In 1897, King Johnny Romana is the hereditary chieftain of a Rroma tribe that has long been at war with ancient sorcerer Count Petofi. King Johnny is at the supreme moment of his destiny, standing over Petofi with his scimitar raised, ready to deal the ultimate blow, when a creepy little guy ruins it all for him. Petofi’s henchman Aristide throws a knife and catches King Johnny in the back. Aristide has a dagger with a curved blade that he sometimes calls “The Dancing Girl,” other times “The Dancing Lady”; he makes a big deal of it, the thing fascinates him. But when he kills King Johnny, Aristide doesn’t even use his special knife. It’s a brutal anticlimax for King Johnny.
King Johnny does live long enough to tell Petofi that he isn’t safe yet. After nine days pass, he will appear to another Rroma, somewhere in the world, and will pass on to that person his immunity to Petofi’s magical powers and his mission to kill him. After Aristide buries King Johnny, he finds that the scimitar has vanished. Evidently it will go to the new avenger.
Meanwhile, at the great house of Collinwood, twelve-year old Jamison Collins is dying. Petofi cast a spell causing Jamison to be possessed by the spirit of his grandson David Collins, who will live in 1969. But David won’t live at all unless the spell is broken, because it is killing Jamison. Jamison’s devoted uncle, rakish libertine Quentin Collins, makes a deal with wicked witch Angelique. He will marry her if she manages to break Petofi’s spell and save Jamison. They made a similar bargain previously, but that time her magic failed.
Petofi senses that his spells are being challenged. He marches to Collinwood and orders Quentin to make Angelique stop what she is doing. Angelique herself enters; she and Petofi confront each other, then she goes back to the study to resume her attempts to free Jamison. We end with Petofi preparing to cast a spell against her.
Petofi confronts Angelique in the drawing room at Collinwood while Quentin looks on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
This is an entertaining, fast-paced episode. It’s too bad it is the final appearance of actor Paul Michael in the series. He played the most unpromising part of King Johnny so skillfully that we barely noticed he was little more than a menacing pose, an evil laugh, and an ethnic stereotype. He does return with a small part in the feature film House of Dark Shadows, but it would have been fun to see what he could do with a really meaty role.
Count Petofi, 150 year old sorcerer, is holding time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins prisoner. Barnabas’ distant cousin, rakish libertine Quentin Collins, is convinced that only Barnabas can free him of the curse that has made him a werewolf and condemned any male descendants he may have to the same fate. Petofi is afraid of the Rroma people, a group of whom are in the area, and Quentin hits on a plan to use this fear to his advantage. He will tell Petofi that he has a confederate who will tell the Rroma where he is unless he releases Barnabas by 12:45 AM.
In fact, Quentin has enlisted his girlfriend, maidservant Beth, to carry this message to the Rroma camp. When Petofi reminds Quentin that his magical powers make it very easy for him both to compel Quentin to tell him who the messenger is and to stop any messenger once he knows her name, Quentin says there is no need to compel him to say the name. He claims that it is wicked witch Angelique.
As soon as Quentin tells this lie, we wonder why he hadn’t thought of Angelique sooner. Angelique has intervened to rescue Barnabas before, and she and Quentin are in touch. Petofi’s powers may be greater than hers, but it would take him more time to outfight her than it would for her to show the Rroma the way to his hiding place.
Petofi insists Quentin drink with him, and Quentin is too civilized to refuse. This is mirrored back at Collinwood. The repressed Charity Trask has lost her personality and became a vessel for the spirit of Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye. Charity/ Pansy insists that Beth drink with her.
While Petofi does not tamper with Quentin’s drink, Charity/ Pansy puts something in Beth’s that knocks her out. Charity/ Pansy wants Quentin for herself. She has thought of killing Beth, and knows Quentin will be upset with Beth if she disappoints him. That leaves us in suspense as to whether she murdered Beth or merely kept her from running her errand.
This diptych emphasizes Petofi’s power and Charity/ Pansy’s unpredictability. Quentin need not fear Petofi will poison him, because there are any number of more elegant ways he could kill him if he wished to do so. As another sorcerer said of himself in #528, he is much too talented to spend his time drugging drinks. But Beth should fear Charity/ Pansy, because she is still connected to the world of the living only uncertainly, and there is no telling what she might do to find her footing.
Quentin Collins is strapped to a table under a descending pendulum which supposedly has a razor sharp blade. His captor, a strange man named Aristede, tells wicked witch Angelique that Quentin will die in minutes unless she gives him the severed hand of Count Petofi, which has magical properties. Aristede is under the impression that Quentin and Angelique are engaged, and he has set the blade to strike Quentin’s body at a point causing the maximum wedding night-related inconvenience.
A little off the top I can understand, but this is ridiculous! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Meanwhile, Quentin’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins has the hand and is hoping it will cure Quentin of a curse under which he is laboring. Rroma maiden Julianka claims that she knows how to use the hand to relieve lycanthropy. Her great-grandmother cured Count Petofi himself of that condition, and took the hand from him as payment for doing so. She is the only living person who knows the procedure, and no one else will know it until her daughter is born.
Barnabas and Angelique have a scene which ends with a decision to go to Aristede together. Barnabas tries to use his vampire powers to hypnotize Aristede; if he had been thinking logically, he could just have taken his bat form and flown around the meeting place, since Quentin can’t be very far from it if Aristede is going to be able to take the hand and stop the pendulum in the few minutes remaining. Instead, he lets Aristede lead him far in the wrong direction. When it seems to be too late, Aristede taunts Barnabas by telling him where to find Quentin’s body. To his consternation, Barnabas then vanishes and the squeaking of a bat rings out. Barnabas rescues Quentin at the last possible second, of course.
In #767, Quentin’s nephew Jamison dreamed that Quentin told him three things would happen that would spell his doom. The first was the discovery of a silver bullet on the great estate of Collinwood. That happened in that very episode. The last would be when the one person Quentin truly loved turned against him. We know that Jamison is the only person Quentin loves, so we know what to look for there. But the second has been a mystery up until now. Quentin said that the only person who could help him would be murdered. It has not been clear until now that there is one and only one person who can relieve Quentin of his curse. Now that Julianka has been identified as that person, viewers who remember back that far will not be surprised that at the end of the episode she is lying in the woods, a mysterious mark on her forehead, unable to move.
Diana Davila plays Julianka with her eyes always wide open. She does not blink, and when she looks from side to side she turns her whole head. The rest of her body is rigid, too, and she maintains a heightened tone throughout. This is quite effective for Julianka as written; she is supposed to seem distant and unapproachable. Miss Davila bobbles over a few too many of her lines for the performance to reach its full potential, but you can see what she was going for, and it was terrific.
Soap operas usually have at least one set representing a public gathering place where characters can meet one another unexpectedly. By this point in the development of Dark Shadows, the population of its universe is so heavy with monsters and witches that unexpected meetings usually take place in graveyards, or basements, or out in the woods someplace. But for the first seventy three weeks of the show, one of the most important meeting places was a tavern called The Blue Whale, and as the bartender Bob O’Connell was a significant, though almost always silent, presence.
The Blue Whale has been mentioned occasionally since those days, most recently in #704, shortly after vampire Barnabas Collins traveled back in time to the year 1897. Today is the first time we visit the Blue Whale in the 1897 segment, and the first time we have seen Bob O’Connell as the man pouring since #439, when Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. In those days, the tavern was called The Eagle and O’Connell’s character’s name was Mr Mooney.
When we arrive at the tavern today, there is only one customer, a young man sitting at a table. When the bartender sets a drink in front of him, he orders a Chartreuse. The bartender moves to take the drink he has just served, apparently thinking the young man changed his mind, but the young man explains that he is waiting for someone else. This man, a heavyset fellow with gray side whiskers, enters a moment before the bartender brings his liqueur.
The bartender wonders if Aristide still wants the drink he originally ordered. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The younger man is known to returning viewers as a knife-wielding criminal named Aristide, the older as his master, who calls himself Victor Fenn Gibbon. The two urgently discuss a woman named Angelique. Fenn Gibbon tells Aristide that he can almost forgive him for being so distracted by Angelique’s beauty that he allowed her to take “the Hand” from him, and furthermore that she appears to have magical powers. He says that he showed forged papers to one Edward Collins, and that on the basis of those papers Edward concluded that he was “a member of the British aristocracy” and invited him to stay at the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Aristide will have to stay in the village of Collinsport, since Fenn Gibbon does not want their association to become known to the Collinses. Aristide is bitterly disappointed.
This will remind longtime viewers of seagoing con man Jason McGuire and his sidekick, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. Jason turned up in March 1967 with a sinister plan and soon took up residence as a guest at Collinwood. Shortly afterward, Willie joined him. At first Jason insisted Willie stay in town. He made that insistence while sitting at virtually the same spot Fenn Gibbon and Aristide occupy today, and Willie reacted with the same disappointment Aristide shows when he was told to stay in a flophouse when his co-conspirator was to be a guest in a mansion.
When Fenn Gibbon tells us that the letters he showed Edward were forgeries, he raises the question of his real name. He seems to have a whimsical sense of humor, and a double barreled name that sounds like a species of small ape found in a peat marsh would appeal to someone trying to test the credulity of an American impressed by the naming conventions of the British upper classes. And indeed, returning viewers know that Edward lacks a sense of humor, is quite a snob, and displays all the tell-tale signs of a hopeless case of Anglophilia.
A small young woman takes her place at the bar. Fenn Gibbon recognizes her as of Romani extraction. He becomes agitated and leaves, but directs Aristide to get to know her. Aristide, whom returning viewers saw meet with misfortune when he tried to pick up Angelique, gladly complies. She responds to his initial approach with a flat declaration that she isn’t interested, but when he mentions the other Romani people in the area, she perks up. She gives her name as Julianka, and asks if he knows a woman named Magda. He says he has met her.
This will intrigue returning viewers. The other day, Aristide robbed Edward’s brother Quentin of the legendary “Hand of Count Petofi,” a severed appendage which broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi had stolen from Romani chieftain/ organized crime boss King Johnny Romana and which she plans to use to lift a curse she had placed that made Quentin a werewolf. When Quentin told Magda what had happened, he described Aristide only as a “young man.” If Magda really has met Aristide, Quentin’s reticent reply would have cost him an opportunity to help Magda figure out who her enemies really are.
Whether or not Aristide has met Magda, he does know where she lives. He escorts her to the grounds of the Old House at Collinwood. He does not offer to accompany her into the house, but asks her to meet him later at the Blue Whale. As Angelique had responded to Aristide’s overtures by choking him within an inch of his life, Julianka responds to them by drawing a dagger. Aristide just doesn’t have game.
After Aristide parts from Julianka, the werewolf pounces on him. He is about to be devoured when Fenn Gibbon shows up. The sight of pretty little Julianka drove Fenn Gibbon away in a barely concealed panic, but the werewolf doesn’t scare him a bit. He talks calmly to the werewolf, and says that he has orders for him. The werewolf docilely complies. This would be a much bigger surprise if the werewolf were not an adorable little doggie wearing a tidy suit with a watch fob, but it still sends the message that Fenn Gibbon has very extensive powers.
In the Old House, Julianka meets Barnabas. She says that she can use the Hand of Count Petofi to cure Quentin. She also says that Magda’s husband Sandor is in Montreal. This point will be of interest to regular viewers. We haven’t seen Sandor since #750. We may well have been wondering whatever happened to him. We are particularly likely to have been wondering about that this week, since Thayer David, who plays him, is playing Fenn Gibbon. They don’t usually double actors within a time period, and so Fenn Gibbon’s introduction might have suggested they wanted us simply to forget about Sandor. If they are going to take the trouble to tell us he is in Montreal, perhaps we can hope he will return before long, and simply not share scenes with Fenn Gibbon.
Barnabas is in a glum mood. He always is, more or less, but especially so when he has had to deal with Angelique. She told him earlier that she has moved on from her centuries-long fixation on him and now wants to marry Quentin. Barnabas responds with disbelief, declaring that the only reason she would do that is to spite him. Since her obsession led her to turn him into a vampire and kill everyone he ever loved, you can see that Barnabas would have mixed feelings when she tells him that she is looking for a fresh start. On the one hand, it suggest the possibility that he might achieve some kind of freedom. But he’s still a bloodsucking ghoul, his sister and mother and true love and uncle and aunt and countless others are still dead, and the person behind all that doesn’t even care about it anymore.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that it is only appropriate that Angelique made Barnabas a vampire. Angelique too is phenomenally selfish, and whatever she creates becomes a replica of herself. So of course her greatest achievement is to turn a man into a metaphor for extreme selfishness. Barnabas’ selfishness tempers his rage at Angelique’s news; when Julianka comes to him, he is deep in thought, no doubt brooding about what it all means for him.
In his post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn shows that the relationship between Fenn Gibbon and Aristide is modeled on that between Gutman and Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon, and he and his commenters demonstrate that that novel and its 1941 film version included explicit hints that Gutman and Wilmer were occasional sex partners. Aristide has been so eager to connect with the ladies that it’s hard to see much gay subtext between him and Fenn Gibbon so far, but it’s early days for them on the show. Moreover, the echo of Jason and Willie reminds us of the hints the show dropped that those two had shared more than a firm handshake at some point in their seafaring days. The original series bible and the early drafts of the first scripts had referred to The Blue Whale as “The Rainbow Bar”; maybe Aristide and Fenn Gibbon are destined to bring that name back.
When wicked witch Angelique first turned Barnabas Collins into a vampire in the 1790s, he went to the waterfront and preyed on the women he found spending their nights there. When Barnabas traveled in time from the 1960s to the year 1897, he again made his way to the waterfront. Whether he bit the women or not, he choked them to death, earning the sobriquet “The Collinsport Strangler.”
Once he had become a vampire, Barnabas displayed so many traits he had come to have in common with Angelique that we suspect he is not only cursed by her, but possessed by her. More precisely, it often seems that when Angelique made Barnabas a vampire she created a copy of her own personality and put it in his mind, where it took control of him. We have further support for that interpretation in today’s opening reprise. We see Angelique on the same set where Barnabas has several times been the last person a young woman would encounter. This time, she encounters a young man. He flirts with her, as the women flirted with Barnabas. Before long, he is choking and within seconds of death because of her action. In this case, she has taken his handkerchief and is tightening it around the neck of a toy soldier that once belonged to Barnabas. She is threatening to kill him unless he tells her where he has hidden the legendary “Hand of Count Petofi.”
The man’s name is Aristide. He capitulates, telling her he buried the hand at the old cemetery, in a grave marked with a stone bearing the name of Townsend. She gives the handkerchief another tug, and he falls down, unconscious.
Later, we are in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Angelique comes down the stairs, carrying the box in which the hand is kept. Stuffy Edward Collins sees her. Regular viewers have seen the box on a table in the upstairs hallway many times, from the first week of the show onward. It is rather odd that Edward doesn’t ask her why she is carrying it around. Even if we decide to forget that the prop is familiar and decide to treat it as representing something Edward hasn’t seen before, people don’t usually walk around carrying wooden boxes in front of themselves.
Still, Edward does have other matters on his mind. Angelique had been introduced to the family as Barnabas’ fiancée, at a time when all the Collinses knew about Barnabas was that he was their distant cousin. She disappeared when he was exposed as a vampire. Edward tells her that the family’s lawyer, Evan Hanley, told him that he knew her before she met Barnabas, and that he believes that her association with him was innocent. Edward also says that he cannot believe that this is true. Angelique tells Edward a story about Barnabas biting her and making him her slave; Edward is convinced instantly, and declines her offer to leave at once. He urges her to stay at Collinwood until she can make new plans.
Meanwhile, we have learned that Aristide is alive and not seriously injured. A man in a set of whiskers that represent the aesthetic sensibilities of the late Victorian era developed to their uttermost extremity finds Aristide crumpled on the ground, rouses him from unconsciousness, and responds to his story about Angelique almost killing him with dismay that she stopped short. He tells Aristide not to do anything more. His own credentials are in order, and he will present them at Collinwood as he sets about his second attempt to get the hand.
The man does go to Collinwood. He gives Edward a letter from their “mutual friend,” the Earl of Hampshire. It attests to the good character of its bearer, Victor Fenn Gibbon. Edward insists that Fenn Gibbon stay in the house, and he accepts.
Angelique emerges from the drawing room, still carrying the box. Edward continues to ignore it; Fenn Gibbon can’t take his eyes off it. Edward introduces her as Angelique Duvall. This is the first time we have heard the name “Duvall” in connection with her; when we met her in the part of the show set in the 1790s, her name was Angelique Bouchard, and when she turned up in 1968 she called herself Cassandra Blair. Fenn Gibbon asks if she is French. She says that she was born in the USA, but that her forebears were French people who lived on Martinique. Indeed, when she was known as Angelique Bouchard she lived on that island, and it was there she met Barnabas. Fenn Gibbon tells her that lovely as France’s colonial possessions may be, none is as “exquisite” as she. She is charmed, and excuses herself. She leaves the house, taking the box with her.
While Fenn Gibbon regales Edward with tales of derring-do from the battle of Khartoum, Angelique takes the box to the Old House. There, she meets the rakish Quentin Collins, whose desperately handsome face has been severely disfigured by a previous encounter with the hand. Angelique dismisses Quentin’s girlfriend, maidservant Beth, telling her that she cannot be present during what she must now do for Quentin. Beth leaves, Angelique shows Quentin the hand, and Quentin demands that Angelique set to work curing him. She says there will be a price for her services. If she cures him, he will have to marry her. He has nothing to lose, and she looks exactly like Lara Parker, so of course he agrees.
Angelique picks up the hand and gets to work casting a spell, but the hand quickly escapes her control. She turns to find that it is on Quentin and he is in agony. He pleads with her to help, she cries out that she can do nothing, and we see Fenn Gibbon peering in through the window.
Fenn Gibbon* is the fifth role Thayer David played on Dark Shadows. The first, second, and fourth were all closely associated with the Old House. They were crazed handyman Matthew Morgan, who holed up there after he killed local man Bill Malloy; much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes, who lived and worked there; and broad ethnic stereotype Sandor Rákóczi, who with his even more offensively conceived wife Magda lives at the Old House in 1897. With this iconography behind David, regular viewers will know that when they see Fenn Gibbon in the window of the Old House, they are seeing a man who knows his way around the place.
David’s third role sheds even more light on Fenn Gibbon. In the parts of the show set in 1968 and subsequent years, he plays Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, expert on the occult and descendant of Ben. Unlike most of the characters who made a splash on the show, Stokes has a functioning conscience. He does not always live within the law, but he always strives to do what is right. When we see that Fenn Gibbon knows about the hand and has orchestrated a criminal conspiracy to obtain it, we see that he is an evil version of Stokes. At once this makes him fascinating to regular viewers. Stokes himself is a reimagining of the show’s first academic specialist in the paranormal, Dr Peter Guthrie, who was killed by a witch in #186. He is a jovial and talkative eccentric, where Guthrie was a tight-lipped and understated Yankee. Fenn Gibbon seems to have inherited Stokes’ whimsical bent and exaggerated manner; we now have to wonder what Stokes would be like as a villain.
Even those who joined the show after it went to 1897 and who therefore do not know about Stokes will be intrigued when they see David as Fenn Gibbon. Sandor hasn’t appeared since #750, but he is still alive. This marks the first time Dark Shadows has cast the same actor as two living characters in the same time frame.** Sometimes an actor has doubled as a living character and as a ghost, or has appeared in two roles in parts of an episode set in different periods of history. But this is a new frontier for doubling on the show. Sandor is always a lot of fun, so we might hope that he will be back and that he and Fenn Gibbon just won’t have scenes together. But coming on the heels of his long absence, it does have an ominous ring.
In #758, Quentin backed Angelique against a wall and asked her why she preferred Barnabas to him. That was a very good question. The two of them are obviously attracted to each other, and have a lot of fun every time they are alone together. By contrast, the only emotions Barnabas has ever shown in response to Angelique are glumness and rage. Her maniacal insistence that Barnabas should love her drove Angelique to wreak immense havoc in the 1790s, and also motivated some story in 1968. But there is nothing to it beyond his misery and her self-absorption. When we see her turn her attentions to Quentin, longtime viewers will cheer at the hope that we are about to be freed from that dead end once and for all.
*He introduces himself today as “Fenn Gibbons,” which is how he is almost always addressed. But the closing credits leave the S off his name. The closing credits have been unreliable lately, identifying Edward as his grandson Roger and misspelling Aristide’s name. Still, “Fenn Gibbon” sounds better to me; “Fenn Gibbons” suggests a group of small apes found in a peat bog.
**Don Briscoe briefly played both werewolf Chris Jennings and Chris’ brother Tom, but that is only a partial exception- Tom was a vampire at that time.
Quentin Collins has devoted himself to the pursuit of evil, and as a result he has two intractable problems. When Quentin murdered his wife Jenny, her sister, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, turned him into a werewolf. Magda later found out that Jenny had borne twins to Quentin, and since the curse is hereditary she tried to lift it. She placed the magical “Hand of Count Petofi” on Quentin before his transformation. That didn’t stop him becoming a wolfman, but it did cause his face to be severely disfigured when he returned to human form.
Now Quentin has made his way to the house of Evan Hanley, his onetime friend and partner in Satanism. Evan had recently been disfigured in the same way Quentin is disfigured, also as a result of contact with the hand, and Quentin knows that Evan stole the hand from Magda to use in an attempt to de-uglify himself. When Quentin sees that Evan is handsome again, Evan denies that he used the hand to restore his looks. He claims not to know what happened. That is as frustrating for the audience as it is for Quentin. We were sure Evan would start looking like himself again, and they went to enough trouble to show that he was not able to correct his appearance by himself that we were expecting the cure to involve a significant plot point. When Evan presents us with “It just happened” as his explanation of how he got his old face back, we are quite sympathetic to Quentin’s decision to grab a blunt instrument and knock him out.
Quentin finds the hand in a box in Evan’s desk, and a strange man immediately enters. He demands Quentin give him the hand at once. Quentin is willing to surrender the hand once he has used it to become his desperately handsome self again, but the man will not wait. He pulls a knife to underline his point. The knife is a flat piece of wood cut in a shape with some pronounced curves and no sharp edges, and the man holds it loosely at the end of an arm that is directly over the box Quentin could easily raise to disarm him. So the audience has to help a bit to make the confrontation credible. Still, the acting is very good, and the dialogue, in which the man combines lethal threats with apparently sincere expressions of sympathy for Quentin’s plight and jokes at his expense, is complex and lively enough that we are glad to make the effort. Besides, the man goes to the trouble of telling Quentin that the knife is named “The Dancing Girl” and that it was made long ago by a Persian swordsmith, so he’s giving our imaginations something to work with. I, for one, didn’t have any trouble keeping a straight face when Quentin lost the fight and the man left with the box containing the hand.
Kids, if you are going to rob someone at knife-point, do not imitate what Aristide is doing here. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Quentin goes to Magda at the Old House on the estate of Collinwood and reports what happened. She is frightened, since she herself stole the hand from a Romani chieftain/ organized crime boss named King Johnny Romana. When he says that a strange man came to take the hand, she assumes that he is an emissary of King Johnny’s, and that his next stop will be to kill her. When Quentin says that the man was young, Magda is puzzled- the recognized norms dictate that King Johnny send “an elder of the tribe” to complete such a task. She sets aside her plan to flee, and agrees to help Quentin in his attempt to summon wicked witch Angelique.
Quentin and Evan conjured Angelique up in #711. In previous segments of the show, when it was set in the 1790s and in the 1960s, Angelique established herself as one of its principal sources of action. But she hasn’t had much to do in 1897. She had a showdown with fellow undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins back in May, and has barely been seen since. Quentin and Magda speak for the audience when they wonder where she is and what she has been doing. They speculate that she might have gone home to the depths of Hell, and light some black candles to accompany an incantation meant to call her thence.
Angelique does appear, but not at the Old House. Evan finds her in his parlor when he comes to. One of the possible explanations for the restoration of Evan’s good looks was that he made some kind of bargain with Angelique; this is excluded, not only when he is surprised to see her, but when she asks questions that make it clear she knows nothing about the hand or anything that has happened since Magda brought it back with her. Angelique orders Evan to give her a complete briefing, and we cut back to the Old House.
Quentin is still in front of the black candles, fervently reciting his mumbo-jumbo, and Magda is telling him they have failed. After a moment, Angelique enters. Quentin jubilantly declares that he has succeeded in summoning her, and Angelique says that she is not aware of that. She tells him she was with Evan, and asks about the hand. Quentin tells her it was taken from him, and asks for her assistance. She says she is willing to help him, for a price, and that as a token of her good faith she will retrieve the hand. But first she insists he tells her everything he knows. We cut to the waterfront.
There, the man who took the hand from Quentin is standing alone in the fog. Angelique enters and flirts with him. He gives his name as Aristide. She says she is a puppeteer, and that if he lends her his handkerchief she will perform a trick. She wraps his handkerchief around the neck of a doll depicting a Continental soldier, a familiar prop from 1967 that became prominent during the 1790s segment, and squeezes it. Aristide begins choking, and Angelique orders him to give her the hand before he dies.
The closing credits bill Michael Stroka as playing “Aristede,” an unusual spelling. The following item, posted in the comments under Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, confirms my resolution to stick to the conventional spelling:
Factoid… I have the original script for episode 808, and Aristede is spelled throughout as Aristide.
Comment left 3 September 2017 by “Isaac from Studio 16 on W 53rd” on Danny Horn, “Episode 792: Dances with Wolves,” Posted at Dark Shadows Every Day, 19 December 2015.
In the same comment thread, Carol Zerucha goes on at length about Stroka’s ethnicity. He was Slovak, as she is, and she had a big crush on him when she was a kid watching the show. The characters in today’s episode assume that Aristide is Roma, but Ms Zerucha points out that we have no reason to assume they are right, and that he, too, might be Slovak.
Also in that thread, FotB “Straker” says that Aristide looks like William F. Buckley, Jr. I agree. I wish they had at some point cast him as a character who leaned way back in his chair and used polysyllabic words.
Vampire Barnabas Collins has stashed his coffin in its old hiding place, the hidden chamber inside the mausoleum where his parents and sister are buried. As dawn approaches, he tells his reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, that this is the last day he will have to leave the coffin there. The suspicions that had recently surrounded him have cleared, and he will move the coffin back to the basement of Magda’s home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, when he next arises.
The graveyard is immersed in a heavy fog. As Barnabas approaches the mausoleum, a familiar voice calls to him. His old nemesis and ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique, implores him to come with her and leave the year 1897. She warns him that he must return to 1969 now, or it will be too late. Barnabas tells Angelique that he has not accomplished the goals for which he came to the past, and that he will not leave until he has done so.
Longtime viewers may be puzzled when Angelique tells Barnabas that she has helped him before. In #757, Angelique did prevent her fellow undead blonde fire witch, Laura Murdoch Collins, from staking Barnabas, but that did not seem to be intended as a service to Barnabas. Rather, it recalled #417, in which Angelique prevented Barnabas’ friend Ben Stokes from staking him and freeing him of the effects of the vampire curse she had placed upon him. She told Ben that she wanted Barnabas to suffer forever, and nothing she says to Laura indicates that she has changed. Indeed, the only time she ever seemed to act out of goodwill towards Barnabas was in #410, when Barnabas was about to rise as a vampire for the first time and she, regretting the curse, tried to stake him herself. Perhaps there is a retcon coming up, in which it will be made possible for Barnabas and Angelique to join forces against some new enemy.
It certainly seems that the show is about to take a new turn of some kind. The major storylines with which the 1897 segment began are all approaching their natural conclusions, and a number of major characters have already been killed off. Longtime viewers will recognize an acknowledgement of these facts, not only in Angelique’s explicit statement that the proper time for Barnabas’ stay in the late nineteenth century is almost up, but also in the doings of another character in the graveyard.
Inveterate prankster Carl Collins suspects Barnabas of being a vampire, and in a dream visitation his late fiancée Pansy directed his attention to the mausoleum. Lurking outside it, he sees Barnabas open the secret panel and go into the chamber where the coffin is kept. Carl declares that “We’ll get him tonight! We’ll get cousin Barnabas… TONIGHT!”
Carl is played by John Karlen, who first appeared on Dark Shadows as the luckless Willie Loomis. It was Willie who, in a misbegotten attempt at jewel theft, inadvertently freed Barnabas to prey upon the living in #210. In consequence, Barnabas bit Willie and enslaved him. When Willie first served him, Barnabas would control him not only by the usual vampiric practices of blood-drinking and telepathic summoning, but also by frequent heavy beatings with his cane. Later, Willie would come to feel that Barnabas was his friend; it was never clear that Barnabas reciprocated this feeling.
Carl first met Barnabas in #706. He introduced himself by holding a gun to Barnabas’ head and threatening to shoot him if he did not admit that his story of being a long-lost cousin from England was a lie. The gun turned out to be loaded with a flag labeled “FIB,” and the whole thing was Carl’s idea of a joke. Barnabas’ icy response, starting with his incredulous tone while asking if “YOU are a COLLINS?,” set the tone for all of his subsequent dealings with Carl, in which his attitude ranged from undisguised contempt to barely disguised contempt. Yet Carl remained convinced that he and Barnabas were going to be great friends, and he even asked Barnabas to be the best man at his wedding to Pansy. Carl is much more enthusiastic about his supposed friendship with Barnabas than Willie is about his, and Barnabas is far more open about his hostility towards him, making the Carl/ Barnabas relationship a spoof of the Willie/ Barnabas one.
Ever since Pansy’s death, Carl’s thoughts about Barnabas have taken a darker cast. When we see him in the mausoleum, watching the panel open, we know that his plan to “get cousin Barnabas” will take him into the chamber where Willie forever lost his freedom. We know, too, that Willie’s misfortune revolutionized the show; when it puts this actor on this set, Dark Shadows is promising to make major changes.
We cut to the drawing room of the great house on the estate. Rakishly handsome Quentin Collins is talking with Magda. As Angelique cursed Barnabas to be a vampire, so Magda cursed Quentin to be a werewolf. Angelique placed her curse because she was upset that Barnabas did not love her and was under the impression she was about to die. Magda placed hers because Quentin had married and then murdered her sister Jenny. Magda did not know then that Jenny had borne twins to Quentin, a son and a daughter. Since the curse is hereditary, Magda has been trying desperately to reverse it ever since she learned of the children’s existence.
The children are still secret from Quentin, and so he does not understand why Magda is trying to help him. When he demands she tell him, she says “I. Did. Not. KNOWWW!” in exactly the same intonation she had used when she first heard about the children in #763. First time viewers don’t know any more than Quentin does what she is talking about- the children are not mentioned today. Magda makes up an obvious lie, saying that she hadn’t known how much Jenny loved him. That isn’t meant to fool the audience, and doesn’t fool Quentin. But when Carl enters, Quentin drops the subject and leaves new viewers in suspense about what Magda now knows that they do not.
Carl knows that Magda lives with Barnabas, and refuses to talk in front of her. She teasingly asks “Mr Carl” if he “don’t like me any more,” and walks out with a bold stride, suggesting that Carl may at some point have shown signs of liking her rather too avidly for her husband’s comfort. Once she is gone, Carl tells Quentin that there is a vampire in their midst. Quentin dismisses this out of hand, telling him that their brother Edward staked a vampire named Dirk and told him about it in vast and gory detail. Carl asks who made Dirk a vampire; Quentin says that it was Laura. No, says Carl, Barnabas made Dirk a vampire, and Barnabas is a vampire himself.
Quentin begins to laugh, but within seconds realizes that there is a great deal of evidence in plain sight to support Carl’s assertion. He agrees to go with Carl to the mausoleum, but we hear his thoughts as he reflects that Barnabas’ efforts to help him are the only hope he has of release from the werewolf curse.
In the mausoleum, Carl wonders aloud where Barnabas came from. Quentin supposes that he was there all along. Carl is horrified at the thought that he is “the real Barnabas- our ancestor! Oh God, that makes it worse!” Quentin orders Carl to open the panel, and Carl obeys. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, John Karlen once again plays the servant’s role.
In the hidden chamber, the brothers open the coffin, finding the diurnally deceased Barnabas. Quentin tells Carl to hand over the gun he has brought; Carl obeys. Quentin asks Carl if he knows how to get out of the chamber. When Carl says that he does not, Quentin turns the gun on him and forces him to stay. Quentin shuts his brother up in the chamber with the vampire.
In #384, set in the 1790s, Barnabas shot and killed his uncle Jeremiah. Barnabas and Jeremiah were about the same age, and had been very close; they were often compared to brothers. Barnabas was not yet under a curse when he committed that fratricide; it was an act entirely of his own will. Angelique was also partly responsible; she had cast spells on Jeremiah and on Barnabas’ fiancée Josette, causing them to conceive a mad passion for each other and to run off and get married. Enraged, Barnabas broke from the customs of New England and challenged Jeremiah to a duel. Consumed with guilt, Jeremiah deloped and let Barnabas kill him.
Barnabas’ killing of Jeremiah was murder under the laws which prevailed at the time in Maine, which was until 1821 part of Massachusetts. Indeed, Massachusetts’ anti-dueling act of 1730 provided that anyone who had either been killed in a duel or been put to death for winning a duel would “be given an unchristian burial at a gallows or crossroads, with a stake driven through their body.” Since the audience knows that Barnabas is fated to become a vampire, there is a chilling irony in seeing him volunteer for a staked burial.
Dark as was the shadow the duel cast over the subsequent history of the Collinses, at least Barnabas’ act showed a kind of twisted courage. But when Quentin uses Barnabas as a weapon to kill his brother, he is acting from the most abject cowardice. In the century that they have been subject to black magic, the Collinses have sunk from tragic grandeur to infantile squalor.
Quentin goes to the Old House and tells Magda what he has done. Magda is horrified at another murder. “No! Too many people are suspicious now. We’ve got to stop it or we’ll all be found out!” Since Magda is not a member of the Collins family, she is often the straight man reacting to revelations of their misdeeds and monstrosities. And since she is played by the charismatic Grayson Hall, the audience tends to adopt her point of view. So it is easy for us to forget that she is a functional sociopath. Despite all the killings we know to have resulted from her actions, it is still startling that Magda’s only objection to Quentin’s attempt to murder his brother is that she is afraid of getting caught.
We cut to another scene on the same set. Magda has summoned Angelique to the front parlor of the Old House. She asks Angelique to erase Carl’s memory so that Barnabas will not choose to kill him. Angelique taunts Magda as an “amateur” in the occult arts, and declares that she is done helping Barnabas. Magda says that she has read the Tarot, and that the cards tell her that Angelique loves Barnabas. She renews her plea to prevent the killing of Carl, but Angelique will not yield.
The reference to the Tarot rings a bell for longtime viewers. In the 1790s segment, Hall played the Countess DuPrés, Josette’s aunt. Angelique was introduced in that segment; she was the countess’ maidservant, and appeared to be a beginner in witchcraft. The countess was oblivious to Angelique’s sideline, and in #393 declared her to be an uninteresting woman whom she had known ever since she was an uninteresting child. The countess spent most of her time in the front parlor of the Old House reading the Tarot. That Angelique speaks so haughtily to the Tarot reader and “amateur” witch Magda on the same set highlights the reversal of roles in this segment.
Meanwhile, Carl searches the hidden chamber for a way to escape. He finds that one of the stones in the steps slides and reveals a lever. He turns the lever, opening the panel. He runs out and vows to destroy Barnabas, in the process almost knocking over a large tombstone that wobbles as if it were made of Styrofoam.
In episodes #310-315, made and set in 1967, strange and troubled boy David Collins was trapped in the hidden chamber for a whole week. He never did find the release lever- the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah finally took pity on him, materializing and showing it to him. The show avoids the implication that David is drastically dumber than his great-great uncle Carl by showing that the stone concealing the lever is already slightly ajar.
Dark Shadows‘ first supernatural menace, on the show from December 1966 to March 1967, was undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. In those days, we learned that at intervals of exactly 100 years Laura incinerated herself and her young son, always a boy named David, and that she (but not the Davids) rose from the ashes as a humanoid Phoenix. Well-meaning governess Victoria Winters led the resistance to Laura.
The story came to its climax as Laura she tried to take her son, Vicki’s charge David Collins, to the fate that had claimed David Stockbridge in 1767, David Radcliffe in 1867, and who knows how many other Davids in the preceding centuries. At the final moment, David Collins ran from the burning shack to which Laura had brought him and found his way to Vicki’s arms. With that, he chose Vicki and life over his mother and death, and Dark Shadows 1.0 reached its conclusion.
Dark Shadows 2.0 picked up immediately after, and focused on another supernatural villain, vampire Barnabas Collins. There isn’t an established mythology for filicidal humanoid Phoenixes, so the writers had leaned heavily on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and on stage and film adaptations of the novel for the structure and details of the Laura story. For example, in many scenes they went out of their way to show that Laura never eats or drinks. They eventually established that Barnabas doesn’t eat or drink either, but when he first came on they had to show that they were not just repeating what they had done so shortly before. So in #221, Barnabas clearly drinks a cup of coffee.
The original plan had apparently been that Barnabas would wreak terror for thirteen weeks while Vicki gradually figured out what was going on, organized a force to do battle with him, and then staked him in #275, destroying him in the last episode the ABC network was likely to air before cancelling the show. But Barnabas brought a new audience with him, prompting ABC to renew for another thirteen weeks. So his destruction had to be postponed indefinitely, and Vicki wound up on the margins of the story. She became Barnabas’ friend and stalwart defender before ultimately disappearing altogether.
Since then, Dark Shadows has been reinvented several times. Version 3.0 ran from November 1967 through March 1968; it was a costume drama set in the 1790s, to which Vicki had been transported by the mysterious powers represented by the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah. Version 4.0 ran from March through November 1968; it was a Monster Mash in which a variety of vampires, Frankensteins, witches, and other refugees from the Universal Studios back catalog stumbled over each other in an ever-more futile search for a coherent plot. Version 5.0 began in November 1968 with two stories revolving around nine year old Amy Jennings. These were the Haunting of Collinwood by the malign ghost of Quentin Collins, who represented a special threat to Amy, and the Werewolf Curse on Amy’s big brother Chris. I don’t know what was in the original flimsies, but I suspect this portion of the show was originally meant to be much shorter than it is and to serve as a prologue to Version 5.0.1, a costume drama set in 1897, when Quentin was alive and the werewolf curse began. It shows signs of having been greatly extended when Quentin’s ghost started to attract a large and fervent fan-base and the producers were unsure whether he could keep that following as a living being.
We finally went back to 1897 in #701, twelve weeks ago. Barnabas, who at the beginning of the Monster Mash period was freed of the effects of the vampire curse, tried to save Amy, Chris, and everyone else at Collinwood by doing some mumbo-jumbo, and found himself transported back in time. Having traveled to the past, he has once again become a vampire.
Among the many people Barnabas has met during his uncertain and frightening journey to the past is another iteration of Laura. It turns out that he remembers her from 1767, when he was a child and she was married to his uncle. She at first accepted his story that he was the great-grandson of the original Barnabas. He was a small boy when she burned that time, and all she can see is that her new acquaintance has a family resemblance to that boy. But he knew that she was planning to incinerate her children, among them the ancestor of the Collinses whom he knows at Collinwood in the 1960s, and he has been flagrantly aggressive in his opposition to her. She has learned that he is a vampire, and has tried to destroy him.
The highlight of today’s episode comes when Laura enters the foyer of the great house and Barnabas pops up to greet her. He calls her Laura Stockbridge, and she begins talking about what he was like as a boy. She refers to their similarity, implying that she is herself a type of vampire. She tells him he shouldn’t oppose her, and he says that he would want her to stop him if he were about to do what she is planning. She says that he cannot know what her plans are. He assures her he does know, and she lists all the people with whom he may have discussed her, dismissing each in turn as an unreliable source. Barnabas keeps smiling. For a thrilling moment, we wonder if his key informant was Vicki. Perhaps she told him about her encounter with the Laura of 1966-1967, and he knows everything she figured out in those days.
Alas, it is not so. Barnabas opens a door and reveals the slumped figure of Laura’s dimwitted thrall Dirk. Earlier Barnabas, in bat form, had attached Dirk to prevent him bringing a letter to the house that would have exposed Barnabas’ secret. Barnabas tells Laura he hasn’t killed Dirk, merely bitten him and questioned him. In the first two-thirds of the episode, Dirk, played by the always-regrettable Roger Davis, kept grabbing Laura and pawing at her; at one point Diana Millay does an adroit little judo move to block his hand before he can put it on her left breast. As a result of these scenes and countless others in which Mr Davis engaged in similar behavior, many in the audience will groan with disappointment when Barnabas says that Dirk is not dead.
Millay and Jonathan Frid are wonderful in this scene. Laura’s lines are perfectly suited to display Millay’s gift for subtle emotional transitions, and Frid’s delivery shows what he can do when he has time to learn his part and the lines do not require him to verbalize the character’s every thought. Mr Davis is also well within his range, playing as he does an unconscious and apparently dead body. He should have specialized in that, it’s the first thing we’ve seen him do really well in all of his many appearances on the show.
Undead blonde fire witches Laura and Angelique are trying to destroy each other, using Laura’s son Jamison and Jamison’s uncle Quentin as their cat’s paws. At the beginning of the episode, it looks like the spell Angelique and Quentin are casting is about to incinerate Laura; at the end, it looks like the spell Laura is casting is incinerating Angelique. In between, Quentin’s sister Judith notices that something is wrong with Jamison, and suspects that whatever Quentin and Angelique are up to is the cause.
Quentin and Laura get all religioused-up asking the gods of ancient Egypt to help them against Laura. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Laura is just about out of story, so we can see that she will be leaving the show soon. She has important relationships to all the characters on the show right now, so her departure will kick this segment of Dark Shadows, a costume drama set in the year 1897, into a new phase. Today’s episode is too deeply involved with the back and forth in the battle of the witches to give much indication as to what that next phase will be, but Judith’s perceptiveness suggests that whatever it is will keep up the rapid pace set in the first twelve weeks of the flashback, unencumbered by characters who slow things down by refusing to face facts.
Longtime viewers will be intrigued by variations on some familiar themes. Angelique orders Quentin to bring her a mirror and then leave the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. Obviously she is going to use it to cast a spell that will protect her from Laura, but she refuses to tell Quentin the particulars. We know well how powerful reflections are in the universe of Dark Shadows; Wallace McBride of the Collinsport Historical Society made some very penetrating observations about how that motif was already in place in episode #1 in his 18 April 2020 post on that treasured, but now only intermittently available, site.
Later, Laura is in the drawing room at the great house on the estate about to tell Judith the secret of the mysterious Barnabas Collins, but Angelique enters, makes googly eyes at Laura, and thereby robs her of the power to speak. When the show had its first séance in #170 and #171, it was held in this room and another iteration of Laura was in attendance. It was that Laura who looked at the medium with bulging eyes when she began to speak, and that medium struggled to speak just as Laura does now. So today we see the tables turned on Laura.
Quentin and Angelique are alone for a moment in the foyer of the great house. He backs her against the portrait of Barnabas that hangs there and asks why she prefers Barnabas to him. That is a question that will have occurred to the audience. The two of them look great together and have a lot of fun together, while Barnabas hates Angelique. All she does is kill his family and friends to punish him for refusing to love her. She brushes Quentin off and orders him to go back to the Old House.
In the final scene, Quentin returns to the Old House and is baffled to find that Angelique not only got there before him, but that she has had time to play a long game of solitaire since returning from the great house. She dismisses his questions and tells him that she wants him to be with her when “it happens.” Before he can find the words to ask what she is expecting, she bursts into flames.
It seems that Angelique is in two places at once. More precisely, it seems that there are two of her, one that Quentin left in the great house, and another who was in the Old House all along waiting to be incinerated by Laura’s spells. Presumably the one in the Old House is a Doppelgänger that Angelique used the mirror to create. Nowadays, the idea of a home-made Doppelgänger fabricated to serve a specific purpose will remind many people of the 2017 season of Twin Peaks, with its concept of a “tulpa.” The Buddhist concept of the tulpa was indeed in circulation in the USA in the 1960s; Annie Besant had introduced it to the Theosophist movement, which had many followers in the Midwest, where writer Sam Hall was born. But Besant and her fans seem to have used the word in a sense closer to its original, in which people attaining Buddha-hood have the power to send copies of themselves back into the world to teach others pursuing enlightenment. Later heirs of Theosophy have tried to develop a non-Buddhist meaning for the word tulpa, but using it to refer to a lookalike that some practitioner of black magic can whip up to do a job appears to be the intellectual property of Lynch/ Frost Productions.
Be that as it may, we have seen ever since Laura was first on the show from December 1966 to March 1967 that each of the supernatural beings on Dark Shadows is a complex of related but independent phenomena, some of which may work at cross-purposes with each other. Angelique in particular seems to create another version of herself and send it out into the world each time she casts a spell. Since others of Angelique’s creatures have gone on to defy her, even trying to kill her, it must have come as a relief to know that this time the Doppelgänger would be going up in flames by nightfall.
Undead blonde fire witch Laura is in the act of driving a stake into the heart of vampire Barnabas when she is interrupted by another undead blonde fire witch, Angelique. Angelique announces that she will always be there to thwart any attempt to stake Barnabas, which rather tends to deflate the suspense inherent in having a protagonist who is a vampire. The two of them exchange threats, and Laura finds that she can hold Angelique at bay by generating the right kind of fire.
Laura leaves Barnabas’ house. His unwilling sidekick, thoroughly human witch Magda, sees her and asks what she was doing there. Laura does not answer, but Angelique enters and tells her. Angelique says that Barnabas would doubtless wreak a terrible vengeance if he found out what had happened while Magda was away. Angelique orders Magda to go to the great house of Collinwood and fetch a fourth witch, black magic enthusiast Quentin. Magda complies reluctantly.
Quentin is falling down drunk, which is not unusual. He has a better excuse than he typically does, however, since he just found out that Magda turned him into a werewolf. He is furious to see her. He says that no matter what she thinks, he will not “lie down and die!” This elicits a laugh from Magda, who points out that he can barely stand up. She tells him that Angelique has ordered him to come to Barnabas’ house, and that he cannot oppose her.
In the house, Angelique tells Quentin he must help her defend Barnabas from Laura. Quentin moans that he is in no condition to help anyone, which only makes Angelique impatient. Unlike her and Magda, Quentin does not know that Barnabas is a vampire, so Angelique keeps reminding herself to say that Barnabas has gone away for the day and that Laura will be a threat to him when he comes back tonight. Quentin tells Angelique about a trinket Laura received from some of the gods of ancient Egypt that keeps her alive, and she sends Magda to steal it from her.
Magda goes to Laura’s cottage. Magda tells Laura that she has more reason to hate Barnabas than she does, since Barnabas enslaved her husband Sandor. She wants Barnabas to be destroyed, but if Laura tells the authorities about him Sandor, too, will be killed. The dramatic date is 1897, and the state of Maine abolished the death penalty in 1887, so Magda is afraid of an extrajudicial killing rather than an execution for complicity in Barnabas’ murders.
Laura tells her that it is necessary to expose Barnabas if he is to be destroyed, but Magda tells her of another way. She says that vampires can be killed by silver bullets through the heart. Laura goes to get money for Magda to buy silver and have it made into bullets. While she is out of the room, Magda steals the trinket. It seems that Magda has given herself a chance to get rid of both Laura and Barnabas.
Once Angelique has the trinket, she tells Quentin that he will have to perform a ceremony using his copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. He is still heavily hungover and balks at the orders, but she gives him no choice. Once he starts his incantation, he breaks into a big smile, clasps the book to his chest, and preaches the phrases like a megachurch pastor when the collection plates are circulating. We cut to Angelique. Her expression is so admiring it is hard to tell whether the reaction is the character’s or the actress’. Angelique does some mumbo-jumbo with objects in the fireplace.
In her cottage, Laura struggles. She looks frantically for the trinket, then prays to Amun-Ra. The final shot of her is filtered to distort her image. It turns her eyes into little black coals, which is an effective visual metaphor.
Laura has been important in the history of the show and is key to this little period of the plot, but it is fairly clear that she is a short-timer now. All she cares about is taking her children away and burning them to death so that she can renew her own existence, and she keeps saying she is on a tight deadline for that project. We can be sure she won’t succeed, and even if she does she will be off the show. So she really could die, making the cliffhanger more suspenseful than usual.
Soaps classically divided the days of the week so that very little happened on Tuesday or Wednesday, Thursdays were devoted to plot mechanics setting up a big development, Fridays would show that big development and end with a memorable cliffhanger, and Mondays would resolve the cliffhanger and give a lot of recap to bring new viewers up to speed. Dark Shadows never followed this formula. These last three episodes are a case in point. #755 was all about Laura trying and failing to figure out whether Barnabas was a vampire. That was a mid-week throwaway if ever there was one, but it aired on a Friday. Yesterday she got confirmation that he was, and we ended with a fine cliffhanger with her holding the stake and mallet beside Barnabas’ open coffin. That aired on Monday, but was a perfect Thursday scene-setter. Today, a Tuesday, we have a whiz-bang battle of the witches, with new alignments and new dangers, a great Friday climax with a cliffhanger fitting for the end of any week.
Violet Welles was far and away the best writer of dialogue on Dark Shadows, and today’s script is so full of gems that even the plot summary on the Dark Shadows wiki is full of quotes. I can hardly blame the editor for that deviation from the usual format, there is so much good stuff I would have been tempted to transcribe the entire script if someone else had not already done so.
Dark Shadows Commentary 