Pilot

Episodes 1 and 2

Originally aired Sept. 22 and 29, 2004. Stream here.

Oceanic Flight 815 crashes on a deserted island in the middle of the South Pacific. The survivors of the crash fight desperately to find someone to rescue them and confront their strange new surroundings.

Todd VanDerWerff: What was the moment for you when you knew Lost was something you wanted to do?

Damon Lindelof: I think instantly.

I was writing for this show, Crossing Jordan, at that time. We were in the third season of that show, and I had been there since the beginning and really loved working there, but at the same time, in terms of the television that I consumed, I was much more into genre serialized television. Alias was one of the shows that I was kind of obsessing on, and had let it be known to both my agents and all of my colleagues of which Heather Caden was one, that I would really love to meet with J.J. [Abrams, Alias's creator] and write on that show if the opportunity presented itself.

Heather reached out to me a couple of times, "Can you meet with J.J now?" And I had just re-upped my deal at Crossing Jordan, and it was sort of like, "Damn it, the timing is wrong, et cetera, et cetera." But I never felt like it was a real thing. Although I was a professional writer, just from a pure fan boy perspective, I was very intimidated by the idea of meeting J.J. and didn't know what I would say to him.

I wanted to write the show for the fandom that was willing to go the deepest

Then she called me up on a Friday evening and said, "It doesn't look like there's going to be any job availabilities on Alias." This was at the very end of January in 2004. "But Lloyd [Braun, the then-head of ABC Entertainment] is super passionate about this idea that he had at our retreat this year, and we went and we developed it with Aaron Spelling and this writer Jeffrey Lieber, but we don't like how it turned out. And Lloyd is really desperately trying to get J.J. to engage, but J.J. is running Alias, and he is doing this other pilot The Catch." That was about a bounty hunter, and it was going to star Greg Grunberg. "And the only way that J.J. will engage is if he supervises some other writer. And I just kind of felt like this sort of thing was straight up your alley and maybe this is the opportunity for you to meet him, but the idea is nothing beyond a plane crashes on an island, people survive. That's kind of all we got."

Finally, there was an opportunity to be in a room with J.J., and it almost felt more exciting to me for it to be about something that wasn't his and up and running, like Alias. It wasn't like, I'm going to sit in a room and I'm going to tell you what I think Sydney Bristow should be doing, or what I love about the show that already exists versus, okay, here is a tabula rasa, anything is possible.

I was excited and engaged. I thought about it and I didn't sleep all weekend long. I was absolutely positive that the meeting was going to get canceled because that stuff happens all the time. Then lo and behold, Monday afternoon, I'm sitting there at Bad Robot — it was not Bad Robot [the major production company] yet, it was a title card at the end of Felicity and Alias, but there was no company, there was just the Alias writers and producers.

So I was basically sitting there and [Alias actor] Kevin Weisman walked by me as I was sitting on the couch. I was like, "Ooh, Marshall" and just kind of sitting there and then J.J. came out of his office. I was wearing this Bantha Tracks T-shirt from the Star Wars fan club that I've owned since 1980. And he was like "Bantha Tracks!" And kind of right there I was like, this could be the beginning of something amazing, and I desperately want this to work. So I think that there was a tremendous amount of engagement, almost instantaneously.

Todd VanDerWerff: Now looking back at the TV landscape of that era, it was still very much rooted in kind of that '80s Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere model. The Sopranos was on the air but that whole movement of TV was sort of in its infancy. What were you going to try and do to stand out in that environment beyond being set on an island?

Damon Lindelof: I think that I was very activated by the idea of a kind of grandeur, building a grander mythology around the show, which The X-Files had done incredibly well for a really long period of time. The X-Files had just ended, so I feel like there's just this huge fandom, myself included, wandering around, just waiting for the next thing to come for us to invest in.

Alias was doing this to some degree with the Rambaldi mythology. It was more of a conspiracy methodology in the same way that The X-Files was, but sort of this idea of real fundamental world building. And that's the thing that fans really go deep on, which was really exciting to me. I knew that would take a tremendous amount of time and effort, but for me, it went all the way back to Twin Peaks, which my dad and I watched religiously, and he would tape on his VHS. As soon as the episode was over, we would watch it again and pause it and look for clues and debate what lines of dialogue meant what. That level of engagement, especially in the online community, was now basically coming alive. So for me, my two television idols were Joss [Whedon] and J.J., and I just wanted to continue working on that kind of stuff.

I really viewed it as, "This should be a cult show." When I say, "cult", that doesn't mean I only want two million people to watch it and have it get cancelled. Although, that's sort of what I started secretly wishing for once we were up and running. But at the time, I was, like, cult shows sort of have like cool cred. Where there were different levels of fandom, but I wanted to write the show for the fandom that was willing to go the deepest.

Todd VanDerWerff: What level of that world building did you guys have done when you sat down to finish the pilot?

Damon Lindelof: Not a lot. The reality was that J.J. and I met the last week of January. We delivered the completed two hour pilot — not the script, but the film; we had shot and then edited it and Giacchino had scored it -in the last week of April, or the first week of May. So you're talking about a 12-to-14 week period under which we made it. We wrote and cast and shot a feature film. So the idea that we had any time at all to sit around and talk about what the fundamental mythology of the Island just didn't happen.

If we think it's cool, let's just do it. There's no trying to talk ourselves out of it.

There were conversations that certainly occurred between J.J. and I about what are the rules that the Island must subscribe to. And in the very first meeting of that Monday afternoon, J.J pitched that they find a hatch, and that there were other people on the island. So that begged the question of, "OK, who built this hatch and what's inside it?" That conversation was happening while we were shooting the pilot. "And who are the other people on the island, and where do they come from, and what is their purpose there?" Because in the original outline, the pilot ended with about 30 of the survivors being abducted. There's this excursion that basically goes to the top of the hill to try the transponder. They returned, and all the other survivors are gone. Which we obviously changed along the way. But the idea that there was a hostile force of other individuals on the island was already sort of getting baked into the premise. That kind of stuff we were talking about, but I don't think we reached any fundamental resolution on.

And then we also hired this brain trust of writers, including Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Jennifer Johnson, Paul Dini, Christian Taylor. Their job while we were shooting the pilot in Hawaii was to basically sit in a room and come up with ideas and mythology and all that stuff. I would call in from Hawaii — there's a three-hour time difference — and we would talk for 90 minutes or two hours a day about some of these ideas with the hopes of basically constructing this document that we would then give to ABC, so that they would know that we had some sort of a plan for moving forward.

But we ended up talking very little about mythology, and much more about the backstories of the characters, and the stories that would take place on the island, because Steve McPherson at that time had replaced Lloyd and Steve let it be known in no uncertain terms that this show was not going to be supernatural, and it wasn't going to be weird. He wasn't really interested in that, because when Alias did that, it lost viewership, and he and J.J. were already sparring over that stuff on Alias. He certainly didn't want to engage in it on Lost.

We knew that the document that we had to present to ABC was going to be: the show is not going to be serialized. Every single episode is going to have a beginning, middle, and end in terms of there's a problem, and the castaways have to face the problem, and they'll solve the problem, and they will be better off, and then nothing weird is going to happen. We are going to subscribe to this Michael Crichton rules of storytelling, which is, nobody really thinks of Jurassic Park as a science fiction movie, even though that's exactly what it is. Because he is presenting the science to back it up. Here is a mosquito, and the mosquito takes dinosaur blood, gets preserved in amber, we know how to clone this shit, so there you go.

The document that we ended up generating was like more of a defense than an offense. And I do think it became characteristic of certainly the first half of season one in terms of the writing all the way up until "Raised By Another" and "Solitary" — the Sayid and Claire flashbacks — where the show started getting "weird and mythological." Either way, we thought that "Walkabout" was a hugely mythological episode, but ABC sort of accepted it at face value that Locke's injury might have been psychosomatic and that he was jarred out of his paralysis as a result of the crash, which is the bullshit that we fed them when we wrote that script. And they were like, "OK." It was like, "No, magic island heals Locke." I mean that's a much better story, isn't it?

Todd VanDerWerff: J.J. Abrams left the show shortly into season one and it really became yours and Carlton Cuse's show. What do you see as J.J. Abrams's major legacy in the program?

Damon Lindelof: Well first and foremost, I think that he sort of really cast the show. I was there, and I'd love to say I had a tremendous amount of input, and I did, but I do think that from the directorial point of view and the star-making and the ensemble building, all that stuff, I think that J.J. just had a tremendous amount of confidence.

Even if you fail, people will appreciate you having attempted the harder trick

So when Josh Holloway came in and read for Sawyer, who was originally written as a sort of very sleek urban-like New York City con men who wears Prada suits and is much more kind of like Ben Affleck character in Boiler Room, Josh came in and read the sides, and then J.J. was like, "Don't do it as that guy, do it as you." And Josh was like, "What do you mean?" He was like "Do the whole Southern accent thing. Like just be you." And Josh was like, "Oh, all right." And then Sawyer was born.

I can tell you 10 stories like that. In terms of Yunjin [Kim, who played Sun] coming in and reading for Kate, and J.J looking at her resume and saying, "Oh my god! There are all this movies in Korea, obviously you speak Korean." And Yunjin was like, "Yeah, I'm completely and totally bilingual." And when she left, he was like, "We've just got to write a character for her." And I was like, "But we already have an outline and we're writing the script and there's nobody like that in it." And he's like, "Oh, don't worry about it."

I think that his legacy is twofold, which is he not only developed the look of the show, the cinematic qualities of the show, but also the sort of bravura sense of, if we think it's cool, let's just do it. Let's just go for it. Like, there's no trying to talk ourselves out of it. Like, what do we have to do lose? I think that it's a very exciting place to write a show from. It's also a very terrifying place.

But the excitement is translated to audience because there is that sort of sense of, well, I'm five hours into Lost and here's an episode where I'm reading like 70 percent of the episode, because it's about these two Korean characters. And if you go into the part of your brain that says, "People aren't going to want to watch a subtitled episode of television. They'll tolerate a scene or two of it, but they're not going to want to watch an episode entire episode of it," and you just go like, "Why wouldn't they? If it's interesting enough, and they care about the characters, and something cool is going on in the Island, why wouldn't they?" What's amazing is people didn't even comment on that episode with 60 or 70 percent subtitles. They were just like, "Oh, that was a cool episode."

I do think that he really instilled us with that sense of go for the idea that excites you, go for the bold idea. Even if you fail, people will appreciate you having attempted the harder trick and crashed than just kind of doing the easy stuff. And that was something that I really learned from him and tried to certainly carry through the show, and Carlton was all about that too. When he came in, he was all about taking risks and doing something that hadn't been done before, and felt like it was unfamiliar territory.