The original intent by the writers in the
first draft was for Jack to be killed at the cockpit and for Kate to step up
and take a greater role as leader. The head of ABC at the time convinced the
writers that this would cause the viewers not to trust the show and the writers
agreed with them.
As a rule, I tend not to like network’s
interference with the creators vision, but this was absolutely the right call
and would still be if the series had been made on cable or streaming now.
Selling the viewer on a pilot is tricky under any circumstances and I think
that trying to kill of someone you think is the lead is a bridge that most
audience will never cross. (I have a friend who watched the pilot of Big Sky
and was basically turned off the series – for a while – when Ryan Philippe,
who had been built up as the lead to that point, was killed in the last minute.
I have more tolerance for him to this twists of television, but even I admit
that was almost a bridge too far for me.)
That said, you fundamentally see where
the skeleton of that idea is in the second part of the pilot. Jack takes a
lesser role – the marshal is getting worse and he has to put on his doctor hat
again – so Kate takes on the part of leading with what happens with the
transceiver. She talks to Sayid about it, she leads the hike with him and for
much of the actual trek, everyone more or less defers to her.
With Jack dealing with the marshal, the
rest of the pilot does what many pilots have to do and starts filling in the
rest of the characters on the show. It does it the most directly with Charlie
and Kate (we see their flashbacks on the plane), but we’re basically starting
to fill in the blanks on most of them. We realize that Walt and Michael may be
related by blood but they’re basically strangers even before Walt tells Locke
the details. Shannon, who basically seemed shallow in the first part, comes
across looking even worse and more petty, but its also clear that Boone and she
almost naturally bring out the worst in each other and it clearly has to do
with more than the trauma. Sawyer finally opens his mouth (and we do learn his
name, in my initial rewatch I didn’t think we learned it until much later in
the series) and as you might expect, it’s to start a fight. That he chooses
Sayid is hardly surprising given the world of post 9-11. Sayid seems to start
out being the most honest of all the survivors – asked where he learned his
military training, he says the Republican Guard which causes Hurley to
initially pull away from him (in Hurley’s defense in 2004, we’d basically been
brainwashed to hate anyone who said they were from Iraq). We still don’t
understand a word Sun or Jin is saying, but that doesn’t stop their characters
from developing Jin clearly may be more equipped to survive on this island than
anyone we’ve seen right now and Sun seems to be both hiding and quietly defiant
at the same time. Claire seems basically more open and warm, and almost from
the start seems to be one of the few characters who will wear her feelings on
her sleeve.
And of course, Locke finally speaks. It’s
telling that his first conversation is with Walt, who is the youngest and
therefore the least inclined to deal with boundaries. Locke never talks down to
him, never shows pity in the way most of us clumsily do, and then invokes
another phrase that goes down in the series’ lore. ‘Two players, two sides. One
is light, one is dark,” followed by: “Do you want to know a secret?” In
hindsight, this line is an ironic joke: on this island, everything and
everybody is full of secrets but no one seems inclined to share or even want to
know what they are.
The key set piece in this episode is the
extended trek to the hills to try and get the transceiver to work. The opening
is magnificent and is one of the first clear demonstrations of how Michael
Giacchino will begin using his musical gifts to their full extent: there’s no
way that scene, despite the brilliant of the imagery works without his
orchestration.
Then there is the sound of the creature
through the jungle, which shows everybody – except Sawyer – running away from
it, pulling out his gun and shooting the bear. Oh, and it’s a polar bear.
Sawyer then reveals the other major secret that’s been confirmed by now – there
was a marshal on the plane, and he had a prisoner. It’s never been confirmed
that Sawyer knew that Kate was the marshal’s prisoner, but I have a feeling he
did – there’s something in the way he looks her after she takes the gun from
him and he says, “I know girls like you,” that just makes me so sure he knew right
of.
It says a lot that even after we learn
the truth about Kate, our sympathies are still with her. It’s not so much as to
how the marshal treats her, it’s that even after he’s knocked unconscious and
she manages to unlock herself from her cuffs, she still puts the oxygen
mask on him and adjusts it even as the roof of the plane is coming off. That
may be one of the first real secrets we learn about Kate; she has compassion
even for those who have betrayed her.
Then of course, there is the final sequence.
I don’t know if there’s much left to say about what we learn, so let’s
concentrate on everyone’s reactions. Sayid shows joy when he sees the bar, and
we won’t that look or tone very often for the entire remainder of the series. There’s
jubilation in Charlie’s voice: “I’ve never been so happy to hear the French!”
Boone crediting Shannon with the ability to speak French (naturally she ignores
it) and Boone trying to press her. And then, there’s the way the joy goes out
of everybody’s tone. First Sayid realizes it’s on a loop and then he goes numb
when he realizes that it’s been going on for sixteen years. Shannon becomes
increasingly dismayed as the message goes on, and you can see in her eyes she
wishes she didn’t know French. Boone is so gutted by what he hears that he
thanks Shannon, something he’ll never do under normal circumstances. Kate is
trying desperately to cling to hope. Sawyer has gone to a tone that is utterly
lost as he realizes how hopeless things are. Ironically, Charlie’s now iconic remark
is the only one that has even the slightest sense of wonder at what’s he heard,
and now we realize it’s because he truly wonders just how screwed they all
truly are.
There’s less to say about watching it on
videotape on the second episode than the first (although it is intriguing to
look at what is essentially a full trailer for Desperate Housewives as
well as Boston Legal.) But the trailer episode is also very fulfilling.
Like almost every ad for a network show in its early run, it wants to give the
appearance that you’re seeing more of the future than you are: we think we’re
seeing several episode ahead, in actuality the footage is only from the first
two. But the series is fundamentally laying the groundwork for many of the
storylines that will form the basis for Season 1. We see Jack’s initial
distrust for Kate after learning the truth, and as we all know by now that
doesn’t go away until well after the first season. We see Jack telling Kate we
all died three days ago and we deserve a fresh start, and we now know that
basically a lie in terms of both how Jack sees Kate and how many of the
characters see themselves. We see them running out of food, which happens two episodes
down the line, we see Locke taking charge of the hunt and showing us his
suitcase of knives. We see Rose telling Jack she’s sure her husband’s still
alive, and though this won’t pay off until Season 2, we now know she’s telling
the truth. We see Jack standing up and staring into the distance, which we know
is extremely critical to the next few episode and what drives him for most of
the series. And that after a series of questions that start with who (including
‘Who dies?” which is going to become very critical to the series) the last
question is “Who knows?” In the case of so much of Lost, the viewer
ended up giving that as an answer to the hopeless questions so many times for
much of the series.
Perhaps most importantly, one of the last
things ABC tells us is that Lost is the most watched show of the new
season (nearly nineteen million of us watched the first episode). It’s because
of this stat, more than other reason, that we got to love every frustrating
minute of what was to come.
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