So, Lost is done. I made a couple comments on the washingtonpost.com analysis. Here they are...
You asked:
What's special about the island? Who knows?
Why does it need a protector? I dunno.
Who are they protecting it from? Beats me.
Who are the others? Who cares?
What was Dharma initiative? Doesn't matter.
What was Widmore after? Never mind.
Was anybody alive at all? Picky questions.
Most of these questions could be dealt with fairly offhandedly. If the show had come out and said (which it basically did, on a few occasions) that there are places on the Earth where electromagnetism spikes, and that the island is at one of those places, would that explain to you what's special about the island? Do you need a physicist to come out and explain it to the audience like we're in a lecture hall (they also went for that approach through Faraday a couple times).
The sci-fi stuff starts when it comes to what happens when you interact with the electromagnetism. You become the smoke monster. You live forever. You destroy the world. That's why it needs protecting, and who it needs protecting from. The frustrating thing is that the only character in the show who ever seemed to actually know the whys of this situation was Faraday, and he died last season. I don't think Jacob ever really knew what the island was, nor did MiB. Maybe their "mother" did, but that's doubtful, too.
The others are presumably people that came to the island sometime after the Black Rock but before the Army and Jughead. That's a pretty narrow window, so it's actually a fairly precise answer. Presumably, after Jacob denotes Alpert to be his right hand man, Jacob brings people to the island for Alpert to work with, trying to prove humanity's goodness.
The Darma initiative was a group out of Ann Arbor that came to the island to study/harness the electromagnetic characteristics of the island.
Widmore's mission was personal. He wanted to reclaim his position as leader of the Others and important dude on the island.
Finally, see my post above, but yes, everybody was really alive. The Sideways World was the only thing that wasn't real, or at least not of our world.
Oh my god, I had to stop reading this analysis a few paragraphs in. It must be incredibly frustrating to the writers to lay things out so plainly and have so many people still confused. Christian's little speech at the end said everything we needed to know. Perhaps because of the non-linear plot or people trying to fit the story into their preconceived notions of what was going on, it gets lost. Here's what happened, and I don't think there's much to dispute here.
1) Jack dies after re-corking the island. We see him die. There's no mystery here. He re-corks the island, winds up in the river, wanders around a bit, falls over, and dies. Incidentally, Charlie died underwater, Boone died in season 1, and Sayid died in the sub, in case there was confusion.
2) Lapidus, Kate, Sawyer, Miles, and Claire fly off the island, presumably to live uneventful lives in the wider world. They eventually die, maybe at 60, maybe at 40, maybe at 110. Also, Hurley and Ben live on to be caretakers of the island, their first order of business being shipping Desmond off to be with Penny and baby Charlie. Everything does not hinge on Jack. As Christian said, some died before him, some died long after him, but everybody dies.
3) There is no logical contradiction in point 2, above. As Christian said, there is no "now" in sideways world. Just because they all died at different times doesn't mean those different times have to correlate to any specific time in Sideways world. We were set up for this idea in Season 5, with all the time travel.
4) They did not die at the plane crash. What happened on the island was real. The island is a real place. Jacob, MiB, and the rest are all real entities. The Oceanic Six did really return to the wider world, and did really go back to the island. The understanding of this point is crucial to the point of the show, as Christian puts it. They all meet up in the Sideways World because the time they spent together on the island was the most important time of their lives. Not of their afterlives, or of their purgatory lives.
There's still plenty to debate and wonder about, but the four points above have to be taken as the basis for any reasonable discussion. It was a fantastic finale, but I've just been amazed at what people are trying to take away from it.