Here is the updated Season 3 league table based on the votes for each episode in the Polls section. Left Behind has currently received nearly 3000 votes, still a long way behind the 5,600 that we got for Expose, which is still the most voted for Episode ever.
Showing posts with label Exposé. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Exposé. Show all posts
Friday, April 6, 2007
The Season 3 Episode League Table
Here is the updated Season 3 league table based on the votes for each episode in the Polls section. Left Behind has currently received nearly 3000 votes, still a long way behind the 5,600 that we got for Expose, which is still the most voted for Episode ever.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Behind the scenes with Doc Arzt
Thanks to DocArzt over at The Tailsection with a story about.. er.. DocArzt...
Visit Daniel Roebucks site
Visit Daniel Roebucks site
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Exposé - Water Cooler Moments
Thanks to Sawyer840 for the video from ABC.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Lost Exposed by J.Wood
Another indepth review of Exposé by the always interesting J.Wood.
In terms of visual symbols, the clear winner for "Exposé" is the Russian doll. This is episode is episodes within an episode, complete with scenes within scenes, undisclosed stories that didn't remain buried for too long, and the two seemingly most disliked characters in the narrative, Nikki and Paulo, having each other's flashbacks. And again, a good bit of audience response was embedded into the dialog.
The Russian doll is a doll within a doll within a doll. Inside the innermost doll were the $8 million worth of diamonds that Zukerman hid — eight seems to be the operative number of the past couple episodes. Nikki and Paulo were pulling a Sawyer/Cooper-sized con by pretending to be an actress and a chef working for television producer Howard Zukerman in Sydney (and in Nikki's case, sleeping with him). Why they targeted Zukerman, we don't yet know. Nikki was guest starring in Zukerman's B-level TV series Exposé, which mirrors title of the episode itself — and is also the show Locke was watching in "The Man from Tallahassee" when he ate his dinner in front of his TV. By the end of "Exposé," we see that the events leading from the Exposé shoot meet up with the events of the "Exposé" episode, and those paralleled events share many narrative threads.
The backstory is a traditional noir story, with a femme fatale setting up a hapless male protagonist in a con for financial gain. The noir flashbacks really only follow the events surrounding Zukerman's diamonds, but those events disclose unknown elements from previous episodes. Noir films are all about the protagonist getting caught in a web of deceit, and the flashbacks knit into previous episodes to form a kind of narrative web that we're now finding ourselves in. You could put a shape to it, giving it a web-like grid.
On the 24th day, Nikki and Paulo, as well as Locke, all take measures to keep their respective hatch finds hidden from the rest; Nikki and Paulo want to protect their stash of diamonds, and Locke wants to protect his seeming sacred destiny with the Swan hatch. On the 49th day, Paulo hides the diamonds that were in the same lake as Kate's case in the Pearl station toilet; while there, Ben and Juliet show up to spy on Jack in the Swan station, and suggest that they'll use Michael to lure Jack. At the end of that same episode is when Michael seemingly communicates with Walt over the computer — this now looks like Ben's work, not Walt's. On the 72nd day, when Nikki and Paulo were first introduced as characters, Paulo's problem in the Pearl station toilet proves to be his retrieving the diamonds, and we now know that this was the moment when all the events leading up to their dual paralysis were set off. Paulo didn't want Nikki or anyone finding the diamonds, so he kept them on himself. These are just a few of the parallels, but along the way, as Paulo gets deeper in his noir web, each flashback links to and develops a previous scene from a previous episode, creating a kind of narrative web (which I've badly represented via a grid). There's one more over-arching link: this was the 14th episode of season three; the theme of every 14th episode of every season to date has been of one individual undermining others through some kind of deceit. In the first season, Walt burnt the raft; in the second season, Ben infiltrated the Lostaways; and here, both Nikki and Paulo jeopardize each other for the diamonds. Each flashback scene is a doll hidden inside another, but like Locke says, things don't stay buried on this island.
The other embedded bit is the audience response, again showing that this narrative is trying to actively engage the Lostologist audience. Sawyer seems as annoyed with Nina and Pablo as many of the fans — "Who the hell are you?" A quick perusal of The Fuselage forums will show just what people thought of these characters before their stories were ever woven back into the narrative. The actor playing Paulo, Rodrigo Santoro, has been called the Brazilian Tom Cruise/Russell Crowe; Zukerman spins this by calling Paulo the Wolfgang Puck of Brazil. The guest appearance by Billy Dee Williams carries forth the internal Star Wars dialog with the audience (Lando Calrissian, the baddest con man this side of Bespin).
But this episode wasn't without its literary references, and those references will work back around to the buried and seemingly dead. Howard Zukerman has an evocative name. We may find out more about him in the future, but there are two Zuckerman references that might be of use. Baron Sol Zuckerman of Great Britain was an anatomist and secretary of the London Zoological Society; during WWII, he studied and assessed bomb impacts on people and buildings. In the 1960s, he served as Britain's chief scientific advisor, and came out against nuclear arms development. He was also a foremost scholar of primate behavior. In his wartime activity, his activism, and his study of primates, we have an individual fit for the Hanso Foundation.
But in literary terms, the name Zukerman also evokes writer Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman. Of note is how Zuckerman was originally the fictional autobiographical product of Roth's fictional character Peter Tarnopol in My Life As a Man. In other words, Roth's character was a writer who created an autobiographical character in Nathan Zuckerman. Again we have a kind of dolls-within-dolls self-reflexivity at play, with a story mirroring its creation. Eventually, through his books The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman takes over Roth's novels as Roth's alter-ego, rather than Tarnopol's. This is the kind of literary wall-breaking that Flann O'Brien, another writer seen in Lost, did with his novel At Swim-Two-Birds; in both Roth's and O'Brien's books, characters have agency and take over the text. As I've argued here and in my book, and as Damon Lindelof recently acknowledged in a radio interview with WBUR's Tom Ashbrook, we the audience are being scripted into the Lost narrative like characters; "your [the audience's] imagination now becomes a part of this show." As such, we have a kind of agency in this text, not unlike a Zuckerman or the Pookah (tricksters, all of us).
The next literary nod occurs in a flashback when Arzt, frustrated at not being told about the case of guns that Kate has, begins to yell "The pigs are walking! The pigs are walking!" In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the pig Squealer is the first to try walking on his hind legs, putting himself in the position of a human; these pigs are also the ones running the farm. After pronouncing for chapters that all animals were equal, the walking pigs announce "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS." In its way, that scene echoes the philosopher Mikhail Bakunin's fear that a former dictatorship run by proletarians will become a dictatorship run by former proletarians.
In the scene when Nikki harasses Sawyer for a gun to get after Paulo, the book Sawyer is reading can barely be made out in the corner of the screen, almost as if it wasn't meant to be seen (again, score one for HDTV if you have it). The book is Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun, a near-noirish Hercule Poirot mystery set on an island off Cornwall. The story begins with a beautiful woman who attracts the attention of other men, and forces her husband to stand by and take it. Already we have our Nikki and Paulo parallels. Poirot has to investigate the death of the attractive woman with nothing but too many suspects and seemingly disparate clues. It wouldn't be fair to give away the ending of a potboiler like Christie's book, but suffice to say that Sawyer's being blamed for Nikki's death follows the plot to a point, but then twists it back around, again following the mirror-twinned narrative fashion Lost has come to develop. But the way Poirot has to deal with clues that don't seem to point in the right direction is echoed in how Hurley and the rest try to piece Nikki and Paulo's "death" together, as well as what we in the audience go through as we slowly piece the flashbacks together. Plywood, power lines, Paulo lies, paralyzed.
However, there's another subtextual reference that calls out from under for discussion, Wade Davis's The Serpent and the Rainbow. For some time now, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have been joking about the coming zombies. Davis is an anthropologist and ethnobotanist from Harvard University who in the early 1980s went to Haiti to investigate claims of voodoo zombification. He documented his experiences in his book, which was adapted by Wes Craven into a film in 1988. Davis found that voodoo bokors (witchdoctors) in Haiti concocted a special kind of toxic powder made from, among other things, puffer fish venom. The fish itself has poisonous spines that contain a tetrodotoxin, which is a neurotoxin more poisonous than a black widow's bite, and with no known antidotes. The puffer fish is famous in Japan for fugu, a kind of Japanese Russian Roulette of fish dishes. Only licensed chefs are allowed to prepare fugu, because if it isn't prepared just right, it retains some of its tetrodotoxin and will first paralyze the diner, and can eventually cause death by asphyxiation. Arzt's spider, lactrodectus regina — the (nonexistent) Medusa spider — seems to have the same kind of tetrodotoxic venom. This spider, by the way, points to two points of mythology on the island — another example of Greek mythology (along with Apollo, the Cyclops, Penelope and Cerberus), and the smoke monster. Just before the spiders swarm, the familiar tick of the smoke monster can be heard and Nikki and Paulo look around for the monster. But this time, it seems to have been crawling along the jungle floor.
But back to Davis and zombies: In Davis's account, a bokor would blow some of the powdered venom onto a victim. The powder is so potent that a little on the skin will get into the blood stream and cause paralysis, slowing the heart rate to such a degree the person seems dead. To psychically break the victim, the unlucky sucker is then buried alive, as if he were dead. The bokor knows how long to leave a victim buried — they're no good dead — and will dig up the person for later use. But being buried alive leads to, among other traumas, a lack of oxygen to the brain, which can cause brain damage. Recover the brain-damaged victim from the ground, use some hallucinogens to cement the shock and cause memory loss, and you have yourself a zombie, a living being without will or the capacity for focused thought that is good for little more than slaving in fields.
There is the famous case in Haiti of Clairvius Narcisse, who was seemingly killed over a land dispute in 1962, and zombified. The bokor who zombified Narcisse used the puffer fish venom to fake his death, then dug him up and kept him working at a sugar plantation for the next two years. The bokor had other zombies at a plantation, and he kept his zombies mollified with a hallucinogenic paste made from the datura plant. When the bokor died in 1964, the doses of paste stopped and Narcisse regained his sanity; he then found his way back to his village and proved he was still alive to the very people who buried him (not all zombies are so lucky). From this we have a few things: we know Nikki and Paulo aren't dead, and are now buried alive; if they make it out, will they be terrorized and brain-damaged from lack of oxygen? What then? We also know that Locke has employed a hallucinogenic paste, both to Boone and himself. We have, then, the makings of zombification — things don't stay buried on this island.
(A word of Wikipedia warning: As I was preparing for this post, I was doing some research and came across a post about "Exposé" on Wikipedia. Since the show hadn't aired, I thought it would be speculations and referential name-checks. Wrong — it was the complete plot, with no spoiler warnings in sight. This made viewing the episode a little less than surprising. Caveat exhibitrum!)
Article by J.Wood
The Russian doll is a doll within a doll within a doll. Inside the innermost doll were the $8 million worth of diamonds that Zukerman hid — eight seems to be the operative number of the past couple episodes. Nikki and Paulo were pulling a Sawyer/Cooper-sized con by pretending to be an actress and a chef working for television producer Howard Zukerman in Sydney (and in Nikki's case, sleeping with him). Why they targeted Zukerman, we don't yet know. Nikki was guest starring in Zukerman's B-level TV series Exposé, which mirrors title of the episode itself — and is also the show Locke was watching in "The Man from Tallahassee" when he ate his dinner in front of his TV. By the end of "Exposé," we see that the events leading from the Exposé shoot meet up with the events of the "Exposé" episode, and those paralleled events share many narrative threads.
The backstory is a traditional noir story, with a femme fatale setting up a hapless male protagonist in a con for financial gain. The noir flashbacks really only follow the events surrounding Zukerman's diamonds, but those events disclose unknown elements from previous episodes. Noir films are all about the protagonist getting caught in a web of deceit, and the flashbacks knit into previous episodes to form a kind of narrative web that we're now finding ourselves in. You could put a shape to it, giving it a web-like grid.
On the 24th day, Nikki and Paulo, as well as Locke, all take measures to keep their respective hatch finds hidden from the rest; Nikki and Paulo want to protect their stash of diamonds, and Locke wants to protect his seeming sacred destiny with the Swan hatch. On the 49th day, Paulo hides the diamonds that were in the same lake as Kate's case in the Pearl station toilet; while there, Ben and Juliet show up to spy on Jack in the Swan station, and suggest that they'll use Michael to lure Jack. At the end of that same episode is when Michael seemingly communicates with Walt over the computer — this now looks like Ben's work, not Walt's. On the 72nd day, when Nikki and Paulo were first introduced as characters, Paulo's problem in the Pearl station toilet proves to be his retrieving the diamonds, and we now know that this was the moment when all the events leading up to their dual paralysis were set off. Paulo didn't want Nikki or anyone finding the diamonds, so he kept them on himself. These are just a few of the parallels, but along the way, as Paulo gets deeper in his noir web, each flashback links to and develops a previous scene from a previous episode, creating a kind of narrative web (which I've badly represented via a grid). There's one more over-arching link: this was the 14th episode of season three; the theme of every 14th episode of every season to date has been of one individual undermining others through some kind of deceit. In the first season, Walt burnt the raft; in the second season, Ben infiltrated the Lostaways; and here, both Nikki and Paulo jeopardize each other for the diamonds. Each flashback scene is a doll hidden inside another, but like Locke says, things don't stay buried on this island.
The other embedded bit is the audience response, again showing that this narrative is trying to actively engage the Lostologist audience. Sawyer seems as annoyed with Nina and Pablo as many of the fans — "Who the hell are you?" A quick perusal of The Fuselage forums will show just what people thought of these characters before their stories were ever woven back into the narrative. The actor playing Paulo, Rodrigo Santoro, has been called the Brazilian Tom Cruise/Russell Crowe; Zukerman spins this by calling Paulo the Wolfgang Puck of Brazil. The guest appearance by Billy Dee Williams carries forth the internal Star Wars dialog with the audience (Lando Calrissian, the baddest con man this side of Bespin).
But this episode wasn't without its literary references, and those references will work back around to the buried and seemingly dead. Howard Zukerman has an evocative name. We may find out more about him in the future, but there are two Zuckerman references that might be of use. Baron Sol Zuckerman of Great Britain was an anatomist and secretary of the London Zoological Society; during WWII, he studied and assessed bomb impacts on people and buildings. In the 1960s, he served as Britain's chief scientific advisor, and came out against nuclear arms development. He was also a foremost scholar of primate behavior. In his wartime activity, his activism, and his study of primates, we have an individual fit for the Hanso Foundation.
But in literary terms, the name Zukerman also evokes writer Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman. Of note is how Zuckerman was originally the fictional autobiographical product of Roth's fictional character Peter Tarnopol in My Life As a Man. In other words, Roth's character was a writer who created an autobiographical character in Nathan Zuckerman. Again we have a kind of dolls-within-dolls self-reflexivity at play, with a story mirroring its creation. Eventually, through his books The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman takes over Roth's novels as Roth's alter-ego, rather than Tarnopol's. This is the kind of literary wall-breaking that Flann O'Brien, another writer seen in Lost, did with his novel At Swim-Two-Birds; in both Roth's and O'Brien's books, characters have agency and take over the text. As I've argued here and in my book, and as Damon Lindelof recently acknowledged in a radio interview with WBUR's Tom Ashbrook, we the audience are being scripted into the Lost narrative like characters; "your [the audience's] imagination now becomes a part of this show." As such, we have a kind of agency in this text, not unlike a Zuckerman or the Pookah (tricksters, all of us).
The next literary nod occurs in a flashback when Arzt, frustrated at not being told about the case of guns that Kate has, begins to yell "The pigs are walking! The pigs are walking!" In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the pig Squealer is the first to try walking on his hind legs, putting himself in the position of a human; these pigs are also the ones running the farm. After pronouncing for chapters that all animals were equal, the walking pigs announce "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS." In its way, that scene echoes the philosopher Mikhail Bakunin's fear that a former dictatorship run by proletarians will become a dictatorship run by former proletarians.
In the scene when Nikki harasses Sawyer for a gun to get after Paulo, the book Sawyer is reading can barely be made out in the corner of the screen, almost as if it wasn't meant to be seen (again, score one for HDTV if you have it). The book is Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun, a near-noirish Hercule Poirot mystery set on an island off Cornwall. The story begins with a beautiful woman who attracts the attention of other men, and forces her husband to stand by and take it. Already we have our Nikki and Paulo parallels. Poirot has to investigate the death of the attractive woman with nothing but too many suspects and seemingly disparate clues. It wouldn't be fair to give away the ending of a potboiler like Christie's book, but suffice to say that Sawyer's being blamed for Nikki's death follows the plot to a point, but then twists it back around, again following the mirror-twinned narrative fashion Lost has come to develop. But the way Poirot has to deal with clues that don't seem to point in the right direction is echoed in how Hurley and the rest try to piece Nikki and Paulo's "death" together, as well as what we in the audience go through as we slowly piece the flashbacks together. Plywood, power lines, Paulo lies, paralyzed.
However, there's another subtextual reference that calls out from under for discussion, Wade Davis's The Serpent and the Rainbow. For some time now, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have been joking about the coming zombies. Davis is an anthropologist and ethnobotanist from Harvard University who in the early 1980s went to Haiti to investigate claims of voodoo zombification. He documented his experiences in his book, which was adapted by Wes Craven into a film in 1988. Davis found that voodoo bokors (witchdoctors) in Haiti concocted a special kind of toxic powder made from, among other things, puffer fish venom. The fish itself has poisonous spines that contain a tetrodotoxin, which is a neurotoxin more poisonous than a black widow's bite, and with no known antidotes. The puffer fish is famous in Japan for fugu, a kind of Japanese Russian Roulette of fish dishes. Only licensed chefs are allowed to prepare fugu, because if it isn't prepared just right, it retains some of its tetrodotoxin and will first paralyze the diner, and can eventually cause death by asphyxiation. Arzt's spider, lactrodectus regina — the (nonexistent) Medusa spider — seems to have the same kind of tetrodotoxic venom. This spider, by the way, points to two points of mythology on the island — another example of Greek mythology (along with Apollo, the Cyclops, Penelope and Cerberus), and the smoke monster. Just before the spiders swarm, the familiar tick of the smoke monster can be heard and Nikki and Paulo look around for the monster. But this time, it seems to have been crawling along the jungle floor.
But back to Davis and zombies: In Davis's account, a bokor would blow some of the powdered venom onto a victim. The powder is so potent that a little on the skin will get into the blood stream and cause paralysis, slowing the heart rate to such a degree the person seems dead. To psychically break the victim, the unlucky sucker is then buried alive, as if he were dead. The bokor knows how long to leave a victim buried — they're no good dead — and will dig up the person for later use. But being buried alive leads to, among other traumas, a lack of oxygen to the brain, which can cause brain damage. Recover the brain-damaged victim from the ground, use some hallucinogens to cement the shock and cause memory loss, and you have yourself a zombie, a living being without will or the capacity for focused thought that is good for little more than slaving in fields.
There is the famous case in Haiti of Clairvius Narcisse, who was seemingly killed over a land dispute in 1962, and zombified. The bokor who zombified Narcisse used the puffer fish venom to fake his death, then dug him up and kept him working at a sugar plantation for the next two years. The bokor had other zombies at a plantation, and he kept his zombies mollified with a hallucinogenic paste made from the datura plant. When the bokor died in 1964, the doses of paste stopped and Narcisse regained his sanity; he then found his way back to his village and proved he was still alive to the very people who buried him (not all zombies are so lucky). From this we have a few things: we know Nikki and Paulo aren't dead, and are now buried alive; if they make it out, will they be terrorized and brain-damaged from lack of oxygen? What then? We also know that Locke has employed a hallucinogenic paste, both to Boone and himself. We have, then, the makings of zombification — things don't stay buried on this island.
(A word of Wikipedia warning: As I was preparing for this post, I was doing some research and came across a post about "Exposé" on Wikipedia. Since the show hadn't aired, I thought it would be speculations and referential name-checks. Wrong — it was the complete plot, with no spoiler warnings in sight. This made viewing the episode a little less than surprising. Caveat exhibitrum!)
Article by J.Wood
Things I Noticed - "Exposé" by Vozzek69
Expose' was a very strange episode - half murder mystery, half 'The Other 48 Days'. I liked parts of it and disliked others. It seemed to create questions that no one really asked (such as what Paulo was doing in the bathroom of the Pearl hatch), then went on to answer those questions all at once. Here are the Things I Noticed:Previously on Lost???
When I started watching this episode I thought maybe my TiVO had skipped the intro, but actually it hadn't. This was the first episode I can remember where they didn't do a "Previously on LOST" voiceover. There were no past scenes pertaining to the current episode, they just launched right into Nikki running through the jungle. (Unless my TiVO really did miss the intro).
Actually, this makes perfect sense. Nikki and Paulo were never previously on LOST. They were never previously a part of anything, up until this season, and I think the writers and producers realized they'd made a mistake in trying to introduce them. More accurately perhaps, they made a mistake in the way they introduced them.
Killing these characters off so quickly may have been a way for them to atone for this error. If so, you have to give them credit for at least listening to the fans. Having seen Nikki and Paulo from soup to nuts, we now know they truly accomplished nothing. They brought nothing and revealed nothing. They interacted with most main characters yet impacted no one, and they had little or no effect on the storyline. In fact, watching this episode it was almost the opposite: as they stumbled Mr. Magoo-like across the island's deepest mysteries, it's almost like they went out of their way to NOT get involved.
When all is said and done, it's almost as if Nikki and Paulo never existed at all - which is an interesting perspective itself. From the first time we saw them up until the episode they died, the running joke all season has been "Who the hell are you?" so they might be the one thing on the island that will actually stay buried.
Sawyer - Picked Last for Kickball
"I don't have the guns... the A-Team took them all". Funny line, but Sawyer's definitely feeling left out. He's used to being right in the thick of everything, but now he's relegated to grave-digging and playing ping-pong with Hurley. And losing, to boot.
Missing Kate, missing the action, Sawyer's left with nothing to do but don his glasses and read. Although he gains posession of a gun this episode, he doesn't get bullets - a metaphor for how useless he feels while Jack, Kate, Sayid, and Locke are off getting into jungle adventures without him.
The Pigs Are Walking!
Cool Animal Farm reference. A book very akin to Lord of the Flies, but the book references are getting a little too common lately.
The Plane Crash... Now Starring Nikki & Paulo
Sorry, but jamming Nikki and Paulo down our throats this episode just didn't work for me. Superimposing them into the plane crash doesn't legitimize their existence. Breaking out the episode one debris and shooting a few beach scenes doesn't give them the same street cred that everyone else gets for having been there all along. We all felt the hairs stand up on the backs of our necks as Shannon screamed creepily along with the whining of the jet engine... we all winced when flaming debris landed inches away from Charlie. Seeing Nikki and Paulo walk around in the background of these great scenes did nothing but piss me off.
And the part with Locke, right as the guy gets sucked into the jet engine... it didn't jive with me. "Hey you get away from there!" was all Locke said before that guy became the first spectacular casualty of LOST. Locke certainly didn't turn to Nikki in the middle and shout "Get back, get out!" before turning back to jet engine guy - and the season one disc I just watched again proves it. So why would the writers make such a mistake? Were they really that desperate to shove Nikki into the most memorable scenes possible, or was there an even stranger reason behind it?
Boone, Shannon, Ethan, Arntz... it's always cool to see these characters again. Still, because of Nikki and Paulo the whole thing just seemed extremely forced. One interesting thing about the Ethan scene: he actually sends Nikki and Paulo inland, encouraging them deeper into the island. Maybe he wanted the monster to eat them.
Promise Me We'll Never End Up Like Them
Nikki's referring to Boone and Shannon's constant fighting, but loyal LOST viewers know the sinister double-meaning behind this dark statement: Boone and Shannon are dead. For those who missed the more obvious "We all know what happens to guest stars" line, this one pretty much seals the deal for Nikki and Paulo this episode.
Dude Monster... Vincent Dude!
The 'Vincent is the monster' theory has picked up a lot of steam lately, and I'm definitely leaning that way myself. For a while now it seems Vincent has shown up during crucial times only to lead someone into danger or to uncover something weird. He was the 2nd character we saw in the entire show, too - right after Jack. Light dark, black white, good evil? It's early to say, but the word MONSTER was used several times tonight by different people.
However, one thing bothers me. Instead of stirring the pot this episode, Vincent actually (almost) helps Nikki and Paulo by uncovering their 'dead' bodies. If he's just a dog, it makes sense that Vincent would sniff out the fact they're alive way before everyone else on the island would. But going with the theory that he's not a dog, is he doing the island's bidding or is he actually working against the island here?
If the island is punishing anyone at all, Nikki and Paulo deserve the worst of it. Although other characters have committed murder, the poisoning of Zuckermann was probably the most ruthless thing we've seen so far. Ironic justice would be served by them dying in the same manner (poison), and we definitely hear the sound of the monster just as the army of spiders marches up Nikki's leg. Yet Vincent seemed to be trying to prevent their demise by uncovering them - perhaps undermining the island's will.
No Polar Bear Bite, Nothin'
The murder mystery feel to this episode lightened the mood, especially considering that the main detectives were Hurley and Sawyer. I thought this was a pretty unlikely team. Funnily enough, Hurley took on the more serious role of trying to figure things out while Sawyer cracked jokes like "Is there a forensic hatch I don't know about?"
Hurley's new closeness to (respect for?) the island is more and more evident as his character evolution continues. He somehow remembered that Eko's last words of "you're next" were uttered in the presence of Nikki and Paulo. Damn, even I missed that. This is something Hurley never would've figured out one or two seasons ago when he was too busy acting as the comic relief. This episode? He's collecting evidence, tracking down witnesses (Desmond), and reconstructing the crime scene step by step. Go Hurley.
Locke Blows Everyone's $&#^ Up
It was great to see 'old' Locke step all over Paulo's little picnic. It reminded me of the first season, when everything out of Locke's mouth was fascinating and we hung on his every word. "Things don't stay buried on this island". Hells yeah.
Luggage Lake
It's a well-known fact that all luggage jarred out of flight 815's torn fuselage ends up landing in the same lake, under the same two corpses, and that the only way to find it is to strip down and dive from the cliff at the far end. So it was perfectly natural for Nikki to assume, after asking Kate where she found HER case, that she would find the case she and Paulo were looking for in the EXACT same spot.
And of course it's there. Right? :)
Paulo Sucks at Hiding Stuff
Okay, here's a scenario: You have tens of thousands of acres of jungle upon which to hide a small handful of diamonds. Do you pick a unique tree or hillside and dig a nice deep hole? Uh-uh. Locke told you "the island's eroding". A better idea would be to find the one place on the island that actually looks inhabited (working lights, monitors, a bathroom, etc...) and hide the diamonds in the toilet basin. Yes it's a strange furnished hatch in the ground with full plumbing and electric... and yes two minutes after you get there an unknown man and woman show up to watch some TV - but hey that's not the point. The toilet basin is an AWESOME place to hide stuff because no one will EVER look there! Totally kickass.
Watching the timed history of 'The Other 48 Days' last season was awesome. So many little things fit together with what was going on during season one (Boone talking on the radio, etc...) that by the time the episode ended you knew the writers really did a fantastic job making everything click. But not this time. This time was kinda ridiculous.
Paulo and Nikki walk right past the Beechcraft, with no intent on mentioning it to anyone? Far-fetched, but okay. Five seconds later Nikki trips over the Pearl Hatch? Come on. Wouldn't this knowledge have been useful during Jack's "Holy crap the Others are coming to get us and I'm trying to find us a place to hide" speech? Guess Nikki didn't get green-screened into that scene.
I don't usually pick on LOST but there were many details that seemed sketchy this episode. How long has it been since Arntz blew up, yet all his moths and spiders are still flapping and kicking in those glass jars? Please. 'But Vozzek, maybe there were air holes'. Yah. Maybe there were.
Charlie + Sun = Cool Scene
One thing I really did like this episode (aside from Nikki on the stripper pole) was the interaction between Charlie and Sun. Knowing Sun's misconceptions on how close the Others really were might affect decisions they made as a group, Charlie chose to come clean about her abduction. There was a good possibility he might be alienated again, yet Charlie did it anyway. That was pretty cool of him, and I thought that scene was well shot.
Sun defending Sawyer as not being a murderer was important because it shamed him into doing the right thing in the end. And although she struck him out of anger for what he did, I think she and Sawyer shared some unspoken thoughts between them. Telling him the diamonds were 'worthless here' was something Sawyer already knew, but the Sawyer of old would've surely hoarded them away for when they'd be rescued. But he didn't, which leads me to think Sawyer's resigning himself more to fate than to science. He's starting to realize they're probably not ever getting off the island. Sun is too. Together they share that moment.
I also somehow got the feeling that Sawyer dumping the diamonds was important to his survival... as if the island would put a giant boot in his ass if he'd tried to keep them. No real evidence to support this, it was just a gut feeling.
The Others Rulebook
Even Ben seemed out of place this episode, showing an uncharacteristic vulnerability as he revealed his plans to Juliet (and Paulo). I also wasn't sure if Ben hesitated and almost glanced Paulo's way for a second, maybe even noticing him(?)
Ben needs to convince Jack to do the surgery because he needs him to want to do it. For some reason he can't put a gun to Kate's head and make Jack operate... I still believe for things to work out correctly it has a lot to do with free will.
Similarly, it's confirmed the Others couldn't just "grab them" when they wanted to, but rather the 815 survivors "needed to come to them". This is why Klugh let Michael go - although the Others could've probably taken who they wanted at any time, it seemed they needed bait to draw them there willingly. Come to think of it, maybe this is why the whole thing with seizing Claire never worked out right for them (it almost seemed Ethan was acting alone on that one). I still don't know all the "rules" on how this free will thing works, but I'm sticking to it.
He Was The Cobra?!?
Billy Dee Williams turns out to be the Cobra - the big bad guy right in the midst of the good guys all along. This little scene could be really important, especially if we consider the title of the episode: Expose'. The very word means "a public exposure or revelation". Could this mean that someone big (HIM?) is planted right before our eyes, right in the midst of what we consider to be the good guys? "Shrouded in mystery for the last four seasons"?
I think it might. That kind of mind-blowing twist would definitely make a good season finale. I can't imagine who it would be at this point, other than maybe someone we don't know much about - like Danielle. Still, it's something to consider. Whoever it is, I don't think they were exposed by Paulo or Nikki.
Nikki Bad... Paulo Good
In the end, I think Nikki and Paulo were finally distinguished by the way they died. They both died by the same method, but not in the same manner.
Nikki died for her lust for power. Paulo died for his lust for Nikki, and I think that's really the lesser of the two evils. Nikki seemed the more heartless of the two - grabbing the key from her dead boyfriend's neck and orchestrating the whole spider thing. It was obvious she was more interested in the diamonds than in Paulo himself.
If you look at Paulo in that last scene and watch his eyes, I think he was trying to warn Nikki about the spiders. Even though she'd intentionally poisoned him, he was still trying to save her. Maybe in the end he saw some redemption, but not Nikki. The same way she lived was the same way she died.
The last thing I noticed... Hurley's shirt was wayyyyy too dry after covering a 3-foot double grave with all that sand. There wasn't the slightest hint of sweat.
Big catfight next week.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Lost Boss Explains Last Night's Double Demise
That the producers decided to kill off much-maligned castaways Nikki and Paolo on this week's episode may not have been a shock to fans. But how the greedy, murderous pair died provided one of the biggest twists — and thrills — of the season. (After being paralyzed by spider bites, the not-so-dynamic duo were buried alive — albeit unwittingly — by Sawyer and Hurley.) "People hated them before they even opened their mouths to say anything significant because it felt like they were crashing the party," exec producer Damon Lindelof acknowledges of the characters who were abruptly introduced last fall. "The easiest thing would have been to just write them out and forget they ever happened, like the cougar on [Season 2] of 24. But that's not Lost. We should at least own up to it."Kiele Sanchez wasn't bothered by the criticism directed at Nikki and reveled in going out with a bang, yet wasn't too crazy about filming the burial scene: "I am horribly claustrophobic — I can't even have a blanket over my face — so I didn't have to do a lot of acting. I was genuinely terrified." — Reporting by Shawna Malcom
Source: TV Guide
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