Lost Rewatch on VHS: Expose

 

The first time I saw this episode I couldn’t understand what its purpose was. When I read Season Three of Finding Lost and found out why people thought it was written, I was annoyed: as if it was a joke that I still didn’t get. When I learned the real reason it  was written, it actually started to irk me as it seemed a pointless exercise. And now that there have been some major truths about what was going on behind the scenes of Lost, the reason for this episode is truly disturbing and speaks to a larger problem that was the frequent subject of discussion among fans – but somehow never when it came to the characters at the center of the episode.

Regardless of how you look at it Expose is not merely a bottle episode, but a pointless one. None of it is ever mentioned the rest of the season and the consequences are only indirectly referred to in the final season. The only story that has any resolution is Charlie’s confession to Sun about his involvement in the staged abduction back in Season 2 and Sun’s revelation to Sawyer that she knows. Nothing else is relevant. So since we don’t have to talk about this episode in relationship to the story, let’s talk about what it means in a larger context.

The first time I saw Expose, as I said, I was utterly baffled by it.  To be clear I hadn’t paid any attention to the internet about the chatter that was going on about the hatred of Nikki and Paulo during this season.  So the fact that the characters seemed to be getting an episode devoted to them only when they had died made absolutely no sense.

As someone who had no understanding of a ‘meta’ type of episode, I didn’t comprehend what the writers of the episode were trying to do by having Nikki and Paulo essentially interact with all the major events of the series but not truly being ‘there’/ Nikki Stafford compared this episode to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead where Nikki and Paulo wonder through all of the major events that are going on during Lost completely unaware of the consequences.  I might be inclined to consider this with more humor were it not for the fact that, considering what we have seen every other character on the series do to this point, it’s hard to really see any major difference between them and everyone else.  Everyone in the series has been withholding what they learn about the island from the group at large; while Paulo and Nikki may take it to an extreme in some cases, they’re not that different from Locke not telling anyone about the hatch or Jack not telling anybody about Henry Gale.  Come to think of it, Paulo shows a lot more sense than Locke and Boone when he sees the plane that will end up killing Boone in Deux Ex Machina.

I also need to make very clear that since I had not truly noticed either Rodrigo Santoro or Kiele Sanchez in any episode other than ‘The Cost of Living’, I had no reason to understand why they were the subject of such dislike. Even having seen all of the episodes they appear in; I find it very hard to find why they in particular should be the subject of such loathing by the fans.  I’ll grant you that their behavior was obnoxious, but it was not much worse than Shannon could be and Sawyer could be downright offensive in the first season.  Lost went out of its way to show that first impressions could be deceiving even with the harshest of the characters; the fact that so many people hated Nikki and Paulo at first blush honestly says more about the fans then it does the writers.

To be clear their creation was a sensible idea, one to be applauded.  By now the show had spent two seasons among the survivors and had made it very clear that only about a dozen of the forty plus people who were alive seemed to be important.  That the series had chosen to expand its universe but not by going further into the background characters was something I found flawed in Season 2 and it seemed like a good idea to do so with Nikki and Paulo. So the attitude towards both of them pretty much at first sight is something I would not have been able to comprehend even if I had been reading the message boards. (I have never been the kind of person who loathes characters that people chose to hate; I could not comprehend, for example, the hatred of Riley Finn in the fourth season of Buffy.)

The perception of Expose seemed to be that it was an apology to the fans by killing off these characters nobody liked in a horrible fashion. And let’s not kid ourselves, there’s something contemptible about this. Nikki and Paulo spend the entire episode trying to find diamonds that they have stolen after killing a man.  I suppose we’re supposed to find them beneath contempt for something that brutal, even though that’s by far less of a rap sheet than Sawyer or Kate have and of course Sayid has done far worse things on the island.  We’re supposed to consider them selfish because the fact that they spend all their time on the island looking for their ill-gotten, worthless gains makes them shallow.  I guess it does, you know, compared to Kate using Jack and Sawyer to open a marshal’s case so she can get a toy plane, but we like her so fine.

But to be clear, they didn’t kill each other. They spent the last eight hours of their lives paralyzed and unable to talk while everybody else on the island talked about them and over them granted them no respect or dignity.  (They don’t even bother to give Paulo a last name and the only reason Nikki does is because she’s in the script for the show.)Then Hurley gives what is a truly lame eulogy and no one bothers to even to stay around while he and Sawyer start to bury them. And then the two of them regain consciousness just in time for Hurley and Sawyer to bury them alive. None of the Others get this cruel a death.

If this were to have served as an apology to the fans, it would have been worthy of contempt. (For more reasons than Nikki and Paulo, which I’ll get to in a second. ) To be clear, that wasn’t why the episode happened. In The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,  the writers were unaware of the fan loathing and in fact Nikki and Paulo were killed off because they hated them as much as the fans did. This actually makes the episode seem even more mean-spirited. Background characters had made appearances and then fundamentally disappeared (ask a Lost fan about the Scott and Steve mystery if you want to go down a rabbit hole) so the decision to kill them off was petty. To do it this way actually seems sadistic because it seems like the writers are being cruel towards something they don’t like.

And to be clear, viewed this way Expose actually looks worse. Much of what the rest of the survivors are doing in this episode is speculation and theorizing, coming up with ridiculous theories and shooting them down. In other words, they’re stand-ins for those of us who watch the show.  Which means the fans have basically spent the entire episode talking about everything except the subjects of the episode themselves, not even noticing that the people they’re talking about aren’t dead. Then they finish killing them off and walk away without a second thought. It’s hard to know if this is some kind of in-joke from the writers at the fanbase, but if it is, it’s hard to consider this a love letter.

And now we get to the core of the issue. Even before the recent revelations about the often hostile behavior towards women and people of color, fans have spent the last decade pointed out that by far the women and people of color on this series got the shortest shrift by the writers. Kiele Sanchez and Rodrigo Santoro are, to state the obvious, a Latino woman and a Latino man. Somehow are accusations of racism and sexism always seemed to stop short with characters we hated.

Some part of me wonders if any of the fans of the show saw it themselves. Did Nikki Stafford, an enlightened writer by any sense of the word, think that when she wrote all those nasty comments about Nikki and Paulo, not just in Season Three but every time she took a swing at them for the rest of her writing? Did Nikki and Paulo in a sense die for our sins?

And here’s something I seriously doubt any fans of the series knows. 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. (I’m pretty sure they cut Catch-22 and I can’t understand why.) 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 giving that their episodes were removed for a similar level of selfishness.

These cuts actually speak to another sign of racism as Further Instructions and The Cost of Living were the only episodes that Adewale-Akinnouye-Agbaje appeared in during Season 3.  No matter why he chose to leave Lost the writers did not want to pay him any more money than they had to.

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.

Next week, we get back on track in a big way.

 

VHS Notes: During this episode I saw advertisements for the DVD release of The Good Shepherd, Robert DeNiro’s movie about the founding of the CIA. It was never a masterpiece the way so many films of 2006 were but I always admired it. I also saw an early promo for Spiderman 3. Ah the days before comic book movies were considered franchises.