LOST Season 6, Episode 3 | What Kate Does

So this week we get a nice connect the dots episode about Kate. The title of the episode is polysemous and speaks perfectly to everything we know about Kate.  It’s also a play on Season 2’s episode titled What Kate Did where we learn for the first time about her killing her stepfather, her background with the Marshall and why she was on the run. This episode actually plays like an immediate sequel to that episode now that the timeline has shifted and the plane never crashes.

The episode shows Kate on the run again which has been a constant for her character since day one.  However it also touches on the juxtaposition of future Kate (the one running from the Temple Others) and past Kate (the one running from the Marshall who kidnaps Claire) and how no matter which time line she is operating in she is drawn to uniting Claire and Aaron and that is a part of her destiny. In the past/new timeline she actually goes so far as to risk getting caught to take Claire to the hospital and then tells her she should keep the baby. In the future time line she admits to Sawyer that she is there to try and find Kate and bring her back to Aaron.

The fact that the time line where she raised Aaron no longer exists (due to the bomb going off) doesn’t matter, as it is simply in her DNA to try and bring Claire and the Aaron together. Furthermore we see Ethan as a comforting doctor rather than the baby thief that he is/was in a different time line and this is great because it shows that his destiny was to always be involved with Claire and the baby independent of his motives. Because the plane did not crash and now that the bomb had gone off that also means that Ethan never went to the island (or went and came back) because the bomb happened before his arrival and changed his life time line but not his destiny.

As discussed in last week’s recap, this season so far seems to really be about each character achieving his or her destiny in some form and the inter connectivity that everyone cannot escape that has driven the show since it’s inception.

Speaking of characters destinies, Sayid is brought back to life only to be tortured which is a constant for his character.  He is always the torturer or the victim of a torturer but nonetheless that is a part of his destiny. The weird part is that the Temple Others save him in the Fountain of Youth to test him only to then decide to kill him. The reason they give is that he is infected which may potentially tie into the infection/sickness that everyone has always been talking about since Season 2.  For example at the end of Season 2 we learned that Kelvin kept Desmond locked in the hatch and when he went outside he wore a HAZMAT suit because he didn’t want to get infected. Furthermore after Ethan kidnapped Claire he administered her shots so she wouldn’t get infected. The irony of course is that in this episode Ethan offers Claire the choice of drugs to curb the baby’s birth and when she asks if it will make the baby sick he says no…which is the same thing he states to her when he has her captive and is giving her the vaccine there. This now all ties full circle back into the fact that back on the island that Dogen (The Asian Master of the Temple) tells Jack that Sayid is infected and that he will turn out like his sister…who of course is Claire and was the first ever Lost character to take the drugs/vaccine not get infected after the plane crashed. Furthermore of course it’s Sayid that is infected because being infected for him is a big metaphor for his entire character as we have always been asked to deal with the question of whether a torturer and a person who has done despicable things can overcome that fact to redeem themselves and become a good person if they had no choice in delivering those actions in the first place as it was bi- product of war. As Dogen states the darkness is growing inside Sayid and will eventually overwhelm him…to be honest we’ve always wondered if that was mentally the case… now it’s just become a supernatural and/or medical question.

Sayid is a great case study for Jacob and the Man In Black, as Jacob believes free will and goodness can win out and the MIB believes that man is man and will always be the animal that he is. It goes back to the argument on the beach at the beginning of the Season 5 finale between the two of them and now it appears that Sayid will fulfill his destiny as the ultimate case study.

Another interesting thing to note is that Jack is of course given the role of doctor to administer the medicine to Sayid. However which makes it even more intriguing is that after basically risking everyone’s lives at the end of Season 5 with the blowing up the bomb scheme he now saves Sayid’s life by not giving him the medicine. He seems to always have the option to control the ultimate destiny of the characters around him like when he had Ben’s life in his hands during his back surgery and he leveraged it to let Kate run away from the Others (see she loves to run!) or when he saved a crash victim’s life only to end up marrying her or when he was the one that got everyone to go back to the island the second time after Locke’s death. One has to think that Jack will be a key cog in deciding the destiny of everyone when the show concludes at the end of the year. We will just have to wait and see.