Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 864: Shipwreck Point

Sorcerer Count Petofi is currently occupying the body of rakish Quentin Collins. When he is in this form, I refer to him as Q-Petofi.

Q-Petofi. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley has displeased Q-Petofi. Q-Petofi has put the zap on Evan and made him dig his own grave. Evan begs for his life, but does so in a stilted, robotic voice that suggests he is struggling against Q-Petofi’s power. It is a neat job of acting by Humbert Allen Astredo.

Evan points out that it would raise suspicions if Q-Petofi were seen with his servant Aristide, especially inside the great house of Collinwood. Evan himself, however, is the Collins family’s attorney, trusted by everyone in the house. If anyone there has suspicions about Q-Petofi, they will confide in him. Q-Petofi decides that he may as well let Evan live, and orders him to keep tabs on wicked witch Angelique.

We cut to the foyer of Collinwood, where Angelique is staying. She is on the telephone trying to reach the local pharmacy, and is annoyed that the meds she wants are not yet available. Another houseguest, Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye, enters. Angelique hurriedly ends the call. Pansy taunts Angelique for the end of her engagement to Quentin. After Pansy exits, Angelique gets back on the phone and resumes talking to the pharmacist. Q-Petofi enters, and Angelique pretends she is talking to someone else, then hangs up.

Returning viewers know that Angelique is carrying on a medical intervention designed by time-traveling mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia’s friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, made his way from 1969 to 1897, and she followed him. Julia had recreated an experimental treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into abeyance for a little while early in 1968 when she snapped back to her own time, vanishing from 1897. Shortly before Julia disappeared, Angelique agreed to complete the procedure and turn Barnabas into a real boy.

Angelique seems less powerful than usual today. Her dealings with the pharmacy are a logical consequence of her agreement to take over Julia’s plan, but she doesn’t usually have to get exasperated with people over the telephone, and not since her early days as a witch in the 1790s has she been so vulnerable to discovery by random passersby. Later, she goes to Barnabas’ hiding place, and Evan follows her. There have been times when Angelique could materialize and dematerialize at will, and it was impossible for any mere mortal to keep track of her whereabouts, but evidently she doesn’t feel up to that today. She does tell Q-Petofi she has a headache, maybe that’s true.

Pansy has a scene in the studio of artist Charles Delaware Tate. She tells Tate she wants to buy one of his paintings; he tells her that everything is for sale, but that his prices are high. She picks out a portrait of the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris; he throws a tantrum and doesn’t want to sell it to her. When she reminds him that he said all the paintings are for sale, he names the ridiculously high price of $5000. That would be well over $150,000 in 2025. Without missing a beat, Pansy pulls out a few large-denomination bills and fans them under Tate’s nose.

Pansy’s only source of income was a cabaret act she recently did at the Blue Whale, a tavern in the village of Collinsport. We saw her there the other day shortly before nine PM, when she was the only person in the barroom. So it doesn’t seem likely she could have earned that quantity of cash there. Nor is there any apparent reason why Pansy would want a portrait of Amanda, whom she saw as a rival for Quentin’s affections. It seems likely that someone else put her up to buying it.

The obvious candidate would be Judith Collins Trask, owner of Collinwood and all the Collins family businesses. Judith is married to the odious Gregory Trask, whose late daughter Charity provided the host body through which Pansy, who died in #771, has been interacting with the world of the living since Petofi erased Charity’s personality in #819. Judith has persuaded Pansy to move back into Collinwood. Judith has herself recently returned to the great house after Trask had her confined to a mental hospital for a period of more than thirteen weeks. Her stuffy but lovable brother Edward told Judith that Trask spent much of that time trying to seduce Amanda, and Judith wants to get the facts about what went on in her absence.

Closing Miscellany

Director Henry Kaplan was not in good form in this one. In the opening, studio lights are clearly visible right in the middle of the screen, between Evan and Q-Petofi. The same thing happened in yesterday’s episode. The other directors might have made a mistake like that once, but I don’t think any of them would have done it two days in a row.

The camera is also frequently out of focus, as is typical of Kaplan’s shows, and it moves unsteadily. He must have been trying to get the camera operators to do something he hadn’t prepared them for, it looks really bad.

There are a couple of notable bloopers that aren’t particularly Kaplan’s fault. When Angelique makes a remark about Q-Petofi’s attitude towards brandy, David Selby says “Don’t you think it’s possible for one’s…change…or one’s taste to change in brandy?” That is followed by a silent beat, as both he and Lara Parker are stunned by the nonsense that just came out of his mouth.

When Tate lets Pansy into his studio, the shade falls out of the window. He looks at it for a second, then the scene goes on. It is one of the all-time great goofs.

Episode 863: Homecomings

In episodes #853-#856, Sorcerer Count Petofi (Thayer David) used his powers to force the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins (David Selby) to trade bodies with him. Ever since, Quentin (Thayer David) has been trying to persuade someone to believe his story about Petofi (David Selby.) For the duration of the switch, I shall refer to Thayer David’s version of Quentin as P-Quentin, and David Selby’s version of Petofi as Q-Petofi.

Yesterday, P-Quentin persuaded his old friend and fellow Satanist, Evan Hanley, of what had happened. Evan agreed to conduct a ceremony to call upon their dark lord and ask for the transfer to be broken. They trick Q-Petofi into coming to Evan’s house and knock him out with chloroform. Then Evan begins an odd incantation:

Oh, Lucifer…

Great God of man and beast, look upon us with favor. Help us correct this evil which has been done in defiance of you.

Renew our bondage as your servants. Grant us the power we need this night, and we will be yours for eternity.

For Baal, who guides your mind.

For Beelzebub, who rules your spirit.

The robber of a soul must not be spared. The robbed must be avenged.

I exorcise thee.

Oh, impure spirit, who is the mind of the enemy, by the holy rite of Hecate, I conjure thee that thou do immediately hear and obey my command. Leave this man’s body, that he may return… Oh, yes, spirits of invisibility, I conjure and constrain thee herewith to consecrate this ceremony. So that surely and without trickery, thou may return each, to the body of [its] origin.

So be it.

Oh, Lucifer, so be it.

So be it…

I charge thee. I conjure thee. I command thee. Answer my demand.

Depart from these alien bodies and return to those from whence you came.

Depart.

So be it.

So be it.

So be it.

Oh, Lucifer, we give thee thanks.

Evan and P-Quentin seem to have the wrong guy. Whatever Satan’s powers may be, undoing evil, restoring property to its rightful owners, and enforcing justice are not exactly among the old fellow’s core competencies. Of course the ceremony fails. Q-Petofi wakes up from the chloroform, tells Evan he has made the greatest and last mistake of his life, and puts the zap on his brain. The next we see him, Evan is digging a grave, refusing P-Quentin’s offer to help him, and listening to Q-Petofi announce that he is about to be buried alive.

Q-Petofi’s announcement is the closing cliffhanger, suggesting that Evan has a somewhat longer life expectancy than we might have imagined when the ceremony fell apart. But once in a while cliffhangers really are resolved with the death of the character who is in peril, and that would seem to be a possibility in this case. Yesterday was Evan’s first appearance after an absence of more than eleven weeks, and he is not associated with any major loose ends in the plot. His alliance with the odious Gregory Trask, husband of Judith Collins Trask, may have given him a foothold now that Judith is back from her own long absence and is looking on Trask with suspicion, but yesterday he seemed to back off from siding with Trask in whatever fight might be coming up. So if the makers of the show are thinking it’s time for Q-Petofi to confirm his credentials as a major villain by killing a familiar character, Evan would be the obvious choice.

Judith confronts Trask today. He lies to her to cover up his misdeeds during the more than thirteen weeks she was confined to a mental hospital. She does not contradict all of his lies, and invites him to embrace her. He seems to think he has regained his control over her, but she tells him two things that make him uncomfortable. First, she says that she has persuaded his daughter to leave her apartment in the village and move back into the great house of Collinwood. When he protests that “She is not my daughter!,” Judith calmly replies that she is, closing the subject and leaving him looking like a petulant child. She also says that she hopes he has not bought or sold any stocks in her name lately, since she has revoked his power of attorney over her holdings. Again, he can say nothing in response.

Judith’s brother, the stuffy but lovable Edward, does not hear the details of this conversation. After Judith leaves the drawing room, Edward enters and tells Trask that he has won again. Trask perks up at this, and becomes his usual overbearing self. But he is just as quickly deflated when Edward tells him that he is looking into what he has been doing for the last thirteen weeks, and that when he finds out he will make a full report to Judith.

When Dark Shadows first became a costume drama set in 1897, Edward assumed he was to inherit the estate of Collinwood and all the family’s businesses. He was haughty and commanding, and Judith was a fragile spinster. But then their grandmother died, and the will left everything to Judith. She fell victim to Trask’s machinations and married him; he gaslighted her into the madhouse. Now that she has come home, Judith has found a new strength, sufficient to hold her own in the household if not to uphold justice and right on the scale which her position in the community would seem to demand. Edward’s dependent financial position, coupled with the many supernatural horrors he has witnessed, have gradually reduced him to a childlike state. In their scenes today, we see that the two of them have come to embody that signature dynamic of Dark Shadows, the relationship between Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother.

Episode 862: Reexamine your loyalties

Know Yourself

In yesterday’s episode, Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, found a note on the dresser in the room where she has been staying in the great house of Collinwood. It read “Know yourself, be who you must be.” The dramatic date is 1897, 1504 years after the Delphic oracle went out of business, so it is unlikely that its management sent the message as a translation of and commentary on their motto γνῶθι σεαυτόν.* It was also 83 years before the US Army adopted the slogan “Be all you can be,” so we can rule out the idea that a recruiting sergeant was trying to get Kitty to enlist. The US Army didn’t even accept countesses in those days, not even if, like Kitty, they originally came from Pennsylvania and are now in Maine.

Ever since she arrived at Collinwood in #844, the ghost of the gracious Josette has been taking possession of Kitty from time to time. The note prompts another spell of Josettification. Kitty puts on Josette’s wedding dress and wraps a red cloak around it. She mutters that “He is waiting for me,” not specifying who “he” is. She goes to the top of Widows’ Hill, the precipice from which Josette flung herself to her death a century before.

Josette was married to Jeremiah Collins. Jeremiah’s ghost appears to Kitty/ Josette. He urges her to leave Collinwood at once, lest “he” kill her. By this time the possession has worn off, and Kitty has no more idea who Jeremiah means by “he” than anyone overhearing her earlier would have known who Kitty/ Josette meant when she said that “he” was waiting for her.

Be on Guard Against Your Enemies**

Jeremiah vanishes, and Kitty is joined by a man she believes to be Count Petofi, the sorcerer who drove her husband to suicide. She fears Petofi and hates him, and is unhappy to find herself standing next to him at the top of a cliff, especially when she is in a confused frame of mind.

In fact, the man is not Petofi. Two weeks ago, Petofi used magic to force the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins to change bodies with him. Now Petofi occupies Quentin’s strong young form, while Quentin is trapped in Petofi’s aging and feeble one. While this predicament lasts, I refer to Quentin as played by Thayer David as P-Quentin, and Petofi as played by David Selby as Q-Petofi.

P-Quentin tells Kitty that he saw Jeremiah’s ghost and assures her he did not cause it to appear. He tells her he is going to Collinwood, and firmly recommends she accompany him. She waits a moment, but seeing no alternative, she goes his way.

Do Not Fight an Absent Foe***

When P-Quentin first found himself estranged from his own body and encased in Petofi’s, he was too stunned to show much tactical sense. He went around blurting out what had happened, earning nothing but a reputation as a lunatic. Now he has learned to let people believe he is Petofi and to conduct himself as befits that role. So yesterday, he found that his sister, Judith Collins Trask, had returned to the house after a long absence. She had not met Petofi, so he introduced himself to her by that name and used his memories of their childhood to befriend her.

Back at Collinwood, P-Quentin enters the drawing room and tells Judith that Kitty is resting comfortably upstairs. Judith is impressed with his thoughtfulness, and leaves him alone in the drawing room while she goes to Kitty’s room. He sees that she is preparing a note for her attorney, Evan Hanley. It occurs to him that Evan can be of use to him, and he sets out for his house.

Give the Advice the Time Calls For ****

P-Quentin knocks on Evan’s door. Evan never met Petofi, and does not recognize him. He and Quentin were for a long time close friends and fellow Satanists, and when he identifies himself as Quentin he does not gain credence. He pushes his way in, and eventually persuades Evan to take him seriously. Evan agrees to go to Collinwood and see if the man who appears to be Quentin knows him, and, if he does not do so, to trick him into participating in a ceremony to reverse the body-swap.

Judith comes. While P-Quentin hides on the terrace, she tells Evan that she wants to revoke the power of attorney she granted to her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, while she was away. Evan makes excuses, but she insists, and he agrees to follow her directions. She exits.

P-Quentin returns, and tells him that if he has involved himself with Trask’s evil schemes, it is time for him to disentangle himself from them.

Act Like a Stranger, If You Are One*****

Back at Collinwood, Q-Petofi opens the drawing room door and sees Judith. Petofi never met Judith, and Quentin has not seen her since she left more than thirteen weeks ago. Not knowing who she is, Q-Petofi simply apologizes, says he didn’t know anyone was in there, and leaves. Thinking he is her brother, Judith is of course indignant.

Judith goes to the foyer and says she expected a warmer greeting. Not having the faintest idea who she is, the best Q-Petofi can manage is “Welcome to Collinwood.” When she protests that even their rather distant brother-sister relationship entitles her to expect better than that, the light comes to him and he calls her by name. This does not appease her.

There is a knock at the front door. Judith is enraged to see Q-Petofi standing still, and orders him to answer it. He does, and lets Evan in. When he does not speak to his old friend, Judith demands to know if he doesn’t recognize Evan either. Q-Petofi pretends to know him, and is powerless to do anything but agree when Evan asks him if he remembers the meeting at his house tonight.

Q-Petofi had been cruising along unchallenged so far. How could he not, when the secret he is concealing is so bizarre? But his interaction with Judith, though it has not exposed his identity, has antagonized someone whose support would be useful to him, and now Evan knows that P-Quentin was telling him the truth.

Know Your Chance ******

Q-Petofi shows up at Evan’s. After some verbal jousting, Evan tells Q-Petofi to take a seat with his back to the room. He says that he has been chosen to preside over the festivities. P-Quentin sneaks up and chloroforms him. Evan says that he doesn’t know how long the chloroform will last, so they must proceed with the ceremony at once.

Honor Good Men *******

When Jeremiah’s ghost fades away, we see Timothy Gordon for the last time. Gordon was a frequent stand-in and background player starting in July 1966. His right hand, which he extends to Kitty in the screenshot above, was the hand that shot out of the coffin Willie Loomis was trying to plunder in #210. In mischievous moments, I think that makes him “Barnabas Collins #1,” in imdb terms. Then again, Jonathan Frid had posed for the face of the portrait of Barnabas some weeks before, and producer Robert Costello modeled for the portrait’s body before that. Many of his fellow extras went on to big careers, but Gordon’s turn as Jeremiah’s ghost made him the only performer to graduate from background player to credited member of the main cast of Dark Shadows. So I think of him as their representative.

*Greek for “Know yourself,” one of 150 maxims inscribed in the walls at the oracle. Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnōthi seauton) was one of two inscribed at the entrance, the other being Μηδεν ἄγαν (mēden agan,) “nothing in excess.” The maxims are preserved in a book by a fifth century CE author named Stobaeus; many of them appear on stones that archaeologists have found at Delphi. There’s a handy list of them on Wikipedia, pairing the Greek with some more or less OK translations. The eighth maxim on Stobaeus’ list is Σαυτον ἴσθι (sauton isthi,) “Be who you are,” which sounds a bit like the second half of the note on Kitty’s dresser.

**Stobaeus’ twenty-ninth maxim is Ἐχθρους ἀμύνου (ekhthrous amynou,) “Be on guard against your enemies.”

***Stobaeus’ 125th maxim is Ἀπόντι μὴ μάχου (aponti mē makhou,) “Do not wage a battle against one who is absent.”

****Stobaeus’ 103rd maxim is Βουλεύου χρόνῳ (bouleuou kronoi,) “Give the advice right for the time.”

*****Stobaeus’ twelfth maxim is Ξένος ὢν ἴσθι (xenos ōn isthi,) which we would translate word for word as “Stranger being, be.” The idiom plays on two senses of the verb εἰμί- the participle ὢν means “If you in fact are,” while the imperative ἴσθι is “assume the character of.” It is the same kind of play on words that you see in the word “like” in the English sentence “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.”

******Stobaeus’ tenth maxim is Καιρον γνῶθι (kairon gnōthi,) “Know the proper time.”

*******Stobaeus’ sixty fifth maxim is Ἀγαθους τίμα (agathous tima,) “Give honors to the good.”

Episode 861: Complete control of my faculties

Judith Collins Trask, owner of the estate of Collinwood and all the Collins family businesses, has returned home after more than thirteen weeks confined to a sanitarium. Her return is supposed to be a big shock, but they spoil it by having Joan Bennett do the opening voiceover. They really should have paid more attention to that sort of thing.

Judith’s husband, the odious Gregory Trask, gaslighted her into the sanitarium, and has been exercising control over the Collins family’s wealth ever since. Today, Judith tells her stuffy but lovable brother Edward that Trask never visited her during her time as a mental patient. Edward is surprised, telling her that Trask left the house for an overnight stay every week during that period, and presented these absences as visits to her. In fact, he is on such a trip now. She does not want to hear any more, and says she will give Gregory a chance to explain himself when he comes back to Collinwood.

Judith claims to be entirely herself. That puts her in the minority today. When she left Collinwood in July, Judith had a stepdaughter named Charity Trask. When she enters today, she sees someone who is to all appearances Charity leading Edward and a lady named Kitty Soames in a séance. The body is indeed Charity’s, but sorcerer Count Petofi erased Charity’s personality in #819 and replaced it with that of the late Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl and “mentalist” whom Judith met in #771, when Judith’s late brother Carl brought her to Collinwood as his fiancée. Pansy noticed Judith’s disapproval of her when she was alive, and is quite indignant about it now. That Judith keeps live-naming her, calling her “Charity,” doesn’t help.

Judith does manage to do something Edward failed to do a while ago, and talks Pansy into moving back into the great house of Collinwood. She agrees to give up the apartment she rented in the village of Collinsport after she took a job doing her old act at the local tavern, the Blue Whale. We saw her at the Blue Whale in Friday’s episode; it was shortly before nine PM, and she was the only person in the place. So perhaps her income as a cabaret performer is not particularly lavish, and the mansion is a more appealing place to live than the apartment that job would pay for.

For her part, Kitty is still, most of the time, the dowager countess of Hampshire. But the ghost of Josette Collins has been possessing her off and on ever since she arrived at Collinwood in #844, and the trend is definitely towards “on.” In Friday’s scene at the Blue Whale, Kathryn Leigh Scott played Kitty quietly and let Nancy Barrett’s Pansy provide the scene with all its Crazy Lady Energy; today, it is Miss Barrett’s turn to stand back and let Miss Scott show that Kitty is Pansy’s match in that department.

Crazy Lady Energy, also known as “CLE,” the main driving force of Soap Opera Land. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Judith and Edward’s brother Quentin is in an even stranger predicament than are Pansy and what’s left of Kitty. Between #854 and #856, Petofi forced Quentin to swap bodies with him, so that David Selby now plays Petofi and Thayer David plays Quentin. I call Mr Selby’s portrayal of Petofi “Q-Petofi,” and Thayer David’s portrayal of Quentin “P-Quentin.”

Kitty with P-Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The initial shock of finding himself estranged from his own body and trapped in Petofi’s left P-Quentin bewildered. All he could do was go to one person after another and tell the true story of what had happened, which produced only a widespread belief that Count Petofi had gone mad. Now he is starting to figure out how to use his resources.

P-Quentin’s first attempt to take advantage of the fact that everyone thinks he is Petofi was not successful. In #859, he exploited Kitty’s fear of Petofi and threatened to make her vanish if she did not bring him a portrait of Quentin later that night. Kitty tried to comply, but failed, and now it is long past the deadline. Soon she will realize that his threat was an empty one, and so far from being useful to him as a cat’s paw, she will be in a position to expose him as powerless.

Today, P-Quentin runs a smarter game. He introduces himself to Judith as Petofi, and claims to have psychic abilities. He pretends to read her palm, and tells her a story from their childhood that very few people could know. She is delighted, and decides that Count Petofi is someone she wants to see more of.

P-Quentin and Judith. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In her bedroom upstairs at Collinwood, Kitty has another fit of Josettification. She opens the trunk at the foot of her bed and finds Josette’s wedding dress. She puts it on and wraps a red cloak around it. She goes to the top of Widow’s Hill, the cliff from which Josette jumped to her death in the 1790s. The ghost of Josette’s husband Jeremiah appears to her.

The show is set in 1897 now. It was set in the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968. Miss Scott played Josette then, and for most of the segment Anthony George played Jeremiah. After Jeremiah’s death, Timothy Gordon played his ghost in a memorable part of the 1790s story. Gordon made two appearances as the ghost after the show returned to contemporary dress, playing him in #462 and #512. This is Jeremiah’s first appearance in 1897, and the second time, after #462, that Gordon’s name appeared in an on-screen credit on Dark Shadows.

Episode 860: I just say things

Edward Collins isn’t what he seems. His stuffy manner is real enough, as are his kind impulses when he sees people in distress. But he allows those who meet him to believe that he is the heir to the vast Collins family fortune, which in fact belongs in its entirety to his sister Judith. Judith is currently an inmate in a mental hospital. During her absence, her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, exercises control of all the family’s assets. Edward hopes to get out from under Trask’s thumb by marrying the dowager countess of Hampshire, a young American woman named Kitty Soames. He befriended Kitty while a houseguest of the late Earl’s, and now that she is widowed and is his guest at the great house of Collinwood he sees an opportunity to take over the Hampshire interests.

Kitty isn’t what she seems. The Earl was bankrupt when he died. He had lost all his wealth and been driven to suicide by sorcerer Count Petofi. Kitty wrote a letter to her mother the other day saying that unless she marries Edward and becomes the mistress of Collinwood she didn’t think she could raise train fare from central Maine to her home in Pennsylvania. Nor is this all. If Kitty were simply without funds, she and Edward would be on an even footing. But she is not what she seems in a metaphysical sense as well as a financial one. She is intermittently possessed by the ghost of the late Josette Collins. Regular viewers have reason to believe that she is Josette’s reincarnation, and that the fits of possession are part of the process by which Josette is reuniting her spirit with her body. But the characters don’t know what we know. As far as they are concerned, Kitty seems to be a plain lunatic.

At rise, Edward catches Kitty in his brother Quentin’s room. She is rummaging through an armoire, apparently looking for something. He asks her what she is doing, and she feigns one of her fits. Kitty is not nearly as good an actress as Kathryn Leigh Scott; she doesn’t fool us for a minute. But Edward believes her. He gently escorts her out of the room. As they leave, we see a face peering at them from the shadows. It is Quentin’s face.

Downstairs, we hear Kitty’s thoughts as she takes satisfaction in having fooled Edward into thinking she was having a fit. Mental health professionals often talk about how people learn to use the resources they have, so that patients who carry diagnoses of major disturbances will sometimes find ways to exaggerate their symptoms for effect. It’s true that psychotic episodes are not usually an asset in the husband-hunting business, but everyone in the segment of Dark Shadows set in 1897 has some issue or other, and Edward really does have a soft spot for mentally ill women (unless they are married to Quentin, but that’s another thing altogether.) So Kitty may as well play up her particular case of dissociative identity disorder.

Kitty was in Quentin’s room trying to steal a portrait of him. She was doing this from her fear of Petofi, whom she believed to have ordered her to bring him the portrait before 9 PM lest he use his magical powers and make her vanish. It is almost that time now, and she has no idea how to find the portrait, let alone get it to him before the deadline. While she is worrying about this situation, a woman named Angelique enters.

Angelique isn’t what she seems. She is one of Quentin’s fiancées, and Edward takes her to be an innocent woman, about 30 years old, who has been hard done by in the course of the supernatural doings of the last several months. In fact, she is a wicked witch who wrought immense destruction the first time she was at Collinwood, in the 1790s, and again the second time, in 1968. She has traveled back in time to 1897, and has been one of the most powerful participants in all of the strange goings-on.

Kitty tells Angelique that she saw Petofi in the vacant rectory on Pine Road, and that he told her the woman who had been squatting there vanished into thin air before his eyes. At this, Angelique turns and rushes off to investigate. It dawns on Kitty that Angelique knows more than she is saying. We cut to the drawing room, where Edward is bracing for a conversation with Quentin.

Quentin isn’t what he seems. In fact, he isn’t Quentin at all. Petofi forcibly swapped bodies with him a few days ago. It is Petofi, using Quentin’s body as a disguise, who confronts Edward and demands to know what he and Kitty were doing in the room. I refer to this form of Petofi as Q-Petofi, and the Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

Q-Petofi confronts Edward. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Edward tells Q-Petofi that Kitty had had a “seizure.” Q-Petofi expresses skepticism about this claim. He proceeds to tell Edward that Kitty’s late husband died in poverty, shortly after being released from prison for a jewel theft. Edward is thunderstruck. He calls the story a lie, and forbids Q-Petofi from repeating it to anyone.

Kitty goes to the village of Collinsport, and pays a visit to The Blue Whale, the local tavern. She wants to see the entertainer, Miss Pansy Faye.

Pansy isn’t what she seems. She has met the Collinses twice. Miss Charity Trask, daughter of Gregory and enforcer in his operation, came to the great house in #727 and took up residence when her father married Judith. Pansy Faye, mentalist and Cockney showgirl, came to the estate in #771 as the coldly cynical fiancée of the childlike Carl Collins. Pansy was killed the night she arrived. A few weeks later, Pansy started to take possession of Charity, and in #819 Petofi erased Charity’s personality altogether and gave her body over to Pansy.

When Kitty enters, Pansy is alone in the bar. She is picking out her theme song on the piano. When Petofi was in the process of switching bodies with Quentin, Quentin was with Pansy in this room. Petofi took control of him briefly and played the same song on this piano. He played it very impressively.

Kitty is desperate to find out what is happening to her, and she knows that Pansy has powers. Once Pansy assures her that she doesn’t work for Count Petofi, Kitty offers her a diamond-encrusted brooch in return for information. Pansy is offended. She says that she will take a gift in return for her services after she has rendered them, but that she does not accept payment in advance. She tells Kitty that there is one way to find out what is happening to her, which is to have a séance. Kitty gets up to leave, and Pansy presses the brooch on her.

The diamond brooch is a puzzle. Perhaps Kitty was lying to her mother when she said that she couldn’t buy a train ticket to Pennsylvania? Or perhaps the brooch is part of the late Earl’s ill-gotten gains, and Kitty doesn’t want to show it to anyone more reputable than Pansy.

Nancy Barrett’s approach to all her roles on Dark Shadows was to throw herself completely into whatever the character was doing at any given moment. That isn’t to say that her performances lacked nuance or that she didn’t support her scene partners, but that her method was to take her part from the outside in, letting the action supply the motivation. As Kitty, Miss Scott has opportunities to take this same approach. But in Kitty and Pansy’s scene in the Blue Whale, she deliberately lets Miss Barrett drive the action. Since Pansy has already completed a process of possession and transformation like that into which Kitty is now entering, Miss Scott can convey a great deal of information about Kitty’s state of mind by giving rather subtle reactions to Pansy’s behavior.

Back at Collinwood, Edward and Q-Petofi are drinking. Edward shakes his head at his brother’s ability alternately to enrage him and charm him. Q-Petofi asks him to be the best man at his wedding to Angelique; Edward agrees at once. Angelique enters, and Edward exits.

Angelique says that she doesn’t want to get married after all. Q-Petofi insists they go ahead. She points out that it was her idea, and he was extremely reluctant to agree to it. This is true- the engagement was part of Angelique’s price for invoking the power of Satan to break spells Petofi had cast on Edward and his son Jamison. While Q-Petofi has managed to copy Quentin’s behavior towards Edward almost exactly, his behavior towards Angelique has been radically different than was Quentin’s. We don’t know what Angelique has made of this.

Edward finds Kitty and Pansy preparing the séance. After an initial protest, he declares he will join them. It ends with a visual quote from Dark Shadows‘ first séance, back in #170. As in that episode, a hooded figure appears in the doorway.

The hooded figure in #170 turned out to be undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Another iteration of Laura was on the show as Edward’s estranged wife in April and May. It seems unlikely she is coming back, so longtime viewers are in suspense as to the significance of the allusion.

The hooded figure today is Natalie Norwick, making the last of her seven appearances as an uncredited stand-in on Dark Shadows. Norwick was in many plays on Broadway, as the lead in more than one, appeared in three feature films, and worked steadily in television from 1945 until the mid 1960s. She retired from acting in 1982, returning to the Broadway stage as understudy to her friend Julie Harris in 145 performances of The Gin Game from 1997 and 1998 when she was in her mid-70s. When Harris had a fall in 1999, Norwick took over the part, playing it in Florida and Washington, DC. She was chiefly based in Los Angeles in the late 1960s; perhaps she took the stand-in work to pay some bills during visits back east.

Norwick is best remembered for a single supporting performance on television in 1966. She appeared in “The Conscience of the King,” an episode of the original Star Trek, as Martha Leighton, the wife of Captain Kirk’s troubled friend Tom. She didn’t get much screen time, but she made the most of it. After Tom is murdered, she plays Martha’s understated reaction with a quietness that startles you no matter how many times you’ve seen it. Norwick is another of the significant talents one wishes Dark Shadows had found more to do with.

Episode 859: Not this grownup

Nine year old Nora Collins enters the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. She walks in on her father, the stuffy but lovable Edward, embracing Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire. She gives them a dirty look and says she supposes Edward is too busy to join her in a game of checkers. He says he does have to run an errand, but suggests that Nora play with Kitty.

Kitty is eager to ingratiate herself with Nora, who clearly wants nothing to do with her. Nora asks, in an icy voice, if the reason Kitty wants to be her friend is that she is planning to marry her father. Returning viewers suspect she is right. Kitty and Edward have more in common than they know. Both are penniless, each is sure the other is very rich, and each imagines marriage to the other will solve all their problems. Kitty can’t very well level with Nora about this, so she claims that the women in the Collins family, being outnumbered by the men, have to stick together. Nora does not hide her distaste at Kitty’s inclusion of herself among the women of the family. Kitty asks Nora if she wants her father to be happy. Nora drills her eyes into Kitty’s face and says in a firm, flat voice “I want that.”

Nora asks Kitty if she is just letting her win at checkers. While she is asking this, Nora moves twice in one turn and takes three of Kitty’s pieces. Kitty watches this without protest and denies that she is letting her win. She then says she wants to concede the game and listen to whatever information Nora is willing to share about the family.

Nora is not impressed with Her Ladyship. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Edward comes back from his errand to find Nora packing up the checkers and the board. He asks if she enjoyed her game with Kitty. Not looking up, Nora says they never finished it. Kitty hastens back in and asks if she wants to finish it now. Edward points out that it is getting close to Nora’s bedtime. He kisses her, and bids her say goodnight to Lady Hampshire. Kitty asks Nora to call her by her first name. Nora pointedly says “Good night, Lady Hampshire.”

It doesn’t show in her scenes with Nora, but Kitty seems to be suffering from a severe mental health crisis. Returning viewers know that the ghost of Josette Collins is taking possession of her, and suspect that she will turn out to be a reincarnation of Josette. Edward knows enough about the supernatural doings on the estate of Collinwood that he might give Kitty the benefit of the doubt when, for example, she comes running in today and is shrieking about a haunted house, a vanishing woman, and a curse that follows her everywhere. But she is so often so highly distraught that Nora must have noticed that she is not right in the head, and she can hardly look forward to having such a person as a stepmother.

Shortly before Nora enters, Edward calls Kitty “Katie.” This is a small enough slip of the tongue, but Kathryn Leigh Scott’s friends call her Katie, so it is a case of an actor’s name in place of the character’s. I think I can see Louis Edmonds blush a little when he realizes what he has done.

This episode marks the final appearance of Nora, and very nearly the last time we will hear Nora’s name. I think she was badly underused, disappointingly so after the outstanding work Denise Nickerson did as Amy Jennings in the months leading up to the segment set in 1897. She will be back later, in other parts.

Director Henry Kaplan was not much of a visual artist, and his deficiencies are particularly glaring today. Especially during Kitty and Nora’s first scene, the camera keeps drifting up to the actors until we see a randomly selected two-thirds of their faces in extreme closeup. Once the shot excludes the eyes or the mouth, it abruptly pulls back. Even the successfully framed closeups are rarely in focus, and you can forget about finding coherent visual storytelling in any kind of shot other than a closeup. The actors themselves do a good job, in spite of Kaplan’s notoriously unpleasant behavior towards them, but aside from a few evocative facial expressions, most of them by Nickerson, it may as well have been a radio play.

Episode 858: Despite all appearances

Sorcerer Count Petofi has forced the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins to trade bodies with him. So Thayer David is now playing Quentin, a forlorn and helpless figure who goes around begging people to listen to his lunatic story, while David Selby plays Petofi as a gleefully cruel young man who takes advantage of all the pleasures available to Quentin. I will refer to Thayer David’s character as P-Quentin and David Selby’s as Q-Petofi.

Q-Petofi goes to Beth Chavez, who used to be a maidservant in the great house of Collinwood and is now one of Quentin’s fiancées, more or less. Beth is in what she identifies as her room. It looks very much like the set that represented her room in the servants quarters of Collinwood, but it is explicitly stated that this room is somewhere else. Maybe she took it with her as part of her severance package.

Beth is terrified of the count, whose slave she was for a while after she left Collinwood. P-Quentin manages to get her to take note of his words, though she seems sure that what he is saying is another of the count’s tricks. He tells the story of how twelve year old Jamison Collins found her about to commit suicide because of what his Uncle Quentin did to her and has refused to speak to him since. He pleads with her to go to Collinwood and see if the man who appears to be Quentin knows the same story.

Beth does go, and she does put Q-Petofi to the test. He has no idea what she is talking about, and tries to bluff his way out by saying that Jamison’s estrangement from him is too painful to discuss. He then yells at Beth, declaring that he knows the count put her up to asking him about Jamison. That means that he and Beth both know that he failed the test. Beth might become P-Quentin’s first ally. Unless, that is, Q-Petofi kills her before she can- there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping him.

P-Quentin does have other potential allies. One is Julia Hoffman, MD. A mad scientist from the twentieth century, Julia followed her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, after he had traveled through time from the year 1969 here to 1897. An experimental treatment briefly freed Barnabas from the effects of vampirism in the spring of 1968; when she arrived from the future, Julia began trying to replicate that treatment. Most people now think that Barnabas has been destroyed, staked in his coffin in #845. But in #849 we saw that Julia was still working on the treatment, and in #853 someone named Kitty Soames barged into Julia’s hiding place and, possessed by the ghost of Barnabas’ lost love Josette, identified the room where Barnabas was hiding. Quentin, at that time still occupying his own body, was with Kitty at the time and realized that she was right. This alarmed Julia, because even though she and Barnabas regarded Quentin as a friend, they knew that he was already under Petofi’s influence and could not be trusted to keep a secret from him.

Another person who might come to P-Quentin’s aid against Q-Petofi is Angelique, the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire in the first place. At this point in 1897, Angelique is another of Quentin’s fiancées. Resenting Petofi’s influence over her prospective husband, she met with Julia in #842 and devised the plan they have been following since. Angelique has a couple of scenes with Q-Petofi in the drawing room at Collinwood today; she notices that his behavior is very different from what Quentin’s has been, but does not suspect that it is Petofi’s mind behind the face.

Angelique calls on Julia in her hiding place. Julia keeps hearing some sound effects we last heard during The Experiment, a storyline that ran through May and June of 1968, when she was building a Frankenstein’s monster in order to permanently cure Barnabas’ vampirism. She describes them as sounding like wind. Angelique cannot hear them, nor can she hear the voices which Julia also hears. When Julia recognizes the voices as occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes and sarcastic dandy Roger Collins, she realizes that they are coming from 1969. The reason she can hear them and Angelique cannot is that she has a physical body in that year, while Angelique is all here, in 1897. Julia tells Angelique she cannot stay in 1897 much longer, and Angelique agrees to take over her part in what remains of their plan.

After Angelique has left her alone, Julia finds that Stokes and Roger can hear her if she shouts. This only lasts for a moment. The sounds fade, and she loses the connection altogether.

P-Quentin comes to Julia’s place. Thinking he is Petofi, she declines to speak to him. He insists he is Quentin. When he tells her some information they had shared privately, she decides he is telling the truth and starts calling him Quentin. In fact, she calls him “Quentin, Quentin,” as she often calls Barnabas “Barnabas, Barnabas.” She is about to tell him the next steps of the plan when she vanishes.

The lady vanishes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The first time traveler we saw vanish in this way was an unpleasant man named Peter Bradford whose personality largely consisted of yelling at people that he preferred to be called “Jeff Clark.” Peter/ Jeff was from the 1790s, but tried everyone’s patience for much of 1968, when the show took place in a contemporary setting. He faded away, returning to his own time, in #637. We didn’t hear any sound effects before he disappeared. The Experiment was still very fresh in our minds at that point, so the sound effects we hear today would not have been available, and besides, no one cares what the world sounds like to Peter/ Jeff. It was just a relief that he was finally gone.

Julia is as appealing a character as Peter/ Jeff was repellent, and it’s sad to see her go. We’ve had some signs lately that the 1897 segment will soon be ending, but we’ve had those signs before, and they’ve kept restarting it. If Julia isn’t coming back to this period, we can only hope that if it goes on much longer, they will find a way to intercut episodes set in 1897 with others set in 1969, where we will be able to spend time with her.

Episode 857: Champagne for Wanda

Sorcerer Count Petofi is wearing the body of rakish libertine Quentin Collins as a disguise, while Quentin is trapped in Petofi’s own aging and pudgy form. I will call the villainous Petofi played by David Selby Q-Petofi, and the forlorn Quentin as played by Thayer David P-Quentin.

We open with Q-Petofi at the front door of the great house of Collinwood. Yesterday we saw P-Quentin on the same spot, and heard David Selby’s voice articulating the miserable thoughts that showed on Thayer David’s face. Today the roles are reversed, and we see Mr Selby looking exultant while the voice of Thayer David talks about the glories of his situation.

We see that Q-Petofi is accompanied by his henchman, Aristide. He dismisses Aristide’s fear that he will somehow reveal his true identity to the occupants of the great house. He twits Aristide for a little while, pretending that he will use him as a guinea pig in a dangerous experiment he has planned for later in the evening, then sends him off to find someone else to serve that purpose.

Q-Petofi walks in on an argument in the drawing room between stuffy Edward Collins and the overbearing Gregory Trask. Trask is in charge of the house while his wife, Edward’s sister Judith, is in a mental hospital. Trask is going over the household accounts and complaining that Edward is spending too much on his houseguest, Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire. Edward asks Q-Petofi to explain Collinwood’s tradition of hospitality to Trask, setting Trask off with a rant about Quentin’s relationship with Trask’s own former houseguest, the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris. Q-Petofi’s indifference to the whole discussion strikes both Trask and Edward as odd, but it really is quite typical of the old Quentin.

After Trask exits, Edward tells Q-Petofi that he thinks he can subdue Trask by marrying Kitty. He says that it takes money to run Collinwood, and the late Earl’s estate gives Kitty ownership of half the county of Hampshire. Returning viewers know that the Earl died bankrupt, and so far from owning great swathes of southern England Kitty doesn’t even have train fare to get from Collinwood in central Maine to her mother’s house in Pennsylvania. So we have confirmation that Kitty has been less than fully honest with Edward. On the other hand, Kitty is under the impression that Edward is rich, while in fact their grandmother left every penny to Judith. So neither is leveling with the other about their financial status. Q-Petofi knows all of this, but it has nothing to do with his plans, and so he struggles to feign interest.

For his part, P-Quentin is sitting in the caretaker’s cottage on the estate. It seems right to longtime viewers that a character played by Thayer David should seek refuge here. When we first saw the cottage, it belonged to handyman Matthew Morgan, who was at that time played by George Mitchell. In #38, Mitchell was replaced in the part of Matthew by Thayer David, in the first of the many roles he would play on Dark Shadows. When Matthew had to leave the cottage for the last time in #112, his whole world fell apart. So when Aristide comes in and brutally evicts him, we can feel the full weight of the disaster that has befallen P-Quentin.

With nowhere else to go, P-Quentin returns to the great house. Once again it is Thayer David’s turn to look soulfully at the camera while David Selby’s voice speaks desperate words in voiceover. He tells himself that his brother Edward will have to believe him when he tells him the truth.

As it happens, Edward likes Petofi and is glad when he believes he is receiving a visit from him. Based on Edward’s earlier remarks about Collinwood’s tradition of hospitality, we could be quite sure that if P-Quentin presented himself as Petofi, Edward would be glad to offer him a place to stay. But P-Quentin plunges right in and tries to tell Edward the whole story. Of course Edward is not convinced. He treats it as a joke in questionable taste, and offers P-Quentin a brandy. When P-Quentin tells him to forget the brandy, he says that if he really were Quentin, he would never forget the brandy.

P-Quentin insists on going ahead with the lunatic tale, and keeps clutching at Edward’s arm. Edward finds the whole experience revolting, and firmly escorts him to the door. If it has occurred to P-Quentin to tell Edward any of the little stories of childhood that only he and Edward would know, it is too late now to do so. Edward orders P-Quentin to stop talking and go home. Little does he know that P-Quentin has no home to go to.

At the waterfront, the fog machine is working overtime, and so is one of the locals. In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, user “Goddess of Transitory” remarks:

I was remarking to my husband about the really remarkable size and relative wealth of the hooker population of Collinsport. They may hang at the docks (makes sense in a port town–you troll for lonely sailors) but they all have really nice clothes and jewelry and no matter how many of them Barnabas et al. tear through, there’s always more.

Makes you wonder what modern day Collinsport’s main economic generator really is…

Comment by “Goddess of Transitory,” left 7 April 2021 on Danny Horn, “Episode 857: All of Him,” 5 May 2016, Dark Shadows Every Day.

We find today’s well-bathed, well-coiffed, well-made-up young woman of professionally agreeable disposition drinking from a flask. Aristide emerges from the fog and takes the flask from her. When she protests, he says that if she follows him, she will be drinking champagne, and her protests subside. Her name is Wanda Paisley.

Aristide takes Wanda to the cottage, where Q-Petofi is waiting. Wanda is quite pleased at the prospect of sharing her favors with two handsome young men at once, but less pleased when Q-Petofi says that before the festivities get underway she will have to throw some I Ching wands and meditate on them. He assures her that she will be well paid for whatever services she may render, and asks her to agree that this is what really matters. Wanda’s agreement is not forthcoming. When Q-Petofi keeps yammering on about the wands and the hexagrams and the trance and the doors, it dawns on Wanda that this evening is not going to be what she signed up for, and she gets up to leave. Aristide grabs her, and Q-Petofi uses his magical powers to coerce her into cooperating.

Wanda casts the wands and meditates on them. She has a vision of a skeleton with big plastic eyeballs reaching its arm bones out to her. She screams. Where she had been sitting is another skeleton with big plastic eyeballs, this one also wearing a dress and a wig. Q-Petofi tells Aristide that “beyond the door anything is possible.”

Her turn as Wanda today marks Karen Lynn’s only appearance on Dark Shadows. She’s very good, it’s a shame they couldn’t find more for her. Her only other screen credit is a 1963 feature called The Orgy at Lil’s, which an IMDb reviewer says made history as “the first roughie.” I don’t know what a “roughie” is, and based on the description of The Orgy at Lil’s I rather doubt that my education in cinematic history would be significantly deepened by finding out. At any rate, it sounds like Miss Lynn was well-prepared to portray Wanda’s enthusiastic response when Q-Petofi first joined her and Aristide.

I made a contribution of my own to the comment thread on Danny’s post:

This has to be the archetypal Dark Shadows episode. It has Jerry Lacy modeling the style of acting he and Lara Parker invented for the show, Louis Edmonds being sarcastic, a squabble about control of Collinwood, people drinking brandy, a prostitute picked up on the docks while the [fog] machine runs, several kinds of supernatural mumbo-jumbo presented as if we will of course understand them, a dream sequence, and a skeleton in a wig. The next episode opens with a grave-digging scene, which is pretty nearly the only thing missing from this one.

Comment left by “Acilius,” 3 December 2020, on Danny Horn, “Episode 857: All of Him,” 5 May 2016, Dark Shadows Every Day.

It’s true no actors blow their lines, none of the boom mic shadows obstruct our view of anything crucial, and there is only one audible cough from a crew member, so it is an unusual episode in some ways. But I could have mentioned another very typical thing- a practical effect they try for the first time. I believe the split screen shot of Q-Petofi in the drawing room and P-Quentin at the cottage is the first time the show has used this device. It doesn’t work very well, but they were always pushing to do something new:

P-Quentin (Thayer David) and Q-Petofi (David Selby.) Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 856: Like a new man

Evil sorcerer Count Petofi has cast a spell causing his mind to take over the body of rakish Quentin Collins, while Quentin is confined to Petofi’s own body. So David Selby begins playing a youthful and handsome Petofi, while Thayer David plays an aging and pudgy Quentin.

In their post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri use a wide variety of expressions to refer to the characters Thayer David and David Selby play today. I will just call Thayer David’s character P-Quentin and David Selby’s Q-Petofi.

Both of those actors give superb performances today; David Selby makes Q-Petofi’s preening arrogance suitably repellent, while the 42 year old Thayer David shows us P-Quentin reduced to the total helplessness of a despised man in extreme old age. There is a scene that Mrs Acilius and I found particularly hard to watch when Q-Petofi’s henchman Aristide takes the thick glasses without which P-Quentin is effectively blind and holds them away from him.

Q-Petofi and Aristide’s gleeful cruelty to P-Quentin make us wonder how the count and his henchman feel about the body they are looking at. The show’s earlier body swap story, in which vampire Barnabas Collins had hoped to die and come back to life in the form of Frankenstein’s monster Adam, led Adam to ask Barnabas in #587 “How could you hate yourself so much that you wanted to change your body?” We hadn’t known that that the count hated himself at all until we saw this scene, but he must have done to take such delight in tormenting P-Quentin, and Aristide’s revelry shows that he, too, harbors more hostility to his master than he ever dared expose.

Q-Petofi taunts P-Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

P-Quentin staggers away from the lair of Q-Petofi and Aristide and meets broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi in the woods. He tries to explain his true identity to Magda, who has experience with magic and has for some time now been his ally. But Magda’s fear of the count keeps her from listening to the far-fetched tale, and she rushes off.

P-Quentin makes his way to the door of his home, the great house of Collinwood. He stands there, and we hear his thoughts, in David Selby’s voice. He tells himself he cannot go in, because no one there would believe him if he told them who he was. He slinks off to the caretaker’s cottage, where he meets maidservant Beth, who is his sometime fiancée. He tries to tell her the story, but she too is terrified of the count. When Q-Petofi shows up, she leaves with him.

Magda is a wonderful character, and what we have seen has given us every reason to hope she will be a substantial part of the show for a while yet. Unfortunately, this is her final on-screen appearance. We will hear her voice once more, six weeks from now. The show has always been visually ambitious, and lately they’ve managed to pull some neat tricks with videotape that led me to hope we would see at least one scene in which Grayson Hall appears opposite herself as both Magda and time-traveling physician Julia Hoffman. When Hall appeared in the 1970 film End of the Road, she said that it was a relief from playing Julia, to whom she apparently referred as “that tight-ass doctor.” Magda is earthy enough that it would have been fun to see how Hall would have used her to demonstrate the same attitude towards Julia, even if she had to stick to words approved by the ABC network’s Standards and Practices office, and Julia’s reaction to Magda would doubtless have been just as much fun.

Episode 855: The winds of change

The Point of Return

Barnabas Collins went into a trance at the end of February 1969 and came to in March 1897, a time when he was a vampire. Barnabas took the audience with him, so that Dark Shadows has been a costume drama set in 1897 ever since. We’ve had a few glimpses of 1969- we can see that time is passing there, that twelve year old David Collins has been saved from death, that the ghosts of rakish libertine Quentin Collins and maidservant Beth Chavez have stopped haunting the great house of Collinwood, and that Barnabas’ physical body has vanished, leaving him no avenue of return to the 1960s. We’ve also had indications at several points that the show was about to put the 1897 segment into its climactic crisis, each of which was followed by a restart of that segment. Some of those false signs probably reflected long-range plans that were abandoned when they saw how popular 1897 was.

Now, they are in a position when they can go back to 1969 whenever they wish. There are only a few unresolved story points in 1897. Most of those can be wrapped up quickly, and the rest can be forgotten. If they wanted to, they could write a single slam-bang episode in which the evil Gregory Trask is forced to accept the annulment of his marriage to Judith Collins and to relinquish control of Collinwood, the family is persuaded that Barnabas never really was a vampire after all, and Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, turns into Barnabas’ lost love Josette and finds a way to leave him that will make him even more miserable than he already is. Sorcerer Count Petofi might be left watching helplessly as Barnabas, his friend Julia Hoffman, and the living Quentin all escape into the future. We could then assume that the rest of the characters just toddled off and led quiet lives.

They could equally well take another tack on their way back to contemporary dress. Barnabas and Julia came to 1897 separately; there is no reason why they, or any other characters, should have to go to 1969 together. Today, Petofi is performing some kind of mumbo-jumbo that is supposed to lead to a body swap that will cause him to trade forms with Quentin. After that, he is confident he will travel to 1969 and be safe from his foes, the Rroma people. He seems to be succeeding. So perhaps a Petofi who looks and sounds like Quentin will appear in 1969, in a Collinwood based on the events that have taken place so far in 1897.

In that pocket universe, Collinwood would be known as Traskwood. Its owner in 1969 would be Trask’s son by a subsequent marriage. Call him Gregory, Junior. It would be unclear at first what happened to Judith and to her presumptive heir, her twelve year old nephew Jamison. The revelation of their fates could set us up for some big twists and the introduction of new characters with familiar faces.

Since Gregory, Junior would be in his sixties, he could have a couple of adult children who would carry on some story points. Gregory III could be played by Jerry Lacy without old age makeup, and could be a morally ambiguous character who might emerge as a protagonist and would certainly become prominent in the pages of the fan magazines. None of the Trasks would have any legal obligation to let Quentin stay in any of their houses or to work for any of their businesses, nor would any surviving Collinses. Moreover, everyone in the area would know full well that there used to be a vampire on the estate named Barnabas Collins, and no one would ever have heard of Julia.

Petofi begins his incantation. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

If the show goes that direction, we could spend half of each week with Petofi-as-Quentin while he makes a place for himself in that pocket universe version of 1969, while we would spend the other half with Barnabas and perhaps Julia back in 1897, where they are in an uneasy alliance with wicked witch Angelique as they try to set history right. Kitty’s Josettification would threaten to destroy this alliance, since Barnabas is obsessed with his love for Josette and Angelique is equally obsessed with her hatred for her.

The body-swap theme of today’s episode, along with the emphasis on the procedure Petofi is following, will remind longtime viewers of The Experiment, a theme that ran from April to May 1968. Barnabas and Julia built a Frankenstein’s monster with the intention of killing Barnabas and bringing him to life again in the new body. Some viewers may have wondered if Jonathan Frid was actually going to leave the show, and if the actor playing the monster was going to take over the role of Barnabas.

This time a larger fraction of the viewers are likely to think the transfer might work, since it would not require a popular star to leave the show. On the contrary, casting David Selby as Petofi in an altered twentieth century would give him the chance to wear up-to-date clothing, have magical powers, inflict cruel punishments on people who get in his way, run con games, hint at an ambiguous sexual orientation, and generally have a wonderful time. Since Mr Selby had by this point become the pin-up of a huge percentage of America’s teenaged and preteen girls, that sounds like a recipe for sky-high ratings. Meanwhile, casting Thayer David as a Quentin estranged from his body and his social environment would present an expert character actor with a challenge worthy of his skills.

It might sound like it would be too confusing to intercut between a parallel version of 1969 and a continuation of 1897, but the show will try almost exactly the same tactic a couple of years from now, as they set up for the storyline that carries the series through its final nine weeks. That closing bit is not widely regarded as one of the better phases of Dark Shadows, but the intercutting timelines that lead to it are an intriguing gambit. Maybe the idea for it came when they were trying to figure out how to get from 1897 back to 1969, in which case it is possible that the scenario I have outlined above may be very much like what the writers had in mind at some point in the development of the story.

Corridors of Trial and Error

We do get a few hints today about what we might see in the 1897 half of the show if it does split. Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi shows up for the first time since #834, before Julia came to 1897. We had begun to fear we wouldn’t see her again. It’s good to have her back, but since Magda is also played by Grayson Hall, it raises the possibility that Julia might go away for a long time. Maybe the action will be split between 1897 and 1969 for some months, and during those months Julia will be in 1969, running her hospital, entirely unaware that there ever was a Barnabas Collins.

Beth is a servant of Petofi’s now, and she spends the episode bickering with her colleague Aristide. It turns out that she still has feelings for Quentin. At the end, she runs out of Petofi’s lair to try to help Quentin. This suggests that Beth’s conflicted loyalties will be a source of drama. Aristide shouts after her not to go, then says that “You’ll ruin everything.” He delivers this line in such a mild tone that the resulting laugh must have been intentional. This raises the possibility of Aristide emerging as a source of laughs. In the hands of actor Michael Stroka, that is a distinct possibility.

Quentin rambles into the Blue Whale, the tavern in the village of Collinsport. It’s after hours, and the only person in the barroom to tell him to stop knocking on the door is cabaret performer Pansy Faye, whose body Quentin first met when it was occupied by Trask’s daughter Charity. He still calls her Charity, which she overlooks because she has the hots for him. Pansy lets Quentin in, and invites him to her place.

Charity lived at Collinwood with her father, and after Pansy took over she stayed on there for some time. The other day she talked about wanting to leave Collinwood and go “home,” but it was not at all clear what that meant. Her invitation to Quentin is the first time she explicitly says that she has her own apartment now. Perhaps, if we stay in 1897, we will see that apartment. Maybe when Thayer David takes over the part of Quentin, Pansy’s psychic gifts will enable her to recognize who he really is, and she will take him in. In those days, of course, a man and a woman would have to get married to rent a lodging, so presumably that would have involved a wedding. Since Quentin would appear to be Petofi, Pansy would thereby become a countess, Kitty’s equal in rank. It already makes Kitty exceedingly uncomfortable to be around Pansy, so that would be an occasion for a great deal of comedy. Moreover, any viewer who saw that both women had the same title and both were involved in supernatural changes of personality would be convinced that the writers had planned that phase of their story all along.

Pansy goes into her act. She sings her song; Quentin is seized with a fit of brio. He gives a little speech addressed to the absent bartender, picks Pansy up, spins her around, kisses her passionately, then sits down at the piano and bangs out the tune of her song. She admires his piano playing and he says that he used to be able to play quite well, before “they” came. Then he suddenly sinks back into his previous depression. He denies that he ever played the piano in his life. We know that it was Petofi who had that moment of brightness, and that Petofi’s mood darkened when he remembered the Rroma who cut his hand off 100 years before. Quentin has no recollection of anything his body does or says when Petofi is using it.

A piano is prominently featured in the drawing room at Collinwood in the 1960s- perhaps there will also be one there when the estate is renamed Traskwood, and when Petofi, as played by David Selby, wangles an invitation to the great house, he will play it. That might set us up for a moment when Quentin returns to his proper body, tries to explain what has happened, and finds that his inability to play the piano marks him as an impostor. You could build a lot of story on that- you might make it look for a while like Quentin could find a home in the Traskwood universe, then show that no, the people back in 1897 have to reset the past before anything can work again.