Review: The Shape of Things to Come

In the first 3 minutes of “The Shape of Things to Come,” we saw rifles, a dead body and some Kate Austen side boob. I thought to myself, “This episode can’t get any better.”

Amazingly, I was wrong.


Sun, Sand and… Dead Doctors from the Future!
Washed Ashore
Plot development on the beach moved about as fast as Hurley in a dead sprint. But it did start with a bang. The body of Dr. Ray washed ashore, shocking Faraday and Charlotte. If his mere death wasn’t enough to rattle them, his slashed throat and battered face certainly were. Immediately, the beach crew begins wondering what could’ve happened, and decide to place a call on iPhone from hell. But before they can, they discuss the return of the helicopter and, with it, Sayid and Desmond. When asked for an ETA on that arrival, Faraday foreshadows the beach’s most interesting happening with the retort, “'When’ is kind of a relative term.”

The Dentist Speaks Morse
A faulty microphone on the phone causes the beach crew to resort to Morse Code. Faraday tries to tell the 815’ers that the freighter folk claim they don’t know anything about the doctor, that Sayid and Desmond are fine, and that the helicopter will return tomorrow morning. But oh Daniel, my sweet Daniel. You forgot about Bernard Nadler: dentist, devoted husband, trained assassin and fluent Morse Code speaker. Bernard corrects Daniel, informing Jack that the freighter communiqué merely asked, “What are you talking about? The doctor is fine.” Oh no you didn’t cross Bernard Nadler, Faraday. Oh no you didn’t.

A Time to Kill
But…well how do I put this lightly? Dr. Ray is not “fine.” He is, in fact, dead. And Daniel Faraday knows why: the time warp. Somehow, Dr. Ray has not yet been murdered on the freighter. But he’s about to have his throat slit and his body thrown overboard. Roughly 31 minutes in the future, his body has already been discovered by the beach crew. That, friends, is why Faraday referred to “time” as a “relative term” early in the episode. Were this a post in which I didn’t have to devote a large chunk of time to the Ben Linus v. Charles Widmore scene, I would get further into the implications of time, and how knowledge of future events affects actions in the present (read: Why wouldn’t Faraday warn the freighter folk about Dr. Ray’s impending death?).

We’ve got bigger fish to fry, so we’ll leave that for another day.

Battle at the Barracks
Against Her Will
Almost immediately, we learned the identity of the jungle assassins from the last episode: it was indeed Martin Keamy & Co. from the freighter. Keamy used Alex to thwart the electromagnetic gate, prompting an automatic call to Ben’s house that warned its inhabitants of the ominous “Code 14j.” Good work, Alex. Your worth to this show grows exponentially with each passing day.

Code 14j
The announcement of Code 14j seemed to derail Ben’s one-man piano recital, much in the same way that Kate’s rescue attempt in Season 3 interrupted Jack’s ivory-tickling scene. Seriously. How do all these guys know how to play piano? Anyway, Code 14j is apparently not a drill. I repeat, it is not a drill. The code sends Ben into a frenzy. He moves everyone to another house, arms the masses (well, only the characters whose names we know, unfortunately for the extras who played “Barracks Inhabitants 1-3” last night) starts barricading the doors and tells Locke that he must survive the attack at all costs. Cool, calm, collected Ben Linus is obviously worried. Turns out, he had reason to be.

Hostage Situation
What was brilliant about the hostage standoff was the stark reality of it. Once Ben began explaining that Alex was a pawn, I thought, “Man, how long is this cat and mouse game gon—.” That’s as far as that thought went, as my contemplation was shattered by Keamy’s remorseless killing of Alex. In truth, I’m okay with her dying. Of all the main players, she was the most expendable. And they did a great job of using her death to dramatically raise the stakes of this battle.“He changed the rules.”
Did anyone seriously not believe shit was about to go down after Ben said this? I got chills. We know he’s capable of a lot, but I didn’t even think he had the power to summon Smokey. And I think that’s exactly what his counter-strike was. When he went into the secret-room-inside-of-the-secret-room and created some signal for Smokey to go out and kill everyone in the tree line. Well, not everyone. As we saw last week, Keamy is alive and well…for now.

I believe we can make this whole incident Chapter 413 in Why You Should Never Underestimate and/or Piss Off Benjamin Linus. What was really great is it answered another question: why did the Others so blindly and loyally trust Ben? With powers like that, who wouldn’t? And for the first time ever, Ben seemed to display an actual (gasp!) human side. When he tells Locke he has to go say goodbye to his daughter, and when he looks down at her lifeless body, we see shreds of compassion that are very un-Linuslike. It was actually a pretty cool scene.

The Breaking of the Fellowship
Ben may have won the Battle at the Barracks (kind of), but in doing so he lost the battle for hearts and minds. Apparently, protecting a new mother, her baby and good ole’, fun-time Hurley from stray bullets was too much for Sawyer. He decided he was taking everybody who didn’t have a weird, spiritual connection with the Island back to the beach (plus, Miles the ghost whisperer. Come on, let's kill him already). Broken and confused, Ben and Locke know that they can’t let Hurley go. Not surprisingly, Sawyer disagrees. Before bullets can fly, Hurley steps in and takes one for the team, deciding to venture with Ben and Locke and help them find Jacob. It’s really interesting to see Hurley getting wrangled into the mythology of this show. His role has gone from comic relief to key player in the course of Season 4, and I, for one, think Jorge Garcia has done an excellent job of pulling it off while retaining the character and personality traits that have always made him so lovable.

The dead body on the beach and the barracks battle would’ve been enough to satisfy me last night. But, perhaps to make up for its 5-week absence, LOST delivered a hell of a lot more than we even deserved last night. And of course, it all went down in flash-forward land.


Indiana Linus
Rather than recap all of Ben’s globe-trotting endeavors, I’ll give you what I saw as the highlights.

• Ben goes from weak, vulnerable victim to gun-toting badass in no time flat. Sorry, dudes on horseback.
• It seems like Ben’s time travel doesn’t afford him the luxury of an exact ETA. He looks pleasantly surprised when the hotel concierge tells him it's October, 2005. I wonder where/when he’s ended up on past journeys.
• Ben was in Tunisia, site of the polar bear that Charlotte discovered earlier this season. I think this means that the polar bear was a remnant of an early time travel experiment. Apparently, Ben’s folks haven’t worked out the whole “drops you in the middle of nowhere” kink in the system.
• Dean Moriarty? That’s Ben’s passport name. Gentleman, start your Googles.

To be honest, I found the first 80% of the Ben/Sayid flash-forward story decent at best. Intriguing, yes. But we didn’t get much that we didn’t already know or couldn’t already guess. Ben travels the globe, then manipulates Nadia’s death by painting Widmore as the bad guy in order to get Sayid to become his personal assassin. Even though it was somewhat predictable, I loved the scene where Sayid killed Ishmael Bakir. It ended with one of Sayid’s best quotes ever: “Don’t tell me this is not my war. Benjamin, who’s next?” Almost instantly, Sayid abandoned his compassionate side and reverted to his killer mentality. It’s not tough to see how he ends up as the man we saw in The Economist.

But please. Don’t tell me you lost sleep over that part of the show. Last night was all about the coolest confrontation in LOST history.

Meeting of the Minds
I think the best way to even try to break down this part of the show is by examining a few select quotes from the meeting of Charles Widmore and Ben Linus.

Ben: When did you start sleeping with a bottle of scotch by the bed.
Charles: When the nightmares started.
Nightmares, huh? The kind of nightmares, visions and hallucinations that rack Jack and Hurley with guilt after leaving the Island? We know Charles Widmore has been to the Island, and we know he wants to get back. Maybe he left before he was supposed to, and maybe that’s why he’s hell-bent on getting back, no matter the cost.

Charles: Are you here to kill me, Benjamin?
Ben: We both know I can’t do that.
Really? Why not? Kill him, Ben! He killed your daughter!

This scene began with enough small talk and pleasantries that I thought, for just a second, that Ben and Charles may have actually been working together. I think we know that not to be the case by now, though. But why can’t Ben kill Charles? Does he need him as a nemesis? Or did Charles, in his time on the Island, discover something that Ben needs? Maybe Charles knows why the pregnant women die. Or how to harness the Island’s life-prolonging qualities. Or how the Island itself ties into the Hanso Foundation and Dharma Initiatives original mission of saving the world, one soul at a time.

Or maybe, just maybe, Charles has a Richard Alpert thing going on. He can’t age, and literally can’t die, so Ben can’t simply walk into a penthouse and murder him. My money’s on the “Ben needs something Charles knows” side of it, but I would be thrilled with a Charles Widmore immortality angle, too.

Charles: I know who you are boy. What you are. I know that everything you have taken from me. So once again, I ask you, why are you here?
“Who you are” and “what you are.” That was really interesting for me. I think it refers to the fact that Ben, unlike Richard Alpert and some Others, is not an actual Island native. Maybe that’s why Widmore resents him so much. Not only did Ben unseat Dharma (and its governing body, presumably presided over by Charles Widmore, among others), he did it without a natural connection to the Island. He was the worthless son of a worthless peon. And yet, somehow, this outsider had a connection to the Island and was able to use it for his own gain. In the process, he got the Island natives to wipe out the Dharma Initiative. It’s one thing to have an usurper to the throne. It’s entirely another thing if the usurper is something of a carpetbagger. You could almost see hate seeping out of the television screen when Charles told Ben, “Don’t stare at me with those horrible eyes of yours.” Talk about somebody saying what we’ve all been thinking for years. That was brilliant.

And finally...

Ben: I’m going to kill your daughter. Penelope, is it?
Tit. For. Tat. Here’s what’s really fascinating about this escalation of stakes… a lot of this show has been about a child’s reaction to his father’s misdeeds. Sawyer, Kate, Locke, Jack, this list of characters with daddy issues goes on and on. The development of characters like Ben and Widmore, however, has addressed that issue from the father’s side of the coin. These are awful, evil men. They have been villainized since day one. They are cutthroat, heartless and cold. Or so we think.

But then, Ben’s daughter is killed. His connection to her, though admittedly not biological, is pretty strong. And we have already seen the lengths to which Widmore will go to protect Penny from those he sees unfit (Desmond). Are they bad guys? Yes, they are. But somewhere in each of their hearts, good lives. The methods with which they choose to act on that part of themselves are questionable at best. But to see a glimpse of the motives behind their actions is to gain a shred of sympathy for these monsters.

I think that happens a lot with parents and children. Growing up, we question why we can’t do this or have to do that. The more we grow up, the more we usually understand. We become adults, we shed a bit of immaturity, and we begin to see the forest for the trees. If you’re lucky, your life experiences will justify the things that upset you about your parents when you were too naïve to understand them. It takes a strong parent to not take the easy way out, too. It’s tough be tough. But if you do things right, your kid might just grow up and learn to respect the hell out of that toughness.
(For the record, I'm not comparing my parents to any of the parents on this show. Yikes.)

What remains to be seen about Ben and Widmore’s heavy-handed and questionable parenting style is just how justified it is. But we are beginning to see how much they care about their children. The looks of horror on their faces when their daughters’ lives were being threatened last night were a significant departure from their usual emotionless visages. And obviously, they’re willing to sacrifice a lot for this Island, whatever it is. But these guys are getting to a crossroads: at what point does this Island’s importance overshadow that of the ones they love? Just how much are they willing to sacrifice for what they believe in? And in true LOST fashion, the answers to those questions will be played out against the backdrop of the father-daughter paradigm. Enjoy that one.


And finally, the tension-filled scene (my fingernails are nubs) ended with this no-explanation-necessary exchange:

Charles: That Island’s mine Benjamin. It always was. It will be again.
Ben: But you’ll never find it
Charles: Well I suppose the hunt is on for both of us.
Ben: I suppose it is.
Sleep tight, Charles.

In closing, I loved this episode. For me, it ranked somewhere above The Economist, and somewhere slightly below The Constant. I give it an 8.9 on the Stephan LOST Awesomeness Scale.

What did you think? Favorite parts? Unsolved mysteries? Could you even sleep? Me neither. Until next week.

Namaste.
.charlie