so we know Michael's spirit was trapped on the island, but there was a chance that maybe it was the power of the Man in Black or the same thing that acted as the source of his power that was keeping Micheal and the other ghosts there. But given that Michael was absent entirely from the flash-sideways universe, which we find out is purgatory, this means nothing that happened on the island in The End changed his fate, or that of the other souls trapped in the jungle. Poor Michael is still trapped on the island, long after his friends have moved on to the afterlife.

The epilogue has Ben asking Walt come to the island to help his father. When Walt responds that his father is dead, Ben tells him that "you can still help him"... implying that Walt can somehow free his father. Or at least keep him company, since Walt is one of the characters shown to be able to communicate with the dead. Thanks troper, I hadn't seen the epilogue yet, but that makes me feel better about that aspect of the ending.

Also, Desmond's conversation with Eloise makes it clear that other characters will still "move on" with their own circles of loved ones, even if not with our core group. This explains the absences of certain characters, such as Richard, who likely moved on with his wife, or Eko, who was actually seen after his death (back in season 3) reunited with his brother in Nigeria. So Michael, Walt, and Vincent are likely present in the afterlife. They're just not with Jack's group in the church. The fridge horror for this troper was what happened to Keamy, Omar, and Mikhail. What happens when you die in the afterlife? - What happens to them? They move on to their next Subsequent Life with the exception that it is truly a sideways translation, stagnating until they achieve the realizations required to pass into a more advanced Subsequent Life ... the horrifying logic then is that if they were truly flawed instead of going forward they may end up going backwards and backwards and backwards until they straighten themselves out!

Aaron "moves on" at the church his mother, fair enough. However in the afterlife he's a baby? What kind of life did he lead, that there was nothing in his afterlife that he needed to face before he could move on? Probably an extremely short one.

Desmond knows that there's a better world out there with Him and Penny, but doesn't know it's the afterlife. All he knows is that it's a wonderful place. How long before you think he tries to get back there, especially if the real world treats him like shit compared to the beauty of what he saw in Happily ever after? Desmond isn't long for this world, and Penny and his son are going to live with the fact that their husband killed himself. Worse still, he might try to take them with him.

In fact, with most interpretations of the ending, Kate, Claire and Sawyer haven't seemed to have done much with their lives, as the issues they're almost identical to their on island personalities in the afterlife. They probably don't live for long after they get off the plane.

None of the above discussions on the meaning of the FST are necessarily true. It's possible that the reason that all of the characters who did not die until after the original timeline played out looked the same age as they did when Jack died is because the FST is directly relevant to their experiences as a group rather than their experiences in the whole of life in general. Christian tells Jack something to the effect that "your time spent with these people was the best time of your life". Therefore, Kate, Aaron, Desmond etc. could easily have all lived to be supercentenarians and their experience in the FST reverts them to how old they were when the events happened (i.e. the bomb) which caused the FST to exist in the first place. The FST is not THE afterlife; it is a stage between life and death, and the fact that only the main characters gather in the church says to me that their presence there at all is because of their lives on the island. Therefore it makes sense that they would look how they did at that time, and it does not mean that the rest of their lives between the OT and the FST were devoid of happiness. I would have preferred it if the FST had been revealed as a direct side-effect of the island, similar to the whispers, and that it was in fact the real "magic box". Plus, the characters that help solves a persons problem in the FST are not the ones from the regular timeline. For instance, Jack uses Juliet to deal with the mental issues caused by his rough divorce from Sarah, even though Kate would be the logical choice. Sawyer uses Miles as his partner because his only real partner, Cassidy, put him in prison. While Ben and Locke are friends, its Jack that helps Locke with his daddy issues this time instead. Rousseau and Ben were enemies all their lives, but Rousseau helps Ben through his issues surrounding Alexs death, even if she doesnt know it. The characters all look the same age because this would be the time of their lives where A.) they would still be able to interact with each other due to Oceanic 815, and B.) this was the time of their lives where they learned how to overcome their issues. They just needed a different person in the FST than they had in the real world.

The news that the sideways universe wasn't "real" but just a preparation for the afterlife does cast a grim shadow over things. It means Jack's son isn't real, never existed. It also means Sawyer killed the Koreans for real, not just temporarily. Actually, there are compelling reasons to think that David is the son of Jack and Kate. Their pre-Guam flight hookup is only weeks before the end of the series so Kate wouldn't be obviously pregnant yet. I mean, just look at how they cast the kid—he's got Jack's brown hair and Kate's freckles. In my mind this is actually Fridge Brilliance

There's some fridge heartbreak in that last one as well. In s5 there are a lot of tropes that suggest Juliet is pregnant, but it's never spoken outright. The fact that in the afterlife she's David's mother, though, implies either that she was going to have a baby or at least that she deeply wanted one.