Our hero emerges from the bamboo forest to discover there has been an accident of some sort. A plane crash, judging from the giant jet engine that is somehow still running in the background. As you might imagine there are a number of injured, pregnant, and obese people lying about. Luckily, Suity McBriskjog is, amongst other things, a doctor and he sets to work saving lives. He uses his med school training to pull a man out from under the still active jet engine, checks up on a pregnant woman, finds her a fat friend, and makes a conscious effort to not do anything to help a guy with a piece of shrapnel in his abdomen. Meanwhilst, hold on to your hat... or your entire body because some gravitationally challenged man gets sucked into the jet engine. An explosion ensues, and we, the viewers, are left to assume that he is one of the lucky ones.
Through a series of conversations, we discover that our favorite spiffy savior is, sadly, named Jack. He finds a "lifeguard" giving some sloppy CPR to an unconscious black woman. Jack chastises him for not being a doctor and also for blowing a bunch of air into the woman's stomach. He performs some doctor grade CPR on her for a few seconds until she wakes up and exclaims, "Oh thank God! I was fine until that young man started blowing a bunch of air into my stomach." Jack then sends the kid on the pointless mission of finding as many different colored pens as possible. That is not even a joke.
Throughout all of this, we start to meet some of the other friends we'll be stuck with for an indeterminable amount of time: The fat guy, the asians, the bald guy, the Iraqi, the black guy, the black kid, the best character on the show, some asshole, a couple of annoying kids, the girl who will obviously fall for Jack later, Shrapnel belly, and old black lady... Exactly the kind of cultural cross section you'd expect to meet in the coach section of a commercial airliner. It should be noted that this is the point where most of them start to wish they had watched more Survivor. Damn you CBS.
Seeing that the situation was as under control as possible, Jack decided to steal away to a private beach to examine his own wounds. Turns out he had a pretty nasty gash taken out of his back. Luckily he had some stitching supplies and a lot of booze, which was sadly wasted on disinfecting his wounds. Kate, the aforementioned probable love interest, swings by to check up on Jack. He asks her, "Hey, do you know how to use a needle and thread? Ever... patch up a pair of jeans or something?"
"I made the drapes in my apartment," She responds.
"I didn't ask what you did with your old prom dress. I want to know if you can stitch up my back."
Well, needless to say, she obliges and Jack reminisces about a time he exploded some poor girl's spinal sack and nerves poured out like a broken faucet and then teaches Kate how to count to five. He's an old fashioned romantic.
We witness some sibling bickering, there's 5 or 6 "That's what she said" joke opportunities every time the best character on the show is onscreen (who shall henceforth be know as Charlie Pace), the asians seclude themselves from the rest of the group and start making sushi, and the pregnant girl makes friends with a man who looks like he could be pregnant. She says that she hasn't felt the baby move since the crash, which is sad. More so for the baby, but also for her and the hungry fat man who may have been planning on eating it. Eventually.
Oh, but wait, FLAHSBACK! Jack's on the plane, looking to get his drunk on, but that bitch stewardess totally ripped him off on a weak ass drink. She comes around after he makes some thinly veiled insults toward her bar-tending skills. She slips him about 90 tiny plane crash proof bottles of vodka which will be quite useful as disinfectants or booze after the ensuing plane crash. Jack makes some small talk with a friendly black woman sitting next to him when the plane hits some turbulance. At this point, Jack flat out lies to her and tells her that it's "normal" and everything is "fine". Then there's that crash I mentioned earlier. Flash present!
Jack has sat idle for too long. It's time to go find the other half of the plane and hopefully a transceiver. Kate decides to go along because... what the hell, why not. Jack decides she's going to need some better shoes if she's going on the hike so she just flat out steals them from a dead guy. Also joining them is Charlie Pace, declaring, "And so we shall be the fellowship of the transceiver."
Oh also, something starts knocking over a bunch of trees and an ominous rainstorm hits the island. Spooky. Jack, Kate, and Charlie Pace set out to find the plane cabin. We find out that Charlie Pace is/was the bassist for a mildly successful rock band and then Jack and Kate go about ignoring him for the rest of the trip to the plane. They somehow find it in the middle of the jungle and climb up to the cockpit. Charlie Pace seems to disappear, a zombie falls out of the cockpit door, and then they start looking for the transceiver.
Kate: What does it look like?
Jack: Well, it kind of looks like a transmitter and a
reciever all built into one unit.
Kate: I don't know what either of those things look like.
Jack: Well then we're in trouble because I'm still a little drunk.
But lo and behold, the pilot is still alive, and it's that delightful mind-reader guy from Heroes! I'll bet he's pretty busy, being on two shows and all... oh. No. Nevermind. He gets his skin ripped off by a monster or a dinosaur or a frankenstein or something. You can't really see it. Seems kind of silly to name the episode after a character who gets killed four minutes after they introduce him. Anyways, better luck on Heroes. Charlie Pace? Oh. He's just in the bathroom. Getting sick? Naturally. Before the pilot died he did manage to let everyone know that he effed up bad and they're like 1000 miles off course. Long story short, no one's coming. Time to make a run for it from the frankenstein though.
When running from a mysterious predator, always remember that you don't have to run fast. You just have to run faster than Charlie Pace. It should be noted that Charlie Pace is not a strong runner or avoider of coil like plants. That being said, Charlie Pace goes down in the mud. Jack, being the bleeding heart liberal that he is, decides to go back to help out, leaving Kate all by her lonesome to hide behind a stick of bamboo, cry, and count to five. Then suddenly, who should find her but Charlie Pace himself. She knocks him over and falls on him in the confusion only to discover that now Jack is missing!
"I'm going to go find him," she says
Charlie Pace protests, "There's a crazy huge monster out there!"
"Then don't come."
"That's what she said.... wait! YOU ALL EVERYBODY!"
Turns out Jack's fine. He is a doctor after all. The fellowship returns to discover they missed the start of fight club. The Iraqi and the Asshole got in a fight because, surprise, the asshole thinks it's the Iraqi's fault that the plane crashed. Every party needs a bad boy. The fight gets broken up and turns out the Iraqi is an expert on transcievers. He volunteers to repair it.
Meanwhile, being the forward thinking industrious people that they are, the asians have prepared some sample sushi dishes and they begin to offer them to the various denizens of the isle. Sadly, not even the fat guy is open minded enough to try it. The only person who gives it a shot is the pregnant girl. A risky move seeing as how she's eating potentially poisonous raw fish for two, but a good move on her part becuase the fish turns out to be magical and her baby comes back to life and starts thrashing wildly in her belly. She forces the asian man to feel it in what is the second most awkward moment of the episode.
Jack has a quick heart to heart with the black guy, Michael, about his son who is becoming a conneseur of foreign language comic books. The kid runs off after his dad offers to buy him a new dog, but no dog can replace his Labradoodle (half Lab, half poodle). The kid quickly makes friends with the creepiest guy on the island who is all too keen on the situation, probably for a number of sinister reasons.
Through a series of inconsequential events, half the people on the island decide to go on a "hike" to find some higher ground to get a better signal for the transceiver. The new fellowship consists of the siblings, the Iraqi, Kate, the Asshole, and everyone's favorite scrapper... Charlie Pace. As I'm sure will happen many times over as the series goes on, these hikers got much more than they bargained for when the asshole SHOOTS A FUCKING POLAR BEAR! Most of the campers seem pretty concerned about where he got a gun (took it from the presumably dead air marshall). Me? I'm more concerned about... why is there a goddamn polar bear on a tropical island?
Spoiler Alert: When the series ends you find out that they're actually at the north pole but global warming has melted everything and the area has become a lush paradise... with monsters. A little preachy, but relevant to today's social issues.
There's some speculation that the asshole guy is actually a criminal that was being transported on the plane and he says he was all sarcastically. They manage to pick up a signal using the reciever function on the transciever
(it's multipurpose) and find out that someone else was stranded on the island and had been broadcasting an S.O.S. for about 16 years. Total. Buzzkill.
Oh, but wait. Flashback. Kate's on the plane and turns out she's the criminal! The marshall gets smacked in the head by a briefcase when the plane starts going down, Kate fumbles around with his many keys and manages to unlock herself from her cuffs and get her oxygen mask on, which... somehow saved her life in the crash.
While everyone else is off poaching polar bears and being depressing, Jack and the fat guy are perfoming an emergency surgery on shrapnel belly. Fat dude passes out and conveniently shrapnel belly wakes up and, surprise! It's our good friend the US Marshall.
This episode earns an orange smile for being pretty intriguing. I can definitely see why people got so into this show.
Lost.
No comments:
Post a Comment