Lost Re-view: What Kate Did

It's hard for me to put myself back in this mindset, but there was a time when one of the most popular unanswered questions about Lost was "what crime did Kate commit?" This second season episode, right down to its title, was crafted to answer that. But talking about this episode is going to take even more space that usual, because in answering that question, Lost covered some interesting character backstory and opened up a number of questions that were never completely explained by the end of the series.

The episode was written by Steven Maeda & Craig Wright, two staff writers who both left the series after the second season. It was directed by Paul Edwards, who after working on the show here for the first time would go on to become the series' most prolific director who wasn't "in-house" working as an executive producer.

It turns out that complicated father issues, already shown to be a key part of Jack, Locke, Sun, and Jin's backgrounds, are key to understanding Kate as well. Her past is both simple and complicated, expected and surprising. Her crime, it turns out, is murder. At age 24, she tampered with the gas main at her mother's house, setting it to explode with Wayne -- her abusive, alcoholic stepfather -- inside. She also took out an insurance policy in her mother's name ahead of time, hoping to set her up for life. The problem was, she didn't appreciate the tangled mess of feelings her mother had for Wayne. Despite the abuse, she loved the man, and she ratted Kate out to the authorities immediately, putting her on the run from marshal Edward Mars.

All that is the expected part. The marshal even taunts Kate with that when he briefly has her in his custody. But there's another dimension to it. It turns out that the man Kate thought was her dad, the Army officer her mother divorced when she was a child, was actually away overseas when she was conceived. Her actual biological father was her "stepfather" Wayne, a fact which (given his behavior early in this episode) it seems he's not even aware of himself.

This is an important piece of Kate's character, the self-hatred she feels that her blood is not that of an army hero, but an abusive drunk. And this self-hatred is sadly driven home even more when Kate goes to see the father who first raised her in a flashback. She asks why he never told her the truth, and he answers "I knew you'd kill him." Worse, when she asks why he didn't, he tells her "I don't have murder in my heart." Kate does, and that's the problem.

The on-Island story this episode plays up the love triangle between Jack, Kate, and Sawyer. Jack is tending to a delirious Sawyer, who is still recovering from his gunshot wound, and hears him murmur that he loves Kate. Jack then doesn't want to leave Kate alone with Sawyer to attend Shannon's funeral, but Kate insists he go. It would all be uninteresting to anyone but the "shippers," if not for some new circumstances and the added context of the flashbacks:

Sawyer's unexpected return to the group has Kate thinking about her past. And because her mind is on the past, just before she comes to watch over Sawyer, she sees a black horse on the Island. Not just any horse, but one key to her first escape from the marshal. He wasn't paying enough attention to the road on a rainy evening, swerved to avoid the horse, and hit a tree. Kate stared for a moment at the horse before driving off.

Just filling the silence with her voice (but knowing Sawyer can't really hear her), she tells Sawyer of having seen the horse. He begins to whisper something that draws her in close... and then he suddenly sits bolt upright, grabs her by the throat, and begins to choke her as he screams "why did you kill me?!" Kate believes she's hearing the voice of her dead father Wayne, somehow possessing Sawyer, and flees the scene.

When Jack finally catches up with her to demand why she left Sawyer all alone (as well as the button; oh, we'll get to the button), she breaks down, upset that she's not as good as Jack. She kisses him, but then thinks twice of it and flees again. It all makes sense when she finally returns to the Hatch and confides once more in the unconscious Sawyer (whom she addresses as Wayne): she hates that Wayne is a part of her, and that she will never be any good or have anything good. Every time she looks at Sawyer, she sees Wayne. From the sound of it, Kate wants to be with Jack, but doesn't think she deserves it.

Upon this revelation, Sawyer regains consciousness -- not possessed -- and the two share a lighter moment in which he sees the strange surroundings of the Hatch and is sure they've been rescued. It's followed by a serious moment outside in which Sawyer sees Kate's horse, and she knows she's not in fact crazy.

So, let the unanswered questions begin!

First, was Sawyer actually possessed by Wayne when he choked Kate and lamented her killing him? No subsequently explained property of the Island (that I can think of) would explain any literal interpretation of that scene, so I choose to believe that Sawyer was just having a weird "waking dream" moment in his recovery that Kate misinterpreted in her fixation. Of course, that transfers the question to: just who did delirious Sawyer think he was speaking to? But that feels like an easier one to answer to me. He could have been having a fever dream about the con man he's chasing, the Others who shot him, maybe even Ana Lucia.

Second, what was the nature of the horse Kate saw? Here, I posit two theories. First, the Island shows some measure of sentience throughout the show in drawing people and things there that are "needed." This is the force that Ben refers to in a later episode as a "magic box," and is what magically transported Anthony Cooper (Locke's father) to the Island in season 3. That force could have been responding to some need of Kate's here, bringing the horse to her to sharpen her memories, help her see that she's a different person from the one who killed her father, and hone her for Jacob's purposes (not to be revealed for some time). That's if you believe the horse is still alive out there in the real world.

Option two in my mind is that the horse is in fact dead... which puts it within the purview of the Man in Black. He can transform into any dead person, even someone who didn't die on the Island, and it's possible that power isn't actually limited to people. He could be appearing here as Kate's horse, trying to remind her of her inherent darkness and tempt her down the path that would allow him to kill her. But Kate passes the test, confessing that her motive for killing her father was not out of noble intention for her mother, but out of hatred for what she recognized in herself. Perhaps if Kate had stayed in denial, the Man in Black could have killed her here; by embracing the truth and purging that evil, she stayed beyond his reach.

Still with me through all that heady stuff? Good, because we have a ways to go. "What Kate Did" actually contains a considerable amount of content that has nothing to do with Kate.

There's an arc for Sayid, who tries to eulogize Shannon at her funeral, but can only lament how unlikely it was they ever would have met or even spoken to each other but for these circumstances. He simply acknowledges that he loved her before walking away. He's still deep in despair when Kate later asks him if he believes in ghosts. He answers that he saw Walt in the jungle before Shannon was shot, asking if that makes him crazy. Maybe, maybe not... though if that's what came to his mind when asked about ghosts, it seems he believes Walt is dead too. (Incorrectly, but that's where he's at right now.)

There are two great scenes with Jin. The first is at the top of the episode when he emerges shirtless from his tent with Sun clinging on him -- and gets a sly thumbs up from Hurley. The second is when Locke uses bolt cutters in the Swan station to finally remove the handcuff from his wrist. He and Michael share a laugh over it, showing how far their relationship has come since Michael put the cuff on him.

Jack also has a few lighter moments. One involves Hurley trying to psychoanalyze him with some things he heard bandied around in his time at the psych ward, while the other has Jack bringing tequila to just sit with a self-berating Ana Lucia.

The writers continue a theme that was big in season 2 -- that the Oceanic survivors all had some connections in their pasts. In the flashback that shows Kate going to speak with her army father, there's a brief glimpse of Sayid on a TV in the background. (The relationship between Sayid and Kate's dad would be explained later in the season.)

The mysteries of the Swan station itself deepen in this episode. When Kate flees Wayne/Sawyer, she leaves the button unmanned, and Locke returns with just 23 seconds (Numbers!) to type in the code -- which he does with only 1 second on the clock. Later, Michael points out the blast doors on the computer room that no one has noticed before, their purpose unknown (for now).

But the big Swan-related revelation comes after Locke shows Eko and Michael the orientation film. Eko reveals that he found the missing chunk of the film in the abandoned Arrow station on the other side of the Island. (Actually, he first tells a Biblical story of Josiah and the Book of Law, but I confess my knowledge of the Bible is insufficient for me to speculate intelligently on the literary metaphor being made here.) Locke remarks at the amazing odds that the removed footage would be found and brought back, but Eko cautions not to mistake coincidence for fate -- a key philosophical thread of Lost.

When the footage is spliced back in, "Dr. Marvin Candle" warns that the computer for entering the numbers should not be used to communicate with the outside world, at the risk of compromising the project and causing another "incident." And at that very moment, Michael is in the computer room checking out the equipment and sees a prompt appear on the screen: "Hello?" He strikes up a chat, and discovers that Walt is on the other end of the conversation.

All this material in the Swan station leaves us with at least three unanswered questions -- though admittedly some of them aren't likely to keep a Lost fan up at night.

Firstly, why the warning not to use the computer for communication? Though there is some tension later in the season about whether the button pushing is for a real purpose or just part of a social experiment, we ultimately learn that indeed, the button pushing is keeping an electromagnetic calamity at bay. Is the concern that using the computer for any other purpose than button pushing is simply too risky? That you wouldn't want to, say, accidentally cause the early 80s version of the Blue Screen of Death at just the wrong moment that renders the computer unable to enter the numbers in time?

Secondly, why was this warning excised from the orientation film? We learn later in the season that the man responsible for this was Radzinsky, the former "Hostile" working for Ben, who painted the blast door map and ultimately went crazy. But we never really get the why of it. Was he hoping to cause another incident by removing the warning against it? He was there for the first incident, so that seems unlikely. Unless that's part of the crazy, anyway. (And if it was, then why not simply stop pushing the button if he wanted to cause a disaster?) Sorry, but I've got no theories here.

But those two extremely insignificant questions are small potatoes next to this: how did Walt get on the other end of that computer chat? And to disprove what seems to me to be the best theory here, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are on record in an interview stating that this was not a ruse -- it really was Walt. So I guess the next most plausible answer is that the Others actually allowed Walt to use a computer connected somehow to the Swan, as part of a plan to bait some of the survivors into coming after Walt.

Admittedly, all of these questions are a distraction from the main thrust of the episode's drama, Kate's dark backstory. But to be honest, while this backstory is more dramatic and interesting (by far) than the Kate flashbacks relayed in her last two episodes, it's not as compelling as most of the other stories told so far this season. So all told (and I'm sorry I felt there was so much to be told), I'd rate this episode a B. Not bad, but not among Lost's best.