The Ballad of Paulo and Nikki

For those looking for a jump-the-shark moment for Lost, the most likely candidate probably comes from an episode early in the current season in which two characters named Paulo and Nikki show up out of the blue and ask to join Locke and company on one of their usual jungle reconnaissance excursions. One might assume that these characters had some greater purpose or hidden agenda, but with no back-story, no narrative function, and no real personality to speak of, these characters became the embodiment of the fears among the fans that the writers were quickly running out of ideas.













Since the beginning, the show has made nods to the fact that there are a few dozen survivors on the island and that the characters we know are basically just the popular clique within that group. The writers occasionally bring them into the fray as a convenient plot device (like the comically disposable Dr. Artzt of the first season), but primarily they function as the butt of a running joke within the series regarding their own worthlessness and ineffectuality. Last night's episode was apparently an attempt on the part of the writers to extend this joke to fill an entire episode

So was last night's episode some kind of clever meta-narrative about disposable side characters or was it just bullshit Geoge Lucas-style history revisionism? Was this actually a good episode, or just a sorry attempt by the writers to atone for their past mistakes?

Let's start with the story itself: Nikki is a second-rate B-television actress that weasels her way into the heart of some sleazy television producer named Henry Zuckerman (really? Zuckerman? Did they think Weinstein sounded too Jewy?); then Nikki teams up with Paulo, her Brazilian chef boyfriend, to kill Zuckerman and take 8 million dollars of diamonds that he had hidden in a Russian nesting doll (oh, he's such a Jew); on their way to America, they crash on the island with everyone else; while on the island, they lose the diamonds; Paulo finds the diamonds and doesn't tell Nikki; Nikki catches him with the diamonds and attacks him with a spider that conveniently paralyzes its victim and makes them appear dead without actually killing them; then Nikki gets bitten by same type of spider, allowing for the tragicomic live burial scene at the end.

My first problem with this story is simply that, after being stranded on an island for two months, there's no way anybody still gives a shit about a bag of diamonds. Maybe if one of them was holding out with a Snickers bar or one of those coconut radios from Gilligan's Island, this plot might seem slightly plausible. Then there's the fact that not only has this plot been done better by numerous feature films, it's actually been done better on earlier episodes of the show (I'm pretty sure the island is already well above its quota for sympathetic con-men and women at this point).

It's a slight disappointment to see Rodrigo Santoro (Paulo) get written off the show, since he actually does seem like a pretty decent actor, but watching Kiele Sanchez try to deliver a self-righteous betrayal speech is a bit like watching a class of preschoolers do monologues from Richard III.

While I do like the idea of flushing out the stories of peripheral characters (especially on a show that's ostensibly based on the idea that there is a reason or purpose behind everyone being on this island), what most annoyed me about this episode was that they could have used the story of these two to fill in the numerous plot holes in the previous seasons, but instead squandered it by showing us pointless flashbacks that mostly gave us information we already knew or assumed. So basically this episode just left me with the feeling that the writers were bitter that everyone hated their crappy new characters, so they tried to give them some depth and have them meet tragically morbid end so that the fans might feel guilty for wishing that the characters were off the show in the first place (luckily I don't).