Quentin Collins is strapped to a table under a descending pendulum which supposedly has a razor sharp blade. His captor, a strange man named Aristede, tells wicked witch Angelique that Quentin will die in minutes unless she gives him the severed hand of Count Petofi, which has magical properties. Aristede is under the impression that Quentin and Angelique are engaged, and he has set the blade to strike Quentin’s body at a point causing the maximum wedding night-related inconvenience.
A little off the top I can understand, but this is ridiculous! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Meanwhile, Quentin’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins has the hand and is hoping it will cure Quentin of a curse under which he is laboring. Rroma maiden Julianka claims that she knows how to use the hand to relieve lycanthropy. Her great-grandmother cured Count Petofi himself of that condition, and took the hand from him as payment for doing so. She is the only living person who knows the procedure, and no one else will know it until her daughter is born.
Barnabas and Angelique have a scene which ends with a decision to go to Aristede together. Barnabas tries to use his vampire powers to hypnotize Aristede; if he had been thinking logically, he could just have taken his bat form and flown around the meeting place, since Quentin can’t be very far from it if Aristede is going to be able to take the hand and stop the pendulum in the few minutes remaining. Instead, he lets Aristede lead him far in the wrong direction. When it seems to be too late, Aristede taunts Barnabas by telling him where to find Quentin’s body. To his consternation, Barnabas then vanishes and the squeaking of a bat rings out. Barnabas rescues Quentin at the last possible second, of course.
In #767, Quentin’s nephew Jamison dreamed that Quentin told him three things would happen that would spell his doom. The first was the discovery of a silver bullet on the great estate of Collinwood. That happened in that very episode. The last would be when the one person Quentin truly loved turned against him. We know that Jamison is the only person Quentin loves, so we know what to look for there. But the second has been a mystery up until now. Quentin said that the only person who could help him would be murdered. It has not been clear until now that there is one and only one person who can relieve Quentin of his curse. Now that Julianka has been identified as that person, viewers who remember back that far will not be surprised that at the end of the episode she is lying in the woods, a mysterious mark on her forehead, unable to move.
Diana Davila plays Julianka with her eyes always wide open. She does not blink, and when she looks from side to side she turns her whole head. The rest of her body is rigid, too, and she maintains a heightened tone throughout. This is quite effective for Julianka as written; she is supposed to seem distant and unapproachable. Miss Davila bobbles over a few too many of her lines for the performance to reach its full potential, but you can see what she was going for, and it was terrific.
The evil Gregory Trask orchestrated a plot to murder his first wife, Minerva, and has married wealthy spinster Judith Collins. Now he and his accomplice, lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley, have conjured up a simulacrum of Minerva to hang around Judith and drive her insane. Once Judith is safely confined to the nearest high-class asylum, Trask will enjoy Judith’s riches, minus only whatever percentage Evan squeezes out of him.
Today, Judith stands in her bedroom in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. She isn’t ready to go to bed, and the simulacrum of Minerva is sitting in the rocking chair, sewing. Trask pretends he cannot see the simulacrum, and forbids Judith to leave the room. When Judith becomes upset, he slaps her. This slap occurs on the soundtrack and in our imaginations. What we see on screen some time before the slapping sound effect plays is Jerry Lacy waving his hand a considerable distance short of Joan Bennett’s face. The two of them do such a good job of acting that this failure of blocking does nothing to undercut the oppressive atmosphere. For her part, Clarice Blackburn plays the pseudo-Minerva with just enough animation that we cannot predict what she will do. These performances take a sequence which may not have seemed like much on the page and make it into one of the most frightening scenes on Dark Shadows. When Judith lies to Trask and says that she does not see Minerva, it’s enough to produce a shudder.
Downstairs, Trask answers a knock at the door and broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi enters. Regular viewers know that Judith despises Magda and Magda hates her, and so it is surprising when we hear that Judith has sent for Magda. Trask blocks her way upstairs. Magda is defiant towards Trask; she knows what he did to Minerva, and is using that knowledge to force him to let her and her husband stay in the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. But Trask has a new threat to make.
Trask knows that Magda is the sister of the late Jenny, who married Judith’s brother Quentin. He also knows something that not even Quentin knows, that Jenny bore twin children to Quentin after he left her. He threatens to send Jenny’s children away from the village of Collinsport. Evidently Magda wants the children to stay where they are, in the care of a woman named Mrs Fillmore. It is unclear why this would matter to her; we have had no indication that she has met Mrs Fillmore, much less visited the children at her house. But it is important enough to her that they not be moved that Magda responds to Trask’s threat with “What do you want me to do to her?”
We cut to Judith’s room. Magda enters. Judith tells her that the ghost of Mrs Trask vanished a few minutes ago, after sitting in the rocking chair for hours. Judith asks if she thinks she sounds mad, to which Magda replies there is nothing so strange about a simple ghost. The simulacrum reappears, and Judith asks Magda if she sees it. Magda says she does not.
Back downstairs, Magda tells Trask that he is a swine. She spits on the floor next to him and stalks off. Much as Magda hates Judith and many as are the crimes in which she is implicated, she is a warm-hearted sort, and Trask’s bloodless cruelty is not to her liking. Indeed, it is strange she did not tell Judith of Trask’s attempt to extort her complicity and make an alliance with her against him.
Meanwhile, Quentin is being held in the jail. When Magda realized that he murdered Jenny, she turned Quentin into a werewolf. She did not then know about the twins, and so she made the curse hereditary. Once she found out that her own kin were in line to become monsters, she started looking for a way to undo the curse.
The police captured Quentin the night before, while he was in his lupine form. As a result of Magda’s latest futile attempt to cure him, Quentin emerged from his bout of lycanthropy with his face disfigured and his memory a blank. Though his clothing and his hairstyle are so highly distinctive that virtually everyone who has seen the show before can tell that the man in the cell is Quentin, the Collinses suffer from a peculiar form of blindness that keeps them from recognizing people with globs of makeup on their faces, so his brother Edward is at a loss as to who he could be.
Magda is working with time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins, distant cousin of Quentin, Edward, and Judith, who has set out on a mission to set the events of the year 1897 right so that Quentin will not become a malign ghost ruining things for everyone at Collinwood in 1969. Unfortunately, vampires are not problem-solvers; their function in a story is to create problems. Since coming to 1897, Barnabas has been responsible for at least six homicides. He has wrought a great deal of havoc even beyond those killings. For example, it was as a direct result of his actions that Judith and Trask got together in the first place. Today, Magda goes to Quentin’s cell and tries to tell him that Barnabas will come to him after nightfall and take him to the Old House.
We do not see Barnabas. We are watching Quentin in his cell when we hear a bat squeaking outside the jail. Barnabas can materialize wherever he chooses; he does not choose to materialize in the cell, where Quentin is alone and unattended, but goes into the outer office in his bat form. We hear a deputy in that office talking to the bat affectionately, asking him where he came from. We haven’t seen the deputy before this episode, but one suspects that a fellow who sees a bat in his office and strikes up a friendly conversation with it must have an extremely sweet personality. We then hear the deputy make a horrified exclamation, and the doors to Quentin’s cell and to the world outside open by themselves. As Quentin walks out, we see the deputy slumped at his desk, two bleeding wounds on his neck.
We cut to the darkened interior of the great house at Collinwood. Quentin comes ambling in. Biting the deputy was certainly not part of any plan Barnabas made with Magda, but it isn’t completely surprising- he hadn’t had a square meal for quite a while. But even for Barnabas, it shows an unusually low degree of operational competence to let Quentin wander off by himself when the whole idea is to get him to the Old House.
In the drawing room, we hear Quentin’s thoughts as he dwells on his amnesia. He does not know who he is, where he is, or why he has come. He sees his gramophone, and starts playing his only record. That brings him back to himself.
Judith enters. Quentin is not only wearing his usual suit and his distinctive hairstyle, he is listening to the music he has been playing obsessively for months and reciting the lyrics to it. As if that weren’t enough, his voice is quite outstanding- he must be the only senior member of an aristocratic Maine family with a West Virginia accent. Yet Judith not only fails to recognize her brother, she refuses to believe him when he identifies himself to her by name.
The simulacrum of Minerva enters, holding a letter opener above her head. Earlier this week, Minerva’s actual spirit had possessed Judith, and under her power Judith had held that same letter opener in that same position as she confronted Evan and accused him of her murder. Judith does not remember that, and she screams at the sight.
In #762, the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask walked in on lawyer Evan Hanley and handsome rake Quentin Collins as they were performing a Satanic rite. Trask’s response was to blackmail Evan. Trask wanted his wife Minerva out of the way so that he could marry rich spinster Judith Collins, Quentin’s sister. Threatened with exposure, Evan cast a spell on an unfortunate young man named Tim Shaw. He brainwashed Tim into reenacting the plot of The Manchurian Candidate, with Trask in the Angela Lansbury role and Evan as the People’s Republic of China. As Evan and Trask planned, Tim killed Minerva. Shortly after, Trask married Judith.
On their wedding day, Judith saw Minerva’s ghost in the corner of the drawing room in the great house of Collinwood. In yesterday’s episode, Minerva’s ghost took possession of Judith, and the closing cliffhanger showed the possessed Judith about to stab Evan with a letter opener to avenge Minerva’s death. As we open today, Judith’s brother Edward enters and prevents the stabbing, and Judith is released from possession. She can remember nothing that happened while she was under Minerva’s power, and Edward is convinced that she has gone mad.
Edward takes Judith to her room, and Trask enters. Evan tells him that Minerva’s ghost has been in touch with Judith. The ghost knows what they did, and if the contact continues Judith will know as well. Trask demands that Evan do something to prevent that, and Evan says that he can cast a spell that may turn the haunting to their advantage and neutralize Judith permanently.
The plan turns out to be the creation of a “black ghost.” The only Black actor to have had a speaking part on Dark Shadows was Beverley Hope Atkinson, who played an unnamed nurse in one scene in #563, almost a year ago. Humbert Allen Astredo, who plays Evan, was also in that scene, playing suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Atkinson was terrific, and it would be great to see her again, but it turns out that the “black ghost” is not actually black. Nor is it a ghost. This misnamed entity is a simulacrum of Minerva, a kind of supernatural hologram that Evan will fabricate and that will appear when Judith is around. This will lead Judith to believe that she is insane, thereby causing her actually to become insane and to cease to be an obstacle to Trask’s enjoyment of her wealth.
The simulacrum first shows up in a transparent form in Judith’s bedroom. Judith screams. In the drawing room, Trask and Edward hear her scream and break off a conversation in which Edward has been urging Trask to agree to annul his marriage to the obviously disturbed Judith. Judith comes downstairs. She is reluctant to explain why she screamed, and tells Edward and Trask that nothing is wrong. She and Trask go to the drawing room and talk privately. He has to prod her a bit before she will admit she saw Minerva. He tells her it was just her imagination. She considers this; after all, she was in bed when she saw the image, so it may have been a dream. But then the simulacrum appears in the drawing room, near the spot where she saw Minerva’s ghost on her wedding day. Judith sees Minerva sitting quietly and sewing. Trask pretends he does not see anything; after a bit, Judith pretends she can’t see the image either. Trask leaves Judith alone with the simulacrum. Judith goes upstairs, and the simulacrum follows her. When they reach the top of the staircase, Judith cries out in fear and tells the simulacrum to stay away from her.
Though it is disappointing to be reminded that Beverley Hope Atkinson isn’t coming back, it is always good to see Clarice Blackburn. In her interviews with the authors of the book Barnabas and Company, Nancy Barrett said that Blackburn was the best performer in the entire cast of Dark Shadows. She doesn’t have a lot to do today- she delivers the opening voiceover, we see a snapshot of her, and as the simulacrum she stands motionless in a corner, sews placidly, then is seen from behind as she follows Judith up the stairs. But if there ever was a case to prove the old cliche that no part is small when a big enough actor plays it, Blackburn makes each of these little turns into a moment viewers will remember.
Screenshots by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
As Judith, Joan Bennett also deserves a great deal of credit for getting the gaslighting plot off to a good start. For example, there is an embarrassingly ill-written scene when Judith is in her room, pacing back and forth while some vibes play on the soundtrack. A knock comes at the door, and the music stops. Judith opens the door, and no one is there. The music resumes, and she starts pacing again. There is another knock. Again the music stops, again Judith opens the door, and again no one is there. The music resumes, and she’s back to pacing. The knock comes a third time. A third time the music stops, and a third time Judith turns to the door. This time she asks who’s there. It’s Trask. She lets him in, and he denies having knocked before. Knocking on doors and running away is a pretty crude tactic even on a show with an audience consisting largely of kids aged twelve and under, and the apparent complicity of the music in Trask’s plot is the kind of thing they ridiculed in Looney Tunes cartoons. But Bennett’s soulful performance holds our attention throughout.
This is the second time Dark Shadows has shown us an adventurer trying to gaslight his new wife so that she will go away and give him unfettered access to her fortune. The first time was in March 1968, when the show was set in 1796. Naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes had married fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. Nathan discovered that Millicent had transferred all her assets to her little brother Daniel. Nathan then set about driving Millicent out of her mind so that he could take her place as Daniel’s legal guardian. That plot also featured some weak writing, but Joel Crothers and Nancy Barrett were so irresistible as Nathan and Millicent that it hardly mattered. Perhaps the writers wanted to revisit the gaslighting theme to show that this time they could consistently write scripts worthy of their outstanding cast.
A day of transformations. At dawn, the werewolf in the cell at the Collinsport jail turned into Quentin Collins. Edward Collins, Quentin’s stuffy brother, witnessed the transformation, and when we first see him he is staring at Quentin in bewilderment. Quentin is wearing the same blue suit he always wears, with the same distinctive hairstyle. But he has a glob of makeup on his face, and that’s enough to stymie Edward’s ability to recognize him.
This may reflect a hereditary disability of some kind. In #784, Quentin’s old friend and fellow Satanist, Evan Hanley, tried to steal the magical Hand of Count Petofi. The hand raised itself to Evan’s face and disfigured him, leaving his gray suit and highly identifiable hair and beard unchanged. But when Quentin saw Evan in #785, he was completely stumped as to who he might be.
Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi enters. Edward accuses her of knowing who the man in the cell before them is. Magda does not share the Collinses’ peculiar inability to recognize people wearing facial appliances, so of course she does know. But she denies it. Edward does not believe her denials, and leaves in a huff.
Magda talks to Quentin, and he begins to speak. But he is not replying to her. Instead, he delivers lines that Count Petofi himself might have spoken when he was dwelling on the loss of his hand. He murmurs about “the forest of Ojden” and “the nine Gypsies” and suchlike. Magda realizes that Quentin has no idea who he is or what is going on.
Magda had placed the hand on Quentin’s heart the night before, as the moon was rising, hoping it would prevent the transformation. It didn’t do that, but by inflicting the same kind of facial disfigurement on Quentin that it had previously brought to Evan it does keep the werewolf story going beyond what might seem like a natural conclusion. When Magda leaves Quentin, she says that come nightfall she will consult with Quentin’s distant cousin, time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins. “He will know what to do!” she declares. Barnabas has been the central character of the show for more than two years, and he has yet to have a non-disastrous idea. Ya gotta have hope, I guess.
At home in the great house of Collinwood, Edward tries to interest his sister Judith in the fact that he just saw a wolf turn into a human. She impatiently declares that she is not going to spend all day thinking about such a thing. Edward starts to remind Judith that she saw the wolf herself. He might have mentioned that she has seen it more than once, including in the very room where they are standing, but she says that it is “morbid” to go on paying attention to the topic once the creature has been caught and they can believe that they are safe.
Judith tells Edward that she had a bad dream. She won’t talk with him about that either. He needles her about her recent marriage to the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask, which he calls “ridiculous.” She says that she does not regret her marriage, and that even if she did it would not be any more ridiculous than his own marriage. Since Edward’s wife was an undead fire witch who tried to incinerate their children to prolong her existence, all he can say to that is “Touché.”
Edward exits, and Judith dwells on her dream. It concerned Trask’s late wife Minerva. Minerva died in #773; Judith married Trask in #784. Judith knows that a young man named Tim Shaw poisoned Minerva, and that Trask gave Tim an alibi. She believes that Trask has forsworn justice for Minerva’s death for her sake. Tim knew that Judith, while under a magic spell, had shot his girlfriend Rachel Drummond to death, and he threatened to expose her if Trask handed him over to the police. What Judith did not know, and what is not mentioned today, is that Tim himself had acted under a spell. Trask and Evan connived to brainwash Tim so that when the Queen of Spades turned up in a card game he would poison Minerva. In her dream, Minerva told Judith that there was danger, then repeated the phrase “Queen of Spades” several times.
Judith turns around and looks at a table. It had been bare when last she saw it, and there was no one else in the room. But now a solitaire game is laid out there. She screams, and Edward comes. Judith turns up the Queen of Spades, and walks out the front door. Edward follows her to Minerva’s grave.
Judith tells Edward her dream, and he transforms into a psychoanalyst. “Your dream is nothing more than a manifestation of your own guilt.” Judith asks Edward what he imagines her to feel guilty about, and he says that she married Trask so shortly after Minerva’s death. She dismisses this, and soon goes into a trance. She wavers back and forth from the waist for a moment, then straightens up with a jolt. When Edward calls to her by her first name, she replies “I will thank you to call me Mrs Trask!” Edward doesn’t know what to make of this demand, but the audience knows that Minerva has taken possession of Judith.
Back at Collinwood, Edward meets Magda. She tells him that she is there to see maidservant Beth. Edward says that he hasn’t seen her all day. That puts him up on the audience; we haven’t seen her since #771. When they were setting up for the trip to this period, Beth was presented as a major character, and her ghost haunted the Collinwood of 1969 along with Quentin’s. When Barnabas and we first arrived in the year 1897 in #701, Beth figured very largely in the story for several weeks. But Terrayne Crawford’s limitations as an actress required Beth to be written as someone who says just what she means, no more and no less. Since the rest of the cast is able to rise to the task of portraying complex motivations and multilayered communication, and since Dark Shadows finally has a writing staff that can provide those things consistently, Miss Crawford has faded further and further into the background.
Edward goes to the drawing room and telephones Evan. Magda eavesdrops. She knows of Evan’s disfigurement, Edward does not. Edward tells Evan he must come over at once, that there is an emergency he must address in his capacity as Collins family attorney. Evan does not want anyone to see his face, and so he tries to beg off. Edward threatens to fire him if he does not show up. Evan has been making vain efforts to restore his appearance for days; he looks at himself in the mirror, and returning viewers might draw the conclusion that his goose is cooked.
That Evan’s face is still disfigured after we have seen Quentin’s disfigurement raises the possibility that the show is heading towards an all-disfigured cast. Evan is played by the conspicuously handsome Humbert Allen Astredo, and as Quentin David Selby’s good looks have become one of the show’s very biggest draws. If they are both going to be uglified for the duration, then there is nothing to stop anyone from having some plastic glued onto their face.
Judith enters. She does not recognize Magda and announces that she is Minerva. She closes herself in the drawing room.
Evan arrives, looking like his old self. Magda is astonished. When they have a moment alone together, he responds to her questions by saying that he will never tell her what happened to undo the hand’s work. That will hook returning viewers more effectively than any cliffhanger is likely to do- Evan’s case had seemed absolutely hopeless.
When Edward tells Evan what Judith has been doing, Evan starts playing psychiatrist, picking up where Edward had left off. “Well now, tell me exactly how she has been behaving. In what way is this delusion manifesting itself?” Edward sends Evan in to see for himself. Minerva/ Judith reacts to the sight of him with horror. She says that he was the one who made Tim Shaw poison her. Minerva did not know this in life, but it has long since been established on Dark Shadows that the dead pick up a lot of information in the afterlife. The murders have been coming thick and fast in 1897, and if all the victims talk to each other they would have a pretty easy time piecing together what has been happening behind closed doors. We end with Minerva/ Judith holding a letter opener over her head, walking towards Evan with evident intent of stabbing him.
Vampire Barnabas Collins has been exposed and is in hiding. Most of those who would destroy him are as evil as he is, and none is as much fun to watch, so we’re on his side.
Stuffy Edward Collins catches Barnabas’ blood thrall Charity Trask in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas sent her there to fetch some soil from his original grave which he will use to make a new coffin habitable. Edward asks Charity what she is doing in the basement; she lies and claims that she can’t remember. This is an interesting moment for fans of Dark Shadows. Nancy Barrett’s acting style is uninhibited and often larger-than-life; one suspects that she was often accused of overacting. But Charity really does overact. In the contrast between her one-dimensional, exaggerated manner when she feigns amnesia and Miss Barrett’s own very noisy but highly textured performances, we see the definitive refutation of any such charge.
Charity got into the basement through a tunnel that connects the beach below Widows’ Hill to a prison cell in the basement of the Old House. In #260, set in 1967, we saw that the tunnel was in place when Barnabas and his little sister Sarah were living beings in the eighteenth century, that Sarah was aware of the tunnel, and that their father Joshua forbade her to tell Barnabas about it. Sarah’s ghost told Barnabas’ victim Maggie Evans how to escape through the tunnel. When Barnabas pursued her through it, we could see from his reaction that he was seeing the tunnel for the first time. The other Collinses of the 1960s were unaware of the existence even of the cell, let alone of the tunnel.
Now it is 1897, and when Charity mentions the tunnel to Edward he impatiently responds that he knows all about the tunnel. His tone suggests that he would expect Charity to know that he knows about it; evidently it is no secret among the residents of Collinwood. Since Edward’s twelve year old son Jamison is one of those residents, and Jamison’s daughter Liz and son Roger will be the adults at Collinwood in the 1960s, one wonders how that knowledge was lost in the seventy years separating this time-travel story from the principal time frame.
In the last scene, Barnabas is in Charity’s bedroom, about to chow down on her bloodstream. We pan from a two-shot to a closeup of Charity. She gives a thirty five second speech about how it isn’t safe for him to stay long, since her father knows that she is under Barnabas’ power and is lying in wait for him. Thirty five seconds is evidently how long it took for Jonathan Frid to put in Barnabas’ fangs, because when we pan back to him they are showing and he is ready to bite. At that moment, Jamison’s nine year old sister Nora walks in and reacts with horror to the sight of Barnabas with his mouth on Charity’s neck.
A lot happens in this one. Inveterate prankster Carl Collins realizes that his fiancée, Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye, is dead. He has a dream in which he meets Pansy backstage as she is preparing for her final performance, then sees her standing on stage before him, his sister Judith, and their distant cousin Barnabas; when he awakes from the dream, Carl is sure he has figured out what happened to Pansy, and he sets out for the very place where Barnabas is planning to rest during the day. This seems to imply that Carl will discover that Barnabas is a vampire.
The dream sequence is like nothing we’ve seen before on Dark Shadows, though it is strongly reminiscent of the kind of thing you would have seen on near-contemporary shows like ABC’s prime-time horror anthology Night Gallery hosted by Rod Serling and the Paulist Fathers’ syndicated morality plays Insight hosted by the Rev’d Fr Ellwood Kieser. It starts with a closeup of a sign on which Pansy’s name is emblazoned in glittery letters, and plays over a soundtrack of an audience applauding thunderously. Pansy calls Judith, Barnabas, and Carl to join her on stage, each in their turn; their behavior in this drama-within-a-drama mirrors their behavior in the framing narrative.
Meanwhile, Barnabas’ unwilling sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, has returned from Boston. There, she met with a leading member of the Romani people, whose name she alternately pronounces as “King Johnny Romana” and “King Johnny Romano.” She shows Barnabas a box she took from King Johnny. It contains a severed hand wearing a ring, which Magda declares will solve their troubles. Magda has placed a curse on Judith and Carl’s brother Quentin, turning Quentin into a werewolf. After placing that curse, Magda learned that her sister Jenny had borne two children to Quentin, and since the curse is hereditary she is desperate to find a way to lift it. Barnabas traveled back in time to 1897 in the course of his own attempt to resist the effects Magda’s curse will have in 1969, so they are allied in this effort.
Barnabas is utterly unimpressed with the hand and with Magda’s plan to place it on Quentin as he is about to transform. He seems convinced that Magda is just trying to conceal the fact that she failed to find anyone in King Johnny’s camp who could actually help them. He doesn’t care about the original owner of the hand, a legendary nobleman named Count Petofi who was himself cured of lycanthropy, or about an incantation Magda says over the hand that is supposed to prepare it to draw the curse from Quentin. He isn’t even interested when she admits that she stole the hand from King Johnny and that if they don’t get it back to him before he realizes it is missing he will send someone to kill her. He reacts as if the whole thing is a show she is putting on to build up her cover story.
In a metafictional set of way, Barnabas is onto something. The original storylines the writers had prepared for the 1897 segment are coming to a head. Several of its major characters have already died, and others, such as Carl, would not be very attractive customers for a life insurance salesman. Apparently the original flimsies, written six months ago, gave only a few more weeks until Barnabas was to return to 1969 and take the show back to contemporary dress. But 1897 is a hit. The ratings are soaring, and there are some dynamics among the characters that they want to explore in a lot more depth. So they want to stay, but to keep the momentum going they need more story and a number of new characters, including a major villain whom Barnabas and Quentin can team up to fight together. So the writers find themselves in the same position with regard to us that Magda is in with regard to Barnabas, trying to sell us on their latest preposterous brainstorm.
Pansy’s farewell performance in Carl’s dream is, alas, Kay Frye’s final appearance on Dark Shadows. Some fans seem unable to look past Pansy’s own hilariously inept performance when we first see her doing her act, and to see that Miss Frye herself does a terrific job playing a cold, cynical working girl. She is good today, when Pansy is on stage and in her character as the “world-famous mentalist and singer,” but is also trying to tell Carl the truth about Barnabas. I only wish they could have brought Miss Frye back as someone else, either in the extended 1897 segment or in another time period.
The opening voiceover plays over this image, a type of visual effect we have not seen before at the beginning of an episode:
A transparent sticker of Barnabas superimposed on the exterior of the Old House. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Barnabas Collins has bitten dimwitted servant Dirk Wilkins, turning Dirk into a vampire like himself. Barnabas has been out all night, searching for Dirk’s hiding place. He hopes to expose Dirk and frame him for his own crimes.
Barnabas comes home to the Old House on the estate of Collinwood to find that Dirk seems to be trying to do the same thing to him. There is a blood-drained corpse in an armchair in his front parlor. It is that of Miss Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl and Dirk’s first victim.
Barnabas’ distant cousins live in the great house on the estate. One of them, prankster Carl Collins, brought Pansy home with the intention of making her his bride. No sooner does Barnabas discover Pansy’s remains than Carl starts banging on the front door, shouting that he wants to speak with her.
Barnabas hides what’s left of Pansy in a secret chamber behind a bookcase, then lets Carl in. Grisly as the circumstances are, one person lying to another about the presence of a third nearby is a stock situation from farce, and John Karlen and Jonathan Frid play the scene with the particular brand of desperate seriousness that only works in farce. Barnabas persuades Carl to go away and search the grounds of the estate.
That takes a few minutes, starting from what the opening voiceover told us in so many words was “an hour before dawn.” In what remains of that hour, Barnabas takes Pansy’s body to a cemetery and buries her in a shallow grave between tombstones, telling her to “rest in peace.”
Barnabas comes home, and finds Carl, who has in the interval not only gone to the great house, the groundskeeper’s cottage, and a house on the estate which is currently occupied by a school, but has also gone into the village of Collinsport and made inquiries about Pansy. A speedy bunch, the Collinses.
Before Barnabas returned to the house, Carl had heard Pansy’s disembodied voice singing the song she had so memorably performed for Barnabas in yesterday’s episode. He had spoken to Pansy’s voice telling her that his grandmother’s will gave him a house to live in and that she could live there with him. This is puzzling for returning viewers. In #714, it was made perfectly clear that the will did not mention Carl at all. Edith Collins left her entire estate to Carl’s sister Judith, and the only one of the brothers who was mentioned was Quentin, who received no money or negotiable assets of any kind but who was guaranteed the right to stay at Collinwood as long as he pleased. Perhaps they are retconning that away, perhaps Carl is lying to Pansy, or perhaps Carl is losing his grip on reality.
Whether or not we are supposed to doubt Carl’s sanity, Barnabas talks Carl into suspecting that he might have hallucinated Pansy’s voice. Carl leaves, and Barnabas has time to return to his coffin before dawn.
The rest of the episode is taken up with doings at the school Carl had visited. We saw Carl questioning Charity Trask, daughter of the school’s master, the overwhelmingly evil Gregory Trask. The prim Charity was exasperated that Carl kept asking about Pansy after she had already denied having seen her. The scene is an interesting one- Charity and Pansy are such total opposites that it is a shame they never met. It would be amusing to see them juxtaposed.
Charity is engaged to marry Tim Shaw, a teacher at the school. Neither of them is happy about this situation. Tim was in love with Rachel Drummond, another of the teachers, and Charity is Barnabas’ blood thrall. But Gregory blackmailed Tim and bullied Charity into accepting the arrangement.
Charity’s mother, prudish Minerva Trask, does not like Tim or want him as a son-in-law. She urges Charity to set her sights on Carl. Charity says that she would rather marry Barnabas; Minerva says that her instincts are sound, but that she ought not to settle for a cousin of the rich Collinses when one of the brothers is available. Even if they have retconned Carl into owning a house, he is clearly not a rich man, so this reveals that Minerva knows as little about his financial position as she does about the curse under which Barnabas labors.
Charity tries to engage Tim in conversation, and is baffled that he is not willing to talk to her. Indeed, he does not seem like himself at all. Not only is he dismissive with Charity, but when Minerva confronts him he is bold and insolent, a far cry from the broken man we have seen interacting with the Trasks previously. When Charity tells him their engagement is off, he does not express the relief that she and we expect, but puts on a stagey voice we have not heard him use before and marches off to apologize to her mother.
There is a reason for Tim’s behavior. Gregory enlisted warlock Evan Hanley to brainwash Tim so that he would kill Minerva. There is some business with the Queen of Spades, first when Tim mutters the phrase “Queen of Spades,” then when Evan sends him a note on which is scrawled “Queen of Spades,” and lastly when he walks in on Minerva playing solitaire and sees her turn up the Queen of Spades. Many viewers in 1969 would have remembered Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate and its 1962 film version. In Condon’s novel, Raymond Shaw became a robot capable of murder when he saw the Queen of Hearts; in the film, the card was the Queen of Diamonds. Many first time viewers, seeing Tim Shaw’s reaction to the Queen of Spades, would have made the connection and understood why he ends the episode by poisoning Minerva’s tea.
Tim Shaw differs from Raymond Shaw in that he is under a spell for a long while, including the whole time we see him today, and he can talk and act independently while it operates on him. Raymond simply became catatonic when he saw the card and remained that way until he heard a command. He then executed the command and came back to himself once he was finished. Tim’s behavior may suggest a nod to another literary work, Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades.” That tale, which Tchaikovsky turned into an opera and which in 1949 was made into a feature film, is about a timid man who inadvertently kills a powerful woman and loses control of himself as a consequence. Like Tim, Captain Herman is coerced into marrying a woman he does not love. Presented with an opportunity to get out of the marriage, he finds himself making extraordinary efforts to go through with it, efforts which bring about his ultimate downfall.
Vampire Barnabas Collins is about to leave his house with his thrall, maidservant Beth Chavez, to look for Dirk Wilkins, a dimwitted servant whom he inadvertently turned into a vampire and let go. They are stopped when Barnabas’ distant cousin, inveterate prankster Carl Collins, comes in and insists on telling him about his recent trip to “Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Queen of the Boardwalk cities!”
Carl offers Barnabas some saltwater taffy, only to find that the tin is empty. He frets that “she” must have eaten it all on the trip back- “You know how women eat when they are nervous.” This leads to Carl’s second order of business, introducing Barnabas to Miss Pansy Faye. Carl met Pansy on the train, and he intends to marry her.
Carl opens the door, then stands before Barnabas and Beth and announces in his most booming voice “Presenting! Direct from her triumphs before Her Imperial Majesty, Queen Victoria of England, that world-famous mentalist and most beguiling songstress, Miss Pansy Faye!” Pansy enters, singing and dancing. In a vaguely Cockney accent, she intones:
I’m gonna dance for you! Gonna dance your cares away. I’ll do the Hoochie Koo, and the Ta Ra Boom De Ay! I’ll sing a happy song, as we dance the whole night long! When the music begins, I’ll give you some spins, I’ll even invent a step or two! So, on with the show! You’ll love it, I know! Oh, I’m going to dance for you!
Pansy’s dance is not particularly elaborate; it is performed almost entirely below the waist, and ends with her bending over and thrusting her rear end upward. That is followed by a cut to Barnabas wearing a look of stupefaction that all the black magic and demonic intrusions he has witnessed over the centuries have not elicited. He turns to Beth, who is visibly struggling to keep a straight face.
Against the backing track of Dark Shadows super-solemn music, this scene is hilarious. Longtime viewers will savor it even more than others. Carl is played by John Karlen, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s plays the luckless Willie Loomis, Barnabas’ first blood thrall. When Barnabas first enslaved Willie in the spring and summer of 1967, the show was at its bleakest. Barnabas was able to fool his distant relatives in the great house into regarding him as a living being and letting him occupy the Old House, but that was only because they had been isolated and embattled for so many months before. When we saw Barnabas and Willie on this set in those days, Barnabas was as grim as death itself, beating Willie with his heavy cane whenever he dared do more than whimper. That Karlen is now here as the man who is introducing a character as exuberantly and preposterously alive as Pansy and that Barnabas’ current thrall is suppressing a laugh takes the despair of that period and packs it with joy.
The despair reasserts itself at the close of the episode. Pansy will go out into the woods, Dirk will take her as his first victim, and Barnabas will come home to discover her body propped up in a chair in the parlor. But the comedy in between is so strong that we can be confident that this will not be the last word. Carl tries to persuade his sister, spinster Judith, to accept his marriage to Pansy. He tells her that he is a new man thanks to Pansy’s influence; he has actually managed to go 48 hours without playing a practical joke. Judith is impressed by this new record, but still will not believe that Pansy is fit to become a Collins. She controls all the family’s wealth, and threatens to cut Carl off without a penny if he goes through with the marriage. He reacts with a series of facial expressions that the Three Stooges would have admired.
While Barnabas and Carl are out, Pansy stays in the Old House with Beth. Beth offers her a cup of coffee; Pansy says she would prefer sherry. Beth goes to look for sherry, and Pansy is caught off-guard that Beth doesn’t live there. When Beth says that she is based at the big house on the property, Pansy asks how big it is. Beth says that it is very big indeed; Pansy says that Carl had told her it was like a palace, and Beth confirms that it is indeed on that scale. Pansy is surprised that Carl was telling her the truth. She takes the drink at a single gulp. With Carl, Pansy was acting a part, and she was a terrible actress indeed. Alone with Beth, she drops the act. The Cockney accent is still not too well-developed, but Kay Frye is much more convincing as a hard-boiled working class woman than Pansy is in any of her roles.
Carl persuades Judith to sit still in Barnabas’ parlor while Pansy does her mentalist act, trying to locate Dirk. Pansy actually goes into a trance and announces that Dirk is dead and his murderer is in the room. When she comes to, Pansy is as surprised as anyone at what happened. Judith is demanding an apology, and Pansy is shocked when Barnabas tells her that she accused someone in the room of murder. A moment later, she is alone, wondering what came over her and lamenting that she “mucked that one up.”
The Old House is a dangerous place to be a fake practitioner of supernatural arts. In #400, set in the 1790s, fanatical but inept witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask performed an exorcism of the Old House, and was visibly delighted when that exorcism seemed to work. That time it was the intervention of wicked witch Angelique that gave Trask his apparent success, but now it seems that Pansy is simply getting it right for the first time.
That Dirk leaves Pansy in a chair in Barnabas’ front parlor is also something that will bring back memories for longtime viewers. In the 1790s segment, another brassy dame on the make brightened up the show for a little while before meeting a grisly demise on this spot. She was Suki Forbes, estranged wife of untrustworthy naval officer Nathan Forbes. Barnabas strangled Suki in #423, after she had discovered his secret. Suki took until #424 to die, but did not manage to disclose what she knew about Barnabas.
An even closer parallel is to #530. In that one, Frankenstein’s monster Adam hates Barnabas for making him what he is. Adam attacks a man called Joe Haskell and thinks he has killed him. At the end of the episode, Barnabas finds that Adam has planted Joe’s body in the front parlor. Any doubt that Adam was trying to frame Barnabas for Joe’s murder would be removed by consulting the novel Frankenstein, in which the Creature frames another character for the murder of his creator’s brother. Dirk knows that Barnabas made him into a vampire, and so has the same motivation to pin a murder charge on Barnabas that Adam had.
Adam was just a few months old when he tried to frame Barnabas for murder, and Dirk is a simpleton. Neither of them had the skills to get the police interested in Barnabas, no matter how many dead bodies they add to the decor of his house. On the other hand, Barnabas himself once very nearly managed to make such a plan work. In #440 and #441, part of the 1790s segment, Barnabas left the corpse of his victim Maude Browning in a bed belonging to Trask. It was only Nathan Forbes’ timely intervention that kept Trask from the gallows that time.
Second consecutive episode ruined by Roger Davis’ performance as crazed groundskeeper Dirk Wilkins. Crazy Dirk has more fans than do any of Mr Davis’ other roles on Dark Shadows, which I do not understand. He is such a swivel-eyed loon from the first shot to the last that he is useless as a character- he doesn’t respond to anything anyone else does or says, just carries on with a chortling mania. The unvarying bombast suggests a desperate actor, and it leaves Mr Davis’ scene partners with nothing to do.
In a comment I left under Danny Horn’s post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, I talked about my mental habit of imagining different actors playing parts that were not well executed:
I amuse myself during weak bits by wondering how characters would have come off if played by other actors. A character as well-written as Dirk, played by an actor as competent as Robert Rodan? Second only to Quentin Collins among the fans! Played by David Groh? Bigger breakout star than Barnabas! Played by Harvey Keitel? Such a hit the show is still in production!
Who knows how they would actually have done- maybe they would have made some kind of unfortunate choice and bungled it. And who knows what effect they would have had on the rest of the show- maybe if Dirk had been a massive hit and they’d rebuilt Dark Shadows around him, the result would have been a less interesting show. But the imaginary show in my head is good enough to get me through some pretty dire segments.
This time through I’ve been imagining Edward Marshall, who wore some of the wardrobe that became Dirk’s when he was cast as petulant ex-convict Harry Johnson in #669, in Mr Davis’ place. Mr Marshall took over the part of Harry from the not reliably brilliant Craig Slocum. He preserved the attitude and a great many of the mannerisms Slocum had given the part, but was substantially more interesting than Slocum ever was. Before he became violently insane, Dirk shared so many of Harry’s qualities that Mr Marshall would have been an obvious choice for the role. I’m sure he would have been better than Mr Davis, though perhaps not on a par with Robert Rodan, David Groh, or Harvey Keitel.
Today’s big plot point comes when Dirk tells twelve year old Jamison Collins that he has killed Barnabas Collins and that Barnabas was a vampire. Dirk is mistaken about the first of these points; he did not harm Barnabas at all. But he is right that he is a vampire.
This part of Dark Shadows is a costume drama set in the year 1897. Barnabas traveled to that year from 1969 while doing battle with some supernatural menaces. In the parts of the show set in the 1960s, the adults in the great house of Collinwood are Jamison’s daughter Liz and son Roger. Liz and Roger have accepted Barnabas’ story that he is their distant cousin from England and have let him take up residence in the Old House on the estate. If Jamison finds out that Barnabas is actually a bloodsucking ghoul, it is unlikely that his children will be sufficiently hospitable to him to allow the parts of the show in contemporary dress to exist. So when Jamison goes to the Old House to check on Dirk’s story and finds a coffin in the basement, we know that something will have to change if the show is to continue.
For most of its run, Dark Shadows was made with severely limited access to videotape editing equipment. If something went wrong, the only way to fix it was to start over. So even spectacular mistakes stayed in, especially if they took place near the end of the episode. Today there is a blooper in the opening voiceover- yesterday’s episode centered on a prophetic dream that twelve year old Jamison Collins had about his future descendant David, but the narrator names the dreamer as “David.”
It doesn’t get much better from there. The episode is a showcase for the acting of Roger Davis as crazed groundskeeper Dirk. Unfortunately Mr Davis is the sort of actor who needs close guidance from a director, and the directors on Dark Shadows famously gave their male performers a great deal of latitude. So he hams up his every scene, often interrupting himself with sounds that are variously transcribed as “huh?” or “hyunh!” or “hyuk hyuk!” He ruins every shot he is in.
The only Davis-free scenes are interactions between maidservant Beth and the show’s two breakout stars, her boyfriend Quentin and her vampire master Barnabas. The writing staff has figured out a way to work around Terrayne Crawford’s limitations as an actress; Beth is always very earnest and straightforward. That is a great relief after the first weeks of the part of Dark Shadows set in 1897, when they gave Beth the same rich and complex motivations they lavished on everyone else and she fell disastrously flat every time. Still, Beth’s emotional transparency does not give David Selby or Jonathan Frid much for Quentin or Barnabas to play off of, so that they seem to be explaining the plot to her.
Quentin at one point slaps Beth in the face today. It used to be extremely rare for male character to slap female ones on the show, but these incidents are have started to come thick and fast since writer violet Welles joined the staff. Miss Welles was far and away the best writer of dialogue on Dark Shadows, and I suppose she must have had a reason for showing us all these women getting hit by men, but I for one am eager for it to stop.
Barnabas bit Dirk a while ago, but before he did that Dirk was already enslaved by undead blonde fire witch Laura. So rather than becoming a blood thrall, Dirk reacted to Barnabas’ bite by going nuts. At the end of today’s installment, Dirk is trying to kill Barnabas. Dirk has yet to find a task so simple he can succeed in it, so we leave without much suspense that he will manage to kill off the main protagonist. I suppose it will do for a Wednesday cliffhanger.
Dark Shadows Commentary 