Yea that scene with the gun massive turned me off at the start. Happy I stuck around till episode 5 and especially 6, which were both fucking brilliant. Lindelof is definitely a lib but seems he genuinely tried to engange with some more radical themes and didn't hold back on expressing the inherent white supremacy inherent in the American police system (im sure other people on the writing team had a lot of input into this as well, don't wanna give him all the credit.)