Today I woke up, flew to San Diego, rented a car, and drove up a mountain. Upon arriving here, the first thing I did was figure out how I was going to watch Lost (well, not quite — I did take care of some pretty key responsibilities first). Josh let me know via email that this episode was going to “make [me] crazy” and that I was going to lose my MIND, so of course I watched it as soon as I could.
From the moment I saw the “Previously . . . on Lost!” scenes, I know I was going to get another episode based around Sayid, my favorite character. On the other hand, I kind of remembered what used to happen on Lost when a character would get a flashback episode. For most of this episode, I thought Sayid was going to end up dead at the end of it. I really enjoyed how the first scene of him growing up in Iraq tried to trick us into thinking he was the sweet, gentle boy, sort of like the childhood scenes of Eko. But, of course, Sayid is a total torturer from the very beginning. And Ben clearly is a sociopath from a very young age. Kind of a match made in heaven!
I really enjoyed this episode, but as far as “clues” it was a little bit light. The only thing that really jumped out at me was Radzinsky’s threat to “call Ann Arbor” and get them involved. The DeGroots, the founders of the Dharma Initiative, are, in the backstory of Lost, researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where Pierre Chang is also an astrophysicist. Maybe, then, this was a hint that we could eventually get some more info on this side of things. And I think we got our answer about how Sayid ended up on the plane: Ben used his knowledge to have Sayid taken into custody by a private bounty hunter. This also explains why Sayid didn’t seem too shocked when we first saw him on Ajira 316 a couple of episodes ago: he knows full well that there are no coincidences in the Lost universe, and that Ben probably had something to do with what was going on. Otherwise, though, this episode was fairly straightforward.
Until the last ten seconds, of course. But I don’t really know what to say about that! Actually, I was here at the observatory when they aired the episode where Locke was shot by Ben, and fell into the ditch filled with Dharma bodies, so to say the least I’m not really convinced that shooting someone and leaving them for dead really cuts it on Lost Island. This is especially true since we have every reason to believe that Ben is in Jacob’s favor when he’s a young guy. Without having any way at all of knowing what’s going to happen next, I really don’t want to drive myself crazy trying to figure out what’s going on. Generally, though, I tend to agree with Faraday: “What happened, happened.” If I had to guess right now — let’s say Sayid was holding a gun to my head — I would say that young Ben has to survive, since we have Old Ben. That doesn’t mean he needs to be totally unscathed, but I do expect that Sayid didn’t just completely thwart the space-time continuum along with Stephen Hawking. And we have to admit it would be pretty amazing if Ben shows up, as Henry Gale, in 2004, knowing full well that Sayid Jarrah tried to kill him when he was a little boy.
It’s fully possible, of course, that this is completely wrong, and that the past has been changed. After all, Ben referred to his father in the past tense when he went to see Sayid (“I really hated him”) and if I didn’t have the bias of wanting to believe that the past couldn’t change, I could totally get on board with the idea that Ben set that van, full of his father, on fire, even though we know that Ben in the usual timeline doesn’t kill Roger until 1992. If this show just changed the timeline, it totally changed the game.
I’m exhausted and tomorrow night I stay up all night, so I’m going to sign off for now and probably won’t have a chance to do much more than this for this week. Luckily, it was more of a character-driven filler episode than a real plot developer. Let me know if you find or think of anything!
As a closing note, I would like to point out to the ads for The Haunting in Connecticut that the movie you’re promoting is not, in fact, “based on a true story.” For the love of Mike.