I didn't even see the theme until you pointed it out
I guess it was subtle after all!
I wondered at Locke's statement, whether "I stopped looking" meant he gave up, or he found what he was looking for.
Well, I think he meant he gave up, in the sense that it's so often the case that you
do
find something as soon as you stop looking. You just stumble across it. But there are two ways of looking at that. It could be seen as, well, giving up, giving
in,
really, to never finding what you're looking for, and then being pleasantly surprised when you find it. Or it could be very "Surrender to destiny"/"It's a lot like drowning that way." The sense that things will take care of themselves, so there's no need for you to stress about them.
Considering how much we've seen him stress about it ("What do you want me to DOOO?!") I'm betting it's the first: he stopped looking and gave up - maybe when he was told he couldn't do the Outback thing - and then found It by accident, literally. He seems to feel that he's very much a part of Its Plan, that his actions are important to The Plan, so I don't buy that he believes things will work out by themselves and he can just relax. But he does seem very relaxed, as long as he believes he knows what his part of The Plan is. Knowing what The Plan is, doesn't seem as important to him as the belief that there is one.
I don't like John Locke at all. I think he's crazy, and dangerously so, not crazy in the entertaining rub-soup-in-his-hair way.
edited for clarity; imagine what it was like before
"Not All Who Wander Are..."
"...In The Grooves."
That would be one hell of a SO.
From various TV guides, it looks like this week's LOST is a new episode, so I'm thinking that the "In 3 weeks" is just for the big event mentioned in the preview, not when the next new episode airs.
Does anyone have confirmation one way or the other?