Damn—that was a lot of typing. And I left out a ton of stuff.
Look–there are some killer good episodes and the first several seasons are just fan-fuckting-tastic.
The Dharma mysteries are wonderful, some of the actors are stunningly good (Locke, The Crazy French Lady, Ben, Hurley and Sawyer are the standouts) but to me, it’s very, very clear that the people who wrote the first 3, 3.5 seasons and the people who wrote the last few seasons didn’t agree on direction. The smoke monster was (early on) never, ever intended to be a main antagonist, It was summoned like a dog, it randomly attacked or didn’t.
A lot of people are fanwanking explainations–I am over on GiraffeBoard . It’s fun and there’s a rich mythology to play with. But for me, the last season was so incredibly dismissive of the first say, 4 seasons that it left a terrible taste in my mouth. To me, it’s like the first 5 seasons were a tightly plotted murder mystery with all these dangling threads. And then, in the last season they said “Oops. It was space aliens. That explains everything”.
For me, the journey is never more important than the destination. It’s like saying “Hey, let’s go on vacation. I’ll start in California and fly to Nee Jersey the long way round. Then, when I get there, I’ll just turn around and come back. Because the plane flight is the important part of the vacation.”
Overall, if you care about tight plotting, characters who grow (only about 3 of them really grow organically as opposed to growing by author fiat) and a really coherent storyline, don’t bother with the show.
On the other hand, if you like pondering unanswered mysteries, coming up with your own explainations, some killer-good acting and some great individual episodes (season 1, ep 17–“The Numbers” is one of my top 10 tv episodes ever), go for it.