LOST Revisited: The Post-Mortem, Part 1

See, the mission statement of the final season was “John Locke was right”. Granted, that’s been my mission statement all along. But when you build a show around Faith vs. Science, and make a strong case for Faith, there has to be a payoff. If Locke was right, and being right gets him murdered in a hotel room, then what’s the point of being right? The whole point is that Locke wasn’t a fool to believe in something bigger than himself, so they have to give us something bigger. Without the eternal reward, they’d undercut their main point – without it, Smokey is right and Locke was just a sucker. So for me, Timeline X went from being an interesting logic puzzle to the payoff to one of the show’s central themes.