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I want to thank you SO much for doing the lords work and posting the script summaries from S6. The amount of times you’ve had to rewatch that season must be horrifying haha. We all so much appreciate you & your efforts!!

I know you have a lot of territory to cover before this, but I must ask, does the tooth have any meaning?!? You don’t have to tell me if it’ll ruin your future post, its just one of those details that still keeps me up at night 🥴

Thank you again! ❤️

Hi! Aw, thank you. I'm so glad I've been able to share them, and I'm just sorry it's taking me so long! I'm actually thinking of making a schedule for posting them so I'll have set appointments with myself to go through the scenes and sob lol.

As far as the tooth, nope, I remember no other mentions of it in the screenplays after Nick picks it up. I consumed them all fairly quickly, so if I'm wrong about that, you'll see when I get into eps 7-10, but I'm like 99% sure.

It’s so interesting to me because the tooth mystery is discussed a lot in the fandom, but for some reason that’s one of the few things in season 6 that doesn’t bother me! I don’t know why, but I didn’t expect it to come up again. I love the aesthetic of it and the fact that Nick cleaned up June’s crime scene. And I love that he just has it in his pocket presumably for the rest of the night. I even have this dark!Nick idea where he didn’t die and crosses paths with June in the woods like a decade later, and he's basically got this grizzled, badass, mountain man vibe going on. And she notices he’s wearing a tooth on a string around his neck, so he admits it’s from her kill. I'm not sure exactly what it would mean to him, but maybe some combination of his ruinous attachment to her, a symbol of her brutal side, and a reminder of the fact that he was devoted to the point of doing absolutely anything for her.

#nick blaine #season 6 #6x06 #osblaine #the tooth

In the Daemon Lover ballad itself, the Devil doesn't corrupt the woman so much as he reveals her.

We learn first that she previously made a promise to another man, and then broke it. Which in itself is pretty reasonable - he was away seven years, he might have abandoned her or died, she can't waste her life waiting, women often had to marry to survive. But she also takes almost no persuasion to leave her current husband and abandon her children. She is quite willing to do it! And the only question she asks of "James Harris" beforehand is how much wealth he has to take her to if she goes with him.

He deceives her, and she lets him deceive her because she wants to believe him. But the deception and her response to it reveals her true character.

I think the same is true for Shirley Jackson's James Harris. On one hand, when his name comes up in the stories it's associated with deception, self-delusion, previously certain things becoming unstable, loss of identity... But on the other hand, he's a disturbing figure in part because he serves to reveal the truth.

In "The Daemon Lover," the woman's search for James Harris shows us how lonely and unwanted she is, and how obsessed with social approval and validation; and it shows us the unkindness of the society around her, and lays bare female husband-hunting as a frantic race to avoid being relegated to the status of a scorned and irrelevant old maid.

In "Like Mother Used to Make," it takes only the brief nudge of James Harris making an incorrect assumption to drive David and Marcia's behaviour. David could so easily correct the assumption and stop her. But he doesn't. He watches his apartment and identity and life be taken over and makes no move to stop it, for fear of being impolite or having to assert himself. And we also see how Marcia doesn't want to be herself and doesn't like her own disorganised, dysfunctional life, but doesn't see herself as capable of organic change - so she has to appropriate someone else's life instead. (I wonder if David ever sensed her jealousy/covetousness before the beginning of the story. I wonder if he refused to recognise it on a conscious level and kept inviting her to dinner anyway, because it would have been rude not to.) James Harris's appearance just reveals certain tendencies that the characters have, and sets them into motion.

We see it in the other stories too. In "Elizabeth," obviously, he's used to show the extent of Elizabeth's unhappiness and the way she externalises it or turns it into self-delusion instead of recognising it. In "Seven Types of Ambiguity" his presence allows the man to buy the book and therefore reveals the man's insecurity and pettiness, the way he uses his newfound wealth to engage in a power-play against someone who helped him and treated him well. Even in "The Tooth," Clara's growing disorientation and eventual loss of self feels like something that already existed is being brought to light.

(It's kind of interesting with the context of James Harris being the Devil, and the Devil being referred to as a deceiver and the Father of Lies.)

And so many of the stories also revolve around seemingly stable situations being disrupted, or people's idealised images of things being shattered. Some of them don't feature James Harris directly - but he's there in that disturbance, in the sense of things not being as settled as they seem.

Also, this all means that James Harris is Shirley Jackson's representative within the stories. Someone who disturbs and unsettles the world of each work by revealing various truths about the characters and the society they inhabit.

#shirley jackson #the lottery and other stories #james harris #the daemon lover #elizabeth #like mother used to make #the tooth #seven types of ambiguity #folk music #child 243 #child ballads

💙💙 Mailbag Time! 💙💙

Fan Question:

“Is it true that The Reality War originally had a scene where Mrs. Flood picked up the Master’s tooth? And if so… why cut it???”

⸻

Ahhh now this is the kind of question that makes me want to light a candle, put on Murray Gold at full blast, and say… 🦷 “What is a tooth, really?” 😇

Look, it’s no secret that The Reality War was bursting at the seams. Time loops, memory glitches, rocket bikes, existential daughters, rogue time hotels—oh my! So when it came time to edit… we had to make choices. Hard ones.

Yes, a certain scene existed. A brief, quiet moment. A woman. A tooth. A long, thoughtful look.

But to really understand it, let’s go back. The Giggle wasn’t just a finale—it was a pivot point in reality. The Toymaker returned, chaos incarnate, puppeteering the world through laughter. We saw the Doctor split—into two faces, four hearts, one impossible timeline. We saw games lost and won, the Toymaker trapped once again in his golden box…

And just as silence fell, a hand reached in. Polished. Precise. It plucked the Master’s final remnant—sealed in that sinister little tooth—right out from under the universe’s nose.

No dialogue. No music. Just… intent.

The edit room has its own laws of time. And let’s be honest—did we want The Reality War ending with even more questions? Would that have been kind? Would that have been fair?

…Of course we would have! 😇 But sometimes you save things. Sometimes, you let the tooth linger. 🦷

And Mrs. Flood? Oh, she’s not done. Not by a long shot. She’s seen too much. Heard too much.

She’s collecting pieces of something…

Something that doesn’t just regenerate—

It rebuilds.

So yes.

A tooth.

A woman.

And a future, just waiting to bite.

#the giggle #the reality war #the tooth #the rani #the master

god has given me blood to drink

the tooth, shirley jackson

#the tooth #shirley jackson #clara’s tooth being her identity…. clara not knowing herself when the tooth is extracted..#god has given me blood to drink

Have you read "The Tooth" by Shirley Jackson?

Yes

I've never heard of this

Voting ended onDec 28, 2023

#short stories #short story #the tooth #shirley jackson #english language literature #american literature #20th century literature #have you read this short fiction?#book polls #completed polls

Then she realized that at the wash-basin she was in the way of the women in a hurry so she dried her face quickly. It was when she stepped a little aside to let someone else get to the basin and stood up and glanced into the mirror that she realized with a slight stinging shock that she had no idea which face was hers! She looked into the mirror as though into a group of strangers, all staring at her or around her; no one was familiar in the group, no one smiled at her or looked at her with recognition; you’d think my own face would know me, she thought, with a queer numbness in her throat. There was a creamy chinless face with bright blond hair, and a sharp-looking face under a red veiled hat, and a colorless anxious face with brown hair pulled straight back, and a square rosy face under a square haircut, and two or three more faces pushing close to the mirror, moving, regarding themselves. Perhaps it’s not a mirror, she thought, maybe it’s a window and I’m looking straight through at women washing on the other side. But there were women combing their hair and consulting the mirror; the group was on her side, and she thought, I hope I’m not the blonde, and lifted her hand and put it on her cheek. She was the pale anxious one with the hair pulled back and when she realized it she was indignant and moved hurriedly back through the crowd of women, thinking, It isn’t fair, why don’t I have any color in my face? There were some pretty faces there, why didn’t I take one of those? I didn’t have time, she told herself sullenly, they didn’t give me time to think, I could have had one of the nice faces, even the blonde would be better.

“The Tooth,” from The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

#the tooth #shirley jackson #literature #quotes #quote