Lost 5.10: "He's Our You"

Episode: "He's Our You"

Hi everybody. Your regularly scheduled tour guide Schnaars is off attending a fancy advance screening of “A Haunting in Connecticut”, munching on lobster-flavored popcorn no doubt, so I'll be filling tonight for all your “Lost” related blogging needs.

The Happenings: This week we get the backstory on how Sayid found himself being led on to the fateful Ajira flight 316 in handcuffs. We open in Iraq with a young Sayid helping one of his friends by killing a chicken that his friend doesn't have the guts to. This ends up being a recurring theme for the episode- Sayid is a natural born killer and he has to accept his role as a killer as a kind of sacrifice for the good of others.

When we cut to 2007 Sayid, he gets a visit from Ben who tells him that Locke is dead and that he “thinks” he was murdered. He also mentions the men watching Hurley from outside the mental institute and tells Sayid that he was born to kill. I think we know how that ends up. Later we see Sayid at a bar, talking to a woman who he thinks is a prostitute but is actually a bounty hunter hired to escort him to Guam to face retribution for killing the man on the golf course in the Seychelles. Soon enough he's cuffed and being led to the Ajira flight 316 gate where he can effectively bug out at seeing the rest of the Oceanic 6 once again united by fate (or Ben, at least).

Now we're caught up with the present day story which, this being “Lost”, is actually 30 years in the past. Sayid is imprisoned in Dharma-ville under suspicion of being an Other... uh, Hostile and Sawyer... uh, LaFleur and the other O6 are trying to figure out how to break him loose while Young Ben wants Sayid to take him away from his abusive father and the patchuli stink of Dharma-ville to live the life of a Hostile. Despite Sawyer's best efforts the hippie-nazis drag Sayid to Oldham, a mad scientist/torturer who lives in a teepee and is played by none other than character actor fave William Sanderson. Soon Sayid is tripping balls and spilling the beans about everything he knows past, present and future.

This is enough to convince the Dharmites that Sayid has to be executed. Sawyer tries to help him to escape, but he refuses, claiming to have realised the reason he's come back to the island. It turns out that none other than Young Ben Linus who breaks Sayid loose. Before they make it to the Hostiles camp they run into Jin and in a shocking twist, Sayid accepts his fate as a killer and shoots Young Ben. Cue cliffhanger.

The Craziness: Other than the shock ending, this was a pretty straightforward episode without much craziness going on. Young Ben passes a Carlos Castenada book to Sayid. Castenada claimed to be educated in the ways of shamanism including the use of psychotropic plants like peyote.

The Verdict: A solid character episode in the mold of the first few seasons, catching us up on a character through flashbacks while advancing the story forward mostly by moving the pieces around. Next week it looks like we'll get caught up on Kate (oh boy) so I expect it'll be two weeks before we get any resolution on the ending.

The Wild Speculation: What is Ben's shooting going to do to the space-time continuum? If he's dead, all bets are off. I doubt it, though. It certainly looked like a shot to the heart but a dead Ben in 1977 would throw the whole show off course. People don't tend to stay dead on this island, anyway. This might put him in the category of Locke and Christian Shepherd as people who have died on the island and come back to life. Also of interest is that all this time adult Ben must have known that Sayid had tried/will try to kill him in the past/future. Whew, how does Schnaars do this every week?