The Shape Of Things To Come part 2

After Sawyer does his best Superman impression it's looking like the writers are having a little fun with us or Claire is Doomed (or both)? Sawyer: "You alright sweetheart?" Claire: "A bit wobbly, but I'll live." Miles: "Well I wouldn't be too sure about that." Punch-in-the-face foreshadowing? Or does Miles know that Claire will die? If Miles can speak with the dead, and perhaps even the whispers (which at this point seem to be made up of mostly the dead or soon-to-be-dead), he might have future knowledge over who bites the dust.



Back to the death of Alex; Papa Linus — hoping Keamy wouldn't have the stones to kill Alex if it gained him nothing — tried to convince him that his adopted daughter, kidnapped from ''an insane woman'' out of pity, really did mean nothing to him. It was a moment reminiscent of the cold hearted father-son square-off in the final act of There Will Be Blood. (I will spoil no further if you haven't seen it.) Keamy put a bullet in the back of Alex's head, anyway. Ben was devastated, naturally, but there was more to his soul-rocked shock than the mere sight of Alex's murder. Ever since Goodwin first mentioned 'the list' to Ana Lucia all the way back in season two, we've understood there are certain rules in LOST that must be followed. "We're the good guys Michael" and "We're not monsters" has always followed the assertion that the Others don't kill "innocent people". And while we might not know exactly what these twisted rules are, we know that Ben has been obeying them - at least in his own mind. ''He changed the rules'' wasn't so much Widmore and I agreed to wage our battle according to a certain set of limitations and regulations, but rather, simply This was not supposed to happen. Ben's genius is derived from having knowledge of future events, via time travel, Desmond-esque precognitive flashes, or the other hot conjecture of the moment, time-loop theory, the idea that Ben has lived this life many times before. So a monkey wrench like this pretty much wrecks Ben's entire game. Many people were disturbed in the season cliff hanger when Walt was kidnapped from the raft but not me. I was a little more disturbed by the death of Alex. Maybe it was being told she meant nothing to Ben right before being killed or maybe it's just that I kinda knew Walt would be back but Alex is dead and death is more of a finality. But not always on LOST so it's not that bad I guess. I have a feeling Keamy will be getting his just rewards for killing Alex sooner or later. The way the writers are, I'm putting my money on the way he goes will be pretty horrific. Right now he's one of the most hated characters on the show and he has accomplished that quicker than Nikki and Paolo could.



Then came the episode's other soon-to-launch-a-thousand-theories scene, not to mention what might be one of the most important ''Easter eggs'' ever planted. After yanking himself out of his stupor, Ben retreated to his secret room, the Island's wizard scurrying behind his curtain to consult his gizmos and magic for answers. Shutting out Locke and company, Ben opened a wooden door carved with all sorts of hieroglyphics — similar to the ones on the countdown timer in the hatch — and disappeared down a secret passage. Have fun decoding those glyphs. But so far some have decoded them to mean something like ""to summon", "time to summon" or "to summon time" on the top line. Second Line - "Protection", "Power" or "Strength". Giving us our four best guesses: "Time to summon strength" "To summon time protection" "To summon time power" or "Time summons the power of life". Decide whichever one you are most comfortable with and go with it. Ben strategically chose the house nearest the glyphed door, giving him some measure of control over the monster or at least a secondary method to keep it away. The sonic fence has apparently been off for while, but the creature hadn't come until Ben removed some other sort of safeguard within the cavern(?). When it did come, the creature passed over the house and went straight for the intruders. They were the main threat – they were obviously counterproductive to the will of the island. They weren't scanned or tickled or flashed; they were immediately dealt with in a manner consistent with a furious animal released after a long caging. I still don't think Smokey's agenda is 100% in tune with Ben or Jacob's, which is why I think the Others were probably scared shit less of it.



But back to Ben, where did he go? For now, I'm going to side with what is certain to be the popular conjecture: that he crawled into the Island underworld and asked Smokey the hell hound to eat the bad man who killed his daughter. His ash-covered clothes would seem to confirm that. So would the fearlessness and glee on his face as Smokey indeed thrashed the freighter mercs to death in the most spectacular display of Smokiness the show has ever given us; it hearkened back to the God storm unleashed upon the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. While all of this seems almost too obvious to be true, for the moment I can't come up with any alternative theories, but if we were to find out that Ben's hidden corridor leads to the Dharma Quantum Leapster (created, no doubt, using instructions decoded from that glyph door), and that in the five minutes he was absent from Locke and company he did weeks if not months of off-Island traveling (and grieving, regrouping, and re-strategizing) before coming back focused, strong, and empowered with the necessary knowledge to defeat his enemies, well, it wouldn't surprise me at all. After the chaos, Ben talks freely in front of everyone about meeting with Jacob. He provides Locke with both a direction and a purpose. Looking relieved, Locke hands Ben back the torch of leadership, both literally (as he hands him the torch) and figuratively. Both Locke and Ben have faith that Hurley can find Jacob's cabin because they know that he's seen it before. That's all fine and good, but what I can't figure out is why Hurley, of all of the Lostaways, is the one who can see the cabin now? And why can Locke no longer find it? Along these same lines, I kept wondering why Hurley ends up regretting going with Locke. At first I thought it would be because Claire gets killed. But now I think Hurley's regret will stem from helping Ben and Locke find Jacob. The other thing I wonder is why isn't the ghost whispering Miles going to the cabin? Wouldn't that seem the obvious choice here? Look for Miles to be going back with Locke, Hurley, and Ben soon.



Meanwhile, on the other side of the Island...Jack has the Meat Sweats

Jack wobbled around the beach, sick; the freighter doctor washed up in the surf, throat slit; Faraday telegraphed the freighter and told the castaways that all was cool, that the choppers were coming to rescue them in the morning; Bernard, who can decipher Morse code, busted Faraday for lying, revealing that what the freaky physicist was actually told was that the freighter doctor was still on the boat, alive and well; and Jack, finally resigning himself to the fact that Locke was right and he was wrong about the freighter folk, asked the question that promises to finally galvanize his season 4 story line: ''Were you ever going to take us off of this island?'' Faraday broke his heart: ''No.'' (Fun Fact! The first U.S. transcontinental telegraph line was finished on — yep — October 24, 1861) Now, let's assume for a minute that the freighter people aren't lying about the doc's condition. If the chopper's return journey to the freighter seemed to swallow a chunk of time, it makes sense that a voyage from the freighter to the island would regurgitate it. Yet the doc shows up dead on the island before he's even killed on the freighter (according to freighter time, anyway). Either way, we've finally got a definitive time difference between the island and the real world, and one that's a lot more than just minutes or seconds. In fact, it seems that the time difference has now reversed itself. Since the ship is anchored, we can assume the island must be moving. The cause? Desmond tore it loose when he turned the fail safe key. Daniel alluded to this with the deck of cards and his ominous comment that it was 'getting worse'. Maybe his ability to jump his consciousness through time and see things as they were (the cards for example) is degrading due to the island's movement. And with the island now slipping through both time and space it's no wonder Widmore's had a hard time finding it. As mind-blowing as all that might be, it's nothing compared to the revelation that the scar on Doc Ray's cheek has been replaced by a freshly, if badly, stitched cut in the same spot. The doc's body travels backward through the time storm to arrive at whatever period in time the island currently exists in (1996?), putting his body back into the exact state it existed at that time (when he'd just been cut). Applying this to the 815'Er's, this explains how Locke can walk and how Rose's cancer seems to have disappeared: upon waking on the beach their bodies were returned to the same physical states they were in at that past time – before those injuries. Doesn't explain how Claire was still pregnant when she woke up but we have a sort of history with pregnant women on the island. Maybe the island wanted her to stay pregnant.



London Calling

In the episode's final moments, Ben paid a visit to Charles Widmore at his London home in the middle of the night. I honestly didn't expect a showdown between Ben and Widmore, at least not this season. I always thought such a meeting would be more climactic than the quiet bedroom scene we were provided with, but it was far from disappointing. In the dialogue between the two of them, we learned some of the most important stuff yet. WIDMORE (to Ben): Don't stand there, looking at me with those horrible eyes of yours...[ Whoa, he went there!] "I know who you are, boy". This is the second time someones said that to Ben. The first time was not so long ago, when Miles told him essentially the same thing. I think he even punctuated it with an "I know what you are". Ben knows Widmore too. They face off like old arch-enemies. "Everything you have, you took from me", Widmore tells him. "The island is mine. It always was, it will be again". This seems to associate Widmore with Dharma. It also reinforces my belief that Charles Widmore has physically been to the island. Probably when Ben was a boy. He mentions nightmares, and I don't think he's speaking of normal everyday ones. Most interesting of all is that they cannot kill one another. It could be they're indestructible in the same sense that bullets would currently bounce off Michael's head. Maybe they need each other for something, or more specifically, they rely on each other in a Ying-Yang sort of way. A light/dark, good/evil, black/white sort of thing. As Tim Curry says in Legend: one can't exist without the other. Maybe Widmore is even Ben's constant.



When Ben accuses him of changing the rules and murdering his daughter, Widmore calmly corrects him. He tells Ben that he himself was responsible for Alex's death. In retrospect, this is probably true. In the past I mentioned how Ben had wanted something all his own, something just for himself, something not pre-determined by the will of the island. That something was Alex. Ben took her from Rousseau, took her as his daughter, and made her his own. If he hadn't done this, she might still be alive. Widmore calls him on it. Ben then dared him to find the island right after pledging to get even with his game-changing opponent by killing his daughter, too: none other than Desmond's squeeze, Penelope. Ben and Widmore seem to be engaged in a war — a war for the Island, a war over time itself. For a long time, Ben was winning that war by either facilitating or managing a new timeline of events, one that denies Widmore his predestined life — a life that may have been ruinous for the entire world. But victory for Ben hinges on knowing or at least anticipating the future — and with Alex's unforeseeable death, it appears Ben has become omnisciently challenged. Once, he was able to see the shape of things to come. Now, the future is as hazy as Smokey is. In the end, it seems they're both playing a high-stakes game. Widmore even uses the term 'game' during their meeting. Only now that Widmore has changed the rules, can Ben also? Does this mean that fate can be re-written? That's the trick here, maybe. The Shape of Things to Come might just mean that things to come can be shaped. The future is an open canvas - nothings really predetermined. Except maybe, for the ending of LOST.