Lost
ABC
Wednesday 8 p.m. / 7 p.m. Central

"Lost" opens with Matthew Fox lying unconscious, surrounded by tropical foliage, under the watchful eye of a golden retriever. Maybe he's just dozing off on vacation somewhere, dreaming of how easy life is now that he's no longer at the helm of the crisis-a-minute circus of "Party of Five." As we soon discover, however, Fox isn't relaxing. He has just tumbled 40,000 feet out of the sky in the fuselage of an aircraft, landing — wouldn't you know it? — on some combination of the Island of Dr. Moreau, Jurassic Park, and the set of The Beach.

This is a working vacation. Fox, as the physician Jack, spends the riveting opening scenes saving injured passengers strewn amidst the wreckage before dousing vodka on his own lacerations to sanitize them. He promptly cajoles the lovely and reticent Kate (Evangeline Lilly) to sow him up. This symbolic gesture implies that Jack is both tough and sensitive, which will come in handy when an upstart band of English public school boys paint their faces and destroy his conch shell.

For all of its flirtation with marooned-on-a-tropical-island tropes that already have been explored in genres from literary fiction to reality TV, "Lost" rises to the occasion, both in technical execution and tantalizing content. This is not really surprising because it comes to us from J.J. Abrams, the same mind that gave us the Last Great Improvment on Convention: Jennifer Garner as a double agent in a leopard-print leather bustier and a pink wig.

Because of the "Alias" pedigree, we have dizzying camera work, effective close-ups and cliffhangers working hand in glove with a gaggle of intriguing characters played by top-flight actors. The most popular of this bunch is surely Dominic Monaghan, fresh off his portrayal of Merry Brandybuck in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Here, rather than being the reliable but overlooked anchorman in the quartet of Hobbits, Dominic plays Charlie, the reliable but overlooked bassist for a fictional band, Driveshaft. He reminds us that Driveshaft is still together, despite the fact that one member has, ahem, now been forced into involuntary detox on a remote South Pacific island. Cheer up, Charlie. There's bound to be something smokeable in those imposing stretches of rainforest.

Other notables include "Oz" alum Harold Perrineau, sans dreadlocks, whose prodigious dancing skills, it's safe to say, won't be needed just yet. Perrineau tries, in vain, to protect his son from the grim reality of a fuselage full of dead bodies, and, with more success, from racial profiling (that fate falls to our sympathetic Iraqi in the next episode). At least, with a bunch of the airline food still miraculously wrapped in its foil, and some balmy temperatures, we won't be treated to the spectacle of the 48 survivors resorting to cannibalism. That is, unless Terry O'Quinn, speechless and scary as hell, gets that gleam in his eye. Yikes. No wonder they cancelled "Millennium."

Let us not overlook, in a crucial cameo, Greg Grunberg as one of the pilots. With no "Alias" episodes until January, the loveable Grunberg stands in as Greek Chorus. Revived by Jack and Kate, he informs them that, because the airplane lost radio contact six hours into its flight, and that no one has shown up 16 hours into the ordeal on the island, chances for a rescue by the formidable Fijian coast guard remain slim. Soon after making this pronouncement, Grunberg is hoisted from the cockpit by an unseen force, chewed nearly in half, and deposited on top of the tree canopy in a bloody mess. Either we've crash landed on a remake of Predator, or the standards for portraying blood and guts in the 8 p.m. time slot have dropped. Nonetheless, something is out there in the jungle scaring the hell out of our cast, and us, and it's probably not the golden retriever.

Though the bumps in the night have their chilling effect, the real darkness in "Lost" lurks in the hearts of its characters, who, traumatized and paranoid, hide their own secrets zealously. Who was in handcuffs on the plane? Where did that gun come from? Why did the plane go down in the first place? We get access to these narrative tidbits via flashbacks to the horribly real sequence in which the plane begins its fateful descent. Those of us who visualize catastrophe in each routine takeoff, landing and 45 degree bank will balk at the scene, especially when the tail pops off like the head of a Pez dispenser. It's easy to look away from that — and the rest of "Lost" — but there's a lot going on that's worth seeing.

— Joshua Adams (joshua at uchicago dot edu)