Season 2, Episode 9: What Kate Did

This might be an episode about Kate, but that's just a guess. Turns out, she is a murderer. She's also going nuts on the island in real time.

MAJOR PLOT POINTS

Sayid must bury Shannon, while Sawyer is still unconscious and in Jack's care after his gunshot wound from the raft got infected. During his feverish ramblings, he asks Jack where Kate is — she has been looking over him pretty much non-stop — and confesses his love for her. A sleep-deprived Kate is in the jungle getting food for Sawyer at the time and sees a black stallion in the jungle, the first hint she thinks she's going crazy.

With Jack at Shannon's funeral, Sawyer wakes up and chokes Kate, asking why she killed him, so when Jack and Locke return to the hatch, they find the alarm sounding, Sawyer having rolled off the bad and Kate nowhere to be found. While Jack goes to find Kate, who kisses him after confessing her turmoil — much of which was revealed in flashbacks (see below) — Locke is manning the hatch.

During flashbacks, we see Kate put her drunk father to bed. She then rides away from the house on her motorcycle as the house explodes. Her father, for much of her life she thought he was her stepfather, beats her mother and constantly gives her dirty, suggestive looks. Kate decided to kill him after he broke her mom's wrist. With the deed done, she goes to say goodbye to her mother at the diner where she works.

As she buys a bus ticket to Tallahassee, U.S. Marshals catch up with her. Kate's mom turned her in for killing Wayne. But driving her back to Iowa, a stallion dashes in front of the marshal's car in the rain causing him to run off the road and hit a telephone pole. The wreck allows Kate to kick the marshal out of the car and escapes.

Back on the island, Kate believes she is talking to Wayne through Sawyer and tells him that she killed him because she couldn't stand the fact he was part of her. Sawyer then wakes up and believes the survivors have been rescued until Kate takes him out of the hatch and into the jungle, where both see Kate's stallion — the embodiment of Wayne.

At the hatch, Locke finally cuts off Jin's handcuff then shows Michael and Mr. Eko the the orientation video. Michael agrees to take shifts at the hatch, while Eko shows Locke a snippet of the orientation video he discovered in the Bible at The Arrow. The extra piece, which Locke and Eko watch, shows Chang warning that the computer's only function is entering that code. Using it for anything else, puts the project's integrity in jeopardy and could lead to another incident. But Michael is contacted by Walt, or someone posing as Walt, during a shift at the hatch.

As an aside, a very satisfied Jin and Sun emerge from their first night reunited. Could this be when she got knocked up?

QUOTABLE

"Don't mistake coincidence for fate." — Eko when Locke waxes poetic about the events that led the two of them to meet with separate pieces of the orientation video