DARK SHADOWS FORUMS
General Discussions => Current Talk Archive => Current Talk '26 I => Current Talk '15 II => Topic started by: Joeytrom on September 18, 2015, 08:54:55 PM
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1897 Laura Collins is unique in many ways but one is that she was there with the pre-cursed Collins family of the 1780's, and Barnabas is the one other character who can actually make that claim.
[spoiler]When she returns from Egypt she has a unique perspective comparing the grim, despair state of the current family as opposed to the content, normal family she probably left behind over a hundred years before.
...Possibly wondering why Jeremiah took over a decade to marry again and both he and his wife dying so soon after and then almost the entire family she knew after that.
...Joshua managed to build the larger house on the hill he always talked about, telling people he expected a larger family (with Jeremiah, Sarah, & Barnabas and their families being too crowded for the former mansion) though she suspected it was to better look down at the common townsfolk.
...Moving into this new house seems to have brought a curse as the family experienced tragedy immediately afterwards and continuing to the present.[/spoiler]
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The real reason for the curse on the family had nothing to do with the house. It was Angelique.
I really don't care for the revised history of the core narrative unveiled in the 1840 storyline. But I guess, Lela, who was running the show at that point, felt they had to go somewhere different.
G.
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Hmm...I would have thought for a least part, was from Judah Collins.
Patti
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as much as I enjoyed seeing Diana Millay again Laura's presence in 1897 and the rewritten 1795 threw so much previously established continuity out of whack it was impossible to ever try and reconcile or make sense of it.
it was a rewrite. [ghost_huh]
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I meant that from Laura's point of view, she wouldn't have known about Angelique and would have thought it was the house itself that caused the trouble.
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In PT 1970, it's hinted a few times that the house itself was cursed. But that got dropped in favor of other developments in the final phases of the storyline.
G.
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Oooh, I don't remember that, Gothick! Definitely something to look forward to.
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They are just little hints--a line here, an anxious grimace there. Effective, and quite understated.
I enjoy the finale, but the whole storyline pretty much goes right off the cliff. Thayer David gets one of my favorite roles, however, and some wonderful moments.
G.
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Very cool, Gothick. And yes, TD is wonderful here, especially in the finale, even as the whole story goes right off the cliff as usual!
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as much as I enjoyed seeing Diana Millay again Laura's presence in 1897 and the rewritten 1795 threw so much previously established continuity out of whack it was impossible to ever try and reconcile or make sense of it.
it was a rewrite. [ghost_huh]
I'm sorry, I'm not getting this.
When Barn went back to faux 1795/6, was Diana Millay there? I really have no memory of this.
Roger Davis wasn't there either, correct?
Patti
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We never saw Laura onscreen in the 1700s, but we find out in 1897 that she had been Jerimiah's first wife, when Barnabas was a child. It's rewritten plot, because originally with Laura in 1967, her history was that she married into a different family each generation. In the 1897 story, they changed it so that Laura always married into the Collins family, generation after generation. So in order, she married Jerimiah Collins, Edward Collins, and Roger Collins. Except if you're watching Laura in black and white, in which case Roger was the only Collins she snagged. History was changed, without any time travel from Barnabas!
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We never saw Laura onscreen in the 1700s, but we find out in 1897 that she had been Jerimiah's first wife, when Barnabas was a child. It's rewritten plot, because originally with Laura in 1967, her history was that she married into a different family each generation. In the 1897 story, they changed it so that Laura always married into the Collins family, generation after generation. So in order, she married Jerimiah Collins, Edward Collins, and Roger Collins. Except if you're watching Laura in black and white, in which case Roger was the only Collins she snagged. History was changed, without any time travel from Barnabas!
I'm not up on the whole Collins genealogy (original, revised, or whatever). Would this have resulted in Laura marrying any of her descendants?!? Perhaps Roger's "incestors" line was accurate, after all...
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We never saw Laura onscreen in the 1700s, but we find out in 1897 that she had been Jerimiah's first wife, when Barnabas was a child.
Actually, that's a misconception, though an easy misconception to make because of the way Barnabas delivers the dialogue. Yes, Barnabas makes a remark about seeing Laura as a child (I believe he was 10?), but at that point she wasn't Jeremiah's wife. It's established in 1795 that Barnabas and Jeremiah are the same age, so Jeremiah would have also been 10 at the time - and presumably Laura was around their age.
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Jerimiah's age depends on which story line you're following. In the big 1795 flashback, he and Barnabas are age mates despite being uncle and nephew. But way back in the beginning, when we heard about Josette for the very first time, Barn said that she was a young woman, roughly his age or a little younger, who was forced (more or less) into an arranged marriage with his much older uncle.
I think that when they decided to add Laura to the 1795 story, they had to go back to that much earlier version of events. Otherwise, Jerimiah would have been the same age as Barn--10 years old!--when he married Laura.
Although, knowing the Collinses....
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Though we subsequently learn that everything we thought had been the backstory of the past (which wasn't actually 1795 but somewhere around 1830) either wasn't the whole truth or indeed completely made up, so that's why for the purposes of the storylines from the point of the 1795/96 flashback onward we need to discount everything we were ever led to believe in Eps #1 through #365 as if we were never led to believe it (one of the major problems with retconning ::)). Plus, in 1897 Barnabas doesn't flat out say that when at the age of ten he saw Laura she was already married to Jeremiah. [nodno] He could have simply been referring to the first time he saw Laura at a point in the past before the marriage. For example, anyone could make a comment about something that was a part of their past life (in this case Jeremiah and Laura's marriage) and then also correlate it to something that took place ever further back in their life (Barnabas seeing Laura when he was ten) and it wouldn't mean both events were concurrent with one another. (Plus, at one point in 1897 Barnabas refers to Jeremiah as his cousin, which certainly was never the case, so...)
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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. [ghost_undecided]
to say nothing of the fact the Pheonix's 100 year cycle gets totally thrown off with each appearance.
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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.
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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".
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Yikes, MB! I guess there's a point where all we can do is just go with the flow! [ghost_grin]
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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. [ghost_grin]
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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
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KMR, that's a clever theory on time travel.
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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. [ghost_tongue]
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.
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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.
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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???
[skelleton_runs]
Patti