Lost Rewatch: Dr. Linus

 

Of all the characters we’ve met on Lost Ben Linus is the closest model of the

antihero we were becoming familiar with during this period. Just as capable of violence as Vic Mackey, crafty as Al Swearengen, more psychological issues that Tony Soprano could have been capable of and just as brilliant when it comes to lying as Walter White. Sayid’s description of Ben to Ilana was accurate given everything we knew about him by that point and would be fitting for so many of the other characters in that era.

But there was a critical difference between Ben and every other antihero we’d met before and basically all we’ve met since: we got a far clearer picture of what made Ben who he was than all of them. In the second half of the series Darlton went out of its way to do something radical with the character who seemed to be the ‘big bad’ of the show to that point. First it took away his leadership and had him suffer his greatest loss in Season 4. Then in Season 5 we spent the first half of it beginning to completely loathe everything about him leading back to the return to the island – and immediately afterward throwing both the character and our feelings about him into complete question. And now in the final season, Lost does something that no other show of this era really tried with any of its antiheroes: it redeemed him. Not just in the eyes of the viewer, but his own, which in truth may have been the harder task.

If I were to state that Michael Emerson’s work as Ben is one of the greatest television performances in history few would consider it hyperbole; even those people who think Lost botched the ending or weren’t fans of the show are willing to acknowledge that. He gives one of the most riveting performances of all time, and what makes all the more fascinating is that for the first three and a half seasons of his work, you didn’t know if you could trust a word that came out of his mouth. This is a contrast to the antiheroes we’ve seen since; every time Walter White or Don Draper tell a lie, the audience knows he is lying because we’ve seen what actually happened. Ben’s superpower is that he can lie straight to character’s faces, have his lies revealed, and then tell alternate lies that must subsequently be exposed.

This was clear from the moment we met Ben, or should I say Henry Gale, in Season 2. He was trapped in Rousseau’s nets, claimed to have crashed on the island on a balloon, and denied with every fiber of his being he was ‘One of Them’. In Season 2, he was locked in a cell in the Swan, and yet despite ostensibly being a prisoner, spent his entire time there in complete control of how every character behaved in regard to him. When his lie was exposed, he simply changed tracks and continued his manipulations, and he was just as good then as before. Under intense interrogation and torture he never gave up a single bit of intelligence about the Others, not even his real name. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been that shocked when at the end of Season 2, we learned in fact he was their leader.

In Season 3, Ben took center stage in the first half of the series, holding Jack, Kate and Sawyer prisoner. It quickly became clear that while he was the leader, none of the people following him seemed to like him that much and they didn’t exactly seem willing followers. Then we learned the real reason for his manipulations: on an island where no one got sick, Ben had a fatal tumor on his spine. Its hard to know whether Ben was more afraid of dying or whether the fact that this tumor was a sign he might not be the Chosen One after all.

We also met Alex, the woman he claimed was his daughter but he’d actually taken from Rousseau when she was a week old. His daughter hated his guts because he’d abducted her boyfriend and had him undergo psychological torture. It was clear that Ben cared about her but it was also clear she was having doubts about him – and the presence of the Oceanics made it very clear that she was being lied too.

Jack thought he’d outmaneuvered Ben when Ben had actually outmaneuvered him when Kate came to ‘rescue’ him and brought Locke right to them. Ben had been able to manipulate Locke in the hatch and he thought he could do it once he came to them. But Ben’s hold over the Others was slipping and his followers were beginning to revolt. In an effort to hold his power over Locke, he tried to humiliate him twice. First he tried to get him to kill his father, which he couldn’t do. Then Locke showed up with his dead father over his shoulder and the group was stunned – including Ben. Ben then tried to show his power by taking Locke to ‘Jacob’, who he said was the true leader of the island who only he talked to. Locke didn’t buy it and kept not buying it until they went to the cabin and saw Ben talking to an empty chair. Then Locke heard ‘Jacob’ and Ben was stunned. He shot Locke and dumped him in a ditch, thinking his problems were solved.

The next day with his power slipping he decided to make an effort to carry out a plan to abduct the pregnant women, a project he’d been working on that his followers were losing patience with. He’d sent Juliet as a mole but then Juliet betrayed Ben and it ended in disaster for everyone who came to the beach. In a desperate final gamble he went out to meet Jack and tried to persuade him that the people coming to rescue them were actually evil. Ben was telling the truth for once but its hard to blame Jack for doubting him and beating him to a pulp. Ben was still trying to persuade Jack to change his mind even when he was tied to a tree – and then Locke showed up like the Messiah and Ben knew his time was over.

Throughout Season 4 Ben was a prisoner but that never stopped him before. He spent the first half of the season at the Barracks manipulating John, finally telling him some of the truth of the threat to the island but not revealing anywhere near the whole truth about his long history with Widmore. That decision to stay quiet probably did as much damage when Keamy and his mercenaries stormed the Barracks – and Keamy demanded Ben leave or he’d kill his daughter. In what was the most heartbreaking moment of the series for Ben so far, he chose to run a bluff and gamble that nothing would happen. Ben had made mistakes that had cost people their lives before but none that had stunned him as when Keamy pulled the trigger and he watched Alex die.

Ben has spent the series ever since then trying to deal with that burden. His initial reaction was for vengeance: he set the Smoke monster on the mercenaries and would later stab Keamy to death. He knew that would doom everyone on the freighter, but he didn’t give a damn when it happened. Perhaps it was because he was dealing with a bigger consequence: ‘Jacob’ had told Locke they needed to move the island and Ben was the only one who knew how. He chose to leave the island and Locke in charge and then he moved the island, leaving it for good.

Then he woke up in the Tunisian Desert in October of 2005. He quickly learned the Oceanic 6 were off the island and that Sayid’s wife was dead. He sought him out in his moment of deepest grief and used that to manipulate him into becoming his hit man. He claimed it was being done to protect the people who came back but when he met with Widmore at the end of the episode, it was clear that protection was the last thing on his mind. He had a hit list and Penny Widmore was the last name on it.

It's not clear if Ben was hoping to find a way back to the island all that time or was just living for revenge through Sayid. But when John Locke reappeared – the man who had been the most susceptible his manipulations on the island – he clearly saw his chance. He broke into John’s hotel room to stop him from killing himself, only to murder him two minutes later once he got the information he needed to execute his plan. Then he started his manipulations to get all of the Oceanic 6 back on the plane.

He used the murder he committed to convince Sayid that Widmore knew about the work he did, putting him back in play to save Hurley. He hired an attorney to question Kate’s custody of Aaron, knowing it would send her running. He went after Jack and told him the only way to save everybody he left behind was to go back to island. When Sun held a gun to his head to blame him for killing Jin, he told her the one thing that could stop her: Jin was alive. He played on everybody’s vulnerabilities to get them to go exactly where they wanted, which was on a plane together.

It's impossible not to watch much of the scenes in Season 5 and not see Ben as a supervillain. He calls Charles Widmore telling him he’s going back to the island and that he’s going to kill Penny before he goes. He gets to the plane and seems indifferent to what happens to all the other passengers. He doesn’t seem to care when the plane crashes on the island with many of the Oceanics gone and just starts marching back to his people. He is arrogance personified and he deserved the oar to the back of the head Sun gives him.

But by this point we know that for all Ben’s manipulations he has less control of events than he can hope and its just as true here. He tries to kill Penny but when he sees Charlie he falters and Desmond recovers from his wounds to beat the snot out of him. Then he wakes up and sees John Locke in front of him. As much as Emerson tries to play that he knew this would happen, it becomes clear very quickly that Ben is stunned by this – and as Locke now seems to know more about the island than he ever did, Ben has now realized he is powerless. By the time he returns to the Others – a moment he must have been dreaming for years, everyone is looking at Locke. Ben is invisible.

By the time of the Season 5 finale Ben is broken beyond words. He will never have the power he did, a vision of his daughter has told him to do everything Locke says, and he’s just seen that Locke is completely communion with the island. So when Locke tells him that he wants Ben to kill Jacob, he can barely work up shock. When they get to the beach Ben is a shell of himself and for a change Locke reminds him of all of his failures and asks him: “Why wouldn’t you want to kill Jacob?”

In the final scene on the island in The Incident, Ben walks into Jacob’s sanctuary where he’s never been allowed all his life. He finally sees the man he claimed to be the mouthpiece of but never even met. He pours out his heart and soul to the man he’s devoted his life too and Jacob just brushes him off. Ben stabs him viciously. And then he walks out of the sanctuary – and finds out not only has he killed Jacob, but that the man who gave him the orders was not, in fact, John Locke. By the time the episode that is center on him begins, the Ben we’ve known (if not exactly loved) now seems as dead as John Locke himself. The fact that he spends much of the episode digging his own grave might seem a metaphor stretched too far but it’s fitting for a man who lost everything long before that.

What has made Ben’s story all the more tragic is that, unlike almost every other major character on the show, we’ve seen how much of that was taken out of his hand at a very young age. He might not have been chosen by Jacob the same way the other Candidates were (though his last name was visible on the Lighthouse) but he’s been on the island far longer and had far fewer options.

Ben lied about being born on the island (big surprise) but it did lead to him coming here. His mother gave birth two months early and died almost immediately afterward, something his father never forgave him for. He came with his father as part of the Dharma Initiative but unlike almost everyone else who was brought to the island, his life got worse long before it. His father was a drunk who regularly beat him and he was so desperate for love that he followed what he thought was the ghost of his mother but might very well have been the Man In Black leading him there, manipulating him at young age. He ran into Richard and at his lowest moment he said he wanted to leave. Richard used him to say he could join them – but he’d have to be very patient.

Four years later when Sayid showed up from the future (as one does on Lost) Ben, still a sweet kid, offered to help him escape because he thought Sayid was ‘a hostile’. Ben came to liberate him having been beaten bloody and found Sayid saying that he was there to save him – not knowing that Sayid thought that his destiny was to kill him as a child because of what Ben had done to him as an adult. (Simple right?)  A badly wounded Ben was brought back to the Barracks and in order to save him Kate and Sawyer took him into Hostile Territory. Richard recognized him (but of course didn’t say so) and said he could save him but that if they did this, he would never be the same.

From that point on Ben swore allegiance to the island. It’s never been clear how he became leader over such figures as Widmore and Eloise Hawking, who had been on the island far long them him by the time he got there but it may have been due to the fact that the island ‘chose him’ by healing him. Over and over Ben has said whatever he did, he did for the island and that has led him to do some truly horrendous things. The one good thing he ever did was when he chose to spare Alex’s life rather than follow the orders to kill her but even that was set off by the fact he lied about her mother from the moment she was born and had a horrible idea how to be a parent. When the time came to choose Alex over the island, he chose the island – and she died as a result.

Dr. Linus is, like all Ben centered episodes, one of the highpoints of the season. Michael Emerson’s work is always brilliant to watch but he has rarely given such a moving performance with so many contrasts between the Ben we knew before and the Ben we saw here. I’ll admit the first time I saw him as a history professor at the school John was substituted at, I thought it was another throwaway as to how different the two worlds were. I didn’t know how well the writers would play it.

Doctor Linus is a history professor which is in itself a great dig: history is more about the past and the facts; on the island Ben has never cared for the past and always lies about everything. But there’s more to it than that. The Ben we’ve seen on the island is manipulative, angry and dark: Dr. Linus is sweet, almost a milquetoast (though there’s more beneath the surface) and is more willing to sacrifice than anything.

There are few scenes more moving than seeing Ben microwaving dinner for Roger and the two of them having the ‘father son’ time they never had in real life. (There are issues here but I’ll get to them later.) It’s not just that Ben is immensely different; it’s that Roger is. This isn’t the same Roger we saw in Ben’s flashbacks; he’s clearly in ill health but it looks like it has nothing to do with the booze. He talks to his son about his job with genuine interest and when he learns how sad his son, he’s genuinely dismayed at how he feels he failed him. (My theory at the time was that after Ben was shot in the real timeline, Roget realized the truth and took him off the island, where they’ve since rebuilt their relationship.) There’s love between the two that we never saw on the show, and its deeply moving.

It's nearly as moving to see that Alex is Ben’s favorite student. In this world he’s clearly a father figure to her and this relationship is clearly better than the one where he was actually trying to be her father. (Kudos to Tania Raymonde; in all her years we never saw her actually being sweet and nice.) It’s a different world for her too; her mother clearly raised her in this world (we see that her last name is Rousseau) but Danielle’s a single mother who’s clearly doing everything for her daughter.

In this world even Ben’s scheming is smaller than usual: he just wants to be principal in favor of a man who has no use for the job or its teachers. It’s worth noting, despite his scheming, Reynolds is doing things that are immoral and against the rules of the school and Ben is acting in the best interest. And for all Ben’s scheming Reynolds’s is clearly more ruthless then him. So Ben does what he never did on the island: he puts Alex ahead of it. Yes, it doesn’t make sense in the context of his scheme, but that’s the point. We need to see Ben make the right choice.

Because on the island he’s been confronted with all the bad choices he’s made. For all his life Ben has been able to avoid responsibility for his actions; there have been countless sacrifices and he’s lied, killed and destroyed but although his lies have been called and he’s lost his position, he’s never had to face the consequences as bluntly as before. In the aftermath of the Temple, the truth about the worst of his sins comes out – his murder of Jacob. Ben puts up an effort to deny it but there’s something half-hearted about it we’ve never seen. It’s as if the actions of the last few days have laid bare everything he’s ever done as a lie and he no longer has the strength to be who he was.

So Ilana marches him away from the group, shackles him to a tree at gunpoint and orders him to dig his grave which she will put him in once he does. Much of the humor in the episode comes from watching Ben try to play at desperation and a certain resignation, particularly with Miles. Perhaps it is the humor of the gallows. Then when UnLocke shows up and makes an offer Ben isn’t in any position to refuse, he takes it – and when he points a gun on Ilana, we think know what’s going to happen.

Except we don’t. And we get a highpoint of the season. Ben looks at Ilana, who is a kindred spirit (I’ll get to that) and makes it very clear just how much he has lost because of the island. In a heartbreaking monologue Emerson is in a place we’ve never seen Ben go. Ben always keeps his emotions close to the vest, but now he’s a raw nerve as he explains all his sins and what he has lost in service to the island. When he tells Ilana he’s going to Locke and says: “Because he’s the only one who’ll have me!” there’s a despair in his voice we’ve never heard. This is a man who realizes the sum of all the bad decisions he’s made in his life and thinks this is the only one he has left to him.

Much as I feel that Ilana was a wasted opportunity on this show it’s very hard not to be moved by Zuleikha Robinson’s work in this episode. Ilana says that Jacob was like a father to her but like everyone else on the island Jacob has been sparing in his information to her. He told her how to get to the island and that there were six candidates left she had to protect. He clearly didn’t tell her much more than that because she didn’t recognize John Locke right off the bat and when she knew he wasn’t who he said he was, she chose to take his corpse to Jacob rather than tell anyone on the island – which might have saved Jacob’s life. She was told to protect a Kwon but she doesn’t know which. She went to the Temple and now everyone there is dead. Jacob is gone and she has no path forward. When she tells Ben that “I’ll have you”, there’s just as much defeat in it as there was in Ben’s voice: she’s lost everything too.

And as if to drive the point home, Hurley and Jack run into Richard in the jungle. Richard was desperate when we last saw him; now he’s in complete despair. He barely bats an eye when he tells Jack everyone in the Temple is dead and when Hurley tells him he saw Jacob, he’s genuinely angry at the man he’s served. When he goes into the Black Rock and tells him he want to die, there’s something so matter-of-fact.

Nestor Carbonell will give greater performances in the final season of Lost but there’s something tremendously sad about the monologue he delivers to Jack in the hold of the Black Rock. He tells Jack he’s given his entire life – “longer than you can possibly imagine’ to a man who told him that he had a plan, a plan of which he had a big part that he would reveal at a later time. He’s never known the details but he’s been loyal all that time – and now Jacob is dead. “So…why do I want to die? Because I just found out my life I had no purpose.” Richard seems more hopeless than we’ve ever seen him, and he wants to die.

So when Jack lights the fuse – and then sits down next to him to talk – he seizes on Jack’s certainty. Jack clearly isn’t sure himself – the way he closes his eyes before the fuse on the dynamite makes it clear he wasn’t sure – but it’s enough to give Richard something to grab on to.

The final scene is one of the reunion scenes on the beach we’ve seen so many times over the course of Lost. People who have been separating for a long time are reunited and they embrace and shake hands with great affection. Jack and Hurley hug Sun (who they haven’t seen since the Ajira flight) they seem glad to see Miles and Frank. But aside from Ilana, who’s relieved to see some of the candidates, there’s utter despair on everyone else’s face.

Ben never came to the camp once after Oceanic 815 crashed and when Frank mentions that he sounds nostalgic, Ben admits he is. For Ben that was a simpler time: he was a father, he was the leader of the Others, he knew who he was in relation to the island. But now that’s all gone. When Frank mentions how different his life would have been if he’d been the pilot, Ben is dismissive.. “The island got you in the end.” Frank smiles at this but Ben is not sarcastic for once: the island he worshipped all his life no longer has its charm. Now as he looks at the people he’s spent years manipulated, the desolation on his face is something we’ve never seen before. He finally is one of the good guys but now it doesn’t seem to matter.

And not just because Widmore’s found the island.

 

IF YOU BELIEVE THE ENDING: Actually I’m not sure you have to change as much with this episode because it is about Ben more than anything else. Because Ben’s history is so invested with the island, the fact that in this world he was part of the Dharma Initiative before he left makes perfect sense in either version. Alex’s version of events isn’t as critical to the show’s ending as anything else. It’s a little weird that Dr. Arzt is here, but he was a high school science teacher in the real world and that hasn’t changed.