Tag: carolyn loomis

Episode 982: Keep the bottle full

In #210, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis found a coffin wrapped in chains in an old mausoleum and jumped to the conclusion that it was full of jewels. He broke the chains and opened the coffin, only to find that it actually contained vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas bit Willie and enslaved him.

Now, Barnabas has traveled to an alternate universe. In this “Parallel Time,” Willie’s counterpart is a writer, the author of several novels and of a biography of Barnabas’ own counterpart, who died a natural death in 1830. This Will Loomis lives in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, which corresponds to Barnabas’ home in his own universe. Will’s wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard, was the first person Barnabas met upon arriving in Parallel Time. Barnabas took Carolyn as his blood thrall, and he has shown her a room in the basement of the Old House that she never knew existed. He stashed a coffin there.

Three of Will’s novels were bestsellers made into feature films, but he and Carolyn are now acutely short of funds. We see why today. Carolyn explains to Barnabas that Will won’t be home until the Eagle closes. Barnabas asks what the Eagle is. He should know- that was the name of the tavern in his Collinsport in the 1790s and again in 1897, and he knew it in both eras. The same place was called the Blue Whale in the 1960s in the main continuity, but evidently it kept its old name here.

Will comes staggering home. He recognizes Barnabas’ profile from a sketch of the subject of the biography he wrote. Carolyn explains that Barnabas is that man’s descendant. When Barnabas says that he read Will’s book and admires it, Will brightens, as authors do, and says that the occasion calls for a drink. At first he insists on putting Barnabas up as a houseguest, free of charge, but Carolyn persuades him to let Barnabas pay rent. It’s anyone’s guess how Barnabas will be paying for anything- he stumbled into “Parallel Time” quite inadvertently, without stuffing his pockets or putting on a money belt or making any other preparations. But Will and Carolyn have an extensive discussion about charging Barnabas rent in this scene, and they bring it up again later. Evidently the writers want us to think about it.

The next day, Will suggests that he and Carolyn go to the great house on the estate to meet the new mistress, the bride of Carolyn’s uncle Quentin. Carolyn pleads a migraine, and Will goes by himself. Housekeeper Julia Hoffman is about to introduce him when he cuts her off. He tells the new Mrs Collins that he knew her father. She is the former Maggie Evans. The past tense about her father Sam is news to returning viewers- yesterday Sam was mentioned in terms that left it unclear whether he was still alive, and we might have hoped to see him. In the main continuity, Sam was killed by a Frankenstein’s monster in June 1968, but that monster would not have existed in this universe.

Will says that he and Sam spent many a night drinking together at the Eagle. The new Mrs Collins is not visibly pleased to be reminded of her father’s drinking habit. She offers Will a cup of tea, and he refuses. He avers that tannic acid is bad for the health. Hoffman is at hand with a glass of brandy, and she chuckles when she agrees with him that she can tell Maggie his views about beverages. Hoffman leaves, and Will urgently whispers to Maggie that he must not trust Hoffman.

Will does not approve of tannic acid. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later, Maggie will go to Angelique’s old room in the east wing of the house and overhear Hoffman telling the portrait of Angelique that hangs there that she has her on the run. Hoffman cackles with glee at Maggie’s discomfort. Maggie opens the door and asks her what’s going on; Hoffman quickly composes herself and says that the staff hasn’t had a chance to tidy up the east wing sufficiently to welcome the new mistress.

Back in the Old House, Will wonders why Carolyn seems so weak. She passes out, and he sees the puncture wounds on her neck. At daybreak, Will waiting for Barnabas by the coffin. He holds him at bay with a large cross and forces him to explain who he is and where he came from. Barnabas tells Will to let him die. Will says he has other plans. He orders Barnabas to open the coffin. There is an even larger cross mounted inside the lid. He says that he will get a book out of Barnabas, and that that book will be his salvation. He makes Barnabas get in the coffin, and chains it shut. To the extent that this universe is a mirror image of the one we have known, we might have expected that Will would believe he could obtain a fortune by putting chains on the coffin, as Willie thought he could obtain one by smashing them off.

The scene between Will and Maggie brings out several of the problems with the current A story, a reworking of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca in which Maggie is the second Mrs de Winter and Hoffman is Mrs Danvers. Maggie Prime has an iconography that goes back to #1, which makes it hard for us to believe that would be overwhelmed by the subtle intimidations that overwhelm Du Maurier’s anxiety-ridden heroine. When we met the Sam of the original continuity in June 1966, he was an alcoholic. Even after the story that was supposed to make Sam’s alcoholism interesting fizzled out and he was retconned as a social drinker, Maggie retained many Adult Child of an Alcoholic traits, such as beginning each utterance with an irrelevant laugh. So Maggie’s reaction to Will’s reminiscence about boozing it up with Parallel Sam goes a long way to confirming that this is the same ol’ Maggie we’ve known all along and leads us to expect her to be as capable as Maggie would be of meeting the challenges before her.

Also, while Kathryn Leigh Scott is a wonderful actress and a great asset to the show, she makes a bad choice in playing Maggie Collins. In the costume drama segment set in 1897, Miss Scott started out as neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond. Rachel was terribly fragile, the survivor of an abusive childhood that left her with paralyzingly low self-esteem. Miss Scott went small as Rachel, taking a subtle approach that required us to watch her closely as we tried to figure out what she was feeling and thinking. But as Maggie Collins, Miss Scott cycles through five or six facial expressions per minute and crafts a distinctive emphasis on multiple syllables per sentence. The directors famously didn’t give the actors much guidance on Dark Shadows– John Karlen said that when he first took on the role of Willie, all Lela Swift told him was “Go!” But either Swift or today’s helmsman, Henry Kaplan, should have taken Miss Scott aside and told her she was overacting and giving Maggie Collins too vivid a personality.

Further, Will is only one of many allies who present themselves to Maggie in her showdown with the memory of Quentin’s first wife, the glamorous Angelique. The second Mrs de Winter feels herself all alone at the estate of Manderley, but Maggie can’t very well feel that way at Collinwood. Not only do people who live there keep making it clear they are on her side, she has a sister to whom she starts writing a letter today, who represents support from and connection with the outside world.

Worst of all, Hoffman is absolutely transparent. In the novel, it is not clear until the very end whether Mrs Danvers is even hostile to the second Mrs de Winter. Du Maurier keeps us guessing for 400 pages whether the whole thing is in the protagonist’s fevered imagination. But the cackling Maggie overhears when Hoffman is having her conversation with the portrait is not even the most flagrant sign she has so far given of her plans.

I outlined these and other objections in a long comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day in January 2021. I still agree with most of what I wrote there, and will be coming back to the topic many times over the next few months.

Episode 981: Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again

When Dark Shadows premiered in June 1966, it was supposed to bring the sensibility of the then-fashionable “Gothic romances” to the small screen. That did not prove to be much of a ratings draw, so six months later they introduced undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who was at the center of a story that by March 1967 had swallowed up all of the major loose ends and committed the show to becoming a supernatural thriller.

Now, vampire Barnabas Collins has crossed over to an alternate universe. We have seen enough of “Parallel Time” over the last several episodes to know that it will feature a story derived from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, one of the foundational works of the “Gothic romance” genre. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will be intrigued at this return to its starting point.

The first person Barnabas meets is the counterpart of his distant cousin and onetime blood thrall, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. This Carolyn finds him in a room deep in the great house of Collinwood and demands to know who he is and what he is doing there. He starts in on the “cousin from England” jazz that won him his place at Collinwood in the continuity we have been following so far. He cites the portrait of him that hangs in the foyer in the familiar timeline, only to be told that there is no such portrait in this house and that his story does not add up. Carolyn marches off to blow the whistle on the intruder, and Barnabas bites her. We can see that Parallel Time is going to move fast- it took Barnabas 28 weeks to attack Carolyn in the other universe.

Same as the old boss. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This Carolyn is married to the counterpart of Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis. While Willie is an uneducated ruffian, Will Loomis is the author of several books, including three bestselling novels and a biography of Barnabas’ late counterpart, who died a natural death in 1830. Will and Carolyn live in the Old House, which corresponds to Barnabas’ own house in the main continuity. Quentin Collins, another distant cousin, is the master of Collinwood here, and widower of Angelique, who corresponds to the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire in 1796 but was apparently a mortal woman and a native of the twentieth century here. Other characters we see today include: Julia Hoffman, in the other universe, a mad scientist and Barnabas’ best friend, but here a uniformed domestic and Angelique’s fanatical devotee, Mrs Danvers to her Rebecca; Carolyn’s mother Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, who is not the owner of Collinwood and the Collins family businesses but a guest in Quentin’s house; and Quentin’s new wife, Maggie Evans Collins. We also hear that Angelique’s father is “Tim Stokes,” the counterpart of Barnabas’ sometime ally, occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes.

What we had seen of “Parallel Time” before Barnabas arrived let us know that Quentin was bringing a new bride home, much to the displeasure of Hoffman and Angelique’s other acolytes. We also knew about the Loomises. So that left us with two candidates to play the part of the intimidated, anxiety ridden “second Mrs de Winter.” Those were Kathryn Leigh Scott, who has been Maggie in the main continuity since episode #1 and has played other parts in time travel segments and as a ghost, and Lisa Blake Richards, who plays Sabrina Stuart, girlfriend of werewolf Chris Jennings.

I love Miss Scott, but I was hoping Miss Richards would be the overpowered new wife. Miss Scott has one of the deepest iconographies of any cast member. No matter how far Miss Scott dials down the big brassy Dark Shadows style of acting, regular viewers simply will not believe that she, answering to the name of Maggie, is going to be reduced to the position that the second Mrs de Winter finds herself in, where she is grateful to her own servants for allowing her a piece of bread and butter when she hasn’t eaten all day. It took all the abuse Barnabas could heap on her, supported by Julia’s magical powers of hypnosis, to break Maggie in 1967. Miss Scott was successful as neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond when the show was set in 1897, but they went out of their way to show that Rachel was not Maggie. The second Mrs Quentin Collins not only has the same name as the wised-up representative of Collinsport’s working class whom we met long ago, we even hear today that her father was an artist who lived in the village, as our Maggie’s was.

Miss Richards, by contrast, would come in clean. Sabrina, stuck in a dead-end story where her character was a mute for a long time, has made relatively little impression. Miss Richards specialized in a very precise, understated approach. She would be the perfect choice to tackle the job Alfred Hitchcock gave Joan Fontaine in his 1940 feature adaptation of Rebecca and depict a character succumbing to obscure anxieties.

We hear today that this Maggie has a sister, which ours never did. Perhaps Miss Richards will appear as that character. We do not hear whether Sam Evans is still alive. He is dead in the main continuity, but that was the result of an attack by a monster who would not have existed in this one. Longtime fans might get their hopes up that we will see David Ford again as Sam’s counterpart. Carolyn Loomis tells Barnabas today that the idea of widowhood is not as unattractive to her as he seems to imagine; since Nancy Barrett had divorced Ford a few months before this episode was taped, bringing him back into the cast might have helped her add some zest to this aspect of her character.

The blocking does not always take into account the dimensions of the brief outfits Junior Sophisticates provided Miss Scott. So when Quentin carries Maggie into the great house today, the camera looks right up her miniskirt. The ratings were still high during this period, but you can tell no one was watching who worked for either ABC’s Standards and Practices Office or the Federal Communications Commission.

Episode 980: I don’t want memories

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard has had a dream in which her new husband, whom she knows as Jeb Hawkes but who when we first saw him asked to be called Jabe, was in a fight on top of Widows’ Hill. His opponent, a stooge named Sky Rumson, threw him off the precipice to his death. When she awoke, Carolyn ran to the hill in search of Jabe. Instead, she found Sky. He told her that her dream was not complete, because it did not show her death. He then grabbed her by the throat.

Jabe rushes up and knocks Carolyn out of Sky’s grip. He and Sky fight, and Sky does throw him off the precipice. Carolyn escapes.

Back home at the great house of Collinwood, Carolyn finds her mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. It takes her a while to compose herself sufficiently to tell Liz and Julia what happened. Julia offers Carolyn a sedative, which prompts her to jump up and shout a verbal refusal. By the time Carolyn starts telling the story, her distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, has joined them in the drawing room. She interrupts herself to yell at Barnabas that he always hated Jabe and is probably glad he’s dead. When Carolyn finishes, Barnabas slips out. Liz calls the police, and Julia is surprised neither of them saw Barnabas leave.

For the last nineteen weeks, the show has been trying to make a story out of some themes drawn from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. That segment is usually called “the Leviathans,” after a race of Elder Gods who are behind the action. Jabe was central to the Leviathan segment. Sky is the only other character remaining from it. Barnabas appears in the house where Sky has been crashing and finds him packing his bag. Sky does not understand how Barnabas got in. Barnabas dismisses his question, merely saying that Sky knows there are things he can do that ordinary people cannot. Sky draws a revolver and fires two rounds at Barnabas point blank, without effect. Sky exclaims “Oh, no!” Barnabas is amused that none of Sky’s late colleagues told him that he is a vampire. He takes Sky’s hand, curls his arm back so that the gun is pointing at his heart, and squeezes Sky’s finger onto the trigger.

Back at the great house, Liz gets a telephone call from the sheriff. The police haven’t found Jabe’s body, and have surmised that it washed out to sea. They have found Sky, and have tentatively ruled his death a suicide. Later, Carolyn has another dream. In this one, Jabe shows up and confirms his death. That marks the end of the Leviathan segment. Carolyn will go on using the name “Mrs Hawkes” and saying she misses Jabe, but otherwise the last nineteen weeks will be forgotten.

Carolyn sees Jabe for the last time. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Before killing Sky, Barnabas had mentioned that he almost regrets not leaving him to the other person who is on her way to do him in. That is Sky’s estranged wife, wicked witch Angelique. Had the Leviathan segment been more successful, or had Geoffrey Scott been even marginally competent in his performance as Sky, they might have made something of the parallels between Sky and Jabe. They are both very tall men with blonde wives who are dissatisfied with them. Angelique is dissatisfied that Sky is a tool of the Leviathans and that he tried to set fire to her on the orders of their representative, and Carolyn is dissatisfied with Jabe because he keeps running away from dangers he has brought on himself by his rebellion against the Leviathans and he won’t tell her anything about himself. Sky is a mortal man, while Angelique may once have been human but has long since become a creature of the supernatural. Carolyn is a mortal woman, while Jabe is now human but was originally a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time.

But the ratings have been sinking throughout the Leviathan period, and the whole narrative structure of the arc keeps collapsing around them every time they try to do anything with it. So they are in too much of a hurry to move on to the next thing to do any exploring of the characters. Also, Scott is hopeless. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, put it, it isn’t that he is an actor with just one strategy. He keeps trying different things, and none of them comes close to working. We won’t see him again.

The new story has to do with an alternate universe that is occasionally visible in a room in the long disused east wing of Collinwood. Barnabas, Julia, and others have been spying on its inhabitants, and Barnabas is fixated on the idea that if he can cross over into it his vampirism will disappear. Since his bloodlust is overwhelming him, he is desperate to pursue this forlorn hope. He goes to the room when the alternate universe cannot be seen there, and a moment later finds that it has changed with him in it. Julia is in the hallway, looking in. At first she and Barnabas can see each other, and she can hear him, though he cannot hear her. After a moment, Carolyn’s alternate universe counterpart enters and demands to know who Barnabas is and what he is doing in the house.

Barnabas took Carolyn as his blood-thrall in October 1967. The show went back in time to 1795 the following month. In the 1790s segment, Nancy Barrett played fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. We saw that Barnabas first became a vampire in 1796; not long after, he took Millicent as his blood thrall. Shortly after the show returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, one of Julia’s colleagues in the mad science profession applied a treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into remission. That freed Carolyn of her connection to him, and at some point she forgot it ever happened.

For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was set in 1897. In that segment, Miss Barrett played repressed schoolmarm Charity Trask. Barnabas bit her, too. Carolyn’s counterpart in “Parallel Time,” known by her married name Carolyn Loomis, is the fourth character* Miss Barrett played on Dark Shadows; considering that Barnabas is so frantically hungry, it looks like she will follow in the footsteps of her predecessors and serve as his breakfast.

*Or fifth- in #819, sorcerer Count Petofi found Charity’s personality to be an irritant, so he erased it and replaced it with that of the late Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl/ mentalist. From that time on, Miss Barrett played Pansy, not Charity.

Episode 975: What strange world have I discovered?

Roger Collins is up late. He heads for bed, and finds his distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, in the house. Barnabas apologizes for prowling about at such a late hour, and offers an explanation. He was in the long-disused east wing, where he found a room that contains a parallel universe.

Barnabas takes Roger to the room, which is vacant. He tells him that the parallel universe is visible only occasionally, and that even when it can be seen there is an invisible barrier that keeps him from entering or communicating with the people he sees there. Roger asks Barnabas if he has ever seen the phenomenon during the day. He says he has not. Roger says he will come back himself in the morning and investigate. Roger goes back to the main part of the house, and Barnabas heads for an exit that is closer to his own house.

Before Barnabas gets very far, he hears Roger’s voice. It is coming from the room, which has changed. He sees Roger’s counterpart sipping wine and talking to the portrait that hangs there.

The portrait depicts the counterpart of Barnabas’ ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique. In #464, Roger became obsessed with an eighteenth century portrait of Angelique herself. When he stared at the portrait, his personality collapsed into that of haughty overlord Joshua Collins, who lived in the days when the portrait was painted. Shortly afterward, Angelique showed up, wearing a wig and using a false name. Roger married her.

The portrait that holds Parallel Roger’s attention shows Parallel Angelique in contemporary guise. He talks to the portrait, not about a distant past which an ancestor of his might have known, but about the days when he and Parallel Angelique used to meet here, in her room. He says that people thought he was in love with her, but that he wasn’t. He was fascinated by her, but not in love. He says that he has never cared for the wine he is drinking, but that he still buys it, because it was her favorite.

The counterpart of Roger’s niece Carolyn enters. We saw the Roger and Carolyn we have known since the first week of the series earlier in the episode. They were embracing while she cried on his shoulder about some problems she is having in the B story. He called her “Kitten,” a term of endearment he has used for her since #4. That was typical of their interactions. But Parallel Carolyn has little use for her uncle. She snaps at him about talking to himself, he snaps at her about being in the room, and they snap at each other about Parallel Angelique. Parallel Carolyn says she would like to make Parallel Angelique “whirl in her grave,” at which Parallel Roger contemptuously declares Carolyn could never accomplish such a thing.

Even in death, Parallel Angelique dominates Parallel Roger and Parallel Carolyn. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Parallel Carolyn mentions that she is married to the counterpart of Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis. Barnabas has seen this other William H. Loomis, and knows that unlike Willie he is an educated man, the author of several books. He is still unable to think of him as anything other than the man he knows, however, and is shocked at the idea that any iteration of Carolyn would marry him.

When Barnabas saw him, Parallel William was wearing pricey clothes and affecting a sophisticated manner, and Barnabas learned that three of his books were bestselling novels that had been made into feature films. But we find out in this scene that the Loomises are now short of funds. Parallel Carolyn is searching for a book that Parallel William wrote and from which he has the opportunity to make a few hundred more dollars by making an abridgment for a magazine. Parallel Roger mocks his niece for scrounging for money; she remarks that their cousin Quentin is not so generous with her as he is with him. This confirms what has been suggested in previous glimpses of the Parallel Time room, that Parallel Quentin is the Master of Collinwood in its universe.

The doors close. When Barnabas opens then again, the room is vacant. He is deeply frustrated that he cannot see more of what happens there. We can understand. We, too, want to watch Dark Shadows, and are disappointed when it isn’t on.

Occasions when we might expect to see Dark Shadows but don’t include most of this episode. The Parallel Time story is just getting started, and it needs a lot of actors who are away doing principal photography for the feature House of Dark Shadows. So we spend the bulk of today on what took up all of yesterday’s episode, a lot of back and forth among characters who aren’t really on the show anymore. They are left over from a couple of exhausted storylines.

A man named Bruno, a remnant of the show’s attempt to tell a story about some events that belong in the tales of H. P. Lovecraft, is holding two prisoners. The prisoners are Chris Jennings and his fiancée, Sabrina Stuart. Chris is a werewolf. He and Sabrina are left over from a story told at the end of 1968 and beginning of 1969, and in the last few months there was a lackadaisical attempt to tie them in with the Lovecraft material. Bruno is hoping to trap Carolyn with Chris when Chris transforms, so that he will kill her. His motivation for this is an overly elaborate plan that no one who has seen the show expects to work, so even though the episode ends with Chris and Carolyn locked up together while the full moon rises it doesn’t leave us in much suspense. I suppose it is a step up from yesterday’s closing cliffhanger, in which Chris found a stooge named Sky Rumson in Bruno’s closet, strung up by his wrists, bleeding and begging for help. That made so little impact it isn’t even mentioned today. For all we know Chris just closed the closet door and let Sky have his privacy.