"Eggtown"

DECEMBER 19, 2010

FOCUS: KATE
EPISODE: 4.4
AIRED: FEBRUARY 21, 2008

I never realized how gloriously stupid Kate’s legal issues are depicted in “Eggtown” until this, my 3rd or 4th viewing. Apparently all of the stuff she did (bank robberies, beating up on US Marshals, etc) didn’t yield any other witnesses – the prosecution was resting their entire case on her mom testifying against her (after the defense called their own witnesses, for some further unknown reason). I was always a bit confused why the trial was in Los Angeles too – wasn’t the house she blew up in Kansas or something?

On the other hand, she looks great in a suit. I’m torn.

Well, as I mentioned yesterday, this episode lives on only as the one that stalls time until “The Constant”, but it’s not too bad if you try to forget about that (which is hard since half of it deals with Jack and Juliet getting really worried about the fate of the chopper – events explored in the other episode). I like the brief con that Sawyer and Kate pull on an increasingly hostile Locke, and any episode that features Myles heavily is worth a look. Plus, it’s nice that Kate gets revenge on Hurley for selling her out in the last episode by “Scooby Doo-ing” him here. The look she gives him when he asks her not to tell Locke is pretty priceless too.

I also enjoy Kate’s out-of-nowhere backhanding of Sawyer. Dude was being a total dick (not to mention the unfathomable sin of not being happy with cuddling/makeouts with Ms. Lilly!), and had it coming. But on the other hand, I loved the line that got him said backhander – pointing out that once she gets pissed at Jack she’ll come back to him. When you watch these things back to back, it’s a lot easier to tell why people got annoyed with her; she DOES flip-flop between the two of them in pretty rapid succession.

Speaking of which, Jack’s trial appearance is fairly ridiculous (he even botches their fake story!), and doesn’t quite jive with later episodes anyway. At the end, he’s refusing to see Aaron, but then the next time we see them in flash-forward, they are together and he’s being a perfectly good dad (technically uncle!) to the little guy. So, again, why do they build climaxes around these go-nowhere subplots or plot points? We never saw what led Jack to change his mind or how the two of them ended up living together.

In fact, apart from the minor Ben/Myles drama and the reason Kate returns to the beach, you can pretty much ignore this entire episode, because everyone else spends the next episode in the same predicament (“Where’s Sayid and Desmond?”). And as for the future, just assume Kate got off her charges because she was a hero or something, and that her and Jack got drunk at Hurley’s party, humped like rabbits in the backseat of his Camaro (which would be how Jack recognized it in “The Beginning Of The End”!), and moved in together. Everything else basically falls in place.

Where are we?