When we first see Ben in this
episode, he is in a rare moment of relaxation, playing a piece of Rachmaninoff
on the piano. We’re stunned not only because we didn’t know he could play but
because its one of the few times in the series he actually seems at peace. When
the episode ends Ben has been on a globe spanning journey off the island and
has been emotionally broken in a way that will change him forever.
The Shape of Things to Come is one
of the underrated episodes in the second half of Lost because it
delivers in every possible way that makes it a great series. We get a deeper look at some of the mysteries
on the island (and around it), we see some of the most shocking action scenes
in the entire series, some of the most violent and terrifying moments, two of
the most emotionally heartbreaking moments in the entire series and a final
scene that ranks as one of the greatest confrontations in the series canon
(even though the showdown behind it never truly panned out.)
And at the center of it is Michael
Emerson who deservedly earned his second consecutive Emmy nomination for Best
Supporting Actor for this episode. From the moment we met Benry in Season Two,
we have never trusted a single word that comes out of his mouth. He is the
consummate liar, the unbridled source of evil, the Wizard of Oz. Of course Jack didn’t believe him when Ben
told him in their confrontation in the Season Three finale when he told Jack
that Naomi represented someone who meant huge harm to the island who would kill
everyone if they made contact with the freighter. I have little doubt the reason that Jack has
spent so much of Season Four, as it has become increasingly obvious to everyone
around them that the freighter folk are not here to save them, because he can
not accept that Ben is telling the truth about anything. When he finally learns
on the beach that Dan and Charlotte have been lying to them all this time, he
is angry not so much because they are not getting off the island but because it
means that Ben was telling the truth. It also means that Locke was right when
he tried to protect everybody but you don’t blame him because at that very
moment Locke has lost whatever credibility he had with the people he was
ostensibly protecting.
Now the mercenaries have come to
the Barracks and Ben is genuinely terrified in a way we haven’t seen
before. His actions are to barricade the
house and to try and convince Locke to stay with him but even in his terror
what he cares about first and foremost is his own survival. The trouble is as
he tries to batten down the hatches, he clearly does not have a plan and he has
no ability to project authority over anyone.
Sawyer defies him and runs out to save Claire and Ben has every
intention of leaving both of them to die.
He then tries to order the usually docile Hurley into keeping them safe
but he refuses to listen even at gunpoint.
Though this is an Emerson episode
Josh Holloway is at the top of his game here.
Sawyer seemed purposeless and broken after killing Cooper at the end of
last season but its clear he’s found a way forward. Throughout his time at the Barracks he’s been
showing more warmth and compassion than we ever saw him saw with anyone other
than Kate: he and Hurley have become room-mates, they were playing horseshoes
earlier this season and at the start of the episode they are playing Risk with
Locke. Sawyer seems to have redirected
his rage towards protecting people: he risks his life to save Claire’s, is
willing to sacrifice Ben if that means his friends can live and at the end of
the episode, warns Locke at gunpoint that if Locke harms one hair on Hurley’s
head, he’ll kill him. Then he leads a group of his friends through the dark
jungle where he knows mercenaries, Others and possibly a smoke monster are
waiting for him.
Ben is still clearly trying to
control everything even in his terror.
When Miles (who clearly has come to regret the decision to stay at the
barracks) comes to him with a walkie-talkie Ben is still trying to pretend he
has things under control. Then Miles tells him they have Alex – and the episode
changes.
We’ve occasionally seen Ben taken
by surprise throughout the last two seasons but he’s usually great at
maintaining his poker face. When he hears Alex is being held prisoner, he
flinches and we can see his hand shake as Keamy talks to him. And it is here that we can see that Ben has
made a major miscalculation.
Ben has spent so much time in
charge (we assume since the Purge) that he has come to assume that his name and
his connection to Jacob alone will strike fear into the heats of all who know
him. He knows how dangerous Widmore is and he knows the threat Keamy imposes
when he talks to him. But because he
spent his entire life on the island, he assumes that will terrorize Widmore’s
subordinates. He got a sign in his confrontation with Miles that wasn’t the
case but perhaps he dismissed it because the threat was merely financial. Now
he is playing poker with his daughter’s life and with a man who has already
more demonstrated he has no respect for it.
The scene where Keamy stands over
Alex is one of the most heartbreaking in the show’s history – arguably in the
entire first decade of the 2000s. Ben
seems to think that he can call Keamy off by telling him that Alex is just a
pawn and that maybe if he things she means nothing to him, he’ll let her
go. When we hear the shot, Ben is
stunned emotionally in a way we’ve never seen him before. And for the first
time in the entire series, he is paralyzed with grief. You could say his statement – ‘He changed the
rules’ is denial and he then goes
straight into anger and bargaining. With
a single minded purpose he goes to his secret room, which apparently has
another secret room, and makes some kind of deal with the devil. And two
minutes later, the devil shows up.
We haven’t seen the monster since
Left Behind but now we get by far the closest look at it. We’ve known how
deadly the monster but now it looks bigger and angrier than we’ve ever seen
it. We don’t know why the monster
doesn’t kill everybody in its path (it’s done so before and as we will learn
has always done that) but what we see is frightening as a single soldiers runs
in terror, starts shooting at it and the bullets pass through it. The man is
dragged back almost as if the chains we’ve heard are actually there. But even in that aftermath Ben knows he has
to say goodbye to Alex. As he stands over his daughter weeping, closing her
eyes he is broken in a way he never has
been.
It will be a while before we
realize it but this episode is where the show begins to shift away from the
idea that Ben is truly the source of evil. The reason that it’s hard to realize it, even
in the midst of everything that we’re seeing him endure on the island is
because of what we are seeing in the flashforwards.
The first scene where Ben wakes up
in the Sahara Desert, wearing a parka with a Dharma logo and is then two
Bedouins ride up to him is just as displacing as the opening scene of the
series. (Indeed Ben is lying in the exact position Jack was in the Pilot and
quickly adapts to his surroundings at the sign of a crisis.) Ben is clearly
aware that he has traveled not only through space but time – the flashforward
is dated October 24, 2005 – but he also quickly has picked up onto what his
happened in the months between. We’ll
eventually get an explanation as to how he ended in Tunisia, but its clear this
is something he’s done before.
We’re dealing with something just
as painful, far more in fact. This is as
we quickly learn how Ben recruited Sayid and when we learn why, our heart
breaks again. Sayid found Nadia after
rescue and married her – and less than a year later, she’s dead. We wondered
when we saw Sayid in The Economist why he was killing so ruthlessly, why he
seemed so broken and why he was working for Ben. Now we see why. Naveen Andrews in the second half of Lost will
be memorable in many ways but now its because we are watching a man with
nothing to live for any more. He spent all his time on the island clearly
hoping that he would be reunited with Nadia; it’s clearly one of the few things
that has motivated him on and off the island. Now he has nothing left.
It's also why part of me truly
wonders if, in fact, Charles Widmore
actually did have Nadia killed. (Indeed by the time the series is almost over
we’ll actually have evidence to argue that Nadia’s death had nothing to do with
Widmore, maybe not even the island.) Ben, as we know all too well, is a
masterful psychological manipulator: he did with Juliet during her time with
the Others, he did it with Jack while he was holding him prisoner and he’s been
doing it with Locke since the moment they met.
We also know that he is incapable of telling the truth; we don’t know
yet how he left the island, but we know it wasn’t by normal methods of
transportation. And I actually don’t
believe (despite what we hear at the end of the episode) that he truly has a
plan to get back to the island.
I think the only moment he is
truly honest with Sayid is when he tells him that “once you let grief become
anger, it becomes all-consuming. I speak from experience.” He is at war with Widmore because he blames
him for Alex’s death, and that is the only thing he has left to live for. That said, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly why
he tapped Sayid. Like Ben, Sayid has
lost the only thing he cared for and while there clearly were other people he
could turn to, the fact that none of the other Oceanics are at Nadia’s funeral
does speak volumes to the distance between them. Sayid needs something to keep
him going and without love, he has turned back to being a killer. (That said,
I’m pretty sure Ben expected Sayid to turn the gun on him after he killed
Bakir.)
The final flashforward is
justifiably one of the great moments in television history. Ben confronts Widmore in his penthouse, and
Widmore is completely unsurprised to see him. It’s here we get another critical
piece of the saga. Not only do Ben and Widmore know each other, they’ve clearly
known each other for a very long time.
We don’t know why Ben can’t kill
Widmore, anymore than we know why Widmore didn’t have Ben killed. There seems
to be some ‘rule’ about it that both men understand but that the series will
never fully spell out. Ben is justifiably angry at Widmore for killing his
daughter. Widmore tells him that he had nothing to do with it but Ben did. (It
is worth noting that Ben himself will take both sides of the issue throughout
the series.) Then Widmore tells Ben that: “I know who you are, boy. I know
everything you have you took from me.” Then he asks him why he’s here. Ben
tells him coldly: “I’m going to kill your daughter Charles. Penelope, was it?
And once she’s dead, you’ll understand how I feel. And you’ll be sorry you
changed the rules.”
At that moment the viewer begins
to shake inwardly. Widmore doesn’t
blink, but his phrase: “You’ll never find her,” sounds almost like a prayer, as
if he is hoping their estrangement will save Penny’s life. We still don’t know what’s happened to
Desmond in the future. He’s not one of the Oceanic 6, but that means nothing:
he wasn’t on the plane. We also know that Penny is determined to find Desmond
and that she has to know about where he is.
Is it possible that in the future she will go looking for him and end up
running into Ben? She clearly knows about the island. Whatever happily ever after Desmond and Penny
might have (and at this point in the series that was very much TBD) Ben being
off the island is now the new Sword of Damocles over their future.
The scene ends with Widmore
telling Ben: “The island is mine. It was once and it will be again.” Ben tells
him that he’ll never find it, leaving out the fact he has before. “I guess the
hunt is on for the both of us, Benjamin,” Widmore says. “I guess so. Sleep
well, Charles,” Ben says and closes the door behind him.
While the Widmore-Ben storyline
will conclude in an anticlimax in the final season, it is scenes like this that
will lead to some of the best drama for the next year and a half. Nikki Stafford spent a fair amount of both
Season 4 and Five of Finding Lost trying to convince us that this was a
battle of good versus evil and trying to convince us that both men could have
been on either side. Her arguments are persuasive, particularly when you
consider the lighting in that scene and
the ambiguity of the characters overall. That said, I’m pretty sure at this
point in the show I was convinced both men were evil geniuses willing to do
everything in their power to obtain their goal.
It’s hard not to think that way based on the
evidence in front of us. Widmore has sent a team of mercenaries with clear
mission to kill everyone on the island to get Ben and in the last two episodes
they’ve killed at least six people. (We don’t know how many other socks ended
up back at the barracks, but the fact that none of them get out afterwards
makes me think that more than just the three Sawyer saw got shot died.)
Similarly Ben was already a collaborator in the Purge, has been more than
willing to send his own people into death, has killed people himself, and has
been more than willing to sacrifice everything for the good of the island.
Right now, we are sympathetic towards him based on his reaction to Alex, but we
know Ben far too well to trust his motives, and the series will spend well into
Season Five making us doubt our momentary sympathy for him. At this point, the question is which of these
two men is the lesser of two evils and how many more people will die in their
war?
So much is going on at the
Barracks that when the body of the doctor washes up on shore with his throat
cut and the last message from the freighter tells us he’s still alive, we
barely have time to blink at this. (We don’t actually mourn the doctor because
frankly, he was a dick.) We’re more concerned with Jack, who clearly has
something more than a stomach bug. (Though again, it’s not like its going to
stop him from getting off the island in one piece.)
Right now, we’re dealing with far
bigger problems. There is now no sanctuary on the island and certainly not on
the freighter. The survivors are even more scattered than they were before and
a lot of people have died. We know that some people will get off the island
soon, but the bigger question will soon be: is it because they are truly the
only ones who got out of this alive?
Rationally it’s hard to accept this – the show is going to end in Season
6, and we’re not even through with Season 4. But we’re not sure that even Jacob
can solve this crisis. (Turns out, he won’t…but that’s a story for later on.)
