Julia Hoffman, MD, can do many things no other medical practitioner has ever accomplished. She can build a Frankenstein’s monster and bring it to life; she can erase a person’s memories and overwrite them with whatever she pleases; she can cure vampirism; and, a few weeks ago, she overcame time and space and transferred herself to a parallel universe. Yet, Julia is quite unreliable about something which most doctors do accurately every time they attempt it. She is often incorrect when she pronounces a patient dead. Julia has been known to pronounce the same person dead twice in one episode, only for us to see them alive and well before the credits roll.
So, it is only fitting that in this mirror universe Julia should be the one who is inaccurately pronounced dead. The pronouncement comes not from a physician, but from a woman named Roxanne Drew who, in lieu of a personality, has the ability to look at a person’s belongings and visualize their current physical state. Julia’s friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, gives Roxanne a scarf that belonged to Julia’s counterpart in this universe. Roxanne declares that the scarf’s owner is dead. The audience knows full well that the other Julia Hoffman is indeed dead, and so does Barnabas. Julia killed her Doppelgänger when she arrived in this universe in #1036. But Barnabas has apparently forgotten about that. He decides that it is his friend who is dead, and he gives up the search for her. He leaves her trapped in a dungeon in the basement of the great house of Collinwood, about to die of thirst.
Roxanne has short red hair, pale skin, and a strong chin. She looks enough like Julia that when we first saw her, we thought she would be revealed to be the daughter of Julia’s counterpart. The false death pronouncement reinforces the suggestion of a kinship between them, but the show has taken no other steps towards substantiating this idea.
Julia has an unrequited love for Barnabas and has given up everything in her life for his sake. He repays her by ignoring her feelings and chasing after other women. Vampires are metaphors for extreme selfishness, but even granting that fact, Barnabas stands out as a jerk.
Roxanne tells Barnabas she has fallen in love with him, and he tells her he loves her. In a display of actual unselfishness, he tells her they cannot be together. The central couple in this part of Dark Shadows, Quentin and Maggie Collins, have had many conversations in which Quentin refuses to tell Maggie about obstacles to their relationship; in #990, Maggie told him that he is treating her “Like a child! And I am not a child!” This scene takes place on the same set as that one, and Roxanne even says “You treat me as a child, and I am not.” Barnabas has a reason for his behavior, while Quentin had none. So the echo explains both why we can care about him, and why we never could care about Quentin.
Barnabas’ unselfishness lasts only for a few minutes. He bites Roxanne. She is happy afterward. She tells Barnabas she lives in a house at Finley’s Cove, and he says he will see her there later.
Roxanne goes home alone. She finds the villainous Tim Stokes waiting for her there. He harasses her, discovers the bite marks on her neck, and learns Barnabas’ secret.
Wicked witch Angelique has died, again. While she still dwelt among the living, Angelique locked Julia Hoffman up in a dungeon and left her to die of thirst. Julia’s buddy Barnabas Collins and a dimwitted policeman called Inspector Hamilton are looking for her. She is struggling to stay awake. The episode devotes so much time to a go-nowhere story about a non-character named Roxanne that we can sympathize with this struggle.
Julia nods off just as Barnabas and the inspector pass by the hidden wall of her dungeon. She does not hear them, and by the time she wakes up and starts calling out they are gone.
While asleep, Julia has a dream in which Barnabas and Roxanne decide that she must be dead. They are going to leave for the alternate universe from which Julia and Barnabas originally came. Julia has given up everything in her life to help Barnabas, and she has an unrequited love for him. For his part, Barnabas has conceived a mad passion for Roxanne, who is young and pretty but has no personality. Roxanne’s short red hair, pale complexion, and strong chin make her look like she could be Julia’s daughter. Indeed, when first we saw her it seemed likely she would be revealed to be the daughter of Julia’s counterpart in this universe. Barnabas is so thoughtless about throwing other women in Julia’s face that it would be like him to cast her aside for the daughter she might have had, Grayson Hall would have done a great job playing the anguish this would have inflicted on Julia, and it would have given Donna Wandrey something to work with as Roxanne. It’s a shame they didn’t run with it.
This is Colin Hamilton’s final appearance as Inspector Hamilton. It is always a bad sign when writers give a character the actor’s name; it suggests they don’t trust him to answer to anything else. They may have been right about Colin Hamilton. He will be back as a doctor in #1219. That is the only episode of Dark Shadows of which no video survives. There is an audio recording, so we can hear that Hamilton delivered the doctor’s dialogue in the same bored, impatient tone he used for the inspector.
Wicked witch Angelique Stokes Collins has cast a spell on Maggie Collins, compelling Maggie to shoot her husband Quentin. Angelique herself dwells among the living because of another spell, one cast by her father, a wizard known as Tim. This spell drains the “life force” from a woman named Roxanne into Angelique, revivifying her after Quentin’s brother Roger drove a hatpin into her brain nine months ago. Angelique has kept her identity secret, in part because Quentin and a friend of his had a panic attack some time ago and destroyed her coffin, keeping the physical evidence from telling its tales. They were two loonies, quelling caskets.
Occasionally Roxanne manages to reclaim enough of her “life force” to make Angelique weak and cold. When this happens, Angelique can perk herself up by hugging a man and kissing him, thereby making all of his body heat flow into her, leaving him an icy corpse. The kiss appears to have become essential to this transfer; her kissing equates coolness. Yesterday she gave Roger this treatment, avenging her own murder.
The spell on Roxanne will break when she speaks, and her pushy ex-boyfriend Claude is about to make her do that. So Angelique has only moments to live. Quentin is on the run from the law, charged with the murder of a man named Bruno. Angelique’s enemy, Barnabas Collins, demands she sign a confession admitting that Bruno was actually killed by a spell she cast using a cravat of his. Quentin is innocent in these loose necktie squallings.
Angelique refuses to sign any such document. Later, Barnabas will tell the whole story to a police inspector whose incredulous response makes it clear that it would not have persuaded anyone had she done so. More urgent is a question he puts to her about the whereabouts of his faithful companion, Julia Hoffman. Angelique has locked Julia in a dungeon and left her to die of thirst. The door to this chamber swings shut silently, and apparently it does not let Julia’s cries for help be heard outside. Many of the places of confinement we have seen on Dark Shadows are the looniest squeaking cells you could imagine, but this one is grimly soundproof.
Roxanne speaks and Angelique dies, defiant to the end. Cloaking queenliest loss, her refusal to bend invests the character with a perverse grandeur.
Barnabas remembers an Angelique who lived on the island of Martinique. For him, all the other Angeliques are just successors to what she brewed up there, Antilles cooking sequels, as it were. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
With Angelique’s death, her spell over Maggie breaks. Maggie collapses and drops the revolver she had trained on Quentin. One of the themes of the show has been that a person who casts a spell creates an alternate version of herself and that version takes possession of the person against whom they direct it. Lara Parker and Kathryn Leigh Scott play Angelique and Maggie’s collapses in the same way; seeing these back to back, we cannot miss the point that what we are really seeing is the simultaneous death of two Angeliques. Sometimes the alternate selves created by the spells outlive the spellcaster, and there is no telling where they will drive the victim. The accursed who wander about the earth, whether they became vampires like Barnabas or zombies like his uncle Jeremiah, are lockless antique legions, unrestricted in their physical movement, unlimited in the duration of their afflictions, uncounted in their numbers.
Miffed that Maggie pointed a gun at him, Quentin leaves the room. He finds Barnabas, who explains everything that has been going on. Quentin goes back to Maggie. She says that she realizes he could never love her or any other woman as he loved Angelique when she was alive. He tells her he never loved Angelique, but that he “hated the ground she walked on” and never shared a happy day with her because she was so cruel to him when they were married. When the same scene played out between Maxim de Winter and his second wife in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and in Alfred Hitchcock’s film based on the novel, we could take it as grounds for hoping that their marriage would take a turn for the better. But Quentin seems never to have loved Maggie, and we have never seen them share a happy day. They speak lovely words as they embrace; kissing allots eloquence. But Quentin’s declaration that he wasn’t any happier in his first marriage than he has been in his second comes only as confirmation of our suspicion that things will only go from bad to worse as long as he and Maggie stay together.
Barnabas and the inspector look for Roxanne. They don’t find her, and the inspector dismisses Barnabas’ whole story. The law moves a lot faster in Soap Opera Land than it does in our world, but only the looniest legal quickness could get Quentin out of trouble in the time that seems to be remaining in this storyline. Later, the inspector catches up to Quentin and arrests him, and Barnabas finds Claude stabbed to death in the woods.
This episode marks the final appearance of Angelique Stokes Collins. Lara Parker, that member of the queenliest looking class, will be back later as another witch named Angelique. It is also the final appearance of actor Brian Sturdivant and of the character Claude North. Sturdivant’s performance has many problems, most obviously his wildly uncertain accent. At times he manages to enunciate a few words in the old “mid-Atlantic accent” stage performers were trained to use in the first half of the twentieth century, but he never keeps it up for a whole line.
Angelique Stokes Collins has returned from the grave to take vengeance on her murderer. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know who that is. For the last several weeks, she has been operating on the assumption that she was killed by her widower, foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins. She has managed to get Quentin charged with one murder and suspected of several others; under her influence, he assaulted a police officer and broke out of jail. She has persuaded him that his current wife, the former Maggie Evans, is a witch and is responsible for all his troubles. He is lurking about the great house on the estate of Collinwood, where yesterday he encountered Maggie and told her he would kill her.
Angelique herself is residing in the great house. Eleven weeks ago she killed her identical twin sister Alexis, assumed Alexis’ identity, and took her place as Quentin’s houseguest. Maggie now thinks of “Alexis” as her friend.
Others in and around the house know better. High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, Quentin’s brother, has seen through her imposture. Two visitors from the alternate universe where Dark Shadows was set for its first 196 weeks, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and vampire Barnabas Collins, knew her counterpart in their world and are onto her tricks.
Angelique hears some noise in her old bedroom in the east wing of the great house. She finds the door locked and hears Roger’s voice. She demands to be let in. He opens the door and she forces her way past him. She finds Maggie in a heap on the floor. Roger rushes out. Maggie tells “Alexis” that Roger tried to strangle her after confessing to three murders, including Angelique’s. Angelique and Maggie decide to call the police.
Julia and Barnabas learned that Angelique’s father, evil barfly Tim Stokes, made it possible for her to rise from the dead by using a mixture of medical science and black magic to establish a remote connection between Angelique and a woman named Roxanne. Through this connection, Stokes drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. Julia and Barnabas have taken Roxanne from the back room of Stokes’ apartment and hooked her up to some mad science equipment in the basement of the Old House at Collinwood. They hope to manipulate Roxanne’s condition as a means of controlling Angelique.
Angelique has locked Julia in a dungeon off the basement of the great house and left her there to die of thirst. Barnabas is sure Angelique has captured her, but cannot begin to guess where she might be. He takes a shot at using the mad science equipment to revive Roxanne sufficiently to knock Angelique out. He cannot see any effect, and goes out to try to look for Julia.
As Barnabas goes out, a man peers at him from behind a tree. Since Barnabas never under any circumstances locks his front door, the man strolls into the house as soon as Barnabas is out of sight.
The man is Claude North, a mysterious person somehow connected with Roxanne. Barnabas comes back to the basement and finds Claude trying to get Roxanne to talk. He tells him that she must not do so just yet, because at her first word Angelique will die and there are some things he has to take care of before that happens. Claude cares nothing for this. Barnabas is afraid that if he attacks Claude, Roxanne will be startled into speaking, so he withdraws.
The other day, we saw a grave marker in Claude’s name, and we have seen that he has the same power Barnabas does to mesmerize people when they follow his command to “Look into my eyes!” He had also been staying in a hidden chamber identical to the one where Barnabas’ coffin was kept for his first 171 years as a vampire. And he had some kind of mystical power over Roxanne, as Barnabas has over his victims. So we thought Claude might be a vampire, too. But today he explains that the grave was his grandfather’s, he clearly doesn’t recognize Barnabas as a fellow bloodsucker, and when cornered he doesn’t flash fangs. So we’re left thinking he’s probably just Roxanne’s overconfident ex.
Meanwhile, Angelique is feeling cold and weak because Roxanne has reclaimed so much of her “life force.” She has cast a spell to cause Roger to slip past the police swarming the estate and make his way to her in her old room. Once they are together, she warms herself up for a while by hugging and kissing him. First time viewers may think this is an odd thing for her to do, but returning viewers know that she is a heat vampire who can by those actions drain the warmth from a living body and leave it an icy corpse. Louis Edmonds has been doing some great work these last few weeks, and he plays Roger’s death scene especially well.
Downstairs in the drawing room, Angelique is still shivering. Maggie enters and sees that “Alexis” is ill. Maggie insists on helping, and Angelique suggests she walk her to the fireplace. They sit together beside it. We learned Wednesday that Angelique has magical hypnotic powers, and Maggie’s counterpart in the main continuity was subjected to frequent mind-wipes. So there is a nice sense of inevitability when Angelique puts her into a trance and orders her to get a gun and prepare to shoot Quentin.
Angelique is still sitting by the fire, still feeling miserable, when Barnabas comes back. He tells her that Claude is with Roxanne and that Roxanne will be speaking at any moment. He writes up a confession and orders her to sign it, saying it will clear Quentin of the murder with which he was charged. He says that this will allow her to find peace. She says she doesn’t want peace. We may wonder how the confession could possibly clear Quentin. All she could do would be to admit that the man Quentin is charged with killing actually died because she cast a magic spell on him. We have already seen that the policeman in charge of the case has zero patience for talk about magic, and there is no end of evidence pointing to Quentin’s guilt.
We end where we began, in Angelique’s room with a homicide in the offing. Then it was Roger with his hands around Maggie’s neck; now it is Maggie pointing her revolver at the door as the knob turns. That isn’t all that suspenseful a situation. I’m sure Maggie would feel bad if she had killed Quentin, but he’s so hyper-violent that no one would doubt she acted in self-defense and has been such a bad husband to her that it’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t get over it in short order. If Quentin dies, there will be so few characters left that the show couldn’t go on, but we will probably be leaving this universe in a few days in any case. So this isn’t much of a Friday cliffhanger.
Yesterday, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard overheard her brother Roger Collins having a conversation with the portrait of wicked witch Angelique. When Roger told the portrait that he murdered not only Angelique herself but also Liz’ daughter Carolyn, Liz stormed into the room. Roger then strangled Liz and stuffed her corpse under a window seat. Today, he is in the room fretting about what to do with Liz’ body. It strikes him that his brother Quentin is currently a fugitive from justice, suspected of three murders, including those of Angelique and Carolyn. He decides to pin Liz’ murder on Quentin as well.
Angelique has come back from the dead and is impersonating her identical twin sister Alexis, whom she herself murdered in #1001. She has persuaded Quentin that his new wife Maggie, whom he does not seem ever to have liked very much, is a witch, Quentin now believes that Maggie, by use of the black arts, committed all of the murders. Maggie has looked at the publicly available evidence and concluded that Quentin has gone insane. She believes that he, by use of his hands and some sharp objects, committed at least some of the murders.
Roger has figured out that “Alexis” is really Angelique. They have a couple of awkward conversations. He asks the portrait why he can talk so freely to it when he is so stilted in his interactions with “Alexis,” since they are “one and the same.”
Roger cannot be frank with the three dimensional version of Angelique. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Maggie has started getting everyone to evacuate the house. When she goes to her room to pack, she finds Quentin waiting for her. He is holding a handkerchief monogrammed “ECS.” He tells her it was Liz’. He demands that she tells him where “the doll” is. She has no idea what he is talking about. He looks directly at her and says in a slow, level voice that he will kill her. She runs away, somehow not persuaded of his innocence.
Maggie flees to the room where Roger killed Liz. She finds Roger there, and tells him Quentin is in the house. Roger locks the door to keep him out. There is no telephone in the room; they talk a bit about how to get across the hall so they can call the police. Maggie falls into Roger’s arms and starts crying. He starts burbling about all the terrible things that have happened. He mentions that Liz was killed in the room. Maggie looks up and says Liz was found in a different room, and that the police think she was killed there. Roger tries to say he was just rambling, but Maggie puts two and two together. She realizes Roger is the murderer, and he realizes that she has realized it. We end with his hands on her throat.
Louis Edmonds is simply amazing as Roger today. The rest of the cast gives him first-rate support, but it is a magnificent turn. If the Daytime Emmys had been around in 1970, this was the episode they should have sent to Academy voters to get him his award.
For some time, wicked witch Angelique Stokes Collins has been dissatisfied with her minion Julia Hoffman. What she most wants from Hoffman is information about her new enemy, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Yet Hoffman has told her nothing useful about Barnabas. The only time she brings him up is to claim that she was busy following him when Angelique needed her to do something else. Even then, her reports are no more substantive than “He went into town,” without so much as a single name of a person he met or building he entered while there. Hoffman keeps showing friendliness to people to whom Angelique wants her to be hostile, asking questions to which she ought already know the answer, and resisting orders she would usually be eager to follow. Whatever is wrong with Hoffman, Angelique does not propose to put up with it indefinitely.
Yesterday, Angelique found the solution to the puzzle. She learned that she has not been dealing with Hoffman at all, but with her Doppelgänger from an alternate universe. Barnabas came from that universe as well. This Julia is as devoted to Barnabas as Hoffman was to Angelique, and followed him to this reality to take her place at his side. Today, Angelique traps Julia in a secret chamber off the basement of the great house of Collinwood and demands to know what she has done with Hoffman. At length Julia confirms her true identity and admits that she killed Hoffman, but she will not answer any of Angelique’s questions about Barnabas.
Angelique takes out a medallion and tells Julia to look at it. Julia gasps and turns away. She says that she knows about hypnosis and knows how to resist it. Angelique says that if she knows how to resist, there is no reason for her not to look at the medallion, but Julia keeps looking away. Julia was first introduced as a psychiatrist, whose talent for hypnosis was of magical proportions. By showing her medallion to a person, she could erase and rewrite that person’s memory as easily and as completely as one could erase and rewrite a chalkboard. Julia is the heroine of the show now, but longtime viewers will still find it fitting that Angelique turns the tables on her.
Upstairs in the same house, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins is having a conversation with Angelique’s portrait. This is one of several habits Roger has that recall Waldo Lydecker, the sarcastic dandy in the 1943 novel and 1944 film Laura. Lydecker turned out to have murdered a woman with whom he had a strange obsession.
Roger is overwrought, telling the Angelique in the portrait that he should have known she would come back from the dead. If he had, he would have realized it was a waste of time to kill her. He only made things worse by doing that; for one thing, it made it necessary for him to kill his niece Carolyn. As he says this, his sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Carolyn’s mother, overhears. She storms in. He tries to deny that meant anything he said, but Liz won’t be stopped. As Roger presses his hands on Liz’ shoulders, Joan Bennett plays the part of someone being strangled. Louis Edmonds’ fingers are nowhere near her throat. You can’t believe that Roger is hurting Liz, but you can easily believe that Edmonds and Bennett are a brother and sister playing pretend. They look like they’re about six.
Oh, oh, I’m being strangggled!
Just as Roger closes Liz’ body into the storage space under the window seat, Barnabas enters. Roger is on the point of tears, a circumstance Barnabas notices. Roger keeps urging Barnabas to leave the room with him, but he replies that what he has to say will take only a moment. Barnabas says that he is worried about Liz. Roger gets even more upset, and Barnabas finally agrees to go downstairs with him.
For longtime viewers, this scene makes a poignant contrast with #446. In that episode, set in the year 1796, Edmonds played haughty overlord Joshua Collins, father of Barnabas. Joshua discovered that Barnabas had become a vampire. Joshua confronted his son in his hiding place. Joshua was at once horrified and shattered, but in no way intimidated by Barnabas, who was for his part alternately ashamed and petulant. Edmonds and Jonathan Frid made that scene into one of the high points of the series. Now, it is Edmonds’ turn to be the murderer dejected by the knowledge of his own inexpungable guilt, and Frid’s turn to be the upright family man. Barnabas does not know Roger’s secret as Joshua knew his, but in Roger’s inability to face him we see the fear of the same righteous condemnation Joshua had felt it his duty to proclaim.
At one point in this conversation Frid has so much trouble with his lines that the words dissolve into a buzzing sound. I told my wife, Mrs Acilius, that it sounded like Barnabas had briefly turned into Bob Dylan. She roared with laughter and said that was exactly what she was going to say.
This is the first “Parallel Time” episode in which Lara Parker is credited as playing Angelique. Previously she had been billed as Alexis Stokes, the identical twin sister whom Angelique killed when she rose from the dead ten and a half weeks ago and whom she has been impersonating ever since. Several times in the series, cast members have wandered onto the set while the credits were rolling.* Referring to this, Mrs Acilius had explained that they kept using Alexis’ name in case any characters who didn’t know who she really was wandered in while the credits were rolling. She imagined them looking up, widening their eyes, and pointing. She meant that hypothesis as a joke. But since the only character in today’s episode who didn’t know Angelique’s true identity was Liz, who was dead by the time the credits rolled, I think we have to take it as proven.
*Most conspicuously in #703, #635, #510, and #328. There are also moments when crew members can be seen during the closing credits, most spectacularly in #999, when a man is just sitting there eating a sandwich.
In #969, vampire Barnabas Collins was in the east wing of the great house of Collinwood. He opened a door to a room which, like all other rooms in that long-disused area, was bare and vacant. But he did not see it as it was. Rather, he saw the same space brightly lit, fully furnished, and richly decorated. Women who appeared to be matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and mad scientist Julia Hoffman were in the room, bickering in a way Liz and Julia never would about matters neither Liz nor Julia knew anything about. After a moment, this apparition dissolved and Barnabas could see the empty room.
Over the next two weeks, Barnabas and others at Collinwood witnessed the same phenomenon a few more times. In #970, Julia told Barnabas that Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, expert on all topics relevant to whatever needs explaining, had told her about the many worlds hypothesis. She wondered if the room represented a portal between alternate universes, in which similar people lead different lives. Barnabas conceived the hope that he might escape the vampire curse and become human again if he could cross over into the universe that occasionally becomes visible in the east wing. He managed to make the crossing in #980, but found that his curse had followed him to the new continuity.
In #1002 and #1003, we saw that the phenomenon also operates in reverse. In the new continuity, Quentin Collins went to the east wing and opened the door, expecting to find the fully furnished room, but instead saw the bare room as it exists in the main continuity. There, he could see and hear children David Collins and Amy Jennings talking about how “Dr Hoffman” had told them that they should avoid the room because Barnabas got trapped there. Quentin saw the main continuity again in #1007, wicked witch Angelique caught a glimpse of it in #1008, and Barnabas and Quentin saw it together in #1012.
In #1031 and #1032, Barnabas returned to the main continuity for a brief visit. He met Julia in the room where the phenomenon occurs. He neglected to tell her that the people in the other universe can sometimes see and hear what is said in that room, and that he has already had to deal with suspicions from Quentin and Angelique because they have heard her saying that someone named Barnabas has crossed into their universe and that he is under a curse.
In #1035, Julia’s counterpart, the housekeeper in the great house, was looking into the room and heard that Barnabas is a vampire. Since Angelique already regarded Barnabas as an enemy and this Julia Hoffman was Angelique’s most fanatical devotee, she made her way to Barnabas’ coffin with a hammer and stake. She was in the act of bringing the hammer down in #1036 when Julia herself showed up behind her and beat her to death. Julia had crossed over from the main continuity to take her place at Barnabas’ side. She stole Hoffman’s French maid outfit, assumed her identity, and became a double agent, pretending to spy on Barnabas for Angelique when she is really spying on Angelique for Barnabas.
Lately, Angelique has been getting suspicious of Julia. Julia tells Barnabas about this. He urges her to go back to the main continuity. She tells him “I’ll be all right for now.” Later, she tells Barnabas she is going on a covert mission to meet Quentin, who is hiding from the law in a cave. He says this is too risky; she again says “I’ll be all right.” He stares at her silently for a long moment. Even Barnabas knows that a character who says “I’ll be all right” twice in one episode is doomed.
Angelique is in the east wing when she hears voices coming from the room where the phenomenon occurs. She opens the doors and sees the counterparts of Quentin and his wife Maggie. They are talking about Julia’s decision to follow Barnabas out of their native universe. They refer to Julia as “Dr Julia Hoffman” and talk about her extreme devotion to Barnabas.
Julia reaches the cave where Quentin is hiding. She has talked him into going with her when Angelique shows up. Angelique claims that the police are swarming the area and that Quentin will be caught if he tries to leave. He obeys her instructions to take shelter in a tunnel deep in the cave. Julia asks what is going on, and Angelique replies with a question of her own. “First of all, I want you to tell me just exactly where you were going to take Quentin, Dr Hoffman.”
With this line, the “Parallel Time” segment has nowhere to go but its climax. Julia is the heroine of the show and the main audience identification character. This function is usually served by a character who is played by an actress twenty years younger than Grayson Hall was in 1970 and who does not spend as much time as Julia does covering up murders and making a mockery of all that is holy. But that’s who we’ve got, and once the self-pitying vampire for whom she has an all-consuming unrequited love rescues her from the arch-villainess the story will be over.
There are a couple of things today that make me wish “Parallel Time” had started differently and gone on a lot longer. The scene between the Maggie and Quentin of the main continuity includes a moment when Maggie says something Quentin regards as foolish, and he replies by saying “Maggie…” in a slow, irritated voice. This is the hallmark of the Parallel Time version of Quentin with whom we’ve spent the last twelve and a half weeks. The parts the actors take in the costume drama segments tend to influence the characters they play when they come back to a contemporary setting, and the purpose of Parallel Quentin seems to have been to find a new path of development for the original Quentin. But Parallel Quentin’s contempt for his wife has been a dead end, and hearing the charming rascal who took the show by storm in 1969 echo it strikes a sour note. If they had started with several weeks of a relationship between Quentin and his new bride that we could root for and then shown it slowly falling apart under the witch’s malevolent power, there might have been space to find something new in Quentin. But the breakneck pace of story progression to which Dark Shadows has been committed since the end of 1967 precludes anything like that.
Angelique mentions to Quentin that Maggie’s father Sam Evans died under circumstances that have never been fully explained, and that there are reasons to believe that his own father had a guilty secret in connection with it. That might have been an interesting thing to let the audience know before we came within sight of the end of the segment. Not only could it have given Quentin and his new wife something to feel interestingly uncomfortable about, but it would mirror the first 40 weeks of the show, in which the Sam Evans of the main continuity carried the heavy burden of a secret pertaining to an incompletely explained death. Longtime viewers might be excited to see that story turned inside out.
Maggie Collins is unnerved because people keep getting murdered in and around the great house of Collinwood. Her husband Quentin was arrested for one of those murders and is the prime suspect in another. He escaped from jail, just in time to be unable to account for his whereabouts during yet another. Maggie goes downstairs and finds old world gentleman Barnabas Collins in the foyer.
Maggie mentions that Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of Quentin’s late wife Angelique, has suddenly taken ill and is asking her to call her father, evil barfly Tim Stokes. Maggie does not understand what Stokes can do that a doctor can’t, but this has happened before and Stokes was able to fix the problem. Barnabas excuses himself, saying he has urgent business to attend to at the Old House on the other side of the estate. He promises to be back soon.
Maggie hears footsteps outside her bedroom, which she thinks might be Quentin’s. The only friend she has in the great house at the moment is Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, who is under sedation following the murder of her daughter. So she rushes to the Old House to look for Barnabas. He is not in; she finds a strange man in the parlor. She asks him who he is and what he is doing there. He insists that he will ask the questions. He asks what Barnabas has done with “her.” Maggie has no idea what he is talking about. He demands that she look into his eyes; as soon as she does, he realizes she is telling the truth. He orders her to tell Barnabas that he will be back, but refuses to give his name.
Maggie runs back to the great house. She finds Barnabas in the foyer, and gives him a full report. Barnabas urges Maggie to believe in Quentin’s innocence. That is something she can no longer do. She says that she is afraid that Quentin has lost his mind and that he will kill everyone in the house, one by one. We pan out and see Quentin lurking at the top of the stairs, listening.
Maggie has a dream. Quentin comes home smiling, with a spring in his step, after chairing a meeting of the board of directors of Collinsport Enterprises. He takes her in his arms and tells her he’s neglected her long enough. She says she doesn’t feel neglected. He says he is taking six months off work, and that the two of them will be leaving tomorrow for a trip around the world.
Quentin finds a bouquet of flowers. He instantly becomes extremely hostile. He accuses Maggie of receiving the flowers as a gift from her lover. She is baffled and denies his allegations. He strangles her. She wakes up, and finds Quentin standing over her, his hands on either side of her neck.
We’ve never seen Quentin and Maggie as happy as they are in the opening part of her dream, but we have several times seen his mood abruptly flip from cheerful to violent. He is not entirely guilty of any of the murders, but he does sometimes choke people, and was in fact choking the person he is charged with strangling immediately before a witch cast a spell to complete the killing.
Moreover, we have seen a dream very much like this one before. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in another universe. In that continuity, Maggie’s counterpart dreamed of Quentin’s ghost in #682. That dream began with Quentin taking a delighted Maggie in his arms and dancing with her; all of a sudden, for no discernible reason, he interrupted the dance to strangle her.
That Quentin did not confine his strangulations to dreams. He murdered his wife Jenny by strangulation in #748. Wife-strangling is a pastime the two Quentins have in common. This Quentin is suspected of killing Angelique. His defense against that charge is that he could not have driven the pin into the back of her head that killed her, because he was using both hands to choke her at the time. So it would seem that Maggie’s fears are well-founded.
Late in 1968, the ghost of Quentin Collins began haunting the great house on the estate of Collinwood. The ghost gradually waxed more powerful and more malevolent, killing some people and tormenting others. By March of 1969, the great house had become altogether uninhabitable. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, trying to contact Quentin, traveled back in time to 1897, when Quentin was a living being. During the eight months the show was set in that year, we got to know a Quentin who was selfish, cowardly, untrustworthy, cruel, and supremely charming. Barnabas’ interventions changed history. In the revised timeline, Quentin did not become a malevolent ghost. He didn’t even die. A spell was cast on him that immunized him against aging, so that when the show returned to a contemporary setting in November 1969 he was alive, well, and to all appearances 28 years old.
In 1969 and 1970, Quentin still had all the lovableness that came from being played by David Selby. But the writers were stumped when it came time to give Quentin something to do. They kept him in a holding pattern for a month or so with a case of amnesia, and used him and one of his girlfriends to tell a version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. When Barnabas and his best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, were doing battle with an unseen race of monsters from beyond space and time, they occasionally turned to Quentin for help. When Barnabas’ old nemesis, wicked witch Angelique, grew jealous of his interest in governess Maggie Evans, she cast a spell to cause Quentin and Maggie to conceive a wild passion for each other, something which came and went and which Barnabas never noticed. None of that activity made an impression on the audience or gave the character room to grow.
The evil but irresistible Quentin of 1897 had a great deal in common with high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, who was in 1966 the show’s first true villain. As played by Louis Edmonds, Roger was so much fun to watch that it was soon out of the question to follow the original plan and kill him off when his crimes were exposed, so they nerfed him. Roger turned into a sarcastic but harmless snob. When in November 1967 the show went back in time to 1795, Edmonds played haughty overlord Joshua Collins, a man as strong as Roger was weak. In a tragic turn Aristotle would have admired, it was Joshua’s virtues that led to disaster for himself and everyone he loved. In the 1897 segment, Edmonds played the stuffy but lovable Edward Collins, who had many faults but was devoted to his family and committed to doing the honorable thing. Under the influence of these roles, Roger himself had by the time the show was done with him transformed into an upright family man.
The makers of the show have apparently decided that if traveling in time and casting Edmonds in other roles could change Roger so profoundly, finding a setting where they can present us with a different version of Quentin might be a path to reinvigorating that character. To that end, they have traveled, not backward in time, but sideways in time. We are now in a different universe than the one where the first 196 weeks of the show took place. The show insists on calling this universe “Parallel Time.”
Here, Quentin is the master of Collinwood and Maggie is his wife. This Quentin is something his counterpart never was, an authority figure. But authority does not come naturally to him, as it did to Joshua and Edward. He holds onto it in his relationship with Maggie by treating her as a child, with the result that their marriage is all but dead. He ignores his son Daniel, caves in to the servants when they stand their ground against him, and throws tantrums and runs away when he encounters serious opposition. In those moments he reminds us of the cowardice Quentin showed in 1897. On occasion, however, he has shown physical courage, as when he stood up to an evil man called John Yaeger. As Joshua suffered from the overgrowth of his virtues, so Quentin’s better deeds seem to be the accidental byproduct of his vices. What we have seen in Parallel Time makes it easy to imagine that when we get back to the main continuity, we will see Quentin as a sometime action hero who must at all costs be kept from taking charge of anything. Had the segment caught on as 1795 and 1897 did and been expanded beyond the bounds originally planned for it, who knows what other paths it might have opened for the character.
Angelique was Quentin’s first wife, who was murdered nine months ago but has risen from the dead, assumed the identity of her identical twin sister Alexis, and set about taking revenge on her killer. She doesn’t know who that was, though for now she is operating on the assumption it was Quentin.
Roger and the matronly Elizabeth Collins Stoddard are Quentin’s siblings. While in the main continuity Liz kept her share of the inheritance as Roger was squandering his, here she entrusted her money to Roger, so that they are both penniless dependents on Quentin.
Barnabas and Julia have crossed over from the main continuity. Barnabas is pretending to be a long-lost cousin of the Collinses, while Julia is impersonating her own counterpart. That other Julia Hoffman was the housekeeper at Collinwood and Angelique’s most fanatical devotee until Julia showed up, beat her to death, and stole her French maid outfit.
At this point, Quentin is on the run from the law, suspected of the murder of sleazy musician Bruno Hess. He was choking Bruno shortly before his death, but is in a sense innocent of the crime, since it was a spell Angelique cast that completed the fatal strangulation. Liz’ daughter Carolyn is in mourning for her husband Will, who found himself caught between Angelique’s magical powers and Barnabas’ and could do nothing but fling himself to his death from a high window. Yesterday Carolyn announced that she knew and could prove who had killed Angelique. She went to the room on top of the tower attached to the great house. A man entered. She greeted him. He drew a knife and she screamed.
Today, Roger tells Liz and Julia that he heard Carolyn’s scream, ran to the tower room, and found her stabbed to death. Presumably the same man killed her who killed Angelique. The three current suspects are Roger himself, Quentin, and butler Mr Trask.
Yesterday’s episode hinted heavily that Trask was the culprit, and Liz says that he has been missing since Carolyn was killed. We had not seen or heard of Trask in more than eight weeks, and in none of the handful of episodes in which he appeared before that hiatus was it suggested he might have killed Angelique. If it does turn out that the butler did it, therefore, it would be obvious that the show had originally planned to pin the crime on a major character and chickened out at the last minute. We do see a man lurking about today who might be Trask and almost certainly is the mysterious and terrible “Claude North” whom we have heard about recently; if Trask and North are one and the same, that might lead somewhere, but it would hardly be a logical culmination of what we have seen so far.
The whole point of the “Parallel Time” segment is to reconceive Quentin. Making him the killer of Angelique might fit with that. The Quentin of the main continuity murdered his wife Jenny in 1897,* and Angelique is much less sympathetic than Jenny was. Quentin does not have to be admirable, or even defensible. He just has to be attractive. If they can find a way to occasionally make his vices into motives for good deeds, all the better. But Carolyn’s counterpart in the main continuity has been a central figure on the show since the first week, and like all characters played by Nancy Barrett she is a fan favorite. If this Quentin deliberately kills Carolyn, especially by hacking her to bits with a kitchen knife, it is hard to see how the Quentin of the main continuity will benefit. It is true the present Quentin is such a gloomy sourpuss and such a miserable failure as a husband to Maggie that he has already alienated the audience, so they might have decided they had nothing to lose by turning him into Jack the Ripper.
That leaves Roger. He has been painted in the colors of his counterpart as he was in 1966, making him a possible murderer. Even at his coldest, the Roger of the main continuity was close to Carolyn, whom he called “Kitten.” But when we first saw the characters from the current universe in #975, they were hostile and impatient with each other, and Roger took a menacing tone with his niece. The only person for whom this iteration of Roger has any affection is Angelique, and all of that flows to a version of her that exists only in his imagination. Roger seems to be describing himself in both universes when he tells Liz that “The sum total of my life seems to be that I can never help anyone.” So we can certainly believe he killed both Angelique and Carolyn, and that he might kill again.
Liz and Roger’s counterparts have been on the fringes of the action in the main continuity for years, and today we see that this Liz and Roger are also excluded from much that is happening. They visit the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town scouting out potential resting places for Carolyn. Unknown to them, there is a hidden chamber in the back of this mausoleum, and Claude North is lurking there, a dagger in his hand, while they chat in the publicly visible part. They then go to Carolyn’s home, the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, to look for anything she might have written that would give a clue as to who killed her. Unknown to them, Julia is in the basement of the house, conducting a mad science procedure to weaken Angelique by reviving a woman named Roxanne on whose “life force” she is feeding. One wonders where else they will stop on their way home, and of what other uncanny doings they will be oblivious while there.
We hear Julia’s thoughts as she is preparing to revive Roxanne. She tells herself that this is the procedure that brought Adam and Eve to life. She is not thinking of some obscure midrash about the book of Genesis, but about two Frankenstein’s monsters she loosed upon the world in 1968.
*Jenny must have been in someone’s mind when they were making this episode. We catch a glimpse of a gravestone in her name during a cemetery scene:
In the first months of Dark Shadows, characters several times shared meals in the kitchen in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. In that intimate setting, they would often exchange information that made it possible for them to advance the story. As time went on, the show developed more ways to get knowledge flowing, and the kitchen lost its importance. We haven’t seen it since #208.
Now, the show is set in an alternate universe, which it calls “Parallel Time.” We see the kitchen in this reality’s Collinwood today, the last glimpse we get of the room in any version of the place. Young Amy Collins visits butler Mr Trask there while he is sharpening a large knife. She tells him a man is living in the tower room. He leaves to investigate, leaving the knife on the countertop. The camera zooms in on the implement, lingering over it while an ominous cue plays on the soundtrack.
Later, Amy returns to the kitchen with the matronly Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz is upset that dinner is not ready and Trask is nowhere to be found. Amy notices that the knife is not where Trask left it hours before. Liz is unimpressed with this fact, as anyone would be who had not seen the zoom shot and heard the melodramatic music. We cut to the tower room, where Liz’ daughter Carolyn Loomis greets someone we cannot see. We cut to a hand holding a knife very much like the one Trask had sharpened. The hand brings the knife down, and Carolyn screams.
It is Carolyn who is the main source of information for the other characters in today’s show. Carolyn’s husband was killed the other day in a conflict between two supernatural beings. The other characters in today’s episode have no idea that such beings dwell among them, and think that those two in particular are simply members of their extended family. Carolyn has had all she can take of this situation. She claims “to know all the secrets” of Collinwood, and is far too drunk to keep many of them to herself.
Trask learned several secrets from Carolyn in Act One, when he was leaning up against the door to the drawing room, his ear pressed hard to it, eavesdropping ferociously on her conversation with her uncle, Roger Collins. Carolyn taunts Roger with his failure to recognize someone he loves desperately. She declares that she can prove that the houseguest who has been staying in the great house lately is not Alexis Stokes, but Alexis’ identical twin sister, Angelique Stokes Collins.
Roger rejects this claim. Since Angelique died last year, one might expect Roger to be confident in his rejection, but he is high-strung and defensive about it. Carolyn does not deny that Angelique is dead. Indeed, she says that if anyone were to look at the base of “Alexis'” skull, they would find a scar where the killer drove in the hatpin that killed Angelique, proving that “Alexis” is Angelique’s reanimated corpse. This makes more sense to Roger than one might expect. When he first saw Alexis in #990 she had to give him her hand and talk soothingly to him for some time before he would accept that she was not Angelique risen from the grave.
As it happens, Carolyn is right. Two weeks after she met Roger, Alexis saw Angelique lying in the tomb. Alexis touched her sister to bid her a final farewell, only to find that all of the heat was draining from her body into Angelique’s. Moments later, Alexis was dead and Angelique was standing over her icy corpse. Angelique put on Alexis’ clothes, did her hair in the style Alexis wore, and met Trask, who accompanied her to the great house. Ever since, Angelique has been passing herself off as Alexis.
Amy interrupted Trask while he was eavesdropping. He ordered her to leave him alone, getting quite surly about it. If he can hear everything Carolyn and Roger are saying, we wonder why they can’t hear him being nasty to a member of the family. But apparently they can’t. She goes away, and he presses himself even closer to the door.
Carolyn is still talking to Roger and Trask is still eavesdropping when “Alexis” comes by. She reproves Trask, opens the doors to the drawing room, and exposes him to Roger and Carolyn. Roger is too shocked by the sight of “Alexis” and Carolyn is too amused by it all for either of them to do anything about Trask’s misconduct.
Later, Carolyn returns to the drawing room and finds her mother talking with “Alexis.” She leans down way into “Alexis'” personal space, making her hilariously uncomfortable.
“Alexis” leaves them alone. Carolyn tells her mother that she knows who murdered Angelique. She says that she had suspected her, and is greatly relieved to know that she was wrong. Roger eavesdrops on this conversation, and turns around to see the shadow of yet another eavesdropper.
Carolyn tells Liz that she not only knows who the murderer is, she has talked to “him” recently. That doesn’t narrow it down. She has talked to all three current suspects, and all of them are men. Roger gets very agitated whenever the topic of Angelique’s murderer comes up; his reaction is one of many heavy-handed clues the show has been giving lately that he did it. They had not suggested Trask might be the culprit when he was last on the show, in #1004, but they couldn’t be more obvious about it today. The third suspect is Quentin Collins, brother to Roger and Liz, who is currently a fugitive from justice, having escaped from jail after he was charged with another murder. Quentin is the man living in the tower room; Carolyn saw him there the other day, and he took a threatening tone with her. So any of those three men might be the one wielding the knife in the final shot.
This is a day for final appearances. Not only do we bid the kitchen adieu, but also Carolyn Loomis, Mr Trask, and Amy Collins. Nancy Barrett and Jerry Lacy will be back as other characters, but Denise Nickerson is gone from the cast as of today. After a great run in her first couple of months on the show, she was criminally underused. Still, whenever they did put her on she was typically the highlight of the day, so it is sad to lose her.
Liz mentions someone named “Dr Blum” today. We never see Dr Blum. The only character in the whole series who seems to be Jewish is Dr Julia Hoffman, who like the unseen Dr Blum is a psychiatrist. It was less than a year after this episode aired, on 26 May 1971, that President Richard Nixon said in a conversation with his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman that the reason he was unpopular with Jewish voters was that “Most of them are psychiatrists.” Ever since the tape of that conversation was released in 2002, people have been trying to figure out what Nixon meant to say. Perhaps the White House taping system malfunctioned, and picked up some audio not from the Richard Nixon of our universe, but from one who lived in one of the universes where Dark Shadows took place. There, he might have been making a simple statement of fact.
Dark Shadows Commentary 