We don’t know that. We have no reliable information to this effect.
We know from the video Locke watched at Mikhail’s station that there are on the island “Hostiles” who are opposed to Dharma personnel, but we don’t know if Ben, Juliet, Mikhail et al. are those Hostiles or if they’re Dharma. Mikhail claimed to be with Dharma, but we have reason not to believe just about everything he said.
And Locke’s actions in Australia and his conversations with Ben seem to make it exceedingly unlikely that Locke has any knowledge of Dharma or the Others that we don’t already know about.
It’s interesting to note that this episode is an example of what happens when the questions get answered, pretty much in their entirety, without posing new questions.
Well, I admitted that there were other things that didn’t fit the idea; I was just setting up the theory and seeing what fit.
As for as DHARMA and the Others, from one of the podcasts (dunno if information from them is open or not, so I’ll spoiler just in case)
[spoiler]Cuse and Lindelhof have said that everything Mikhail said other than him being part of DHARMA was correct and have confirmed that the Others are not DHARMA.
Of course, they also said that the Others either were not aware of the Swan station or at least didn’t know what was going on there, which was somewhat contradicted in this episode with Ben and Juliet using the Pearl monitors to watch the Swan.[/spoiler]
I’m sure that if they had the old actors around, they re-shot some similar people scenes. But I don’t think they’d try to re-create much of the set – i.e. the crash wreckage for any reshooting of charcters in those scenes.
And storyteller0910 – I agree. Nice analysis. Good point about how they could have prevented Jack’s kidnap, and now they don’t have a doctor when they really needed one. Irony strikes hard at Nikki and Paolo.
I did a quick double take when I read this line – for a moment, I thought you meant me.
Read the whole thread, dont think anyone else has mentioned this…
When Paolo first overhears Ben and Juliette, she says something along the lines of “Who left this open?” to which Ben replies “…have them cover it up with the plane”.
Did the others kill Boone on purpose? Or was it just bad timing?
Both of these statements presume that diamonds have intrinsic value, which is really not the case. Diamonds are worth a lot in our society because our society believes they’re worth a lot.
Sawyer’s greedy, but he’s pragmatic too. He hasn’t demanded anyone pay him for something out of his stash with money or gold watches or anything; many times when he’s made a transaction in the past, the other party traded food or a favor for whatever they wanted (when they didn’t take it by force, anyway). He likes having power over others, but money isn’t going to accomplish that, as it would in a society with a fiat economy. The guns, on the other hand, represent power and survival, and he’s had an obsession with them for quite a long time.
As for the Others, I don’t think they’d necessarily care for the diamonds. Theirs is a communal, cultish, idealistic society, with higher goals in mind than the accumulation of wealth for the sake of accumulation of wealth. They have no trading partners; supplies from Dharma get dropped on the island regularly. There’s no reason to be interested in diamonds at all. Do you really think, for instance, that Ben would hand Locke or Sayid over to the Losties in exchange for a handful of diamonds?
What was the timing of the Ben/Juliet scene exactly? Was it before Ben had even been captured (“captured”?) by the losties? I think so but I’m just making sure.
Damn, what a creepy episode. I thought my post-nasal drip is what kept me up most of last night, but it could easily have been the whole buried-alive thing!
Also, his ass was in the fire at that moment-- people thought he might have killed Nicki and Paolo to get those diamonds. By throwing the diamonds away, he showed he didn’t value them, and reinforced the idea that he was not behind their killings.
They have to be coming back, I can’t accept the alternative.
They introduce new characters. Everyone complains that they’ve been shoehorned into the plot, and people worry that they’re immediately going to be killed off a la Arzt.
So they give us a whole show where they’re shoehorned into previous scenes, then killed off at they end. The net result: a bag of diamonds. Oh wait, never mind, they buried those with them.
I’m hoping someone with a fondness for diamonds does a spot of grave digging, and we find out just how good the island is at healing.
That said, it was a fantastic self-contained episode. Oh, and I think the emphasis on ‘the benefactor being the bad guy’ was hinting at Sawyer, rather than something in the overall plot.
And a walkie-talkie, presumably tuned to the Others’ frequency. Muahahaha.
…Now if only one of the Losties would show some smarts for once and actually think to take advantage of it. Sayid’s not at camp, so I have little hope for that.
