OT: Lost 6x07 'Dr. Linus' Discussion

Looking forward to the showdown between the good guys, the evil army of undead, and Charles Widmore!

Jack and the dynamite………….wooooooooo!

Is that two weeks in a row with zero Sawyer scenes?

I’m officially stymied by the :world without the plane crash". Is something going to happen on the island to explain the “off the island” world? It’s just too much.

I like how Jacob requires the people he “works with” to make sacrifices, and blindly put faith in him. It’s a very nice contrast to Smokie’s style of promising things to those he “works with”, at no apparent cost. Smokie is always trying to convince people that they are “free”, and promoting a “self serving” attitude.

Smokie is very similar to the Snake tempting Adam and Eve to eat the Fruit of Knowledge, in the Garden of Eden, after God told them that it was the only thing that was forbidden. The whole “Free Will” thing, ya know? I’m not looking for religious allegories, but this seems too obvious.

When Iliana told Sun that she or Jin(or both) was a candidate, and that there were only six left, who was she referring to? Is it Locke, Jack, Sawyer, Sayid, Hurley, and Kwon? I ask because Locke seems to be……..well, dead, and not a very likely candidate, anymore.

I also think Ben is as good as dead, and he’s going to make a very noble sacrifice for Jacob(and others) in the process. Iliana’s gesture “saved” him, and now that he’s good(er), his fate is to die a hero.

Busting out the “typical 80’s antagonist guy” from the Die Hard movies brought a smile to my face. It’s nice to see “bad guys” from your childhood still playig detestable jerks when you’re 30. Has that actor ever been in a role where he wasn’t an arrogant a$$? I can’t get the movie Real Genius out of my head!

What happened to Ben’s dad on the island? Gassed to death right?

Is it possible he’s suffering from radiation poisoning from the bomb in the off-island timeline?

I thought it was cool that Ben chose to help Alex instead of himself off the island, while he did the opposite on the island.

I don’t like Ilana, but want to know how she knows what she knows. Are we going to see an Ilana-centric episode?

I was also confused about the whole ’there’s six candidates left’ thing too. Is it possible that the sixth isn’t Kate or the other Kwon, and someone else entirely?

How useless has Sun become? She used to be a pretty cool character, now she’s just along for the ride. I hope she is reunited with Jin soon, so that we can have an episode where she doesn’t say “You saw Jin?” or “Jin was here?”.

I guess Widmore coming back was pretty obvious, but is there a role for Desmond again?

Iliana was going to shoot Ben after she said she’d have him. I’ll be disappointed if Ben and Richard get axed off halfway through the season.

Did anyone else think that the Jack/Richard/Black Rock scene completely stole the show? Jack is routinely annoying, but I though that whole storyline was terrific.

When Ben tries to blackmail the principal, and the principal fires back with the ‘I won’t write a letter of rec. for Alex’, well Ben still has the power and the principal lacks some foresight cuz Ben can just say “Oh yea you got me okay I won’t say a word” then Alex gets the letter, gets into Yale, and THEN Ben drops the hammer on the principal. I know this has nothing to do with the fact that mainland Ben ‘saved’ Alex unlike island Ben, but had to say it nonetheless.

Wow, Brian liked the Ben episode? Next thing you’ll tell me is Dick Jauron likes defensive backs!

But I completely agree with you, it was a fantastic episode. I always said Ben would die when someone finally stopped listening to his attempts to save his own life, because they were sick of his constant manipulation. It was brilliant to see him going back to his MO, nobody buying it, and finally changing for the better, instead of becoming what everybody already believed he was.

I thought the lunch scene where Locke, barely knowing Ben, says he’d listen to Linus as principal was fantastic. It struck me as very interesting that a relative stranger could influence Ben to deceive his boss. In his other life, he’s the influencer.

So we have:

main character perspective Ben: Manipulator, influencer
flash-sideways Ben: Manipulator, suppressed influencer; easily influenced

I said this in last weeks thread as well. When they show the previous weeks episode with the little “pop-ups” it’s full of inconsistencies. A good example is in last nights.

During the scene when Dogan and Sayid were fighting in the Temple, Dogan had the chance to kill Sayid and didn’t. The “pop-up” said that Dogen didn’t kill him because he knew that if he did, his scale would tip from good to evil.

That’s great…good piece of intel, right? Except for the fact that Dogan gave Jack a poison pill to give to Sayid that (probably) would have killed them. How’s that different? Yes, Sayid had to CHOOSE to take the pill, but murder is murder.

On top of that, when the group first got to the temple, right before Hurley exclaimed that “Jacob sent us” Dogan ordered the Ohters to execute the survivors.

It’s stupid, and nobodys ever said those pop-ups are cannon or meaningful at all, but they seem to present some conflicting information. Just venting about that…

Miles is such a good addition to the show. I’m not so sure how centric he will be to the plot, but his humor, and his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-esque rapport with Hurley are breaths of fresh air to the show. How great was his line to Ben about the diamonds? Who didn’t love seeing him examining the diamond at the end?

Way back when, as the Losties are entering numbers in the computer, and Michael communicates with someone on the other end…did we ever find out who that was, or where that other end was located?

I wish I could remember and i’m waiting until the series ends to re-watch everything.

The total emoional deconstruction of Ben in both realities was very well done. Who knew that there was actually a caring human being under there.

Open question to everyone:

Does being touched by Jacob make someone “off limits” from being killed by Smokie?"