In 1968, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, built two Frankenstein’s monsters. Now Julia has traveled back in time to 1840. She and Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Leticia Faye have come under the power of Judah Zachery, a warlock who was beheaded in 1692. Judah’s head and body have been maintaining separate residences ever since, and now he wants them reattached. Julia has given Leticia a list of medical supplies that she will need to complete the operation.
The other day, we heard Quentin Collins and his wife Samantha quarreling about their crappy marriage. Evidently Quentin asked Samantha to agree to a divorce four years ago so that he could marry someone he didn’t hate. Today, we learn that this person’s name was Joanna Mills, that she was a widow when Quentin took up with her, that her landlady Mrs Purdy was her only friend, and that Mrs Purdy identified Joanna’s corpse after she escaped from the insane asylum and drowned herself.
Mrs Purdy shows up at the great house of Collinwood and tells Quentin all of this. He doesn’t know what to make of this news, since he recently received a handwritten note apparently from Joanna. Indeed, immediately after Mrs Purdy leaves Quentin finds another such note.
Returning viewers have every reason to believe that the notes are the creations of Daphne Harridge, a young woman whom Quentin just hired to be governess to his son Tad. Daphne keeps writing in her journal that her plan to murder Quentin is coming along nicely. At one point today, she leaves her gun behind in the drawing room where a houseguest finds it. An amazingly poor sense of OpSec is one thing all the most popular characters on Dark Shadows have in common, so we can take it that Daphne will be on the show for a long time.
For her part, Samantha is furious that Quentin has hired Daphne. She has always hired the governesses. It is particularly galling to Samantha that Quentin did not inform her that he had taken that task from her, even though he told the cook that Daphne would be coming. Samantha tries to bring up something she asserted earlier, that Tad is not Quentin’s son but the product of a dalliance she had with a lover. He cuts her off before she can repeat this claim, and tells her she is free to leave the house.
Mrs Purdy is played by Camila Ashland, her third and, alas, final role on Dark Shadows. The others were also one-shots. In #928, Ashland played Mrs Hutchins, a woman the villains hired to lie to Julia. In #997, she was Mrs Duval, landlady to masochistic barmaid Buffie Harrington. Ashland was an extremely distinguished stage actress. She has a lot of trouble with her lines today, but she still manages to get the point across that Mrs Purdy was not at all shocked that Joanna was carrying on an affair with a married man and that she tried her best to get her decent care when her mental health collapsed.
Mrs Purdy wears a bonnet that I believe we have seen before. In the early days of the show, the most frequently mentioned figures in the supernatural back-world behind the action were The Widows, ghosts of women whose young husbands died because of the Collins family’s inhumane management of its whaling fleet. In #266, we learned that The Widows were named Rachel Comstock, Margaret Findley, and Abigail Tolliver. A couple of times we caught glimpses of The Widows, and when we did we always saw one wearing a bonnet just like Mrs Purdy’s.
We are now in the era when the Widows would have been alive. I wonder if they dug the bonnet up for the first time since 1967 because in some early stage of the planning for the 1840 segment they were thinking of incorporating a story that would have introduced Rachel, Margaret, and Abigail as living characters.
