Lost: "Pilot, Part 1"

It's jarring to watch the first few minutes of "Lost" again. Part of the fear is, I think, our own knowledge of what's to come - you can't help but pondering hatches and cages and a man named Ben, when you see Jack wake up again, looking so good in a suit that you have to wish he'd never found that shitty blue t-shirt (isn't it funny how, by now, the castaways have worn the same clothes for so long that they've practically got superhero uniforms - Sawyer's scrubulicious work-shirt, Locke's Eagle Scout cargo pants, Kate's sporty-chic wifebeater...)

The show's greatest pleasures are rooted deeply in space and time - our steadily-expanding knowledge of the island's layout, and the vivid one-day-at-a-time presentation. These two facets of "Lost" are rarely remarked upon, and they're also the two things which make the show so special. Can you name any other show on network TV with such a vivid sense of place - another show that actually deserves its own Tolkien-style map? HBO got there first, of course - with the Sopranos' Jersey, with ancient Rome, and with Deadwood, a town so small you can hear the sheriff screwing the rich widow from three log cabins over. But not even HBO has quite caught up with Lindelof/Cuse's vision of time. No matter how often the plot might zip-zap backwards and forwards, the show is always rooted in a steady forward motion, day in, day out. In this way, "Lost" is really the 21st century's first period piece - it's just about to be 2005, on the island.

Those are the two reasons why it's so anxiety-inducing to see Jack race through the forest out into the beach. We're feverishly aware that he will be on this island for months (we're right around day 100 in season 4), and more, we know what's happening elsewhere on the island - that Desmond is lying down in the hatch, more alone than ever, probably drinking to forget about the man he just accidentally killed; that Ben is at the Flame, showing Juliet her cancer-free sister, while his man Ethan races towards one beach and his rival Goodwin races to another.

The island, at moments like this, seems like such a fiercely physical, hyperreal narrative arena. You can imagine that Jack could have run in the wrong direction and tripped one of Rousseau's traps, or run straight into a polar bear. You can never quite get a handle on how big the island is - we live for those very occasional airborne shots, like in the season 3 premiere - and so, even though it feels extremely physical, and alive, there is also something mesmerizingly small about it. It's like a video gamescape in a free-range GTA clone, or a dollhouse version of an outer ring of Hell.

There's another reason the opening minutes make for such anxious viewing - they are just about the most perfect minutes in TV history, about as close to pure cinema as network television could ever get. The beginning of this saga - from when Jack opens his eyes to the moment he staggers away from the beach for his fix-me meet-cute with Kate - is essentially wordless, horrifically quiet before it becomes extraordinarily loud, and represents everything great and ridiculous about what this show would be - an energetic, more-is-more aesthetic, a steady piling of happenstance upon happenstance, like fragile candy-colored Jenga blocks: there's wreckage of a plane crash! one guy is pinned down under the fuselage! you think that's bad, but you haven't seen the pregnant chick! she's having contractions! quick, hand her off to the fat guy while you give the old lady CPR! great, the old lady's breathing again, but watch out, part of the wreckage is about to fall on the pregnant chick and the fat guy! and everything's EXPLODING!

There hasn't been anything else like this scene in the show. Oh, there's been action sequences - the season 3 ending battle on the beach, with Hurley leading the way in the old Dharma van - but nothing matches the endless background desperation, the choreography of mayhem that's half Buster Keaton and half Looney Tunes. That may be part of the reason that some people have gotten continually exasperated with the show. The pilot promised endless island action, but the show quickly became so much more inquisitive - pondering, in season-long rap sessions, strange hatches and numbers. Watched now, five episodes away from the end of a revitalized season four, the plane crash plays more than ever like a traumatizing event because, by comparison, everything else that has happened to the castaways seems so quiet. The heart of what "Lost" is about isn't in the plane crash (which we never see) or its bloody aftermath (where we begin) but in the quiet aftermath to the aftermath, while the credits roll and Michael Giacchino's mournful score plays over scenes of devastation. All of "Lost" is the meditative aftermath to calamity.

Musing - how is it that J.J. Abrams could direct both the two-hour pilot of "Lost" and the two hour third "Mission: Impossible" movie with pretty much the same visual aesthetic - shaky camera, heavy close-ups during dialogue scenes - and come up with two great hours of television and two obnoxious, grating, miserable hours of cinema? Part of it is the democratic camera, focusing equal attention on its huge cast and not on one single megastar. Yet it's also, I think, the implicit understanding that each of those characters will have a story to tell.

Yes, that's built into the show, but isn't that really the point of television - that every character, sooner or later, will discover his own plot? (Think about Gunther on "Friends," or the town of Springfield in "The Simpsons"). Whereas in "Mission: Impossible 3," Abrams doesn't even bother to give us any background on the rest of the team. No one in "Mission: Impossible 3," or really, most major Hollywood movies anymore, have secrets. I don't mean plot secrets, like "I'm working for the terrorists to save America!" I mean real secrets - something they don't want anyone else to know about. Now more than ever, TV characters take their cue from Bogart in "Casablance" - you don't know a single thing about him (there's intimations of fighting in a revolution, and he can't ever go back to America), and that profound unknowability makes him all the more fascinating.

I don't think anyone remembers anyone from "Mission: Impossible 3," because everyone's motivations are so banal. But after the first 45 minutes of "Lost," you know everyone on the cast, precisely because you don't quite know them. Four seasons later, we still don't. How about that?