Monday 26 January 2009

Lost Series 4 Episode 9 - The Shape of Things To Come

When I thought that Lost couldn’t get any better, it produces an episode like this – ‘The Shape of Things To Come’. It’s everything that an episode of Lost should be, fights, sly jokes and more weirdness than a day in the life of Michael Jackson!

This story concentrates on Ben, who is off the Island in a couple of different flash-forwards. In one, he has seemingly left the Island, as he is wearing a Dharma coat. However, he finds himself face down in the Tunisian desert, perhaps it was the same region where Charlotte found the polar bear skeleton with the DHARMA collar? Ben is then confronted by two armed locals. He kills one of them and attacks another before stealing an horse and riding to the city.

Later, Ben is in Iraq where he encounters Sayid, who is attending his wife, Nadia’s, funeral. Ben tells Sayid that Widmore ordered an hitman to kill his wife. Later, Sayid kills the assassin and agrees to become an hitman for Ben – in order to get revenge on Widmore.

Back on the Island, the corpse of the freighter’s doctor washes up on the beach. Faraday tries to call the boat using morse code. However, he lies to the others about the message, saying that ‘Everything was fine’. But, quite bizarrely, Bernard can understand morse code and told everyone about the real content of the message – ‘What are you talking about? The doctor is fine’. Angry, Jack forces Faraday to reveal that it was never their intention to rescue the survivors.

We learn that the snipers form the last episode, who killed Danielle and Karl, where the men from the boat, lead by Keamy. Alex is taken hostage, as the men shoot up Locke’s camp and kill a number of people in the process. Keamy shouts at Ben to come out and produces his hostage and holds a gun to her head. However, Ben doesn’t believe that he’ll go through with it but he (and most of the viewers, I’m sure) are left shocked when Keamy executes Alex. It was rather shocking and the acting involved is absolutely top-notch.

Ben utters something about ‘he’s changed the rules’ and runs off and seemly activates the ‘smoke monster’, which kills a number of Keamy’s men, with the rest taking cover. The rest agree that they should leave the camp but Ben stays behind for a while, to grieve over the corpse of his ‘daughter’. Meanwhile, Sawyer wants to return to the beach with Claire, Aaron and Hurley but the latter is held at gunpoint by Locke and forced to go with him and Ben, to find Jacob’s cabin. Hurley is one of the few that has seen the mysterious house, which contains the mysterious figure. Hurley agrees to go with them but it was nice to see that Sawyer cared about him!

Back to the future and Ben is in London and confronts Widmore, while in bed! He tells him that he had ‘changed the rules’ and in revenge, he would kill his daughter, Penny, so he knows what it felt like. The flash-forward was actually filmed in London, as Alan Dale was appearing in a west-end show at the time.

Overall, it was a truly excellent episode. We learnt a lot more about Ben, seeing that he was indeed human! Michael Emerson is becoming my favourite actor in Lost. Apart from his wonderful sarcastic comments and looks, his reaction to the death of his daughter was superb. And how shocking was that! The babe count has definitely gone down with the departure of Alex (Tania Raymonde)! But on a technical note, the episode was one, if not the best directed episode of Lost, since the first two episodes. For that alone, it deserves the highest praise.

10/10

Next Time: Keamy proves he is indeed a ‘bad arse’ by shooting new-born puppies - because he’s bored!


RIP ALEX :-(

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