LAND OF DEAD ENDS

The drama of the series was to create believable story lines - - - conflict that the characters had to deal with - - -  in order to find a real climax and conclusion to the series. There were so many diverse story arcs that seemed to have real significance that turned out to be story dead ends.

With all the Dharma hatches, orientation films, and sci-fi experimentation, we thought that all those different stations would be pulled together into a cohesive explanation of all the island mysteries. Many people thought the greatest clue of all time was the Blast Door Map. But we were wrong. The stations were merely stages and they had no real impact in the final season.

The Season 5 cliffhanger with Juliet pounding away on the atomic bomb, hoping that it would blow everyone up (to allegedly reboot the time on the island). That was the debate: did the bomb go off? Did the bomb explode in the white light? Did the island re-boot the time line because of Juliet? Why would a nuclear device change time? The whole Hatch, Incident, and time travel story lines had no impact on the sideways world. It is fairly clear that these were edgy and emotional moments, but they did not matter in the series final "battle."

The major story line around Juliet and Claire was the island's failure to allow women to give birth. The infertility problem was supposed to be a big clue of what the island was - - - and the deaths of pregnant women was the key. But we got no answers to that story line either. When Locke was trying to ascend to the leadership of the Others, we only got a mild sideslap by Alpert who considered Ben's "projects" a waste of time and away from their real purpose, a purpose that was never disclosed to us.

The whole spiritual-religion-ritual Egyptian temple stories, including the smoke monster invading the sanctuary of the temple as crazy Claire was trapped in a pit, made reference to life and death, but in such in indiscriminate and unreal fashion. Why did MIB have to kill all the temple people? That action did not "free" it. In a Star Trek analogy, many of the final seasons contained stories like this: red shirts on missions being wiped out by violence. For no apparent reason except some emotional visual on the TV screen.

Even the love stories seemed forced, unrealistic, and not warm and fuzzy. It still makes no sense that Kate winds up with Jack. The idea that Sun and Jin would be divided by time in order to fall back in love seems, universal physics in suspense,  unbelievable.

But the greatest high speed highway exit ramp dead end was the Jacob and MIB story. It was the main focus of the last season. It's set-up was a battle between supernatural beings, but the reasons never stated except that they had been on the island for thousands of years. The light and dark, good and bad, moral and evil symbols had no final meaning in the end. We still don't know what Jacob or MIB were, or what they truly represented to the story foundation. It is not like their story line was the final gate to break through a video game level to be "rewarded" with a sideways happy ending.

If you trace the "big" plot lines of the series, you will find a tangled spaghetti bowl of inconsistencies, hanging stories, continuity errors, and lack of an overall story dynamic. I think many people were drawn into the complexity and layers of different stories because they had been promised by TPTB that they would find out what it all meant in the end.