Meet Me In The Middle

Even I can admit when an episode underwhelms me a little. And, at least initially, that’s how I felt about “What Kate Does,” the second episode in LOST’s final season. Presenting a viable follow-up to last week’s blockbuster premiere was a tall order. And until the last two minutes, last night’s episode just didn’t do it for me. It was like the punchline to a joke that I thought was going to be a lot funnier.

That said, there were some really interesting little tidbits throughout the episode, with plenty of winks and nods in the alternate reality (or “Flash-Sideways”) that might clue us in to what we can expect from that story arc. And actually, the second time I watched it, I liked the whole episode a lot better. Yeah, I watched it twice. I know.

So let’s get after it, shall we? Because episodes of LOST are like different kinds of beer. Some are better than others, but they’re all good. Bottoms up.

What Kate Always Does

Last night we saw Kate run from the law, tell a lie, get an assist from the kindness of strangers and then rediscover a soft spot in her heart. Stop me if you’ve heard that one. But like last week’s Oceanic 815 flight, the story was a little off from what we’ve come to understand as the primary narrative. I said it last week and I’ll say it again: there are occurrences – winks and nods – in this sideways reality that are leading up to a reconciliation with the Island reality. Last night, the near-déjà vu moments and “Do I know you?” glances were too frequent and too deliberate to not mean something.

Death Cab for Cuties
That Marshall sucks at chasing cars. Seriously, Doc Arzt even set a moving screen 50 feet down the road and somehow the Marshall couldn’t catch up to it. But somehow, Kate got away again as the cabbie steamrolled Arzt’s duffel bag full of microscopes and Petri dishes. Wink & Nod #1: Kate and Jack unwittingly shared a long glance as Jack waited outside the airport as Kate’s cab was stopped. They said, “Do I know you from somewhere?” without saying it. Don’t believe me? Watch it again.

After ditching Claire and the Cabbie (which would be the worst LOST spin-off ever), Kate is freed from the cuffs by a chop shop employee who might as well be Tom the Other’s Hetero-Doppelganger. But Kate’s soft spot strikes again when she sees the baby stuff in Claire’s bag, and she goes back to help her out.

Remember Richard Malkin? He was Claire’s psychic, who insisted the baby be raised by Claire and nobody else. It would seem that declaration transcends alternate realities, as even when Claire does make it to the adoptive parents’ home, a marital rift has negated the adoption. If that wasn’t enough of an omen, Claire went into labor right on the front porch. By this point, the cosmos are basically screaming, “CLAIRE! This baby is yours. You can’t escape it.”

Baby Mama Drama
Kate rushes Claire to the hospital, where we are treated to a long-form Wink & Nod in the form of Kate not being able to pull herself away from Claire’s predicament. In the Island reality, Kate served as Claire’s midwife. In this reality, she does the next best thing by not abandoning her new friend. Why? Kate couldn’t tell you. But she obviously feels compelled to stay. She knows something is familiar and amiss about Claire. She just doesn’t know what. But we, the audience, do. The emotions and memories of Kate 1.0’s experience as Aaron’s deliverer, then surrogate mother, are tapping on the glass surrounding Sideways Kate, trying to make her remember.

Hell, Claire even reciprocates this unspoken knowing by covering for Kate when the cops come looking for her. Kate assumed the name Joan Hart, presumably as an homage to Melissa Joan Hart, who’s hit show Sabrina The Teenage Witch was never canceled in this iteration of time. Why would Claire cover for a dangerous fugitive? Because she, too, knows that there’s more to her new friend than she can immediately understand. She even trusts Kate with a credit card to help her get off to a decent start.

Oh, and who was there to tend to Mommy Claire? Dr. Ethan Rom! I mean, Dr. Ethan Goodspeed! Remember, Ethan is the son of Horace Goodspeed, so that’s where this naming comes from. Apparently in this iteration of the story, Ethan doesn’t become the Chief of Medicine at St. Others Hospital, opting instead for a more traditional medical gig. He also, for whatever reason, doesn’t go by Ethan Rom. That’s an interesting twist. It makes me wonder if non-native Others are subjected to some sort of “born-again” process where their names/identities/essences are changed in some meaningful way in order to assimilate them into the Others culture. Or maybe Rom was his middle name. Either way, “Ethan Rom” is an anagram for “Other Man.” So there.

Dr. Goodspeed tells Claire – in Wink & Nod #3 – that “Aaron is going to be a handful,” based on his near-early arrival. And Claire follows that up with Wink & Nod #4, telling Kate that she doesn’t know why she referred to the baby as “Aaron,” but that, “it’s like I knew or something.” But Claire does know, ya know? She has already experienced this birth in an alternate reality. And she’ll realize it soon enough.

Fun fact: I paused the TV on the shot of the ultrasound. The date read “10-22-2004.” Oceanic 815 crashed on the Island on 9-22-2004. Have fun with that one .

Been Here. Done This.
Winks & Nods, people. These subtle near-understandings of the split reality that our characters are undergoing each week are going to snowball until one or more of them start to realize what’s going on.

How do I know? Because I, too, am experiencing some déjà vu this season. The experience of our Sideways-in-Time castaways is one big Wink & Nod to Desmond’s journey in the season four episode, “Flashes Before Your Eyes.” His consciousness leaps to a world he’s experienced before, where he and Penny live together and he’s interviewing for a job at Widmore industries. But in this iteration, a beeping microwave jars him with a haunting familiarity. And a street musician belting out Oasis tunes jogs his memory fully, as he recognizes Charlie and recalls the Island, the button, the boat race and everything else.


See. We’ve been to this rodeo, cowboy. Desmond figured it out with enough jogs of the memory. And our Oceanic 815 Part II characters will figure it out, too. When they do, I think they’re going to need to reconcile their two timelines. And that’s gonna be good.

Two Roads Diverge

One thing I think is fun about Season Six: the Island stuff takes place three years later (in time) than the back-stories, just like in the old days when we had flashbacks every week. It’s like we’ve come full circle back to Season One, but now those flashbacks are being shot through a multi-faceted prism of time. I swear I’ve kissed a girl.

Anyway, until the last two minutes, the Island story was split across two stories: Kate’s 1,438th chasing of someone into the jungle and the Sayid, Wanted: Dead or Alive story. Let’s start with Kate. And I’ll get to those last two minutes later.

Road One: Kate Being Kate
Sawyer begins by reprising his role as the “New sheriff in town” from season two’s episode “Long Con,” where he seized the gun cache from Jack. This time though, he’s using his gun to escape. And who’s going to follow him? You guessed it: Kate Austen. As backup she takes Jin and two Others, Aldo and Justin. Can I just say, Justin is the worst-named Other in the bunch. That’s like parents who name their first kid something like “Harmony,” and their next kid “Justin.” It’s like, “Yeah, we cared enough to get creative on the first kid but, Justin, he was kinda a mistake and we just needed a name.” Justin. I died.

One thing that struck me about this hapless foursome: Aldo’s keen awareness of the events of the last five seasons. He knows who Kate and Jin are, he knows what Smokey has been up to and is still capable of. And he has to stop Justin from blabbing about the Ajira flight and something about Rousseau. The Others, it would seem, are not totally surprised to see our heroes. And I get the feeling that they know a little more than they’re letting on about what our heroes’ purpose is. Maybe they know what Jacob is trying to do with them. I got that feeling again later in the episode, when Jack asked Dogen if he was from the Island, and Dogen replied that he was “brought here,” like everyone else.

But I digress. So Jin and Kate ditch their Sherpas, and Jin goes to find Sun while Kate seeks out Sawyer. The Kate and Sawyer scenes are a little played-out by this point. But damn, Josh Holloway has just become a much better actor in the last five years. His sitting on the dock of the bay scene was painful to watch, in a good way. He broke down and admitted that all his anger toward Jack was really just a mask for his own guilt, which he harbored for asking Juliet to stay with him in 1977.

Then, with unprecedented coldness, Sawyer dismissed Kate as a mere annoyance. It was perfect. Later, Aldo called Kate a bitch, which I thought was harsh. But if that’s true, then Sawyer’s got 99 problems, but that particular bitch ain’t one. It’ll be interesting to see where Sawyer goes from here, now that’s he’s at least begun to deal with his guilt. The previews for next week seem to hint that we’ll find out shortly.


Road Two: Down With the Sickness
First, a clarification note. Last week I referred to a character as Creepy Old Asian. Turns out he is named Dogen. Also, his bespectacled assistant is named Lennon.

Second, line of the night goes to Miles, spoken to Sayid: “As you can see, Hugo here has assumed the leadership position, so that’s pretty great.”

Now then. Lennon and Dogen seem none-too-optimistic about Sayid’s “resurrection.” In fact, they go all Sayid on Sayid, strapping him to a table and basically torturing him in order to find out what they needed to know. 


Dogen “questions” Sayid without saying a word. He tests him. First by covering him in ash. Then by electrocuting him. Then by burning him with a hot iron. Sayid seemed to react normally to all of these tests, right? The ash didn’t affect him, and then he felt pain from the other two things. Contrast that with last week’s Locke 2.0, who couldn’t penetrate the ash and then had bullets bounce off him. So it’s safe to assume Sayid is not afflicted with Man-in-Black-itis, right? That’s what I thought.

But Lennon says Sayid failed these tests. And later we found out what, exactly, they were testing him for. Kind of. Jack sticks up for Sayid and doesn’t make him take the pill, instead opting to test the pill on himself. Dogen gets his Heimlich Maneuver on to save Jack, because apparently that pill as not, as advertised, a “cure” for Sayid’s “infection.”

So what in the name of John Locke’s Tortured Soul is this infection? Lennon says that it means Sayid’s body has been “claimed.” Is this the same “sickness” and “infection” that talk that permeated Seasons one and two? I think so. But Rousseau fought that sickness by shooting her team. Dogen and Lennon opted for a more scientific route. So maybe they know more about fighting the sickness, or maybe it’s a different disease altogether.

But wait, what are they curing again? What has Sayid come down with? In true LOST fashion, the answer to that question presented only more questions. Dogen and Lennon refer to it as a darkness. One that is growing in Sayid. And that if it reaches his heart, it will transform Sayid from the man they know into something much scarier. How do they know so much about this? Well that brings us to the last two minutes…


The Last Two Minutes
Though at times a little flat, What Kate Does went out with a bang.

First, Dogen and Lennon revealed to Jack that they knew so much about this darkness, this sickness, because they had watched it overtake… his sister. Claire Littleton.

Finally, we see Jack forced to confront the reality presented to him by Claire’s mom at his father’s funeral last season: that Claire is his sister. And also, Claire’s alive! The oft-debated fate of our Aussie Mommy has been revealed, and we’ll finally get to see what led her to leave Sawyer and Miles three years ago, wandering off in the middle of the night to follow a vision of her father.

Quick side note: remember Ethan’s insistence that Claire be vaccinated and protected from the Island’s sickness? Suddenly I wonder if he wasn’t as crazy as I thought. Maybe he knew that she was a “candidate” for this darkness, this evil, and he felt the need to protect her.

But more importantly, the end of the episode caught us up with where Claire is now. She is standing in the jungle, with a Rousseau-esque grit and a smoking gun, saving Jin from certain death at the hands of Aldo and Justin. You had to know Justin was going to die. They named him Justin.

Where does Claire go from here? How will she react to Jin, who she hasn’t seen in years? She can’t go back to the Temple with him, because she’s apparently infected. But is she just going to let Jin go on his merry way?

Time will tell on what Jack, Claire and Jin do with this bombshell of information. I’ll let the next few episodes explore that, and I’m going to make a different point to wrap this up.

Convergence

Remember how I spent the first part of this article whining that our two separate realities just have to meet up and converge at some point? I think that, last night, the writers might have given us one more little clue to that end.

The two divergent roads that comprised the on-Island narrative were, for most of the episode, separate. The story started in the same spot (the Temple), then split off (following Kate in one direction and staying with Jack in the other) and then, at the end, it converged. The revelation Jack receives about Claire coincides perfectly with Jin’s discovery of Jungle Claire. These two stories, while largely independent, were also affected by each other. And in the end, they couldn’t avoid converging toward one central conflict: what to do with Claire.


That’s exactly what I think will happen with our alternate realities. These two separate narratives are still affecting each other – we’re getting hints about that via those little aforementioned Winks & Nods (I promise I’ll stop saying Winks & Nods. Winks & Nods. Okay I’m done) – and eventually, the storyinglines will acquiesce to the inevitability that they are intrinsically linked.

Much in the same way that our characters have always been linked to each other, before and after the crash of Oceanic 815.

Much in the same way that divergent motifs like “good and evil,” are better understood and explored when they converge on common ground.

And much in the same way that all these disparate strands of storyline will – we hope – converge to tell one amazing story by the time this whole saga wraps up in May.

Until next week.

Namaste.

Charlie