LOST was like a super-extended montage of all of my favorite movies, and "Sliding Doors" most accurately falls into the flash sideways and the series finale. If you've watched the film (starring Gwyneth Paltrow), by the end of the movie you realize that although the parallel timeline isn't real, it is convincingly imperfect and bittersweet in it’s depiction of “what if” as better, comparatively, than the actual reality. You realize that even when the characters get some of the things their hearts truly desired, perhaps more justly, at an earlier point in the timeline there was so much more to lose. More importantly, in the event of getting one thing, you must trade another. In the real timeline, things had worked themselves out in the way they were meant to be for the greater good of all parties involved. Even so, throughout the bulk of the movie you're convinced that the currently-unknown-as-real-life-timeline sucks and you’re passionately yet foolishly rooting for the unknown-as-imaginary-timeline, right up until The End.
In my humble opinion of season six and the finale episode, whether the bomb “worked” or not, whether the “sideways” scenes were a physically real timeline byproduct of the bomb or not, doesn’t matter. The entire final season was absolutely necessary because it showed the characters and the audience the answers to the questions that, if we’re being honest, we wanted to know as soon as it dawned on us that the flashbacks made nothing random and everything was connected! “What if the plane didn’t crash on the island?” “What if these characters didn’t meet each other? What if some of them did become aware of their link to other characters off the island? It had to be shown and focused on, if relatively briefly, to us and to the “chosen ones” themselves. It magnifies the stark contrast to the greater importance of the island itself. It assigns value to all the thematic experiences that were only capable of happening in that place with those characters that were chosen to have the opportunity! These people gained redemption, love, grace, faith, free will, true connection, and purpose in ways that they never could have replicated in another situation. Some of the characters blossomed under the circumstances, some wilted and failed.
The final episode aims to reveal that only the people who fulfilled their greatest destiny and redemption ON the island, that sacred and real place created specifically for the greater good of the entire universe, got to move on to the afterlife together as part of the "spiritual clan," as Doc Jensen from EW.com refers to it. The characters that did not submit to honoring the island’s purpose by choosing to unite with the team doing so, encompassing the characters whose downfall occurred on the island, were not part of this afterlife group because their redemption or destiny might take place in a different place in a different time under different circumstances, possibly with a different “clan.”
Whether the alternate “sideways” timeline was intended to be real or not, I think they were striving to illustrate in the final season what would have taken place had the bomb worked and they never crashed on the island, had the island and it’s curators never been involved in their lives at all, and had the one nagging resentment or disappointment in their original timeline been resolved before it ever even occurred to them.
The writers did an exquisite thing which was largely overlooked, like the mother of all Easter eggs throughout the series. Consider the possibility of the final season itself being the ultimate failsafe, representing “if all else fails to propel these souls into resolving all their individual issues so they can move on, insert Team Island Failsafe *here* (i.e. Desmond - Here, there, anywhere!) and watch the rapture unfold.” The biggest inescapable flaw in these characters and all mankind, mentioned by Mother, is that we are all discontent under any and all circumstances, always wanting more (kind of like all the viewers?). The final season was essential because there was a comforting allure, and some resolution in the playing out of a time and place in which they all had significantly less strife, even in “letting go” with failsafe Desmond’s intervention. It was a way for them to test-drive all the things that, before they arrived on the island, they had thought would make them happy.
In effect, the final episode tries to remind us that the island was a powerful tool that was meant to be used, in all its supernatural power, to overcome human nature’s discontent and the impossible odds of life and flawed being. Avoiding “catastrophe” by landing safely in L.A., they did not appear any better or happier or more “alive.” Remember Jacob, also a flawed curator, telling the candidates they were not “just fine,” as Sawyer had ranted, in their pre-island lives? They all might have been “fine,” but none of them had the chance to be great or “special” as some of them so wanted to be. They all needed to be made aware of their own innate role that only the island could afford them. All of the miserable-yet-joyous, triumphant-yet-tough island Incidents made this alternate timeline possible, whether in their soul-journey to the afterlife or in the bomb’s detonation byproduct timeline, so that they might appreciate the gift they had all been so fortunate to receive.
The theme of sacrifice and trading one thing for another, like the parallel universe represented in “Sliding Doors,” should not be lost on anyone here, if you’ll excuse the pun. Jack held on to his perceptions and which desire he was willing to forfeit in the struggle more firmly than the other characters and longer than they did, beginning the story and ending it rightfully so because he, in all his Jack-like glory, chose the obvious Greater Good in one of the most sacrificial, heroic ways. Because of the island and for the island, each character’s soul had to acknowledge and “remember” their existence on the island before moving on, choosing to validate it as the truly superior experience. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it where they, together, truly shine?
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