Evil sorcerer Count Petofi has cast a spell causing his mind to take over the body of rakish Quentin Collins, while Quentin is confined to Petofi’s own body. So David Selby begins playing a youthful and handsome Petofi, while Thayer David plays an aging and pudgy Quentin.
In their post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri use a wide variety of expressions to refer to the characters Thayer David and David Selby play today. I will just call Thayer David’s character P-Quentin and David Selby’s Q-Petofi.
Both of those actors give superb performances today; David Selby makes Q-Petofi’s preening arrogance suitably repellent, while the 42 year old Thayer David shows us P-Quentin reduced to the total helplessness of a despised man in extreme old age. There is a scene that Mrs Acilius and I found particularly hard to watch when Q-Petofi’s henchman Aristide takes the thick glasses without which P-Quentin is effectively blind and holds them away from him.
Q-Petofi and Aristide’s gleeful cruelty to P-Quentin make us wonder how the count and his henchman feel about the body they are looking at. The show’s earlier body swap story, in which vampire Barnabas Collins had hoped to die and come back to life in the form of Frankenstein’s monster Adam, led Adam to ask Barnabas in #587 “How could you hate yourself so much that you wanted to change your body?” We hadn’t known that that the count hated himself at all until we saw this scene, but he must have done to take such delight in tormenting P-Quentin, and Aristide’s revelry shows that he, too, harbors more hostility to his master than he ever dared expose.
P-Quentin staggers away from the lair of Q-Petofi and Aristide and meets broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi in the woods. He tries to explain his true identity to Magda, who has experience with magic and has for some time now been his ally. But Magda’s fear of the count keeps her from listening to the far-fetched tale, and she rushes off.
P-Quentin makes his way to the door of his home, the great house of Collinwood. He stands there, and we hear his thoughts, in David Selby’s voice. He tells himself he cannot go in, because no one there would believe him if he told them who he was. He slinks off to the caretaker’s cottage, where he meets maidservant Beth, who is his sometime fiancée. He tries to tell her the story, but she too is terrified of the count. When Q-Petofi shows up, she leaves with him.
Magda is a wonderful character, and what we have seen has given us every reason to hope she will be a substantial part of the show for a while yet. Unfortunately, this is her final on-screen appearance. We will hear her voice once more, six weeks from now. The show has always been visually ambitious, and lately they’ve managed to pull some neat tricks with videotape that led me to hope we would see at least one scene in which Grayson Hall appears opposite herself as both Magda and time-traveling physician Julia Hoffman. When Hall appeared in the 1970 film End of the Road, she said that it was a relief from playing Julia, to whom she apparently referred as “that tight-ass doctor.” Magda is earthy enough that it would have been fun to see how Hall would have used her to demonstrate the same attitude towards Julia, even if she had to stick to words approved by the ABC network’s Standards and Practices office, and Julia’s reaction to Magda would doubtless have been just as much fun.
Dark Shadows Commentary 