@inez, actually I had the parent constructor called first, but it was causing a bug where two titles were being added to the figcaption after updating the caption. It's probably easier to explain in person or over skype, but I'll try here: 

Basically, in the onSplice method, (which is called when the caption is updated as well as when the thumbnail is created), this.$title was evaluating to false on caption update even though it had already been set when the thumbnail was created. Moving this.$title above the parent constructor fixed that problem. 

I'm not 100% sure why this is the case so if you have insight into this I'd appreciate it.