In retrospect, yes. But I'm talking about what the creators intended at the pilot stage. Terry O'Quinn wasn't cast on the show until months after the pilot was made and the series picked up, and Kindred didn't appear until episode 3. So when the pilot was shot, when the trailer was made, there was no Kindred. Now, that could be just because they always planned for the character to appear later and didn't need to cast him at the pilot stage. But there was that symbol that was clearly intended to be important and was then abandoned.
And not just the symbol on the TV -- at the start of the trailer, you can see there are electrical disturbances, some kind of symbols dancing on Jo's clock radio, and a weird aurora in the sky, which seem to suggest more going on than just a plane crash. There's a sense of eeriness there in the pilot that's hard to reconcile with the "It's just some greedy billionaire with hired killers" explanation they gave later. So I get the impression that the Kindred stuff was a more mundane replacement for whatever sci-fi weirdness was originally planned. Because even today, the execs at the big networks are afraid that science fiction is too niche.
I'd really like to know what's been going on behind the scenes, how much of what we're seeing was planned and how much was revised from the original plan.
Well, I can't explain it, but somehow I knew from the start that AI would be involved in some respect. Either I read something I've now forgotten, or I made a lucky guess based on the title and the trailer.
