barnabas and rachel drummond

[michael c]

i am currently watching the early-ish part of the 1897 storline.

here we have barnbas and rachel drummond striking up a friendship and possibly a romance.now i don't know about you but i find this pairing of jonathan frid and kathryn leigh scott to be quite disturbing considering the cruel,dehumanizing way barnabas treated maggie evans when he was first released in 1967.i simply cannot get past those images.they're burned into my memory bank.as late as the eve plotline barnabas was willing to sacrafice maggie to the experiment.

for some reason the pairing of barnabas and josette during the 1795 story didn't bother me because it was essentially a "prequal" with much of the action taking place before anelique placed barnabas under the curse.
but the 1897 barnabas lived through his actions in 1967 so his relationship with maggie was much more recent then that with josette.there is no "innocence" there.i simply can't romance any pairing of these two after 1795.


on a similar note i'm finding rachel to be a rather insipid character.i prefer a spunkier kls.her inguenue routine doesn't work for me.perhaps i'd like the character more if she'd been played by you-know-who.with so many interesting female characters populating this part of the story(judith,beth,jenny,laura and angelique)rachel kind of bores me.

[Nelson Collins]

I'll admit I have not seen that part of th 1897 storyline, but aren't soaps littered with couples that started out less than friends?  Even for (arguably) the most famous soap couple of all, Luke and Laura from General Hospital.  Didn't their relationship start with him raping her?  And yet they eventually became lovers and married and etc....

[stefan]

Rachel? Is that Kitty Soams or Lady Kitty? (still can't get all the 1897 names right) The Josette reincarnation?

I tend to feel that Barnabas's treatment of Maggie was the "before Frid caught on" time period. Not to say the early b&w is not the most genuinely scary and creepy of the series but Barnarbas was really not the same person as after 1795 - at least not in the writing. Anyway, whenever I see anything disturbing or akward that's what I tell myself. Like the later pairing of Barnie with Angelique. As an avid 1795 fan I just can't stomach it.

Not sure if Rachel is Kitty (gosh, how many characters did everyone play?) but I felt, as a diehard Josette/Barnabas fan, it was one of the most interesting and engaging of 1897 but was maaaaddd that, it's apparent they hated us, they chopped it down as in 1795. Too bad really because the Josette/Barnabas pairing was, in my opinion, the most potent of all and even a Kitty recincarnation would have been wonderful.

[AndreDuPres]

Rachel was basically Jane Eyre, for she was a governess with a troubled past:  she was KLS's first character in 1897 *way* before Kitty came on.  I honestly liked Rachel (just not nearly as much as Kitty), though.  Sure, she was a ditzy ingenue, but she at least had some spunk and curiosity (she obivously had a certain valour for going up to the Tower Room all alone in the middle of the night despite Judith and Edward's orders) who would have been *perfect* for Alexandra Moltke.  She didn't get much screen time after Laura came (back) on the show, and they probably should have simply brought Kitty Soames on to start with rather than Rachel.

[Gothick]

I think they had a whole arc for Rachel planned that never got off the ground because KLS decided to take an extended vacation from the show (I think it was the safari in Africa thing) for several months.  So the character and her storyline came to an abrupt end.  I do agree that Rachel is probably the least satisfactory of all the KLS characters.  She just seems to have "helpless victim" tattooed on her forehead.

The only really good scenes with Rachel, from a dramatic point of view, are the ones with Trask.  I practically squirm watching them because Lacy's depravity is so palpable, it's like something icky between dropped down the back of your neck to watch him with KLS in those scenes.  Eventually the Rachel character does show some backbone in her scenes with Trask.

There are a couple of hints in the final weeks of the 1969 Quentin's haunting storyline (before 1897) as to where they were planning to go with Rachel's storyline, but only hints.

G.

[michael c]

that's interesting gothick.
i didn't know that the reason that rachel disappears from the storyline was that kls requested time off.does that mean that the kitty hampshire character was not originally part of the story but hastily written in when kls wanted to return?i wonder why they didn't just bring rachel back rather than creating a different character?does anyone know why joan bennett disapppears for several weeks/months as well?

[Mysterious Benefactor]

i didn't know that the reason that rachel disappears from the storyline was that kls requested time off.does that mean that the kitty hampshire character was not originally part of the story but hastily written in when kls wanted to return?

No, it was the DS PTB who told KLS that she had to come back because they were ready to introduce Kitty into the storyline.

i wonder why they didn't just bring rachel back rather than creating a different character?

Apparently they thought it was better to kill off Rachel than to just have her disappear. Actually, a few characters within different storylines were killed off because the actors portraying them either decided to leave the show or went off temporarily to do other things. The behind the scenes goings on that influenced the storylines are often just as interesting as what was happening on screen. 

does anyone know why joan bennett disapppears for several weeks/months as well?

When Liz was in Windcliff and dead but not dead, and when Judith was institutionalized, Joan was off doing Summer Stock.