Ben and Locke: The Manipulator and the Believer

There's a moment in Season 5, in a dingy hotel room off the grid, where Ben Linus strangles John Locke to death. He does it after talking Locke down from suicide, after extracting one last piece of useful information, after pretending, for the hundredth time, to be Locke's ally. It's the most Ben Linus thing that has ever happened on the show: save a man's life so you can take it yourself, on your own terms, for your own reasons. And it's the most John Locke thing, too: to die trusting the person who has been lying to him from the very first day they met. Their relationship is LOST's darkest love story, a connection built on jealousy so deep it became its own kind of devotion.

The Beginning

They meet in Season 2, and the power dynamics are wrong from the start. Ben is captured in a net, calling himself Henry Gale, pretending to be a lost balloonist. Locke is the one holding the gun. This should give Locke the advantage, and for about fifteen minutes of screen time, it does. But Ben Linus doesn't need a gun to control a room. He needs a conversation.

What Ben recognizes in Locke, almost immediately, is the thing that makes Locke both powerful and exploitable: his need to be special. Locke walked again on this Island. He heard the whispers. He felt the Island choose him. And he needs someone to confirm it, to tell him it's real, that he's not deluding himself. Ben sees that hunger and understands it perfectly, because Ben has the same hunger. He just learned, decades ago, to hide it behind strategy.

Their early interactions in the Hatch are a masterclass in manipulation. Ben, locked in the armory, systematically dismantles Locke's confidence through a series of careful, measured conversations. He doesn't threaten. He doesn't demand. He asks questions designed to make Locke doubt himself, doubt the button, doubt his own importance. And it works, because Ben is targeting the wound that never healed: the part of Locke that spent his entire pre-Island life being told he was ordinary.

The most chilling thing about Ben's manipulation of Locke is that it's not purely strategic. There's genuine fascination there, maybe even envy. Ben has led the Others for years. He's the Island's chosen representative, or so he's told himself. And then this bald man in a wheelchair walks off a crashed plane and the Island heals him, speaks to him, reveals itself to him in ways it never did for Ben. Locke is the thing Ben has always wanted to be: a natural. And Ben hates him for it.

The Conflict

Their dynamic across Seasons 3 and 4 is a slow, escalating war between two men who both believe the Island belongs to them. Ben operates through information, leverage, and the carefully maintained fiction that he knows more than he does. Locke operates through conviction, stubbornness, and the equally maintained fiction that faith is enough.

Ben's strategy with Locke is consistent across every season: give him enough validation to keep him engaged, then pull the rug. He takes Locke to see Jacob's cabin and lets him hear the voice, then dismisses the experience. He challenges Locke to kill his father as a test of leadership, knowing Locke can't do it, then watches Locke find a workaround through Sawyer. Every interaction follows the same pattern: elevate, undermine, repeat. Ben keeps Locke in a permanent state of almost-special, always reaching for confirmation that Ben will never fully give.

The reason this works, the reason Locke keeps coming back, is that Ben is the only person on the Island who takes Locke's spiritual experience seriously. Jack dismisses it. Sawyer mocks it. Even the other Others treat Locke with suspicion. But Ben engages with it, argues about it, competes for it. He's the worst possible validator, but he's the only one Locke has.

Their power struggle reaches a turning point in "The Man Behind the Curtain," when Ben takes Locke to Jacob's cabin. Something happens in that cabin, something Ben didn't expect. The room shakes. A voice says "Help me." And for one terrifying moment, Ben is not in control. Locke heard Jacob. Ben, who has been pretending to commune with Jacob for years, may never have heard him at all. The look on Michael Emerson's face in that scene is one of the great performances in the show's history: rage and fear and humiliation compressed into a single expression.

Ben shoots Locke and leaves him in the DHARMA mass grave. It's not a strategic move. It's a tantrum. The man who controls everything just lost control of the one thing that matters most to him, his relationship with the Island, and he responds with violence because he has no other tool left.

The Breaking Point

Locke survives the shooting, because of course he does, the Island isn't done with him yet. But his survival only deepens Ben's resentment. Every time Locke should die and doesn't, it confirms what Ben fears most: that Locke really is special, and Ben really isn't.

Their final confrontation happens off the Island, in the hotel room, and it's structured like a therapy session gone horribly wrong. Locke is suicidal. He's failed to convince any of the Oceanic Six to return. He's paralyzed again. The Island that healed him has abandoned him to the real world, where he's just a sad man in a wheelchair with a story nobody believes.

Ben arrives and does what Ben always does: he talks. He validates. He tells Locke he matters, that his mission is important, that he can't give up. He physically stops Locke from hanging himself. For one brief, disorienting moment, it looks like genuine compassion. Like Ben, stripped of his Others and his Island and his power games, might actually care about this man he's spent years tormenting.

Then Locke mentions Eloise Hawking, and Ben's face changes. The information he needed has been delivered. He wraps the cord around Locke's neck and pulls. "I'll miss you, John," he says, and the awful thing is that he probably means it. Ben's relationship with Locke is the most honest thing in his life, even if that honesty is mostly composed of violence and jealousy.

Locke's murder is the act that defines both characters. For Locke, it's the final confirmation of a lifetime of being used: by his father, by the Island, by everyone who saw his faith as a resource to be extracted. For Ben, it's the point of no return, the crime so large that everything after it becomes about whether atonement is possible.

What It Means

Season 6 transforms their relationship into something neither of them intended. Locke is dead, genuinely dead, and the thing walking around in his body is the Man in Black, the smoke monster, the Island's oldest prisoner using Locke's face and memories as a costume. Ben doesn't know this at first. He follows "Locke" because he's been conditioned to follow, to position himself next to power. But when he learns the truth, something shifts.

Ben's realization that he murdered Locke for nothing, that the Man in Black manipulated him into killing the one person who might have actually deserved to lead - is the beginning of his redemption arc. It doesn't excuse the murder. LOST is careful about that. But it gives Ben something he's never had before: genuine remorse. Not strategic remorse, not "I'm sorry because it's useful," but the sick, private recognition that he destroyed something irreplaceable out of jealousy.

The flash-sideways gives them a coda that earns every painful moment that preceded it. In the sideways world, Ben is a high school teacher and Locke is a substitute teacher in a wheelchair. Ben advocates for Locke, helps him, treats him with kindness. It's a small, quiet correction: the version of their relationship that might have existed if Ben hadn't been consumed by envy and Locke hadn't been consumed by need.

And then comes Ben's choice. When Hurley invites him into the church, into the light, into whatever comes after the flash-sideways, Ben says no. He's not ready. He needs more time. He stays behind, in the space between, and the last person he speaks to is Locke. "I'm sorry for what I did to you," he says. "I was selfish and jealous." And Locke forgives him. Of course Locke forgives him. Forgiving people who hurt him is the most John Locke thing there is.

Ben's choice to stay behind is the most theologically interesting moment in the finale. It's not punishment. Nobody is keeping him out. He's choosing to not yet accept grace, because he doesn't believe he's earned it. The man who spent his entire life pretending to have a relationship with the divine is, in the end, the one who takes it most seriously. He knows what forgiveness means, and he knows he's not there yet.

Their relationship is LOST's argument that the people who hurt us most are often the people who understand us best. Ben knew Locke better than anyone, knew his wounds, his hunger, his magnificent, exploitable faith. He used that knowledge to destroy Locke, and then spent the rest of eternity trying to deserve the forgiveness Locke gave him freely. It's not a love story in any conventional sense. But it might be the most honest relationship the show ever told: two broken men, one who believed too easily and one who couldn't believe at all, circling each other until one of them finally learned to say he was sorry and mean it.