9 Most Fan-Pleasing Moments In Television
8. Nikki And Paulo Are Horribly Killed To Death
Come season three of Lost, the show was haemorrhaging goodwill in pints: a lacklustre, even dull season two had segued into a worse season three, and fans were up in arms. And then Nikki and Paulo were introduced. Who were Nikki and Paulo? That’s a very good question. Survivors of the plane crash that propelled the narrative, they weren’t in the tail section of the plane, crashed on another part of the island. No, Nikki and Paulo had been with the other main survivors of the crash all along… it’s just that they’d not been part of the plot until now.
To say fans hated the new cast members would be a massive understatement. It wasn’t the first time show-runners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof had addressed why the dozens of crash survivors who were played by extras didn’t ever have anything exciting happen to them: in the first season, the unfortunate Leslie Arzt was constantly moaning about the lead characters’ ‘little clique’, at least before he exploded. But coming at a point when the mythology of the show was broadening out and a definitive end point had been given to fans, to waste screen time on two annoying newcomers was considered unforgivable.
When the show returned from the mid-season break, Cuse and Lindelof acknowledged the fact that Nikki and Paulo had been a massive misstep. Season three’s fourteenth episode, Exposé, gave us back-story for the pair of conniving lovers, and told us where they’d been and what they’d been doing for the previous eighty days… and then killed them, really rather horribly, as a nod of gratitude to the fans for sticking with the show during its rocky period.
Femme fatale Nikki poisoned poor, stupid, unsuspecting Paulo, temporarily paralysing him, and then fell victim to the same spider bite… and the rest of the survivors, thinking that the two were dead, proceeded to bury them alive.