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.
No comments:
Post a Comment