LOST went from mind-blowing premiere mode to story-of-the week with last night’s Kate centric episode “What Kate Does”. A lot of fans found the transition to be a bit jarring, with many going as far as calling the episode “Filler.” Blasphemy. The fact is, “What Kate Does” was a tightly wound bundle of story clock-work that advanced a lot of major threads and event brought some to a close. Let’s review.
The Kate aspect was all about how no matter what universe our favorite fugitive winds up in she will always be drawn towards Claire and Aaron. You’ll remember she left off last week pointing a gun to Claire’s head in a cab, this week she dumped Claire on the side of the road only to have an attack of conscious. She returned and brought Claire to the people who were supposed to be adopting her baby only to learn that the arrangement had been called off. As if that were not bad enough, Claire goes into labor on the lady’s front door step.
Kate takes Claire to the hospital where the attending doctor winds up being Ethan “Rom” Goodspeed, AKA the crazy bastard that kidnapped Claire back in the island timeline. Funny how these things work out. In this universe he’s totally nice, though, and actually stops the baby from being born early.
Don’t worry, aside from exploring the essential nature of Kate’s character there was plenty of island weirdness too. First of all, despite Naveen Andrew’s British accent shining through last week and confusing everyone, we found out that Sayid is indeed Sayid. Not a Zombie, as he assured Hurley, but undead none-the-less. Don’t celebrate just yet, though. According to The Others’ temple boss Dogen, Sayid is infected with the same kind of ‘sickness’ that drove crazy French lady Rousseau’s team nuts back in the day. The disease will blacken his soul and turn him into an agent of evil, apparently.
Kate’s island story kicks off when Sawyer escapes from the temple and she and Jin depart with some Others, one played by Mac (Rob McElhenney) from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, to bring him back. Kate soon ditches that crew, since she has no intention of hanging out at the temple, and pursues Sawyer. She catches up with him at New Otherton where he finds his engagement ring and cries a bit about Juliet. Sawyer and Kate take turns blaming each other for Juliet’s death, and Sawyer ultimately throws the ring in the water. The biggest thing to come of all of this: Sawyer and Kate is completely over. In this timeline. I suppose the overhanging question is, will destiny bring them back together in the alternate time line?
Claire’s whereabouts are also cleared up. She is roaming around the jungle looking a lot like the crazy French chick. I suppose we call her the crazy Aussie chick now. The fact that she, like Sayid, has the sickness is revealed to Jack by Dogen, but wait a second: does that mean that like Sayid, Claire was also once dead and brought back by baptism in the Temple’s toilet water? I suppose we’ll get more on that next week.
Overall not a bad episode. I suppose greedy fans who expected the answers to come in huge bursts of exposition would be disappointed, but honestly – where would the fun be in that? “What Kate Does” was all about progress at a safe speed. In a way, it was more like the era of LOST season one, where the weird sci-fi/fantasy lived in the subtext of the show.
