Pilot, Part 1

Pilot, Part 1
Season	1
Episode number	01
Airdate(s)	22 September 2004
Length	42:20
Flashback	Jack
Days	1-2
Writer	Teleplay by J.J. Abrams & Damon Lindelof Story by Jeffrey Lieber and J.J. Abrams & Damon Lindelof
Director	J.J. Abrams
Guests	Fredric Lane - Edward Mars L. Scott Caldwell - Rose Nadler
Co-stars	Kimberley Joseph - Cindy Chandler Jon Dixon - Flight Attendant #2 Michelle Arthur - Flight Attendant #3 Dale Radomski - Tourniquet Man Geoff Heise - Man Barbara Vidinha - Woman
Uncredited	Greg Grunberg - Seth Norris Frank Torres - Gary Troup
Transcript	Pilot, Part 1 transcript

"Pilot, Part 1" is the first of the two-part pilot episode of Lost. It was originally broadcast on September 22, 2004, and "Pilot, Part 2" aired the following week. The two parts aired together 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 to treat the injured and attempts to find the cockpit of the plane in the hope of contacting civilization.

The episode establishes the show's use of flashbacks to show characters' lives before arriving on the Island. The one flashback in this episode depicts Jack's 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 cabin window to his left. A friendly flight attendant, Cindy Chandler, passes and asks him if he enjoyed his drink. His lukewarm response that "it's not a very strong drink" leads her to give him two more sample bottles of vodka. After consuming one of the bottles, Jack rises and stands in the aisle, where a hurried Charlie Pace passes him, pursued by Chandler and another flight attendant. Rose Nadler, sitting next to Jack in seat 23D, comments about the incident. She reacts to some light turbulence and Jack attempts to allay her aviophobia, to which she agrees, saying that her temporarily absent husband always reminds her that "planes want to be in the air." Jack says her husband sounds like a smart man; Rose responds she'll tell him that when he returns from the bathroom. The plane begins to shake more violently before making a sharp, uncontrolled descent, causing those not seated to strike the cabin roof. The cabin loses pressure as the plane rapidly descends, oxygen masks fall from the ceiling, which the passengers quickly put on. After securing his mask, Jack looks out the right window, this time at the approaching ocean.

On the Island

Jack comes to in a bamboo grove.

Jack wakes in shock, flat on his back in a dense a bamboo grove. Vincent, a golden Labrador, looks at him and runs past him. Slowly Jack struggles to stand and leans against a tall piece of bamboo. He finds a sample bottle of vodka in his jacket pocket and returns it. Jack runs haphazardly through the grove towards the beach passing a white tennis shoe hanging from a tree. ♪

Jack and Locke pull a survivor from beneath the plane's wheels.

He emerges at a pristine beach but to his left is the chaos of the wrecked mid-section of Flight 815. Jack stumbles towards the crash site where survivors move about in disarray. Charlie Pace, dazed, stands dangerousl y close to a still-running engine. Jin-Soo Kwon, oblivious to his fellow passengers, cries out in Korean for his wife, and Michael Dawson shouts for his son, Walt, as he runs through the wreckage. Nearby, Shannon Rutherford stands screaming hysterically beneath the plane's precariously teetering wing. With the help of John Locke and two other men, Jack pulls a passenger with a crushed leg from underneath one of the plane's detached landing wheels and ties a tourniquet above the injury. Jack sees 8-month pregnant girl crying for help. Jack orders Locke to keep others away from the engine and runs to the girl and asks how far apart her contractions are. He notices a young man incorrectly performing CPR on a woman. Meanwhile, Gary Troup, while crossing the path of the still-running engine is sucked in and the engine explodes violently.

Jack and Hurley help Claire escape the falling wing.

After shielding Claire from the explosion, Jack tells her to remain absolutely still and directs Hugo "Hurley" Reyes to take her away from the fumes of the burning wreckage and call him if her situation worsens. Hugo asks his name and Jack calls his first name back. Jack now goes to the young man trying to resuscitate the woman and tells [[Boone Carlyle|the young man] he is doing the mouth to mouth incorrectly. The well-intentioned but unqualified Boone goes find a pen thinking it may help. The woman, Rose, eventually is breathing after Jack refuses to give up. Jack looks up and sees Hugo and Claire sitting under the plane's wing which is creaking ominously. He dashes to them and the three just escape as the wing collapses and explodes. A piece of the plane's engine narrowly misses Charlie as he wanders aimlessly. ♪

Jack wanders through the wreckage and stops at what remains of the fuselage and peers in. Boone arrives a handful of pens saying that he didn't know which one would work best. Jack replies that they are all good as Boone solemnly looks into the wreckage. ♪

Jack tells Kate about his experience with fear, while she stitches his wound.

Jack finds a sewing kit in a suitcase and runs to a secluded spot away from the wreckage to treat a large gash on his back above his waist. He sees Kate Austen walking out of the jungle and asks her to stitch his wound as it is out of his reach. She reluctantly agrees. She rinses her hands with Jack's vodka while he washes the wound. He chooses "standard black" thread. Terrified, Kate is calmed by Jack's story of his first solo surgical procedure on a girl when he accidentally ripped her dural sac, where he conquered his fear by "letting the fear in," but only for five seconds which he counted away. Kate says that she would have run for the door, but Jack points out that she is not running now.

On the beach it is twilight as Sawyer smokes grimly as he surveys the wreckage, Claire stands looking to sea, Locke sits on the beach. Hurley salvages some meals from the plane's galley. Sayid enlists Charlie to keep the fire he has built alight and "big" otherwise no-one will see it. Rose tearfully kisses her wedding ring.

Night. Charlie has written FATE on a bandage on each finger of his left hand. Sayid says that he would have expected them to have been rescued by now. Shannon petulantly refuses a chocolate bar offered by Boone while she paints her toenails, saying she will eat on the "rescue boat". Hurley distributes the meals, giving two to Claire. Michael cares for his son. Jin tells Sun that she must stay with him at all times and not care about the other survivors.

Michael and Walt lay by a fire.

Jack tends to an unconscious Edward Mars who is badly injured by shrapnel embedded in his abdomen. Kate asks Jack if he believes the man will live and informs him that she was sitting next to him during the flight. They discuss the crash and where the missing cockpit and tail might be. Jack thinks there might be a transceiver in the cockpit they could use to send a signal .

Hurley hands Claire her dinner.

The Survivors hear the the Monster.

Beyond the light of their fire, the peacefulness is interrupted by loud and terrifying mechanical-sounding noises from the jungle, punctuated by the crashing of trees. The survivors gather together fearfully and look toward the noises. Rose remarks that the sounds seem "really familiar." Someone asks where she is from, and she says the Bronx (in New York City).

The next day, as some of the survivors discuss the strange jungle noises of the night before Kate readies Jack to find the cockpit and its transceiver. Kate takes walking shoes from a dead body and looks up to see Locke watching her. He smiles to reveal an orange peel obscuring his teeth. Jack leaves Boone in charge of the wounded, including Edward Mars. Charlie pushes himself into the small group and they set off based on Kate's descriptions of the location of smoke. ♪ Kate tells Charlie he looks familiar, and he reveals to her that he is the bassist in the band Drive Shaft. Vincent watches the trio from the bushes.

As evening approaches a tropical rainstorm drenches the survivors. Only Locke remains uncovered as he welcomes the rain with open arms. The terrifying noises and movement in the jungle is seen again by Claire and Rose.

Jack, Kate and Charlie discover the pilot is alive.

The trio find the nose section of the plane, which is sitting at a steep angle in the trees. ♪ Led by Jack they climb into the nose and scale the slanted floor, where Jack pries open the cockpit door and a body falls through the door. Inside they find the pilot, still in his seat, who suddenly coughs. 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 "they are looking for us in the wrong place". The pilot locates the transceiver, but can't get it to work. Jack and Kate notice that Charlie is missing. As Kate calls for him, he guiltily emerges from the bathroom.

Jack, Kate and Charlie find the Pilot.

Loud noises and the mechanical thrashing heard by the survivors on the beach fill the air. The pilot attempts to investigate by cautiously peering out of a broken cockpit window. To the horror Kate, Jack and Charlie the pilot is seized by something unseen and pulled through the window, a large splatter of blood splashes on the cockpit window as he disappears. Jack 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 to free his leg before running and becoming separated. Kate continues running, but stops and draws under the trailing roots of a banyan a tree and in terror calms herself by counting to five. [[Run Like, Um... Hell?|♪]

Charlie runs into Kate and the two begin searching for Jack who is now the one missing. The rain stops. Kate goes back for Jack and 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, mangled. Jack steps out of hiding, saying that he dodged the Monster. Looking up Charlie wonders what could have possibly done that to the pilot.

Trivia

Jack's small bottle of vodka

Boone offering Shannon an Apollo Bar

The tail section, originally supposed to land on the same beach as the fuselage

• The premiere episodes from the first three seasons are Jack-centric, although he only has one flashback in this episode.
• The premiere episodes from the first three seasons start with a character and 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 Paulo), and "Greatest Hits" (Charlie), in the flashbacks of midsection 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 tail section survivors), "Live Together, Die Alone, Part 2" (Desmond), "A Tale of Two Cities" (the Others), "One of Us" (the Others), and "The Other Woman" (the Others).
• J.J. Abrams won an Emmy for the directing of this episode.
• Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Jeffrey Lieber received an Emmy nomination for writing the episode.
• When this episode was repeated in the United Kingdom on August 10, 2005, the deaths of Gary Troup and the pilot were omitted in order for the premiere to maintain a PG rating. However, reruns shown after 10 p.m. show these scenes.
• Jack's bottle of vodka contains Cyrillic text "dozhd" transliterated as "rain", with the English words "Pure Vodka" below it.
• Boone offers Shannon an Apollo Bar.
• The boots Kate removes from a corpse are from the brand "Ariat", an equestrian athletic shoe.[1]
• Originally, the tail section of Oceanic Flight 815 was going to land on the same beach as the fuselage (rather than across the Island). ("Inner Demons")
• Sound bytes are used from the PC game Half-Life 2: When the plane's engine explodes and debris rains down, a man is hit by a piece and the sound produced is virtually identical to that of a Combine soldier dying. The sound of the debris crashing is also identical to that of wood breaking in the game. This is one of several allusions to Half-Life within the series.
• The title, like many episodes, has a double meaning: not just the first episode, but the first victim of the Smoke Monster.

Production Notes

• This is the only first hour of a season in which all main cast members appear.
  • Yunjin Kim (Sun) and Terry O'Quinn (Locke) appear without speaking lines.
  • This is the only season premiere to feature Michael and only one to feature Jin and Boone in a speaking part until Season 6 premiere.
• With a budget of $11.5 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. (Pilot, Part 1 audio commentary) Contrary to popular belief, this story change occurred long before the casting of Matthew Fox.
• At one point in the development of the script, Boone's name was going to be "Five" (he would be named "Boone Anthony Markham V" and would go by "Five"). When they decided to change it back to "Boone", they ran a find-and-replace on the script, which resulted in the the dialog between Kate and Jack in the stitching scene reading as, "One, Two, Three, Four, Boone." (Pilot, Part 1 audio commentary)
• 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 in the story as the actual date that Oceanic Flight 815 crashed. This was confirmed aloud in "Live Together, Die Alone, Part 1" and "The Glass Ballerina".
• According to producer Bryan Burk, the color red was purposefully de-emphasized in the crash scene so the few shots of blood would "really land." (Pilot, Part 1 audio commentary)
• For the scenes with Kate and Charlie running from the cockpit, the actors weren't able to be filmed in focus, so they were filmed running in place. A long lens (putting the background out of focus) and a shaking camera were used to give the illusion of them running through the jungle. (Pilot, Part 1 audio commentary)
• Aside from the main cast, this episode also features the first appearances of Rose Nadler, Edward Mars, Cindy Chandler, Michelle and JD.
• An audio commentary by J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof and Bryan Burk is available for this episode on the Season 1 DVD.
• On the DVD featurette on the creation of the pilot, a version of the cast picture with Rose instead of Claire can be seen, meaning that she may have been a regular instead.

Bloopers and continuity errors

See main articles: turbine explosion, persistent rumors

• 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 Jack is shown running through the wreckage, the main landing gear of the plane has only four wheels instead of the six a B-777 would have. Also, in several shots of the instruments in the cockpit, there are three engine indicators instead of the two a 777 would have.
• 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 and explained as an artifact of poor CGI effects (which should have shown the object radiating out from the turbine after the explosion, instead of approaching the turbine beforehand).
• When the Monster grabs the pilot and pulls him out of the plane, a lot of blood falls on the window behind Kate. A few seconds later, the window is clean again.

Music

Michael Giacchino's score for this episode relies more on synthesized instruments than later episodes would, but the instrumentation is otherwise very similar. The episode also establishes the basic contrast between quiet, consonant passages and loud, dissonant ones. The show's main "mystery" theme is introduced as Jack runs out of the jungle to the crash site. A 14-bar percussion cue during the chaotic scene at the crash site was appropriated for use in the end credits theme music for the show. After the action settles down, Giacchino introduces the gentle theme for the survivors, which has become a much-used theme throughout the series. Also introduced is the show's first "traveling theme," a quiet and repetitive motif for scenes involving treks across the Island. (A different statement can be heard on the Season 3 soundtrack as "Juliet is Lost.")

The Season 1 soundtrack includes the following tracks written for "Pilot, Part 1":

• "The Eyeland"
• "World's Worst Beach Party"
• "Credit Where Credit is Due"
• "Run Like, Um... Hell?"

Analysis

Recurring themes

• The episode opens with a close-up of Jack's eye, pulling back and showing him alone in the jungle. (Eyes)  (Isolation)
• Claire tells Jack that she is eight months pregnant. (The Numbers)  (Pregnancies)
• Charlie puts white tape on 4 fingers of his left hand onto which he writes the letters "F A T E" with a black marker. (Black and white)  (Fate versus free will)  (The Numbers)
• When Kate is getting prepared to sew up Jack's wound, she asks him if he has a thread color preference for the stitches; he replies, "No. Standard black." (Black and white)
• While Kate is sewing up his wound, Jack talks about his "count to five" story, which he used to combat fear. (Fear)
• The girl Jack operated on in his "count to five" story was 16 years old. (The Numbers)
• John Locke has a gash above and below his right eye from the crash. (Eyes)
• 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)
• Jack tells the pilot that at least 48 people survived the plane crash. (Life and death)  (The Numbers)
• 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)  (Rebirth)
• The pilot is pulled from the cockpit, and later found dead on a tree. (Life and death)
• Jack is sitting in row 23 on the plane. (The Numbers)
• Jack strikes the cockpit door eight times before it gives way. (The Numbers)
• When the pilot regains consciousness, Jack tells him it's been 16 hours since the crash. (The Numbers)
• Jack, Kate and Charlie are drenched with a sudden rainstorm as they advance into the jungle. (Rain)
• One of the first people Jack notices and helps after he shows up at the crash site is his half-sister Claire. (Character connections)

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)

Literary techniques

• Jack finds a vodka bottle in his pocket when he wakes up disoriented in the jungle. (Foreshadowing)
• Jack's flashback introduces one of 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)
• After Jack's "count to five" story, Kate tells Jack she would've run for the door in that situation. Jack replies, "No, I don't think that's true. You're not running now." (Foreshadowing)
• When Jack is explaining to Kate what happened to the plane, he makes a model of the plane out of leaves to illustrate his point; this looks similar to 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)
• Rose is shown kissing her husband's wedding ring. (Foreshadowing)
• Charlie runs by Jack in the airplane and later spends extra time in the cockpit restroom. (Foreshadowing)
• Before entering the cockpit, Jack tells Kate and Charlie, "Let's do this." (Regularly spoken phrases)
• After getting separated from Jack, Kate tells Charlie, "We have to go back for him." (Regularly spoken phrases)
• The pilot is the first "redshirt" of the series. (Redshirt)

Storyline analysis

• Jack, Kate, and Charlie locate the cockpit in order to salvage the plane's transceiver. This is the series' first A-Mission. (A-Missions)
• Attending to various medical situations after the crash and coming up with a plan to locate the transceiver to find rescue, Jack begins to emerge as the leader of the middle section survivors. (Leadership)

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

• Why did Jack wake up in the middle of the jungle?
• Why did the Monster kill Seth Norris?

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)