Emily St. James and Noel Murray head Back To The Island in first book excerpt

2004 Week may be over, but The A.V. Club continues to mine pop culture history as well as our own with the first excerpt from Lost: Back To The Island—a comprehensive and critical companion to a series that altered the TV landscape forever, co-authored by two critics who shaped different eras of our site. Emily St. James and Noel Murray both wrote extensively about the classic ABC mystery drama, poring over character details and story arcs in recaps and other long-form reads, so it was only natural that they'd join forces to reexamine what made Lost a critical success and an enduring cultural obsession.

It's also fitting for The A.V. Club to share an excerpt from the book ahead of its release via Abrams Books on September 17, one that was selected by St. James and Murray for our readers. Read on for their insights on "Pilot," which remains a compelling opening statement for the series while also serving as a reminder of how far the show would eventually travel outside of its original framework.

Center: cover art for Lost: Back To The Island (Artwork courtesy of Abrams Press; image: Cindy White)

W H E R E  A R E  W E ? 

“PILOT”

SEASON 1, EPISODES 1 & 2 ORIGINAL AIRDATES 9/22/04 & 9/29/04

NOEL: It’s hard to talk about the beginning of Lost without wanting to race ahead to the ending—or even to the middle. Once you’ve seen the whole series, watching the first episode again raises all kinds of questions I itch to answer. The most immediate may be: How much of the show that Lost would become is already evident in its first two hours? But before we get to that, right here at the top we should take a moment to appreciate just how terrific “Pilot” is. With Lost, there’s no “it starts slow but give it four or five episodes and then it gets good.” This show comes roaring out of the gate at such an incredible clip—with a plane crash on an uncharted island, and the rapid-fire introduction of about a dozen immediately engaging characters—that it easily could have coasted on that “Pilot” momentum for a whole season. (I might even argue that it did, at times.)

When I watch it now, four things stand out:

THE TWO CRASH SCENES. The first is the most memorable, with Jack running around on the beach for roughly the first ten minutes of the episode, trying to steer a bunch of panicked survivors to safety while enlist- ing the more capable ones to help, as a roaring jet engine and a collapsing fuselage threaten lives. (The engine yanks one man to an unforgettable death.) We don’t know who any of these people are yet, but we know right away that when in doubt, we should probably focus our attention on Jack. But I often forget that toward the end of “Pilot,” in the flashback to Kate on the plane, we also see the moment when the tail section of Oceanic 815 rips off, sending several passengers flying into the air.

HOW FEW FLASHBACKS THERE ARE. I mistakenly remembered see- ing what nearly every key castaway was doing on the plane before it broke apart; but the pre-crash 815 flashbacks in this episode are really limited to Jack, Charlie, and Kate.

HOW WELL THE MAJOR CHARACTERS ARE INTEGRATED INTO THE ISLAND ACTION. Even during the mayhem after the crash, we get at least glimpses of Michael, Hurley, Locke, Claire, Shannon, Boone, Jin, Charlie, and Rose. Not long after the situation stabilizes, we meet Kate, Sayid, and Sawyer (with Sawyer getting a cool bad-boy close-up, smoking a cigarette), and Sun and Walt aren’t far behind. That’s a lot of people introduced within the first twenty minutes; and it sets up the show with lots of stories to tell in Season One.

HOW QUICKLY SOME OF THE ISLAND MYSTERIES ENTER THE PICTURE. There’s a polar bear attack. A radio salvaged from the plane picks up Rousseau’s sixteen-year-old call for help. And oh yeah, there’s some kind of monster howling and shaking the trees—even killing 815’s pilot. Again: What a way to hook an audience. Who wouldn’t stick around for at least a few more episodes to see where all this is headed?

I’ll also add that J. J. Abrams handles the action masterfully, balanc- ing the mad rush when the 815ers are in crisis with quiet, still moments of reflection. (At one point there’s a shot of a sunset over the ocean and the wreckage that is lyrical in a way unlike anything I can recall in any of the episodes to come.) The performances too are razor sharp from minute one. I was never all that invested in the Jack/Kate romance; but even I have to admit that the first scene between the two of them, where Jack talks Kate through sewing up his wound, is a charmer.

EMILY: I recently rewatched Lost, and I kept sending messages to a friend that amounted to “How has TV fallen so far from this?” Not every element of Lost clicks at every single moment. Sometimes, the storytelling is more functional than poetic. Sometimes, the direction can be a bit slapdash. Sometimes, the performances lack nuance or depth. Sometimes, the show feels like it’s going to disappear into its own navel and never come out.

And then you’ll have a moment like the sunset you called out, Noel, and on come the waterworks, sparked by nostalgia for how good TV was back in the day. While every element may not work well together in every episode, more often than not, at least a couple of things are cook- ing. And when every element of your show has the potential to be some of the best TV of all time, well, then it’s a real treat to just watch the show.

I first saw the Lost pilot in a stuffy, too-warm apartment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was the summer after I had graduated from college, and a handful of network pilots for the fall had leaked* onto file-sharing sites online.† One of them was Lost. My wife and I crowded together in bed and watched as an instantly compelling cast of characters crashed on a mysterious island and found themselves immediately drawn into a series of improbable mysteries. That fall season was the first I paid atten- tion to with a real critical eye, and Lost set the bar horribly high. I just assumed that every fall season would have a pilot as good as Lost’s.

Now, twenty years removed, Lost is still the answer I give to the question “What’s the best pilot ever made?”‡ I think there are probably pilots that are better as artistic works, and I think there are probably pilots that are better simply as episodes of television. (The Lost pilot, after all, very much resembles the movie it would have become overseas to defray costs had ABC not picked the show up.) I don’t think, however, that there is another pilot that works so well as both an episode of TV and an artistic work simultaneously. The pilot takes a whole bunch of character types and storytelling tropes you know backward and forward from watching TV, then shakes them all up together. Then it makes room for moments of quiet mournfulness and strange melancholy. It tells its story as often through images as it does through words. It offers big action but also laser-sharp character writing. It doesn’t do everything perfectly, but it does everything well. I’ve been doing this long enough now to know how impossible doing anything well in a pilot is. On those grounds, Lost’s pilot is a low-grade miracle.

* Considering how many of them were from ABC and considering how far behind the other networks ABC was at the time, I’ve always wondered if some enterprising person in ABC’s marketing department looked at how good the Lost and Desperate Housewives pilots were and thought, “Couldn’t hurt!” before putting them online.

† Yes, I am admitting to an extremely minor crime in the pages of a major publication, but (a) the statute of limitations has surely passed, and (b) I’ve spent so much money on Lost stuff over the years. Don’t arrest me, Disney!

‡ Interestingly enough, many of the best drama pilots of the past ten years—Mr. Robot, The Handmaid’s Tale, Yellowjackets, Lindelof’s own Watchmen—take big lessons from Lost’s pilot, often by keeping a tight character focus on deeply traumatizing events, then veer in their own directions.

It’s tempting to write about the Lost pilot as unprecedented. It was (probably) the most expensive pilot to that point, costing around $14 million, it took huge storytelling swings, and it melded together several TV subgenres—the sci-fi drama, the Twin Peaks–style mystery show, the Love Boat–style “shove a lot of characters into one exotic location” show, the thirtysomething-style intimate character drama—into a new TV storytelling type that we still . . . mostly compare to Lost. The closest antecedent to it in TV history is probably the Twin Peaks pilot,* but Lost is pulpier and more eventful. Twin Peaks was all mood and vibes; Lost is all blood and guts.

The real precedent for Lost can be found in a slightly more disreputable corner of TV history: the light anthology drama. These shows proliferated in the 1970s, seeing the apex of their success with the ABC series The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. The shows were evolutions of the anthology dramas that had dominated the 1950s but proved harder and harder to produce as networks lost easy access to standing backstage sets on studio lots in an era of Hollywood contraction. A show like The Love Boat had a skeleton crew of series regulars, whose stories (such as they were) would continue throughout the series, but the real attraction was the guest stars of the week, who would have their own crises and love stories to celebrate.

The smartest thing about Lost was how it took the anthology-style cast of characters and stranded them on the same beach; the showrunners used a full season of television to make every single one of them the focal point in one hour or another. And in the pilot, the sharpness of Abrams and Lindelof’s character writing is the hidden spine holding together the wilder mysteries.

Noel, you and I have seen the full series, but try to put that out of your mind for a second. Which characters grab you the most immediately when watching the pilot?

NOEL: It’s tempting to say Hurley, just because he’s so likable from the get-go, with his honest reactions to dire situations and his willing- ness to do what’s needed of him anyway. Without spoiling too much, I will say that I do think the scene where Jack asks for Hurley’s help with his impromptu surgery on Kate’s marshal perhaps unintentionally fore- shadows where this story is going to wind up.

* See also: pilots that are better as artistic works than the Lost pilot.

It’s also tempting not to say Jack or Kate, given that both characters become more problematic later. (We’ll get to that.) But I have to admit that both of them are incredibly charismatic in the pilot. In fact, given the way things play out in the series, it’s odd that Jack comes off so charming and my beloved Sawyer is so abrasive. Meanwhile, Locke—who has a powerful scene with Walt, explaining the rules of backgammon—has an air of menace about him that forecasts villain. (In a way I guess he is, eventually.)

I’m actually going to pick another character, though, who represents the show’s thematic complexity and unapologetic thorniness—and who in retrospect is an odd choice to be one of only three 815ers to get a flashback showcase, alongside Jack and Kate. I don’t know if J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof decided to center Charlie in “Pilot” because Dominic Monaghan was one of the show’s most famous faces—having just been in the Lord of the Rings trilogy—but even if so, the way we meet him is incredibly effective. He’s so affable from the get-go; but then we find out that the reason he’s so eager to join Jack and Kate on their expedition to retrieve the radio from the cockpit is that he stashed some heroin in the lavatory.

That one revelation (coupled with the later reveal that Kate spent Flight 815 in handcuffs) says so much about what this show’s going to be. Some characters will perform heroic acts for selfish reasons, and some flashbacks will give us information about the characters that no one else on the Island knows. There are secrets within secrets here.

EMILY: One thing I find interesting about the early seasons of Lost is that it’s a simpler show. To some degree, that’s to be expected. All TV shows become more complicated the deeper they get into their runs— which is not a criticism, necessarily. The storytelling of the pilot is so propulsive and the mysteries so immediately intriguing that the show likely couldn’t have sustained a bunch of intricate character portraits, even if it had the real estate for them.

It does mean, however, that the characters mostly function as arche- types you might be more familiar with from other TV shows. There’s a Heroic Doctor ( Jack) and a Mysterious Older Man (Locke) and a Charming Rogue (Sawyer) and an Addict Rock Star (Charlie) and so on and so on. And in the weeks to come, the show will mostly spend its time inverting those archetypes in relatively predictable ways, complete with more capital letters. Kate’s the Beautiful Criminal? Well, would you believe that she’s maybe also Misunderstood?

Abrams left the show fairly early in its run,* but this approach to building a TV show had his fingerprints all over it—surround characters you feel like you know already (because you kind of do) with a swooping, swirling curlicue of a plot. You can see a lot of what he would do in Lost on the (also terrific) pilot for Alias, where he surrounds a star-making performance by Jennifer Garner with some of the goofiest spy movie shenanigans imaginable, as well as a bunch of characters you understand almost from looking at them. This isn’t easy; there’s a real skill to knowing how to make an audience understand what they’re looking at almost immediately, and Abrams has it. It’s likely why he’s so successful.

It extends to other projects. I’d argue that Abrams’s gift for complex simplicity was core to Lost’s quick ascension. He knows exactly which screws to turn and when, and he knows how to get you on board with a character almost immediately. Yet within this version of the show is little of what it would become, even beyond the sense of “all shows get more complicated as they go along.” Lost eventually became this pseudo-spiritual series of parables about people who were lost metaphysically before they became lost more literally. While you can sense that idea lapping at the edges of the pilot, it’s not nearly as present as the pulpier version of this story about archetypal characters you already know and love from a billion other things getting trapped on an island where nothing is quite as it seems.

Perhaps that’s why every time I revisit the pilot, I’m struck anew by how different it is from what the show became. It’s recognizably Lost on a plot level, but the deeper thematic weight the series would develop as soon as two episodes from now† is mostly hinted at. Again, I don’t want to hold that against the pilot, because pilots are inherently cumbersome beasts, and they never possess all the thorny complications of the shows that follow. But I do think the version of Lost presented in the pilot is just a bit thinner than the show we got in a way that could have quickly started to feel just a bit hollow.

* He departed roughly a third of the way into Season One so he could go make the 2006 film Mission: Impossible III.

†  In “Walkabout,” which is the subject of its own essay.

I love that we have the Lost pilot because it’s a tremendous piece of television. But I’m glad that the show almost immediately started leaving it in the dust.