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« on: November 30, 2014, 10:36:27 PM »
The episode opens with CD Tate's Made Guy, with the camera showing us whatever passes for thoughts in his head... as registered in his face, that is. He approaches Tim, and I wondered if perhaps he was imprinting on Tim, and wondered if his first word might be "Mommy?"
We get Tate's story of how he met Petofi in Paris ten years earlier. I think everyone on DS might be playing older people... Roger Davis would have been a teenager, right? Shaw and Tate become drinking buddies. For two or three episodes, we've actually been seeing some different, more human, sometimes more relaxed scenes, rather than just confrontations and plot, plot, plot. They don't trust each other more when drunk, though, and Tate ends the scene by threatening to kill Shaw. On DS, everyone seems to threaten to kill others if they do this or that aggregious thing, even if they aren't criminals or killers. I wonder if it was just more common for people to threaten to kill someone when they got mad, in the 1960s.
Tim reasons strangely. He thinks that simply by bringing the news of Tate's ability to create human beings to Petofi, he'll profit somehow. He expects a partnership, just for that. Tim Shaw, 50% partner in world domination, yet serving no function in the mayhem, just sort of hanging around and receiving riches, just because he told Petofi about Tate. What an honorable man he must assume Petofi is, someone who'd live up to the most insane agreements... Tim is a born agent, even if he's no good at it. His first instinct is to graft himself onto someone else's good fortune. Petofi is always a few jumps ahead, and puts together that Amanda is a Tate creation in no time whatsoever...
Welcome, Kitty Soames, Lady Hampshire. She is distinguished from Rachel Drummond by the presence of a mole near the right corner of her mouth.
Petofi's plan is now to kill Barnabas just to leave Julia on her own, ready to turn to Quentin as her only ally, and blab her time secrets that she doesn't have, except for which hexagram is the good one. It's a silly plan. They should have just told Petofi all about the I Ching the moment he asked, of course. Why not?
If Q's portrait bleeds for him when he's scratched, why did it matter if Beth shot him? Barnabas meets Kitty in woods, reactivates his Josette fixation. The circumstances are silly and contrived, but there's something about periodically going back to the Josette thing that I like. It unites the show across all times, in a way, as Angelique's presence does, giving things a bit of an epic feel. Or something.