Discuss - Ep #1056

Robservations #1056

Barnabas looks sad at Angelique's death.   ***  Rebecca finally finishes, with Q revealing he hated Ang.   Did he ever seem as if he'd loved her at all?   ***  Claude North, great big build up, now he's dead.   Huge implied backstory, then they yank the character away w/o explaining.   Not immortal apparently.   Oh throaty-talking man of mystery, he hardly knew ye.

I think I remember reading that Dark Shadows had a total of three cameras.  If this is true, then they were doing their absolute utmost when they showed Claude North inducing Roxanne to talk, Barnabas watching as Angelique died, and Maggie nearly shooting Quentin and then falling to the floor, switching back and forth between the three scenes.  I'm happily imagining the coordination involved.  Once upon a time my brother gave me for Christmas a game that he had put together that was Monopoly, except instead of Boardwalk, Park Place, and so on there were the rooms of our house, and we were our own tokens, moving through the house.  We played it once or twice, shouting all over the house to tell each other what was going on.  That's how I'm imagining the filming of the three interwoven scenes today.  Yeah, I know it wasn't like that.  There were microphones and head sets.  The sets were on the same floor.  But that's how I'm imagining it anyway.

I enjoyed seeing Maggie in her spell, holding the gun away from her as if the hand holding it were not hers, leaving the drawing room, crossing the foyer, and climbing the stairs.  But as we dissolved to Claude and Roxanne, did we see Kathryn Leigh Scott turning around to come down the stairs?  Even if we did, it still seemed to be in character, so I can imagine Maggie almost shaking loose of the spell - and then turning around once again to proceed to Angelique's room.  Incidentally, wouldn't it be neat if our-time Quentin and Maggie were watching the scene in Angelique's room  from the our-time hall?

Rebecca finally finishes, with Q revealing he hated Ang.   Did he ever seem as if he'd loved her at all?

Quentin seemed irrational, which could have been a result of either love or hate.  You might try watching parallel time while telling yourself, "The great reveal at the end is that Quentin adored Angelique to distraction and that Maggie, as she fears, will never, ever measure up to Angelique."  What got me was when Quentin says that he and Angelique didn't have a moment of happiness.  So, those letters that Angelique caused Maggie to find - were they fake?  Quentin's reaction at the time suggested they were not fake, but one of those letters was supposedly written upon the birth of Daniel, and Quentin seemed to be very much under Angelique's (or Tim Stokes's) spell at that point.  I'm assuming that when Quentin said they had not a moment of happiness, he was referring to after their marriage, so are we to assume further that Daniel was born before Quentin and Angelique were married?  Or is it that, since Quentin was under a spell, he did not actually feel the happiness he wrote about upon the birth of Daniel?  And if so, did the spell last from the wedding through to the birth, or did it go dormant after the wedding and get revived for the birth?  And if not, when did the spell finally get put to rest?  And if Angelique threatened a Collins family scandal, why didn't Quentin ever reach a point where he just didn't care?  Looking at what we've seen of Quentin, I think he would have snapped long before Angelique's death.

The drawing room explanation essential to any English country house mystery happened, but it wasn't Inspector Hamilton doing the explaining to an admiring audience, it was Barnabas doing the explaining to a skeptical Inspector Hamilton.  And we didn't hear it.  Most unorthodox.

Will we be there for Barnabas's explanation to Maggie that Hoffman isn't Hoffman and Alexis isn't Alexis?  Or did that happen off-camera?  And what has happened to Roger's body (as cold as if had been dead for eons, I'm sure), and why hasn't Maggie told the oh-so-practical Inspector Hamilton that Roger by his own confession (which we didn't exactly hear, but never mind) killed Angelique, Carolyn, and Elizabeth so that the oh-so-practical Inspector Hamilton will see that the only murder of which Quentin can be accused is Bruno's?  Or did that happen off-camera too?  And why does anybody think that Hoffman's say-so will make any difference to Inspector Hamilton, especially given that Inspector Hamilton knows that Hoffman is so not herself lately that she can't even remember her special greeting for the oh-so-practical Inspector?

Claude North, great big build up, now he's dead.   Huge implied backstory, then they yank the character away w/o explaining.   Not immortal apparently.   Oh throaty-talking man of mystery, he hardly knew ye.

Yes, sketchy backstories seem to be the norm in parallel time 1970.  With all the material and potential material they had, this storyline could have lasted as long as 1897 did and (in my opinion) would have been the better for it, but alas, it was not to be.

Today's episode was full of action.  At the end, I sat thinking that action-packed episodes are fun, but that on the whole I prefer the episodes where everybody is concentrated on one extremely knotty problem.