LOST FINALE!!!!

[manasecret]

Abrams is also big on puzzles, and very big on letting you figure out the puzzle yourself and not giving out the answer. (He edited a Wired issue with this theme a few months ago.) For any puzzle, the journey and self-discovery is what is the real fun and of importance, not the final answer. A simple example is using cheats during video games -- sure if you're stuck, you can look up the answer or use a cheat to make the game easier, but then you miss the self-accomplishment of it all. Or another example -- looking at the answers of a crossword puzzle without trying to get them for yourself. There's some satisfaction in getting the answers, sure, but it doesn't match the satisfaction of discovering them for yourself. This I think probably comes directly from his thoughts on mystery boxes.

That is likely where he left Lost. Many of the questions are puzzles that are given enough clues to let you decipher. The others are left as mystery boxes, for you to never know the true answer of what's inside, but with your imagination, leaving infinite possibilities.

[Teuthida]

That's like writing 3/4 of a book and then telling the reader to write the rest.

For your game cheating analogy...that would be like getting all the answers before the show ended. Sure the princess keeps ending up being in a different castle but Mario eventually gets her in the end. Lost is more like Mario trying to rescue the princess except at the end he doesn't find her and instead wakes up and it was all a dream.

What was fun was for the viewer to guess the answers during the course of the show. To never get any just flat out sucks.