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I think it might help, Oliver, if you outlined your detailed argument about the gold metaphor from the Tea Party a bit the way you did for me. It might explain better what you're getting at with the nature of the episode.
It's worth noting that Will himself rebels. Of all the characters in Chiru, Will has felt the closest to a "reader stand-in." I suppose Erika too, if we associate Erika with a certain kind of "undesirable" reader. Will could be seen as either another kind of "undesirable" reader (though nowhere near Erika's level), or as the "right" kind of reader. In either case, we have both of them being played with by Bernkastel out of deliberate cruelty and indecipherable motive.
To accept Bern herself (whether one is accepting her facts or not) is to essentially buy the idea that the writer was playing with you out of boredom, as Bern herself does. To say the story has meaning somehow is to side with Battler. The problem, of course, is that the weight of the evidence appears to throw in against Battler... but if he didn't have a grand turnaround in store for ep8, I guess there wouldn't be much tension to it.
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