If you are for some reason not caught up on Lost, this is your very obvious Spoiler Alert.

The better portion of a week has passed since the Lost saga came to an end. For the most part, my friends hated it. At first, as you will know if you follow my Twitter, I hated it as well. The final moments anyway. That, however, was because I misunderstood. I initially took away from those last 10 minutes that everyone had died in the crash of Oceanic 815 and everything had been for not. As I was burning with hatred, I read the internet, and I came to understand that there had not been two ‘purgatories,’ just one and everything that happened on the Island actually happened. And with that I grew to love the finale as a whole. Which leaves me at odds with many of my friends.

Today I was texting with one friend when he said, “I think that show gave up a while ago.”

To which I replied, “You can dislike the story they told, but I would say if anything they got over ambitious. Not that they gave up.”

And I think that’s when it really hit me that that was the case. Because the people wanted answers. Answers to questions they’ve had for six years. And they sort of got them. But they got them in weird ways, like, “hey, here’s that temple we mentioned. It kinda doesn’t matter, and we really just wanted to build new sets, but here it is.” Or, more annoyingly, “hey, here’s a light house that maybe explains some stuff, it’s just that no one could see it cause they weren’t actually looking for it. But it’s here for this one episode. And it actually could have been a part of the temple or something which would have been a little more logical as to while people didn’t see it, but here it is. Yay, right? Oh, and here’s Ilana, we’re gonna do a lot with her. She’s gonna… Oh crap, how many episodes do we have left? Oops, Ilana went the way of Arzt.”

As much as I enjoyed the ride, the writers just had so much they wanted to do, but it was stuff that didn’t really need doing or didn’t have time to evolve properly. Like the time traveling. I loved it. But what did all those episodes really give us?

1. Sawyer and Juliet (OK, that one was worth it).
2. Some time with the Dharma folk (not really that pressing for me).
3. Knowing that the statue was Taweret (they could have just found an ancient blueprint. Maybe in the Temple, thereby giving it slightly more purpose).
4. Jack going all insane about blowing up a bomb, thus bringing us back to the future and, more importantly, giving us Sideways (which… well, let’s just go to a new paragraph).

The time traveling was important because it gave us Jughead, which gave us Sideways, which gave us our closing minutes. But was that really the necessary path? There could have been some sort of plot device that left the story a little more focused. I really think they could have brought in the Sideways and the Jacob/MIB struggle early to mid-Season 5 without a donkey wheel induced time sickness. You have the electromagnetism, you have the weird healing powers, you have some sort of omnipresent deity, do you really need to spend all this time working up to The Incident when you could have had damn near anything on this crazy Island trigger the Sideways world? A shorter swim into the “how crazy sci-fi can we get” pool and a little more focus on the “let’s work with what we have” mantra and the show probably would have been sharper and more pleasing to a wider audience.

That being said, this is the story the writers wanted to tell and I will always be grateful for it (now that I understand there weren’t two ‘purgatories!’). Because I invested so much time and had so much fun in the process of digging deeper, rewatching, reading Lostpedia, debating with friends, correcting people’s poor quoting abilities, enlightening people who weren’t so nerdy as to be so obsessed and do all the aforementioned things. Because I yearned for every episode and became the Shush Nazi whenever it was on (sorry Charlene, but we already know you think ‘Jack is a douche’). Because nearly every episode led to a different possible answer which led to more digging and debating.

Rarely has something from pop culture garnered such interest from me. Harry Potter would be second. Far, far, far off in third would probably be buying every album by a particular artist. Lost really did something special when it filled my life with unhealthy compulsive fixation in a way few other shows could because they wrap everything up in a tight little bow every week. And for that, I will always love Damon and Carlton and J.J. and everyone else involved. Even though it has finished airing, it will never leave me. My parents and I will still discuss it. People will always get around to watching it and I can discuss it with them. There will never be an end to its mysteries which is part of what drove the show’s success all along.

Which brings me to my final point for the haters. A big reason for the hatred is because there weren’t enough (if any) answers in the finale. What the hell did you really need answered? What is so goddamn important that they didn’t answer or give healthy allusion to? And where is your imagination?

Example: Why did Eloise Hawking tell Sideways Desmond that he wasn’t ready and it wasn’t time? And for that matter, how did she know if she wasn’t part of the collective? Clearly Des was ready and it was time, so my theory is this: in life Eloise was forced to raise her son in a strict, scientific cage and knowingly send him to death at her own hands, so maybe she was enjoying her time with happy, musical Faraday (now Widmore) and didn’t want it sullied if the collective group came to understanding thus endangering this world. Pick your own theory and we can argue over merits. As for her knowing things, even entering Desmond’s life re-lived, this is a show where Hurley can talk to dead people, Miles can hear the dead’s last thoughts, Desmond has some weird super power over electromagnetism, human existence is powered by some light in a watery cave and the dude who plays Sayid somehow forgot how to act in the sixth season. Suspend some disbelief here, people.

If the show had given every answer to every question, people would still be unhappy and I wouldn’t be able to continue to dream up quaint theories. But it is too late, it is over and whatever happened, happened.

So I will leave the haters with the words a young Boy in Black spoke to a young Jacob over a game of Senet: One day, you can make up your own game and everyone will have to follow your rules.