Dark Shadows is completing the ninth week of a segment set in the year 1840. Like the other episodes of the segment, this one is packed with action, but still seems slow. In part that is because they are in such a hurry to keep the story beats coming that they don’t anchor them in relationships between characters we care about. In part it is because of the drag longtime viewers feel when they see undisguised recycling of stories from previous segments. In part it might be because they spent so much time in the months leading up to the segment teasing developments that haven’t taken place and are pretty clearly not going to take place. And in part it is because of something the original audience would not have known but that today even the viewers most scrupulous about avoiding spoilers cannot help but know, that we are just a hundred episodes from the end of the series. It’s hard to believe that anything much will come of what is happening when we know that that less than 10% of the show remains.
Seagoing con man Gerard Stiles was evicted from his body the other day. The new occupant is warlock Judah Zachery. Judah was put to death by order of magistrate Amadeus Collins in 1692, but he is not one to let a little thing like that slow him down. After 148 years as a disembodied head, he is getting busy with a plan to avenge himself on Amadeus’ descendants.
One of these, Quentin Collins, wants to show off his latest home improvement project to his good buddy Gerard. Not knowing that there is no longer any such person, he takes Judah to the basement of the great house of Collinwood and shows him his “Stairway into Time.” He explains that by going up and down the stairway, a person will be able to go forward and backward in time. He does not explain how this works, but since it is the means by which mad scientist Julia Hoffman brought us from 1970 to 1840 regular viewers know that it does work. Several months ago, the characters found that they could pass into an alternate universe by walking through a door in a little-used hallway of the great house. There was no attempt to suggest any mechanism, either technological or natural or magical, to account for this aperture. Because there was no explanation to consider, we wound up simply accepting the alternate universe as a bare fact. The Stairway into Time is similarly easy to accept.
Judah, masquerading as Gerard, seems unconvinced. Quentin goes off to get some of the project documents, leaving Judah alone in the basement. He uses the time to cast a spell on overbearing undertaker Lamar Trask. Lamar is sure Quentin is a warlock who murdered a woman named Lorna Bell in the course of a Black Mass. In fact, Judah committed this crime. He sends a dream in which Lamar sees Quentin killing Lorna. When Lamar wakes up, he is sure that he has had a revelation from the Almighty.
Quentin returns to the basement with his papers. Judah is reading them aloud when Quentin’s wife Samantha barges in. She starts telling Quentin that they need to talk about the governess in charge of their son Tad’s education. Then she notices Judah. Thinking him to be Gerard, Samantha falls silent. She looks down, shamefaced, and says she thought Quentin was alone. She hurries out.
Quentin tells “Gerard” that they shouldn’t let Samantha get in the way of their friendship. Until #1120, Samantha and Gerard thought that Quentin and Tad were dead, lost at sea. They married. When Quentin came back, he found the situation amusing, and promised to abide by whatever decision Samantha made about her marital status. It was fine with him when she chose Gerard, but when she said she wanted to take Tad with her the conversation became intensely hostile. When Gerard found out that Samantha wanted to marry him even though she no longer had a claim on Quentin’s inheritance, he quickly made it clear he was not interested. So neither man actually wants Samantha, but Quentin very much regards Gerard as a dear friend. Quentin’s brother Gabriel may have spoken truer than he knew in #1127, when he was taunting Samantha and asked her if she had addressed her son with “Dear Tad, there is something I must tell you. You are going to have two fathers now.” In fact, Quentin and Gerard were co-parenting Tad when their ship ran into trouble, and would probably still be happily doing that now if all had gone according to plan.
Lamar comes to Collinwood and tells Samantha about his dream. She thinks he is an idiot, which of course he is. Nonetheless, she is looking for a way to dislodge Quentin from his father Daniel’s affections. She hopes that Daniel will disinherit Quentin and name Tad as his heir with herself as his guardian. So she sends Lamar along his way with encouragement to keep accusing Quentin of witchcraft.
After a quarrel with Quentin, Samantha tells Daniel what Lamar told her. Daniel marvels that she would listen to anything such a “pompous imbecile” might tell her, but he does remember the events of the 1790s, when he was a boy, and of 1803, when he was 20. There was witchcraft in the area in those periods, and it led to strange and horrible acts of violence. There have been strange and horrible acts of violence lately, some of them uncommonly like the events of those earlier years. So Daniel cannot lightly disregard the allegations against Quentin, despite their ludicrously unreliable source.
Daniel confronts Quentin in the drawing room. He asks “Are you practicing witchcraft in this house?” Quentin is shocked by the question, and rages at Samantha and Lamar for bringing it to Daniel’s mind. Daniel insists Quentin answer, and he says “No, I am not practicing witchcraft in this house.” He really should have omitted the phrase “in this house,” since he does after all have access to many other houses, but that suffices to bring the scene to its conclusion. Quentin goes on to the foyer, where he shouts at Samantha that if she keeps trying to turn Daniel against him he will take great pleasure in strangling her.
Daniel has great faith in Gerard. Judah takes advantage of this. When Daniel tells “Gerard” that he regards him as a man of sound judgment, Judah responds that Quentin is his closest friend and that he could not take Lamar’s charges seriously without far more compelling evidence than has been forthcoming. Daniel brings up Quentin’s Stairway into Time, which he has regarded as a joke but which Lamar has made him suspect might be some kind of product of black magic. Judah offers to show him the stairway and put his fears to rest.
When Daniel sees the stairway, he says that he must have been right. It is simply an ordinary stairway, and Quentin’s talk about time travel can only be one of his peculiar little jokes. He walks up it a bit, and Judah causes him to have a vision of Quentin strangling Lorna. Not only did Daniel likely hear Quentin shouting about how much he would enjoy strangling Samantha, he himself murdered his own wife Harriet by strangulation some years ago and from time to time has fits of madness during which he mistakes other women for Harriet and tries to strangle them. So he knows that his family is a strangley bunch, and believes that what he is seeing is real.
Daniel has a heart condition, and the vision of Quentin strangling Lorna triggers chest pains. This episode marks the final appearance of Lorna and of actress Marilyn Joseph; we may wonder if it marks Daniel’s final appearance as well.
