generating dramatic conflict to keep the show going is what turned them into jokes. By the time the ending rolled around, it was far too late to undo years of damage.
Lost had a more complicated and tricky (and therefore more excusable) problem at the core - how to explain the mysteries the writers kept throwing out there, to hold our interest, just enough so that the answer would be satisfying, but not so much that it would fall flat because of being overly literal and destroying the magic.
I liked it but they could of expanded upon The Light and The Smoke's intention. Say something like how The Light had something to do with the creation of Humans and there souls/spirit etc, sort of making the island like the fable place "Garden of Eden". Also making it quite clear MIB would spread like a virus corrupting the entire human race literally from within, like a walking talking Devil.
The danger of something like that is, how literal do you get? Do you have people quoting from the Bible? Do you show Satan as a character, with something to indicate who he is (brimstone, horns)? It's the same balance problem as any explanation would have. For instance, they certainly hinted that MiB was a corrupting, Satanic force. They just didn't take the next step to show it. What's the next step? Is it enough? When does it become too much? How do you know when to stop?
The biggest problem was everything was hinted at and never explained.
Lots of stuff was explained. The whispers for instance. And that explanation sucked. I wished they'd left that unexplained. How do we know that we would have liked the explanations after they presented them? At that point, it's too late to take them back.
On the other hand, however, I actually really like that we didn't get a lot of explanation. This show, more than anything else, was about Jack's transformation from Man of Science into Man of Faith. The fact that he didn't know exactly what was going on but still believed he needed to act made his story all the more powerful for me.
Yep. There's a point at which the explanations must stop. The writers chose a certain place to draw the line. People can imagine that if they'd gone just a step further, or ten steps further, or a hundred steps further, it would have been "better," but there's no way to prove that unless you can put it on film and show us. This is all about how it comes off on screen: does it feel right?
The writers originally planned the "they are dead and the island is purgatory" as the ultimate solution.
I'll bet they had no definite ending in mind at all. The only element that seemed obvious from the first was the idea that the characters were metaphorically lost, and that side of the story would be all about their journey to be found.
On the other, literal side of the story, they threw every idea under the sun at us (the purple sky, what was that?!? a resurrection pool??? did anyone ever figure out what all that fuss was about approaching the island on the right bearing??? and frankly I still don't see why Desmond had to keep punching in the numbers since the world didn't end when he stopped) just to keep viewers intrigued. I realized about midway thru (S4ish) that there was no way any human mind could ever devise a single coherent explanation for that mountain of nonsense, so I simply decided not to be disappointed when the inevitable occurred, and they let the show end with a lot of stuff unexplained.
