alexander – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 911: I might forget I’m dead

The Story So Far

In December 1968, children David Collins and Amy Jennings explored the long-deserted west wing of their home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood. They stirred up the ghost of Quentin Collins, who turned out to be David’s great-great uncle and Amy’s great-grandfather. For the next several weeks, Quentin steadily gained power and wrought ever graver havoc, until by the end of February the great house had become uninhabitable and David was hovering between life and death. At that point, David and Amy’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins did some mumbo-jumbo to try to contact Quentin’s ghost, only to come unstuck in time and find himself in the year 1897, when Quentin was a living being.

For the next eight months, Dark Shadows was primarily a costume drama set in 1897. Occasional glimpses of 1969 showed us that the haunting was continuing. In #839, we saw David lying dead before his father Roger, finally having succumbed to the effects of the haunting. But while Roger was lamenting him, David came back to life. The events in the part of the episode set in 1897 had changed the future, so that the ghost of Quentin found peace and Collinwood returned to its usual condition. But that took effect as of the anniversary of the change. Everyone’s memories of the ten months of Quentin’s haunting and of the eight months of Barnabas’ absence in the past are intact.

Not only is Quentin no longer a ghost, he isn’t even dead. In the altered version of 1897 that we saw, an artist named Charles Delaware Tate painted a portrait of Quentin that had the same magical effects on him that Dorian Gray’s portrait had in Oscar Wilde’s novel. Quentin looks, moves, and sounds exactly like he did when he was 28 years old. He has recently returned to Collinsport, and has amnesia. He was found carrying identity papers in the name of Grant Douglas. He’s open to the possibility that that may not be his right name, but when he finds Dr Julia Hoffman, MD trying to convince him he is the 99 year old Quentin, he is incredulous.

At Collinwood

We open today in Quentin’s old room in the west wing. Julia has persuaded Quentin to sit there and listen to his record player. In the unaltered timeline, he was obsessed with a sickly little waltz, listening to it over and over in 1897 and inflicting it on Collinwood when he was a ghost. Julia plays the record, and it doesn’t mean a thing to him. She becomes frustrated and accuses him of lying when he says that he doesn’t remember that he is Quentin.

The music does ring a bell for someone else in the house. The sound of it reaches David and wakes him. Alarmed, he makes his way to Quentin’s room. By the time he gets there, Quentin is hiding behind a curtain. Julia tells David she went in to look for a painting, and that she thoughtlessly started the record player. He accuses her of hiding Quentin. While she is denying it, he sees Quentin’s shoes sticking out from under the curtain.

In 1963, philosopher Edmund Gettier published a little paper about the traditional definition of knowledge as “justified true belief.” He gave several examples of justified true beliefs that most people would not regard as knowledge. His examples were kind of far-fetched, but it is easy to come up with more plausible instances. For example, I first read Gettier’s paper when I was in college, and at the same time I was reading Anthony Trollope’s novel The Eustace Diamonds. The main point of that novel is that everyone believes that Lizzie Greystock has stolen some diamonds from her late husband’s estate. She has in fact done so, and they have good reason for believing that she did so, but those reasons are so mixed up with misunderstandings of Lizzie’s motives and other circumstances that we wouldn’t say any of them really knows anything about her. My epistemology professor was excited when I told her about the novel, since the example she gave to our class to show that Gettier’s contrivances were not the only cases illustrating his point was something overly elaborate about believing that you have recognized someone whom you have partially seen while he is hiding most of himself behind a curtain.

David’s claim that Julia is hiding Quentin is another Gettier case. He believes it, the sight of Quentin’s shoes in Quentin’s room provides compelling justification for believing it, and it is true. Yet the Quentin whom Julia is hiding does not have any of the characteristics that give David’s belief the significance that he draws from it. His presence is not a sign that the haunting has resumed and that David is back in mortal danger. He is not a ghost at all and is not a threat to David or anyone else in the house. So while David has a justified true belief that Julia is hiding Quentin, that belief is so deeply entangled with a severe misunderstanding of the situation that we wouldn’t count it as knowledge.

Once David is gone, Quentin emerges and demands answers from Julia. She tells him something about Quentin’s ghost; he already finds her insistence that he is 99 years old to be so preposterous that the additional detail that he used to be dead prompts a merry laugh. By the time he is at the front door ready to leave, he is stern and telling Julia that he expects a “full explanation” tomorrow. Lotsa luck on that- ghosts, time travel, magical portraits, and a universe where the present is a stew made up of the consequences of several mutually incompatible pasts? And those are just the elements you can’t avoid in the executive summary of the situation. A “full explanation” involves werewolves, vampires, a humanoid Phoenix bent on incinerating her children, demons conjured from the depths of Hell, a sorcerer who still misses his pet unicorn, and about a thousand other fantastical topics.

David eavesdrops on Quentin and Julia’s parting conversation. When he was a ghost, we never heard Quentin speak- he communicated telepathically with David and Amy, and they could apparently hear his voice on a particular telephone, but he never stood around and talked with anyone like this. So the mere fact of the conversation undermines David’s belief that the man he is looking at is Quentin’s ghost. When David hears Julia call Quentin “Mr Douglas,” he can see that whoever this person may be, he is not exactly Quentin, not as he knew him. He does recognize the name “Mr Douglas” as that of a man his cousin Carolyn Stoddard met at the antique shop in the village where she works and whom she visited in the hospital when he first had amnesia, so his attitude towards him changes.

In the Antique Store

Unknown to Julia or Carolyn, David has been assimilated to a cult that serves unseen supernatural beings known as the Leviathans. Carolyn’s mother, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, has also been absorbed into the cult, as has Barnabas. Megan and Philip Todd, the owners of the antique store, are members too, and they are fostering a mysterious creature who currently appears to be an eight year old boy and answers to the name Alexander. Liz takes David and Amy to the antique store, where they interrupt an uncomfortable conversation between Alexander and Julia.

Liz suggests to Julia that they should leave Amy and David in the store to play with Alexander. Julia doesn’t think this is such a hot idea, but Liz insists.

We then have the first scene on Dark Shadows populated by three child actors. It was a breakthrough when the ten year old David played with the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins in the spring and summer of 1967; their scenes, the first interaction between children on Dark Shadows, advanced it towards becoming a kids’ show. David had up to that point been the only child on the show. He was first a homicidal monster who threatened the adults, then a figure threatened by his mother Laura and in need of rescue. When we saw him with Sarah, the two of them built a relationship that was of importance in itself and that had consequences which grew to dominate the story, leading directly to the show’s first time travel segment in November 1967. In David and Sarah, the fans running home from elementary school to watch the show could see characters their own age driving the action.

The current phase has been very heavy in adult interest. This first three-scene among children might be expected to take us back to territory Sarah and David did so much to open, but it does nothing of the kind. The three children do not really interact with each other at all. David is under the control of the Leviathans, Alexander is a manifestation of their power, and Amy is at a loss to figure out what’s going on. The forces motivating the action are not on screen, any more than they would be if the boys’ parts were played by marionettes.

Amy finds that Alexander has a photograph of Carolyn as she was when she was eight. She realizes that he stole it from a photo album at Collinwood. She declares that she will take it back to the house. Alexander forbids her to do so, and David takes his side. Amy is puzzled by David’s attitude. David threatens to sic Quentin on her. That shakes her up, but she says that Quentin is gone. David says he isn’t, and he and Alexander force her to play hide and seek. Once she is out of the room, David tells Alexander to keep her away for a couple of minutes. He telephones “Grant Douglas” and asks him to come to the shop to pick up a book he left there.

Amy comes back just in time to see and recognize Quentin. She runs upstairs and goes into the room which belongs to Alexander. She hears a heavy breathing there and sees something that terrifies her. Returning viewers know that what she saw was some inhuman thing that is of the Leviathans.

For his part, David is quite calm with “Grant.” Though we saw at the beginning that his connection to the Leviathans has not removed his fear of Quentin, he has reached the conclusion that he doesn’t need to be afraid of “Grant Douglas.” Maybe he thinks that someone using the names of two such prominent Canadians can’t be all bad. He gives Quentin the book and assures him Amy will be all right.

Quentin accepts David’s assurance, but we cannot. Amy is absent from the cast for long periods, and is usually unmentioned during those intervals. The same was true of Nora Collins, the character Denise Nickerson played in the 1897 segment. The show seems to be deliberately telling us not to get used to having this fine young actress in the cast. And the Leviathans haven’t done anything truly horrible yet- they are due to murder a character we really like. So it is quite possible we will tune in tomorrow and find that Amy is dead. Again, the contrast with the David and Sarah story is telling. David Henesy was a core member of the cast from the first week of the show, and the ghost of Sarah was a key part of the show for months. Dark Shadows was as much their show as it was that of any of the adults on screen. Keeping both Amy and Denise Nickerson at the margins, they make it clear that the kids are going to be taking a back seat.

David Henesy and Denise Nickerson were both highly capable performers, but eight year old David Jay just stands on his mark and shouts his lines. That need not have been a problem. Alexander has only been in human form for a week or two, so we don’t expect subtlety from him, and to the extent that he sounds like a real child he is supposed to be a vicious little bully trying to figure out what he can get away with. Such children often do put on acts and sound awkward, so Mr Jay’s professional ineptitude dovetails with the requirements of his part. That’s similar to the way Sharon Smyth’s limitations fit with the part of Sarah. We were supposed to be unsure whether Sarah knew that she was a ghost, whether she knew what year it was, and what if anything she remembered from one appearance to the next. Since Miss Smyth* was, as she says now, “clueless” about the craft of acting, she did a great job keeping us guessing. Later we saw Sarah as a living being, and Miss Smyth’s performance was less satisfactory. We know that Alexander is likely to transform into a shape that is not compatible with David Jay soon, so his shortcomings aren’t a particular concern. But again, the fact that Alexander comes with an expiration date keeps us from regarding him as one of the main characters.

The Store Room

While the kids were alone in the antique shop, Liz took Julia to a store room in the west wing of Collinwood to show her some photographs she had been asking about. While there, they come upon a painting. Liz says that she bought it about a year before at a charity auction, and that when her brother Roger saw how lousy it was he said he hoped that it was a worthy cause. She took it directly to the store room. It is signed “Harrison Monroe” and dated 1968. We will learn tomorrow that it depicts a place called Indian Hill. Julia recognizes the painting as extremely similar to an equally undistinguished landscape she bought a few weeks ago.

Detail from “A View of Indian Hill,” Harrison Monroe, 1968.

That painting was the work of Charles Delaware Tate, executed about 20 years previously. That Tate had been alive and working as recently as that gave Julia the hope that he might still be around and able to help a friend of hers who has problems. Yesterday, an expert called on to remove the landscape and reveal the portrait underneath it said that Tate died in 1959. But this painting is apparently the product of the same hand. Julia hopes that “Harrison Monroe” is a pseudonym of Tate’s.

It has been clear to the audience ever since Julia found the first painting that Tate would be back. That can’t be welcome news to many people. Like all characters played by Roger Davis, Tate is a loathsome man who shouts his lines and assaults his scene partners. So this pseudonym, as strongly redolent of old Virginia as “Grant Douglas” is of twentieth century Canada, will bring a sinking feeling to much of the audience. Our reprieve that began when we left Tate in the nineteenth century five weeks ago cannot last much longer.

*Her name is Mrs Lentz nowadays, but that’s an odd title to give a nine year old. So I refer to her as Miss Smyth.

Episode 909: Beyond what I saw before

Paul Stoddard (Dennis Patrick) has been staying in his ex-wife’s home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood. At the end of yesterday’s episode, he found a boy known as Alexander hiding in his room. He chased Alexander out of the room. We saw Alexander go behind some curtains. In today’s opening reprise of that scene, Paul looks behind the curtain and sees, not Alexander, but a girl. The girl calls him “Daddy” and runs off. He looks at a photo album and recognizes her as his daughter Carolyn as she was at the age of eight. Since Carolyn is alive and well, the girl cannot be her ghost. He concludes that she must be something that the mysterious enemies whom he knows to be persecuting him have conjured her up.

Paul sees this pseudo-Carolyn a few more times, but no one else does. The last time he sees her, he chases her into a closed room.

Paul chases the pseudo-Carolyn into a closed room.

When Paul opens the door to the room and invites permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman to look inside, no one who could be mistaken for Carolyn is there. Alexander is, and he has the same book with him that the pseudo-Carolyn took into the room with her.

Alexander is not the eight year old boy he appears to be. He is both a borrowing from H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror and a meta-fictional comment on Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome. He began life a couple of weeks ago as a whistling sound coming out of a wooden box, spent a week as a newborn baby, then emerged in his current form. When he masquerades as the very young Carolyn, he doesn’t get any bigger or smaller, but he does shift his shape between male and female. Which, good for him (them?,) I suppose.

Many longtime viewers will be even more intrigued by another metamorphosis that we see today. The foyer set has always stopped a little bit downstage from the front door. The room into which Paul chases Carolyn/ Alexander lies beyond this line. Previously, when characters had entered that space they simply exited and were picked up elsewhere later. The only time the camera followed actors beyond the line was in #664, when time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins and indentured servant Ben Stokes walked from the foyer to the study by way of an undecorated area of the studio. That area is decorated now.

In the picture of Julia, Paul, and Alexander above, we see a portrait in the foyer behind Paul’s left shoulder. That depicts Barnabas as he was in the 1790s, before he became a vampire. It first appeared in #204, when Dennis Patrick was on the show as Paul’s sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire. It was still being painted when Patrick joined the cast a few weeks before. When he first entered the great house in #195, there was a mirror on that spot. The mirror had been trading places with a metal doodad that was shaped like a coat of arms. At the moment Jason entered, the mirror caught a portrait on the opposite wall, making it look like there was a portrait there. On repeat viewings, that effect makes it clear that Jason’s purpose is to clear the decks of leftover story elements that will not be needed in the show’s future as a supernatural thriller.

When Jason first came to the house and insisted on staying, he and Liz stood in the foyer. She looked into a space beyond the camera, to the viewer’s left (=stage right,) and said that she supposed she could find a room for him there. Jason identified the imaginary part of the house Liz was facing as the servants’ quarters, and when in later episodes we saw servants going to their rooms that was indeed the direction they exited. So when they have Patrick on screen when they enlarge the performing space available in the foyer to include an area to the viewer’s right (=stage left,) they are picking up on that aspect of his iconography.

The Carolyn side of Carolyn/ Alexander is played by Lisa Ross, whose given name was Alyssa Mary Ross. In later years, she took her husband’s name and was known as Mrs Eppich. She was born in 1959 and died in 2020; her family put a very nice tribute page to her online, you should look at it.

Lisa Ross had brown eyes; Nancy Barrett, who plays the adult Carolyn, has brilliantly blue eyes. Since half the episodes of Dark Shadows in this period were directed by Henry Kaplan, a specialist in extreme closeup shots, no regular viewers can be unaware of this. For a single episode, #578, Miss Barrett was replaced as Carolyn by Diana Walker. That one was directed by Sean Dhu Sullivan, who was adept at a wider variety of setups than Kaplan and therefore did not shove the camera into the actors’ faces over and over. Miss Walker’s eyes might be brown, I can’t tell. If so, maybe it was her Carolyn whose juvenile form Alexander assumed.

Episode 908: Mollycoddle that monster

The current phase of Dark Shadows is focused on the threat to the human race posed by the Leviathans, unseen supernatural beings who have taken control of several characters on the show. Among their devoted servants are matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her nephew, strange and troubled boy David Collins. Today, Liz and David welcome a boy known as Alexander to the great house of Collinwood. Alexander appears to be an eight year old boy, but is in fact an extreme case of Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome. Last week he was an infant, and a few days before a whistling sound coming from a wooden box. Whatever Alexander may really be, he holds a key position in the Leviathans’ plan.

At times, Dark Shadows becomes so much a kids’ show that it loses much of its adult audience. The Leviathan story so far has gone to the opposite extreme. A scene in which Alexander orders the thirteen year old David to give up the transistor radio he had long wanted and that his father just gave him will probably get similar reactions from viewers of all ages, but when Alexander scolds Liz for asking questions and she apologizes, only those who remember Joan Bennett as the great star she was in the late 1930s and early 1940s will get the full force of the moment. In general, adults will probably feel the distress Alexander’s tyranny is supposed to induce, while the fans who are running home from elementary school to watch the show will likely be either annoyed with the kid or amused to see the grownups getting theirs.

Liz’ ex-husband Paul is being persecuted by the Leviathans and their human agents. Paul is staying at Collinwood, and he is outraged to find Alexander in the house. Paul carries on like a crazy man, prompting Liz to tell him that if he doesn’t compose himself he will end up in a mental hospital. He tells Maggie Evans, David’s governess, about his suspicions; she listens sympathetically until he catches Alexander eavesdropping and roughs the boy up. Maggie then freezes in horror, and Paul goes on shaking Alexander and yelling at him until Liz enters and puts a stop to it. While Liz and Maggie stand in the corridor and talk about Paul’s lunatic behavior, he paces in the drawing room, telling himself that he mustn’t “fly off the handle” again.

David enters and hands Paul a small photo album. He says that it has pictures of Paul and Liz’ daughter Carolyn when she was a child. Since Paul wasn’t around when Carolyn was growing up, David says it occurred to him that Paul might want to look through it. Paul thanks David for his thoughtfulness.

As Paul leafs through the album, we get a look at a picture depicting Carolyn as she was when she was about ten. We haven’t seen the model before. Dark Shadows had such a tight budget that regular viewers will be fairly sure they wouldn’t have brought a girl in only to pose for a single photograph, so we might start wondering when we will meet the ten year old Carolyn.

Child Carolyn. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We may also be wondering when we will see another girl of about the same age. Denise Nickerson, twelve years old in December 1969, has been in the cast for a year at this point, and has made major contributions every time we’ve seen her. We saw in #893 and #896 that her character Amy Jennings is still living at Collinwood and is still David’s chief playmate. But as is usual in episodes where she does not appear, Amy is unmentioned today. Liz tells Paul that David spends entirely too much time surrounded by adults, as if Amy does not exist. They followed the same pattern during the eight months of 1969 when Dark Shadows was set in 1897 and Nickerson played nine year old Nora Collins. When Nora was in the episode, she was often its brightest spot, but when she wasn’t her name never came up. It’s unnerving that the show does so little to reassure us that it will continue to make use of such a talented and appealing young actress.

Alexander sits on the bench that has been in the foyer at Collinwood throughout the whole series. The Dark Shadows wiki says this is only the second time the bench has been used. I want to say it is the third- I remember David sitting there in #176, when Maggie’s predecessor Vicki told him he could have two desserts, cake and ice cream, but I seem to recall either him or someone else sitting there at some point around that time. I’m not going to go back through those episodes to check, but if you’ve been watching them I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a note in the comments.