I’m not a Lost hater.

I never missed an episode in six seasons. I listened to podcasts about Lost. I scoured Lost blogs for alternate theories and spoilers. I took the ride.

Mostly, the ride was enjoyable. The deliberate pacing, the elliptical story structure and the attention to minute detail all hinted at a secret grandeur just below the surface and drew me in. I enjoyed trying to tease apart the mysteries of the island. I was anxious to find out the answers to the unending parade of mysteries, even after I started sensing that the writing had lost its way.

So it is with considerable sadness that I must call shenanigans on the ending. Shenanigans.

Lost was essentially a story-telling Ponzi scheme. The producers took our attention and our interest, promising mind-blowing returns if we were just attentive. For six seasons, they spent that goodwill on tantalizing diversions and dead ends. Somewhere around the third season, a lot of viewers gave up and the producers promised anew that they knew where this was all going, that they were going to pay off in three years if the viewers would just be patient.

So we waited. We waited to find out why The Island was so important. We waited to learn why The Island rendered women infertile and could be steered by a donkey wheel. We longed to know the meaning of Walt’s paranormal abilities. Polar bears, mystical numbers, miraculous healing – the list goes on forever. All these dangling threads are promises to the investing audience.

The fly in the ointment, as in any Ponzi scheme, is that the writers weren’t investing our interest wisely. They had no idea how to pay off all the storylines. I don’t think they were convinced the show would last long enough that they would have to. When the day of reckoning came, they gave us some tearful reunions, a white light for everyone to walk into and they crossed their fingers that we wouldn’t notice that the fascinating events of the past six seasons didn’t amount to a Story. Instead, they were just a series of things that happened to keep us watching the car commercials. Look! The gang (with a few puzzing exceptions) is back together! And they’re going to some sort of Unitarian Universalist heaven! Don’t look at the man behind the curtain.

I watch a lot of TV. A lot of TV is mediocre. I don’t usually get worked up about it.

I think I’m irritated with Lost because it had the potential to be something great. It’s not that I want every single thread accounted for – I understand that mystery is a big part of the allure of shows like this. All I really wanted was to have the main concepts pay off. I wanted to know that the end of this story was related to the beginning in some real way. I wanted to know that the pilots had some idea where we were going when I buckled my seatbelt.

They didn’t. It’s the only conclusion you can draw from the vague and formless ending. I don’t know what they spent those six years doing, but they didn’t spend it working on making The Island’s mythos cohesive. They didn’t spend that time investing the actions of the characters with meaning beyond luring the viewers back.

I liked the show – but I won’t rewatch it looking to see what I missed on the first run-through, because nothing I missed really mattered. For me, Lost goes down as a brilliant and expensive missed opportunity.

I know a lot of people have reported being completely satisfied with the ending, and I’m intrigued. If you’re one of those people, I’d love to hear from you. Was this the set of revelations you were expecting? Did the ending miss anything that was important to you?