angelique – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 979: Nicholas Blair

The Failure Demon

Suave warlock Nicholas Blair first joined the cast of characters in June 1968, posing as the brother of Cassandra, wife of Roger Collins. Since Cassandra was an alias that 200 year old wicked witch Angelique was using, we knew right away this could not be so. Nicholas asserted himself as Angelique’s boss, faced down the ghost of the fanatical Reverend Trask, and kept saying that he had a plan that was far more important than Angelique’s petty little scheme to establish herself in the great house of Collinwood and turn Roger’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins back into a vampire. As played by Humbert Allen Astredo, Nicholas kept us believing for weeks that we would be in awe once we heard his plan.

Eventually, Nicholas stumbled upon the fact that Barnabas’ best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, had constructed a Frankenstein’s monster in the course of a project to keep his vampirism in remission. From that point on, Nicholas declared that his plan was to force Julia to make a female Frankenstein’s monster, to mate the already existing monster to her, and thereby to breed a new race of people loyal only to his master, Satan. He’d been on the show so long at that point that his sudden parachuting into the Frankenstein story only revealed that up to that point, all his talk about his grand design had been empty boasting.

Moreover, Nicholas’ plan for the patchwork people did not make sense in the context of the show. In a novel or movie like Rosemary’s Baby, the audience sees the heroine raped with the acquiescence of her husband, and our horror at that crime gives force to the premise that she will bear Satan’s only begotten son, who, in an inversion of the Christian story, will transform the whole world by the very fact of his birth. Stealing fresh corpses, chopping them up, and stitching them together isn’t the same horror as rape, but it is a pretty disgusting way to spend an evening, so I suppose that will get you off to some kind of start. But if your show is on the air for half an hour a day across the board Monday through Friday, your audience has time to sit with Nicholas’ scheme and think through all of the practicalities it implies. The new race is going to take many years to grow and multiply and overtake H. Sap., even if its members all have Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome. What are we all supposed to do in the interim, watch the Frankenbabies through nanny cams? It isn’t an idea for series television.

Nicholas not only saddled himself with a plan that obviously wasn’t going to work, he didn’t deliver on his claim to be a surpassingly talented sorcerer. In #528, Angelique asked him to slip a potion to one of her adversaries. He complained that “I am much too talented to spend my time drugging drinks,” but he complied with the request. Not only did that turn out to be a waste of time, later he would on his own initiative drug a couple of other people’s drinks, again without the results he wanted.

Eventually, Nicholas fell in love with Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. That amused Angelique, who taunted him with all the times when he had sneered at her for the humanity she showed in her emotional attachment to Barnabas. As Nicholas grew fonder of Maggie, his powers became less reliable, and his involvement with the main plot became more tenuous. No longer able to make Angelique obey him, Nicholas was reduced to using unsightly ex-convict Harry Johnson as his henchman. By the time the Frankenstein project collapsed and Satan called Nicholas back to Hell, not even Astredo’s considerable acting talent could make us take him seriously.

Nicholas returned in February 1970, just over five weeks ago. At that point the show was mainly concerned with an attempt the writers were making to take some material from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft and make a story out of them. The Leviathan People are Elder Gods who want to reconquer the Earth and destroy humankind. Their harbinger was a shape-shifting monster who had taken the form of a tall young man and invited people to call him Jabe. Jabe was supposed to join with Roger’s niece Carolyn to produce a new race of people.

The Lovecraft material never came together, and by the middle of February the makers of the show were scrambling to find a new direction. Nicholas appears to have been a last-minute replacement for a different sort of villain who was supposed to take over as the chief menace in the second half of the segment. Now they have thrown out that second half and are trying to get to something else before the ratings drop any further. So they brought back an already established character and plugged him into the scenes originally meant to be played by the one they never got around to introducing.

Bringing Nicholas in to the Leviathan arc makes it hard for longtime viewers to ignore the similarities between the Leviathans’ plan to breed a new race and his 1968 plan for the patchwork people, including the shared weakness that if either plan were successful, it wouldn’t leave you anything to put on a daytime soap. Also, Nicholas explicitly acknowledges that he has already failed in one such project, lampshading the problem but not alleviating it. He also keeps bringing up his “Master,” who is clearly still Satan. No other character in the Leviathan arc makes reference to any themes derived from Christianity- everyone else is living in the determinedly non-Christian world of Lovecraft’s imagination. So he seems out of place from the beginning.

The Leviathans’ plan was already nearing collapse when Nicholas showed up. Every time Jabe has used his powers, the results have backfired on him. His personality has alienated all of his allies. And now he doesn’t even want to be a shape-shifting monster anymore- he fell in love with Carolyn, and just wanted to take her on dates and then marry her. Nicholas is supposed to be the trouble-shooter who will turn this troubled operation around, but nothing about him inspires confidence that he is the right person for that job.

Since Nicholas arrived, things have gone downhill for the Leviathan cause even faster than they had been before. In #966, Nicholas watched in horror as Jabe smashed the box from which he originally emanated, causing all of the Leviathans’ other visible belongings to vanish. Nicholas then declared that everything was over, and that the time of the Leviathans was no more. But they still didn’t have another story ready to go, so he and Jabe have continued to hang around. Nicholas still has one follower, Angelique’s estranged husband Sky Rumson, but since there is no reason for Sky to be on the show either, that isn’t much of a basis for Nicholas’ continued presence. On his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn called Nicholas a “failure demon”; all in all, that would seem an apt classification.

Today, Jabe turns up at Nicholas’ place. Nicholas knows that Angelique cursed Jabe to be plagued by a mysterious shadow not his own that follows him and drives him mad. This much is borrowed from George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes, but unlike the Reverend MacDonald’s allegory of sin and anxiety this shadow is a physical weapon that will kill Jabe when it grows strong enough. Jabe asked Nicholas to use his powers to lift Angelique’s spell the other day, but Nicholas refused, even though he claimed that he could and he acknowledged that it would have been to his advantage to do so. The opening voiceover today reminds us that Nicholas knows all about the shadow.

Now, Jabe is telling Nicholas that he was wrong to turn against him, wrong to smash the box, wrong to give up his destiny of leading the Leviathans to global dominion. Nicholas dwells on his exhaustive knowledge of the shadow and tells Jabe he can take the shadow from him and set it on Angelique. He begins to hypnotize Jabe. When he seems to have Jabe in a trance, he tells him he does not give second chances, and that he is going to kill him and Carolyn. Jabe suddenly produces the paper cutout Angelique used to place the shadow curse on him and places it on Nicholas’ jacket. He then runs out of the room. The shadow appears and envelopes Nicholas, who collapses. Even though he knew in advance exactly what was going on, Nicholas still could not avoid death as the result of getting slapped on the chest with a piece of construction paper. He dies as he lived, a failure demon to the end.

Sky enters. Jabe returns, and Sky tells him Nicholas is dead. Sky whines that because Nicholas was not human, his death will not be the end of him and Jabe will not get away with killing him. Geoffrey Scott’s appallingly bad acting reinforces the image of Nicholas as a colossal loser- if this was the only ally he had left at the end, he must have been an even more hopeless stumblebum than we had thought. Jabe exits. A moment later, Nicholas’ ghost appears to Sky and tells him to kill Jabe.

Nicholas gives Sky his orders. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Jabe goes back to the great house of Collinwood to tell Carolyn that he is rid of the shadow. They are married now, but have spent very little time together because the shadow has kept chasing Jabe off. She is puzzled by the whole thing, in part because Jabe refuses to tell her anything about his situation, and is unenthusiastic about Jabe’s renewed insistence that they go away immediately. She agrees to leave with him in the morning.

Carolyn goes upstairs. In the drawing room, Jabe hears Nicholas’ voice telling him that he will never escape. Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David Collins, enters; Jabe tells him that he and Carolyn are going on a trip tonight.

Jabe sent Carolyn upstairs with orders to pack and tell her mother they were leaving, but it would seem she has not complied. She is snoozing in a chair in her room. She has a dream. It begins with Nicholas’ voice rasping at her that it will all end at Widows’ Hill. She then sees Jabe and Sky, lit in groovy psychedelic colors, arguing about Nicholas and fighting near the precipice. Sky throws Jabe over the edge.

Groovy, man. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn awakens, calls for Jabe, and rushes out. On her way she tells David that she is going to Widows’ Hill. A moment later Jabe comes along, and David relays this information to him.

Carolyn gets to the top of Widows’ Hill, where Sky is waiting for her. He tells her that the dream Nicholas sent her stopped short of its end, because he did not want her to see her own death. He grabs her by the throat.

Meanwhile, in another universe…

While Jabe, Nicholas, and Carolyn are cleaning up the messes the Leviathan segment left behind, Roger is busy getting the new storyline off the ground. There is a room in the long disused east wing of the great house in which an alternate universe is occasionally visible. Roger goes there, and sees the counterparts of Carolyn and David. They are talking about the boy’s parents, whom Roger ascertains to be, not himself and undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch, but the counterparts of his distant cousin Quentin Collins and of Angelique. Everyone else we have seen in “Parallel Time” has the same first name as their counterpart in the main continuity, but David’s is named “Daniel.”

Roger never found out who Cassandra really was, so it is a puzzle for longtime viewers how he knows Angelique’s name. Carolyn and her mother met her under that name at the house she and Sky shared, but somehow did not recognize her as Cassandra. She visited them at Collinwood after her marriage to Sky broke up, but did not see Roger there.

Arrivals and Departures

This is the first time we see this Daniel Collins, but not the first time we are exposed to his name. The closing credits for #958 billed David Henesy not as David Collins, the role he played that day, but as Daniel Collins. I don’t know whether they had already decided that would be his name in Parallel Time and the person making up the credit roll got confused about it, or if the writers thought the goof was funny and gave the character the name as an inside joke.

Also, Mr Henesy played a character named Daniel Collins in February and March 1968, when the show was set in the year 1796. Since they have established that the two universes diverged during that Daniel’s lifetime, he may be this Daniel’s namesake. There is another connection, an accidental one I’m sure but an accident with a bit of an eldritch quality to it. In #350, three weeks before the 1790s segment began and more than sixteen weeks before Daniel made his first appearance, a slip of Nancy Barrett’s tongue left Carolyn referring to David as “Daniel.” It’s odd that the two Daniels were both heralded by these small inadvertences.

This episode marks, not only the final appearance of Nicholas, but also that of Roger. Louis Edmonds will play Roger’s counterpart in the Parallel Time segment, and as these episodes are being taped he is playing still another iteration of Roger on the feature film House of Dark Shadows. He will also be back in another role later on. But all the character development Roger has gone through since we first saw him in episode 1 is at an end.

Monday’s episode gave Roger his real sendoff, and my post about it summed up his history. I will just mention here that when I first saw Dark Shadows, Roger was something of a puzzle to me. That was the 1990s, when I saw it on what was then The SciFi Channel. The first episode I saw was #193, featuring art dealer Portia Fitzsimmons, but I didn’t have a chance to watch it at all regularly until a month or so after that, when Barnabas had already joined the cast. By that point Roger was already very much confined to the margins.

Curious as to when the dazzling Mrs Fitzsimmons would return, I looked online and found what is now the Dark Shadows wiki. I was disappointed to find that she was a one-off character. I also found that her function was to bring to a head a major story centering on Roger. I then looked through the episode summaries of the first weeks of the show. Those were quite terse and indigestible, meant to remind people who had seen the episodes of points they had forgotten. But one thing I did gather from them was that Roger had been a major character when the show started, indeed its chief villain. I couldn’t imagine the sardonic but lovable Roger of 1967 and 1968 in that capacity, and when I finally saw those episodes many years later I was thrilled by Edmonds’ performance.

One of the strongest themes of Roger’s character in his early days as a villain was his open hatred of David. It is nice for longtime viewers that he makes his final exit with an affectionate fatherly hand on David’s shoulder.

Episode 978: Perhaps for the last time

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.”

Episode 974: The has-beens

Dark Shadows spent a few months trying to put a story together from some themes drawn from the works of H. P. Lovecraft. A race of Elder Gods known as the Leviathan People wanted to escape from their long captivity in the underworld, retake the Earth, and destroy humankind. To that end, they controlled the minds of several people in and around the village of Collinsport, formed them into a cult, and entrusted them with the care of a fast-growing, shape-shifting monster. When the monster was able to assume the form of a grown man, he was supposed to be joined to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in an unholy ceremony that would transform Carolyn into the same sort of being he was, and mark the beginning of the Time of the Leviathan People.

In #965, the unholy ceremony was underway. But the monster, who when he first appeared as an adult invited people to “Call me Jabe,” had decided he would rather become a human than turn Carolyn into a Leviathan. So he called to Carolyn’s distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, to whisk her away from the scene while he used the Leviathan sceptre to smash the Leviathan box, causing the Leviathan altar to explode and the Leviathan high priest to declare that the time of the Leviathans was over. He told Jabe that he had not only ruined the Leviathans’ grand design, but had doomed himself. His squamous, rugose, and paleogean form was his only true form; the tall young man is just a projection that cannot survive on its own.

Evidently, the original plan was that Jabe’s rebellion would begin a second half of the Leviathan arc. In that half, the chief villain would be a Leviathan who had been roaming the Earth for centuries and who wielded powers as great as Jabe’s even though he could not fulfill Jabe’s intended role as harbinger of Leviathan world dominion. The battle that Barnabas, Jabe, and their allies waged against that villain would involve a trip back in time to the 1790s, during a brief visit to which period Barnabas had first encountered the Leviathans. That return to the 1790s would tie the Leviathans into the tales that have become basic to the show’s backstory, including the stories of the gracious Josette, well-meaning governess Vicki, and Barnabas’ first vampire curse.

They abandoned that plan in some haste. The Leviathan arc never came together as a coherent story, and it was a flop in the ratings. So they never introduced the second Leviathan villain. In his place, they brought back suave warlock Nicholas Blair, who had been one of the villains in 1968, and made him the high priest of the cult and Jabe’s supervisor. When we hear about past deeds that Nicholas could not have done, they nonsensically attribute them either to Mr Strak, a character whose whole point was that he was only on the show once and could never be seen or heard of again, or to Jabe himself, who is four months old. The ghost who was supposed to usher in the return to the eighteenth century turns up in two episodes, does some shouting, then meets wicked witch Angelique, who tells him that he is irrelevant to the story and causes him to disappear forever.

Now, the show is gearing up to tell a story about a parallel universe that Barnabas has found in the east wing of the great house of Collinwood. But all the actors we need to kick that story off are in the cast of the film House of Dark Shadows, which had started principal photography by the time this episode was taped. So we have to find a way to take the characters left over from the Leviathan arc and make a story out of whatever it is they are doing.

Even though Nicholas has said in so many words that the Leviathan segment is over, he and his henchman Bruno are still hanging around Collinsport. They are joined by a third stooge, Angelique’s estranged husband Sky Rumson. Sky had been a fabulously successful publisher because of the deal he made when he met Nicholas and sold his soul to him, but now that the Leviathans have been defeated his enterprises are going under. Sky has apparently been crashing at Bruno’s place.

Bruno and Sky are holding a young woman named Sabrina Stuart prisoner. Sabrina had shown up and offered Bruno a packet of cash to leave Collinsport and forget about her fiancé, Chris Jennings, whom he knows to be a werewolf. Bruno refused to leave, saying that he hopes to exploit Chris’ curse for his own evil purposes. Sabrina then drew a gun on him. Before she could shoot, Sky bumbled in and distracted her. Bruno ordered Sky to guard Sabrina while he contacted Nicholas. Sky resented Bruno’s commands, but obeyed them anyway.

When Sky gets Sabrina into Bruno’s back room, she asks him what they are going to do to Chris. Sky lampshades the fact that there is no reason for him to be on the show when he says that he has never heard of Chris and has no idea what is going on. After Bruno and Nicholas have conferred, Sabrina tells Sky that they seem to have forgotten about him. Sky protests that this is impossible, since Nicholas had promised to talk with him about his future. He goes out to the front room, and sees that Sabrina was right. Bruno and Nicholas have in fact left without him.

Sky finds Angelique sitting in the corner, waiting for him. She left him when she learned that he was a pawn of the Leviathans and he tried to set fire to her. She taunts him for his reduced circumstances:

ANGELIQUE: From tycoon to lackey. My, how the mighty are fallen.

SKY: Angelique, what are you doing here?

ANGELIQUE: Oh, I came to see you, Sky.

SKY: How did you know where to find me?

ANGELIQUE: Oh, I’ve been keeping a very close watch on your activities. Tell me-how does it feel to be a has-been?

SKY: What are you talking about?

ANGELIQUE: That’s what you are, you know.

SKY: I said, what are you talking about?

ANGELIQUE: Every one of your business ventures is a disaster. There’s nothing you can do about it, because all you are now is Nicholas Blair’s slave.

SKY: That’s not true! I’m very important to him!

ANGELIQUE: Oh, don’t be absurd. Consider right now, what you’re doing- what he has you doing. Keeping guard over a helpless young girl. You’re not important to Nicholas. He doesn’t care anything about you.

SKY: That’s not true.

ANGELIQUE: What does Nicholas plan to do with that girl anyway? Or hasn’t he consulted you?

SKY: Angelique, shut up!

ANGELIQUE: What’s the matter, Sky? Am I making you unhappy?

SKY: Get off my back!

ANGELIQUE: [Chuckling] Oh, you’ve grown quite thin-skinned in your declining days, haven’t you?

Shall I tell you how it’s all going to end? Nicholas is going to find some ingenious way of doing himself in, he always does. And then you’re going to be alone. All alone. With no one to turn to. And then… Someone’s going to put you out of your misery. Who knows? It may even be me. Well, I better not keep you any longer. I know you have an important job to do in the next room.

Angelique tells Sky off. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique’s sarcastic characterization of guarding Sabrina as “an important job” not only reflects the lowly status of the work compared to the executive responsibilities Sky recently had as the head of a big business. The story has passed Sabrina and Chris by as completely as it has passed by Sky, Nicholas, and Bruno. Chris knows that on nights of the full moon, he will become an animal who, if not restrained, will kill at least one random person. Both magical and scientific means to relieve him of his curse have failed, but he has friends who will keep him cooped up on those nights so that he doesn’t hurt anyone. Yet he persistently refuses to let them do so. He is deliberately choosing to be a serial murderer. Not only is there no moral ambiguity about him, he has no plans or goals to draw our curiosity and win our sympathies in spite of ourselves. He is a simply and tediously bad person, and to the extent that livelier characters go along with him we like them less. Since Sabrina has no interest in anything other than her relationship with Chris, the two of them are both useless.

Nicholas is puzzled that Jabe continues to exist. He thinks that Jabe’s love for Carolyn, whom he has married, is giving him such a strong will to live that he has managed to hold onto his humanoid form for so long. As Angelique indicated when she told Sky that “Nicholas is going to find some ingenious way of doing himself in, he always does,” Nicholas’ run on the show in 1968 ended with the total failure of all his efforts and his abrupt recall to Hell. But he hopes that he can turn things around for himself. He was only seconded to the Leviathans by his real boss, Satan. He thinks he might be able to get his career back on track in Satan’s organization if he can be the one to destroy Jabe. To that end, he wants to use the werewolf to kill Carolyn, thereby depriving Jabe of his zest for life and making him fade away.

Siccing the werewolf on Carolyn is a typical Nicholas scheme. Even in his monstrous form, Jabe was defenseless against werewolves. So all Nicholas has to do is set the werewolf on him. Bringing Carolyn into it only increases the chances of failure. Moreover, Jabe is likely to be killed off soon, so we might have been willing to believe Nicholas would be the one to do it. But Carolyn has been a core member of the cast since the first week, so once Nicholas promulgates a scheme that involves her death, regular viewers know nothing will come of it.

Moreover, Nicholas has only a short time to make good his designs on Jabe. Angelique blames Jabe for Sky’s involvement with the Leviathans, and has taken a page from George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes by plaguing him with an autonomous shadow that occasionally appears to him. The shadow that attached itself to Anodos, MacDonald’s protagonist, was an allegory for anxiety as a consequence of unredeemed sin, but the shadow Angelique imposes on Jabe is a direct threat to his physical survival. It grows in size and intensity at each appearance, and when it engulfs Jabe entirely it will kill him.

In the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, Jabe calls on Angelique to relieve him of the shadow. Nicholas comes instead. Jabe asks him for help against the shadow. He refuses. He does say that he very much hopes that he, not Angelique, is the one who finishes Jabe off, but he will not try to remove the shadow even to improve his own odds of success. Again, we are left wondering why the camera keeps settling on Nicholas if he won’t take action to change the direction of the plot.

Angelique appears to Jabe after Nicholas has gone. Jabe pleads with her to lift the shadow, and she says no. He tells her he had nothing to do with Sky’s recruitment to the Leviathan cult, and that he barely knows Sky. Angelique knows these things to be true, so she pauses before she answers him. She tells him he was the center of the Leviathan conspiracy, so she blames him for everything done in the course of it.

We end up at Bruno’s place. Sky has told Chris that Sabrina is being held prisoner there, and has given him the key. Chris lets himself in and opens a closet. He finds Sky in it, strung up by his wrists and bleeding. Sky begs for help, and Bruno appears. He holds a gun on Chris and greets him with “Good evening, Mr Jennings! Sabrina and I have been waiting for you.”

Writer Gordon Russell deserves a lot of credit for taking this unpromising material and coming up with a well-constructed script with a fast pace and intelligent dialogue. The actors also do a good job, all of them except the woefully inept Geoffrey Scott as Sky.

But director Henry Kaplan really does let everyone down. The episode starts with a fantastically bad job of blocking. Bruno and Sabrina are standing at right angles to each other, enabling us to see both of their faces.

Unfortunately, this pose means that when Sabrina draws her gun, she is not pointing it at Bruno, but holding it in front of him and threatening to fire it into the wall. Kaplan’s habit of relying heavily on closeups in lieu of a visual strategy does nothing to obscure this, and viewers who missed yesterday may be genuinely puzzled as to who or what Bruno is afraid Sabrina will shoot.

Episode 970: Another road

Yesterday, Barnabas Collins went to the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood to search for the coffin that vampire Megan Todd occupies during the day. Barnabas is himself the vampire who ended Megan’s human life, passing his curse along to her. When his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, makes a characteristic remark and tells him “you must not feel personally about Megan Todd,” Barnabas asks “How can I feel any other way?” Most of Barnabas’ feelings, in this or any other matter, consist of pity for himself, but there is a trace of sympathy for Megan in there someplace, probably.

Now, Barnabas has taken Julia to a spot that he happened upon while looking for Megan. While Julia was in the carriage house on the estate with matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Barnabas saw two women who looked and sounded exactly like them in a brightly lit, fully furnished, heavily decorated room behind a pair of doors in the otherwise dark and empty east wing. Julia’s double was wearing a French maid outfit and giving orders to Liz’, which is probably someone’s fetish but which is totally out of character for the women Barnabas knows.

In #351, Barnabas was without a blood-thrall. Julia offered to guard his coffin during the day. They were not really friends at that point, and he reacted to her offer warily. Among his objections was that it was not suitable for her, as a medical doctor, to fill such a position. She assured him that she was not volunteering “to be your maid.” Longtime viewers might remember that line when they see Parallel Julia in her livery.

There was an invisible barrier in the doorway that Barnabas could not cross, and he was unable to attract the attention of the women who were so near to him, even when he shouted what he supposed to be their names. The doors closed, and when they opened again the barrier was gone, but so were the doubles of Julia and Liz, along with all the furnishings and lights that had surrounded them.

Thinking of what Barnabas has told her about the room, Julia hesitates to enter it with him. She dismisses her concern as “silly.” Regular viewers will perk up at this- labeling a fear as “silly” is the surest way of marking it as the basis of an upcoming major story point. Once inside the bare room, Julia starts thinking out loud:

JULIA: I was at Eliot Stokes’ house one night, oh, last spring. We were having a brandy after dinner and he started talking about time… He was complaining that we all simply accept it. We don’t have much choice, I thought.

But Eliot had been reading a theory. It sounded insane to me. A theory of parallel time… we live on this universe in 1970, right? We accept the fact that our time is the only time that we can truly know. Suppose time is like a road and parallel to it there’s another road. On one we live the lives we know, but on the other road our lives are different because we’re in a different time-band* and we’ve made different choices. For example, in that other band of time I could’ve made a different choice when I was at college. Instead of being a doctor I could’ve married and had children.

Barnabas, you don’t actually think through some warp in the time band that you have actually seen us living other lives?

BARNABAS: I don’t know, there’s got to be a more rational explanation.

JULIA: Must there?

So, now we know that we are about to launch a new kind of time travel story. The show has taken us back in time for long costume drama inserts, most notably from November 1967 to March 1968 when it was set in the 1790s and from March to November 1969 when it was set in 1897. Now they are going to travel sideways in time, and take us to a parallel universe where Julia is a maid and Liz is not the lady of the house.

Time bandits. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

At the end of the episode, Barnabas sees the room change again. Parallel Time Liz and Parallel Time Julia uncover a portrait that hangs there, the portrait of a woman whom PT Liz insists is dead and PT Julia insists is still the rightful mistress of the room. Barnabas recognizes the subject as the Parallel Time counterpart of his ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique.

With this, the behavior of PT Liz and PT Julia falls into place. We’re about to see a story derived from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. PT Julia is Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper maniacally devoted to Rebecca, the late wife of Maxim de Winter. PT Angelique is the one whose death and continued ownership of the room have been a point of contention between PT Julia and PT Liz. We’ve seen a photograph of Parallel Time counterparts of Barnabas’ distant cousin Quentin Collins and strange and troubled boy David Collins, signed “Your loving husband, Quentin.” PT Quentin is the one whom we have heard Liz say is returning with a new wife. In the main “time-band,” Quentin is a penniless rogue with a long supernatural backstory, but his counterpart is the master of Collinwood, and Liz ranks somewhere below the uniformed domestics in the household hierarchy. The David we know is the son of Liz’ brother Roger and a blonde fire witch named Laura Murdoch, but evidently his Parallel Time counterpart is the son of the counterparts of Quentin and Angelique. We have had no indication of who Quentin’s new wife is to be.

This is not the first reference to Rebecca on the show. When Clarice Blackburn joined the cast as housekeeper Mrs Johnson in September 1966, she was supposed to model the character on Mrs Danvers. Mrs Johnson came to Collinwood as a spy for Collins family nemesis Burke Devlin, driven by her certainty that Roger was responsible for the death of her beloved former employer Bill Malloy. Bill, like Rebecca, had drowned under suspicious circumstances, though he didn’t have much else in common with her. By the time the “Death of Bill Malloy” story played out, Mrs Johnson had taken on a new function as an inveterate gossip who made narrative progression possible by blabbing everything she knew to everyone she met. Blackburn’s outstanding talents made her a significant part of the show for quite some time; it’s a shame she isn’t going to be part of the upcoming segment.

Rebecca was not the only Du Maurier novel to inspire a story on Dark Shadows. Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis first freed Barnabas to prey upon the living after David and Mrs Johnson told him the plot of Du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek and claimed that it happened to one of the Collins ancestors. Searching for the treasure the pirate gave to the lady, Willie stumbled upon Barnabas’ coffin. He opened it, earning a bite that made him the vampire’s slave.

Willie’s mistake was that he did not know what kind of show he was on. When Dark Shadows began, executive producer Dan Curtis and ABC vice president for daytime programming Leonard Goldberg** meant for it to be the television equivalent of the “Gothic romance” novels that were so popular in those days. Du Maurier’s novels were among the cornerstones of the Gothic romance genre, and if it were still that kind of show in April 1967 Willie would have been on solid ground in his expectation that there might be a lot of jewels hidden in an unmarked coffin in the old mausoleum. But when Laura was on the show from December 1966 to March 1967, her story subsumed all the major plot threads into a tale of the supernatural. Willie and his sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, were on the show as in-betweeners to sweep up the last non-paranormal odds and ends and help introduce the next uncanny menace.

Now, the show is heading in the opposite direction, and Willie is back to help take us there. In Parallel Time, Dark Shadows will finally do the Daphne Du Maurier adaptation that didn’t work out in the Bill Malloy story and that was never meant to work out for Willie. But Megan has to be destroyed before Barnabas can decamp for Parallel Time, and he and Julia order Willie to destroy her.

It was not a foregone conclusion that Julia and Barnabas would want to stake Megan. At the moment, Julia is giving Barnabas injections meant to relieve him of the effects of the vampire curse. Similar injections had worked in 1968 and again during the 1897 segment. Julia shows Barnabas the cross she wears to ward Megan off, and he does not recoil from it. That suggests the injections are having some effect on him, even though he keeps complaining that they aren’t doing anything to curb his bloodlust. When Julia and Barnabas find Megan in the east wing, she refuses the injections. When they find that she is feeding on Roger, they conclude that she cannot be allowed to see another night.

Willie is horrified by the command to drive a stake through Megan’s heart. He protests that he doesn’t even know her. As Barnabas and Julia tell him of the nightmare that awaits everyone if he doesn’t do as they say, he starts to talk about his fiancée Roxanne and the secrets he has been keeping from her. He worries about the image she will have of him if she finds out that he is the former blood-thrall of one vampire and the destroyer of another. “I mean, she’s gonna be thinkin’ I’m weird or somethin’!” I suppose that would be an occupational hazard for blood-thralls.

Willie is worried Roxanne might get the wrong idea about him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is an odd moment when Julia is asking Liz about the east wing. Liz tells her that Roger knows more about the legends of the house than she does. When Julia was first on the show, she was posing as an historian looking into the old families of New England. In those days, Liz mentioned that Roger knew far less about the Collins past than she did, which fit with the original keynote of Roger’s character, an extreme lack of family feeling. But by this point, Roger has merged with the roles Louis Edmonds played in the 1790s and 1897 segments, both of whom were dedicated to the honor of the Collins name.

*The first appearance of this bit of Collinsport English.

**Not to be confused with his then-boss, network president Leonard Goldenson.

Episode 968: Look in the water, look into the fire

In #808, set in the year 1897, the chief villain was sorcerer Count Petofi. Petofi’s henchman Aristide threatened an enemy with “the mysterious shadow he can cast, the shadow that isn’t your own that follows you.” That suggested a borrowing from George MacDonald’s once-famous 1858 novel Phantastes, one of the forerunners of the “fantasy” genre. MacDonald’s protagonist, Anodos (whose name comes from the Greek for “No Way,”) travels through Fairyland. Anodos falls afoul of an ash tree, which uses its magical powers to plague him with an autonomous shadow. The shadow comes and goes as Anodos makes his journey; at times he finds himself morbidly attached to it, at other times full of despair at the sight of it. In a climactic section, he is trapped in a tower, alone with the shadow and afraid he will remain solitary forevermore. He is freed of the shadow in the end.

Though MacDonald’s popularity faded as the years went on, he was still quite popular in some circles in the 1960s, a beneficiary of the enthusiastic endorsements of writers like C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and W. H. Auden, who admired not only his manner of evoking a dream but also his intense Christian fervor. He still has a following today. Writer Meredith Finch and artists Christine Norrie and Andrew Pepoy adapted Phantastes into a graphic novel in 2022.

Shortly after the shadow is attached to him, Anodos happens upon a cottage in the woods. He enters, and meets a wise woman. She tells him what has happened:

The woman never raised her face, the upper part of which alone I could see distinctly; but, as soon as I stepped within the threshold, she began to read aloud, in a low and not altogether unpleasing voice, from an ancient little volume which she held open with one hand on the table upon which stood the lamp. What she read was something like this:

“So, then, as darkness had no beginning, neither will it ever have an end. So, then, is it eternal. The negation of aught else, is its affirmation. Where the light cannot come, there abideth the darkness. The light doth but hollow a mine out of the infinite extension of the darkness. And ever upon the steps of the light treadeth the darkness; yea, springeth in fountains and wells amidst it, from the secret channels of its mighty sea. Truly, man is but a passing flame, moving unquietly amid the surrounding rest of night; without which he yet could not be, and whereof he is in part compounded.”

As I drew nearer, and she read on, she moved a little to turn a leaf of the dark old volume, and I saw that her face was sallow and slightly forbidding. Her forehead was high, and her black eyes repressedly quiet. But she took no notice of me. This end of the cottage, if cottage it could be called, was destitute of furniture, except the table with the lamp, and the chair on which the woman sat. In one corner was a door, apparently of a cupboard in the wall, but which might lead to a room beyond. Still the irresistible desire which had made me enter the building urged me: I must open that door, and see what was beyond it. I approached, and laid my hand on the rude latch. Then the woman spoke, but without lifting her head or looking at me: “You had better not open that door.” This was uttered quite quietly; and she went on with her reading, partly in silence, partly aloud; but both modes seemed equally intended for herself alone. The prohibition, however, only increased my desire to see; and as she took no further notice, I gently opened the door to its full width, and looked in. At first, I saw nothing worthy of attention. It seemed a common closet, with shelves on each hand, on which stood various little necessaries for the humble uses of a cottage. In one corner stood one or two brooms, in another a hatchet and other common tools; showing that it was in use every hour of the day for household purposes. But, as I looked, I saw that there were no shelves at the back, and that an empty space went in further; its termination appearing to be a faintly glimmering wall or curtain, somewhat less, however, than the width and height of the doorway where I stood. But, as I continued looking, for a few seconds, towards this faintly luminous limit, my eyes came into true relation with their object. All at once, with such a shiver as when one is suddenly conscious of the presence of another in a room where he has, for hours, considered himself alone, I saw that the seemingly luminous extremity was a sky, as of night, beheld through the long perspective of a narrow, dark passage, through what, or built of what, I could not tell. As I gazed, I clearly discerned two or three stars glimmering faintly in the distant blue. But, suddenly, and as if it had been running fast from a far distance for this very point, and had turned the corner without abating its swiftness, a dark figure sped into and along the passage from the blue opening at the remote end. I started back and shuddered, but kept looking, for I could not help it. On and on it came, with a speedy approach but delayed arrival; till, at last, through the many gradations of approach, it seemed to come within the sphere of myself, rushed up to me, and passed me into the cottage. All I could tell of its appearance was, that it seemed to be a dark human figure. Its motion was entirely noiseless, and might be called a gliding, were it not that it appeared that of a runner, but with ghostly feet. I had moved back yet a little to let him pass me, and looked round after him instantly. I could not see him.

“Where is he?” I said, in some alarm, to the woman, who still sat reading.

“There, on the floor, behind you,” she said, pointing with her arm half-outstretched, but not lifting her eyes. I turned and looked, but saw nothing. Then with a feeling that there was yet something behind me, I looked round over my shoulder; and there, on the ground, lay a black shadow, the size of a man. It was so dark, that I could see it in the dim light of the lamp, which shone full upon it, apparently without thinning at all the intensity of its hue.

“I told you,” said the woman, “you had better not look into that closet.”

“What is it?” I said, with a growing sense of horror.

“It is only your shadow that has found you,” she replied. “Everybody’s shadow is ranging up and down looking for him. I believe you call it by a different name in your world: yours has found you, as every person’s is almost certain to do who looks into that closet, especially after meeting one in the forest, whom I dare say you have met.”

Here, for the first time, she lifted her head, and looked full at me: her mouth was full of long, white, shining teeth; and I knew that I was in the house of the ogre. I could not speak, but turned and left the house, with the shadow at my heels. “A nice sort of valet to have,” I said to myself bitterly, as I stepped into the sunshine, and, looking over my shoulder, saw that it lay yet blacker in the full blaze of the sunlight. Indeed, only when I stood between it and the sun, was the blackness at all diminished. I was so bewildered—stunned—both by the event itself and its suddenness, that I could not at all realise to myself what it would be to have such a constant and strange attendance; but with a dim conviction that my present dislike would soon grow to loathing, I took my dreary way through the wood.

The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald: Lilith and Phantastes, edited by Anne Fremantle (Noonday Press, 1954) pages 311-314*

Petofi never got round to casting the mysterious shadow on any of his enemies or doing anything else to remind people of MacDonald’s works. But today wicked witch Angelique picks up on Aristide’s suggestion. One-man wrecking crew Jeb Hawkes, alias Jabe, comes home to the carriage house on the estate of Colllinwood and finds Angelique waiting for him. She tells Jabe she blames him for something that happened to her husband. He denies responsibility. Ignoring his protests, she trims a piece of black construction paper into a crude figure. She places the figure on his chest and tells him it will spell his doom.

Jabe holds the paper doll Angelique made. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Jabe has no idea how this could be. Angelique thinks aloud for a moment about keeping him guessing, then decides she may as well tell him. She instructs him to look into the fire. When he does, he has a vision of himself asleep in bed (fully clothed, of course, it’s Collinsport) when a shadow in the form of Angelique’s cutout appears, engulfs him, and makes him scream. We cut back to the carriage house, where Jabe keeps telling Angelique that she while she may be able to make him have visions, she can’t cause such a thing to happen in reality. She assures him she can.

The carriage house is a cottage in the woods, so in this scene Angelique combines the roles of the wise woman who explains the shadow curse to Anodos and the ash tree that places it. The cutout is a much sillier visual than was the image Anodos saw in chapter four of Phantastes, when his curse began:

When [the Moon] shone out again, with a brilliancy increased by the contrast, I saw plainly on the path before me—from around which at this spot the trees receded, leaving a small space of green sward—the shadow of a large hand, with knotty joints and protuberances here and there. Especially I remarked, even in the midst of my fear, the bulbous points of the fingers. I looked hurriedly all around, but could see nothing from which such a shadow should fall. Now, however, that I had a direction, however undetermined, in which to project my apprehension, the very sense of danger and need of action overcame that stifling which is the worst property of fear. I reflected in a moment, that if this were indeed a shadow, it was useless to look for the object that cast it in any other direction than between the shadow and the moon. I looked, and peered, and intensified my vision, all to no purpose. I could see nothing of that kind, not even an ash-tree in the neighbourhood. Still the shadow remained; not steady, but moving to and fro, and once I saw the fingers close, and grind themselves close, like the claws of a wild animal, as if in uncontrollable longing for some anticipated prey. There seemed but one mode left of discovering the substance of this shadow. I went forward boldly, though with an inward shudder which I would not heed, to the spot where the shadow lay, threw myself on the ground, laid my head within the form of the hand, and turned my eyes towards the moon. Good heavens! what did I see? I wonder that ever I arose, and that the very shadow of the hand did not hold me where I lay until fear had frozen my brain. I saw the strangest figure; vague, shadowy, almost transparent, in the central parts, and gradually deepening in substance towards the outside, until it ended in extremities capable of casting such a shadow as fell from the hand, through the awful fingers of which I now saw the moon. The hand was uplifted in the attitude of a paw about to strike its prey. But the face, which throbbed with fluctuating and pulsatory visibility—not from changes in the light it reflected, but from changes in its own conditions of reflecting power, the alterations being from within, not from without—it was horrible. I do not know how to describe it. It caused a new sensation. Just as one cannot translate a horrible odour, or a ghastly pain, or a fearful sound, into words, so I cannot describe this new form of awful hideousness. I can only try to describe something that is not it, but seems somewhat parallel to it; or at least is suggested by it. It reminded me of what I had heard of vampires; for the face resembled that of a corpse more than anything else I can think of; especially when I can conceive such a face in motion, but not suggesting any life as the source of the motion. The features were rather handsome than otherwise, except the mouth, which had scarcely a curve in it. The lips were of equal thickness; but the thickness was not at all remarkable, even although they looked slightly swollen. They seemed fixedly open, but were not wide apart. Of course I did not remark these lineaments at the time: I was too horrified for that. I noted them afterwards, when the form returned on my inward sight with a vividness too intense to admit of my doubting the accuracy of the reflex. But the most awful of the features were the eyes. These were alive, yet not with life.

They seemed lighted up with an infinite greed. A gnawing voracity, which devoured the devourer, seemed to be the indwelling and propelling power of the whole ghostly apparition. I lay for a few moments simply imbruted with terror; when another cloud, obscuring the moon, delivered me from the immediately paralysing effects of the presence to the vision of the object of horror, while it added the force of imagination to the power of fear within me; inasmuch as, knowing far worse cause for apprehension than before, I remained equally ignorant from what I had to defend myself, or how to take any precautions: he might be upon me in the darkness any moment. I sprang to my feet, and sped I knew not whither, only away from the spectre. I thought no longer of the path, and often narrowly escaped dashing myself against a tree, in my headlong flight of fear.

The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald: Lilith and Phantastes, edited by Anne Fremantle (Noonday Press, 1954) pages 284-286

The only images of the sky we ever see on Dark Shadows are stock footage and stills; a massive translucent figure looming in front of the moon, an immense shadow itself casting a shadow on the ground below, is far beyond anything they have attempted. So we can understand why they decided to go to the opposite extreme, and try to build an initially unprepossessing prop into something powerful. Moreover, the show at this point has an audience consisting very largely of elementary school students, so the sight of a major character using scissors to trim a figure out of construction paper will be relatable.

The shadow that follows Anodos does not develop the ability to cause physical harm to him. It wears him down psychologically, and is the Reverend MacDonald’s allegory for anxiety resulting from sin. Jabe’s vision tells us that this story will deviate from the source material, and that his shadow will grow in size and intensity until it kills Jabe.

Of course, a story about a dark shadow involves the show making reference to its own title. Around the time Dark Shadows was on the air, it was a fad for teenagers in movie theaters to cheer whenever a character said the title of the film. I wonder if the appearances of Jabe’s unwanted companion prompted many members of the original audience to cheer.

Closing Miscellany

There is a moment that may not mean much to first-time viewers, but that will astonish confirmed fans. Jabe goes into the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard introduces him to Angelique, whom she knows only as a fellow rich lady. When Liz starts telling Jabe about Angelique’s stately home, Angelique volunteers that Jabe has been there and that he is close to her husband. Throughout the preceding 193 weeks, characters have been able to count on their enemies to keep their secrets for them. Disclosing information relevant to the plot to Liz is particularly inconceivable, even in the most desperate circumstances. When Angelique disregards these rules, she is going so far against the grain that my wife, Mrs Acilius, wondered for a second if Lara Parker had decided to throw the script away and blow up the show.

Today marks the final appearance of two actors on Dark Shadows. Roger Davis first appeared in #404 as an unpleasant man named Peter Bradford; today he is Peter’s ghost. Mr Davis played several other parts in the interval, all of them selfish, handsy men with an irritating habit of shouting their lines in a voice rising, not from the diaphragm, but from tightened rectal sphincters. Making matters even worse, Mr Davis is a highly trained, accomplished actor who is capable of doing excellent work. Once in a rare while, he deigns to put his skills to use on Dark Shadows, and he was part of one or two of the best scenes on the show. But most of the time, he chooses to put all of that aside and instead assaults his female scene partners on camera and subjects us to his unvarying anal screech. When Angelique dismisses him, we forgive her all her past misdeeds. Mr Davis will be back as the juvenile lead in the feature House of Dark Shadows, but at least we no longer have to dread 4:00 PM on weekdays.

Christopher Bernau also makes his departure as Philip Todd, Jabe’s onetime foster father. The part of Philip didn’t give Bernau much to work with, and he compounded the difficulties by playing him as if he were Jack Benny. But Bernau, too, was a very capable actor, and he was a true professional. A few times he has shown us what he can do, and he will be missed. Later in the 1970s Bernau achieved fame in two parts that harked back to Dark Shadows. He played Dracula on Broadway in 1977. That same year, he joined the cast of The Guiding Light as womanizing rogue Alan Spaulding, a part he played for several years until his death, of AIDS, in 1989. I reminisced about Bernau’s Alan Spaulding on Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day:

I was a kid when Bernau joined GUIDING LIGHT. My mother watched that show, and I had several times attempted to watch it with her, but it always defeated me after 5 or 10 minutes. It just seemed like a window into the deepest level of Hell, the frozen cavern where absolutely nothing happens. But Bernau caught my imagination. I could watch entire episodes if he was in them.

Years later, when I watched DARK SHADOWS on the Sci-Fi Channel, I realized what made Bernau so compelling on GUIDING LIGHT. He was doing a Jonathan Frid imitation. Within moments of first seeing Barnabas, I exclaimed “Alan Spaulding!” It was only years later that I learned Bernau had been on DARK SHADOWS.

Comment left 10 December 2020 by Acilius, on Danny Horn, “Episode 888: Little Shop,” 26 June 2016, Dark Shadows Every Day.

Alan Spaulding was such a hit for Bernau that there can be no doubt a Jonathan Frid imitation was a better starting place for him than was a Jack Benny imitation, at least in daytime.

The closing credits run over a view of the landing at the top of the foyer stairs. We see this space straight-on, an unusual angle. Typically they tilt the camera way back and look up at it. Perhaps they are showing off some new equipment.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Credits on Twitter.**

*I first heard of Phantastes from a January 2022 episode of God and Comics, a podcast that three Episcopal priests did until shortly after one of them flaked off and became a Roman Catholic. When they talked about Anodos’ shadow, I wished I had a Dark Shadows blog, so I could tell people about the connection to this story.

My copy of The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald is one I came across at a charity book sale in May of 2025. I’ve had it on the table next to the spot where I sit when I write these posts ever since. It isn’t my kind of writing. I usually enjoy dry, matter-of-fact prose, while MacDonald was rarely less florid than in the passages above. Besides which, MacDonald was a sometime clergyman whose evangelistic zeal led even the Reverend Misters hosting God and Comics to admit that his books reminded them too much of their day jobs for their taste. For my part, I say there’s a place for everything, and the proper place for MacDonald’s heavy-handed style of preaching is a pulpit in a church I don’t attend.

**As the saying goes, people who call Twitter “X” would have turned you in to the Stasi.

Episode 955: What I was and what I always shall be

What a First-Time Viewer Might See

A woman is in a bedroom, packing a bag. A man bursts in with a flaming torch. She exclaims:

Sky, what are you doing?

SKY: I wanted it to work out. I really wanted you to be with me, and I’m sorry you can’t. Goodbye Angelique.

Sky then charges at Angelique with the torch, and we break for the opening title. When we return, Angelique is dodging the flames and they are quarreling. She takes a statuette and tightens a cloth around its neck. Sky begins choking. Angelique orders him to put the torch in the fireplace. He does. She continues tightening the cloth, and he collapses. The actions combine with the eerie music on the soundtrack to tell us that Angelique is casting a spell on Sky. Angelique kneels over Sky and talks about how their marriage was all wrong from the beginning. She takes on a calm tone while allowing that they are equally at fault really; “We both kept from each other our darkest secrets.” She tells Sky she really did love him and wishes it could have worked out between them. All the while she delivers this speech in her mature, thoughtful voice, she is pulling the cloth ever tighter, apparently strangling Sky to death.

We cut to a terrace, where a sinister looking man is silently calling for someone named Maggie to come to him. A young woman comes and tells the sinister looking man she felt she had to come to that spot. She is Maggie, and she calls him Barnabas. She says he doesn’t look like himself, and asks if he has been ill. He is distressed at her questions. She says that sometimes he seems very warm, and other times it seems she doesn’t know him at all. He gives her a ring, and tells her it is very dear to him and a token of their deep friendship. They embrace. He looks at her neck and opens his mouth. His canines are unusually long. A young man calls out a sharp “Excuse me!”

The young man marches up, addresses Maggie as “Miss Evans,” and apologizes for interrupting the moment. He insists on talking with Barnabas alone. When Maggie Evans has left them, the young man sternly observes that “I don’t have to ask what would have happened if I hadn’t arrived when I did.” He tells Barnabas that he must stay away from Maggie, because “In your present state you can only hurt her, you know that.” He says that it is almost sunup. Because someone named “Julia” has been unable to locate someone named “Willie,” he will accompany Barnabas home and will spend the day there.

We cut to the young man dozing in a chair. He is awakened by a knock at the door. He answers it, and finds Angelique. He reacts to the sight of her with shock. She greets him with “Well, don’t just stand there, Quentin. Kiss me.” After a commercial break, she repeats the command. Quentin gives a tiny smooch to a spot of air a few inches in front of Angelique’s lips, prompting her to remark that “You never meant it before, but you used to do a lot better than that.”

Angelique tells Quentin that since they last saw each other, “We’re both a great deal older, and I hope one of us at least is wiser.” Neither of them looks to be much more than 30, so one might assume that by “a great deal older” she means that they are in very different stages of life than they were in the few years of their separation. Quentin tells Angelique that “Barnabas said you hadn’t grown any older, and he was right.” She responds that he also looks exactly the same as when last they met. Since we saw in the first scene that Angelique has the power to cast magic spells, this exchange raises the possibility that they may be much older than they look.

Quentin wonders why Angelique has come back. She says “Oh, Quentin, don’t look so apprehensive. Actually, I came here hoping that I’d be able to see Barnabas, that I’d be in time, but obviously, I’m not.” Quentin guardedly asks “What do you mean obviously?” She says that she knows what has happened. Barnabas went to her house the previous evening and told her that her husband had betrayed him to someone called “Jeb Hawkes.”

Quentin is startled to hear this about Sky. Angelique explains. “Barnabas has told you all about the Leviathans, hasn’t he?… Sky was one of them, before I met him. I left him tonight and I’m never going back to him.” Whatever the Leviathans are, it seems genuinely to sadden Quentin that Angelique found out she had unknowingly married one. He asks if there is anything he can do to help her.

Angelique tells him there is nothing he can do. She goes on to explain: “The truth is my interest in you in the past was never more than a device intended to upset Barnabas. I was very good at devices, always have been. Perhaps, in spite of my feelings for Sky, Barnabas has always been my one true love.” Since Quentin was so unhappy to see Angelique and she told him that his kisses were never sincere, it is not too surprising that this confession does not seem to wound his ego in any way. He tells her that he is sorry it is too late for her to see Barnabas, and he sounds like he means it. He is quick to agree when she says she wants to spend the day in the house, and he suggests she take a nap in an upstairs bedroom.

Angelique says that “It feels good to be back in this house.” She reminisces about a time when she lived there and was happy. She says “I’ll sleep in Ang-… I’ll sleep in Josette’s room.” It sounds like the name she checked herself partway through saying was her own. Since she did live there, it would make sense that there would be a room that others would call “Angelique’s room,” but she does not refer to herself in the third person at any other point in the episode, so we are left wondering if the actress just slipped.

The next scene takes place in the same room. Again Quentin is by himself, this time reading the newspaper. Again he is disturbed by a knock on the front door. He gets up, mutters “All right,” and opens it. To our surprise, he finds Sky. It had looked like Angelique killed Sky in the first act, but here he is, without so much as a frog in his throat to show that he was strangled nearly to death this morning.

Sky tells Quentin that he believes his wife is in the house, and asks if he may come in. Quentin says that he would of course let him in if his wife were there, and before he can deny that she is, Angelique comes downstairs. Quentin asks Angelique if she wants him to stay; she says he can go.

Sky tells Angelique that he has spent the day with someone named “Nicholas Blair.” This Nicholas told him all of Angelique’s secrets. Angelique says Nicholas would have done better to tell Sky about her “before you almost got yourself killed.” Sky ignores this and says that things haven’t really changed between them- he still loves her. She points out that just a few hours ago, she had to choke him out to stop him killing her, not a common event in happy marriages. He says that Nicholas has agreed to let them live together if “you become one of us.” Evidently Nicholas, too, is a “Leviathan,” and is inviting Angelique to become one. She rejects this, saying that she wants nothing to do with Nicholas or the Leviathans and would be interested in Sky only if he broke free of them. They part.

Barnabas enters, a tense expression on his face. He tells Angelique that Quentin told him she was there. Angelique praises Quentin for his kindness and understanding and tells Barnabas that he was right about everything. Calling herself a fool, she says that what has happened to him is her fault. She thought she could trust Sky with Barnabas’ secret, and it was Sky’s betrayal that brought his current misfortune upon Barnabas.

Barnabas relaxes, and tells Angelique that she didn’t hurt him deliberately. She concedes this point, but says that she did do so “the first time.” He says that was long ago and is best forgotten. She embraces him, then says that it is “ironic, how it happened in the same identical way.” The more she talks about whatever it is she is referring to, the more visibly uncomfortable Barnabas grows. Finally she says that maybe this means that “we could become closer friends than we were before… Perhaps it means that we can start again. Start at the beginning as we did the first time.” That’s too much for him, and he turns away from her. She keeps going on about how they are “both outcasts,” and he looks like he wants to run screaming into the night.

She mentions Nicholas, and suddenly Barnabas’ eyes are fixed on her again. She hadn’t known he hadn’t known Nicholas was involved. He declares that he must tell Maggie that Nicholas has returned, because when Nicholas was around before he tried to kill Maggie. Barnabas tells Angelique to wait for him, and rushes out to tell Maggie about the new danger she is in. Angelique gives snippy responses to each mention of Maggie’s name, and looks jealous when Barnabas leaves.

Back on the terrace, Barnabas tells Maggie about Nicholas in a quiet, urgent voice. She assures him she knows how to take care of herself. He tells her that “you mean far too much to me” for him to be happy when she is in the kind of danger Nicholas represents. We see Angelique eavesdropping from the shadows, fuming.

In the next scene, Angelique is still on the terrace, still eavesdropping, but Maggie is inside the house with Quentin. They address each other as “Miss Evans” and “Mr Collins.” Quentin Collins is urging Maggie to stay away from Barnabas “for your own good and for his.” He tells her that “the people he was involved with” are “out to kill him,” and that “if they know you are seeing him, they may do it through you,” by using her as the bait for a trap. Maggie will not agree to stop seeing Barnabas.

At this confirmation that Maggie and Barnabas have been “seeing each other,” Angelique turns to the camera. “You asked if there was any way you could help me, Quentin. Well, there is. Only, you’ll never be aware of it. I am what I was and what I shall always be. I call upon the powers of darkness to help me once again. Make a flame where there was no flame before and let that flame transmit the power of love to those who look into it.” The fireplace in the room where Maggie and Quentin are talking to each other flares up and they look into it. Angelique does some more spellcasting, and all of a sudden Maggie and Quentin are calling each other by their first names, embracing, and talking about their mad love for each other. They look at their hands and notice each of them now sports a trident-shaped symbol that had not been there before.

What a Longtime Viewer Might See

Barnabas’ trouble, unspecified in today’s dialogue, is that the Leviathans have turned him back into what he was from the 1790s until March 1968, a vampire. Barnabas was one of the pop culture crazes of the 1960s, and Dark Shadows was known to millions who never saw a second of the show as the soap opera with a vampire. So even first time viewers were unlikely to need an explanation. But not mentioning it will bring fond memories back for some longtime fans, since Barnabas had been on the show for 40 weeks before the word “vampire” was uttered.

Maggie is the governess to the children at the great house of Collinwood. In 1967, Barnabas abducted her, tortured her, and tried to erase her personality and replace it with that of his lost love Josette. Her memory of that experience has been wiped several times, once by Nicholas, and now she thinks Barnabas is just peachy. They’ve been getting very cozy for the last several weeks. The ring that he gives her today is Josette’s.

Maggie wearing Josette’s ring. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Considering their past, it’s pretty weird Barnabas has a shot with Maggie, but it wouldn’t be any less weird if Angelique had a shot with Barnabas. Not only did she kill him and raise him from the dead as a vampire, she was also responsible for the deaths of the people he cared most about, including Josette, his mother, and his little sister. Her approach to him today reminds us that they have so much in common that it often seems as if Barnabas were not only cursed by Angelique, but possessed by her.

Maggie’s predecessor as governess was the well-meaning Victoria Winters. Vicki was Dark Shadows‘ original audience identification character, and drove most of the action in the 42 weeks before Barnabas debuted in April 1967. When Barnabas replaced Vicki as the show’s big attraction, she kept putting herself in situations where it would be difficult for him not to bite her. It was as if Vicki knew that she was a character on a show of which Barnabas was the star, and she was working to establish herself in the A story. The terrace set made its first appearance in one of those situations, in #299. Vicki hugs Barnabas and moves her neck as close as she can get it to his fangs, before a friend shows up and interrupts him, pushing Vicki back out of the plot. Quentin’s interruption brings that scene back to the minds of those who saw that episode.

Angelique and Quentin got to know each other when Barnabas had traveled back in time to 1897 and the show was, for eight months in 1969, a costume drama set in that year. By the end of that period, she was as monomaniacally fixated on Quentin as she had previously been on Barnabas. She didn’t even care that Barnabas was off chasing another woman. So we might wonder if she is putting on a brave face when she tells Quentin that she merely used him as a means of getting Barnabas’ attention.

From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. That segment introduced Angelique as the witch who first made Barnabas a vampire. The spell she casts on Maggie and Quentin today is identical to one she cast on Josette and Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah in 1795, right down to the tridents on their hands. Since Maggie and Josette are both played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, the connection will be hard for longtime viewers to miss.

First time viewers might be puzzled by Maggie and Quentin’s protestations that their attraction to one another does not make sense. Even if Maggie has been “seeing” Barnabas, she and Quentin are such a gorgeous pair of young people that it would be weird if they didn’t get together sooner or later. But those who saw #691 will remember that at that point, Quentin was a ghost who tried to strangle Maggie. During the 1897 storyline, history was changed so that Quentin didn’t die, but after the manner of time on Dark Shadows that difference only took effect on the anniversary of the event. The haunting still took place, and Maggie and the others affected by it remember vividly what Quentin’s ghost did.

Episode 954: Her chosen profession

The Leviathan People are an unseen race of Elder Gods who want to displace humankind and retake the Earth. To that end, they have assembled a secret cult of people who are under their control.

One of the most fervently devoted cultists is Megan Todd. Megan is standing on the terrace of the great house of Collinwood. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, former leader of the cult, appears. Megan tells Barnabas he is a traitor to the Leviathans. Barnabas tells her he is more than that- he has become a vampire. He bites Megan, breaking the Leviathans’ grip on her and taking her into his own power.

In the 1790s, Barnabas was briefly married to a wicked witch named Angelique. It was Angelique who, in those days, first made him a vampire. She has mellowed considerably since then. She has renounced the use of her powers and is living on an island off the coast of central Maine with her husband, a businessman named Sky Rumson. Barnabas turns up in Angelique’s bedroom and tells her that the Leviathans have made him a vampire again. He also tells her that Sky was the one who tipped off the Leviathans that he had become disaffected from the cult. She does not want to believe this.

Sky introduces Angelique to a man named Nicholas Blair. Sky tells Angelique that Nicholas is responsible for all his success. Angelique and Nicholas are surprised to see each other. He was her boss when she was working in Satan’s upper New England operation, back in 1968. Later, Sky will confirm to Angelique that he is a member of the Leviathan cult, and will tell her that his dearest wish is that she should also join it.

While Angelique is in her room packing to leave, Nicholas tells Sky that she cannot become a member of the cult, and gives him a flaming torch to use to kill her. Sky says that he really loves Angelique and doesn’t want to comply. Nicholas insists. We cut to Angelique. Sky bursts in, the torch in his hand, not noticeably shorter than it was when Nicholas gave him his orders. Evidently it didn’t take long for him to pick a side.

Can this marriage be saved? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Dark Shadows never explicitly used the bit of lore that says vampires cannot cross flowing water, so I don’t suppose we can say it was an inconsistency for them to have Barnabas get himself onto an island and back to the mainland. I’m a bit disappointed they didn’t incorporate it into the story- it’s a familiar bit, and Angelique is so powerful that if she and Barnabas are going to be on the same side they need to put as many obstacles between them as they can to keep the suspense going. Otherwise she can just turn all of his adversaries into toadstools.

Episode 947: More! MORE! MO-O-O-RE!!!

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins comes home shortly after dawn and finds that the window of his front parlor has been smashed in. Entering the house, he finds two young men passed out. He knows both of these men, and knows that neither is what he seems to be. The taller of them, who once asked to be called Jabe, is in his true form an indescribable monster from beyond space and time, the harbinger of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who mean to retake the Earth and destroy humankind. The other, Chris Jennings, is a werewolf. The Leviathans are vulnerable to werewolves, and Barnabas realizes that Chris reverted to his human form when the sun rose, just as he was about to kill Jabe.

Chris comes to, and Barnabas hustles him out of the house. He then wakes Jabe. He tells Jabe that he fought the werewolf off, killing it and saving Jabe’s life. Barnabas was the original leader of a cult devoted to serving the Leviathans, but has since become disaffected. Jabe had seen evidence of this, and set out for Barnabas’ house meaning to punish him for his disloyalty. But by the time the werewolf chased him into the house he was crying out for Barnabas to help him, so he is ready to believe the story. Taking credit for things he had nothing to do with is one of Barnabas’ core competencies, so it is no surprise to longtime viewers that Jabe decides that he can trust Barnabas after all.

Barnabas’ ex-wife Angelique is now married to a man named Sky Rumson. She does not believe that Sky knows anything about her past or about anything supernatural, but the audience has seen over the last few episodes that he is an agent of the Leviathans. Angelique put Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn up in a house she and Sky have on an island to help Barnabas in his fight against the Leviathans while Sky was away on a business trip. At the end of that trip, Sky called to ask Angelique to pick him up at an airport far from the island house. When she got to the airport, she found he had already left. She wound up spending several hours alone on the road. Returning viewers know that Sky’s call was a trick to get her away from the house so Jabe could come and have his way with Carolyn. We also know that Jabe chickened out of his evil plan when he actually saw Carolyn, and that she is fine now.

Angelique comes home from her long wild goose chase and asks Sky what happened. He said he had an important phone call coming at the house, so he had to leave early. Angelique accepts this surprisingly easily. Barnabas shows up to take Carolyn home. He and Sky meet. After Barnabas is gone, Sky asks what the deal is with Carolyn. He presses the point, and Angelique tells him everything she knows about Barnabas and the Leviathans, including that he is now “their most dedicated enemy and he means to use every power he has to stop them.”

This scene is bad news for Barnabas, but it is worse for the audience’s image of Angelique. She used to be a wicked witch of vast destructive power, and was supposed to be the ultimate Soap Opera Vixen. But you wouldn’t have to be a witch, or even a vixen, to avoid the situation Angelique puts herself in. Leaving the airport when he knew she was on the way was a colossal act of thoughtlessness, and no husband who committed it could expect to hear a word from his wife about anything else for at least a week. After that, there will be a long period when she will have an unanswerable source of material to keep him off his guard any time he tries to bring up topics she doesn’t want to discuss. By the time Sky is able to start asking questions about why Angelique had Carolyn spend the night, it will probably be another full moon.

That isn’t even the worst of it. Angelique believes that Sky is simply a denizen of the sunlit world known to us in our everyday experience and explained well by science, and she further believes that he sees her in the same way. That makes it all but impossible for her to tell him what she tells him here. She launches right in with “the Leviathans, they’re terribly dangerous creatures, completely evil and they mean to start a whole new society.” If he really were a total naïf in supernatural matters, this story would lead him to pick up the telephone and call the men in the white coats to come and take Angelique to a place where she could get a good long rest.

I don’t think Angelique’s scene with Sky could have worked in any case, but Geoffrey Scott’s limitations as an actor make it even worse than it had to be. He underacted so severely that he could hardly be said to be giving a performance at all. That makes a stark contrast with Lara Parker, who as Angelique fully embraced the hyper-intense Dark Shadows house style of acting, which, in honor of her own hilarious explanation of it, is sometimes known as “Go back to your grave!” That contrast is interesting at a technical level. It goes a long way towards explaining what Orson Welles meant when he said that hamminess was not overacting, but false acting. Parker goes as far over the top as she can, but there is rarely anything false about Angelique, while every tinny note Scott strikes in his flat recitation of his lines is thoroughly fake.

A charismatic actor might have been wasted as Sky, as Parker is wasted today. But the audience might have been able to meet the show halfway if we could believe that Sky was so fascinating to Angelique that she didn’t realize what she was saying. As it is, Scott looks so much like he is modeling menswear for the Sears catalogue that it is always a bit of a surprise when he moves and speaks. However much Angelique might enjoy Sky’s company, it never occurs to us that he would be a match for her in any sense.

Sky goes to Jabe and repeats what Angelique told him about Barnabas. There is an exchange which looks fine in print, but which Scott’s delivery makes sound like a blooper:

JABE: So everything he told me this morning was a lie! And I thought he had saved my life!

SKY: Evidently, everything he told you was a lie.

You would deliver Sky’s line with an emphasis on “everything,” as would I, as would anyone else. But Scott emphasizes “Evidently” and pauses slightly after “you,” making it sound as if he hadn’t heard Jabe. For a fraction of a second, you can see the amazement in Christopher Pennock’s face as he reacts to this clanger.

Jabe carries a cage with him as he goes to an old graveyard. The camera locks in on him in closeup as he shouts that, while death might be an adequate punishment for a mere murderer, Barnabas must suffer “More! MORE! MO-O-O-ORE!!!” More, more, more, how do you like it, how do you like it….

More more more. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The first time I saw this scene, I regarded it as a low point- I imagined someone tuning in to Dark Shadows for the first time at that moment, and instantly turning it off, believing ever after that only people of an extremely low mentality could like the show. I still think it’s pretty embarrassing writing, but having seen him in other roles I’ve come to realize that Pennock was in fact a good actor and that as Jabe he was saddled with an impossible task. Also, I’ve seen video of him on panels of original cast members at Dark Shadows conventions, and it is obvious that he was as sweet as Jabe is vicious. So watching the scene today, I ignored Jabe and looked at Christopher Pennock, studying his face to see what he was thinking as he struggled to find a way to give the audience something worth their while.

Jabe makes an incantation, and a bat comes flying to him. He catches it in the cage. We get a closeup of the bat puppet in the cage, which looks very much like a humane trap from Havahart. We know that Jabe plans to use the bat to make Barnabas back into a vampire, which he was for 172 years, but the realistic cage and the adorable little puppet prevent the situation from generating any terror. Dan Curtis said that when he was producing Dark Shadows, his young daughters used to urge him to make the show more frightening. When we were chuckling at the sight of the bat today, Mrs Acilius imitated a child saying “Make it scary, Daddy!”

Behold and tremble! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 944: The girl who wasn’t afraid of him

A werewolf is prowling through the woods on the great estate of Collinwood, and Sabrina Stuart, a young woman with white hair, sees him. She knows that when the moon is not full, the werewolf is her ex-fiancé Chris Jennings. She screams at the sight of him. This would be an understandable reaction if the werewolf were scary looking, but since he is a man whose face and hands are covered with hairy makeup appliances while the rest of him is wearing clothes, he is a just cute little doggie who might like a bickie. Television, they say, is a visual medium; that means that the images you put on the screen will stimulate the audience’s imaginations. If you are telling a story about a monster, you must show only enough of him to get them to wonder what terrible things he might do. Once you’ve shown so much that they start to laugh, you’re sunk.

Sabrina composes herself, and tries to reason with the werewolf. He stands there listening to her attentively, being the goodest little boy. This ends when a man emerges from the brush and jumps him. The man shoots the werewolf, who yips and runs away. Sabrina is upset with the man, who is surprised she does not regard him as her rescuer. She identifies herself by name.

The buttinski. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The man’s name is Bruno, and he works for another monster, one whom we see only when he is masquerading as a young man. That monster once said he wanted to be called Jabe, but everyone very inconsiderately keeps calling him Jeb instead. Jabe has told Bruno that he is vulnerable to werewolves. Bruno disregarded Jabe’s report that only silver bullets can kill a werewolf, and fired regular ammunition. Jabe is upset about this.

Bruno tells him all is not lost. Since Sabrina was not afraid of the werewolf, his human form must be that of a man to whom she is close. Bruno says Sabrina has a brother, and thinks out loud that he ought to just go ahead and kill him. Regular viewers know that Sabrina’s brother, though he is not a werewolf, is a character played by Roger Davis, so we’re all for Bruno’s idea. But Jabe vetoes it, saying that if a werewolf is killed while in human form he will turn into the wolf and remain in that form forever. That’s new information on Dark Shadows, though there had been so many werewolf movies by 1970 I can’t imagine it was original.

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins stops by the antique shop where Jabe lives. Barnabas had been the leader of the cult that serves Jabe, but has become disaffected. Jabe knows this. Each wants to kill the other, but neither has been able to make a substantive move. Jabe demands Barnabas do something about the werewolf, in the process exposing his vulnerability. Barnabas is friendly with Chris and knows all about him, so this exposure makes it possible for him and Jabe to join battle.

In the closing credits, writer Violet Welles’ name is misspelled “Wells.” Today’s script is not up to her usual standards; maybe “Violet Wells” was her guild-approved pseudonym.

Episode 940: You had dark hair

A shape-shifting monster from beyond time and space has assumed the form of a young man and decided to marry heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Carolyn’s distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, knows all about the monster and wants to prevent the wedding.

The other day, the monster mentioned to Barnabas that when he is not in human form, nothing can kill him. That would seem to imply that when he is in human form, at least some of the things that kill humans can kill him. So Barnabas slips some poison in a drink and gives it to the monster. The plan is logical enough, but like all of Barnabas’ plans it fails. Whatever the monster’s vulnerabilities are, that particular poison is not one of them. It does not harm him at all, though it does affect the drink’s flavor sufficiently to damage the monster’s confidence in Barnabas’ bar-tending abilities.

Barnabas’ next plan is less sensible. His ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique, is living nearby with her new husband. He goes to Angelique and asks her to take Carolyn in for a while. Angelique reminds Barnabas that Carolyn knows her and dislikes her. She was married to Carolyn’s uncle Roger for a while in 1968, when she was using the alias Cassandra. By the end of that period, she had alienated Carolyn and everyone else at the great house of Collinwood. Barnabas exclaims “But she won’t recognize her; you had dark hair!” Presumably the scripted line was “But she won’t recognize you; you had dark hair!”

Barnabas pleads with Angelique. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Which doesn’t really make all that much more sense- the black wig Angelique wore when she was calling herself Cassandra was the entirety of her disguise. She didn’t need to conceal her identity any more thoroughly than that, since the only people who could recognize her were Barnabas and time-traveling governess Vicki. Barnabas couldn’t afford to admit that he had lived in the 1790s and married a witch, and Vicki was at that point not allowed to do anything that would affect the course of the A story, so the wig was plenty. To say now that the difference in hair color will keep Carolyn from recognizing Angelique as Cassandra is to lampshade the absurdity of Barnabas’ idea.

Barnabas tells Angelique that the monster is affiliated with mysterious supernatural beings known as the Leviathan People. This alarms Angelique sufficiently that she agrees to hide Carolyn.

This is also the episode in which rakish libertine Quentin Collins reintroduces himself to the family at Collinwood. They had known him as the ghost who drove them from their home in November 1968, and Carolyn met the living Quentin in late 1969, when he went by the name Grant Douglas.

Quentin is at loose ends, so he agrees when Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman ask him to help them in their battle against the Leviathans. The plan is for him to use the power of his handsomeness and charm to distract Carolyn from the monster. This would seem to be quite a sensible idea, since he has been the big attraction of the fan magazines since he joined the show.

We cut to the great house of Collinwood, where the piano is being played very well. We see that Carolyn is the pianist. This is puzzling to longtime viewers. The piano has been a prominent part of the drawing room set from the beginning of the show, an echo of the deep prehistory of Dark Shadows, which was originally based in part on old teleplays Art Wallace wrote about a lady who gave piano lessons. We have seen Carolyn poke at the keyboard a couple of times, in a manner that made it clear she could not play at all.

Quentin knocks at the front door and Carolyn lets him in. He gives his right name, and claims to be his own great-grandson. When Carolyn asks why he said his name was Grant Douglas, he claims to be a writer who used that among other pseudonyms. That doesn’t explain anything, but Carolyn settles for it, for some reason. He tells her that, since they are only third cousins, their family relationship is no bar to them spending a great deal of time together. She says she is busy tonight, but eagerly volunteers that she is free tomorrow.

The monster enters. He meets Quentin, and they take an instant dislike to each other. That doesn’t mean much, since the monster is extremely obnoxious and everyone not under the power of the Leviathans dislikes him. For that matter, some who are under their power can’t stand him, either. For example, Barnabas was a devotee of theirs until he had to deal with the monster, and his personality broke the spell. So it remains to be seen what contribution, if any, Quentin will make to this story.

Quentin doesn’t try to persuade Carolyn to break her date with the monster. He, Julia, and Barnabas are at Collinwood when the monster calls. He tells her Carolyn is on her way, two hours earlier than originally planned. The monster and Carolyn share a drink; he slips her a mickey. Once she is passed out, he carries her up to the room in which he assumes his true form, declaring that her new life is about to begin.

Up to this point, drugging drinks has chiefly been a source of comedy on Dark Shadows. Barnabas tried to poison Angelique in #402, when they were married; that led to a farce scene when his mother showed up, Angelique passed the poisoned drink to her, and he had to scramble. For a while in 1968, a warlock calling himself Nicholas Blair hung around and functioned as Angelique’s boss; in #528, she asked him to slip some poison to Vicki, prompting him to complain that “I am much too talented to spend my time drugging drinks.” By the time he was done, he had not only complied with Angelique’s request, but drugged a couple of other people’s drinks on his own initiative. He may as well have kept his pride, since none of those poisonings got him what he wanted. So the monster’s use of that tactic might lead us to suspect that Carolyn’s odds are better than they appear.