TWO weeks ago, a colleague in the TV trade informed us that Channel 2's sudsy telenovela, "Rosalinda," was about to conclude its story after months and months on the tube. We decided to view it as regularly as our schedule permitted, so we could write about its denouement, and the Mexican soap's impact on our televiewing habits.

Well, here we are, 10 episodes later, and it doesn't look like "Rosalinda" is anywhere near calling it quits!

There was a time there when Rosalinda and Fernando Jose appeared to have finally ironed out the problems that were getting in the way of their eventual romantic rapproachment:

Rosalinda regained her memory, she realized that Fernando Jose was her husband and that she loved him more than she did her handsome manager. So, when Fernando Jose visited her in her hospital room, his eyes shining with love and remorseful tears, we thought that their reconciliation episode would be the popular telenovela's finale.

Fat chance. Instead of accepting Fernando Jose's (don't you just love those double names?) abject apologies and welcoming him back into her bosom with open arms, the sweet Rosalinda was transformed into a peevish shrew in front of our eyes!

She lashed out at her husband and bitterly rejected his professed love. More than that, she showed a decided preference for her manager's loving ministrations!

Oh, boy, we thought, here we go again-another round of complications and recriminations, of roller-coaster ups and downs and Kennon Road twists and turns, just to keep the soap's fans glued to their TV screens for a couple more commercially profitable weeks-or months-or years?!

Madre mia, is it going to be Rosalinda Forever? Are we doomed to sullenly gather as an entire electronics-hooked, love-besotted and soap-obsessed nation at 7 p.m. every weeknight to see Thalia and her ardent consorts going through the dolors and horrors of yet another installment of this long-running tale about a flower vendor-turned-singer-turned-fulltime neurotic who loved not wisely but much too often for everyone's good?!

Could be. The last few times we caught the show and its jerky plot gyrations, these monumental events transpired:

A nasty and lazy married man was getting the hots for his sister-in-law.

Another married man, even nastier and lazier than the first cad, was starting to seduce his mother-in-law! And he was doing it in the most transparently gauche way: taking off his shirt to turn her on with his hairy chest and love handles, etc.!

An insufferably uppity woman was planning to get pregnant by her brother-in-law.

And Rosalinda's father fell gravely ill. At death's door, he asked for his nasty, vengeful sister so that he could finally reveal to her what the whole televiewing world already knew: that it was he, not his wife, who had shot and killed his sister's husband, thus pushing her to treat Rosalinda and her mother like dirt for many years.

And what did Rosalinda's father get for his pains? Nothing: his stupid sister refused to believe his deathbed confession. So, after ranting and raving for a while longer (this character is the most talkative dying man ever to assault televiewers' eardrums), he finally kicked the bucket. So sad-but at least it silenced him.

Even sadder, it prompted Thalia to go to town with her hysterics, crying herself a river with three waterfalls over her character's dad's death.

In her past incarnations on TV, Thalia has never been a great actress, not even a particularly good one, either-but here, toward the end of Rosalinda's melodramatic Via Dolorosa, she hits the pits of bathos.

This may not be due to a deterioration of her thespic ability, but to the fact that, in trying to stretch out its life span on TV, her telenovela's plot twists have become so bizarre and downright silly: first she loved her husband, then she hated him with a vengeance, and then, just last Monday, she loved him passionately again!

This wild illogic has taken its toll not just on Rosalinda's believability, but on Thalia as well. So, instead of crying as Rosalinda caterwauls and ululates over her dad's dead bod, we snicker at Thalia for the badly-botched acting job.

Before everything else dissolves into a muddy puddle of mediocrity and downright silliness, we beg the gods of television to put an end to this eternal soap's geriatric misery-and, by association, that of its veritable nation of viewers' as well. Pleadingly, bleatingly, we pray: Let Rosalinda's turgid telenovela end this week!

This month?