s4e09: The Shape of Things to Come

On island, we find out that the people responsible for killing Karl and Rousseau were in fact the team of soldiers on the boat. They drag Alex back to the camp and make her turn off the sonic fence; she uses a special distress code, warning the village of the approach. The soldiers arrive with "shock and awe," as Ben puts it (I suspect this may have been intended as political commentary of some sort), killing several Socks and blowing up Claire's house (miraculously, she is unharmed). The soldiers send Miles in with a walkie-talkie so they can communicate with Ben; he won't come out, so they threaten to kill Alex. When Ben attempts the old "Go ahead, she means nothing to me" ploy, they kill her. A stunned Ben remarks that "He changed the rules" and proceeds to loose Smokey on the soldiers. Everyone else runs into the jungle. Sawyer, Claire and Miles head for the beach; after a confrontation between Locke and Sawyer over who gets Hurley (who is needed to find the cabin, according to Ben), Hurley heads off with Locke and Ben to find Jacob.

On the beach, Dr. Ecklie washes ashore with his throat slit. Daniel repairs the radio enough to send Morse code to the boat, asking what happened to the doctor. The boat replies that the doctor is fine - but Daniel lies, claiming that they've said the helicopters are coming in the morning. Bernard, who conveniently knows Morse code, catches him, and Jack demands to know if there were ever plans to rescue the crash survivors. "No," Daniel says.

In flash forward, Sayid has married Nadia (which is like post-Season 1 fanfiction) only to see her killed. Ben teleports to the Tunisian desert (I think we can safely assume this is what happened; did you notice that he was wearing a jacket that belonged to Dr. Edgar Halliwax, by the way?), then makes his way to Iraq, posing as a member of the press. Sayid notices him taking pictures and attacks him as a "vulture" - clearly life in the public eye has been quite stressful - but Ben reveals that one of Widmore's men killed Nadia. Later, Ben tracks the man responsible as what appears to be a distraction; in other words, he distracts him just long enough for Sayid to kill him. Sayid all but begs Ben to let him be a killer for him, which kind of contradicts Sayid's suggestion in "The Economist" that Ben had virtually blackmailed Sayid into becoming a killer for him. Ben's smile as he walks away makes it clear that this was what he wanted to happen, however, so maybe that's what Sayid was getting at. In the final scene, Ben breaks into Charles Widmore's penthouse suite and tells him that because Widmore "changed the rules" and killed Ben's daughter, Ben is going to kill his daughter - of course, this is Penelope, and I think this means Desmond is getting off the island because you get a lot more potential conflict out of this reveal that way. Widmore says by way of exposition that everything Ben has, he stole from Widmore, including the island - this continues to suggest that Widmore was, decades earlier, Dharma's bankroll. This is also kind of a classic "Who am I supposed to be rooting for?" scene; depending on who you tend to believe in this scene, one or the other of them is really evil.

Quite the upping of the body count, no? If we include the last five minutes of "Meet Kevin Johnson," that's more than a dozen people who have died in just slightly over the last hour of the show - Alex, Karl, Rousseau, the three Socks, Dr. Ecklie, and presumably all six soldiers. And we haven't even been back to the boat - I assume next week we will be.