I watched the second part of the Lost pilot.
It's good. It's fairly entertaining, a pretty good thriller.
Here's the problem:
The characters aren't human.
What I mean by that is they don't act the way humans act.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Humans are obligatorily social animals. Nothing about us makes sense except when viewed in light of that fact.
Throw a bunch of strangers [1] into an unknown and dangerous situation and you'll get conflict and cooperation. And we're seeing those things.
But humans make societies. We can't help it. It's at the core of every single one of our interactions with other humans: How does this person fit into my society? How do I fit into their society?
And one of the fundamental ways we do that, one of the things that marks us as human, is storytelling. Put any two of us in a room and we'll start telling stories to each other. "Here's what happened to me" and "This is the way this process works" and "Tell me who you are".
The people in Lost aren't doing that. We get glimpses here and there--"we move a lot/my mother died", "I'm a rock star bassist",[2] "I was in the Republican Guard"--but not a hundredth of what should be going on. Our favorite story is autobiography: These people should be virtually obsessed with asking and telling each other who they are.
Yet no one has asked the pregnant woman who or where the father is. No one has said why they were on the plane. (We can now deduce that it was headed from Australia to the US.) No one has said "I'm a stockbroker/housewife/on vacation/retired military". No one has talked about their daughter/husband/co-workers waiting for them back in the States. No one has bragged about how important they are.
That's not just weird, it's not human.
I'll grant you, it's clearly a deliberate choice for the mode of telling the story of Lost, I'm just saying, it makes our interaction as the audience with these characters very artificial.
[1] It's also fairly freaky that of the forty or so survivors, there are only about three pairs and no pre-existing relationships of more than two people. And it's just contrivance that none of the crew--who are theoretically trained in dealing with emergencies--survived.
[2] Or is it "rockstar"? See previous post.
ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention that the shot of Evangeline Lilly washing in the ocean in her teeny-tiny underwear was the most blatant kind of fan-service short of actual nipplege. I'm not complaining, mind you, I'm just pointing that out.