I appreciate what he says he’s going for, which is that it’s a story about the characters, not the sci-fi/magic. If you’ve watched Tales from the Loop, I think it does a much better job at this. You always want to know more about the tech, but you’re never lead to believe that that’s what the story is about.
I would liken good story writing to a magic trick. The writer has to create a bunch of threads, and weave them together in such a way that are interesting, but just opaque enough that you can’t predict how they all tie together in the end. And once you reach the end, like a magic trick, your mind is blown at how well everything fits together.
But Lost and Leftovers feel like they’re keeping a bunch of threads going, only to drop 90% of them on the floor, tie two together, and say “it was never about those other threads”. And I feel like I’m still standing there like, “um…aren’t you going to guess my card?”
Lindelof thinks that’s his gimmick, but to me just feels like he’s just decided he’s not going to do the actual difficult part of story writing.