The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham

Sawed Off Shotguns Look A Lot Like Flashlights

This episode starts with Caesar snooping through what at first looked to be some sort of office. The date on the Life magazine was April 19, 1954 a reference to the meeting of Locke and Alpert from the Jughead episode. Caesar finds maps and a sawed off shotgun. Illana comes in and this group of crash survivors start the pattern of lies all over again. She tells him about a man in a suit. We realize we are on the island where the Hydra station is and it almost looked like the plane was fine. Even though they talk about “the crash” maybe it was the runway that actually saved them from crashing. A quick note about the scene between Caesar and Illana - this originally was to be the first scene we saw in the first episode of the season. In a quick last minute decision, Damon and Carlton decided to not put the two new characters on the Nikki and Paolo course and saved their introduction for later. Good decision!

Locke is added to the “Mystical Character That Introduces Themselves After a Dramatic Removal of an Oversized Hoody” (i.e. Obi Wan, Gandalf, and Spock) list. The shot of Locke standing on the beach looking out at the other island (“his island”) was gorgeous. It almost evoked a feeling that Locke knew he wasn’t back on his island, yet. Locke begins his second trip to the island much the same way he did the last time; he eats a mango and then tells his “Big Secret” to a complete stranger.

I Have A Bone (sticking out of my leg) To Pick With You

Illana tells Locke that the pilot and some woman took off in one of the pontoon boats. Frank is alive and I believe the woman will turn out to be Sun. Not only is Locke alive on the island again but it seems his leg is healed as well. Also it seems that Locke is really alive and not the creepy alive that we see with Christian. Then we begin the episode flashbacks to show what happened on Locke’s "get everyone back to the island reunion tour". Locke turns the wheel and ends up in the Tunisian desert. The wormhole magic churned his tummy and made him puke. Yes, now that you mention it, the moment did remind me of when Dr. Manhattan teleports Silk Specter to the arid wastes of Mars and she tosses up her lunch. And yes, that was a Watchmen reference, wanna make something of it? Locke sees the camera and knows he is being watched, but by whom? It takes a while for the truck to go get him so whoever was watching knew he was going to be there but didn’t know exactly when. They take Locke to a makeshift hospital and he has a piece of wood shoved into his mouth (reminded me of Boone’s leg being reset as well as Sawyer getting the shot). I attempted to translate what Locke said while he was muffled by the piece of wood and it sounded something like: “Hey, wait a minute, is there a real doctor here? Where am I, what are you doing? Ouch this hurts. Oh, tastes like Sanskrit.” All the while I kept thinking “just pass out already” this was much worse than watching Boone get his leg reset by Jack. Funny that Boone was a sacrifice that the island demanded it ends up so was Locke, and they both needed to have their leg reset, painfully. As Locke lost consciousness he sees Abbadon standing behind a sheer curtain watching the events.

How Long Has It Been Since I We Last Met?

When Locke woke up with a cast on his leg I counted real quick and I came up with four toes! Widmore is at Locke’s bedside and he reintroduces himself to John. Widmore is now 71 if you do the math. In a few short minutes he explains a few things to John. Tunisia is the exit spot for the frozen donkey wheel (guess becausecause it is the exact opposite side of the Earth where the island is), Ben pulled a Jacob on his Esau and tricked him into leaving (that’s Biblical dude!), and took control of the island. Apparently Widmore was the leader and according to him he led his people peacefully protecting the island for over thirty years. Locke offers the most feeblest attempt at a lie that I have seen from him yet when he tried to tell Charles that he is not trying to bring the O6 back. Charles tells Locke he is going to help Locke bring them back. There is a war coming and Widmore wants to be sure that the right side wins. I wonder if he is talking about the purge or the incident or something else. Locke doesn’t ask questions about the war that is coming but then he has always been a sucker for the “father figure batting his eyelashes while calling John special trick” and it worked for Widmore here as well.



It was a nice touch the TPTB slipped in with Charles giving John his Jeremy Bentham identification. Might the name change indicate Charles’ motives? . The real Bentham and Locke were ideological opposites. Bentham considered Locke's belief in natural law “nonsense“. Is that how Widmore views Locke? As silly nonsense? A fool? If so, then Widmore is a jerk. OR… Bentham pioneered a school of thought call Utilitarianism, which evaluates the morality of an action based on the amount of good that said action generates for the most amount of people. Ergo, Widmore is using Locke but to facilitate a greater good. If so, then Widmore is a good guy. OR… After he died, Bentham's corpse, per his instructions, was entombed inside a cabinet called an Auto Icon. Whenever his followers gathered, they were supposed to wheel him out so he could hang with them. Creepy? Oh, yeah. Application to Locke? Widmore was lying when he told Locke he didn't want him to die. He wanted Locke to wind up in a box. Meaning: The Coffin. Or maybe Jacob's cabin! After all, isn't that ghost shack basically a rustic extrapolation of Bentham's Auto-Icon, a vehicle that allows this ''Jacob'' i.e., Locke to haunt the Island? Maybe this is the ''destiny'' Locke is being set up for: An eternity of ''Help me'' flickering. If so, … I don’t know what the hell that means. Charles tells John that the phone has a direct connect to him by just pushing 2-3. Charles also offers and explanation for the freighter (did you believe him?) and tells John one last time that the island needs him. One last thing to notice about this scene was how unhappy Locke is to see yet another wheelchair.

Do You Know The Way To San Jose … Err, Santa Domingo?

Sayid is doing his part with habitat for humanity and he knows Spanish. Silly Iraqi, who do you think you are, Jin? Give Locke credit for not going the old John Locke route of being all crazy and demanding to Sayid, which wouldn’t have worked either so this scene could have been summed up in three lines:
John-”Sayid, we have to go back to the island.”
Sayid-”No.”
John-”Okay, well go wash your hair or something, bye.”

On to play “Where’s Walt-o?”. Walt tells Locke that he had a dream of him on the island wearing a suit. He was surrounded by people who were trying to hurt him. This was a little bit of what we had already seen at the beginning of the episode. What about the part where people are trying to hurt him? We still don’t know how good Walt’s powers are or their extent and I certainly hope this isn’t the final goodbye from Walt. The rest of his story could be explained by a third party and we could never see Walt again but I hope we see Walt once again and maybe on the island. Locke couldn’t bring himself to tell Walt about his father and he felt the boy had been through enough and didn’t try to recruit him. Notice that Abbadon comments “Boy gotten big .”. Abbadon has seen Walt before but not for a while. The scene ends with Ben watching all of this go down and he don’t look like a happy camper.

Something Sphinx At Santa Rosa

Hurley has a watercolor painting of the Sphinx in front of him when Locke goes to see him. What does that mean? A Sphinx was the threshold guardian/protector you know, like The Others, charged with protecting the Island or Smokey protecting the Temple. The word ''sphinx'' means ''to strangle.'' What could that foreshadow? Hurley would have been fine if it turned out Locke was dead and he was a ghost visiting him. Hurley freaks when he realizes Locke is alive and he is even more jumpy when he sees Abbadon watching them. Once again Hurley would rather choose insanity instead of leaving his comfort zone. After the two meet, Abbadon tells Locke exactly what he does for Charles. “helps people get to where they need to get to.” Anybody else see the ferryman on the river Styx when Abbadon tells Locke all of this? Next stop Kate who feels some anguish when Locke asks her if she cares about the people left back on the island. She responds by asking John if he has ever been in love. She thinks about Sawyer and the next thing she does is ask Locke about being in love. Locke said he had been in love, once, but it ended because he was angry and obsessed. Kate puts another nail in her coffin with me when she stabs at Locke with “Look how far you’ve come.” Bitch, when are they killing her off?

Interlude: A Cemetery, A Death, A Car Accident, A Set Up?

Locke is told that Helen had died of a brain aneurysm. Notice her day of death was 4/8. Or so Abbadon said. Do you believe him? Consider: What if Team Widmore faked that grave and fabricated that story to keep Locke on task and make sure he had no possible motivation for wanting to back out and not go back to the Island?

Then, Abbadon got gunned down and we quickly discover Locke can’t drive for shit with a cast on his leg. He wound up in Jack's hospital, and he awoke under Jack's woozy-boozy-hateful gaze. How many hospitals have we seen Locke in? Locke pulls out the old crazy demanding John Locke on Jack and we get another Man of Science/Man of Faith debate for the thousandth time! Jack plays the age card (snap!) Locke plays the dead father says hello card (Oh SNAP!!)

It Was Ben Linus … In The Hotel Room … With An Extension Chord

Back at John’s seedy motel room, he writes his Dear Jack suicide letter and prepares to hang himself. Locke had been totally destroyed by going 0 for 6 on his back-to-the-Island recruitment drive. Each encounter had chipped away at his faith and self-esteem, so much so that by the end, you got the sense that Locke saw himself the way everyone else saw him. A failure, which is exactly what happens in Don Quixote. For a moment he thinks about calling Charles but decides to throw the phone in the trash. I will use my powers of premonition and see in a future episode that phone rings and isn’t answered. Widmore calls Eloise Hawking and she goes over and finds John and the suicide note that she ends up giving to Jack. Anyway, Ben gets there and tells John he is trying to protect him. I don’t know how to feel about this scene. Do I believe what Ben says about Widmore or not? The great snake of LOST rose to the occasion as he coaxed Locke off the ledge. ''You have no idea how important you are,'' he said. ''You've got too much work to do.'' Ben knows he cannot allow John to die without his faith intact. Our rooting interest here was pretty complicated, in a marvelously ironic way. We knew that Locke actually needed to die to fulfill his Island-saving destiny, but Ben succeeded, and managed to talk Locke off his cross...and then he went and made good on Hurley's subliminal foreshadowing and sphinx ed him to death with the extension cord. But why? Why save him, then brutally kill him? Does the Island's resurrection power not work on suicides? Was Ben actually doing Locke a favor by murdering him, i.e., helping him fulfill the requirement of dying in such a way that wouldn't deny him a shot at living again in paradise?

Ben is surprised to hear that Jin is alive. He’s even more surprised to hear Locke mention Eloise Hawking. The words ''Eloise Hawking'' seemed to function almost like a psychotic trigger, and Ben seemed to snap, either out of reflex or some quick realization that he had no choice: He had to kill Locke; he could not allow him to meet Ms. Hawking. Then Ben does a quick crime scene cleanup, tells John’s corpse he will miss him, takes Jin’s ring, and leaves. So we know Ben was lying when he told Jack he didn’t know Locke’s death was a suicide. We also know why Ben was so eager to know what the note said because Ben didn’t know it existed. He was interested because he wanted to know if it said anything about Widmore or Ben. Ben’s power lies in knowing exactly what everyone else knows and knowing what it all means. It is interesting to note that the episode is titled The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham, a person created by Widmore and perhaps it points to the fact that Locke was not Locke off of the island. On the island Locke is the destiny driven boar hunting man of purpose. Off the island he is a doofus, always has always will be. Jeremy Bentham died when Locke stepped off of the table edge. John Locke died when Ben strangled him. In short, Locke needed to die - but not by his own hand. There are rules that need to be followed, and Ben is fully versed in them. Benjamin Linus knows the way it works. So does Charles Widmore, which may be why he didn't want Locke back on the island despite all the things he said about helping him get there. Ben knew that if Locke had died faithless, or by suicide, he might not have been resurrected. That's the single most important part of his visit to the hotel room.

Meanwhile, Back In The Jungle…

Locke tells Caesar a little bit about the DI and that he had been on the island before for over 100 days. Caesar tells Locke about the really big guy with curly hair who disappeared when the plane started to shake. He also mentions the white light and says they saw other people disappear as well. Caesar then takes Locke to an area where they are keeping the people that were injured. The big ending reveal is Locke sees Ben who also made his way back to the island.

Another Thought On Ben Killing Locke

Don't fall into the trap - don't think for one minute that the mention of Ms. Hawkings name suddenly 'changed Ben's mind' or gave him stranglerrific ideas. Ben didn't just happen to have a spray-bottle of bleach and some green latex gloves on him, nor did he stop at the 24-hr Quick mart to pick them up afterward. You can bet your ass that everything he does is coldly calculated, and Ben already had that stuff when he showed up. He knew he'd have to kill Locke just as certainly as he knew he had to make it look like a suicide. Do you think Ben wiped his fingerprints from the extension cord and bleached the room to avoid being caught by the cops? No, he needed the newspapers to reflect that Jeremy Bentham had taken his own life. This got Jack to the funeral, but more importantly it served to let Charles Widmore think he'd succeeded in driving Locke to suicide. Sneaky shit? Yup. That's Benjamin Linus.

Finally, I also think Ben was telling the truth when he told Locke that Widmore was using him. His words here were frantic and strained, his whole demeanor was a lot different than the rest of his conversation with John. Of course, Ben needs to stop telling people that Widmore is 'extremely dangerous' and start telling them WHY he is. That might kind of, like, help him gain some credibility or something. But doing that would give us the same information by default, and the writers probably don't want to spring that one on us just yet. I still keep putting myself in Ben's shoes though, imagining how frustrating it must be to have to do all this seemingly evil shit in order to 'get people where they need to be', all for the good of a cause we have yet to finally see. Ben is the ultimate Abbadon.

Another Theory About The People On Flight 815 We Didn’t See

Ben realized that Locke's death was necessary, the fact that Locke knew about Hawking may or may not have triggered this realization. Ms. Hawking is the one who tells people how to get back to the island. Ben figured that in order for Locke to know who Ms. Hawking was, Jacob/Richard/Christian must have talked to him. This is not the first time that Ms. Hawking has helped to organize a flight that was supposed to emulate an earlier one. 815 was NOT the original flight, but simply one of several that have crashed or landed on the island throughout history. It would be interesting to see the passenger list or to see who was on the flight that they didn’t show us. Or even the ones that suddenly disappeared in a flash of white light. On flight 815, Christian Shepard had to go back in a coffin, (I wouldn’t be surprised to see an episode where we see someone sell Jack the white pair of tennis shoes that he puts on Christian, I wonder who they belonged to?) and was resurrected on the island. Ben must have known this, or known that it had happened to someone before (Jacob? Richard? Ben himself?), and realized that if the island wanted Locke to see Eloise, he must be playing the role of the dead leader on this particular instance of the flight. Widmore probably knew this too, and wanted Locke to live because he doesn't really want Locke to be the leader; he just wants Locke to help him become leader again by gathering up all the ones who left for him, which also explains why Abbadon was only concerned about getting everyone together, and didn't really seem to care about Locke's personal life. Ben knows that Locke could not know about Ms. Hawking unless Jacob/the island told him, and that if Ms. Hawking is involved, someone special has to be dead because they will be returning on one of the flights that is determined by Ms. Hawking at the Lamp Post station. Obviously, this person is John Locke. Ben wasn't trying to get rid of Locke completely, as he is sure to bring Locke on the plane and seems to know that he will come to life on the island.