Convergence?
One of the worst film and TV tropes is when a character has a very important piece of information, but refuses to explain what’s going on because “you just have to see it or figure it out for yourself.”To the average viewer, this proposition is almost never true; it’s just a contrived way of dragging out a scene for a dramatic effect or to stretch story arcs with filler material. In reality, there are very few events that cannot be explained in one sentence.
How many times during LOST did you yell at the screen telling a character to ask an obvious question to another character?!
In their end chats, the producers are keen to say that part of the appeal of LOST was the questions and not the answers. Well, yes and no. Yes, viewers were captivated by the mysteries and unanswered questions, but no, the vast majority of viewers wanted answers to those mysteries and questions. And the funny thing is, any answer would have been okay.
The collision of two parallel universes with the island as a focal point. Fine.
The collective delusions of a mental institution patient roster. Fine.
The surreality of phasing between realms like heaven and hell. Fine.
The overlapping world of invisible dopplegangers. Fine.
It was all a dream. Fine.
A bad answer is still an answer. It is a matter of subjective opinion.
But not to answer is a matter of objective scorn.
Mysteries and questions create the action which must converge with answers in order to resolve the story plot issues. Otherwise, it is mostly a mental roller coaster ride of nothingness, just the fleeting thrill of the plot twists and turns.
If you want to leave the viewers to figure it all out by themselves, then you must give them actual clues and not dead ends or red herrings to get to the answer. Agatha Christie does not end her books with a a blank page after the sentence, "and the murderer is . . ." LOST gets poor marks from giving clues in context and continuity to paint the final picture for viewers.
Some believe that the "filler" or the roller coast ride so to speak dragged down and altered the LOST experience. The idea of the Other 48 tail section passengers was clearly filler. In the Star Trek universe, they were Red shirts (fodder to be killed off). The back story of the Dharma folks was immaterial and irrelevant to the castaways story of survival. The back story of Jacob and his brother was also not a focal point to move the viewers toward Season 1 and 2 answers. The time travel story arc was a continuity mess and weakest part of the show.
If you strip away the layers of filler paint, what is left on the canvas?
The producers claim that the big picture was The Big Question: life and death.
But they did a poor account of communicating their position on the meaning of life and the purpose of death. There was no moral center in the stories. There was no judgment or punishment for sins. There was no redemptive moments. TPTB that the ending was more spiritual than anything else. But that is not an answer, it is a white wash because spirituality can mean thousands of different things to a thousand different people. How did Jack become "spiritual?" He never did either in life or in death. He had no religious convictions or contemplation of the universe during the series. So it is specious to say that the show was about Jack's spiritual journey.
The only thing that converged in the end was Jack's soul to his body in some after life church. But that does not answer how or why Jack got to that point of existence, or for that matter, what existence Jack had before entering the church.
Perhaps the writing of the show was parallel to early first person shooter video games, that run through various levels of game play (the action) with no real end point or goal.
