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Episode 882: The show must go on. That’s the one and only rule there is.

Many fantastic tales dwell on a sense that dreams have a great power in the world, and so their characters are often afraid of falling asleep. Dark Shadows has several times referenced Edgar Allan Poe, who explored that fear in stories like “The Premature Burial,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Man of the Crowd.” The show brought up another writer of fantastic tales preoccupied with the fear of sleep in #808. Aristide, henchman of sorcerer Count Petofi, threatened an enemy of Petofi’s with “the mysterious shadow he can cast, the shadow that isn’t your own that follows you.” That was a reference to George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes, in which a man named Anodos is plagued by a shadow that moves about on its own, following him and blighting his existence. Not only does Anodos fear sleep from time to time in Phantastes, but the main theme of MacDonald’s other very popular novel, 1895’s Lilith, is Mr Vane’s long refusal to sleep and the great battle he must wage in the dream-world when he finally does allow himself to nod off.

Aristide’s threat suggested that the show was about to give us a story based on Anodos and the autonomous shadow. Aristide is dead now, and Petofi is running out of story, so that isn’t going to happen, at least not in the segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897. But today we do get a little bit of George MacDonald in the form of a battle against sleep. Petofi is casting a spell over himself and handsome young rake Quentin Collins. If Quentin loses conscious control of his mind for even a moment, he and Petofi will evacuate their respective bodies and be re-embodied as each other. Petofi will then transport himself, in Quentin’s body, to the year 1969. Quentin will be left behind in 1897, occupying Petofi’s aging form and waiting helplessly for Petofi’s mortal enemies to come and kill him, thinking they are taking their long-delayed revenge.

By the time Quentin finds out what’s going on, it is the wee hours of the morning, after he hasn’t slept for a couple of nights. His friends, Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye and time-traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, keep marching him around the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in an effort to keep him awake. They don’t brew up any coffee, strangely enough. But Barnabas does call on wicked witch Angelique and appeals to her to use her powers to put some kind of barrier between Quentin and Petofi.

Angelique tells Barnabas that she is reluctant to help Quentin because she is upset that he wants to go to New York and look for a woman named Amanda Harris. She had wanted Quentin to fall in love with her, and is jealous that he chose Amanda instead. Barnabas points out that if she doesn’t help Quentin, he won’t exist in the form that either she or Amanda knew. Angelique explains that she has a reason for her attitude:

Before I came here this time, I was in the everlasting pits of Hell, where other creatures of my kind live. Only, my stay here on Earth made me dissatisfied with my life there. I longed to come back here… To Earth, to become a human being. I begged my master for the chance.

Finally, he gave it to me on one condition and one condition only… That I make one man fall in love with me, without any use of supernatural spells or powers. One man, one chance. That’s what I was granted.

Since Quentin is the one man who represented Angelique’s one chance, letting him go to Amanda might mean that Angelique has to go back down. My favorite part of her speech is “Only, my stay here on Earth made me dissatisfied with my life there.” Sure, she could have been happy in the everlasting pits of Hell, as one is, but how ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Pa-ree. Or, since Angelique’s sojourns in the upper world have all brought her to Collinsport, after they’ve had the lobster roll at the Blue Whale.

While Barnabas is talking with Angelique, Pansy is on Quentin duty. She decides to keep him awake by compelling him to join in a performance of her song. A record of this song, performed by Nancy Barrett and David Selby, hit the stores the very day this episode was first broadcast, so this is product placement. But Pansy is doing exactly what she would do in this situation, Quentin is reacting just as he would react, and it is a charming moment.

The musical number is preceded by Pansy making what literary critics call a programmatic statement. “Feel like it or not, you gotta do it, the show must go on. That’s the one and only rule there is, love. So let’s have a bright chorus from that new team, Pansy Faye and Quentin Collins.” Pansy is not only a good pal and a gifted psychic, she is an accomplished scientist. She has indeed stated the complete physics, metaphysics, and every other operating principle of the universe of Dark Shadows when she says that “The show must go on.”

Angelique and Barnabas enter. Angelique insists on some time alone with Quentin. He says that once he gets to New York he most definitely will be looking for Amanda and that he has no interest in a relationship with Angelique. She looks away from him and talks herself into believing it will be OK if he falls in love with her after Amanda “has ceased to exist.” Longtime viewers can be fairly sure this means that Angelique is planning to murder Amanda, but at the moment the important thing is to get Angelique involved in helping Quentin against Petofi.

Angelique opens the door to the foyer, where we catch a glimpse of Nancy Barrett and Jonathan Frid doing a really marvelous mime depicting “intense conversation.” It’s one of those deliberately stagey bits of business that these twentieth century New York actors do so well.

Angelique opens the door on a silent “conversation.”

Angelique stares into the fire and tries to project psychic power Petofi-ward. We get a process shot simultaneously depicting Angelique in the drawing room and Petofi in his lair. The shot is not very successful, and Angelique explains that her efforts aren’t working either. She says that Petofi is in so deep a trance that she cannot reach him as she has done before.

Petofi’s surroundings are so heavily decorated that this shot just looks cluttered to me. I suppose having Petofi low in the shot and behind the flames is meant to remind us of Angelique’s old neighborhood, but the visual metaphor is spoiled by the cruddy 1960s TV color palette.

In black and white, as most viewers would have seen it in 1969, the shot has different problems- while the more abstract visual style does make the Petofi-as-Satan metaphor legible, it is less clear which shapes are in Angelique’s space and which are in Petofi’s.

Pansy, eavesdropping from the foyer, hears Angelique say that she will need to have something Petofi is wearing right now, something still warm from contact with him, in order to reach him with her powers. Pansy resolves to provide this, and she sneaks out. She makes her way to his lair, and is about to undo Petofi’s necktie when he comes out of his trance and tells Pansy she has interfered with his plans once too often. We have flashed to the motionless Petofi several times today, leading us to think that Thayer David was going to collect his fee without having to deliver a line. So it is quite effective when he springs into action.

Episode 881: Voracious for the future

The dramatic date is November 1897. We open in an abandoned mill on the old North Road in Collinsport, Maine. The late Garth Blackwood, once the keeper of Britain’s Dartmoor Prison, is about to avenge his own murder. Blackwood was raised from the dead by sorcerer Count Petofi and Petofi’s stooge, artist Charles Delaware Tate. Petofi wants to be rid of his unreliable servant Aristide, and decided that Blackwood, whom Aristide killed while escaping from Dartmoor and has feared ever since, will be the one to slay him.

Blackwood is ready to strangle Aristide, who takes a moment to tell him that if he does so he will be endangering his own existence. He explains that there are others who conjured him up to perform the very task he is about to undertake, and that once he has completed it they will not need him anymore. Blackwood says that this is no problem. Once he has killed Aristide, he will kill them too. He pulls a chain tight around Aristide’s neck.

Tate is outside while this is happening. The set represents the exterior of the mill. The set is alternately in deep shadow and illuminated by lightning flashes. We haven’t seen it before, it is rather nice.

Tate hides while Blackwood leaves, then goes into the old mill and confirms that Aristide is dead. Aristide was a nasty and inept fellow, but Michael Stroka found so many ways to make him fun to watch that he will be missed.

Back in his studio, Tate tells Petofi what he saw. He also reminds Petofi that Blackwood has killed two other people, and that he will in all likelihood go on killing everyone he meets. Petofi doesn’t care about any of that. All that interests him is his plan to forcibly swap bodies with handsome young Quentin Collins and, as Quentin, to travel to the year 1969.

Blackwood storms in, declares that Petofi and Tate are his prisoners, and says that they are under sentence of death. Petofi tries to cast a spell to make Blackwood go away; he finds that there is more to Blackwood than his magic can control. He can only hold him at bay, and that only for a moment. Tate shoots Blackwood. The bullet wounds cause him to fall and briefly lose consciousness, but he is soon back on his feet. He leaves, and vows that he will return to finish what he started.

At the great house of Collinwood, Quentin is going through his belongings. Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye enters. Quentin explains that he will be leaving on the early morning train to get away from Petofi. Pansy is sad to see him go, but she well knows how dangerous Petofi is. Quentin further explains that he has been looking through all his old stuff to see if any of it is worth keeping. He doesn’t think any of it is, but she thinks a photograph of him at the age of ten is adorable, and is glad when he makes a gift of it to her. They share a really lovely moment, as she says that she still wishes they could have become lovers and he plays along. She says that if he’d married her, she’d even have given up her career for him. He says gravely that he never would have asked her to do that. Quentin never asked Pansy for any of what she wanted to give him, and her reaction to this line shows that it has reminded her of that fact. But she still cares about him, and it is still a sweet little exchange. They smile their unforgettable movie-star smiles at each other when they part.

Later, Pansy has a dream in which Quentin falls asleep and Petofi seizes his body the instant his guard is down. She awakes, and realizes she must rush downstairs to prevent this dream coming true.

Episode 880: I like all of my stories to have endings

Collinwood: Judith, Trask, Beth, Quentin

In November 1897, wronged woman Judith Collins Trask has had her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, bricked up in her brother Quentin’s bedroom. While Gregory is taking this in, the ghost of another wronged woman appears to him. She is Quentin’s ex-fiancée Beth Chavez. Beth is looking for Quentin. Trask is initially frightened, but then urges Beth to go to Quentin and tell him to come up to the room.

Quentin is in the drawing room, and Beth does appear to him. She says that she cannot rest in peace until she has given him a message. We wonder if she is about to tell him about Trask, but no such thing. Instead, she tells Quentin she forgives him. Then she vanishes, and he shouts that he can’t forgive himself.

We first saw Beth and Quentin at the same time, when their ghosts appeared to children David Collins and Amy Jennings in Quentin’s room in #646. That was broadcast and set in December 1968. Since the show went to 1897 in March, the living beings Quentin and Beth have attracted very different responses from the audience. Quentin has become a huge breakout star, while Beth has faded into the background. She died Monday; this is her first return as a ghost, and her final appearance overall. It rounds things off nicely that her departure begins in the room where we first saw her.

Quentin’s skeleton had been in the room in late 1968. David and Amy removed it and buried it on the grounds. Now history has been changed. Trask’s skeleton may take its place when the show returns to contemporary dress, behind a brick wall there that wasn’t there before. In #839, we saw that while the changes in 1897 have brought peace to the ghosts of Quentin and Beth in 1969, the characters in that year still remember the haunting. So you’d expect the wall to be a puzzle to them, and if they tear it down the skeleton will be as well.

Judith enters and tells Quentin that he can’t go to his room, or to any other room in the west wing of the house. She explains that it cost a fortune to keep that wing open, so she has had it sealed off. She has moved all of his things to a bedroom in the main part of the house. Quentin asks Judith where Trask is; she claims he ran out in pursuit of two violent men who forced their way into the house and hasn’t been seen since, and asserts that she is terribly worried about him. She sounds sincere, but Quentin isn’t fooled. He smiles and asks if he is right to believe that Trask’s story is ended. Judith says that it isn’t, not quite.

Collinwood is supposed to be an immense house, literally. After the first year of Dark Shadows, when a story about the Collinses running out of money was complemented with some specifics about the size of the place,* they have been making it out to be unknowably large. So it seemed inexplicable yesterday that Judith would choose Quentin’s room as Trask’s place of immurement. We learn what her plans were today. There is a telephone in the room; that telephone had been important during the Haunting of Collinwood story. Evidently Judith has rigged it to receive incoming calls only. It rings, and Trask can hear her taunting him. He cannot call out to summon help.

In the first 55 weeks of Dark Shadows, Joan Bennett’s character Elizabeth Collins Stoddard was a recluse who hadn’t left Collinwood in 18 years, believing that she had killed her lousy husband and that his body was buried in a locked room in the basement. It turned out that she hadn’t killed him at all, and the whole recluse theme, and the blackmail plot that it led to, were just one big dead end. As Judith, Bennett is making up for Liz’ lost time.

Outside: Petofi, Aristide, Garth Blackwood, the Widow Romana**

Sorcerer Count Petofi has tired of his unreliable servant, a bungling sadist named Aristide. He has conjured up the ghost of the man Aristide most fears, a jailer named Garth Blackwood whom Aristide killed while escaping from Dartmoor Prison. Blackwood is now hunting Aristide. Blackwood and Aristide were the two violent men who surprised Judith in her bedroom, though Trask never went in pursuit of them.

Aristide ducks into an abandoned mill on the old North Road where he and Petofi had squatted. He hears someone hiding in the back room. A woman jumps out with a knife. Aristide disarms her. He realizes she is the widow of King Johnny Romana, a Rroma chieftain/ organized crime boss whom he killed in #827. Rather than killing her with her own knife, Aristide offers to betray Petofi to the Widow Romana if she will let him join her tribe. He gives her directions to Petofi’s current location. On her way there, she crosses paths with Blackwood, who kills her. Blackwood then makes his way to the mill, where we see him grabbing Aristide.

Aristide draws a map for the Widow. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When King Johnny died, we learned that in a few days another Rroma somewhere would inherit his immunity to Petofi’s spells and his mission to kill him. That was eleven weeks ago, and we’ve been waiting. The Widow Romana’s appearance today is a gesture towards tying up that loose end.

*In #2, Liz tells well-meaning governess Vicki that there are a total of 40 rooms, most of them in the closed-off parts of the house; in #87, the opening voiceover says that there are 80 rooms.

**Her name is given in the credits as “The Widow Romano,” but “Romana,” which we had heard as King Johnny’s surname in earlier episodes, is a likelier Romany name.

Episode 879: A room of one’s own

The odious Gregory Trask is plotting to murder his fabulously wealthy wife, the former Judith Collins, before she can change her will. He has made an arrangement with Aristide, a sadist who is fleeing a demon his former master conjured up from the depths of Hell to stalk him. He promises to lay the demon to rest once Aristide has murdered Judith.

For her part, Judith has made an arrangement of her own with a man named Tim Shaw. Tim is not appreciably more scrupulous than Aristide, and he hates Trask with a passion. He is also free of the time constraints that the stalking demon imposes on Aristide.

Judith goes upstairs to her bedroom, where Aristide is lurking behind the curtains. The scene looks rather like that in the 1954 film Dial M for Murder, in which a man hides behind curtains while waiting to murder a woman whose husband is blackmailing him into the crime. It is likely that Dial M for Murder was on the minds of the makers of Dark Shadows at this time, since star Jonathan Frid had just missed four and a half weeks while playing the lead in a stage production of it in the Chicago area.

In Dial M for Murder, the wife survives the attempt, killing the would-be assassin. Judith also survives, but not through her own action. Instead, the demon, whose name is Garth Blackwood, bursts into the room. Aristide escapes through the window. Trask enters and finds Blackwood still in the room. Blackwood menaces him with a heavy chain he carries, then leaves in pursuit of Aristide.

Judith persuades Trask to join her in a glass of brandy. He takes a sip, she does not. He passes out, and Tim enters. When Trask awakens, he finds himself in a room in the west wing of the house. Tim is with him in the room. Tim tells Trask goodbye, then springs out the door and locks it behind him. When Trask opens the door shortly after, he finds that Tim and Judith are bricking him in.

So long, Gregory. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

It’s rather much to ask us to believe that the mortar dries instantly, leaving Trask unable to push the wall down. To be bricked up in Collinwood is the fate of all Trasks- Gregory’s ancestor, the original Reverend Trask, was bricked up in an alcove in the basement of the Old House on the estate in #442 by the vengeful Barnabas Collins. Barnabas chained that Trask up, giving the mortar time to set. Moreover, Barnabas chose a dark little out-of-the-way spot in a vacant house. This is in a bedroom suite that Judith’s brother Quentin uses. Most of Quentin’s stuff is out of the room, but there is still some furniture in there and a bunch of candles. You have to wonder what she will tell Quentin when he comes home. For some time they’ve been going on about how vast the great house is, at one point saying that no one had ever counted the number of rooms in it, so it is just bizarre that Judith picked a room that someone is on his way to sleep in.

Episode 878: The moors are my domain

Episode 174 of Dark Shadows, broadcast and set in February 1967, included a scene set in a police station and morgue in Phoenix, Arizona, where we met Lieutenant Costa of the Arizona State Police. Lieutenant Costa was played by John Harkins, who would become a ubiquitous TV presence in the decades to follow.

Harkins returns to the cast today as another law enforcement character. The show is set in 1897, and the action is almost entirely driven by supernatural doings. Harkins’ character, Garth Blackwood, is the late keeper of Dartmoor Prison. He is conjured up from the depths of Hell by sorcerer Count Petofi, who has decided to use him to kill his unreliable servant Aristide. Blackwood was heard but not seen yesterday, in a flashback set near Dartmoor. That flashback broke the record Harkins’ previous appearance had long held for the scene in the series set furthest from Collinsport, Maine.

Blackwood storms into the room where Petofi is recovering from a knife wound Aristide recently inflicted on him. He announces that his prisoner was seen entering the house and threatens Petofi with a heavy chain he carries. Petofi keeps smiling, but points out that he is injured and was unable to stop Aristide leaving. Blackwood exits. The threat suggests that conjuring him up may not have been Petofi’s wisest move. Petofi has such great powers that we have for some time suspected that he himself would have to be the source of his own destruction. Perhaps Blackwood will be the instrument who finishes him off.

At the great house of Collinwood, matriarch Judith Collins Trask tells her lawyer, Evan Hanley, that she is ready to put her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, in his place. She will be changing her will the next day to remove Trask as executor of her estate. Evan, a former co-conspirator of Trask’s in his evil schemes against Judith and others, is reluctant, but can tell there is no point in resisting Judith. He exits, and Trask enters. Judith tells him she will be rewriting her will to pass all of her wealth to worthy causes after she dies, and he is thunderstruck. He exits hastily.

Trask goes to Evan’s house. He tries to talk his onetime partner in crime into stopping Judith’s plan, but Evan says that her resolution is beyond his ability to change. Aristide bursts in. He pleads for help, and reveals that Petofi has conjured up a demon to stalk him. Evan knows Petofi’s power and wants nothing to do with the situation, but Trask does not know what he is dealing with. He promises to help Aristide in return for a favor. Evan leaves the room, and Trask tells Aristide he wants him to commit a murder for him. After he agrees, Evan returns and Trask persuades him to let Aristide stay in his house for an hour.

In Trask’s absence, Blackwood catches up with Aristide. He enters the house, and Aristide flees. He demands Evan let him search the house. Evan’s background as an attorney kicks in, and he declares he will not let Blackwood conduct a search without a warrant. Blackwood’s response is to strangle him with his chain. Evan has been one of the most consistently interesting characters in the 1897 segment; his death is another sign that we will soon be leaving this epoch.

Garth Blackwood dispatches Evan Hanley. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 877: Put down that sword

Throughout October 1897, which at 4 PM on participating stations of the ABC television network coincided with October 1969, 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi occupied the body of handsome young Quentin Collins and banished Quentin to his own aging form. Last week Quentin broke that spell, and now the two of them are themselves again.

News of the restoration has not reached everyone, however. On Friday and Monday, Quentin’s lover, maidservant Beth, saw him at the top of Widows’ Hill. Thinking he was Petofi, she flung herself to her death on the rocks below rather than submit to whatever evil magic he had in store for her. Yesterday, Petofi’s unreliable servant Aristide went to Quentin, thinking he was his master, and begged for a task by which he could earn his way back into his good graces. Quentin sent him to murder Petofi, which he is trying to do when we open today.

The attempt takes place in the studio of artist Charles Delaware Tate, an unpleasant man who is tied to Petofi. Tate finds Aristide plunging a knife into Petofi’s chest. He stops the attack and gets through to Aristide that the swap is over and he is stabbing Petofi himself. Desperate to undo his latest offense, Aristide hastens back to the great house of Collinwood, intending to kill Quentin.

Petofi comes to and tells Tate that he intends to repossess Quentin’s body and use it to escape his enemies. When Tate tells him what Aristide has gone to do, he sends him to stop him. He does so, showing up in the drawing room at Collinwood in the nick of time and, at gunpoint, forcing Aristide to lay down the sword with which he was about to run Quentin through.

Back in the studio, Petofi instructs Tate to draw a magical sketch. The sketch depicts a man called Garth Blackwood, a cruel jailer whom Aristide killed when he escaped from prison in England. Petofi remembers meeting Aristide for the first time the night he escaped Blackwood’s prison. In #854 Petofi had said he met Aristide in an alley near the Thames in London, but this time we flash back to a meeting on the moors in the county of Devon. Petofi recalls that Aristide pledged his fealty to him in return for freedom from Blackwood’s ghost.

Once Tate has drawn his sketch, Blackwood will come back to life, determined to take his vengeance on Aristide. Aristide returns to the studio to resume begging for mercy, and Petofi takes great pleasure in showing him the sketch and telling him what is in store for him.

Episode 876: The gift again

In #425, broadcast in February 1968 and set in February 1796, the gracious Josette was near the cliff on the top of Widow’s Hill when she saw her lost love, Barnabas Collins. Wicked witch Angelique had turned Barnabas into a vampire, and Barnabas planned to kill Josette and raise her from the dead with the same curse. Angelique sent a vision to Josette of what her existence would be like after she rose from the grave to prey on the living. While Barnabas watched helplessly, Josette flung herself to her death onto the rocks far below the cliff.

Barnabas spent the next centuries telling himself that Josette’s suicide was the result of a misunderstanding. In #233, broadcast and set in May 1967, he was masquerading as his own descendant, a cousin from England come to visit the Collinses of Collinsport, Maine. He told heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and well-meaning governess Vicki Winters that Josette jumped from the cliff because she did not realize that her lover had come with only good intentions for her. By that time, it seemed he might actually have convinced himself it was true.

Today, it is 1897, and rakish libertine Quentin Collins and his sometime lover, maidservant Beth Chavez, reenact Josette’s suicide. They, however, follow the script which had previously applied only in Barnabas’ head. For several weeks, sorcerer Count Petofi has been occupying Quentin’s body, having confined Quentin to his own aging form. Beth was for a time in thrall to Petofi, and is terrified of him. Petofi was still Quentin-shaped yesterday when he chased Beth onto the top of Widows’ Hill. He collapsed in the woods, and a moment later the spell was broken and the body was Quentin’s again. Quentin, restored to his own person, wanders up to the summit and is surprised to see Beth there.

Quentin tries to tell Beth that he is himself, but she is not disposed to listen. Thinking that he has come to do something worse than simply kill her, she leaps from the cliff.

Terry Crawford says that when they first did this scene, they wanted her to emphasize the drama of Beth’s suicide by really flinging herself down hard. Since the floor was only a couple of feet below the set, the springy mattress that she flung herself on bounced her back into the frame, and they had to retake the shot. I wish we had that out-take, it must have been hilarious.

Quentin returns to the great house of Collinwood, in shock. He doesn’t notify the police or anyone else of Beth’s death- apparently the seascape just isn’t complete without a dead maidservant or two strewn carelessly about.

Barnabas, who has traveled back in time from 1969 to 1897 and who is currently free of the effects of the vampire curse, enters. He has befriended Quentin, and is at war with Petofi. He knew about the body swap, and had urged Quentin to make the effort that reversed it. He does not know how that effort turned out. He is happy to hear that Quentin is himself again, unhappy to learn of Beth’s demise, and insistent that Quentin must go far away before Petofi can get at him again.

We cut to a studio occupied by artist Charles Delaware Tate, a stooge of Petofi’s. We can see that Tate stole the magical portrait that keeps Quentin from turning into a werewolf. He covers the portrait with white paint. A visitor enters. It is Petofi’s servant Aristide. Aristide’s face is covered with dirt. Petofi has turned against Aristide, who has been in hiding. Tate agrees to help Aristide get a bath and clean clothes, but will not intercede with Petofi on his behalf.

Aristide does not know that the body swap is over. He goes to Collinwood, finds Quentin, and assumes that he is Petofi. When he offers to do whatever is necessary to restore himself to his master’s good graces, Quentin tells Aristide to find the man who appears to be Petofi and kill him. Aristide, a sadistic fiend, is delighted to receive this sort of command. He goes back to Tate’s, finds the real Petofi there, and stabs him in the chest.

Aristide getting ready to stab Petofi. Still not using his favorite knife, “The Dancing Girl” (alias “The Dancing Lady.”) Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 875: Barnabas, Quentin, and the difficulty of being oneself

This is the first episode credited to Peter Miner as line producer. Dark Shadows was being taped way out of sequence at this period, so Robert Costello’s name will appear in the credits several more times in the next few weeks. The role of the line producers is one of the most under-discussed aspects of the show’s history; writer Ron Sproat, for example, was in a 1985 festival appearance unable to remember ever receiving any input from Costello. So far as he could recall, the writers interacted exclusively with executive producer Dan Curtis.

Even if Sproat’s memory were accurate, I suspect that much of Curtis’ own time working on the show was spent in meetings with Costello. He was there from the beginning, and was around throughout the long periods when Curtis was away in London and other places working on other projects. When the show makes deep cuts into its early stages of development, referring to story points that played out long before any of the current staff of writers came aboard, I always suspect it was Costello who suggested the idea. Now that he is leaving, we will see if those references become rarer. If they don’t, maybe it is Curtis’ own memory that has been at work. On the other hand, even if they do dry up it may just be that they had run out of things to say about those old themes. Whatever happens, Costello had a hard job and clearly did it better than almost anyone else could have, it’s sad to see him go.

Today’s story is about the results of a spell that 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi cast a few weeks ago. Petofi forcibly swapped bodies with handsome young Quentin Collins. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

Yesterday, maidservant Beth Chavez found out about the body swap. In love with Quentin and terrified of Petofi, she was horrified by it. Today, she searches desperately for someone she can trust, and makes the singularly unfortunate choice of weak-willed schoolteacher turned unscrupulous adventurer Tim Shaw. She goes to Tim’s hotel room, tells him the story, and asks for help. Uncharacteristically, he does not look for a way to sell the information Beth gives him. He simply goes to Q-Petofi, whom he believes to be Quentin, in what can only be a sincere effort to do the right thing. He brings Q-Petofi back to his room, where Beth is waiting. She soon manages to escape, and Q-Petofi chases her.

For his part, P-Quentin made a happy discovery yesterday and the day before. When Petofi executed the body swap, he took his powers with him into Quentin’s form. But now P-Quentin finds that the powers have returned to Petofi’s own rightful body, which is to say to him. After consulting with his friend and distant cousin, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, P-Quentin decides to will himself back into his own body.

This works. Quentin awakes as himself, in the woods on Widows’ Hill. He finds Beth at the summit of the hill, near the cliff from which so many people have leapt or fallen to their deaths. She thinks he is Petofi, and flees to the edge while he tries to reassure her of his true identity. The closing cliffhanger leaves her inches from death.

A few years ago, I posted a fanfic idea in the comments on Danny Horn’s post about this episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day. I still like it:

This is one of the episodes that could have been novelized by “Marilyn” Ross under the title “Barnabas, Quentin, and the Dumbest Possible Plan.” Rather than will himself into his own body right away, thus returning Petofi to his body and for all they know to his full powers, a character with brains might have tried swapping places with someone relatively harmless. Beth would seem to be the obvious person. If she comes to in Petofi’s body, Beth would seem to be the person most likely to accept the situation and least likely to use the powers of Petofi to destroy Our Heroes. Playing Quentin may have been just the challenge Terry Crawford really needed to show off her acting talents, and I’m sure Thayer David would have done wonders as Beth.

Quentin/ Beth/ Petofi could have been the first in a whole series of body swaps. Some of those swaps could have led to villains getting their comeuppance, helping to clear the decks for the end of the 1897 segment. So, while inhabiting the body of a villain, Quentin tries to do something heroic, winds up in mortal peril, and at the last second snaps back to his previous host, just in time for the villain to be the one who dies.

Comment posted 6 December 2020 on Danny Horn, “Episode 875: Switchback,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 8 June 2016.

Fans if the original Star Trek will recognize the source of my inspiration. The episode titled “Return to Tomorrow” features a malevolent alien squatting in Mr Spock’s body. Spock hides his consciousness in the brain of Nurse Christine Chapel, whom the alien once controlled, as Petofi once controlled Beth, and who has a crush on Spock as Beth does on Quentin. And Spock and Nurse Chapel, as a composite being, deliver the fatal blow that kills the alien.

Episode 874: Makes a girl feel creepy

Ever since its first time-travel storyline, when it spent November 1967 through March 1969 visiting the 1790s, Dark Shadows has been committed to treating its cast as a repertory theater company. Now, we are coming to the end of the 35th week of an arc set in 1897, and most of the actors are not only playing characters unique to that year but are playing two characters at once. So David Selby joined the cast as rakish libertine Quentin Collins, and Thayer David, who has played several parts on the show, had been playing sorcerer Count Petofi. But a few weeks ago Petofi cast a spell to trade bodies with Quentin. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

In #819, Petofi found uptight minister’s daughter Charity Trask to be an irritant, and so he erased her personality. He replaced it with that of late Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye, whom Charity had never met. Pansy has been residing in Charity’s body ever since. Charity had run out of story, and Pansy is a lot of fun, so it would be a pure loss if this transformation were reversed.

Pansy Faye, occupying the former body of Charity Trask.

In #844, a young American woman named Kitty Soames arrived at the great house of Collinwood. Kitty is the dowager countess of Hampshire. The late Earl was a friend of Quentin’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward, and because of his involvement with Petofi he died penniless. Kitty is hoping to marry Edward and rescue her financial position. Since Edward is also penniless and looking for a way out of his troubles, we might look forward to a comedy resolution where each finds out about the other’s poverty on their wedding day.

But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards. From the day of her arrival, Kitty has been having psychotic episodes. These are triggered by the irruption into her consciousness of the mind of the late Josette DuPrés. In the 1790s, Josette was engaged to marry Barnabas Collins. A wicked witch sabotaged their engagement, turned Barnabas into a vampire, and drove Josette to kill herself. Barnabas became obsessed with recreating Josette; in 1967, when the show was set in contemporary times, he tried to achieve this by abducting women and torturing them. Now Barnabas has traveled back in time to 1897, and he is apparently not being evil when he urges Kitty to allow Josette to take over as her primary consciousness.

Barnabas and Kitty, under Josette’s watchful eyes.

Petofi’s magical powers are concentrated in his right hand, and he took them with him when he moved into Quentin’s body. Today we see that he is losing these powers. Q-Petofi confronts Barnabas, who is for the time being free of the effects of the vampire curse. Q-Petofi announces he will restore those effects and touches Barnabas’ forehead with his right hand. When nothing happens, Barnabas taunts him. Later, Q-Petofi confronts Pansy, who has figured out about the body swap. He announces he will turn her back into Charity. He touches her with his right hand, and again nothing happens. She complains that he makes her feel creepy acting like that. The scene between Q-Petofi and Pansy really is hilarious.

For her part, Kitty/ Josette has gone to P-Quentin, whom she believes to be Petofi. She insists he touch her with his magic hand and clear up her identity crisis; unable to convince her he has no powers, he plays along. To his amazement and delight, it works. She realizes she is both Kitty and Josette, and he realizes that he now has Petofi’s powers.

Kitty/ Josette goes to her room in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Josette has communicated with the living through her portrait since its first appearance in #70; longtime viewers will remember a one-sided conversation strange and troubled boy David Collins had with it in #102. Kitty hears the portrait talking to her, urging her to become Josette, assuring her they will be happy once they meld into a symbiont. Barnabas shows up, and Kitty/ Josette has a candid and endearing conversation with him. She realizes the whole truth about him; she knows everything Josette knows. She cannot decide what she ought to do.

Episode 873: Charming and exquisitely dangerous

In October 1897, sorcerer Count Petofi has used his magical powers to swap bodies with Quentin Collins. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

We open with Q-Petofi meditating on a lineup of I Ching wands. He goes into a trance which unlocks a cosmic force that transports him to the great house of Collinwood in 1969. He wanders into the drawing room, finds a newspaper dated 28 October of that year, and starts exulting. Maggie Evans, governess in the great house in the late 60s, hears him and comes downstairs.

As the segment of Dark Shadows set in 1897 winds down, we’ve been thinking of ways they might have moved forward. Some of the possibilities involve splitting the week between episodes set in 1897 and others set in 1969. Maggie has been on the show from episode #1, and has been central to several of the storylines that take place in contemporary dress. The last of these stories before the move to 1897 centered on Quentin’s malevolent ghost haunting Collinwood and making it impossible for anyone to live there. In the course of that, he appeared to Maggie several times. In #682, Maggie had a dream in which Quentin’s ghost strangled her to death. Though the events we have seen in 1897 have changed the future, we saw in #839 that the 1960s characters remember Quentin’s haunting. So when Maggie is on her way to meet someone who is to all outward appearances Quentin, we have a hint that a story might be brewing in which Q-Petofi finds himself carrying the can for all of the horrors Quentin’s ghost wrought between December 1968 and September 1969.

Alas, it is not to be. By the time Maggie reaches the drawing room, Q-Petofi has vanished. A few moments after he left 1897, maidservant Beth scattered the wands and brought him back. He is furious when he comes to, and she explains that she had to do it. The magical portrait that keeps Quentin, and presumably also Q-Petofi, from becoming a werewolf is not in the suitcase Q-Petofi gave her earlier in the evening to bury. Q-Petofi has been in possession of Quentin’s body and of his portrait for weeks, and he has vast powers of sorcery, so you’d think he would have hidden the portrait long before. His magic powers would seem to give him the ability to do anything at all to hide it. My favorite idea is that he would impose onto Quentin’s portrait an exact copy of the portrait that hangs above the mantel in the drawing room of the great house and hang it in its place, so that it would be hidden in plain sight for years to come.

Besides, if Q-Petofi was going to bury the portrait surely he would at least have put it in something airtight and made of metal, not a wooden suitcase that doesn’t close all the way and that will likely rot to dust in a year or two. Apparently he isn’t as big on long-term plans as he led us to believe when he claimed he was working on a design to become the ruler of the cosmos.

Q-Petofi orders Beth to bring Pansy Faye, a deceased Cockney showgirl/ mentalist who has for some time been inhabiting the body once occupied by the stunningly dreary Charity Trask, to Quentin’s room at Collinwood. He demands information which she refuses to give. She storms out.

Pansy has a dream in which she and Quentin dance in the drawing room of Collinwood while a specially recorded version of her song, I Wanna Dance for You, featuring the voices of Nancy Barrett and David Selby, plays in the background. Colors flare on the screen while we hear them sing. Miss Barrett was an excellent singer, Mr Selby an adequate one. He does speak a few of his lines, which damages the rhythm of the song, and the flaring colors often obscure the actors completely. Mr Selby and Miss Barrett are so lovable that we very much want to overlook these flaws in the number’s conception.

The dream ends with Quentin turning into Petofi and laughing evilly at Pansy. She awakes in horror. She has known for some days that Q-Petofi isn’t Quentin, and she knows enough about Petofi that it is strange she hasn’t already figured out that he is the one hiding inside his body. But when she sits up with a gasp, we know that she has finally put it all together.

Time-traveler Barnabas Collins, a recovering vampire, meets Q-Petofi in the drawing room at Collinwood. Q-Petofi is convinced that Barnabas stole the portrait of Quentin, and is very aggressive about pressing his suspicions. Barnabas has been playing dumb ever since his vampirism went into remission, but after a couple of minutes of Q-Petofi’s hectoring he addresses him as “Count Petofi.” When Barnabas cannot tell him what he wants to hear, Q-Petofi declares that he will restore the vampire curse to its full potency. He touches Barnabas’ forehead with the right hand in which his powers are concentrated. Barnabas squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, then opens them with a look of triumph. He asks Q-Petofi what has become of his powers.

The rest of the episode revolves around yet another possessed person. Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, is also Josette DuPrés, who plunged to her death from the cliff at Widow’s Hill 101 years before. Barnabas was supposed to marry Josette at one point, and he has been obsessed with recreating her ever since.

In May and June of 1967, when the show was set in the present, Barnabas abducted Maggie and tried to brainwash her into becoming Josette. In those days, the show was ambiguous about why Barnabas picked Maggie. Strange and troubled boy David Collins was an intimate friend of Josette’s ghost, and when he saw Maggie in Josette’s dress in #240 and #241, he thought she was Josette, looking just as she always did. Indeed, Miss Scott had played the ghost a few times, always behind a veil. When Barnabas was about to give up on Maggie in #260 he very earnestly told her “But you are Josette!” Yet after Maggie escaped, he picked another girl and planned to repeat the experiment with her, explaining to his sorely-bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #274 that all you have to do is “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure, and a new personality is created.”

But when the show made its first trip back in time, visiting the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968, Kathryn Leigh Scott played Josette. That was a bold move. Longtime viewers were left with the uncomfortable feeling that Barnabas may have had a point when he devised the horrifying program of torture that made the show so terribly bleak for several weeks. When we see Miss Scott playing Kitty, who really is Josette and really does have to accept that fact, longtime viewers can only squirm as they remember Barnabas shoving Maggie into his old coffin and later walking down the long gray corridors of his basement on his way to the prison cell where he was going to murder her. We’ve since come to know Barnabas as an endearingly ineffectual comic villain, but it is a stretch to remind us of him as he was in those grim days and ask us to concede that he was in any sense right.

Kitty confronts Barnabas at Collinwood and accuses him of orchestrating her Josettifying psychosis. He denies that he is responsible, and claims to know that Josette’s spirit lives in her and that she ought to yield to it. When she asks how he knows, he makes up a story about being a boy in England, falling in love with a portrait of Josette, and reading her diaries. She is unconvinced.

Later, Josette goes to P-Quentin in Petofi’s old squat, the abandoned mill on the North Road. She believes he is Petofi, and asks him to use his power to resolve her identity crisis. He tries to explain that he only looks like Petofi, and has none of his power, but she refuses to believe him. Having nothing to lose, he decides to play along. He tells the right hand to tell Kitty the truth about herself, and touches her forehead. She suddenly realizes that she is both Josette and Kitty. P-Quentin just as suddenly realizes that Petofi’s power has returned to the body in which he is now an unwilling tenant.

Kitty/ Josette keeps telling P-Quentin that she remembers what he was able to do with his right hand when he was staying with her and her late husband in England a few years before. This is a pretty bad continuity error. For eight weeks from #778, the most dynamic story on the show centered on the fact that Petofi’s hand was cut off in 1797 and kept in a box by a Romani tribe for the hundred years since, until broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi stole it in an attempt to lift the werewolf curse from Quentin. It was only in #815, in August, that Petofi reattached his hand and with it regained the bulk of his power. Granted, #815 is eleven and a half weeks ago, but the show now takes so little time to onboard new viewers by recapping that the writers are clearly counting on the audience to have a great deal of information about the story so far in their heads. As such, it is very surprising that they would break from established continuity on such a major point of the recent months.