Nikki and Paulo’s Lost episode feels like a time capsule to a bygone era

Warning: Spoilers after you.

“Exposé” focuses on the characters Nikki and Paulo, who were introduced at the beginning of season three to serve one purpose: to show what the other thirty-something survivors have been up to they are not main characters when they aren’t relevant to the main plot. Essentially, Nikki and Paulo replace Scott and Steve from season 1, two characters so insignificant that the main characters constantly confuse them despite one of them dying early on. In practice, focusing on secondary characters like this isn’t a bad idea, as the audience is constantly told there are dozens of survivors but only sees about ten of them. “Exposé” has become a rare episode dedicated to supporting castaways, complete with flashbacks. The result is an emotional, self-contained episode with some nice meta commentary on the show’s convoluted mythology and even a noir-inspired mystery.

Essentially the “Lost” equivalent of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” we see Nikki and Paulo accidentally stumble upon many of the series’ biggest locations and mysteries to date, and not tell anyone about them. They stumble upon Pearl Station long before the rest of the characters, but aren’t interested in it at all, so they’re oblivious to its purpose. Paulo even encounters Ethan while he’s plotting Claire and Charlie’s kidnapping, and decides to keep it to himself. Of course, none of this matters because they die in probably the cruelest way in the series: a spider bite temporarily paralyzes them, causing the other survivors to mistake them for dead and bury them alive.

Watching it today feels like looking back at a time when network TV could experiment wildly with episodes. A time when a hit show could dare to feature two random background characters, only to kill them off immediately.