RATS IN A CAGE

Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage...
Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage...
Someone will say what is lost can never be saved...
Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage...

Smashing Pumpkins.

This chorus could sum up LOST.

All the main characters led not "great" lives. They have had professional triumphs, but led painfully lonely personal lives. They may have had criminal pasts or mental issues which led to painfully lonely lives.

One could see the analogy of dropping broken spirited individuals onto an island to see how they interact with each other.

Daniel used a lab rat to experiment with conscious time travel.  In the end, it ruined his and his girlfriend's minds.

The analogy could go further to explain that the whole LOST experience could have been the tortured lost mind of Daniel after subjecting himself to his own experimental backlash.

The conflicting science in the show is the conflicting scientific principles colliding in Daniel's fragile mind which could not explain how his girlfriend was permanently injured. The idea of his step-father, Widmore, being an evil incarnate or his mother being a controlling soul trying to isolate him from the real world may have been phobia and paranoia of a comatose mind. For Daniel broke away from both his parents by imagining himself going back (in time) to an island to "rescue" plane crash victims.

Except, there were plane crash victims to save. Daniel's mind experiments may have unlocked a portal to an alternative universe or dimension which he could interact with the lost souls of Flight 815 as they journeyed through the after life. Daniel in essence was a hitch hiker on others cosmic journey in time and space. The afterlife has no physics or rules so it was hard for an analytical mind like Daniel's to cope with this new reality. A reality that his mind recognized but the other people he had mental contact with did not. The main characters were not aware that they were dead until the end. But instead of being upset by the news, the characters seemed surreal and content by their fate. They did not question how or why they died, or even where they were - - - - it was like a burden was lifted from each of the them with a large sigh of relief. Their experiment or journey was over. They were no longer rats in a cage for survival. They could move on to an eternal retirement.