Recap / Lost S 01 E 22 Born To Run

Season 1, Episode 22:

Born to Run

"You always want to run away, Katie."

Written by Edward Kitsis, Adam Horowitz (Teleplay) & Javier Grillo-Marxuach (Story).

Directed by Tucker Gates.

Sawyer: You all remember Joanna, don't you? Huh? The woman who drowned? Now what's Kate doing with poor Joanna's ID? Could it be she'd do just about anything to get on that raft? So she could get herself rescued, run off with a new identity before half the reporters in the world descend on this damn Island? She might even poison the captain himself.

Kate: Shut up!

Sawyer: She don't care about nothin' or nobody but herself.

In flashbacks, Kate sneaks into a hospital to visit her terminally ill mother, Diane, but finds her way blocked by a cop stationed outside her room. She asks her childhood friend Tom, who is a doctor there, to help her get in. The two visit a time capsule they buried when they were children. Kate gets into Diane's room, and apologizes for everything she's put her through. Diane yells out for help, and Kate runs with Tom. Kate gets into a car crash in her escape, in which Tom is killed. Kate escapes from the police on foot.

On the Island, Dr. Leslie Arzt tells the raft crew that need to launch as soon as possible, as they're on the verge of monsoon season. Kate asks Michael for a spot on the raft, claiming superior sailing experience to Sawyer. Sawyer confronts Kate, having figured out that she was the Marshal's prisoner. During a conversation with Walt, Michael suddenly collapses. Sun tries and fails to reconcile with Jin before he leaves on the raft. Sayid and Locke bring Jack to the Hatch. Jack agrees with Locke that they should try to open it, while Sayid thinks they are both insane. While talking to Locke, Walt suddenly tells him not to open "it".

Jack examines Michael, and comes to the conclusion that he was poisoned, for which Michael suspects Sawyer. Michael tells Sawyer that he's off the raft, so Sawyer outs Kate's criminal past to the rest of the survivors, and accuses her of poisoning Michael. Kate admits to being the Marshal's prisoner, but says she didn't poison Michael. Later, Jack confronts Sun, who turns out to be the real culprit, having tried to poison Jin so he would be too sick to leave on the raft. At night, Walt admits to Michael that he burned the first raft. Michael forgives him, and tells him they don't have to leave the Island if he doesn't want, but Walt ominously says they do. Sun tells Kate that Jack knows she tried to poison Jin, but not that it was her idea. Kate cries as she thinks of Tom.

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Tropes in this episode include:

• Actor Allusion:
  • Kate's alias when she tries to visit her mother is "Joan Hart." Her mother is played by Beth Broderick, who was on Sabrina the Teenage Witch with Melissa Joan Hart.
  • At one point, Sawyer refers to Jin as "Sulu." Daniel Dae Kim appeared on Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise.
• Blatant Lies: When Sawyer confronts her about trying to steal his place on the raft, Kate claims that all she did was ask some questions and Michael misunderstood her intentions. Sawyer doesn't believe her.
• Cannot Keep a Secret: Hurley blurts out that Kate is a fugitive to Locke, who wasn't aware.
  "Well how am I supposed to keep straight who knows what around here? I mean, Steve didn't even know about the polar bear."
• Childhood Friend Romance: The recording Tom and Kate left in their time capsule has them talk about getting married when they're older. Although Tom is now married with a child to another woman, they do share a kiss in his car.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Locke still has a scar on his head from where Shannon's bullet grazed him in the last episode.
  • Hurley mentions that Steve didn't even know about the polar bear.
  • Charlie jokes that he's writing a song called "Monster Eats the Pilot".
• Dead Artists Are Better: Charlie predicts that Drive Shaft's albums will be selling much better now that he's presumed dead in a plane crash.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Attempted by Kate, who steals the passport of Joanna, the woman who drowned in "White Rabbit", intending to impersonate her after getting off the Island to escape the police. Sawyer ruins this plan by outing it to the other survivors.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Jack realizes that it was Sun who poisoned Michael, and that it was by accident as she was trying to make Jin too ill to go on the raft. However, in another twist, it was actually Kate who gave her the idea so that she could get a seat on the raft as well.
• Early Personality Signs: The tape in Kate and Tom's time capsule shows that Kate has always been one for running and having trouble settling down, which is implied to be because of a bad home life.
• Easily Forgiven: Despite how furious he was at the time, Michael instantly forgives Walt for burning the first raft. It probably helps that they've actually built a proper relationship for the first time in Walt's life since then, and Michael would prefer not to jeopardise that.
• Epic Fail: Kate's attempt to get on the raft is a miserable failure; trying to convince Michael directly doesn't work, convincing Sun to poison Jin so that he has to stay behind goes badly awry, and not only does she not manage to get on the raft, but she's exposed as a criminal to the other survivors.
• Exact Words: When Kate confesses that she was the Marshal's prisoner, she says she didn't poison Michael. It's later shown that she told Sun to poison Jin so that he would get too sick to sail and she could get a spot on the raft.
• Honor Before Reason: Tom refuses to get out of the car Kate is trying to escape in, instead trying to convince her to turn herself in. This gets him killed when police shoot at the vehicle.
• Hypocrite: Jack questions Locke for keeping the Hatch a secret; Locke shoots back that Jack did the same with the Marshal's guns, saying that they both used their best discretion. When Locke later questions Jack keeping Kate's fugitive status to himself, Jack reminds him of his own argument, earning a smile from Locke.
• Improperly Paranoid: Michael assumes that Sawyer poisoned him out of spite for his place on the raft being less than secure.
• Internal Reveal:
  • Jack learns about the Hatch from Sayid, who got the truth out of Locke after the end of the previous episode.
  • Sawyer (having worked it out on his own) reveals to the rest of the survivors that Kate is a criminal and was the Marshal's prisoner.
  • Walt admits to Michael that he was the one who burned the first raft.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Sawyer is unambiguously a criminal himself, but he's right to be angry when he's falsely accused of poisoning Michael, and everything he accuses Kate of (except poisoning Michael - and even that was the result of her own idea to poison Jin going awry) is true; the only reason Kate tries to stop him from saying it is because she knows it's true.
• Metaphorically True: Kate's claim that the toy airplane belonged to "the man [she] killed" is revealed to be this; it belonged to her childhood friend Tom Brennan, whom she loved and who was fatally shot when she tried to flee from the law with him in the car. She didn't personally kill Tom, but she was directly responsible and blames herself for his death. On the other hand, her claim that the plane belonged to "the man [she] loved", which Jack dismissed as a lie, is revealed to be literally true.
• Moral Myopia:
  • Kate asks Jack if he thinks she's capable of poisoning Michael; Jack reminds Kate that he doesn't know what she's capable of, an implicit reminder that Kate is a fugitive who has kept her crime to herself. She's also angry when Sawyer exposes her as a criminal, even though she legitimately is a criminal, had been planning to pose as a dead woman to secure her own freedom, and gave Sun the idea that led to Michael being poisoned.
  • Michael calls Sawyer out for his history of stealing from dead bodies, calling him a liar and criminal who Michael doesn't want around his son. Notably, Michael only brings this up after he thinks Sawyer has poisoned him, even though it was all true long before that, his distaste for Sawyer didn't stop him from letting Sawyer buy his way onto the raft, and he allows Sawyer back on the raft once it comes out that he wasn't responsible.
  • Sawyer takes offense when Michael calls him a criminal. While he's right to be angry at being falsely accused of poisoning Michael, Sawyer was a criminal long before the plane crash, and everything else Michael accused him of (stealing from the dead and using the stolen goods to buy favors) is perfectly true.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Kate refusing to take Tom's advice to turn herself in, and her decision to ram a police barricade in an escape attempt, gets Tom killed.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • Kate's attempt to visit her dying mother and apologize for her past actions results in her mother selling her out and her best friend being killed in the escape attempt.
  • Tom trying to convince Kate to turn herself in after her visit to Diane goes sideways, and his refusal to leave Kate, gets him killed.
• Not Me This Time: He was never a suspect, but Walt still tells Locke that he wasn't the one to poison Michael, and he confirms that he thought Locke would suspect him because he burned the first raft.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: Charlie asks Kate, a wanted fugitive, if she wants to be famous.
• Only Sane Man: When Locke shows the hatch to Jack, Sayid tries to convince him to bury it because anything bad could be inside. He only told Jack in the first place so he could talk Locke out of trying to open it, and he's the only one to raise the point that the Hatch, which has no external means of opening it, wasn't meant to be opened.
  Jack: Best case scenario, there's supplies. Worst case, we use it as a shelter.
  Sayid: Actually, Jack, I can think of much worse cases than that.
• Parental Betrayal: After Kate risked her freedom to visit her ill and dying mother to apologize for her actions, the first words out of said mother's mouth are to scream for help.
• Remember the New Guy?: Justified with Arzt. He's introduced without much fanfare, and none of the other characters comment on his sudden involvement in the plot, but it's been well established already that there are far more survivors of the crash than just the named characters we've met so far. Since he is just one of these background survivors, it makes sense that everyone already knows who he is.
• The Reveal: The significance of Kate's toy airplane from "Whatever the Case May Be" is revealed. Namely, that it belonged to her childhood best friend/Love Interest Tom Brennan, who was killed in a car crash she caused while on the run.
• Rewatch Bonus: When Walt tells Kate and Sun about Michael's condition, Sun's face falls, which, on a first viewing, comes across as concern for Michael. On a rewatch, it becomes clear that she's realized that her attempt to get Jin off of the raft went awry.
• Secretly Selfish: Despite leading Sun to believe that she only suggested poisoning Jin to help her, Kate clearly had the ulterior motive of snagging a place on the raft.
• Self-Serving Memory: Tom claims that Kate talked him into putting his toy airplane in their time capsule; Kate reminds him that it was his own idea, which is supported by the tape they buried with it.
• Ship Tease: Charlie invites Claire to come hang out with him in Los Angeles after they get rescued.
• Shout-Out:
  • The opening sequence, in which a blonde Kate, on the run from the law, checks into a motel and takes a shower, is a reference to Psycho, with Kate's hair dye even flowing down the shower drain in a way that resembles the blood from the famous shower scene. The soundtrack for this scene hammers home the parallels, as it resembles the track "Temptation" from the film and is titled "Kate's Motel", a pun on Bates Motel.
  • Sawyer asks if Michael is planning to vote him off the raft.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Arzt responds to Sawyer asking for his qualifications by saying "I'm a doctor and you're a hillbilly". Sawyer responds that Arzt is a high school science teacher.
• Temporary Scrappy: Dr. Leslie Arzt, an obnoxious Know-Nothing Know-It-All who pops up out of nowhere to parody fan complaints about the show only focusing on a small number of the survivors. He joins the "A-team" on one of their missions, whining and belittling them the entire time, before being promptly blown up waving around a stick of mouldy old dynamite, while in the process of giving a lecture about how dangerously unstable it is.
• Time Capsule: Kate and Tom buried one in 1989, and upon Kate's return to visit Diane, she convinces Tom to dig it up, as they might never get another chance to.
• Vagueness Is Coming: While talking with Walt, Locke gently takes hold of his arm as reassurance that he won't tell anyone he burned the raft. At that moment, Walt starts freaking out and repeatedly tells Locke "not to open it," ostensibly talking about the Hatch even though he should have no knowledge of its existence. Later, after admitting he burned the raft because he didn't want to leave the island, Walt says they have to go now when Michael offers to stay.

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