Whereas, for me, it avoided all the things I dislike about sci-fi (and the things most of my friends love) like the specifics, the dharma initative, codes, time travel, other hard sci-fi etc and focused on core human issues. It was about people who were lost - literally, on an island, but also figuratively. There were passengers who died immediately, and everyone left behind were complex characters with difficult pasts, personal demons, isolated from community.

It's ridiculous that the immediate twitter outcry was how stupid it was it was all a dream - because each of these characters experienced personal growth, found redemption from inside themselves. A group of tortured loners came together in a community, and they work out all of the issues and learn the lessons they were unable to learn during their truncated lives. It wasn't until they had completed their journey that they were ready to accept their fates, first on the island, then in reality. It isn't a "gotcha!" or a twist ending dream.

Nothing in the ending negates any of the story that came before it - Everything happened, they just happened to be dead at the time. Either they grew in a purgatory type place, or you get to see who these flawed people could have been, but never got the chance. Before this revelation, they were all going to live happily-ever-after in a magical sideways world that is far more preposterous than saying that everything that came before is impossible in current earth life. Which is the bigger cop-out again?

The last scene was chilling - it doesn't end on a wrap party inching towards the light, but an empty beach covered in wreckage ... reminding us that no one survived. I'm neither religious nor a hard-line atheist, but if people wanted more portals and polar bears or aren't open-minded enough to toy with the idea that we don't know what happens immediately after death, then they've completely missed the point of a character-driven television show.