Let me just offer an observation here.

A number of people have commented that they weren't much surprised by
Sinclair being taken aboard, because on the nets -- and this has ONLY taken
place on the nets -- this speculation has been bandied about for some time.
We now have ten zillion speculations on the reason *why*. I will not comment
on them one way or another (though I suppose I could point, without making the
real comparison between types of typists, to the idea that an infinte number
of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards would eventually produce
Hamlet simply by chance combination; sooner or later, something close to the
reality might be stumbled upon...and let me ask a simple question: what
purpose does that serve? It only lessens the enjoyment of those who would
simply like to enjoy what happens WHEN it happens).

Any good detective knows that you can't really begin to speculate about
motive until you have all the information right at hand. At this point there
is information you don't have...and absent that, any guesses will either be
wrong, or close enough to hinder the fun but still essentially incorrect.
It's like trying to guess the contents of a box without knowing the size of
the box...it could be a marble, it could be an elephant or a pre-fabricated
house.

All I'm suggesting is that you consider not trying to come up with every
possible angle, and let the show progress on its own. Right now everybody
seems to be scrambling to make sure every even remotely feasible possibility
is covered, and there an infinite number. As an organized activity, this will
in time only prove frustrating. By the end of the season, as with being near
the end of a movie, you'll have enough info on hand to start making some
educated guesses. To do so now is to begin the process of calling out
possible endings during the first five minutes of a movie...you'll miss the
important things, and annoy the people sitting behind you.

I'm not saying stop; I'm just saying...relax, a little, I guess, and
simply be aware that you *cannot* scatter-shot this thing without having
access to all the information. It's like trying to guess the beginnings of
World War One without knowing *any* of the background of the countries
involved. Suffice to say that the reason would not be simplistic, or cliched,
or *easily deduced*. One thing I learned in two years on "Murder, She Wrote"
was to come up with a fairly complex mystery, something that can't be easily
solved going in, but which makes perfect sense after you have all the facts
and know which clues were the real ones, and which were simply red herrings.

Just a thought....

jms