Season 6, Episode 7:
Dr. Linus
Fleeing the carnage at the Temple, Ben runs through the jungle, scared and alone until he finally catches up with Ilana, Sun, Miles and Lapidus. He tells them that Sayid won't be joining them on account of having killed Dogen and Lennon, and convinces the group to go back to the survivors' camp.
Dr. Ben Linus, European History teacher, lectures his class about Napoleon's exile to the island of Elba. As the class is dismissed, Linus is summoned by Principal Reynolds note and told that he'll be supervising the after-school detentions all week rather than holding "History Club", an extracurricular study program. Ben is upset, because he wants to help those students that genuinely want to learn, but Reynolds thinks is a waste of time. In the staff room, Ben and Arzt, the science teacher, complain about how Reynolds cares more about the school's budget than the students. Locke, the substitute teacher, plants the idea in Ben's head that maybe he should be the principal.
As Miles asks Ben about the Smoke Monster, Ilana suddenly starts questioning Ben about how Jacob died. She gives Miles the bag of Jacob's ashes, he does a reading and confirms Ilana's suspicions that Ben was the one who killed Jacob. Ben protests his innocence, but no one believes him. After a night of hiking through the jungle, the group returns to the survivors' beach camp and scrounge for supplies while Ilana starts stripping some airplane wreckage for cabling. Ben tries to convince her that Miles isn't trustworthy, but she shrugs him off.
At home, Ben makes dinner for Roger, his sick and elderly father, while wondering out loud if he's a bigger loser than the kids he's babysitting in detention.
Ben: I know.
They're interrupted by a visitor: Alex Rousseau, one of Ben's History Club students. She's disappointed that History Club has to be cancelled for the week, since she's got a History test and was hoping for the tutoring, so Ben offers to meet her in the library before school and help her out.
As Ilana storms around the camp and picks up odd items, Sun asks her what's going on and finds out about the Candidates, and that Ilana was sent by Jacob to guard the remaining ones. In the jungle, Jack wakes Hurley and they head off towards the Temple. Hurley tries to stall and gives bad directions, remembering Jacob's warning, but they run into Richard and he insists on leading them. At the beach, Ben and Lapidus collect useful items and muse over how long it's been since Oceanic 815 crashed. Ben is very intrigued when Lapidus reveals that he was supposed to have been the pilot but "overslept" and missed the flight.
Just then, Ilana puts a gun to Ben's head, marches him to the survivors' graveyard, tethers him to a tree, gives him a makeshift shovel and orders him to dig his own grave.
Before school, Ben tutors Alex on European history. She's very bright, but extremely stressed out about the upcoming test and how it will affect her future, especially her dream to go to Yale. Ben is nothing but encouraging and offers to write her a great recommendation letter, but Alex says that it would need to come from a Yale graduate, and the only one she knows is Principal Reynolds. When she calls him a "pervert", Ben presses her for more information and learns that Reynolds and the school nurse have been having an affair, even having sex on school property. Ben promises not to tell anyone, but there's a look in his eye that's very reminiscent of the original Benjamin Linus...
Ben digs the grave as Ilana watches. When Miles comes by with some food, Ben reminds him of the attempted blackmail and offers to get Miles the $3.2 million in exchange for helping him escape. Miles refuses, since he can just as easily dig up Nikki and Paulo for the $8 million in diamonds they were buried with.
Richard leads Hurley and Jack through the jungle, while Hurley asks whether Richard's agelessness has anything to do with time travel, cyborgs or vampirism. Richard answers that he was "touched" by Jacob and given the "gift" of immortality, though he considers it more of a curse. They arrive at their destination: not the Temple, but the Black Rock. Richard reveals that everyone at the Temple is dead (though there was no sign of Kate or Sayid) and tells Hurley not to believe anything Jacob says before marching into the Black Rock to "die".
Arzt is marking papers when Ben arrives and asks him to access the school nurse's email account. Ben lays out his scheme to get proof of her affair with Principal Reynolds and use it to blackmail him for the job of school principal. Arzt agrees to help in exchange for a better parking spot and better teaching equipment, and admits he didn't have Ben pegged for such "a real killer".
On the Black Rock, Richard wanders through the hold and tells Jack that he's been to the Black Rock before, but only once. As Hurley follows them in, Richard grabs a stick of dynamite out of a crate and asks Jack to light the fuse on it: part of Richard's "gift" from Jacob is that he cannot kill himself, and if he lit the fuse himself, it simply would not work. Jack lights the fuse on the dynamite, sets it down in front of Richard… and then sits down across from him and says "Let's talk." Hurley freaks out and demands that Jack leave with him, but Jack is confident that nothing will happen. He tells Hurley to leave, and reluctantly, Hurley does so, leaving Jack and Richard alone with the dynamite.
Jack: Actually, I don't think either one of us is gonna die.
Richard: What makes you think that?
At the last moment, the fuse fizzles out and the dynamite doesn't explode. Convinced, Richard defers to Jack's idea of going back "to where we started". At the beach, Ben is still digging when the Man in Black arrives to speak to him, out of sight of Ilana and the others. He tells Ben about his plan to leave the Island, and offers to put Ben in charge of the Island once he's gone. He even gives Ben a chance to escape by freeing him from the tether, leaving a loaded rifle in the jungle and telling Ben to meet him on Hydra Island. Once the Man in Black has left, Ben makes a break for it into the jungle with Ilana hot on his heels.
Ben goes into Principal Reynolds office with copies of the incriminating emails and, in classic Benjamin Linus form, gives him an ultimatum: resign and write a recommendation to the school board that Ben take over the principal job, or else the emails go to the school board—ending his career—and to Reynolds' wife—likely ending his marriage. Reynolds, however, has an ultimatum of his own. He knows that Alex needs a recommendation letter in order to get into Yale, but if Ben goes through with his scheme, Reynolds will write a very scathing letter instead, effectively destroying Alex's future.
In the jungle, Ben finds the rifle left for him by the Man in Black and gets the drop on Ilana. He forces her to drop her gun and surrender, but he doesn't shoot her.
Ilana picks up her gun and walks back to camp. A moment later, Ben follows.
Ben goes into the principal's office. Reynolds isn't there, and Ben briefly toys with the name plaque on the desk when Alex enters. She wants to thank Reynolds for the glowing letter of recommendation he wrote, and wonders if Ben had anything to do with it (he says "no"). When Reynolds arrives, Ben slyly gets him to find someone else to cover detention, and tells Alex the History Club is back on. Outside, Arzt is livid that Ben didn't go through with the scheme and that he won't be getting a new parking space. Ben offers his own space to Arzt and, content, goes off to his next class.
Ilana and Ben return to the camp, and Sun accepts his offer to help her put up a tent. Lapidus builds a fire while Miles sits off on his own, inspecting a bag of diamonds. Ilana sheds a few tears as she mourns for Jacob. As this happens, Jack, Hurley and Richard arrive. The reunion is mostly joyous, but Richard and Ben both stand apart from the group. Observing all this is a submarine periscope, and a young sailor reports what he sees to his boss: Charles Widmore.
Tropes in this episode include:
- Armor-Piercing Response: When Ben claims that Jacob didn't even care about being killed, he is stunned into silence by Miles's response.Miles: No, he cared.
Ben: Excuse me?
Miles: Right up until the second the knife went through his heart, he was hoping he was wrong about you. I guess he wasn't. - Bad Liar: Far from being his usual Consummate Liar self, Ben makes an absolutely pathetic attempt at denying Miles's claim that he killed Jacob.Ben: [obviously feigned shock] What?! That's not true!
- Blessed with Suck: Richard states that his supposed "gift" of long life from Jacob's touch is actually a curse.
- Brick Joke: When Ben tries to bribe Miles to help him escape from Ilana, he tells him that he doesn't need his money, because he's right next to the graves of "a couple of jabronies [...] named Nikki and Paulo who got buried alive with eight million dollars in diamonds on top of them". At the end of the episode, Miles has the diamonds in his hands, having unceremoniously dug up Nikki and Paulo's graves offscreen.
- The Bus Came Back: The episode ends with the return of Charles Widmore, who has finally found the Island.
- Death Seeker: Richard goes into a Heroic BSoD after Jacob's death and the massacre at the Temple, believing that Jacob had no plan and his entire life has had no purpose, and asks Jack to help him kill himself.
- Dig Your Own Grave: Ilana forces Ben to dig his own grave while she plans to kill him for murdering Jacob.
- Dramatic Irony:
- Frank wonders how different his life would have been if he hadn't overslept and flew Flight 815, unaware that the pilot was killed by the Smoke Monster shortly after the crash.
- Roger laments that he and Ben didn't stay on the Island in the Flash-sideways, thinking their lives would have turned out better if they had. The audience knows that this is not the case, as they did exactly that in the original timeline, and it ended with Ben killing Roger.
- Foreshadowing: Richard mentions that he has been on the Black Rock once before.
- Heel–Face Turn: After a long slow burn redemption arc with two seasons of acting as a Token Evil Teammate, Ben finally truly becomes one of the survivors after he accepts responsibility for his past mistakes and Ilana forgives him for killing Jacob.
- I Cannot Self-Terminate: Richard reveals that part of Jacob's gift of long life is that he can't kill himself, and so asks Jack to do the job for him. He demonstrates this by dropping some dynamite in the Black Rock, which doesn't explode.
- In Spite of a Nail: As Ben points out, the fact that Lapidus overslept and missed Oceanic 815 when he was supposed to be flying it didn't stop him from ending up on the Island a few months later anyway (not to mention returning 3 years later).
- Ironic Echo: When Ben tells the group that Sayid killed Dogen and Lennon, he responds to Ilana asking if he's sure by saying "He was standing over their dead bodies with a bloody dagger so yeah, I'm pretty sure." Miles says the exact same thing a few minutes later when he tells Ilana that Ben killed Jacob.
- Moral Myopia: Ilana couldn't care less about the fact that Ben murdered John Locke, an innocent man she doesn't know, but tries to kill him in revenge for murdering Jacob, who she describes as the closest thing she had to a father.
- Morality Pet: Flash-sideways Ben is unwilling to ruin Alex's chances of getting in to Yale in pursuit of his own ambition to become principal.
- My Greatest Second Chance: Flash-sideways Ben manages to choose Alex over power, in contrast to how his original timeline counterpart let her die when given the same choice. Since the Flash-sideways is really the afterlife, Ben gets to correct the biggest mistake of his real life.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Hurley wisely decides not to stick around when Jack lights the dynamite and takes a seat next to Richard.
- Shout-Out: The Man in Black releases Ben from his manacles just like how the Emperor released Luke's handcuffs in Return of the Jedi.
- Skeptic No Longer: Jack finally embraces his destiny and the fact that he has been brought to the Island for a reason when he lights the fuse on a stick of dynamite and then just sits there, certain that it will not go off because the Island will not allow him to die that easily. He's right.
- Title Drop:Principal Reynolds: The history club isn't for them, it's for you. It makes you feel needed. Unfortunately, for now you're "needed" in detention. Thanks for your understanding, Linus.
Ben: It's Doctor Linus, actually.
