Season 3, Episode 14:

Exposé

A panicking Nikki buries something in the ground, then rushes to the beach, where she collapses, saying something inaudible, in front of Hurley and Sawyer, who pronounce her dead.

In flashbacks, Nikki guest stars as a crime-fighting stripper named Corvette in a TV show named Exposé. She and Paulo conspire to murder the show's main producer, and steal a bag of diamonds from his house. After the crash, the two lose their luggage, including the diamonds, and spent most of their time on the Island searching for it. They look for it in a lake in the jungle, where Paulo finds the bag, but lies about it. Nikki realizes that Paulo has the bag when she sees that he has his nicotine gum, which was also in their luggage.

In the present, the survivors at the beach investigate Nikki's death. They find Paulo, also dead, in the jungle. The group suspects the Others, although suspicion starts to fall on Sawyer when Charlie admits to Sun that he and Sawyer were responsible for her "kidnapping", and Desmond tells Hurley that he saw Sawyer arguing with Nikki that morning. Sawyer tells the rest that he lied because he found the diamonds Nikki had buried, but that he had nothing to do with what happened to them. He decides to bury the diamonds with them, since they are worthless on the Island. The final flashback reveals that Nikki and Paulo are not dead, merely paralyzed by bites from a Medusa Spider, and that Nikki was trying to tell Hurley and Sawyer this when she collapsed. Nikki wakes up just as the survivors are in the process of burying them, but it is too late, and the pair are buried alive.

Tropes in this episode include:

• Accidental Misnaming: Sawyer refers to Nikki and Paulo as "Nina and Pablo".
• Actor Allusion: Zuckerman says that Paulo is known as the "Wolfgang Puck of Brazil." Rodrigo Santoro is actually known as the "Brazilian Tom Cruise."
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • The soundstage of Exposé is actually in the location of the Admiralty House, the residence of Australia's governor-general.
  • Locke tells Paulo that winter is coming when he tries to bury the diamonds in the beach. However, the island is in the Southern Hemisphere, where November would mark the coming of summer.
• The Atoner: Charlie confesses to Sun that he, not the Others, was the one who attacked her in "The Long Con", and apologizes.
• Badass Boast: Sun gives one on behalf of her husband when she confronts Sawyer over convincing Charlie to attack her.
  Sawyer: You gonna tell Jin?
  Sun: No.
  Sawyer: Why not?
  Sun: Because then we'd have to dig another grave.
• Best Out of Infinity: Sawyer and Hurley are playing ping-pong when Nikki stumbles out of the jungle, with a frustrated Sawyer insisting on increasing how many games they play every time he loses.
  Hurley: You said best out of five.
  Sawyer: Well, now we're going best of seven.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Nikki is revealed to be this, being kind and friendly with people, but hiding that she's a ruthless thief.
• Breather Episode: We don't get any major updates on what's happening on the other side of the Island.
• Buried Alive: The ultimate fate of Nikki and Paulo, whom the other survivors bury when they are paralyzed by a bite from a Medusa Spider, mistakenly believing them to be dead. Nikki wakes up just in time to see them shovel a pile of dirt into her face, but can't do anything to stop it.
• Call-Forward: When Nikki and Paulo discover the beechcraft, Paulo refuses to climb up to it, pointing out that it will fall off the cliff if he gets into it. As we know from Boone's tragic death, he was right.
• The Cameo:
  • Billy Dee Williams appears As Himself, playing "The Cobra" in the Show Within a Show, Exposé.
  • Ethan Rom returns for one scene to give Nikki and Paulo advice on how to find their bag in a flashback.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The Medusa Spider that Arzt talks about in his conversation with Nikki, as well as its ability to attract other Medusa Spiders with its pheromones, becomes very important at the end of the episode, as it's revealed that a pair of them paralyzed Nikki and Paulo with their bites, which leads to them being Buried Alive.
  • Paulo's nicotine gum is stated by Nikki to have been in the same luggage bag as the diamonds. She realizes that he's found the bag when the gum falls out of his pocket while they are talking on the beach.
• Continuity Nod: During the aftermath of the plane crash, Boone comes running up to ask Nikki for a pen, referencing the Snipe Hunt Jack sent him on in the first episode.
• Damned by Faint Praise: Hurley struggles to find nice things to say about Nikki and Paulo at their funeral.
  "Nikki and Paulo. I guess we didn't really know you very well. And it appears, you killed each other for diamonds. But I know there are good parts to you too. You were always nice to me. And you're a member of the camp. And... I really loved Exposé. OK then, goodbye."
• Damned By a Fool's Praise: Book Dumb Hurley describes Exposé as "the most awesome hour of television ever."
• Dead All Along: Inverted. Nikki and Paulo are assumed to be dead for most of the episode, until the ending reveals they've been alive all along and merely paralyzed by a Medusa Spider bite. Then they die for real when they are Buried Alive.
• Deadpan Snarker: When Hurley tells him he's "messing up the crime scene," Sawyer sarcastically asks if someone has found a DHARMA forensics hatch without him knowing.
• Death by Materialism:
  • Nikki and Paulo get themselves killed in a horrifying way by fighting over a bag of diamonds which, as Sun points out, are worthless on the Island anyway.
  • More specifically, if Nikki hadn't taken the time to hide the diamonds before running to the beach after the Medusa Spider bit her, she probably would have made it in time to tell the others that she was only paralyzed, and they wouldn't have buried her alive.
• A Death in the Limelight: For Nikki and Paulo.
• Didn't Think This Through: Nikki uses a Medusa Spider to paralyze Paulo so that she can take the diamonds back from him, but in her excitement, forgets that the spider's pheromones attract other Medusa Spiders, leading her to be bitten and paralyzed too.
• Evil All Along: Nikki's appearance on Exposé reveals that Billy Dee Williams's character, LaShade, who appeared to be the Big Good, was actually the Big Bad "The Cobra" all along. Hurley is shocked by this dramatic twist.
• Flashback: Nikki and Paulo murdered a producer in Australia to steal his diamonds. Following the crash, they spent all of their time trying to find the bag with them.
• Foreshadowing: Nikki and Paolo poison her producer/boyfriend to get his diamonds. Nikki has no problem dealing with Paolo the same way.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Paulo considers Ethan to be more trustworthy than Arzt.
• Internal Reveal: Charlie reveals to Sun that he and Sawyer were behind her supposed kidnapping attempt in "The Long Con".
• Karmic Death: Nikki and Paulo's death is absolutely horrifying, but considering that it's a direct consequence of their greed and petty squabble over some diamonds that they murdered a man to steal, they had it coming.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: Zuckerman dies halfway through telling Nikki how he's going to marry her once he resolves something with his wife.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Nikki tells her producer that her character is not coming back next season because she's only a guest star, and "you know what happens to guest stars." Sure enough, Nikki is Killed Off for Real this episode.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Implied. In one flashback, Paulo says they should have gone to Ethan for help in finding their luggage. However, the date given for the flashback is actually a week after Ethan kidnapped Claire, suggesting that Nikki and Paulo had no idea what was happening in the rest of the camp.
• Lower-Deck Episode: The point of Nikki and Paulo was to give a face to the survivors outside of the main cast and show what they have also been doing on the island. Dr. Arzt is prominently featured in the episode as well.
• Mandatory Line: Jack, Kate, Locke, Sayid, Ben, and Juliet only briefly appear in the flashbacks. While the rest get new scenes to show interactions with Nikki and Paulo, Jack just has a repeat of his "live together, die alone" speech from "White Rabbit," while Sayid appears via recycled footage from their visit to the Pearl in "The Cost of Living."
• Matryoshka Object: Zuckerman keeps his diamonds in a Russian Matryoshka doll.
• Mondegreen Gag: Hurley and Sawyer are unsure what Nikki said before her apparent death. Hurley initially thinks "power lines," before deciding it was "Paulo lies." Turns out she was actually saying "paralyzed."
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • The awkward scene of Paulo flushing the toilet in the Pearl in "The Cost of Living" is repeated, with the new context that he was in there to recover the diamonds he had previously hidden in the cistern.
  • At the start of the episode, a panicked Nikki stumbles out of the jungle, mumbles something inaudible that Hurley interprets as "Paulo lies", and seemingly dies. This scene is repeated at the end of the episode, with the knowledge that Nikki did not die, but was merely paralyzed by a Medusa Spider bite, and she can clearly be heard saying the word "paralyzed".
• P.O.V. Sequel: The flashback portion of the episode is to Lost what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet, with the seemingly superfluous side characters of Nikki and Paulo taking center stage, while the usual main characters come across as side characters in their story. Specific references to past episodes include:
  • New angles of the original plane crash.
  • Nikki and Paulo find out about Boone stealing the water supply and watch Jack's "live together, die alone" speech.
  • Arzt is furious that the "A-team" didn't tell anyone else about the U.S. Marshal's case with four guns, and Paulo finds his and Nikki's bag in the same lake that Kate and Sawyer found the case.
  • Nikki and Paulo discover the beechcraft and the Pearl before anyone else, but are not interested by either of them.
  • At the Pearl, Paulo witnesses Ben and Juliet discussing their plan to manipulate Jack into performing Ben's surgery some time before the events of "One of Them".
• Power Incontinence: When Hurley asks Desmond if he can use his psychic powers to find out how Nikki died, he tells him that he has no control over his flashes, which Hurley considers "kind of lame."
• Red Herring:
  • The survivors discover a walkie-talkie in Nikki and Paulo's tent, which Sawyer takes as a sign that they were working for the Others. It turns that Paulo found it in the Pearl when he hid the diamonds there and overheard Ben and Juliet discussing their plans to make Jack do Ben's surgery, and stole it.
  • Desmond reveals that Sawyer had an argument with Nikki the morning of her death, despite claiming he didn't know her, casting some suspicion on him. He didn't actually have anything to do with her death; they argued because Nikki had just discovered Paulo lied about finding the bag, and wanted a gun, which Sawyer didn't have. The reason Sawyer lied about this was because he had discovered the diamonds she buried, and was planning to steal them.
• Revision: Nikki, Paulo and Arzt are incorporated into several scenes, most notably the aftermath of the plane crash and Jack's "live together, die alone" speech, for which they were not originally present. The show's writers have stated that they went to great lengths to find unused angles from these scenes so as to include them in ways that wouldn't explicitly contradict the existing footage.
• Rewatch Bonus: Vincent's strange behaviour, dragging the tarp off of Nikki and Paulo's bodies, makes a lot more sense after The Reveal, when it becomes clear that he was trying to warn the survivors that they weren't really dead.
• Running Gag: Sawyer constantly forgets Nikki and Paulo's names and makes clear that he has no idea who they are.
• Sherlock Scan: Sawyer realizes when he sees the dirt under Nikki's fingernails that she must have buried something valuable in the jungle.
  Sawyer: She was digging. And when we found him I saw a fresh mound of dirt. She was burying something. And if you take the time to dig a hole right before you die, then what you're hiding's probably pretty damn good.
• Shout-Out: In one flashback, after Kate revealed the existence of the gun case, Arzt proclaims "The pigs are walking!"
• Show Within a Show: Nikki's reason for having been on Oceanic 815 is that she was in Sydney filming a guest appearance on Exposé, a show about strippers who fight crime of which Hurley is a huge fan.
  Hurley: Only the most awesome hour of television ever. It's like "Baywatch", only better. Its about Autumn and Crystal, two strippers that solve crimes with the help of their suave smooth-talking club owner, Mr. LaShade.
  Sawyer: How'd I miss that one?
• Skewed Priorities: Immediately after the plane crash, while everybody else is in hysterics, the first thing Nikki asks Paulo when she finds him is where their bag with the diamonds is. Paulo is visibly shocked by this, and this is probably why he starts to come to the conclusion that Nikki cares more about the diamonds than him.
• Speak Ill of the Dead: Sawyer shows no respect for the seemingly-deceased Nikki and Paulo, making clear that he doesn't know or care who they are.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: After hearing the Monster rustle through the trees for the first time, Paulo wonders if it's a dinosaur, which was exactly what Hurley asked Jack in "Tabula Rasa".
• Stylistic Suck: What little we see of Exposé features melodramatic music, Bad "Bad Acting" and stilted dialogue (Nikki's character shouts "Razzle Dazzle" as a Pre-Asskicking One-Liner). One of the producers also suggests an absurd plot twist where Nikki's character survives being shot multiple times with the reveal that she was wearing a bulletproof vest, which Nikki herself has to point out makes no sense since the audience has already seen that she was only wearing a bikini under her coat.
• Tempting Fate: After seeing Shannon and Boone argue at the airport and mistaking them for a couple, Nikki asks Paulo to promise that they will never end up like them, and he obliges. In the end, Nikki and Paulo's relationship becomes far more dysfunctional than Shannon and Boone's ever was, since at least they never got each other killed over diamonds.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot: Nikki and Paulo's flashbacks don't line up from a logical standpoint. He finds the bag on Day 33, recovering it after telling her that there's nothing at the waterfall, but waits until Day 49 to try to bury it on the beach.
• Villain Protagonist: The episode's centric characters are Nikki and Paulo, a pair of murderous thieves who remain thoroughly unsympathetic for the duration of the story until their greed gets them both killed.
• Wham Line: Nikki's explanation of what the Medusa Spider does, revealing that she and Paulo are not dead.
  Nikki: He told me why they call it the Medusa Spider. Wanna know why? Because one look from Medusa will turn anyone to stone, just like one bite from the spider will paralyze you, for about eight hours. It won't kill you, it'll just slow your heart rate down to the point of where even a doctor would have a hard time hearing it beat.