"The End" - Further Thoughts

After a week, a second viewing, a couple of podcasts and several websites, I have reached more conclusions about the LOST finale.  Although I stand by most of my initial interpretations, there are a few things that I have changed my mind about.  Chief among them is the status of Ben in the flash-sideways world.  I had originally thought that his reluctance to enter the Church indicated that he was not yet dead in the real world.  On further reflection and some brilliant insight by my friend Stacey, I see now that Ben too was dead as the entire flash-sideways world was a part of the afterlife.  The sideways world was an environment to rectify the character's human lives and in some cases come to terms with their flaws and failings.  This is not to say that it was Purgatory in the Catholic sense because not everyone was suffering for their past transgressions.  True, Ben was feeling guilt about some of the things that he had done in his life, specifically his treatment of Alex and Danielle Rousseau, but it was self imposed and may have been a byproduct of his Island enlightenment at the fists of Desmond.  Although Ben was sometimes a part of Jack's life, he was more tied to Alex, Rousseau and probably a number of Others.  When they have all been Island enlightened and come to terms with their pasts, together they will be able to enter the Church and move on as a group.

I've also had a chance to think more about the implications of the supposed detonation of Jughead at the end of Season 5.  At the beginning of Season 6, we all thought Juliet had split the timeline by setting off the H-bomb, but the more I have thought about it, this is likely not the case.  The bomb did not detonate when Jack dropped it down the shaft and we all assumed that Juliet detonated it by repeatedly hitting it with a rock.  I have been under the impression that because of the electrical anomaly at the future site of the Swan Station, the detonated H-bomb served to propel Jack et al back to their present time (2007) while also creating a timeline in which Oceanic 815 never crashed.  At the end of the finale, I was left feeling that Jughead had been a red herring along; a plot device used to get all of our characters back to 2007.  Now I'm of the opinion that Jughead was never actually detonated.  When we were first introduced to the Swan Station in Season 2, Sayid remarked on the amount of concrete being excessive even going as far to compare it to the containment of Chernobyl.  Furthermore, in Season 5, Daniel Farady told the young Eloise Hawking that the Others must encase the leaking Jughead in concrete.  I now feel that the Incident was not the destruction of the H-bomb but rather the attack on the Swan Station construction site by what appeared to be Hostiles.  After they vanished and the Dharma Initiative picked up the pieces, they encased the core of Jughead in concrete and built the rest of the station as planned.  The time-jump by Jack et al was caused by the mysterious elctrical properties of the Island in order to get them to where they were supposed to be in time.  Perhaps that's a little far fetched but seems par for the course on such a mysterious and powerful island.