Huh?"

Oh, and when Jack goes flying through the air to kick Flocke in the face, it was a nicely composed shot and a decent air-punching moment.

Apart from that, the island storyline felt really blah. Almost everybody was relegated to the status of "extra," and I didn't really care if Lapidus and his gang flew off the island or not. I mean, yay, I guess. But since that plane was crammed with characters I'd long since stopped caring about, it was a bit anti-climactic.

Sigh. And then let's talk about the "flash-sideways" universe. So... almost everybody gets awakened to their memories of the "real" world by encountering their true love. Which means that Jack really was Kate's true love after all? But Kate wasn't Jack's. And Shannon was Sayid's true love? I mean, really? Shannon? Not Nadia? I mean, okay, whatever.

The two main exceptions, in this episode at least, were Jack and Locke. Jack gets awakened by his dad's coffin, and it seems as though his "true love" was the whole community of castaways, whose well-being he'd cared for so ineptly throughout the show's run. (Everybody else gets montages of just their love relationships, but Jack gets a montage of the whole gang, sort of.) And Locke, meanwhile, can't be reawakened to the "real" world until he has the mythical surgery and regains the ability to walk. Because walking, not Helen or anyone else, was Locke's true love. Or something. Wha huh? Or maybe it's supposed to be that the island was Locke's true love, and somehow regaining the ability to walk makes him think of the island.

And now we come to the revelation of the episode's final minutes, which I've been putting off talking about. The flash-sideways universe wasn't an alternate universe at all, it was... purgatory? Limbo? Some kind of afterlife way-station. And for some reason, the Losties had to come together in a church before they could move on to the real afterlife.

I can see this spawning a million parodies based around the opening monologue of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy."

So why was it 2004 in purgatory? Why was the island underwater? Why was Sawyer suddenly a cop? With Miles as his partner? (Even though Miles doesn't get to be there in the end.) And why were the details of Locke's accident changed so it was Locke's fault? Not to mention, why did Jack and Juliet have that creepy Stepford kid? (Because we were supposed to think this was an alternate universe that resulted from Jack's hydrogen bomb, and it was a fake-out.)

Those are questions we really shouldn't ask, I guess, because they don't matter. All that matters is that in the end, this particular community of people form something meaningful, even something holy, and they can't go to Heaven unless they all leave together. Yes, it's another set of Rules.

And the final moments, after Jack's dad gave his heavy-handed explanation, and everybody was gathered inside the church from Madonna's "Like A Prayer" video, and there were handshakes and reunions and a door full of light... I started swearing at my television set. I think I'm still in shock at how lame and idiotic the final five minutes or so felt.

In the end, it's hard not to see Lost as the longest con of them all. Not because we didn't get enough answers - it's really true that after this episode, I don't need any more answers than what we got. But because all along, Lost seemed to be a story. Until the end, when it wasn't. In the end, it was just a bunch of stuff that happened.

It's way too early to tell, but I have a feeling that this will go down in history with the "Patrick Duffy stepping out of the shower" thing on Dallas. It just felt like a cheap, cop-out ending. In a sense, nothing that happened in the "flash-sideways" universe mattered because they were all already dead, and they were going to "move on" eventually one way or another. And nothing on the island mattered, because... well, it just didn't seem to matter very much.

We'll have to wait a bit to see how the zeitgeist as a whole decides to think of this episode – maybe it'll wind up getting a free pass, because the show as a whole was so good. Maybe it'll wind up getting damned. But let's hope that people do remember how great Lost was at its best, since Lost was such an influential, successful show, and I hope somebody else eventually tries to duplicate all of its achievements.

As for me, I think I'm going to wind up thinking of Lost as an anthology show, another Twilight Zone or Outer Limits. It served up some wonderfully weird, allusive stories. It gave us some brilliant mind-benders. There were individual episodes and story arcs that stand out as among the best hours of television ever created. You just can't think of Lost as one unified story any more, because then you realize it all leads up to this utter flatness. This zone of apathy and new-age "walk into the light" catharsis.

But maybe you

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