This may or may not be my last post on "The End". There are a few things that I want to say, mostly in response to other comments on the finale I've seen:
* The debate continues over whether and to what extent the plot/ending of LOST was known ahead of time, or whether they made it up on the fly as they went. I am completely dumbfounded by the question itself. Now that the show is over, who cares?
When the show was ongoing, it was a question with at least some relevance, because people wanted to know if the show was going somewhere or was doomed to collapse on its own weight. Of course, it was always silly to believe that the entire story could be written ahead of time--that's just not realistic for any work of fiction. But now that the show is over, you don't have to worry about whether to invest your time in it or not. You can view the work as a complete story, and make your own decision about whether its worth revisiting or whether you should try to forget about all the time you wasted on it.
If everything was planned out all along, but you thought it stunk, does that somehow make it better? If they made it up every week, but you found it to be a compelling and moving story, then what difference does it make?
* The final points all deal with technical story points of "The End". One that comes to my mind is the mobisode "So It Begins", in which Christian Shephard tells Vincent to go wake up his son as "he has work to do". We can believe that this manifestation of Christian was the Monster (as it was in "White Rabbit", at least according to it), in which case it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, or we can believe that this manifestation of Christian was somehow tied into 2004X Christian and the work that Jack needs to do to get to that phase. (Or we could chalk it up to any number of things, in which case it doesn't really play into a discussion of "The End").
I don't really have an answer to this--I just think that the mobisode in question is one that people should go back, watch, and weigh in on.
* There were a number of people asking technical questions about how the cork worked, why Jack didn't get turned into a monster, and the like. First of all, going to deep into it takes away the magic of the show, as the producers have said many times. Setting that aside, I thought it was fairly clear. No one was quite certain what would happen if the light was turned off, and what happened was that it removed the source of the Monster's power and caused the Island to go into fall-into-the-sea mode.
Intellectually, I think the connection between the cork and the Monster makes a lot of sense. After all, the Monster was created by being exposed to the energy in the source. It makes sense that with that energy unplugged, he'd become a mortal again.
Others wanted to know why Jack was not transformed into a Monster by being present when the cork was put back in place and the energy returned. I think it's easy enough to chalk it up to the person needs to be exposed to the energy at its full potency to suffer the ill effects we saw in "Across the Sea".
Inherent in the question seems to be the premise that turning into a Monster makes one evil. I think that what "Across the Sea" was striving to show us was that this isn't the case. Jacob and MiB weren't inherently good or evil (although they have made intrinsic character traits that pointed in that direction--MiB's mischievousness, Jacob's honesty), and MiB did not become evil when he became the Monster. MiB's choices that followed--the manner in which he pursued trying to escape his de facto prison--were what made him evil. So even if Jack had been transformed into a monster-like state, there's no reason to believe he would automatically have been Hurley's antagonist.
* Christian told Jack that time doesn't matter here [2004X]. I'll leave it up to the reader to determine how people crossing over from 2004X to the Island timeline could explain many of the weird phenomenon of LOST (think Eloise, appearances of Charlie, Walt, ...)
* Some people believe that the white light of the church was the same as the light at the heart of the Island. I have to admit this never really crossed my mind. There are two (not necessarily mutually exclusive) ways to think about that. The first is that the journey the Lostaways were embarking on together was back to the source, a sort of Eastern concept of a spirit comprised of all souls. The other way is to consider that Jack, by saving the Island, saved the light. So when people warned of everyone dying should MiB achieve his objective, they didn't mean it in a literal sense, but in a spiritual sense.
Questions like this are the kind of thing that might be debated for many years to come, and also have the potential to give the 2004X the powerful meaning that the producers claimed they were going for.
