Episode 1037: An uncertain and frightening journey

In November 1967, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters participated in a séance. She came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. For the next four months, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. Viewers made the acquaintance of wicked witch Angelique and learned how old world gentleman Barnabas Collins first became a vampire.

Vicki herself learned nothing from her trip back in time. She spent the first part of it telling the actors about the parts they had played in the first 73 weeks of the show. After that incredibly stupid habit had burned away any goodwill the audience had for the character, Angelique framed Vicki for her own acts of sorcery. Vicki at first refused to take these charges seriously, an inexplicable response given both her knowledge of the period in which she found herself and her extensive experience with the supernatural in her own time, then kept looking for the most idiotic possible means of defending herself until she was sent to the gallows. In the nick of time, she was whisked back to the séance and to the 1960s, rope burns already visible on her neck. Vicki never regained the audience’s sympathy, and was written out later that year. Maggie Evans succeeded Vicki both as governess at Collinwood and as the perpetually imperiled heroine.

Now Barnabas has traveled in time, not backward, but sideways. He is in an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” Here, Maggie’s counterpart is married to foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins, the master of Collinwood. Angelique’s counterpart is Quentin’s late first wife, returned from the grave and scheming to get Maggie out of the way so that she can remarry her widower. Angelique casts a spell today that leads Quentin to confront Maggie and announce that he is certain that she is a witch.

The 1790s segment was in some ways one of the show’s greatest triumphs, but nothing about Vicki’s part in it was very good. So seeing this Angelique reenact the story that culminated in the witchcraft trial will bring a sinking feeling to longtime viewers. It doesn’t help that Maggie has made a number of inexplicably foolish decisions and quailed in the face of opposition she would seem to be able to overcome easily.

Moreover, Quentin is such a miserable husband to Maggie that we have no rooting interest in their marriage. He is being relatively nice to her at the beginning of the episode, because she was just abducted and imprisoned by a madman, and he feels vaguely guilty that he had jumped to the conclusion that she left voluntarily and berated everyone who suggested she might be in trouble. But even in those nice moments he maintains a paternalistic, condescending tone towards Maggie. When she wonders aloud what other crimes her abductor might have committed, he insists that there could not have been any others and becomes exasperated with her for raising the topic. That led my wife to yell at the screen “Quentin, you are the worst husband! There may be others who are also the worst, but you are the worst!”

Quentin pets Maggie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Quentin so quickly flips from acting like he is indulging the moods of his silly child-bride to accusing Maggie of witchcraft, he not only confirms Mrs Acilius’ assessment that he is “the worst.” Coming so shortly after the abduction story, he seems to be a man blaming his wife for being raped. Indeed, the man who abducted her had in #1022 and #1023 jumped her and sexually assaulted her in a dark alley, and she explained her decision to keep quiet about that attack by saying she was afraid Quentin would blame her. This is an important theme, but it would be a tricky one to explore on a show about witches and vampires and time travel and parallel universes where the median viewer is about ten years old.

Perhaps it would have been possible to have another take on the themes of the 1790s segment that would not have led us to this particular dead end. I think of a comment left in 2017 on Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day:

You know, [Parallel Time] might have had a very different feel with the following changes:

Alexandra [Moltke Isles] takes the role of Quentin’s evil first wife, Victoria Stokes Collins. There is no nice twin. She dabbles in “the black arts” but is not a full-on witch. She and Quentin have a son, David.

Lara Parker takes the role of Quentin’s new wife, Angelique “Angela” Evans. She’s kind-hearted and traditional and a romantic. She has no witchcraft powers. But not quite the pushover as time goes on.

And Kathryn Leigh Scott plays Margaret “Maggie” Evans still, but she’s now Angela’s sister and Cyrus’ lab assistant. She’s a modern woman — middle class, educated, confident, reluctant in matter of love.

Maggie and Angela are different — Maggie is the more confident, assertive, cynical of the two — but they are close and both “good” girls. Maggie doesn’t like Quentin.

Lisa Richards is looking for other work.

So in this version, there was a seance two years ago but instead of a murder, Victoria just simply vanished when the lights went out. They never learned what happened. There is no portrait. No one mentions her by name.

When Barnabas enters parallel time, Quentin has just brought Angela home, with Roger and Hoffman treating her like crap.

After about two weeks of establishing all these new relationships, they recreate the seance.

The lights go out, and when they come back on, there’s Victoria in clothing from the late 1700s. She has no memory of what happened — and doesn’t really care. She wants her rightful place as mistress of Collinwood back. (Explanation for her vanishing and returning: Daddy Stokes playing with I-Ching wands. Victoria kills her father when she learns he did that).

Can you imagine the shock for the audience to have “Vicky” just show up like that? And in the same manner RT Vicky did. And then to be evil?

That really could have been fun.

Comment left 29 July 2017 by “William” on “Episode 1056: The Parallel Sky,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day.

I like this idea very much. When she played Angelique’s identical twin Alexis, Lara Parker created a character who was not murderous, but far from a naif, and it is easy to imagine that a person like that would have stood up well enough to the kind of stresses that the wicked witch would bring against her to keep the drama going for some time. And it would be a nice inversion, not only to see the evil Vicki persecuting the innocent Angelique, but also to have his unresolved feelings for Vicki render the time traveler Barnabas as clueless in the evil Vicki’s proper world as the well-meaning Vicki was in Barnabas’ native time.

Moreover, these last two weeks the barrier between the universes has been getting leaky. So when the evil Vicki is finally thwarted here, she might escape into the original continuity and wreak havoc there. That would pick up on a road not taken in #872, when sorcerer Count Petofi escaped from the year 1897 and made his way to the Collinwood of the present day, only to be snatched back to the past after a few minutes.

I can’t wish that all of “William’s” dreams had come true. I like Lisa Blake Richards, so I’d want to leave her in the Jekyll and Hyde story and come up with another storyline to feature Kathryn Leigh Scott, either as Maggie or as another character. And it is a gift to viewers who have been with the show from the beginning that David Henesy’s character in Parallel Time is called Daniel Collins rather than David Collins, the name of his part in the other continuity, since the point was made in #153 and referenced later that David’s name was the result of events that wouldn’t have happened here. And while the séance gimmick is too good not to do, I would still like to see Mrs Isles play twins- the evil Victoria and her non-evil sister Veronica.*

*Mrs Acilius doesn’t like the name “Veronica” for this character. She’d rather call her Vanessa or Vivian.

Episode 1036: I am who I am

Housekeeper Julia Hoffman, fanatical devotee of the undead Angelique Stokes Collins, has discovered that Angelique’s enemy Barnabas Collins is a vampire. Hoffman is standing at Barnabas’ open coffin. In one hand she holds a stake on his chest, in the other a mallet upraised.

As Hoffman is about to rid the world of this loathsome abomination from beyond the grave, another woman strikes her dead. This woman appears to be Hoffman’s identical twin. Regular viewers know that she is another Julia Hoffman, a Doppelgänger intruding here from another universe. This Julia is a medical doctor by qualification and a mad scientist by vocation, and she is as committed to Barnabas as Hoffman is to Angelique.

Julia kills Hoffman. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia sees her own face on a corpse of her own slaying. She leaves the secret chamber and closes the panel that hides it. A man enters the house. He takes Julia to be Hoffman, and demands to know why she is there and why she is not wearing her French maid uniform. Julia says that she was running an errand, and that she is on her way into town. The man remarks that she does not seem like herself; she replies that “I am who I am.” The man does not give any sign that this assertion reminds him of either Popeye the Sailor or the God of the Book of Exodus. Longtime viewers will already have noticed more than a few parallels between Julia and each of these characters.

The man says he has come to the house to see its master, Will Loomis. He wants to ask Will for money so that he can leave town. When Julia says that Will is sleeping and may not be up for hours, the man turns his request to her. He says that he, Angelique, and others had paid her plenty over the years in return for her discretion, and he asks for $500. She says she doesn’t have any money with her. Indeed, she is not carrying a purse, and her bank account and other liquid assets are all located in a different universe. The man leaves.

Julia is back in the secret chamber trying to figure out what to do when Will comes home. He pulls a gun on her. He is one of Barnabas’ blood thralls, and is in charge of protecting him during the day. He knows that Hoffman and Angelique are Barnabas’ enemies. Thinking that Julia is Hoffman, he is prepared to kill her. She denies that she is Hoffman, and tells him that if he looks in the secret chamber he will know she is telling the truth. He does, and a look of recognition comes on his face. “You are Julia!” he says, delighted. Barnabas had told Will about her and others in his own universe, and he couldn’t be happier to meet her.

Julia decides to masquerade as Hoffman. She says that if she could fool the man who came by earlier, whose name is Bruno, she should be able to fool Angelique and the others. Will points out that fooling Bruno for a few minutes is not the same thing as fooling Angelique for an indefinite time, but Julia is nothing daunted.

Julia passes the first test. Angelique finds her in her room and demands where she has been all day. Julia says she was following Barnabas, as per her orders. That is the right answer. Angelique asks what she was talking about last night when she said on the telephone that she had discovered Barnabas’ big secret and would tell her what it was when they were face to face. Julia says that she thought she was onto something while following him around, but in the light of day it turns out to be pretty vague. Angelique is frustrated and orders her to resume snooping on Barnabas.

Meanwhile, Bruno has learned that his acquaintance Cyrus Longworth the mad scientist is dead. Cyrus had kidnapped Maggie Evans Collins, second wife of Angelique’s widower Quentin Collins. Barnabas killed Cyrus while rescuing Maggie.

Bruno knows that Cyrus kept a big wad of cash in the wall safe in his laboratory, in the sum of “thousands!” of dollars. He goes to the lab and rummages through the papers on the desk, certain that the combination to the wall safe is there. That seems like bad OpSec, but Cyrus wasn’t very shrewd, so it is no surprise that Bruno turns out to be right. He finds that the cash is gone. All that is in the safe is a notebook. Bruno is furious at the sight of the notebook, exclaiming “Why aren’t you money!?”

Bruno sees that the notebook is marked to be delivered unread to Quentin Collins in the event of Cyrus’ death. Bruno reads it and laughs joyously. He says that he was mistaken when he said there was no money in the safe. There is far more money than he hoped for.

Bruno telephones Angelique. Like almost everyone else, Bruno believes Angelique to be her identical twin sister Alexis. Angelique rose from the dead and murdered Alexis, who was already established as Quentin’s permanent guest in his home, the great house of Collinwood. Alexis was convinced that Angelique was murdered and was trying to investigate when Angelique killed her. For her part, Angelique knows she was murdered and very much wants to complete that investigation. Bruno happily tells “Alexis” that he knows who murdered Angelique.

Bruno’s claim that the notebook represents far more money than he had hoped for narrows the range of possible suspects to one. He hoped for thousands of dollars, so whatever message Cyrus wanted to deliver to Quentin must be something that can be leveraged for hundreds of thousands or millions. Quentin himself is the only person we’ve seen who has resources like that. He is too selfish to pay blackmail to conceal anyone else’s guilt, even that of his closest family members, so the notebook must contain an accusation against Quentin. Whether that accusation is correct, of course, remains to be seen.

Episode 1035: Terrified at his own duality

Since #1021, Barnabas Collins has been trying to figure out what links mild-mannered scientist Cyrus Longworth with a strange and violent man known as John Yaeger. Yesterday, Cyrus telephoned Barnabas and told him that Yaeger was holding Maggie Collins prisoner in an old farmhouse. Today, Barnabas finds Yaeger choking Maggie in the basement of that farmhouse.

Barnabas orders Yaeger to unhand Maggie, saying that he will kill him if he does not. Maggie gives an ecstatic look, then Yaeger flings her to the floor. He and Barnabas start fighting. Yaeger’s weapon of choice is a heavy cane that conceals a bayonet. The other day, Barnabas was looking at his own heavy cane and thinking about what an effective weapon it is, setting us up to expect a cane fight between him and Yaeger. Returning viewers will therefore be puzzled that Barnabas doesn’t even have his cane. Barnabas’ cane is one of his signature gimmicks, so maybe the makers of the show didn’t want to risk damaging it.

Yaeger exposes the bayonet in his cane and stabs Barnabas with it. Barnabas pulls it out of his chest and keeps coming. Yaeger asks “What kind of creature are you?,” to which Barnabas replies that he will never know. Barnabas strangles Yaeger to death. Barnabas’ threatening statements to Yaeger combine with the fact that he keeps choking him well after he becomes unconscious to leave us no label for this act other than willful murder.

Maggie gets up and goes into the room where Barnabas has just finished killing Yaeger. As she does so, there is a bad goof in the production, as a gap in the panel behind her exposes another set, the one representing the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. Watching Dark Shadows is an education in how resilient an audience’s suspension of disbelief can be, but the idea that the farmhouse is very far from the great house is so important to the suspense that this one really does undercut the rest of the episode.

Maggie should just have clicked her heels and said “There’s no place like home.”

Maggie and Barnabas watch in amazement as the dead Yaeger transforms into Cyrus. Once they have absorbed the implication that Yaeger was just Cyrus in disguise, Barnabas takes Maggie home to the great house.

Maggie is walking when Barnabas gets her in the front door, but she is unconscious by the time he puts her on the couch in the drawing room. Housekeeper Julia Hoffman and Carolyn Stoddard Loomis, a cousin of Maggie’s husband Quentin, are astounded to see them, and have many questions. Barnabas confirms that Yaeger was holding Maggie prisoner and that he is now dead, then orders Hoffman to bring a blanket for her mistress.

Quentin comes home. Barnabas tells him they must go to the farmhouse at once. There, they see Cyrus’ body. Thinking of what Barnabas and Maggie saw, Quentin realizes that the experiment Cyrus had been so secretive about must have been the creation of a Jekyll and Hyde formula. He decides that they should tell the police everything, in spite of the damage it will do to Cyrus’ posthumous reputation and the risk that Barnabas might be inconvenienced in some way for having murdered him.

Quentin has only known Barnabas for a few weeks, and has been wary of him. He has been especially impatient over the last several days with Barnabas’ insistence that Maggie was in danger when he was under the impression that she had merely left the house. This scene shows us Quentin’s remorse at having disbelieved Barnabas, and marks the beginning of a friendship between the two.

Back in the great house, Hoffman is in a brightly lit, richly decorated room, making a telephone call. She is telling the person on the other end of the line that she has learned a crucial secret about Barnabas, and that this secret might be just what they have been looking for. She promises to tell the other person what the secret is once they can talk face to face. Returning viewers know that Hoffman is talking to Quentin’s undead first wife, Angelique, who has been staying in the great house in the guise of her identical twin sister Alexis. The two of them have been scheming to split Maggie and Quentin up so that Angelique can remarry Quentin and resume her place as the mistress of Collinwood. They were in league with Cyrus/ Yaeger, and are afraid that their enemy Barnabas may have picked up some information from him that he can use against them.

Later, Hoffman is on her way back to the same room, perhaps to place another call to Angelique. She finds she cannot pass through the doorway. A phenomenon is occurring that others have seen before. Hoffman sees, not the room that is in that space as she knows it, but dark, bare walls. There are two people there, whom she can see and hear though they are not aware of her. They appear to be herself and Quentin, and they are talking about Barnabas. The man says that Barnabas will be doomed if the “people in that other time” find out that he is a vampire.

Regular viewers know that the man and woman are Julia Hoffman and Quentin Collins, but not the Hoffman and Quentin we have come to know over the last eleven weeks. They are part of another universe altogether. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in that universe, and most of the current characters are counterparts of characters we met there. Barnabas crossed over from that continuity to this one in the futile hope that by doing so he would escape the vampire curse and become human again. Hoffman’s counterpart in the original continuity, Julia Hoffman MD, is as devoted to the undead Barnabas as Hoffman herself is to the undead Angelique. Quentin’s is best friend and confidant to Barnabas and Julia, and is neither the master of Collinwood nor married to his world’s version of Maggie, who is the governess at Collinwood.

Earlier this week, Barnabas popped back to his own reality for a few minutes and talked with Julia. It is his fault that she and Quentin are talking about his vampirism where Hoffman can hear them. He knew that the room as it is in the original universe occasionally becomes perceptible to people in the current universe, since he and Quentin themselves saw it when Julia was standing there talking about him. He just did not think to mention that fact to her.

In the foyer, Barnabas tells Carolyn to stay with Maggie. Carolyn points out that her husband Will Loomis is going to be away until mid-morning, so Barnabas will be alone in their house for several hours. He says he will be all right. While she eavesdrops on this conversation from the drawing room, Hoffman uses the mirror in Carolyn’s compact to confirm that Barnabas does not cast a reflection.

This is precisely the same method Julia used in the original continuity, in #288, to make sure Barnabas was a vampire. The feature film House of Dark Shadows wrapped principal photography several weeks ago; Julia does the same thing there. It is somewhat undercut for returning viewers, not so much by the many times Jonathan Frid’s reflection is inadvertently captured in the many mirrors that decorate the sets in this “mirror universe,” but by the deliberate choice the show made in #1033 to show us an inverted reflection of Barnabas in a magnifying glass in Cyrus’ laboratory. Also, longtime viewers will remember a period in 1968 when Angelique’s counterpart in the main continuity was a vampire. They went out of their way to show us her reflection several times. They never explained what point that was supposed to be making, but it was obviously intentional. If we were confused then, we will be confused again this week.

Julia learned earlier this week that Barnabas keeps an empty coffin behind a secret panel in Carolyn and Will’s house. So she knows where to go this morning. She opens the coffin, places a stake on Barnabas’ chest, and raises a hammer to drive it through his heart. Roll credits!

This cliffhanger leaves us wondering who will interrupt Hoffman and save Barnabas in the first scene of act one on Monday. Carolyn and Will are Barnabas’ victims and are in charge of protecting him, so it would be logical for one or both of them to come home earlier than expected. That would be an anticlimax, but the characters are on the show so rarely and the actors are so dynamic that it would have its compensations. Barnabas has a third victim, Buffie Harrington. We haven’t seen Buffie since #1023 or heard her name since #1028, but regular viewers were reminded of her yesterday when Barnabas mentioned an incident he could have learned about only from her. So it would make sense for her to show up, and it would certainly be nice to see her again.

There are also a few long-shot possibilities. The show spent much of 1969 explaining how Barnabas and Quentin became friends; today Quentin’s counterpart accepts Barnabas as a friend. Perhaps this continuity’s Quentin will somehow save Barnabas. Also, Barnabas’ brief visit home suggests that the barrier between the universes is getting leakier, so we can’t discount the possibility that the original Quentin, the original Julia, or perhaps Will’s counterpart or another character from the old days may happen by.

Episode 1034: Time is our only weapon

Yesterday’s episode ended with a climactic moment in Dark Shadows‘ adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde. Sabrina Stuart, fiancée of mild-mannered scientist Cyrus Longworth, had discovered that Cyrus’ evil alter ego John Yaeger is holding Maggie Evans Collins prisoner in a dungeon outside the village of Collinsport. For some reason she drove to Maggie’s home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Cyrus/ Yaeger followed her there and choked her out in the drawing room. Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, who is Maggie’s sister-in-law and Sabrina’s friend, saw the strangling and screamed. Cyrus/ Yaeger dropped Sabrina to the floor and turned his attention to Liz.

It was unclear at that time if Sabrina was dead or merely unconscious. Today’s opening voiceover says flatly that “Yaeger killed her,” and in the first scene of act one housekeeper Julia Hoffman checks Sabrina’s body and declares that she is dead. Since the narrator and Hoffman are both played by Grayson Hall, longtime viewers will be cautious about accepting these pronouncements. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe. There, Hall played Hoffman’s counterpart, a medical doctor who has many abilities no other member of her profession can equal but who is curiously unreliable when she pronounces patients dead. Julia has been known to erroneously pronounce the same person dead twice in a single episode. So we have to reserve judgment for a bit about whether Sabrina will be wanting breakfast.

Liz locked Cyrus/ Yaeger in the drawing room before he could get his hands on her, and he smashed a window and ran out when he heard her talking with Hoffman in the foyer. Liz and Hoffman find that Cyrus/ Yaeger had torn the telephones in both the drawing room and the foyer out of their wall sockets. We’ve seen telephones in other parts of the house several times, but evidently those are out of order today. Hoffman says that she will go to the Old House on the grounds of the estate, home to Liz’ daughter Carolyn and Carolyn’s husband Will, and call the police from there. Hoffman assures Liz that Cyrus/ Yaeger must have left the estate and that he will present no danger on the fifteen minute walk to the Loomis house.

Hoffman’s confidence on this point puzzles Liz, who watches her leave carrying only a flashlight while she herself crouches in the drawing room holding a pistol. It may puzzle first-time viewers as well. Those who have been watching for several days know that Hoffman is in league with Cyrus/ Yaeger. Hoffman has been acting as a messenger between Cyrus/ Yaeger and her mistress Angelique, the undead first wife of Quentin Collins, who is Maggie’s husband and Liz’ brother. Angelique wants Maggie out of the way so that she can remarry Quentin, and is supporting Cyrus/ Yaeger’s plan to torture her into loving him.

At the Loomis house, Hoffman calls the police and reports exactly what Liz knows. When she is done with her call, she realizes that she is alone in the house. Earlier, she was peeking through the window when Carolyn and Will’s mysterious houseguest, a person named Barnabas Collins, opened the secret panel behind a bookcase. She takes advantage of the opportunity to find out what Barnabas is hiding. She sees a coffin in the chamber behind it. Without hesitation, she opens the coffin. She finds that it is empty. She closes the panel, wondering why Barnabas would keep an empty coffin in a hidden chamber. She is on her way out when Barnabas enters and demands to know what she is doing there. She tells him what happened in the drawing room of the great house, and he rushes out with her.

Cyrus/ Yaeger is in his laboratory. He takes out the antidote. This will puzzle regular viewers. Up to this point, it has seemed clear that Cyrus/Yaeger has only one potion, and that it effects both his Hyde-ification and his re-Jekyllizing. He threw all of that potion away a couple of weeks ago, after he tried to rape Maggie in a dark alley. He cannot make more, since it requires a compound that only one chemist could provide and Cyrus murdered that chemist when he learned his secret. His current Yaegerness is the result of a spontaneous transformation that took place without drinking the potion. So we are at a loss to explain why he still has any of it. He tells himself that there is only enough to change him once. By the time he starts drinking it, the police are knocking at his door.

At length, Cyrus lets the policeman in. He asks what took so long; Cyrus claims to have been asleep. He tells Cyrus that Yaeger has murdered Sabrina; Cyrus responds with genuine shock. The policeman apologizes for not having known that Cyrus was engaged to marry Sabrina, but insists that he answer his questions.

Most of Collinsport’s police officers have been farcically incompetent. The actors have responded to the challenge of playing these useless men in various ways. Dana Elcar, who in 1966 and 1967 was the first of four to play Sheriff George Patterson, kept you hoping that his character was just playing dumb. Some of the others either gave up and let us see their own contempt for the bumblers the scripts had saddled them with, as Vince O’Brien did towards the end of his own time as the last of the Sheriffs George Patterson. Dreariest of all was the first law enforcement officer on Dark Shadows, Constable Jonas Carter, whose flagrant incompetence at his job scarcely exceeded the incompetence Michael Currie brought to the role. This policeman doesn’t solve anything, but Philip R. Allen’s performance makes him seem like the greatest detective we’ve ever seen. Allen is spellbinding as he simultaneously depicts sincere empathy and an unbending determination to get at the facts. It’s too bad this is the only time we get to see this dynamic actor on Dark Shadows.

Outside the great house, Barnabas and Liz are watching the ambulance take Sabrina’s body away. Its flashing lights illuminate their faces. This is the first evidence we have seen that emergency vehicles exist in any iteration of Collinsport. Indeed, when the characters decide that someone is dead they usually take it for granted that there is no longer any point in calling the authorities, that they should just set about digging a grave and burying the body.

Barnabas and Liz watch the ambulance take Sabrina’s body away. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas asks Liz if she knew that Yaeger had threatened Maggie and that he has an unwholesome interest in her. She did not. Maggie had not told anyone at Collinwood about the incident in the dark alley. Barnabas tells her only that he heard about it in town. Regular viewers know that a woman named Buffie Harrington foiled Yaeger’s assault on Maggie when she happened by the alley. Barnabas can hardly tell Liz about his connection with Buffie, since he is a vampire and Buffie is his victim. They decide they must tell the police about Yaeger and Maggie, and they go back to the Loomis house to make a telephone call.

Cyrus is still in his lab. He knows that he might change back into Yaeger at any time. He decides to call Barnabas at the Loomis house and tell him where Maggie is. Barnabas holds the telephone so Liz can hear what Cyrus is saying. Barnabas asks Cyrus how he knows that Yaeger is holding Maggie; he says he can’t tell him. Barnabas and Liz rush out. They don’t think to call the police.

Speakerphone, 1970-style. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Back at Collinwood, Liz tells Hoffman she ought to go to the policemen outside the house and tell them what Cyrus told her and Barnabas. She also frets about Barnabas’ safety. Hoffman says she is quite sure that Barnabas Collins does not need anyone’s protection. Liz does not know what she means, but is in too much of a hurry to question her. Hoffman thinks to herself about how much has happened that she has not had a chance to tell Angelique.

In his lab, Cyrus raises a pistol to his head and puts his finger on the trigger. Before he can fire, he transforms into Yaeger.

Barnabas makes his way to Maggie’s dungeon. He searches it, finding her belongings but not her. She has picked the lock, untied the ropes in which Cyrus/ Yaeger bound her, and let herself out. She is hiding elsewhere in the basement. She can hear Barnabas’ steps, but does not know who it is. She assumes that it is Yaeger. When she hears him leave the basement, she starts to make her way out. Just as she emerges from the shadows, Yaeger appears on the steps and greets her. She screams, and he pounces.

Episode 1033: You’ll miss me whether I go or stay

Sabrina Stuart has been having a rough few weeks. Her fiancé, mild mannered scientist Cyrus Longworth, has been spending less and less time with her and is entangled with a strange, violent man named John Yaeger. The other day, she was with Cyrus in his laboratory and saw him transform into Yaeger. He confirmed that he had devised a potion to alter his appearance, and that Yaeger is merely a disguise he assumes to carry out crimes. The transformation Sabrina saw took place spontaneously, without a dose of the potion. Cyrus poured the potion down the drain a while ago, when he was feeling guilty about a rape he had committed as Yaeger, and we have seen him re-Jekyllize himself only by drinking another dose. So for all we know he will never resume his normal appearance. Sabrina pledged to stand by Cyrus no matter what; in response, he jeered and said he had no further use for her.

Tonight, Sabrina went out with her friend Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz took her to a concert. The two women come to Cyrus’ laboratory, where Sabrina has left her wallet. Sabrina apologizes and calls herself stupid for forgetting it, as she keeps apologizing and calling herself stupid throughout the episode. She is very nervous, as witness not only her forgetfulness but also her physical awkwardness, shown most strikingly in the frequent mismatch between her facial expressions and her circumstances.

In his post about this episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn makes several complaints about Lisa Blake Richards as an actress, saying that “I don’t understand what Sabrina does with her face most of the time. She acts like she just got it recently, and she hasn’t figured out how to use it yet.” I think Danny is unfair to Miss Richards generally, and that this is a case in point. As Danny documents, the episode is full of flubs and goofs of various kinds, so it is natural to write off any kind of awkwardness as just another mistake. But considering how distracted and anxiety-ridden Sabrina must be given what she knows about Cyrus, her disconcerting facial expressions suit her perfectly, and are an intelligent acting choice on Miss Richards’ part. That we first see her in a scene with Liz helps to underline this intelligence, since Joan Bennett is the only other member of the cast who seems to know her lines today. Her smooth performance gives Miss Richards something to play off of and spotlights Sabrina’s barely controlled panic.

Sabrina and Liz haven’t been in the lab very long when Cyrus enters, as Yaeger. He introduces himself to Liz as a close associate of Cyrus’, and asks Sabrina to stay and help him analyze some data. Sabrina agrees to do so, and Liz excuses herself.

Cyrus, as “Yaeger,” listens while Liz and Sabrina talk in the laboratory. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Cyrus tells Sabrina to mail some of his clothes and all of his money to New York. She asks if he is moving to New York permanently. In response, he rambles on about how big the world is and how little of it he knew before he assumed his current appearance. Apparently Cyrus retains his ignorance of geography when disguised as Yaeger. He simply tells Sabrina to send his belongings to New York, addressed to John Yaeger at General Delivery. Apparently he thinks there is only one post office location in the state of New York.

We next see Sabrina in the basement of an old farmhouse. Returning viewers know that Cyrus obtained this farmhouse last week by murdering the man who was about to sell it to him. Evidently, Sabrina has followed him there. She sees and hears him in a dungeon, tormenting Maggie Evans Collins, the wife of Liz’ brother Quentin. When Cyrus emerges from the dungeon, Sabrina runs away. He does not see her, but he finds the check he gave her to send to some post office randomly chosen from among the 1720 in New York State in 1970. It fell out of the pocket in her skirt* onto a stair.

We cut to Liz’ home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood. We hear a car screeching to a halt. Sabrina comes running in the foyer, calling the names of the residents of the house. Cyrus follows her. He marches her into the drawing room and asks a series of questions. When she tells him she put the check in a safe place, he produces it. She blurts out that she dropped it. She pleads with him to let Maggie go. He says it would be foolish to let someone go who knows what Maggie knows about him. Sabrina knows even more about Cyrus than Maggie does, and asks what he is going to do to her. He tells her she knows what he is going to do. He strangles her.

Liz enters and screams. Startled, Cyrus lets go of Sabrina’s neck. She falls to the floor, her eyes closed. Tomorrow it will be confirmed that she is dead.

Liz had a dream earlier. She and Sabrina entered Cyrus’ lab and found it a shambles. Sabrina started cleaning the place up, only to find Maggie’s dead body sprawled on a table. Liz told this dream to a person named Barnabas Collins, who introduced himself to her family a few weeks ago as a distant cousin from South America. While the rest of the Collinses believe that Maggie left of her own accord, Barnabas is convinced that she is being held prisoner. The dream convinces Liz that Barnabas is right. When she told him about the dream, she also told him she had met Yaeger. Barnabas knows how cruel and dangerous Yaeger is, and has since #1021 been trying to find out exactly what the connection is between Cyrus and Yaeger. He announced to Liz that there is only one way to find out whether Yaeger has abducted Maggie, and when we last saw him in this episode he was in Cyrus’ lab, looking at the wardrobe he keeps there to wear when he is disguised as Yaeger.

Sabrina’s death marks Lisa Blake Richards’ final appearance on Dark Shadows. Her quiet competence as an actress allowed her scene partners to dial the vehemence essential to the Dark Shadows house style of acting down to bearable levels, and it highlighted Sabrina’s clumsiness under the severe pressures to which the story subjected her. I was glad when, during a 2020 reunion of Dark Shadows cast members on Zoom, Mitch Ryan took a call from Miss Richards, who was at that time his fellow student in a writing class. I’ll miss her, even if Danny Horn doesn’t.

*That pocket gets a couple of closeups today; after watching the episode, my wife and I happened to see another video mentioning that there was a trend towards putting pockets in skirts in the early 1970s.

Episode 1032: The presence of two

A mysterious rupture in space and time occasionally appears in a room in the east wing of the great house of Collinwood. In the universe where Dark Shadows was set for its first 196 weeks, this room is vacant, bare, and dark. In another universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time,” the same room is brightly lit, fully furnished, and richly decorated. When the rupture occurs, people standing in the doorway in one universe can see and hear what happens in the other universe, but they cannot enter it, and the people they observe are not aware of them.

Vampire Barnabas Collins crossed over from the original continuity in #980, and pops back today. His best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, welcomes him home. He declares that he cannot stay. He has learned that Maggie Evans Collins, whose counterpart in their universe has been important to Barnabas and Julia, is in danger and he feels a responsibility to rescue her. Julia says that she saw her own counterpart and that of wicked witch Angelique in the room earlier in the evening, and that they were plotting to destroy Barnabas. She says that he must stay in his native universe for his own safety. He disregards this and orders her to lock him in the room so that he can cross back over to the other continuity the next time the phenomenon occurs. Soon, he is back there, himself imperiled and with no idea how to help Maggie.

Maggie is the prisoner of Cyrus Longworth, a mad scientist who has developed a potion that alters his appearance so drastically even those who know him best do not recognize him when he is under its influence. Thus disguised, Cyrus calls himself “John Yaeger” and sets about beating some people, raping others, and murdering still others. As “Yaeger,” Cyrus is keeping Maggie in a dungeon and telling her he will not let her out until she falls in love with him. She has a fever today. He brings her an antibiotic and tells her how to use it. As he is giving the instructions, his voice and facial expression are so typical of Cyrus that it is a bit odd Maggie does not suspect that he and Yaeger are one and the same. She tells him that she has given up on returning to her previous life and is willing to go off and make a new one with him. Cyrus is overjoyed at this, and talks about how wonderful things will be from now on.

Watching the episode, I had a number of things to say about Barnabas and the two Julias. Then I read Danny Horn’s post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, and found that he had already said them. The only big difference is that Danny doesn’t like this part of the show and I do, but once you’ve figured out that he and I are not the same person, not even counterparts in alternate universes, that isn’t an especially interesting fact.

Danny does make one claim about the difference between the Julia Hoffman, MD whom we know from the original continuity and the housekeeper Julia Hoffman we’ve been getting to know in recent months that I would dispute:

But there is a difference, an actual reason why Actual Julia is better than Parallel Julia, which is that Julia is a higher social class than Hoffman, and this gives her more power to impact the story.

I know, that sounds awful, but it’s true. Julia is a doctor, and doctors are incredibly powerful on soap operas. When there’s a crisis, you call the doctor, and then everyone literally stands around and waits for the doctor character to tell them what to do. Julia can examine people, and make treatment decisions. Those decisions are mostly sedative-related, but still, she’s an active character in the scene.

As a doctor and permanent house guest, Julia also has complete freedom to go anywhere she likes, at any hour. She can leave the house and go meet fashion models and art collectors, or dig up a grave, or pretend to write a book. She can shop for antiques, and boss policemen around. There is no limit to what Dr. Julia Hoffman can do, as long as it makes the story more interesting.

And Hoffman is a housekeeper. She has no freedom, no social power, and nobody asks her for advice. There’s just no contest.

Danny Horn, “Episode 1032: The Curse of Blinovitch,” posted 6 June 2017 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

Julia’s status made it easy for her to establish herself on the show in 1967, but at this point Hoffman has as much potential for development as Julia had then. As the housekeeper, Hoffman has the run of Collinwood, which is where all the action takes place. That gives her all the authority she needs to become involved in any story. It adds an interesting wrinkle that she often has to take orders from characters who are less powerful than she is. Occasionally she gives orders to women who are nominally her superiors, and seeing a woman in a French maid outfit dominate rich ladies is no doubt deeply satisfying to certain people. Angelique is as firmly established as the main driver of the action now as Barnabas was when Julia first joined the cast of characters, and Hoffman’s relationship with her is in every way the same as Julia’s relationship to Barnabas. So I think Hoffman is Julia’s equal as a story generator.

I was also going to make fun of Cyrus’ extreme gullibility when Maggie says she will leave with him, but I then I read John and Christine Scoleri’s discussion in their post at Dark Shadows Before I Die, and found that they had beaten me to that. They even included a link to the Warner Brothers cartoon of the big monster saying that “I will love him and squeeze him and call him George”, and captured a screenshot of Maggie rolling her eyes at Cyrus’ dopey reaction:

John: Boy, Yaeger is as dumb as he is sleazy. That he would so quickly buy Maggie’s story seems completely out of character. Of course, he’s so caught up in how he’s going to hug her and pet her and squeeze her and rub her and caress her… Though he probably won’t call her George.

Christine: I was worried Maggie was going to be the dumb one and not try to convince him that she was willing to leave with him so she could attempt to escape. I wonder how far they’ll get before she slips up and he brings her right back.

John and Christie Scoleri, “Dark Shadows Episode 1032: 6/9/70,” posted 9 June 2020 on Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Cyrus’ stupidity might make us sympathize with Barnabas’ determination to continue to try to rescue Maggie in spite of everything. Regular viewers know that Cyrus has a devoted fiancée who fell in love with him even without being kidnapped, and that she has vowed to stand by him even while he is in the guise of Yaeger. So Cyrus’ abduction of Maggie cannot be attributed to any form of loneliness, only to a lust for power and cruelty for their own sakes, and his reaction to her pretense of surrender is a sign that he is even more demented and therefore less predictable than we might have assumed. The dungeon scenes have already been relentlessly bleak, and when we see how unhinged Cyrus really is they promise to become even harder to watch.

Episode 1031: Some way of getting there

In 1968, vampire Barnabas Collins fell into the hands of mad scientist Eric Lang. Like Julia Hoffman, the mad scientist into whose hands Barnabas had previously fallen, Lang wanted to cure Barnabas of vampirism. Unlike Julia, Lang had a plan that actually worked. First, he gave him a treatment that temporarily arrested the symptoms of the curse. Then he built a Frankenstein’s monster which he planned to bring to life with an infusion of Barnabas’ “life force.” Wicked witch Angelique killed Lang before he could complete this experiment. Julia took over, and succeeded. The monster, named Adam, drained Barnabas’ affliction from him permanently.

Julia and Barnabas turned out to be the worst parents imaginable, and Adam grew to hate them. The big guy found kindness in the form of Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, an expert on the supernatural. Stokes taught Adam to speak and to read, and tried to introduce him to the social graces. In #636, Adam was in Stokes’ apartment when an enemy knocked on the door. Stokes told him to hide in the back room. He did, and was never seen and barely ever mentioned again. Only in #933, when another guest of Stokes’ had an unfortunate experience in that room, did we get confirmation that Adam wasn’t still waiting there.

Now, we are beginning the eleventh week of an arc set in a different universe than the one where the show spent its first 196 weeks. Barnabas, again a vampire because of a new curse, had discovered that a particular room in the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood sometimes changes its appearance. Standing in the hall and looking through the door, he could see, not the bare dark walls that are there in his world, but a fully furnished, richly decorated, brightly lit room. People with the same appearances and voices as those he knew would come and go in that room, but they could not see or hear him, nor could he pass through the invisible barrier in the doorway to join them. Stokes explained the many-worlds hypothesis, which he calls “Parallel Time.” Hoping that he might be freed from his curse if he could enter the other universe, Barnabas stood in the room while it was in its normal state. It changed around him, and he found himself in that other continuity.

Barnabas was disappointed to find that he was still a vampire. He bit and enslaved the first person he met. Now he has come to know many people, among them counterparts of Angelique, Julia, and Stokes. Angelique is a wicked witch here as well. She has returned from the dead, murdered her identical twin sister Alexis, and taken Alexis’ place as a permanent houseguest at Collinwood. He knows who she really is and she knows that he knows, but neither is in a position to fight the other. He does not know that Angelique killed Alexis, nor does he know that she, like he, is a vampire. She does not steal blood from the living, but warmth. And her attacks, when they provide her with enough warmth to keep her going, are invariably fatal.

Julia is Angelique’s most fanatical devotee. She is reluctant to bring victims for her to quick-freeze, but is happy enough to serve her in every other way. The portal occasionally opens in the room on this side too, so that inhabitants of the current timeline can catch glimpses of the main continuity as those in the main continuity can catch glimpses of what is happening here. That’s given the show opportunities to contrast this Julia with the one we first met. They have made it very clear that this Julia has the same feelings for Angelique that the original Julia has for Barnabas. Since we know that the other Julia has been Barnabas’ constant helper through all his murders and other activities, we can assume that this Julia will be Angelique’s deadliest enforcer.

Stokes has played a parental role in Angelique’s life. Originally he was identified as Angelique and Alexis’ father, and that is how he is described today. In between there were a couple of days when he was their stepfather, but that didn’t fit with other information we had, and we can hope they will drop that point. At any rate, Stokes disliked Alexis and forgot all about her four seconds after Angelique told him she had killed her. He delights in Angelique. He is an evil mirror image of his virtuous opposite number in the other universe.

Yesterday, Stokes and Angelique were in his apartment, which is the same as the one his counterpart occupies. He told her that he used his unsurpassed mastery of the occult to make it possible for her to return from the dead. Angelique wanted him to cure her of the need to steal the warmth from the living, but he said neither he nor anyone else knows how to do that. When he told her that someone else was involved in the process, she brightened and asked to meet this other person. Stokes looked sad, even ashamed. He indicated that the person is in the back room of his apartment, and Angelique went to its door.

Today, Angelique enters the room. She finds a blanket covering a woman’s body. Stokes enters. Angelique asks if the woman is alive; Stokes says she is more alive than Angelique is. He took much of her “life force” to make it possible for Angelique to overcome death. She retains enough of this force to stay alive. If she dies, all of her “life force” will disappear, including the portion which animates Angelique. But as long as she lives, the woman will keep pulling that portion back to herself. At moments when the woman is drawing on it most effectively, Angelique is overwhelmed with the desperate need for warmth and can right herself only by consuming a victim.

Was this your card? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This story is the reversed mirror image of Adam and Barnabas. As Adam cured Barnabas of vampirism by absorbing his “life force” and coming to life, so the unnamed woman causes Angelique’s heat vampirism by reclaiming her own “life force” and staying alive. Adam had a female companion, an intended Bride of Frankenstein named Eve. Eve was played by Marie Wallace. The original audience was in a position to know that whoever is under the blanket, she will not be played by Miss Wallace. Somerset had premiered opposite Dark Shadows on NBC at the end of March, and she was an original member of its cast.

Evidently, the show does not want us to miss the echo of Adam. Angelique goes back to the apartment later in the episode, and finds Stokes playing chess against himself. First-time viewers will recognize this as a symbol of Stokes’ attempt to manipulate those around him for the sake of an elaborate plan, but those who have been with the show for a long time will also remember Adam’s habit of passing the time with solitaire games of chess.

Meanwhile, in the original continuity, Julia is looking into the room where the portal between universes sometimes becomes visible. She sees her own counterpart talking with Angelique. She is horrified to hear them decide that they must destroy Barnabas, and despairs that she cannot pierce the invisible barrier that separates the two worlds.

Later, Barnabas is in the room. He finds Angelique’s diary and turns to her account of how “he” has a plan to defeat death. Barnabas wonders who “he” is, and decides to take the diary someplace where he can study it. He sets it down. When he looks up, the room is dark and bare. He is back in his own universe, without the diary. Julia enters and welcomes him home.

Without missing a beat, Barnabas exclaims that he must not stay. He has discovered that Maggie Evans Collins, counterpart of someone important to him in his own world, is in danger, and he has to go back to the other universe to rescue her. This is a typical moment. Julia has given up everything she has and any hope of a meaningful relationship with anyone else in her devotion to Barnabas, and in return he keeps throwing other women in her face. The story in “Parallel Time” is getting more complicated and the sufferings of the characters there are getting more urgent, so we can be sure Barnabas will find a way back. But longtime viewers will remember that when Barnabas traveled back in time to 1897, Julia eventually found a way to join him there. So when he travels sideways in time and returns to the other continuity, we can hope that Julia will somehow manage to take her place at his side.

The closing credits bill Grayson Hall twice, once as “Julia Hoffman” and once as “Dr Julia Hoffman.” Julia was in hundreds of episodes before the “Parallel Time” story began, and has appeared a couple of times in episodes where Miss Hoffman the housekeeper also figured. This is the first time her degree makes it on screen.

Episode 1030: As though I had touched death

Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is fretting about her brother Quentin’s childish behavior. Quentin’s wife, the former Maggie Evans, has left the house abruptly, without her purse, and has been away for some time. Liz is sure something bad has happened to Maggie, but Quentin refuses to look for her.

Liz tries to interest Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of Quentin’s late first wife Angelique, in Quentin and Maggie’s troubles. She does not know that the person she is talking to is not Alexis at all, but Angelique herself. Angelique rose from the dead, murdered Alexis, and took Alexis’ place as a permanent houseguest in the great house of Collinwood as part of her plan to win Quentin back. To that end, Angelique is conspiring with a man she knows as John Yaeger. He has abducted Maggie and is holding her in a dungeon out in the country, hoping that after enough time alone with him she will forget all about Quentin and fall in love with him.

“Alexis” is pacing around the drawing room while Liz talks about Maggie and Quentin. She is half listening when she approaches a window and sees Yaeger waiting outside. She suddenly tells Liz that she is going to go out herself and look for Maggie. Liz tells her this is too dangerous, but she rushes out. She confers with Yaeger in the gazebo.* Yaeger is despairing of his plan, much to Angelique’s annoyance.

Angelique, alias Alexis, sees Yaeger at the window. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is no such person as Yaeger, any more than there is a living Alexis Stokes. The man is really Cyrus Longworth in disguise. Maggie and Quentin think of Cyrus as a friend, a mild-mannered scientist who means well, though he is sometimes strangely naive. Cyrus has developed a potion which changes his appearance so drastically that not even those who know him best can recognize him when he is under its influence. After Cyrus tried to rape Maggie last week while disguised as Yaeger, he threw the potion away. But he then transformed spontaneously, without drinking it. Since he cannot re-Jekyllize himself without it, we are left wondering if he will remain in his Yaeger form permanently. We may also wonder what he will do if he reverts to his usual appearance in front of Maggie. He has admitted to himself that he and Yaeger are not separate people, but still seems to want to hold onto some sense that they are. He can’t very well do that if Maggie knows he is the one keeping her locked up.

Liz stays in the drawing room after “Alexis” leaves. Roger Collins enters and helps himself to some brandy. Liz picks up with her brother where she had left off with “Alexis.” Roger doesn’t even pretend to care about Maggie. He was fixated on Angelique when she was alive, and cannot forgive Maggie for not being her. He is glad Maggie is gone, and nothing Liz says about her can stir his interest. Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds played different versions of these characters starting in #1, and it is always great to see them together.

Angelique has a problem of her own. She can stay out of the tomb only so long as she finds living bodies to drain of their warmth. She’s already killed three people that way. The first two were Alexis, whom she is successfully impersonating, and a handyman named Fred, who was expected to leave town anyway. Neither of them has been missed. The third, lawyer Larry Chase, caused puzzlement when his ice cold corpse was found in front of her, but as an isolated occurrence no one seems to have found a way to start solving that puzzle. So “Alexis” is not currently suspected of being a vampiric creature.

The need for warmth suddenly comes over Angelique. She goes to the drawing room and huddles in front of the fire. Roger sees her and remarks on how much she, “Alexis,” reminds him of Angelique. She says she doesn’t want to talk about her sister, then approaches Roger and embraces him. He says he feels terribly cold. She asks him to kiss her. That’s all it took to kill Fred and Larry, and a lot more contact than it took to kill Alexis. Roger is about to do it when Liz enters. They break their clinch and Angelique makes haste to go out. Roger is still feeling extreme cold, but he has no idea his sister just saved his life.

We see Angelique in the apartment of her (step?)father, Tim Stokes. She tells him she killed some stranger on her way over. By this time, his body will have been discovered, so cold that it will be assumed he had been dead for days. She tells Stokes that it was his occult prowess that enabled her to return from the dead, and asks if he can free her of her heat vampirism. He says that he cannot, and that he is so much the greatest expert in this sort of thing that there is no point in looking for anyone else who might be able to do so. She presses, and he mentions that someone else was involved in the process. She demands to see this person; he tells her the person is in the back room of the apartment. She eagerly goes to the door, unbothered by his pained refusal to accompany her.

Stokes’ apartment is laid out like the apartment of Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, his counterpart in the parallel universe where Dark Shadows was set for its first 196 weeks. Two people had important connections with that other Stokes’ back room. One was Frankenstein’s monster Adam, who was last seen going in there. Adam’s creation was a means of freeing another vampire of his curse; longtime viewers may therefore wonder if we are about to meet his counterpart. The other was Paul Stoddard, ex-husband of Liz’ counterpart, who was attacked and killed in that room by a murderous shape-shifter who, like Cyrus Longworth/ John Yaeger, was played by Christopher Pennock. Perhaps whoever is waiting for Angelique in the room is somehow connected with Cyrus/ Yaeger.

There are other possibilities. Angelique’s counterpart in the other continuity was for a time subordinated to suave warlock Nicholas Blair. We have not seen a counterpart of Nicholas here; my wife, Mrs Acilius, thinks that we will meet another Nicholas tomorrow.

*Which she pronounces “ga-ZAY-bo,” a bit of Collinsport English Lara Parker introduced way back in #489. It’s fun to hear it again.

Episode 1029: Listen to an enemy

Last week, a man who refused to identify himself cold-called Maggie Collins and told her to meet him secretly in a dark alley near the waterfront. Once she got there, he grabbed her and set about raping her. Only when one of Maggie’s old school friends happened by was he interrupted and she rescued. Today, the same man calls Maggie and tells her to meet him secretly on a cliff in the woods. This time he identifies himself as Cyrus Longworth, whom she did not recognize during his previous attack on her and whom she still regards as a friend, so she agrees. Once she gets there, he approaches her. He is disguised as “John Yaeger,” an imaginary person whom he creates by taking a potion he made to change his appearance. The Yaeger disguise is effective at concealing Cyrus’ identity, but Maggie does recognize him as the same man who trapped her the last time she fell for this. He takes her prisoner and locks her in a dungeon in the basement of an old farmhouse he obtained yesterday by murdering its rightful owner. He tells her she will come to like it there.

Dark Shadows first became a hit in May and June of 1967, when it was set in a different universe. We saw Maggie’s counterpart held prisoner by vampire Barnabas Collins, who had the lunatic idea that if he tortured her in the right way her personality would disappear and that of his lost love Josette would take its place. Maggie escaped from Barnabas; her memory of his crimes against her was mind-wiped away, and she became quite fond of him. The show eventually decided to run with Barnabas’ idea, building more and more connections between Maggie and Josette. Late in 1969, another character played by Kathryn Leigh Scott actually did turn into Josette. By the time we crossed over to the current continuity ten weeks ago, the original Maggie and Barnabas were an item.

The feature film House of Dark Shadows retells the story of Barnabas’ imprisonment of Maggie. Principal photography on that film just wrapped a few weeks ago. So it is front of mind for the production staff. The dungeon Cyrus has prepared for Maggie is made of the same panels representing brick walls that indicated the dungeon where Barnabas kept the other Maggie. Moreover, Cyrus has stocked it with some of Maggie’s belongings, including the silver brush and mirror that had once belonged to Josette which Barnabas provided to the Maggie of his universe. So the horror of seeing Maggie in the dungeon, at the mercy of the loathsome Cyrus, is compounded by the thought that the show might possibly do what it did with Barnabas, and have Cyrus’ plan work. Longtime viewers can all too easily imagine Maggie deciding she loves Cyrus, disgusting as he is.

Fortunately for the audience, Cyrus meets someone today whose involvement in the plot assures us that his plan will not be a straightforward success. This person knows him as John Yaeger; he knows her as Alexis Stokes. In fact, she is Alexis’ twin sister, the late Angelique Stokes Collins. Angelique rose from the dead, murdered Alexis, and took her place as a permanent houseguest at the great house of Collinwood. Maggie and her husband, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, own Collinwood. Angelique was Quentin’s first wife, and she wants to be reunited with her widower. When she meets Cyrus, she decides to encourage him in his designs on Maggie.

Angelique gets that old gleam in her eye. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique’s counterpart in the original continuity is a wicked witch whose plans always misfire. As they are unraveling, they usually add a madcap quality to the proceedings which makes a sharp contrast with the unrelieved bleakness of Maggie’s time in Barnabas’ dungeon. Though this Angelique is utterly evil, we can hope she will spare us that dreariness.

Episode 1028: Those detestable traits of his

Mad scientist Cyrus Longworth developed a potion that changed his appearance so drastically that even people who knew him well cannot recognize him when he is under its influence. He used this disguise to carry out beatings, rapes, and murders. Now, he has spontaneously transformed in front of his fiancée, Sabrina Stuart. Cyrus had fooled Sabrina into thinking that his disguise was a separate person named “John Yaeger.” Sabrina had reason to hate Yaeger and fear him. She was shocked to learn that Yaeger and Cyrus were one and the same, and Cyrus ridiculed her for her continued attachment to him. Nonetheless, Sabrina pledged to support Cyrus come what may, and she does keep his secret today. Even after he threatens her with the sword in his cane, a threat which seems all too real since Christopher Pennock holds the prop too close to Lisa Blake Richards’ face when he pops the sharp blade out, she still stands by her man.

Cyrus has slipped into the great house of Collinwood and entered the master bedroom. He is watching the lady of the house, Maggie Evans Collins, while she sleeps. Cyrus tried to rape Maggie in a dark alley last week, and apparently he has decided to finish the job while she is in her own bed. At the last moment, Maggie’s stepson, strange and troubled teen Daniel Collins, enters. Cyrus hides behind the curtains while Daniel asks for his father.

Cyrus has ot chosen a particularly good hiding place. The light is on him, and he is directly in Daniel’s line of sight. It is preposterous enough that an armed intruder as physically prepossessing and as unscrupulous as Cyrus would hide from Maggie and Daniel, and this slip emphasizes that Cyrus, however much he may revel in the harm he has done as when in his disguise, is basically a coward.

Hey Daniel, notice that very tall man peeking out from behind the curtains directly in front of you? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Daniel has been bitterly hostile to Maggie up to this point. Today they are suddenly great friends. He says sadly that he sometimes gets a premonition when something evil is about to happen in the house, and that he has such a premonition now. She talks to him affectionately, so softly that we can’t tell whether she is calling him “Daniel” or “Dan,” and touches his hair. Regular viewers have seen these two actors play friends in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows, when the action took place in a different universe and they were various other characters. It’s good to see them pick up where they left off, and exciting to think of what they might be able to do to breathe more life into Maggie’s stories. Alas, this is the last time we will see Daniel.

Later, Cyrus meets with someone we’ve never seen before. The closing credits will identify this man as Aldon Wicks. Cyrus says he wants to buy an old farmhouse from Wicks. He is particularly interested in a room in the basement, which he wants to outfit with an extra-heavy door. Wicks puts the door Cyrus wants on the room. When the time comes to pay up, Cyrus asks Wicks a bunch of questions, the answers to which all imply that no one knows where he is or will miss him if he disappears. So Cyrus stabs him to death with his cane. That’s certainly one way to cut costs on a real estate transaction.

The opening voiceover is delivered by associate director Ken McEwen. In the first 54 weeks of Dark Shadows, every voiceover was delivered by Alexandra Moltke Isles in character as well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, whether Vicki was in the episode or not. Between them and today, the narrator has always been an actor who appears in the episode. McEwen was drafted to appear in a few episodes as lawyer Larry Chase when Don Briscoe’s health problems caught up to him and forced him to leave the cast. Maybe they gave McEwen a contract to appear in three episodes more than turned out to include parts for Larry, and that explains his voice responsibilities in this one, #1079, and #1082.

A third pair of videotape editors are credited today, Carl Pollack and Fred Labib, joining the teams of Indra Sadoo and Chuck Gardner and Dan Rosenson and Robert Steinback.