Really... I TRY to stay out of this one every time it comes up, knowing that the "who's at fault?" debate is just a MAJOR button for me. Arrrghhhhhhh!

In a way I suppose I feel like we are these characters "best friends" -- the only people who can be expected to understand them and their goals and dreams and fears and needs and insecurities better than anybody else, better than they do themselves. We are the only ones who can maintain a clearheaded insight into what is going on between them while they themselves cannot see beyond the need to protect themselves against the hurt.

But here we are involved in a never-ending argument which, with the full benefit of hindsight, still cannot agree on who should have done what, when. Instead of seeking higher levels of understanding, too often it seems we are falling back on positions of "blame" or "betrayal". And that just doesn't seem healthy, or, I dunno... productive.

Even worse, this discussion seems to have polarized people on all the lists, even into creating websites which apparently seek to support one character's position to the others detriment. I never saw the two characters rights as mutually exclusive like this, rather, what hurts the one by definition of their symbiotic friendship, hurts the other.

What's more, I honestly don't get the feeling that we were supposed to be watching these episodes and deciding that one character is obviously at "fault", or "responsible" for what happened, or to "blame" for the ending of S2. I thought the intent was to show that they were swept under by circumstance -- self-preservation, dumb luck, external factors, miscommunication and matters not yet understood that are on a somewhat cosmic scale. I thought we were being shown that suddenly both were thrust into new territory and both were unbalanced and trying, unsuccessfully, to cope.

I thought the intent was to show that in being hurt and in not having access to information that the other possessed, they made uninformed choices. Because of the enormity of the personal stakes, they acted out of fear instead of rationality. That by being torn apart, the very connection that makes them a formidable united front, leaves a ripped and bleeding wound that they can only try to mend by falling back on who they used to be before they had so much invested in each other. Is that really so hard to understand?

Maybe it's easier for some of us to get inside one character's head and not the other's, and I guess that's understandable. But if WE can't step back from that perspective and see the other, then it seems a little unfair to expect the characters to do so, given that they are under such tremendous emotional strain. Yet we do that over and over again.

Anyway, this is all just theory. I wanted to have a go at maybe explaining what I mean when I talk about each character's perspective and see if anybody else sees the same things.

So I'm just gonna go of in a little dream world and wax poetic and pseudo-scientific about two fictional characters and their pretend motivations just to get it out of my system.

If, like me, you have no life, I invite you to join me in the group obsession if you so desire.

Kaz (to be continued... in (2) and (3))