US Air Date: 09/05/2007

Writers: Drew Goddard & Liz Sarnoff

Director: Bobby Roth

This episode tells Ben Linus’s history and starts off with shots of his mother giving birth to him in woods near Portland and then dying on a road-side. It cuts to Ben meeting Locke as he arrives carrying his father’s body into the Others’ camp. Locke demands Ben take him to meet Jacob and he agrees after Locke savagely beats Mikhail. As they travel, Ben recalls his childhood on the island, which he and his father came to because of the Dharma Initiative. During a trip into the jungle, he meets a ‘hostile’ who he bonds with. Once at Jacob’s house, Locke grows enraged when Ben tells him Jacob is in the seemingly empty chair next to him. He hears a voice say “help me” and switches on a torch, which Ben had forbade him from doing, and things suddenly start to be thrown around the room. Despite seeing the shadowy outline of a man, Locke accuses Ben of faking his presence and leaves for camp. In a final flashback we see Ben gas his father, who he has always blamed him for his mother’s death, and go back to the barracks where he is greeted by Alpert and his men who are all protected by gas masks, making it clear he colluded with them. It ends with Ben admitting to Locke that he wasn’t born on the island and showing him a pit full of skeletons in Dharma outfits. He shoots Locke after telling him that he killed his own people because it was obvious they couldn’t get on with the natives. He demands to know what Jacob said and then leaves Locke, who has fallen into the pit, to die.