Ever since we first saw his ghost scowling at us in July, when the show was set in the far-off future year 1995, Dark Shadows has been trying to build Gerard Stiles up as the next villain who will become a breakout star. Gerard’s ghost haunted the great house of Collinwood and masterminded its destruction in August and September 1970, when the show took place in a contemporary setting. For over six weeks now, we’ve been back on Gerard’s home territory, in the year 1840, where he is a living being. Today, they remember that they are supposed to make us care about him.
So far in 1840, Gerard has been a complete bust as a charming villain. James Storm’s natural appeal has been thwarted by Gerard’s limited range. So far, the only attitudes he has portrayed are Smug and Enraged, neither of them an inherently attractive state.
Nor have the people who like Gerard given us much reason to hope he will show a more appealing side. Lady novelist Flora Collins raves about him as “The Healer!,” but in their scenes together Gerard displayed only his customary self-satisfaction while Flora seemed determined to find something marvelous about him. Samantha Drew Collins, widow of Quentin Collins, was in love with Gerard and even married him. But Gerard was just as blandly smug in his scenes with her as he was in his scenes with Flora, and when it turned out Quentin wasn’t dead after all Samantha very quickly caught on that he never had any feelings for her, only for Quentin’s money. He dismissed her, and we haven’t seen her since. Quentin regards Gerard as a friend; he was amused to find that he and Samantha had had a wedding, and he is amused when he talks about Gerard’s presentation of himself as a seer. Quentin may enjoy Gerard’s company, but only to the extent that he doesn’t take him seriously.
Not only has Gerard not lived up to the “charming” half of “charming villain,” he barely qualifies as a villain at all. A villain is supposed to give the rest of the cast things to do. The protagonists get to be heroic, the ingenue gets to suffer nobly, etc, because of the villain’s evil deeds. But most of Gerard’s evil deeds have failed to attract anyone’s notice, let alone open up the story for participation by more characters. He now divides his time between two solitary pursuits, berating a severed head he keeps in his bedroom and fondling a jewel-encrusted golden mask he stole from the tomb where he found that head. Even the other residents of Flora’s house, a mansion known as Rose Cottage, don’t know about Gerard’s pastimes.
Teenager Carrie Stokes comes to Gerard’s room during his head-berating time. He is furious at the interruption. His anger stuns Carrie, who has been away for a few weeks and who has a crush on Gerard. Gerard eventually remembers to smile at Carrie, and sounds pleasant when he asks her to go away.
In 1970, Carrie’s ghost took possession of teenager Hallie Stokes. She was terribly afraid of Gerard’s ghost at that time, and Carrie/ Hallie was among those Gerard’s ghost murdered shortly before the show took us to 1840. So when regular viewers see Carrie brighten up at the sight of Gerard and try to flirt with him, it not only confirms that an adolescent girl might be attracted to him, but also takes us back to one of the moments when Gerard was impossibly repellent and revises it as a late stage in a story which has yet to be told. So that little scene is a step towards making Gerard interesting.
Gerard has figured out that the head is the focus of an evil spirit that is in the process of taking possession of him. Every member of the audience figured that out quite a while before he did. In fact, even after the head had told Gerard what it was doing in so many words, illustrating its explanation with vivid imagery in a dream visitation, Gerard still kept looking at the head and demanding further clarification. Gerard’s apparent cognitive limitations further undercut our hopes that he will be a dynamic presence in the plot. Interesting characters don’t have to be smart in an IQ sense, but they do have to know what they want, to observe what is going on around them, to absorb new information, and to use that information in their efforts to pursue their goals. Until today, Gerard has not shown the ability to do any of those things.
Gerard finally does something with a definable purpose when he takes the head, still in its glass case, to the top of the cliff on Widow’s Hill and throws it to the rocks below.
Carrie emerges from the darkness the moment after Gerard flings the head into the abyss. He demands to know what she saw and why she is there. She says she saw nothing, and that she followed him to see if he was meeting a girl. He calms down and makes another attempt to be charming. She says that he seems to be himself again. He is happy with this idea.
Gerard takes Carrie back to Rose Cottage. Her governess, Daphne Harridge, is waiting for her there. Daphne says that she will take Carrie back home to the great house on the estate of Collinwood. But then it turns out that Samantha has sent her son Tad, Daphne’s other charge, to stay with Flora at Rose Cottage and that there is no reason Carrie should not stay there as well. Gerard sends Carrie out of the room to say goodnight to Flora.
Gerard takes this as an opportunity to pressure Daphne to go out with him on a date. Daphne has only just met Carrie and may not know about her feelings for Gerard. Nonetheless, she is uncomfortable with the idea of going out with him, partly because Samantha’s sister Roxanne just died, partly because of Gerard’s aggressive manner, and partly because Flora’s son Desmond already forced her to spend some hours socializing with him in the afternoon. She keeps refusing, and he keeps informing her that he will call for her at Collinwood in an hour.
After a hostile interlude with Desmond, Gerard spends some quality time fondling the mask. He then gets very sleepy. He yells down the hall at Carrie, saying he is about to take a nap and asking her to wake him in half an hour. She yells back that she will be glad to. As is customary for men in Collinsport, he lies down on the bed fully clothed, boots and all. He dreams that Carrie wakes him, saying that a pleasant man has come to see him. He opens the door to find a man he has never seen holding the glass case that he had thrown off the cliff. He awakens, and the same scene plays out.
The man is unknown to Gerard, but familiar to longtime viewers. He is Humbert Allen Astredo. In 1968, Astredo played the suave Nicholas Blair, who was introduced as a warlock of unfathomably vast powers. Astredo’s talents as an actor were so considerable that he held our attention for weeks and weeks, keeping us waiting to see what terrible plan Nicholas was pursuing. When it finally became clear that Nicholas was flying blind and that whatever he might come up with to do was going to fail almost immediately, the disappointment was so bitter that he had to be incinerated and dragged back to Hell in front of us. Apparently even that wasn’t sufficient punishment for having disappointed us so thoroughly. When another storyline collapsed early in 1970, they brought Nicholas back for a couple of weeks, just so that they could kill him off again.
In between his two tours of duty as Nicholas, Astredo appeared in the long segment of Dark Shadows set in 1897 as lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley. Evan was both a commentary on Nicholas and a great improvement on him. He aspired to become what Nicholas was introduced as already being. That gave him a set of goals and kept us in suspense as to how close he would come to achieving them. When he fell short of his objectives, it was interesting to see what would happen to him and how he would react to it.
We can’t tell who Astredo is today. He might be a third run-through of Nicholas. If so, we can expect that he will strut and preen and tell Gerard that he cannot escape what is in store for him. When Gerard’s personality is erased and James Storm starts playing the evil spirit of the head, Nicholas will become his helpless stooge and wind up in yet another damnation scene. That sounds pretty dismal. But if this is another human aspiring to become a warlock, perhaps he will recapture the spark that Astredo cultivated as Evan. If that happens, Gerard or whatever takes Gerard’s place just might have an associate in whose company he can finally shine brightly enough to become what we had hoped he would be.
