Why I am not happy with the Lost finale

I've generally enjoyed Lost over the past few seasons, and I've come to accept that many of the plot elements on the show can be explained no better than Star Wars can explain the Force, or X-men can explain how mutant superpowers work. There's a point when you have to stop asking "why" and enjoy the content given that the writers can never fully explain every single detail. That's fine.

What's not fine, however, is brushing these things aside as if they aren't special or noteworthy or like they don't matter or like the viewer shouldn't expect the worlds built around these things to ultimately be important. My dissatisfaction with Lost is on the same level as Luke telling us the force isn't special, or the X-Men telling us that the battle for the rights of the mutants wasn't important. Those things have to be important, or there was no point telling the story to begin with.

Ultimately there was no reason Lost couldn't have just been a very special and well done example of science fiction storytelling with a clear plot that began, built up, and ended with a resolution of a number of conflicts. There's no reason it had to suddenly turn into this weird unclear spiritual quagmire in the final episode. The finale was a cop-out of proportions I have never personally experienced. Is this how fans of the Sopranos felt? Is it worse?

Anyway, let me get into the specifics of my issues with the finale:

1. Unclear what happened

A lot of people on Twitter are saying that people who didn't like the ending simply didn't understand it. Really, now, I think I am a smart enough guy with a lot of experience following weird show plots and reading crazy prose. I totally can see the various ways the finale can be explained, but this finale will have people arguing about it, and that's bad for a season that was prefaced with the idea that all will be revealed. If everything was revealed, why are we still arguing about it? It's not 100% clear what happened. We were five minutes from the end of the entire run of this show without a totally clear idea of what was going on. Did the final 5 minutes explain it all?

Will it even matter if the crew behind the show comes out and tells us what they meant? If Michelangelo came out and told us that the statue of David was a woman, would we think it was a woman? The art should speak for itself.

2. Missing characters

I know it would be hard to schedule every actor to come back for the finale, but that's not my problem. There were MAJOR characters totally missing, and no matter what interpretation of the ending you have, you can't be satisfied with the idea that this resolution left out characters who had extremely major plot arcs. Where were Michael and Walt? I believe the actor for Michael was mad at the way his character was handled. Once again, not my problem. I could definitely deal with these people not being there, but it's still a problem and flies in the face of people saying that the ending was perfect. Not perfect.

3. What does it mean to "let go" or "not let go"?

This is similar to the first point, but it's such a huge hole that I need to address this by itself. Ben and Eloise couldn't let go, I assume, and that's why they both resisted entering the church at the end. What does that even mean, though, in terms of story? What happens to them if they don't let go? Is it a bad thing? Ben's ending actually seemed fairly happy. He finally got what he wanted, and he got forgiveness for his most heinous crime. So what exactly am I supposed to think of him not being able to enter the church at the end and join everyone else? This was a BRAND NEW idea that was just introduced minutes before the end, it had no special connection to the story we'd been watching all along. His story was already resolved. What could it possibly mean to not have him with everyone else to share in that? On a similar note, what was the deal about Eloise not wanting to let go and let Daniel join everyone? The world we were shown seemed happy enough. Is it a bad thing at this point if she's clinging to her beloved son? What did it mean to enter the church? What would it have meant for Ben or Eloise, and why would that have changed the plot one way or another? All we can do is guess! Do I need to have a spiritual outlook to understand? I don't want to have to be spiritual to understand a TV show built around good old-fashioned storytelling!

Then again, someone could come along and tell me this point is stupid because I am misunderstanding the plot. Refer to point 1.

3. Major plot points not sufficiently addressed or addressed in a very patronizing way.

A great example of this is Jack telling us that having Jacob's power is no different from before. Jacob is a guy who painstakingly followed and stalked around all the people he would bring to the island - in a mysterious plane crash, no less. I was so excited to see how Jack's new powers would play out and what he could do with them. Oh, sorry, no powers. Nothing. Jacob was just a weirdo who made up that these people were chosen and randomly was able to appear all over the world to be in their lives. Hurley can see dead people, Miles can talk to the dead, smoke monster can see the dead, become a deadly smoke cloud, AND shapeshift. Jack becomes Jacob and he is the same as always? That's so patronizing and a huge cop-out. Jacob had powers. We all know he had powers. That's one of the main premises of the plot of this show and one of the huge revelations in the last couple seasons is that there's this guy Jacob who is actually making them come to the island to live out these tests of humanity in the name of finding a protector for the light.

Unfortunately, this is just one good example in a pile of many examples where a core plot element was brushed to the side like it didn't mean anything.


4. It didn't have to be this way

I feel very strongly that what the writers had built up could have all been resolved in a number of ways that would have addressed most of my complaints here. Lost is like your favorite song missing the last 30 seconds. You know it could have ended well, it just didn't. I am confident that people will draft alternate ways the show could have ended which would have satisfied most people a lot more. I don't want to make people who loved the ending mad, but I feel pretty strongly that there wasn't just one good way it could have ended for you, either, and I believe even more strongly that a significantly larger number of people could have enjoyed it given the material the writers were working with.