Our first
encounter with Gail Emory, Caleb's cousin on his mother's
side, is in the pilot. She arrives in Trinity after waking
from a nightmare, and hearing about Merlyn's death on the
news. She used to live in the town, but hasn't been there
for at least ten years. (She hasn't met Caleb before, and
arrives just after his tenth birthday party.) We aren't
told why she originally left, but you can guess she was
taken into care after the death of her parents in the Trinity
Guardian office fire in 1976. Her arrival in Trinity, following
Gage's imprisonment, immediately pushes her in loco parentis,
a role that she doesn't really accept until the episode
Meet The Beetles.
Despite the evidence that Gail is an accomplished undercover
investigator, there are plenty of clues that Gail is more
fragile and less skillful than she would like to admit.
Dead To The World shows Gail putting her experience as
a reporter into practice, but it could be argued that
the detective skills she employs to track Holly Gallagher
down to the Juniper Sanitarium required no greater leap
of the imagination than that of a runner following a paper
trail. In Strangler, she fails to make the link between
a recent unsolved murder by strangulation and a stranger
in town named DeSalvo; a mistake that very nearly costs
her life.
Gail obviously has suspicions that her parents’
death wasn’t as straightforward as it appears, yet
it has taken her keen journalistic instincts ten years
to spur her into action. As early as Damned If You Don’t
there are hints of sexual attraction between Gail and
Buck, the series’ key relationship. Despite suspecting
Buck’s involvement in the fire Gail is drawn to
him like Poppy Bowen to the chimes of an ice-cream van.
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Gail’s
key episode is Ring Of Fire. Ironically, this vitally important
episode was denied to American viewers. Worn down, she admits
that she lacks the strength of character to get to the truth
about her parents’ deaths. Mrs. Gardner provides Gail
with new information that fires her enthusiasm, and prompts
her to investigate the case more rigorously. She was told
that her father was using his newspaper to run a smear campaign
against Buck. She breaks into Buck’s house, where
Lucas tells her that she only has to ask him nicely to discover
the truth. Perhaps realising that she’d never learn
the truth without his assistance, she agrees to make a deal
with Buck.
She’s
entirely unprepared for what she discovers: that she was
physically abused by her father, who also beat her mother.
“I don’t think I want any more truths,”
she whimpers. Gail confronts Buck with her suspicions. Once
again Buck emerges with the upper hand, despite his warnings:
her asks her if she is “ready to make a deal,”
she replies “And then what, you own my soul?”
It’s plain that it’s not just her soul Buck
is interested in, it’s the packaging too. She submits
to him and is, at least spiritually, broken. Their relationship
is consummated in The Plague Sower, the debt repaid. |
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Gail
begins to recapture some of her former feistiness in Echo
Of Your Las Goodbye, fighting against what Lucas calls “an
almost supernatural desire”. The link is finally broken,
and the status quo restored, when she discovers Judith’s
papers at the orphanage, and realises that Buck is Caleb’s
father. She tries to leave Trinity, but is horrified to
discover that she is pregnant with Buck’s child. She
attempts suicide, goaded on by Selena, but is rescued by
Caleb.
The series ends on a downbeat for Gail. When Buck dies in
The Buck Stops Here she admits that she still has feelings
for him. Finally, in Requiem, she’s attacked by Caleb,
loses her child, and is left hospitalised.
On a superficial level, Gail’s role in the series
seems to be rather low-key. However, closer analysis reveals
Gail is repeatedly used as the catalyst to make progress
in the series’ long reaching plot arcs.
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It's
obvious that the writers found her easy to write for, and
had lots of fun in the process. Selena is a very complex
woman. She'd be the first to admit that she's the good time
had by all. Our first encounter with Selena is in Stemmerman's
Pool Hall and appropriately, she's dressed in scarlet. Shortly
afterwards we discover that Selena is a teacher at Trinity
Elementary School; scenes that contrast starkly with the
flirtatious Selena we'd witnessed earlier. In later episodes
we often visit her at the school - she seems to have a genuine
rapport with the children, yet these scenes are rather poignant,
too. |
Selena's
promiscuity probably results from her low self-esteem. Buck
treats her like a whore, yet she stays with him for most
of the series. Theirs is certainly a love/hate relationship.
But make no mistake - with or without her mentor, Selena
is a dangerous woman. In the pilot, Buck sends her to seduce
his Deputy, Ben Healy, to discover how much he's willing
to tell her about Merlyn's death. In the very next episode,
A Tree Grows In Trinity, she tries to reduce the saintly
Matt. (She tries again in To Hell And Back, tempting the
former alcoholic with a drink.) It is also A Tree Grows
In Trinity that contains the most shocking revelations about
Selena. We discover that she has had the reporter, Rafael
Santo, imprisoned in a shack in the woods for several months,
and treats him as a sex slave.
A scene
shot from the episode's pre-credits sequence, but dropped
from the final edit, would have provided an early indicator
that Selena was short changed in the marbles department.
It showed her talking to, and gently feeding, Santo, as
if it was an everyday domestic situation. Later in the episode
Buck asks her, reproachfully, "What did you do? Bite
off his tongue in a fit of passion?" Chastised, she
says nothing, and it takes a few seconds before the implications
of the scene sink in.
The depths of Selena's depravity aren't explored quite so
graphically after this, although it's obvious that she has
a penchant for kinky sex. She uses a candle to drip hot
wax onto Buck's chest in Dead To The World. She teases Gail
about Buck in Ring Of Fire, "He's got strange taste,
doesn't he, Miss Emory?" Buck and Selena taunt each
other with their infidelities in Inhumanitas and Doctor
Death Takes A Holiday. (In the latter Selena purposefully
kisses Billy in front of Buck after she overhears him telling
Billy "I tell her what to think, and she thinks it."
It is, however, a rather futile gesture.) The most revealing
episode is Potato Boy, another pivotal show that wasn't
screened in America. It shows a completely different side
to Selena, and defines her personality. Caleb finds Selena
crying (she's been called a whore in the street), and comforts
her. She gives Caleb some extra tuition at her apartment,
and tells him the biblical origins of his name. Caleb cuts
himself, and Selena mothers him. It's a rare moment of normality
and perfectly depicts Selena's vulnerability. Later she
visits a local priest, her father, who shuns her. "Brenda
Bakke has speculated that this was because Selena murdered
her mother!) Buck uses Selena throughout the series: to
seduce Ben (in Resurrector as well as the pilot); to get
Mel Kirby to confess to murdering his wife in Resurrector;
and as a bargaining chip with the kidnappers in Learning
To Crawl.
Selena
is one of the few characters that continues to develop satisfactorily
as the season progressed. Bringing in Billy Peele was a
wise move in this respect, allowing Selena to free herself
a little from Buck's grip. Eventually, in the last few episodes,
it becomes painfully obvious that Selena is quite insane.
There a clues aplenty, both obvious and subtle. Her obsession
with getting even with Buck eventually sours her relationship
with Billy, who realises that Buck will never allow Selena
to escape his clutches. In Triangle, an episode showcasing
Gail and Selena, she admits to her self-destructive tendencies,
telling the suicidal Gail that she'll "meet you cliffside."
Events take a sickening turn in Requiem, where Selena offers
her services to the possessed Caleb. It recalls the unnerving
scene in Echo Of Your Last Goodbye, who Selena tells Caleb
"Don’t be putting your hand where they don't
belong, least not yet..." She tells Caleb that Gail's
unborn child is a threat to his blossoming power ("another
heir in the oven, and heir that should have been mine"),
and lures Gail into Caleb's trap. Buck blames Selena for
Gail's miscarriage, and finally discards her. |
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It's
rare - but not unprecedented - that one of the lead characters
in a television series is killed off in the first episode.
Merlyn's death at the beginning of the Pilot sets the sombre
tone for the entire series, creating a new baseline which
all the subsequent events are measured against. It also
acts as a catalyst for the story arc concerning Buck's claim
that Caleb is his son, the principal theme that continues
right to the very end of Requiem.
Merlyn had been traumatised when she witnessed Lucas Buck
raping her mother (an event that resulted in Caleb's birth
and their mother's suicide). Merlyn's father, Gage Temple,
attacks her with a spade, driven over the edge by her repetitive
chanting, "Someone's at the door. Someone's at the
door. Someone's at the door." Lucas Buck arrives and
breaks her neck; an act which he later defends to his Deputy
as a mercy killing.
Ironically,
Merlyn's death liberates her, and she is finally able to
communicate with Caleb, who had protected his sister when
she was vulnerable. "In life you were my voice,"
she tells Caleb, "and now you must hear me." Resurrected,
she is consumed with a burning sense of injustice, but initially
with little power to exact her revenge. She's originally
only seen by Caleb, although she is able to manifest herself
in other ways. (The bloody messages seen by Buck and Curtis
Webb's tape recorder in A Tree Grows In Trinity, for example).
From Rebirth onwards Merlyn gains the means to be seen by
other characters; a skill she soon put to good use, appearing
to Father Tilden in Inhumanitas, for example.
In Echo Of Your Last Goodbye she appears to Ben in the guise
of a date that he'd arranged to meet through the personal
ads. Later in the episode she appears as several characters,
in the bar where Ben is drinking his way towards oblivion.
We see
another side of Merlyn in Rebirth, when she takes the opportunity
to use the soul of Kristy's unborn child to reincarnate
herself as Halle Monroe, relishing her new found corporeal
existence. She falls in love with Ray, and there's some
doubt that she will be willing to give up this new life.
It's a key episode for Merlyn, and is a welcome after a
couple of episodes where she appears only briefly, if at
all.
Merlyn's motivations are complex and often contradictory.
She fluctuates from being saintly to being as cold and calculating
as Buck.
She endangers
Kristy's child in Rebirth, and punishes Matt and Gail with
sickness that she's spreading throughout Trinity in The
Plague Sower. Caleb reprimands her for going too far, but
it is too late for Matt, who is permanently injured. She
is also indirectly responsible for the death of the nurse
in Strangler, who is killed after Merlyn riles DeSalvo.
From the events that we witness it's likely that Merlyn's
body count exceeds Buck's.
Her two fundamental desires are to reveal the truth about
her death and to protect Caleb from Buck's influence. In
Learning To Crawl she'd rather see Caleb dead, after his
electrocution in the Sheriff's office, then let him return
with Buck. Eventually though, in Requiem, she is forced
to side with Buck to prevent Caleb from being corrupted
by evil. |
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