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Episode 836: The grownup world

It is 8 September 1969, and the ghost of Quentin Collins has rendered the great house of Collinwood uninhabitable. The family, including permanent house guest Julia Hoffman, have been staying at the Old House on the estate while recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is on a trip back in time to 1897, when Quentin was killed and the trouble started. But Julia has received a letter Barnabas wrote to her in September 1897 indicating that, as of that date, his mission was about to end in total failure, and so she decides to take matters into her own hands. First, she must learn exactly how and when Quentin died.

Julia goes to the great house and follows the sound of Quentin’s theme song to the tower room. There, she finds the ghost of maidservant Beth, who was one of Quentin’s many lovers. When Beth is in a shadowy corner, she puts on a ghostly voice and tells Julia that her name would mean nothing to her. As soon as she comes into the light, Julia says that they’ve met several times, and soon she is calling her by name. Along with the fact that, as Beth, Terrayne Crawford is just standing there in the same light as Grayson Hall, with no practical effect whatsoever to suggest ghostliness, this deflates whatever feeling we are supposed to have that we are witnessing an encounter with the supernatural.

Julia insists Beth tell her how Quentin died. When the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah Collins was on the show from June to November 1967, she would often insist on the Ghost Rules and vanish if people put direct questions to her. But Beth just wanders around a little, moans to Quentin that she has no choice but to tell Julia what she wants to know, and starts dishing. Again, they aren’t making ghosts like they used to.

Beth tells Julia that on 10 September 1897, she found out Quentin was going to marry a woman named Angelique. Quentin did not tell her this news himself; he left it to Angelique to do so, making the blow fall all the more heavily. This will remind longtime viewers of #392, when Barnabas could not bring himself to tell his ex-fiancée Josette that he was engaged to Angelique, leaving Angelique to tell Josette herself in #393. Josette waited until #425 to leap to her death from the cliff at Widows’ Hill, but things move faster now. Beth went straight from her conversation with Angelique to her room, where she had a bottle labeled “Poison.”

Sensible shopper that she is, Beth buys her poison in the Generic section of the murder weapon store. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Before she could do away with herself, Beth was interrupted by a knock on the door from twelve year old Jamison Collins. Jamison came in to show her a puzzle he had solved, then saw the bottle. He demanded to know what was going on, and she admitted that she was planning to kill herself because Quentin was going to marry Angelique. He stopped her doing that, but after he left to confront Quentin she took a loaded revolver out of her dresser.

Jamison found Quentin in the drawing room, in Angelique’s arms. Angelique at first dismissed Jamison, saying that his uncle was too busy to speak with him, but Jamison held his ground and insisted on seeing Quentin alone. Quentin obliged, but would answer Jamison’s questions only with airy assertions that he is too young to understand the situation. Jamison is so composed and forceful, and Quentin’s behavior is so flagrantly irresponsible, that we might expect Jamison to ask to be spared lectures on maturity from a man so much more childish than he. Instead, Jamison simply becomes angry and tells Quentin that after what he has done to Beth, he wants nothing more to do with him.

In #767, Jamison had a dream in which Quentin’s ghost said that his death was preceded by three events. The first two events happened shortly after. The third event was that Jamison rejected him. This has now happened, and in the dream Quentin said that once that took place “There was almost no time left for Quentin Collins.” Indeed, shortly after Jamison stalks off Beth shows up with her revolver and shoots Quentin. He staggers from the drawing room and goes upstairs. Since the staircase is made of eleven steps and is eight feet tall, that’s some pretty fancy staggering for a man who has just taken a round to the midsection. Quentin keeps staggering all the way to the tower room, where Beth shoots him a few more times.

We cut back to 1969, where Beth tells Julia she killed herself the day after she killed Quentin. She doesn’t seem to be done talking when Julia excuses herself. Say what you will about Sarah, she always left them wanting more.

Julia finds twelve year old David Collins, Jamison’s grandson, in the drawing room with Quentin’s ghost. Since Barnabas took us back in time with him in #701, we’ve got to know the living Quentin quite well, and he is a charming rascal who has very little in common with the silent, family-annihilating ghost we saw late in 1968. Beth’s story does very little to explain how the one turned into the other. The ghost has been draining the life from David; Julia orders David to come away from him, and he does. David lies down on the couch, and Julia examines him. She finds that he is weak, but resting comfortably.

Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes enters. Quentin’s ghost has vanished. Stokes calls Julia by her first name, something he had not done prior to this episode, and asks after David. She at first says he will be all right, then checks on him again. She cannot find a pulse, and declares him dead. Julia has performed wonders in her work as a medical doctor, but her death pronouncements are so often wrong that this does not give much grounds for alarm. However, we then hear Quentin’s voice laughing maniacally, darkening David’s prospects.

Terrayne Crawford seems to be such a nice person that it distresses me to point out that she was not a very good actress. But in this one, Beth’s lack of supernatural quality and Julia’s bland reaction to her make it seem like writer Gordon Russell and director Lela Swift were conspiring to vent their exasperation with Miss Crawford’s limits. She can play one emotion at a time, so that when Beth is shocked to learn that Quentin is going to marry someone else she is only and entirely Shocked. When Beth is suicidal, she is only and entirely Sad; when she decides to take Quentin’s life instead of her own, she is only and entirely Gleeful; when she tells Julia that her vengeance did not relieve her sorrow over Quentin, we can see that’s true, because she is only and entirely Sorrowful. The result is like looking at a series of wood block cuts illustrating various emotions. It’s all very clear and quite vivid, but there’s no sense of development from one scene to the next. Had Miss Crawford been able to lay one emotion over another and play two or more of them at a time, the grin on Beth’s face when she kills Quentin would have shown us that all the layers of complexity of feeling had finally been stripped away and only hatred was left. That would have been a tremendous climax for the character. But since there was never any such complexity to start with, it’s just another block cut.

Often when I see disappointing performances on Dark Shadows, I think of other actors in the cast and try to imagine what they would have done with the part. Gail Strickland, like Miss Crawford, is a tall, thin woman whose chin juts out on a horizontal line, and she was on the show as doomed schoolteacher Dorcas Trilling for a couple of episodes in May. Dorcas’ role would have been well within Miss Crawford’s competence, and in her long and distinguished career Miss Strickland proved she could do just about anything. So on a day like this, I envision a different, much more nuanced Beth. The episode in my imagination is really stellar, I wish you could see it.

Today, David Henesy plays both his 1897 character Jamison Collins and his 1960s character David Collins. He is not credited for either of those roles, but for Daniel Collins, whom he played when the show was set in the 1790s back in late 1967 and early 1968.

Episode 835: A past that runs parallel to our present

Stuffy Edward Collins was under a spell for several weeks that prevented him from keeping up with what has been happening on the estate of Collinwood in 1897. He knows that his distant cousin Barnabas is a vampire who originally died in the 1790s and has come back to prey on the living. From this, he has drawn the eminently logical conclusion that he is a character in a horror story, and that it is his responsibility to be the hero who destroys the undead ghoul.

Barnabas is beside himself. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In fact, Dark Shadows stopped being that kind of show long ago. Others know that it is chiefly about time travel now. That point is made when we flash forward to the year 1969, from which Barnabas has traveled to prevent a disaster that had its roots in 1897. Barnabas’ friends Julia Hoffman and Timothy Eliot Stokes talk about the intersection of past and present, so that the events of 5 September 1897 are somehow also taking place on 5 September 1969. The show has been using anniversaries as substitutes for natural laws in this way since #157, broadcast and set in January 1967, and they spin this out much further today. In his post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn writes a big prose poem about the weirdness of the show’s conception of time at this point, it’s well worth reading.

When Barnabas first came on in the spring of 1967, it was set in contemporary times and the writers had a lot of fun with characters who mistook the genre of show they were on. Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis heard the plot of Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek, concluded he was part of a Gothic romance, and wound up freeing Barnabas and becoming his blood thrall. That mistake continued to shape Willie’s character. Willie was forced to be Barnabas’ accomplice in the abduction and attempted brainwashing of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Willie listened to Barnabas’ own rantings about his motive being an attempt to recreate his lost love Josette, and kept imagining that he would somehow overcome Barnabas to rescue Maggie and become her lover. Willie also harbored a deep hostility towards Burke Devlin, who was left over from a period when the show really was inspired by Gothic romance.

Willie’s sometime friend Jason McGuire made a similar mistake, believing that the show was still the noir crime drama it was when it spent weeks on the question of where Burke’s fountain pen had got to. So he sleuthed out signs of where Willie went when no one was looking and where Barnabas got his money. All that Barnabas could contribute to that kind of story was murder, and so he unceremoniously strangled Jason in #275.

Local physician Dr Dave Woodard thought he was on the usual daytime dramas of the period. Actor Robert Gerringer had a lot of fun playing Woodard as if he were on The Guiding Light. There were whole episodes built around that conceit- for example, we spend #235 in the Collinsport Hospital, where everyone acts just as you would expect them to on any other soap, except for Maggie, who is there being treated for vampire bites. Woodard notices that his friend Julia is growing close to Barnabas, and in #324 comes to the logical daytime conclusion- they are having an affair. Eventually Woodard finds out that he has misidentified the genre of the show, but it is too late- Barnabas and Julia murder him in #341.

Today, that is to say 5 September 1897, Edward catches Barnabas and locks him in the prison cell in the basement of the Old House at Collinwood. Barnabas kept Maggie in that cell when she was his prisoner, and the ghost of his little sister Sarah helped Maggie find a secret panel that led to a tunnel to the beach. In #260, Maggie escaped through that tunnel at the last minute before Barnabas could kill her, and Barnabas himself later used the same tunnel to escape from the cell in #616. In #781, Edward made it clear that he knew all about the tunnel and expected everyone else at Collinwood to know about it as well. So it is no surprise when he tells Barnabas that he has blocked it off. In fact, he says that he has blocked “all” of the secret passages- we may wonder just how many escape routes there are.

Edward leaves Barnabas alone in the cell, saying he will be back before dawn. There is a writing desk in the cell; Barnabas remembers that Willie moved that desk to the front parlor for him in 1967, and so he describes his predicament in a letter to Julia and closes it in a secret compartment of the desk.

In 1969, nine year old Amy Jennings is in the parlor, playing with her dolls. One of the dolls is named “Amanda”; this will catch the attention of returning viewers. The 1897 story features a character named Amanda, who is an oil painting come to life. If artist Charles Delaware Tate could make his paintings come to life, as in Greek myth the sculptor Pygmalion made a statue come to life as a woman named Galatea, then perhaps we should find out who made Amy’s doll before we let it out of our sight.

Amy first came on the show in November 1968, at the beginning of the story that led from contemporary dress to the 1897 segment. Her very first night at Collinwood, Amy went straight to the room where the magic objects were hidden that would trigger that story. She often delivers her lines directly into the camera, as if she knows perfectly well where the audience is. Amy is at the opposite pole from Edward and such earlier characters as Willie, Jason, and Woodard- she not only knows what genre the show is, she’s read the flimsies for next month’s episodes and is getting a head start on them.

Amy looks in the desk for a book to read to her dolls, and inadvertently opens the secret compartment. She eventually gives the letter to Julia; this is what prompts Julia and Stokes to have their talk about the ontological status of past events and what philosophers call “the reality of tense.” They know all about the time travel aspect of the show; Julia, in fact, has for some time been the closest thing the audience has in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s to a point of view character, one who knows everything we do. She was certainly the first one to know that the show was transitioning from vampire horror to quasi-science fiction. She surprised Barnabas in #291 with a proposal to develop a medical treatment that might put his vampirism into abeyance.

In the letter, Barnabas refers to his “secret.” Stokes does not know what this is, and is not satisfied with Julia’s lame attempts to answer his questions about it. This makes sense to regular viewers; shortly after Stokes arrived in Collinsport, another mad scientist got hold of Barnabas and succeeded where Julia had failed in putting the symptoms of the vampire curse into remission. For all the time he has known Barnabas, Stokes has seen him moving about in the day, casting reflections in mirrors, eating food not derived from human blood, etc. In 1968 and 1969, his ignorance of his Barnabas’ past vampirism is not much more serious than his ignorance of the details of the automobile accident that killed Mr Hanson in 1956. But the vampirism came back in full force when Barnabas went to the past, so Stokes is at a loss as to what the letter means.

Julia decides that she will try to travel into the past using the same mumbo-jumbo that transported Barnabas there. While Stokes reads up on that, Julia and Amy make a stop at the great house on the estate, which is impenetrably haunted by the ghost of Quentin Collins. That errand seems to be going sideways when the episode ends.

Episode 834: Gentlemanly greetings

Stuffy Edward Collins arrives at the cottage in the village of Collinsport which artist Charles Delaware Tate is currently occupying. He has come in response to an invitation apparently from Tate.

Tate lets Edward into the cottage, but he cannot explain what occasioned the invitation. Another man enters and says that it was he, not Tate who sent the invitation. Edward is visibly displeased.

Edward once knew the man as Victor Fenn-Gibbon, friend of the English aristocracy, but subsequently learned that he was actually Count Andreas Petofi, Hungarian nobleman and reputed sorcerer. When Edward tells Petofi that his brother Quentin Collins told him that he was the cause of the spells that have recently been cast on many members of the Collins family, including himself and his son, Petofi asks him if he believes everything Quentin says. That earns him a hearing.

Petoi tells Edward that he knows the greatest threat to the Collinses is one of their own number- Barnabas Collins. Edward insists on playing dumb, and Petofi has to say out loud that Barnabas is a vampire. We see Tate eavesdropping on this conversation, and wonder what effect it will have on the story that he now knows Barnabas’ secret.

Edward agrees to work with Petofi to find and destroy Barnabas. Meanwhile, we see that Barnabas is hiding out under Edward’s own roof, in the great house of Collinwood. He and broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi are in Quentin’s room. They know that Quentin is a werewolf, Quentin and Magda know that Barnabas is a vampire, and all of them are working together to frustrate justice and keep the show fun.

Barnabas and Magda see a portrait that Tate painted of Quentin. There is a full Moon tonight; Quentin did not change. But the portrait did. The year is 1897, and The Picture of Dorian Gray has been in the bookstores for seven years. Moreover, Barnabas is a time traveler from the 1960s, so he had even more opportunity to read it. He catches on right away, and explains to Magda that from now on it will be the portrait that changes, while Quentin remains the same.

Barnabas made his voyage from 1969 by accident. Collinwood was uninhabitable because Quentin’s ghost was haunting it so aggressively that everyone was dying. Barnabas went to Quentin’s old room, and found some I Ching wands. Under the guidance of occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes, he cast the wands, meditated on them, and his “astral body” found itself animating the physical body that lay in a hidden, sealed coffin in 1897. Now Barnabas looks through the room again, searching for the wands. He finds them, and with Magda goes to the basement of the Old House on the estate. He explains that this is where he did his thing in 1969, and that he will do the same thing on the same spot in order to contact Quentin’s ghost in 1969 and ask him what’s going to happen next. He also says that his physical person will be sitting there motionless, perhaps for several days. Since Edward and Petofi are on their way, and they both know that the basement of the Old House is Barnabas’ very favorite hangout, this would seem to be rather a hazardous plan.

Barnabas settles in for a nice long sit. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 833: We don’t have any secrets in Collinwood

There once was a woman named Miss Charity Trask. Charity was desperate to please her father, the hypocritical and overwhelmingly evil Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask. She faced the world as Trask’s enforcer, and was herself so fiercely repressed that she drained the joy out of every group she joined.

There is no longer such a person as Miss Charity Trask. Sorcerer Count Petofi caused the spirit of the late Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl and fake psychic, to take up residence in Charity’s body. Charity/ Pansy still lives in the great house of Collinwood, of which Trask has established himself as master, but since her only functioning mind is that of the deceased Pansy, she doesn’t understand why people insist on livenaming her.

Charity/ Pansy enters the drawing room and finds Amanda Harris. Amanda greets her as “Miss Trask,” alienating her at once. Charity/ Pansy demands to know what Amanda is doing at Collinwood. Amanda says that she lives there as Trask’s guest. Charity/ Pansy calls for Trask. She leans out the door of the drawing room and in the loudest, harshest voice Nancy Barrett could manage shouts “Hey, Trask! Trask!” It takes Trask a moment to answer, perhaps because Jerry Lacy had the same trouble we had while watching and couldn’t stop laughing. It is one of the top ten intentional comedy moments in the series, maybe top five.

Charity/ Pansy can see that Trask has designs on Amanda, as can everyone else. But she doesn’t care about that. She is convinced Amanda has come to the house to seduce rakish libertine Quentin Collins, whom she herself is determined to marry.

Amanda had no such plans when she first came to the house, but she meets Quentin today, and a few minutes later they are locked in a passionate kiss. Trask surprises them, and declares that he will protect Amanda from her weaknesses.

For his part, Quentin is busy trying to figure out what is happening to him. He is a werewolf, and there is a full Moon tonight, yet he did not transform. He finds a portrait in his room. It bears a plate with his name and the current year- “Quentin Collins, 1897.” But it depicts him as he is when he is in his lupine form. He knows that it is the work of artist Charles Delaware Tate, and goes to confront Tate in his studio in the nearby village of Collinsport.

Quentin handles Tate roughly and demands to know why he painted a wolf on the canvas with his nameplate. Tate says that Charity saw the painting and thought it looked like a wolf, but that when he looked at it himself he saw only Quentin’s face. Quentin takes Tate to his room and shows him the painting; Tate is shocked to see that it is, indeed, the wolf.

Tate gets another shock before he leaves the house. He meets Amanda, and Trask asks him to paint her portrait. Tate has never seen Amanda before, but he has painted her many times. Returning viewers know that Tate’s painting abilities are a gift from Petofi, and that with them comes the power to conjure into existence that which he paints. Amanda is Tate’s creation.

Tate doesn’t want to accept this fact, and so he flees the house. He rushes back to his studio, and tries to take his mind off what is happening by sketching a still life. He adds an imaginary vase to the arrangement of fruit on the table before him. To his dismay, the vase materializes.

Tate painted Amanda into existence two years prior, and has been working steadily as a visual artist since. So you might wonder why he is only now noticing that things pop into being when he draws or paints them.

One possible explanation that comes to mind is about Petofi, the source of Tate’s abilities. Petofi’s right hand was cut off a hundred years ago, in 1797, and most of his power went with it. He was just recently reunited with the Hand. It once more grows from his wrist, and he is restored to his former might. Perhaps when Petofi first gave Tate his abilities, he could give him just enough to create Amanda and a great deal of commercial success. But now he is stronger, and perhaps Tate is stronger too. Petofi had better hope Tate doesn’t think of painting a picture of an avenger putting him to death for the many crimes he has committed against the Rroma people.

Episode 832: The stamp of Petofi

As the full Moon is about to rise, hypocritical Rev’d Gregory Trask is standing outside the prison cell in the basement of the great house of Collinwood. He is taunting its inmate, rakish libertine Quentin Collins. Trask knows that Quentin is a werewolf, and is reveling in the prospect of watching him transform, then going to the police.

To Trask’s great disappointment, Quentin stays human. Once the Moon has been up for a while, Quentin grows jubilant. He threatens to contact the police himself, and points out that Trask is committing a number of felonies by holding him in the cell. With singularly poor grace, Trask lets him out. The scene between them is hilarious.

In the foyer, Quentin meets 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi. He grabs Petofi by the neck, trying the old fellow’s patience. Petofi says that it is quite silly of Quentin to behave as if he can do him physical harm, and that he ought to learn to curb his temper. “But you’re also rather charming, which means there’ll always be somebody who’ll help you.” Of course Quentin is enormously charming- he is played by David Selby. When we first met him, Quentin was a ghost who never spoke but spent months abusing children, murdering day players, threatening to kill our favorite characters, and bringing every storyline screeching to a halt. Still, enough of Mr Selby’s inherently adorable personality came peeking through that Quentin was already a fan favorite long before he delivered a word of dialogue.

Something similar is going on with Amanda Harris, who is an oil painting come to life. Amanda is much nicer than the ghost of Quentin was, but she is a bit shaky in execution. Future Broadway star Donna McKechnie admits nowadays that, while she was a highly trained dancer and singer by 1969, she was still something of a beginner at acting, and that does show when Amanda has a lot to say. But her limited skills really don’t matter at all. Even when Miss McKechnie looks at a scene partner, takes a deep breath, and shouts a whole speech, she is so appealing that your only question is why Amanda acts that way. Maybe that’s how all oil paintings behave two years after they’ve come to life.

In her two-dimensional form, Amanda was the product of Charles Delaware Tate, an artist who received great talents as the result of a Faustian bargain with Petofi. Tate is in the village of Collinsport now. Petofi summoned him to paint a portrait of Quentin. We’ve had many heavy-handed clues that the portrait would function like the picture of Dorian Gray, and that on nights of the full Moon it would transform and leave Quentin as a human. Today Quentin finds the portrait in his room, and it indeed looks like the werewolf. Unfortunately for the show, the werewolf is a cute doggie who wears a tidy little suit, and unless you see him in the act of killing someone it is impossible for us to be afraid of him. As a painting, he wouldn’t pass muster as a set decoration for the walls of an ostensibly haunted house on Scooby Doo Where Are You.

You *must* answer me- who is the goodest boy? *Who!?* Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 831: The most loquacious people I know

Sorcerer Count Petofi enters the great house of Collinwood, carrying a large painting covered with a cloth. He finds the hypocritical Rev’d Gregory Trask, who is at the moment master of the house, standing in the drawing room, dazed. Petofi realizes that Angelique the witch cast cast a spell on Trask, and that this spell is part of her effort to obstruct his own evil plans.

Petofi meets broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi in the foyer. He forces her to tell him that Angelique is upstairs, in Quentin Collins’ suite. He exits, taking the painting with him.

Angelique is casting a spell, ordering Trask to point a revolver at his temple. She is about to make him squeeze the trigger when Petofi surprises her. He overpowers her, both physically and in terms of the spell, and frees Trask.

Petofi dominates Angelique. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin is in the prison cell in the basement. Together with the scene between Petofi and Angelique, this circumstance will ring bells for longtime viewers. We first saw this cell in #401, when the show was set in 1795. In that part of the series, Thayer David played much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes, who was a plaything in Angelique’s hands. Ben was the first prisoner confined to the cell, when haughty overlord Joshua Collins was punishing him for some or other things he had been powerless to prevent. Now, the dramatic date is 1897, and the same actor is playing Petofi, who stands at the opposite extreme from Ben. Angelique is not much better able to resist Petofi than Ben had been to resist her, and so far from being a place where he will be imprisoned the cell is just another place for him to exercise his power over everyone else.

Quentin is in the cell because he is a werewolf, and this is the night of a full Moon. The closing cliffhanger comes when Trask, released from Angelique’s spell, comes and tells him he will watch him transform into the animal, then go get the police.

Episode 830: Up in the tower room, all bloody

We open in the woods on the estate of Collinwood, where a young woman in heavy makeup and bright clothing is crying. Another woman in even heavier makeup and even brighter clothing approaches and asks her what is wrong. The first woman says that she had a vision which told her that the rakish Quentin Collins will die of stab wounds twelve days from now, on 10 September 1897.

The first woman used to be Charity Trask, the miserably repressed daughter of the evil Gregory Trask. She is now possessed by the spirit of Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye. Charity knew that Quentin was a werewolf, and wanted nothing to do with him. Evidently Pansy did not acquire that knowledge when she took up residence in Charity’s body, and has decided that she will marry Quentin. Quentin has no interest in either Charity or Pansy, and already has two other fiancées, one of whom he loves, at least after his fashion, and the other of whom is sealed to him by a pact with the Devil. Yesterday Charity/ Pansy learned of the second engagement, and tried to kill Quentin to prevent it coming about; week before last, she tried to end the first engagement by killing the fiancée. Pansy had her faults, but she wasn’t inclined to physical violence. That part seems to be Charity’s contribution to the symbiont.

The other woman is broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi. Magda was the one who made Quentin a werewolf in the first place. She cursed him for murdering his wife Jenny, who was her sister. It was only after she had placed the curse that Magda learned that Jenny had given birth to Quentin’s twin children, a boy and a girl. Since the curse is hereditary, Magda is now desperate to lift it, and she and Quentin have become allies.

Some time ago, we learned that if Quentin dies, there will be no hope of lifting the curse. So Magda is terrified when Charity/ Pansy tells her of her vision of Quentin’s death. She takes her back home to the great house on the estate, where her father and Quentin are bickering while they recap yesterday’s story. Trask tries to deny that Charity/ Pansy is insane or that she is capable of killing, but when she enters and announces that she will murder the first person who comes between her and Quentin he has to admit that it might be time to find a place for her in residential care.

We turn our attention to the upstairs of the great house. We see Charity/ Pansy in bed, with Magda sitting in a chair beside. The gramophone is playing a record of Pansy Faye’s theme song. Regular viewers will wonder where Charity/ Pansy could possibly have found such a thing. Charity never met the living Pansy, who was killed the very evening she arrived at Collinwood. Perhaps Pansy’s fiancé, the childlike Carl Collins, bought the record when he met Pansy in Atlantic City and brought it back with him. Carl himself was killed well before the possession began, but perhaps Charity or Charity/ Pansy found it among Carl’s effects.

Charity asks Magda if she likes the tune. “I only like Gypsy music,” she replies. Charity/ Pansy and Quentin both reiterate their theme songs endlessly, but few other characters in the 1897 segment have so much as a dedicated entrance cue. This line of Magda’s makes us wonder what the show might have been like if they had given every major character a theme song.

Trask has a crisis in the drawing room. He hears a ghostly voice warning him that there will be another killing soon. He starts shouting the name “Minerva!” and pleading for mercy. First time viewers might not know what to make of this. Those who have been with the show for a while know that Minerva was Trask’s wife and Charity’s mother, and that he instigated a plot to murder her so that he could marry wealthy spinster Judith Collins and become master of Collinwood. When the voice starts to talk about “the beast that walks like a man,” Trask says “You’re… not Minerva?” Jerry Lacy is an expert comic actor, and his delivery of that line is laugh-out-loud funny.

The same ghost appears visibly to Quentin in his room. He recognizes it as that of Tessie Kincaid, a woman he killed in a recent fit of lycanthropy. He knows that she is appearing to him because tonight there will be a full Moon.

Tessie appears to Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Magda enters and finds Quentin writing a suicide note. She tells him he must not kill himself. She chains him to a post in his room and stands by with a pistol. Trask enters and finds them in this compromising position. Mrs Acilius and I laughed as we imagined how Magda and Quentin might have claimed they were planning to spend the evening.

But there is no point in lying to Trask. Between what Tessie’s ghost told him and what he overheard while eavesdropping on a conversation Quentin and Magda had earlier in the drawing room, he has figured out Quentin’s problem. He takes the gun from Magda and recognizes the bullets with which it is loaded as silver. He announces that he will wait until the Moon rises and see what happens.

Tessie’s turn today marks Deborah Loomis’ third and final appearance on Dark Shadows. Miss Loomis didn’t get to do very much, but she made the most of all of it, and I wish we had seen more of her.

Episode 829: Miss Moon Eyes

The dramatic date is 28 August 1897. On 23 July, in #803, sorcerer Count Petofi cast a spell on stuffy Edward Collins. Ever since, Edward has believed he was a valet recently separated from the service of the Earl of Hampshire. This led Edward’s brother, the rakish Quentin, to follow the Collinses’ long-established procedure for responding to mental illness and lock him up in the room on top of the tower in the great house of Collinwood.

In #816, broadcast on 11 August 1969 and therefore set on 11 August 1897, Petofi brought something even stranger on Edward’s twelve year old son Jamison. He called the spirit of Jamison’s grandson David to project itself from 1969 and to take possession of Jamison. In 1969, David is deathly ill because Quentin’s ghost had besieged him and everyone else at Collinwood. Now, Jamison too is dying, and in the moments he has been able to speak he has let the living Quentin in on the fact that he will eventually become a family-annihilating ghost.

Wicked witch Angelique has made a bargain with Quentin. She will try to restore Jamison and Edward to their usual selves, and if she succeeds Quentin will marry her. We see her beside Jamison, talking earnestly with him, praying loudly to “the Master of Darkness” to cure him and Edward so that she and Quentin can devote themselves to the service of that supernatural personage. In 1968, when the show was in contemporary dress, Angelique and others used a lot of euphemisms like “Master of Darkness,” but lately the ratings are high enough that the ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices has been letting them say the name “Satan.” I suppose Angelique’s persistence in the former phrasing shows that she’s still devoted to the old time religion.

Satan comes through, and Jamison and Edward are freed. This leads to a bit of awkwardness in each case. Quentin and Edward’s step-niece Charity Trask has lost her personality as the result of another of Petofi’s spells, and is now hosting that of the late Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl and onetime fiancée of Quentin and Edward’s late brother Carl. Charity/ Pansy is exploring the great house when she comes to the locked door of the tower room. She hears Edward inside calling for help. He is still in his valet persona, and he is delighted with her when she promises to get a key and let him out. Edward returns to himself, with no memory of anything that has happened since 23 July, while Charity/ Pansy is away. When she comes back up and opens the door, she finds that he is in a foul mood and that he disapproves of her intensely. She is understandably miffed at his apparent fickleness and ingratitude.

For his part, Jamison’s quite different experience has left him with some memories. He tells Angelique of images that are floating around in his mind. She recognizes them as things associated with Petofi, and is distressed. She tells him he is better off not knowing what they are. Quentin is more distressed when Jamison looks at him and asks why he is trying to kill David Collins. Jamison can’t explain who David Collins is or how he learned that Quentin was trying to kill him, but this does confirm everything Quentin has gathered about his post-mortem destiny.

While Edward comforts Jamison in the study, Quentin and Angelique meet in the drawing room. She asks if he will honor his end of their deal; he says that he will, though he makes abundant protests about his reluctance to do so. Charity/ Pansy eavesdrops at the door. She has decided that she will marry Quentin, and is horrified to hear this conversation.

Edward enters and asks Angelique to excuse him and his brother. She exits, and Edward declares that the first order of business must be to hunt and destroy vampire Barnabas Collins. Quentin is appalled at this. He tries to tell Edward that Petofi is their most immediate threat; after he explains who Petofi is, Edward agrees that they will get around to fighting him at the appropriate time, but he insists that Barnabas is their main concern.

Edward exits, and Charity/ Pansy enters. She tells Quentin that she overheard his conversation with Angelique. She says that he will not marry Angelique. Quentin bitterly responds that he will, and that there is nothing she can do to stop it. At this, Charity/ Pansy picks up a knife and tries to stab Quentin. Quentin holds her at bay, and Edward enters in time to see what is happening and to get Charity/ Pansy off of Quentin. Quentin says that Charity/ Pansy’s condition is further evidence of the need to focus on fighting Petofi, but Edward will not swerve from his determination to concentrate on Barnabas. Moreover, he decides that he will now quiet Charity/ Pansy himself. He sends Quentin out of the room and prepares to give Charity/ Pansy a stern talking-to.

Charity/ Pansy’s attempt to prevent Quentin’s marriage to Angelique by stabbing him is of a piece with her attempt to break up Quentin’s relationship with maidservant Beth in #823/824 by poisoning Beth’s brandy. The original Pansy, whom we saw as a live person in #771, was not exactly nice. She was cold, hard, and cynical, trying to exploit the childlike Carl. But she didn’t seem to be bent towards physical violence. That appears to be Charity’s contribution to the composite being that the two of them now make up.

Before Edward can deliver whatever lecture he had planned to give Charity/ Pansy, she goes into a trance. The live Pansy had done a stage act as a “mentalist” and fortune teller, and was astonished in #771 when she tried to do her act at Collinwood and found herself actually channeling spirits from the great beyond. Now Charity/ Pansy routinely acts as a medium.

Charity/ Pansy announces that something terrible will happen on 10 September. Countdowns don’t usually work as a source of suspense on soaps. They might be all right in a play or a feature film, where we know that there will be a final curtain or a last frame after which the imaginary universe will cease to exist, but so long as the series is scheduled to come on every weekday at 4 PM, we know that there is always going to be room to move any deadline a little further out. Besides, since Dark Shadows was done virtually live to tape, they could rarely predict with any accuracy just how many ticks of the clock it would take to get all the movements made and dialogue spoken before the crisis is supposed to be reached. But “10 September” is in a slightly different category. Quentin explicitly says on screen that today is 28 August, which was indeed the original broadcast date in 1969. And when Edward says that his last memories are of 23 July, he is indeed referencing the original broadcast date of #803. So when Charity/ Pansy says “10 September,” she is committing the show to something in the real world. We may well sit up and take notice.

Charity/ Pansy has a vision of what will happen on that date. She sees Angelique looking at a portrait of Quentin in the drawing room. Red paint is dripping from the figure’s chest into a pool on the floor. That pool is next to a trail of other drops of red. In her mind’s eye, Charity/ Pansy follows the drops into the foyer, up the stairs, and into the tower. There, she sees Angelique opening the door to the tower room and finding Quentin sprawled, a sheet of red plastic, or perhaps construction paper, on his chest. Charity/ Pansy screams and runs out. From the dramatic music and Charity/ Pansy’s agitated reaction, I take it the object lying on Quentin’s chest is meant to suggest blood.

Through Charity/ Pansy’s eyes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The acting is all very strong today. I was fascinated with Nancy Barrett’s use of her face to highlight Charity/ Pansy’s makeup. She relaxes her jaw muscles slightly more than usual, causing the dark treatment around her eyes to stand out. That in turn creates a visual metaphor labeling Charity/ Pansy a “painted lady.”

My wife, Mrs Acilius, was particularly impressed with Louis Edmonds’ realization of Edward. When the spell breaks and he becomes himself again, Edward is alone in an empty room. He has no dialogue, no props, and no scene partner to work with. Yet he instantly conveys what has happened. Even first time viewers will understand that the obliging servant has now become a stuffy authority figure.

Edward’s towering indignation when Quentin first tells him he was the one who locked him in the tower room gives way instantly when Quentin explains that he was under a delusion at the time. Edmonds executes that transition so smoothly that first time viewers will not notice the oddness of it, but longtime fans who remember the many previous occasions when the Collinses locked each other there as a response to mental illness will chuckle.

One of the prominent features of Edward’s personality is his warm relationship with his children. This sets him apart from the first two characters Louis Edmonds played on the show, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins and haughty overlord Joshua Collins. Edward’s dialogue in his scene alone with Jamison involves several discrete points of information, and it would have been understandable if the affection he displays for Jamison while he getting all of those words across had been either perfunctory or mawkish. But he and David Henesy get the emotions exactly right while also delivering the lines very clearly.

Edward’s preoccupation with Barnabas is a delicious little bit of commentary on the show itself. Dark Shadows‘ ratings, chronically low during its first 42 weeks on the air, perked up when it added Barnabas to the cast in April 1967. That summer, schoolkids curious to see a vampire on daytime TV made it into a hit, and not long after Barnabas became one of the pop culture sensations of the 1960s, instantly recognizable to many millions of people who never watched the show. To this day, people who have heard of Dark Shadows are likely to refer to it as “the vampire soap opera from the 60s.” It was Barnabas who took us with him to 1897, when he traveled back in time in the course of his attempt to rescue David from Quentin’s ghost, and for the first months of the 1897 storyline he was the only character who knew what was at stake for the 1969 version of the Collinses in the events going on around him.

But now Barnabas is on the fringes of the story, and Quentin, Angelique, and Petofi all know about 1969. Edward’s idea that the action has to focus on Barnabas is evidence that he hasn’t been watching the show. Petofi is the principal antagonist now, Quentin the chief protagonist, and Barnabas can be absent for weeks at a time while they and others find all sorts of things to do. This represents, not Barnabas’ failure, but his ultimate success. Before he was introduced, every story revolved around well-meaning governess Vicki, the main character. A soap opera can’t really have a main character. It needs to keep multiple storylines running at once, occasionally intersecting with each other, often running for long periods with little or no interaction. When one person had to be at the center of every development, the result was slow and claustrophobic.

Barnabas blew that confining structure open, because as a vampire his function in the story was not to solve problems, but to create problems for other people to solve. So no matter how much time they spent focusing on him, he always directed our attention towards everyone else. We wondered who would catch on to his secret, who would fall victim to his malign intentions, who would find a way to fight him, etc. When a mad scientist managed to free Barnabas of the effects of the vampire curse, he retained his function as a problem-maker, even when he set out to be a problem solver. Every time he announced that he had a plan, we looked forward to seeing how the rest of the cast would react to that plan’s rapid and catastrophic collapse.

Barnabas is as hapless in 1897 as he has been in every other time period, as witness the fact that he has been exposed as a vampire and driven into hiding. But he isn’t even the show’s Screw-Up-in-Chief now. That title belongs to broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi. In #807, Petofi compelled Magda to review the preceding 22 weeks of the show and admit that she had precipitated every plotline. The first of those was the release of Barnabas into the world of 1897, so that his crimes and misadventures are just a subcategory of hers. Since Magda is played by Grayson Hall, who in her original role of Julia Hoffman is waiting for us in 1969, we can be confident she won’t be coming back to contemporary dress with us, but for the moment she has relegated Barnabas to the status of a secondary character.

Episode 828: Sovereign of the worms

In 1897, King Johnny Romana is the hereditary chieftain of a Rroma tribe that has long been at war with ancient sorcerer Count Petofi. King Johnny is at the supreme moment of his destiny, standing over Petofi with his scimitar raised, ready to deal the ultimate blow, when a creepy little guy ruins it all for him. Petofi’s henchman Aristide throws a knife and catches King Johnny in the back. Aristide has a dagger with a curved blade that he sometimes calls “The Dancing Girl,” other times “The Dancing Lady”; he makes a big deal of it, the thing fascinates him. But when he kills King Johnny, Aristide doesn’t even use his special knife. It’s a brutal anticlimax for King Johnny.

King Johnny does live long enough to tell Petofi that he isn’t safe yet. After nine days pass, he will appear to another Rroma, somewhere in the world, and will pass on to that person his immunity to Petofi’s magical powers and his mission to kill him. After Aristide buries King Johnny, he finds that the scimitar has vanished. Evidently it will go to the new avenger.

Meanwhile, at the great house of Collinwood, twelve-year old Jamison Collins is dying. Petofi cast a spell causing Jamison to be possessed by the spirit of his grandson David Collins, who will live in 1969. But David won’t live at all unless the spell is broken, because it is killing Jamison. Jamison’s devoted uncle, rakish libertine Quentin Collins, makes a deal with wicked witch Angelique. He will marry her if she manages to break Petofi’s spell and save Jamison. They made a similar bargain previously, but that time her magic failed.

Petofi senses that his spells are being challenged. He marches to Collinwood and orders Quentin to make Angelique stop what she is doing. Angelique herself enters; she and Petofi confront each other, then she goes back to the study to resume her attempts to free Jamison. We end with Petofi preparing to cast a spell against her.

Petofi confronts Angelique in the drawing room at Collinwood while Quentin looks on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This is an entertaining, fast-paced episode. It’s too bad it is the final appearance of actor Paul Michael in the series. He played the most unpromising part of King Johnny so skillfully that we barely noticed he was little more than a menacing pose, an evil laugh, and an ethnic stereotype. He does return with a small part in the feature film House of Dark Shadows, but it would have been fun to see what he could do with a really meaty role.

Episode 827: Magnificent, ain’t I?

Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana and his Afro-Romani henchman Istvan have cornered broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi on top of the cliff at Widows’ Hill. King Johnny declares that he will now kill Magda. She is a major character, it’s a Tuesday, and this is the resolution of yesterday’s cliffhanger, so we have three reasons for expecting her to survive.

However, none of the three reasons is as strong as it might at first appear. First, while Magda precipitated every major storyline in the segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897, none of those stories needs any further action from her to continue right now. We’ve also had an indication that Grayson Hall’s original character, Julia Hoffman, will soon be returning to the cast. Second, Dark Shadows never followed the traditional soap opera format in which important developments were reserved for week-ending finales. Third, while the great majority of episode-ending cliffhangers fizzled out in the opening seconds of the next installment, occasionally they did go ahead and resolve one with a death. Besides, as my wife Mrs Acilius points out, Magda laid her husband Sandor’s ghost to rest at the top of the episode, and it is called Widows’ Hill because widows go there to die. So there actually is some suspense as to whether King Johnny will make good on his threat.

Time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins shows up at the last moment and orders King Johnny to release Magda. King Johnny refuses and orders Istvan to throw Barnabas off the cliff. Barnabas looks into Istvan’s eyes, using his power of hypnosis. Once Istvan is under his control, Barnabas compels him to walk off the cliff. King Johnny then realizes who Barnabas is. He holds Barnabas at bay with a cross. Barnabas tells him that he can reclaim what Magda stole from him, but only if he lets her go. At that, King Johnny becomes cooperative. Too bad Barnabas didn’t open with that- Istvan could have lived. Fortunately for Barnabas and Magda, King Johnny forgets about Istvan instantly.

King Johnny shows off his hand-chopping clothes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

For a hundred years, King Johnny’s tribe kept as its most prized possession The Hand of Count Petofi. This was literally a severed hand, cut from a Hungarian nobleman. Count Petofi was a sorcerer, and when nine Rroma men severed his right hand in a forest one night in 1797, most of his power went with it. Magda stole the Hand in hopes that she could use that power to undo a spell she herself had cast, but found that the Hand would not obey her. Now Count Petofi himself, 150 years of age, has reclaimed the Hand, and it is once more attached to his wrist. He is hugely powerful and a great problem for Barnabas.

Barnabas tells King Johnny what has happened. King Johnny turns out to be the one person in the world over whom Petofi has no power. In return for Petofi’s location, King Johnny agrees to return with the Hand and lift the curse Magda regrets. In his purple robe, King Johnny goes to Petofi’s hiding place. He and Petofi have a long and rather pointless conversation. Finally, Petofi is strapped to his chair and King Johnny raises his sacred scimitar, ready to re-sever the Hand.

This is a less suspenseful cliffhanger than yesterday’s. Petofi is still generating story; in fact, he is the only character who is. The hideout is Petofi’s territory; we have seen him thwarted there, but the defeats he suffered only confirmed that it is not a place where major changes take place in the direction of the narrative. And the meandering dialogue between Petofi and King Johnny deflates all the dramatic tension. Returning viewers have plenty of time to remember that, while Petofi’s magic may be useless against King Johnny, Petofi’s henchman Aristide is somewhere around, and he is quick with a knife. Without Istvan to run interference for him, King Johnny will be vulnerable to Aristide the whole time he’s dawdling around.

As King Johnny, Paul Michael has a very hard job. Not only is the character an egregious stereotype, but he really is scandalously ill-written. Violet Welles was far and away the best writer of dialogue on the show, and she manages to give a few glittering lines even to King Johnny. Still, he is ridiculous from beginning to end, a lot of menacing poses held together with a sinister laugh. That he is watchable at all is a tribute to Michael’s mastery of his craft. In his facial expressions and body language, we can see evidence of thought that is entirely absent from his words.