Pilot, Part 1

"Pilot, Part 1"
Season	1
Episode number	1
Airdate(s)	September 22, 2004
Flashback	Jack
Days	1-2
Writer	Jeffrey Lieber J.J. Abrams Damon Lindelof
Director	J.J. Abrams
Guests	Fredric Lane - The Marshal L. Scott Caldwell - Rose
Co-stars	Kimberley Joseph - Flight attendant #1 Jon Dixon - Flight attendant #2 Michelle Arthur - Flight attendant #3 Dale Radomski - Tourniquet Man Geoff Heise - Man Barbara Vidinha - Woman
Uncredited	Greg Grunberg - Pilot Frank Torres - Gary Troup
Transcript	Pilot (Part 1 and 2) transcript

"Pilot, Part 1" is the first of the 2-part pilot episode for Lost. "Pilot, Part 2" aired the following week. The complete pilot aired in its original format on October 2, 2004. Jack Shephard, a doctor from Los Angeles, finds himself one of forty-eight survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious island. With the help of other survivors, he begins treating the injured and attempts to find the cockpit of the plane in the hope of contacting civilization.

The episode begins to set the precedent of real-time events and "flashbacks" of characters' pasts before being on the Island. Jack's one flashback in this episode depicts his view of events on the plane just prior to the crash.

Synopsis

Flashback

Jack, looking out the window of Flight 815

Jack Shephard, sitting in seat 23A on board Oceanic Flight 815, pensively looks out the window to his immediate left. A friendly flight attendant, Cindy Chandler, approaches Jack and asks him whether he enjoyed his drink. His lukewarm response results in her handing him two more bottles of vodka. Following his rapid consumption of one of the drinks, Jack rises and stands in the aisle, where a hurried Charlie Pace passes him, pursued by Chandler and another flight attendant. Responding to this, Rose Nadler, sitting next to Jack in seat 23D, comments about the incident. After Nadler's visible reaction to some light turbulence, Jack attempts to allay her aviophobia, to which she agrees, saying that her temporarily absent husband always reminds her "planes want to be in the air." Shortly after, the plane begins to shake more violently before making a sharp, uncontrolled descent, causing those not seated to strike the cabin roof. Due to the loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks fall from the ceiling, which all of the passengers quickly put on. After securing his mask, Jack looks out the right window, this time at the approaching ocean.

Real-time events

Jack Shephard runs through the jungle

Jack Shephard lies sprawled out under a group of trees in a bamboo grove located on the outskirts of a jungle. Vincent, a golden labrador, trots through the trees, stopping at Jack for a few moments, before moving on. With great effort, Jack gets to his feet, rests against a tall shoot of bamboo and pulls a bottle of vodka from his jacket pocket, before returning it. Jack then starts running haphazardly through the grove towards the beach, passing a white tennis shoe hanging from a tree to his right.

Emerging near the ruined mid-section of Flight 815, Jack stumbles towards the crash site, while Charlie Pace, still dazed by the crash, stands dangerously close to a still-running engine. Jin-Soo Kwon, oblivious to his fellow passengers, cries out in Korean for his wife, while Michael Dawson similarly searches for his son, Walt. Nearby, a screaming Shannon Rutherford stands beneath the plane's remaining, albeit precariously teetering, wing. With the help of John Locke and another fellow survivor, Jack pulls a passenger with a crushed leg from underneath one of the plane's detached landing wheels. When Jack notices an 8-month pregnant Claire Littleton's cries for help, he orders Locke to keep others away from the engine, before running towards her and asking how far apart her contractions are coming. Jack also notices Boone Carlyle incorrectly performing CPR on Rose Nadler. Meanwhile, Gary Troup, while crossing the path of the still-running engine, is sucked in, causing it to explode.

Jack and Hurley help Claire escape the falling wing

After shielding Claire from the explosion, Jack tells her to remain absolutely still, before directing a nearby Hugo "Hurley" Reyes to help her escape from the fumes of the burning wreckage and call for him if the situation worsens. Reyes and Littleton move to beneath the plane's wing while Jack orders the well-intentioned but unqualified Boone to go find a pen, thus allowing the former to resuscitate Rose without interruption. Subsequently, Jack urges Hurley and Claire to move from beneath the wing just before it breaks off from the body of the fuselage, causing another large explosion and the destruction of the plane's other engine, a piece of which narrowly misses Charlie as he continues to wander.

After wandering through the wreckage, Jack stops at what remains of the fuselage and peers at the dead bodies within. Boone arrives with multiple pens stating that he didn't know which one would work best, then solemnly looks into the wreckage. Jack takes a sewing kit from a suitcase on the beach and moves away from the wreckage to examine a wound on his left side. He sees a young woman walking out of the jungle and asks her to sew his wound. She reluctantly agrees. Terrified, Kate is calmed by Jack during the process by listening to the story of his first solo surgical procedure, where he conquered his fear during an emergency by "letting the fear in," but only for five seconds.

Michael and Walt lay by a fire

Back on the beach, Jack tends to an unconscious male survivor who is badly injured by shrapnel embedded in his torso. Kate asks Jack if he believes the man will live and informs him that she was sitting next to him during the flight. Other survivors(including the father and son we later meet as Michael Dawson and Walt Lloyd) congregate to discuss what to do with the bodies still in the fuselage.

An Iraqi survivor creates a fire and asks Charlie to assist him. Meanwhile, another scruffy-looking man is seen lounging nonchalantly, his back amongst the wreckage, smoking a cigarette. Hurley salvages some meals from the plane's galley and distributes them, giving two to Claire, whose pains have since subsided. Elsewhere, a young woman petulantly refuses a snack offered by Boone, her male companion, because she will eat on the "rescue ship" when it arrives. By that time, the growing general expectation among the survivors is that they will be rescued soon. Sayid organizes the cleanup of the beach.

The Survivors are awoken by the mechanical sounds of the Monster

In the evening, beyond the light of their fire, the peacefulness of waiting is interrupted by loud and terrifying mechanical-sounding noises from the nearby jungle, punctuated by the crashing of trees. The source of these noises is later referred to as the Monster. Rose remarks that the sounds seem "really familiar." Someone asks where she is from, and she says the Bronx (in New York City).

By the next day, Jack has decided that in order to increase their chances of being rescued, the survivors should send a radio message using the transceiver of the aircraft, located in the cockpit, which broke off in the air. In doing so, Jack reveals to Kate that he took a few flying lessons but that it "wasn't for him". Jack leaves Boone in charge of the wounded, including the man with shrapnel in his stomach. Based on her descriptions of the location of smoke, Jack sets off into the jungle accompanied by Kate, at her insistence, as well as Charlie. As the trio walk away from the beach, they are observed from the brush by the dog encountered by Jack when he awoke in the jungle. Kate tells Charlie he looks familiar and he reveals to her that he is the bassist in a band called Drive Shaft.

Jack, Kate and Charlie, on their quest to find the Front section

As the three advance into the jungle, they are drenched by a sudden rainstorm. They find the nose section of the plane, which is sitting at a steep angle in the trees. The three of them, led by Jack, climb into the nose and scale the slanted floor, where Jack pries open the cockpit door. Inside he and Kate discover the pilot, still in his seat, who suddenly awakens. The pilot tells Jack and Kate that the plane had lost radio contact before the crash and had changed course towards Fiji. They were, in his reckoning, 1000 miles off course and thus no one knows where they are. The pilot locates the transceiver, but can't get it to function. At this time, Jack and Kate notice that Charlie is missing, but he promptly emerges from the restroom.

Meanwhile, on the beach during the same rainstorm, a group of the survivors huddles in part of the fuselage. The conspicuous exception is an older fellow, John Locke, who sits alone in the rain on the beach, unbothered, with his arms outstretched in the air, as if glorying in the rain itself. A young Korean couple (whom we later meet as Jin-Soo Kwon and Sun-Hwa Kwon) stay together under part of the fuselage. The man tells his quiet wife in Korean to remain close to him at all times.

Kate asks Charlie about Jack

In the jungle, the conversation in the cockpit is interrupted by loud noises from outside the plane, accompanied by mechanical thrashing heard by the survivors on the beach. The pilot attempts to investigate by cautiously climbing out of a broken cockpit window. To the horror of the survivors, he is seized by some unseen presence while halfway out the window, his blood splattering upon the plane's front end. Jack quickly grabs the transceiver as he and Kate exit the cockpit in terror. As the three run from the Monster, Charlie trips; Jack runs back to him. Kate continues running, but stops against a tree and calms herself by counting to five. Charlie runs into Kate and the two begin searching for Jack, who is now apparently missing. Moments after, Kate finds the pilot's badge in the mud beneath a tree. Charlie and Kate look up and spot his bloodied body suspended in the treetops, unnatural and twisted. Jack then steps out of hiding, saying that he dodged the Monster, and Charlie wonders what could have possibly done that to the pilot.

Trivia

General

• From first to third season, the premiere episode was Jack-centric, although he only has one flashback in this episode.
• From first to third season, the premiere episode starts with a character never seen before on the show, and a locale never seen before on the show.
• The crash site seen in this episode is replicated in "Walkabout" and "Exposé".
• The day of the crash (Wednesday, September 22, 2004) is featured in this episode as well as in "Walkabout" (Locke), "Exposé" (Nikki), and "Greatest Hits" (Charlie), in the flashbacks of mid-section survivors, as well as the mobisode "So It Begins" (Vincent). It is also shown from the perspectives of others in "The Other 48 Days" (The Tailies), "Live Together, Die Alone, Part 2" (Desmond), "A Tale of Two Cities", "One of Us", "The Other Woman" (Juliet) and the mobisode "The Envelope" (Juliet).
• J.J. Abrams won an Emmy for directing this episode.
• Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Jeffrey Lieber received an Emmy nomination for writing the episode.
• The scene where Jack, Kate and Charlie head for the cockpit is referenced again in the episode "The Beginning of the End".
• When this episode was repeated in the United Kingdom on 10th August 2005, Gary Troup's and the Pilot's death were omitted in order for the premier of the show to maintain a PG rating. However, re-runs shown after 10pm show these scenes.

Production notes

• With a budget between $10 to $14 million this episode, along with "Pilot, Part 2", became the most expensive pilot in TV history.
• Jack was originally intended to get killed off in the pilot episode, with Kate replacing him as the de facto leader of the survivors. However, due to strong notes from the network against the death, the writers decided to keep Jack and introduced the short-lived pilot character instead. Contrary to popular belief, this story change occurred long before the casting of Matthew Fox.
• Boone's original name was "5". When they decided to change it to "Boone" they ran a find-and-replace on the script. They later noticed that this changed the dialog between Kate and Jack in the stitching scene to "1, 2, 3, 4, Boone." (Noted during commentary track on DVD at roughly 14:50, Boone was named "Boone Anthony Markham V" and would be called "Five" by the Losties.)
• The pilot, although uncredited, was played by Greg Grunberg, J.J. Abrams's childhood friend who has appeared in almost every one of his productions.
• September 22, 2004, the date this episode originally aired, was later adopted as the actual date storywise that Oceanic Flight 815 crashed. This was confirmed aloud in "Live Together, Die Alone, Part 1" and "The Glass Ballerina".

Bloopers and continuity errors

See main articles: turbine explosion, persistent rumors

• When the plane crashes and the people are panicking, we see the same people running in and out of shot repeatedly in the background behind the main characters.
• Rose is not wearing her husband's wedding ring around her neck as she later says she always does when they are flying although she is seen kissing it on the beach briefly.
• The Oceanic airplane is supposed to be a Boeing 777, but when you see Jack running through the wreckage you can see that the main landing gear of the plane has only 4 wheels instead of the six a B-777 would have. Also, when Kate, Jack and Charlie reach the front section of the plane, in several shots where you can see the instruments of the cockpit, there are 3 engine indicators instead of the two a 777 would have.
• When Jack uses his tie in the first scenes, you can see he is still wearing it in the next shot.
• The black object that appears to swoop down in front of the turbine engine just prior to it exploding was believed by many fans to be the cause of the explosion, and related to The Monster. This was later refuted by the producers as being an artifact of poor CGI effects (which should have been shown radiating out after the explosion was rendered, instead of approaching the turbine before).
• When the Monster grabs the pilot and pulls him out of the plane, a lot of blood falls on the window behind Kate. Although, few seconds later, the window is clean again.
• In the scene when the pilot first wakes up, you can see him wearing a wedding ring. Later in the scene right before he is sucked out by the monster, he puts his left hand on the back of the seat and he is not wearing a ring. See Frank's flashback in ("Confirmed Dead")

Recurring themes

• Charlie puts tape on four fingers of his left hand and writes the letters F A T E on the tape. (Fate)
• When Kate is getting prepared to sew up Jack's wound she asks him if he had a thread color preference for the stitches, and he replies, "No. Standard black." (Black and White)
• The episode opens with a close-up on Jack's eye, which becomes a recurring theme. The character with their eye in close-up view will most probably be the center of the episode's events and flashbacks. (Eyes)
• While Kate is sewing up his wound, Jack talks about his "Count to 5" story, which he used to combat fear. (Fear)
• On their first night on the Island, the survivors are awoken in fear by mechanical noises and shattering trees in the jungle. (Fear)
• At the Front section, Jack, Kate, and Charlie have their first traumatizing encounter with the unseen "Monster." (Fear)
• At the wreckage on the beach, the presence of death is very strong, with all the dead bodies lying around, in addition to those trapped in the fuselage. (Life and Death)
• At the wreckage, Gary Troup gets sucked into a still-running turbine, instantly killing him and causing the turbine to explode. (Life and Death)
• Jack saves Rose's life. (Life and Death)
• The pilot is pulled from the cockpit, and later found dead on a tree. (Life and Death)
• Among the very first survivors Jack tends to is the pregnant Claire. (Pregnancies)
• Jack, Kate and Charlie are drenched with a sudden rainstorm as they advance into the jungle. (Rain)
• Jack is sitting in row 23 on the plane. (The Numbers)

Cultural references

• Monkey Island: Sawyer calls the Island "Monkey Island," a possible reference to LucasArts' series of computer adventure games. (Games)
• The Godfather: Locke is seen smiling with an orange in his mouth, a trick Vito does for his grandson in The Godfather. (Movies and TV)
• Sigmund Freud & the Oceanic feeling - In Chapter I of his book, Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud discusses a letter he received from his friend, the French novelist and mystic Romain Rolland. In this letter, Rolland describes what he calls the "Oceanic" feeling - that is, a feeling of eternity, a deep and innate connection with all things, a "oneness" with the world. Rolland, a "man of faith," sees this "Oceanic" feeling as being the primal source of all religion, but itself independent of any particular religion. Freud, an atheist and avowed "man of science" disagrees. While he admits that many people may experience this "Oceanic" feeling, he locates its source not in some mystical feeling of connection, but in an infantile helplessness experienced when confronted with a hostile world and the subsequent longing for the protection and guidance of the father. For Freud, this "Oceanic" feeling is "sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate."

Literary techniques

• Jack's flashback introduces the main storytelling device of the series. (Flashback)
• Kate is first seen by Jack emerging from the jungle rubbing her wrists. In "Pilot, Part 2", we see that this is because she was wearing handcuffs on the plane. (Foreshadowing)
• When Jack is explaining to Kate what happened on the plane, he makes a model of the plane out of leaves to illustrate his point. This looks a lot like Kate's toy airplane. (Foreshadowing)
• The introduction of the Monster is the first big plot twist of the series. Its appearance and nature remain concealed. (Plot Twist)
• The pilot is the first redshirt of the series. (Redshirt)

Storyline analysis

• "Finding the Cockpit" is an A-Mission

Unanswered questions

Unanswered questions
Do not answer the questions here. Keep the questions open-ended and neutral: do not suggest an answer. More details...

For fan theories about these unanswered questions, see: Pilot, Part 1/Theories

• What is the Monster?
• Why did the Monster kill Seth Norris?
• Why was Jack laying in the bamboo jungle instead of on the beach?
• How can it be possible that one of the engines is still running ?

See also

• Welcome to Oahu (transcript of the DVD bonus feature's about the filming of the pilot)
• Turbine explosion (debunked theory)
• The Wreck Of Island Aeromotive (a parody of this episode)