"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-

"Pilot: Part 2"

Lost - Season One
Aired: September 29, 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 Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof
Directed by J.J. Abrams

One consequence of dividing a 2-hour premiere into halves is the inevitable trimming of plot and character introduction.  If the first half can't engage the audience while at the same time providing a baseline for the events to follow, the ramifications can prove to be of a capsizing nature (refer to Joss Whedon's cult favorite Firefly, whose pilot episode wasn't even aired until well after the series had launched, and was one of a number of poor executive decisions that resulted in the series's untimely cancellation).  By dividing the pilot of Lost in two, ABC could have easily heralded the death knell for Abrams's latest project, and while I still maintain that this would have been more effective as a unified whole, the quality of the show's writing up to this point has averted this pitfall.

(To summarize the final couple acts of the previous episode, Jack Shephard, Kate Austen and Charlie Pace set off to find the plane's cockpit, which had landed in the middle of the waterlogged jungle.  There the three find the plane's transceiver and a barely-living pilot (played by Abrams regular Greg Grunberg), who is subsequently vacuumed out of the ruins presumably by whatever entity was responsible for the thunderous noises heard the previous night.  Charlie has some odd preoccupation with the plane's bathroom, a detail worthy of note.  With transceiver in hand, the three dash back to camp.)

Part 1 introduced us to a wide array of characters, most notably Shephard, the stouthearted if slightly nervous spinal surgeon from Los Angeles, and Austen, whose character is a little more fleshed out here.  In flashbacks it is revealed that she was a prisoner handcuffed to a US Marshal (Fredric Lane) for as-yet-unknown circumstances.  The Marshal fared less fortunately in the crash and has wound up on the beach with a sizable chunk of plane shrapnel in his stomach.  How this drama is going to unfold will likely be answered within the next stretch of episodes.  What is quite evident for the time being is how at ease Kate is with handling a gun (after Sawyer shoots and kills a wild polar bear) despite her claim that she's never used one. 

Speaking of which...there's a freaking polar bear!  As a group consisting of Kate, Sawyer, Charlie, Shannon Rutherford, Sayid Jarrah and Boone Carlyle branches off to find higher ground for the transceiver, they are attacked by none other than an Arctic bear who appears to be thirsting for more than just Coca-Cola.  As Shannon so cleverly notes, "Polar bears don't usually live in the jungle."

Of course the show can't maintain viewer interest without internal friction within the camp, and the wide racial palette of the cast allows for conflict.  Sayid, being an Iraqi, is perhaps the most obvious scapegoat, and Sawyer won't stop to grant him quarter.  When the Marshal's handcuffs turn up in the jungle, Sawyer turns the spotlight onto Sayid, and the results aren't so pretty.  While Sawyer's nicknames (especially "Al-Jazeera") strike a humorous tone, there is also something very unsettling in knowing that his chauvinistic inclination isn't too far removed from that of the American public.  By portraying Sayid as a comparatively more sagacious, rational character, he is also one that elicits sympathy, a rare and rather daring depiction of a Middle Eastern man.  Sawyer on the other hand is probably the least likable person on the island up to this point.  In addition, we get a few immediate pre-crash flashbacks of Charlie, who (surprise) had a stash of heroin stored in the lavatory, explaining his desire to accompany Jack and Kate to the missing third of the plane. 

This episode effectively maintains the momentum of Part 1, and gives us a more magnified view of several of the castaways.  One concern I would imagine may have been in the minds of some viewers is the extent of the season's budget that went into this monolith.  As mentioned in the previous review, the cost of building (and subsequently disassembling) and transporting the wreckage set was not cheap.  Had the producers invested too much funding into the pilot, the only logical result would have been resorting to bottleneck episodes for the remainder of the season, episodes that would have been filmed on relatively inexpensive sets and would have likely done little to advance the plot.  Fortunately, as someone who has already seen the entire series, I can put these fears to rest.  There is still a smorgasbord of great things to come, polar bears and all, and I look forward to hitting them all in successive reviews.

Grade: A

"Pilot: Part 1"

Lost - Season One
Aired: September 22, 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 Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof
Directed by J.J. Abrams



If we've learned anything about islands in historical fiction, it's that they're a hoarded wealth of intrigue, danger, suspense, spirituality and sensuality.  From the economically-concerned survivalism of Robinson Crusoe to the web of love and retribution in Shakespeare's The Tempest, they are one of the commonest but most captivating plot devices.  They are apart from civilized society.  They are home to exotic fauna and foliage.  Not all of that fauna and foliage is happy to have visitors.  Murder and crime are more easily accomplished without the constraints of civilized society.  I think you can connect the dots.

Lost is the brainchild of J.J. Abrams, who created the espionage thriller Alias and college drama Felicity before that.  Based on his resume we can already predict character development and long-term plot arcs will be the standard.  Add in that this two-part pilot was the most expensive ever produced for ABC (resulting in the truly ironic firing of former chairman Lloyd Braun, who had greenlighted the project in the face of dwindling network ratings), reportedly costing anywhere between $10 and $14 million.  That this show was even given a second thought speaks volumes about the amount of faith the network put into it, as it easily could have been a colossal disaster.

Fortunately that faith was well-invested, because not only is the premiere of Lost viscerally and sensorially astounding, but it's also compelling, chronicling the plane crash and miraculous survival of 48 passengers (with fourteen being regular cast members).  As if in real life, the individuals remain innominate until the situation demands their introduction.

We meet Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox, Party of Five), a spinal surgeon from Los Angeles who gets dropped in the middle of a serious crisis, risking himself to save the lives of others wounded in the crash.  A more enigmatic but equally important character is Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly), who despite being out of her element is driven by a strong will and versatility.  The scene where an anxious Kate stitches up Jack's wound is one of the most iconic of the series' run.

Few of the other characters are given little more than a fugitive introduction.  There's the washed-up rock star Charlie Pace (Dominic Monhagan, The Lord of the Rings), whose shadowed eyes belie his comic disposition.  There's a very pregnant woman named Claire Littleton (Emilie de Ravin, The Hills Have Eyes), who seems oddly cheery in spite of all the turmoil.  There's an older man played by Terry O'Quinn (Millennium, The X-Files) who seems to be of importance but has little to do in this episode.  More curious is an Asian couple (Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim) alienated not only by their lack of English but also antiquated gender roles.  A Middle Eastern man named Sayid (Naveen Andrews, The English Patient), a hardened redneck (Josh Holloway), and a larger-than-life guy you can't help but want to hug (Jorge Garcia) both beg stories to be told, while a pair of bickering siblings, the unnerved Boone (Ian Somerhalder, The Vampire Diaries) and the comparatively bitchy Shannon (Maggie Grace, Taken) are decidedly less inspiring.  Rounding out the cast are the overprotective father Michael (Harold Perrineau, The Matrix trilogy) and son Walt (Malcolm David Kelley), and a soundless but sharp woman (L. Scott Caldwell) who Jack brings from the cusp of death.

It's awfully odd that all of these survivors would be so cushioned in the fall so as not to wind up with more than mere flesh wounds, but odder still are the grotesque noises heard in the jungle at night.  From the get-go it is clear that there is something not quite right with the island, and while ABC's decision to split the pilot into two halves may not do its story total justice, it certainly serves as an engaging doorway into a storyline bound to be riddled with mysteries.  A more comprehensive outline of the plot will follow in my review of Part 2.

Grade: A