Month: February 2026

Episode 943: Moon Poppy

Maggie Evans, governess in the great house on the estate of Collinwood, is being held prisoner in a big mausoleum somewhere. Her captor appears to be a young man, but is actually a monster from beyond space and time. He is associated with the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who are planning to take the earth away from humankind with the aid of some people whom they control and whom they have formed into a cult. The cultists call the monster Jeb, even though when we first saw him he said he wanted to be called Jabe.

Jabe orders Maggie to open a wooden box and look inside. He makes it clear to her that she is supposed to be under his control after she has done this, so she plays along. He lets her go, with orders that she is to spy on old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, a leader of the cult who has become disaffected from it and is working against Jabe.

Back in the great house, Maggie tells Barnabas what happened. Barnabas’ best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, enters; he tells Julia that Maggie is their new ally in the fight against the Leviathans. When Barnabas was still loyal to the Leviathans, he tried to absorb Julia into the cult. That effort failed, and Barnabas explained that “certain people” were immune from absorption because of their “genetic structure.” Since Julia is the only Jewish character on the show, this sounded jarringly like a claim that the Leviathans were a restricted club. Evidently Maggie is now among those “certain people.” Since Maggie has a Welsh name and is played by a Minnesota-born actress of Scandinavian descent, that retroactively takes some of the anti-Semitic edge off Barnabas’ earlier remark for viewers who remember that episode (unless she converted.)

Maggie had taken an apologetic tone when she told Julia she wanted to be alone with Barnabas; Julia is very circumspect when she comes in at the end of their conversation. For a long time now, the show has been working on the idea that Julia wants a romantic relationship with Barnabas and is sad that he does not share her desire; for the last couple of weeks, they have been hinting that Barnabas and Maggie are getting pretty cozy. Regular viewers will be interested to see Grayson Hall playing Julia being a good sport about losing Barnabas to Maggie, and Kathryn Leigh Scott playing Maggie wishing she didn’t have to hurt her friend’s feelings.

We learned yesterday that Jabe is vulnerable to werewolves. As luck would have it, there is a werewolf at large in the Collinsport area. He is Chris Jennings, and Barnabas and Julia have been trying to cure him of the effects of his curse. He had been spending the nights of the full moon in a cell at Windcliff, a mental hospital Julia is in charge of, but last month came back to the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of Collinwood. He couldn’t stand being cooped up, and chose to go back to his old practice of killing someone at random every month.

Julia and Barnabas don’t know that Chris is a weapon they can use against Jabe, and they want him to go back to Windcliff. The moon will be full tonight, so they are particularly anxious. But his onetime fiancée, Sabrina Stuart, has a different idea. She has been in contact with an expert on lycanthropy, and he has shipped her the only surviving specimen of the Moon Poppy. She brings the potted plant to Chris and tells him that the flower will open when the moon starts to rise. If he eats it while it is blooming, he will be cured. Otherwise, he will lose his chance- the plant will be dead before morning.

Sabrina pleads with Chris. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Chris’ transformation begins with moonrise, and once he has become the wolf he has no will of his own. When Barnabas stops by to take him to Windcliff, he points this out to Chris. But Chris is determined to try Sabrina’s cure. He is like every addict who talks himself into believing that this time, it will be different. Of course his determination fails him at the last moment, and by the time he can reach for the opening flower, it is a hairy paw, not a hand, that stretches towards it.

The flower cure and Chris the unlikable protagonist are both borrowings from the 1941 film The Wolf Man. Jabe lives in an antique shop; there’s an antique shop in that movie, too. There were some hints early on that werewolves were a threat to the Leviathans; evidently they had planned to bring these two stories together all along.

Closing Miscellany

Sometimes the closing credits are on cards, one after another; other times, they are on a continuous roll. Through the first year of the show, when they were on a roll costume supplier Ohrbach’s would be misspelled “Orhbach’s.” We haven’t seen that misspelling for a long time, but it’s back today. It will keep cropping up for the rest of the series.

Barnabas and Julia find a fake letter from Maggie saying that she’s been away visiting her Aunt Louise in Quebec. This is the first time we’ve heard of any members of Maggie’s family other than her late parents. Since the letter is a phony meant to cover up her abduction and neither Julia nor Barnabas seems to have heard of Louise before, it is possible there is no such person. Still, Maggie has been a major character since the first episode, so it does get longtime viewers thinking about how little we know about her background.

This is only marginally relevant to the episode, but I can’t resist bringing it up. The other day, a Twitter user named Zach Wilson (whose bio describes him as “watcher of TV, all of it, one episode at a time”) posted an image of pages of TV Guide from 22 April 1966 with the question “What would you watch?” An Educational TV station in whatever market it was running a WGBH-Boston produced telecast of the Boston Theater Company’s production of Gertrude Stein’s “Yes is for a Very Young Man,” starring Lisa Blake Richards. The Harvard Crimson had reviewed the stage production in November 1965; they said that “the play was lousy,” but they praised the cast for making the most of a bad script, singling out Miss Richards for the “outstanding job” she did “with a whining, pathetic character.” Sabrina isn’t exactly Lady MacBeth, either, and Miss Richards had her work cut out for her finding a way to make us want to see more of her.

Episode 942: Michael grown

Our Story So Far

The current A story revolves around a race of Elder Gods called the Leviathan People. The Leviathans have taken over the minds of several characters and formed them into a cult devoted to advancing their plan to return to Earth and supplant humankind. As part of this plan, a monster has taken up residence in the room above the antique shop in the village of Collinsport. The monster’s true form is bizarre, terrifying, and unseen. It can assume other forms, and as it was growing it went through the shapes of a series of children. Now its human guise is that of a man in his twenties who, when first we saw him, invited people to “Call me Jabe.”

Jabe is a blowhard, impatient, petulant, and unreflective. He is keen to take heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard as his bride and make her into the same kind of monster he is. Carolyn’s distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, was the Leviathans’ first choice as leader of the cult, and has now become disaffected from it. Working with another distant cousin, the perennially youthful Quentin Collins, Barnabas has for the moment put a stop to Jabe’s plans for Carolyn. Jabe has killed a couple of people, including Carolyn’s father Paul Stoddard and Sheriff Davenport, and plans to kill many more. He is fairly sure that Barnabas is working against him, but is afraid that if he strikes out at Barnabas his own superiors among the Leviathans will punish him. Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and her cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, are devoted members of the cult, as is Quentin’s great-granddaughter Amy Jennings, but none of them knows about Jabe’s plans for Carolyn.

When Jabe appeared to be a thirteen year old boy named Michael, he spent a substantial amount of time bullying David. He has continued this in his adult form, breaking David’s leg for no reason to which the audience was made privy. David’s governess, Maggie Evans, saw Michael’s mistreatment of David and tried to stop it, and in response he locked her up and tried to kill her. No one has told Maggie that Michael and Jabe are the same person, but she does know that that Jabe is at fault for David’s injury. She has also, in the last several days, seemed to be getting very cozy with Barnabas. Jabe has abducted Maggie and has her locked up in a big mausoleum someplace.

Meet Bruno

Jabe is in the antique shop when a man wearing a fur coat enters. Regular viewers recognize the actor as Michael Stroka. For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897, and Stroka played the sadistic Aristide, henchman to sorcerer Count Petofi. Petofi was a witty and whimsical villain, and Aristide spent a great deal of time as his straight man. Aristide also gave Stroka opportunities to show off his own formidable gift for deadpan comedy.

Bruno and Jabe. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The fur coat is so specific to 1970 that the sight of Stroka wearing it means that the show has very literally returned to “contemporary dress.” His character introduces himself to Jabe as Bruno, and says that he will help him in any way. Bruno shows considerable knowledge of the story so far; the other cultists didn’t come with that knowledge, leading us to wonder whether he is one of them or is some kind of supernatural being. As the episode goes on, we see that Bruno shares Aristide’s fascination with knives and his glee in threatening to kill and disfigure pretty girls, and is also about as ineffective when he sets about doing Jeb’s dirty work as Aristide was when he tried to do Petofi’s. So however he came to know what he knows, it seems safe to dismiss the idea that he is anything other than what Aristide was.

David and Barnabas

At the great house of Collinwood, David enters by means of wheelchair. He and Barnabas talk about Maggie’s unexplained absence. They consider the possibility that Jabe might be responsible for it.

Just the other day, adult characters not in on the secret of the Leviathan cult mentioned that David did not seem like “the same little boy” he had been. He isn’t a little boy at all- he’s thirteen. Barnabas talks to him in this scene as one adult to another. After all these years, it’s refreshing to see a sign that David might eventually be allowed to grow up.

Maggie’s First Tormenter

Maggie awakens to find herself in a mausoleum. Before she can make her way to the door, the late Sheriff Davenport enters. Jabe has raised him from the dead and made him his slave. Your typical zombie is an inarticulate sort, who, if moved to speech at all, might emit a faint groan of “Brai-i-i-ins.” Davenport is an exception to this norm. He is positively chatty. He talks about how uncomfortable his grave was, about his sympathy for Maggie, and even starts in with a story about his wife. The guy just won’t shut up.

David and Jabe

David goes to the antique shop. How he got himself from Collinwood to the village in a manual wheelchair designed for use in a hospital is not explained. He tells Jabe about his conversation with Barnabas, including the part where Barnabas told him to study the holy book of the Leviathans and look for information about Jabe’s weaknesses. He says that he found a passage saying that Jabe is vulnerable to werewolves. He didn’t tell Barnabas about this, but came straight to the shop. Jabe is terrified by the mention of werewolves, and relieved David didn’t talk to Barnabas. He tells him not to trust Barnabas.

Jabe and David. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is a werewolf on the show, Amy’s brother Chris Jennings, who inherited the curse from their great-grandfather Quentin. Quentin’s own lycanthropy was put into abeyance by the same magic spell that immunized him against aging. We haven’t seen Chris for about a month, when there was a full moon and he killed a character left over from an exhausted storyline. There were some hints early in the current story that Chris represented a threat to the Leviathans, and this is now confirmed.

Maggie’s Second Tormenter

Bruno shows up in the crypt where the late Sheriff Davenport is haranguing Maggie. He sends Davenport to guard the door. Maggie asks Bruno if he is dead, too. He assures her he isn’t, and is very unpleasant to her. Aristide was a lot of fun when he had someone to play off of, but where Petofi was sprightly, Jeb is monotonous. While Aristide would set his sights on victims who gave him more resistance than he bargained for, Maggie’s situation makes her tense and unwilling to volunteer anything. Maggie holds her ground and refuses to answer any of Bruno’s questions, so that he cannot afford to murder her as he had intended to do. That’s logical behavior on her part and a happy ending for the audience, but it does keep Bruno from doing anything to make us want to see him again.

Bruno meets David

Bruno goes to the antique shop. Jeb introduces him to David. He pushes David out of the shop with a brisk movement that is Stroka’s first opportunity to get a laugh as Bruno. He reports his failure to Jabe, who is too afraid of werewolves to rage at him as he has raged at everyone else who has told him things he didn’t want to hear.

Maggie’s Third Tormenter

Jabe goes to the crypt and sends Sheriff Davenport back out. He confronts Maggie, who tells him she recognizes him as “Michael grown up,” using the exact phrase David had used with Barnabas earlier. He tells her she will be all right if she opens a wooden box he has brought with him and looks in it. Returning viewers know that this is “the Leviathan Box,” and that it was by opening it and looking inside that Amy came under the power of the cult.

Episode 941: Barnabas, Quentin, and the Stopped Clock

Yesterday and today, a clock stopped at 8:00 featured prominently in shots when it was pivotal to the story that it was not 8:00. The clock is part of the merchandise in an antique shop, so it is understandable it does not run, but it is rather odd to see someone telling people that he didn’t wait for 8:00 when a clock face displaying that time looms over his shoulder. Today, it is important that a scene in the shop is taking place after 10:00. We open that scene with a view of a different clock, one that reads 10:20, but before long the stopped clock is back in full view.

At the great house of Collinwood, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is rushing to the front door. Governess Maggie Evans asks him where he is going. He says that he is going to the village of Collinsport. She says she is going there as well and that she will ride in with him. He says that he can’t take her. He refuses to explain why. The other day, Maggie and Barnabas held hands and leaned in close to each other, talking softly about how important their friendship was. This sudden refusal to communicate pulls Maggie up short. She demands to know whether Barnabas trusts her. He says he does. She marches up to him and orders him to “Prove it!” The tight aspect ratio of old time TV combines with director Henry Kaplan’s habit of putting the actors as close to the camera as he can get them to make it seem, in the moment, that the feelings Maggie expects Barnabas to prove are of an erotic nature.

Hubba-hubba. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie has been the governess at Collinwood for over a year now. Her predecessor, the well-meaning Vicki Winters, was written out of the show for a number of reasons, not least their inability to figure out an intelligible relationship between her and Barnabas. There was a long period when Vicki the character seemed to know that she was on a show starring Barnabas and she kept trying to involve herself in his storyline, even inviting herself to spend the night at his house. In theory, Barnabas was in love with Vicki and yearned for her, but no matter how flagrantly she threw herself at him he never did anything about it. Eventually they paired her off with an intolerable jerk, and the two of them disappeared into a rift in the space-time continuum.

Vicki never did take quite as direct an approach with Barnabas as Maggie does today. No matter how deeply Vicki drove the ball into his court, she always counted on him to show at least a little initiative. Maggie knows better than to rely on Barnabas, and she corners him into agreeing to see her and give some kind of explanation when he is done with the mission he is concealing from her, at 10:00 sharp.

Fans often fret about the “Vickification” Maggie undergoes while she is serving as governess. When it became clear that Vicki wasn’t going to matter to Barnabas, she couldn’t be allowed to affect the A story in any way. To keep her on the sidelines, she was written as an ever greater ninny.

Maggie is pretty bad at her job- she’s a squish when the children don’t want to do their lessons, which is every time we’ve seen her with them. But she’s still good with grownups, she’s smart, and she’s emphatically sexy. So she isn’t going to go down into irrelevance without a fight.

Maggie isn’t the only character insisting on her place in the story. A few weeks ago, it seemed that matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard would be a part of the main plot for the first time in ages when she was inducted into a secret cult serving a mysterious race of Elder Gods who are trying to regain control of the Earth. But she has drifted back to the sidelines, and has yet to meet the cult’s leader in his current form.

Barnabas was Liz’ preceptor in the cult, and she is indignant with him for the decline in her part:

Liz: Barnabas, I must speak to you.

Barnabas: Not now, Elizabeth.

Liz: Have I done something wrong? Just tell me that.

Barnabas: No, nothing at all.

Liz: I’ve tried to follow the rules, as many as I know. You yourself can testify to my faithfulness. But David sees our leader, you’ve seen him.

Barnabas: Jabez?

Liz: Is that what he calls himself now? Well, no matter what name, he’s the same boy who used to play here. Surely he must remember me with some affection.

Barnabas: He is only recently matured enough to appear to us.

Liz: Why have I been ignored? Barnabas? You haven’t answered my question.

Barnabas: You’ll meet him soon enough but now is not the time.

Liz: Does the book specify when I am to meet him? Is that why you’re against it now?

During the show’s costume drama segments, Joan Bennett got to play dynamic roles, but she has been excluded from the action in the contemporary parts for so long that she has a tremendous amount of passion to bring to this scene. It is great to see her cut loose for once.