Review: Lost 5.10: He's Our You

Sayid shoots at his juvenile torturer.

Sayid as a character is one that soon goes off the rails in terms of characterisation during this season. Throughout the first four season he's the muddled mixture of science and faith; the conflicted Muslim atoning for the crimes he committed in his army days and with the intense physical and technological skills required to assist the Survivors in any way possible. The moment that Lost's mystical BS starts to arrive here in Season Five, Sayid's characterisation evaporates and this episode only really serves to tie up the loose ends of his off island storylines.
     Off the Island, we see the point where, after The Economist, Ben tells Sayid that there's no one left for Sayid to assassinate. This leads Sayid to do charity work in the Caribbean, as we saw back in The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham. After the events of that episode, Ben comes and tells Sayid about Locke's death, giving him the instructions that he acts upon when he rescues Hurley from the mental institution. Even later, after the events of Ben's stand-off with Sun in This Place Is Death, Sayid meets Ilana at a bar. She tricks him and claims to be in the employ of one of the businesses whose head Sayid assassinated, and thus is forced onto Flight 316.
     In 1977, young Ben gives Sayid a sandwhich but is attacked by his father for it. Sayid is interrogated by Dharma's interrogation expert and is given truth serum, revealing details about all of the Survivor's origins as well as information about Dharma that even they don't know yet. Later that day, the Dharma leaders take a vote on whether or not to kill Sayid. The vote is unanimously yes. Sawyer attempts to release him but he rejects the offer. Later, Ben does the same and the two escape into the jungle. Taking his last opportunity, Sayid shoots young Ben and runs off.

The torturer is tortured.

      Despite the fact that he was in tight circumstance and that the future Ben would "ruin" Sayid's life, there really is no precedent in attacking a child. I have no sympathy for Sayid's post-island and then post-return plight whatsoever; he had a choice. He chose to kill those men, despite his four seasons worth of character development that showed that he had rejected murder after everything he did in the past. Sayid ceases to become an interesting character because his motivations are contradictory without being deliberately so. I don't know why Ben killed Locke, but there are lots of reasons for it. The only reason for Sayid's actions are ones that directly contradict the actions they defend.

    He's Our You took the character of Sayid and made him into a caricature of his former self. It robbed him of any credibilty as a developing human being, and that's why this bugs me. This episode, as all episodes on Lost are, was technically brilliant, but the content foreshadowed a turn in the series' writing that will become ever apparent as we head towards the finale of my Lost reviews.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: A fine example that Whatever Happened, Happened.