Episode Report Card Dan Kwa: B+ | 317 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT Sucked In
By Dan Kwa | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on 2004.09.22
Fox, seeing someone else in distress, recruits a big and tall gentleman to keep an eye on the pregnant woman. As he runs off to rescue someone else, B&T shouts out, "Hey, what's your name?" Matthew Fox shouts back, "Jack!" He inconsiderately fails to ask about B&T's name. It's Hurley, Jack. I looked it up because I felt bad for him.
Further down the beach, a younger guy ["Verve! -- Wing Chun] is performing chest compressions on a middle-aged woman. Jack runs over and helpfully tells the guy he's doing it all wrong; he then tilts the woman's head back not at all and does the exact same thing the guy was doing. The guy says he's a lifeguard, and Jack snottily tells him to give his license back. Then the guy, doggedly helpful, asks if they should perform a tracheotomy-by-pen, and Jack says, even snottilier, "Yeah, good idea, you go get me a pen." It's swell to have a hero who knows how to save people and all, but nonetheless, this sequence made me instantly dislike Jack. While I admit that if I were in the same situation as Jack I would be panicking and pissing myself and possibly on fire, I'd like to think I'd be doing all those things politely. (On the other hand, we do get to hear the guy urgently ask another passenger if he has a pen, which is awesome.) Anyway, Jack saves her. Then a part of the plane starts falling and Jack has to save some other people, and then there's another explosion, and then he saves...you get the idea.
Then we get the credits, over some slow-motion shots of Jack staggering around and passengers running aimlessly this way and that. There's a nice shot of Jack looking into the cabin, where a dead person's hand artfully hangs into frame like a boom mike on a cable-access show. The young guy brings Jack a handful of pens, because he didn't know which one would work best, and Jack seems to recall that he was kind of a wad to the guy, as he graciously accepts them rather than saying something else bitchy.
Jack stumbles off to an especially fetching bit of beach to tend to his own wounds, but finds he can't reach the big gash on his back. Luckily, at that moment, a woman who looks quite a bit like Kate Beckinsale walks out of the jungle, rubbing her wrist and looking dazed. Jack asks her to sew him up, and when she's dubious, notes that it's cool; he's a doctor. I like thinking of this as an all-purpose justification for pretty much anything you might ask someone to do. "Could you please place this Butterball turkey on your head? I'm a doctor, I'd do it myself, but my hands aren't clean." (A friend of mine, in his first year of medical school, recorded an album of obscene songs titled Don't Worry, Baby, I'm Almost A Doctor.) After some give and take, she agrees to help. Jack hands her the bottle of vodka; she looks as if she'd enjoy drinking it, but instead pours it on her hands per Jack's instructions. She looks at the sewing kit he scrounged from a dead person's luggage and says, "Any color preference?" Rather than asking her to weave him a rainbow friendship bracelet in his back skin, he says that black is fine.