After the debate of whether the two-part finale crashed and burned like Flight 815 in the pilot episode, the LOST communities and commentators quickly faded from mainstream memory. No more weekly back and forth in the blogs and message boards about alleged clues, plot twists or personal theories. In the end, those outside-the-show interactions between other LOST fans were more important and enjoyable than the actual show's conclusion.
There was no cliffhanger. Either you were satisfied with the ending or you were severely disappointed. but wrapped around that gut level reaction was the gauze of what the heck really happened?
There were more misdirection, deception, lies, red herrings, dead ends, dropped story arcs, continuity errors, big question-no answer elements than anyone could have kept track of, let alone try to piece together in some reasonable form. Despite the loud cries from TPTB that LOST was not a show about hell, limbo purgatory or the after life, the End ended in a wait station in the after life, devoid of the science of time (linear or otherwise) or real reflection (if the island was real and so important, why did they not remember it when they created the sideways world?).
But you could stretch for the answer that was hidden in plain view from Season 1. Kate, the fugitive, has a dark secret to share. She wants Jack to know why the Marshal was after her.
“I want to tell you what I did—why he was [chasing] after me.”
Jack just shook his head. “I don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter, Kate, who we were—what we did before this, before the crash. … Three days ago we all died. We should all be able to start over.”
The answer was exactly as Jack told Kate: they all died in the crash. And the entire hidden in plain view was each character's personal journey to start over again. Not in an underworld sense of repentance or redemption by a series of painful trials in order to purify one's soul. But in the sense of over-writing one's hard drive of human emotions, errs, flaws and torments, not in a religious purification ritual, but like erasing then rebooting a computer hard drive.
For some reason, the survivors of Flight 815 did not die in a traditional, religious sense. They did die in a human sense, but were granted an opportunity to find their "true character" in the spiritual island realm. Their new "lives" and final report card was solely based on island events in order to meet Christian's definition that all the church participants' most important aspect of their (new) lives was with each other on the island purgatory.
Just as the wreckage of the airplane on the beach symbolized the wreckage of their past lives, the survivors who were willing to put themselves to the test of becoming lost then found in true friendship would survive to live in the End.
And that may be the final lesson of LOST. The friendships of the community that bounced wit, humor, facts, theories, arguments, puzzles, Easter eggs and frustration for six years.
