Lost 101 The Pilot Trivia, Facts & Description

• The premiere episodes from the first three seasons are Jack-centric, although he only has one flashback in this episode.
• The premiere episodes from the first three seasons start with a character and locale never seen before on the show.
• The crash site seen in this episode is replicated in "Walkabout" and "Exposé".
• The day of the crash (Wednesday, September 22, 2004) is featured in this episode as well as in "Walkabout" (Locke), "Exposé" (Nikki and Paulo), and "Greatest Hits" (Charlie), in the flashbacks of midsection survivors, as well as the mobisode "So It Begins" (Vincent). It is also shown from the perspectives of others in "The Other 48 Days" (the tail section survivors), "Live Together, Die Alone, Part 2" (Desmond), "A Tale of Two Cities" (the Others), "One of Us" (the Others), and "The Other Woman" (the Others).
• J.J. Abrams won an Emmy for the directing of this episode.
• Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Jeffrey Lieber received an Emmy nomination for writing the episode.
• When this episode was repeated in the United Kingdom on August 10, 2005, the deaths of Gary Troup and the pilot were omitted in order for the premiere to maintain a PG rating. However, reruns shown after 10 p.m. show these scenes.
• The boots Kate removes from a corpse are from the brand "Ariat", an equestrian athletic shoe.
• Sound bytes are used from the PC game Half-Life 2: When the plane's engine explodes and debris rains down, a man is hit by a piece and the sound produced is virtually identical to that of a Combine soldier dying. The sound of the debris crashing is also identical to that of wood breaking in the game. This is one of several allusions to Half-Life within the series.
• Jack's bottle of vodka contains the Cyrillic text "дождь", transliterated as "dozhd", and translated from Russian as "rain". It also included the words "Pure Vodka" written in English.
• The title, like many episodes, has a double meaning: not just the first episode, but the first victim of the Smoke Monster.
• By the end of this episode, only 8 of the main characters have been named for the viewing audience. They are, in order: Jack, Charlie, Sayid, Shannon, Kate, Boone, Walt and Sun (in Korean).
• In the enhanced version, the scene that shows Jack staring out at the ocean after the crash is shown changes. In the enhanced, the ocean is seen for a few seconds before showing Jack's face staring at it. In the original version, the scene immediately cuts to Jack's face staring.
• This episode is rated TV-14 (V).

 

• This is the only first hour of a season in which all main cast members appear.
  • Yunjin Kim (Sun) appears without speaking lines.
• This is the only season premiere to feature Michael and only one to feature Jin and Boone in a speaking part until the Season 6 premiere.
• With a budget of roughly $12 million, this episode, along with "Pilot, Part 2", was the most expensive pilot in TV history. Boardwalk Empire's 2010 pilot cost $18 million.
• Jack was originally intended to get killed off in the pilot episode, with Kate replacing him as the de facto leader of the survivors. However, due to strong notes from the network against the death, the writers decided to keep Jack and introduced the short-lived pilot character instead. (Pilot, Part 1 audio commentary) Contrary to popular belief, this story change occurred long before the casting of Matthew Fox.
• At one point in the development of the script, Boone's name was going to be "Five" (he would have been named "Boone Anthony Markham V" and gone by "Five"). When they decided to change it back to "Boone," they ran a find-and-replace on the script, which resulted in the the dialog between Kate and Jack in the stitching scene reading as: "One, Two, Three, Four, Boone." (Pilot, Part 1 audio commentary)
• The pilot, although uncredited, was played by Greg Grunberg. Grunberg, a childhood friend of J.J. Abrams, has appeared in many of his productions as a good luck charm.
• September 22, 2004, the date this episode originally aired, is also the date within the storyline on which Oceanic Flight 815 crashed. This was confirmed aloud in "Live Together, Die Alone, Part 1" and "The Glass Ballerina".

 

"Pilot, Part 1" is the first of the two-part pilot episode of Lost. It was originally broadcast on September 22, 2004, and "Pilot, Part 2" aired the following week. The two parts re-aired together on October 2, 2004. Jack Shephard, a doctor from Los Angeles, finds himself one of forty-eight survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious island. With the help of other survivors, he begins to treat the injured and attempts to find the cockpit of the plane in the hope of contacting civilization.

The episode establishes the show's use of flashbacks to show characters' lives before arriving on the Island. The one flashback in this episode depicts Jack's view of events on the plane just prior to the crash.