Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1085: What’s happened to my freedom?

If you’re telling a fictional story and your audience is with you, they will treat whatever you don’t explain as something that does not need to be explained. So if the story takes place in and around a village on the Atlantic coast about 50 miles from Bangor, Maine, you don’t need to explain why Bar Harbor doesn’t exist in the world you are describing. They will take it for granted that your village is on that spot instead.

When you introduce fantastic elements and don’t explain them, you have “fantasy fiction.” That’s the category Dark Shadows has belonged to since undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins joined the cast of characters late in 1966 and her arc absorbed all of the unresolved narrative threads that were still generating interest. So in March 1970, it turned out that an alternate universe could sometimes be glimpsed in a room in the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood, and that people who entered the room at the right time could cross over into that universe. The aperture between the universes was not induced by any process, either natural or artificial; it was just there, and it was marked by an ordinary door. The handful of throwaway lines we heard about the many-worlds hypothesis were not explanatory in any way; they were simply a description of one way the show might use the alternate universe to develop characters. Because the practicalities were not explained, we accepted them as something that needed no explanation.

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and her friend, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, crossed over into the other universe. They escaped from it in July, while the alternate version of Collinwood was on fire. Evidently the flames disturbed the aperture, because they found themselves, not in the summer of 1970, but in 1995. In that far-off future year, Collinwood was in ruins and everyone who had lived there was either dead, missing, or insane. Julia and Barnabas learned that this sad state of affairs resulted from a mysterious disaster that took place at some point in 1970. They had gathered only a little information as to what this disaster might have been when they had to flee for their lives. A ghost led them to a magic doorway behind which a staircase appeared. They followed this staircase to another doorway. They passed through that, and found themselves back in the Collinwood of their own native universe in 1970, sometime before the disaster is due to strike.

Passing from 1995 to 1970 by means of a stairway is as fantastic as passing from one universe to another by means of a door, but it was not explained, and has barely been mentioned these last three weeks as Julia, Barnabas, and those they have told of their experiences have been trying to figure out what the disaster is going to be and how they might prevent it. So we have accepted it as readily as we accepted the “Parallel Time room.”

That changes today. Julia knows that the ghosts represent people who lived in 1840, and has started looking for information about the staircase in documents from that year. Quentin Collins has been giving her a hand with this project. She finds a plan for a “Proposed Stairway into Time” signed by another Quentin Collins and dated 1840.

Plan. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The ghost of governess Daphne Harridge seemed friendly to Julia and Barnabas in 1995, but in 1970 she has ensorcelled Quentin and kept him from being as helpful to Julia as he might. Today, Daphne oversees the destruction of a notebook in which teens David Collins and Hallie Stokes have written an account of their experiences with her and the other ghosts. But later it seems Daphne might be coming back around. She gives Quentin another journal, which he hands over to Julia. In it, Julia finds that Quentin’s namesake from 1840 had written about the thoughts that led him to design his “Proposed Stairway into Time”:

There is no such thing as time. There’s only space, physical space, and it is space that measures the distance between those points which we, in our ignorance and folly, insist are points in time. All time is one point, one moment. It is ever existent and it is ever accessible, and it is physical space that can be used to make all time easily accessible.

This describes the show’s method of jumping backward, forward, and sideways in time accurately enough. They cut from a set in one part of the studio to a set in another, and in so doing they have defeated chronology. Since Julia has found the note as part of an investigation that has kept her busy for so long, we are led to expect that we will be hearing more of this kind of talk, perhaps arranged in a pattern that will create the impression that we are being presented with an explanation of something.

Dark Shadows has been desperately short of story since Julia and Barnabas returned to 1970, and spinning out explanations is one way of introducing new story points. When these explanations resemble theories that researchers are actually using to look into natural phenomena, they turn fantastic fiction into science fiction. At no point has Dark Shadows come anywhere near this genre, and it does not seem like the “Proposed Stairway into Time” will lead them there. But who knows. Before Laura came on the show, it was a Gothic romance that included hints that ghosts and other unearthly forces were at work in an uncanny back-world behind the action. If Laura could transform it from that into the supernatural thriller it has been ever since, perhaps Quentin’s namesake from 1840 will be able to transform it into a science-fiction show.

If they are going to take that route, a time-travel gimmick would seem to be the logical way to merge onto it. Ghosts and vampires and zombies and other revenants, like time travel and alternate universes, are ways of making believe that options which events have foreclosed are still at least partly open to us. So if we say that the 1840 Quentin built a time machine, we can subsume more or less everything else we have seen under the idea that he created a rupture in space-time through which all of the other weird phenomena have been cascading.

Episode 1084: A living man no bigger than a doll

Julia Hoffman and her friend Barnabas Collins recently returned to 1970 after a cosmic journey that ended with two weeks in 1995. In that far-off future year, they found the great house of Collinwood in ruins and everyone who had lived there either dead, missing, or hopelessly insane. This was the result of a mysterious disaster that occurred before 1970 was out. Since they returned, they have been trying to find out what this disaster will be and to prevent it.

Julia’s friend Timothy Eliot Stokes tells her she and Barnabas have accomplished nothing since they came back to 1970. He says that the time has come to enlist the aid of a strangely dressed man named Sebastian Shaw. Sebastian has psychic powers, and may be able to use them to figure out what’s going on.

Sebastian comes to the great house. Julia tells him of her experience in the future. He has a vision which he says he cannot interpret. It is presented to us in an unfocused shot, so that we can believe Sebastian does not know what he is seeing. But we recognize it. It is The Playroom, a room that intermittently exists behind a door in a little-used part of the great house. Most of the time that door opens on a linen closet, but teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins have found that occasionally the same door admits them to a much larger space stocked with antique toys and ruled by the ghosts of several people who died in 1841. Julia knows The Playroom well; she and Barnabas visited it several times in 1995, and met the same ghosts there who are now taking control of David and Hallie. Julia and Barnabas also went to The Playroom in 1995 with two living people, Carolyn Fredericks (née Carolyn Collins Stoddard) and the Sheriff of Collinsport. But in 1970, only the linen closet has so far been visible to anyone other than Hallie, David, or the ghosts.

After Sebastian has his vision, Stokes and Julia decide to bring David and Hallie to him. Stokes goes upstairs to fetch them, and Julia goes to get some tea. When she returns to the drawing room, Julia finds Sebastian at the piano. He is playing the melody that often sounds in The Playroom, and that Julia heard echoing through the house in 1995. She asks him where he heard it. When he says he was just making it up as he went along, she flatly declares that he is lying. He must have heard it in his vision, because it is the very tune that is associated with the phenomenon they are investigating. He will not admit to this, and she will not soften her tone. On the contrary, she says that she had suspected that he was a fraud, but that she now believes he is something far worse- a man with genuine psychic gifts who uses them dishonestly. We learned yesterday that this is precisely what Sebastian is, but Julia can hardly expect him to agree with her. He says that he is being insulted, and leaves the house before Hallie and David can get downstairs.

Julia has been given to counterproductively harsh behavior of this sort since returning to 1970. Perhaps this is the consequence of a trauma she suffered in 1995, when a blatantly evil ghost known as Gerard Stiles took possession of her. Or perhaps it is the influence of someone she encountered on the first leg of her journey, when she was in an alternate universe. There, she met her own Doppelgänger. She greeted this other Julia Hoffman by beating her to death, stealing her clothes, and assuming her identity. A deed like that might leave a mark on its doer. Besides, that other Hoffman was herself inclined to be tactless, so perhaps Julia picked that habit up in the course of her imposture.

Unknown to Julia and Stokes, David and Hallie are busy in The Playroom today. Yesterday they learned that the ghosts plan to reduce them to the status of the dolls that are in a dollhouse there. In particular, the ghost of a teenage boy named Tad wants to take possession of David, and that of a teenage girl named Carrie wants to take possession of Hallie. Tad and Carrie will then live their lives while David and Hallie are in storage as inanimate things in a miniature case. Hallie and David took the dolls to the fireplace in the drawing room and burned them there, hoping this would break the power of the ghosts. Once they had seen the flames consume the dolls, they returned to The Playroom, hoping to find that it had vanished and the linen closet had resumed its place. To their dismay, they found that The Playroom was still there and the dolls had reappeared in their places in the dollhouse.

While David and Hallie are processing this fact, they see lights come on inside the dollhouse. The dollhouse has no electricity, so this puzzles them. David looks inside the dollhouse and sees a man in it. He is the size of the dolls, but is moving around as if he is alive. By the time Hallie comes around to look, the tiny man has vanished. She believes that David saw him, though.

David then tells Hallie that they ought to write up everything that has happened to them since they first encountered The Playroom. When Hallie asks what good that would do, David says it is the only way people will know what happened to them after they are gone.

They go to David’s room and write the whole story in a notebook. When Stokes comes to get them, they hide the notebook. They return to the room after Sebastian’s abrupt departure, and find that the notebook is gone.

Hallie and David decide that one of the ghosts must have taken the notebook. They go to The Playroom to look for it. They open the door, and see Carrie and Tad reading the notebook.

David and Hallie see Carrie and Tad. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David’s vision of a little man moving around inside the dollhouse now reminds me of the moment in part 6 of the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks when a tiny version of the supernatural figure known as “Mike” appears to the near-catatonic Special Agent Dale Cooper and urges him to “Wake up! Wake up! Don’t die! Don’t die!” “Mike” is a resident of The Red Room, a space that is as mysterious in its nature and as intermittent in its presence as is The Playroom. We can assume that the tiny man David sees is Gerard, whose plans for him are just the opposite of “Mike’s” wish that Cooper should regain his true identity and once more function as an action hero.

At the time, the idea of living figures small enough to make their homes in a dollhouse and of people from the outside world shrunken and enclosed with them might have reminded viewers of the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “Miniature,” featuring the young Robert Duvall as a lonely man who encounters such a situation. “Mike” himself is a reference to 1960s cult television; he is a mysterious one-armed man who sometimes goes by the name Philip Gerard, evoking the two antagonists Dr Richard Kimble faced on The Fugitive. So it is not unlikely that “Miniature” was a common source for that installment of Twin Peaks and this installment of Dark Shadows. It isn’t even impossible that David Lynch or Mark Frost saw this episode of Dark Shadows and were on some level influenced by it as they wrote the script for Twin Peaks, though of course that would be a far less probable source than The Twilight Zone, which has long been one of the most heavily rerun of all TV shows.

At any rate, I think the similarity is intriguing even beyond the question of influences and sources. A soundstage looks a lot like a dollhouse, and when a drama isn’t connecting with the audience the actors may as well be dolls the director is playing a private game with. So the premise of characters ending up in a dollhouse plays to a fear that must prey on the minds of the writers.

Moreover, all three of these shows share a theme of stunted sexual development. Robert Duvall’s character in “Miniature” is a solitary man who cannot achieve any form of intimacy with another person. The stupefied Agent Cooper lives with a woman who has mistaken him for her husband and enjoys sex with her, but that is strictly a matter of mechanics. He has no idea what is going on during their encounters.

For their part, David and Hallie seem to be developing on the usual timetable. Certainly the dialogue between them when they were first introduced acknowledged that they were old enough to be interested in each other sexually, though David made it very clear to Hallie that she was not the partner he would choose. But Tad and Carrie seem to be quite alarmingly immature. Tad first possessed David in #1081, on Monday. That day, Hallie found David in The Playroom. Speaking as Tad, David took her to be Carrie. Tad was shocked by Hallie’s 1970 clothing and advised her to take it off immediately. It doesn’t seem to occur to Tad that there is anything untoward about demanding Carrie disrobe in front of him. Tad also said that he would be sad when he was too old to play with the toys in The Playroom. But he is very obviously much too old to be enthusiastic about a rocking horse, a dollhouse, a miniature carousel, and a bunch of stuffed animals. So his and Carrie’s attachment to those things shows that even when they were alive they were relics of a dead past. They never grew up, and their ghosts are determined to freeze Hallie and David in place, immobilized and on display in a small, unchanging world.

Danny Horn’s post under the title Episode 1084 on his great Dark Shadows Every Day doesn’t have all that much to do with the episode, but it is a magnificent production in its own right. Its subtitle is “100 Things That I Would Like David and Hallie to See When They Open the Playroom Door, in No Particular Order.” The 100 things he lists range from chuckleworthy to hilarious. Best of all, it ends with a video the post inspired Cody Schell to put together with alternate endings for the episode.

Episode 1083: The grifters

Elizabeth Collins Stoddard called on astrologer Sebastian Shaw in #1073 and commissioned him to do her horoscope for the rest of the year. Contrary to the dire warnings Liz had received from her distant cousin Barnabas Collins and her permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, Sebastian’s horoscope predicted that nothing of the slightest interest would happen at the great house of Collinwood for the rest of the year 1970. So far as Liz can tell, this has held true.

Longtime viewers know that denial, the psychological defense mechanism, is the keynote of Liz’ character. Evidently this information is also available to Sebastian and his associate Roxanne Drew. Liz’ friend Timothy Eliot Stokes visits Sebastian today, and Sebastian has a vision of the two teenagers who reside at Collinwood as they will be at some point in the near future. He tells Stokes that he sees the two of them are asleep. But after Stokes leaves, he tells Roxanne that in fact they were not asleep, but dead. He wants to go to Collinwood and tell Liz the truth, but Roxanne forbids him, saying that doing so will jeopardize their relationship with Liz, the richest sucker they’ve ever had on the line.

Roxanne makes it clear that neither Sebastian nor the story is going anywhere. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In these scenes, we learn that Roxanne is evil and that she has control over Sebastian. We also get the idea that her plans are probably short-term. She must expect to have completed fleecing Liz and skipped town before the disaster occurs. Otherwise, even if Liz survives they’ll be losing her as a client when she discovers that Sebastian’s predictions were wrong.

Anyone could tell Liz what she wants to hear, but since Sebastian really can see into the future, using him as a lie-teller seems like a sheer failure of imagination on Roxanne’s part. That’s only one of several problems with the writing of these episodes. The show is heading for a trip back in time, which requires designing sets, making costumes, planning out new stories with new characters, casting parts, etc. As day follows day and we keep finding ourselves back where we started, it seems that they are just stalling while all that work is being done. I suppose if Sebastian were to make full use of his gifts, he might make the story move fast enough that they would run out of road before they are ready to move on.

If Sebastian were simply a fraud, he might be able to spin things out as the makers of the show need. But the only person we have seen who pretended to have supernatural gifts was Miss Pansy Faye in #771. For some time Pansy had been making a living by faking contact with the spirit world. But once she found herself in the ghost-packed environs of Collinwood, Pansy actually served as a medium for communication with that other world, much to her surprise. So a fraudulent Sebastian would just encourage longtime viewers to get their hopes up for a similarly clever resolution. By the time all the contracts were signed, sets prepared, and wardrobe fitted, we’d be the ones feeling cheated.

Episode 1082: I haven’t been wrong very often when it comes to judgment of people

Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman have returned to 1970 from a cosmic journey that took them first to a parallel universe, then to the future year 1995. In the parallel universe, they met a comatose woman named Roxanne Drew. Barnabas was immediately smitten with Roxanne, and was still attracted to her even after she gained the ability to open her eyes and move around. By the time she was able to speak, he was in love. Roxanne couldn’t come along when they left her universe, and he’s been down in the dumps about that. Barnabas could always go to the hospital and look for another comatose woman, but I suppose that might not be quite the same, somehow.

Now, Barnabas has met Roxanne’s counterpart in his own universe. She is attached to astrologer Sebastian Shaw, whom Barnabas had been pestering for reasons having to do with the efforts he and Julia have been making to prevent a mysterious disaster they learned about during their stay in 1995. Sebastian was so fed up with Barnabas that he walked out of his own living room, leaving Barnabas alone there. Then the door opened, and a Roxanne Drew entered, carrying a brown paper grocery bag. Barnabas greeted her by name, to her puzzlement.

When Barnabas explains that he knew another Roxanne Drew who looked exactly like her “in another time,” Roxanne assumes he means many years ago. He allows her to proceed under this assumption, which does seem less likely to prompt a call to the police than introducing yourself to a stranger with a story about how you’ve been traveling between parallel universes and back and forth in time. Roxanne comes out with a theory that two people with the same name born on the same day in different parts of the USA might become “astral twins” and look just alike. This idea may not be less plausible than what Julia and Barnabas have actually done, but it does seem considerably less likely to be useful in making up interesting stories. So it comes as a great relief when Roxanne stops talking about it.

Barnabas asks Roxanne to meet him for dinner at 10 PM. This is an odd invitation, since Barnabas is a vampire. Where is he going to take her, the blood bank? She hesitates, but at length agrees to meet him “there.” They haven’t named a place.

Later, Roxanne calls the great house of Collinwood. Julia answers. Roxanne identifies herself, and Julia reacts with amazement. Roxanne says she must be thinking of “that other Roxanne Drew.” She says that she won’t be able to meet Barnabas for dinner “there” after all.

Barnabas enters. He is excited to tell Julia about Roxanne. She tells him she already knows about her, and gives him Roxanne’s message. Julia reminds him that some people in the parallel universe were radically different from their counterparts in this universe, giving herself and her counterpart as an example. Barnabas refuses to admit that this Roxanne Drew is not the same person as the one whose immobility and silence so charmed him in the other continuity. Julia keeps warning him, and he declares that “I haven’t been wrong very often when it comes to judgment of people.” This remark will astound regular viewers. Barnabas is a worse judge of character than any figure in all human history. I myself can’t claim to be all that perspicacious, but neither I nor anyone else I know has ever misjudged a person so desperately we were turned into vampires as a result. That has happened to Barnabas twice. Julia is so stunned by Barnabas’ bizarre remark that all she can do is humor him and say that she agrees with his assessment of himself.

Barnabas goes back to Sebastian’s apartment and speaks to Roxanne. She says he must not have received her message. He says he did, but asks to come in anyway. She allows it, and he gets strangely aggressive with his insistence that they will eventually go out together. He’s usually a lot more pleasant with people, unless he’s been feeding on their blood or threatening to kill them. He wants to charm Roxanne, so we may wonder why he gets in her face, adopts a sullen tone, and vows that she will someday date him. The other Roxanne had an obnoxious ex-boyfriend named Claude North. In his sulky and petulant refusal to take no for an answer, or even for an indication that he has to change tactics, Barnabas sounds a lot like Claude.

Meanwhile, Julia has been trying to find out which house in the area was known as “Rose Cottage” in 1840. During their sojourn in 1995, she and Barnabas received some cryptic clues about the disaster that will befall the great house of Collinwood and everyone in it later in 1970, one of which was the phrase “the night Rose Cottage was destroyed.” Also during that trip they saw the ghosts of some people who lived in 1840, and since returning have found a document from that year that mentions a house called Rose Cottage, but does not say which house it was.

Teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins had died in the version of 1995 Barnabas and Julia visited. They saw ghosts who looked just like them, but were in fact those of figures from 1840 named Carrie and Tad. Julia suspects that David and Hallie are withholding information from her about paranormal occurrences in the house, as she and Barnabas are withholding information from them. Rather than leveling with Hallie and David about what they learned in 1995 and asking them to reciprocate, Julia has decided to be as inexplicably harsh and aggressive with Hallie as Barnabas is with Roxanne.

Hallie finds Julia going through some old tax records today. When Julia says that she is trying to figure out what house in the area used to be known as “Rose Cottage,” Hallie mentions that Julia had previously asked her if she’d ever heard of such a place. Julia takes that remark as an opportunity to fix Hallie with an unwavering stare and drill her with question after question. During this bizarre interrogation, the ghost of Tad and Carrie’s governess Daphne Harridge appears to Hallie, reminding her not to answer. Julia loses interest in Hallie and turns back to the tax records. Hallie excuses herself and follows Daphne out of the room.

David has a dream in which he finds Hallie in an unfamiliar corridor. He asks her where they are. She says they are in Rose Cottage. She tells him to follow her to a birthday party. He is unhappy that he has not brought a present; she laughs a little at this. They go into a small room and see two dummies sitting opposite each other at a table. Hallie says that they will sit in the other two places at the table. There are placecards identifying them as Carrie and Tad. They sit down, and Daphne’s gigantic face appears at the window. Daphne has been silent in all her appearances so far. She breaks her silence in this dream, laughing maniacally at the sight of David and Hallie sitting with the dummies.

Happy Dappy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David wakes up. He goes to a little-used part of the house. He finds Hallie in front of a door behind which there is usually a linen closet. Sometimes, however, the space transforms into a larger room stocked with antique toys. Hallie and David refer to that room as “The Playroom.” They have seen Daphne there several times and have sensed the presence of another, more blatantly hostile spirit, one which Julia and Barnabas came to know in 1995 as Gerard Stiles. Hallie asks David why he has joined her. He tells her about his dream. It turns out she had the same dream. They resign themselves to entering The Playroom. Inside, they see a dollhouse that has previously been set up with its facade towards them is now set on a lower table with its interior on display. There is a room that looks just like the one in their dream, complete with dolls sitting at the table.

Barnabas and Julia visited The Playroom several times in the future, and the dollhouse was there then. It always seemed likely that the dollhouse was a model of Rose Cottage. Now, it is confirmed that it is not merely a model of it, but is in some sense identical with it. Perhaps it is a ghostly survival of a house that no longer exists, or perhaps it is a mystical reflection of a haunted house that stands somewhere else in the area. One way or another, it seems that Hallie and David are fated to lose their independent existence and become inert playthings confined to an inaccessible space.

David, Hallie, Daphne, and Gerard are part of a recycled story. In late 1968 and early 1969, Dark Shadows adapted Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw with David and his friend Amy in the roles of the children Miles and Flora and the ghosts of Quentin Collins and Beth Chavez as the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. The whole point of the novella is that it is an open question whether the ghosts are real and the new governess is heroically trying to save the children from them or the ghosts are figments of the imagination of the governess, a crazy woman who is a mortal threat to her charges. Benjamin Britten’s opera preserves that ambiguity to some extent, but screen adaptations tend to come down firmly in favor of the ghosts being real. The first “Haunting of Collinwood” left no room for doubt on that score, and the current Re-Haunting of Collinwood is just as emphatic.

The ghosts of Quentin and Beth were silent when we first saw them in 1968, as Daphne’s ghost has been silent until she laughs maniacally today. They made their first appearance in #646, but neither of them made a sound until Quentin laughed maniacally in #689. Gerard has yet to make himself heard, though actor James Storm read the opening voiceover narration in #1066.

Episode 1081: Tell me what I said

This script badly needed another trip through the typewriter before it fell into the hands of the cast and production staff.

We start in a mysterious room that intermittently materializes in a disused corner of the great house of Collinwood. It is stocked with toys appropriate for small children, and is known to teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes as “The Playroom.” Hallie sees a boy in clothing from the nineteenth century who appears to be David making vigorous use of the rocking horse in the room. He will not respond to her in any way, so she leaves the room and goes to the hallway. There, she is shocked to find David wearing his usual clothes and smiling at her.

This bit is video copied and inserted from the end of #1080. After the opening title, Hallie explains to David that she saw him in the room studying a model ship that is there. This is not remotely true. We saw the room throughout Hallie’s whole time there, and at no point did the boy whom she took to be David look at the model ship. Nor did we see the ship, for that matter. This episode was taped four days before #1080, so they may have forgotten about Hallie’s lines until they spliced in the opening, at which point it was too late. In view of the pressures of time and budget to which the makers of the show were subject that may be understandable, but it can hardly be considered a good start.

There is a lot more business involving Hallie and David. They keep taking turns being possessed by ghosts and then returning to themselves, not knowing what they said or did. David Henesy is a good enough comic actor to get laughs each time this happens to David Collins, but it does not advance the story or deepen our understanding of the characters. Since it is a repeat of a story we saw a year and a half ago when other ghosts took possession of David and his friend Amy, it doesn’t even come as a surprise.

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins learns that his distant cousin, Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes, has had a disappointment. Carolyn asked an astrologer named Sebastian Shaw to draw up her horoscope. Sebastian has abandoned the task partway through and refuses to finish it. Barnabas recently took a trip to the year 1995, Collinwood was still in ruins as the result of an unexplained disaster that will take place later in this current year, 1970. In 1995, a crazed Carolyn wrote a note with six cryptic phrases which Barnabas took to be clues as to the events that would precede the disaster. One of those phrases was “The unfinished horoscope.” When Barnabas hears what Sebastian has done, he decides that by persuading him to finish the horoscope he might be able to prevent the disaster.

We cut to Sebastian’s place, where we see that Sam Hall was not the only person having difficulty writing today. We zoom in on a folder labeled “CAROLYN STODRARD HAWKES.” The camera lingers over the big block letters for so long that you could have read them even on a 1970 television picking up the low-quality signal typical of ABC affiliates:

Stodrard. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas is unable to persuade Sebastian to finish the horoscope. Sebastian declares that “The only Schumann that tells me what I must do is me!” and walks out of his own parlor, leaving Barnabas alone there. Barnabas looks bewildered, perhaps wondering why Sebastian thinks his name is Schumann.

The door opens, and a woman enters. When Carolyn telephoned Sebastian yesterday, someone other than him answered, so we might suspect someone else lives there. But there was no hint as to who that might be. In fact, it is someone whose name Barnabas knows very well. She is Roxanne Drew. They have never met, and she doesn’t know him from Schumann. But before his trip to 1995, Barnabas was staying in an alternate universe and he got to know Roxanne’s counterpart there. He somehow fell in love with her and has been pining for her ever since. He greets this Doppelgänger by name, with a triumphant smile.

I should mention that a copy of the book Astrology by Louis MacNeice figures prominently in these episodes. I’ve never read that book myself, but I have an acquaintance in common with MacNeice. I was a graduate student in Classics at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1990s, and one of my professors was Peter Green. As a young poet in England in the years after the Second World War, Peter had been something of a protege of MacNeice’s. Since astrology is a way of inscribing the passage of time with meaning, and since Dark Shadows is so much about time travel that it insisted on calling the alternate universe where Barnabas met the first Roxanne “Parallel Time,” I think it would be apt to quote MacNeice’s “Meeting Point“:

Time was away and somewhere else,

There were two glasses and two chairs

And two people with the one pulse

(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):

Time was away and somewhere else.

And they were neither up nor down;

The stream’s music did not stop

Flowing through heather, limpid brown,

Although they sat in a coffee shop

And they were neither up nor down.

The bell was silent in the air

Holding its inverted poise—

Between the clang and clang a flower,

A brazen calyx of no noise:

The bell was silent in the air.

The camels crossed the miles of sand

That stretched around the cups and plates;

The desert was their own, they planned

To portion out the stars and dates:

The camels crossed the miles of sand.

Time was away and somewhere else.

The waiter did not come, the clock

Forgot them and the radio waltz

Came out like water from a rock:

Time was away and somewhere else.

Her fingers flicked away the ash

That bloomed again in tropic trees:

Not caring if the markets crash

When they had forests such as these,

Her fingers flicked away the ash.

God or whatever means the Good

Be praised that time can stop like this,

That what the heart has understood

Can verify in the body’s peace

God or whatever means the Good.

Time was away and she was here

And life no longer what it was,

The bell was silent in the air

And all the room one glow because

Time was away and she was here.

(Louis MacNeice, “Meeting Point,” 1939, as reprinted in The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice [Oxford University Press, 1967])

Episode 1080: It’s going to be uneventful

Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, studying a horoscope that astrologer Sebastian Shaw prepared for her. Liz’ daughter Carolyn asks what the horoscope says will happen today. Liz responds that it predicts the day will pass without incident. She adds that the horoscope has made the same prediction about each of the last several days, and that it has been right so far. The audience can agree with Liz’ assessment of the last several episodes, though we might wonder at what the makers of the show were thinking when they chose to make this explicit.

Carolyn is struck by the fact that Sebastian looks just like her late husband Jabe, whom she and others insisted on calling Jeb. So much so, in fact, that they are played by the same actor. Jabe died some time ago, and Sebastian has already denied that he rose from the grave. But two years ago Carolyn’s friend Vicki met her own late fiancé, an unpleasant man called Peter, after he had come back to life. Vicki found that Peter had lost his memory, refused to believe anything he told her about their past, and wanted to be known as Jeff. After several tedious months Peter/ Jeff admitted his true identity and he and Vicki went away and stopped bothering us. So Carolyn has grounds for hoping that the astrologer is not merely Sebastian, but will turn out to be Seb/ Jeb. We are forcefully reminded of Peter/ Jeff when Carolyn picks up the telephone to call Sebastian. She is standing next to a sculpture of a horse. The camera zooms in on that part of a horse which Peter/ Jeff brought to mind every time we saw him.

When Carolyn makes the call, she says “I’d like to speak with Sebastian Shaw, please.” When Liz commissioned her horoscope, she went to Sebastian’s apartment, which was clearly his only premises. He is a prickly sort, unlikely to let a visitor answer his telephone for him, so this line suggests that someone else has regular access to Sebastian’s place. Nothing we have seen so far has given us a hint who this might be.

Sebastian is alone when Carolyn calls on him. She asks him where he is from. He says that he is from New York City, then asks why she is so inquisitive. Liz told him that he looks remarkably like Jeb, so Carolyn could easily answer that she wonders if he might be related to him. That would put him on the defensive if he withheld the basic facts about himself. But Carolyn simply says that she was idly curious, giving him an opportunity to shut her down immediately. Longtime viewers know that Jeb was originally a formless monster from beyond space and time and therefore had no relatives in the usual sense. But Carolyn doesn’t know that, and even if she did she would have no reason to suspect that Sebastian knew it.

Meanwhile, teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes are falling under the influence of some ghosts who resemble them as strongly as Seb resembles Jeb. Longtime viewers may not believe that this contradicts Sebastian’s prediction that nothing noteworthy would happen, since it is a rehash of a story we saw eighteen months ago, when David and his friend Amy fell under the influence of some other ghosts and, as in that story, they keep going in circles as to how they feel about it and what they should do.

In the course of The Re-Haunting of Collinwood, a mysterious room sometimes materializes in a disused part of the great house. Hallie goes to that room today. She sees David wearing clothes from the 1840s and making vigorous use of a rocking horse. She talks to him, but he does not respond to her at all. She gets steadily more upset. She turns and leaves the room, exclaiming “All right then!” as she does so. In the hallway outside, she then sees David, wearing his usual clothes and smiling at her. She gasps in amazement.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, said that this closing could have been a lot more effective had Kathleen Cody read a single line differently. Hallie’s mounting agitation as the person whom she believes to be David so totally ignores her is fine, but if at the end of it she had just relaxed a little and said “All right then” in a quiet voice, she would have had somewhere to go when Hallie sees David in the hallway. As it is, she is already at maximum tension, so her gasp adds nothing to the scene.

The mysterious room is stocked with toys and known as “The Playroom.” The fans often complain that the toys are meant for kids much younger than Hallie and David. When David Henesy joined the cast of Dark Shadows in 1966, he was nine and could pass for six; by this point he is about to turn fourteen and could pass for sixteen. Miss Cody is at this point about to turn sixteen, and looks about that age. It is not likely that a person their age would take much interest in a rocking horse, or a miniature carousel, or a stuffed animal. But as Mrs Acilius points out, that is as it should be. We are not supposed to like this situation. It is unsettling that teenagers would become fascinated with those things, and that is the point. The ghosts were the ages David and Hallie are now when they died, and evidently they were hung up on the toys in The Playroom; that suggests that they represent some kind of arrested development, that even when they were alive they were stuck in the past. If Hallie and David are going to have a future, they will have to break free of the ghosts and everything they stand for.

Episode 1079: Just join hands with us and you’ll know everything

The ghost of Daphne Harridge wants to kill Quentin Collins, for no reason the show divulges to us; then she doesn’t, again for no reason we can see. Daphne insists teenager David Collins and Hallie Stokes not look at her, then insists they do look at her. David refuses to join hands with Hallie and Daphne to gain mystical knowledge, then demands Hallie join hands with him in a séance. Quentin is under Daphne’s power and unable to assist Julia Hoffman in her quest to free the great house of Collinwood from the hauntings; then he orders Julia to attend him while he performs an exorcism of the house.

Quentin the exorcist. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn said everything I wanted to say about how unsatisfying all of this is. The show has had its ups and downs. I call this segment The Re-Haunting of Colllinwood, because the A story from December 1968 to March 1969 is often called The Haunting of Collinwood and this is a recycling of that. The original Haunting of Collinwood was itself pretty slow-paced and frequently got bogged down with ominous games of dress-up. This time around the pace is again slow and the rounds of dress-up are even more tedious.

It is somewhat interesting to listen to Quentin reciting traditional Christian formulas as he conducts the exorcism. When we first got to know him, Quentin was a devout and enthusiastic Satanist. I suppose all religions lose adherents from time to time.

Episode 1078: The only answer

Quentin Collins and David Collins are under the influence of the unspeaking ghost of Daphne Harridge. Quentin and David each fret about their inability to resist Daphne, to understand their own actions, or to tell each other or anyone else what is going on. Since Daphne is herself a total enigma at this point, the audience learns nothing when these characters are on screen.

Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman know that Daphne is associated with an impending catastrophe. They are trying to learn about her as part of their efforts to prevent this catastrophe. Since Daphne will not allow either David or Quentin to give them any information, they are helpless.

The episode ends with Daphne about to stab Quentin in the back. This is not much of a cliffhanger. Quentin is 100 years old, but has the body of a 30 year old because of a magic spell that also makes him impervious to physical injury. Daphne can stab him all day and all night, and all that will happen is that his enchanted portrait will get a little grislier.

There is some business about a photograph David took. We saw this photograph in #1064, when there was some dispute about whether one of the ghosts was visible in it. Today David shows it to Quentin and asks him if he sees a face in it. Quentin says that it does look like a face, but he thinks it’s just an optical illusion created by the sunlight on some leaves. We imagine that the face will be a subtle thing, as it would have to be if it were somewhere in the photograph we saw in #1064, but when they show it to us later the face is as prominent as any other feature of the image. The result is an insult to the audience’s intelligence.

The original photograph, as seen in #1064.

Episode 1077: It’s wrong to love the dead and go on looking for them

The ghost of Daphne Harridge, who died in 1841, gives a bunch of lilacs to Quentin Collins, who immediately falls in love with her. Quentin himself died a couple of times before gaining eternal youth in 1897, so he and Daphne have more in common than you might think.

Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes is half convinced that a local man named Sebastian is actually her dead husband returned to life, mainly because he is played by the same actor. They did this same story in 1968, when well-meaning governess Victoria Winters was convinced that a local man named Jeff was actually her dead boyfriend come back to life. That time around the story was a total non-starter, because it was obvious that Vicki was right. This time it is unclear whether Carolyn is right. It is also unclear what difference it would make if she were, since Carolyn’s husband was entirely exhausted as a source of story development when he died and Sebastian is a clown.

Daphne’s ghost has been appearing to grouchy New England teen David Collins longer than she has been appearing to Quentin, and the two of them are keeping their connections with her secret from each other. They themselves don’t know why. They don’t actually have motivations- it’s the influence of the ghosts holding them back. The ghosts, you see, have a deal with the writers to keep the story from moving faster than they planned when they made up the flimsies for these thirteen weeks.

David borrows Quentin’s camera and takes some pictures at a picnic. He develops the pictures in his darkroom. (Yes, David has a darkroom but no camera.) It is a picture Carolyn had in #1064, set in 1995, 25 years after the present. Carolyn was a crazy woman then, living in the aftermath of a catastrophe that is due to strike the estate of Collinwood later in 1970. Housekeeper Mrs Johnson said that the picture was taken “the first time we saw him,” and Carolyn tore it up. David tells Carolyn today that the picture gives him a sense of dread, and she doesn’t know what he is talking about. But we see the malign ghost that ruled the house in 1995 standing in the background behind them.

The picnic scene is the first attempt they have made in a while to represent an outdoor setting in the daytime, and it is executed quite well. It is preceded by a still of a wooded scene that I don’t believe we’ve seen before. We had some fresh stills of the Moon the other day; it’s nice that they are giving us new images of the outdoors, even if they are not motion pictures.

Also, Carolyn eats a little food today. She ate some grapes one day in the 1995 segment. People ate on camera quite often in the first six months of Dark Shadows, but I believe these are the first two instances of characters taking solid nourishment in front of us since then.

In a bit of Collinsport English we’ve heard before, Quentin refers to another Collins named Quentin, one who was alive when Daphne was, as his “great-grand-uncle.” “Grand-uncle” is not unknown in American English, but it is far less common than “great-uncle.”

Episode 1076: The addition of the letter O

Grouchy New England teen David Collins and his live-in girlfriend Hallie Stokes go to a playroom for small children that intermittently manifests itself in a space otherwise occupied by a linen closet in the west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Hallie is possessed by the spirit of a girl named Carrie, who died in 1841. David hasn’t caught on that Hallie isn’t herself, and in his exasperation he asks her to “stop acting like the world’s number-one weirdo.” Carrie is puzzled by the word “weirdo.” She recognizes it as a derivative of “weird,” but claims that “the addition of the letter O makes it completely incomprehensible.” Evidently Carrie wasn’t all that quick on the uptake. If someone called me a “peculiar-Z,” I might not know why the letter Z was added, but it would be perfectly clear to me what they were saying. Historians of American English often say that the 1830s and 1840s were the single busiest period for the invention of new slang terms the USA has ever seen, so that if Carrie were as stumped by the “O” on “weirdo” as she claims to be, she would likely have been unable to conduct a conversation with many of her contemporaries.

David’s realistic 1970 dialogue and Carrie’s antiquated verbiage bounce off each other to produce some intentional comedy; my wife, Mrs Acilius, thought the scene was really funny. It is certainly more appealing than the rest of the episode, which is yet another series of events that take place only because the characters cannot bring themselves to tell each other what’s going on. Because the ghosts won’t let them, yes yes yes, we’ve been through all that many times before. The fansites seem bored enough by the whole thing that one of biggest points of discussion is whether it is reasonable to say that, because a bit of Grayson Hall’s slip is visible under her skirt at one point, we can say that we see her “underwear.” I guess the slip is “underwear” in the sense that she is wearing it under something else, and it probably wasn’t supposed to be visible, but you’d have to be a very specific kind of person to get excited about it.

Hall plays Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia is a psychiatrist, among other things. She tells Quentin Collins that the ghost of Daphne Harridge, a governess who like her charge Carrie died in 1841, fills the room with the scent of lilacs when she is near. Quentin is so obviously lying when he tells Julia that he has not smelled that scent that we are probably supposed to assume that Julia is onto him.