Lost, "He's Our You": The prisoner

Spoilers for tonight's "Lost" coming up just as soon as I try the dipping sauces...
"Because, Sayid, to put it simply: you're capable of things that most other men aren't. Every choice you've made in your life -- whether it was to murder or to torture -- it hasn't really been a choice at all, has it? It's in your nature. It's what you are. You're a killer, Sayid." -Ben
"He's Our You" was, in many ways, our first old-school "Lost" episode of the season. Where most other episodes have either featured lots of time travel, or two distinct storylines involving characters on the island versus those in the real world, this reverts to the original model of a story on the island where one character's struggle (in this case, Sayid's) is illuminated by flashbacks from their life on the mainland.
Of course, the show and its characters have been through enough changes that we could get a relatively traditional episode where the flashbacks all take place after the crash of Oceanic 815, while the "present-day" scenes are in 1977, but this was structured similarly to a first season episode, down to the potentially stunning moment at the end, when Sayid calmly put a bullet in the chest of 12-year-old Ben Linus and staggered off through the jungle.

How stunning that moment was, and how impressed I was by "He's Our You," will depend on a couple of things that we won't know for another week at the earliest. First, and most obvious, is whether Sayid was able to disprove Faraday's closed-loop theory of time travel by killing someone we know to be alive 30 years in the future. The second is whether there's anything more to tell about Ben and Sayid's falling-out on the mainland.

Let's talk about the "death" of young master Linus first. If Faraday is right that the past can't be changed by anyone but Desmond, than Ben's very much alive, and the show doesn't even have to stretch that much to explain it. We have plenty of past evidence (Locke and Christian's resurrections, Michael's failed suicide attempts) that the island has the power to raise the dead and/or prevent the deaths of people it has a use for. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see, early next week, young Ben getting up in amazement, then reveling in the realization that he was "special" and chosen by the island for some great purpose. And if the closed loop then keeps spinning, then the Ben who "meets" Sayid in season two remembers him well as the man who tried to kill him, and when he calls Sayid a killer in Santo Domingo, he's only throwing Sayid's own 30-year-old words back in his face.

But just for argument's sake -- and so far everything that's happened this season supports the closed-loop, "12 Monkeys" model, so I'm just having fun here -- what if Dan is wrong? What if Sayid really did kill Ben as a boy? Does the adult Ben lying in the Hydra infirmary in 2007 suddenly vanish? Does he become a walking paradox? Are we going to deal with the creation of multiple, alternate timelines, where everything the Lostaways do back in the Dharma years creates a new parallel universe, each slightly different from the one before?