Rewatching LOST: 1.02 “Pilot, Part 2″

Where Part 1 of the Pilot was very action-packed, setting up much of the show’s overall premise (the island, the crash, the smoke monster), Part 2 was very much a character piece. Every member of the show’s sprawling cast got a moment in the spotlight, and all of them were mysteries to be unraveled…

• Walt goes wandering a short ways into the jungle, disregarding his father’s wishes, to look for Vincent, his dog. Instead of Vincent, he finds a pair of handcuffs.
• Jack, Kate, and Charlie return to the beach from their adventure at the crashed cockpit to find Sayid and Sawyer in a brutal fist fight, with most of the other survivors looking on. Jack and Michael run in to break up the fight, which began when Sawyer posited a theory that on the plane, Sayid was the wearer of the handcuffs that Walt found. Later, under much different circumstances, Sayid turns this theory back on Sawyer, accusing him of being the suspected criminal on the plane.
• Sawyer becomes privately emotional while reading from a handwritten letter he carried in his pocket.
• Sayid volunteers to examine the transceiver from the cockpit to try and get it to work. He later determines that the transceiver has enough battery power left to attempt to make contact with anyone off the island who might be able to hear them. But since the battery is a limited resource, he suggests they attempt to send a signal from high up on one of the island’s mountains in order to increase their chances of being heard.
• Kate and Sayid lead a group up the mountain to attempt to send a signal. The group consists of Charlie, Boone, Shannon, and Sawyer. During their trek, an animal charges at them in the jungle that turns out to be a polar bear. Sawyer kills it with a gun he procured from the wreckage, along with a badge belonging to a U.S. Marshall.
• A man was severely wounded during the crash, with a large piece of shrapnel embedded in his abdomen. This man was sitting next to Kate on the plane. While the others are traveling up the mountain, Jack operates on him on the beach, removing the shrapnel, with reluctant assistance from Hurley. The man turns out to be the very Marshall whose gun and badge Sawyer stole on the beach — and he was there to bring in Kate, who was a fugitive and the real wearer of the handcuffs. He awoke during his surgery and warned Jack not to trust Kate under any circumstances.
• Jack reveals to Michael that he saw Vincent the dog in the jungle the day before.
• Walt strikes up an odd friendship with Locke, who teaches him to play Backgammon before sharing with him a secret.
• On the mountainside, Sayid attempts to make contact with the outside world, but instead picks up a radio signal that’s being sent from somewhere on the island. This signal is so strong, it prevents Sayid from being able to send a signal of his own. The radio signal is a recorded S.O.S., made by a French woman and playing on a loop — and has been for sixteen years and five months. The recording says:

“Please. Please help me. Please come get me. I’m alone now. I’m on the island alone. Please, someone come. The others, they’re dead. It killed them. It killed them all.”

• Charlie is a heroin addict. He was carrying heroin on his person while on Oceanic 815, and dumped it in the bathroom to avoid being caught when a flight attendant became suspicious of him. He was actually high when the plane crashed.
• Boone and Shannon have an antagonistic sibling relationship.
• Michael and Walt also have a strained relationship.
• Jin has some experience at fishing.
• Sayid was a military communications officer in the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Gulf War.
• Walt is 10 years old. Until her death a few weeks ago, he lived with his mother in Australia.
• Locke likes games — Backgammon, among them.
• 8-month-pregnant Claire has a belief or intuition that her baby is a boy.
• Hurley tends to pass out at the sight of blood.
• Kate does not know how to use guns.
• Shannon speaks French. She spent a year in Paris during college.

• Vincent is Walt’s dog.
  Question: Who is the “Vincent” that Michael and Walt referred to? 1.01
  Question: Where does the dog come from that’s seen repeatedly throughout the episode, most notably rousing Jack in the first scene? 1.01
• Charlie was in the cockpit looking for a pack of heroin he stashed there. He found it, and brought it back to the camp.
  Question: What was Charlie doing in the bathroom that he didn’t want Jack and Kate to know about? 1.01

• What’s the source of Boone and Shannon’s difficult relationship?
  Answered in 1.13.
• Why do Michael and Walt not get along?
  Answered in 1.14.
• What’s the story between Sun and Jin?
  Answered in 1.06 and 1.17.
• What brought Sayid, an Iraqi national, to Australia and the United States?
  Answered in 1.21.
• Kate posed a valid question to Jack: Are the survivors any safer from the monster on the beach than they are in the jungle?
• Where did Walt’s Spanish-language comic book come from?
• Is there a connection between the polar bear in the comic book and the real, live polar bear that charged at the survivors on the island?
• What was in Sawyer’s handwritten letter that made him so emotional?
  Answered in 1.08.
• What’s the secret Locke told Walt?
  Answered in 1.03.
• What’s a polar bear doing on this tropical island?
• Since she’s a criminal fugitive, does Kate really not know how to use guns, or was she just pretending not to, in order to preserve her secret?
  Answered in 1.12.
• What crime(s) did Kate commit?
  Answered in 1.12.
• What was the favor Kate was going to ask of the Marshall on the plane?
  Answered in 1.03.
• Who is the French woman who sent the S.O.S. signal?
  Answered in 1.09.
• How did the French woman get to the island sixteen years ago?
  Answered in 1.09.
• Is she still on the island?
  Answered in 1.09.
• Who are the friends she refers to, and what’s the “it” that killed them all? The monster?
  Answered in 1.09.
• What piece of equipment is on the island that’s transmitting her S.O.S. message?
  Answered in 1.18.

• The nervous tapping sound that Charlie makes with his “DS” ring on Oceanic 815 while he’s feeling early withdrawal from his drugs sounds eerily similar to the clicking sound the monster sometimes makes.
• Sayid was set up from the beginning to be a fascinating juxtaposition of a character: a citizen of a nation most of the world at the time had cause to dislike, yet Sayid himself is an extremely likeable character from the get-go. By contrast, Jin and Sawyer both were made to be unlikable at this early stage.
• The scene where Locke explains to Walt the rules of Backgammon is quite possibly the most important moment in the entire pilot. It’s the first time the show would ever use the recurring motif of black vs. white, aka dark vs. light. The pieces on the Backgammon game board, much like the pieces on a chess board, are half black and half white. Locke’s words in describing them would carry ever-greater significance in the episodes and seasons to come: “Backgammon is the oldest game in the world. Archaeologists found [Backgammon] sets when they excavated the ruins of Mesopotamia. Five thousand years old — that’s older than Jesus Christ. Their dice were made of bones. Two players, two sides. One is light, one is dark.”
• I remember that the first time I watched this episode, the revelation that Kate was the real fugitive on the plane just completely bowled me over. That was the biggest twist for me of the entire 2-part pilot, the one I still remember my jaw dropping over. The signs were there — Kate rubbing her sore wrists when she first meets Jack, the extra curiosity she showed over the Marshall as Jack attended to him — but I still didn’t see it coming. What about you? Were you surprised, or did you figure it out in advance?

Image credits: “Rewatching Lost” logo by Robin Parrish. Season 1 cast promotional image and Oceanic Airlines logo: American Broadcasting Company.