Rewatching LOST: 5.12 “Dead is Dead”

Ben sets off with Locke to fulfill the reason he came back to the island, but along the way he learns just how much Locke has changed.

• Ben is thunderstruck when Locke wakes him up in the infirmary on Hydra Island, and Ben sees that Locke is back from the dead. Locke asks why Ben tried to return to the main island, and Ben says he broke the rules by coming back, and needed to be judged by the smoke monster.
• On the beach, Ben sees that Ilana and some of her friends have acquired a very large steel crate, which they are preparing to move, but she won’t tell him what’s inside it.
• Ben returns to his old office in the Hydra station and Locke enters, hoping they could talk about why Ben killed him. Ben rambles on about Locke having to serve as the proxy dead body on the plane, and about Ben needing to get Locke’s critical information about how to get back to the island before Locke could hang himself. But Locke, amused by Ben’s long-winded explanation, says he was merely hoping Ben would apologize. Locke decides to go with Ben to the main island and help him accomplish his mission of being judged by the monster.
• Back on the beach, the two of them take one of the outrigger canoes, though Caesar tries to stop them. Ben shoots and kills Caesar, which he tells Locke to consider his hoped-for apology. When they reach the dock on the main island, they banter about why Ben killed Caesar, who was unarmed. Ben claims to have done it to save Locke’s life. Locke counters that Ben has been lying about everything since he got back to the island: he’s not interested in being judged because he “broke the rules,” he wants to be judged for letting his daughter die.
• When they reach the Barracks, Locke criticizes Ben for taking the Others in such a corporate, civilized direction during his time as leader. A light comes on inside Ben’s old house, and Ben goes inside to find Sun and Frank, who were told by Christian to wait there for John Locke to arrive. The four of them soon convene in the living room, and Locke explains that he believes he can help Sun to find Jin, even though Jin is stuck in 1977. Frank wants no part of any of this, refusing to trust Ben or Locke, and leaves. But before Locke can help Sun find Jin, he says that Ben has something important to do first.
• Ben goes down to the secret door in his hidden room, and goes inside, where he walks through a narrow cave to a small mud puddle. He reaches down into it and pulls something out, which causes the water to drain from the puddle. (This is how he summons the monster, such as when he called on it to attack Keamy’s men.) He goes out to the front porch of the house to wait for the monster to come, where he and Sun talk about Locke’s resurrection. Ben admits that he’s scared to death by Locke being alive again, because it’s unprecedented, even here on the island. Death is the one thing you don’t come back from no matter what, he says. Locke joins them and notices that the monster hasn’t shown up yet, so he supposes they’ll just have to go to it. Ben is confused; he doesn’t know where the monster lives. But to his surprise, Locke does know.
• Locke leads them to what we know as the Temple — which Ben reveals is actually just a wall built half a mile around the real Temple to keep outsiders from ever seeing the real thing. But Locke says they’re not going inside the Temple, they’re going under it. He leads the way through the same hole that Montand was dragged down into when he lost his arm, and they walk through underground caves until Ben falls through a weak spot in the floor. Locke disappears to find something to pull Ben out, but Ben notices that he’s inside a large, ancient chamber, covered with hieroglyphs — one of which resembles the four-toed statue facing down the smoke monster. Ben’s torch goes out just as black smoke starts to emanate from a vent just below this large hieroglyph. The smoke monster appears and envelops Ben, playing back memories of his life with Alex, including her death. Unexpectedly, the monster suddenly vanishes back into its vent, and Ben finds himself in the presence of his dead daughter, Alex. He apologizes for letting her be killed, but she throws him against a wall and makes him promise to follow John Locke’s every word. She disappears when he swears to do this, and then Locke returns up above with something Ben can use to climb out. Ben informs him that the monster let him live, while he stares at Locke in awe.

• In 1977, Ben rested in a tent at the Others basecamp, recovering from his injury at Sayid’s hands after Richard took him inside the Temple. While there, he and Widmore met for the first time; it was an amicable meeting where Widmore assured Ben he would always be one of them, even though he would soon have to return to the Dharma Initiative for the time being.
• In the 90s, following the Purge, Ben was sent by then-leader of the Others Charles Widmore to kill Danielle Rousseau, who had just arrived on the island two months prior. But Ben was surprised to find that Danielle had given birth to a baby girl, Alex, and instead of killing them both, he stole the baby from Danielle, deeming her “a crazy woman,” and warned Danielle to keep away from him. Ben returned to Widmore to confront him about expecting him to kill a baby, and Widmore buckled. Ben decided to raise the baby as his own daughter.
• Four or five years later, Ben was installed as the leader of the Others after Widmore was banished for having a relationship and conceiving a child with an outsider who lived off the island. Apparently this was against the rules, though before he was sent away, Widmore criticized Ben for having broken the rules as well, when he saved Alex’s life. But Ben continued to argue that it was Widmore who wanted Alex dead, not the island.
• In 2007, just before he returned to the island, Ben tracked down Desmond and Penny to a boat dock in Los Angeles. He pulled a gun and — after Desmond received a gunshot wound to the abdomen — he told Penny she had to die because her father had killed Ben’s daughter. But he changed his mind when he realized that Penny had a young son, Charlie. He hesitated just long enough for Desmond to rally his strength and beat him up and throw him into the water.

• Because she’d met Ben once before. He was the one who stole Alex from Danielle when she was just a baby.
  Question: Why did Danielle believe that “Henry,” aka Ben, was one of the Others? 2.14
• The Others’ leader, Charles Widmore, wanted Danielle and Alex killed (probably as a way of “finishing the job” after the Purge — giving the Others complete dominance on the island), but the man he sent to do the job, Benjamin Linus, refused to kill them. Instead, he saved both their lives by taking Alex and raising her as his own daughter, and warning Danielle to keep her distance from the Others. Though they would be separated, they would both live.
  Question: Why did the Others steal Alex from her mother, Danielle? 1.23
• Nothing very exciting. Just a small mud puddle.
  Question: What was behind the ancient door hidden beneath Ben’s house? 4.09
• Ben drained the mud puddle.
  Question: What did Ben do behind the door to summon the smoke monster? 4.09
• Widmore objected to Ben becoming one of his people, and their rivalry grew as Ben became an adult. Ben had already demonstrated a connection to the island when he saw his dead mother, and he cleverly used his skills as a master manipulator to make Widmore look bad in front of his people. When Widmore left the island regularly to have an affair with a woman living elsewhere and this relationship lead to the birth of a child (the girl who would grow up to become Penelope Widmore), he broke the Others’ rules concerning interaction with outsiders. Widmore was banished from the island forever, and Ben was elevated to the society’s leader.
  Question: Why does Ben have such a bitter rivalry with Widmore? What’s their history? 4.09
• He didn’t go willingly. He was taken away by the submarine, banished by his people for having a relationship with an outsider.
  Question: Widmore was once an Other living on the island, so why did he leave the island? 5.03
• No, Penny lives, though her husband Desmond was gravely injured during Ben’s attempt.
  Question: Ben’s “loose end” was him seemingly attempting to fulfill his promise to Widmore to kill Penny. Did he succeed in killing her? 5.06

• What’s in Ilana’s steel crate?
• How did draining the water out of that tiny hole below Ben’s house summon the smoke monster?
• Who built the monster-summoning water hole there to begin with?
• Why would the island let Ben come back, but not Widmore?
• What’s the answer to the question, “What lies in the shadow of the statue?”
• Why did Ilana ask this question to Frank? Is it some kind of pass code?

• “Dead is Dead” is the third Ben-centric episode of the series.
• Something I missed the first time around: Pretty ironic of Ben to criticize Kate for pretending to be Aaron’s mother when he did the exact same thing by pretending to be Alex’s father.
• It’s sooooo different looking back on this episode now, knowing that Locke is really Jacob’s nemesis in disguise. Every word he says, every interaction he has with Ben in particular, carries a deeper, double meaning.
• The Temple seems to have more connections to Jacob’s nemesis than to Jacob himself. The smoke monster lives beneath it, for example. I’ve noticed a lot of little things this season like this that seem to point to the Others unknowingly doing the bidding of Jacob’s nemesis more than they support Jacob himself. Hm.

Need more depth and detail? Read my full recap of “Dead is Dead”.

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Image credits: “Rewatching Lost” logo by Robin Parrish. Season 5 cast promotional image: American Broadcasting Company.