Lost 6.7 "Dr. Linus"
Lost 6.7 "Dr. Linus"
Mar 10I never trusted Henry Gale. From second one, I knew he was up to something. I wanted to torture him with a nail gun. It was the eyes, I think. Those eyes.
My first thought, to crib from Robert Browning, was that he lied in every word. And Henry Gale was a liar. And a killer. A horrible little man. He wasn’t even Henry Gale, late of Kansas. He was Benjamin Linus, and everybody hated him for it.
How things have changed.
People who write off the craftsmanship of Lost and reduce it to a series of implausible twists and interminable teases have a crippled view of the show, and Ben Linus’s arc throughout the past five years has been a testament to that. Last night’s episode was a significant hour for him.
The question that has dogged us all season is one of destiny. We’ve seen that Kate is always, well, Kate and that Sayid is never not a murderer, but we’ve also seen John Locke become a rational man, watched Jack deal with his obnoxious interpersonal issues and now we’ve seen Ben choose integrity and compassion over authority and power not just once, but twice, once in each world.
This season, as we start to learn more about Jacob and his lassez-faire way of rolling, his maddening lack of specificity, it’s easy to see both how he can turn the Others to his whims and why exactly it would make them seem like evil pricks. We’ve watched Ben move from zealotry to agnosticism and it has humanized him in unexpected ways. He’s given the island his daughter, his father and his entire adult life and when he was not rewarded with a medal and a parade, he lashed out angrily. In that way, his murder of Jacob is the most human act we’ve seen him perform. I know that feeling, the feeling of being the good child in the Prodigal Son parable; odds are you do, too. It would be easy for Ben to be spiteful and to choose The Man In Black/fLocke/whatever we’re calling him in fitful, angry vengeance; he doesn’t, though. He grows. He’s a dark man who chooses the light – a contrast to last week’s episode where we watched a dark man consumed by darkness. Maybe – just maybe – Jacob saw that coming, too, and sacrificed himself to save Ben in the end.
The real power of this episode, at least to me, was at the end I was almost disappointed in Ben for sacrificing the “greater good” for the sake of his prized student moreso than I was in him sacrificing his daughter before. That turnabout really made me appreciate what they have been doing this season.