Episode 819: You’re a bit of all right, you are!

Evil sorcerer Count Petofi tells the disastrously repressed Charity Trask that he will show her a vision of her own death. He’s tried that twice before on other characters, with mixed success, and it doesn’t work at all with Charity. He can’t see the visions he causes her to have; when she describes them to him, he is afraid that she has seen, not her own impending demise, but his. He casts a spell on her and rushes out.

Petofi meets his boyfriend Aristide and takes him on a shopping trip through the cemetery. What he wants with the body he orders Aristide to exhume is not made clear.

The importance of the episode is in the spell Petofi casts on Charity. He effectively murders her. For the rest of the segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897, Nancy Barrett will play, not Charity, but Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl who came to the great estate of Collinwood as the fiancée of the daffy Carl Collins. The show often tends towards the somber, so it is a joyous thing to see Charity/ Pansy enthusiastically shake her moneymaker.

It is sometimes said that Petofi makes Charity believe that she is Pansy, but this is not correct. Charity never met Pansy, and barely knew the late Carl. She certainly never saw Pansy perform on stage. Yet she sings Pansy’s theme song word for word and note for note as she did, and does the dance that went with it just as Pansy did it. She has Pansy’s garish sense of style, her not-very-convincing East London accent, and her memories of Carl. Petofi has caused Pansy to take possession of Charity and to live again through her body, as he has caused David Collins, strange and troubled boy indigenous to the mid-twentieth century, to take possession of his grandfather Jamison Collins. While David’s spirit is killing Jamison’s body, Pansy seems to be having a wonderful time in Charity’s person, certainly far more than Charity ever had herself. As for Charity’s mind, that seems no longer to exist.