I wasn’t sure I was going to write about last night’s episode of Lost, but Anne Palmer Johnson implied on Facebook that I’d have something to say, so here it goes: my haphazard reaction to “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham.” (By the way, I wrote this without looking at Seth’s coverage of the episode, as an experiment to see what we’d each glom onto, but I’m off to read it now.)

This is about Lost, so you know there be spoilers here.

First off: I dig the hell out of Terry O’Quinn. I’ve been a fan of his since, I think, his portrayal of Howard Hughes in my beloved The Rocketeer. O’Quinn’s ability to carry Locke from confidence to defeat and back and forth is fantastic.

This episode sure wastes no time, opening as it does with the resurrection of John Locke that we were sure was coming anyway. I would’ve thought they’d hold that for that oomph later on. Playing that card now, though, may have been the best way to make it a surprise — this was maybe the only time I wouldn’t have expected it. (See my old post, “And Bring That Corpse With You,” for a bit about the symmetry of Locke’s return to the Island.)

Doing it this way also immediately reconnects us with Locke and the show itself, by framing the story in a familiar way: The episode begins and ends on the Island (at an unspecified time), making the story of Jeremy Bentham into a variation on the old-fashioned Lost flashback.

The newly accelerated pace of the show packs all (?) of Locke’s efforts as Bentham into a single episode, too, which is pretty remarkable. You could easily get a few hours of television out of all his travels from the Island to Tunisia to Manhattan to LA, on any other show.

This is a great example of something that I dig about Lost, but which I don’t think we’ve talked about. The consequences of Locke’s actions off the Island — and his death — wouldn’t ordinarily be worth the multiple episodes of examination and fallout that we’ve seen it given already. But Lost’s time-twisting turns consequence into suspense by showing us the effects of his actions first, then building up (and back) to the actual actions.

I’m a big pedantic jerk when it comes to the difference between plot and story, and I won’t bore you with that side of me here and now, but I’ll say this: Lost is a great example of how separating plot from story can change what your audience finds engrossing. If we’d seen Locke show up and ask everyone to go back to the Island, and then watched Jack unravel, it might have been dramatic but it wouldn’t have had the mystery that Lost fans love. By showing us the elements out of order, the writers tap into that kind of provocative mystery that surrounds the question, “What did he do?” That the answer is almost never as satisfying as the question is besides the point — it makes the question.

When Ben shows up in Locke’s hotel room, we get a double dose of surprises — first Locke doesn’t kill himself as we were told, then we find out Ben’s been lying again — so that the actual performance of Locke’s actions is still dramatic, even though we (thought we) knew what happened.

The big lesson I’m taking away from this, though, is just how valuable the character of Ben is to this kind of storytelling. He’s a consummate liar, with mixed or hidden motives, and that makes this kind of storytelling possible. Without Ben’s methods and style (e.g., from a previous episode, “He didn’t come to see me. I went to see him.”) we’d be left with just one more character saying “I don’t want to talk about it” or “There isn’t time to explain! Let’s go!”

I think the fact that Ben knows things, but lies about them, is what makes him such a popular character. Whenever he speaks, we’re engaged in a game to guess what’s true — he’s a untrustworthy sphinx. That’s much more satisfying than the emotional withholding of information that everyone else does. (See Kate’s refusal to talk about Aaron, Sawyer’s refusal to talk about seeing Kate with Claire in the past, or Locke’s refusal to talk about the light from the Hatch.)

The issue when splitting plot from story, like this, is where to put the audience relative to the characters. In, say, Pulp Fiction, we know things about the bloody fate of John Travolta’s character that he doesn’t when we spend time with him at the end of the film, loading that story with dramatic irony. Vega’s role in the hold-up at the diner is part of a different story from that of Bruce Willis’ fugitive boxer, but they’re both part of the same plot of Pulp Fiction.

On Lost, we know things about almost every character that they keep secret from each other. Ben knew the truth about Locke’s death, but we didn’t because, for that bit of information, we were positioned with Jack and Friends rather than Ben. We know about Ben’s birth — and, thus, that he’s doing some kind of lying when Jack asks him how we can read (at a time like this) and Ben replies, “Because my mother taught me.” — even though almost no other characters do. We’re with Locke when he sees the light from the Hatch and thinks it means something, not with Sawyer when Locke finally tells him about it. But we weren’t with Locke when he looked “into the eye” of the Island, so it creates a mystery.

If we were just to watch Lost straight through, following one character after another from the first flashback to the final episode, it would be the same story but it wouldn’t be the same show.

Anyway. I liked last night’s episode.