"Exposé"

Who are Nikki and Paulo? Well now we know and I guess I feel a little bad about hating them up until now, although the writers/producers didn't really give us a reason to like them before.

STOP READING NOW TO AVOID SPOILERS!!!!

Nikki and Paulo are "dead" from the get go. Or so we thought. The camera zoomed in on one of their "dead" faces before every flashback which made me think that it was a little weird for dead people to be having flashbacks. Of course as we learned in the final moments of the episode, they were alive all along and probably terrified! In their island flashbacks I can honestly say that I liked the effort that was made to insert them into specific parts of the island stories from the first season. I really liked how seamless their inclusion was in the original plane crash aftermath scene as well as getting the bit with them talking to Ethan. It was of course nice to see Boone and Shannon again even if it was so briefly but it was even more of a surprise to see Dr. Arzt! I never expected to see him in any flashbacks.

There was not much overall story progression but I didn't really expect much considering that there was no "Previously On LOST" intro. The last time that happened was in "Tricia Tanaka Is Dead" and as fun as that episode was, there were no new answers. The one nugget that we did get about The Others came when Paulo was hiding his stolen diamonds in the Pearl Station. We saw Ben and Juliet (in tattered clothes and no shoes by the way!) using the Pearl monitors to see Jack in the Swan Station. It was a bit contrived, but it showed that Ben made the decision to get captured...leading me to continue my mistrust of Danielle and speculating on her involvement with Ben in the past and the present.

So Nikki and Paulo killed a TV producer in Australia for his diamonds but not before Nikki guest starred on his TV show, "Exposé," as a stripper/crimefighter. She definitely had that stripper part down pretty well! I really liked the line she told the producer about how she was a guest star on his show and people expected her to die. It's nice to see that everyone had a sense of humor about these characters. It was also wonderful to see Billy Dee Williams as the guy as The Cobra! Great guest star!

When Paulo was in the Pearl by himself, he found one of the walkie talkies The Others used leading Sawyer to mistakenly assume that Nikki and Paulo were working with The Others. Do you think that walkie talkie might be important later in the season? I do. Charlie confessed to Sun about his and Sawyer's involvement in her "kidnapping" in season two. It was nice to see Charlie and Sawyer come clean, but I'm afraid that this is what might lead to Charlie's inevitable death. Sun even suggested as much to Sawyer.

Nice use of the Medusa Spider on Paulo but the Black Smoke would have none of it! Smokey made sure to have plenty of the same spiders available to put Nikki in the same boat for eight hours. The eight hours were winding down just as Sawyer and Charlie were shoveling sand into the new graves. That was a pretty dark ending for a fairly light episode. Seeing Nikki's eyes open just as that shovel full of sand covered her face was very unsettling.

Alas poor Nikki and Paulo, we hardly knew ye. But island life goes on. Unfortunately we will have to wait a few more weeks before we get any sort of continuation of the Locke/Anthony Cooper storyline. Hopefully next week we'll get back to the overarching storyline that I am most interested in.

Next Week on LOST: