The empty chair looked at first like a pretty good metaphor for patient “Lost” fans, hoping for some answers Wednesday as the season wound down in this, the 51st to last ever episode.
Ben had taken Locke into the jungle to meet his leader, someone named Jacob, who would tell him everything there was to know about the island. And when they got there, all it was was an empty chair that Ben talked to.
“You’re crazy,” Locke grumbled. “You don’t know anything.”
But then Jacob – the invisible force, whatever the heck it was – spoke, uttering those words from the sci-fi movie “The Fly,” “help me” before knocking stuff around and proving that something was there.
It seemed pretty anticlimactic in a way “Lost” fans were getting used to –- they’re not going to tell us anything.
But then we learn that Ben and a group of outsiders were responsible for the mass killing of the entire Dharma Initiative people, including his own father Roger WorkMan, whose bones and rusted VW minivan Hurley ran across earlier in the season.
The chilling Jonestown scenario was accomplished through poison gas, with Ben working with a group from the other side of the electronic fence, led by that dark eyed right hand man Richard, who looks exactly the same now as he did when Ben encountered him as a lad.
Locke, who got no answers at the Jacob cabin, got this big explanation at the mass grave.
Then Ben shot him dead.
Like one of the old guys on “Survivor,” full of wisdom and always eliminated too early, Locke will leave a huge hole in the series, which next week shifts back to the bickering between Jack and Juliet and the rest of the people.
Jack, for his part, told everybody he knew about Juliet’s plan, she told him and apparently is against it too, though she might be a triple agent by now. There was no advancement in the plotline of Naomi, the woman who -- ahem people! – came from a rescue ship still docked not far from the island.
But the Dharma story is coming clear – they came to the island to seek peace and harmony.
Ben’s dad brought him there when he was a boy. Ben’s mother died in childbirth while hiking 32 miles from Portland; the guy who stopped to help them happened to be the guy to welcome father and son 10 or 12 years later – with the word “Namaste!” a Yogic term, much like “Shambala,” that Three Dog Night song still playing when Roger Workman was taking his final ride up to the mesa to drink beers with his son.
His son, a weird kid who kept seeking his dead mom on the island, who had by now turned into a weird adult, had other plans.
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