Uncharted Island

I’ve been looking forward to this episode ever since I heard the title of it a few weeks back. A shoutout to Ben’s alias Henry Gale… and so promising when it comes to the real story behind the Others.

A few things before the first commercial break: Ben’s parents were named Roger (Work Man?) and Emily, and he was not born on the island - and Locke absconding with the tape recorder that he handed to Sawyer was not a part of one of Ben’s convoluted schemes.

As expected, Ben is middle management, and he answers to Jacob. I have to say I agree with Locke in believing that Jacob just another manipulation. I mean, we’ve just seen that Ben was not born on the island, as he claims. He has not spent his whole life there… Unless he’s telling the truth in his mind, that we’ll have a scene coming up where Ben sees himself to have been born again on the island.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen! The balance of power has shifted… already. Locke calls Ben out on the carpet. Ben looks to the… Others for backup, and they just sit idly by while Locke beats the crap out of Mikhail. Locke grates on my nerves a lot, but that was awesome. I cheered out loud. Not too loudly, of course - I don’t want to wake up my son.

Ben’s class has an alarm for Hostile attacks. So the Hostiles from the Dharma films are not our Others, they’re island natives. And then Ben sees his dead mother outside his window. Smokey?

Are we going to find out that Annie ends up being Alex’s mom… for real? Is Danielle that crazy? I hope I’m wrong about this. But I can’t shake the feeling…

Little Ben didn’t turn the pylons back on. And there are those whispers. And… Richard looks the same age as he does now.

… I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the scene with Jacob. What the…? Jacob would appear to be real, although Locke couldn’t see or hear him until he turned his back to leave. And Ben was right, Jacob really gets ticked off about technology. Does Jacob take the form of Smokey to prowl about the jungle? So freaky. That scene had all the creepiness of the first season.

Wow, we all knew that Ben was a liar with a questionable set of morals involving the sanctity of human life. After last week’s ultimatum to Locke about killing his father, and seeing how Roger treated Ben all his life this week, I figured he must’ve killed him. But gassing him like that… and sitting there while he died, that was just cruel. It’s like I said about the difference between Sawyer shooting the one guy and then strangling Cooper with the chain. And Richard and the rest of the natives gassed the rest of the hippie Dharma folks. We saw the Purge. Was this the Incident, too?

And it would appear that there is, indeed, some sort of fountain of youth type thing going on here. Richard doesn’t look a day older than he did when Ben was a kid, although he dresses far less like a hippie now. How long ago did this occur? It would seem that something must be done to retain the look of youth, or else how would the kids be able to age and grow up?

This episode was supposed to answer “all our questions” about the Others. Well, I know by now not to listen to the promos, but I was hoping for at least one or two more answers.

Is Locke going to die after being shot in the gut and left for dead in the mass Dharma grave? I’m thinking that Ben’s snarky words about hoping Jacob will help him now may turn out to be prophetic. Jacob seems to be, for lack of a better word, the island deity. People can only see him if he allows them to see him, hear him if he wants them to. Now I understand why Him was always pronounced with a capital letter. Early on in the episode, I did think that Locke was right, and Jacob was fake… and I even thought that the alarm in the school scene might have been a Village-like scenario where the beasts were a contrivance to keep the villagers in line. But both of those thoughts were summarily shot down.

So much more to work out in my head after tonight’s episode, but my son just woke up screaming, so that will have to wait for another day.