One Quick Note About "He's Our You" and "What Happened Happened"...

Happy LOST Day, everyone!

I doubt that most of you will see this before tonight's episode, but I wanted to get it in here anyway, pretty much just to say "I told you so."

There has been a lot of talk on the various podcasts about Sayid's shooting of Ben in "He's Our You." And of course there would be - it was one of the most shocking LOST moments ever. Many people have been saying that it proves that adult Ben knew who Kate, Jack, Sawyer, Jin, Hurley, and especially Sayid were because he remembered them from being a kid. He knew just how to manipulate them based on what he saw of them as a child, and he knew, for example, that he could rely on Sayid to be his hired gun because he remembered Sayid as a cold-blooded killer. If he tried to kill me when I was 12, he'd have no problem knocking off a few strangers, he might have thought to himself. But there was something in "What Happened Happened" that clued me in to the idea that this is not the case at all.

In "What Happened Happened," Juliet and Sawyer bring a dying young Ben to the Others in hopes that they can save him. Richard Alpert is there and agrees to help, but as he takes Ben's almost lifeless body, he says something akin to, "You know that once he is with us, he won't remember any of this." If this is true, then Ben wouldn't remember anything before whatever healing may or may not take place in the Temple. He wouldn't have any memory of the Losties being there. And it would make Ben's statement way back in Season 2 or 3 that he was born on the island true after all; from Ben's perspective, he was born there. He would have no memory of his childhood with Dharma...except for the fact that he knows that Roger Linus is his father, and knows that Roger blames Ben for his mother's death and probably knows how abusive he was. This might throw a wrench in the works of this idea. So then we have to consider the idea of Ben being reborn on the island. Is this the "birth" on the island Ben is referring to? Or maybe it's a third possibility: Ben does remember his childhood, including all the Losties being there, but he is returned to his father and the rest of the DI crew to infiltrate them, which he eventually does about 20 years later. The Others brainwashed him to the point of killing his own father without a care (the abuse didn't help, either) as he and the Others unleashed the purge on the DI.

I don't know, just some thoughts.
Enjoy the show tonight!