HERE ON FIBBER ISLAND: Did you like it? Did you hate it? Did you understand it? Those of us lucky enough to live on the West Coast haven't seen it yet, but here's your thread. I'll update later.
Added: In the end, the finale was about Lost, The Story, and not Lost, The Mystery. Which is exactly what I wanted. Last year's finale gave us reenactment as portent, a warning that not all would go right with the fuzzily-reasoned plan to blow up the past with a nuclear warhead. This year's finale (and parts of the season) gave us reenactment as a way of unclogging memory, an invitation to the characters to look hard into those mirrors that kept popping up. Not to spoil -- you wouldn't be reading if you were worried about that, would you? -- but tonight's callbacks, both the explicit flashbacks (sonogram, delivery, hatch) and the more oblique references (Locke echoing Juliet's "it worked" from the beginning of the season; Jack repeating "what happened, happened" without the "you have to let go" kicker, which Christian supplied later) just felt earned.
I suppose I should expect some disappointment at an episode that definitively picked a side in the fundamental Lost debate: Man of science, or man of faith? But I don't. The rules of why the characters had to do what they did to get to the final scenes weren't important. This episode felt right as the payoff for all of their stories -- for the long con, as Sawyer might describe the show as a whole. So no, I don't care that nobody explained Walt, or that we don't know who etched the hieroglyphs into the stopper, or who the skeletons in the sub-basement were, or what happened after the scene where the thing happened and the other thing was doing that thing, or even what Juliet meant in the first episode this season when she said "it worked," because it didn't. As a person who complained about the alternative universe, even I will admit that ultimately that was the one that resonated.
And, incidentally, now that I'm spoiling, I also thought that a lot of care went into the guest list for the party (other than one omission who could be explained by another). I appreciated the distinctions that they drew.
