Yes, they seem to be presenting Guthrie as a stereotypical dry academic. Maybe the idea is to emphasize his trustworthiness, and therefore to make it believable that Carolyn gives in right away and agrees to let her mother be taken to a hospital.
I hadn't thought of that. I could only get irritated at a 1967 show presenting a sort of "respectable" 1950s-ish (to me) guy as their new hired Expert and prospective Hero. A lot of people were already losing respect for that kind of straight-laced, hollow sort of surface "respectability", but those people were generally too young to be in charge of TV programs... You're right though, it's just that he's an academic, and to be accepted at Collinwood, he has to ooze cliche respectability. Academics can exude more individuality and life though, as with good old Elliot.
I also wonder about the physical details of Elizabeth's condition. Diapers? Dehydration? Laura said the past and the future would cease to exist for Elizabeth, so maybe physically Elizabeth is in exactly in the condition she was in when the trance started - which could be very uncomfortable, depending on what that condition was.
I wondered about the fact that time is supposed to have stopped for Liz, according to Laura, yet her processes seem to have slowed down, not stopped. She has a slow heartbeat, not no heartbeat. If she'd had no heartbeat though, they'd have rushed her to the ER immediately. They needed the debate over getting her there, or not, and so gave her a bit of a heartbeat. That means, though, that time is just very slowed down, so even if her first moments of Laura's ministrations were intensely unpleasant, she's not experiencing day after day of that hell, because of how little time is passing for her. If time really was frozen, her experience of anything and everything would have stopped completely at that moment. Without time, there is no experience.
On the other hand, if Laura was just being loose with her language, maybe time isn't literally affected in any way whatsoever. Maybe it just looks that way. Maybe Liz is just physically paralyzed. In that case, I guess she would have been experiencing something very bad, for all this time.
