Lost: Season 3, Episode 14 "Exposé" Review

"Who the hell's Nikki?"

-Sawyer

The flashbacks for "Exposé" focus on everyone's favorite characters; Nikki (Kiele Sanchez) and Paulo (Rodrigo Santoro).  Nikki is a guest star on a TV show called Exposé, which is filmed in Sydney.  She is also sleeping with the show's creator, Howard Zukerman (Jacob Witkin), who has hired Paulo as his personal chef.  The whole thing is a ruse as Paulo poisons Howard and they make it look like a heart attack so the duo can steal his 8 million dollars worth of diamonds before getting on Oceanic 815.

After the crash, Nikki and Paulo mostly keep to themselves and focus on finding Nikki's bag, where the diamonds are hidden.  They end up discovering the Beechcraft and the Pearl hatch before anyone else, but have little interest in exploring them.  Paulo ends up finding the diamonds in a lagoon, but does not tell Nikki because he is afraid she will leave him if they find the diamonds.  He ends up hiding them in the Pearl station bathroom and accidentally overhears Ben (Michael Emerson) and Juliet (Elizabeth Mithcell) planning on capturing Jack (Matthew Fox).  He later retrieves the diamonds during Locke's (Terry O'Quinn) mission to the Pearl.  Nikki and Paulo do get closer, but she realizes he has found the diamonds when she sees he has his nicotine gum, which was also in her bag.  She tries to get a gun from Sawyer (Josh Holloway), but he refuses.

Nikki takes Paulo into the jungle and confronts him about the diamonds.  She throws a Medusa spider at him, which bites him.  The side-effect is he will be paralyzed for 8 hours.  Nikki finds the diamonds, but doesn't notice more Medusa spiders arrive and she is bit.  Quickly, she buries the diamonds in the jungle before running back to the beach and collapsing in front of Sawyer and Hurley (Jorge Garcia).  She says the word "paralyzed", before the venom takes effect.  They think she said "Paulo lies" and they believe she is dead.

Sawyer, Hurley, Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), Sun (Yunjin Kim), and Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) start investigating Nikki's death and find Paulo's body as well one of the Others' walkie-talkies, which Juliet had accidentally left behind.  They run through several theories: the Monster killed them, the Others killed them, or maybe even Sawyer killed them, as he has been behaving suspiciously.  Sawyer says he figured out Nikki was burring something, so he dug it up and found the diamonds.

During the investigation, Charlie confesses that he and Sawyer were being Sun's kidnapping.  She slaps Sawyer, but decides not to tell Jin.  Later, they have a funeral for Nikki and Paulo.  Sawyer dumps the diamonds into the grave with them.  As the sand is dumped in, Nikki opens her eyes, but it's too late.  The two of them are buried alive.

What Works:

I know a lot of people don't like this episode because it doesn't really matter and it focuses on Nikki and Paulo.  Those are absolutely fair complaints, but I still really enjoy the episode.  It has one of my favorite endings in the entire run of the show with the diamond thieves being buried alive together.  It's tragic, but because we don't like these characters, it's also hilarious.  It cracks me up every time I watch this episode and I love how dark it is.

I also love the start of Nikki's flashbacks.  They are extremely WTF?  The reveal that she plays a stripper on a TV show that also stars Billy Dee Williams is fantastic and pretty surreal.

I liked seeing Nikki and Paulo's time on the island.  It's mostly unimportant, but it's a good excuse to get some deceased characters back on the show.  Plus we get Paulo's refusal to climb into the Beechcraft (fair enough) and Nikki's complete lack of interest in going into the Pearl.  At least the writers didn't try to make us like these characters on their way out the door.

Finally, I enjoyed our main cast playing detective, especially because the people who would normally tackle this; Jack, Kate (Evangeline Lilly), Sayid (Naveen Andrews), and Locke, aren't around.  Having Hurley, Charlie, and Sawyer on the case makes this a lot more fun, even if they never figure out exactly what happened.

What Sucks:

The downside to "Exposé" is spending an entire episode with Nikki and Paulo.  Though we get a little more depth to Paulo, these two still suck and I'm not sad they leave the show.  I like most of the episode, like I said, but at time, these two still suck to watch.

Finally, this episode is extremely inconsequential to the rest of the show and is one of the most skippable episodes.  I mostly get why.  Even the writers wanted to forget about Nikki and Paulo.  The biggest problem is the fact they find a walkie-talkie that belonged to the Others in Paulo's tent.  That doesn't go anywhere, even within the episode itself.  Why not cut that completely?  It's weird to have it here.

Platinum Polar Bear:

The Platinum Polar Bear goes to the most competent character in an episode.  For "Exposé", I'm going to get a little weird.  One of the showrunners, Damon Lindelof, confirmed that the spider that bit Nikki was actually the Monster taking on the form of a spider.  In season 6, we learn that Nikki is one of the Candidates, so that means the Man in Black used this situation to take out one or two of the Candidates.  That's some fantastic 4-D chess right there, so I'm giving the award to the Man in Black for taking down Nikki a (and, to a lesser extent, Paulo as well).  This is his 1st time winning the award.

Verdict:

While "Exposé" unfortunately features Nikki and Paulo and doesn't matter at all in the long run, it's also the episode that kills off Nikki and Paulo in hilarious fashion.  It has plenty of fun moments and one of the best endings of the entire series.  It's almost a stand-alone episode and I'm glad it exists, even if it meant dealing with Nikki and Paulo all season.

 8/10: Really Good