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Recaps that I enjoyed reading this week:

Jeff (Doc) Jensen, in his recap at EW, calls Kate a “Good Shepherdess” in this episode, because she runs after the “sad strays of her flighty flock” — grieving Sawyer on the Island and pregnant Claire, all alone in L.A.

Jensen writes about how the title is in the present tense, and how that reflects what is going on in the episode. In both realities, the characters are trying to get away from their past.

He has two theories about the Sideways flashes. The first is that The Sideways world is the LOSTie’s afterlife, and the second is that the Sideways story is a metaphor for our relationship to fiction.

(My own take is that the Sideways story shows how fiction is written. A writer, starting with a character, will play with the character in his mind or in drafts, putting the character into first one situation then another, seeing which situation best gets the writer where she is trying to go, which one best reveals character, creates interesting conflicts, or barrels towards a satisfying resolution.

When I watch the Sideways world, remembering the original flashback world, it feels as if I am reading subsequent drafts of a story. The essence of the characters remains the same, but the details of their situations — their external circumstances — differ.

There is certainly more to it than that — I’m sure the LOST writers will ultimately merge all these worlds together, in some way — but I think it must have been a blast to write the Sideways scenes, creating two similar, but different, scenarios — and then getting to keep them both. An unusual opportunity to have one’s (Dharma) cake and eat it too.)

Back to Jensen’s recap: He makes an interesting point about the new-and-improved Jack having a Zen-like grounding in the present, which combines the episode’s theme of the present tense with the Zen backdrop provided by Dogen and his temple.

There’s a lot more to this recap (8 pages!), and you can read it here: Jeff Jensen’s recap of 6×03: Staying Connected.

Fishbiscuit, at Fishbiscuitland, offers sharp insights into Kate’s character. For example, she writes: “Whenever [Kate] does a person wrong, she turns around and pours her heart into helping them recover from whatever it is she just did.”

She can be very funny: “I know the poor man [Sawyer] needs his space, but he’s going to have to snap out of it pretty quick. We’ve only got three months left! I don’t want to see him dressing up in her clothes and building a shrine to her in his attic or anything like that.”

And she picks up on cool details: “Lindsey Baskum” (the name of the woman in the Sideways world who was supposed to adopt Claire’s baby, but didn’t) is an anagram of “Used by Malkins.” (Richard Malkin was the psychic who Claire visited, who told her to go to L.A. to give her baby to a couple he knew there. His wife and daughter made brief appearances on the show. Perhaps collectively they are the Malkins (plural) that the anagram refers to.)

She has interesting things to say about free will and fate: “Jack and Locke, Kate and Sawyer, Hurley and Sayid, Sun and Jin – all were brought to the Island by Fate. Dogen says that he was also ‘brought’ to the Island. It’s an Island of immigrants, where everyone is imported from somewhere else. There are no indigenous people. Who brings them there and for what purpose? That is the question we are now circling in an ever decreasing orbit, but it doesn’t seem to me that Free Will has much of anything to do with it.”

There are a lot more great points in this recap, and the well-chosen images and quotes make it a pleasure to read: Fishbiscuit’s recap of 6×03: Kate, Interrupted.

A week ago, I said that I wasn’t going to be writing any recaps this year. But then, as it turned out, I couldn’t resist writing something after all. What I ended up with is not quite a recap — I’m not sure what to call it (any suggestions?). I invite you to read it, if you haven’t already: Ms Terri’s (not quite a) recap of 6×03 What Kate Does.

Finally, if you want to quickly review the highlights of 6×03, here’s the “Previously on LOST” bit (which ABC calls, confusingly, “Quick Cut” on the video title) which (I assume) is what we’ll be seeing at the start of the next episode: