LOST: Tabula Rasa

As the title suggests, this episode centers around the idea of tabula rasa, or "clean slate" as it's translated from latin. Now that the Losties are stranded on the island with people that don't know them very well, they all have a chance to start their lives over. This idea will remain central to the show for a while now as we see flashbacks from the points of view of other characters, but the story is focused more around Kate this episode.


As hinted at in the pilot, Jack discovers from the dying US Marshal that Kate is a former criminal. This information starts to leak out to some of the other Losties, most importantly Hurley and Sawyer, but we still don't know what it is that she actually did. Sawyer eventually decides to just put the Marshal out of his misery with his remaining bullet, but he misses the heart and causes the Marshal to have a longer, more painful death. Locke returns Vincent to Walt, and there's some hope that the relationship between Walt and his dad will be sustained.


There weren't many clues in this episode that I could find, but this is expected because it's an early season one episode. One thing that is interesting, however, is the fact that the plane was already far off course before hitting turbulence and crashing on the island. This might suggest that Jacob had something to do with the plane crash, although Desmond is the one who caused the system failure that caused the turbulence. This will definitely be something to think about as I watch further episodes.

Score: 8

Best Quote: "Three days ago we all died. We should all be able to start over."

Best Moment: The camera rotating around Locke's head at the end. It's a nice lead-in to the next episode.

WTF Moment: It's not a very big moment, but the Marshal surviving the gunshot was surprising.