"Pilot: Part 2"

Lost - Season One
Aired: September 29, 2004
Starring: Naveen Andrews, Emilie de Ravin, Matthew Fox, Jorge Garcia, Maggie Grace, Josh Holloway, Malcolm David Kelley, Daniel Dae Kim, Yunjin Kim, Evangeline Lilly, Dominic Monhagan, Terry O'Quinn, Harold Perrineau, Ian Somerhalder
Written by Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof
Directed by J.J. Abrams

One consequence of dividing a 2-hour premiere into halves is the inevitable trimming of plot and character introduction.  If the first half can't engage the audience while at the same time providing a baseline for the events to follow, the ramifications can prove to be of a capsizing nature (refer to Joss Whedon's cult favorite Firefly, whose pilot episode wasn't even aired until well after the series had launched, and was one of a number of poor executive decisions that resulted in the series's untimely cancellation).  By dividing the pilot of Lost in two, ABC could have easily heralded the death knell for Abrams's latest project, and while I still maintain that this would have been more effective as a unified whole, the quality of the show's writing up to this point has averted this pitfall.

(To summarize the final couple acts of the previous episode, Jack Shephard, Kate Austen and Charlie Pace set off to find the plane's cockpit, which had landed in the middle of the waterlogged jungle.  There the three find the plane's transceiver and a barely-living pilot (played by Abrams regular Greg Grunberg), who is subsequently vacuumed out of the ruins presumably by whatever entity was responsible for the thunderous noises heard the previous night.  Charlie has some odd preoccupation with the plane's bathroom, a detail worthy of note.  With transceiver in hand, the three dash back to camp.)

Part 1 introduced us to a wide array of characters, most notably Shephard, the stouthearted if slightly nervous spinal surgeon from Los Angeles, and Austen, whose character is a little more fleshed out here.  In flashbacks it is revealed that she was a prisoner handcuffed to a US Marshal (Fredric Lane) for as-yet-unknown circumstances.  The Marshal fared less fortunately in the crash and has wound up on the beach with a sizable chunk of plane shrapnel in his stomach.  How this drama is going to unfold will likely be answered within the next stretch of episodes.  What is quite evident for the time being is how at ease Kate is with handling a gun (after Sawyer shoots and kills a wild polar bear) despite her claim that she's never used one. 

Speaking of which...there's a freaking polar bear!  As a group consisting of Kate, Sawyer, Charlie, Shannon Rutherford, Sayid Jarrah and Boone Carlyle branches off to find higher ground for the transceiver, they are attacked by none other than an Arctic bear who appears to be thirsting for more than just Coca-Cola.  As Shannon so cleverly notes, "Polar bears don't usually live in the jungle."

Of course the show can't maintain viewer interest without internal friction within the camp, and the wide racial palette of the cast allows for conflict.  Sayid, being an Iraqi, is perhaps the most obvious scapegoat, and Sawyer won't stop to grant him quarter.  When the Marshal's handcuffs turn up in the jungle, Sawyer turns the spotlight onto Sayid, and the results aren't so pretty.  While Sawyer's nicknames (especially "Al-Jazeera") strike a humorous tone, there is also something very unsettling in knowing that his chauvinistic inclination isn't too far removed from that of the American public.  By portraying Sayid as a comparatively more sagacious, rational character, he is also one that elicits sympathy, a rare and rather daring depiction of a Middle Eastern man.  Sawyer on the other hand is probably the least likable person on the island up to this point.  In addition, we get a few immediate pre-crash flashbacks of Charlie, who (surprise) had a stash of heroin stored in the lavatory, explaining his desire to accompany Jack and Kate to the missing third of the plane. 

This episode effectively maintains the momentum of Part 1, and gives us a more magnified view of several of the castaways.  One concern I would imagine may have been in the minds of some viewers is the extent of the season's budget that went into this monolith.  As mentioned in the previous review, the cost of building (and subsequently disassembling) and transporting the wreckage set was not cheap.  Had the producers invested too much funding into the pilot, the only logical result would have been resorting to bottleneck episodes for the remainder of the season, episodes that would have been filmed on relatively inexpensive sets and would have likely done little to advance the plot.  Fortunately, as someone who has already seen the entire series, I can put these fears to rest.  There is still a smorgasbord of great things to come, polar bears and all, and I look forward to hitting them all in successive reviews.

Grade: A