Teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes are intermittently subject to possession by the ghosts of Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes. They fear that the ghosts will soon take them over permanently, erasing their own personalities once and for all. We have seen the future, and know that unless something changes not only will the bodies of Hallie and David become vessels for Carrie and Tad, but those bodies will die and the ghosts will haunt the uninhabitable ruins of the great house of Collinwood for years to come.
Previously, Tad and Carrie had been unaware of David and Hallie. When one of them was possessed, the ghost would not know whom the other meant when addressing them by the name of the living person. But yesterday Carrie and Tad simultaneously took possession of Hallie and David, and they talked to each other about how much they liked them and how puzzled they were that they were afraid of them. They went to the ghost of their governess, Daphne Harridge, and asked her if she knew why David and Hallie were afraid of them. For a moment we might have hoped that communication would take place and the story of the haunting would finally pick up steam, but that hope was dashed when Daphne responded to Tad and Carrie with silence. Daphne had been silent in her interactions with the living characters until Hallie and David heard her laugh in a dream they both had in #1082. It’s depressing that she can’t talk even to her fellow ghosts.
Any hopes we may have had for Hallie or Carrie also suffered yesterday from Kathleen Cody’s poor performance. Miss Cody gets a lot of hate from fandom, much of it unfair. She is good sometimes. But called upon to draw a bright line between the frightened Hallie and the cheerful Carrie, she went way overboard in both parts. The excessively ebullient Carrie is easy to ignore, while the heavily distraught Hallie is tiresome in the extreme. Even the usually reliable David Henesy occasionally got caught up in Miss Cody’s hamminess and overplayed David Collins. He pulled himself back each time, but it is hard to look forward to heaven knows how much more of this story when that keeps happening.
Today we get another David and Hallie/ Tad and Carrie episode, and it is little better than yesterday’s. Miss Cody is even more monotonous than she was yesterday. Mr Henesy does keep from following her into the dead end where she is stuck, and he manages to introduce a touch of comedy. The ghosts lock David in his room with Hallie, and his response is go directly to the window, open it, and climb out. His room appears to be on the third floor of the house and to overlook a cliff, but if that’s the only alternative to spending an hour locked up with Hallie I don’t think anyone can blame him.
The highlight comes when David sees his distant cousin, Quentin Collins, standing by the brandy decanter. David has overheard Quentin muttering about a mysterious stranger and has questions:
David: Who are you talking to?
Quentin (drunk): The dregs, David…the dregs of this glass. That’s where all the answers are.
David: I thought you said something about a stranger.
Quentin: Oh, well, I’m in immediate danger of becoming a stranger to my glass, but that can be easily remedied. Yes, it can be. [Pours drink.] Ah ha ha…friends again.
Quentin was a malevolent ghost when we first got to know him, late in 1968. We then traveled back in time to 1897, where we met him as a living being. He was an utterly irresponsible rascal, selfish, cruel, cowardly, and shameless, and everyone who saw him fell in love with him at once. His death was prevented, he was immunized against aging, and when the show returned to contemporary dress there he was, none the worse for his 100 years. But they couldn’t find much of a place for him in the story. He may not be making many things happen these days, but in this exchange we find that he is still an alcoholic. As long as he has that going for him, he will always be the Quentin we can’t get enough of.
Dark Shadows Commentary 