LOST: Welcome To The Island

So let's begin at the beginning, which in the world of LOST, is not the beginning at all. The "present day" of the show has never seen the survivors off the island (there has only been one sequence that takes place in the present time frame off the island, and it was at the end of Season 2). The opening shot is of Jack Sheppard's (Matthew Fox) eye opening up for the first time on the island. The eye opening shot would become a recurring establishing shot for episodes, with the given focus character's eye opening (the idea of the "focus character" will be explained soon). Jack opens his eyes and is initially perplexed about his surroundings, a dense and quiet jungle. He finds a small bottle of alcohol in his pocket and watches a dog walk by. It isn't until he walks onto the beach that he remembers what happened. The tranquility dissolves immediately and is replaced by absolute chaos. The middle section of the airplane Jack was on is now in flames on the beach, with malfunctioning engines and debris flying everywhere. Some of the other survivors are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, others are trying to help, while some aren't doing much of anything...

Fortunately, Jack is a doctor, and is used to working under pressure. He immediately takes charge, giving orders to the people who can walk to help them better assist those who can't. This behavior and grace under fire is what helps the other survivors see Jack as a leader, and while LOST is an ensemble show with over 10 regular characters (regular here means that the actors' names appear in the "Starring" billing, but no one has been in every episode of the series), Jack is definitely the de facto main character. The rest of the two-part pilot is about establishing who a few of the characters SEEM to be and showing both the audience and the survivors that this isn't a regular island.

The characters we meet in the pilot may or may not be accurate representations of who they were before they got off the island. The absolute best example of this is John Locke (Terry O'Quinn), but I will not discuss him because (1) we didn't learn about his secret until a few episodes after the pilot, and (2) the reveal is one of the greatest twists in television history, in my opinion. The revelation itself coupled with the way it was shot made for a perfect "HOLY SHIT" moment that I was sadly robbed of, since I didn't start watching the show until near the end of the first season (I saw what it was on the internet). Instead, I will bring up Kate (Evangeline Lilly). When we meet her, she seems like just another scared passenger. We watch her and Jack meet and start a friendship when he tells her that he needs help sewing up a wound he received in the crash. The travel together to the cockpit, along with an musician named Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), to try and send out a radio signal to rescue planes. She seems like just a normal woman. That is, until Jack starts treating a wounded passenger, who reveals himself to be a United States Marshal, who had apprehended Kate in Australia and was bringing her back to the states to await trial. A young boy named Walt (Malcolm David Kelly) found a pair of handcuffs in the jungle, and suddenly, the audience found out who they belonged to.

Of course, the show would kind of suck if all of these character revelations were told to us (breaking the rule of "show, don't tell), and it wouldn't really make sense for people to spill their darkest secrets to strangers (Kate's secret does get told to Jack, but that is after we see it). Instead, each episode contains flashbacks. With only a few exceptions, each episode focuses on one character. Over the course of the episode, we see a series of flashbacks from their life before they got to the island that coincides with what they are dealing with on the island. With Charlie, for example, we learn that he is a drug-addicted ex-rock star, and when he starts running out of heroin on the island, his flashbacks show how his addiction began. Over the course of the series, the flashback formula has been tweaked every now and then, giving us "on-island" flashbacks for instances when characters disappear for significant periods of time, an entire flashback episode detailing what happened to the tail end of the plane (it broke into three parts), and a few interesting new designs in Season 3.

Finally, there were some events that happened in the pilot that showed that this was no ordinary island. From a mysterious creature that made an ear-splitting roar that sounds like nothing ever heard before to an encounter with a polar bear (remember that this is the south Pacific), the survivors began wondering where they were. The pilot of the plane revealed that, due to inclement weather, the plane was over 1,000 miles off course when they lost radio contact with air traffic controllers. But perhaps the strangest, and most terrifying thing of all was a transmission the survivors pick up on a radio that is being broadcast from somewhere on the island. It is a French woman asking for help, saying that "it killed them all". And it has been playing for 16 years.

Up next: where might they be?