Television’s Greatest Pilots: Lost

Doctor Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) awakens in a jungle, disoriented and injured, he follows a yellow labrador retriever to a beach and sees the devastating wreckage of the plane he was on: Oceanic Flight 815 traveling from Sydney to Los Angeles. After a few seconds of panic, he jumps into action and begins helping the other survivors, saving several people’s lives including the eight months pregnant Claire Littleton (Emilie de Ravin), Hurley Reyes (Jorge Garcia) and Rose Nadler (L. Scott Caldwell).  After the initial danger has passed Jack finds a quiet place to try to tend to his own laceration but can’t reach it and asks Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly) to assist.  Hurley begins gathering food and distributing it and Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews) organizes a clean-up group.  Boon Carlyle (Ian Somerhalder) God’s Friggin’ Gift To Humanity. attempts to get his stepsister Shannon Rutherford (Maggie Grace) to help, but she is convinced that a rescue party is coming and there is no need.  Michael Dawson (Harold Perrineau) is trying to keep his son Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) safe and console him at the thought of having lost their dog, a yellow labrador retriever.  As night settles in, a strange roaring noise is heard, and the castaways can see palm trees further inland sway and move as if something giant is moving amongst them.

The next morning Kate, Jack and Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) head into the jungle to find the front section of the plane to get the radio transceiver to call for help.  They learn that their plane was 1000s of miles off course when it crashed, and no one will know where to look for them.  They get the radio but are then attacked by the unseen giant creature they heard the night before. When they reach the beach, a pair of handcuffs found by Walt has started a fight between Sawyer (Josh Holloway) and Sayid after Sawyer racially profiles Sayid due to him being from the Middle East and calls him a terrorist and arouses suspicion that Sayid was the person originally in the handcuffs.  Jack and Kate split up the fight, and need Sayid to attempt to fix the radio, which he does, but they need to get to higher ground in order to get a signal out.  Jack is about to attempt to remove shrapnel from a wounded passenger so he cannot accompany the party about to venture into the jungle to find a spot with a signal. Kate and Sayid begin to prepare for their trek, when they are joined by Shannon, who is going only to spite her brother, Boone, God’s Friggin’ Gift To Humanity, joins in to protect his sister, Charlie, who is going to be close to Shannon, and Sawyer who is going to keep an eye on Sayid. Tensions are high within the group, but they soon learn that there is another radio already broadcasting which is blocking their signal and it is a distress call that has been running on a loop for 16 years.  Back on the beach, the man Jack is operating on turns out to be the U.S. Marshall and the owner of the handcuffs, but jack also learns who was wearing them when the plane crashed, and it wasn’t Sayid!  Intermixed with the present-day action, we also see flashbacks of different characters adding insight into each one including Charlie being a drug addict, who was in handcuffs and why Jack had a bottle of alcohol in his pocket.

Lost premiered on September 22, 2004, with the two-part pilot being appropriately titled “Pilot”.  Part two aired one week later on September 29^th.  Both parts were directed by co-writer and co-creator J.J. Abrams.  The concept of the show was originally thought of by ABC network president Lloyd Braun while on vacation in Hawaii and originally was going to be a series based on the Tom Hanks film Cast Away which had come out four years earlier.  He described the show as “parts Cast Away, Survivor, and Gilligan’s Island, with a Lord of the Flies element.” And although most found the idea laughable, Thom Sherman, senior vice-president, saw its potential. The original script for a show titled “Nowhere” was written by Jeffrey Lieber and it and its re-write was not acceptable to Braun who then contacted J.J. Abrams who was at first hesitant and agreed only if he could add a supernatural element and have a co-writer which ended up being Damon Lindelof.  The only edict handed down from Braun was the show’s title Lost must not be changed.  Abrams and Lindelof, created the series’ style, characters and bible that outlined the major mythological ideas and plot points for a series that would run for four to five seasons.  The co-creators did need to deceive the studio slightly by insuring them that the show’s episodes would be more episodic rather than serialized with each episode being self-contained, they knew from the beginning that this would not be the case but told this fib to get the series greenlit.  Due to arbitration with the Writers Guild of America, Lieber would later get himself co-creator credit, even though very few elements from the original script were used, there was enough similarity the Guild found it was warranted.

Reviews of the Pilot episodes were very positive with most critics praising the ensemble, story and writing. In 2005, J.J. Abrams would go on to win an Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Drama series for the pilot episode and the show itself took home several others including Outstanding Drama Series, Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Drama Series, Outstanding Music Composition for a series (Dramatic Underscore), Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series, and Outstanding Casting for a Drama Series.  It was also nominated for several other Emmy awards.  Casting director April Webster won an Artios Award for her work in the pilot. Part one of the pilot also won two Golden Reel Awards for Best Sound Editing in Television Short Form: Sound Effects and Foley and Dialogue and ADR, and a VES Award for visual effects. The episode was nominated for a Hugo Award and awards from the American Society of Cinematographers, Art Directors Guild and Directors Guild of America.

Lost is often listed as one of the greatest series of all time and I must agree, and the pilot is a perfect example of why.  A series pilot’s job is to grab an audience and keep them engaged, leaving them wanting more but also giving them enough information, so they don’t feel lost (pun intended). This is a difficult thing to do, as there is a fine balance that must be achieved in finding the right amount of information without it feeling heavy or unnatural.  The dialogue needs to feel organic and not forced and the story needs to have a good pace and rhythm. As you can tell from the lengthy recap, which just barely hints at everything that was included in the Pilot episode, a lot happened in those first two hours, but it never felt long or tedious.  From start to finish, the action felt real and meaningful, there are moments of heart pounding excitement and fear mixed with quiet moments that allow initial character development and exploration and yet it never felt heavy handed or pretentious with the sound and music adding insight and guiding our emotional responses to the action on screen.

In addition to the technical elements, the direction and the writing casting is vital, every character, even those you are meant to dislike, must, at some level, connect with the audience and this cast immediately tackles this herculean task, which considering the size of the ensemble is amazing.  I also enjoy the fact that the pilot episode is called “Pilot”, which for a show about a plane crash has a dual meaning, this foreshadows the cleverness that the series contains.  I know there are a lot of people that don’t like how the show ended but I don’t think anyone can argue that the way it began was epic!