Midsection Beach. Locke wakes up Mercutio and tells him that he found Walt's dog and has tethered it to a tree nearby. "I know that Walt lost his mom," Locke says. "I thought that you should be the one to bring his dog back to him." Aw, that's kind of nice. Mercutio thanks him.

Broody Beach, located just down the way from Midsection Beach. Jack sits staring at the ocean, which I must admit is looking particularly fetching in this scene. A cold front came through New York Sunday night, and my attractive lawyer wife and I were walking back from the car to our apartment and she commented how chilly it was, and I gave her a plaintive look, and she realized she's in for another six months of not being able to mention the weather because I will immediately start yammering on about Hawai'i. Jack's wearing his white shirt and dark pants and brooding about how he killed Shrap. Cripes, if this island is haunted, I want it to be by ghost pirates or something, not by everyone's guilt. Kate plops down next to him. With her white blouse and dark jeans they kind of look like one of those Midwestern couples who wear matching clothes on vacation. Also, they both look sad and pensive. Kate wants to tell Jack what unspecified crime she committed. Jack says no, he prefers that the crime remain unspecified. He says it doesn't matter who any of the castaways were before the crash. "Three days ago we all died," he thematicizes. "We should all be able to start over."

A montage? Seriously? It's the kind of montage where everyone does everything in slow motion. Hurley provides the Dogme justification for the montage by listening to a Discman, even though Sayid prolly wants that Discman and those batteries for more critical uses than a montage. (The song is called "Wash Away" by some guy named Joe Purdy, and is nice enough, though it basically sounds like the producers have been hanging out on the North Shore long enough to hear a lot of Jack Johnson and Bruddah IZ and wanted to find a song that sounded a little like both of them but would cost a lot less to license.) Jin strokes his sleeping wife's face in Korean. (My friend Denny, who speaks Korean, assures me that this means the same thing in English.) Shannon looks gloomy until Boone, God's Friggin' Gift to Humanity shows up with her sunglasses, repaired with a paper clip. She smiles delightedly and he looks tremendously self-satisfied. (What is the context of this scene? Those sunglasses have never previously been mentioned, have they? This makes me think that Maggie Grace and Ian Somerhalder were told that this entire episode actually revolved around his quazy quest to fix her sunglasses, and they filmed a whole bunch of scenes involving that issue, only to cut them all except this last bit. Perhaps in the Lost offices, they've assembled a separate cut of "Tabula Rasa," the "Zeppo" cut, where Boone, God's Friggin' Gift to Humanity fights his way through the jungle and robs corpses of duct tape only to have Shannon yell, "No! Not good enough!" and burst into tears.) Sayid walks along the beach holding what appears at first to be a cricket ball but instead is an apple; rather than bowl it, as I hoped he would, he simply tosses the apple to Sawyer, who's being a Gloomy Gus. Charlie replaces the F in FATE, written on his fingers, Radio Raheem-style, to an L, spelling LATE. I don't know what LATE refers to, but if he added a letter, he could be referencing Driveshaft's #19 smash, "Baby, Let Me Clean Your Slate (Until It Can't Get Any Cleaner)." Behind him, Claire tells her fetus that surely they'll get more lines next episode. In the montage's climax, Walt runs across the beach to meet Mercutio and Vincent the Shifty-Eyed Dog. That dog is really panting a lot. Walt seems really happy. We see the back of Locke's head as he sits there watching them...