But you just illustrated part of the problem. You can't take a show that focused so heavily on the Sci-Fi aspects and then switch completely over to the other side of magic oh la la, and then blame that kind of disjointed storytelling as appealing to as wide an audience as possible. It would be one thing if the writers had skillfully weaved those two elements together, but they haven't. Think about the time travel storyline and think about the episodes from this past season. It's like they're practically from two different shows.

The root of the problem is that the purpose of the show seemed to change every season. It's like someone kept moving the goal posts randomly and arbitrarily. That's the root of the problem. The reason why storylines were dropped and forgotten, why the tone of the show kept jumping around, why answers were never given to the mysteries. But the problem is made worse simply by bad writing. You can get away with a lot of stuff, as long as you make it interesting. I agree with someone who posted up thread about Lost being great with cliffhangers and mysteries but awful about resolving things or answering questions. It's like they can't tie things together if their life depended on it. The Adam & Eve thing is a great example. Because Jack explicitly said that the bodies looked to have been there for 40-50 years. And now the writers have decided to hastily wrap up that little mystery by claiming it's Crazy Mother & MIB, both of whom died like 2000 years ago. Bad bad writing.

You like the supernatural explanations? WHAT supernatural explanations? A cave of light isn't an explanation! The reason why MIB & Jacob can't kill each other being because their mother made it that way. That's not an explanation. That's just bad writing!

Miracles have to have some sort of root. They can't simply just be random unexplained things. For a lot of people, it's divine intervention. That's how it happened on Battlestar Galactica. But it has to be rooted in something. We haven't found out exactly what the island is yet, but it has to be something that explains how those "miracles" might have been possible. God, angels, aliens, crazy alternate reality where normal rules don't apply, it has to be something. But all those things would result in people being pissed cause deux ex machinas are still considered bad writing.

My absolute favorite thing about Lost were the character interactions. Talk about tone changes, in the beginning it had less to do with god or science, and more to do with just the characters in an extraordinary situation. Those first few seasons when the flashbacks slowly revealed how everyone was connected, their back stories, how they interacted on the island to survive, set up camp, find water, etc. That stuff was brilliant. Remember the fight between Michael & Jin over the watch? The fight itself was awesome, but I also loved how they brought to the foreground those racial tensions. Really great stuff. Great writing. And now they've killed most of the characters or completely ruined the characters (a la Sayid). Pfft.