Discuss - Ep #0830

[Watching Project]

Robservations #830

[alwaysdavid]

Trask thinks that the Almighty will cure Charity, but so far only the witch has been able to change events.  Trasks begs Minerva to leave him alone, but then it's Tessie's ghost who tells him about Quentin.  Finally Quentin decides to chain himself up.  Trask seems to have the upper hand.

[IluvBarnabas]

Trask is both smart and dumb in this episode. He doesn't think Charity is capable of murder, even though she isn't acting like the Charity he knows but a 'common woman of the streets' as he once said the first time he saw her behaving like Pansy. That's the dumb part.

He does regain some intelligence when he goes to Quentin's room, sees him chained up, and realizes he is the werewolf.

It would have been nice to see Minerva's ghost again, not the spirit that Evan conjured up and controlled, but the real deal...I can't believe that she would forgive and forget that her own husband had her murdered.

Why hasn't Quentin gotten it into his head that when there's a full moon he should be anywhere else except at Collinwood? Is he confident that he's chained himself up so tight he can't break free? Then why ask Magda to shoot him if he does? I suppose one could say he wants to cover all bases, but even so, he still should not be hanging around the house when he knows he's going to turn into a werewolf.

[EmeraldRose]

Major Milestones:
1. Trask told Quentin that Judith had greatly improved.
2. Trask got a ghostly warning from Tessie about "the beast that walks like a man" being inside the house.
3. Magda chained Quentin in his room and he told her to shoot him with silver bullets if he changed into a werewolf and was going to escape from the room. Trask walked in on them!

It was funny when Trask thought it was Magda who was haunting him. I knew it wasn't her right away, because Tessie's voice sounded too young. Then, she appeared to Quentin. Poor Quentin!

Charity/Pansy Faye had spunk!  She would not be ordered around by anyone, especially her father! She was pretty belligerent and threatening.  I don't think the real Pansy Faye was so violent. It seems to me that Count Petofi's spell changed her into being a more violent version of Pansy Faye. 

It was great when Magda prevented Quentin from committing suicide. 

----- Sally -----

[Roland]

That must have been a much more innocent time.  Frankly, if someone today suggested a scene in which a highstrung minister broke in on a couple in a room in which one party was chained to a post, the raison d'etre might be an entirely different one from what we get here. 

Rev Trask:  What ARE you people doing here?

or

Quentin and Magda, I had no idea!

[Lydia]

I had forgotten what a dangerous person Pansy-in-Charity was: it's so easy to remember just the song and the accent.  I was thinking yesterday that she and Servant Edward could have a glorious time reminiscing about Dear Old England, but that was not to be.  Oh, well, having a crazed killer-wannabee floating around the great house certainly adds a bit of life to the proceedings.

It was surprising that Trask didn't know his own late wife's voice well enough to know that the voice he was hearing did not belong to her, but I suppose it just never occurred to him that it might be somebody else.  I wish it had been Dorcas Trilling instead of Tessie Kincaid.  We got a good idea of what sort of person Dorcas was before she died, and her character had real potential, sadly cut short, whereas we know nothing about Tessie except that she's good at pushing plots along.

I keep thinking about how convenient the werewolf plot is: you can put it away in mothballs for a few days or a few weeks while the moon's not full and take it out again when your other plots peter out.

That pillar (or whatever the correct architectural term might be) in Quentin's room was also convenient.  Have we ever seen it before?  And did Quentin and Magda check to make sure that it wouldn't give way?  Now there's a thought: the werewolf pulls the pillar out from its mooring (that's surely not the correct architectural term; I'm visualizing MB's eyebrows sky-high right now) and the whole house comes crashing to the ground.  Alternative scenario: the pillar breaks, the werewolf heads for the door, and Magda dutifully shoots for the heart and misses six times.  Honestly, does Quentin expect the werewolf to stand with an apple on its head while Magda aims?

[Midnite]

The voiceover refers to Charity as "a possessed victim."  I wish I'd remembered that during a debate (another DS site and a lifetime ago) about whether she was experiencing an actual possession or not.

Magda seemed quite shocked by the news that a full moon was imminent.  You'd think she would keep better tabs on something so important.

We see both gramophone horns-- the black one shows up in Charity's room, and the flowery red horn is currently in Quentin's room.

Magda and Quentin assure each other that Petofi skipped Quentin while punishing everyone else in the family because he sympathizes with his cursed nature, and that Quentin is the only family member that Petofi doesn't hate for the same reason.  But this contradicts what came out of the big man's mouth.  In #801/2, Petofi said that Quentin would be spared from any truth spells because he is the only person in the house who admits the truth about himself.  There was also something about Petofi only helping him for a price.  But shouldn't M & Q have been talking about "empathy" rather than sympathy anyway?

There was an odd transition during Tessie's haunting of Quentin.  She tells him that she will be with him that night, and we immediately cut to Quentin in closeup with his back to her as he begs for mercy with his face in his hands.  I wonder if there wasn't supposed to be more of Tessie, especially since we got only a very brief glimpse of her grotesque makeup.

I agree with other posters that Pansy's spirit behaves differently from what we saw of her in life, but I think her violent streak in situations involving the Q man was explained during a recent voiceover:  "...for Charity Trask, mad and jealous, has tricked Beth into drinking a glass of brandy that contained poison."  Pansy's loss of Carl and her obsession with Quentin have irrevocably changed her.

That must have been a much more innocent time.  Frankly, if someone today suggested a scene in which a highstrung minister broke in on a couple in a room in which one party was chained to a post, the raison d'etre might be an entirely different one from what we get here.

ROFL

What a marvelous Friday cliffhanger!

[Lydia]

About Charity vs. Pansy...perhaps the possession isn't a complete takeover and the personalities of Pansy and Charity have mingled together creating a very combustible result.