'Lost' Recap: A Will of Their Own

The trippy episode with many time-travel implications plays up the concept of free will as Sayid makes a stunning decision

''The world is all that is encased here; life, death, people, the allies, and everything else that surrounds us. The world is incomprehensible. We won't ever understand it; we won't ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat it as it is, a sheer mystery!'' — Carlos Castaneda

We are mysteries unto ourselves. Are killers born or made? Are we born evil or do we become evil? Are we products of nature or nurture? ''He's Our You,'' the tenth episode of Lost's rapidly dwindling fifth season, was a brain-melting thriller filled with deep, dark thoughts, with none bigger than this: Has Sayid changed Lost history by popping a cap in Young Ben in the Dharma Initiative past? It's the old ''If you could go back and kill Hitler, would you and could you?'' conceit, and the show winked at it when Sayid dropped the ''genocide'' bomb in describing his former employer's wickedness. However, I'm guessing that Sayid — new and improved with drug-induced pseudo-enlightenment — didn't succeed in realizing his new life's purpose, at least not yet. Shooting Ben didn't immediately cause reality to blink away, so we are left to wonder: Did the paradox-averse Overmind which regulates the course of events on the Island direct Sayid's bullet to avoid Ben's major organs? (Yo, Double-O Jarrah: Aim for the freakin' head!) Or is Young Ben simply not dead yet? You know where this is going. Next episode: ''Paging Dr. Shephard! Paging Dr. Shephard! Yet another life-saving/cosmos-preserving surgery on your arch-nemesis is waiting for you in Operating Room 306!''

''He's Our You'' reminded us that Ben has invested a lot of energy twisting and warping and prodding and poking Sayid into a vengeance-crazed, self-loathing killing machine. During the Oceanic 6 off-Island digression, when he recruited the heartbroken castaway to serve as his personal instrument of death, Ben led Sayid to believe that there was a great purpose to his globetrotting killing spree. He was avenging the murder of his true love Nadia. He was protecting the Left Behinders. He was prosecuting a righteous war against an awful evil. But then came the Moscow incident, when Ben — looking super fly in his Harry Lime-meets-The Shadow black-rimmed hat and overcoat — kicked him to the curb in the dirty Russian snow. The war with Widmore was over. No more people to kill. ''You're free!'' Ben said. Sayid was shell-shocked. ''What am I supposed to do now?'' he whimpered, looking like an abandoned puppy. Ben told him to ''Go live your life,'' but there was a cruel knowingness to it, and Sayid saw through it. Epiphany: They had never been allies. Ben was the pimp, and he was the whore. Turning bloody tricks hadn't filled Sayid with meaning, just corruption and damnation. The debasement continued months later in the Dominican Republic. Ben: Actually, I got some more folks for you to bump off, old chum. Sayid: Leave me alone. Ben laid it on, Moscow cruel. ''You are capable of things most of us aren't,'' Ben said. ''It's in your nature. It's what you are. You're a killer.'' This, while Sayid was trying to rehab his bullets-and-bloodspurt life by hammering together homes for the ironically named philanthropy Build Your World. (Extreme Makeover: Redemption Edition.) Sayid refused...and then basically did what Ben wanted him to do, anyway. Ben really is the Shadow: He knows what lurks in the hearts of men — and he knows how to work it.

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