Let’s Talk About One of Lost’s Most Tormented Characters

A LOT happened to Claire on Lost. This girl has known more trauma than a World War I field hospital. Poor thing just needs a hug and a bubble bath. Where do I even begin? I guess the beginning is as good a place as any …

The story of Claire

Abandon All Hope of Not Being Spoiled, Ye Who Enter Here …

At the beginning of Lost, we’re introduced to Claire Littleton, a young pregnant woman traveling from Australia to Los Angeles on the infamous flight 815. Why? Because a psychic told her to go Cali and give her kid up for adoption, as you do. Of course, Claire never made it to LA. Instead, Claire and the other passengers crash landed on the mysterious island where the majority of Lost takes place.

Like the other passengers, Claire takes a bit of time to adjust to her new spooky magical evil deserted island home. Eventually she and the rest of the gang make due with what they have, and she even strikes up an on again, off again relationship with fellow passenger Charlie. Sounds like paradise! Except she keeps having these weird dreams. Nightmares really. Claire begins to believe that these dreams might be prophetic in nature, and she begins to get really worried about her unborn baby. She’s on a deserted island? What could possibly go wrong?

Claire gets kidnapped, that’s what goes wrong. She runs into a man named Ethan Rom, who is later revealed to be (again spoiler alert) one of the mysterious Others, a rival group of people on the Island whose origins are far too complicated to explain here. Ethan injected Claire with all sorts of freaky drugs, and fully intended to steal her unborn baby. She’s eventually rescued by her squad, but she suffers that most mysterious and potent of television afflictions … amnesia.

As Claire’s memories of her capture slowly but surely return, her baby comes to term. She gives birth right there in the jungle to a little boy she names Aaron. Charlie becomes a proud surrogate father. The trio are a semi happy family for a while, that is until Charlie heroically lays down his life in a suicide mission to turn off a signal jammer in an underwater Dharma station. Claire, naturally, is crushed.

Charlie’s death couldn’t have come at a worse time. Divisions have caused the survivors to split into two groups, with Charlie joining the one founded by Locke. Charlie begins to have visions of her dead father, and then she wanders off into the jungle … where she lives alone for three f*cking years.

Poor Aaron meanwhile has been adopted by Kate, who lies and tells everyone that he is her biological child. Aaron and Kate are able to escape the island, leaving Claire just … in the woods. Claire is eventually found by fellow survivor Jin, where it’s revealed that she’s been living Bear Grills style (without the fancy hotels) in a ramshackle tent all the while slowly losing what little sanity she had left. Jin eventually is able to coax Claire back from the brink to live with the rest of the surviving survivors, but it’s revealed that the Man In Black (aka the Smoke Monster) got to her first, and is now exerting his subtle psychic influence over her mind. He fed her paranoia and made her believe that he could help her find long lost baby Aaron. Eventually she cut ties from her old friends entirely and joined up with The Man In Black, hoping that he could help her succeed in finding her kid where she had failed.

While many feared that Claire was too Down With The Sickness to be saved from The Man In Black’s influence, Claire eventually was able to free herself from his control and escape with the other survivors off the island. While Claire’s exact fate is unknown, it’s revealed through her dialogue with Kate during “The End” episode that she was able to reunite with Aaron and her mother Carole.

But what about the flash sideways?

Oh god … the flash sideways. How could I forgot? In the alternate Lost timeline that branched out at the end of season 6, Claire landed safely in LA with the rest of the passengers on flight 815. She was robbed at gunpoint by Kate while trying to get into a taxi, and left on the side of the road. After looking through her possessions, Kate realized Claire was pregnant and returned her things in remorse. Kate then drives Claire to the hospital in the highjacked taxi after the latter starts having contractions, after receiving an ultrasound, she names her unborn child Aaron.

Eventually Claire makes her way to a fundraising concert with David, who she met after David’s father Jack accepted the young mother to be into their family. At the concert, she reunites with Charlie and gives birth to baby Aaron backstage. Reunited at last, the happily family remember their time spent together on the island, and walk into the afterlife together.