Right on - but I’m not sure to what you are responding.
DT1
4682
Oh, I thought you were questioning his motivation for being an asshole. I was just saying that it was mostly to maintain his role as the leader.
Ach, ja! So, I am a little confused on that … But I guess I’ll have to see that played out.
He seems to vacillate pretty sharply between devoutly following the path and sharply resisting it. I think that’s just one of those things I’ll have to see played out a little further or perhaps to the end.
I have no way of knowing what The Path is, so I can’t even begin to figure out how much he knows of it, how much he is misinterpreting it, and how much he is outright resisting.
Anyone care to speculate on what happened after getting heaved off the marina? Desmond and Family just started up the boat and split while Ben held his breath for a bit? Certainly would have been awkward to surface and they’re still undoing the lines …
Well, when he called Jack he was still dripping, so there wasn’t much time for anything else to have happened. If his arm was as tweaked as it looked I imagine he would have taken a while getting to shore while Desmond and family packed off to whatever location will eventually end up being The Island.
Poor Ceasar. And poor Frank!
Great episode. All kinds of confirmation about Ben’s background and maybe some of his motivations. What is Richard’s connection to the Temple? High Priest? Avatar? Also, in a previous episode a long time back, didn’t Ben or Locke mention that the rest of the others (and presumeably Richard) had gone to the Temple, which was why we never saw them again?
Miles-centric episode next week! Wooooo!!!
Yeah, shooting Caesar seemed a bit unnecessary and cold-blooded, even for Ben. It was definitely unexpected, though, since they’d been setting him up as a Jack parallel only to off him casually. Did not see that one coming.
One thing I noticed: when they saw the temple wall, Ben said “We built the wall to keep people like you two from ever seeing the temple.” The others built the wall? So they’ve been there for hundreds, maybe thousands of years?
Yeah … That didn’t make much sense to me rhetorically - to the point that I’m invoking ‘no corpse, no crime’ … On the other hand, Nikki and Paulo.
If folks came from Black Rock, that’d be hundreds at least.
It’s also possible Ben was using “we” to refer to those groups and people who are loyal to the Island. Our current group of Others may originate as far back as the Black Rock, but he might count the Island’s original Egyptian (or so it seems) residents as “we” too.
Notes from the podcast:
Ben is legitimately surprised that Locke is actually alive. Carlton goes out of the way to make clear that it is possible that he was just “mostly dead.” That doesn’t make it good composition, but it’s what they were aiming for, anyway.
I guess this is what happens when one of your primary characters is a manipulative dick that repeatedly lies to the audience.
bloo
4691
Yeah. They need to explain this eventually. If the Others built a big wall to hide their temple, why would they have let this unlocked back door be around?
Crater
4692
My theory is that these are members of the Dharma initiative. They’re the only folks that I can think of that have used riddles for identification purposes.
The only real basis I have for this is season 2, when Desmond asked Jack “Are you him?” followed by “What did one snowman say to the other?”. Sure, Desmond wasn’t Dharma, but he most likely learned all of that after spending all that time in the Swan with Kelvin(?).
The best I can think of is that Dharma found out that the Oceanic 6 were going back to the island (they did use the Dharma Lamppost station, after all), and infiltrated the passengers.
We know that Dharma hasn’t had a problem using force in the past, and they’d probably be a bit trigger-happy given what happened to the last Dharma folks on the island.
I’d say thousands of years. The heiroglyphs in the temple weren’t Egyptian, but there was clearly an Egyptian figure meeting something that seemed like the smoke monster, so I’m guessing that way in the past, the natives had contact with Egypt. I’m not going to be satisfied until I know about the whole four-toe thing.
H.
The Dharma Initiative took over the area where their camp is/was because that was where the things they wanted to study (the smoke hole in Ben’s closet, for one) were located, and in the process denied access to the area from the Others with the sonic fence (but not the Island, as witnessed by Richard being able to go through it at will, apparently; Richard seems to be a manifestation of the Island, since he never ages, as a real person would do).
The Island has no physical powers at all; it can only read people and cause hallucinations. It manipulates people psychologically. Being thousands of years old, the Island is not real sophisticated. It manipulates people in the only way it knows how, with fear, and it is not all-powerful in this; some people can resist the manipulation to one degree or another and even lie to it successfully for a time (Ben, for one). The Island, for want of a better term, wants worshippers, apparently, and offers eternal life in return for obedience, which apparently includes never leaving the island (maybe it’s afraid of being overwhelmed from the outside world).
The DI has managed to understand and even control the Island a bit, and was busy building things (the Pearl et al) towards this end, when the Island strikes back by indoctrinating little Ben and biding it’s time until Ben is older and can mass-kill the DI people and allow the Others (the Island’s worshippers) to take over the smoke-hole and the Wheel from the now defunct DI and happily return to whatever it is they do.
The resurrected Locke is obviously a manifestation of the Island.
Probably all crap. :)
Clearly ridiculous. No man is an island.
Khoram
4696
Have you considered this?
The Egyptian figure depicted with the smoke monster is Anubis, the weigher of the hearts of the dead for Osiris, who judges whether the dead so weighed get to go to the after-life or not. I suppose the smoke-monster is Anubis’ way of gathering evidence.
I can’t wait to see what they come up with for Osiris.
Funkman
4699
The Dharma Initiative took over the area where their camp is/was because that was where the things they wanted to study (the smoke hole in Ben’s closet, for one)
But that house is not originally Ben’s house! It’s not his closet! Does this not seem intensely odd to anyone? For whatever reason, this is really bugging me. And its not even the first time that Ben has accessed secret passages in various Dharma houses.
I think it was the same secret passage last time, he used it to summon the smoke monster to kill Widmore’s army dudes.
