Lost: ABC Messed Up the “The End”?

In case you haven’t heard, the series finale of Lost aired on Sunday night and brought to a close the story of the survivors of flight Oceanic 815. Many viewers enjoyed the last episode but there were others who felt confused, frustrated, and tricked by the producers. It turns out that part of their frustration isn’t the producers’ fault.

Lost, as most everyone knows by now, follows the story of a diverse group of people who crash land on a very strange island. Many actors have come and gone in the show’s six seasons but the final regular cast includes Daniel Dae Kim, Emilie de Ravin, Evangeline Lilly, Jeff Fahey, Jorge Garcia, Josh Holloway, Ken Leung, Matthew Fox, Michael Emerson, Naveen Andrews, Nestor Carbonell, Terry O’Quinn, Yunjin Kim, and Henry Ian Cusick.

To the delight of many fans, “The End” also includes appearances from several performers from past seasons, including Maggie Grace, Ian Somerhalder, Elizabeth Mitchell, Jeremy Davies, Cynthia Watros, Dominic Monaghan, Rebecca Mader, John Terry, L. Scott Caldwell, Sam Anderson, Sonya Walger, Francois Chau, Fionnula Flanagan, and Neil Hopkins.

While the end credits rolled on the Lost series finale, viewers were shown images of rusting plane wreckage on a beach. Some understood this to simply be the remnants of the Oceanic 815 crash. Others read more into it, thinking that this indicated that no one had survived the initial crash or, that the escape plane with Kate, Sawyer, and the others had crashed.

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We now know that ABC, and not the producers, added those images. The network apparently wanted to soften the transition between the ending and the local news and didn’t consider that they might be misinterpreted.

An ABC spokesperson wrote to the LA Times, “The images shown during the end credits of the Lost finale, which included shots of Oceanic 815 on a deserted beach, were not part of the final story but were a visual aid to allow the viewer to decompress before heading into the news.”

So, to review… what happened on the island, happened. Jack died on the island at the end of the story. Hurley became the new Jacob and Ben helped him. Kate and friends flew back to the mainland. The alternate story that we saw in season six was the place the survivors created so they could reconnect in the afterlife after they had all passed on, in their own time. ABC messed up. End of story.

What do you think? Does ABC’s admission change your feelings about the last episode? Make things more clear?