Sunday, March 1, 2009

As I Lay Dying: Revisiting "The Life & Death of Jeremy Bentham" and Your Comments


It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance between the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Round two.

I watched "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham" again, taking notes of course. I also wanted to address many (but not all) of your great comments from last week's post. If I had more time, I would love to respond to all of you individually!

IMAGINARY/REAL/SPACE TIME MAP

Caesar found the map in the Hydra island office; in fact, he seemed to be looking for it. Are we all on board with Faraday as the author/creator of said map? IS there a correlation between that and the infamous Swan hatch door map? Are those on the island affected by time shifts depending upon WHERE they are located between the hatches at the time?

AARON

The lack of concern for his whereabouts is a tad disconcerting. Jack was more concerned with returning to the island and a roll in the hay with Kate than the well-being of his own nephew. Abaddon, Ben, Hawking and even Widmore were insistent that EVERYONE who had left the island had to go back, and yet none have inquired about Aaron. Seems beyond odd.

BEN

Ben must have known that Locke had to 'die' in order to serve as a proxy for Christian Shephard on the Ajira flight back to the island
- that is why he killed him. I assumed that he also had to know that the island wasn't done with Locke, that upon returning...Locke would reanimate. Then why say that he'd miss him if it was only temporary? Ben has left Locke for dead before...

Who is Ben's off island man, the one who was watching the O6 for him?

BENTHAM/LOCKE

He'd never been to the smaller Hydra island, but he was staring out at the main island so he knew where he needed to be.

In a previous episode, the 2 outrigger canoes were shown to be back on the main island (before Sawyer and co. took off one one of them). So does Locke lead some of the new Ajira folk from the Hydra island over to the main island via outrigger at some point?

Upon a second viewing, it really struck me that Jack, Kate and Sayid were quite mean to Locke...
  • Jack: "Have you ever stopped to think that these delusions that you're special aren't real? That maybe there's nothing important about you at all? Maybe you're just a lonely old man who crashed on an island."
  • Kate: "I think about how desperate you were to stay on that island. And then I realized...it was all because you didn't love anybody."
  • Sayid: "Why do you really need to go back? Is it just because you have nowhere else to go?"
They better be careful....Locke is the Island's boy, and destiny can be a fickle bitch.

CAESAR & ILANA

Assuming that Walt's dreams about Locke are about to become a reality, were these two on the flight to keep an eye on or harm Locke after returning to the island? Were they hired by Widmore or Ben?

CHARLES WIDMORE

Ashlie inquired
why Widmore didn't try to get back to the island himself via an event window/flight like the Losties, and if there are consequences if he chose to return. She's also wondering if Ellie (young Eloise Hawking) was exiled as well, or wants to go back.

My guess is that Widmore has tried to return many times with no success. He certainly has the resources, but that he was exiled must be related to his inability to go back. As for Hawking, I agree with Ashlie that perhaps she feels it is her destiny to guide the others back rather than returning herself. Or it could be that her son Daniel Faraday is her eyes and ears on the island, and she serves their mission better by being at home base. I'm also convinced that she has an integral connection to Widmore that has not been revealed.

CHRISTIAN SHEPHARD


Did Ben know that Christian was a living ghost after the crash, that he spoke on behalf of Jacob? Did the two ever meet?

Nurby notes that possibility that Ben's story about Thomas the Apostle may have been about Jack's inability to believe that his father is alive, and not about his disbelief in Locke and his message.

FRANK LAPIDUS

Doug (aka 1MileToGo)
found it interesting that Frank took the flight manifest and wonders who else was on the Ajira flight...Widmore? Walt? Ms. Hawking?

My response is - great question! I hope that all of them were.

HYDRA ISLAND

In Season 3, when Sawyer and Juliet were put to work after being taken by Ben and the Others, Juliet said that they were helping to build a runway. It seems that even back then, Ben knew exactly what was going to happen.


RICHARD ALPERT

When he told Locke that he had to die in order to bring back and save his friends, he had to know that Locke's death would only be a temporary means to do so; that the island wasn't done with him...right?

ROXANNE

Many of you asked who she is. We haven't met her yet, but Ilana mentioned her name as one of the passengers from flight 316.

I am interested to find out if she's working with Caesar and Ilana on some unknown mission, given that she was "scouting" the beach for them after the crash.

SAYID

Who were the people that Ben was having him assassinate for two years? Were they associates of Widmore's?

WALT

When he visited Hurley at Santa Rosa after Locke died, he questioned why everyone was calling him Jeremy Bentham. But from what we saw during their brief encounter, Locke didn't tell Walt about his pseudonym. So did Locke visit Walt again? If not, how did Walt find out?

And I agree with all of you that he not only needs to go back...he has (without knowing it) and will.
---

Thank you again for your comments - I love the feedback and discussion. As a reminder, if you are not comfortable leaving your theories and thoughts using your name, feel free to email them to me and I will post them anonymously for you.

Oh, and if you're at all interested in hearing me ramble on about Lost (as opposed to just reading my usual stream of consciousness), click here to listen to my guest appearance on the Sci-Fi Party Line podcast.

Have a nice week! See you late Wednesday night, if not sooner...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Grrrr...the things that Sayid, Kate, & Jack said to Locke made me mad. I mean, are those three people who you look to as your moral compass?

Capcom said...

It also irked me how Locke was so mean to Abaddon. Locke seems to get rude like that when he's on a tear about whatever his current personal mission is, and starts barking orders at people. Abaddon was just trying to help him, as far as we know. :-p

Anonymous said...

Locke's insecurities tend to materialize in insults...hence his attitude towards Abbadon, I would say. Jo, I would still love to hear your thoughts on the timeline, if you feel like we are also missing time between the meeting we were shown with Jack and the death of Bentham. Jack's beard doesn't seem to be measuring up...

Thanks for the "shout out" in the blog - I was so excited, I might as well have won the lottery. When I told (and read it outloud) my fiance, he asked, "Is she famous? Is this like a famous blog?" I could only respond, "She's famous to me!" Made my day!

Anonymous said...

"Grrrr...the things that Sayid, Kate, & Jack said to Locke made me mad. I mean, are those three people who you look to as your moral compass?"

I initially had the same reaction, but after giving the episode some time to digest, I can understand why they reacted to Locke the way they did. It's important to remember their prior experiences with Locke--killing Naomi with a knife in the back... blowing up the sub and the communications station... knocking Sayid over the head. They only spent 100 days on the island with Locke, and from their point of view, he behaved irrationally most of the time, thwarting every effort to leave.

That said, my biggest beef in Locke's interactions with the O6 was that his whole argument was "you have to go back! I'm special!" I'm puzzled that he never mentioned anybody left on the island (why would he not use Sawyer to persuade Kate?), never gave them a reason to have to come back... and nobody asked him how he left! The last they saw of him, the island went "bloop", and we saw them talking about it on the life raft and Penny's boat... Hurley knew Locke was involved in the island disappearing, and not one of the O6 bothered to ask him (a) what happened to the island, (b) where are the people that were on it, and (c) how the hell did he get back?