*** Spoilers Ahead ***
Update
Adding insult to injury, the dumbasses at ABC added the final images of the plane wreckage on the beach to the Lost finale so the "transition to the nightly news was softened". The wreckage wasn't actually part of the show. WTF? That changes everything and I really wanted to stop thinking about this POS. Giving up on my "it was all purgatory" theory, this semi-official Bad Robot post by a writer that worked on Lost has to be the best explanation of anything I've read on what happened on the show. It was still religious crap though.
Original Post
I only feel relief Lost is over. This is the second big TV series for me, Battlestar Galactica was the first, that appeared to be sci-fi but were really Trojan horses for religion. When Battlestar Galactica ended this way, I was so deeply invested in the show it crushed me. I was prepared to be disappointed in Lost, but after the show ended in the worst possible scenario, I am going to be extremely cautious about watching any long running serialized sci-fi show. If you're watching one of these shows right now, here's how you might spot one of these shapeshifters:
This is not to say that a sci-fi show needs to be able to scientifically explain everything shown on screen, their is a difference between magic and religion.
Magic > Religion
Magic in a science based show is not the same as religion. Magic are feats that are unexplainable with our current technology. For example, the communicator in Star Trek The Original Series I argue was magic for people that watched the show live. Viewers accepted it and the show never explained how it worked, no technobabble. Less than 20 years after the show, we had the functional equivalent.
A religious show is one that foists the dogma of a religious institution(s) on its viewers without calling them out by known names. If I knew what I was watching in Lost for sure before last nights finale, I would have turned it off long ago and never looked back. When you have to hide your religious propaganda for fear of losing viewers, it is not the same as magic as a plot device, and it borders on proselytizing.
Stargate SG-1: Science, Magic, Religion and Gods Done Right
By comparison, Stargate SG-1 treated the possibility of gods and associated ideas as alien species. Some were benevolent, and earth stories of myth were created by a technologically simple people to explain the wonders witnessed, e.g. teleportation. Other aliens abused their advanced technology to trick simple people into worshipping them, purely for the adulation or their own financial enrichment. These were the shows bad guys. That part of the show was great.
Which brings us back to what Lost was about
After perhaps season 2 or 3 of Lost, I suspected after reading numerous theory sites we were getting the old bait and switch. It looked like a sci-fi show, but its really about religion. Not even religion as a plot device, but the point of the whole show was to document a religious process. I continued watching because I do love a good mystery, and at least Lost provided that. After seeing the finale, if you are still confused about what the show was about, you have over-thought what you just saw. I could easily be wrong, but here's what I think happened on Lost:
If you are an atheist like me, here's what happened after the plane crash:
If you are a christian, the explanation of what the show was has been hiding in plain site all along. Jack's father is Christian Shephard. More precisely, Jack's father is a christian shepherd. Here's what Lost meant:
That's it. I am not going to watch the show over again to try and convince myself there was something else there, that I missed a plot point, it really was all internally consistent and there is another explanation. There isn't. The end of the series, the last 10 minutes, could only been more clear if Christian Shephard had said:
What about Fringe?
Fringe appears to be Bad Robot's (J.J. Abrams television and movie production company that made Lost makes Fringe) antidote for Lost. By the end of season 1 and now through season 2, Fringe has been moving fast. There has been very little that seems likely or even possible they could attempt to answer with religious explanations. The plot and the characters are evolving together and so far remain internally consistent, at least it seems that way to me.
Conclusion
I felt like writing this was necessary to move on with my life, nearly 4 days of which were spent watching Lost. It certainly did not deserve that time. The older I get and the larger the disappointments become, the more I conclude that no individual entertainment is worth committing that much time to. So if nothing else, I thank Lost for showing me that what has been lost was my time.