I had planned to end Jack Shepherd Week with a discussion of his love life, specifically the Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle. But I was up early this morning for a job interview and now don’t have the energy to attack such a monstrous topic. Instead, I am going to start my plot discussion. First season, first episode, first image is Jack. “The Pilot” opens on a close up of Jack’s eye. He’s lying in the jungle. Vincent, Walt’s yellow lab, approaches him. Jack stands up, and after finding a shooter of vodka in his pocket, starts running at full speed. He passes a white tennis shoe stuck in a tree. Then he runs out onto the beach and finds the wreckage of Oceanic Flight 815 and the surviving passengers in various states of distress.
We have to ask ourselves: how significant is that opening? The show reminds us of it frequently.By my count, there are 16 other episodes that begin with an extreme close up on an eye. Over half are from the first season. The question is, what could the opening mean? Jack claims that he blacked out during the plane’s turbulence and woke up in the jungle.[1] In the 5th season, Jack also wakes up in the middle of the island’s jungle.[2] Only he’s also traveled back in time to 1977. Is it even possible that Jack’s first introduction to the island was free of supernatural forces? He did seem to run to the crash site on his instincts. He was also the only passenger to awaken so far away from the crash site. Basically, we know that when one travels through time and space to reach the island, one can flash randomly into the jungle. On the flip side, is it possible that one can flash randomly into the jungle and not have traveled through time and speech? In other words, did the producers bind themselves to a time-travel theory from the first shot?
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