Three ghosts who have been hanging around the great house of Collinwood for the last several weeks have assumed corporeal form. Teenagers Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes have taken possession of the bodies of David Collins and Hallie Stokes. Once embodied, Carrie and Tad cast a spell that brought their governess, Daphne Harridge, back to life in a body of her own.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman confronts Daphne and demands she help David and Hallie resume their place among the living. Daphne angrily refuses. “I’m not going to let you destroy Tad and Carrie to bring David and Hallie back!” Carrie and Tad were already destroyed, when they died in 1841; it was Daphne who robbed Hallie and David of their rightful place among the living when she helped Carrie and Tad possess them. That possession is a murder, and one of the victims of that murder, David, has been a central character since the show’s first week in 1966, and the show has often been driven by our concern for his well-being. Daphne’s protest, voiced in a righteous tone that makes it clear David and Hallie mean nothing at all to her, marks Daphne as a villain whose motivations are entirely hostile to everything we could care about. But Daphne is, among other things, Kate Jackson. As such, it is impossible for an audience not to fall in love with her. Though Daphne’s presence in the story can lead to nothing but disaster for the human characters, we cannot want her to go away.
Among Julia’s many powers is mastery of a preternatural form of hypnosis that enables her to mold people’s memories as easily as a potter can shape clay. Until today, we have seen her use this power only on humans. But Daphne is human now, at least technically, so Julia gives it a shot. She takes out her magical medallion and shows it to Daphne. Once Daphne is in a trance, Julia asks her questions. They are not questions about Daphne’s memories of the past, but about events that will take place in the future. Somehow Daphne knows the answers to those. They suggest that the final catastrophe is very near at hand.
Carrie and Tad have been inmates at Windcliff, a psychiatric facility Julia controls. Daphne had reached them there, driven in a car by charming rogue Quentin Collins. When Windcliff was first introduced in the summer of 1967, it was made explicit that it was located a hundred miles north of Collinwood. It lay far enough away that Julia could be sure no one on the estate or in the village of Collinsport would recognize her face or name when she showed up in town in #284. It was an unmistakable sign of supernatural agency when Maggie Evans was able to make it from Windcliff to Collinsport on foot in a single night in #295. And after hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell was sent to Windcliff in #658, everyone seemed to forget all about him, as they had forgotten about sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis after he was set there in #329. The place was the functional equivalent of the far side of the moon.
Today, Tad and Carrie escape from Windcliff and Tad remarks that Collinwood is “only a few miles” away. This is quite a severe retcon. It does strip away the sense that Windcliff is a safe place where the characters can take refuge from the impending catastrophe, raising the stakes and heightening the tension. But it also leaves us wondering why they don’t just go someplace else further away. The Collinses are supposed to be terribly rich, so there’s nothing stopping them from buying a place in California or Hawai’i or Bugtussle, Oklahoma and moving there while the ghosts have their way at Collinwood.
Dark Shadows Commentary 