Tag: christopher pennock

Episode 949: Not that Quentin Collins

Ten year old Amy Jennings is at home in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Evidently she’s in a literal mood- she’s in the drawing room, so she’s drawing. Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard sees Amy’s work and asks why she is doing it. Amy says she thinks the design is “pretty”; Carolyn replies that “pretty” is the last thing she would call it. That may seem rather rude, but as Amy hasn’t been seen since #912 I suppose she’ll take what she can get.

The design is one which on Dark Shadows is called simply a Naga. It is the secret emblem of a secret cult serving the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods. Secret cultist Megan Todd wears the Naga on a large pendant around her neck; Megan’s husband, secret cultist Philip, wears it on a shining ring; Carolyn’s mother, secret cultist Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, wears it as an oversized broach. Amy herself is a secret member of the secret cult, but she hasn’t yet acquired any conspicuous jewelry emblazoned with the secret symbol, leaving her to do her own artwork. Carolyn wonders aloud why so many people are so preoccupied with the design.

Quentin Collins enters. Amy is terrified. Starting in December 1968, Quentin’s ghost haunted Collinwood. By March, the house was uninhabitable and strange and troubled boy David Collins was near death. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins tried some mumbo-jumbo in hopes of communicating with Quentin; he came unstuck in time and found himself in the year 1897, where he remained for eight months. While Barnabas was flailing about in the late Victorian era, time continued to pass in 1969, and Quentin’s obsession of David finally killed him in September. But a sequence of events with which Barnabas had a tenuous connection changed the circumstances on the night in September 1897 when Quentin originally died, causing him to survive. That night, as it happened, was exactly 72 years before David’s death. On Dark Shadows, anniversaries have the power that laws of nature have in our world, so that caused the haunting to break and David to come back to life. Due to a series of spells cast on him during Barnabas’ sojourn in the past, Quentin is still alive and still apparently in his late twenties in 1970. But the haunting still happened between December 1968 and September 1969, and everyone who lived through it still remembers it.

Quentin has introduced himself to Carolyn as his own great-grandson. Since Carolyn never actually saw his ghost, she is willing to accept this. But Amy had more dealings with the ghost than anyone but David, and it is obvious to her that they are one and the same. She clings to Carolyn.

Amy knows a Quentin when she sees one. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn laughs at Amy’s fear and tells her that this Quentin is not the ghost, but is “a cousin of ours.” This is intriguing to regular viewers. It was during the 1897 segment that the audience learned that Quentin was the great-grandfather of Amy and her brother Chris, and just a few weeks ago that Chris learned about that relationship. It is through their descent from Quentin that Amy and Chris are cousins to Carolyn. So if Amy knows she is a Collins, she must have been told that the ghost that tormented her and David was that of her great-grandfather. A scene in which someone gave her that information might have been a good use of Denise Nickerson’s considerable acting talent, but they didn’t bother to produce one.

Quentin tells Carolyn to leave him alone with Amy. Still chuckling, she complies. Once they are alone in the drawing room, Quentin kneels and touches Amy’s face, assuring her that he is “not that Quentin Collins.” David Selby brought immense charm to the role of Quentin, so this scene isn’t as revolting as it might have been, but it is still pretty bad, and we can’t be surprised that Amy is not satisfied.

Amy goes to the village of Collinsport to seek guidance from her spiritual advisor. He is a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time who usually takes the form of a very tall young man. When he first assumed that form, he invited people to “Call me Jabe,” but no one did. They call him “Jeb” instead, and he answers to it.

Jabe lives in a room above Megan and Philip’s antique shop, and when Amy enters the shop she finds him looking after the place. Apparently shape-shifting monsters from beyond space and time aren’t above doing a little work in retail now and then. She tells Jabe about her encounter with Quentin, and then tells him about a dream she had. In the dream, she went into the long-disused room where she and David first met Quentin. Quentin’s theme song, a sickly little waltz, was playing; she exclaims “It was terrible!” Longtime viewers know the feeling. The tune played incessantly during the “Haunting of Collinwood” period, and when they went back to 1897 characters kept complaining to the living Quentin that he was making them miserable by playing it on his phonograph all the time.

In the dream, Quentin appeared to Amy wearing the nineteenth century clothing and the angry scowl that he wore when he was a ghost. But when he was a ghost, he never spoke words the audience could hear. The only exception was a dream sequence in #767, when Quentin’s ghost spoke to David. That was also the only other dream sequence to be presented as this one is, in flashback as the dreamer is recounting it after the fact. That sequence marked a watershed, the first attempt to explain how Quentin the cranky ghost emerged from Quentin the charming scoundrel we had got to know in the 1897 segment.

This episode, also, has to do with the relationship between these two iterations of Quentin. Amy tells Jabe that Quentin’s ghost in the dream warned her against him by name, and says that she is therefore convinced that the living man she met in the drawing room today is in some way identical to the ghost who haunted the house for those ten months. Amy’s dream marks the final appearance of Quentin’s ghost, but we can see the ghost will not be forgotten.

A state police investigator named Lawrence Guthrie is in town looking into two murders Jabe has committed, those of Carolyn’s father Paul and of a law enforcement officer whose gravestone revealed that his given name was “Sheriff Davenport” (we never learn what Mr Davenport’s title was.) Jabe orders Philip to kill Guthrie. Philip calls Guthrie and asks him to come to the antique shop when Jabe will be out. Once Guthrie is there, Philip tells him that the upstairs room where Jabe stays is an important part of the story of the murders. He shows Guthrie into the room. He stays outside, and locks Guthrie in. Guthrie encounters Jabe there in his true form; Jabe kills him. This is quite effectively handled. My wife, Mrs Acilius, was completely caught off guard by the killing. She believed Philip really was trying to break free of the Leviathan cult, and wondered what Guthrie was supposed to find in the room.

Neither Jabe nor Philip is an especially well-developed character, but Christopher Bernau and Christopher Pennock were both fine actors, and they play off each other very well today. It is a tribute to their performances that Guthrie’s death scene comes as a surprise.

At the end, Quentin is at Collinwood trying to tell Carolyn that it was Jabe who killed her father and Mr S. Davenport. Inexplicably, Carolyn is interested in dating Jabe, and is unwilling to listen to this. Jabe bursts in and announces that there has been another murder, that the murderer is in custody, and that he has confessed to it and to the killings of Paul and Sheriff. That murderer, Jabe says, is Philip. That’s another surprise- after the murder of Guthrie, Jabe did tell Philip that he had another task to perform, and once we hear that he has confessed to the killings it makes perfect sense that that would have been what Jabe meant. But I don’t think anyone could have predicted it. It makes for a strong ending.

Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day is a lovely little bit of fanfic proceeding from the assumption that Lawrence Guthrie is the brother of Dr Peter Guthrie, the parapsychologist whom undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins killed in March 1967.

The closing credits again misspell writer Violet Welles’ name as “Wells.” They started doing that last week, around the same time the misspelling of wardrobe house Ohrbach’s as “Orhbach’s,” a frequent goof in the show’s first year, reappeared after a long absence.

Episode 947: More! MORE! MO-O-O-RE!!!

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins comes home shortly after dawn and finds that the window of his front parlor has been smashed in. Entering the house, he finds two young men passed out. He knows both of these men, and knows that neither is what he seems to be. The taller of them, who once asked to be called Jabe, is in his true form an indescribable monster from beyond space and time, the harbinger of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who mean to retake the Earth and destroy humankind. The other, Chris Jennings, is a werewolf. The Leviathans are vulnerable to werewolves, and Barnabas realizes that Chris reverted to his human form when the sun rose, just as he was about to kill Jabe.

Chris comes to, and Barnabas hustles him out of the house. He then wakes Jabe. He tells Jabe that he fought the werewolf off, killing it and saving Jabe’s life. Barnabas was the original leader of a cult devoted to serving the Leviathans, but has since become disaffected. Jabe had seen evidence of this, and set out for Barnabas’ house meaning to punish him for his disloyalty. But by the time the werewolf chased him into the house he was crying out for Barnabas to help him, so he is ready to believe the story. Taking credit for things he had nothing to do with is one of Barnabas’ core competencies, so it is no surprise to longtime viewers that Jabe decides that he can trust Barnabas after all.

Barnabas’ ex-wife Angelique is now married to a man named Sky Rumson. She does not believe that Sky knows anything about her past or about anything supernatural, but the audience has seen over the last few episodes that he is an agent of the Leviathans. Angelique put Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn up in a house she and Sky have on an island to help Barnabas in his fight against the Leviathans while Sky was away on a business trip. At the end of that trip, Sky called to ask Angelique to pick him up at an airport far from the island house. When she got to the airport, she found he had already left. She wound up spending several hours alone on the road. Returning viewers know that Sky’s call was a trick to get her away from the house so Jabe could come and have his way with Carolyn. We also know that Jabe chickened out of his evil plan when he actually saw Carolyn, and that she is fine now.

Angelique comes home from her long wild goose chase and asks Sky what happened. He said he had an important phone call coming at the house, so he had to leave early. Angelique accepts this surprisingly easily. Barnabas shows up to take Carolyn home. He and Sky meet. After Barnabas is gone, Sky asks what the deal is with Carolyn. He presses the point, and Angelique tells him everything she knows about Barnabas and the Leviathans, including that he is now “their most dedicated enemy and he means to use every power he has to stop them.”

This scene is bad news for Barnabas, but it is worse for the audience’s image of Angelique. She used to be a wicked witch of vast destructive power, and was supposed to be the ultimate Soap Opera Vixen. But you wouldn’t have to be a witch, or even a vixen, to avoid the situation Angelique puts herself in. Leaving the airport when he knew she was on the way was a colossal act of thoughtlessness, and no husband who committed it could expect to hear a word from his wife about anything else for at least a week. After that, there will be a long period when she will have an unanswerable source of material to keep him off his guard any time he tries to bring up topics she doesn’t want to discuss. By the time Sky is able to start asking questions about why Angelique had Carolyn spend the night, it will probably be another full moon.

That isn’t even the worst of it. Angelique believes that Sky is simply a denizen of the sunlit world known to us in our everyday experience and explained well by science, and she further believes that he sees her in the same way. That makes it all but impossible for her to tell him what she tells him here. She launches right in with “the Leviathans, they’re terribly dangerous creatures, completely evil and they mean to start a whole new society.” If he really were a total naïf in supernatural matters, this story would lead him to pick up the telephone and call the men in the white coats to come and take Angelique to a place where she could get a good long rest.

I don’t think Angelique’s scene with Sky could have worked in any case, but Geoffrey Scott’s limitations as an actor make it even worse than it had to be. He underacted so severely that he could hardly be said to be giving a performance at all. That makes a stark contrast with Lara Parker, who as Angelique fully embraced the hyper-intense Dark Shadows house style of acting, which, in honor of her own hilarious explanation of it, is sometimes known as “Go back to your grave!” That contrast is interesting at a technical level. It goes a long way towards explaining what Orson Welles meant when he said that hamminess was not overacting, but false acting. Parker goes as far over the top as she can, but there is rarely anything false about Angelique, while every tinny note Scott strikes in his flat recitation of his lines is thoroughly fake.

A charismatic actor might have been wasted as Sky, as Parker is wasted today. But the audience might have been able to meet the show halfway if we could believe that Sky was so fascinating to Angelique that she didn’t realize what she was saying. As it is, Scott looks so much like he is modeling menswear for the Sears catalogue that it is always a bit of a surprise when he moves and speaks. However much Angelique might enjoy Sky’s company, it never occurs to us that he would be a match for her in any sense.

Sky goes to Jabe and repeats what Angelique told him about Barnabas. There is an exchange which looks fine in print, but which Scott’s delivery makes sound like a blooper:

JABE: So everything he told me this morning was a lie! And I thought he had saved my life!

SKY: Evidently, everything he told you was a lie.

You would deliver Sky’s line with an emphasis on “everything,” as would I, as would anyone else. But Scott emphasizes “Evidently” and pauses slightly after “you,” making it sound as if he hadn’t heard Jabe. For a fraction of a second, you can see the amazement in Christopher Pennock’s face as he reacts to this clanger.

Jabe carries a cage with him as he goes to an old graveyard. The camera locks in on him in closeup as he shouts that, while death might be an adequate punishment for a mere murderer, Barnabas must suffer “More! MORE! MO-O-O-ORE!!!” More, more, more, how do you like it, how do you like it….

More more more. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The first time I saw this scene, I regarded it as a low point- I imagined someone tuning in to Dark Shadows for the first time at that moment, and instantly turning it off, believing ever after that only people of an extremely low mentality could like the show. I still think it’s pretty embarrassing writing, but having seen him in other roles I’ve come to realize that Pennock was in fact a good actor and that as Jabe he was saddled with an impossible task. Also, I’ve seen video of him on panels of original cast members at Dark Shadows conventions, and it is obvious that he was as sweet as Jabe is vicious. So watching the scene today, I ignored Jabe and looked at Christopher Pennock, studying his face to see what he was thinking as he struggled to find a way to give the audience something worth their while.

Jabe makes an incantation, and a bat comes flying to him. He catches it in the cage. We get a closeup of the bat puppet in the cage, which looks very much like a humane trap from Havahart. We know that Jabe plans to use the bat to make Barnabas back into a vampire, which he was for 172 years, but the realistic cage and the adorable little puppet prevent the situation from generating any terror. Dan Curtis said that when he was producing Dark Shadows, his young daughters used to urge him to make the show more frightening. When we were chuckling at the sight of the bat today, Mrs Acilius imitated a child saying “Make it scary, Daddy!”

Behold and tremble! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 935: Call me Jabe

Sheriff Davenport and his new sidekick, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, have come to the top of the stairs above Philip and Megan Todd’s antique shop in the village of Collinsport. The sheriff has a search warrant that specifies the room by the landing as a place of interest in connection with the violent death of one Paul Stoddard. Philip begs the sheriff not to enter the room, saying that a boy who lived there recently died and that any disturbance would “defile” it. He swears the room is entirely empty. The sheriff expresses his sympathy, but opens the door anyway.

Inside is a young man. Philip seems as surprised at the sight of him as are the sheriff and Julia. He gives his name as “Hawkes, Jeb Hawkes. Short for Jabez… Call me Jabe.” No one calls him Jabe, which seems a bit rude. Jabe claims that he came by earlier when Megan was in and Philip was out, and that she offered to let him live in the room.

The room does not contain any furniture, any luggage, or any other movable property whatsoever. Moreover, while it is possible Megan might have rented the room without mentioning it to Philip, it is difficult to see what Jabe has been doing up there since she left, and since Philip has been moving around the rest of the building it is even more difficult to suppose Jabe could have left his belongings elsewhere without attracting Philip’s notice. Jabe claims to be a photographer, but does not appear to have any camera equipment. Moreover, the sheriff will later tell Julia that he noticed a distinctive odor on Jabe that was prominent on Paul’s corpse, and that he found one of Paul’s cufflinks, damaged as by fire, on the floor of the antique shop. In the finest traditions of Collinsport law enforcement, the sheriff does not take Jabe or Philip into custody, question either of them more than cursorily, or close off the antique shop for a further search. He does come back later to tell Jabe that he should think about finding another apartment.

Jabe is the latest embodiment of a mysterious creature that has previously taken the form of a newborn boy, an eight year old boy, an eight year old girl, and a thirteen year old boy. The boys were vicious little tyrants who did not seem to think at all, only to follow impulses to dominate and humiliate whomever they met. The girl was a Doppelgänger of Paul’s daughter Carolyn as she was when she was eight, and she existed specifically to make Paul feel worthless because he was a deadbeat dad. None of these children engaged with another character in a way that meant there was anything at stake for them in any scene. They as much as tell us that the same will be true of Jabe. When Philip complains today that he has put him and Megan in a difficult position by failing to tell them of his plans, Jabe answers “Maybe I just didn’t want to let you know. Maybe I just wanted to see you sweat it out.”

The only time one of the children did anything surprising in an effort to take on an adversary was when the eight year old boy shape-shifted and became the young Carolyn. Had the sheriff not shown the clownish ineptitude typical of his office, but instead done what a real cop would do and arrested Jabe and Philip, they might have created a situation in which Jabe would have to surprise us again. It might be interesting to see him turn into the grown-up Carolyn, for example. As it is, Jabe just insults Philip, goes to the police station, and murders the sheriff.

Jabe berates Philip. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This puts a new spin on Roger Ebert’s category of “Idiot Plot.” Ebert said that a movie had an Idiot Plot when its story would end immediately if any of the characters had the brains of an average member of the audience. In this case, the story stays stuck in an angry and utterly predictable rut because of the sheriff’s inexplicable nonfeasance.

The first time Mrs Acilius and I watched Dark Shadows through, we hated Jabe and didn’t want to see Christopher Pennock again. Later, Pennock will return in several quite different roles, each of them more appealing than the one before. By the end of the series he had become one of our favorites, and it occurred to us that even as Jabe he managed to do a lot of things right. But there is only so much an actor can do to work around a script problem, and as written Jabe is barely a character at all. His actions cause problems for several other people, but nothing we see him do or hear him say makes us care about why he takes those actions as opposed to any others. It certainly doesn’t help that half of his episodes, including this one, are directed by Henry Kaplan, whose idea of visual composition was to shove a camera so close to an actor’s face that you can see about one half of one cheekbone.

It didn’t have to be that way. Not only was Pennock a fine actor when he had something to work with, but in this episode we have a scene between Julia and rakish libertine Quentin Collins that shows how a character with a bizarre backstory and a record of evil deeds can become an audience favorite. Quentin is down in the dumps because he just failed to rescue his one true love, Amanda Harris, from the realm of the dead. Julia urges him to reconnect with the Collinses of Collinwood. He asks how he can possibly explain that he is 72 years older than he looks and is now alive, even though his ghost carried out a protracted and deadly haunting of the estate. This dialogue shows that Quentin’s origins require us to believe any number of impossible things, and longtime viewers remember that he is a murderer who killed his wife in cold blood, among other unspeakable acts. But all we see in this scene are his charm and the affection that he and Julia have for each other, and we want to see more of that, as much as they can give us. With similar material, Pennock could have achieved similar results. But it is already clear that he won’t get it as Jabe.

Postscript

In his scene with Julia, Quentin says that no one at the hotel where he and Amanda have been staying remembers her, and that all traces of the alias she had been using seem to have disappeared. Julia speculates that when he lost her in the underworld, the last 72 years of Amanda’s life were negated, that the past was reset so that she did in fact die on a night in the 1890s when she might have died had one of the gods of the dead not intervened.

This raises two questions. First, Amanda has been keeping Quentin. If they are now in a timeline where she never came to town, who’s paying his hotel bill and buying his liquor? It’s a standard feature of soap operas that unless they are telling a story about conflicts over ownership of a business or a house or some other valuable property, everyone just has an inexhaustible supply of money, but they put enough time into Amanda and Julia’s squabble as to which one of them would be Quentin’s sugar mama that you might have expected a line or two about this question.

Second, if everyone else has forgotten Amanda, how does Julia remember her? Quentin journeyed through the infernal regions with her, and so I suppose it makes a kind of sense that from that supernatural location he would have a perspective that would transcend our perception of time and space. But Julia was in and around Collinsport the whole time Quentin and Amanda were harrowing the abode of the permanently unavailable. I suppose the real answer is that she is the audience’s point of view character, and as such knows everything we know. But it does leave us wondering if, in the course of her adventures, some kind of uncanny power may have rubbed off on her.

In place of 131: “A Christmas Carol”

There never was an episode #131 of Dark Shadows. They made a point of giving numbers divisible by 5 to episodes that aired on Fridays, so on days when the show was not broadcast-as it was not broadcast on 26 December 1966- they just skipped the number that would have been used had it run that day.

Since that preemption was the result of Christmas-related programming,* this seems like the place to promote 2021’s big Dark Shadows Christmas event, a dramatic reading of the Orson Welles version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol by ten surviving members of the original cast. Surviving at that time- it turned out to be Mitchell Ryan’s last performance before his death on 4 March 2022; Christopher Pennock had been involved in the early stages of the production, but he would die in February of 2021.

It is irresistible viewing for Dark Shadows fans. It makes extensive use of music from the show- rather too extensive for my taste, but Mrs Acilius liked it, and from what I gather she appears to be in the majority.

The acting is quite good. I was especially impressed by James Storm’s portrayal of Bob Cratchit. I had never seen Mr Storm in anything but Dark Shadows, where he was cast in the preposterously unplayable role of Gerard Stiles, so it was amazing to me to see what he could do when he had something to work with.

Another pleasant surprise was Alexandra Moltke Isles as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Readers of this blog know that I have a high opinion of Mrs Isles’ abilities, but this was her first part in 53 years. I held my breath to see how many steps she had lost in that interval. As it became clear that she could go as deep into her character as ever and pull up a treasure trove of dramatic insight, I was thrilled.

Mrs Isles appeared at one or two Dark Shadows conventions early in the 1980s. During the unpleasantness, she couldn’t very well make herself available for any event where she would be expected to take questions from the floor, but from time to time she sent greetings on video that would be played at conventions. And she sat for several interviews about Dark Shadows over the years. So you can’t say she made herself a complete stranger, but it is still quite a novelty to see her in this setting.

Many longtime fans describe Mrs Isles as the cast member who was least friendly to them when the show was in production, and there may be a reason for that. In the Q & A, she responds to the question about her first encounter with fandom by telling a story about a girl jumping her on the street and trying to rip her hair out of her head. After that introduction, it is remarkable that she’s been around as much as she has.

The person who had been absolutely disconnected from fandom the longest was David Henesy. He stuck with acting for a few years into the 1970s, but never attended a convention or had any connection with any Dark Shadows themed public events until a cast reunion on Zoom in October 2020. His performances as the child characters (he’s by far the youngest member of the cast, a mere 65 years old at the time of taping) are as letter-perfect as was his work in the series.

*A football match, but a football match usually held at Christmas-time.

Episode 1090: Today’s Ten Things That Make No Sense

Sebastian Shaw’s terrible clothes, Julia Hoffman’s ridiculous bossiness, and Barnabas Collins’ apparent sincerity. 

Episode 1090: Today’s Ten Things That Make No Sense