Most Lost fans would agree that the last few episodes were top notch. Lost was getting back on track with interesting storyline, action, mystery and answers. They are back, we said! They really got the spark back, and the show will be totally awesome from now on. No more stupid filer episodes where we get no answers, and the plot doesn’t even move an inch!
And then they pull the Nicky and Paulo episode on us. For those of you who don’t watch Lost, let me explain you. Nicky and Paulo are sort of like the Jar Jar of Lost. They were introduced in season 3 and the writers just decided to work them into the story using “they were here since season 1 – it’s just that they didn’t really do anything meaningful”.
This weeks episode was essentially an attempt to retcon these two into the core Lost continuity. So we saw flashbacks of them “injected” into the original footage the plane crash site on day one. We saw them listening to Jack’s speech re: cave. They also interacted with Ethan, and Dr. Artz (or whatever his name was) – another retcon character introduced in season 2 for the sole purpose of blowing him up with the Black Rock dynamite to illustrate it’s potency.
Let me break this down for you:
“Oh, hai, we’ve been here all along” is totally lame.
“Look at me, I’m at the crash site standing next to that guy who is gonna get sucked into the engine turbine” is so lame that I actually laughed while watching it.
Retcons are absolutely the worst tools in the TV writer toolbox, because let’s face it. When you retcon something into existence, you are just fucking with us. We know Nicky and Paulo were not there in season 1 and 2. We spent hours carefully dissecting all these episodes, looking for clues, easter eggs, references, links and etc. Lost fans are meticulous bunch who finds meaningful clues in everything. Now you are asking us all to just go along and pretend Nicky and Paulo were there all along?
I’m sorry but this is just wrong. They should have known better than that. We all half-expected them to be Others anyway. Having Nicky and Paulo outed as Other spies would be more plausible than artificially injecting them into the storyline.
Not to mention that this episode was just a filler. Nothing happened. Let me summarize for you the events from this episode that may actually have some impact on the future.
Spoilers below, highlight to read:
The second noteworthy event is Charlie telling Sun that him and Sawyer were responsible for her would-be kidnapping thing. It may or may not come up in the future
Other than that, nothing happened. It was all retcon work, and some flashback scenes from Nicky and Paulo’s life.
I hereby nominate this episode for the Worst Lost Episode Ever award. It is a complete throwaway. If you decide to miss just one episode this season, miss this one. In fact, I think they we should convince them not to put it on S3 DVD’s at all. The sooner we forget this monstrous abomination of an episode the better.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Lost. I just hate Nicky and Paule. And Jar Jar. Fortunately, the ending of the episode suggests that we hopefully won’t be seeing much of these two in the future episodes.
Note: I wanted to put an image of Nicky and Paulo in this post for reference but they suck so badly that Google image search can’t find them, and the only google hits for them are from message board posts where people discuss how lame and irrelevant their characters are. :P
[tags]lost, retcon, nicky and paulo, nicky, paulo, lame, totally lame, super lame, horrible, worst episode ever[/tags]
I haven’t watched the newest episode yet, so I tried not to read spoilers. I hate retcon too – I guess the show creators were making fun out of it too, when Sawyer said in the recent ep.: “Who the hell are you” to the above mentioned characters :-)
I have to admit I quit watching halfway through the second season. I thought then — and I still think now — that the show had become an exercise in referential mania. They had a fantastic storyline, a great delivery and then … realized it couldn’t be milked over four years, so it started to sputter. Too bad, because it was well done at first.
If they had played a part in any storyline before the last little bit, maybe I would care, since they were essentially over-developed extras, I didn’t. The laughable attempts to integrate them into the events of the early episodes felt completely faked (was actually slightly painful to watch)
Seriously, if any other character had been involved in that particular ending it would have been kinda gross, with those 2 I just laughed at it
[quote post=”1498″]They had a fantastic storyline, a great delivery and then … realized it couldn’t be milked over four years, so it started to sputter.[/quote]
Most of season 3 was complete garbage, but last few episodes were actually surprisingly good. I’m hoping that with the Nicky and Paulo story out of their system they will concentrate on the good stuff – ie the Jack, Kate, Locke and Sayid part of the story.
[quote post=”1498″]Seriously, if any other character had been involved in that particular ending it would have been kinda gross, with those 2 I just laughed at it[/quote]
I actually said something among the lines of “good riddance”. I don’t think anyone will really miss them.
And btw, I could not believe that Sawyer thew the diamonds into the grave. It was so out of character for him it’s not even funny.n
[quote post=”1498″]I guess the show creators were making fun out of it too, when Sawyer said in the recent ep.: “Who the hell are you” to the above mentioned characters[/quote]
Exactly. The writers know that Nicky and Paulo are a joke. This makes me wonder why did they make the last episode at all. If they quietly allowed them to fall into obscurity no one would complain.
Perhaps they had contractual obligations regarding the two and had to give them a proper sendoff. :|
I just watched it. It’s probably an all-time low of the show quality. It was just a LOST time for me.
And because the writers could not come out with anything better, they made Sawyer just to repead the above mentioned line. Pathetic.
Yup, I think Sawyer summed it up the best – no one knows who they are and no-one gives a rat’s ass about them.
Unfortunately, to have that dotted through an episode that is ALL ABOUT those characters is not something to be proud of – it shows even the writers aren’t taking them seriously, in the one episode where they ought to be getting serious treatment
Whilst I’m here, does anyone know how to make the “Firefox is already running but is not responding, end the process or restart your computer” message go away when Firefox isn’t appearing in the process list of Task Manager and restarting didn’t have any effect (it was doing it before restarting, and continued afterwards)? It would be really appreciated if someone knew a magic button to push :wink:
Matt – it almost sounds like a corrupted profile or something.
I would recommend the following:
1. go into your Firefox profile (it’s in %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\) and back up your bookmarks.html
2. start firefox in safe mode:
firefox -safe-mode3. reset everything back to defaults and try again.
If that doesn’t work try to create a new profile.
If you can’t do that, delete the profile folder altogether and see if you can run it.
I wish I’d read that before I pushed blindly ahead with my own attempt to fix it
I thought re-installing would fix it, but now the installer doesn’t do anything (I run it, “Firefox Setup” appears in the process menu, collects some memory then stops and no installation window comes up)
That was the same with the v.2.0.0.0 setup I still have from last time I installed and the v.2.0.0.3 setup I just downloaded
I do however have several backups of my profile data (as the profile on another computer, on a USB as the profile for Firefox Portable and a copy I made in My Documents) Hopefully it didn’t get corrupted by all the copying around.. that would be a real bugger
wait no, change of situation again – I tried running Portable Firefox (from my hard drive – I keep a copy there as well) and that worked fine, went and found the remnants of Firefox that were left after the uninstall and deleted them in case they were messing up the reinstall, went hunting through my open windows for where the firefox installer was and found the “lets install firefox” windows hiding underneath everything
Really bugs me when installer windows go under the stuff I already have open, especially if they then don’t have a toolbar block.. same goes for Windows option windows when they randomly have nothing on the toolbar and I have to minimise everything to find them
Tip: the stuff that doesn’t show in taskbar will still show up in the Alt+Tab switcher. :)