Back to the Island: Why So Many People Had a Problem With Kate

 

From the moment I was introduced to her to the last moment of the series I always liked everything that Evangeline Lilly did as Kate Austen. Like everyone in the cast, she played her role so perfectly that I could never imagine anyone else in the role and it’s always astonished me that Lilly was basically unknown when she first appeared on Lost. Every scene she was in – almost always alongside veteran performers – she seemed more than their equal and I could never look away from her. I always thought one of the bigger blunders – among many the Emmys made during this period – was that she was never nominated either for Best Actress or Supporting Actress in a drama.

That’s why I was astonished as to what a polarizing character she was both at the time and to an extent today. And in both Finding Lost and in a separate article in Back to the Island we see signs of the controversy around her. In the former we learn that late in the show’s original run fans became so frustrated towards her character that many people were rooting for her to die by the end of the fifth season. In the latter Emily St. James devotes a chapter at the end of the recaps for Season 2 in which she points out all the problems with Kate’s character during the run of the series and uses it as a metric to discuss the larger problem with Lost and its female regulars.

I am of two minds of these points of view. On the one hand, I completely understand – though I don’t agree entirely with either perspective – why so many fans had an issue with Kate during her run and the larger flaws with Lost and female characters on the show. On the other hand, I deeply disagree with that perspective in regard to Kate in the context of Lost particularly in that she was never fully realized. This is a complicated web to unravel and it requires two separate articles to do so. In the first I’ll discuss why that conflict came about and the logic with the basic argument for both points of the view and in the second I’ll explain why I not only disagree but feel that in many ways Kate was as important to Lost as any of the male characters in regard to the larger themes.

The first point is, unfortunately, ridiculously simple to understand and honestly anyone whose spent five minutes on a fan site devoted to any television show in the 21^st century, it practically goes without saying: when it comes to almost all forms of entertainment, the most misogynistic fanboys overrule anything and they hate female characters with a terrifying level of intensity. One can’t even limit it to the kind of genre shows that Lost became: Anna Gunn underwent so much online harassment for playing Skyler White on Breaking Bad she practically had to go into hiding afterwards.

The work that Lilly did on Lost thankfully never underwent that kind of intensity (though I never spend much time on chatrooms so I can’t say for sure) but there was always a certain amount of toxic masculinity that sadly continues to this day. In large part I think her character suffered from the same blaming of the female characters on shows that had the so called “White Male Antihero’ as their lead. Skyler White is the most infamous version but I’ve seen so many others over the years, from Rita and Debra Morgan on Dexter to as recently as Sally on Barry. These series featured white men doing horribly things – in many cases cold blooded murder – and the women in their lives are subject to horrific online abuse because they either seem naïve in not knowing about their significant others horrible activities or on the converse, try to stop them from doing those horrible things. They are the moral compass or often the victims of these horrible men’s abuse but invariably the internet chooses to shame them – almost certainly because they cast a shadow on the fan’s who want to see the antihero do these horrible things and get away with them, and these women are being buzzkills. This says more about the fandom then the shows but such has always been the case and probably always will be.

Of all the characters on Lost Kate probably had the most consistent moral compass. She was a good friend to many of the characters, she was trustworthy and reliable and she could handle a gun or hang with the boys. The fans seemed to be fine with this for the first half of Lost but when everyone went back to the island, the fans turned against Kate.

The clearest example of this, in my personal experience, came when Nikki Stafford was doing a rewatch of Lost with her son which she graciously shared with her readers on social media. I gladly shared my comments and experience over that period and I had a lot to say. As I expected the tumult against Kate comes near the end of Season 5. 16 YEAR OLD SPOILER WARNING AHEAD:

At this point Jack has decided to drop an atomic bomb in the middle of an energy pocket to negate it which would (logically) stop everything that has happened on the series over its run from ever happening. When this was mention, the anti-Kate comments came out in force. I pointed out, logically, that Kate was speaking from the high ground. Jack was talking about dropping an atomic bomb that would in the best case scenario kill everybody on the island and in the worst case, probably kill Jack and everyone else who had survived the crash. I could have also pointed out (and did in my own rewatch) that when this eventually happened no one who went along with Jack on this mission either thought it was a good idea or that it would even work. I didn’t point out (because it only recently occurred to me) that the fans were taking the side of Jack who for much of the original run of the series most fans had their own issues with both as a leader and a character. (I’ll deal with that in a series on Jack later on.)

The one response I remember getting was succinct: “Nah. I still hate her.” That didn’t really surprise me either. Logic rarely works when it comes to genre fans and it never works for female characters. Even when they’re right, they’re still wrong.

St. James argument is more valid historically and I’d reached a similar conclusion well before my attempt at writing my most recent episode guide. I was well aware that while many of the male characters on Lost are among the most beloved in television history, it’s track record with female characters is, to put it charitably, execrable. Indeed with the sole exception of Kate, the only two female characters who emerge from all of Lost fully realized from beginning to end are Yunjun Kim’s Sun Kwon and Elizabeth Mitchell’s Juliet Burke – and by the final season, the writers had basically eroded a lot of what they had spent four and a half years building with Sun.

And while I was far from thrilled with the attitude that Ryan took against Lost I have to admit when it comes to the female actors on Lost, Lilly included, I very much wonder if they’re being badly treated by the show was part of the toxic attitude on the set. It would explain why so many female characters were either badly written, under utilized or killed off before they could reach their full potential on Lost over the years. I’m not sure whether Ryan’s book illustrates it but in the years to come I’m going to be looking very carefully during the recollections of so many of the actresses on the show to know if they left the series willingly or were pushed. (Michelle Rodriguez has always seemed to be the most obvious example. As of this writing she said she was only going to be there one season. Jury’s still out whether I buy that.)

There are, however, parts of St. James argument that don’t quite hold up. She talks about all of the major dramas on TV that had strong female characters while Lost was on the air: not just Breaking Bad, but Mad Men, The Sopranos, Deadwood and Battlestar Galactica. The only show that doesn’t have a strong record of female performers is The Wire. St. James is right as far as that goes. What she omits from the discussion is that all of the dramas she lists were on cable. And while network television would eventually catch up to cable in many respects when it came to brilliant dramas during this period, the area it clearly lagged behind on was female characters.

To be sure there were clear exceptions, mostly on the shows that were written either by J.J. Abrams or Joss Whedon. But as someone who watched network TV during this same period, by and large the best dramas of that era were solely lacking in strong female characters to match the male leads. It was certainly true on 24 ;Kim Bauer was the worst example of this and most of the other strong women were in the White House, not fighting it out with Jack Bauer. House had a lot of great actresses on the show during its run but they were usually only there as love interests (the show completely wasted Olivia Wilde) and Boston Legal kept going through attractive female attorneys at a ridiculous rate. It wasn’t until Shonda Rhimes came along that a female character on network television was allowed to be as much a bad-ass as the males – and most of the time on Grey’s Anatomy that basically meant they could sleep with whoever they wanted with no consequences.

During the 2000s network television was still essentially trapped in the idea of females as wives, girlfriends or mothers. This was true even when they were the leads of their own series like Patricia Arquette was on Medium. Women weren’t given much room for growth on CSI or the Law & Order franchises. Teenage and twentyish women had a lot of room for growth; older women, no. Things probably didn’t begin to change until Friday Night Lights came along and it didn’t solidify until the 2009-2010 season when we were blessed with The Good Wife and Parenthood. After that, women began to become more professional and allowed to be more then who they slept with.

Kate Austen had the misfortune of being a character on network TV while it still hadn’t figured that out yet how to make them independent of the boxes that female characters were still in (and for that matter were mostly on cable as well). When you throw in the fact that so much of Kate’s character was hastily rewritten after the pilot was developed to a series,  the toxic masculinity that fuels so much of the fandom, and some of the pressure that Lilly kept feeling during the show’s run, I don’t blame either Lilly for being frustrated and so often betrayed by the writers or for observers for thinking the show never did right by Kate. It’s a rational conclusion to draw and St. James’s position, while I think it lacks context, nonetheless has merit to it.

However I vehemently disagree with the statement she uses to conclude the article:

“But isn’t it a glaring issue to make one of (Lost’s) most significant female characters also one of its biggest ciphers?”

Kate was many things on Lost; the one thing she wasn’t was a cipher.  Indeed I understood her motivations and her actions better than far more of the male characters during the course of Lost’s run. That will be the thesis of the second part where I make the argument as to why and how Kate Austen was so important to Lost.