Follow along! The episode guide to "Pilot, Part 1" is in Finding Lost, pp. 9-14.Wow, it’s so weird and amazing to be back here again. There’s no Dharma Initiative, no Others, no hatches. No one’s been off the island and back again, the survivors don’t know each other. It was like I was watching an entirely different show. But man, I love this pilot every time I go back and watch it. And now, with season 5 behind us, it’s new again. Look, it’s Chah-lie! And Hurley has fuzzy hair! Claire’s back, and round! Locke has... hair! (You know, I really didn’t realize in the first episode that Mount Baldy actually had fuzz around the sides and back of his head.) Jin’s a dick! Sun is submissive! Sawyer’s smoking… and he’s an ass! Jack is... not a tool! Boone and Shannon… still tools.
What I plan to do for our rewatch is point out a few fun things I didn’t notice the first time around, and then a bunch of things that are different now that we’re at the end of season 5. I don’t mean for my lists to be comprehensive, because A) I want you guys to be able to chime in with everything you saw, and B) I want to have a bit of a life for the next 8 months. So here we go!
Fun stuff I noticed:
• When Jack wakes up at the very beginning, I noticed what appears to be a black metal cylinder beside his head. Last year one of my readers emailed me asking if I would rewatch the opening, and wondered if it was Ben’s billy-club. Could it be?
• Hurley says the word “dude” in his third line of dialogue
• Jack saves Rose, Hurley, and Claire in the first 5 minutes. I think this is why I was slow to get on the “Oh SHUT UP Jack” train… I think everyone on that island owes Jack their lives. Maybe he’s right to be holier-than-thou. But honestly, by season 4, we kinda want him to shut up. But in this episode, I thought he was freakin’ awesome.
Things that are different in retrospect:
• We all remember Vincent being at Jack’s side when he woke up, but now we know from the final mobisode (see Finding Lost — Season Four, page 140-141) that Christian sent Vincent to wake up his son, telling him he has important work to do
• As Jack is running to the beach, he passes a white tennis shoe hanging from a bush. I guess now we can assume that was Christian’s.
• Jack tells Kate about the whole counting to five thing, and how you have to stay put and fix things. Kate says if she’d been in his situation during that surgery she would have run out of the door. Both their personalities were already perfected by that first episode.
• Jin says to Sun, “Don’t worry about the others; we need to stay together.” That line is ironic in season 5 (especially if you think of the Others with a capital letter…)
• Kate says she saw smoke in the valley and that’s where the fuselage was. But now I wonder, was she the first person to see Smokey?
• When Smokey attacks that night, Charlie steps up and says, “Terrific.” Which is exactly what Lapidus said when Bram cracked open the crate and he saw Locke’s body in there.
• Kate needs hiking boots, and slowly takes them off a dead body. It’s the opposite action to Jack putting shoes ONTO a dead body, Locke’s.
• Locke spends the first episode staring at the water, and when he’s resurrected, he just stands on the beach looking out at the water.
• The co-pilot of the plane died on impact, just like Lapidus’s.
