Anyway, I get why some people are frustrated by the final episode. It didn't answer a lot of the show's lingering questions (what are the numbers, how did the dharma initiative find out about the island, and what happened to walt (though in regards to the last question the answer is obvious - he was too busy starring in The Blind Side)), and didn't give a definitive answer to the big one - What exactly is the island? Personally, about half way through this season I decided that there was no way everything was going to be answered satisfactorily and decided not to get too hung up about it (see how enlightened I am), really I just wanted to go along with the ride. Wherever that ended up probably wouldn't be wholly satisfying, but I hoped it would at least be compelling.
That said, I think the writers really had two ways they could have ended the show. They could have gone with the big screw with everybody's head ending, which would probably have involved the world ending, or they could have just focused on providing some sort of resolution to the character's lives and leave it at that. Obviously they chose the latter and I can't really blame them. Had they decided just to blow Hurley to smithereens (for example) I think the majority of the fan base would have been even more pissed than they are now. Overall I think the resolution was a satisfying one and, once you accept that the show was so ambitious that there was no way that any ending would have tied everything up nicely, its difficult to fault the writers too much for going the direction they did.
A few more random thoughts:
1) Its interesting that this was really just a resolution of the last two seasons, and not so much the whole show. This lends some credence to the idea that while they creators may have had some general idea about where to go with the show from the beginning, they really were just throwing up a lot of white noise to see what would stick before they were given a definitive end date by ABC.
2) I also think the ambiguous ending is in keeping with how the entire show has played out. More than any other show I can think of (with the obvious exception of Everybody Loves Raymond), its really made an effort to 'show not tell' and leave a lot to the fan's imaginations. While I do think they could have done a better job wrapping up some of the big questions over the final few weeks, I think its just as likely that had the resolution been more explicit the whole thing would have felt forced and a little corny. That said I think a special edition DVD with anextra half hour of explanatory footage is inevitable.
3) I'm going to be really interested to see how Lost plays in syndication. Unlike other 'mythology' heavy shows in the past (X files, Buffy, etc) Lost doesn't really have many stand alone episodes, and you can't really just drop in at any point and get a feel for whats going on. I would think that would limit new viewers, and existing fans have already seen everything. Of course I'm the same guy who thought nobody would buy Avatar on DVD because without 3-D it really wasn't anything special, and its become the best selling disk of all time so what do I know.
I'll just finish up by saying that overall Lost was an incredibly interesting show I enjoyed the ride. It may also be the last of its kind (a high budget network, effects heavy, network show) since as TV becomes more fragmented its unlikely that there will be enough incentive to mount a production on its level since the large audience won't be around to sustain it. Still I look forward to revisiting it on DVD and seeing if knowing what, sort of, was going on the whole time detracts form my enjoyment.
One more note: I watched this episode live because I didn't think there was any way I would be able to not hear the ending. Big mistake. The first two hours went like this - 5 minutes of show, followed by three minutes of commercials. It was unbearable. If they hadn't shown the last twenty minutes commercial free I think the show would have been in violation of some sort of FCC standard about content per hour. I mean I get that ABC knows they got a captive audience, but come on. This was ridiculous.
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