Lost Rewatch: Born To Run

 

 

As I said in Whatever the Case May Be, I was never one of those Lost fans who either never liked or came to loathe Kate. That said, having rewatched Born to Run, I am starting to understand slightly better why so many people had issues with Kate, because this episode shows just how good a liar and manipulator she actually is and just how determined she can be to get what she wants no matter who she hurts in the process.

Perhaps the reason I missed this even after multiple rewatches is because this episodes shows many of the regular characters behaving just as poorly.  Perhaps because we are so focused on the bad attitudes of so many of the male characters, we ignored just how badly Kate is behaving even though it’s in front of us the entire episode.

As it becomes very clear that the raft is going to need to be launched much sooner than even Michael had wanted, Kate has now made it very clear that she wants to be on it.  Our focus in the scene is clearly on Michael’s stubbornness and that he has decided to stick to his original line-up even though Kate’s experience on a boat will probably be more beneficial than anything Sawyer could hope to offer.  But watch it again and listen to how Kate phrases things, particularly when she asks if Walt is coming on the raft. Michael has made it clear from day one that the whole reason he has been building the raft was to take him and his son off it. Kate is essentially phrasing it to sound that this very reason is now a liability to the trip. When Michael tries to challenge her on it, she responds: “What do you know about sailing?” Challenging the man who built the raft and who you’re asking permission to sail on it would be terrible form for anybody.

Michael’s behavior has not changed one bit over the last season; he continues to stick to his original opinion of people the moment he first meets them and sticks with it no matter what they do to assist him. He makes it very clear when he sarcastically asks Jack if he and Locke have made up (we’ll get to that) and the second Jack suggests that he was poisoned, he immediately thinks Sawyer did it even though it makes no real sense. If Sawyer really wanted to get back at Kate, why would he poison Michael? That Michael is actually thinking this way says far more about Michael than it does about Sawyer.

And for those who were still following the Kate-Jack-Sawyer triangle, again we have a clear contrast between how they have dealt with Kate’s status as a fugitive. Sawyer now confirms that he did know that Kate was the marshal’s prisoner and that if the rescue comes, Kate will be heading back to prison. However when Hurley accidentally reveals to Locke that Kate was the fugitive, Jack notably winces. For everything he has been holding against Kate in private for being a criminal and lying to him, he has kept her secret all this time.  (It’s kind of amazing, considering Hurley’s ability to spill information, that Hurley has managed to keep it this long.) He might suggest to Kate that she might have poisoned Michael (and in his defense, it’s not an entirely unreasonable suspicion to make at the time) but he keeps his suspicions to himself. The minute Sawyer suspects that Kate poisoned Michael, he turns on her for the first time since the series began and exposes her secrets for the entire island to see.  It is a truly despicable act, and it does (momentarily) turn Kate into a pariah for the first time since the plane crash.

In Kate’s flashback, which takes place before the one in Whatever the Case May Be, we learn more about Kate than we have so far in the series. We suspected the robbery and shooting we saw in that flashback were the crime that made her a fugitive in the first place; now we learn it’s the tip of the iceberg. We still don’t know the real crime that sent her on the run, but the flashback confirms another of Kate’s flaws. As much as she wants to run away (something that the recording of her in 1989 started long before that) she always seems to come back. She did that in her flashback and it thwarted her escape; now we see she has returned to her hometown because her mother is dying of cancer (and will be for a long time) and she wants to make amends. That she seems to think that she can just walk in to her mother’s hospital room seems naïve, but it seems to be reconnaissance to run down her childhood sweetheart, Tom.

The scenes with Tom are particularly painful as they are of lost promise more than anything else. We know even before we hear the record that Kate and Tom clearly thought they were going to live happily ever after, and now that can never be the case.  The time capsule seems significant now because it is where the plane that she wanted so hard to find in the marshal’s case is in it, but as we shall see it has a more symbolic importance that will become clear much later in the series’ run. When Kate finally appears next to her mother’s sickbed, she seems utterly open and despairing for the first time in the entire series – and then her mother starts to scream for help. (At the time, most of us thought it was because Diane was terrified of her daughter; we will eventually learn she was simply keeping an earlier promise that proved how despicable a human being she is.) Even then, Kate can not bear to face being in a cage; she runs away – and as a result, Tom dies.  Tom is not, for the record, ‘the man she killed’ but he is the man she loved and that’s why his death hurt her so badly.

The thing is, the end of that scene shows just how determined Kate is to not face the consequences of her actions. Even after seeing the man she loved take a bullet in the chest, even though the last thing he said to before he died was to stop running, she keeps on doing it. And similarly the last scene of the episode makes it clear just how good a liar she is. Kate confessed her sins to the camp when Sawyer exposed her (though again she cages is by saying ‘what I’m accused of doing, still refusing to say she’s guilty) and then tells everyone she didn’t poison Michael. We believe her because Jack has talked to Sun who he believes was responsible because she was trying to keep her husband from going on the raft. What Sun doesn’t tell anyone is that this was Kate’s idea. Kate wanted a spot on the raft and if it happened to coincide with helping Sun, well that’s a fringe benefit. Many fans continuously blame Jack for taking a self-righteous attitude towards Kate, and it’s ironic that this is one of the only things she actually does that he thinks she’s innocent of.

Then again, Jack’s mind isn’t entirely on the raft. Sayid has brought Jack out to the hatch, which has now basically been unearthed. Understandably Jack is pissed at Locke for keeping this to himself for three weeks, but what else is new? I imagine he’s actually angrier when Locke says: “All due respect Jack, but since when do I answer to you?” As we all know by now, Jack is more or less a dictator when it comes to his leadership style and he can not take any challenge to it. Locke has basically said outright what no doubt many in the camp have been thinking to this point, and when he chooses to bring up the secret Jack was keeping about the guns – not just from Locke, but from everybody else – it is a fair point. I have little doubt that, left to his own devices, Locke would have kept the hatch a secret until he could have managed to open it and maybe then told everybody what he found. Sayid has essentially forced his hand.

And its worth noting that when Jack essentially agrees with Locke, Sayid is appalled –   he’s clearly assessed even by now how much the two disagree and obviously thought Jack would do so just out of habit. He thinks the hatch was never meant to be opened from the outside and that there is something dangerous in it. That said, it’s hard to imagine Sayid could have convinced anybody to after all this time to just bury the hatch again (if nothing else, it would have really pissed off the fanbase who’d spent as much time as Locke wondering what was inside).

And if we needed any doubt that what was in the hatch was clearly dangerous, we get the biggest warning sign of all when Walt comes to Locke in the middle of the episode. The second Locke touches Walt, he gets a very clear sign what is in the hatch and just how dangerous it is. We never do learn exactly what he sees, but it’s clearly enough to terrify him. He burned the first raft because he didn’t want to leave the island, and he’s clearly been hinting to his father the last few episodes that he’s not entirely wild about making this trip. But the moment he sees what Locke he does a complete 180 and decides he and Michael need to get away as fast as possible.

And it says a lot about Locke, who knows how special Walt is and who is fully aware of his gift, that not even this changes his mind. He is convinced the hatch is his destiny and nothing that has happened – not the death of Boone, not being ostracized by the camp, not being shot by Shannon – is going to stop him from realizing it.  He thinks because he has Jack on his side that he can achieve it now. He doesn’t know that by doing this he has essentially laid the groundwork for the hatred between them that will make up the backbone of the rest of the series.