Brothah

I am also really enjoying the way this show explores what it means to be part of a community. Again and again we see different models of small social groups whose members depend upon one another (The Losties, the Others, Desmond's monastery, etc... you can even look at Jack's "invasion" of a Thai village or Locke's life on the marijuana commune) but who have different strategies for order and structure and survival. The Lost Beach is mostly comfortable anarchy, with no need of rules and law because everyone respects one another and the ill shit between people can be settled between them; and they only need a "Leader" in times of crisis (when they first got to the island, when figuring out how to respond to threats from outside... you notice that even though Hurley was grooming Sawyer for the throne, they seemed to be doing FINE without Jack). The Others, on the Other hand, live in an extremely structured network with its own laws, tribunals, sheriffs, and an autocratic and exceedingly nasty leader, Ben (and possibly someone even shadier and more powerful, Jacob). The monastery episode reveals Desmond's major failing: he is unable to abide by the rules and be a productive constructive loving part of any community (even a community of two, as we saw with Penny and now with Ruth, and "the Family" is the smallest and most intimate form of community). His stupid "Calling" is everybody's calling, except not everybody has so much trouble with it: finding a place in the universe and loving the people who share that place.

I don't know what that all means, either within the show (is that what Lost Island boils down to for all the Losties: a purgatory they all need to pass through in order to be purged of their own failure to truly live in honest and open and respectful communities? (Sun & Jin, Jack and his wife and his father, Sawyer and Charlie and Locke and Ecko... all these folks got problems being upfront with the ones who love them)) or outside the show, from a cultural perspective (is it a way to comment on how Americans--and really residents of any modern industrialized society--no longer believe themselves to be a part of a community in the same way, with responsibilities to their neighbors and the capacity to solve their own problems, etc? is it about post-9/11 anxiety about how "our community" is threatened, and what is wrong with "our community" that brings those threats in the first place? who knows!). But I am enjoying it.