I started out kind of ambivalent toward Beth, but much less so than many of my friends. It's funny--people seemed to really hit both ends of the spectrum where she was concerned, either adoring her and thinking she was perfect, or really disliking her. I never felt that strongly about her, although I tended toward the "pro Beth" side of the spectrum from the beginning. But then something really interesting happened.
After the episode "Click" aired, a fellow Moonlight fan (not a member of this site) started a Facebook page for Mick. I had resisted the urge to get a Facebook page till then, but knowing "Mick" had a Facebook page, I just
had to get one so I could see what he was up to.
Well, it became evident very soon that the person behind Mick's page was creating a really interesting sort of "fanfic" via Facebook--she was making stories, using Mick's Facebook statuses. So I decided to ask if I could play along. My friend asked me if I would like to create a Facebook page for Beth, and I said yes. That was the beginning of an amazing experience, in which I "lived" as Beth on Facebook for 18 months or so. Every morning, I woke her up and started her day, and every night I put her to sleep. Mick and Beth had amazing adventures together, some very tumultuous. Their relationship was tested many times. They almost broke up more than once. And eventually, Mick proposed, and they were married on the one-year anniversary of the airing of "Sonata." It was like living in the middle of a fanfic, a sort of parallel life that was both fun and exhausting.
My part in the Facebook experiment eventually ended because of creative differences between Mick's creator and myself. It was a very painful experience for me to leave Facebook Beth behind, because I had grown to love her so much--I really felt that I understood her after walking in her shoes, virtually speaking, for so long. I have no illusions that "my" Beth is the right one, or the only way to interpret her. But by "living" her, I grew to appreciate her, warts and all. Her impulsiveness, her generosity, her peculiar habit of stuffing her traumas into little boxes in her mind and trying to forget they exist, her tremendous bravery and her tendency to put her foot in her mouth, all add up to one of the most interesting, damaged, gallant characters it's ever been my pleasure to know. So it's from that perspective that I developed my personal analysis of Beth.
Beth, to me, is a classic case of PTSD, complicated by the fact that she suppressed the memory of her childhood trauma so successfully that she never processed it. And during the course of the 16 episodes, we watched her beginning to cope with the emotional baggage of her abduction, complicated by the hugely shocking discovery that there's a whole shadow-society of vampires living right alongside the ordinary humans in the world. Beth was drawn to Mick in a way that made no sense to her at first. And as her attraction to him grew, her relationship with Josh, already apparently in a bit of a stall ("sleepovers" after a year together??), began to deteriorate even more rapidly. But Josh was safe, handsome, kind, undemanding--everything she'd told herself she wanted in a guy. So she waffled. I think that's a pretty normal response, actually. The pull of excitement, danger, mystery, vs. the safe haven of love, solidity, comfort. Was she kind to Josh OR Mick while she did that little dance between them? Nope. But I think her actions were pretty understandable. And in the end, when Josh died, I think a great deal of her anger at Mick was actually anger and guilt and remorse at herself.
In the four final episodes of Moonlight, Beth's character was changed greatly--more than any other character (well, with the exception of the ones who were eliminated entirely, like Coraline and Carl Davis). I really think the massive shakeup in Moonlight's producing and writing staff that happened during the writers' strike had a lot to do with that, as did the increasing insistence from CBS that the show change its style. But since it is what we got, it's canon, and we're stuck with it.
I try to see Beth in those final four episodes in terms of a woman coming to grips with the loss of the "person" she thought she was, and trying to become something--someone--new. In a short space of time, she learned that becoming a vampire can leave you in a hideous limbo; she lost her steady boyfriend in a horrifyingly brutal way; she confronted her childhood demon and struck back, only to discover she'd almost killed someone who was human, not vampire; she saw the other man in her life go through massive emotional and physical changes, and had to process the fact that he sacrificed his dearest wish--to become human again--in order to save her; she lost her beloved editor and then voluntarily gave up the job she loved in order to protect Mick; she had to re-live her own childhood horror again, as a result of the Fordham kidnapping; she made that "deal with the Devil" with Josef and deliberately chose to have a threat "eliminated"... this stuff all took place within the space of a few weeks!
So I tend to give her a break when she acts like an idiot.
Beth's not perfect--she's not even
close. That's one of the things I love about her--she's an amazingly full, rich character with many, often competing qualities, good
and bad. That's the amazing thing about Moonlight. Somehow, in the space of just 16 episodes, despite huge problems that plagued the show from its inception, they created a big, complex, fascinating world, filled with multidimensional, complicated, interesting characters who defy simple characterization.
But as an adult, she kept having nightmares, snatches of memories from her childhood kidnapping. And she found herself drawn to a mysterious man who she kept running into, despite the fact that she had a very real boyfriend.
Oh, to know what would have happened when Mick found out Dean Foster's death was because of Beth. I suspect that Beth would have grown and Talbot would have acted more like the flaky human.
Guilt, pain, remorse, trauma. 
