I finally snared Cheryl into watching the pilot of LOST this week. I’ve been hooked on the show for years, from the very first second of the pilot episode. An eye opens, pupil constricting, and we pan out to a very confused man in a business suit and tie, lying arms akimbo staring up at palm trees in a dense South Pacific jungle. Loud and atonal electrical whining erupts all around him. Confused, he rolls to one side, eyes lighting on a panting dog, friendly but frightened. The whirring, whining roar is like a car trying to negotiate a snow-packed hill. He slowly rises, reaches under his suit coat to find blood staining his white shirt, from a gash under his left arm. As if he suddenly realises where he is and what has happened, he erupts in a sprint, racing through a bamboo thicket, out onto a beach of chaos. Screams, shock, fire, a broken airplane fuselage with one wing pointed skyward, and a single turbine slowing, speeding, slowing, finally pulling in a wayward victim to a shredded mincemeat death.
The next five minutes find Jack Shepherd, MD, trying to bring order to a battle scene, blowing life into a middle aged black woman, noting two Koreans who are unharmed, calming an 8 month pregnant Australian who’s threatening premature labor, fixing a tourniquet on a bleeding limb, triaging right and left, and finally getting a svelte young Canadian off into the jungle to stitch him up.
I knew that if I could just get Cheryl to watch that one opening scene, the most powerful I’ve ever seen on television, she would get hooked on the show just as I had. Netflix has all five seasons on Instant Play, so we can breeze through the show as quick as we like. Less than week in, and we are already ready to catch episode #9.
LOST has been one of my all time favorite TV serials since that pilot, and watching it a second time through reveals exactly why. At first, I loved the show because it was filmed mostly outside, in Hawaii, with a bunch of beautiful people (and a few ugly ones) of all ages and backgrounds. No standard police, doctor, or legal procedural, it was a genre all to itself. THe confusion of the crash victims predicament grew with each passing year, as more and more people, places and times began to fill the screen. At last, I decided I didn’t care if any of the mysteries are solved; I just reveled in the fog.
Each of the many characters is more fulfilling, not less, when seen again for the first time with foreknowledge of who they are, where they came from, where they are going, and how they are changing. I am going to love following Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, Hurley, Said, Charlie, Sun, Clare (and her baby), and all the others (and Others) we’ll met along the way. I’m having a lot of fun biting my tongue as Cheryl pops out with both questions and suppositions about what is going on and what each person’s motives are. Occasionally, I give in, and give her a small reveal, but mostly, I’m enjoying just watching her have fun, all over again for me, and the first time for her.
Since Cheryl will read this entry, I can’t really look forward too much, but I am bristling with anticipation at seeing once again the saga of Desmond (who ends up being my favorite Lostie) and Penny, and trying to fathom Ben’s ceaseless plotting. And of course, there is the last season about to start. I don’t know whether to watch it myself first, or wait until Cheryl has seen the first five years, and then go at it together.