See that eyeball up there? That belongs to one Jack Shephard. A survivor of flight 815 that crashed on an island somewhere in the Pacific shortly after takeoff from Sydney, Australia. Get used to seeing closeups of eyes in this show. They do that a lot. Especially considering this show was on the alphabet network and not the eyeball one. Looks like CBS missed the boat on that one. But oh well, let's not leave Jack lying there, we need to talk about him and all the other survivors. For the most part, I'm going to go by what I see in each episode not what I know now. Sure there will be times where I will drop a little spoiler for later episodes but it won't be real spoiler-y. So Jack Shephard wakes up in the jungle and makes his way to a beach where he finds the wreckage of the Oceanic flight that he was on.
Jack is force! He is all over the place helping people, saving people, giving directions to everyone on how to help each other. Jack is all gas and no breaks. He never panics, he never questions anything. A neurosurgeon, Jack goes into hero mode almost instantly. Something many of the other survivors desperately need. Who else do we meet? Well, there's Boone Carlyle an idiot, and his sister Shannon, a total bitch. As Jack takes a break from his heroic ways he takes a moment away from the crash site to check on his own injuries. He has a wound on his left side that is bleeding and needs some attention. Unfortunately he can't do much for it since he can't really reach it. Lucky for him a rather attractive woman approaches him. Her name is Kate. Jack talks Kate into stitching up his wounds. The writers did a decent job of covering up Matthew Fox's Party of Five tattoo. Jack tells Kate he allows panic to seep into his consciousness for just five seconds and then keep going. OK, seems legit, I'll go with it.
We also meet Charlie, Sayid, Hurley, Claire (who is pregnant), Michael and his son Walt. LOST is told in two different timelines in that we see what happens after the crash but we also see parts of each survivor's life before the crash in flashbacks. Some flashbacks go back years while others are more recent. In the first set of flashbacks we see the survivors on the plane before it crashed. Jack is sitting next to a woman named Rose. She tells Jack her husband is in the bathroom. We see Charlie rush past Jack on his way to the bathroom as well. Back on the island we see Kate take some boots from a dead guy while another survivor gives her an orange-y smile. We would later go on to find out his name is John Locke. The first night after the crash we hear something big making a loud noise. Something big enough to make large trees shake and bend. It also shows up the next day. There's also a yellow Labrador retriever named Vincent running around with the survivors who turns out to be Walt's dog.
Jack, Kate, and Charlie go on a search for the cockpit in order to find a transceiver which is just a fancy name for a walky-talky. Charlie brags about being in a rock band named Drive Shaft. The trio is able to find the cockpit and the pilot (Greg Grunberg who would go on to play a bigger part in the show Heroes) is still alive. He tells them that the plane turned around six hours into the flight due to radio failure. This resulted in them being a thousand miles off course so any rescue team is looking in the wrong direction. The pilot is then snatched from the plane by whatever is in the jungle. There is blood everywhere. Kate takes off running and hides in a bunch of trees. While there she uses Jack's five second rule. They eventually find the pilot high up in a tree now dead.
Back on the plane we see Boone and Shannon are in first class as Charlie runs past them. While in the bathroom Charlie, who is now being chased by crew members, takes heroin from his shoe and attempts to flush the toilet but before he can the plane crashes. We then see the real reason Charlie went to the cockpit was to get his drugs back. We meet two other crash survivors who are from Korea and do not speak English. The husband, named Jin, seems very controlling forcing his wife to button the top button on her shirt while Michael is trying to communicate with her. Michael is trying to find Walt who has found a set of handcuffs. Sawyer, a somewhat racist redneck fights with Sayid who is from Iraq. Sawyer is quick with the nicknames, insults, and likes to say "son of a bitch" a lot. He calls Hurley "Lardo" which is the first official nickname (insult) he uses and accuses Sayid of crashing the plane. We see a rivalry form between Jack and Sawyer early on with Sawyer calling Jack the big hero. While speaking to Sayid, Hurley finds out Sayid fought in Desert Storm but not on the American's side.
Sayid works on the radio they got from the cockpit and suggests they try to use in while on higher ground as the battery in the radio is low. We see Jin offer food to Hurley before giving any to his wife. In a sign of protest his wife whose name is Sun unbuttons the top button on her shirt again. Kate, Sayid, Charlie, Shannon, and Boone all decide to go on a hike to see if they can get a signal with the radio. Sawyer, after reading a letter he has watched them leave and decides to join them. Walt sits down and tells John Locke that his mother recently passed away. John tells him he's having a bad month. John explains the game of backgammon but it seems like he's talking about more than just a game. "One is light. One is dark.". He then asks Walt if he wants to know a secret. For the first time since crashing, Claire feels her baby kick and shares the moment with Jin who is awkward about it in a fairly funny moment.
Sawyer and his group encounter a polar bear which just happens to be on a tropical island. Huh? "Guess what? I just shot a bear!". I'll point out some good lines when I remember to and that is one of the lines that has stuck with me still to this day. While Sawyer tells Shannon how he got the gun he calls her "Sweet Cheeks" which is the dumbest name I have ever heard and don't know how anyone could ever like being called that. Now, where was I? Back on the plane we see that Kate was the person in the handcuffs who was brought onto the plane by a US Marshall. The Marshall is where the gun came from that Sawyer had and he's also the man that Jack is trying to save on the beach with shrapnel buried in his side. Jack tries to remove it with Hurley's help; well, Hurley's there, anyway. Not sure how much help he really was. The radio group finally get the radio to work but cannot transmit a distress signal due to another message already broadcasting on a loop. The message is in French that Shannon manages to roughly translate as "Please help me. Please come get me. I'm alone now. Please someone come. The others are dead. It killed them. It killed them all.". Sayid estimates that if the counter counting how many times the message transmits is correct it has been transmitting for more than sixteen years. Charlie asks what we are all asking at this point: "Guys, where are we?".
