"Tabula Rasa"

Lost - Season One
Aired: October 6, 2004
Starring: Naveen Andrews, Emilie de Ravin, Matthew Fox, Jorge Garcia, Maggie Grace, Josh Holloway, Malcolm David Kelley, Daniel Dae Kim, Yunjin Kim, Evangeline Lilly, Dominic Monhagan, Terry O'Quinn, Harold Perrineau, Ian Somerhalder
Written by Damon Lindelof
Directed by Jack Bender

This is my first review of 2011 (I started this week's other post two days before Christmas and took a break in between - getting four teeth pulled tends to do that to you), so Happy New Year, followers (ok, follower). Hopefully this year will be a time of much inspiration and motivation to write, but we will take things one week at a time.

This is the first episode to air after the two-part pilot, and while the premiere set the stage for a number of different story arcs to come, "Tabula Rasa" is perhaps a better example of the type of storytelling we will be seeing from the remainder of this series. While much of the same action and tumult from the previous two episodes continues to brew here, the script is almost entirely centered on the character of Kate, contrasting flashbacks of pre-island life with her post-crash story. I would have expected this episode to center around Jack with the weight given to his presence in the pilot, but it was a much more astute decision on the writers' part to focus our attention on a far more enigmatic character.

So just what do we learn about Miss Austen? Well, not a whole lot that couldn't have been left to the imagination, but enough to keep us hooked for more details. Grungy and penniless, a pre-island Kate stumbles onto a ranch in Australia and takes refuge for the night. The following morning she is discovered and awakened by a sympathetic farmer named Ray (Nick Tate), who offers to accommodate her in exchange for her accepting a job on the farm. When Kate agrees to a ride to a train station from Ray, it turns out to be a set-up. Ray has contacted the authorities, and the odious Marshal (Fredric Lane; last seen with a bread-basket sized hunk of shrapnel in his gut) is hot on her trail.

Things on the island don't fare much better. The Marshal is in critical condition and his death will surely sever the last link to Kate's criminal past on the island, but the situation becomes further messy when Jack stumbles upon her mugshot in the Marshal's luggage. Though he is unforthcoming of his findings (despite the much less discreet Hurley, a character destined to be a bastion of comic relief, too finding the photograph, and becoming particularly skittish in a subsequent encounter with Kate).

This episode is a bit short on concrete answers. We don't know what Kate did that put her on the run, why she fled to Australia, or just how personal the relationship between her and the Marshal was prior to the island. But faithfully "Tabula Rasa" adheres to the rich canvas of characterization established in the dual-pilot. When Kate crashes Ray's truck in an effort to escape the Marshal, rather than leaving Ray to die, she sticks around to salvage him from the wreckage. There is a powerful compassion to her character that strictly belies her opaque criminal background. Even as the Marshal, barely conscious and bleeding to death, continues to provoke her in his final moments, she makes the magnanimous decision to spare him a slow and painful demise. She doesn't kill him, but rather enlists a trigger-happy Sawyer, who doesn't really kill him either, but...it's better this scene be watched than recounted.

There's a motley of other "oh no, we're fucked!" moments to be found, namely a cryptic radio transmission found by Sayid (Naveen Andrews) and gang that Shannon (Maggie Grace) ruffledly translates from French into a distressing mayday that's presumably been on a loop for sixteen years. Elsewhere, the mysterious Locke (Terry O'Quinn) discloses the occurrence of a miracle on the island. But more on this next week...

Grade: A-