There were three reasons to watch ‘Lost’ — or to stick with it, more aptly, across six immensely engrossing and immensely frustrating seasons. You could watch for the characters, who were two-dimensional and archetypal in a way, but rich and relatable and even lovable in the way that great pulp casts can sometimes be. You could watch for the thrill of it — the endless cliffhangers, the constant narrative whiplash, the mobius-strip plotting, and the way the show could blithely disassemble and reassemble its narrative architecture (flashbacks followed by flashforwards! flashforwards followed by time travel!) and somehow have the whole thing work. And of course, you could watch for the macro-plot — the mythology of a mysterious island, which layered puzzle atop riddle atop intrigue like no show since The X-Files, promising all the while (or seeming to promise, at least) to be building up to a revelatory denouement.

Last night’s series finale was a great success if you watched the show for the first reason, intermittently interesting if you watched it for the second, and a great crescendo of failure if you watched it for the third.

Guys, where are we?” Dominic Monaghan’s Charlie famously asked his fellow plane crash survivors in the pilot episode. To be judged a success on its own terms, “Lost” needed to answer that question much, much more completely than it did. Across six seasons, it’s true, we learned endless facts about the island — about its geography, its inhabitants, and what had happened on it across decades and centuries. But we never learned the whys behind the facts. And with the final season in the books, there’s good reason to think that we never learned them because the show’s creators never had a well-thought-out “why” for their story in the first place. The island wasn’t a real mystery — it was just a MacGuffin.

I guessed about halfway into the episode that Jack would not survive it. This is no work of genius on my part. In a way, the ending was almost so perfect that it's amazing we didn't all call it. Certainly people have guessed that the series that began with Jack's eye opening would end with it closing. And it made perfect sense that Jack, who was meant to die at the end of the original version of the Lost pilot, instead die at the end of the series.

But though I saw that--and knew, as Jack staggered through the bamboo, that he was going out to die precisely where he first came to the Island--all my intellectualizing went out the window when Vincent reappeared as he had in the pilot's first minutes. The show was returning to its simplest roots: life and death in the wild, and people trying to save other people. Even if you saw the closing eye coming, what that eye saw before it gave up its spark--a plane flying, safe in the sky, with Jack's friends on board--counts among the loveliest images Lost has produced in six years of them.

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.

As to the producers claiming that they knew all along how the show would end, all I can say is I hope you’re lying. Because if you really had this in mind all along, if from the start you planned to duck virtually every interesting question you raised and instead stick us with a lame, inter-faith, karma-purgatory dose of nonsense–you’re a cruel gang of bastards.

Thrillingly, cleverly, and in a manner that tapped into the simple, profound truths of great American works like Our Town, the show spelled out for viewers what it has been saying all along. Lost is about life and death, faith and science, spirit and flesh, and has always stressed that the title refers to the characters' souls, not their location.

Instead, it turns out the passengers of Oceanic 815 are all dead, victims, if the end-credit imagery is to believed, of the same tragic plane accident that started the whole thing. Six seasons of polar bears, bachelor pad hatches, landlocked ships, personal submarines and a fleet of fallen airplanes, and it was all apparently some sort of shared afterlife experience. Excuse me, but what are we supposed to do with those religious statues full of heroin, with Fionnula Flanagan's pendulums, with the crazy Frenchwoman and the time shifts and the whole glorious Richard Alpert back story? And what on Earth are we supposed to do with the Dharma Initiative?

Release them into the universe, apparently, along with the image of Allison Janney in bad biblical hair. Because as Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) kept telling Jack and anyone who would listen, really, none of it matters, except that it's over, and even if Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse decided, and possibly at the last minute, that their uber-narrative would be an over-the-top marriage of Incident at Owl Creek Bridge and It's a Wonderful Life, at least it's over, and that's something.