First, sorry I came off sounding arrogant - I have a very sick companion pet parrot and I'm not sleeping from worry and nursing him every 2 hours, so apologies - wasn't minding my tone of voice.

First, you're right about Garrett... I completely forgot about that. I don't recall them saying he was subjected to any sort of machine. So that pretty much rules out the machine contributing to madness - despite it being so traumatic it had Coulson begging to just die.

Anyway, just to clarify, I didn't mean to make it sound like the machine was responsible for the fixation. That was obviously the synthesized GH325 serum. What I meant was just that a fixation doesn't necessarily indicate madness - I was thinking along the lines that the TAHITI project was a package deal procedure in bring someone back from death (per Coulson's quip when he called it "Project Lazarus" referencing Dr. Who). I was just sticking to the idea that the GH325 injections were part of the treatment of reanimation life and that also require erasing traumatic memories.

It wasn't until we all started exploring how this was used on Cal that we cleared up some of the confusion and that the writers did, in fact, treat the serum and the machine as separate entities of the TAHITI project - at least to the degree it was revealed to us when Coulson referred to it now as the "TAHITI protocol." Now we're up to the "TAHITI protocol," and the question is - was there 2 memory wiping machines? One destroyed at the TAHITI location and another located elsewhere? That's still not clear to us, but Coulson somehow salvaged some parts of it and has decided to call this new thing the TAHITI protocol. It does get confusing trying to sort the details and make sense of it. Anyway... now that I've eaten my crow and beat this horse dead, I think we can stick a fork in this pig and call it done.