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« on: September 18, 2014, 03:25:58 AM »
HAA VO. Judith is gaslighted (gaslit?) into signing her life away. "Minerva" watches, face so utterly dead and blank that it doesn't seem that Clarice is even really there. Clarice is one of the best special effects DS had...
It's far too easy, under the right circumstances, to turn a person's sense of reality inside out. Note that Judith was, at no point, lacking in sanity or reason. No disease affecting the brain, nothing. All that happened was that she was treated AS IF she was crazy when she wasn't. We all depend for our stable sense of reality on the receipt of certain cues from the world and other people, on a regular basis. The state of our world is confirmed each day by what we see and hear. If we stop getting those expected confirmations, without any apparent reason or conspiracy, the world turns to chaos. Up is down. We lose our anchor. It's all well done, except for the end, where Judith echoes Elizabeth with "Don't bury me alive." Groan.
Evan's black ceremony-- okay, this is the blooper scene I thought I missed with Blair. The stagehand, suddenly knowing he was going to be needed across the room, runs in front of Humbert! It's like an SCTV sketch or something! I was surprised that Evan spoke to her as if she was really the ghost of Minerva, or at least a conscious being of some kind, and not basically the supernatural hologram he had claimed she was.
Judith joins the growing list of prestigious individuals who have been imprisoned in the Tower Room, where she herself was keeping Jenny not so long ago. No nosy governess to see the light in the window from outside this time... This may be the absolute peak moment for Greg Trask's viciousness... when he sets up in Judith's mind the fear of visits from a whole crowd of ghosts of those who have recently died at Collinwood... "... and all the dead", as he puts it, then the horror music swells, scene ends. That's a genuinely awful moment. [spoiler]He earned the eventual comeuppance he receives later, just with that.[/spoiler]
Disfigured Quentin goes to Hanley's house for the Hand, thinking Evan cured himself with it. Q knocks Evan out and rifles through the room, finding It. In one of the best, most unexpected cliffhangers ever, we get our first glimpse of Aristede, appearing at the door/window just as Trask had in place of the Devil, demanding the Hand, in a much flatter and deeper voice than we ever hear him speaking in, later on. Aristede (unnamed as of yet) not only knows about the Hand, but knows who Quentin is despite his face! A mysterious figure from the outside world knows all the secrets, as if he's been observing them all through some telescope... and the world of 1897 DS starts to become much larger.