Gately, the wraith, and the figurants — "you can’t appreciate the dramatic pathos…"
you can’t appreciate the dramatic pathos of a figurant until you realize how completely trapped and encaged he is in his mute peripheral status […] No way for a figurant to win. No possible voice or focus for the encaged figurant.
Context
The thought-experiment (attributed ambiguously — "either the wraith is saying or Gately is realizing"): a 'Cheers!' figurant who stands up and shouts for attention doesn't break into the show, he just becomes a prop in the name-stars' storyline (the Heineken Maneuver bit). Genre convention itself polices the periphery: "No possible voice or focus" — focus, the optics word, doing the sentencing. Gately extends it darkly on his own: "Gately speculates briefly about the suicide statistics for bottom-rung actors."