Nancy B VO.  Is Barnabas outside the Room while yesterday's cliffhanger is redone?  He's at Collinwood right after.  Welcome back Michael!  Goodbye again Michael.... The whole disappearance of Maggie went on without any interaction with Paul Stoddard... who reappears.  Barnabas's coming to his senses happened faster than I remembered, in that antique shop scene last episode.  He tries to get Paul Stoddard safely out of town, but unfortunately, it all looks too much like Barnabas's trying to get rid of him to end his interference.  Stoddard doesn't buy it.

In the little celebration in the drawing room, with Liz and the Todds, Barnabas arouses Megan's suspicion by hesitating to have Carolyn become one of them.  Was that the plan originally?  That would have made it all so easy, if everyone involved was a Leviathan... no tricks, no courting of Carolyn, they could just have gotten on with the wedding, but that would have been a bit of an anti-climax.

Paul Stoddard cleverly gets the Todds' keys out of Meg's purse, and gets into the Room, and sees It.  End.

Grayson VO.  I like DS's double cliffhangers, like this one.  #926 ended with the cliffhanger of Maggie raising the candlestick, and the teaser for #927 gives us a second cliffhanger just a second or two later, when the candlestick connects with Phillip's head... then the opening theme.  Then... Michael nonchalantly pops into the drawing room when Julia's there.  She gets nowhere interrogating him of course, Michael having the total unflappable cool of someone who thinks he knows for a fact that he will never have to answer to anyone.  Maggie rushes in right after he leaves, certain she's killed Phillip Todd.  As Julia examines the "body", someone rushed by in front of the screen.  I found myself imagining the meeting where Dan Curtis tells everyone "And if you can't get to your proper place in time without running in front of a live camera, do it!" 

Phillip goes after Michael, but after her enlightening talk with Barnabas, she knows he doesn't have to punish him, the matter's already in hand.  She quiets Phillip down, and tells Michael lovingly to wait in "my bedroom"... are the Todds in separate rooms now?  Another whole set-- do we see it again? 

Megan and Michael have a good scene there.  I actually really like how strangely and mysteriously the end for Michael is handled.  There's a lot to wonder at, and think about.  Megan is, at the same time, saying that they're about to kill him, and that he'll be better off after... apparently he continues on.  Yet... this death is treated as being as terrible as a real death.  Michael is certainly disturbed by it.   It's not just that he doesn't get to be a kid anymore.  The process itself must be agonizing, a real end in some sense.  [spoiler]We never do find out what's so awful about it for him.[/spoiler]

Michael reveals a bit of inhuman, otherworldly strangeness, not just in his reactions to what's going to happen, but to the subject of Carolyn.  I can't describe it.  Some odd gestures, etc, leading to his making a heart with his and her names on the mirror.  Creepy and not human. 

Megan's attitudes and reactions are interesting, too.  I get the sense she's genuinely upset and terrified for Michael, not just putting on a show for spectators, but she's able to switch it on and off at will.  Julia puts a needle to his arm to stimulate him back to life... end.  By Violet Welles.

I found Joe on a cheap VHS at a Walgreen's... Susan Sarandon plays his daughter, her first part.

I just accidentally rewrote my notes for #908, thinking it was #926, that's how out of it I am, so I'm posting these too:

Alexander spanks Liz, verbally.  That must have been fun for these child actors...  Paul Stoddard asks Maggie about Alexander.  Roger's home!  Hi Daddy!!  It's always funny to me whenever Roger walks in the front door, why is that?  Maybe it's like when a sitcom father gets home from the office, only he doesn't know there's a zombie in the drawing room or something... or maybe Roger is impermeably stuffy and serious, like a politician or general on Monty Python.

Roger has bought a transistor radio for David.  I remember how mine changed my life in Christmas 1972...  More interesting than Alex appropriating it is later when he has David plant a memory of how Carolyn looked as a child in Paul Stoddard's head, via a family photo album, so Paul would recognize young Carolyn when Alex posed as her... since Paul actually never saw her as a child in real life.  Strangely complicated, and classically DS.

...he thought, "I wish one would sing something other than Time Of The Season!"

(Would a little "She's Not There" kill them?  Well not really 'cause...)

Susan Sarandon is your sister

"... employ hired goons to beat up your old flames, and throw them out of town!!"

But it shows that original cad Roger still lives, within that proper exterior...

I was bordering-on-appalled, dom, when I finally saw 1968 (as an adult anyway, and I don't remember it from childhood), after being familiar with both 1967 and 1897, and finding the writers making a gradual transition for Barnabas, between villain and hero, expecting us just to shift our attitude gradually.  I mean, there were no huge life-changing transformational moments.  It's as if they expected our attitude toward him to morph into a positive one, for no particular reason.  I'm sure they expected this partly because of the huge fan base Jonathan had acquired.  Plus, we'd seen innocent Barnabas in 1795.