A happy fan poses on a promotional mock-up

The final episode of the TV show Lost aired earlier this week. Those who haven’t caught it yet would be well advised to avoid the following for fear of spoilers.

The End, the appositely titled two-hour finale, was pretty good drama but fairly bad science fiction. The alternative universe that ran parallel to events on Lost‘s island since the start of the final season was revealed, in a painful reversion to cliché, to be, yes, the afterlife. A rather large number of professional television reviewers seem to have interpreted this wrongly, assuming that the finale indicates that the island itself is some kind of purgatory. In fact, for the central mysteries—the secrets behind the strange goings-on on the island itself—viewers were told nothing new. The writers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, who once reassured wavering fans that everything in the series