My take on the finale by Brandon

Here's my take on the show. Everything we saw in seasons 1-5 happened from the plane crash to the hydrogen bomb, Dharmaville, the flashbacks/forwards, time travel and everything in between was real in the universe of Lost. What I think many people didn't realize was the show was not about answering every single tiny little question and plot twist that came along. The show wasn't even about the mysteries. It was about the characters we came to know and love.

In the final season we began to see the flash-sideways time-line alongside the original timeline, which picked back up in 2007 after our Losties were flashed 30 years to the present. Juliet successfully detonated the bomb but there was a time flash which instantly transported them to safety... blah blah blah we already know this.

People made the mistake of thinking these two time-lines were going to merge at some point. Suddenly, in the last five minutes of the show we saw Jack dying on the island lying next to Vincent cut together with the scene in the church. Christian calmly told Jack he was dead, and Jack was dead too. He also said something very important about there being no concept of time "here".

After a little thought I have decided the alternate reality was a sort of limbo in which our characters found each other in death, helped each other remembered how they died and helped them "let go" and accept redemption. This is why Jack saw all the most influential people from his Island days, because that was the most important time of his life and they were the ones who helped him along his journey.

They did not all die at the same time, but what we saw in the finale was death from Jack's perspective. If they had chosen to do another flash-sideways episode we could have seen this scene from anybody's perspective (i.e. the plane crashing after Lapidus thought he was flying them to safety, and Kate drowning in the plane, or Hurley living to a ripe old age on the island governing it fairly and "moving on")

As for the rest of the story and what the Island is, why it was special, why it needed a guardian and the rules? Those questions were never answered because Lost was a show about people and perspective. All the people who knew about the island's origins (Dogen, the temple dwellers and the descendants of the Island's original inhabitants, Mother, Jacob, the Man in Black, the survivors of the Dharma Initiative) were dead and their stories were not passed on.

At first I was disappointed by the ending but I think it fits nicely with the concept of perspective. We see Jack's story to completion and it ended right where it started.