Fun
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Nostalgic
Intense
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Curious
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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: March 30, 2005
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Lost, “Deus Ex Machina” (Season 1, Episode 19) [Stream on Netflix]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: The very first season of Lost was as much a triumph of planning and strategy as it was a triumph of story and compelling action. Before the show premiered, the objective was simply to hook audiences as quickly and as spectacularly as they possibly could. And with one of the most acclaimed TV pilots of all time, that box got checked pretty emphatically. But once that happened, once the audiences showed up in droves and everybody knew the show was in it for the long haul, the objective changed: how was a premise like a bunch of plane crash survivors stranded on a desert island supposed to last for many seasons? Either they figure it out and get off the island, or they don’t figure it out and … you know, starve to death.
The primary way that Lost figured out to deal with the problem of longevity was to take each episode and make it half contemporary action and half flashback. Each episode would feature backstory on one particular character, fleshing out their motivations, their secrets, and their circumstances. And with an island full of crash survivors, there were plenty of flashbacks to go around.
By the 19th episode of the series, “Deus Ex Machina,” Lost had already featured one episode centered on John Locke, which cast him as a wheelchair-bound who stubbornly insisted on traveling to Australia to go on a walkabout. The hook, of course, was that the Locke on the island could walk, one of many early indicators of the miraculous properties of the island. In Locke’s second episode, we see him before the wheelchair, encountering his birth mother (Swoosie Kurtz) and his long lost father (Kevin Tighe), who came to him needing a kidney transplant. After an episode’s worth of internal strife, Locke decided to indeed gift his dad with a kidney. The conclusion to the episode is both classic Locke (the universe never fails to crap all over him) and also an introduction to a character who would end up tying a few of Lost‘s characters together.
