LOST Season Five, Episode Ten: "He's Our You"

Spoiler Alert: If you haven't seen the most recent episode, stop reading.

So I'll start with the most obvious bit: that can't happen, right? But therein, I think, lies the problem with this season. The initial reaction to Sayid shooting little Ben is shock, because if Sayid kills Ben in 1977, how is Ben still around in 2007?

But as soon as you move past that, it becomes obvious that, of course, Ben is not dead. What happened, happened (according to Faraday, who is probably the only reliable narrator on the show regarding time travel). And sifting through the comments by more eagle-eyed viewers than myself at televisionwithoutpity.com, there's plenty in the show to back up that theory. So now the question is, how does Ben survive? And more importantly, if this always happened in his past...well, we've got a whole new perspective on how Oceanic 815 crashed in the first place.

All that said, though, the stint in 1977 is becoming tiring. I hope we get all of the Losties in the same time again soon so we can move toward a definitive endgame (which seems to be that war Widmore mentioned a few episodes ago). But with only a handful of episodes left in the series, its high time we start moving toward that conclusion. Because the rest of this episode? Fell pretty flat. There've been a more than a few times this season where we've had large chunks of episodes devoted to telling us things we already knew, which is frustrating. So if the time travel conceit is no longer working, it's time to leave it behind and actually answer some questions about what's happening in the present day. Hopefully we'll be at that point soon, but I have a feeling it won't happen until the season finale.

Overall, though, the show is still quite compelling. Even if this episode isn't the strongest we've seen? It's still better than just about anything else on network television.

B+