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Ben thoughts
The Lost meta mood persists, which means a few assembled thoughts about what we know, and don't know, about Benjamin Linus.
Looking back to Ben's first on screen appearance, undercover as Henry Gale: he has a real penchant for masterplans that involve letting himself getting beaten up, does he? Seriously. The typical Ben plan to get the upper hand against the odds seems to consist getting himself in a situation of utter powerlessness, which more often than not involves physical abuse, then mess with the minds of his captors, then either destroy them or get them to work for him or at least with him. In miniature form and in about a minute, this is even carried out in the first flashforward of The Shape of Things to Come, where he gets captured by two armed bandits, plays harmless and has one dead and one unconscious in thirty seconds flat. While one could argue he didn't intend getting captured by the Losties at thend of s3 - that defeat of the Others on the beach was definitely un-planned, and without it, he would have had more bargaining power with Jack - he had to be aware that was a possibility. He definitely intended to get captured in s2. (He wouldn't have had the Henry Gale alias and backstory ready if he really had stumbled into one of Rousseau's traps by accident.) If this was just about getting himself a surgeon (i.e. drawing Jack out to be captured, and the others to be captured so he'd have leverage against Jack) for his tumor, you'd think there would have been less painful ways, so I'm tempted to think he didn't completely lie when telling Locke "I was coming for you" (after all, as we see in s3, Ben was genuinenly fascinated by the whole crippled-man-walking deal, both for competitive reasons and for general island mysticism) after his unmasking. Now, given that Ben has a deceptively harmless exterior and isn't, and will never be, an athlete, one reason why he developed this getting captured/ messing with minds routine is probably that he needed to turn a disadvantage into an advantage in terms of sheer survival necessity. But if you look back to his beginnings: this is basically how he started out. In a position of utter powerlessness, as a child, with a verbally abusive father, both of them way down in the small island hierarchy (the janitor and his son), trapped behind the sonic fences. A decade or more later, he is involved/co-organizing (we don't know for sure yet) the "purge", the death of every single member of the Dharma Initiative on the island and ends up as the leader of the group behind said purge. So I wonder whether in addition to finding the whole beaten up captive = > puppet player routine useful, he's also endlessly replaying the pattern he imprinted.
Ben and personal relationships: for someone so good at playing mind games, he sucks at those. We don't know yet what became of his childhood friendship with Annie, other than going by the fact he still keeps the present she gave him when he was ten, he's still attached. We do know that the living person who knows him the longest, Richard, and in theory should be his oldest friend, much like the island has no problem playing him and Locke out against each other. (See Richard giving Locke Sawyer's file.) Though Richard at least goes through some effort to keep Ben alive in the s4 finale. Then there is Juliet, and while I had my problems with The Other Woman as far as Juliet's characterisation was concerned (plus fears that thankfully were not born out by the rest of the season), I wasn't that surprised that Ben in flashbacks came across like an emotional teenager, cooking dinner, reading books she likes and utterly incapable of unterstanding you don't own people and that killing the competition isn't a successful wooing technique. And then, most tragically, there is Alex. Given the parental role model Ben had in his own father, it's not surprising he did the exact opposite: microcontrol instead of total neglect. Roger probably would have had trouble remembering whether Ben had any friends as a teenager; Ben's way of dealing with poor Karl as Alex' boyfriend isn't a sensible chat about birth control but a stint in a cage and brainwashing techniques. The net result was the same in that Ben hated Roger and Alex hated Ben even before he finally told her the truth about her mother, though I would say Alex despite her anger never quite stopped loving him; hence the cries of "Daddy" and before that telling Karl she knows Ben doesn't want her hurt on the day of her death. You could say there is a horrible cycle going on: the one time Ben's assessment of a situation, his ability to manipulate people who threaten him into doing what he wants them to do utterly fails him, it costs his daughter her life, and the last thing she hears is Ben saying exactly the kind of things Roger used to tell him - that he doesn't love her, that she means nothing to him. His misreading of a man, his hubris gets her killed, and of course the very fact he kidnapped her as a baby and made her into his daughter; neither Keamy nor Widmore would have cared anything about Alex Rousseau one way or the other.
And then there is is Locke. This particular dynamic starts in s2, when Ben poses as Henry Gale and after a torture session with Sayid (which, btw, makes for great karmic irony in regards to Sayid later working for Ben, and it's worth noting what he shouts at Ben while beating him "You would remember! You would remember how deep. You would remember every shovelfull, every moment. You would remember what it felt like to place her body inside. You would remember if you buried the woman you loved. You would remember -- if it were true!"; no prices for guessing what gives Ben his later assessment of how to hire Sayid). While Locke at first distrusts "Henry" as much as everyone, Ben gets under his skin pretty quickly, not just via pushing buttons re: Locke's rivalry with Jack. They have Dostoyevsky versus Stephen King debates, and the crucial turning point comes when the hatch goes into lockdown, and the two of them are trapped inside. Due to breaking his leg, Locke has to entirely depend on Ben to save the day, and once that's done, Ben stuns him by not taking the chance to escape by coming back. Since this is also a Locke flashback episode, we go directly from the memory of Anthony Cooper (yet again) and Locke's fiancee Helen both leaving him to Ben coming back:
Locke: Helen.
[Anthony gets in the cab and leaves, then a shot of the bunker where the alarm continues to sound]
Locke: Henry! Henry! Henry! Henry! Please say something.
[The alarm stops, the lights go out, and a black light illuminates a map above Locke, then the lights come back on, the blast doors raise, and Locke uses his arms to slide to the computer room]
Locke: Henry! Henry? Anybody here? Is anybody here? Henry!
["Henry Gale" enters the room from behind Locke]
Locke: You came back.
Ben: What, did you think I was going to leave you here? Come on, can you stand?
Locke: I don't -- I think so. [Locke stands and leans again a wall] Thank you, Henry. Thank you for not leaving me.
Ben: You're welcome, John.
It's still anyone's guess why he does come back, btw; if he had escaped, Jack probably would have pursued, which would have allowed Jack's capture for surgery as easily as the Michael scenario later. He might have considered it useful to put Locke in his debt, and/or mess with his mind some more, but imo the not leaving then contributes to Locke's extraordinary reluctance to kill Ben early in s4 even after Ben shot him. As for Ben, after they meet again in mid-s3, he keeps switching between treating Locke as competition for the island's/Jacob's affection, a fellow believer and a potential disciple. It's not surprising that Ben has insight into Locke ("No John. I wanted to know what it felt like when your own father tried to kill you. He's the reason you destroyed the submarine, isn't he? You're afraid. You're afraid of him and this is the one place he can never find you. This is the one place he can never get to"; or "John, the hesitation that you're feeling is just the part of you that still feels like he has a perfectly good explanation for stealing your kidney...throwing you out of an 8 story window"); it's more surprising that Locke has some insight into Ben ("Your wondering why it hasn't happened for you. You're not recovering as fast as you'd like. How long's it been since Jack fixed ya? A week? Now that I think about it, how'd you get sick in the first place?"), and that this time he's aware that he's being manipulated by someone (as opposed to events with his father, and later with the young cop), but willing to go along with it anyway ("You don't have to pretend to be disappointed anymore. We both know you wanted it to happen. That's why you left the C4 in Sayid's bag; because you wanted me to make it happen").
After Locke's stint in a mass grave, courtesy of Ben, and his return from their thanks to the island the competitiveness in their relationship ebs away (though not completely) in favour of a shared dedication and an increasingly similar emotional situation. If Ben has (temporarily) lost leadership of the Others, there is a widening gulf between Locke and the Castaways now, despite the fact some of them come with him at the start of the season; they've all seen him kill Naomi (well, lethally wound, but that's a technical differentiation), and most of them are convinced he's insane. If Ben has lost Jacob's favour, Locke can't for along time find Jacob again, either. There are still differences, other than Ben's superior intellect, I mean. When Ben hears Keamy has one of "his people" hostage, he calmly says that everyone of them is ready to die for the island. (And in s3, we've seen how absolutely willing he was to sacrifice the two girls who captured Charlie or Mikhail.) It's not until Miles tells him Keamy has Alex that his reaction changes; Ben can care for a (very) few individuals, and the island, but not a group of people. Whereas Locke might have become increasingly ruthless but still doesn't want to see Jack and the others harmed, trying his best to stop Keamy from dying once he finds out this will trigger a bomb that will blow up the Freighter whom he has every reason to believe the surviving Castaways are all on at this point. This different view on the value of human lives doesn't stop their odd empathy with each other. You don't have the impression that the "I'm sorry"'s on both their parts are hypocritical ("I'm sorry about your daughter"; "I'm sorry this happened to you"; "I'm sorry for everything I put you through"). This doesn't mean, btw, that I doubt Ben wouldn't, if it would serve his purposes, still sacrifice Locke; but Locke seems to be the only person (other than Hurley in that priceless candy sharing scene) who despite having a clear idea of what Ben is capable of and has done in the past still doesn't despise him (Juliet) or is afraid of him (most Others and Castaways), or ready to trade him in (Richard), and that in addition to all the eerie parallels - both children born too early, after only seven months, both with mothers named Emily, both with dastardly fathers, both contacted by Richard Halpert as children, both either insane or visionary when it comes to the island, and probably both - makes the relationship pretty unique.
Ben as a leader: he undeniably has mad recruiting skills. See Michael, see Sayid. I would say see Juliet, but she got recruited by Richard and Ethan. By late s3, the Others are starting to question and be weary, not just Juliet, but he seems to have been their unquestioned leader for many years before that, so he's able to keep the people he recruited loyal to him, by and large. The question is, how did he get the job in the first place, was there a leader of the hostiles other than Richard before him, why did Richard never try for the top job himself but first promotes Ben and then Locke to the position, why does Charles Widmore feel Ben stole the island from him, and what exactly were the rules that don't apply anymore; who implemented them in the first place? Given Ben's assortment of passports, it seems likely he left the island himself in the past on occasion, instead of just sending Richard, Tom or Ethan as we see him do in seasons 3 and 4. (He also seems familiar enough with Charles Widmore to make a remark about his sleeping habits, but then Widmore could have been on the island before the Purge.) Then there is his obsession with trying to get babies born on the island, the reason why Juliet got recruited in the first place. At a guess, one reason is that if there are no babies, the island population, such as it is, depends on constant recruitment of new people, which in turn makes it prone to infiltration and discovery by Widmore & allies; if Ben had found away around the pregnancy = death sentence problem, this would no longer be the case after a few years. Otoh, Richard speaks of the whole getting children effort as "wasting our time" in The Brig, so it might be something more personal for Ben, given that his own mother died in childbirth.
Questionable responsibility: we're still due some answers as to which events already shown on screen Ben might be guilty of organizing. S4 cleared up that the fake Oceanic 815 plane and assorted bodies were due to Charles Widmore, not him, and while in the short hiatus between Meet Kevin Johnson and The Shape of Things To Come a lot of viewers thought he had organized the death of Karl and Danielle Rousseau, this turned out not to be the case, either, both being due to Keamy. But how about:
a) The death of Nadia. This basically was the best recruiting tool ever as far as Sayid was concerned, and there was Ben's slight smile once Sayid insisted on working for him as he walked away. On the other hand, the s4 finale put together with The Shape of Things To Come seems to put him in the clear at least for organizing Nadia's death, as he went from turning the wheel directly to showing up in the desert, and from there in the hotel in Tunisea where he catches sight of Sayid on the tv screen. (He's still wearing his improvised bandage around the arm, so not much time can have passed between leaving the desert and arriving at the hotel, plus he exlicitly asks the woman at the reception which year it is.) However, I'm not sure this necessarily means Widmore organized Nadia's death. We have only Ben's word that the bald head who showed up at her funeral worked for Widmore, and the Los Angeles traffic photograph he shows Sayid could easily have been faked. After hearing Sayid say in the newsclip "I just want to go home and bury my wife", Ben, using the Mittelos contacts he has, could have gotten the necessary material in time to have it at hand when meeting with Sayid during Nadia's funeral.
b) The death of "Jeremy Bentham". Sayid when getting Hurley out of the asylum in the s4 finale says Bentham aka Future!Locke "appears" to have committed suicide, and that qualifier is usually tv speak for "someone else killed him". Possible candidates again include Widmore and Ben, if, say, Locke's death somehow allows Ben to return to the island despite the "rules" of not returning once the wheel is turned, because the island needs either him or Locke. (Something the flashback with Richard testing the child John would point to.) And despite the mixed feelings described above, if it's Locke versus a return to the island, I think Ben would pick a return to the island. Otoh, there is him saying "I should have realised it was pointless" (his attempt to kill Locke in The Man behind the Curtain in order to remove the competition), which didn't strike me as a lie. One thing is for sure, though: his insistance they take Locke's body with them to Jack in the final scene of s4 must have a practical reason. (Ben otherwise is big in leaving bodies behind. When Richard asks him whether he wants them to retrieve and bury Roger's body together with the other Dharma people, Ben says no; and after saying goodbye to her with that one breakdown we see, he leaves Alex' body behind as well.)
c) That bunny. (Number 8 in Every man for himself.) Did he or didn't he? I'm not entirely kidding. On the audio commentary for The Man behind the Curtain, our trusty writers say that it's an early indication of what's to come that even when he is a child, Ben has the caution, planning and ruthlessness to test whether or not he has managed to disable the lethal sonics by letting his beloved pet jump through a potential death zone first. The habit of keeping pet rabbits around is alive and well when he either kills one in front of Sawyer or pulls an elaborate pretense of doing so, and I think there was a rabbit at the end of Sayid's flashforward as well. What is that about, and is it directed at the child within?
Looking back to Ben's first on screen appearance, undercover as Henry Gale: he has a real penchant for masterplans that involve letting himself getting beaten up, does he? Seriously. The typical Ben plan to get the upper hand against the odds seems to consist getting himself in a situation of utter powerlessness, which more often than not involves physical abuse, then mess with the minds of his captors, then either destroy them or get them to work for him or at least with him. In miniature form and in about a minute, this is even carried out in the first flashforward of The Shape of Things to Come, where he gets captured by two armed bandits, plays harmless and has one dead and one unconscious in thirty seconds flat. While one could argue he didn't intend getting captured by the Losties at thend of s3 - that defeat of the Others on the beach was definitely un-planned, and without it, he would have had more bargaining power with Jack - he had to be aware that was a possibility. He definitely intended to get captured in s2. (He wouldn't have had the Henry Gale alias and backstory ready if he really had stumbled into one of Rousseau's traps by accident.) If this was just about getting himself a surgeon (i.e. drawing Jack out to be captured, and the others to be captured so he'd have leverage against Jack) for his tumor, you'd think there would have been less painful ways, so I'm tempted to think he didn't completely lie when telling Locke "I was coming for you" (after all, as we see in s3, Ben was genuinenly fascinated by the whole crippled-man-walking deal, both for competitive reasons and for general island mysticism) after his unmasking. Now, given that Ben has a deceptively harmless exterior and isn't, and will never be, an athlete, one reason why he developed this getting captured/ messing with minds routine is probably that he needed to turn a disadvantage into an advantage in terms of sheer survival necessity. But if you look back to his beginnings: this is basically how he started out. In a position of utter powerlessness, as a child, with a verbally abusive father, both of them way down in the small island hierarchy (the janitor and his son), trapped behind the sonic fences. A decade or more later, he is involved/co-organizing (we don't know for sure yet) the "purge", the death of every single member of the Dharma Initiative on the island and ends up as the leader of the group behind said purge. So I wonder whether in addition to finding the whole beaten up captive = > puppet player routine useful, he's also endlessly replaying the pattern he imprinted.
Ben and personal relationships: for someone so good at playing mind games, he sucks at those. We don't know yet what became of his childhood friendship with Annie, other than going by the fact he still keeps the present she gave him when he was ten, he's still attached. We do know that the living person who knows him the longest, Richard, and in theory should be his oldest friend, much like the island has no problem playing him and Locke out against each other. (See Richard giving Locke Sawyer's file.) Though Richard at least goes through some effort to keep Ben alive in the s4 finale. Then there is Juliet, and while I had my problems with The Other Woman as far as Juliet's characterisation was concerned (plus fears that thankfully were not born out by the rest of the season), I wasn't that surprised that Ben in flashbacks came across like an emotional teenager, cooking dinner, reading books she likes and utterly incapable of unterstanding you don't own people and that killing the competition isn't a successful wooing technique. And then, most tragically, there is Alex. Given the parental role model Ben had in his own father, it's not surprising he did the exact opposite: microcontrol instead of total neglect. Roger probably would have had trouble remembering whether Ben had any friends as a teenager; Ben's way of dealing with poor Karl as Alex' boyfriend isn't a sensible chat about birth control but a stint in a cage and brainwashing techniques. The net result was the same in that Ben hated Roger and Alex hated Ben even before he finally told her the truth about her mother, though I would say Alex despite her anger never quite stopped loving him; hence the cries of "Daddy" and before that telling Karl she knows Ben doesn't want her hurt on the day of her death. You could say there is a horrible cycle going on: the one time Ben's assessment of a situation, his ability to manipulate people who threaten him into doing what he wants them to do utterly fails him, it costs his daughter her life, and the last thing she hears is Ben saying exactly the kind of things Roger used to tell him - that he doesn't love her, that she means nothing to him. His misreading of a man, his hubris gets her killed, and of course the very fact he kidnapped her as a baby and made her into his daughter; neither Keamy nor Widmore would have cared anything about Alex Rousseau one way or the other.
And then there is is Locke. This particular dynamic starts in s2, when Ben poses as Henry Gale and after a torture session with Sayid (which, btw, makes for great karmic irony in regards to Sayid later working for Ben, and it's worth noting what he shouts at Ben while beating him "You would remember! You would remember how deep. You would remember every shovelfull, every moment. You would remember what it felt like to place her body inside. You would remember if you buried the woman you loved. You would remember -- if it were true!"; no prices for guessing what gives Ben his later assessment of how to hire Sayid). While Locke at first distrusts "Henry" as much as everyone, Ben gets under his skin pretty quickly, not just via pushing buttons re: Locke's rivalry with Jack. They have Dostoyevsky versus Stephen King debates, and the crucial turning point comes when the hatch goes into lockdown, and the two of them are trapped inside. Due to breaking his leg, Locke has to entirely depend on Ben to save the day, and once that's done, Ben stuns him by not taking the chance to escape by coming back. Since this is also a Locke flashback episode, we go directly from the memory of Anthony Cooper (yet again) and Locke's fiancee Helen both leaving him to Ben coming back:
Locke: Helen.
[Anthony gets in the cab and leaves, then a shot of the bunker where the alarm continues to sound]
Locke: Henry! Henry! Henry! Henry! Please say something.
[The alarm stops, the lights go out, and a black light illuminates a map above Locke, then the lights come back on, the blast doors raise, and Locke uses his arms to slide to the computer room]
Locke: Henry! Henry? Anybody here? Is anybody here? Henry!
["Henry Gale" enters the room from behind Locke]
Locke: You came back.
Ben: What, did you think I was going to leave you here? Come on, can you stand?
Locke: I don't -- I think so. [Locke stands and leans again a wall] Thank you, Henry. Thank you for not leaving me.
Ben: You're welcome, John.
It's still anyone's guess why he does come back, btw; if he had escaped, Jack probably would have pursued, which would have allowed Jack's capture for surgery as easily as the Michael scenario later. He might have considered it useful to put Locke in his debt, and/or mess with his mind some more, but imo the not leaving then contributes to Locke's extraordinary reluctance to kill Ben early in s4 even after Ben shot him. As for Ben, after they meet again in mid-s3, he keeps switching between treating Locke as competition for the island's/Jacob's affection, a fellow believer and a potential disciple. It's not surprising that Ben has insight into Locke ("No John. I wanted to know what it felt like when your own father tried to kill you. He's the reason you destroyed the submarine, isn't he? You're afraid. You're afraid of him and this is the one place he can never find you. This is the one place he can never get to"; or "John, the hesitation that you're feeling is just the part of you that still feels like he has a perfectly good explanation for stealing your kidney...throwing you out of an 8 story window"); it's more surprising that Locke has some insight into Ben ("Your wondering why it hasn't happened for you. You're not recovering as fast as you'd like. How long's it been since Jack fixed ya? A week? Now that I think about it, how'd you get sick in the first place?"), and that this time he's aware that he's being manipulated by someone (as opposed to events with his father, and later with the young cop), but willing to go along with it anyway ("You don't have to pretend to be disappointed anymore. We both know you wanted it to happen. That's why you left the C4 in Sayid's bag; because you wanted me to make it happen").
After Locke's stint in a mass grave, courtesy of Ben, and his return from their thanks to the island the competitiveness in their relationship ebs away (though not completely) in favour of a shared dedication and an increasingly similar emotional situation. If Ben has (temporarily) lost leadership of the Others, there is a widening gulf between Locke and the Castaways now, despite the fact some of them come with him at the start of the season; they've all seen him kill Naomi (well, lethally wound, but that's a technical differentiation), and most of them are convinced he's insane. If Ben has lost Jacob's favour, Locke can't for along time find Jacob again, either. There are still differences, other than Ben's superior intellect, I mean. When Ben hears Keamy has one of "his people" hostage, he calmly says that everyone of them is ready to die for the island. (And in s3, we've seen how absolutely willing he was to sacrifice the two girls who captured Charlie or Mikhail.) It's not until Miles tells him Keamy has Alex that his reaction changes; Ben can care for a (very) few individuals, and the island, but not a group of people. Whereas Locke might have become increasingly ruthless but still doesn't want to see Jack and the others harmed, trying his best to stop Keamy from dying once he finds out this will trigger a bomb that will blow up the Freighter whom he has every reason to believe the surviving Castaways are all on at this point. This different view on the value of human lives doesn't stop their odd empathy with each other. You don't have the impression that the "I'm sorry"'s on both their parts are hypocritical ("I'm sorry about your daughter"; "I'm sorry this happened to you"; "I'm sorry for everything I put you through"). This doesn't mean, btw, that I doubt Ben wouldn't, if it would serve his purposes, still sacrifice Locke; but Locke seems to be the only person (other than Hurley in that priceless candy sharing scene) who despite having a clear idea of what Ben is capable of and has done in the past still doesn't despise him (Juliet) or is afraid of him (most Others and Castaways), or ready to trade him in (Richard), and that in addition to all the eerie parallels - both children born too early, after only seven months, both with mothers named Emily, both with dastardly fathers, both contacted by Richard Halpert as children, both either insane or visionary when it comes to the island, and probably both - makes the relationship pretty unique.
Ben as a leader: he undeniably has mad recruiting skills. See Michael, see Sayid. I would say see Juliet, but she got recruited by Richard and Ethan. By late s3, the Others are starting to question and be weary, not just Juliet, but he seems to have been their unquestioned leader for many years before that, so he's able to keep the people he recruited loyal to him, by and large. The question is, how did he get the job in the first place, was there a leader of the hostiles other than Richard before him, why did Richard never try for the top job himself but first promotes Ben and then Locke to the position, why does Charles Widmore feel Ben stole the island from him, and what exactly were the rules that don't apply anymore; who implemented them in the first place? Given Ben's assortment of passports, it seems likely he left the island himself in the past on occasion, instead of just sending Richard, Tom or Ethan as we see him do in seasons 3 and 4. (He also seems familiar enough with Charles Widmore to make a remark about his sleeping habits, but then Widmore could have been on the island before the Purge.) Then there is his obsession with trying to get babies born on the island, the reason why Juliet got recruited in the first place. At a guess, one reason is that if there are no babies, the island population, such as it is, depends on constant recruitment of new people, which in turn makes it prone to infiltration and discovery by Widmore & allies; if Ben had found away around the pregnancy = death sentence problem, this would no longer be the case after a few years. Otoh, Richard speaks of the whole getting children effort as "wasting our time" in The Brig, so it might be something more personal for Ben, given that his own mother died in childbirth.
Questionable responsibility: we're still due some answers as to which events already shown on screen Ben might be guilty of organizing. S4 cleared up that the fake Oceanic 815 plane and assorted bodies were due to Charles Widmore, not him, and while in the short hiatus between Meet Kevin Johnson and The Shape of Things To Come a lot of viewers thought he had organized the death of Karl and Danielle Rousseau, this turned out not to be the case, either, both being due to Keamy. But how about:
a) The death of Nadia. This basically was the best recruiting tool ever as far as Sayid was concerned, and there was Ben's slight smile once Sayid insisted on working for him as he walked away. On the other hand, the s4 finale put together with The Shape of Things To Come seems to put him in the clear at least for organizing Nadia's death, as he went from turning the wheel directly to showing up in the desert, and from there in the hotel in Tunisea where he catches sight of Sayid on the tv screen. (He's still wearing his improvised bandage around the arm, so not much time can have passed between leaving the desert and arriving at the hotel, plus he exlicitly asks the woman at the reception which year it is.) However, I'm not sure this necessarily means Widmore organized Nadia's death. We have only Ben's word that the bald head who showed up at her funeral worked for Widmore, and the Los Angeles traffic photograph he shows Sayid could easily have been faked. After hearing Sayid say in the newsclip "I just want to go home and bury my wife", Ben, using the Mittelos contacts he has, could have gotten the necessary material in time to have it at hand when meeting with Sayid during Nadia's funeral.
b) The death of "Jeremy Bentham". Sayid when getting Hurley out of the asylum in the s4 finale says Bentham aka Future!Locke "appears" to have committed suicide, and that qualifier is usually tv speak for "someone else killed him". Possible candidates again include Widmore and Ben, if, say, Locke's death somehow allows Ben to return to the island despite the "rules" of not returning once the wheel is turned, because the island needs either him or Locke. (Something the flashback with Richard testing the child John would point to.) And despite the mixed feelings described above, if it's Locke versus a return to the island, I think Ben would pick a return to the island. Otoh, there is him saying "I should have realised it was pointless" (his attempt to kill Locke in The Man behind the Curtain in order to remove the competition), which didn't strike me as a lie. One thing is for sure, though: his insistance they take Locke's body with them to Jack in the final scene of s4 must have a practical reason. (Ben otherwise is big in leaving bodies behind. When Richard asks him whether he wants them to retrieve and bury Roger's body together with the other Dharma people, Ben says no; and after saying goodbye to her with that one breakdown we see, he leaves Alex' body behind as well.)
c) That bunny. (Number 8 in Every man for himself.) Did he or didn't he? I'm not entirely kidding. On the audio commentary for The Man behind the Curtain, our trusty writers say that it's an early indication of what's to come that even when he is a child, Ben has the caution, planning and ruthlessness to test whether or not he has managed to disable the lethal sonics by letting his beloved pet jump through a potential death zone first. The habit of keeping pet rabbits around is alive and well when he either kills one in front of Sawyer or pulls an elaborate pretense of doing so, and I think there was a rabbit at the end of Sayid's flashforward as well. What is that about, and is it directed at the child within?
no subject
evilmorally ambiguous masterminds would volunteer for that kind of stuff...