Back To The Island: Opinon Pieces on Lost
Did Nikki and Paulo Die For Our Sins?
This article needs a bit more of a personal touch than usual.
As someone who has never spent any real time in internet chatrooms connected to any form of popular culture (and who considers himself blessed because of this) I was largely absent from the debate over divisive characters on so many of the greatest series in history. That didn’t mean I didn’t have my own opinions on so many of the characters — it just had a different metric than I suspect most fans have.
From the day I started watching television I had one rule for judging whether I liked a character: how repulsive they were as an individual to others. This may have led to my having issues with some truly incredible series. I had a lot of trouble appreciating ER for most of its run because so many of the characters were off-putting. Over the years — and as the writers deepened them — I came to appreciate their layers. (Well, not with Romano, he had none and I was glad when the chopper killed him.)
Now this may not have served me particularly well considering that just as I started watching TV we entered the age of the antihero. But I always tried to give the writers the benefit of the doubt for far longer than they deserved. I always felt that The Sopranos was a show that tested your patience with the characters for too long and when Adriana was killed off, that was the line for me and I stopped watching. I still feel its an overrated series compared to The Wire and Deadwood which had many reprehensible characters but also many good ones as well as much more to recommend them. And while the leads of Mad Men and Breaking Bad were reprehensible people, there were enough fascinating character around them to stop me from ever judging the series to harshly no matter how dark the leads and some characters got.
During the last decade, however, as so many dramas doubled and tripled down on having nothing but unpleasant characters I chose the route of least resistance: not to watch. I suspect I may have lost something by not watching shows like Game of Thrones, Succession, Euphoria and Ozark but I gave all of them quite a bit of latitude before deciding there was nothing for me in them. I didn’t want to spend my time among so many toxic personalities doing bad things to other bad people and being forced to care. I realize I may be among the minority but I’m fine with that.
And I suspect that, while I enjoyed many of the series in the first paragraph and will gladly watch them when they air on television, I regularly rewatch Lost every couple of years like clockwork. All of the characters occupy a gray area, never being entirely good or entirely bad and in a world where so many shows double down on your engagement with antiheroes if not outright villains there was something brave about a series which saw characters who while they were as broken as Tony Soprano or Walter White were doing everything in their power to work together. “Live together, die alone” was an early catchphrase for Lost and it was a core message. Compared to the actions of much of the dramas of the last twenty years, which focus on protagonists working entirely for themselves and are willing to kill to realize their goals, that’s one of the most unifying messages of the series.
It is by use of that standard one looks at what ‘others’ have considered polarizing characters. Having seen the lists over the years their metric is vastly different from mine. Particularly in so much of the drama of the 21st century, it basically involves the characters — almost always female — who are essentially buzzkills because they dare to complain about the horrible things the Walter Whites and the Marty Byrdes are doing. I mentioned that this toxic masculinity was mostly present when it came to Kate, but it basically applied to the majority of the female characters when the series was on the air — and it showed the lack of consistency.
Kate, as I mentioned, was hated in later season because she had a moral compass. There were a lot of people who never liked Juliet because they didn’t think she was trustworthy no matter how many times she proved herself to the survivors. Shannon was hated for being too whiny. Ana Lucia was hated for being too aggressive. It should go without saying that many of the male characters exhibited behavior that was infinitely worse for far longer — Sawyer is the most blatant example of that — yet the fanbase never reacted as vehemently to them as they did the women.
And this brings me to the point of this article in what is considered Lost’s greatest blunder — and that also throws into question so much of the writing of those like St. James about the show’s problems with female characters and character of the color. In one of those coincidences that has to be one of publishing, almost halfway between her article about Kate Austen at the end of Season 2 and her article on her writing on Lost and non-white character is a flat-out rave for one of the most polarizing episodes in the entire series ‘Expose’.
I will quote St. James own words for why it happened:
Expose only exists because of an oft-uttered question about the first two seasons of the show: Was the audience ever going to get to know the many random castaways who wandered around in the background of shots? The show had added a handful of recurring characters from this general pool of people, but never any new series regulars. On a show that needed to pull off the magic trick of seeming like everything was planned from the start…abruptly adding new characters who’d been there all along might have felt like a cheat.
Still, after the show had killed off two of the three main Tailies (the tail section survivors introduced in Season 2) and was about to kill off a third, it behooved the series to add new characters who had been there in some way. Enter Nikki and Paulo, two castaways who had supposedly been there from the very beginning, even though the audience was just meeting them now.
Now there were two schools of thought on the characters played by Kiele Sanchez and Rodrigo Santoro, respectively. The first school, as voiced by Nikki Stafford, found them utterly repellent from the word go. The other school barely noticed them. I was firmly in the latter. And because I was absent from internet chatrooms I knew nothing about the visceral contempt that so many fans seemed to hold towards them from the start.
Which is why when Expose aired on March 28, 2007, I was utterly baffled by it. Lost was coming back from its winter hiatus with a series of incredibly strong episodes, including the previous week’s ‘The Man From Tallahassee’ in which Locke seemed to have crossed over to the dark side of the force (as Hurley would have put it) and we’d just learned that somehow Locke’s father, the man who had pushed him out a window and paralyzed him, had appeared out of ‘a magic box’ and was hog-tied by the Others. I also wanted to know what was going to happen to Kare and Sayid and what Jack was going to do now that the submarine that was supposed to bring him home had been destroyed.
So imagine my amazement to find an entire episode devoted to two characters I had basically not noticed during all of Season 3, apparently only to drop dead in front of the castaways, have every character try to figure out what happened to them, intercut with a series of flashbacks showing Nikki and Paulo apparently being randomly inserted into critical island events with all the subtlety of the clip shows Lost was beginning to air every season. It was baffling and that’s before you get to how it ended. (Believe me I’ll get to that.)
In the aftermath of the incredible remainder of Season 3, climaxing with the game changing Through the Looking Glass I forgot about this until I purchased the next volume of Stafford’s Finding Lost. It was then I learned about this hatred that Stafford held towards Nikki and Paulo. And for a writer who was objective in everything else, her contempt for these poor characters seemed unwarranted. There was a segment in every episode they appeared in called ‘Nikki & Paulo — Why?” in which she devoted at least one paragraph arguing how off-putting and unpleasant she and many founds them.” She utterly raved about Expose and what happened to them (again I’ll get to that) and that should have been the end of it. But in what can be considered the sign of pure spite she not only referred to their deaths with cheers multiple times afterwards but in every subsequent volume she went out of her way to remind her readers and by extent the writers just how badly Lost had screwed the pooch with them. I wondered considering Kiele Sanchez’s character’s name and her pseudonym, did she take this more personally than others but that was the mandate of the masses.
This episode is one of the most polarizing in the entire series and I understand why — though I have to say my reasons are not the same as the fan base.
For starters having rewatched Lost multiple times, I’ve since paid extra attention to the episodes that Sanchez and Santoro appear it. In the six episodes they appeared in leading up to Expose, I think combined the two of them have maybe twenty minutes of screen time, probably less. I won’t pretend that they’re likable or that the writers did them any favors but there is nothing about their work that ever struck me as repellent by my standards or even the ones that led to so many characters being labeled ‘annoying’ on the internet years later. The series doesn’t seem to know what to do with them, but they’re not as difficult as Ana Lucia had been when she’d been introduced in Season 2. In short, they don’t deserve what happens to them by a long shot.
Now let’s get to Expose. In it we learn that Nikki Fernandez had a role on a long running TV series called Expose and that her character was killed off in a twist that revealed a critical person was the villain all along. She’s actually having an affair with the showrunner and we learn that she and Paulo were conspiring to kill him to steal $8 million in diamonds before they got on Oceanic 815. The flashbacks that follow show them basically in critical moments during the original series — the pilot, Jack giving his ‘live together, die alone’ speech, the characters walking by the plane that will kill Boone, the Pearl station, seeing Ben and Juliet in the Pearl, etc. None of this has any real effect on them, all they care about is finding their diamonds which they lost when the plane crashed.
While this is going on Nikki has dropped dead in front of Sawyer and Hurley. Sawyer doesn’t know who Nikki is; Hurley says she’s been there all the time. The survivors at the beach try to figure out what happened to her, try to figure out where Paulo is, find him also dead and then try to figure out who they were. They theorize about them — Jin thinks the monster killed them, Sun thinks the Others did and everyone tries to figure out what they did to each other. Meanwhile they dig graves for these characters and all of the flashbacks start by cutting to their bodies.
Now if you’re a real fan of TV, you might realize that Expose is what they call a ‘meta’ episode. I didn’t know the term in 2007 but I’d actually seen more than my share of those episodes already. Darin Morgan may have created the kind of episode when he did his revolutionary work for The x-Files, Buffy The Vampire Slayer did something like it at least once a season and I’d even seen one on Homicide. When done well, these episode are usually brilliant deconstruction pieces, hysterically funny and a pleasure to watch.
‘Expose’ is none of those things for a critical reason. In episodes like ‘Jose Chung’s From Outer Space’ or ‘Humbug’, Morgan never thought The X-Files was beneath him, he just thought there were some absurd things about them. This was true of other writers like Vince Gilligan who just wanted to have fun when they were biting the hand that fed them and most importantly while The X-Files was mythology show it was not serialized the way Lost was.
By contrast the only reason ‘Expose’ exists is because the writers had decided to cut bait on what they now considered a storytelling mistake. There might have other ways to get rid of Nikki and Paulo but they chose the meanest way possible by essentially turning them into idiots unconcerned with everything that was going on the island. This was a legitimate complaint fans had about the regulars doing so, but in the hands of the writers it comes not as a jape but as mean-spirited.
I wonder if the cast members themselves were aware of what was going on when they received this script and if they were annoyed by it. Because in the context of Lost this is thee only episode I remember it seems like every single actor in the cast is just going through the motions. None of them seem so much bored as they are incurious. Even Jorge Garcia seems like he’s not having any fun and when they guy who’s known for being the funny guy doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself, that’s saying a lot.
And that’s in the present. In the flashbacks everyone else looks like they’re not in the same episodes that Nikki and Paulo are experiencing. William Mapother is clearly trying to do comedy, which he can’t; Terry O’Quinn dialogue with Paulo really sounds like he thought he left this part of his character behind a year ago and Michael Emerson doesn’t sound so much malevolent as Ben but as someone who can’t believe he has to explain his evil plan to his underlings by now. There are weaker episodes in the first three seasons of Lost but even in ‘Dave’ and ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ you can at least see the actors trying something with the horrible writing, even if it isn’t working. Only in Expose do you see the characters wondering if it was worth moving to Hawaii for this show.
And that leads to the climax: Nikki and Paulo aren’t dead. They’ve been paralyzed by the Medusa Spider and are unable to move. So for the entire episode, everyone’s talking over their heads and not paying attention to them. Then they are lowered into their graves, given the weakest of eulogies, and are buried alive as the entire cast walks away bored.
Nikki Stafford for the record, loved this part of the episode and called it the highlight. As for myself each time I rewatch the series I’m more reluctant to see Expose again. I mean, I don’t have to: it’s the only episode that has no relevance to the rest of Lost and I openly think it’s the worst episode of the show, hands down. Which is why I find it stunning that there are so many people — including St. James herself — who absolutely love this episode “It rules,” she says in the second paragraph.
And it is here I must point out what might not be clear: Nikki is a woman and Paulo a man of color. You know, the exact kind of characters who everyone else argues never got a fair shake on Lost but don’t even get mentioned in passing in either of the chapters St. James writes about female characters and non-white characters getting fair play and to be clear, doesn’t give any credit to in her review of Expose.
Now I do understand that is the most polarizing episode in the history of the series but I suspect it’s more for the point that it was written at all rather than Nikki and Paulo’s fate. And that’s before you consider something you as a fan of Lost may not be aware of but I was — and I’m actually going to quote my own rewatch to explain:
When Lost ran in certain syndicated runs, several episodes were cut from the repeats, the lion’s share of them from Season 3. This never made much to sense to me with a story where every episode of the story is vital to the plot of Lost. It was not until years after the fact that I realized which episodes were cut. And having put it together with recent revelations, there’s something even more troubling about it.
The episodes that were cut were The Glass Ballerina, Further Instructions, The Cost of Living, Stranger in a Strange Land, Tricia Tanaka is Dead and Expose. With the exception of The Glass Ballerina and Stranger in a Strange Land, all of these episodes feature Kiele Sanchez and Rodrigo Santoro. Since actors receive residuals based on reruns of episodes, it now seems like they were removed so the producers of Lost would not have to pay Sanchez and Santoro. The fact that Nikki and Paulo killed each other out of greed now seems far more ironic given that their episodes were removed for a similar level of selfishness.
…So when it has been decided that Nikki and Paulo are the worst aspects of Lost altogether and that they deserved their deaths, I will never be able to jump on that bandwagon. Nikki and Paulo may have represented the worst aspect of humanity but everything that surrounds their death on Lost — the toxic backlash of the internet fandom, the horrid treatment of performers by writers, the problems that actors of color face to this day — is equally upsetting. And the fact the writers chose to do spend all of this time and energy just killing characters they had no use for instead of solving some of the mysteries on the show leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I might not be able to ever praise them, but they sure as hell deserved more than to be just buried.
Now this may go against the beliefs of the fan bases of Lost but I’ve never really given a damn about what the internet says about any fandom and that’s just as true for a show I love as one I don’t care about. And it really does make me wonder what they did to piss off so many people.
A theory I have has to do with the fact that Season 3 was so divisive among the fanbase. At the start of Season 3 Lost was at its all-time height among viewership — 21.2 million people tuned into the season premiere. However that very factor put the writers in a quandary. The pattern for network television at the time was a show with ratings this high was that it was going to stay on the air until it had become so unpopular among the fans that no one cared when it was cancelled. Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof by this same point wanted to have an end day for Lost but ABC had no intention of given them that.
So for the first six episodes Jack, Kate and Sawyer are imprisoned on Hydra Island — and for the first time some of the forward momentum for Lost is clearly gone. I don’t think those episodes are as horrible as the masses believe but I do see points where the show seems to be running in place, particularly in the stories involving Kate and Sawyer on that island. I also agree that the flashbacks for the characters are starting to have diminishing returns, particularly with Jack.
There was grumbling about this to be sure but I suspect the fans decided to put all of their anger on Nikki and Paulo who they considered symbolic of everything that was bad about Season 3. And while that’s understandable, it’s also a sad sign of the often toxic nature of fandom to put blame where it doesn’t belong. And considering Cuse and Lindelof realized this was a dead end, they decided to cut bait. They would do so a couple of other times on storylines that didn’t work but rarely was it as heavy handed and nasty as it was with Nikki and Paulo.
It may be an exaggeration that Nikki and Paulo died for the sins of the fanbase but they definitely did because of the writers. And perhaps that’s why I’m going to keep rewatching Expose every time I rewatch the series. Not because the episode deserves it or even because I think the characters deserved better.
No it’s because sometimes you need to be reminded of the nasty nature of fandom and the petty grievances that cause so many characters to take abuse they don’t deserve and suffer the virtual slings and arrows of the internet. And it does remind viewers of Lost that sometimes you have to bear some horrible and nasty stories before things get better. Immediately after this episode Lost went into its homestretch that rejuvenated the series creatively and led to the incredible second half of the show that ranks with some of the greatest television of the era. The writers would almost never step wrong from that point right up until the very end. It doesn’t make Nikki and Paulo’s deaths any less unpleasant or the fan base’s treatment any more called for but that’s what even the best TV is like.
Try to remember that next time you watch Season 3.