Discuss - Ep #1230

Robservations #1230

Again, why the duelling pistols in the Drawing Room?   Q aims at Forsythe... the latter should say, shoot!  Not my body!   

I was starting to suspect I'd been wrong about Ben Stokes Jr. not appearing till the last scene of DS.   Hi Thayer.   Violent Forsythe is as annoying as Morgan is.  I prefer him aloof and contemptuous.   Selby bumps into door exiting Drawing Room... only time I remember anyone doing that.   Forsythe: "I'm going to kill every Morgan Collins I can get my hands on!!"   !!!

Most bizarre seance ever?   Forsythe won't talk, so they knock him out and contact him in a seance, thereby making him conscious again, yet not...  Now, re-possessing the body he's already possessing, he cooperates, and explains himself.  Why?  Do seances induce spirits to talk when they don't want to?   Are they like truth serum, for ghosts?  I don't think so!

Forsythe stupidly yells his head off at Brutus, about how he's going to tell the Secret, instead of spending those precious seconds actually explaining.  End.

Yes, an incredibly weird séance, even by Collins standards! The 1840PT family seems to be a bunch of users--look how Quentin was able to talk Ben Stokes (the Younger?) into letting him talk to Carrie about being in the séance. And then he talked Carried into it--unfortunately off camera. Too bad this was Selby's final appearance on the show!

Fun scene with Catherine and Morgan/James, who downs the drugged brandy so trustingly. Forsythe must have been a first-class idiot--Brutus must have found it pathetically easy to do-- whatever he did to him.

Again, why the duelling pistols in the Drawing Room?

I don't know why there were there, but I like the fact that there's a certain amount of continuity.  When Daphne didn't shoot herself, her business with the pistols might have been gratuitous, but now when we see Quentin open the pistol box, we say, "Oh, yeah."  The rule of three says there should be another scene with the pistols, but it really should have come before Daphne's scene, telling us why the pistols were there.  Then we would have had a nice Pistol Arc.

Ben Stokes Jr.

Ben Stokes (the Younger?)

Have we been told that there was ever another Ben Stokes in parallel time than the one we saw today?  Because I don't see any reason to assume it.

Quentin promised Ben that Carrie wouldn't be hurt in the séance, and promised again and again and again, and yet this Quentin has struck me as anything but a starry-eyed optimist.

Fun scene with Catherine and Morgan/James

But why was Catherine's deceit necessary?  Couldn't they just have drugged his food?  This episode seemed to me to be filled with people behaving foolishly - Quentin saying no, no, Carrie wouldn't be hurt in the séance,  Quentin deciding to go through with the risky business of Catherine deceiving James-in-Morgan, James-in-Morgan (who doesn't trust any Collins, no, not he!) not insisting that he and Catherine switch glasses before he drank, and then James-in-Morgan wasting time, as Magnus noted, blustering to Brutus instead of telling the tale to Julia.  But that last bit of foolishness did seem to be in character for James Forsythe.  He's always more interested in Brutus than in the 1841 folk.

Oh, and by the way, why was I surprised that there was a decanter of brandy - or something - in Morgan's room?  This is Collinwood, after all.

Couldn't they just have drugged his food?

Well, if PT Quentin is anything like the RT Quentins, he'd think of drink before food. And there is after all a decanter in Morgan and Catherine's bedroom.

And anyway, it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that except for the very earliest eps., almost no one at Collinwood ever, ever eats.

Lydia, I suppose PT Ben's father could have had a different name (though with a similar history that would have brought him to the Collinses in 1795PT or so), but it seems more likely there was a Ben back then.   If you're saying PT1841 Ben may have been "the" one-and-only Ben, he's not old enough, and, well, all I can do is say again how troubled I am at the idea of PT as a world of "other choices", including characters "choosing" to be born in another century...  The fact that DS may have done this already (PT1970 Q/Ang) doesn't mean I want to see any more of it.

Oops - forgot to post this:

FAREWELL, DAVID SELBY!

David Selby makes his final appearance on DS in this ep...
(Though he would begin work on NoDS 17 days after this ep originally aired.)


I was thinking Selby's appendicitis attack happened a bit later.

So... Selby's last moment on DS on TV was his backing into that door?