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One of the boldness’s of Santa
Barbara at the origin of the magic it offers to its viewers is the
occasional appeal to fantastic elements. We listen to the fantastic events
taking place in reality that no science or no logic can rationally explain. That
is why we shall not speak here about the dreams had by the characters (The Capwell
zone for example), or the hallucinations arisen from a state of coma
(Brandon reliving the Nativity at Christmas 1988). Following the example of
other daytime soap-operas, Santa
Barbara had appeal to fantastic elements repeatedly during its
existence. These events outside reality can be divided into three categories:
the fantastic meetings, the premonitory dreams and the time travels.
The fantastic meetings
One of the first incursions of Santa
Barbara in the fantastic category takes place in October 1986. Eden
Capwell and Cruz Castillo, then engaged, go to the South of France, in Monte
Carlo then in Nice for a romantic stay. Hosted in a castle in Nice, they
discover a suitcase containing old costumes from the last century. The owner of
the castle tells them that they belonged to the son of the Duke of the castle,
Edward, and to a woman named Anna with whom he was in love. But the Duke wanting
to force his son to marry a princess, Anna committed suicide by hoping to make
him change his mind and then to resuscitate to find Edward. Her plan having
failed, their love was never able to bloom, and they both continue to haunt the
castle forever, unable to find each other. Even if she is impressed by this
ghost story, Eden decides to wear the dress to spend an evening worthy of a
novel from the Renaissance with Cruz, her beloved. The spirits of Edward and
Anna do not need to appear to Eden, finally gathered thanks to the strength of
the love that Eden and Cruz were able to inspire them. The owner of the castle
moreover confirms to them that the drafts felt in some of the rooms disappeared
for this night, a sign that the souls of the unfortunate couple are finally in
peace.
The same story, minus a few details, happens
again in April 1988, this time during the wedding of Eden and Cruz in Pebble
Creek. It is just before their so awaited union that, with each of them, two
heroes get acquainted with Amelia and Captain Edward Anderson. Dressed in
costumes completely old-fashioned, the two characters turn out very quickly to
be the ghosts of a couple of lovers whose story is dramatic. Indeed, while
seeing the ship of her beloved sinking offshore at a few miles of the Pebble
Creek coast, Amelia committed suicide by throwing herself into the ocean. But
for the second time, the love of Eden and Cruz offers a couple of spirits the
force to break the fate which prevented them from meeting and from living their
love peacefully.
To believe that the destinies of Amelia and
her captain are intimately connected to those of Eden and Cruz, because in 1990,
on the occasion of a pilgrimage to Pebble Creek after their break-up, our heroes
find a lonely Amelia, separated too from the person she loves. The magic of
Pebble Creek then operates again and both couples succeed in re-forming and in
pursuing their adventures.
Read also : Eden
Capwell and Cruz Castillo's wedding
Another fantastic meeting operates in
December 1987, with a character often summoned in television shows in this
period of the year: Santa Claus. These are Julia Wainwright and Mason Capwell
who open the ball, asked to audition for the role of Santa Claus for a charity
party organized by Lionel Lockridge. They then meet a man named Kris Kringle,
who tells them he is the most competent for the job, being himself the real
Santa Claus. Julia and Mason have fun with it, while wondering around at Kris’
place to find out about the whole life of both heroes from their childhood. When
after an unfortunate combination of circumstances, Kris ends up being locked in
prison, he does not wait to disappear in smoke to join his cabin under the snow.
There Julia and Mason find him and spend a night in his guest room, persuaded to
be hosted by a delirious fanciful man. But at night, it is Kris that they see
from the window of their bedroom, flying towards heavens on his sled pulled by
flying reindeers...
Kris makes his return to Santa Barbara next
year. At Christmas time, this time Eden and Cruz seek him to participate in a
charity fair for the city orphans. After the party, Kris sprains his ankle a few
hours before the departure for his tour. He then asks Cruz for help for the
annual distribution of presents for all the young children of the world. With a
certain surprise, Cruz then finds himself playing the benefactor around the
world on a flying sleigh together with one of Kris' elves. Kris, to thank Eden
and Cruz for having played the temporary workers for the night, gives them the
gift of a magic stone which allows them to fulfil a wish. Eden then has the idea
to use it to wish the awakening of the young Brandon Capwell, plunged into a
profound coma at the hospital for several days. The magic operates and Brandon
wakes up immediately after the wish is pronounced. A beautiful Christmas Eve
rich in miracles...
Read also : The
biography of Kris Kringle
After Santa Claus, it is with guardian
angels that are confronted with some of the heroes of the show as from 1989. It
is at first Mason, during his coma, who flies away in paradise and discovers
there that his former love, Mary DuVall, is officially his guardian angel and
watches over him since her death about three years earlier. We would have been
able to believe that these so sweet reunion scenes come from Mason’s delirium
during his semi-conscious state, until an event confirms their truthfulness.
Indeed, a few months later, Julia and Mason, freshly married, go on a heavenly
desert island for their honeymoon. But Julia falls seriously ill suddenly and
Mason is afraid for her life. The appearance of a mysterious woman came to bring
care and a cure for Julia which allows her to survive. When Mason understands by
a letter she left him that their benefactress is in fact Mary, her status of
guardian angel is then confirmed without any discussion.
Read also : Detour
to Paradise, to find oneself better...
Another guardian angel then makes his
appearance at Christmas 1989: while Cruz is further discouraged by his problems
with Eden, an unpredictable and strange man comes to him. He tells him that his
name is Paddy and that he is his guardian angel. He offers Cruz the necessary
comfort to help him to get back on his feet, by showing him how much he is loved
and also by presenting him the life of his family and friends without his
presence and his support. Thanks to the success of his action, Paddy will even
gain his wings to Eden.
Finally, it is one year later, in December
1990 that the third guardian angel intervenes to save another hero of the show.
It is Briana, who appears to Eden during her coma, and allows her to change in a
irreversible way some events of past (see lower, in the time travels).
Read also : The
biography of Paddy
A last fantastic meeting can be mentioned,
still in 1990. It is the one of Cruz with the old Indian, shaman of the Sakites
tribe. He, before dying, gives Cruz (who would be a descendant of the tribe), a
talisman with magic powers. The effects of this object on Cruz confirm these
statements, because in its ownership, Cruz repeatedly escapes death by miracles.
The man was a magician, whose powers were moreover desired by many persons, of
whom a Pasha, who kidnaps Cruz in his Moroccan palace to bring light to the
origin of these powers. But this is then another story...
Read also : Cruz
captive of a harem
The premonitory dreams
In Santa Barbara, the heroine (heroin) the
most convenient to the premonitory dreams is named Eden Capwell. Twice in the
series, Eden succeeds in seeing in a dream the elements with no knowledge of
which she had nevertheless and that she had no means to guess. The first time
goes back up to her marriage with Cruz in 1988. During an ancestral ceremony in
Mexico, Guillermo Castillo, Cruz’s uncle, predicts for Eden that she will see
in a dream the place where she and Cruz can get married. Eden has fun with it,
until she had one night the dream of a large (upper-class) hotel built on a
magnificent property on the border of the ocean. While she gets ready to give up
finding this place in the reality, she makes a surprising discovery: her parents
already surrendered in this place. It is even over there that they spent their
honeymoon and conceived Eden! Nevertheless, they had never spoken to her about
it nor even less shown a photo. Moreover, even there, in the hotel of Pebble
Creek, Eden will feel as enticed by a magnet towards the room where her parents
had stayed, more than twenty five years earlier...
Read also : The
biography of Guillermo Castillo
It is the next year when Eden will again be
subject to a series of premonitory dreams. While they had confirmation that
their baby Adriana did not finally die, Eden and Cruz is in the incapacity to
locate her. It is then Eden that has regularly visions of her child asleep, as
well as the place which she does not succeed in defining. She will need several
days to discover finally that this place is situated in Paris and that it is the
apartment occupied by Ric, Cruz’s brother. Until she finally sees Adriana
there, she is persuaded that her baby is in the reality there. If Cruz has
difficulty in adhering to her visions, the arrival of Eden in the French capital
confirms her dreams: her daughter is in the hands of Ric and of his wife... Or
how demonstrate, if need were, the links mystic quasi-uniting of every mother to
her child...
During the same storyline, a second person seems to weave some narrow links with Adriana and the other characters involved in her kidnapping: the medium Sandra Mills. From the moment she appears to Cruz with the certainty that Adriana is alive, Sandra shows at many times the veracity of her gifts. During phases of "dreams", Sandra is capable of feeling Catherine Thoreau's death and of guaranteeing that the body of a child found dead is not Adriana's.
The time travels
Great classic of the science-fiction, the
time travel is also part of the fantastic themes approached by Santa
Barbara. The show applies the theory which wants an event that is
modified in the past, to then have immediate repercussions in the present.
The first time travel takes place in 1988,
after the wedding of Eden Capwell and Cruz Castillo. Once united, the couple
decide to spend their honeymoon in Pebble Creek, love place of Eden's parents
where they conceived her. By discovering an old book in one of the bedrooms of
their hotel, Eden and Cruz have fun reading the magic curses it contains and see
a mirror which leads them directly... to 1962. And so they fall on that period
version of Sophia and C.C. Capwell, at the time of their arrival to Pebble
Creek. But C.C.'s legendary jealousy does not delay in making him become enraged
with his young wife, when he surprises her dancing with Cruz and having fun with
him. The couple quarrel and threaten to part. Eden worries about the effects on
the present if her parents do not get reconciled and do not conceive her, as
says it History, during their stay there. So, Cruz tries to persuade C.C. that
there is nothing between Sophia and him, whereas Eden convinces Sophia that all
men are jealous and that she has to forgive her husband. By organizing the
reunion of her parents in the stables of the hotel, Eden succeeds in restoring
the events having led to her conception and by there even to her existence. Once
the past is saved, Eden and Cruz hurry to leave the 60s to return in their good
old year of 1988.
The second time travel this time concerns
only Eden. At the end of 1990, Eden is victim of a car accident and goes to the
hospital, plunged into a profound coma. Her guardian angel Briana appears to her
then and offers her the possibility of returning in the past to, at first, clear
up a murder. Indeed, a few days before her coma, Eden shot in position of
self-defence at Robert Barr, her former boyfriend and her sister Kelly's new
love. But as she could not prove that she was threatened, Eden said nothing
about it to the police and Kelly was charged in her place. So Eden comes back on
the scene at the evening of the murder, and discovers, like a spirit, another
vision of the events that happened that night. She surprises at first Craig Hunt
prowling in secret rooms of Robert's manor house, before discovering that
another person was also present this evening. This unknown person was in fact
all this time hidden behind one of the panels of the wall overhanging the
staircases of the manor house and shot at Robert a first time, just before
Eden's fire. So, Eden does not have to feel guilty of having killed Robert
anymore and can help, once brought out of her coma, to get Kelly acquitted.
But the occasions to modify the present during time travels thanks to Briana do not stop there for Eden. Still in a coma, Eden takes advantage of the opportunity which is offered to her to erase an evening she cared about a lot: the one when her mother Sophia offered herself for one night to her former lover Lionel Lockridge, one evening of 1990. So she goes back to this evening and reaches in preventing them from committing the irreparable action. So that even the compromising photos of this act which Gina Capwell had taken without her knowledge to blackmail Sophia to disappear, the event having been erased by Eden in the past and thus even in the present.
In any daytime soap-opera, the part of magic and dream has to be always tangible "to make sacred" a love story and to lead it on the way of the myth. This is what the writers managed to weave with delicacy and with certain realism, around the couple Eden Capwell and Cruz Castillo, or also around the story of Mary DuVall and Mason Capwell. Even if the authors kept a rather conventional approach of the incursion of fantastic in reality (ghosts, guardian angels and Santa Claus), it is necessary to recognize that it protected the viewers of any incoherence or dive in ridiculous storylines (such as the return of Bobby Ewing under the shower one year after his death in Dallas, or the kidnapping of Fallon Carrington by aliens in The Colbys).
