Clearly, there are Lost spoilers below, but if you are a year and a half behind (cough, cough, James) I don’t feel that bad if you do end up getting spoiled.

• So the Sideways world was a sort of Purgatory, a place that was important in helping our characters move on, but not necessarily “really real.” Already people are griping about it online, but I think it was a cool and unexpected twist. It also makes sense in the fact that it doesn’t undo everything that happened on the Island. It was a bold choice, it was emotional, and I didn’t guess it. So what more do people want?
• There are some questions about Sideways world that do linger.  Like, David is just totally a figment of Jack’s imagination?  And wasn’t Nadia the true love of Sayid’s life?  It would seem to me that Sayid would be reunited with Nadia in the afterlife.  And it would have been nice to see more familiar faces there – Walt, Eko, hell, even Frogurt!  Don’t they get to “move on” with our guys, or were they so unimportant  to this last phase of the story they just have to move on on their own?
• Walt in particular could have used some clarifying, but last we saw him he had moved on, and was living life as best he could in the real world with his grandma.  Oh well.
• On the Island, things were intense and amazing.  Seeing Rose, Bernard, and Vincent again was a great treat, and I knew I would lose it if FLocke killed them.  There were some action-movie cliches that were a tad on the hokey side – the fight on the cliff, the “I saved a bullet for ya!” quip, etc., but it still all managed to work for me.
• It was also nice for the show to acknowledge that jack being the next Jacob was an “obvious choice,” and Hurley’s words of “I’m glad it’s not me” did in fact to be pretty ironic.  It’s too bad that he doesn’t get home, because he did have parents who loved and missed him.  But hey, better him than Linus, right?
• So what happened in the lives of our characters after Jack died?  In my humble opinion, it seems like we are meant to assume Lapidus, Miles, Richard, Sawyer, Claire, and Kate escaped the Island, and go on  living in the real world.  I wonder how Kate will explain having survived two plane crashes.  Actually, how will Lapidus explain coming back without nearly everyone he left with?  These are small concerns.  Kate and Claire likely go on to raise Aaron,  Richard goes gray and dies naturally at the tender age of 204, Lapidus mows lawn for a living, and Miles and Sawyer enroll in police academy and become partners.  Maybe not that last part.)  Meanwhile, on the Island, Hurley is the  new Jacob, Ben is his right hand man, they have lunch with Rose, Bernard, and Vincent every once in a while, and maybe they hang out with Cindy and the two kids she’s been raising.  Hurley also is able to send Desmond home, possibly on the boat, possibly using magic, but he and Penny and Charlie live happily ever after.

I’m still processing the finale, but overall it was an emotional, satisfying conclusion to one of the greatest TV series ever.  There are questions that still bug me – like how Smokey appeared as Christian to Jack off the Island, and why Desmond told Charlie he saw Claire getting on a helicopter with Aaron, and why were Jack and company blamed for the time-jumping because they left, when it was all Ben’s fault for turning the wheel?  I do like the fact that we now know that Jughead did NOT split the timeline – that was the Incident, and that was that.

Bottom line, Lost succeeded where The Sopranos, The X-Files, and Quantum Leap failed – it provided a great ending to a great show.  Lost’s ending will be debated for years to come, and some people will always hate it.  But it worked for me, and I think a lot of other people out there, too.

Lost, you will be missed!