acting – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1056: Clio’s squeaking skeleton

Wicked witch Angelique Stokes Collins has cast a spell on Maggie Collins, compelling Maggie to shoot her husband Quentin. Angelique herself dwells among the living because of another spell, one cast by her father, a wizard known as Tim. This spell drains the “life force” from a woman named Roxanne into Angelique, revivifying her after Quentin’s brother Roger drove a hatpin into her brain nine months ago. Angelique has kept her identity secret, in part because Quentin and a friend of his had a panic attack some time ago and destroyed her coffin, keeping the physical evidence from telling its tales. They were two loonies, quelling caskets.

Occasionally Roxanne manages to reclaim enough of her “life force” to make Angelique weak and cold. When this happens, Angelique can perk herself up by hugging a man and kissing him, thereby making all of his body heat flow into her, leaving him an icy corpse. The kiss appears to have become essential to this transfer; her kissing equates coolness. Yesterday she gave Roger this treatment, avenging her own murder.

The spell on Roxanne will break when she speaks, and her pushy ex-boyfriend Claude is about to make her do that. So Angelique has only moments to live. Quentin is on the run from the law, charged with the murder of a man named Bruno. Angelique’s enemy, Barnabas Collins, demands she sign a confession admitting that Bruno was actually killed by a spell she cast using a cravat of his. Quentin is innocent in these loose necktie squallings.

Angelique refuses to sign any such document. Later, Barnabas will tell the whole story to a police inspector whose incredulous response makes it clear that it would not have persuaded anyone had she done so. More urgent is a question he puts to her about the whereabouts of his faithful companion, Julia Hoffman. Angelique has locked Julia in a dungeon and left her to die of thirst. The door to this chamber swings shut silently, and apparently it does not let Julia’s cries for help be heard outside. Many of the places of confinement we have seen on Dark Shadows are the looniest squeaking cells you could imagine, but this one is grimly soundproof.

Roxanne speaks and Angelique dies, defiant to the end. Cloaking queenliest loss, her refusal to bend invests the character with a perverse grandeur.

Barnabas remembers an Angelique who lived on the island of Martinique. For him, all the other Angeliques are just successors to what she brewed up there, Antilles cooking sequels, as it were. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

With Angelique’s death, her spell over Maggie breaks. Maggie collapses and drops the revolver she had trained on Quentin. One of the themes of the show has been that a person who casts a spell creates an alternate version of herself and that version takes possession of the person against whom they direct it. Lara Parker and Kathryn Leigh Scott play Angelique and Maggie’s collapses in the same way; seeing these back to back, we cannot miss the point that what we are really seeing is the simultaneous death of two Angeliques. Sometimes the alternate selves created by the spells outlive the spellcaster, and there is no telling where they will drive the victim. The accursed who wander about the earth, whether they became vampires like Barnabas or zombies like his uncle Jeremiah, are lockless antique legions, unrestricted in their physical movement, unlimited in the duration of their afflictions, uncounted in their numbers.

Miffed that Maggie pointed a gun at him, Quentin leaves the room. He finds Barnabas, who explains everything that has been going on. Quentin goes back to Maggie. She says that she realizes he could never love her or any other woman as he loved Angelique when she was alive. He tells her he never loved Angelique, but that he “hated the ground she walked on” and never shared a happy day with her because she was so cruel to him when they were married. When the same scene played out between Maxim de Winter and his second wife in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and in Alfred Hitchcock’s film based on the novel, we could take it as grounds for hoping that their marriage would take a turn for the better. But Quentin seems never to have loved Maggie, and we have never seen them share a happy day. They speak lovely words as they embrace; kissing allots eloquence. But Quentin’s declaration that he wasn’t any happier in his first marriage than he has been in his second comes only as confirmation of our suspicion that things will only go from bad to worse as long as he and Maggie stay together.

Barnabas and the inspector look for Roxanne. They don’t find her, and the inspector dismisses Barnabas’ whole story. The law moves a lot faster in Soap Opera Land than it does in our world, but only the looniest legal quickness could get Quentin out of trouble in the time that seems to be remaining in this storyline. Later, the inspector catches up to Quentin and arrests him, and Barnabas finds Claude stabbed to death in the woods.

This episode marks the final appearance of Angelique Stokes Collins. Lara Parker, that member of the queenliest looking class, will be back later as another witch named Angelique. It is also the final appearance of actor Brian Sturdivant and of the character Claude North. Sturdivant’s performance has many problems, most obviously his wildly uncertain accent. At times he manages to enunciate a few words in the old “mid-Atlantic accent” stage performers were trained to use in the first half of the twentieth century, but he never keeps it up for a whole line.

Episode 1055: The man who murdered Angelique

Angelique Stokes Collins has returned from the grave to take vengeance on her murderer. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know who that is. For the last several weeks, she has been operating on the assumption that she was killed by her widower, foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins. She has managed to get Quentin charged with one murder and suspected of several others; under her influence, he assaulted a police officer and broke out of jail. She has persuaded him that his current wife, the former Maggie Evans, is a witch and is responsible for all his troubles. He is lurking about the great house on the estate of Collinwood, where yesterday he encountered Maggie and told her he would kill her.

Angelique herself is residing in the great house. Eleven weeks ago she killed her identical twin sister Alexis, assumed Alexis’ identity, and took her place as Quentin’s houseguest. Maggie now thinks of “Alexis” as her friend.

Others in and around the house know better. High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, Quentin’s brother, has seen through her imposture. Two visitors from the alternate universe where Dark Shadows was set for its first 196 weeks, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and vampire Barnabas Collins, knew her counterpart in their world and are onto her tricks.

Angelique hears some noise in her old bedroom in the east wing of the great house. She finds the door locked and hears Roger’s voice. She demands to be let in. He opens the door and she forces her way past him. She finds Maggie in a heap on the floor. Roger rushes out. Maggie tells “Alexis” that Roger tried to strangle her after confessing to three murders, including Angelique’s. Angelique and Maggie decide to call the police.

Julia and Barnabas learned that Angelique’s father, evil barfly Tim Stokes, made it possible for her to rise from the dead by using a mixture of medical science and black magic to establish a remote connection between Angelique and a woman named Roxanne. Through this connection, Stokes drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. Julia and Barnabas have taken Roxanne from the back room of Stokes’ apartment and hooked her up to some mad science equipment in the basement of the Old House at Collinwood. They hope to manipulate Roxanne’s condition as a means of controlling Angelique.

Angelique has locked Julia in a dungeon off the basement of the great house and left her there to die of thirst. Barnabas is sure Angelique has captured her, but cannot begin to guess where she might be. He takes a shot at using the mad science equipment to revive Roxanne sufficiently to knock Angelique out. He cannot see any effect, and goes out to try to look for Julia.

As Barnabas goes out, a man peers at him from behind a tree. Since Barnabas never under any circumstances locks his front door, the man strolls into the house as soon as Barnabas is out of sight.

The man is Claude North, a mysterious person somehow connected with Roxanne. Barnabas comes back to the basement and finds Claude trying to get Roxanne to talk. He tells him that she must not do so just yet, because at her first word Angelique will die and there are some things he has to take care of before that happens. Claude cares nothing for this. Barnabas is afraid that if he attacks Claude, Roxanne will be startled into speaking, so he withdraws.

The other day, we saw a grave marker in Claude’s name, and we have seen that he has the same power Barnabas does to mesmerize people when they follow his command to “Look into my eyes!” He had also been staying in a hidden chamber identical to the one where Barnabas’ coffin was kept for his first 171 years as a vampire. And he had some kind of mystical power over Roxanne, as Barnabas has over his victims. So we thought Claude might be a vampire, too. But today he explains that the grave was his grandfather’s, he clearly doesn’t recognize Barnabas as a fellow bloodsucker, and when cornered he doesn’t flash fangs. So we’re left thinking he’s probably just Roxanne’s overconfident ex.

Meanwhile, Angelique is feeling cold and weak because Roxanne has reclaimed so much of her “life force.” She has cast a spell to cause Roger to slip past the police swarming the estate and make his way to her in her old room. Once they are together, she warms herself up for a while by hugging and kissing him. First time viewers may think this is an odd thing for her to do, but returning viewers know that she is a heat vampire who can by those actions drain the warmth from a living body and leave it an icy corpse. Louis Edmonds has been doing some great work these last few weeks, and he plays Roger’s death scene especially well.

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

Downstairs in the drawing room, Angelique is still shivering. Maggie enters and sees that “Alexis” is ill. Maggie insists on helping, and Angelique suggests she walk her to the fireplace. They sit together beside it. We learned Wednesday that Angelique has magical hypnotic powers, and Maggie’s counterpart in the main continuity was subjected to frequent mind-wipes. So there is a nice sense of inevitability when Angelique puts her into a trance and orders her to get a gun and prepare to shoot Quentin.

Angelique is still sitting by the fire, still feeling miserable, when Barnabas comes back. He tells her that Claude is with Roxanne and that Roxanne will be speaking at any moment. He writes up a confession and orders her to sign it, saying it will clear Quentin of the murder with which he was charged. He says that this will allow her to find peace. She says she doesn’t want peace. We may wonder how the confession could possibly clear Quentin. All she could do would be to admit that the man Quentin is charged with killing actually died because she cast a magic spell on him. We have already seen that the policeman in charge of the case has zero patience for talk about magic, and there is no end of evidence pointing to Quentin’s guilt.

We end where we began, in Angelique’s room with a homicide in the offing. Then it was Roger with his hands around Maggie’s neck; now it is Maggie pointing her revolver at the door as the knob turns. That isn’t all that suspenseful a situation. I’m sure Maggie would feel bad if she had killed Quentin, but he’s so hyper-violent that no one would doubt she acted in self-defense and has been such a bad husband to her that it’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t get over it in short order. If Quentin dies, there will be so few characters left that the show couldn’t go on, but we will probably be leaving this universe in a few days in any case. So this isn’t much of a Friday cliffhanger.

Episode 1054: The room keeps changing

Yesterday, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard overheard her brother Roger Collins having a conversation with the portrait of wicked witch Angelique. When Roger told the portrait that he murdered not only Angelique herself but also Liz’ daughter Carolyn, Liz stormed into the room. Roger then strangled Liz and stuffed her corpse under a window seat. Today, he is in the room fretting about what to do with Liz’ body. It strikes him that his brother Quentin is currently a fugitive from justice, suspected of three murders, including those of Angelique and Carolyn. He decides to pin Liz’ murder on Quentin as well.

Angelique has come back from the dead and is impersonating her identical twin sister Alexis, whom she herself murdered in #1001. She has persuaded Quentin that his new wife Maggie, whom he does not seem ever to have liked very much, is a witch, Quentin now believes that Maggie, by use of the black arts, committed all of the murders. Maggie has looked at the publicly available evidence and concluded that Quentin has gone insane. She believes that he, by use of his hands and some sharp objects, committed at least some of the murders.

Roger has figured out that “Alexis” is really Angelique. They have a couple of awkward conversations. He asks the portrait why he can talk so freely to it when he is so stilted in his interactions with “Alexis,” since they are “one and the same.”

Roger cannot be frank with the three dimensional version of Angelique. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie has started getting everyone to evacuate the house. When she goes to her room to pack, she finds Quentin waiting for her. He is holding a handkerchief monogrammed “ECS.” He tells her it was Liz’. He demands that she tells him where “the doll” is. She has no idea what he is talking about. He looks directly at her and says in a slow, level voice that he will kill her. She runs away, somehow not persuaded of his innocence.

Maggie flees to the room where Roger killed Liz. She finds Roger there, and tells him Quentin is in the house. Roger locks the door to keep him out. There is no telephone in the room; they talk a bit about how to get across the hall so they can call the police. Maggie falls into Roger’s arms and starts crying. He starts burbling about all the terrible things that have happened. He mentions that Liz was killed in the room. Maggie looks up and says Liz was found in a different room, and that the police think she was killed there. Roger tries to say he was just rambling, but Maggie puts two and two together. She realizes Roger is the murderer, and he realizes that she has realized it. We end with his hands on her throat.

Louis Edmonds is simply amazing as Roger today. The rest of the cast gives him first-rate support, but it is a magnificent turn. If the Daytime Emmys had been around in 1970, this was the episode they should have sent to Academy voters to get him his award.

Episode 1047: Extraordinary enemies

Evil wizard Tim Stokes combined medicine with black magic to connect his late daughter Angelique with a woman named Roxanne. The connection drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. This rendered Roxanne comatose and allowed Angelique to move among the living so long as Roxanne neither dies nor gets even a tiny bit better.

Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are interlopers from another dimension. They know what Stokes has done and want to defeat Angelique. They made off with Roxanne and were keeping her in the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, planning to use some mad science equipment to revive her. Roxanne did perk up after the first treatment, and Barnabas took her on a date to his favorite place, the old cemetery north of town, where she showed some signs of recognizing her surroundings.

Yesterday, Stokes went to the Old House to search for Roxanne while Barnabas was out. When Barnabas got home, Roxanne was nowhere to be found. We learn today that Stokes does not have her. He turns to a man named Claude North for help in finding her. Yesterday he told Angelique that he was most reluctant to contact North; only after an incantation calling upon all the spiritual forces of darkness fails to solve their problem does he consider turning to him. He told Angelique that North was no ordinary man, and he is evidently more unpleasant to deal with than are Satan and his minions. But he answers when Stokes picks up the telephone and calls him.

Barnabas is also familiar with “Claude North” as the name of someone linked to Roxanne. He found a drawing of her signed by North in the secret chamber in the back room of the mausoleum in the cemetery. He goes back to the cemetery twice tonight. The first time, he goes into the secret chamber and finds evidence that a man with the initials “CN” has been staying there. He takes this as confirmation that it is Claude North’s roost. It does not seem likely that it is North’s only residence, since there is no sign of a telephone there. Stokes is spying on Barnabas while he does this. He is disturbed that Barnabas knows about the secret chamber, and wonders if he has been keeping Roxanne there.

Barnabas goes back to the Old House and finds Stokes talking with the lady of the house, Carolyn Loomis. Angelique killed Carolyn’s husband Will the other day because he would not reveal Barnabas’ secret, and Carolyn has been drinking steadily ever since. Barnabas tells Stokes that since he has extended his condolences to Carolyn, he can leave now. Stokes takes his time about going. He says that Will thought that Barnabas might have a girl someplace. “Is he right, Mr Collins? Do you have a girl someplace?” Thayer David delivers this line with an urgency that elevates it from mildly clever to almost brilliant. Jonathan Frid responds with a slow burn that brings the exchange to perfection. Barnabas knows that Stokes neither has Roxanne nor knows that he does not have her, but he also knows that Stokes, as a native of this universe, is likelier to find her than he is.

“Do you have a girl someplace?” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas goes back to the cemetery and finds Roxanne there. She is kneeling at a gravestone. It marks the grave of Claude North, who lived from 1814 to 1866.

In his own world, Barnabas was trapped in the counterpart of the secret chamber in the mausoleum for 171 years. So regular viewers think of that chamber as a place for vampires. North’s tombstone suggests that he might be such a creature.

Moreover, the drawing of Roxanne evokes Charles Delaware Tate, an artist who was a character on the show in 1969. Tate had the magical power to bring people to life by drawing them. He became obsessed with a woman he created in that way. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, Tate’s erotic preoccupation with a product of his own imagination is as much a metaphor for extreme selfishness as is the vampire. So if the answer to the question of Roxanne’s origin is that she sprang into being as the result of North’s drawing of her, it would only be appropriate if North were also a vampire.

There is a scene in the room on top of the tower at the great house of Collinwood. Carolyn goes there and looks at the window from which Will fell to his death. To her surprise, sourpuss Quentin Collins enters the room. Quentin is a fugitive from justice, having assaulted a policeman and fled from jail because he was under arrest for murder. He makes menacing remarks demanding her silence; she’s so drunk that it doesn’t seem likely she will remember he was there. In the other continuity, the Collinses had a habit of using the tower room, which is entirely enclosed in windows that can be seen from every part of the estate, as a hiding place; we can see that their counterparts here maintain the same self-defeating tradition.

Episode 1045: Have you a medical degree?

We open in the room atop the tower of the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Wicked witch Angelique, enemy of the mysterious Barnabas Collins, confronts Will Loomis, Barnabas’ henchman. She demands Will tell her Barnabas’ secret. Returning viewers know that Barnabas is a vampire, and Will is his blood thrall. When Will tells Angelique that he is incapable of betraying Barnabas, we know that he is making a literal statement of fact. But Angelique has power over Will, too. Caught between these opposing forces, Will does the only thing he can. He opens the window and flings himself to his death.

John Karlen plays Will, Lara Parker Angelique. In his post about this episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn observes that Karlen approached all of his parts as if he were in a play by Tennessee Williams. In a comment I left under that post, I said that while most of Karlen’s scene partners stuck with their own distinctive styles of acting while playing opposite him, resulting in surprisingly effective mashups of techniques that you wouldn’t think could coexist on any stage, Parker followed his volcanic lead in today’s first act. Will’s anguish and Angelique’s vehemence both go way over the top, but the result is far from hammy. Orson Welles famously said that hamminess is not overacting, it is false acting. There is nothing false between Will and Angelique today.

Just before Will jumped out the window, Julia Hoffman entered the room. Furious that Will has died without telling her what sort of creature Barnabas is, Angelique accuses Hoffman of startling him and ruining everything. Wondering if Will may have survived his fall, she orders Hoffman to accompany her to the foot of the tower. Hoffman kneels down and says that Will’s spinal cord snapped on impact resulting in instant death. Angelique says that she is intrigued by Hoffman’s diagnosis. “Have you a medical degree?”

Unknown to Angelique, the true answer would be yes. Angelique believes herself to be with Hoffman the housekeeper, her most fanatical devotee. In fact, the woman is Hoffman’s counterpart from an alternate universe, Dr Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia has followed her best friend Barnabas into this continuity and is assisting Barnabas in his battle against Angelique. Julia killed Hoffman and assumed her identity. Julia responds to Angelique’s puzzlement with a story about an incident when she saw a man fall from a roof and land in the same twisted position Will now holds. She remembered the words the doctor said when examining that man and merely repeated them when she saw Will’s distorted neck. Angelique compliments Julia on her extraordinary memory, and proceeds as if she were telling the truth. There seems little else she could do.

I remembered the line “Have you a medical degree?” from the first time Mrs Acilius and I watched Dark Shadows. Angelique has noticed that Julia is different from the Hoffman she knows, and has been showing signs of impatience with her. But she has not suspected she is a different person, only that she is going soft on her enemies. “Have you a medical degree?” makes it seem that might be changing. Julia may be in grave danger before long.

Barnabas rises from his coffin in the basement of Will’s house. He goes upstairs and finds Angelique waiting for him. She says she came, not to see him, but to console the widow Loomis. Thus Barnabas learns that Will has died.

Barnabas tells Angelique that he will avenge Will’s death upon her, but she tells him that he is the one to blame. It was because his power over Will matched hers that Will could respond to her commands only by killing himself.

Angelique’s counterpart in Barnabas’ own universe placed the curse that first made him a vampire. She was also wholly or partially responsible for the deaths of his mother, sister, aunt, uncle, fiancée, and many other people he cared about. So he reacts to the sight of this Angelique with barely controlled rage. For her part, she has no idea who he is, and does not know why he is hostile to her. She, therefore, is much cooler. The contrast is fascinating to watch, far more interesting than are the scenes between Barnabas and the other Angelique and one of the joys of the “Parallel Time” segment.

Julia and Barnabas are busy with a science project. They have learned that Angelique returned from the grave because her father, evil barfly Tim Stokes, somehow established a remote connection between her and a woman named Roxanne whom he keeps in the back room of his apartment. This connection, whatever it is, drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. This creates a delicate situation. If Roxanne dies, all of her “life force,” including that which animates Angelique, will vanish. But if she regains any of the force that has been taken from her, even enough to flutter her eyelids, Angelique will collapse and, unless Roxanne is brought back down to the prescribed level of debility, re-die.

When Julia and Barnabas first came upon Roxanne, they planned to kill her to finish Angelique off. Barnabas put the kibosh on that when he saw how pretty Roxanne was. Then they thought of destroying Angelique by reviving Roxanne, but, for reasons too silly to explain, they’ve decided they want to keep Angelique around. So now Barnabas has decreed that they will manipulate Roxanne’s condition to slow Angelique down. They have taken her from Stokes’ place and put her on a table in Will’s basement, somewhere away from the coffin. They have connected her to a lot of mad science equipment that is supposed to act on the “life force.” Longtime viewers know all about this equipment, because Julia had it in 1968 when she was building a Frankenstein’s monster as part of a project to cure Barnabas of vampirism.

The doctor is in. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia runs the equipment. Roxanne’s condition does not change. Julia tells Barnabas that Angelique is expecting her back at the great house. In her absence, Barnabas takes Roxanne’s hand and stares at her. She opens her eyes and sits up. In the great house, Angelique weakens and collapses.

Many fans wonder where Julia could have got the “life force” equipment. In her own universe, she is a medical doctor and the head of a private hospital, so she could order anything she needed from a medical supply house. Here, her only identity is her imposture as Hoffman the housekeeper, who did not have a prescription pad.

I don’t see why people are so concerned with this. In 1968, the equipment originally belonged, not to Julia, but to another mad scientist, Dr Eric Lang. Barnabas and Julia simply stole it from Dr Lang’s house after he died. In this continuity, we haven’t heard about Dr Lang, but we hadn’t heard about him in the main continuity either until Barnabas fell into his clutches, at which point he already had all of his equipment. So we can presume Barnabas and Julia just found out when his counterpart would be out of the house and raided the place.

Will’s death marks his final appearance, but John Karlen will be back in a couple of months as Willie Loomis, the version of him we met in the main continuity. He will play other characters later, when the show will be set in other periods.

Episode 1040: Probably wondering

From its first episode, one of the principal sets on Dark Shadows has been the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. So every violent death on the show has been pregnant with the possibility of a scene in which the characters gather on that set and a detective says that he supposes they are probably wondering why he asked them to join him there. We come as close to that scene today as we ever will.

The detective is Inspector Hamilton of the Collinsport police. That is itself a disappointment to regular viewers. In #1034, a detective played by Philip R. Allen made an appearance. He had little to do, but Allen was such a dynamic actor that it was gripping to watch him do it. When we heard that the police were on their way, we might have been excited to see Allen again. Inspector Hamilton is played by Colin Hamilton. It’s always a bad sign when the producers don’t trust an actor to answer to any name other than his own, and Hamilton’s performance is a case in point. The only note he strikes today is languid annoyance. Perhaps he had watched the Thin Man movies and been impressed by the use William Powell and Myrna Loy made of that note in their portrayals of Nick and Nora Charles in their drawing room reveals, but if so he had forgotten that Powell and Loy did other things as well.

Making matters worse, Inspector Hamilton does not actually have much to contribute. Sleazy musician Bruno Hess gave him photostats of a couple of pages of the journal of the late Cyrus Longworth, homicidal maniac, in which Cyrus speculates that his friend Quentin Collins murdered Angelique, his first wife. But Cyrus did not see Quentin commit that crime, so the papers are in no sense evidence.

Quentin gets very angry with Bruno. Standing next to Inspector Hamilton, he declares that Bruno will never make trouble for him again and that he will put a stop to him “with my bare hands!” He then rushes out of the house. At length, Inspector Hamilton moseys over to Bruno’s place.

The camera gets there before Inspector Hamilton does. We find Quentin crushing Bruno’s throat in his elbow. He releases him and shouts that he isn’t “worth killing!” A moment later, Bruno starts choking and falls to the floor. Quentin ridicules him, then kneels down and finds that he really seems to be unconscious. Inspector Hamilton then enters and says that he hopes for Quentin’s sake that Bruno isn’t dead. This line is a bit surprising; it would have fit with Colin Hamilton’s lazy performance had Inspector Hamilton said that he hopes Bruno is alive so he won’t have to stay up late doing paperwork.

As it happens, Angelique has returned from the grave and is impersonating her identical twin sister Alexis. None of the other characters in today’s episode are onto her. We see her flash a self-satisfied grin every time Quentin annoys Inspector Hamilton by proclaiming his intention of killing Bruno. We also see her cast the spell that causes Bruno to choke and die.

Quentin being innocent of strangling Bruno. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Bruno’s death is no great shock. He smacked Angelique around yesterday, a sure sign of a short and unhappy future, and had been absent from the action and unmentioned on screen for more than six weeks before he came back on Tuesday. Actor Michael Stroka will be back later as another character.

Angelique could be fairly sure that Quentin was in Bruno’s cottage and that Inspector Hamilton was on his way there when she was casting the spell, but she has no powers of remote viewing. For all she knew, Quentin may have been choking Bruno while she was casting the spell. Had that been the case, we would have been presented with a puzzle in logic. Bruno would have died of strangulation while Quentin was strangling him, but there would be a sense in which we could say that Quentin was not the strangler. That sense might not have made much difference to Quentin’s felony exposure, though Angelique would also be guilty of the killing.

This scenario should remind viewers who have been with the show from the beginning of the first murder mystery on Dark Shadows, the vehicular homicide of a man known only as Hansen. Hansen was walking by the road one night in 1956 when a car hit him and continued on. The owner of the car, Burke Devlin, was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison for five years. It later turned out that Burke had been blacked out drunk when he started driving the car away from a restaurant, and that he gave the keys to his passenger, Roger Collins, after they had gone some way. Roger was also heavily intoxicated, and he was behind the wheel when the car hit Hansen.

Burke claimed that Roger’s role in Hansen’s death exonerated him of guilt. But since Burke knew that Roger had had as much to drink as he had, handing the keys to him was scarcely more responsible than operating the vehicle himself. Indeed, by the time of the collision Burke had passed out, so if he had kept the keys the car would not have been moving and Hansen would have had nothing to fear. The fact that Roger was also guilty of a crime does nothing to clear Burke. Remembering that, we may wonder whether Angelique’s participation really clears Quentin.

The version of Quentin that became a major breakout hit was the one we saw in 1969, when the show was a costume drama set in the year 1897. That Quentin had all of the vices Roger had in 1966, and like Roger was witty and full of joie de vivre. The easygoing 27 year old David Selby had a sex appeal that reached young viewers who did not respond to Louis Edmonds in that way, and the show was free to make villains into permanent parts of the cast of characters at that point, so Quentin became what Roger might have been.

After the show returned to a contemporary setting in late 1969, it struggled to find a place for Quentin. Now they have crossed over into an alternate universe, and they have dabbled with the idea of turning his counterpart into an action hero like Burke. That hasn’t worked at all, but then Burke’s own arc of development fizzled out, so I suppose we can say that Parallel Quentin really is a mashup of Burke and Roger.

Episode 1038: A family that is finished

Julia Hoffman joined the cast of characters in the summer of 1967 as a supremely confident professional, a medical doctor doubly qualified as a psychiatrist and a blood specialist and the head of a private hospital. Julia came to the estate of Collinwood because she had figured out that Barnabas Collins, master of the Old House on its grounds, was a vampire. She had a plan for curing vampirism and believed that if she succeeded she would change the way science defines life and death, thereby revolutionizing medicine.

Julia’s plan was not successful. She came to be so closely entwined with Barnabas and so deeply complicit in his crimes that she could not hope for any future that did not revolve around him. She decided to make the best of this, and set about falling in love with Barnabas. At first he mocked her cruelly for this. Eventually his response to her signs of romantic interest softened into an embarrassed sympathy.

In #980, Barnabas crossed over into an alternate universe, hoping that he would escape his curse there. He found he was still a vampire, and that he was surrounded by strangers. He has now persuaded the Collinses in the great house at Collinwood that he is their long-lost cousin from South America. He has once more established himself in the Old House, this time by biting and enslaving its owners. He quickly made enemies, most notably the undead Angelique Stokes Collins. The housekeeper in the great house was Angelique’s most fanatical devotee and deadliest enforcer. Her name was Julia Hoffman.

Yesterday, Hoffman had learned that Barnabas was a vampire, found his coffin, placed a stake on his chest, and raised a hammer to drive it through his heart. At the last second, a blow was struck from behind, killing Hoffman and saving Barnabas. The killer was Julia, who had made her way into this universe to take her place at Barnabas’ side.

In #351, Julia offered to guard Barnabas during the day. Since Barnabas had previously given this task only to domestic servants, he was shocked to hear a medical doctor volunteer to perform it. Julia smiled and said “I am not offering to be your maid.” Now, Julia is wearing Hoffman’s French maid outfit and posing as her in an attempt to find out what Angelique is up to. Long before Julia killed Hoffman, she had destroyed her old self in the course of her relationship with Barnabas.

Julia is waiting by Barnabas’ coffin when night falls. The lid opens, and she looks delighted. This image is hilarious, but again contrasts with her earlier behavior to show how ragged her personality has become after all this time as a vampire’s henchman. In #289, Julia made her way to Barnabas’ coffin during the day, opened it, looked inside, and staggered back, shivering with a mixture of terror and triumph. She was at once fantastically intrepid and apparently sane. We did not then know what her intentions were, but the daring action combines with Grayson Hall’s masterful performance to persuade us that Julia might be equal to almost any task.

Now, Julia has become so dependent on Barnabas that she neither sees the horror of the situation nor remembers that he is dangerous to her. The very first we saw of Barnabas was his hand darting out of his coffin to choke someone who woke him unexpectedly, and the second time someone did that, in #275, the choking was lethal. Moreover, Barnabas knew that Hoffman was his deadly foe, so even if he’d been up for a while he could be expected to kill Julia before she had a chance to utter a word if he found her in his hiding place dressed as she is.

Fortunately for Julia, Barnabas has developed a habit of standing around and pontificating before his murders. So she has a chance to explain who she is. She shows him the stake and hammer Hoffman was holding when she found her, and he is convinced. He seems impressed that she killed her Doppelgänger for his sake, and they look more like they are about to kiss than they ever have before.

Barnabas and Julia, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!

Julia goes to the great house to report to Angelique, who is staying there in the guise of her identical twin sister Alexis. Angelique irritably asks where Julia has been all day. Julia makes an excuse, and Angelique starts talking about the progress of her evil plans. Before she gets very deep into it, she has a seizure of some kind. Julia asks what she can do to help, and Angelique tells her that she knows very well what to do. The only useful information Julia can get out of her are the word “father” and the sentence “He is doing this!” She decides to call on Angelique’s father, Tim Stokes. She looks Stokes’ address up in the telephone directory, and sets out.

When Stokes answers his door, he expresses surprise, not that Julia is there, but that she bothered to knock before entering. He makes some remarks which Julia cannot even pretend to understand. He says that Angelique must surely have told her about the situation; she says that she did, but that she is very confused about all of it. Stokes ushers her into his back room to give his own explanation.

A blanket covers the body of a woman lying on a table in the back room. Stokes explains to Julia that the woman is not dead. He drained her “life force” to enable Angelique to transcend death, but she retains enough vitality that she keeps pulling that force back to herself from Angelique. That is what causes Angelique to have her seizures. The woman must remain in precisely her current state if Angelique is to exist in the world of the living. The more of her strength she regains, the weaker Angelique will become, and if she dies, Angelique will return to the grave. He has given the woman an injection; he tells Julia that when she returns to the great house she will find that Angelique has recovered.

Julia does indeed find this. She urges Angelique to have Stokes over and repair her relationship with him. Since everyone else is out of the house, tonight would be the perfect time for such a tête–à–tête. Angelique agrees.

While Angelique is mixing martinis for Stokes, Julia is with Barnabas. She goes to the Old House and tells him what she has discovered. He produces a short knife and says that it should take care of the matter. In Stokes’ apartment, he stops and talks about all the time he has spent trying to find Angelique’s vulnerabilities, and wonders that now they have found such a simple method for getting rid of her once and for all. It sounded to my wife as if he was upset that Julia had beaten him to the answer.

In the back room, Julia hands Barnabas the knife. He again goes into a pre-murder soliloquy. Julia peps him up by telling him that the woman isn’t really alive, and that her continued existence means death and destruction for many others. Barnabas agrees. He lifts the blanket and prepares to strike.

The first murder in which Julia participated directly was that of her onetime friend and medical school classmate Dr Dave Woodard in #341. Woodard had learned that Barnabas was a vampire and that Julia was helping him, and was going to expose them both. After resisting the idea for several days, Julia complied with Barnabas’ demand that she prepare a lethal injection for Woodard. She handed him the hypodermic then, as she hands him the knife now. In those days, Barnabas and Julia were not yet friends, and Barnabas replied that she would have to administer the shot herself. In the end, he wound up giving Woodard the fatal dose while Julia stood in the doorway and blocked their victim’s escape. Afterward, Barnabas taunted Julia with her new status as a murderer, making her miserable. Now, they like each other fine, and he accepts the weapon as a matter of course.

It is not surprising that Barnabas, confronted with a problem, chooses murder as the solution. That is always his Plan A, and usually his Plan B and Plan C as well. Indeed, when he wonders what Stokes will do when Angelique is dead he implies that he will murder him too, lamenting that “It never ends does it, when one begins to unravel evil?” Barnabas looks utterly hopeless when he says this. He always feels deeply sorry for himself when he thinks about killing someone.

But this is a new step for Julia. She usually puts up at least a show of reluctance when Barnabas is planning a murder, even if her immediate response when she finds a corpse in his vicinity is to arrange for its secret disposal. What Stokes told her about the “life force” logically entails that bringing the woman out of her coma would destroy Angelique as surely as killing her would. Their resources in this universe are so limited that this may not be a viable course of action, but on her previous form you would expect Julia at least to suggest it. We may wonder if something inside her finally broke when she looked at someone she had killed and saw her own dead face looking back at her.

Episode 1034: Time is our only weapon

Yesterday’s episode ended with a climactic moment in Dark Shadows‘ adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde. Sabrina Stuart, fiancée of mild-mannered scientist Cyrus Longworth, had discovered that Cyrus’ evil alter ego John Yaeger is holding Maggie Evans Collins prisoner in a dungeon outside the village of Collinsport. For some reason she drove to Maggie’s home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Cyrus/ Yaeger followed her there and choked her out in the drawing room. Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, who is Maggie’s sister-in-law and Sabrina’s friend, saw the strangling and screamed. Cyrus/ Yaeger dropped Sabrina to the floor and turned his attention to Liz.

It was unclear at that time if Sabrina was dead or merely unconscious. Today’s opening voiceover says flatly that “Yaeger killed her,” and in the first scene of act one housekeeper Julia Hoffman checks Sabrina’s body and declares that she is dead. Since the narrator and Hoffman are both played by Grayson Hall, longtime viewers will be cautious about accepting these pronouncements. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe. There, Hall played Hoffman’s counterpart, a medical doctor who has many abilities no other member of her profession can equal but who is curiously unreliable when she pronounces patients dead. Julia has been known to erroneously pronounce the same person dead twice in a single episode. So we have to reserve judgment for a bit about whether Sabrina will be wanting breakfast.

Liz locked Cyrus/ Yaeger in the drawing room before he could get his hands on her, and he smashed a window and ran out when he heard her talking with Hoffman in the foyer. Liz and Hoffman find that Cyrus/ Yaeger had torn the telephones in both the drawing room and the foyer out of their wall sockets. We’ve seen telephones in other parts of the house several times, but evidently those are out of order today. Hoffman says that she will go to the Old House on the grounds of the estate, home to Liz’ daughter Carolyn and Carolyn’s husband Will, and call the police from there. Hoffman assures Liz that Cyrus/ Yaeger must have left the estate and that he will present no danger on the fifteen minute walk to the Loomis house.

Hoffman’s confidence on this point puzzles Liz, who watches her leave carrying only a flashlight while she herself crouches in the drawing room holding a pistol. It may puzzle first-time viewers as well. Those who have been watching for several days know that Hoffman is in league with Cyrus/ Yaeger. Hoffman has been acting as a messenger between Cyrus/ Yaeger and her mistress Angelique, the undead first wife of Quentin Collins, who is Maggie’s husband and Liz’ brother. Angelique wants Maggie out of the way so that she can remarry Quentin, and is supporting Cyrus/ Yaeger’s plan to torture her into loving him.

At the Loomis house, Hoffman calls the police and reports exactly what Liz knows. When she is done with her call, she realizes that she is alone in the house. Earlier, she was peeking through the window when Carolyn and Will’s mysterious houseguest, a person named Barnabas Collins, opened the secret panel behind a bookcase. She takes advantage of the opportunity to find out what Barnabas is hiding. She sees a coffin in the chamber behind it. Without hesitation, she opens the coffin. She finds that it is empty. She closes the panel, wondering why Barnabas would keep an empty coffin in a hidden chamber. She is on her way out when Barnabas enters and demands to know what she is doing there. She tells him what happened in the drawing room of the great house, and he rushes out with her.

Cyrus/ Yaeger is in his laboratory. He takes out the antidote. This will puzzle regular viewers. Up to this point, it has seemed clear that Cyrus/Yaeger has only one potion, and that it effects both his Hyde-ification and his re-Jekyllizing. He threw all of that potion away a couple of weeks ago, after he tried to rape Maggie in a dark alley. He cannot make more, since it requires a compound that only one chemist could provide and Cyrus murdered that chemist when he learned his secret. His current Yaegerness is the result of a spontaneous transformation that took place without drinking the potion. So we are at a loss to explain why he still has any of it. He tells himself that there is only enough to change him once. By the time he starts drinking it, the police are knocking at his door.

At length, Cyrus lets the policeman in. He asks what took so long; Cyrus claims to have been asleep. He tells Cyrus that Yaeger has murdered Sabrina; Cyrus responds with genuine shock. The policeman apologizes for not having known that Cyrus was engaged to marry Sabrina, but insists that he answer his questions.

Most of Collinsport’s police officers have been farcically incompetent. The actors have responded to the challenge of playing these useless men in various ways. Dana Elcar, who in 1966 and 1967 was the first of four to play Sheriff George Patterson, kept you hoping that his character was just playing dumb. Some of the others either gave up and let us see their own contempt for the bumblers the scripts had saddled them with, as Vince O’Brien did towards the end of his own time as the last of the Sheriffs George Patterson. Dreariest of all was the first law enforcement officer on Dark Shadows, Constable Jonas Carter, whose flagrant incompetence at his job scarcely exceeded the incompetence Michael Currie brought to the role. This policeman doesn’t solve anything, but Philip R. Allen’s performance makes him seem like the greatest detective we’ve ever seen. Allen is spellbinding as he simultaneously depicts sincere empathy and an unbending determination to get at the facts. It’s too bad this is the only time we get to see this dynamic actor on Dark Shadows.

Outside the great house, Barnabas and Liz are watching the ambulance take Sabrina’s body away. Its flashing lights illuminate their faces. This is the first evidence we have seen that emergency vehicles exist in any iteration of Collinsport. Indeed, when the characters decide that someone is dead they usually take it for granted that there is no longer any point in calling the authorities, that they should just set about digging a grave and burying the body.

Barnabas and Liz watch the ambulance take Sabrina’s body away. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas asks Liz if she knew that Yaeger had threatened Maggie and that he has an unwholesome interest in her. She did not. Maggie had not told anyone at Collinwood about the incident in the dark alley. Barnabas tells her only that he heard about it in town. Regular viewers know that a woman named Buffie Harrington foiled Yaeger’s assault on Maggie when she happened by the alley. Barnabas can hardly tell Liz about his connection with Buffie, since he is a vampire and Buffie is his victim. They decide they must tell the police about Yaeger and Maggie, and they go back to the Loomis house to make a telephone call.

Cyrus is still in his lab. He knows that he might change back into Yaeger at any time. He decides to call Barnabas at the Loomis house and tell him where Maggie is. Barnabas holds the telephone so Liz can hear what Cyrus is saying. Barnabas asks Cyrus how he knows that Yaeger is holding Maggie; he says he can’t tell him. Barnabas and Liz rush out. They don’t think to call the police.

Speakerphone, 1970-style. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Back at Collinwood, Liz tells Hoffman she ought to go to the policemen outside the house and tell them what Cyrus told her and Barnabas. She also frets about Barnabas’ safety. Hoffman says she is quite sure that Barnabas Collins does not need anyone’s protection. Liz does not know what she means, but is in too much of a hurry to question her. Hoffman thinks to herself about how much has happened that she has not had a chance to tell Angelique.

In his lab, Cyrus raises a pistol to his head and puts his finger on the trigger. Before he can fire, he transforms into Yaeger.

Barnabas makes his way to Maggie’s dungeon. He searches it, finding her belongings but not her. She has picked the lock, untied the ropes in which Cyrus/ Yaeger bound her, and let herself out. She is hiding elsewhere in the basement. She can hear Barnabas’ steps, but does not know who it is. She assumes that it is Yaeger. When she hears him leave the basement, she starts to make her way out. Just as she emerges from the shadows, Yaeger appears on the steps and greets her. She screams, and he pounces.

Episode 1033: You’ll miss me whether I go or stay

Sabrina Stuart has been having a rough few weeks. Her fiancé, mild mannered scientist Cyrus Longworth, has been spending less and less time with her and is entangled with a strange, violent man named John Yaeger. The other day, she was with Cyrus in his laboratory and saw him transform into Yaeger. He confirmed that he had devised a potion to alter his appearance, and that Yaeger is merely a disguise he assumes to carry out crimes. The transformation Sabrina saw took place spontaneously, without a dose of the potion. Cyrus poured the potion down the drain a while ago, when he was feeling guilty about a rape he had committed as Yaeger, and we have seen him re-Jekyllize himself only by drinking another dose. So for all we know he will never resume his normal appearance. Sabrina pledged to stand by Cyrus no matter what; in response, he jeered and said he had no further use for her.

Tonight, Sabrina went out with her friend Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz took her to a concert. The two women come to Cyrus’ laboratory, where Sabrina has left her wallet. Sabrina apologizes and calls herself stupid for forgetting it, as she keeps apologizing and calling herself stupid throughout the episode. She is very nervous, as witness not only her forgetfulness but also her physical awkwardness, shown most strikingly in the frequent mismatch between her facial expressions and her circumstances.

In his post about this episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn makes several complaints about Lisa Blake Richards as an actress, saying that “I don’t understand what Sabrina does with her face most of the time. She acts like she just got it recently, and she hasn’t figured out how to use it yet.” I think Danny is unfair to Miss Richards generally, and that this is a case in point. As Danny documents, the episode is full of flubs and goofs of various kinds, so it is natural to write off any kind of awkwardness as just another mistake. But considering how distracted and anxiety-ridden Sabrina must be given what she knows about Cyrus, her disconcerting facial expressions suit her perfectly, and are an intelligent acting choice on Miss Richards’ part. That we first see her in a scene with Liz helps to underline this intelligence, since Joan Bennett is the only other member of the cast who seems to know her lines today. Her smooth performance gives Miss Richards something to play off of and spotlights Sabrina’s barely controlled panic.

Sabrina and Liz haven’t been in the lab very long when Cyrus enters, as Yaeger. He introduces himself to Liz as a close associate of Cyrus’, and asks Sabrina to stay and help him analyze some data. Sabrina agrees to do so, and Liz excuses herself.

Cyrus, as “Yaeger,” listens while Liz and Sabrina talk in the laboratory. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Cyrus tells Sabrina to mail some of his clothes and all of his money to New York. She asks if he is moving to New York permanently. In response, he rambles on about how big the world is and how little of it he knew before he assumed his current appearance. Apparently Cyrus retains his ignorance of geography when disguised as Yaeger. He simply tells Sabrina to send his belongings to New York, addressed to John Yaeger at General Delivery. Apparently he thinks there is only one post office location in the state of New York.

We next see Sabrina in the basement of an old farmhouse. Returning viewers know that Cyrus obtained this farmhouse last week by murdering the man who was about to sell it to him. Evidently, Sabrina has followed him there. She sees and hears him in a dungeon, tormenting Maggie Evans Collins, the wife of Liz’ brother Quentin. When Cyrus emerges from the dungeon, Sabrina runs away. He does not see her, but he finds the check he gave her to send to some post office randomly chosen from among the 1720 in New York State in 1970. It fell out of the pocket in her skirt* onto a stair.

We cut to Liz’ home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood. We hear a car screeching to a halt. Sabrina comes running in the foyer, calling the names of the residents of the house. Cyrus follows her. He marches her into the drawing room and asks a series of questions. When she tells him she put the check in a safe place, he produces it. She blurts out that she dropped it. She pleads with him to let Maggie go. He says it would be foolish to let someone go who knows what Maggie knows about him. Sabrina knows even more about Cyrus than Maggie does, and asks what he is going to do to her. He tells her she knows what he is going to do. He strangles her.

Liz enters and screams. Startled, Cyrus lets go of Sabrina’s neck. She falls to the floor, her eyes closed. Tomorrow it will be confirmed that she is dead.

Liz had a dream earlier. She and Sabrina entered Cyrus’ lab and found it a shambles. Sabrina started cleaning the place up, only to find Maggie’s dead body sprawled on a table. Liz told this dream to a person named Barnabas Collins, who introduced himself to her family a few weeks ago as a distant cousin from South America. While the rest of the Collinses believe that Maggie left of her own accord, Barnabas is convinced that she is being held prisoner. The dream convinces Liz that Barnabas is right. When she told him about the dream, she also told him she had met Yaeger. Barnabas knows how cruel and dangerous Yaeger is, and has since #1021 been trying to find out exactly what the connection is between Cyrus and Yaeger. He announced to Liz that there is only one way to find out whether Yaeger has abducted Maggie, and when we last saw him in this episode he was in Cyrus’ lab, looking at the wardrobe he keeps there to wear when he is disguised as Yaeger.

Sabrina’s death marks Lisa Blake Richards’ final appearance on Dark Shadows. Her quiet competence as an actress allowed her scene partners to dial the vehemence essential to the Dark Shadows house style of acting down to bearable levels, and it highlighted Sabrina’s clumsiness under the severe pressures to which the story subjected her. I was glad when, during a 2020 reunion of Dark Shadows cast members on Zoom, Mitch Ryan took a call from Miss Richards, who was at that time his fellow student in a writing class. I’ll miss her, even if Danny Horn doesn’t.

*That pocket gets a couple of closeups today; after watching the episode, my wife and I happened to see another video mentioning that there was a trend towards putting pockets in skirts in the early 1970s.

Episode 1026: The spectacle of Barnabas Collins trying to prove anything

Maggie Evans is depressed about her marriage to drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins. In #1016, Maggie was getting ready to call a lawyer so she could put an end to their joyless union, but she changed her mind and decided to give it one more try. That has not worked out, and she has gone from contemplating divorce to attempting suicide. She is about to fling herself to her death from a window high in the great house of Collinwood when Quentin’s sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard enters the room and talks her out of it. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe, which is in some ways a mirror image of this one. This incident is a case in point. In the original continuity, it was Liz’ counterpart whom people kept interrupting while she was trying to do away with herself,* so she takes the reversed position in this universe.

Most of the episode is devoted to the activities of a visitor from the main continuity, Barnabas Collins. The only thing Barnabas has a motivation to do is to try to get back home, but he seems to have decided he’d rather meddle in the problems the people in this alien universe are having. He suspects that the houseguest at Collinwood who is generally accepted as Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of Quentin’s late first wife Angelique, is in fact Angelique herself risen from the dead. He also suspects that Maggie’s suicide attempt was the consequence of spells Angelique cast on her.

Barnabas is right about these things, but his grounds for believing them are thin. Angelique’s counterpart in his universe is a wicked witch who has long been the bane of his existence, and so he simply assumes that a woman with her face and voice will be the same. But for three weeks, Alexis really was staying at Collinwood, and Angelique really was in her tomb. Alexis looked and sounded exactly like Angelique. We saw that, while Alexis may not have been a one-dimensional innocent, she was not a witch and was not a direct threat to anyone’s life or liberty. Had Barnabas met Alexis before Angelique came back to life and murdered her, he would have had exactly the same suspicions about her that he has now about Angelique. It is purely a matter of luck that his suspicions coincide with the truth.

In the main continuity, Barnabas’ best friend and most frequent accomplice in his many crimes is mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia’s counterpart here is the housekeeper at Collinwood. Miss Julia Hoffman is as devoted to Angelique as the original Julia is devoted to Barnabas. As the first Julia shows great reluctance when Barnabas is about to murder someone and shows even greater efficiency in getting rid of the bodies afterward, so this Julia protested yesterday that she would have nothing to do with Angelique’s plan to drive Maggie to her death, but was waiting outside the room when she was about to jump.

After confronting Julia and Angelique, needlessly revealing to them his suspicions, Barnabas decides to get some hard evidence. So he goes to Angelique’s old bedroom and stares really hard at the portrait of her that hangs there. She is in another part of the house, but grows agitated. She runs to the room and screams at him to stop staring into her eyes. He breaks into a triumphant… not grin, exactly, it’s more of a simper. It may be the only triumphant simper ever seen. That suits the occasion. He knows he was right, but Angelique knows that he knows, and it is not clear what he either can do to fight her or what reason he has to want to fight her.

Barnabas’ triumphant simper. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Jonathan Frid’s invention of a facial expression previously thought to be impossible is one of several bits of conspicuously good acting in this episode. He also gets to deliver brief enigmatic responses to a number of questions, such as “Perhaps” and “Did I?,” and he makes each of those words materialize in space in such an arresting way that even his scene partners can’t help but show how impressed they are. As Liz fussing over Maggie, Joan Bennett shows a maternal quality that brings her hitherto undefined character into a very sharp focus. Grayson Hall also adds greatly to Hoffman’s depth. Standing by while Maggie is trying to kill herself, she is bland and detached. When she tells Angelique that it really is better for them that Maggie did not succeed, she is the opposite, torn between a number of emotions, including relief that she has avoided responsibility for a death.

Angelique has several comic lines, for example a wistful lament that she doesn’t get to see Maggie’s corpse mangled on the rocks below her window. And she puts real fervor into her spellcasting directed at Maggie. My wife, Mrs Acilius, remembered that when Lara Parker first joined the cast she wished she were playing an ingenue, so much so that Frid had to keep reminding her that she was the villain. But now she has settled in and become part of the group. So when Angelique abuses Maggie, Parker and her friend Kathryn Leigh Scott turn into two little girls playing make-believe, and they have so much fun at it that they are irresistible to watch, no matter how miserable Maggie is.

*For example, in #266, #267, and #268, and #569.