HOW IT SHOULD HAVE ENDED

Since the finale, the negative reviews seem to be pounding the neutral-to-sweet "nice" ending for the characters reviews. The vile appears to be directly inserted into Season 6's bag of tricks: creating another new "story telling device" (the sideways world) while at the same time allowing all the important island events and mysteries to become meaningless. Some say the producers merely kept throwing "effects" at the audience for five seasons to keep the show alive. The critics howl that the producers had no legitimate story basis or "cause" for any of those "effects." Some have charted the unanswered questions as purely dead ends, throw out to the viewers with no preconceived answers. It is like Eloise, Faraday's lab rat, running a maze of dead ends; the only solution to the vexing story problems was the "sideways exit."

Some harsh critics view the last season and wrap up as the producers being "intellectually dishonest" to the fan base. If you are going to hoist science, science fiction or fantasy elements into a show, you should know the reason why 1 plus 2 equals 3. Otherwise, the even the charge "they are making it up as they go along" would be a sounder position than "they had no clue what they were doing; they were just throwing crazy twists against the wall to see if the viewers stuck to it." Like monkeys in a zoo throwing objects at each other for their own amusement. So, there is some bitterness in a growing number of hard core fans that they feel they were "conned" by TPTB into watching a unique sci-fi show that had no lasting "pay off" explanation.

If the producers and writers wanted to make a meaningful ending, they could have done so if they really wanted to do so . . . they could have tied all the elements into "their" sci-fi world, but in the end they did not even try that route. They decided to keep their story world vague and story line unexplained and confusing in order to not to answer the hundreds of burning questions from the fans.

For some fans, they are now looking for an external answer to disappointing conclusion. The most bitter question is "why?" Why create a new fabrication to end the show (dead limbo sideways purgatory)? Why throw out mysteries and events you had no answers to? Just to be smug? Just to mess with people's minds? Pure laziness?

The funny thing is that if those spiking questions are true, then TPTB could have played their hand better. In reading both sides of the Ending issue, there could be only one way to let the series live on with some vitality. They could have saved themselves the grief of the teeth grinding anger of Season 6 by merely ending the entire series with the Season 5 cliffhanger! Yes, the screaming Juliet fade to white light ending. It would have drawn comparisons to a Sopranos WTF? ending, but at least the fans could still rationally debate what it all means (or could mean). Season 6 flushed all rational debate down the toilet. After another season, we still really don't know if Jughead exploded; whether "it worked," whether the island was another sidecar rest stop in purgatory, whether it was just Jack's redemptive dream or plain shenanigans.