i don't agree with any of you lol. i am excited about finding out who ben is really fighting. i agree that a lot of the mystery is gone though, and that the others suck more now than before. i'm annoyed by a few things. i thought the others had super fighting skills, ben certainly kicked sawyers ass although through a cage and with a stick, but he could at least have tried to resist jack when he attacked him, couldn't he? and why did he show up alone? i love the ben character but i guess that's just me
next season won't switch to present time with flash-backs to island time. it will still be all about what happens on the island, with flashbacks and some flash forwards.
remember that there are lots of ways for them to tweak it. charlie asked desmond in the finale if he had any flashes prior to dying, and desmond hadn't. i think that was sort of a mini-cliffhanger, what happens to desmonds visions now that charlie is dead. if they continue and he can still see the future, maybe one day he learns how to control himself more and how to change things and prevent everything. there are several turns they may take. maybe the flashbacks start a new plotline where they try to find a way to get back on the island, and then in the series finale, you see how they got rescued in island-time, and how they found their way back to the island in flash-forward time, with maybe some mind-boggling or super-deep flashbacks in between, like a double or triple super episode. i'm gonna give this a shot before i get let down.
as far as ben's stature with the others is concerned, in the past few episodes i think they have made it appear is if though ben is slipping and losing his people, and maybe he is a little bit, but the producers also angled it so that it seemed like alpert was fed up with ben and tried to double cross him, but in the finale i actually got the sense that he was more worried about ben than anything. i don't think ben's done at all. and since jack learned that ben didn't really kill jin, sayid and bernard, but that jack and his people killed ten others, i don't see why they need to keep him. the whole reason why jack took him was because he killed his friends.