*Spoiler alert! If you don't want to know what happens, don't read any further!*
OH MY STARS, what an episode. Let's jump right in.
I was so glad to see a Sayid-centric episode tonight. He's always been the most interesting character, in my opinion--a true anti-hero. Is he a good guy, or a bad guy? Or a bad guy trying very hard to be good? Or a good guy doing very bad things because he thinks he has no choice? He's fascinating.
Though I have always thought the writing for this show was brilliant, tonight was especially dazzling. Beginning the show by showing us Sayid's complicated issues with his father was perfectly shadowed in his curious developing relationship with Kid Ben, another young man with a difficult dad. The present, past and future relationship between those two is as conflicted as any father/son dynamic we've seen thus far. It was fantastic plot and character development, and I almost felt like we were seeing the true climax of Lost--will everything else that happens from here on out be an unraveling of tonight's events?
(That's what I was thinking, but it's not what I was saying. I believe it was something very profound like "OH MY GOSH, HE SHOT HIM! HE SHOT HIM! HE SHOT HIM!" And Hubs, incidentally, sat next to me and shook his head, mumbling that "they just jumped the shark." I suppose this goes to show you that one person's brilliant plot twist is another person's shark jump. What do you think?)
The giant question, of course, is whether Kid Ben actually died. If the time-travel issues have been mind-blowing thus far, they may have just gotten crazier. We know (or think we know) that Ben is still alive, because we've seen him, in the present, lying in a cot on the Island, with John Locke pointing at him and saying "that's the man who killed me." So he has to be alive still (right?), and perhaps tonight's failed shooting was simply the reason Ben is so devoted to the destruction of our Oceanic friends. It's revenge for the fact that Sayid tried to kill him.
BUT. What if Ben is dead? Faraday has said that it's impossible to change the past (and, by the way, I'm thinking of starting a Bring Back Faraday petition, but that's another issue). If Kid Ben was actually killed, what can this possibly mean for the future, or the past, or the present, or whatever it is?
The shooting scene was so dramatic that everything else pales in comparison, but there are a few other things to point out:
I'm loving the new and improved Sawyer--cool, collected and thoughtful. I hope he and Juliet work out. But I hope the writers spend not another blessed second on the romance angle, because really. Just stop.
I'm curious about the woman who brought Sayid on the plane. She must be working for someone who knew the plane was going down (though I don't think she knew it herself). Ben? Widmore? Eloise Hawking?
Best quote of the night was from Sawyer, when the fiery van crashed into the building: "Three years, no burnin' buses, y'all are back for one day..."
Just for grins, I've included a poll to see what everyone thinks about the outcome from the shooting (if you're reading in a feedreader, you might have to click over to see it). What's your best guess--is Ben dead? Note that I did not include an option for "I don't know", because it would be so much more fun to make you COMMIT! (Please note: it appears that it takes a few minutes for new poll votes to register.)
If you're blogging Lost at your blog, feel free to leave your link in the comments section below.
