carrie stokes – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1100: What it’s like to be alive

The ghosts of four people who died in 1841 have been haunting the great house of Collinwood. They represent teenagers Carrie Stokes and Tad Collins; Carrie and Tad’s governess, Daphne Harridge; and a sometime pirate captain known as Gerard Stiles. Three of these four have now assumed corporeal form. Tad and Hallie have taken possession of their lookalikes, David Collins and Hallie Stokes. They then performed a ceremony that caused Daphne to come back to life in a body of her own. We open with these three repeating the ceremony in order to conjure Gerard back into existence as a living being.

When Carrie and Tad performed the ceremony the first time, they did not know whether they would raise Daphne or Gerard. That episode ended with a knock at the door, leaving us to wonder along with them who would come. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said it would be funny if it were someone else. She suggested the writers might take a page from Let’s Make a Deal and have Tad and Carrie find a donkey behind Door Number Three.

Today, the ceremony again ends with a rapping on the door. But it is not Gerard. It isn’t a donkey, either. It is Willie Loomis, servant to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. John Karlen always finds a way to bring out humor in his characters’ predicaments, and the rough-hewn Willie does deflate the grandiosity of Carrie, Tad, and Daphne’s meddling in God’s realm.

Scrambling to cover up the signs of the ceremony before he has to open the door to Willie, Tad calls out “We were sleeping! (pause) I was sleeping!” David Henesy plays this absolutely straight, so that we can see it dawning on Tad that he and Carrie aren’t supposed to be sleeping together. Karlen wasn’t the only actor who knew how to find the laughs hidden in his lines.

Daphne hides. Tad opens the door. Willie sees the pentagram on the floor with the candles at its points and says he recognizes it as a device of black magic. He forestalls the teens’ attempt to pretend to be Hallie and David by calling Tad by name. Tad then turns to Carrie and makes fun of Willie’s twentieth century vocabulary in an attempt to intimidate him by a display of social superiority. This collapses immediately, and Willie says that Tad and Carrie have to come with him because he is bigger than they are.

Willie detains Carrie and Tad in the drawing room, waiting for Barnabas to come back. He has to leave them when he hears Maggie Evans, governess to the late David and Hallie, coming downstairs. Maggie is the victim of a vampire, and Willie is part of the crew that is keeping her from going off to get her blood sucked.

Willie rushes to the foyer and asks Maggie why housekeeper Mrs Johnson isn’t keeping her in her room. Maggie does not respond. The true answer would be that Clarice Blackburn has a writing job on another soap now and isn’t available to play the part, so they leave Mrs Johnson’s absence unexplained.

While Willie gets Maggie back to her room, Tad and Carrie listen to the dogs howling outside. Carrie says she has never heard howling like that before, and Tad contradicts her. He says that if she searches her memory, she will find that they heard just that sound in their own time. He gives a somber look, as if he knows what the howling means. The show has been making it clear that we will be going back in time to 1840 sooner or later. These lines of Tad’s tell us that we will find a vampire in operation when we get there.

In Maggie’s bedroom, Willie explains that Hallie and David have been possessed by Carrie and Tad. Maggie has seen enough in her time at Collinwood that she finds this instantly credible. She blames herself, saying that if she were not ill she would have been able to prevent the possession. Willie asks what she could have done, and she cannot think of anything. He presses her to tell him who the vampire is. She claims he cannot understand what she is going through. He cannot tell her that he himself was once the victim of a vampire, since that vampire was Barnabas and the show will implode if Maggie is ever told about that. So they are left at a stalemate.

Meanwhile, Daphne takes shelter in a deserted mansion once known as Rose Cottage. Gerard confronts her there. He is cranky about still being dead. She tells him it’s no one’s fault that the ceremony didn’t work. They will reenact it tonight, when the stars are back in the right alignment. She also tells him that they don’t need Tad and Carrie to accomplish their goal. This line is unfortunate- to the extent that the story has generated suspense, it has involved us wondering how Carrie and Tad are involved in whatever it is Gerard wants to do. When we hear they aren’t involved at all, it lets the air out of an already badly under-inflated set of tires.

Gerard vanishes from Daphne’s presence and materializes in a mysterious chamber known as The Playroom. The Playroom intermittently appears in a little-used part of the great house, behind a door that usually opens on a linen closet. There is a dollhouse in The Playroom that is a scale model of Rose Cottage and that is, in some supernatural sense, identical to it. Gerard sets fire to the room in the dollhouse that corresponds to the room in Rose Cottage where Daphne is. He uses his finger to hold closed the door corresponding to the one from which she could escape a fire in the room.

Gerard holds the door shut. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Daphne finds that the room she is in is engulfed in flames and she cannot open the door. Apparently Gerard has decided that if Daphne is going to tell him they don’t need Tad and Carrie, he doesn’t need Daphne, either. Daphne, being as she is played by Kate Jackson, is impossible not to care about, so this cliffhanger does make us want to come back Monday and see her escape. But since it implies that none of the relationships among the ghosts means anything, and since we’ve already seen that none of the living characters can mount an effective resistance to the ghosts, it also brings us to the conclusion that the whole Re-Haunting of Collinwood story is at a dead end.

Episode 1099: A governess that was here once

For several months starting in late 1968, Dark Shadows did an adaptation of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. This segment is often called “The Haunting of Collinwood.” For the last six weeks, they’ve been doing a second adaptation of that same novella. I call the current segment “The Re-Haunting of Collinwood.”

So far, the remake has been so close to the original that it is little more than a test of the patience of longtime viewers. The last few days, they’ve been deviating a bit. So the ghosts of teenagers Tad and Carrie have erased the personalities of their lookalikes, David Collins and Hallie Stokes, and are now operating as living beings in their bodies. That didn’t quite happen in 1968 and 1969, when David and his friend Amy Jennings were beset by ghosts who were excited by their resemblance to their late ancestors Jamison and Nora Collins.

Carrie and Tad have cast a spell that has conjured up their old governess, Daphne Harridge, as a living woman. Amy and David never even tried to bring lady’s maid Beth Chavez back to life. She remained an unspeaking ghost until the show went back in time to 1897 and we met her in her proper lifetime. Today, Daphne orders Tad and Carrie to go through the same spellcasting procedure to bring the other ghost, the evil Gerard Stiles, back to life. Again, David and Amy did not try to bring Quentin Collins back to life. He is alive today only because he was immunized against death and aging in the 1897 segment, since he was such a hit with the audience.

Summoning Gerard. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Yesterday, David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins questioned Carrie and Tad and revealed their true identities. Neither of them was able to name the parents of the person they were possessing. Tad was also unable to name David’s former governess Victoria Winters. Through the show’s first year, Vicki was the chief protagonist and main audience identification character. She was written out in 1968, and Barnabas’ question was the first reference to her in months. She comes up again today. Carrie brings some contemporary clothes for Daphne to wear. She explains to Tad that “They belong to a governess that was here once… Her name was Victoria or something.” She says that the current governess told Hallie that Victoria left the clothes behind, but did not explain why.

Two consecutive episodes alluding to Vicki will be enough to get longtime viewers wondering if we will see her again. They had run out of things for Vicki to do in the story long before she left the show, and there is no clear opening for her now. When Carrie calls attention to the fact that there is a mystery around the circumstances of Vicki’s departure, she reminds us that that Vicki disappeared into a time warp. Since The Re-Haunting of Collinwood seems to be heading into a trip back through time to the year 1840, that might lead us to hope that what we find in that year will have something to do with Vicki. Then again, if all the ghosts are going to turn into living people, maybe they will be able to cancel their reservations for the journey to the past and stay in contemporary dress. Perhaps in that case, Vicki will find her way back as well. We might imagine that we will find tomorrow that they have failed to bring Gerard to life, but have conjured up Vicki instead. Maybe the summoning procedure only brings up governesses with long black hair.

Daphne is played by Kate Jackson, in her first screen role. Miss Jackson would go on to star in primetime series such as The Rookies, Charlie’s Angels, and Scarecrow and Mrs King.

Episode 1098: Who was your governess before Maggie? Tell me her name.

Barnabas Collins leaves people who appear to be his distant cousins Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes and David Collins, as well as Carolyn and David’s houseguest Hallie Stokes, in David’s bedroom. Barnabas is still within earshot when these three address each other as “Leticia,” “Tad,” and “Carrie.” He rushes back into the room, looks at those who might be taken for Hallie and David, and declares “You are both possessed!” He ignores the fact that the same evidence indicates that Carolyn is also possessed.

Initially, Tad and Carrie pretend they were only using those names as part of a game. Barnabas says that in that case, he will play, too. He asks Tad to name David’s mother. He cannot. He then asks who his previous governess was. He can’t answer that, either. He asks Carrie why Hallie lives in the great house of Collinwood. She says that it is because there was an accident. Barnabas confirms that is so, and that the accident involved her parents. He asks her what their names were. She cannot answer. He presses on when they object. Finally, Carrie calls out to Daphne, a ghost whom she and Tad had previously denied ever having heard of, to come and help them. Shocked, Tad looks at her and calls her Carrie. The cat is out of the bag.

Longtime viewers will be thrilled by Barnabas’ questions. Not only is it a refreshing change to see him demonstrating presence of mind and moving quickly to advance the story, but the references to David’s mother and to his previous governess bring up characters who used to be very important to the show and who have been absent from the story and unmentioned for a long time. Real heads know who those women were, Tad and Carrie are exposed as noobs.

Throughout this interrogation, Carolyn/ Leticia was standing still, watching placidly while Carrie and Tad got flustered and blew their cover. Barnabas asks what the ghosts of Daphne and of someone named Gerard want. At that, Carolyn/ Leticia breaks her silence. Smiling, she says that Tad and Carrie do not yet know the answer to that themselves. Neither does she, come to that. She wafts away, leaving everyone reeling.

Yesterday, Tad told Carrie that if they let on who they really were, they would be defeated at once. It was not at all clear then what anyone could do to bring that about. Tad tells Barnabas that he and Carrie are here to stay, and that there is nothing he can do to stop them. This seems to be true.

Carrie distressed, Tad defiant. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

After Barnabas leaves Carrie and Tad alone in David’s room, they wonder what happened to Hallie and David. They say that they liked them, and that they hope nothing bad happened to them. Carrie asks Tad if he thinks David and Hallie are dead. He says he doesn’t think so, but he sounds very doubtful. Carrie asks where they are. He says they aren’t anyplace. While he and Carrie are using their bodies, Hallie and David “don’t exist.” It may seem obvious that ceasing to exist qualifies as something bad happening to a person, but ever since Epicurus in the fourth century BCE that has been an open question among philosophers. So maybe nothing bad did happen to David and Hallie. Certainly nothing at all will happen to them ever again.

Though Carrie and Tad have entirely erased Hallie and David, Carolyn persists. Leticia sets out to tell Quentin Collins something. By the time she gets to Quentin’s room, Carolyn has reemerged and is unsure what she is doing there. Quentin is drunk, which is not unusual. He is under Daphne’s power and has been unable to do anything to prevent Tad and Carrie from taking over David and Hallie’s bodies. Carolyn became clairvoyant when Leticia moved in with her, and can tell Quentin is feeling guilty about something. He denies everything.

There’s a lot of spellcasting today. Quentin tries to break free of Daphne by setting fire to her handkerchief. This fails immediately. Carrie and Tad try to raise one of the ghosts from the dead. They hope they will get Daphne, because they are afraid of Gerard, but they have no way of knowing which one it will be. The episode ends with a knock at the door. We will have to wait until tomorrow to find out whether that will be Daphne, Gerard, or the man from the gas company come to read the meter.

Episode 1097: In a different life

In July 1970, Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman came unstuck in time and spent two weeks in the far-off future year 1995. They found that the great house of Collinwood was in ruins, its residents either dead, missing, or insane as the result of a mysterious disaster that took place before 1970 was out. Since returning to their own period, they have been making fruitless efforts to learn what is happening and prevent the disaster.

Today, we see Julia sitting on the couch in the drawing room, reading a book and picking her teeth. Barnabas is pacing nearby. I am not making this up, the ABC network actually broadcast this on national television.

This thrilling scene follows an exchange in which Barnabas and Julia talk about a place called Rose Cottage that they heard about in 1995 and have been trying to find for the last six weeks. Julia tells Barnabas that it has just occurred to her that the place may not be known as Rose Cottage now. Barnabas does not understand what she means. Julia tries to explain that it might be possible for people to use one name for a house at one time and a different name for the same house at a different time. Barnabas has difficulty with this concept. Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid, highly trained and much-honored actors, play this exchange with great emotional tumult, focusing our attention on the precise level of cognitive ability it suggests the characters have.

Just as we are thinking that the show has finally come to a dead halt, Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes enters. Julia and Barnabas notice that Carolyn seems to be in a good mood, to which they make it their business to put an immediate stop. They say Carolyn must not have heard about the latest crisis concerning teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins:

JULIA: Carolyn, how are you feeling?

CAROLYN: Quite well, thank you. But both of you look so terribly distressed. Whatever’s the matter?

BARNABAS: Well, hasn’t anyone told you?

CAROLYN: Told me what?

BARNABAS: Well, the children are missing.

CAROLYN: Oh, that. Yes, I know.

JULIA: Well, aren’t you the least bit concerned about it?

CAROLYN: No.

JULIA: Why, Carolyn? Why aren’t you concerned? Carolyn, do you know something about David and Hallie you’re not telling us?

CAROLYN: Perhaps.

JULIA: Well, you must tell us. Do you know where they are?

CAROLYN: They’re gone. David and Hallie are gone.

BARNABAS: We told you that!

JULIA: Carolyn, we believe they’re in some terrible danger, the children.

CAROLYN: The children, in danger? No, no, that’s not true.

JULIA: How do you know it’s not true?

CAROLYN: Because I know the children are alive and well.

JULIA: If you know that much, then you must know where they are.

CAROLYN: No, that’s all I can tell you. They’re alive and well. Now, you must excuse me, I’m really very tired. (Exit)

BARNABAS (watching Carolyn go): Do you think she knows what she’s talking about?

JULIA (wonderingly): I have no idea.

They say that if a performer is really present in a scene, there is always a chance that when you throw the light on them something wonderful will happen. What Nancy Barrett does here is as pure an example of this I could hope to find. Carolyn’s blissed-out insouciance is so great to watch that it redeems everything that went before. I wonder if Frid and Hall’s ferocious overplaying was deliberate, meant to give the sharpest possible contrast to what they knew Miss Barrett was about to do.

Later, Barnabas encounters Carolyn in the little-used west wing of the great house:

BARNABAS: Carolyn, what are you doing up here?

CAROLYN: What, I just went to get something from my room.

BARNABAS: Your room?

CAROLYN: Yes, just down the hall.

BARNABAS: But your room isn’t up here in the west wing, it’s downstairs in the house proper.

CAROLYN (laughing): Don’t be absurd. You know perfectly well I’ve always lived in the west wing. I do think it the most enchanting part of the house.

BARNABAS: Carolyn?

CAROLYN: May I ask why you keep calling me that?

BARNABAS: Because it’s your name.

CAROLYN (laughing): You know very well my name is Leticia, and I live in that room just down the hall.

BARNABAS: Leticia?

CAROLYN: Of course.

BARNABAS: Well, Leticia, perhaps you can tell me where the children are. Can you do that?

CAROLYN: What an odd question.

BARNABAS: What’s odd about it?

CAROLYN: Do you realize how late it is? Where else would the children be but in bed? You are a strange one! (exits, laughing.)

In 1995, Barnabas and Julia found that Hallie and David had died in 1970, and that ghosts which looked like them were in fact the ghosts of teenagers named Carrie and Tad who died in 1841. So when they find that David and Hallie are not in the house, they fly into a panic. In that same year, they found that Carolyn was alive, and that she had gone insane in 1970. So far as they could tell, Carolyn believing herself to be someone named Leticia who lived in the west wing of Collinwood was no part of the disaster. So they stay focused on Hallie and David, and let Carolyn/ Leticia go her own way.

Barnabas takes “Leticia’s” suggestion and goes into David’s bedroom. There, he finds the young fellow asleep in bed. Later, Julia has gone to Hallie’s room and found her bed also occupied. Julia woke her and herded her into David’s room, where Barnabas confronts both teens. They claim that they ran away from home because all the talk about ghosts and whatnot had unsettled them, and that they came back because they realized they were being silly. Barnabas mentions the names of some of the ghosts; they claim never to have heard those names. Barnabas is startled by this denial. Returning viewers know that Julia has mentioned the names to David and Hallie, and it is likely she told Barnabas she had done so. They are trying to play dumb, but in fact reveal that something is very wrong.

Carolyn enters. Barnabas leaves her alone with the teenagers. He is still just outside the door when he hears the three of them bid each other goodnight. Carolyn calls them Carrie and Tad; they call her Leticia. Barnabas bursts back in and declares “You are both possessed!” All three of them are possessed, but what he saw in 1995 leads him to disregard Carolyn’s possession and to focus on David and Hallie’s.

Early in the episode, we saw what it means when Carolyn says “David and Hallie are gone.” They no longer exist. Their bodies are now the vessels through which Tad and Carrie have resumed living. Carrie and Tad talked about the importance of keeping up the appearance of being Hallie and David; Tad said that one slip would be enough to expose them, and then “the game will be over.” We might wonder how. What can the living characters do to defeat the ghosts, if they know what the ghosts are doing? Nothing we’ve seen in the last six weeks suggests an answer to that question. For all we can tell, Julia, Barnabas, and the rest of them are so completely helpless that the ghosts may as well throw all discretion aside and operate openly.

Episode 1091: Whoever did this

David Henesy has been in the cast of Dark Shadows since the first week, yet today is the first time he has been called upon to deliver the opening voiceover narration, after dozens of other cast members have had their turns. He does a great job with it, he should have done it every time.

As the voiceover concludes, we dissolve to an extreme closeup of a fixture that has been on the show even longer than has Mr Henesy, the clock in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. We see that there is a little painting in the body of the clock, above its face. It is a rustic landscape centered on a small church. I believe this is the first time we have been able to see this painting; certainly it is the first time it has received such emphasis. The episode will end with a closeup of a cross that heroine Julia Hoffman is carrying as she goes off to confront a vampire. Opening with a picture of a church and closing with a cross would suggest that there is some kind of Christian content in between, though it escapes me what it might be.

Today’s story is a whodunit. Governess Maggie Evans has been bitten by a vampire. Julia suspects her best friend, Barnabas Collins. Barnabas denies that he is the guilty party. They have three conversations which we might call soulful, if it weren’t tactless to remind Barnabas that he has no soul. When Julia sees Maggie’s indifferent response to Barnabas when he visits her in her sickroom, she is convinced of his innocence. That does raise the question of how Barnabas has been getting his nutrition lately, a question the show does absolutely nothing to answer or forestall.

Teenager Hallie Stokes fears that the ghost of the evil Gerard Stiles is responsible for Maggie’s condition. Her friend David Collins conjures up, not the ghost of Gerard, but that of Hallie’s lookalike Carrie Stokes, who indicates that Gerard had nothing to do with it.

So we know that we now have a B-story to complement the A-story of Gerard’s haunting of Collinwood, and that the villain in that B-story is a vampire who is new in town. Barnabas mentions that astrologer Sebastian Shaw arrived in Collinsport only recently; Julia rules Sebastian out as a potential vampire, since she has seen him during the day.

Sebastian arrived with a woman named Roxanne. Barnabas does not mention Roxanne as a suspect, perhaps because he is deeply infatuated with her and does not want to believe she shares his curse. But returning viewers know that Roxanne appears only at night that she has some hold over Sebastian that makes him miserable, and that just before Maggie showed up with the puncture marks on her neck Roxanne was quarreling with Sebastian about a date he had had with Maggie. Roxanne alluded to mysterious powers that she has and looked self-satisfied when she said she had further plans to use those powers. So I think we have to classify Roxanne as the prime suspect in the latest attack on Maggie.

Episode 1086: Their ridiculous prophecies

Teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes are intermittently subject to possession by the ghosts of Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes. They fear that the ghosts will soon take them over permanently, erasing their own personalities once and for all. We have seen the future, and know that unless something changes not only will the bodies of Hallie and David become vessels for Carrie and Tad, but those bodies will die and the ghosts will haunt the uninhabitable ruins of the great house of Collinwood for years to come.

Previously, Tad and Carrie had been unaware of David and Hallie. When one of them was possessed, the ghost would not know whom the other meant when addressing them by the name of the living person. But yesterday Carrie and Tad simultaneously took possession of Hallie and David, and they talked to each other about how much they liked them and how puzzled they were that they were afraid of them. They went to the ghost of their governess, Daphne Harridge, and asked her if she knew why David and Hallie were afraid of them. For a moment we might have hoped that communication would take place and the story of the haunting would finally pick up steam, but that hope was dashed when Daphne responded to Tad and Carrie with silence. Daphne had been silent in her interactions with the living characters until Hallie and David heard her laugh in a dream they both had in #1082. It’s depressing that she can’t talk even to her fellow ghosts.

Any hopes we may have had for Hallie or Carrie also suffered yesterday from Kathleen Cody’s poor performance. Miss Cody gets a lot of hate from fandom, much of it unfair. She is good sometimes. But called upon to draw a bright line between the frightened Hallie and the cheerful Carrie, she went way overboard in both parts. The excessively ebullient Carrie is easy to ignore, while the heavily distraught Hallie is tiresome in the extreme. Even the usually reliable David Henesy occasionally got caught up in Miss Cody’s hamminess and overplayed David Collins. He pulled himself back each time, but it is hard to look forward to heaven knows how much more of this story when that keeps happening.

Today we get another David and Hallie/ Tad and Carrie episode, and it is little better than yesterday’s. Miss Cody is even more monotonous than she was yesterday. Mr Henesy does keep from following her into the dead end where she is stuck, and he manages to introduce a touch of comedy. The ghosts lock David in his room with Hallie, and his response is go directly to the window, open it, and climb out. His room appears to be on the third floor of the house and to overlook a cliff, but if that’s the only alternative to spending an hour locked up with Hallie I don’t think anyone can blame him.

David climbs out the window to get the hell away from Hallie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The highlight comes when David sees his distant cousin, Quentin Collins, standing by the brandy decanter. David has overheard Quentin muttering about a mysterious stranger and has questions:

David: Who are you talking to?

Quentin (drunk): The dregs, David…the dregs of this glass. That’s where all the answers are.

David: I thought you said something about a stranger.

Quentin: Oh, well, I’m in immediate danger of becoming a stranger to my glass, but that can be easily remedied. Yes, it can be. [Pours drink.] Ah ha ha…friends again.

Quentin was a malevolent ghost when we first got to know him, late in 1968. We then traveled back in time to 1897, where we met him as a living being. He was an utterly irresponsible rascal, selfish, cruel, cowardly, and shameless, and everyone who saw him fell in love with him at once. His death was prevented, he was immunized against aging, and when the show returned to contemporary dress there he was, none the worse for his 100 years. But they couldn’t find much of a place for him in the story. He may not be making many things happen these days, but in this exchange we find that he is still an alcoholic. As long as he has that going for him, he will always be the Quentin we can’t get enough of.

Episode 1085: What’s happened to my freedom?

If you’re telling a fictional story and your audience is with you, they will treat whatever you don’t explain as something that does not need to be explained. So if the story takes place in and around a village on the Atlantic coast about 50 miles from Bangor, Maine, you don’t need to explain why Bar Harbor doesn’t exist in the world you are describing. They will take it for granted that your village is on that spot instead.

When you introduce fantastic elements and don’t explain them, you have “fantasy fiction.” That’s the category Dark Shadows has belonged to since undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins joined the cast of characters late in 1966 and her arc absorbed all of the unresolved narrative threads that were still generating interest. So in March 1970, it turned out that an alternate universe could sometimes be glimpsed in a room in the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood, and that people who entered the room at the right time could cross over into that universe. The aperture between the universes was not induced by any process, either natural or artificial; it was just there, and it was marked by an ordinary door. The handful of throwaway lines we heard about the many-worlds hypothesis were not explanatory in any way; they were simply a description of one way the show might use the alternate universe to develop characters. Because the practicalities were not explained, we accepted them as something that needed no explanation.

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and her friend, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, crossed over into the other universe. They escaped from it in July, while the alternate version of Collinwood was on fire. Evidently the flames disturbed the aperture, because they found themselves, not in the summer of 1970, but in 1995. In that far-off future year, Collinwood was in ruins and everyone who had lived there was either dead, missing, or insane. Julia and Barnabas learned that this sad state of affairs resulted from a mysterious disaster that took place at some point in 1970. They had gathered only a little information as to what this disaster might have been when they had to flee for their lives. A ghost led them to a magic doorway behind which a staircase appeared. They followed this staircase to another doorway. They passed through that, and found themselves back in the Collinwood of their own native universe in 1970, sometime before the disaster is due to strike.

Passing from 1995 to 1970 by means of a stairway is as fantastic as passing from one universe to another by means of a door, but it was not explained, and has barely been mentioned these last three weeks as Julia, Barnabas, and those they have told of their experiences have been trying to figure out what the disaster is going to be and how they might prevent it. So we have accepted it as readily as we accepted the “Parallel Time room.”

That changes today. Julia knows that the ghosts represent people who lived in 1840, and has started looking for information about the staircase in documents from that year. Quentin Collins has been giving her a hand with this project. She finds a plan for a “Proposed Stairway into Time” signed by another Quentin Collins and dated 1840.

Plan. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The ghost of governess Daphne Harridge seemed friendly to Julia and Barnabas in 1995, but in 1970 she has ensorcelled Quentin and kept him from being as helpful to Julia as he might. Today, Daphne oversees the destruction of a notebook in which teens David Collins and Hallie Stokes have written an account of their experiences with her and the other ghosts. But later it seems Daphne might be coming back around. She gives Quentin another journal, which he hands over to Julia. In it, Julia finds that Quentin’s namesake from 1840 had written about the thoughts that led him to design his “Proposed Stairway into Time”:

There is no such thing as time. There’s only space, physical space, and it is space that measures the distance between those points which we, in our ignorance and folly, insist are points in time. All time is one point, one moment. It is ever existent and it is ever accessible, and it is physical space that can be used to make all time easily accessible.

This describes the show’s method of jumping backward, forward, and sideways in time accurately enough. They cut from a set in one part of the studio to a set in another, and in so doing they have defeated chronology. Since Julia has found the note as part of an investigation that has kept her busy for so long, we are led to expect that we will be hearing more of this kind of talk, perhaps arranged in a pattern that will create the impression that we are being presented with an explanation of something.

Dark Shadows has been desperately short of story since Julia and Barnabas returned to 1970, and spinning out explanations is one way of introducing new story points. When these explanations resemble theories that researchers are actually using to look into natural phenomena, they turn fantastic fiction into science fiction. At no point has Dark Shadows come anywhere near this genre, and it does not seem like the “Proposed Stairway into Time” will lead them there. But who knows. Before Laura came on the show, it was a Gothic romance that included hints that ghosts and other unearthly forces were at work in an uncanny back-world behind the action. If Laura could transform it from that into the supernatural thriller it has been ever since, perhaps Quentin’s namesake from 1840 will be able to transform it into a science-fiction show.

If they are going to take that route, a time-travel gimmick would seem to be the logical way to merge onto it. Ghosts and vampires and zombies and other revenants, like time travel and alternate universes, are ways of making believe that options which events have foreclosed are still at least partly open to us. So if we say that the 1840 Quentin built a time machine, we can subsume more or less everything else we have seen under the idea that he created a rupture in space-time through which all of the other weird phenomena have been cascading.

Episode 1084: A living man no bigger than a doll

Julia Hoffman and her friend Barnabas Collins recently returned to 1970 after a cosmic journey that ended with two weeks in 1995. In that far-off future year, they found the great house of Collinwood in ruins and everyone who had lived there either dead, missing, or hopelessly insane. This was the result of a mysterious disaster that occurred before 1970 was out. Since they returned, they have been trying to find out what this disaster will be and to prevent it.

Julia’s friend Timothy Eliot Stokes tells her she and Barnabas have accomplished nothing since they came back to 1970. He says that the time has come to enlist the aid of a strangely dressed man named Sebastian Shaw. Sebastian has psychic powers, and may be able to use them to figure out what’s going on.

Sebastian comes to the great house. Julia tells him of her experience in the future. He has a vision which he says he cannot interpret. It is presented to us in an unfocused shot, so that we can believe Sebastian does not know what he is seeing. But we recognize it. It is The Playroom, a room that intermittently exists behind a door in a little-used part of the great house. Most of the time that door opens on a linen closet, but teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins have found that occasionally the same door admits them to a much larger space stocked with antique toys and ruled by the ghosts of several people who died in 1841. Julia knows The Playroom well; she and Barnabas visited it several times in 1995, and met the same ghosts there who are now taking control of David and Hallie. Julia and Barnabas also went to The Playroom in 1995 with two living people, Carolyn Fredericks (née Carolyn Collins Stoddard) and the Sheriff of Collinsport. But in 1970, only the linen closet has so far been visible to anyone other than Hallie, David, or the ghosts.

After Sebastian has his vision, Stokes and Julia decide to bring David and Hallie to him. Stokes goes upstairs to fetch them, and Julia goes to get some tea. When she returns to the drawing room, Julia finds Sebastian at the piano. He is playing the melody that often sounds in The Playroom, and that Julia heard echoing through the house in 1995. She asks him where he heard it. When he says he was just making it up as he went along, she flatly declares that he is lying. He must have heard it in his vision, because it is the very tune that is associated with the phenomenon they are investigating. He will not admit to this, and she will not soften her tone. On the contrary, she says that she had suspected that he was a fraud, but that she now believes he is something far worse- a man with genuine psychic gifts who uses them dishonestly. We learned yesterday that this is precisely what Sebastian is, but Julia can hardly expect him to agree with her. He says that he is being insulted, and leaves the house before Hallie and David can get downstairs.

Julia has been given to counterproductively harsh behavior of this sort since returning to 1970. Perhaps this is the consequence of a trauma she suffered in 1995, when a blatantly evil ghost known as Gerard Stiles took possession of her. Or perhaps it is the influence of someone she encountered on the first leg of her journey, when she was in an alternate universe. There, she met her own Doppelgänger. She greeted this other Julia Hoffman by beating her to death, stealing her clothes, and assuming her identity. A deed like that might leave a mark on its doer. Besides, that other Hoffman was herself inclined to be tactless, so perhaps Julia picked that habit up in the course of her imposture.

Unknown to Julia and Stokes, David and Hallie are busy in The Playroom today. Yesterday they learned that the ghosts plan to reduce them to the status of the dolls that are in a dollhouse there. In particular, the ghost of a teenage boy named Tad wants to take possession of David, and that of a teenage girl named Carrie wants to take possession of Hallie. Tad and Carrie will then live their lives while David and Hallie are in storage as inanimate things in a miniature case. Hallie and David took the dolls to the fireplace in the drawing room and burned them there, hoping this would break the power of the ghosts. Once they had seen the flames consume the dolls, they returned to The Playroom, hoping to find that it had vanished and the linen closet had resumed its place. To their dismay, they found that The Playroom was still there and the dolls had reappeared in their places in the dollhouse.

While David and Hallie are processing this fact, they see lights come on inside the dollhouse. The dollhouse has no electricity, so this puzzles them. David looks inside the dollhouse and sees a man in it. He is the size of the dolls, but is moving around as if he is alive. By the time Hallie comes around to look, the tiny man has vanished. She believes that David saw him, though.

David then tells Hallie that they ought to write up everything that has happened to them since they first encountered The Playroom. When Hallie asks what good that would do, David says it is the only way people will know what happened to them after they are gone.

They go to David’s room and write the whole story in a notebook. When Stokes comes to get them, they hide the notebook. They return to the room after Sebastian’s abrupt departure, and find that the notebook is gone.

Hallie and David decide that one of the ghosts must have taken the notebook. They go to The Playroom to look for it. They open the door, and see Carrie and Tad reading the notebook.

David and Hallie see Carrie and Tad. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David’s vision of a little man moving around inside the dollhouse now reminds me of the moment in part 6 of the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks when a tiny version of the supernatural figure known as “Mike” appears to the near-catatonic Special Agent Dale Cooper and urges him to “Wake up! Wake up! Don’t die! Don’t die!” “Mike” is a resident of The Red Room, a space that is as mysterious in its nature and as intermittent in its presence as is The Playroom. We can assume that the tiny man David sees is Gerard, whose plans for him are just the opposite of “Mike’s” wish that Cooper should regain his true identity and once more function as an action hero.

At the time, the idea of living figures small enough to make their homes in a dollhouse and of people from the outside world shrunken and enclosed with them might have reminded viewers of the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “Miniature,” featuring the young Robert Duvall as a lonely man who encounters such a situation. “Mike” himself is a reference to 1960s cult television; he is a mysterious one-armed man who sometimes goes by the name Philip Gerard, evoking the two antagonists Dr Richard Kimble faced on The Fugitive. So it is not unlikely that “Miniature” was a common source for that installment of Twin Peaks and this installment of Dark Shadows. It isn’t even impossible that David Lynch or Mark Frost saw this episode of Dark Shadows and were on some level influenced by it as they wrote the script for Twin Peaks, though of course that would be a far less probable source than The Twilight Zone, which has long been one of the most heavily rerun of all TV shows.

At any rate, I think the similarity is intriguing even beyond the question of influences and sources. A soundstage looks a lot like a dollhouse, and when a drama isn’t connecting with the audience the actors may as well be dolls the director is playing a private game with. So the premise of characters ending up in a dollhouse plays to a fear that must prey on the minds of the writers.

Moreover, all three of these shows share a theme of stunted sexual development. Robert Duvall’s character in “Miniature” is a solitary man who cannot achieve any form of intimacy with another person. The stupefied Agent Cooper lives with a woman who has mistaken him for her husband and enjoys sex with her, but that is strictly a matter of mechanics. He has no idea what is going on during their encounters.

For their part, David and Hallie seem to be developing on the usual timetable. Certainly the dialogue between them when they were first introduced acknowledged that they were old enough to be interested in each other sexually, though David made it very clear to Hallie that she was not the partner he would choose. But Tad and Carrie seem to be quite alarmingly immature. Tad first possessed David in #1081, on Monday. That day, Hallie found David in The Playroom. Speaking as Tad, David took her to be Carrie. Tad was shocked by Hallie’s 1970 clothing and advised her to take it off immediately. It doesn’t seem to occur to Tad that there is anything untoward about demanding Carrie disrobe in front of him. Tad also said that he would be sad when he was too old to play with the toys in The Playroom. But he is very obviously much too old to be enthusiastic about a rocking horse, a dollhouse, a miniature carousel, and a bunch of stuffed animals. So his and Carrie’s attachment to those things shows that even when they were alive they were relics of a dead past. They never grew up, and their ghosts are determined to freeze Hallie and David in place, immobilized and on display in a small, unchanging world.

Danny Horn’s post under the title Episode 1084 on his great Dark Shadows Every Day doesn’t have all that much to do with the episode, but it is a magnificent production in its own right. Its subtitle is “100 Things That I Would Like David and Hallie to See When They Open the Playroom Door, in No Particular Order.” The 100 things he lists range from chuckleworthy to hilarious. Best of all, it ends with a video the post inspired Cody Schell to put together with alternate endings for the episode.

Episode 1082: I haven’t been wrong very often when it comes to judgment of people

Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman have returned to 1970 from a cosmic journey that took them first to a parallel universe, then to the future year 1995. In the parallel universe, they met a comatose woman named Roxanne Drew. Barnabas was immediately smitten with Roxanne, and was still attracted to her even after she gained the ability to open her eyes and move around. By the time she was able to speak, he was in love. Roxanne couldn’t come along when they left her universe, and he’s been down in the dumps about that. Barnabas could always go to the hospital and look for another comatose woman, but I suppose that might not be quite the same, somehow.

Now, Barnabas has met Roxanne’s counterpart in his own universe. She is attached to astrologer Sebastian Shaw, whom Barnabas had been pestering for reasons having to do with the efforts he and Julia have been making to prevent a mysterious disaster they learned about during their stay in 1995. Sebastian was so fed up with Barnabas that he walked out of his own living room, leaving Barnabas alone there. Then the door opened, and a Roxanne Drew entered, carrying a brown paper grocery bag. Barnabas greeted her by name, to her puzzlement.

When Barnabas explains that he knew another Roxanne Drew who looked exactly like her “in another time,” Roxanne assumes he means many years ago. He allows her to proceed under this assumption, which does seem less likely to prompt a call to the police than introducing yourself to a stranger with a story about how you’ve been traveling between parallel universes and back and forth in time. Roxanne comes out with a theory that two people with the same name born on the same day in different parts of the USA might become “astral twins” and look just alike. This idea may not be less plausible than what Julia and Barnabas have actually done, but it does seem considerably less likely to be useful in making up interesting stories. So it comes as a great relief when Roxanne stops talking about it.

Barnabas asks Roxanne to meet him for dinner at 10 PM. This is an odd invitation, since Barnabas is a vampire. Where is he going to take her, the blood bank? She hesitates, but at length agrees to meet him “there.” They haven’t named a place.

Later, Roxanne calls the great house of Collinwood. Julia answers. Roxanne identifies herself, and Julia reacts with amazement. Roxanne says she must be thinking of “that other Roxanne Drew.” She says that she won’t be able to meet Barnabas for dinner “there” after all.

Barnabas enters. He is excited to tell Julia about Roxanne. She tells him she already knows about her, and gives him Roxanne’s message. Julia reminds him that some people in the parallel universe were radically different from their counterparts in this universe, giving herself and her counterpart as an example. Barnabas refuses to admit that this Roxanne Drew is not the same person as the one whose immobility and silence so charmed him in the other continuity. Julia keeps warning him, and he declares that “I haven’t been wrong very often when it comes to judgment of people.” This remark will astound regular viewers. Barnabas is a worse judge of character than any figure in all human history. I myself can’t claim to be all that perspicacious, but neither I nor anyone else I know has ever misjudged a person so desperately we were turned into vampires as a result. That has happened to Barnabas twice. Julia is so stunned by Barnabas’ bizarre remark that all she can do is humor him and say that she agrees with his assessment of himself.

Barnabas goes back to Sebastian’s apartment and speaks to Roxanne. She says he must not have received her message. He says he did, but asks to come in anyway. She allows it, and he gets strangely aggressive with his insistence that they will eventually go out together. He’s usually a lot more pleasant with people, unless he’s been feeding on their blood or threatening to kill them. He wants to charm Roxanne, so we may wonder why he gets in her face, adopts a sullen tone, and vows that she will someday date him. The other Roxanne had an obnoxious ex-boyfriend named Claude North. In his sulky and petulant refusal to take no for an answer, or even for an indication that he has to change tactics, Barnabas sounds a lot like Claude.

Meanwhile, Julia has been trying to find out which house in the area was known as “Rose Cottage” in 1840. During their sojourn in 1995, she and Barnabas received some cryptic clues about the disaster that will befall the great house of Collinwood and everyone in it later in 1970, one of which was the phrase “the night Rose Cottage was destroyed.” Also during that trip they saw the ghosts of some people who lived in 1840, and since returning have found a document from that year that mentions a house called Rose Cottage, but does not say which house it was.

Teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins had died in the version of 1995 Barnabas and Julia visited. They saw ghosts who looked just like them, but were in fact those of figures from 1840 named Carrie and Tad. Julia suspects that David and Hallie are withholding information from her about paranormal occurrences in the house, as she and Barnabas are withholding information from them. Rather than leveling with Hallie and David about what they learned in 1995 and asking them to reciprocate, Julia has decided to be as inexplicably harsh and aggressive with Hallie as Barnabas is with Roxanne.

Hallie finds Julia going through some old tax records today. When Julia says that she is trying to figure out what house in the area used to be known as “Rose Cottage,” Hallie mentions that Julia had previously asked her if she’d ever heard of such a place. Julia takes that remark as an opportunity to fix Hallie with an unwavering stare and drill her with question after question. During this bizarre interrogation, the ghost of Tad and Carrie’s governess Daphne Harridge appears to Hallie, reminding her not to answer. Julia loses interest in Hallie and turns back to the tax records. Hallie excuses herself and follows Daphne out of the room.

David has a dream in which he finds Hallie in an unfamiliar corridor. He asks her where they are. She says they are in Rose Cottage. She tells him to follow her to a birthday party. He is unhappy that he has not brought a present; she laughs a little at this. They go into a small room and see two dummies sitting opposite each other at a table. Hallie says that they will sit in the other two places at the table. There are placecards identifying them as Carrie and Tad. They sit down, and Daphne’s gigantic face appears at the window. Daphne has been silent in all her appearances so far. She breaks her silence in this dream, laughing maniacally at the sight of David and Hallie sitting with the dummies.

Happy Dappy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David wakes up. He goes to a little-used part of the house. He finds Hallie in front of a door behind which there is usually a linen closet. Sometimes, however, the space transforms into a larger room stocked with antique toys. Hallie and David refer to that room as “The Playroom.” They have seen Daphne there several times and have sensed the presence of another, more blatantly hostile spirit, one which Julia and Barnabas came to know in 1995 as Gerard Stiles. Hallie asks David why he has joined her. He tells her about his dream. It turns out she had the same dream. They resign themselves to entering The Playroom. Inside, they see a dollhouse that has previously been set up with its facade towards them is now set on a lower table with its interior on display. There is a room that looks just like the one in their dream, complete with dolls sitting at the table.

Barnabas and Julia visited The Playroom several times in the future, and the dollhouse was there then. It always seemed likely that the dollhouse was a model of Rose Cottage. Now, it is confirmed that it is not merely a model of it, but is in some sense identical with it. Perhaps it is a ghostly survival of a house that no longer exists, or perhaps it is a mystical reflection of a haunted house that stands somewhere else in the area. One way or another, it seems that Hallie and David are fated to lose their independent existence and become inert playthings confined to an inaccessible space.

David, Hallie, Daphne, and Gerard are part of a recycled story. In late 1968 and early 1969, Dark Shadows adapted Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw with David and his friend Amy in the roles of the children Miles and Flora and the ghosts of Quentin Collins and Beth Chavez as the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. The whole point of the novella is that it is an open question whether the ghosts are real and the new governess is heroically trying to save the children from them or the ghosts are figments of the imagination of the governess, a crazy woman who is a mortal threat to her charges. Benjamin Britten’s opera preserves that ambiguity to some extent, but screen adaptations tend to come down firmly in favor of the ghosts being real. The first “Haunting of Collinwood” left no room for doubt on that score, and the current Re-Haunting of Collinwood is just as emphatic.

The ghosts of Quentin and Beth were silent when we first saw them in 1968, as Daphne’s ghost has been silent until she laughs maniacally today. They made their first appearance in #646, but neither of them made a sound until Quentin laughed maniacally in #689. Gerard has yet to make himself heard, though actor James Storm read the opening voiceover narration in #1066.

Episode 1076: The addition of the letter O

Grouchy New England teen David Collins and his live-in girlfriend Hallie Stokes go to a playroom for small children that intermittently manifests itself in a space otherwise occupied by a linen closet in the west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Hallie is possessed by the spirit of a girl named Carrie, who died in 1841. David hasn’t caught on that Hallie isn’t herself, and in his exasperation he asks her to “stop acting like the world’s number-one weirdo.” Carrie is puzzled by the word “weirdo.” She recognizes it as a derivative of “weird,” but claims that “the addition of the letter O makes it completely incomprehensible.” Evidently Carrie wasn’t all that quick on the uptake. If someone called me a “peculiar-Z,” I might not know why the letter Z was added, but it would be perfectly clear to me what they were saying. Historians of American English often say that the 1830s and 1840s were the single busiest period for the invention of new slang terms the USA has ever seen, so that if Carrie were as stumped by the “O” on “weirdo” as she claims to be, she would likely have been unable to conduct a conversation with many of her contemporaries.

David’s realistic 1970 dialogue and Carrie’s antiquated verbiage bounce off each other to produce some intentional comedy; my wife, Mrs Acilius, thought the scene was really funny. It is certainly more appealing than the rest of the episode, which is yet another series of events that take place only because the characters cannot bring themselves to tell each other what’s going on. Because the ghosts won’t let them, yes yes yes, we’ve been through all that many times before. The fansites seem bored enough by the whole thing that one of biggest points of discussion is whether it is reasonable to say that, because a bit of Grayson Hall’s slip is visible under her skirt at one point, we can say that we see her “underwear.” I guess the slip is “underwear” in the sense that she is wearing it under something else, and it probably wasn’t supposed to be visible, but you’d have to be a very specific kind of person to get excited about it.

Hall plays Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia is a psychiatrist, among other things. She tells Quentin Collins that the ghost of Daphne Harridge, a governess who like her charge Carrie died in 1841, fills the room with the scent of lilacs when she is near. Quentin is so obviously lying when he tells Julia that he has not smelled that scent that we are probably supposed to assume that Julia is onto him.