Here's what's cool about this episode: the ending credits. They show the whole staircase in the foyer at Collinwood, so you can count the steps: ten, plus the first floor, plus the second floor. To me, it looks as though that second floor walkway is far higher than the usual second floor but the steps tell me that it isn't. The staircase in my house has twelve steps between the floors, and the staircases in the eighteenth-century farmhouse in which I grew up had eleven steps between the floors, so ten steps makes that second floor quite low. Would one of you artistic types out there care to explain to me in words of one syllable how Sy Tomashoff managed to fool my eye?
Conversations between Dr. Hoffman and Dr. Woodard are always interesting, and the conversation in this episode was especially so, as I sat and wondered: "When is Julia lying and when is she telling the truth?" A good rule of thumb is if she's smiling then she's lying, but it doesn't follow that if she's not smiling then she's telling the truth. Is it Julia's idea that the only way to cure Maggie is to show her a de-fanged Barnabas? I thought she was going to make a serious error when she suggested that Woodard would gain fame and fortune if he supported her; Woodard doesn't appear to be the ambitious type. But she dropped that in favor of the idea that he could help her make a major medical breakthrough, and that hook worked - sort of.
Burke comes across as much pleasanter in this episode than he has in recent ones. Vicky engages in a flight of romantic imagination, and he doesn't tell her she's being silly! Maybe he took a laxative.
Sarah's got a very useful skill: she knows when somebody is dead. Maybe Julia should hire her as an assistant.
