"The Shape of Things to Come"
Episode Rating: A+
WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
After a five-week hiatus, Lost returns without missing a beat-in fact, tonight's episode outshines all but two of the last eight episodes. You'd think a writers strike might put a wrench in the cogs of the writing, but it seems like it just gave the writers more time to craft a great episode. Few episodes of any series are so tightly constructed, with equal parts of amazing thrills, emotion, plot, and acting.
Talk about a perfect title; this episode was entitled
The Shape of Things to Come, one of Lost's very common literary references, being a book by H.G. Wells. However, the title describes this episode perfectly. Tonight's show paved the way for many plots that I expect will extend to, at the very least, the end of the season, and likely the end of the series. Before going into detail, let's just sum some of these up-we learned the event that will motivate Ben for the rest of the series and we got conclusive proof that the freighter is bad and the war is beginning; together, these give us an idea of the shape of what is to come-namely, a war between two ambitious men (one of them driven by revenge) and a plane-load of survivors stuck in the middle.
The Shape of Things to Come indeed.
Two weeks ago, I posted my top-five character list, where I revealed my favorite character of the series to be Ben. Tonight's episode only strengthened my conclusion-Ben is one of the best characters in TV history. I always saw him as a multi-layered character, but this episode fleshed him out so much more. We used to see him, whether you liked him or not, as something supernatural or inhuman. Tonight, we learned that Ben is very human.
Let's start at the beginning and work our way to the end of the episode. I have to say, the pre-credits sequence was one of the best in the show's history. The body washed ashore, the bad-guys forced Alex to lead them into the barracks, and Ben pulled a shotgun out of a piano-bench. Best of all was the great gag with Sawyer, Locke and Hurley playing Risk. A thrilling start, to say the least. The plot had two parallel storylines, and let's get the smaller one out of the way first.
The body that washed ashore was the ships doctor. We saw him first in
The Constant, and then in
Ji Yeon when he lead Sayid and Desmond to their room. In this episode, he had his throat slit and looked like he'd been dead for a few days. Obviously, this brings the timeline into question. Remember, the island belongs to its own timeline-24 hours on the island equals 20 minutes in the real world (or something close to that). I'm guessing the Doc got killed in some confusion after Sayid ratted out Michael-that's my only guess as to why he is dead. As for the timeline, if the body fell off the ship and passed through the "time wall" into the island, it could have decayed a bit in that time period.
Jack is sick-the next-episode preview revealed it to be appendicitis. One of the great unanswered questions of the show is the question of what does someone do on the island when they are really sick-especially the doctor. Luckily, Jack has Juliet to help him out. I don't know how this will be relevant to the ultimate plot of season four, but I'm sure it will play into things nonetheless.
The most important aspect of this secondary plot was that Jack finally realized that the freighter is not there to rescue them. This is something that will pave the way for the rest of the season, I'm guessing. All of Jack and the other survivors on the beach will have the ultimate goal of getting of the island and evading the freighter-this is one of the many events in the episode that clues us into the shape of things to come.
But this episode was about Ben-and what a glorious episode it was. I was amazed with how much depth was added to an already complex character-at one time, it made him more of a human, more of a hero. On the other hand, his villainous qualities were brought out in the final scene.
The freighter-army attacking the barracks, and the subsequent actions, disproved one of my theories. Claire lived-she could always die later on, leaving Aaron to Kate, but I think this was the opportunity to whack the character, and it didn't happen. Claire is going to live on the island without her baby. Why? I can't answer that. But if we accept that Claire lives on the island, then that answers another question. Remember that Jack is Claire's half-brother. In the future, Jack goes insane wanting to go back to the island. If Claire is still on the island, and Jack finds out she was his sister, wouldn't that be a cataclysm for him wanting to return?
Anyway, I loved the entire firefight sequence. Sawyer played an awesome role in the episode. He had the heroics of Rambo, selflessly running into battle to save Claire. 3 survivors we've never seen before (like the red shirts on Star Trek) got whacked, showing us that the army from the freighter wasn't messing around. The tension in this sequence was astounding-when Sawyer got back with Claire, I honestly thought one or both of them was going to die.
And then they killed Alex. Poor Alex...I never saw this one coming. I mean, how often, on TV, do the hostages actually get killed? It was Ben's own arrogance that did his daughter in. Ben is always in control-up until now, the audience has never seen him out of control of the situation. Sure, he's been tied up or captured by Jack and friends, but he always had a plan. For once, Ben was faced with a situation where he wasn't in control, but he thought he could talk his way out of it. He told them Alex meant nothing to him, but the look on his face after she was slaughtered said otherwise.
We have never seen Ben cry. We've never seen him sad. We've never seen him in a situation where he actually lost something. But he did lose something-Alex was the only person in the world who meant something to him. This was Ben's first real experience with loss, and how did he react? Like any other human would. He broke down and cried. He wept for his daughter, like any civil, sane human would. Anyone who still thinks Ben is an inhuman monster can't possibly believe that now. You can still call him twisted and cruel if you like, but Ben is very human, and much more vulnerable than we would have believed.
In his destress, he summonned good ol' smokey. It looks like Ben can summon it, if not control it. He obviously feared the thing, so I'm guessing it's not under his total control. The real mystery is the question of what was behind the door Ben entered? I think time-traveling is a major plot in this show, and I think Ben has gone through space and time before, and will again (evidenced by the flash-forward--more on that ina minute). Perhaps that door was a gate into the heart of the island, where Ben could summon the monster, and spend time grieving for his daughter----maybe time had stopped inside there, giving him time to compose himself.
Alex's death paves the way for a whole new Ben storyline-revenge. His flash-forward tied together a few plots, and gave the episode even more dramatic weight. We saw him lose his daughter and we saw his vengeful actions in one episode.
The flash started in Tunisia, where a bleeding Ben was lying in a parka. He'd come from somewhere cold, obviously, but this was never explained. Let's go back to time-traveling.That door Ben went through tosummon Smoeky probably also let him travel through time and space, and he went to Tunisia. The space/time-traveling can't be easy on the guy; he vomited upon waking up. Also notice that this was the same desert Charlotte wasvisiting in Episode 2 of the season--where she found the Polar Bear skeleton.
The flash-forward disproved one of my big theories. In the last few column entries (about episodes) I theorized that Ben would get the Oceanic Six off the island. It seemed plausible, but obviously that's not the case, as Ben and Sayid's conversations proved. Ben said he left the island in Desmond's boat, which he stole in the Season 2 finale. This seems plausible, but the first scene of the flash-forward disproved it. I think Ben got here through time-traveling, or something akin to that. Once the Oceanc Six left, Ben must have traveled to Tunisia.
We learned why Sayid is working for Ben-he lost his wife, Nadia. In the Season 1 episode
The Greater Good, a flash-back introduced us to this character. Further episode showed Sayid searching for his love. It looks like after the island they found eachother, but it wasn't meant to be. Revenge can separate and unite people, and in the case of Ben and Sayid, it united them. When Sayid agreed to join Ben, Ben had a smug smile on his face. I'm sure some will interpret this as an evil grin, but I think that grin was aimed at Widmore, in the sense of "I have an ally now, and you are dead." I don't think Ben has anything sinister in plan for Sayid.
The final scene had Ben going to Charles Widmore's penthouse and declaring he would kill Penelope. We all know what complications this will stir with a certain Scot-and the scary part is, I fully believe Ben can carry this threat out. As the opening scene of the flash-forward demonstrated (when Ben killed the two men with a concealed gun), you do NOT screw with Mr. Linus. This is another scene that foreshadows future plots. In this scene, Ben officially declared war on Widmore. The game is afoot, as Sherlock Holmes would say-in fact, there was a Holmes reference in the episode. In the middle-east, Ben used the alias "Moriarty"-the name of Holmes' arch-nemesis. This scene also told us that Charles was the leader of Dharma-he claimed to have owned the island.
Anyway, the flash-forward was great. It looks like the flash-forwards-random blips on a map up until now-are coming together. Combined with the attack on the barracks and the death of Alex, we get an episode that gives us great insight into the mind of Ben, and is emotional as possible.
This episode brought a lot of humanity to the table. Obviously, Ben's grieving over his daughter illustrated his humanity. Sawyer demonstrated his humanity when he selflessly saved Claire, and later by threatening Locke with death if Hurley was hurt. Sawyer is a lot nicer than he leads us to believe. The blend of action, emotion, and humanity made tonight's episode a winner. I'd rank it up with
The Constant as one of the best episodes of the season.
REFERENCE EPISODES:
(Episodes Tonight's Installment Reference, Directly or Indirectly, or Were Mentioned in My Article, Sorted in Air Date Order)
"The Greater Good"-introduced Nadia, Sayid's future wife
"Live Together, Die Alone"-Ben stole Desmond's boat in this episode (on another interesting note, the flash-back in this episode featured Charles Widmore using wine to show how he thought of Desmond. When Ben went to meet Widmore, Charles was drinking the same wine)
"The Economist"-flash-forward introducing the partnership of Ben and Sayid