Lost 3/26 "He's Our You"

Some thoughts covering last night's episode:

- Jack lying low once again; wonder if this building to a point where Sawyer HAS to turn to him for help when shit becomes just too unmanageable for a lie.

- When do we get to the Juliet/Kate part of the love square?

- After Sawyer went all revenge angst on Jack, I thought maybe he would harbor a little grudge against Sayid for torturing him. There were some points where it seemed difficult to know if Sawyer was gonna let Sayid take the fall.

- Sayid is a badass. He is the only one to ever see through Ben's bullshit; yet is always indebted to him for giving him a purpose off the island (which isn't hard for the O6, they all needed purpose). However that purpose was killing and Sayid fashions himself a changed man, even though we know since childhood he has been rewarded for doing dirty work. He thought he was killing to keep his friends on the island safe. Yet, once he gets to the island and finds Sawyer and Co. all cushy, it dawns on Sayid once he sees creepy kid Ben that the bastard probably fucked with him to kill all those people; not only that, Ben probably hired the bounty hunter chick (She might believe her story, but it's probably Ben pulling the strings) to force him back onto the island. You can tell that Sayid is trying to lay out the implications of him being in the past as perhaps it is his punishment to die as an Hostile for all the sins he committed as a torturer and especially on behalf of one B. Linus.

- Once young Ben comes and offers to free Sayid as long Sayid takes him to Alpert and the others, Sayid may have already decided then to kill Ben and hopefully cleanse himself of all the wrongs he did on Ben's behalf and change the future. I thought at first that it was already Sayid's destiny (and by destiny, the future that lead cyclically led to the past had already been written by the past's events) to ferry Ben to the other's. There are a few implications here of what might happen as a result of Sayid shooting Ben:

1. Ben is alive! Does Dr. Jack make the choice to save Ben? Or maybe by wearing a protective vest or something, young Ben is forewarned of his potential fate by the Others or, perhaps more mind boggling, Locke/Ben who eventually come back even further into the past before the O6. It could all be a ruse by the Others to fully take Ben away from Dharma without them asking any questions - or to initiate a war that they know they will win. Young Ben could already have been a spy. Also, if future Ben had grown up with all of the O6 people in his past, and thus knowledge of future events, why would he send Sayid back in time to facilitate his own death? This leads to...
2. Ben is dead! The book young Ben handed Sawyer was named "Two Realities," which may have been a foreshadowing of where our Losties are headed. Ben dying would seemingly create a "paradox" in time UNLESS what Sayid did in his moment of self-redemptive clarity is create a new reality with a gunshot. Does future Ben disappear? Nope. The idea of multiple realities is that in a universe of infinite possibilities, EVERY possibility happens once with then an infinite set of new consequences. For our purposes then, there exist now TWO realities, or an "A" and "B" timeline. In the "A" timeline exists Sun, Old Ben, Locke, and Lupidus, as well as all the events on the island (including Ben NOT dying, and the rest of the O6 presumably living out their lives in the 70s). In the "B" Timeline, Sayid effectively hit the reset switch on the outcome of future events. Ok the big noodle cooker: why won't the Losties then disappear from the island? Because they got there from the "A" timeline/reality - where the past's events have already been secured.

Now the popular Lost idea of course correction is that there is a Master timeline/reality. Imagine a tree for a moment; small events and outcomes my changes creating smaller branches, yet those branches can only be supported by a strong singular trunk. After a while those branches will recede or feed back into the main trunk, because as the tree (time) gets taller and grows on, certain events must happen to avert the tree's destruction. Course correction is the idea that small changes or branches in time will never affect the outcome of the tree; they are just vestigial trappings that will feed back into the main trunk or timeline.

Multiple reality theory suggests that what Sayid did was not just create a new branch off the main tree, but a completely new tree standing side by side to the one they just fell off of. If a tree falls in the forest, how many realities are destroyed?