I hope not. That would be a serious cop-out. But damn, they went to a pretty dark place.
Yeah um… I don’t even know what to say. Yikes.
— Alan
Menzo
4543
I did not see that coming.
He’s not dead, of course, but damn.
It looks like Sayid just shot Ben to get back at him for stuff that Ben did to Sayid to get back at him (Sayid) for shooting him (Ben). Ow.
This is the event that sets Ben apart ad brings him to the notice of the Island’s mystical healing powers. This is the event that sets Ben on course to do the things he was going to do.
Really interested in where Farrady went.
nabeel
4546
“Three years, no burnin’ buses. Y’all back for one day …”
I thought it was to prevent the Purge. Does Sayid know about Ben’s role in that?
He must. The “responsible for genocide” part can’t refer to anything else.
I don’t think anyone does directly but it seems like something he could reasonably piece together. Especially with the recent knowledge he gained of him as a child (wanting to join the others, his father, the fact that he’s actually part of Dharma). I’m betting his motive is more revenge/prevention, thinking that if he kills him now he won’t be around to raise hell later.
Now either Farraday was wrong and they can change the past or there was something strange about the last time jump changing that or they can’t change the past and Ben will live or Sayid (and perhaps the others that came on the second flight) are somehow like Desmond and “exist outside of the rules.”
I hope that Ben lives and ends up healed by the Island. Anything else throws all consistency (and credibility of the writers, which is already suspect in my opinion) out the window making the show very fucking lame.
Of course the writers are now a little hamstrung. Either they stick with the notion that time can’t be changed and we all know what’s essentially going to happen or they break away from that and throw the idea of consistency out the window.
Hmm that’s a good point. Either way Sayid thinks Ben is evil and needs to be stopped. I think they’ve given plenty of motive for that.
I think you’re excluding an option here. My guess is that during The Incident (the finale) all of the Oceanic folks will end up back in the present and then things will start happening going forward. While we might know what happens to the Dharma Initiative and it might be completely unchangeable, that doesn’t imply that we know what happens in the present future, where we have yet to time travel (outside of some brief time skipping segments that told us very little). Even if the rest of this season is going through a series of “preordained” events, I think that you can still have an interesting and unpredictable series finale and use that as good backstory to inform the events in the future.
Absolutely, I’m not saying they’re forced to end the series in a predictable way, just the 70s time line. I wouldn’t be surprised if they jump through time again.
I just can’t see Ben dying in the 70s, it would break all the rules that they’ve established and would be the biggest cop-out to date (and this series has had several), even more so than magically bringing Locke back from the dead after what seems like several months near as I can tell.
I think Locke was supposed to be dead for like days of real time (like a week, 2 max) not months, though it took more like a year to fill in the blanks between when we first saw his funeral and then everything else. I don’t really have anything to base that on other than that’s how it feels to me so I could be wildly wrong.
Not that him being dead for days or weeks instead of months makes his reincarnation any more plausible or anything.
That’s what I first thought, then I started thinking about it and there are several clues that point to Locke being dead for a very long time.
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In just this last episode (admittedly I wasn’t watching that closely so I might have gotten this one wrong) we saw Ben visiting Sayid in central America (or wherever he is) building houses, that was after Ben killed Locke (as I believe Ben tells Sayid Locke’s dead) and Ben recruits him to start killing Widmore’s people all over the world.
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If we look further back in the series Jack was flying around trying to get back to the island, we find out later that he started doing that after he met with Locke just before Ben killed him. He was apparently doing that for months as he lost his job due to his alcohol issue that arose after he spoke with Locke.
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The time jumping that was happening on the island was stopped by Locke and Sawyer, Juliet and the rest got stuck in the 70s. Then three years passed in both the present and the 70s. Locke was off the island for those three years. He broke his leg when he left, his leg was still in a cast when he was killed. Most breaks heal in a few weeks, months at most, even if it was a year that’s still two years that Locke was dead.
This could be the biggest problem with the short-term theory of Locke being dead, since Ben needs time to run down to the Dominican Republic and back, but if Ben had already decided or discovered that Locke would need to die, he doesn’t necessarily have to be telling the truth. More significantly, the gap between Ben showing up at the work site and Sayid getting arrested isn’t clear - it could be as short as a day.
This is consistent with either theory because we do not know how long after meeting with Jack Locke decided to kill himself, unless there was a card that I don’t remember accurately.
While we know that the three years on the outside parallels the three years in the 70s, we do not know what part of those intervening years Locke jumped over when he moved the Island. Remember that Ben showed up in the future (relative to the present time when he did it) after he moved the Island. It’s possible that while three years have passed for both the on- and off-Island groups, only a few months have passed for Locke.
Don’t you love time travel stories?
I do think Ben’s visit to Sayid was after he killed Locke but I think it was like right after, within a couple of days. I also don’t think Locke came out that close (in time) to when the other people did, I think he came out closer to what constitutes the “present” within the show than he did to the 3 years earlier. I think that’s why they were more willing to use Big Walt (in a non-ghosty form or whatever).
The Jack flying thing is a harder nut to crack. Initially I thought they meant to suggest he had been flying around for months, but more recently it seemed like it was a more recent thing that had only occured a couple of times. But really the timeline on that is pretty muddled, at least in my head, maybe someone can link some Lostpedia thing or something that gives a clear answer on that… Could go either way though, so maybe Locke was dead for months if Jack was in fact flying for months, because IIRC it was Locke that brought that urge upon him and made him go all beardy and alchey. I don’t remember if it was Locke’s death or just his initial visit that spawned that though. Anyone?
Hmm, turns out Lostpedia does have something that covers this.
According to their timeline, Locke was dead for 7 days.
See here
I haven’t dug into their timeline enough to know how they are calculating these dates though.
Also: Looking at the timeline, I think the reason for confusion on how long Jack has been flying is due to the the writers having retconned a bit. The timeline I linked to mentions Jack’s quote to Kate about how he’d been using the golden pass to fly “every weekend”, (which is, I think, why I intially imagined he was flying for months) but it also seems (going by the timeline) that the previous weekend was the first weekend he flew after the Locke confrontation… I guess this could mean multiple things, maybe he was already flying around before Locke ever visited him, though his reaction to Locke certainly would suggest otherwise (he didn’t seem to want to go back to the island prior to that).
Hmm, ok, according to that timeline it seems like Jack probably started flying around after Locke first visited him but before Locke “killed himself”, so maybe he was flying around for a month (on the weekends, as he mentioned to Kate in that first flash forward episode) and the most recent flight to Sydney was the last one prior to their actual return to the island and it occured the day Locke died.
bloo
4560
Faraday and Charlotte said that Ben had used the nerve gas before, which Sayid could reasonable have learned from Juliet or the rest.
