Our favorite castaways thus far have been on the island a few months, but for Lost fans, it's been more than 260 days since Jack's super-freaky flash-forward. As the Jan. 31 season premiere (finally) draws closer, TVGuide.com is offering daily profiles — "refreshers," if you will — of the key players in ABC's island-based odyssey.
Locke, by the "Numbers": John Locke (played by Terry O'Quinn) was brought up in foster care after his 15-year-old mother abandoned him. Later he met his mother, Emily Locke, while he was working in a toy store. He also soon tracked down his biological father, Anthony Cooper, and the two bonded. It was later revealed that meeting his mother was not a coincidence, but a con planned by his father, who was in need of a kidney transplant. Locke
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Terry gets off to a fun start, holding his Emmy and saying, "Did you see how many of these are back there? It's going to be a long night."8:38 pm/ET: It's starting. Terry is asked to check the designer tag on his necktie.Terry's thinking as the category was announced? "I thought, 'As soon as this award is done, I get to go to the bathroom.'" As for winning, "It's a little frosting on being nominated. Beyond that I don’t have expectations." 8:39: On the monitor, did Katherine Heigl just visibly say, "S--t!" upon winning?A speculation-based Lost question: Is Locke Jacob? "I have no idea," Terry says, dismissing such rumors as having "no basis in fact."
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7:55: OK, I've got a bottle of bubbly on ice, so I can chug... I mean, make a heartfelt toast every time Ugly Betty and/or The Office win, and I've got three pairs of ratty sneakers to throw at the TV every time they don't. So I guess I'm as ready as I'll ever be to ringlead my first-ever live Emmy blog. Hey, I just realized that makes me a virgin! Be gentle with me, will ya, folks?7:58: Yikes. Just read the preshow red-carpet coverage. Funny stuff. Now I'm nervous.8:00: A song and dance from Family Guy's Brian and Stewie Griffin. Never got that show. Must be "thrilling" in the auditorium. Yep, look at Jeremy Piven. He's bored already.8:01: Charlie Sheen and the tubby kid from Two and a Half Men liked being name-checked in the song. Some people are so easy to please.8:02: T.R. Knight looks irritated by a lyric about Isaiah Washington replacing Kramer on Seinfeld. 8:03: OK, that's over. Things are looking up. Oh, I spoke too soon. It's Ryan Seacrest. Please no jokes. 8:04: OK, maybe ...
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Question: I know it's a little late, but I'd like to address the Emmy nominations. I think that Elizabeth Mitchell definitely was robbed of a Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series nod for Lost. Her work has been top-notch, and Juliet emerged as my favorite character this Lost season. Cheers for Michael Emerson and Terry O'Quinn on their nominations. They — especially Emerson as the enigmatic and chilling Ben — deserve it. But the person who perhaps deserves an Emmy nomination most of all, and who never gets noticed, is John Terry. Terry is such a fantastic (and underrated) actor, he actually makes you feel empathetic for Jack's father when you know you should be rooting for Jack. Lost definitely should've been nominated as a series, because the writing, directing and acting were excellent this past season (let's just forget about the prehiatus episodes and "Stranger in a Strange Land"). Once again, though, the Emmy nominations were utterly predictable. On another Lost topic, many ...
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Like the characters in tonight's episode, we can live in the hope that "The Awakening" remains the weakest installment of this series. In fact, we might even wonder why this arguably religious fantasy was included in a series devoted to science fiction at all; more importantly, we can wonder why, if this obviously heartfelt production was to be included, they executed it so poorly, with so many goofy little details that pull the viewer out of the drama.Based, presumably rather loosely, on Howard Fast's short story "The General Zapped an Angel" (the producers were so concerned that the not-exactly-surprising ending would be given away that they credited the story in the opening as "The General Zapped... "), it's squarely in the tradition of attempted mystical uplift in science fiction drama. As I mentioned in my first post, Howard Fast is best known for his historical fiction, the field to which he contributed most often and most importantly; like sf, historical fiction is a field th...
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