You know, I'm really glad we were fortunate enough to live during the high point of western civilization.  Food was cheap and abundant, humanity reached closer to a true democracy than ever before, and special effects in movies were fucking awesome. To paraphase H. G. Wells in his book New World Order, almost no one in America has seen active troops on their streets or even at any point in their lifetime.  We have forgotten the suffering of war and the deprivation and famine.  Mothers no longer worry that all of their children will die; instead they fear that one of them might.  Of course, anyone paying attention can see that the American lifestyle is unsustainable and bound to collapse within a few generations.  It's all built on the death and suffering of third world countries, and eventually the political and financial blowback from our actions will overwhelm the ability of the police state to suck the Southern Hemisphere dry.  And so it goes with the television show Lost.  A sort of modern parable of loss, of separation from civilization and isolation.  A Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson for urban life, not written by monks or professional authors but pieced together by television executives and hack writers.  I'm serious about this:  Lost is a perfect metaphor for America.  We got six decades of perfect growth, ABC got six seasons of money.  Like mindless fans, Americans thought life would continue to improve, culminating in some type of orgasmic enlightenment at the end, explaining away our confusion and doubt.  What we didn't know is that the last two seasons and the last twenty years were both, in their own way, a sort of moderating apology for earlier excesses.  America is bankrupt and stuck in this military-industrial complex, and Lost is spending entire episodes explaining why there are goddam polar bears and research centers on the other Island (Animal testing during the sixties. SPOILER ALERT: Mary Kay Commandos).  But since people won't listen when I harp on them about the NWO, let me tell you about the Lost scam instead.  Here is Wikipedia's explanation for the conception of the show:

The series began development in January 2004, when Lloyd Braun, head of ABC at the time, ordered an initial script from Spelling Television based on his concept of a cross between the novel Lord of the Flies, the movie Cast Away, the television series Gilligan's Island, and the popular reality show Survivor. ABC had also premiered a short lived series about plane crash survivors in 1969 called The New People with the opening episode by Rod Serling. Gadi Pollack notes that some of "the influences of Lost came from...the game Myst."^[17] Jeffrey Lieber was hired and wrote Nowhere, based on his pitch to write the pilot.^[18] Unhappy with the result and a subsequent rewrite, Braun contacted J. J. Abrams, who had a deal with Touchstone Television (now ABC Studios), and was also the creator of the TV series Alias, to write a new pilot script. Although initially hesitant, Abrams warmed up to the idea on the condition that the series would have a supernatural angle to it.

I couldn't have said it better myself.  There was never any secret set of rules for Lost, or any pre-planned ending to surprise the viewers.  The writers were making the story up as they went along.  And what's the deal with the alternative reality plotlines?  Filler? I honestly haven't seen every episode, and usually fast forward when they leave the Island, but I have seen enough to know the producers don't have a coherent idea of how the series will end.  The writers introduced so many concepts it will be impossible for them to tie it all back together.  I haven't watched Lost for a few weeks now, since the episode where Locke destroyed the Temple and that other guy broke the lighthouse mirror.  Great, I said to myself, now they don't have to explain the rules for either location.  And I stopped caring, because there was nothing I could do about it.  The whole metaphor is like something my good friend VZN said.  The New World Order oligarchs are anarchists.  They create a sense of panic, enable the chaos, then manage and consolidate a previously free society under their grasp.  Lost operates along the same lines.  So in this theory, Goldman Sachs is the smog monster.  People in the government such as Karl Rove are Jacob, all-powerful and omniscient until some douche just stabs him with a knife.  That's the real joke in both Lost and the real world.  There aren't any rules, there never were, and everything you put your time and energy into turns out to be an illusion.  I know, the systems of control, isolation and alienation in real life are scary.  That's why we need nonsense shows like Lost, so that real life will seem sane by comparison.