Lost Rewatch On VHS: Eggtown

 

Note: This episode, like several others, had ‘enhancements’ – a small screen at the bottom with captioning that revealed certain details of previous episodes that certain viewers might have forgotten over time. Among them is one in the opening scene where Locke brings Ben his breakfast and reveals he’s locked in the basement and tells us where this room is and how the situation is reversed from where it was in Season 2. In other words, it was the TV version of Finding Lost, albeit with even more details.

One of the ads during the episode is for an ABC sitcom called Miss Guided with Judy Greer as the lead! Why did no other service give her another chance like this?  Also we get a promise of a sneak peek of a little independent film called Iron Man.

 

In the final act of the episode when Locke is committing one of the most frightening things we’ve seen him to do yet, he introduces himself to Miles as John Locke “and I am the protector of this island.”  I have a feeling that, if the rest of his followers had heard him say that (never mind what he actually does to Miles) they would have run for the beach as fast as their legs could carry them. Because Locke has now made it very clear what his intentions are and that he has been lying to them when he offered to protect them in the first place.

We’ve known since Season 1 that Locke’s religion is the island and he has sworn allegiance to it. However in previous seasons he’s at least made the effort to try and keep people safe and to help protect them even if it was only because he thought they were important to the island. Now he’s forsaken any human impulses at all.  His response to Kate’s not-joke about this being a dictatorship is not comforting and for all Sawyer’s reference to their being sheep, there is clearly unease, creature comforts aside. Hurley is clearly terrified of getting on Locke’s bad side, Claire is troubled by his behavior and we already know that Sawyer isn’t with him. For all John’s talk of bringing everybody here to keep this safe, they are all very clear that they are dealing with someone who is at best confused about the next steps, and at worst, unhinged.

The only reason we don’t truly wonder if Locke has become a monster is because both Ben and Jack are right about what they say about him. Ben says that John is lost because he is trying to manipulate him and Jack, who has similar doubts about the freighter folk, automatically says Locke has no idea what he’s doing when the suggestion comes up – but both men are dead on with their assessments. Locke is so desperate for some kind of affirmation that he is doing the right thing that when Sawyer comes to his door and offers him a shoulder to lean on, he agrees to it because he needs a friendly face.

In Finding Lost Season Three, Nikki Stafford speculated Locke used Sawyer to kill Cooper as much because Sawyer had conned him out of the guns in The Long Con as because of how Cooper had ruined Sawyer’s life the same way he ruined Locke’s. While I’m not sure I agree with that theory,  I now wonder if Sawyer agrees to help Kate because he is still angry about the trick Locke played on him just a week ago.  Because Sawyer basically does a version of the exact same trick he played on Locke when he took the guns in the first place. He convinces Locke that he is his friend, gives him confidence about something Kate told him and tricks Locke into trusting him to get away from the boathouse so that Kate can get Miles away from him and to meet Ben. Locke hasn’t learned from his mistakes but Sawyer clearly has: Locke is completely fooled by Sawyer’s con and doesn’t even think about punishing him. Granted his focus is now on the people who immediately he sees as his betrayers and because he’s in a position of power, he now has the ability to wreak vengeance on Miles and Kate. In the latter case, there’s no evidence that might have held up (we know that Sawyer has the authority to protect Kate) but Locke never does anything to punish Sawyer for the rest of the season. (Though to be fair, there will be a significant number of upheavals before he remembers too.)

Eggtown does not have the best reputation in certain circles: (Nikki did not think highly of it) but aside from the fact that it has the worst representation of a trial in history, I don’t think the parts involving Kate are as bad as some people think. I do, however, understand why Kate’s reputation starts to truly take a hit during this season and much of it has to do with what’s going on in New Otherton.

Kate has clearly stayed behind because she has her own agenda, and we’re not terribly surprised to know what it is: Sawyer finally told her something she’s been avoiding for three seasons and she needs confirmation that its true.  That Kate is first and foremost protector of her own interests is not surprising but it’s not much different from many of the other characters on the island and two of them are the people she tries to get help with.  To be fair, she tries to get Locke’s permission but Locke has already proven he will listen to no one else’s point of view even if it might help him.  Having taken the high road, Kate then goes to Miles and tries to get answers without involving anybody but Miles wants a quid pro quo.

The scene where Miles finally encounters Ben is fascinating and almost comedic in the context of Season Four.  Ben is confronted with someone who has a momentary advantage of him but he’s clearly stunned when it turns out that what Miles wants from him is money/ It’s one of the first times in a while we’ve seen him surprised and when he asks why its such a specific sum, it’s one of the few times in the entire series that he genuinely doesn’t have an answer – and Miles doesn’t give him one.  (The viewer does get one, eventually.) The fact that Miles is clearly so mercenary fits in with his nature as well as how coldly he discussed that everybody on the freighter knows who Kate is and what she’s done.  In a sense, he tells Kate exactly the same thing Sawyer did in the previous episode – and right now, we’re still trying to understand why she chose to ignore them both.

And at the end of the episode when Kate chooses to leave Sawyer behind with no explanation, his hostility is more than warranted. Kate has been flittering between Jack and Sawyer since day one and the fact that she chose to stay with Sawyer just two days after Jack told her that he loved her says more about her moral problems than any crime she will be charged for in the future.  Sawyer by far is the most honest person in the episode about his intentions and Kate repays by slapping him in the face. I could understand why some fans who didn’t already dislike Kate might turn on her here. It’s hard not to see her actions on the island as selfish.

Now in the flashforward while we don’t get any new information about the Oceanic Six (at least, it doesn’t seem that way until the last line of the episode) we do get an answer to the question at the end of Through the Looking Glass: how was Kate walking around free to meet with Jack in the future? And the answer seems to be, she was put on trial for her crimes.  I’ll set aside as to the fact the writers of this episode clearly never saw an episode of Boston Legal as to how a trial works and get to the more important issue: what we learn about Kate in it.

Jack testifies as a character witness at Kate’s trial and its here that we hear for the first time the story that they’ve been telling the world. Jack is clearly so confident that the public believes it that the man who frowned at everyone’s morality on the island has no problem freely perjuring himself in a court of law. Right now, it seems that the story is that the crash involved far fewer survivors at the start: Jack mentions that only eight of them originally survived the crash. This actually leads to another question: which people did they say didn’t come back? Are they names we know? (The live episodes won’t tell us that; the DVD actually does.) He also lies about the Marshal not surviving, Kate telling him her crimes, and him believing that they she had to be innocent.  As a sweetener, he even says he’s not in love with Kate any more.  Jack was a never good liar on the island but now in a court of law, he does it better than Kate ever did – and it clearly makes her uncomfortable beyond the obvious reason.

This episode also has the final confrontation between Kate and Diane and there is something emotionally satisfying about it.  Kate finally tears into her mother with the righteousness it deserves and Diane doesn’t even have the courtesy to acknowledge she did the right thing. She says everything changed after she thought Kate was dead but we’ll eventually learn that’s not the case. There’s no indication Diane went to meet the Oceanic Six when they were first rescued, she certainly made no effort afterwards, and she clearly was willing to testify against her daughter. The only thing that seems to have changed her mind isn’t even sympathy for her; it’s that she wants to meet her grandson before she dies. Kate got not mercy for her mother for anything that happened in any of the flashbacks and she shows none here. Whatever reason for Diane’s decision not to testify, she deserves no sympathy. We have no idea if Diane dies after this episode or if she’s still alive by the time we get to the present day, but it’s clear from the series that Kate has kept her promise to keep Diane out. If nothing else, she deserves credit for that.

When the DA offers a plea bargain, Kate seems to have accepted it even if it means that she can’t do the one thing she’s good at: run. In a sense this episode shows that Kate has been finally willing to take responsibility if not for her actions, then for someone else. She has decided to protect her son and keep her safe from the circus around her. She’s made it clear that as much as she cares for Jack, her son has to come first. Of course, then we get back to her house and we learn her son is – Aaron.

My larger problem with this revelation has little to do with Kate but how much it undercuts a major storyline that has been beneath the surface of the first half of the series.  Ever since we saw ‘Raised by Another’, we have been led to believe that Claire was put on the plane because Aaron had to be born on the island. We’ve spent the better part of three seasons thinking that there is some deeper importance to Aaron’s birth. The fact that Aaron ends up getting off the island cuts the legs off his importance to Lost as a whole. He will have an underlying importance for awhile (much of Season Five is about the idea of how the characters on this shows issues with their parents are changed by the children they have in the interim) but it really makes you wonder what the whole purpose of everything involving Aaron’s protection and safety has been for much of the first three seasons.

If this storyline undercuts Aaron, it completely destroys Claire’s relevance to the story. The obvious question as to why Aaron is being raised by Kate off the island is what happened to Claire? And the show completely waffles it. Considering the revelations we had about Claire’s connection to Jack as well as her connection to Charlie, the obvious step forward for the show would be to make her more important to the series, not less.  But Lost doesn’t have a great history in that regard: Shannon was only alive a few episodes after Boone was killed and Michael’s character was gutted after Walt was kidnapped.  Charlie died just a couple of days ago, and everyone seems to have moved on. The show will do somewhat better with this going forward, but they truly dropped the ball when it came to Claire, though it’s not going to be clear how badly for a few more episodes.

None of this has done much to move the bigger problem: what’s happening on the freighter? Much of the action on the beach is out of concern what has happened to the helicopter that took off at the end of the previous episode. Jack is doing everything in his power to assure the people on the beach that things are going to be okay, but while his followers are slightly more trusting of him than Locke, that’s a low threshold. Eventually Jack demands that Charlotte use the emergency frequency to call the freighter – and the answer they get is that it never go there.

Our first thought is obvious: did the helicopter not make it back to the freighter? Naomi’s crashed when it was coming to the island, and Frank barely managed to land it.  It’s quickly becoming clear that finding this island – and leaving it – are extremely difficult, if not impossible. Is something keeping the helicopter from getting to the island?

In the next episode we will start to get answers to these questions. However, for once, we won’t care about that as the writers are about deliver not only one of Lost’s greatest episodes but one of the great episodes in the history of television.