1. They're emotionally manipulative but people are so stupid they just ate it up. When I first started watching in the first season and part of the second one I thought like everyone else I was watching a complex, metaphysical and spiritual work of art. Turns out it was just a bunch of nonsense they knew they could get rich off of as long as they could keep us guessing and keep us feeling like we're watching something ingenious and deep, playing mystical sounding music to play around with us, keep the actors seeming like something fascinating would be revealed.
That's an outstanding on-spot critique.
2. They can't create a good antagonist. First the Others/Dharma initiative were horrendously hard on the survivors, attacking, killing, kidnapping for no reason. Then for no reason at all they decided to make the smoke monster the main 'enemy,' but he wasn't even that bad; His "mother" and he himself said so. Still, for some reason he became representative of "malevolence" according to Jacob, BUT what the F*** is that!? There was ALREADY so much evil throughout the series, before and after and whatever, wherever they were, so how could Jacob's twin have possibly been the source of it, especially when he couldn't leave the island? He couldn't even go into a bunch of bamboo! And you expect me to believe this thing/person is supposed to be that dangerous? Yes, he did tell like 2 lies, kill at least one innocent person (Richard's wife) and a bunch of hostile minor characters in one, maybe two shots, and give the sociopathic Benjamin Linus a slight bit more anger to kill Jacob with, but that's still NOTHING compared to the Dharma initiative and Widmore's crew, neither of which were under that unnamed man/creature's control. In the last season they claim that if he got off the Island everyone in the world would disappear, which was their idea of Hell as Hurley said that was what Hell was for the proxy of Richard's wife. But they did so many time skip and what they called "Flash sideways" that they didn't even think to use one to show us what would happen if he/it got off the Island. Know why? BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T KNOW THEMSELVES. All they knew was that they had to explain why there's a sentient smoke being, what it is, what it can do etc and they made a bunch of stuff up and didn't care if it fit so long as it was 'complete'.
Well, I agree with your conclusion, but not your reasoning to arrive at the conclusion.
Jacob's twin was not inherently evil. The Smokester was a malevolent energy force in the cave that needed some kind of trigger to release it, presumably, a human body. The Man-in-Black was still alive when Jacob pushed him into the cave, but dead when he came out the other side, and the Smokester was released, yet again.
I say "yet again" because we saw several skeletons in the cave with the implication being that several other people had entered the cave and released the Smokster thing on previous occasions.
However, that only begs the question, if Jack killed Locke and then Jack went back into the cave, why didn't the Smokester re-appear as Jack?
Like you, the Smokester was cruising around the Island for 2,000 years and couldn't find a cave in a grove of bamboo?
I'm willing to set aside reality a little bit, but not that much. If I wanted off that bad, I'd have walked every inch of the Island until I found it, and the Island ain't all that big.
Richard's wife was already dead before he was sold into slavery.
This is another thing, I call them Red-Herrings, others call them McGuffins. It just nonsense that leads you down the path to a dead end, and it is exemplary of very, very, very, poor script-writing (or writing for a book even). In fact, if LOST were a book, it would be panned as garbage by every critique on the planet.
So, Christian shows up in Jack's office in Los Angeles.
Which Christian? Smokester Christian, Dead Christian, Island Christian?
Well it can't be the Smokester, because we're told the Smokester can't leave the Island. So, which Christian was it?
Then Christian appears with the Whisperers on the freighter just before it blows up. Which Christian was that? Smokester Christian, Dead Christian, Island Christian?
It can't be Smokester Christian because again, we're told the Smokester can't leave the Island and can't travel over water.
Was it Dead Christian? But Christian didn't die on the Island, so why would he be a Whisperer, or with the Whisperers?
But then wait a minute, Michael didn't die on the Island either, because he was on the freighter and the freighter was beyond the range of the Island (which is why the Zodiac with Dan stayed with the Island and the freighter and helicopter didn't), so why was Michael with the Whisperers?
And then Ben's mother. She first appears to him at the window to his bedroom at the Barracks. We're told, and shown, that the Smokester can't cross the Sonic Barrier protecting the Barracks. Ben's mother didn't die on the Island, so who was it?
Richard's wife didn't die on the Island either, but she appears there.
3. I want the hours I spent watching that hogwash back! And maybe J. J. Abrams and the other creators and writers to be put in a pillories with a bull's eye at the center, a videocamera and five minutes alone with them and a gross of eggs or two.
JJ Abrahms left at the beginning of the 3rd Season. The last episode in which he was involved was a Tale of Two Cities, which was the premiere of the 3rd Season.
The show went down the tubes and lost a lot of viewers after he left.
I have the DVD set and the commentaries are useless. It's just the writers praising themselves with a lot of self-congratulatory back-patting for the, um, "immaculate research" the claim they did, that they never really did at all.