Discuss - Ep #1237

[Watching Project]

Robservations #1237

FAREWELL, CHRIS PENNOCK & KATHY CODY!

Chris Pennock and Kathy Cody make their final appearances on DS in this ep...
(Though Chris Pennock will appear in NoDS...)

[MagnusTrask]

Farewell Christopher Pennock, Kathy Cody.

Beginning tape #199 of 200.   First K Prentice VO?   Oh no, there's the sword!   They focus in on it and then pull back from it almost lovingly.   Does Gabriel really bite it this early?  Yes, he does!   Pennock is very convincing, and I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that he was having the time of his life.   Did this leaving of his life become it?   

Who here was shocked seeing this as a kid?   I'm going to guess that I wasn't watching at this point, since impaling was actually an intolerable thought for me back then.

Poor Carrie.  She's terrified of everybody around her.   I buy the fear, unlike Hallie's in 1970.   Nice to see Julia maternal with Melanie.   Kendrick is a born showman, making a big production out of presenting Melanie's real mother.  He should have hosted "This is Your Life"!

[DarkLady]

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that he was having the time of his life.   Did this leaving of his life become it?

I'll bet he was too! Every single Pennock character--Jeb Hawkes, Cyrus/Yaeger, RT and PT Gabriel--has died a spectacularly violent and almost always gory death. Pennock seemed to enjoy every one of them. I guess one could say that every leaving of his life became it.  

Who here was shocked seeing this as a kid?

Call it a character flaw, but I didn't watch the show until the SciFi run, when I was much older. It was a shocker even then. I guess that with the show nearly done, DC figured he had nothing to lose. What were they going to do, fire him?

Julia is very nice to Melanie, even telling her that's she (J.) has always thought of her (M.) as a Collins, and they do both miss Justin. She even backs off when Melanie tells her that she wants to talk to Kendrick ALONE. Maybe Julia is finally getting resigned to the inevitable.

Kendrick isn't just a showman, he's also an action hero!

[Lydia]

The voiceover said that this was the most fateful night of Melanie's life, but I think that honor should go to the night when she followed Justin into the Room.

Gosh, how I love Gabriel's death!  Thank you, thank you writers!  And didn't Gabriel look dead!  Thank you, thank you Chris Pennock!  Of course, that knight's armor with sword included at no extra charge give rise to truly pleasant speculations as to how it it got there.  Did it come with the house?  Why was it in a secret passage rather than on full display in the public part of the house?  Why didn't it have a pink sash around it as any self-respecting suit of parallel time armor ought to have?

Incidentally, I have no memory of seeing Gabriel's death when it originally aired.  But I don't know if I even saw the episode at the time.

OK, yeah, Kendrick's a showman, yeah, he's an action hero, but I'm starting to find him rather tedious.  He's as virtuous as Joe Haskell was, especially now that he appears to have dropped all efforts to find Stella's murderer.  I suppose that, despite what Flora said, he believes that Gabriel killed Stella.  He is, as I said the other day, not very bright.  But I wonder what would be happening now if the series hadn't been cancelled.  I'm figuring either he would have killed Melanie or Melanie would have killed him.  The writers would have had to flip a coin to decide which it would be.

[MagnusTrask]

Gosh, how I love Gabriel's death!  Thank you, thank you writers!  And didn't Gabriel look dead!  Thank you, thank you Chris Pennock! 

I'm with you, but surprised, since you'd said (about Judah's Head) that the horror element didn't appeal to you.   I was thinking later, did we actually see him dead, with his body going slack, or on the floor, or did we just see him choking and dying?   Pointless question I guess, I really have no idea why I'm asking, except that you reminded me I'd been thinking about it.  (It takes me forever to get to sleep, so there's a lot of opportunity for useless thought.)

This is the only gory death I can remember in DS.   That's how cinema was going at the time, and maybe DS would have gone this way too.   I did get the impression, though, that the makers of DS, maybe Mr. Pennock himself, might have said "What're they going to do, cancel us again?!"

[DarkLady]

Well, okay, I guess this was the goriest on-screen death in the show--pretty jolting stuff for 1971 daytime TV. Other deaths on the show were also gory, but the gore was more discreet. Think of everyone who got shot, stabbed, strangled or vamped or who fell or jumped off Widows' Hill!

[MagnusTrask]

Did not of course intend to give you a hard time at all DL... for me "gore" means that you not only see the death, but there's also a disturbing amount of blood shown on-camera, and perhaps an especially gruesome injury such as an impaling.

[DarkLady]

Not at all, MT! You are quite right! 

[Lydia]

I'm with you, but surprised, since you'd said (about Judah's Head) that the horror element didn't appeal to you.

This didn't appeal to me from a horror angle.  To me, horror means "I like being scared, and I like being grossed out."  This wasn't realistic enough to scare me, and there wasn't enough blood to gross me out or (more important) make me keel over.  I like the absurdity of it, and I like the incredible stillness of Gabriel's face.

[MagnusTrask]

Well...., unsure what to say.  I've never liked being "grossed out", and have avoided slasher movies all my life.   Good horror is almost the opposite of that though, I think.   The thoughts aren't forming....  For me, there was plenty of blood, and an impaling, and CP's choking sounds that conveyed some deep damage was happening.   I can detach myself and have a sense of absurd fun about that, but in a black humor sort of way, not because I eat that kind of thing up and can't get enough of it.    I actually don't understand gore films, or their audience.    

And thanks for the reassurance, DL!

[DarkLady]

Sure thing, MT! The psychological stuff is much scarier for me, for instance, what would Julia and Morgan find in Brutus's secret office with its strangely modern file cabinets?