The Shape of Things to Come, Revisited

So for my Lost talk at the Kitchener library last week, I rewatched “The Shape of Things to Come,” the Ben flashforward that I originally blogged about here. I was just meaning to go and check the opening scene, this time with the finale in mind, and thinking of it all being continuous from him moving the Frozen Donkey Wheel. Instead, I saw some new things I hadn’t really seen before, and so I wanted to reopen some questions to y’all on that episode.

So let’s start with the finale, with Ben turning the wheel to move the island, and subsequently being ejected from the island. He’s just killed Keamy, and as far as he knows, he’s blown up every person on the freighter. He’s said goodbye to Locke, and heads into the stalactite (or are they stalagmite?)-filled polar chamber. He’s ripped the Dharka on the way down, and the cut is pretty deep, into his arm. He turns the wheel, crying partly because he knows he’ll be forced off the island, and partly in mourning for Alex. There’s a flash, and boom… (now we’re in The Shape of Things to Come) he wakes up in the desert in Tunisia. He breathes out the arctic air and checks the arm of his jacket. He’s disoriented, freaking out, and he bends over and vomits onto the ground. Suddenly two Bedouin come riding over to him, and his mind is all over the place. You can tell he’s still confused… but this is Ben. He comes to his senses pretty quickly, overpowers the men, ties up his wound, and rides into town.

If we accept, then, that the events of TSOTTC come immediately after turning the wheel, then one assumes he’s had no time to prepare for what comes next, and luck just falls into his lap. At the hotel, where he finds out it’s October 2005, he sees a television where Sayid is talking about the death of his wife. Ben sees his opportunity and heads to Tikrit. He has a few days in there where he can put together a fake photo of the Widmore lackey, and convinces Sayid it’s actually a traffic shot of the guy at La Brea and Santa Monica. Sayid shoots the guy, and becomes Ben’s man.

So does Ben really zip 10 months into the future and whip up this too-perfect story, or does something else happen?

The answer to that question might lie in where he goes right after Alex is killed. He disappears into his hieroglyphic powder room behind the suit closet, and when he emerges, Old Smokey shows up angry as hell and eats all of Keamy’s men. The audience assumes the two actions are linked – that Ben went underground to call up the monster – but are they? Perhaps Smokey shows as the island’s reaction to Widmore “changing the rules,” and Ben had nothing to do with it. Maybe Ben disappeared into a time machine of sorts, and he already zipped into 2005, laid the groundwork for his war against Widmore, and then returned, knowing it was all in place. Maybe he simply did some research, and already watched Sayid mourning Nadia in the future once, figured out which Widmore lackey would be there, and then went through it all again… but considering post-Donkey Wheel he seems a little surprised about the date, and surprised to see the Sayid news clip, I don’t think he had things down to a science when he zipped forward. But he was definitely doing something under there, and I’m not convinced he was yelling “Sooey!” for Smokey.

Something I completely missed the first time, but now take it as proof of the claim that Claire is dead is a brief exchange between her and Miles. Sawyer saves her in his valiant hero scene, and takes her to the bedroom. Hurley is holding Aaron while the shootout is going on. He moves away from the window and goes to check on Claire. She comes out of the bedroom holding Aaron, and when Sawyer asks if she’s okay, she says, “Yeah, a bit wobbly, but I’ll live.” Miles, sitting nearby on the couch, replies bluntly, “Well, I wouldn’t be too sure about that.” Miles isn’t a fortune-teller, he’s a ghostbuster, so his reply wouldn’t be him seeing a flash of the future – it’s him seeing something right now. I’m thinking he senses from her standing there that she’s no longer with us. Death on the island is very different than death in our world. Yes, Nikki and Paulo and Ana Lucia and Libby and Eko and Boone and Shannon and dozens of others all left behind bodies to bury, but none of them were the offspring of Jacob’s mouthpiece. I’m thinking Claire means something different to the island, and it takes care of her because she’s Aaron’s mother. Maybe Smokey’s appearance had nothing to do with the death of Alex, and everything to do with the “death” of Claire.

I said it at the time, and I’ll say it again: that scene at the end of the episode is probably a harbinger of what is to come for the next couple of seasons. The episode IS called The Shape of Things to Come, after all… The face-off between Ben and Widmore never gets boring, no matter how many times you watch it. Ben asks Charles when he started keeping scotch by the bed, and Charles says it coincided with when the nightmares started. He asks Ben if he’s here to kill him, and Ben replies, “We both know I can’t do that.” Does he mean he can’t do it, as in it would be morally wrong? Or does he mean he can’t physically do it? Is Widmore immortal? Are they both immortal? (It would certainly explain how Ben takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’, but it would make his worry about his spinal cancer seem a little less serious.)

Rewatch this scene as if Ben is pure evil, and Widmore is the victim, and it plays out perfectly. When Ben says Widmore murdered his daughter, Widmore replies that they both know he did nothing of the sort, and that Ben did. Ben maintains that isn’t true, and Widmore repeats, “Yes, Benjamin, it is.” He asks Ben how he has the nerve to pretend he’s the victim, and then says, “I know who you are, boy.” It’s interesting he calls him “boy” here, as if he knew him as a boy and he’ll always be a boy to him. It’s why I think Widmore is much older than we originally thought. Perhaps his obsession with the Black Rock is because he was originally on it. So again, he says, “I know who you are, boy. What you are. I know that everything you have you took from me.” I know WHAT you are, he says, as if he’s something other than human. And he says he took everything from him, as if the island was his (maybe Alex was his?) and Ben usurped him in some way. Ben replies that he’s going to kill Penny, so that Widmore will know how he feels, and will regret that he’d changed the rules. Widmore says he’ll never find Penny (I guess by October 2005 Pen and Des are in deep hiding somewhere?) and Ben says he’ll never find the island, and Widmore says the hunt is on for both of them.

If this isn’t a signal to what’s next to come, I don’t know what is. I’m just hoping we get a LOT of new scenes with these two, because they’re riveting to watch together.