The reclamation of Benjamin Linus

Ben is one of Lost’s most interesting characters. Sociopath, mastermind, manipulator extraordinaire, pathological liar, Ben is so interesting largely because he is not what he seems to be most of the time: he is not unadulterated, irredeemable evil. He does care about something.

Ben was tragically abused by his father because of something that was no one’s fault: his mother’s death in childbirth. Ben’s deep wounds coupled with his brilliant mind make him potentially dangerous, but he is still trusting and hopeful of a better life for himself when he trusts Sayid to take him to the Others. Somehow, Sayid’s deception and attempted murder of Ben (and perhaps his experience in that pool in the temple?) put Ben over to the dark side. But it’s instructive that his evil results in large measure from injustices against him.

The only three things or rather the only three people he cared about were his mother, Juliet, and Alex. But they did not love him back: his mother, who gave him his name, died giving birth to him. Juliet did not love him, but loved Goodwin whom Ben set up to get killed as a result (which didn’t help to endear Juliet to him), and Alex hated him as a teenager as she came to understand how evil Ben was. Juliet betrayed the Others, and Alex was killed because Ben chose to use strategy rather than give himself up to save her life. After her murder, Ben seems to wake up for the first time in his life. First blaming Charles Widmore, he ultimately takes full responsibility himself for Alex’s death and submits himself to judgment by the smoke monster. The monster, instead of executing Ben, lets him off with a very emotional slap on the wrists and simply uses him to accomplish his (the monster’s) agenda of killing Jacob. It’s not hard to do: Jacob brings out in Ben all the longing that perhaps Ben himself didn’t know was there. Ben had a longing to see Jacob, a longing for Jacob to be the loving father he never had. When Ben confronts Jacob about his absence in his life with the words, “What about me?” and Jacob responds, “What about you?” that easily pushes Ben to stab Jacob repeatedly and fatally in the heart.

“What about you?” Ben thought that Jacob was blowing him off, but there’s something more to that question, I think. A lot more. It goes back in part to Alex’s death.

The death of Alex, the only person left that Ben actually cared about, reminds me of a play that hasn’t actually been referenced on Lost, but is instructive nonetheless. It’s Jean Anouilh’s play Becket, about Thomas Becket, a figure not unlike Ben Linus. Becket at the outset of the play is the cold, calculating, Machiavellian right-hand man of England’s King Henry II. In the first Act of that play, the boorish King orders Becket to surrender to him the woman who loves him. Becket hesitates and the King says,

“You care about her then? Can you care for something? Go on, tell me, tell me if you care about her?”

Becket almost does, but not enough to cross the king. He surrenders the woman who soon afterward kills herself.

The king is shocked by the suicide and says to Becket, “You loathe me, I shan’t even be able to trust you now.”

But Becket reassures him,

“So long as Becket is obliged to improvise his honor he will serve you. And if one day he meets it face to face….But where is Becket’s honor?”

Ben likewise serves the forces of death because he has no honor and “improvises from day to day.” “How many times to I have to tell you, John,” Ben told Locke at the end of season 4. “I always have a plan.”

Eventually, Becket does find his honor. If you don’t know the rest of the story, read the play (or see the movie version with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton; a remastered re-release just came out on DVD). Long story short, when Becket finds his honor, he does a complete about-face spiritually, and opposes the forces he was working for.

Could a change like this take place in Ben's life? I think when Jacob died, Ben at least began to feel his lack of honor as in the scene from Becket. In the sneak preview of one scene from the first episode of the sixth season, Ben says something that was cut from the episode as it aired. In the preview, Ben stares at the fire where Jacob has burned up and asks, “Why didn’t he fight back? Why did he just let me kill him?” Something seems to break in Ben at that point. Later at Locke’s burial, Ben is the one who offers a eulogy: “John Locke was a believer. He was a man of faith. He was a much better man than I will ever be. And I’m very sorry I murdered him.” These words are remarkable. First that Ben voluntarily speaks the truth and confesses his crime. And second that these words are spoken with an obvious profound sense of remorse, not just for what he has done, but for who he is. Everything he has ever done has been about “me”. Everything except sparing Alex as a baby, and even her he allowed to be killed to save his own neck. Ben’s whole life has been “me, me, me”. I wonder how many times since Locke’s funeral Ben has been haunted by Jacob’s words “What about you?” Ben seems to be really answering that question now, and he’s finding that the answers aren’t pretty. And if one day Ben meets his honor face to face, what then? But where is Ben’s honor?


Maybe it’s at the temple.