We are in the fifth week of a segment set in a different universe than the one where Dark Shadows spent its first 196 weeks. There are enough stories to keep everyone busy all day every day, and almost all of those stories are working quite well right now.
The only exception is the one that dominates the action today. In #994, we learned that a man named Dameon Edwards used to be a frequent visitor to the great estate of Collinwood. Dameon hasn’t been seen or heard from in about a year. He’s dead, as it happens, and his ghost has been popping up and making various people uncomfortable.
Since the first thing we had ever heard about Dameon was that he was dead, we were off to a rocky start with him. The main continuity had a great success with Quentin Collins, who was introduced the same way. But Quentin was not only a member of the Collins family that is central to the show, he figured first as a series of weird and frightening events in the lives of children David Collins and Amy Jennings, characters we know and care about. Dameon’s only background is that he was one of many ex-boyfriends of Angelique Collins, the late and recently reanimated wife of Quentin’s counterpart. His actions are just a bunch of not-particularly scary special effects that are witnessed by people who have either been brought on so that they can worry about them, such as sleazy musician Bruno Hess and uptight butler Mr Trask, or who have bigger problems, such as Quentin and Angelique.
I’ve speculated in previous posts that this was not the original plan for Dameon. Maybe they planned to develop more of a connection between him and the action, and just couldn’t fit the necessary material into the first 13 scripts of the “Parallel Time” segment. Or maybe they did not intend to introduce a new character, but the counterpart of someone we know from the other continuity. Whatever they may have hoped to do, what they actually did falls absolutely flat.
To the extent that Dameon is the counterpart to anyone in the other continuity, it would be Quentin’s ghost. Indeed, today he leads Parallel Quentin to a room that reminds us of the one from which Quentin’s ghost began his reign of terror in late 1968 and early 1969. As 1969 went on, the living Quentin became an important character. Due to a trip back in time and some magic, he was prevented from dying and immunized against aging. The people he had haunted remembered the ghost, but the living Quentin was also around. Eventually they started to treat the ghost as a separate being from the Quentin who was a regular fixture of the cast of characters. So I suppose they might have intended to have Quentin’s ghost cross over into the current continuity, confusing David Selby when he saw himself wearing mutton chop sideburns, a Victorian-era suit, and a sardonic grin while he refused to speak. But that kind of thing was still a stretch for viewers when they did it on Twin Peaks twenty years later, and would have been a big ask for a daytime audience to follow in 1970.
There are a number of buildings on the estate of Collinwood. There is the Old House, a big mansion where the Collinses lived until the 1790s, and the great house, an even bigger mansion where they have lived since. These days, the Old House is home to hard-drinking writer William H. Loomis and his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Sometimes the place is called “Loomis House” in recognition of its inhabitants. We learn today that the Loomises have a servant. His name is Wilfred Block, but everyone knows him as Fred.
Fred hears some noise coming from the attic. He goes up there and finds two kids who belong at the great house. They are Amy Collins and her cousin, Daniel Collins. Amy is out cold, and Fred asks Daniel what he did to her. Daniel claims to be innocent. He says that Amy just looked at a portrait and fainted. That’s the sort of thing the Collinses do all the time, so Fred accepts it. He carries Amy back to the great house. Daniel follows.
There, Daniel tells his father, Quentin Collins, the same story he told Fred. Fred tells Quentin that he couldn’t get any answers out of Amy. She just kept repeating the words “chained” and “trapped.” Quentin thanks Fred.
On his way out, Fred sees a woman whom he greets as “Miss Alexis.” He tells Alexis that he misses her visits to the Loomis House. She walks up very close to him and says she is feeling cold. He says he knows what to do about that, and hugs her. She holds the embrace for quite a while. He says he’s wanted to do that ever since he first saw her. She tells him to kiss her. Before he can comply, they hear Quentin coming. They separate and look nonchalant. Quentin is surprised Fred is still there. Fred hastens out.
Later, Alexis’ aunt, Hannah Stokes, would go to Fred at the Loomis House and ask him to come to her place, telling him Alexis wanted to see him there. That scene took place out of our view. The next time we do see Fred, Hannah is leading him into her parlor. Fred tells Alexis that he’d been planning to see her at Collinwood, but she says it is better at Hannah’s. Hannah leaves them alone together. They embrace, and Fred kisses Alexis. He feels cold. She tells him he will go on feeling cold, but bids him embrace her again. He does. He collapses.
Hannah was close to one of her nieces, Quentin’s late wife Angelique Stokes Collins. But she never got along with Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis. Angelique had shared Hannah’s interest in the occult, and had been her pupil in that area, while Alexis scorned such matters. Alexis came to stay at Collinwood four and a half weeks ago, and spoke to Hannah only once during that time, when Hannah invited herself to the great house. That was a tense meeting which ended with Alexis all but ordering Hannah to go.
Hannah is taken aback today when she answers her door. She sees Alexis. She makes sarcastic remarks about Alexis, which do not deter her visitor from entering. The visitor asks Hannah to tell her fortune. Hannah resists, but the visitor keeps telling her it is something she wants very much. Hannah starts laying out the Tarot, but the first two cards disturb her so deeply she stops and cannot be persuaded to resume. She tells her visitor that they mean that she has no future. The visitor responds with a placid look and an insistence that Hannah read her palm. Hannah does not want to see the same message there, but the visitor will not be denied. When she looks at her palm, Hannah has a realization. “You are not Alexis! You are Angelique!”
Hannah is horrified that Angelique has returned from the dead. She does not want to know how it was done. Angelique seems eager to tell her everything; if Hannah were willing to listen, she might even volunteer that she murdered Alexis by draining the warmth from her body to heat her own undead frame. Angelique asks Hannah to bring her up to date on some things that happened while Alexis was at Collinwood and she was in the tomb. She then explains that her own death was also a murder, and that she wants to avenge it, though she does not yet know who the murderer was. She also has plans for Quentin, though she does not make it clear at this time what those are. She tells Hannah to bring Fred to her so that she can drain the warmth from him. Hannah protests, but Angelique tells her she has no choice. If she does not deliver Fred to her, she will haunt Hannah as long as Hannah lives.
After Fred collapses, Angelique calls her aunt back to the parlor. She tells her that she is all right now. Hannah finds that Fred is dead. Angelique agrees that he is, and repeats that she is warm again. She goes on: “That’s the way it must be now. This is the way I will live now. And when Quentin comes to join me, he will live this way, too. For eternity.” Evidently she is now a vampire, only instead of blood she drains heat from her victims. Also, she will be killing someone every 24 hours. Collinsport has been established as a very small town, so if she and Quentin are both going to be keeping up that pace it’s hard to see how it can last even for a year, let alone for eternity.
Quentin Collins
Quentin does not suspect that Angelique has risen from the dead, killed her sister, and taken her place. He has problems of his own. At the beginning of today’s episode, he is standing at the door to Angelique’s old bedroom in the east wing of Collinwood, where Alexis stayed during her visit and which Angelique now occupies again under Alexis’ name. He is looking into the room, but does not see it. Instead, he sees an entirely different space. Unlike Angelique’s richly decorated room, it is bare and dark.
Quentin sees two children in the room. They look and sound exactly like Daniel and Amy, though they are wearing clothing he does not recognize. He calls the names Daniel and Amy, but even though they are just a few feet away from him they do not seem to hear him or to be aware of his presence. An invisible barrier of some kind keeps him from entering the room.
Though the children cannot hear Quentin, he can hear what they are saying. The boy says that according to his father, “Dr Hoffman” said that “Barnabas got caught” in the room. The girl is alarmed and says that she does not want to get caught. She does not want to be in the room at all, but would rather be asleep in bed.
Quentin keeps calling the names Daniel and Amy. After a moment, he hears Daniel’s voice coming from somewhere other than the room. He turns, and sees Daniel and Amy standing behind him in the hallway. They don’t know what he is talking about when he asks them if they have been in the room, and he doesn’t know how to explain what he saw.
The Hoffman likeliest to come to Quentin’s mind is Julia Hoffman, Angelique’s fanatically devoted servant, who is the housekeeper at the great house of Collinwood and is certainly not a doctor. The only Barnabas he can think of is Barnabas Collins, an ancestor who died in 1830 and who was the subject of a biography Will Loomis wrote five years ago. Amy has told him that Will has started another book about that Barnabas. Quentin read Will’s original book, and was puzzled as to what could possibly be left to be said about its subject. So the conversation he has overheard makes no more sense to him than does the setting in which it took place.
Quentin shoos the children away and goes into the room. It is furnished as it always is. Angelique, whom he believes to be Alexis, is lounging in the middle of it. He tries to explain the phenomenon to her, and she does not take him at all seriously. He tells her enough that she should know that if it was an hallucination, it was a remarkably involved one, the sort that occurs only to people with grave mental illnesses. Even so, she could not be less interested in it. She wants to know what Quentin is doing to investigate her murder. He says that he doesn’t believe Angelique was murdered, to which she replies that he is a fool. This conversation does not have an obvious track forward, and Quentin quickly excuses himself.
Barnabas Collins
Barnabas Collins went to the island of Martinique in the 1790s on a business trip for his father’s shipping concern. While there, he met two lovely young women. One was Josette DuPrés, daughter of the richest sugar planter on the island. He was captivated by Josette, but did not believe she could love him. Josette’s aunt, the exiled Countess DuPrés, had brought a lady’s maid with her when she escaped from the French Revolution. This maid, named Angelique, was quite as beautiful as Josette, and made it clear that she was available to Barnabas. He consoled the sadness that he felt when he supposed Josette to be unreachable in a light-hearted love affair with Angelique. When it turned out that Josette was not unreachable at all, he forgot about Angelique and turned to her. Soon, he and Josette were engaged to be married.
When Josette and her father came to Collinwood for the wedding in 1795, the countess and Angelique came along. Angelique was sure that Barnabas was marrying Josette only to conceal his true intention, which was to keep her as his real partner. When she discovered that this was not the case, Angelique vowed to do something about it. She had learned black magic, and was ready to wreak a terrible vengeance.
Angelique managed to end Barnabas’ engagement to Josette, and had caused many disasters by the time Barnabas agreed to marry her. Before long, he discovered that she was a witch. He made several farcically inept attempts to kill her. When he shot her with a gun, she thought he had succeeded. As she lay bleeding, Angelique cursed Barnabas to become a vampire. It turned out her wounds were only superficial, but the curse was not. Barnabas was eventually trapped and chained in his coffin until 1967, when he was accidentally freed once more to prey upon the living.
That Barnabas Collins was not the one Will wrote his 1965 book about, and that Angelique is not the one who has returned from her coffin to stay in Quentin’s house. They were residents of a parallel universe. It was in their universe that the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows took place. There, the east wing of Collinwood has long been vacant and disused. Barnabas happened to be there when the bare dark room Quentin sees today was replaced by Angelique’s room from this universe. He and several other residents of the original continuity saw the phenomenon a number of times over the next few days.
Barnabas became preoccupied with the forlorn hope that if he could enter the other “time-band,” he might be freed of the vampire curse and become human again. His closest friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, tried to dissuade him from this plan, but he was nothing daunted. Barnabas finally did manage to find a way through the barrier.
Once in “Parallel Time,” Barnabas’ hopes were instantly disappointed. He was still a vampire. The first person he met was Carolyn Stoddard Loomis. He bit her and made her his thrall. Will found out about this very shortly after, and trapped Barnabas in a chained coffin. He is using him as a source of material for a new book.
The children Quentin saw talking about Barnabas were not Daniel and Amy Collins, but David Collins and Amy Jennings from the main continuity. They don’t know that Barnabas is a vampire; so far as they are concerned, he is their kindly cousin from England, an old world gentleman with some eccentric habits.
Amy Collins
Amy had stayed with the Loomises for a few days recently when there was some trouble in the great house. She took Daniel to their attic because she wanted him to join her in her favorite pastime while she was there, going through the trunks. Daniel declares that only girls would be interested in an activity like that. Amy doesn’t refute his claim when she says that the trunks have all sorts of interesting old stuff in them, such as dolls.
Daniel asks Amy about the basement of the Loomis House. She tells him that Will has the only key, and that he refuses to let even Carolyn go down there. We know that the basement is where Will keeps Barnabas’ coffin. Daniel says that there is a tunnel that leads from the beach right into the basement, and that he likes to play there. He says that it has been sealed up lately, but suggests Amy come with him to unseal it and explore. She says “Not at night,” and turns away. He calls her a scared-y-cat. Longtime viewers know that the same tunnel exists in the main continuity and that it has been a hugely important part of the story more than once, and will wonder if they can again match the excitement associated with it in those past episodes.
Amy tells Daniel that there is a sword somewhere in the attic, a real one. This does not exactly thrill Daniel, but at least he asks if it is a saber or a fencing foil, which is more than he had to offer in response to the prospect of digging up some antique dolls. He goes to look for the sword behind some paintings. When he turns up the portrait of Barnabas Collins, he hears a heartbeat. Longtime viewers will remember that characters have several times heard a heartbeat when looking at the portrait of Barnabas in the main continuity, and that this means that Barnabas is going to be on the show before much longer. Amy can’t hear the heartbeat, but she does have a strong reaction. It is at this point that she faints and the ill-fated Fred enters.
Regular viewers know that Amy’s muttering of the words “chained” and “trapped” mean that she has a mystical perception of Barnabas’ situation. But Quentin doesn’t have the slightest idea what to make of it. Amy comes to in the drawing room and tells Quentin that when she saw the eyes in the portrait of Barnabas, she realized he needed help. Quentin says that Barnabas has been dead for a very long time.* Amy says she knows, and leaves it at that.
Ben Stokes
In the 1790s, the Barnabas of the main continuity befriended much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes. Barnabas’ father, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, made Ben’s life miserable. Barnabas took pity on Ben, teaching him to read and write and standing up for him when he was wrongly accused of misconduct. In return, Ben gave Barnabas his absolute loyalty.
When Angelique came to Collinwood in 1795 and hatched her evil schemes, she decided she needed a henchman. She chose Ben. She pretended to find Ben attractive. He matter-of-factly walked up to her and took hold of her, as if women who look like movie stars come on to indentured servants every day. She soon used his excitement to cast her spell on him. He found himself helping Angelique to do great harm to Barnabas and everyone he cared about, grieving him very deeply.
Eventually, Ben broke free of Angelique. He went on to be freed from his indenture and to have children. One of his descendants is Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, an expert on the occult and a frequent ally of Barnabas and Dr Hoffman.
Fred’s response to Angelique today reminds us of Ben so long ago. Once Ben gathered that Angelique was propositioning him, he didn’t see any need to talk at all. They both had work to get back to, so he was ready to get down to business straightaway. But Fred keeps telling Angelique how beautiful she is and how he always hoped something would develop between them. His dialogue and Edmund Hashim’s delivery of it are as realistic and unadorned as Angelique’s lines and Lara Parker’s style are florid and over the top. The contrast is deliberate, as the contrast between the monosyllabic working-class “Fred” and the ornate and ethereal “Angelique” is deliberate. Just as Ben did not know what kind of world he had stumbled into when he reached for the original Angelique, Fred has no idea that he lives in a place where beings such as this Angelique can exist.
When Barnabas first came to this universe, Carolyn Loomis told him that Angelique and Alexis were the daughters of “Tim Stokes,” the counterpart of his old acquaintance Timothy Eliot Stokes. We have yet to see Tim Stokes, but we can be sure he will played by Thayer David. We know what Thayer David looks like. Alexandra Moltke Isles, who was in 333 episodes as well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, dated critic John Simon in the 1970s. Simon was a college classmate of Thayer David, and told her that in their day David was “the handsomest man at Harvard.” When I mention that to my wife, Mrs Acilius, she says that those must have been rough days for Harvard. David may have been better looking before he put on weight, but he never bore anything that could be mistaken for a family resemblance to the dazzling Lara Parker.
Longtime viewers, thinking back to what we saw when the show was set in 1795, might have an idea. Will’s book proves that the timelines diverged in the 1790s, when the Barnabas of the current timeline left Angelique alone and had a happy marriage with Josette. Perhaps in that continuity Ben really did pair off with Angelique. If so, Angelique and Alexis might be their descendants. They were lucky to inherit all of the genes governing their appearance from her.
The thought of the counterparts of Ben and Angelique as the forebears of the Stokes family in the current continuity might shed some light on its members. We’ve heard not only that Hannah and Alexis had no use for each other, but that Alexis and her father have not spoken for a long time. Like Hannah, Tim shared Angelique’s interest in the occult and doted on Angelique, while scorning Alexis. The new Angelique certainly qualifies as the Evil Twin, and is very much a continuation of the Angelique we already know from the main continuity. From what we know about them, Hannah and Tim seem to be the sort of people Angelique would naturally turn to for help in her deadly doings.
As for Alexis, she seems to have set her cap for Quentin, and succeeded in driving Quentin’s current wife Maggie out of Collinwood when she caught Alexis and Quentin in rather a compromising position. Alexis kept saying it would be easier for the new Mrs Collins to come home if she were to leave, but she never did leave. On a conventional soap, Alexis would have the makings of a Vixen, but it takes more than husband-stealing to join the ranks of the villains on Dark Shadows. Alexis would seem to take more after Ben, who had been indentured because he was a thief and was bewitched by Angelique because he disregarded sexual morality. She may have those sorts of flaws, but compared to the evils around her they seem like minor foibles indeed.
Edmund Hashim
Fred is played by character actor Edmund Hashim, making his only appearance on Dark Shadows. Hashim does a fine job. Fred had to be played with strict naturalism, so that the only resource Hashim could draw on to hold anyone’s attention against the flamboyant Parker was skilled and truthful acting. He pulls it off. It’s a shame we won’t see him again. He died in 1974 at the age of 41, one of the first cast members to pass away. The only ones who predeceased him were Fred Stewart (1970, aged 64,) House Jameson (1971, aged 68) George Mitchell (1972, aged 66) and Patrick McVey (1973, aged 63.)
*In fact, he says that Barnabas has been dead for “over 200 years.” It’s 1970, as the wardrobe makes unmistakably clear, and they have explicitly said that the Barnabas Quentin has heard of died in 1830. So he’s bad at math.
Medical researcher Cyrus Longworth has invented a potion which, when he drinks it, darkens his hair, causes him to grow more of it, and adds to his muscle mass. When he is in this state, Cyrus calls himself “John Yaeger.” Yaeger serves Cyrus as a very effective disguise. The other day, he ran into his old friend Quentin Collins while he was presenting himself as Yaeger. Quentin did not suspect that the man he was talking to was Cyrus.
Cyrus uses Yaeger to escape responsibility for violent crimes. He has started a couple of bar fights in the Eagle tavern. Barmaid Buffie Harrington has drawn Cyrus’ special attention; he hit her, twisted her arm, choked her, and threatened worse when he was alone in the tavern with her, and he has since taken an apartment in her boarding house. Cyrus has also beaten Buffie’s sometime boyfriend Steve so severely that he put him in the hospital. Cyrus was choking Steve when he heard a police whistle and ran away. It looked like he would probably have murdered him if the police had been a minute later. When Buffie saw Cyrus in his undisguised form and told him of the cruelty she and Steve had suffered at Yaeger’s hands, Cyrus barely bothered to conceal his pleasure. When Buffie asked Cyrus if Yaeger worked for him, Cyrus was delighted to say that he did.
We open in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, where Cyrus is waiting for Quentin. All of a sudden Cyrus starts to transform into Yaeger. This is the first time the transformation has taken place spontaneously, without a fresh dose of the potion. Cyrus leaves a note, then jumps out the window and runs away.
In his laboratory, Cyrus is about to drink the antidote to restore his usual appearance. He decides he would rather have some more fun as Yaeger first and puts the antidote back. His fiancée and lab assistant Sabrina Stuart comes downstairs. She has not seen Cyrus as Yaeger before, and is completely fooled by the disguise. She has heard the name John Yaeger in connection with recent strange behavior on Cyrus’ part, and is stern with him. Regular viewers know how brutal Cyrus is with Buffie, and we fear that he will mete the same treatment out to Sabrina. But he does not do so, not this time. He insists that Cyrus wants him to wait in the laboratory, and Sabrina leaves him alone there. After Sabrina exits, he takes a painting from the wall and goes.
Cyrus takes the painting to the apartment he has rented in the name of Yaeger. Buffie comes to him there. He harries her about her visit to him when he looked like his usual self and she knew him as Cyrus. He says she told Cyrus she likes a quiet man. He walks up to her, talking all the while about how quiet he can be. He gets quieter and quieter until he brings his hand across her face with full force. The next we see, she is bruised and cut, her clothing badly torn. Christopher Pennock and Elizabeth Eis play these moments very well. They are really hard to watch.
Cyrus gives Buffie the painting from his laboratory. He asks her if she wants him to take her someplace nice, with good food and a sophisticated atmosphere. She perks up and is enthusiastic. He then points out that she is covered in bruises and abrasions and wearing damaged clothing. He ridicules the idea that she could be seen anywhere looking like that, and taunts her with imprecations to take better care of herself. She leaves, hanging her head and carrying the painting. Cyrus laughs, relishing the misery he has inflicted on Buffie.
Cyrus rejoices to have battered and humiliated Buffie.
As Cyrus, whether he has red hair, a white coat, and a diffident manner, or black hair, a mustache, and a sadistic swagger, Pennock has a relatively straightforward job to do. He is to embody a total rat bastard, one who pretends to be nice when he might be held accountable for his actions and who exults in hurting people when he thinks he can get away with it.
Eis has a trickier assignment. When we first saw Buffie, she was cheerfully fending off Steve’s clumsy advances. Even after she had seen Cyrus, as Yaeger, outfight many strong men, she still stood up to him and spoke her mind. But now he has harmed her again and again, and she just keeps coming back for more. It would be depressing to see anyone fall into that pattern, but it strips us of all hope when we know the person to be so lively and dynamic. That’s the point, I think, and Eis doesn’t let us off the hook. Buffie still holds her head up, she still looks Cyrus in the face, she still speaks in a mature tone of voice when she protests against his abuse. But even so, whatever masochistic fascination is at work has such a grip on Buffie that she will not walk away from a situation that is already intolerably bad and can only get worse.
A Window Into This World From That
We are currently several weeks into a segment set in a different continuity than the one where Dark Shadows spent its first 196 weeks. Vampire Barnabas Collins brought us here. Barnabas discovered that a room in the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood was the site of an inexplicable phenomenon. When he opened the doors to the room, he usually saw it as it was in his universe, a dark space with bare floors and undecorated walls. But once in a while, it appears to be brilliantly lit, fully furnished, and the setting of frequent meetings among people who look and sound just like his acquaintances, but who are living different lives. Through an invisible barrier, Barnabas could see and hear those people, but he could neither pass through the barrier nor attract the people’s notice.
Barnabas became obsessed with the forlorn hope that if he could pass into the other universe, he might be free of his curse and become a living man once more. Other characters from the main continuity joined him in watching their counterparts in the other world; few of these knew that Barnabas was a vampire, but all of them could see that the phenomenon had some obscure significance special to him, and were concerned that he was going to do something dangerous. In #980, Barnabas managed to make his way through the barrier, only to find that he was still a vampire. He bit the first person he met, and shortly after was chained in a coffin by her husband. He has been trapped there ever since.
The room on which Barnabas and others in the main continuity had been spying in the days before he crossed over has been a major set in the “Parallel Time” segment, and every time we see it we wonder if those others are still watching. Today, we intercut with the original “time-band.” Quentin goes to the room, and finds the bare dark space it represents in the main continuity. He sees two children there, whom he takes to be his son Daniel Collins and Daniel’s cousin Amy Collins. The boy is telling the girl that “Dr Hoffman” told his father that Barnabas got caught in that room. The girl responds that she certainly does not want to get caught, and she wants to leave at once. Quentin calls Daniel and Amy’s names, and is puzzled that the children do not react. He hears Daniel’s voice coming from behind him. He turns and sees Daniel and Amy standing in the hallway, asking why he is calling their names.
This is the first indication we have had that the main continuity is ever visible from this one. We are left wondering if the traffic between the universes can go both ways, and if so whether this continuity and the original one will in some way merge together. Cyrus’ attack on Buffie and her response to it were so difficult to watch that, done as well as the scenes were done today, they left us reluctant to tune back in tomorrow. The story of Buffie’s degradation at Cyrus’ hands can only become more depressing as it goes. But this new information about how “Parallel Time” works suggests such a wide variety of possible next steps that it sets our imaginations into overdrive, and we can’t wait to see which way we will turn next.
Wealthy socialite Alexis Stokes is looking at her identical twin sister, the late Angelique Stokes Collins. Angelique has been dead and in her coffin these six months, but hasn’t decayed visibly. This has led Angelique’s widower, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, to the conclusion that Angelique is an uncanny being whose remains must be burned. Quentin’s friend, foolish scientist Cyrus Longworth, heartily concurs with this opinion. Alexis sits by the coffin and tells her late sister that she has, with great regret, come to share Quentin and Cyrus’ conclusion. She touches Angelique’s shoulder. At this, Angelique’s eyes pop open. She speaks, and tells Alexis that she is half right. Someone must be destroyed, but it will be Alexis, not Angelique.
Angelique and Alexis stand facing each other in the tomb. Angelique explains that all she needed to come back to life was a touch. Now that Alexis has given her that, the warmth has begun to drain from her body into Angelique’s. Soon all of Alexis’ body heat will be transferred to Angelique. She will then die, and Angelique will trade places with her. The “heat vampire” idea was one the show explored briefly in April 1969, when undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins drained the warmth from the bodies of the living to keep herself alive. Now Angelique will return from the grave as another heat vampire. Alexis will lie in the coffin, and Angelique will move back in to the great house of Collinwood, where Alexis has for the last three weeks been staying as Quentin’s guest.
Footage of the dress rehearsal for this scene survives. The only other surviving videotape from any episode of Dark Shadows not originally released for broadcast are the opening slates of the episodes.* The confrontation between Alexis and Angelique not only involves the most complicated videotape editing they’ve done so far, it also requires Lara Parker to do some intricate acting work as she plays off a version of herself she can neither see nor hear. In the rehearsal footage, she several times breaks character and turns to director Lela Swift to report on things that aren’t going right. We can hear Swift’s responses over the control room microphone. Some crew members are in and out of the shot, and at the end two people come to help Parker out of the coffin. It’s fascinating for hard-core fans, a must-watch:
By the time Mr Trask, the butler in the great house at Collinwood, comes to the mausoleum to see what’s taking so long, Angelique has changed into Alexis’ short bluish gray suit and chignon hairstyle with a tight spiral twist at the back, the look that the mysterious Madeleine wore in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. She has changed Alexis into her own gown and loose hairdo, and has put Alexis into her coffin. She is closing the lid of the coffin when Trask enters. Trask asks if she is ready to return to Collinwood, and she says she is looking forward to it.
We cut to the drawing room at Collinwood, where Quentin is yelling at the wind. He is convinced that it is really a ghost expressing discontent, and he demands to know what the trouble is. He doesn’t get any answers.
Angelique and Trask enter the house. Posing as Alexis, Angelique dismisses Trask, and tells Quentin she now agrees with him and Cyrus. The body in the tomb must be destroyed.
Cyrus is in his laboratory. He is talking with his lawyer, Quentin’s cousin Chris Collins. Chris has questions about Cyrus’ instructions to open a bank account in the name of John Yaeger and deposit $5000 in it. He asks if Yaeger is a pseudonym Cyrus is planning to use. Cyrus denies this, and says that Yaeger is a man he met recently who is helping him with his current experiments. In #985, Cyrus responded to Chris’ questions about these experiments with a lot of mad scientist ravings that alarmed him. Since Cyrus offers no information about Yaeger aside from his connection to this dubious project, Chris is reluctant to comply with Cyrus’ directives. Cyrus agrees that Chris should meet Yaeger first. Chris says “I’m looking forward to meeting him. See you, Cyrus,” and exits. This is the last time we will ever see Chris. Actor Don Briscoe’s health problems were catching up to him, and he was not able to return to the show.
While Quentin and Cyrus burn the coffin, Angelique is in her old bedroom. Alexis had been staying there, so Angelique is right at home. Trask tells her it is as if Angelique never left. Later, Quentin comes to invite her to join him and Cyrus for a drink downstairs. She declines, saying she would like to be alone.
Lara Parker’s performance as the newly returned Angelique is marvelous, her best work so far. We can see that she is a different person than the one who left the house earlier in the evening, and we can believe that the other characters don’t see it. In a closeup, she wrinkles her face like the Grinch, suggesting that Angelique has come to steal Christmas. The supernatural element of her confrontation with Alexis suggests Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia,” which the show has been drawing on for the last few weeks, and reminds longtime viewers of Laura’s April 1969 storyline. But the idea of a woman killing her identical twin and taking her place would have been familiar to much of the audience from the 1964 film Dead Ringer, in which Bette Davis played the sisters in that sad situation. Bette Davis is one of the people frequently mentioned when film buffs name The Greatest Screen Actor of All Time, but not even she could have done better than Parker does today.
In the drawing room, Cyrus is alone. He was reluctant to accept Quentin’s invitation to stay for a drink, and is pacing and fidgeting. What Quentin does not know is that Cyrus is in the middle of a Jekyll and Hyde project, and he wants to get back to his lab to take the potion and change himself into the brutal John Yaeger. He revels in Yaeger’s cruelty and is addicted to the transformation.
Music begins playing on the soundtrack we have not heard before, a jagged piano theme. Cyrus suddenly feels the pains that he has felt after taking the potion. He sees Yaeger’s dark hair springing into place on his arms. He looks in the mirror and sees that he has become Yaeger, without taking the potion. He goes to flee the house, but realizes Quentin is already approaching. He retreats to the drawing room and locks the door. Quentin knocks, asking what on earth is wrong with Cyrus.
This is not only the first time Cyrus has changed without drinking the potion, it is also the first time he has appeared without a putty appliance precariously attached to the bridge of his nose. He looks far more convincing without it, though of course he is even more instantly recognizable as Cyrus.
In his post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn points out both that the videotape editing is extremely ambitious today, with the confrontation between Alexis and Angelique at the beginning and the pretaped sequence of the Cyrus-to-Yaeger transformation at the end, and that that the editing in between these heroic shots looks ragged. The jump cut to Cyrus and Quentin’s approach to the mausoleum makes it look like Cyrus’ laboratory opens onto the cemetery, the first sequence of Angelique in her old room begins and ends with unusually long sequences of her pruning some extremely unhealthy looking flowers, and Cyrus spends a surprisingly large amount of time in the drawing room pacing about. Danny guesses that they did not know how long the process shots would run, so they inserted filler that could be removed if they went long.
That could be, but I like the episode the way it is. The jump cuts give the whole thing a dreamlike quality that works well with the subject matter. That’s certainly the case with the cut to the cemetery- we don’t know where Cyrus’ lab is, but we do know that only death is likely to come from the work being done there, so that jump makes a grim symbolic sense. Moreover, the actors use the sequences Danny identifies as filler to shed light on the characters and situate the scenes in the story. Angelique is so absorbed in her plant that you can believe she came back from the dead specifically to work on it, and nothing Trask or Quentin has to say is going to distract her for long. Cyrus’ pacing makes it clear he feels trapped at Collinwood, which adds considerably to the force of the moment when, as Yaeger, he has to hide from Quentin.
*I should mention that we have the dress rehearsal for #584. What we don’t have is a finished episode- they never made one. They just sent the tape of the dress rehearsal to the ABC network, and that was broadcast.
Trask the butler is surprised to see young Amy Collins in the great house of Collinwood. Amy’s cousin Quentin, the master of Collinwood, sent her to stay in the Old House on the estate, home to Will and Carolyn Loomis. The visibly uncomfortable Trask tells Amy she is not supposed to come back until Quentin sends for her. Amy says that she can’t stand it at the Loomises. Trask snaps at her for making life more complicated “at a time like this.” Amy asks what’s so unusual about this time, and Trask claims that he just means that he has been working hard. After an awkward silence, Amy asks if there has been any news about someone called Dameon Edwards. At Edwards’ name, Trask flies out of control. He grabs Amy by the shoulders, leans down so that his nose is in her face, and shouts that she has seen Edwards again. Terrified, she says she hasn’t. He shakes her and shouts louder, she freezes tighter and tighter. It’s getting pretty disturbing when the front door opens. Quentin enters, with two other adults, and demands to know what Trask thinks he’s doing.
Trask goes berserk.
Jerry Lacy and Denise Nickerson do a great job in this scene, which comes as no surprise to longtime viewers. For much of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897. In that segment, Nickerson and Mr Lacy played Nora Collins and the evil Gregory Trask. They were terrific together then, as they are today.
Gregory was cruel to children, including Nora. Gregory’s goal was to take control of Collinwood and all its residents, and for a time he seemed to be succeeding. As such, Gregory’s abuse of Nora left us feeling helpless. This Trask is not in control of anything, least of all himself. We don’t know exactly what secret he is frantically trying to keep in connection with Edwards, but we know he believes that it might be exposed at any moment and that when it is he will be ruined. He is acting from panic. Outrageous as Trask’s attack on Amy is, we can see that it is not likely to be repeated and it does not fill us with despair.
Quentin takes Amy to the drawing room and talks with her privately. She is absorbed in her dislike of the Loomises’ house. She says she has a feeling that something terrible is happening there, but she can’t give any reason why she should feel that way. She says that Will spends all of his time writing a new book. This surprises Quentin, who says that Will hasn’t written a word in five years. Amy says that he is busy now, and mentions that she stole a couple of pages from his wastebasket. Quentin asks if she still has them. She hands them over, and he reads them avidly.
Quentin is so enthusiastic about joining Amy in spying on Will’s new project that he forgets all about Trask. Amy seems to have forgotten him as well. When Quentin walked in and found Trask getting rough with her, it looked like he was going to dismiss him on the spot, but now it seems Trask will keep his job for a while longer.
The two who entered with Quentin were Cyrus Longworth and Alexis Stokes. Alexis is the identical twin sister of Quentin’s late wife, Angelique. Cyrus was a friend of Angelique’s, and is a fool. He is a scientist by occupation, and unknown to any of the other characters in today’s episode has been taking a potion of his own devising to turn himself into a hairier and more openly sadistic version of himself. That Jekyll and Hyde potion was the end product of an idea he got from Angelique. Cyrus tells Alexis today that Angelique was his teacher in matters of the occult, with which he is fascinated.
Quentin, Cyrus, and Alexis have returned from Angelique’s tomb. Alexis went there to try to prevent the men from unsealing the tomb and opening the coffin. They were so caught up in the idea that she was really Angelique come back to life that there was no point in her trying to talk sense to them. When they had done their work, they were astounded to find, not only that Angelique’s body was where it was supposed to be, but that it was perfectly preserved six months after her death. Quentin twice asked Cyrus how that could be, first appealing to his expertise as a scientist, then to his studies in occult lore, and each time Cyrus responded with a declaration that what they were seeing could not possibly exist.
The men are now convinced that Alexis is not Angelique, and they tell Trask this. He never thought she was, and is entirely absorbed in his fears about Dameon Edwards. All he says in reply is that he believes there is an evil presence in the house.
Quentin and Cyrus want to cremate Angelique’s body. They announced this plan while they were still in the tomb, prompting Alexis to remind them that her sister’s will specified that she be buried and to threaten to take them to court if they go against Angelique’s wishes.
Cyrus talks with Alexis in Angelique’s old bedroom, telling her that the body’s extraordinarily uncorrupted state has persuaded him that Angelique survives in some uncanny way. He urges her to let the body be destroyed. She continues to demur.
Cyrus says that when she was alive, Angelique had a “rapport with the unnatural” that inclines him to believe she might come “back from the death.” These awkward phrases were probably just line bobbles by Christopher Pennock, but they suit Cyrus well. He’s supposed to be an intellectual who spends little time talking to anyone, and such people do indeed tend to stumble over their words.
Later, Alexis summons Trask. She asks him to drive her to the cemetery and to keep their trip there a secret from Quentin. He acquiesces.
At the mausoleum, Trask is worried about an impending storm. He says he will go back to the car to get an umbrella, but Alexis tells him to forget about that. He is simply to wait for her in the car. She plans to spend only ten minutes with her sister’s remains.
Alexis looks in the coffin and talks to Angelique. She has bad news for her:
I don’t know what your secret was, Angelique, or why you still look as you did in life. I only know that it is wrong. It goes against the natural order of things. I don’t want to do what I have to do now. Quentin and Cyrus are right. Your body must be destroyed.
Distraught, Alexis puts her hand on Angelique’s shoulder, touching her sister one last time. We cut to a closeup of Angelique lying in her coffin. Her eyes pop open, and her lips curl into a smile. For a half a second, these motions look like they might be mechanical reflexes taking place within a dead body as it begins to decompose. But then she speaks: “My dear Alexis, you were always so right. Someone must be destroyed, but it won’t be me. It will be you.”
The show has kept us in suspense for three weeks as to whether Alexis was Angelique. Now, they’ve settled that question, and we know who Alexis is. Unfortunately for her, it seems we just have time to say goodbye.
In our world, bodies do sometimes turn up long after death showing no visible signs of decay. There were several vampire panics in Europe in the early modern era when exhumed corpses were found still looking fresh after months in the grave. Cyrus does not know of any such events in his world’s history, so he and Quentin have to come up with the idea of a panicked response on their own.
It has also been traditional in many branches of Christianity to regard a long-uncorrupted corpse as a count in favor of putting the person on the calendar of saints. Dostoevsky was hugely fashionable in the USA in the Cold War years of the 1950s and 1960s, and it is probable that the writing staff had at least a nodding acquaintance with The Brothers Karamazov. One of the central episodes of that novel comes when the admirers of the godly Father Zosima insist on leaving his body unburied for a long period, certain that it will remain uncorrupt and prove that the anniversary of his passing should be kept as a feast day. To their horror, his remains rot in the usual way. We’ve only been in this particular universe for four weeks, and the only indication we have so far had that Christianity even exists here came early on, when Will used the sign of the cross to immobilize and trap a vampire. So it is no surprise that Quentin, Cyrus, and Alexis never consider that the perfect preservation of Angelique’s body might suggest that she has taken a place among the saints.
Quentin Collins walks into the bedroom once occupied by his late wife Angelique, where Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis is staying. Quentin arrives just in time to see sleazy musician Bruno Hess strangling Alexis. He interrupts this process. Bruno is convinced that Alexis is Angelique returned from the grave, and that she is responsible for many strange and unhappy occurrences that have taken place on the estate of Collinwood since her arrival.
Bruno holds the deed to a cottage on the grounds of the estate and lives there, to Quentin’s intense annoyance. He hates Bruno, who had an affair with Angelique, a fact he likes to throw in Quentin’s face. You might think Quentin would call the police and report Bruno’s assault on Alexis. Not only would that result in a felony charge, but if Bruno bursts out with his suspicions it should be easy to get a civil commitment order that will earn him a a long stay in a home for the very nervous. But Quentin leaves Alexis and Angelique’s room without calling the sheriff. What’s more, when he goes to the drawing room and finds Bruno still in his house he has a lengthy conversation with him and waits for him to go. He never does telephone the police.
By the end of the episode, Quentin has convinced himself to take Bruno’s theory seriously. Alexis overhears him talking about it with his friend Cyrus Longworth. Quentin tells Cyrus that they must open Angelique’s tomb and look in her coffin.
Alexis finds them there, the coffin already out of its niche. She objects to the desecration of her sister’s resting place. She promises to leave Collinwood immediately if they will let Angelique rest in peace. Quentin refuses. He opens the box. Whatever he finds inside prompts a reaction of shock on his face and on Alexis’ as they look inside.
Between these scenes, we spend time in Cyrus’ laboratory. He is a mad scientist who has devised a Jekyll and Hyde potion. His alter ego goes by the name John Yaeger. Cyrus’ fiancée Sabrina Stuart is a sweet, trusting young woman who is determined to believe the best of Cyrus, but she has heard so much about Cyrus’ involvement with the brutal Yaeger that she is certain something is terribly wrong. We know that Cyrus was close to Angelique, and that she put him up to the Jekyll and Hyde experiment. Sabrina doesn’t know what Cyrus’ project is, but his withdrawn and irritable manner reminds her of the influence Angelique had on him. She says “It’s the same as it was when Angelique was alive- you were different then, and you’re different now.” I’m sure that was the scripted line, too.
Sabrina demands Cyrus stop lying to her and tell the truth about who Yaeger is and what hold he has over him. We saw yesterday that Cyrus’ attitude towards the potion and towards his time as Yaeger is already that of an addict towards his drug, and he sullenly refuses to answer any of Sabrina’s questions, even with more lies. She grows more and more exasperated.
Sabrina’s time with Cyrus is cut short when barmaid Buffie Harrington enters and insists on talking with Cyrus alone. Yaeger gave Buffie a check signed by Cyrus to cover the damages he did to her place of employment in a bar fight the other night; she wants to know if the check is authentic. Cyrus confirms that it is, much to Buffie’s delight. She mentions that her sometime boyfriend Steve is in the hospital because of a beating Yaeger gave him; Cyrus hands her a pile of cash to cover Steve’s hospital expenses. Buffie tells Cyrus that Yaeger has taken rooms in the boarding house where she stays, and that he frightens her. She does not tell him that Yaeger has hit her, choked her, and threatened her every time they have met. We know that he knows that- he has met her only when he was in the form of Yaeger, and he recognizes her on sight, showing that he remembers their encounters. Buffie asks if Yaeger works for Cyrus. He smiles with great satisfaction and says that he does.
That smile is a key moment. Yesterday’s episode gave the Jekyll and Hyde story a new lease on life by confirming that it will indeed be about addiction. That’s the usual thing with that material, but Dark Shadows has taken familiar tales in such weird directions that we could by no means take it for granted that its version would follow the typical pattern. Cyrus’ response to the thought that he controls Yaeger, who has put Steve in the hospital and is terrorizing Buffie, confirms something else. Cyrus’ diffident manner and scientific preoccupations help Sabrina hold onto the idea that he is a sweet man whose only flaw is naïveté, but Christopher Pennock’s rendering of that smile leaves no doubt that Yaeger is Cyrus’ means of indulging his own sadistic impulses.
As Buffie is leaving, Cyrus asks her if she likes Yaeger. Holding her head high, she says that sometimes she does. She sounds like she means it. Buffie was a commanding presence when first we saw her, and she is forceful throughout this scene. But she has given up on fighting back against Yaeger or even trying to run away from him. Her line suggests that she is not simply giving in to fear, but is drawn to a masochistic fantasy. Yaeger has been so vicious and Cyrus is so sinister that there is no prospect this fantasy is going to be channeled into any kind of consensual game- Buffie is drifting into a situation that can lead only to her destruction.
This episode includes one of the all-time great bloopers. The closing credits run over a shot of Angelique and Alexis’s room. For the first minute or so, we see a man sitting in a chair, chewing on something. Whoever he was, apparently he decided he’d found a good spot for lunch. Eventually the camera zooms in on the portrait of Angelique that dominates the room. This is so obviously an attempt to get the lunch-eater out of the frame that it only adds to the hilarity.
Writer Gordon Russell has to give two characters plausible motivations today, and he succeeds admirably.
One is Dr Cyrus Longworth, the apparently nice half of a Jekyll and Hyde duality. Jekyll and Hyde is a story about drug addiction, but Dark Shadows has so often featured villains whose crazy ideas have turned out to be true that we can’t be sure the show’s version will be that way. For all we know, it might turn out that Cyrus really has developed a method of separating the good from the evil in human nature and that he will use it to breed a new race.
Today, Cyrus is confronted in his laboratory by his fiancée Sabrina Stuart and his friend Quentin Collins about his association with his alter ego, whom they believe to be a separate person named John Yaeger. Cyrus pulls himself up to his full height and declares “I can end my relationship with Yaeger any time it suits me.” At this, the universal motto of the addict, we know just what is driving Cyrus. We can set aside all the talk in the opening voiceovers and elsewhere about how good and innocent Cyrus is, and see him as a man in the grip of a force he won’t face and can’t beat.
The other character in need of an intelligible motivation is Cyrus’ friend, sleazy musician Bruno Hess. Bruno is staying in a room above Cyrus’ laboratory in hopes that the ghost of a man he murdered won’t be able to find him there. The ghost appears to him there today, and sets the room on fire. Cyrus helps Bruno put the fire out, and talks about trying to exorcise the ghost. Bruno tells Cyrus he doesn’t believe he can help him. When he says this, Bruno seems, for the first time, reasonable. He has asked many things of Cyrus, so many that we might think of him as nothing more than a source of ever-escalating demands. But when he says that what is happening now is outside Cyrus’ province, we can see that there is some kind of mental process going on in his head.
Bruno thinks the ghost and the fire were both sent by Quentin’s late wife, Angelique. In the universe where Dark Shadows spent its first 196 weeks, Angelique’s counterpart is a witch who has a complicated relationship to fire. She is vulnerable to it, but can also use it in various ways. And, she has returned from the dead many times. If the Angelique in this continuity is like that one, it would make sense to suspect her. Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis is Quentin’s guest at the great house of Collinwood. Bruno believes Alexis is really Angelique. He bursts in on her and says that he has a way to test whether she is Angelique returned from the dead. If she is, she can’t die again. So he sets about strangling her. If he kills her, Bruno will know he was mistaken.
In the main continuity, every drawer in every table at the great house contains a loaded gun. Longtime viewers have no reason to doubt that the same circumstance obtains here. So if we had not seen Bruno being rational in his scene with Cyrus, we would have no question in our minds but why Alexis does not draw a weapon and shoot the crazy man who is going to do nothing but try to kill her. That moment of lucidity makes the scene interesting. It even makes it somewhat surprising that Bruno goes all the way to homicide- we know he is a strange and violent man, but if he could think as clearly as that, maybe he could come up with a less drastic expedient.
The “Dan Curtis Productions” logo at the end of the closing credits is printed in a simpler style than it has been so far. We will see this new style several more times in the remaining months of the show.
We are in the fourth week of an arc set in a different universe than the one we saw in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows. This universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time,” was originally introduced as a realm populated by Doppelgänger of the characters we have known. They are the same people, but have made different choices and are therefore living different lives.
Some of the Parallel Time characters fit this description. So, we have known matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother Roger Collins from episode #1. In the early days of the show, much was made of the Collinses’ straitened financial circumstances, the result of Roger squandering the half of the family’s assets he had inherited and Liz scrambling to keep control of the business. Roger lived in Liz’ house as her guest and worked in the business as her employee, and she kept a wary eye on any move he made to get his hands on her money. In #981, Parallel Liz mentions that she used to be quite wealthy, but that she entrusted her share of the Collins fortune to Roger, and as a result they are both penniless. Original Liz saw that fate as a distinct possibility, every time Roger was in the same wing of the house as her bank account information.
Parallel Liz and Parallel Roger live in the great house of Collinwood as the guests of their brother Quentin. Parallel Quentin is not at all the same person as Original Quentin. He is an entirely different person. Original Quentin was born in 1870, died in 1897, became a ghost haunting Collinwood in 1968 and 1969, and as the result of a time travel storyline in 1969 was both spared death and immunized against aging. Original Quentin was a riff on the early conception of Roger as a villain, and he was a huge hit with the viewing public during the part of the show set in 1897. Ever since Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress in late 1969, they’ve been at a loss what to do with him. Parallel Quentin is an attempt to reinvent the character to let him keep enough of his vices that he retains the roguish charm that the fans liked, but at the same time use those vices as motivation for him to act the part of the hero from time to time.
There is need for an action hero today. Quentin’s friend, dippy mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, has invented a Jekyll-and-Hyde potion and taken a swig of it. As the darkly mustachio’d John Yaeger, he has been persecuting barmaid Buffie Harrington and Buffie’s unlucky boyfriend, big galoot Steve. We open with Yaeger choking Buffie and telling her she needs to be beaten into submission. Later, Yaeger gets the jump on Steve in a dark alley behind the Greenfield Inn, an establishment that also fronts a sinister alley in the main continuity. He threatens him with his sword cane. Steve manages to get that weapon away from him, but Yaeger beats him down. Yaeger is choking Steve, apparently with the intention of murdering him, when he hears a police whistle and runs away.
Cyrus Longworth and John Yaeger are played by Christopher Pennock.* In the main continuity, Pennock played a character who asked to be called Jabe but wound up answering to “Jeb.” Jabe appeared to be a man in his twenties, but was in fact a shape-shifting monster who was only a few months old when he was destroyed. We’ve heard a good deal about what Cyrus was doing six months ago and more, and there are diplomas on the walls of his laboratory that show his history is nothing like Jabe’s.
Among the very few choices in Jabe’s short life was an attempt to renounce his shape-shifting abilities so that he could remain in human form at all times. In that way, he is the opposite of Cyrus, who chooses to take his potion knowing it will change him into Yaeger.
Also, Jabe was so obnoxious that even people brainwashed to regard him as a divine being come to fulfill a plan that more than justified the extermination of the human race found his personality too much to take and turned against him after a few encounters. But by the end of Jabe’s time on the show, it had become undeniable that there was a kernel of sweetness in his personality. In this regard, too, Cyrus is the opposite of Jabe. We hear his soft voice and see his diffident manner, and we assume that the single-minded scientist in his lab coat, toiling all hours on a project that he keeps saying will benefit humankind, is a well-meaning sort, though perhaps dangerously naïve. Cyrus’ dutiful assistant and devoted fiancée, the lovely Sabrina Stuart, encourages us in that assumption, insisting that Cyrus is thoroughly good, if hopelessly unworldly. But as the initially insufferable Jabe turned out to be endearing at the end, so the apparently innocent Cyrus is deliberately choosing to turn himself into Yaeger even after he knows what Yaeger is capable of. What’s more, he refuses to let anyone at all help him with his experiment, meaning there is no one to restrain Yaeger’s sprees.
Sabrina’s counterpart in the main continuity was the fiancée, not of Jabe, but of another dangerous shape-shifter. She was engaged to werewolf Chris Jennings. As this Sabrina is convinced Cyrus is good, so that one kept insisting Chris was good, even after she had learned that he repeatedly refused to be restrained on nights of the full Moon, so that the killings he committed in his lupine form were premeditated murders on his part. This Sabrina does not know the nature of Cyrus’ work, and she believes that Yaeger is an enemy of his who is holding him prisoner. Sabrina would appear to stand with Roger and Liz as a character who is in a meaningful sense the same person in both timelines, so we are in suspense as to how she might react if she finds out the truth about her man.
Sabrina’s part makes us wonder if the original plan were to cast Don Briscoe, who plays Chris in the main continuity, as Cyrus and Yaeger. At this time Briscoe was struggling with bipolar disorder. He was trying to self-medicate with street drugs, which not only made matters worse in itself, but also led him to get a severe beating one night while trying to score a fix in Central Park. Briscoe appears in Parallel Time as lawyer Chris Collins and has a small part in the concurrently filmed feature House of Dark Shadows, but his health problems ruled out a part as crucial as the lead in the Jekyll and Hyde story.
Buffie is played by Elizabeth Eis, who appeared in one episode set in the main continuity as Nelle Gunston. Nelle was a young woman from Virginia, bored by life with her parents, who had joined the cult that was meant to serve Jabe and the world-wrecking plan to which he was central. When she was asked if she would commit murder if that was what the cult required, she smiled pleasantly and said “Even that.” Nelle was killed before she could meet Jabe.
Buffie is not at all the same person as Nelle. She is not from Virginia, for one thing. When she thinks about leaving Collinsport to get away from Yaeger, she realizes she has only $13.40 to her name, and laughs at herself for a plan that wouldn’t get her any further than Worcester, Massachusetts. Naming Worcester as a synonym for “nowhere” would suggest that she is a New England girl, which would fit with her employment in a bar in a fishing village in central Maine. Buffie is the opposite of what they originally told us the characters in Parallel Time would be- she is not Nelle after she has made a different choice, she is a person who began differently than Nelle and is making a similar choice.
Buffie is in her room when her landlady, Mrs Duvall, comes for the rent. Buffie has a check ready. Mrs Duvall thanks Buffie for recommending her boarding house to a gentleman who has rented her four best rooms at a very handsome price. She tells Buffie that the man is a big step up from Steve. Buffie has no idea what she is talking about. Yaeger shows up, and Buffie realizes he is Mrs Duvall’s new prize boarder. Buffie is horrified, and demands her rent check back. Mrs Duvall refuses to return it. Yaeger points to a print hanging on the wall and instructs Mrs Duvall to take it away and burn it. She is doing so when Buffie protests that it is hers. At that, Mrs Duvall stops short of the door, but she does not put the print back on the wall. Eventually, Mrs Duvall does take Buffie’s print, and leaves her with Yaeger.
Mrs Duvall leaves with Buffie’s print.
The telephone rings. It is Quentin, asking Buffie about Yaeger. Yaeger stands next to her and forces her to answer Quentin’s questions with lies. Later, Steve will come to Buffie’s room. She will tell him to give up on her and not to take any more beatings from Yaeger on her behalf. Steve asks if Yaeger is a superman; Buffie widens her eyes and says that he might be. This brings us back to Nelle, who renounced her life in Virginia and her connection to the human race because she was looking for a superman and thought she would find one in Jabe. Steve may not have had much to offer, but it’s a cinch he wasn’t as bad as Yaeger, and he’s gone from Buffie’s life after this scene.
The emptiness of Buffie’s life is represented today by a prop we have seen only once before on Dark Shadows, a television set. There was a set in a motel room in Bangor in #27; we never do see one in the Collinsport or the Collinwood of the main continuity. Perhaps the makers of the show are suggesting that people who have nothing better to do than to watch the idiot box are likely to fall prey to any fella who offers physical abuse and verbal intimidation.
Mrs Duvall is played by Camila Ashland. Ashland was a very distinguished stage actress who appeared in #928 as someone called Mrs Hutchins. A man from the cult around Jabe hired Mrs Hutchins to tell some lies to throw mad scientist Julia Hoffman off their trail. That didn’t work, but Julia admired Mrs Hutchins’ performance, as we suspect Grayson Hall admired Ashland’s. When the man from the cult paid Mrs Hutchins for her work, he was unpleasantly surprised at her questions and the uneasy conscience it reflected, responding roughly that she is being paid for a job and should leave it at that. He didn’t realize he was dealing with an artist. Mrs Duvall’s eagerness to please the obviously horrible Yaeger shows that she really is the crude mercenary the man from the cult assumed Mrs Hutchins was.
We cut to Cyrus’ laboratory. Yaeger has fled there from the police. He is about to take the re-Jekylling formula when Quentin shows up and demands to know where Cyrus is. We end with them in that standoff.
*Billed twice in the closing credits- as Christopher Pennock for Cyrus, and as Chris Pennock for Yaeger. Adorable!
The first expert in forbidden lore to join the cast of characters on Dark Shadows was Dr Peter Guthrie of Dartmouth College, parapsychologist. Guthrie was chief scientific advisor to well-meaning governess Victoria Winters as she assembled the forces of good and led them in battle against undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. In #184, Guthrie confronted Laura. He told her that he had figured out she was “The Undead,” the first appearance of that expression on Dark Shadows. He also offered to help her if she would desist from her plan to murder her young son David. Guthrie was nervous about making this offer, apparently fearing Laura might draw him into her web of evil. He needn’t have worried about that- she responded, not by corrupting Guthrie, but by killing him.
The second such expert was a straightforward mad scientist. She was Julia Hoffman, MD, who in #291 offered to cure vampire Barnabas Collins of his curse. Though Julia made it a condition of her offer that Barnabas stop preying on the living, as Guthrie had conditioned his offer to Laura on her allowing David to live, we could already see that Julia was far more deeply compromised than Guthrie had been. She had learned of Barnabas’ existence while treating his victim, Maggie Evans, and she could gain the time to make her experiment work only by betraying Maggie’s trust and preventing her from regaining her memory of what Barnabas was and what he had done to her. Before long, Julia acquiesced to Barnabas’ pressure and joined him in murdering her old medical school classmate, Dr Dave Woodard. Eventually, she and Barnabas would become the parents of a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam. The shocking abuse they heaped on Adam in his infancy left no doubt that as a mad scientist, Julia is as much a symbol of extreme selfishness as is a vampire.
Adam was the product of an experiment designed by another mad scientist, Dr Eric Lang. Lang was even more flagrantly evil than Julia. When he needed a head for the monster, he tied his assistant down and set about cutting his head off. Granted, the assistant was a character played by Roger Davis, so the audience could see where Lang was coming from. In fact, the writers themselves eventually got so fed up with Mr Davis they cut the head off the final character he introduced. Still, Lang’s impatient response to the assistant’s complaints showed that he was utterly lacking in human compassion.
Now, we are in a different universe than the one where Dark Shadows spent its first 196 weeks. The resident mad scientist in this “Parallel Time” is Dr Cyrus Longworth. Cyrus has developed a potion that turns him into a real jerk. That may not sound like much of an achievement compared to building a Frankenstein’s monster or curing vampirism or whatever it was Guthrie wanted to do for Laura. But that’s to be expected. By the time Guthrie came to the great estate of Collinwood early in 1967, monsters and black magic and the like had been fixtures there for over 171 years. It appears that such things are relatively new to this version of Collinwood, so Cyrus is doing the sort of modest project that tends to characterize a field when it is first starting.
When Cyrus drinks his potion, his red hair turns black, he grows a lot more of it, and a putty appliance materializes, dangling precariously from the bridge of his nose. In this form, he calls himself “John Yaeger.”
That nose may not be made of Silly Putty, but it certainly isn’t a serious putty. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
As Yaeger, he goes to the Eagle, a tavern in the village of Collinsport, where barmaid Buffie Harrington is fending off the advances of her boyfriend Steve. Steve keeps coming up behind Buffie and grabbing her by the waist, a move that doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination. Buffie seems to be at once excited by Steve’s aggressiveness and irritated that he is keeping her from getting her work done. When Yaeger shows up and orders Steve to vacate the premises, Buffie’s evening goes from complicated to disastrous. The men fight, Steve loses, and Yaeger bodily ejects him from the tavern. Buffie confronts Yaeger about the wreck he has made of the place.
Later, Yaeger returns with a check to cover the damages. Buffie sees that the check is signed “Cyrus Longworth.” She explains that she used to work for the Collins family, and she knows who Cyrus is. She doesn’t believe that Cyrus would be friendly with Yaeger, and is sure he wouldn’t give him a check to cover the expenses he had incurred in a bar fight. Yaeger tells her the check is legitimate, and insists she keep quiet about his connection to Cyrus. He leaves.
Later, Quentin Collins finds the battered Steve and brings him into the tavern. Steve refuses to call the police, vowing to find Yaeger and settle the score himself. He leaves, and Quentin asks Buffie what she knows about the man who beat Steve. She says she doesn’t know much about him, but that a friend of Quentin’s does. She shows him the check with Cyrus’ signature. Perplexed, Quentin leaves.
Suddenly, Yaeger appears from nowhere. He tells Buffie that she promised not to tell of his connection to Cyrus. He starts choking her.
This is Elizabeth Eis’ first appearance as Buffie. Eis was on Dark Shadows once when it was set in the main continuity, playing Nelle Gunston, a devotee of a sinister cult who met Barnabas in the Blue Whale, a bar that corresponds to the Eagle in that universe. Barnabas killed Nelle before her only episode was over. It’s good to have Eis back, she was fun as Nelle and is a commanding presence today.
George Strus plays Steve, in his first and only role on the show. Strus was primarily a stunt performer, but he had lines in a few productions, most notably as a tough in Shaft. His last imdb credit was as a stunt performer in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, made in 1991, twenty years after Shaft. Steve is supposed to be a big dumb galoot, and Strus pulls that off satisfactorily.
Christopher Pennock’s name appears in the closing credits for the role of Cyrus. He is credited as “Chris Pennock” for Yaeger, adorably enough.
Dark Shadows never followed the usual soap opera pattern of a week building to a slam-bang conclusion on a Friday. This one is a case in point. It aired on a Friday, and nothing new happens.
The actors are all very good, and each makes the most of their time on screen today. As child Amy Collins and drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, Denise Nickerson and David Selby do a good job reacting to the ghost of someone named Dameon Edwards, which they saw yesterday. As sleazy musician Bruno Hess and sneaky butler Mr Trask, Michael Stroka and Jerry Lacy do a good job being alarmed by the prospect that Dameon has returned to expose their guilty secrets. As mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, Christopher Pennock does a good job failing to perceive the consequences of his lunatic scheme. And as Cyrus’ blindly devoted assistant/ fiancée Sabrina Stuart, Lisa Blake Richards does a good job being trusting and optimistic.
I’ll just single out one moment, when Bruno sees his piano playing with the touch of visible fingers and realizes it is Dameon’s doing. Michael Stroka gives a memorable take.
If the piano starts playing itself, Bruno’s going to be out of a job.
Cyrus drinks the potion he has formulated to turn himself from a mild-mannered Jekyll into a brutish Hyde. As her did the first time we saw him do this, he cries out in pain and collapses. This time they add a lot of flaring green lights to illustrate his distress. The process is not effective at all- at first, I thought something had gone wrong with one of the cameras. At the end of the sequence, we fade from Pennock in his Cyrus look to him in his Hyde makeup, which we didn’t see the first time. The shot doesn’t line up, so it does not create the illusion of a transformation, and the prosthetic nose isn’t very firmly attached, so it takes a second to realize that it is supposed to be part of his face and not just something that landed on him while he was falling.
Dark Shadows Commentary 