(Possible unboxed Season One spoilers inside. Please, no Season Two spoilers outside spoiler boxes).
This thread isn’t really about the show so much as the situation the show is based on, but we can assume for the sake of argument that the main characters are also a part of the group. (Because I’ll take any opportunity to look at Sayid.)
You’ve just survived a plane crash with several dozen other people, and you’re on a deserted island. What do you do? What job would you have? What would you do differently from the others?
I have no real wilderness survival skills, so much of what I know would be useless in these circumstances. I do know how to create clean drinking water from bad, so the group’s dire circumstances before they found the fresh stream would’ve been averted temporarily. I also know how to test the edibility of plants, but I don’t know how motivated I’d be to try.
Once the food and water situation was resolved, and the group was in relative safety, one of my first goals would be to tour the entire outside of the island. I’d hate to find out after living there for two years that either, a) we’re on a peninsula, or b) there’s a luxury resort twenty miles around the coast.
I would want to set up specific groups based on skill and ability. Some people would be in charge of hunting. Others in charge of foraging. Still others would fish. And so on. The group is still too “every man for himself.” The group needs to be set up as a tribal system, where the entire group works together for the greater good. There’s time later for a bartering system, where everyone can trade their special skills and abilities for someone else’s.
Also, I would get the group to enforce the rule that the island’s only doctor not be allowed to do dangerous things. And Sawyer would not be allowed to keep all the stuff he looted and then bargain for it. He could be the quartermaster if he wants, but taking other people’s stuff and then insisting it’s now his would not be allowed. The other 95% of the population should have threatened to strip him naked and tie him to a log tossed in the ocean if he didn’t quit hoarding everything he came across.
I spent a large portion of my childhood watching Gilligan’s Island reruns, so the first thing I’d do is have the Professor create one of those bamboo cars so we could drive to the other side of the island and party with the rock star/natives who managed to land on the island. I’d then take all of Ginger’s dresses and create a really posh cabana and have Sawyer as my fanning cabana boy.
I’d work to become Assistant to the Leader. Right-arm gal, crony, suck-up. I’m not comfortable being responsible for the big decisions, but I’m good at implementing them and getting (manipulating?) people to agree to help. When told what to do (as long as it seems reasonable), I can get it done. I do want to understand WHY decisions are made the way they are, though, and am often percieved to have authority issues.At some point I’d probably piss off the leader with my constant questioning and find myself in the middle of a coup. All this time I’d really be encouraging the rest of the castaways to think for themselves and question just as much as I do, but no one would hear me saying that.
Half the castaways would begin to look to me for leadership, which would make me mightily uncomfortable, because I’d always be second guessing myself. Nonetheless, I’d be seen as the authority figure and be pushed into a position of power I didn’t really want.
I can’t decide whether I’m Jack or Colonel Tigh, actually. Could go either way.
Well, I have wilderness survial skills, and I can make and handle weapons from improvised materials. I also have some skill at spearfishing and trapping. With my luck, I’d end up as Arzt!
If not, I’d probably be a Lockian-type character, going my own way but helping anyone who asked for help.
::sniff:: My perfect record…broken. ::sniff::
Once it became obvious we weren’t going to be rescued any time soon, I would also want to get people to start thinking long term (like Sun and her garden). Bamboo huts, more weapons, training, etc. Sayid and Locke should be doing weapons training for everyone (including Walt). As soon as the Pissed-Off Giraffe started rattling the forest, and it became obvious there were real dangers around, I’d start setting up nightly watches. There’s no reason that everyone except the injured and heavily pregnant could not take watches.
Considering I’m an ER nurse, I’d probably be the one setting up a triage station to treat the injured and helping Jack perform whatever medical miracle of the week he was working on. Then I’d be walking the perimeter of the beach, cause, you know, it’s really suck to build shelters, launch a raft and stuff, and then find out that there’s a Club Med two miles down the beach.
Once immediate food 'n water needs are met, as far as I am concerned the first order of business, indeed the only order of business, is getting the hell off the island. I haven’t seen an episode of the show in question, but if they were aboard an airliner that landed softly enough for them not have all been killed, I can’t believe there is no radio transmitter aboard that is either functional or capable of repair. Likewise, the plane is full of salvageable materials and goods. Tribes? Gardens? Bah. Rafts or outrigger canoes or some form of watercraft is the way to go.
I have some survival/primitive skills trainng and I’d just as soon skip the whole “live the rest of my life as a subsistence-farming primitive” option.
I’d be helping you. I’m an EMT, so I have extensive first-aid training. And yes, I’d want to do more exploring of the island.
I hated that they burned the wreckage of the plane - I thought they should have buried the bodies, or if they really felt the need to burn them, they should have burned them by themselves. The shell could have made for a good shelter.
I’d be helping build shelter, starting fires, finding food–that sort of thing, organizing. I wouldn’t mind doing a lot of the dirty work, if only to take my mind off of being stranded on a desert island…
I would organize the castaways into tiger teams to create white papers on various straw men. I’d improvise PowerPoint presentations with big leaves and charcoal. We would identify our resource constraints and break up into planning sessions to determine our budgetary plan for upcoming periods. Central to this effort would be the formalization of an organizational chart, which would be reproduced and distributed to all participants. Equally important would be the determination of a concrete set of performance metrics so projections can be compared to actuals on a forward-looking basis.
Hey, you gotta go with what you know.
In truth, I’d probably form a harem and murder the competition in their sleep.
I’m the organizing type. The first order of business (after first aid and making sure there were no more exploding engines) is to account for everyone so we know exactly who we’ve got in the group. Then we start figuring out who has which useful skills and start making sure the group’s immediate needs are met, such as fresh water, food and shelter. Get a fire going, then assign a few people to walk the beach and see if they can find that Club Med.
And yeah, no way is Sawyer getting away with that hoarding crap he likes to pull. If you don’t institute some basic rules of society immediately, people get all Lord of the Flies-y.
I totally agree - why would they think it’s ok to let Sawyer keep all that stuff and others have to buy or barter for it? I would just plain tie him up and take that stuff away.
I’m surprised that from the beginning they didn’t do a tally of skills - that seemed to happen as the show went on. Might be more efficient to do it from the beginning.
I would start watching those around me. I would carefully judge their ability, common sense and skills before determining who should be allowed to live in my glorious new perfect society, and who becomes shark chum.
Or maybe that just my common daydream of dealing with ignorant coworkers… either way.
Right from the start I would’ve set up a solar still (I’m assuming that some plastic tarp could’ve been found in the wreckage). Otherwise, I would’ve set up some sort of water catcher.
A fish trap would work well and provide effectively free food. For hunting, I would’ve started with a boomerang for birds. Wire from the plane would’ve worked well for snares. Rotinone-bearing plants are fairly common in the tropics, and would be really useful for fishing (rotinone is a piscine-specific poison- it suffocates the fish, they float to the surface, you gather 'em… and rotinone doesn’t hurt humans).
Next step would be shelter- and the wreckage from the plane would’ve provided a lot of the base materials. Barring that, thatch is pretty damned easy to make, and would be very water resistant. Rope’s a bit harder, but you’ve got lots of cheap labor (hey, you- weave this or we all die), and there’s plenty of wire to hold you 'til you get the first batch of handmade rope).
Then we’d start systematically exploring the island. Boar aren’t native to tropical islands- they were originally seeded there by humans for food. See if anything else was left there, as well.
Oh, and batteries are worth their weight in gold… especially rechargeables. Hoard 'em- and if Sawyer started hiding stuff, well… we’d have a new source of meat, now wouldn’t we? “Hey guys! I found some long pig! Shame about Sawyer- he fell off a cliff while we were hunting, but said that we should go on without him. Who’s hungry?”
