benlehman

Having thought about it a few more minutes: you know that phrase "third time's a charm"? That's what's going on. It's a genre trope, and doesn't have to have any particular extra signifcance in a given story. Sort of like the thing in movies/TV where ALL bags of groceries contain a loaf of French bread, or how Beowulf is loaded with alliterative epithets, or the sea in Homer is always wine-dark... it's the structure and tradition of the medium, a thing that gives it the appropriate flavor and cadences and lets people make mental shortcuts, rather than content as such.