Why I loved the Lost finale

[Spoilers herein.]

For a good explanation why I loved the finale of Lost, I refer you to this blog:

Should anyone ever decide to write the history of the red herring, Lost should get a couple of chapters all to itself. You see, the mysteries didn't matter. They never really mattered. It was always about the people.

Yep. A bit like the Dharma Initiative and that infamous button, all the crap that happened on the island was just one massive red herring, ultimately irrelevant. It really happened, but it wasn't what the story was about. The story was really about the relationships, the coming-together.

All through Season Six, I had lost interest in what happened on the island. What really captivated me was the alternate timeline. What was going on there? What was its relationship to reality? It was this that intrigued me, and this that I most looked forward to seeing resolved. After all, this storyline wasn't about getting your head round facts and figures and weird science-fiction concepts. It was about the characters, and it was they who had captivated my imagination since the very beginning of the series.

Yes, it turns out this alternate timeline was purgatory. I know everyone was saying five or six years ago that they were all dead, and the island was purgatory, but this is of quite a different order. Everything that happened on the island was real (it was never purgatory). Jack and several others died on the island, just like we saw; several escaped in the plane, and presumably went on with their lives somewhere else; Hurley and Ben stayed on the island as its protectors, and they presumably died there eventually. What we were watching in the alternate timeline was the way, way distant future, when each character created their own fiction by which to find their friends again.

What I liked about this ending was that there were just enough ends tied up to be satisfying, and (more than) enough questions still rolling round free waiting to be answered with a million different theories.

One last thing in this rather rambling post: I really liked the Ben/Hurley thing. It was sad that Ben didn't feel able to join the reunion, but I liked that he was redeemed in some way. He's always been an ambiguous character, but he's been such a bastard this season, he had been unseated from his lofty status as my all-time favourite Lost character. He was reinstated last night.