What Acilius Thinks About Dark Shadows
Episode 938: Memory lane
For the last eleven weeks, the A story on Dark Shadows has been about the Leviathan People, a mysterious race of Elder Gods who are trying to retake the Earth from humanity by enlisting a few people in central Maine into a secret cult and saddling them with responsibility for an ungovernable monster. The cultists…
Episode 937: The list of the expendables
A monster from beyond space and time has taken the form of a vicious man-child and asked people to call it “Jabe.” A cult devoted to the Leviathan People, mysterious Elder Gods who brought the monster to Earth, have decided to put up with its murders and depredations, but even they draw the line at…
Episode 936: Behind that closed door
The Leviathan People, a mysterious race of Elder Gods, are planning to retake the Earth from humankind. They’ve started small, putting together a secret cult of devotees in and around the village of Collinsport, Maine, and placing a rapidly growing creature in a room above an antique shop there. Now the creature has taken the…
Episode 935: Call me Jabe
Sheriff Davenport and his new sidekick, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, have come to the top of the stairs above Philip and Megan Todd’s antique shop in the village of Collinsport. The sheriff has a search warrant that specifies the room by the landing as a place of interest in connection with the violent death of…
Episode 934: Some plans we could spoil
Last Experience We open with a reprise of the end of yesterday’s episode. Quentin Collins and Amanda Harris are reenacting the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. As in the ancient Greek story, they will live together if they can escape all the perils on the road from the realm of the dead to that of…
Episode 933: Easy street
In the middle of The Odyssey, Odysseus and his companions enter a certain cave and follow a path that leads to the realm of the dead. There, Odysseus talks with several people whom he knew when they were alive, then comes back to the upper world. This passage, known in Greek as the νέκυια (nekyia,)…
Episode 932: Just ourselves, and immortality
For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897. Among the characters we got to know were Quentin Collins, Charles Delaware Tate, Count Petofi, and Amanda Harris. Quentin was a rakish libertine and occasional murderer who was cursed to be a werewolf. Tate was an artist. Petofi was a…
Episode 931: Into strange rooms
Some invisible Elder Gods known as the Leviathans have taken control of a group of individuals in and around the area of Collinsport, Maine and formed them into a cult serving their plan to reclaim the Earth. Confusingly enough, the cultists are also known as Leviathans. In 1949, deadbeat dad Paul Stoddard was leaving his…
Episode 930: Indoctrinated by his thinking
The current A-story is about a group of people under the control of the Leviathans, unseen supernatural beings. The Leviathans’ plan involves a mysterious force that has incarnated itself in a series of children, most recently an apparently thirteen year old boy named Michael, and will culminate in the obliteration of the human race. Since…
Episode 929: The convergence
For the first 55 weeks of Dark Shadows, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard was under the impression that she had killed her husband Paul and that Paul’s associate Jason McGuire had buried his corpse in the basement of the great house on the estate of Collinwood. She spent nineteen years at home, terrified that if she…
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