FINAL POLLS

The polls in the right hand column of this blog were closed about halfway through Season 6. It was to gauge the unscientific opinion of new readers. It was an effort to get people bridging the first season with the last one.

Did Flight 815 actually crash in S1E1 (the pilot episode)?
84 percent said yes; 15 percent said no.
After the first half of season one, one would have thought the yes answer would have been 99 percent. This was especially true after the show producers were adamant that the characters were not in purgatory.

But in the end, some are calling the sideways world purgatory (it is better named a waiting room to heaven than a place where people are working out their sins. Or in the hospital setting, a recovery room where characters were "awakened" by their past memories in order to "move on.") But the cross-over between the characters in the sideways world and the island world could mean that the worlds are connected in a single, spiritual realm where the sideways world is a repressed consciousness while the island is the conscious effort for redemption.

Did the plane crash? At the very least, there is the perception that a plane crashed and that certain souls survived it.

If Flight 815 crashed, where are the survivors?

Alive, on Earth: 30 percent
Alive, in a different realm: 30 percent
In limbo, purgatory: 30 percent
Dead, in the underworld: 7 percent

This may have been the most interesting aspect of the LOST Season 6 mid-point. Where the characters were was open to wide interpretation. In the end, the characters are "dead" in some afterlife realm, 37 percent would have been partially correct. If you believed the characters at some point were in a different realm, 67 percent would be partially correct. If you believed the characters were alive (especially on the island), 60 percent thought that was true. If you try to make a consensus out of these close opinions, it would seem that people believed the characters were "alive" but in a "different realm."

Then, if you factor in what Christian said, that everything Jack experienced was "real" including the sideways world, one could conclude that the show's unspoken definition of life and death does not have a normal definition. It could mean that the "reality" of human existence spans both being alive, being dead, then being "reborn."

Based on your (mid-season) expectations, how do you think LOST will end?

Great: 19 percent
Satisfactory: 28 percent
Underwhelming: 38 percent
Badly: 14 percent

Based on the reviews, comments and posts throughout the Internet, I think the vast majority of viewers found themselves in the Satisfactory or Underwhelming range. Many were satisfied with the sideways ending giving some happy-ending final resolution to the characters. But at the same time, there was major disappointment in the lack of answers to the island mysteries. Those who were satisfied with the ending have accepted the producer's premise that the show was not about answers but about the journey of the characters. In rebuttal, those underwhelmed (and the few really angry viewers) felt that if the writers were making a complex, layered storyline of events, mysteries and Easter egg clues, that they should have answered the questioned they posed to the viewers. Some felt conned or cheated in the end. Anyone can criticize the material presented to them; if this is how TPTB wanted to end their story, that is fine. But as some commentators said, "it could have been worse," or more to the point, "it could have been better."