SOAP OPERAS

The creator of the anime series, Baccano!, had a line in adapted episode which probably probably sums up LOST: 

Stories never begin, nor do they end. They are comprised of people living. An endless cycle of interacting, influencing each other, and parting ways.

It was a way to try to describe a complex and layered novella series with a wide range of characters. In the end, the confusion comes down to when a drama-adventure series turns into a standard soap opera.

Soap operas were early transpositions of live theater acting to the television audience. A weekday drama airing during the daytime, intended for women (particularly "homemakers"/"at-home moms"), soaps were known for excessively emotional acting and shallow plots and scripts. Soap operas are so-called because the earliest dramas, which originated in the 1950s and 1960s, were sponsored by soap-making companies.

When the LOST show runners continually defended their series from critics, they inferred that the critics did not get it: the show was about character development and not explanations of sci-fi story lines or mysteries.

The one difference between LOST and a standard soap opera is that LOST did have complex plots and scripts, but it had only vague and shallow answers to the mysteries and questions the plot lines posed to viewers. Viewers, who were as rabid as daily soap watchers, spent years trying to figure things out to minute detail. The problem with LOST is that it was not a long running soap opera in terms of fixed characters and slow moving to tedious cliche plots. LOST fans were promised by the creators and writers that it would be different; that if fans kept with them they would get answers to their questions. 

After Season 6 concluded, the show runners claimed that they had answered most of the "big" questions which set off another round of fan debates and arguments. However, Carlton Cuse said afterward, "Very early on we had decided that even though LOST is a show about people on the island, really, metaphorically, it was about people who were lost and searching for meaning and purpose in their lives. And because of that, we felt the ending really had to be spiritual, and one that talks about destiny. We would have long discourses about the nature of the show, for many years, and we decided it needed to mean something to us and our belief system and the characters and how all of us are here to lift each other up in our lives."

Damon Lindelof  explained, "For us, one of the ongoing conversations with the audience and there was a very early perception, was that the island was purgatory and we were always out there saying 'It's not purgatory, this is real, we're not going to Sixth Sense you.' And we felt it too that the show had to become sort of meta in this way. And so the writers said, 'Obviously, there are all these mysteries. But what if we answered a mystery that was never asked, what's the meaning of life and what happens when you die?'"

Damon added that the idea for the "Flash Sideways" world came about between the planning of seasons four and five because "We were out of flashbacks and we were done with flash forwards. So we started to think about, what if we sort of Trojan horsed in a paradoxical sideways story line?"

So basically, the show creators admit that they used soap opera techniques of changing course, mixing up the characters, adding strange and disturbing elements in order to keep the audience engaged in the show despite the show's writers running out of original ideas.

And even if the hidden agenda of the show was to ask The Big Questions, what's the meaning of life and what happens when you die,? LOST failed to deliver because there was no clarity on when the main characters died and where did their souls go. Was the island heaven? Was the island hell? Was the sideways world purgatory? Or heaven? Or was the O6 arc purgatory (as in Jack's breakdown and suffering return to the island)? Or was the O6 arc heaven (for characters like Walt who was in a normal family with school friends leading a normal life)? Or was it up to each viewer to impress their own belief system on to the events to come to their own conclusions?

Critics of the final season bring up the "more questions than answers" response to this narrative as proof that the show lost its bearings after Season Two by throwing disassociated concepts at the writers wall to see what would stick.

Fans of the final season are content with the mere fact that the main characters grew into a group of friends at the sideways church. That the loners, misfits and troubled souls could find a measure of happiness in the end, whether it was actually real or an illusion.