This week’s episode is entitled “What Happened, Happened”. The title is an appropriate one for this episode as we have to realize that what is happening in the past with the LOST people in 1977 has always been the past. They have not changed things by going back into the past. This isn’t “Back to the Future” where an alternate time line has been created. What happened, has already happened and has always been, which is what Miles tries to explain to Hurley here in this episode. I believe Miles represents the voices of the creators and writers of the show here as I think they are using him to talk to the audience as a way of letting them understand what’s going on in the show. The past has not changed by the appearance of the “LOST” people in the past, this has always been the past. Get it? The scene was very funny.

This episode however focuses mainly on Kate and her time on the island during the 1970s and her time off the island in 2000s. This was a difficult episode for me as a parent because it explains why Kate left Aaron before she decided to go back to the island and it also shows where Aaron is now. I don’t know how I feel about the answers given in this episode. Although Kate is not Aaron’s biological mother, she is and has been his mother for the majority of his life. To walk away from him the way she’s done is difficult because I don’t know if a parent can just do that. I know there are bad parents out there who are capable of doing horrific things to their children, but Kate is portrayed as truly loving and adoring Aaron as her own child. Why leave him to go with Jack back to the island?

Spoilers…......................

The explanation is that Kate goes back to island to find Claire - Aaron’s biological mother. In this episode we see that Kate took Aaron as a way of coping with the loss of Sawyer. I’m not sure if I can believe that. Although Kate truly loves Sawyer, she also loves Jack. I always felt it was Jack who she truly loved and not Sawyer. I’m in the Jate (Jack/Kate) camp on this one. Maybe Kate felt guilty because Sawyer jumped out of the helicopter to save everyone and leave her with Jack which Sawyer pretty much confirms later in the episode. I don’t know. So as of this week’s episode, two mysteries are solved: Aaron was left back home in the US with his grandmother (Claire’s mother) and the thing that Sawyer whispered in Kate’s ear after jumping off the helicopter was that Kate visit his daughter - which she did.

The big storyline in this episode really isn’t the relationships between Kate, Jack, Sawyer, and Aaron, but the rescue of young Benjamin Linus. Yes, he is not dead - or at least not yet. He is in dire need of medical assistance and Juliet can only do so much - she needs Jack to come and help. Unfortunately Jack has refused to help. Jack believes like Sayid that they do not want to see this child grow up to be the evil Ben that they know. Jack is willing to let him die. Kate doesn’t feel that way and she decides that the only way young Ben will get the treatment he needs is by bringing him to the Others.

Kate does just that and goes it alone at first, but she’s soon joined by Sawyer who turns off the electric fence/grid and guides her to the Others camp. There they meet up with Richard Alpert and the Others who take the young Ben.  Richard says that if they take him, he will never by the same. He will not remember anything that happened (which answers the question why doesn’t he know Sayid and everyone else in the future) and that he always now will be one of the them - meaning the Others.

One of the Others mentions to Richard that Charles and Ellie will not like this to which Richard replies that he doesn’t answer to them. Charles and Ellie are the young Charles Widmore and Elouise Hawking. It just dawned on me that with the mention of Charles and Elouise and Daniel being Elouise’s son, does that make Charles Widmore Daniel’s father? And where the hell is Daniel?!

Richard takes Ben to the mysterious temple which we saw in the episode “This Place is Death”. The smoke monster I believe lives there and Ben can also control the smoke monster. What’s the connection there?

The episode ends in a very cool manner as we flash forward to 2007 and Ben is waking up after being hit over the head by Sun. There to greet him as he wakes up is the man he killed: John Locke. “Welcome back to the land of the living,” says John to Ben an obvious play on the fact that John is now alive and it was Ben who killed him.

Next week’s episode is entitled “Dead is Dead”. The plot of this episode is as follows: “To atone for sins of the past, Ben must attempt to summon the smoke monster in order to be judged.” Is Ben finally feeling sorry for himself? Or is this judgement something else entirely different. The scenes from next week’s episode look like something out of Indiana Jones. I wonder if this will be a major episode as far as “LOST” mythology is concerned. Will we get answers on what the smoke monster is and what’s the mystery of the island itself?

Overall this was a good episode. Not the best of the season, but a good episode that serves as a significant piece to the on going story of “LOST”. We’ll see you next week.