He's Our You

I'll admit it: I gasped when Sayid shot young Ben last night. I really didn't think he had it in him to kill a child. But this is LOST, and as such, it poses the question: is Ben really dead?

The hardcore fans on Lostpedia are abuzz with theories and explanations as to what really happens with Ben. I read everything from "of course Ben isn't dead, how would all that later shit go down if he was dead?" to "Ben lives and Jack saves him" to "Ben lives, and Sayid is the one who turns him into a cold-hearted psychopath by shooting him and leaving him for dead." All valid theories, especially that last one. But I do have my own theory to explore. It's not very well-formulated, but here it goes:

Sayid really did kill Young Ben, placing Old Ben in an alternate space/time. Ben and Sun were the only Losties who hadn't gone back in time when the flash occurred on flight 316. After the crash, Sun stole the outrigger and she and Lapedus arrived at the main island to find the barracks abandoned--obviously they were still in 2008 while everyone else went back in time to the 1970's. Perhaps killing Young Ben put Old Ben in (on?) an alternate time-space plane, one where his past didn't actually occur. To put it more clearly, killing Young Ben put everyone ELSE on a different life path, a path where Ben and his evil don't exist, where the Dharma Initiative survives, and none of the past LOST events as we have seen them actually take place on that alternate plane.

Does that make any sense at all? I hope it does. It's just a crazy, wacky theory to add to the already-burgeoning plethora of LOST hypotheses. It really only explains why Ben didn't travel back in time with the rest of the Losties--because in the time everyone else travels back to, Ben dies.

I also wanted to mention a couple of interesting tidbits that I learned by stalking Lostpedia. First, after Sayid exists the building in Moscow where he kills the Russian dude, mirrored writing "Олдхэм Фармасьютикалс" can be seen above a door, which translates to "Oldham Pharmaceuticals." Oldham is, of course, the "other" Sayid who gives the real Sayid one heavy dose of LSD.

Speaking of the good shit, a (real) Wikipedia search for LSD mentions the name Richard Alpert. Yup, a real-life person. According to the site, Alpert "is a contemporary spiritual teacher who wrote the 1971 bestseller Be Here Now." How this plays into the LOST storyline is anyone's guess and I will not attempt to figure this out unless given more information.

I would love to go further into "questions answered" and my never-ending list of stuff I still want answered, but I have a lunch date. In conclusion, I would just like to say that Sayid is the man and I totally want to get his A-rab money.