bloopers – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1053: To have the final word

For some time, wicked witch Angelique Stokes Collins has been dissatisfied with her minion Julia Hoffman. What she most wants from Hoffman is information about her new enemy, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Yet Hoffman has told her nothing useful about Barnabas. The only time she brings him up is to claim that she was busy following him when Angelique needed her to do something else. Even then, her reports are no more substantive than “He went into town,” without so much as a single name of a person he met or building he entered while there. Hoffman keeps showing friendliness to people to whom Angelique wants her to be hostile, asking questions to which she ought already know the answer, and resisting orders she would usually be eager to follow. Whatever is wrong with Hoffman, Angelique does not propose to put up with it indefinitely.

Yesterday, Angelique found the solution to the puzzle. She learned that she has not been dealing with Hoffman at all, but with her Doppelgänger from an alternate universe. Barnabas came from that universe as well. This Julia is as devoted to Barnabas as Hoffman was to Angelique, and followed him to this reality to take her place at his side. Today, Angelique traps Julia in a secret chamber off the basement of the great house of Collinwood and demands to know what she has done with Hoffman. At length Julia confirms her true identity and admits that she killed Hoffman, but she will not answer any of Angelique’s questions about Barnabas.

Angelique takes out a medallion and tells Julia to look at it. Julia gasps and turns away. She says that she knows about hypnosis and knows how to resist it. Angelique says that if she knows how to resist, there is no reason for her not to look at the medallion, but Julia keeps looking away. Julia was first introduced as a psychiatrist, whose talent for hypnosis was of magical proportions. By showing her medallion to a person, she could erase and rewrite that person’s memory as easily and as completely as one could erase and rewrite a chalkboard. Julia is the heroine of the show now, but longtime viewers will still find it fitting that Angelique turns the tables on her.

Upstairs in the same house, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins is having a conversation with Angelique’s portrait. This is one of several habits Roger has that recall Waldo Lydecker, the sarcastic dandy in the 1943 novel and 1944 film Laura. Lydecker turned out to have murdered a woman with whom he had a strange obsession.

Roger is overwrought, telling the Angelique in the portrait that he should have known she would come back from the dead. If he had, he would have realized it was a waste of time to kill her. He only made things worse by doing that; for one thing, it made it necessary for him to kill his niece Carolyn. As he says this, his sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Carolyn’s mother, overhears. She storms in. He tries to deny that meant anything he said, but Liz won’t be stopped. As Roger presses his hands on Liz’ shoulders, Joan Bennett plays the part of someone being strangled. Louis Edmonds’ fingers are nowhere near her throat. You can’t believe that Roger is hurting Liz, but you can easily believe that Edmonds and Bennett are a brother and sister playing pretend. They look like they’re about six.

Just as Roger closes Liz’ body into the storage space under the window seat, Barnabas enters. Roger is on the point of tears, a circumstance Barnabas notices. Roger keeps urging Barnabas to leave the room with him, but he replies that what he has to say will take only a moment. Barnabas says that he is worried about Liz. Roger gets even more upset, and Barnabas finally agrees to go downstairs with him.

For longtime viewers, this scene makes a poignant contrast with #446. In that episode, set in the year 1796, Edmonds played haughty overlord Joshua Collins, father of Barnabas. Joshua discovered that Barnabas had become a vampire. Joshua confronted his son in his hiding place. Joshua was at once horrified and shattered, but in no way intimidated by Barnabas, who was for his part alternately ashamed and petulant. Edmonds and Jonathan Frid made that scene into one of the high points of the series. Now, it is Edmonds’ turn to be the murderer dejected by the knowledge of his own inexpungable guilt, and Frid’s turn to be the upright family man. Barnabas does not know Roger’s secret as Joshua knew his, but in Roger’s inability to face him we see the fear of the same righteous condemnation Joshua had felt it his duty to proclaim.

At one point in this conversation Frid has so much trouble with his lines that the words dissolve into a buzzing sound. I told my wife, Mrs Acilius, that it sounded like Barnabas had briefly turned into Bob Dylan. She roared with laughter and said that was exactly what she was going to say.

This is the first “Parallel Time” episode in which Lara Parker is credited as playing Angelique. Previously she had been billed as Alexis Stokes, the identical twin sister whom Angelique killed when she rose from the dead ten and a half weeks ago and whom she has been impersonating ever since. Several times in the series, cast members have wandered onto the set while the credits were rolling.* Referring to this, Mrs Acilius had explained that they kept using Alexis’ name in case any characters who didn’t know who she really was wandered in while the credits were rolling. She imagined them looking up, widening their eyes, and pointing. She meant that hypothesis as a joke. But since the only character in today’s episode who didn’t know Angelique’s true identity was Liz, who was dead by the time the credits rolled, I think we have to take it as proven.

*Most conspicuously in #703, #635, #510, and #328. There are also moments when crew members can be seen during the closing credits, most spectacularly in #999, when a man is just sitting there eating a sandwich.

Episode 1043: The temperament to kill

In 1967, vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman settled in on the estate of Collinwood, Barnabas as the master of the Old House on the grounds and Julia as a permanent guest in the great house. Now they have both crossed over to an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” Barnabas has passed himself off to the residents of the great house on this universe’s version of Collinwood as their long-lost cousin from South America, as in the original continuity he persuaded their counterparts he was their cousin from England. He has bitten and enslaved the owners of the Old House, alcoholic writer Will Loomis and Will’s wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Julia met her own counterpart, a Julia Hoffman who never became a doctor or got entangled with Barnabas. This Hoffman was the housekeeper in the great house, and as fanatically devoted to the undead Angelique as the original Julia is to Barnabas. Julia greeted Hoffman by beating her to death, stealing her French maid outfit, and assuming her identity.

Yesterday, Carolyn told Julia that she had realized who killed Angelique the first time. Today, she clams up and refuses to say who it is. Julia tells Barnabas about this. He suspects she is protecting Will. He questions Will, who says he is innocent. Barnabas’ power precludes Will from lying to him, so he turns his attentions to Carolyn. He forces her to say that she believes the killer to be her mother, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Barnabas knows Liz’ counterpart in his own continuity and cannot imagine that any version of her would commit such a crime. Carolyn’s reason for accusing her mother is that the murder weapon was one of her hatpins. Barnabas points out that anyone in the house could have stolen the pin.

Angelique has returned from the dead. Impersonating her identical twin sister Alexis, she is staying in the great house as the guest of her widower, sourpuss Quentin Collins. Quentin is missing at the moment, on the run from the police after being charged with a murder of which he is more or less innocent. Barnabas and Julia know who Angelique is and what she is up to.

Angelique is being maintained in the world of the living by a procedure her father, Tim Stokes, invented. Stokes is keeping a comatose young woman named Roxanne in the back room of his apartment. Stokes has somehow established a remote link between Roxanne and Angelique. This link drains most of Roxanne’s “life force” into Angelique. Roxanne must remain in precisely her current state of debility for Angelique to continue her existence. If Roxanne dies, the force will vanish altogether, taking Angelique with it. If Roxanne regains her strength, the link will be broken and the whole force will revert to her.

Barnabas has devised a cockamamie scheme to take Roxanne’s body from Stokes’ place, hide it somewhere, and have Julia bring her back to life. He reminds Julia that she performed a similar procedure when she cured him of his first vampire curse by constructing a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam. She responds that what Stokes has done is altogether different from what she did, and that she has no idea whether she will be able to figure it out. Barnabas, who has no scientific education beyond whatever he picked up as a boy in the eighteenth century, vows to revive Roxanne himself if Julia will not help.

Julia points out the many flaws in Barnabas’ plan. As she does so, Jonathan Frid’s delivery of Barnabas’ responses gets more and more uncertain. He’s been doing quite well in recent episodes, but he’s so bad in this scene that before long Grayson Hall can no longer keep track of Julia’s lines. When, on his way out of the house, he proclaims that he is ready to do battle with Angelique, he is proposing a two-front war. He is already engaged in desperate combat with the coat rack holding his cane. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said that Barnabas’ plan is so ridiculous it’s no wonder the actors can’t get the words out.

Barnabas takes Will to the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town. He explains that there is a secret room there that was used to hide weapons from the British during the Revolutionary War. Will made a study of the Collins legends and is skeptical, but Barnabas opens the panel and ushers him in.

Once they are inside, it is Barnabas’ turn to be surprised. In his universe, he was locked in a chained coffin in the counterpart of this room, undiscovered for 171 years. But here, he finds furniture, a candelabra, a glass of fresh milk, and a drawing of Roxanne signed “Claude North.” Someone has been living there, someone connected with Roxanne. Will says out loud that they can’t keep her there. Barnabas says that they will find another place for her, and they carry on.

Will and Barnabas find the drawing. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas and Will enter Stokes’ apartment. Will assures Barnabas that Stokes won’t come back until after closing time at the local tavern, but a moment later claims that he feels a presence. Barnabas looks around. No sooner had he declared that Will is wrong than the ghostly voice of the late Miss Julia Hoffman fills the room, forbidding them from proceeding with their mission.

Roxanne is played by Donna Wandrey, whose short red hair, pale complexion, and strong chin are reminiscent of Grayson Hall. When we first saw her, we wondered if it would turn out that Roxanne was Hoffman’s secret daughter. The ghostly voice adds substance to the idea that there was something important linking Hoffman with Roxanne.

Episode 1035: Terrified at his own duality

Since #1021, Barnabas Collins has been trying to figure out what links mild-mannered scientist Cyrus Longworth with a strange and violent man known as John Yaeger. Yesterday, Cyrus telephoned Barnabas and told him that Yaeger was holding Maggie Collins prisoner in an old farmhouse. Today, Barnabas finds Yaeger choking Maggie in the basement of that farmhouse.

Barnabas orders Yaeger to unhand Maggie, saying that he will kill him if he does not. Maggie gives an ecstatic look, then Yaeger flings her to the floor. He and Barnabas start fighting. Yaeger’s weapon of choice is a heavy cane that conceals a bayonet. The other day, Barnabas was looking at his own heavy cane and thinking about what an effective weapon it is, setting us up to expect a cane fight between him and Yaeger. Returning viewers will therefore be puzzled that Barnabas doesn’t even have his cane. Barnabas’ cane is one of his signature gimmicks, so maybe the makers of the show didn’t want to risk damaging it.

Yaeger exposes the bayonet in his cane and stabs Barnabas with it. Barnabas pulls it out of his chest and keeps coming. Yaeger asks “What kind of creature are you?,” to which Barnabas replies that he will never know. Barnabas strangles Yaeger to death. Barnabas’ threatening statements to Yaeger combine with the fact that he keeps choking him well after he becomes unconscious to leave us no label for this act other than willful murder.

Maggie gets up and goes into the room where Barnabas has just finished killing Yaeger. As she does so, there is a bad goof in the production, as a gap in the panel behind her exposes another set, the one representing the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. Watching Dark Shadows is an education in how resilient an audience’s suspension of disbelief can be, but the idea that the farmhouse is very far from the great house is so important to the suspense that this one really does undercut the rest of the episode.

Maggie should just have clicked her heels and said “There’s no place like home.”

Maggie and Barnabas watch in amazement as the dead Yaeger transforms into Cyrus. Once they have absorbed the implication that Yaeger was just Cyrus in disguise, Barnabas takes Maggie home to the great house.

Maggie is walking when Barnabas gets her in the front door, but she is unconscious by the time he puts her on the couch in the drawing room. Housekeeper Julia Hoffman and Carolyn Stoddard Loomis, a cousin of Maggie’s husband Quentin, are astounded to see them, and have many questions. Barnabas confirms that Yaeger was holding Maggie prisoner and that he is now dead, then orders Hoffman to bring a blanket for her mistress.

Quentin comes home. Barnabas tells him they must go to the farmhouse at once. There, they see Cyrus’ body. Thinking of what Barnabas and Maggie saw, Quentin realizes that the experiment Cyrus had been so secretive about must have been the creation of a Jekyll and Hyde formula. He decides that they should tell the police everything, in spite of the damage it will do to Cyrus’ posthumous reputation and the risk that Barnabas might be inconvenienced in some way for having murdered him.

Quentin has only known Barnabas for a few weeks, and has been wary of him. He has been especially impatient over the last several days with Barnabas’ insistence that Maggie was in danger when he was under the impression that she had merely left the house. This scene shows us Quentin’s remorse at having disbelieved Barnabas, and marks the beginning of a friendship between the two.

Back in the great house, Hoffman is in a brightly lit, richly decorated room, making a telephone call. She is telling the person on the other end of the line that she has learned a crucial secret about Barnabas, and that this secret might be just what they have been looking for. She promises to tell the other person what the secret is once they can talk face to face. Returning viewers know that Hoffman is talking to Quentin’s undead first wife, Angelique, who has been staying in the great house in the guise of her identical twin sister Alexis. The two of them have been scheming to split Maggie and Quentin up so that Angelique can remarry Quentin and resume her place as the mistress of Collinwood. They were in league with Cyrus/ Yaeger, and are afraid that their enemy Barnabas may have picked up some information from him that he can use against them.

Later, Hoffman is on her way back to the same room, perhaps to place another call to Angelique. She finds she cannot pass through the doorway. A phenomenon is occurring that others have seen before. Hoffman sees, not the room that is in that space as she knows it, but dark, bare walls. There are two people there, whom she can see and hear though they are not aware of her. They appear to be herself and Quentin, and they are talking about Barnabas. The man says that Barnabas will be doomed if the “people in that other time” find out that he is a vampire.

Regular viewers know that the man and woman are Julia Hoffman and Quentin Collins, but not the Hoffman and Quentin we have come to know over the last eleven weeks. They are part of another universe altogether. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in that universe, and most of the current characters are counterparts of characters we met there. Barnabas crossed over from that continuity to this one in the futile hope that by doing so he would escape the vampire curse and become human again. Hoffman’s counterpart in the original continuity, Julia Hoffman MD, is as devoted to the undead Barnabas as Hoffman herself is to the undead Angelique. Quentin’s is best friend and confidant to Barnabas and Julia, and is neither the master of Collinwood nor married to his world’s version of Maggie, who is the governess at Collinwood.

Earlier this week, Barnabas popped back to his own reality for a few minutes and talked with Julia. It is his fault that she and Quentin are talking about his vampirism where Hoffman can hear them. He knew that the room as it is in the original universe occasionally becomes perceptible to people in the current universe, since he and Quentin themselves saw it when Julia was standing there talking about him. He just did not think to mention that fact to her.

In the foyer, Barnabas tells Carolyn to stay with Maggie. Carolyn points out that her husband Will Loomis is going to be away until mid-morning, so Barnabas will be alone in their house for several hours. He says he will be all right. While she eavesdrops on this conversation from the drawing room, Hoffman uses the mirror in Carolyn’s compact to confirm that Barnabas does not cast a reflection.

This is precisely the same method Julia used in the original continuity, in #288, to make sure Barnabas was a vampire. The feature film House of Dark Shadows wrapped principal photography several weeks ago; Julia does the same thing there. It is somewhat undercut for returning viewers, not so much by the many times Jonathan Frid’s reflection is inadvertently captured in the many mirrors that decorate the sets in this “mirror universe,” but by the deliberate choice the show made in #1033 to show us an inverted reflection of Barnabas in a magnifying glass in Cyrus’ laboratory. Also, longtime viewers will remember a period in 1968 when Angelique’s counterpart in the main continuity was a vampire. They went out of their way to show us her reflection several times. They never explained what point that was supposed to be making, but it was obviously intentional. If we were confused then, we will be confused again this week.

Julia learned earlier this week that Barnabas keeps an empty coffin behind a secret panel in Carolyn and Will’s house. So she knows where to go this morning. She opens the coffin, places a stake on Barnabas’ chest, and raises a hammer to drive it through his heart. Roll credits!

This cliffhanger leaves us wondering who will interrupt Hoffman and save Barnabas in the first scene of act one on Monday. Carolyn and Will are Barnabas’ victims and are in charge of protecting him, so it would be logical for one or both of them to come home earlier than expected. That would be an anticlimax, but the characters are on the show so rarely and the actors are so dynamic that it would have its compensations. Barnabas has a third victim, Buffie Harrington. We haven’t seen Buffie since #1023 or heard her name since #1028, but regular viewers were reminded of her yesterday when Barnabas mentioned an incident he could have learned about only from her. So it would make sense for her to show up, and it would certainly be nice to see her again.

There are also a few long-shot possibilities. The show spent much of 1969 explaining how Barnabas and Quentin became friends; today Quentin’s counterpart accepts Barnabas as a friend. Perhaps this continuity’s Quentin will somehow save Barnabas. Also, Barnabas’ brief visit home suggests that the barrier between the universes is getting leakier, so we can’t discount the possibility that the original Quentin, the original Julia, or perhaps Will’s counterpart or another character from the old days may happen by.

Episode 1028: Those detestable traits of his

Mad scientist Cyrus Longworth developed a potion that changed his appearance so drastically that even people who knew him well cannot recognize him when he is under its influence. He used this disguise to carry out beatings, rapes, and murders. Now, he has spontaneously transformed in front of his fiancée, Sabrina Stuart. Cyrus had fooled Sabrina into thinking that his disguise was a separate person named “John Yaeger.” Sabrina had reason to hate Yaeger and fear him. She was shocked to learn that Yaeger and Cyrus were one and the same, and Cyrus ridiculed her for her continued attachment to him. Nonetheless, Sabrina pledged to support Cyrus come what may, and she does keep his secret today. Even after he threatens her with the sword in his cane, a threat which seems all too real since Christopher Pennock holds the prop too close to Lisa Blake Richards’ face when he pops the sharp blade out, she still stands by her man.

Cyrus has slipped into the great house of Collinwood and entered the master bedroom. He is watching the lady of the house, Maggie Evans Collins, while she sleeps. Cyrus tried to rape Maggie in a dark alley last week, and apparently he has decided to finish the job while she is in her own bed. At the last moment, Maggie’s stepson, strange and troubled teen Daniel Collins, enters. Cyrus hides behind the curtains while Daniel asks for his father.

Cyrus has ot chosen a particularly good hiding place. The light is on him, and he is directly in Daniel’s line of sight. It is preposterous enough that an armed intruder as physically prepossessing and as unscrupulous as Cyrus would hide from Maggie and Daniel, and this slip emphasizes that Cyrus, however much he may revel in the harm he has done as when in his disguise, is basically a coward.

Hey Daniel, notice that very tall man peeking out from behind the curtains directly in front of you? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Daniel has been bitterly hostile to Maggie up to this point. Today they are suddenly great friends. He says sadly that he sometimes gets a premonition when something evil is about to happen in the house, and that he has such a premonition now. She talks to him affectionately, so softly that we can’t tell whether she is calling him “Daniel” or “Dan,” and touches his hair. Regular viewers have seen these two actors play friends in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows, when the action took place in a different universe and they were various other characters. It’s good to see them pick up where they left off, and exciting to think of what they might be able to do to breathe more life into Maggie’s stories. Alas, this is the last time we will see Daniel.

Later, Cyrus meets with someone we’ve never seen before. The closing credits will identify this man as Aldon Wicks. Cyrus says he wants to buy an old farmhouse from Wicks. He is particularly interested in a room in the basement, which he wants to outfit with an extra-heavy door. Wicks puts the door Cyrus wants on the room. When the time comes to pay up, Cyrus asks Wicks a bunch of questions, the answers to which all imply that no one knows where he is or will miss him if he disappears. So Cyrus stabs him to death with his cane. That’s certainly one way to cut costs on a real estate transaction.

The opening voiceover is delivered by associate director Ken McEwen. In the first 54 weeks of Dark Shadows, every voiceover was delivered by Alexandra Moltke Isles in character as well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, whether Vicki was in the episode or not. Between them and today, the narrator has always been an actor who appears in the episode. McEwen was drafted to appear in a few episodes as lawyer Larry Chase when Don Briscoe’s health problems caught up to him and forced him to leave the cast. Maybe they gave McEwen a contract to appear in three episodes more than turned out to include parts for Larry, and that explains his voice responsibilities in this one, #1079, and #1082.

A third pair of videotape editors are credited today, Carl Pollack and Fred Labib, joining the teams of Indra Sadoo and Chuck Gardner and Dan Rosenson and Robert Steinback.

Episode 1024: Chance and Mrs Stoddard are identical twins

When Dark Shadows began in June 1966, its biggest draw was movie star Joan Bennett as reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz was highly capable, and Bennett made her compelling to watch. When in #25 Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, grudgingly complimented her on her “neat way of managing people,” we could see that he was putting it mildly. But the show didn’t handle Liz’ storyline very well, and she soon became a blocking figure. As the owner of the estate of Collinwood and of the Collins family businesses, as a central player in all the stories they had started with, and as the powerful personality Bennett had created, Liz was such an important part of the show that when she became a brake on the action, there was a constant danger that it would be impossible for anything to happen ever again.

The arrival of Roger’s estranged wife Laura Murdoch Collins in #123 marked Dark Shadows’ transformation into a supernatural thriller. By the time Laura went up in smoke in #191, her story had absorbed two of the four original narrative themes, “The Revenge of Burke Devlin” and well-meaning governess Vicki’s growing friendship with strange and troubled boy David, and had undercut whatever interest we might still have had in the other two, the mystery of Liz’ decision to become a recluse and Vicki’s quest to learn her true identity. The emerging Dark Shadows 2.0 had little room for Liz, and she subsided to the margins. When the show traveled back in time and became a costume drama from November 1967 to March 1968 and again from March to November 1969, Bennett played other characters and was able to make a substantial contribution, but Liz would never again be a suitable vessel for her great talents.

For the last eight weeks, the show has been in another time travel segment. Now it has traveled, not back in time, but sideways. They are in an alternate universe. The show insists on calling this universe “Parallel Time.” It is 1970 here, as it is in the original continuity, but a different 1970 where people with the names and faces we already know are living very different lives.

The Elizabeth Collins Stoddard of Parallel Time is not the mistress of Collinwood or an effective businesswoman. This Liz entrusted her inheritance to her brother Roger, who turned out to be just as feckless as his counterpart in the original continuity. As the penniless Roger we met in 1966 lives in Liz’ house as her guest and works in Liz’ business as her employee, so this Liz and Roger both live at Collinwood as the dependents of their brother, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins.

In the original continuity, Quentin was not Liz and Roger’s brother, nor did he own anything. We got to know him when Dark Shadows was set in 1897, and he was a charming rogue, the younger brother of Judith and Edward Collins, who like Liz and Roger were played by Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds. So the parallel lines representing the two versions of 1970 take a bit of a swerve into that other epoch.

Today, Liz is busy organizing a costume ball to be held in the great house of Collinwood. They had such a ball every year at this time when Quentin was married to his first wife, the late Angelique Stokes Collins, and Liz thinks that having another one would be the perfect occasion for Quentin to introduce all of his friends to his new wife, the former Maggie Evans. Liz needs help getting this party going. She comes bustling into the drawing room today and addresses herself to Angelique’s identical twin sister, Alexis Stokes, announcing that the party is tonight and 14 of the guests have failed to RSVP. She bemoans her inability to get anything organized and pleads with Alexis to help her. Alexis agrees to do so and excuses herself from a chess game she had been playing with Barnabas Collins, a man who recently showed up and introduced himself as a distant cousin of the Collinses of Collinwood.

Quentin enters the drawing room and orders Liz to cancel the ball. She says that it is too late to do that. Quentin stalks off and goes outside. Liz turns to Barnabas and asks him to reason with Quentin. Barnabas is unsure that he is the right person, but he goes to the door anyway. He opens it just in time to hear Quentin peeling away in his car. Maggie appears at the head of the stairs and asks if Quentin has gone. Barnabas has to say that he has, and Maggie looks crushed. Liz is unable to help in any way.

Later, Liz returns to the drawing room in the middle of a conversation between Quentin and Maggie. She is carrying an enormous decanter containing some sherry and congratulating herself on calming the cook’s nerves by her bartending. Quentin excuses himself to go get into his costume.

Liz brings the party. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Liz finds that Maggie has not yet chosen a costume. She urges her to do so at once. Maggie says she supposed that Angelique always picked out her costume weeks in advance. Liz knows that Maggie is intimidated living in Angelique’s shadow, and does not know what to say in response to that remark. She quickly changes the subject. She brightens, and says that Alexis has brought many lovely dresses down from the attic. She urges Maggie to go to Alexis’ room and choose one of them.

As the time for the guests to arrive comes near, Liz and Barnabas meet in the foyer. A portrait of the Barnabas Collins who died in 1830 hangs on the spot on the wall next to the front door where earlier this week we had seen a metal doodad that looks like a coat of arms. Barnabas is wearing the same outfit, and looks just like the man in the portrait. Liz is wearing a dress of the same vintage. She is overjoyed, and tells Barnabas that the period suits him. He thanks her, and returns the compliment. Quentin is wearing a blue federal coat; Liz and Barnabas tell him that he, too, is suited to the early 1800s. Alexis comes downstairs in a blue dress, and she receives the same commendation. Lastly Maggie makes her appearance. When Quentin sees her dress, he becomes very tense. He tells her to take it off, orders her never to wear it again, and smashes his glass on the floor. The camera pans from Barnabas’shocked expression to a flickering look of pleasure on Alexis’ face; Liz stands between them, and unfortunately we only see the top of her head.

What Liz does not know is that the person she thinks is Alexis is in fact Angelique risen from the grave. Angelique murdered Alexis, took her place, and is conspiring with housekeeper Julia Hoffman to drive Maggie and Quentin apart. The story is a souped-up version of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, in which the dead first wife is not only a memory that triggers anxiety in her successor but a supernatural being who rises from the dead to torment her directly. There is a scene with Maggie looking out the window of the drawing room that is an exact recreation of a shot in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film of Rebecca, and when Angelique and Hoffman trick Maggie into wearing the same dress Angelique wore to last year’s ball, prompting Quentin’s outburst, most grownups in the original audience would remember the same thing happening to the second Mrs de Winter in that film.

Angelique is the villain, and Maggie is the heroine. Still, we rather like Angelique. The sister-murdering is bad, of course, but Quentin is such a lousy husband that she is doing Maggie a big favor by trying to bring their intolerable marriage to its end as soon as possible. For example, today Quentin finds Maggie reading his old love letters to Angelique. He might justifiably have objected that those are private and say he wished she’d asked before reading them, but he doesn’t do that or anything else one adult would do when disappointed in another. Instead, he flies into a rage, accuses her of a variety of things she hasn’t done, and orders her to, and I quote, “Go to your room!”

Later, in the room they share, Quentin is still scolding Maggie for failing to admit that she was lying about how she found the letters. We know she had in fact told the truth. When she tells him so, he dismisses her with a shake of the head. When she brings up the fact that it is the anniversary of his wedding to Angelique, he shouts that she is forbidden to discuss the subject, then storms out and slams the door. This is when he goes downstairs, tells Liz to cancel the party, and drives away. We have never seen Maggie have a happy day with Quentin. He sometimes manages to be pleasant in the intervals between his tantrums, but even then he can’t let go of his habit of talking to Maggie as if she were a child and he were her somewhat weary guardian. If Angelique can hasten their final split, Maggie will owe her an enormous debt of gratitude.

Barnabas is not in fact a descendant of the man whose portrait now hangs in the foyer. He is a visitor from the main continuity. Angelique’s counterpart there is his great enemy, so it is fun to see him talking with this Angelique and playing chess with her.

David Selby has a problem with one of his lines, when Quentin winds up saying “I wonder where I got the illusion that an hour or two alone would settle one’s all of problems.” This is a fairly minor stumble by Dark Shadows standards, but it comes when Angelique is in closeup and Lara Parker’s left eyelid twitches when she hears “one’s all of problems.” That reaction is worth a laugh.

Episode 1022: Do any of us know where our dreams come from?

Angelique Stokes Collins, late wife of gloomy sourpuss Quentin Collins, has risen from the grave, murdered her identical twin sister Alexis, and taken Alexis’ place as Quentin’s houseguest in his mansion, the great house of Collinwood. Impersonating Alexis, she has been busy with a lot of cackhanded schemes to drive a wedge between Quentin and his new wife, the former Maggie Evans. As recently as yesterday, Quentin and Maggie were keeping their cool and showing signs that they might catch on to what “Alexis” was up to, but today they both melt down completely. Quentin has a fit when he sees Maggie reading a book about witchcraft that Angelique left in the drawing room, and Maggie goes to Quentin’s friend Cyrus Longworth to ask some questions about Quentin’s role in Angelique’s death.

Cyrus is pretty nutty himself. He is a mad scientist who has developed and become addicted to a Jekyll and Hyde potion. When he drinks it, his appearance changes so drastically that even the people closest to him cannot recognize him. Thus disguised, he goes by the name “John Yaeger” and indulges his sadistic impulses.

Cyrus assures Maggie that Quentin did not murder Angelique. She leaves his laboratory feeling relieved. She forgets her gloves. He picks them up, and spends eight seconds rubbing them on his face, sniffing them, and looking ecstatic. Eight seconds is quite a long period to devote to that particular pastime.

Buffie Harrington comes to Cyrus’ lab. When he is masquerading as Yaeger, Cyrus’ favorite hobby has been beating Buffie and ridiculing her. She has a self-destructive streak that led her to submit to that treatment. Unknown to Cyrus and unmentioned in today’s episode, Buffie has a new dominator. Vampire Barnabas Collins has bitten her, made her his slave, and ordered her to find out whatever she can about Yaeger from Cyrus.

Buffie is very much in charge of her scene with Cyrus. She runs through a long list of emotions- anger and impatience with Cyrus, attraction to him and pity for him, contempt for Yaeger and admiration for him, pity and anger towards herself, all portrayed clearly and convincingly by Elizabeth Eis. Returning viewers who realize that Buffie is on a mission from Barnabas to get Cyrus to tell her what he knows about Yaeger will be impressed that Buffie is as good an actress as Eis was. She is looking for the note that will crack the glass holding Cyrus’ secrets, and striking each one perfectly.

When Buffie finds out that the gloves are Maggie’s, she mentions that she knew Maggie when they were growing up in the village of Collinsport. She says that Maggie was always a special person, obviously destined for greater things. Looking at herself in the mirror, Buffie says that Maggie probably doesn’t hate herself when she sees her reflection. Buffie may still be acting, trying to elicit Cyrus’ sympathy, but we don’t see his reaction when she says these things, only two images of her face. And her words do fit with the self-destructive streak she has shown in her relationship with “Yaeger.” Not only Elizabeth Eis’ extraordinary good looks, but also her forceful and intelligent manner, make it shocking to see Buffie looking at herself and hear her saying such things. The show never explains where Buffie’s urge to destroy herself came from, but Eis makes us both believe that it keeps overwhelming her and wish that she could escape it.

Cyrus stops by Collinwood to return Maggie’s gloves. When she sees him, Maggie brightens up and starts moving fluidly from the hips up in a way that suggests sexual attraction. She is disappointed he won’t stay. Considering how close Cyrus got to Maggie when they were in his lab and how he gazed longingly into her eyes until she asked him if something were wrong, it’s hard to see how he can fail to find her excitement encouraging.

Cyrus drinks his potion. Once Yaegerized, he telephones Maggie. He refuses to identify himself, but says that if she meets him at the docks at 6 PM sharp he will give her information about Angelique’s death. Maggie is initially appalled by the idea of a strange man asking her to meet him at the docks, but she is still carried away with the suspicions Angelique planted in her mind that Quentin is a wife-killer. She can’t resist.

Yaeger is at the docks when Buffie happens by on her way to work at the Eagle tavern. She speaks to him. He jeers at her until she leaves. Cyrus keeps telling himself what Buffie told him in their scene today, that Yaeger enjoys life. All I can say is that there are far more enjoyable things to do with a beautiful young woman than to beat her, insult her, and drive her away. Yaeger seems to me to be an utterly miserable sort, as strongly bent away from life towards death as is Buffie.

Maggie shows up shortly after Buffie has gone. Yaeger doesn’t tell her anything she doesn’t know. He moves in close and starts talking about wanting her favors. She says she will be going, and he grabs her from behind. He puts his hand over her mouth to stifle her screams while he does a series of pelvic thrusts. His facial expression gets more and more distorted until his tongue pops out.

Cyrus, in his “John Yaeger” disguise, rapes Maggie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I suppose Cyrus/ Yaeger is rather an intelligent depiction of a rapist. He craves cruelty for its own sake. Any sexual thrill he may get is a side effect of the pleasure he derives from hurting women. Cyrus is engaged to a lovely young woman who is devoted to him, his lab assistant Sabrina Stuart. Sabrina’s name doesn’t even come up today. When Buffie was under his influence, she would have gone along with just about any sort of relationship he wanted to develop, either as Cyrus or in the guise of Yaeger. All he wanted to do was use her as a punching bag and then laugh at the bruises he left on her. Maggie is clearly attracted to Cyrus today, and however loyal she may be to Quentin is at the least available for some very pleasant flirting. But all Cyrus can think to do is to conceal his identity so that he can humiliate her in the alley where the streetwalkers pick up their johns.

The conceit that Cyrus and Yaeger are different people helps writer Joe Caldwell make today’s script into an essay about rape. Had Maggie recognized Cyrus in the alley, he might have claimed that he took her earlier response to him to be an invitation to sex. It is certainly easy to imagine a husband as uncharitable as Quentin taking such a claim seriously. But when Cyrus disguises himself as Yaeger, he shows that he has no wish to accept an invitation of any kind from Maggie. All he wants is to avoid punishment for the crime he is planning to commit against her. Indeed, when she sees Cyrus as Yaeger, Maggie shows nothing but distaste and a desire to flee. Cyrus evidently prefers those reactions to the enthusiasm Maggie showed for him when he was being sweet and friendly.

The Yaeger makeup is not very consistent from day to day. This time, the hairline is so high that he kept making me think of John Cazale as Fredo Corleone. Also, Christopher Pennock’s acting is not up to its usual standard; he overacts so severely that he keeps stumbling over his words. He even botches the opening voiceover. Perhaps he was too nice a guy to really get into a character who is the distilled essence of Rapist. At this point, Cazale had done only one TV show, a guest spot on NYPD, a series made in New York that featured Dark Shadows cast members in about half its episodes. Maybe Cazale would have been available for the role of Cyrus/ Yaeger. He too was a famously nice guy, but was perhaps a more accomplished actor than Pennock and better able to handle a part like this one.

Episode 1018: The doctor’s verdict

Dave Woodard, MD, was on Dark Shadows from April to November 1967. Woodard was introduced as physician to Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie was the victim of vampire Barnabas Collins. Woodard was the show’s answer to Dr John Seward, the commonsensical local physician in Bram Stoker’s Dracula who called in his old mentor Dr Van Helsing when he found that his patients were suffering maladies he could not explain. Woodard’s call went to his medical school classmate, Dr Julia Hoffman. As Van Helsing was an incredible polymath, equally at home in several branches of medical science, of esoteric philosophy, and even in the law, Julia was dually qualified as a blood specialist and a psychiatrist and just so happened to have a theory about curing vampirism.

This Van Helsing proved a traitor to her patient and to her friend. In order to persuade Barnabas to agree to cooperate with her experiment, Julia betrayed Maggie, using her magical powers of hypnosis to erase Barnabas’ abuse from Maggie’s memory. As time went on, Woodard figured out Barnabas’ secret and Julia’s complicity in his crimes. To keep him quiet, Julia prepared a lethal poison and helped Barnabas administer it to Woodard in #341.

From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows traveled back in time and was a costume drama set in the 1790s, the period when Barnabas first became a vampire. It was then that we were introduced to wicked witch Angelique, who often caused pain to her victims by sticking pins in dolls. When suspicion spread that witchcraft was going on, Angelique framed well-meaning governess Victoria Winters for her own crimes.

Now, the show has traveled in time again, not backward but sideways. Barnabas has gone to an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” Maggie’s counterpart in this universe is married to drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, master of Collinwood. Angelique’s counterpart was Quentin’s first wife. She died last year, but has risen from the grave. When she was alive, Angelique built a cult around herself, some members of which reacted to her death with the firm conviction that she would come back to life. Now that she has done so, she has kept most of her devotees in the dark. She has told only two of them who she really is. Everyone else, friend and foe alike, thinks she is her identical twin sister Alexis.

One of the two people who knows Angelique’s true identity is her aunt, Hannah Stokes. Angelique forced Aunt Hannah to act as her henchman from #1003 until we saw her for the last time in #1014. In #1015, Angelique revealed herself to her most devoted follower, the housekeeper at Collinwood. This person is named Julia Hoffman.

Alexis really was staying at the great house of Collinwood from #984 to #1001, when Angelique rose from the dead, murdered her, and assumed her identity. When Alexis showed up, she found that Maggie was uncertain of her position in the house because everyone was so obsessed with Angelique. Hoffman deliberately and very blatantly worked to exacerbate Maggie’s insecurities, in the manner of Mrs Danvers in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. Unlike Maxim de Winter in the novel, Quentin caught on to what was happening and sent Hoffman away for a time. And unlike the second Mrs de Winter, Maggie refused to put up with Quentin’s miserable behavior, including his alarmingly affectionate relationship with Alexis, walked out on him and went to stay with her sister in New York. The absences of Hoffman and of Maggie coincided with the work Grayson Hall and Kathryn Leigh Scott, along with the other survivors from the summer 1967 cast, did in the feature film House of Dark Shadows.

Today, we open in Quentin and Maggie’s bedroom. Quentin is in the hospital, so Maggie is alone in bed. But she is not alone in the room. Barnabas is there, about to bite her. He bared his fangs and plunged his head into her pillow in the last scene of yesterday’s episode; he does the same in the opening reprise. But when we come back from the title sequence, he is showing us his teeth again, and there is no blood on them. Evidently he just wanted to rub his face in Maggie’s pillow for a second while he worked up his appetite.

Barnabas is going in for a second round when the doorknob starts to turn. He retreats into the shadows, then turns into a bat and flies away. Hoffman enters. Maggie wakes up. She is startled to find Hoffman in the room. Hoffman explains that she thought she heard a prowler. Maggie tells her she doesn’t believe her.

Indeed, it is hard for us to believe Hoffman. The only sound we could hear Barnabas make was his squeaking in his bat form. Any sounds of footsteps the microphone did not pick up must have been much quieter than the squeaking that was going on while Hoffman was already in the room. Hoffman does not appear to have heard the squeaking, so it would not seem she could possibly have heard anything that would lead her to believe there was a prowler. Later, we hear Hoffman on the telephone to Angelique, gleefully reporting that Maggie was unnerved to find her in her room. So apparently she did not hear Barnabas. She went into the room to advance her plan of making Maggie look foolish. When she brought up the idea of an intruder, she was only accidentally pointing towards the truth, not saying something she believed or had reason to believe.

In the hospital, Quentin meets with his doctor, Cyrus Longworth. Quentin had severe chest pains the night before, so bad that Cyrus was for a time certain he had only minutes to live. Cyrus is deeply disturbed when he comes into the consultation room. He tells Quentin that he has run every relevant test, and that the results prove beyond a doubt that there is nothing physically wrong with him. Quentin asks how that can be, and Cyrus says that his chest pains were probably the result of a supernatural influence. His preliminary diagnosis is that a witch pushed a pin into a doll. This is correct. Angelique did indeed push a pin into a doll representing Quentin.

It took Woodard months of exposure to a pile of evidence before he would use the word “supernatural” without hesitation. All Cyrus needs is to see a man who is sick one day and healthy the next, and he’s right there. In #985, we learned that Cyrus had worried his friends by presenting a paper on black magic at a scientific conference. He was a member of Angelique’s cult, and at her suggestion he devised a Jekyll and Hyde formula that he has used to indulge his sadistic desires, which include murder. He is a mad scientist, less Woodard than Julia.

Back at Collinwood, Maggie gets dressed and opens the front door. She finds Barnabas standing there, about to knock. She says she is on her way to the hospital to visit Quentin. The telephone rings, and she finds that Quentin is on his way home. Barnabas asks to stay with her while she waits for her husband to return, and she agrees.

The two have a remarkably cozy conversation. They are so close together that her hair bounces in his breath. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said it looked like Barnabas was about to kiss Maggie at any moment. “You mean bite her,” I said. “Same thing,” she responded.

This conversation includes one of the most interesting of all the show’s countless bloopers. Maggie confides her insecurities about succeeding Angelique as Mrs Quentin Collins. Barnabas asks “Did Quentin really love Josette?” We cut to a closeup of Maggie. For half a second, Kathryn Leigh Scott visibly struggles not to laugh. Cast members almost never corrected each other on camera, just delivering their next scripted line no matter how bad the preceding miscue had been, but this one was so extreme that she improvised “Josette? I think he loved Angelique.” Once she had contained her laugh, she slipped right back into character. It really sounds like Maggie is caught off guard by Barnabas’ stumble, not like Miss Scott is caught off guard by Jonathan Frid’s. And when we cut back to Barnabas, his face is just as it was when we cut away to the closeup. That is an impressive bit of professionalism.

Quentin comes home, and Barnabas excuses himself while he and Maggie have their joyous reunion. Maggie tells Quentin that she wants him to dismiss Hoffman. When she describes the awkward moment in her room, he grows impatient and irritated. He refuses to dismiss “someone for walking into a room!” Hoffman enters. Quentin orders the two of them to feel better about each other.

This is puzzling in a way. Before Maggie left, Quentin had caught on to what Hoffman was doing, and he seemed to be thinking of firing her. But regular viewers will not be entirely surprised. The confrontation that led to Maggie’s departure was all about Quentin’s habit of treating her like a child, and the whole time she was away he kept saying that he was not going to indulge her childish behavior. Quentin has got so deep into the habit of belittling Maggie that he cannot resist doing it even when he knows that she is in the right.

In their room, Maggie is getting ready to go back to bed while Quentin looks in her suitcase. He finds the voodoo doll there. As Mrs Acilius pointed out, Maggie was still in New York when Quentin’s pains started, so she is not very likely to be the witch. Also, the room has been open and vacant all night, so anyone could have walked in and left the doll. No reasonable person could take this as any kind of evidence against Maggie, but Angelique and Hoffman don’t have to concern themselves with reasonable people- their target is Quentin.

Episode 999: It’s the same as it was, you were different then

Quentin Collins walks into the bedroom once occupied by his late wife Angelique, where Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis is staying. Quentin arrives just in time to see sleazy musician Bruno Hess strangling Alexis. He interrupts this process. Bruno is convinced that Alexis is Angelique returned from the grave, and that she is responsible for many strange and unhappy occurrences that have taken place on the estate of Collinwood since her arrival.

Bruno holds the deed to a cottage on the grounds of the estate and lives there, to Quentin’s intense annoyance. He hates Bruno, who had an affair with Angelique, a fact he likes to throw in Quentin’s face. You might think Quentin would call the police and report Bruno’s assault on Alexis. Not only would that result in a felony charge, but if Bruno bursts out with his suspicions it should be easy to get a civil commitment order that will earn him a a long stay in a home for the very nervous. But Quentin leaves Alexis and Angelique’s room without calling the sheriff. What’s more, when he goes to the drawing room and finds Bruno still in his house he has a lengthy conversation with him and waits for him to go. He never does telephone the police.

By the end of the episode, Quentin has convinced himself to take Bruno’s theory seriously. Alexis overhears him talking about it with his friend Cyrus Longworth. Quentin tells Cyrus that they must open Angelique’s tomb and look in her coffin.

Alexis finds them there, the coffin already out of its niche. She objects to the desecration of her sister’s resting place. She promises to leave Collinwood immediately if they will let Angelique rest in peace. Quentin refuses. He opens the box. Whatever he finds inside prompts a reaction of shock on his face and on Alexis’ as they look inside.

Between these scenes, we spend time in Cyrus’ laboratory. He is a mad scientist who has devised a Jekyll and Hyde potion. His alter ego goes by the name John Yaeger. Cyrus’ fiancée Sabrina Stuart is a sweet, trusting young woman who is determined to believe the best of Cyrus, but she has heard so much about Cyrus’ involvement with the brutal Yaeger that she is certain something is terribly wrong. We know that Cyrus was close to Angelique, and that she put him up to the Jekyll and Hyde experiment. Sabrina doesn’t know what Cyrus’ project is, but his withdrawn and irritable manner reminds her of the influence Angelique had on him. She says “It’s the same as it was when Angelique was alive- you were different then, and you’re different now.” I’m sure that was the scripted line, too.

Sabrina demands Cyrus stop lying to her and tell the truth about who Yaeger is and what hold he has over him. We saw yesterday that Cyrus’ attitude towards the potion and towards his time as Yaeger is already that of an addict towards his drug, and he sullenly refuses to answer any of Sabrina’s questions, even with more lies. She grows more and more exasperated.

Sabrina’s time with Cyrus is cut short when barmaid Buffie Harrington enters and insists on talking with Cyrus alone. Yaeger gave Buffie a check signed by Cyrus to cover the damages he did to her place of employment in a bar fight the other night; she wants to know if the check is authentic. Cyrus confirms that it is, much to Buffie’s delight. She mentions that her sometime boyfriend Steve is in the hospital because of a beating Yaeger gave him; Cyrus hands her a pile of cash to cover Steve’s hospital expenses. Buffie tells Cyrus that Yaeger has taken rooms in the boarding house where she stays, and that he frightens her. She does not tell him that Yaeger has hit her, choked her, and threatened her every time they have met. We know that he knows that- he has met her only when he was in the form of Yaeger, and he recognizes her on sight, showing that he remembers their encounters. Buffie asks if Yaeger works for Cyrus. He smiles with great satisfaction and says that he does.

That smile is a key moment. Yesterday’s episode gave the Jekyll and Hyde story a new lease on life by confirming that it will indeed be about addiction. That’s the usual thing with that material, but Dark Shadows has taken familiar tales in such weird directions that we could by no means take it for granted that its version would follow the typical pattern. Cyrus’ response to the thought that he controls Yaeger, who has put Steve in the hospital and is terrorizing Buffie, confirms something else. Cyrus’ diffident manner and scientific preoccupations help Sabrina hold onto the idea that he is a sweet man whose only flaw is naïveté, but Christopher Pennock’s rendering of that smile leaves no doubt that Yaeger is Cyrus’ means of indulging his own sadistic impulses.

As Buffie is leaving, Cyrus asks her if she likes Yaeger. Holding her head high, she says that sometimes she does. She sounds like she means it. Buffie was a commanding presence when first we saw her, and she is forceful throughout this scene. But she has given up on fighting back against Yaeger or even trying to run away from him. Her line suggests that she is not simply giving in to fear, but is drawn to a masochistic fantasy. Yaeger has been so vicious and Cyrus is so sinister that there is no prospect this fantasy is going to be channeled into any kind of consensual game- Buffie is drifting into a situation that can lead only to her destruction.

This episode includes one of the all-time great bloopers. The closing credits run over a shot of Angelique and Alexis’s room. For the first minute or so, we see a man sitting in a chair, chewing on something. Whoever he was, apparently he decided he’d found a good spot for lunch. Eventually the camera zooms in on the portrait of Angelique that dominates the room. This is so obviously an attempt to get the lunch-eater out of the frame that it only adds to the hilarity.

Who he is and what he is eating, I don’t know. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 966: All our dead have turned into skeletons

For sixteen weeks, Dark Shadows kept gearing up to tell us about the Leviathan People, a Lovecraftian race of Elder Gods who had a plan to retake the Earth and destroy humankind. During that time, the show gave us several good scenes, some striking images, a few thrilling moments, and many outstanding performances. But it never came together into anything that could be called a story. Today, they officially run up the white flag.

The harbinger of the Leviathans is a shape shifting monster from beyond space and time. The monster settled into the form of a tall young man, fell in love with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, and decided he just wanted to be human and marry her. Nicholas Blair, high priest of the cult devoted to the service of the Leviathans, wants to join him and Carolyn, not in marriage, but in a ceremony that will turn her into the same kind of squamous, rugose, and paleogean creature the monster is when he is relaxed. The monster disrupts that ceremony, and suddenly the whole Leviathan project crumbles.

Nicholas tells the monster that he will die soon, since he can no longer change out of his humanoid form. The monster doesn’t understand what he means. Nicholas explains that the body through which he once invited people to “Call me Jabe” cannot live on its own. Since he can no longer shift shape, the monster’s future as Jabe is extremely limited.

Meanwhile, Nicholas’ henchman Bruno is hanging around the carriage house on the estate of Collinwood, where Jabe has been staying. He peels an apple and sits in a chair next to a zombie. We’ve seen plenty of zombies, but no one on the show has had anything to eat since the diner at the Collinsport Inn was a frequent set in 1966 and early 1967, so the apple is noteworthy.

In a different role, Michael Stroka visited the diner in its one post 1967 appearance, in #813. No one was being served that time, though.

Bruno finds that there is a fire raging in the back room, and orders the zombie to help him put it out. As he gives this order, the zombie’s flesh and clothing disappear. All that is left of him is a skeleton. Bruno goes to the woods and finds another skeleton, this one with eyes in its sockets and clothes around it. He sees Nicholas, and tells him that “All our dead have turned into skeletons!” Nicholas explains that the power of the Leviathans is broken, and their time is up.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins takes his distant cousin Carolyn back to her home in the great house of Collinwood. Barnabas tells Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, that Carolyn is in a trance. They take Carolyn upstairs and put her in bed.

Liz has been under the control of the Leviathans, a dedicated and ruthless member of their cult. She asks Barnabas what is going on, and he launches into a denunciation of the Leviathans. She responds with complete bewilderment. Barnabas realizes that Liz is not only free of the Leviathans, but that she does not remember them or anything she did for their sake.

This may disappoint longtime viewers. Throughout 1967 and 1968, the show kept Liz firmly shielded from any knowledge of the supernatural stories, let alone active involvement in them. For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897, and Joan Bennett played Judith Collins. Unlike Liz, Judith was allowed to know what was going on and to take part in the action. She was under mind-control when she shot governess Rachel Drummond to death, but when she was released from that control she remembered what she had done and was desperate to cover it up. In that desperation, she became a player in several plot-lines and we saw what Bennett could do when she had something to work with.

Liz hasn’t actually killed anyone, but she did lock governess Maggie Evans up to keep her from getting in Jabe’s way, and, when it looked like Jabe would kill Maggie, Liz’ greatest worry was that the resulting publicity would exonerate the man who has been framed for the murders Jabe had already committed. So if she came out of the cult remembering what she had done, Liz would be free to become a full participant in any story. Now, she snaps right back into her usual place, which is nowhere at all.

Jabe comes to Carolyn’s room. He orders Liz to get out of his way. As a cultist, she had responded to this sort of thing with dutiful obedience, but now she is quite properly indignant. Jabe is pleased to see that she has changed, but he keeps insisting she let him talk privately with Carolyn, and never thinks to say “please.” At Carolyn’s request, Liz finally agrees to this.

Jabe tells Carolyn that he will die soon unless he goes far away. He refuses to explain why this will happen, as he has consistently refused to answer any of Carolyn’s questions about him. But she somehow loves him anyway, so she agrees to marry him in the morning and leave town with him immediately after. Carolyn writes a farewell note to her mother, then falls asleep.

Carolyn has a dream in which she and Jabe go to the drawing room at Collinwood to get married. They find Nicholas there, and he starts in on the same Satanic invocation he had made before Jabe put the kibosh on the whole Leviathan segment. This was so incongruous that Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud. Carolyn’s own shocked reaction absorbs the incongruity into the drama. Barnabas interrupts the ceremony and demands that Jabe admit that he murdered Carolyn’s father, Paul Stoddard.

Three times, Carolyn has had dreams in which Jabe made it clearer and clearer that he murdered Paul. Another distant cousin, Quentin Collins, came to her during waking hours and told her the same thing in so many words. But somehow it hasn’t clicked yet. In this dream, Jabe’s reaction to Barnabas finally gets the message through to her. Carolyn says she knows that Jabe killed Paul, and in response Jabe puts his hands around her throat and starts choking her.

Carolyn wakes up. She goes to the carriage house and tells Jabe she can’t marry him. She won’t explain why. Jabe is enraged by this. He puts his hands around her throat and starts choking her.

Christopher Pennock was a fine actor and a seriously nice guy, and in the last few days he has made us want to believe that Jabe has turned over a new leaf. But this closing makes it clear that he is still a no-goodnik. The Leviathan material is all they have had on the show lately; there are some other characters who have problems that could be developed into something, problems such as lycanthropy and vampirism, but those have been completely subordinated to the Leviathans and are in any case nothing new to Dark Shadows. So despite Nicholas’ assurance that Jabe can’t exist much longer, it is hard to see an end to a period when all they have to offer are Jabe’s tantrums.

When Jabe is choking Carolyn, the camera drifts a bit and exposes the “Property of ABC-TV” stencil on the side of the scenery:

Episode 964: Plan 9 from Down East

We are approaching the end of the sixteenth week of a segment made up of material drawn from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. Central to this is the idea of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who want to retake the Earth and eliminate humankind. There has been a lot of good stuff in these episodes, but it hasn’t come together as a unit. At this point, the narrative seems to be falling apart completely.

The harbinger of the Leviathans, who appears to be a tall man in his mid twenties named Jeb but is in fact a four-month old shape-shifting monster who would rather be called Jabe, has lost interest in the plan and wishes he could be a real boy. Jabe has alienated virtually everyone with whom he has come into contact, including people who were under heavy mind-control meant to turn them into his slaves, and has been reduced to raising four recently deceased men to serve him as zombies.

Yesterday, he ordered the zombies to kill five of his enemies. The targets he listed were mad scientist Julia Hoffman, vampire Barnabas Collins, Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis, and Barnabas’ distant cousins Roger Collins and Quentin Collins. The zombies have abducted Julia and brought her to Jabe’s house. She is welcomed there by a man named Sky Rumson. Sky is not a zombie, but may as well be for all the skill Geoffrey Scott brings to the role. When Scott recites his dialogue, you get the impression that he is telling you what an actor would say had they cast one in the part. Grayson Hall could fill any stage without support, making Julia’s scene with Sky relatively painless, but if it was meant to have any significance the audience will never know what that was.

Sky and a zombie force Julia into the back room of the house, where Jabe is in the squamous, rugose, and paleogean form of the true Leviathan. She is terrified by the sight. Jabe resumes his human shape. He and Julia go back to the living room, where he confides in her that he doesn’t want to take his Leviathan form ever again. He wants to renounce his powers and become human. He knows that Julia is giving Barnabas treatments to put his vampirism into remission, and that she succeeded with such treatments when Barnabas was under a different vampire curse in 1968. He asks her to help him rid himself of his Leviathan side. She is unsure she will be able to do so, but can’t resist the challenge. By the end of the scene, she is figuring out what tests she will have to run to diagnose the biochemical basis of Jabe’s condition.

Christopher Pennock really was a fine actor, and he is outstanding in this scene. He sounds like a deeply lonely, helplessly confused young boy who can’t figure out how to overcome the consequences of his own abuse of the people around him. Jabe’s request for Julia’s help and his agreement to lay off Barnabas as the price for it doesn’t fit with the orders he gave the zombies yesterday, the actions he takes later today, or anything else in the Leviathan story, and is a sign that the plot is falling apart faster than the writers can patch it up. But he and Hall are so splendid in showing Jabe’s neediness and Julia’s response to it that it doesn’t matter.

Meanwhile, Sky is at the great house of Collinwood, looking for Jabe’s foster mother-turned-makeout partner Megan Todd (it was 1970, everyone took Freud very seriously.) He meets Roger and Quentin there. They hold him at sword point until he tells them where Julia is and how to get past the zombies. To the extent that there is a reason for Sky to be on the show, it is to illustrate how total the control is the Leviathans have over the minds of the people they have co-opted, so when he gives in so quickly to Quentin’s threat to give him a scar (not even to kill him, just to compromise his potential as a model for deodorant ads) he dissolves the last prospect that the Leviathans themselves will be a danger we can care about.

Quentin goes off to rescue Julia, and Roger assumes responsibility for holding the sword. He is momentarily distracted when he sees Megan in the window, and Sky takes advantage, disarming Roger and running out of the house. Outside, he meets Megan and tells her that Jabe is upset with her for some reason. She asks if he is afraid of her. He is puzzled by the question, and tells her she is very beautiful. She invites him to look at her. As he does, she opens her mouth, revealing vampire’s fangs. She bites him.

Megan finds breakfast. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin arrives at Jabe’s house. Jabe is surprised to see him, but not surprised Sky was too chicken to keep any of his secrets. He orders the zombies to seize Quentin. The tall, portly, shaven headed zombie, who wears a mustache that keeps him from being mistaken for Tor Johnson in Plan 9 from Outer Space, slaps Quentin in the face a single time. With this, Quentin instantly loses consciousness. Yesterday, other zombies slapped Julia and Roger in the face, each a single time, and each of them instantly lost consciousness as well. Great ones with slaps, the zombies.

Jabe instructs the zombies to stuff Quentin into a coffin that is about three feet too short for him, and then has them carry it all the way to the cemetery. He has them bury Quentin in a grave that one of them had recently vacated. I suppose real-estate flipping has been interesting to TV viewers for longer than I had thought.

There is a famous goof in today’s episode. When Quentin grabs the sword out of its display on the wall of the Collinwood drawing room*, the lamp underneath it falls off the table and smashes on the floor. You know this wasn’t supposed to happen because it takes place out of frame and you can hear the stagehands sweeping the floor while Sky is pinned to the wall. Also, Dan Curtis was way too tight with a buck to break a lamp for the sake of a scene that’s mainly about a character as minor as Sky Rumson. It’s a shame they couldn’t have pulled the camera back and shown the lamp shattering, it would have been perfectly suited to the moment. And if they had to sweep up the wreckage right then, well, it would have been hilarious if housekeeper Mrs Johnson had come in with her broom and dustpan, taken care of the mess, and left without a word about what Quentin and Roger were doing to Sky.

A fine lamp about to meet its doom. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

*Something he first did in #703, when he and Barnabas first met. He knocked a lamp over then, too.