Jordan and I are back for another give and take on the most recent episode of LOST. We’ve gone back to a written exchange for just for this week…
LOST 5.10, He's Our You
So Jordan, did you see Sayid pulling the trigger on young Ben coming, or like me, were you not completely unprepared for it? That’s one thing I love about this show. I am so into it, and so drawn in to the characters and the story that I often don’t think ahead to what might be coming, I just let it happen. This seems like one of those times, where if I would have thought about it, I might have guessed that Sayid was about to shoot Ben. But as it was, I had no idea.
I don’t know what you mean by “not completely unprepared”, you sound like a politician.
anyways, it was definitely a shock to me. i never saw it coming even after he said the line about being a killer. it reminded me of the scene where michael shoots ana lucia.
Yeah, the “not completely unprepared” was a typo. I are a good writer. But yeah, back to the scene…my first thought in seeing it was that Ben was dead. I believed Sayid had done what Faraday said could not happen. But…then I thought that the island would not let Ben die. And then I remembered: wait a second. This already happened. We KNOW for a fact that Ben has to survive this because he DOES. How does a professional killer not kill Ben at point blank range? I don’t know. Maybe we can blame that on the island. But the bottom line is: Sayid always shot Ben in 1977, and Ben always survived it, right?
That’s what I’m sticking to. but i wouldn’t be shocked if sayid did actually change the past. the show has set up these rules about the time traveling and I’m definitely more on the side that this always happened. but I’m kind of waiting for the show to break these rules that they have set up. another interesting theory is that ben died when sayid shot him and that he has always been dead since that time. but he is running around like how christian or yemi does. some lines that hint toward this are when widmore says to ben “i know who you are, what you are.” and also when miles is trying to get ben to give him 3.2 million dollars he says “do not treat me like i’m one of them, like I don’t know who you are, or what you can do” and as we know miles can talk to dead people, so maybe he knows that ben is dead. this seems like a stretch, even for this show. but ya never know.
Yeah, that does seem like a stretch. Especially with Ben moving back and forth off the island and catching beatings and whatnot. If he is dead, then what’s the difference between a living person and a dead person? Also, this is random, but since you mentioned Miles asking for 3.2 Million dollars last season, I’ll mention it. The writers have said that we will learn more about that specific request before the end of this season. So I thought that was interesting. I hope that means we’ll get a full backstory on Miles.
But back to Sayid…what he did in the last episode has been talked about for a long time as one of the biggest hypotheses associated with time travel: would you go back and kill young Hitler if you could? I think the writers have put a unique spin on the question however, because I think what we saw wasn’t Sayid killing young Hitler, it was Sayid creating young Hitler. The writers did a good job convincing us that Ben’s life on the island was awful, and that it was so bad that it turned him into the lying manipulator that he became. But I think now we’ve seen the most traumatic experience of Ben’s life. He did a good deed and broke a stranger out of prison, only to be shot because of it.
yeah if ben survives he is definitely gonna be pissed. i thought about that too how sayid tried to kill ben but probably just gave him a reason to be evil instead. not that ben is really all that evil. its interesting to note however that ben thinks he has been shot by a hostile, but this doesn’t seem to dissuade him from joining up with them in about 15 years.
Wow, you still refuse to call Ben completely evil. I love it. (and for the record, I’m not fully convinced Ben is evil, I’m just heavily leaning that way.) One thing I’ve read that’s important to remember in regards to Sawyer’s allegiance to the DI over Sayid. It’s not just that he’s saving his own skin, I think he might feel more connected to the DI at this point. As viewers of LOST, we’ve seen 3 years of Sawyer-Sayid interactions and only 3 episodes of Sawyer and the Dharma Initiative. But in the reality of the show, Sawyer only spent 3 months with Sayid, and now he’s spent 3 YEARS with the DI. Even though his existence there is based on a lie and crazytime travel, it makes it plausible that he has more allegiance to his DHARMA friends than to Sayid.
yeah he for sure was loving his life before jack and co. showed up. he had a nice cushy job, he was well respected, and he had a hot girlfriend that he was “playing house” with like he wanted to do with kate originally. not to mention since he killed the real sawyer what worries can he possibly have? the only thing is that he has a little daughter running around the states.
So, the flaming bus that young Ben used as a diversion kept Kate from telling Sawyer exactly why she came back to the island. Do you think she was going to say it was him? Or do you think there’s something else: Jack, Aaron, Vincent? Or maybe she came back because she’s always wanted to be a mechanic and had a premonition that she’d be given a grease monkey job by a now-defunct Dharma community 30 years into the past. Or not.
they made it feel like she was going to say sawyer. but i dont buy it.
i think it has something to do with aaron, maybe she wants to find claire or christian or something.
Here’s a random theory I read and liked: Remember early in season 3 when Ben took Kate to the beach before bringing her to the cages. Did we ever find out what they talked about there? She seemed pretty disturbed, didn’t she. Any chance he told her something like “If I ever go missing and my dad is looking for me, I’ve been shot in the jungle.” Pretty far fetched…but would be cool.
well we get to see about five minutes of conversation between them and then it goes to commercial. but i got the feeling that after the last line that ben says there probably wasn’t much convo being made. i do like the idea of ben telling someone in 2004 about him being shot in 1977, but that particular situation doesn’t make sense to me.
See, I don’t even remember anything about that conversation. I didn’t even remember them showing it. I need to go back and watch that I guess.
Anything else about the episode worth talking about?
sayid took some lsd, that was pretty interesting. and everything he says while tripping was pretty cool. telling them he is from the future and that they are all going to die. then he comes two seconds from blowing Sawyer’s cover, which i get the feeling is going to happen sooner or later. another interesting note is that the family of Peter Avellino hires Illana to bring Sayid to Guam since he murdered mr avellino last season. this is the way that sayid happens to be on ajira 316. so did ben knowingly have sayid kill peter ave just so these chain of events would occur and sayid would end up on the plane? was it just coincidence? did ben hire Illana and tell her to make up the story of peter ave? and if she is just some bounty hunter, does that give her the authority to bring someone on a plane in handcuffs?
also i loved how in this episode ben made sayid realize that he had been willingly killing people and not just doing it because ben told him to. ben even leave santo domingo and acts surprised that sayid doesn’t want to kill the guy outside hurley’s mental institute. and apparently that was enough to convince sayid to come back to america and kill the guy.
Yeah, what was Ben’s motives for having Sayid kill all those people? Was it to set him up for an easy deportation to ensure he’s on Flight 316? Was it just to get him back for shooting him 30 years earlier? The interesting thing if it was the former, is that Ben was maneuvering to get Sayid back to the island to ensure that Sayid would be able to shoot him 30 years earlier. That’s some serious dedication to preserving the space-time contimuum. Oh, and I agree that Sawyer’s cover is going to be blown soon.
Finally, some quick notes from last week’s LOSTcast that we recorded:
+ turns out Rebecca Mader wasn’t the one responsible for changing the script. Damon and Carlton apologized profusely for blaming her once they remembered the actual story. The screw up was a result of someone else changing the script to match Mader’s birthday, and them not catching the implications.
+ I guess we know now that it wasn’t Sayid who gave Ben that nasty beating before boarding flight 316. Must have been Desmond or Penny who gave it to him, but what happened to them?
+ Both clues that I listed as proof that we COULD be in an alternate timeline are also pretty debunkable. Yes, the numbers were overheard on the radio as 316 crashed, but that might just mean that sometime between 2004 and 2007 someone went back to the tower and turned the broadcast back on (i dont think they were taped over, just turned off). And also the Processing station was at least “a shuttle ride” away from New Otherton. So like you were saying, it’s possible that the Others just left that building alone.
one last thing that we were going to mention if we did this over the phone. i am packing up my belongings and moving to hawaii on 9/9/09. i will be living on o’ahu which is where Lost is filmed pretty much exclusively. is it coincidence that i just happen to be moving to the island and will be living there during the filming of the last season? thats for you to decide. but just know this, my plane, which will be landing on the very same island that flight 815 (crash) landed on, is flight number 851. and no i wasn’t aware of this before i booked the flight.
Wow! 815…851, that’s nuts. What will be even crazier for you is when you get on the plane in L.A. and the pilot says, welcome aboard Flight 851 to Sydney” because I secretly changed your itinerary. That’s going to blow your mind.
Seriously though, we’ll talk some more about your impending move to Hawaii in our next LOSTcast, which we can hopefully record following the airing of Episode 5.11 “Whatever Happened, Happened”, which airs tonight.
Namaste…