Lost - Expose

When I review something I like to review what is given to us viewers on the screen, however that is not going to be possible for this episode. The meat of this review is what happened backstage and due to the nature of the show it's going to centre on the production team's continued path to distrust. First of all a quick sum up of the episode, it's a good bit of fluff and gives the camp something to do while we take an episode away from the rescue attempt, ordinarily this would get a fun fluffy 6/10.

I fully believe that the production team let down Kiele Sanchez & Rodrigo Santoro the actors who play Nikki & Paulo and threw them to the wolves. From day one the producers of Lost were clear that they had a plan, as a viewer I was cool with that liked what I saw and decided I was in this for the long haul. And then season two happened, on my watch through (which started before these reviews) the season was better than I remembered but then it did spend half the season introducing "the tailies" a group of five character's (two main, two supporting and an occasional guest character) who were then killed off, or thrown into the background or given an average of one scene a season. But then again they did introduce Ben so we got a bit of goodness and a lot of dead end story that went nowhere.

We reach season three and we're repeating the start of the previous season in that it's a very slow start and the show has never been good at pacing the use of characters. If you take every regular and put them in the category of overused, underused or just right very few will be in the third category. Due to the pacing fandom of the show was at a low ebb as season three got going and the wrath of fandom was taken out on Nikki and Paulo who started cropping up in the background of scenes and like most of the cast based at the camp didn't do a lot. The producers to appease fans announced they had a plan for the show and it would be a six season run, then to appease us short term killed off Nikki and Paulo.

This is just abject cowardness imo and shows a lack of production management, also it takes away a little trust as a viewer. From this point there would always be a bit of suspicion between myself and the producers. As an episode it's fine, it even has a lot of fannish touches for viewers in bringing back characters from the dead for some flashbacks. Everything I've read about the initial plans for the characters sound brilliant and going through with those storylines would have been a good way to get the show on track. As such from a character point of view we have Nikki and Paulo playing their endgame characters for this episode and are not recognisable to the characters we've seen for the entire run up to now. It's like watching episode one of Robot seeing Tom Baker making his debut as The Doctor and not tuning in again until episode four as Logopolis the performances are unrecognisable from each other but in Tom's case we saw the character change. As such this episode gets two marks 6/10 for what we got on screen and 0/10 for the spineless producers.