nixsight

Benry! Benry! Benry! Benry!

Benry:

Yes, yes, I know the rest of you are probably over calling him Benry, but I’m not even remotely tired of it yet…

There was a time not that long ago when an episode that started with Benry looking confused and terrified would have been both a quite appealing prospect – he was an ‘orrible individual, wasn’t he? – and a novelty bordering on an impossibility. One thing we’ve known about Henry Gale, since not long after his introduction all the way back in Season 2, is that he is always in control.

However, this season has shown us genuine growth and development in his character, with him taking a genuine knock with the discovery that Locke wasn’t Locke but Non-Locke, and that he had been played for a fool. Manipulation, after all, is the field in which Benry really made his name, and for him to be manipulated himself is unheard of.

The other thing that we learned over the course of the last season, of course, was that though he took greater relish in his role than some might, Benry’s driving motivation has been the protection of the island. It’s become clear that it isn’t just evil that motivates him. Though he’s a dick for the sake of being a dick sometimes, for the most part Benry does what he does because he believes it’s the right thing to do.

As we saw a couple of episodes back, in the alternate Benjamin Linus is a history teacher – working at the school that John Locke substitutes at – and after a bit of on-island recapping, this is where we see him. The writers have him talking to his students about Napoleon, and his loss of power, and it’s difficult not to see the deliberate comparisons that are being drawn between he and Napoleon.

Alternate Linus is kind of a sweetie, by all early impressions, and heavily put upon by an obnoxious headmaster, in sharp contrast to the version of the character we’re used to. Of all of the alternates, he’s the one who is most different from his island counterpart, but he’s also recognisably the same fellow we know. It’s fitting – last season, we saw Linus as a boy bullied badly by his father, until a brush with death left him with the role of island protector, and made him into the viciously pragmatic man we were used to. Of all of the characters, he’s the one most dramatically changed by the island, and that’s what we’re seeing in this alternate.

This is the world in which his father got to grow older and mellower, instead of Benry killing him.

So far this is the most cameo/coincidence heavy of the new episodes, with Arzt and Alex in prime roles. There’s also a delicious role-reversal in Locke encouraging him to take a more proactive role in his life.

(And I swear, it is an absolute pleasure sorting through screengrabs of Alex, trying to pick one out…)

Oh, stuff that’s happened while I’ve been going on about that – Miles exposed Ben Linus as the one who killed Jacob, and Ilana, inbetween tormenting Linus for his crime, told Sun that she and Jin were “Candidates” for replacing Jacob.

Ilana is such an odd character – she was introduced in a pretty low-key manner, but it now seems she’s involved with Jacob in a similar way to Richard.

Richard, incidentally, is leading Hurley and Jack through the jungle. He even almost explains to Hurley how he’s managed not to age, but stops at the last second. Richard seems pretty petulant about the whole Jacob thing, actually. He no longer trusts the guy.

Miles, on the other hand, is suddenly pretty fond of Jacob, from beyond the grave… and keeps sticking the knife in with Ben, tormenting him with the knowledge that Jacob had higher expectations of him than he thought. Pretty tactless of Miles, really – he tells Ben all this while Ben is digging his own grave at gunpoint.

This is an odd moment, actually – if the characters are to be believed, Jacob is speaking to both Hurley and Miles, now that he’s dead.

It’s funny that Arzt has turned up again – Richard takes Hurley and Jack back to the Black Rock, and that’s where we saw the end of Arzt. There’s also a reference to Nikki and Paolo, and that’s canny – the Nikki/Paolo episode was one of the few that featured Arzt prominently.

[Huh... just watching through it again a couple of days after writing the rest of this, and I think I totally missed the fact that Richard as good as says that he came to the island on the Black Rock.]

There’s been some theorising about whether Jacob is really the good guy and non-Locke the bad guy, or whether it’s actually the other way around, and there’s something in that, but it’s becoming clear in these last few episodes that the entity using Locke’s image, as much as it offers the choice of free will over determinism, seems to require the spilling of blood from all of its followers. That, to me, isn’t a positive sign.

The interesting thing is, after weeks of Jacob’s influence slowly diminishing in the wake of his death, this episode also sees a shift back toward him as a force on the island. At around the same time that Jack convinces Richard that Jacob may still have a plan – even following his own murder – turning Richard back from the brink of a suicidal lapse in faith, Benjamin Linus makes the choice between the easy option of killing once again, this time to escape from responsibility for his murderous actions – which followed his own loss of belief in Jacob – and to his surprise finds mercy and an invitation from Camp Jacob.

Off the island, the alternate Dr Linus also redeems himself, but this time it’s by not doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. The parallel is drawn between the two iterations again and again, because here, he sacrifices his own power and the greater good for Alex. Previously on Lost, of course, he allowed her to die because he believed he was protecting Jacob and the island. There seem to be two points being made, here: the Linus not affected by the island would rather give up his own hubris and power rather than make a decision that would hurt another person, and a world with Jacob in it is a world that’s bad for Alex.

It might not matter that Benjamin Linus finds redemption on the island, as it happens, because hark! A submarine! Bearing his mortal enemy Jim Robinson!

Another really good episode. Everyone does awesome work, but Michael Emerson manages to handle a completely different take on the same character, while at the same time dealing with some pretty significant but understated changes in the legacy iteration’s personality, with characteristically terrific skill.

Oh, and two other things that I noticed on a brief second watch. Two cute Miles moments, actually.

First, considering he’s been pretty much a comprehensive asshole since he turned up, isn’t this kind of cute:

And in an episode that did even more to cement the sense of continuity and place that I mentioned in an earlier post than any before it, with the return of the Black Rock, Arzt, and the references to Paolo and Nikki, I thought this was a nice touch:

Oh, Miles. Don’t ever change. You mercenary fuckbag!