Something I think we don’t talk about a lot was that Gertrude was playing with the idea of sacrificing Gerard to stop the circus. That’s already a lot to take in, but something I think that’s important to what she says is the way she structures her sentence.

The first, and main, reason she lists to not sacrifice Gerard is his lack of strong connection to The Eye. The second reason she lists it that she’s grown fond of him. The “read between the lines” of it all is that she doesn’t want to sacrifice him, but the sentence is formatted in a way that makes it seem like her feelings aren’t a priority compared to the logical logistics of it all.

Now, I think could be read two ways with a character as complicated as Gertrude: You could read this as Gertrude putting her logic before her emotion and being willing to sacrifice Gerard if the cards fell that way. Which isn’t exactly a stretch when you think of everything that happened with Michael.

However, I think the second way you could read this is that Gertrude isn’t fully comfortable accepting that she doesn’t want to sacrifice him after a life of making hard calls and is therefore padding her real reason (affection) with logic because it makes it easier to swallow. I especially think this interpretation is interesting because Gertrude does admit that she knows Gerry has a connection to The Eye yet she doesn’t throw out the idea of strengthening it to help with ritual. In fact, she just drops the topic entirely which doesn’t seem like the norm for her.

This is super interesting dialogue considering how fast the series moves on from it, and while the series moved on from it, it’s been living in my mind rent free.