I guess, some of these may have been artefacts from how the printout was produced. Notably, ELIZA was an extensible system, meant to start with a small script, to be extended progressively, and featured "live" editing capabilities. According to the 1966 paper, "START" is actually ELIZA's answer after returning from an editing session. And I wouldn't be shocked, if the final empty list had been placed there for convenience by the system.

Other: It has been a while, since I had a closer look at ELIZA, and I have to admit that I forgot most about the intrinsics of the MEMORY rule.

PS: An interesting feature of ELIZA in the context of problem solving may be that, if there is more than a single recomposition rule, ELIZA will cycle through them (e.g., alternating between two expressions.) This may allow for some interesting, even surprising, and still state-dependent behavior, kind of a "Moiré logic". :-)