Luciaphil, fabulous comments as always.  Your wonderful notes about Ned the Abominable in particular had me in hysterics.  

As for Stokes, I wonder whether he might have had a psychic moment when he discovered those I Ching wands?  Rather as he did when he was showing Julia Ben's diary and then suddenly the spirit of Ben was writing in the missing words THROUGH him.  I'm sure that Stokes did some forms of meditation, lucid dreaming, and the like as part of his studies, and that generally fosters the innate psychic abilities we all possess to some degree.  Just a thought. (I realize I am going to great lengths to explain something that happened because the writers again needed to get from point A to point Z in 5 minutes.)

A sudden thought; could the dress Quentin gave Maggie have belonged to the young Judith?  

And talking of HER ... I'm still waiting for the next installment!

Steve who owns 4 decks of tarot cards and knows exactly what to do with them!

Hi Connie, thanks for the clever slash-o-rama!  

You do beautiful work.

Your admirer,

Gothick

Connie my dear,

At long last,  YOU have captured the essence of Quentin Collins!  something NOBODY ELSE has managed to do!

I just love it when Selby plays drunken Quentin.  One of my fave scenes is that "morning after" that big night at the Hi Hat Lounge!  And Grayson plays the straight man pricelessly in that scene, too.

Admiringly,  Steve

Oh, Connie, you ARE a wicked lass.

And of course I love every second of your wickedness!

Are we going to see one of your delicious storyboards on this topic???

Steve

Dear gang,

I'm surprised not to see at least one topic acknowledging the advent of the Prince of Darkness... erm, I mean the Bailiwick of Sanctity, "Reverend" Gregory Trask!

I think the 1897 Trask is my favorite of them all.  He seems the most complex, and the most devoutly hypcritical.  1795 Trask and poor deluded Lamar (his name is a joke the writers indulged in on Lara Parker's name in real life) both seem to have been fairly sincere in what they were doing, and Lamar actually had personal reasons for going out of Barnabas and Quentin.

Greggie-poo's motives are pure, unadulterated greed, occasionally laced with lust and a good healthy dose of thirst for power.  He gets some fantastic lines, and fabulous Jerry Lacy just goes from strength to strength in his portrayal of the character.

I don't watch the series on Sci Fi, so I'm not sure whether Mamma and Daughter have made their entrance yet, but they are wonderful to watch in their interactions with Big Daddy.

Ah, Trask!  vicious and hypocritical though you are, what would Collinwood be without you?

Gothick

Yes, Doombuggy, but it's GRAYSON HALL.

That adds a megawatt level to the shcok value to those of us who grew up thinking of Dr. Julia Hoffman as our favorite eccentric aunt next door.

Steve

Rachel doesn't get on my nerves as much as PT Maggie Evans did.  The real problem with Maggie and Quentin in that storyline is that the hero and heroine are such dreadful characters that you are rooting for the baddies to win.

When I think of characters like Rachel Drummond, I'm reminded of a line that Oscar Wilde had about one of the original soap opera heroines of literature:  "one would have to have a heart of stone to weep at the death of Little Nell."  Maybe that's an overly subtle way of stating that people who fall for fake sentimentality of this sort can be guaranteed to lack the capapcity to act with compassion when faced with victims of violence in the real world.

KLS isn't my favorite on the series by a long shot, but I do think she was a competent actress who also had sufficient warmth of presence to explain why the characters, male or female as the case may be, took an interest in her.  On Monday I watched an episode where Maggie had escaped from Barnabas only to be recaptured by him and subjected to a horrifying punishment in the Mauseoleum.  She played a wide range of emotions with understated, persuasive ability in this show (and had wonderful onscreen chem with Johnny Karlen in their scene together, too).  

Just some thoughts...

Gothick