The problem with Kate

One mystery of Lost that I have always found especially mystifying is the mystery of why Kate is so unbearable. Normally I am quite contrarian in my opinions; I like to defend minority viewpoints, and often find myself a convincing devil’s advocate. However, I have to go with the masses here: Kate is awful. Her episodes are terrible, her stories unconvincing, her relationships flat and dull. From episode 1 till the present day, I’ve been singularly baffled as to why anyone on the show or off is interested in her.

But why is she so terrible? There are usually quite easy answers to this sort of question: the inability of television writers to craft rich and believable female characters, a tendency in television to favor broad, easy types over believable human beings, the fact that many so-called “actresses” are little more than leggy swimsuit models who can read lines. Yet on the latter count: from what little I’ve seen of Evangeline Lilly, she seems like a genuinely grounded, interesting, and complex person. This isn’t to say she’s a great actress, but she’s not terrible — certainly adequate, at least. And on the former counts…

I know that people can and do argue that Lost is as sexist as any other television show. However, as I’ve written before, I strongly disagree. It isn’t perfect. But many of the allegations levelled against it are confused, and disingenuous in the extreme. There’s a tendency to highlight certain statistics and ignore others — for instance, saying that Lost “kills women” while ignoring the many male characters who’ve also been killed (on the one hand Shannon, Ana Lucia, Libby, Charlotte, Rousseau; on the other hand Boone, Mr. Eko, Charlie, Michael, Faraday), or taking “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” positions such as condemning the death of Ana Lucia whilst simultaneously hating on her character. Haters gonna hate. I believe that Lost has some of the best female characters on television, and by “best” I mean not “most saintly” or even “most heroic,” but rather “most complex and interesting.” I love(d) Juliet (does it count as dead if she’s probably almost immediately going to live on in Mundo X?) because she was her constant coldness and calculating manner had an odd air of delicacy, because she was ruthless with a rifle and her intelligence constantly shone through. I also loved her because I felt that she was not an accessory to the male characters on the show: her character fought against that subordination, and her aloofness lent her the sense that she was always on her own mission. I love Eloise Hawking for the same reason: she’s a better adversary to Ben Linus than Widmore is, because in every era she has that sense of lone wolf-ness: a combination of monastic devotion to the Island and powerful self-interest. Note also that in neither case (Juliet or Eloise) did this independence preclude romance or, in Eloise’s case (though perhaps it ought to’ve) motherhood.

So given that I don’t feel Lost‘s writers are incapable of writing powerfully interesting female characters, what is so wrong with Kate that it’s proved unfixable over five years?

I suspect the answer lies in a point I’ve already raised. Juliet, I said, was not an accessory (or more than an accessory) to the male characters on the show. I think that Kate, fundamentally, is. If one were to craft a one-line description of Kate’s role on the show, it would read: Love Interest. That is the primal part of Kate’s character. It comes before all other things. Kate exists to be desired by Jack and Sawyer; the fact that this defines her very existence as a character explains what is, for me, the most irritating aspect of the Love Triangle ™: its inexplicability. You can’t explain why Kate loves either Jack or Sawyer — ontologically, she has no other choice. She exists to love and be loved by them. Everything else about her (her “tracking skills,” her ludicrous career as a fugitive, her baffling decision to raise Aaron) is tacked on secondarily, to lend color and/or some kind of foundation to her Love Interest role. They don’t arise from some intrinsic understanding of who Kate is*; in an important sense, Kate is no one. She is like those roles in scripts that say simply, “Police Officer,” “Checkout Girl,” or “Waitress #3.” For five years, the totality of her existence has been functional. No wonder she’s dull.

I will raise the flag of institutional sexism only in this place: that I feel Kate’s failure to evolve beyond her functional character is the result of a pervasive sense that it’s perfectly okay for the female Love Interest to not have a character beyond that function — the result of a lack of need for the female character to be more than that. At the start of the show, all the lead characters were types: the Man of Science, the Man of Faith, the Funny Con Man, and so on. These types can be equally flattening and limiting — if the Con Man cons because he’s a con man, the Man of Science refuses to believe because he’s a Man of Science, the Man of Faith believes in everything because he’s a Man of Faith. Characters can become tautologies. But there’s a sense (at least on intelligent shows — I’m not touching procedural dramas) that male characters have to be more than that. They have to have depth; they have to have agency. Female characters lag behind in this department. As long as they (a) are attractive, or (b) service the development of male characters, they escape attention.

This problem is so endemic that on most shows it goes almost unnoticed. However, I think Kate stands out on Lost because other characters, male and female, have so transcended the issue — while she remains imprisoned by her function, forever limited by it. Imagine if the Love Triangle had been got rid of back in season 2. How might Kate have evolved once she was no longer required to dutifully anchor one of the LT’s three tiresome, unintelligible points? Sawyer escaped it, and turned into someone stronger, darker, more compelling, and more mature. But because Kate is a woman — because it is somehow, for some reason, so much harder to envision the purpose of a woman not anchored to men — she doesn’t have the same chance.

*What Kate Does, in other words, and What Kate Did, are actions unconnected to any central sense of Kate.

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