Lost Re-view: Tabula Rasa

Time for the next episode of Lost in my grand re-viewing of the entire series.

The second episode of a network TV series is often a rocky one. Pilot episodes are usually made months ahead of time, in order to sell the concept to the network. When the first "real" episode comes along, everyone involved is just getting back into the swing of things months later. For Lost, it must have been an even greater challenge, since the story was an ongoing one, and picked up mere hours (or maybe even minutes) after the conclusion of the previous episode.

When this episode (written by co-creator Damon Lindelof) begins, Kate, Charlie, Sayid, Boone, and Shannon still haven't made it back from their attempt to send out a distress signal from higher ground. This showcased another important element of Lost: episodes wouldn't really be self-contained. Sure, in an hour of Lost, you could get a tale about a character, an emotional arc, with a beginning, middle, and end. But the saga of the Island would often just pause as it was and pick up again next episode. (As a footnote, I think you can credit 24 for paving the road here, making it acceptable for a network show to be written this way as "standard operating procedure.")

It's interesting that Lost's first regular episode focuses on Kate, the character who I noted in the pilot seemed most "off" from how she'd come to be portrayed on the show. Did the writers gravitate to her because they saw the need to adjust the character a bit? Did they go to her simply because of the story reality that the marshal who captured her was dying of a shrapnel wound, and that they'd have to tell Kate's story immediately because he logically would die quickly (and with him, the easy way to segue into the story)? Was it a real-world necessity that they could only get guest actor Fredric Lehne for one episode, so they rushed to kill off his character? Hard to say for sure.

In any case, I probably thought this episode was more interesting the first time around. Knowing the full truth about Kate's history removes a little of the interest, of course. Even if at the time you had somehow just known that Lost was going to be successful and last six years -- without actually knowing Kate's real story -- it would have been less interesting. The central questions of "will anyone learn that Kate is a fugitive?", "what will they do if they learn?", and "what did she do?" were inevitably going to be answered.

Nevertheless, the episode still has a lot to offer even if the suspense is gone. The Kate storyline has a lot of heart to it. We see her on the run in Australia, staying with a farmer named Ray. What we know now that we didn't know at the time was that Kate killed her abusive father (the man who she'd thought was her stepfather for her whole life). That offers a whole new context to her relationship with farmer Ray. This was probably the first person who was anything like a father figure that Kate had opened up to and trusted -- at all -- since she first went on the run. She lives with him for three months.

And then he betrays her, turning her in for the reward money. ($23,000. Heheh, 23. Those damn numbers.) In the full context of Lost, we now know what a real disappointment Ray's betrayal must have been for Kate. And she ends up looking like a better person as a result, because of her reaction to it all. She pulls the unconscious Ray from the flipped-over truck, not leaving him to die even after what he did. And she still says to the marshal that she wants to make sure Ray gets the reward money for turning her in. On some level, this farmer probably reminded Kate of the man she thought was her biological father. In short, this whole plot thread offers a brand new emotional resonance when you come to it with full knowledge of the series, which is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping and looking for in going back to watch it all again.

Just as interesting as the Kate storyline are things going on with the other characters on the Island. There are great little moments, like Sawyer calling Kate "Freckles" for the first time, and also beginning to scavenge and horde things. Locke's wheelchair makes its first appearance. (The writers say they didn't know Locke had been in a wheelchair when they made the pilot, but they obviously knew it by the time they were making this episode.) Charlie's back to what he did in the pilot, writing profound-to-a-drug-addict messages on the bandages wrapped around his fingers. (He changes the message F-A-T-E from the pilot episode into L-A-T-E here.) And there's the moment where Michael stumbles upon Sun topless, cleaning herself up at Jin's command -- a precursor of the conflict between Michael and Jin.

And there are still other character moments that are more than quick fun, carrying more resonance. Claire and Charlie begin to bond in this episode -- and we know what an important relationship those characters would have.

There's also the small but compelling storyline of Locke finding Vincent. He carves the little whistle to bring Vincent out of hiding. And then, showing keen insight, he doesn't bring the dog straight to Walt, but goes to Michael so that he can be the one to save the day.

The most illuminating on-the-Island storyline is Jack's. He's really showing his "fixer" complex in this episode, determine to save the marshal's life and spend as many of the group's limited resources as are needed to do it. What's more, when Sawyer steps in and shoots the marshal to "put him out of his misery" -- and botches the job! -- Jack has to kill the man with his bare hands to save him hours of choking in agony. Major stuff for Jack, even though he is not the focus of the episode. (By the way, how could Sawyer miss like that? Maybe because of the vision problems we'd learn about much later?)

More staples of the Lost format began to appear in this episode. For the first time, we got the "whooshing" sound effect leading into a flashback -- though it wasn't used in every instance, and was never used to get back out from a flashback. Also, this episode ends with the first of Lost's many montages -- only it's not set to a sweet piece by composer Michael Giacchino. Instead, it's a quiet pop song played on a Walkman Hurley finds, in a style very reminiscent of what J.J. Abrams did on Felicity.

We get the answer to a question from the pilot. The "secret" that Locke told Walt was simply that "a miracle" had happened on the Island. He was indeed alluding to regaining the use of his legs, but did not specifically tell Walt the whole truth.

Speaking of truths, the whole episode deals a lot with characters holding information out on one another. Sayid convinces the people who know about the French distress signal to conceal the information, knowing that widespread knowledge of it will crush people's hopes of rescue. Jack finds out the Kate is a criminal, but then conceals that truth from Kate to see if she'll come clean on her own.

Some very interesting things happen right at the end of this episode. Kate comes to Jack and wants to tell him what she did. But Jack shuts her down, delivering the message behind the episode's title, Tabula Rasa. (Fun fact: the philosophical concept of "tabula rasa," being born as a blank slate, was first posited by the real John Locke.) Jack says that every one of the survivors is now a blank slate and that their pasts don't matter.

First of all, this opinion is basically the antithesis of what Lost would stand for in its first season. The first season was all about learning the pasts of these characters, who they were before the crash. And it all mattered very much.

Secondly, I have to wonder just what Kate would have told Jack if he had let her confess. Considering where Kate was as a person at that point in time, would she have told the truth? It doesn't seem likely. Would she have made excuses, telling Jack the whole story about her stepfather? She didn't really know him that well yet. Would she have proclaimed her innocence? If she had, I think it would have made trusting her a lot tougher later, both for the other characters and for the audience.

The episode does end on a bit of a weird note. Literally, in fact. As the montage I mentioned earlier comes to an end, the camera does a slow pan around Locke, moving into a close-up on his face. He watches Walt and Michael with a look that might mean a lot of things, except that it is scored by an incredibly creepy and ominous string accent that leaves you wondering the worst about Locke. Could he be a creepy pedophile or something? I'm not sure what this moment is all about. Is it just artificially trying to create some tension on which to end the episode? At this point in time, did the writers think that the end of every episode should have some sort of "hand off" indicating who next week's episode would be about? Strange stuff.

In any case, the episode overall isn't brilliant like the pilot. But I think that would have been incredibly hard to pull off. There's still good material here in any case, and I'd rate this episode a B+.

But this review needs a post-script, because another one of those 13 "Missing Pieces" mobisodes is tied to this episode. This time, it's a scene called "Jack, Meet Ethan. Ethan? Jack." It's exactly what you'd think from the title, a scene in which Jack meets the undercover Other Ethan for the first time.

Obviously, Ethan wouldn't really appear on the show for a few more episodes. But just as obviously, he's supposed to have been there from the beginning, so there's nothing wrong with the idea of retroactively creating a moment like this. There are even a few interesting things to ponder out of this scene.

Ethan's "in" is that he brings Jack a suitcase full of medicine that he claims to have found in the crash. The audience can have a little fun speculating whether that's true, or if the medications were provided by the Others just so that Ethan could build trust.

The scene has Ethan bringing up the possibility that Jack will have to deliver Claire's baby there on the Island. He then confides that his wife died in childbirth, and that the baby was lost too. Given the fertility problems the Others were having, I think you can take this story at face value -- it's not just an angle in Ethan's masquerade as a crash survivor. And when you take that detail as true, it humanizes Ethan's character a great deal.

So I'd say this mobisode actually does add to and flesh out the narrative of Lost in a small but useful way. Of course, even though it falls chronologically at this point in the series, and you could even watch it for the first time right here (it doesn't spoil anything), it only really resonates with a viewer who has seen the next few seasons. I guess that's the point of these mobisodes. (The good ones, anyway.)

Next up, one of the famously great episodes of the series, Walkabout.