Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the writer-producers in charge of Lost, did the right thing with the big finale. To repeat a line uttered by John Locke during last night’s episode, a line spoken earlier this season by the character Juliet Burke: “It worked.”

To be sure, Lindelof and Cuse gave their fans a puzzling, ambiguous ending in the form of the elegiac, 20-minute sequence that punctuated the six-season series; but they also came up with a fitting last chapter that makes enough sense not to be considered a cheat or an evasion.

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The reaction was split in my household. My younger son, a diehard fan, age 12, stormed off the couch at 11:30 p.m., further expressing his displeasure by slamming his bedroom door. He returned to say, in so many words, that he was disappointed that the show hadn’t tied up its wild plot strands; maybe he was hoping for a more rousing and settled conclusion; furthermore, I think, he was saddened by the sight of Dr. Jack Shephard’s breathing his last in the bamboo, with the dog Vincent lying beside him as he died. It’s always a killer, when they bring out the dog, and I wasn’t sure if that move was a cheap shot or not. On the other hand, a dog’s opinion of someone’s death (sad but accepting) seems like a worthwhile thing to think about. My 12-year-old son also may have been transforming his sadness over Jack’s death into anger and frustration with the show’s writers, in the same way that fans of Sherlock Holmes were pissed at Arthur Conan Doyle when he killed off his most famous character.

Although she didn’t storm away from the TV in a huff, my wife was also not so thrilled with the ending. She felt the writers had copped out. My older son, age 15, watched the finale at a friend’s house among those of his kind (fellow teenagers). When he got back, we asked him what he thought, and he said he didn’t want to talk about it. My wife looked at me and said, “Who’s he—you?” This was a reference to the fact that, on our first real date, back in 1984, I had refused to discuss the movie we had just seen together (Paris, Texas), telling her, self-importantly, that I didn’t want to ruin it by analyzing it, or some such sophomoric crapola (I was 20), which I probably threw out there as a way of trying to seem deep and mysterious. It didn’t work; I still haven’t heard the end of it.

Anyway, as dumb a kid as I might have been back in 1984, I still understood my older son’s mute reaction: the final minutes of Lost had taken us into irrational territory; and talking about that stuff, as I’m doing now, does indeed detract from the experience somewhat. It’s like new peanut butter. When you twist off the lid the first time, the surface looks so pretty and perfect; if you want to eat it, however, you have to stick the knife in, thereby destroying what’s pretty about it. So, yeah, talking about the ending of Lost, like I’m doing now, will inevitably ruin it, to some degree, but it’s the only way we’ll get to eat it.

So what happened? In a nutshell, this: At the end of last season, the main characters set off a hydrogen bomb on the island, which seemingly blasted them out of the 1970s and back to the year 2007. All during the final season, I had been under the false impression that the bomb-detonation had created the alternate universe the show’s minders have labeled the “flash-sideways” world. In this strange realm, the plane crash that had brought the show’s characters together had never occurred; and in this “flash-sideways” place, they kept running into one another while going about their slightly more humdrum lives in Los Angeles.