SO WHAT ABOUT THE THE OTHER CRASH SURVIVORS? ARE THEY JUST HANGING AROUND ALL THE TIME?
Of the 47 survivors referenced in the Pilot, we only meet fourteen. The other thirty-three... well, we'll certainly begin to wonder who they are and what they're up to after a while.
And that's why they're all disappearing.
It's our intent that by the third episode (fourth at the latest), the unspeaking masses will officially vanish under extremely mysterious circumstances. Of course, the sudden and unexpected reduction of their numbers puts even more strain on those left behind- not to mention an ongoing fear that they may be next...
Of course, any of these "33" could turn up later in the series with partial recollections of where they've been...
But that's another story.
The pilot had 14 main characters with speaking parts. TPTB reference that these 14 characters would be, in essence, the show. The other 33 plane survivors in the beach camp would be literally and figuratively expendable. So the early plan was to have the 33 background actors suddenly "vanish" from the camp - - - to amp up the aghast of the remaining 14 survivors. It is all well and good to pare down the cast for production, budget and story clarity reasons to 14 actors so the viewers could more easily follow their back stories and relationships. But if the producers were going to have a mass disappearance to rocket their original storyline, why did it not happen?
The 33 background survivors hung around for the series like cattle, red shirts to be picked off when needed by the writers.
There is also a hint that the writers would use "flashbacks" to add or stretch out the episodes by using dead or missing characters to fill in the blanks with the main characters current problems. I imagine that a flashback on a science question would lead to a flashback with a character, say Kate, having a casual conversation with Arzt about how to distill or filter water. Kate would remember this knowledge and propose it to the remaining survivors to solve the problem at hand. Instead, Artz was used to graphically represent the danger of unstable TNT.
How would have the mass disappearance of 33 people affected the main characters?
It certainly would have made them more paranoid and defensive. They would become suspicious of any jungle noise. They would become suspicious of each other. Who would they trust? Who was hiding something? In essence, this plot played out in a short form with the Tailies story arc, where a few in their group were kidnapped, and Ana Lucia became the hard nose security chief to protect them from further attacks.
If this was to be the format for the beach camp early on, then there would have been a real need to elect one leader to make final decisions to protect their survival. It would have also allowed the camp survivors to be more active, and not reactive, to the environment around them.
