Julia's scarf in the latter half of the episode kept distracting me. First I couldn't stop thinking how pretty it was. Next I noticed Julia fiddling with it while she was talking to Quentin, and I wanted to see more of this use of the scarf as a substitute for a pair of gloves. And finally I started thinking about how long the scarf was, and about how it was wrapped around Julia's neck, and about Isadora Duncan's awful death, and of course I wondered whether Grayson Hall was thinking about Isadora Duncan as well.
I did keep sufficient control of my thoughts to wonder why Julia expected Daphne to know things that were going to happen in the future. Daphne did know them - but why did Julia expect Daphne to know them, and why did Daphne in fact know them? If I were Julia (and I'm very glad that I'm not), I would be working on getting details about 1840 from Daphne. Maybe the writers are steering clear of hard facts about 1840 in order to maintain a freer hand for when we finally get there. (It isn't a spoiler that we're going to end up in 1840, is it? It would be very odd if we didn't end up there.) Very little of what we see in 1840 fits with what we see in 1970 anyway, however, so I don't know why the writers are being careful, if that's what they're doing. Golly, just a couple of weeks before we went to 1795, we got a completely different story of the events leading up to Josette's death from what we actually saw. The writers appear to have become awfully wimpy.
Why is it that Joe Haskell never escaped from Windcliff? Yes, I know, it's because Joel Crothers had left the show. (And who can blame him? I've been watching some pre-Barnabas episodes recently, and I felt quite sorry for Crothers. Did pre-bite Joe ever do anything that wasn't Scouts Honor?) But still I ask: Why didn't Joe ever escape from Windcliff? Everybody else did. Tad and Carrie didn't even think twice about it today. And then, what a surprise, they're just a few miles from Collinsport, whereas back in 1967 Windcliff was 100 miles away. Considering the difference between David's room at Windcliff this year and Maggie's room at Windcliff three years ago, I wonder if Julia had moved Windcliff to the Collinsport area following a devastating and completely unexpected fire. (A few dozen patients would have escaped in all the upheaval, but who would have noticed?) Of course she would have hoped that Elizabeth would open up the West Wing for the Windcliff inmates (the remaining few, anyway), but maybe Liz's horoscope told her to refuse.
