"The Lonely": Anyone else love this one?

I'd like to think you're right.

There's an exchange early on between the Ted Baxter character and Allenby where the Baxter character asks him what's in the crate and Allenby says something along the lines of "I don't know ... maybe it's an illusion ... or perhaps salvation ..." The Alicia Corry fell in love with, the Alicia Corry's loneliness invented, enabled him to rediscover the humanity his prolonged isolation had purged from him. Seeing Alicia for the illusion that she is equips Corry with the will to rejoin society, where his salvation resides.

Then again, the things we make in our image and keep alive by love, do we ever forget these things? Will Corry truly ever be able to leave behind his loneliness? How much of Alicia and what she signified will he take with him back to Earth? Is she as obsolete as that car he worked on to pass the time? Or is she something more?

I suppose the wind, and the sand, and the years will swallow up this question, along with all the others ...

"I like to think she was never as real as Cory thought she was but that due to is unbearable loneliness he created a real woman n his mind."

This is an interesting thread. I've always taken this episode as we saw it, i.e., that she was a very sophisticated robot who seemed like a real woman (more advanced, I suppose, than Data in Star Trek). This thread seems to be suggesting that we are only seeing her as Cory saw her, not as she really was, i.e., as more robot-like with no "emotion chip." This never occurred to me, perhaps because it's Jean Marsh, who will always be very real as Rose Buck to me.