Tag: house of dark shadows

Episode 994: I might as well be glad

Amy Collins twice sees the ghost of Dameon Edwards, whom she and others at the great house of Collinwood apparently knew when he was alive a year or so previously. At that time, Dark Shadows was set in a different universe than the one it has been showing us for the last few weeks, so the first thing the audience has ever heard about Dameon is that he is dead. Nor do we learn much more about him today. He looks at people with a vaguely sad expression, wanders off, and vanishes into thin air, never speaking a word. His part reminds me of G. K. Chesterton’s line that “Journalism consists largely in saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”

When Amy sees Dameon the second time, he leads her to the basement of Collinwood. This is a bit of a treat for longtime viewers. We may only have been in this universe for a few weeks, but the house is supposed to be laid out similarly to the one where we spent the previous 196 weeks, and the basement of that house was a significant set in the first year of the show. We haven’t been to that basement since #273, when it was revealed that reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard was mistaken in her belief that she had killed her husband Paul and that he was buried in a locked storeroom there. It turned out Paul wasn’t dead at all. Liz was so embarrassed when her mistake was revealed that no one ever mentioned it again.

Dameon reminds us of that storeroom when he leads Amy, not to the spot where it was, but to an alcove in the wall opposite it. Amy’s cousin Daniel’s bedroom is a mirror image of his counterpart David’s bedroom in the other continuity. If the basement is a mirror image as well, the alcove to which Dameon leads Amy corresponds to the locked storeroom. Dameon turns towards the door, and vanishes as he walks into it. Amy screams.

He wasn’t there again today. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Dameon is completely new to the audience, and the story of Liz’ belief that Paul was buried in the basement is so old that the reference will be lost on anyone who hasn’t been writing up notices about every episode of the show for the last few years. So the whole thing is pretty ineffective. Indeed, while Amy is screaming Denise Nickerson is visibly struggling not to laugh out loud.

Oh I am sooo scared! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I’m sure this episode is the result of a failed plan. Dameon must represent a character who would have meant something to us. Since most of the people we have seen in the last few weeks have the same names and are played by the same actors as counterparts from the original continuity, that character would likely have been a familiar face. The one face that would have brought the locked room in Liz’ basement to the minds of longtime viewers would have been that of Dennis Patrick. Patrick was in #273 as Jason McGuire, the seagoing con man who first convinced Liz that Paul was buried in her basement and then returned to exploit that belief by blackmailing her, and returned late in 1969 as Paul himself. Liz’ counterpart in the current universe is named Mrs Stoddard, so Paul must have existed there as well.

Patrick and his wife Barbara Cason were at this time in Tarrytown, New York, playing supporting roles in the feature film House of Dark Shadows. Patrick’s role as the sheriff puts him in only a few scenes, and Dan Curtis may well have hoped that once he’d got Patrick back to the East Coast he would be able to persuade him to return to the show for a short stint as Parallel Paul’s ghost. But Patrick was based in Los Angeles at this time, busy there as a producer and in demand as an actor, and he had no interest in coming back to a daytime drama taped in NYC for any length of time. So Dameon may have been a last-minute patch to cover Parallel Paul’s absence.

If Plan A had been that today’s ghost would represent Parallel Paul, Plan B appears to have been that he would remind longtime viewers of Quentin’s counterpart in the main continuity. Quentin was introduced late in 1968 as a ghost who did not speak. He first appeared to the children at Collinwood. Those were Amy’s counterpart, Amy Jennings, and her friend, strange and troubled boy David Collins, whose counterpart here is Daniel. Quentin’s ghost beckoned Amy and David into hidden rooms where they would, as they called it, “play the game.” When Dameon beckons Amy to the basement today, she asks if this is another of the games he used to play with her and Daniel.

The echo of the “Haunting of Collinwood” story is clear. But a revisiting of it that would have been effective would have taken some time to set up, especially since there is a living, speaking Quentin at the center of the show now. By the time they got to this topic, David Henesy had left to start his own stay in Tarrytown for House of Dark Shadows, so we won’t be seeing Daniel for a while. The most they can do is what we see here.

The upshot of these two aborted plans is a situation that does not seem to belong on the show at all, and it is no wonder Nickerson can’t keep a straight face. Even more than it reminds me of “Lord Jones is dead,” this installment reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1920 poem “The Penitent“:

I had a little Sorrow,

Born of a little Sin,

I found a room all damp with gloom

And shut us all within;

And, “Little Sorrow, weep,” said I,

“And, Little Sin, pray God to die,

And I upon the floor will lie

And think how bad I’ve been!”

Alas for pious planning —

It mattered not a whit!

As far as gloom went in that room,

The lamp might have been lit!

My Little Sorrow would not weep,

My Little Sin would go to sleep —

To save my soul I could not keep

My graceless mind on it!

So up I got in anger,

And took a book I had,

And put a ribbon on my hair

To please a passing lad.

And, “One thing there’s no getting by —

I’ve been a wicked girl,” said I;

“But if I can’t be sorry, why,

I might as well be glad!”

I don’t know if Amy had been a wicked girl, but the other characters today all seem to have secrets that it would behoove them to feel sorry for when Dameon shows up. There is drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, who like Amy sees Dameon twice; sleazy musician Bruno Hess, whom Quentin suspects of having killed Dameon; and butler Mr Trask, who, when Quentin mentions Dameon, frantically denies knowing anything about him, and who, when Amy says she saw Dameon, squeezes a drinking glass so tightly it shatters in his hand.

This is the first time we see Mr Trask. He is the fourth character played by Jerry Lacy. Mr Lacy first joined the cast in the fall of 1967 to do his celebrated Humphrey Bogart imitation as lawyer Tony Peterson before finding immortality as overheated witch-hunter Reverend Trask in the 1790s flashback that ran from November 1967 to March 1968. That first Trask came to his end sealed in a basement alcove not so different from the one into which Dameon disappears today. That incident made a big impression, and was referenced several times on the show and time and again in spin-offs of Dark Shadows in other media. Mr Trask’s debut today may, in the original, never-developed plan, have been intended to remind viewers of it. Perhaps Mr Trask would be the one to open the alcove and find Parallel Paul’s remains. That would be a fitting way to join the story that introduced the idea of a basement burial to Dark Shadows with the famous story that showed one taking place.

Mr Lacy matched his triumph as the first Trask when he returned as his hypocritical descendant Gregory in the 1897 segment that spanned most of 1969. Today’s Mr Trask is in part a placeholder for sinister housekeeper Miss Hoffman. Quentin explains today that he sent Miss Hoffman to visit her friends. Mr Lacy was in one scene of House of Dark Shadows, a funeral sequence shot on the first day of principal photography, and unlike Dennis Patrick he was still living in NYC. So he was available for a couple of weeks of fill-in work. The role is thin on paper, but Mr Lacy gives the part a lot of life.

Episode 986: I saw her in the casket myself

In #949, eleven year old Amy Jennings saw twenty-nine year old Quentin Collins. She reacted with terror, certain that he was the ghost of her great grandfather, the ghost who had persecuted her and everyone else at the great house of Collinwood from December 1968 to September 1969. Heiress Carolyn Collins laughed at Amy and told her that he was not a ghost, but was a cousin of theirs, another descendant of Quentin’s. In fact, Quentin was Amy’s great-grandfather and Carolyn’s great-great-uncle, but he wasn’t a ghost, and he meant no harm to Amy.

Amy refused to accept Carolyn and Quentin’s assurances that he was “not that Quentin Collins.” That refusal highlighted Quentin’s convoluted backstory. The show went back in time in March 1969 to the year 1897, and during an eight-month costume drama segment it introduced us to Quentin as he was before he died. He was a charming rascal who immediately became a huge breakout star. During the 1897 segment, they showed history being changed so that Quentin never died and was the beneficiary of a magic spell that immunized him against aging. Ever since early 1967, Dark Shadows has been operating on a model of the cosmos in which the usual laws of cause and effect are replaced with anniversaries. So in #839, we saw that Quentin’s haunting of Collinwood had gone on for ten months and had finally resulted in the death of strange and troubled boy David Collins. But that day was also the 72nd anniversary of the change in history which prevented Quentin’s death, so the haunting broke and David came back to life. When Quentin showed up in 1969 as a living being, everyone remembered the haunting. Most characters accepted Quentin’s claim to be his own great-grandson, but Amy saw the truth, that he and the ghost were two continuations of one man.

The show’s metaphysics probably didn’t bother anyone who watched it the first time it was broadcast. The characters just take them for granted, as in our world we take hard-to-explain phenomena like gravity and magnetism for granted, and the story keeps on going as if they somehow made sense. What the writers were worried about when Amy saw the living Quentin was not that their model of the universe lacked plausibility, but that they hadn’t found a way to keep Quentin at the center of the story. He’d made a hit in the 1897 segment because he was connected to everyone and was naturally involved in everything that was happening, but in 1969 and 1970 he is a visitor, a distant relative who has come wandering in from who knows where. When Amy tries to figure out in what sense he is “that Quentin Collins,” she is trying to solve a puzzle that the show has to solve to keep him generating heat in the ratings.

Now, Dark Shadows has crossed over to an alternate universe. Here, we have met yet another iteration of Quentin. This Quentin Collins is the Master of Collinwood. Amy lives in the house in this continuity as well, but she really is Quentin’s cousin, and her last name is Collins.

Parallel Quentin hasn’t thought to tell Amy that there is a houseguest staying at Collinwood. She is Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of his late wife Angelique. Since there are a lot of people around the estate who keep saying that Angelique is going to come back to life, the sight of Alexis comes as quite a shock to everyone. Amy sees Alexis today, and reacts with terror, certain that she is the ghost of Angelique. She does not accept Quentin’s belated explanations, anymore than her counterpart accepted Carolyn’s. Amy Jennings had specialized in looking directly into the camera; as Amy Collins, Denise Nickerson has a moment after Quentin and Alexis have explained the situation to her when it looks like she is about to make this move, but she does not.

Amy terrified. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Amy has two more scenes today. She opens the front door and lets Angelique’s associate, sleazy musician Bruno Hess, into the house. Amy greets Bruno with “She’s upstairs.” He asks how she knows who he came to see, and she tells him he always came to see “her” before. She wonders if “they” will make Bruno call the woman “Alexis.” Perhaps she thinks all adults are in on this scam, pretending that the dead can be counted on to leave the living alone. Later, she gives Quentin a telegram. When he scolds her for having opened it, she is at once sincerely remorseful about what she has done and indignant about what is going on upstairs. She says that while opening other people’s mail is indeed bad, what “she” has done is even worse.

On Friday, the show hinted that Alexis might be Angelique. Today, Bruno starts an investigation to check up on Alexis’ report that she arrived in New York from Genoa a couple of days before. They spend enough time on Bruno’s activities that it would be surprising if her story simply held up, so that keeps the question alive.

Quentin’s new wife, the former Maggie Evans, left him and went to her sister Jennifer’s place in New York on Friday. She was fed up with Quentin’s high-handed attitude, with everyone’s preoccupation with Angelique, and with Alexis’ presence in the house. Quentin picks up a telephone today, says “Operator, this is a person to person call. Mrs Collins!” And they connect him to Jennifer’s place! In spite of this magical power, he still can’t persuade Maggie to come to the phone. By the end of the call, he and Jennifer are mad at each other, too.

When this episode was taped, principal photography was underway for the feature film House of Dark Shadows. Many of the best-known members of the cast are going to be in Tarrytown, New York for the next six weeks. When Quentin talks to Jennifer Evans, he offers to go to Maggie in New York- we might assume he means NYC, but I suppose Jennifer might live in Tarrytown, and Maggie’s real reason for staying with her is that she doesn’t want to be separated from Kathryn Leigh Scott.

As Quentin and Alexis, David Selby and Lara Parker are the biggest names currently on Dark Shadows, and they are playing characters quite different from those that made them famous. This Quentin intermittently displays the charm which the one from the main continuity exudes so effortlessly, but he is a downer at least half the time, and his position as Master of Collinwood keeps him from being the lovable rascal who has been a fixture on the cover of the fan magazines for a year now. And even if Alexis is Angelique, she is an Angelique who has not gone through any of the development that has held the fans’ attention for over two years. Angelique was a story dynamo from her introduction at the end of 1967, but what has made her indispensable in arc after arc is that she usually knows everything the audience knows about what is happening and has some crazy scheme that no one else would have thought of as to how she can make it all much worse. And over the last year, she has shown an ability to learn and grow that has made her a much more interesting character. A new Angelique, starting from scratch, won’t match the audience’s understanding of the situation, and won’t remember anything that gave her new depth in 1969 and early 1970.

You may wonder if these two can carry the show for a month and a half. The writers certainly did, as witness a conversation between Alexis and Quentin today. She goes on at length about how difficult it was to grow up in her sister’s shadow, saying that she tried to imitate Angelique but could never make it. The harder she tried to copy the habits that attracted everyone to Angelique, the more embarrassed their reactions were.

Not only does Alexis tell us explicitly that she isn’t as appealing as Angelique, Quentin couldn’t be less interested what she is saying. He is preoccupied with a dispute he is having with Bruno. That dispute, were Alexis aware of it, would probably interest her as little as what she is saying interests Quentin. In their scene together, Alexis does not give any sign that she recognizes Bruno. After he leaves, she looks at a picture of him on some sheet music he composed, as she would do if she never had seen him before. So, if she is Angelique returned from the grave, she would appear to have lost her memory of Bruno along the way. And whoever she is, her attitude towards him throughout is one of amused tolerance. We can’t imagine her being particularly invested in a conflict about whether Bruno has a right to live in the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of Collinwood. So the scene between Angelique and Quentin, in which neither has anything to say that is of concern to the other, seems to be something like the opposite of a programmatic statement. Rather than telling us what they plan to do, the writers are telling us what they are afraid we will think they have done.

Not that they have despaired of making it work. By the end, Quentin and Alexis have drawn each other’s attention sufficiently to do some pretty firm smooching. Maggie has been a fan favorite from episode #1, and many of the nine year old girls in the audience probably identify with her and are excited about the idea of her being married to Quentin. The image of him cheating on Maggie with the wicked witch will outrage them enough to keep them tuning in.

The prospect of an affair between Quentin and Alexis presents something of a puzzle in logic. If she really is who she says she is, he is cheating on Maggie with her. But if she is Angelique, he has been cheating on her with Maggie, albeit unknowingly. One way or another, it is far from gentlemanly behavior on his part. As for Alexis, what we know so far would tend to confirm our initial assumption that Angelique is an Evil Twin, but seeing her go after Maggie’s husband will keep regular viewers from labeling her the Good Twin.

Episode 974: The has-beens

Dark Shadows spent a few months trying to put a story together from some themes drawn from the works of H. P. Lovecraft. A race of Elder Gods known as the Leviathan People wanted to escape from their long captivity in the underworld, retake the Earth, and destroy humankind. To that end, they controlled the minds of several people in and around the village of Collinsport, formed them into a cult, and entrusted them with the care of a fast-growing, shape-shifting monster. When the monster was able to assume the form of a grown man, he was supposed to be joined to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in an unholy ceremony that would transform Carolyn into the same sort of being he was, and mark the beginning of the Time of the Leviathan People.

In #965, the unholy ceremony was underway. But the monster, who when he first appeared as an adult invited people to “Call me Jabe,” had decided he would rather become a human than turn Carolyn into a Leviathan. So he called to Carolyn’s distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, to whisk her away from the scene while he used the Leviathan sceptre to smash the Leviathan box, causing the Leviathan altar to explode and the Leviathan high priest to declare that the time of the Leviathans was over. He told Jabe that he had not only ruined the Leviathans’ grand design, but had doomed himself. His squamous, rugose, and paleogean form was his only true form; the tall young man is just a projection that cannot survive on its own.

Evidently, the original plan was that Jabe’s rebellion would begin a second half of the Leviathan arc. In that half, the chief villain would be a Leviathan who had been roaming the Earth for centuries and who wielded powers as great as Jabe’s even though he could not fulfill Jabe’s intended role as harbinger of Leviathan world dominion. The battle that Barnabas, Jabe, and their allies waged against that villain would involve a trip back in time to the 1790s, during a brief visit to which period Barnabas had first encountered the Leviathans. That return to the 1790s would tie the Leviathans into the tales that have become basic to the show’s backstory, including the stories of the gracious Josette, well-meaning governess Vicki, and Barnabas’ first vampire curse.

They abandoned that plan in some haste. The Leviathan arc never came together as a coherent story, and it was a flop in the ratings. So they never introduced the second Leviathan villain. In his place, they brought back suave warlock Nicholas Blair, who had been one of the villains in 1968, and made him the high priest of the cult and Jabe’s supervisor. When we hear about past deeds that Nicholas could not have done, they nonsensically attribute them either to Mr Strak, a character whose whole point was that he was only on the show once and could never be seen or heard of again, or to Jabe himself, who is four months old. The ghost who was supposed to usher in the return to the eighteenth century turns up in two episodes, does some shouting, then meets wicked witch Angelique, who tells him that he is irrelevant to the story and causes him to disappear forever.

Now, the show is gearing up to tell a story about a parallel universe that Barnabas has found in the east wing of the great house of Collinwood. But all the actors we need to kick that story off are in the cast of the film House of Dark Shadows, which had started principal photography by the time this episode was taped. So we have to find a way to take the characters left over from the Leviathan arc and make a story out of whatever it is they are doing.

Even though Nicholas has said in so many words that the Leviathan segment is over, he and his henchman Bruno are still hanging around Collinsport. They are joined by a third stooge, Angelique’s estranged husband Sky Rumson. Sky had been a fabulously successful publisher because of the deal he made when he met Nicholas and sold his soul to him, but now that the Leviathans have been defeated his enterprises are going under. Sky has apparently been crashing at Bruno’s place.

Bruno and Sky are holding a young woman named Sabrina Stuart prisoner. Sabrina had shown up and offered Bruno a packet of cash to leave Collinsport and forget about her fiancé, Chris Jennings, whom he knows to be a werewolf. Bruno refused to leave, saying that he hopes to exploit Chris’ curse for his own evil purposes. Sabrina then drew a gun on him. Before she could shoot, Sky bumbled in and distracted her. Bruno ordered Sky to guard Sabrina while he contacted Nicholas. Sky resented Bruno’s commands, but obeyed them anyway.

When Sky gets Sabrina into Bruno’s back room, she asks him what they are going to do to Chris. Sky lampshades the fact that there is no reason for him to be on the show when he says that he has never heard of Chris and has no idea what is going on. After Bruno and Nicholas have conferred, Sabrina tells Sky that they seem to have forgotten about him. Sky protests that this is impossible, since Nicholas had promised to talk with him about his future. He goes out to the front room, and sees that Sabrina was right. Bruno and Nicholas have in fact left without him.

Sky finds Angelique sitting in the corner, waiting for him. She left him when she learned that he was a pawn of the Leviathans and he tried to set fire to her. She taunts him for his reduced circumstances:

ANGELIQUE: From tycoon to lackey. My, how the mighty are fallen.

SKY: Angelique, what are you doing here?

ANGELIQUE: Oh, I came to see you, Sky.

SKY: How did you know where to find me?

ANGELIQUE: Oh, I’ve been keeping a very close watch on your activities. Tell me-how does it feel to be a has-been?

SKY: What are you talking about?

ANGELIQUE: That’s what you are, you know.

SKY: I said, what are you talking about?

ANGELIQUE: Every one of your business ventures is a disaster. There’s nothing you can do about it, because all you are now is Nicholas Blair’s slave.

SKY: That’s not true! I’m very important to him!

ANGELIQUE: Oh, don’t be absurd. Consider right now, what you’re doing- what he has you doing. Keeping guard over a helpless young girl. You’re not important to Nicholas. He doesn’t care anything about you.

SKY: That’s not true.

ANGELIQUE: What does Nicholas plan to do with that girl anyway? Or hasn’t he consulted you?

SKY: Angelique, shut up!

ANGELIQUE: What’s the matter, Sky? Am I making you unhappy?

SKY: Get off my back!

ANGELIQUE: [Chuckling] Oh, you’ve grown quite thin-skinned in your declining days, haven’t you?

Shall I tell you how it’s all going to end? Nicholas is going to find some ingenious way of doing himself in, he always does. And then you’re going to be alone. All alone. With no one to turn to. And then… Someone’s going to put you out of your misery. Who knows? It may even be me. Well, I better not keep you any longer. I know you have an important job to do in the next room.

Angelique tells Sky off. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique’s sarcastic characterization of guarding Sabrina as “an important job” not only reflects the lowly status of the work compared to the executive responsibilities Sky recently had as the head of a big business. The story has passed Sabrina and Chris by as completely as it has passed by Sky, Nicholas, and Bruno. Chris knows that on nights of the full moon, he will become an animal who, if not restrained, will kill at least one random person. Both magical and scientific means to relieve him of his curse have failed, but he has friends who will keep him cooped up on those nights so that he doesn’t hurt anyone. Yet he persistently refuses to let them do so. He is deliberately choosing to be a serial murderer. Not only is there no moral ambiguity about him, he has no plans or goals to draw our curiosity and win our sympathies in spite of ourselves. He is a simply and tediously bad person, and to the extent that livelier characters go along with him we like them less. Since Sabrina has no interest in anything other than her relationship with Chris, the two of them are both useless.

Nicholas is puzzled that Jabe continues to exist. He thinks that Jabe’s love for Carolyn, whom he has married, is giving him such a strong will to live that he has managed to hold onto his humanoid form for so long. As Angelique indicated when she told Sky that “Nicholas is going to find some ingenious way of doing himself in, he always does,” Nicholas’ run on the show in 1968 ended with the total failure of all his efforts and his abrupt recall to Hell. But he hopes that he can turn things around for himself. He was only seconded to the Leviathans by his real boss, Satan. He thinks he might be able to get his career back on track in Satan’s organization if he can be the one to destroy Jabe. To that end, he wants to use the werewolf to kill Carolyn, thereby depriving Jabe of his zest for life and making him fade away.

Siccing the werewolf on Carolyn is a typical Nicholas scheme. Even in his monstrous form, Jabe was defenseless against werewolves. So all Nicholas has to do is set the werewolf on him. Bringing Carolyn into it only increases the chances of failure. Moreover, Jabe is likely to be killed off soon, so we might have been willing to believe Nicholas would be the one to do it. But Carolyn has been a core member of the cast since the first week, so once Nicholas promulgates a scheme that involves her death, regular viewers know nothing will come of it.

Moreover, Nicholas has only a short time to make good his designs on Jabe. Angelique blames Jabe for Sky’s involvement with the Leviathans, and has taken a page from George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes by plaguing him with an autonomous shadow that occasionally appears to him. The shadow that attached itself to Anodos, MacDonald’s protagonist, was an allegory for anxiety as a consequence of unredeemed sin, but the shadow Angelique imposes on Jabe is a direct threat to his physical survival. It grows in size and intensity at each appearance, and when it engulfs Jabe entirely it will kill him.

In the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, Jabe calls on Angelique to relieve him of the shadow. Nicholas comes instead. Jabe asks him for help against the shadow. He refuses. He does say that he very much hopes that he, not Angelique, is the one who finishes Jabe off, but he will not try to remove the shadow even to improve his own odds of success. Again, we are left wondering why the camera keeps settling on Nicholas if he won’t take action to change the direction of the plot.

Angelique appears to Jabe after Nicholas has gone. Jabe pleads with her to lift the shadow, and she says no. He tells her he had nothing to do with Sky’s recruitment to the Leviathan cult, and that he barely knows Sky. Angelique knows these things to be true, so she pauses before she answers him. She tells him he was the center of the Leviathan conspiracy, so she blames him for everything done in the course of it.

We end up at Bruno’s place. Sky has told Chris that Sabrina is being held prisoner there, and has given him the key. Chris lets himself in and opens a closet. He finds Sky in it, strung up by his wrists and bleeding. Sky begs for help, and Bruno appears. He holds a gun on Chris and greets him with “Good evening, Mr Jennings! Sabrina and I have been waiting for you.”

Writer Gordon Russell deserves a lot of credit for taking this unpromising material and coming up with a well-constructed script with a fast pace and intelligent dialogue. The actors also do a good job, all of them except the woefully inept Geoffrey Scott as Sky.

But director Henry Kaplan really does let everyone down. The episode starts with a fantastically bad job of blocking. Bruno and Sabrina are standing at right angles to each other, enabling us to see both of their faces.

Right angle pose.

Unfortunately, this pose means that when Sabrina draws her gun, she is not pointing it at Bruno, but holding it in front of him and threatening to fire it into the wall. Kaplan’s habit of relying heavily on closeups in lieu of a visual strategy does nothing to obscure this, and viewers who missed yesterday may be genuinely puzzled as to who or what Bruno is afraid Sabrina will shoot.

Is someone over there?