In episodes #853-#856, Sorcerer Count Petofi (Thayer David) used his powers to force the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins (David Selby) to trade bodies with him. Ever since, Quentin (Thayer David) has been trying to persuade someone to believe his story about Petofi (David Selby.) For the duration of the switch, I shall refer to Thayer David’s version of Quentin as P-Quentin, and David Selby’s version of Petofi as Q-Petofi.
P-QuentinQ-Petofi
Yesterday, P-Quentin persuaded his old friend and fellow Satanist, Evan Hanley, of what had happened. Evan agreed to conduct a ceremony to call upon their dark lord and ask for the transfer to be broken. They trick Q-Petofi into coming to Evan’s house and knock him out with chloroform. Then Evan begins an odd incantation:
Oh, Lucifer…
Great God of man and beast, look upon us with favor. Help us correct this evil which has been done in defiance of you.
Renew our bondage as your servants. Grant us the power we need this night, and we will be yours for eternity.
For Baal, who guides your mind.
For Beelzebub, who rules your spirit.
The robber of a soul must not be spared. The robbed must be avenged.
I exorcise thee.
Oh, impure spirit, who is the mind of the enemy, by the holy rite of Hecate, I conjure thee that thou do immediately hear and obey my command. Leave this man’s body, that he may return… Oh, yes, spirits of invisibility, I conjure and constrain thee herewith to consecrate this ceremony. So that surely and without trickery, thou may return each, to the body of [its] origin.
So be it.
Oh, Lucifer, so be it.
So be it…
I charge thee. I conjure thee. I command thee. Answer my demand.
Depart from these alien bodies and return to those from whence you came.
Depart.
So be it.
So be it.
So be it.
Oh, Lucifer, we give thee thanks.
Evan and P-Quentin seem to have the wrong guy. Whatever Satan’s powers may be, undoing evil, restoring property to its rightful owners, and enforcing justice are not exactly among the old fellow’s core competencies. Of course the ceremony fails. Q-Petofi wakes up from the chloroform, tells Evan he has made the greatest and last mistake of his life, and puts the zap on his brain. The next we see him, Evan is digging a grave, refusing P-Quentin’s offer to help him, and listening to Q-Petofi announce that he is about to be buried alive.
Q-Petofi’s announcement is the closing cliffhanger, suggesting that Evan has a somewhat longer life expectancy than we might have imagined when the ceremony fell apart. But once in a while cliffhangers really are resolved with the death of the character who is in peril, and that would seem to be a possibility in this case. Yesterday was Evan’s first appearance after an absence of more than eleven weeks, and he is not associated with any major loose ends in the plot. His alliance with the odious Gregory Trask, husband of Judith Collins Trask, may have given him a foothold now that Judith is back from her own long absence and is looking on Trask with suspicion, but yesterday he seemed to back off from siding with Trask in whatever fight might be coming up. So if the makers of the show are thinking it’s time for Q-Petofi to confirm his credentials as a major villain by killing a familiar character, Evan would be the obvious choice.
Judith confronts Trask today. He lies to her to cover up his misdeeds during the more than thirteen weeks she was confined to a mental hospital. She does not contradict all of his lies, and invites him to embrace her. He seems to think he has regained his control over her, but she tells him two things that make him uncomfortable. First, she says that she has persuaded his daughter to leave her apartment in the village and move back into the great house of Collinwood. When he protests that “She is not my daughter!,” Judith calmly replies that she is, closing the subject and leaving him looking like a petulant child. She also says that she hopes he has not bought or sold any stocks in her name lately, since she has revoked his power of attorney over her holdings. Again, he can say nothing in response.
Judith’s brother, the stuffy but lovable Edward, does not hear the details of this conversation. After Judith leaves the drawing room, Edward enters and tells Trask that he has won again. Trask perks up at this, and becomes his usual overbearing self. But he is just as quickly deflated when Edward tells him that he is looking into what he has been doing for the last thirteen weeks, and that when he finds out he will make a full report to Judith.
When Dark Shadows first became a costume drama set in 1897, Edward assumed he was to inherit the estate of Collinwood and all the family’s businesses. He was haughty and commanding, and Judith was a fragile spinster. But then their grandmother died, and the will left everything to Judith. She fell victim to Trask’s machinations and married him; he gaslighted her into the madhouse. Now that she has come home, Judith has found a new strength, sufficient to hold her own in the household if not to uphold justice and right on the scale which her position in the community would seem to demand. Edward’s dependent financial position, coupled with the many supernatural horrors he has witnessed, have gradually reduced him to a childlike state. In their scenes today, we see that the two of them have come to embody that signature dynamic of Dark Shadows, the relationship between Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother.
The name “Magda” was first mentioned on Dark Shadows in #642, broadcast and set in December 1968. At that time, the residents of the great house of Collinwood had noticed unaccountable goings-on, and as they often do they held a séance to appeal to the spirits of the dead for guidance. The spirit they reached in that one identified herself as Magda. She repeated two things- “My curse!” and “He must not return!” Magda said enough to suggest that she had cursed someone and regretted doing so, and that she knew that the Collinses were threatened by the return of someone from her own period, but that was all. Since the Collinses of 1968 had never heard of anyone associated with their house named Magda and could find no record of such a person, those suggestions remained vague and useless to them.
They meant a good deal more to regular viewers. We already knew that the malign ghost of Quentin Collins had appeared in a room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house, that children David Collins and Amy Jennings were falling under the ghost’s influence, and that Quentin lived at Collinwood near the end of the nineteenth century. We therefore assume that Quentin is the one who “must not return!,” and that Magda, whoever she was, must have known Quentin and therefore also have lived sometime in the 1890s.
Among the participants in the séance was Amy’s older brother, mysterious drifter Chris Jennings. Chris broke the séance off before Magda could go into enough detail to help the others. The show had long since established that the person who ends a séance prematurely is the one who harbors a dreadful secret that the voice from beyond might uncover. Even the characters have caught on to this pattern; they treat Chris with suspicion. They do not know what we do, that Chris is a werewolf. So he is indeed under a curse, and we can take it that his curse originated when Magda placed it on one of his ancestors.
Over the next few months, Quentin’s power steadily grew, and at the same time Chris’ periods in his animal form grew longer and more frequent. These two developments moved in such close tandem that we had to suspect that there was some causal relationship between them. This suspicion was reinforced when, in #683, another ghost associated with Quentin, that of a tall, thin, blonde woman named Beth, led Chris to what proved to be the unmarked grave of an infant. That infant was wearing an amulet meant to ward off werewolves. The records of the silversmith who made the amulet showed that it was commissioned and paid for in 1897 by Quentin Collins and Beth Chavez. Thus we learned that a werewolf was active in the area of Collinwood when Beth and Quentin were alive, and that they cared about a baby who died at that time. The logical inference would be that the curse under which Chris labors originated at that time, that Beth and Quentin had something to do with it, and that the baby was related to someone who became one of Chris’ ancestors.
Now, the show has become a costume drama set in 1897. Quentin and Beth are alive. Beth is a maidservant who first came to Collinwood in the train of Quentin’s estranged wife, Jenny. Quentin left Jenny and was banished from the house the previous year; word was put about that Jenny responded to the desertion by going away and leaving no forwarding address. When Quentin returned to Collinwood in #701, he was surprised to find Beth still on staff, and he set to work trying to seduce her.
In #720, Quentin discovered that Jenny had not in fact gone so far away as he and everyone else had been led to believe. She turned up and stabbed him. He then learned that Jenny had become violently insane when he left her and that his sister Judith and brother Edward had responded to her illness by locking her up in a room hidden inside the great house. They kept Beth in their employ because she was the one entrusted to care for Jenny.
Now, Beth has given in to Quentin’s charms. The other night Jenny was hiding in Beth’s room while Beth and Quentin shared a tender moment, and she reacted by coming at them with a knife. Quentin disarmed Jenny, restrained her, and then put his hands around her throat. While Beth pleaded with him to stop, he choked Jenny to death. He keeps protesting that, because Jenny at one point had a knife, this was an act of self defense, but the audience and Beth both saw what happened, and she won’t agree with him any more than we will.
Edward and Judith have decided to shield Quentin from the legal consequences of his actions, and in the village of Collinsport the will of the Collinses supersedes the laws of the state of Maine. But Quentin finds no comfort in his immunity from criminal prosecution. Just hours before he murdered Jenny, Quentin discovered that he knew nothing about her origins. He thought she was some kind of Anglo, but she was passing. She was actually a Romani woman. Her sister is one of the neighbors, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi.
In Wednesday’s episode, Edward convinced Magda the police and courts would do nothing to punish Quentin, and so Magda threatened to place a curse on him to avenge Jenny’s death. Edward, a rational-minded modern man, dismissed Magda’s threat as “words.” But Beth and Quentin know things about the universe they occupy that Edward does not know. When Beth heard Magda’s threat, she looked wide-eyed at Quentin, walked backwards away from him, and ran off. Quentin, who is obsessed with the occult, was immediately terrified, and has been dissolving into a puddle ever since.
Yesterday, Quentin fell into a trap Magda set for him and brought a curse upon himself. Today, Magda stands with her husband Sandor by Jenny’s grave, watches the full Moon rise, and recites an incantation specifying that Quentin’s male descendants will suffer from the same curse he does. So far as Magda knows, Quentin does not yet have any descendants, male or female, and so that proviso is just an abstraction for her.
We know more than Magda does. Not only have returning viewers heard her spirit say that she regrets the curse and been led to the conclusion that it fell on Chris Jennings, but even those who are watching the show for the first time today know that Quentin and Jenny are the parents of twin infants whom Judith is paying a Mrs Fillmore to raise in her home in the village of Collinsport. Mrs Fillmore’s name was first mentioned in #707, and it comes up today when Judith is firing Beth.
Judith explains to Beth that, since Jenny is no longer around, she no longer has any work to do at Collinwood. She indicates her dissatisfaction with Beth, and says that it is only through Edward’s influence that she included a severance payment with her letter of dismissal. Beth mentions her task of taking money to Mrs Fillmore to pay her for taking care of Jenny and Quentin’s children; Judith does not see a need to retain an employee simply to carry an envelope full of cash to the village every now and then.
Beth objects that Judith is terminating her employment because she has become involved with Quentin; Judith takes that as an opportunity to castigate her for the impropriety of that relationship. Joan Bennett plays Judith’s reaction to Beth quite effectively; in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, “Rev Velveteen” writes:
I wanted to mention a Judith Collins, er, Joan Bennett acting moment I found particularly entertaining here. When she’s giving Beth the boot and the servant attempts to “innocently” inquire as to why she’s being let go, Judith turns around and gives her SUCH a look! Huge eyes, a stifled gasp, then bright pursed lips…Her expression goes from incredulous (Are you freaking KIDDING me?) to amused (Just how stupid does she think we are?) to triumphantly satisfied (Fine, we shall just both play out this little charade and I’ll soon be rid of you.) Her chin goes up as she turns away snarkily-“Let’s just say that now Jenny’s gone, your services are no longer needed,” which everyone on and off screen knows is a total lie. It’s such a sweet piece of work by Ms. Bennett, I need to keep an eye out to see if she repeats that expression because it just sums up the whole character of any Collins she plays when as the perpetual straight man, she’s faced with yet another absurd situation. And is also just stunning in that gorgeous green dress.
Comment left by “Rev Velveteen” at 12:43 am Pacific time, 25 June 2020, on Danny Horn, “Episode 750: Gypsy Ascendant,” 18 October 2015, Dark Shadows Every Day
Yesterday, Judith gave the penniless Quentin $10,000 on condition that he leave Collinwood forever and induce Sandor and Magda to do the same. Quentin had hoped to use the money to bribe them into forgoing Jenny’s vengeance, but they only pretended to take it to lure him into bringing the curse on himself. Magda contemptuously threw the cash at him after he did so.
Quentin has told Judith that Magda took the money and agreed to go. Today, Magda comes to the house to ask for Jenny’s things. Judith starts in with lecture about how she must go at once, since she and Sandor have been paid so well to leave, and Magda reveals that she did not take the money. Enraged at Quentin’s childish lie, Judith demands he return the $10,000. He tells her to sue him, and stalks off. Judith fumes, knowing that she has been cheated and that she cannot assert her rights without creating the public scandal that she fears above all else.
Quentin finds Beth packing Jenny’s things. He tells her he has to leave tonight, and announces that she will be coming with him. She responds in a mild tone that she doesn’t seem to have any say in the matter. She tells Quentin that she has lost her job, and says that she will give him her decision in the afternoon.
Sandor comes for Jenny’s things. Quentin offers him the $10,000 all for himself if he can lift the curse. He says he doesn’t know how. Quentin says he will give it all to him if only he will tell him what form the curse will take. Sandor shakes his head at Quentin’s desperation and says that knowing that would be of no benefit to him.
As night falls, Quentin goes to Beth’s room. She agrees to go with him, but insists on running a personal errand first. Even though she just told him that they have to be honest with each other, she will not tell him what it is. She is still honoring Judith and Edward’s decree that Quentin must not know that Jenny gave birth to his twin children after he left her, and that they are in Mrs Fillmore’s care.
Quentin keeps saying there is no time left to do anything but run. We might wonder why he didn’t stop by Beth’s room earlier. She is on her way out the door when Quentin cries out and collapses in severe pain. Regular viewers recognize Quentin’s pains as the same Chris had when he turned into a werewolf. When we see the rising moon and hear the baying of the hounds, we know who Chris’ forebears are, and why Magda came to regret her curse.
One day in the year 1897, Edward, Carl, and Quentin Collins hear their sister Judith read their grandmother’s will. Stuffy Edward and childlike Carl are shocked to find that Judith is the sole heir of their family’s vast holdings. Quentin stole the will and tried to forge a new one, so he is not shocked, but he is weirdly gleeful about the paragraph relating to him. He will receive no property and no income, but will be guaranteed a place to live in the great house of Collinwood forever. This enshrines his relationship with Judith as one of the clearest examples of Dark Shadows’ signature dynamic of Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother. No matter how atrociously Quentin may behave, no matter how loudly Judith may disapprove of him, she has no authority to punish him and her concern for the family’s good name will compel her to cover up his misdeeds and shelter him from their natural consequences.
Meanwhile, governess Rachel Drummond and ladies’ maid Beth Chavez are busy with a mystery concerning the room on top of the tower that stands in the middle of the great house. Rachel has seen lights in the room and suspects someone is being held prisoner there; contrary to the direct orders of Judith and Edward, and against Beth’s very strongly worded advice, Rachel is investigating this matter aggressively. She sneaks up the stairs to the top of the tower, listens at the door to the room, and sees Beth coming out of it with a tray.* She then goes to Beth’s room, where she interrupts Quentin sexually harassing Beth. When she tells Beth what she saw in the tower and asks about it, Beth is shocked that Rachel went into the tower. She denies everything.
Later, Rachel goes back to the top of the tower and again listens at the door. She hears a cradle rocking. We saw that cradle in #645, when Dark Shadows was set in contemporary times and Quentin and Beth were ghosts haunting children David Collins and Amy Jennings. They sent Amy and David to fetch the cradle from the attic of the Old House on the estate and to bring it to Quentin’s old room in the west wing of the great house. This is one of the first times in the 1897 segment when we explicitly close a loop opened during the “Haunting of Collinwood” story.
*At the beginning of the episode, we saw Beth approach the room with the tray and a baby doll. During that scene, we hear what I believe is new music. It has been quite some time since we have heard any new cues, so this stands out.
Three of the residents of the great house of Collinwood in the year 1897 are spinster Judith Collins, her brother, libertine Quentin Collins, and their grandmother, nonagenarian Edith Collins. At the opening of today’s episode, Judith walks in on Quentin strangling Edith in her bed. She tells him to stop it and leave the room. He complies, with a sulk. Edith shakes off her annoyance with Quentin, and she and Judith have a conversation about various matters.
One of Dark Shadows’ signature relationships is that between Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother. However serious the misconduct Bratty Little Brother commits in his disobedience to Bossy Big Sister, in the end she will cover it up and protect him from its consequences. Nothing at all will happen to Quentin as a result of his attempt on his grandmother’s life; Judith will just continue disapproving of him, as she has always done. Later in the episode, Quentin will remark to his recently arrived and quite mysterious distant cousin Barnabas Collins that Judith “gets carried away by delusions of authority. The fact is, she has no authority whatsoever.” Judith overhears this and objects to it, but Quentin’s presence in the house suffices to prove that her manner is not an expression of authority, but simply childlike role-playing.
Quentin’s motive for his attack on dear old grand-mama was his demand that she tell him the family’s “secret.” Edith has declared that she will pass this secret on only to Edward, who is Judith and Quentin’s eldest sibling. Edward is away, and Edith is terribly afraid she will die before he returns. After Judith shoos Quentin out of Edith’s room, she herself tries to wheedle Edith into telling her the secret. Edith tells Judith she is better off not knowing, but Judith does not seem to be convinced. Quentin has said in so many words that his only desire is to take control of the family’s wealth, and Judith is focused on preventing him from doing that. So we can assume that their frantic eagerness to learn the secret is rooted in the belief that the person who knows it will inherit the estate from Edith.
We see Edward. He is not at Collinwood, or even in the village of Collinsport. If I recall correctly, this is the first time the show has taken us anyplace out of town other than the mental hospital since we visited Phoenix, Arizona in #174, more than two years ago.
Edward is in a train station, impatient and irritable, talking with a young woman whose rigid posture and blank facial expression show that she is exceedingly uncomfortable. Her name is Rachel Drummond, and she is to be the new governess for Edward’s son and daughter. He says that he means for her to use her own judgment in making up their curriculum. Rachel says she will have a clearer idea of what her approach will be once she has met the children and Edward’s wife. Edward freezes, and says that he has no wife. Rachel apologizes for her assumption; he says that she has no need to do that, as he had given her no way of knowing about the situation. In a soft voice, Rachel asks about Mrs Collins’ death; Edward replies that “Mrs Collins no longer exists” and that is all he will be saying about the topic. Rachel asks how she should respond if the children ask about their mother; Edward tells her to say that she is away, nothing more.
Back at Collinwood, a recently arrived visitor named Barnabas Collins comes calling with a gift for Edith. It is a piece of jewelry that he inherited from Naomi Collins, whom he identifies as his great-great-great-grandmother. Judith accompanies him to Edith’s bedroom.
Meanwhile, Edward lets himself and Rachel in the front door. He is carrying their bags and grumbling about the lack of servants. Quentin enters. Edward is shocked that his ne’er-do-well brother has returned to the house from which he was banished a year ago, he hoped forever. He has little to say as Quentin teases him and Rachel, saying that she is too pretty to be either the new governess or Edward’s new wife. He asks if she is Edward’s mistress, angering him and making the already unhappy Rachel quite miserable. She says she is the new governess. Quentin asks if she is married. Edward erupts with “Would it make any difference to you if she were?” In the wake of the painful exchange about Edward’s wife no longer existing, this carries a suggestion that makes Rachel’s position even more difficult. Edward realizes what he has said and falls into a horrified silence.
Edward asks Rachel to excuse him and Quentin while they have a private talk. She has nowhere to go; she has not been shown around the house or told which areas she is free to enter, so all she can do is sit quietly in the foyer. Still, that would appear to be an improvement over the endless cascade of awkward exchanges she has had so far, and so she agrees without protest.
While Edward reads Quentin the Riot Act in the drawing room, Judith shows Barnabas into Edith’s room. The room is darkened so that only the outlines of their figures are visible. Judith opens the curtains to let the moonlight in, and sees Edward’s carriage outside. She hurries down to fetch Edward, leaving Barnabas alone with Edith.
Edith asks his name. When he says that he is called Barnabas Collins, she is startled. She sits up and uneasily asks him to step into the light so she can see his face. She reacts with horror. “You! You are the secret!” she exclaims. “Passed down from one generation to the other! You were never to be let out! We have failed! We have failed!” He approaches her. “Don’t come near me! I know what you are!”
When Dark Shadows premiered, the Collinses of 1966 had three big secrets. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard had summoned a young woman who had never heard of her or of Collinwood, Victoria Winters, to be governess to her nephew David. Vicki was trying to find out who her biological parents were and why she was left at a foundling home as an infant; the show hinted heavily that Liz was her mother, but dropped that without any resolution. Also, Liz hadn’t left the house for 18 years. That turned out to be because she thought she killed her husband and that his body was buried in the basement. After 55 weeks of that story, it turned out she hadn’t killed him at all, and within days they forgot about the whole thing forever. The third secret was about Liz’ brother Roger. A man named Burke Devlin thought Roger had framed him on the manslaughter charge that cost him five years in prison, and vowed to destroy the Collinses in revenge. After 40 weeks, Burke forced Roger to confess that his suspicions were correct, but by that time Burke had decided to let bygones be bygones and that story also vanished with barely a trace.
With that record, all the talk about “the secret” that we hear when we first arrive in 1897 might make longtime viewers apprehensive that there will be another interminable guessing game that peters out with little or no resolution. But the show has changed. This secret is not only revealed to us within a week, it is a forceful and elegant solution to a major problem.
Barnabas is a time traveler from the 1960s. He has come back by means of some mumbo-jumbo to prevent Quentin’s ghost from haunting Collinwood and making life impossible for the Collins family in the year 1969. He is also a vampire. He originally lived in the 1790s, and Naomi was his mother, not his great-great-great-grandmother. A would-be thief accidentally freed him to prey on the living in April 1967; he managed to conceal his true nature from his living relatives, and in March 1968 he was freed from the effects of the vampire curse. When he came to this period, he found himself once more an undead abomination.
Barnabas has no idea why Quentin’s ghost has become such a problem in 1969, no idea how to investigate the question, and no idea what, if anything, he will be able to do to correct matters if he somehow does manage to find the answer. Since events are moving very fast in 1897, everyone there is deeply and intricately involved with everyone else, and Barnabas is a stranger, there is a distinct possibility that he will be sidelined. That happened to Vicki when she left November 1967 and found herself in the year 1795; by the time the show returned to contemporary dress four months later, she had been an ineffectual ninny for so long that she had lost the loyalty of the audience, never to regain it. As a vampire, Barnabas could make his way to the center of the story by killing everyone, but that would tend to create a narrative cul-de-sac. So Dark Shadows is taking an enormous risk with its star by putting him in this situation.
When Edith tells Barnabas that he is the secret, at one stroke she puts him at the center of the story, connects the part of the show set in 1897 with that set in 1795, and raises a whole set of questions about how the events of those two periods led to what we have seen in the parts set in the 1960s. She electrifies the audience with the promise of an entirely new kind of show.
She also answers a minor, but potentially nagging question. From #204 on, we saw that Barnabas’ portrait hangs beside the entrance to the great house, and we are repeatedly told that it has been there as long as anyone can remember. The Collinses know that the man who sat for it was a cousin of their direct ancestor, and believe that he left for England in the 1790s, never to return. Why display the portrait of so distant a relative in so prominent a place for so long?
Edith’s recognition of Barnabas tells us why. She has studied the portrait for as long as she has known the secret, and when he comes into the light she can see at once that he is its subject. The portrait was therefore meant to help the keeper of the secret defend the family against Barnabas. It actually had the opposite effect. In 1967 and again on his arrival at the great house this week, Barnabas appealed to his resemblance to the portrait as evidence that he was a descendant of “the original Barnabas Collins,” and so persuaded the living members of the family to let him make his home in the Old House on the estate.
The opening voiceover today is the same we heard yesterday and the day before. I do not believe they had ever replayed an opening voiceover even once prior to this; I’m sure they had never done so twice. This one just tells you that Barnabas has traveled back in time, and it is now 1897. Repeating it doesn’t hurt anything, but I do wonder what they were thinking. Were they considering changing the nature of the voiceover, making them so simple that they could be reused routinely? Or was there some kind of problem, say a technical difficulty with the equipment or an issue with the actors’ contracts, which kept them from recording fresh ones?
When vampire Barnabas Collins first came to the great house of Collinwood in April 1967, the living members of the Collins family were embattled, isolated, and desperate for friendship. In 1966, one of the major themes of Dark Shadows had been that the Collinses were running out of money and their nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin, was using his own fortune to buy up their outstanding debts and alienate the people of the village of Collinsport from the Collinses. Everywhere they turned, they met hostility in one form or another. Their two most devoted employees had been plant manager Bill Malloy and handyman Matthew Morgan; in a fit of rage, Matthew killed Bill, and went on to abduct and try to kill well-meaning governess Victoria Winters. Roger Collins’ estranged wife, Laura Murdoch Collins, showed up; she turned out to be an undead blonde fire witch out to kill their son, strange and troubled boy David. No sooner had Victoria rescued David from Laura than seagoing con man Jason McGuire presented himself and set about blackmailing matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Jason even forced Liz to give the bedroom next to her daughter Carolyn to his rapey sidekick, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis.
So when a man knocked on the door who looked exactly like the portrait of an ancestor who lived in a previous century and introduced himself as a distant cousin from England, a wealthy eccentric with courtly manners who wanted only to spend time on the estate where his forebears lived long ago, Liz and Roger were delighted to host him. Barnabas spent most of 1967 as a comic villain scrambling to maintain the pretense that he was native to the twentieth century, but as far as the adult residents of the great house were concerned his authenticity was established beyond doubt the first moment they saw him.
Now Barnabas has traveled back in time to the year 1897. In this period the Collinses of Collinwood are rich, powerful, and paranoid. Unknown to Barnabas, a woman named Magda Rákóczi, whom he had given a ruby ring as a bribe to secure her help after she learned that he was a vampire and that her husband Sandor was his blood thrall, had preceded him to the great house. Magda did not know why Barnabas had come to Collinwood, but she knew that he had some objective and that he would likely leave as soon as he had accomplished it. When Barnabas told Magda that he would keep giving her jewels as long as she helped him, he therefore gave her an incentive to slow him down as much as possible. She therefore told repressed spinster Judith Collins and Judith’s brother, libertine Quentin Collins, that they should beware of a “creature of darkness” who would be calling on them after sundown and who would claim to be “a friend, or perhaps a relative.”
Neither Judith nor Quentin has any respect for Magda, as much because of her Romani ethnicity as because of her mercenary ways. But when Barnabas introduces himself, Judith is deeply shaken. Quentin mocks her, suggesting that the resemblance between Magda’s prediction and Barnabas’ identification is as likely to be a coincidence as anything else, but as soon as he is alone with Barnabas Quentin pulls a sword, holds it at Barnabas’ throat, tells him he knows he is an impostor, and demands the truth within “five minutes” or he will run him through.
With this act, Quentin shows as little strategic nous as Barnabas had shown when he led Magda to believe that it was in her interest to make sure he stayed around for a while. Quentin does not know that Barnabas is a vampire, so that running him through with a sword would do nothing but give whoever saw it a story that he could not tell without branding himself a lunatic. But he does know that he is the black sheep of the family, and that his brothers and sister are eager to get him out of the way before their grandmother dies and her will goes into probate. If he kills a man in cold blood, they would have an excellent reason to have him committed to an asylum and whatever legacy he receives placed in a conservatorship they would control.
So Quentin’s threat is an empty one. Had Barnabas caved in and made a confession that he was a fraud, only Judith would have known of Quentin’s triumph, and she has made it clear that she is not about to yield a penny of her inheritance to him no matter what he does. At most, Quentin would have given Judith a new esteem for Magda, who herself has no use at all for him. And when Barnabas holds his ground, all Quentin can do is back down, losing face and making himself permanently ridiculous in his eyes.
The particulars of the scene are interesting, as well. Quentin tells Barnabas that he has “five minutes” to explain himself. When we heard that, my wife and I laughed out loud. Are we about to be treated to five minutes of silence while they hold their poses? Surely, we thought, it was a blooper- the scripted line must have been “five seconds.” But no! A moment later, Quentin says that “five minutes can go by rather quickly, when a man is about to die.” Had Barnabas been struck with terror at the sight of the weapon so close to him, he might have started confessing as soon as he saw it, but by the time Quentin doubles down on this “five minutes” it is obvious he has already lost the game.
Quentin tells Barnabas that he has just returned from a visit of about six months in England, during which time he discovered that he had no relatives there named Collins. This gives Barnabas an opportunity to insult Quentin, saying that his reputation may have preceded him and driven his relatives to make sure he did not find out about them. This stuns Quentin satisfactorily, but is not strictly necessary. There had been a great deal of migration from Ireland to England by the 1890s, more than enough that an Irish name as widespread as Collins would have been very familiar there. It is hardly likely that even if he had spent six months doing nothing but tracking down every Collins family in the country Quentin would have been able to have confidence that he had not overlooked some descendant of a Collins who had left Collinsport generations before. After all, they didn’t have ancestry dot com back then! It is clear that he must be lying.
Worst of all from Quentin’s perspective, he is still holding the sword at Barnabas’ throat when Judith comes in. At that sight, she has no choice but to set aside her own doubts about Barnabas. She demands Quentin apologize to Barnabas. Barnabas tells them that he can assure Quentin that he does not want any of the family’s money; in fact, he says, the English Collinses are quite comfortable financially and he plans to make some investments in local businesses while he is in Collinsport. Quentin perks up at this, no doubt seeing Barnabas as a possible mark for his next con game. Longtime viewers will remember that when Barnabas introduced himself to the 1960s iteration of the family, Roger was extremely interested in his apparent wealth and had several ideas about how he might help himself to a share of it.
Judith offers Barnabas a room at the great house. He says he would rather stay at the Old House on the estate. Judith breaks it to him that the current head of the family, dying nonagenarian Edith Collins, has let “Gypsies” live there. She makes it sound like a whole Romani clan has settled in, but in fact it is just Magda and Sandor. Barnabas feigns surprise, but still asks permission to inspect the house. Judith consents, and he sets out, alone
Danny Horn’s post about the episode on his Dark Shadows Every Dayfocuses on the ways it makes Quentin look like a child. I’d say it makes Judith look equally childish, even though she is clearly senior to Quentin. The two of them model one of Dark Shadows‘ signature pairings, that of Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother. Even when the big sister is in a position to exercise authority, as in the 1960s Liz was in a position to exercise authority over Roger, she winds up being merely bossy because however flagrantly he disobeys her, in the end she covers up his misdeeds and protects him from the punishment they merit. Longtime viewers suspect Judith will find herself doing the same.
In yesterday’s episode, Quentin entered maidservant Beth’s room and found her getting ready to go out. He asked if it was her day off; she said Judith gave her permission to run personal errands in town. He grabbed at her things and found an envelope with $300 cash. She claimed she saved this out of her salary, an obvious lie. He made leering insinuations about her relationship with his oldest brother Edward; she slapped his face.
Now, Beth is on her way back to Collinwood from her mysterious errand. Barnabas sees her in the woods and addresses her by name. She asks who he is and how he knows her. He introduces himself, and explains that he saw her photograph in an album at Collinwood. In fact, his friend Julia Hoffman saw such a photograph in 1969 and described it to him; Barnabas himself never saw it, but he did see Beth’s ghost. Evidently the photo had already been taken and put into the album, because Beth smiles when Barnabas talks about it. He asks Beth about the children at Collinwood. She mentions two; he asks about a third, and she says there is no third. He asks why he thought there was, and she seems uncomfortable. After she leaves, we hear his thoughts in a voiceover monologue. In 1969, Beth’s ghost led Barnabas’ friend Chris Jennings to an infant’s coffin; he wonders if that child has already died, and looks around, as if he might be standing on its grave.
Barnabas’ next stop is at the waterfront. When he was first a vampire in the late eighteenth century, Barnabas once found himself on the docks by chance and was overcome with thirst for the blood of the streetwalkers who worked there. This time he must have made a conscious decision to find a sex worker to drain of blood. Some wonder why he does not feed on Sandor and Magda, but longtime viewers know the answer to that one. When Barnabas was first on the show, Willie was his blood thrall, and each bite left Willie critically ill throughout the daylight hours. Barnabas needs Sandor and Magda to guard him during the day, so others will have to suffer to provide him with blood.
Barnabas picks up a small object from the pavement. He hears a soprano voice nearby, calling for an unseen “Charlie!” to help her find her lost makeup compact. The owner of the voice comes into view and introduces herself to Barnabas as Sophie Baker.* Barnabas gives her the compact. She thanks him and says it was a gift from a dear man, a Captain Strathmore. She asks Barnabas his name. He says he thinks it is best if he doesn’t give his name. “What an odd thing to say,” she responds. If she made her living the way Barnabas hoped the woman he found would make hers, it wouldn’t be odd at all; Sophie’s reaction is that of someone who has no idea that she is in a place where that trade is practiced. Evidently Sophie comes from a sufficiently comfortable background that prostitution does not impinge on her thoughts even as something other women do.
Barnabas tries to get away, and Sophie asks “Well, what’s the matter with me?” Charlie is hopelessly drunk, leaving Sophie without an escort. Barnabas is plainly alone, and the night is young. The pub is nearby- why don’t they stop in for a drink. Barnabas shows great reluctance, but finally agrees to walk Sophie to the door. She takes out her compact to freshen her face, looks in its mirror, and notices that Barnabas does not cast a reflection. She is stunned by this. Barnabas bares his fangs, and sates his bloodlust.
The compact with a mirror was apparently a new invention when one was advertised in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue in 1908, so it is an anachronism in 1897. But it is a perfect touch. Sophie’s discovery that Barnabas does not cast a reflection turns the scene from a little bit of farce into a tale of horror in a fraction of a second. That the compact allows such an efficient use of time makes it no wonder that they used the same prop in 1967, when Julia glanced in her compact to confirm her hypothesis about Barnabas’ nature in #288.
This time, the compact also goes a long way towards explaining Barnabas’ attitude towards Sophie. It shows that she can afford to buy the latest and most sophisticated trinkets, and that she expects to be seen using them. Barnabas picks the compact up and returns it to Sophie as a gentleman might a lady’s handkerchief. Sophie’s personality may have led her to match the outgoing and uninhibited manner that is a professional requirement for sex workers and that made them easy targets for Barnabas, but when he sees that she is not of their class he becomes reluctant to attack her. Thus we learn that snobbery Barnabas has shown in some of his darker moments is not just an occasional failing, but that his whole career as a vampire is primarily a war on poor people.
Back at Collinwood, Quentin spots Beth taking a tray of food upstairs. He waylays her, uncovers the tray, and demands to know who it is for. She says it is for Edith, and he declares that his grandmother is far too ill to eat so much. When he finally lets her go, Beth goes to Edith’s room and tells Judith about Quentin’s interrogation. They confer about the matter in urgent whispers. Judith tells Beth they will have to be far more discreet now that Quentin is back. She urges her to take care Quentin does not see her when she takes the rest of the food “upstairs.” Evidently there is someone in the house Quentin does not know about, and Judith and Beth are conspiring to keep it that way.
Judith leaves the room, and Quentin slips in. He pretends to be Edward. Edith is not fooled, and expresses her annoyance with him. She says she is not as far gone as he thinks she is, and he assures her that she is. She will die tonight, and will tell him the family secret before she does. He seems to be threatening to kill her himself by the time the episode ends.
Every episode of Dark Shadows begins with a voiceover delivered by a member of the cast. This one reuses yesterday’s opening voiceover. I believe this is the first time they have done this.
*The closing credits give her name as “Sophie Barnes,” but she very clearly says “Baker.”
Magda Rákóczi, preposterously broad ethnic stereotype, has discovered that the recently arrived Barnabas Collins is a vampire. Barnabas has bitten and enslaved Magda’s husband Sandor, and tells her that she, too will do his bidding. When she asks what has brought him to this conclusion, he tells her that as long as she is in his employ, he will give her jewels. He hands her a ruby ring, and she agrees.
Longtime viewers know well that Barnabas’ plans regularly backfire. Today, we see one of the reasons why. Barnabas does not tell Magda why he has come to the estate of Collinwood in the year 1897, but he does tell her that the following night he will be calling on the Collins family in the great house in order to win their acceptance of him as a distant cousin from England. For all she knows he might be able to complete his task and go back to where he came from shortly after the Collinses welcome him. That would leave her with no further jewelry. So Magda goes to the great house and tells spinster Judith Collins and her brother, libertine Quentin Collins, that a stranger will visit them after sunset. He will present himself as a “friend, perhaps a relative,” but they must not trust him. He is in fact a “creature of darkness” who means them harm.
Judith and Quentin are one of Dark Shadows‘ signature pairings of Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother, and they bicker about whether to be disgusted or amused by what they take to be Magda’s transparently fraudulent warning. When Barnabas shows up, Judith is shaken and Quentin laughs at her for taking Magda seriously. In the last scene, Quentin does pull a sword on Barnabas and threaten to kill him on the spot unless he tells a more acceptable story, so apparently he placed a higher value on Magda’s words than he wanted to let Judith know.
Her dialogue is full of lines like “I don’t care” and “It’s none of your business,” and Terry Crawford decides that the best acting choice she could make would be to play it as if Beth sincerely means every word that she says. This is different from what a good actor would do in every respect.
She should be fencing with him, half-flirting and half-angry and half-guilty. Yes, she should be playing three halves right now; that’s the point of the scene. But Terry Crawford gives you what’s on the page, because somebody explained the concept of “subtext” to her once, while she was thinking about something else.
Alas, it is so. Appealing as David Selby’s personality is and lively as his interpretation of Quentin is, Miss Crawford’s literalism means that his efforts are largely wasted, at least in his scenes with her. With Joan Bennett’s Judith or with any of the other members of the cast, we can see that while Quentin’s behavior is inexcusable, his charm is irresistible. But Miss Crawford shows us Beth resisting it with no apparent difficulty, and that leaves him as just another jerk. As I put it in a comment on Danny’s post:
I agree about Terry Crawford. She has to do something very difficult- simultaneously show contempt for Quentin and attraction to him. She manages only the first, meaning that when he keeps at her after she tells him to leave her alone, it isn’t a game, it’s just sexual assault. That makes Quentin a lot harder to like than he needs to be.
This episode ends with one of the all-time great screw-ups. A few times actors have come partly into view during the closing credits, usually just one arm briefly entering the shot. But this time Jonathan Frid comes walking right into the frame, gives a horrified reaction, and scurries off. It is a thing of beauty, enough to make you wonder how there can be people who are not fans of Dark Shadows.
A great moment in the history of television, or THE GREATEST moment in the history of television? You decide. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.
This is the second of three episodes featuring Cavada Humphrey as Madame Janet Findley, a medium called in to investigate the strange goings-on at the great house of Collinwood. Humphrey’s performance so utterly dominates the segment, and I have so little to add to what I said about her style in yesterday’s post, that all I can do is make a series of more or less miscellaneous observations about its other aspects.
Today Madame Findley meets children David Collins and Amy Jennings. Amy and David are coming under the influence of evil spirit Quentin Collins. She questions them in the drawing room, and finds a hidden panel that leads to the long-abandoned west wing of the house. Over the children’s objections, she enters the secret passage. As soon as she is in, they hurriedly close the panel, locking her in. Evidently their objections were part of a ruse designed to lead her to Quentin’s stronghold. All too often on Dark Shadows, the audience knows too much about what characters are trying to do. This scene stands out, because they really do keep us guessing whether the children want Madame Findley to go into the secret passage. We don’t really know what their goals are until we see them shut her in.
Earlier in the episode, Amy’s brother Chris dropped in. He was very eager to see permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. Amy mentioned to Chris that there was another visitor in the house. When Chris asked who it was, Amy replied, “Her name is Madame- Madame something- at least that’s what they call her.”
I heard these lines in the voice of T. S. Eliot. The rhythm is reminiscent of a section of his poem The Waste Land, which in 1968 was an extremely familiar text to people with literary ambitions:
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
It was indeed a mysterious Tarot card that prompted matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard to call for help, and that call brought Madame Findley to the house. The card she interprets is the Tower of Destruction, which unlike the cards Eliot’s Madame Sostris describes actually appears in existing Tarot decks. She doesn’t have a cold, and she isn’t in the business of selling horoscopes door to door. On the contrary, as Humphrey plays her she is a dazzling presence.
Liz did not call Madame Findley directly. She telephoned occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes, who introduced her to La Findley. At first sight, Stokes appears to be a stuffy academic with an impossible Anglophile manner, but as we get to know him he turns out to be very much at home in the bizarre netherworld in which the show takes place, so much so that his supernatural adversaries fear that he may have powers surpassing theirs. T(homas) St(earn)s Eliot was so much like T(imothy) Eliot St(oke)s in the first impression he made, so highly regarded by the sort of people who wrote Dark Shadows, and so generally famous in the 1960s that it is very likely that Stokes’ name was at least partly inspired by him.
It’s true that Madame Findley’s name lacks the exotic glamour Eliot gave his character. I suppose if you have all of Europe to choose from, you can take your stray Tarot cards to someone named “Madame Sosostris,” but if you are limited to central Maine, you have to settle for “Janet Findley.”
I made a remark about Madame Findley’s name in the comments on Danny Horn’s post about episode #647 on his great Dark Shadows Every Day:
It’s just delightful that they introduce an otherworldly, mystical character, played with an actress who brings a genuinely eerie note to her performance, and her name is… “Janet Findley.” It’s like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when they meet the wizard who is known as “Tim.”
I wonder if there’s any connection between the name “Janet Findley” and the name “Janet Fisher,” whom Carolyn mentioned as a friend once of twice in the first season. Seems like a lot of Janet Fs. For that matter, I wonder if there’s a connection between Tim the Wizard from Monty Python and Tim(othy Eliot) Stokes, who a couple of episodes back had to tell Vicki that he isn’t a wizard.
–Comment left by Acilius, 8 October 2020, on Danny Horn, “Episode 647: The Wire,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 12 May 2015
That remark drew a response from a commenter who posts as “Mary”:
Findley is a popular name on Dark Shadows. In addition to Janet, Margaret Findley is one of the ghostly widows, Thomas Findley is one of Jeb’s zombies in the Leviathan storyline and Findley’s cove is the location of Carolyn’s cottage in 1995.
Comment left by “Mary,” 18 February 2021, on Danny Horn, “Episode 647: The Wire,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 12 May 2015
When Madame Findley asks about the closed-off parts of the house, Liz tells her about both the west wing and an east wing. The phrase “east wing” had come up a couple of times in the first year of the show, but it always seemed to be either a case of the writers not having made up their minds which side of the house the deserted wing was on or a slip of the tongue by the actors. This is the first time the show makes it clear that the house really does have two deserted wings.
Humphrey was too perfect for Dark Shadows to play only one role. In a comment on Danny’s post about this episode, I indulged in a little fanfic about another part that would have been right for her:
Cavada Humphrey looks quite a bit like Jonathan Frid. I wonder what 1795 would have been like if Barnabas had had an older sister who bossed him around, stood around during his ridiculously childish fits of petulance, occasionally acted as his conscience, and time and again serve as his enabler and protector. It would have been funny to see Grayson Hall’s Countess express disapproval of such a relationship.
Heck, that older sister could have been Sarah. Just because she’s a child in her ghost form doesn’t mean she has to have died at that age. Maybe she comes back in the form in which her relationship to her brother took its permanent shape, when she was about nine and he was about seven. Of course, that possibility is foreclosed at Sarah’s first appearance, when she tells Maggie not to let her “big brother” know she saw her, but I suppose they could have retconned that away with a phony flashback where she says “little brother.”
Comment left by Acilius, 8 October 2020, on Danny Horn, “Episode 648: Astral Disturbances,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 14 May 2015.
I’m very fond of Sharon Smyth, and Sarah’s last appearance in the 1795 segment was so poignant it would have been a substantial loss for her not to have been in it. On the other hand, she had so much less to do when she was playing a living being than she did in the preceding months when Sarah was a ghost, and so much of what she did get to do was outside her rather sharply limited range, that it is not difficult to imagine a different kind of Sarah making the eighteenth century insert a more compelling drama.
One of the most story-productive relationships in the first 40 weeks of Dark Shadows was that between reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Having squandered his entire inheritance, Roger lived as a guest in Liz’ house and drew a salary from her business. She tried to order him to rein in his bad behavior, but time and again wound up shielding him from accountability. When she does that, she reduces herself from authoritative to bossy.
In the summer of 1967, the relationship between mad scientist Julia Hoffman and vampire Barnabas Collins began to follow the same dynamic of Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother. Appealing to her professional standing as a medical doctor doubly qualified in hematology and psychiatry and to her situational awareness as a native of the twentieth century, she makes efforts to convince him that not every problem has to be solved by murder. When he disregards her advice and kills people anyway, she covers up for him. Realizing that she is stuck with Barnabas for the rest of her life, Julia tries to drum up a romantic relationship with him, but he is not interested. Eventually, she will come to be “like a sister” to him in more senses of that phrase than she would like. In the years to come, we will even see storylines in which the two of them explicitly masquerade as siblings.
Dark Shadows took a break from its contemporary setting and began an extended stay in the late 18th century beginning in November 1967. We’ve already caught a glimpse of the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic in this period, when haughty overlord Joshua Collins found himself taking orders from his sister, repressed spinster Abigail. Today, we take a bit of a self-referential turn as a character decides to deliberately mimic this trope.
Caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes has talked fluttery heiress Millicent Collins into marrying him. Millicent is very rich and beautiful, Nathan is charming and handsome, and there are many reasons to think they might make a happy couple. There is one small problem. A very small problem, really; not more than five feet tall and well under 100 pounds. It is Nathan’s current wife, Suki. Suki has found out what Nathan is up to, and wants a cut of his take. To his surprise and discomfort, she shows up today at the great house of Collinwood and introduces herself to Millicent as Nathan’s sister.
The Millicent/ Nathan story has been a lot of fun so far, and Suki is just fantastic. Actress Jane Draper gives a performance as big as her body is small, and Suki instantly sees through Nathan’s every lie, which is to say his every utterance. She dominates every scene she is in.
Yesterday, Suki walked in on Nathan at The Eagle tavern and took charge of the place. Today, she is in command of the drawing room at Collinwood. Nathan and Millicent serve up one straight line after another, every one of which Suki answers by saying something unexpected and exciting.
Suki looks out the window and sees Barnabas looking in. She doesn’t know who he is, much less that he is a vampire, but she can recognize a miserable creep when she sees one. He throws her off her form, and we dissolve to an upstairs bedroom.
The rest of the episode is a scene where Barnabas lets himself into the bedroom occupied by his ex-fiancée, the gracious Josette. He tells Josette they can never be together again, but won’t explain why. She says she wants to be with him no matter what. He bites her. They’ve been telegraphing this scene all week. It’s a complete anticlimax, and it does nothing to make up for Barnabas interrupting our time with Suki.
For a show that plundered story ideas from virtually everywhere, Dark Shadows was remarkably wary of lifting anything from the Bible. Suki’s claim to be Nathan’s sister is something of an exception. It reminds us of Abraham, who twice in Genesis passes off his wife Sarai/ Sarah as his sister and then recommends that his son do the same with his wife Rebecca. The 1795 flashback is supposed to explain the origin of the accursed Collins family for us, to answer the question “Who are Barnabas’ kin?” as Genesis answers the question “Who are Joseph’s kin?” So Suki is in tune with the rationale of the segment when she draws on that book. While Genesis explains and justifies a patriarchal order of society, so that Sarah and Rebecca just go along with Abraham’s loony schemes, daytime serials are aimed at a mostly female audience and need self-starting female characters. So it is only to be expected that the gimmick will be at Suki’s initiative this time.
Indentured servant Ben was unhappy enough when he was under the rule of haughty overlord Joshua Collins. He has now found himself doubly enslaved, still subject to the Collinses, but also under a spell cast by lady’s maid/ wicked witch Angelique that compels him to do her bidding. At least Joshua isn’t bothering him these days- Angelique has, for reasons of her own, turned him into a cat. In Angelique’s room, Ben wields a hatchet, gleefully preparing to decapitate the cat formerly known as Joshua.
Angelique interrupts Ben’s evil plan.
Angelique enters and forbids Ben from committing this act of felicide. Ben is disappointed. When his arguments make no impression on her, he whines “Ple-e-e-ase!” Thayer David gets the full comic value out of that, Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud.
Angelique’s main business is preventing Joshua’s son Barnabas from marrying the gracious Josette. To that end, she orders Ben to steal some things. When he protests that it will be the end of him if he is caught, she tells him to see to it that he isn’t caught.
In the parts of the show set in 1967, Barnabas is a vampire. We have heard him use the very words Angelique uses here when telling people who were under his power not to be caught, most recently with his distant cousin/ blood thrall Carolyn in #362. The echo is so specific and of so recent an episode that we can’t help but wonder if Angelique’s witchcraft will not only turn Barnabas into a vampire, but will deposit her personality in his body.
Barnabas and Josette’s wedding is supposed to be held in the front parlor of the manor house. When the bride doesn’t come downstairs, her father, André DuPrés, asks his sister, the Countess DuPrés, if he should look for her. She agrees that he should. This is an odd little moment, suggesting that the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic we have seen among the Collinses of the 1960s may have been familiar in the House of DuPrés in 1795.
André goes up to Josette’s room. He shouts her name, looks for her in the linen chest at the foot of her bed, and shouts for her some more. He reports her absence to the party downstairs. Angelique lifts a flute of champagne, silently toasting her triumph.
Vampire Barnabas Collins has decided that he will eventually kill his sometime accomplice turned bête-noire, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Julia has decided that her only possible helper is the ghost of Barnabas’s ten year-old sister, Sarah.
Julia goes to Sarah’s grave in the Tomb of the Collinses and calls to her. She hears the strains of “London Bridge,” then sees Sarah. Sarah tells Julia that she will not help her, because she killed someone she liked, Dr Dave Woodard. Julia tries to put the blame for that crime on Barnabas, but Sarah declares that she helped him. We heard “London Bridge” in the background during the murder scene in #341, so we know that Sarah saw the crime and Julia will not be able to deceive her.
In this scene, Sarah says that she cannot act directly against Barnabas. This is a striking moment, because it is the first time Sarah has spoken her brother’s name out loud. Sarah’s statement explains why she watched as Barnabas and Julia killed Woodard, and also why so many of her attempts to protect her friends from him have ended up with them in worse shape than before and Barnabas insulated from all accountability.
When Julia was working with Barnabas, she too made desultory attempts to restrain his worst tendencies, while always protecting him from the consequences of his actions. The dynamic between them mirrored the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother pattern that matriarch Liz and her brother Roger have been modeling from the first day of the series. Seeing Julia with Barnabas’ literal sister, we see that this dynamic has defined the Collinses for centuries.
Dark Shadows Commentary 