najiwench wrote:is anyone else disturbingly irritated by that finale? I mean...what the smurf...really. I want the past 6 seasons back, kplzthx. Damnit, I could have been watching Heroes or some other crap...Criminal Intent or something...
Personally I liked the finale quite a bit. I didn't LOVE the finale, but I did like it. I think you might be misunderstanding one part of the ending, which a lot of people did (apparently even some Washington Post reviewers): they didn't die in the crash. They were not dead in the island storyline. In the "sideways" story, yes, they're dead there, but that story is taking place long after the island story. Unfortunately they just have Christian give one quick line "some of them died before you, some of them died long after you" to indicate this, and if you missed it or didn't grasp the implications immediately then you can easily think the island story was all a bunch of zombies.
I also think there was an expectation that the sideways story and the island story would somehow merge, or that there would be some grand twist equal to season 3, when we thought we had been watching a bunch of flashbacks only to find we were watching flash forwards of them after they had left the island. We didn't get that, and frankly that was a bit of a one trick pony. Once you're expecting the narrative device to be tricky it loses the element of surprise. Kinda like if someone pulls a quick magic trick on you when you're not expecting it. It's pretty clever and you're flummoxed, but if you ask them to do it again then you can likely figure out how they're doing it and it's not as surprising or neat anymore.
As for dangling plot threads, yes, there definitely were several. The Walt story, the numbers, the no babies born on the island (which they came out in a podcast and gave the explanation for that being that there was a nuke leaking radiation buried under dharmaville). They attempted to deflect these in two ways:
1 - They made "The Rules" for the island subject to Jacob's whim, and said he had a thing for numbers. Thus you could suppose that the numbers were just Jacob exerting his influence in a way he wanted. If you accept it as the answer then it's certainly not a satisfying one. But then I can't imagine an answer that would make them make any more sense. Some people have tossed around that they're the first numbers spat out my some famous equation. Ok, so how does that make someone who wins the lottery with them have terrible luck? It doesn't. Nothing scientific can (and math is probably the most pure science there is), thus all you have left is some mystical explanation, ala back to Jacob. But back to the main point of this little bit: Jacob makes the rules, and thus a lot of crap can be explained away by it being a Jacob rule or whimsy.
2 - "Every question will just lead to another question". This was something spoken by mother lady in the Man in Black/Jacob episode, and it was aimed directly at the fans. I call it the 3 year old "why?" philosophy. Ever try to explain something to a 3 year old and they just keep asking "why?" to every response you give? This is their logic for why they stopped explaining the island mythology where they did. They told us where Jacob and the Man in Black came from, what the function of the island is, and why there is a guardian. Beyond that wasn't necessary to explain for the purpose of the story, and even if they did explain further, it would just raise more questions so there really wasn't a point to it. It would eventually lead to questions about the nature of the universe, good and evil, God, etc, and this probably wasn't something they wanted to try and answer since there's a world of differing opinions on such things.
So yes, they left some things unanswered, but I don't think the things they didn't answer really have much impact on the overall story. I thought it was a great 6 years and don't regret a moment of it. The story was really about the characters, and I think all of their stories were closed quite nicely (except Sun and Jin. Way to orphan you kid guys!). The island story was just a vehicle to tell their stories and redeem them.
