Last night’s episode of LOST put me on an emotional rollercoaster. I want to hate the Benjamin Linus character so bad yet I can never do that despite all the evil and horrible things he does to people. He saves Alex then hesitates to kill Penny when he sees her young son. How can such a monster have the tiniest bit of good in him? Even after learning that he was planning to kill Locke (big surprise), I just felt bad for him. Sorry, for him actually. It had something to do with seeing the good side of him come out and realizing how he wasted his life ruining the lives of others.
Despite how I feel about him, Ben is still the best character on the show. Period. Since 90% of the episode was about Ben, the entire episode had an extra tension from the beginning to the end. I loved seeing how he tricked Cesar and was glad to get just a flavor of how he got Widmore off the island. I hope we see more of it because I didn’t see enough to understand why Widmore and Ben despise each other so much. And I’m willing to be that Ben’s death –whenever that happens – will be at the hands of the monster. He may put up with following John Locke for awhile but at some point I can see him thinking he can get away with thing again and trying to kill Locke will be his undoing.
And it was nice to finally learn more about the monster. Okay, we didn’t have all our questions answered but at least we know where it comes from and that it really can turn into other people such as Alex or Christian. I’m not big on my Egyptian mythology or history so of someone can tie it into a real Egyptian god or monster (or point me to a website that can offer some well thought out theories) that would be great.
The hardest part of the episode for me to watch was when Ben was “judged” by the Monster. There are some aspects of the show (like Locke’s attempted suicide a few episodes back) that just ring too close to home. It’s silly, I know. But sometimes guilt resurfaces even when there’s no logical reason for it to do so.