Julia Hoffman, MD, can do many things no other medical practitioner has ever accomplished. She can build a Frankenstein’s monster and bring it to life; she can erase a person’s memories and overwrite them with whatever she pleases; she can cure vampirism; and, a few weeks ago, she overcame time and space and transferred herself to a parallel universe. Yet, Julia is quite unreliable about something which most doctors do accurately every time they attempt it. She is often incorrect when she pronounces a patient dead. Julia has been known to pronounce the same person dead twice in one episode, only for us to see them alive and well before the credits roll.
So, it is only fitting that in this mirror universe Julia should be the one who is inaccurately pronounced dead. The pronouncement comes not from a physician, but from a woman named Roxanne Drew who, in lieu of a personality, has the ability to look at a person’s belongings and visualize their current physical state. Julia’s friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, gives Roxanne a scarf that belonged to Julia’s counterpart in this universe. Roxanne declares that the scarf’s owner is dead. The audience knows full well that the other Julia Hoffman is indeed dead, and so does Barnabas. Julia killed her Doppelgänger when she arrived in this universe in #1036. But Barnabas has apparently forgotten about that. He decides that it is his friend who is dead, and he gives up the search for her. He leaves her trapped in a dungeon in the basement of the great house of Collinwood, about to die of thirst.
Roxanne has short red hair, pale skin, and a strong chin. She looks enough like Julia that when we first saw her, we thought she would be revealed to be the daughter of Julia’s counterpart. The false death pronouncement reinforces the suggestion of a kinship between them, but the show has taken no other steps towards substantiating this idea.
Julia has an unrequited love for Barnabas and has given up everything in her life for his sake. He repays her by ignoring her feelings and chasing after other women. Vampires are metaphors for extreme selfishness, but even granting that fact, Barnabas stands out as a jerk.
Roxanne tells Barnabas she has fallen in love with him, and he tells her he loves her. In a display of actual unselfishness, he tells her they cannot be together. The central couple in this part of Dark Shadows, Quentin and Maggie Collins, have had many conversations in which Quentin refuses to tell Maggie about obstacles to their relationship; in #990, Maggie told him that he is treating her “Like a child! And I am not a child!” This scene takes place on the same set as that one, and Roxanne even says “You treat me as a child, and I am not.” Barnabas has a reason for his behavior, while Quentin had none. So the echo explains both why we can care about him, and why we never could care about Quentin.
Barnabas’ unselfishness lasts only for a few minutes. He bites Roxanne. She is happy afterward. She tells Barnabas she lives in a house at Finley’s Cove, and he says he will see her there later.
Roxanne goes home alone. She finds the villainous Tim Stokes waiting for her there. He harasses her, discovers the bite marks on her neck, and learns Barnabas’ secret.
Wicked witch Angelique has died, again. While she still dwelt among the living, Angelique locked Julia Hoffman up in a dungeon and left her to die of thirst. Julia’s buddy Barnabas Collins and a dimwitted policeman called Inspector Hamilton are looking for her. She is struggling to stay awake. The episode devotes so much time to a go-nowhere story about a non-character named Roxanne that we can sympathize with this struggle.
Julia nods off just as Barnabas and the inspector pass by the hidden wall of her dungeon. She does not hear them, and by the time she wakes up and starts calling out they are gone.
While asleep, Julia has a dream in which Barnabas and Roxanne decide that she must be dead. They are going to leave for the alternate universe from which Julia and Barnabas originally came. Julia has given up everything in her life to help Barnabas, and she has an unrequited love for him. For his part, Barnabas has conceived a mad passion for Roxanne, who is young and pretty but has no personality. Roxanne’s short red hair, pale complexion, and strong chin make her look like she could be Julia’s daughter. Indeed, when first we saw her it seemed likely she would be revealed to be the daughter of Julia’s counterpart in this universe. Barnabas is so thoughtless about throwing other women in Julia’s face that it would be like him to cast her aside for the daughter she might have had, Grayson Hall would have done a great job playing the anguish this would have inflicted on Julia, and it would have given Donna Wandrey something to work with as Roxanne. It’s a shame they didn’t run with it.
This is Colin Hamilton’s final appearance as Inspector Hamilton. It is always a bad sign when writers give a character the actor’s name; it suggests they don’t trust him to answer to anything else. They may have been right about Colin Hamilton. He will be back as a doctor in #1219. That is the only episode of Dark Shadows of which no video survives. There is an audio recording, so we can hear that Hamilton delivered the doctor’s dialogue in the same bored, impatient tone he used for the inspector.
Wicked witch Angelique Stokes Collins has cast a spell on Maggie Collins, compelling Maggie to shoot her husband Quentin. Angelique herself dwells among the living because of another spell, one cast by her father, a wizard known as Tim. This spell drains the “life force” from a woman named Roxanne into Angelique, revivifying her after Quentin’s brother Roger drove a hatpin into her brain nine months ago. Angelique has kept her identity secret, in part because Quentin and a friend of his had a panic attack some time ago and destroyed her coffin, keeping the physical evidence from telling its tales. They were two loonies, quelling caskets.
Occasionally Roxanne manages to reclaim enough of her “life force” to make Angelique weak and cold. When this happens, Angelique can perk herself up by hugging a man and kissing him, thereby making all of his body heat flow into her, leaving him an icy corpse. The kiss appears to have become essential to this transfer; her kissing equates coolness. Yesterday she gave Roger this treatment, avenging her own murder.
The spell on Roxanne will break when she speaks, and her pushy ex-boyfriend Claude is about to make her do that. So Angelique has only moments to live. Quentin is on the run from the law, charged with the murder of a man named Bruno. Angelique’s enemy, Barnabas Collins, demands she sign a confession admitting that Bruno was actually killed by a spell she cast using a cravat of his. Quentin is innocent in these loose necktie squallings.
Angelique refuses to sign any such document. Later, Barnabas will tell the whole story to a police inspector whose incredulous response makes it clear that it would not have persuaded anyone had she done so. More urgent is a question he puts to her about the whereabouts of his faithful companion, Julia Hoffman. Angelique has locked Julia in a dungeon and left her to die of thirst. The door to this chamber swings shut silently, and apparently it does not let Julia’s cries for help be heard outside. Many of the places of confinement we have seen on Dark Shadows are the looniest squeaking cells you could imagine, but this one is grimly soundproof.
Roxanne speaks and Angelique dies, defiant to the end. Cloaking queenliest loss, her refusal to bend invests the character with a perverse grandeur.
Barnabas remembers an Angelique who lived on the island of Martinique. For him, all the other Angeliques are just successors to what she brewed up there, Antilles cooking sequels, as it were. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
With Angelique’s death, her spell over Maggie breaks. Maggie collapses and drops the revolver she had trained on Quentin. One of the themes of the show has been that a person who casts a spell creates an alternate version of herself and that version takes possession of the person against whom they direct it. Lara Parker and Kathryn Leigh Scott play Angelique and Maggie’s collapses in the same way; seeing these back to back, we cannot miss the point that what we are really seeing is the simultaneous death of two Angeliques. Sometimes the alternate selves created by the spells outlive the spellcaster, and there is no telling where they will drive the victim. The accursed who wander about the earth, whether they became vampires like Barnabas or zombies like his uncle Jeremiah, are lockless antique legions, unrestricted in their physical movement, unlimited in the duration of their afflictions, uncounted in their numbers.
Miffed that Maggie pointed a gun at him, Quentin leaves the room. He finds Barnabas, who explains everything that has been going on. Quentin goes back to Maggie. She says that she realizes he could never love her or any other woman as he loved Angelique when she was alive. He tells her he never loved Angelique, but that he “hated the ground she walked on” and never shared a happy day with her because she was so cruel to him when they were married. When the same scene played out between Maxim de Winter and his second wife in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and in Alfred Hitchcock’s film based on the novel, we could take it as grounds for hoping that their marriage would take a turn for the better. But Quentin seems never to have loved Maggie, and we have never seen them share a happy day. They speak lovely words as they embrace; kissing allots eloquence. But Quentin’s declaration that he wasn’t any happier in his first marriage than he has been in his second comes only as confirmation of our suspicion that things will only go from bad to worse as long as he and Maggie stay together.
Barnabas and the inspector look for Roxanne. They don’t find her, and the inspector dismisses Barnabas’ whole story. The law moves a lot faster in Soap Opera Land than it does in our world, but only the looniest legal quickness could get Quentin out of trouble in the time that seems to be remaining in this storyline. Later, the inspector catches up to Quentin and arrests him, and Barnabas finds Claude stabbed to death in the woods.
This episode marks the final appearance of Angelique Stokes Collins. Lara Parker, that member of the queenliest looking class, will be back later as another witch named Angelique. It is also the final appearance of actor Brian Sturdivant and of the character Claude North. Sturdivant’s performance has many problems, most obviously his wildly uncertain accent. At times he manages to enunciate a few words in the old “mid-Atlantic accent” stage performers were trained to use in the first half of the twentieth century, but he never keeps it up for a whole line.
Angelique Stokes Collins has returned from the grave to take vengeance on her murderer. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know who that is. For the last several weeks, she has been operating on the assumption that she was killed by her widower, foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins. She has managed to get Quentin charged with one murder and suspected of several others; under her influence, he assaulted a police officer and broke out of jail. She has persuaded him that his current wife, the former Maggie Evans, is a witch and is responsible for all his troubles. He is lurking about the great house on the estate of Collinwood, where yesterday he encountered Maggie and told her he would kill her.
Angelique herself is residing in the great house. Eleven weeks ago she killed her identical twin sister Alexis, assumed Alexis’ identity, and took her place as Quentin’s houseguest. Maggie now thinks of “Alexis” as her friend.
Others in and around the house know better. High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, Quentin’s brother, has seen through her imposture. Two visitors from the alternate universe where Dark Shadows was set for its first 196 weeks, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and vampire Barnabas Collins, knew her counterpart in their world and are onto her tricks.
Angelique hears some noise in her old bedroom in the east wing of the great house. She finds the door locked and hears Roger’s voice. She demands to be let in. He opens the door and she forces her way past him. She finds Maggie in a heap on the floor. Roger rushes out. Maggie tells “Alexis” that Roger tried to strangle her after confessing to three murders, including Angelique’s. Angelique and Maggie decide to call the police.
Julia and Barnabas learned that Angelique’s father, evil barfly Tim Stokes, made it possible for her to rise from the dead by using a mixture of medical science and black magic to establish a remote connection between Angelique and a woman named Roxanne. Through this connection, Stokes drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. Julia and Barnabas have taken Roxanne from the back room of Stokes’ apartment and hooked her up to some mad science equipment in the basement of the Old House at Collinwood. They hope to manipulate Roxanne’s condition as a means of controlling Angelique.
Angelique has locked Julia in a dungeon off the basement of the great house and left her there to die of thirst. Barnabas is sure Angelique has captured her, but cannot begin to guess where she might be. He takes a shot at using the mad science equipment to revive Roxanne sufficiently to knock Angelique out. He cannot see any effect, and goes out to try to look for Julia.
As Barnabas goes out, a man peers at him from behind a tree. Since Barnabas never under any circumstances locks his front door, the man strolls into the house as soon as Barnabas is out of sight.
The man is Claude North, a mysterious person somehow connected with Roxanne. Barnabas comes back to the basement and finds Claude trying to get Roxanne to talk. He tells him that she must not do so just yet, because at her first word Angelique will die and there are some things he has to take care of before that happens. Claude cares nothing for this. Barnabas is afraid that if he attacks Claude, Roxanne will be startled into speaking, so he withdraws.
The other day, we saw a grave marker in Claude’s name, and we have seen that he has the same power Barnabas does to mesmerize people when they follow his command to “Look into my eyes!” He had also been staying in a hidden chamber identical to the one where Barnabas’ coffin was kept for his first 171 years as a vampire. And he had some kind of mystical power over Roxanne, as Barnabas has over his victims. So we thought Claude might be a vampire, too. But today he explains that the grave was his grandfather’s, he clearly doesn’t recognize Barnabas as a fellow bloodsucker, and when cornered he doesn’t flash fangs. So we’re left thinking he’s probably just Roxanne’s overconfident ex.
Meanwhile, Angelique is feeling cold and weak because Roxanne has reclaimed so much of her “life force.” She has cast a spell to cause Roger to slip past the police swarming the estate and make his way to her in her old room. Once they are together, she warms herself up for a while by hugging and kissing him. First time viewers may think this is an odd thing for her to do, but returning viewers know that she is a heat vampire who can by those actions drain the warmth from a living body and leave it an icy corpse. Louis Edmonds has been doing some great work these last few weeks, and he plays Roger’s death scene especially well.
Downstairs in the drawing room, Angelique is still shivering. Maggie enters and sees that “Alexis” is ill. Maggie insists on helping, and Angelique suggests she walk her to the fireplace. They sit together beside it. We learned Wednesday that Angelique has magical hypnotic powers, and Maggie’s counterpart in the main continuity was subjected to frequent mind-wipes. So there is a nice sense of inevitability when Angelique puts her into a trance and orders her to get a gun and prepare to shoot Quentin.
Angelique is still sitting by the fire, still feeling miserable, when Barnabas comes back. He tells her that Claude is with Roxanne and that Roxanne will be speaking at any moment. He writes up a confession and orders her to sign it, saying it will clear Quentin of the murder with which he was charged. He says that this will allow her to find peace. She says she doesn’t want peace. We may wonder how the confession could possibly clear Quentin. All she could do would be to admit that the man Quentin is charged with killing actually died because she cast a magic spell on him. We have already seen that the policeman in charge of the case has zero patience for talk about magic, and there is no end of evidence pointing to Quentin’s guilt.
We end where we began, in Angelique’s room with a homicide in the offing. Then it was Roger with his hands around Maggie’s neck; now it is Maggie pointing her revolver at the door as the knob turns. That isn’t all that suspenseful a situation. I’m sure Maggie would feel bad if she had killed Quentin, but he’s so hyper-violent that no one would doubt she acted in self-defense and has been such a bad husband to her that it’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t get over it in short order. If Quentin dies, there will be so few characters left that the show couldn’t go on, but we will probably be leaving this universe in a few days in any case. So this isn’t much of a Friday cliffhanger.
For some time, wicked witch Angelique Stokes Collins has been dissatisfied with her minion Julia Hoffman. What she most wants from Hoffman is information about her new enemy, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Yet Hoffman has told her nothing useful about Barnabas. The only time she brings him up is to claim that she was busy following him when Angelique needed her to do something else. Even then, her reports are no more substantive than “He went into town,” without so much as a single name of a person he met or building he entered while there. Hoffman keeps showing friendliness to people to whom Angelique wants her to be hostile, asking questions to which she ought already know the answer, and resisting orders she would usually be eager to follow. Whatever is wrong with Hoffman, Angelique does not propose to put up with it indefinitely.
Yesterday, Angelique found the solution to the puzzle. She learned that she has not been dealing with Hoffman at all, but with her Doppelgänger from an alternate universe. Barnabas came from that universe as well. This Julia is as devoted to Barnabas as Hoffman was to Angelique, and followed him to this reality to take her place at his side. Today, Angelique traps Julia in a secret chamber off the basement of the great house of Collinwood and demands to know what she has done with Hoffman. At length Julia confirms her true identity and admits that she killed Hoffman, but she will not answer any of Angelique’s questions about Barnabas.
Angelique takes out a medallion and tells Julia to look at it. Julia gasps and turns away. She says that she knows about hypnosis and knows how to resist it. Angelique says that if she knows how to resist, there is no reason for her not to look at the medallion, but Julia keeps looking away. Julia was first introduced as a psychiatrist, whose talent for hypnosis was of magical proportions. By showing her medallion to a person, she could erase and rewrite that person’s memory as easily and as completely as one could erase and rewrite a chalkboard. Julia is the heroine of the show now, but longtime viewers will still find it fitting that Angelique turns the tables on her.
Upstairs in the same house, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins is having a conversation with Angelique’s portrait. This is one of several habits Roger has that recall Waldo Lydecker, the sarcastic dandy in the 1943 novel and 1944 film Laura. Lydecker turned out to have murdered a woman with whom he had a strange obsession.
Roger is overwrought, telling the Angelique in the portrait that he should have known she would come back from the dead. If he had, he would have realized it was a waste of time to kill her. He only made things worse by doing that; for one thing, it made it necessary for him to kill his niece Carolyn. As he says this, his sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Carolyn’s mother, overhears. She storms in. He tries to deny that meant anything he said, but Liz won’t be stopped. As Roger presses his hands on Liz’ shoulders, Joan Bennett plays the part of someone being strangled. Louis Edmonds’ fingers are nowhere near her throat. You can’t believe that Roger is hurting Liz, but you can easily believe that Edmonds and Bennett are a brother and sister playing pretend. They look like they’re about six.
Oh, oh, I’m being strangggled!
Just as Roger closes Liz’ body into the storage space under the window seat, Barnabas enters. Roger is on the point of tears, a circumstance Barnabas notices. Roger keeps urging Barnabas to leave the room with him, but he replies that what he has to say will take only a moment. Barnabas says that he is worried about Liz. Roger gets even more upset, and Barnabas finally agrees to go downstairs with him.
For longtime viewers, this scene makes a poignant contrast with #446. In that episode, set in the year 1796, Edmonds played haughty overlord Joshua Collins, father of Barnabas. Joshua discovered that Barnabas had become a vampire. Joshua confronted his son in his hiding place. Joshua was at once horrified and shattered, but in no way intimidated by Barnabas, who was for his part alternately ashamed and petulant. Edmonds and Jonathan Frid made that scene into one of the high points of the series. Now, it is Edmonds’ turn to be the murderer dejected by the knowledge of his own inexpungable guilt, and Frid’s turn to be the upright family man. Barnabas does not know Roger’s secret as Joshua knew his, but in Roger’s inability to face him we see the fear of the same righteous condemnation Joshua had felt it his duty to proclaim.
At one point in this conversation Frid has so much trouble with his lines that the words dissolve into a buzzing sound. I told my wife, Mrs Acilius, that it sounded like Barnabas had briefly turned into Bob Dylan. She roared with laughter and said that was exactly what she was going to say.
This is the first “Parallel Time” episode in which Lara Parker is credited as playing Angelique. Previously she had been billed as Alexis Stokes, the identical twin sister whom Angelique killed when she rose from the dead ten and a half weeks ago and whom she has been impersonating ever since. Several times in the series, cast members have wandered onto the set while the credits were rolling.* Referring to this, Mrs Acilius had explained that they kept using Alexis’ name in case any characters who didn’t know who she really was wandered in while the credits were rolling. She imagined them looking up, widening their eyes, and pointing. She meant that hypothesis as a joke. But since the only character in today’s episode who didn’t know Angelique’s true identity was Liz, who was dead by the time the credits rolled, I think we have to take it as proven.
*Most conspicuously in #703, #635, #510, and #328. There are also moments when crew members can be seen during the closing credits, most spectacularly in #999, when a man is just sitting there eating a sandwich.
In #969, vampire Barnabas Collins was in the east wing of the great house of Collinwood. He opened a door to a room which, like all other rooms in that long-disused area, was bare and vacant. But he did not see it as it was. Rather, he saw the same space brightly lit, fully furnished, and richly decorated. Women who appeared to be matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and mad scientist Julia Hoffman were in the room, bickering in a way Liz and Julia never would about matters neither Liz nor Julia knew anything about. After a moment, this apparition dissolved and Barnabas could see the empty room.
Over the next two weeks, Barnabas and others at Collinwood witnessed the same phenomenon a few more times. In #970, Julia told Barnabas that Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, expert on all topics relevant to whatever needs explaining, had told her about the many worlds hypothesis. She wondered if the room represented a portal between alternate universes, in which similar people lead different lives. Barnabas conceived the hope that he might escape the vampire curse and become human again if he could cross over into the universe that occasionally becomes visible in the east wing. He managed to make the crossing in #980, but found that his curse had followed him to the new continuity.
In #1002 and #1003, we saw that the phenomenon also operates in reverse. In the new continuity, Quentin Collins went to the east wing and opened the door, expecting to find the fully furnished room, but instead saw the bare room as it exists in the main continuity. There, he could see and hear children David Collins and Amy Jennings talking about how “Dr Hoffman” had told them that they should avoid the room because Barnabas got trapped there. Quentin saw the main continuity again in #1007, wicked witch Angelique caught a glimpse of it in #1008, and Barnabas and Quentin saw it together in #1012.
In #1031 and #1032, Barnabas returned to the main continuity for a brief visit. He met Julia in the room where the phenomenon occurs. He neglected to tell her that the people in the other universe can sometimes see and hear what is said in that room, and that he has already had to deal with suspicions from Quentin and Angelique because they have heard her saying that someone named Barnabas has crossed into their universe and that he is under a curse.
In #1035, Julia’s counterpart, the housekeeper in the great house, was looking into the room and heard that Barnabas is a vampire. Since Angelique already regarded Barnabas as an enemy and this Julia Hoffman was Angelique’s most fanatical devotee, she made her way to Barnabas’ coffin with a hammer and stake. She was in the act of bringing the hammer down in #1036 when Julia herself showed up behind her and beat her to death. Julia had crossed over from the main continuity to take her place at Barnabas’ side. She stole Hoffman’s French maid outfit, assumed her identity, and became a double agent, pretending to spy on Barnabas for Angelique when she is really spying on Angelique for Barnabas.
Lately, Angelique has been getting suspicious of Julia. Julia tells Barnabas about this. He urges her to go back to the main continuity. She tells him “I’ll be all right for now.” Later, she tells Barnabas she is going on a covert mission to meet Quentin, who is hiding from the law in a cave. He says this is too risky; she again says “I’ll be all right.” He stares at her silently for a long moment. Even Barnabas knows that a character who says “I’ll be all right” twice in one episode is doomed.
Angelique is in the east wing when she hears voices coming from the room where the phenomenon occurs. She opens the doors and sees the counterparts of Quentin and his wife Maggie. They are talking about Julia’s decision to follow Barnabas out of their native universe. They refer to Julia as “Dr Julia Hoffman” and talk about her extreme devotion to Barnabas.
Julia reaches the cave where Quentin is hiding. She has talked him into going with her when Angelique shows up. Angelique claims that the police are swarming the area and that Quentin will be caught if he tries to leave. He obeys her instructions to take shelter in a tunnel deep in the cave. Julia asks what is going on, and Angelique replies with a question of her own. “First of all, I want you to tell me just exactly where you were going to take Quentin, Dr Hoffman.”
With this line, the “Parallel Time” segment has nowhere to go but its climax. Julia is the heroine of the show and the main audience identification character. This function is usually served by a character who is played by an actress twenty years younger than Grayson Hall was in 1970 and who does not spend as much time as Julia does covering up murders and making a mockery of all that is holy. But that’s who we’ve got, and once the self-pitying vampire for whom she has an all-consuming unrequited love rescues her from the arch-villainess the story will be over.
There are a couple of things today that make me wish “Parallel Time” had started differently and gone on a lot longer. The scene between the Maggie and Quentin of the main continuity includes a moment when Maggie says something Quentin regards as foolish, and he replies by saying “Maggie…” in a slow, irritated voice. This is the hallmark of the Parallel Time version of Quentin with whom we’ve spent the last twelve and a half weeks. The parts the actors take in the costume drama segments tend to influence the characters they play when they come back to a contemporary setting, and the purpose of Parallel Quentin seems to have been to find a new path of development for the original Quentin. But Parallel Quentin’s contempt for his wife has been a dead end, and hearing the charming rascal who took the show by storm in 1969 echo it strikes a sour note. If they had started with several weeks of a relationship between Quentin and his new bride that we could root for and then shown it slowly falling apart under the witch’s malevolent power, there might have been space to find something new in Quentin. But the breakneck pace of story progression to which Dark Shadows has been committed since the end of 1967 precludes anything like that.
Angelique mentions to Quentin that Maggie’s father Sam Evans died under circumstances that have never been fully explained, and that there are reasons to believe that his own father had a guilty secret in connection with it. That might have been an interesting thing to let the audience know before we came within sight of the end of the segment. Not only could it have given Quentin and his new wife something to feel interestingly uncomfortable about, but it would mirror the first 40 weeks of the show, in which the Sam Evans of the main continuity carried the heavy burden of a secret pertaining to an incompletely explained death. Longtime viewers might be excited to see that story turned inside out.
Maggie Collins is unnerved because people keep getting murdered in and around the great house of Collinwood. Her husband Quentin was arrested for one of those murders and is the prime suspect in another. He escaped from jail, just in time to be unable to account for his whereabouts during yet another. Maggie goes downstairs and finds old world gentleman Barnabas Collins in the foyer.
Maggie mentions that Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of Quentin’s late wife Angelique, has suddenly taken ill and is asking her to call her father, evil barfly Tim Stokes. Maggie does not understand what Stokes can do that a doctor can’t, but this has happened before and Stokes was able to fix the problem. Barnabas excuses himself, saying he has urgent business to attend to at the Old House on the other side of the estate. He promises to be back soon.
Maggie hears footsteps outside her bedroom, which she thinks might be Quentin’s. The only friend she has in the great house at the moment is Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, who is under sedation following the murder of her daughter. So she rushes to the Old House to look for Barnabas. He is not in; she finds a strange man in the parlor. She asks him who he is and what he is doing there. He insists that he will ask the questions. He asks what Barnabas has done with “her.” Maggie has no idea what he is talking about. He demands that she look into his eyes; as soon as she does, he realizes she is telling the truth. He orders her to tell Barnabas that he will be back, but refuses to give his name.
Maggie runs back to the great house. She finds Barnabas in the foyer, and gives him a full report. Barnabas urges Maggie to believe in Quentin’s innocence. That is something she can no longer do. She says that she is afraid that Quentin has lost his mind and that he will kill everyone in the house, one by one. We pan out and see Quentin lurking at the top of the stairs, listening.
Maggie has a dream. Quentin comes home smiling, with a spring in his step, after chairing a meeting of the board of directors of Collinsport Enterprises. He takes her in his arms and tells her he’s neglected her long enough. She says she doesn’t feel neglected. He says he is taking six months off work, and that the two of them will be leaving tomorrow for a trip around the world.
Quentin finds a bouquet of flowers. He instantly becomes extremely hostile. He accuses Maggie of receiving the flowers as a gift from her lover. She is baffled and denies his allegations. He strangles her. She wakes up, and finds Quentin standing over her, his hands on either side of her neck.
We’ve never seen Quentin and Maggie as happy as they are in the opening part of her dream, but we have several times seen his mood abruptly flip from cheerful to violent. He is not entirely guilty of any of the murders, but he does sometimes choke people, and was in fact choking the person he is charged with strangling immediately before a witch cast a spell to complete the killing.
Moreover, we have seen a dream very much like this one before. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in another universe. In that continuity, Maggie’s counterpart dreamed of Quentin’s ghost in #682. That dream began with Quentin taking a delighted Maggie in his arms and dancing with her; all of a sudden, for no discernible reason, he interrupted the dance to strangle her.
That Quentin did not confine his strangulations to dreams. He murdered his wife Jenny by strangulation in #748. Wife-strangling is a pastime the two Quentins have in common. This Quentin is suspected of killing Angelique. His defense against that charge is that he could not have driven the pin into the back of her head that killed her, because he was using both hands to choke her at the time. So it would seem that Maggie’s fears are well-founded.
Evil wizard Tim Stokes combined medicine with black magic to connect his late daughter Angelique with a woman named Roxanne. The connection drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. This rendered Roxanne comatose and allowed Angelique to move among the living so long as Roxanne neither dies nor gets even a tiny bit better.
Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are interlopers from another dimension. They know what Stokes has done and want to defeat Angelique. They made off with Roxanne and were keeping her in the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, planning to use some mad science equipment to revive her. Roxanne did perk up after the first treatment, and Barnabas took her on a date to his favorite place, the old cemetery north of town, where she showed some signs of recognizing her surroundings.
Yesterday, Stokes went to the Old House to search for Roxanne while Barnabas was out. When Barnabas got home, Roxanne was nowhere to be found. We learn today that Stokes does not have her. He turns to a man named Claude North for help in finding her. Yesterday he told Angelique that he was most reluctant to contact North; only after an incantation calling upon all the spiritual forces of darkness fails to solve their problem does he consider turning to him. He told Angelique that North was no ordinary man, and he is evidently more unpleasant to deal with than are Satan and his minions. But he answers when Stokes picks up the telephone and calls him.
Barnabas is also familiar with “Claude North” as the name of someone linked to Roxanne. He found a drawing of her signed by North in the secret chamber in the back room of the mausoleum in the cemetery. He goes back to the cemetery twice tonight. The first time, he goes into the secret chamber and finds evidence that a man with the initials “CN” has been staying there. He takes this as confirmation that it is Claude North’s roost. It does not seem likely that it is North’s only residence, since there is no sign of a telephone there. Stokes is spying on Barnabas while he does this. He is disturbed that Barnabas knows about the secret chamber, and wonders if he has been keeping Roxanne there.
Barnabas goes back to the Old House and finds Stokes talking with the lady of the house, Carolyn Loomis. Angelique killed Carolyn’s husband Will the other day because he would not reveal Barnabas’ secret, and Carolyn has been drinking steadily ever since. Barnabas tells Stokes that since he has extended his condolences to Carolyn, he can leave now. Stokes takes his time about going. He says that Will thought that Barnabas might have a girl someplace. “Is he right, Mr Collins? Do you have a girl someplace?” Thayer David delivers this line with an urgency that elevates it from mildly clever to almost brilliant. Jonathan Frid responds with a slow burn that brings the exchange to perfection. Barnabas knows that Stokes neither has Roxanne nor knows that he does not have her, but he also knows that Stokes, as a native of this universe, is likelier to find her than he is.
“Do you have a girl someplace?” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Barnabas goes back to the cemetery and finds Roxanne there. She is kneeling at a gravestone. It marks the grave of Claude North, who lived from 1814 to 1866.
In his own world, Barnabas was trapped in the counterpart of the secret chamber in the mausoleum for 171 years. So regular viewers think of that chamber as a place for vampires. North’s tombstone suggests that he might be such a creature.
Moreover, the drawing of Roxanne evokes Charles Delaware Tate, an artist who was a character on the show in 1969. Tate had the magical power to bring people to life by drawing them. He became obsessed with a woman he created in that way. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, Tate’s erotic preoccupation with a product of his own imagination is as much a metaphor for extreme selfishness as is the vampire. So if the answer to the question of Roxanne’s origin is that she sprang into being as the result of North’s drawing of her, it would only be appropriate if North were also a vampire.
There is a scene in the room on top of the tower at the great house of Collinwood. Carolyn goes there and looks at the window from which Will fell to his death. To her surprise, sourpuss Quentin Collins enters the room. Quentin is a fugitive from justice, having assaulted a policeman and fled from jail because he was under arrest for murder. He makes menacing remarks demanding her silence; she’s so drunk that it doesn’t seem likely she will remember he was there. In the other continuity, the Collinses had a habit of using the tower room, which is entirely enclosed in windows that can be seen from every part of the estate, as a hiding place; we can see that their counterparts here maintain the same self-defeating tradition.
Writer Gordon Russell takes bits of old episodes and mixes them as if he were rotating a kaleidoscope. There is a plot involved also, but the screen iconography is the main thing.
The show has been operating on the principle of the kaleidoscope for some time. They’ve traveled back in time repeatedly. Now they have traveled sideways in time and taken us to an alternate universe, which they insist on calling “Parallel Time.” Each of these segments represents a turn of the kaleidoscope, rearranging the actors, sets, musical cues, curse stories, imaginary geography of the estate of Collinwood and village of Collinsport, and other elements to create new patterns that shed unexpected light on familiar material.
Evil wizard Tim Stokes has used a combination of black magic and medical science to establish a remote connection between a woman named Roxanne and his late daughter, Angelique Stokes Collins. This connection drains the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique, reanimating her and leaving Roxanne comatose. To sustain this circumstance, Roxanne must remain in precisely her current condition. If she dies, all of her “life force” will vanish, returning Angelique to the tomb. Whenever she recovers even a tiny bit of her lost strength, Angelique collapses, possibly to die.
Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are visiting from the main continuity, and they are determined to stop Angelique’s evil plans. They have learned what Stokes has done, and have taken Roxanne into their own custody. As we open, Julia has just given up on an attempt to revive Roxanne and gone back to the great house at Collinwood, where she is impersonating her own Doppelgänger, the housekeeper. This woman, also named Julia Hoffman, was Angelique’s most fanatical devotee until Julia killed her, stole her French maid outfit, and assumed her identity.
Alone with Roxanne in the secret room behind the bookcase in the front parlor of the Old House on the grounds of the estate, Barnabas gives a soliloquy about his feelings for her. She opens her eyes and sits up.
In the spring of 1968, Julia took charge of an experimental procedure another mad scientist had devised to free Barnabas of his vampirism. The core of this procedure was the creation of a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam. In #490, Julia ran the apparatus and was disappointed when Adam seemed still to be inanimate. She and Barnabas left the lab, and Adam came to life. Her disappointment and departure are repeated in this scene, though Barnabas is there to see Roxanne open her eyes.
When Roxanne comes to, we cut to the great house and see Angelique collapse. She crawls around on the floor, trying to make her way to a telephone. This action is shown in quick cuts, but not quite quick enough. It is so much the sort of melodramatic business that was overdone in movies in the 1940s and 1950s and parodied in sketches on The Carol Burnett Show in the 1960s and 1970s that it raises a bad laugh.
Barnabas takes Roxanne out of the secret room, to the parlor. He finds that she cannot speak. He shows her a drawing of her that he found in another secret room, the chamber in the back of the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town. It is signed “Claude North.” Roxanne reacts to the drawing with delight and to the name “Claude North” with dismay.
In the summer of 1969, the show was set in the year 1897. One of the characters we got to know in that year was the mysterious Amanda Harris. It turned out that Amanda had popped into existence when an artist thought her up and made a sketch of her. This artist, a repellent little man named Charles Delaware Tate, had no idea he was endowed with the power to bring his fancies to life by drawing them until he met Amanda, at which point he developed an exceedingly unpleasant obsession with her.
Roxanne’s origins are at this point as unknown to us as Amanda’s were when we first got to know her. So the drawing will suggest to longtime viewers that “Claude North” will turn out to be this universe’s version of Tate. When Stokes tells Angelique that he might be able to bring Roxanne back by contacting North, the thought of having further dealings with the man is abhorrent to him. Like Roxanne’s own display of distaste at North’s name, that fits with the idea that he might be a version of the loathsome Tate.
In the great house, Maggie Collins, current wife of Angelique’s widower Quentin, finds Angelique crawling on the floor and picks up the telephone to call the doctor. Angelique says that she needs her father, not the doctor, puzzling Maggie. While they contact Stokes, Barnabas takes Roxanne to the mausoleum and shows her the secret room in an attempt to restore her memory and her power of speech.
In #283, the original continuity’s version of Maggie was a mental patient at Windcliff, a private hospital Julia controls. She had succumbed to amnesia, reverted to early childhood, and become largely nonverbal after an ordeal as Barnabas’ victim. In that episode, Julia took Maggie on a trip to the mausoleum, where Barnabas had tortured her, in an attempt to restore her memory and power of speech. Now, the relatively benevolent Barnabas is taking Roxanne to this universe’s version of the same location in the same hope.
Stokes attends to Angelique in her room. He gives her some medicine to keep her alive until they can find Roxanne. He warns her that if Roxanne manages to speak, her first word will send Angelique back to the grave. He performs an incantation to summon the spiritual forces of darkness to come to their aid. When Mrs Acilius and I were watching this on Amazon Prime, Stokes’ incantation was interrupted by an ad for Chipotle. I’d always thought calling on the Devil and his minions was likelier to bring Taco Bell upon you, but I don’t suppose Chipotle is all that different.
During the 1897 segment, we saw a new version of a character from an earlier phase of the show, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. That iteration of Laura was a heat vampire who drained the warmth from the living to remain animated. They’ve given the current version of Angelique the same condition, though we haven’t seen it lately. In #737, Laura was in a bad way. She lay in bed and her thrall Dirk Wilkins cozied up to her in the most sex-like interaction we had seen on the show up to that point (or up to this point, come to that.) Angelique’s bedroom is laid out the same way today as Laura’s was then, and as Dirk was on Laura’s right, Stokes is on her right. Earlier episodes made it clear that there was something deeply weird about the relationship between Stokes and Angelique. In the contrast between this scene and the one between Laura and Dirk, longtime viewers can see that Angelique and Stokes’ particular weirdness does not involve incest per se. Rather, it is their shared dedication to evil for its own sake that warps everything between them.
Back in the Old House, Barnabas puts Roxanne to bed on her table in the secret room. He goes into the parlor. A car pulls up. It is Carolyn Loomis, wife of his late blood thrall Will Loomis. Carolyn chatters happily about some shopping she did and asks for Will. Barnabas realizes she does not know that Will has died. He breaks the news to her. He says that Angelique killed him, which is part of the truth. Carolyn says it is because of Barnabas that Will was killed, which is the other part of the truth. Barnabas seems to have a whole speech prepared about how he will avenge Will’s death by defeating Angelique, but Carolyn keeps interrupting to ask who will avenge it by defeating him
Elsewhere in the 1897 segment, Barnabas’ enemies had killed his blood thrall Sandor Rákóczi. In #798, Sandor’s wife Magda blamed Barnabas for her husband’s death. She told him she would avenge Sandor by killing him. She then despaired of that and offered herself to him as his next victim. Barnabas grandly replied, “No, Magda, you will not kill me, and I will not harm you. We will grieve together.” Carolyn does not allow Barnabas to speak so loftily.
Carolyn goes to the great house. She is just about to reveal Barnabas’ secret to Maggie when Barnabas himself shows up. While he defuses the situation, Stokes realizes that the Old House is vacant. He slips out to search for Roxanne there. When Barnabas returns, Roxanne is nowhere to be found.
It may seem unlikely that the show will resolve this cliffhanger in the obvious way, by showing us that Stokes took Roxanne from the secret room. They usually go for surprise. Nonetheless, longtime viewers will be inclined to expect this to happen, even though it is so on-the-nose. This room was first seen in #113, when crazed handyman Matthew Morgan opened it as a dungeon for well-meaning governess Victoria Winters. Not even Vicki’s charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins, knew of the room’s existence, and David knew the Old House better than any other character on the show at that point. The room is therefore uniquely Matthew’s territory.
Like Matthew, Stokes is played by Thayer David. Stokes’s ancestor was eighteenth century indentured servant Ben Stokes, whose counterpart we saw in the 1790s segment as a commentary on Matthew, an example of the good and sane man Matthew might have been had he not grown up in the shadow of the ancient curses of Collinwood. Once those curses had been in operation for a little while, Ben started turning into Matthew. As Matthew inadvertently killed a man because of his unbounded devotion to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Ben inadvertently killed a man because of his unbounded devotion to Barnabas. As Matthew set out to cover up his accidental homicide by killing Vicki, who was played by an actress whose father was a Danish count, so Ben deliberately committed a murder to cover up his own accidental killing, and his victim was a lady with the title “Countess.” As a descendant of Ben and therefore a reflection of Matthew, it is a matter of course that Stokes knows about the room. Barnabas’ decision to hide Roxanne in the room is just one more case of a severe misreading of Dark Shadows by someone who didn’t watch the 1966 episodes.
We open in the room atop the tower of the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Wicked witch Angelique, enemy of the mysterious Barnabas Collins, confronts Will Loomis, Barnabas’ henchman. She demands Will tell her Barnabas’ secret. Returning viewers know that Barnabas is a vampire, and Will is his blood thrall. When Will tells Angelique that he is incapable of betraying Barnabas, we know that he is making a literal statement of fact. But Angelique has power over Will, too. Caught between these opposing forces, Will does the only thing he can. He opens the window and flings himself to his death.
John Karlen plays Will, Lara Parker Angelique. In his post about this episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn observes that Karlen approached all of his parts as if he were in a play by Tennessee Williams. In a comment I left under that post, I said that while most of Karlen’s scene partners stuck with their own distinctive styles of acting while playing opposite him, resulting in surprisingly effective mashups of techniques that you wouldn’t think could coexist on any stage, Parker followed his volcanic lead in today’s first act. Will’s anguish and Angelique’s vehemence both go way over the top, but the result is far from hammy. Orson Welles famously said that hamminess is not overacting, it is false acting. There is nothing false between Will and Angelique today.
Just before Will jumped out the window, Julia Hoffman entered the room. Furious that Will has died without telling her what sort of creature Barnabas is, Angelique accuses Hoffman of startling him and ruining everything. Wondering if Will may have survived his fall, she orders Hoffman to accompany her to the foot of the tower. Hoffman kneels down and says that Will’s spinal cord snapped on impact resulting in instant death. Angelique says that she is intrigued by Hoffman’s diagnosis. “Have you a medical degree?”
Unknown to Angelique, the true answer would be yes. Angelique believes herself to be with Hoffman the housekeeper, her most fanatical devotee. In fact, the woman is Hoffman’s counterpart from an alternate universe, Dr Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia has followed her best friend Barnabas into this continuity and is assisting Barnabas in his battle against Angelique. Julia killed Hoffman and assumed her identity. Julia responds to Angelique’s puzzlement with a story about an incident when she saw a man fall from a roof and land in the same twisted position Will now holds. She remembered the words the doctor said when examining that man and merely repeated them when she saw Will’s distorted neck. Angelique compliments Julia on her extraordinary memory, and proceeds as if she were telling the truth. There seems little else she could do.
I remembered the line “Have you a medical degree?” from the first time Mrs Acilius and I watched Dark Shadows. Angelique has noticed that Julia is different from the Hoffman she knows, and has been showing signs of impatience with her. But she has not suspected she is a different person, only that she is going soft on her enemies. “Have you a medical degree?” makes it seem that might be changing. Julia may be in grave danger before long.
Barnabas rises from his coffin in the basement of Will’s house. He goes upstairs and finds Angelique waiting for him. She says she came, not to see him, but to console the widow Loomis. Thus Barnabas learns that Will has died.
Barnabas tells Angelique that he will avenge Will’s death upon her, but she tells him that he is the one to blame. It was because his power over Will matched hers that Will could respond to her commands only by killing himself.
Angelique’s counterpart in Barnabas’ own universe placed the curse that first made him a vampire. She was also wholly or partially responsible for the deaths of his mother, sister, aunt, uncle, fiancée, and many other people he cared about. So he reacts to the sight of this Angelique with barely controlled rage. For her part, she has no idea who he is, and does not know why he is hostile to her. She, therefore, is much cooler. The contrast is fascinating to watch, far more interesting than are the scenes between Barnabas and the other Angelique and one of the joys of the “Parallel Time” segment.
Julia and Barnabas are busy with a science project. They have learned that Angelique returned from the grave because her father, evil barfly Tim Stokes, somehow established a remote connection between her and a woman named Roxanne whom he keeps in the back room of his apartment. This connection, whatever it is, drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. This creates a delicate situation. If Roxanne dies, all of her “life force,” including that which animates Angelique, will vanish. But if she regains any of the force that has been taken from her, even enough to flutter her eyelids, Angelique will collapse and, unless Roxanne is brought back down to the prescribed level of debility, re-die.
When Julia and Barnabas first came upon Roxanne, they planned to kill her to finish Angelique off. Barnabas put the kibosh on that when he saw how pretty Roxanne was. Then they thought of destroying Angelique by reviving Roxanne, but, for reasons too silly to explain, they’ve decided they want to keep Angelique around. So now Barnabas has decreed that they will manipulate Roxanne’s condition to slow Angelique down. They have taken her from Stokes’ place and put her on a table in Will’s basement, somewhere away from the coffin. They have connected her to a lot of mad science equipment that is supposed to act on the “life force.” Longtime viewers know all about this equipment, because Julia had it in 1968 when she was building a Frankenstein’s monster as part of a project to cure Barnabas of vampirism.
Julia runs the equipment. Roxanne’s condition does not change. Julia tells Barnabas that Angelique is expecting her back at the great house. In her absence, Barnabas takes Roxanne’s hand and stares at her. She opens her eyes and sits up. In the great house, Angelique weakens and collapses.
Many fans wonder where Julia could have got the “life force” equipment. In her own universe, she is a medical doctor and the head of a private hospital, so she could order anything she needed from a medical supply house. Here, her only identity is her imposture as Hoffman the housekeeper, who did not have a prescription pad.
I don’t see why people are so concerned with this. In 1968, the equipment originally belonged, not to Julia, but to another mad scientist, Dr Eric Lang. Barnabas and Julia simply stole it from Dr Lang’s house after he died. In this continuity, we haven’t heard about Dr Lang, but we hadn’t heard about him in the main continuity either until Barnabas fell into his clutches, at which point he already had all of his equipment. So we can presume Barnabas and Julia just found out when his counterpart would be out of the house and raided the place.
Will’s death marks his final appearance, but John Karlen will be back in a couple of months as Willie Loomis, the version of him we met in the main continuity. He will play other characters later, when the show will be set in other periods.
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