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
The rain is mainly falling on the plane. You're watching Lost on ABC. As Jack, Charlie, and Kate enter the airliner full of dead people, ABC would also like to remind you that the season premiere of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is coming up. On ABC, natch.
Because the front end of the plane has landed on a tilt, the trio must climb their way up the center aisle through all those poor bastards who were upgraded to first class shortly before being downgraded to dead. This is a pretty great scene, especially the part where Charlie slips and stops his slide by grabbing the leg of Ralph Fredrickson, a thirty-six-year-old father of sextuplets. Up, up, up the inclined plane they go. When they reach the cockpit, Jack has to whack at the door handle with a fire extinguisher, because of terrorists. On like the fiftieth whack, the door flies open, and what appears to be a department-store mannequin wearing a co-pilot's uniform hurtles out.
Kate and Jack make it into the cockpit where they pick their way around the strapped-in corpse of the pilot to search for the transceiver. But suddenly, as Kate is leaned all the way over him, the pilot wakes up with a gasp. At first I thought this was a hokey and cheap scare moment, but then I remembered that every time I've ever been asleep and Kate Beckinsale, the star of Laurel Canyon, stretched herself out across my lap, I've immediately woken up, too. The pilot thoughtfully asks how many survived the crash and how long it's been since the plane went down. When he hears that no one has come to rescue them in sixteen hours, he tells them that the plane's radio went out six hours into the flight, and he turned toward Fiji. Which means that any rescue party searching for them is looking 1000 miles away from the right place. Everyone spends a little time thinking about that before the pilot points out the transceiver and Jack asks where Charlie went. To the bathroom, it turns out, for the express purpose of coming back out again and looking guilty. While Kate was talking to him, I noticed that a few of the first-class seats are empty, which makes me think that maybe some other people survived and have currently set up their own camp, far away from the coach passengers' camp, with wider seats and a better menu selection.
KATANG! The Iron Giant's back. He's prowling the edges of the cockpit, looking for Hogarth. (By the way, ABC would like you to know that The Bachelor is on next -- specifically by superimposing a grinning picture of someone, I guess The Bachelor hisself, over the bottom right-hand corner of this extremely tense scene.) The pilot -- who apparently is someone famous in the J.J. Abrams universe ["It's darling Greg 'Agent Sean' Grunberg, for anyone who somehow didn't see the show" -- Wing Chun] -- sticks his head out the broken cockpit window and is immediately snatched up, screaming, into the sky. Aw, the Iron Giant is going bobbing for humans! A big splat of blood hits the window, as if the pilot were the world's biggest highway dragonfly.