Threshold
"She fakes just like a woman/but she breaks just like a little girl...."

Bob Dylan wasn't trying to be nice when he wrote those lyrics, but my heart couldn't help but go out to Molly Caffrey, whose life at Threshold consists of nothing but faking. The classified aspects of the job require her to keep those closest to her at several arms' distance. She has to snow the people she loves every day of the week. How do you live like that without cracking? Rationalization. "Protocols aren't my idea of a life, but the alternatives are worse," she tells Nigel, who was the unwitting source of a leak one of his ex-wives had him tailed  to a restaurant by a low-rent PI. Nigel had been going stir-crazy until he connected with some of the patrons. ("I finally found someone who could argue intelligently about bullpen depth.") Nigel's confrontation with the gumshoe was classic: "I've got a date with a dead cat tell Paula I traded up!" Protocol sank its teeth a lot deeper into Molly right into her heart. Her old grad-school advisor, Andrea Hatton, became infected by the alien signal after Fenway's files were raided by shifty Senator Tollman. As their plane approached

Mexico, Molly made the hard decision to destroy the plane and its infected passengers. "If it ever came to it, I'd rather be dead," Baylock tells her. "Anyone would." Afterward, Molly walked outside and heard her cell phone ring as she sat on a bench. Molly's lips pursed, her eyes squinted and her cheeks became puffy when her mother offered her condolences after hearing the "official" version of Andrea's death. For a split second Molly was a heartbroken child in need of solace and comfort. Then the protocols that have been drummed into her restored her emotional discipline. Who the hell wants to be professional when circumstances dictate that you terminate a close friend? You can only hold in that kind of guilt for so long. Patton was demented for a reason, folks. He couldn't turn it off. The rest of us cling to being human, no matter how impossible our worlds make it. The irony is, in every disguise lies a truth if you look hard enough.   GJ Donnelly