Air Date: April 24, 2008
Wow.
Seriously, wow.
Last night's episode of "Lost" was mother effing epic.
I'm going to split the three different parts of last night's out of this world episode, because damn, a lot happened. A friendly game of Risk (in which Hurley cryptically tells Sawyer and Locke that "Australia is the key to the game,") is interrupted when Charles Widmore's mercenaries attack Locke's camp in an attempt to bring Ben in. Sawyer runs to rescue a sleeping Claire from one of the houses, running into a group of non featured characters... who all get picked off one by one. Note to any characters who want to survive on "Lost..." if you have a speaking role, your odds of survival are much better.
The mercenaries reveal that they are holding Ben's daughter hostage, and threaten to kill her if he doesn't come out. Talking to the lead mercenary over a radio, Ben told him he wouldn't come out, confident that they were bluffing and would never shoot his daughter.
Then they shoot his daughter.
A stunned and hurt Ben uses the last bit of defense he can on the surrounding assault team.
He calls out the smoke monster.
Let me repeat that: Ben calls out the smoke monster.
Seriously, ol' smokey is apparently like an attack dog that Ben can use whenever he feels like it. Which means he lied about not knowing anything about it when Locke asked him.
After smokey takes out the mercenaries- because guns are very ineffective against a monster made of smoke, Ben stops to "say goodbye to his daughter."
Locke's team runs into the woods, where they hope to find Jacob's creepy ghost cabin. After all the insanity, Sawyer decides he's finally had enough of Locke's crazy man shenanigans and decides to head back to Jack's camp with Claire, Aaron, and Hurley. But Benjamin and Locke won't let Hurley go... because he is the only one who can find Jacob's cabin. Hurley mans up and says he will stay with Locke and Ben to avoid anymore bloodshed, and Sawyer touchingly promises to kill Locke if he hurts even one of Hurley's curly hairs. And Locke's response, after a bit of a beat, is priceless... he looks Sawyer in the eye and says "fair enough."
Back on the beach with Jack's crew, things get tense when a body washes ashore on the beach. It turns out to be the doctor from the freighter, whose throat has been slashed (clearly he didn't heed his own warning about "not pissing the captain off.") Jack wants an explanation and gets Daniel to use the broken satellite phone to transmit a signal to the ship in morse code... and then Daniel tries to lie about the freighter's mysterious response. Unfortunately for Daniel, old Bernard knows morse code and calls him on the lie. When Jack asks if the freighter crew ever had any intentions of bringing the survivors back from the island, a freaked out Daniel admits that they never did plan on rescuing them, giving legitimacy to Ben's claims that the crew plans on slaughtering everyone on the island once they have Ben in their possession.
Oh, and Jack is getting sick... which is clearly going to lead to an episode where somebody who isn't a doctor must operate on the doctor. This kind of story turn seems a bit lame, considering all the game altering twists and turns in the last episode, but hopefully the writing team is going somewhere with the subplot.
Anyway, on to the last but certainly not least of the three parts of the episode... Ben's flash forward. The first time we see him, Ben is waking up in the middle of the Sahara Desert, where he quickly kills two men on horseback who discover him. He heads into town and checks into a hotel (where he is a preferred customer who travels under an alias,) and asks the desk clerk the date... and needs to confirm the year.
So somehow Ben got off the island and ended up right smack in the middle of the desert... but is unsure of the year. More time travel stuff, it looks like.
Ben arrives just in time to show up at a funeral... for Sayid's dead wife. Turns out Sayid finally found the woman he had been searching for before he crash landed on mystery island, married her, and less than a year later, had to bury her. She was murdered, and Benjamin claims he is at the funeral to find the assassin who killed his wife. He shows him a picture of a man who was seen driving away right after Sayid's wife was murdered in Los Angeles... at the corner of La Brea and Santa Monica, which is just three blocks from where she was killed. And also my exact neighborhood, which is spooky/ awesome.
Ben tells Sayid that he got off the island using "Desmond's boat." Now, waking up in the middle of the desert probably implies that he didn't use a boat... but Desmond may have something to do with it, since it seems like Ben might have jumped through time somehow.
Sayid, angry and mournful, helps Ben track down and kill the assassin... then asks Ben who is "next" on his list. Ben tries to talk Sayid out of helping him, telling him it's "not his war," but Sayid insists, telling him he has nothing to live for other than avenging his wife's murder. Benjamin finally relents, but when walks away from Sayid, he smiles his evil Ben smile. And we witness how another one of our poor islanders is manipulated by Ben Linus.
At the end of the flash forward, Ben sneaks into Charles Widmore's hotel suite, where the two men finally confront eachother face to face. Ben tells Widmore that he "changed the rules" when his men murdered Alex. Widmore tells Ben that "everything you have you took from me," implying that Widmore was probably behind the Dharma Initiative work that Ben disrupted... by murdering anyone who worked for them. When Widmore asks Ben if he's going to kill him, Ben tells him that "both you and I know that I can't do that." Ben then promises to hunt down Widmore's daughter and kill her as revenge... that's right, Benjamin Linus has a personal vendetta against Desmond's true love, Penny. Widmore tells Ben that he'll never find Penny, while Ben tell Widmore he'll never find the island... and the game is on.
So why can't Ben kill Widmore? What are these "rules" Ben speaks of that Widmore broke? How far back does their association go? How the hell DID Ben get off the island? And just where does one buy food for your pet giant smoke monster anyway?
This was an episode where the patience of "Lost" fans really paid off, as mind blowing reveal after mind blowing reveal added up, all of them building to what promises to be an absolutely explosive finale where more than one of our favorite islanders will probably not make it. It was a fast paced hour with tons of new information that left fans with even more intriguing questions than ever, and most excitingly, it really did hint at the shape of things to come for the show now that the writers have the freedom of knowing just how long the show will go on and that they have an idea of where their endpoint is... we're gonna get more and more answers as the show goes on. Which will lead to more and more questions.
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