Chicken killer, Qu'est-ce que c'est...
I love Sayid episodes... Naveen Andrews really shines when he gets his time.. probably one of the most underrated actors on the show... he really brings the substance to the material... so let's get started...
It turns out Sayid is a natural born killer... he lured that chicken to it's doom, instead of watching his brother unwillingly do it...Much like Eko, when he was a boy.... We saw Eko's fate play out...Old Smokey gave him the business... I think that had more to do with the actor no longer wanting to be on the show...if you'll recall Eko's story, he sought redemption once his brother was killed... then later he rescinded and basically spat in the Smoke monsters face, saying he did nothing wrong..wrong answer.. I don't think Sayid wants to be a killer but there he is.... but it's definitely more of a burden he's regretful of, than a desire to be evil...some people are just good at what they do, you know?
Speaking of people good at their jobs, you have to hand it to the casting directors on this show...
could this little kid be creepier??? I'm not even joking when I say that this young actor will probably grow up and look like THIS exactly...
I re-watched the episode from last year, where Ben goes to see Widmore. The best line of dialogue was Widmore saying: Don't you look at me with those eyes, boy!
Which is just further proof that Ben has creepy eyes..
Moving on....
Ooohhh wiitccheeeyy woman...see how high she flies.....
Now we know Ilana's back story: She's full blast, Dog the Bounty Hunter style!!... although I can't really endorse her methods...think about how many skeevy dudes she's had to kiss to get her way... yuck... anyhoo, she's working for the family of the man Sayid killed on the golf course last year, while he was under the employment of Ben... She was going to take him back to Guam, which explains how they came to be on the Ajira 316 flight... coincidence, plain and simple... at least I'm going to leave it at that for now... why look for trouble where there isn't any?
Bottom line, she said she didn't know Ben Linus but Sayid gave her a pretty good synopsis... that's the kind of information she'll be holding on to when she comes across Ben on the Island.... remember that last we saw Ben, Locke was standing over him at the infirmary...we'll assume that Ben is there recovering from the concussion that Sun gave him with that boat oar...
Let's get some of the remnants of last week out of the way...
Hurley lets the cat out of the bag in regards to Juliet and Sawyer cohabiting to Kate...Jack sits in on it and just takes it all in... Hurley has a way of putting things that keep him as the voice of the audience... He tells Kate that Sawyer and Juliet are together, "you know, like you and Jack were"... wow... so just in case you start feeling sorry that Kate is missing the Sawyer boat, you are brought back to the realization that Jack and Kate were in fact happily together for a while...
The further continuation of last week was Jack's new found greater purpose and allowing things that are not in his control to come to pass as they should... when Hurley asked Jack what he was going to do about Sayid, Jack said he was going to let Sawyer handle it and Hurley was like, really? As in, that's not the old Jack I know!.... something tells me that Jack is a little too "Serenity now" and the lid is going to blow off the pot soon... we'll have to wait and see on that one...
Getting back to business.. The title of tonight's episode was "He's Our You", which was a veiled reference to the torturer Oldham, played by Larry, of the "my name is Larry, this is my brother Darryl and this is my other brother Darryl" fame... HBO subscribers will recognize him as Farnum from Deadwood... you may not have recognized him because he wasn't letting the 4 letter words fly last night... a much more subdued Hippie style truth getter...
Sayid sang like a canary, which while it was all truth, HAD to be really freaky for Horace and the gang... "You are all going to die" is not the message you are looking for from your hostage...couple that with some maniacal laughter and you got yourself a new Joker, Batman...
It was a good thing Sawyer changed his name to LaFluer, right?? And personally, after getting to know the character these past 2 weeks, I'm kind of looking forward to Radzinsky offing himself in the Swan station in a couple of years...that dude is off the chain....
So Ben decides that it's time to run away and he's going to use Sayid to get him there.. and once again we are introduced to potential evil and it comes in the form of a hoodie...
You may recall that when Charlie was feeling particularly evil, he would throw the hood up on his sweatshirt... then a couple of weeks ago, Locke had a hood on when he revealed himself to the Ajira 316ers... then he promptly took it off... just like Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi... This is just the writers way of paying tribute to their own geeky history...
But it does lead me into the book that Ben gave Sayid to read:
A Separate Reality: by Carlos Castaneda.
In the book Castaneda continues his description of his apprenticeship under the tutelage of Don Juan. The main focus of the book centered around Don Juan's attempts at getting Carlos to See, a practice best described as, in Castaneda's own words, "perceiving energy directly as it flows through the universe".
Whoa... so think about it this way, Star Wars fans...suppose Jacob is the Emperor and Ben is Anakin Skywalker...eventually he will become Darth Vader... If this book isn't a direct corollary to this theory then it certainly should be...
So the question becomes, if you could go back in time, would you kill Hitler? Or Darth Vader? Well Sayid would...or he would at least try..
But remember: Darth Vader ended up returning to the right side of the Force and destroying the Emperor. Had he been killed by Obi Wan, the Emperor would have just found someone else to run the show with him...
So did Sayid kill Ben? I'm going with no, but that's because I have a theory on the "whatever happened, happened" reasoning Faraday gave about the past.
Don't think about the 815ers going back in time...put that aside for a second and look at this show and all that we've seen through the eyes of Benjamin Linus:
He came to the Island as a boy. Within a year, he had had enough of his drunk dad and he ran away. He met Richard and Richard said be patient. So Ben was patient. During that time, Jim LaFluer became the head of security and one day brought a perceived "hostile" into Dharmaville. This hostile is Sayid Jarrah. Sayid shoots young Ben in the chest at point blank range.
Now here's the leap of faith you need to take with me: Ben lives.
It's really not a leap... I suppose you could argue that if Ben dies, another "Ben" could take his place... But he doesn't... we see Ben as an older man, who killed the DI and assumed leadership of the Others. The same Ben who meets Sayid in the holding cell at the Swan station, when Sayid comes to torture him and get the truth. Make sense?
It's quite a story telling device and it shows that the writers have really thought this out...let's explain it this way:
Ben meets Sayid in 1977 for the first time. Sayid has a "history" with Ben based on his interaction with him from 2004-2008.
Sayid meets Ben for the first time in 2004. Ben has a "history" with Sayid based on his interaction with him in 1977.
Brilliant!!
And it explains why Ben never really feared for his life when he was beaten down so many times.. He knew that he would be alive in 2008... imagine if a person came up to you and said "In 2012, you smack me in the face and call me a liar", you could look at that 2 different ways: you could be like "why did I smack that guy?" OR you could be like "holy moly! I'm still going to be alive in 2012, so I'm going to go skydiving and not worry about plummeting to my death!"
Right???
Because if you subscribe to the "whatever happened, HAPPENED" then it wouldn't matter that the guy came from the future and told you what you were going to do. If it happened, it happened.
So this explains how Ben came to know so much about the 815ers. He grew up with them in essence. Once he puts it all together, he'll be able to use that knowledge to his advantage and become the leader of the Others.
Now what I like to think about in the pack and play while I'm pretending to nap is this: Ben once told Juliet, she belonged to him. We've seen him go to great lengths to get her to love him. Previously we thought these were really weird, mommy issues. But what if Ben and Juliet somehow end up together after Ben gets a little older? It's really not a stretch...perhaps Kate and Sawyer skip out on Juliet. Ben sees this, stores that info away for the future in which he puts Kate and Sawyer into a bear cage together. It certainly would explain the painting that hangs in 2004 Ben's house, of what appears to be Juliet holding a gerbil...
OK.. that's enough from me... this is slightly mind blowing but it opens up so many more mysteries... the easiest way to start looking at this show is to think about how we, the audience, were inserted into this story right in the middle of it, with the 815 crash. While it may seem logical to start the story there, we are seeing that it's really just the middle...
Sorry if I blew any minds..
L Prez OUT
