Saturday, January 14, 2023

Rewatching Lost: Pilot Part 2

 

 

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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