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.
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.
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.
Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana puts broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi on trial in the secret room of the old Collins family mausoleum. Evidently King Johnny has considerable magic powers; he conjures up the ghosts of several notorious murderers to serve as the jury. He also brings in the ghost of Magda’s husband to serve as the one witness for the defense.
The scenario is a remake of The Devil and Daniel Webster, a play that debuted at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1939. But the makers of Dark Shadows were likely thinking of a more recent Broadway production as well. From November 1964 to June 1965, a musical with a book by Ernest Kinoy and music by Walter Marks ran first at the Shubert Theatre, then at the Lunt-Fontanne, for a total of 232 Broadway performances. Its title is one of King Johnny’s favorite words- Bajour.
King Johnny keeps complaining that Magda tried to “pull the bajour on me!,” by which he means that she gave him one thing disguised as another. In the show, based on Joseph Mitchell’s stories of life among Rroma in the New York metropolitan area, bajour refers simply to a confidence trick with a big payoff for its perpetrators. The cast, saddled with a bunch of instantly forgettable songs, sings as joyously as it can about how the Rroma, to whom they of course refer as “gypsies,”* love nothing more than cheating lonely old women out of their life savings. This uninhibited celebration of racism reported losses of nearly a million dollars, more than twice the total amount of money invested in it. Perhaps the fictional Rroma weren’t the only ones who enjoyed running a good scam. Perhaps, too, Mel Brooks’ 1967 film The Producers wasn’t entirely a work of fiction.
The cast of Bajour does not appear to have overlapped with that of any episode of Dark Shadows. The closest link I can find to the cast at this period of the show is Michael Bennett, who danced in Bajour and later married Donna McKechnie. Many very distinguished performers appeared in Bajour, but I’m not tempted to do any imaginary recasting. I’m sure Chita Rivera and Herschel Bernardi were wonderful as leads Anyanka and Cockeye Johnny Dembo, but they couldn’t have outdone Grayson Hall and Thayer David as Magda and Sandor. Herbert Edelman was good in everything, and I’m sure his turn as “The King of Newark” was no exception, but no one could have done more than Paul Michael does to make the cartoonish role of King Johnny watchable. Paul Sorvino had a great career, and even has a screen credit in common with Henry Judd Baker- they both appeared in the disastrous 1980 film Cruising. I’m sure Sorvino would have been interesting as a replacement for Baker as Istvan, the mute Black Rroma, but that part is all about physical presence, and as was the case with Baker’s part in Cruising he is effective in a way that Sorvino could not have matched. Nancy Dussault is another performer who never lets an audience down, but Diana Davila’s approach to the character of Rroma maiden Julianka was so cleverly conceived that I couldn’t bear to think of anyone else taking the part.
While I’m on the topic of the Rroma, I want to bring up an oddity about my favorite Dark Shadows blog, Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day. When he was writing about these episodes, Danny often stopped to ridicule the idea of a Rroma tribe living in New England in 1897. Danny works for the Wikimedia Foundation; you’d think he’d be in the habit of checking Wikipedia, where the article “Romani People in the United States” would tell him that, while Rroma have been migrating to North America continually since 1498, the majority of the ancestors of the million or so Americans who now identify as Rroma came in the late nineteenth century. The new arrivals tended to take some time to assimilate to the ways of the USA; the article is, as of this writing, illustrated with a photo of a Rroma caravan near Portland, Oregon, in 1905:
Rroma caravan near Portland, Oregon, in 1905. Photograph by the Portland Oregonian, found on Wikipedia.
Most Romani-Americans are totally assimilated nowadays, so much so that many people in the USA don’t realize that there actually is such an ethnic group. But there are still Romani heritage festivals in many cities, and the last traditional caravans were still traveling the Great Plains as late as the 1940s. And in Maine in 1897, Romani caravans were a frequent sight, one that indeed aroused exactly the sort of zyganophobic** reactions Magda and Sandor encountered from virtually everyone in their first days on the show.
Even Istvan isn’t as hard to explain as Danny seems to think. In the early days of European settlement, Rroma were often brought across the Atlantic as slaves; that was the case for the people on Christopher Columbus’ third voyage in 1498. Some intermarried with enslaved people of African extraction. There are still Afro-Romani communities in Louisiana and Cuba.
I started writing about Dark Shadows in the comment sections on Danny’s blog. He made a great display of ignoring the first 42 weeks of the show, and consistently made the harshest possible judgments of the acting of Alexandra Moltke Isles, who played well-meaning governess Vicki. That created a space for me to point out when the show was harking back to its early days, and to defend Mrs Isles. I would be remiss in a post like this if I did not mention that Mrs Isles made a documentary feature in 2003 called Porraimos: Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust. I’ve never been able to get hold of a copy of the film, but the New York Times liked it when it was shown on PBS.
*Rroma sometimes call themselves Gypsies, but you can’t assume they’ll like it if an outsider uses that word.
A lot of action in this one. Rakish Quentin Collins bluffs sorcerer Count Petofi with a threat that his nemesis, Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana, will be coming. At the last moment, Petofi gives in and releases Quentin’s distant cousin, time traveling vampire Barnabas Collins, whom he has been holding prisoner.
Back in the great house of Collinwood, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi discovers maidservant Beth Chavez lying unconscious on the floor. Magda takes her pulse. She then picks up the snifter from which Beth had been drinking, holds it to her nose, and gives a look of discovery. All of a sudden, Grayson Hall looks very much like her first character on Dark Shadows, Julia Hoffman, MD.
Somehow Magda gets Beth back to her room and saves her life. Beth tells her that she was poisoned by a woman called Charity. Magda leaves the room to look for Charity. Before she gets more than a few feet into the hall, King Johnny’s henchman Istvan springs out from the Shadows’ and grabs her.
Quentin comes into the foyer of the great house. Beth is there. He sees that she is upset and weak and asks what is wrong, but she will not explain. He asks if Barnabas can sneak to her bedroom without being observed. She leads the way to make sure no one who is involved in the vampire hunt sees him.
After Beth, Barnabas, and Quentin do some recapping, we see Magda in the woods with Istvan. She tries to talk him into running away with her, but he ignores her. He is supposed to bind and gag her. As we have seen many times on Dark Shadows, Magda has to hold the gag in her teeth. At the very end, an unseen figure approaches with a lantern, and Magda reacts with terror.
Count Petofi, 150 year old sorcerer, is holding time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins prisoner. Barnabas’ distant cousin, rakish libertine Quentin Collins, is convinced that only Barnabas can free him of the curse that has made him a werewolf and condemned any male descendants he may have to the same fate. Petofi is afraid of the Rroma people, a group of whom are in the area, and Quentin hits on a plan to use this fear to his advantage. He will tell Petofi that he has a confederate who will tell the Rroma where he is unless he releases Barnabas by 12:45 AM.
In fact, Quentin has enlisted his girlfriend, maidservant Beth, to carry this message to the Rroma camp. When Petofi reminds Quentin that his magical powers make it very easy for him both to compel Quentin to tell him who the messenger is and to stop any messenger once he knows her name, Quentin says there is no need to compel him to say the name. He claims that it is wicked witch Angelique.
As soon as Quentin tells this lie, we wonder why he hadn’t thought of Angelique sooner. Angelique has intervened to rescue Barnabas before, and she and Quentin are in touch. Petofi’s powers may be greater than hers, but it would take him more time to outfight her than it would for her to show the Rroma the way to his hiding place.
Petofi insists Quentin drink with him, and Quentin is too civilized to refuse. This is mirrored back at Collinwood. The repressed Charity Trask has lost her personality and became a vessel for the spirit of Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye. Charity/ Pansy insists that Beth drink with her.
While Petofi does not tamper with Quentin’s drink, Charity/ Pansy puts something in Beth’s that knocks her out. Charity/ Pansy wants Quentin for herself. She has thought of killing Beth, and knows Quentin will be upset with Beth if she disappoints him. That leaves us in suspense as to whether she murdered Beth or merely kept her from running her errand.
This diptych emphasizes Petofi’s power and Charity/ Pansy’s unpredictability. Quentin need not fear Petofi will poison him, because there are any number of more elegant ways he could kill him if he wished to do so. As another sorcerer said of himself in #528, he is much too talented to spend his time drugging drinks. But Beth should fear Charity/ Pansy, because she is still connected to the world of the living only uncertainly, and there is no telling what she might do to find her footing.
For some time after the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask first appeared in #725, he projected an intense evil that overshadowed everything around him. Trask’s daughter Charity debuted in #727. Charity was Trask’s enforcer, and was herself so intensely joyless that her mere presence could drain the life out of anyone she disapproved of. The Trasks are triumphs of acting by Jerry Lacy and Nancy Barrett, but they are so intense they threaten to overload the show. So even as devoted a fan as my wife, Mrs Acilius, chose to skip many of the Trask-driven episodes on this watch-through.
In #771, inveterate prankster Carl Collins brought Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye home to the estate of Collinwood. At that point, Dark Shadows was quite somber; when Pansy starts singing and dancing, she seems to have wandered in from another universe altogether. Pansy bills herself as a mentalist; when she tries to do her act at Collinwood, an actual message from the supernatural interrupts her, much to her astonishment.
Pansy was killed by a vampire named Dirk Wilkins the very night she arrived at Collinwood, leading us to assume that the note of brightness she represented was at an end. But strangely, she has now returned. Charity and Pansy never met; when Carl was looking for Pansy in #772, he asked Charity if she had seen her, and the sheer idea of the two of them sharing a scene was enough to raise a chuckle. But now they share more than that. Sorcerer Count Petofi has cast a spell causing Pansy’s spirit to take up residence in Charity’s body. Now, Charity’s personality seems to have faded away altogether, and all that’s left is Pansy.
Charity/ Pansy has a scene with Trask that blasts away the excessive tension he once introduced. He keeps demanding that she behave as he is used to seeing Charity behave, and she keeps singing, dancing, and making fun of him. Miss Barrett and Mr Lacy are both highly accomplished comic actors, and this scene is among their finest achievements in that field.
It also includes a serious moment that further confirms Charity really is channeling Pansy, not acting out some kind of delusion. At one point she becomes very still and prophesies the circumstances of Trask’s death. As she completes this pronouncement, she says that it is different now when she speaks of things unseen. It used to be a game, but now she hears another voice and reports what it tells her. This picks up on Pansy’s astonishment at her own success in #771, something Charity could not possibly have known about.
Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana has cornered broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi in her living room in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. He turns his back on Magda, closes his eyes, and starts reciting a lot of nonsense. Magda sees an opportunity to escape, and creeps over to the front door. When she opens it, a large man enters, blocking her exit.
The man is King Johnny’s minion Istvan. He is played by Henry Judd Baker, who was the only Black man ever to appear on Dark Shadows. He does not have any dialogue; Istvan, King Johnny will tell us later today, lost his tongue as the penalty for a misdeed. We do hear him laugh and grunt. He also wears trousers from the Lilli Von Shtupp “It’s Twoo! It’s Twoo!`” collection.
After Dark Shadows, Baker would reunite with Jonathan Frid, manhandling him in the movie Seizure. He also had a memorable turn in the lamentable 1980 film Cruising as a scantily clad man who slaps the main character. He died in 2016; the funeral home’s website calls him “Judd Henry Baker.” Maybe that’s a mistake on their part, or maybe he flipped the two parts of his given name for his acting work.
Meanwhile, evil sorcerer Count Petofi is holding time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins prisoner. Petofi threatens to burn the great house of Collinwood to the ground and kill its residents if Barnabas does not take him to the year 1969. Barnabas realizes that this is an empty threat, and refuses to comply. This is notable as one of the few times Barnabas actually outwits someone. Also, Petofi’s sidekick Aristide spends the scene showing off two big flaming torches, continuing the show’s longstanding mockery of the fire marshals of New York City.
King Johnny found a severed hand at Magda’s house, which he thinks is the one that was cut from Petofi’s right wrist long before. Little does he know that Petofi has taken that one and reattached it. When he and Istvan take Magda with them as their prisoner, what they actually have is a hand Petofi cut off a corpse he ordered Aristide to dig up. They haven’t got very far when the ghost of that man appears and reclaims the hand. King Johnny responds to this unusual sight with fury, realizing that Magda pulled a fast one on him. She manages to get away from him and Istvan.
In Dark Shadows #1, set in 1966, two people came to Collinsport, Maine. They were the well-meaning Vicki Winters and dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Vicki had taken a job as the governess in the great house of Collinwood, hoping that she would find the answers to questions she had about her own mysterious origins. Those questions had left her feeling that she knew nothing about herself.
Burke was a working class boy from Collinsport who had gone to New York City five years before, fresh out of prison and penniless. By 1966 he was a corporate raider, a millionaire many times over. He came back to his hometown because he wanted revenge on high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, who used Burke’s car to kill someone while Burke was passed out drunk in the backseat, then persuaded the court that Burke was solely responsible for the homicide. Burke and Vicki ultimately became a couple, but for some months Burke strung Roger’s niece Carolyn along and used her to cause trouble for the Collinses.
Now the show is set in 1897, and Burke and Vicki are both long gone. Carolyn and Roger are waiting for us when the show returns to contemporary dress, and the actors who play them are in the cast in other roles. But we’ve been reminded of Burke recently. Tim Shaw is a working class boy from Collinsport who, after spending time as a teacher at a miserable boarding school run by the evil Rev’d Gregory Trask, was chosen by Trask to take the fall for the murder of his wife, Minerva Trask. As Burke was physically present but mentally compromised at the killing for which he went to prison, so Tim was present at the killing of Minerva, but not in his right mind. The show is about the supernatural now, so it was a magic spell, not booze, that kept Tim from knowing what was going on when he poisoned Minerva. And the pace is too fast for arrests and trials, so Trask’s plan went wrong and he had to tell the police Tim wasn’t guilty after all. So Tim went straight to New York, and just a few weeks later came back to Collinsport, very rich and out for revenge.
Like Burke, Tim arrives in Collinsport with a woman. Unlike Vicki, Amanda Harris knew Tim before they got on the train. But we learn today that Amanda, like Vicki, is tormented by her ignorance of her own background. Again, the starker palette in which the show draws its stories at this period means that instead of not knowing who her birth parents were, Amanda has no memories at all prior to two years ago.
Amanda first appeared as a hardboiled operator who was attached, not to Tim, but to his money, and who gave him expert assistance in the con game he was running on Trask. As Tim was an elaboration on Don Briscoe’s W. C. Fields’ imitation, Amanda was a nod to Mae West. But the show has decided to make Amanda a long-term addition to the cast, and they already have an all-villain cast. So they soften Amanda’s edges. We see her packing her bags and telling Tim she is going to leave because he doesn’t really care about her and she can’t stand what she is doing with Trask. When she complains that Tim is just using her, she echoes speeches Carolyn made after her bitter realization about Burke’s true intentions. Now that her relationship to Tim mirrors both Vicki and Carolyn’s relationships to Burke, Amanda can inherit the goodwill longtime viewers have towards both of those characters.
To Have Something I Can Believe In
Tim’s sudden wealth came from his possession of a magical object, The Hand of Count Petofi. When Amanda first heard of the Hand, she asked if it was a piece of jewelry or some other kind of artifact. It did not occur to her that it was literally the severed hand of a Hungarian nobleman. This gruesome thing had been cut a century before, in 1797, by nine Rroma men, and had ever since been in the custody of the leader of their tribe.
In #778, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi returned to her home in the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. She had gone to Boston, where King Johnny Romana, possessor of the Hand, was staying with his caravan. She had pleaded with King Johnny to help her remove a curse she had placed that made rakish libertine Quentin Collins and all his male descendants into werewolves. Magda had not known when she placed the curse that Quentin was the father of her sister Jenny’s children. She hoped that King Johnny would take pity on the Rroma children and use the Hand to end the curse. When he did not, she stole it, intending to use its powers herself. Magda soon found that the Hand did no one’s bidding. It helped some people, hurt others, and was stolen by each of a long series of scheming characters.
After Tim brought the Hand back to Collinsport, it was stolen again. This time, the thief turned out to be none other than Count Petofi himself, 150 years old and on the point of death. Once he had the Hand back, it reattached itself to his wrist and he regained his health.
Petofi has some sort of plans for Quentin. He has retained one of his minions, nationally renowned artist Charles Delaware Tate, to paint a portrait of Quentin. That project is finished, but Tate is still living in a cottage he has rented in Collinsport. Today Petofi visits Tate there.
Petofi finds Tate sketching an imaginary woman, one he has been obsessively drawing and painting for about two years. Petofi sets himself up as Tate’s analyst. “Only little boys invent ideal women,” says he. He has a plan to relieve Tate’s childish fixation. It is another project. If Tate had seen A Chorus Line, he might appreciate Petofi’s theory of work as therapy, as explained in the lyric “Give me a job and you instantly get me involved, if you give me a job then the rest of the crap will get solved.” But that show won’t premiere for another 78 years, so Tate resists.
It doesn’t help that the job Petofi has in mind involves another severed hand. The Rroma are on their way, and they want the Hand back. Petofi, whose magical powers were formidable even when he was one-handed, is much mightier now, but the thought of the Rroma agitates him violently. Evidently they know about some weakness of his that enables them to defeat him. King Johnny and his men don’t know that Petofi is in Collinsport. He has cast a spell to silence Magda, but they won’t leave the area without the Hand. Several people know about Petofi and have no reason to protect him. If the Rroma start asking questions, it won’t be long before they close in. So Petofi has exhumed a recently deceased local man, cut off his right hand, and brought it to Tate for detailing.
Tate owes his talents, and his life, to Petofi, so the outcome of their meeting is never really in doubt. His next encounter does involve a surprise. Amanda comes to Petofi’s hiding place, sent by Tim, and asks for his help. Petofi tells Amanda that Tim has a poor strategic sense. Indeed, Petofi has already told Tim that, lovely as Amanda is, he has no use for her at the present time. But when he sees her face to face, Petofi recognizes her as the imaginary woman in Tate’s pictures.
Returning viewers already know that Tate’s portrait of Quentin takes on the features of a wolf when the Moon is full, so it is no surprise that his works, like several other portraits we have seen on Dark Shadows, have magical powers. When we learn that Tate first painted Amanda two years ago and she has no history prior to that time, we figure out that he inadvertently used those powers to conjure her into being.
Tate is played by Roger Davis, an unpleasant man who figured as Vicki’s love interest in her last, woefully ill-conceived storyline. In that arc, made and set in 1968, Mr Davis’ part was variously known as Peter Bradford and Jeff Clark. He had amnesia, and Vicki kept trying to help him recover memories which would prove to him that he has no roots in the 1960s, but that he is an uncanny being who was brought to life by an adventure she had outside the bounds of space and time. Once we recognize what they are suggesting about Amanda’s origin, longtime viewers might expect an inversion of that story, with Mr Davis playing the person trying to persuade his lover that he accidentally created her by a magical process he himself did not understand.
Somebody to Dance For
While all of this action is taking place downstream of Count Petofi, the person who set in motion the events that first brought Petofi to town is in big trouble. Magda comes home to find King Johnny himself waiting for her. He menaces her, calls her names, and twice hits her in the face very hard.
Ever since Violet Welles joined the writing staff, men have been slapping women quite a bit on Dark Shadows. Welles was by far the best writer of dialogue on the show, but I for one could do without the slapping. Fortunately King Johnny is played by Paul Michael, a well-trained actor; no matter how brutally King Johnny abuses Magda, Grayson Hall is in no danger. One could never say the same of Mr Davis’ screen partners.
King Johnny tells Magda that he will take her back to his caravan in Boston to stand trial for the death of Julianka, a Rroma maiden whom he sent to kill her some weeks ago. Since Magda cannot say Petofi’s name, she cannot tell King Johnny that it was he who killed Julianka. Magda is terrified of the trial, and King Johnny tells her that there is a way she can avoid it. If she does not give him the Hand, he will slit her throat immediately.
King Johnny searches the house, and does not find the Hand. He is about to carry out his promise to kill Magda when he sees the wooden box in which the Hand was long kept lying on the floor. He opens it. What he sees inside resembles the Hand closely enough to convince him, and keep Magda alive for another day. Clever as she has been so far, we may wonder how many days are left for her. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around to throw Magda a rope to grab onto.
Evil sorcerer Count Petofi tells the disastrously repressed Charity Trask that he will show her a vision of her own death. He’s tried that twice before on other characters, with mixed success, and it doesn’t work at all with Charity. He can’t see the visions he causes her to have; when she describes them to him, he is afraid that she has seen, not her own impending demise, but his. He casts a spell on her and rushes out.
Petofi meets his boyfriend Aristide and takes him on a shopping trip through the cemetery. What he wants with the body he orders Aristide to exhume is not made clear.
The importance of the episode is in the spell Petofi casts on Charity. He effectively murders her. For the rest of the segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897, Nancy Barrett will play, not Charity, but Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl who came to the great estate of Collinwood as the fiancée of the daffy Carl Collins. The show often tends towards the somber, so it is a joyous thing to see Charity/ Pansy enthusiastically shake her moneymaker.
It is sometimes said that Petofi makes Charity believe that she is Pansy, but this is not correct. Charity never met Pansy, and barely knew the late Carl. She certainly never saw Pansy perform on stage. Yet she sings Pansy’s theme song word for word and note for note as she did, and does the dance that went with it just as Pansy did it. She has Pansy’s garish sense of style, her not-very-convincing East London accent, and her memories of Carl. Petofi has caused Pansy to take possession of Charity and to live again through her body, as he has caused David Collins, strange and troubled boy indigenous to the mid-twentieth century, to take possession of his grandfather Jamison Collins. While David’s spirit is killing Jamison’s body, Pansy seems to be having a wonderful time in Charity’s person, certainly far more than Charity ever had herself. As for Charity’s mind, that seems no longer to exist.
The disastrously repressed Charity Trask knows that rakish libertine Quentin Collins is a werewolf, and she wants to warn everyone about him without actually saying the facts out loud. She corners maidservant Beth Chavez in the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood and urges Beth to end her romance with Quentin.
Charity keeps saying that there is something about Quentin that Beth does not know. In fact, Beth not only knows everything Charity does about Quentin’s curse, but a great deal more. She was the very first person to know that Quentin was a werewolf, before Quentin himself knew. She was with him the first time he transformed, and when he became human again in the morning she refused to tell him what she had seen. She had previously seen Quentin murder his wife Jenny, she knows that Jenny’s sister Magda placed the curse as vengeance for that murder, and she was the one who told Magda that Jenny had borne children to Quentin who would inherit their father’s curse. Beth is the foremost authority on Quentin’s condition. But she is protecting him anyway.
Charity then goes to a set known to longtime viewers as the Evans cottage. In the parts of Dark Shadows set between 1966 and 1968, this set is home to artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Today the dramatic date is 1897, but the cottage is already an artist’s studio. It is occupied by Charles Delaware Tate, a nationally renowned painter who was commanded by the evil sorcerer Count Petofi to execute Quentin’s portrait. When we first saw Tate in the cottage, he said that he rented it because he’d heard about it from a friend who had stayed there some time before.
The cottage is full of paintings and sculptures. This is odd for a rental. Several possible explanations come to mind. Did Tate bring a dozen or more of his own works to keep him company? Did his friend or other artists who had rented it leave their completed pieces behind? Did the landlords display their own collection there for the edification of their tenants? Easy as these explanations are to think of, none of them seems very likely, and the question is never addressed in the show. The out-of-universe explanation is of course that when the audience looks at an artist’s studio, it expects to see a lot of artwork, and the artwork here gives director Lela Swift a chance to make good use of color.
At any rate, the set is gorgeous today, full of bright greens and mixed reds. Swift was a highly ambitious visual artist, and she outdoes herself here. The first shot in the cottage begins with a closeup of the portrait of Quentin. It then pulls back further than any previous shot of this very familiar set, showing us a lattice that used to be part of the set representing the kitchen/ breakfast nook area at Collinwood. Behind it is a plant with some large, intensely green foliage. We then track around the set to see several sculpted pieces in black, paintings in a variety of tones, and a whole array of vivid colors in the furniture and other decorations. Dark Shadows has come a long way from the clumsiness that marked its use of color when it first switched from black and white in #295.
Charity is unaware that she and Tate are not alone. Tate’s master, Petofi, is in the next room eavesdropping. Charity is horrified to see the portrait of Quentin, and reminds Tate that she saw Quentin’s features in the portrait change into those of a wolf when she visited the cottage on the night of a full Moon. Tate tries to convince her she did not really see such a thing, but she will not have it. Charity gives Tate a warning somewhat less incoherent than the one she had given Beth. After she exits, Petofi and Tate talk. Tate had suspected Quentin was a werewolf, and now is sure. Petofi says that his plans for Quentin are none of Tate’s concern.
Petofi goes to the great house. Quentin confronts him there, demanding to know by what gods he swears. He replies “I have but one, and his name is Petofi!” Charity sees Petofi and vehemently demands he leave. I don’t know why she does this. As far as I can recall, Charity knows Petofi only as Victor Fenn-Gibbon, an honored guest of the Collins family. He did cast rather a nasty spell on her when he was using that alias, but I don’t see why she would realize that he was to blame for it, or for any of his other misdeeds.
Whatever the motive for Charity’s angry reaction to him, Petofi responds by magically robbing her of the power of speech. When he tells her that he has a healing touch, his manner and the background music indicate that after he touches her, what Charity will say will never again be up to her.
Dark Shadows Commentary 
