In my very first piece regarding Lost I
made it clear how much of a fan I was of Evangeline Lilly's work as Kate
Austen. I made it clear that I thought that many of the argument made by Emily St. James in Finding
Lost about Kate were essentially presentist views of TV from 2024 that had
little to do with what television was Lost was being made in 2004. I
argued that I believed much of the reason Kate took abuse from the fanbase had
to do with the same kind of toxic misogyny that turned them against Skyler White
and Debra Morgan when Breaking Bad and Dexter were on the air and
actually recounted one such example I had encountered. (Naturally the first
comment on that article when it was published was one that basically coated in
that same toxic misogyny.)
I don't expect to win any more hearts and minds
with this article then the first one did: haters gonna hate, particularly with
female characters on pop culture TV shows. And it's not like I denied there
weren't flaws with Kate's character during Lost's run. What I do think
is that its important to understand that part of the reason for why I was
impressed with Lilly's work at the time and always am after every rewatch is in
large part because of the actress herself and how television was in transition
when Lost was being made in 2004 and how it had shifted by the end of
its run.
First let's deal with something we've all
forgotten: Evangeline Lilly was essentially unknown when she was cast in Lost. She had a handful of screen appearance
prior to be cast in Lost but all of them, even in shows like Smallville
were uncredited. She'd been in three films uncredited and honestly I don't
think anyone would want credit for appearing in Freddy vs. Jason or White
Chicks. The casting director went way out on a limb when they cast a
complete unknown as a major character on Lost. That no one expected Lost
to even get picked up to series, much less become one of the biggest hits
in TV history, doesn't change just how big a limb the producers went.
Now I acknowledge that the role was changed
immensely was the decision was made before shooting began to not kill Jack
Shephard off in the Pilot and much of Kate's backstory ended up going to other
characters. It doesn't change the fact that almost from the start of the series
the writers decided that Kate was going to be a vital part of Lost going
forward.
St. James makes the argument that had J.J. Abrams,
who wrote the Pilot stayed with Lost Kate's character might have had
more dimension then she did when Darlton took over the showrunner duties.
There's weight to this: Felicity and Alias had already become
critical successes by having a strong female character at their center. But
having seen both of those series it leaves out the fact that both dramas were
only critical hits and not popular successes. (Indeed Alias only
had its greatest ratings during its fourth season when it aired immediately
after Lost on Wednesday nights.) And the unfortunate truth is that I'm
not sure America was ready in 2004 for a network drama to succeed with an
ensemble show with a female as its main character.
Network television was changing immensely by the
time Lost aired as was the role of the female characters. There may have
been few Buffy Summers and Sydney Bristows at the center of most dramas but the
ground had begun to improve on network TV for female characters beyond the
tropes of wife/girlfriend/mother that most network dramas had been casting
women in. We'd seen it with Alison Janney's immense popularity on The West
Wing as CJ, Mariska Hargitay
creating what is the most iconic policewoman in history as Olivia Benson on Law
& Order: SVU and today forgotten but then popular and Emmy winning
shows such as Judging Amy and Joan of Arcadia.
The biggest shift for female characters came not
long after Lost debuted when in March of 2005 ABC launched as a
mid-season replacement what was at first a critically maligned and only
marginally more ratings successful medical drama known as Grey's Anatomy. While my dislike for all things Shonda Rhimes
is well documented elsewhere I can't deny the way she expanded immensely
opportunities for actresses, particularly of color with more complicated
characters then they'd been allowed to have to that point.
Now I watched Grey's Anatomy during the
first five seasons despite my multiple issues with it at the time and many of
which I believe are still valid. But I think a large part of the reason I still
have immense respect for the work Evangeline Lilly did as Kate on Lost stems
from what the showrunners did differently about her as opposed to all of the
female interns, residents and attendings at Seattle Grace. (That is what it was
called while Lost was on their air so I'm going to refer to it as that
for the sake of these articles.)
For all of the cosmetic flourishes of Grey's
Anatomy I've always held its essentially a soap opera disguised as a
medical drama. And on a soap opera the primary subject that defines all the
characters is who they're sleeping with. For all the pivots to female
solidarity and racial equality that the saga of Meredith Grey and Christina
Yang seemed to be about, they nevertheless regarded a lot of their
identities as to their sexual entanglements and romantic attachments. You
didn't watch Grey's Anatomy the same way you watched ER (still
going on when the show premiered) which never forgot it was a medical drama
first. The residents at Seattle Grace were all becoming specialists in
dysfunctional romantic relationships and frankly on their best day their
bedside manner was worse than Jack Shephard's at St. Sebastian.
It might not seem like a high bar that Kate
managed to be a better female character then Meredith Grey but it is telling
that even during the creakiest stages of the love triangle she was tangled in
Kate seemed to be more concerned with helping everybody first. This was true
even if it seemed counterintuitive. Critical to the first half of Lost is
how active Kate is trying to get everybody rescued when we know by the time the
Pilot is over, the only thing waiting for Kate in civilization is handcuffs. By
any reasonable definition Kate should be spending her time on the island
enjoying that she has two men lusting after her but as she tells Jack early in
the first season "I can't dig in." This is the opposite of Meredith
going to Derek and saying: "Pick me. Choose me. Love me" and then
spends most of the next season mooning over Derek as she does her residency.
On a more direct criticism one of the reasons I
always found Lost a more substantial show then Grey's Anatomy was
that love stories were more important to the show's foundation then a series
that ostensibly was about finding love in the workplace. Regardless of what you
think of the final season and the series finale I defy even the most nitpicking
of fans to argue that what's not important is the island but finding the person
who makes you whole and that love can transcend everything. This is the
complete opposite message of Grey's Anatomy both while Lost was
on the air (and honestly still today) which essentially argues that what
matters is having as much as sex as possible and that soulmates are just
something you move on from with enough time and a need to scratch a similar
itch.
There's also the fact that, even by the standard
of the horrible parent issues every character had, Kate's are among the most
complicated. As I've written before:
It wasn’t just that Diane Janssen was married to
Wayne a man who regularly beat her, forced her daughter to live in the house
with this drunk, and he may very well have molested her into the bargain but
after Kate killed the man she thought was her stepfather in an act to see Diane
up for life, Diane still took the side of Wayne and reported her to the
Marshals. Furthermore when Kate returned to learn why Diane called Kate the selfish one for killing
the man she loved. To be sure Kate had done what she did when she learned that
Wayne was her real father but it doesn’t make Diane’s sympathy for this devil
any more horrific.
But unlike so many other characters on Lost Kate
had actually someone in her life who did love her very much. Kate spent her
childhood thinking that Sam, Diane’s first husband, was her birth father. Sam
knew the truth – that Wayne and Diane had been having an affair and that he
couldn’t have been her real father – but he never treated Kate that way and loved
her like she was his own daughter. When Diane divorced Sam when Kate was five
to marry Wayne, Sam kept quiet about it because he that if Kate learned the
truth about it she’d kill him – which is how it played out. Diane was the main
parent in Kate’s life but Sam was always a presence, taking her on camping and
hunting trips and was always devoted to her.
And yet as we see in the second half of the series
Kate manages to take all of this and find a way to break the cycle by taking on
the burden of being Aaron's mother when its thrust upon her and proving that
you don't have to have be a birth parent to be a good mother.
Kate spends the first half of Lost trying
to figure out which relationship makes her whole: Jack or Sawyer. In what is
perhaps the most daring conclusion of any network drama her final answer is
'none of the above'. Because when Kate gets back to civilization she decides to
take on the role of being Aaron's mother and it clearly makes her whole in a
way that neither Jack nor Sawyer does. Indeed it's pretty clear that her
relationship with Jack ended because she was putting Aaron's needs above her
personal happiness: she couldn't have her son be around a drunk and
increasingly degenerating partner.
Many chose to blame Kate for much of what happened
in the Season 5 finale, arguing that Jack was really willing to blow up the
whole island because he lost Kate and Sawyer and Juliet's relationship blew up
because Juliet was scarred by Sawyer seeming to pick her. But as Sawyer himself
points out Kate was right there and Jack had many ways to fix things, none of
which involved dropping a hydrogen bomb into an energy pocket.
If there's something that frustrated me about Kate – and I'll confess it became an irritant
for me at times – it was that she seemed very much to be Lost's Hamlet:
she could never truly decide between running away and coming back. In large
part this was because she cared too much about the people around here, which is
far from the worst flaw for a character to have. The problem was as Nikki
Stafford pointed out as early as Season 3:
While Marshal Mars told her she'd never stop
running, Kate always comes back. She returned to her childhood sweetheart Tom
in Born to Run (and got him killed), she came back to see her mother twice,
despite her mother's hatred, and its disastrous both times. When she returns to
get Jack, she thwarts his chances of leaving. She runs away from circumstance
but returns to the people she loves (usually inadvertently hurting them.)
During Season 4 she accepts probation as part of a
plea bargain where she can't leave the
state for five years, ostensibly because she wants to stop running. And yet as
we see in Season 5 her flaw of coming back keeps getting in her way. She keeps
going to see Cassidy to talk about Sawyer mainly because she made a promise to
him. When an attorney (paid for by Ben) comes to her door demanding a paternity
test her first decision is take Aaron run. She then goes to see Sun because
she's someone and believes she cares about her, not knowing that Sun is using
her to find and kill Ben – and inadvertently setting a course that will
separate Sun from her son forever (though she can't take all the blame there)
When she learns what Jack and Ben are planning she
says (rightfully) that they're all nuts and then heads off with Aaron. But when
she realizes that Aaron at some level subconsciously misses Claire she makes
the hardest decision of her life to come back to the island to find her and
reunite her with her mother.
As I've written before (and I expect to get more
hate mail for repeating it) none of what happens in Dharmaville is Kate's fault
directly. She goes with Jack and Dan to find the Others even though she clearly
thinks Dan is crazy because she the only one who knows where to find them and
no one else from Sawyer's group is willing to go with her. She tries to protect
Jack from getting hurt by what happens to the Others who she knows will not
hesitate before killing her – and indeed Eloise tries to kill her when she's
about to leave them. It's clear she came back to the Barracks to stop what Jack
was planning and indeed she makes it very clear what was going to happen when
she's in the sub with Sawyer and Juliet. Kate spends most of the Season 5
finale trying to stop carnage from happening. And its telling when Kate tells
Jack why she came back to the island, he doesn't care about it either. He spins
a narrative that Claire might decide not to give Aaron up for adoption but the
viewer is as aware as Kate about how many promises he's given that he's never
kept. Even in the final minutes before everything goes boom we see Kate doing
everything she can to haul Sawyer and Jack away from the pocket. She's still
trying to help people.
By the time the final season of Lost aired
TV was firmly in the era of White Male Antiheroes and it had a very clear
vision of the wives and girlfriends in this world: they were wet blankets
stopping the viewer from enjoying the horrible behavior we watched each week.
Why is Betty Draper so upset? She should be thrilled Don comes home after a
busy day of having sex with his clients! Why does Rita Bennett have to be so
demanding of Dexter? Doesn't she understand he's got an active nightlife
killing people?! How can Skyler White think to put the needs of her family
about that of a hard-working crystal meth cook? Walter's busy watching Jane die
and letting mid-air plane crashes happen as a result!
So naturally during one episode when it looked
like Kate might have been shot, half of the Lost fans seemed to be
rooting for it. I myself never lost sympathy for Kate and that's particularly
true during the final season.
Kate is still unconcerned with so many of the
horrible things as the series enters its endgame and it must be devastating
watching her be rejected time and again. She goes after Sawyer and tries to
explain why she came back and he won't even look at her. She's been trying to
bring him back for years and she's failed. She finds Claire in the pit back at
the Temple and her first reaction to when she tells her that Aaron's alive is
to say that she'd better hope I don't get out of this pit. When the Monster attacks
the Temple she goes after Claire to protect her and is shocked to find Claire
seems just fine with it. Ultimately she's told by Widmore herself that while
he's there to protect the candidates he has no problem letting her be
collateral damage.
As if to drive the point home late in the series
after Jack decides to stay on the island Kate tells Sawyer we have to go back
for him. Sawyer looks at her and says: "We're done going
back."
And yet throughout the final season time and again
she defies so many of the burdens set by the island. She constantly rebels
against the Others and does everything she can to help Claire. When he
initially plans not to take Claire off the island (for reasons I'll get into
later) Kate defies him and brings her on the Elizabeth. And let's not forget in
the final battle between Jack and the Man in Black, the winner was…Kate with a
bullet.
Perhaps the best way to view Evangeline Lilly's
Kate Austen is not to compare her with the other female characters of so many
dramas of that era but to see her as a link between those network heroines that
came just before Lost debuted and the many more fascinating female leads
in the decade to follow. One can see her as a model in many of the fascinating
female leads and supporting characters such as the uber sexual investigator
Kalinda on The Good Wife, the bipolar but often laser focused Carrie
Matheson on Homeland, the more devoted to the cause then her husband
Elizabeth Jennings on The Americans and Kim Wexler on Better Call
Saul who spends much of the series trying to choose between the angel and
devil on her shoulder. I can see bits of
every part of Kate in all of these brilliant characters during the 2010s and
it's worth noting none of them ever suffered the kind of toxic backlash that
any of the wives and girlfriends of those white male antiheroes – or Kate
herself ever did. That's more than anyone could have expected from Evangeline
Lilly when she was cast in her first major TV role of significance and it's a
legacy nearly as great as Lost's itself.
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