Episode 1102: Can one more thing happen?

There are two storylines running on Dark Shadows at the moment. The A story began as an adaptation of Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw. Since they already adapted The Turn of the Screw as a Dark Shadows storyline in late 1968 and early 1969, it was rather grim for longtime viewers to see the same thing coming up again, but they’ve taken a fresh angle on it these last couple of weeks. The Miss Jessel equivalent, late governess Daphne Harridge, has taken the form of a living woman. That the living woman is the young Kate Jackson means that the audience instantly falls in love with her, which is very helpful since she is on a lot and the scripts do not give her an intelligible motivation for any two actions.

The characters corresponding to children Miles and Flora are teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes. The ghosts of Daphne’s charges Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes have taken over the bodies of David and Hallie. Daphne, Carrie, and Tad keep trying to perform a magic spell that will give corporeal form to the fourth ghost, Peter Quint equivalent Gerard Stiles. Gerard is even more blatantly evil than are the other three, and they keep getting interrupted before they can turn him into a real boy. Today, Carrie and Tad are inmates at Windcliff, a psychiatric facility under the control of mad scientist/ heroine Julia Hoffman, and at the end of the episode Julia catches Daphne in Tad’s room, making another attempt to get through the spell.

Julia catches Daphne with Tad in his room at Windcliff. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The interiors of Windcliff look very much like an old mansion, prompting many commenters to say that the production staff had mounted so many scenes in the great house of Collinwood that they have forgotten how to depict any other kind of setting. But when we first saw Windcliff in #265, there was an exterior shot that made it look very much like a big old house that had been converted to use as a public facility. There’s no reason why the patients’ rooms shouldn’t still have looked like bedrooms.

Windcliff.

The B story is also heating up. There is a vampire prowling around the estate of Collinwood, and it isn’t Julia’s buddy Barnabas Collins. This new vampire has been feeding on Hallie and David’s governess Maggie Evans, and Maggie is so low on blood she may die if she is bitten again. Julia was guarding Maggie in the opening reprise of yesterday’s close, when the vampire appeared in the room, caused Julia to fall asleep, and drew Maggie out of bed. Today, charming rogue Quentin Collins enters in the nick of time to prevent Maggie being bitten again.

Quentin is distressed he did not get a good look at the vampire and still does not know who it is. They’ve made a big enough deal about the vampire’s identity that it must be someone we have already met, and we could see that the vampire is shorter than Maggie, which rules out all of the men in the cast. The only female character we haven’t seen in the daytime is the mysterious Roxanne Drew, so regular viewers don’t have a long list of suspects to work with.

One puzzle that hasn’t been solved is why Maggie is not at Windcliff. Windcliff was introduced as the place she was kept when she escaped from Barnabas after a time as his victim. Barnabas believed she was dead at that time, but as a vampire he had difficulty traveling any distance from Collinwood and he did show a tendency to lose interest in people who went away for any period of time. So if the new vampire operates along the same lines now that Barnabas did then, it would seem much wiser to send Maggie to Windcliff than to keep her in the great house.

This is the last of 63 episodes credited to writer Joe Caldwell. Caldwell made uncredited contributions to the show for some time before his name first appeared onscreen in #245. He specialized in intimate character studies; the slow pace of the show in 1967 gave him an opportunity to write many episodes of that type, all of them among the highlights of a very uneven period. He left in October 1967, and returned in 1970 when Violet Welles left the writing staff.

Even though very little really happened in the early part of the Re-Haunting of Collinwood segment, the show was so busy spinning in its tight little circles that it left Caldwell no opportunity to write the sorts of finely crafted miniatures in which he excelled. As a result, his second tour of duty on Dark Shadows does not include many memorable scripts. He will not be replaced, leaving Gordon Russell and Sam Hall as the only two credited writers for the remainder of the series. Others continued to make uncredited contributions from time to time, and in Welles’ case some of those contributions are instantly recognizable. But for the most part, it’s just those two guys locked in a room with executive producer Dan Curtis from now on.

Episode 1101: Whithersoever the governess listeth

Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are trying to prevent a disaster that is fated to destroy the great house of Collinwood and everyone in it before the year 1970 is out. They have a handful of cryptic phrases that clue them in to events that will precede this disaster. One of the phrases is “The night Rose Cottage was destroyed.” They have no idea what Rose Cottage is, and have been unable to find anyone who does.

Julia finds heiress Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes leaving the great house. Carolyn says nonchalantly that there is something she has to do at Rose Cottage. Julia gets Carolyn to say that going to Rose Cottage involves leaving the grounds of Collinwood through the front gate. She asks her to mail a letter for her on her way. She agrees, and waits outside while Julia goes back into the house to get the letter.

Julia rushes to a bedroom where Barnabas is sitting with governess Maggie Evans, who is the victim of a vampire other than himself. Julia fabricates a letter while repeating to Barnabas what Carolyn said. Julia takes over the vigil, and Barnabas gives Carolyn the phony letter. He then follows her to a deserted mansion in the area.

Barnabas barges in on Carolyn in a room in Rose Cottage. He ignores her indignation at his following her and presses her with questions:

CAROLYN: Barnabas!

BARNABAS: So this is Rose Cottage.

CAROLYN: You followed me here!

BARNABAS: Carolyn, who is your friend? Who were you talking to just before I came in?

CAROLYN: That, that really is no concern of yours, now is it?

BARNABAS: Carolyn, you must tell us everything you know about this place, who lived here and who it was you were trying to find.

CAROLYN: Why are you and Dr. Hoffman so interested in this place?

BARNABAS: We’ve told you before one of the events that’s to happen before the disaster at Collinwood is the destruction of Rose Cottage.

CAROLYN: Rose Cottage… [laughs] Now, that’s a strange name for a place like this, isn’t it?

BARNABAS: I know now why it was so difficult to find. How did it get such a name?

CAROLYN: Oh, it happened a very long time ago, when Carrie was very small.

BARNABAS: Carrie lived here?

CAROLYN: Are you going to be quiet and let me tell you?

BARNABAS: I’m sorry, go on.

CAROLYN: Carrie, Carrie always dreamed of having a doll’s house which she would call Rose Cottage. So for her birthday I asked Quentin to build her one. Quentin was so good with his hands you know, and so terribly inventive. He actually built a replica of this house, and I gave it to Carrie for her birthday. [laughs] I told her she would have to find another name for it, but she said no, it would always be Rose Cottage to her. So she kept calling it that, and before very long people called the mansion itself Rose Cottage.

BARNABAS: When was all this, Carolyn?

CAROLYN: I’m not going to answer any more of your questions! You were very rude to follow me here, very rude indeed!

Carrie died in 1841. Her ghost has taken possession of teenager Hallie Stokes. The ghost of Carrie’s friend Tad has taken possession of David Collins. Tad and Carrie, in personis David and Hallie, are currently at Windcliff, a psychiatric facility Julia controls. Before they were taken there, Carrie and Tad did some mumbo-jumbo and restored their late governess Daphne Harridge to life. Daphne then led Tad and Carrie in an unsuccessful attempt to do the same for another ghost, erstwhile pirate captain Gerard Stiles. Carolyn is possessed by the spirit of a certain Leticia Faye, though unlike Hallie and David her own personality still exists within her body and from time to time asserts itself.

We have seen the dollhouse of which Carolyn/ Leticia speaks many times, and we know that it is in some supernatural sense identical with the full-scale mansion. The episode opened with a reprise of Friday’s cliffhanger, in which Gerard used the dollhouse to trap Daphne in the mansion and to set fire to it. Carolyn/ Leticia interrupted Gerard and saved Daphne.

Barnabas returns to the great house and tells Julia that he now knows where Rose Cottage is. He says that he saw Carolyn there. She asks if he got any information out of Carolyn. He says that he did not. He does not mention the business about Carrie and the dollhouse, which is just bizarre. He and Julia know about a mysterious playroom full of toys appropriate to small children that intermittently appears in a space in a little used part of the great house otherwise occupied by a linen closet. They know that all four ghosts are associated with this playroom. You would think he would therefore realize that a story about a toy of Carrie’s would be relevant to their concerns, but apparently the connection escaped him.

In the last scene, Julia is in Maggie’s room when she is suddenly seized by a fit of sleepiness. A dark figure in a cloak and a slouch hat appears inside the window. Maggie gets up and goes to the figure, who is no taller than she is.

The figure’s slight build and short stature may suggest it is a woman, but no woman on Dark Shadows has ever worn shoes like that. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I don’t know if the above makes it clear, but this episode is a sharp step up from last week’s offerings. It is tightly paced, clearly developed, and forcefully acted, a bright spot in a storyline that has been desperately dreary so far.

Episode 1100: What it’s like to be alive

The ghosts of four people who died in 1841 have been haunting the great house of Collinwood. They represent teenagers Carrie Stokes and Tad Collins; Carrie and Tad’s governess, Daphne Harridge; and a sometime pirate captain known as Gerard Stiles. Three of these four have now assumed corporeal form. Tad and Hallie have taken possession of their lookalikes, David Collins and Hallie Stokes. They then performed a ceremony that caused Daphne to come back to life in a body of her own. We open with these three repeating the ceremony in order to conjure Gerard back into existence as a living being.

When Carrie and Tad performed the ceremony the first time, they did not know whether they would raise Daphne or Gerard. That episode ended with a knock at the door, leaving us to wonder along with them who would come. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said it would be funny if it were someone else. She suggested the writers might take a page from Let’s Make a Deal and have Tad and Carrie find a donkey behind Door Number Three.

Today, the ceremony again ends with a rapping on the door. But it is not Gerard. It isn’t a donkey, either. It is Willie Loomis, servant to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. John Karlen always finds a way to bring out humor in his characters’ predicaments, and the rough-hewn Willie does deflate the grandiosity of Carrie, Tad, and Daphne’s meddling in God’s realm.

Scrambling to cover up the signs of the ceremony before he has to open the door to Willie, Tad calls out “We were sleeping! (pause) I was sleeping!” David Henesy plays this absolutely straight, so that we can see it dawning on Tad that he and Carrie aren’t supposed to be sleeping together. Karlen wasn’t the only actor who knew how to find the laughs hidden in his lines.

Daphne hides. Tad opens the door. Willie sees the pentagram on the floor with the candles at its points and says he recognizes it as a device of black magic. He forestalls the teens’ attempt to pretend to be Hallie and David by calling Tad by name. Tad then turns to Carrie and makes fun of Willie’s twentieth century vocabulary in an attempt to intimidate him by a display of social superiority. This collapses immediately, and Willie says that Tad and Carrie have to come with him because he is bigger than they are.

Willie detains Carrie and Tad in the drawing room, waiting for Barnabas to come back. He has to leave them when he hears Maggie Evans, governess to the late David and Hallie, coming downstairs. Maggie is the victim of a vampire, and Willie is part of the crew that is keeping her from going off to get her blood sucked.

Willie rushes to the foyer and asks Maggie why housekeeper Mrs Johnson isn’t keeping her in her room. Maggie does not respond. The true answer would be that Clarice Blackburn has a writing job on another soap now and isn’t available to play the part, so they leave Mrs Johnson’s absence unexplained.

While Willie gets Maggie back to her room, Tad and Carrie listen to the dogs howling outside. Carrie says she has never heard howling like that before, and Tad contradicts her. He says that if she searches her memory, she will find that they heard just that sound in their own time. He gives a somber look, as if he knows what the howling means. The show has been making it clear that we will be going back in time to 1840 sooner or later. These lines of Tad’s tell us that we will find a vampire in operation when we get there.

In Maggie’s bedroom, Willie explains that Hallie and David have been possessed by Carrie and Tad. Maggie has seen enough in her time at Collinwood that she finds this instantly credible. She blames herself, saying that if she were not ill she would have been able to prevent the possession. Willie asks what she could have done, and she cannot think of anything. He presses her to tell him who the vampire is. She claims he cannot understand what she is going through. He cannot tell her that he himself was once the victim of a vampire, since that vampire was Barnabas and the show will implode if Maggie is ever told about that. So they are left at a stalemate.

Meanwhile, Daphne takes shelter in a deserted mansion once known as Rose Cottage. Gerard confronts her there. He is cranky about still being dead. She tells him it’s no one’s fault that the ceremony didn’t work. They will reenact it tonight, when the stars are back in the right alignment. She also tells him that they don’t need Tad and Carrie to accomplish their goal. This line is unfortunate- to the extent that the story has generated suspense, it has involved us wondering how Carrie and Tad are involved in whatever it is Gerard wants to do. When we hear they aren’t involved at all, it lets the air out of an already badly under-inflated set of tires.

Gerard vanishes from Daphne’s presence and materializes in a mysterious chamber known as The Playroom. The Playroom intermittently appears in a little-used part of the great house, behind a door that usually opens on a linen closet. There is a dollhouse in The Playroom that is a scale model of Rose Cottage and that is, in some supernatural sense, identical to it. Gerard sets fire to the room in the dollhouse that corresponds to the room in Rose Cottage where Daphne is. He uses his finger to hold closed the door corresponding to the one from which she could escape a fire in the room.

Gerard holds the door shut. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Daphne finds that the room she is in is engulfed in flames and she cannot open the door. Apparently Gerard has decided that if Daphne is going to tell him they don’t need Tad and Carrie, he doesn’t need Daphne, either. Daphne, being as she is played by Kate Jackson, is impossible not to care about, so this cliffhanger does make us want to come back Monday and see her escape. But since it implies that none of the relationships among the ghosts means anything, and since we’ve already seen that none of the living characters can mount an effective resistance to the ghosts, it also brings us to the conclusion that the whole Re-Haunting of Collinwood story is at a dead end.

Episode 1099: A governess that was here once

For several months starting in late 1968, Dark Shadows did an adaptation of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. This segment is often called “The Haunting of Collinwood.” For the last six weeks, they’ve been doing a second adaptation of that same novella. I call the current segment “The Re-Haunting of Collinwood.”

So far, the remake has been so close to the original that it is little more than a test of the patience of longtime viewers. The last few days, they’ve been deviating a bit. So the ghosts of teenagers Tad and Carrie have erased the personalities of their lookalikes, David Collins and Hallie Stokes, and are now operating as living beings in their bodies. That didn’t quite happen in 1968 and 1969, when David and his friend Amy Jennings were beset by ghosts who were excited by their resemblance to their late ancestors Jamison and Nora Collins.

Carrie and Tad have cast a spell that has conjured up their old governess, Daphne Harridge, as a living woman. Amy and David never even tried to bring lady’s maid Beth Chavez back to life. She remained an unspeaking ghost until the show went back in time to 1897 and we met her in her proper lifetime. Today, Daphne orders Tad and Carrie to go through the same spellcasting procedure to bring the other ghost, the evil Gerard Stiles, back to life. Again, David and Amy did not try to bring Quentin Collins back to life. He is alive today only because he was immunized against death and aging in the 1897 segment, since he was such a hit with the audience.

Summoning Gerard. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Yesterday, David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins questioned Carrie and Tad and revealed their true identities. Neither of them was able to name the parents of the person they were possessing. Tad was also unable to name David’s former governess Victoria Winters. Through the show’s first year, Vicki was the chief protagonist and main audience identification character. She was written out in 1968, and Barnabas’ question was the first reference to her in months. She comes up again today. Carrie brings some contemporary clothes for Daphne to wear. She explains to Tad that “They belong to a governess that was here once… Her name was Victoria or something.” She says that the current governess told Hallie that Victoria left the clothes behind, but did not explain why.

Two consecutive episodes alluding to Vicki will be enough to get longtime viewers wondering if we will see her again. They had run out of things for Vicki to do in the story long before she left the show, and there is no clear opening for her now. When Carrie calls attention to the fact that there is a mystery around the circumstances of Vicki’s departure, she reminds us that that Vicki disappeared into a time warp. Since The Re-Haunting of Collinwood seems to be heading into a trip back through time to the year 1840, that might lead us to hope that what we find in that year will have something to do with Vicki. Then again, if all the ghosts are going to turn into living people, maybe they will be able to cancel their reservations for the journey to the past and stay in contemporary dress. Perhaps in that case, Vicki will find her way back as well. We might imagine that we will find tomorrow that they have failed to bring Gerard to life, but have conjured up Vicki instead. Maybe the summoning procedure only brings up governesses with long black hair.

Daphne is played by Kate Jackson, in her first screen role. Miss Jackson would go on to star in primetime series such as The Rookies, Charlie’s Angels, and Scarecrow and Mrs King.

House of Dark Shadows

Vampire Barnabas Collins joined the cast of Dark Shadows in April 1967. Barnabas introduced himself to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her family as their distant cousin from England. Soon, Liz had given him run of the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, and she was treating that house and its contents as though they were Barnabas’ property.

In May and June of 1967, Barnabas took Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, as his new victim. He did not merely want to drink Maggie’s blood. He wanted to erase her personality and overwrite it with that of his lost love Josette. At the climax of this plan, he would make her into a vampire like himself, and the two of them would go forth to prey upon the living.

Barnabas’ plan failed. Maggie recovered her will and escaped from Barnabas. She would have exposed him, had her psychiatrist Julia Hoffman not betrayed her and magically mind-wiped her memory of what Barnabas was and what he had done. Julia attached herself to Barnabas as his personal physician, making it possible for him to go long periods without biting anyone. Barnabas continued to make his home at the Old House and to pass as a live Englishman. In time, the relationship between Julia and Barnabas became the core of Dark Shadows, and its most important stories were their adventures.

With Barnabas’ introduction, the show became a hit. By the time 1968 turned into 1969, it was one of the major pop culture fads of the period. That gave executive producer Dan Curtis an opening to pitch a Dark Shadows feature film to Hollywood studios. The one that bought the idea was MGM, headed at that time by Kirk Kerkorian, a tycoon who was trying to get out of the movie business and put MGM’s brand and other resources in service of his chief goal in life, making himself the king of Las Vegas. Kerkorian still had contracts with distributors that obligated him to provide a certain number of features a year. Dark Shadows already had a fan base, so that a film version of it wouldn’t require as much spending on advertising and promotion as would a new product, and the show was done so cheaply that Curtis couldn’t very well argue that he needed a big budget for production. So Kerkorian saw a way to meet his legal obligations at minimal financial risk.

The movie that resulted from this business decision is slow-paced, confusing, and amateurishly shot. I love it.

Most of the events and characters are drawn from the first seven months Barnabas was on the show. There are lots of Easter eggs for fans of the show. Almost all of the music is recycled from the show, including a brief bit of one of the rock and roll numbers that often played on the jukebox at The Blue Whale tavern in the first year but that have rarely been heard since. Both Maggie, in the opening scenes, and the sheriff later on point flashlights directly into the camera. The sheriff and his deputies display the same clownish ineptitude that distinguished them on the show. My favorite example comes after a deputy has driven his car directly into a tree. The sheriff says that he wouldn’t have done that unless he saw something, prompting us to think that a Collinsport law enforcement officer probably would be more comfortable driving with his eyes closed.

The events do not take place in the same sequence as they did on the show, and some of the characters are jumbled as well. So in 1967, the governess in the great house was the well-meaning Victoria Winters and her boyfriend was dashing action hero-turned hopeless schlub Burke Devlin. Vicki and Burke were already past their peak of interest in April 1967, and have been gone and forgotten for years at this point. Maggie is the governess on the show now, and she is the governess in this version of Collinwood as well.

Maggie’s last steady boyfriend was hardworking fisherman Joe Haskell, who left the show when he was the victim of a vampire in 1968. So in this Collinwood, Maggie is engaged to Jeff Clark, who corresponds to the character who married Vicki after Burke was lost in a plane crash. Like his namesake on the show, this Jeff is played by the repellent Roger Davis. There is a costume party in the movie, as there was in the show. Jeff wears an eighteenth century naval uniform that was originally worn on television by Nathan Forbes, a character who, like Joe, was played by Joel Crothers. It is as if Curtis is acknowledging that we would rather see Maggie and Joe, but rubbing our faces in the fact that we’re getting more Roger Davis instead.

Julia is not Maggie’s psychiatrist in this universe. When Barnabas is freed from his coffin, she is already at Collinwood, researching the Collins family history. She claimed to be doing that as a cover story in 1967, but here it is apparently the truth, for some reason. She confirms that Barnabas is a vampire when she sees that he does not cast a reflection in the mirror in her compact, the same gimmick she used on the show. She makes her offer to cure Barnabas of vampirism 56 minutes into this 96 minute movie, after he has killed several people and thrown the whole area into an uproar. She falls in love with him shortly after, to his embarrassment. When the treatments misfire by causing him to age rapidly, as they did in the show, he deviates from the original by killing her.

That sets off the final crisis. Barnabas takes Maggie to his hiding place and tries to Josettify her. Several characters set out to hunt him. Jeff finds that Barnabas has killed some of them and turned them into vampires. He kills two of these, then finds Barnabas and destroys him just as he is about to turn Maggie into a vampire.

We had barely seen Jeff and Maggie together, and in their few shared scenes they had no chemistry at all. Nor has he been involved in any of the other action sequences. Indeed, he begins the climactic sequence by being woken and told that he has overslept, which serves to underline his peripheral position in the plot up to that point. So it is entirely unsatisfying that he comes out of the blue and is the rescuer in the grand finale.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that we have seen Maggie interact quite a bit with Roger Collins, brother to Liz and father of strange and troubled boy David. Roger also took an active part in the first destruction of a vampire, when his niece Carolyn was staked. So it would make sense for him to be the rescuer, and for Mr Davis’ character to be left out of the movie altogether. A romance between Roger and Maggie would hark back to the early days of the show, when there were a few hints that Vicki, a Jane Eyre analogue, might start dating Roger, whose position as father of her charge and whose very name recall Mr Rochester.

Fans often wonder what Barnabas’ long-term plan was in the Spring and Summer of 1967. Maggie was known to everyone and her disappearance was big news, so he could hardly have presented her to the family once she was Josettified. And his own operations as a vampire were an ongoing disaster that had everyone in the Collinsport area on edge. Add a second vampire to the household, and the situation would become entirely unsustainable.

The show indicated what would probably have happened had Barnabas succeeded, first in February 1969, and then in more depth in July 1970. In #694, the ghost of Quentin Collins takes control of the great house, forcing all of its residents to flee for their lives. In episodes #1061-#1070, Julia and Barnabas come unstuck in time and find themselves in the far-off future year 1995, where another ghost has taken control of Collinwood. The great house is in ruins, the grounds overgrown, and the residents of Collinsport are unwilling even to mention the estate, let alone go there. Surely those were the only surroundings in which Barnabas and a vampiric, Josettified Maggie could have gone on existing.

That’s very much the situation that is about to come into being at the end of this film. We don’t see the great house. Instead, Jeff encounters occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes on an island overgrown with weeds, finds that he has become a vampire, and destroys him. He then goes to a building in ruins, apparently located on the same island (though the scraps of film that make up this movie are so confusingly pieced together that you can never be quite sure where anyone is supposed to be at any time,) and finds Roger sitting on a sort of throne. Roger is also a vampire, and Jeff destroys him too. From there he goes to the Old House, probably, where he confronts Barnabas in a big space that is also in ruins. The structures we do see show us what would happen to the great house if Barnabas survived, and what may happen to it anyway. The only living members of the family are Liz, who was catatonic after she found out that her daughter had become a vampire and doesn’t seem likely to make much of a recovery, and David, who was already pretty screwy when the movie started. It’s hard to see how either of them is going to keep such a big place up.

Episode 1098: Who was your governess before Maggie? Tell me her name.

Barnabas Collins leaves people who appear to be his distant cousins Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes and David Collins, as well as Carolyn and David’s houseguest Hallie Stokes, in David’s bedroom. Barnabas is still within earshot when these three address each other as “Leticia,” “Tad,” and “Carrie.” He rushes back into the room, looks at those who might be taken for Hallie and David, and declares “You are both possessed!” He ignores the fact that the same evidence indicates that Carolyn is also possessed.

Initially, Tad and Carrie pretend they were only using those names as part of a game. Barnabas says that in that case, he will play, too. He asks Tad to name David’s mother. He cannot. He then asks who his previous governess was. He can’t answer that, either. He asks Carrie why Hallie lives in the great house of Collinwood. She says that it is because there was an accident. Barnabas confirms that is so, and that the accident involved her parents. He asks her what their names were. She cannot answer. He presses on when they object. Finally, Carrie calls out to Daphne, a ghost whom she and Tad had previously denied ever having heard of, to come and help them. Shocked, Tad looks at her and calls her Carrie. The cat is out of the bag.

Longtime viewers will be thrilled by Barnabas’ questions. Not only is it a refreshing change to see him demonstrating presence of mind and moving quickly to advance the story, but the references to David’s mother and to his previous governess bring up characters who used to be very important to the show and who have been absent from the story and unmentioned for a long time. Real heads know who those women were, Tad and Carrie are exposed as noobs.

Throughout this interrogation, Carolyn/ Leticia was standing still, watching placidly while Carrie and Tad got flustered and blew their cover. Barnabas asks what the ghosts of Daphne and of someone named Gerard want. At that, Carolyn/ Leticia breaks her silence. Smiling, she says that Tad and Carrie do not yet know the answer to that themselves. Neither does she, come to that. She wafts away, leaving everyone reeling.

Yesterday, Tad told Carrie that if they let on who they really were, they would be defeated at once. It was not at all clear then what anyone could do to bring that about. Tad tells Barnabas that he and Carrie are here to stay, and that there is nothing he can do to stop them. This seems to be true.

Carrie distressed, Tad defiant. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

After Barnabas leaves Carrie and Tad alone in David’s room, they wonder what happened to Hallie and David. They say that they liked them, and that they hope nothing bad happened to them. Carrie asks Tad if he thinks David and Hallie are dead. He says he doesn’t think so, but he sounds very doubtful. Carrie asks where they are. He says they aren’t anyplace. While he and Carrie are using their bodies, Hallie and David “don’t exist.” It may seem obvious that ceasing to exist qualifies as something bad happening to a person, but ever since Epicurus in the fourth century BCE that has been an open question among philosophers. So maybe nothing bad did happen to David and Hallie. Certainly nothing at all will happen to them ever again.

Though Carrie and Tad have entirely erased Hallie and David, Carolyn persists. Leticia sets out to tell Quentin Collins something. By the time she gets to Quentin’s room, Carolyn has reemerged and is unsure what she is doing there. Quentin is drunk, which is not unusual. He is under Daphne’s power and has been unable to do anything to prevent Tad and Carrie from taking over David and Hallie’s bodies. Carolyn became clairvoyant when Leticia moved in with her, and can tell Quentin is feeling guilty about something. He denies everything.

There’s a lot of spellcasting today. Quentin tries to break free of Daphne by setting fire to her handkerchief. This fails immediately. Carrie and Tad try to raise one of the ghosts from the dead. They hope they will get Daphne, because they are afraid of Gerard, but they have no way of knowing which one it will be. The episode ends with a knock at the door. We will have to wait until tomorrow to find out whether that will be Daphne, Gerard, or the man from the gas company come to read the meter.

Episode 1097: In a different life

In July 1970, Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman came unstuck in time and spent two weeks in the far-off future year 1995. They found that the great house of Collinwood was in ruins, its residents either dead, missing, or insane as the result of a mysterious disaster that took place before 1970 was out. Since returning to their own period, they have been making fruitless efforts to learn what is happening and prevent the disaster.

Today, we see Julia sitting on the couch in the drawing room, reading a book and picking her teeth. Barnabas is pacing nearby. I am not making this up, the ABC network actually broadcast this on national television.

This thrilling scene follows an exchange in which Barnabas and Julia talk about a place called Rose Cottage that they heard about in 1995 and have been trying to find for the last six weeks. Julia tells Barnabas that it has just occurred to her that the place may not be known as Rose Cottage now. Barnabas does not understand what she means. Julia tries to explain that it might be possible for people to use one name for a house at one time and a different name for the same house at a different time. Barnabas has difficulty with this concept. Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid, highly trained and much-honored actors, play this exchange with great emotional tumult, focusing our attention on the precise level of cognitive ability it suggests the characters have.

Just as we are thinking that the show has finally come to a dead halt, Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes enters. Julia and Barnabas notice that Carolyn seems to be in a good mood, to which they make it their business to put an immediate stop. They say Carolyn must not have heard about the latest crisis concerning teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins:

JULIA: Carolyn, how are you feeling?

CAROLYN: Quite well, thank you. But both of you look so terribly distressed. Whatever’s the matter?

BARNABAS: Well, hasn’t anyone told you?

CAROLYN: Told me what?

BARNABAS: Well, the children are missing.

CAROLYN: Oh, that. Yes, I know.

JULIA: Well, aren’t you the least bit concerned about it?

CAROLYN: No.

JULIA: Why, Carolyn? Why aren’t you concerned? Carolyn, do you know something about David and Hallie you’re not telling us?

CAROLYN: Perhaps.

JULIA: Well, you must tell us. Do you know where they are?

CAROLYN: They’re gone. David and Hallie are gone.

BARNABAS: We told you that!

JULIA: Carolyn, we believe they’re in some terrible danger, the children.

CAROLYN: The children, in danger? No, no, that’s not true.

JULIA: How do you know it’s not true?

CAROLYN: Because I know the children are alive and well.

JULIA: If you know that much, then you must know where they are.

CAROLYN: No, that’s all I can tell you. They’re alive and well. Now, you must excuse me, I’m really very tired. (Exit)

BARNABAS (watching Carolyn go): Do you think she knows what she’s talking about?

JULIA (wonderingly): I have no idea.

They say that if a performer is really present in a scene, there is always a chance that when you throw the light on them something wonderful will happen. What Nancy Barrett does here is as pure an example of this I could hope to find. Carolyn’s blissed-out insouciance is so great to watch that it redeems everything that went before. I wonder if Frid and Hall’s ferocious overplaying was deliberate, meant to give the sharpest possible contrast to what they knew Miss Barrett was about to do.

Later, Barnabas encounters Carolyn in the little-used west wing of the great house:

BARNABAS: Carolyn, what are you doing up here?

CAROLYN: What, I just went to get something from my room.

BARNABAS: Your room?

CAROLYN: Yes, just down the hall.

BARNABAS: But your room isn’t up here in the west wing, it’s downstairs in the house proper.

CAROLYN (laughing): Don’t be absurd. You know perfectly well I’ve always lived in the west wing. I do think it the most enchanting part of the house.

BARNABAS: Carolyn?

CAROLYN: May I ask why you keep calling me that?

BARNABAS: Because it’s your name.

CAROLYN (laughing): You know very well my name is Leticia, and I live in that room just down the hall.

BARNABAS: Leticia?

CAROLYN: Of course.

BARNABAS: Well, Leticia, perhaps you can tell me where the children are. Can you do that?

CAROLYN: What an odd question.

BARNABAS: What’s odd about it?

CAROLYN: Do you realize how late it is? Where else would the children be but in bed? You are a strange one! (exits, laughing.)

In 1995, Barnabas and Julia found that Hallie and David had died in 1970, and that ghosts which looked like them were in fact the ghosts of teenagers named Carrie and Tad who died in 1841. So when they find that David and Hallie are not in the house, they fly into a panic. In that same year, they found that Carolyn was alive, and that she had gone insane in 1970. So far as they could tell, Carolyn believing herself to be someone named Leticia who lived in the west wing of Collinwood was no part of the disaster. So they stay focused on Hallie and David, and let Carolyn/ Leticia go her own way.

Barnabas takes “Leticia’s” suggestion and goes into David’s bedroom. There, he finds the young fellow asleep in bed. Later, Julia has gone to Hallie’s room and found her bed also occupied. Julia woke her and herded her into David’s room, where Barnabas confronts both teens. They claim that they ran away from home because all the talk about ghosts and whatnot had unsettled them, and that they came back because they realized they were being silly. Barnabas mentions the names of some of the ghosts; they claim never to have heard those names. Barnabas is startled by this denial. Returning viewers know that Julia has mentioned the names to David and Hallie, and it is likely she told Barnabas she had done so. They are trying to play dumb, but in fact reveal that something is very wrong.

Carolyn enters. Barnabas leaves her alone with the teenagers. He is still just outside the door when he hears the three of them bid each other goodnight. Carolyn calls them Carrie and Tad; they call her Leticia. Barnabas bursts back in and declares “You are both possessed!” All three of them are possessed, but what he saw in 1995 leads him to disregard Carolyn’s possession and to focus on David and Hallie’s.

Early in the episode, we saw what it means when Carolyn says “David and Hallie are gone.” They no longer exist. Their bodies are now the vessels through which Tad and Carrie have resumed living. Carrie and Tad talked about the importance of keeping up the appearance of being Hallie and David; Tad said that one slip would be enough to expose them, and then “the game will be over.” We might wonder how. What can the living characters do to defeat the ghosts, if they know what the ghosts are doing? Nothing we’ve seen in the last six weeks suggests an answer to that question. For all we can tell, Julia, Barnabas, and the rest of them are so completely helpless that the ghosts may as well throw all discretion aside and operate openly.

Episode 1096: Goodbye, David. Goodbye, Hallie.

Dark Shadows began in June 1966, when well-meaning governess Victoria Winters was on her way to the great house of Collinwood to take charge of the education of strange and troubled boy David Collins. David’s aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, had written to Vicki to offer her the job; his father, Liz’ brother Roger Collins, was opposed to Vicki’s hiring. Roger’s opposition rose from mild disapproval to paranoid fervor when he learned that his arch-nemesis, Burke Devlin, rode into the village of Collinsport on the same train as Vicki.

In the months that followed, the only story that consistently worked was Vicki’s attempt to build a friendship with David in spite of his vicious and at times murderous hostility towards her. Later, David met Burke, and the two of them quickly bonded over their shared hatred of Roger. For his part, Roger was haunted by the thought that Burke was David’s biological father, a thought which Liz forbade him to express.

For a long time, David continued to be the pivot on which the story turned. Crazed handyman Matthew Morgan abducted Vicki and tried to kill her; that crisis reached its emotional peak when David found Vicki bound and gagged in Matthew’s hiding place and refused to rescue her. David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, came back to claim him, which would have meant his death. That arc ended when David ran from the fishing shack Laura had set ablaze and flung himself into Vicki’s arms. With that, he chose Vicki and life over Laura and death, appointing Vicki as his new mother. That marked the conclusion, not only of the David and Vicki story, but of Dark Shadows 1.0.

As the show reinvented itself, David remained the key to the action. The two long costume drama inserts that established Dark Shadows as, first and foremost, a show about time travel, the trip to the 1790s that lasted from November 1967 to March 1968 and the trip to 1897 that ran from March to November 1969, were both prompted by attempts to protect David from a looming supernatural menace. Though he was not an active participant in either of those stories, it was his peril that triggered them, and attempts to protect him and his analogues in previous generations of the Collins family that set the boundaries of the possible action.

As of this episode, all of the characters mentioned above are off the show. Vicki made her final appearance in #665*; Matthew made his in #123; Laura in #191**; Burke in #344; Roger, in #979***. Liz made her last substantive appearance on Friday; she will have one brief scene in #1198, simply to mark the end of a storyline. David leaves the show today.

In the early parts of today’s episode, David and his fellow teenager, houseguest Hallie Stokes, are being led through the woods by the unspeaking ghosts of two people who died in 1841. David’s psychopomp is the late Gerard Stiles, who was apparently a pirate when he was alive but has become a landlubber in death. Hallie’s is the late Daphne Harridge, who was once the governess at the great house. Daphne’s charges were Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes. Hallie and David have spent vast amounts of time moaning about how the ghosts of Carrie and Tad are going to take possession of their bodies and erase them from existence. Much of this moaning has taken place in a mysterious room which they call “The Playroom.” The Playroom intermittently exists in a obscure corner of the great house. When it materializes, it can be found behind a door that at other times opens onto a linen closet. Gerard, Daphne, Tad, and Carrie have free rein in The Playroom.

There is a dollhouse in The Playroom that the ghosts like to play with when David and Hallie aren’t looking. This dollhouse is a scale model of Rose Cottage, a mansion which stood somewhere near Collinwood in 1840. It is in some supernatural sense identical with that mansion. In #1082 and again in #1093, it was made clear to Hallie and David that they are fated to become dolls confined to this dollhouse, and that any living that is left for their bodies to do will be done by Carrie and Tad.

Daphne and Gerard take Hallie and David to a full-sized version of Rose Cottage that stands in the woods. It is unclear whether this mansion is visible all the time, or if it comes and goes as does The Playroom. The latter would seem more likely, since it is such a big place it is hard to imagine it would have escaped the notice of the people who have heard the expression “Rose Cottage” and have recently been trying to figure out which of the big houses in the area was around in 1840 and could have been known by that name in that year.

Gerard gets David to Rose Cottage while Daphne and Hallie are still making their way through the woods. David takes a nap in the corridor outside the upstairs parlor where the dolls are kept. He has another dream like the one he and Hallie both had in #1082, in which they are in the upstairs parlor. Daphne is in his dream. She smiles. Her smile is more unsettling than Gerard’s sneer. David wakes up and finds that Daphne is there, with Hallie.

David says they must resist; Hallie says it is too late. Then there is a commercial break. When we come back, they are in the upstairs parlor. Hallie notices the dolls are gone. David says they are no longer needed. Hallie says they must resist; David says it is too late. David Henesy manages to make David Collins’ part in these two scenes work. In the corridor, David is conflicted, trying to sound brave as he says the words about resisting but looking helpless as his eyes turn to the ghosts. In the parlor, he is simply defeated. His performance sketches a clear line between these two emotional states.

Kathleen Cody is less successful as Hallie. She seems to have come to terms with the reality while in the corridor. In the parlor, she flips back into Hallie’s usual mode, maximum possible tension. It doesn’t help that her dialogue is a bunch of questions about why they can’t resist. In context, those questions are just nonsense, and Hallie’s abrupt switch from quiet resignation to extreme plangency is inexplicable. My wife, Mrs Acilius, asked if they were trying to make us root for the ghosts who promise to shut Hallie up.

This story is the second time Dark Shadows has adapted Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. The first time through, in late 1968 and early 1969, David and his friend Amy Jennings took turns in the role of Child Who Enforces the Will of the Ghosts and Child Who Resists the Will of the Ghosts. That got to be frustrating, but at least they waited until the episode was over to switch roles. Switching them during a commercial break is just a slap in the face of the audience. Miss Cody’s decision to play Hallie at such a high level of agitation so much of the time was a costly mistake, but no performer could really have saved the part.

The ghosts indicate that David and Hallie are to take their seats at the table where the dolls usually sit. When they do so, we jump to a somewhat lower camera angle. This cut does indeed make it look like Hallie and David are small figures inside a small space. Henry Kaplan directed this episode. I usually have a lot of complaints about Kaplan. His preferred visual strategy was to cut from a closeup of one face to a closeup of another face to an extreme closeup that shows at most part of a face. But this shot achieves a subtle effect, and that effect tells the whole story. I can’t suppress a suspicion that Lela Swift stepped in and set the shot up for Kaplan, but even if she did he deserves credit for not fouling it up.

Carrie and Tad come into view. Carrie superimposes herself on Hallie’s body, Tad superimposes himself on David’s, and both ghosts fade out. As they do, we hear Tad say “Goodbye, David,” and Carrie say “Goodbye, Hallie.” We will see Carrie and Tad in the persons of Hallie and David for some time, but will never see either David or Hallie again.

Final farewell. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I remembered this closing image vividly from our previous watch-through of the series. I misremembered the lines, though. I recalled David and Hallie saying goodbye to each other, not the ghosts saying goodbye to the teenagers as they took possession of them. I think it is better the way it is. We are supposed to be horrified at Carrie and Tad’s thoughtless cruelty as they annihilate Hallie and David, and denying them even the opportunity to bid each other farewell serves that purpose. Unsatisfactory as are the rest of the episode and indeed the rest of the David and Hallie story, this closing shot is highly effective.

*Alexandra Moltke Isles last played the character in #627. Two other actresses succeeded Mrs Isles in the role.

**Another iteration of the character appeared in 20 episodes between #729 and #760.

***Another version of the character appeared in 17 episodes between #975 and #1055.

Episode 1095: Elizabeth Collins Stoddard

I first started watching Dark Shadows in the 1990s, when what was then The Sci Fi Channel was showing it Monday through Friday at 10:00 and 10:30 AM. I got into the habit of daily viewing when they were showing episodes from the summer of 1967, when the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins was occasionally dropping in on strange and troubled boy David Collins. Sarah’s brother, vampire Barnabas, was thinking he might want to kill David, and David’s aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, was a blocking figure who refused to engage with any evidence that anything unusual was going on.

In those days, it appeared that if Barnabas got his way the estate of Collinwood would be peopled only by the unquiet spirits of the dead. I imagined how that might have played out, if the show were not an open-ended serial but were allowed to come to an end. I pictured the great house in ruins. Well-meaning governess Victoria Winters and her boyfriend, hopeless schlub Burke Devlin, would venture into the wreckage. Vicki and Burke would dodge phantoms and demons and make their way into the drawing room. There, they would find Liz sitting serenely while leathery-winged fiends flutter about her head. Vicki would plead with Liz to escape with them. Liz would only smile at her and say that nothing is wrong, nothing at all. Seeing that Liz had taken her commitment to denial as a way of life to its ultimate extreme, Vicki and Burke would have no alternative but to leave without her.

The makers of the show have acknowledged that Barnabas’ plan would have left Collinwood entirely uninhabitable. They did that in the feature film House of Dark Shadows, which replays the story that led to the summer of 1967 and takes it to that conclusion. And they are doing it again now.

Vicki has long since left the show, replaced as the audience point of view character by mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Julia tried to cure Barnabas of his vampirism in 1967; in 1968, she completed a procedure devised by a fellow mad scientist that did put the symptoms of his curse into abeyance. Barnabas has since bungled his way into another vampire curse, but his connection to Julia still makes it possible for him to be a permanent part of the cast of characters and, on balance, a defender of the status quo, which in a genre where the most important thing is that there is still a story left to tell in the next episode is the closest thing there is to a hero. As such, he is the successor to Burke, who was supposed to be a dashing action hero when Dark Shadows started.

In July 1970, Barnabas and Julia came unstuck in time and found themselves in the far-off future year 1995. There, the great house of Collinwood was in ruins, its residents either dead, missing, or insane as the result of a mysterious disaster that took place before 1970 was out. The estate was dominated by malevolent ghosts, and the people of the village of Collinsport dared not even speak of the place, let alone visit it. Since Julia and Barnabas returned to 1970 in #1071, they have been trying to figure out what the disaster will be and to prevent it.

At first, Liz was somewhat sympathetic to Barnabas and Julia’s efforts, as befits the several times in 1969 and early 1970 we saw her admit that uncanny events were taking place around her. But her old commitment to denial came back to the surface when she forbade Julia and Barnabas to talk with David or teenage houseguest Hallie Stokes about what they had seen in 1995, even though Hallie and David are clearly central to the upcoming disaster. Because they cannot talk with the teens, Barnabas and Julia have not been able to do anything to prevent the ghosts from encroaching on them and taking an ever stronger position in the house.

In #1088, Liz finally realized what was going on and ran to find Julia, crying that they would have to get David and Hallie out of the house before the ghosts got hold of them. But it was too late. She found herself looking into the face of the haunting, an evil spirit known as Gerard. By the time Julia caught up to her in #1089, Liz was entirely under the power of Gerard, and placidly refused to accept that anything out of the ordinary was going on.

Hints have been mounting that the disaster will occur soon. Today, Julia and Barnabas tell Liz that it is urgent Hallie and David be taken from the house at once. Liz refuses, telling them that when the night ends with no further disturbances they will have to admit that all of their fears are simply a “ridiculous fantasy.”

For their part, David and Hallie have been spending a lot of time the last few weeks sitting around moaning about how helpless they are. That does not make for gripping television, even when they look at a dollhouse and say they think the ghosts have been playing with the dolls when they weren’t looking. David gets an idea. The dolls in the ghosts’ dollhouse have connections with particular people around the estate, so if he and Hallie make a doll of Barnabas, perhaps that will cause Barnabas to be aware of what the ghosts are doing.

Hallie asks David why he wants to alert Barnabas in particular. He says that if anyone can fight Gerard and the other ghosts, it will be Barnabas, because “He’s… different.” In the summer and fall of 1967, David was the one person at Collinwood who was on track to figure out Barnabas’ secret, leading the show into a blind alley from which it escaped by going back in time to the year 1795. When they returned from that first costume drama insert in March 1968, David was for some reason no longer a threat to Barnabas. But he was still conscious about his distant cousin in ways his Aunt Liz would never countenance. So in #660, David told his friend Amy Jennings that “Barnabas knows a lot of things that he doesn’t tell anybody.”

The doll is not particularly realistic; the spirit world doesn’t require very high production values, and Hallie and David are under severe time constraints. So their Barnabas doll is adorably crude. I’m thinking of making it my PFP, replacing the tailor’s dummy known as “Mr Juggins” that I’ve been using since David and Amy showed him to Liz in #681.

Looks more like Jonathan Frid than does the Barnabas from the Gold Key comics. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Regular viewers know that David’s instincts are sound. Barnabas and Julia confronted Gerard in the room where the dollhouse is in #1070. Gerard was powerless against Barnabas. Something might have come of that, but Gerard then turned his attention to Julia, causing her to become very ill and forcing them to retreat. After they have put the doll in the dollhouse, David and Hallie leave the room for a little while. When they return, the Barnabas doll has been thrown from the dollhouse and destroyed, suggesting that Gerard did indeed see a danger in its presence.

Finally, Julia and Barnabas manage to corner Liz and force her to let them take Hallie and David away. After they leave her, Liz shuts herself up in the drawing room and apologizes to the unseen Gerard. She says she could not think of any way to resist them further.

Liz, defeated. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This admission of defeat is the next to last time we will see Liz. She will appear again in one scene twenty and a half weeks from now, in #1198, in which she will simply serve to confirm that things are back to normal. Moreover, that version of Liz appears in a Collinwood where none of the events we have seen over the last several months has taken place; we have no idea what her character development has been. This is the final appearance of the person we have been watching since episode #1.

When Dark Shadows began, Joan Bennett was its biggest ratings draw and Liz was the most powerful character. Her function as Keeper of the Secrets set her on the path that would lead her towards extreme denialism and away from any active role on the story, but along the way Bennett used her great talents to give the show’s foundations their basic outline. For example, in the relationship between Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, Bennett and Louis Edmonds pioneered the dynamic of Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother, the same dynamic that makes Barnabas and Julia so much fun to watch and that turned Quentin Collins into a breakout hit in 1969 when we saw him with his Bossy Big Sister, Judith (also played by Joan Bennett.) In her other roles, Bennett will continue to be indispensable to the show, but those of us who started with #1 will never stop wishing the writers had found more to do with the character of Liz.

Episode 1094: Our hearts will beat in tune

Carolyn Hawkes comes to the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood and announces to her mother, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, that she is about to do something special and they must light candles to provide the appropriate ambiance. Liz gets very unsettled by Carolyn’s attitude and keeps insisting that she go to bed, but Carolyn is nothing daunted. She stands behind the candles, apologizes for being out of practice, and starts to sing. Earlier, Liz had told permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman that Carolyn could not sing at all, and she seems quite surprised to be so abruptly proved wrong. Julia comes running in and shouts “Carolyn! ST-A-A-AAP!”

Carolyn in position for her concert. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia recently came unstuck in time and spent a couple of weeks in the far-off future year of 1995, where Collinwood was in ruins as the result of a mysterious disaster that is due to occur sometime before 1970 is out. Some residents of the great house, including Liz, vanished in that disaster; others, including Carolyn, went insane.

Carolyn would then be murdered by one of the ghosts who rule Collinwood in 1995. She left behind a note consisting of six cryptic phrases, which Julia and her friend Barnabas Collins have taken to refer to events that led up to the disaster in 1970. One of those phrases was “The night I sang my song.” It was in a conversation about that phrase that Liz told Julia Carolyn was incapable of song, and it is because the singing represents a step towards the disaster that Julia is so desperate for Carolyn to stop.

At the beginning of the episode, the evil Gerard Stiles, the ghost whom we saw kill the older Carolyn in 1995, took possession of Carolyn. As a result of the possession, she developed “second sight,” a mind-reading ability she had never had before. This will remind longtime viewers of another character played by Nancy Barrett, Miss Pansy Faye. We first met Pansy in #771, set in the year 1897, when she was played by Kay Frye. Pansy was a Cockney showgirl and fraudulent mentalist who came to Collinwood as the fiancée of daffy Carl Collins. To her amazement, Pansy found that in the ghost-packed atmosphere of Collinwood she really did have the psychic powers she had long pretended to have. Pansy didn’t live very long, but she returned to the show in the person of Miss Barrett when evil sorcerer Count Petofi caused her spirit to take over the body of the repressed and vicious Charity Trask. The song Carolyn sings in the drawing room today was Pansy’s song in both of her incarnations.

Pansy was fun the first time we watched the 1897 episodes, and she only got more enjoyable the second time through. It was prophesied yesterday that Carolyn would be taken over by a ghost named Leticia; if Leticia is like Pansy, that’s something to look forward to.

The reminder of Petofi is even more welcome. The story has been going nowhere for the last five weeks. Villains are supposed to create situations to which the other characters will respond, whether heroically or pitiably. Gerard is not a villain- he has been established as evil, but he has not given anyone else anything interesting to do. Petofi generated story all the time, so if Gerard is going to start taking pages from his book, we can hope that the show will come back to life. It’s even possible that when we travel back in time to 1840 to meet Gerard, Leticia, and the rest of them as living beings, as the show has been making it clear will happen sooner or later, it will turn out that Gerard is Petofi in disguise.