Tag: review

We finally get to meet Jacob, not only is he real but he has intervened in our Oceanic 815 survivors lives at crucial moments in their pasts. White shirt, and he’s joined on the beach to see the arrival of what is possibly The Black Rock by a man who wears a black shirt presumably he is Jacob’s dark counterpart.

Rose, Bernard and Vincent are alive and living a happy peaceful life on the island away undetected by both the Others and the Dharma Initiative. Being together is all that matters. It’s always something with you people.

In my experience the people that go out of their way to tell you that they are the good guys are almost always the bad guys. The circle of ash was broken and so whoever was constrained to the cabin has escaped. They believe it was somebody other than Jacob which suggests that it was the man in black which means that it was not Jacob that spoke to Locke and therefore the others may have been following the orders unwittingly of Jacob’s nemesis.

Jacob resurrects Locke after his ‘fall’.

It is about love. Rose and Bernard. Sun and Jin. Love eventually triumphs over adversity. “Your love is a special thing”. Jacob speaks excellent Korean, in addition to English and Russian (?).

We finally get to see the accident in the operating room that formed the basis of the story that Jack told Kate in the pilot episode where he overcame his panic and was able to repair the damage he’d caused. Interestingly it seems the reality of the situation doesn’t quite match Jack’s perspective, he believes that his father was undermining him when in fact Christian was genuinely helping him to overcome his panic and believe in his ability to operate.

The Oceanic survivors are there on the island for a reason. Jacob it seems is playing a long game and is placing his pieces for the final showdown with his nemesis.

Again with the love theme. Juliet loves Sawyer so much that she would rather that she never met him than worry that she might lose him.

Hurley is a great barometer for establishing other character’s intentions because he is so open and has no agenda which means that people tend to be open and honest with him. Hurley and Jacob’s conversation in the taxi cab shows Jacob to be a good man.

So that’s how Pierre Chang lost his arm!

Heartbreaking to see Juliet die.

Richard knows what lies in the shadow of the statue, what he says in Latin apparently translates to “He who will protect/save us all”. Does that mean Jacob? The man in black has manipulated Ben into killing Jacob but it seems that Jacob was expecting it and that although he’d prefer Ben not to carry out the act he is sanguine about it.

Juliet not dead yet and with eight hits manages to set off the bomb and the screen goes white. What the hell does this mean?

Lots of answers but with them come more questions. Like where did Charles Widmore get a horse on the island?

Ben is lying about knowing that Locke would be resurrected by the island as he was truly very shocked to see Locke welcoming him back to the land of the living. What is in Illana’s crate?

Ben and Ethan are carrying out Widmore’s orders to kill Rousseau but Ben steals Alex instead. this is pre-purge so the two of them must still be living amongst the Dharma initiative and not yet fully members of the Others.

Michael Emerson and Terry O’Quinn are really great in this episode as Ben and Locke and I love that their roles are now somewhat reversed with Locke knowing more than Ben about what is going on and what to do next. Is Caesar dead? That was fairly short lived for what I thought would have been a new major character. He’s dead before he’s made barely any impact.

Who are Illana’s gang protecting the island from and what purpose are they protecting it for. Why didn’t Ben recognise later that the Oceanic Six had been members of the Dharma Initiative. What about Sawyer, Jin, Juliet and Miles whom he has lived with for three of his most formative years and during a period of time that major events happened including getting shot by an escaped prisoner.

Because what is about to come out of that jungle is something I can’t control. Then Locke emerges. Big clue to suggest that Locke is in fact just a manifestation of the smoke monster.

What lies in the shadow of the statue?

Hieroglyphs depicting Anubis communing with the smoke monster.

Did it let Ben live because he’s taken responsibility for the death of Alex. Presumably Alex was not really there and so Ben was talking to an aspect of the monster and then talks to Locke who is I think yet another aspect of the monster.

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.