There’s something to this. It explains a couple of things that have been bugging me (or at least one of them): Why did Desmond need to talk to Daniel’s mother? He goes to all that trouble, gets there, and it’s “Already on that.” He wasn’t necessary to save the flashies. They’d already stopped flashing when Locke got back. If Ben hadn’t gotten the information out of Locke before he died it’s possible that Ben really wouldn’t have known how to get the 6 back. Of course, it’s still not clear to me that they *had *to get back. They certainly didn’t need to get back to stop the flashes. I miss fish biscuits. Things were simpler then.
I thought that too. Ben was picking up the cord and winding it up as if to put it away until Locke mentioned Eloise Hawking. Then, Ben’s behavior changed. I’ve watched the episode twice now, and I really don’t think Ben was originally there to kill him. There’s something more going on.
Another seeming plothole: how do Hurley and Walt, particularly Walt, know that Locke is traveling under the name Jeremy Bentham?
Locke doesn’t use this name in his interactions with either Hurley or Walt, and we see their entire interactions from start to finish. In both cases Locke also appears to them without introduction by any third parties using his name (as opposed to Sayid and Kate, where we don’t see the full interactions, and Jack, who probably would have seen his name on some medical form).
I could buy that Hurley talks to someone later that tells him about the man he saw calling himself “Jeremy Bentham,” but Walt we KNOW hasn’t talked to anyone, because he complains about it when he meets Hurley again for the first time… and then tells him that “Jeremy Bentham” came to see him. Why would he use a name he’s never heard and that he has no way of knowing means anything to Hurley anyway?