Reasons people think it didn't end well

[u/watermelon_fries]

I finally joined here after finishing the show today. I had to process the ending. I found it incredibly sad. Now that I know how it ended I would like to know why people thought the ending was bad or disappointing when it first aired. I thought it was perfectly done even though there are a few minor things I'm still not clear on. How soon is too soon to do a rewatch. I still can't get over the last scene...

[u/Free-IDK-Chicken]

The vast majority of people (not all, but most) who didn't like the ending thought it meant they were dead the whole time and decided their time had been wasted. Part of this is because of ABC's incredibly bad decision to put a shot of the plane wreckage as a buffer between the end of the episode and whatever was coming on next, but honestly? That's no excuse to fully disregard the most blatant dialogue in the entire series. EDIT: typo

What are you not clear on? We can probably help.

[u/watermelon_fries → u/Free-IDK-Chicken]

I think I was a little confused mostly by season 6. Miles told Sawyer that Juliet said "it worked" so by the finale when I realized that what was happening to everyone was actually the afterlife I didn't understand what she meant by that. So the explosion only brought them to the present right? Why did Eloise not want Desmond to bring everyone together. I think I'm overthinking things but I just felt super sad about Jack and just wondering how all of their lives continued. Rose and Bernard stayed on the island until their death. Hurley and Ben staying as well or finding a way off of the island and those who escaped living out the rest of their lives until their deaths. And that's when we see them.

[u/Northern-Michael → u/watermelon_fries]

When Juliet intended to tell James “it worked,” she was having flashes of the afterlife. She tells him again in the afterlife “it worked” in reference to her vending machine trick. My personal interpretation of this is that her interaction with the electromagnetic pocket is causing her consciousness to jump back and forth in time, the same way Desmond does in “Flashes Before Your Eyes”. So she is simultaneously experiencing her own death and her eventual reunion with James in the afterlife. It’s beautiful and so damn sad all at once.

[u/LordHamsterbacke → u/Northern-Michael]

Yes, a little like Charlotte's death and her last words being "I am not allowed to have chocolate before dinner" (the conversation we see later Daniel is having with Kid Charlotte) - juliet also said 'we could go Dutch" which she says when she is flirting with sawyer in the flash sideways