Last 'Lost' turned out to be lazy writing

The producers of "Lost" kept telling us that their main goal was to make viewers feel like they hadn't wasted the time they invested watching the show over the past six years.

There are some viewers who feel like their investment paid off. And others who, to one degree or another, feel ripped off.

Count yours truly among the latter group.

We knew that all our questions were not going to be answered in the final episode of "Lost." We knew that there were going to be mysteries that remained.

It would have been nice if executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and their team had bothered to answer even a tiny minority of the questions left hanging.

Don't get me wrong. The end itself — in which we saw all of the main characters happily dead and headed toward something great (heaven?) — was fine, in a weepy sort of way.

But when the good feelings started to wear off, we were faced with the reality that we had been snookered.

After six seasons of mysteries on top of mysteries, questions on top of questions, we were told that "Lost" has always been about its characters. (That was a drum beaten throughout the two-hour preview show that aired just before the finale.)

I could fill up today's paper with all of the unanswered questions. We could spend all day saying, "What about that?" "What about that?" "What about that?"

In the end, what we got was among the laziest writing in the history of television. After six seasons, we were essentially told two things:

First, the answers don't really matter.

And, second, you can go make up your own answers.

Even within the finale itself, the writing was simplistic at best. The Big Battle with the Smoke Monster — what all of "Lost" had been leading up to — was wildly anticlimactic.

Um, let's see … we move the big rock … the Smoke Monster becomes mortal … Kate shoots him … it's over.

Talk about lazy writing.

Again, don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that I wanted everything laid out for me.

As a matter of fact, I maintain that the last episode of "Battlestar Galactica," which aired a year ago, is one of the great series finales of all time.

It didn't answer all our questions. There are questions that will never be answered definitively, leaving a lot of room for debate. And I've had several of those debates myself with my fellow geeks.

But it gave us enough answers to form the basis of those debates. Within the universe it created, events made sense.

Within the "Lost" universe, there was no attempt to make any of it make sense. A lot of it came down to — well, that was magic.

That's simply not good storytelling.