off to a good (versus evil) start

Congrats to everyone like myself who, after one day, is on track!

...I give myself one week. I intend to DO THIS THING, but it just wouldn't be in my nature to stick to a consistent 2-a-day pace. Anyone who ever made a paper countdown chain for Christmas knows that the best days are the ones where you forgot to do it for a bit, so you get to go CRAZY and rip off a whole bunch of ringlets. Plus there's a BONUS: real fast, YOU'RE THAT MUCH CLOSER TO CHRISTMAS.

Yesterday at the Model Home we screened/Hulu'd the two-part pilot episode, aired back in 2004 when I thought LOST looked like a terrible, hyper-serious ABC melodrama-thriller. Oh, what bullshit my expectations turn out to be.

In that same vein, here's a little bit of Pilot Trivia from Lostpedia:
In the making of the pilot episode, it is revealed that the pilot character was added late in production, as Jack had originally been planned to be killed off in "Pilot." The pilot's body that was found hanging in the tree was also originally intended to be Jack's.

I love that Jack was supposed to die. Most things about this show throw me into a frenzy of theorizing "what it's all about," but Jack's last minute salvation as a CHARACTER makes me certain of one thing:

Cuse and Lindelof had NO IDEA what was going to happen with this show when they started. Nothing was certain. It's a giant experiment in storytelling. They started with a few decided upon circumstances (characters, settings, number of pieces the plane was in) and let the thing take on an organic life of its own.

So when they were like "OH DUDE, JACK COULD DIE. IT WOULD BE LIKE IN PSYCHO. NO ONE WOULD SEE IT COMING!" The show was like, "Naw. Chill out, guys. He lives. Stop forcing ideas. Lemme do this." Then they were like "OH MAN, WE'RE GONNA ADD THESE CHARACTERS AND THEY'RE GONNA BE SO CORRUPT AND INTERESTING AND OUT OF NOWHERE. CURVEBALL!" And the show was all, "Meh. I'm gonna bury them alive they're so bad. Let's forget they happened."



And that's the story of how LOST (portrayed above by the smoke monster) challenged the expectations of its own creators.