Lost: Pilot

I hear that Season 6 of Lost is going to circle back to a lot of stuff that happened in Season 1. To prepare for this, therefore, I plan to watch some (all?) of those episodes before the premiere on Tuesday night. And I saw that Arlene just started watching all five seasons from scratch and plans to blog her thoughts about it. So I figure, why not provide you with my extremely inane observations about Season 1 as I rewatch it? Without further ado, here are my thoughts about the pilot episode. Note: spoilers abound, although I sorta tried to keep them vague–still, if you haven’t seen all episodes yet, you probably don’t want to read this:

1. That opening shot of Jack’s eye opening, with the iris contracting, really is iconic and awesome. You can see why so many people believe the series will end on a very similar shot. Personally, I think the last scene will reveal that they’re all robots sent back in time to assassinate the leader of the future resistance: that polar bear.
2. Boy, they may have overdone it with Shannon. She is the least nuanced of the character types introduced–a dumb, whiny rich girl. It’s been so long now that I don’t even recall the details of her character arc, although I just remembered who she ends up getting together with and find it fascinating how quickly he stopped mentioning her in later seasons. Oh, spoiler alert, at some point in the first few seasons Shannon dies.
3. Hurley is pretty well defined right from the start, except that they didn’t quite realize how dense he was at first. When Sayid said he had been in the Republican Guard Hurley really should have replied, “like, from Texas?”
4. I forgot about this, but when Kate is stitching Jack up he tells her about his first surgery; that surgery is the same one we saw in the Season 5 finale. But in the pilot, Jack doesn’t mention a) that it was his dad who made him count to 5; or b) that right afterwards he met Jacob. Of course, he didn’t know about b) when he told the story so I guess I’ll forgive them for that.
5. Ah, Charlie. We miss you, you goofy British drug addict.
6. First lines spoken by Locke are in a conversation with Walt in which he describes a game he found. “Backgammon is the oldest game in the world… older than Jesus Christ… Two players, two sides; one is light, one is dark.” I’m just saying, we might have been exposed to a bit of Extreme Foreshadowing there.
7. The Jin/Sun story is really set up wonderfully. It’s amazing how much both characters (and their relationship) have changed since then.
8. Remember when LaFleur shot a polar bear? That was pretty great.
9. It’s actually kind of surprising how much backstory we already get in the 2 hour premiere. We learn quite a bit about Jack of course, but we also learn that Charlie’s a smack addict/rock (semi-)star, Hurley is good-natured, Sayid was an Iraqi soldier and is good with electronics, Kate needs a man’s help to do anything (and was in a federal marshall’s custody on the plane), Sawyer is a jerk who just looks out for himself, Shannon & Boone are kinda dumb and obnoxious, Locke’s weird, Michael’s been a bad father and hardly knows Walt… Considering the pilot is actually really entertaining, this amount of exposition is kind of impressive. Of course, over the next 5 years a whole lot of those details were subverted, or just changed.

In other news, this was really fun to watch. It’s impressive how strong this show was right from the beginning–a lot of the stuff we have grown to love/hate/mock about Lost was present in the pilot (and, to get a little ahead of ourselves, in the first handful of episodes thereafter). I’m very much looking forward to the rest of this totally inane endeavor.