The day I never thought would arrive has just busted down the door, punched me in the face, and called me bad names. Brace yourselves: Lost may be slipping, and is in danger of falling out of that must-see tier of shows with last night's episode "What Kate Does."

Let's get this out of the way first: We all have super-duper-sky-high expectations for Season 6, thinking it will be hand-delivered on a velvet-lined platter by a lingerie-clad Evangeline Lilly (or lingerie-clad Josh Holloway) and redefine everything we know about TV. That's an unfair assumption to put on anything, and because of that I blame myself for not liking last night's episode.

But what's going on here? So far, Season 6 of Lost looks nothing like the previous five seasons of the show, and that's a bad thing. When did Lost become a borderline fantasy program? When did these characters, once so fully fleshed out, revert back to cookie-cutter stereotypes? When did the off-island "backstories" become so mundane? In previous seasons of Lost, if something was boring in one part of the show, you at least had the option of paying extra attention to another part of the show. For example, the on-island drama of Season 5 more than made up for the off-island banality of Season 5 (just get back to the island).

We saw Kate run from the law in an alternate timeline last night, but here's what we learned: Claire isn't the smartest woman in the world. Seriously, who gets in a car with the same person that just abducted you at gunpoint? You are going to make a horrible mother, Claire. Anyone can argue that there is some cosmic force making the Oceanic 815 survivors trust each other in this alternate reality, but to me it felt forced. I'm with TV.com user GiulioCaim, who last week wrote in the comments section that the parallel universe stories are potentially a great storytelling device, because it lets us see the characters without the influence of the island on their destiny. But so far, we're 0 for 1 on alt-flashes showing us anything.