Okay, y’all… It’s 2:00 AM, and I’m exhausted, and my brain is kind of fried because I’ve been writing newspaper features all week… but I must talk about last night’s episode of Lost. Must. So if you haven’t seen it yet, go fire up your DVR, and if you have seen it, the let’s get cracking. There’s a hell of a lot of shaking going on.

Many Spoilers Ahead!

For me, this episode, “Whatever Happened, Happened,” feels like the show’s delivery on a promise it has been making for the last season or two. You know, the promise that it would return to the taut storytelling of its first year, but with a new emotional depth that can only come from characters who have had time to grow. There have been some great episodes since the show got back on track at the end of season three, but tonight was just… above and beyond.

One the most immediate level, the episode-specific story was beautiful. What elegant construction, showing us that Kate took Aaron for selfish reasons—to fill the hole left by Sawyer’s absence—but then loved the boy enough to give him to Claire’s mother. She accepted responsibility for her own actions and so relinquished a child who’s life she altered without his consent. Instead of handoff from an irresponsible foster mom, Aaron’s passage to his grandmother was an act of generosity and love. Hell, I even believed Kate when she said she was going back to find Claire… to help finish Aaron’s reunion with his actual family. (And kudos to Evangeline Lilly for giving what I’m calling her best performance of the series.)

This story resonates even more because the episode’s mythology-related events reflect what’s happening to Kate. 

For instance, there are two ways to interpret the scene where Kate and Sawyer give young Ben to Richard Alpert. On one hand, it’s a milestone in the ur-story, giving us concrete information about  everything from Ben’s past to Widmore’s long-term involvement with the Others to the apparently freakish scope of Alpert’s power. (What’s he going to do to Ben in Jacob’s cabin? Suck his soul out through his nose?)

On the other hand, the scene mirrors the moment that Kate releases Aaron. Again, she could have been selfish. She could have let the kid die—lord knows, it might have spared he some future pain—but instead, she chose to look past herself and help a child. Never mind the time travel rules that say Ben had to be saved: Symbolically, Kate gave Aaron away a second time.

So now we have this narrative about a woman who is become more whole because she’s in a cycle of painful sacrifice. She cares for children, she gives them away. She cares for Sawyer, she stops fighting for him. What an empathetic progression in a character who has often seemed selfish and immature. Think about the distance between “I want to risk your life to steal a stupid airplane from a bank” and “It will kill me to do it, but I will let you go.”

And how nice that on the edges of Kate’s story, we see similar growth in other lead characters. Sawyer’s commitment to Juliet and Jack’s new faith in the island were both threaded  expertly into the script. (And I’ve got to rescind what I wrote about Jack a few weeks ago. Gonzalo was right in the comments thread: He’s not an asshole. He’s a well-intentioned man coming to terms with faith. It’s just taken me a while to see it.)

While it’s developing individual characters, this episode also gooses the hell out of the show’s larger arc.  That mythology stuff I mentioned up there? So satisfying. The scene with Richard Alpert is just as effective as a WTF moment as it is as a metaphor for Kate’s personal situation. And then there’s the added bonus of that final scene, where adult Ben looks like he’s going to combust when he wakes to find the not-so-dead Locke staring him down. We’re instantly primed for next week’s episode, which looks like it’s going to show Ben in a moment of weakness. That could change the direction of the series for good.

I’d argue that the large and small narratives here both owe some of their power to what’s been happening for the last few weeks. By mostly focusing the show on  the 1970s Dharma Initiative, the creative team has given us something manageable to hold on to in Lost’s ever-widening universe. All these revelations and character evolutions have occurred in a society that’s easier to grasp than the scary, scary jungle or the globe-hopping locales of the Oceanic 6. As in season one, when the reference point was usually the beach camp, these episodes have created a touchstone that makes new information less disorienting. We can process the stuff about time travel or Sawyer’s softer side more easily because we can relate it to the fixed point of the Dharma Initiative. Every action has an immediately graspable consequence to that tiny world of research stations and prefab homes. (It also helps that we’ve had fewer characters to focus on recently.) 

Also? How nice was it when the show laughed at itself? When they let Hurley get pissed about the confusing rules of time travel, the writers were acknowledging that they’re asking us to accept a lot of weird shit right now. But they were also telling us they’ve got it under control. Because they goofed on their own plot devices, I’m more inclined to trust them. It’s those self-serious, “this is great art” television writers that you’ve got to watch out for. 

In summary: Kate’s story? Moving. Mythology story? Exciting. Number of locations and character? Manageable. Comic relief? Well-timed. 

The sentence has been forming in my fingers for weeks, but now I can finally type it: Welcome back, Lost. You have returned to the peak of your game.