Tanja wrote:

Still, my favourite scene is probably Servalan making Investigator Reeves back off with nothing more than a glance and "there are no other women like me".

Ooh yes. Probably my favourite Servalan line ever.

I just wish she'd played the final line "I didn't kill you, Tarrant. Yet." differently - I want it to be the moment when she snaps back into her normal, ruthless self, but she does it with a sob.

Sally wrote:

I *do* think it makes her weaker (yes, the scene with Reeves is >good,

however) *without* adding any worthwhile dimension at all > - and the whole thing is so utterly conventional. I guess it comes >down to our perception of the character: Servalan is fairly cliched >from the start (all of this is IMO only) but there is a reasonable >integrity of character in the charming, smiling, hollow, unable-to->feel monster which Children of Auron and Sand totally violate.

But that's part of what I like about it, I think. The charming, smiling, hollow, unable-to-feel monster who so successfully suppresses her very conventional Achilles heel. And the supposed unworthiness of Don Keller as the object of her devotion is more or less irrelevant. It's not what he was that matters, it's what, for a brief while at a key stage of her life, she thought he might be. That's enough for the thought of him to push through the pin-sized hole in her armour and momentarily transform her to the 17-year-old girl.