The Leviathan Episode's

[Gothick]

Hi Taeylor,

They never specified exactly what the Leviathan creature looked like, but IMNSHO it resembled the hideous, transgalactic, nightmare terror of "Yog Sothoth" as revealed in the climax of the 1969 film of The Dunwich Horror.  A lot of the plot of Leviathan was inspired by The Dunwich Horror, with some bits of The Call of Cthulhu thrown in for good measure.  (These were both originally short stories by H. P. Lovecraft)

Naga, female Nagini, is a Sanskrit word denoting a spiritual being taking the form of a snake.  If you check Wikipedia there's probably an entry about it.  My talk of Jeb's personal Naga is my own little joke, I'm afraid...

cheers, G.

[arashi]

I'd still like to know where the werewolf mythos came in. Was this an original part of the story? Because if not, Neil Gaiman is a Dark Shadows fan.

[arashi]

You know, I must say, that I am getting a total kick out of the fact that for once, Roger's in on fighting the supernatural baddies.

[spoiler]So I'm on disc 3, the episodes where Jeb and his zombie army bury Quentin alive, and the question pops up, just how much protection does his portrait afford him? Does it only protect him from aging and wounded flesh? Can he actually die from suffocation or drowning of the like?[/spoiler]

[MagnusTrask]

I think Q would die, and then his corpse would continue to look unchanged and as fresh as a daisy, while the image in his portrait decomposed, which it was going to do anyway.   

[Joeytrom]

I thought the Leviathan monster looked like the three headed snake on the altar.  Its probably best we didnt see it as it would have looked incredibly fake & cheesy.  I wonder if they could have used footage from one of the Japanese monster films as I recall one of them had a flying three headed monster.

[Taeylor Collins]

I would rather use my imagination than see a HORRID HORRID daytime FX.  If they did it today on Daytime it would suck...imagine 1970.

[Mark Rainey]

No. King Ghidorah would never work out. He charges two legs and no arms.

[loril54]

No. King Ghidorah would never work out. He charges two legs and no arms.

Laughing so hard I hurt. I really mean it. 

[michael c]

I'd still like to know where the werewolf mythos came in. Was this an original part of the story? Because if not, Neil Gaiman is a Dark Shadows fan.

my leviathan is a bit rusty but if i recall as originally plotted the leviathans existed only as an "energy" or something of that sort.there was no physical manifestation.

the show during the begining of this storyline was basically divided in half.barnabas lead the leviathan plot and julia lead the remainder of the chris jennings werewolf plot.the characters involved in each plot didn't interact much with those in the other.

so my guess is that tacking the werewolf thing onto the leviathan thing was a clumsy late attempt to interweave the two storylines.it didn't make any sense as the leviathans were originally described.

[arashi]

I was wondering where the werewolf mythos came in to Lovecraft's works, if at all.

[Mark Rainey]

No connection to Lovecraft whatsoever. Now if Quentin had turned into a cat instead of a werewolf... maybe then. (Lovecraft was extraordinarily fond of cats and occasionally presented them as heroic figures.)

[Brandon Collins]

I actually liked the whole werewolf thing that was added in the end. Knocked Jeb down about 1000 pegs, which was definitely a good thing.

[arashi]

No connection to Lovecraft whatsoever. Now if Quentin had turned into a cat instead of a werewolf... maybe then. (Lovecraft was extraordinarily fond of cats and occasionally presented them as heroic figures.)

Ah ha! Thanks for the answer. I could be NOT lazy and actually go out and get his books, but I'm working my way through Richard Matheson at the moment. For future reference, any suggestions for a first time Lovecraft reader?

And yay for cats!

[Mark Rainey]

H. P. Lovecraft: Tales, edited by Peter Straub, is an excellent volume featuring most of HPL's best stories. Stories I'd recommend most for the DS fan would be "The Dunwich Horror," "Whisperer in the Darkness," "Call of Cthulhu," "Haunter of the Dark," and "Dreams in the Witch House." Also on my general recommended reading list are "The Thing on the Doorstep," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "At the Mountains of Madness," and "The Music of Erich Zann" (which is the basis for several of my own Cthulhu-related stories in my collection The Last Trumpet.

[MagnusTrask]

All I know about Lovecraft is from an ineffective tutorial a friend gave me on a tape-letter (problem was on my end) last year, though I learned that with my crappy concentration, the dense writing is something I'd better avoid to give my charley-horsed brain a break.    Too bad-- it sounds very cool.     All I really know is that there were those '70s paperback covers with faces with bricks over parts of them, or worms crawling out of the eyesockets and whatnot.

I don't know why I'm saying "whatnot" lately.    Some of these things may just be to entertain me.

In any DS storyline I don't like so much, I'm frustrated yet relieved toward the end, when they start throwing kitchen sinks in.    It livens things up, at least.    Though, if they'd worked on making the concept stranger and creepier toward the end instead of throwing in Blair and conventionalizing the 'evil', I might feel better about Leviathans now.   Where are those defiant (behind closed doors?), beleaguered, subversive DS writers making it good in spite of their overseer, when you need them?    Off with paying jobs to feed their families, probably.   Good for them.