Episode 850: That’s your train, lady

In June 1966, Dark Shadows opened with a train carrying well-meaning governess Victoria Winters and dashing action hero Burke Devlin from New York City to Collinsport, Maine. Vicki and Burke first met at the train station in Collinsport. When she found that no one was waiting to take her to the great house of Collinwood, Burke volunteered to drive her there. We haven’t seen the train station since, and all subsequent references to mass transit to and from Collinsport in the 1960s have been about buses. That is to some extent an adjustment to real-world history. In our universe, passenger train service to central Maine had already stopped by 1966.

Now, the show is set in 1897. Devastatingly handsome reprobate Quentin Collins has talked the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris into joining him on the 6 PM train from Collinsport to NYC. Amanda and Quentin will remind viewers who have been with the show from the beginning of Vicki and Burke. Quentin is no hero, but he serves the plot function Burke did in those early days, antagonizing all the authority figures and fascinating all the women and children. Amanda takes part in some sleazy schemes, while Vicki was eventually forced to be an impossibly stainless model of virtue. But as Vicki was on a quest to learn the truth about her biological parents and felt she could know nothing about herself until she found out who they were, Amanda is tormented that she has no memories and no information about herself dating beyond two years into the past. And as in the first week Vicki was a savvy New York street kid who could keep smiling while she fended off the indecent advances of the lecherous Roger Collins, so Amanda sees right through the equally lecherous but toweringly hypocritical Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask.

Quentin and Amanda agree to meet at the train station. Amanda has to hide from Trask and from a repulsive little man named Charles Delaware Tate, and so she will spend the afternoon in a vacant house on Pine Road where a friend of Quentin’s is squatting. Quentin will settle his affairs at Collinwood. When they made this plan, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that Dark Shadows has so consistently shown that when its characters leave separately they do not meet each other at their intended destination that it would be a surprise if they get on the train together. Indeed, from the time Amanda leaves Collinwood the suspense is not about whether their reunion will be thwarted, but how.

Tate steals a portrait of Quentin. He knows that the portrait has magical powers and is of the utmost importance to Quentin. Quentin discovers that the portrait is missing. He writes a note saying that he may not be able to get to the train station by 6 PM and asks his nine year old niece, Nora Collins, to take it to Amanda at the house on Pine Road. Nora agrees to do so.

Quentin goes to Tate’s and demands he give the portrait back. They get into a fistfight. Quentin knocks Tate out and searches the house.

Trask catches Nora on her way to the house on Pine Road. He forces her to give him the note. He reads it, and goes to the house himself. He and Amanda have a confrontation. She tells Trask that she first approached him as part of a con game she was ashamed to take part in, but when she saw him leering at her she decided that he deserved to be cheated. He furiously denies being a lecher and she calls him a liar. Trask can intimidate most people into silence, so much so that his scenes are often suffocating to watch, and it is glorious to see Amanda dump the whole truth on him and not back down.

Trask does get in one more lie. He claims that he just saw Quentin getting ready to go out on a date with his other fiancée, Angelique. Amanda doesn’t believe him but she does know about Angelique. She also told Quentin that she wasn’t convinced she was right for him, and that if he didn’t show up she would understand that he had decided they didn’t have a future together after all. So when at the conclusion the conductor sees Amanda standing on the platform by herself and tells her that it’s time to get on the train, we are to assume that she thinks it is over between her and Quentin.