Strippers! Guns! Billy Dee Williams! Combine them together, add water and you’ve got one of the best Lost openings ever. One of the highlights of a surprisingly good episode featured a focus on two of the show’s initially-superfluous, Barbie & Ken guest stars, Nikki and Paulo. And “we all know what happens to guest stars,” don’t we? The standard conceit of the expendable guest star meeting their untimely demise is nothing new on the show, as Dr. Arzt the science teacher, Colleen the significant “Other,” the Captain of Flight 815, Kelvin Inman, and even Boone & Shannon can all attest to.
Anyway, what Paulo and Nikki may not have in common with those ill-fated characters is a moral compass. We quickly discover their capacity for dastardly activity, poisoning a wealthy Australian TV producer they’ve been conning in order to steal an $8 million bag of diamonds. I don’t think they made Jacob’s list. And they seem to meet a fitting fate, one right out of a Hitchcock movie or Twilight Zone episode, being buried alive. I wasn’t sure the writers would have the balls to actually go through with it (shades of Charlie’s aborted death by hanging in season one), but that was a heckuva moment to end the show with. Creep City, amirite?! I suppose we might see them again at some point, perhaps when Cerberus gets bored appearing as Locke’s father, but for now Paulo & Nikki will be long-remembered for their gruesome exit from the show and perhaps transcend the category of “throwaway guest star.” Though, they were pretty much thrown away, weren’t they?
Their dastardly deeds notwithstanding (those of you who had the over in the “# of Times Jeff Uses ‘Dastardly’ in His Lost Recap Pool” win!), one thing that is apparent about them is that they’re intelligent. Intelligent enough to discover a Dharma station, another crashed plane and the existence of the Others about a month before anyone else. The other castaways were likely too busy to notice there might’ve been more going on around the Island than tedious love triangles and raft-building.
Quick Hits
- The opener, which featured a look at a scene from Hurley’s favorite show, Exposé, highlighted the “show-within-a-show” concept that one could easily apply to Lost itself. We’ve long wondered how and why all of these castaways–with myriad links between them back in the real world–have all been brought together. Is someone “watching” the events on the Island from afar, the events being played out on a grand stage for someone’s amusement? Billy Dee’s amusement…
- It was nice having some gaps–albeit minor ones–filled in from the past two seasons. Seeing familiar scenes from a different perspective and all that. Ben and Juliet at odds even before they make contact with the castaways was a nice scene, but I was more interested in Juliet’s reaction to being inside Pearl Station. She said it “gave [her] the creeps.” A reminder of a less-than-pleasant past, clearly. Another building block in reconstructing the origins of life on the island, whether Dharma or Other. I eagerly await the day when we’ll see Dharma and Other flashbacks to their initial clashes on the Island way back when.
- Courtesy of the handy title cards on each of the flashbacks, we now know the castaways have been marooned for 80 days. Hard to believe how much has happened in just under three months. There’s been some question as to the flow of time on the Island (which I attribute to multiple interviews with the show’s creative staff), so it’s nice to have another “concrete” point of reference for the Lost timeline.
- Saywer. Book Club. “Evil Under the Sun.” Agatha Christie. Wikipedia.
Evil Under the Sun (published in 1941) is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie featuring Hercule Poirot. The plot is close to, although not exactly the same as, the short story “Triangle at Rhodes” that was published in Murder in the Mews.
A quiet holiday at a secluded hotel in Cornwall is all that Poirot wants, but amongst his fellow guests is a beautiful and vain woman who, seemingly oblivious to her own husband’s feeling, revels in the attention of another woman’s husband. The scene is set for murder, but can the field of suspects really be as narrow as it first appears?
In “Triangle at Rhodes”, a short story by Christie first published in February 1936 in U.S. periodical “This Week”, Poirot again witnesses an apparent liaison between two married people. Again everyone believes that the responsible party is a beautiful and magnetic woman, Valentine Chantry, who is murdered. In “Triangle at Rhodes” the murder is by poison and it is thought that she and her lover have attempted to murder her husband and that the plot has gone wrong, but Poirot reveals that the murder was committed by her husband in cahoots with her apparent lover’s wife, Mrs. Gold.
- Even if you’ve seen 300, you may not realize Paulo appeared in the film in a rather significant role.
THIS! IS! A! SPLIT! SCREEN! - Man, did that song Nikki danced to in the opener ever bring back memories. “Rump Shaker” by the all-time great Wreckx-N-Effect. There was many a day in middle school I walked the streets quietly singing those timeless lyrics to myself. When I was looking through the lyrics online, the following bolded line was perhaps my favorite:
All I wanna do is zoom-a-zoom
All I wanna do is zoom-a-zoom – JUST SHAKE YA RUMP
All I wanna do is zoom-a-zoom-zoom-zoom
and a poom-poom – JUST SHAKE YA RUMP (rump shaker)
Break it down..
Uhh, yeah.. – JUST SHAKE YA RUMPW-N-E
Uhh, yeah..
is in effectUhh, yeah..
Peace
Peace..
And we out..{*DJ scratches “come on” while a woman moans*}
Other Stuff from Other Sites
- Why was Locke all wet after he blew up the sub last week? If he planted the C4 inside the sub and come out the hatch onto the dock, there’d be no reason for him to be wet. Damon Lindelof was asked about this in a recent interview, and his reply does nothing to quiet any speculation on this: “No comment.” Is the sub still alive and well, anchored offshore for Locke to make use of in his great escape? [EW Online]
Until next week. We can only hope we haven’t seen the last of Billy Dee.