Margaret has compelled me to catch up on The Office and LOST this summer (thanks to DVDs and iTunes), both of which I’ve enjoyed a great deal — but (semi-spoiler alert) I’m struck, and disappointed, by the mortality/disappearance rate of black characters in LOST. (We’re part-way into Season Three, so readers who know the series can judge to what we’re referring.) The first season gave writers a lot to work with, and a richly integrated cast; at this point, the color spectrum has shifted vigorously away from the darkest skin tones.
Which reminds me that someone suggested that my owning a television is like Les Carpenter owning a biretta — a waste of a glorious resource upon someone who doesn’t adequately appreciate it. And to make it worse, the Center’s townhouses come equipped with cable subscriptions. After the novelty of flicking through a hundred or so channels (it looked as though there were five or six “Christian” channels, to my surprise), we haven’t turned it back on.
Back to LOST for a second — I was intrigued to read Edward Cook’s entry about watching LOST with Hebrew subtitles; evidently the subtitling industry regards Hurley’s “Dude!” as equivalent to Hebrew ben-adam (literally “son of humanity,” “son of a human,” or traditionally “Son of Man”). The soteriological implications of a “Dude” theology, especially when we make the connection to The Dude of The Big Lebowsky (finally making sense of that bowling-with-angels sequence, and enhancing the Old-and-New Judaeo-Christian partnership of Walt and the Dude), set the imagination reeling.