If you read a detective story that had a very unsatisfying ending, or the clues ended up being fairly randomly placed without leading to anything (or if the whole story ended up being a dream), you would lose a lot of respect for the book as a whole. Lost called its viewers to invest in the story and its characters and to accept the delayed gratification of understanding the world at a later point. We were invited to ask questions, and led to believe that the story was all leading somewhere and that it all fit together (although we might not have the answers actually handed to us). The end was distinctly unsatisfying and amounted to a sort of admission that the writers had gotten in too deep and had just put in elements that didn’t make much sense. Maybe the writers also overestimated the extent that “because magic” constituted an answer without going into how that magic works or even fits into the bigger picture.
On the other hand, this article offers some interesting (albeit unofficial) answers to some of the questions we were left with at the end of the show. It’s annoying in the same way as the series was though, as it slaps you on the wrist for asking questions that were clearly supposed to be asked at the time before the writers forgot about them.
