I hope that, in the end, my bitterness and disappointment about the ending won’t permanently taint how I look back at the series as a whole.

I’m actually surprised that I feel this way. I was always one of those people who would say that LOST was about the journey, not the destination, that they didn’t have to answer every question.

I just never thought that they wouldn’t answer the *crucial* questions — especially since Darlton, in interview after interview, had promised that they would.

I was also one of those people who would always tells the scoffers that I trusted the writers, that they would never (as the scoffers claimed) end it in some lame way, by saying it was all a dream, or a virtual-reality experiment.

But then the ending was almost as bad. They totally sucked the significance out of the sideways world by saying they were all dead.

I had been fascinated by the sideways worlds, and looking forward to learning what they were about. But the explanation — unless I am still missing something important — didn’t even make any sense.

I’ve been giving the writers standing ovations for years. Overall, yes, sure, it was a huge accomplishment. I’m just holding my applause for now, while I try to process the ending, and try to see if I can make some sense out of the gulf between what the writers had promised and what we had seen.