My gut reaction at the end of the 2 1/2 hour series finale was; WHAT THE HELL IS THIS? But then I started thinking (obsessing) about it as I went to the Gym, and then I Decided :
1. The initial island stuff really happened. The plane crash happened, the survivors happened, all of that was real. Boone's death was real, and Shannon's. The magical healing powers of the island for Locke and Rose happened. The polar bear stuff and the weird stuff; it all happened.
2. The flashbacks were all real. Jack with the broken marriage; Kate on the run; Sayid the torturer; Hurley and the bad luck.
3. The flash forwards were all real. All the post-island stuff really happened. Jack the alcoholic who needs to go back, Kate the mom, Sun the revenge-seeking single mother.
4. The Dharma stuff happened. There were a group of scientists on the island who were trying to tap into "the source," the same source that Jacob spent centuries protecting. For the scientists, it was a source of energy. For Jacob (and those who came before him and after him), it was the source of good on earth.
5. The post-nuclear-bomb island stuff happened. Desmond did pop the cork, and Jack did put the cork back in, and Locke and Jack did have their final showdown between good and evil and the island did start to fall apart, and Sawyer and Kate and Miles and Richard and Lapidus all did take off. And then, Jack did die on the island (although it was the longest-lasting mortal wound ever), in exactly the same spot where he first woke up on the island, with Vincent by his side. He finally "let go." Jack, ever the searcher for his inner peace, found it at last.
6. The key to the flash sideways is when Christian told Jack at the end "there is no now." I do think that everyone who was gathered in that church is dead, but I don't think they all died at the same time, in the crash. I think they lived their lives however they were meant to, and they died when they were supposed to. I think the flash forward was the "gathering spot" they had all subconsciously agreed to when they were together on the island. It explains why things turned out well for everyone in the forward — Sun and Jin happy ever after with their baby; Jack with the son he always wanted; Hurley successful; Locke putting his father in a vegetative state; Sayid able to "save" Nadia. The reason why Ben stays outside the church is because he's not dead yet (to steal from Monty Python). But he got his redemption, and his forgiveness from Locke, and who, five years ago, would ever have imagined Benjamin Linus becoming the character he became?
So, that's my theory and I'm sticking to it (I think; I haven't read anything else on the Internet yet). As far as the episode itself goes, I thought it was epic. The epiphanies that we witnessed were lovely and moving (Charlie and Claire win, hands down), the dramatic tension between Locke and Jack was set at just the right pitch, the way that Richard embraced his new-found mortality was terrific.
Most of all, however, the emotion that ran among the cast, Jack and Kate's island farewell, Jack and Hurley's "deal," the look on Sawyer's face when he "found Juliet," Hurley and Ben in the aftermath, Hurley and Ben at the church ("you were a great number 2" — bawled my eyes out at that), it was all so ... true. So even if there was a ton of stuff that happened in the last six years that drove us crazy and then turned out to literally mean nothing, it doesn't matter. In the topsy-turvy world of Lost that we came to love and obsess over, in the end, it was all about the love.
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