Season 3 / Episode 5 – Eko sees his dead brother walking the jungle. Eko confronts his brother and his past, and insists on having done his best with the life he was given. Eko meets the black cloud, is tossed around like a rag die, and dies in Locke’s arms. Locke, Desmond, Sayid, and two extras see another station via television monitor. A man with an eye patch covers the camera with his hand. Jack is in the middle of some sort of game between Juliet and Ben. Ben supposedly has a tumor against his spine and has captured Jack in order to have an operation. Ben admits to having planned to break Jack down in order to get Jack to want to do the operation. Juliet uses trickery to pass a message to Jack without being discovered by anyone monitoring.
Juliet asks Jack to do the surgery and kill Ben, making it look like an unfortunate accident during surgery. We don’t trust them. It’s all a head game. For all we know, those x-rays of the spinal tumor don’t even belong to Ben. That’s what the LOST writers have done to us. Nothing is safe anymore. No assumption is obviously true. But just when you expect to find an even greater conspiracy, the mystery is gone and the truth was pretty close to the appearance. Jack is getting played, that’s all there is to it. Sawyer and Kate are probably getting played too. These Others are so impossible to figure out. They could be from any number of explanable origins.
Eko was one of my favorite characters, and he will be missed. But with visions of the dead traipsing about the island, perhaps we haven’t seen the last of him… LOST has set a new precedent for television quality. The actors, sets, dialogue, and storyline are so far superior to the television shows of 10 years ago. It’s like getting to watch a movie in 40 minute segments once a week, only the movie lasts a little longer than two hours. When it’s all said and done, I will probably purchase each LOST season on DVD so I can watch them in sequence without waiting. There are very few television series out there that I would purchase on DVD.