Eggtown

I BREAK THE YOLKS, MAKE A SMILEY FACE


Sawyer really messed up this episode... big time. Kate came to spy, yet she also came for him too. Sawyer’s too busy feeling sorry for himself to realize this. This leads him to say some pretty harsh things at the absolute worst times. When a girl tells you she’s not pregnant she wants some soft words and an arm around her shoulder, not a ‘whoo-hoo!’ followed up by a ‘that would be the worst thing in the world and you know it!’ Kate’s in the middle of considering Sawyer’s offer to stay but still feels an obligation to Jack – if she can just find out the deal with Miles, she can satisfy both camps and do what her heart wants. Yet here’s Sawyer being an insensitive jackass, telling her he only ‘told her’ he’d protect her because he figured it was what she wanted to hear. Worse yet, he’s sabotaging the whole thing without even meaning to - a leftover mechanism from his past life – because I believe he genuinely does love Kate and want to protect her… he just sucks at showing it.





We learned a lot this episode about how the plane crash was generally portrayed to the public. Jack, Hurley, Sayid, and whomever got together and thought it was in Kate’s best interest to portray her as a superhero. The ‘sick of lying’ line has even more meaning. Really cool moment when Kate called her son’s name. . This of course implies that Claire will never leave the island, which may be a reason Jack doesn’t want to see the baby. Jack’s already got enough daddy issues without the added pressure of seeing Aaron (his nephew) - a stark and painful reminder of what happened to his friends who didn’t make the O6. After the trial, Kate showed a genuine interest in seeing Jack on a connected type basis - totally inconsistent with the future-scene in last season’s finale. Somewhere between then and now, Jack royally pisses Kate off, and I’m betting it has to do with the simple fact that Aaron must go back to the island along with the rest of the Oceanic 6. No matter how many times Jack rides his golden ticket across the Pacific, he’ll never find the island without the others alongside him… I daresay, maybe even sitting in their exact numbered chairs. Angry season-finale Kate won’t even consider it, because her last pledge to Claire will of course be to always look after baby Aaron. Plane crashes are probably dangerous to babies.

Locke putting the grenade in Miles' mouth, pretty cool. Locke suffered some challenges to his leadership in this episode, including a crisis of self-confidence. I guess stuffing an explosive into a bad guy's mouth is one way to feel like a man again. Sawyer is right: Locke is going Kurtz on us. The horror...the horror...

By the way, Sawyer and Hurley are just two wacky roomies now! How cute! A man who reads but his friend likes to watch tv! Quick, get them a spinoff! But I digress.

There was a tiny bit of a double standard at work in this episode. Seems the quality of mercy is only strained when Kate's the one dishing it out. She got so mad that Sawyer was happy about her not being pregnant on a deserted island with one of those killer fetuses, that she knocked him in his head. But when Dr. Schmoopy McPerjury gave her the cold shoulder because his fragile, quivering psyche was too distraught and overwhelmed to face this actual human being back in the real world, she seemed to be willing to cut him quite a break. Maybe Kate has a soft spot for delicate men. Who knows? She seems to have been a loving and responsible mother to Clare's son Aaron. Could there possibly be some ulterior reason for her forgiving mood towards Jack? There was something creepy about this little family, since we all know it means that something unspeakably tragic has happened to this little family:

Kate didn't just get herself a pass out of prison. She also managed to nab Clare's kid. Remember how Aaron was not to be "raised by another"? Seems Kate was the "another" that Clare was being warned about. Did Kate kidnap this baby to provide herself some kind of cover? Is she pretending to be his biological mother.

In addition to Kate’s story, Eggtown includes another curious exploration of the notions of freedom and imprisonment, through the interplay of Locke and Ben. In the opening scene, Ben once again shows that Locke’s physical power over his body pales in comparison to his mental control over Locke’s mind. Ben alludes to his previous imprisonment in the Swan armory (the same man in a different place), but it is also important to note that Ben now resides in the same location in which Locke found Cooper (a different man in the same place). Even though Miles is in chains, he too appears to exercise more freedom than his keeper, as he tells us that he is ‘exactly where he wants to be.’

In one of Locke’s first flashback scenes of the Season One episode Walkabout, Locke stated that “Patience … is the hallmark of a leader”. If that holds true, then Locke has a long way to evolve before he can become a great leader. Right now, his impatience is his downfall (just as it was with the hatch in Season Two). In this episode, he responds to the constant undercutting of his authority, not by adapting to the psychological game, but by resorting to physical bullying. Locke has not yet reached the point where he will ‘shoot people in the head and continue on with his day,’ but his treatment of Miles suggests that he might not be very far from it. Hurley’s flash-forward scenes created a sense of impending doom about the destiny of John’s new flock, and now Kate’s flash-forward suggests that Claire may be the one to suffer the same fate as Boone.It seems more possible than ever that Locke’s story will end in tragedy and not triumph: he’s more lost than he’s ever been. For now, though, Kate’s story offers us hope that at least some Lost characters eventually may find what they have been seeking.

One of the most persistent criticisms against Kate has always been that she will not hesitate to use any of the other adults in her life to serve her own interests. On the island, she successively manipulates Hurley, Sawyer, Locke, Miles, and Ben in a plot to uncover information useful only to herself. By contrast, the flash-forward scenes stress Kate’s steadfast unwillingness to use her new son Aaron in the same way. First, Kate rejects her attorney’s reasonable advice to use the child to gain the jury’s sympathy. Her lawyer still tries to use her son in a roundabout way, but Kate cuts off the examination right before Jack begins to testify about Aaron. Kate’s mother even offers to sabotage the case, requesting only to see her grandson in return, but Kate refuses to utilize him even in that small way. In her final exchange with Jack, she once again makes her position clear: she values Aaron’s well-being above all else, including her own interests.

Of course in actuality, this episode wasn’t about Kate. This wasn't really about Kate's guilt or innocence. It was about All of Kate's Men. When you come down to it, it's never been about Kate at all, has it? Kate's just a vehicle the writers use to work out their twisted notions of sex and guilt. They let Kate do naughty nekkid stuff with the beautiful Sawyer but then they make her act very offended about it afterwards. In this episode, Kate learned the very important lesson that there are two kinds of men: the hot, saucy kind that are only good for one thing, and the limp, noodly kind, that are just useless entirely.

Xanadu, the boxed wine, getting excommunicated by Locke - that crap’s enough to weird anyone out. As the DA puts it, Kate’s the very definition of a flight risk. We’ve been watching her run for three seasons now, and aside from the fact she didn’t blow anything up, this episode was no different. You couldn’t expect her to stick around there.

This episode posed more questions than it answered. Why didn't Kate want to bring her son to court? Is she trying to hide him from the world? Why did Jack tell the jury that only eight people survived the crash of Oceanic 815? Who does Miles really work for? How does Ben know him? What was the significance of Daniel Faraday's guessing game with the cards? And most of all: Why was the episode called ''Eggtown''?
One of the questions I do have a theory on is the Daniel and his cards. What does the fact that he doesn’t know what the cards are when he clearly thinks he should? It means that the time anomaly isn’t the only thing going on with the island. In all likelihood, the island is also slipping dimensionally. I think those cards were exactly as Daniel remembered them when they were turned face down. But when they were turned up, they were different. Why? Because things are constantly CHANGING. Things have always been changing… most people have just been too stubborn to admit it. This began right at the start of season two, when the furnishings in Desmond’s Swan Hatch began morphing from scene to scene. It continued into season three, when stuff would appear out of nowhere and the entire contents of Ben’s fridge would rearrange themselves in the blink of an eye.

I'M A BITCH, I'M A LOVER, I'M A CHILD, I'M A MOTHER