The only thing I feel bad for Howard about is he did miss out on the three biggest, most thrilling, most consistent seasons of television period. S3-5 really did provide great cliffhangers, fun twists, exciting action, memorable visuals(the sight of the statue, the island disappearance, the plane breaking up from the Others pov), answers--yes--answers to questions and some of the most epic storytelling ever in tv history.
But I don't feel bad that he missed this season because it was not very good--a whole bunch of running from camp to camp to drag out the season, boring sideways flashes, boring new characters like Dogen, pointless cameos and returns of minor characters no one cared for like Charlotte Mikhail Keamey Libby Ana Lucia, pointless namedropping like Nikki & Paolo, unfocused character arcs i.e. Sayid the evil one, Claire the crazy one, the horribly handled exit of Ilana complete with no flashback to fill in her backstory or her relationship with Jacob, lame lazy answers to longstanding mysteries i.e. the whispers how Smokey came to be, the mystery of the island turned out to be a butt plug which was fitting given the screwing L/C gave us.
I just can't see how people who watched S4 or 5 could sit here and tell me S6 wasn't very underwhelming and unsatisfactory. L/C were just drifting this season. And the season finales of S3, 4 and 5 were epic exciting payoffs to their respective seasons. This series finale would be pedestrian for a regular weekly episode and for not only a season finale but a series finale it was downright poor.
And all the revisionist history about LOST was about the characters--hogwash. It reminds me of the BS Tim Kring went on about Heroes being a show about the Petrellis. Or Ron Moore's flaccid response to the BSG finale criticism about how it wrapped up the mythology.
Jack and to some lesser extent Sawyer were the only characters that had any sort of satisfying arc this season. The rest were chess pieces and glorified extras--Sayid was a zombie, Claire a mad woman that with a little speech by Kate was her old self in the blink of an eye, MIB was a brat whose sole motivation in killing people was to get off the island and show Mom who was boss, Jacob--had an ill-defined plan, Jin was repeatedly taken hostage by the Others at the Temple then by Claire and then by Widmore, Sun wacked her head and wrote in English her dialogue(I guess you could argue her and Jin's reunion was a longstanding thread but the limp build up to it and the blink-and-you'll-miss it feel of the actual reunion just fell flat for me--they were no Mulder and Scully), Hurley was the resident moron that the writers thought we would find adorable comic relief, Richard's origin story gave us the show's best episode this season but bryond that he wandered around and was offscreen for a good part of the season with Miles and Ben. Frank was a plot device so was Miles--not that I really mind but please don't tout the show then as being great at character arcs this year. Widmore was wasted. Eloise only was seen in the sideways universe. Kate as usual was pining for Sawyer and Jack--yawn. Locke was dead so not much of an arc there.
So yeah I'm comfortable with my lukewarm opinion of the finale. It had a very nice ending if not well earned but it wasn't enough to make up for the anticlimatic Major Fight between MIB and Jack, the idiotic game plan of Jack the Protector to let Des go down there and do exactly what MIB wanted, the long stretchs of boring passages, the contrived feel of the sideways once we learn what they were actually and the underwhelming reveal of the Source/Light.
It was definitely better than a lot of series finales but considering that track record that is damning it with faint praise. This was hardly what I expected from the duo that brought us "Through the Looking Glass", "Theres No Place Like Home" and "The Incident". This season got 18 episodes-which is a lot more than many series get--and instead of making the most of them they just wasted them on stuff nobody was interested in rather than using the time to explore the more interesting mysteries. I don't know how many fans gave a crap about Libby/Hurley or seeing a return by Charlie where he acts like the annoying irritable child he was in season two in episodes like "Fire + Water". So when I saw LOST this year doing the same kind of things I criticized V, Flash Forward, post season one Heroes doing I wasn't going to give them a pass because it was LOST. In fact, LOST had set a higher standard and I was holding this season up to it.
