Lost Explained a Core Mystery in the Pilot, and Fans Thought It Was a Mistake (2024)

When Lost debuted on ABC 20 years ago, its popularity was a surprise to everyone from the producers to the studio. A heavily serialized story set on an island with monsters and mystery didn't seem like a formula that would work in the pre-streaming age. One reason the series remains so popular is that many of those big questions seemingly remain unanswered. One of Lost's biggest early mysteries was explained in the pilot episode, but most fans thought it was mistake made by sloppy filmmaking. Before fans even knew about the ghostly island whispers or even what the Smoke Monster was, the questions that kept them tuned in were more personal.

In the beginning of the show, the mysteries the fans most wanted answers to involved the characters. When Kate Austen was revealed as the fugitive on the plane, what she did drove her story for more than one season. After the pilot, successive episodes would reveal bits and pieces of these stories through the series' infamous flashbacks. While viewers doubted what was and wasn't real on the island, they often took the flashbacks at face value. Although maybe they shouldn't have. During the flashback scenes there are subtle dialogue inconsistencies that should match since they show the same moment. While fans chalked this up to a mistake, it might have been a sign the flashbacks are subject to interpretation or character experience.

The Lost Pilot Was a Breakneck Production That Seemed Bound to Fail

Lost Went from Concept to ABC Debut in Less Than Nine Months

The genesis of Lost came from an ABC executive named Lloyd Braun who wanted a dramatized series that resembled Survivor. He commissioned a writer, Jeffrey Lieber, to write multiple scripts, but the network ultimately passed on making a pilot. However, shakeups at parent company Disney gave Braun more freedom, and he tried to get his dream project made, this time with J.J. Abrams and young TV writer Damon Lindelof. In mere weeks, they wrote a rough treatment, and Braun greenlit the pilot episode.

"Well, I liked big swings, and so Lost represented the kind of show I wanted to make. Lost was…my baby… I don't create any of these shows, really brilliant writers create these shows… I came up with the core concept." -- Lloyd Braun at a University of California Television panel discussion.

At the time, the Lost pilot was the most expensive two hours of television ever made, and it seemed like a show that ABC would never pick up. However, after test screenings and countless meetings, the show was picked up for 13 episodes. This meant Abrams and Lindelof had around twice as much time to finish the pilot episode from its original cut to what debuted on television. Visual effects shots, the score and sound design were finished during this time to get the show ready to air. While still not a lot of time for a high-budget production, it was enough to fix any "mistakes" in the episode.

One such mistake was noted during the sound design process, according to 815 - The Story of the Lost Pilot. In the script, the announcement Cindy (the Flight Attendant) made was written exactly the same way the three times it was heard. During filming, there were slight variations in how the actor delivered her lines. Correcting this would have been a simple task with additional dialogue recording. While the version in the "final cut" was changed, the alterations made the announcement even more inconsistent, not less. While this could be a mistake, it wasn't the last time the same moment from different perspectives played differently in Lost.

How the 'Seatbelt Announcement' Discrepancies Affect Lost's Storytelling

The Flashbacks Are Clearly Memories, and Therefore Not Consistent

The first flashback to before the crash audiences see is from Jack Shephard's point of view. He gets a pair of vodka bottles from Cindy, one of which he uses to treat his cut after the crash. In this version of the scene, Cindy says "the pilot switched on the fasten seatbelt sign" just before the crash. When the plane starts to go down, Jack blacks out only to wake up in the bamboo field in that iconic first scene of the episode. He'd also been drinking, though he doesn't appear to be incapacitated.

The Lost Flashbacks With the Fasten Seatbelt Announcement

1. Jack Shephard sitting with Rose
2. Charlie Pace fleeing the flight attendants with his drugs.
3. Kate Austen sitting next to the US Marshal

The second time viewers hear the announcement, it's from the perspective of Charlie Pace, who is struggling from the beginning of heroin withdrawal. Cindy the Flight Attendant goes to get help from her peers, and Charlie runs from her. He bumps into Jack during that moment, in fact. In this scene, viewers hear Cindy say, "the captain has turned on the fasten seatbelt sign." While the actor is shown at first, this part of the dialogue plays over Charlie running to the first class bathroom where, eventually, he retrieves his drugs after the crash.

The third time viewers hear the announcement, it's from Kate Austen's perspective, revealing she is the fugitive on the plane. In this case, Cindy refers to the pilot as "the Captain" but she says, "switched on" instead of "turned on," as the documentary noted. That this wasn't fixed in post-production is a subtle but clear sign the flashbacks aren't what they seem. In all three cases, the characters whose memories audiences are seeing aren't paying attention to the announcement but something else.

Lost's Flashbacks, Flash-Forwards and Flash-Sideways Were All Subjective

Tied to the Characters, Viewers Shouldn't Take These Scenes as Fact

Even without knowing the hectic schedule the Lost pilot had to adhere to, it is easy to think this is simply a continuity mistake. Even with all the careful planning that went into crafting this series, it was made by human beings. After all, the infamous "Nikki and Paulo" episode was meant to be a gift to the fans -- humanizing some of the "redshirts" -- and it was almost universally loathed. However, in hindsight the variation in these tiny details seems to make it clear these flashbacks are memories, and human memory is remarkably inconsistent.

Through the first five seasons of Lost both its flashbacks and flash-forwards are tied to a specific character. This means that what viewers are seeing is not a journalistic account of what happened, but rather the characters' memories of these events. Lost was a series that demanded more of its audience than other network shows. Especially as the fanbase grew intensely passionate, these tiny details were meant to be clear clues to the storytellers' intentions. Just like real human memories, these off-island sequences were subject to the limitations or biases of the characters experiencing them.

"So, we all liked the idea in the Tibetan Book of the Dead of The Bardo, which…[is] a place that you go when you die but you don’t know that you’re dead…. [T]he entire purpose of being in this space is to come to the revelation that you have died, but no one’s allowed to tell you." -- Damon Lindelof via Collider.

The final season's so-called Flash-Sideways were even more character specific. Each "bardo" (a metaphysical state of being between life and death) wasn't the same for each character. After all, Sun and Jin Kwon spent about a day or so in the alternate Los Angeles before "awakening" and heading to the church in the final scene. Other characters, like Jack or John Locke, experienced days or weeks before getting there. As Christian Shephard explained in the final scene, time was relative for each of the castaways on their path to the next plane of existence.

Lost Reaffirmed These Inconsistencies in Season 5's Flash-Forwards

The Oceanic Six Reuniting Played Out In Different Ways Through Its Episodes

Once Lost introduced the Flash-Forwards for the Oceanic Six in Season 4, viewers saw what their lies off-island were like. However, in Season 5, audiences saw how the surviving castaways made their way back to the island. In a scene where they all gather together with Ben Linus, the specifics of that discussion vary based on which character is at the center of the episode. Even more than the seatbelt announcement in the pilot, this reveals the off-island scenes are tied to each character's perspectives, and they play out a little differently.

Conversely, things are different on the island. Perhaps Lost's biggest cliffhanger was the "hatch," and it took three episodes in Season 2 for the answer to be revealed. The standoff between Jack and Desmond, who has a gun to Locke's head, is seen from three different points of view. Whether it was Jack, Locke or Kate viewing these events, in this case the dialogue and circumstances around the standoff are basically the same. The moments are still tied to individual characters' experiences, but they don't differ in any significant ways.

For all the mysterious powers of the island, this detail further underscores the idea that everything the castaways experienced there happened just as audiences saw it. The off-island stories, however, are less concrete. Even if the details differ by a few words or sentences, these are the parts of the show that are most left up for interpretation. Memory is notoriously unreliable and subjective, which is why the flashbacks, flash-forwards and, especially, the flash-sideways on Lost could be so different.

The complete Lost series is available to own on DVD, Blu-ray, digital and streams on Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu.

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Lost

TV-14

Drama

Adventure

Mystery

The survivors of a plane crash are forced to work together in order to survive on a seemingly deserted tropical island.

Release Date

September 22, 2004

Cast

Jorge Garcia , Josh Holloway , Yunjin Kim , Evangeline Lilly , Terry O'Quinn , Naveen Andrews

Main Genre

Drama

Seasons

6

Creator

J.J. Abrahms, Damon Lindelof, Jeffrey Lieber

Number of Episodes

121

Network

ABC

Streaming Service(s)

Crackle , Hulu , Amazon Freevee , Prime Video , Plex