Umm, the whole idea of multiple identical dolls that I put forth was put forth as a joke. Hence the winking ghost smiley
and the cheesy Halloween pumpkin smiley
.
I fully believe that the show expects us to believe that the doll we see Sarah give Maggie and the one she's seen cradling at the mausoleum is one and the same.
As to the bizarreness of Sarah having the doll back after giving it to Maggie (and Maggie potentially still having it somewhere down the line as if she's always had it), well, I honestly chalk that up to poor continuity - and that's the point I was trying to make with my other posts. The sad but real possibility exists that we see Sarah cradling her doll at the mausoleum simply because the director of this ep and possibly even the writer forgot or maybe even never knew that in Ep #308 Maggie had the doll back. Those sorts of continuity problems happen all the time on DS. And of course the show as a whole thought nothing of them because DC himself thought so little of the audience that he believed no one would ever question such things. We often see somewhat similar things when a character is suddenly wearing completely different clothes than they had been in a previously staged version of the same scene, or they're standing in a completely different place on set than they had been in a previously staged version of the same scene, or they're holding something completely different in their hands or busying themselves with some completely different activity than they had been in a previously staged version of the same scene. I often think the motto at DS was "We don't need no f**king continuity!" because, well, let's face it, there's often so little of it.
All that being said, though, it's certainly fun to try to come up with plausible ways to explain away such continuity errors (though good luck ever trying to explain away the different clothes
). And I've certainly enjoyed reading the possible theories that have been put forth to try to explain why Sarah had her doll back. After all, spinning theories is certainly one of the things that these topics are all about.