I never trusted Henry Gale.\u00c2\u00a0 From second one, I knew he was up to something.\u00c2\u00a0 I wanted to torture him with a nail gun.\u00c2\u00a0 It was the eyes, I think. Those eyes.<\/p>\n
My first thought, to crib from Robert Browning, was that he lied in every word.\u00c2\u00a0 And Henry Gale was a liar.\u00c2\u00a0 And a killer. A horrible little man.\u00c2\u00a0 He wasn’t even Henry Gale, late of Kansas.\u00c2\u00a0 He was Benjamin Linus, and everybody hated him for it.<\/p>\n
How things have changed.<\/p>\n
People who write off the craftsmanship of Lost<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n The question that has dogged us all season is one of destiny.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00c2\u00a0 I know that feeling, the feeling of being the good child in the Prodigal Son parable; odds are you do, too.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe – just maybe – Jacob saw that coming, too, and sacrificed himself to save Ben in the end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I never trusted Henry Gale.\u00c2\u00a0 From second one, I knew he was up to something.\u00c2\u00a0 I wanted to torture him with a nail gun.\u00c2\u00a0 It was the eyes, I think. Those eyes. My first thought, to crib from Robert Browning, was that he lied in every word.\u00c2\u00a0 And Henry Gale was a liar.\u00c2\u00a0 And a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[242,4],"tags":[432,412],"class_list":["post-3171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lost","category-tv","tag-lost","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}