5x10, "He's Our You"

We're staring in the face of two scary possibilities:

-Ben Linus is dead thus changing the history of the Island. The Purge likely never happened and the DHARMA Initiative was never destroyed. It makes sense now that DHARMA signs were still hanging up in Othersville in 2007 because they were never taken down by The Others. Yet: why was Ben still alive in 2007 when Sun and Lapidus left him?

-Ben Linus will be risen from the dead by the island, Locke and Christian style. OK... I can accept the resurrection of Locke but you'd think that if Ben had been shot in the chest by Sayid as a twelve year-old and then rose from the dead later he would've said something about it at some point along the way. In true LOST fashion, Ben could just go, "Oh I couldn't tell you because then it would change the past," but that just feels like a deus ex machina than a well executed plan.

Both of these options are really bizarre, yet I think they've been preparing us for this moment all along by repeatedly stating the past can not be changed. I've been thinking they've been meaning to say that, "You can't change the past unless you were always meant to change the past." This would now be the case if Ben is dead and DHARMA un-purged. But I think it'll end up being the latter, with his resurrection serving for Ben as evidence of The Island's power the same way Locke regaining the ability to walk did.

*I expected a far more dramatic parting of ways between Ben and Sayid. We've seen Sayid act toward Hurley as if Ben did or said something that convinced him definitely of Ben's duplicity. So how could Sayid really just have let Ben go after killing all those people for him? You'd think Sayid should've asked why they just don't go after Widmore himself then. How could he have just accepted, "Ok, we're done here" as the end of his killing spree?

Overall, I thought this was the weakest episode of the season. It didn't really break new ground so much as remind us that what Sayid was capable of. Even with all that, I still didn't think he'd pull the trigger on a twelve-year old so the episode managed to plant enough doubt about Sayid's killer instincts. I think I just expected a lot more out of an episode that was supposed to fill in the blanks of Sayid's backstory. It did that, just not in any particularly memorable way.