TV Watch: Lost, What Kate Did

This was a bit of a mixed episode for me - still good, but it kinda shines a light on one of the fundamental problems Lost will need to overcome this season.

So, first - we got a lot good little bits, mostly surrounding around Sayid's "sickness" and a lot of fan moments in the sideback scenes from the parallel universe. There's a lot of chatter that the sideback plots will be mostly fan filler, but I still think they're an interesting foil for the main plotline. Here we have Kate being not just badass Kate, but looking after Claire as well. We've also got Claire pulling a "deja vu" style event - naming Aaron when she has barely thought about keeping him, which I'm assuming will be commonplace drops through the end of the show.

Anyway, back to Kate. The backstories stopped being overly useful a while ago, mostly because they didn't offer much new information on the character. In some ways, the sidebacks suffer from that - but we can look at them for insight into how the island has changed (or, technically, would change people). Is Kate who goes after Sawyer to, eventually, go after Claire much different than Kate getting Claire to the hospital? There has been a lot of talk about the island / Jacob choosing people so that they can have a chance at retribution/resolution/absolution. In this case, Kate seems to have the same absolution: Claire.

And a note on Sawyer: he's probably my favorite character right now. I hate it when TV plots abbreviate grief or emotion because it isn't a convenience to some other plot point. Sawyer has plenty of room to breath and, well, brood - which is exactly what would make sense for him.

But then we have the sickness. See the Lost And Gone Forever Blog for a great recap of the various contradictions to the sickness and the vaccine we've witnessed over seasons. It went from being one of the more interesting early mysteries (seeing "Quarantine" on an open hatch is kinda brilliant) to just plain confusing. Can the writing march forward and explain the range of events we've seen? I'm hoping so - because that will be better than some reconned explanation which just happens to fit this season.

So a thumbs up, but with the tacked on reminder that the show has a lot of work to do.

Crazy theory time. Last week's was that Jacob, Anti-Jacob and Richard are all aliens. The weak point in this theory seems to be Richard, which seems like a hard sell to be on the same level as Jacob and Anti-Jacob ... which is pretty sound reasoning since nothing in the storyline refers to Richard in the same light. Richard seems like he more likely shares the same camp as Ben and now Sayid - someone who has been effected by the island at a very extreme level. A slave on the Black Rock who went to temple, it might seem.

Not much this episode contradicted the alien theory, but nothing really to support it either - we didn't really see anything of Smokey. Which, I'm hoping we don't get into a tempo where we only get cool Jacob/Locke related material every three to four episodes.