LOST: Episode 5.07

The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham

This one has to be Terry O'Quinn's Emmy submission episode. He was amazing, particularly in the suicide scene.

And this one shouldn't be too difficult to recap, since it was pretty straightforward storytelling. Well, as straightforward as a LOST episode can ever be!

On Island

Cesar - the guy who gave his condolences to Jack in line at the airport, and who was on Flight 316 - is ransacking a Dharma office in the dark.  He finds an old LIFE magazine, with a picture of a hydrogen bomb on the front (I think), and a file filled with charts like this:

Written all over it: Things like "Space - Time", "Real Time", "Imaginary Time" and "Imaginary Space".  Hmm.

He also finds a sawed off shotgun, loaded, that he sticks in his manpurse just as Ilana - Sayid's marshall - comes in and tells him that a man in a suit was found just standing in the water.  They go to the beach, where among the survivors of Flight 316, they find John Locke.  Alive and well and nattily dressed.

The following morning, John stands on the beach, looking out at the water, completely at peace.  When John asks Ilana where the outrigger canoes came from, she tells him that they were already there, and that the pilot and a woman took one of the canoes and left.  Since John is looking out over the water at what appears to be another island, I'd say that 316 crashed on the Hydra station island, and Frank and the woman took the canoe to the main Island.  Ilana asks John who he is, where he came from and why he's dressed so nicely.  He says he's dressed this way because he died and this was what he was going to be buried in.  And then we get a flashback.

John's Flashback

John turns the wheel and lands in Tunisia, the same place Ben (and I assume the polar bear) landed.  With his broken leg, he can't move, but there are surveillance cameras watching the spot and a bunch of Tunisians eventually come and get him and bring him to a hospital, where his leg is reset in the most primitive of ways.  Ouch.  He loses consciousness, and when he wakes up some time later, his leg is in a cast and Charles Widmore is sitting bedside.

Widmore tells Locke that he's special and that Widmore has been trying to protect Locke - and the O6 - all along.  He tells Locke that Ben tricked him into leaving the Island.  He gives Locke a new identity (Jeremy Bentham), a passport, a car and a driver (Matthew Abbadon) in order to help him get the O6 back to the Island.  John doesn't trust him (and I'm not sure I do, either), but he needs his help so what choice does he really have?  Widmore tells him that Eloise Hawking will help them all get back to Island.  He also tell him that there is a war coming, and John needs to be on that Island when it does.

John visits Sayid (who is doing a Habitat for Humanity thing!), Kate, Hurley and Jack, and they all tell him the same thing: No.  (He does not visit Sun because of his promise to Jin) He also pays a visit to Walt, just to see that he is OK.  And Ben is following him.

With each rejection from the O6, and with the likelihood that he will have to die looming in his near future, John becomes increasingly disheartened.  It doesn't help that Jack and Kate are particularly cruel to him, telling him that he's a lonely, unimportant old man who loves no one and whom no one loves.  Nice.  John also tells Jack that his father says hello - way to go John for figuring that one out - and that just sends Jack over the edge.

When John tries to reconnect to someone he had loved - Helen - he finds that she has died in the intervening three years from a brain aneurysm.  Abbadon is shot and killed while they visit her grave (by Ben), and John gets into a serious car crash while fleeing the scene.  How many times is John Locke going to have to wake up in a hospital?

Back at his hotel room, despondent, Locke writes his suicide note to Jack, and strings himself up with an extension cord.  As he's about to hang himself, Ben breaks down the door and talks him out of it.  He tells John that it is he who has been protecting everyone from Widmore and not the other way around.  Ben really appears to care about John, but when he hears that Jin survived the blast, something changes.  Hearing that Widmore told John that Eloise Hawking was in Los Angeles and would help him get back to the Island seems to be a tipping point for Ben.  I don't know what the information changed in Ben's mind, but it seems he now feels he doesn't need John anymore and so he grabs the extension cord and strangles John to death!  Dude!  And Michael Emerson actually makes me feel sorry for Ben as he does it.  He stages the scene to look like a suicide and tells John's hanging body that he'll miss him.

Back on the Island

John and Cesar are in the same Dharma office from the beginning of the episode.  Cesar tells him about the flashing light just before the crash and how some of the people disappeared from the plane right before it crashed.  He takes John to see some of the injured survivors and who should be lying there but John's old friend Ben.

Thoughts:

• If nothing else, this episode illustrated just how much John belongs on the Island, how at peace he seems to be.  It helped me to understand why he was so crazy-obsessed about not leaving all these years.  And since John seems to be quite corporeal - eating a mango, for instance - he is not a ghost.  He is actually revived.  Does that mean Christian is also really alive?
• I am not too jazzed about all of those survivors of Flight 316.  We just got rid of the extraneous 815ers!
• Do you think Sun is the woman who went with Frank?  That's who I thought of first, but then wouldn't she have disappeared along with Jack, Kate and Hurley?  And where's Sayid?
• So who's the real bad guy, Ben or Widmore?  Perhaps it's both of them.