We are in the fifth week of a segment set in a different universe than the one where Dark Shadows spent its first 196 weeks. There are enough stories to keep everyone busy all day every day, and almost all of those stories are working quite well right now.
The only exception is the one that dominates the action today. In #994, we learned that a man named Dameon Edwards used to be a frequent visitor to the great estate of Collinwood. Dameon hasn’t been seen or heard from in about a year. He’s dead, as it happens, and his ghost has been popping up and making various people uncomfortable.
Since the first thing we had ever heard about Dameon was that he was dead, we were off to a rocky start with him. The main continuity had a great success with Quentin Collins, who was introduced the same way. But Quentin was not only a member of the Collins family that is central to the show, he figured first as a series of weird and frightening events in the lives of children David Collins and Amy Jennings, characters we know and care about. Dameon’s only background is that he was one of many ex-boyfriends of Angelique Collins, the late and recently reanimated wife of Quentin’s counterpart. His actions are just a bunch of not-particularly scary special effects that are witnessed by people who have either been brought on so that they can worry about them, such as sleazy musician Bruno Hess and uptight butler Mr Trask, or who have bigger problems, such as Quentin and Angelique.
I’ve speculated in previous posts that this was not the original plan for Dameon. Maybe they planned to develop more of a connection between him and the action, and just couldn’t fit the necessary material into the first 13 scripts of the “Parallel Time” segment. Or maybe they did not intend to introduce a new character, but the counterpart of someone we know from the other continuity. Whatever they may have hoped to do, what they actually did falls absolutely flat.
To the extent that Dameon is the counterpart to anyone in the other continuity, it would be Quentin’s ghost. Indeed, today he leads Parallel Quentin to a room that reminds us of the one from which Quentin’s ghost began his reign of terror in late 1968 and early 1969. As 1969 went on, the living Quentin became an important character. Due to a trip back in time and some magic, he was prevented from dying and immunized against aging. The people he had haunted remembered the ghost, but the living Quentin was also around. Eventually they started to treat the ghost as a separate being from the Quentin who was a regular fixture of the cast of characters. So I suppose they might have intended to have Quentin’s ghost cross over into the current continuity, confusing David Selby when he saw himself wearing mutton chop sideburns, a Victorian-era suit, and a sardonic grin while he refused to speak. But that kind of thing was still a stretch for viewers when they did it on Twin Peaks twenty years later, and would have been a big ask for a daytime audience to follow in 1970.
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