Far too much of our culture fears death so much it offers up only visions of torment or emptiness, a refusal to acknowledge its reality in the ubiquitous depiction of ghosts as "not having moved on". In this final episode, we have the depiction, not of purgatory, but rather the mind's coming to terms with the reality of death - going to the great length of creating an entire life as a defense against the reality. Bringing full circle not just the major cast players, but Juliette's dying words to Sawyer in the first episode, "It worked." Exploding the bomb did, indeed, work. It just didn't work in the way anyone thought.
I also think that Hugo was the only real choice for caretaker. He may have been a slightly slack, clueless bumbler; as Ben Linus tells him (in one of those moments that show that Ben Linus was more than a sociopath), Hugo will do well as long as he does what he does well, take care of people. That is what Hurley always did. Taking care of the island, running things not as Jacob did - some secret society with ever-descending spirals of understanding and knowledge. His constant demand for openness, his various ploys - from the Golf Course to the con on Sawyer to the demand for funerals for those who died - all show that in hi heart, Hugo cared not a fig for the deeper ways of the island. All he cared about was people.
All in all, this final season, with its twin story lines closed the final circle, answered the only question worth asking with a chuckle ("yes, the island is real, you dope"), and saw in the lives of the survivors of Oceanic 815 that most fleeting and rare of experiences - lives lived more fully and honestly (even in deceit) than might otherwise have been. Who they were before; who they were after they left (those few who did) did not matter. Sawyer and Kate and Claire get off the island, yet, as Christian tells Jack, the time spent on the island was the most important thing any of them ever did. Who knows how those three lived, and perhaps even loved, once they had gone; in death, they find themselves returning to those people whom they loved at that time, because their living, and their loving, was far more real than anything before or after.
I will admit that, even more than the moment Jin and Sun realize what is happening (and the moment this viewer understood, too, what was happening), the moment when Juliette and Sawyer meet at the vending machine and realize what is happening, I got teary.
Finally, I have to say that ending the series this way, for me, makes of it what it has always seemed to me to be - a variant on that 19th century serialized novel, appearing not in monthly installments, but yearly ones. Tying up all those odd loose ends in a way that always left the reader surprised was a feature of those particular ways of story-telling (consider the very final chapter of Crime and Punishment as emblematic of the type). With this ending, the creators achieved what they set out - to tell a complete story, from beginning to end, making of series television something more than it might otherwise have been.
