Ever since she came to the estate of Collinwood in #844, Kitty Soames, the dowager Countess of Hampshire, has been having psychotic breaks. Regular viewers know that these are supernatural in origin. The late Josette DuPrés Collins is taking possession of Kitty.
As Kitty continues turning into Josette, so rakish libertine Quentin Collins has begun turning into sorcerer Count Petofi. Josette has been dead for 101 years, but Petofi is alive and squatting in an abandoned mill on the old North Road in the village of Collinsport. Petofi’s magical powers are immense, but he is vulnerable to the Rroma people, who have reason to hate him and have been hunting him for a century. He has cast a spell that will cause him and Quentin to switch bodies. We see the first effects of this spell today.
Petofi knew Kitty’s late husband quite well. We learned in #844 that he persecuted the Earl and drove him to suicide; we learned also that Kitty was left penniless. During a conversation with Kitty today in the drawing room at Collinwood, Quentin switches into Petofi mode and confronts her with these facts. She slaps him, and he reverts to himself. He is bewildered by the fact that she slapped him, and cannot remember saying anything. This is just how Kitty is after one of her Josette moments- she doesn’t even know that they happened. Kitty tells Quentin that “If you don’t remember, neither do I.”
I clapped and cheered when she said this. The writers of Dark Shadows rarely trust their characters with such simple lines. Most of them would get flustered and say something compromising, and even the very smartest of them, such as Julia Hoffman, MD, would likely make up a cover story that would be at risk of disproof. That Kitty can make the perfect response leaves me sad that she is so clearly meant to be a short-timer. Perhaps we can hope that she will stick around for a while after she has fully become Josette, and that she will show us a new side of that character.
There’s also a laugh-out-loud funny moment in this one when Petofi is talking to his henchman Aristide. Once he is in the form of Quentin, he plans to travel forward in time from 1897 to 1969. Julia came from that year a while ago, and was dressed in the costume of the period. Petofi disapproves of her look, and says that he can’t believe that men’s fashions will be as degraded. If he’d known how American men would actually dress in the years following 1969, he might have surrendered to the Rroma!
Dark Shadows Commentary 