Rewatching LOST: 5.11 “Whatever Happened, Happened”

Kate goes to great lengths to save young Ben’s life, while Jack infuriates everyone by refusing to do anything to help.

• Jin wakes up where Sayid knocked him out and finds young Ben, shot in the chest. He quickly scoops up the boy and races him back to the Barracks. There, Kate has just met Roger Linus, Ben’s father, and before she knew who he was, forged a tentative friendship with him. Jin arrives with Ben and rushes him into the infirmary.
• Sawyer is in Security Headquarters, looking through security feeds from around the island to try and find Sayid. Kate runs in and tells him that Sayid shot Ben, and then ran off into the jungle. Horace arrives and they check the jail cell together, where they find a set of janitor’s keys that are still stuck in the lock. The implication is clear: Ben stole his father’s keys to let Sayid out, before Sayid shot him and escaped alone.
• Sawyer takes Miles aside and asks him to get Jack, Kate, and Hurley and keep them under lockdown in one of the houses, so they can’t talk to anyone.
• Juliet performs emergency surgery on Ben, but she can’t stop the internal bleeding and she tells Sawyer she needs a real surgeon. Sawyer runs to the house where Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Miles are waiting, and asks Jack to come help. But Jack shocks everyone by refusing to operate on Ben for a second time, telling a furious Kate that he already saved Ben once (when he removed adult Ben’s spinal tumor) and he doesn’t need to do it again. After Sawyer’s gone, Kate storms out of the house and goes to the infirmary to check on Ben.
• At the infirmary, Juliet tells Kate that Ben is stable for the moment, but it won’t keep. Kate says she doesn’t understand why Jack won’t help, explaining that he’s changed significantly since the last time they were on the island. She also tells Juliet about her and Jack’s former engagement to be married, which ended badly. Roger comes in and he and Kate continue their earlier conversation, during which Roger reveals that he’s been a terrible father to Ben, mostly because his wife died during childbirth. Ben suddenly goes into hypoxic shock, and Juliet orders a distraught Roger out of the building.
• Back at the house, Hurley and Miles have a funny conversation about time travel. Hurley can’t seem to understand how things in the past are written in stone and unable to be changed, even though Miles keeps explaining it to him.
• After Juliet sends Roger away to the Staff station for medical supplies, she and Kate talk options, and since Jack won’t help, there’s only one possibility remaining: maybe the Others can do something to save Ben. Juliet helps Kate load Ben into a Dharma van, which Kate drives alone toward Hostile territory.
• When Kate reaches the sonic fence, Sawyer arrives in a second van explaining that Juliet told him everything and he came to help her get Ben to the Others. But he makes it clear that he’s doing it for Juliet.
• Juliet marches angrily into the Dharma house and confronts Jack alone about his refusal to help her save Ben’s life. The conversation quickly devolves into a furious Juliet demanding to know why Jack came back to the island if he isn’t going to do anything useful. Jack says he knows he was supposed to return, but he doesn’t know why yet.
• In the jungle, Sawyer asks Kate about his daughter Clementine, and if Kate gave her money like he asked her to. She tells him she did, and tells him of Cassidy’s theory that Sawyer jumped from the helicopter to keep from having to be with her. Sawyer denies this but says he was no good for her anyway, though he’s done a lot of growing up over the last three years, with Juliet by his side.
• The Others find Sawyer and Kate and take them to see Richard Alpert at Sawyer’s request. They ask Richard if he can save Ben’s life, and Richard says he can, but that if he does, Ben will forget everything about what happened to him, and that his innocence will permanently be lost. “He will always be one of us,” Richard says. Sawyer and Kate agree, and Richard carries Ben alone to the Temple, where he takes Ben inside, an action we assume leads to Ben becoming the duplicitous, conniving villain we know him to be in the present.
• Back in 2007, Locke waits patiently at Ben’s bedside on Hydra Island, until Ben wakes up. “Welcome back to the land of the living,” Locke says with a wry smile.

• In 2005, following up on Sawyer’s request before he jumped from the helicopter, Kate visited Cassidy and gave her money to help take care of Sawyer’s daughter, Clementine. Kate confided the truth to Cassidy about the Oceanic 6 and everyone left behind, and that Aaron was not really her baby. Cassidy theorized that Sawyer jumped from the chopper because he didn’t want to deal with the responsibility of being Kate’s boyfriend.
• In 2007, after meeting the other Oceanic 6 members and Ben at the pier, Kate took Aaron to a grocery store to get him some milk. Aaron disappeared from her side when her attention was elsewhere, and she found him after a frantic search of the store, walking with a stranger who looked remarkably like Claire.
• The next morning, Kate returned to Cassidy and told her about Jack’s plan to go back to the island. Then she told Cassidy about losing Aaron in the supermarket, and how she always suspected that he would be taken from her in the end, even though he’d always needed her. “You needed him,” Cassidy corrected her, explaining that Kate had needed someone to fill the void left by Sawyer.
• That night, Kate went to see Carole Littleton at her hotel room, and told her everything: that Aaron was her grandson, that Claire was still alive, and that Kate had been posing as his mother because she needed him. She said a painful goodbye and left Aaron in his grandmother’s care, announcing that she was going back to the island to find Claire.

• Sawyer asked Kate to see to it that his daughter, Clementine, received all the financial support she would need from her father.
  Question: What was the favor Sawyer asked of Kate? 4.10
• Kate decided to give Aaron to his grandmother Carole Littleton.
  Question: What happened to Aaron? Why does Kate no longer have him? 5.06
• Why did Kate change her mind and decide to go back to the island?
  Question: Kate decided to return to the island to find Claire, presumably to help Claire escape and be reunited with her son. 5.06
• It was always what happened.
  Question: Did Sayid change history by shooting Ben? Or was his attempted murder always what happened? 5.10
• Whatever Richard Alpert did to Ben inside the Temple altered him somehow, and erased his memory of the events leading up to his near-death.
  Question: If history wasn’t changed when Sayid shot Ben, then why doesn’t adult Ben seem to remember meeting any of the Oceanic survivors when he was a child? 5.10

• What exactly did Richard Alpert do to young Ben inside the Temple? Why did it cause Ben’s memory to be erased and his innocence to be lost?

• “Whatever Happened, Happened” is the ninth Kate-centric episode of the series.
• Even the Evangeline Lilly critics out there — and there are many of you — have to admit that this episode featured her best work to date. The scene where Kate leaves Aaron behind is one of the most heartbreaking moments Lost has ever featured.

Need more depth and detail? Read my full recap of “Whatever Happened, Happened”.

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