Discuss - Ep #0432

[Watching Project]

Robservations #432

And if you'd care to look back, the first WP discussion topic for this ep:

Re: Discuss - Ep #0432

[dom]

As Ben stated in the closing act yesterday; Abigail gets what she deserves (or does she?). Blackburn was fabulous in this episode.

Trask & Daniel - very disturbing - Daniel gives as good as he gets - perhaps better. Great scene.

Abigail is dead. Trask ought to have a field day with this.

[DarkLady]

The whole scene with Barnabas and Abigail is priceless. He sure knows what makes her tick.

Very sweet scene with Naomi and Daniel. He tells her he's lonely now that Sarah is dead and upset that Millicent cries all the time. She invites him to stay with her and Joshua at Collinwood. The poor little guy says the house is too depressing, but almost immediately apologies. Later, she rescues him after a really, really scary scene with Trask. But things get even worse when he, Naomi, and Trask stumble across the very dead Abigail in the woods….

[MagnusTrask]

"Why do you think the Devil wants to touch you?"  All of this from Barnabas had potential to be a very smart and classic scene, but I think the lines might have become slightly jumbled, either strange inflections or ad-libbed words.   It could have been so much, this business of connecting Abigail's obsessive vigilante piety to her sexual repression.

Trask: "Curiosity is the Devil's money!"   What?   Alright, that means we're picking the Devil's pocket every time we ask a question, so... that's good...!

Barnabas bares his fangs at Abigail, but it's unclear what he intends to do with them.   He seems to be showing off what he is, and if she'd said "Oh!  You're a vampire!" and he didn't intend feeding, he'd have had an awkward moment where he stopped showing his fangs, and said "Yes".    Sort of a muffled thud moment.   It's good for Barnabas that the dilemma of feeding vs. strangling was solved by Abigail picking that moment to have a heart attack.

[MysticScribe]

Abigail was always smugly adamant that she could spot evil-doers, witches and the devil possessed, but when confronted by Barnabas, she refused to believe. No doubt she was a repressed, vinegary spinster and perhaps her zealotry wasn't just an outlet for her repression, but a mantle to cloak decades of bitter disappointment. Maybe facing something truly unnatural and evil tore that mantle off (made all the more shocking as it was her own kin) and her final moments involved some major reassessment of her beliefs. Probably not, though. I wasn't sorry to see her go, she was an annoying quidnunc.

I've always liked the scene with Trask and Daniel. When Daniel told Trask that he was the one who looked like the devil, Trask's smile conveyed a lot, at least to me. I don't know if it was scripted, direction, or accident, but Trask seemed genuinely amused and able to laugh at himself. During most of the conversation with Daniel, Trask came across as a more traditional minister, patiently and quietly attempting to teach a child about good and evil. Of course, that didn't last long and he was right back to the usual foaming-at-the-mouth fanaticism. I loved Naomi comforting Daniel and taking Trask to task.

[DarkLady]

Welcome, MS!

I seem to remember that at some point Naomi comments that when Abigail was younger she did not lack for suitors and could have had a home and life of her own instead of feeling that she had to take care of her brothers. This makes me think that Abigail was the oldest sib and much older even than Joshua, who seems to defer to her opinion a lot of the time. But the much-younger Jeremiah didn't much care for her.

[MagnusTrask]

I liked it when Naomi said to Trask in the woods: "Stop talking to me!"

[dom]

I half expected Naomi to give him a good wallop. 

If Barnabas could have, he should have killed the tree and tied the deceased Abigail to it, lol.

[DarkLady]

I think that just tying her to the poor tree would have killed it. 

[Joeytrom]

I thought that maybe the mother of Abigail, Joshua, & Jeremiah may have died in childbirth or shortly after and Abigail may have raised Jeremiah herself but that doesnt seem likely as she isn't the motherly type at all.  Perhaps Naomi took care of both of them and thats why Jeremiah ignores her a lot. 

It was mentioned early on that Abigail took after her mother and she may have taken her words more extreme.

Going by the ages of Abigail & Joshua, their parents really must have been old when Jeremiah came along.  He probably didn't know either of them well.

[dom]

Going by the ages of Abigail & Joshua, their parents really must have been old when Jeremiah came along.

Which would be a circumstance that lends credibility to the theory that she died in childbirth. Jeremiah could have been Abigail's. That would explain alot, lol, and be true to form for a soap.

[alwaysdavid]

Abbigail would have felt it was her duty to raise the brothers. Barnabas tells her the truth and she dies. I would have liked to have him say Angelique was the witch not Vickie and see her reaction. Naomi was often refered to as being a drunkard in things I had read about her, but there has been so much more to the character than just that.  She has lost both her children recently and could have immersed herself in liquor, but does not, and nowtakes a motherly attitude to the orphan. Interesting that Trask says that Dan was toushed by the devil and then Dan says Trask looks like the devil.  And in the end Dan finds Abbigail in he woods dead.

[DarkLady]

I agree with what's been said. I suspect the father and mother of Abigail, Joshua and Jeremiah died shortly after Jeremiah was born. If Abigail was at least a young teenager and Joshua a few years younger and Jeremiah still an infant, she would have felt it her duty to raise them. Probably she sacrificed her chance at marriage and considered that her duty to her brothers as well. In those days, if a woman wasn't married by age twenty, she was considered an old maid.