Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 965: The charred and blackened stars

The Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods, plan to retake the Earth and destroy humankind, and their harbinger is a shape-shifting monster who has taken the form of a tall young man and asked people to call him Jabe. Their plan requires that Jabe join himself to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in an unholy ceremony that will transform Carolyn into the same kind of squamous, rugose, and paleogean creature Jabe defaults to being. Jabe has fallen in love with Carolyn, but so far from redoubling his determination to fulfill the plan his feelings have turned him against it. He wants to renounce his powers, become truly human, and make a life with Carolyn as she is. Though Jabe’s personality has been so obnoxious that even people brainwashed into supporting the Leviathans’ whole program have gotten fed up with him and become his enemies, he has somehow won Carolyn’s heart. She doesn’t know that he is a monster from beyond space and time, still less that he murdered her father and several other people. She is in love with the man he appears to be, and he wants to become that man in fact.

I first shared my thoughts about Dark Shadows online in the comments section of Danny Horn’s great blog Dark Shadows Every Day. In his post about #962, Danny identifies a major problem with the relationship between Carolyn and Jabe:

But both sides have apparently agreed to shield Carolyn from the big sinister secret, so in practice, she hasn’t had very much to do, except to fall passionately in love with Jeb, because of reasons.

As I’ve said before, I don’t know why Carolyn likes Jeb, and I’ve been scratching at that itch for a while. But today, I think I figured out the real problem with her character arc, and it’s all about the let’s-break-antiques scene.

This was Carolyn and Jeb’s first date, back in episode 940. I didn’t write about it at the time, because I had other things to say, and I didn’t realize how important it was until now.

The scene takes place in the antique shop, and it starts with Jeb gazing at her, and sighing, “I’m going to be very happy with you.”

She’s puzzled. “What made you say that?”

“Because I felt it,” he shrugs. “Haven’t you ever said or done what you felt?”

“Sometimes I do.”

“I do it all the time,” Jeb smirks, and swaggers across the room. “Everybody should. I always do what I feel. Right now, I feel like doing this.”

And then he picks up a porcelain figurine from a nearby display, and smashes it on the floor.

Carolyn is horrified, obviously. “Jeb, you shouldn’t have done that!”

He smiles. “Why not?”

“That was an antique, and it didn’t even belong to you!”

“Haven’t you ever felt like breaking something?”

She stops short. “Yes,” she says, “but…”

“Well, then, let’s see you break this.”

Then he picks up another figurine.

“Go on,” he says, offering it to her. “Break it.”

She looks into his eyes, and says, “I wish I could begin to understand you.”

“Maybe you can,” he says, “if you just free yourself. Go on. Just let it drop from your hand.”

[Smash]

He smiles, and opens a bottle of wine. She asks what he’s doing, and he says, “We’re going to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“Your liberation.”

“I don’t understand.”

He hands her the drink. “Oh, you will… soon.”

It’s a weird scene, and it should have been followed immediately by a dozen more weird scenes along the same lines. This should have been the storyline.

After all, the whole point of the Leviathan threat is that they’re going to take Carolyn, a character that we love and root for, and turn her into a hideous gargantuan, rutting with her blasphemous mate and raising a brood of ambidextrous deathstalkers.

And in the let’s-break-antiques scene, they set up the idea that Jeb is going to change Carolyn’s personality, leading her step by step into his dark world, in the service of her “liberation” from boring traditional values, like respect for other people’s ugly decor. We should have seen her going down that path, becoming more and more estranged from the family and friends who aren’t part of this nightmare death cult.

Except they didn’t. The champagne was drugged, and she blacked out, and since then, they haven’t even touched on the idea that Jeb might be leaving a stain on Carolyn’s soul.

Now, this is a show that’s explored a dozen varieties of hypnosis and possession in minute detail, so it’s not like they don’t know how to write a story like that. They just didn’t. To the extent that we believe that Carolyn loves Jeb, it’s an entirely innocent, human infatuation with a handsome stranger, who she’s unfortunately not really allowed to know very much about.

Because they can’t change Carolyn.

This is an enormous problem for the show, and it’ll be one of the key pieces to the puzzle of Who Killed Dark Shadows. There are four core family members, and they are untouchable. They don’t experience any lasting change, starting around early 1968 and continuing until the end of the show. Sure, they have moments of temporary hypnosis and possession, everybody does, but they don’t actually change.

And if Carolyn can’t change, even a little, then that means there’s no future, just a status quo that leads inexorably towards entropy, and the heat death of this fictional universe.

Danny Horn, “Episode 962: The Second Law of Thermodynamics,” posted 30 November 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

My main role in Danny’s comments was to draw connections between the episodes he discussed and the episodes from the first 42 weeks of the show, which he made a point of not discussing. In response to the above, I wrote:

It is too bad that the show got to the point where the only stories that counted were the supernatural ones. Not that those shouldn’t always have been the A stories, but there should have been room for B stories where we explore the characters’ personalities and see how humans might react if they were to find themselves living in a world like that of DARK SHADOWS.

As it turned out, it was difficult to do much with human characters even within the supernatural stories. Danny’s hypothetical series of scenes between Carolyn and Jabe where we see Carolyn being seduced to the dark side could have been very powerful if we’d been tracing Carolyn’s evolution from tempestuous, self-centered, spoiled rich girl of 1966 and 1967 to the relatively calm, responsible young woman we saw in 1968 and 1969. They could then keep us in continual suspense- would Carolyn continue to grow into a powerful matriarch, or would the shock of one otherworldly horror after another shatter all her progress and send her reeling back to her most unsympathetic moments? Since we haven’t had scenes focusing on Carolyn’s personality and relationships since Jason McGuire was on the show, and we aren’t expecting any to come ever again, hav[ing] a thread like that on the show at this point would seem as out of place as does a week spent documenting in exhaustive detail the evolution of Bruno’s attitude towards Jeb.

Comment left 29 December 2020 by “Acilius” on Danny Horn, “Episode 962: The Second Law of Thermodynamics,” posted 30 November 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

Nancy Barrett is a superb actor, and while she is on camera we believe that Carolyn loves Jabe. But she has to create this impression from the ground up every time she appears. Nothing that is happening reinforces it. Not only does her love for Jabe pop into being out of nowhere, but because she is not involved with anything he is doing it cannot motivate her to take any significant actions. Today Jabe and Carolyn stand before an altar while a high priest of the cult devoted to the Leviathans is performing the ceremony meant to unite them in horrid monstrosity. But Carolyn is there, not because of any decisions she has made or feelings she has, but because she has been hypnotized by the high priest.

I am reminded of the 2006 film Idiocracy. An average man from the early twenty first century suddenly finds himself in a future where everyone has a very low mentality. He goes to the movies and discovers that the most popular film of the era is called Ass. It is a 90 minute closeup of a pair of flatulent buttocks. When he becomes head of state, the protagonist explains that in his day there was something called a “story.” He describes a story as “a way of making you care whose ass it is and why it is farting.” That’s what the Leviathans segment lacks. The execution is good enough to make us believe that particular things are happening, but there is nothing to make us care who is making them happen or why they want them to happen.

One of the few forms of narrative that is still cultivated in the world of Idiocracy is professional wrestling, a dramatic genre in which villainous characters often have changes of heart and become heroic. This is known as the “heel-face turn” (as opposed to the “face-heel turn,” which is the opposite character development.) They have been working on Jabe’s heel-face turn for a few days. Yesterday he asked mad scientist Julia Hoffman to cure him of whatever it is that makes him revert to his monstrous form. Christopher Pennock and Grayson Hall played that scene so well that we wished we could ignore everything else in the episode and believe in it. Jabe started the episode by ordering four zombies whom he had raised from the dead to murder five people: Julia; her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins; two distant cousins of Barnabas’, Quentin Collins and Roger Collins; and Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis. Jabe told Julia he would not kill her or Barnabas if she complied with his request, but at the end of the episode he had the zombies stuff Quentin in a coffin and bury him alive. After that, we could hardly believe that Jabe had changed at all.

Today, Barnabas is at home when Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, bursts into his front parlor. She tells him she is sure Quentin is trapped somewhere and has no more than an hour to live. Barnabas has no idea how Maggie can know this, and she can’t explain it herself. The camera zooms in on a trident drawn on her hand, and regular viewers know what is going on. A while ago, Barnabas’ ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique, cast a spell on Maggie and Quentin causing them to feel an overwhelming love for each other at irregular intervals. Angelique thought this would make Barnabas unhappy, but he hasn’t noticed it, and he has so much else going on right now it seems unlikely he’d care much one way or the other if he did. The spell enables Maggie to lead Barnabas to the grave where Quentin is trapped and to tell Barnabas to dig it up. Quentin is fine when they exhume him, so if anything Barnabas should be glad of Angelique’s spell.

When Quentin comes out of the coffin, he says his only problem is that his legs hurt. Since he is 6’4″ tall and the coffin is at most 5′ long, that’s understandable. He says that Jabe told him he had something out of the ordinary in store for him. Now he knows that whatever else Jabe may be, “he’s a man of his word!” Usually David Selby’s accent raises a bit of a puzzle- why is the rakish scion of an aristocratic old New England family also an amiable West Virginian? But Mr Selby’s delivery of this line, with its note of appreciation for Jabe’s forthrightness, is so perfect that you could never wish him different in any way.

The high priest of the Leviathan cult whom we will see presiding at Jabe and Carolyn’s joining ceremony is none other than suave warlock Nicholas Blair, who was well known around the great estate of Collinwood in 1968. Nicholas finds Julia working on a chemistry experiment preparatory to her project of humanizing Jabe; he smashes her equipment and says he will let her live if she goes away and does not interfere with the Leviathans’ project.

When Nicholas calls on Carolyn to hypnotize her, she recognizes him and expresses mild surprise that he is back. When she insists on addressing him as “Mr Blair,” he tells her that her mother called him by his first name. She replies, “Well, that’s my mother’s business,” and asks him again why he is there.

Jabe visits Julia at Barnabas’ house and pleads with her to do something for him tonight. She says that even if that were possible, she would refuse to do it, since she knows that he buried Quentin alive a few hours ago. He says that she must believe that he is “a changed man” who is willing to “live and let live,” though he is not free to explain what has brought this change on. Barnabas comes downstairs and gives Jabe a dirty look.

The joining is underway at a cairn in the woods. Only people associated with the Leviathans can see the cairn. A small wooden box sits on the cairn; Jabe originally emerged from that box, four months ago, back when he was nothing more than a whistling sound. Nicholas stands to one side, obscured by branches, reciting a lot of mumbo-jumbo and waving a long rod. Jabe and Carolyn stand together on the other side. Nicholas orders Jabe to take the rod. He does. He stands behind the raised part of the cairn that serves as an altar and faces the box.

Perhaps not Carolyn’s dream wedding. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

At that moment, Jabe shouts “Now, Barnabas! Get her now, Barnabas!” Barnabas leaps from behind the foliage, grabs Carolyn by the arm, and runs off with her; Jabe brings the rod down on the box, smashing it. Nicholas exclaims “You fool, do you know what you’ve done!? Better leave now or we’ll both go up in it!” The cairn glows and collapses; Nicholas and Jabe stand together off to the side, watching. Jabe clutches himself by the middle, groans, and passes out.

The cairn’s last moment. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The pair that is actually joined by the ceremony. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Watching it this time, I was not only surprised by Jabe’s “Now, Barnabas! Get her now, Barnabas!”; I remembered being surprised by it last time we watched the show through. It really is a thrilling moment, one of many in the Leviathans segment. But since it exhausts all of the elements in that segment from which a story could have been built, and since there is absolutely no other storyline going just now, I’m afraid the comparison to Idiocracy’s movie-in-a-movie Ass has to stand.

Episode 964: Plan 9 from Down East

We are approaching the end of the sixteenth week of a segment made up of material drawn from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. Central to this is the idea of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who want to retake the Earth and eliminate humankind. There has been a lot of good stuff in these episodes, but it hasn’t come together as a unit. At this point, the narrative seems to be falling apart completely.

The harbinger of the Leviathans, who appears to be a tall man in his mid twenties named Jeb but is in fact a four-month old shape-shifting monster who would rather be called Jabe, has lost interest in the plan and wishes he could be a real boy. Jabe has alienated virtually everyone with whom he has come into contact, including people who were under heavy mind-control meant to turn them into his slaves, and has been reduced to raising four recently deceased men to serve him as zombies.

Yesterday, he ordered the zombies to kill five of his enemies. The targets he listed were mad scientist Julia Hoffman, vampire Barnabas Collins, Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis, and Barnabas’ distant cousins Roger Collins and Quentin Collins. The zombies have abducted Julia and brought her to Jabe’s house. She is welcomed there by a man named Sky Rumson. Sky is not a zombie, but may as well be for all the skill Geoffrey Scott brings to the role. When Scott recites his dialogue, you get the impression that he is telling you what an actor would say had they cast one in the part. Grayson Hall could fill any stage without support, making Julia’s scene with Sky relatively painless, but if it was meant to have any significance the audience will never know what that was.

Sky and a zombie force Julia into the back room of the house, where Jabe is in the squamous, rugose, and paleogean form of the true Leviathan. She is terrified by the sight. Jabe resumes his human shape. He and Julia go back to the living room, where he confides in her that he doesn’t want to take his Leviathan form ever again. He wants to renounce his powers and become human. He knows that Julia is giving Barnabas treatments to put his vampirism into remission, and that she succeeded with such treatments when Barnabas was under a different vampire curse in 1968. He asks her to help him rid himself of his Leviathan side. She is unsure she will be able to do so, but can’t resist the challenge. By the end of the scene, she is figuring out what tests she will have to run to diagnose the biochemical basis of Jabe’s condition.

Christopher Pennock really was a fine actor, and he is outstanding in this scene. He sounds like a deeply lonely, helplessly confused young boy who can’t figure out how to overcome the consequences of his own abuse of the people around him. Jabe’s request for Julia’s help and his agreement to lay off Barnabas as the price for it doesn’t fit with the orders he gave the zombies yesterday, the actions he takes later today, or anything else in the Leviathan story, and is a sign that the plot is falling apart faster than the writers can patch it up. But he and Hall are so splendid in showing Jabe’s neediness and Julia’s response to it that it doesn’t matter.

Meanwhile, Sky is at the great house of Collinwood, looking for Jabe’s foster mother-turned-makeout partner Megan Todd (it was 1970, everyone took Freud very seriously.) He meets Roger and Quentin there. They hold him at sword point until he tells them where Julia is and how to get past the zombies. To the extent that there is a reason for Sky to be on the show, it is to illustrate how total the control is the Leviathans have over the minds of the people they have co-opted, so when he gives in so quickly to Quentin’s threat to give him a scar (not even to kill him, just to compromise his potential as a model for deodorant ads) he dissolves the last prospect that the Leviathans themselves will be a danger we can care about.

Quentin goes off to rescue Julia, and Roger assumes responsibility for holding the sword. He is momentarily distracted when he sees Megan in the window, and Sky takes advantage, disarming Roger and running out of the house. Outside, he meets Megan and tells her that Jabe is upset with her for some reason. She asks if he is afraid of her. He is puzzled by the question, and tells her she is very beautiful. She invites him to look at her. As he does, she opens her mouth, revealing vampire’s fangs. She bites him.

Megan finds breakfast. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin arrives at Jabe’s house. Jabe is surprised to see him, but not surprised Sky was too chicken to keep any of his secrets. He orders the zombies to seize Quentin. The tall, portly, shaven headed zombie, who wears a mustache that keeps him from being mistaken for Tor Johnson in Plan 9 from Outer Space, slaps Quentin in the face a single time. With this, Quentin instantly loses consciousness. Yesterday, other zombies slapped Julia and Roger in the face, each a single time, and each of them instantly lost consciousness as well. Great ones with slaps, the zombies.

Jabe instructs the zombies to stuff Quentin into a coffin that is about three feet too short for him, and then has them carry it all the way to the cemetery. He has them bury Quentin in a grave that one of them had recently vacated. I suppose real-estate flipping has been interesting to TV viewers for longer than I had thought.

There is a famous goof in today’s episode. When Quentin grabs the sword out of its display on the wall of the Collinwood drawing room*, the lamp underneath it falls off the table and smashes on the floor. You know this wasn’t supposed to happen because it takes place out of frame and you can hear the stagehands sweeping the floor while Sky is pinned to the wall. Also, Dan Curtis was way too tight with a buck to break a lamp for the sake of a scene that’s mainly about a character as minor as Sky Rumson. It’s a shame they couldn’t have pulled the camera back and shown the lamp shattering, it would have been perfectly suited to the moment. And if they had to sweep up the wreckage right then, well, it would have been hilarious if housekeeper Mrs Johnson had come in with her broom and dustpan, taken care of the mess, and left without a word about what Quentin and Roger were doing to Sky.

A fine lamp about to meet its doom. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

*Something he first did in #703, when he and Barnabas first met. He knocked a lamp over then, too.

Episode 963: A very bizarre practice

The reigning chief villain on Dark Shadows is a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time. He refuses to shift his shape, since he likes being a tall young man. He isn’t interested in any part of space or time not connected with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, with whom he has fallen in love. He can’t persuade anyone to call him by his preferred name, “Jabe,” so has resigned himself to going by “Jeb.”

As we open, Jabe is raising four men from the dead. That he can do such a thing might suggest that he is a formidable menace, but the introductory voiceover explains that he has no choice about it, since he is “unable to trust one living human being.” Whatever powers he may have, Jabe is surrounded by enemies whom he can battle only by resorting to the most desperate means. We are left wondering how much longer the show can keep the storyline going if it depends on such a feeble menace.

Jabe and one of the zombies are peeking through the window of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, home to vampire Barnabas Collins, a distant cousin of Carolyn’s. Jabe sees Barnabas’ best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, giving him an injection. He realizes that Julia is trying to treat Barnabas’ vampirism.

Jabe goes to the great house on the estate and orders Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, to keep watch over Barnabas’ blood thrall Megan Todd. Liz is one of Jabe’s few remaining followers. He is crude and abusive towards her; she protests that they are in her house, and when he responds to this with a sneer she gives him a look of disbelief. First-time viewers can understand how Jabe came to be so isolated.

When Barnabas was first on the show, from April 1967 to March 1968, Liz never figured out that he was a vampire. The show depended on keeping Liz in the dark about Barnabas’ curse, because she was too civic-minded to let him stay in a house on her estate if she had known that he was an abomination risen from the depths of Hell to prey upon the living, even if he was her cousin. In those days, the show seemed determined to keep Liz on the shelf lest she be stained by contact with the main story, and so they took care to give Barnabas’ adversaries reasons to keep from telling Liz about him.

Now, Liz is under the control of the forces Jabe represents. She is already hostile to Barnabas, and has told Jabe she would try to evict him from Collinwood if that is what he wants her to do. Jabe does not have any reason to withhold from her the fact that his enemy is a vampire.

Moreover, Liz is no longer the symbol of lawful goodness she was two years ago. In #956, she told eleven year old Amy Jennings that she hoped Jabe wouldn’t murder Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Her first reason for not wanting this to happen was that it would remind people of the other murders Jabe has committed. The second, and more important, was that it would tend to exonerate the person they have framed to keep the heat off Jabe. It seems likely that Jabe will soon defeated and Liz will be released from the spell under which she has been laboring, but if she comes out of that remembering what Barnabas is she will also remember that she herself is complicit in some pretty serious felonies, all of them well-known to Barnabas. Since Liz knows that Barnabas is invested in her position in the community and puts a high priority on protecting it, the show wouldn’t have a hard time explaining why she keeps him around, and she would be available to take part in whatever stories they might have going.

Liz is sitting with Megan. She can see that Megan is ill and goes to fetch her a glass of water. When she returns, Megan has gone. We see Megan at Barnabas’ house. Barnabas is intensely hungry. But he does not want to bite her. He knows that if he does so, she will die. She insists, and he gives in.

Julia enters and pronounces Megan dead. Barnabas is in a panic; he had earlier lied when Julia asked him if he had bitten anyone, and he flies directly into hysteria, accusing Julia of implying that he acted deliberately. She keeps her cool and assures him she does not see it that way. Usually Julia’s quickness to make excuses for Barnabas’ murders is an opportunity for Grayson Hall to amaze us with the spectacle of a brilliant woman rationalizing the behavior of a hopelessly evil man, but this scene is a showcase for Jonathan Frid. So they have taken care to establish that Barnabas was overpowered by the need for blood and have shown him taking steps to avoid biting Megan, allowing us to take Julia’s behavior more seriously and focus on Barnabas’ panic.

Barnabas tells Julia that to prevent Megan rising as a vampire they will have to drive a wooden stake through her heart. Previously Barnabas has simply strangled his victims or broken their necks after they died, and that has kept them from coming back. He did this as recently as #951, when he fed on Jabe’s would-be devotee Nelle Gunston. Regular viewers will know that the trip he and Julia make to the basement to fetch a stake is just a setup for them to return and find Megan already gone. Before that happens, there is a strange moment when Barnabas and Julia have the stake and are talking about driving it through Megan’s heart. Barnabas wants to spare Julia that horror, but she smiles warmly as if assuring him that it is her pleasure to join in the act.

Togetherness. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Jabe dispatches his four zombie henchmen into the great house, saying that he has given them their orders and now it is time to “Carry them out!” Julia lives in the great house, and is working with some test tubes in her bedroom. It’s the first time we’ve seen Julia’s room in years, and the first time we have seen scientific apparatus of any kind there. One of the zombies knocks on her door, another emerges from behind the curtains, and a third comes up and slaps her in the face. Perhaps remembering Jabe’s words as he sent them into the house, they carry her out.

You can’t say the zombies don’t follow instructions. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

One of the zombies is named Thomas Findley. Longtime viewers will remember Madame Janet Findley, a psychic who made a big impression in three episodes in December 1968, and Margaret Findley, who was one of the ghostly Widows who were prominent in the show’s supernatural back-world in its first 26 weeks. Another zombie is a large bald man who will remind many viewers of Tor Johnson in Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Danny Horn’s post about this one at his great Dark Shadows Every Day is a fascinating comparison of the episode with four issues of Gold Key’s Dark Shadows comic book. Other commentators have mentioned that the graveyard scenes often evoke the sensibility of EC Comics, particularly in the character of The Caretaker, but Danny’s in-depth discussion of what this episode has in common with those four issues is far and away the most substantive analysis I have seen of the overlap between the visual grammar of Dark Shadows and that of comic books.

Episode 962: So many ways to lose people

The chief villain on Dark Shadows at the moment is a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time who has decided the only shape he is interested in assuming is that of a tall young man. When he first appeared in this form, the monster asked people to “Call me Jabe.” Jabe is supposed to seize control of the Earth and eradicate the human race, but he couldn’t even get people to comply with this simple request. He’s been answering to “Jeb” for weeks now.

Several of Jabe’s followers, people who were completely down with the part about exterminating all humans, have found that his personality is just too much to put up with. Some of these are trying to destroy him. One of Jabe’s followers-turned-aspiring-assassins is a crazed sadist known only as Bruno. Yesterday, Bruno trapped Jabe with a werewolf, a creature to whom Jabe is vulnerable. Jabe escapes from the werewolf and confronts Bruno about his attempt to murder him.

Jabe is unconvinced by Bruno’s paper-thin excuses, but is shocked when Bruno tells him that Megan Todd, who was once Jabe’s foster mother and his most devoted follower, has been bitten by vampire Barnabas Collins and is now helping Barnabas in his own battle against Jabe. When Jabe finds a sleeping Megan calling out for Barnabas to summon her and sees the bite marks on her neck, he blames himself. Barnabas, too, used to be one of Jabe’s followers, and when he turned against him Jabe made him a vampire. He refuses to let Bruno kill Megan, and instead puts him in charge of keeping her away from Barnabas.

Jabe puts Bruno in charge of Megan. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Regular viewers would likely not have been surprised that Jabe survived yesterday’s closing cliffhanger- once he is gone, the current story will end, and they don’t yet have anything ready to go when that happens. But we would have expected Jabe to kill Bruno. That he not only does not do this, but keeps him around, shows just how precarious Jabe’s position has become. He is surrounded by enemies, many of whom know all of his secrets, and several of whom have supernatural powers. His grip on his few remaining allies is uncertain, and he does not seem to have the tactical sense to use his own powers effectively. So the writers have to slow the story way down to keep from running out of road.

Meanwhile, the werewolf is prowling through the woods. He meets his great-grandfather, Quentin Collins. It was a curse Quentin brought on himself that made him and his male descendants werewolves. The same magic spell that put Quentin’s own lycanthropy into remission immunized him against aging. The werewolf recognizes Quentin as one of his own kind and won’t attack him. When the sun comes up, the werewolf collapses and reverts to the form of Chris Jennings, who resembles his great-grandfather in that each of them is twenty-nine years old.

Quentin tells Chris that he wants to help him; Chris says that he ought to, since it’s his fault that he’s a werewolf. Quentin doesn’t have anything to say to that, nor is he willing to give Chris the help he asks for, which is immediate death. He asks Chris what he remembers; he says that the night before, Bruno was holding him prisoner, aided by the reanimated corpse of Sheriff Davenport. Chris wonders if he killed Bruno.

Quentin and Chris go to the old crypt where Bruno and Zombie Davenport had kept Chris. They find the shredded remains of Davenport’s defiled corpse, but no trace of Bruno. Quentin tells Chris that he didn’t kill any living person, that he only returned to death something that had already died, and rightly so. He advises Chris to avoid zombies from now on. When we heard Quentin offer this great-grandfatherly guidance, Mrs Acilius laughed out loud- what does Quentin think, that Chris spends his nights hanging out at the zombie bar?

It turns out Chris will have more trouble following great-granddad’s counsel than he might have thought. At the end, Jabe stands in a cemetery, by a row of four fresh graves of men each of whom died in his thirties, and prays to the “god of the Underworld” to raise them so that he can use them to kill five other people and send their souls his way forever. Whichever god he reaches apparently likes the terms of this deal, because a hand pops up through the dirt.

This post is something of a private milestone for me. I was inspired to blog about Dark Shadows by Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day. As the title would suggest, Danny’s original idea was to post about an episode a day, but as he went his posts got to be more and more ambitious and less and less frequent. He posted a review of #1170 in October 2019, then gave up altogether for several months, not posting again until July 2020. Danny started with #210; since the makers of the show skipped some episode numbers, #1170 was the 946th episode he had covered. I started at the beginning, so #962 is my 947th episode.

My project is in no way comparable to Danny’s. I have his blog to consult, as well as other fine sites, especially John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die, while he was usually the first to review the episodes he dealt with. And my posts are nothing like as ambitious as were his. So, if I have only a few stray remarks to make about an episode, I just make those remarks and call it a day. In that situation, Danny would write a detailed review of a novel or a board game or something else related to the show, or analyze an historical event connected with it, or compose a stunning prose poem, then append his remarks about the episode as a postscript. But modest as my aims are, I’m still haunted by the fear that I’ll run out of steam, so it’s reassuring to me that I’ve maintained daily posting beyond the point at which he took his long hiatus.

I have my eye on a couple of upcoming Danny-derived benchmarks. He posted about a total of 1018 episodes; I’ll reach that number with #1033 on 10 June. And of course #1170 itself has a cursed aura, I’ll be glad to get beyond that. Once I do, I’ll probably be counting down by percentages until I reach the end of the series with #1245 in April 2027.

After April 2027, I plan to review the feature film Night of Dark Shadows* in a post to go up on the 56th anniversary of its release, 3 August 2027, and Tim Burton’s 2012 film Dark Shadows at some point thereafter. I’m leaning towards reviewing the series that aired on NBC in primetime in 1991 and the pilot that Dan Curtis shot for the WB network in 2004. If I do write about those things, the posts will go up sometime after the one about Night of Dark Shadows and before the one about the Tim Burton movie. I probably won’t cover any of the novels or comic books or newspaper strips or other spinoffs. I did review Dan Curtis’ TV movie of Frankenstein on a preemption day in 2024, and if I review any of his other standalone adaptations of material that Dark Shadows mined it will be on upcoming preemption days, not as posts that appear after I’ve finished the original series.

*House of Dark Shadows was released 28 October 1970, while the show was still on. My post about it should go live on 28 October 2026, the same day as the one about #1132.

Episode 961: Fatigue, that’s what it was

The Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods, are planning to retake the Earth from humanity. Like all stories of Elder Gods, this one raises the question of why they lost the Earth in the first place. The answer seems to be clear. The first Leviathan to manifest himself is a shape-shifting monster who spends most of his time in the form of a tall young man who, when we were introduced to him, asked to be called “Jabe.” No one would call him that, so he settled for “Jeb.” The Leviathans have assembled a cult of people to serve them; Jabe’s personality has alienated many of them already, and seems likely to alienate more.

Among the ex-followers who were glad to join a plot to exterminate homo sapiens but who found Jabe too obnoxious to stomach are vampire Barnabas Collins and a crazed sadist known only as Bruno. Jabe’s onetime foster mother, Megan Todd, lost her allegiance to the Leviathans after Barnabas bit and enslaved her. Since Barnabas’ current bout of vampirism is the result of a curse Jabe placed on him during a tantrum, the cult’s loss of Megan is another strike against Jabe.

The Leviathans have two principal vulnerabilities. They can be destroyed by ghosts or by werewolves. Since they have chosen to start their campaign on the great estate of Collinwood, which is the world capital of both ghosts and werewolves, this would suggest that they are as bad at strategic planning as Jabe is at team-building.

Bruno has captured the current werewolf and lures Jabe to him. He also discovers that Megan is Barnabas’ blood thrall. Everything else today is filler, but it does give the actors a chance to show off. Bruno beats the werewolf with a whip to ensure that he will be angry enough “to rip a man to shreds!” He’s a werewolf, the whole idea is that he’s already disposed to rip anyone he meets to shreds, but as Bruno Michael Stroka puts so much zest into the whipping scene that we forget how ridiculous the furry rig Alex Stevens is wearing looks and feels sorry for the poor widdle doggie.

Leave that poochie alone! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas summons Megan to his house and gives her some instructions that don’t make sense and that she won’t have the chance to follow. While she is there, she says she just wants him to suck her blood. He does. Marie Wallace plays Megan in this scene as if she is having a sexy dream.

Bruno left the late Sheriff Davenport, whom Jabe killed and then brought back as a zombie slave, to guard the werewolf. To keep the zombie from getting in the way of his plan to use the werewolf against Jabe, he tricks him into letting the werewolf destroy him. Davenport is the most garrulous zombie of all time; in his first postmortem appearance, when Jabe set him to hold prisoner Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, Davenport rambled on and on about everything he saw and heard, at one point launching into an explanation of some things his wife used to do that annoyed him. Today he has to argue with Bruno, demanding to know whether he has authorization from Jabe to leave the werewolf alive and giving his opinion that it isn’t a good idea to take too much initiative. Ed Riley does as much as anyone could to overcome the ludicrous overwriting of his part. No one could make a chatterbox like Zombie Davenport seem like a partially reanimated corpse, but when he isn’t saddled with excessive dialogue Riley manages to create the impression that he is at least somewhat weird. It’s too bad he won’t be back.

Episode 960: My last run-in with him

When Dark Shadows began in June 1966, its most dangerous villain was high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Roger had squandered his half of the Collins family’s wealth and put his sister, the reclusive Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, in a difficult position by selling his half of the family business to support his extravagant lifestyle. He now worked in the business as Liz’ employee and, with his son, strange and troubled boy David, lived in Liz’ house as her guest. Roger schemed to cover up his past crimes, and was quite willing to add murder to them if that was the only way to preserve his cushy circumstances.

As played by Louis Edmonds, Roger was too much fun to be killed off as the original story bible foresaw. The show had not in those early days committed itself to the all-villain cast that has come to define it, so they decided that they could keep Roger around only by nerfing him. He became a sardonic gay uncle, amusing, lovable, and harmless. He has been on the margins for years now, often absent for long periods. When Dark Shadows turned to time travel and began to feature extended costume drama inserts, they could make use of Edmonds’ talents by casting him as other characters. His turn as haughty patriarch Joshua Collins made him the star of the 1790s segment that ran from November 1967 to March 1968, and as the stuffy Edward Collins he was among the highlights of the 1897 segment that took up most of 1969. Now that the show has returned to contemporary dress, Edmonds is Roger again, and he is the same afterthought he has been for so long.

Today, a villain who introduced himself as Jabe but whom everyone calls Jeb walks into the house. Roger hears him, and protests that it is customary to knock. Jabe says that Liz gave him the run of the place, and tells Roger he has come to visit David. Roger forbids him to see David; Jabe says there is nothing he can do to stop him, and he goes upstairs to David’s room.

Roger picks up the phone and calls his distant cousin Quentin Collins. He tells Quentin he isn’t going to put up with any more of Jabe’s insolence, and that he doesn’t care how dangerous he is. He hangs up, and finds Jabe standing in front of him. Jabe asks if he is wondering how much he heard. Roger says that he doesn’t care if he heard all of it, that he wants him to leave the house at once. Jabe says that if it was Quentin he was talking to, he knows more about him than he had assumed. He also tells Roger that nothing Quentin may have told him about him and his associates was an exaggeration. If Roger defies them, he and everyone he loves will pay a terrible price.

Roger and the “cheap, insufferable pig.” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Roger was a villain, they sometimes made him sympathetic by having dashing action hero Burke Devlin threaten to take over the house and start ordering him around. Later, Liz was being blackmailed by seagoing con man Jason McGuire, who when he reached the zenith of his power acted like he owned the house and tried to order Roger around. Burke eventually peaced out, and Jason’s scheme led to his own death not long after he got openly aggressive towards Roger in the drawing room. So longtime viewers will look at this scene and find a reason to believe that Jabe’s menace is approaching its peak.

Jabe’s henchman Bruno has captured Chris Jennings, who is a werewolf. He has locked Chris up in the tomb of the Stockbridges, an old Collinsport family who are in a way related to Roger’s ex-wife. The full Moon will be rising tonight, and Bruno has chained Chris to a wall in the tomb. He has set the world’s most talkative zombie to guard Chris. The zombie was in life a law enforcement officer known as “Sheriff Davenport.” When Jabe raised him from the dead, we saw that his gravestone read “Sheriff Davenport,” so apparently “Sheriff” was his given name. Bruno gave Sheriff a revolver loaded with silver bullets and ordered him to shoot Chris if he started transforming.

Bruno went to Jabe to report that he had captured the werewolf. Before he could get a word out about that, Jabe was berating him about other matters. Jabe wound up hitting Bruno, then twisted his arm until he said that Jabe was born to lead and he was born to follow. After that, Bruno decided that he wouldn’t have Sheriff kill the werewolf after all. Rather, he would sic the werewolf on Jabe.

Jabe’s intolerable personality keeps alienating followers, and he has assembled an array of adversaries including not only people like Bruno who know all of his secrets, but also a vampire, a wicked witch, a mad scientist, and a man with a Dorian Gray-like magical portrait that gives him an immunity to physical harm. On top of all that, we saw yesterday and today that a ghost is after Jabe, and that Jabe is especially vulnerable to ghosts. Add the werewolf to that force, and it seems Roger will be sipping his brandy in peace any day now.

Episode 959: My being able to speak hasn’t helped much

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard talks her friend Sabrina Stuart into wearing a wig over her prematurely gray hair. Sabrina’s ex-fiancé Chris Jennings sees Sabrina with the wig and is suddenly attracted to her again. Sabrina knows that Chris is a werewolf. She disregards both Chris’ lycanthropy and the fact that he is more interested in her wig than in her and starts talking to him about renewing their engagement.

Sabrina plays to Chris’ wig fetish. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

A villain named Bruno has evil plans for the werewolf. He knows that the werewolf is a man who is close to Sabrina, and when he sees her with Chris he realizes it is him. At the end of the episode, he abducts Chris at gunpoint.

Episode 958: A house of lies

The residents of the estate of Collinwood are divided. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, her nephew David Collins, and their distant cousin, eleven year old Amy Jennings, have been brought under the power of the Leviathan People, an unseen race of Elder Gods who mean to retake the Earth from humankind. Liz has invited the harbinger of the Leviathans, a shape-shifting monster who in his human form is a young man who once revealed he wanted to be known as Jabe, to live in the carriage house on the estate. Jabe’s onetime foster mother Megan Todd is living as Liz’ guest in the main house.

The main house is also home to mad scientist Julia Hoffman and governess Maggie Evans, who have ranged themselves against the Leviathans. Yesterday Jabe was about to kill Maggie when he saw something outside Collinwood’s Tower Room that scared him off. Wanting to know what it was Jabe was afraid of, Julia went to the scene to investigate, and found Jabe lurking there. Before he could attack her, the mysterious presence returned, and Jabe ran off. Today, we see the presence- it is a dark shadow. It makes perfect sense that a reminder of which show he is on would terrify Jabe. The writers keep painting his character into a corner so that he won’t be able to continue once the current storyline ends.

Julia sees a dark shadow. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The shadow appears to be that of a slim man wearing a comically oversized hat and a cape. The only character who dressed that way was painter Charles Delaware Tate. Tate was killed by a werewolf in #922. It seems unlikely that Tate’s ghost would haunt Jabe, since werewolves and Leviathans are each other’s implacable enemies. Granted, the Leviathans are also hostile to humans, but Tate was always something of a post-humanist himself. For a while he had magical powers that he used to blur the boundary between humans and their portraits, and in his later years he tried to replace himself with a robot. Besides, Tate was always such a jerk to every individual person he met that it is difficult to imagine him taking much trouble to defend humanity in the mass.

Jabe has murdered three people so far. He raised one of these, Sheriff Davenport, from the dead. He made Davenport into a peculiarly garrulous zombie and forced him to do his bidding. I don’t know of any stories where the same person manifests after death as both a zombie and a ghost, but then I’m no expert on tales of the supernatural. So I guess the shade could be Davenport’s.

Jabe also murdered Paul Stoddard, Liz’ ex-husband and father of her daughter Carolyn. Last week Jabe was afraid Paul’s ghost would come after him, so he dug his body up and burned it. Today we hear that the village of Collinsport is buzzing with talk about the fact that Paul’s body went missing. So Paul is a possibility. The third victim, Maine state police investigator Lawrence Guthrie, was a one-time character. It would seem a bit late to start developing him now.

At the end of the episode, the ghost appears to David in the form of a man hanging from the ceiling. We get a clear look at the ghost’s trouser legs and boots. This rules out, not only Davenport, Paul, and Guthrie, but almost all characters from the parts of Dark Shadows set in contemporary times. The only women who have worn trousers were Carolyn, in a couple of 1966 episodes, and Megan. Both of them are still alive. The only man who wore boots was motorcycle enthusiast Buzz, who dated Carolyn for a little while in 1967. Those longtime viewers who remember Buzz might be amused if it were to turn out that he was the Leviathans’ mightiest foe.

“If you FEEL it… Sit it!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This episode also features Roger Collins, who is Liz’ brother and David’s father. Roger meets his distant cousin Quentin Collins. From December 1968 to September 1969, Quentin was a ghost who haunted Collinwood, rendering the place uninhabitable and killing David. There was a time travel story going on for most of that period, and in September 1897 events played out differently than they had the first time through. The result of that difference was that Quentin did not die. The haunting broke and David came back to life on the anniversary of the change. Some magic spells cast on him have kept Quentin alive and apparently twenty nine years old ever since, but the haunting still happened and Roger’s memory of it gives him a shock when he sees the living Quentin. He quickly composes himself; he has already heard of Quentin’s claim to be his own great-grandson, and accepts it cheerfully.

Amy is Quentin’s actual great-granddaughter, and she is not so easily persuaded. Both as a living being in the 1890s and as a ghost in the 1960s, Quentin was obsessed with a phonograph recording of a sickly little waltz and inflicted endless replays of it on the residents of Collinwood. While Quentin and Roger are chatting in the drawing room, she starts playing the waltz. Amy asks Quentin if he likes it. He zones out, and after a long interval declares that he likes it very much. She says she is going to play it again, and Roger forbids her.

Amy says she doesn’t have anything to do. Roger puts his hand on her shoulder, tells her that the house is full of good books, and marches her off to find one. I had remembered this scene with David as the one Roger takes to the library, and moreover had remembered it as their last scene together. When the show started, Roger was a villain and David was a budding psychopath, so it would have been touching to end their story on this note of loving paternal firmness.

Later, Amy goes upstairs to David’s room. David has for several weeks been using a wheelchair because of a broken leg, but it hasn’t occurred to anyone to move him to one of the vacant rooms on the first floor. She tells him about Quentin, and he tells her to get the sacred book of the Leviathan people from its hiding place on the top shelf of his bookcase. They search the book for guidance. Just as they find something promising, they feel a ghostly chill. The book flies off David’s desk and bursts into flames. The ghost has done its work; David observes that “The chill is gone.”

David keeps ordering Amy around the whole time they are on together. This is quite a change from the beginning of Amy’s time on the show, in the early days of Quentin’s haunting, when they bickered like an old married couple and took turns being the one in charge. Since then, Amy has been in steep decline, absent from the cast and unmentioned for months at a time. Indeed, today is the last episode in which Denise Nickerson will appear only as Amy Jennings. Amy will make two brief appearances in upcoming episodes where Nickerson plays another character, but this is the end of the road for her as a significant presence on the show. She started so strong and Nickerson was so talented that it is very sad to see her go like this. The chill is gone, baby.

Roger doesn’t know about the Leviathans, but he has caught on that something very strange is going on. He goes to the Old House on the estate, home to his distant cousin Barnabas Collins. He finds Quentin there. Quentin tells him Barnabas is not in. Roger tells Quentin about the strange goings-on, and Quentin says that he can explain them. He warns Roger that the knowledge he is about to impart to him will put him in deadly jeopardy.

Once Roger has heard the story, he says he wants to take David and flee. Quentin tells him this will not work- the Leviathans will kill both of them if they try it. All they can do is fight them. Roger is unconvinced of their chances, but does not have a better idea.

Roger was one of the last characters to hold out against the evidence that the show had become a supernatural thriller. Even after he was forced to accept that he was up against uncanny forces of evil, he would snap back to “Surely there is a logical explanation!” mode the minute the danger had passed. That changed when Quentin’s ghost forced the family out of the main house in #694. When he accepts Quentin’s story today, we can see that it will no longer be Roger’s function to slow the story down. That is good news and bad news- Dark Shadows long had too many speed bumps, and like all of Louis Edmonds’ characters, Roger is too delightful to be related to such a lowly rank. But not since he ceased to be a villain in #201 have the writers come up with anything else for him to do. We may be losing Roger altogether before much longer.

Episode 957: That’s a bad sign

Willie Loomis has come back to the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, where he once lived as the sorely bedraggled blood thrall of vampire Barnabas Collins. Willie intends to stay only for a short time, answering an invitation from Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Willie is engaged to marry a woman named Roxanne, and Roxanne expects to leave with him in the morning. But he finds out that Barnabas and Julia, along with the kindly Maggie Evans and some other people, are locked in battle with a vast and incomprehensible evil. So Willie announces that he cannot leave. He will stay and help Barnabas and Julia fight.

At the beginning and end, a shape-shifting monster sees something that terrifies him. Pondering this, Barnabas remembers that the two things which frighten the monster are ghosts and werewolves. Since Collinwood is the world capital of both ghosts and werewolves, that raises the question of why the monster wants to be there. The disturbance can’t be a werewolf- the first time it occurs, it prevents the monster from attacking Willie and Maggie, and if it were a werewolf it would just have gone on to attack them itself. The second time, Julia comes face to face with it. It casts a glowing light on her, and she asks what it is. One might assume she would recognize a werewolf, who in any case don’t glow. The show does a good job making us wonder just what the phenomenon is and making us hope we will find out tomorrow.

When Barnabas first enslaved Willie in 1967, he was extremely cruel and Willie was miserable beyond imagining. When Willie came back in 1968 after a stay in Windcliff, the mental hospital Julia controls, Barnabas’ vampirism was in remission and Willie took rather an insouciant attitude towards him. In those days, Barnabas put up with Willie’s insubordinate attitude with relatively mild displays of annoyance. Barnabas finally brought Willie to heel in #560, when he convinced Willie that his disobedience was putting Maggie in danger and Willie responded with agony. Torturing Willie in that way made Barnabas smile for the first time in ages. He was glad to return at last to his happy place.

Now, Barnabas is a vampire again, but Willie is full of friendship and goodwill towards him. He talks warmly to Julia about how Barnabas helped him in the past. In turn, Barnabas is genuinely concerned for Willie’s well-being, telling him that the current situation is too dangerous for him and that he should go live his own life. This new coziness leads to some intentionally funny moments. At one point, Willie walks in on Barnabas saying out loud that he doesn’t understand what’s going on. He tells the vampire “You’re talking to yourself, Barnabas. That’s a bad sign!” As if that’s the part he needs to worry about!

Willie has a conversation with Maggie that verges on the poetic. When he tells her “I never knew how awful it was to be alone until I wasn’t,” we find ourselves wanting him to go directly to Roxanne and run as far as he can as fast as he can.

There is a big mirror on the wall at the foot of the stairs in Barnabas’ house. At one point he walks in front of it and casts a reflection. Sometimes they have been very emphatic that vampires don’t cast reflections. Most famously, Julia confirmed that Barnabas was a vampire in #288, when she contrived to open her compact and point the mirror at him. The same prop was used in #704, when it exposed Barnabas’ secret to the luckless Sophie Baker, prompting him to murder her. On the other hand, when wicked witch Angelique became a vampire for a while in 1968, there were some shots that were obviously deliberate in their composition that prominently featured her reflection in mirrors, making the point that she was an exception to this rule. The mirror doesn’t have to be on the wall, but if it is we will inevitably see Jonathan Frid reflected in it, suggesting that they put it there on purpose to show that he is now another exception to the rule.

Willie was off the show for a year, from #696 (broadcast 24 February 1969) to #956 (broadcast 23 February 1970.) His absence during that period was not explained. Today he mentions to Julia that he has been working at another hospital, as he once worked for her at Windcliff. Indeed, she had offered him a job there in #537. Since Julia did not know about this other hospital job, he must have taken it sometime after leaving his position at Windcliff and without a reference from her. Before Barnabas enslaved him, Willie was a dangerously unstable ruffian, wanted by the police, so they are likely the first employers he has had who would have provided a usable reference. So he probably left Collinwood for the job at Windcliff not much later than March 1969 and held a job in some third place before getting back into hospital work more recently.

In the first year of the show, only David Henesy, as strange and troubled boy David Collins, looked directly into the camera; in the last year, that move has been the signature of Denise Nickerson as David’s young friend Amy Jennings. Today, just about every member of the cast does it. I believe it is the first time Jonathan Frid has done so, though there have been times when his examination of the teleprompter has moved him perilously close to an unintentional soliloquy.

Barnabas tells Julia that their enemies will never find his coffin “where it is now.” The first time we heard that was in 1967, and back then it made us wonder why, if he has an impregnable hiding place for his coffin, he usually just leaves it in the middle of his basement where no one coming downstairs could avoid seeing it. Barnabas spent most of 1969 as a time traveler visiting 1897. His vampirism was exposed in that year, and he was hunted. He assured his allies that no one could find his coffin where it was hidden then; they found it immediately. So longtime viewers aren’t so sure that Barnabas will escape detection during the day.

As Julia, Grayson Hall has a new hairdo today. It is a bit longer than it has been, and is swept up in front.

Episode 956: Your ol’ William

Today we see Willie Loomis, much-put-upon servant of old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, for the first time since #696. We have heard no explanation of where he has been during the year in between. Long before his absence began, in #537, Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman had offered Willie a job at Windcliff, a mental hospital which she controls and where he was once a patient. Maybe he went off to work there.

Willie makes his first entrance today in conversation with Amy Jennings, a child who was herself a patient at Windcliff until she moved to the great house on the estate of Collinwood in #639. Willie knows Amy and expects her to know him, presumably from the time they overlapped on the estate, though perhaps they may have met at the hospital as well. Amy lets Willie in the house, but is in a hurry to go outside. He asks where she is going at such a late hour; she says that she left her bicycle outside and has to put it away before it starts raining.

Next we see Willie, he is on the telephone, making kissing noises. “Oh, oh, well you know, I can’t help it, precious. Oh, I mean your ol’ William, he wants to be with you so bad, but I just gotta wait. Well, sure I’ll hurry, I’ll get back as soon as I can.” Willie has always been much given to referring to himself in the third person, even in his first week on the show, when he was played by James Hall. This is the first time he has called himself “William,” and the first time we have had evidence that there is a woman anywhere in the world who reciprocates his romantic feelings.

Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard enters. Liz had unpleasant dealings with Willie in his early days, and like most other people in and around Collinsport believes that he abducted Maggie Evans,The Nicest Girl in Town, and held her prisoner in May and June of 1967. She is disgusted to see him in her house. He tells her that Barnabas and Julia asked him to come to Collinwood. He says that he went to the Old House on the estate, where Barnabas lives, and that he is not at home. He asks if Julia still lives in the great house; Liz says that she does, but that she isn’t in at the moment. Maggie is the governess at Collinwood now, and is in the minority of Collinsporters who don’t believe Willie was her kidnapper. She doesn’t know what happened to her in that period, since Julia used her magical power of hypnosis to wipe Maggie’s mind clear of the memories of the period to cover up the fact that Barnabas was the guilty party. Nonetheless, she is sure Willie was not to blame, and she considers him a friend. Willie asks to see Maggie, and Liz says that she, also, is out. He tells Liz he is getting married; she could not be less interested.

Liz and Amy meet in the drawing room and confer about Maggie. They have locked her in the room on top of the great house’s tower, because she is opposed to a conspiracy they are involved in. Amy says that she has told their leader about Maggie, and that he is on his way to take care of Maggie. The leader is a shape-shifting monster. Liz says she hopes he won’t come in the form he assumes when he is in his room, because that would involve killing Maggie. They have managed to frame someone else for the murders the monster has already committed, so if he kills Maggie it will reveal that that man is innocent.

Willie overhears the end of this conversation, and Liz and Amy realize he has overheard them. He sneaks up to the tower room to free Maggie. He gets into the room, but Amy closes and locks it, trapping them inside. Amy makes her signature move, looking directly into the camera and smiling at the audience. We hear the monster approaching, and Willie and Maggie clutch at each other.