barnabas collins – Page 8 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 873: Charming and exquisitely dangerous

In October 1897, sorcerer Count Petofi has used his magical powers to swap bodies with Quentin Collins. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

We open with Q-Petofi meditating on a lineup of I Ching wands. He goes into a trance which unlocks a cosmic force that transports him to the great house of Collinwood in 1969. He wanders into the drawing room, finds a newspaper dated 28 October of that year, and starts exulting. Maggie Evans, governess in the great house in the late 60s, hears him and comes downstairs.

As the segment of Dark Shadows set in 1897 winds down, we’ve been thinking of ways they might have moved forward. Some of the possibilities involve splitting the week between episodes set in 1897 and others set in 1969. Maggie has been on the show from episode #1, and has been central to several of the storylines that take place in contemporary dress. The last of these stories before the move to 1897 centered on Quentin’s malevolent ghost haunting Collinwood and making it impossible for anyone to live there. In the course of that, he appeared to Maggie several times. In #682, Maggie had a dream in which Quentin’s ghost strangled her to death. Though the events we have seen in 1897 have changed the future, we saw in #839 that the 1960s characters remember Quentin’s haunting. So when Maggie is on her way to meet someone who is to all outward appearances Quentin, we have a hint that a story might be brewing in which Q-Petofi finds himself carrying the can for all of the horrors Quentin’s ghost wrought between December 1968 and September 1969.

Alas, it is not to be. By the time Maggie reaches the drawing room, Q-Petofi has vanished. A few moments after he left 1897, maidservant Beth scattered the wands and brought him back. He is furious when he comes to, and she explains that she had to do it. The magical portrait that keeps Quentin, and presumably also Q-Petofi, from becoming a werewolf is not in the suitcase Q-Petofi gave her earlier in the evening to bury. Q-Petofi has been in possession of Quentin’s body and of his portrait for weeks, and he has vast powers of sorcery, so you’d think he would have hidden the portrait long before. His magic powers would seem to give him the ability to do anything at all to hide it. My favorite idea is that he would impose onto Quentin’s portrait an exact copy of the portrait that hangs above the mantel in the drawing room of the great house and hang it in its place, so that it would be hidden in plain sight for years to come.

Besides, if Q-Petofi was going to bury the portrait surely he would at least have put it in something airtight and made of metal, not a wooden suitcase that doesn’t close all the way and that will likely rot to dust in a year or two. Apparently he isn’t as big on long-term plans as he led us to believe when he claimed he was working on a design to become the ruler of the cosmos.

Q-Petofi orders Beth to bring Pansy Faye, a deceased Cockney showgirl/ mentalist who has for some time been inhabiting the body once occupied by the stunningly dreary Charity Trask, to Quentin’s room at Collinwood. He demands information which she refuses to give. She storms out.

Pansy has a dream in which she and Quentin dance in the drawing room of Collinwood while a specially recorded version of her song, I Wanna Dance for You, featuring the voices of Nancy Barrett and David Selby, plays in the background. Colors flare on the screen while we hear them sing. Miss Barrett was an excellent singer, Mr Selby an adequate one. He does speak a few of his lines, which damages the rhythm of the song, and the flaring colors often obscure the actors completely. Mr Selby and Miss Barrett are so lovable that we very much want to overlook these flaws in the number’s conception.

The dream ends with Quentin turning into Petofi and laughing evilly at Pansy. She awakes in horror. She has known for some days that Q-Petofi isn’t Quentin, and she knows enough about Petofi that it is strange she hasn’t already figured out that he is the one hiding inside his body. But when she sits up with a gasp, we know that she has finally put it all together.

Time-traveler Barnabas Collins, a recovering vampire, meets Q-Petofi in the drawing room at Collinwood. Q-Petofi is convinced that Barnabas stole the portrait of Quentin, and is very aggressive about pressing his suspicions. Barnabas has been playing dumb ever since his vampirism went into remission, but after a couple of minutes of Q-Petofi’s hectoring he addresses him as “Count Petofi.” When Barnabas cannot tell him what he wants to hear, Q-Petofi declares that he will restore the vampire curse to its full potency. He touches Barnabas’ forehead with the right hand in which his powers are concentrated. Barnabas squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, then opens them with a look of triumph. He asks Q-Petofi what has become of his powers.

The rest of the episode revolves around yet another possessed person. Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, is also Josette DuPrés, who plunged to her death from the cliff at Widow’s Hill 101 years before. Barnabas was supposed to marry Josette at one point, and he has been obsessed with recreating her ever since.

In May and June of 1967, when the show was set in the present, Barnabas abducted Maggie and tried to brainwash her into becoming Josette. In those days, the show was ambiguous about why Barnabas picked Maggie. Strange and troubled boy David Collins was an intimate friend of Josette’s ghost, and when he saw Maggie in Josette’s dress in #240 and #241, he thought she was Josette, looking just as she always did. Indeed, Miss Scott had played the ghost a few times, always behind a veil. When Barnabas was about to give up on Maggie in #260 he very earnestly told her “But you are Josette!” Yet after Maggie escaped, he picked another girl and planned to repeat the experiment with her, explaining to his sorely-bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #274 that all you have to do is “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure, and a new personality is created.”

But when the show made its first trip back in time, visiting the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968, Kathryn Leigh Scott played Josette. That was a bold move. Longtime viewers were left with the uncomfortable feeling that Barnabas may have had a point when he devised the horrifying program of torture that made the show so terribly bleak for several weeks. When we see Miss Scott playing Kitty, who really is Josette and really does have to accept that fact, longtime viewers can only squirm as they remember Barnabas shoving Maggie into his old coffin and later walking down the long gray corridors of his basement on his way to the prison cell where he was going to murder her. We’ve since come to know Barnabas as an endearingly ineffectual comic villain, but it is a stretch to remind us of him as he was in those grim days and ask us to concede that he was in any sense right.

Kitty confronts Barnabas at Collinwood and accuses him of orchestrating her Josettifying psychosis. He denies that he is responsible, and claims to know that Josette’s spirit lives in her and that she ought to yield to it. When she asks how he knows, he makes up a story about being a boy in England, falling in love with a portrait of Josette, and reading her diaries. She is unconvinced.

Later, Josette goes to P-Quentin in Petofi’s old squat, the abandoned mill on the North Road. She believes he is Petofi, and asks him to use his power to resolve her identity crisis. He tries to explain that he only looks like Petofi, and has none of his power, but she refuses to believe him. Having nothing to lose, he decides to play along. He tells the right hand to tell Kitty the truth about herself, and touches her forehead. She suddenly realizes that she is both Josette and Kitty. P-Quentin just as suddenly realizes that Petofi’s power has returned to the body in which he is now an unwilling tenant.

Kitty/ Josette keeps telling P-Quentin that she remembers what he was able to do with his right hand when he was staying with her and her late husband in England a few years before. This is a pretty bad continuity error. For eight weeks from #778, the most dynamic story on the show centered on the fact that Petofi’s hand was cut off in 1797 and kept in a box by a Romani tribe for the hundred years since, until broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi stole it in an attempt to lift the werewolf curse from Quentin. It was only in #815, in August, that Petofi reattached his hand and with it regained the bulk of his power. Granted, #815 is eleven and a half weeks ago, but the show now takes so little time to onboard new viewers by recapping that the writers are clearly counting on the audience to have a great deal of information about the story so far in their heads. As such, it is very surprising that they would break from established continuity on such a major point of the recent months.

Episode 870: Your Josette, always

In October 1897, the estate of Collinwood and all of the other assets of the Collins family are the property of Judith Collins Trask. Judith has just returned from a stay of more than thirteen weeks in a mental hospital, but even when she was having the breakdown that put her there she was not one of the show’s principal sources of that great motive force of Soap Opera Land, Crazy Lady Energy (CLE.)

In #819, sorcerer Count Petofi erased the personality of Judith’s stepdaughter Charity Trask and gave her body to the late Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl/ mentalist. Since then, Pansy has been a reliable provider of CLE. But today, she serves as the baseline of sanity.

We open in a bedroom occupied by the mysterious Barnabas Collins. Months ago, the Collinses discovered that their distant cousin Barnabas was a vampire who originally lived in the 1790s. Pansy staked Barnabas in his coffin in #845, and for the four and a half weeks after the characters believed he was destroyed. Now a sickly man has shown up who looks and sounds just like Barnabas. He claims to have been the vampire’s victim. He lives in the daylight, casts a reflection, does not recoil from the sign of the cross, and eats food not derived from human blood. He has been seen alongside the staked vampire. So Judith’s brother Edward has accepted the sickly Barnabas’ story. At Edward’s invitation, he is a guest at Collinwood, resting after his ordeal. Edward wins Judith over to his point of view, and she is glad to welcome Barnabas as a dinner guest.

Another resident of the great house is not so sure. He appears to be Judith and Edward’s brother Quentin. He is in fact Petofi, who has cast a spell to hijack Quentin’s body and confine Quentin to his own aging and pudgy form. Q-Petofi has seen all the evidence that Edward has, including the two Barnabases side by side. But he also knows that Barnabas is a time traveler who came to 1897 from 1969, and that several magical beings and science fiction types are in his orbit. So he is looking for a trick. He has coaxed Pansy into the room, telling her that only she can make the final determination about who the man in the bed is. Pansy looks at Barnabas and declares that he is not the vampire. Q-Petofi is still unconvinced, and is about to put some kind of spell on Barnabas when Edward enters.

Downstairs, Pansy meets with Judith. Judith has figured out that her husband, Charity’s father Gregory Trask, gaslighted her into the breakdown that put her in the hospital, and that among his many misdeeds while she was there was his attempt to seduce a woman named Amanda Harris. In #864, Pansy bought a portrait of Amanda for an eye-wateringly large sum; yesterday, she set it up in the drawing room at Collinwood, causing Trask to fly into a rage. We learn in this scene that Judith put Pansy up to buying the portrait as part of a plan to get back at Trask. The two of them share some amusingly salty dialogue, showing us a worldly wise side of Judith that we have not seen before.

Today’s dose of CLE comes from a houseguest, Kitty Soames. Kitty is a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire. She is Edward’s guest, and she came to the house in #844 intending to lure Edward into a marriage that would relieve the financial distress she has been in since the late Earl’s bankruptcy. But since the day she arrived, she has been having fits of madness caused by the irruption into her consciousness of the mind of the late Josette, lost love of Barnabas. The conflict between Kitty/ Josette’s two personalities gives her one mad scene after another today.

Kitty enters the foyer, where a portrait of Barnabas hangs. She sees the portrait’s eyes glow and hears a heartbeat, something which has been happening to people under Barnabas’ influence since #205. She has a panic attack. Pansy and Judith come from the drawing room and cluster around her. Pansy walks her upstairs to her bedroom and tries to persuade her to have a cup of broth. Kitty raves about the danger that an antique music box in her room presents to her. After a bit, Edward enters and dismisses Pansy.

Kitty tells Edward that she thinks she ought to leave Collinwood, since she has been suffering from a severe mental illness throughout her stay. Edward says that he does not believe that the problem is psychological, since the music box and other objects that she finds disturbing have in fact materialized around her inexplicably. He says that to the extent that her problems are rooted in her feelings, a therapy he will suggest might be just the thing to cure them. He asks her to marry him. She agrees, and they kiss.

Edward’s first wife was the former Laura Murdoch, an undead blonde fire witch. Laura was quite calm and rational in her way, but she embodied a principle of insanity in the universe. Quentin was married to a woman named Jenny, who may have seemed mentally healthy when they met but who went immensely insane after Quentin ran off with Laura. I suppose that, with that kind of family history, Edward is just cutting out some of the preliminaries by proposing to a lunatic while she is in the middle of a psychotic episode.

Edward and Kitty announce their engagement after dinner. Q-Petofi notices that Barnabas is shocked; he apologizes, smiles, and stands, a champagne glass in his hand and congratulations on his lips. He then excuses himself, saying that he still feels weak and thinks he ought to retire for the evening.

If any longtime viewers harbored doubts that Q-Petofi is right and this Barnabas is our old friend, they are dispelled when we see him in his room moaning about how he doesn’t want to lose Josette again. We end with a blissed-out Kitty entering his room, telling him she heard him calling, and declaring that she will be his Josette always. They share a passionate kiss.

Edward is the third major role Louis Edmonds has played on the show; he has been a principal member of the cast since episode #1. This is his first on-screen kiss on Dark Shadows. Some fans like to show off their knowledge of the actors’ sexual orientations by speculating about a correlation between their private lives and their on-screen kissing of opposite sex scene partners. This particularly settles on Anthony George, who was on the show for a while in 1967 and whose attempts to kiss women always went horribly wrong. But that is obvious nonsense. Jonathan Frid was gay, and the actresses all attested that he was the best kisser in the cast; Barnabas’ kiss with Kitty/ Josette today is a case in point. Joel Crothers, a regular from 1966 to 1968, was gay too, and he was another expert smoocher. Roger Davis is as straight as they come, and rivaled George for traumatic lip collisions. Kitty and Edward’s kiss shows that, while Edmonds might not have been interested in taking Kathryn Leigh Scott home, he was the equal of any heterosexual actor at playing love scenes with women when the cameras were rolling. I believe that what men like Edmonds, Frid, and Crothers did is known as “acting.”

Episode 869: The man who walks in the day

In October 1897, the hypocritical Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask is married to the vastly wealthy Judith Collins, owner of the estate of Collinwood and of the Collins family businesses. For more than thirteen weeks, everything seemed to be going Trask’s way. He had gaslighted Judith into a mental hospital and had almost free rein over all of her assets. In her absence, he invited the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris to stay in the great house on the estate, and set out to seduce her.

Piece by piece, Trask’s little corner of paradise fell apart. First, 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi orchestrated a series of events that led Trask to sign a confession to the murder of his first wife, and no matter how many times he destroyed the confession new copies of it kept materializing. Then Petofi erased the personality of Trask’s daughter and enforcer Charity, replacing it with that of late Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye. Later, Amanda fell in love with Judith’s brother Quentin, told Trask off, and wound up leaving for New York by herself. Now, Judith has returned from the mental hospital, all sane and deeply suspicious.

The front door of the great house is Trask’s enemy today. No sooner does he enter it than he finds Pansy in the foyer, singing her song. He demands she stop and tells her he is her father. She laughs at this claim, and reminisces about the late Bertie Faye. Trask goes into the drawing room, and to his horror sees a large oil painting of Amanda on an easel. We saw Pansy setting it up earlier in the episode, and saw her buy it a few days ago. But Trask didn’t see those things, and when she tells him she doesn’t know anything about it, he seems to accept her denials. She exits upstairs.

The front door opens again, and Judith’s brother Edward enters with two other men. One appears to be Quentin, but is in fact Petofi in possession of Quentin’s body. The other appears to be time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins.

Trask and Edward both believe that Petofi is Quentin; since he is played by David Selby, I call him Q-Petofi. The man who appears to be Barnabas is very weak. He says that his name is indeed Barnabas Collins, but that he is not the vampire. He claims to have arrived from England, to have been attacked by a vampire who looked just like him, and to have little memory of what happened after.

In #845, Pansy went into a cave and found a coffin containing what appeared to be Barnabas. She drove a stake through his heart. When Edward and Q-Petofi met this weak Barnabas yesterday in the doctor’s office, they were skeptical of his story. They took him to the cave, opened the coffin, and saw the body Pansy had staked inside, the stake still lodged in its heart. Since they could see the two of them side by side, Edward could only conclude that the weak man is different from the vampire, and that his story is therefore true. Q-Petofi, well aware of the many magical and science-fictional entities in Barnabas’ orbit, is not at all convinced.

Trask sees the weak Barnabas and is enraged that Edward and Q-Petofi have brought the vampire back from the dead. While Q-Petofi takes the weak Barnabas upstairs to a bedroom, Edward tries to reason with Trask. This is seldom a fruitful exercise. When Edward finally points out that it is broad daylight and the weak Barnabas is alive and moving, Trask is left speechless.

Alone with the weak Barnabas, Q-Petofi tries to trick him into believing that he is Quentin and that he can trust him. When Q-Petofi goes on about all the secrets that Barnabas and Quentin have shared, the weak Barnabas responds only with bewilderment.

Q-Petofi goes back to the cave and sets the coffin on fire, acting on the hypothesis that the destruction of the staked Barnabas will have some kind of effect on the weak Barnabas. We cut back to Collinwood and see that it has none. Trask lets himself into the bedroom. After some small talk, he thrusts a large wooden cross at the weak Barnabas’ face and stands silently for a moment. The weak Barnabas looks up from his bed and asks if Trask is all right. He hurriedly says that he only brought the cross to help him pray for his recovery. The weak Barnabas observes that this is very kind, and closes his eyes while Trask kneels beside the bed.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that not only the actor Jerry Lacy, but the character Gregory Trask, seems to enjoy himself very much when there is something to be righteously indignant about. Not only does Trask have a whole set of self-aggrandizing mannerisms and techniques for silencing everyone else when he is furious, but as a con man an atmosphere of crisis provides him with an opportunity to think on his feet and devise new schemes for bilking people out of whatever they have that he wants. Mr Lacy’s joy in performance runs throughout the whole episode, but Trask’s goes through wild fluctuations, peaking each time he thinks he has found a new way to present himself as the champion of The Almighty and plummeting each time his understanding of the situation is deflated. In his first several appearances, Trask was so overwhelmingly evil and so frequently successful that he was hard to watch. When we see him repeatedly brought up short in an episode like this, all of the discomfort of those early days pays off.

In the drawing room, Edward tells Pansy that there is a sick man in a bed upstairs who looks like the vampire Barnabas and is named Barnabas Collins, but is not the man she staked. She is horrified at the thought. Barnabas was indirectly responsible for the death of Pansy as a physical being, and later murdered her fiancé, the childlike Carl Collins. He also took Charity as one of his victims for a time. Besides, in her manner of dress, quantity of makeup, working-class accent, and brashly friendly manner Pansy is the representative of all the “girls at the docks” upon whom Barnabas has fed down the centuries. So no one has more reason to fear Barnabas than does Pansy in the form of Charity. Edward reassures her as best he can, then goes up to look in on the patient.

Pansy absorbs the news that another Barnabas Collins is in the house.

The scene between Pansy and Edward will remind longtime viewers of the characters the same actors played between November 1967 and
March 1968, when Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. Nancy Barrett was fluttery heiress Millicent Collins, while Louis Edmonds was haughty overlord Joshua Collins. In #450, Millicent had discovered the horrible truth about Barnabas and it had proven to be too much for her rather fragile grip on sanity. She decided that the vampire was not her cousin, but an impostor, and she told Joshua that it was wrong of him to have “That man who says he is Barnabas” in the house.

Not only is Pansy’s horror at the thought of a man who says that he is Barnabas staying at Collinwood reminiscent of Millicent, but her relationship to Charity also reflects the development of Millicent throughout the 1790s segment. Millicent’s transformation from a lighter-than-air comedy character to a darkly mad victim, first of her wicked husband Nathan, then of Barnabas, marked the transition to the climactic phase of the 1790s segment. Charity’s replacement by Pansy in #819 came at a time when the show was flashing many signals that the 1897 segment was nearing its end. Those signals may well have reflected an earlier plan, but 1897 was such a hit that they kept passing by the off-ramps back to the 1960s and restarting the uncertain and frightening journey into the past. Now it seems they really are getting ready to move on, and Pansy’s prominence reminds us of just how radically different a place Collinwood is now than it was when we arrived in this period in #701, at the beginning of March.

Pansy is still quaking at the thought of another Barnabas Collins when Q-Petofi enters and closes the doors of the drawing room behind him. Pansy hasn’t quite figured out his true identity, but she knows that he is not really Quentin, and that he does not mean her well. She is terrified and says she will scream unless he opens the doors.

Regular viewers have reason to believe Pansy will do more than scream. In #829, she tried to stab Quentin. And those who have been with the show for a long time will remember what happened in #204, broadcast and set in April 1967. Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, another Nancy Barrett character, found herself in the drawing room with dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. When Willie closed the doors and refused to open them, Carolyn didn’t bother screaming- she pulled a loaded gun on him.

Q-Petofi has magical powers that neither Quentin nor Willie could match, so he is not in mortal jeopardy as they would be were they to put themselves in his position. But he has created a volatile situation, and unless he resolves it within a few seconds he is likely to find himself with a huge mess on his hands. Rather than falling back on his occult talents, Q-Petofi takes a page from Quentin’s book and charms Pansy into cooperating. He tells her that he is as frightened of Barnabas as she is. That intrigues her sufficiently that she starts listening to him. He tells her that only she can discern whether the man in the sick bed upstairs is what he claims to be. A moment later, Q-Petofi has persuaded Pansy to go with him to see the weak Barnabas. The episode ends with Pansy looking at the weak Barnabas lying in bed, her eyes widening in a strong but unspecified reaction. We will have to wait until tomorrow to find out whether she is terrified at the sight of her nemesis or amazed to see an innocent man wearing the hated face.

Episode 868: The man we thought he was

In October 1897, sorcerer Count Petofi has used his powers to steal the body of handsome young Quentin Collins and to trap Quentin in his own aging form. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

We open outside a cave near the estate of Collinwood, where Q-Petofi’s henchman Aristide is on the ground, gradually coming back to consciousness. Q-Petofi had ordered Aristide to hold wicked witch Angelique prisoner in the cave. Shortly after Q-Petofi left, Angelique slipped out of the cave and ran past him. Aristide followed her, and she bashed him on the head with a rock.

Aristide’s eyes focus, and he sees time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins standing over him. The last time he saw Barnabas was in #842. Barnabas threatened to kill Aristide then, and he was so terrified that he ran away and didn’t come back until he heard that Barnabas had been staked in his coffin. The coffin is in the cave, and Aristide just saw Barnabas in it, the stake still in his heart, so he is shocked to see him up and about.

We cut to the great house of Collinwood, where Q-Petofi and Quentin’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward are recapping another storyline. Edward exits, and a telephone call comes from Ian Reade, MD. Dr Reade says that a strange man is in his office, asking for Edward. When he describes the man, Q-Petofi recognizes him as Barnabas. He takes a gun and goes to Dr Reade’s.

Q-Petofi finds Barnabas lying on Dr Reade’s exam table. He orders Dr Reade to leave. Dr Reade reminds Q-Petofi that they are in his office and refuses to comply with his commands. He does leave for a moment to call Edward again; when he comes back, he finds Q-Petofi holding Barnabas at gunpoint. He bravely tells Q-Petofi that if he wants to kill Barnabas, he will have to shoot him first.

Edward comes. Dr Reade trusts Edward and agrees to leave the room while he is there. After dawn breaks, Edward is astonished to see that Barnabas is still alive. Barnabas tells his old story that he is their cousin from England come to pay his respects. He says that when he first arrived, a man approached him in the dark woods, a man who, when he emerged from the shadows, proved to be his exact double. Until, that is, he opened his mouth and showed two long fangs. Barnabas says that he does not know what happened next or how much time has passed. All he knows is that this strange man kept him captive and dominated his will, from time to time appearing to him and repeating his original assault.

Edward is inclined to believe this story, Q-Petofi to shoot Barnabas on the spot. They compromise, and agree to take him to the cave. If Barnabas’ coffin is empty, they will shoot him. Dr Reade sees Edward and Q-Petofi carrying Barnabas out of his office, and objects that in his condition Barnabas may die if he is subjected to any exertion. When the question is asked if he is willing to go, Barnabas weakly croaks out a “yes.” At that, Dr Reade is willing to wash his hands of the whole thing. For someone who was willing to be shot a few minutes before, it’s quite a startling capitulation.

Q-Petofi does not know that Angelique and Aristide are no longer in the cave, so he insists on leading the way in. He finds that they are gone and the chains around Barnabas’ coffin have been broken. He invites Edward and Barnabas in. He takes it as obvious that the broken chains prove that the coffin is empty, but Edward, with his sense of fair play, insists on opening the coffin before they shoot Barnabas. The body is still there, the stake still in the chest. Barnabas reacts with horror, the others with amazement.

In #758, Angelique created a Doppelgänger of herself to trick an enemy into thinking that she had killed her, and in #842 she agreed to help Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman, MD in a plan to allow him to reestablish himself as a member of the Collins family. Julia was working on a medical intervention to free him of the effects of vampirism, and now we can see that Angelique contributed the grounds for the Collinses to believe that their cousin never labored under that curse.

When Dark Shadows was in production in the 1960s, the legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail had been fashionable topics in English departments for decades. That vogue was reflected not only in the coursework the writing staff likely did when they were in college, but also in the popularity of novels like The Once and Future King and the Broadway show based on it, Camelot. When I was hanging out in used book stores in the 1980s and 1990s, mass market paperbacks printed in that era collecting the Grail sagas were still a staple.

The coffin in the cave recalls a prominent figure in one of those sagas, a king named Amfortas. In Heinrich of Turlin’s The Crown, Amfortas did not requite the love the mighty sorceress Orgeluse had for him. The humiliated Orgeluse inflicted a wound that both paralyzed Amfortas and made him immortal. In that state, Amfortas was confined to a coffin that was hidden in a cave. Sir Gawain found the coffin and freed Amfortas both of his paralysis and of his immortality.*

Longtime viewers of Dark Shadows will see many parallels to the story of Barnabas and Angelique in Heinrich’s story of Amfortas and Orgeluse. During the part of the show made and set in 1968, two mad scientists played the role of Sir Gawain in returning Barnabas to humanity. The first was a man named Eric Lang, the second was Julia. Now, Angelique herself, who was the original source of the curse that made Barnabas a vampire, combines the functions of Orgeluse and of Gawain. She not only frees Barnabas, but also redeems herself. The Grail legends also abound in other elements that figure prominently in this part of the show. For example, Count Petofi was originally on the show as a severed hand with magical powers, later to be reunited with the rest of its body. Gawain’s most famous story is of his battle with the Green Knight, who starts off as a severed head. Doppelgänger abound in the Grail legends, especially the so-called Vulgate Lancelot where a double of Queen Guinevere sets off a whole arc.

Dr Reade is played by Alfred Hinckley. Hinckley was in plays on and off Broadway, and when the networks ran a lot of programming produced in New York, his was a frequent face on American television. He was in Dark Shadows episode #1 as the conductor of the train that brought well-meaning governess Vicki Winters and dashing action hero Burke Devlin to Collinsport. Longtime viewers were reminded of that train in #850; maybe the production staff was reminded of it too, and that was why they called Hinckley to make his second appearance on the series today. It’s also his final appearance.

*Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal features another version of the Amfortas legend, calling the sorceress by a different name, omitting Amfortas’ paralysis, leaving out the coffin in the cave, and giving the honor of healing Amfortas and succeeding him as king of the Grail to Percival rather than Gawain.

Episode 867: The name of your beloved

The dramatic date is October 1897. Sorcerer Count Petofi is using the body of Quentin Collins as a disguise. While he is doing this, I call him Q-Petofi.

Q-Petofi has stripped witch Angelique of her powers and confined her in the cave where the chained coffin of vampire Barnabas Collins is kept. In #845, we saw Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye open this coffin and drive a stake. Now, Angelique starts banging away at the lock on the chains with a rock. When Q-Petofi’s servant Aristide comes to investigate the noise, Angelique talks about pulling the stake out of Barnabas’ heart so that he will rise again. Aristide dismisses this idea.

Longtime viewers won’t be so sure that pulling the stake out will not bring Barnabas back. In #630, broadcast and set in November 1968, warlock Nicholas Blair pulled a stake from the heart of vampire Tom Jennings and put him back into operation. That came to mind in #846 when Quentin’s brother, stuffy but lovable Edward Collins, learned that Pansy had staked Barnabas and decreed, not that Barnabas’ body be taken out into the sunlight and allowed to disintegrate, but that the coffin be chained and the cave sealed up.

Presenting the stake in the vampire’s heart as an on/ off switch lets a lot of the suspense out of the show, and it feels like a cheat. But however bad the idea is, apparently it was not original to Dark Shadows. Two frequent commenters bring this out under Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day. “Courtley Manor” (also an FotB here) writes:

Well, in some vampire legends the stake through the heart (or often the stomach or solar plexus) served a two-fold purpose. Believing a corpse was bloated due to ingestion of blood (which we now know is rather caused by gases produced by microscopic organisms during decomposition), the vampire slayer would deprive the bloodsucker of its recent meal and also the ability to consume more blood by, in effect, bursting it like a balloon. Also, the stake pinned the nightwalker to the earth or coffin so it couldn’t roam about anymore. Dan Curtis and/or the writers may have been drawing on these older legends, and figured that removing the stake could conceivably allow the vampire to heal from its wound and rise again.

Comment left 9 March 2021 by “Courtley Manor” on Danny Horn, “Episode 867: Nothing Up My Sleeve,” 26 May 2016, at Dark Shadows Every Day.

“Goddess of Transitory” added this remark to “Courtley Manor’s”:

John Carradine played exactly this in the old film House of Dracula–he starts out as a skeleton in a coffin with a stake in its rib cage as part of a sideshow but when the stake is removed, he’s back–cape, hat, and bat transforming powers intact.

Comment left 12 April 2021 by “Goddess of Transitory” on Danny Horn, “Episode 867: Nothing Up My Sleeve,” 26 May 2016, at Dark Shadows Every Day.

Meanwhile, back at the great house of Collinwood, Q-Petofi is passing as Quentin. Edward is fretting that his girlfriend Kitty Soames is missing. Kitty, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, has been having psychotic episodes ever since she arrived at Collinwood in #844. Unknown to Edward, these are the result of the spirit of the late Josette Collins taking possession of her. Q-Petofi found Kitty in Josette’s room at the Old House on the estate earlier, and lost track of her when she ran out into the woods.

Kitty/ Josette comes wandering into the drawing room. She claims to have seen Barnabas in the woods. When she says where in the woods she saw him, Q-Petofi says “Near the cave!” Edward wants to go to the cave to see if Barnabas is still in his coffin. Q-Petofi, not wanting Edward to walk in on Angelique and Aristide, volunteers to go. When Edward says he thinks he ought to handle the matter himself, Q-Petofi causes Kitty/ Josette to feel a chill. She asks Edward to stay with her, and he agrees to let Quentin go.

Q-Petofi finds Aristide holding a gun on Angelique. Aristide tells him what has been going on, and they open the coffin. They find Barnabas still inside. We see him there, the stake still in his chest.

Hello, Barney, well, hello, Barney! It’s so nice to have you back where you belong.

This is the first time we have seen Jonathan Frid since #845. He’s been in Chicago doing a play. Clearly Dan Curtis isn’t going to pay his fee just to have him lie in the coffin and breathe rapidly while the others talk about how dead he is, so we know that Barnabas is back.

Q-Petofi says that he will come back later and that he and Aristide will destroy the coffin and the body. To keep Angelique from making any more trouble, he casts a spell and surrounds her with magical flames.

While Q-Petofi is back at Collinwood reassuring Edward and Kitty/ Josette that Barnabas is dead, Angelique offers to tell Aristide secrets that no mortal man knows if he will release her from the magic flames. Aristide has no supernatural powers or occult knowledge; he is just a lummox whom Q-Petofi employs because he likes his looks and finds his sadism useful when he wants someone tortured to death. But somehow Aristide is able to stop the flames. Before Angelique can start talking, he pulls a knife on her and tells her that he doesn’t want her secrets- he just wants to kill her. Aristide has a special knife that he makes a fetish of. He calls it “The Dancing Girl.” Except when he calls it “The Dancing Lady.” At any rate, this isn’t it.

Aristide is inefficient about taking the knife out of its hiding place. He gives Angelique time to run out of the cave. He runs after her, and she hits him in the head with a rock, knocking him out. When he comes to, Aristide sees a man standing over him, asking for help. It is Barnabas.

Episode 866: Some various phases of change

It is 20 October 1897. Angelique, immortal witch and time-traveler, has discovered that her sometime fiancé, Quentin Collins, is not himself. He is 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi, and Petofi is him, having used his magic powers to force Quentin to trade bodies with him. I will refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

Yesterday, Q-Petofi caught Angelique trying to help P-Quentin. He attacked her, and we open today in a cave where he has imprisoned her. He tells her he has stripped her of her powers. He demands she tell him what she and time-traveling mad scientist Julia Hoffman have been doing. Regular viewers know that Julia is gone, having vanished from 1897 and returned to the 1960s in #858. That Q-Petofi does not know this is one of the few signs we have had recently that he has limitations.

Q-Petofi leaves Angelique in the cave with a chained coffin. He tells her that it is the one in which her ex-husband, vampire Barnabas Collins, was staked (#845.) She looks at the coffin and gives a little soliloquy about how she needs Barnabas, but he cannot help her.

Q-Petofi is not the only resident of the great house of Collinwood who is not the person he seems to be. Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, came to Collinwood intending to get Quentin’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward Collins to marry her by concealing some key facts about her financial status. But the very day she arrived, in #844, Kitty found that she was the one most gravely deprived of information about herself. As soon as she saw the portrait of Barnabas that hangs by the front door in the foyer, she became possessed by the spirit of Barnabas’ lost love Josette.

Kitty’s episodes of Josettification have continued. Today’s begins with another look at the portrait and a longing sigh. As sight of the chained coffin sets off Angelique’s yearning for Barnabas, so the portrait is the visual cue that triggers Josette to come to the surface of Kitty’s mind. By the end of the episode, she will be in Josette’s bedroom at the Old House on the estate, telling an unseen person that she is waiting for him.

Kitty is still herself most of the time. And we can assume that sooner or later, Petofi will be defeated and Quentin will return to his right body. But a third resident of the great house has made a permanent and irreversible change of spirit. Her body is that of Charity Trask, whose father, the odious Gregory Trask, is married to Quentin and Edward’s sister Judith. But in #819, Petofi annihilated Charity’s personality and replaced it with that of Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl/ mentalist who came to Collinwood in #771 and was killed that very night, without ever having met Charity.

Angelique and Kitty/ Josette yearn for Barnabas’ return. Increasingly, the audience does too- there doesn’t seem to be anywhere the story can go until he comes back. That sets them and us against Pansy. She doesn’t share our concern for narrative progression- she is such a daffy invention she can amuse us all by herself. And she knows that Barnabas was a vampire, who preyed on Charity and was ultimately, if indirectly, responsible for Pansy’s death. Indeed, it was she who drove the stake in #845. So Barnabas is absolutely the last person Pansy wants to see again. But now someone else has emerged in next to last place.

On Friday, Pansy looked at Q-Petofi and realized that he was not Quentin. She confronted him with questions that Quentin could answer but he couldn’t, exposing him to Angelique as an impostor. When Pansy shut herself in her room, Q-Petofi went upstairs and through her door threatened that if she didn’t keep quiet “her days [would be] numbered.” Now, she has passed a note to Edward reporting on the incident. Edward and Q-Petofi meet with Pansy in her room. She tells Edward about the visions and sensings that led her to conclude that the man with him is not really Quentin. Edward thinks Pansy is just a delusion Charity is having, and so cannot ascribe much evidentiary value to these experiences. Q-Petofi claims that when he said “her days are numbered” he meant that her days as a resident of the house were numbered if she went on saying bizarre things about him. Edward asks Pansy if she might be mistaken in her interpretation of her psychic data. She says she never has been before, but allows, in a very reasonable tone, that it is possible she could be this time.

Pansy is, at the moment, the only person who could possibly be an ally for P-Quentin in his attempt to return to his own body. She does not seem to be a match for Q-Petofi’s magical powers, and so others would have to be recruited to help in the fight. But if she is now as unsure as it seems, P-Quentin doesn’t even have a place to start.

When Kitty/ Josette is in the room at the Old House, she looks at the portrait of Josette and sees that it is signed and dated. We’ve seen the portrait many times since its first appearance in #70, and it has never before borne either a signature or a date. The signature is “Coswell,” which is as good as any.

The date on the portrait is 1797, which is rather less good. In #402, set early in January 1796, we saw the portrait delivered to the Old House. Moreover, it was in #425, set in February 1796, that Josette flung herself to her death from the top of Widows’ Hill. So if this portrait is a replacement for the original, it was painted at a time when the subject was unavailable for further sittings.

Moreover, Kitty misstates the current date as 1797 in a letter to her mother, which is supposed to be a sign of her Josettification. Viewers who remember the 1790s flashback will just be puzzled by this, while those who do not are unlikely to see much significance in the date at all. It is hard to see why they’ve decided to retcon this particular point.

Episode 858: Despite all appearances

Sorcerer Count Petofi has forced the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins to trade bodies with him. So Thayer David is now playing Quentin, a forlorn and helpless figure who goes around begging people to listen to his lunatic story, while David Selby plays Petofi as a gleefully cruel young man who takes advantage of all the pleasures available to Quentin. I will refer to Thayer David’s character as P-Quentin and David Selby’s as Q-Petofi.

Q-Petofi goes to Beth Chavez, who used to be a maidservant in the great house of Collinwood and is now one of Quentin’s fiancées, more or less. Beth is in what she identifies as her room. It looks very much like the set that represented her room in the servants quarters of Collinwood, but it is explicitly stated that this room is somewhere else. Maybe she took it with her as part of her severance package.

Beth is terrified of the count, whose slave she was for a while after she left Collinwood. P-Quentin manages to get her to take note of his words, though she seems sure that what he is saying is another of the count’s tricks. He tells the story of how twelve year old Jamison Collins found her about to commit suicide because of what his Uncle Quentin did to her and has refused to speak to him since. He pleads with her to go to Collinwood and see if the man who appears to be Quentin knows the same story.

Beth does go, and she does put Q-Petofi to the test. He has no idea what she is talking about, and tries to bluff his way out by saying that Jamison’s estrangement from him is too painful to discuss. He then yells at Beth, declaring that he knows the count put her up to asking him about Jamison. That means that he and Beth both know that he failed the test. Beth might become P-Quentin’s first ally. Unless, that is, Q-Petofi kills her before she can- there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping him.

P-Quentin does have other potential allies. One is Julia Hoffman, MD. A mad scientist from the twentieth century, Julia followed her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, after he had traveled through time from the year 1969 here to 1897. An experimental treatment briefly freed Barnabas from the effects of vampirism in the spring of 1968; when she arrived from the future, Julia began trying to replicate that treatment. Most people now think that Barnabas has been destroyed, staked in his coffin in #845. But in #849 we saw that Julia was still working on the treatment, and in #853 someone named Kitty Soames barged into Julia’s hiding place and, possessed by the ghost of Barnabas’ lost love Josette, identified the room where Barnabas was hiding. Quentin, at that time still occupying his own body, was with Kitty at the time and realized that she was right. This alarmed Julia, because even though she and Barnabas regarded Quentin as a friend, they knew that he was already under Petofi’s influence and could not be trusted to keep a secret from him.

Another person who might come to P-Quentin’s aid against Q-Petofi is Angelique, the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire in the first place. At this point in 1897, Angelique is another of Quentin’s fiancées. Resenting Petofi’s influence over her prospective husband, she met with Julia in #842 and devised the plan they have been following since. Angelique has a couple of scenes with Q-Petofi in the drawing room at Collinwood today; she notices that his behavior is very different from what Quentin’s has been, but does not suspect that it is Petofi’s mind behind the face.

Angelique calls on Julia in her hiding place. Julia keeps hearing some sound effects we last heard during The Experiment, a storyline that ran through May and June of 1968, when she was building a Frankenstein’s monster in order to permanently cure Barnabas’ vampirism. She describes them as sounding like wind. Angelique cannot hear them, nor can she hear the voices which Julia also hears. When Julia recognizes the voices as occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes and sarcastic dandy Roger Collins, she realizes that they are coming from 1969. The reason she can hear them and Angelique cannot is that she has a physical body in that year, while Angelique is all here, in 1897. Julia tells Angelique she cannot stay in 1897 much longer, and Angelique agrees to take over her part in what remains of their plan.

After Angelique has left her alone, Julia finds that Stokes and Roger can hear her if she shouts. This only lasts for a moment. The sounds fade, and she loses the connection altogether.

P-Quentin comes to Julia’s place. Thinking he is Petofi, she declines to speak to him. He insists he is Quentin. When he tells her some information they had shared privately, she decides he is telling the truth and starts calling him Quentin. In fact, she calls him “Quentin, Quentin,” as she often calls Barnabas “Barnabas, Barnabas.” She is about to tell him the next steps of the plan when she vanishes.

The lady vanishes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The first time traveler we saw vanish in this way was an unpleasant man named Peter Bradford whose personality largely consisted of yelling at people that he preferred to be called “Jeff Clark.” Peter/ Jeff was from the 1790s, but tried everyone’s patience for much of 1968, when the show took place in a contemporary setting. He faded away, returning to his own time, in #637. We didn’t hear any sound effects before he disappeared. The Experiment was still very fresh in our minds at that point, so the sound effects we hear today would not have been available, and besides, no one cares what the world sounds like to Peter/ Jeff. It was just a relief that he was finally gone.

Julia is as appealing a character as Peter/ Jeff was repellent, and it’s sad to see her go. We’ve had some signs lately that the 1897 segment will soon be ending, but we’ve had those signs before, and they’ve kept restarting it. If Julia isn’t coming back to this period, we can only hope that if it goes on much longer, they will find a way to intercut episodes set in 1897 with others set in 1969, where we will be able to spend time with her.

Episode 855: The winds of change

The Point of Return

Barnabas Collins went into a trance at the end of February 1969 and came to in March 1897, a time when he was a vampire. Barnabas took the audience with him, so that Dark Shadows has been a costume drama set in 1897 ever since. We’ve had a few glimpses of 1969- we can see that time is passing there, that twelve year old David Collins has been saved from death, that the ghosts of rakish libertine Quentin Collins and maidservant Beth Chavez have stopped haunting the great house of Collinwood, and that Barnabas’ physical body has vanished, leaving him no avenue of return to the 1960s. We’ve also had indications at several points that the show was about to put the 1897 segment into its climactic crisis, each of which was followed by a restart of that segment. Some of those false signs probably reflected long-range plans that were abandoned when they saw how popular 1897 was.

Now, they are in a position when they can go back to 1969 whenever they wish. There are only a few unresolved story points in 1897. Most of those can be wrapped up quickly, and the rest can be forgotten. If they wanted to, they could write a single slam-bang episode in which the evil Gregory Trask is forced to accept the annulment of his marriage to Judith Collins and to relinquish control of Collinwood, the family is persuaded that Barnabas never really was a vampire after all, and Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, turns into Barnabas’ lost love Josette and finds a way to leave him that will make him even more miserable than he already is. Sorcerer Count Petofi might be left watching helplessly as Barnabas, his friend Julia Hoffman, and the living Quentin all escape into the future. We could then assume that the rest of the characters just toddled off and led quiet lives.

They could equally well take another tack on their way back to contemporary dress. Barnabas and Julia came to 1897 separately; there is no reason why they, or any other characters, should have to go to 1969 together. Today, Petofi is performing some kind of mumbo-jumbo that is supposed to lead to a body swap that will cause him to trade forms with Quentin. After that, he is confident he will travel to 1969 and be safe from his foes, the Rroma people. He seems to be succeeding. So perhaps a Petofi who looks and sounds like Quentin will appear in 1969, in a Collinwood based on the events that have taken place so far in 1897.

In that pocket universe, Collinwood would be known as Traskwood. Its owner in 1969 would be Trask’s son by a subsequent marriage. Call him Gregory, Junior. It would be unclear at first what happened to Judith and to her presumptive heir, her twelve year old nephew Jamison. The revelation of their fates could set us up for some big twists and the introduction of new characters with familiar faces.

Since Gregory, Junior would be in his sixties, he could have a couple of adult children who would carry on some story points. Gregory III could be played by Jerry Lacy without old age makeup, and could be a morally ambiguous character who might emerge as a protagonist and would certainly become prominent in the pages of the fan magazines. None of the Trasks would have any legal obligation to let Quentin stay in any of their houses or to work for any of their businesses, nor would any surviving Collinses. Moreover, everyone in the area would know full well that there used to be a vampire on the estate named Barnabas Collins, and no one would ever have heard of Julia.

Petofi begins his incantation. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

If the show goes that direction, we could spend half of each week with Petofi-as-Quentin while he makes a place for himself in that pocket universe version of 1969, while we would spend the other half with Barnabas and perhaps Julia back in 1897, where they are in an uneasy alliance with wicked witch Angelique as they try to set history right. Kitty’s Josettification would threaten to destroy this alliance, since Barnabas is obsessed with his love for Josette and Angelique is equally obsessed with her hatred for her.

The body-swap theme of today’s episode, along with the emphasis on the procedure Petofi is following, will remind longtime viewers of The Experiment, a theme that ran from April to May 1968. Barnabas and Julia built a Frankenstein’s monster with the intention of killing Barnabas and bringing him to life again in the new body. Some viewers may have wondered if Jonathan Frid was actually going to leave the show, and if the actor playing the monster was going to take over the role of Barnabas.

This time a larger fraction of the viewers are likely to think the transfer might work, since it would not require a popular star to leave the show. On the contrary, casting David Selby as Petofi in an altered twentieth century would give him the chance to wear up-to-date clothing, have magical powers, inflict cruel punishments on people who get in his way, run con games, hint at an ambiguous sexual orientation, and generally have a wonderful time. Since Mr Selby had by this point become the pin-up of a huge percentage of America’s teenaged and preteen girls, that sounds like a recipe for sky-high ratings. Meanwhile, casting Thayer David as a Quentin estranged from his body and his social environment would present an expert character actor with a challenge worthy of his skills.

It might sound like it would be too confusing to intercut between a parallel version of 1969 and a continuation of 1897, but the show will try almost exactly the same tactic a couple of years from now, as they set up for the storyline that carries the series through its final nine weeks. That closing bit is not widely regarded as one of the better phases of Dark Shadows, but the intercutting timelines that lead to it are an intriguing gambit. Maybe the idea for it came when they were trying to figure out how to get from 1897 back to 1969, in which case it is possible that the scenario I have outlined above may be very much like what the writers had in mind at some point in the development of the story.

Corridors of Trial and Error

We do get a few hints today about what we might see in the 1897 half of the show if it does split. Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi shows up for the first time since #834, before Julia came to 1897. We had begun to fear we wouldn’t see her again. It’s good to have her back, but since Magda is also played by Grayson Hall, it raises the possibility that Julia might go away for a long time. Maybe the action will be split between 1897 and 1969 for some months, and during those months Julia will be in 1969, running her hospital, entirely unaware that there ever was a Barnabas Collins.

Beth is a servant of Petofi’s now, and she spends the episode bickering with her colleague Aristide. It turns out that she still has feelings for Quentin. At the end, she runs out of Petofi’s lair to try to help Quentin. This suggests that Beth’s conflicted loyalties will be a source of drama. Aristide shouts after her not to go, then says that “You’ll ruin everything.” He delivers this line in such a mild tone that the resulting laugh must have been intentional. This raises the possibility of Aristide emerging as a source of laughs. In the hands of actor Michael Stroka, that is a distinct possibility.

Quentin rambles into the Blue Whale, the tavern in the village of Collinsport. It’s after hours, and the only person in the barroom to tell him to stop knocking on the door is cabaret performer Pansy Faye, whose body Quentin first met when it was occupied by Trask’s daughter Charity. He still calls her Charity, which she overlooks because she has the hots for him. Pansy lets Quentin in, and invites him to her place.

Charity lived at Collinwood with her father, and after Pansy took over she stayed on there for some time. The other day she talked about wanting to leave Collinwood and go “home,” but it was not at all clear what that meant. Her invitation to Quentin is the first time she explicitly says that she has her own apartment now. Perhaps, if we stay in 1897, we will see that apartment. Maybe when Thayer David takes over the part of Quentin, Pansy’s psychic gifts will enable her to recognize who he really is, and she will take him in. In those days, of course, a man and a woman would have to get married to rent a lodging, so presumably that would have involved a wedding. Since Quentin would appear to be Petofi, Pansy would thereby become a countess, Kitty’s equal in rank. It already makes Kitty exceedingly uncomfortable to be around Pansy, so that would be an occasion for a great deal of comedy. Moreover, any viewer who saw that both women had the same title and both were involved in supernatural changes of personality would be convinced that the writers had planned that phase of their story all along.

Pansy goes into her act. She sings her song; Quentin is seized with a fit of brio. He gives a little speech addressed to the absent bartender, picks Pansy up, spins her around, kisses her passionately, then sits down at the piano and bangs out the tune of her song. She admires his piano playing and he says that he used to be able to play quite well, before “they” came. Then he suddenly sinks back into his previous depression. He denies that he ever played the piano in his life. We know that it was Petofi who had that moment of brightness, and that Petofi’s mood darkened when he remembered the Rroma who cut his hand off 100 years before. Quentin has no recollection of anything his body does or says when Petofi is using it.

A piano is prominently featured in the drawing room at Collinwood in the 1960s- perhaps there will also be one there when the estate is renamed Traskwood, and when Petofi, as played by David Selby, wangles an invitation to the great house, he will play it. That might set us up for a moment when Quentin returns to his proper body, tries to explain what has happened, and finds that his inability to play the piano marks him as an impostor. You could build a lot of story on that- you might make it look for a while like Quentin could find a home in the Traskwood universe, then show that no, the people back in 1897 have to reset the past before anything can work again.

Episode 849: You wouldn’t expect me to forget a vampire

Once upon a time, an American girl named Kitty moved to England, where she joined the household of the Earl of Hampshire as a governess. The Earl married her, and she became his Countess. Now it is 1897. The Earl is dead, driven to suicide by sorcerer Count Petofi. Kitty has returned to America, without the stepchildren who were once her charges and with so little money that she writes a letter apologizing to her mother that she cannot pay the train fare from Maine to her home in Pennsylvania. She is staying in the great house on the estate of Collinwood, home to her late husband’s friend Edward Collins. Her hope is that Edward will marry her and allow her to go on living in the style to which she has grown accustomed.

Her hopes would seem to be well-founded. Edward was so devoted to the late Earl that for a time he was under the delusion that he was his valet, and he is smitten with Kitty. But there are several flies in the ointment. For one thing, regular viewers know that Edward is in fact penniless. His sister Judith inherited the whole of their grandmother’s estate. He lives in Judith’s house as a guest and works in her business as her employee, and while she is in the mental hospital he must take orders from her husband, the odious Gregory Trask.

Second, Petofi is in the area. It was he who cast the spell that prompted Edward to reveal his true self-image as the Earl’s manservant, and he has evil plans for many of the people with whom Kitty must deal. She met Petofi at Collinwood the day she arrived there, but has kept her acquaintance with him secret from Edward and everyone else.

Third, vampire Barnabas Collins saw Kitty and believed she was his lost love Josette come back to life. Shortly after, she had a psychological break suggesting he was right. A music box that Barnabas has given to several women whom he wanted to turn into Josette appeared in Kitty’s room the other day, after a woman who used to be Trask’s daughter Charity but has now been transformed into Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye had warned her it was a sign of great danger.

It seems unlikely Barnabas put the music box on Kitty’s table. For one thing, Charity/ Pansy had staked him shortly before, so that he is apparently hors de combat. Further, it was placed there during the daylight hours, when he is always out of operation. Also, it appeared while Kitty was sitting a few feet away, and she did not see anyone else in the room. Petofi stripped Barnabas of his power to materialize and dematerialize at will some time ago, so he would not have been able to manage that trick. The explanation that will occur to longtime viewers is that Josette’s ghost did it. She was very active at Collinwood before Barnabas made his first entrance in April 1967, when the show took place in a contemporary setting. Perhaps she is active in 1897, as well.

Kitty doesn’t know about any of that, so she assumes that Petofi is responsible. She marches over to Petofi’s residence, an abandoned mill. Originally this was a hideout, but by now most of the principal cast have visited him there at least once, so she could have stopped just about anyone on the street and asked for directions. She accuses him of having Charity/ Pansy give her a chilling warning about a particular music box, and of then causing that music box to appear in her room. He has no idea what she is talking about. She produces the music box and they play it. She then has another mental flash onto images of Barnabas. Petofi finds all of this most interesting, and walks Kitty back to Collinwood.

There, Kitty finds the devastatingly handsome reprobate Quentin Collins moping over a glass of liquor. She asks him if she has him to thank for the music box. He is shocked to see it. He says that it looks just like one that belonged to a distant relative of his, but that he doesn’t believe it can be the same one. She asks if the relative is Barnabas Collins, and he is shocked again. He asks how she knows that name. In response, Kitty introduces Quentin to the concept of “learning”: “I collect information, Mr. Collins, and I remember what I hear… I listen when people speak.” Quentin reacts as if it is the first time anyone has described these activities to him, which, considering the world he lives in, is not so unlikely.

Back in his squat, Petofi sees his servant Aristide for the first time in several days. Aristide went absent without leave when Barnabas threatened to kill him, and has come back now that he has heard Barnabas has been safely disposed of. Petofi is irked, not only at Aristide’s unauthorized departure, but even more at his failure to carry out the task he had entrusted to him. They had captured Julia Hoffman, MD, Barnabas’ friend, who followed him after he traveled back in time from 1969 to 1897. Petofi wanted to know how they managed this journey, and was convinced Julia was withholding the information he needed. Aristide rigged up a death trap that Barnabas triggered when he came to Julia’s rescue. Aristide did not stay to make sure it actually killed her.

Aristide shows Petofi that the gun he pointed at Julia’s heart did fire a bullet through the back of the chair to which he tied her. One would think that even a sorcerer, seeing that bullet hole, would conclude that Julia got out of the ropes while Aristide wasn’t looking. But instead he looks with a wild surmise and goes to Julia’s hiding place, in the old rectory on Pine Road.

Before Petofi enters, we see Julia holding a hypodermic and preparing an injection. She hides the needle when she hears the knock on the door. Julia had been giving Barnabas a series of shots meant to put his vampirism into remission. That she is still preparing the shots suggests to regular viewers that Barnabas’ staking was a trick of some kind, and that he is still in operation somewhere.

There are rules of etiquette in the universe of Dark Shadows that people follow no matter how absurd it is to do so. Julia lets Petofi into the room, even though he has tried to kill her. One cannot refuse admittance to anyone who knocks! She accepts a snifter of brandy from him and drinks it. One cannot refuse to share liquor with anyone who offers it!

As it happens, Petofi has put cyanide in the brandy. Enough cyanide, he says, to kill ten women. When he tells Julia this, she briefly tries to pretend that she is ill, then gives up. He declares that she cannot die. She admits that this is true. He figures out that only her “astral body” is in 1897, while her physical person remained in 1969. She confirms this.

Julia tries to make Petofi think he has succeeded by faking the symptoms of cyanide poisoning. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later, Petofi concludes that if he is to go to 1969, he will need to have a physical body there. Barnabas the vampire originally died in the 1790s and was in 1897 a body sealed in a coffin, so when he traveled back in time he could animate that body and be subject to all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Petofi decides that the body he wants is the best-looking available male one, which is Quentin’s. We have seen that Petofi can vacate his own body and take possession of another’s, as when in #801 he took up residence in twelve year old Jamison Collins. He has also, for reasons of his own, granted Quentin eternal youth. So it now seems logical to him that he should compel Quentin to make the exchange.

Of late, the editors of the Dark Shadows Wiki have taken to having discussions with each other in comments placed in parentheses and italicized. I couldn’t resist adding a comment myself to a discussion attached to the entry for this episode. My contribution is the fourth of the four below:

In 807, Aristede tells Charles Delaware Tate that if Petofi got his hand back, he would be able to live forever. As Petofi got his hand back, he must have a body in the future, so why would he need Quentin’s?

(Who would you rather look like?)

(Isn’t the point of the body-switch to evade the gypsies?)

(Yes, that is the point of the body-switch — but surely he only needs to switch bodies? If he can switch bodies now, and become unrecognisable, why does he need to go to the future as well?)

(Petofi says that he has many ambitious plans. If he carries them out, they may attract widespread attention. The Rroma have been keeping track of him for a long time, and may become suspicious if a known associate of Petofi’s starts doing all sorts of spectacular things.)

I expect this whole discussion to be deleted soon- it isn’t really in keeping with the purpose of the site, which is just to serve as ready reference for basic facts about each episode. But it does address a theme that often comes up in online discussions of this storyline, so I wanted to preserve it here.

Episode 847: Some new and astounding piece of information

Julia Hoffman, MD, has followed her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, on an uncertain and frightening journey into the past. They are now in the year 1897, where Barnabas hopes to prevent disasters that would befall the Collins family in 1969. Today, Julia is in their hiding place, the old rectory on Pine Road, trying to replicate the experimental treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into remission for a while early in 1968. A knock comes at the door.

It is Julia and Barnabas’ current arch-nemesis, sorcerer Count Petofi. Julia reacts to the sight of him with fear. Petofi assures Julia that he does not now have any intention of making another attempt on her life. He tells her that she is alive thanks to the incompetence of his henchman Aristide and to Barnabas’ bravery, but that if she finds herself in danger again she must not count on Barnabas to save her. When he tells her that this is because a woman drove a stake through Barnabas’ heart, Julia reacts with shock. She asks if Petofi plans to hand her back over to Aristide for another try; he says that his plan is rather to keep her under constant surveillance so that when she returns to 1969, he will go along with her.

Julia learns that Barnabas is dead, and not just because it is daytime. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia’s displays of fear and bravery are a bit of an attention-getter for returning viewers. Last week she learned that it is only her “astral body” that is in 1897, while her physical body is in 1969. She is therefore immune to any physical harm. It is tactically sound to keep this information from Petofi, of course, but characters on Dark Shadows do not always have sufficient discretion to observe this basic rule of gamesmanship. Barnabas particularly is in the habit of showing all his cards to his enemies while hiding everything from those who would like to help him, and even Julia, who is the smartest character on the show, has done the same thing from time to time. The most celebrated example is probably #619, when she marched into a hostile warlock’s living room, told him everything he wanted to know, and somehow walked away the winner. But today not only does she keep shtum during the scene, the show doesn’t even let the audience in on what she’s doing. First time viewers are as much in the dark as Petofi is.

Later, Julia goes to the great house of Collinwood to tell rakish libertine Quentin Collins that Barnabas had asked her to take a message to him in the event that he died. Quentin is in terrible danger from Petofi, and must flee at once. Quentin says that he has already come to that conclusion, and urges her to do the same. Julia tells him that she cannot. Barnabas left several tasks uncompleted that must be attended to for the future of the Collins family to take its necessary shape. She assures Quentin that she is not in as much danger as he is. She says that Petofi thinks she is his ticket to 1969, and that he will not kill her. Again, she does not even hint at her immunity to physical harm.

Earlier in the episode, Petofi had ordered Quentin to keep watch on Julia. When he resisted, Petofi reminded him that if it were not for his intervention, Quentin would be a werewolf and the lovely Amanda Harris, whom Quentin has asked to run off with him, would be lethally mauled the next time she is in his vicinity during a full Moon. Quentin has betrayed Barnabas and Julia on Petofi’s orders before, and we have little doubt that he will do so again.

Barnabas knew that Quentin was under Petofi’s control, and he shared his information with Julia. The other day he told Quentin where his coffin was kept during the day, leading directly to his staking. Longtime viewers may have taken this as another example of Barnabas showing his cards to his enemies. Those watching closely will have noticed an enigmatic look Barnabas gave Quentin as he was leaving the room at the end of that conversation, and will have asked if he was up to something. That Julia holds back the fact that she cannot be killed in 1897 suggests that she knows that whatever she tells Quentin will get back to Petofi. This will prompt us to ask the same question.

Last week, Julia made an agreement with wicked witch Angelique to fight Petofi together. Angelique would not tell her what her plan of action was, but when Julia looked in the mirror and saw, not her own reflection, but Angelique’s, she said that she understood what the plan was and knew that it would work. So if we have been watching regularly, we are likely confident that Julia, Angelique, and Barnabas have a surprise in store for Petofi.

One of Petofi’s vulnerabilities is prominently featured today. As a supervillain, he is committed to the idea of exercising as much control as possible over the world. With that commitment comes a blind spot. He is slow to understand events that take place outside anyone’s control. When he learned that Barnabas and Julia had traveled through time while meditating on I Ching wands, he himself cast such wands, meditated on them, and had a terrifying experience. He was convinced Julia had directed that experience, and it was when she could not tell him how she had done so or how to subject the consequences of meditation to his will that he ordered Aristide to kill her.

Petofi has now learned that Julia was telling the truth when she said that the effects of the meditative state were not within her power. But he is still experimenting with the wands, trying to develop a technique to subdue the power that meditation on them unlocks. He uses a man named Tim Shaw as the subject of his experiment today; Tim has a vision in which a masked man, who turns out to be Quentin, kills Amanda.

Tim had come to Petofi with the news of Barnabas’ death, hoping to collect some kind of reward from him. Petofi was quite cheerful at the news, but uninterested in the details until Tim told him that the killer was a woman he knows by the name Charity Trask. That threw Petofi for a loop, and he went to Quentin.

Petofi had ordered Quentin to stake Barnabas. He congratulated him on manipulating Charity into doing it for him, and was visibly disconcerted when Quentin said it was an accident Charity followed him- he hadn’t even known she was there. Again, Petofi’s overestimation of the efficacy of plans reveals a soft spot. If Angelique, Julia, and Barnabas can strike him there, they have an excellent chance of bringing him down.