The production crew was never able to make the cave holding the all-important, island-binding golden light look more impressive than a water ride at a cheap amusement park, and it was a major problem that the scenes of Desmond and Jack lugging stones around the sacred pool inspired giggles rather than awe.

Image Matthew Fox, left, Jorge Garcia and Evangeline Lilly in a scene from “The End,” the final episode of the ABC series “Lost,” which included in its last moments a revelation about Mr. Fox’s character, Jack Shephard. Credit... Mario Perez/ABC

“The End” exemplified how pedestrian the action in “Lost” became over the years, a falloff that began even in Season 1. There was nothing to make you tense up in the scenes of Jack and Locke fighting on the cliff or of boulders rolling around as the island threatened to disintegrate. (One exception: Kate telling Sawyer, “I’ll see you at the boat,” and leaping off the cliff into the ocean. But that’s a hard scene to mess up.)

Now let’s get back to the ending of “The End,” in which the big reveal was that Jack Shephard, to all appearances a divorced father and successful surgeon in the sideways universe, was in fact dead. So were all the other Losties who had gathered in the church. The scenario was cleverly constructed to remove the possibility that they had been dead all along (a possibility I erroneously considered, and blogged about, before rewatching the scene), or that any of the events on the island or in the off-island lives of the Oceanic 6 had been other than real.

As explained by Jack’s (dead) father, and amplified by an exchange between Hurley and Ben, life had continued after Jack died on the island, stabbed by the monster inhabiting Locke’s body. The survivors on the Ajira plane, including Kate, Claire and Sawyer, had presumably made it to safety (Kate for the second time), while Hurley and Ben had remained as the island’s new protectors.

Now, beyond some future expiration date, they had all died and gathered because, as Christian Shephard told Jack: “This is the place that you all made together so that you could find one another. The most important part of your life was the time that you spent with these people.”