one should never strike a child however...

david certainly tested my patience during the early barnabas storyline when he broke into the old house(after he had repeatedly been told not to)and encounters maggie done up a la josette collins and fancies her a "ghost".

not only was this clearly not an appparition but a flesh and blood person it was also a girl david knew well and also knew was missing.

now i realize we are supposed to see this scene through the fanciful perspective of an "imaginative child" but it comes across as ridiculous.it's also another case of the writers trying to make david act younger than he was.while this type of fantasy might be reasonably understandable coming from a four year old one would hope an intelligent child of ten would be able to make this differentiation.

i so agree.

i was wowed by laura the minute she walked into the diner(the suit!the hat!the gloves!)and loved diana millay's strange delivery.i also love the character of maggie in these episodes.it's sort of her last storyline where she still functions in her orginal purpose(waitress,town gossip,good girl from the wrong side of the tracks)before her descent into perpetual victimhood begins.

and welcome back dom!

it always amazes me that(according to the d.s. almanac)clarice blackburn only appeared in 79 episodes during the show's five year run...and only 57 as mrs.johnson.

for me she's a much bigger presence than those numbers would suggest.i always get such a kick out of her scenes...even as the loathsome abigail collins.

sadly after 1897 the writers seemed to lose interest in the character or perhaps ms.blackburn became unavailable because she only appears in a few episodes.

however her appearence during the 1995 segment was memorable.

i never got the impression that the writers ever intended to evolve sabrina into a fully developed character.

she was used more as a plot device to further a few storylines along and then she had served her purpose.

that said still i couldn't help but feel terrible when[spoiler]sabrina was killed during the parallel time story...she was just such a victim.[/spoiler]

as for the wig it was the late 1960's and wigs and falls were all the rage(goodness knows our girls wore plenty of them)so perhaps it's not that big a deal.

interesting points.

when i was watching the 1897 storyline it never occured to me that barnabas didn't identify the people he met there in relation to the people he knew in the present.for instance i don't recall him having any special reaction when he met judith whom of course not only resembled elizabeth but also his own mother naomi.

the exception would be both rachel and kitty whom he seemed to perceive as some manifestation of josette.

with the 1795 story perhaps because it was the first go-round with a time travel plot they felt they needed to spell that out to the audience with each episode(but boy did that voiceover get old!).i guess because vicki was supposed to represent "us" the viewer she needed to register shock with each new encounter.this must have gotten pretty tiresome for alexandra when the director shouted "o.k. alex when joan walks into the scene look really shocked!" and then some variation on that day after day for weeks.

during the 1970pt. storyline they did return to making some sort of explanatory announcement during the voiceover because all of the characters had the same names as their "real time" counterparts.

well put petofi.

when i first saw quentin(and that gramaphone)in his old room in the present i thought that this was not so much storytelling as it was marketing.that room(and that gramaphone)were part of the quentin "brand" much like barnabas and his inverness cape.they were used whether or not it made sense.

of course "we" overanalyze every aspect of the show but the pre-teen audience the show was courting at the time probably didn't question quentin's presence there.

i haven't seen the 1840 storyline but i gather quentin regains some of his relevence.

i just realized my previous post was my one thousandth.

i don't know what took me so long.

i seem to remember liz doing alot of her patented hand-wringing while staying at little windwood island.

she felt that mrs.rumson somehow "looked familiar" but she couldn't place her.carolyn drew a complete blank.

which is really funny because besides the hair angelique looked and acted exactly the same.