Cancel your meetings, lock the doors, and put the phone on silent ring, ’cause we’re about to pre-hash “What Kate Does,” the second episode of Season 6 (actually the third hour of Season 6, but let’s not quibble), which airs tonight, and the focus, as the title implies, is on Kate Austen.

Events from last week’s episode will be discussed in this Pre-Game, so if you haven’t seen “LA X” yet, steer clear!

First Things First

Before we start, I strongly recommend heading over to my recap of “LA X” to check out the lively conversation still going on in the Comments section there, about the events in the premiere. It’s the perfect starting place to get those brain juices going for tonight’s ep.

I also recommend downloading your copy of my Ultimate Unanswered Questions List. A few of the questions on there we now have answers to, thanks to “LA X.”

Regarding “LA X”

Since we’ve had a week to live with the season premiere now, I’ve had a few new thoughts and questions about what we saw (and didn’t see), and what it might mean.

Now that Jacob is dead, will Richard Alpert begin to age?
Here’s a crazy thought. Jacob did something to Richard Alpert to cause him to stop aging. What that was, remains a mystery. But it seems that there are two possibilities: 1) Jacob put a one-time-whammy on Richard, stopping him from ever aging again; or 2) Jacob was perpetually preventing Richard’s aging. If the latter was true, then it would mean that Richard will start to age now. It strikes me that in the long run, this might not be such a terrible thing. Maybe once this conflict between Jacob and the Man in Black is ended, Richard will be free to live a normal life.

Where are Rose & Bernard?
I don’t mean in the alternate or “sideways” reality. I’m talking about on the island, in the reality where the bomb didn’t change history. Did they jump back to the present with everybody else? Or did they stay in 1977? If proximity to the bomb and the Swan electromagnetic pocket thingamajig was what sent the survivors back to 2007, then it’s conceivable that Rose & Bernard might have been unaffected, because they were pretty far away from the blast. So here’s the $20 million question: if Rose & Bernard stayed put in 1977, then… might they be the Adam & Eve skeletons? If so, then how and why they wound up buried in the caves — instead of out at their hidden love shack — with those white and black rocks, is something that would require an explanation.

What’s in a Name?

“What Kate Does” is a title that references the Season 2 episode “What Kate Did,” in which we learned of the crime that made Kate a fugitive. Kate murdered her biological father, because he was an abusive husband to her mother.

Yet back at Comic-Con ‘09, a video we were shown revealed that in this sideways reality, Kate was unsuccessful in killing her father, but accidentally killed another man instead. This leads me to wonder if now that Kate has escaped from Marshall Mars, will she try to kill her father again? That would explain the connection between the two episode titles.

Then again, it could be more of a thematic relationship than a literal one, about how even in two different realities, in drastically different circumstances, Kate is still Kate.

Enjoy tonight’s episode, and I’ll see you back here first thing in the morning for my full recap and analysis.

Pre-game image: Robin Parrish. Island background image: Zuma Press. Lost Season 6 image: American Broadcasting Company.