COLLECTION 7 DISK 4, AFTER WATCHING IT AGAIN

Saturday, May 18, 2013 1:17 AM

I have watched Collection 7 Disk 4 again.

Naomi said something like i used to think about tragedies that you got over them & life went on, but now i know you don't and it doesn't.

About love. In this disk, it's revealed that Joshua loved both Naomi & Barnabas, without them knowing it. He could feel love but he couldn't show it, not in such a way that they felt it. Is that how he escaped the curse? The wiki says yes.

Learning that her husband loved her all this time even though he coiuldn't show it was not enough to stop her suicide. Neither was the prospect of adopting Millicent and Daniel, which Joshua wanted to do and which might have brought them together, had she lived. Would Millicent recover from Lt. Forbes, given enough time? Maybe she would have, if Naomi had lived.

http://darkshadows.wikia.com/wiki/Joshua_Collins

According to the Wiki he lived til 1805. Ten years after chaining Barnabas into his coffin. I'm not sure when, if ever, in Collection 1 the plaques by Joshua, Naomi and Sarah's graves are clearly shown. But the official story seems to be that he survived because he was unable to love Barnabas. At least, he may have felt love, but he coudn't show it.

I think Joshua personifies a kind of love that was rebelled against during the 1960's. The patriarch of the family who provides for them financially, but whose love is not perceived by them. Joshua Collins is everything the 60's generation was rebelling against. He's also the quintessential WASP, lacking warmth. This kind of love was derided by the middle or upper class kids who became hippies as "plastic."

This is a theme close to the heart of the series.

This episode was directed by Dan Curtis himself. 

COLLECTION 7 DISK 4, before watching it a 2nd time

Saturday, May 18, 2013 8:32 PM

Here's what i want from watching the last disk of collection 7 again:

Naomi's speech before she kills herself.

The revelation that Joshua loved Naomi all along after all, though she she and Barnabas thought he didn't.

The last look between Barnabas & Joshua, before Barnabas gets in his coffin expectiing his father to destroy him before he wakes up, so he'll never wake up again. I wanted to see who directed that episode, who directed them in that long, meaningful gaze.

The scene in which he was going to bite Millicent again, the way he looks at her. Then when Vickie gets back to the 20th century, Barnabas looks at her that same way.

He looks at the living, pulsing throat, longingly. He brushes the hair back, almost tenderly. then opens his mouth ferociously.

It's that sudden change from tender longing to ferocious attack that's so erotic. (Lara Parker was probably sorry she never had a scene like that with Jonathan Frid, so she had to write terrible novels imagining it.) (Though there is one erotic scene between Barnabas & Angelique that was never shown, just obliquely referred to, but I imagined it as vividly as if I had seen it, the young gentleman and heir to the estate and the voodoo savvy maid of his fiance's aunt, who imagined that it meant something to him and wrought terrible revenge when it turned out it didn't.)