Wednesday Night TV

I always fall way behind on Tuesday or Wednesday, and today I only caught two shows. Highlight for spoilers:

• Lost: I seriously enjoyed the opener, making us think Nikki was a stripper before revealing that she starred on a V.I.P./She Spies-type show with Billy Dee Williams, who was awesome. Plus, Nikki's easy on the eyes, which I don't mind at all. But from then on? Eh.
  
  So Nikki and Paulo killed a guy and stole some diamonds, they found out a couple secrets about the island before anyone else, Paulo went to the bathroom that time in the hatch so he could retrieve the diamonds he hid there, and then they're paralyzed and buried alive. Seriously? It seems odd that Paulo was apparently an awesome chef with a nice gig and Nikki had just gotten a pretty big break as an actress, and that's when they'd kill a guy for $8mil? Criminals make sense when they have nothing else going for them, not when their lives are looking pretty promising.
  
  But more than that, I feel like we went through the painful introduction of these two characters for this? It kind of felt like a B-level horror movie concept. I can only assume that when Locke mentioned to Paulo that things buried near the beach will wash up, that leaves the door open for them to somehow survive, but I have mixed feelings on that.
  
  Most of the time, I don't like it when a character appears to die but then shows back up alive. There's nothing really more dramatic than a character facing death, but if the people making a show try to play with you, make you think someone dies and they don't, it feels like they're cheating. Creating an exciting moment that will have big consequences in the characters' world, then pulling back and saying "ha ha, only kidding" is cheap.
  
  But at the same time, if we had the awkward introduction over the course of the season and their own flashback episode, and then they die... that seems like cheap filler material. I have no problem with filler in the form of an episode that doesn't advance the plot but allows us to spend more time with the characters, but if you fill an entire episode with filler about characters that you just now introduced and then kill off, what was the point?
  
  I'm a big Lost fan, and haven't actively disliked many episodes, but I think this one falls in that category.


• South Park: I quit watching 24 somewhere in the beginning of the third season, and either the South Park writers did too or the show has remained exactly the same. From the way the phones rang to Kiefer Sutherland's "whispering, but whispering really loudly for dramatic effect" to the visuals and pacing, everything was exactly how I remember it from a few years ago.
  
  The best South Park episodes have either something interesting to say or make you laugh so hard it hurts, and this one did neither. It did have some laughs though, so it was good television, but sub-par by South Park standards.

Still to watch: House, Jericho, Friday Night Lights, Bones.

And I wish I could've come up with a better image of Nikki, cause that's really low quality, but she looked great all through the episode.