Okay, I'm going to do a pretty bad job sifting through your post, but I'll do my best! Lets start from the end:


I'm pretty sure that the sideways reality was somewhat created for them, but I don't think we'll ever really know how. I get this impression because of what Eloise Hawking said to Desmond when they first met in that reality. But I don't know what role she had in forming that reality. It's possible that she was just one of the first to wake up, and now she just wants to stay there because her son is there and hasn't moved on.


Charlotte and Daniel weren't in the church? I guess I didn't see everyone who was there. But I think the answer to most of "Why wasn't ____ in the church?" is a combination of who had woken up and the effectiveness that last scene would have I think they wanted some sort of core group there at the end. That was the group with the greatest number of interconnections, and perhaps that's why they were the ones ready to move on, because as Christian said, they were the most important to Jack and vice versa (and to each other). I also wondered about Walt and Michael, but perhaps by Michael's actions he wasn't as connected to the group as everyone else.


Well, that's one of those questions that we're not going to get answered, and it's one of the things I think the creators of the show wanted us to think about. I would assume heaven, but would they be going there together? That's something I'd have to ponder over for a while.


That's the thing, I don't think it's as straight-forward as all that, which is why the things that Christian said to Jack about that place were so important. It was independent of time. That might be a cop-out, but it works for me. if we were talking strictly about a solid timeline, you'd have to place the sideways universe at the end of Hugo's presumably long existence. But that would mean that when everyone else died they'd just sort of float around on hold until Hugo died so they could all join the same reality together. I think I prefer the way they presented it.


That's a great question that I think will be a fun one to debate. I think it'll be the same for Daniel and Charlotte (presuming Charlotte wakes up, which I don't think she had as of the end). My best guess is that Ben is going to want to spend time with Alex in this reality before he moves on. Possibly, he doesn't feel he deserves to go. The moment between him and Hurley outside the church was a really sweet one, and it seems like he did redeem himself in the time after Jack died.



I was a fan of how it ended when I watched it, and the more I think about it, the more I like it. What I fear is that there will be a backlash from casual fans of the show who have little to no concept of what happened and couldn't keep even a little of it straight. My biggest fear is that those fans were expecting all along that by the finale they would have a one-phrase answer that they could repeat to others. "Oh, Lost? Yeah, they were all in heaven/hell/purgatory." "Lost, that show about the plane that crashes in the Garden of Eden." "Turns out, it was all in Vincent's head."

I thought about those people when the Richard-centric episode aired, because when Richard spoke to Jacob on the beach, my take away was that Jocob just explained, in two minutes of a random episode, the entire show. But I feared that the afore-mentioned casual fans would either miss that or still be holding out for specifics like I mentioned in my first post. But no, it was clear by then that we weren't going to get much more of an explanation than that scene on the beach. Sure, after that we got the light at the heart of the island, but it still came down to what Jacob said on the beach.