The opening voiceover, which talked about Barnabas and Julia escaping from parallel time, surprised me, because I didn't think it was quite that way. They escaped from a fire, but parallel time itself was not unfriendly to them by the time they left. Further on in this episode, I started thinking about what Barnabas and Julia are trying to do: gather information and then go back to 1970 and prevent the catastrophe from happening. They haven't the least idea of how the parallel time room works, and they didn't know until they came to 1995 that it was possible to travel through time in that room. I'm thinking that maybe the heat of the fire caused the time slippage in the room, but who knows? How do Barnabas and Julia know that they won't end up in 2070, or 2095, or heaven knows what date in heaven knows what time band?
Nancy Barrett has been impressive all week, but she was particularly impressive today. She was perfect as she sat in the rocking chair in the playroom holding that pillow, because holding the pillow didn't make any sense. And then, golly, the grapes she ate! I looked. She really was putting them in her mouth. She had to be eating them for real. And looking at them, I couldn't be sure that they weren't sour.
The conversation at Stokes's house brought home to me that this is a twenty-five-year-old mystery - and not just something that was shut away out of sight, the way Barnabas was chained in his coffin in 1795 and Quentin died and was, apparently, walled up in his room in 1897. Professor Stokes has had this at the forefront of his mind every day for 25 years. He's the one that the institution has written to about Quentin. Why Stokes? He's not a Collins. Why not the Collins family lawyers, Richard and Frank Garner? Maybe it's because Quentin's too distant a cousin in the eyes of the Garners, or maybe Liz's relationship with the Garners never recovered from the low point it hit during her buried alive obsession. But anyway, this mystery wasn't put in a Tupperware container and stashed away someplace. It's alive!
