pocket1_pita | Lost 4.13 There’s No Place Like Home, Parts 2 & 3

By far the strangest and most intriguing scene is the one where Ben moves the Island. After killing Keamy, Ben turns on the elevator time machine and blows a hole in the back of it. There’s a weird tunnel back there. So the time machine was just built over the tunnel to the Island Moving Mechanism? I can’t wait to hear the explanation for this one. Ben tells Locke that his bad emotional response got in the way of a good command decision when he killed Keamy and that he is sure (:wink:) that Locke will do a much better job as leader. It’s almost ridiculous because Ben is so scathing and you know that Locke is going to just SUCK as a leader. A bigger chump than John Locke was never born. He may be the worst leader I could even imagine. A weak despot – impotent and covetous – with a history of anger management problems, mediocrity, inability to follow-through and isolation. He will trust no one and everyone at the same time. He will do anything as long as someone tells it to him in a dream or tells him he is special. He is almost a recipe for a comicbook supervillain. You get the feeling that a lot of the bad things that happened to Locke were Ben’s doing. Or that Ben’s installment as Leader of the Others somehow made them happen. Was he testing Locke or trying to beat him down? I think we’ve always kind of wondered whose side John is on anyway. I think he would say he is on the Island’s side, but is the Island good or bad or just powerful? It has an agenda that is opaque to us and frankly it is opaque to Locke too. He has no idea what he is putting his trust in, and if we know anything about Locke it is that he has terrible terrible judgment

So Ben puts on Halliwax’s parka and goes down, down, down the rabbit hole. Isn’t it interesting that Dharma has parkas as part of the uniform. Since the time machine is built over the opening to the tunnel to frozen-Island Moving Mechanism, what was the parka for? It has an Orchid Station logo on it, and a name tag. There is either another frozen place or there is another door to the frozen place. I bet there was an underground to the original S2 Hatch before it was poured all over with concrete. Freaky. Anyway, he comes out in a cave with a big frozen wheel in it the ladder breaks and he cuts his shoulder. He starts to turn the wheel heaving and crying we see that Ben is sacrificing the thing he loves most in the world for the second time in a few days. He can never come back to the Island. At this point Pearl says – maybe it they moved it more often it would be easier to turn. And then there’s a big flash of purple light and a buzzing noise and - whoomp – the Island disappears.

Can I get a big fat WTF?

We now know that Ben appeared in the middle of the Tunisian desert 10 months later right after this happened. We also saw a Dharma polar bear in the same desert. Did it wander through some kind of portal (no, I am not giving up my network of wormholes theory thankyouverymuch) or was it trained to move the Island? It seems like there are more trainable and less dangerous animals that might move the Island. Like a cow – maybe even one of those big fluffy yaks so it won’t freeze. Also, Ben had been to that hotel before a lot of times. He was notorious there from the look on the receptionist’s face. He made that plan to recruit Sayid on the spur of the moment. He just turned, saw him on the TV and decided to go to Iraq and recruit him or maybe just take pictures of him. Somewhere in that time period Ben had access to funds, a big camera, information about Nadia and how she died, and a even a picture from a traffic camera in LA. He couldn’t be working alone. He must have existing allies and he may not be able to go back to the Island, but he certainly isn’t powerless. Does not able to go back mean that he is like Desmond and can’t pass through the Island barrier without a Constant? Or does it mean something else more complicated? Also, since Sayid saw the Island disappear, why would he believe Ben’s story about how he got off the Island?

So what exactly happened when Ben moved the Island?

Popular Mechanics has a few articles on it:

Time Travel Expert: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4266335.html

Einstein Would Approve: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4266329.html

“To make physics sense of the movement of the island in Lost, I assume that the island is actually connected to the South Pacific by a wormhole-like warp in space-time. (It doesn't have to be a simple worm hole; it could be a warren of parallel and intersecting tubes.) Then, to move the island, all you have to do is move the wormhole connection, not the island itself. That's what I think Ben did. He changed the nature of the space-time connection between the island and the rest of the world.

So the island didn't disappear. It didn't even move. Imagine that you are visiting a small town that you used to visit when you were young. You drive for miles, and never come to it. But it turns out the town has not moved. Rather, the highway now goes around it. That's what Ben did—he changed the highway.”

That makes some sense to me.