Nice. I could take some cheap shots at you're chosen beliefs or lack thereof, but instead I'll respect your right to them and not insult you. Maybe you could extend me and otehr RPF members the same next time?
Scott
I think he just meant from a storytelling perspective, not in life. Which is not to say I agree with him, for me this show was all about faith.
I loved this finalé, though I was a little disappointed from the point Christian showed up to the end. I thought that we were getting a bit of "It's a Wonderful Life," with all of our characters getting a second chance at life but with all the lessons learned from their other lives. I had been focusing so much on them getting from "fake universe" back to "real universe," it hadn't occurred to me until this episode that having them remember the island and their other lives was even better - it was an incredibly elegant form of "rescue" from the island that didn't involve transportation or erasing the past. I also liked that idea in that it was more relevant to the island and the events of the series than what we got in the end. That their actions with the bomb could create this alternate timeline, an alternate shell for them to populate where things were better, where they could live out their lives having overcome their inherent flaws and pain, where Sayid could go back and be with Nadia, where Charlie and Claire could raise Aaron and Sun and Jin could raise their daughter, where Jack could be a better father than he had growing up. To have it all be a "construct" robs the events in that world of some of their weight - the babies being born weren't real births, Jack's son wasn't real, etc. And in the end, it's just not as relevant to the show's events or the island. It's just "this is what happens when you die - you find your loved ones and move on with them."
Was Aaron in the church with them? I don't remember. If so, is he part of the construct, or was this group the most important for Aaron as well (and he exists in this plane as a baby)? He never forged his own meaningful adult relationships?
As for who was there and who was not, it was just the souls that chose to be together as a group. Ben is dead there, but is not part of that group. Vincent, Dan, Charlotte, Miles, Lapidus, Michael, Walt, etc, they presumably had found more important "family" in their lives. For this group, this was it. They were all lost, they were all alone, and in their lives this was the group that became their family. It is interesting for me to think about how long each lived. Kate "missed Jack so much." Ben and Hurley could have played Jacob and Alpert's roles for hundreds or thousands of years. Those things are interesting, but not as satisfying for me as having them simply live on in the flash sideways, knowing what they'd been through.
All in all, I'm very satisfied. I cried a bunch of times, including right at the beginning with all the cuts between the two storylines set to music. What an accomplishment this show represents, flaws and all...
