Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1000: All people have a reason for their fears

Trask the butler is surprised to see young Amy Collins in the great house of Collinwood. Amy’s cousin Quentin, the master of Collinwood, sent her to stay in the Old House on the estate, home to Will and Carolyn Loomis. The visibly uncomfortable Trask tells Amy she is not supposed to come back until Quentin sends for her. Amy says that she can’t stand it at the Loomises. Trask snaps at her for making life more complicated “at a time like this.” Amy asks what’s so unusual about this time, and Trask claims that he just means that he has been working hard. After an awkward silence, Amy asks if there has been any news about someone called Dameon Edwards. At Edwards’ name, Trask flies out of control. He grabs Amy by the shoulders, leans down so that his nose is in her face, and shouts that she has seen Edwards again. Terrified, she says she hasn’t. He shakes her and shouts louder, she freezes tighter and tighter. It’s getting pretty disturbing when the front door opens. Quentin enters, with two other adults, and demands to know what Trask thinks he’s doing.

Jerry Lacy and Denise Nickerson do a great job in this scene, which comes as no surprise to longtime viewers. For much of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897. In that segment, Nickerson and Mr Lacy played Nora Collins and the evil Gregory Trask. They were terrific together then, as they are today.

Gregory was cruel to children, including Nora. Gregory’s goal was to take control of Collinwood and all its residents, and for a time he seemed to be succeeding. As such, Gregory’s abuse of Nora left us feeling helpless. This Trask is not in control of anything, least of all himself. We don’t know exactly what secret he is frantically trying to keep in connection with Edwards, but we know he believes that it might be exposed at any moment and that when it is he will be ruined. He is acting from panic. Outrageous as Trask’s attack on Amy is, we can see that it is not likely to be repeated and it does not fill us with despair.

Quentin takes Amy to the drawing room and talks with her privately. She is absorbed in her dislike of the Loomises’ house. She says she has a feeling that something terrible is happening there, but she can’t give any reason why she should feel that way. She says that Will spends all of his time writing a new book. This surprises Quentin, who says that Will hasn’t written a word in five years. Amy says that he is busy now, and mentions that she stole a couple of pages from his wastebasket. Quentin asks if she still has them. She hands them over, and he reads them avidly.

Quentin is so enthusiastic about joining Amy in spying on Will’s new project that he forgets all about Trask. Amy seems to have forgotten him as well. When Quentin walked in and found Trask getting rough with her, it looked like he was going to dismiss him on the spot, but now it seems Trask will keep his job for a while longer.

The two who entered with Quentin were Cyrus Longworth and Alexis Stokes. Alexis is the identical twin sister of Quentin’s late wife, Angelique. Cyrus was a friend of Angelique’s, and is a fool. He is a scientist by occupation, and unknown to any of the other characters in today’s episode has been taking a potion of his own devising to turn himself into a hairier and more openly sadistic version of himself. That Jekyll and Hyde potion was the end product of an idea he got from Angelique. Cyrus tells Alexis today that Angelique was his teacher in matters of the occult, with which he is fascinated.

Quentin, Cyrus, and Alexis have returned from Angelique’s tomb. Alexis went there to try to prevent the men from unsealing the tomb and opening the coffin. They were so caught up in the idea that she was really Angelique come back to life that there was no point in her trying to talk sense to them. When they had done their work, they were astounded to find, not only that Angelique’s body was where it was supposed to be, but that it was perfectly preserved six months after her death. Quentin twice asked Cyrus how that could be, first appealing to his expertise as a scientist, then to his studies in occult lore, and each time Cyrus responded with a declaration that what they were seeing could not possibly exist.

The men are now convinced that Alexis is not Angelique, and they tell Trask this. He never thought she was, and is entirely absorbed in his fears about Dameon Edwards. All he says in reply is that he believes there is an evil presence in the house.

Quentin and Cyrus want to cremate Angelique’s body. They announced this plan while they were still in the tomb, prompting Alexis to remind them that her sister’s will specified that she be buried and to threaten to take them to court if they go against Angelique’s wishes.

Cyrus talks with Alexis in Angelique’s old bedroom, telling her that the body’s extraordinarily uncorrupted state has persuaded him that Angelique survives in some uncanny way. He urges her to let the body be destroyed. She continues to demur.

Cyrus says that when she was alive, Angelique had a “rapport with the unnatural” that inclines him to believe she might come “back from the death.” These awkward phrases were probably just line bobbles by Christopher Pennock, but they suit Cyrus well. He’s supposed to be an intellectual who spends little time talking to anyone, and such people do indeed tend to stumble over their words.

Later, Alexis summons Trask. She asks him to drive her to the cemetery and to keep their trip there a secret from Quentin. He acquiesces.

At the mausoleum, Trask is worried about an impending storm. He says he will go back to the car to get an umbrella, but Alexis tells him to forget about that. He is simply to wait for her in the car. She plans to spend only ten minutes with her sister’s remains.

Alexis looks in the coffin and talks to Angelique. She has bad news for her:

I don’t know what your secret was, Angelique, or why you still look as you did in life. I only know that it is wrong. It goes against the natural order of things. I don’t want to do what I have to do now. Quentin and Cyrus are right. Your body must be destroyed.

Distraught, Alexis puts her hand on Angelique’s shoulder, touching her sister one last time. We cut to a closeup of Angelique lying in her coffin. Her eyes pop open, and her lips curl into a smile. For a half a second, these motions look like they might be mechanical reflexes taking place within a dead body as it begins to decompose. But then she speaks: “My dear Alexis, you were always so right. Someone must be destroyed, but it won’t be me. It will be you.”

The show has kept us in suspense for three weeks as to whether Alexis was Angelique. Now, they’ve settled that question, and we know who Alexis is. Unfortunately for her, it seems we just have time to say goodbye.

In our world, bodies do sometimes turn up long after death showing no visible signs of decay. There were several vampire panics in Europe in the early modern era when exhumed corpses were found still looking fresh after months in the grave. Cyrus does not know of any such events in his world’s history, so he and Quentin have to come up with the idea of a panicked response on their own.

It has also been traditional in many branches of Christianity to regard a long-uncorrupted corpse as a count in favor of putting the person on the calendar of saints. Dostoevsky was hugely fashionable in the USA in the Cold War years of the 1950s and 1960s, and it is probable that the writing staff had at least a nodding acquaintance with The Brothers Karamazov. One of the central episodes of that novel comes when the admirers of the godly Father Zosima insist on leaving his body unburied for a long period, certain that it will remain uncorrupt and prove that the anniversary of his passing should be kept as a feast day. To their horror, his remains rot in the usual way. We’ve only been in this particular universe for four weeks, and the only indication we have so far had that Christianity even exists here came early on, when Will used the sign of the cross to immobilize and trap a vampire. So it is no surprise that Quentin, Cyrus, and Alexis never consider that the perfect preservation of Angelique’s body might suggest that she has taken a place among the saints.

Episode 999: It’s the same as it was, you were different then

Quentin Collins walks into the bedroom once occupied by his late wife Angelique, where Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis is staying. Quentin arrives just in time to see sleazy musician Bruno Hess strangling Alexis. He interrupts this process. Bruno is convinced that Alexis is Angelique returned from the grave, and that she is responsible for many strange and unhappy occurrences that have taken place on the estate of Collinwood since her arrival.

Bruno holds the deed to a cottage on the grounds of the estate and lives there, to Quentin’s intense annoyance. He hates Bruno, who had an affair with Angelique, a fact he likes to throw in Quentin’s face. You might think Quentin would call the police and report Bruno’s assault on Alexis. Not only would that result in a felony charge, but if Bruno bursts out with his suspicions it should be easy to get a civil commitment order that will earn him a a long stay in a home for the very nervous. But Quentin leaves Alexis and Angelique’s room without calling the sheriff. What’s more, when he goes to the drawing room and finds Bruno still in his house he has a lengthy conversation with him and waits for him to go. He never does telephone the police.

By the end of the episode, Quentin has convinced himself to take Bruno’s theory seriously. Alexis overhears him talking about it with his friend Cyrus Longworth. Quentin tells Cyrus that they must open Angelique’s tomb and look in her coffin.

Alexis finds them there, the coffin already out of its niche. She objects to the desecration of her sister’s resting place. She promises to leave Collinwood immediately if they will let Angelique rest in peace. Quentin refuses. He opens the box. Whatever he finds inside prompts a reaction of shock on his face and on Alexis’ as they look inside.

Between these scenes, we spend time in Cyrus’ laboratory. He is a mad scientist who has devised a Jekyll and Hyde potion. His alter ego goes by the name John Yaeger. Cyrus’ fiancée Sabrina Stuart is a sweet, trusting young woman who is determined to believe the best of Cyrus, but she has heard so much about Cyrus’ involvement with the brutal Yaeger that she is certain something is terribly wrong. We know that Cyrus was close to Angelique, and that she put him up to the Jekyll and Hyde experiment. Sabrina doesn’t know what Cyrus’ project is, but his withdrawn and irritable manner reminds her of the influence Angelique had on him. She says “It’s the same as it was when Angelique was alive- you were different then, and you’re different now.” I’m sure that was the scripted line, too.

Sabrina demands Cyrus stop lying to her and tell the truth about who Yaeger is and what hold he has over him. We saw yesterday that Cyrus’ attitude towards the potion and towards his time as Yaeger is already that of an addict towards his drug, and he sullenly refuses to answer any of Sabrina’s questions, even with more lies. She grows more and more exasperated.

Sabrina’s time with Cyrus is cut short when barmaid Buffie Harrington enters and insists on talking with Cyrus alone. Yaeger gave Buffie a check signed by Cyrus to cover the damages he did to her place of employment in a bar fight the other night; she wants to know if the check is authentic. Cyrus confirms that it is, much to Buffie’s delight. She mentions that her sometime boyfriend Steve is in the hospital because of a beating Yaeger gave him; Cyrus hands her a pile of cash to cover Steve’s hospital expenses. Buffie tells Cyrus that Yaeger has taken rooms in the boarding house where she stays, and that he frightens her. She does not tell him that Yaeger has hit her, choked her, and threatened her every time they have met. We know that he knows that- he has met her only when he was in the form of Yaeger, and he recognizes her on sight, showing that he remembers their encounters. Buffie asks if Yaeger works for Cyrus. He smiles with great satisfaction and says that he does.

That smile is a key moment. Yesterday’s episode gave the Jekyll and Hyde story a new lease on life by confirming that it will indeed be about addiction. That’s the usual thing with that material, but Dark Shadows has taken familiar tales in such weird directions that we could by no means take it for granted that its version would follow the typical pattern. Cyrus’ response to the thought that he controls Yaeger, who has put Steve in the hospital and is terrorizing Buffie, confirms something else. Cyrus’ diffident manner and scientific preoccupations help Sabrina hold onto the idea that he is a sweet man whose only flaw is naïveté, but Christopher Pennock’s rendering of that smile leaves no doubt that Yaeger is Cyrus’ means of indulging his own sadistic impulses.

As Buffie is leaving, Cyrus asks her if she likes Yaeger. Holding her head high, she says that sometimes she does. She sounds like she means it. Buffie was a commanding presence when first we saw her, and she is forceful throughout this scene. But she has given up on fighting back against Yaeger or even trying to run away from him. Her line suggests that she is not simply giving in to fear, but is drawn to a masochistic fantasy. Yaeger has been so vicious and Cyrus is so sinister that there is no prospect this fantasy is going to be channeled into any kind of consensual game- Buffie is drifting into a situation that can lead only to her destruction.

This episode includes one of the all-time great bloopers. The closing credits run over a shot of Angelique and Alexis’s room. For the first minute or so, we see a man sitting in a chair, chewing on something. Whoever he was, apparently he decided he’d found a good spot for lunch. Eventually the camera zooms in on the portrait of Angelique that dominates the room. This is so obviously an attempt to get the lunch-eater out of the frame that it only adds to the hilarity.

Who he is and what he is eating, I don’t know. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 998: What can one do to Cyrus Longworth?

Writer Gordon Russell has to give two characters plausible motivations today, and he succeeds admirably.

One is Dr Cyrus Longworth, the apparently nice half of a Jekyll and Hyde duality. Jekyll and Hyde is a story about drug addiction, but Dark Shadows has so often featured villains whose crazy ideas have turned out to be true that we can’t be sure the show’s version will be that way. For all we know, it might turn out that Cyrus really has developed a method of separating the good from the evil in human nature and that he will use it to breed a new race.

Today, Cyrus is confronted in his laboratory by his fiancée Sabrina Stuart and his friend Quentin Collins about his association with his alter ego, whom they believe to be a separate person named John Yaeger. Cyrus pulls himself up to his full height and declares “I can end my relationship with Yaeger any time it suits me.” At this, the universal motto of the addict, we know just what is driving Cyrus. We can set aside all the talk in the opening voiceovers and elsewhere about how good and innocent Cyrus is, and see him as a man in the grip of a force he won’t face and can’t beat.

Cyrus doesn’t have a problem, you two have a problem. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The other character in need of an intelligible motivation is Cyrus’ friend, sleazy musician Bruno Hess. Bruno is staying in a room above Cyrus’ laboratory in hopes that the ghost of a man he murdered won’t be able to find him there. The ghost appears to him there today, and sets the room on fire. Cyrus helps Bruno put the fire out, and talks about trying to exorcise the ghost. Bruno tells Cyrus he doesn’t believe he can help him. When he says this, Bruno seems, for the first time, reasonable. He has asked many things of Cyrus, so many that we might think of him as nothing more than a source of ever-escalating demands. But when he says that what is happening now is outside Cyrus’ province, we can see that there is some kind of mental process going on in his head.

Bruno thinks the ghost and the fire were both sent by Quentin’s late wife, Angelique. In the universe where Dark Shadows spent its first 196 weeks, Angelique’s counterpart is a witch who has a complicated relationship to fire. She is vulnerable to it, but can also use it in various ways. And, she has returned from the dead many times. If the Angelique in this continuity is like that one, it would make sense to suspect her. Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis is Quentin’s guest at the great house of Collinwood. Bruno believes Alexis is really Angelique. He bursts in on her and says that he has a way to test whether she is Angelique returned from the dead. If she is, she can’t die again. So he sets about strangling her. If he kills her, Bruno will know he was mistaken.

In the main continuity, every drawer in every table at the great house contains a loaded gun. Longtime viewers have no reason to doubt that the same circumstance obtains here. So if we had not seen Bruno being rational in his scene with Cyrus, we would have no question in our minds but why Alexis does not draw a weapon and shoot the crazy man who is going to do nothing but try to kill her. That moment of lucidity makes the scene interesting. It even makes it somewhat surprising that Bruno goes all the way to homicide- we know he is a strange and violent man, but if he could think as clearly as that, maybe he could come up with a less drastic expedient.

The “Dan Curtis Productions” logo at the end of the closing credits is printed in a simpler style than it has been so far. We will see this new style several more times in the remaining months of the show.

Episode 997: How pretty your tears

We are in the fourth week of an arc set in a different universe than the one we saw in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows. This universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time,” was originally introduced as a realm populated by Doppelgänger of the characters we have known. They are the same people, but have made different choices and are therefore living different lives.

Some of the Parallel Time characters fit this description. So, we have known matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother Roger Collins from episode #1. In the early days of the show, much was made of the Collinses’ straitened financial circumstances, the result of Roger squandering the half of the family’s assets he had inherited and Liz scrambling to keep control of the business. Roger lived in Liz’ house as her guest and worked in the business as her employee, and she kept a wary eye on any move he made to get his hands on her money. In #981, Parallel Liz mentions that she used to be quite wealthy, but that she entrusted her share of the Collins fortune to Roger, and as a result they are both penniless. Original Liz saw that fate as a distinct possibility, every time Roger was in the same wing of the house as her bank account information.

Parallel Liz and Parallel Roger live in the great house of Collinwood as the guests of their brother Quentin. Parallel Quentin is not at all the same person as Original Quentin. He is an entirely different person. Original Quentin was born in 1870, died in 1897, became a ghost haunting Collinwood in 1968 and 1969, and as the result of a time travel storyline in 1969 was both spared death and immunized against aging. Original Quentin was a riff on the early conception of Roger as a villain, and he was a huge hit with the viewing public during the part of the show set in 1897. Ever since Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress in late 1969, they’ve been at a loss what to do with him. Parallel Quentin is an attempt to reinvent the character to let him keep enough of his vices that he retains the roguish charm that the fans liked, but at the same time use those vices as motivation for him to act the part of the hero from time to time.

There is need for an action hero today. Quentin’s friend, dippy mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, has invented a Jekyll-and-Hyde potion and taken a swig of it. As the darkly mustachio’d John Yaeger, he has been persecuting barmaid Buffie Harrington and Buffie’s unlucky boyfriend, big galoot Steve. We open with Yaeger choking Buffie and telling her she needs to be beaten into submission. Later, Yaeger gets the jump on Steve in a dark alley behind the Greenfield Inn, an establishment that also fronts a sinister alley in the main continuity. He threatens him with his sword cane. Steve manages to get that weapon away from him, but Yaeger beats him down. Yaeger is choking Steve, apparently with the intention of murdering him, when he hears a police whistle and runs away.

Cyrus Longworth and John Yaeger are played by Christopher Pennock.* In the main continuity, Pennock played a character who asked to be called Jabe but wound up answering to “Jeb.” Jabe appeared to be a man in his twenties, but was in fact a shape-shifting monster who was only a few months old when he was destroyed. We’ve heard a good deal about what Cyrus was doing six months ago and more, and there are diplomas on the walls of his laboratory that show his history is nothing like Jabe’s.

Among the very few choices in Jabe’s short life was an attempt to renounce his shape-shifting abilities so that he could remain in human form at all times. In that way, he is the opposite of Cyrus, who chooses to take his potion knowing it will change him into Yaeger.

Also, Jabe was so obnoxious that even people brainwashed to regard him as a divine being come to fulfill a plan that more than justified the extermination of the human race found his personality too much to take and turned against him after a few encounters. But by the end of Jabe’s time on the show, it had become undeniable that there was a kernel of sweetness in his personality. In this regard, too, Cyrus is the opposite of Jabe. We hear his soft voice and see his diffident manner, and we assume that the single-minded scientist in his lab coat, toiling all hours on a project that he keeps saying will benefit humankind, is a well-meaning sort, though perhaps dangerously naïve. Cyrus’ dutiful assistant and devoted fiancée, the lovely Sabrina Stuart, encourages us in that assumption, insisting that Cyrus is thoroughly good, if hopelessly unworldly. But as the initially insufferable Jabe turned out to be endearing at the end, so the apparently innocent Cyrus is deliberately choosing to turn himself into Yaeger even after he knows what Yaeger is capable of. What’s more, he refuses to let anyone at all help him with his experiment, meaning there is no one to restrain Yaeger’s sprees.

Sabrina’s counterpart in the main continuity was the fiancée, not of Jabe, but of another dangerous shape-shifter. She was engaged to werewolf Chris Jennings. As this Sabrina is convinced Cyrus is good, so that one kept insisting Chris was good, even after she had learned that he repeatedly refused to be restrained on nights of the full Moon, so that the killings he committed in his lupine form were premeditated murders on his part. This Sabrina does not know the nature of Cyrus’ work, and she believes that Yaeger is an enemy of his who is holding him prisoner. Sabrina would appear to stand with Roger and Liz as a character who is in a meaningful sense the same person in both timelines, so we are in suspense as to how she might react if she finds out the truth about her man.

Sabrina’s part makes us wonder if the original plan were to cast Don Briscoe, who plays Chris in the main continuity, as Cyrus and Yaeger. At this time Briscoe was struggling with bipolar disorder. He was trying to self-medicate with street drugs, which not only made matters worse in itself, but also led him to get a severe beating one night while trying to score a fix in Central Park. Briscoe appears in Parallel Time as lawyer Chris Collins and has a small part in the concurrently filmed feature House of Dark Shadows, but his health problems ruled out a part as crucial as the lead in the Jekyll and Hyde story.

Buffie is played by Elizabeth Eis, who appeared in one episode set in the main continuity as Nelle Gunston. Nelle was a young woman from Virginia, bored by life with her parents, who had joined the cult that was meant to serve Jabe and the world-wrecking plan to which he was central. When she was asked if she would commit murder if that was what the cult required, she smiled pleasantly and said “Even that.” Nelle was killed before she could meet Jabe.

Buffie is not at all the same person as Nelle. She is not from Virginia, for one thing. When she thinks about leaving Collinsport to get away from Yaeger, she realizes she has only $13.40 to her name, and laughs at herself for a plan that wouldn’t get her any further than Worcester, Massachusetts. Naming Worcester as a synonym for “nowhere” would suggest that she is a New England girl, which would fit with her employment in a bar in a fishing village in central Maine. Buffie is the opposite of what they originally told us the characters in Parallel Time would be- she is not Nelle after she has made a different choice, she is a person who began differently than Nelle and is making a similar choice.

Buffie is in her room when her landlady, Mrs Duvall, comes for the rent. Buffie has a check ready. Mrs Duvall thanks Buffie for recommending her boarding house to a gentleman who has rented her four best rooms at a very handsome price. She tells Buffie that the man is a big step up from Steve. Buffie has no idea what she is talking about. Yaeger shows up, and Buffie realizes he is Mrs Duvall’s new prize boarder. Buffie is horrified, and demands her rent check back. Mrs Duvall refuses to return it. Yaeger points to a print hanging on the wall and instructs Mrs Duvall to take it away and burn it. She is doing so when Buffie protests that it is hers. At that, Mrs Duvall stops short of the door, but she does not put the print back on the wall. Eventually, Mrs Duvall does take Buffie’s print, and leaves her with Yaeger.

The telephone rings. It is Quentin, asking Buffie about Yaeger. Yaeger stands next to her and forces her to answer Quentin’s questions with lies. Later, Steve will come to Buffie’s room. She will tell him to give up on her and not to take any more beatings from Yaeger on her behalf. Steve asks if Yaeger is a superman; Buffie widens her eyes and says that he might be. This brings us back to Nelle, who renounced her life in Virginia and her connection to the human race because she was looking for a superman and thought she would find one in Jabe. Steve may not have had much to offer, but it’s a cinch he wasn’t as bad as Yaeger, and he’s gone from Buffie’s life after this scene.

The emptiness of Buffie’s life is represented today by a prop we have seen only once before on Dark Shadows, a television set. There was a set in a motel room in Bangor in #27; we never do see one in the Collinsport or the Collinwood of the main continuity. Perhaps the makers of the show are suggesting that people who have nothing better to do than to watch the idiot box are likely to fall prey to any fella who offers physical abuse and verbal intimidation.

Mrs Duvall is played by Camila Ashland. Ashland was a very distinguished stage actress who appeared in #928 as someone called Mrs Hutchins. A man from the cult around Jabe hired Mrs Hutchins to tell some lies to throw mad scientist Julia Hoffman off their trail. That didn’t work, but Julia admired Mrs Hutchins’ performance, as we suspect Grayson Hall admired Ashland’s. When the man from the cult paid Mrs Hutchins for her work, he was unpleasantly surprised at her questions and the uneasy conscience it reflected, responding roughly that she is being paid for a job and should leave it at that. He didn’t realize he was dealing with an artist. Mrs Duvall’s eagerness to please the obviously horrible Yaeger shows that she really is the crude mercenary the man from the cult assumed Mrs Hutchins was.

We cut to Cyrus’ laboratory. Yaeger has fled there from the police. He is about to take the re-Jekylling formula when Quentin shows up and demands to know where Cyrus is. We end with them in that standoff.

*Billed twice in the closing credits- as Christopher Pennock for Cyrus, and as Chris Pennock for Yaeger. Adorable!

Episode 996: His divided nature

The first expert in forbidden lore to join the cast of characters on Dark Shadows was Dr Peter Guthrie of Dartmouth College, parapsychologist. Guthrie was chief scientific advisor to well-meaning governess Victoria Winters as she assembled the forces of good and led them in battle against undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. In #184, Guthrie confronted Laura. He told her that he had figured out she was “The Undead,” the first appearance of that expression on Dark Shadows. He also offered to help her if she would desist from her plan to murder her young son David. Guthrie was nervous about making this offer, apparently fearing Laura might draw him into her web of evil. He needn’t have worried about that- she responded, not by corrupting Guthrie, but by killing him.

The second such expert was a straightforward mad scientist. She was Julia Hoffman, MD, who in #291 offered to cure vampire Barnabas Collins of his curse. Though Julia made it a condition of her offer that Barnabas stop preying on the living, as Guthrie had conditioned his offer to Laura on her allowing David to live, we could already see that Julia was far more deeply compromised than Guthrie had been. She had learned of Barnabas’ existence while treating his victim, Maggie Evans, and she could gain the time to make her experiment work only by betraying Maggie’s trust and preventing her from regaining her memory of what Barnabas was and what he had done to her. Before long, Julia acquiesced to Barnabas’ pressure and joined him in murdering her old medical school classmate, Dr Dave Woodard. Eventually, she and Barnabas would become the parents of a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam. The shocking abuse they heaped on Adam in his infancy left no doubt that as a mad scientist, Julia is as much a symbol of extreme selfishness as is a vampire.

Adam was the product of an experiment designed by another mad scientist, Dr Eric Lang. Lang was even more flagrantly evil than Julia. When he needed a head for the monster, he tied his assistant down and set about cutting his head off. Granted, the assistant was a character played by Roger Davis, so the audience could see where Lang was coming from. In fact, the writers themselves eventually got so fed up with Mr Davis they cut the head off the final character he introduced. Still, Lang’s impatient response to the assistant’s complaints showed that he was utterly lacking in human compassion.

Now, we are in a different universe than the one where Dark Shadows spent its first 196 weeks. The resident mad scientist in this “Parallel Time” is Dr Cyrus Longworth. Cyrus has developed a potion that turns him into a real jerk. That may not sound like much of an achievement compared to building a Frankenstein’s monster or curing vampirism or whatever it was Guthrie wanted to do for Laura. But that’s to be expected. By the time Guthrie came to the great estate of Collinwood early in 1967, monsters and black magic and the like had been fixtures there for over 171 years. It appears that such things are relatively new to this version of Collinwood, so Cyrus is doing the sort of modest project that tends to characterize a field when it is first starting.

When Cyrus drinks his potion, his red hair turns black, he grows a lot more of it, and a putty appliance materializes, dangling precariously from the bridge of his nose. In this form, he calls himself “John Yaeger.”

That nose may not be made of Silly Putty, but it certainly isn’t a serious putty. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

As Yaeger, he goes to the Eagle, a tavern in the village of Collinsport, where barmaid Buffie Harrington is fending off the advances of her boyfriend Steve. Steve keeps coming up behind Buffie and grabbing her by the waist, a move that doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination. Buffie seems to be at once excited by Steve’s aggressiveness and irritated that he is keeping her from getting her work done. When Yaeger shows up and orders Steve to vacate the premises, Buffie’s evening goes from complicated to disastrous. The men fight, Steve loses, and Yaeger bodily ejects him from the tavern. Buffie confronts Yaeger about the wreck he has made of the place.

Later, Yaeger returns with a check to cover the damages. Buffie sees that the check is signed “Cyrus Longworth.” She explains that she used to work for the Collins family, and she knows who Cyrus is. She doesn’t believe that Cyrus would be friendly with Yaeger, and is sure he wouldn’t give him a check to cover the expenses he had incurred in a bar fight. Yaeger tells her the check is legitimate, and insists she keep quiet about his connection to Cyrus. He leaves.

Later, Quentin Collins finds the battered Steve and brings him into the tavern. Steve refuses to call the police, vowing to find Yaeger and settle the score himself. He leaves, and Quentin asks Buffie what she knows about the man who beat Steve. She says she doesn’t know much about him, but that a friend of Quentin’s does. She shows him the check with Cyrus’ signature. Perplexed, Quentin leaves.

Suddenly, Yaeger appears from nowhere. He tells Buffie that she promised not to tell of his connection to Cyrus. He starts choking her.

This is Elizabeth Eis’ first appearance as Buffie. Eis was on Dark Shadows once when it was set in the main continuity, playing Nelle Gunston, a devotee of a sinister cult who met Barnabas in the Blue Whale, a bar that corresponds to the Eagle in that universe. Barnabas killed Nelle before her only episode was over. It’s good to have Eis back, she was fun as Nelle and is a commanding presence today.

George Strus plays Steve, in his first and only role on the show. Strus was primarily a stunt performer, but he had lines in a few productions, most notably as a tough in Shaft. His last imdb credit was as a stunt performer in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, made in 1991, twenty years after Shaft. Steve is supposed to be a big dumb galoot, and Strus pulls that off satisfactorily.

Christopher Pennock’s name appears in the closing credits for the role of Cyrus. He is credited as “Chris Pennock” for Yaeger, adorably enough.

Episode 995: Another slow Friday

Dark Shadows never followed the usual soap opera pattern of a week building to a slam-bang conclusion on a Friday. This one is a case in point. It aired on a Friday, and nothing new happens.

The actors are all very good, and each makes the most of their time on screen today. As child Amy Collins and drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, Denise Nickerson and David Selby do a good job reacting to the ghost of someone named Dameon Edwards, which they saw yesterday. As sleazy musician Bruno Hess and sneaky butler Mr Trask, Michael Stroka and Jerry Lacy do a good job being alarmed by the prospect that Dameon has returned to expose their guilty secrets. As mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, Christopher Pennock does a good job failing to perceive the consequences of his lunatic scheme. And as Cyrus’ blindly devoted assistant/ fiancée Sabrina Stuart, Lisa Blake Richards does a good job being trusting and optimistic.

I’ll just single out one moment, when Bruno sees his piano playing with the touch of visible fingers and realizes it is Dameon’s doing. Michael Stroka gives a memorable take.

If the piano starts playing itself, Bruno’s going to be out of a job.

Cyrus drinks the potion he has formulated to turn himself from a mild-mannered Jekyll into a brutish Hyde. As her did the first time we saw him do this, he cries out in pain and collapses. This time they add a lot of flaring green lights to illustrate his distress. The process is not effective at all- at first, I thought something had gone wrong with one of the cameras. At the end of the sequence, we fade from Pennock in his Cyrus look to him in his Hyde makeup, which we didn’t see the first time. The shot doesn’t line up, so it does not create the illusion of a transformation, and the prosthetic nose isn’t very firmly attached, so it takes a second to realize that it is supposed to be part of his face and not just something that landed on him while he was falling.

Episode 994: I might as well be glad

Amy Collins twice sees the ghost of Dameon Edwards, whom she and others at the great house of Collinwood apparently knew when he was alive a year or so previously. At that time, Dark Shadows was set in a different universe than the one it has been showing us for the last few weeks, so the first thing the audience has ever heard about Dameon is that he is dead. Nor do we learn much more about him today. He looks at people with a vaguely sad expression, wanders off, and vanishes into thin air, never speaking a word. His part reminds me of G. K. Chesterton’s line that “Journalism consists largely in saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”

When Amy sees Dameon the second time, he leads her to the basement of Collinwood. This is a bit of a treat for longtime viewers. We may only have been in this universe for a few weeks, but the house is supposed to be laid out similarly to the one where we spent the previous 196 weeks, and the basement of that house was a significant set in the first year of the show. We haven’t been to that basement since #273, when it was revealed that reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard was mistaken in her belief that she had killed her husband Paul and that he was buried in a locked storeroom there. It turned out Paul wasn’t dead at all. Liz was so embarrassed when her mistake was revealed that no one ever mentioned it again.

Dameon reminds us of that storeroom when he leads Amy, not to the spot where it was, but to an alcove in the wall opposite it. Amy’s cousin Daniel’s bedroom is a mirror image of his counterpart David’s bedroom in the other continuity. If the basement is a mirror image as well, the alcove to which Dameon leads Amy corresponds to the locked storeroom. Dameon turns towards the door, and vanishes as he walks into it. Amy screams.

He wasn’t there again today. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Dameon is completely new to the audience, and the story of Liz’ belief that Paul was buried in the basement is so old that the reference will be lost on anyone who hasn’t been writing up notices about every episode of the show for the last few years. So the whole thing is pretty ineffective. Indeed, while Amy is screaming Denise Nickerson is visibly struggling not to laugh out loud.

Oh I am *sooo* scared! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I’m sure this episode is the result of a failed plan. Dameon must represent a character who would have meant something to us. Since most of the people we have seen in the last few weeks have the same names and are played by the same actors as counterparts from the original continuity, that character would likely have been a familiar face. The one face that would have brought the locked room in Liz’ basement to the minds of longtime viewers would have been that of Dennis Patrick. Patrick was in #273 as Jason McGuire, the seagoing con man who first convinced Liz that Paul was buried in her basement and then returned to exploit that belief by blackmailing her, and returned late in 1969 as Paul himself. Liz’ counterpart in the current universe is named Mrs Stoddard, so Paul must have existed there as well.

Patrick and his wife Barbara Cason were at this time in Tarrytown, New York, playing supporting roles in the feature film House of Dark Shadows. Patrick’s role as the sheriff puts him in only a few scenes, and Dan Curtis may well have hoped that once he’d got Patrick back to the East Coast he would be able to persuade him to return to the show for a short stint as Parallel Paul’s ghost. But Patrick was based in Los Angeles at this time, busy there as a producer and in demand as an actor, and he had no interest in coming back to a daytime drama taped in NYC for any length of time. So Dameon may have been a last-minute patch to cover Parallel Paul’s absence.

If Plan A had been that today’s ghost would represent Parallel Paul, Plan B appears to have been that he would remind longtime viewers of Quentin’s counterpart in the main continuity. Quentin was introduced late in 1968 as a ghost who did not speak. He first appeared to the children at Collinwood. Those were Amy’s counterpart, Amy Jennings, and her friend, strange and troubled boy David Collins, whose counterpart here is Daniel. Quentin’s ghost beckoned Amy and David into hidden rooms where they would, as they called it, “play the game.” When Dameon beckons Amy to the basement today, she asks if this is another of the games he used to play with her and Daniel.

The echo of the “Haunting of Collinwood” story is clear. But a revisiting of it that would have been effective would have taken some time to set up, especially since there is a living, speaking Quentin at the center of the show now. By the time they got to this topic, David Henesy had left to start his own stay in Tarrytown for House of Dark Shadows, so we won’t be seeing Daniel for a while. The most they can do is what we see here.

The upshot of these two aborted plans is a situation that does not seem to belong on the show at all, and it is no wonder Nickerson can’t keep a straight face. Even more than it reminds me of “Lord Jones is dead,” this installment reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1920 poem “The Penitent“:

I had a little Sorrow,

Born of a little Sin,

I found a room all damp with gloom

And shut us all within;

And, “Little Sorrow, weep,” said I,

“And, Little Sin, pray God to die,

And I upon the floor will lie

And think how bad I’ve been!”

Alas for pious planning —

It mattered not a whit!

As far as gloom went in that room,

The lamp might have been lit!

My Little Sorrow would not weep,

My Little Sin would go to sleep —

To save my soul I could not keep

My graceless mind on it!

So up I got in anger,

And took a book I had,

And put a ribbon on my hair

To please a passing lad.

And, “One thing there’s no getting by —

I’ve been a wicked girl,” said I;

“But if I can’t be sorry, why,

I might as well be glad!”

I don’t know if Amy had been a wicked girl, but the other characters today all seem to have secrets that it would behoove them to feel sorry for when Dameon shows up. There is drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, who like Amy sees Dameon twice; sleazy musician Bruno Hess, whom Quentin suspects of having killed Dameon; and butler Mr Trask, who, when Quentin mentions Dameon, frantically denies knowing anything about him, and who, when Amy says she saw Dameon, squeezes a drinking glass so tightly it shatters in his hand.

This is the first time we see Mr Trask. He is the fourth character played by Jerry Lacy. Mr Lacy first joined the cast in the fall of 1967 to do his celebrated Humphrey Bogart imitation as lawyer Tony Peterson before finding immortality as overheated witch-hunter Reverend Trask in the 1790s flashback that ran from November 1967 to March 1968. That first Trask came to his end sealed in a basement alcove not so different from the one into which Dameon disappears today. That incident made a big impression, and was referenced several times on the show and time and again in spin-offs of Dark Shadows in other media. Mr Trask’s debut today may, in the original, never-developed plan, have been intended to remind viewers of it. Perhaps Mr Trask would be the one to open the alcove and find Parallel Paul’s remains. That would be a fitting way to join the story that introduced the idea of a basement burial to Dark Shadows with the famous story that showed one taking place.

Mr Lacy matched his triumph as the first Trask when he returned as his hypocritical descendant Gregory in the 1897 segment that spanned most of 1969. Today’s Mr Trask is in part a placeholder for sinister housekeeper Miss Hoffman. Quentin explains today that he sent Miss Hoffman to visit her friends. Mr Lacy was in one scene of House of Dark Shadows, a funeral sequence shot on the first day of principal photography, and unlike Dennis Patrick he was still living in NYC. So he was available for a couple of weeks of fill-in work. The role is thin on paper, but Mr Lacy gives the part a lot of life.

Episode 993: She lacks the power to tell us more

The show has been keeping us in suspense as to whether Lara Parker is playing wealthy socialite Alexis Stokes or Alexis’ identical twin sister, the late Angelique Stokes Collins. Regular viewers know that the title “the late” is no impediment to a major part for a character on Dark Shadows. In the universe where the action took place for the first 196 weeks, Angelique’s counterpart was a wicked witch who returned from the dead countless times, and the clues are mounting that Alexis’ sister is active on the estate of Collinwood in this continuity, whether in her form or a more ethereal one.

While with Angelique’s widower Quentin Collins, Alexis has witnessed a series of odd occurrences that have led her to become distraught and to protest that Angelique is haunting them. She has questions, and takes those questions to two of Angelique’s acquaintances, medical researcher Cyrus Longworth and Cyrus’ assistant/ fiancée, Sabrina Stuart. That would seem to support the premise that she is Alexis, but she keeps the suspense alive for regular viewers when she approaches Cyrus’ laboratory by its courtyard door. The other day, the police were watching Cyrus’ house, and they did not notice that there was a door in the courtyard. When a detective came inside and spoke with him, Cyrus pointed the door out to him and told him that only a few people knew of it. Angelique was very close to Cyrus and was involved in his work, so we can assume she was one of those few people. It is not at all clear who could have told Alexis about the door.

Ms A. Stokes comes in through the courtyard door.

On Friday, Alexis joined a group assembled in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood to reenact the séance at which Angelique died. Sabrina went into the trance and started shouting about murder. Ever since, Alexis has been sure Angelique was murdered. When she questions Sabrina today, Sabrina first asks her what she knows about the original séance.

Alexis says she has heard that Sabrina went into a trance and started speaking for a man. In the séances we have seen in the main continuity, the spirits have always spoken through a medium of the same sex. My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that if this universe is a mirror image of that one, it makes sense that they would speak through one of the opposite sex. Alexis says that the man who spoke through Sabrina said something that angered Quentin, prompting him to rise from the table and start strangling Angelique. At that moment, the lights went out. When they came back on, Angelique was dead. The authorities would rule the death the result of a stroke.

Sabrina says that in her vision at the second séance, she saw those same events. But she also saw another figure standing near Angelique. Alexis declares that she must identify that other figure, since that must be the person who murdered Angelique. Quentin was much too busy strangling her to be the murderer, apparently.

Quentin’s counterpart in the main continuity lived in 1897. We saw him strangle his own wife, Jenny, to death in #748. Jenny had a sister named Magda, but they were not twins. Magda placed a curse on Quentin when she found out what he had done.

For his part, Quentin is also trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. He has asked Alexis and Angelique’s spooky aunt Hannah, who was introduced yesterday as one of his least favorite people, to come to Collinwood and exorcise the spirit that has been bothering everyone. Just as Hannah is getting ready to do some mumbo-jumbo, she starts choking. The Angelique from the main continuity was forever casting spells to choke people remotely, so regular viewers will assume that Hannah’s niece is behind her discomfiture.

Quentin talks with Alexis about taking everyone and fleeing the house to escape from the ghost. Alexis says he can do what he thinks best, but that she is not leaving until she finds out more. Before we went back in time in the original continuity and saw Quentin as a living being in 1897, he was a ghost who drove everyone out of Collinwood, so when this Quentin thinks of taking the family and fleeing a ghost we see another inversion.

Later, Quentin is alone. Angelique’s theme song starts playing from everywhere in the house. He cannot escape it. Regular viewers will remember that the ghost of the other Quentin persecuted the residents of the great house by playing a phonograph recording of a sickly little waltz over and over. In 1897, we found that the living Quentin obsessively played the same recording, occasioning protest from all the other characters. This may be a different Quentin, but we can’t help take a certain satisfaction in seeing him get a taste of the medicine his counterpart dished out so cruelly to the other characters and to the audience.

Episode 992: What form she has, I do not know

We meet Hannah Stokes, aunt of identical twins Alexis Stokes and Angelique Stokes Collins. Hannah is in the cottage on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, home to sleazy musician Bruno Hess. When we first see her, Hannah is casting a horoscope. Later she reads tarot cards. Still later she sprinkles some bone meal on a stolen handkerchief and says an incantation over it. The point of all this mumbo-jumbo is to determine whether the blonde woman living in the great house on the estate is Angelique or Alexis. Since Angelique died six months previously, this question would seem to have an obvious answer, but Bruno and Hannah seem to know that death is seldom a major disability among characters on Dark Shadows.

Hannah laughs at Bruno, who shares her hairstyle but does not appreciate her talents.

Hannah goes to the great house to see her niece. Alexis hated Hannah, so if she is the woman she could be expected to receive the visit coldly. Angelique was close to her, but knew of Alexis’ attitude. So if she is the woman, she could be expected to behave in exactly the same way. Indeed, the episode began with Angelique’s son Daniel and her widower Quentin noticing little things Alexis did just as her sister would do them, prompting her to point out that they were raised by the same mother and picked up many habits from her. So if a resurrected Angelique is trying to imitate Alexis, she has enough material to work with that not even her aunt can tell them apart.

Hannah goes back to the cottage. None of her black magic answers the question of which sister is living in the great house, but she is sure that Angelique is present on the estate in some form, perhaps visible, perhaps ghostly. Bruno is convinced Angelique is present in her own form and using Alexis’ name. Quentin overhears their conversation and believes for a moment that Bruno is right, before talking himself out of it. Later, he and Alexis see Angelique’s piano playing itself in her old bedroom, and Alexis believes that Angelique’s ghost is playing it.

The most interesting thing about this episode is Paula Laurence’s turn as Hannah. Her whole performance today is an imitation of Lara Parker as Angelique. Laurence was such a different physical type from Parker I couldn’t put my finger on what she was doing until she was about to exit the cottage at the end of her first scene and she laughed at Bruno. She recreated the very distinctive laugh Parker uses as Angelique. At that, my wife and I simultaneously said “The same laugh!” From then on, it was impossible to miss the imitation. It comes across as a family resemblance, of a piece with Alexis and Angelique trimming plants the same way or humming the same tune while fluffing pillows.

The cottage is the place for spooky doings. We are in a different universe today than the one where the show was based for its first 196 weeks. In the main continuity, we first saw the cottage as the home of crazed handyman Matthew Morgan, who would be scared to death by ghosts. Matthew was succeeded as a resident of the cottage by undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Laura was central to the storyline that picked up where the ghosts who killed Matthew left off. Most of the major narrative loose ends, such as the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc, were wrapped up as points within her story, while the ghosts were pulled out of the unseen back-world behind the action and brought into the spotlight. By the time Laura went up in smoke, the back-world of uncanny beings and the front-world of business stories and estranged spouses had reversed their places, and Dark Shadows had become a supernatural thriller.

The cottage was vacant for a long time after Laura. The next inhabitant was werewolf Chris Jennings. He was haunted there by the ghost of the main continuity’s counterpart of Quentin, who had lived and died in 1897. Quentin’s ghost seemed to have greater power in the cottage than elsewhere on the grounds of the estate. When the show traveled back in time to 1897, we found that Quentin and his fellow Satanist Evan Hanley had spent time there working black magic. At one point Quentin and Evan asked for a spirit to come from Hell to join them in an evil plan, and the one who appeared was Angelique’s counterpart, who like Laura was an undead blonde fire witch. Also in 1897, we learned that Quentin had been entangled with another iteration of Laura, and that the cottage had been one of their places.

Vague as Hannah’s findings are, they combine with Angelique’s iconography and that of the cottage to assure us that her ghost is active on the estate and that she will be returning in physical form. They are still keeping us guessing about how Alexis fits into all of that, but it seems more and more likely that she is at least sincere in her belief that she is not Angelique. Maybe she is an entirely separate entity who will eventually meet her reanimated sister, or maybe it will turn out that she and Angelique are inhabiting the same body. The spirits of the dead have been known to sublet space from the living on Dark Shadows, so that is one of many possible outcomes.

Episode 991: It wasn’t all mushy

In December 1966 and January 1967, strange and troubled boy David Collins was unwilling to believe that a woman who had come to the estate of Collinwood was his long-absent mother, Laura Murdoch Collins. He had troubling dreams about her. In #150, we saw him asleep in his bed when Laura appeared in the corner of his room. He opened his eyes and looked at her while she made a speech. This is not generally considered a dream sequence, since David appears to wake up at the beginning of it. But Laura turns out to be a humanoid Phoenix. The Phoenix is a creature first described in the Histories of Herodotus. As is typical in ancient Greek literature, all dreams in Herodotus take the form of a person materializing at the foot of the dreamer’s bed and delivering a speech while the dreamer appears to be awake. So I think we have to consider that the first dream sequence dramatized on Dark Shadows.

Now, we have crossed over into an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” David’s counterpart is strange and troubled teenager Daniel Collins. Daniel is unwilling to believe that a woman who has come to the estate of Collinwood is not his late mother, Angelique Stokes Collins. We see him asleep in his bedroom. As Daniel’s problem is the mirror image of David’s, so his room is the mirror image of David’s. Daniel’s bed is at stage right while David’s is at stage left on the same set. Daniel has a troubling dream in which Angelique appears to him. Dark Shadows is a lot more definite now than it was in its first year, so they have a special effect to show that even though Daniel is opening his eyes and getting out of bed, it is still a dream sequence. It is 1970, so that special effect is a disco glitter ball throwing colored lights.

Daniel thrashes about in bed, and the visitor, who has been patiently trying to explain to everyone that she is Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis, comes rushing in. Daniel awakes, and asks her to promise to tell him the truth. He in turn promises to keep her secret. He asks her if she is his mother. She is silent, apparently stunned by the question. At that moment, Daniel’s father Quentin appears in the doorway.

Laura turned out to be an undead blonde fire witch come to burn David alive that she might renew her own unnatural existence. Angelique’s counterpart in the main continuity is also an undead blonde fire witch, and for a time she was David’s stepmother and represented a considerable danger to him. So regular viewers will understand Daniel’s confusion.

There is a scene today in the tavern in the village of Collinsport. In the main continuity, this tavern was called the Eagle in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the Blue Whale in the twentieth. In this universe, it is still called the Eagle. The bartender in the Blue Whale is usually played by Bob O’Connell. The bartender in the Eagle today is played by Kenneth McMillan. McMillan was a very distinguished actor and does a fine job telling a long story, but Bob O’Connell is a favorite of longtime viewers and I think we are all disappointed we didn’t get another chance to see him.