Oh, and isn’t it pretty clear at this point that Widmore ordered, and is thus mainly responsible for, the purge?
He was leader when young Ben is taken to the Others the first time, and still the leader when adult Ben and teenage Ethan are part of the Others on a permanent basis. It’s not clear what relation Ben is to the Purge in this ep, since his hair is different: it may be soon after, or it may be years.
That should probably count in the ongoing question of whether Ben or Widmore is a bigger bastard. Ben may have followed a genocidal command, but he wasn’t the one who planned or ordered it. Widmore was (with or without the blessing of the Island).
Rosseau’s crew landed sometime after the purge, yes?
My thought is that the apparitions, including Christian and Alex, are Jacob. Separate from the SM.
In last night’s episode, which I thought was fantastic by the way, it seemed that the SM judged Ben and then after it was through, Jacob appeared as Alex to tell Ben to start following Locke.
I think we’re going to see an interesting change in Ben now that he’s been told straight-up by the island to follow Locke. Ben seems to truly follow Jacob so we might have a funny new relationship between Ben and Locke where Ben is his humble servent.
Then something’s waaaaaay wrong: all the tech, the hatch furnishings, etc are from the early to mid '70s.
Record players with Mama Cass albums? Ancient computers? All sorts of '70s memorabilia, etc. Why was Dharma stuck in the mid '70s?
The only thought that makes sense is that somehow the Dharma guys got bumped 20 years into the future. Plus, wasn’t Ben pretty young when he did the purge? He certainly wasn’t in his '30s.
I get the feeling that the Purge was Ben’s first act as the leader of the Others. We know that they had a truce for a long time, and I don’t know why they would suddenly break it.
I think this episode was meant to establish clearly that Widmore is the bigger bastard. Widmore = baby-killer. Ben = not a baby-killer.
Also, it’s a good point being brought up about the timeline. If Rousseau’s crew landed in 1988, and the purge was in 1992, what were Ben and Ethan doing with the Others in 1988? We saw in an earlier episode that Ben clearly was still living with the Dharma Initiative right up until the purge. Were he and Ethan sneaking out of Dharma at night to play dress up with the Others prior to the purge?
Who says that the Others could leave the island before they had the sub? If they weren’t able to leave regularly (implied this episode), how would they know if they were jumping “normally”?
As for the heading thing? Who knows. Maybe that was a relatively recent discovery.
Anyone think it’s weird that “Jacob wants it” is like the magic phrase with The Others? I know he’s got to be their prophet (or whatever) but it REALLY seems like nothing is ever checked out.
Charles: I’m gonna kill that Ben kid. He never should have been brought here.
Richard: Jacob wanted it.
Charles: Oh, okay.
No checking. No nothing. Seems really weird.
Seems like a guy who lies could get some real power with that group.
The timeline seems to be pretty well established. Danielle must have arrived around 1988 to make Alex the proper age when 815 crashes in 2004. I think the only real date they’ve shown for the purge was when Locke dreamed about Horace building the cabin, and Horace said he’d been dead for 12 years, which means he died in 1992. It does fit with this episode, since the Purge must have happened between the kidnapping of Alex in 1988, and the scene where Charles is banished, and Alex is several years older.
For whatever reason, it seems that the Dharma equipment was just never updated, even though Dharma itself was still operating in some form for a long time after the 70s.
That’s true, but that tunnel or structure is not the Temple. It’s miles away from the Temple. The structure does lead to a smaller tunnel which leads to a drain, whence the SM may come out of.
…and further, there is a sonar wall around the camp that seems to be there for the express purpose of keeping the Smoke Monster out.
It seems peculiar to have a means to summon the monster inside a impenetrable wall. Why not summon it, turn the wall back on, and dip out? Smoke Monster in a cage!
Right, which is why I had assumed that Ben and Ethan’s baby stealing exploits were post purge. I mean, the Dharma folks seemed fairly tightly regulated and suspicious of people crossing lines or not being where they were supposed to. And Widmore’s speech to baby Ben seemed to imply, to me at least, that baby Ben was going to go back undercover at Dharma up until the purge, not switch back and forth willy-nilly.
Then again, Ben’s goofy boypiece hair did make him look younger than purge Ben, so who really knows at this point?
I was likewise weirded out by the fact that a Dharma-tech building seems to have a direct ground-level interface into a Other-tech structure. Maybe the Dharma-folk did build the house around the stone with crazy glyphs, never realizing that it could also be a doorway down into Other-tech craziness?
Sure, but who says they couldn’t? Ben doesn’t seem to imply that it’s really a super-hard thing to leave the Island regularly, just that Widmore wasn’t supposed to do so, according to the “rules.”
No reason to assume that the heading thing is recent or old, just that we know it’s perfectly possible for there to be, at least at some times, ways to get regular boats/planes off the island if you know what you are doing.
In this case though, the guy saying it was Richard, and Richard is somehow super-special in a way we don’t yet understand. If random Other claimed it, I think people would be more suspicious. But Richard is like, the Panchen Llama or something. For all we know, he’s Jacob’s brother-in-law.
The restless soul thing for the unworthy dead could fit in with the apparitions, but were people like heroically dying Charlie or innocent Alex really unworthy when BEN is found worthy? Or even Walt, who wasn’t even dead in the first place? Or Eko, who seems to get killed as a result of calling out the monster for NOT being what it claims to be?
And the smoke monster has never been seen to devour anyone or their bones, just beat the living daylights out of them. I’ve always found it odd that despite being so powerful, it didn’t really end up doing that much damage to Keamy and his goons, or that it gets “hurt/scared” by dynamite. I mean, you’d think that it could simply rush up to a Keamy goon, rip him apart, and move on to another and take them all out. Instead they mostly seem to fight it off, and only one guy is beaten up really really bad… but even he lives to at least get back to the boat as best I can remember.
