Rewatching LOST: 5.04 “The Little Prince”

Kate makes plans to confront the person trying to take Aaron from her, while the survivors on the island consider the consequences of changing history as they continue traveling through time.

• Sun receives a package from Charles Widmore at her hotel suite. In it, she finds surveillance photos of Ben, reports on his various activities, and a pistol.
• Kate, who’s been staying with Sun since fleeing from her own house, leaves Aaron in Sun’s care and goes to visit the lawyers at Agostini & Norton. She offers a trade: she’ll give them the blood samples they want of her and Aaron if she can speak to the client who wants them. But the lawyer turns her down, insisting that she’s going to lose Aaron and she should prepare for it now.
• At the hospital, Sayid is attacked by a man pretending to be a nurse. Once the man is down, Sayid finds a piece of paper in his pocket with Kate’s address written on it. Jack meanwhile gets a phone call from Hurley, who’s at the county lockup and happy to report that he’s safe from Ben. Jack informs Ben of Hurley’s situation, and that they now have to find a way to get Hurley out of jail. When the two of them find Sayid and his unconscious attacker, Jack panics at the sight of Kate’s address and calls her. But she’s not home; she’s parked in front of Agostini & Norton’s office, and when he presses her, she gives him her location. Sayid and Ben go to get Hurley out of jail. Ben instructs Jack to get Kate and meet them that night at the Long Beach Marina.
• Jack arrives at Kate’s location to find her waiting outside the lawyers’ office in order to follow him to his mysterious client. While she explains to Jack what’s going on, she spots the lawyer leaving in his car, so Jack hops in beside her and they follow him to a hotel, where they see him meet with Carole Littleton, Claire’s mother. After the lawyer leaves, Kate freaks, but Jack decides to go to Carole and explain the truth to her. But he’s surprised to find that Carole knows nothing of Aaron or what the Oceanic 6 did; she’s merely in town to collect a settlement from Oceanic Airlines, and her lawyer happens to be Agostini & Norton. Jack runs back to the car and tells Kate.
• Instead of the county jail, Ben and Sayid go to a parking garage, where Ben meets with his lawyer — the same man from Agostini & Norton that just met with Carole Littleton. He tells Ben that the police have no case against Hurley, and that he’ll be released in the morning.
• Kate and Jack arrive at the Long Beach Pier, and there they meet Ben and Sayid. Kate is outraged to see Ben, even though Jack vouches for Ben and tries to explain that he’s there to help them get back to the island. Kate realizes that Agostini & Norton’s mystery client is Ben, who’s been manipulating her into giving up Aaron just so she would be free to go back to the island. Ben admits to it, and Jack’s stunned. Meanwhile, Sun has also arrived with Aaron asleep in her backseat, and she watches the argument unfold on the pier before grabbing the gun Widmore gave her and exiting her car.
• While trying to resuscitate Charlotte, Juliet gets Daniel to tell her why Charlotte is getting sick from the time jumps. He says it’s because the time-jumps are violating the survivors’ internal clocks, causing “really bad jetlag.” Locke meanwhile tells Sawyer that they have to go back to the Orchid station, because the Orchid is where the time-jumping started and it could be where it ends. And he suggests they take the zodiac raft to get there faster. Sawyer doesn’t understand what good that would do, so Locke explains that if he can leave the island the same way Ben did, maybe he can convince the Oceanic 6 to return — and their return might be what stops the time-jumps. When Charlotte wakes up, Sawyer declares that they’re going back to the beach to get the raft and head for the Orchid.
• Night falls as the survivors trek back to the beach, and on their way there, they spot a bright light shining straight up into the sky. Locke recognizes it as the light from the Swan station hatch, which he cried atop the night that Boone died, so he directs them to go around it. As they resume their walk, Miles hides from the others the fact that his nose is now bleeding, too. Soon they hear screaming in the distance and Sawyer goes to check it out. He’s amazed to witness Aaron’s birth, with Kate helping Claire through the delivery. Emotions are stirred deep within him at seeing Kate again, but he fights the urge to go forward and say anything. Another time flash occurs, and Kate and Claire are gone.
• Sawyer and Locke later have a heart-to-heart about the things they both just saw before the time jump, and what their lives were like then. Locke points out that he could have gone to the hatch and saved himself the pain he experienced then, but he needed that pain to get to where he is now. Miles divulges his nosebleed to Daniel, and Daniel theorizes that the flashes are happening to those who have been exposed to the island the longest. Miles protests that he he’s never been on the island before the freighter brought him here, but Dan asks if he’s certain of that. The group arrives at the beach to find that their camp is back, but the place has been abandoned and left to deteriorate. The raft is gone; in its place are a pair of outrigger canoes. Miles suggests that what was left of the survivors on the beach when the last time jump occurred must have taken the raft to get away from whoever arrived here on the canoes. He finds inside one of them a water bottle from Ajira Airways, an airline based out of India. Locke suggests they steal one of the canoes to take their trip to the Orchid, so they quickly set sail. Before they get very far, the second canoe shows up behind them, and whoever is on it starts shooting at them. Juliet shoots back and seems to hit one, but then a time jump occurs and they’re saved, though caught in a tremendous rainstorm. They quickly head for the shore before the boat can flood.
• When they arrive on the shore, Sawyer tells Juliet how hard it was to see Kate again and not get close to her. Their conversation ends with Sawyer noticing Juliet’s nose bleeding. Charlotte calls out to everyone to come see something; she’s discovered wreckage just washed ashore from a ship at sea.
• Out on the ocean in a small life raft, a crew of six Frenchmen argue about losing their ship. One of them, a woman, sees a man floating on the water unconscious, atop a large plank. They paddle over to him and discover it to be Jin, who survived the freighter’s explosion after all!
• The next morning, Jin wakes up on the beach in the presence of the Frenchmen, and he’s questioned by the young woman who spotted him from the raft. Her friends are highly suspicious of him, but she’s much kinder. He’s astonished when she introduces herself to him as Danielle Rousseau.

• Two nights after their rescue onboard the Searcher, Kate suggested to Jack that the Oceanic 6 add Aaron’s parentage to their lie. She said they could tell everyone that Aaron was hers, that she was six months pregnant when the plane crashed and that she gave birth to him on the island. Jack reluctantly agreed.

• No, Jin lives! He escaped his brush with death by being blown out to sea by the bomb’s blast, and clinging to a piece of debris to survive.
  Question: Is Jin really dead? 4.14
• At Kate’s request while still onboard the Searcher, the Oceanic 6 agreed to pretend that Aaron was Kate’s son. Kate pointed out that Claire had meant to give Aaron up for adoption anyway, and she felt that it should be one of the survivors who became his adopted parent.
  Question: How and why did Kate end up posing as Aaron’s biological mother? 4.04
• Who else? Benjamin Linus.
  Question: Who is Agostini & Norton’s client that’s trying to separate Kate from Aaron? 5.01
• According to Daniel, the time jumps are causing something like “really bad jetlag,” throwing off the mind’s internal clock, though it has more detrimental physical effects, including brain hemorrhages. Now that all of the survivors are beginning to experience the headaches, it seems that the amount of time one has spent on the island dictates how early they are affected by the time jumps. Since Charlotte believes she was born on the island, she must have spent more time there than anyone, and that’s why she was the first to get the headaches.
  Question: Why is Charlotte’s nose bleeding in response to the time jumps? 5.01
• No, Jin is alive, having apparently been thrown from the deck of the freighter Kahana by the blast that destroyed it, and survived by floating on a broken off piece of plywood. He was caught within the radius of the island’s move, so he has been jumping through time with the rest of the survivors, though he has been unconscious since the jumps began. Sun believes that he’s dead because she saw the freighter blow up while she thought he was still on it.
  Question: Is Jin really dead in the future? If so, how did he die? 4.07

• Miles’ nose bleeding next, after Charlotte’s, means that he’s spent more time on the island than any of them except her. The fact that Juliet came next, means that Miles spent more than three years on the island (because that’s how long Juliet spent on it). When did Miles live for more than three years on the island, and why doesn’t he remember it?
• Where did the canoes come from that were at the survivors’ camp? When in time did they arrive, and who brought them there? Did they arrive on Ajira Airways?
• Who shot at the survivors from the second canoe?

• “The Little Prince” is the eighth Kate-centric episode of the series.
• I don’t think it was ever explained who the men were who kept trying to kill Sayid. Even going back to Nadia’s hit-and-run murder, followed by the man outside Hurley’s room at the mental hospital, the men in the “safe house” hotel room waiting for both Hurley and Sayid, and now this fake nurse in the hospital… Who did all of these people work for? Widmore? Ben? Any theories?

Need more depth and detail? Read my full recap of “The Little Prince”.

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Image credits: “Rewatching Lost” logo by Robin Parrish. Season 4 cast promotional image: American Broadcasting Company.