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« on: May 11, 2014, 10:54:47 PM »
700--
You re-experience all this through your own recaps, don't you DL? Well done. So that's why Maggie says these unexpected things in that scene on the stairs-- she's following a different script from that story. (I've thought of ordering that story through Talking Books, but I thought it was the model for 1897.) Suddenly she says and does things based on ideas about Quentin's ghost that we haven't seen justifications for-- such as the idea that David must reject Q. That must have been Turn of the Screw. A terrible decision though, because of what we come to know about Q later-- [spoiler]the fact that Jamison's rejection of Quentin was the ultimate disloyalty and disappointment in his life... just the thing to tick off Q's ghost to the twelfth power.[/spoiler]
In Q's room, Barn and Maggie... Fake-out scare scene with the approaching stranger being Stokes... we find Amy in a standing stupor behind Quentin's curtains, after having been silenced strangely and atmospherically by Quentin earlier. Nice odd moment, when Q put his hand on her shoulder, and her mouth opens, and face freezes.
Maybe this is the moment of storyline change-- Stokes searching Q's desk and finding the I Ching wands. This always seems to me like one storyline intruding prematurely into another. It was certainly a big moment when I re-watched DS in 2002, for the first time since childhood. I loved the I Ching more than any other DS device. My family was passing through an airport, and I insisted we stop because I saw a thick paperback about I Ching in a store book carousel... and bought it. And was SO disappointed it was just a means of predicting future luck... The book was only reprinted, I'm sure, because the 1897 storyline was so popular.
So Quentin himself provides the means for changing his story retroactively... if he'd been thinking, he might actually have guided them there for that purpose. I actually kept backing up the tape to rewatch the spot in the desk the wands came out of-- strange I know. Quentin lets Stokes and Barnabas leave with the wands, and journals. [spoiler]Who knows, maybe the havoc was to force them to go back in time and fix everything. After all, his ghost murders will be undone too, maybe.[/spoiler]
They've already set up the table in the Old House basement, whose only real purpose will be for [spoiler]Barnabas to sit at for a few months.[/spoiler] Stokes reads and puzzles over Q's journals there.
Maggie is lured to Collinwood again, for David. Stop bellowing that you're going to get David, just grab him and go. You're only daring for Q to smite you in a way he can't resist. David is smitten.
Now the fateful I Ching scene. If the I Chinger, the Chingstronaut, whatever, can control at all what happens, maybe it makes perfect sense to use it. Maybe Barnabas can guide himself through some supernatural maelstrom to find Quentin or Quentin's spirit, and communicate clearly, because they exist in the same plane. That I assume is the interesting, poorly-explained idea, here. That idea seems to exist just in Barnabas's imagination, though. Nothing Stokes said about I Ching leads to that premise. Yet the Prof doesn't totally dismiss it. He protests as if it's the groundless idea it seems to be, and then almost immediately relents.
All I can think is-- the writers had some inventive ideas shooting around amongst each other. The ideas were great. However, a bad writing mistake that sometimes is made is that the writers of a show fail to imagine themselves as unknowing viewers who haven't been living with these interesting ideas every day for weeks. They then speed past explanations because they themselves no longer need them. The writers are experts now on their fictional version of I Ching. WE however are just being introduced to it all NOW. They are supposed to put themselves in the shoes of we ignorant viewers and explain fully.
Here comes the coffin.... Written by Gordon Russell.