Viewers of ABC’s “Lost” saw the body of a dead John Locke in the show’s Season 5 finale Wednesday night. However, a very alive Terry O’Quinn, who plays Locke, was in Spartanburg on Thursday to play in the BMW Charity Pro-Am at Carolina Country Club.
Between holes, O’Quinn was happy to talk to fans about golf, the finale and the fate of his character in the show’s simpulan season, beginning in 2010.
O’Quinn called himself an OK golfer, saying he would be happy with an 85 or under.
“I played well on the front. A little bit rough on the back,” he said as his group neared hole 17.
O’Quinn said he hasn’t seen the finale and didn’t know how the story was edited.
“Don’t tell me,” he joked. “I want to be surprised.”
In the season cliffhanger, a bomb, which could prevent Flight 815 from ever crashing on the mysterious island, was detonated.
As for his character, O’Quinn says he’s really gone. Locke’s dead body was rolled out of a metal box toward the end of the two-hour episode, baffling islanders who had been following a Locke imposter. Exactly who is now occupying Locke’s body wasn’t revealed. O’Quinn said it would be “a good guess” to assume it’s a man seen with the infamous Jacob in the beginning of the episode.
“I think, unfortunately, I think it’s ended for Locke. But I’m still there, as far as I know,” O’Quinn said. “I don’t know how it’s going to end for this other guy. I’m sad. I miss John Locke, poor guy. He was a pawn.”
O’Quinn is gearing up to play a new character when the sixth season begins next year. As for the rest of the story line, he swears he has no idea.
“Your guess is honestly as good as mine is,” he said. “There’s going to be some confrontation that will somehow, I’m guessing, have to do with Jack or Locke or something like that. I think these guys are just setting up good and evil. It’s the way Locke said in the very beginning of the show: One is light and one is dark. Two sides. I think that’s what we’ve got.”
Update: 16:00 Thanks to RJ for this little update from E!Online.
5:38 a.m.: Someone asks McPherson more about Elizabeth Mitchell, and he says, “She’s a fantastic actress and we’re thrilled to be able to have her do both [Lost and V]…You’ll see her on Lost, but V is her next piece.”
Update: 14:00 At today’s ABC Upfront Presentation they ABC Panel had this to say. “Very grateful to producers of Lost to let Elizabeth Mitchell film V pilot but “I think you will see her on Lost.”
Here are the latest details about Elizabeth Mitchell and her character Juliet and if we will see her again. To be honest I think the writers left it open to see how well her new show V does, but here is Ausiello’s take:
Thanks to Everyone that sent this in.
And now for some news that should surprise no one: ABC is expected to announce tomorrow that it has picked up a reboot of the camptastic ’80s thriller V and that Lost heroine Elizabeth Mitchell is a full-time castmember.
Translation: She will not be returning to Lost as a series regular.
However, before you go declaring Juliet DOA from last week’s detonated hydrogen bomb, I should point out that this piece of scoop comes with a big but attached: Mitchell’s Lost days are not done. Multiple sources confirm that the actress is expected to appear in an unspecified number of episodes next season, so it’s entirely possible Juliet survived Jughead and her absence will be explained in another way. (Check out Doc Jensen’s column this Wednesday for a comprehensive Juliet theorypalooza.)
*UPDATED* Added a little tidbit about Elizabeth Mitchell
Not much but here you go. Enjoy!
Question: This is probably a long shot, but got any Lost scoop? –Jeff
Ausiello: Yeah, having Lost scoop in late May is about as unlikely as me combing through my old transcripts and finding an unused Damon Lindelof quote pertaining to the show’s series finale. OMG, looky here: “We’ve been planning out the selesai season for four years now. And of all the talks we have had about the show, [reuniting all the castaways] is the subject that has come up the most. The ending was almost where we began, and we had to figure out how to get there. It’s like a wedding where the reception is the part that requires the most planning and is the most fun to plan. We’ve exchanged our vows and I am ready to go party.”
Question: Realistically, how many episodes of Lost do you think Elizabeth Mitchell will be in next year? –Derek
Ausiello: My gut is telling me we’ll see her in two episodes max. But my gut has been wrong before. Oh, who am I kidding, no it hasn’t.
Ausiello: May’s series finale is going to be a real downer, predicts Michael Emerson. “I don’t think Lost will have a happy ending,” he confessed to us at the Saturn Awards. “It’s the end and I think we are going to start seeing more casualties. I would put money on major characters being killed. I believe it will be a sad ending to the show — or at least bittersweet. I think it will definitely be a series finale for grownups.” Emerson, meanwhile, is still trying to make sense of the season 5 finale. (Join the club!) “I killed Jacob… maybe… probably,” he hedged. “It isn’t like we haven’t seen plenty of other people be killed and somehow come back. And what does it mean if I did kill him? I Who the hell was he anyway? Obviously, Ben wanted a father. So much of our show is about bad fathers. It is one of our biggest themes. And Jacob disappointed in those simpulan moments. And maybe Jacob made it easy for him. Maybe that was all meant to happen. Is it all ordained? Maybe. And for that matter, can Jacob even be killed? Stay tuned is my response.”
Update: 6th July 21:40 Thanks to Ramsey for the following.
So my pal Matt and I attended the really fun – and a bit emotional Bandar Ceme at bits where they showed clips like the Oceanic survivors buliding and sailing off on a raft from Season 1 and Desmond finally getting thru to Penny in The Constant.
Anyhow – there was a signing after and all I had on me was a copy of ‘Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince’ that i’m trying to read before the movie comes out. Carlton & Damon said during the Q&A that JK Rowling’s brave announcement that they’ll only be 7 Harry Potter books inspired them to make LOST just 6 seasons long. They both signed by book and after a read what Damon wrote inside: ”Locke is VERY simular to Snape!” Shock! LOL
Update: 6th July Thanks to Deniz who as at the event for sending us his photos.
Hey All, LOST writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse along with Director Jack Bender held a Q&A Session in Curzon. Lucky for us, several fans attended and were able to provide us with the details.
We were sent both the audio and a summary, so special thanks to Gob for the audio and my good friend and podcast partner Karen for the heads up about a summary from her friend Matt who was in attendance as well.
NOTE: Since the panel was in some auditorium, the folks in the audience asking questions were much louder than Darlton and Bender, so I tried my best to balance it out. So I hope you all can listen. In case you can’t listen or hear the audio too well, the summary is behind the button.
Plus, I have not had a chance to listen to the audio or read the whole summary yet, so I am posting this all here in the spoilers section just in case.
Enjoy!!
Curzon Q&A with Darlton and Jack Bender
Initial thank yous, then showed a recap video of Lost.
1) D&C confirmed that Stranger In A Strange Land was the turning point for the studio, and they were allowed to establish an end date. 2) Jack’s beard is bad. 3) 16 episodes next year, but 18 hours of Lost. Jack Bender confirmed a two hour season premiere, and a two hour finale. 4) After Lost, they will go in to hiding for a while, due to the inevitably interpretive quality to the series ending. Damon: You are married to your destiny, you can try to avoid it, but it will catch up to you. This is why Charlie shut the door in the Looking Glass station, because he embraced his death. Sometimes they get pointers from the studio, telling them stuff is too outlandish. Originally, in the season four premiere, Hurley was going to come across himself in Jacob’s cabin, but the network urged them to change the scene to Christian Shepherd, afraid it would set a precedent of weirdness. With season six, there won’t be any of that
Questions:
Q: What was your favorite scene to watch or write? CC: The scoring session we attended for the raft’s launch at the end of Exodus . These musicians were playing this incredible music without having rehearsed it, and the moment was so beautiful, there were tears in the control booth. That was just one of those great moments where you felt this blessed synergy of all these talented collaborators all come together and make Lost what it is. JB: I love all of them DL: I have many…but for me, during season one, when we first started writing the show coming out of the pilot, when it first started revealing itself, was really cool. I’m drawn to scenes that take place with just two characters and somehow they’re talking about very very heady things and I’m a huge fan of whenever Jack and Locke talk to each other. We’ve been very judicious in having those guys talk to each other, it happens very rarely. I go back back to White Rabbit and that 6 or 7 minute long scene where they’re just sitting in the jungle and Jack says he’s following the impossible and Locke says what if it’s not impossible and we were all put here for a reason, and that scene is the genesis for those guys’ relationship and if you think about how that was the 3rd episode shot out of the pilot, here we are now, 100 episodes later, and now Jack is finally saying ‘Y’know, Locke might be onto something’ CC: Jack’s kinda slow. DL: It had to permeate through his beard Q: My wife is fascinated with the artistry of delivering this idea into a script. We had, in a video podcast last year, a glimpse into the writers’ room and she’s fascinated that you get the idea and put it into a script CC: We have a call centre in Delhi. We just ask them ‘we need a flashforward this week’ DL: We have a minicamp before we write, where we just discuss the season with the writers, the character arcs and we decide on the season’s jawaban image so we know exactly our beginning and where we’re trying to get to. Once we start writing the show on a week-to-week episode basis it gets a bit more intense CC: We spend a lot of time breaking each aspect of the story and once we have the story worked out from beginning to end, we’ll put it up on whiteboard and then pitch it back to ourselves, and we’ll have scenes in different colours, withan on island story, an off island story, and a C-story, split it into six acts for the commercial breaks and structure it so you’ll wanna come back after each act. Then we’ll give it to some writers to rewrite and send back, and we’ll give our notes, make some changes Q: Jack was originally a protagonist for the show, but he seems to have gotten more antagonistic as it goes on. Was this intentional? JB: Matthew Fox loved the idea of wearing the not so flattering jumpsuits and his character beginning to let go of his heroic side, which people accuse me of, taking Jack Shepherd’s character. DL: Basically Jack spent a hundred hours majorly rejecting it, there was no purpose whatsoever to the island and now he’s come back in the 70s and he’s still waiting to be told ‘Here’s what you’re supposed to do’ and then when he is told what to do, he then gets to decide what he is going to do, so basically it’s contingent on what he feels his mission is. Q: Can we get more Lost screening where you project episodes in a cinema like this? CC: I think so. It’s a good idea and it may happen in some form or other Q: On the official website, there was a video of behind the scenes and you went into your offices and you had a wall of whose dead and whose alive, I want to know about Claire being on the wall of dead [shocked gasps from audience] DL: Are you absolutely sure Q: I am DL: [explains wall of alive, dead, undead] Well, uh, if you say you saw her there, I don’t know what to tell you. JB: I think her agent slipped it in there DL: She is going to be back on the show. CC: Eventually all of them will be on the wall of the dead. Q: My question is about the fate of Lost, because I know it ends with season 6, but do you think because of Bryan Fuller with Pushing Daisies continuing it in a comic book, and I love Ultimate Wolverine vs Hulk (Damon’s comic) and with Lost it has a disjointed timeline and it comes together in the end, do you think that you’ll do any spin offs in a comic book form? DL: We feel that if we hold anything back for the jawaban season of the show, it will be bad. People have come along this far, and they need a conclusion. Q: You make a lot about the characters searching for their destiny and their purpose, do you feel that you yourselves had a purpose in your own lives being involved in the show, or you’ve learned something about life from doing it? CC: I think as writers we use the show to explore personal issues, spiritual or otherwise. We’re mainly concerned by how much faith and how much control do you have over your own destiny, something which is very fascinating to us, and obviously season 5 was an exploration of that with the time travel leading to an event at the end of the season, so that is going to be something we’re going to explore a lot on the jawaban season of the show. The writers room is diverse and that diversity gets worked out in the characters. Q: What’s Brian K. Vaughan like? DL: Unfortunately he has left for greener pastures. When he first came on the show Jorge Garcia was ecstatic because he’s a huge fan of his work. Q: Where are exactly are you with season 6? CC: We are here, and the following Monday we’ll start writing. JB: Shooting starts August 24th CC: We’ll work continuously until the middle of April and the show will air sometime between January and February and will finish around May. Q: I want to know about the end of Lost. Michael Emerson said in an interview this week that he suspects it will be quite bittersweet or melancholy. Is it going to be an upbeat ending or ambiguous? Just any kind of hint to the flavour of the ending. DL: All of the above. We are aspiring for an ending that is fair. Bittersweet comes with the territory. The ending will be different as for once, we won’t leave you on a cliffhanger. You will stay on the cliff this time. CC: We hope that if we like it, you will like it. Q: I was sad Charlie died, but he had to die to give his story credibility. That makes me wonder about John Locke. The fact he is now dead, having hit his lowest ebb…what’s up with that character arc? CC: We’re not prepared to answer any of those questions here tonight. We feel that the jawaban part of the experience of Lost is that you have this time between to theorise, postulate, agonise. JB: If the actors really need to know what’s coming ahead, they’ll ask. As an example, Josh Holloway did not know what he was whispering to Kate when he jumped out of the helicopter, and neither did Evangeline Lilly, but the actors sold it so well. Terry O’ Quinn was playing Locke with this dark mysterious quality, unintentionally playing into the ending which he didn’t know. I presented him with the script asking him he wanted to read it and he was sure. He came back after saying ‘I wish I hadn’t read it’ Q: How much do you know about each character’s story, are there any you’re particularly proud of, or not proud of? DL: When you come up with an idea for a character, and they come into the show, like Eko, who was originally a priest who had a crisis of faith, and we found Adewale in New York, and we basically said we don’t buy that this guy is a priest who has lost his faith, we buy that this guy is a warlord impersonating a priest, and somewhere along the way he’d decide he wasn’t just impersonating a priest, he’d decide to be one. So we’re certainly proud of the way that one worked out, and as for the ones we’re not proud of, we bury alive…or have Michael shoot them. Q: How do you come up with these amazing twists CC: A lot of getting yourself to a point where you cry. We have a really brilliant writing staff and that’s part of the DNA of the show now, and that’s a big part of the writer’s room, how we re-route things one way and flip it back another. We love introducing a character in a certain way and then reveal the character to be very different. You know originally Sawyer tested the second lowest after the pilot, and now of course he’s a very heroic version of that character. Q: Keep the Smoke! DL: You’ll be seeing the smoke in a probably interesting character in itself JB: And it will be in the shape of Jack’s beard Q: Season 5 was hard work watching, with time travel. How are you going to pay that off DL: We acknowledge with a degree of difficulty. We were ostensibly frightened at first with the time travel story, were basically desperate to get everybody back together again. Time travel is now complete and everybody gets back together in one form or another and we feel that season 6 is a lot like season 1 with its community. Q&A ended here. The guys signed stuff for the fans. My friend had a copy of Half Blood Prince, Damon signed it saying ‘Locke is VERY similar to Snape!’
The exec producer of Ian Somerhalder’s new CW series, The Vampire Diaries, is close friends with Lost exec producer Damon Lindelof. So when he’s not sucking blood in the South, Ian may reappear on the island as Boone. While apartment hunting in Atlanta, where Diaries shoots, with his new on-screen vampire brother Paul Wesley, Ian tells me, “I’ve heard a little bit about what’s happening this season on Lost, and there’s definitely an avenue they’re going down to bring back a lot of us.”
Any crossover [with] Lost would “only help the success of our show…as long as it’s not screwing up production,” Ian says. So what if Boone, Shannon, Charlie and the rest of Lost’s “living dead” turn out to be vampires? “That would not be good,” says the actor, who currently lives around the corner from Maggie Grace (Shannon) in Venice Beach. “There are already enough vampires flying around the airwaves. If we can keep it at True Blood, Twilight and Vampire Diaries, the world will be better off!”
Update: Holloway says Sawyer’s leader days are over and Sawyer’s state of mind post-Juliet is “destroyed.” He will be “salty” and angry again.
1) Parallel with S1 and S6 – DL confirms many characters from season one! CC: Says there is a way of discovery that they will have in play in S6 2) Faraday confirmed for S6!! 3) Will we see flashbacks to characters’ childhood? CC says S6 will be different. CC won’t describe what that point of difference is. 4) Richard Alpert’s backstory is “involved” 5) DL: Juliet WILL be in jawaban season. 6) Q: Is Man in Black’s name “Esau?” Emerson: Might be too literal–but I like the way your mind works. 7) Food drop in S2 finale might be covered… DL: “Something we’ll try to address.” 8) We won’t see much DHARMA in S6 9) Jacob has NOT appeared as another character on the show. 10) Dominic Monaghan appeared on the panel!!!!
