LOST Season 1, Episode 2 “Pilot (Part 2)”
Written by Jeffrey Lieber (story) and J.J. Abrams & Damon Lindelof (story and teleplay)
Directed by J.J. Abrams
Aired September 29, 2004 on ABC
After its focused, incredibly effective first hour, LOST‘s second episode is much more representative episode of the series to follow, blowing out the tense, limited scope of “Pilot (Part 2)” into its fully-realized, maximalist vision of character tensions, big ideas, evocative imagery – and of course, a verifiable shit ton of mysteries, amplifying the human drama and ending TV’s biggest, most ambitious two-hour pilot with a tense, iconic cliffhanger for the ages.
“Pilot (Part 2)” begins with a flashback to musician Charlie’s final minutes on the Oceanic Airlines plane; as we saw during Jack’s flashback, Charlie was clearly up to no good – and it’s here where we discover the first real internal character tension of the series (though we meet Jack and Kate in the pilot, there’s nothing mentioned about their backstories), which then follows suit through every other incidental scene of the episode. Unsurprisingly, Charlie’s a drug addict; turns out his trip to find the plane’s hull was not out of benevolence, but to find the bag of heroin he dropped there in the flight’s final airborne moments.
Though the first two hours certainly set up Charlie as a comedic salve to relieve tension, “Pilot (Part 2)” builds a stark dichotomy of the laughing jokester making friends amongst the wreckage, with the sneaky, self-serving addict getting stoned in secret. That dissonance forms the basis of the entire episode, which presents its conflicts in two distinct, occasionally overlapping categories; incredibly personal reveals like Charlie’s addiction or Kate being the one under the US Marshal’s arrest, or larger, familial conflicts like the aforementioned couple, Walt and his father, or the now-tanned Shannon and “God’s gift to humanity” Boone.
All are incredibly effective at teasing out strands of character; beginning with the wife’s passivity and silence – which, for first-time viewers, seems to neatly fit the character tropes of Eastern couple representation in media of the era (of course, there’s much more going on under the surface, some of which even LOST itself couldn’t have known yet). They aren’t the only ethnic trope LOST challenges its characters and audiences with; as the yappy redneck notes to Sayid during one of his numerous rants tinged with post-9/11 racism, “we’ve all got a role to play” – and though some of those are still yet to be revealed, “Pilot (Part 2)” is rich with moments in establishing the genesis of arcs for so many characters.
Some of these get a little more depth than others, of course – the quiet woman watching Kate standing in the ocean in her underwear is a bit eye-rolling in how thinly it portrays Western vs. Eastern women, especially compared to more developed exchanges, like Hurley and Sayid’s burgeoning friendship and the wrench thrown into it when Hurley learns Sayid fought against the United States in the Gulf War. But all of them are in observance of a single fact; first impressions, in fact, are just impressions – it takes true engagement, not the shouting assumptions of an idiot, to really understand a person and what they’re going through. LOST already knows the answers to this for each of its characters; those tracks are laid so carefully in these smaller moments, some only exist as a glance of the eye (in the case of Sun) or a carefully framed image, like the bald guy holding the black and white backgammon pieces on either side of his head.
“Pilot (Part 2)” eventually begins to pull these disparate threads together – which include Boone calling his sister useless, and Jack preparing to do surgery on the dude with a big piece of shrapnel in his side – and it’s there where one can feel the series start to find a rhythm, streamlining its narratives by isolating groups of characters together, and funneling the show’s deeper ambitions through them both. While Jack and Hurley prepare for surgery, Sayid leads a small group of survivors – Kate, Charlie, the still-unnamed Sawyer, and the siblings – into the woods, in the hopes of getting signal from their recently-repaired transceiver.
Watching the third act of “Pilot (Part 2)” is watching writers as composers, as it begins to weave its characters and the mysteries enveloping them into one, beginning with the handcuffs Walt found in the woods while searching for Vincent (the dog Jack saw in the show’s first scene). LOST uses those handcuffs to play with audience expectations, slowly revealing that neither Sayid or Sawyer – who brandishes a US Marshal’s gun – is the criminal, which gives way to the episode’s second flashback, where we learn the origin of Kate and the US Marshal, the man Jack’s currently removing a large bit of shrapnel from.
In a matter of minutes, LOST shifts from smaller character dynamics like Shannon trying to be “useful” and the light metaphorical musings of backgammon’s history (“Their dice were made with bones”, the bald man tells Walt), into much larger, dramatic story beats, all of which work wonders as effective hooks to capture an audience’s attention. As the group ascends the mountain, they are nearly attacked by a polar bear (the same animal we saw in Walt’s comic book earlier in the episode), a flashback reveals the Oceanic plane breaking in half (… and we’ve already seen the plane’s cockpit) and Kate’s mysterious arrest while she brokers a peace between Sayid and the annoying redneck (giving the former the gun’s magazine, in an obviously misguided attempt to bring ‘balance’ to their conflict) – all of which, of course, are but appetizers for the main course of “Pilot (Part 2)”, and the discovery of the distress signal playing on the island.
The final scene of “Pilot (Part 2)” is one of the best of the whole first season, as the group discover a message playing over and over in French. As Charlie celebrates (“I’ve never been so excited that the French are coming!”), Shannon finally finds purpose in her life and translates the message as it repeats for the 729,435th time and discovers a terrifying truth – someone else made it to the island 16 years ago, and set up an emergency message that was never stopped… and possibly never answered.
How the final scene escalates is phenomenal television; as the group climbs, so does the dramatic escalation. As Sayid realizes they have a bar of signal and a little bit of battery left, a gamut of emotions runs over the group; Sawyer’s impatience, Shannon’s lack of confidence, and Charlie’s existential indifference are all used as accelerators for the translation and dissemination of the broadcast message (which… that robot “iteration” voice still creeps me the hell out), which ends with Charlie announcing the show’s central mystery to the audience:
“Guys… where are we?”
It’s a perfect closing note to the show’s two-hour pilot, which lays out a still-impressive and ambitious set of character stories, narrative motivations, and attention-grabbing mysteries – like what was Kate about to say to the marshal? – in almost effortless fashion. It’s a storytelling approach that feels almost antithetical to the current dramatic television model, where shows spend entire episodes are spent on drawn-out character beats (and the now-trope-y flashback episode, an evolution of LOST‘s concept of intertwining flashbacks into its formula), or take the opposite approach, packing plot into every conversation until the audience is drowning in weightless easter eggs, conflicts, and carrot-on-a-stick reveals (the La Brea approach… or The Event… or FlashForward – you get the point).
LOST was certainly a series that would fall victim to both over its run; however, it remains one of the gold standards of serialized storytelling, elements of its construction still present in so many television series today. “Pilot (Part 2)” is obviously not the apex of LOST‘s versatility with these core elements, but it’s a pretty great start, the rare second hour not afraid to step forward into the unknown – and the even rarer series doing it with confidence,
Other thoughts/observations:
- When I think of board games and television, I think of two modern scenes that really work as eye opening moments for both series; Locke’s backgammon explanation, and D’Angelo’s breakdown of chess in The Wire‘s first season.
- It’s interesting how little Locke and Sawyer feature in these opening episodes; they’re not even named characters in the first two hours of the series, joining Jin and Sun as the most prominent, nameless faces on the island at the moment.
- LOST‘s penchant for broken families is already apparent; Jin/Sun’s clearly strained marriage, Boone and Shannon’s complicated, toxic dynamic, and Walt/Michael (who is also still unnamed by the end of the pilot!).
- Dangerous climbing montage!
- If Locke’s use of the backgammon pieces wasn’t obvious, the framing of the black piece next to his scarred eye certainly makes an evocative portrayal of man’s duality.
- There’s brief drama where Claire can’t feel her baby’s kick… until she eats the raw fish Jin caught, where she feels a kick and decides (with her motherly intuition, of course) she’s having a boy.
- the chain smoking whiny boy is seen reading a hand-written letter at one point… I’m sure that’s not a nod towards anything.
- gotta love some early 2000s camera lingering on Kate’s exposed body. Also, Evangeline Lily is ripped, which gives Kate a bit of unexpected physicality (when it isn’t being played for titillation).
- Shannon crying over being mean to the flight attendant is hilariously selifsh, and a great example of her misplaced, immature emotions.
- Walt notes he lives with his mother and Vincent in Australia – or at least, did until she died a few weeks ago.
- Locke’s response to hearing Walt’s story? “Well, you’re having a bad month.”
- “Two players, two sides. One is light, one is dark.”
- I still laugh when Hurley keels over mid-surgery; no matter how many times I see this episode, it will always work for me.
- Sawyer ‘assesses’ Kate: “I know your type, I’ve been with girls like you.”
- Hurley laughs off Jin’s attempts to feed him: “Dude, I’m starving… but I am nowhere near that hungry.”
- Sawyer’s first nickname is born, when he calls Jack “doc”. He also has a derogatory name for Hurley, but that is booed by just about everyone in his presence when it’s uttered.
- Up next: The island offers Kate a proposition in “Tabula Rasa”.