LOST: Season Five Episode Ten

" He's Our You"

Episode Rating: A-

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Sayid has never been one of my favorite Lost characters; don't get me wrong, he's an interesting person and is the series' resident bada**, but he isn't as strong a character when compared to the rest of the cast. As such, tonight's installment, while by no means a bad episode and quite possibly the best Sayid episode yet, it was probably my least favorite of the season so far. Despite that, there were still some classic moments. The torture scene was the standout, with William Sanderson giving an amazingly chilling performance as Oldham; Naveen Andrews delivered his finest moments as Sayid when he opened up under the influence of the drug. The entire scene was effectively eerie, and there were plenty of other great moments as well. There's lots to pick apart, so let's tear into this kill-a-riffic episode.

A Separate Reality

Little Ben was determined to be nice to Sayid, for reasons we found out later on. He brought the prisoner sandwiches and, in the episode's first non-flashback scene, a book. The book was Carlos Castaneda's A Separate Reality; I researched this book (that's what commercials are for) and found that it is an allegedly non-fictional book published in 1971 (no one is sure if the story is true or not). In it, Castaneda describes his apprenticeship with a self-proclaimed Yaqui Indian Sorcerer, Don Juan Matus. The book is split into two parts, the first, "The Preliminaries of Seeing," being a description of how, after Castaneda left Matus' apprenticeship in 1965, he was re-initiated. The second part, "The Task of Seeing," tells how Castaneda learned to "see," a practice Castaneda described as, "perceiving energy directly as it flows through the universe."

Books on Lost always have a deeper purpose. The writers don't pull a book off the shelf and thrust it into the hands of the actors. I believe that tonight's episode was part one of A Separate Reality, "The Preliminaries of Seeing." If one substitutes Sayid for Castaneda and Ben for Don Juan Matus, then everything falls into place. As we saw in flashbacks, Sayid was initially eager to work with Ben, but had a falling out with him. He's Our You is all about him getting back into the work Ben got him to do-he wasn't directly returning to his "apprenticeship" with Ben, but he accepted Ben's teachings and embraced them. To the best of my knowledge, this is similar to "The Preliminaries of Seeing." At the end of the episode, Sayid accepted his role as killer and shot Ben.

The similarities aren't that vague; there's more. In "The Preliminaries of Seeing," Castaneda describes a plant he smoked that opened and freed his mind, making him more lucid and allowing him to "see." This is similar to the drug that the Dharma interrogator, Oldham, gave Sayid. In addition, Castaneda met another sorcerer during this time; Oldham might be Lost's stand-in for that sorcerer.