Jack and Kate Plus 815
I don’t watch a lot of television, but on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. the world around me falls silent and for an hour the only thing that matters is uncovering the secrets of the hit ABC show Lost.
Each week while I’m puzzling over time travel, smoke monsters, and disappearing islands I have never taken the time to ask myself is Lost a feminist show?
This is the question Natalie Wilson tackled yesterday at the new Ms. magazine blog by examining the character Kate, who is arguably a feminist heroine of the show.
In season five, we Lost fans saw our tough-as-nails Kate leave the island to focus on being a model mother. While women like Jennifer Godwin celebrated Kate’s transformation from a wild girl to “wildly competent mother,” Wilson feels Kate was simply “put into one-dimensional mommy mode.”
She asks: Why do none of the childish males of Lost have to “become men” via parenthood? And why not celebrate Kate for her bravery, independence, strength, courage, and bad-ass island-saving skills rather than her “nurturing femininity”?
Furthermore, all of Lost‘s primary female characters are framed around pregnancy narratives (think Sun, Claire, Juliet). And Jill of Feministe has revealed that Kate was initially conceived as the island leader but “NBC execs thought that people wouldn’t watch the show if a chick was in charge, so they gave that role to Jack and turned Kate into one corner of a love triangle.”
Wilson asks, “For once, could we have a mainstream female protagonist not deciding which hot white man to go ga-ga over?”
Nonetheless, I do feel Lost offers well-balanced and well-developed female characters, so if it’s 8 p.m. on a Tuesday, don’t call me.
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