Rather than reject the current Lost ending outright I will attempt to write my own 'Epilogue' describing events that happen after plane leaves the island but before the "eternal journey" begins.
To briefly recap: Ben, Hurley, Jack, Desmond, Rose, Bernard and Vincent are still on the island; Kate, Claire, Sawyer, Miles, Lapidus, and Richard Alpert are on Ajeira flying to somewhere. Boone, Shannon, Libby, Charlie, Sayid, Sun and Jin are dead on the island (along with some others, but we don't care so much about them). We also have some Lost diaspora unaccounted for: Walt is somewhere around Manhattan, Aaron is either in Los Angeles or Australia with his grandmother, Ji Yeon is in Seol Korea with her grandmother, Clementine (Sawyer’s daughter) is somewhere, and Penny and Charlie Hume are somewhere. There are some major questions that have been left unanswered at this point (some of which are likely unanswerable): (1) what is the island? (2) What happened when Juliette activated the nuclear bomb at the end of season 5 in 1977? (3) Does the island require some sort of balance between benevolent and malevolent forces in order to exist? (4) What ever happened to the Dharma Initiative? (5) Who were the others and where did they come from? (6) Why are the numbers significant?
Hurley has now taken Jack's place as protector of the island with Ben as his "number 2." However, it is unclear what Hurley’s role should be and the ending is ambiguous as to when Jack dies. Let’s say the island heals jack’s knife wound and he wakes up in the bamboo field, now what? I say Hurley’s first move is to get Desmond off of the island so that he can return to his wife and child. Desmond gets on his old boat and Hurley sends him on his way (discovering his new-found Jacob powers in the process). After parting ways with Desmond, Hurley has to do something to pass the time on the island, so he begins to investigate the numbers again. He talks to dead people some more (except Jacob, who is gone for good) and he sets up shop with Ben in the old Dharma town. One day Jack wanders into town and finds Ben and Hugo; they exchange excited hugs but there is an unmistakable tension between them. Hurley realizes that he has the power to send Jack back to the real world where he can be happy and live a complete life; he tells Jack about this idea, but Jack has made his choice and insists on staying on the island. Jack walks away and Hurley calls after him “you have to go back!” What ensues is a constant game of cat-and-mouse between Hurley and Jack on the island, with Hurley trying to get him to leave and Jack stubbornly insisting that he stays (inverting the Jacob—Esau tension).
In the meantime, the plane passengers manage to find their way back to civilization without making a huge scene, and Kate is forced to take on a central leadership role as Claire’s life-counselor and Sawyer’s therapist. She reunites Sawyer with his long-lost daughter and brings Aaron and Claire back together. At some point she manages to resolve most of what was unsettled, and she finds herself longing to find Jack. She turns to Richard, who has sought out either a life of seclusion or a fast-paced city life to complete his temporal journey, in hopes that he can guide her back to the island. But Richard has severed ties and is just living out the end of his life, so she eventually finds Desmond who has inherited Widmore’s fortune and connections to the island and the Dharma initiative. Clearly there is a lot of time and drama here, but the real question is do Kate and Jack ever find each other? My answer not until they meet in “purgatory” aka sideways timeline.
Answers to other questions … The Island is exactly what Jacob said…the cork in a bottle full of good and evil. Juliette never activated the nuclear bomb in 1977, instead the island “flashed” them back to the present right when she tried to trigger it. The island always has good and evil aspects represented, so there will always be tension and a struggle for balance. The Dharma Initiative faded years ago, but what remains of it is probably owned by Charles Widmore or Ben’s contacts in the real world. The others were another group of stranded travelers that Jacob brought or allowed to come to the island in search of a replacement, he allowed them to live on the island and communicated with them through Richard, and eventually they were well established as a Jacob-worshipping cult on the island. The numbers are a representation of the essence of the island and thus have strange powers and effects just like the mystical electro-magnetic properties; Hurley’s unfortunate fate is that his life will be guided by the numbers until the day he dies. But before Hurley can die, he must find a replacement! My nomination Walt! Hurley needs someone to keep him company on the island (and play white-and-black metaphorical board games with him), so why not bring back his long time mind companion Walt (he probably hates it in NYC anyway).
Also I would like to note that Ben is the only one of the “main” characters (not including children) who is not present in the church at the end of Lost Thus he is going to hell (and he knows it!).
That is all…
