Episode Report Card Dan Kawa: B | 2 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Sucked In
By Dan Kawa | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.21.2004
Anyway, obviously a plane crashed. A lot of people seem to be wondering (a) whether anyone would survive such a plane crash; (b) why there weren't more trauma victims; and (c) how come the jet engine was still running even with no power source whatsoever. I did a little digging and asked some aeronautics experts and determined that whatever, who cares, this is still a pretty impressive sequence.
After Matthew Fox finishes counting to five in his head, he runs to help a guy who's all squooshed under some wreckage. He calls over two other guys and, with their help, pulls out the wounded dude, whose leg is -- medically speaking -- totally fucked up. Fox does something tourniquety, and then sees a pregnant woman down toward the water calling for help. He runs the length of the plane to her, which gives us a second to see the extent of the damage, plus it gives someone in effects the chance to create a very spiffy waves-of-heat visual.
The woman's eight months pregnant. Should she really be flying at eight months pregnant? I once again checked with experts -- this time a number of New York's finest OB-GYNs -- who told me that a woman eight months pregnant should definitely avoid flying on a plane that's going to crash. So that was some unsound prenatal care there, lady. While Fox and the pregnant woman renegotiate her contractions, some yahoo gets sucked into the jet engine, and unlike on Firefly -- where the result of such an event is explosive laughter on my part -- here the result is an explosive explosion on the engine's part. And explosive laughter on my part. Debris flies everywhere, sort of hitting one guy, who screams a lot.
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.