Happy  50th!

Thanks!

Happy Birthday, John!

Yay, cuz I've been anxiously awaiting the point at which you can participate again, Magnus.

And I prefer calling him by his first name too, btw, instead of Reverend.

I well remember this part of the storyline well as I was being threatened with being sent away to school at the time it originally aired and seeing this was truely frightening to the boy who used to be me.

You poor thing.

Some of the nuns at my Catholic school believed that children "learn through fear" too.  Though to their credit, they NEVER thought of us as animals.  (Though it's not surprising to learn that Trask looks down on animals too.)

Wow, what a great villain!  He can stir painful memories, or inspire such hatred that you want to talk back to him through your screen.  Or maybe that last one is just me? 

No problem, Pansity, and thanks!

KLS has developed the quirky acting tick of touching her hair.  I wonder where she got that from?   

Quentin doesn't seem to learn that the cottage is not the place to meet with his women.

LOL  He's so cute when he's plastered.

It appears that he meets his second death there until we learn that its all Angelique's plot to get back Barnabas.

And he flirted with death in Egypt, too!

Her statement to Barnabas that she'd kill anyone for him should have been a lesson learned back in 1795.

So true.

When Angelique and Barnabas had their 1897 reunion in the tower room, she told him that she cared about David as much as he did (though he didn't buy it, and neither did we), and here she rubs in Barnabas' face that if she doesn't get her way, David will die along with Quentin.  That is just nuts.

And while I understand Angelique's curiosity about Laura, I don't get why she'd want to get tangled in her affairs (literally?).

We learn that Laura's life in is the urn so does this mean she isn't like the phoenix of the present day?

I think it does.  The early setup for her was that a Murdoch would die by fire every 100 years-- 1767, 1867, and 1967, but only the modern Laura Murdoch married into the Collins family.  However, this generation gives us a Laura Murdoch Collins who died in the past year in Alexandria, and who [spoiler]by Barnabas' account, greatly resembles a Laura Stockbridge who married a Collins and died in 1785.[/spoiler] So the writers have clearly broken the rules, but by making her dependent on the flame, could it mean she's a different Laura, and thus a different Phoenix altogether?  This would let Roger off the hook for marrying his own grandmother.  Or maybe she requires the urn, and Ra's help, because she's not supposed to be there? 

Since Quentin learned about the urn through Angelique's powers, is this evidence that she was in the original timeline?  But whether she was or not, she wouldn't have had a reason to make Quentin's blood boil in a Barnabas-less 1897, so are we to assume that Quentin strangled Laura (perhaps somewhere other than the cottage, perhaps not) and... she simply didn't die?

The jewels Magda knew about were the ones Edith wore, and can't you just picture Judith snatching them off of her body before the old woman was buried?

But didn't the jewels that Barnabas sold off belong to Naomi?

Could that be why they showed up in the crystal ball, rather than through Barnabas's powers?

Magda had different jewels in mind at the time, and her predictions about them were inaccurate before, but it's an interesting theory nonetheless.  Divination sometimes works in unexpected ways.