Lost Rewatch on VHS: He's Our You

 

VHS NOTES: Nothing incredibly thrilling to report. There are trailers for the DVD release of Twilight (Ew!) as well as the Seth Rogen action comedy Observe and Report and the intriguing Ben Affleck-Russell Crowe thriller State of Play. We also see ads announcing Samantha Who? being moved to Thursday nights (why did they cancel this show again?) Most significantly we see the previews for Izzie Stevens brain operation that would lead to Derek proposing to Meredith and the two of them living happily ever after…oh right.

 

The obvious reference from the title of the episode refers to how Lafleur tells Sayid who Oldham is. As much as I’d love to talk about William Sanderson (and I will spend some time later on) given the flashbacks of the episode and the story that parallels Sayid with Ben in the past and in the present - though given the nature of time travel, which is which is up for consideration – it’s pretty clear that is how Sayid regards Ben, both in the context of Dharma and everything he knows about him.

From the moment that ‘Henry Gale’ ran into Sayid in ‘One of Them, the fates of Sayid and Ben have increasingly been intertwined. Ben has demonstrated throughout the series his ability to manipulate all of the survivors, but his manipulations of Sayid bring out the worst in him – something that Sayid has always known, even when they have the conversation that is the most critical not only the episode, but in understanding both men.

“Because Sayid, to put it plainly, you’re capable of things that most men aren’t. Whenever you’ve made a choice, whether its to murder or to torture, it hasn’t really been a choice at all. It’s in your nature. You’re a killer.”

 

Note the circumstances in this conversation. Sayid is in Santo Domingo, doing humanitarian work. He is alone in a room and he suddenly goes still. He knows Ben is there, even before he turns around. “How did you find me?” he asks. “I looked,” Ben said. Which is a lie. Ben then tells Sayid that Locke is dead, and says his death was retribution for the work they did the past two years. We already know that is a lie. He tells Sayid there’s a man that’s been waiting outside Hurley’s institution for two years but he never actually tells Sayid it’s Widmore’s men because for all we know it isn’t Ben is perfectly capable of just putting a man to sacrifice. All of this is a maneuver for Ben to get what he wants, which is everyone on a plane back to the island, so he can resume his post.

This speech can just as easily apply to Ben as Sayid, as we are very aware by this point. He is capable of things that most men aren’t as much as Sayid is. He is just as capable of violence as Sayid is, we’ve seen it on multiple occasions and we’ve seen him kill three people by his own hands and who knows how many by his manipulations. He might claim that everything he’s done has been for the island or for Jacob, but that’s another way of saying that whenever he’s made a choice it really hasn’t been a choice at all.

It’s in your nature.

The next five episodes will resume the kind of flashback structure we saw in the first three seasons, but there’s a different connotation now. In keeping with the theme of time travel, the sequences do not necessarily take place immediately after each other but with gaps of years, maybe decades. In Sayid’s we travel not only through time, but across the globe as ease flashback features a different geographic location. The message may be that no matter where Sayid goes, he can not escape who he is.

Similarly all of the flashbacks will feature on the characters relationships either with their parents or as parents. In Sayid’s case, it’s the former. Unlike almost every other character on Lost, we have learned nearly nothing about Sayid’s family in his flashbacks. In the teaser to the episode we basically learn everything we need to know about him that all the ones we got about the rest of his fellow survivors over three years.

Sayid’s father is clearly a monster who determines that one’s manhood is based on violence. Sayid’s older brother is bullied into a test of this and we see that even at a young age Sayid was capable of doing the kinds of things most men aren’t. Like all the other violence we have seen him commit over the course of the series, it is out of a need to protect someone he loves. But as he told ‘Henry’ when they first met he realized he was always capable of it.

He has always referred to himself as a torturer rather than a killer, even though he has done just as much of the latter as the former. Perhaps it is because at least as long as he called himself that he could hide his true violence, perhaps because he knew there was a use for it, at least on the island. He is all capable of love, deep and consuming but just as often we have seen that love has led him to do as much violence as anything else. And, as we see in the opening scene, he has always been capable of turning that part of himself off when he needs to do those horrible things.

It’s in your nature.

Now in 1977 Sayid is a prisoner and he meets the thirteen year old Ben who as an adult has made his life a misery even more than the other survivors. We see very clearly what was only implied in The Man Behind the Curtain: Ben’s father is as violent a man as Sayid’s was and Ben is clearly terrified of him. It’s hardly a coincidence that while Sayid is being interrogated the young Ben Linus is undergoing a horrible beating that pushes him to his limit.

It has been four years since Ben came to the island and had his interview with Richard. In their last encounter Richard told him Ben would have to be patient and Ben has clearly done that.  But Ben is clearly as gentle and sympathetic as he was in that flashback, even though he is miserable he is polite to everyone else in Dharma and is nice enough to bring Sayid food even though it’s clearly just cover. It says a lot about how bad things are at home that Ben is still trying to be friends with a ‘hostile’. Sawyer is being sarcastic when he calls him a ‘sweet kid’, but he must be having a hard time trying to correlate the man who stuck him in a polar bear cage and spent weeks manipulating with his friends with the thirteen year old who treats him with respect.

Sayid, however, spent far more time with Ben than Sawyer ever did in the present and has a far deeper understanding of the kind of man he is. We’ve spent the first half of Season Five wondering why, if Sayid was allied with Ben in Season 4, why he was so contemptible of him in the present. And in the second flashback we learn exactly why. After nearly two years of using him as his personal hitman Ben simply tells him in the freezing cold that he’s done and to get on with his life. Ben has no problem walking away from the man who became a brutal murderer for him.

Or did he? When Sayid tells him that he killed all these people for Ben, Ben tells him: “You didn’t do it for me.” And he’s right. Sayid famously told Locke the day he trusted Ben was the day he sold his soul. Ben came to him at the lowest point in Sayid’s life after Nadia’s death. Whether Nadia was the victim of Widmore will never be known (we will get a hint at the end of Season 5 it may not have been his doing) but Ben saw an opportunity. But Ben also told Sayid that this was not his war at a point when he was fresh from a painful loss and Sayid told him: “I have no life. They took it from me.” Ben might have been using Sayid, but Sayid was more than willing to be used. We’ve seen this exact same scenario play out, when Sayid was willing to turn his former friend into a suicide bomber to find Nadia, when he became a torturer for the Americans after learning the truth about his commanding officer. He tells Ben that he’s not who he thinks he is: “He doesn’t like killing.” That’s true. But when he meets with Ilana in a bar not long after it, he tells her without telling her that it’s the only thing he was ever good at. And that’s true too.

Alone among the Oceanic 5, he is the only one who did not come willingly. This is the first time we actually get a sense of Ilana after several episodes of hearing her and wondering why she was accompanying Sayid in the first place. It’s clear in the few scenes that they have that Ilana is a manipulator herself and we’ve already seen how susceptible Sayid is to manipulation from women. We saw it play out with Elsa in The Economist, but here he is at his lowest point and he desperately needs to connect, if only for a moment. Ilana gets him alone, pulls a gun on him and claims she is working for the family of Peter Avellino, who we saw him kill in a flashback of Sayid’s.

But there’s clearly more to it than that. She denies that she is a bounty hunter when Sayid asks. She seems very determined to get on the same plane that the Oceanics are on. And though she claims not to know who Ben Linus is when Sayid asks, we just don’t know whether we trust her. We will learn very quickly that Ben wasn’t the only person on Ajira who knew that they weren’t going to Guam and that she had every reason to make sure Sayid was on that plane.

The critical scene is clearly that when Sayid is being interrogated by Oldham, played by that brilliant character actor William Sanderson. (It’s been awhile since a Deadwood alumnus made an appearance on Lost.) Oldham is talked about by the Initiative as if he is some kind of monster, and it might seem underwhelming when all he does is apply a dropper full of a solution on a sugar cube and Sayid just talks. But it’s actually scarier by its effectiveness. Oldham is calm throughout his two scenes, utterly matter-of-fact when he orders the restraints to be put on Sayid and tells him that resisting will make no difference. And the thing is he’s clearly better at this than Sayid was with the Hostiles. Sayid interrogated and tortured Benry for weeks and he couldn’t even get his real name out of him. One drop of the solution and Sayid, clearly on an acid trip, tells the Dharma folk every single fact that he knows.

The difference is no one really cares. Radzinsky spends the entire episode just plain and simple wanting to know what the ‘hostile’ knows about the Swan. (Not what he knows about the rest of the Initiative; just his work.) Horace spends most of the episode barely able to hold him in check. There’s an irony in this episode, too. Throughout the series, it’s been a regular complaint that none of the characters share information with each other. Now Sayid tells Dharma everything that has happened to him since he landed on the island, even going so far as to blow Sawyer’s identity and the Purge – and no one cares except that he knows about the Swan. Even when Sayid tells him about things that haven’t happened yet, Radzinsky only wants confirmation of what he already he believes.

While this is going on Sayid breaks into laughter for the only real time we’ve seen on the show. But it’s not genuine laughter. It’s the laughter of someone who realizes how insane the situation is – and who may very well have gone crazy himself.

In Finding Lost, Nikki Stafford tries to justify what Sayid does by saying that if Ben is gone, the Dharma Initiative would just keep going on peacefully. I find this a false narrative based on the meeting that takes place. Horace tries to say that they have a rule of law and Radzinsky literally goes ‘blah blah blah’. We have a feeling even if Sayid had gone along with ‘Lafleur’ earlier Radzinsky would have found a way to shoot him by accident. And listening to the meeting it’s clear he doesn’t have to do much persuading. We won’t see Amy again after this episode (which is a shame, I love Reiko Aylesworth) but in a sense we don’t need to after this episode. Amy by extension should be the most empathetic character towards the show but she has no problem going along with Radzinsky’s solution. “I can’t sleep with one eye open,” she says. Two days ago she and her husband got into a screaming match and now she has no problem manipulating him in order to get along with her own prejudices and fears. And I don’t believe this is bullying based on everything we’ve seen about Dharma’s relationship with the Hostiles. Furthermore, given what we know about  the nature of the Others (which hasn’t changed in twenty years) the Purge would probably have happened regardless and the only difference might have been that Ben ended up in the pit.

There’s also an attempt to justify Sayid’s action by pointing out that Ben drives a burning bus into a crowded community with no consequence for innocent bystanders. That’s true, but Sayid doesn’t know that at the time. When thirteen year old Ben comes to see him that night, he’s got his wrists outside the bars and he’s clearly been waiting for him. Even before that happens he tells Sawyer with a serenity we’ve never seen that he knows what his purpose is.

And there is no grander purpose really. I don’t think Sayid truly believes that if he kills Ben as a child, it will stop everything that happens. To use a phrase we’ll hear later Sayid doesn’t speak destiny. Perhaps some small part of him thinks that this might change the future but I never truly bought it. Even if it did Sayid had to know there’s no way that would happen and he would somehow wake up in a happier world or even off the island.

Its ridiculously simple. Sayid told Ben if he saw him again, it wouldn’t be pleasant for either of us. And he is keeping his promise. Nothing he has seen about Ben in the 1970s has done anything to change his mind about Ben as an adult. So what if Ben was beating severely by his father and Sayid was too. You’d think that would be a sign of sympathy between them, but for Sayid it just proves that he’s already locked on his path, the same way he was when he was that age. He doesn’t think there’s any saving Ben – or really himself. He’s on the island which he worked so hard to escape and even if he could, what’s there to go back to?

So when Sayid looks at Ben and tells him: “You were right. I am a killer,” it’s not just him bringing things full circle. It’s Sayid finally acknowledging who he is. He always thought he was lost even when he got on Oceanic 815. He’s spent his time on the island constantly giving in to the worst parts of his nature, but all that time he held on to hope and salvation. He had for a while with Nadia, and then it was taken from him. When he tells Ilana that Ben is ‘responsible for nothing short of genocide’, it’s an accurate summary but he finishes it by saying that he worked for him. So what does that make him?

After Sayid shoots Ben, there are tears in his eyes. He now has nowhere left to go. So the last image of the episode we see is him slowly and disjointedly running into the darkness. We won’t see him until the season is nearly over but the metaphor is fitting. Because in a sense after this, he never truly leaves it.