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.
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