Discuss - Ep #0700

[Watching Project]

Robservations #700

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

Re: Discuss - Ep #0700

[DarkLady]

Barn and Maggie find Quentin's Room. Suddenly they hear approaching footsteps--but it's only Professor Stokes, who followed them. He thinks Quentin died in this room. The trio find Amy hiding behind a curtain and unable to speak.

The I Ching! Stokes finds Quentin's set of I Ching wands and says he now knows a lot more about Quentin than he did a moment before. Barnabas looks apprehensive as he thinks about the I Ching, something beyond his ken.

We get the big "Turn of the Screw" scene: At Collinwood, Maggie comes down from the upstairs landing, closing the door behind her. She has obviously been searching for David and is trying to decide what to do now. She calls David’s name as she starts back up. Can you hear me? she calls. I know you’re in the house! I want to help you! Please make a sound, she begs him. On hearing nothing, she goes back down to the foyer, defeated. To her joy, David steps out onto the landing. Don’t come up here! he warns her. I’ve come to take you away, Maggie says. I know, he replies. Don’t you want to come with me? she asks. David nods. Quentin expresses his displeasure with a sudden thunderclap. Maggie calls out to him, I am not afraid of you! I am not going to let you keep David! Come to me, David, she implores him. Clearly paralyzed with fear, he wails, I want to, but I can’t! Maggie tells him, Then you can, you can if you try. Walk down the stairs and into my arms, she coaxes him. David looks back toward the closed landing door, then carefully backs away. Holding onto the railing, he starts to move toward Maggie, who tells him, You’ll never have to be afraid again! When he reaches the top of the stairs, the landing door slowly opens. He turns toward it fearfully and stops. Maggie calls out, Don’t stop now! Then she calls out defiantly, Quentin, you can’t have him! He is not yours to have! He is not like you, Quentin! I am going to make sure that he never will be! she vows passionately. After another thunderclap, Maggie faces the open landing door and tells Quentin resolutely, I’m not afraid of you! I’m not! You can’t change David! You have tried, and you have failed! Quentin, I love David, and I am going to take him away from you! Can you hear me? She tells David, I’m coming up to get you. David tries to tell her not to, but Maggie says scornfully, Quentin doesn’t have the courage to stop me. You don’t belong with him--you belong with your family and me. Now near the top of the stairs, Maggie reaches out her hand and tells David to come to her. David looks back one more time, then makes almost a flying leap into Maggie’s arms. She croons his name. Holding him tight, she tells him, There’s one more thing you have to do before you can leave--you must send Quentin away. I can’t! David protests, petrified, but Maggie insists, You’ll never be free otherwise. David turns to look at the landing door. It slams shut. David collapses into Maggie’s arms. Maggie misinterprets this as she croons with relief and gratitude, David! We’ve won! --but then to her horror David slumps unconscious on the stairs.

Stokes and Julia watch--Julia with great apprehension--as Barnabas throws the wands. He gets the 49th hexagram, the hexagram of change--and the one that almost everyone else in the show will get too. Julia is horrified as he mutters about "moving toward the coffin......"

[MagnusTrask]

700--
You re-experience all this through your own recaps, don't you DL?  Well done.  So that's why Maggie says these unexpected things in that scene on the stairs-- she's following a different script from that story.  (I've thought of ordering that story through Talking Books, but I thought it was the model for 1897.)  Suddenly she says and does things based on ideas about Quentin's ghost that we haven't seen justifications for-- such as the idea that David must reject Q.  That must have been Turn of the Screw.  A terrible decision though, because of what we come to know about Q later-- [spoiler]the fact that Jamison's rejection of Quentin was the ultimate disloyalty and disappointment in his life... just the thing to tick off Q's ghost to the twelfth power.[/spoiler]

In Q's room, Barn and Maggie... Fake-out scare scene with the approaching stranger being Stokes... we find Amy in a standing stupor behind Quentin's curtains, after having been silenced strangely and atmospherically by Quentin earlier.  Nice odd moment, when Q put his hand on her shoulder, and her mouth opens, and face freezes.

Maybe this is the moment of storyline change-- Stokes searching Q's desk and finding the I Ching wands.  This always seems to me like one storyline intruding prematurely into another.  It was certainly a big moment when I re-watched DS in 2002, for the first time since childhood.  I loved the I Ching more than any other DS device.  My family was passing through an airport, and I insisted we stop because I saw a thick paperback about I Ching in a store book carousel... and bought it.  And was SO disappointed it was just a means of predicting future luck...  The book was only reprinted, I'm sure, because the 1897 storyline was so popular.

So Quentin himself provides the means for changing his story retroactively... if he'd been thinking, he might actually have guided them there for that purpose.  I actually kept backing up the tape to rewatch the spot in the desk the wands came out of-- strange I know.  Quentin lets Stokes and Barnabas leave with the wands, and journals.  [spoiler]Who knows, maybe the havoc was to force them to go back in time and fix everything.  After all, his ghost murders will be undone too, maybe.[/spoiler] 

They've already set up the table in the Old House basement, whose only real purpose will be for [spoiler]Barnabas to sit at for a few months.[/spoiler]  Stokes reads and puzzles over Q's journals there. 

Maggie is lured to Collinwood again, for David.  Stop bellowing that you're going to get David, just grab him and go.  You're only daring for Q to smite you in a way he can't resist.  David is smitten.

Now the fateful I Ching scene.  If the I Chinger, the Chingstronaut, whatever, can control at all what happens, maybe it makes perfect sense to use it.  Maybe Barnabas can guide himself through some supernatural maelstrom to find Quentin or Quentin's spirit, and communicate clearly, because they exist in the same plane.  That I assume is the interesting, poorly-explained idea, here.  That idea seems to exist just in Barnabas's imagination, though.  Nothing Stokes said about I Ching leads to that premise.  Yet the Prof doesn't totally dismiss it.  He protests as if it's the groundless idea it seems to be, and then almost immediately relents. 

All I can think is-- the writers had some inventive ideas shooting around amongst each other.  The ideas were great.  However, a bad writing mistake that sometimes is made is that the writers of a show fail to imagine themselves as unknowing viewers who haven't been living with these interesting ideas every day for weeks.  They then speed past explanations because they themselves no longer need them.  The writers are experts now on their fictional version of I Ching.  WE however are just being introduced to it all NOW.  They are supposed to put themselves in the shoes of we ignorant viewers and explain fully.

Here comes the coffin.... Written by Gordon Russell.

[DarkLady]

Thanks, MT! The lead-in to 1897 seems (to me) to be based on "The Turn of the Screw," what with the male and female ghosts seducing the boy and the girl. The big moment on the stairs does end quite differently in the story, though.

Your spoiler about the table in the OH basement is hilarious! I have to admit I never thought about the fact that Quentin allows the three adults to grab all the I Ching paraphernalia as well as Amy. It might be because he simply isn't strong enough to face all three of them at once, certainly not Barnabas. But now that he (more or less) has David--nice use of "smite" and "smitten," MT!--why would he want to change the past?

[MagnusTrask]

Thanks, DL.

But now that he (more or less) has David--nice use of "smite" and "smitten," MT!--why would he want to change the past?

Because he has an awful existence.  He died young, in a horrible way, and is stuck forever in twisted bitterness.  Undoing the horror in his life would be a big motivator.  Once he's set upon this path of owning David, though, it's unlikely he'd also have this other plan going too. 

[Mysterious Benefactor]

A final batch of screen caps and/or set ups for this ep has just been posted. And with them I've finally caught up on the "Complete This Phrase / Fill In The Blank(s) - The Werewolf-Quentin's Ghost" and "Caption This! - The Werewolf-Quentin's Ghost" boards for this go-round.