In my previous post about The Stand, I alluded to the fact that a new TV show this season was loosely based on the book. Since the show is on tonight, I figured now would be an excellent time to introduce it to everybody.
This past summer, I stumbled across a lineup of the upcoming fall television season and I have to admit I was unimpressed with most of the new shows. A Friends spin-off, something about families trading parents, and far too many “reality” shows. Whoopdie-doo. Then I happened to see ABC’s lineup and something caught my eye. The extremely short tagline said something to do about a group of airplane survivors stranded on a deserted island and suddenly there was hope. Maybe this new season might actually produce something besides “HIS FATHER’S THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY!” I did a little more prodding and found that the show was called Lost and that it would indeed revolve around the plot of a group of 46 survivors of a horrible plane wreck. The more I thought about it, the cooler the concept sounded to me and so I have to admit that going into the series premier, my expectations were dangerously high.
They have yet to be let down.
The series premier started off with a bang. Literally. The viewers found themselves looking through the eyes of Jack as he shook off the dizziness and tried to figure out just what in the hell had happened to him. He runs out onto a beachhead where he and the viewers are greeted with hysterically screaming and injured victims, the low wheezing and sputtering of a now useless plane engine, and bloodied corpses strewn across the area. Luckily, Jack remembers that he is a doctor and begins rounding up people as fast as he can. He managed to save as few people, but some are just beyond his skills. Oh yeah, and the engine sucks in a retard who runs up to it, thereby causing the engine to explode and rain fiery shrapnel down upon the survivors. Whoops.
As the episode progresses, you finally meet a few of the soon-to-be main cast members. They are as follows.
- Jack - Mentioned earlier, the doctor and arguably main character.
- Kate - The first person Jack managed to save, which results in her forming a special bond with him. Could love be in the air? Well, if so, Jack most certainly isn’t catching her drifts. Oh, and she’s HOT!!
- Sayid - A former member of the Iraqi Republican Guard, he now is a US citizen who is a whiz with the electronics. It’s his idea to gut whatever electronics there are and build a distress signal box. I’ll let ya know how that turned out. His accent is pretty cool too.
- Hurley - He too quickly takes a liking to Jack and has become his defacto right hand man. He’s a big man who certainly livens things up with his sense of humor. He gets maybe 20 lines an episode and somehow comes away with the feeling that he stole each and every scene he was in.
- Shannon and Boone - She’s 20, he’s 22, and their siblings who love to hate each other. She’s what you might call a “stuck up, pampered, rich bitch” while you can tell he was the black sheep of the family who hated money and just wanted to be normal.
- Sawyer - The man you want to love, but know there’s no way in hell you ever will. The very next day after crashing, Sawyer could be found digging through the personal belongings of cargo area looking for money, watches, laptops, and anything else of value. He’s also a sexist pig and lets it be known he has his eyes set on Kate.
- Walt and Michael - Finally, some people of color! Walt is the (12 year old?) son of Michael (yes, he’s the same actor who played Link in The Matrix), although they don’t really know each other. Quickly after Walt’s birth, his parents divorced and he moved with his mother to Sydney. You quickly find out that his mom died and that Michael had went to pick Walt up to come live with him in the states. I smell awkwardness! Oh yeah, Walt has a dog named Vincent who also survived the crash. He’s cool.
- Jin and Sun - More minorities! Although, these two are Korean and don’t speak a lick of English! More on them in a little bit.
- Charlie - Yes, Charlie was one of the hobbits in LOTR. Move on you nerds. In Lost, Charlie plays the roll of an ex-rock star. His band was awesome in early 90s, but has since fallen on hard times. Charlie is also a drug addict who is about to unwilling go through rehab thanks to the fact that he only has a week’s worth of crack in his luggage.
- Claire - She’s pregnant, she’s alone, she’s cute, and she’s about to pop. Damn. Good thing there’s a doctor on the island. But wait a minute; the producers are toying with killing her! NOOO!
- Locke - Ah, Locke. I saved the best for last. Locke is probably one of the coolest characters on television in a long time. The producers of the show continually make him out to be a good guy (He tracked and found Walt-s dog Vincent, he-s shown the group how to hunt and live off the land, and he helped Charlie get over his drug addiction.) Yet at the same time, they continually make him out to be the bad guy as well by zooming the camera in on his eerie grin and playing spooky music at the end of his scenes. He’s probably the oldest guy on the island, easily the oldest out of all the main character and he seems to want to stay on the island. He keeps talking about his “miracle” and nobody knows what in the hell he is talking about. But mostly he’s just damn cool.
The subsequent episodes take a neat spin. From episode 2 up until now and probably for the rest of the year, they have focused not only on the trials and tribulations of the survivors, but on one certain person’s background. Again, here is the character list and what we have learned about each character so far from their personal episode.
- Jack - He was on his way back home to the US after traveling to Sydney. Why was he there? To pick up his dead father and bring his body home. We also learn that when Jack was younger, his dad used to beat him and tell him he was too dumb to become a doctor, so of course he’s got some issues there.
- Kate - In probably the first real twist of the show, we learn that sweet, (and HOT) Kate was being “escorted” back to the US by a Federal Marshall. Jack is the only person who saw her mug shot and when Kate tries to tell him why she’s a convict, he cuts her off telling her he doesn’t want to know.
- Sayid - As stated earlier, Sayid worked as an interrogator for the Iraqi Republican Guard. However, one day he is forced to interrogate a Kurdish childhood girlfriend of his and she is able to show him the evilness in what he does. At the end of the episode, we see him shoot his boss and smuggle her out of the detention facility, but we don’t know how he managed to escape or what he did after he got out. He also carries with him a picture of the girl, who he says is dead.
- Hurley - No episode yet.
- Shannon and Boone - No episode yet.
- Sawyer - Not surprisingly, Sawyer was a con artist in his previous life. He finds married women, seduces them, and then swindles the family out of thousands of dollars though some fake “oil investment” plan. However, near the end of the episode, we see him just about to steal twenty thousand dollars when the couple’s child walks in the room. He freezes, drops the money, and runs out of the house. Back on the island, Kate finds a letter that Sawyer carries with him postmarked back in 1976. It’s written by a child to a “Mr. Sawyer” and vows revenge. Apparently this “Mr. Sawyer” stole money from the child’s family and forced his parents to commit suicide. Kate puts two and two together and realizes that the letter was indeed written by Sawyer himself and that somewhere along the line, he simply became “Mr. Sawyer.”
- Walt and Michael - No episode yet.
- Jin and Sun - Jin is a lowly waiter who manages to win the heart of Sun, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. To marry Sun and receive her father’s blessings, Jin goes to work for her dad. Over the years, things get rough and Sun realizes that Jin’s job for her father is killing their relationship. She secretly learns English and plans to leave him while they are at the airport when she suddenly realizes that everything he did and suffered through was out of love for her, so she decides to get on the plane with him and stick it out.
- Charlie - His flashback spans over about a decade. It starts off with him as the good little boy who can play a mean guitar. His older brother pleads and pleads with him to start a rock band and when they do, they are an instant him. Charlie has no interest in drugs, but he catches his older brother with them and eventually starts taking them himself. Since then, the band broke up and Charlie’s brother got himself cleaned up, married, and settled down with kids while Charlie is still in the gutter and trying to “bring the band back.”
- Claire - Her episode was last week and DAMN! Claire is the Australian Cutie who learned 9 months before getting on the plane that not even birth control pills are 100%. The boy who knocks her up freaks and runs off, leaving here with no choice but to have the baby and give him up for adoption. Meanwhile, she goes to a psychic just for kicks, but he freaks out and demands that she keep the baby. Shocked (since she’s only 2 months pregnant), she demands to know why and he pretty much tells her that the baby will become the next Hitler without her loving influence. He keeps telling her that nobody but her can keep this child from becoming evil and so she runs out of his office. For the next 7 months, he keeps calling and showing up at her house pleading with her to keep the baby and just before she is to sign the adoption papers, she goes to him just to hear him out and see what his plan is. He hands her $10,000 and a plane ticket for later that day. He tells her that she must take THIS plane and no other plane to LA and that when she gets there, a loving couple will adopt the baby. She gets on the plane and of course it crashes. As she is telling Charlie her story, she makes the remark of “Well, I guess he wasn’t too psychic since I’ll never see that couple now” and then it dawns on her. There never was any couple. The psychic knew the plane was going to crash and by getting her on that plane, he forced her into keeping the baby.
- Locke - Locke! Again, I saved the best for last. In Locke’s episode, we see that in his past life he was a Nobody. He worked in a small cubicle, played RISK during his lunch break by himself, and was made fun of by everybody he came into contact with. He acts as if he is somebody of importance, somebody destined to greatness, but every time he brings this up, they laugh at him. We see that he is extremely excited about his upcoming trip to Australia where he is going to partake in a three week trek through the Outback on a tour. Later, we see him in the Australian office being rejected for the trek and he is outraged, saying he has looked forward to and trained for this for over three years. The agent responds with “Yeah, but you didn’t tell us about your ‘condition’” and the camera pans out to show how he is sitting in a wheelchair. At the close of his episode, we relive the tragic plane crash again and find Locke lying on the beach. As he comes to, he sits and up notices that his shows were blown off. And then his toes wiggle. His eyes grown huge as he slowly lifts his legs in the air and pulls himself up to stand. Someway, somehow, the crash “cured” him and enabled him to walk again.
But, of course, most of the show is centered around their daily lives on the island. You learn that the plane, traveling from Sydney to LA, ran into some foul weather. The dieing pilot uses his last breath to explain that the transceiver was knocked out of commission and that the plane was flown hundred of miles off course in an attempt to get around the storm. So, in short, nobody on the outside world knows about the plane’s diversion and therefore, they’re unlikely to search where the survivors now are. There are apparently other people who have been stranded on this island before hand since a few skeletal remains have been found. Sayid managed to pick up a French distress signal that’s been broadcasting continuously from the island for the past 16 years, but he was attacked by an unknown assailant before he could locate its source. Oh, yeah, and when nighttime falls, ear piercing roars can be heard from deep within the jungle as treetops are visibly pushed over and stomped to the ground. Fun stuff!
So, getting back to my original point, remember how I said this show was loosely based on The Stand? Well, the similarities are already beginning to take shape. Jack, being the reasonable thinker that he is, realizes that some newly discovered caves would offer better protection that the beach. He also finds a fresh water spring nearby, which further encourages him to move. However, the rest of the survivors aren’t so sure since they don’t want to abandon the beach and give up hope in being rescued. He does, however, convince a small chunk of people to come with him and finally, we begin to see the separation that occurred in The Stand. As of now, Hurley, Walt and Michael, Jin and Sun, Charlie, and Locke have joined Jack, as well as some other, unknown people.
The rest have stayed on the beach and frankly, this show just seems to get better and better each and every week. The music is outstanding (I’ve already downloaded many episode and ripped about six songs straight to my iPod since they are all orchestral pieces I have no way of finding the names to.) The camera work and acting is light years above and beyond other “dramas” like ER, Law & Order, or C.S.I. And the flashbacks are the added touch that seals the deal. So, if my rambling here hasn’t already convinced you to give the show a try, well…give the damn show a try! There’s one more episode tonight before the Holiday Break (ABC @ 8:00) and I promise if you just give it a try, you’ll become addicted.
I swear, ABC should pay me for pimping this damn show out so much.
