Close-up on Matthew Fox's eye. It opens, and his pupil does whatever the opposite of dilating is. Lating? Anyway, it gets smaller all of a sudden. Fox gasps: he has just awoken from a long, long dream in which he was solely responsible for the well-being of his four irritating siblings. (A little box pops up in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. This show is available in HDTV, ABC would like you to know.) Fox is lying flat on his back in a bamboo grove with a scratch on his cheek, his tie askew, and a healthy amount of stubble. (Oh, by the way, you're not just watching ABC -- it's ABC7, your friendly New York affiliate, says the little superimposed graphic in the corner. Just in case you were wondering.) Fox hears a noise to his left and whips his head in that direction. (Oh, this show? -- the one you're watching? -- is a series premiere on ABC. Just FYI, bud.) There's a dog with Fox in the bamboo grove -- a friendly-looking yellow lab with its tongue hanging out. The dog runs past Fox, stepping basically on his head.
Part of the problem with recapping a show as intentionally mysterious as Lost is that you find yourself looking for clues far more avidly than you would if you were just watching for fun, because if something turns out to be important in Episode 21, you want to have mentioned it in Episode 1. So you really have to hedge your bets. For the record, Matthew Fox has very similar photogenic scratches on each cheek.
Fox manages to stand up, bracing himself against a bamboo pole, and checks himself out. Bloody wounds, check. Airline bottle of vodka in pocket, check. Sudden sense of claustrophobia, check. He runs through the bamboo, passing a tennis shoe hung from a tree just so by the prop department, and coming out on a beach.
Here's where I will come right out and admit that the reason I was excited about this show when I first heard about it. I wasn't excited because it featured several actors I liked, such as Dominic Monaghan and Naveen Andrews and Harold Perrineau. I wasn't excited because of J.J. Abrams, the show's creator; I've never watched a J.J. Abrams show before and don't give two craps about J.J. Abrams. I wasn't excited specifically because of the premise, or the mystery, or the $75 million they spent just to transport the airplane chunks. No, I was excited because they're filming Lost in Hawai'i. It's not set in Hawai'i, of course; it's set in Neverland, or Atlantis, or whatever. But it's being filmed on the North Shore of O'ahu, and I am sort of obsessed with Hawai'i. My wife and I lived there for a year, and ever since, I've made it my life's mission to find a path back to living there. I mourn the loss of Hawai'i in my life and fetishize the place to such an absurd degree that even as a Mainland haole, I still insert the snooty apostrophe in its name. In fact, I even smugly proclaim that it's not an apostrophe, it's an 'ökina. I still lard my prose with Hawai'ian words all the time, even though hardly anyone knows what the hell they mean. Which is a roundabout way of explaining why when I first saw Matthew Fox run onto the beach amid horrific flaming pieces of aircraft wreckage, horribly burned passengers staggering around, and bodies strewn across the sand, and heard screams and cries and the whine of a jet engine still sucking in smoke and heat and the flames of Hell, my immediate reaction was to sigh at how pretty the beach looked and how much I wished I was there.
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.
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.
As dark begins to fall, we see that the castaways have started two bonfires on the beach: the Cool People bonfire and the Loser Bonfire. A scruffy blond dude lights a cigarette. The pregnant woman stands in profile, looking down at her prosthesis. She is one skinny pregnant lady. Hurley stacks up airline dinners: beef on the left, fish on the right. One of the guys who helped Jack pull Leg Injury out from under the wreckage sits on the beach -- you know, ruminatin'. We meet Sayid and Charlie; Sayid is from the Middle East, Charlie from the Shire.
Meanwhile, Fake Kate Beckinsale is stitching up Jack's back. She asks him why he doesn't seem afraid and he goes off on this long speech about fear that I won't even relate because its writerly details and the circumstances of its telling and the one glistening tear Jack cries while telling it are so ludicrous as to beggar belief, so I'll just point out that the whole point of it is that if you're scared you should count to five.
Night on the beach. Time to meet the castaways! Charlie is writing "FATE" on his fingers, and some girl is painting her toenails. I'm glad everyone is making an effort to keep their digits looking good. I have to watch this show, after all, and there's nothing worse than watching a show filled with people with boring, unadorned fingers and toes. Toenails's companion, the Pen Wrangler, comes over and offers her some chocolate, which she rejects out of hand. Many folks on the boards have talked about how this scene proves she's a bitch. And I'm not disagreeing that she's a bitch, but I also like to imagine that she rejects the chocolate because she's actually deathly afraid of chocolate and cannot get near it, even if there's no other way to stay alive. She's not a chocoholic; she's a chocophobe. Pen Wrangler tells her that they may be stuck on the island for a while; she tells him that help is on its way, and that she'll eat on the rescue boat.
Hurley sits down to the pregnant lady and gives her some food. "Any more...you know...baby stuff?" he asks. She says she's fine, and he gives her an extra meal. Later they will find him, rolling around on the ground, moaning, "It tastes like burning."
Meanwhile, Mercutio is hanging out with his son. Also, there's a Korean couple speaking in subtitles. The fact that there are subtitles (I had heard their dialogue would go unsubtitled) makes me sad because I was looking forward to writing not-quite-dirty fake dialogue and attributing the translation to my friend Denny who knows Korean. I'm goin' do it anyway, though. This scene is way better if you disregard the subtitles -- in which the man tells the woman to stick with him and not to worry about anyone else -- and imagine instead that he's saying, "You're so totally sexy. I love your demure, downcast eyes. Your demure, downcast eyes get me hot, baby, so fuckin' hot."
Fake Kate stands near Jack, who is tending to a guy with a gigantic piece of shrapnel stuck in his belly. She asks if he's going to live, and reveals that he was sitting to her.
Later, as they sit by the fire, Jack and Kate try to piece the crash together with the aid of an incongruously immaculate palm-frond airplane. I like to imagine that they filmed a much more extensive version of this scene, with palm-frond airplane wind-tunnel reenactions, just in case ABC turned down Lost but was interested in C.S.I. Deserted Island. Jack says he blacked out before the crash, but Kate says she saw the whole thing. They establish that the cockpit might be mauka of them, and decide to look for it tomorrow. Jack also realizes if he's gonna ask anyone their name, it might as well be the hot chick who thinks he's awesome as opposed to the big dude who looks like Harry Knowles. It turns out Fake Kate's name is Kate, which is a little confusing until you realize the character is actually Kate Beckinsale herself! Star of Pearl Harbor! Just like how Jennifer Grey was a character on, you know, it's like, you know, and Judge Reinhold a character on that Judd Apatow show that never got picked up. But Kate Beckinsale's career is still on the upswing, so they had to hire a doppelganger to play her. Ingenious.
Then, KATANG! There's some big clanky monster out in the jungle stomping palm trees in the dark. There's been a lot of speculation as to what the monster is, but don't worry -- I figured it out. It's the Iron Giant, who's been reassembling himself on this island for fifty years and has decided that not being a gun is for saps. The Iron Giant is gonna bust some heads.
(Oh, spoiler alert, by the way. Don't read the preceding paragraph if you don't want to know what the monster is.)
Commercial!
Flashback! Jack's on the plane. (This is an ABC series premiere, by the way. And you're still watching ABC7. In case you forgot.) Jack gets a few extra bottles of vodka from the flight attendant and then alks out, pouring nearly an entire bottle into his cup and downing it. And this is before the crash even starts. He gets up to go to the bathroom but is stopped short by a hobbit gallivanting down the aisle. Jack sits back down just as the plane hits a big fat bump. The woman across the aisle -- whom Jack will later resuscitate -- observes that she's a bad flier, and wishes her husband wasn't back in the restroom. Jack says he'll stay with her and that everything will be fine right before, of course, everything goes to shit and people start flying into the ceiling and the plane goes into a screaming nosedive and the oxygen masks pop out of the ceiling. I hate plane crash scenes. ["Seriously, when we were watching it, I commented to Glark that the sequence was recapper crack: 'Chaos.' There you go: three minutes, recapped." -- Wing Chun]
Okay, back to the pretty beach. Folks are speculating as to what the monster is, and Bad Flier mentions that the sound it made ("KATANG!") was familiar. "Where are you from?" someone else asks, and she replies, "The Bronx." And the monster actually does sound like the D train, but as I've already determined it's the Iron Giant, that clue is irrelevant.
Kate and Jack head out into the jungle with Charlie to find the cockpit, but not before Kate robs a corpse for some nice hiking boots. ["Typical Beckinsale." -- Wing Chun] This scene really works in deepening Kate's character, because I imagine that Kate Beckinsale typically has an assistant to do her corpse-robbing for her. She gets an orange-peel smile from the old ruminatin' guy, who first looks like a boxer wearing a mouth guard and then, while he finishes the orange, like an orangutan. For what it's worth, I didn't think there was anything creepy about the orange; I thought it was cute. Not like the dog. That dog is creepy.
Meanwhile, Hurley suggests they might want to do something about all the -- and here he looks nervously at Mercutio's son -- "B, O, D, Y, S." "What are you spelling, man, 'bodies'?" asks Mercutio, and the kid corrects Hurley's spelling. This is a nice bit.
Charlie, Jack, and Kate head up an extremely pretty Hawai'ian valley. Jack has a walking stick. Why does he feel the need to have a walking stick? There are only four plausible reasons to carry a walking stick, two of which enjoy a 100% correlation with jerkitude:
1. Because you are employing the walking stick ironically. If this is the case, you are a jerk.
2. Because you want to appear rugged and outdoorsy. If this is the case, you are a jerk.
3. Because of distinct quirkiness. This may or may not signify jerkitude; in the case of my friend Catherine's husband Carl and his rosewood walking stick with a compass in the head, for instance, it did not. Carl purchased the walking stick because he was nervous about moving to Washington, DC, and thought that carrying around a walking stick might be an effective crime deterrent. Carl also has about him something of the air of a Victorian dandy. He eventually lost the walking stick when he left it leaned up against a hot dog stand on the campus of the George Washington University School of Law.
4. Because you need a walking stick to walk, due to polio or a wound.
I believe Jack's reason for carrying a walking stick -- or rather, the prop department's reason for outfitting Jack with one -- is 40% #1 and 60% #4. He is wounded, but not on the leg. Let's say the members of the Lost prop department think Jack is about 40% jerk. I agree.
Kate asks Charlie if she's met him before, and Charlie claims to be the bassist for the phallically-named band Driveshaft. He sings a few bars from Driveshaft's #4 smash "Pumping Piston In Your Engine of Love." As proof of his membership in the band, Charlie shows Kate a ring, apparently a memento of the band's "second tour of Finland." And now he must toss the ring into the fires of etc., etc. Jack interrupts this fun conversation to tell them to hurry up. Okay, 45%. Also, many people thought they were trudging through a cornfield, which seems pretty unlikely to me. However, please note that I mentioned it, so I still get credit if it turns out it is corn. That damn dog is watching them. Clues were given that Mercutio and his son had a dog on the plane, but man, I don't think this is it. This is one spooky dog. Or rather, it's a normal-looking dog, but whenever it appears on screen, spooky music plays on the soundtrack, and I get all freaked out. While rewatching the show for this recap, I turned down the sound whenever the dog appeared and whistled the theme to The Andy Griffith Show, and everything seemed a lot less ominous. I recommend this method for calming down during other stressful moments in life, like a performance review or your own death from cancer.
It starts raining and gets really dark. The castaways take cover under various Boeing chunks; the Korean guy yells, in Korean, at a gentleman who was trying to scramble into their shelter: "You are too hot to join us under this metal! I am afraid your joining us here would end in a hot ménage à trois!"
KATANG! The Iron Giant is stomping past again.
The expedition finds the front part of the plane, and that's a pretty amazing shot there with the vines and trees and airplane and whatnot. The airline's logo, obviously created by the Art Department to be unmistakably not a real airline's logo, is a big O, standing for Oh Shit, The Plane Is Crashing Airlines, LLC.
Commercials. "Was Britney Spears' wedding bogus? Details at 11." Please -- the story of the week is the mayor of Flint, Michigan having a newspaper carrier arrested for refusing to reveal who in City Hall has a subscription to the Flint Journal. Apparently, the mayor hates the newspaper and recently passed an executive order that no City Hall employees are allowed to read the newspaper at work. How awesome is that? I totally love it when small-time idiots find the perfect event to launch them into the big time.
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 -- 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.
The Iron Giant starts whacking at the plane in roughly the same manner that Jack was whacking at the cockpit door earlier. The nose of the plane falls to the ground, Jack grabs the transceiver, and they all start running like hell through the rain and the mud, the Iron Giant hot on their heels. Charlie catches one of his big hobbit feet in a root and falls; Jack goes back to free him. Kate winds up in a clearing and, in extreme close-up, panic flashing across her face, counts to five. This scene is so good that it makes me forgive the writers for Jack's earlier speech about fear, since I realize now it was necessary to set up this moment. Let it be known, however, that my attractive lawyer wife believes Evangeline Lilly to have an unnaturally wide mouth.
Commercial. Whew, that was intense.
Kate Beckinsale, star of Serendipity, is still in the jungle, wishing that this were an episode of I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here so that she could get her out of there. As she hears a noise and turns, terrified, we see that this show is called Lost and we're watching it on ABC. (Oh, and F everyone's I, Extreme Makeover -- not the Home Edition, the other one, where they remodel the shit out of people's faces -- is having its season premiere very soon.) Charlie stumbles out of the woods, scaring Kate, who responds to being frightened by lying down on top of Charlie. Is this an actual trait of the real Kate Beckinsale? 'Cause if so, I'm gonna sneak up on her and scare her until a judge tells me I can't anymore. Charlie says that Jack saved him, but that they got separated; Kate asks if he saw the Iron Giant, and Charlie says he didn't. (This is a season premiere, says the little red box in the corner of the screen, in case you forgot.) Kate wants to go back for Jack. Charlie wants to come with her. (ABC wants to flash The Bachelor's smug mug in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen one last time. That makes ten separate informational popups in a one-hour show. Good, God, ABC, this isn't football. How long before networks start running a promo crawl at the bottom of the screen 24/7?) "I heard you shout 'Jack,'" Charlie simpers. "I'm Charlie, by the way." Lay off, man. She isn't a furry.
In a clearing, they find pilot's wings in a puddle. Looking up, they try to make sense of an odd shape in the treetops -- Dominic Monaghan does a funny head-tilt here -- and then Jack, trudging out of the woods, tells them it's the pilot. Kate runs to Jack and gives him the kind of non-hug that characters who really love each other give each other in movies set before 1900, which is to say she gets really close to him and breathy and looks into his eyes but doesn't actually touch him. I bet Kate Beckinsale never thought she'd fall in love with a commoner so quickly. "Did you see it?" she asks, and if I know anything, I know that when someone says something twice in a TV show, it's a clue. Only two sentences (as far as I can recall) were said twice in this episode, and I'm predicting right now that they will have great import:
1. "I'll eat on the rescue boat," said twice successively by Toenails. This is a clue. It means she has an eating disorder (besides her chocophobia) and in fact will not eat a single bite until Episode 100, when the rescue boat comes. Then she will eat the rescue boat itself, and its crew, and the castaways will continue to be stuck on the island. Write it down.
2. "Did you see it?" said twice by Kate Beckinsale. This means that Kate Beckinsale actually controls the Iron Giant with a chip implanted in her unnaturally wide lips. Write it down.
Charlie cock-blocks Jack by pointing out the dripping dead body in their midst and asking, "How does something like that happen?" In the episode's final shot, we see the pilot in all his gory. Interestingly, he appears to have been chomped but not swallowed -- that is to say, he was killed but not eaten. Which totally makes sense, because the Iron Giant eats only metal.
on Lost: Kate Beckinsale in her underpants, Sayid on the radio, Mercutio holding handcuffs, a scruffy guy firing a gun, and Toenails has just been through a trauma, okay?