Medical researcher Cyrus Longworth has invented a potion which, when he drinks it, darkens his hair, causes him to grow more of it, and adds to his muscle mass. When he is in this state, Cyrus calls himself “John Yaeger.” Yaeger serves Cyrus as a very effective disguise. The other day, he ran into his old friend Quentin Collins while he was presenting himself as Yaeger. Quentin did not suspect that the man he was talking to was Cyrus.
Cyrus uses Yaeger to escape responsibility for violent crimes. He has started a couple of bar fights in the Eagle tavern. Barmaid Buffie Harrington has drawn Cyrus’ special attention; he hit her, twisted her arm, choked her, and threatened worse when he was alone in the tavern with her, and he has since taken an apartment in her boarding house. Cyrus has also beaten Buffie’s sometime boyfriend Steve so severely that he put him in the hospital. Cyrus was choking Steve when he heard a police whistle and ran away. It looked like he would probably have murdered him if the police had been a minute later. When Buffie saw Cyrus in his undisguised form and told him of the cruelty she and Steve had suffered at Yaeger’s hands, Cyrus barely bothered to conceal his pleasure. When Buffie asked Cyrus if Yaeger worked for him, Cyrus was delighted to say that he did.
We open in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, where Cyrus is waiting for Quentin. All of a sudden Cyrus starts to transform into Yaeger. This is the first time the transformation has taken place spontaneously, without a fresh dose of the potion. Cyrus leaves a note, then jumps out the window and runs away.
In his laboratory, Cyrus is about to drink the antidote to restore his usual appearance. He decides he would rather have some more fun as Yaeger first and puts the antidote back. His fiancée and lab assistant Sabrina Stuart comes downstairs. She has not seen Cyrus as Yaeger before, and is completely fooled by the disguise. She has heard the name John Yaeger in connection with recent strange behavior on Cyrus’ part, and is stern with him. Regular viewers know how brutal Cyrus is with Buffie, and we fear that he will mete the same treatment out to Sabrina. But he does not do so, not this time. He insists that Cyrus wants him to wait in the laboratory, and Sabrina leaves him alone there. After Sabrina exits, he takes a painting from the wall and goes.
Cyrus takes the painting to the apartment he has rented in the name of Yaeger. Buffie comes to him there. He harries her about her visit to him when he looked like his usual self and she knew him as Cyrus. He says she told Cyrus she likes a quiet man. He walks up to her, talking all the while about how quiet he can be. He gets quieter and quieter until he brings his hand across her face with full force. The next we see, she is bruised and cut, her clothing badly torn. Christopher Pennock and Elizabeth Eis play these moments very well. They are really hard to watch.
Cyrus gives Buffie the painting from his laboratory. He asks her if she wants him to take her someplace nice, with good food and a sophisticated atmosphere. She perks up and is enthusiastic. He then points out that she is covered in bruises and abrasions and wearing damaged clothing. He ridicules the idea that she could be seen anywhere looking like that, and taunts her with imprecations to take better care of herself. She leaves, hanging her head and carrying the painting. Cyrus laughs, relishing the misery he has inflicted on Buffie.
Cyrus rejoices to have battered and humiliated Buffie.
As Cyrus, whether he has red hair, a white coat, and a diffident manner, or black hair, a mustache, and a sadistic swagger, Pennock has a relatively straightforward job to do. He is to embody a total rat bastard, one who pretends to be nice when he might be held accountable for his actions and who exults in hurting people when he thinks he can get away with it.
Eis has a trickier assignment. When we first saw Buffie, she was cheerfully fending off Steve’s clumsy advances. Even after she had seen Cyrus, as Yaeger, outfight many strong men, she still stood up to him and spoke her mind. But now he has harmed her again and again, and she just keeps coming back for more. It would be depressing to see anyone fall into that pattern, but it strips us of all hope when we know the person to be so lively and dynamic. That’s the point, I think, and Eis doesn’t let us off the hook. Buffie still holds her head up, she still looks Cyrus in the face, she still speaks in a mature tone of voice when she protests against his abuse. But even so, whatever masochistic fascination is at work has such a grip on Buffie that she will not walk away from a situation that is already intolerably bad and can only get worse.
A Window Into This World From That
We are currently several weeks into a segment set in a different continuity than the one where Dark Shadows spent its first 196 weeks. Vampire Barnabas Collins brought us here. Barnabas discovered that a room in the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood was the site of an inexplicable phenomenon. When he opened the doors to the room, he usually saw it as it was in his universe, a dark space with bare floors and undecorated walls. But once in a while, it appears to be brilliantly lit, fully furnished, and the setting of frequent meetings among people who look and sound just like his acquaintances, but who are living different lives. Through an invisible barrier, Barnabas could see and hear those people, but he could neither pass through the barrier nor attract the people’s notice.
Barnabas became obsessed with the forlorn hope that if he could pass into the other universe, he might be free of his curse and become a living man once more. Other characters from the main continuity joined him in watching their counterparts in the other world; few of these knew that Barnabas was a vampire, but all of them could see that the phenomenon had some obscure significance special to him, and were concerned that he was going to do something dangerous. In #980, Barnabas managed to make his way through the barrier, only to find that he was still a vampire. He bit the first person he met, and shortly after was chained in a coffin by her husband. He has been trapped there ever since.
The room on which Barnabas and others in the main continuity had been spying in the days before he crossed over has been a major set in the “Parallel Time” segment, and every time we see it we wonder if those others are still watching. Today, we intercut with the original “time-band.” Quentin goes to the room, and finds the bare dark space it represents in the main continuity. He sees two children there, whom he takes to be his son Daniel Collins and Daniel’s cousin Amy Collins. The boy is telling the girl that “Dr Hoffman” told his father that Barnabas got caught in that room. The girl responds that she certainly does not want to get caught, and she wants to leave at once. Quentin calls Daniel and Amy’s names, and is puzzled that the children do not react. He hears Daniel’s voice coming from behind him. He turns and sees Daniel and Amy standing in the hallway, asking why he is calling their names.
This is the first indication we have had that the main continuity is ever visible from this one. We are left wondering if the traffic between the universes can go both ways, and if so whether this continuity and the original one will in some way merge together. Cyrus’ attack on Buffie and her response to it were so difficult to watch that, done as well as the scenes were done today, they left us reluctant to tune back in tomorrow. The story of Buffie’s degradation at Cyrus’ hands can only become more depressing as it goes. But this new information about how “Parallel Time” works suggests such a wide variety of possible next steps that it sets our imaginations into overdrive, and we can’t wait to see which way we will turn next.
Wealthy socialite Alexis Stokes is looking at her identical twin sister, the late Angelique Stokes Collins. Angelique has been dead and in her coffin these six months, but hasn’t decayed visibly. This has led Angelique’s widower, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, to the conclusion that Angelique is an uncanny being whose remains must be burned. Quentin’s friend, foolish scientist Cyrus Longworth, heartily concurs with this opinion. Alexis sits by the coffin and tells her late sister that she has, with great regret, come to share Quentin and Cyrus’ conclusion. She touches Angelique’s shoulder. At this, Angelique’s eyes pop open. She speaks, and tells Alexis that she is half right. Someone must be destroyed, but it will be Alexis, not Angelique.
Angelique and Alexis stand facing each other in the tomb. Angelique explains that all she needed to come back to life was a touch. Now that Alexis has given her that, the warmth has begun to drain from her body into Angelique’s. Soon all of Alexis’ body heat will be transferred to Angelique. She will then die, and Angelique will trade places with her. The “heat vampire” idea was one the show explored briefly in April 1969, when undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins drained the warmth from the bodies of the living to keep herself alive. Now Angelique will return from the grave as another heat vampire. Alexis will lie in the coffin, and Angelique will move back in to the great house of Collinwood, where Alexis has for the last three weeks been staying as Quentin’s guest.
Footage of the dress rehearsal for this scene survives. The only other surviving videotape from any episode of Dark Shadows not originally released for broadcast are the opening slates of the episodes.* The confrontation between Alexis and Angelique not only involves the most complicated videotape editing they’ve done so far, it also requires Lara Parker to do some intricate acting work as she plays off a version of herself she can neither see nor hear. In the rehearsal footage, she several times breaks character and turns to director Lela Swift to report on things that aren’t going right. We can hear Swift’s responses over the control room microphone. Some crew members are in and out of the shot, and at the end two people come to help Parker out of the coffin. It’s fascinating for hard-core fans, a must-watch:
By the time Mr Trask, the butler in the great house at Collinwood, comes to the mausoleum to see what’s taking so long, Angelique has changed into Alexis’ short bluish gray suit and chignon hairstyle with a tight spiral twist at the back, the look that the mysterious Madeleine wore in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. She has changed Alexis into her own gown and loose hairdo, and has put Alexis into her coffin. She is closing the lid of the coffin when Trask enters. Trask asks if she is ready to return to Collinwood, and she says she is looking forward to it.
We cut to the drawing room at Collinwood, where Quentin is yelling at the wind. He is convinced that it is really a ghost expressing discontent, and he demands to know what the trouble is. He doesn’t get any answers.
Angelique and Trask enter the house. Posing as Alexis, Angelique dismisses Trask, and tells Quentin she now agrees with him and Cyrus. The body in the tomb must be destroyed.
Cyrus is in his laboratory. He is talking with his lawyer, Quentin’s cousin Chris Collins. Chris has questions about Cyrus’ instructions to open a bank account in the name of John Yaeger and deposit $5000 in it. He asks if Yaeger is a pseudonym Cyrus is planning to use. Cyrus denies this, and says that Yaeger is a man he met recently who is helping him with his current experiments. In #985, Cyrus responded to Chris’ questions about these experiments with a lot of mad scientist ravings that alarmed him. Since Cyrus offers no information about Yaeger aside from his connection to this dubious project, Chris is reluctant to comply with Cyrus’ directives. Cyrus agrees that Chris should meet Yaeger first. Chris says “I’m looking forward to meeting him. See you, Cyrus,” and exits. This is the last time we will ever see Chris. Actor Don Briscoe’s health problems were catching up to him, and he was not able to return to the show.
While Quentin and Cyrus burn the coffin, Angelique is in her old bedroom. Alexis had been staying there, so Angelique is right at home. Trask tells her it is as if Angelique never left. Later, Quentin comes to invite her to join him and Cyrus for a drink downstairs. She declines, saying she would like to be alone.
Lara Parker’s performance as the newly returned Angelique is marvelous, her best work so far. We can see that she is a different person than the one who left the house earlier in the evening, and we can believe that the other characters don’t see it. In a closeup, she wrinkles her face like the Grinch, suggesting that Angelique has come to steal Christmas. The supernatural element of her confrontation with Alexis suggests Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia,” which the show has been drawing on for the last few weeks, and reminds longtime viewers of Laura’s April 1969 storyline. But the idea of a woman killing her identical twin and taking her place would have been familiar to much of the audience from the 1964 film Dead Ringer, in which Bette Davis played the sisters in that sad situation. Bette Davis is one of the people frequently mentioned when film buffs name The Greatest Screen Actor of All Time, but not even she could have done better than Parker does today.
In the drawing room, Cyrus is alone. He was reluctant to accept Quentin’s invitation to stay for a drink, and is pacing and fidgeting. What Quentin does not know is that Cyrus is in the middle of a Jekyll and Hyde project, and he wants to get back to his lab to take the potion and change himself into the brutal John Yaeger. He revels in Yaeger’s cruelty and is addicted to the transformation.
Music begins playing on the soundtrack we have not heard before, a jagged piano theme. Cyrus suddenly feels the pains that he has felt after taking the potion. He sees Yaeger’s dark hair springing into place on his arms. He looks in the mirror and sees that he has become Yaeger, without taking the potion. He goes to flee the house, but realizes Quentin is already approaching. He retreats to the drawing room and locks the door. Quentin knocks, asking what on earth is wrong with Cyrus.
This is not only the first time Cyrus has changed without drinking the potion, it is also the first time he has appeared without a putty appliance precariously attached to the bridge of his nose. He looks far more convincing without it, though of course he is even more instantly recognizable as Cyrus.
In his post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn points out both that the videotape editing is extremely ambitious today, with the confrontation between Alexis and Angelique at the beginning and the pretaped sequence of the Cyrus-to-Yaeger transformation at the end, and that that the editing in between these heroic shots looks ragged. The jump cut to Cyrus and Quentin’s approach to the mausoleum makes it look like Cyrus’ laboratory opens onto the cemetery, the first sequence of Angelique in her old room begins and ends with unusually long sequences of her pruning some extremely unhealthy looking flowers, and Cyrus spends a surprisingly large amount of time in the drawing room pacing about. Danny guesses that they did not know how long the process shots would run, so they inserted filler that could be removed if they went long.
That could be, but I like the episode the way it is. The jump cuts give the whole thing a dreamlike quality that works well with the subject matter. That’s certainly the case with the cut to the cemetery- we don’t know where Cyrus’ lab is, but we do know that only death is likely to come from the work being done there, so that jump makes a grim symbolic sense. Moreover, the actors use the sequences Danny identifies as filler to shed light on the characters and situate the scenes in the story. Angelique is so absorbed in her plant that you can believe she came back from the dead specifically to work on it, and nothing Trask or Quentin has to say is going to distract her for long. Cyrus’ pacing makes it clear he feels trapped at Collinwood, which adds considerably to the force of the moment when, as Yaeger, he has to hide from Quentin.
*I should mention that we have the dress rehearsal for #584. What we don’t have is a finished episode- they never made one. They just sent the tape of the dress rehearsal to the ABC network, and that was broadcast.
Quentin Collins walks into the bedroom once occupied by his late wife Angelique, where Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis is staying. Quentin arrives just in time to see sleazy musician Bruno Hess strangling Alexis. He interrupts this process. Bruno is convinced that Alexis is Angelique returned from the grave, and that she is responsible for many strange and unhappy occurrences that have taken place on the estate of Collinwood since her arrival.
Bruno holds the deed to a cottage on the grounds of the estate and lives there, to Quentin’s intense annoyance. He hates Bruno, who had an affair with Angelique, a fact he likes to throw in Quentin’s face. You might think Quentin would call the police and report Bruno’s assault on Alexis. Not only would that result in a felony charge, but if Bruno bursts out with his suspicions it should be easy to get a civil commitment order that will earn him a a long stay in a home for the very nervous. But Quentin leaves Alexis and Angelique’s room without calling the sheriff. What’s more, when he goes to the drawing room and finds Bruno still in his house he has a lengthy conversation with him and waits for him to go. He never does telephone the police.
By the end of the episode, Quentin has convinced himself to take Bruno’s theory seriously. Alexis overhears him talking about it with his friend Cyrus Longworth. Quentin tells Cyrus that they must open Angelique’s tomb and look in her coffin.
Alexis finds them there, the coffin already out of its niche. She objects to the desecration of her sister’s resting place. She promises to leave Collinwood immediately if they will let Angelique rest in peace. Quentin refuses. He opens the box. Whatever he finds inside prompts a reaction of shock on his face and on Alexis’ as they look inside.
Between these scenes, we spend time in Cyrus’ laboratory. He is a mad scientist who has devised a Jekyll and Hyde potion. His alter ego goes by the name John Yaeger. Cyrus’ fiancée Sabrina Stuart is a sweet, trusting young woman who is determined to believe the best of Cyrus, but she has heard so much about Cyrus’ involvement with the brutal Yaeger that she is certain something is terribly wrong. We know that Cyrus was close to Angelique, and that she put him up to the Jekyll and Hyde experiment. Sabrina doesn’t know what Cyrus’ project is, but his withdrawn and irritable manner reminds her of the influence Angelique had on him. She says “It’s the same as it was when Angelique was alive- you were different then, and you’re different now.” I’m sure that was the scripted line, too.
Sabrina demands Cyrus stop lying to her and tell the truth about who Yaeger is and what hold he has over him. We saw yesterday that Cyrus’ attitude towards the potion and towards his time as Yaeger is already that of an addict towards his drug, and he sullenly refuses to answer any of Sabrina’s questions, even with more lies. She grows more and more exasperated.
Sabrina’s time with Cyrus is cut short when barmaid Buffie Harrington enters and insists on talking with Cyrus alone. Yaeger gave Buffie a check signed by Cyrus to cover the damages he did to her place of employment in a bar fight the other night; she wants to know if the check is authentic. Cyrus confirms that it is, much to Buffie’s delight. She mentions that her sometime boyfriend Steve is in the hospital because of a beating Yaeger gave him; Cyrus hands her a pile of cash to cover Steve’s hospital expenses. Buffie tells Cyrus that Yaeger has taken rooms in the boarding house where she stays, and that he frightens her. She does not tell him that Yaeger has hit her, choked her, and threatened her every time they have met. We know that he knows that- he has met her only when he was in the form of Yaeger, and he recognizes her on sight, showing that he remembers their encounters. Buffie asks if Yaeger works for Cyrus. He smiles with great satisfaction and says that he does.
That smile is a key moment. Yesterday’s episode gave the Jekyll and Hyde story a new lease on life by confirming that it will indeed be about addiction. That’s the usual thing with that material, but Dark Shadows has taken familiar tales in such weird directions that we could by no means take it for granted that its version would follow the typical pattern. Cyrus’ response to the thought that he controls Yaeger, who has put Steve in the hospital and is terrorizing Buffie, confirms something else. Cyrus’ diffident manner and scientific preoccupations help Sabrina hold onto the idea that he is a sweet man whose only flaw is naïveté, but Christopher Pennock’s rendering of that smile leaves no doubt that Yaeger is Cyrus’ means of indulging his own sadistic impulses.
As Buffie is leaving, Cyrus asks her if she likes Yaeger. Holding her head high, she says that sometimes she does. She sounds like she means it. Buffie was a commanding presence when first we saw her, and she is forceful throughout this scene. But she has given up on fighting back against Yaeger or even trying to run away from him. Her line suggests that she is not simply giving in to fear, but is drawn to a masochistic fantasy. Yaeger has been so vicious and Cyrus is so sinister that there is no prospect this fantasy is going to be channeled into any kind of consensual game- Buffie is drifting into a situation that can lead only to her destruction.
This episode includes one of the all-time great bloopers. The closing credits run over a shot of Angelique and Alexis’s room. For the first minute or so, we see a man sitting in a chair, chewing on something. Whoever he was, apparently he decided he’d found a good spot for lunch. Eventually the camera zooms in on the portrait of Angelique that dominates the room. This is so obviously an attempt to get the lunch-eater out of the frame that it only adds to the hilarity.
Dark Shadows never followed the usual soap opera pattern of a week building to a slam-bang conclusion on a Friday. This one is a case in point. It aired on a Friday, and nothing new happens.
The actors are all very good, and each makes the most of their time on screen today. As child Amy Collins and drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, Denise Nickerson and David Selby do a good job reacting to the ghost of someone named Dameon Edwards, which they saw yesterday. As sleazy musician Bruno Hess and sneaky butler Mr Trask, Michael Stroka and Jerry Lacy do a good job being alarmed by the prospect that Dameon has returned to expose their guilty secrets. As mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, Christopher Pennock does a good job failing to perceive the consequences of his lunatic scheme. And as Cyrus’ blindly devoted assistant/ fiancée Sabrina Stuart, Lisa Blake Richards does a good job being trusting and optimistic.
I’ll just single out one moment, when Bruno sees his piano playing with the touch of visible fingers and realizes it is Dameon’s doing. Michael Stroka gives a memorable take.
If the piano starts playing itself, Bruno’s going to be out of a job.
Cyrus drinks the potion he has formulated to turn himself from a mild-mannered Jekyll into a brutish Hyde. As her did the first time we saw him do this, he cries out in pain and collapses. This time they add a lot of flaring green lights to illustrate his distress. The process is not effective at all- at first, I thought something had gone wrong with one of the cameras. At the end of the sequence, we fade from Pennock in his Cyrus look to him in his Hyde makeup, which we didn’t see the first time. The shot doesn’t line up, so it does not create the illusion of a transformation, and the prosthetic nose isn’t very firmly attached, so it takes a second to realize that it is supposed to be part of his face and not just something that landed on him while he was falling.
Quentin Collins, master of the estate of Collinwood, is in an even grimmer mood than usual. His new wife, the former Maggie Evans, has left him after only a week in the great house. She had had all she was going to take of his patronizing attitude towards her and of everyone else’s preoccupation with his first wife, the late Angelique Stokes Collins. Maggie was particularly satiated with Quentin’s houseguest, Angelique’ unmarried identical twin sister, Alexis Stokes. Maggie had found Alexis in Angelique’s bedroom, wearing Angelique’s frilly nightgown, and reaching out to Quentin while suggesting in a soft voice that “Perhaps we can comfort each other.” When that sight moved Maggie to voice objections to the situation, Quentin responded by forbidding her, for her own good no less, from mentioning Angelique’s name ever again. He was amazed that this led Maggie to leave the house. Considering the provocation, it is indeed amazing that Quentin did not require medical attention to remove his brandy decanter from whatever part of his anatomy Maggie could reach.
We open today with Quentin and Alexis back in Angelique’s room. She is fully dressed this time, but they are sitting together on the piano bench. They move their heads together, and lock their lips in a passionate kiss.
Returning viewers know that we are visiting a universe parallel to the one in which the action was based for its first 196 weeks of the show. Angelique’s counterpart in the main continuity is a wicked witch who has returned from the dead quite a few times, so when we first crossed over here and heard her devotees saying that they were sure their Angelique would find a way to come back to life we did not doubt that they were right. Maggie wants nothing to do with Angelique or the cult she built up around herself, but she is among those who are convinced that Alexis is in fact Angelique redivivus. The show has done an excellent job keeping us guessing whether she is or isn’t, and we will still be guessing when we come to the end of today’s episode.
Alexis pulls away from Quentin and is visibly upset. He apologizes for kissing her. She says that she is disappointed in him- she had thought that he, of all people would know that she is not Angelique returned from the grave. He says he does not think that she is. We can believe him- his counterpart in the main continuity usually had two or three fiancées at a time, and they were rarely his only love interests. So he wouldn’t have to believe Alexis was Angelique, or indeed that she was anyone in particular, to start a make-out session with her. After they clear the air, she agrees to stay on in the house until she can meet Quentin and Angelique’s son, her nephew Daniel Collins, who is on a trip at the moment.
Bruno, Sabrina, Cyrus, Gladstone, and the Bunny
Quentin and Alexis aren’t the only ones dealing with frustrated sexual desire. We cut from them to a closeup of a bunny. This universally recognized symbol of amorous enthusiasm is alone in a cage.
The episode originally aired on the second Tuesday of Easter 1970, maybe the bunny was resting up after his big day.
The cage is in a laboratory. A young woman in a lab coat is trying to work on a large apparatus for chemical experimentation while a man wearing a purple suit, a low cut shirt, a large medallion, and a huge bouffant hairdo is pestering her with clumsy attempts at flirting. She keeps laughing off his verbal gambits and swatting away his physical approaches.
A tall young man in a lab coat enters and calls out a booming “Sabrina!” The lounge lizard and the experimenter stand up straighter and step away from each other. Returning viewers know the tall man as aspiring mad scientist Cyrus Longworth and the ill-clad masher as Bruno Hess, musician and hanger-on of the late Angelique. We have not seen the woman before, but we recognize the actress as Lisa Blake Richards, who played another woman named Sabrina in the main continuity. That Sabrina was trapped in a go-nowhere storyline. Before today is done we will have grounds to hope that this one will give Miss Richards a task more in keeping with her considerable talents.
Cyrus sends Sabrina upstairs to wait for a package. Bruno gets ready for his part in Cyrus’ experiment, which involves giving a blood sample. Bruno asks Cyrus why he was so calm when he saw him trying to put the moves on Sabrina. Cyrus replies that he trusts Sabrina too much to worry that Bruno could come between them. He then jabs the syringe into Bruno’s arm with great force and without even looking at the spot from which he is drawing the sample, causing Bruno to jump. He may trust Sabrina, but he wants Bruno to know who’s boss.
Bruno tries to interest Cyrus in his theory that Alexis is Angelique returned from the grave. He eventually manages to get Cyrus to give him a quizzical look, but stops at that point, saying that if Cyrus won’t explain his experiment, he won’t explain his.
Sabrina comes downstairs and says that the package has come and that its bearer insists on meeting Cyrus himself. Cyrus is annoyed by this, but when it develops that the man is Mr Horace Gladstone himself, the very chemist who devised the unusual compound he has brought, Cyrus sends Sabrina back upstairs and Bruno out the basement door so that he can meet with the man alone.
Friday, Cyrus explained to his friend Chris that he is trying to devise a process for separating a human being into two parts, one good and the other evil. His scenes with Chris hit all the obligatory mad scientist notes, right down to disparaging non-mad scientists as unimaginative dolts who may as well believe that the Earth is flat. He won’t tell Gladstone what he is trying to do, perhaps because he has the same last name as did the man who was prime minister of the UK when Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was first published and so he reminds him that he is a character in a derivative storyline. But Gladstone does warn Cyrus that the compound he has purchased is a potent and dangerous one. Gladstone hints at the nature of the hazard when he says that he stepped back from active research when he feared that, even within the bounds of chemistry, he was about to uncover truths best left unknown.
Gladstone is played by John Harkins, in his fourth role on Dark Shadows. As before, he is playing a stranger from far away. In #174, he played Lieutenant Costa of the Arizona State Police. We saw him in a scene set in Phoenix, the first time Dark Shadows took us outside the northeastern USA. We did not leave that region again until #877, when sorcerer Count Petofi thought back to an incident in England in 1885, when he first met his henchman Aristide. Like Bruno, Aristide was played by Michael Stroka. The incident in England involved a man named Garth Blackwood, whom Petofi would bring back from the dead to punish Aristide. Blackwood was played by Harkins.
Harkins’ third character came from even further away than Arizona or England. He was Mr Strak, the representative of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods long confined to the underworld. Strak appeared to Paul Stoddard in #899 and #900, and tricked Paul into selling his daughter Carolyn to the Leviathans. So far as Paul was concerned, Strak came from nowhere and disappeared to nowhere, so that he could never hope to explain to anyone what he had done, still less find a way to challenge the terms of the deal.
Gladstone is from Boston. Dark Shadows is set near the real-world location of Bar Harbor, Maine. The characters often mention Boston, but we’ve never had a scene set there. In #363, the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins was perfectly bland when her friend, strange and troubled boy David, said he had been to China. Sarah said that her father and his business associates were always sailing to China. When David told Sarah that he was joking and he had actually gone to Boston, Sarah was thrilled. She had been to Boston herself once, and considered it a far more exotic place than China could possibly be. Gordon Russell was credited with the script for #363, and Joe Caldwell, the freshly returned author of today’s script, had finished his first tour of duty on the show three weeks before it was taped. But Sarah’s excitement about Boston is so much the kind of character moment Caldwell specialized in that I suspect it was a leftover idea of his that Russell found a place for. Perhaps the casting of Harkins as a Hub man reflects Caldwell’s idea of what Boston would represent to people in a coastal village in central Maine.
Bruno and Alexis
We cut to Bruno, who is on the telephone. He is talking to a person in an office somewhere. He learns that no ships from Genoa have docked in New York in the last week. This information excites him, but his excitement soon gives way to terror as he feels himself choking.
Bruno runs into Angelique’s bedroom, where Alexis is back on the piano bench. He gasps and demands she stop obstructing his breathing. She appears to have no idea what he is talking about.
The Angelique we have known since late 1967 did specialize in casting spells that made her enemies choke. We saw her do that as recently as #955, when her husband tried to set fire to her and she stopped him by twisting a scarf around the neck of a statue. On the other hand, Alexis seems genuinely bewildered by the situation.
When Bruno starts breathing again, he confronts her with the fact that no registered passenger ships from Genoa arrived in New York harbor the week before. She asks him if he considered that she might have been a guest on the yacht of some wealthy friends. He is stumped by this. Again, this keeps the suspense about her true identity alive. Alexis has been established as the sort of person who would be found on someone else’s yacht, but she doesn’t actually say that that is how she got back to the States. She merely asks Bruno if he had thought of the possibility that she may have done so.
Cyrus and Sabrina
Back in the lab, we see Sabrina collecting some equipment while Cyrus tends to his notes. She finds a small box, and asks him if he put it there for her to find. When he says he did, she opens it and finds a ring. She asks if it is an engagement ring. He says he hopes it is. She throws her arms around him and tells him she loves him. He holds her and does not say that he loves her too. He merely says that she knows how he feels about her, an ill-omen if ever we saw one.
Cyrus tells Sabrina that she knows how completely his work consumes his energies, and she says that is one of the things she admires about him. She asks what exactly he is working on. He is reticent, and she tries to walk the question back. He goes into his mad scientist ravings, and she gives him a stunned look. He tries to reassure her, saying that when he gets carried away he talks in cliches. He says that no one has found good or evil in a test tube… “yet!” The crazed gleam comes back into his eyes.
Sabrina is shocked by Cyrus’ ravings
This scene gives Miss Richards more to work with than she had had in her whole time in the main continuity. The look Sabrina gives at the end of Cyrus’ gust of lunacy is the first time she has had a chance to get a laugh, and she makes the most of it. As for Christopher Pennock, he had just been getting the hang of his previous part, hugely overgrown infant Jeb Hawkes, when he was written out. With Cyrus, he can to some extent pick up where he left off. Pennock had begun to find a way to suggest that there was a real sweetness bottled up inside one-man wrecking crew Jeb, and in Cyrus’ love for Sabrina he can play a character who is Jeb’s mirror image- abundantly sweet, but so deep inside his own head that he is about to become a monster.
Bruno
On Dark Shadows, wedding days usually come and go without anyone actually getting married. Typically, the ceremony is interrupted and someone has to go off and dig up a grave, in which they find an empty coffin.
Bruno has no manners and does not observe any of the recognized customs. So even though today is Sabrina and Cyrus’ engagement day, not their wedding day, he jumps the gun and starts opening Angelique’s grave, in which he believes he will find an empty coffin. We end with him chiseling at the wall of the mausoleum. I suppose you could say that he might be planning to work slowly, so that he won’t finish until the day of the wedding, but even if that were true it would be an outright violation of the accepted norm, and an undeniable sign that he is not the sort of person who can be expected to fit in at Collinwood.
This is the last script that will be credited to writer Violet Welles. Welles had done a substantial amount of rewriting on scripts attributed to her friend Gordon Russell before her name first showed up in the credits with #711, and she will do more ghosting for Russell later.
Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day is a tribute to Welles; I recommend it highly. Welles was far and away the best author of dialogue among the nine writers credited through the show’s 249 weeks, so much so that her uncredited contributions are easy to recognize. I will mention a week very close to the end of the series in 1971, a long time after the wheels came off, when all of a sudden characters start making witty remarks and developing interesting relationships. Then it’s back to the dreariness of a bunch of go-nowhere stories.
Welles rated herself low as an inventor of plot-lines. I don’t know what went on during the long hours she spent in story conferences with Russell and Sam Hall, but it was when she was in the room that the most fertile planning sessions Dark Shadows ever had took place. They sketched out flimsies thirteen weeks at a time, and from the time Welles became a regular part of the staff until thirteen weeks after she left, the show was packed with more lively ideas than at any other time. So if she was correct in that harsh self-assessment of what she did in the writers’ room, it was only in the narrowest sense.
Welles also spoke disparagingly of herself as a designer of dramatic structure at the level of individual episodes, but today’s installment shows that this was simply wrong. There is a tremendous amount happening in these 22 minutes, it is crystal-clear throughout what is happening and why we should care, and the actors get to do some of the best work they ever did do. We see two stories, one a mashup of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca with Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 short story “Ligeia,”* the other a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, also with a dash of “Ligeia.”
The episode is set in a different universe than the one in which the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows took place, and most of the characters are “Parallel Time” counterparts of those we met in the main continuity. In the Rebecca/ Ligeia mashup, we today see Quentin Collins, master of the estate of Collinwood, owner of Collinsport Enterprises, and gloomy drunkard; Quentin’s new wife, Maggie Evans Collins; housekeeper Julia Hoffman, fanatical devotee of Quentin’s late first wife Angelique; and Alexis Stokes, Angelique’s freshly arrived identical twin sister. The bit from the Jekyll and Hyde story features scientist Cyrus Longworth and attorney Chris Collins. Angelique comes up in Cyrus and Chris’ conversation, and she is emerging in the role of Ligeia. Like the eponymous character in Poe’s story, she is a celebrated beauty who is dead but expected to return. Alexis herself brings up yet another reference. She wears a short bluish gray suit and chignon hairstyle with a tight spiral twist at the back, the look that the mysterious Madeleine wore and her impostor copied in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Jekyll and Hyde Meet Ligeia
I’ll start with the Jekyll and Hyde story, since it is the simpler one today. Chris is the estate manager at Collinwood, and his responsibilities include custodianship of Angelique’s personal effects. His friend Cyrus has called Chris to his basement laboratory to ask for a favor. Angelique had told him about a chemist in Boston who could help him with some obscure formula he needs for his current experiments. She gave him the man’s contact information, but he lost it, and he wants to look for it in Angelique’s address book.
Before they start talking about the address book, Cyrus tells Chris that he saw Angelique in town today. He tells him he was driving past the drug store and saw her walking down the street. He called to her and she did not answer, but he is certain it was she. Chris does not yet know that Angelique’s identical twin sister is in town, so he does not tell Cyrus about Alexis. He starts with a philosophical approach, then veers towards the explanation medical:
CHRIS: Cyrus, you’re a scientist. A scientist deals in established principle and fact. One thing we have to accept is that death is the end.
CYRUS: I often wonder. People used to believe that the world was flat. They believed that, that the sun revolved around the earth, and these were facts to them.
CHRIS: Uh, what are you saying?
CYRUS: I’m saying that I saw Angelique. I saw her walking down the street.
CHRIS: Well, I wish to submit that there’s an explanation for it. All of this.
CYRUS: What do you mean by that?
CHRIS: You’ve been working yourself too hard. You’ve been locked in this laboratory for over a year. Whatever you’re doing it can’t be worth your health and your peace of mind. It might even damage your mind.
Cyrus tells Chris what he is trying to do:
CYRUS: Let me begin by saying that, that man is chemical in his composition. Now, if the proper compound was distilled, and administered to a human being, this chemical composition could be radically changed, radically altered, and I’ve been working on this composition.
CHRIS: Why, why alter a human being?
CYRUS: Now let me also say this. That man is not one person, he is two. One is good, and the other is, oh, let us say for scientific conversation, the other is evil. Now, these two people are within each of us, and they are always fighting against each other. But if these elements could be separated, just imagine the possibilities. Evil could go its own way, completely free of any aspirations or remorse that are foreign to it. And good, good can have its own life, free of any struggle against, against evil impulses or hostile thoughts. My god, just imagine what a person…
Chris is horrified by this idea, and is glad to be an obstacle to it. Director Lela Swift reinforces Chris’ conviction that Cyrus is destroying himself by placing Christopher Pennock next to a mirror during the most perfervid part of his mad scientist’s programmatic statement, a visual metaphor telling us that Cyrus is splitting himself in two.
Chris tells Cyrus that he won’t help him bury himself even more deeply in the strictly private world he has created. Cyrus says that it is not private, that it is something he shares with Angelique:
CYRUS: Angelique believed in this theory. She believed it could be done. And she was the one who started me on, on all these experiments. Separating good and evil.
CHRIS: (sourly) There is no doubt in my mind which of the two appealed to her.
Chris tells Cyrus that he has been anxious to see him. He has heard that he presented a paper on black magic to a scientific society, and that the news led him to fear that Cyrus’ mind is becoming unbalanced:
CHRIS: I admire your devotion, Cyrus, but not your direction. It can only lead to trouble.
CYRUS: It can only lead to glory. And it will. Very fast, if you’ll just give me the name of that chemist.
CHRIS: No. I’m sorry to withhold it from you, but it’s the only way I can stop you. And I think I have to stop you. I desperately think that.
Angelique was not only a great beauty and a gracious matron, but was also a scientific mind who inspired Cyrus to pursue his scheme. She could introduce an experimenter to chemists whose specialties are so obscure that they cannot be found in any published directory, and her influence leads to the study of black magic and a skeptical view of the finality of death. In these matters, Angelique recalls Ligeia. The unnamed narrator of Poe’s story, Ligeia’s widower, says of her:
I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense –such as I have never known in woman. In the classical tongues was she deeply proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to the modern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault. Indeed upon any theme of the most admired, because simply the most abstruse of the boasted erudition of the academy, have I ever found Ligeia at fault? How singularly –how thrillingly, this one point in the nature of my wife has forced itself, at this late period only, upon my attention! I said her knowledge was such as I have never known in woman –but where breathes the man who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science? I saw not then what I now clearly perceive, that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding; yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast a triumph –with how vivid a delight –with how much of all that is ethereal in hope –did I feel, as she bent over me in studies but little sought –but less known –that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!
At the end of Poe’s story, the narrator’s second wife appears to die. Her body is eventually reanimated with the personality and even in the likeness of Ligeia. Cyrus’ un-nuanced belief that the woman he saw was Angelique come to life suggests that he expects her to follow in the footsteps of that other learned woman.
There is a poignancy now in seeing Don Briscoe play Chris’ concern for Cyrus. Briscoe suffered from bipolar disorder, and was at this time trying to self-medicate with street drugs. After he was violently mugged while trying to score a fix late at night in Central Park, he wound up leaving acting and moved into his parents’ house in Tennessee. He died there, morbidly obese, at the age of 64. I suppose what Dr Jekyll wanted was to come up with a drug that could sort the contents of the mind into orderly batches, so that people like Briscoe could live the lives they deserved to live.
Ligeia at Manderley
Meanwhile, at Collinwood, Quentin has been extremely stingy with information Maggie should know, and has neglected to tell her that Angelique had an identical twin. Hoffman and others on the estate are convinced that Angelique will somehow come back to life, and in their obsession with this idea they have made Maggie exceedingly uncomfortable in her imposing new home. Making matters worse, night before last Maggie heard a voice that she can believe to have been part of a prank played on her by Quentin’s son, strange and troubled boy Daniel, but which Daniel and we have reason to believe was actually Angelique’s ghost. So when Maggie opens the doors to the drawing room and sees Quentin giving a glass of sherry to a woman who, to all appearances, can only be Angelique, she flees in panic.
Quentin goes to Maggie in her bedroom. He explains that the woman she has seen is Angelique’s twin Alexis. At first he is relaxed and soothing, as charming as the Quentin of the main continuity has always been, almost as charming as David Selby is. But as Maggie insists on being left alone, his mood darkens. Alexis sticks her head in and suggests they should clear things up right away; Quentin asks her to wait downstairs. When Maggie refuses to be formally introduced to Alexis and play hostess to her, Quentin becomes stiff, grouchy, and patronizing, ordering her to do her duty as mistress of the house. She does not bend, and he leaves the room in a huff.
Back in the drawing room, Alexis tells Quentin she ought to leave rather than go on upsetting Maggie. Quentin dismisses Maggie’s concerns and proclaims that he alone makes decisions at Collinwood. Alexis is visibly startled by Quentin’s claim to autocracy, and doesn’t know where to look or what to do with her hands as she stammers out “Of course… you… make the decisions.” She goes along with Quentin’s decree that she will stay in the house starting tonight, before she can get her luggage back from the inn in the village.
Hoffman enters. At the sight of Alexis, she gasps “It- it’s you!” Hoffman composes herself quickly, and says that Angelique often spoke of her sister. She asks Alexis if she received the letter she sent her when Angelique died. Alexis says she missed it. Hoffman had sent it to her address in Tangier, but Alexis had moved from there to Florence by that time. Alexis does not seem to be in any particular business, and she describes her decision to return to Collinsport as motivated by a vague feeling of personal obligation, so we can assume that her long stays in these famous cities are a sign that she and Angelique have private resources that amount, if not to a fortune, at least to a competence. Hoffman suggests that Alexis stay in Angelique’s old room. Quentin does not object, and Alexis agrees.
Alone in the drawing room, Quentin wishes Alexis did not resemble Angelique so uncannily. In a gruff tone, he tells himself “I’m as bad as Maggie, I’m behaving like a frightened child.” Quentin’s attitude when he was lecturing Maggie about Alexis had indeed been that of an impatient adult ordering a child to stop having an inconvenient emotion. Since he does not believe he handled that exchange badly, it’s jarring to hear him say explicitly that he saw it that way. He pours himself a stiff drink.
In Angelique’s room, Hoffman tells Alexis she doesn’t have to lie to her. She may have her reasons to pretend with the others, but with her she can talk openly about the fact that she is Angelique risen from the grave. Alexis is thunderstruck by this, and tries to reason with her:
ALEXIS: You thought Angelique would come back? But that’s impossible, she’s dead.
HOFFMAN: She is not like others.
ALEXIS: She certainly wasn’t like anyone else. Nevertheless, she is dead. Do you hear me? She’s dead, and I’m her sister.
Hoffman tries to trip Alexis up by asking which nightgown she would like from Angelique’s dresser. Alexis points out that she has never seen any of them, so she can’t very well answer. Hoffman starts to apologize for her bizarre conduct:
HOFFMAN: I’m sorry, Miss Stokes, I’m sorry if I’ve said anything–
ALEXIS: It’s perfectly all right. I can understand how much you must miss her. But I wouldn’t intimate such a thing to anyone else if I were you. They might be very distressed by it, and so might you.
This exchange is very effective, particularly for regular viewers. Up to this point, Lara Parker has been playing Alexis quite differently than she played Angelique. Even when Angelique had been defeated in a conflict or was trying to seem like a wounded innocent, she always maintained eye contact with her scene partners and found a way to put a little more drama into her voice than any other performer would have thought to do. But Alexis looks down when she is confused, talks in a soft and casual tone when she thinks she understands what’s going on, and asks questions to which she obviously does not already know the answer. We can believe she really is a different character. But her last two sentences to Hoffman are exactly what Angelique would have said. When Alexis lifts her head and delivers them with her right eye fixed on Hoffman, we are suddenly in suspense as to whether Ligeia has already returned.
On her way out of the room, Hoffman passes Maggie. Without turning to face her, she explains that Alexis is staying, at Quentin’s orders. This brief scene is blocked as an homage to Hitchcock, whose 1940 film of Rebecca will have come to mind when Hoffman mentioned Angelique’s nightgowns. The censors tried to prevent the release of that movie, because of a scene in which obsessed housekeeper Mrs Danvers took a nightgown out of a wardrobe positioned in the same spot of the late Rebecca’s room as is the wardrobe in Angelique’s. Mrs Danvers went on and on about how sheer the nightgown was, how “You can see my hand through the material,” etc. Dark Shadows isn’t quite as bold with the homoerotic subtext of Hoffman’s devotion to Angelique as Du Maurier and Hitchcock were with that of Mrs Danvers’ devotion to Rebecca, but the shot is so much in his style and the movie was so famous that a large percentage of the grownups in the audience would likely have picked up on the reference.
Maggie goes to the drawing room, and finds that the decanter Quentin was drinking from is empty and lying on its side. She goes to Angelique’s room. She arrives just in time to see her obviously intoxicated husband in his first wife’s bedroom, with a woman who looks exactly like that first wife who is wearing a frilly nightgown, putting her hand on his shoulder, and saying in a soft voice “Perhaps we can comfort one another.” When we saw this, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that she would not be especially pleased if she were to find me in such a situation.
Maggie and Quentin have a showdown about this in the drawing room. It’s a sensational scene, one of the best in the series. Selby plays Quentin as a drunken, condescending grouch, trying to tell Maggie she didn’t see what she clearly saw. Kathryn Leigh Scott is spellbinding as she plays Maggie’s rage. I think it’s her best moment since #265, when the Maggie of the main continuity was a mental patient and went completely nuts while singing “London Bridge.” That, I think, was the scariest scene they ever did, making us think our old pal Maggie was never going to be all right again.
This time Miss Scott doesn’t sound like any character we’ve heard her play before. In fact, she sounds more like a real person than anyone else ever does on Dark Shadows when Quentin has forbidden her to mention Angelique’s name and she responds “You forbid me! Forbid me like a child, and I am not a child, and I refuse to be treated like a child. Not by you or by anyone. I know what I heard and I know what I saw!” At that, Maggie Collins becomes a distinct character and the Parallel Time storyline jumps to a new level.
Quentin whines that Maggie isn’t giving him a chance, and she lets him have it:
MAGGIE: Nobody’s given me a chance. No. This is Angelique’s house, not mine, you’re Angelique’s husband, not mine.
QUENTIN: All right, if that’s the way you feel about it, get out of here!
MAGGIE: All right, Quentin.
QUENTIN: Leave Angelique’s house and leave Angelique’s husband!
MAGGIE: That’s exactly what I’ll do. That is exactly what I will do!
And to Quentin’s bewilderment, that’s exactly what she does. She rushes out the front door. After a bit, Quentin staggers after her. He looks outside. Alexis comes downstairs, in her sister’s frilly nightie, and asks what happened. Quentin frets that “She actually went out that door.” Alexis asks if he is going after her, and he says “No, why should I? She behaved like a child!” He’s still holding onto the idea that it is right and proper for him to regard his wife as a temperamental child. He wonders if perhaps Alexis is right, then hears Maggie drive away and announces that it’s too late to do anything. He wanders back towards the drawing room while Alexis looks on. We are left wondering if she is Angelique masquerading as her sister, or if Alexis, contrary to appearances, was actually the Evil Twin all along.
*I am indebted to Danny Horn’s commenter “Riccardo” for pointing out the connection to “Ligeia.”
Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard has had a dream in which her new husband, whom she knows as Jeb Hawkes but who when we first saw him asked to be called Jabe, was in a fight on top of Widows’ Hill. His opponent, a stooge named Sky Rumson, threw him off the precipice to his death. When she awoke, Carolyn ran to the hill in search of Jabe. Instead, she found Sky. He told her that her dream was not complete, because it did not show her death. He then grabbed her by the throat.
Jabe rushes up and knocks Carolyn out of Sky’s grip. He and Sky fight, and Sky does throw him off the precipice. Carolyn escapes.
Back home at the great house of Collinwood, Carolyn finds her mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. It takes her a while to compose herself sufficiently to tell Liz and Julia what happened. Julia offers Carolyn a sedative, which prompts her to jump up and shout a verbal refusal. By the time Carolyn starts telling the story, her distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, has joined them in the drawing room. She interrupts herself to yell at Barnabas that he always hated Jabe and is probably glad he’s dead. When Carolyn finishes, Barnabas slips out. Liz calls the police, and Julia is surprised neither of them saw Barnabas leave.
For the last nineteen weeks, the show has been trying to make a story out of some themes drawn from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. That segment is usually called “the Leviathans,” after a race of Elder Gods who are behind the action. Jabe was central to the Leviathan segment. Sky is the only other character remaining from it. Barnabas appears in the house where Sky has been crashing and finds him packing his bag. Sky does not understand how Barnabas got in. Barnabas dismisses his question, merely saying that Sky knows there are things he can do that ordinary people cannot. Sky draws a revolver and fires two rounds at Barnabas point blank, without effect. Sky exclaims “Oh, no!” Barnabas is amused that none of Sky’s late colleagues told him that he is a vampire. He takes Sky’s hand, curls his arm back so that the gun is pointing at his heart, and squeezes Sky’s finger onto the trigger.
Back at the great house, Liz gets a telephone call from the sheriff. The police haven’t found Jabe’s body, and have surmised that it washed out to sea. They have found Sky, and have tentatively ruled his death a suicide. Later, Carolyn has another dream. In this one, Jabe shows up and confirms his death. That marks the end of the Leviathan segment. Carolyn will go on using the name “Mrs Hawkes” and saying she misses Jabe, but otherwise the last nineteen weeks will be forgotten.
Before killing Sky, Barnabas had mentioned that he almost regrets not leaving him to the other person who is on her way to do him in. That is Sky’s estranged wife, wicked witch Angelique. Had the Leviathan segment been more successful, or had Geoffrey Scott been even marginally competent in his performance as Sky, they might have made something of the parallels between Sky and Jabe. They are both very tall men with blonde wives who are dissatisfied with them. Angelique is dissatisfied that Sky is a tool of the Leviathans and that he tried to set fire to her on the orders of their representative, and Carolyn is dissatisfied with Jabe because he keeps running away from dangers he has brought on himself by his rebellion against the Leviathans and he won’t tell her anything about himself. Sky is a mortal man, while Angelique may once have been human but has long since become a creature of the supernatural. Carolyn is a mortal woman, while Jabe is now human but was originally a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time.
But the ratings have been sinking throughout the Leviathan period, and the whole narrative structure of the arc keeps collapsing around them every time they try to do anything with it. So they are in too much of a hurry to move on to the next thing to do any exploring of the characters. Also, Scott is hopeless. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, put it, it isn’t that he is an actor with just one strategy. He keeps trying different things, and none of them comes close to working. We won’t see him again.
The new story has to do with an alternate universe that is occasionally visible in a room in the long disused east wing of Collinwood. Barnabas, Julia, and others have been spying on its inhabitants, and Barnabas is fixated on the idea that if he can cross over into it his vampirism will disappear. Since his bloodlust is overwhelming him, he is desperate to pursue this forlorn hope. He goes to the room when the alternate universe cannot be seen there, and a moment later finds that it has changed with him in it. Julia is in the hallway, looking in. At first she and Barnabas can see each other, and she can hear him, though he cannot hear her. After a moment, Carolyn’s alternate universe counterpart enters and demands to know who Barnabas is and what he is doing in the house.
Barnabas took Carolyn as his blood-thrall in October 1967. The show went back in time to 1795 the following month. In the 1790s segment, Nancy Barrett played fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. We saw that Barnabas first became a vampire in 1796; not long after, he took Millicent as his blood thrall. Shortly after the show returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, one of Julia’s colleagues in the mad science profession applied a treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into remission. That freed Carolyn of her connection to him, and at some point she forgot it ever happened.
For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was set in 1897. In that segment, Miss Barrett played repressed schoolmarm Charity Trask. Barnabas bit her, too. Carolyn’s counterpart in “Parallel Time,” known by her married name Carolyn Loomis, is the fourth character* Miss Barrett played on Dark Shadows; considering that Barnabas is so frantically hungry, it looks like she will follow in the footsteps of her predecessors and serve as his breakfast.
*Or fifth- in #819, sorcerer Count Petofi found Charity’s personality to be an irritant, so he erased it and replaced it with that of the late Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl/ mentalist. From that time on, Miss Barrett played Pansy, not Charity.
Wicked witch Angelique made her first appearance in #368/369, set in the year 1795. We first saw Angelique when she entered the doors of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, working as a lady’s maid and hiding her powers.
Today, it is 1970 and Angelique is back in the Old House. Her ex-husband, vampire Barnabas Collins, has summoned her and asked her to lift a curse she placed on Jabe, the husband of his distant cousin Carolyn. Barnabas tells Angelique that her quarrel was never with Jabe, but with suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Earlier in the episode we had seen Angelique and Nicholas having a discussion about how much they hate each other. He taunted her by claiming she has not changed in the last 200 years. When Barnabas invites Angelique to redirect her wrath towards Nicholas, she perks up. She orders Barnabas to fetch Carolyn’s husband and leave him alone in the Old House with her.
Angelique sits by the fire with Jabe and explains that she cannot simply liquidate the curse. It must end with someone’s death. But the good news is that it does not have to be his death. He can transfer it to someone else. He says he doesn’t want to kill anyone. She tells him that the person she has in mind is Nicholas. Suddenly he’s all ears as she explains the process for handing the curse over.
Angelique finds the limit of Jabe’s newfound reverence for life. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Longtime viewers know that Nicholas was quite wrong to say Angelique has never changed. She was monomaniacal and utterly narcissistic in 1795. She wasn’t so very different when we next saw her in 1968, though the show’s pace was a bit slower at that point and so Lara Parker was free to play her with more nuance. That made a difference that the show underlined early in 1969, when Barnabas took a brief trip back in time to the 1790s and ran into Angelique as she was when first we knew her. Even though they were still enemies in 1968, they occasionally had to tell each other the truth, and occasionally had to leave each other alone to fight other adversaries. The unbending hostility the eighteenth century version of Angelique showed Barnabas startled him and us after we had seen the relatively circumspect approach she took to conducting a cold war against him.
Throughout most of 1969, Dark Shadows was set in 1897. Angelique showed up then, and she remembered the events of 1968. Barnabas and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, were there as time travelers. Julia actually befriended Angelique, and Angelique became Barnabas’ ally in the battles he attempted to wage in that period. Angelique even let go of her erotic obsession with Barnabas, transferring her affections to his distant cousin Quentin Collins.
After the show came back to contemporary dress, Julia stumbled upon Angelique. She found that Angelique had sworn not to use her powers, had married a man who made her happy, and had lost all interest in Barnabas or anyone else at Collinwood. She was as relaxed and attentive to others as in 1795 she had been frantic and self-absorbed. Only after it turned out the same supernatural enemies Barnabas and Julia were fighting had corrupted her husband did Angelique start casting spells again, and then in pursuit of more rational, identifiable goals than she had ever sought in the eighteenth century.
That arc of character development ends with this episode. We will see Lara Parker as several more characters up to and beyond the end of the series, some of them named Angelique, but none of whom went through the transformations we have seen.
Today also marks the final appearances of werewolf Chris Jennings and his girlfriend Sabrina Stuart. Evidently the makers of the show planned to bring them back in a few months, after an upcoming story plays out, but by that time actor Don Briscoe was unable to work. He had bipolar personality disorder and tried to self-medicate with street drugs.
Quentin was such a big hit in 1897 that they had a magic spell put on him that immunized him against aging and brought him intact to the contemporary setting. Today, Barnabas takes Quentin to a room in the long disused east wing of Collinwood where you can occasionally catch glimpses of an alternate universe. The effect manifests while they are looking in, then winks out, leaving the dark, bare room that is in that space in their universe. Once that happens, Barnabas announces “You have just seen Parallel Time.” Those of us who have been watching from the beginning know that he got the line wrong. You’re supposed to say “Parallel Time is a Dan Curtis Production.”
An information management day. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has told his distant cousin, Roger Collins, about a parallel universe that is occasionally visible in a room in the long disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood. Today, Roger tells his sister Elizabeth about the room. Liz owns the house. We might wonder if she will have questions about what effect the presence of a spare universe on the premises will have on her property taxes.
Roger talks about the phenomenon while standing in the room with permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. He is incredulous when he notices that Julia is not listening to him. She cannot tell him what has distracted her. Unknown to Roger and Liz, Barnabas is a vampire. Julia has devised a treatment that is supposed to put this curse in remission, but it is not working at all. She has given him the last of the injections, and the only difference in Barnabas is that he is getting sick and feeling an unusually intense bloodlust.
Caretaker Chris Jennings, another distant cousin, comes stumbling home to his cottage on the grounds of the estate. He finds his girlfriend and ex-fiancée Sabrina Stuart waiting for him. Chris is another patient Julia has been unable to help. He is a werewolf. There was a full moon last night. Sabrina tells Chris he killed a man named Bruno. Chris is distressed that he killed anyone, but Sabrina points out that Bruno knew of his secret and was trying to use him to kill others. He was holding her and a man named Rumson prisoner, and when the police searched Bruno’s premises after his death they found Sabrina and Rumson imprisoned there. Sabrina keeps telling Chris she wants to marry him. Most of the time they will live ordinary lives, but one night out of 28 she will just have to lock him up in a special cell. Chris won’t hear of this.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, is a great one for love stories and an admirer of actress Lisa Blake Richards. Chris and Sabrina have run out of road on Dark Shadows, and are obviously going to be written out soon. Mrs Acilius wishes they could ride off into the sunset accompanied by the sound of wedding bells. So when Chris refused to marry Sabrina, she exclaimed “Stupid man!” I pointed out something Chris knows but does not mention to Sabrina, that his curse is hereditary. Any male descendants he has will also be werewolves. Mrs A conceded that this does complicate matters.
Roger saw Chris at Bruno’s place when he rescued him and Carolyn shortly before moonrise last night. Chris was at that time in the throes that precede his transformation. Chris ran off before Roger or Carolyn could see what became of him. Roger comes to the cottage to check on him.
Chris is in the back changing out of his bloody clothes, so Sabrina answers the door. She tells Roger that Chris is there and that she was with him all night, watching over him because he was ill. After what he saw of Chris at Bruno’s, Roger has no doubt that Chris needed a nurse, and he tells Sabrina that he is glad he had such a charming one. The audience can understand that Sabrina wants to conceal Chris’ lycanthropy from Roger, but surely it cannot be wise for her to claim that she was in the cottage overnight. Not only are her true whereabouts known to everyone who was in or around the police station the night before, but since Roger was the one who found Bruno’s body and he found it on the grounds of Collinwood, even police as inept as the ones in Collinsport are likely to follow up with him. Besides, her imprisonment with Rumson is a sensational story, of interest to the press. Maybe we will move on to the next phase of the show before the facts come to light, but Sabrina can’t know that.
Sabrina is determined to persuade Chris to resume their engagement. She goes to the one person whose opinion Chris seems to respect, Barnabas. When she knocks on his door, Barnabas hides behind a partition. When Sabrina first arrived, she had seen Barnabas through the window of his front parlor, so she lets herself in. He finally gives up on hiding and pleads with her to leave. She ignores what he is saying and keeps talking. She plows ahead with her idea about how Barnabas can help her and Chris become a happy married couple. Barnabas struggles to resist his urge for blood, but cannot. He bites Sabrina, much to her surprise. Miss Richards’ understated exclamation of “Barnabas!” when he shows his fangs and goes for her neck is very nicely done, it really sounds like a woman puzzled that a trusted friend is violating her personal space.
Sabrina staggers back to Chris’ cottage. She collapses in his chair, and he sees the puncture wounds on her neck. They are much bigger than the marks we’ve seen on Barnabas’ previous victims. I suppose he really was a lot hungrier than usual. Chris doesn’t know that Barnabas is a vampire, and the cliffhanger leaves us wondering whether he can avoid finding out.
Probably the most memorable shot in the episode is a very impressive bit of videotape editing. Roger and Barnabas are standing at the door to the Parallel Time room, watching Roger’s counterpart interact with Liz’ and Chris’. Parallel Roger walks toward the door. He exits the room, not into the space Roger and Barnabas occupy, but into the hallway as it exists in Parallel Time. He vanishes from their view, and the effect also winks out in the room, leaving Roger and Barnabas looking into the bare, dark chamber it is in the house they know.
The Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods, plan to retake the Earth and destroy humankind, and their harbinger is a shape-shifting monster who has taken the form of a tall young man and asked people to call him Jabe. Their plan requires that Jabe join himself to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in an unholy ceremony that will transform Carolyn into the same kind of squamous, rugose, and paleogean creature Jabe defaults to being. Jabe has fallen in love with Carolyn, but so far from redoubling his determination to fulfill the plan his feelings have turned him against it. He wants to renounce his powers, become truly human, and make a life with Carolyn as she is. Though Jabe’s personality has been so obnoxious that even people brainwashed into supporting the Leviathans’ whole program have gotten fed up with him and become his enemies, he has somehow won Carolyn’s heart. She doesn’t know that he is a monster from beyond space and time, still less that he murdered her father and several other people. She is in love with the man he appears to be, and he wants to become that man in fact.
I first shared my thoughts about Dark Shadows online in the comments section of Danny Horn’s great blog Dark Shadows Every Day. In his post about #962, Danny identifies a major problem with the relationship between Carolyn and Jabe:
But both sides have apparently agreed to shield Carolyn from the big sinister secret, so in practice, she hasn’t had very much to do, except to fall passionately in love with Jeb, because of reasons.
As I’ve said before, I don’t know why Carolyn likes Jeb, and I’ve been scratching at that itch for a while. But today, I think I figured out the real problem with her character arc, and it’s all about the let’s-break-antiques scene.
This was Carolyn and Jeb’s first date, back in episode 940. I didn’t write about it at the time, because I had other things to say, and I didn’t realize how important it was until now.
The scene takes place in the antique shop, and it starts with Jeb gazing at her, and sighing, “I’m going to be very happy with you.”
She’s puzzled. “What made you say that?”
“Because I felt it,” he shrugs. “Haven’t you ever said or done what you felt?”
“Sometimes I do.”
“I do it all the time,” Jeb smirks, and swaggers across the room. “Everybody should. I always do what I feel. Right now, I feel like doing this.”
And then he picks up a porcelain figurine from a nearby display, and smashes it on the floor.
Carolyn is horrified, obviously. “Jeb, you shouldn’t have done that!”
He smiles. “Why not?”
“That was an antique, and it didn’t even belong to you!”
“Haven’t you ever felt like breaking something?”
She stops short. “Yes,” she says, “but…”
“Well, then, let’s see you break this.”
Then he picks up another figurine.
“Go on,” he says, offering it to her. “Break it.”
She looks into his eyes, and says, “I wish I could begin to understand you.”
“Maybe you can,” he says, “if you just free yourself. Go on. Just let it drop from your hand.”
[Smash]
He smiles, and opens a bottle of wine. She asks what he’s doing, and he says, “We’re going to celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?”
“Your liberation.”
“I don’t understand.”
He hands her the drink. “Oh, you will… soon.”
It’s a weird scene, and it should have been followed immediately by a dozen more weird scenes along the same lines. This should have been the storyline.
After all, the whole point of the Leviathan threat is that they’re going to take Carolyn, a character that we love and root for, and turn her into a hideous gargantuan, rutting with her blasphemous mate and raising a brood of ambidextrous deathstalkers.
And in the let’s-break-antiques scene, they set up the idea that Jeb is going to change Carolyn’s personality, leading her step by step into his dark world, in the service of her “liberation” from boring traditional values, like respect for other people’s ugly decor. We should have seen her going down that path, becoming more and more estranged from the family and friends who aren’t part of this nightmare death cult.
Except they didn’t. The champagne was drugged, and she blacked out, and since then, they haven’t even touched on the idea that Jeb might be leaving a stain on Carolyn’s soul.
Now, this is a show that’s explored a dozen varieties of hypnosis and possession in minute detail, so it’s not like they don’t know how to write a story like that. They just didn’t. To the extent that we believe that Carolyn loves Jeb, it’s an entirely innocent, human infatuation with a handsome stranger, who she’s unfortunately not really allowed to know very much about.
Because they can’t change Carolyn.
This is an enormous problem for the show, and it’ll be one of the key pieces to the puzzle of Who Killed Dark Shadows. There are four core family members, and they are untouchable. They don’t experience any lasting change, starting around early 1968 and continuing until the end of the show. Sure, they have moments of temporary hypnosis and possession, everybody does, but they don’t actually change.
And if Carolyn can’t change, even a little, then that means there’s no future, just a status quo that leads inexorably towards entropy, and the heat death of this fictional universe.
My main role in Danny’s comments was to draw connections between the episodes he discussed and the episodes from the first 42 weeks of the show, which he made a point of not discussing. In response to the above, I wrote:
It is too bad that the show got to the point where the only stories that counted were the supernatural ones. Not that those shouldn’t always have been the A stories, but there should have been room for B stories where we explore the characters’ personalities and see how humans might react if they were to find themselves living in a world like that of DARK SHADOWS.
As it turned out, it was difficult to do much with human characters even within the supernatural stories. Danny’s hypothetical series of scenes between Carolyn and Jabe where we see Carolyn being seduced to the dark side could have been very powerful if we’d been tracing Carolyn’s evolution from tempestuous, self-centered, spoiled rich girl of 1966 and 1967 to the relatively calm, responsible young woman we saw in 1968 and 1969. They could then keep us in continual suspense- would Carolyn continue to grow into a powerful matriarch, or would the shock of one otherworldly horror after another shatter all her progress and send her reeling back to her most unsympathetic moments? Since we haven’t had scenes focusing on Carolyn’s personality and relationships since Jason McGuire was on the show, and we aren’t expecting any to come ever again, hav[ing] a thread like that on the show at this point would seem as out of place as does a week spent documenting in exhaustive detail the evolution of Bruno’s attitude towards Jeb.
Nancy Barrett is a superb actor, and while she is on camera we believe that Carolyn loves Jabe. But she has to create this impression from the ground up every time she appears. Nothing that is happening reinforces it. Not only does her love for Jabe pop into being out of nowhere, but because she is not involved with anything he is doing it cannot motivate her to take any significant actions. Today Jabe and Carolyn stand before an altar while a high priest of the cult devoted to the Leviathans is performing the ceremony meant to unite them in horrid monstrosity. But Carolyn is there, not because of any decisions she has made or feelings she has, but because she has been hypnotized by the high priest.
I am reminded of the 2006 film Idiocracy. An average man from the early twenty first century suddenly finds himself in a future where everyone has a very low mentality. He goes to the movies and discovers that the most popular film of the era is called Ass. It is a 90 minute closeup of a pair of flatulent buttocks. When he becomes head of state, the protagonist explains that in his day there was something called a “story.” He describes a story as “a way of making you care whose ass it is and why it is farting.” That’s what the Leviathans segment lacks. The execution is good enough to make us believe that particular things are happening, but there is nothing to make us care who is making them happen or why they want them to happen.
One of the few forms of narrative that is still cultivated in the world of Idiocracy is professional wrestling, a dramatic genre in which villainous characters often have changes of heart and become heroic. This is known as the “heel-face turn” (as opposed to the “face-heel turn,” which is the opposite character development.) They have been working on Jabe’s heel-face turn for a few days. Yesterday he asked mad scientist Julia Hoffman to cure him of whatever it is that makes him revert to his monstrous form. Christopher Pennock and Grayson Hall played that scene so well that we wished we could ignore everything else in the episode and believe in it. Jabe started the episode by ordering four zombies whom he had raised from the dead to murder five people: Julia; her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins; two distant cousins of Barnabas’, Quentin Collins and Roger Collins; and Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis. Jabe told Julia he would not kill her or Barnabas if she complied with his request, but at the end of the episode he had the zombies stuff Quentin in a coffin and bury him alive. After that, we could hardly believe that Jabe had changed at all.
Today, Barnabas is at home when Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, bursts into his front parlor. She tells him she is sure Quentin is trapped somewhere and has no more than an hour to live. Barnabas has no idea how Maggie can know this, and she can’t explain it herself. The camera zooms in on a trident drawn on her hand, and regular viewers know what is going on. A while ago, Barnabas’ ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique, cast a spell on Maggie and Quentin causing them to feel an overwhelming love for each other at irregular intervals. Angelique thought this would make Barnabas unhappy, but he hasn’t noticed it, and he has so much else going on right now it seems unlikely he’d care much one way or the other if he did. The spell enables Maggie to lead Barnabas to the grave where Quentin is trapped and to tell Barnabas to dig it up. Quentin is fine when they exhume him, so if anything Barnabas should be glad of Angelique’s spell.
When Quentin comes out of the coffin, he says his only problem is that his legs hurt. Since he is 6’4″ tall and the coffin is at most 5′ long, that’s understandable. He says that Jabe told him he had something out of the ordinary in store for him. Now he knows that whatever else Jabe may be, “he’s a man of his word!” Usually David Selby’s accent raises a bit of a puzzle- why is the rakish scion of an aristocratic old New England family also an amiable West Virginian? But Mr Selby’s delivery of this line, with its note of appreciation for Jabe’s forthrightness, is so perfect that you could never wish him different in any way.
The high priest of the Leviathan cult whom we will see presiding at Jabe and Carolyn’s joining ceremony is none other than suave warlock Nicholas Blair, who was well known around the great estate of Collinwood in 1968. Nicholas finds Julia working on a chemistry experiment preparatory to her project of humanizing Jabe; he smashes her equipment and says he will let her live if she goes away and does not interfere with the Leviathans’ project.
When Nicholas calls on Carolyn to hypnotize her, she recognizes him and expresses mild surprise that he is back. When she insists on addressing him as “Mr Blair,” he tells her that her mother called him by his first name. She replies, “Well, that’s my mother’s business,” and asks him again why he is there.
Jabe visits Julia at Barnabas’ house and pleads with her to do something for him tonight. She says that even if that were possible, she would refuse to do it, since she knows that he buried Quentin alive a few hours ago. He says that she must believe that he is “a changed man” who is willing to “live and let live,” though he is not free to explain what has brought this change on. Barnabas comes downstairs and gives Jabe a dirty look.
The joining is underway at a cairn in the woods. Only people associated with the Leviathans can see the cairn. A small wooden box sits on the cairn; Jabe originally emerged from that box, four months ago, back when he was nothing more than a whistling sound. Nicholas stands to one side, obscured by branches, reciting a lot of mumbo-jumbo and waving a long rod. Jabe and Carolyn stand together on the other side. Nicholas orders Jabe to take the rod. He does. He stands behind the raised part of the cairn that serves as an altar and faces the box.
At that moment, Jabe shouts “Now, Barnabas! Get her now, Barnabas!” Barnabas leaps from behind the foliage, grabs Carolyn by the arm, and runs off with her; Jabe brings the rod down on the box, smashing it. Nicholas exclaims “You fool, do you know what you’ve done!? Better leave now or we’ll both go up in it!” The cairn glows and collapses; Nicholas and Jabe stand together off to the side, watching. Jabe clutches himself by the middle, groans, and passes out.
Watching it this time, I was not only surprised by Jabe’s “Now, Barnabas! Get her now, Barnabas!”; I remembered being surprised by it last time we watched the show through. It really is a thrilling moment, one of many in the Leviathans segment. But since it exhausts all of the elements in that segment from which a story could have been built, and since there is absolutely no other storyline going just now, I’m afraid the comparison to Idiocracy’s movie-in-a-movie Ass has to stand.
Dark Shadows Commentary 
