I have to admit I wasn’t terribly impressed with the latest episode, “What Kate Does.” This is due in part to the fact that I don’t really like Kate. I don’t think her character adds very much to the show. The so-called love triangle between her and Jack and Sawyer has been dragged out to the point where most fans just don’t care anymore who she’ll end up with, if she ends up with either of them.
The truly interesting thing about “What Kate Does” is how, in the alternate reality (or “flash-sideways,” as they are being called), Kate still manages to have a role in both Claire’s life and the life of her son, Aaron. In the main reality, Kate has come back to the island for the expressed purpose of finding Claire, after having spent three years raising Aaron as her own. If there is a theme in “What Kate Does,” it’s that no matter what hand fate deals us, the lives of some people are inevitably bound together.
This leads to a startling reveal that Claire’s doctor is none than Ethan Goodspeed, one of the Others, and the man who kidnapped Claire on the island so they could take her baby. In the flash-sideways, Ethan was presumably never raised by the Others (since the island sunk) and didn’t develop the homicidal streak that caused him to kidnap pregnant women and hang people from trees. Like Kate, it would seem that in every reality Ethan has a role to play in the lives of Claire and Aaron.
Did anyone notice that the baby’s heart-rate monitor flat-lined right at the moment Claire decided against delivering the baby at that very moment? I didn’t, but my wife did. She’s good about noticing stuff like that.
Take, for example, that Other who goes with Kate and Jin after Sawyer? Not Aldo, but the other guy. Did you recognize him? If you’re from Canada you might, since he played BLT on “Degrassi Junior High.” I have to wonder if the casting wasn’t deliberate considering all of the Canadian jokes centered around the Others. Ethan saying he was from Ontario, Mikhail thinking that the Others in the Looking Glass station were on assignment in Canada, etc., etc.
And what’s up with Sayid being “claimed”? Presumably by the Smoke Monster, since this would seem to be the same infection that claimed Rousseau’s team. Seeing the way the “sickness” turned her lover, Robert, into a violent sociopath, things don’t bode well for our favourite Iraqi torturer.
It was also nice to see Sawyer more or less doing what I said he would do. His return to the Dharma barracks for the ring he was going to use to propose to Juliet shows just how important she was to him, and puts Kate in her place at the same time.
The big reveal of the episode is that Claire is alive and well, and has apparently become the island’s new Rousseau, complete with her own jungle booby-traps. Considering the possibility now that the Man in Black/Smoke Monster is also responsible for the apparition of Christian Shepherd we’ve seen wandering around the island — the same apparition that led Claire away from the rest of the Losties way back in Season 4 — it seems likely that the reason he took Claire to the cabin was in order for her to break the circle of ash binding the Man in Black to that location. This would also explain why Dogen says that Claire has also been “claimed.”
But whose side is Claire really on? We’ll have to wait and see.
