I got on the Lost bandwagon late into the game. Well, that’s not entirely true. When I first started seeing promos for Lost in 2004, I was ready for it. I couldn’t wait. I was ready to jump on board right from the beginning.
Then I missed the first episode”¦ and forgot to tape it. I hadn’t yet discovered the wonderful world of DVRs (TiVo, to use the trendy lingo).
Since I wasn’t really proficient with bit-torrent at the time, I never caught up and I never got on board. I knew Lost was the kind of show I would have to catch from the beginning and I’m a little OCD when it comes to my television shows. I didn’t want to watch it from the middle and I knew trying to catch up in re-runs would be hit or miss, so I wrote it off.
At the beginning of this year, my girlfriend got me a Netflix subscription for my birthday. Lost was halfway through the second season and I’d been catching promos of the new episodes on various ABC shows. Since I wasn’t watching, I would watch the promos and be mildly irritated at myself for missing the boat, so to speak. About three weeks in to my Netflix subscription, I put Lost on the list and started getting the discs in between my catching up on season 1 and 2 of 24. And that was pretty much it. I promoted the remaining six discs in my queue and burned through them in a week.
This isn’t supposed to be a full recap of the episodes from the first season, it’s supposed to be a handy guide for the important characters introduced in season one and important events from season one. It will address some of the theories introduced by the enormous online community for this show (I had no idea. I never searched for a Lost site online until two days ago to find a picture of the Blast Door map) and my own theories on the storylines. I’m not going to get into trying to predict what the writers have coming, really, because I don’t think we will figure it out and, if we do figure it out, they’ll probably change it.
On the Season 1 DVD, the show’s creators say they set out to create a scripted Survivor, which no one was interested until someone had the idea to make the Island itself a main character. That was your pitch, and what kicked it off.
The Main Characters
Dr Jack Shephard: Jack is the de-facto leader of the castaways we meet in the first episode. The opening shot is on Jack as we fade into the show. Jack was in Australia to retrieve the body of his father, Christian Shephard, who’s an alcoholic and has his license revoked for operating on a patient drunk. Jack becomes leader of the group based primarily on the fact he’s a doctor and the way he initially takes charge of the situation after the crash. Jack is divorced, after having married a patient whose legs he fixed. Since he’s a spinal doctor, and Locke is paralyzed, there’s an assumption that Jack and Locke may have met by far before.
James “Sawyer” Ford: The con man who was in Australia to hunt down “Sawyer” the man who conned his family out of all their money, which caused his father to kill his mother and commit suicide. Sawyer’s mission in life, other than conning people out of money, is to find this Sawyer and kill him. He gets a lead telling him Sawyer is in Australia. After killing this man, Sawyer discovers the man wasn’t who he was looking for. There is rampant speculation about who this Sawyer will turn out to be, due to the tendency of all these people to be weirdly connected.
Kate Austen: Kate was in Australia to escape federal marshals who were hunting for her after she escaped custody. She was turned in to the authorities by the farmer she was staying with. Kate’s backstory is complex. We don’t know, in the first season, what she did to get the marshals on her trail. We know she visited her mother in the hospital while a fugitive. Her mother was dying of cancer and her childhood friend was a doctor in the hospital. That friend was the same one who she shared a time capsule with. Before visiting her mom, they went to retrieve the time capsule where they got a toy plane. Marshals caught up to her in the hospital and her friend died helping her escape. She later organizes a bank robbery to retrieve the toy plane, and finally retrieves it out of the marshals Halliburton. Kate seems like a good person, but we don’t discover what she did until season 2.
Boone Carlyle: Shannon’s sister, and meets an unfortunate end in the first season. He’s in Australia to help his sister. He assists Locke in digging up the hatch and later climbs into the drug smugglers plane. His weight makes the plane fall out of its perch and he dies due to injuries sustained. In the first season, this is frequently used as an indicator of the Island having a mind of its own, as it prevented Locke from climbing into the plane by temporarily re-paralyzing him and then crashing the plane. The area this plane is in becomes important again in Season 2. Before he dies, Boone gets a message on the plane’s transceiver that says he’s reached the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815. This is later explained in season 2.
Shannon Rutherford: Spoiled rich girl, Shannon’s case in season one is an interesting one. We know the island has the ability to heal (it cures Locke’s paralysis) but doesn’t do anything for Shannon’s asthma, in fact it seems to make it worse. This is pointed at as another reason why the Island Has A Plan and picks and chooses the people it wants to save. Boone has a dream in which the island kills Shannon and it symbolically releases him from her (only for him to be killed soon after). Shannon’s story through the first season is one of redemption as she goes from a spoiled terror in the first episode to an almost tragic character at the end. We know that Shannon often slept her way through rich men to survive and that she was married at some point, but we don’t know who any of these men are.
John Locke: Was in Australia to go on a walking tour of the Outback but is not allowed to go due to him being confined to a wheelchair. When he wakes up on the island after the plane crash, his legs work. Locke believes he has a spiritual connection with the island, to the point where he believes the island wanted Boone to die because it took away his legs again before Boone could be saved. Locke’s history is long and complex and still not fully fleshed out. We know his mother is crazy and his father abandoned him. Later, his father finally contacts him and cons him into giving up a kidney before abandoning him again. We still don’t know what happened to John’s legs or where he learned his tracking or outdoor skills since he was a cubicle slave in the US. John is very possibly the most complex character on the show.
Hugo “Hurley” Reyes: Speaking of complicated backstory, we discover that Hurley is a lottery winner. The numbers he won with (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42) are all numbers he heard from a crazy guy in the insane asylum. This guy, Leonard Simms, we discover heard the numbers when he was stationed at a naval listening post with his partner Sam Toomey. Hurley goes to Australia to find Toomey where we discover that he died, but his widow informs Hurley that he also believed the numbers were cursed. We later find out that Danielle Rousseau heard the same transmission of the numbers, which she blames for their crash on the island.
Jin and Sun Kwon: Jin was a fisherman’s son in Korea while Sun is the daughter of a rich business man. Sun’s father employs Jin to be muscle, tasking him with beating up a government official who makes the wrong decision. Jin and Sun’s story is really a microcosm of the entire show, as neither one is happy with their lives, they both have secrets, and neither one will tell the other what they feel or what they saw. Jin and Sun are in Australia to deliver a watch for Sun’s father and are flying to LA to deliver another. We discover in this season that Sun was getting ready to leave Jin in the Australian airport, but decides against it. We also discover Jin wants to leave his life as muscle, but is threatened against such thoughts.
Michael Dawson and Walt Lloyd: Michael is Walt’s father. Walt’s mother took him and moved to Australia after a cab in New York City hit Michael. Michael desperately wants to get off the island because he doesn’t want Walt to be raised there and builds a raft. Walt, at first, doesn’t want to leave, burning his father’s first raft. Later, after the hatch is discovered, Walt wants to leave the Island. At the end of the season, Walt is kidnapped off the raft by the Others, who have a motorboat. The season closes on the raft crew with the Others kidnapping Walt and blowing up the raft. We get the sense that Walt is special and he has some sort of psychic powers. This is explored further in season 2.
Claire Littleton: Claire gets pregnant out of wedlock and is to deliver the baby to a couple in Los Angeles. Strangely, she sees a psychic who, at first, tells her that danger surrounds the baby and she must be the only person to raise it. Claire decides against this and is going to give the baby away, but changes her mind at the last minute. She returns to the psychic who has also changed his mind. She must deliver the baby to a couple in Los Angeles, and she must take Flight 815. This led to the speculation that the plane was crashed on purpose, but that theory seems to be refuted in Season 2. On the island, Claire is kidnapped by the Others after she has visions and dreams of someone harming her baby. She and Charlie are eventually kidnapped by Ethan, who later hangs Charlie from a tree to slow pursuit. Claire is gone for days and that time isn’t filled in until season two. She returns with the baby still in tact and delivers it soon after, although why the Others never tried to take her or the baby again isn’t explained.
Side Characters
Ethan Rom: He blends in with the survivors after the crash and is later revealed to be an agent of the Others. He kidnaps Claire and Charlie and leads them away. During pursuit, Jack and Kate are separated while running from the monster and Jack tumbles down an embankment. Ethan appears and threatens to kill one of the hostages. When they don’t stop, they find Charlie strung up in a tree by the neck. Later, Claire is returned to the camp with amnesia. Ethan appears again, threatening that he will kill a survivor every night until he gets Claire back. The first night, one survivor is beaten so severely that “every bone in his body is broken.” The next night, they set up an ambush for Ethan but, rather than keeping him alive, Charlie puts six bullets in his chest, ending Ethan’s mystery.
Danielle Rousseau: The French Woman discovered by Sayid. Danielle claims to have crashed on the island 16 years ago when a science expedition went wrong. She later had a baby on the Island who was taken by the Others after a plume of black smoke appeared on the beach. She set up a repeating distress signal that the castaways pick up after getting the plane’s radio. Another seemingly impossible thing on the island is that she’s been sending out a distress signal for years with no way to recharge power.
Dr Christian Shephard: Jack’s father. There are a large number of theories about Christian on the show because of the mysteries they continue to involve him in. In this season, Jack identifies his body in Australia, but the body isn’t in the coffin when Jack finds it on the island. Most of this speculation wouldn’t start until Season 2, so I’ll save it until then.
Anthony Cooper: Locke’s father, he cons Locke out of a Kidney. Speculation on fan sites and the show’s tendency to have everyone connected somehow have him being the real Sawyer that the castaway’s Sawyer is looking to kill.
The Others: We don’t see or learn much of the Others in season one. Danielle Rousseau speaks of them and tells them they will come to take Claire’s baby. Ethan is the only of the Others we see until the last episode of the season when a group of them attack the raft and take Walt.
The Island
For most of the first season, the writers lead the viewers into believing the island is a spiritual place. Many theories coming out of the first season had the island as heaven, hell, or purgatory. This theory was supported by various instances where people see the dead on the island. Jack, in early episodes, sees his father walking around on the island and is eventually led to his father’s empty coffin inland on the island. Sawyer is visited, he thinks, by the soul of a man he killed in the body of a wild boar (the man’s dying words were: it’ll come back around, which you hear in the woods during the episode).
The island also contains things that shouldn’t be there, always seeming to coincide with things on people’s minds. They discover a polar bear on the tropical island, very soon after Walt sees a polar bear in a comic book. The first evening on the island, the castaways are terrified by an unseen monster. This monster generally leaves our main characters alone, yet violently kills the pilot when the castaways find him in the cockpit. (This was always one of the plot points that bugged me. They find the pilot after almost a full day on the island, where he was apparently unconscious in the cockpit for all that time. Then, he wakes up just in time to deliver the message that they crashed 1000 miles off course and then the giant unseen monster eats him. It wasn’t until the DVD extras where I found out this was because Jack was supposed to die in this scene until they changed their minds and wrote the pilot in). Rousseau tells us this monster is the island’s security system, which lead to speculation that the monster was eliminating people who weren’t meant to survive the crash. Locke also later comes face to face with what we assume to be the monster, and it leaves him alone the first time only later it attacks them again when they have dynamite.
Also, how has no one else found this island yet? We discover that, at some point, a drug smuggler’s plane crashed on the island. We also discover a slave ship, the Black Rock, that washed inland more than 100 years ago. There’s also obviously a group of people already living on the island and there were obviously people there before who built the hatch.
The overwhelming message of the first season is the island giving the castaways something they desire in a way to give them a second chance and to make them want to be on the island. Locke is given back the use of his legs, he’s wanted and respected, and he’s away from his cubicle job. Kate is no longer being hunted for murder and is able to assume a new identity, for a while, but is given a life not on the run. Michael is given a chance to bond with a son who really wanted nothing to do with him. Walt is given Locke, someone who appreciates him. Hurley, who hates what winning the lottery has done to him and his relationships, is allowed to be just another dude again. Claire is given her baby and the ability to raise it with someone. Charlie is able to get off heroin and is given the chance to create a family. Every character, in their flashback episode, is given something they desperately wanted. This frequently led the discussion toward the Island of having some spiritual meaning. Were the characters dead? Were they sucked into an alternate universe a la The Langoliers? Was the island some sort of utopia that responded to desires and fears?
When we left season one, we had a few unsolved mysteries. How and why did the plane crash? The hatch was now open, but what was down there. What was the island and how was Locke having visions in his dreams. Was the Island really sentient? Who were the people who kidnapped Walt? Was he their target all along or was he the consolation prize because they couldn’t get to Claire’s baby?
We didn’t know, but all of the theories would be blown out of the water in season 2.
