Eggtown

Tonight was another excellent episode of Lost. I say this without reservation, even though I figured out the final twist, of the true identity of Kate's son, ahead of time. I praise the episode because, once again, it delivered a lot of great twists, turns, and developments that were all grounded in character.

Kate and Sawyer are back on the outs again, but we now see that things aren't going to really work out for her and Jack either. We got major change in the nature of Kate's character, as we see that in the future she is finally settled down and no longer has to -- nor, much more importantly, wants to -- avoid being tied down to one place. This is a pretty sharp contrast to the flash-forwards we've seen so far. Jack, Hurley, and Sayid all end up much worse off in the future, but Kate has grown and seems better off.

This would seem to be a large part of why when we saw Jack approach her about going "back to the island," she dismissed him.

Plot-wise, we got final resolution on Kate's criminal past. We learned that she is indeed one of "the Oceanic Six." And we've learned that they all (well, Kate and Jack at least) seem to have agreed on a fiction that only eight of them survived the plane crash.

This opens up all kinds of crazy threads on the future. It suggests that no one else is around that knows the truth and wants to contradict them -- not "Others," not the boat rescuers, not Penny, or Desmond, or anyone else. More telling than Hurley's "I wish I hadn't gone with Locke" statement, it says that some major changes are going to happen to the characters before we're done. I can't imagine the current Jack, for example, not wanting to honor all the lives lost so far (from Boone to Charlie and everyone in between) and deciding to lie and ignore any sacrifices they made.

The episode also seems to tell us that Claire is destined not to survive, since Kate winds up raising Aaron. In a way, it sets us up for her fate to match Charlie's, from a storytelling standpoint. We knew all season that Charlie "was going to die." There were only two questions: when and how would it happen, and might the writers show us a way out of that predicament? Well, now it seems Claire is also destined to die, and there is no way out of it for her. So now the clock is ticking... when is she going to come to an end? How? Why?

All of this, plus some other intriguing character moments too. Ben still managing to get under Locke's skin, suggesting he still hasn't changed and probably never will. But Locke shoving a live grenade into a prisoner's mouth -- an extreme he's arguably never gone to -- suggesting maybe he already has. The strange hint that the new character Dan has some sort of condition of short term memory loss. The first hints that Jin and Sun don't want the same thing for their future, if they get off the island.

This great season keeps on rolling strong.