Desmond Hume

Found on the island living alone in the Swan hatch, Desmond has been pressing the same button every 108 minutes for years, gripped by a discipline that seems half faith and half penance. He's wary and combative with the new arrivals, guarding secrets about the hatch and about why he's there at all, but a strange gentleness keeps breaking through the paranoia.

Cusick plays certainty and terror as the same expression, so you never know if Desmond is a prophet or a man broken by isolation. The show gives him a mythology unlike anyone else's on the island, tangled up with fate, guilt, and time itself, and he sells every impossible turn with a Scottish burr and haunted, decent eyes.