Thanks etta y! We think so...

i thought the dialog they wrote for rodriguez's character was one of the worst parts about the movie. so bad. i had a lot of the same reactions after i saw it, but for some reason, the movie stuck in my head for days afterwards. i don't know if it was the intense sensory experience, or if they actually hypnotized me, but i couldn't stop thinking about it. it seems to have worn off, though.

I think we are probably supposed to read it in the Naive way, but I agree that it's frustrating: it kinda just throws away everything in the sideways timeline. If it is purgatory, and it's all after the characters die, then it has almost no bearing on the "real" timeline story (except maybe for Desmond's possible premonition of it), and thus is kind of a waste of our time. In that case, I think either A) the writers didn't know it was going to be purgatory when this season started, or B) it was ill-conceived and/or poorly realized. Because yeah, why would it be so complicated? Why would Jack and Juliette have a son in purgatory? Why would sequential events happen at all, if there is no "now"? (Also, I find it hard to believe that in Sayid's afterlife, Shannon would trump Nadia.) Having said that, I enjoyed the mushy, surprised reunions (weird absences notwithstanding) and I thought the island-timeline story ending was cool (but it was so heavily foreshadowed that Hurley would take over after Jack died that I was hoping it was a fakeout). I will also say that without his major role as the awakener in the sideways-timeline, it would have been pretty lame for Desmond to end the series unconscious.