I was a latecomer to the show LOST, as I am with most good TV shows, and was able to binge all 6 seasons over a matter of weeks like a crazy hermit. I had avoided LOST for a long while because I had heard a lot of bad things about it; people were complaining that things were not being explained, there were numerous plot holes, and biggest of all, people were extremely unhappy with the ending. This put me off as I’m the sort of person that once I start watching something, I absolutely have to finish it and I didn’t want to start watching something that would end up pissing me off down the line! However, time went by and I thought that perhaps I should find out what everyone had been raving about so I gave it a go.
Unpopular opinion time! I am actually a fan of the show and I did in fact like the ending……I know, bad me, get on the naughty step. I think the show works best if you watch it all the way through, without years between seasons, it helps you to notice the small things and appreciate them, and you remember a lot more of them too! This show was so sad in places it made me tear up and the ending was no exception. It was all I needed the ending to be, so I’m lucky not to be disappointed with it. The story is very rich, beautifully told, full of mystery and intrigue, and it will break your heart. Over and over again. It’s so worth the pain though. The soundtrack is outstanding too and will hit you in the feels.
That is not to say that there weren’t some negatives, which is what this post is about! If you would like me to give the show a full review, and have me take you down the flowery path of the beauty that is this show, then let me know! I’m sure I will want to talk about it in depth if only to get my feelings of love towards it out into the ether!
For this post however, I wanted to express my frustrations towards two of the shows biggest female characters; Juliet and Kate. To do so, there will of course be minor spoilers but nothing big about the story or ending. I hope this post entertains you as well as lets me vent a little and get this stir-crazy, Coronavirus, mad-hermit energy out!
I am aware that one of the characters I will be moaning about has quite a big fan base and so I am sure to attract the ire of those people! Please remember that this is just my subjective opinion and like arseholes, everyone has one. My views do not disprove or invalidate your own. Variety is the spice of life as they say and it would be boring if we all liked the same things. So let’s dive in!
Kate gets on my nerves for a number of reasons, one of the main ones being that she is like this throughout most of the show!
Everything is a drama for Kate and most of the time it’s a problem she has either created herself or is exaggerating for attention it would seem. That is not to say I don’t feel sorry for her. Her step-dad abused her mum and when she killed him to protect her, her own mother turned against her. That is undeniably sad. But she also caused the death of her childhood sweetheart. I understand her not wanting to go to prison but she must have known it was only a matter of time before she was caught and yet she started dragging others into her mess which resulted in the poor guy dying. This is a pattern she repeats throughout the shows run; it’s almost as if she is allergic to accountability and uses the feelings some of the guys have for her to get them involved in things they shouldn’t be involved in.
She also likes to play the tortured, misunderstood outsider role that just doesn’t suit her and often doesn’t make sense. There’s a moment where she finds a toy plane that her and her childhood sweetheart buried under a tree. When Jack asks her about it, she pulls a face like the one in that picture and tells him that he wouldn’t understand. Everyone experiences loss, there is no life without death and there is not one person who won’t be touched by death at some point. Even though grief is experienced differently by people, the pain and sadness is universal. At this point Jack knew she was a fugitive so it would not have been hard for him to understand that she indirectly caused his death. It is a perfect example of Kate playing the 14 year rebel girl who thinks they are so complex that no one could ever understand their pain. Girl, you’re not that unique.
Another example of Kate and her unnecessary drama is when Jack asks her and the rest of the Oceanic Six to go back to the island. He asks her what happened to Aaron, his half-nephew, and she says she’ll come if he never asks her that again…..WHAT?! She could have killed the kid for all he knows! Jack has every right to know what happened to his nephew. It may be hard to talk about but it’s a kid, not a dog! But of course she can’t just tell him as then she would be like normal people when she just wants him to fuss and worry about her. It’s just one of her most-frustrating behaviours that drove me CRAZY….in case you couldn’t tell!
Aside from this, she is always so dramatic. She seems to cry in the most random of places, like when Jack had his appendix out. She didn’t seem to cry when she finds out a certain thing about Charlie, but when Jack is having an operation which Bernard and Juliet seemed confident about, she starts crying like a fucking baby! Yes, you can argue that she has feelings for Jack but compared to the other event, they don’t even compare. It almost seemed contrived and as an attention ploy; you would have thought she would have expressed concern and tried to be positive for Jack instead of making the situation about her.
She always has to be involved in everything that is going on. What’s the word for that……oh yeah. NOSY. A lot of the other characters, like Hurley or Charlie, had their adventures here and there and when they weren’t doing that, they were working on things at the camp. Not Kate. She always seemed to be earwigging on the others, hiding behind people’s tents and the moment she’d hear them talking about a mission in the jungle for whatever reasons she’d pop around the corner and say “I’m coming with you!”. Like a shitty whack-a-mole that just keeps coming. The island is HUGE but she’d always be there to insert herself into the mission. And if they told her she couldn’t come, she would follow them secretly, which usually caused problems and drama, such as the time when she did this and ended up losing a lot of weapons to the Others and prevented Jack and Sawyer from finding Michael because the Others took her hostage and used her to get Jack to leave the weapons and go back to camp. It’s incredibly frustrating to have a character whose need for attention and feeling important supersedes all sense and reason. She cannot be left out to such an extent that she causes serious repercussions and she never seems to have any remorse about it.
Another thing that irritated me about her character is how the writers seemed to make her the expert of everything. Picking up a trail in the jungle? She can do that! (There was a reason given for that, but it’s not that alone she is an expert in). She was suddenly an expert electrician and could fix the electricity problem in the hatch. She could play golf like a pro, leagues better than any other survivors. There were other examples like this which I can’t remember with the passing of time, but if you give the show a watch you will notice it! My point being there that the other survivors had things they were good at, which is the case with all living people; Sayid was great with technology and torturing people (I’ll let you wonder about that one!), Michael was good at construction, Jack is a doctor, Shannon helped them understand the French message, and so on. But, they had certain strengths. Kate is written to be the expert of everything, no matter the problem, she has the solution, an endless fountain of knowledge, and she no longer seems relatable as a result. Her weaknesses seem to be that she is “misunderstood” and had a hard life. These are flaws that are purely irritating, not things we ever really see her grow or learn from.
My final gripe with Kate is how she treats Jack and Sawyer. It is true that women do get dragged for things men don’t and that’s not ok. If women want to play the field like guys, they should be able to do that without the stigma and slut-shaming that goes on. But by the same token, just as men get called out for playing with women’s feelings, women should also be called out for the same behaviour. Shit behaviour is shit behaviour, gender should be irrelevant. And playing with people’s feelings is exactly what she does, so let me run you through some events.
First she’s flirting with Jack, then she’s flirting with Sawyer. Then she kisses Sawyer to get information out of him but clearly loves it. Then she kisses Jack and then does all that annoying, dramatic, woman shit of turning away and running off like it’s a mistake. At this point, she knows they both like her. So when locked in a cage with Sawyer she shags him, telling one of the Others that she loves Sawyer to stop them beating him up. When Sawyer asks if she really loves him, her answer isn’t clear. When they can escape, she makes it obvious to Sawyer that she is devastated to leave Jack behind. When Jack comes back with Juliet and they’re getting along she’s jealous. Even more so when she realises that Jack saw her in the cage with Sawyer, something she clearly wished Jack had never seen. So what does she do? She goes and fucks Sawyer. Even Sawyer calls her out on this at some point. Basically, she wants them both and when she’s shagging one she doesn’t want the other to move on to someone else, but just sit around pining over her. NO BITCH! CHOOSE! Jack or Sawyer! You can’t treat people like that and lead them on in this manner, making them believe you care for them and then go after the other one because you feel like it. Men get derided for this behaviour and so should she. This is not a case where they just wanted something casual with her, they clearly liked her and she was playing with their feelings.
I also couldn’t resist producing some photographic proof of Kate’s romantic time on the island……the last one is of course a joke as that was the real life relationship Evangeline Lilly had with Dominic Monaghan, but it makes it even better to include it!
Oh and I must mention one last thing! I’m not sure that Kate fully grasps the meaning of the word “Outcast” when she gives Sawyer some advice, saying “From one outcast to another”……Kate is portrayed as being loved by pretty much everyone on the island, went on nearly every mission into the jungle. Of all the characters in this show, outcast is not the word you would associate with the popular, pretty and smart girl who seems to be able to handle everything. My eyes rolled so hard at that I almost had an aneurysm.
But that’s enough about Kate. Let’s talk about my other least favourite character…..
Oh Juliet. What do I find frustrating about Juliet……well, her face. And no, I don’t mean that she is ugly, I mean that it is frozen. Emotionless. Cold. Devoid of any personality whatsoever. She has the exact same expression on her face whether she is angry, sad, confused, happy. I don’t know if this is just the actress and her way of acting, or whether she was written this way or directed to be this way but it’s incredibly annoying. I can imagine them thinking to do this to maybe add a mystique to her character, an intrigue as to who she is or what she is doing on the island, her motives and her feelings. But in fact I felt it to come across as boring, devoid of humanity and fucking irritating. On top of that she always talks in a monotonous, patronising voice, as if everyone around her is thick and needs to be spoken to like a partially deaf 3 year old.
Not only that, but until season 5, all we know of her is that she is a fertility doctor, her sister had cancer and she was brought to the island by Richard. I understand wanting to add mystery to a character, wanting the viewer to keep watching to find out their secrets, but that is a lot of seasons to be completely in the dark about a person and it doesn’t help you to warm to her or take an interest. Instead, it soon becomes boring. By the time season 5 happened, you knew more about Nikki and Paulo, the 2 randomly introduced characters in season 3 who didn’t last long. That doesn’t say much for Juliet’s character development.
Until season 5, it seemed as if none of the other survivors knew anything about her at all as she always refused to tell them anything. Whenever anyone asked her, Jack would intervene or she’d look at them with a blank face like she doesn’t understand English and would change the subject. And strangely, everyone seems to be ok with this! They have an Other who has been living in their camp. eating their food, who kept Jack , Kate and Sawyer prisoner and they don’t bat an eyelid at the fact that she won’t tell them anything about herself! It just doesn’t ring believable to me. I can’t imagine people happily sleeping next to someone they cannot trust. When she does talk about things, she tells a lot of lies, further lending the idea that she can’t be trusted. Character development is important in a show and of course they won’t give away everything at once or there’s no place to grow, but there were no great developments in her character until the later seasons so I don’t think she was written well at all.
An example of this is it not being very well explained how someone can go from being a relatively normal person to become fine about abduction and murder and kidnapping other people’s children! It seems such a leap that is not well signposted. In the few flashbacks we have of her off the island, she seems like a normal person. She looked after and loved her sister, she was pretty much like most people. Then she goes to the island and is obviously very upset to see what is happening to pregnant women there.
Ben even keeps her there even though she said she wants to leave. So at what point did kidnapping and murder become ok?! There needed to be more explanation around this for me to understand how she could become desensitised to this. I mean, if Ben said to me “We’re abducting some survivors, can you bring this one a sandwich and manipulate him” I would say HOLD YOUR FUCKING HORSES MATE! Yes, she may have been corrupted by Ben or someone or something else, but we need to see this if you want us to invest in this character, and we don’t really see enough of this to understand why she goes along with it.
Rant aside, let me just finish with some positives. As I mentioned at the start of this post, I am a big fan of the show and have a lot of positive things to say about it, even about the controversial ending. There are many characters I love in LOST, and also other characters that I did not like at all! I think what makes these two my least favourite is due to problems in the writing, the way I couldn’t relate to them much and the fact that I don’t think their arcs were particularly interesting or showed much growth.
In Juliet’s defence, her character is a lot more interesting in the last 2 seasons, she seems to become more human and there is some growth that we witness over those seasons which, if I’m being honest, caused me to like her and feel a certain type of sadness at a certain moment in season 6. I appreciated this change in her and felt like it redeemed her character somewhat. Kate however, I didn’t feel changed much at all and still seemed very self-absorbed by the time the end rolled around.
Despite this, LOST is still an amazing show I feel everyone should watch at least once, but preferably twice as you are able to notice the small things you may have missed the first time around. You can argue that my frustration about these 2 to the point of writing this post shows you the power of the writing of the show! If you do decide to dive into the LOST rabbit hole, make sure to get those tissues ready because you are going to need it. It will break you heart.
Thank you so much for reading this rant of mine! And stay safe 🙂
