By Chris Ryall
July 1, 2004
So Pilot Season for me is like baseball season for BULL DURHAM’s Annie Savoy. Every year, I like to champion one worthy show and push it as much as I can. Last year it was ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, which worked out much better than my choice of PUSH, NEVADA. This season, even without having seen every new show yet, I can say that J.J. Abrams’ LOST is the best pilot I’ll watch all summer.
It has one bad thing going for it, in that it’s on ABC. You know, home to last season’s KAREN SISCO, another solid show that was bungled, pulled, promised to return and then cancelled. So any time a good show breaks from the norm, it worries me that the network won’t stand behind it. I have to hope ABC has a vested interest in keeping Abrams happy, although since ALIAS’s premiere next season has been pushed back a while, you never know.
Back to LOST. The pilot opens with Matthew Fox, a long way from PARTY OF FIVE, waking up on a tropical beach. He’s been in an accident, most likely a plane crash. In a few minutes, we see it was definitely a plane crash. Fox’s character, Jack, is a doctor, walks back onto the shore and sees a plane’s wreckage, bits of the fuselage and bodies alike strewn all over the beach. But there are some survivors, and as a doctor, he goes about seeing to the living.
He helps a pregnant woman in her third trimester. Some people are beyond his help, but he does what he can. Other survivors help. But then a man is sucked into the still spinning turbine. Another is impaled by shrapnel. Some of the plane’s fuselage collapses and explodes. The survivors barely make their way away from the wreckage and take stock of their situation.
Their situation is bleak—the front end of the plane is missing, and with it, the black box and transceiver, the only thing that can help rescuers pinpoint their location.
As the survivors get to know each other, some people rise to the occasion and others wilt, as is always the case in these types of situations. One woman, Kate, after helping sew up Jack’s gash, tells him she saw smoke on another area of the island, most likely from the cockpit. They strike out to search for the transponder, and another guy, the bass player in a somewhat popular band, tags along. Already we see that some of the survivors have something to hide.
As the other survivors build fires, they hear noises from the jungle. Noises like loud growls and roars, and off in the distance, they see some trees crashing down as though trampled.
Meanwhile, Jack and his search party locate the cockpit. They manage to crawl up into it—it landed at a vertical angle and the camera work showing their ascent into the plane is well done. There’s a real sense of claustrophobia as they make their way into the cockpit, past dead bodies and hanging oxygen masks. One of the pilots is alive, barely. He reports that the plane’s instruments went awry and when the bad turbulence that split the plane in half struck, they were a thousand miles off-course. Any potential search parties are looking in entirely the wrong areas.
They find the transceiver, but as they do, the pilot is ripped from the cockpit by…something. Something huge. We don’t quite see what.
Going back to the group, we get to know the characters a bit more. There’s a young black boy who’s with his estranged father. The son finds a pair of handcuffs in the jungle—someone’s an escaped criminal, but who? There’s also a brother and sister, one of whom is in denial about their predicament. A former Iraqi Republican guard who is in a combative situation with the group’s resident loudmouth. A repressed Asian couple. A heavy-set guy with Harry Knowles hair who could easily have been played for laughs, but isn’t.
The transceiver barely has any battery life left, and gets no signal from the beach. So the Iraqi guard and a few others light out for a cliff-top to try it there. On their way, they’re attacked by a large animal. The loudmouth guy pulls out a gun and shoots the animal dead. It’s then that they, and we, see that the animal is a large polar bear. On a tropical island.
Throughout, we see flashbacks to the plane ride, getting to see the characters before they ended up stranded on the island. We see who it was who was in the handcuffs, and see a complication for that person arise at the end of this episode. In fact, as much as this premise could feel limited, GILLIGAN’S ISLAND meets LAND OF THE LOST meets…KING KONG? (we never see the huge shape that killed the pilot…yet…), the pilot episode plants more than enough intriguing plot points to carry he show for some time.
The transceiver barely gets a signal, but as they’re trying to call out, they pick up a distress call in French, a looping signal that’s been playing for a while. Roughly…sixteen years. And there’s feedback caused by…something nearby.
The show ended and I was pissed. Pissed that I have to wait a lot longer than anyone who will see this show when it debuts in the fall to see what happens next. I also felt relieved because…man, it’s so rare that any pilot makes me want to see more. Most have made me want to see less, but this one…it’s maybe the best thing I’ve seen on network TV in years. It’s tense, has good dialogue, good drama, good characters (the loudmouth could tone it down a little before he becomes a joke) and clever intrigue between the survivors. I really loved this show.
Seriously, I really loved this show. It’s pretty violent for an 8:00 show, in that the violence, the plane crash and maimed passengers, is very realistic for a network TV show. I just hope the time slot doesn’t necessitate subsequent episodes be watered down, because this one was pretty much note-perfect.
Every time I start to think I’m too hard on the majority of pilots I’ve seen, something like this comes along and reminds me that TV doesn’t have to suck. Episodic TV is capable of doing things that movies aren’t, when utilized properly. So I’m going to continue to take the bad shows to task, because shows like LOST really emphasize the potential of the medium. More, please.
ABC’s LOST airs this Fall on Wednesday nights at 8:00 PM.
Next Week: ABC's LIFE AS WE KNOW IT
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