"Dead is Dead" Review

"Dead is Dead" wasn't quite as good as "Whatever Happened, Happened" (who would've thought a Kate episode would be better than a Ben episode?), but it was pretty great in its own right.

For both of our sakes, I'll try to bring this recap in at about half of the 1600 words of my last one.

-Ben's bit of trickery in the beginning which resulted in Caesar being blown away seemed like a whole lot of maneuvering with no real purpose. Ben feeds Caesar suspicions about Locke, which results in Caesar trying to stop Locke from taking the boat, which results in Ben shooting Caesar. But you wouldn't have needed to shoot him if you didn't make him suspicious in the first place, right? Did you just want the gun? Once you got it, again, why did you need to shoot him? It's like Ben was just doing it for the sake of being manipulative...

-...or for the sake of killing off somebody who got another job or whose guest-star contract ran out. Could that be it? I have no idea. Jeff Jensen over at EW.com is for some reason certain that Caesar is alive, so maybe he knows something I don't. I'm actually hoping for that, because I really liked Caesar, but...man, a shotgun blast to the chest is going to hurt a little bit.

-While we're talking about the Ajira folk, what the heck kind of 180 did the writers pull with Ilana? Talk about your out-of-left-field plot developments: did Smokey come and brainwash her, was she always a sleeper agent, has she been to the island before? On the bright side, this means Frank "I'm an Awesome Character" Lapidus gets to be the hero of his own storyline.

-Speaking of Frank, it must be really hard for the writers to spread out screen time to so many different characters and keep them relevant to the plot. Like, really hard. But somehow they manage it. The only character I'd say who has definitely been under-utilized this season is Miles, but it looks like he's finally getting his own episode next week.

-Off-island developments: yes, Ben was going to kill Penny. And yes, Desmond did beat him up instead. But it didn't exactly happen like that: Ben, in a fit of dead mommy issues, lowered his gun at the sight of little Charlie. Very interesting. (And then Desmond beat him up.)

-Desmond's miraculous recovery -- Ben has just shot him -- is, I think, in direct correlation with Michael's inability to die while he was off-island (seen in "Meet Kevin Johnson"). Michael couldn't die because the island still needed him -- just like Mrs. Hawking told Desmond that "the island isn't done" with him. (For the record, we never actually saw a wound or an impact point: the bullet seemed to hit the grocery bag, the force of which knocked Desmond over, so it probably either grazed him or missed completely.

-Wouldn't it be funny if Ben got arrested? I mean, he goes around in broad daylight on an open pier making big scenes with guns.

-Concerning Ben's on-island flashbacks: more parenting issues. Turns out his orders were to kill Danielle and Alex, but he couldn't bring himself to do either. And we still haven't actually seen Widmore's usurpation take place, but we were given the reasons: he was never around and broke a lot of rules, including fathering a daughter (Penny) with an outsider. So apparently Penny never has been to the island.

-Concerning Ben's motives: he left the island to avenge Alex's death, and only helped Locke and the Oceanic Six get back because they were his own ticket back. He basically admitted that in his phone call to Widmore. But he was caught in a Catch-22: he couldn't get back to the island without Locke, but if Locke came, he would still threaten Ben's leadership. He was able to put off the inevitable by killing Locke -- thus stopping a conversation between Hawking and Locke in which Hawking would've confirmed to Locke that he was meant to lead -- and he planned on killing him again once they got back to the island. (It's questionable whether or not he knew Locke would reincarnate -- he implied to Jack that he did, but sounded like he was making excuses for his look of utter surprise when he woke up to Locke's grinning face -- but in terms of his evil plans, it doesn't really matter whether he knew or not.)

-I really liked the ending. Alex was such a part of the fabric of the episode that it would've been a letdown had she not actually appeared, and her aggressiveness toward Ben was a fun little surprise. Of course, it's not really Alex, right? Among the dead, on Lost, there are ghosts (Christian, Charlie, maybe Locke, maybe Claire) and then there are visions conjured by Smokey -- Alex and Eko's brother Yemi. Because Eko's death scene, we now realize, was a "judgment" very similar to Ben's -- the difference between the two being that Smokey killed Eko and showed Ben mercy (albeit with a few conditions). That gives me a lot more retroactive respect for Eko's death scene, which I really hated at the time.

-And finally, let's talk about those aforementioned conditions. Ben is to follow Locke no matter what and definitely not try to kill him again...or else. In other words, consider Ben usurped. By the island itself. Ben's always been sort of fate's mistake, a guy who realized he wasn't part of the Plan but fought tooth and nail to stay at the center of it anyway. And now he's been shoved aside. How will he react? Will he even try to actually follow his instructions? And if not, how quickly and mercilessly will the island respond?

TAGS: Alex, Ben, Caesar, Charlie Hume, Desmond, Frank Lapidus, Ilana, Locke, Penny
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[ READER COMMENTS ]

1

Nicole said:

Smoky didn't show Ben mercy... killing him would have been letting him off easy. Having him follow Locke is a far worse punishment.

Posted at 08:40 AM, on April 14 2009

"Dead is Dead" Review

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