January 2025 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 680: Chicken Little was right

Strange and troubled boy David Collins and nine year old Amy Jennings are falling under the sway of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins. Quentin has been gaining strength gradually; at first he was confined to a small chamber hidden behind a wall in a storage room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood, and was dependent on Amy and David to do his bidding elsewhere. Now he can move around the estate and do things for himself. He is still able to control only one of the children at a time, though, and when Amy found out that Quentin had poisoned her brother Chris she made up her mind to fight him.

Today, David goes to the west wing to tell Quentin that Amy will cooperate with him if he promises to leave Chris alone. When David puts this to Quentin, he nods in agreement. If Quentin is still weak enough that he must give in to Amy on this point, he is still weak enough to be stopped before he does any great harm. That builds suspense- the show has invested so much time in building up the threat Quentin poses that it would feel like a cheat if he were defeated now, but we can look forward to seeing him survive a series of close calls between now and the time when his storyline approaches its climax.

David was not the only one who went from the main part of the house to the west wing. Governess Maggie saw him go there, in direct defiance of her orders that he stay in his room. Maggie followed David down the corridor and saw him go into the storage room. By the time she entered that room, David had gone into Quentin’s secret chamber and closed the panel behind him, leaving Maggie baffled as to where he could be. She went back to the main part of the house to wait for David.

In David’s room, Maggie sits in the armchair by the wall. She is still there when David comes back. This recreates a pair of scenes in #667, when David sat in the chair and was still there when Amy entered. That was supposed to be a power move, and it worked, more or less. David asserted his role as Quentin’s spokesman, and Amy acquiesced.

But Maggie can’t pull it off. She doesn’t give in to David when he denies everything, tells her her eyesight must be failing, claims that she doesn’t have the right to punish him, and yells at her that he will “get even.” But her visible nervousness encourages him to try each of these tactics. It’s only when she reminds him that he had his flashlight with him when he went into the west wing and says she will look for it in the storage room that she shuts him down, and then only for a moment.

David protests his innocence to Maggie, but he tells us that the sky is falling.

Maggie goes back to the west wing, where she sees Quentin. David looks directly into the camera and recites the epigram “I do not love thee, Dr Fell.” In the first months of the show, David was the only character who made eye contact with the audience. He stopped doing that late in 1966, when he stopped being a menace, and several other characters have been called on to do it since. It’s good to see him revisit the technique, and he is quite effective at it today.

Closing Miscellany

As my screen name may have led you to suspect, I make my living as a Latin teacher. So I would be remiss if I did not mention that “I do not love thee, Dr Fell” is a translation of a piece often used on the first day of introductory Latin classes, Martial’s Epigram 32:

Non amo te, Sabidi, nec dicere possum quare.

Hoc tantum possum dicere: non amo te.

When poet Tom Brown translated the epigram in 1680, he changed the name “Sabidius” to “Dr Fell” in memory of the dean of the Oxford college which he had briefly attended. A literal translation should enable you to figure out the meaning of each of the Latin words: “I do not love you, Sabidius, and I cannot say why. I can say only this: I do not love you.”

In a conversation with housekeeper Mrs Johnson, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard says that “David is twelve years old.” This is the first time in a while David’s age has been specified explicitly.

Liz orders Mrs Johnson to take David’s dinner to him on a tray and sit in his room while he eats. Longtime viewers may remember that when Mrs Johnson started working in the house in #77 and #79, David was afraid she would be his “jailer”; in #189, she actually did sit in his room and function as his jailer for a little while. She is reluctant to do that again today, because she has caught on that David and Amy are involved with something uncanny and she is afraid of them.

Danny Horn devotes his post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day to a tour of the props and decor of David’s room. It’s a lot of fun. One of his commenters, “Jayson O’Neill,” links to a 2014 post on the Dark Shadows News blogspot page focusing on David’s posters; another, “John E. Comelately,” points out that famed rock and roll band The Turtles released a track in 1967 called “Chicken Little Was Right.” I made a comment myself finding fault with the acting and blaming director Dan Curtis for it; I don’t agree with that anymore, but you’re welcome to read it if you want.

Episode 679: Your make-believe people

The spirit of the late Quentin Collins is taking possession of children Amy Jennings and David Collins, and they now realize that Quentin’s plans for them are evil. David despairs of resisting Quentin; Amy tries to tell matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard what is going on, but Quentin appears to Amy and stops her before she can say anything useful. I have some miscellaneous observations to make:

Quentin scares Amy and stops her telling Liz what is happening. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, I pointed out that it is unnecessary to call the story a “metaphor for child abuse” or “allegorical child abuse.” When adults terrorize kids into harming their loved ones, that simply is child abuse. Quentin is abusing David and Amy by means that don’t seem to exist in our world, but it is very definitely abuse and it can be expected to have the same consequences that would follow if he were using more realistic methods.

2. When Quentin interrupts Amy’s attempt to tell Liz what has been going on, the show is repeating a structure it used just a few days ago, in #675. Amy’s big brother Chris was about to confess to the sheriff that he was a werewolf when a telephone call from recovering vampire Barnabas Collins gave Chris an alibi and ended the sheriff’s interest in anything he might say. In each case a confession comes right to the point of terminating one of the two major ongoing storylines and is interrupted before it can do so.

3. Liz catches David twisting Amy’s arm, covering her mouth, and yelling at her. After Liz scolds David and sends him to his room, she tells governess Maggie Evans to discipline David by any means necessary. Several times in the last couple of weeks, the show has gone out of its way to demonstrate that Maggie is a hopelessly lax disciplinarian, no obstacle at all to Quentin’s designs on Amy and David. Now we see that even the other characters have started to catch on to this fact.

4. There are a couple of sequences of coming and going from David’s room. These feature a good deal of camera movement from the inside to the hallway outside. The show has been giving us a lot more of this kind of thing lately, laboring to suggest spaces connecting one room to another. There used to be scenes set in the village of Collinsport, and characters who lived there. Maggie lived in town then, and her house was a frequent set. But now she lives in the great house on the estate of Collinwood, and the only regular character who does not live somewhere on the estate is Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, whom we have not seen since #660. If all the action is going to shrink to Collinwood, and most of it to the great house, it makes sense they would develop a strategy to make that house seem like a bigger place.

5. The show has a fondness for a particular shade of bright green at this point. You will notice it in the clothes that both Amy and Liz are wearing in the screenshot above. It also shows up towards the end of the episode. Maggie follows David into the long-deserted west wing of the great house; he is sneaking off to visit Quentin in his stronghold, a dusty little room there. The sequence again places an emphasis on the corridors. We have seen the west wing corridors several times. As before, they are draped with elaborate cobwebs but chock-full of objets d’art. There is a new one on display today, a lamp in that same bright green. It is in the center of the shot while David makes his way to the room. That helps to make the space seem bigger, as we measure David’s progress not by he slowness of his steps but by his steadily changing relationship to the lamp. The corridor is dark enough that only a brightly colored object could serve this function, but it is in focus for so long that we are left with a feeling that it must have some significance of its own.

6. When David is lying to Liz to keep her from making sense of what little Amy was able to tell her, he claims to have an imaginary friend named “Lars,” a giant who lives in “the house by the sea.” Collinsport is a coastal village, so there are lots of houses by the sea there, and for much of 1968 suave warlock Nicholas Blair lived in what was always called “a house by the sea.” But only one place has been called “the house by the sea,” a Collins family property that has been vacant since the 1870s. Well-meaning governess Victoria Winters and her fiancé Burke Devlin were interested in buying that house in September and October of 1967, but for legal reasons the sale turned out to be impossible. The business about The House by the Sea seemed very much like it was going to lead to a ghost story that would bring into view another branch of the Collins family and involve Burke and Vicki being possessed by evil spirits. Perhaps that was the intention when it was first dreamed up in the flimsies six months before, but it never went anywhere and was forgotten completely the minute it ended. This is the first reference to the house since #335. If that were at one time the plan, bringing up “The House by the Sea” today might be a way for the writers and producers to remark to each other on the fact that they are now making a story like the one they dropped back then.

Episode 678: This time, I saved him

At the estate of Collinwood, two ghosts are at odds over the fate of a werewolf. Caught in the crossfire are a mad scientist, a recovering vampire, and a couple of kids.

The ghosts are the evil Quentin Collins and a weepy woman so far known only as Beth. The werewolf is Chris Jennings, who is staying in the caretaker’s cottage on the estate. The mad scientist is Julia Hoffman, MD, a permanent guest in the great house. The recovering vampire is Julia’s inseparable friend Barnabas Collins, master of the Old House. The kids are Chris’ nine year old sister Amy and strange and troubled boy David Collins, who live in the great house.

Yesterday, Quentin went to the cottage and put strychnine in Chris’ whiskey. Beth appeared to Julia and led her and Barnabas to the cottage in time to save Chris; today, they figure out that Beth is a ghost.

Quentin has been exercising power over David and Amy, at first with Beth’s cooperation. Beth appears to Amy in a dream visitation. While she guides Amy to images of Chris and David and to the realizations that Quentin means to kill Chris and that David has tried vainly to stop him, we hear Beth speak for the first time. She says everything twice, giving her dialogue a lyrical quality that could be quite lovely. Unfortunately, Terrayne Crawford’s limitations as an actress keep that loveliness from coming through.

Barnabas and Julia know that Chris is a werewolf and have persuaded him to accept their help. They question Chris and are satisfied that he did not poison himself. When he mentions that David visited him the previous morning, Barnabas decides to go interrogate David. Longtime viewers know that David has extensive experience with ghosts, a fact of which Barnabas has at times been most uncomfortably aware. Once Barnabas has learned that Beth is a ghost, it will strike us as reasonable that he will be interested in David’s connection with the matter.

Amy goes to the cottage and sees Julia tending to Chris. They tell her he just had an upset stomach and will be fine. She does not believe them, and says she had a dream that convinced her Chris was in mortal danger. This intrigues Julia, who presses for more details about the dream. Amy clams up, but now Julia and Barnabas, the show’s two chief protagonists, have figured out that David and Amy have something to do with ghosts, and that those ghosts in turn have to do with Chris. The Haunting of Collinwood story hasn’t made any real progress for several weeks, but that can now change.

Back in the great house, Barnabas questions David about his visit to Chris. He doesn’t get any more information out of him than Julia had got out of Amy. There is a bit of intentional humor when Barnabas tells David he thought it would be pleasant to share breakfast with him and Amy. David says it isn’t so pleasant at breakfast- housekeeper Mrs Johnson is in a bad mood in the mornings. Barnabas suggests they ignore her, and David replies that it is not easy to do that. David Henesy delivers this line with perfect comic timing.

Barnabas realizes David knows more than he is telling. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Amy shows up and responds favorably to Barnabas’ self-invitation to their breakfast. After Barnabas leaves the room, Amy confronts David about Quentin’s attempt to kill Chris. David has despaired of opposing Quentin, and is terrified when Amy tells him she will go tell matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard everything that has been going on. He is convinced Quentin will kill them if she does this. He is pleading with her to come back when the episode ends.

Episode 677: To contain your violence

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have figured out that mysterious drifter Chris Jennings is a werewolf. Last night, Barnabas took Chris to the room hidden behind the secret panel in the old Collins family mausoleum and locked him up there. That had the desired effect- Chris transformed, but couldn’t get out and didn’t kill anyone.

This morning, Barnabas walks with Chris as he returns home to the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood. They find Julia already there. Barnabas had neglected to tell Chris that Julia also knows his secret, so he is puzzled to find her in his house. When she explains that she knows he is the werewolf, she also says that she advised Barnabas against helping him. She seems to be in quite a snippy mood.

Chris says that Julia was right; Barnabas replies “Right or wrong, I have made my decision and I intend to follow it through!” That’s a perfectly characteristic remark for Barnabas, who often shows great tenacity but never shows any signs of a functional conscience. Julia warms up and tells Chris that she will come back the following morning and begin a series of tests meant to discover a medical intervention to deal with his condition. Later, Chris will call Barnabas “a good man.” When Barnabas says that some would dissent from this view, Chris says that those who do are “wrong, very wrong.” Chris hasn’t been watching Dark Shadows!

While werewolf Chris was cooped up in the mausoleum, strange and troubled boy David Collins was at home in the great house of Collinwood. David is friends with Chris’ nine year old sister Amy, and both children are coming under the sway of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins. Last night, Quentin showed David a bottle of strychnine and ordered him to poison Chris with it. David refused that order. A moment after Barnabas and Julia leave the cottage, David knocks on the door.

David asks who it was he saw “sneaking out” of the cottage. Chris tells him that he may have seen Julia and Barnabas, but that they probably weren’t “sneaking”- they had simply stopped by to visit him. When David is surprised that they came so early in the morning, Chris points out that he dropped in only a few minutes later. David declares that he always gets up early, and is surprised Chris doesn’t know that. Chris does not seem to believe that it is reasonable for David to expect him to know what time he gets up.

David tells Chris he likes what he has done with the interior of the cottage. Chris says he hasn’t changed a thing- it is just as he found it. This will interest longtime viewers. The last person to stay in the cottage was David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who occupied it early in 1967. David often visited her there in those days. We remember those scenes when he takes a seat in front of the fireplace, where he and Laura used to sit.

Chris tells David he was up all night and has to get some sleep. He offers him a soda “to give you some energy for your hike through the woods.” Once they have collected their sodas, Chris tells David “Well, I tell ya, I like a carbonated grape soda myself. It reminds me of the vineyards in the south of France.” He delivers this line in the voice of W. C. Fields. This is the first unmistakable occurrence of Briscoe’s W. C. Fields imitation; it is a seed from which much will grow. In August, another character of Briscoe’s will make an appearance wearing Fields’ signature costume, top hat and all.

David’s comment about the figures he saw “sneaking” from the cottage shows that he is worried about Chris, and he keeps talking and asking questions until Chris all but pushes him out. His concern is quite understandable in the light of the command Quentin gave him the night before.

After David leaves the cottage, the camera stays in the front room by itself and focuses on the door for such a long time we begin to wonder whether anyone else is coming. Maybe they just want us to see what a nice door the set department has put together. Finally it does open, but we do not see anyone enter. The stopper rises from a decanter of brandy on the table, apparently by itself. The strychnine bottle Quentin showed David comes into view; it tips over, and its contents are emptied into the decanter.

When the day is done, we are at the great house. Julia and Barnabas have had a conversation about a book she is reading, The Lycanthrope of Angers. Coupled with Chris’ joking reference to the south of France, this mention of a city in northwestern France suggests that there is something French about being a werewolf. Barnabas used to be a vampire; that condition came upon him because of his involvement with some French people. Perhaps the makers of the show were planning to turn to the same country to explain the origin of Chris’ troubles. It might not be so far-fetched. The show is set in Maine, after all, home to a great many Franco-Americans.

Alone in the cottage, Chris decides to celebrate the end of the Moon’s “cycle of fullness” by taking a drink of whiskey before bed. He sickens. At first he thinks he is transforming into the werewolf. He collapses, but does not go into the convulsions typical of strychnine poisoning.

Julia is in bed in her room in the great house. She is awakened by the sound of sobbing. A tall, very thin blonde woman in a long white dress appears. She beckons Julia and leaves the room. Julia pauses to put on a robe.

Barnabas is downstairs; he sees the woman. He initially mistakes her for heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, the only blonde woman in the house, but by the time the woman in white has reached the bottom of the stairs and gone out the front door he knows it is not her.

Given their shared hair color, it is unsurprising Barnabas mistakes the woman in white for Carolyn. But there is a bit of an Easter egg here for sufficiently obsessive fans. As the Dark Shadows wiki notes, actress Terry Crawford appeared in a 1969 commercial for the “Barnabas Collins Dark Shadows Board Game” with her hair styled so that she would look like Nancy Barrett as Carolyn.

Julia arrives downstairs and asks if Barnabas saw the woman. The two of them go out the front door and spot her in the distance, on the path to Chris’ cottage. We cut to the cottage, and see the woman enter. Barnabas and Julia enter a moment later, at which point she is gone. They find Chris unconscious, and Julia says he is dying.

Returning viewers recognize the woman in the white dress as Quentin’s associate Beth. We do not know why Quentin wants Chris to be poisoned, or why Beth wants Julia and Barnabas to find him while he is still alive. Perhaps they are working at cross-purposes, and Beth is trying to keep Quentin from killing Chris. Or perhaps they are working together, and their shared plan was to injure Chris but to get Julia, who is after all a doctor, to him in time to prevent the worst.

Episode 676: Scared of the funniest things

Chris Jennings turns into a werewolf when the moon is full, which it is about half the time in the universe of Dark Shadows. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has learned of Chris’ plight and decided to help him. As they make their way through an old cemetery to the hidden chamber where Barnabas will lock Chris up so that he doesn’t hurt anyone tonight, Barnabas asks Chris to confirm that he doesn’t remember anything he does in his lupine form. Chris does, saying that waking up and not knowing what he did the night before “is the most agonizing part of the whole thing.” You might think that he would find it even more agonizing to know that he has been killing one or two random human beings a month for the last seven years, but different things bother different people.

Chris asks how Barnabas knew that he didn’t remember what he did as the werewolf. Barnabas replies “Well, it’s obvious you’ve forgotten that you attacked me in this graveyard the night before last.” Chris says that “It’s a wonder you’re still alive.” To which Barnabas replies “No, it’s a wonder YOU’RE still alive!” For a moment we wonder how long this will go on, but Barnabas explains that werewolves can be killed by silver weapons. The head of the cane he carries is silver, and he struck him with it.

Barnabas shows Chris to the hidden room in the back of the old Collins family mausoleum. Barnabas himself was kept in a chained coffin in this room for over 170 years, when he was a vampire. He tells Chris that the room was originally constructed to hide ammunition from the British during the Revolution, which we have heard before. The coffin is still there; he tells him it is empty, and denies knowing anything about it. He says that the walls of the tomb are solid granite a foot thick; this is the first we’ve heard this detail. When Chris asks if anyone else knows about the room, Barnabas concedes that “A few” do. He assures him that none of them will be around tonight. Regular viewers will start making up a list of all the characters currently on the show who know about the room; Barnabas’s friend Julia Hoffman and his servant Willie Loomis know about it, as does strange and troubled boy David Collins. Barnabas can tell Julia and Willie to stay clear, and David has no reason to come to the cemetery tonight.

Barnabas explains that he will not show Chris the mechanism that unlocks the door from the inside, but promises to come back to release him after dawn. Chris urges Barnabas to leave at once; Barnabas insists on sticking around and asking more questions, saying that the moon isn’t up yet. Chris tells him that he first transformed shortly after he graduated from architecture school. “Oh, I was going to be an architect to be reckoned with, bold, imaginative, revolutionary. I thought nothing could stand in my way. Then something did.”

After Chris delivers a monologue about what a soulful and remorseful serial killer he is, Barnabas finally does close the secret panel. He sticks around until he hears the sounds of the werewolf snarling in the hidden room.

Chris’ nine year old sister Amy is staying at the great house of Collinwood. David finds her standing outside the front door, staring at the moon. She tells him that the moon scares her sometimes. His response is “Well, then don’t look at it,” which does seem logical. But she tells him that she can’t help it. David complains about how odd she is. We will hear more of this grumbling; it makes them seem like an old married couple, and is hilarious.

Amy and David are coming under the influence of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins. Quentin keeps trying to get them to set various members of the Collins family up for lethal traps; they haven’t succeeded yet in killing anyone, but housekeeper Mrs Johnson has caught on that there is something peculiar going on with the two of them, and she is frightened.

Mrs Johnson enters the drawing room to do some straightening up and finds the children playing a game with a deck of stage magician’s oversized cards. She and they stare silently at each other for a minute or two, and she protests. They say they were just watching her work, and she orders them to go to bed. They object that it isn’t bedtime yet. Of course it isn’t, Mrs Johnson doesn’t work around the clock. They get even more intensely on her nerves by bringing up a recent incident when she saw Quentin’s ghost, and in her exasperation she chases them out of the room.

Amy and David irritate Mrs Johnson. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There isn’t anything about Quentin in the episode prior to that scene, so I cannot imagine what viewers would make of it. It’s late in the day, a domestic is tired, and a couple of kids are trying to annoy her. That is a relatable situation, but it doesn’t match with the heavy, melodramatic Dark Shadows music and the terrified affect with which Clarice Blackburn plays Mrs Johnson. I suppose that by January 1969, Dark Shadows was so widely known as a supernatural thriller that most people tuning in for the first time would assume that something paranormal was going on, but if they turned the television on after the opening titles and didn’t realize what show they were watching, they could only have concluded that they were witnessing an utterly ludicrous case of exaggerated seriousness. After David and Amy are out of Mrs Johnson’s sight, we see them go upstairs laughing, but that proves only that they are trying to upset her, not that they are connected to a malign power greater than themselves.

Barnabas enters and sees that Mrs Johnson is upset. She begins to tell him why, but interrupts herself to declare that he won’t believe her. He assures her that he will, and keeps asking her to go on. After she has told him everything she and the audience both know, he asks her to start over. The scene cuts out, suggesting that Barnabas is taking pains to get as much information from Mrs Johnson as he possibly can.

The children go to the little room in the long-deserted west wing of the house where they first met Quentin. Quentin is there when they arrive. This is the first time we have seen Quentin waiting for them; previously, they have had to summon him. Quentin does not speak; David can sense that he wants Amy to go back to the main part of the house so that they can talk privately.

Alone with Quentin, David asks where “the bottle” is. Quentin opens a rolltop desk, and David sees a bottle. He is shocked to find that the bottle is labeled “strychnine.” He declares that he won’t hurt Chris, and he runs out of the room.

Downstairs, Amy is in the drawing room, where she presses a few keys of the piano. We heard her play “London Bridge” in #656, but this doesn’t seem to be a part of any song. She is just idly pecking at the keyboard. When David comes, Amy complains about how long he was gone. He is distant, refusing to maintain eye contact or to answer any of her questions. He says they won’t be playing tonight.

We cut back upstairs, where Quentin is picking up the bottle of strychnine. Mrs Johnson saw Quentin in Chris’ cottage, so we know that he can go there. If David won’t poison Chris, perhaps Quentin will do it himself.

Episode 675: The best alibi you can have in this town

In #128, wisecracking waitress Maggie Evans opened a conversation in the diner at the Collinsport Inn with that old familiar ice-breaker, “Whaddaya hear from the morgue?” The show took us all the way to Phoenix, Arizona for a trip to that city’s morgue in #174, but it is only today we see the inside of Collinsport’s own morgue for the first time. Sheriff George Patterson brings heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in to identify a body found on her property. Carolyn is shocked to find that it is her friend, Donna Friedlander.

Last night, Carolyn and Donna were in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood with permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman and old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, who lives in the Old House on the same estate. Also in the room was Chris Jennings, a mysterious drifter who caught Carolyn’s fancy and who now lives in the caretaker’s cottage on the estate as her guest. Barnabas invited everyone to dinner at his house. The ladies delightedly accepted, but Chris begged off, saying he would have to leave immediately to keep an important business engagement in Bangor, Maine. Donna said that she was going home to Bangor and that she was ready to leave, and asked Chris for a ride. When he tried to squirm his way out of taking her, Barnabas looked on with smug self-satisfaction.

This morning in the morgue, Carolyn tells Sheriff Patterson that the last time she saw Donna, she was leaving with Chris. But she recoils from the implication. She cannot believe that Chris had anything to do with Donna’s death.

Carolyn does not know what Barnabas has figured out. Chris is a werewolf. When Barnabas told Julia that he had come to that conclusion, she was unconvinced. Barnabas’ dinner invitation was a ploy intended to elicit just the panicked reaction Chris did have. Barnabas’ look of triumph at Chris’ frantic attempts to ensure that he is alone on this night of the full Moon reflects his belief that he has been proved right.

Barnabas went to the cottage some time after the Moon rose, intending to use his silver-headed cane to take control of Chris in his werewolf form. But he delayed too long, and by the time he got there the cottage was vacant and Donna’s mangled corpse lay in the woods nearby.

We cut to the cottage, where we see a disheveled and bloodstained Chris come home. He has just had time to change his shirt and set some furniture right side up when Carolyn drops in. She has come to warn Chris that Sheriff Patterson is coming. The sheriff is right behind her. Carolyn leaves the two of them alone. Chris refuses to allow a search of the premises; when he spots Donna’s purse on his table, he throws a newspaper over it. The sheriff somehow fails to notice this, but takes Chris to his office for questioning.

In the drawing room, Barnabas and Julia are fretting over Donna’s death. Barnabas asks “Could we have stopped it?” He decides that they could not have, and that whatever sequence of events led to the killing must have been “Donna’s fault.” It is always fun to watch the scenes where Barnabas faces the horrific results his actions have on other people, strikes a noble pose while briefly considering the possibility that he may be partially responsible for them, and then agrees with Julia that it is pointless for him to blame himself. Julia and Barnabas’ self-exculpatory attitudes are so transparently absurd that you have to admire Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid for keeping straight faces while delivering their dialogue.

Meanwhile, Carolyn has called the Collins family lawyer, Richard Garner. Garner agrees to help Chris. We saw Garner and his son Frank a number of times in the first months of 1967, but he hasn’t been on screen since #246. He has only been mentioned a handful of times since then, most recently in #577. This is the last time his name will come up.

Back in the drawing room, Barnabas tells Julia that he can see “So many possibilities” for dealing with Chris’ problem. Frid’s delivery of this line made my wife, Mrs Acilius, shudder. She could hear the evil in his voice as he shows us Barnabas playing God.

Chris is in an interrogation room, telling Sheriff Patterson a series of mutually contradictory lies about what he did last night. The sheriff says he’s going to leave him alone for a few minutes so that he can come up with a more plausible story. You might think this was a sarcastic remark, but in this context it seems it might actually be sincere. Sheriff Patterson’s failure to notice Donna’s purse on Chris’ table is of a piece with the complete nonfeasance he has shown all along, and Vince O’Brien delivers the line so warmly it doesn’t sound like a joke. Moreover, Sheriff Patterson’s predecessor as Collinsport’s chief representative of law enforcement, Constable/ Sheriff Jonas Carter, capitulated to the Collins family’s directions to cover up a crime in his final appearance on the show, back in #32. Longtime viewers may suspect that Sheriff Patterson is as averse to the tough parts of his job as was Constable/ Sheriff Carter.

While Chris is alone in the interrogation room, he decides to tell Sheriff Patterson the truth when he comes back. He does in fact open his mouth and get the first few words of a confession out when the sheriff cuts him short. He says that Barnabas Collins called the office to tell him Chris was with him last night, and that Barnabas is “about the best alibi you can have in this town.” He shakes Chris’ hand and sends him on his way. Law enforcement characters on Dark Shadows are symbols of helplessness, and after that moment Sheriff Patterson has reached the zenith of that quality, achieving a measure of futility that cannot be surpassed. We never see him again.

Sheriff Patterson completes his quest. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Chris goes home and finds Barnabas waiting for him. Chris expresses his gratitude for the alibi Barnabas gave him, but keeps trying to get him to leave before the Moon rises. Barnabas tells him that when he leaves, Chris will leave with him. Barnabas closes the episode by telling him that he knows that he is not only Chris Jennings, but that “You are also the werewolf.”

This episode marks the final appearance not only of Sheriff Patterson, but also of Vince O’Brien. O’Brien joined the show in #148 as the second actor to play Lieutenant Dan Riley of the Maine State Police. O’Brien’s stolid manner suited the role of that ineffective investigator, but he was much less fun to watch than was the man who originated the part, the charming John Connell.

O’Brien took over as the second Sheriff Patterson in #328. He was again a step down from his predecessor; the first Sheriff Patterson was Dana Elcar, an extraordinary performer who always found a way to give the audience hope that his character was only playing dumb. Other actors filled in for O’Brien a couple of times, Angus Cairns in #341 and #342 and Alfred Sandor in #615, leading some fans to refer to “the Patterson brothers” (whose parents named all of their sons George) and others to speculate that for a time Collinsport allowed any man to be sheriff who was willing to change his name to “George Patterson.” Like O’Brien, Cairns and Sandor were accomplished professionals, but none could match Elcar’s gift for overcoming bad writing and keeping our attention focused on the sheriff.

Episode 674: When there is a moon

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is attracted to mysterious drifter Chris Jennings, so much so that she has set Chris up in the caretaker’s cottage on the estate of Collinwood. Today, Carolyn’s friend Donna Friedlander is visiting her. The day’s main action is a classic farce plot. Donna wants Chris to drive her home to Bangor, Maine, but in order to keep a secret from her he makes a series of increasingly frantic attempts to avoid doing so. In the end Donna doesn’t get her ride, and Chris doesn’t keep his secret.

The episode deviates from the typical farce in that Chris is not a man trying to keep his or his roommate’s girlfriends from finding out about each other. He is a werewolf, and the Moon is full. If Donna is with him after dark, he will kill her, as he has already killed an unknown number of people in the last several years.

Donna is a student of interior design, and Carolyn is showing her around the great house. We first see her when Carolyn brings her into the study. Chris is in the room with his sister, nine year old Amy, who has been staying at the great house. Chris is distracted, abrupt, and rude with Donna. His manner grows even less inviting when he sees an inverted red pentagram on Carolyn’s face, typically the sign that the person will be the werewolf’s next victim. His eyes bug out, he breaks into a sweat, and turns his back on the ladies, stalking off to stare out the window.

Donna and Carolyn leave the room. In the hallway outside the study, Donna exclaims “Wow!” and exhales as if she were very worked up. She tells Carolyn that Chris is her type. She summarizes that type as “moody”; a more fitting description of what Donna saw of Chris’ behavior would be “not interested,” but hey, I’m not the sex police. If Donna gets excited by foul-tempered guys who ignore her and want her to go away, that’s none of my business.

The little space in which Donna tells Carolyn she is attracted to Chris is a new set. We’ve been seeing a lot more of these tiny nondescript corners representing hallways lately, and Donna’s identification with interior design makes us conscious of this one. In #664, they even had actors walk from one set to another through some undecorated studio space that they tried to persuade us was a corridor. It seems they are developing a strategy to make us feel that the great house is a bigger place than they have managed to create in our minds just by cutting from one room to another.

Complicating matters for Chris are old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Barnabas has figured out that Chris is the werewolf, and today explains this to Julia.

Barnabas uses the word “werewolf” as he is bringing Julia up to date. This represents a departure from the show’s previous practice. Barnabas was himself a vampire when he first came on the show in #211, but they didn’t use the word “vampire” for 40 weeks, until #410. They aren’t afraid of vocabulary anymore.

Julia doubts Barnabas’ interpretation of the facts, and he decides to demonstrate his thesis by putting Chris in an awkward position. He invites Chris, Carolyn, and Donna to join him and Julia for dinner at his home, the Old House on the estate. Chris excuses himself by claiming to have a business meeting in Bangor for which he must leave at once. At this, Donna asks for a ride to that town. Barnabas watches Chris’ discomfort with a smug grin, confident that he is being proven right.

Outside the front door of the great house, Chris tries to wriggle out of giving Donna a ride by saying that now he is getting a migraine and will have to cancel his meeting. He offers to give Donna his keys, suggesting she hide them under the front seat when she parks his car at the bus station in Bangor. She initially accepts this, but later comes to the cottage to say she has decided against it. She is there when he transforms, and runs away.

Back in the great house, Barnabas is telling Julia that werewolves are vulnerable to silver weapons, so he will be able to use the head of his cane to control Chris. Julia wonders if Chris may already have left with Donna. Barnabas airily dismisses this, assuring her that he knows Chris well enough to be sure that Donna is perfectly safe. In fact, Barnabas barely knows Chris at all, but he is so pleased with himself for having figured out who the werewolf is that we can see there wouldn’t be much point in reminding him of this. At his leisure, Barnabas sets out for the cottage, which he finds to be unoccupied and in disarray. Donna’s mauled corpse lies in the woods nearby.

We might wonder why Chris saw the pentagram on Carolyn and not on Donna during the scene in the study. Is the show telling us the pentagram is out of order as a warning system? If so, is it just breaking down from overuse, or is some other supernatural presence interfering with it? Or maybe it isn’t automatic, but is a message from some spirit that has guessed wrong this time? They don’t explain, and the pentagram has been a big enough part of the werewolf story up to this point that it produces a lot more confusion than you might expect.

Yesterday’s episode ended with a bewildered Chris finding Amy in the cottage. Amy was listening to a mysterious voice Chris could not hear. Chris’ bewilderment deepened when Amy obeyed the voice’s command to hurry away. He finally discovered that Amy lit a fire in his hearth and burned a shirt of his in it. Chris took us to the final blackout holding the scorched remains of his shirt, giving a look in the direction Amy had fled, and exclaiming “My shirt!” in a pained voice that would make anyone laugh.

Today’s episode opens with a reprise of that interaction, but it is played very differently. Instead of a light scene that ends with a note of comedy, we have a heavier confrontation that builds to a melodramatic shock. Chris is alarmed, not bewildered, to find Amy in his cottage, and his alarm mounts when she responds to the mysterious voice. When he goes to the hearth, he is forceful, apparently angry. He still exclaims “My shirt!” even though the wardrobe department did not provide a shirt, but his voice is not the high-pitched, defeated squawk that had made the end of yesterday’s installment so funny. This is a full-throated baritone shout. The more serious tone of the scene sets us up for an outing that is technically a comedy and is at several turns quite funny, but that finally concerns itself with a matter of life and death.

Donna is played by Beverly Hayes, in her only appearance on Dark Shadows. Miss Hayes’ IMDb page tells us that for a few months in 1965 she was a regular on a soap called A Flame in the Wind, that in 1968 and 1969 she had a recurring part on The Secret Storm, and that after her one shot on Dark Shadows she was absent from the screen for 41 years, returning in a 2010 production called Marathon. Since then she has been in other little-known independent films, including something from 2015 called House of Shadows, which sounds suspiciously like an imitation of Dark Shadows. She also has some writing credits. Donna is perfect as a one-shot, but Miss Hayes does such a good job with her I wish they’d cast her in other roles later on.

Episode 673: Urgent business

This episode rests squarely on the shoulders of eleven year old Denise Nickerson, playing the role of nine year old Amy Jennings. A performer of any age could take pride in the results.

We first see Amy in the predawn hours of a night when a werewolf is prowling the grounds of the great estate of Collinwood. The werewolf has attacked heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard; old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is out hunting him. In the opening sequence, Barnabas fired a shotgun at the werewolf without result, then hit him with his silver-headed cane and drove him off. Barnabas is still outside, still tracking the werewolf. Barnabas’ friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, is nervously pacing in the drawing room of the great house.

Amy comes downstairs. Julia sees her and demands to know why she is up and dressed at such an hour. Amy says she must go to the caretaker’s cottage on the estate, where her grownup brother Chris lives. Julia forbids her to go out. Julia saw the werewolf attack Carolyn, but says nothing about the incident. She tells Amy only that it is dangerous in the woods at night. Amy says that she had a dream from which she drew the conclusion that “Something is happening to [Chris,] and it’s happening now!” Neither Amy nor Julia knows that Chris is the werewolf, but they both know that Amy has a paranormal sensitivity to whatever is going on with Chris. Julia offers to go to the cottage if Amy will stay in the house. Amy gladly agrees, and Julia gets a gun and goes.

This quarrel could have been quite annoying. Julia is withholding vital information from Amy, who is in her turn insistent on doing something she could not possibly expect to be permitted. The actresses make it interesting. Amy stands very still, locks her eyes on Julia’s, and enunciates each word carefully, showing every sign of an earnest attempt to persuade her. When she cannot, she does not display anger or frustration or irritation. The only emotion she projects is a sense of urgency. Unlike children throwing tantrums, who make conflicting demands because they are in the grip of conflicting feelings, Nickerson leads us to believe that Amy is pursuing a single coherent objective. We expect her to be part of action that will advance the story.

Grayson Hall emphasizes Julia’s attentive response to Amy’s words and her reluctance to physically restrain her. It is still inexplicable that Julia fails to tell Amy about the attack on Carolyn and about the fact that Barnabas is walking around with a gun ready to shoot at figures moving in the darkness, but those failures don’t bother us as much as we might expect them to do. We see her taking seriously information which we know to be accurate, and this gives us grounds to hope that she will do something intelligent.

Julia gets to Chris’ cottage and back without being eaten by the werewolf or shot by Barnabas. At the cottage, she finds that the furniture has all been overturned and Chris is not in. Back home, she smiles and tells Amy that she saw Chris and he was fine. Julia’s lies convince Amy. She brightens immediately and happily goes back to bed. This really is an amazing moment of acting on Nickerson’s part; Amy’s mood switches in a second from dread and gloom to a big glowing smile. Executing that lift on command is the equivalent of faking a loud laugh and having the result sound natural.

The next morning, Amy mentions to Julia that she and Carolyn have plans to go into town. That leaves Julia no choice but to level with Amy about the werewolf attack. Amy is shocked that Carolyn was hurt, and even more shocked that she might have been killed. Julia assures her that the wounds Carolyn did suffer were minor and that she will be all right after some rest, but Amy is deeply affected. She looks directly into the camera and tells the audience that she did not want Carolyn to be harmed.

Amy tells us she is sorry that Carolyn was hurt. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the first months of Dark Shadows, strange and troubled boy David Collins was the only character who looked directly into the camera. He did it several times in those days, and actor David Henesy’s talent for the role of Creepy Little Kid always made it pay dividends. He stopped looking into the camera in the autumn of 1966 when David Collins stopped being a menace, and various other actors have been called on to break the fourth wall from time to time since. Since Amy joined the show, eye contact with the audience has become her province, and Nickerson manages to deliver a jolt every time they have her do it.

First-time viewers won’t know why Amy is so eager for us to know that she did not wish Carolyn ill, but the way she addresses herself to us leaves no doubt that Julia is missing the point when she makes conventional remarks about how no one wanted anything bad to happen to Carolyn, no one could have prevented it, etc etc. The camera stays on Amy as Julia burbles through these lines, and the particular sadness on her face confirms what she indicated by looking at us, that she knows more about the incident that Julia imagines.

Returning viewers know that Amy and David are falling under the power of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins, and that Quentin ordered them to send Carolyn out the night before so that she would no longer obstruct his plans. We also know that Quentin, who had for many weeks been confined to the little room in the long-deserted west wing of Collinwood where David and Amy first saw him several weeks ago, was the other day able to manifest himself in Chris’ cottage. He is gaining strength, and Amy and Chris’ presence on the estate is part of the reason.

Amy talks Julia into letting her go outside. Again, this could be an annoying scene. As Julia points out, the animal that attacked Carolyn has not been captured, and Barnabas has not returned. Further, regular viewers know that Amy’s promise to stay within sight of the front door is worthless, since she and David have often broken similar promises. But Julia knows that Amy has an extraordinary awareness of the situation, and she knows also that in #639 the werewolf ran away when he saw Amy. So all Grayson Hall has to do is look at Amy with a searching gaze and talk to her in a hushed voice, and we get the idea that she has come to the conclusion that the child will be able to take care of herself.

Amy wanders deep into the woods, and comes to a spot where we earlier saw the werewolf transform back into Chris. When that happened, the camera caught the hem of a white dress and panned up to show the face of the woman wearing it. At first it was a puzzle who that might be. Wicked witch Angelique often wore white dresses, but she is not connected to the ongoing stories, and the last time we saw her she was killed in a way that suggests she won’t come back to life at least until this thirteen week cycle is over. The ghost of the gracious Josette was known in the first year of the show as “the woman in white,” but we saw her quite recently, and she doesn’t have anything to do with Chris and Amy.

The figure turned out to be the ghost of someone named Beth. We have seen her only once before, in #646. She was with Quentin, and like him could exist only in a little room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house. But now she, too, is able to roam about the estate. When Amy comes to the spot where Chris transformed, Beth appears to her. She begins crying. Amy sounds like any other sweet little girl when she urges Beth not to cry, and then suddenly becomes quite a different person. Her face goes blank, and she declares in a flat voice that she knows what she must do. This isn’t such a tricky transition as the one Nickerson achieved when Amy cheered up in response to Julia’s lie, but it certainly is effective.

Amy goes to Chris’ cottage. He is out. She finds his bloodstained shirt, puts it in the fireplace, and sets it alight. Chris comes in and sees her. She embraces him, and tells him she must be going. He asks why, and she seems genuinely surprised by the question. “Can’t you hear her?” Chris says he can’t, Amy says she can, and she hurries away.

Chris looks at the fireplace. One sleeve of his shirt is hanging out, a fire hazard; he puts it into the center of the hearth. He examines it, and with dismay exclaims “My shirt!” Don Briscoe delivers that line with the timing and inflection of Jack Benny, and it is hilarious. Mrs Acilius and I laughed long and loud at it; we are convinced that the humor must have been intentional, at least on the part of actor Don Briscoe, probably on that of director Lela Swift, and possibly on that of writer Ron Sproat as well. The episode belongs to Nickerson, but that final line leaves us with a strong memory and a deep fondness for Briscoe as well.

Episode 672: And it was my mother’s voice

Today, everyone has the memory of a goldfish. Heiress Carolyn receives a telepathic message from her mother, the apparently-dead Liz, urging her to go home to the great house of Collinwood and stay inside in order to escape a terrible danger. A few minutes later, she has apparently forgotten the content of this message, as she goes back outside to check on Liz in her coffin.

During her brief stay in Collinwood, Carolyn talked with permanent houseguest Julia. Julia keeps telling her that Liz is dead and that the dead cannot communicate with the living, suggesting that she too has become a goldfish. Julia is a doctor, and Liz is entombed because she mistakenly declared her dead. She had made the same mistake about her several weeks before, and learned nothing from that experience. But she has also attended several séances, built two Frankenstein’s monsters, seen a number of ghosts, and spent a year and a half carrying on a one-sided romance with recovering vampire Barnabas. She also knows that in #592 and #593, Carolyn herself died and came back to life. So it is bizarre that she goes on about the finality of death and the impossibility of communication between the living and the dead.

Carolyn goes back to her mother’s crypt and is attacked by a werewolf. Liz knew she would be buried alive, and so insisted her coffin be equipped with a button that would ring bells everyone at Collinwood could hear. While Carolyn is confronting the werewolf, Liz overcomes her paralysis sufficiently to push this button. That brings Barnabas and Julia.

The werewolf paused in his attack on Carolyn when he saw her silver bracelet; that gave Julia and Barnabas time to arrive while Carolyn was still alive. Barnabas strikes him with the silver head of his cane, causing him to run off. When Carolyn tells of the werewolf’s fascination with the bracelet, Barnabas mentions that the head of the cane is also silver; he grows very thoughtful, apparently realizing that silver has a power over the werewolf. Yet later, when he goes to hunt for the werewolf, he takes a gun but nearly leaves the cane behind. He finally takes it, but his long hesitation shows that he, too, is suffering from goldfishism.

While still in the crypt, Julia had looked at Liz’ body and insisted she was dead. She wrote off the ringing of the bells as a coincidence, perhaps caused by some jostling during Carolyn’s encounter with the werewolf. Later, Liz gets out of the coffin and goes home to Collinwood. There, Julia, Barnabas, and Carolyn are astonished to see her. Julia examines her. After she finds that Liz has what is in Collinsport English called a “pulsebeat,” she seems willing to concede that she might be alive. She then starts giving orders which everyone willingly follows, because she is such a good doctor.

Liz remembers. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Liz is the one character whose brain seems to be in working order today. She can remember that her trouble started when her brother Roger’s wife Cassandra cast a spell on her. Barnabas and Julia know that Cassandra was in fact a wicked witch named Angelique, and that Barnabas has just returned from a trip back in time during which he destroyed Angelique. They assure her that Cassandra will never return. They can’t tell her why they are sure of this, because they, like the producers of Dark Shadows, have decided that Liz must never know what is really happening around her, lest she become an active participant in the plot. So all they can say is that they just know, and she is of course unconvinced.

It is a relief to wrap up the “Liz will be buried alive” storyline; that was dull from the beginning, and just got duller as it went. It didn’t help that we have seen Liz immobilized by depression twice before. This isn’t even the first time she has been rendered catatonic as the result of a curse placed by an undead blonde fire witch.

It’s also encouraging that Julia and Barnabas have met the werewolf and are engaged with him. They are the show’s chief protagonists, and nothing can really move without their involvement. Now that they are involved with the werewolf, we can stop spinning our wheels.

Episode 671: We promised Maggie we’d be good children

An extraordinarily uneventful outing. In yesterday’s episode it looked like heiress Carolyn would go to visit Chris the werewolf as he is in the middle of a transformation and would be attacked. But she didn’t go. Governess Maggie did go to Chris’ cottage, and at the end of the episode it looked like she might be attacked. As we open today, she is there and he is about to change, but she leaves and gets home safely while he is still in human form.

It again looks like Carolyn might be attacked when she walks through the woods to visit the mausoleum where her mother, matriarch Liz, is entombed. Liz was alive when she was mistakenly buried and is still alive now. Liz is unable to move or speak, but she somehow shares the audience’s thought that Carolyn might possibly be attacked. We see her in her coffin and hear her interior monologue as she thinks about the “terrible danger” her daughter is in.

As it happens, Carolyn makes it home fine. Later she goes out again; we see the werewolf prowling nearby, again raising the theoretical possibility that she will be attacked. But Carolyn hears Liz’ voice in her head, a telepathic warning that she should hasten off. The werewolf also reacts as if he can hear Liz’ voice, and he goes off in another direction. The screen goes dark and the credits start rolling. The werewolf hasn’t attacked anyone and no one has learned anything about him.

It appears that the werewolf is trying to figure out where Liz’ voice is coming from.

It’s kind of interesting that Liz can transmit telepathic messages now. She could use a supernatural power or two if she’s going to get into the swing of things on the show. It’s also interesting that the werewolf seems to be able to overhear the messages Liz sends to Carolyn. Chris’ little sister Amy lives in the great house of Collinwood now, and along with strange and troubled boy David she is falling under the power of the evil ghost of Quentin Collins. Quentin communicated with Amy before he could get through to David. David was miffed by this, since “Quentin is my ancestor.” That suggested that Quentin will turn out to be Amy’s ancestor as well, making her and Chris members of the Collins family. If so, that might explain why Chris, even in his lupine form, was able to pick up a telepathic transmission Liz directed to her blood relatives.

There is a wardrobe malfunction in this one of a type that showed up several times in the first year of the show. When Carolyn makes her first entrance, she walks down the stairs in the foyer. At each step, Nancy Barrett’s chest thrusts into her sweater with results that would probably not have made it on the air had anyone from the ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices been watching the show. In the early days, they put the actresses into very form-fitting tops often enough that I thought they were challenging the audience to take an adult attitude towards female anatomy, and so I did my best to rise to that challenge by leaving it unremarked when we could see the exact shape of their breasts. But it’s a rare occurrence now, so I think we have to list it among production faults.