Selby VO. It's day. Quentin's in the Drawing Room with his travelling cyllinder player, drinking and trying to deaden his conscience. Trask comes in, increasingly at home there. Q taunts Greg with all the earthly delights that Greg is secretly pursuing, not abstaining from.
Carl, vamp escapee (or escaper), tells Trask about Barnabas. One of those secret just-for-the-viewers-and-the-God-he-thinks-likes-him smiles comes over Trask, showing that his lust to smite Barnabas is equal to his lusts for power and money. Why? I know, his grandfather (?), but did Greg know? He didn't seem interested in Barnabas before his last talk with Edward, and it seemed just to come out of the blue, his anti-Barnabas-ness.
Barnabas rises. The door to the Mausoleum is OPEN! And Quentin walks through it! Hi! Well, isn't this awkward!! Q forestalls the bitey-bitey by cementing their alliance, and giving Barnabas all the news that's fit to kill relatives over. VERY interesting moment and scene. Once they're firmly on the same side, that's the cue apparently for Barnabas to start ordering Quentin around like he was, I don't know, a selflessly loyal female doctor who's in love with him, or something. Proving that the really great thing about having friends is that they're nice, and will let you walk all over them.
After Carl tries and fails to show Trask the coffin, Trask stands alone in the mausoleum, talking to himself, telling himself he must save Carl's soul. No observers to impress, there. So... he actually believes he's God's agent, and that what he does is right. That makes it all more complicated, and sicker.
Drawing Room, Collinwood. Barnabas, a bit torn up one would think over "having" to kill a cousin, instead is taking his usual delight in it, that he always takes in revenge. He toys with Carl like a cat. (Maybe it's automatic, like a cat's playing with prey.) This time around, I noticed that the death took place during a commercial break, with Carl on the floor. It seems possible Barnabas went too far accidentally, (perhaps intending to make him talk or something) as he did with Dirk, biting him. Bad interrogation technique.
Quentin possibly makes another life-saving on-the-spot decision, discovering and then immediately forgiving the murder, telling Barnabas he had no choice. It may be that he had to choose a side, or that he identifies with Barnabas because he also does "only what he must", or maybe Quentin felt he'd have been killed that moment himself if he took Carl's side. No one really cared about Carl though. Q rightly berates Barnabas for not even making sure Carl had told no one.
Another big scene-- Trask confronts Barnabas at dawn. The cock crows... the end. It's a classic scene, but with good and evil all tangled up. We hate the priest more than we could ever hate Barnabas, despite what he's just done. Trask is unequivocably the bad guy here, even if he's right. We're really supposed to like the guy outing the vampire! That's how it always works in the movies!
This time, I wasn't disturbed by watching one of my childhood heroes resort to cold-blooded murder. I saw someone who was always on the edge of violence all the time anyway, who has this "mission" to help David and Chris, but which I have trouble believing he believes in all that much. It's not alarming or confusing that he kills Carl. Barnabas is a villain, sort of. I'll swing back in his favor later, I suppose. The Carl thing really did confound me though, for a long time.
Maybe Barnabas has grabbed at the idea of saving Chris and David as a justification for his existence. After "reforming", he was a sort of strangely "cured" killer who was never caught, who just sort of continued to hang around the scene of his most recent crimes, after having the murderousness in him removed like a bad gall bladder, in a bizarre sort of anti-climax. Does he settle in and have a nice normal life like everybody else? Do you turn yourself in? No option makes sense, and life is just ... going on as if it all never happened, smiling at relatives... crazy. So you tell yourself you're taking on a holy mission, perhaps to atone, and give some identity and solidity to your existence. Now he's a crusader, but maybe one that doesn't actually care.
That may or may not make sense.
Joeytrom -- I don't understand. Do you think all those people had to be killed, no matter who did it? Why couldn't Rachel, Dirk, and Pansy have just survived, in timeline one?
Good to see you in the WP dom... is there some point when your tapes will start up again, and you can watch along with the WP?
