There was no Barnabas or Quentin in this episode!
And no Julia or Angelique, though I would've thought that Don Briscoe had the chops to carry the episode, but he didn't do it. DB was way over the top in his scenes, Donna McKechnie was over-emoting and we see that annoying habit she has of facing the camera to scream or even while just conversing (this isn't Broadway, sweetie), and Roger Davis seemed to be doing his trademark ad libbing, and the end product was a terrible, awful, very bad mess. The one bright spot was the dialogue between Petofi and Beth, which used the analogy of finding a new road after the first one has ended to beautifully spell out why she has suddenly turned to Petofi, which is why I anticipated seeing Violet Welles' name in the credits, though I suspect it's not for the same reason that alwaysdavid expected to see it (Reply #2).
The I-Ching experience felt very rushed. We don't see Beth walk through the door, and we don't see what she saw. She then tells us there were shadows. "Only shadows," she says. Just shadows, really??!!!
The camera really ought to stop showing the actors turning over and rearranging the wands after they're tossed. But why is Beth not getting a clue that there's a reason she threw the 23rd hexagram?
Like the previous ep, Thayer David got very close to an actress' face and delivered a p-word so strongly that it made her blink and blew her hair about.
How fortunate for Amanda that she was well out of Tate's reach when she first appeared. Would she have been treated to the same manhandling and verbal abuse that he showed his male creation, who also got stuffed into a closet, kidnapped, pressed for information by Tim, and then threatened again? Maybe to some degree. It had the Barnabas/Julia method of child rearing written all over it.
Amanda to Tim: "I saw that man unable to speak, trembling with fear, in a world where he doesn't belong-- I saw that creature and I saw myself."
Was Amanda admitting to having vague memories of being in the same sorry state when she was first created?
alwaysdavid and Lydia, has it ever been established that pay scale on DS was lower in the absence of any dialogue? I hope it's not the impression I gave when I've talked before about the tendency to not put an actor's name in the credits for a non-speaking role. I wasn't referring at all to wages.
Sally, I added spoiler tags to your final milestone. It happens in the next ep.