Tag: carolyn loomis

Episode 1049: Evening brings another secret

In the first months of Dark Shadows, characters several times shared meals in the kitchen in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. In that intimate setting, they would often exchange information that made it possible for them to advance the story. As time went on, the show developed more ways to get knowledge flowing, and the kitchen lost its importance. We haven’t seen it since #208.

Now, the show is set in an alternate universe, which it calls “Parallel Time.” We see the kitchen in this reality’s Collinwood today, the last glimpse we get of the room in any version of the place. Young Amy Collins visits butler Mr Trask there while he is sharpening a large knife. She tells him a man is living in the tower room. He leaves to investigate, leaving the knife on the countertop. The camera zooms in on the implement, lingering over it while an ominous cue plays on the soundtrack.

Later, Amy returns to the kitchen with the matronly Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz is upset that dinner is not ready and Trask is nowhere to be found. Amy notices that the knife is not where Trask left it hours before. Liz is unimpressed with this fact, as anyone would be who had not seen the zoom shot and heard the melodramatic music. We cut to the tower room, where Liz’ daughter Carolyn Loomis greets someone we cannot see. We cut to a hand holding a knife very much like the one Trask had sharpened. The hand brings the knife down, and Carolyn screams.

It is Carolyn who is the main source of information for the other characters in today’s show. Carolyn’s husband was killed the other day in a conflict between two supernatural beings. The other characters in today’s episode have no idea that such beings dwell among them, and think that those two in particular are simply members of their extended family. Carolyn has had all she can take of this situation. She claims “to know all the secrets” of Collinwood, and is far too drunk to keep many of them to herself.

Trask learned several secrets from Carolyn in Act One, when he was leaning up against the door to the drawing room, his ear pressed hard to it, eavesdropping ferociously on her conversation with her uncle, Roger Collins. Carolyn taunts Roger with his failure to recognize someone he loves desperately. She declares that she can prove that the houseguest who has been staying in the great house lately is not Alexis Stokes, but Alexis’ identical twin sister, Angelique Stokes Collins.

Trask eavesdropping. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Roger rejects this claim. Since Angelique died last year, one might expect Roger to be confident in his rejection, but he is high-strung and defensive about it. Carolyn does not deny that Angelique is dead. Indeed, she says that if anyone were to look at the base of “Alexis'” skull, they would find a scar where the killer drove in the hatpin that killed Angelique, proving that “Alexis” is Angelique’s reanimated corpse. This makes more sense to Roger than one might expect. When he first saw Alexis in #990 she had to give him her hand and talk soothingly to him for some time before he would accept that she was not Angelique risen from the grave.

As it happens, Carolyn is right. Two weeks after she met Roger, Alexis saw Angelique lying in the tomb. Alexis touched her sister to bid her a final farewell, only to find that all of the heat was draining from her body into Angelique’s. Moments later, Alexis was dead and Angelique was standing over her icy corpse. Angelique put on Alexis’ clothes, did her hair in the style Alexis wore, and met Trask, who accompanied her to the great house. Ever since, Angelique has been passing herself off as Alexis.

Amy interrupted Trask while he was eavesdropping. He ordered her to leave him alone, getting quite surly about it. If he can hear everything Carolyn and Roger are saying, we wonder why they can’t hear him being nasty to a member of the family. But apparently they can’t. She goes away, and he presses himself even closer to the door.

Carolyn is still talking to Roger and Trask is still eavesdropping when “Alexis” comes by. She reproves Trask, opens the doors to the drawing room, and exposes him to Roger and Carolyn. Roger is too shocked by the sight of “Alexis” and Carolyn is too amused by it all for either of them to do anything about Trask’s misconduct.

Later, Carolyn returns to the drawing room and finds her mother talking with “Alexis.” She leans down way into “Alexis'” personal space, making her hilariously uncomfortable.

Hello there. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

“Alexis” leaves them alone. Carolyn tells her mother that she knows who murdered Angelique. She says that she had suspected her, and is greatly relieved to know that she was wrong. Roger eavesdrops on this conversation, and turns around to see the shadow of yet another eavesdropper.

The Shadows’ knows. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn tells Liz that she not only knows who the murderer is, she has talked to “him” recently. That doesn’t narrow it down. She has talked to all three current suspects, and all of them are men. Roger gets very agitated whenever the topic of Angelique’s murderer comes up; his reaction is one of many heavy-handed clues the show has been giving lately that he did it. They had not suggested Trask might be the culprit when he was last on the show, in #1004, but they couldn’t be more obvious about it today. The third suspect is Quentin Collins, brother to Roger and Liz, who is currently a fugitive from justice, having escaped from jail after he was charged with another murder. Quentin is the man living in the tower room; Carolyn saw him there the other day, and he took a threatening tone with her. So any of those three men might be the one wielding the knife in the final shot.

This is a day for final appearances. Not only do we bid the kitchen adieu, but also Carolyn Loomis, Mr Trask, and Amy Collins. Nancy Barrett and Jerry Lacy will be back as other characters, but Denise Nickerson is gone from the cast as of today. After a great run in her first couple of months on the show, she was criminally underused. Still, whenever they did put her on she was typically the highlight of the day, so it is sad to lose her.

Liz mentions someone named “Dr Blum” today. We never see Dr Blum. The only character in the whole series who seems to be Jewish is Dr Julia Hoffman, who like the unseen Dr Blum is a psychiatrist. It was less than a year after this episode aired, on 26 May 1971, that President Richard Nixon said in a conversation with his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman that the reason he was unpopular with Jewish voters was that “Most of them are psychiatrists.” Ever since the tape of that conversation was released in 2002, people have been trying to figure out what Nixon meant to say. Perhaps the White House taping system malfunctioned, and picked up some audio not from the Richard Nixon of our universe, but from one who lived in one of the universes where Dark Shadows took place. There, he might have been making a simple statement of fact.

Episode 1048: There are a lot of closets, baby!

The police are looking into the murder of Angelique Stokes Collins. Angelique has risen from the grave and is available to assist with the investigation, though Inspector Hamilton, like most of the other people in the village of Collinsport and on the estate of Collinwood, thinks she is her identical twin sister Alexis.

Hamilton is impatient with everyone, a bad quality in an investigator. So when he accuses “Alexis” of helping Angelique’s widower Quentin to burn Angelique’s body in order to cover up evidence that Quentin murdered her, she responds with a more or less true account of what happened, omitting only that it was Alexis’ body Quentin burned. Hamilton cuts her off in mid-sentence, proclaiming that he won’t listen to any more of it.

Hamilton was once a close friend of Julia Hoffman, the housekeeper at the great house on the estate and Angelique’s most fanatical devotee. What neither he nor Angelique knows is that Hoffman is dead. Her Doppelgänger has come from an alternate universe, killed her, and assumed her identity. This other Julia Hoffman is working in concert with another interloper from the same universe, vampire Barnabas Collins, to defeat Angelique and end her presence among the living.

Hamilton questions Julia about the night of Angelique’s death. That was many months ago and Hoffman was not present at the scene, so Julia is able to fake her way through the questioning without major slips. But when Hamilton starts talking about old times, Julia is at a total loss. Hamilton mentions to “Alexis” that she does not seem like the Julia Hoffman he knows. Since Angelique has begun to notice differences in Julia’s behavior from what she would expect of Hoffman, this indiscreet remark represents a considerable danger to her.

At the Old House on the estate, Hamilton questions Carolyn Loomis. Carolyn’s husband was caught between Angelique’s powers and Barnabas’ the other day, and all he could do to resolve the strain was to fling himself to his death from a high window. Carolyn is hugely drunk. She raves at Hamilton that “Collinwood is not exactly a picture book house by the sea. There’s a skeleton in every closet, and there are a lot of closets, baby! Let me put it this way, Inspector- Collinwood is a nice place to visit, but you would not want to live there.” He seems to regard this as the sort of unseemly thing it is best to pass over in silence.

Carolyn is not overawed by the dignity of Hamilton’s badge. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There are several strong hints today, as there have been over the last couple of weeks, that Carolyn’s uncle Roger Collins murdered Angelique. They can drop as many hints to that effect as they like, and longtime viewers will still be surprised if it turns out to be true. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in the universe from which Julia and Barnabas came. Roger’s counterpart there was indeed a potentially deadly villain in the first months of the show, but he was eventually nerfed. By the time we decamped for this continuity, it had been more than three years since he was a menace to anyone. They’ve been painting this character in the colors of the 1966 Roger, and his languidly sarcastic manner combines with his relationship to the portrait of Angelique to remind us of Waldo Lydecker in the 1944 film Laura. But we saw so much of Roger the harmless gay uncle in 1967 and Roger the conscientious family man in 1968 and 1969 that it is still hard to imagine that he will turn out actually to be a killer.

The show was done live to tape for years, and even after post-production editing became an important part of it they were slow to credit the videotape editors. They’ve been making up for that lately, though. Today they credit their fourth pair of editors, Alex Moskovic and Rene Labat. Still other teams will be named in the weeks ahead, but Moskovic and Labat are the last ones I will mention here, unless there is something special about the cutting of a given episode.

Episode 1047: Extraordinary enemies

Evil wizard Tim Stokes combined medicine with black magic to connect his late daughter Angelique with a woman named Roxanne. The connection drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. This rendered Roxanne comatose and allowed Angelique to move among the living so long as Roxanne neither dies nor gets even a tiny bit better.

Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are interlopers from another dimension. They know what Stokes has done and want to defeat Angelique. They made off with Roxanne and were keeping her in the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, planning to use some mad science equipment to revive her. Roxanne did perk up after the first treatment, and Barnabas took her on a date to his favorite place, the old cemetery north of town, where she showed some signs of recognizing her surroundings.

Yesterday, Stokes went to the Old House to search for Roxanne while Barnabas was out. When Barnabas got home, Roxanne was nowhere to be found. We learn today that Stokes does not have her. He turns to a man named Claude North for help in finding her. Yesterday he told Angelique that he was most reluctant to contact North; only after an incantation calling upon all the spiritual forces of darkness fails to solve their problem does he consider turning to him. He told Angelique that North was no ordinary man, and he is evidently more unpleasant to deal with than are Satan and his minions. But he answers when Stokes picks up the telephone and calls him.

Barnabas is also familiar with “Claude North” as the name of someone linked to Roxanne. He found a drawing of her signed by North in the secret chamber in the back room of the mausoleum in the cemetery. He goes back to the cemetery twice tonight. The first time, he goes into the secret chamber and finds evidence that a man with the initials “CN” has been staying there. He takes this as confirmation that it is Claude North’s roost. It does not seem likely that it is North’s only residence, since there is no sign of a telephone there. Stokes is spying on Barnabas while he does this. He is disturbed that Barnabas knows about the secret chamber, and wonders if he has been keeping Roxanne there.

Barnabas goes back to the Old House and finds Stokes talking with the lady of the house, Carolyn Loomis. Angelique killed Carolyn’s husband Will the other day because he would not reveal Barnabas’ secret, and Carolyn has been drinking steadily ever since. Barnabas tells Stokes that since he has extended his condolences to Carolyn, he can leave now. Stokes takes his time about going. He says that Will thought that Barnabas might have a girl someplace. “Is he right, Mr Collins? Do you have a girl someplace?” Thayer David delivers this line with an urgency that elevates it from mildly clever to almost brilliant. Jonathan Frid responds with a slow burn that brings the exchange to perfection. Barnabas knows that Stokes neither has Roxanne nor knows that he does not have her, but he also knows that Stokes, as a native of this universe, is likelier to find her than he is.

“Do you have a girl someplace?” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas goes back to the cemetery and finds Roxanne there. She is kneeling at a gravestone. It marks the grave of Claude North, who lived from 1814 to 1866.

In his own world, Barnabas was trapped in the counterpart of the secret chamber in the mausoleum for 171 years. So regular viewers think of that chamber as a place for vampires. North’s tombstone suggests that he might be such a creature.

Moreover, the drawing of Roxanne evokes Charles Delaware Tate, an artist who was a character on the show in 1969. Tate had the magical power to bring people to life by drawing them. He became obsessed with a woman he created in that way. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, Tate’s erotic preoccupation with a product of his own imagination is as much a metaphor for extreme selfishness as is the vampire. So if the answer to the question of Roxanne’s origin is that she sprang into being as the result of North’s drawing of her, it would only be appropriate if North were also a vampire.

There is a scene in the room on top of the tower at the great house of Collinwood. Carolyn goes there and looks at the window from which Will fell to his death. To her surprise, sourpuss Quentin Collins enters the room. Quentin is a fugitive from justice, having assaulted a policeman and fled from jail because he was under arrest for murder. He makes menacing remarks demanding her silence; she’s so drunk that it doesn’t seem likely she will remember he was there. In the other continuity, the Collinses had a habit of using the tower room, which is entirely enclosed in windows that can be seen from every part of the estate, as a hiding place; we can see that their counterparts here maintain the same self-defeating tradition.

Episode 1046: Such a fearful unreality

Writer Gordon Russell takes bits of old episodes and mixes them as if he were rotating a kaleidoscope. There is a plot involved also, but the screen iconography is the main thing.

The show has been operating on the principle of the kaleidoscope for some time. They’ve traveled back in time repeatedly. Now they have traveled sideways in time and taken us to an alternate universe, which they insist on calling “Parallel Time.” Each of these segments represents a turn of the kaleidoscope, rearranging the actors, sets, musical cues, curse stories, imaginary geography of the estate of Collinwood and village of Collinsport, and other elements to create new patterns that shed unexpected light on familiar material.

Evil wizard Tim Stokes has used a combination of black magic and medical science to establish a remote connection between a woman named Roxanne and his late daughter, Angelique Stokes Collins. This connection drains the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique, reanimating her and leaving Roxanne comatose. To sustain this circumstance, Roxanne must remain in precisely her current condition. If she dies, all of her “life force” will vanish, returning Angelique to the tomb. Whenever she recovers even a tiny bit of her lost strength, Angelique collapses, possibly to die.

Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are visiting from the main continuity, and they are determined to stop Angelique’s evil plans. They have learned what Stokes has done, and have taken Roxanne into their own custody. As we open, Julia has just given up on an attempt to revive Roxanne and gone back to the great house at Collinwood, where she is impersonating her own Doppelgänger, the housekeeper. This woman, also named Julia Hoffman, was Angelique’s most fanatical devotee until Julia killed her, stole her French maid outfit, and assumed her identity.

Alone with Roxanne in the secret room behind the bookcase in the front parlor of the Old House on the grounds of the estate, Barnabas gives a soliloquy about his feelings for her. She opens her eyes and sits up.

In the spring of 1968, Julia took charge of an experimental procedure another mad scientist had devised to free Barnabas of his vampirism. The core of this procedure was the creation of a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam. In #490, Julia ran the apparatus and was disappointed when Adam seemed still to be inanimate. She and Barnabas left the lab, and Adam came to life. Her disappointment and departure are repeated in this scene, though Barnabas is there to see Roxanne open her eyes.

When Roxanne comes to, we cut to the great house and see Angelique collapse. She crawls around on the floor, trying to make her way to a telephone. This action is shown in quick cuts, but not quite quick enough. It is so much the sort of melodramatic business that was overdone in movies in the 1940s and 1950s and parodied in sketches on The Carol Burnett Show in the 1960s and 1970s that it raises a bad laugh.

Barnabas takes Roxanne out of the secret room, to the parlor. He finds that she cannot speak. He shows her a drawing of her that he found in another secret room, the chamber in the back of the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town. It is signed “Claude North.” Roxanne reacts to the drawing with delight and to the name “Claude North” with dismay.

In the summer of 1969, the show was set in the year 1897. One of the characters we got to know in that year was the mysterious Amanda Harris. It turned out that Amanda had popped into existence when an artist thought her up and made a sketch of her. This artist, a repellent little man named Charles Delaware Tate, had no idea he was endowed with the power to bring his fancies to life by drawing them until he met Amanda, at which point he developed an exceedingly unpleasant obsession with her.

Roxanne’s origins are at this point as unknown to us as Amanda’s were when we first got to know her. So the drawing will suggest to longtime viewers that “Claude North” will turn out to be this universe’s version of Tate. When Stokes tells Angelique that he might be able to bring Roxanne back by contacting North, the thought of having further dealings with the man is abhorrent to him. Like Roxanne’s own display of distaste at North’s name, that fits with the idea that he might be a version of the loathsome Tate.

In the great house, Maggie Collins, current wife of Angelique’s widower Quentin, finds Angelique crawling on the floor and picks up the telephone to call the doctor. Angelique says that she needs her father, not the doctor, puzzling Maggie. While they contact Stokes, Barnabas takes Roxanne to the mausoleum and shows her the secret room in an attempt to restore her memory and her power of speech.

In #283, the original continuity’s version of Maggie was a mental patient at Windcliff, a private hospital Julia controls. She had succumbed to amnesia, reverted to early childhood, and become largely nonverbal after an ordeal as Barnabas’ victim. In that episode, Julia took Maggie on a trip to the mausoleum, where Barnabas had tortured her, in an attempt to restore her memory and power of speech. Now, the relatively benevolent Barnabas is taking Roxanne to this universe’s version of the same location in the same hope.

Stokes attends to Angelique in her room. He gives her some medicine to keep her alive until they can find Roxanne. He warns her that if Roxanne manages to speak, her first word will send Angelique back to the grave. He performs an incantation to summon the spiritual forces of darkness to come to their aid. When Mrs Acilius and I were watching this on Amazon Prime, Stokes’ incantation was interrupted by an ad for Chipotle. I’d always thought calling on the Devil and his minions was likelier to bring Taco Bell upon you, but I don’t suppose Chipotle is all that different.

Stokes DoorDashes Chipotle. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

During the 1897 segment, we saw a new version of a character from an earlier phase of the show, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. That iteration of Laura was a heat vampire who drained the warmth from the living to remain animated. They’ve given the current version of Angelique the same condition, though we haven’t seen it lately. In #737, Laura was in a bad way. She lay in bed and her thrall Dirk Wilkins cozied up to her in the most sex-like interaction we had seen on the show up to that point (or up to this point, come to that.) Angelique’s bedroom is laid out the same way today as Laura’s was then, and as Dirk was on Laura’s right, Stokes is on her right. Earlier episodes made it clear that there was something deeply weird about the relationship between Stokes and Angelique. In the contrast between this scene and the one between Laura and Dirk, longtime viewers can see that Angelique and Stokes’ particular weirdness does not involve incest per se. Rather, it is their shared dedication to evil for its own sake that warps everything between them.

Back in the Old House, Barnabas puts Roxanne to bed on her table in the secret room. He goes into the parlor. A car pulls up. It is Carolyn Loomis, wife of his late blood thrall Will Loomis. Carolyn chatters happily about some shopping she did and asks for Will. Barnabas realizes she does not know that Will has died. He breaks the news to her. He says that Angelique killed him, which is part of the truth. Carolyn says it is because of Barnabas that Will was killed, which is the other part of the truth. Barnabas seems to have a whole speech prepared about how he will avenge Will’s death by defeating Angelique, but Carolyn keeps interrupting to ask who will avenge it by defeating him

Elsewhere in the 1897 segment, Barnabas’ enemies had killed his blood thrall Sandor Rákóczi. In #798, Sandor’s wife Magda blamed Barnabas for her husband’s death. She told him she would avenge Sandor by killing him. She then despaired of that and offered herself to him as his next victim. Barnabas grandly replied, “No, Magda, you will not kill me, and I will not harm you. We will grieve together.” Carolyn does not allow Barnabas to speak so loftily.

Carolyn goes to the great house. She is just about to reveal Barnabas’ secret to Maggie when Barnabas himself shows up. While he defuses the situation, Stokes realizes that the Old House is vacant. He slips out to search for Roxanne there. When Barnabas returns, Roxanne is nowhere to be found.

It may seem unlikely that the show will resolve this cliffhanger in the obvious way, by showing us that Stokes took Roxanne from the secret room. They usually go for surprise. Nonetheless, longtime viewers will be inclined to expect this to happen, even though it is so on-the-nose. This room was first seen in #113, when crazed handyman Matthew Morgan opened it as a dungeon for well-meaning governess Victoria Winters. Not even Vicki’s charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins, knew of the room’s existence, and David knew the Old House better than any other character on the show at that point. The room is therefore uniquely Matthew’s territory.

Like Matthew, Stokes is played by Thayer David. Stokes’s ancestor was eighteenth century indentured servant Ben Stokes, whose counterpart we saw in the 1790s segment as a commentary on Matthew, an example of the good and sane man Matthew might have been had he not grown up in the shadow of the ancient curses of Collinwood. Once those curses had been in operation for a little while, Ben started turning into Matthew. As Matthew inadvertently killed a man because of his unbounded devotion to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Ben inadvertently killed a man because of his unbounded devotion to Barnabas. As Matthew set out to cover up his accidental homicide by killing Vicki, who was played by an actress whose father was a Danish count, so Ben deliberately committed a murder to cover up his own accidental killing, and his victim was a lady with the title “Countess.” As a descendant of Ben and therefore a reflection of Matthew, it is a matter of course that Stokes knows about the room. Barnabas’ decision to hide Roxanne in the room is just one more case of a severe misreading of Dark Shadows by someone who didn’t watch the 1966 episodes.

Episode 1042: Used as a voodoo doll, to cast spells

Vampire Barnabas Collins has crossed over from the universe where Dark Shadows took place for its first 196 weeks and established himself as a character on another soap opera with the same title, made by the same people and broadcast in the same time slot. His best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, has joined him in the cast of this new show. Barnabas is pretending to be a descendant of another Barnabas Collins, who in this continuity lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830. Julia is impersonating another Julia Hoffman, who was the housekeeper at the great house of Collinwood and a fanatical devotee of the undead Angelique until our Julia beat her to death and stole her French maid outfit.

Barnabas has taken three victims. These are alcoholic novelist Will Loomis; Will’s wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard; and masochistic barmaid Buffie Harrington. Will and Carolyn own the Old House on the grounds at Collinwood, which in his own universe was Barnabas’ home. He lives there now as their unwelcome guest. Buffie has not been seen since #1023, and is mentioned today for the first time since #1028. Will discovered Julia next to Barnabas’ coffin shortly after she killed Hoffman; when he saw the corpse, he realized who Julia was and was delighted to meet her. It becomes clear only today that Carolyn also knows who Julia is. It is Carolyn who brings up Buffie’s name in her conversation with Julia. Carolyn says that Buffie was working at Collinwood the previous year. She assumes that Julia will recognize Buffie’s name in connection with something other than her former employment on the estate, so it is plausible that she knows that she has been inducted into the sisterhood of the scarf, but it is not made explicit.

Staff conference. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn and Julia are talking about the séance at which Angelique died the first time. This séance was reenacted in #990. They made a big deal at that time about how everyone involved in the original séance was in attendance at the reenactment, with only two exceptions. Foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins, Angelique’s widower, refused to have anything to do with it. And since Angelique herself was in the tomb at that time, her identical twin sister Alexis sat in for her. Neither Carolyn nor Buffie was there; since someone has to tell Julia about the séance, it makes sense to retcon her into attendance. It is not immediately obvious why they have chosen to insert Buffie into it. Regular viewers may hope that means that we will see more of Elizabeth Eis’ fine performance in this role, but she doesn’t turn up today.

Two weeks after the reenactment of the séance, Angelique rose from the dead, murdered Alexis, and took her place. She has been impersonating her ever since. Barnabas and Julia know that the “Alexis” who is staying in the great house as Quentin’s guest is really Angelique, though they do not know about the sororicide. The conversation between Julia and Carolyn is the first time it is confirmed that they have shared their information with the Loomises.

Angelique suspects that Quentin killed her, and has decided to get revenge on him by annihilating his family (except for her own son by him.) As part of that plan, she used witchcraft to finish strangling a man named Bruno whom Quentin had just been choking. When a policeman in whose presence Quentin had a few minutes before vowed to kill Bruno with his bare hands strolled in and found Quentin over the body, he arrested him. Yesterday, Angelique talked Quentin into assaulting that policeman and escaping from jail so that he could interfere with the investigation into Bruno’s death. Apparently Quentin thinks courts love it when you do those things.

Angelique keeps needling Quentin’s current wife, the former Maggie Evans, by alternately describing the evidence of Quentin’s guilt and urging her to have total faith in his innocence. Maggie is already close to a breakdown, and this doesn’t help. Julia finds her outside Angelique’s old bedroom, where she is convinced she heard the piano playing. They enter the room, and find it vacant. Longtime viewers will remember early 1969, when supernatural forces tormented the living by making a sickly little waltz resound throughout the house, and will assume that Angelique is using magic to make Maggie to hear the music.

Julia urges Maggie to get out of the house for her sanity’s sake. As Maggie is starting to think that might be a good idea, Angelique enters. Angelique looks askance at Julia. Hoffman the housekeeper had not only been dedicated to her, but was barely able to control her loathing for Maggie. So far Angelique has not suspected that Julia is not who she appears to be. When she sees Julia’s sincere concern and hears a suggestion that Maggie do something other than fall into a trap, she wonders what is going on.

Julia returns to the Loomis house in time to see Carolyn have a vision of the fateful séance. When Carolyn comes out of the trance, she declares that she knows who killed Angelique.

Episode 1017: Without hesitation

In April 1967, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis found a chained coffin. Believing the coffin to be loaded with jewels, he broke the chains and opened it. To his horror, Willie found that the coffin contained vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas bit and enslaved Willie, then ventured forth to prey upon the living.

In #230, Barnabas was in the process of taking Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, as his victim. Willie secretly tried to save Maggie. When the rescuers Willie had tipped off appeared, he and Barnabas hid behind a wall and eavesdropped on their conversation. Barnabas realized what Willie had done. Enraged, he beat Willie with his heavy cane. In #232, Willie’s sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, visited Barnabas’ home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Jason saw that the left side of Willie’s face was covered with large bruises. Up to that point, the keynote of Barnabas’ character had been the care he took to conceal his evil nature from the world. It came as a shock to see that he had been so crazed that he left marks on Willie where anyone could see them.

After Maggie escaped from Barnabas, her memory of what he did to her was erased by several magical interventions, and she came to regard him with warm affection. By March 1970, a romance was blossoming between them.

In that same month, Barnabas discovered that an alternate universe could occasionally be glimpsed in a room in the long-disused east wing of the great house at Collinwood. Hoping to be cured of his vampirism, he managed to cross over into that universe in #980. He found that he was still a vampire, and that he was surrounded by strangers, albeit strangers with names and faces that were very familiar to him.

Willie’s counterpart is alcoholic author William H. Loomis. The new universe is a mirror image of the old one, so that while Willie unchained Barnabas’ coffin, Will puts chains on it. Barnabas kept Willie as a prisoner in the Old House and used him as a slave, while Will owns the Old House and keeps Barnabas prisoner, extracting information from him that he plans to use as the basis of a new book. Eventually Will became careless, and Barnabas bit him. Now Will and his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard, are both victims of Barnabas’ bloodlust.

Barnabas has managed to persuade the occupants of the great house that he is their distant cousin whose ancestor left Collinwood for Peru in the nineteenth century. While he was at the great house, he met Maggie’s counterpart. She is the wife of drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, the master of Collinwood. Barnabas eavesdrops on their joyous reunion, which brings his own loneliness into sharp focus.

Maggie’s joyous reunion with Quentin brings misery to the lonesome Barnabas.

Barnabas goes home to the Old House. He eavesdrops while the Loomises argue. Carolyn has shaken free of her dependence on him and wants to warn people that there is a vampire in their midst; Will says Barnabas would kill her before she could ever do such a thing. Barnabas interrupts the conversation. He tells Carolyn that since she is a Collins, he feels a kinship for her that makes him reluctant to harm her in any way. When she asks if he would kill her and Will if they turned against him, he says flatly that he would do so “Without hesitation.” The show is often marketed as the story of a “reluctant vampire” who is determined to protect his family; this exchange shows both the basis for that description in Barnabas’ words and the limits of its accuracy regarding his deeds.

Barnabas goes into the hidden chamber off the front parlor of the Old House where his coffin is currently being kept. Before he turns in for the day, he tells Will to come back at nightfall with a cross and to prevent him leaving the chamber that night. He refuses to explain why.

Will follows the strange command. While he is keeping Barnabas in the hidden chamber, Maggie comes to the house. Will and Barnabas hide behind the wall and eavesdrop on her conversation with Carolyn. Maggie goes on about the fine impression Barnabas has made on the Collinses, and she sounds quite taken with him herself. That leads to another reversal. While in #230 Barnabas and Willie’s eavesdropping led Barnabas to realize what Willie had been up to with Maggie, today Will and Barnabas’ eavesdropping leads Will to realize that Barnabas is afraid he will bite Maggie.

The end result is the same. His craving for Maggie’s blood overwhelms Barnabas. When Will tries to obey his original command to keep him in the chamber, Barnabas uses his mind control powers to weaken Will’s will. Will manages to continue resisting, holding the cross towards Barnabas. It looks like a fair fight, until Carolyn opens the panel and bumps into Will. Barnabas thrashes him with his cane and runs out. Carolyn tends to Will, paying special attention to the badly bruised left side of his face.

Barnabas goes to the great house. He finds Carolyn at the front door. He reminds her of his threats, and recedes into the bushes. When Maggie comes out to see what is happening, Carolyn makes a weak excuse for her late visit. The puzzled Maggie thanks her for her concern, and they part.

We then cut to a bedroom where Maggie is sleeping. A bat squeaks at the window, and Barnabas materializes. He bares his fangs and plunges his head towards her neck.

This is the 26th of 26 episodes of Dark Shadows to survive only as a kinescope after the original videotape master was lost. It’s always a pleasant surprise for me when these crop up, but it’s probably just as well there won’t be any more of them. The “Parallel Time” segment is the first part of the show to make really good use of color, so that the two kinescopes from it, this one and #1006, are the only ones to represent a significant artistic loss. One more videotape master went missing, for #1219, but they had stopped making kinescopes by then, so MPI Home Video whipped something up from an audio track that a fan recorded off the air at the time of the original broadcast. They added narration by Lara Parker and some stills from #1218 and #1220.

This episode marks an epoch in the development of Dark Shadows. For the first time, videotape editors are named in the closing credits. They have done a fair bit of videotape editing in the last few months, but now they formally acknowledge the editors as a permanent part of the show. Dan Rosenson and Robert Steinback, hail to thee!

Episode 1011: In death he dictates

Mad scientist Cyrus Longworth has developed a potion that changes his appearance so drastically that even those closest to him cannot recognize him when he is under its influence. In this disguise, he calls himself “John Yaeger” and indulges his sadistic impulses. He has just committed his first murder, killing a man who had learned his secret. The potion he needs to restore his usual looks is in his lab, but he can’t get there without passing the police. So he has ordered Buffie Harrington, a young woman he has been terrorizing, to fetch it for him. He was waiting for Buffie in a cave on the beach near the estate of Collinwood when he saw the signs of a secret passage, and decided to see where it would lead him.

It has led him to the basement of the Old House on the estate, home of writer Will Loomis and his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard. We have known that this passage was here since #1003, when strange and troubled teen Daniel Collins suggested that his young cousin, Amy Collins, join him in opening it and exploring the basement. Amy refused to go there at night, prompting Daniel to taunt her as a scared-y-cat. We also know, if only because the opening voiceover has been telling us every day for the last five and a half weeks, that vampire Barnabas Collins is chained in a coffin in the basement. Will is holding him captive and forcing him to dictate his autobiography to him.

Barnabas is a visitor from a parallel universe. Longtime viewers are familiar with that universe; Dark Shadows was set there for its first 196 weeks. There is a tunnel between the beach and the basement there as well, and each time it has figured there has been a major development in the story. So when Cyrus, disguised as Yaeger, follows the tunnel and discovers Barnabas’ coffin, we can believe something big is about to happen. He starts to unchain the coffin; if he frees the vampire, that would certainly qualify.

Will and Carolyn are upstairs. She hears the sounds Cyrus is making in the basement and tells Will to go down and check. He takes this as an invitation to another of their drunken quarrels, in which he taunts her for being Barnabas’ victim. Eventually he does go downstairs, where he pistol-whips Cyrus into unconsciousness. He and Carolyn rather improbably manage to carry Cyrus up to the parlor.

When Cyrus comes to, he finds Carolyn aiming the pistol at him. He calls her by name. She does not recognize him, and asks how he knows her. He tells her that he makes it his business to know who all the attractive women are. He asks why Will isn’t there. She doesn’t answer the question. He sees that she is trembling so violently that she can barely keep hold of the pistol; he knocks it out of her hands and runs away. Later, he will meet Buffie in the cave, get the potion from her, and shed his disguise in time to get away with his crimes.

Will rejoins Carolyn in the parlor. He scolds her for letting the intruder escape; she says he was wrong to leave her alone with him. He says he was busy sealing up the panel so that no one else could come into the basement through the tunnel. He says that Barnabas’ coffin must be moved. His idea is to carry it up the stairs and hide it in a secret chamber behind the bookcase in the parlor.

This chamber, too, has its counterpart in the original continuity. We first saw it in December 1966, when crazed handyman Matthew Morgan abducted well-meaning governess Victoria Winters and planned to kill her there. After Barnabas joined the cast of characters in April 1967 and became the master of the Old House, he several times used the chamber as a hiding place. Matthew’s plans for Vicki backfired on him when the ghosts of Collinwood and scared him to death before he could carry out his fell design. None of the occasions when Barnabas used the chamber worked out very well for him. So longtime viewers may suspect that, even if Will and Carolyn can somehow transport Barnabas and his coffin up the stairs and into the hidden chamber, things will not go as they project.

Will and Carolyn let Barnabas out of his coffin. They wear large crosses around their necks, and hold them towards him when he looks at them. They get him up the stairs and into the secret chamber this way.

Once there, Will resumes interrogating Barnabas. Barnabas protests that Will has “enough story” and ought to set him free; Will disagrees. One wonders if Barnabas’ line represents Sam Hall’s feelings as one half of the two-man staff currently charged with writing five scripts a week for Dark Shadows.

Story conference. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Will’s counterpart in the original continuity is Willie Loomis, who was Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall. In #326, Barnabas had framed Willie for some of his own crimes, and the police had obligingly shot him several times. Barnabas was worried that Willie was not dying quickly enough. He railed to his associate, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, that Willie continued to “cling to life with leech-like persistence!” When Julia assured him that Willie would probably die without regaining consciousness, Barnabas said that he might just as easily make a full recovery and set about “writing his memoirs!”

The show picked up on that line after it went back in time to the 1790s. We learned in #510 that Ben Stokes, the much-put-upon indentured servant who was Barnabas’ friend before and after he first became a vampire, did indeed write a memoir, and in #756 we learned that Ben’s memoir included the story of Barnabas’ curse. I wonder if Barnabas’ line to Julia about Willie writing his memoirs was the seed, not only of Ben’s memoirs, but of the whole story of Will Loomis.

Barnabas’ cartoonish villainy in #326 was hilarious, but his objections to Will’s behavior today are quite reasonable. Will would have been doing his civic duty had he staked Barnabas, and indeed Barnabas asked Will to let him die when he first found him in his coffin. Keeping him trapped in the coffin endangers the community irresponsibly, and when Will opens it night after night with Barnabas immobilized by the cross and forces him to produce an oral history he can use use as a source of material he is choosing to be as much of a parasite on Barnabas as Barnabas’ curse has forced him to be on his victims.

Moreover, when Will tells Carolyn today that the book he extracts from Barnabas will be “all true” and that “every critic” will hail it as “a classic,” he seems to be delusional. If it is “all true,” the book will be a novelization of the last 160 weeks of Dark Shadows. The show is fun to watch, but that’s largely because the writers know what kind of material the actors and directors can use to create exciting moments. I can’t imagine anyone looking at it as so much text sitting on the page and calling it “a classic.”

Will turns his back on Barnabas and takes a note. Seeing an opportunity, Barnabas grabs the cord by which the cross hangs from Will’s neck, choking him. Will falls to the floor, and Barnabas bares his fangs.

I haven’t read Anne Rice’s 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire. Ms Rice says she wrote a short story about a reporter taking an oral history from a vampire no later than 1969, the year before this storyline premiered. That story has never been published, but biographers of hers report having seen it and they accept the dating. She also says that she decided to turn it into a novel in 1973, not because she had seen Dark Shadows, but because her daughter had died and she thought it would be a way of exploring her grief. So, any similarities are mere coincidence. I bring it up here, because it represents the definitive refutation of Will’s expectation that “every critic” would hail his retelling of Dark Shadows from the time Barnabas debuted as “a classic.” Ms Rice was free to craft a story that would be right for a novel, unconstrained to copy material produced to keep a soap opera spinning, and most of the reviews she received were quite hostile.

Episode 989: This tacky little drama again

Dark Shadows has taken us to a parallel universe where the A story is a mashup of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca with Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 story “Ligeia,” and the B story is a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Today we also get a good look at the C story, another mashup. The ingredients in this one are Dracula and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Drunken novelist William H. Loomis and his disappointed wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard, take the roles of George and Martha. The parts of Nick, of Honey, and of George and Martha’s imaginary son are combined in vampire Barnabas Collins.

Honey is present at two conversations with George and Martha. She flees from each, moved to vomit by their cruelties, and after the second is never seen again. One session with Will and Carolyn was enough for Barnabas. The circumstances of his exit were rather different from those of Honey’s. Barnabas did not become physically ill when he saw Will and Carolyn quarreling, and is willing to keep skulking in and out of their basement when he is not out preying upon the living. But Will has other ideas. He has chained Barnabas in his coffin in the basement of their house and is planning to force him to tell him his life story, which Will thinks he will be able to use as material for a book that will restore his fortunes. In this he is the mirror image of his counterpart in the main continuity, who broke the chains that held Barnabas in his coffin in his own attempt to get rich quick.

As Martha taunts George for the dead end his career has reached, Carolyn is in the habit of taunting Will with his inability to write new books of his own. As Martha flirts aggressively with Nick in front of George, so Carolyn wants Will to release Barnabas so that he can drink her blood again. As George and Martha’s son turns out to be imaginary, not part of their material reality, so Barnabas is a visitor from the main continuity, not a part of this universe. Inasmuch as Jonathan Frid is away for several weeks making the feature House of Dark Shadows, Barnabas is present only as a topic in Will and Carolyn’s quarrels.

Will pours himself a glass of something, perhaps bergin and water. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

One might wonder if the idea of casting John Karlen as an analogue of George in an adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? occurred to the makers of the show around the time of #706. In that episode, Karlen played inveterate prankster Carl Collins, who held a gun at Barnabas’ head and threatened to shoot him. When he pulled the trigger, a flag labeled FIB! sprang out. George fires a rifle at Martha in Act One of the play, only to produce a similar effect with a Chinese parasol.

Later, Carolyn is eavesdropping outside the drawing room in the great house of Collinwood while Will is flirting with a lovely houseguest, a central character in the Rebecca/ Ligeia mashup. Carolyn stands in the doorway, in Will’s line of sight when he tries to make a date with the woman. Will has already rubbed Carolyn’s face in the intimate nature of her connection to Barnabas, and as his victim she can’t very well recreate Martha and Nick’s threat to cuckold George with any other male. So if we are going to have another scene built around that kind of insult, it will have to be Will who plays it with another woman.

Will makes sure Carolyn can see him at work. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn also spends some time with her friend Sabrina Stuart, who is part of the Jekyll and Hyde story. Sabrina is engaged to Dr Cyrus Longworth, the Jekyll character, and did not recognize him when last night he invaded her home and assaulted her in the persona of John Yaeger, the Mr Hyde character. Cyrus himself is puzzled when he comes to his laboratory in the morning and finds a terrible mess there, along with an IOU from Yaeger. A policeman shows up and asks him some questions, assuring him that he does not match the description of Yaeger. In his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn points out that this scene is recycled beat for beat from Dan Curtis’ 1968 TV movie adaption of Jekyll and Hyde.

Carolyn marches into Cyrus’ lab and tells him Sabrina is missing. She is angry with him for leaving Sabrina alone when the man who attacked her is still at large. He tries to assure her that Sabrina is in no danger, but since he cannot explain why he would believe that he only exasperates her further. She insists they go looking for Sabrina, and he acquiesces. It turns out Sabrina is in the great house of Collinwood, in a trance, trying to reenact the séance at which the Rebecca analogue died.

In the main continuity, Carolyn’s counterpart was married to someone whom she believed to be a man named Jeb. Like Cyrus, he was played by Christopher Pennock. Also like Cyrus, he was a shape-shifter who in his other form committed horrific acts of violence. Carolyn accepted Jeb’s refusal to tell him anything about himself, as Sabrina accepts Cyrus’ refusal to tell her anything that might lead her to suspect the nature of the potion he has developed. It is refreshing to see this Carolyn taking Sabrina’s side and insisting Cyrus do things a reasonable person might do.

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.