Friday, June 17, 2005

LOST- Episode 3: Tabula Rasa

  Previously on LOST- The plane crashed, Jack did his doctor thing and Locke upped his creep factor by asking Walt if he wants to know a secret.

  The show opens with the extras doing their best to sort through the wreckage.  Suitcases and clothes are strewn everywhere and everyone seems to still be a little bit dazed from their ordeal.  Elsewhere, Jack is trying to get his shrapnel patient to stay still, but he keeps muttering things like, "Don't trust her."  Jack is getting frustrated that the guy won't tell him who he is talking about, but then the guy changes the subject and demands the handcuffs that were in his jacket pocket.  Jack goes to get them, but instead finds a print-out of Kate's mugshot.  He stares in disbelief as the marshal goes back to whispering, "She's dangerous."

  The radio team is cranky and starting to bicker as they make their way back to the crashsite.  Sayid suggests they stop and make camp.  That night around the fire, Sayid tries to recreate what happened to their plane and figure out where they crashed.  This bores Sawyer, who would rather talk about the weirdness of the island, like the French transmission they picked up.  Sayid then convinces them not to say anything about what they heard to anyone else because it would take away their hope.

  Back at the beach, Hurley is asking Jack about the encounter with the monster and Jack is forced to admit that he didn't actually see the thing.  Satisfied that the thing is not a dinosaur, Hurley shifts his questions to the marshal's condition, which seems to annoy Jack even more.  Jack gives his grim diagnosis as Hurley discover's Kate's mugshot for himself.  Jack cuts off yet another line of questioning about Kate and walks away. 

  As the others sleep, Boone creeps over and snatches the gun.  Sayid wakes up along with everyone else and they question him.  Boone says he was going to stand guard, considering what is out there.  An argument ensues over who gets to hold the gun, until everyone agrees to Shannon's idea to let Kate hold it.  As Kate takes the gun, she flashes back to when she was sleeping in a barn and woke up with a shotgun pointed at her face.  She explains to the farmer that she walked in from town and tells him that her name is Annie.  He asks if she is hungry.

  Over breakfast, Kate continues to spin her lies, saying she is from Canada and touring Australia by foot after graduating college.  The farmer offers her a job, which "Annie" accepts.

  The expedition returns in the morning and Sayid gathers everyone around to tell them what happened.  His impromptu press conference boils down to one basic lie: They didn't pick anything up and coudn't send a signal out.  Sayid then starts the organization process, asking for help with rationing food, collecting water and gathering electronics so they can boost the transceiver's signal.  As Sayid continues to blah blah blah in the background, Jack and Kate find each other and Kate says she has to tell him something.  They walk down the beach and Kate fills Jack in on the whole French transmission deal.  On Jack's end of the conversation, he lies and tells her that the marshal didn't say anything when he woke up.

  Later, Hurley questions Jack's decision to not tell Kate that he knows about her being a criminal.  Jack states simply that it's not his problem.  Hurley agrees that the marshal will take care of her when he gets better, but Jack doesn't think that will happen without stronger antibiotics.  They need to check the overhead compartments of the plane for more medicine.  Hurley doesn't like that idea, you know, because of the dead bodies. 

  Jack has decided he will do it and crawls into the fuselage with a flashlight.  As if it wasn't creepy enough to be in there, he hears a commotion, which turns out to be Sawyer rummaging around.  Jack scoffs at Sawyer's looting and  tries to take the moral high ground, but Sawyer counters with a good point about wasting all the medicine on a guy who is probably going to die anyway.  Sawyer tells him to look at the big picture.  Jack is still in civilization while he is in the wild.

  The salvage effort continues the next day.  Charlie helps Claire with the heavy lifting, while Jin tells Sun to go clean herself up because she is filthy.  He tells her he loves her, but she walks away in silence.  Elsewhere, Hurley bumps into Kate, who tries to introduce herself, but Hurley is more than a little nervous since in this case, her assumed reputation has preceded her.  He stumbles through telling her where Jack is and then literally runs off.

  A heavy rain begins to fall as Kate stands over and stares at her captor's unconscious face.  She flashes back to the middle of the night at the farm house, where the farmer catches her taking her money out of its hiding place in the pantry.  He tells her he would have held it or she could put it in the bank, but Kate says she has trust issues.  She is leaving and the farmer knows it.  He knows she has some kind of shady past since she clams up everytime he wants to talk about her life, but he had hoped she wouldn't leave in the middle of the night.  He finally convinces her to stay one more night and he will drive her to the train station in the morning.  She smiles at him and he says that he gets it.  "Everyone deserves a fresh start."

  Back to reality, Kate's daydreaming is interrupted when the marshal's eyes bolt open and he grabs at her throat.  They roll around a bit, but Jack comes into the tent to save the day.  All the excitement has made the marshal's condition worse and Jack gives his expert diagnosis that the man needs more water.  Out in the rain, Kate asks if the marshal's death will be quick and a frustrated Jack screams that it won't be.  It will be a three or four day painful ordeal.  Kate asks for the marshal to be put out of his misery, but as a doctor, Jack can't agree to that.  He says he saw the mugshot and he is not a murderer.

  This verbal slap in the face makes Kate think back to the car ride to the train station with the farmer.  Kate notices that he keeps looking in his rearview mirror and sure enough, a truck is behind them and appears to be in hot pursuit.  Kate slowly realizes that she has been set up and the farmer admits that he has known about her for a couple of days when he saw her picture in the post office.  Farmer Ray admits that he turned her in for the $23,000 reward that would help pay his mortgage.  He tries to make things better by saying it was a hard decision.  The marshal pulls up along side them, sees Kate and makes the gun sign with his pointer and thumb.

  It is still pouring rain as Michael tries to construct some better shelter for himself and his son.  As he does this, he questions Walt about the bald guy he was hanging out with.  Walt perplexes his dad by saying that the things they talked about were secret.  This is too much for Michael who presses a little harder and learns that Mr. Locke said a miracle happened to him.  God only knows why this is a secret.  Michael responds that a miracle happened to all of them by surviving a plane crash.  Michael tells Walt not to hang around Locke anymore.  Walt is angry about this but angrier that Michael won't find the dog, Vincent.  Michael says he will try to get the dog back when it stops raining.  Almost instantly, it stops raining.  *insert Twilight Zone music*

  Cut to Michael walking through the jungle, muttering to himself as he looks for Vincent.  He gets nervous when he hears some growling and rustling in the brush.  He makes the probably wise decision to run for it but stops in his tracks when he stumbles onto a topless Sun washing herself.  Michael stammers through explanations and apologies and hands her her top back.

  As the marshal's cries of pain can be heard in the tent, Charlie approaches Locke, who is carving a whistle.  Charlie tries to hint at his own musical talent, eventually forced to say, "I'm in a band." to get his point across.  Locke does not seem interested.  Elsewhere, the cries of pain are getting louder and bothering everyone.  Shannon wishes the man would just die already.  Sayid tells Jack that everyone is getting upset and hints again at the euthanasia issue.

  That night, Sawyer tells Kate that he is glad he doesn't have the gun anymore because he would have put the marshal out of his misery.  Sawyer also mentions that there's only one bullet left, which surely won't become a plot point!

  Jack is in the tent, continuing futilely to try and save the marshal's life.  The marshal gets chatty and tells Jack not to trust her no matter what she says or how she makes him feel because she will do anything to get away.  Jack wants to know what she did, but the marshal demands to talk to her alone.

  Kate stares at the tent where her captor is dying, and flashes back to the continuing car chase on the back roads of Australia.  Kate grabs the wheel and flips their truck off the road.  Kate is okay, but the truck is on fire and the farmer is out cold.  She drags him to safety and in doing so, gets captured by the marshal. 

  In the present, Kate has arrived to chat withthe marshal, who asks what the favor she was going to ask for was.  After a quick repeat flashback to Kate's POV during the crash, she tells the marshal that she wanted him to make sure that the farmer got his reward for turning her in.  This makes the marshal laugh and die a little bit more.  The marshal then asks Kate to put him out of his misery.

  Jack is respecting their privacy by standing outside the tent, when Hurley approaches and questions whether she should be alone in there since she has the gun.  This is news to Jack who rushes toward the tent to find Kate walking out with a sad look on her face.  They make eye contact just as a gun shot rocks the beach's quiet serenity.  Sawyer then comes storming out of the tent with a mean look and a gun in his hand.  Jack is angry, but Sawyer defends himself.  He understands why Jack couldn't do it, but the guy was asking to die.  He didn't like doing it, but it had to be done.  Then a look of shock comes over everyone's faces when they hear a cough.  The marshal is not quite dead.  Only mortally wounded. 

  Jack starts to mop up the blood and discovers that Sawyer missed the heart and punctured a lung- which will take hours to bleed out.  Too bad they only had that one bullet.  I knew that would be important!  Jack tells Sawyer to get out.  Sawyer does so, cursing at himself and smoking as off-camera, Jack ends up being the one to do what needed to be done.

  Early next morning, Locke uses his new whistle to lure Vincent out of the jungle.  He then wakes Michael up and tells him the good news.  He tells him he tied the dog up and thinks Michael should be the one who brings him back.  Michael gives a sleepy, yet sincere thank you.  Elsewhere, Jack is watching the tide roll in when Kate comes by to sit with him.  She wants to tell him what she did, but he says he doesn't want to know.  Everything that happened before the crash doesn't matter anymore.  They all get to start over now.

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