Tabula Rasa: Season 1 | Rotten Tomatoes (2024)

Reviews 96% Audience Score 50+ Ratings Mie is a young woman with amnesia who is locked up in a secure psychiatric hospital. After Thomas Spectre goes missing, Detective Inspector Wolkers visits her, claiming that she was the last person seen with him -- making her a witness and prime suspect in the disappearance. As she appears to be the key to solving the case, the police won't allow Mie to be released from the hospital until Thomas is found. That means she has to reconstruct her lost memories and find her way through her recent past in a desperate attempt to fill in the blanks. But the more Mie remembers, the more she mistrusts the people around her -- and herself. Read More Read Less

Critics Reviews

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Tabula Rasa: Season 1 | Rotten Tomatoes (1) Euan Ferguson Guardian [Tabula Rasa] is a disarmingly good psychological chiller...modernly unsettling: I physically jumped a couple of times. May 31, 2018 Full Review Tabula Rasa: Season 1 | Rotten Tomatoes (2) Rosie Knight Nerdist Powerful and frightening. Sep 7, 2018 Full Review Tabula Rasa: Season 1 | Rotten Tomatoes (3) Victoria Segal Sunday Times (UK) Yet, despite its pulpy qualities, the head-spinning time slips are genuinely disorientating and disturbing: an effective bit of TV gaslighting that leaves viewers as bewildered as Mie. May 18, 2018 Full Review Tabula Rasa: Season 1 | Rotten Tomatoes (4) Steve Murray ArtsATL Think of it as a female elaboration of Memento, and you won't be far off. Apr 9, 2018 Full Review Read all reviews

Audience Reviews

View All (13) audience reviews

Lukas K Annemie "Mie" D'Haeze (Veerle Baetens) got behind a terrible car accident and has since suffered from a very special kind of amnesia. True, she can remember every detail of what happened before the tragic accident. However, when it comes to the memories afterwards, hardly any information reaches her long-term memory. Especially when Mie is under stress, she finds it difficult to properly classify things around her."Tabula Rasa" was really surprisingly good!The story, at least for me, wasn't a bit predictable until the end.The actors are also very good and the story creates a very good atmosphere! Rated 4.5/5 Stars • Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 04/10/23 Full Review Audience Member It's mind-blowing. The first few episodes might seem slow, but once it picks up pace halfway through the season, it's absolutely brilliant, keeps you guessing, and keeps surprising you with twists you'd never imagine -- not in a gimmicky way, but in a very organic way that feels so natural in hindsight. Rated 5/5 Stars • Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/09/23 Full Review Audience Member Glacial pacing. Gave up after enduring 4 episodes. Rated 1.5/5 Stars • Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 01/09/23 Full Review Audience Member mess.This is really good Rated 4/5 Stars • Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/09/23 Full Review Audience Member The show is...decent, I guess? I don't want to rag on it too much because it is engaging at times, and some people even wrote that its twists were enthralling. I mean, maybe? But if you pick up on what it is blatantly putting down in the very first episodes--which is that women are over-emotional and that they're only bearable as long as their sexiness doesn't, but always manages to, inevitably turn crazy--then there is not much at all novel or surprising about the flow of the story. To be sure, this show does have what I think my 65-year old father would require in a mystery, and the sound and camera work were well done. But I found myself constantly distracted by cringe-worthy, trope-y writing that, instead of putting me "on the edge of my seat," had me wondering time and again if any women at all were involved in the writing or filming of this mystery that supposedly centers a female character. Let me explain a bit for those still reading. The main character of this show, Mie, is a woman who is gaslit and treated terribly by pretty much everyone for the entire series (which she spends in a mental hospital...not that she is written as doing much other than wandering around her house before she lands there). These issues are not interrogated within the series in a way that other shows/films (ex. Memento, which similarly has a plot around faulty memory and terrible people) do, they just are. She also has no female friends, since the series focuses entirely on the relationships she has with men (that approach her often out of the blue with little suspicion on her part); her one female defender (her sister) is absent for most of the series because she can't bare to talk about what's going on because her never-ending 7-month pregnancy makes her extra sensitive? The other women, few as they are, are vilified spectacularly, some a great deal more than others (watch it and you'll see that it just...escalates), and the prevalent reasons given for their vilification is uncontrollable lust and/or jealousy and/or narcissism and/or a lying nature. There's a lot of lecturing to the female characters, too, about how to get over themselves and be "better people." The men in the series, on the other hand, are consistently violent and sexist but get a pass because they're ultimately, according to the plot, "misunderstood." There is a lot of blatant sexual harassment, too, of the main character, and nary a conversation goes by that she is not sexualized in some way. In the end, the men are depicted as flawed but selfless, and eventually every single one is revealed to be a "hero" in one way or another. None of them actually improve as human beings though. As for the women? Well, they get to live happily with their heroic men once they've come around to realizing just how good those men were to them all along. Most of them, anyway.Don't get me wrong, some parts of this show are good. The horror elements in the beginning were great. The acting was decent, too, and I enjoyed the way they try to capture emotion and psychological states with abstract visuals/use of sound. But for me what was frustrating (the outdated caricatures that parade around as women, and the trope-y writing based on such) outweighed the good. The last episode that many praise was for me the most exasperating of them all. If you have the time, sure, watch this show. But don't expect too much and use the fast forward button as you see fit because you won't miss much as long as you remember that women just be damn crazy bro. (Bonus, a small rant. So there's this scene in like the very first episode where Mie spots some random burly guy with a gun in the forest staring into her house. Her house is in the middle of fricken nowhere, too. She calls her husband over all panicked and points and her husband's like, hahaha, it's fine, you're worrying too much, stop it, let's have sex already. and then he waves at the creepy man and the man waves back, and that's it! it's done! This man is later revealed to have some weird animal murder disassemble shed nearby, but no biggie, at least it's not humans shrug, and none of it is ever really addressed or resolved. repeat this a hundred times and you have the series in a nutshell. Mie's fear is silly or inconvenient to the busy men around her who need her to just cooperate and stop being emotional because it's all in her head anyway and goddamn why are you so difficult when you used to be so sexy ugh.) Rated 2.5/5 Stars • Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 01/09/23 Full Review ginger b Builds a little slowly in the early episodes (enough to hold your interest though) and just gets better and better. Rated 4.5/5 Stars • Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 03/30/23 Full Review Read all reviews Post a rating

Cast & Crew

Veerle Baetens Annemie D'Haeze Jeroen Perceval Thomas de Geest Hilde Van Mieghem Rita Gene Bervoets Inspecteur Jacques Wolkers Peter van den Begin Jan Peeters Natali Broods Dr Mommaerts
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Episodes

Episode 1 Aired Oct 29, 2017 Spectre Mie, who has amnesia, finds herself in a locked psych ward, where a detective questions her about the recent disappearance of a man with whom she was seen. Details Episode 2 Aired Nov 5, 2017 Houdini Mie loses her temper at a family birthday party and becomes suspicious of her husband; Inspector Wolkers finds evidence linking Mie to Thomas. Details Episode 3 Aired Nov 12, 2017 Bird for the Cat Thomas invites Mie to meet him at the recycling center, where they form a connection; Benoit receives a gift with an indiscreet message. Details Episode 4 Aired Nov 12, 2017 Ariadne's Thread Worried about her daughter's behavior, Mie hires "spiritual cleansers" to exorcise their home; Inspector Wolkers reveals an ulterior motive to Mie. Details Episode 5 Aired Nov 19, 2017 V. Mie undergoes hypnosis; a family Halloween party takes a somber turn; suspicious of her husband's frequent outings, Mie decides to follow him. Details Episode 6 Aired Nov 19, 2017 The Bear Pit Mie confronts her family, demanding to know what they've held back from her; she later learns more about her worrying medical history. Details Episode 7 Aired Nov 26, 2017 Wally A few weeks before the disappearance, Benoit spots a message on Mie's phone and follows her; Vronsky asks Mie for a tiny gift in return for a favor. Details Episode 8 Aired Nov 26, 2017 Wood for the Trees The day of the disappearance, Mie overhears an argument between Benoit and her mom; Nikki visits Mie at the hospital and reveals a secret. Details Episode 9 Aired Dec 3, 2017 Bob Mie meets the witness who saw her with Thomas right before he disappeared; Dr. Mommaerts gets Mie to remember her final encounter with Thomas. Details

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Photos

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Tabula Rasa — Season 1

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Season Info

Director
Kaat Beels, Jonas Govaerts

Screenwriter
Christophe Dirickx, Veerle Baetens, Malin-sarah Gozin

Network
VRT1BE

Rating
TV-MA

Genre
Mystery & Thriller

Original Language
Dutch

Release Date
Oct 29, 2017
Tabula Rasa: Season 1 | Rotten Tomatoes (2024)

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