Category: Reviews

Roger Linus is not quite the abusive douchebag we’ve been led to believe he was, he is genuinely very concerned about Ben when he sees Jin bring him back suffering from the gunshot wound inflicted by Sayid. Roger is remorseful about how poor a father he’s been.

Cassidy has an interesting interpretation of Sawyer’s sacrificial leap from the helicopter. He did it because he’s a coward.

Miles and Hurley’s conversation is very meta and explains how we are supposed to believe time travel works on the show i.e. not like Back to the Future, you can’t change your future by changing the past. Which presumably means that Ben cannot die and Sayid’s attempted homicide was futile.

Jack refusal to help save Ben is because he’s come to realise that perhaps he was getting in the way of what the island wants. But Kate even after all that Ben had done to her does everything within her power to save the life of younng Ben.

Odd that when Sayid was torturing Ben in the Swan station that Ben didn’t recognise him as being the same guy he helped escape from the Dharma initiative and subsequently shot him.

Juliet makes the suggestion to Kate that maybe the Others can do something to save Ben and in her expression there seems to be some realisation that of course all these events were meant to happen as it is this that leads Ben to eventually join the Others.

Shocking end to this episode of Lost in more way than one. A teenage Ben is shot by Sayid in 1977. Shocking because it is almost unheard of for a child to suffer a violent death of US network television. And if he is indeed dead what does this mean for the show? He can’t be surely as according to Daniel Faraday “whatever happened, happened” so the past cannot be changed so if Ben is alive in 2007 then he must somehow survive this.

Two thoughts/theories on this.
1. Assuming Faraday is correct and the producers of the show have said that there will be no time travel paradoxes then young Ben will survive the gunshot. Is this event the catalyst that turns a quite sweet kid into the manipulative cold hearted Benjamin Linus we’ve come to know?

Typical Lost irony would be that the man Sayid hates for turning him into a monster (or to be more precise turning him back to monstrous actions as we mustn’t forget he had been a torturer in Iraq) is a monster himself because of being betrayed and shot by Sayid in 1977.

2. However perhaps we have been misled up to this point and Daniel Faraday is wrong (or lying) and this is a course correction of a sort as we were shown with Desmond trying to prevent Charlie’s death. Perhaps Ben was never meant to become the leader of the others plus according to Christian he was never meant to turn the Frozen Donkey wheel to move the island. If Ben had died as a child then all the events we have seen so far in the series would have played out quite differently, this is probably the best argument for him surviving this incident.

Jack in the jungle mirrors him coming around in the pilot episode. Focus on the eyes. What just happened? Why have they been randomly deposited on the island?

Hawking’s church is a Dharma station? The lamppost. How they found the island. Ben lies. Ben always lies.

The island is not done with Desmond. Some kind of game and we are just the pieces.

Dharma built the lamppost specifically to find the island. They’d gathered proof that it existed, the Black Rock Captain’s log perhaps. If Hawking was an Other how and why is she now in a Dharma station?

Ajira Airways! Same as the water bottle Sawyer and co. found on the beach by the boats. Were the Oceanic 6 the ones in the other boat that shot at them? Or was it some other passengers on the Ajira 316 flight?

Jack is clearly the Thomas the Apostle of the story of Lost. Does this make Jacob Christ? Then who would Locke be? Perhaps Judas.

Ben has to keep a promise to an old friend. The promise he made to Widmore to kill Penny I think. If Desmond is in town then Penny almost certainly is too and Ben thinks he can seize this opportunity to carry out that threat. I really hope he fails.

The Shepherd boys all have a wanderlust. What is the significance of the scene with Ray. It seems odd to introduce a totally new character just so that Jack can pick up his father’s shoes.

Did Kate give Aaron to Claire’s mum? Finally an explanation about Christian’s white tennis shoes. Ben is injured and at the harbour, does that mean he tried and failed to murder Penny.

Hurley is awesome and is totally not believable as an asshole millionaire who would buy 78 seats on a flight for himself. Sayid is a prisoner under escort, why is he being transported to Guam? I guess that Illana is acting under orders from Jacob and is aware that the plane is going to crash and that Sayid needs to return to the island in that crash.

Frank Lapidus is flying the plane! Wait a second… we’re not going to Guam are we?

Extreme turbulence. White flash. Jack wakes up in the jungle. He was not actually involved in a plane crash, he just materialised in the jungle. Is this what happened to him in the Oceanic 815 crash?

Jin is shocked and pleasantly surprised to see Jack, Hurley and Kate.

Not a great episode and it is interesting that they only took 6 episodes to get back to the island. I’d have thought a lot more of this season would have been off island. The start seemed like a dream sequence as it seemed so unreal that Jack would wake up in exactly the same way as he did in the pilot episode. And that he, Hurley and Kate would be back on the island but be spatially separated and not knowing how it happened.

Ben lies. It is pathological. The line about how he can read “my mother taught me” is a throwaway line, a joke, but it is also a lie.

I’m sure Desmond is correct that they are all just like pawns in a massive game of chess.