Could the lame ending of LOST be a long con?

I wonder …

Could the ending be a long con by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, something they dreamed up in order to see if they could get away with it?

Think about it. Six years of dazzlingly smart, complex story-telling, raising questions of free will versus destiny, science versus faith, and good versus evil, weaving themes about the betrayal of children by their parents, creating characters with “special” powers, building a world with a system of mysterious rules that keeps even the most powerful in check, seeding easter eggs and cross-references so complex that thousands of blogs and websites and the amazing Lostpedia had to be created to keep track of them all … and then it all boils down, in the words of my blog-pal Val, to “they died happily ever after”?

No way.

Sawyer, a man who knew a lot about how to run a long con

Yes, I’m being tongue-in-cheek. But I really can’t imagine how they came up with such an ending. It was so jarring, so disconnected from anything that had come before.

What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? Do you think the ending fit in with what had come before? If so, why? If not, did it bother you or did you enjoy it the way it was?

Editing to add: Demonstrating once again that there are no new ideas, after posting this, I did a vanity search on Twitter for “LOST long con,” and I found that a whole lot of people had already been tossing that idea around long before I thought of it. That search, though, fortuitously led me to an article which is the best I’ve read so far on the finale: Lost was the ultimate long con by Charlie Jane Anders.