Lamar Trask got so excited by the Almighty that I started wondering why he became an undertaker. Shouldn't he have followed in his father's footsteps and become a minister? I thought: "Maybe he figured he could make a better living at undertaking," but I'm not sure that's the answer, because Trasks know how to make a good thing out of any career path.
We heard a very little about what must have been an incredible odyssey. It starts with Quentin and Tad being washed off of their ship, and up to this point it has seemed quite possible that Gerard pushed them off, especially given how he laughed in private after retelling the story in public. But Quentin still thinks of Gerard as his friend, and I imagine that there was no way for Gerard to be sure that Quentin would be more profitable to him dead than alive, so I suppose it must have been entirely by accident that Quentin and Tad were swept away. It's astonishing that both of them survived. And then there was the long trek home, with letters that never made it to Collinwood, and Quentin's attempt - successful, he had thought - to communicate psychically with Samantha. I'm imagining Tad, decades hence, enthralling his grandchildren with the story.
There was a nice moment when Quentin and Samantha were conversing. Quentin asked, "How's father?" and Samantha didn't respond, but rather asked, "What should I do?" because, apparently, she was too consumed with her own dilemma to think of anything else.
Barnabas and Quentin talked briefly about Barnabas's plan to restore the Old House, and I thought Barnabas must be getting awfully tired of restoring it. He did it in 1967, he did it in 1897, and now he's doing it in 1840. He's probably got the problem areas memorized by now.
Towards the end there was what I think must be a continuity error. Barnabas recognized Quentin and was astonished to see him, and that was OK, but at the end of the same conversation, which I believe we heard from beginning to end, Barnabas knew that Samantha was going to Boston to see Tad even though nothing had been said about it. Or did I miss something?
