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« on: March 02, 2014, 01:17:59 AM »
Roger Davis VO. Pivotal episode, and it might have been a great one if A Moltke had still been here. I wouldn't blame her for not wanting to go out on a note of utter devotion and heartache for Jeff Clark of all people, though. Time travel helped Vicki get over Burke... maybe they should have whisked her off to 1897... Anyway, Barnabas and Vicki get to say goodbye, because of Vicki's idea of leaving Collinwood, perhaps put here in the story just so they could have that goodbye scene, [spoiler] though the goodbye wasn't final, as it turned out.[/spoiler] Liz and Barnabas actually witness Vicki and Peter disappear, which is nice for their later sanity. It would be hard on Liz in particular to be stuck between belief and disbelief on these things.
It's sort of touching how totally awkward and naive Barnabas is in his proposal scene. Everything he's saying to Vicki is utterly wrong. His worldliness is failing him completely here. I'm very glad they wrote the scene this way. This is "inbetween Barnabas", not the totally selfish villain, not the somewhat wiser, more heroic figure quite yet, either. He's in transition. Maybe people who know better will sometimes be overwhelmed by losing someone to the point where they can only think about their own side of it. Anyway, Barnabas has that embarrassment of the middle-aged man rejected by a young woman... he feels ridiculous, is probably filling his head with thoughts of "How could I have ever thought she could see anything in someone my age, I should know better at my age, yet I don't, what a fool I turned out to be..." If he ever saw Lolita, he must be comparing himself to Humbert Humbert. Vicki manages in her grief not to encourage this sort of thinking on Barnabas's part. Good for her. She takes care of them both.
Maybe in the 18th century, people made such arrangements, another man marrying and caring for the woman who has been rejected. He was dressing his needs up in an old-world sort of protection of the woman left adrift after having been abandoned, which might have been a shamewful thing for the woman back then.