Little Ben is Dead(!) and I don’t feel so good myself -thoughts on Lost 'He's our You'

The entire time I was like, they’re not going to do it, they’re not gonna do it- Bang.
I haven’t been this shocked by a death since Alex last season, and that was just tragic and sad (and possibly poignant? More to follow). The death of Little Ben was both tragic and sad, but with a whole whack of temporal paradox mindfuck thrown in for good measure.
Like, if Little Ben is dead, then we no longer have a show. Our entire show just came undone. Way to go, Sayid.
But, as we have been told, there are rules; whatever happened, happened.
Dead is dead.
And, up until now, we’ve been able to go along with that. But the rules themselves are at contradiction with each other now. The world of Whatever happened, happened cannot exist now within the world of Dead is dead.
How they resolve this incongruity will decide the course of the rest of the show.
I’m so stoked. That was the best episode ever. Little Ben is dead.
Is Ben ever going to be pissed about this.

Of course, it wasn’t the best episode ever. For instance, I for one, am going to go thumbs down on the flashback/forward things. I mean, yes, it was cool to see a little Sayid who, like erstwhile Eko always had a bit of the bad ass in him, and yes, we always assumed we’d see how they came to be on 316 in flashback. I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be so… mundane. This new girl is not interesting and her face is funny and I’d like her to go away now please. Thank-you.
Caesar interests me a little more, what with his get up and go to check out Hydra Station and score a hidden firearm.
And yet I can appreciate how having Caesar seduce and detain Sayid is not the sort of twist Lost writers are going for this late in the game. So I’ll just back off on this. We had to explain how Sayid got in handcuffs and now we have. Fantastic. Fortunately, in the glorious present day of 1977, things were a lot more … I want to say awesome. I want so say intense. I want to say the word that’s the intellectual equivalent of an orgasm but there isn’t one; I want to pound on the keys of my keyboard as hard as I can because that’s just how unbelievably great everything else was.
The return of Roger Workman. The Carlos Castaneda nod. Olden (?) and his wondrous sugar cubes.
This guy deserves his own aside because he’s my favorite Dharma to date, and because he’s the ‘He’ of the ‘He’s our You’. Now aside from the fact that he appears to be a torturer, he doesn’t actually seem to do anything worse than tie his prisoner’s to a tree and dose them with acid. And the fact that he listens to a gramophone and lives in a teepee just warms my heart.
Did anyone get a chance to read his job title off his uniform? Does anyone have a screencap of that? Because I want that job.
The scene where Sayid is tied to that tree and tripping shall go down as one of my favourites of the series. Comparable to the scene where Hurley spills the beans in ‘the Lie’, it had a whole whack of temporal paradox mindfuck barely averted by the fact that –unlike Hurley’s mother- they didn’t believe him.
I still believe that Radzinsky now possesses many of the pieces of puzzle; namely that Jin was freaking out about a plane moments before Sayid was found within the perimeter; Sayid, who then claimed to have arrived on an airplane.
Not that anything like this could possibly matter anymore, now that Little Ben is dead and we don’t have a show.
Can’t wait til next week.

Oh yeah, I can’t believe I almost forgot to go into the whole ‘death of Alex/death of Little Ben’ connection. Aside from being the two most shocking deaths on the series thus far, I think we can see now just how messed up ‘changing the rules’ is going to make us. That was the point where things began to diverge.
“Haven’t I told you John? I always have a plan.”
So sayeth Ben in ‘There’s No Place Like Home.’
Well, he’d better have a really good plan, now.

My quick and dirty theory as to how disaster could be averted: okay, well, I don’t really have one. But we know the Island is a pretty funky temporal place, a place where miracles happen. So either the Island will protect future Ben from the changes in the timeline long enough for him to … I really have no idea what he could do here, actually, but he’d do something badass… Or, we will see a scene wherein Little Ben meets his Mom and she says words to the effect of: “Get up Ben. You have work to do.”