What Kate Does Recap

Feb 10

metalman777Lost recap, season 6 No Comments

"What Kate Does" is the 3rd episode of Season 6 of Lost and the 106th produced hour of the series as a whole. It was first broadcast on Feb 9, 2010.

I give the episode an admiring B, and if you ask me again in a few hours, I might add a + to it, because the more I think through this deeper-than-it-appears affair, the more I’m stimulated by it. Granted, it’s my job to think about Lost, like, a lot, but put the episode’s good stuff on a scale and I’ll wager it’ll outweigh the lame stuff.
Josh Holloway’s wrenching acting as he revealed the heartbreaking disclosure that he intended to propose to Juliet. The intrigue of “infected” and “claimed” Sayid. The hilarious irony of Dr. Ethan Goodspeed. Crazy-scary mother-gone-wild Claire. The notable camaraderie of the Temple castaways, determined to survive their latest ordeal with “live together, die alone” idealism and great, knowing humor. And don’t look now, kids, but is Jack Shephard actually getting likable again? I loved his sincere concern for Kate and Sayid, his willingness to accept Sawyer’s seething heartbreak, and his humbled self-awareness. I loved his smiles, his knowing laughter, his warmth. “You take care of Sawyer, I’ll take care of Sayid,” Jack told Kate, the castaway dad huddling with the castaway mom on how to handle their troubled castaway kids. When he told Dogen, “I don’t even trust myself,” Jack may have uttered the most heroic statement of his wannabe hero life, because it was so painfully honest. Superman of Science? No. Superman of Faith? No. Just Jack. And in the end, one wonders if that’s exactly what he needs to be to save the day for himself and his friends.
The Sideways world story line very clearly mirrored the Island world story line. Kate chases after Sawyer; Kate chases after Claire. Is there a physical, cosmic connection between the two realities? Still TBD, though we were again given a few moments that seemed to suggest the Sideways characters were either intuitively recalling their Island experience or perhaps even channeling it. We’ve been told not to view the Sideways stuff as an inconsequential ”What if…?” fairy tale about an uncrashed Oceanic 815. Yet most of ”What Kate Does” felt exactly like that… until the final act, when we got the great comic irony of Tom Cruise’s Evil Cousin serving as Claire’s perfectly decent OB. By the end of the episode, I accepted Lost‘s first regular episode Sideways tale as a simplified pitch of the entire conceit. Nonetheless, I wished we had gotten more. Specifically: a clarifying peek into Sideways Kate past. Did this Kate also have a childhood pal with a fondness for toy airplanes? Did this Kate also murder her father? Did this Kate also marry a cop that looks like the guy Castle? The episode decided not to dote on the past.
Now, all of this is neat. But is Lost doing this just to be all fancy-pants literary, or could it be that Lost is trying to tell us something? Could it be that the creative design of Lost‘s sixth season, embedded and suffused with past episode resonance, is a clue to resolving the mystery of its seemingly split reality? I am wondering — and perhaps you are, too — if these corresponding events across parallel realities are meaningful synchronicities. It’s almost as if no matter the world, these people are destined to intersect and to play out variations of the same essential drama. THEORY! It’s all about reincarnation. The Sideways world is basically the afterlife for the Island castaways. Their Sideways selves contain the experiences of their Island World identities within their genetic make-up/spiritual essence. Think I’m crazy? Then I refer you to last year’s anagram clue, the Canton-Rainier (aka ”reincarnation”) Carpet Cleaning Company. See? Totally settled!
Now here’s the crazy thought I had — an alternative to past-life/reincarnation theory. I submit that when Kate saw Jack at the airport, she established a psycho-spiritual circuit with her doppelganger self on he Island, and specifically the moment between Jack and Kate in Temple. This circuit facilitated a transference of psychic energy that flowed from Island Kate to Sideways Kate — or rather, from Redeemed Kate to one of her Fallen Kate selves in another world. That energy? Strength. Selflessness. A sense of sacrifice. A sense of ”You All Everybody” idealism. All qualities that Kate embodied in her Island story — and all qualities that Kate gained during her Sideways story.To put it more simply: Island Kate inspired Sideways Kate. Bottom line: The Sideways-Island relationship is a metaphor for our relationship to fiction. It’s about how fantasy redeems reality
Then she saw the plush killer whale. Stopped her really, really cold. Kate looked in the mirror. The ”déjà vu-or-guilt?” expression wrinkled across her face. It would totally make sense to me if that killer whale poked at her Island-past life memory, because after all, in the Island world… it was Kate who gave Aaron that killer whale, not Claire. FLASHBACK-WHOOSH TO… the season 4 episode ”Something Nice Back Home,” the episode in which Aaron’s killer whale made its most prominent (and I think its only) appearance. This was the story in which Claire disappeared into the jungle with Ghost Christian, setting in motion the events that would send Aaron off the Island with Kate. This was also the episode in which Sawyer began to step up as a selfless castaway leader, setting in motion the events that would lead him to his own kind of ”something nice back home,” domestic bliss with Juliet in the Dharma ‘70s. This was also the episode that Jack proposed marriage to Kate — and then drove her away with his suspicion that her heart still belonged to Sawyer. This was also the episode where a bleeping smoke detector led Jack out in the waiting area of his hospital suite, where he found Ghost Christian sitting there, waiting for him. This was also the episode in which Jin made arrangements with Charlotte to make sure Sun got a spot on the helicopter that would get her off the Island, setting in motion the chain of events that would separate them. In various ways, all of these plot points from ”Something Nice Back Home” were implicitly referenced in the Island-set portion of ”What Kate Does.” I’ll identify them as we go — just look for handy-dandy SHAMU ALERT!
Killer whales belong to a long line of fish references in Lost. In season 3, we learned that the Hydra Station experimented on dolphins and sharks in their aquarium. In the season 4 premiere, Hurley’s sanitarium was swimming in big fish imagery, from a drawing in the day room to the graphic on Ghost Charlie’s short. At the end of season 5, we saw Jacob eating fish for breakfast. And of course, now we have… the Locke-ness Monster. You laugh — but then, you forget Claire’s disturbing nightmare from her season 1 episode ”Raised By Another,” which was suffused with her Aaron anxiety and future foreboding, and in which she encountered a creepy looking John Locke, one eye black, one eye white. Killer whale colors. Interesting. Especially interesting given our cultural affection for killer whales. See: Shamu, Free Willy, and one of favorite movies from my youth, Orca, the Killer Whale!, in which this boy killer whale goes crazy psycho on evil whalers for killing his pregnant girlfriend killer-whale mate. So very damn sad. IMPLICATION: FLocke, the Locke-ness Monster, may look fearsome and scary, but really, he’s our protector and friend. Just like Willy. Just like Prometheus.
Many people suspect Sayid became imbued with Jacob’s spirit, like he became a vessel for some or all of Jacob’s soul — a living Harry Potter horcrux. Maybe Dogen was trying to jar Jacob loose, bring him to the surface of Sayid’s consciousness. Honestly, watching Sayid suffer last night, my first thought was that Sayid should have… well, died. It looked like Dogen was inflicting way too much punishment, and Sayid’s tolerance struck me as almost superhuman — and superhuman ain’t natural. And here’s this observation from my colleague and fellow Lost friend Adam B. Vary. He noted that for a guy who went into death convinced he was going to hell, Sayid sure didn’t act like he was being punished, be it fairly or unfairly. His only frame of reference for his experience was one he knew full well: torture. He told Dogen that he had no information to share, nothing that he was hiding. Was that the ”tell” Dogen was looking for? We must recall last season, when Richard indicated that one of the side effects of the holy hot tub process was forgetfulness. Maybe Sayid remembers too much; maybe if the spring had worked, he wouldn’t have processed his experience through the lens of his old, damned life. Regardless: Sayid said and did all the wrong things for Dogen. FAIL! Time will tell if his grading is correct.
Aldo got up in Kate’s grill and reminded her that he was the all-grown-up-now Stephen Hawking-reading Other-boy that she and Sawyer assaulted outside Room 23 back in season 3. In doing so, Lost was cleverly reminding us of a significant gap in the Island’s story. The Oceanic 6 left the Island on the same day that the LeftBehinders started time traveling. That was around January of 2005. The dating of the current Island drama: December 2007/January 2008. That’s about 36 months of Island history that we have not seen. During that time, Aldo grew up. What else changed during that window? Well, for starters, someone disturbed the circle of ash around Jacob’s cabin and ransacked the joint. Also: Richard’s tribe of Others set up camp on the beach. Perhaps season 6 will help fill in the blanks.
The last time we saw Claire in the Island narrative, she was hanging with her father, Christian Shephard, in Jacob’s shack. We suspected that like Christian, she, too, was dead, killed during Keamy’s mercenary raid on New Otherton. In light of the revelation that Fake Locke is Smokey, and knowing that Smokey can animate or take the form of the dead, we should be wondering if back then, Ghost Christian and Ghost Claire were Smokey manifestations, too. Then again, this frizzy-haired crazy Claire that we saw last night came off as human. We were told by Dogen that Claire had been ”claimed” by the same ”darkness” currently spreading within Sayid. So many pieces of info, desperately needing clarifying context. I’m still crunching it. In the meantime, I’m going to theorize that Scary-Pale Claire is the Solomon Grundy of the Island… or a golem. And I’m not going to tell you what the hell I mean by that either! (1-10 from Doc Jensen)
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For me the most important line is the one above, spoken by Dogen. “Claimed” suggests that Sayid’s body has been taken over by someone (or something) else. We all assumed last week it was Jacob, and maybe the Temple dwellers assume it’s the Man in Black, and that he’s the bad dude. Watching Sayid hooked up to the electrocution device and seeing him getting stabbed with a hot poker made me think, “Wow… karma’s a bitch.” But they were using these torture instruments diagnostically. How? Could they have been seeing if the thing that Sayid’s body is hosting would jump out? Did they think he’d start talking in tongues? Or was it something more physical and less supernatural than that?
So… is this a production error or a suggestion that in the new timeline, Flight 815 actually left a month later? Claire’s ultrasound readout clearly says the date is 10/22/2004, which puts the flight in October, NOT September. (It also says it’s 9:29 in the morning, and considering it’s probably been a few hours of Kate and Claire running around and it’s been broad daylight the entire time… this is probably yet ANOTHER prop error.) So… prop error or hint that even the date is different?
The killer whale doll! Do you remember that? It’s from “Something Nice Back Home.” As Jack’s going completely ballistic on Kate because of some phone call that he thought might have something to do with Sawyer and he’s about to leave them, just as he says, “You’re not even RELATED to him!” Aaron comes walking out into the kitchen and he’s standing there holding the whale doll. Kate would have bought that for him, and in this reality Claire’s the one who got it for him. (It’s a clear reminder of the black and white theme on the show.)
Dogen says to Jack that he needs to remain separate from his people, because it makes it easier when he makes decisions they don’t like. As much as I loathe having to remind anyone of the events of “Stranger in a Strange Land,” this reminded me of the Jack tattoo that “Woman From the Others Who We Never Saw Again and Seemed to Have Been A Mistake At the Time Before the Writers Had Truly Worked Things Out” said meant, “He walks among us, but he is not one of us.”
Dogen’s name comes from D?gen Zenji, who was a Zen Buddhist master of one of the three sects of Japanese Buddhism. He lived in the thirteenth century.
Kate’s used the name “Joan Hart” before. I think it was in the flashback where she dyes her blonde hair back to the original brown and then asks the guy at the hotel front desk for any letters to Joan Hart.
In the original timeline that we saw before, many of us speculated that there was no adopting family on the other side, and Richard Malkin simply knew that flight was going to crash and he put Claire on it, forcing her to have to raise Aaron on her own. Does the adopting mom on the other side suggest that Malkin really was telling the truth, or did this change as a result of the different timeline? (11-17 from Nik at Nite)
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As Kate, Claire and the taxi driver make their break for it, Kate looks out her window and sees Jack. They share a lengthy glance that, in my humble opinion, tells us something important: she clearly remembers him. Now you might be thinking, “Of course she remembers him, she collided with him outside the 815 bathroom.” Yes, that’s true, but her expression is one of complete bewilderment, and that’s because she remembers him from somewhere else. Think about it – she’s desperately trying to make her escape, Arzt is blocking the taxi, all hell is breaking loose… in this situation, it would take something really out of the ordinary to make her forget all that for even a few seconds. When she sees Jack, she knows that she knows him from somewhere else.
Claire goes into labor and Kate, pulling a 180 from the desperate-to-escape convict we saw earlier, drives her to the hospital and even stays by her side. The doctor is none other than our good friend Ethan, which I thought was one of the episode’s more favorable developments. “I don’t want to stick you with needles if I don’t have to,” he says. I guess papa Horace got him on the sub in “The Incident” or else he wouldn’t actually be alive in this timeline.
Kate, Jin and two Others head out to recover Sawyer. And guess what – one of the Others is Aldo, vigilant guard of Room 23 (and I thought he was blown up at the beach raid in “Through the Looking Glass”!). I kind of liked Aldo showing up, mainly because he adds a degree of continuity to the Others, which is something the Others sorely lack most of the time. Apparently he’s been holding a grudge against Kate for knocking him unconscious three years ago, motivating him to spend the entire episode as an incompetent jerk. But he’s an Other, so I guess we shouldn’t expect anything other than constant, needless violence and threats from him. (Ok, I just have to mention how weird it was to see Mac from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia pop up as a character on Lost!! The two shows could not possibly be more opposite. Lost is intelligent and insightful and full of mystery. It’s Always Sunny is the most irreverent and funny show I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen It’s Always Sunny, give it a try. Just make sure there are absolutely no kids around!)
Kate finds Sawyer at the Barracks continuing to mourn Juliet. He even digs an engagement ring out the floorboards of his old house and, like Desmond in “Flashes Before Your Eyes”, he chucks it into the ocean. He won’t go back to the Temple with Kate, though it’s not entirely clear that she’s headed back there, anyway. If the Others’ goal is really to unite the “Touched”, they’re sure doing a lousy job.
Check out that ashy smoke that Dogen sprays on Sayid. Related to the circle of ash that keeps away the Smoke Monster? Quite possibly.
Since Dogen used the same words as Rousseau – i.e., “infected” and “sick” – I’m going to venture that this sickness afflicting Sayid is the same one that claimed the lives of Rousseau’s team. But this creates some inconsistencies. We pretty much know how Rousseau’s team got sick: the Smoke Monster did something to them. It would then make sense that ash is used in both the sickness “test” and to protect oneself from Smokey. But how did Sayid catch the sickness? We’ve known his whereabouts almost the entire time he’s been back on the island, and he never encountered the Smoke Monster. I guess going into the Spring could have something to do with it (on account of the water being murky), but Dogen and a couple Others went in there, too, and I’m assuming they’re not sick.
But instead of telling Jack anything concrete or meaningful about the sickness, Dogen sidesteps questions by revealing that it “claimed” his sister – Claire. Does this mean Claire is going crazy and leaving traps because she’s infected? That’s a little strange, as Claire is acting like Rousseau, who is the one verifiable person that didn’t get infected. Personally, I have trouble taking the Others at their word. But if he’s telling the truth, we’ll need to be shown some sort of flashback involving Claire and Dogen. But shooting Aldo doesn’t make Claire an “infected” person in my book, yet.
Deciphering the Others’ hierarchy has been a goal of Lost fans ever since Benry Gale claimed that bearded Tom was not the leader. That was four seasons ago. One would think we’d stop running into people claiming to be in charge of the Others by now.Tom, Klugh and Isabel were possibilities a long, long time ago. Stronger contenders included Charles Widmore, Eloise Hawking, Benjamin Linus and John Locke, who have all claimed to be the leader. And when finally it’s looking like the guy with the real authority has been Richard Alpert (on Jacob’s behalf) all along, Dogen appears. Is Dogen above Richard? I hope not, as that would really mess with my conception of the Others. I’d like to believe Dogen is lower on the chain than the “official” leader bracket, but I can’t really picture him taking orders from the likes of Ben. (18-25 by Robz888)
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Aaron has identity even before his birth. This is a disturbing and wonderful and deeply mysterious truth, made more profound by the chilling then comforting presence of Ethan Goodspeed at Claire’s bedside. Apparently, whether Claire gives birth on-Island or off, Ethan must lead the prenatal preparations. This revelation was one of several instances of relational inevitability dramatised over the last three hours. The recurring theme of inevitability seems fresh with each occurrence, seems a necessary aspect of the narrative.
His name must be Aaron. “I don’t know why I said it,” Claire says to Kate. “It was like I knew it or something.” He is Aaron because his own flesh-and-blood mother must raise him. And somehow, we know, even before Claire knocks on the door of the adopting family’s house, there is no way they can adopt the baby. Of course the woman’s husband left her–the world is course-correcting in such a way that Claire, whether she likes it or not, will have to raise the baby herself. That is her destiny, but more importantly, this is Aaron’s destiny.
The most terrible and exciting aspect of this entire sequence of scenes is the fact that every facet of the strange inevitability around Aaron revolves around the truth that he must return to the Island. Yet we know, in the spacetime inhabited by fugitive Kate and pregnant Claire and the pleasant Dr. Goodspeed, the Island is submerged under a thousand metres of water. There is no Island to which Aaron can return, and in this spacetime, he was never even on the Island. Yet the connection to the Island is undeniable. Aaron is tethered to the Island by an umbilical stronger and more real than the one connecting him to his mother.
Sayid and Jack place greater value on their trust of each other than on their own lives.
This is not a show about good versus evil. It is not about free will versus determinism. It is not about time travel or electromagnetic anomalies or spacetime displacement. It is about our very humanity. It is about who we are at the very centre of our conscious selves.
The interaction between the two women is as rich in its own way as the higher-stakes scenes between Jack and Sayid. Claire ought to be frightened by the reckless fugitive who thinks nothing of pointing loaded guns at anyone crossing her path. Yet Claire feels endeared to the woman and her genuine desire to help. When Claire asks Kate to accompany her to the door of the adoptive parents’ home, we know the connection is firm. And when they dash to the hospital, Claire protects her new friend.

Two sides: One Jacob, one the Man in Black. One says human beings are essentially good, that we seek perfection. One says human beings are corrupt, that we can only be judged for our sins.

In the world of LOST–on the Island–they’re both wrong. Human beings are good and bad. But our humanity is only good. It is our humanity–the fertile soil of our existence as complete human beings–that is worthy above all of our most reverent attention–even to the point of sacrificing health and life to secure for the common good (26-31 from Pearson Moore)

============(I don’t know why my numbered list reset to 1. Can’t fix it!! aargh!)

The Others started freaking out about Sayid after he had mysteriously come back to life (yeah, I’d freak out too). But does the Sickness only infect dead bodies? And, more specifically, do they have to be unburied to infect them? Claire likely died somewhere in the jungle after the explosion at the Barracks. And remember that Christian’s body was unburied when the coffin crashed on the Island too. Boone, Shannon, Charlie, Eko, Ana-Lucia, Libby and Nikki & Paolo were all buried and we haven’t seen them walking around the Island ala Christian.But if Smokey is the one claiming them, can Smokey only assume the forms of unburied bodies? He’s appeared as Christian and Yemi to be sure (both unburied, Yemi’s body was burned and later disappeared). He’s also appeared as Alex, whose body I believe was left at the Barracks in the aftermath of the attack (Ben said goodbye, but I don’t think he buried her).I wonder if this has anything to do with the theory that Smokey really is one of the Egyptian Gods of the underworld. Of course, since we now know that the Nemesis = Smokey, Smokey’s got to be a more important god to rival Jacob. If Jacob is Horus, Osiris, orRa then Smokey is Anubis, Set, or Apep. Regardless, I think this is definitely worth keeping in mind. (from Mistaking Confidence With Kate)

And here’s a promo for next weeks episode. Is Sawyer going to team up with the Locke-ness Monster?

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