Thoughts on the end of Lost:

— The episode title had a double meaning. Not just “The End” of the show, but… the real end. Death. The end of the show was about Buddhism. Letting go. Accepting death. All questions lead to more questions, as Allison Janney’s character said in “Across the Sea.” You get no answers in life. Life is about being lost. Death is the only place where you are not lost. It is the eternal answer.

It gives greater symbolism to all those times on the show when we focused in on someone’s eye opening. Waking up, pain, constant conflict and struggle, terror, alertness, awareness of suffering: life. With the end of the show comes the end of Jack: death. The end of pain and suffering and struggle.

Rose and Bernard had it right in last season’s finale, “The Incident.” When Sawyer, Kate and Juliet ran into them and explained how they had to stop Jack or they all would die, Bernard shrugged and said, “So we die.” Rose and Bernard had already learned to let go.

— Even though this wasn’t the answer for the flash-sideways universe I would have written, I accept it. It was poetic and poignant. It worked for me. I respect Cuse and Lindelof’s choices.

That said… a bit too much deception and manipulation on their part. This whole season, it seemed like the flash-sideways world was a result of the nuclear bomb. In “Happily Ever After” (that episode title makes more sense now), I thought Widmore put Desmond into the electromagnetic chamber in order to make him see the flash-sideways universe, because Widmore somehow knew about it, and Desmond’s knowledge of it would somehow help save the island. I thought the flash-sideways characters and the real characters would somehow penetrate the barrier between their two worlds and help make things right. But it turns out there was no connection after all. Widmore put Desmond into the chamber merely to test his electromagnetic resistance and see if he could survive in the Heart of the Island in order to help save it, yes. But what happened to Desmond in the flash-sideways world in that episode wasn’t connected plotwise to what happened to him in the real world in that episode. I think.

But… Eloise wasn’t part of the group who created the flash-sideways purgatory. The group would have had to create her. But none of them knew that she had killed Faraday and that she would therefore not want to let go of that world. So… that didn’t really make sense. Actually, I guess Jack and Kate read Faraday’s journal in the Others’ tent in 1977, and could have pieced it together, right? So they could have known.

Still, I don’t know. Cuse and Lindelof were a bit too clever by half in their deception (or not clever enough?), and the execution was kind of sloppy. Doesn’t totally make sense as a story. But even if it didn’t totally work for me logically and intellectually, it worked for me poetically and emotionally. I don’t totally buy it, but I do accept it and love it for what it is, if that makes sense.

— I guess Ben wasn’t ready to let go. Still atoning? Wanting to spend more time with imaginary Danielle and Alex, even if he knew it was imaginary?

— I really lost it when Claire gave birth to Aaron and Charlie came back in and all of Claire’s memories of the two of them came flashing back. Full-on waterworks. Tears, sniffling, shortness of breath. It happened again to a lesser extent when Sawyer and Juliet reunited. Those moments were just incredibly sweet and touching and emotionally fulfilling.

— As I said on Twitter: Jack Shephard was the William Henry Harrison of Island protectors.

— I wonder what year Hurley and Ben finally died. How long did they protect the island? I want to see a show where they have eternal life and they eventually bring another group of candidates to the island who arrive in a futuristic robot plane or boat and they are cyborgs.

— So Shannon, not Nadia, is Sayid’s true love?

— I really want to know what happened to Sawyer, Kate and Claire when they left the island and got back to the real world. What did they do for the rest of their lives? Especially Sawyer. Did he spend the rest of his life alone, pining for Juliet, until he died?

— Took me a while to figure out what the ending meant, especially when I saw the shoe still stuck in the bamboo tree after all this time. First I thought the whole island experience had turned out to have been a figment of Jack’s imagination, and that he had actually died in the first few seconds of the pilot episode. But no, he wasn’t wearing the same clothes as in the pilot, and he saw the Ajira plane overhead, and of course if he died in the pilot, he would never have had the profound experiences with everyone on the island, and what his father said to him in the church (that they all created this purgatory/holding area together because they had their most significant experiences of their lives together) wouldn’t have made sense. (Nor would Ben’s conversations outside the church with Locke and with Hurley.)

— So… I liked the ending. Everyone together and happy. It gave me this nice and warm feeling: this tight group of people who had these transformative experiences together.

Lost is over. But I won’t be letting go of it for a long time.

R.I.P, Losties.