bruno – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 953: Every move unwise

For most of 1968, Dark Shadows was a shapeless mess. The makers of the show had caught on that the audience liked monsters, so they kept tossing one monster after another into the mix, hoping to repeat the popular success they had had with vampire Barnabas Collins the year before. One of the storylines that ended up disappointing this hope most completely was that centering on 6’4″ Frankenstein’s monster Adam; another was the “Dream Curse” that was supposed to revive Barnabas’ vampirism after it had been put into remission by the mad scientists who created Adam.

Suave warlock Nicholas Blair was on the show in those days. Nicholas appeared to be a regional manager for Satan’s operations in upper New England. He found out about Adam and came up with the idea of using him as the progenitor of a new species that would displace humankind and win the Earth for his master. Adam met heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and fell hard for her. He also developed an interest in the writings of Sigmund Freud. But he never clicked with the audience, and Nicholas’ plan didn’t make any sense in the context of the show. So the plan flopped and Nicholas was called to the main office. He’s back today.

The A story for the last fourteen weeks has been the effort of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods, to use a 6’4″ shape-shifting monster as the progenitor of a new species that will displace humankind and win the Earth for them. The monster, who once invited people to call him Jabe, met Carolyn and fell hard for her. The Leviathans want Jabe to take Carolyn as his bride and turn her into a creature like himself, but he would rather be human and take Carolyn out on dates. Jabe isn’t the reader Adam was. Adam might be interested in Jabe’s current projects, though. When he was growing into his adult form, Jabe’s foster parents were antique dealers Philip and Megan Todd. He has now arranged to kill Philip, and as we open today he is passionately kissing Megan.

The door opens, and Nicholas enters. He tells Jabe that he is his boss, and that the Leviathan takeover of the Earth was his idea. It is the same idea that didn’t work last time he was on the show, and when he tells Jabe that he failed that time he adds that he does not intend to be punished for failing again.

Nicholas bullies Jabe into going to his room and turning into the inhuman monster he really is. Henchman Bruno shows up to consult with Nicholas while Jabe is in the room. Nicholas tells Bruno it is his responsibility to see to it that Jabe doesn’t kill anyone else. Nicholas leaves, and Bruno goes into Jabe’s room. Less than a minute after Nicholas told him to keep Jabe from further killing, Bruno is standing before the monster, apparently about to be killed.

Bruno manages to get out of the room alive. Jabe returns to human form and follows him. Bruno gasps that Jabe was going to kill him. Jabe replies that he wasn’t, “it was.” Adam might have found significance in this remark. One of Freud’s central concepts was a division between the ego (from the Latin pronoun equivalent to the English “I”) and the id (from the Latin for “it.”) People repress their unacceptable urges and attribute them to something separate from themselves. So, I don’t want to kill my father and marry my mother, it does. Bruno tells Jabe that in the room, he is “it,” and moreover that he himself, as a devotee of the Leviathans, wants to become something like “it.” Evidently the Leviathans’ promise to their followers is that they will replace their ambiguous and divided personalities with pure unreasoning id.

Jabe tells Bruno that he wants to be human. Bruno is horrified by this, commanding “Don’t even say that!” Indeed, Nicholas had said that for the Leviathan People, wanting to be human is the ultimate sin. That suggests a backstory which, if developed, might make the Leviathans scarier than they are. All tales of Elder Gods who want to take the Earth back raise the question of how they lost it in the first place. If our remote ancestors figured out a way to take it from them, surely we, who can learn everything they knew and add to it knowledge they lacked, will be able to prevail against them at least as easily.

But if it was envy of early humans that wrecked the Leviathan world order, a couple of possibilities open up. It could be that some of them defected to join us, so that their final defeat was mostly a struggle between Leviathans with our forebears as helpless on-lookers. In that case, it would remain to be seen whether humans could beat Leviathans. It could also be that the Leviathans who joined the human side have descendants among humans today, and that some of those descendants are vulnerable to co-optation by the Leviathans who are trying to reclaim their former position. There is a hint today that this might turn out to be the case- Bruno asks Nicholas why the estate of Collinwood is so important, and Nicholas, looking uncomfortable, tells him that there is a reason, but that he cannot explain it. Perhaps the members of the Collins family have some Leviathan blood that makes them at once receptive to the appeals of their estranged kinfolk and peculiarly dangerous to them if they are antagonized.

Nicholas is a logical choice to represent the idea that the greatest weakness of the Leviathan People is the temptation to become human. At the zenith of his power in 1968, he would reprove his subordinate Angelique for her romantic feelings for Barnabas, sneering that they made her “so human.” His downfall began when he fell in love with Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and found himself being humanized. So if Jabe is going to meet his doom because his desire for Carolyn makes him renounce his Leviathan form, he is going to remind longtime viewers of Nicholas, and we may as well have Nicholas on the show.

They may have had another reason to want Humbert Allen Astredo back in the cast. Lara Parker used to say that none of her acting lessons really took, and that it was only when Astredo would explain various techniques to her between rehearsals of their scenes as Nicholas and Angelique in 1968 that it all finally clicked for her. I’m sure Parker was exaggerating to make a self-deprecating joke, but it is undeniably true that her performances improved greatly after she had been working with Astredo for a while. So maybe the producers were hoping that some of the less experienced actors in the cast would benefit from time with this outstanding teacher.

The Dream Curse involved more than a dozen repetitions of a sequence over a period of months while one character after another had the same basic nightmare. The sequence involved opening a bunch of doors and seeing enigmatic images. Each time another character had the dream a little bit was added. At the end, it turned out that the curse was not able to renew Barnabas’ vampirism, so there was no point to any of it. For some reason, this did not go over very well with the fans.

Lately, Carolyn has been having a recurring nightmare. We see it for the third time today. The first time she had it, Jabe told her all about himself, and she saw that he had killed someone. Not too long after she woke up, her distant cousin Quentin came by and told her that Jabe had murdered her father Paul. The next time she went to sleep, she had the dream again, and it was clearer that Paul was one of the people Jabe had murdered. This time she even opens Paul’s coffin. She can’t figure out what the dream means. Too bad Adam isn’t around, by now he must have read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and enough of the case studies to apply his technique. If she told him the dream, he would be able to explain to her that the dream means that she is an hysterical female who needs to keep coming to him at least twice a week.

Jabe visits Carolyn, who tells him all about the dream. Not being trained in psychoanalysis, Jabe doesn’t tell her about her unresolved Electra complex or even send her a bill. He just rushes out to exhume Paul’s coffin. This leads to one of the most extraordinary images in Dark Shadows. They wanted to show that Paul’s body was there, but actor Dennis Patrick was by this time in California, producing and taking a role in the movie Joe. So they superimpose a photo of Patrick’s face on a still of a plush-lined box. The resulting image defies all description:

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I’d remembered this as an image they flashed on the screen for a moment, but no, they hold it for quite a while. And then they go in for a closeup! Which is the last thing we see before the credits roll!

An old friend of mine has a brother who was hung up on Dark Shadows for a while, he apparently got the DVDs and watched them obsessively for months. When I told him that I was writing this blog, he claimed that this picture of Paul was the only thing he remembered about the show. I can believe it, really. I often try to figure out what they were thinking when they put the episodes together; as you can see with my speculation above about how the Leviathans lost the power they used to have over the Earth, sometimes I resort to some fairly elaborate fanfic to try to puzzle it out. But why they believed it was appropriate to put this image on national television, let alone to linger over it, cut back to it in closeup, and leave it as the climactic episode-ender, that stumps me completely.

Episode 946: To come to me willingly

In May and June of 1967, vampire Barnabas Collins held Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, prisoner. He drank her blood, tortured her, and drove her insane. When Maggie escaped, he turned his attentions to well-meaning governess Vicki Winters. Maggie’s imprisonment was the storyline that first made Dark Shadows a hit, but it was bleak and often difficult to watch, and if its horrors had shortly after been reenacted with Vicki as the victim many viewers would likely have given up on the show. So Barnabas decided that he wanted Vicki to come to him of her own will. That avoided the problem, but left the show stuck in a rut. For the next several months, Barnabas did not have a coherent goal. Since he was the main figure in the A story, that left Dark Shadows spinning in circles.

They escaped from that rut in November 1967, when Vicki went back in time to the 1790s. The audience followed her there, and we found out how Barnabas first became a vampire. He had fallen afoul of wicked witch Angelique. Angelique wanted Barnabas to love her. Since her enormous powers were explicitly shown to include the ability to make people fall in love with each other, we wondered why she didn’t simply use that ability on Barnabas. They answered that question by having Angelique declare that she wanted him to come to her of his own will. She tried to attract his love by casting a series of spells on everyone around him, spells that resulted in death and ruin for the people he most cared about. When Barnabas found out what was going on and tried to kill Angelique, she turned him into a vampire.

Now it is January 1970, and Barnabas’ vampire curse is in abeyance. A race of Elder Gods called the Leviathan People are trying to retake the Earth from humankind, and have threatened to reactivate the curse if he does not help them. The Leviathans control a group of people whom they have formed into a cult devoted to their service. The Leviathans have brought a shape-shifting monster to life, and it is written that the monster will marry Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn Collins Stoddard and turn her into a creature like himself.

Angelique has renounced her powers and is trying to live as a mortal woman. The other day, Barnabas asked her to help him protect Carolyn from the Leviathans. Angelique no longer wants anything to do with Barnabas or anyone else from the estate of Collinwood, but she understands the threat the Leviathans pose and is willing to help Barnabas against them, provided she can do so without losing what she has in her current life. Barnabas arranged for Carolyn and her mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, to hide out at Angelique’s house while he tried to figure out a way of fighting the monster. Liz is a dedicated member of the cult, and believes Barnabas to be its faithful leader, so when Barnabas told her to take Carolyn to Angelique’s she complied at once.

Unknown to Angelique, her husband, hard-charging businessman Sky Rumson, is himself a member of the Leviathan cult. Thursday, he telephoned the monster and told him Carolyn was at the house; Friday he opened the door to the monster, and the monster went to Carolyn. Today, the monster decides that he will not impose the transformation on Carolyn after all. Instead, he will wait for her to come to him of her own will. This keeps the story from ending here, but it makes it unclear where it can go.

The monster’s decision poses a deeper problem for him as a presence on the show than the similar decisions did for Barnabas and Angelique. They pursued identifiable goals, and were influenced by thoughts and feelings they had while they interacted with others. The only goal the monster has is to take possession of Carolyn, and now it is unclear what that means. Nor is anything at stake for him in any encounter with another person. He keeps saying that he doesn’t need anyone, and that seems to be true- there is no reason to pay attention to him in any scene. He has, in short, been established not as a character at all, but simply as a function. All he has ever been is Threat. Now that he has decided to be nice to Carolyn, he will no longer even fulfill that function. His future would appear to be quite limited.

Sky also appears to be a short-timer. When Dark Shadows started, one of its most dynamic characters was hard-charging businessman Burke Devlin, played ably by the charismatic Mitchell Ryan. Despite all of Ryan’s magnetism, they could never come up with anything very interesting for Burke to do. Hard-charging businessman just isn’t a type they have much use for. They signal that Sky won’t be around long by casting Geoffrey Scott in the role. Scott was very handsome and would go on to a long career on screen, but in early 1970 he did not appear to have any skills of any kind as an actor. Not only does he deliver his dialogue as if he were reading a series of nonsense syllables aloud, but he is noticeably bad at hitting his mark. For example, on Friday Sky at one point backed away from Carolyn during a conversation. He took a step too far, with the result that his rear end was a few inches from a hearth with a vigorously burning fire. It was hard not to watch the seat of his pants and wait for it to ignite. There were times when they cast actors who still needed a lot of training and kept them around for quite a while, but Scott was at this point in his career so amazingly inept that it is hard to imagine they meant to use him for anything more than the decorative value his good looks offered.

Liz is at home in the great house of Collinwood when a man she has not seen before appears on the walkway above the foyer and starts giving her orders. He comes down and introduces himself to her by the name Bruno. He shows her that he is wearing a ring that identifies him as a member of the Leviathan cult. Liz says that he must have come to give her instructions. He confirms that this is so.

A howling resounds outside, and Bruno asks Liz about it. She tells him that she long ago met a wolf-like creature in the woods, and she suspects the howling comes from that creature. Returning viewers know that the Leviathans are vulnerable to werewolves and that the monster is terrified of them. Bruno knows this too, so he goes out to hunt for it.

The monster, in the form of a tall young man, comes to the great house to introduce himself to Liz. She is concerned when he tells her to stop taking orders from Barnabas, but delighted when he says that Carolyn has a future with “us.” Carolyn telephones from Angelique’s house, and Liz puts the monster on the phone.

Carolyn is all smiles when she is talking to the monster. They’ve met a few times, and he has been nothing but a jerk to her. She had objected to his behavior, and his responses had ranged from frightening to slimy. That she is all of a sudden attracted to him undercuts her character almost as badly as nerfing his threat to her undercuts his position on the show.

After the phone call, Bruno returns. He tells the monster he couldn’t find the werewolf. The monster declares that he will go to the Old House on the estate to confront Barnabas, whom he labels a traitor. Bruno points out that it is almost daybreak, and if he waits just a little while he will not be in danger from the werewolf. The monster says that it is too important to wait.

The werewolf chases the monster through the woods. By the time the monster gets to the Old House, he is shouting for Barnabas, the “traitor” he was planning to deal with, to come and help him. Barnabas is nowhere to be seen, and we end with the werewolf bursting through the window. The werewolf got a few closeups earlier in the episode, when he was nosing around in the woods. These always make him look like a cute widdle doggie. If they hadn’t given us those ridiculous images, his entrance through the window might have been a genuinely scary moment.

The right way to show a werewolf. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn’s scene at the beginning involves a couple of notable wardrobe-related points. She went to bed Friday fully dressed, even wearing shoes, and is still that way when she is back in bed today. Several times we have seen men go to bed shoes and all, but usually the women wear nighties. I think this is the first time we have seen a shod woman asleep in bed.

Carolyn falls on her back in the opening reprise. She is wearing a very short skirt, and this fall exposes her underwear. She is lying on the bed in several subsequent shots, and it must have taken some doing to keep the undies from making another unscheduled guest appearance.

Episode 944: The girl who wasn’t afraid of him

A werewolf is prowling through the woods on the great estate of Collinwood, and Sabrina Stuart, a young woman with white hair, sees him. She knows that when the moon is not full, the werewolf is her ex-fiancé Chris Jennings. She screams at the sight of him. This would be an understandable reaction if the werewolf were scary looking, but since he is a man whose face and hands are covered with hairy makeup appliances while the rest of him is wearing clothes, he is a just cute little doggie who might like a bickie. Television, they say, is a visual medium; that means that the images you put on the screen will stimulate the audience’s imaginations. If you are telling a story about a monster, you must show only enough of him to get them to wonder what terrible things he might do. Once you’ve shown so much that they start to laugh, you’re sunk.

Sabrina composes herself, and tries to reason with the werewolf. He stands there listening to her attentively, being the goodest little boy. This ends when a man emerges from the brush and jumps him. The man shoots the werewolf, who yips and runs away. Sabrina is upset with the man, who is surprised she does not regard him as her rescuer. She identifies herself by name.

The buttinski. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The man’s name is Bruno, and he works for another monster, one whom we see only when he is masquerading as a young man. That monster once said he wanted to be called Jabe, but everyone very inconsiderately keeps calling him Jeb instead. Jabe has told Bruno that he is vulnerable to werewolves. Bruno disregarded Jabe’s report that only silver bullets can kill a werewolf, and fired regular ammunition. Jabe is upset about this.

Bruno tells him all is not lost. Since Sabrina was not afraid of the werewolf, his human form must be that of a man to whom she is close. Bruno says Sabrina has a brother, and thinks out loud that he ought to just go ahead and kill him. Regular viewers know that Sabrina’s brother, though he is not a werewolf, is a character played by Roger Davis, so we’re all for Bruno’s idea. But Jabe vetoes it, saying that if a werewolf is killed while in human form he will turn into the wolf and remain in that form forever. That’s new information on Dark Shadows, though there had been so many werewolf movies by 1970 I can’t imagine it was original.

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins stops by the antique shop where Jabe lives. Barnabas had been the leader of the cult that serves Jabe, but has become disaffected. Jabe knows this. Each wants to kill the other, but neither has been able to make a substantive move. Jabe demands Barnabas do something about the werewolf, in the process exposing his vulnerability. Barnabas is friendly with Chris and knows all about him, so this exposure makes it possible for him and Jabe to join battle.

In the closing credits, writer Violet Welles’ name is misspelled “Wells.” Today’s script is not up to her usual standards; maybe “Violet Wells” was her guild-approved pseudonym.

Episode 942: Michael grown

Our Story So Far

The current A story revolves around a race of Elder Gods called the Leviathan People. The Leviathans have taken over the minds of several characters and formed them into a cult devoted to advancing their plan to return to Earth and supplant humankind. As part of this plan, a monster has taken up residence in the room above the antique shop in the village of Collinsport. The monster’s true form is bizarre, terrifying, and unseen. It can assume other forms, and as it was growing it went through the shapes of a series of children. Now its human guise is that of a man in his twenties who, when first we saw him, invited people to “Call me Jabe.”

Jabe is a blowhard, impatient, petulant, and unreflective. He is keen to take heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard as his bride and make her into the same kind of monster he is. Carolyn’s distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, was the Leviathans’ first choice as leader of the cult, and has now become disaffected from it. Working with another distant cousin, the perennially youthful Quentin Collins, Barnabas has for the moment put a stop to Jabe’s plans for Carolyn. Jabe has killed a couple of people, including Carolyn’s father Paul Stoddard and Sheriff Davenport, and plans to kill many more. He is fairly sure that Barnabas is working against him, but is afraid that if he strikes out at Barnabas his own superiors among the Leviathans will punish him. Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and her cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, are devoted members of the cult, as is Quentin’s great-granddaughter Amy Jennings, but none of them knows about Jabe’s plans for Carolyn.

When Jabe appeared to be a thirteen year old boy named Michael, he spent a substantial amount of time bullying David. He has continued this in his adult form, breaking David’s leg for no reason to which the audience was made privy. David’s governess, Maggie Evans, saw Michael’s mistreatment of David and tried to stop it, and in response he locked her up and tried to kill her. No one has told Maggie that Michael and Jabe are the same person, but she does know that that Jabe is at fault for David’s injury. She has also, in the last several days, seemed to be getting very cozy with Barnabas. Jabe has abducted Maggie and has her locked up in a big mausoleum someplace.

Meet Bruno

Jabe is in the antique shop when a man wearing a fur coat enters. Regular viewers recognize the actor as Michael Stroka. For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897, and Stroka played the sadistic Aristide, henchman to sorcerer Count Petofi. Petofi was a witty and whimsical villain, and Aristide spent a great deal of time as his straight man. Aristide also gave Stroka opportunities to show off his own formidable gift for deadpan comedy.

Bruno and Jabe. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The fur coat is so specific to 1970 that the sight of Stroka wearing it means that the show has very literally returned to “contemporary dress.” His character introduces himself to Jabe as Bruno, and says that he will help him in any way. Bruno shows considerable knowledge of the story so far; the other cultists didn’t come with that knowledge, leading us to wonder whether he is one of them or is some kind of supernatural being. As the episode goes on, we see that Bruno shares Aristide’s fascination with knives and his glee in threatening to kill and disfigure pretty girls, and is also about as ineffective when he sets about doing Jeb’s dirty work as Aristide was when he tried to do Petofi’s. So however he came to know what he knows, it seems safe to dismiss the idea that he is anything other than what Aristide was.

David and Barnabas

At the great house of Collinwood, David enters by means of wheelchair. He and Barnabas talk about Maggie’s unexplained absence. They consider the possibility that Jabe might be responsible for it.

Just the other day, adult characters not in on the secret of the Leviathan cult mentioned that David did not seem like “the same little boy” he had been. He isn’t a little boy at all- he’s thirteen. Barnabas talks to him in this scene as one adult to another. After all these years, it’s refreshing to see a sign that David might eventually be allowed to grow up.

Maggie’s First Tormenter

Maggie awakens to find herself in a mausoleum. Before she can make her way to the door, the late Sheriff Davenport enters. Jabe has raised him from the dead and made him his slave. Your typical zombie is an inarticulate sort, who, if moved to speech at all, might emit a faint groan of “Brai-i-i-ins.” Davenport is an exception to this norm. He is positively chatty. He talks about how uncomfortable his grave was, about his sympathy for Maggie, and even starts in with a story about his wife. The guy just won’t shut up.

David and Jabe

David goes to the antique shop. How he got himself from Collinwood to the village in a manual wheelchair designed for use in a hospital is not explained. He tells Jabe about his conversation with Barnabas, including the part where Barnabas told him to study the holy book of the Leviathans and look for information about Jabe’s weaknesses. He says that he found a passage saying that Jabe is vulnerable to werewolves. He didn’t tell Barnabas about this, but came straight to the shop. Jabe is terrified by the mention of werewolves, and relieved David didn’t talk to Barnabas. He tells him not to trust Barnabas.

Jabe and David. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is a werewolf on the show, Amy’s brother Chris Jennings, who inherited the curse from their great-grandfather Quentin. Quentin’s own lycanthropy was put into abeyance by the same magic spell that immunized him against aging. We haven’t seen Chris for about a month, when there was a full moon and he killed a character left over from an exhausted storyline. There were some hints early in the current story that Chris represented a threat to the Leviathans, and this is now confirmed.

Maggie’s Second Tormenter

Bruno shows up in the crypt where the late Sheriff Davenport is haranguing Maggie. He sends Davenport to guard the door. Maggie asks Bruno if he is dead, too. He assures her he isn’t, and is very unpleasant to her. Aristide was a lot of fun when he had someone to play off of, but where Petofi was sprightly, Jeb is monotonous. While Aristide would set his sights on victims who gave him more resistance than he bargained for, Maggie’s situation makes her tense and unwilling to volunteer anything. Maggie holds her ground and refuses to answer any of Bruno’s questions, so that he cannot afford to murder her as he had intended to do. That’s logical behavior on her part and a happy ending for the audience, but it does keep Bruno from doing anything to make us want to see him again.

Bruno meets David

Bruno goes to the antique shop. Jeb introduces him to David. He pushes David out of the shop with a brisk movement that is Stroka’s first opportunity to get a laugh as Bruno. He reports his failure to Jabe, who is too afraid of werewolves to rage at him as he has raged at everyone else who has told him things he didn’t want to hear.

Maggie’s Third Tormenter

Jabe goes to the crypt and sends Sheriff Davenport back out. He confronts Maggie, who tells him she recognizes him as “Michael grown up,” using the exact phrase David had used with Barnabas earlier. He tells her she will be all right if she opens a wooden box he has brought with him and looks in it. Returning viewers know that this is “the Leviathan Box,” and that it was by opening it and looking inside that Amy came under the power of the cult.