5.9 "Namaste" & 5.10 “He’s Our You”
Some of you might have noticed that I kind of dropped off the face of the earth last week. Sorry about that. Luckily, I have organized everything I had to say about last Wednesday’s filler transitional episode into a somewhat-not-really short series of bullet points that you may feel free to scroll through in order to get to the meatier stuff of last night’s whopper.
- If the trees sway mysteriously in the wind to the sounds of dragon bellies rumbling, you can bet the smokey monster is up to something naughty again.
- If a light turns on in an abandoned house while Frank and Sun are strolling through the old Dharma neighborhood at very reasonable hours of the night, you can bet it's Dr. Christian Shephard waiting around to relay another helpful message about how they’ve either gone about something the wrong way or have a long, long road ahead of them.
- “My” runway theory was totally on target. Now the question is, were Ben and the Others anticipating the Aljira plane when they built the runway, or did they have other plans for it?
- I about had a conniption fit when Jack bumped elbows with Dr. Pierre Chang, who assigned the other doctor with janitorial duties. Then I just laughed.
- Any fuzzy feelings I was harboring for Sawyer fizzled into thin air when he verbally assaulted Jack with some zingers about how he, all bespectacled and severely flat-ironed, is actually thinking things through, whereas Jack always just forged blindly ahead and got lots of people killed. Rude!
- Radzinsky, the original button pusher and designer of the Swan (a.k.a. the Hatch), gets extremely cranky when riffraff such as Sayid catch a glimpse of his precious model, which looks like someone built the Epcot Center out of toothpicks and then chopped the whole thing in half.
- Ben does not destroy all the Dharma folk after all—somewhere between now and his eventual turn to the dark side (which is ironic because the young impressionable version of him looks a wee bit like Harry Potter minus the forehead lightning), Charlotte makes her escape, presumably by leaving the island with her mother, and the baby whom I am currently assuming to be Miles is somehow granted a reprieve from death by poison gas as well.
Okay, let’s move on now, shall we? First thought: wow. “He’s Our You” feinted and then delivered quite a blow to the gut, with its deceptive interplay between Sayid’s moments of weakness/self-doubt and the subtle reminders that he is in fact a natural-born killer. (Take the opening scene, for instance, where I found myself hoping that the meek little chub of a boy would turn out to be Sayid, even though I knew full well that he was actually the one doing the neck-snapping, and with such calm and indifference that his father* praised him for acting like a real man.) I was almost duped into thinking, just as Sawyer was, that Sayid envisioned the purpose of his return to the island as an opportunity for self-sacrifice, to make amends for all the atrocities he has committed against other people. I mean, we all know what the island likes to do to those who have reached the end of their personal journey, would be to do them in (Mr. Eko, anyone?).
Well, it turns out that Sayid’s idea of righting wrongs is to annihilate the true perpetrator of injustice, namely, an angsty pubescent Ben—who, so far, hasn’t done anything morally reprehensible other than profess his hate for a physically abusive father and a exhibit a strong desire to leave Dharma and join the Others. Well, that and set a bus on fire in order to divert attention away from his success at springing Sayid out of his jail cell. So maybe he’s a little messed up, but I think I would be too, living under the same circumstances.
But then there’s the fact that present-day Ben is responsible for a much more extensive laundry list of Terrible Things. So you could almost view Sayid’s mission to rid the earth of this transgressing man pre-transgression as a philosophical conundrum similar to “would you shoot Hitler in the face if you saw him walking down the street pre-WWII and you happened to have a gun in your hand?” I guess the real question, though, is how Hitler-esque is Ben, really? Is Sayid truly “doing what needs to be done,” or is he just taking things a little too personally?
I do think it’s fair to admit that it’s not entirely Sayid’s fault for behaving so irrationally. Ben has done quite a number on him, for one thing. When he’s fed some solid-phase Verisaterum (another Harry Potter reference!), it compels him to tell the others (lowercase) everything, including that fact that he is from the future, which makes them think that he’s gone a little nutso. And maybe he has. Did anyone else experience a pure wave of terror tingles down the spine when Sayid burst out in that psychotic fit of giggles? *shudders just thinking about it*
So we know it’s going to happen. I have even been subconsciously waiting for it since Ben’s little pixie face showed up between Sayid’s jail cell bars at the end of “Namaste.” Nevertheless, when Sayid pulls the trigger and Ben does the traditional stumble-back with the numb-shocked look of incomprehension and then slumps forward onto the ground, I can’t help but think… well, FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDGE. I mean, seriously, Sayid. I know you were still a little loopy from captivity and, you know, being tied to a tree and forced to swallow some unpleasant truth cubes, but do you not realize that you have just taken a crap in the ultimate taboo of time travel? What kind of repercussions is this going to have on the future? To paraphrase Sawyer, Faraday (still MIA, by the way) apparently has some interesting ideas on what they can and can’t do. Is killing Ben one of them? I’d really like Faraday to come out of whatever hole he’s hiding in (probably Charlotte’s closet) and explain some things to us, please.
One final question: who hired Ilana to seduce Sayid into a pair of handcuffs and cart him off to Guam? (“Are you sure we’re going to Guam?” “Where else would be going?” Hahahahahhaa.) All the signs are pointing rather blatantly at Ben (did he look even remotely surprised to see Sayid on the plane?), but that kind of makes me want to look the other direction, at Charles Widmore. (At least one if not the other can be blamed for just about anything at a time.) This would involve a rather wild conspiracy involving Ben and Widmore’s “organization,” the members of which Sayid has taken out one by one as per Ben’s request, and highlights some potential cross-loyalties between Team Widmore and Team Ben. Eloise Hawking, for instance, has already been linked to both men, who also happen to want the same thing (to get the Oceanic 6 back on the island) but for different reasons… or so we’re told.
Sound bites: the Sayid and Sawyer edition
Sayid after Sawyer surreptitiously asks how he’s holding up: “A 12-year-old Ben Linus brought me a chicken salad sandwich. How do you think I’m doing?”
Sayid: [upon seeing Oldham, the Dharma brand of torturer] “Who is that man?”
Sawyer: “He’s our you.”
*Fun fact: Sayid’s father looked kind of familiar, which immediately sent my brain cogs turning because déjà vu with a Lost character always makes you think twice and where you might have seen him/her in a previous episode. It turns out, though, that Mr. Sayid Senior was the sinisterly jolly Afghan terrorist who took Tony Stark prisoner in Iron Man. He also portrayed Saddam Hussein in W. Such is the product of racial typecasting. Go figure.
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