Lost, Season 4, Episode 9 "The Shape of Things to Come" (4/24/2008)

Benjamin Linus: For some time, Ben has been in control of the island situation. Despite Jack’s or John’s thoughts to the contrary, Ben is in complete control. Ben had warned the Losties that calling the freighter was going to be a bad idea and that they were not there to rescue them. We have seen that come to be true. Ben’s can of whoop-ass after he teleported was amazing. Is there anything that guy can’t do? Well, I guess one thing would be to save his daughter, as he watched Alex get killed by Charles Widmore’s lead mercenary on the raid, Martin Christopher Keamy. However, Ben did not think she would be killed because of some unwritten rules in this battle between Ben and Widmore…rules we have not been made aware of yet, but it’s the same rules that Ben was abiding by when he chose to not kill Widmore after showing up in his bedroom in London He tells Charles that he is going to find and kill his daughter Penelope (Penny) so that they are even after Widmore “killed” Alex. On a separte note: how about that telescoping whacking stick that Ben has?? Wicked cool.

Charles Widmore: It appears that he did in fact put Desmond on that around the world boat race, along with all of the other contestants, in the hopes that someone would find the island. How did he lose the ability to find it? How did he come to claim it as his to begin with? These questions are slowly becoming a focal point of where we’ll be headed with this great story. With Ben now threatening Penny (and knowing that Desmond is on the island, which will bring Penny to him), it will be interesting to see what, if anything, Widmore does from this point forward. Obviously he knows that Ben can tele-travel, so it would seem his much to fear. He still enjoys his McCutcheon Whiskey. Tells Ben: “I know who you are, what you are. I know everything you have you took from me….that island’s mine, Benjamin. It always was. It will be again.” What????

SMonster: WOW! Was that friggin awesome, or what? Okay, the massive SMonster attack on the mercenaries was cool, but how did Ben do that? Does he control it? Or is it an island anomaly that Dharma at some point learned to manipulate, something Ben has since been able to do, or was it created as a defense system? Was Ben sending it out all of the previous times, or is it also able to work on its own?

Jack: After Daniel admits that the Freighters were not there to rescue the Losties, you could see the hope leave his eyes. But the question I have is: what is ailing Jack? When did he get this illness? Is it possible that someone is making him sick on purpose? Funny to have him say to Kate that he wrote his own prescription, seeing that in the future he was told by a pharmacist, in reference to his pain medication addiction, that they could not accept prescriptions he has written himself.

Sayid: At some point after returning from the island, Sayid marries Nadia, his love from Iraq (you will remember that she bought a house in California, and it was John Locke, then working as a house inspector, who gave her the all-OK about her house). Seeing Ben at Nadia’s funeral in Tikrit (October 2005) astounded Sayid, but when Ben convinced Sayid that it was Widmore’s men who killed her in California, he was ready to work for Ben in taking down people working for Widmore (which we saw this season in The Economist).

John: Brought his tribe to the abandoned Others village to keep them safe, and now it seems nearly every one of them has been killed. And John is STILL under Ben’s control. And also it seems that John is not very alert: how long has Ben been sitting on the piano bench with the shotgun inside it??

Sawyer: After the attack and death of Alex, he decides to head back to the beach, and takes Claire and Aaron with him.

Hurley: Hurley's knowledge of where to find Jacob's cabin makes him an important person for Ben and Locke to use in their quest to find Jacob and find out how to handle the incursion of Widmore's men. Hurley tells Sawyer and Clair to go to the beach without him and he will go with Ben and Locke.

Jacob: Who is he??? Where he is??

Bernard: Knows Morse Code. NICE!

Claire: Well, I’m not sure how she survived her house being blown to bits, but I’m glad she did. Still, that would’ve lent credence to why Kate would’ve brought Aaron back as one of the Oceanic 6. I guess we have to wait to find out why that eventually happens.

Danielle Rousseau: Well, sorry to report, but it appears that she is dead and we won’t get any of her back-story. That is a bummer because it seems like it would've been a good one.

Alex: Well, I’m not sure why they had to kill her off other than to fuel Ben’s anger. But I don’t think was actually needed as he’s already angry enough. I liked Alex and HATE that they chose to kill her off.

Funny lines:
1. While playing risk, Hurley says “Australia’s the key to the whole game”. (Is this some sort of clue?)

Interesting:
1. The code to the fence to alert if there has been an intruder compromise: 1623 (note: 16 and 23 are two of the numbers)
2. Ben teleported to Tunisia, which is where we first saw Charlotte Staples Lewis. She was there looking at the polar bear bones, and the polar bear had been wearing a Dharma collar. It would seem that Tunisia was one of the places that they used to test teleporting from the Orchid Station.
3. When Ben teleported, he was wearing an Orchid Station jacket with the name Halliwax on it. That would be Edgar Halliwax (from the Orchid Video), aka Mark Wickmund (the Pearl Station video), aka Marvin Candle (the Swan Station video). By wearing the Halliwax jacket it would imply that the Orchid Station is indeed an place that allows not only teleportation of consciousness, but also of body. (That confirms the Orchid Video with Bunny #15 appearing in it.)
4. Ben checks into hotel in Tunisia as Dean Moriarty. This is also the name of the lead character in Jack Kerouac’s book On the Road.
5. Vincent! Well, he wasn’t in the show long, but he did find the body of Ray, the freighter's body, floating in the surf.
6. Which leads me to: who killed the doc?? Or, does the time distortion of the island make it so that the doctor is still alive on the boat, but the island being ahead-of-time means that the doctor does die in the future and maybe his body is tossed overboard from the freighter. Make sense?
7. The juxtaposition of Ben and Charles looking for something and being told by the other that they’ll never find it: Ben telling Charles he’ll never find the island, and Charles telling Ben he’ll never find Penny.

Final questions:
1. When Ben was a kid on the island, there were the “hostiles” on the island that they were trying to protect themselves from. Bear with me: what would happen if Widmore was the leader of the hostiles, and when Ben took control of the hostiles (and wiped out Dharma at the same time), he could’ve booted Widmore off the island, leaving him with no way to re-locate it as it is hidden from common radar, view, etc. Widmore could’ve been on the island from before Dharma, and possibly as far back as when the big four-toed statue was made, but is now on the outside trying to locate it. When he tells Ben, “You took what was mine”, it could be that the island was Widmore’s home before Ben took it over. Or maybe he tried to infiltrate Dharma to find the island, teaming up with the Hanso Foundation, which led Ben to wipe out Dharma. Lots of possibilities. Still not sure what "rules" he broke in reference to killing Alex. We'll find out, I'm sure

Check out this website for some really great screen shots: http://losteastereggs.blogspot.com/

Tune in May 1, 2008 at 10pm for “Something Nice Back Home”.

Until then, if you get into trouble, press 1623.