Once upon a time, there was a television show about a bunch of people on an island. For six years it was one of the most fascinating things on TV. And then it ended, in the worst way possible. 
 
 Lost ended tonight, and with it the hopes and dreams of millions of people who thought it might finally get good again. SPOILER ALERT: It didn't. What did we learn? Nothing. We learned nothing from two-and-a-half hours of slow-motion bullshittery backed with a syrupy soundtrack. 
 
 Everyone loves to see characters who haven't been around for a while, right? Juliet! Where have you been? Shannon! Long time since you were around, irritating all of us and ruining Sayid. But good to see you, I guess! Rose and Bernard! Nice beard, bro! And Vincent! The goddamn dog! There you are, doing dog stuff. How great is it to get all these characters back? Not very great at all, as it turns out. 
 
 For years, the show's creators and actors have been running the same bullshit line about how Lost is a character-driven show. Here is the thing, though: It is not a character-driven show. It is a show, that has characters! But the characters do not "drive" the show, except in the sense that they do things that help advance the plot. Because it is a "plot-driven" show! Lost is a show that is interesting because it has an interesting plot. Frankly, most of the characters suck! Especially Kate. And Jack. And Sawyer. And, really, all of them, except for Ben. 
 
 So what we got was a show with an engaging, mysterious plot, that was constantly being sabotaged by fool writers who thought that what the audience really wanted was, like, a love triangle. A love square! "Yes, Mr. Cuse, I don't give a shit about the donkey wheel. What I really am after is the answer behind the mystery of Jack's hideous tattoo." 
 
 And yet, somehow, we all kept coming back. I'm not going to use the "abusive relationship" metaphor, because that's hacky and offensive, but I'll say this: Those guys know how to write a finale. Season after season, it was the same thing: The first five or six episodes were great. The middle ten were terrible—just lazy, premise-stretching garbage—and then they'd pull it together for the finale. 
 
 Do you remember the hatch lighting up? Or Jack blasting In Utero and realizing that you were witnessing—I still shit my pants thinking about this years later—a flash-forward? That was why we kept watching the show: The amazing, game-changing, cliffhanger finales. 
 
 And so it stood to reason that maybe they would pull together this pitiful excuse for a season with some kind of halfway-coherent, tightly-paced, tightly-plotted finale that would answer some of our lingering questions and wash the taste of C.J. Cragg as Hypatia out of our mouths. Ha, ha! Why did I think that? 
 
 What we got instead was another two hours of running around the goddamn island with everyone having feelings and stuff—which wasn't even that bad, honestly!—and then, and I have to type this in caps because it's the only way to really let my rage out, IT TURNED OUT THAT THEY HAD ALL DIED. All of them! And not even all together, simultaneously, in some awesome disaster/explosion. They had all died, at various times, throughout history. (Except for Michael and Walt, apparently!) And then they, like, remembered that they were dead, in this terrible, unfortunate excuse for Heaven they had created, and the Church went to white, and Jack was lying there, dying, with the dog. 
 
 The dog. I swear to God, Abrams, Super 8 better be a fucking masterpiece. 
 
 Look: I had given up on getting any interesting answers to any of the thousands of questions I still had. When the explanation for "the whispers" came, I hung my head, and thought, "Well, I guess this is how it has to happen." 
 
 But I expected more from the flash-sideways (I cannot believe they have compelled me to use that word, "flash-sideways," though I suppose it is technically a "flash-way-the-hell-forward-to-when-everyone-is-dead"). I have taken a creative writing class or two (can you tell?) and do you know this thing they teach you? "Don't end your story with all your characters being dead." It is like cheating. It is worse than cheating! It is the wussiest thing a writer can do. And these smug dickheads went ahead and did it. 
 
 So here's my proposal: Let's get another season. We'll all agree to forget the flash-sideways ever existed. Let's just get Ben and Hurley running the island, making jokes and being bros and doing fun things. Is that too much to ask for? Because I don't have anything to be obsessed about anymore. And I really don't want to start watching V. 
 
 [Pic via ABC] ||||| Mario Perez/ABC 
 
 
 
 Mike Hale has more on the series finale of “Lost” here. 
 
 This post contains spoilers. The real spoilers. 
 
 Well, it was better than the “Life on Mars” finale. 
 
 But you have to think that the gauzy, vaguely religious, more than a little mawkish ending of ‘Lost’ — “Touched by a Desmond” — will not sit well with a lot of the show’s fans. Many of them will have thought that things were going pretty well for the first two and a quarter hours of the final episode, as the producers treated them to a series of montaged moments in the sideways reality world, in which the main characters regained their memories of the island. But then came the ending, in which most of the main cast members gathered at a church for the big reveal: they were all dead. 
 
 And they knew it now, though Jack, as always, took the longest to catch on. (Or maybe just Jack was dead, and this was his funeral?) His father told him: “This is the place that you all made together so that you could find one another. The most important part of your life was the time that you spent with these people. That’s why all of you are here.” With that, white light flooded the church and they all went … well, who knows. 
 
 Meanwhile, back on the island, Jack, having saved the world and then passed stewardship of the place along to Hurley, staggered into the bamboo field where the series started with Jack’s eye opening after the crash of Oceanic 815. Stabbed by the Man in Black, he lay down to die next to Vincent (who had been kept by Rose and Bernard all these years). As the Ajira plane passed overhead, carrying Frank, Richard, Miles, Kate, Sawyer and Claire to safety — or were they already dead? — we saw a close-up of Jack’s eye closing, taking “Lost” full circle. 
 
 The best moments of the finale were the ones when memories flooded back to Sun and Jin (who got their English back one last time), to Sayid and Shannon, and to Sawyer and Juliet, who recoiled as if they’d each touched a live wire. The island scenes, in which Desmond put out the golden light, Jack killed the Man in Black before he could flee, and then Jack turned the light back on, were wan and rushed, as the island narrative has been throughout Season 6. But there was some funny byplay primarily involving Hurley, Ben and Miles, and fans of Michael Emerson who like to see Ben’s good-soldier side were rewarded. 
 
 So what was the island? Those who have been voting for purgatory all along can make a case, though it seems highly unlikely that the creators had anything so specific in mind. Fans and commentators will go through all sorts of twists and turns to make sense of the ending. From here, it seems that if everyone is dead, the only thing that makes sense — if that’s a requirement — is that everyone was dead at the beginning. 
 
 (On rewatching the scene last night it was immediately clear, as many of you have pointed out, that the characters hadn’t been dead all along and that the narrative was meant to have stretched for some undefined period of time after Jack’s death. Mea culpa. That new understanding will be reflected in my longer take on the finale, to be posted later today.) 
 
 The finale will be compared, in its effect if not its form, to that of the “Sopranos.” The “Sopranos” finale was ambiguous and a bit of a shrug, but not puzzling; to me the “Lost” finale, in the immediate aftermath, felt forced and, well, a bit of a cop-out. 
 
 I’ll expand on (and possibly revise) these thoughts in a notebook you can find on nytimes.com/arts Monday morning or in Tuesday’s newspaper. In the meantime, please let us know how you felt about the finale and how you’re interpreting it.
– In case you haven't heard, Lost ends its run tonight with a 2½-hour episode that carries six seasons' worth of speculation and the anticipation of pretty much the whole internet. "We feel like Lost deserved a real resolution, not a 'snow globe, waking up in bed, it’s all been a dream, cut to black' kind of ending," co-creator Carlton Cuse tells the Washington Post. To indulge your addiction: Watch cats tell the story in 1 minute. Check out TV Guide's favorite episodes. See every shirtless scene, compiled by New York (and featuring a shot of Kate with no pants). Scroll through io9's list of the best Lost memes. And it's come to this: See The Awl's list of the best lists.