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michelles-garden-of-evil · 4 years ago

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Episode 35 Review: In Which Matt Calls Out Jean Paul

{ Not available on YouTube }

{ Synopses: Debby Graham | Bryan Gruszka }

{ Screencaps }

Welcome back to Maljardin, the beautiful tropical “paradise” that is, in reality, a deadly prison for the guests of Jean Paul Desmond and his demonic lookalike ancestor Jacques Eloi des Mondes. Tensions mount as more and more characters realize that the island’s multimillionaire owner god refuses to let them escape and pushes for a séance in order to contact his late wife. One, Reverend Matthew Dawson, ex-minister and current stalker of one Holly Marshall, has reached the breaking point and now dares challenge Jean Paul.

Now, I know that I briefly compared and contrasted Matt with Reverend Trask (specifically, the second Reverend Trask) from Dark Shadows in my Episode 10 review last year. There are a handful of similarities--including both running boarding schools of questionable ethics (which I forgot to list in that review)--but they remain characters with fundamentally different personalities at their cores. In spite of this, Matt does share one of the favorite hobbies of the men of the Trask family: YELLING in an exaggerated Mid-Atlantic accent in long and emotional speeches! That’s what happens for a good portion of the episode, and I can’t deny that I find this sort of soap opera shouting match highly entertaining.

We open with Jean Paul descending the Great Hall’s staircase while wearing the Blue Suit of Sexiness, which he will continue to wear for the next few episodes. He sees Matt staring at the portrait of THE DEVIL JACQUES ELOI DES MONDES and asks him if he’s “mesmerized by” him. (How could anyone not be, I wonder, before reminding myself that Matt is straight.)

“It seems everyone is, or at least the evil Raxl fears he’s spreading,” is the Reverend’s response.

“And you?”

“There is evil here, Mr. Desmond, but I don't believe in devils. I attribute it more realistically to a live, active human being.”

And then they exchange pissy faces to dramatic music.

I’ve noted before that I didn’t expect a minister like Matt (especially one who believes in other supernatural phenomena) to admit that he doesn’t believe in devils. Still, even if he did, that’s no guarantee that he would make a distinction between Jean Paul and Jacques or think anything of his sudden switches of personality beyond grief and/or mental illness.

The first shot of the glass-top table set up for the séance. Kind of odd that Jean Paul just happens to have a table with astrological symbols on it just lying around.

Just then, Raxl and Quito enter, and the former announces to Jean Paul, “It is foretold that the Conjure Woman one day will find death on Maljardin!” Jean Paul ignores this and tells Vangie (who also conveniently just entered) that she must hold the séance and he must speak to Erica.

Some Jean Paul crazy eyes. Shades of Gérard “Crazy Eyes” Berner, discussed in this entry.

“Master! In the Temple of the Serpent, the Conjure Woman was told that this séance must not take place! The spirits have spoken!” Raxl protests, but he ignores her. Remember, this is a man who announced three episodes ago that he is willing even to perform blood sacrifices to get his Erica back. He is crazy in love--literally. His obsession with Erica makes Matt’s decision to quit his ministry to stalk Holly seem sane.

“On Maljardin, only I speak!” Jean Paul declares, eyes wide and burning like the blue flames on a gas stove. He uses his “on this island, I am God” tone of voice, but sadly Jacques isn’t cheering him on this time. Speaking of Jacques, he immediately storms over to the portrait and shouts, “I must have contact with my darling!” as though he thinks that Jacques will willingly provide that. Oh, Jean Paul, my sweet summer child, if only you knew that he has no intention of resurrecting your dear, sweet Erica.

Alison arrives just in time to overhear him tell Matt that, as an “undesirable element that would ensure its failure,” he shouldn’t take part in the séance. He starts to ask Alison to join him, but then decides he would rather make a passive-aggressive comment about how Matt probably doesn’t believe in souls (WTF?), which triggers the following argument:

Jean Paul: "And the theologian, not because he believes in the soul, but because..." Matt: "Because he is tolerant, Mr. Desmond!" Jean Paul: "Tolerant of what? My madness, perhaps?" Matt: "I did not say that!" Jean Paul: "Are you prepared to face the dead?"

He tries to get Vangie to let him choose who will participate in the séance, but she refuses because she understands spiritualist matters better than he does. (Also, she can teleport to and from Maljardin, so it’s not like she’s trapped on the island like the other guests. This means that she can stand up to Jean Paul without the risk of him imprisoning her.)

Raxl brings up the missing notes about Erica. Alison demands to know how she knows about them, and she claims that she knows because of how often she and Dan discussed them. Raxl accuses Alison of trying to hide the notes in the cove (but why would she store them so far from the lab?). Matt has a point when he says the following line:

I am accused of pushing Holly Marshall down the stairs, Dan Forrest is accused of tampering with the cryonics capsule, Mrs. Marshall is accused of trying to kill her own daughter, and you are accused of concealing Dr. Menkin’s notes that might bring Erica Desmond to life again!...Now, a séance. Who knows what new accusations we will hear and against whom, and I wonder who will make them?

Raxl, Vangie, and Quito visit the temple to pray for the protection of everyone during the séance. This is probably the point where Tarasca would have appeared and vanished for the first time in the original draft, but we may never know for sure. Meanwhile, Jean Paul brags both to Jacques’ portrait and to my hysterical laughter that he is now in full control of himself. Sure, Jan Jean.

I really like this shot of Jean Paul with his arms outstretched in front of Jacques' portrait. Taken out of context, it looks like he’s trying to hug Jacques. "Caressing" evil, indeed.

Matt approaches the stairway to the crypt, but Jean Paul stops him. Matt then remembers that he threatened to kill anyone who trespassed into the crypt, which shocks Alison. “Does it upset you that I want to protect your sister’s return?” he asks her, and this triggers a second, much longer argument between Jean Paul and Matt. As usual with long conversations on this show, I will only include the highlights and summarize the rest.

It starts out with Matt repeating that everyone on Maljardin is Jean Paul’s prisoner. He accuses him of making them all suspect each other as a deliberate act of divide-and-conquer. I think that, in order for that to be true, it would require Jean Paul to be both omniscient and omnipotent, neither of which he is. (Even his hidden camera system only covers certain rooms.) Matt also accuses Raxl and Vangie of “seeking guidance for further accusations,” whatever the hell that means.

“Do you fear to face your judgment day?” Jean Paul asks him, which momentarily shuts him up. He stares at Jean Paul, stunned at the thinly-veiled threat.

Meanwhile in the temple, Raxl and Vangie decide who should and shouldn’t attend the séance. In short, neither Holly nor Dan should attend, but Quito should.

When Raxl asks if Jean Paul should attend, Vangie faints onto the temple floor!

When Matt recovers, he makes a whole list of over-the-top accusations against Jean Paul: "Hear me! Be a little god on your insane Island, manipulate our lives, play games with our reason! Be both judge and jailer! Yes, raise the dead, walk on water! That will be next. Crucify yourself, but remember, you, too, will be judged!"

Matt trying to look intimidating.

Jean Paul (thinking): “Please. When I said I was God on this island, I didn’t mean it in that way.”

You know, Jean Paul’s behavior this week reminds me of someone--and no, I’m not referring to whom you probably think I’m going to. I’m thinking instead of Jerry Layton, the show’s co-creator, producer, and “so-called production expert” who apparently shared some notable personality traits with early Jean Paul. According to the show’s floor director, Bob Wilson:

To be honest with you I always thought, and I’m not the only one who thought this, that the Jean Paul Desmond character was really Jerry Layton. Oh yes. He was mad. He was crazy. He would rant and rave about the simplest thing. And we would all stand around and wait until he did his little thing. And it was almost like an actor taking his lines and just running amok with them. I recall that--it was very easy to be intimidated by this character. I remember [technical producer André “Andy” Moujean] and I coming away from that dinner and saying to each other--What are we getting ourselves into?[1]

According to StrangeParadise.net, Layton insisted on running the show on next to no budget, which earned him the nickname “Mickey Mouse” among the production team. There’s a hilarious photo on there of Colin Fox with a Mickey Mouse pin pinned on one of Jean Paul’s dressing gowns and a mischievous smile on his face. There’s also this one in the website’s archive of the wall where John Pashley, one of the cameramen, wrote the comment “While my prose will not compare with Proust, thank f.....g Christ for Mickey Mouse.”[2] Notable examples of Layton’s mismanagement of the show include the lack of air conditioning in the studio while filming in August (as noted in this quote on Fox’s IMDb page) and the grueling schedule for the cast and crew, which Wilson also mentioned in his interview:

We all put in horrendous hours, not only in the production, but in getting the thing together. ... There were an awful lot of people who stayed [in Chelsea, at Crawley studios] overnight. I was not one of them, but I can remember the sound guys staying overnight, trying to meet deadlines, with their effects. I can remember the lighting guys staying overnight, trying to get the right look on a particular scene. [...] The bus would deliver, say, 25 people, and at night, maybe 17 would go back, because the other people were staying overnight to try to make deadlines.[3]

Despite these similarities, however, I doubt that Jean Paul is based on Jerry Layton. First, there is no evidence that Ian Martin actually ever visited the set, despite his position as headwriter. In fact, according to Wilson, he never did:

SRS: I was curious whether you ever met Ian Martin--he was the guy who wrote the first seven or eight weeks.

BW: I did not. To the best of my knowledge, I don’t believe--which is an unbelievable statement to make, but I’m pretty sure I’m right in saying this--I do not believe that any of the writers ever attended a production meeting, when we were at the studio. Now if Ian Martin was there, it would have been fleetingly, and he was the initial writer. The reason I’m even bringing this up is it was the bane of the actors’ existence that this didn’t happen. Many times they would say, “How can this guy continue writing [the show]--he hasn’t even been here to see, to get the feel of the set, of the ambience...”

SRS: He was writing it, but you were taping at that point well in advance of the broadcast--I see on this plan [of the set, which BW had] here, there’s a date--”August 11, ’69, programs number 2 and 3”--I’m taking from this that the original production of the actual show began in August of ’69. I don’t believe it began running on Canadian television until October of ’69.

BW: That would be correct.

SRS: So Mr. Martin is happily writing his scripts, but he’s not viewing any of the episodes... So he’s just spinning it off in his little room.

BW: Which was a sin, because we could feel the way it should have gone, we could feel where it could go--we weren’t writers, and when I say “we” I include cast and crew, because we were a family, we were very much a family. ... Had any one of the writers, Ian Martin or any one of the writers after that come out and even just spent some time, it would have paid so many dividends. As I say, I stand to be corrected, but to the best of my knowledge, that never took place.[4]

Second, such megalomaniacal types tend not to have a sense of humor regarding their own shortcomings. If Layton had even suspected that Jean Paul was supposed to represent him (assuming that he behaved as Wilson claims he did), I think that he would have insisted on changing his characterization earlier on. Most likely, Jean Paul’s characterization derives from the archetype of the Byronic lord of the manor, an extremely popular character trope in Gothic literature. Examples include Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre, Nicholas van Ryn from Dragonwyck, and (eventually) Richard Morgan from Martin’s 1979 novel Shadow Over Seventh Heaven. Despite this, I have to wonder if, when the actors were rehearsing this script, they were thinking of Mickey Mouse and his own so-called production expertise and putting their feelings about him into it.

Some delicious Raxl scenery-chewing in the Not-So-Hidden Temple after Vangie faints. “It is the prophecy,” she recalls in reference to Vangie’s prediction that she will die on Maljardin. “MUST IT BE NOW?”

Returning to our recap, Alison tries to shut Matt up because “Jean Paul is under a strain,” but he won’t have it. He proceeds to criticize Jean Paul to his face, and one has to wonder if some of these lines reminded Dan MacDonald of Mickey Mouse:

Why is it that no one’s feelings are to be considered, only his? There is no one, it seems, in all the world that has ever suffered except Jean Paul Desmond! No one has ever lost a loved one, only Jean Paul Desmond and his unique sorrow for his beloved Erica!

Colin Fox doing some literal backacting.

Jean Paul getting pissy.

We wondered whether we had seen him change into another man, one man one moment, another man the next! Now we are seeing the real man…A man who ignores the suffering of others, who is indifferent to the pain he inflicts upon them, who is willing to imprison them for all their lives for the sake of an impossible experiment in bringing back the dead, in getting what he wants because he suffers, because he is willing to punish the whole world in order to get what he wants out of blind selfishness masquerading as strength, this selfish thing! So great is his love of himself, which he calls love for his dear Erica!

For the most part, he’s right about Jean Paul, save for the part about him being indifferent to others’ suffering. He’s indifferent to the detained guests’ wishes to escape the island, yes, but not to Alison’s mourning of her sister or Holly’s of her father. He just doesn’t want the tabloid press to find out about the cryonics situation and spread scandalous rumors (or, perhaps, a scandalous truth) about him and Erica. Matt thinks that the whole cryonics experiment is just as blasphemous and ridiculous as Jean Paul’s insistence that he is God on his island.

Jean Paul’s anger is so intense that it’s starting to mess up his shellacked hairdo.

Now it’s Jean Paul’s turn to fling accusations at him: "I did not pursue a young girl in the name of God and good works. I did not beset and harass a mere child out of a sick desire. And I did not strike the girl unseen and secretly fling her down the stairs because she knew, knew what you were!" A reminder: Holly is almost twenty-one, and yet Jean Paul refers to her as not just a child, but a young one. The way the characters keep talking about Holly like she’s seventeen is just baffling. Like I’ve said before, Matt’s attraction to Holly is already creepy enough without those kinds of implications, simply because of the former captor/former captive power dynamics involved.

Just after Jean Paul says that he is responsible for everyone on the island, Quito arrives, carrying Vangie. “Your responsibilities grow,” Matt tells him. “Now you have the soul [line flub for “blood?”] of Evangeline Abbott on your hands.” However, it turns out he spoke too soon, for Vangie soon recovers, albeit with a vision of death!

“Jean Paul, I saw death!” she says upon recovering. “The death I saw was not my own ending. A figure--it wasn’t clear.” And then she points to Jacques’ portrait and shouts, “That man! The Devil!”

This leads Alison to beg Jean Paul to cancel the séance. Jean Paul is surprised that "now the scientist believes in the devil." Jean Paul, being extremely stubborn, insists again on going through with the séance. But what unholy death and destruction will this séance wreak on Maljardin?

Jean Paul sitting down at the séance table during the credits.

Coming up next: The séance and a return to the YouTube episodes. (Am I the only one who’s been missing the ridiculous automatic captions? I hope not.) Shortly after that, the next part of my review of Shadow Over Seventh Heaven, which I would have posted before this one, but I was so much farther along with this one that I decided to post it first.

{<- Previous: Episode 34 || Next: Episode 36 ->}

Notes

[1] Bob Wilson, interview with S. R. Shutt, Ottawa, October 15, 2002. Wilson is also the one who called Layton the “so-called production expert,” which reminds me of David Benioff, the “so-called production expert” behind Game of Thrones whose mismanagement of that series is well-documented on the YouTube channel The Dragon Demands. In a sense, Benioff and Weiss wrote it like a soap opera, changing characterizations and “subverting expectations” at will with random plot twists--which is fine until you remember that they were running a high-budget adaptation of an unfinished book series.

[2] Another funny photo of the wall can be found here, On this one, someone dubbed the show “Canada’s own all-American T.V. series!” and used the Mark of Death (from a future storyline--not saying any more about it until later) as an unofficial logo.

[3] Wilson.

[4] Ibid.

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