[bewitched]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

For me, it's not so much which questions were answered or not, it's the sheer magnitude of them. That's not even my biggest problem with the finale or the final season. But watch that video I linked to. The overwhelming quantity of unexplained stuff that begged explanation is staggering.

See, I don't think it needed explaining. Are there unanswered questions I would have liked an answer for...sure. Did I need an answer...no. The other stuff, no matter how spectacular, was clearly just (extraordinary) fluff of a life lived. The island was (is) an extraordinary place that afforded extraordinary experiences, but in the end, they were experiences of the castaways presented, at times by Jacob as a way to parse and, at other times, merely as circumstance, which facilitated their redemption and their ultimate salvation.

The utter disrespect for the audience in throwing so much absolutely pulled out of their asses stuff, all the while insisting there was some grand plan where most of that stuff would come to make sense, is hubris of the worst quality. It was all outright lies and bullsh!t.

IMO, you are placing far too much emphasis on our own (personal) feelings and not enough on what was presented as a means to facilitate a story or life. Stories are rarely strictly linear. There is fluff. There is nonsense. There are unanswered questions. I will never be able to answer why my father hates me; why life chose to give me a perfect daughter when I had planned for none. Some questions are never answered. Some beg for an answer that never comes. They didn't have to manipulate flashbacks. They didn't have to manipulate a closing scene to fit with an opening scene. Did they always know 100% where they were going? No. They had a general idea of a beginning and an end. They had a story to tell. sometimes it went off track just as reality sometimes goes off track. Most of life's questions go unanswered and yet we still find a beginning and an understanding of the end.

The fact that I knew it all along, and have been saying so since Season One, makes it all the more infuriating. I had to deal with Lost apologists for six years, and it gives me no pleasure to be right in the end, and to have endured six years of undeserved mockery for my convictions that the writers had none.

And you know, no disrespect intended, I have to question why you stuck it out. You have been a pessimist and someone who clearly has been infuriated by the lack of a neatly tied package from the beginning. Why did you keep watching when you clearly hated it so?

I'm no apologist. LOST needs no apology. It's a frickin' TV show. Either you bought into it, or at the very least agreed to go along for the ride, or you never bought in to the premise and thought the whole thing was a bunch of crap. I don't think any of us who loved the ride would for a second apologize for agreeing to suspend reality (and perhaps the natural order) for an hour a week.

I don't think you're right (and quite frankly, I suspect you derive a great deal of pleasure from thinking you now have definitive prove to give you an "I told you so."). I think a story was told. It was well told. It made me laugh, it made me cry...it made me look forward to Tuesday night. Was it always exactly what the writers originally had in mind? I don't know, circumstances (such as Mr. Eko's 3 season arc unexpectedly becoming a 15 episode +/- arc) change, people (Walt) change. Do I care? Not really. Would I think differently if I had an exact outline of their original plans? Maybe. But I didn't. I was along for the ride. It was wild. I was unpredictable. It was amazing. And yes, at times it was stupid, pointless and pedantic but you know what? It was a great ride. I'll miss my Tuesday nights. I'll miss my Wednesday obsessive armchair quarterbacking. I'm satisfied to think the characters I've grown to love have found their redemption, have found their peace....