This script badly needed another trip through the typewriter before it fell into the hands of the cast and production staff.
We start in a mysterious room that intermittently materializes in a disused corner of the great house of Collinwood. It is stocked with toys appropriate for small children, and is known to teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes as “The Playroom.” Hallie sees a boy in clothing from the nineteenth century who appears to be David making vigorous use of the rocking horse in the room. He will not respond to her in any way, so she leaves the room and goes to the hallway. There, she is shocked to find David wearing his usual clothes and smiling at her.
This bit is video copied and inserted from the end of #1080. After the opening title, Hallie explains to David that she saw him in the room studying a model ship that is there. This is not remotely true. We saw the room throughout Hallie’s whole time there, and at no point did the boy whom she took to be David look at the model ship. Nor did we see the ship, for that matter. This episode was taped four days before #1080, so they may have forgotten about Hallie’s lines until they spliced in the opening, at which point it was too late. In view of the pressures of time and budget to which the makers of the show were subject that may be understandable, but it can hardly be considered a good start.
There is a lot more business involving Hallie and David. They keep taking turns being possessed by ghosts and then returning to themselves, not knowing what they said or did. David Henesy is a good enough comic actor to get laughs each time this happens to David Collins, but it does not advance the story or deepen our understanding of the characters. Since it is a repeat of a story we saw a year and a half ago when other ghosts took possession of David and his friend Amy, it doesn’t even come as a surprise.
Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins learns that his distant cousin, Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes, has had a disappointment. Carolyn asked an astrologer named Sebastian Shaw to draw up her horoscope. Sebastian has abandoned the task partway through and refuses to finish it. Barnabas recently took a trip to the year 1995, Collinwood was still in ruins as the result of an unexplained disaster that will take place later in this current year, 1970. In 1995, a crazed Carolyn wrote a note with six cryptic phrases which Barnabas took to be clues as to the events that would precede the disaster. One of those phrases was “The unfinished horoscope.” When Barnabas hears what Sebastian has done, he decides that by persuading him to finish the horoscope he might be able to prevent the disaster.
We cut to Sebastian’s place, where we see that Sam Hall was not the only person having difficulty writing today. We zoom in on a folder labeled “CAROLYN STODRARD HAWKES.” The camera lingers over the big block letters for so long that you could have read them even on a 1970 television picking up the low-quality signal typical of ABC affiliates:
Barnabas is unable to persuade Sebastian to finish the horoscope. Sebastian declares that “The only Schumann that tells me what I must do is me!” and walks out of his own parlor, leaving Barnabas alone there. Barnabas looks bewildered, perhaps wondering why Sebastian thinks his name is Schumann.
The door opens, and a woman enters. When Carolyn telephoned Sebastian yesterday, someone other than him answered, so we might suspect someone else lives there. But there was no hint as to who that might be. In fact, it is someone whose name Barnabas knows very well. She is Roxanne Drew. They have never met, and she doesn’t know him from Schumann. But before his trip to 1995, Barnabas was staying in an alternate universe and he got to know Roxanne’s counterpart there. He somehow fell in love with her and has been pining for her ever since. He greets this Doppelgänger by name, with a triumphant smile.
I should mention that a copy of the book Astrology by Louis MacNeice figures prominently in these episodes. I’ve never read that book myself, but I have an acquaintance in common with MacNeice. I was a graduate student in Classics at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1990s, and one of my professors was Peter Green. As a young poet in England in the years after the Second World War, Peter had been something of a protege of MacNeice’s. Since astrology is a way of inscribing the passage of time with meaning, and since Dark Shadows is so much about time travel that it insisted on calling the alternate universe where Barnabas met the first Roxanne “Parallel Time,” I think it would be apt to quote MacNeice’s “Meeting Point“:
Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with the one pulse
(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):
Time was away and somewhere else.
And they were neither up nor down;
The stream’s music did not stop
Flowing through heather, limpid brown,
Although they sat in a coffee shop
And they were neither up nor down.
The bell was silent in the air
Holding its inverted poise—
Between the clang and clang a flower,
A brazen calyx of no noise:
The bell was silent in the air.
The camels crossed the miles of sand
That stretched around the cups and plates;
The desert was their own, they planned
To portion out the stars and dates:
The camels crossed the miles of sand.
Time was away and somewhere else.
The waiter did not come, the clock
Forgot them and the radio waltz
Came out like water from a rock:
Time was away and somewhere else.
Her fingers flicked away the ash
That bloomed again in tropic trees:
Not caring if the markets crash
When they had forests such as these,
Her fingers flicked away the ash.
God or whatever means the Good
Be praised that time can stop like this,
That what the heart has understood
Can verify in the body’s peace
God or whatever means the Good.
Time was away and she was here
And life no longer what it was,
The bell was silent in the air
And all the room one glow because
Time was away and she was here.
(Louis MacNeice, “Meeting Point,” 1939, as reprinted in The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice [Oxford University Press, 1967])
Dark Shadows Commentary 