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Roger Linus is not quite the abusive douchebag we’ve been led to believe he was, he is genuinely very concerned about Ben when he sees Jin bring him back suffering from the gunshot wound inflicted by Sayid. Roger is remorseful about how poor a father he’s been.

Cassidy has an interesting interpretation of Sawyer’s sacrificial leap from the helicopter. He did it because he’s a coward.

Miles and Hurley’s conversation is very meta and explains how we are supposed to believe time travel works on the show i.e. not like Back to the Future, you can’t change your future by changing the past. Which presumably means that Ben cannot die and Sayid’s attempted homicide was futile.

Jack refusal to help save Ben is because he’s come to realise that perhaps he was getting in the way of what the island wants. But Kate even after all that Ben had done to her does everything within her power to save the life of younng Ben.

Odd that when Sayid was torturing Ben in the Swan station that Ben didn’t recognise him as being the same guy he helped escape from the Dharma initiative and subsequently shot him.

Juliet makes the suggestion to Kate that maybe the Others can do something to save Ben and in her expression there seems to be some realisation that of course all these events were meant to happen as it is this that leads Ben to eventually join the Others.

Shocking end to this episode of Lost in more way than one. A teenage Ben is shot by Sayid in 1977. Shocking because it is almost unheard of for a child to suffer a violent death of US network television. And if he is indeed dead what does this mean for the show? He can’t be surely as according to Daniel Faraday “whatever happened, happened” so the past cannot be changed so if Ben is alive in 2007 then he must somehow survive this.

Two thoughts/theories on this.
1. Assuming Faraday is correct and the producers of the show have said that there will be no time travel paradoxes then young Ben will survive the gunshot. Is this event the catalyst that turns a quite sweet kid into the manipulative cold hearted Benjamin Linus we’ve come to know?

Typical Lost irony would be that the man Sayid hates for turning him into a monster (or to be more precise turning him back to monstrous actions as we mustn’t forget he had been a torturer in Iraq) is a monster himself because of being betrayed and shot by Sayid in 1977.

2. However perhaps we have been misled up to this point and Daniel Faraday is wrong (or lying) and this is a course correction of a sort as we were shown with Desmond trying to prevent Charlie’s death. Perhaps Ben was never meant to become the leader of the others plus according to Christian he was never meant to turn the Frozen Donkey wheel to move the island. If Ben had died as a child then all the events we have seen so far in the series would have played out quite differently, this is probably the best argument for him surviving this incident.