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Episode 792: No place. And every place.

Quentin Collins has devoted himself to the pursuit of evil, and as a result he has two intractable problems. When Quentin murdered his wife Jenny, her sister, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, turned him into a werewolf. Magda later found out that Jenny had borne twins to Quentin, and since the curse is hereditary she tried to lift it. She placed the magical “Hand of Count Petofi” on Quentin before his transformation. That didn’t stop him becoming a wolfman, but it did cause his face to be severely disfigured when he returned to human form.

Now Quentin has made his way to the house of Evan Hanley, his onetime friend and partner in Satanism. Evan had recently been disfigured in the same way Quentin is disfigured, also as a result of contact with the hand, and Quentin knows that Evan stole the hand from Magda to use in an attempt to de-uglify himself. When Quentin sees that Evan is handsome again, Evan denies that he used the hand to restore his looks. He claims not to know what happened. That is as frustrating for the audience as it is for Quentin. We were sure Evan would start looking like himself again, and they went to enough trouble to show that he was not able to correct his appearance by himself that we were expecting the cure to involve a significant plot point. When Evan presents us with “It just happened” as his explanation of how he got his old face back, we are quite sympathetic to Quentin’s decision to grab a blunt instrument and knock him out.

Quentin finds the hand in a box in Evan’s desk, and a strange man immediately enters. He demands Quentin give him the hand at once. Quentin is willing to surrender the hand once he has used it to become his desperately handsome self again, but the man will not wait. He pulls a knife to underline his point. The knife is a flat piece of wood cut in a shape with some pronounced curves and no sharp edges, and the man holds it loosely at the end of an arm that is directly over the box Quentin could easily raise to disarm him. So the audience has to help a bit to make the confrontation credible. Still, the acting is very good, and the dialogue, in which the man combines lethal threats with apparently sincere expressions of sympathy for Quentin’s plight and jokes at his expense, is complex and lively enough that we are glad to make the effort. Besides, the man goes to the trouble of telling Quentin that the knife is named “The Dancing Girl” and that it was made long ago by a Persian swordsmith, so he’s giving our imaginations something to work with. I, for one, didn’t have any trouble keeping a straight face when Quentin lost the fight and the man left with the box containing the hand.

Kids, if you are going to rob someone at knife-point, do not imitate what Aristide is doing here. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin goes to Magda at the Old House on the estate of Collinwood and reports what happened. She is frightened, since she herself stole the hand from a Romani chieftain/ organized crime boss named King Johnny Romana. When he says that a strange man came to take the hand, she assumes that he is an emissary of King Johnny’s, and that his next stop will be to kill her. When Quentin says that the man was young, Magda is puzzled- the recognized norms dictate that King Johnny send “an elder of the tribe” to complete such a task. She sets aside her plan to flee, and agrees to help Quentin in his attempt to summon wicked witch Angelique.

Quentin and Evan conjured Angelique up in #711. In previous segments of the show, when it was set in the 1790s and in the 1960s, Angelique established herself as one of its principal sources of action. But she hasn’t had much to do in 1897. She had a showdown with fellow undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins back in May, and has barely been seen since. Quentin and Magda speak for the audience when they wonder where she is and what she has been doing. They speculate that she might have gone home to the depths of Hell, and light some black candles to accompany an incantation meant to call her thence.

Angelique does appear, but not at the Old House. Evan finds her in his parlor when he comes to. One of the possible explanations for the restoration of Evan’s good looks was that he made some kind of bargain with Angelique; this is excluded, not only when he is surprised to see her, but when she asks questions that make it clear she knows nothing about the hand or anything that has happened since Magda brought it back with her. Angelique orders Evan to give her a complete briefing, and we cut back to the Old House.

Quentin is still in front of the black candles, fervently reciting his mumbo-jumbo, and Magda is telling him they have failed. After a moment, Angelique enters. Quentin jubilantly declares that he has succeeded in summoning her, and Angelique says that she is not aware of that. She tells him she was with Evan, and asks about the hand. Quentin tells her it was taken from him, and asks for her assistance. She says she is willing to help him, for a price, and that as a token of her good faith she will retrieve the hand. But first she insists he tells her everything he knows. We cut to the waterfront.

There, the man who took the hand from Quentin is standing alone in the fog. Angelique enters and flirts with him. He gives his name as Aristide. She says she is a puppeteer, and that if he lends her his handkerchief she will perform a trick. She wraps his handkerchief around the neck of a doll depicting a Continental soldier, a familiar prop from 1967 that became prominent during the 1790s segment, and squeezes it. Aristide begins choking, and Angelique orders him to give her the hand before he dies.

The Collinsport Strangler strikes again? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The closing credits bill Michael Stroka as playing “Aristede,” an unusual spelling. The following item, posted in the comments under Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, confirms my resolution to stick to the conventional spelling:

Factoid… I have the original script for episode 808, and Aristede is spelled throughout as Aristide.

Comment left 3 September 2017 by “Isaac from Studio 16 on W 53rd” on Danny Horn, “Episode 792: Dances with Wolves,” Posted at Dark Shadows Every Day, 19 December 2015.

In the same comment thread, Carol Zerucha goes on at length about Stroka’s ethnicity. He was Slovak, as she is, and she had a big crush on him when she was a kid watching the show. The characters in today’s episode assume that Aristide is Roma, but Ms Zerucha points out that we have no reason to assume they are right, and that he, too, might be Slovak.

Also in that thread, FotB “Straker” says that Aristide looks like William F. Buckley, Jr. I agree. I wish they had at some point cast him as a character who leaned way back in his chair and used polysyllabic words.

Episode 791: Roomful of spirits

The evil Gregory Trask coerced lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley into helping him murder his wife, Minerva, so that he could marry wealthy spinster Judith Collins. Now Trask and Evan have conjured up a magical simulacrum of Minerva and caused it to hang around Judith. They claim they can’t see it, which, coupled with some other troubles Judith has had, leads her to believe that she has lost her mind. Trask and Evan strong-arm Judith into signing a paper, Trask locks her up in the tower room, and Evan makes the simulacrum disappear.

In case you can’t tell, these guys are villains. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, Judith’s brother Quentin is at large. Quentin is a werewolf, and when he returned to human form this morning his face was disfigured. This worked to his advantage. He was in jail at the time, and he was being watched. The sheriff’s deputy had not recognized Quentin’s brother Edward when he came to jail that night, so it isn’t so surprising he doesn’t recognize Quentin, even though he is six foot four, has a distinctive hairdo and prominent mutton chop sideburns, and is wearing the same blue suit with a frock coat that he always wears. It is surprising that Edward doesn’t recognize him either, but this may be the result of a congenital problem the Collinses have. Not only was Quentin himself stumped when the equally identifiable Evan had a similar glob of makeup on his face recently, but Judith fails to recognize Quentin today when he comes to the drawing room. When Judith found him, Quentin was listening to his favorite record and reciting its lyrics in his unaltered voice, and he identified himself to her by name. Still, she couldn’t see it.

Quentin bursts into Evan’s room shortly after he finishes dissolving the simulacrum of Minerva. He sees that Evan’s face is no longer disfigured, and assumes that he used the magical Hand of Count Petofi to restore his appearance. Evan tells him he did not- he can’t explain why his face reverted, it just did so on its own. This does not satisfy Quentin, and it will not satisfy returning viewers. We saw Evan struggle to fix his problem for some time, and when he found himself in a crisis situation he suddenly turned up looking like his old self. So we’ve been in suspense for several days wondering what the explanation would be for his cure, and we are no more inclined to settle for a non-explanation than is Quentin.

Quentin knocks Evan out with a candlestick; the background music is a cue we have previously heard during on-camera murders, leading us to wonder if Evan will survive the blow. Quentin rummages around for a moment and finds the hand. He is looking at it, wondering how to use it to restore his appearance, when a man in a wool cap enters and orders him to surrender the hand at once.

This episode features one of Dark Shadows‘ all-time great goofs. When Evan is casting the spell to dissolve the simulacrum, a black-clad figure dashes past in front of him. A voice can be clearly heard exclaiming “Jesus, Lacy!” Evidently actor Jerry Lacy was in such a hurry to get from one set to another that he didn’t realize he was crossing a live camera.

Episode 790: Making a demon of her

The evil Gregory Trask orchestrated a plot to murder his first wife, Minerva, and has married wealthy spinster Judith Collins. Now he and his accomplice, lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley, have conjured up a simulacrum of Minerva to hang around Judith and drive her insane. Once Judith is safely confined to the nearest high-class asylum, Trask will enjoy Judith’s riches, minus only whatever percentage Evan squeezes out of him.

Today, Judith stands in her bedroom in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. She isn’t ready to go to bed, and the simulacrum of Minerva is sitting in the rocking chair, sewing. Trask pretends he cannot see the simulacrum, and forbids Judith to leave the room. When Judith becomes upset, he slaps her. This slap occurs on the soundtrack and in our imaginations. What we see on screen some time before the slapping sound effect plays is Jerry Lacy waving his hand a considerable distance short of Joan Bennett’s face. The two of them do such a good job of acting that this failure of blocking does nothing to undercut the oppressive atmosphere. For her part, Clarice Blackburn plays the pseudo-Minerva with just enough animation that we cannot predict what she will do. These performances take a sequence which may not have seemed like much on the page and make it into one of the most frightening scenes on Dark Shadows. When Judith lies to Trask and says that she does not see Minerva, it’s enough to produce a shudder.

Trask slaps Judith while pseudo-Minerva sews. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.

Downstairs, Trask answers a knock at the door and broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi enters. Regular viewers know that Judith despises Magda and Magda hates her, and so it is surprising when we hear that Judith has sent for Magda. Trask blocks her way upstairs. Magda is defiant towards Trask; she knows what he did to Minerva, and is using that knowledge to force him to let her and her husband stay in the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. But Trask has a new threat to make.

Trask knows that Magda is the sister of the late Jenny, who married Judith’s brother Quentin. He also knows something that not even Quentin knows, that Jenny bore twin children to Quentin after he left her. He threatens to send Jenny’s children away from the village of Collinsport. Evidently Magda wants the children to stay where they are, in the care of a woman named Mrs Fillmore. It is unclear why this would matter to her; we have had no indication that she has met Mrs Fillmore, much less visited the children at her house. But it is important enough to her that they not be moved that Magda responds to Trask’s threat with “What do you want me to do to her?”

We cut to Judith’s room. Magda enters. Judith tells her that the ghost of Mrs Trask vanished a few minutes ago, after sitting in the rocking chair for hours. Judith asks if she thinks she sounds mad, to which Magda replies there is nothing so strange about a simple ghost. The simulacrum reappears, and Judith asks Magda if she sees it. Magda says she does not.

Back downstairs, Magda tells Trask that he is a swine. She spits on the floor next to him and stalks off. Much as Magda hates Judith and many as are the crimes in which she is implicated, she is a warm-hearted sort, and Trask’s bloodless cruelty is not to her liking. Indeed, it is strange she did not tell Judith of Trask’s attempt to extort her complicity and make an alliance with her against him.

Meanwhile, Quentin is being held in the jail. When Magda realized that he murdered Jenny, she turned Quentin into a werewolf. She did not then know about the twins, and so she made the curse hereditary. Once she found out that her own kin were in line to become monsters, she started looking for a way to undo the curse.

The police captured Quentin the night before, while he was in his lupine form. As a result of Magda’s latest futile attempt to cure him, Quentin emerged from his bout of lycanthropy with his face disfigured and his memory a blank. Though his clothing and his hairstyle are so highly distinctive that virtually everyone who has seen the show before can tell that the man in the cell is Quentin, the Collinses suffer from a peculiar form of blindness that keeps them from recognizing people with globs of makeup on their faces, so his brother Edward is at a loss as to who he could be.

Magda is working with time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins, distant cousin of Quentin, Edward, and Judith, who has set out on a mission to set the events of the year 1897 right so that Quentin will not become a malign ghost ruining things for everyone at Collinwood in 1969. Unfortunately, vampires are not problem-solvers; their function in a story is to create problems. Since coming to 1897, Barnabas has been responsible for at least six homicides. He has wrought a great deal of havoc even beyond those killings. For example, it was as a direct result of his actions that Judith and Trask got together in the first place. Today, Magda goes to Quentin’s cell and tries to tell him that Barnabas will come to him after nightfall and take him to the Old House.

We do not see Barnabas. We are watching Quentin in his cell when we hear a bat squeaking outside the jail. Barnabas can materialize wherever he chooses; he does not choose to materialize in the cell, where Quentin is alone and unattended, but goes into the outer office in his bat form. We hear a deputy in that office talking to the bat affectionately, asking him where he came from. We haven’t seen the deputy before this episode, but one suspects that a fellow who sees a bat in his office and strikes up a friendly conversation with it must have an extremely sweet personality. We then hear the deputy make a horrified exclamation, and the doors to Quentin’s cell and to the world outside open by themselves. As Quentin walks out, we see the deputy slumped at his desk, two bleeding wounds on his neck.

We cut to the darkened interior of the great house at Collinwood. Quentin comes ambling in. Biting the deputy was certainly not part of any plan Barnabas made with Magda, but it isn’t completely surprising- he hadn’t had a square meal for quite a while. But even for Barnabas, it shows an unusually low degree of operational competence to let Quentin wander off by himself when the whole idea is to get him to the Old House.

In the drawing room, we hear Quentin’s thoughts as he dwells on his amnesia. He does not know who he is, where he is, or why he has come. He sees his gramophone, and starts playing his only record. That brings him back to himself.

Judith enters. Quentin is not only wearing his usual suit and his distinctive hairstyle, he is listening to the music he has been playing obsessively for months and reciting the lyrics to it. As if that weren’t enough, his voice is quite outstanding- he must be the only senior member of an aristocratic Maine family with a West Virginia accent. Yet Judith not only fails to recognize her brother, she refuses to believe him when he identifies himself to her by name.

The simulacrum of Minerva enters, holding a letter opener above her head. Earlier this week, Minerva’s actual spirit had possessed Judith, and under her power Judith had held that same letter opener in that same position as she confronted Evan and accused him of her murder. Judith does not remember that, and she screams at the sight.

Episode 789: We are going to create a thing

In #762, the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask walked in on lawyer Evan Hanley and handsome rake Quentin Collins as they were performing a Satanic rite. Trask’s response was to blackmail Evan. Trask wanted his wife Minerva out of the way so that he could marry rich spinster Judith Collins, Quentin’s sister. Threatened with exposure, Evan cast a spell on an unfortunate young man named Tim Shaw. He brainwashed Tim into reenacting the plot of The Manchurian Candidate, with Trask in the Angela Lansbury role and Evan as the People’s Republic of China. As Evan and Trask planned, Tim killed Minerva. Shortly after, Trask married Judith.

On their wedding day, Judith saw Minerva’s ghost in the corner of the drawing room in the great house of Collinwood. In yesterday’s episode, Minerva’s ghost took possession of Judith, and the closing cliffhanger showed the possessed Judith about to stab Evan with a letter opener to avenge Minerva’s death. As we open today, Judith’s brother Edward enters and prevents the stabbing, and Judith is released from possession. She can remember nothing that happened while she was under Minerva’s power, and Edward is convinced that she has gone mad.

Edward takes Judith to her room, and Trask enters. Evan tells him that Minerva’s ghost has been in touch with Judith. The ghost knows what they did, and if the contact continues Judith will know as well. Trask demands that Evan do something to prevent that, and Evan says that he can cast a spell that may turn the haunting to their advantage and neutralize Judith permanently.

The plan turns out to be the creation of a “black ghost.” The only Black actor to have had a speaking part on Dark Shadows was Beverley Hope Atkinson, who played an unnamed nurse in one scene in #563, almost a year ago. Humbert Allen Astredo, who plays Evan, was also in that scene, playing suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Atkinson was terrific, and it would be great to see her again, but it turns out that the “black ghost” is not actually black. Nor is it a ghost. This misnamed entity is a simulacrum of Minerva, a kind of supernatural hologram that Evan will fabricate and that will appear when Judith is around. This will lead Judith to believe that she is insane, thereby causing her actually to become insane and to cease to be an obstacle to Trask’s enjoyment of her wealth.

The simulacrum first shows up in a transparent form in Judith’s bedroom. Judith screams. In the drawing room, Trask and Edward hear her scream and break off a conversation in which Edward has been urging Trask to agree to annul his marriage to the obviously disturbed Judith. Judith comes downstairs. She is reluctant to explain why she screamed, and tells Edward and Trask that nothing is wrong. She and Trask go to the drawing room and talk privately. He has to prod her a bit before she will admit she saw Minerva. He tells her it was just her imagination. She considers this; after all, she was in bed when she saw the image, so it may have been a dream. But then the simulacrum appears in the drawing room, near the spot where she saw Minerva’s ghost on her wedding day. Judith sees Minerva sitting quietly and sewing. Trask pretends he does not see anything; after a bit, Judith pretends she can’t see the image either. Trask leaves Judith alone with the simulacrum. Judith goes upstairs, and the simulacrum follows her. When they reach the top of the staircase, Judith cries out in fear and tells the simulacrum to stay away from her.

Though it is disappointing to be reminded that Beverley Hope Atkinson isn’t coming back, it is always good to see Clarice Blackburn. In her interviews with the authors of the book Barnabas and Company, Nancy Barrett said that Blackburn was the best performer in the entire cast of Dark Shadows. She doesn’t have a lot to do today- she delivers the opening voiceover, we see a snapshot of her, and as the simulacrum she stands motionless in a corner, sews placidly, then is seen from behind as she follows Judith up the stairs. But if there ever was a case to prove the old cliche that no part is small when a big enough actor plays it, Blackburn makes each of these little turns into a moment viewers will remember.

Screenshots by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

As Judith, Joan Bennett also deserves a great deal of credit for getting the gaslighting plot off to a good start. For example, there is an embarrassingly ill-written scene when Judith is in her room, pacing back and forth while some vibes play on the soundtrack. A knock comes at the door, and the music stops. Judith opens the door, and no one is there. The music resumes, and she starts pacing again. There is another knock. Again the music stops, again Judith opens the door, and again no one is there. The music resumes, and she’s back to pacing. The knock comes a third time. A third time the music stops, and a third time Judith turns to the door. This time she asks who’s there. It’s Trask. She lets him in, and he denies having knocked before. Knocking on doors and running away is a pretty crude tactic even on a show with an audience consisting largely of kids aged twelve and under, and the apparent complicity of the music in Trask’s plot is the kind of thing they ridiculed in Looney Tunes cartoons. But Bennett’s soulful performance holds our attention throughout.

This is the second time Dark Shadows has shown us an adventurer trying to gaslight his new wife so that she will go away and give him unfettered access to her fortune. The first time was in March 1968, when the show was set in 1796. Naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes had married fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. Nathan discovered that Millicent had transferred all her assets to her little brother Daniel. Nathan then set about driving Millicent out of her mind so that he could take her place as Daniel’s legal guardian. That plot also featured some weak writing, but Joel Crothers and Nancy Barrett were so irresistible as Nathan and Millicent that it hardly mattered. Perhaps the writers wanted to revisit the gaslighting theme to show that this time they could consistently write scripts worthy of their outstanding cast.

Episode 788: From a beast to a man

A day of transformations. At dawn, the werewolf in the cell at the Collinsport jail turned into Quentin Collins. Edward Collins, Quentin’s stuffy brother, witnessed the transformation, and when we first see him he is staring at Quentin in bewilderment. Quentin is wearing the same blue suit he always wears, with the same distinctive hairstyle. But he has a glob of makeup on his face, and that’s enough to stymie Edward’s ability to recognize him.

Who could it possibly be? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This may reflect a hereditary disability of some kind. In #784, Quentin’s old friend and fellow Satanist, Evan Hanley, tried to steal the magical Hand of Count Petofi. The hand raised itself to Evan’s face and disfigured him, leaving his gray suit and highly identifiable hair and beard unchanged. But when Quentin saw Evan in #785, he was completely stumped as to who he might be.

Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi enters. Edward accuses her of knowing who the man in the cell before them is. Magda does not share the Collinses’ peculiar inability to recognize people wearing facial appliances, so of course she does know. But she denies it. Edward does not believe her denials, and leaves in a huff.

Magda talks to Quentin, and he begins to speak. But he is not replying to her. Instead, he delivers lines that Count Petofi himself might have spoken when he was dwelling on the loss of his hand. He murmurs about “the forest of Ojden” and “the nine Gypsies” and suchlike. Magda realizes that Quentin has no idea who he is or what is going on.

Magda had placed the hand on Quentin’s heart the night before, as the moon was rising, hoping it would prevent the transformation. It didn’t do that, but by inflicting the same kind of facial disfigurement on Quentin that it had previously brought to Evan it does keep the werewolf story going beyond what might seem like a natural conclusion. When Magda leaves Quentin, she says that come nightfall she will consult with Quentin’s distant cousin, time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins. “He will know what to do!” she declares. Barnabas has been the central character of the show for more than two years, and he has yet to have a non-disastrous idea. Ya gotta have hope, I guess.

At home in the great house of Collinwood, Edward tries to interest his sister Judith in the fact that he just saw a wolf turn into a human. She impatiently declares that she is not going to spend all day thinking about such a thing. Edward starts to remind Judith that she saw the wolf herself. He might have mentioned that she has seen it more than once, including in the very room where they are standing, but she says that it is “morbid” to go on paying attention to the topic once the creature has been caught and they can believe that they are safe.

Judith tells Edward that she had a bad dream. She won’t talk with him about that either. He needles her about her recent marriage to the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask, which he calls “ridiculous.” She says that she does not regret her marriage, and that even if she did it would not be any more ridiculous than his own marriage. Since Edward’s wife was an undead fire witch who tried to incinerate their children to prolong her existence, all he can say to that is “Touché.”

Edward exits, and Judith dwells on her dream. It concerned Trask’s late wife Minerva. Minerva died in #773; Judith married Trask in #784. Judith knows that a young man named Tim Shaw poisoned Minerva, and that Trask gave Tim an alibi. She believes that Trask has forsworn justice for Minerva’s death for her sake. Tim knew that Judith, while under a magic spell, had shot his girlfriend Rachel Drummond to death, and he threatened to expose her if Trask handed him over to the police. What Judith did not know, and what is not mentioned today, is that Tim himself had acted under a spell. Trask and Evan connived to brainwash Tim so that when the Queen of Spades turned up in a card game he would poison Minerva. In her dream, Minerva told Judith that there was danger, then repeated the phrase “Queen of Spades” several times.

Judith turns around and looks at a table. It had been bare when last she saw it, and there was no one else in the room. But now a solitaire game is laid out there. She screams, and Edward comes. Judith turns up the Queen of Spades, and walks out the front door. Edward follows her to Minerva’s grave.

Judith tells Edward her dream, and he transforms into a psychoanalyst. “Your dream is nothing more than a manifestation of your own guilt.” Judith asks Edward what he imagines her to feel guilty about, and he says that she married Trask so shortly after Minerva’s death. She dismisses this, and soon goes into a trance. She wavers back and forth from the waist for a moment, then straightens up with a jolt. When Edward calls to her by her first name, she replies “I will thank you to call me Mrs Trask!” Edward doesn’t know what to make of this demand, but the audience knows that Minerva has taken possession of Judith.

Back at Collinwood, Edward meets Magda. She tells him that she is there to see maidservant Beth. Edward says that he hasn’t seen her all day. That puts him up on the audience; we haven’t seen her since #771. When they were setting up for the trip to this period, Beth was presented as a major character, and her ghost haunted the Collinwood of 1969 along with Quentin’s. When Barnabas and we first arrived in the year 1897 in #701, Beth figured very largely in the story for several weeks. But Terrayne Crawford’s limitations as an actress required Beth to be written as someone who says just what she means, no more and no less. Since the rest of the cast is able to rise to the task of portraying complex motivations and multilayered communication, and since Dark Shadows finally has a writing staff that can provide those things consistently, Miss Crawford has faded further and further into the background.

Edward goes to the drawing room and telephones Evan. Magda eavesdrops. She knows of Evan’s disfigurement, Edward does not. Edward tells Evan he must come over at once, that there is an emergency he must address in his capacity as Collins family attorney. Evan does not want anyone to see his face, and so he tries to beg off. Edward threatens to fire him if he does not show up. Evan has been making vain efforts to restore his appearance for days; he looks at himself in the mirror, and returning viewers might draw the conclusion that his goose is cooked.

That Evan’s face is still disfigured after we have seen Quentin’s disfigurement raises the possibility that the show is heading towards an all-disfigured cast. Evan is played by the conspicuously handsome Humbert Allen Astredo, and as Quentin David Selby’s good looks have become one of the show’s very biggest draws. If they are both going to be uglified for the duration, then there is nothing to stop anyone from having some plastic glued onto their face.

Judith enters. She does not recognize Magda and announces that she is Minerva. She closes herself in the drawing room.

Evan arrives, looking like his old self. Magda is astonished. When they have a moment alone together, he responds to her questions by saying that he will never tell her what happened to undo the hand’s work. That will hook returning viewers more effectively than any cliffhanger is likely to do- Evan’s case had seemed absolutely hopeless.

When Edward tells Evan what Judith has been doing, Evan starts playing psychiatrist, picking up where Edward had left off. “Well now, tell me exactly how she has been behaving. In what way is this delusion manifesting itself?” Edward sends Evan in to see for himself. Minerva/ Judith reacts to the sight of him with horror. She says that he was the one who made Tim Shaw poison her. Minerva did not know this in life, but it has long since been established on Dark Shadows that the dead pick up a lot of information in the afterlife. The murders have been coming thick and fast in 1897, and if all the victims talk to each other they would have a pretty easy time piecing together what has been happening behind closed doors. We end with Minerva/ Judith holding a letter opener over her head, walking towards Evan with evident intent of stabbing him.

Episode 787: You said that, I said nothing

Dark Shadows fans like to make jokes about the inefficiency of law enforcement in the fictional town of Collinsport, but in this episode we see that the sheriff and his men really never had a chance. The ancient and esteemed Collins family controls everything in the area, and they will go to any lengths to keep the police from obtaining the information they need to do their job effectively.

Stuffy Edward Collins invokes the police when he demands that broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi vacate the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Magda laughs and says that if the police show up, she will tell them that Edward’s distant cousin Barnabas is a vampire. Horrified at the damage it would do to the Collins family name were word of Barnabas’ condition to get out, Edward backs down. Barnabas is at large and has been responsible for at least six homicides since traveling through time to the year 1897, including the murder of Edward’s brother Carl in the drawing room of their home just the other day. But evidently that is a small matter to Edward compared to the danger that the sheriff might be indiscreet.

Barnabas materializes at the police station, where a werewolf is being held in custody. A deputy is startled to see Barnabas in front of him all of a sudden. For only the third time in the series, Barnabas says “Look into my eyes!” and induces an hypnotic trance in someone not his blood thrall. It is the first time he has exercised this power on someone other than Edward’s nine year old daughter Nora. Barnabas tells the deputy that once he has completed his task, he will remember nothing. So he is following the family policy with regard to keeping the police in total ignorance.

Edward shows up and sees Barnabas. Edward is wearing a cross and holding a revolver loaded with six silver bullets, which on Dark Shadows are as effective against vampires as they are against werewolves. Barnabas hides behind the deputy and tells Edward that he is acting in the interests of the future of the Collins family. Edward says that he belongs to the past, not the future. Barnabas doesn’t explain anything; he vanishes.

Not exactly an heroic look for ol’ Barney. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas’ post-hypnotic suggestion has its effect, and the deputy is bewildered to find himself face to face with Edward. Edward tells him that they must watch the werewolf. The deputy starts to say something about the sheriff, and Edward replies “The sheriff doesn’t realize what this animal is!” Of course he doesn’t, no one will tell him anything about it.

Back in the Old House, Barnabas and Magda lament their failures. He could not take the werewolf from the cell in the police station to the cell in the basement of the house; she could not persuade lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley to return a severed hand he stole from them. They wanted to do these things because the werewolf is Edward’s brother Quentin, whom Magda is trying to free from his curse by means of the hand’s magical powers. Barnabas knows that if they do not succeed, terrible consequences will ensue in 1969.

Closing Miscellany

It is a serious mistake to show the werewolf when he is not in the act of committing a spectacular homicide. They didn’t have the budget to put him in full-body makeup, so he wears a tidy little suit, complete with a watch fob. He is so well put together that it is difficult to imagine him inspiring any fear other than the fear that one will not meet his apparently rather exacting standards of attire.

*Whoooo’s* a well-dressed doggie? You are! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is a noteworthy blooper in this one. Magda confronts Evan, declaring “The book, I know you took it from the Old House!” Usually actors roll with each other’s bobbled lines, but this is far enough out that Humbert Allen Astredo obviously has no idea where Grayson Hall is in the script. All he can do is ask “The book?” “The hand!” she corrects.

They also make a goof in the closing credits. This is one of three consecutive days when Louis Edmonds is billed not as Edward, but as Roger Collins, the role he plays in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. He’s been identified correctly throughout the first seventeen weeks of the 1897 segment and everyone else is identified correctly in these episodes, so it is not clear what happened.

Danny Horn’s posts at Dark Shadows Every Day are often laugh-out-loud funny, and the one for this episode is especially so. His description of the scene between Magda and Evan has some big laughs, and when he imagines the sheriff’s deputies trying to catch the werewolf by “putting on their alluring lady-werewolf disguises a la the Warner Brothers cartoons,” well that’s just super how could anyone improve on it.

Episode 786: Dreams of long ago

The evil Gregory Trask has married Judith Collins and become the master of the estate of Collinwood. Trask shows his daughter, the repressed Charity, her new home in the great house. In the drawing room, Trask tells Charity that he wants her to marry Judith’s brother, the rakish Quentin, to whom he refers as the one eligible bachelor remaining in the Collins family. This is odd- like his brother Quentin, Edward Collins is a widower, and unlike Quentin Edward is sufficiently conscious of the appearance of propriety that it would be relatively easy for the sanctimonious Trask to control him. Besides, Edward’s son Jamison is Judith’s heir, giving Trask a reason to keep a close eye on both of them.

Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi enters and announces that she wants to speak with maidservant Beth Chavez. Trask says that he wants to talk to Magda alone in the drawing room. Charity wants to leave anyway; she hasn’t visited her mother’s grave today. Trask is worried because it is dark and both a vampire and a werewolf are loose on the grounds of the estate, but he and Charity decide it will probably be fine, so off she goes.

Trask gives Magda 24 hours to vacate her home in the Old House on the estate. She tells him she can prove that he murdered his first wife, prompting Trask to reconsider the eviction notice.

Magda lowers the boom on Trask. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the woods, Charity sees the werewolf, whom we know to be Quentin. She runs back home in a panic. Trask initially opposes Magda’s offer to walk Charity to her bedroom, but when she insists he crumbles. While Charity rests, Magda takes out her tarot deck and tells Charity she will read the cards for her. She brushes Charity’s objections aside as lightly as she had her father’s. She finds that Charity will be paired with an attractive man, but that this man is evil and that she must avoid him at all costs.

Charity has a dream in which she and Quentin speak tenderly to each other and kiss, only for him to zone out while a werewolf appears. The bulk of Charity’s dream consists of her and Quentin striking poses while the soundtrack plays the sickly little waltz Quentin obsessively plays on his gramophone, and David Selby’s voice recites some dreary lyrics that apparently go with it. This does nothing to explain the characters’ in-universe motivations, but it does explain the real-world reason why Dan Curtis wanted the writers to get the audience thinking of Charity and Quentin as a potential couple and to have her encounter the werewolf. In his post about the episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn explains that the sequence is product placement for some records that were released around this time. It’s interesting that Charity has inherited so much of her father’s money-mindedness that she sells advertising time in her dreams, but the actual sequence is unbelievably tedious to watch.

Episode 785: Time is my hobby

Early in 1969, the great estate of Collinwood became uninhabitable. The ghost of Quentin Collins took possession of the place and was about to kill strange and troubled boy David Collins. Quentin and David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins traveled back in time to the year 1897, when Quentin was a living being, and hoped to somehow prevent Quentin from becoming an evil spirit.

So far, Barnabas has managed to make everything much, much worse. As soon as he arrived in 1897, he found that he had become a vampire. So far, he has been responsible for at least six homicides that did not take place the first time through this period of history. He has also enslaved three people by biting them. He has not prevented a curse that has made Quentin a werewolf, which is evidently the origin of the disaster at Collinwood in 1969.

Moreover, Barnabas’ blunderings have caused Judith Collins, who owns Collinwood and the Collins family businesses, to become close to the hypocritical Rev’d Gregory Trask. Trask has responded to Judith’s interest in him by enlisting lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley to carry out a particularly cruel plan to murder Trask’s wife Minerva. Now Trask and Judith are married. Today she tells her brothers, Quentin and the stuffy Edward, that she is changing her will. Edward’s twelve year old son Jamison will still be her heir, but Gregory will administer the estate if Judith dies before Jamison is 21. Regular viewers know, not only that Gregory killed Minerva on the off-chance that he would thereby get a shot at taking Judith’s money, but that he is a sadist who takes special pleasure in making Jamison miserable. So this provision is a death sentence for Jamison. Since the residents of the great house at Collinwood in the 1960s are Jamison’s daughter Liz, son Roger, and grandchildren Carolyn and David, Trask will negate Dark Shadows‘ contemporary timeline if he murders Jamison.

It is not impossible that this might happen. The show is now chiefly about time travel, and the 1960s are not an indispensable destination. Barnabas did leave a few interesting characters behind when he traveled to the nineteenth century- sooner or later he is going to have to be reunited with mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, and occult expert Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes also has a lot to offer. But if Barnabas could find a way to come unstuck in time, Julia and Stokes can too. Wicked witch Angelique has already made her way to 1897. And anyone else we might miss can be replaced by the same actor playing a similar part. It does seem unlikely Collinwood will become Traskwood. But in April 1967 it seemed even less likely that the ABC network would devote thirty minutes of airtime five days a week to showing a vampire feeling sorry for himself, yet here we are.

Quentin is amused by Judith’s marriage to Trask, Edward appalled. Edward tells Judith that their grandmother’s will specified that he and Quentin would have the right to stay in the house as long as they wished, a point Judith concedes. This is a retcon. When the will was read in #714, it was made very clear that only Quentin was given a place in the house. Jamison was named as contingent heir. Edward was not mentioned at all. Neither was Carl Collins, another brother of Judith’s, whom Barnabas murdered a couple of days ago and who has already been forgotten.

Judith runs Edward and Quentin out of the drawing room. When she comes back in, she finds that the new will has been torn to shreds, a dagger has been stuck into a Bible under a verse lamenting the sufferings of the righteous, and there is a childish drawing tacked to the wall labeled “Mrs Trask.” Although “Mrs Trask” is now her own name, a fact which she proudly declared to Edward a few minutes before, she immediately assumes the drawing depicts Minerva.

Not the usual sort of portrait one finds on the walls of the great house. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This resonates with two stories that longtime viewers will remember. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. The ancestor of the future Collinses in that period was Daniel Collins, who like Jamison and David is played by David Henesy. Daniel’s big sister Millicent married roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes, who set about trying to murder Daniel in order to get all of Millicent’s wealth for himself.

Yesterday Judith saw Minerva’s ghost in the same part of the drawing room where these odd occurrences have taken place, and the Biblical verse is very much the sort of thing Minerva would have been likely to quote. So we are to assume that she is indulging in a little poltergeist activity. But the “Mrs Trask” drawing is so unlike anything the somber Minerva would have made herself that we can only assume she took it from some other spirit out in the unseen realm. Since “Mrs Trask” is Judith’s name now, the question of who that spirit might be brings up a second old story.

From March to July 1967, Liz was being blackmailed by seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Jason’s ultimate demand was that Liz should marry him, giving him control of the Collins family fortune. Liz’ daughter Carolyn was outraged when it looked like she was going to marry Jason, and in #252 she taunted her mother by shouting the name “Mrs McGuire!” over and again. Perhaps Minerva’s dead spirit has crossed paths with Carolyn’s unborn one, and Carolyn has drawn the picture as a way of rehearsing for that scene. Though Carolyn is an adult, Jamison had a dream in #767 in which he caught a glimpse of the Collinwood of 1969 and saw that Carolyn has a fondness for childish imagery.

There is also some business in this episode about broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi’s effort to lift the werewolf curse she placed on Quentin. Magda has stolen a severed hand that has magic powers and plans to put it on Quentin’s heart when he begins transforming tonight. Yesterday, Evan forced Magda to let him see the hand; when he looked at it, the hand grabbed him. It left him unconscious and severely disfigured. Now Magda is keeping Evan in her home, the Old House at Collinwood, and treating him with surprising tenderness. Quentin sees Evan there. He does not recognize him, even though he and Evan were close friends, Evan is wearing the same gray suit he always wore, and his very distinctive hair and beard are unchanged. Eventually Evan regains the ability to say his name, and Quentin freaks out. He does not want to go through with Magda’s plan, but when the transformation begins he drops his opposition.

Magda placed the hand on Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The hand looks very much like a Halloween decoration, so much so that I wonder if Dan Curtis hoped to make some money by getting copies of it into department stores by October 1969. It’s pretty disgusting to look at, but that’s the point.

One of the problems Dark Shadows had throughout its run was that it tended to veer between appealing exclusively to adults and exclusively to children. In the early months, its glacial pace, heavy atmosphere, psychological depth, and reliance on the star power of Joan Bennett drew a rather mature audience. As the supernatural and fantastic themes came to predominate, the average age of the viewers dropped towards the single digits. By the end of the big Monster Mash that ran through 1968, the show’s strongest demographic was probably elementary school pupils. Dividing an episode between the relatively adult melodrama of Edward’s reaction to the Judith/ Trask marriage and the undisguised kids’ stuff of The Hand of Count Petofi would seem to be a way of offering something to both the oldest and youngest viewers.

This episode originally aired on 27 June 1969. That was the third anniversary of the show’s premiere. That first installment, like 332 of those that followed it, revolved around the character of well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, played by Alexandra Moltke Isles. Mrs Isles left the show in November 1968; her son Adam Isles, who would in the 2000s become a top official of the USA’s Department of Homeland Security, was born this day. Mrs Isles has said in interviews that while she was recovering from the birth she tuned in to Dark Shadows, but that the show had changed so much in her time away from it that she couldn’t figure out what was going on.

I imagine Mrs Isles had changed a great deal as well. Like so many members of the cast and production staff, she was a fashionable, sophisticated New York society figure. While she was working on the show, she was immersed in its imaginary world, but after several months away she would have refocused her attention on the sorts of things she was raised to care about when she was growing up as the daughter of Countess Mab Moltke. One doubts that magical severed hands, werewolves, devil worshipers, and actors in brownface makeup would have ranked especially high on that list.

Episode 784: Impaled by a pin

Vampire Barnabas Collins has come unstuck in time and traveled from 1969 to 1897, a year in which he hopes to prevent a disaster. Unfortunately, Barnabas generates disasters with his every action, and so he has taken the grim situation he found upon his arrival and made it incalculably worse.

Now, Barnabas has been exposed as a vampire. Shortly before dawn, he returns to the cave where he has been hiding his coffin. There, he finds lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley (Humbert Allen Astredo) waiting for him, holding a cross. When Evan makes it clear he has no immediate plans to destroy him, Barnabas says that he does not want to be treated as an exhibit for the curious or a subject for research. This will remind longtime viewers of Barnabas’ initial response when in 1967 Dr Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) offered to develop a medical treatment for his vampirism. That treatment was not entirely successful, but it set Julia and Barnabas on a path that led them to become fast friends, and a later medical intervention did free him of the effects of his curse.

Barnabas needs all the friends he can get, and indeed there have been some signs that he is about to make new ones. But Evan is not going to be one of them. He knows that Barnabas has the famed “Hand of Count Petofi,” a relic of someone to whom Barnabas refers as “the most evil man who ever lived.” When Dark Shadows was set in 1968, Astredo played suave warlock Nicholas Blair, who was hung up on the idea of recruiting “the most evil woman who ever lived” to take part in one of his schemes, an idea which led directly to the failure of his mission and his own recall from Earth to Hell. Evan forces Barnabas and Barnabas’ reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi (Grayson Hall,) to let him look at the hand. That backfires immediately, and leaves Evan’s face severely disfigured. When Barnabas sees what has happened, he declares that Magda must not go through with her plan to use the hand to release rakish Quentin Collins from the werewolf curse she placed on him.

Evan uglified. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, the cruel and hypocritical Rev’d Gregory Trask proposes marriage to wealthy spinster Judith Collins (Joan Bennett.) In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Bennett plays reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz stayed in her house for 19 years because she thought she had murdered her husband Paul; only when seagoing con man Jason McGuire tried to use this belief to force Liz into marrying him and giving him control of the estate of Collinwood and the Collins family businesses did she confess to the killing. It then turned out that Paul wasn’t dead at all, and the whole thing was a cruel trick he and Jason played on Liz.

Unlike Liz, Judith actually has killed someone. She shot neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond to death in #775. Gregory prevented Judith from telling the police about this, persuading her that because she was under a vampire’s* power at the time she was not responsible. Since then, Judith has been putty in Trask’s hands. She accepts his proposal, and they are married by the end of the episode.

On Dark Shadows, wedding days are always occasions of horror and sorrow, and today is no exception. Trask’s wife Minerva was murdered in #773; unknown to Judith, Trask conspired with Evan to commit this crime and leave everyone thinking that a man named Tim Shaw did it. Trask’s plan to frame Tim fell apart in #777, when Tim showed up at Collinwood and revealed that he had seen Judith shoot Rachel. Since Trask killed Minerva in order to free himself to marry Judith and take control of Collinwood and the Collins businesses, he cannot risk Judith’s conviction on a murder charge, and so he tells the sheriff that Tim cannot have killed Minerva. When Trask and Judith come home from their wedding, Judith sees Minerva’s ghost in the drawing room. Evidently Minerva is not ready to rest and let Gregory reap the rewards of her murder.

*Not Barnabas, another one. Collinwood is crowded at night in 1897.

Episode 783: Talk to the hand

Nine year old Nora Collins walks in on her teacher, Charity Trask, being bitten by vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas tells Nora to “Look into my eyes!” He hypnotizes Nora and mind-wipes away her memory of him. Barnabas has been on Dark Shadows for more than two years now, and this is only the second time he has pulled the “Look into my eyes!” move with someone whose blood he has not been drinking. The previous occasion was also with Nora, in #756. In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Barnabas is usually paired with mad scientist Julia Hoffman, who is the master of a magical form of hypnosis that allows her to rewrite people’s memories at will. So if Barnabas exercised this traditional vampire power in those segments of the show, he’d be stepping on Julia’s territory. But this episode is part of a time-travel story set in 1897, and Julia is not here.

Barnabas has been exposed and is being hunted by a number of people. His current hiding place is inside a cave. He confers there with his reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi. Today the show is being taped on new cameras, and the image is crisper and more nuanced than we have seen since it went to color in August of 1967. The cave would barely have shown up through yesterday’s cameras, but it looks nifty today.

Magda is Barnabas’ sidekick, she is quick with lies, and she is played by Grayson Hall, but she does not do hypnosis. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Magda has stolen a severed hand that a crime boss was keeping in a box, and believes that she can use it to undo a curse she placed on the rakish Quentin Collins. Barnabas is worried that they will not use the hand correctly when the time comes to release Quentin. Since there is no way to test the procedure they plan to use on Quentin, he asks if it will be able to help someone else. Magda says that it should. He has the bright idea to summon Charity. He evidently overate, and she is in danger of dying from loss of blood.

Vampires are metaphors for extreme selfishness, and with this suggestion Barnabas is a case in point. If the hand can lift curses from the people it touches, why does Barnabas not have Magda place it on him? If it freed him of vampirism, that would heal Charity and his other victims, and would allow him to stroll up to the vampire hunters on some sunny day and watch their suspicions of him collapse. But that is out of the question, because he does not know how to control the hand. He is simply using Charity as a laboratory animal.

Barnabas telepathically summons Charity. As it happens, lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley is at her bedside. Evan is among the vampire hunters, and knows Charity is under Barnabas’ power. He physically restrains her from leaving her room. Barnabas and Magda despair of bringing Charity and the hand together. The hand then disappears from its box. Magda thinks the hand is simply lost and is terrified that she will not be able to return it to its owner, but Barnabas is serenely convinced that it has gone to Charity under its own power.

This turns out to be true. The hand materializes in Charity’s room. Evan sees it, and, expert that he is in occult lore, exclaims “The hand of Ojden!” It settles on Charity’s face, and when it vanishes the bite marks are gone from her neck and she is once again her brisk, authoritative, and intensely priggish self, no longer a thrall of Barnabas. The hand reappears in the cave next to the box, and Barnabas smugly announces to Magda that it completed its mission.

For some reason, Barnabas’ self-satisfied certitude crumbles and he feels compelled to check on Charity to see that she has indeed been healed. He materializes in her room, but she is not there and the cock is already crowing. When he returns to the cave, Evan meets him, holding up a cross and keeping him from getting back into his coffin.