Hal horizontal in V.R.5 (Family and Hamlet)
Charles Tavis is probably not related to the Moms by actual blood. […] For their part, the Moms and C.T. have never represented themselves as anything other than unrelated but extremely close.
Context
The scene's long horizontal litany drifts into the Tavis succession's origin, and every fact of it is unstable. C.T. arrives in the family as the infant of a dwarf widow the Moms's binge-drinking father brought home from a disappearance, his own father killed at competitive darts during the delivery; the whole account comes from seven-year-old Orin decocting it out of a distraught C.T. in an OB/GYN waiting room, and "Pinpoint accuracy had never been Orin's forte." So the usurper-administrator's provenance — the very question of how the man who now runs the dead king's house is related to the queen — is unknowable, and lands on the scene's quietly loaded formula: they present as "unrelated but extremely close." The Claudius apparatus is installed not as accusation but as permanent ambiguity, a blood-relation the family will neither confirm nor deny.