Just finished watching the enhanced version of it on the east coast. It's been a long time since I've seen it but I thought it was still great. It does introduce a lot of elements and themes that we see in later seasons. Locke with the white and black backgammon pieces and so on. Plus a pretty big presence by the (unseen) Smoke Monster. Charlie notes that the monster let either him or Jack alone, which we know that because they were candidates. Another thing...Kate was a far more interesting character in the pilot. Unfortunately once season two came along, she just became the love interest for Jack and Sawyer. It's too bad...she could have been something more.
I hadn't watched the pilot since it first aired. it's great how you see the hints at the themes played out in later seasons.
I saw the first half hour. The lack of widescreen and the pop-ups annoyed me but otherwise, it was nice to see how it began. The music really made the show feel grand. The whole production was big too, like it was bigger than just another network show. The one thing that caught my eye was Jack's little bottle of booze. I was watching the teaser for "LA X" on YouTube today and Cindy gave Jack a little bottle of something on the plane.
I wasn't fond of the pop-ups either. Cindy the Stewardess. Talk about a minor character I often wondered about. I wonder if she and those two kids survived Widmore's mortar attack.
We were wondering last night while watching the Pilot - wasn't Locke a candidate? Didn't the smoke monster drag him through the jungle and try to get him into a vent. I guess you can say the smoke monster wasn't really trying to kill Locke, but it sure seemed so to me!
We watched last night too. God, that premiere episode was truly epic, as was the entire first season. We had never seen anything like this before. The flashbacks were amazing. What a great mechanism to explore the characters. It was fun seeing some of the little things we didn't think twice about at the time...like the backgammon pieces.
I re-watched the pilot a few months ago, and it seemed to me that the Smoke Monster was actually trying to drag Locke into the underground entrance to the Temple (where Danielle's guy lost his arm in Season 5). For what purpose, I don't know. It's possible Smokey had already chosen Locke as his way off the Island.