Ben and Locke trying to block the door in Lost: The Shape of Things to Come(2008).
© ABC

Mania Grade: B+
Episode: The Shape of Things to Come
Starring: Evangeline Lilly, Josh Holloway, Matthew Fox, Michael Emerson, Elizabeth Mitchell
Written By: Brian K. Vaughn, Drew Goddard
Directed By: Jack Bender
Network: ABC

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LOST: The Shape of Things to Come

Lost returned this week an hour later with an exciting and extremely complex episode. At first glance, it doesn’t seem so, but the seeds planted in this episode add layers to an already complicated episode making it even deeper but also a bit tougher to follow.

On the island, everything is straightforward and fairly hi octane with soldiers attacking the barracks determined to kidnap Ben and Daniel finally revealing a truth to Jack that’s was inevitable. The body of the doctor from the freighter washes up on shore with his throat cut and almost simultaneously soldiers attack the barracks with Ben’s daughter Alex as a hostage. A standoff between the soldiers and Ben ensues with a gun pointed at Alex’s head at the center of the conflict. Ben has always been confident and he seems so in this situation too. When the soldier puts a bullet in Alex’s skull,Ben is literally shocked. The last thing you want on the island is to push Ben to the point at which he loses control and this execution does just that. Ben slips into a cave and suddenly the badass smoke monster kills all of the soldiers. This sequence was stunning with the execution being a real shocker and the following attack being exhilarating. It’s scenes like this that make lost such a thrill to watch. 

The flashbacks are where the complexities are the most prevalent in this episode. Ben’s a real globe trekker and often when he arrives in various locales, he doesn’t always know the day and year in which he has landed. It had previously seemed that Ben was somehow forcing Sayid to work for him. It’s not surprising that Sayid is taking missions from Ben of his own accord. It would just be too easy if what we were previously led to believe was in fact the reality of the series. It did seem that Sayid agreed to work with Ben to easily with almost no questions asked. Why wasn’t Sayid curious about Ben’s interest in the murder of Sayid’s wife? Ben always has a hidden agenda and Sayid is usually the least trusting, so why not even a question from Sayid? The answer is that Sayid either already knows something or we’ll learn why later. It’s the closing moments of the episode, and of the flashback that really makes things more complicated. Ben confronts Charles Widmore and discusses the revenge he’ll be seeking and the changing of the rules of the game. Ben mentions these “rules” several times in the episode. Widmore replies that the island was his and it’ll be his again. Was Widmore connected to Dharma? The age difference between Widmore and Ben doesn’t seem exactly right if that’s the case but that could have something to do with the weird time displacement on the island.