>
> I have to admit, I knew exactly what I was rooting for and
> I didn't feel funny at all about it.
Well, of course you were rooting for the punishment of the bad guys! "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord," and as teevee viewers, _we are Gods._ Not only do we possess mechanical super-hero super-powers, like the miraculous ability to traverse forwards and backwards across the slow flow of time in what seems to us like an eye-blink, to be in two places at once, see around corners and through walls, etc., but also we can also peer into a character's soul.
As telepaths we audience rely upon the good faith of screenwriters; I can't remember them _ever_ letting me down. Imagine, for example, we're watching a show where the plot is, a protagonist is unjustly framed for a crime and he struggles to exonerate himself. In a lot of shows we, as omniscient Gods, actually see the crime being committed by someone else and so we're sure all along he's innocent; but in other cases all we have is the word of the character (e.g., in conversation with a supporting character, he says "I didn't do it!" _convincingly_) and sometimes his innocence is not proven to us by anything more than his unspoken status as the "good guy" character. Yet how the audience would feel let down, even betrayed, if at the end of the show we'd learn that the "framed" character was guilty all along! We'd be even more dissatisfied than if a character had pocketed a handgun earlier in a scene, but at a moment of crisis he reached in his pocket and pulled out a rubber chicken instead.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net