This Jack-centric episode ended with one of the most intense moments from the show yet.  I remember watching the episode for the first time and really thinking that Charlie was dead.

Jack, Locke, Kate and Boone take off after Ethan, who had taken Charlie and Claire captive, dragging them through the jungle.  Jack’s obsessive desire to be a hero was compounded by his guilt over the fact that he did not believe Claire when she claimed that she had been attacked at the caves.  Jack was going to find Charlie and Claire and no one was going to stop him.

This is just one more example of Jack and his hotheadedness.  Doing this rewatch, I think it is apparent that Jack’s own behavior is what really drove Kate into the arms of Sawyer.

We also discovered that Jack had turned in his father Christian for operating under the influence of alcohol during a surgery where the patient died.  This was what Jack had done to his father that his mother alluded to in the previous Jack-centric episode which sent Christian running off to Australia.

The other major event that happened at the end of the show was Locke and Boone’s accidentally finding the Hatch which becomes John’s own obsession for the remainder of the season.

The scene with Charlie hanging from the tree is one of the most dramatic and tense scenes from the first season.  From when Kate and Jack cut him down to when Jack was pounding on his chest, the scene was very well done.  It was very emotional and, as I said it, I could not believe what I was seeing.  You can feel the anguish from Jack and Kate as they raged and cried over the fallen Charlie.

And when Jack paused and the camera zoomed out, it really felt like Charlie was dead.  Jack’s resuming of CPR was very feral.  Then, when Charlie came around, the joy in their faces were perfect.

I felt for Charlie, who had to face the fact that Ethan took Claire and Charlie failed to protect her as he said he would do.

This episode, along with the previous one, started to dive into the mysteries and the mythology of the Island, and this one focused on Claire.

Watching this with the knowledge of what was to come, this feels like a storyline that was dropped or changed by the people in charge and, if I were to say there was one character who was shorted in LOST, Claire would be the one.

We see Claire’s flashbacks to when she discovered she was pregnant.  She was not thrilled but her boyfriend Thomas convinced her to give it a try.  However, that little weasel only made it about three months before he took off.  I do not think he ever returned to the show in anyone else’s flashback either.  Thomas was quite the loser.

Claire and a friend had gone to a psychic named Richard Malkin who seemed to have a terrible reaction to Claire’s future.  He refused to continue the reading.  After Thomas left, Claire went back and asked him to finish the reading.  He had said he reacted poorly the last time because he saw something “blurry.”

This time, Malkin insisted that Claire be the one who raised the baby.  He said there would be “great danger” if anyone else raised the child.  Claire was freaked out by him, but he would not stop. He would call Claire in the middle of the night to try to convince her not to put the baby up for adoption.

When Claire discovered that she could not give up the baby, she went back to Malkin looking for help.  He told her that he had set up a nice couple in LA that could raise the child without any dangers, but Claire had to go tomorrow.  He got her a seat on Oceanic 815.  After hearing the story, Charlie wondered if Malkin knew the plane was going to crash and if he did this so Claire would have to raise the baby.

The problem is… later on in the series, we return to Malkin during a Mr. Eko flashback and he admits to being a fraud.  So, if was not a real psychic, what was all of this Claire stuff?

I personally believe that the show made a change in the plans for the baby (who would be named Aaron).  Maybe there was some contractual issues, because Claire would disappear for quite a time during the show’s run.  Her development does not feel as if that was what the writers had originally intended.  And truthfully, Aaron does become more important of a character in LOST than Claire was, but not with the strange, impending danger foretold by the psychic.

This episode also showed us the first “Other” on the Island.  Ethan Rom, who popped up an episode ago, was revealed to not have been on the plane (thanks to Hurley and his Census).  Ethan had “attacked” Claire in her sleep and tried to do something with the baby, but Jack believed that Claire had dreamed this.

The very end of the episode featured Ethan standing in the jungle in font of Claire and Charlie in one of the creepiest moments of season one.  The Others storyline was brilliantly woven into the series to provide a human challenge/danger for the survivors to deal with.  It was revealed wonderfully by Sayid, who returned to the camp after his interactions with Danielle, saying “We are not alone.”

The ninth episode of the first season of LOST went into the mythology of the Island for a bit and introduced us to several major factors that would carry throughout nearly the entire series.  And Jack, Charlie, Michael and Hurley played some golf.

This episode was a Sayid-centric episode showing us Sayid in action during the Gulf War as a torturer for the Republican Guard.  I have to say the inclusion of an Iraqi army character in the show is just brilliant and to make him as deep and complicated as Sayid defied all stereotypes.  It would have been easy to make him a villainous, evil character but Sayid is not that, although he may believe that he is.  In his flashbacks, we see Sayid reconnect with a woman he had known as a young girl, Nadia.  But Nadia had been captured by the Republican Guard as a traitor and Sayid’s job was to get information out of her which was something Sayid did not want to do.

Meanwhile, on the Island, Sayid, who had left the camp to be alone after torturing Sawyer last episode, finds a metal cable that leads into the water from the jungle.  He followed the cable in the jungle and he gets captured by the French woman.

Danielle Rousseau.  She would become one of the biggest mysteries of the series and a beloved side character from the LOST community.  Danielle is clearly a little off-balanced…maybe I’d go as far as to say crazy.  She believes that Sayid is one of them and she tortures him to try and get him to tell her where Alex is.

There are a bunch of things introduced in these scenes with Danielle and Sayid.  These include:

* The Others, people whom Danielle claim are here though she has never seen them.  She hears them whisper.

* The sickness.  In the message when she said that “it killed them all”, Danielle was referring to the sickness.  She was shipwrecked with a science vessel and the mysterious sickness apparently infected all of her crew.  She then killed them all, including her love, Robert, to prevent the sickness from spreading off the Island.

* That when Sayid mentioned the “Monster” in the jungle, Danielle said, “There’s no such thing as monsters.”

* Danielle mentioned Alex, which turns out to be her child.  We would later find out that Alex is a young girl stolen from Danielle as a baby by Ben Linus.

The golf course was some of the most fun scenes of the season so far.  Seeing the survivors just let loose and enjoy themselves. It furthered the competitive relationship between Jack and Sawyer as well.  We also see Ethan for the first time from out of nowhere and we never give him a second thought since there have been plenty of background characters who have yet to be introduced.  Why would one unfamiliar face mean anything to us.  Heck, Sullivan and his hives appeared here for the first time too.  Of course, Ethan will play a huge role going forward as one of the Others.

One of the more uncomfortable episodes of LOST as they took a step unexpected by having Sayid torture Sawyer.

It was revealed early that Shannon was suffering from asthma and she was missing her inhalers since the crash.  Boone saw Sawyer reading the novel Watership Down, which he said was in his bags, which was where the inhalers were.  So if Sawyer had the novel, he had the inhalers.

Both Jack and Kate tried to get Sawyer to give up the medicine, but he would not listen.  In fact, he said h would give the medicine if Kate kissed him.  It all seemed juvenile until Shannon had a major attack.

Because of this attack, jack and Sayid decided that desperate times, yada yada yada.  Turns out that Sayid was more than just a “communications officer” during the Iraq War.  He was a torturer.

The scenes where Sayid took bamboo and shoved them under Sawyer’s fingernails was extremely uncomfortable to watch.  Sawyer’s cries of anguish was as tough to watch as it was for Jack to listen to.

The episode was a Sawyer-centric episode, looking at how he was a confidence man (CON MAN) back in the real world, scamming rich women and their husbands out of money.  We discovered how much Sawyer hated himself as well.  He had become the man he was searching for. Literally. Sawyer’s real name is James Ford.

Turns out, the letter he had been reading was a letter than James had written to a con man- actually named Sawyer- whose con had led to James’s father to commit suicide after killing the young boy’s mother.  James wrote the letter blaming “Sawyer” for the death of his parents.  However, as he grew older, James found himself doing the exact same thing as “Sawyer” so he adopted the persona of Sawyer.

Sawyer has a hatred of himself, and he goes out of the way to push people away from him.  He sees himself as a bad person, much like the man whom he blamed for killing his parents.  It is one reason why Sawyer has acted the way he has on the Island, staying at length from any other survivors.

Confidence Man is a solid character story giving us background information on Sawyer as well as Sayid, who leaves camp feeling guilt of his own over his role in torturing Sawyer.

Oh, and Kate did kiss Sawyer in a very seductive manner.  After the kiss, Sawyer revealed that he did not have the inhalers after all.  It was all just a way to continue to look like an asshole.  Fortunately, Shannon was helped by Sun using eucalyptus.

You All Everybody

You All Everybody

Drive Shaft’s big hit, You All Everybody, debuted in its full in this episode as we get a Charlie-centric episode called “The Moth.”

We know that Charlie is a junkie, addicted to some form of drugs.  He had given those drugs to Locke in the previous episode and he is starting to go through withdrawals and it was affecting his attitude.  Charlie was feeling useless and confronted Jack about it.  Problem was… that was the moment when an earthquake came, trapping Jack inside a cave.  Charlie was able to get out.  The group of survivors immediately went about trying to dig Jack out from the cave.

This had turned to be one of my favorite episodes of the early part of season one.  I liked Charlie, knowing him as Pippen from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I connected to Charlie’s story.

Charlie went to Locke and asked for his drugs back.  Locke told him a story about a moth and how they had to struggle to escape from their cocoon.  Locke said that the struggle was nature’s way of strengthening the moth.  Locke told Charlie that he would let him ask for his drugs three times, this being the first, and on the third time, Locke would give them to him.

Back at the cave, Charlie returned and they had a a small hole dug through but no one was small enough to crawl through it.  Charlie volunteered.  He was able to crawl into the cave with Jack just before the tunnel collapsed again.

Inside the cave, Jack and Charlie engaged in some witty banter, a trademark of LOST.  Jack had a separated shoulder that Charlie had to put back in place.  Charlie spotted a moth and follows it out of the cave.  Is this irony or part of the magic of the Island?

Charlie asked for his drugs back for the third time from Locke, who gives them back only to see Charlie toss them into the fire.

Charlie becomes one of those beloved characters on the Island (except for a stretch during season 2) and this is truly the start of that.  Dominic Monagham was the biggest name celebrity on LOST when it started so the focus on Charlie makes a lot of sense.

We had side stories involving Sayid trying to triangulate the signal of the French woman, which seemed to work until someone hit him in the back of the head and destroyed his machine.

We also see more about Sawyer and his tendency to gain some form of retribution against those he believed caused him harm.

We got our first look at the marriage of Jin and Sun in this episode, entitled “House of the Rising Sun.”  The episode begins with Jin brutally attacking Michael for apparently no reason.  Jin was reacting to a watch that belonged to Sun’s father, a watch that Michael had found on the beach.  Jin assumed Michael stole it and reacted violently.

The flashbacks introduced us to Jin and Sun in love and hoping to convince her father that they should be married.  Sun did not believe her father would do this, but Jin convinced him.  How was not revealed yet, outside of Jin agreeing to work for Sun’s father.

We do not know anything for sure yet, but one particular scene with a blood covered Jin makes us infer that Sun’s father was not a nice person.  Jin working for him was pulling Sun away from him and she planned on sneaking away from them before they loaded the Oceanic 815 flight that was fated to crash on the island.  However, Sun changed her mind prior to leaving and stayed with Jin.  This showed how deep their relationship was despite the troubles they were facing.

And… we discovered that Sun could speak English!  And Jin did not know.

Jack decided that it would be smart for the survivors to move from the beach and take up residence in the caves where they had found the fresh water.  Many of the survivors disagreed and the camp split into two groups.

Meanwhile, Locke realized that Charlie was a drug addict and he approached the former Drive Shaft member with a proposition.  Locke said that the Island would provide for him if he did something for the Island.  Locke wanted Charlie to give up his drugs and the Island would return his guitar.  Charlie gave Locke the bag of drugs he had and Locke pointed out that Charlie’s guitar case was above them.

I had never been a fan of the Jin-Sun-centric episodes since they were in Korean and that meant that I had to follow along with the subtitles.  Still, the story develops extremely well over the years.  At this point, I did not understand why Sun chose to stay with Jin, because he was being shown as such a rotten man, foul tempered and controlling.  But once we learned more about these two, we would fall in love with the always separated couple.

Episode 5 of the first season of LOST became a Jack-centric episode and we get our first example of what would become a long time running theme:  Man of science vs. man of faith.

Jack has been seeing things for an episode or two.  Not just things, but his dead father, Christian.  Understandably confused, Jack takes off into the jungle to try and find out what is going on.

Unfortunately, this comes at a time when the camp’s water supply is quickly running out and the group is beginning to panic.  With Jack gone, the group was not sure of who to look to for answers.  John offers to head into the jungle to see if he could find water.

Locke does not find water.  Instead, he finds Jack dangling off a cliff.  After pulling him to safety, John and Jack engaged in the first of many philosophical discussions which always punctuated their relationship.  At this point, they seem as if they could be friends, but we know how that turns out.

Jack’s hero complex is on display several times here as is his guilt over being unable to save everyone.  His father had told Jack as a child that he did not have what it took to be a doctor and deal with the failure of losing a patient.  It is clear that Jack is having plenty problems with guilt over his actions.  One of those actions is the reason why Christian took off to Australia.  While we do not know it yet, Jack’s mother specifically told Jack that it was his fault for his father leaving to the down under.

Jack returned to the beach after finding water and delivers the iconic speech that ends with the classic line, “If we don’t learn to live together, we’re gonna die alone.”  This is another major theme of LOST that is developed through the entire season.

Another major theme that we see here for the first time is “Daddy Issues.”  Jack is the first one we know of with the troublesome father, but plenty of other characters on LOST have the same deal.

“Walkabout” is one of the greatest episodes from the first season because there was quite the shock ending and it took some time to introduce to us one of television’s greatest…and saddest characters, John Locke.

Played by the brilliant Terry O’ Quinn, John Locke became one of the most important fixtures on the Island as of this episode.  He was around the first three, but it wasn’t until “Walkabout” that we realized what level he was going to reach.

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do!”

The episode starts with Vincent barking up a storm, letting everybody know that the fuselage was being invaded by something mysterious.  Turns out, there are wild boars on the Island and this gives John Locke an opportunity to step up.  With food provisions dwindling and tempers flaring, John suggests that they hunt boar and he recruits Kate and Michael to help him get it done.

Meanwhile, we flashback to Locke’s life just prior to his trip to Australia.  He is an office worker who enjoys games of strategy and war and he involves himself into them deeply.  Others at his work find reasons to make fun of John and his hobby and we discover how lonely John is.  He is calling sex lines and calling the woman on the other end “Helen.”  We’ll know more about a specific Helen later.

John is preparing himself to go to the Australia outback and go on a mystical walkabout.  Of course the company will not allow him to go on the walkabout because…. John Locke is in a wheelchair.  That is the HUGE reveal in this episode… that John Locke had been paralyzed for four years prior to arriving on the Island…where he was paralyzed no more.  John kept yelling that something or other was “his destiny” and he is now certain that he has found that destiny.

Knowing how that comes about really shows how sad John Locke is as a character and how tragic a life he lives.  We’ll look more at the character of John Locke as the show progresses, but, while watching the first season knowing how it ends, there sure seems to be a bunch of foreshadowing going on.  Certain sounds, images and dialogue which makes me believe that these writers had a pretty good idea of where the arc of John Locke would be going.

A major moment in “Walkabout” occurred when Locke came face to face with the “Monster” on the Island.  At this point, we have no idea what happened, but we know he lies about it to the rest of the group.

Rose also gives us a piece of foreshadowing as she tells Jack, who is trying to comfort her and suggests that she says something about her husband at the memorial service the survivors were setting up for the bodies in the fuselage, that her husband, Bernard, was not dead.  Of course, we know from season 2 that Rose is absolutely correct and that Bernard is alive and well and in the tail section of the plane.

This episode really solidified the mysteries of the Island and created such a wonder about what was actually going on.  John Locke is one of my personal favorite characters in the entire series and Terry O’Quinn is unbelievably good as Locke.  He is as complex of a character that has ever been on television and his pain and desire to be more than what he is can be felt by anybody.

The first flashback episode of LOST was Kate-centric and we see how she was captured by the Marshal Edward Mars and wound up on Oceanic Flight 815 from Sydney, Australia.

This episode was entitled “Tabula Rasa” which, in its modern meaning, means “Blank Slate” and it comes from the theories of philosopher John Locke.  No, not the John Locke on the show, but, of course, that is why they used the phrase.  Tabula Rasa is one of the big themes from the show itself, this time referred to by Jack.

Kate wanted to tell Jack what she had done in the real world to get Mars to chase her, but he stops her.  He said that everyone has a right to a new start here on the island.  It hadn’t mattered what had happened before.  Jack said three days ago, we all died.

Now this was a popular theory from early on in the series, to explain the odd things happening.  It most likely stemmed from this very moment of dialogue.  However, it means more than the literal interpretations of it.

Jack recognized that the past was unimportant to where they were right now and that this gave everyone a chance to start anew.  Kate had been nothing but selfless and heroic since crashing on the island and Jack was giving her the benefit of the doubt.

There were some other key events that happen in Tabula Rasa.

We had one of the first examples of the numbers showing up as the reward money for Kate was at $23,000.  The numbers, 4 8 15 16 23 42, are everywhere in LOST in some variations.  They were on Oceanic 815.  There were 48 survivors.  There will be many more examples of the use of these numbers repetitively.

Edward Mars is an interesting case.  We know as the series goes on that the Island has healing properties.  Locke can walk.  Rose’s cancer is gone.  Things like that.  However, Edward Mars suffered from the shrapnel that had been lodged in his abdomen and he was dying slowly.   Strange that the Island did not seem to want to save him.  Or did they just not give it a long enough time?  The whole “putting him out of his misery” thing may have been worse yet.  I also had not realized before, but when Jack went back into the tent after Sawyer failed to kill Mars with the gun, Jack does put him out of his misery.  We don’t see it, but if you pay attention to that scene, it is certainly implied.

We get some great parts with Sawyer.  This is the first time that we see that he is more than just a jerk.  We start with his nicknames.  I believe this is the first time he used “Freckles” when referring to Kate. When he is looting the luggage in the plane, he says that he is in the “wild,” but later with the botched attempt at putting Mars down, Sawyer displayed some remarkable acting in his facial responses.  The horror of what he had done truly came through the exterior of his vernacular.

We get the first inkling of the relationship that would develop between Sawyer and Kate as well as the relationship between Sawyer and Jack, both of which are major connections for the series.

It is interesting early that they were certainly planning on pushing a relationship between Michael and Sun, but nothing major ever comes from that.

Speaking of Michael, I never understood why he is so opposed to Locke, especially when Locke went out of his way to help Michael look good in Walt’s eyes by finding Vincent.  Maybe Michael is just jealous of the attention Walt gives to Locke.  When you really look at it, Michael is really one of the worst characters here among all of the rotten people looking for a clean slate.

Tabula Rasa.

I decided that I would start a rewatch this summer of LOST, my favorite TV show of all time.  And since I was rewatching the show, I would also add a category to the TV G[eek] menu so I can write about each episode.\

I must say that when LOST went off the air, I had a hole in my heart for quite a while.  It was finally filled by a bunch of good TV shows, but nothing has ever matched J.J. Abrams’ classic ABC show.

The first two episodes go together as Pilot Part 1 & 2, so I am reviewing them together as well.  I do not know how someone could watch this pilot episode and not be completely swept up in the mystery and excitement that was LOST.

The show famously started focused in on Jack’s eye.  It is one of the most iconic of shots from LOST.  Then, we learn so much about the character of Jack Shepherd in the next 10-15 minutes, which were 10-15 of the best minutes on network TV.  Jack comes to and finds the crash scene on the beach with people crying and confused.  He then runs back and forth trying to save as many people as he could.  Jack was always the hero.  The frenetic pace of Jack going from a man pinned beneath plane wreckage to Claire who looked to be in labor to Boone who was doing CPR on Rose incorrectly was something to see and informed us about Jack’s character more than any flashbacks could.

That is one of the strengths of this episode.  We are introduced to these characters: Charlie, Kate, Sawyer, Sayid, Boone, Shannon without having to use flashbacks, which would eventually be used to go deeper in the character.  We know that everyone gets a new start on the Island, and the first introductions we have are not influenced by who they were.

We are introduced to the monster on the Island.  Of course, we learn what that is as the series progressed, but at this point, we had zero idea.  The sounds were scary and intentionally mysterious.  Then, with the killing of the pilot (which was originally supposed to be Jack- imagine how different LOST would be without Jack) showed how deadly serious this situation was.

We got a conflict between Sayid and Sawyer which would carry over for much of the series.  It started out growing out of Sawyer’s mistrust of Sayid because of his nationality.  Sawyer also turned on Hurley, everyone’s favorite, calling him “Lardo”.  We discovered that Sawyer was not a nice person.  Still, the scene with Sawyer reading the letter hinted that there was more to this redneck than we thought.

The episode also spent a bunch of time making Kate look like a hero, only to pull the rug out from under her and us by revealing that she was the prisoner being escorted from Australia by the Marshal.  It was a great reveal to tell us that what we see from these people, who they appear to be, may not be who they are.

Jin and Sun were quite isolated early because of the language barrier and the closed mind of Jin.  These two are probably the characters who change the most during the run time of the show.

We get very little about one of the series’ most important characters, John Locke.  However, John, unwittingly, does specifically explain the entire Island to Walt when he is telling about backgammon.  Two sides-one is light, one is dark.

We get the scene with Sawyer shooting the polar bear which caused a lot of controversy and debate at the time.  Clearly, polar bears should not exist on this island but here it was.  It just added to the group of strange mysteries that we see.  Little things meant to mess with a viewer.  The shoes hanging from the bamboo.  The arrival and seemingly knowledgeable Vincent, the handcuffs, the French message, and the Monster were all dropped on the viewers with no explanation.

Charlie perfectly summed up the thoughts of the viewers with the last line of episode 2: “Guys, where are we?”

The LOST pilot is one of the greatest pilot episodes ever shot and does an amazing job of setting up the story as well as presenting us with characters that may not be what they appear.