Ask LOST — Michael Emerson (Part 2)

Michael Emerson in "Ask Lost" part 2

This is the 7th short video in the Ask LOST series. It appears to be the last one that ABC is going to put out, at least for now. So it’s fitting that this portion of the series ends where it began — with Michael Emerson.

He’s my favorite actor, of all the LOST actors, to watch being interviewed. I just love the way he thinks about what he’s saying — you can almost see the gears turning in his head. I love the sound of his voice, as I’ve mentioned before — his stage actor’s diction. Most of all, I love his sense of humor. A great example of that is in the last segment of this video, where he gently pulls our leg with an almost straight face — and then, holding off until the very last moment, he breaks out in a grin.

I do disagree, though, with Emerson’s notion that Ben hasn’t fundamentally changed. I think Ben changed a lot, in this last season — or else we are seeing a radically different side of him that we had never seen before. Ben had always been such a powerful presence, the alpha bad guy, but in Season 5 he became greatly diminished, losing alpha status first to Locke (or, rather, to notLocke), and then to Jacob. In his last scene in the Finale, he seemed to regress back to being a wounded child, which was something far different, though no less lethal, from the terrifying puppetmaster he had been in Seasons 2, 3, and 4.