angelique – Dark Shadows Commentary

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.

Episode 924: Afraid of the dark

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman finds that wicked witch Angelique has married a businessman who has a house on an island off the coast of central Maine. Angelique tells Julia that her husband’s love has freed her to live as a human being, and that for the sake of that love she has renounced her powers. In #882, set in the year 1897, Angelique said that she would soon have to return to the underworld unless she could find a man who would love her. The show has since returned to a contemporary setting, and she met her husband less than a year before, sometime in 1969. Evidently her time wasn’t running as short as she led us to believe it was.

In the 1897 segment, the show was quite clear that Angelique was aligned with Satan and that the underworld she was talking about was a Hell that Dante or Milton or other Christians would have recognized. The deal she described with her master therefore made little sense then. But Dark Shadows has drawn freely on the mythologies of many cultures and has made up stories about supernatural worlds of its own. The borrowings from the Christian tradition are a relatively minor part of the universe they have been patching together, and they have recently given us reason to suspect it is something they are backing away from. So I don’t think we are under any obligation to reconcile Angelique’s account of the lord of the damned with the teachings of any church.

Angelique is afraid that Julia has come to reenlist her in the cosmic battles surrounding the estate of Collinwood. In fact, Julia had no idea she would find Angelique. She went to the island because she had figured out that a painting she was looking for was there. It is a magical portrait of rakish Quentin Collins, obscured by a landscape painted over it. Quentin has amnesia, and Julia apparently thinks that if she shows him the portrait she will be able to jar some memories loose.

Angelique agrees to let Julia take the painting and expose Quentin’s portrait, on condition that the overpainting be exactly reproduced on another canvas and brought back to the house on the island before her husband knows it was gone. Julia suggests they tell him a lie that will give them more flexibility, but Angelique says he is “a very thorough man” and would ask too many follow-up questions if they gave him any information at all.

Before and after her scene with Julia, we see Angelique with her husband. The first scene begins with some very awkward kissing. The awkwardness is partly due to Geoffrey Scott’s total incompetence as an actor; he stands stiffly while Lara Parker simultaneously kisses him and nudges him to his mark, making it look like she is moving a couch. But part of the blame must rest with director Lela Swift, who set up the shot from an angle that puts the emphasis on the straining muscles in Parker’s neck and back. Perhaps Swift overestimated Scott’s abilities.

“Move three inches back and to the right, dummy, you’re supposed to be in the center of the frame!”

This scene is accompanied by some music for a small string ensemble; I don’t believe we have heard the track since the very early days of the show. It feels jarringly old-fashioned. All of Dark Shadows’ orchestral score strikes 21st century viewers as a relic of an earlier era, but it set it apart from other daytime soaps of the 1960s and early 70s, most of which had an organ playing on the soundtrack. Compared to the organ accompaniment, which today’s audiences would find simply intolerable, I suppose even these creaky old violins are relatively modern.

The second scene ends with a more successful kiss. It is accompanied by a woodwind piece that used to be associated strongly with well-meaning governess Vicki and her doomed love for dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Burke was written out of the show in 1967, Vicki in 1968, and this music cropped up occasionally in 1969 during sentimental moments. It is still noticeably more old-fashioned than the rest of the score, albeit more dynamic than the string serenade that went along with the first kiss.

Meanwhile, in the great house at Collinwood, strange and troubled boy David Collins is coming down with a cold. David’s governess, Vicki’s successor Maggie Evans, is trying to get him to take his schoolwork seriously. A boy known as Michael appears in the house and announces that he and David will be playing now. Maggie explains that it is not a good time, and Michael bullies both her and David into giving him his way.

Michael is not really human, but is a manifestation of a supernatural force that has subjugated David and many other people. Seeing Michael push Maggie around, we might remember May and June of 1967, when Maggie was the prisoner of vampire Barnabas Collins. Those episodes were bleak and at moments painful to watch, but they also drew a new audience and made Dark Shadows, for the first time, a hit.

Barnabas attracted a crowd, not simply because he was cruel to Maggie, but because we wondered how others would react to his evil deeds, because his motives were unbelievably zany, and because actor Jonathan Frid took a visible joy in playing him. He became a breakout star, familiar to millions who never saw a single episode of Dark Shadows or knew anything else about it, because he generated stories that allowed the whole cast to shine, followed his crazy ideas to the point where many of them became the realities of the show’s narrative universe, and had quirks that dovetailed perfectly with Frid’s strengths.

Michael has none of these things going for him. When he is nasty to Maggie, he does not produce any suspense as to what others will do. Not only do most characters assume that as a teacher she will be able to handle an obstreperous child by herself, but most of the people to whom she would likely turn for support are among Michael’s subordinates. There are no crazy ideas bursting out of him- he is just a little tyrant, who at no point seems to have any hidden motives or nuances of feeling. And Michael Maitland seems depressed the whole time he is on screen. As a result, Michael is as straightforward and tedious as Barnabas was luridly intriguing.

When Barnabas was holding Maggie prisoner, his blood-thrall Willie felt sorry for her. He occasionally made efforts to help her, none of which did anything but make her situation even worse. John Karlen’s portrayal of the feckless Willie brought him almost as much fan mail as Jonathan Frid received during that period. Today it is David’s turn to play Willie to Michael’s Barnabas, and he does not disappoint. Thirteen year old David Henesy plays David Collins’ conflicted feelings more subtly than Karlen had played Willie’s, and as a result we watch him very closely. Disappointed as we may be in Michael, Mr Henesy’s triumph in these scenes brings the episode to a strong close.

Episode 923: He kindly stopped for me

Yesterday, Amanda Harris told the story of a suicide attempt she made in 1897. A supernatural being whom she calls “Mr Best” thwarted this attempt, and told her that he would arrange for her not only to avoid death, but to remain young, for the years that it had been ordained she would live. If in that time she could reconnect with her lost love, rakish Quentin Collins, she and he would never die. Now it is 1970, and Amanda’s time is up. Mr Best is at her door. Amanda has found Quentin, but he has amnesia and is not ready to resume their relationship as Mr Best’s terms require.

Mr Best has changed startlingly since we met him in the flashback that showed us Amanda’s story. Then he was warm and solicitous; today he is truculent and cold. Even his makeup is different. A pale coloring suggests sunken cheeks, making him look corpse-like.

Not so friendly anymore. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Amanda has reversed her own attitude as well. In 1897, Mr Best lamented her wish for death and pleaded with her to stay alive; now it is Amanda’s turn to beg Mr Best for more time while he shows impatience with her. When she tells him about Quentin’s amnesia, he asks brusquely “Are you making this up?” It merits a laugh that the story of Dark Shadows has become so far-fetched that even Death Incarnate finds it hard to believe. But Mr Best does soften, and gives Amanda seven more days to get Quentin to tell her he loves her.

Quentin’s own perpetual youth is the result of a magical portrait that immunized him from the effects both of aging and of the werewolf curse that was placed on him in 1897. Quentin’s great-grandson Chris Jennings has inherited that curse. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman had learned that artist Charles Delaware Tate was still alive, and hoped he would paint a portrait of Chris that would free him from lycanthropy. Tate told Chris he no longer had the gift, but Chris forced him to paint his picture anyway. The moon rose, Chris transformed, and as the wolf he murdered Tate.

One of Chris’ surviving victims is his ex-fiancée, Sabrina Stuart. Sabrina saw him transform, and as a result was struck dumb for years and went prematurely gray. She can talk now, but she’s still gray. She shows up today at the great house of Collinwood where she calls on heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Carolyn tells Sabrina that she doesn’t love Chris and never will, but that she realizes Sabrina loves him. This adds to a growing list of reasons the show has given us to doubt that Chris will be on much longer. His premeditated murder of Tate establishes him as a pure villain. A villain’s function is to create problems for other characters to solve, and Chris has been too passive and too dependent on Julia to be an interesting villain. His relationship with Carolyn gave him a connection to the core cast, but Carolyn’s conversation with Sabrina makes it clear that that is gone now.

Sabrina insists Carolyn go on a road trip with her. She takes her to Tate’s house and leads her into the room where Chris murdered the artist. She tells her that a man was just killed there. Carolyn asks Sabrina if Chris did it. Sabrina looks pained, and says “Not Chris!” This further undermines Chris’ position. As long as Sabrina was mute, we could wonder whether she would blow the whistle on Chris once she regained the power of speech and if so what the consequences of that would be. But now we see that she is still in denial about him, and can set aside any hope that she might generate a story for him.

Carolyn asks Sabrina how she knows about the murder. No answer is forthcoming, and there doesn’t seem to be any way she could know. Evidently Sabrina has now developed some kind of clairvoyance about Chris’ murders. Since she is apparently determined to use that power to limit Chris’ relevance to the story, it is yet another reason to suspect he will be written out soon.

Sabrina making the most of her turn in the spotlight. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia enters the crime scene. She and Carolyn are surprised to see each other. Sabrina announces that Julia knows all about Chris, and gets upset about it. Julia, a psychiatrist by profession, slaps her in the face, the accepted treatment for angry women in 1960s television shows. Sabrina quiets down, and Julia sends her away with Carolyn. Once they are gone, she settles in at Tate’s desk and starts rummaging through his papers.

Julia wants to cure Quentin of his amnesia. She looked through an old Collins family photo album, and found that two pictures of him had gone missing. She is puzzled as to who took them; this is a continuity error, since in #686 and #687 there was a whole thing about ghosts removing photos relevant to Quentin from albums after Julia had looked through them. Be that as it may, Julia discovers in Tate’s papers that he had painted over Quentin’s portrait and that it is now in a big house on an island nearby.

We see a man holding a telephone and reciting lines of dialogue. He puts the phone down, looks at Julia, and recites more lines in the same unmodulated voice. Grayson Hall stays in character with her responses, and plays Julia asking to see the painting, but the man does not do anything that could be called acting. Dark Shadows has featured its share of lousy performances, but I cannot recall a member of the cast simply enunciating words as if he were in a neurologist’s office demonstrating that he had memorized the unrelated syllables given him to reproduce. It is genuinely bizarre.

The man’s name is Geoffrey Scott, and if anyone had told him he was supposed to act he would be playing a character called Sky Rumson. I suppose “Rumson” is a good name for a character who is identified with a house on the beach, since beach houses are what Rumson, New Jersey is known for, though the beach might not be front of mind in early January in central Maine. Sky is a go-go businessman, and his lines to Julia are about what a great hurry he is in.

Sky shows Julia the painting that covers the portrait of Quentin. He tells her that it isn’t very good. Indeed it is not particularly distinguished, but it is far superior to any of Tate’s other works, some of which they want us to regard as museum pieces. Sky says that he bought the painting for his wife, who has an unaccountable fondness for it. He shows Julia a painting of Mrs Rumson. Julia has seen the painting before, and knows the model very well. It is a portrait of her old frenemy, wicked witch Angelique.

For regular viewers, this ending will be as satisfying and as logical as Geoffrey Scott’s phonetic rendering of his dialogue is disconcerting and inexplicable. Eight weeks ago, the show returned to contemporary dress after a long stay in 1897, beginning a new clutch of stories. Angelique is often absent from the show for extended periods, but she always turns up sooner or later. None of the three major storylines- Chris’ werewolf curse, Amanda’s attempt to rekindle her romance with Quentin, and the menace of the secret cult devoted to supernatural beings known as the Leviathans- is very closely connected to either of the other two, and none of them has any particular sense of urgency. Angelique’s vast powers and maniacal narcissism make it easy for the writers to inject her into every plot and accelerate them all towards a common resolution. In the 1897 segment, they moderated both her might and her mania, so that they can now keep her on indefinitely without overwhelming the show. Angelique is not what Julia expected to find, but she may be just what the doctor ordered.

Episode 885: The girl in the portrait

We open with a reprise of yesterday’s closing scene. It is November 1897, and time traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is about to be reunited with his lost love, Josette DuPrés, who threw herself to her death from the cliff on Widows’ Hill in February 1796. Josette is now reincarnated in the person of Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire. Josette’s personality has been emerging from the substrata of Kitty’s unconscious mind in the eight weeks she has been staying at the great estate of Collinwood. Now Kitty and Josette are merging into a symbiont, and that combined being has agreed to marry Barnabas tonight. Kitty/ Josette is in the Old House on the estate, in the bedroom once meant for Josette, waiting for Barnabas to return from the great house where he has told his distant cousin Judith of their wedding plans.

Barnabas enters the bedroom just in time to see Kitty/ Josette assumed bodily into the portrait of Josette that hangs over the mantel. He reaches up to touch Kitty/ Josette, and the two of them both vanish.

Barnabas finds lying himself on the ground, wearing clothes he last put on in the 1790s. He stands up and calls out for Kitty. “Kitty! Kitty! Where are you, Kitty?” He calls her name several more times. Oddly, he stops short of calling out “Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!” In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, user “kosmo13” wrote “It would’ve been cool if they’d had a cat wander into the scene at that moment and had Barnabas say ‘No. Not you!'”*

Barnabas comes face to face with Ben Stokes, who was his indentured servant and fanatically devoted friend in the 1790s. Ben has no idea why Barnabas is talking as if they haven’t seen each other for a long time- they saw each other last night, as far as he is concerned. Barnabas realizes that he has traveled back in time again. He was in 1897 after being dislocated from the 1960s. Now he has returned to February 1796, to the very night Josette killed herself.

Barnabas tries frantically to keep Josette from repeating her suicide. He sends Ben to the great house of Collinwood to see if Josette is in her room there, as she is supposed to be. He is concerned that, since the trip through the portrait left him on the ground near the woods, there is no telling where it may have dropped Kitty/ Josette.

He needn’t have worried about that. We see Josette in bed, as she was in #425, the first time the show took us through this night. Her aunt Natalie, the Countess DuPrés, is with her, and is intensely afraid of a prophecy foretelling Josette’s death this night. That much is identical to what we saw in the previous timeline, when the show was set in the 1790s in February 1968. Josette does tell the countess that she had an odd dream in which she was wearing an unfamiliar dress and having a conversation with a portrait; that dream, which Josette herself dismisses as not at all important, is evidently the only trace of Kitty left in Josette’s conscious mind.

Josette tells the countess about her dream. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This scene plays on the iconography of these two actresses. From the moment Kathryn Leigh Scott showed up as Kitty in #844, her title has reminded us of Josette’s aunt. So it is with a nice sense of inevitability that we see the show’s first countess again. Moreover, Miss Scott first joined the cast as Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town; Grayson Hall as Maggie’s psychiatrist, Julia Hoffman, MD. So it seems right to us when the countess becomes a therapist and listens intently to Josette’s account of her dream, growing only more interested as Josette insists that the dream was unimportant.

The first time through, Barnabas was trying to kill Josette and turn her into his vampire bride. Wicked witch Angelique, who had made Barnabas a vampire in the first place, lured Josette to the top of Widows’ Hill and showed her a vision of herself as a vampire. When Barnabas showed up, Josette ran from him and jumped off the cliff, flinging herself to a death on the rocks below rather than let him make her what he was.

This time, Barnabas wants Josette to live. He knows what Angelique is planning. During his eight months in 1897, he and Angelique became allies, almost friends. So it is logical that he meets with her and asks her to leave Josette alone. But this is Angelique as she was in #425. She is enraged with Barnabas, and full of hate for Josette. She does listen to him, and for a moment she seems to be considering his request that she stay with him through the night. One wonders how she would have reacted had Barnabas leveled with her about what happened in 1897, explaining why he thinks they can be something other than enemies. But he holds back, telling her nothing. She makes a hostile remark, and vanishes.

Angelique does just what she did the first time- she tricks the countess into leaving Josette’s room, projects a voice that Josette mistakes for Barnabas’ voice calling her to go to Widow’s Hill, and causes Josette to see a vision of herself as a vampire once she is on top of the hill. At the end, we hear footsteps approaching. The last we saw Barnabas, he announced he was hastening to Widows’ Hill to keep Josette from jumping; if he arrives now, that is exactly what he will prompt her to do.

In the 1897 segment, Grayson Hall played broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi and also had a few weeks as Julia. Today she returns to the cast after an absence of more than five weeks. She spent that time in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, where she had a part in a movie called Adam at 6 AM. The cast included Michael Douglas, Joe Don Baker, Dana Elcar, Louise Latham, and Meg Foster. Actor Steve McQueen was one of the producers. Hall and Elcar were the only Dark Shadows alums in the company, though Foster later played an ultra-soapy story opposite David Selby in a miniseries called Washington: Behind Closed Doors.

We haven’t seen the countess since #666. In that one, Barnabas had traveled back to a night a few weeks after the one he arrives in today. He made a terrible mess of things, which is his function on the show, and Ben wound up inadvertently killing the countess. Seeing her today, regular viewers can hope that, whatever misfortunes Barnabas brings with him this time, at least that won’t happen. The countess is a likable character, and while there was a point to showing Ben becoming a murderer it is a point they have already made. They won’t lose anything if they imply that the events we are about to see prevent it from happening.

*Posted 25 December 2024 on Danny Horn, “Not in Canvas Anymore,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 21 June 2016.

Episode 882: The show must go on. That’s the one and only rule there is.

Many fantastic tales dwell on a sense that dreams have a great power in the world, and so their characters are often afraid of falling asleep. Dark Shadows has several times referenced Edgar Allan Poe, who explored that fear in stories like “The Premature Burial,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Man of the Crowd.” The show brought up another writer of fantastic tales preoccupied with the fear of sleep in #808. Aristide, henchman of sorcerer Count Petofi, threatened an enemy of Petofi’s with “the mysterious shadow he can cast, the shadow that isn’t your own that follows you.” That was a reference to George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes, in which a man named Anodos is plagued by a shadow that moves about on its own, following him and blighting his existence. Not only does Anodos fear sleep from time to time in Phantastes, but the main theme of MacDonald’s other very popular novel, 1895’s Lilith, is Mr Vane’s long refusal to sleep and the great battle he must wage in the dream-world when he finally does allow himself to nod off.

Aristide’s threat suggested that the show was about to give us a story based on Anodos and the autonomous shadow. Aristide is dead now, and Petofi is running out of story, so that isn’t going to happen, at least not in the segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897. But today we do get a little bit of George MacDonald in the form of a battle against sleep. Petofi is casting a spell over himself and handsome young rake Quentin Collins. If Quentin loses conscious control of his mind for even a moment, he and Petofi will evacuate their respective bodies and be re-embodied as each other. Petofi will then transport himself, in Quentin’s body, to the year 1969. Quentin will be left behind in 1897, occupying Petofi’s aging form and waiting helplessly for Petofi’s mortal enemies to come and kill him, thinking they are taking their long-delayed revenge.

By the time Quentin finds out what’s going on, it is the wee hours of the morning, after he hasn’t slept for a couple of nights. His friends, Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye and time-traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, keep marching him around the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in an effort to keep him awake. They don’t brew up any coffee, strangely enough. But Barnabas does call on wicked witch Angelique and appeals to her to use her powers to put some kind of barrier between Quentin and Petofi.

Angelique tells Barnabas that she is reluctant to help Quentin because she is upset that he wants to go to New York and look for a woman named Amanda Harris. She had wanted Quentin to fall in love with her, and is jealous that he chose Amanda instead. Barnabas points out that if she doesn’t help Quentin, he won’t exist in the form that either she or Amanda knew. Angelique explains that she has a reason for her attitude:

Before I came here this time, I was in the everlasting pits of Hell, where other creatures of my kind live. Only, my stay here on Earth made me dissatisfied with my life there. I longed to come back here… To Earth, to become a human being. I begged my master for the chance.

Finally, he gave it to me on one condition and one condition only… That I make one man fall in love with me, without any use of supernatural spells or powers. One man, one chance. That’s what I was granted.

Since Quentin is the one man who represented Angelique’s one chance, letting him go to Amanda might mean that Angelique has to go back down. My favorite part of her speech is “Only, my stay here on Earth made me dissatisfied with my life there.” Sure, she could have been happy in the everlasting pits of Hell, as one is, but how ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Pa-ree. Or, since Angelique’s sojourns in the upper world have all brought her to Collinsport, after they’ve had the lobster roll at the Blue Whale.

While Barnabas is talking with Angelique, Pansy is on Quentin duty. She decides to keep him awake by compelling him to join in a performance of her song. A record of this song, performed by Nancy Barrett and David Selby, hit the stores the very day this episode was first broadcast, so this is product placement. But Pansy is doing exactly what she would do in this situation, Quentin is reacting just as he would react, and it is a charming moment.

The musical number is preceded by Pansy making what literary critics call a programmatic statement. “Feel like it or not, you gotta do it, the show must go on. That’s the one and only rule there is, love. So let’s have a bright chorus from that new team, Pansy Faye and Quentin Collins.” Pansy is not only a good pal and a gifted psychic, she is an accomplished scientist. She has indeed stated the complete physics, metaphysics, and every other operating principle of the universe of Dark Shadows when she says that “The show must go on.”

Angelique and Barnabas enter. Angelique insists on some time alone with Quentin. He says that once he gets to New York he most definitely will be looking for Amanda and that he has no interest in a relationship with Angelique. She looks away from him and talks herself into believing it will be OK if he falls in love with her after Amanda “has ceased to exist.” Longtime viewers can be fairly sure this means that Angelique is planning to murder Amanda, but at the moment the important thing is to get Angelique involved in helping Quentin against Petofi.

Angelique opens the door to the foyer, where we catch a glimpse of Nancy Barrett and Jonathan Frid doing a really marvelous mime depicting “intense conversation.” It’s one of those deliberately stagey bits of business that these twentieth century New York actors do so well.

Angelique opens the door on a silent “conversation.”

Angelique stares into the fire and tries to project psychic power Petofi-ward. We get a process shot simultaneously depicting Angelique in the drawing room and Petofi in his lair. The shot is not very successful, and Angelique explains that her efforts aren’t working either. She says that Petofi is in so deep a trance that she cannot reach him as she has done before.

Petofi’s surroundings are so heavily decorated that this shot just looks cluttered to me. I suppose having Petofi low in the shot and behind the flames is meant to remind us of Angelique’s old neighborhood, but the visual metaphor is spoiled by the cruddy 1960s TV color palette.

In black and white, as most viewers would have seen it in 1969, the shot has different problems- while the more abstract visual style does make the Petofi-as-Satan metaphor legible, it is less clear which shapes are in Angelique’s space and which are in Petofi’s.

Pansy, eavesdropping from the foyer, hears Angelique say that she will need to have something Petofi is wearing right now, something still warm from contact with him, in order to reach him with her powers. Pansy resolves to provide this, and she sneaks out. She makes her way to his lair, and is about to undo Petofi’s necktie when he comes out of his trance and tells Pansy she has interfered with his plans once too often. We have flashed to the motionless Petofi several times today, leading us to think that Thayer David was going to collect his fee without having to deliver a line. So it is quite effective when he springs into action.

Episode 871: The twin of life

In October 1897, sorcerer Count Petofi has hijacked the body of Quentin Collins and banished Quentin to his own aging form. I call the villainous Petofi played by David Selby Q-Petofi, and the forlorn Quentin played by Thayer David P-Quentin.

Today, wicked witch Angelique explains to P-Quentin how she and mad scientist Julia Hoffman cured time-traveler Barnabas Collins of vampirism, created a Doppelgänger of Barnabas, and used that Doppelgänger to persuade Quentin’s family in the great house of Collinwood that Barnabas never really was a vampire. Later, artist Charles Delaware Tate mistakes P-Quentin for Petofi, and tries to kill him. Q-Petofi then enters and takes control of Tate, using him for a project of his own.

Petofi stripped Angelique of her powers in #865, and deprived Tate of his ability to paint in #851. Angelique has been such an important part of the show for so long that regular viewers are confident she will be back eventually, but the 1897 segment seems to be lurching towards its close, and after her last exit there was no urgent reason in the story for her to come back. It’s good to see that she is still part of this arc.

Tate’s continued presence is rather less good news. Like all characters played by Roger Davis, he has an obnoxious personality and a grating voice, with a disturbing habit of invading his scene partners’ personal space. Today, he keeps grabbing at Q-Petofi’s coat while Q-Petofi bats him away; this is so irritating that it is unclear whether the line “You’ve got trouble with your hands” was scripted for Q-Petofi or ad libbed by David Selby.

For the last couple of weeks, we have had grounds for hope that Tate would just go away. When he sold the portrait of the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris in #864, he lost his last connection to an ongoing plot point. We saw in that same scene that he had a lot of paintings he could sell for high prices if he took them back to New York or another major city. We also know that he has no friends or potential sources of income in the small town of Collinsport. So evidently he is just sticking around to punish the audience for watching the show.