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If you didn't see the series premiere of Lost, here's what you missed: Terry O'Quinn was in it, and he freaked everyone out.

We could have just ended that sentence after "Terry O'Quinn was in it," couldn't we? Because freaking everyone out is what he does by default.

What's especially funny about the Lost premiere is that O'Quinn didn't really do anything in it. If he had ten words of dialogue in the episode, we'd be very surprised. The most memorable thing he did was stick an orange slice over his teeth and smile at our leading lady. But if you look around online, you'll see that the moment gave a lot of folks the willies. If Harold Perrineau Jr. or Naveen Andrews had done exactly the same thing, everyone would have probably thought it was cute. (In fact, we did think it was cute.) But because it was Terry O'Quinn, prior experience tells us to suspect some hidden menace.

We don't know much about the backgrounds of any of Lost's doomed passengers, but as soon as we saw Terry O'Quinn among them, we couldn't help starting a countdown to the moment when we'd find out that his Locke works at a high-level post in a super-secret government agency. We originally had Chris Carter to thank/blame for that, since he's the one who cast O'Quinn in pretty much that exact role in his three TV series -- The X-Files, Millennium, and Harsh Realm -- but Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams bears some responsibility for it too, for casting O'Quinn as...a high-level operative in a super-secret government agency, on Alias. He must look trustworthy. Or like he can keep super-secret secrets, at least. Like, maybe there's so much classified information crammed into his head that there's no room for active hair follicles.

O'Quinn is also adept in such roles as police chief, sheriff, or army guy in straight-to-tapers with titles like Shadow Conspiracy, Shadow Warriors, and Company Business. He was in both of the apparently unrelated Justice in a Small Town and Murder in a Small Town, reputedly to of the most generic suspense thrillers of the 1990s. He also played Howard Hughes in The Rocketeer, and co-starred in All the Right Moves and Young Guns. So in other words, if you've ever watched USA on a Saturday afternoon, you should have a passing familiarity with his body of work, which ranges from roles that call for him to bark at callow youths to roles that call for him to hiss at nosy investigators who don't know when to keep out of the government's business.

But there is another side to Terry O'Quinn -- or, if not an entire side, at least one memorable role. While the dudes are chilling on the living-room couch in front of USA, watching Terry O'Quinn as Admiral Truman Hager in Visions of Murder, the girls are upstairs in the bedroom with the shades closed, watching -- for the fourteenth guilty time -- Terry O'Quinn as Jack Moseley in The Cutting Edge. O'Quinn gets the thankless, one-dimensional role of Rich, Permissive Father Who Spoiled the Spoiled, Bitchy Ice Queen -- Moira Kelly in her crabbiest role ever. Kelly's Kate is such a wench, in fact, that the viewer can't help flashing back to other O'Quinn roles and hoping he'd suddenly get the urge to put on ninja gear, capture her at gunpoint, smuggle her onto a plane and dispose of her in such a way that no one would ever, ever find her. Ever. And he probably wishes he could do it, too.

(We don't mean to be all Tim Allen with the division of movie interests along gender lines, but come on: no guy has ever watched The Cutting Edge on purpose.)