Well, That's A Horse Of A Different Colour!

Spoilers for this week's episode of Lost follow! Stop reading now if you don't want to know what happened in "He's Our You"!

If we had had any concerns about whether Season Five, with all of its time-traveling adventures, was going to address the paradox question head on (and I certainly did!)... well, last night all of those worries were blown away, along with a 12 year old boy's future! (Of course, the island has been known to revive/repair people before, so I could be premature in my considerations about the fate of young Benjamin Linus.)

So... did Sayid just successfully change history in a very large way? After all, there are dozens, if not hundreds of Dharma followers who won't be purged with the help of a young-adult version of Ben if he's not around to offer that assistance. And of course, most of what happened to Flight 815's survivors was directed by an even older version of Mr Linus, who won't be around if he's killed as a pre-teen. In fact, since Sayid, at one point in the episode, refers to Benry as "a monster responsible for nothing short of genocide," our favourite Iraqi expatriate has essentially pulled off the classic time travel money shot: he's gone back in time and killed Hitler-as-a-boy! Now what's the world (or, in this case, the island) going to look like, as a result?

If nothing else, by next week (or so), we should have a much better idea of how the creative team behind Lost is planning to treat time travel. They've stopped skirting around the edges of it (at last!) and instead thrust it right out into the middle of the stage, for all to see... and talk about, for the next seven days!

One aspect of "He's Our You" last night was disappointing to me, and that was the fact that the bad blood between Sayid and Benry, that we'd previously seen evidence of without any explanation, seemed to have a pretty lame genesis. Sayid's pissed at him because Benry, the master manipulator, told him something about himself that he didn't want to face ("It's in your nature, it's what you are: you're a killer, Sayid")?! That's it?! Really? I guess I was expecting more, maybe something along the lines of Sayid figuring out that Benry was serving his own opaque agenda by getting Sayid to target men who weren't actually involved with Nadia's murder. What we got instead didn't seem to justify Sayid's antagonism toward him later, considering how tough Sayid is supposed to be and given that he knows Benry's a liar who twists words to suit his purpose.

On the flip side, I absolutely loved William Sanderson as the hands-off interrogator. He struck the perfect note in that role, and made some of Sayid's "confessions" all the wackier, considering how they were coerced!

And finally, those who follow "Doc" Jensen's Lost write-ups on Entertainment Weekly know that Lost's # 1 fanboy has had a theory for awhile that Season Four was some sort of twisted mirror image of Season Three, and that the same holds true for Seasons Five and Two. I've had my doubts about that idea, but last night's episode actually had me re-evaluating my stance on that. Why? Well, Sayid's flashback to the chicken-killing incident was eerily similar to what we learned about Eko's childhood early in Season Two, and of course the capture, imprisonment and interrogation of Sayid in "He's Our You" conjured up memories of Ben "Henry Gale" Linus in very much the same predicament later in that same sophomore season. Those could be coincidences or (worse) a sign of a writing staff recycling old ideas, but I'm now more inclined to think that Jensen's onto something and there's some sort of symmetry at work that actually means... well, I don't know! But it would be pretty cool if there was a reason behind it!

All in all, I thought last night's offering was better than the one the week before, and now I can't wait to see what next week brings!