SPOILER ALERT – I talk about these early episodes as someone who’s seen everything, so if you’re not completely caught up with the end of Season Five, read no further

[Watched 1.1 – Pilot Part 1; 1.2 – Pilot Part 2; 1.3 – Tabula Rasa; 1.4 – Walkabout; 1.5 – White Rabbit]

* After Season Five wrapped up, The Missus and I thought it would be neat to re-watch the entire series from the beginning in the months prior to the sixth and final season. Meanwhile The Missus’s parents, who are in town for Memorial Day, had decided to watch the show for the very first time, plowing all the way through the series so they too could watch the final season. Call it fate, call it luck, call it karma, but this was a pretty good excuse to start watching the show from the first episode onward this weekend.

* I’m still amazed at just how involving these first few episodes are. I’ve told the story about how The Missus and I caught the sneak preview of the first episode at San Diego Comic Con 2004 a million times, but seriously, we went in there with less than no expectations and left true believers proselytizing to all and sundry. That whole first sequence with Jack waking up in the middle of the jungle, seeing a labrador retriever, and then running into a horrific plane crash on the beach with shrapnel flying every place and people getting sucked into jet engines–magnificently intense television. The rest of the episode was a balance between further shocks–the giant monster roaring through the jungle, the death of the pilot–and deft little (well, okay, played to the balcony) character moments–Jack asking Kate to stitch him up, the “count to five” story. I half-worried that the show wouldn’t be much fun to watch over again since I know the answers to so many early questions, but it’s still a ton of fun.

* And oh yeah, there’s plenty of death. I remember a big part of my attraction to the show being how it showed people dealing with the plane crash, the dead and the dying. That was actually a big plot driver in these first few episodes, especially by episode four, when the bodies in the fuselage are cremated and Claire leads her memorial service. Yet oddly, it was a much lighter show, too. Action-packed and heavy on carnage, yeah, but not the relentless parade of murder and failure that it’s since become. Back when Charlie, Claire, Boone, Shannon were on the show, it was much younger and funner-seeming, even if all Boone and Shannon did at this point was bitch at each other. It was also a much less dense show, both visually and narratively–during the J.J. Abrams-directed pilot you had shots of fields of stars and sunsets, while in lieu of the non-stop mythology-exploration and multiple timeframes of Season Five you had lengthy sequences of people just climbing up stuff. Everything’s bright: the white of the beach, the blue of the ocean and the sky, the green of the jungle. For pete’s sake, episode three ends with a musical montage in which various pairs of characters do nice things for each other–Sayid tosses Sawyer some fruit, Jin brushes a lock of Sun’s hair, Boone finds Shannon’s sunglasses, Michael brings Walt his dog, etc. It’s bizarre to think that Boone and Shannon won’t last till the middle of Season Two, Michael will murder two people in cold blood and die estranged from his son, and Sawyer will fall in love with a woman who dies in an attempt to never have met him.

* Back then it really did seem like much more of a Lord of the Flies set-up than a science fiction one, even though even at this early stage we knew that Locke had seen the monster and been spared by it, we’d seen a polar bear, and we were catching our first glimpses of ghost-Christian. Debates about what to do with the bodies, figuring out how to get food, arguing with Sawyer over the ethical way to divvy up supplies, all of that presented the island as a lowercase-i “man vs. nature”-type antagonist that would give rise to internal power struggles. I dug that! Though I grant you it might have been difficult to sustain for six seasons. Anyway that seemed to be the implication of Jack’s big “live together; die alone”

* The show also hadn’t quite settled into itself yet. The pilot had a slightly different look to it, The music in the pilot, though composed by Michael Giacchino just like everything else, was much heavier on percussion, from drums to vibraphones; to my ear, the string-heavy sound we’re used to didn’t fully emerge until episode four, while the first recognizable theme didn’t show up until episode five. Ditto the flashback structure: the pilot’s flashbacks were limited to shots of the plane in mid-flight, while Kate’s flashback (in addition to having unusual slow-mo lead-ins) lacked the big revelatory twist, which was instead presented in the island material (she’s a criminal!). Not until that wonderful, wonderful moment in episode four where you learn Locke was in a wheelchair did the Lost flashback come into its own.

* And speaking of Locke, they were rather ambiguous as to whether or not he was a bad guy back then. That musical montage that capped off episode three ended with sinister sounds and a close-up of his scarred face. He was just one of several rather creepy things going on, from the endlessly repeating distress call to the Shining-like apparition of the man in the suit in the distance. It was quite a scary show and still can be from time to time.

* I only caught one Easter Egg: After the Monster’s first run through the jungle that first night, the next morning you hear some of the characters discussing in in the background. You hear Rose (love you Rose!) say that something about it sounded familiar, and then she tells another character she’s from the Bronx. I guess she recognized the taxicab receipt-printing noise the sound guys built into the Monster’s clickings and whirrings. I did, however, dream that Richard Alpert was hanging out among the castaways in the early episodes, but so far that hasn’t panned out.

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