When the going gets tough, the LOST get LOSTING.

Previously, On LOST: Oceanic Flight 815 crashed on a mystery island which resulted in so much plot you'll never believe it. The main thing to know is that there is something very special about this island, which seems to involve strange quantum energies and ghosts and smoke monsters, all of which makes people willing to fight and kill in order to possess it, and there are a bunch of people on the island doing just that right now. There's our Oceanics, survivors of the crash, who are our heroes, mostly. There's a group the Oceanics call "The Others," led by a fellow named Ben Linus, who have held possession of the island for long years, but it's an increasingly tenuous hold. This group seems to follow a mystery figure known as Jacob, so I will call this group "Jacobians," usually. The line between Oceanics and Jacobians is getting pretty blurred these days. A Jacobian transplant named Juliet is staying at the Oceanic beach camp with the primary Oceanic leader (surgeon Jack), while a handful of Oceanics have joined secondary Oceanic leader (tracker/hunter/messianic weirdo John Locke) in occupying an inland Jacobian enclave, along with a semi-captive Ben Linus. The beach group are (optimistically) hoping to be rescued by a recently arrived freighter. The inland group are (wisely) hiding from the freighter, because they (correctly) anticipate the arrival of the murder soldiers.

Did I mention the murder soldiers?

There is a third group on the island now. These newcomers are here on the orders of a shadowy financier named Charles Widmore. Widmore has been searching for the island for a long time (oh btw the island is hard to find) and now that he has finally found it, he's sent the aforementioned freighter to the island, which is parked a mile or so offshore. From the freighter Widmore has sent a team of scientists, who are mostly cool, and a team of murder soldiers, who are entirely not cool. The murder soldiers just murdered Rousseau, the crazy-eyed French lady who has been living in the jungle for almost two decades ever since her daughter Alex was taken by the Jacobians—specifically by Ben Linus, who kidnapped Alex and raised her as his own. The murder soldiers also murdered Karl, Alex's boyfriend. God dammit guys! That was our only Karl!

Anyway the murder soldiers didn't murder Alex yet, because as mentioned she is the adopted daughter of Jacobian leader Ben Linus, and the murder soldiers are here for Ben Linus.

Aaaand murder!

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O B S E R V A T I O N

This episode is not as celebrated as the previous Season 4 entry, The Constant, but it's at least as vital an episode when it comes to unpacking the mysteries of the underlying story of LOST, and that's what we do around here. It's one of my very favorites. We're going to dig deep.

Enough said? Onward, then.

Episode 9: THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME (Ben): We open on a tableau of the Oceanic survivors who have stayed on the beach awaiting rescue. Jack feels pretty bad in the tummy, but never mind that—there's a dead body washed up in the surf! It's the doctor from the freighter, throat cut! But wait, we haven't seen him die! What happened? Freighter scientist Daniel Faraday (who is mostly cool) contacts the freighter with the news of the dead doc. The freighter replies, asking what the hell is Daniel Faraday smoking?—the doc is on board and just fine! Oh boy! Here comes the time-travel shit!

Incidentally, Faraday tried to lie to the Oceanics about this message (it was in code), and when he gets busted (by Bernard!), he finally admits the secret that he has been doing the absolute worst job of keeping (and which we should have already guessed, given the presence of murder soldiers), which is that nobody on the freighter ever had any intention of rescuing anyone. This is the part of Faraday that isn't so cool, the jittery-lying part. In his defense he seems aware that this is the part of him that is not cool, and he seems to wish that he was cooler. At this very disappointing revelation, Jack Of Course makes his Jack Of Course Face then doubles over in pain, because, like us, he senses that a Jack episode is coming next.

Enough of that for now. Time for today's main event. The murder soldiers march Alex to the sonic fence designed to keep people like murder soldiers out of the Jacobian colony, and order her to disable it. She does so, but she does it in a way that sends a secret alert back to Ben' house. Fortunes are always rising and falling on Mystery Island, so it turns out that Ben is currently John Locke's prisoner/guest, living in (I think?) the same house where Ben had Jack imprisoned/guested last season, which means that it is Locke, living in Ben's bungalow (the Bengalow?) who intercepts the message. Locke does a smart thing and goes to Ben's place to ask Ben about it. Ben immediately snaps to action. "They're coming," he hisses, taking charge effortlessly after spending a week or so letting Locke pretend he has the upper hand, as Ben is wont to do. Hilariously, Ben reveals he has had access to tons of hidden guns all along, which he now immediately starts pulling out of piano benches and hidey holes and handing to his ostensible captors.

He also claims that the murder soldiers are here to capture him alive, so "if you want to stay alive, I'm the best shot you've got." This turns out to be true, probably. It's always important to point out when Ben says something that turns out to be true; it's so rare. He urges them all back to the Bengalow for secret-portal reasons that will become clear soon enough. In a moment that accelerates his character's ongoing hero turn, Sawyer insists on going to get a napping Claire (Hurley was babysitting Aaron), despite Ben's protestations that there isn't sufficient time. Turns out Ben is telling the truth there as well, because Sawyer's still out in the open when the shooting starts and, one after another, various extras run out of their cabin door and get shot dead. This is meant to be horrifying, and it mostly is, but there's something about the skeet-shoot timing of the murders and the fact that Sawyer, who is armed and totally exposed, is not harmed, that makes it sort of gruesomely hilarious. We've been seeing these extras in the background since the start of the series. We'll be seeing them a lot less now. Operation Cull the Extras has begun. It won't end until early next season.

Ducking behind "cover" like picnic tables and 2-foot-high picket fences and swing sets, Sawyer tries to get to Claire's cabin as these crack shots miss him and miss him and miss him, but he's not as fast as the rocket the murder soldiers fire. Boom goes Claire's house. Miraculously unhurt Sawyer finds a miraculously unhurt Claire in the wreckage and bravely boosts her back to the barricaded Bengalow. Bravo!

Our heroes all pose with guns and freak out until they are interrupted by the doorbell. It's Miles, the blackmailing acerbic ghost-whisperer from the freighter's science team, who is mostly cool, by which I mean he is a major asshole (albeit a funny one) but he's not murderous, which passes for cool these days. He has a walkie-talkie. The murder soldiers would like to speak with Ben Linus.

Ben's not interested until he hears that the murder soldiers have Alex. He takes the walkie and speaks with Martin Keamy, the canny but brutish head murder soldier, who tells Ben that if he comes out, nobody else gets hurt. In reply, Ben says something very specific that I'd like to explore later. Here it is:

You and I both know that once you have me, there's nothing to stop you from killing everybody else on this island.

This turns out to be also true, probably.

Keamy whistles, and Alex is led out. Keamy points a gun at her head and delivers an ultimatum: Ben has ten seconds to come out or Keamy kills his daughter. When Ben refuses, Keamy hands her his walkie and instructs her to say goodbye to her father, and Alex begins to beg Ben while Keamy counts down. Ben, who seems sincerely certain that Keamy will not kill Alex, is in the middle of bluffing for Keamy's sake that he doesn't care about Alex at all, when Keamy shoots Alex in the head.

He didn't even finish his ten-count.

She is dead.

It's brutal. It's final.

Keamy walks back into the jungle.

Ben is catatonic, shaken to his core.

"He changed the rules," he whispers, some minutes later.

This seems to bring him back to himself. He stands and, before anyone can stop him, darts into his hidden spy room, lowers a blast door, and then opens a door to a hidden room within his hidden room, which is the most Ben Linus thing I've ever seen. The door is covered with hieroglyphs and whatnot, which is (I think) the first we've seen of that sort of thing, but it's certainly not going to be the last. In goes Ben Linus, a man whose inner sanctum has an inner sanctum.

When Ben emerges, his hands and face are covered in dirt. Seconds later, a rumbling comes rumbling; the smoke monster has arrived. Everyone walks outside, where the monster is wrecking shop. There is panicked gunfire. One murder soldier runs out of the trees and a smoke tendril pulls him back in. "Did you just call that thing?" Hurley asks. Ben just stares at the carnage. "Head for the trees, I'll join you," Ben tells them, tears in his eyes. "I have to say goodbye to my daughter." The Gang Hauls Ass.

Ben kneels beside his dead daughter and sobs, a broken man.

Later Ben rejoins Locke & Co., where Locke expresses his condolences (Ben: "Thank you, John") before admonishing him for lying about not knowing what the smoke monster was, which hey good job Locke for remembering that bit of continuity. Ben deflects, very Bennishly: "You can ask Jacob all about it when we go to the cabin."

Sawyer has had enough. He's going to the beach with everyone else, and everyone else is ready to go with him when Locke pulls a gun, because he needs Hurley to find the cabin. There's a standoff, which is broken when Hurley agrees to come with Locke. "You harm so much as one hair on his curly head, I'll kill you," Sawyer snarls. Aw. Sawyer loves his buds. This is the moment Sawyer truly became President.

Off go Ben and Locke and Hurley, seeking the cabin that Ben still claims houses Jacob, which is one of the few untruths this inveterate liar has told this episode.

But the biggest lie Ben ever told was when he said his daughter meant nothing to him.

Meanwhile we have a flash forward featuring Ben, who wakes up in the desert, gasping and wearing a Dharma parka. He vomits, then inspects a wound in his arm. What? Why? How? No answers this episode, but we'll have them before the season ends, so hold tight for now.

Ben is soon accosted by a pair of armed desert horsemen, who he quickly (and impressively!) subdues and incapacitates and probably kills. Taking one of their horses, he rides to an unidentified Tunisian city and secures a room in a swanky hotel under an already-established alias. ("Dean Moriarty" which, lol, come on, was "Ignatius J. Reilly" taken?) The alias stuff isn't a surprise, because we've seen Ben's secret room full of passports in an earlier episode, but the rest is all pretty impressive stuff to a regular viewer of the show; until now, Ben had seemed formidably intelligent but physically unimpressive. Now he reveals himself as Jason Bourne with a 5-dollar haircut.

Also of interest, Ben asks the hotel clerk the date. And the year. So Ben knows about the time-travel shit!

Leaving the desk, Ben notices a TV in the lobby informing him (and us, and apparently the actress playing Nadia) that Sayid is mourning his wife, Nadia, which is our first indication that a) Sayid found and married Nadia, and b) she's dead. Damn, RIP Nadia. This gives us a reminder that Sayid is now a celebrity when it is convenient to the show for him to be one, as one of six survivors of Oceanic 815 returned to the world. It also gives us a rough timeline of when Ben has arrived on Earth from the island (this is how I'll casually remind you of my humble belief that the island and Earth are separate entities)—long enough after Sayid got off the island that he's been able to find and marry Nadia, so some months or at least some weeks.

We next see Ben in Iraq surveilling Nadia's funeral procession, where he recruits a devastated Sayid to his cause, which answers our season-long question of how future off-island Sayid comes to be working with Ben. Ben tells Sayid that the man who ordered Nadia's death is Charles Widmore—and this is probably true. Logically speaking, Ben, who just arrived off-island, couldn't have killed Nadia, so Widmore probably really is behind it, even though the death benefits Ben's plan and the way it benefits Widmore's plan is much more obscure and not something I'll be dealing with today. In the next scene, Ben and Sayid are tracking down the man Ben says is the murderer, and Sayid shoots him dead. Louis, I think this is the beginning of a horrible friendship ...

Final scene: Ben uses his spycraft to break into Charles Widmore's London penthouse, where he surprises Widmore awake, and they have a conversation that makes up almost all the dialogue these two crucially important characters are ever going to share, which I'm now going to replicate in full.

BEN: Wake up, Charles.

WIDMORE: I wondered when you were going to show up. I see you've been getting more sun.

BEN: Iraq is lovely this time of year. When did you start sleeping with a bottle of scotch by the bed?

WIDMORE: When the nightmares started.

[Widmore pulls back the covers and pours himself a glass of MacCutcheon.]

WIDMORE: Have you come here to kill me, Benjamin?

BEN: We both know I can't do that.

WIDMORE: Then why are you here?

BEN: I'm here, Charles, because you murdered my daughter.

WIDMORE: Don't stand there, looking at me with those horrible eyes of yours and lay the blame for the death of that poor girl on me, when we both know very well I didn't murder her at all, Benjamin — you did.

BEN: No, that's not true.

WIDMORE: Yes, Benjamin, it is. You creep into my bedroom in the dead of night — like a rat — and have the audacity to pretend that you're the victim. I know who you are, boy. What you are. I know that everything you have you took from me. So... once again I ask you: Why are you here?

BEN: I'm here, Charles, to tell you that I'm going to kill your daughter. Penelope, is it? And once she's gone... once she's dead... then you'll understand how I feel. And you'll wish you hadn't changed the rules.

WIDMORE: You'll never find her.

[Ben turns to leave.]

WIDMORE: That island's mine, Benjamin. It always was. It will be again.

BEN: But you'll never find it.

WIDMORE: Then I suppose the hunt is on for both of us.

BEN: I suppose it is. Sleep tight, Charles.

And that, my friends, is how a paradigm shifts. We have a lot to discuss.

End of Episode 9.

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B E L I E F

Oboy. When this episode aired, I think it was perceived as having opened up massive new questions—which it had! But, as is common with LOST, a repeat viewing recasts these new questions as revelations and answers. It's a central-enough episode that, when I began this project with a look at a handful of "Rosetta Stone" scenes and episodes (see here and here and here and here), I almost included this one.

I've written before about the decision in mid-Season 3 to set a fixed end date for the series, and how that decision freed the creative team to stop their increasingly lax narrative circling and pull the narrative tight. I'm of the opinion that by the time Season 4 began, the main thrust of the remaining story had been fully worked out, as had most of the key details, and this episode is where it really shows for the first time. I believe that's what we're being told with the apt episode title—not everything to come, but the shape of it. Almost every detail points toward some coming revelation, which points to another coming revelation, which ... well. There's so much to work with here. This thread goes through the whole sweater, and if I try to get it all out now I'll just wind up with a pile of yarn. What's needed is a formal structure.

Let's use the text of Ben and Widmore's cryptic conversation to guide us through.

Spoilers are even more in effect than ever before.

1) "I wondered when you were going to show up ... I see you've been getting more sun." Here we learn that Widmore has been expecting Ben. This suggests that he knows that Ben can get on and off the island. Resourceful fellow that he is, Widmore probably has already received report that Ben is off the island. The "more sun" line suggests he probably knows where Ben landed when he left the island, which means he knows how Ben got off the island (spoilers—Ben moved the island, exposing himself directly to the light at the heart of it). We'll eventually learn that Widmore has men monitoring the area in the Sahara where Ben materialized, which suggests a number of other things. First, the men on horseback who Ben incapacitated were likely Widmore's men, at least one of whom seems likely to have survived, and this is the most likely way that Widmore would have known to be expecting Ben. Second, this provides direct evidence that the island is physically co-existent with various spots on Earth, and one of them is Saharan—remember Charlotte discovering a Dharma polar bear at a Tunisian archeological dig? Remember Rose's faith healer talking about geological "places of power?" Third, at least one of these places are known to and monitored by Charles Widmore. We'll eventually receive very strong suggestions that these places of power are parts of an orbit (or orbits), whose path was charted by a Dharma scientist who is none other than ... well. Let's just say that Charlies Widmore knows the Dharma scientist who charted the island's orbit very well and leave it there for now.

Incidentally and speaking of strange orbits, Ben moved the island (spoilers) before Sayid got off the island, yet by the time he appears, Sayid has managed to get to the mainland and find and marry Nadia and have a certain amount of wedded bliss. Even given a very fast reunion and courtship and a very short span of bliss, Ben's lost a few months. Remember folks, when moving an island (spoilers) in the spring, turn your calendars forward; in the fall, turn them back.

The "more sun" line also opens a theme within this conversation, which is that Widmore sees Ben as a subterranean thing. It's a sly way of calling him a rat before eventually doing it more directly. Calling him a rat is also probably Widmore's reference to Ben's access to and familiarity with certain ancient tunnels beneath the island—because in this episode we learn that Ben has access to a portal that pretty clearly leads into the ancient tunnels where the smoke monster lives, and in my opinion that changes a lot of what we know about Ben. Oh have the LOST creators not mentioned the ancient tunnels where the smoke lives before now? What scamps! Actually, they have. At the end of Season 1, the smoke appears and tries to drag Locke down into the tunnels, and if you recall, Locke wants to go ...

So we might ask ... how long has Ben been visiting the smoke in Its subterranean lair? And what truths has he learned there? And what lies has he believed? (While we're here, let's ask the same questions about John Locke.)

Which brings us to ...

2) "I know who you are, boy. What you are. I know that everything you have you took from me." Let's get this one out of the way: It's a major reveal in Season 5 that Widmore used to be the leader of the Jacobians on the island (succeeding his wife, Eloise Hawking—another major reveal). However, he essentially already basically says it here, and so blatantly that I am now retroactively surprised that I was surprised by the reveal. Little surprise, though, that Widmore would call Ben boy. We've already seen that Ben first came to the Jacobians as a child. (We'll get more particulars about how that transpired, but we'll get them another day.)

And we'll eventually be shown what Widmore is implying here: Ben Linus usurped Charles Widmore, by revealing to Widmore's followers that that their leader had fathered a daughter off-island—a baby girl who grows up to become Desmond's constant love Penelope. This is presented as a big-time violation of Jacobian law, worthy of banishment. It's also not mentioned exactly how it was that Ben was able to expose Widmore and to demonstrate the required authority to assume leadership in his absence. However, I think we can see the shape of it.

I'd like to focus now not so much on the who you are part as the what you are. Widmore sees Ben as not just a "who" but a "what."

I believe Widmore knows Ben to be somebody in communion with and in thrall to the black smoke, aka the godlike entity I've been calling "The Adversary." And I believe Widmore has very good reason for thinking that. First of all, it happens to be true. Ben's childhood encounters with The Adversary were shown in the previous Ben-centric episode, and the relationship is revealed in this episode to still be very much in effect. Second, I believe Ben got the advantage he needed to supplant Widmore directly through his relationship with this godlike being, who manipulates whoever It needs to in order to serve Its own purposes. This is unconfirmed but unfalsifiable speculation, but I believe it was The Adversary who furnished Ben with both the evidence he needed to banish his rival and the proofs of his authority he needed to convince the rest of the Jacobians to accept him to leadership. My evidence for this belief is that this is exactly what we will learn The Adversary has been doing to usurp Ben Linus, using John Locke as his tool. And, like Charles Widmore before him, I think Ben Linus knows it was The Adversary that has been the instrument of his demise.

And by the way, we've buried the lede (and so has the show, because they never connect those dots), because there isn't a secret portal to The Adversary's ancient network of caves in Ben's house, there's a secret portal to The Adversary's ancient network of caves in the house of the head of the Dharma initiative, whose house Ben appropriated along with the rest of the facilities when he gassed the D.I. to death using their own STAGED (see link for clever acronym). It seems weird that the Dharma initiative would create an instrument for mass human extermination, doesn't it? Or maybe not so strange.

The Adversary doesn't just have Ben in thrall, and John Locke in thrall. We are invited to understand that It must have had Dharma Director Horace Goodspeed in thrall. Who was it that just happened to come upon Ben's parents in distress at the time of his birth? Horace Goodspeed. Who was it that brought Ben's father (and, thereby, Ben) to Dharma? Horace Goodspeed. Who lived in a house that has a secret portal to the network of ancient caves where The Adversary lives? Horace Goodspeed. When you think of smoke, think of Horace. How long had Horace been visiting the smoke in Its subterranean lair? And what truths had he learned there? And what lies had he believed? And while we're here, let's ask the same questions about many many many others. Let's ask them of Charles Widmore.

The final and greatest reason I believe Widmore knows Ben to be a vassal of The Adversary is because like calls to like. I believe Widmore is a vassal of The Adversary as well. I believe every leader of the Jacobians has been a vassal of The Adversary at one time or another, and so with any group that comes to the island, including our Oceanic heroes. It's what The Adversary does, with all sides, playying them against each other toward Its own ends, using people as games pieces to be used and sacrificed when convenient to Its plans—just as Ben is now being sacrificed, like Horace Goodspeed and Widmore before him, (and, we're invited to assume, countless others before them). So, too, I believe, with Charles Widmore, who has been sleeping with a bottle next to the bed since the nightmares started.

If you want some evidence of Widmore's corruption beyond his general ruthlessness, let's go to ...

3) "That island's mine, Benjamin. It always was. It will be again." One observation I would make is that The Adversary's human gamepieces take on the qualities of The Adversary itself, and when in contention with one another, Its pawns tend to replicate The Adversary's contention with the even-greater entity I've been calling The Island (as distinct from the island), which we covered waaaaaay back at the beginning of this series, and which we should always remember makes up the central conflict in the buried understory of this show. As above, so below.

The Adversary has a dominionist isolationist view of the island, and it is utterly ruthless in pursuit of that view. It is dominionist in that It believes the island should belong to It and It alone, and feels it has a right to use and manipulate the light at the heart of the island to achieve its own purposes. It is isolationist in that it opposes people finding the island, and takes steps to make human discovery difficult or impossible, and because, while it is willing to utilize the humans that are brought there, as a general operating principle It believes in expunging people from the island. The Adversary believes that humans are unworthy of The Island and their presence there is an offense. It believes that humans always corrupt, and fight, and destroy, which It attempts to prove to The Island by manipulating humans into doing just that. It believes that The Island considers humans to be worthy (though if you listen closely, you'll learn that The Island doesn't frame things this way; It is only interested in progress), and It hates The Island for bringing the humans to corrupt and destroy.

This hate is one reason (we'll save my case for the full story for another day) that I believe The Adversary once held a role now filled by Jacob; namely, the role of island protector. We're invited to understand that It now wants to destroy the island (and thereby, It believes, to kill The Island), but we're also invited to believe that this urge is birthed from an eons-long grudge against The Island for persistently bringing unworthy creatures into their shared world. It wants to destroy the island and kill The Island specifically from a corrupted desire to protect it and It from the presence of unworthy intruders.

Widmore and Ben are children of their spiritual father. Both men seem to believe that everything they do is in service of Jacob, an entity Ben has never met (and who I must presume Widmore has never met), an entity about whom we must conclude he has learned everything he knows from The Adversary. Like The Adversary, both men see the island's resources as theirs to use, as both also see themselves as the natural possessors of it. Both are willing to exterminate entire populations of humans to cleanse the island of unwanted elements. Both manipulate those around them to serve their own ends, which they both frame as necessary in order to protect the island. Each of them does it in their own way, and each of them has their own particular personal goals and different levels of awareness of and ignorance about the infinitely complex reality within which they strive. And so it is, we'll discover, with Horace Goodspeed. And so it will eventually be with John Locke. And, so it has been, we'll learn at the very end, with Jacob and his brother, and the woman they know as Mother. As above, so below.

4) "Have you come here to kill me, Benjamin?" ... "We both know I can't do that." Now this is remarkable. Not won't but can't. And both Widmore and Ben seem to know it. I believe we're encouraged to muse over the fact that Widmore sent murder soldiers to the island to murder everyone except Ben Linus. And Ben seemed to know this; he claimed that the murder soldiers had been instructed to take him alive, and their tactics bear this out. And we're invited to wonder ... why? Does Ben have some sort of special knowledge Widmore seeks? If so, it never comes up. Ben also claimed that the murder soldiers intended to murder everyone else on the island, and that sure seems like what the murder soldiers intended. Everyone? Well, maybe not everyone.

I think of Sawyer standing armed and in the open while unarmed people are killed all around him. I think of a rocket that blew up an entire house yet somehow did not kill Claire sleeping inside. It's funny in the moment because it seems like a reductio ad absurdum version of any story's plot armor for main characters. And maybe that's all it is, but ... I think of Michael trying to kill himself and failing. I think of 60 people who survived being aboard an airliner that broke apart 500 feet in the air. I think of the claim that the island won't let you die. I believe the murder soldiers may have found themselves strangely unable to murder any individuals who are Jacob's candidates—not won't but can't.

Ben seemed pretty damn sure that his daughter was going to be safe even with a gun to her head, didn't he? He didn't just mourn the monumental loss of his only family when he was proved wrong, he sat in the shambles of all he knew to be true. As Michael Emerson (never better than here) plays it, Ben is shattered, catatonic, in a way that I believe reflects a shattering of his entire worldview. "He changed the rules," Ben whispers. And then he acts.

Who changed the rules? What rules?

I believe Ben believed that his daughter was one that "the island" wouldn't allow to die. I believe he believed that his daughter was a candidate, and he believed it to the core of his being, that The Island—that Jacob—wouldn't let his daughter die.

But hold on a dang minute ...

5) "You'll wish you hadn't changed the rules." Ben says this to Widmore. So Widmore changed the rules, not the island, not Jacob. Right?

Yes. Or at least "yes" to a degree. I do think that Widmore and Ben had likely made an agreement between themselves that despite their own total lack of ruth, family was off-limits—daughters, particularly. But it doesn't scan for me that Ben would be utterly shattered to realize that the promises of the most ruthless man he knows has proved to be untrustworthy. Remember the shape of things to come we've been given: As above, so below.

The idea of a strategic game has been embedded into LOST from the very first episode, and I believe the idea of rules is one of the most important keys to all mysteries. I think we are dealing, whether Ben and Widmore fully know it, with games within games, and rules within rules, and even rule-makers upon rule-makers.

We will learn that in the contention between Island and Adversary, The Island is the greater, because It can impose rules upon The Adversary, and we can even eventually guess what some of those rules are. We will learn that Jacob has a measure of The Island's dominance, because he can impose rules upon The Adversary indwelling within his brother, and we will even eventually learn what some of those rules are. I think Ben and Widmore have an agreement to not go after family, but I also think they know they can't go after family for the same reason they know they can't kill each other—not won't, but can't. Are Ben and Widmore candidates? They don't appear to be. But there is some rule at play restricting them, and they know it.

There were rules imposed upon them about their daughters, too—or so Ben thought. And when he realized that rule had been changed, I believe he changed his entire game. Did he summon the smoke to attack the soldiers who had murdered his daughter? It seems pretty obvious that he did. But we also know that The Adversary doesn't act on the orders of people, or for their benefit.

So what did Ben agree to do, down there in the caves, to get The Adversary to do his bidding?

That's a good question. We should never stop asking it until we know.

6) "Don't stand there, looking at me with those horrible eyes of yours and lay the blame for the death of that poor girl on me, when we both know very well I didn't murder her at all, Benjamin — you did." As above, so below. Neither Widmore nor Ben are willing to take responsibility for the results of their own actions. For both of them, anything they do, no matter how horrible, is something that was forced upon them by the actions of another.

But Widmore truly does seem to believe that Ben is responsible for Alex's death, and truly seems aggrieved that Ben would attempt to lay the blame elsewhere. Why? I do not know; it's not explained, it's only hinted at here. But I think we can see the shape.

Did Widmore order Alex's death? Maybe. Probably not. My belief is that Widmore, like Ben and The Adversary, understands that some people have supernatural protection. Like Ben and The Adversary, Widmore doesn't share information with those around him unless delivering the knowing furthers his own ends. He probably just told the soldiers to kill everyone and trusted that the rules would keep safe anyone under protection, a list that he may well have also believed included Alex. Why was Alex's name taken off the island's list of protection? From Charles' perspective, it would make perfect sense that Ben—the corrupted and usurping rat—is the one to blame. From Ben's perspective, it would make perfect sense that Charles—who was leader before him, and for longer, and more ruthlessly—would have figured out how to do it, especially since Ben has been spending the last several months aware that he has been left out of Jacob's favor (his cancer) and desperately scrambling to hold his ever-loosening grip on power.

We're invited to wonder: Do these two even know that some of the rules they are under were imposed upon them by The Adversary? Do they even realize that The Adversary is able to impose rules? I believe It can. As above, so below.

I believe that, just as the Island can impose rules upon The Adversary, and just as Jacob can impose rules upon his brother, so The Adversary can impose rules on human beings, or at least upon human beings under Its influence (evidence will be here soon enough). I believe that picking out whose rules are at play is one of the trickiest bits of LOST lore there is. Because Ben and Widmore are playing their own games, I believe they fell into the trap of thinking they know all the rules. Because they are part of a more powerful entity's game, I believe neither of them do a very good job of understanding what rules are at play, or where those rules come from, or what those rules do. Do they believe that all rules come from Jacob? I believe they do. Who told them? Who else?

I think what's true of these two is true of The Adversary as well. As above, so below. Because It is playing Its own games, I believe It falls into the trap of thinking It knows all the rules. But It is part of a more powerful entity's game, too. Does It even understand that game? Has It even realized that there is a higher game at play?

One final thought: Like Ben and Widmore, The Adversary also seems unwilling to accept that It is responsible for the effects of Its own actions. Like Its spiritual children, anything It does, no matter how horrible, is something that was forced upon It by the actions of another. So, in the name of protecting something against which It has come to harbor a murderous hate, It plays Its many games and tells Its many lies.

But I believe the biggest lie It ever told was when It told itself Itself The Island meant nothing to It.

L O S T

Next Time: When the Cabin's Rockin', Don't Come Locke-in'

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He's got it figured out, he's the one that's got it figured out.