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He lied.

The topic before him had no bearing on his words: he deceived in matters large, in details small.  The consequences of dishonesty figured into his thoughts only to the extent of laying the groundwork for the next deception, which in turn would provide the foundation for subsequent misdirection.  He manipulated facts and fabricated stories to suit his purpose, to frame conditions to his liking, to cause those he controlled to believe he was advancing their agenda so that he could nefariously implement his own well-engineered plans.

He manipulated, coerced, forced those under him to commit the worst offences.  When lying was insufficient to his ends, he murdered.  He killed with his bare hands or with weapons, with guns, gas, or rope.  He actively participated in mass murder.  A reasonable jury of his peers would be obliged to find him guilty on all charges and pass down the severest of sentences.

Benjamin Linus was arguably the most villainous, hateful character on the Island.  But we found ourselves liking him.  Ilana, who knew his crimes, was never taken in my his tricks, pardoned him.  The man who was his opposite, who endeavoured never to fabricate an untruth, took him on as advisor.   At Ben’s own death he was found worthy to make the voyage to the Church of the Holy Lamp Post, having served well as Hurley’s faithful consigliere.

It is appropriate to ask what might reasonably be considered the greatest unanswered question in the six years of LOST:  Who was Benjamin Linus?

Original Innocence

The circumstances of his youth were most similar to those of his future nemesis, John Locke.  Both men were born several months premature to a woman named Emily.  Both endured a tortured childhood of neglect and abuse without the care of a mother.   Each of them later in life would methodically engineer his own father’s death.

At some point their paths diverged.  Locke never seemed to grow up.  He insisted that the world around him conform to his understanding, that those in charge allow him to be the person he believed himself to be.  Locke’s innocence was so integral to his being that he could not conceive of the notion of deception.  Even after fifty years of navigating the real world, he never figured out that at every turn people had been taking advantage of his trust in them.  His gullibility would be his undoing.  He lost his money, lost a kidney, lost the use of his legs, and finally lost his life.  Every bit of suffering in his sad life was the bitter outcome of his own innocent trust in the good will of others.

We don’t know which events in Ben’s early years led to his adoption of deceit and manipulation as a default modus operandi.  The example of John Locke indicates we cannot blame a motherless childhood or the capricious vagaries of life that placed more than a boy’s fair share of suffering in their paths.  Apparently neither of these conditions was sufficient to induce either life-long innocence or habitual deceit.  Every generation provides examples of children neglected and abused who become sterling examples of trustworthy industry and responsibility in their adult years.  We must look to some other cause of Ben’s manipulative lifestyle.

Both men came to hate their fathers, but at different times, and for different reasons.  It is in the Darltonian expression of malignant fatherhood that we see the most vivid contrast between Ben and Locke.

Anthony Cooper, like Ben and James Ford after him, earned his livelihood from a keen facility with manipulation.  But a lifetime of seducing women and conniving to take their husbands’ savings made him too busy to check in on young John Locke, even once.

Sins of the Fathers

Roger Linus was a very different kind of father.

Roger might have left his son, if he’d had the opportunity to do so.  But on a janitor’s wages, and with most of his meagre income dedicated to nightly rounds of liquid amnesia, he would never get off the Island.  So he took the time-honoured path of many men in the same situation:  he ignored his son.  Child neglect was not a punishable offence in the Dharma Initiative, and besides, these were the disco-drenched 70s; no one was sober enough to figure out what anyone else was doing.

The situation was sad for young Ben, but many boys have grown up under similar situations without becoming psychopathic liars.  But few boys under such conditions were exposed to the species of psychological abuse that Ben suffered on a nightly basis.  Roger planted in his son’s heart an idea of the kind that should never be expressed to a child, even in a fit of anger.  Especially not in a fit of anger.  Roger told his son that he, Ben, was responsible for his own mother’s death.

Perhaps this was the unbearable burden of undeserved guilt that caused Ben’s visions of his dead mother.  He didn’t question her apparition, but others did.  When he entered the deactivation code for the sonic fence and slipped into the Hostiles’ territory, he came upon Richard Alpert.  When Ben explained he was looking for his dead mother, Richard’s interest in the boy increased immediately.

RICHARD: Did she die here, on the Island?
BEN: No. When I was a baby.
RICHARD: Did you see her, out here, Ben, in the jungle?
BEN: She talked to me.
RICHARD: What did she say?
BEN: That I couldn’t come with her. She said it wasn’t time yet.

In hindsight we know that the apparition of someone who had not died on the Island would be taken as unusual by any of the Others, and especially by the one member of the League of Jacob who lived through the ages.  What did the apparition of Emily Linus mean to Ben?  To the Others?  Was Ben possibly among those being groomed by Jacob for Island leadership?  Did Ben’s visions point to some other “special” aspect of his character that would have significance for Jacob’s band?

Roger’s frequent refrain that Ben had caused his own mother’s death was the inexcusable ranting of a man entirely unfit for the care of a child.  I don’t imagine there is any way to accurately calculate the deep psychological damage that must have been inflicted by Roger’s deplorable contempt for his own son’s mental health.  The wounds to Ben’s soul must have been painful beyond anything a human being should have to endure.

I don’t believe, though, that Roger’s thoughtlessness and his unsuitability for parenting were sufficient to have caused Ben’s manipulative temperament and his comfort in deception.  I believe going to the root of Ben’s character requires that we spend time contemplating a concrete object in Richard’s possession at the time of his meeting with Ben.  If we understand this object, we will understand Ben.

The Compass

We saw this compass for the first time in Lost 4.11 (“Cabin Fever”).  It was one of the six items Richard showed to young John Locke in 1961, asking the boy, “Which of these things belong to you already?”  The compass was one of the items Locke identified as belonging to him.

The boy was correct.  The adult John Locke gave the compass to Richard in 1954 during the period of erratic time travels as a proof that he was from the future.  Richard kept the compass for the next 53 years.  He surrendered the compass to the wounded, time-traveling John Locke in 2007, instructing Locke to give the compass back to him the next time Locke saw him.  That next meeting turned out to be their short conversation in 1954, since that was Locke’s next stop on his time-travel tour.  Richard accepted the compass, showed it to young Locke in 1961, and returned it to Locke in 2007, who transported it back to 1954, gave it to Richard, who…

With most of the human players in Jacob’s two-thousand-year-old game of backgammon, the compass was caught in an endless time loop.  The compass existed in concrete form, but it was never created.  The compass had no possible entry point into the loop.  It had no beginning, it would never have an end.  It just was.

The Man in Black, posing as John Locke just before the real Locke’s time-travel appearance in 2007, asked Richard about the compass Locke had given him in 1956.  “A little rusty,” Richard said, “but she can still find north.”  Perhaps it was a manifestation of the MIB’s sense of humour, perhaps it was a deeper intention to control people, events, and time itself, but it was the Smoke Monster who told Richard to give the compass back to Locke during that critical rendez-vous in 2007.  By instructing Richard to return the compass to Locke, Smokey was ensuring the perpetuation of an endless time loop.  If nothing else, the endless circularity through time of people, events, and objects supported the MIB’s understanding of human behaviour.  ” They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.”

If all the important events on the Island were captured in endless loops, the Smoke Monster would always turn out to be correct.  If every occurrence of any importance was relegated to a time loop, Jacob’s vision of human progress finally ending the loops would never come to pass.  Perhaps by controlling all the defining events in this manner he could gain the upper hand over Jacob and make the final move that would end their perpetual game of senet to his advantage.

Destroying the Loop

We were witness to the end of all time loops.  The selfless heroism of Boone, Charlie, Locke, Sayid, Kate, and the greatest hero, Jack Shephard, ended for all time the eternal, circular game of senet.  The destruction of time loops was the final grand objective of Lost.  By accepting Jacob’s gauntlet, these men and women not only showed their mettle and proved their valour, but demonstrated for all the stuff of which humans are truly made.

Those who were “special” were the immortal heroes, the women and men who did not shirk the call of destiny, even when the Island called them to self-sacrifice.  “You were special, John,” Ben told Locke outside the Church of the Holy Lamp Post.  Indeed.  Locke’s heroism was the most magnificent demonstration of the divinity of his soul, for he knew his mission had to end in his own death.

Jack’s mission was the single most important calling anyone had received since Biblical times.  Everything else had to be put on hold, even the reconciliation of Jack with his own father.  How fitting it was, then, that the Island summoned not Kate, not Sarah, not his sister, Claire, but Christian Shephard, to bring his son back to consciousness after the crash.  “I need you to go find my son,” Christian told the yellow Labrador Retriever, Vincent.  “He’s over there in that bamboo forest, unconscious.  I need you to go wake him up…. He has work to do.”

Ray Shephard never had faith in his son, Christian.  Christian never had faith in his son, Jack.  Jack ended the cruel, circular Shephard heritage of father-son enmity by raising a fine son, David, and connecting with him.  Jack was allowed this final resolution not in his life on earth, but in the life after his heroic act.

Ben’s Loop

Ben was a tragic figure.  For many years he thought himself “special”.  Perhaps Richard, knowing of Ben’s visions of his mother, considered him “special”, too.  Perhaps most or all of the Others considered their leader somehow different from themselves.  He had inherited the Island from Charles Widmore, after all.  But Jacob didn’t grant him even a perfunctory audience, not a word of gratitude for his long service.  Ben never was special.  Finally grasping the truth of that fact must have hurt Ben to the very depths of his being.

I believe the tragedy of Ben, the endless, almost unbearably monotonous quality of his grand deceptions and fabrications, and the genesis of his flawed character were all wrapped into a single momentous event in 1977 that captured him forever into a great time loop.

In Season Five, Sayid gave us his understanding of Benjamin Linus:

“He’s a liar, a manipulator…a man who allowed his own daughter to be murdered to save himself…A monster responsible for nothing short of genocide.”

In Sayid Jarrah’s mind, Ben Linus was of the same ilk as Adolf Hitler.   Sayid brought young Ben into his confidence, allowing Ben to believe he was one of the hallowed “Hostiles”.  The adolescent Ben trusted Sayid so much he engineered an elaborate jail break for the man.  Alone with Ben far away from the Dharma barracks, Sayid saw the chance he had been waiting for.  He aimed the gun directly at the boy’s heart and fired.  Ben fell to the ground, apparently dead.

The waters of the Temple eventually saved Ben.  Richard claimed Ben would not remember anything that happened before the immersion in the waters, but he would be changed forever.  He would no longer have the innocence of youth.

I believe it was not Jacob’s healing waters that robbed young Ben of his innocence.  I believe it was Sayid’s betrayal of Ben’s trust that forever removed any possibility of trust from the boy’s range of conceivable dispositions.  After he had placed complete faith in a man he believed a “Hostile”, one of the “good guys” in the boy’s mind, only to become the object of the man’s unjustified but complete hatred, how could he ever again trust anyone?  How could he tell anyone the truth ever again?  If the only person he ever found worthy of his trust could shoot him in the chest, fully intending to murder him with a single shot, how could he ever place even a modicum of faith in anyone’s professed intentions?

In spite of what Richard claimed, I believe Ben could never have forgotten this event.  Perhaps he didn’t remember Sayid, but how could he have forgotten a bullet to the chest?  A wound that very nearly killed him?  No amnesia-inducing waters would carry a force sufficient to overcome a reality that strong and dark and full of corruption.  Ben remembered.  Those memories made him into the man he became.  And what he became was another tragic loop, just another example the Smoke Monster could point out as proof of his thesis regarding the most enduring and contemptible qualities of the corrupt and rotten human soul.

Redemption of a Soul Lost

Charles Widmore’s instructions to Ben in 1988 could not have been any clearer:  Ben was to find Danielle Rousseau’s camp, murder the woman, and kill her child.  The young man had wanted to join the Others since his arrival on the Island fifteen years before.  He must have been a constant pain in Widmore’s side, this young man who thought himself “special”.  A young man who even then must have been using every waking moment of his life trying to discover the means by which he might wrest control of the group from Widmore’s hands.  Did Widmore send young Ethan Rom on the mission to ensure Ben’s faithful execution of the gruesome task?

I don’t believe Ben refused Widmore’s orders in an attempt to amass political power.  I don’t think he saved Danielle and baby Alex to spite Widmore or usurp his authority.  I think his decision to spare baby Alex’s life was the only response Ben could have made in the situation.  Just as life experience had turned him into a psychopathic liar, I believe the earlier and even more painful events of life–beginning with separation from his own mother–instilled in Ben Linus a natural affinity for children and an unquenchable desire to ensure the fulfillment of their needs.  Roger Linus was the worst father one could imagine.  Ben must have had such a deep desire to correct the evils his father had wrought that the prospect of raising a girl with the full intensity of a father’s love must have driven him more than any consequences Widmore might have chosen to mete out for Ben’s insubordination.  Baby Alex’s life must have meant as much to him as his own life.  When he looked into the little baby’s eyes, he must have seen only one possible outcome.

The Final Blow

Perhaps raising a child to adulthood could have made up for Ben’s earlier genocide.  In the Richard Attenborough film, “Gandhi”, one of the most moving scenes occurs near the end of the movie.  A Hindu man, Nahari, rushes up to the Great Mahatma, who is weak from the nearly month-long food fast he began in response to Muslim/Hindu bloodshed.  The man’s eyes are wide in sheer terror.

Nahari:  I’m going to Hell! I killed a child! I smashed his head against a wall.
Gandhi:  Why?
Nahari:  Because they killed my son! The Muslims killed my son!
Gandhi:  I know a way out of Hell. Find a child, a child whose mother and father have been killed and raise him as your own.  Only be sure that he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one.

Ben almost fulfilled the self-imposed assignment.  Sixteen-year-old Alex had grown into a beautiful young woman, capable in many ways, but still a child, still in need of a father’s care.  Ben took a gamble when Widmore’s thug, Keamy, held a gun to Alex’s head.  The gamble was almost sure to succeed.  Ben and Widmore both knew the rules, and those rules prevented either of them from assassinating family members.

“I stole her as a baby from an insane woman,” Ben said.  ”She’s a pawn, nothing more. She means nothing to me. I’m not coming out of this house. So if you want to kill her, go ahead and–”

Ben didn’t get to finish his statement.  Keamy put a bullet in the girl’s brain and her lifeless body dropped to the ground.

Final Reckoning

He was a sad and lonely figure seated on the marble bench outside Our Lady of the Foucault Pendulum.

Perhaps he could have entered the church, Alex or Danielle accompanying him as his Constant.  He had served admirably as Number Two to the Protector of the Island, Hurley.  He was a sad man because he realised the enormity of his crimes.  But more than anything, he continued to suffer the devastation of Alex’s death.   Sadness and devastation kept him outside, alone, spiritually unable to cross the threshold to the final antechamber before… moving on.

But he was there.  Charles never made it anywhere near the church.   Keamy died in a place where everyone was already dead–his soul forever expunged from the rolls of those who could call themselves human beings.

Ben was there.

Ben, despite a life of lies, tortures, and murders, mass murder, the cold-blooded execution of his own father–in spite of everything, Ben sat outside the church.

We might think of it as an instance of undeserved grace.  I find myself believing something else entirely.  Possibly none of us, other than the great heroes–the Jack Shephards and Kate Austens and John Lockes–could be said to deserve the grace that allows us admittance to the final antechamber.  Perhaps that grace is extended even to those among us, undeserving as we are, who nevertheless think ourselves somehow a cut above, that in spite of our foibles we somehow deserve redemption.  Perhaps even arrogant fools such as these are extended an undeserved and unappreciated grace.

Ben is not among these delusional fools.  The pain in his soul is real.  He is lonely, devastated, aching in the deepest recesses of his spirit.  He stays on in his purgatory because to do otherwise would be to deprive himself of the single honest objective of his life:  Raising a helpless girl he was supposed to have murdered, teaching her everything that is good and noble and true in the hearts of women and men, and seeing his helpless baby turn into a capable and beautiful and trusting young woman.

Benjamin Linus was allowed this grace, not because he begged for it or deserved it or thought himself worthy.  He was allowed this final grace precisely because he knew himself unworthy, and because the death of Alex forever marked him a sad and lonely and pained man.

In Ben’s pain and humility he found pardon and redemption.  And someday, someday soon, taking Alex’s hand or Danielle’s hand in his own, he will cross the threshold, sit with his beloved Constant in a pew, surrounded by the Rousseau family friends and relatives and those cherished and adored, those Ben trusted, and experience the bright light that will carry them to a happier and eternal destiny.

PM

Related posts:

1. White Rabbit: The Cultural and Symbolic Significance of Christian Shephard in LOST by Pearson Moore
2. Principal Purpose: Culture and Meaning in LOST 6.07 “Dr. Linus” by Pearson Moore
3. So You Could Find One Another: Cultural Perfections in LOST 6.17-6.18 “The End” by Pearson Moore

Tags: Alex, Benjamin Linus, LOST Theories, Pearson Moore, recaps&reviews