Lost 4.9 "The Shape of Things to Come"

Monday, 28 April 2008

By John Keegan Visit Critical Myth for an archive of John's TV Review archives, with more than 1100 entries.   During this short spring hiatus, I played the new video game “Lost: Via Domus”. I was far from impressed, and this episode actually provided me with the reason why all these other media ventures fail. The series is simply too good to duplicate successfully. The long-term payoffs and powerful characters moments are only meaningful within the context of the story arc as a whole. Ben warned the survivors of Oceanic 815 that the arrival of the “rescue” boat was the beginning of the end, and after a steady build-up, that prediction has come to pass. The mercenaries have brought the apparently protracted cold war between Ben and Charles Widmore to a new level, “changing the rules” as Ben says, and whatever semblance of security remained has been dashed. There’s a certain irony in the notion that Team Locke fled to the Barracks to survive, considering that most of them were slaughtered. It also speaks to the reason why Hurley is available for his eventual role as one of the Oceanic 6; at this point, there is no meaningful split between the survivors anymore. It’s just a matter of when the war comes to them. The mercenaries are after Ben, and as such, the episode revolves around his choices, his responses, and his manipulations. Ben has always been one of the best characters on the series, and this episode reaffirms his role as the “evil mastermind”. Even in the face of personal loss, he manages to take control and maintain focus. He absorbs his loss into the greater conflict, which gets more definition in this episode. And of course, Locke remains under his complete control. In terms of the standoff at the barracks, the production staff played a nice bit of misdirection. All the pre-episode buzz made it sound like Claire was going to be killed, and given that Aaron is one of the Oceanic 6, this was plausible. Instead, Claire survived the onslaught, and Alex was the truly meaningful casualty. This came as quite the shock, but taken in conjunction with the flash-forward, it fit the parallels within the narrative. Of course, now that Alex is dead, there’s every reason to assume that Danielle is dead. This is an unfortunate turn of events, and it will certainly add to the accusations of misogyny leveled at the writing staff. Granted, this has been a bloody season overall, but most of the high-profile casualties have been women, granting motivation to the choices of men. There’s still quite a bit to go in the season, so things could change quickly, but it will undoubtedly be a cause for criticism. (Then again, Danielle may well survive and Alex’s death could push her into new and more-relevant territory. One can always hope.) Alex’s death, however, does serve to escalate the war between Ben and Widmore. The arrival of Widmore’s assault team was already an escalation, but Ben was more or less content to ride it out with the survivors of Oceanic 815 as his cannon fodder. That had obviously changed by the time of the flash-forwards, and this episode covers the shift in Ben’s philosophy. Logically speaking, no one else on the island could possibly drive Ben towards sustained violence. His philosophy, for quite some time, has been strength through targeted isolation, after all. That includes isolation of information, such as the ability to control (or, at the very least, direct) the Cerberus system (“the smoke monster”) to attack the mercenaries. This brings up an interesting question. Has Ben been responsible for previous appearances by the “monster”, or has this always been an ace in the hole? It strongly suggests that the Dharma Initiative either created Cerberus or managed to learn enough about it to manipulate it. Whatever the case, this is an intriguing piece of information. By the end of the episode, Ben and Locke have convinced Hurley to take them to Jacob. With the season being relatively short (especially after the writers’ strike), there’s no reason to believe that this will be even slightly protracted. The arc of the season strongly indicates that the Oceanic 6 event will be in the finale, so Hurley must get to the beach in the next few episodes. Locke’s search for Jacob must also be resolved. And now, after this episode, it’s clear that Ben must arrive at a certain destination: the Orchid Station. Ben’s appearance in the middle of Tunisia not only connects with the polar bear in “Confirmed Dead”, but it connects with the viral “Orchid orientation” video, since he’s wearing the uniform of someone named Halliwax. Edgar Halliwax was the name given by the man in the Orchid video that was also known as Mark Wickmund in other Dharma videos. This suggests that the Orchid Station involves a teleportation experiment, which could explain a great number of things. If the electromagnetic anomaly on the island already warps time and space, teleportation is not necessarily a stretch! Ben immediately sets out to tap his resources. A date is given (October 2005), which makes it possible that Ben jumped in both space and time. If so, that may be why he was shocked to see Sayid on the news, mourning his wife. With the loss of Alex so recent (at least for him), he understood Sayid’s mental state and immediately saw how it could be used to his advantage. It’s surprising to learn that Sayid begins his service to Ben voluntarily, even happily. In that respect, Sayid is still master of his own agency, even if Ben is still using him to his own devices. Ben’s conversation with Charles Widmore is filled with innuendo and tantalizing possibilities. For whatever reason, Ben cannot kill Charles Widmore; instead, he opts to pay Widmore back for the loss of Alex by killing Penny. Setting aside how this should make for some interesting Ben/Desmond conflict, it opens up a stunning line of speculation, one that could change the scope of “Lost” tremendously. The original “Hostiles” were the pre-Dharma inhabitants, apparently led by Richard, a man who appears to be long-lived (if not immortal). Ben eventually took control of the Hostiles, eliminating the Dharma Initiative in the process. One might have assumed that Ben took control from Richard, but what if that wasn’t the case at all? What if there was once someone who led the Hostiles, someone who lost control of the island because of Ben’s connection to Jacob? The theory is that Charles Widmore was once the leader of the Hostiles, the original inhabitants of the island, and he is consequently unable to be killed. He could have been there for decades or centuries, perhaps even born on the island. Ben might have sent him away into exile, leaving him to track down any clue he could find to locate the island and take back control. (Not all the details fit yet, but the broad concept is there.) That might explain why Widmore might have attempted, perhaps in connection with Thomas Mittlewerk, to take control of the Hanso Foundation and, by extension, the Dharma Initiative. That would have been one source of information on the location of the island. It even lends support to the idea that Widmore manipulated Desmond to participate on the race around the world, on a path that appears to have been designed to take people in the known region of the Pacific where the island is located. All of that may be wrong, but it would appear to explain how Ben and Widmore knew each other on a personal level, why their conflict appeared to be relatively old, and why there would have been “rules of engagement”. It would also continue to muddy the waters in terms of Ben’s claim that his Others are “the good guys”. It’s amazing to think that, on top of all of the items related to Ben, there’s still a subplot back on the beach. Jack is starting to feel sick to his stomach, and that is beginning to affect his ability to deal with the treacherous Daniel and Charlotte (who is obviously sitting back waiting to see where the wind blows). Beyond foreshadowing Jack’s addiction to pills in the future, this is just set-up for the next episode. The schedule for the rest of the season looks pretty tight, in all the right ways. The next episode will focus on Jack, bringing the issues on the beach to a head. The episode after that focuses on Locke, which should be another mythology-driven installment. Then it’s the three-hour, two-part season finale, which should be a thrill ride to the next major paradigm change. The second half of the season could go down as one of the best stretches for the series to date.

 

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