If there’s reason to be disappointed in the way Lost ended, it’s only because they attempted the impossible and did a B+ job at it.

In the days after the Lost finale, cafeteria tables and Facebook walls everywhere reverberated with the aftershocks of this year’s Big One. Six seasons of wild tangents and metaphysical questions came to a close with the biggest fictional TV series event on record: 5-plus hours devoted solely to wrapping up a crazy sci-fi mystery show that started with a plane crash and ended with… well, that part’s still up for debate.

Fans immediately went into a frenzy, passing judgment on whether the big conclusion was worth the years of buildup, and arguing over what this big island epic really meant in the end. However, an equally interesting point of discussion may be what it meant for us as TV viewers, and how this ground-breaking show, no matter what the moral of the story was, has changed the face of television. In a post-Lost world, its real legacy may not be the philosophic points it made, but what a show like this makes possible in the years to come. After all, the series may have had its flaws, but a flawed masterpiece is better than no masterpiece at all.

[Series spoilers to follow.]

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(Indulge me, if you will, on a tangent before we continue. The final episode of Lost was an incredibly skilled piece of television craftsmanship. It let us have euphoric moments of emotional release with each of a cast of characters we’d grown to love over the years, and that’s about the best we can hope for from a team trying to end a long-running series.

However, I would have changed the final 10 minutes in a small way: make the show less overtly spiritual. With a small bit of maneuvering, the “faith” the show spent so much time harping on could have been a faith in the goodness of humanity instead of a literal, glowing, afterlife happy place. Instead of revealing that the “Sideways” world was some pit stop on the highway to heaven, let the mystical Lost universe keep one foot grounded in the sci-fi reality it had cultivated. Would it have been that different to frame the Sideways world as an actual alternate reality, and let the characters leap from one reality to the next? They’ve already time traveled, fought living smoke, intentionally set off an H-bomb to reset their time-space continuum, seen and spoken with ghosts, watched entire landmasses disappear before their eyes, and raised the dead on more than one occasion. Is inter-dimensional transfer of consciousness any more of a cop-out than an extra-dimensional spiritual class reunion?

All of season six, I was personally rooting for a scenario in which the characters who learned the lessons they were brought to the Island to learn were given a choice. Let Rose and Bernard, who chose to stay on the Island, live out their twilight years the way they saw fit. Let the candidates who realized their mistakes in one world complete their personal journeys by leaping into a world where they’re rewarded with a shot at happiness. Not a fully clean slate, having had their epiphanies in the alternate world and learned of their Island travails, but a chance to live the way they should have. Otherwise, being brought to the Island really was just a long, drawn-out punishment. In the existing scenario, they’re not happy until they’re dead. Jack died alone (cuddling with a cute dog, sure, but that was a bit cheap). Sayid died honorably, but as a zombie nonetheless. Jin and Sun drowned and left an orphan child behind. Locke was tragically strangled to death by Ben, who now gets to live out his years as Hurley’s island VP (imagine that awkward dynamic). Kate and Sawyer get to go home, sure, but without the people they loved most.

A more satisfying conclusion would have had them all hopping into the light and being transported sideways into a better life: a reward for all the bullshit and Dharma food they’ve had to put up with for so long. The moral of my revised ending wouldn’t be, “Be good and you’ll be rewarded after you die”, but “Realize your flaws and make a new life for yourself with the knowledge you’ve gained”. That, I could have got behind 100%. Plus, it would have gelled more with my understanding of the show’s faith vs reason dynamic.)

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Okay, I just had to get that out.

But whether you agree or disagree with where the finale in particular or the show as a whole decided to take us, think for a second why you had the reaction you did. The reason it’s even possible to be so strongly disappointed in Lost, or become such a passionate defender, is because it’s the most ambitious undertaking in TV history, a show that aimed extremely high and pulled viewers into a gripping universe. This team put together a mystery and a character study, a family drama, a sci-fi fantasy and an exotic action series all at once. If there’s reason to be disappointed, it’s only because they attempted the impossible and did a B+ job at it.

Look at the topics touched on even in my short hypothetical. Life and death, science and faith, time, consequence, redemption, relationships. Whether we’re satisfied or not, Lost proved that a complex show that deals in big ideas can grow a loyal, passionate following. Especially when they focus on quality storytelling. The times in their arc that the fans cite as low points were narrative experiments that didn’t really work out — an understandable side effect of attempting such a grand project. But when Lost was at its best (and centered on its strongest characters, like Locke, Desmond, or Ben), we got some of the best hours of network television ever produced.

Add to that the fact that Lost is the only show in recent memory, possibly ever, that prompts this much debate on “What it all means”. It’s the only show that invites, some might even say requires, serious exegesis to fully digest. Lost was packed with detail and allusion. People analyzed Lost like no other series. They cited world mythology and classic literature in figuring out its symbolism. All for a TV show.

For those of us who fantasize about having salon-style discussions with our smart friends, wittily dissecting meaningful works of fiction over cocktails, but are never able to get more than one person to finish the same book in a month, Lost was the closest we came. Conversations between Losties are more akin to comparative lit class than water cooler banter, and that’s an admirable accomplishment. We’ll be lucky to have any other show try something as worthy of sinking our intellectual teeth into, even if this particular work wasn’t the definitive example it could have been.

So is there reason to be upset at Lost? Maybe. We can see now that some narrative branches were dead ends, and a few loose threads defy the show’s ultimate logic. For the die-hard fans that had faith in a flawless master plan, there is an element of let-down. But looking back at all the spectacular scenes of human emotion, the deliciously blunt cliffhangers and the debates that raged as a result, I can’t help but be grateful for what Lost did pull off, and hope that in a TV studio somewhere there’s a team right now saying, “We want to do what Lost did, only learn from their mistakes and do it even better.” And I want to live in a reality where they succeed.