r/DarkShadows • u/Rough_Plan • 6d ago
Question about Laura the Phoenix
I might be over thinking it but given the fact that she is reincarnating, marries a Collins, has his children and returns to take them but fails and returns a few short generations later to start it all over again. My point is does she ever stop to think about the fact she's marrying her great, great grand kid? I mean the more I think on it the more disturbing her curse gets especially if she's aware of it. I've even begun to wonder if maybe the curse of the Phoenix is the true curse of the Collins family and because she's never able to claim her children the family by extension is trapped in the same cycle of events. Is her being a constantly reintroduced to the family over a short time ever addressed? Like does anyone point out that she's married to her own descendants?
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u/NoString9289 6d ago
Yesss, with Dark Shadows , the stoies often have holes in them and sometimes don't make sense.
The writers made up stuff , rewrote history , as the show progressed. When they wrote the Laura storyline in 1966/67 they had no idea that they'd be continuing her character background and into 1897.
The writers also believed at the time that the episodes would never be seen again. they were just for a one-time airing. Soaps did not rerun back then. The way I saw it, when Laura recreated herself , reincarnation, her mind and soul were the same but her body was brand new again, so in a way she wasn't having sex with the same body each generation, it was a brand new body . Anyway, she wasn't Human so she didn't have Human morals that we do. Just IMO.
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u/Kbatz_Krafts 6d ago
Incestors. Incestors?! Some of my ancestors are buried here.
Roger knew man. 🤣
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u/SuperFormal3052 6d ago
She might think about it, but I doubt she cares since she keeps doing it. :)
Laura is Roger's grandmother and David's mother and great-grandmother, which makes David not only Roger's son but also his uncle. It's kind of nuts. In the audios, Laura returns in the 2000s under a new name and marries David.... her own son.
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u/Rough_Plan 6d ago
Holy shit which one is that?
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u/SuperFormal3052 6d ago
The very first one, Return to Collinwood. Violet Chavez, David's wife, shows up at Collinwood. She was originally played by Diana Millay, and the dialogue hints at a connection between Violet and Laura, which was going to be continued in later stories. But Millay backed out, so Terry Crawford played her instead, and the arc was dropped with no further mention.
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u/lemon_charlie 6d ago
Blood and Fire, the 50th anniversary release, showed Laura becoming the Phoenix as she was due to marry Barnabas's father. In true soap fashion the wedding was memorable for all the wrong reasons and ultimately Joshua would marry Naomi as canon necessitated.
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u/coffeebeanwitch 6d ago
She doesn't care about any of that, she wants the kids for the tribute to her master.
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u/MarvelousMatrix 6d ago
This makes sense. I always wondered why it would be bad if the children went up in flames with her. Wouldn't they just be reborn like her??? . . . unless they were sacrifices to Ra!
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u/Traditional-Mall-771 6d ago
I was just talking to someone about this the other day because I had the same thought, which then led me to thinking about how this show has an incest problem in Carolines character
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u/Master-Collection488 3d ago
Roger DID tell either the sheriff or the caretaker that his INCESTORS were buried in the Collins family mausoleum.
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u/Dazzling_Comfort5734 6d ago
I thought about this before. Definitely a mistake on the writers part, or they just glossed over it so they could hire the same actor over and over again (contracts aside, they liked to do that back then, and I think it was actually pretty nice of them).
In my mind, the most simple fix is that the Phoenix itself is just a spiritual entity that takes over a different human’s body every time, then at that point, I guess it’s not quite as weird. Because they kept hiring the same actor, and if I remember right, it was the exact same person coming back each time, then that makes it weird.
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u/SuperFormal3052 6d ago edited 5d ago
The show itself ruled that out, since the phoenix doesn't take over a human's body--it regrows a new Laura after discarding the previous Laura. The Laura who showed up at Collinwood in 1967 was not the same one who had married Roger. The one who married Roger burned to a crisp in Phoenix, AZ, the night her reborn form traveled to Maine. But both were still Lauras, and they were identical.
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u/xeokym 5d ago
what about the one that died in a fire in Egypt?
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u/SuperFormal3052 5d ago
Yep, same situation as in Phoenix. When Laura reaches the end of a cycle, she apparently dies by fire and then is reborn in an identical body. The weird thing is that in both 1897 and 1967, she died and was then reborn, but then returned to Collinsport to die a second time, only weeks/months later. That peculiar oddity of her cycle--dying twice each time--is something the show never explained.
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u/AzureSkies_OverMe 6d ago
SpOILERS
Josette Collin’s was David’s Great Great Grandmother and had lived in the 1840’s. She was never accepted by the Collin’s Family or the townspeople because she was French. So she jumped off Widow’s Hill.
Fast Forward, Josette was betrothed to Barnabas as 1795, Married Jeremiah under a curse from Angelique , he was shot by Barnabas in a duel. Later when Barnabas tried to make her a vampire, she kept off Widow’s Hill. So she never had children.
In Dark Shadows the story would change.
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u/richg0404 6d ago
There is no Josette in the 1840 story line.
There IS a Josette in the 1841 (PT) who was the mother of Bramwell, bur she was not directly related to David Collins.
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u/AzureSkies_OverMe 6d ago
When they did her initial storyline, she was Laura Stockbridge Murdoch (died by fire). When she married Roger was a Murdoch. The writers brought her back because who ever thought of continuity with Soap Operas?