Vagaries

A couple of Sundays ago, I was watching Flight of the Conchords, when who should I see playing the role of an Australian ambassador? It was none other than Alan Dale AKA Charles Freakin' Widmore. Of course, my initial reaction was: "What the hell is Charles Widmore doing on FOTC? And since when is he Australian? Is this some sort of trick? Is he trying to bring Bret and Jemaine to the island? How does it tie in? Then Jemaine broke into a song about hurt feelings and I remembered what show I was watching.
But, I started thinking about it the other day and it made me wonder what it must be like to be a cast member on LOST. I'm sure it's probably great right now. You're on a highly successful show with thousands of avid followers waiting eagerly for any little nugget of information that will be thrown there way. You've got rabid hardcore obsessed fans watching episodes over and over, meticulously breaking down every move each character makes, looking for the slightest shred of significance in even the most mundane details. You're getting lots of recognition, your name's getting out there.
However, Lost is one of the few things I watch where I have trouble separating the actors from the characters. I'm sure this is an effect is more easily achieved on tv series than it is in movies, just because it's like you're living with these characters week after week. And in Lost, the job they do of getting you involved with the characters is just phenomenal. There's so much back story and so much individual attention placed on each member of the ensemble that you feel like you're really inside their lives. This makes me wonder whether anyone on that show will ever be able to get out from under those characters when the show's finally over. I know that from my perspective, even cast members that I knew before Lost, if I see them the very forst thinh that I'll associate them with is their Lost character. For example: if I ever see Dominic Monaghan in anything, he''l always be Charlie first and a Hobbit second. I know that I've seen bot Terry O'Quinn and Naveen Andrews in things both before and after Lost, but they are forever Locke and Sayid now. Henry Ian Cusick doesn't even stand a chance of being anything but Desmond, whatever he may do post-Lost.
In a mostly unrelated note, when I was looking at Alan Dale's IMDB page I noticed that he was in an episode of the short lived sci-fi series Time Trax. I don't remember much about this show except that I thought it was awesome when I was in middle school, and that I wished that I had the ability to slow down time. Anybody else ever watch it? Anybody else even know this blog exists yet? That's what I thought.