Laura 1785/1897

[michael c]

as that "barmy" caretaker told us in 1967 ad nauseum "L. Murdoch Stockbridge died by fire..."

in the original telling of Laura's story she married into the Stockbridge and Radcliff families in her previous Collinsport incarnations. her subsequent inclusion in 1795 and 1897 was a complete rewrite.


it was also a completely unnecessary rewrite. having Laura married to Jeremiah in the 18th century not only threw continuity out of whack but didn't add anything to the overall mythology. if they wanted to retroactively include in that period she could have come to Collinwood as the wife of another relation. there was no dramatic purpose for her to be married to Jeremiah. it was sloppy.

as for her marrying into the family in the 19th century who knows??? they probably thought the show was so poorly rated in 66/early 67 few viewers would have even known she had previously been part of the story. 

to say nothing of the fact the Pheonix's 100 year cycle gets totally thrown off with each appearance.

[Uncle Roger]

Supposedly Diana Millay was going to return to the show if it had not been canceled. She was always adamant that she would only play Laura, so that would surely have screwed up the continuity even further.

[michael c]

it does make Millay/Laura an interesting figure in the whole thing...


she's not just another member of the "stock company" but definitively, indelibly "The Phoenix".

[DarkLady]

Yikes, MB! I guess there's a point where all we can do is just go with the flow! 

[Gothick]

Doesn't 1897 Laura recall Barnabas as a rather sad, thoughtful child in one line?  I thought it implied that she was an adult woman when they had met in the 1780s.  The 18th century concept of adult was different from our own so she might have been a teenager... it's all quite vague.

The reality, of course, is that they kept changing the backstory to accommodate whatever they were writing at the time. Remember when Barnabas and Josette's love suddenly turned out to have happened in 1797, and that date was written in ugly red paint on her portrait?

G.

[DarkLady]

I remember Laura reminiscing too, Gothick. That's why I thought they retrofitted her into the original older Jerimiah story.

Then again, Laura could have been as young as 16 when she married Jerimiah.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

it's all quite vague.

Exactly! Plus in the original backstory Jeremiah is years and years older than Barnabas. And it all takes place in the 1830s, so we'd have to forget that and transport it ourselves to the 18th century - and it was bad enough when the show retconned events 40 years earlier and threw out everything we were led to believe!! We shouldn't have to do so nor should we be able to do so just to make some sense of vagaries!! It makes everything a complete mess!! Which is why it's so much simpler to accept what the show went out of its way to establish: that what we were led to believe in Eps #1 through #365 never happened the way we were led to believe it happened, and, therefore, it's so much simpler to interpret Laura and Jeremiah's marriage through what we actually saw in 1795/96, meaning that if Barnabas first saw Laura when he was ten, then she wasn't yet married to Jeremiah because he was also ten - and when Laura speaks of Barnabas as a child, she wasn't much older than he was. And it is quite possible to do all that because nowhere does anyone state plainly that Laura and Jeremiah were already married when Barnabas and Laura first saw each other...

[KMR]

One thing that helps me deal with continuity problems on DS is my own personal view of time travel that I finally happened upon not too long ago.  In this view, whenever a person travels from Time X (let's call it Time X1) to another Time Y, they actually begin a new parallel time thread branching off from the "original" Time Y (let's call it Time Y1), which could be called Time Y2.  Then, when they return to Time X, they are not in Time X1, but in a new parallel time thread Time X2.  So whenever a character is in a non-native time, that is a parallel time, not the "original" version of that time.  And when they return to their native time, it's probably a parallel time, not the original version, because it has effects that could only have occurred in a parallel thread.  So once Vicki went back to 1795, we never ever got back to the original time thread that the series started out in; we got to a thread that had branched off from her point of entry in 1795.  (In the original time thread, she never exists at Collinwood until 1966.)  The DS storyline then just follows the time thread that the time traveller is travelling along.

And if there are any continuity problems that occur within a specific story arc where nobody has done any time travel between the original mention of a certain detail and the revised version of that detail, maybe we can just assume that one character or another has done some sort of time travel that happened offscreen.   

[Gerard]

The writers, of course, should've done a bit more research.  In the 1897 storyline having Laura showing up, instead of having her been the first husband of Jeremiah, they could've made her the husband of another Collins (make someone up, like Noah or Able or whatever Collins) that Barnabas would've remembered.  Continuity is simple when one just takes a second to think.

Gerard

[Josette]

KMR, that's a clever theory on time travel.

[michael c]

The writers, of course, should've done a bit more research.  In the 1897 storyline having Laura showing up, instead of having her been the first husband of Jeremiah, they could've made her the husband of another Collins (make someone up, like Noah or Able or whatever Collins) that Barnabas would've remembered.  Continuity is simple when one just takes a second to think.

exactly. since the story was being made up and rewritten anyways Laura could have come to Collinwood as the wife of any old relation. making her Jeremiah's wife was not only sloppy, it was unnecessary. 

and even at that she didn't have to be married into the family for Barnabas to remember her. she still could have been married into another prominent Collinsport family (Stockbridge. Radcliff) as in her original timeline.

[MagnusTrask]

Actual continuity would have meant going with the Laura backstory established in early 1967.  So they didn't just screw it up, they went out of their way to rewrite it all in 1897, intentionally, not caring about the continuity, not about the bits they wanted to throw away, while STILL leaning on what continuity they wanted to hold onto, expecting viewers to have selective memory?  ...so that the Collinses could be involved in every part of the story, past and present and future.  That seems to have been the priority.

[Patti Feinberg]

Don't we 'hear' (Barn thinking to himself) that when he was a boy, she was his aunt?

Jeremiah, the one who, due to Ang's curse, marries Chjoette, was married before???

Patti