The ghost of Quentin Collins drove all of his living relatives out of the great house on the estate of Collinwood the other day, and now he has fetched two of them back. They are twelve year old David Collins and nine year old Amy Jennings. Today, governess Maggie Evans, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, and Barnabas’ bedraggled servant Willie Loomis search the great house looking for the children.
When they find Amy, she is possessed by the evil spirits and insists that the house is where she belongs. She willingly leaves with Willie. When they get back to Barnabas’ house, she calmly tells Willie that he will never again have reason to worry about Maggie. “Maggie is not anywhere anymore… anywhere at all. You’ll see.” In the great house, Barnabas finds that Maggie has been dressed in clothing appropriate to the period when Quentin lived, the 1890s. She does not recognize him or respond to her own name. When he asks who she is, she struggles, then faints.
Dark Shadows first became a hit in May and June of 1967, when Barnabas was a vampire trying to erase Maggie’s personality and overwrite it with that of his lost love Josette. Since then, Maggie’s memory has been wiped, Barnabas has been cured, and the show has made it clear they will not be revisiting the question of whether he will have to pay for his crimes against her. They are great friends now. It is ironic that Barnabas is the one trying to get Maggie to return to herself, but it does further confirm that Maggie’s memory of her days in his dungeon is gone for good.
I remember this episode well. At first I thought the Victorian dress Maggie suddenly was wearing didn’t add up to anything Josette-essential until I took a good look at the colours. I thought the dark green sash was horribly out of place, and then? I realized all three of those colours are representative of Josette’s bedroom at The Old House. The green sash represented her drapes. Wild, eh?
Comment left 25 February 2019 by “D. Wor” on “Dark Shadows Episode 696: 2/24/69” (25 February 2019) at Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri.
In Friday’s episode, Barnabas meditated on the idea that he and Quentin never knew about each other. Longtime viewers, seeing Maggie out of touch with her own identity and her proper time, might wonder if Quentin now knows what Barnabas did to her in 1967 and if he is taunting him with a reminder of it.
The ghost of the evil Quentin has driven the living members of the Collins family from the great house on the estate of Collinwood. They have taken refuge in the Old House on the estate, home to their distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas. Quentin wants to take possession of children Amy and David. Knowing of his plans for them, David and Amy sneak into the great house to recover and destroy the antique telephone Quentin first used to communicate with them. The children do not find the telephone there, and governess Maggie comes to the house and takes them away. Later, Maggie goes to their rooms in Barnabas’ house. She discovers that the children are missing, and Quentin’s telephone has appeared in David’s room.
Dark Shadows first became a hit in the late spring and early summer of 1967, when Barnabas was a vampire and Maggie was his victim. That story was chiefly modeled on the 1932 film The Mummy. As Boris Karloff’s Imhotep saw Zita Johanns’ Helen as the reincarnation of his lost love Ankh-Esen-Amun, so Jonathan Frid’s Barnabas saw Kathryn Leigh Scott’s Maggie as the reincarnation of his lost love Josette. As Imhotep took Helen prisoner and tried to replace her personality with Ankh-Esen-Amun’s, so Barnabas took Maggie prisoner and tried to replace her personality with Josette’s. As the movie showed us flashbacks to Imhotep’s time as a living being with Zita Johanns playing Ankh-Esen-Amun, so from November 1967 to March 1968 Dark Shadows became a costume drama set in the 1790s and featuring Miss Scott as Josette. Even Frid’s acting style and mannerisms were strongly reminiscent of Boris Karloff’s.
Since those days, Maggie’s memory has been repeatedly erased and Barnabas has been cured of vampirism. More than once, there were stories suggesting Maggie’s memory might come back and blow the whole show up, but those always ended with yet another mind-wipe. Several times lately, the show has gone out of its way to emphasize that they will not be revisiting that theme. There are two such moments today. David complains that the Old House is “like a prison”; Maggie, who was for long weeks kept in the barred cell in the basement, doesn’t miss a beat before replying “For a very good reason!”
In 1967, Barnabas’ only interest was recreating the history of the Collins family. His attempted Josettification of Maggie was part of that antiquarian project. Today, we catch a glimpse of what he might have been hoping for in that period. He and Maggie are sitting in the parlor reading family histories, and she glances at him with a fond smile. Granted, if his original project had been successful Maggie would have forgotten her own name, they would both have been vampires, and no living human would be safe from their creeping terror, but between feedings the two of them would probably have sat around like this.
Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins finds his distant cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, trying to pull the metal ring that opens the secret chamber hidden inside the old mausoleum.
Barnabas asks what David was doing. He says he was upset with his governess, Maggie Evans, and was hiding from her. Barnabas gestures around the publicly known part of the mausoleum and says “There’s no place to hide here.” David vigorously agrees, and says he didn’t expect Maggie to come there at all. Barnabas asks if David was trying to get into the hidden chamber.
Panicked, David claims not to know what Barnabas is talking about. Barnabas reminds him that he caught him at the mausoleum in #315. Longtime viewers will recall that he subsequently found part of David’s pocket knife in the hidden chamber and confronted him with it, and David seems to remember that as well. He drops his attempt to deny knowing about the chamber, and tells Barnabas he heard an animal inside it.
This goes to the heart of the issue that has brought Barnabas to the mausoleum. Barnabas has befriended mysterious drifter Chris Jennings and has learned that Chris is a werewolf. When Chris is in his beastly form, Barnabas locks him in the hidden chamber to keep him from hurting anyone. The werewolf is in there now. He was growling and snarling when David arrived, but fell silent when Barnabas entered.
Barnabas asks how an animal could have got into the hidden chamber; David admits he can’t think of a way. He then asks David if he can hear the noise now; he says he can’t. He asks if he might have imagined the whole thing; he doesn’t disagree.
Barnabas takes David back home to the great house of Collinwood. His governess Maggie is waiting up for him. She stays in David’s room until he seems to be asleep, then kisses him on the forehead and goes.
Yesterday, David told Maggie that she is a pretty girl. He’s twelve now, old enough to get excited about that very conspicuous fact, so when he opens his eyes immediately after she leaves the room returning viewers might think the reason he faked being asleep was that he was angling for the kiss.
David went to the mausoleum to release the werewolf because the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins made him do it. Quentin has been dominating David lately. After Maggie goes, Quentin appears in the room and David confronts him. He says he does not want to be part of Quentin’s cruel schemes any longer. In response, Quentin causes David to suffer extreme pain. Passing by in the hallway, Maggie hears David’s scream and Quentin’s laugh, and she opens the door to find David curled up on the floor.
The laugh is noteworthy. Maggie hears it, and it is not a sound David could have made. She has already seen Quentin, but now she has further evidence that he exists. Moreover, it is the first time Quentin has broken his silence. We first met Quentin when he was in company with another ghost, a woman named Beth Chavez. Beth has spoken since then; we wonder when Quentin will have lines to deliver.
Actor Roger Davis rejoined the cast yesterday, after an absence of not nearly long enough. He has an interminable scene with Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid, during which he thrusts his arm onto the mantel immediately behind Hall, effectively putting his arm around her shoulders. She visibly flinches at this invasion of her personal space. When he exits she sighs “Oh, I thought we’d never get rid of him.” Frid says that he thought the same thing. They then get back into character and play out the scene in the script.
Roger Davis imposes himself on Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid.
Later, Kathryn Leigh Scott is on a set representing the woods, and she sees Mr Davis. She reacts with a shout of “Don’t come near me! Stay where you are!” When she demands to know “Why have you come back?,” he reminds her that the camera is on and he is playing a character named “Ned Stuart.” She goes into character and says her lines, keeping as much distance from him as the 4:3 aspect ratio of 1960s US television would allow.
The parts of the episode that are not ruined by Mr Davis’ odious presence tell a story about ghosts and werewolves. Frid and Hall play Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman, friends of werewolf Chris Jennings. The other day Barnabas and Chris dug up an unmarked grave and found that it contained the remains of a baby wearing an apotropaic device meant to ward off werewolves. We saw the ghost of Quentin Collins watching as they did so, a sad look on his face. Later, we learned that Quentin paid for the apotropaic device, proving that there was a werewolf in the area when he was alive and that he had some connection with the baby.
Strange and troubled boy David Collins is under Quentin’s influence. After Quentin imposes himself on him, David writes a story about a werewolf who tried to keep from hurting anyone by locking himself in a room, but who was let out of that room and killed by a hunter. Barnabas has indeed locked Chris in the secret room of the old Collins family mausoleum.
Julia finds the story and shows it to Barnabas. They fear that David has somehow learned of Chris’ secret. As Barnabas and Julia are aware, David is one of the few people who know about the secret room. And indeed, at the end of the episode, we see him about to open the panel that leads to it.
But that may not be the story’s whole meaning. Regular viewers know something that Julia and Barnabas do not. David and his friend, Chris’ nine year old sister Amy, first came into contact with Quentin when they made their way into a room hidden behind a wall in the long-deserted west wing of Collinwood. They found a decayed skeleton seated in a chair there, wearing Quentin’s clothes. Evidently Quentin was locked in that hidden room, and Amy and David let him out. Perhaps the story David wrote is a suggestion that Quentin was a werewolf, and that by letting him out he and Amy exposed him to hunters.
When Dark Shadows began in June 1966, we were introduced to Roger Collins as a high-born ne’er-do-well with no sense of responsibility to anyone or anything. Roger had squandered his entire inheritance; his sister, reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, nearly bankrupted herself trying to buy up his half of the family business to keep it from falling into outside hands. Roger and his son, strange and troubled boy David, lived in Liz’ house as her guests. Roger drew a salary from the business, but barely pretended to do any work for it. He made absolutely no pretense of concern for David; on the contrary, he expressed his hatred for his son openly, tried to persuade Liz to send him to a boarding school or an institution or any other place that was far away, and speculated out loud that David might be the natural son of his sworn enemy, dashing action hero Burke Devlin.
David’s mother, Roger’s estranged wife Laura Murdoch Collins, was on the show from December 1966 to March 1967. Roger schemed to get her to leave and take David with her. When he discovered that Laura was an undead fire witch whose plan was to burn David alive in order to secure her own peculiar immortality, he was shocked into a display of fatherly tenderness. He’s never been quite himself since.
By April 1968, the show had long since erased all signs of the financial crisis Roger’s crapulent youth had brought upon the family. Further, Roger had by that time shown so many signs of mature responsibility in his attitudes both towards his son and towards his work that we might have wondered if they were going to retcon away all of his vices. It was a genuine surprise when, in #474, Liz told Roger’s new wife Cassandra that Roger lived in her house as her guest, worked in her business as her employee, and owned nothing himself. Roger’s spendthrift past seemed to have no place in the story by that point.
Today, Roger is at his most conventionally respectable. He comes home from a long business trip, indicating his sober devotion to the work of Collins Enterprises. He finds David in his room, struggling with distant cousin Barnabas Collins and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman. After a commercial break, Roger says that he has heard about the many complicated events that took place while he was away. Barnabas explains that David had told him that silversmith Ezra Braithwaite came to the house to see him, bearing a ledger with information he wanted. David found Mr Braithwaite in the drawing room, dead of a heart attack. The ledger was nowhere to be found. Barnabas and Julia have come to David to ask if he can shed any light on what may have happened to the ledger, and the boy became violently upset. Roger insists Julia and Barnabas leave the room. He talks soothingly to David and tells him he does not believe any accusations against him.
Later, Roger confronts Barnabas and Julia in the drawing room. He finds the ledger on the desk where Mr Braithwaite was sitting when he died; he does not accept Julia and Barnabas’ assurance that it was not there earlier. He dismissively asks if they are suggesting that “a ghost” put it there. He demands they apologize to David, making it a condition for their continued presence in the house that they do so.
Barnabas is shocked when Roger threatens to revoke his great house privileges. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
As it happens, Barnabas and Julia strongly suspect that a ghost did put the ledger back on the desk, and the audience knows they are right. Roger has seen quite a bit of evidence of supernatural forces at work in and around Collinwood, as has Liz. But both of them consistently refuse to acknowledge this evidence. Each of them has had moments when the wall of denial started to crumble; notably in #88, Roger said to Liz, “I’ve seen and felt things, things I couldn’t actually explain. You can’t tell me it hasn’t happened to you, because I know better.” But they always snap back to form sooner or later, no matter how obvious the truth is, and there would obviously be no point in laying the facts before Roger when he is in this mood.
Julia and Barnabas have asked Liz to show them the old family archives. It is the middle of the night, everyone is very tired as the result of the fuss and bother that occurs when a corpse has to be removed from the house by lawful means, they will not tell her what topic they are researching, and they insist on starting work immediately. She asks if they expect her to go along with them on this basis, prompting Barnabas to smile as genially as he can and say “Of course!” You can’t expect to persuade crazy people to behave reasonably, so she gives in.
The archives are a dusty room somewhere in the great house that Julia somehow failed to enter during the months when she was staying at the house under the pretense of being an historian looking into the early years of the Collins family. The first book Julia picks up is an old photo album, and one of the first pages she turns to is a photograph of a woman whose ghost she and Barnabas saw the other night. The photo is dated 1897. The woman looks just as she did in her ghostly form, suggesting that she died not much later than that. There is some business with doors slamming shut and windows blowing open to fill the last thirty seconds of the episode, and the closing credits roll.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that Roger’s defensiveness concerning David serves the same purpose in the plot as does Barnabas and Julia’s ludicrously cack-handed approach to questioning him. The evil ghost is still quite weak, the ghost of the woman opposes him, and David and his friend Amy Jennings are desperate to escape from his influence. If any of the adults caught on to what was happening at this point, they could cut the Haunting of Collinwood story short. But it is just getting interesting, and there is only one other plot ongoing now. So we don’t want that. Roger and Liz have to be in full denial mode, Julia and Barnabas have to be terrible at talking with kids, and governess Maggie Evans has to be a squish who doesn’t know the first thing about discipline for the plot to work.
Fortunately, we have ample foundation for each of these character developments. Roger’s origin as a shockingly indifferent father makes it understandable that he would swing to the opposite extreme and treat David with excessive indulgence. As a former vampire and a mad scientist, Barnabas and Julia are metaphors for extreme selfishness, and when they were called upon to act as parents to Frankenstein’s monster Adam in April 1968 they did the worst possible job. Maggie is brand new to governessing; she has been on the show since #1, so we know that she was good at running the coffee shop in the Collinsport Inn, at containing the damage her father did by his alcoholism, at escaping from vampires and mad scientists, and at miscellaneous other tasks involving other adults. But she has never been responsible for children or trained as a teacher, and so it neither surprises us nor alienates us from her that she is bad at the job.
Dark Shadows has two ongoing storylines at this point. Mysterious drifter Chris Jennings came to town a couple of months ago and turned out to be a werewolf. Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard does not know of Chris’ curse. She has taken a fancy to him and set him up in the caretaker’s cottage on the estate of Collinwood. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman do know that Chris is a werewolf, and they are working to help him. Barnabas has found a place to keep him confined on the nights of the full Moon, and Julia is trying to develop a medical intervention that will keep him in his human form.
Meanwhile, Chris’ nine year old sister Amy has taken up residence in the great house on the estate. She and her twelve year old friend, strange and troubled boy David Collins, are falling under the power of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins. At first Amy could communicate with Quentin more clearly than David could. This made David envious. In #640, David complained that Amy could hear his voice and he could not, even though “Quentin Collins is my ancestor.” That suggested to the audience that Quentin would turn out also to be Amy and Chris’ ancestor, joining the werewolf story with the Haunting of Collinwood.
Today, Barnabas and Chris have dug up a spot on the ground to which the ghost of a mysterious woman had led Chris. They find a tiny coffin holding the remains of an infant. They discover that the infant was wearing a medallion in the shape of a silver pentagram. The sight of the dead baby shocks Barnabas right away; Chris keeps his composure at first, but seems close to tears a moment later. Quentin stands in the shrubbery and watches Barnabas and Chris.
Barnabas has not seen Quentin and does not know who he is. Others have seen him and described him to Barnabas and Julia. They and those others suspect that he is a malevolent ghost with designs on David and Amy. No one has yet made a connection between Quentin and the werewolf story, however.
Julia and Barnabas have also seen the mysterious woman who led Chris to the baby’s grave. They know that she is a ghost and that she has helped Chris, and they also know that her clothing is of the same vintage as is the clothing which Quentin wears. But they do not know what, if anything, the two ghosts have to do with each other. The audience knows that the female ghost’s name is Beth and that she was with Quentin in the little room in the long deserted west wing of the great house when the children first met him.
Barnabas tells Chris that the pentagram can only be a device to ward off a werewolf, so that there must have been a werewolf in the area when the baby was buried. He also tells Chris that the mysterious woman would not have led him to dig up the grave unless what they found in the coffin would be of help to him.
While Barnabas inspects the pentagram in the drawing room of the great house, David throws darts at a board propped up on a chair nearby. The audience knows that David is under Quentin’s control, so it is obvious to us that the dart playing is an attempt to distract Barnabas and keep him from figuring out the meaning of the pentagram. Lacking our knowledge, Barnabas is merely annoyed with David. Jonathan Frid and David Henesy expertly develop the comedy in Barnabas’ fast-burn reaction to David’s behavior.
Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard interrupts the scene. She notices what Barnabas is doing. He shows her the pentagram, and she recognizes the jeweler’s mark as that of Braithwaite’s silver shop in the village of Collinsport. While Barnabas telephones Braithewaite’s and arranges to take the pentagram there to see if the proprietor can give him any information about it, Carolyn tells David she wants to have a conversation with him about some cryptic remarks he made earlier. David refuses, saying that he has homework to do. Carolyn argues with him briefly, but finally gives up and leaves. Barnabas is still involved in his conversation with Mr Braithwaite when David hides the pentagram behind his dartboard.
Barnabas gets off the phone, and David resumes throwing darts. Barnabas asks him why he isn’t doing the homework he was just telling Carolyn presented such an urgent obligation that he could not talk with her. He launches into a shaggy dog story, the upshot of which is that he has to wait for Amy.
More exasperated than ever, Barnabas turns to the desk and sees that the pentagram is gone. He demands David return it. David denies having it. He says that it may have vanished on its own. After all, unaccountable things happen at Collinwood all the time, as Barnabas is in a position to know. The way he says “You should know that” reminds longtime viewers that David has more than once shown signs of figuring out more about Barnabas’ own connections to the supernatural than have any of his adult relatives. In #316, he pointed out that none of the Collinses really knows anything about Barnabas- “He just showed up one night.” And in #660, he told Amy that “Barnabas knows a lot of things he doesn’t tell anybody.” At moments like these, we wonder just how much information David really has at his disposal. Perhaps he secretly knows everything, and has just decided there’s no point in notifying the authorities.
David invites Barnabas to search him. He lists the contents of his pockets, and turns the right front pocket inside out. He tells him that he has a pack of chewing gum, which he got from Amy. He specifies that he traded her a box of raisins for it. As David Henesy delivers the line and Jonathan Frid shows us Barnabas’ reaction, this detail is laugh-out-loud funny. Barnabas surrenders and apologizes to David, fretting about the pentagram’s absence.
Barnabas takes a sketch of the pentagram to Braithwaite’s. In the first months it was on the air, Dark Shadows took us to New York City twice, to Bangor, Maine several times, and to Phoenix, Arizona once. But now that both stories center on characters all of whom dwell in one or another of the houses at Collinwood, it is as rare to leave the estate and go into the neighboring village as it was then to go on those remote excursions.
Old Mr Braithwaite tells Barnabas that the shop has been in operation since 1781 and has been providing fine silver to the Collins family the whole time. Regular viewers know that Barnabas was alive then, and lived in Collinsport. A curse made him a vampire in the 1790s, and he was under its power until he was freed early in 1968. So he must have been quite familiar with Braithwaite’s in its early years. What is more, in #459 we saw that in the first months of Barnabas’ career as a vampire his father Joshua learned of his curse and commissioned a local craftsman to make silver bullets with which he could put Barnabas out of his misery. That craftsman must have been one of the first Mr Braithwaites.
The incumbent Mr Braithwaite tells Barnabas he will consult his records as soon as the shop closes and telephone him if he finds anything. When the call comes, David answers. Mr Braithwaite tells David that he can’t imagine why he forgot about the pentagram since it was one of the very first he made himself, back in 1897. Quentin appears, takes the phone from David, and hears Mr Braithwaite say he will stop by Collinwood with the ledger shortly.
Mr Braithwaite almost remembers.
David protests that Quentin had no right to take the phone from him. Quentin turns to him, gives him a menacing look, and walks toward him. David backs away and and takes a place on the stairs, still objecting loudly to what Quentin did.
Closing Miscellany
The closing credits list the actor who plays Ezra Braithwaite as “Abe Vigodo.” Perhaps in some parallel time-band there was a man of that name who played Tossio in The Good Father and Detective Fosh in Barney Moeller, but this is in fact Abe Vigoda.
“Abe Vigodo”
In his 1977-1978 ABC TV series Fish, Vigoda’s character was married to a woman played by Florence Stanley. Stanley was also a Dark Shadows alum, as a voice actress. She provided sobbing sounds heard in #4, #98, #515, #516, and #666. Vigoda once appeared on the panel at a Dark Shadows convention; his main statement was “I don’t remember much about it.” I can’t find evidence that Stanley ever appeared in such a setting. I would love to imagine that Vigoda and Stanley compared notes about their experiences on Dark Shadows between setups on Fish, but I would be astonished to learn that ever happened.
Vigoda always played old men. The second screen credit on his IMDb page is a 1949 episode of Studio One in which he took the role of “Old Train Passenger.” At that time, he was 28. Vigoda was a marathon runner, a form of exercise that tends to burn out all the fat under the skin of the face. And of course he was a very strong actor, easily able to convince us that he is of a great age. So even though Vigoda was only three years older than Jonathan Frid, and about 175 years younger than Barnabas, it isn’t quite as funny as it might be to hear him call Barnabas one of “you young people.”
Danny Horn devotes his post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Dayto three points. The first is his exultation that his least favorite writer, Ron Sproat, was credited with his final script yesterday, so that today is the first day of the Sproatless Dark Shadows. The second is that the show is finally joining the werewolf story with the Haunting of Collinwood. The third is a point I have some reservations about. He says that this is the first episode where Quentin “has a feeling,” and therefore declares it to be Quentin’s debut as a real character. “It’s nice to meet you Quentin. Welcome to the show,” he concludes.
It’s true that Quentin shows a wider range of feelings today than he had previously, but I think it is an exaggeration to say that we are only now seeing his feelings. For example, when in #680 Quentin agrees to Amy’s demand that he stop trying to kill Chris, he looks very much like a man humiliated to find that he has to capitulate to a nine year old girl. In the same episode he showed amusement and anger at appropriate points. Those three responses may not sound like much, but David Selby’s face is a magnificent instrument, one he plays it expertly. For him, they are more than enough to make Quentin into a real person.
Chris and Carolyn have a brief scene in the drawing room as they are getting ready to go on a date. Chris defuses a potentially awkward conversation about his previous failures to respond to Carolyn’s hints that she was interested in him by saying “Oh, I didn’t notice that” in the W. C. Fields imitation he had used with Amy in #677. She chuckles delightedly. This is not implausible. Not only can we imagine her being relieved that the topic didn’t ruin their evening, but W. C. Fields was very much in vogue in the late 1960s, so much so that a fashionable young woman might have chuckled when a man briefly imitated him.
David and Carolyn have an exchange that longtime viewers will find less plausible. He asks her if she has ever seen a ghost; she responds by asking if he has. But each of them knows perfectly well that the other has seen ghosts. David spent the first year of the show on intimate terms with the ghost of the gracious Josette, and he and Carolyn both saw and had substantive conversations with the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah. In #344, Carolyn told David that when she was a little girl her best friend was the ghost of a boy named Randy. It’s just trashing character development to retcon all that away.
Barnabas says something that will catch the ears of properly obsessed fans. When he is in the shop, he tells Mr Braithwaite that he will gladly drive back from Collinwood whenever he has any information for him. There have been some suggestions lately that Barnabas has learned to drive and has come into possession of a car, but this is the first definite confirmation of that point.
Governess Maggie Evans saw the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins yesterday, and she tells housekeeper Mrs Johnson about it today. Mrs Johnson saw Quentin a few days ago; she and Maggie are the only adults in the great house of Collinwood who know that Quentin exists, and not even they know his name. Quentin is gradually taking control of Maggie’s charges, nine year old Amy Jennings and twelve year old David Collins. Yesterday, David led Maggie and his aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, to the room in the long deserted west wing where Maggie saw Quentin. There is a mannequin there wearing a coat like Quentin’s; David says that he and Amy call it “Mr Juggins,” and Liz chooses to believe that Mr Juggins is what Maggie saw.
We see Maggie in bed. She gets up, goes back to the room, and sees Mr Juggins. We dissolve to a shot of Quentin in Mr Juggins’ place. Horrified, Maggie watches Quentin approach with a length of fabric. He chokes her with it. She falls to the floor. She is lying there when we cut to commercial. Maggie was introduced in #1 and has for long stretches been a central character, one of the most recognizable on Dark Shadows. Kathryn Leigh Scott tells a story of going to a wilderness area in Africa when the show was a hit and being greeted with cries of “Maggie Evans!” For the moment, it looks like they have decided to kill her off in the middle of a Tuesday episode.
Of course they haven’t. We come back from the break to hear Maggie telling old world gentleman Barnabas Collins about the dream in which she was strangled. She is surprised that Barnabas believes her story about seeing the man when she was awake, shares her suspicions that David and Amy are connected with the man, and is open to the idea that the dream is “a warning.” Barnabas tells Maggie that he and his inseparable friend, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, saw a woman dressed in clothes of the same period as Quentin’s clothes, that the woman’s presence could not be explained, and that she led them to Amy’s brother’s Chris at a moment when Chris needed medical help to save his life. Barnabas has concluded that the man and the woman are ghosts and that they represent something very dangerous.
Barnabas enlists the aid of occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes agrees to conduct a séance in the drawing room in the hopes of contacting Madame Janet Findley, a psychic researcher whom he brought to the house in #647 to investigate the early signs of Quentin’s haunting. Amy and David tricked Madame Findley into going to Quentin’s stronghold in the west wing in #648, and she did battle with him there in #649. After that confrontation, Madame Findley appeared at the head of the stairs in the foyer and tumbled down them, dead.
This is the tenth séance we have seen on Dark Shadows. They usually come with four roles to be filled. In all séances, someone acted as organizer and leader. In eight of the first nine séances, someone else objected to the idea of a séance, but reluctantly took a place around the table. In seven of the nine, someone went into a trance, becoming a medium. Every time the trance began, someone grew alarmed at its first signs and tried to end the séance before the dead could speak; that drew a stern rebuke from the leader. The medium then spoke, more often than not passing out after struggling to utter a few mysterious words.
The roles of reluctant participant and objector are often combined. Today, Mrs Johnson is the first to combine the role of reluctant participant and medium. This is also the first time the trance does not draw an objection from someone wanting to stop the séance. Mrs Johnson does pull her hands back early on, breaking the circle of contact, and Stokes delivers the requisite stern rebuke. But no one speaks up when she starts to moan. As Madame Findley, she at first produces the usual jumble of words (“The children! Panel! Room!”) She manages to cry out “He killed me! He killed me!” before collapsing face first onto the table in the orthodox manner.
In their post about this episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri compare Mr Juggins with Otto the Automatic Pilot from the 1980 film Airplane! Perhaps inspired by the dissolve from Mr Juggins to Quentin today, they go on to Juggins-ize Otto:
The Scoleris also list all the séances on the show up to this point. They name the leaders and mediums, but not the reluctant participants or the objectors. I have added those:
Dark Shadows Before I Die Séance Tracker
Episode 170/171: Dr. Peter Guthrie conducts; Carolyn, Vicki, Roger and Laura Collins participate; Josette speaks through Vicki in French; held in the drawing room at Collinwood [Roger and Laura join reluctantly; Carolyn objects]
Episode 186: Vicki conducts; Sam and David participate; David Radcliffe speaks through David; held in the drawing room at the Old House [Sam is both reluctant joiner and objector]
Episode 280/281: Roger conducts; Liz, Vicki, Burke, Barnabas, Carolyn participate; Josette speaks through Vicki; held in the drawing room at the Old House [Liz, Burke, and Barnabas are reluctant; Barnabas objects]
Episode 365: Roger conducts; Liz, Julia, Vicki, Carolyn and Barnabas participate; Sarah Collins speaks through Vicki after Carolyn pretends Sarah is speaking through her; Vicki is transferred to 1795; held in the drawing room at Collinwood [Liz and Barnabas are reluctant; Liz objects]
Episode 449: Countess duPrés conducts; Joshua Collins participates; Bathia Mapes shows up, claiming she was called; held in the drawing room at Collinwood [Joshua is reluctant; no trance]
Episode 510/511: Professor Stokes conducts; Julia and Tony Peterson participate; Reverend Trask speaks through Tony Peterson; the basement wall breaks open to reveal his skeleton; held in the basement at the Old House [Tony is reluctant, Julia objects]
Episode 600: Professor Stokes conducts; Barnabas and Julia participate; Phillipe Cordier speaks through Barnabas; held in the drawing room at the Old House [No conspicuously reluctant participant. Julia objects]
Episode 640: David conducts; Amy participates; unsuccessful attempt to contact Quentin Collins; held in Amy’s bedroom at Collinwood [Amy is reluctant; no trance]
Episode 642: Professor Stokes conducts; Liz, Vicki, Carolyn, Chris participate; Magda speaks through Carolyn; held in the drawing room at Collinwood [Chris is reluctant and is objector]
Today’s episode: Professor Stokes conducts; Barnabas, Maggie and Mrs. Johnson participate; Janet Findley speaks through Mrs. Johnson; held in the drawing room at Collinwood [Mrs Johnson is reluctant; no objector]
This is Maggie’s first séance, and they’ve been spending a lot of time lately showing us that she is unsure of herself. So it would have been expected for her to become frightened and try to stop the séance when Mrs Johnson goes into the trance. Maybe that’s why they left it out- it was too obvious a move. But the pattern is so familiar now that it feels like they’ve forgotten something when they leave the objection out.
At the estate of Collinwood, two ghosts are at odds over the fate of a werewolf. Caught in the crossfire are a mad scientist, a recovering vampire, and a couple of kids.
The ghosts are the evil Quentin Collins and a weepy woman so far known only as Beth. The werewolf is Chris Jennings, who is staying in the caretaker’s cottage on the estate. The mad scientist is Julia Hoffman, MD, a permanent guest in the great house. The recovering vampire is Julia’s inseparable friend Barnabas Collins, master of the Old House. The kids are Chris’ nine year old sister Amy and strange and troubled boy David Collins, who live in the great house.
Yesterday, Quentin went to the cottage and put strychnine in Chris’ whiskey. Beth appeared to Julia and led her and Barnabas to the cottage in time to save Chris; today, they figure out that Beth is a ghost.
Quentin has been exercising power over David and Amy, at first with Beth’s cooperation. Beth appears to Amy in a dream visitation. While she guides Amy to images of Chris and David and to the realizations that Quentin means to kill Chris and that David has tried vainly to stop him, we hear Beth speak for the first time. She says everything twice, giving her dialogue a lyrical quality that could be quite lovely. Unfortunately, Terrayne Crawford’s limitations as an actress keep that loveliness from coming through.
Barnabas and Julia know that Chris is a werewolf and have persuaded him to accept their help. They question Chris and are satisfied that he did not poison himself. When he mentions that David visited him the previous morning, Barnabas decides to go interrogate David. Longtime viewers know that David has extensive experience with ghosts, a fact of which Barnabas has at times been most uncomfortably aware. Once Barnabas has learned that Beth is a ghost, it will strike us as reasonable that he will be interested in David’s connection with the matter.
Amy goes to the cottage and sees Julia tending to Chris. They tell her he just had an upset stomach and will be fine. She does not believe them, and says she had a dream that convinced her Chris was in mortal danger. This intrigues Julia, who presses for more details about the dream. Amy clams up, but now Julia and Barnabas, the show’s two chief protagonists, have figured out that David and Amy have something to do with ghosts, and that those ghosts in turn have to do with Chris. The Haunting of Collinwood story hasn’t made any real progress for several weeks, but that can now change.
Back in the great house, Barnabas questions David about his visit to Chris. He doesn’t get any more information out of him than Julia had got out of Amy. There is a bit of intentional humor when Barnabas tells David he thought it would be pleasant to share breakfast with him and Amy. David says it isn’t so pleasant at breakfast- housekeeper Mrs Johnson is in a bad mood in the mornings. Barnabas suggests they ignore her, and David replies that it is not easy to do that. David Henesy delivers this line with perfect comic timing.
Amy shows up and responds favorably to Barnabas’ self-invitation to their breakfast. After Barnabas leaves the room, Amy confronts David about Quentin’s attempt to kill Chris. David has despaired of opposing Quentin, and is terrified when Amy tells him she will go tell matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard everything that has been going on. He is convinced Quentin will kill them if she does this. He is pleading with her to come back when the episode ends.
Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have figured out that mysterious drifter Chris Jennings is a werewolf. Last night, Barnabas took Chris to the room hidden behind the secret panel in the old Collins family mausoleum and locked him up there. That had the desired effect- Chris transformed, but couldn’t get out and didn’t kill anyone.
This morning, Barnabas walks with Chris as he returns home to the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood. They find Julia already there. Barnabas had neglected to tell Chris that Julia also knows his secret, so he is puzzled to find her in his house. When she explains that she knows he is the werewolf, she also says that she advised Barnabas against helping him. She seems to be in quite a snippy mood.
Chris says that Julia was right; Barnabas replies “Right or wrong, I have made my decision and I intend to follow it through!” That’s a perfectly characteristic remark for Barnabas, who often shows great tenacity but never shows any signs of a functional conscience. Julia warms up and tells Chris that she will come back the following morning and begin a series of tests meant to discover a medical intervention to deal with his condition. Later, Chris will call Barnabas “a good man.” When Barnabas says that some would dissent from this view, Chris says that those who do are “wrong, very wrong.” Chris hasn’t been watching Dark Shadows!
While werewolf Chris was cooped up in the mausoleum, strange and troubled boy David Collins was at home in the great house of Collinwood. David is friends with Chris’ nine year old sister Amy, and both children are coming under the sway of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins. Last night, Quentin showed David a bottle of strychnine and ordered him to poison Chris with it. David refused that order. A moment after Barnabas and Julia leave the cottage, David knocks on the door.
David asks who it was he saw “sneaking out” of the cottage. Chris tells him that he may have seen Julia and Barnabas, but that they probably weren’t “sneaking”- they had simply stopped by to visit him. When David is surprised that they came so early in the morning, Chris points out that he dropped in only a few minutes later. David declares that he always gets up early, and is surprised Chris doesn’t know that. Chris does not seem to believe that it is reasonable for David to expect him to know what time he gets up.
David tells Chris he likes what he has done with the interior of the cottage. Chris says he hasn’t changed a thing- it is just as he found it. This will interest longtime viewers. The last person to stay in the cottage was David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who occupied it early in 1967. David often visited her there in those days. We remember those scenes when he takes a seat in front of the fireplace, where he and Laura used to sit.
David in a familiar spot.
Chris tells David he was up all night and has to get some sleep. He offers him a soda “to give you some energy for your hike through the woods.” Once they have collected their sodas, Chris tells David “Well, I tell ya, I like a carbonated grape soda myself. It reminds me of the vineyards in the south of France.” He delivers this line in the voice of W. C. Fields. This is the first unmistakable occurrence of Briscoe’s W. C. Fields imitation; it is a seed from which much will grow. In August, another character of Briscoe’s will make an appearance wearing Fields’ signature costume, top hat and all.
David’s comment about the figures he saw “sneaking” from the cottage shows that he is worried about Chris, and he keeps talking and asking questions until Chris all but pushes him out. His concern is quite understandable in the light of the command Quentin gave him the night before.
After David leaves the cottage, the camera stays in the front room by itself and focuses on the door for such a long time we begin to wonder whether anyone else is coming. Maybe they just want us to see what a nice door the set department has put together. Finally it does open, but we do not see anyone enter. The stopper rises from a decanter of brandy on the table, apparently by itself. The strychnine bottle Quentin showed David comes into view; it tips over, and its contents are emptied into the decanter.
When the day is done, we are at the great house. Julia and Barnabas have had a conversation about a book she is reading, The Lycanthrope of Angers. Coupled with Chris’ joking reference to the south of France, this mention of a city in northwestern France suggests that there is something French about being a werewolf. Barnabas used to be a vampire; that condition came upon him because of his involvement with some French people. Perhaps the makers of the show were planning to turn to the same country to explain the origin of Chris’ troubles. It might not be so far-fetched. The show is set in Maine, after all, home to a great many Franco-Americans.
Alone in the cottage, Chris decides to celebrate the end of the Moon’s “cycle of fullness” by taking a drink of whiskey before bed. He sickens. At first he thinks he is transforming into the werewolf. He collapses, but does not go into the convulsions typical of strychnine poisoning.
Julia is in bed in her room in the great house. She is awakened by the sound of sobbing. A tall, very thin blonde woman in a long white dress appears. She beckons Julia and leaves the room. Julia pauses to put on a robe.
Barnabas is downstairs; he sees the woman. He initially mistakes her for heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, the only blonde woman in the house, but by the time the woman in white has reached the bottom of the stairs and gone out the front door he knows it is not her.
Given their shared hair color, it is unsurprising Barnabas mistakes the woman in white for Carolyn. But there is a bit of an Easter egg here for sufficiently obsessive fans. As the Dark Shadows wiki notes, actress Terry Crawford appeared in a 1969 commercial for the “Barnabas Collins Dark Shadows Board Game” with her hair styled so that she would look like Nancy Barrett as Carolyn.
Julia arrives downstairs and asks if Barnabas saw the woman. The two of them go out the front door and spot her in the distance, on the path to Chris’ cottage. We cut to the cottage, and see the woman enter. Barnabas and Julia enter a moment later, at which point she is gone. They find Chris unconscious, and Julia says he is dying.
Returning viewers recognize the woman in the white dress as Quentin’s associate Beth. We do not know why Quentin wants Chris to be poisoned, or why Beth wants Julia and Barnabas to find him while he is still alive. Perhaps they are working at cross-purposes, and Beth is trying to keep Quentin from killing Chris. Or perhaps they are working together, and their shared plan was to injure Chris but to get Julia, who is after all a doctor, to him in time to prevent the worst.
Chris Jennings turns into a werewolf when the moon is full, which it is about half the time in the universe of Dark Shadows. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has learned of Chris’ plight and decided to help him. As they make their way through an old cemetery to the hidden chamber where Barnabas will lock Chris up so that he doesn’t hurt anyone tonight, Barnabas asks Chris to confirm that he doesn’t remember anything he does in his lupine form. Chris does, saying that waking up and not knowing what he did the night before “is the most agonizing part of the whole thing.” You might think that he would find it even more agonizing to know that he has been killing one or two random human beings a month for the last seven years, but different things bother different people.
Chris asks how Barnabas knew that he didn’t remember what he did as the werewolf. Barnabas replies “Well, it’s obvious you’ve forgotten that you attacked me in this graveyard the night before last.” Chris says that “It’s a wonder you’re still alive.” To which Barnabas replies “No, it’s a wonder YOU’RE still alive!” For a moment we wonder how long this will go on, but Barnabas explains that werewolves can be killed by silver weapons. The head of the cane he carries is silver, and he struck him with it.
Barnabas shows Chris to the hidden room in the back of the old Collins family mausoleum. Barnabas himself was kept in a chained coffin in this room for over 170 years, when he was a vampire. He tells Chris that the room was originally constructed to hide ammunition from the British during the Revolution, which we have heard before. The coffin is still there; he tells him it is empty, and denies knowing anything about it. He says that the walls of the tomb are solid granite a foot thick; this is the first we’ve heard this detail. When Chris asks if anyone else knows about the room, Barnabas concedes that “A few” do. He assures him that none of them will be around tonight. Regular viewers will start making up a list of all the characters currently on the show who know about the room; Barnabas’s friend Julia Hoffman and his servant Willie Loomis know about it, as does strange and troubled boy David Collins. Barnabas can tell Julia and Willie to stay clear, and David has no reason to come to the cemetery tonight.
Barnabas explains that he will not show Chris the mechanism that unlocks the door from the inside, but promises to come back to release him after dawn. Chris urges Barnabas to leave at once; Barnabas insists on sticking around and asking more questions, saying that the moon isn’t up yet. Chris tells him that he first transformed shortly after he graduated from architecture school. “Oh, I was going to be an architect to be reckoned with, bold, imaginative, revolutionary. I thought nothing could stand in my way. Then something did.”
After Chris delivers a monologue about what a soulful and remorseful serial killer he is, Barnabas finally does close the secret panel. He sticks around until he hears the sounds of the werewolf snarling in the hidden room.
Chris’ nine year old sister Amy is staying at the great house of Collinwood. David finds her standing outside the front door, staring at the moon. She tells him that the moon scares her sometimes. His response is “Well, then don’t look at it,” which does seem logical. But she tells him that she can’t help it. David complains about how odd she is. We will hear more of this grumbling; it makes them seem like an old married couple, and is hilarious.
Amy and David are coming under the influence of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins. Quentin keeps trying to get them to set various members of the Collins family up for lethal traps; they haven’t succeeded yet in killing anyone, but housekeeper Mrs Johnson has caught on that there is something peculiar going on with the two of them, and she is frightened.
Mrs Johnson enters the drawing room to do some straightening up and finds the children playing a game with a deck of stage magician’s oversized cards. She and they stare silently at each other for a minute or two, and she protests. They say they were just watching her work, and she orders them to go to bed. They object that it isn’t bedtime yet. Of course it isn’t, Mrs Johnson doesn’t work around the clock. They get even more intensely on her nerves by bringing up a recent incident when she saw Quentin’s ghost, and in her exasperation she chases them out of the room.
There isn’t anything about Quentin in the episode prior to that scene, so I cannot imagine what viewers would make of it. It’s late in the day, a domestic is tired, and a couple of kids are trying to annoy her. That is a relatable situation, but it doesn’t match with the heavy, melodramatic Dark Shadows music and the terrified affect with which Clarice Blackburn plays Mrs Johnson. I suppose that by January 1969, Dark Shadows was so widely known as a supernatural thriller that most people tuning in for the first time would assume that something paranormal was going on, but if they turned the television on after the opening titles and didn’t realize what show they were watching, they could only have concluded that they were witnessing an utterly ludicrous case of exaggerated seriousness. After David and Amy are out of Mrs Johnson’s sight, we see them go upstairs laughing, but that proves only that they are trying to upset her, not that they are connected to a malign power greater than themselves.
Barnabas enters and sees that Mrs Johnson is upset. She begins to tell him why, but interrupts herself to declare that he won’t believe her. He assures her that he will, and keeps asking her to go on. After she has told him everything she and the audience both know, he asks her to start over. The scene cuts out, suggesting that Barnabas is taking pains to get as much information from Mrs Johnson as he possibly can.
The children go to the little room in the long-deserted west wing of the house where they first met Quentin. Quentin is there when they arrive. This is the first time we have seen Quentin waiting for them; previously, they have had to summon him. Quentin does not speak; David can sense that he wants Amy to go back to the main part of the house so that they can talk privately.
Alone with Quentin, David asks where “the bottle” is. Quentin opens a rolltop desk, and David sees a bottle. He is shocked to find that the bottle is labeled “strychnine.” He declares that he won’t hurt Chris, and he runs out of the room.
Downstairs, Amy is in the drawing room, where she presses a few keys of the piano. We heard her play “London Bridge” in #656, but this doesn’t seem to be a part of any song. She is just idly pecking at the keyboard. When David comes, Amy complains about how long he was gone. He is distant, refusing to maintain eye contact or to answer any of her questions. He says they won’t be playing tonight.
We cut back upstairs, where Quentin is picking up the bottle of strychnine. Mrs Johnson saw Quentin in Chris’ cottage, so we know that he can go there. If David won’t poison Chris, perhaps Quentin will do it himself.
Dark Shadows Commentary 