BORN TO RUN: MERVIN & MAUDE > NICKY AND LILLIAN

'Centennial' provided Toobworld with an interesting "Born To Run" theory for Two For Tuesday......

After the Wendells killed Soren Sorenson in 1889 and got away with it, their fortunes increased and they became the biggest private land owners in all of the Centennial region. In the mini-series, if not in the book, it appears that Mervin Wendell died at the age of 74 a few years after the end of the great World War. For the purposes of this Toobworld theory, I think he may have been dead by the year 1921. (Jim Lloyd read his obituary to Hans Brumbaugh and it mentioned the war as having already ended.)

I've written in the past that not only does reincarnation exist in Toobworld, but that certain souls are destined to be reunited in their next lives. The example I usually cite is that of Ross Poldark, of the landed gentry in Cornwall back in the 18th Century, and his gypsy bride Demelza Carne. In the 1990's, their souls were reunited, but now he was a well-to-do lawyer in San Francisco named Greg Montgomery and she was Dharma Liberty Finkelstein, the daughter of hippies.

The souls of Mervin and Maude Wendell were reincarnated as well, not too long after their deaths; reborn into new bodies by the mid-1920's. Had they been allowed to remain in the afterlife for a while longer, perhaps the karma they brought upon themselves would have been lessened. Instead, they came back too soon and so their destinies played out much like a TV rerun. ["Born To Rerun" is the term I use to describe reincarnation in the TV Universe.]

Nicholas Frame and Lillian Stanhope were Shakespearean actors of the London stage whose automatic claim to fame was fast falling behind them by the 1970's. Things were so bad that they had to resort to trickery in order to get their latest production of the Scottish play on the boards - Lillian began an affair with their producer, Sir Roger Haversham, so that he would continue to finance the production.

But eventually Sir Roger found out......

You can see the parallels - sex as the ploy in the con; the deceived learning too late that he had been duped; and the woman causing the death of the victim. Maude used the handle of the fake gun to club Sorenson to stop him from attacking her husband, and Lillian threw a container of cold cream at Sir Roger's head as he attacked Nicholas.  We even saw both couples performing the Scottish play!

Usually I claim that the character is the same age as the actor who plays him, and that if the plotline is set in the present, then they share the same birth year. This wouldn't work with Nicholas Frame, however, since Richard Basehart was born in 1914 and Mervin Wendell was very much alive at the start of the war, selling war bonds. (Although he is slowly dying.) But Basehart looked as though a few years could be shaved off his age with no harm to the credibility of the character done.

BCnU!