The Sayid Ultimatium: Lost Recapped

So after all that time on the Island, all those introspective flashbacks about not torturing people and not taking orders without first thinking about the consequences and all those yearning looks out to the ocean, it turns out Sayid can't help but fall back into gun-for-hire type ways once off the Island. If there is one thing that always strikes me about LOST, it's how tragic of a tale this show really is. And with each successive flash-forward, the show seems to be saying, almost gleefully, that not only can't you change who you are, but you're doomed to repeat all your past mistakes over and over and over again.

As the newest member of "The Oceanic Six," Sayid seems to be doing just that, killing people and taking orders without much of a conscious. Part Jason Bourne, part James Bond and part Bruce Wayne, it seems that for Sayid, the easiest cover for an assassin is one that works in broad daylight. And if murdering two people in cold blood during the episode wasn't bad enough (they were on yet another LOST created "list" according to Sayid), it turns out the man pulling Sayid's strings, and probably the strings of the entire series, in one Benjamin Linus.

And to this, I say brilliant.

For you see, with Ben Linus administering medical attention to a wounded Sayid in the flash-forward (does Sayid's left arm ever NOT get shot?), tonight's episode of LOST proved one thing: Ben Linus is not only getting off the Island, he's totally and perfectly alive, albeit with a new pair of eyeglasses.

After the first two episodes, I really started to believe that Ben was the person in the coffin at the end of Season Three. It just seemed to make sense. Ben gets off the Island, he is alone, powerless and his cancer comes roaring back, killing him. Jack, upon reading about his demise, goes into a suicide spiral of pills, booze and self-loathing because Ben is the only person who can get Jack back to the Island!

Makes sense, right?

Yeah, I thought I was so smart.

Well, it turns out, I am. But I was just dead-wrong about that plot point. UNLESS, of course, and I just this second thought of this, Ben faked his own death to throw the scent off for the Matthew Abaddon contingent of baddies looking for him and is alive and well, playing Charlie to Sayid's Angel.

Or maybe Ben is really dead, and this flash-forward took place before Jack's flash-forward at the end of Season Three.

My head hurts.

Anyway, so what else did we learn tonight besides that Sayid is a bad-ass, bad-golfer, well-shampooed killer working for Ben? And that Naomi (Marsha Thomason getting more play as a corpse than as a warm body), wore a bracelet given to her by an "R.C.?"

Well, for starters, we started to see more clues to the fact that the Island is not really within the bounds of physical reality. Jeremy Davies' Daniel didn't have as much twitchy workplay to stumble through this week, but he did partake in one of the key scenes of the episode. When Regina (the voice of Zoe Bell) fired a science class payload rocket from The Others Others' ship and it didn't hit the Island until some 31 minutes later, you could almost hear Richard Dreyfus saying, "this is important!" How come the rocket, which should have landed within about a minute after being fired took almost thirty times longer to get there? As Dan said to Regina after the rocket didn't land on time, "that is far more than weird." Between the rocket and the fact that Daniel was so adament that Frank Lapidus follow the exact compass bearing out of the island, "no matter what," I really believe the big part of this season will deal with not only what, but when the Island actually is.

The rocket scene though also proved to be frustrating. I loved how within about 20 minutes of contact with the outside world, Jack immediately asked about his beloved Boston Red Sox and their 2004 World Series win. That is a great character moment and totally believable. And yet when Jack said to Frank (unfortunately Yankees fan, and I was just starting to like him and his ridiculous chest hair), "I can't believe it's been a hundred days since I've seen a game," they were conveniently interrupted by the landing rocket before, I assume, Frank could have said to Jack, "a hundred days? Try 10 years!!"

This episode of LOST had a lot of those "movie moments" which I found kind of irritating.

Really? A beeper is going to go off right as Sayid is prepared to tell his girlfriend/soon-to-be-victim all his secrets? Come on! The writing on this show is better than that. LOST is certainly genre work, and at times it's more than hokey (see: Sawyer and Kate talking about playing house this week), but the scripts usually eschew the cliched moments that you see in every stock horror movie or romantic comedy. And if they do use the standard cliches, they are usually played to a better effect than they were tonight.

The other thing I didn't like about this episode was that it turned Hurley into Andy Pettitte.

Remember Hurley? Great friend, good guy, the most loyal person on the Island outside of maybe Vincent the Dog? Yeah, well he totally sold out his friends so Locke could capture them. (Cough, Judas, cough.) It just seems like a crazy leap of faith that Hurley, just a day or two after Charlie's death, is so ready and willing to roll over on Sayid and Kate. That bothered me just because when viewed in the whole of the series, it was entirely out of character.

But outside of the Hurley flub, the other character moments tonight were dead solid perfect: Sawyer calling Ben "Gizmo," Jack using Kate as bait because he knew Sawyer would protect her, Ben commenting on the lack of prison cell space on the island, Hurley calling the annoying Miles the "new Sawyer," and Sayid saying that he would only believe Ben once he sold his soul (this is called foreshadowing, people!). "The Economist" was pretty ripe with goodness, bloodshed and mystery.

Now, who the hell is in the coffin?!