THE ENDING

Michael Emerson, who played Ben, earlier this year gave an interview about his time on LOST.

When asked about the ending, he said he understood what the writers and producers were doing with the story. He said that by the end, the series have various tangent story lines going out from the beginning, in both time and space. He agreed with the decision to go back to the beginning in order to end the series. He said the TPTB decided to go with a spiritual end.

Many fans would agree with Emerson that the spiritual ending was a fine way to end the series.

But the main complaint of the spiritual ending as it was presented to us was that it did not explain the previous five long seasons of events and mysteries.

LOST exploded on the television scene. It took critics and fans by storm. Like a real explosion, TPTB had to top themselves on a weekly basis by throwing more drama and mysteries at the public. They did so by spoon feeding parts of back stories, adding crazy mysteries like polar bears in the tropics, and power struggles among various island factions. That would have been well and good but for the added madness of time travel, frozen donkey wheels, island disappearing, ancient civilization hieroglyphs and the Numbers of the Hatch. You can't just throw out a dozen new story arcs with crazy attributes and not answer them - - - how they are connected to the main story line.

The main story line itself was lost by the third season. The idea of rescue became a non-focal point. Even the idea of survival from rival tribes seemed to be secondary to the weird science fiction elements that have been thrust before our viewing eyes.

For a show that landed its ending on a spiritual note, there was very little spiritualism in the series. There were some religion icons in the background, but there was no moral center to the series. There was no real punishment for those who did heinous crimes. There were little debate between right and wrong. In fact, just listing the attributes and events of each character would create a long rap sheet for most of them. More than a few of them would have been institutionalized as criminally insane, including Ben.

So the series created a massive among of diverging story mysteries that were analyzed by fans for clues and meaning, but abandoned all those allegedly important stories for a spiritual reunion in the sideways realm. There is a huge gap in logic on why the characters in the church met back up in the after life when in fact most of them had stronger bonds with other people, especially their family members. The spiritual ending did not answer any of the real questions that were posed by TPTB and that drove the rabid attention of fans.

Once TPTB exploded the series into fragments of diverse story lines, scientific principles, strange occurrences, they had no means to reconstruct the early story. In other words, they broke the ceramic plate and they could not put the pieces back together. And this is why the ending still hits a raw nerve with many fans.

They feel that LOST was a great show with a bad ending. Even the most forgiving fans say that LOST was a great show with a satisfying ending. But a great show should have a great ending. When led down the path with great expectations, the show should have delivered a mind blowing conclusion and not another story U-turn.