They're so desperate a kid needs knife lessons?

The only problem I have with Locke teaching Walt how to handle a knife is that he should have okayed it with Michael.

They are in a survival situation and *everyone* should be lining up for knife handling and weapons making. Walt is older than I was when I learned the proper respect for knives. What he learns from Locke could save his life, and indeed the lives of others on the island. Even Shannon.

In the situation they are in, it's not a matter of specialization of skills, it's a matter of sharing what you know, so that the group can be as strong as possible.

Exactly. First order of business should be that each day, once their essential food needs are met, Jack should be teaching EVERYONE on that island the basics of first aid. Hunting, knife handling, and general wilderness survival lessons from Locke should be a high priority too.

You made me go read the Sawyer Apologistas! Bad Matt! No biscuit!

The thing is, I like Sawyer a lot. Well, "like" is not the word I'm looking for exactly, but I like the conflict he brings to the group, I like that he's psychologically FUBAR, and OK, the pretty doesn't hurt either. But why must people feel compelled to try white-washing the character? What's the point? And oy, with the "my character is better than your character!" argument.

When it comes down to it, I don't necessarily disagree that the torture was just as disturbing and wrong (if not more so) than Sawyer's passive-aggressive self-destructive assholitude, but something about the tones of these posts just set my teeth on edge.

Eh. Fandomization of a show comes with the good and the bad, I guess. Now, where are all the good fic, damnit?

It's interesting -- but I don't know if the writers have thought this through yet -- the "lifeboat" concept. Because, as large a group as this is, and as seemingly-paradise a place as they washed up, why would they snap immediately to the lifeboat mentality?

More to the point, how? Small groups have managed to overcome personality conflicts to create a main goal and work toward it, but large groups, it gets more and more dicey. More opportunities for competing leaders, less interaction with every individual in the group, more mouths to feed, less opportunity to cement power by offering or withholding a key survival component (since whatever it is, it can't possibly go around to everyone).

The castaways from the Bounty survived, by snapping to a familiar leadership pattern (although a number of them starved to death anyway). The survivors of that plane crash in the Andes similarly had a schema around which to cohere: they were a sports team (plus extra people). The Essex, the whaling ship on which Moby Dick is loosely based, lost almost all its crew, in part because the three surviving dinghys were separated; but even so, it was the 'outsider' crew-members -- several black recruits from the bigger cities of Massachusetts, as opposed to the white Nantucket crew who were practically all 2nd cousins -- who died first.

I imagine some of the probabilities lie on individual personality -- note that the only military guy on Crashy-Crashy Island is a refugee from a dictatorship, so that's out as a leadership method -- but because this is fiction, they also lie on what crazy thing the jungle will think up next.

So is this some kind of record time for the woobiefication of a bad boy?

Oh, I doubt it.

Yeah, I like Sawyer. But not as you know, my favoritest person ever that I want to spend ever so much time with. I enjoy the character, which is whole 'nother thing. He is interesting to me, not because woobie, but because of the conflict he engenders.

What I see is the reactionary stuff. Of course there should be organized efforts. Of course there should be education. Of course there should be shared resources. But they're still at the point where (presumably) half the people are living on the beach because they believe they will be rescued. This is a major mentality chasm, and one not conducive to the things they should be doing.

I'm about where Liese is WRT to why they haven't started setting up their community for the long haul. They're still in a kind of shock and denial. And, hey, Michael's going to start on the Aquaduct, yeah?

Sawyer. Sawyer, Sawyer, Sawyer. See now, what I like about Sawyer so far is that I don't think he'd take kindly to woobification. I think he'd nickname the apologist something... not nice. And I would laugh. I like to think his motivations for joining in the reindeer games last week were not because he was all hurt and lonely, but because he's self-serving: "Kate's hot, maybe I can get with her if I pretend to listen;" or, "Well, shit, if we're stuck here, I'm going to need something from one of these twits eventaully, so...;" or, "Damn, I'm bored. Think I'll go poke at the morons." This is the dream to which I will hold firm. Also? He's hot.

How long have they been on the island now? Two weeks?

I think last week was the first time I was really unhappy with the Sawyer characterization itself (as opposed to rolling my eyes at his apologists), since I have little of Jen's hope that his sudden turnaround was anything other than the writers mining his torture for sympathy before trying to make the character a snarky heartthrob in the fashion of daytime soap rapists. But he was definitely enjoyable earlier on when he was the annoying gadfly who wasn't necessarily doing anything wrong.

I was also disappointed that Jack was so blasé about having treated torture as a second resort rather than a last one, and on someone who turned out not to be the guilty party after all. I mean, I understand his and Sayid's reasons for doing so, but he should be tearing himself up over what happened instead of enjoying a leisurely golf game with adoring spectators. Also not thrilled that a dig about Kate liking Sawyer prompted him to abandon even halfhearted gestures of responsibility for the injuries, since I'd like to think violating his Hippocratic Oath in fairly brutal fashion should cause more upset than his prospective girlfriend of two weeks not joining him in shunning a rival.

I'd like it better if the mistakes seemed to have consequences that last a little longer than the teaser of the next episode.

Yeah, totally with you on that, Matt. I'm still hoping for some longer term ramifications. But since we haven't bothered with the ramifications of some simpler, more obvious things like, say, smack withdrawal, I'm not altogether too confident.