And just when Jack/Lock/Elmer Fudd is just about to kill him; gun actually to his temple and cocked; he utters the ultimate weapon in disarmament - ‘Listen to me…’
and they DO!
MiM
For the record, I should note that the Jin and Sun episodes from season one (the first two if there were more than two) were the best episodes (or anyway best flashback segments) of the series much less the season. It’s just a fact I thought I’d mention. 
-FrL-
I love the speculations on this page about how the story will go. Now if the writers are as creative as Dopers there’s a good season ahead.
Question - If Miles and Daniel were just there to get Ben, why would they care whether Juliet was on the ship’s manifest or not?
Presumably because they know some information about their target Ben, including his leadership of a band of folks who’ve been on the island for a while. If Juliet isn’t one of the 815-ers, then she must be one of his. The hostile reaction to Juliet may be due to their knowing about the massacre of the Dharma folks at the hand of the Hostiles (aka Others).
Given that Ben shot Charlotte, “they’re not exactly his fans” is a pretty safe bet. I think we can easily eliminate the “join forces” option.
And the real revelation at the end of this episode…?
Ben is secretly a woman!
Hey, he’s the one who said he had a little man in the boat… 
The whole “rescue” mission has me confused.
As Diceman mentioned above,
I couldn’t tell if he was telling her that he didn’t want there to be any survivors, or if he was emphasizing that she shouldn’t expect to find any survivors. At the end of Season 3 when she first parachutes onto the island, she does seem surprised to find survivors from the crash of 815. She says something like “You’re all supposed to be dead.” And she’s got the photo of Desmond and Penny and called him by name when they first took her helmet off. So I have to assume that she was looking for Desmond, or at least aware that he was on the island.
Charlotte, it seems, may also have been surprised that there were survivors from 815. Maybe she was faking it, but she was asking Hurley a lot of questions before Locke shut him up, so I’m not sure if she was just pumping him for information about the survivors or if she was genuinely surprised to find them.
The other three, however, were definitely expecting to find survivors from 815 on the island, although as Daniel told them, “Rescuing you isn’t our primary objective.” So yeah, I’m completely confused as to what the mission really is.
That’s just because Jack and Kate were the ones who called the boat on Naomi’s sat-phone. There was no evidence in the episode to suggest they knew who any of the others were, including (and especially) Locke.
I think they just didn’t expect one of the “natives” to be part of the Flight 815 survivor group. When they realized Juliet was not from 815, they knew she must be part of Ben’s group and assumed she knew where he was.
I’m thinking you should probably stick to paintball…
Well, I think Ben and his group had the Flight 815 “found off Bali” crash site faked, simply to close the book on it so that nobody would continue looking for the real crash site.
And interestingly, it was Locke that asked the most direct question in this one: “What IS the smoke monster?”
But I think Ben really doesn’t know, either.
I don’t think Ben shooting Charlotte was a “Hey, look, she has a bulletproof vest so she’s not a rescuer!” point. I think he simply wanted to kill her. Because she and her team are after him, and Ben is not on their “Person we’d most like to sit and have a cup of tea with” list.
Besides, even if pointing out that she was wearing a vest discredits her as being only on a rescue mission, revealing that the boat people are after Ben discredits HIM in his claim of “everybody on this island will be killed”. Now he simply looks like he’s trying to protect his own ass (whether he’s right or not in his claim).
I think Ben just saw an opportunity to try to take out one of his enemies and he went for it. If that team WAS sent by Dharma, then clearly Ben is Public Enemy #1, having led the charge on gassing the Dharma compound when the Hostiles took over. Interesting that the Band-Of-Four’s chopper was carrying that crate of gas masks, too.
Naomi was the first from the “freighter” onto the island – she didn’t expect Flight 815 survivors.
But when the chopper with the four arrived, they already knew about the survivors because remember Jack has already called the boat on the satellite phone. Kate’s talked to them, too – and then Naomi once more before she died. She also gave the duress code (tell my sister I love her), at least telling the boat people that something was not all hunky-dory for their mission.
So when the Chopper-Four show up, I’m sure they all knew about the survivors. But they were also probably told to get whatever info they could from the Flight 815 folks – and to “play along” like they intend to rescue them (even though it’s clear that’s not their primary objective). Whether they really intend to rescue the 815ers after achieving their real objective, or just kill everybody like Ben claims – that remains to be seen.
But the pilot had apparently been studying the 815 manifest long enough to memorize the list of passengers, which is how he was able to identify Juliet as a “native”. So I’m guessing he’d had that information long before Naomi parachuted down and discovered there were survivors. Maybe not, maybe they were able to get the manifest once they knew the 815 passengers were alive. But it still doesn’t explain what Naomi was doing with the picture of Desmond and Penny.
Naomi dismissed Frank, the pilot, as a drunk. If he even did tell her that he had realized the televised wreckage of Flight 815 was fake, she probably didn’t think his ravings were worth listening to. But Frank knew that what was on TV wasn’t flight 815.
But I’m still having trouble making it make sense. If he had succeeded in killing her then he most certainly would have been executed by Locke or Sawyer. The only way he wormed out of it was by giving a detailed bio of Archaeologist girl and an account of the “rescue team”, which was only confirmed by Archaeologist girl’s guilty looks as Ben gave the run down. Maybe Ben shot her to show his captors that he was desperately serious and afraid of the rescue team, but aimed for the vest area so she’d still be around to confirm his story.
Anyone have any speculations on who the woman was with Faraday when he was watching the news report about Flight 815? Since they didn’t show her face I imagine it will be some big reveal at some point this season.
My guess right now is that it’s Sarah, Jack’s ex wife.
I don’t know about that. She kept asking “what if there are survivors” when the what’s-his-name was telling her about her mission. I don’t think she was at all surprised to find survivors, as I don’t think she was very satisfied with what’s-his-name’s terse answer.
Good point. I was thinking more about her landing on the island last season, when she seemed surprised and told Hurley “They found 815 off Bali – no survivors”.
From this one, yes, it seems like “the team” at least had some notion that Flight 815 might have gone down around the Dharma island instead. Perhaps they realized WHO was behind the faked crash-site footage (assuming it was Ben and his people) – and that Ben knew something about 815.
http://www.lost-tv.com/transcripts/Confirmed_Dead.html
Yeah. No way she believed the found-the-wreckage story. She clearly knows that’s not true. She knows she’s not going to the fake wreck site.
yep – definitely sounds that way from the transcript. I haven’t gone back to re-watch this one yet.
But last season, she seemed more like she believed the “815 was found” story when she first told Hurley. Perhaps the writers hadn’t yet decided how her role in the start of this season would be playing out yet. (Or at least, they hadn’t told the actress).
That scene was supposed to take place in Essex, England, so I doubt it was Sarah.
