Harriet wrote:

<I can understand if no one feels like having the Blake-at-Star-One thing just now, but it did make me pause to think about why McVeigh feels wrong and Blake mostly right.>

Probably a whole raft of reasons, but I'll try. All opinions my own, as usual.

Is it about the innocents being killed? Noooo ... not entirely. I've seen pictures of children killed by Allied bombing in the war (please note, I am talking about those raids aimed at military targets here, not terror bombing) and though I might find it hard to call *it* 'right', I don't think of it as horrendously 'wrong' in the same way as I do the Oklahoma bombing. My instinctive reaction is that if they were aiming at legitimate military targets, in a 'just' war (those words 'if' and 'just' is both important and extremely personal, something everyone needs to sort out for themselves) then I can say they were 'right' in spite of the unplanned (though not unforseen) consequences. Possibly the particular action, in hindsight, was wrong, but they were right to fight and that does count for something. I can understand and empathise with what they were trying to achieve; I simply have no way to do that with McVeigh.

Which brings it back, I suppose, to the cause in question. Maybe it's (at least partly) because many fans *can* understand and empathise with Blake's central motive of destroying a tyranny, (even if disagreeing loudly the means he uses) that he is in that different moral basket.

And I've also no doubt part of it *is* because they're all fictional. After all - to take the process one step further - look at Servalan, who destroyed a whole race (no doubt including infant Auranar who would have looked just as pathetic in photographs) for selfish reasons. Yet many fans still admire her and even cheer in those episodes where she wins. Even *she* doesn't feel 'wrong' in the same, visceral way, because it's removed by the fiction and the fantasy.

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