Lost is over and the series finale was a pitch perfect ending to the show we’ve all come to love and hate simultaneously over the years. I can see how the episode would frustrate a lot of people, especially those who spent the series more focused on the island than the characters. It is easy to get wrapped up in the mythology of the show, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that without an outstanding ensemble cast portraying characters we’ve all gotten to know incredibly well over the past six years, the island mythology wouldn’t have been interesting. If the show were full of cardboard cutouts of stereotypes who were discovering all this mystical stuff, the show would have been canceled after the first season. Regardless of what you’ll read from comments about Lost in other places, the show WAS always about the characters. The setting provided an intriguing and different location for the action to take place, and the island itself was basically another character, but when it came time to wrap up the series, it had to be about the characters.

The answers simply weren’t that interesting! People for whatever reason seemed to lose sight of the fact that this was a TV show. They had outlandish expectations for answers, so when we DID find concrete answers, they weren’t satisfied. The whispers being the souls of the dead trapped on the island. Jacob and the Man in Black being regular people with their own problems and insecurities. Adam and Eve being the bodies of Jacob’s brother and mother. The island literally being a cork that keeps evil at bay. The list goes on and on. It seemed like fans of the show expected answers that would blow our minds away and reveal some hidden truth behind the veil of reality. But now, the show is over, and we will never find out where the island came from, who its original protector was, who built the statue, what was up with all the hieroglyphics, why Walt and Aaron were so important, how the magic lighthouse worked, how Jacob learned to be the protector of the island, the science behind the donkey wheel that disappears the island and travels people to Tunisia, what would have happened if the island were “uncorked,” why Desmond could survive cataclysmic electromagnetic events, or tens of other questions. And I assert that it doesn’t matter. Part of the appeal of the show all along was its mystery. To have everything unraveled in such plain terms as they had explained things this season would take away from the mystical aspect of the show and hurt it.

Now that the show is over, I can actually tell people what it was about. Up until last night I had to say something like “Well these people get stuck on an island and all kinds of crazy shit happens to them.” But Lost was the story of an island that needed a protector. The island is a stopper for an evil that, if unleashed upon the world, would end life. There are forces at work on the island that are actively trying to unleash the evil, and the island’s current protector, Jacob, knows his time is coming to an end. He brings a group of people that he has chosen to the island to find his replacement. These people are all flawed, handpicked because their lives off the island are full of sorrow. They crash on the island and learn to survive, and throughout six seasons they grow as people more than perhaps on any other TV show I’ve ever seen. They are oblivious to the reason they were brought to the island for most of the series, though they quickly get a sense that this island is not normal. While we watch the small picture drama in the group play out, the pieces are being moved in the larger game – the search for the island’s new leader. And in the finale, the island finds its new leader. And the show ends. The finale’s on-island plot satisfactorily resolves the main plot of the show.

Now that it’s over, looking back at these characters’ story arcs cements just how amazing the show was. Jack, the doctor, the man of science, who wants more than anything to leave the island and never look back, transforms into a man of faith, willing to become Jacob’s replacement and sacrifice himself for the island.

Ben, the leader of a group of “native” inhabitants of the island, goes from being a lying, manipulative murderer who believes he is next in line for the throne, to a disillusioned and defeated shell of a man, misled into killing Jacob, and back to a place of redemption in the end when he is offered a job as the right hand man of the new island leader.

Every character on the show goes through an unbelievable arc, so much that when you look at these characters now, in the series finale, and look at them then, in the pilot, it’s hard to fathom how far they’ve come. The process of character development was so organic that watching the show you didn’t really notice. Instead, the Sawyer that jumps from a helicopter so that it can safely carry his friends to rescue is the same Sawyer that wouldn’t give sick people medicine three seasons earlier, and it seems natural, not forced. I have never seen a show with such well-rounded, realistic, believable, and fully-developed characters.

I wasn’t thrilled with everything about the series. At times during seasons two and three, the show stalled for time too much. Part of me does want more answers, despite myself. This final season wasted too much time on the “flash-sideways” plot device that was revealed in the finale to be a form of purgatory. While it served as a way to show us the highlights of the past six seasons, it felt, and feels, divorced from the main story on the island, and I don’t honestly think Lost would have lost much by leaving that out. But, in the end, the show was an overwhelming success, and the finale resolved the on-island storyline that we had cared about for so long. Leaving out the flash-sideways and a couple of minor missteps this season, it was a fitting cap on the series as a whole. I’m sad that I’ll never have another new episode of Lost to look forward to, but I’m happy that the series ended on such a high note.

Finally, the direction of this final episode was amazing. In the first shot of the first season, Jack opens his eyes in a field of bamboo, Vincent the dog runs over to him to wake him up, and he finds that his plane has crashed. His whole transformative ordeal is in front of him. Six seasons later, when he has finished sacrificing himself to save the island, he finds himself laying in the same field of bamboo, looking up at the sky. He sees the plane carrying his surviving friends to safety flying overhead, away from the island forever, and he knows his work is finished. Vincent comes and lays next to him, and he closes his eyes. Beautiful.