That is a shame you feel that way.. I thought it was a very good movie.
The way I look at it is: the point of Roddy (Harvey Keitel) going blind was to give Katherine a turning point for her character.
Up to that point, she was living almost exclusively for herself: she marries Max von Sydow's character but has no children by him and eventually leaves him (though she keeps his last name, showing that she still respected something about him) to remarry someone passive and servile to her needs. When she discovers she is going to die and be on Death Watch, she at first fights any attempts at signing the contract, but eventually caves in (but with her own plot in mind). She gets the money for her passive husband who doesn't have a penny to his name, whereupon she gets a disguise and disappears to die on her own terms.
When she discovers that Roddy was filming her for the show all along, she had every right to leave him.. yet she doesn't. He is blind, alone.. in a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere. If not for the helicopters from NTV coming in, he would probably die on his own. So the fact that she not only forgives him but helps him escape with her is a pretty big character change for her.
As far as the "she's not really dying" bit, I kind of suspected that the pills were a poison to make her die slowly and painlessly (ie the premise of the show was concocted on the lie that she had a terminal illness). So either the doctor had an attack of conscious or it really was a mistake. It doesn't matter, because the entire point is HOW you live your life and what you do with the time you have (kind of like the theme of BLADE RUNNER: 4 years or 40 years... extra time doesn't mean anything to those who don't do anything with it [note how all of the truly human characters in BLADE RUNNER are passive bystanders, anonymous background filler or victims.. it is only the replicants that move the story and actually do anything).
She decided that she would die on her own terms, as well as bring bad publicity to NTV (ie they were responsible for getting someone killed, and the producer [Harry Dean Stanton] would probably get charged with manslaughter). The effect on Roddy is that he finally realized that you need other people to experience life with, and that to isolate yourself is to live like a blind man: sooner or later you will need someone to help you, and if you are truly alone you may as well be dead.
Speaking of the fear of loneliness, those of you who read this should check out THE NINTH CONFIGURATION.
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