The day before the series finale aired in 2010, I made a post on what was my first blog about Lost. In it, I picked what I considered the best episodes of each season. For Season 3 I selected this episode ahead of ‘Flashes Before My Eyes’ and the season finale.
I understand why both episodes are
held in higher regard: they are among the greatest moments in TV history. But there is a part of me that will always
rank ‘Man Behind the Curtain’ slightly ahead of both. Some of them were
apparent at the time I wrote the list; years of rewatches have made me realize
that are more reasons.
The obvious reasons are that this
is the first Ben-centric episode. (It’s also the last traditional flashback
episode the series will ever air.) This puts Michael Emerson, already one of
the great performers in the cast front and center for the first time, and even
though the flashback barely uses him, it’s more than apparent why this is the
episode he received his first Emmy nomination for. (It was the first of four
consecutive ones he received; he would win in 2009.) It gives the first real
look at Ben’s backstory and it paints a far more sympathetic picture of him
then we would have thought possible for the character we’ve until now
classified as the villain of Lost. It
also gives major revelations about Richard in a way none of us could have
expected. It is the first mention we’ve had of Jacob as the real power behind
the island, and we get what we think is our first look at him. (It will turn
out that Locke’s dismissal of Jacob’s existence is not entirely without merit
in the context of this episode.) It leads to our first visit to the cabin and
what may very well be the highpoint of Season 3. It gives us our first look at the Dharma
Initiative beyond the abandoned stations and old films we’ve spent the last two
seasons watching. And most of the
episode is focused on Ben and Locke which as all of know by now, is Lost’s
sweet spot.
All of these would be enough to
make the episode a classic on its own. What is more interesting about it is
that in hindsight this episode involves a major sea change in how the series
will approach Ben going forward. The scene where Locke demands answers from Ben
and hears the name of Jacob for the first time will always be remarkable
because this is the first time in their interactions that the power dynamic has
shifted from Ben to Locke. It’s clear in the opening sequence that when Ben
told Locke if he didn’t kill his father
he was certain he was never see John again. Now one day later and things are
already starting to unravel (he’s just learned that his recorder is missing
when he comes out of his tent) when he sees that everyone is focused on Locke who
drops Cooper’s body in front of him and calls Ben on what was clearly a bluff.
The look on Ben’s face shows that he has been blindsided. He tries to regain
power by bringing up Jacob and Locke will have none of it. Locke tells Ben that he believes that there
is no Jacob and that “you are the man behind the curtain. The Wizard of Oz. And
you’re a liar.” The fact that Ben isn’t aware of his hand shaking is a tell;
Ben was always in control of his behavior even as Henry Gale.
Ben’s hand is shaking not because
of his fear of Jacob but because of his fear of Locke. He knows what an impact
Locke showing up in the camp after he’d been publicly humiliated by him has. He
knows the ground beneath him is shifting and he gets confirmation when Mikhail
shows up. It’s pretty clear the two never had much use for each other before
and now Mikhail is openly disdainful of how he and Locke are interacting. Then
Locke starts whaling on Mikhail. Ben calls for Tom and then more frantically
for Richard, and they just stand there and watch. It’s the first time in Season
3 Ben’s authority has openly been ignored. The cherry on top comes when Alex,
who as far as we know has not talked to her father since in The Man from
Tallahassee, goes to the two of them and shows her favor to the man who put a
gun to her head. When she says: “Happy birthday, Dad” before leaving, it’s
clearly another jab: she might not know why Ben’s birthday is such a painful
memory for him but I have a feeling there haven’t been a lot of surprise
parties in Otherville.
What the flashbacks reveal is more
telling than we thought in retrospect because not only do we feel immense
sympathy for Ben through all of them (well, maybe not the last one) but because
it hindsight, it shows Ben may never had any true power at all. We’re not
shocked to learn he wasn’t born on the island; it would have been more shocking
if he’d been telling the truth about that. But that’s not entirely a lie: Ben
has lived on this island more than thirty years and it may feel like he’s lived
on the island his whole life.
And it looks very much like
initially he wanted to live here as much as everyone else we’ve met to this
point. Small shock that we learn that Ben’s childhood was a horror show – that
seems to be par for the course on Lost - but this one hurts more
because we actually see Ben as a child and the abuse is far more raw. Ben’s
mother died giving birth to him and his father has resented him for that his
whole life. How exactly he ended up getting invited to the Dharma Initiative is
never clear - the major theory at the time was the Initiative wanted Ben and
they had to take Roger to get him. What is clear is that Roger was brought
under false pretenses, was brought in as a janitor and spent much of his early
days fighting off ‘The Hostiles’. (This is clearly early in the Initiative’s
tenure on the island; they clearly know about the monster but not the natives.)
The only people Ben gravitates towards are Horace and a girl his own age named
Annie. We will see the former again later in the series but we will never again
see Annie, which is one of the series greater loopholes considering we will
revisit this era again. It is clear that their friendship touched Ben in ways
that almost nothing else did in his life. Ben is not a man who cares much about
the past; the fact that he’s holding on to a gift from her thirty years later
says a lot about what she meant to him.
Of course that very night, he sees
his father drunk on the couch and gets a horrible birthday message from his
father. In later seasons we will wonder if young Ben Linus was born the monster
he was despite the evidence we have at the time. It has always been hard for me
to bridge the gap between the man we see cold-bloodedly gas his father and the
boy we see in tears so many times in the episode.
There’s also the real possibility
that Ben is being manipulated by forces beyond his control even now. When he
sees his mother in his house and then runs into the jungle later and sees her
beyond the fence warning him not to move forward, there’s a strong possibility
that the island is bringing him there. We won’t know until the second half of
the series what this represents but it looks like Ben is being used to go into
the jungle and have a meeting with Richard. Yes the same Richard we see in the
present, and I mean exactly the same. When Ben used the phrase: “You do
remember birthdays, Richard?” in the first scene, it now takes on a whole
new context. In The Brig we assumed Richard was leading an insurrection; now it
looks like he’s the power behind the throne and that thirty years ago, he saw
how special Ben was. (Note the questions he asks Ben about seeing someone who
is dead and what he was told. We will get context on that too but not until the
series is nearly over.)
Whatever forces are manipulated
Ben, he’s clearly willing to go along with them. Maybe it is out of hatred for
his father’s abuse; maybe he genuinely wants to see his mother again. (Of
course this is where I tell you that Emily Linus is played by Carrie Preston –
Mrs. Michael Emerson. Preston is in her own right as brilliant a performer as
her husband. She never appeared on Lost again but that was because she
was about to have her own breakthrough. The next year she would be cast on True
Blood, two years later she began her guest role on The Good Wife and
has been as much a fixture in the era of Peak TV as her husband has been. They
are the character actor power couple of the last twenty years. Gushing
interlude over.) Whatever the reason at the end of the episode his anger at his
father essentially leads him to kill not only him but the entire Dharma
Initiative.
The scene at the end is one of the
most ghastly in all of Lost as Ben returns from his father to see the
aftermath of the Purge. It is pretty clear the monster we know as Ben was born
that day as he coolly walks among the bodies of people he lives with for the
last fifteen years and only shows the slightest bit of remorse when he closes
Horace’s eyes. And he’s just as dismissive when Richard asks if he wants to
bring his body. He hates his father so much he doesn’t even want him to be a
pit of skeletons. (As it turns out, however, it might have been in his long
term interest to do so: we’ve already seen that Hurley found Roger’s van and
that’s going to have major repercussions.)
Ben then takes Locke to the cabin
where he says Jacob is. In retrospect, we know this isn’t where Jacob lived
(and in fact that Richard has known that Ben has been lying about this for a
while but we’ll get to that) but it seems like it might. There’s a line of ash
they have to step over, Ben lights a lantern and says in portentous tones:
“There’s no going back.” Then they go in…and there’s an empty chair.
The scene never gets old no matter
how many times you rewatch it, no matter whether or not you know the truth.
Locke is utterly stunned when Ben says that Jacob is in that empty chair and we
genuinely think that this man we’ve thought was the mastermind behind
everything is actually completely insane. (That is, after all, kind of a
prerequisite for the evil genius.) Emerson commits completely to it, which
makes what could be a laughable scene seem genuinely serious. O’Quinn turns
around, utterly defeated because the man he thinks has all the answers has
none. Then he hears two words: “Help Me.”
In retrospect Emerson is even
better in the next moments when Locke turns the flashlight on the chair and
everything goes insane: the chair begins rocking, windows begin breaking. Ben
snatches the chair and shouts at Jacob and is thrown backwards. For the
briefest of moments we see a spectre in the chair and Locke runs out in terror.
Perhaps Locke genuinely does believe it was an act.
Now of course it seems that
Emerson may have giving a performance not even he may have known about it. At
the time, he looks genuinely shocked when Locke asks if he said anything and
when he is thrown across the room, but we think that Ben might just be putting
on another performance. And when Ben
leads John to the mass grave and tells him (for a change) what happened and how
they got there and then shoots John, we think that this might be a combination
of a power move and revenge. He knows what a threat Locke is to him and he
wants to remove it. But when Ben shouts out: “What did he say?” it’s now clear
that it isn’t just because he realizes John is special. It’s because when John
tells him what he heard, there’s a moment when his throat clenches. In it Ben
has just realized that he was never special at all and John was. Is Ben trying to set up another scenario he
doesn’t think Locke can overcome? Or is he so focused on the new set of
problems that he can’t even bother to deal with it anymore?
To be fair, there is quite a bit going on back on the beach. Everyone now knows about Naomi and the truth
about the crash, Juliet has revealed that she has decided to double cross Ben,
and Jack has finally decided to let everyone in on his plan. But because this
is fundamentally a story about Ben and Locke, I think we’ll let that sit until
the next episode. (That being said when Mikhail tells Ben about the freighter,
he seems stunned to hear about it and doesn’t move with the urgency that
Mikhail justifiably believes it
deserves. These are not the actions consistent with what Ben tells us at the
end of Season 3; never mind what we learn in Season 4.)
Perhaps that’s the reason I still
favor ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’. Where ‘Flashes Before My Eyes’ and ‘Through
the Looking Glass’ both utterly change the game of Lost, this episode is
extraordinary on a subtler level. We have as many questions at the end of it as
we do with any others but unlike some of them, it’s because we have seen behind
the curtain and learn the Great and Powerful Oz was not only once a scared, powerless
boy but thirty years is pretty much the same. And now that the curtain has been
lifted, he will spent the next half of the series powerless among his own
people – and trying to find it over those who believe he still has it.
VHS NOTE: This episode also
features the first appearances of Sterling Beaumon as Young Ben and acclaimed
character actor Jon Gries as Roger Linus. We will see both again in Season 5.
Another intriguing character, Olivia, shows up with Horace at the start of the
episode and her relationship to Dharma is never clear. We think she is Horace’s
wife but she never appears after this episode and she may never have had any
relationship to him at all. Could Samantha Mathis never find her way back to
the series?
There is also a mention of a
volcano on the island that is never referred to again. Apparently there were
plans to make it the centerpiece of the series finale. It’s hard for me to see
how that could have worked at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment