Pilot - Part 1
From the opening shot of this first episode, we are treated to a visual and symbolic feast. The first thing we see is an opening eye, its lens reflecting towering bamboo trees. A man in a suit is lying on the ground, in the jungle. He's disoriented. He looks around, and sees a Labrador walk past. He gets up, wincing, and is almost puzzled to find a small bottle of liquor in his pocket. We are introduced to a mystery. Who is this guy? Is he some kind of businessman? Where is he? Why does he have booze in his pocket?
But there's no time to ponder our questions. The man in a suit rushes through the dense brush, past a tennis shoe hanging from the bamboo, and finds a beach. The camera pans around, and we hear a woman screaming. The man in the suit follows the screams, and he comes across a horrific scene. The debris of a plane crash litters the beach. People are running, screaming through the smoke; others stumble around, dazed and confused. The man in the suit surveys the scene.
He hears another man screaming for help, stuck under a large hunk of metal. The man in a suit can't remove it, and immediately enlists a couple more men to help. Together, they lift the wreckage and pull the injured fellow out. The injured man has a huge gash in his leg. The man in the suit immediately takes off his tie, and applies a tourniquet to the mangled limb.
The man in a suit hears another cry. He sees a pregnant woman kneeling in the sand. He rushes over and asks how long she's been pregnant. It's been 8 months, and she thinks she's having contractions. The man in a suit tells her to calm down, and then notices someone else giving CPR to a woman in a rose shirt just yards away. The man in a suit is concerned; he gets the nearest person, a large heavyset man, to help the pregnant woman away from the fumes. The heavy man is dismayed, but has the presence to ask: "Who are you?" The man in the suit responds, "Jack."
Jack goes over to the black woman who's receiving CPR. He says that the other fellow is doing it wrong, breathing air into her stomach instead of into her lungs. Jack takes over (he's a doctor, not a businessman) while the other guy goes off in search of pens in case they need to aerate the woman's throat. Jack successfully gets the black woman to start breathing.
Now Jack hears a loud, metallic noise. He looks up, and sees that the remaining wing on the fuselage of the plane wreck is about to crash down, right on top of the pregnant woman and the fat man. He races over, pulling them to safety as seconds later the wing collapses in a fiery explosion.
Finally, the pace slows. We see the credits appear, quiet music drifts through the smoldering bits and pieces of airplane, and the survivors begin to take stock of their situation. So begins the epic of Lost. Like the group of passengers stranded on the beach, we have almost no idea as to what's going on. We only know the name of one person, Jack, the man who's just saved the lives of at least three people. We know a plane has crashed on a beach. We are immediately presented with mysteries and answers, but the unfolding of the secrets of this place has only just begun.
Rarely do we get twenty uninterrupted minutes of drama on TV, filled with mystery and action. Lost is a rare show, a show that enjoys breaking conventions. In this, the pilot episode, information is doled out slowly. We won't learn the names of all of our main characters for several more episodes. We won't learn what's really happened and why for a much longer period of time. But surely, we will discover who these people are and what this place is.
Unlike Jack, not everyone is so ready to adapt to their new surroundings. Kate, the young woman Jack convinces to stitch him up, appears quite queasy seeing Jack's wounds. When we first see her, she's rubbing her wrists and wandering in a daze. Jack again exercises leadership and maybe even some bedside manner, talking down her fearful instinct to run.
Kate: I might throw up on you.
Jack: You're doing fine.
Kate: You don't seem afraid at all. I don't understand that.
Jack: Well, fear's sort of an odd thing. When I was in residency my first solo procedure was a spinal surgery on a 16 year old kid, a girl. And at the end, after 13 hours, I was closing her up and I, I accidentally ripped her dural sac, shredded the base of the spine where all the nerves come together, membrane as thin as tissue. And so it ripped open and the nerves just spilled out of her like angel hair pasta, spinal fluid flowing out of her and I... and the terror was just so crazy. So real. And I knew I had to deal with it. So I just made a choice. I'd let the fear in, let it take over, let it do its thing, but only for 5 seconds, that's all I was going to give it. So I started to count, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Then it was gone. I went back to work, sewed her up and she was fine.
Kate: If that had been me, I think I would have run for the door.
Jack: No, I don't think that's true. You're not running now.
Meanwhile, the survivors take stock of their situation and begin to carve out their roles. The heavy man gathers the dinner trays from the airplane wreckage. A black man finds his son, Walt. A Korean couple huddles alone, cut off from the others as they are cut off from the English language. A redneck loner smokes a cigarette in solitude. The black woman fingers a wedding ring. A couple of other men, Charlie and Sayid, build a fire big enough for rescuers to see. Other people wander the beach, alone. Darkness falls, people gather around fires. Throughout all this, from the exciting adventures at the start on the beach, to the slow gatherings of people, we've been presented a style of realism. The wreckage looks real, the injuries look real, the heroism and fear we've seen have been portrayed realistically. So it comes as a great surprise when we start hearing some very unreal sounds. The unexpected has arrived.
We hear a crash out in the jungle. Jack and Kate look up. We hear a clang, and a sort of bubbling noise. More people get up. We hear more clangs and crashes, and then we see some trees fall in the jungle. The rest of the camp takes notice. "That was weird, right?" says Charlie, while the black boy wonders if it's "Vincent" - his father is pretty sure it isn't Vincent. Another tree falls. The pregnant woman asks, "Did anybody see that?" The fat man says "Yeah." We hear a slow ratcheting sound, and then a loud screech that sounds like a cross between a horn and a whistle. Everyone gets to their feet, the sounds continue, more trees fall, and then whatever it is seems to go away. "Terrific," says Charlie.
We never see what made the noises or what caused the trees to fall. This is a classic technique from the horror genre. It helps to build fear and suspense when we can't see what it is that we're supposed to be afraid of. Ignorance builds fear. And in this moment, our expectations about this show change irrevocably, as do the expectations of the survivors on the beach. We've already been clued in by Jack's talk with Kate while she's stitching him up: This is most definitely a show about fear.
But Lost is a show with many themes, and it crosses many genres. It is a show about heroes and leadership, science and faith, good and evil, choice and destiny, fear and mystery and estrangement. It is drama, action, horror, disaster, and epic mythology. And like all good fiction, science or otherwise, Lost provides commentary on the issues affected our real-world lives, without directly addressing them.
Of course, the event that has defined our cultural landscape for the past several years was 9/11. On that fateful day, a number of Arab and Persian men hijacked four airplanes and crashed them into U.S. buildings. Since then, we haven't been the same. That event signaled that we are not a part of the world we once knew. We have enemies who are not clearly defined by geography or nation. Our own government is as shady as they come. Paranoia and estrangement and fear are part of the national ethos these days. Lost is a show about a crashed airplane, with an unknown enemy or entity stalking the survivors, who are all strangers to each other and from many different backgrounds. I don't think it's a coincidence that one of the men is Iraqi. While the show isn't directly allegorical, it definitely feeds off of events in the real world.
After the intial break, the next scene establishes a convention that occurs throughout the series. We are given a flashback to an earlier time, before the crash. In this scene we see Jack sitting on the plane, chatting up the stewardess and pocketing the small bottle of vodka. This short flashback serves many functions. First, it answers a mystery from the opening scene: How did Jack end up with a bottle of alcohol in his coat? We see quite clearly that he pocketed it from the stewardess, Cindy. We also see a tidbit of Jack's character. He's definitely using his flirtatious charm to get an extra bottle, and the stewardess is more than happy to respond. Jack gets up from seat 23A as if to go to the bathroom, but he's knocked back by a fellow barreling down the aisle. Jack takes a new seat as the plane hits turbulence. He's right next to the black woman he administered CPR to, and they chit chat briefly. And then all hell breaks loose on the plane.
Back on the beach, the camera pans across Jack's face as he scans the peaceful horizon. If you listen closely, you can hear the blurry characters in the background talking about the amazing event of the previous evening:
Charlie: It didn't sound like an animal, not exactly.
Rose: That sound that it made, I keep thinking that there was something really familiar about it.
Survivor: Really? Where are you from?
Rose: The Bronx.
Charlie: Might be monkeys. It's monkeys.
Hurley: Technically, you know, we don't even know if we're on...
Other survivors are more focused on facilitating outside rescue, and Jack is one of them. He decides to head out into the valley in search of the cockpit and the black box, following Kate's observation that there was smoke further inland. Kate appears to follow Jack just to be with him, while Charlie's motivation to join this trek seems more opaque. Charlie is an impish man. Earlier we saw him writing letters on the tape he's put around his fingers. Now he's engaging in some light banter with Kate. Have they met before? No, Charlie's actually the bass player for a band called Driveshaft. The march on.
The moment of levity soon passes. Eerily, unexpectedly and immediately, it starts raining. Gloom permeates the air as the trio find the cockpit of the plane. It's dark and spooky, even more so with the horrific images of dead bodies strewn about the front end of the aircraft. Surprisingly, the pilot of the aircraft is alive, but hope is short lived. The pilot informs Jack and Kate that they are off course. They'd lost communication between Australia and Los Angeles, and started to head towards Fiji. By the time they crashed, they were already a thousand miles off course. Whatever rescue attempt has been mounted to find the missing flight is looking in the wrong place. And suddenly Charlie is missing.
Thankfully, he emerges from the bathroom, obviously relieved. The relief is short lived, though. We hear the awful sounds from the previous night, the sounds that accompanied trees being uprooted. We see shadows, and then suddenly the pilot is yanked from the cockpit. The whole assembly is knocked to the ground of the jungle. Our survivors run for their lives. Again, neither the audience nor the characters see what's after them. At least this time we got some foreshadowing of this from the people on the beach huddling in the rain.
Charlie falls down into the mud, his foot entangled in bramble. Jack rushes back for him, while Kate plows ahead. She makes her way into a grove of banyan trees. "Jack!" Kate yells, but she hears no response. It's quiet again, except for a periodic thumping noise that shakes the ground. Kate remembers Jack's story from yesterday, and counts to five out loud. It's raining. She hears animals in the mist, and steps back out... right into Charlie. Charlie recounts his tale - Jack sent back for him, got him back up, then they were running again, and now he doesn't know where Jack is. It stops raining, as suddenly as it started. Kate insists on going back for Jack, but Charlie resists, even though Jack just saved him.
Kate goes for Jack, and Charlie follows. The wander through the wet jungle, and Kate finds a small pin, with wings on it. In a great shot, we see a reflection in the pool of water on the ground. There's a body in the tree. It's the pilot. But Jack is okay - he dived into some bushes. Charlie points to the bloody pilot, and asks: "How does something like that happen?"
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Oceanic Airlines is a fictional airline which has coincidentally appeared in other movies and television programs.
Code 11-14: In this movie, an FBI agent searches for a killer aboard Oceanic Airlines flight 816 bound for Los Angeles from Sydney.
Executive Decision: In this movie, Oceanic Flight 343 from Athens to Washington, DC was hijacked by terrorists.
Nowhere to Land: Oceanic Flight 762, also from Sydney to Los Angeles. Nerve gas onboard.
Alias: Oceanic's flight to Sydney is briefly mentioned in this TV show in an announcement at LAX, when the show's main character Sydney Bristow is there. Alias and Lost were both created by J.J. Abrams.
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(Date Posted:06/01/2007 16:11:34)
Looking at this episode again, it amazes me how just about every single scene has a payoff. Like, I never noticed before how Kate asks Charlie if they've ever met. What a set up, considering all the connections that actually have been drawn between all our different characters! And yet, I don't think we've ever seen a Charlie/Kate connection drawn. In the end, it seems more improbable that they *haven't* met before. I was really expecting to see Kate in one of Charlie's flashbacks in Greatest Hits.
Let's see... the liquor bottle pays off in the first flashback on the plane, as well as throughout the series as we learn of Christian's alcoholism and later Jack's. Vincent continues to pay off, every scene of his is just cool.
The tennis shoe... I still haven't figured that one out yet. Except that Christian seems to be wearing tennis shoes in Jack's visions in White Rabbit. And Charlie losing his shoe in Greatest Hits.
What about Jack in a suit? In White Rabbit, his father is in a suit. And how ironic that I thought that Jack was a businessman, and then he takes over CPR from Boone, who actually is a businessman. The whole Boone business is priceless, by the way. He is so incompetent. He was doomed to die. And what a name!
Claire's pregnancy pays off big time. And without being sappy. Instead it's dark and grim, with fertility being a driving theme throughout the show. Aaron seems very important. Claire's childbirth in the jungle is twinned much later by Ben's birth in the woods outside Portland.
Hurley holding his watch all covered in sand. Sands of time. Watches are a part of Lost, and Time has become a central theme.
Smoke monster. Awful din. 'Nuff said.
Kate rubbing her wrists pays off in the next episode, when we discover that she was the one wearing the handcuffs. Those handcuffs end up on Jin for an entire season.
Jack counting to five, twinned by Kate at the end counting to five. Kate is connected to running from the get go.
Rose playing with her wedding ring. Pays off with Bernard's return.
I love the shot which focuses on Jack's face while the survivors discuss the smoke monster in the background. Sounds like the Bronx, huh?
Cindy the stewardess, eventually taken by The Others. Wonderful.
Charlie and the bathroom, getting his drugs. Pays off in the next episode. The theme is revisited with Paulo stashing diamonds in the loo of The Pearl, and Hurley hiding Naomi. Sawyer is going off to pee when he's lured by Locke to The Brig.
The Pilot is killed and ends up in a tree. What a wonderful mystery.
I love those Banyan trees.
Actually, aside from Jack's opening eye, how much in this episode is really symbolic? It's not like Tabula Rasa, with philosophical references and multiple meanings. It's not White Rabbit, and its introduction of Watership Down. What other symbolism am I missing here?
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(Date Posted:06/01/2007 21:34:32)
I think Oceanic was also in the movie Con-Air, or whatever it's called. I haven't seen it but caught just a bit one time while hubby was watching and noticed Oceanic right away.
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(Date Posted:06/02/2007 00:13:50)
The opening eye (the right eye in particular) is a symbol of the rising sun, of Horus or Ra. Horus is an ancient Egyptian sky-god who has been around so long that he has evolved dramatically throught the ages. As a sky god, sun of Osiris and Isis, he was represented by a peregrine falcon. He evolved into a sun god, and merged with Ra. Eventually he became brother of Osiris, and still later Osiris himself resurrected. (The left eye is associated with the Moon and the god Thoth.) So the Right Eye is the Divine Masculine, and the Left Eye the Divine Feminine?
The Egyptian hieroglyph of the eye, in addition to indicating Horus, is also used as a common verb - "to do", "to make" or "to perform." Certainly after Jack opens his eye, he's in action, performing all kinds of acts to save some complete strangers.
The opening eye also may symbolize omniscience. In this sense it may be a nod to the narrative structures employed in television. The camera becomes our eye, presenting a story to us in the third-person omniscient voice.
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(Date Posted:06/02/2007 22:55:43)
Ooh, and then there's the fact that this is a man who *fell from the sky*. The sky god who fell to earth? The rising sun, the setting sun... the rising son, the fallen son.
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(Date Posted:06/04/2007 15:36:31)
Hmmm...
I don't know yet!
See, here's the thing. This is so funny. I'm wanting to get my Dad hooked on Lost. He and my mom have seen an episode or two, but it didn't take. Which really surprised me, about my Dad, that is, because he's a writer who also teaches creative writing, and he's got an appreciation for science fiction and literature and all that. Kurt Vonnegut was possibly the first author he introduced me to, to give you an idea. It was "The Sirens of Titan."
Well, I thought, given his background and predilections, maybe he needs a little bit of a nudge, a, shall we say, compelling opportunity to really appreciate Lost, and maybe that nudge might come in the form of a series of essays from his eldest daughter elucidating some of the hidden points contained within this marvelous series. At the very least he'll appreciate getting some writing from me, even if the show doesn't take (but I think it will.)
So, really, I'm writing because of my daddy issues!
With that in mind, I've gotten through House of the Rising Sun, and I'm almost done with The Moth. (In the course of this process, I'm beginning to realize that the really neat references, allusions and symbolism take off in Tabula Rasa - the Pilot episodes seem straightforward and perfunctory in comparison to what follows...) And I'm wrestling with how much I want to share my stuff. I mean, on the one hand, I'm hoping to get some feedback on anything I might have missed, anything that I might want to include to share with him. On the other hand, I'm kind of sensitive to criticism, and maybe my writing isn't all that much and this is all a waste of time. Or maybe it should be more private, more just between him and me. So I don't know.
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(Date Posted:06/04/2007 16:31:10)
I'm also trying to read every literary reference that appears. In the last few weeks I've read James Hilton's Lost Horizon, Melville's Confidence-Man, Richard Adams' Watership Down, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (again), Green Lantern/Flash Faster Friends, and The Phantom Tollbooth (again). Oh, I've even dived into some Biblical Apocrypha. That was special.
Queued up for the summer: Aldous Huxley's Island, Walker Percy's Lancelot, Jame's Turn of the Screw, Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, Judy Blume's Margaret, Verne's Mysterious Island, Herge's Tintin: Flight 714, and of course Golding's Lord of the Flies. I've even got Bad Twin, for what it's worth, and I'll probably tackle Gilgamesh in the fall.
More ambitious projects would include the actual writings of Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Hobbes, Bakunin, Montaigne, Hawking, and Burke, not to mention Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamozov and all 15 of Baum's Oz tales.
I'm not planning to re-read Watchmen, Of Mice and Men, Heart of Darkness, The Pearl, Animal Farm, To Kill a Mockingbird, Owl Creek, or Wrinkle in Time.
I'm probably going hold off on Stephen King, Tale of Two Cities, The Odyssey, Finnegan's Wake, Odysseus, Foucalt, and Ayn Rand.
I am so very much glad we have a nine-month hiatus.
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(Date Posted:06/07/2007 00:59:35)
People keep complaining about the smoke monster. They want to know what it is! And every episode that passes by, somebody somewhere says, "Well, we didn't find out about the smoke monster. These writers are just stringing us along, making it up as they go."
I disagree. I think TPTB have known about the smoke monster all along, and I think they've planned all along to keep that Mystery a mystery until we get to the Series Finale, which we now know to be the end of Season 6. Some of that opinion is based on the podcasts and interviews with the Darlton; another clue (and really my true source of faith) comes from the text of the show itself. Which I should be getting to sometime in the next month or so.
I also disagree with the notion that it's just "scary and mysterious to entertain the audience." I think its invisible presence in the Pilot was vital to the development of the story as an epic mythology. Given the exquisite realism presented in those first twenty minutes, it's the primary if not the only indication that the Island is no ordinary place, but a Special World, a world of myth, a world in which the Hero's Journey can truly take place.
In that light, I think Smoky is sacred, and I will be very sad when that last Mystery is finally revealed. In fact, I kind of hope that it's secret is never revealed.
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(Date Posted:06/07/2007 13:12:08)
I agree, the story is well planned out. If you read my writing, you will see that I always have had faith that the writers are following a plan, and that has been born out by podcasts and the story as well. There are main plot points that are in a master outline that they have had since the beginning. It only makes sense in pitching a show like this to the network executives at ABC that they had a plan all along. Each individual episode is sort of "made up as they go along", but each mythology and major plot point must be adhered to, and nothing can be introduced in an episode that detracts or doesn't advance that concept.
Glad to see that there are other, like minded individuals, that watch this amazing story unfold - and it warms my heart knowing that there are viewers that "get it" and don't expect the answers to be delivered in an episodic instead of epic manner.
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(Date Posted:06/10/2007 17:00:38)
I've become obsessed with mirrors and twins, mirroring and twinning. I think mirrors and twins have been with the show from the beginning.
In Pilot 1, we open and close with shots of reflections. In the opening, we see Jack's opening eye, reflecting the sky and trees above. The episode comes to an end with Kate picking up the pilot's wings from the mud, and seeing a reflection in the pool of water on the ground, showing us an image of the sky and trees above, which hold the dead body of the pilot. Jack, who is not a pilot, was alive on the ground. The pilot, who is not Jack, is dead in the air. The dead pilot is "responsible" for the predicament - he's the one who turned the plane off-course. The living not-pilot (Jack) takes responsibility for the predicament, running on to the beach and saving people's lives. So not only do we have "mirrors" in the first episode, we have mirror-twinning.
The episode is structurally split in half, twinned and mirrored. First, the twinning.
The first half begins with Jack running to the beach, it is daylight out, and realism is at the forefront. The half ends at night, with an appearance (unseen) by "the monster", and a comment by Charlie ("Terrific.") The appearance of "the monster" inverts our expectations of realism.
The second half begins with Jack, on the plane, with realism... and then moves to the beach, and it's daylight, and we're seeing Jack's eyes looking out towards the horizon. The episode ends with "day turning into night", an appearance by "the monster" (unseen), and ends with a comment by Charlie - "Guys, how does something like that happen?"
Now for the structural mirroring. The first half begins with Jack talking about counting to five to face down Fear, the second half ends with Kate counting to five to face down Fear. The first half opens with the plane crashed on the ground, the second half opens with the plane in the air. In another mirror, the plane "crash" is featured at the beginning of the first half and at the end of the second half, with the cockpit crashing down off the trees. And of course, the first half begins with a "mirror shot" and the second half ends with a "mirror shot."
Smoke has also been in the show from the start. Kate tells Jack that she saw smoke in the valley, assuming it's from the cockpit. But there is no evidence that the cockpit was ever on fire.
