Episode 143: Why did you paint my dream?

So much of today’s episode is given over to recapping that I’m just going to make a few miscellaneous notes.

There is a video insert representing a street scene in the town of Collinsport that I don’t think we’ve seen before. It must be rush hour, we’ve never seen this many cars there before. Nor have we ever seen the town’s drug store.

Well-meaning governess Vicki takes her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins, into Collinsport. They want to see drunken artist Sam Evans. David wants to thank Sam for giving him a painting depicting his mother, the mysterious and long-absent Laura, naked and in flames (just what every nine year old boy wants!) Vicki wants to talk with Sam about the unseen forces that compelled Sam to create the painting and her to ask Sam him for it. Sam tells Vicki that the same force has driven him to paint another picture on the same hated theme.

Back in the great house of Collinwood, a plainclothesman comes from the Maine state police. The authorities in Phoenix, Arizona are investigating a fire that destroyed the building in that city where Laura lived. The charred body of a woman Laura’s age, height, and build was found in her apartment. Since the only person associated with the building whose whereabouts were unaccounted for the night of the fire was Laura, the police initially recorded the remains as Laura’s. Laura was first seen in Collinsport the night of the fire, and has interacted with many old friends and acquaintances. So the body is now listed as unidentified, and the Maine police are assisting their Arizona counterparts in their attempt to find out who she was.

This officer has brought a few pieces of jewelry found in the apartment, hoping Laura can identify them. Laura isn’t in this episode, so he shows them to reclusive matriarch Liz instead. Liz identifies a locket as a family heirloom her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, gave to Laura when they were married. It contains a lock of David’s hair and a picture of a blond boy who does not appear to be David.

Laura showed Vicki an identical locket in #139 and told her it contained a lock of David’s hair. Liz insists there is only one such locket. In view of all the signs that Laura is a supernatural being, we can tentatively assume that the burned body is indeed her corpse. As the body now living in the cottage at Collinwood is an uncanny duplicate of her original body, so the locket Vicki saw in 139 is a duplicate of the original locket.

When Laura showed Vicki the locket, she did not open it. Vicki has only Laura’s word that there is hair in it. Indeed, Laura asks Vicki to collect a lock of David’s hair, suggesting that the hair may not have been duplicated when the locket was. We’ve already had many hints that while Laura has come back from the dead, she hasn’t come all the way back- what we see when we look at her is only a fragment of a human being, maybe one of several fragments scattered throughout the world. The corpse in Phoenix is one fragment, the guest in the cottage is another, the ghost David sees flickering on the lawn is another, etc. Nor is her resurrection something that offers new life for anyone else. If she can’t bring even a lock of David’s hair back with her, we must assume that anyone who tried to join her on her path would simply be destroyed.