christopher pennock – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1115: The woman in question

The year is 1840. Vampire Barnabas Collins summons his latest victim, Roxanne Drew. They meet at the gazebo on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood. He says he has a way they can be together forever. She says she would die for him. That’s what he had in mind. He bites her, drains her body of blood, and lets her fall to the floor of the gazebo. He tells her corpse that it will be found tomorrow, and that Roxanne will be mourned. The following night, she will rise as a vampire. He walks off, leaving her.

Roxanne, left like a cat leaves a mouse for its people to find.

Roxanne’s sister Samantha also has a new relationship, and may also be murdered as a result. Her husband, whose name is Quentin Collins, is missing and presumed dead after a shipwreck. Quentin and Samantha’s son Tad was with his father and is also missing. Quentin’s friend Gerard Stiles has been a guest at the great house of Collinwood for some time. We saw the other day that Samantha turns to Gerard when she needs comforting, and they kiss today.

After Gerard and Samantha’s love scene, Gerard is alone in the drawing room with Quentin’s brother Gabriel. He is in the act of walking out on Gabriel when Gabriel addresses him as “Mr Miller.” Gabriel leafs through a stack of papers about the life of crime Gerard led under his original name, Ivan Miller. Gerard grabs the papers from Gabriel. Gabriel clutches at Gerard’s arm and squeezes it so hard Gerard falls to his knees. Gerard is stunned by Gabriel’s strength. Gabriel gets around by pushing himself in a manual wheelchair, which does indeed build the muscles in the arms and upper back, so it is a believable moment.

Gabriel then hands Gerard the papers and says that they are his copy. He has another copy stashed where it will go to the authorities should any harm befall him. He says that he will hold them back provided Gerard makes himself useful to him. First he dispatches Gerard to acquire a large packet of arsenic. Then he tells Gerard that his next duty will be to poison Samantha with the arsenic a little bit at a time, so that she dies a painful, lingering death. Gerard says that he would rather just leave Collinwood and make a fresh start somewhere else rather than do that. Gabriel says that since Samantha’s death will make him the heir to his terminally ill father’s vast estate, he will be able to pay Gerard very handsomely for the task. He offers him 10% of the Collins fortune. Since Gerard apparently murdered a woman in Portugal a few years back, Gabriel is quite sure he will not be squeamish about murdering another woman, especially when he stands to profit so richly. Gerard says they have a deal.

In #1077, set in 1970, another Quentin Collins was reading the family history when he learned for the first time that he had a “grand uncle” who lived in 1840 who was also named Quentin Collins. Not even the family history mentioned Tad’s name. Since that Quentin was born in 1870 (though he looked much younger than his hundred years,) we could take it that neither Grand Uncle Quentin nor his widow was the one through whom ownership of the Collins family wealth passed to the other generations we have seen. Indeed, longtime viewers may recall that in #701 and #702, set in 1897, Quentin’s very elderly grandmother Edith Collins reminisced on her deathbed about her husband Gabriel. So we know that Gabriel and Edith are the parents of a son who will sire that other Quentin and his siblings, among them Edward Collins, whose son Jamison will go on to be the father of Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and Roger Collins, the adults at the great house in the 1960s.

As of this day in 1840, however, Gabriel’s father Daniel Collins has named his son Quentin his sole heir, with Tad in second place and Samantha in third. Told that Quentin and his son are dead, Daniel has refused to rewrite the will in Gabriel’s favor. Early in the episode, Samantha tells Gabriel that when Daniel dies, it will be up to her to take care of him and his wife, and that she will do so provided they behave themselves. Knowing that it does not work out that way, we can believe Gerard will actually carry out the assignment Gabriel gives him today.

The disappearance of Quentin and Samantha from the Collins family’s memory by the late nineteenth century is only the first of four reasons we might believe Gabriel’s plan will come to fruition. The second is the casting of Samantha. Virginia Vestoff was a splendid actress whose performance lets a great deal of fresh air into every scene she appears in. However, Samantha is Vestoff’s first role on Dark Shadows. If she were a member of the show’s established repertory company, we might be confident that Gerard will disappoint Gabriel and let her live. But first timers, even spectacularly talented ones with solid backgrounds on Broadway and in daytime television, often turn out to be short-timers. So her presence adds to the suspense about her character’s future.

The third reason is an echo of the circumstances of one of Dark Shadows‘ most prominent on-screen murders. In 1967, Barnabas coerced his associate, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, into preparing a lethal injection for her old friend Dave Woodard, who was threatening to expose their crimes. As Gerard brings the arsenic to Gabriel today, only to be shocked to hear that he will have to commit the murder himself, so Julia offered the hypodermic to Barnabas, only to be told that she would administer the deadly shot. The murder of Woodard actually came off, so longtime viewers have another reason to expect that Samantha, too, might die. And of course that Gabriel pulls the same maneuver on Gerard that Barnabas pulled on Julia shows that they really are members of the same family and that they are bearers of that family’s curse.

The fourth reason grows from what we have seen of the future of Collinwood. In segments set in 1970 and 1995, we have seen that Gerard’s ghost will destroy Collinwood and rule over its uninhabitable ruins for decades after. Today that starts to make sense. If Gabriel’s descendants own the house and hold their position in the community as the result of a hideous crime their ancestor committed through Gerard, then it is fitting that Gerard should be the face of the long-delayed reckoning for that crime.

I should mention that Vestoff is not alone in giving an excellent performance today. Christopher Pennock was pretty hard to take when he first joined the show as monstrous man-child Jabez Hawkes in #935; he moved well, but he delivered his dialogue with so much bombast that he stood out even among the cast of Dark Shadows. He was noticeably better as Jekyll/ Hyde characters Dr Cyrus Longworth and John Yaeger from #985, but still enunciated his lines too self-consciously to really draw the audience in. As astrologer Sebastian Shaw from #1073, he was a little more natural, but Sebastian was such a poorly conceived character that he couldn’t really show his stuff.

As Gabriel, Pennock finally comes into his own. He is smooth as silk in Gabriel’s scenes with Gerard today; it’s a pleasure to listen to him sidle his way from one syllable to the next. He’s just as pitch-perfect projecting Gabriel’s humiliation and uncontrolled rage in his scene with Samantha as he is at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum with Gerard. Certainly Vestoff and James Storm are first-rate scene partners; they may deserve a share of the credit for Pennock’s fine work. Or maybe he just needed to sit down, I don’t know.

It’s no news to fans of Dark Shadows that Jonathan Frid was capable of great work. He’s been on top form this week. The other day, Barnabas’ aged friend Ben Stokes told him a bizarre story, to which Barnabas replied “You’re mad, old man.” No actor could deliver Henry V’s dismissal of Falstaff, “I know thee not, old man” more heart-breakingly than Frid delivers that line. And watching his face as Roxanne falls dead in Barnabas’ arms, you can feel the terror and the awe of the moment. The murders sometimes come so thick and fast on Dark Shadows that watching them we can feel like we are seeing the coyote raise yet another the mushroom cloud at the end of his fall after failing to catch the roadrunner, and Barnabas himself often takes killing very lightly. But there is nothing cartoonish about what he does to Roxanne.

Episode 1110: A room filled with toys

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has escaped from a band of zombies who were wrecking the great house of Collinwood. From her perspective, it is a few moments after she saw her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, wrestling with the zombies and urging her to save herself by walking down a mysterious staircase. But she soon discovers that she has left the year 1970 and made her way to 1840, when both the zombies and the ghosts who have triggered their destructive actions were living human beings.

Julia enters the staircase from a playroom that is only intermittently present in 1970 and walks down its two flights. She exits into the same playroom, which is a normal presence in 1840. We saw this same distortion of space in #1070 and #1071, when Julia and Barnabas used the staircase to escape from the far-off future year of 1995 and return to 1970. It was an effective way of expressing the magical nature of the staircase and the playroom then, and is still effective the second time.

When they opened the playroom door on their return to 1970, Barnabas and Julia saw a girl in the corridor. That girl appeared to be a ghost named Carrie whom they had met in 1995, but turned out to be a living girl named Hallie Stokes who had moved into Collinwood while they were away on their bizarre cosmic journey. Now, Julia opens the door and sees the living Carrie in the same corridor.

Hallie was the niece of occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes and therefore a descendant of much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes, whom we got to know from November 1967 to March 1968, when the show was set in the 1790s. We learn today that Carrie is Ben’s granddaughter, and that he and she are staying in the great house as the guests of Daniel Collins.

We saw Daniel in the 1790s segment. He was played then by David Henesy, who was eleven years old at the time. Mr Henesy looked a lot older in September 1970 than he had three years before, and he was an accomplished young actor. But it would likely have been beyond even his abilities to play a character well into middle age, so when we see Daniel from the knees down later in the episode we can be fairly sure he will turn out to be someone else.

Julia sees a confrontation between Carrie and a tall young man in a wheelchair. The man turns out to be Daniel’s son Gabriel. He insists Carrie open the door to her grandfather’s bedroom and push him in. Carrie objects, and Gabriel sneers that she is not to tell a Collins what to do at Collinwood. He berates her, saying that while others may indulge her because they are impressed by her good looks he sees only her impudence. She capitulates to his demands.

In the room, Gabriel turns his abusiveness against Ben. He orders Ben to break some bad news to Daniel. Word has come that Daniel’s son Quentin and Quentin’s son Tad have been lost at sea. Ben protests that Daniel is in no condition to receive such news. Gabriel digresses and says that he cannot make his own living; Ben tells him that many men in worse condition than he is have done, which only makes him angrier than he was to start with. Gabriel regrets his inability to stand up and strangle Ben. We can see that he’s a true Collins; they are a strangley bunch. He then says that he is now likely to become Daniel’s heir, and threatens to evict Ben and Carrie from Collinwood when he does. He menaces Ben with the prospect that he will use his position to make Carrie’s life difficult if he does not obey him now. Ben gives in.

Gabriel bullies Ben. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Ben returns to his room he finds Quentin’s wife, Samantha Drew Collins, waiting for him there. He tells her that the news did not prompt Daniel to change his will. She is still in line to inherit the estate when Daniel dies.

Samantha goes to the drawing room, where she finds Gabriel playing a one-handed game of chess. She is smugly pleased with his dismayed reaction to the news that Daniel has not changed his will. She exits and later returns with word that Daniel has escaped from the tower room. The Collinses have always made a practice of keeping mentally ill family members in that room, and Samantha and Gabriel are so frightened by his escape that we can assume Daniel’s illness disposes him to violence.

Julia emerges from the shadows in Ben’s room. Ben is alarmed to see her, and horrified when she identifies herself a friend of Barnabas’. She claims that she is not a monster, which is a defensible claim, given a very narrow definition of “monster.” When she tells him about traveling back in time from a future period when Barnabas is free to prey upon the living and she is his best friend, he says that she is mad. She denies being mad, which is what a person would do when they are as far from sanity as she is. Ben is leery, but agrees to help her. He escorts her back to the playroom and tells her to stay there until morning. Of course she leaves the room very shortly thereafter, and as soon as she enters the corridor Daniel grabs her by the throat.

The drawing room is downstairs; Ben’s room and the playroom are upstairs. No one seems to be helping Gabriel get from one floor to another, and there is no sign of any ramp or other contrivance that would make it possible for wheelchair users to get themselves from one floor of the house to another without help. Odd as this is, it is not a first on Dark Shadows. In January and February 1970, strange and troubled boy David Collins used a wheelchair in a few episodes because David Henesy had actually suffered a leg injury. David kept going up and down stairs by himself, without explanation of how such a thing was possible. I suppose they got few enough letters complaining about the illogic of that movement that they decide they could get away with it again.

Carrie has three scenes. In addition to her encounter with Gabriel, she talks with Samantha in the playroom and with her grandfather in his room. As Hallie, Kathleen Cody was in a state of maximum nervous tension from the start, so that she had nowhere to go in response to anything that might happen. As Carrie’s ghost, she often swung to the opposite extreme, being so blandly cheerful that she made no impression at all. She did put in a few good performances in the 1970 segment, however, and she is quite good as Carrie today.

Samantha is played by Virginia Vestoff, making her Dark Shadows debut. Vestoff was a distinguished performer who is now remembered chiefly for her role as Abigail Adams in the original Broadway cast of 1776 and of the 1972 film based on that musical. The Broadway cast also included several other Dark Shadows alums- David Ford (Sam Evans #2, Andre DuPres) as John Hancock, Emory Bass (Mr Best) as James Wilson, Daniel F. Keyes (The Cemetery Caretaker) as Josiah Bartlett, and Peter Lombard (Oberon) as a stage manager and understudy for the roles of Stephen Hopkins and Thomas Jefferson. All of those, aside from Lombard, also appeared in the film. Vestoff died of cancer in 1983, aged 42, a major loss to the world of the theater.

A great deal of emphasis is placed today on Samantha’s maiden name, Drew. We have in the last few months met two characters named Roxanne Drew; we can take it that Samantha will turn out to be related to one of those in some way.

Longtime viewers, learning that Daniel and Ben are in the 1840 story, will readjust their expectations. Most of what we saw in the ten weeks leading up to this uncertain and frightening journey into the past was recycled from a story that ran from December 1968 to March 1969 and culminated in a trip to the year 1897. So we may have come in thinking there would be a retelling of 1897. But seeing Ben and Daniel, we have the prospect of a sequel to the 1790s segment. That does sound like a fresher idea.

The episode is certainly structured very differently than were the first episodes of either the 1790s segment or the 1897 segment. Those featured a relatively wide variety of brightly lit sets full of busy people, getting us off to a fast start in a new world. Today most of the action takes place in the playroom, Ben’s room, and the corridor between them, with a couple of brief glimpses of the drawing room. We keep cutting to Julia standing very still behind one partition or another as she eavesdrops on the dialogue. We are operating within a very small space, but hearing about people who are far outside that space and whom we are confident we will meet soon. So rather than leading with the equivalent of a panorama of our new surroundings, they are opening the space up for us a little bit at a time. That makes it easier to keep the action moving rapidly and clearly, and also leaves us wanting more.

Episode 1093: It’s just gonna happen anyway

In July, vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman came unstuck in time and found themselves in the far-off future year 1995. Julia and Barnabas found that the great house of Collinwood had been in ruins ever since some mysterious disaster took place on an unspecified night in 1970. Some residents of the great house went missing that night, others died, and two of them, Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes and Quentin Collins, went insane. The mad Carolyn of 1995 apparently knew that Barnabas was a vampire; she had known that for a while in 1967, when she was his victim, but appeared to have forgotten it when he was relieved of the effects of his curse for a while starting in March 1968. Towards the end of Barnabas and Julia’s time in 1995, Carolyn left a note for them, consisting of six cryptic phrases, shortly before the ghosts who rule Collinwood killed her. They decided the phrases were clues to the disaster, and ever since returning to 1970 have been trying without success to use them to figure out what is going on.

One thing that is clear is that the disaster will involve the deaths of teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins and the merger of their ghosts with the ghosts of their lookalikes from the year 1840, Carrie Stokes and Tad Collins. David and Hallie are aware of this and spend all their time moaning about how helpless they are to do anything about it. Their headquarters for this operation is a room that intermittently materializes behind a door that usually leads to a linen closet. The room is much too large to fit into the space the linen closet occupies, is stocked with high-end antique toys, and is frequented by the ghosts. Hallie and David call it “The Playroom.” In 1995, Julia and Barnabas found that The Playroom was in existence all the time and that anyone could enter it, but until today only David, Hallie, and the ghosts have been able to go there. Everyone else just sees the linen closet when they open the door.

Hallie and David are in The Playroom, bummed out because Carrie has revealed to them that they are fated to become dolls in the dollhouse that is there. This was previously revealed to them in #1082, but Dark Shadows has been losing teenage viewers lately, so perhaps David and Hallie weren’t watching that day. A miniature carousel starts turning and playing music; David is influenced by the music, and says that perhaps their future in the dollhouse won’t be so bad.

Meanwhile, Carolyn is in the corridor outside The Playroom. We see her after the camera pans out from a closeup of the stained glass work above the door that sometimes opens on The Playroom. We notice that it depicts roses. The dollhouse is a scale model of a house that was known as Rose Cottage in 1840, and is in some sense identical to that house. One of the clues Carolyn left in 1995 was “The night Rose Cottage was destroyed,” which has led Barnabas and Julia to ask everyone if they’ve ever heard of Rose Cottage and to work feverishly to try to locate it. You might think they would remember the roses above the door to The Playroom and to think of the toys they saw there in 1995, but no such luck.

Carolyn hears the carousel’s music and wonders where it is coming from. She opens the door to The Playroom. She still hears the music, but sees only the linen closet. It is a haunting moment. We know that she is glimpsing an aperture between her world and another, but nothing she can see could lead her to conclude that anything at all extraordinary is happening. It might leave us wondering what it would be like if we were in the presence of some utterly bizarre phenomenon- would we notice?

Carolyn returns to the corridor. Her back is turned when David opens the door. We see The Playroom behind him. We wonder if Carolyn would be able to see it if she were facing the right way. David closes the door silently. Carolyn turns and is startled to see him. He says he is looking for Hallie. Carolyn asks him about the music; he claims he cannot hear it. He suggests someone may have left a radio playing in another part of the house.

The sequence reminded me of the 2017 season of Twin Peaks, as does the whole idea of The Playroom. As Agent Cooper disappeared into the mysterious, intermittently existent Red Room and the Black Lodge beyond, so the ghosts threaten to absorb the living characters into the mysterious, intermittently visible Playroom and the ruinous world of 1995 beyond. As Deputy Hawk once caught a glimpse of the curtains of the Red Room in the clouds above the spot deep in the woods where the worlds sometimes open onto each other, a glimpse so brief and vague that someone unfamiliar with the legends of the Black Lodge would likely either ignore it completely or assume it was a reflection of the clouds from some water on the ground, so the music from the miniature carousel gives Carolyn a glimpse so subtle and vague that anyone who had not been briefed by Julia and Barnabas would immediately accept David’s idea that it is just a radio. I doubt that this part of the show had a direct influence on Twin Peaks– more likely, the shared imagery is just the logical endpoint of a sense that there is more to the world than we can readily perceive with commonplace fears of being trapped in unfamiliar places. But I do think the two shows can shed light on each other.

Under the influence of the ghosts, Hallie and David make a doll with bright yellow hair and put it in the dollhouse. It represents someone named “Leticia” who will join them when they are living in the dollhouse. Since the only blonde character on the show other than Hallie is Carolyn, we have to assume that a ghost named Leticia has the same designs on Carolyn that Carrie has on Hallie and Tad has on David.

In 1995, Carolyn had not disappeared into the dollhouse, but was living in a shack by Finley’s Cove. She even went in and out of The Playroom from time to time, interacting with Tad and Carrie. This is the first indication we’ve had that the ghosts’ will is not entirely ineluctable. There may be nothing the characters can do to keep a disaster from occurring, but perhaps there is some hope that we might see them do something to shape the particulars of the disaster that will befall them.

Carolyn is busy looking after David and Hallie’s governess, Maggie Evans. Maggie is ill, having been bitten by a vampire. When he found out about this, Barnabas was surprised to learn he isn’t the only vampire in town, and he and Julia have been trying to figure out who has been feeding on Maggie. Carolyn and Maggie talk about the previous vampire attacks. There is an electric moment when each of them looks like she is trying very hard to remember something that is hidden way down in the recesses of her mind. Several times in 1968, Nancy Barrett played Carolyn as if she remembered a lot more about Barnabas than he knew. The script didn’t give her any support in that, and she eventually had to give it up. Maggie was Barnabas’ victim in May and June of 1967; that experience has been wiped from her memory several times, and we may wonder if it will emerge one more time. In light of what we saw about Carolyn’s knowledge in 1995 and the similarity of what Maggie is going through now to what she went through in 1967, this moment is highly effective.

Miss Barrett also manages to get a laugh from regular viewers today. She has a scene with Christopher Pennock as astrologer Sebastian Shaw. Pennock also played Carolyn’s late husband Jabe (alias “Jeb”) Hawkes. The two characters are supposed to resemble each other strongly, and for a while Carolyn hoped Sebastian would turn out to be Jabe. But she’s given up on that, and Sebastian wants to date Maggie.

Sebastian comes to Collinwood. Carolyn tells him Maggie is very sick and cannot receive visitors. Sebastian wants to see her anyway. Carolyn tells him that is impossible. He becomes angry and declares that she will see him sooner or later, no matter what! Sebastian storms out of the house, and Carolyn watches him go with a sad little smile. Sebastian is violent, irrational, controlling, and childish, just like Jabe. Her look shows us how much she misses those things about him.

Aww, what a wonderful dangerously unstable man-child he is!

Carolyn can’t get the tune the little carousel plays out of her head. She goes back to the door and opens it. Now, it opens on The Playroom. The circle the ghosts have drawn around Hallie and David now encloses her as well. We can start to see how she might have known enough to leave the clues she left in 1995 for Barnabas and Julia.

The vampire story is new and has some promise, but the haunting has been going in a tight little circle for five weeks, with no progress in sight. The miniature carousel is all-too-apt a symbol of that. Even the opening voiceover seems to acknowledge that the show is in a rut. It breaks off in mid-sentence. We hear Kathryn Leigh Scott telling us that David and Hallie have discovered “a secret world- a world populated by the dead. And this night, they learn…” That’s it, the audio stops abruptly at that point. What do David and Hallie learn? What does it matter, whatever it is can’t possibly affect the story in any way.

Episode 1073: I don’t have to imagine things

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and his friend, Dr Julia Hoffman, MD, have returned to 1970 after an inexplicable journey through time. During a sojourn in 1995, they learned that a mysterious disaster is about to befall the great house of Collinwood. They have told several people about this disaster and withheld the information from several others.

Among those Julia and Barnabas have told is matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. We see Liz in the drawing room discussing the matter with governess Maggie Evans. Maggie is hurt that Barnabas hasn’t seen her since he returned. When Barnabas departed, there was a story brewing about a possible romance between him and Maggie; we might have thought the show would have forgotten this narrative thread, and some fans would prefer it had done so. But evidently it isn’t quite gone yet.

Among those Barnabas and Julia have not told is grouchy New England teen David Collins. David enters the room as Liz and Maggie are talking about the idea that something might happen. He says that something is happening, all right. Liz asks what it is and he says he will tell them what he knows if they tell him what they know. Liz huffily declares that the matter at hand has to do with a theory he could not possibly understand, and that she knows he could not understand it because she doesn’t understand it, either. Unimpressed by this logic, David stands his ground. He says it’s time they stop treating him like he is four and a half years old. Liz tells him that if he knows something they ought to know, he should tell them about it. How he is supposed to know what they ought to know when they won’t tell him anything is unclear. The exchange ends in a stalemate.

Julia and Barnabas have also tried to keep the relevant information from the other teen in the house, Hallie Stokes. Hallie eavesdropped on a conversation yesterday and picked up some ominous-sounding remarks with no context. David had a dream that night in which he saw Hallie wearing an old-fashioned long orange dress with puffy sleeves. Later, the same dress materialized on Hallie’s bed.

What neither Hallie nor David knew was that Barnabas and Julia saw that dress in 1995. The girl wearing it looked exactly like Hallie, but was named Carrie. She danced a minuet at the gazebo on the grounds of Collinwood with a boy who looked exactly like David but was named Tad.

When Hallie sees the dress at the beginning of today’s episode, she wonders how it got there. Maggie knocks on the door and Hallie hides it under her bedclothes. After Maggie goes, Hallie wonders why she didn’t just ask her about it. Longtime viewers have seen enough supernatural storylines start on Dark Shadows to know that a compulsion to withhold information is often the first step towards doom. It is frustrating that Liz, who has been central to the show since episode 1 premiered on 27 June 1966, hasn’t learned that lesson yet and applied it to her dealings with David.

David goes to Hallie’s room and tells her about his dream. She says that lots of boys dream about her; he says that unlike the others, he tried to go back to sleep afterward. David doesn’t specify what the other boys are doing with the image of Hallie in the middle of the night, but he lets her draw the conclusion that she isn’t up to his standards in that wise. When he tells her about the dress, she freaks out and accuses him of playing tricks on her. He doesn’t know what she’s talking about and doesn’t care enough about her to stick around until she clarifies it. He grumbles that he’ll never understand women and stalks off.

Later, David gets a note telling him to go to the gazebo at midnight. He sees Hallie emerge from the bushes, wearing the dress. He suddenly realizes that she is not Hallie at all. Carrie has made her appearance.

Carrie and David by the armillary sphere. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The gazebo set is decorated with an armillary sphere that is prominently featured today. From the first appearance of this doodad in #737, we might have wondered if the show was going to incorporate astrology into its stories. Two of the cryptic phrases Julia and Barnabas collected as clues during their visit to 1995 were “the night of the sun and the moon” and “the unfinished horoscope,” indicating that the time is coming for this to occur.

Liz is in a strange quiet mood today; Joan Bennett plays her very deep. She speaks softly, rarely makes eye contact, and often gives little signs of deep, somber thought. She mutters to Maggie that no one can know the future, “unless…” When Maggie asks unless what, she refuses to answer.

Liz telephones a man named Sebastian Shaw, who is wearing a piece of clothing that was ridiculous even by the standards of 1970. Actor Chris Pennock would later say that he retained absolutely no memory of ever having played a character named Sebastian; if I had worn that garment on national television, I think I would have blocked out the recollection as well.

Sebastian gets very prickly when people do not accept him as a serious professional. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Sebastian is an astrologer. He agrees to cast a full horoscope for the rest of 1970 for Liz. Since Barnabas and Julia told Liz that an unfinished horoscope is one of the signs that doom is near, it would seem rather bold of her to start an astrologer casting an elaborate chart.

Episode 1030: As though I had touched death

Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is fretting about her brother Quentin’s childish behavior. Quentin’s wife, the former Maggie Evans, has left the house abruptly, without her purse, and has been away for some time. Liz is sure something bad has happened to Maggie, but Quentin refuses to look for her.

Liz tries to interest Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of Quentin’s late first wife Angelique, in Quentin and Maggie’s troubles. She does not know that the person she is talking to is not Alexis at all, but Angelique herself. Angelique rose from the dead, murdered Alexis, and took Alexis’ place as a permanent houseguest in the great house of Collinwood as part of her plan to win Quentin back. To that end, Angelique is conspiring with a man she knows as John Yaeger. He has abducted Maggie and is holding her in a dungeon out in the country, hoping that after enough time alone with him she will forget all about Quentin and fall in love with him.

“Alexis” is pacing around the drawing room while Liz talks about Maggie and Quentin. She is half listening when she approaches a window and sees Yaeger waiting outside. She suddenly tells Liz that she is going to go out herself and look for Maggie. Liz tells her this is too dangerous, but she rushes out. She confers with Yaeger in the gazebo.* Yaeger is despairing of his plan, much to Angelique’s annoyance.

Angelique, alias Alexis, sees Yaeger at the window. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is no such person as Yaeger, any more than there is a living Alexis Stokes. The man is really Cyrus Longworth in disguise. Maggie and Quentin think of Cyrus as a friend, a mild-mannered scientist who means well, though he is sometimes strangely naive. Cyrus has developed a potion which changes his appearance so drastically that not even those who know him best can recognize him when he is under its influence. After Cyrus tried to rape Maggie last week while disguised as Yaeger, he threw the potion away. But he then transformed spontaneously, without drinking it. Since he cannot re-Jekyllize himself without it, we are left wondering if he will remain in his Yaeger form permanently. We may also wonder what he will do if he reverts to his usual appearance in front of Maggie. He has admitted to himself that he and Yaeger are not separate people, but still seems to want to hold onto some sense that they are. He can’t very well do that if Maggie knows he is the one keeping her locked up.

Liz stays in the drawing room after “Alexis” leaves. Roger Collins enters and helps himself to some brandy. Liz picks up with her brother where she had left off with “Alexis.” Roger doesn’t even pretend to care about Maggie. He was fixated on Angelique when she was alive, and cannot forgive Maggie for not being her. He is glad Maggie is gone, and nothing Liz says about her can stir his interest. Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds played different versions of these characters starting in #1, and it is always great to see them together.

Angelique has a problem of her own. She can stay out of the tomb only so long as she finds living bodies to drain of their warmth. She’s already killed three people that way. The first two were Alexis, whom she is successfully impersonating, and a handyman named Fred, who was expected to leave town anyway. Neither of them has been missed. The third, lawyer Larry Chase, caused puzzlement when his ice cold corpse was found in front of her, but as an isolated occurrence no one seems to have found a way to start solving that puzzle. So “Alexis” is not currently suspected of being a vampiric creature.

The need for warmth suddenly comes over Angelique. She goes to the drawing room and huddles in front of the fire. Roger sees her and remarks on how much she, “Alexis,” reminds him of Angelique. She says she doesn’t want to talk about her sister, then approaches Roger and embraces him. He says he feels terribly cold. She asks him to kiss her. That’s all it took to kill Fred and Larry, and a lot more contact than it took to kill Alexis. Roger is about to do it when Liz enters. They break their clinch and Angelique makes haste to go out. Roger is still feeling extreme cold, but he has no idea his sister just saved his life.

We see Angelique in the apartment of her (step?)father, Tim Stokes. She tells him she killed some stranger on her way over. By this time, his body will have been discovered, so cold that it will be assumed he had been dead for days. She tells Stokes that it was his occult prowess that enabled her to return from the dead, and asks if he can free her of her heat vampirism. He says that he cannot, and that he is so much the greatest expert in this sort of thing that there is no point in looking for anyone else who might be able to do so. She presses, and he mentions that someone else was involved in the process. She demands to see this person; he tells her the person is in the back room of the apartment. She eagerly goes to the door, unbothered by his pained refusal to accompany her.

Stokes’ apartment is laid out like the apartment of Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, his counterpart in the parallel universe where Dark Shadows was set for its first 196 weeks. Two people had important connections with that other Stokes’ back room. One was Frankenstein’s monster Adam, who was last seen going in there. Adam’s creation was a means of freeing another vampire of his curse; longtime viewers may therefore wonder if we are about to meet his counterpart. The other was Paul Stoddard, ex-husband of Liz’ counterpart, who was attacked and killed in that room by a murderous shape-shifter who, like Cyrus Longworth/ John Yaeger, was played by Christopher Pennock. Perhaps whoever is waiting for Angelique in the room is somehow connected with Cyrus/ Yaeger.

There are other possibilities. Angelique’s counterpart in the other continuity was for a time subordinated to suave warlock Nicholas Blair. We have not seen a counterpart of Nicholas here; my wife, Mrs Acilius, thinks that we will meet another Nicholas tomorrow.

*Which she pronounces “ga-ZAY-bo,” a bit of Collinsport English Lara Parker introduced way back in #489. It’s fun to hear it again.

Episode 1020: The last of the bachelors

Angelique Stokes Collins has risen from the dead, but her renewed existence may end within seconds. She is overwhelmingly cold, and can warm up only by draining the heat from the body of a living person. Someone is coming in the front door, just in time to be her victim and die in her stead. She wonders who it will be.

Almost all the characters currently on Dark Shadows are either so important to an ongoing story that their deaths would end a major arc or have so many connections to everyone else that their deaths would start a new one. So if she kills mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, his fiancée Sabrina Stuart, or barmaid Buffie Harrington, Angelique will be ending the Jekyll and Hyde story, or at least shifting it into a radically new phase. If she kills drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, his wife Maggie Evans Collins, or housekeeper Julia Hoffman, she will be ending the adaptation of Rebecca. If she kills Carolyn Loomis or her husband Will, she will be ending the restaging of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

If Angelique kills woebegone homebody Elizabeth Collins Stoddard or her brother, sardonic dandy Roger Collins, she won’t be ending any ongoing stories. But Liz and Roger are the counterparts of characters who were central to the life of the great house of Collinwood in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows, when it was set in another universe, and are played by actors who have substantial followings. If either of them is murdered, the audience will expect major consequences. Angelique’s son Daniel Collins and Daniel’s cousin Amy Collins aren’t doing much just now, but if Angelique kills a child, especially her own son, the ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices would join the audience in insisting she face a serious reckoning that would take up a lot of screen time. This fit of heat vampirism came on Angelique too suddenly to make sense as the start of a new arc, so we can rule all of those candidates out.

There are also a couple of characters who were introduced to fill in for actors who were away the previous couple of months filming their parts in the theatrical feature House of Dark Shadows. Among those are Angelique’s Aunt Hannah and butler Mr Trask. They are possibilities, but are both played by actors who have enough going for them that it would be a bit surprising to bring them back just to kill them off. There are also a few miscellaneous day players whose characters would have no reason to let themselves into the great house of Collinwood- a bartender we saw in #991, a landlady we saw in #997, etc.

So it would seem that there are only two people who could be Angelique’s next meal. One is sleazy musician Bruno Hess, a former boyfriend of hers who lives in the cottage on the grounds of Collinwood and is friends with Cyrus, but who has been neither seen nor missed for some time. The other is Larry Chase, attorney at law.

Bruno is played by the dynamic Michael Stroka, who twice made a mark when cast in stories set in the other universe. Larry was written into the show as a last-minute substitute for a part played by an actor whose health problems made it impossible for him to continue. They didn’t have time for auditions, so they drafted associate director Ken McEwen for the part. McEwen was in the building, and he had a guild card because of some small parts he’d taken in TV shows he’d worked on in the 1950s. When he has enough time to rehearse, which is to say when he has had more time to rehearse than actors usually got on a show like Dark Shadows, McEwen gets his lines right, except for adding “Well…” at the beginning of every single one. You can tell he is making a sincere effort not to ruin the show. But that’s about all you can say for him. Even at his best he’s stiff and distracted, and when he hasn’t been able to get his part down, he disintegrates completely. So it isn’t much of a surprise that Larry is the one who opens the door. It wasn’t a surprise to me, I should say; writing these posts keeps all the details fresh in my mind. My wife, Mrs Acilius, looked at him for about thirty seconds and asked “Who’s that?”

Larry plays the same scene with Angelique that her second victim, Fred the transient handyman, had played with her in #1003, right down to telling her that he had wanted to hold her since he first saw her. Fred was played by Edmond Hashim, and anyone who sees the two versions of this scene side by side will come away with a new appreciation for Hashim’s talents as an actor. This is McEwen’s final on-screen appearance, though he will pinch hit as the opening narrator in three upcoming episodes. He will continue as an associate director through episode 1179/1180 in December.

Will enters to find Angelique screaming and Larry dead. Angelique, who is impersonating her late identical twin sister Alexis, claims that Larry was just standing there when he had an attack of some kind and dropped dead. Will touches the corpse and says that he is so cold he must have been dead for hours. “Alexis” insists he just died a moment before. Will calls Cyrus, who is the Collins family physician.

Cyrus is in his lab, looking at the potion which turns him into the Mr Hyde-like John Yaeger. He is about to capitulate to his craving when the telephone rings. Will tells him that Larry is dead and asks him to come to Collinwood. Cyrus puts the potion back in his safe and rejoices that he is “Saved!” Larry was Cyrus’ lawyer and apparently a social friend as well. We’ve already seen Cyrus do enough horrible things that this sociopathic reaction is no shock.

Back at Collinwood, Will and “Alexis” are talking with Barnabas Collins. Unknown to “Alexis,” Barnabas is a visitor from the other universe. Her counterpart in his world was the wicked witch who turned him into a vampire, so Barnabas cannot keep a hostile edge out of his voice and manner when he is talking to her. Will is one of Barnabas’ victims, and knows all of his secrets.

When they are alone in the drawing room, “Alexis” questions Will about Barnabas. Will denies knowing him particularly well. Barnabas is staying at Will’s house, and several years ago Will wrote a biography of Barnabas’ counterpart in this universe, a man who lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830. Barnabas claims to be a descendant of that Barnabas Collins, and to have come to Collinwood to meet the author of the biography. Will becomes more and more disturbed as “Alexis” presses him harder and harder for information. She is perplexed that he won’t tell her anything. Lara Parker and John Karlen have both been on the show for a long time, but this is the first substantial two scene between them, and it is terrific. Their acting styles were very different, but they couldn’t have meshed better.

Barnabas is sitting at a table in the Eagle tavern. There is a glass of reddish liquid in front of him. In view of his condition, one wonders what that liquid might be.

Enjoying your AB Negative, Mr Collins? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas invites Buffie to sit with him. Since there are no other customers, she agrees. He tells her he is from South America. The son of this universe’s Barnabas Collins whom he claims as his great-grandfather went to Peru; when he introduced himself to the family, he said that his forebear did not die in that country. But evidently his imaginary descendants stayed on the continent, somewhere.

The Eagle is the counterpart of the Blue Whale in the other continuity. In #3, Burke Devlin was sitting at a table in the Blue Whale with hard-working young fisherman Joe Haskell when he said that his success in life began when a strange man picked him up in a bar in Montevideo. That was the show’s only reference to Uruguay, but Burke, the Blue Whale, and Brazil came to be strongly associated with each other. The song “Aquarela do Brasil,” a big hit in the English speaking world in the 1960s under the title “Brazil,” played on the jukebox at the Blue Whale, and it became Burke’s theme song. Ultimately Burke would die on a business trip to Brazil. Barnabas and Burke were enemies; when he sits at this table and claims to have a South American background, longtime viewers may wonder if he is thinking that the new universe is a place where he can try out a new personality and maybe he will start by imitating Burke’s.

Burke was a dashing action hero, attractive to women. Barnabas’ attempt to imitate him breaks down almost immediately. He winds up mimicking another prominent bachelor from his native universe, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, when he asks Buffie if she’s ever heard of the theory of “Parallel Time.”

Buffie shakes her head no. Barnabas says that some people believe that there are many universes, and that a copy of each of us can be found in each of them. They may look the same, but they lead different lives because they have made different choices. Buffie laughs and says that she hopes her other selves are having more fun than she is. She hastens to say that she doesn’t mean she isn’t having fun at the moment, sharing a table with Barnabas; she means that her life in Collinsport, as viewed from the most all-encompassing perspective and analyzed in the most thorough philosophic manner, well and truly sucks shit. Barnabas says that the other Buffies in the multiverse might have left Collinsport* and had wonderful adventures.

Longtime viewers saw one of those other Buffies in #951, when we were still in the original continuity. She had a different name; she went by Nelle Gunston. And as befits a mirror universe, she moved in the opposite direction. Rather than leaving Collinsport to look for something new as Buffie wishes she had done, Nelle left her parents’ home in Virginia and went to Collinsport because she had joined a cult dedicated to the destruction of the human race and its replacement by a loathsome breed of Elder Gods known as the Leviathan People. Barnabas had been the leader of the Leviathan cult, and when Nelle came to town she sat with him by the same table where Buffie and Barnabas sit today. They even take the same seats.

Buffie is charmed by Barnabas’ talk; between the suavity that Jonathan Frid brings to his part today and the energy with which Elizabeth Eis presents Buffie’s enthusiasm for him, it is far easier than it usually is to believe that Barnabas is a sexy dude. Maybe we are supposed to think that role-playing as Burke has enabled him to loosen up.

The conversation is really warming up when the bell attached to the front door rings. “Customer,” Buffie ruefully says to Barnabas as she rises. It is Cyrus.

Barnabas invites Cyrus to sit with them. He declines, saying that he came only to ask Buffie if she had seen John Yaeger lately. She tenses up. Yaeger used to beat her up and force her to help him with his crimes. She says that Cyrus himself had told Buffie that Yaeger wouldn’t be back in Collinsport. Cyrus says that he did, but that he is worried he might not be able to predict Yaeger’s movements as well as he thought he could. He offers Barnabas a lift back to Collinwood. That’s a bit surprising, since Cyrus got uptight when he saw Barnabas. As Yaeger, Cyrus discovered that there is a coffin in the basement of Will and Carolyn’s house, and he suspects that Barnabas spends his days there. But longtime viewers can remember the days Barnabas and Burke had conversations at the Blue Whale that were just as tense as the one he and Cyrus have in the Eagle, and Burke never failed to observe the small graces. It’s just the done thing, I suppose.

Cyrus leaves, and Buffie remains standing. She and Barnabas keep talking. He gets close, and goes in for a bite. He stops himself at the last second, to her surprise and disappointment. She was apparently ready for a kiss on the neck. He says he has to go. She is even more disappointed by that, but he promises to come back at closing. He asks to walk her home, and she happily agrees.

Will and Cyrus are in the drawing room at Collinwood. Will urges Cyrus to join him in a drink. When Cyrus declines, Will reminisces about the old days at Collinwood, when the party would just be getting started at this hour. In those days, people would leave the great house in the small hours of the morning and continue their revels at the Eagle. Cyrus says he won’t find much company there tonight. When he says that the only people in the place earlier were “the girl who works there” and Barnabas, Will looks alarmed. All of his mannerisms that suggest drunkenness drop away, and he rushes out.

Will gets to the tavern, and finds Buffie alone. The alcoholic author is obviously one of her favorite and most lucrative customers, so even though she has already blown out the candles she tells him he is in time for last call. To her amazement, he is not interested in a drink. He asks her where Barnabas is. She says he’ll be back and that he is taking her home. He says no, and she asks what’s wrong. Before he can answer, Will hears Barnabas’ voice behind him, echoing Buffie’s question. Laboring under the vampire’s power, Will has no choice but to leave Buffie alone with Barnabas.

Nelle, too, had agreed left the tavern with Barnabas. She expected to meet the leader of the Leviathans at his place, and was unhappy to find that the two of them were alone. Buffie is again an inverted mirror image of her counterpart. She takes Barnabas to her place, and is quite happy to be alone with him. The two close in for an embrace. He bites her neck, and she collapses. He had bitten Nelle, too. At that moment, Cyrus enters the room.

Cyrus does not exactly have a counterpart in the other continuity, but Christopher Pennock did play the Leviathan leader whom Nelle expected to meet. Like Cyrus, that character was a murderous shape-shifter. So Cyrus’ unexpected arrival mirrors the Leviathan leader’s unexpected absence.

When we first cut to Buffie’s room, the camera lingers for several seconds on an extremely unusual prop. It is a television set. The only other time we have seen a television set on Dark Shadows was in #27, in the other universe, when Burke visited investigator Stuart Bronson in a hotel room in Bangor, Maine where there was a small portable unit. It looks like it might be the same set.

The shot goes on so long, and the set is such an odd thing to see in the context of the show, that they must be making some kind of point with it. We have wondered why Buffie submitted to Yaeger’s abuse, when she is such a strong and intelligent person. Her reflection in Nelle suggests a partial answer. Nelle was drawn to the Leviathans, who offered to destroy her and all other humans. We can assume that Buffie, too, was following a self-destructive urge when she went along with Yaeger. Associated with her, the television is a symbol of the annihilation of the self. Turn the idiot box on, turn your mind off. If you aren’t careful, you may even wind up spending your weekdays staring glassy-eyed at ABC’s daytime lineup.

*He actually says “Collinwood.” Which is a blooper, but since Buffie mentioned in her first episode that she used to work at Collinwood it is kind of an interesting one. Maybe when another Buffie left her position as an upstairs maid or whatever she was, she got further than the nearest tavern.

Episode 999: It’s the same as it was, you were different then

Quentin Collins walks into the bedroom once occupied by his late wife Angelique, where Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis is staying. Quentin arrives just in time to see sleazy musician Bruno Hess strangling Alexis. He interrupts this process. Bruno is convinced that Alexis is Angelique returned from the grave, and that she is responsible for many strange and unhappy occurrences that have taken place on the estate of Collinwood since her arrival.

Bruno holds the deed to a cottage on the grounds of the estate and lives there, to Quentin’s intense annoyance. He hates Bruno, who had an affair with Angelique, a fact he likes to throw in Quentin’s face. You might think Quentin would call the police and report Bruno’s assault on Alexis. Not only would that result in a felony charge, but if Bruno bursts out with his suspicions it should be easy to get a civil commitment order that will earn him a a long stay in a home for the very nervous. But Quentin leaves Alexis and Angelique’s room without calling the sheriff. What’s more, when he goes to the drawing room and finds Bruno still in his house he has a lengthy conversation with him and waits for him to go. He never does telephone the police.

By the end of the episode, Quentin has convinced himself to take Bruno’s theory seriously. Alexis overhears him talking about it with his friend Cyrus Longworth. Quentin tells Cyrus that they must open Angelique’s tomb and look in her coffin.

Alexis finds them there, the coffin already out of its niche. She objects to the desecration of her sister’s resting place. She promises to leave Collinwood immediately if they will let Angelique rest in peace. Quentin refuses. He opens the box. Whatever he finds inside prompts a reaction of shock on his face and on Alexis’ as they look inside.

Between these scenes, we spend time in Cyrus’ laboratory. He is a mad scientist who has devised a Jekyll and Hyde potion. His alter ego goes by the name John Yaeger. Cyrus’ fiancée Sabrina Stuart is a sweet, trusting young woman who is determined to believe the best of Cyrus, but she has heard so much about Cyrus’ involvement with the brutal Yaeger that she is certain something is terribly wrong. We know that Cyrus was close to Angelique, and that she put him up to the Jekyll and Hyde experiment. Sabrina doesn’t know what Cyrus’ project is, but his withdrawn and irritable manner reminds her of the influence Angelique had on him. She says “It’s the same as it was when Angelique was alive- you were different then, and you’re different now.” I’m sure that was the scripted line, too.

Sabrina demands Cyrus stop lying to her and tell the truth about who Yaeger is and what hold he has over him. We saw yesterday that Cyrus’ attitude towards the potion and towards his time as Yaeger is already that of an addict towards his drug, and he sullenly refuses to answer any of Sabrina’s questions, even with more lies. She grows more and more exasperated.

Sabrina’s time with Cyrus is cut short when barmaid Buffie Harrington enters and insists on talking with Cyrus alone. Yaeger gave Buffie a check signed by Cyrus to cover the damages he did to her place of employment in a bar fight the other night; she wants to know if the check is authentic. Cyrus confirms that it is, much to Buffie’s delight. She mentions that her sometime boyfriend Steve is in the hospital because of a beating Yaeger gave him; Cyrus hands her a pile of cash to cover Steve’s hospital expenses. Buffie tells Cyrus that Yaeger has taken rooms in the boarding house where she stays, and that he frightens her. She does not tell him that Yaeger has hit her, choked her, and threatened her every time they have met. We know that he knows that- he has met her only when he was in the form of Yaeger, and he recognizes her on sight, showing that he remembers their encounters. Buffie asks if Yaeger works for Cyrus. He smiles with great satisfaction and says that he does.

That smile is a key moment. Yesterday’s episode gave the Jekyll and Hyde story a new lease on life by confirming that it will indeed be about addiction. That’s the usual thing with that material, but Dark Shadows has taken familiar tales in such weird directions that we could by no means take it for granted that its version would follow the typical pattern. Cyrus’ response to the thought that he controls Yaeger, who has put Steve in the hospital and is terrorizing Buffie, confirms something else. Cyrus’ diffident manner and scientific preoccupations help Sabrina hold onto the idea that he is a sweet man whose only flaw is naïveté, but Christopher Pennock’s rendering of that smile leaves no doubt that Yaeger is Cyrus’ means of indulging his own sadistic impulses.

As Buffie is leaving, Cyrus asks her if she likes Yaeger. Holding her head high, she says that sometimes she does. She sounds like she means it. Buffie was a commanding presence when first we saw her, and she is forceful throughout this scene. But she has given up on fighting back against Yaeger or even trying to run away from him. Her line suggests that she is not simply giving in to fear, but is drawn to a masochistic fantasy. Yaeger has been so vicious and Cyrus is so sinister that there is no prospect this fantasy is going to be channeled into any kind of consensual game- Buffie is drifting into a situation that can lead only to her destruction.

This episode includes one of the all-time great bloopers. The closing credits run over a shot of Angelique and Alexis’s room. For the first minute or so, we see a man sitting in a chair, chewing on something. Whoever he was, apparently he decided he’d found a good spot for lunch. Eventually the camera zooms in on the portrait of Angelique that dominates the room. This is so obviously an attempt to get the lunch-eater out of the frame that it only adds to the hilarity.

Who he is and what he is eating, I don’t know. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 997: How pretty your tears

We are in the fourth week of an arc set in a different universe than the one we saw in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows. This universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time,” was originally introduced as a realm populated by Doppelgänger of the characters we have known. They are the same people, but have made different choices and are therefore living different lives.

Some of the Parallel Time characters fit this description. So, we have known matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother Roger Collins from episode #1. In the early days of the show, much was made of the Collinses’ straitened financial circumstances, the result of Roger squandering the half of the family’s assets he had inherited and Liz scrambling to keep control of the business. Roger lived in Liz’ house as her guest and worked in the business as her employee, and she kept a wary eye on any move he made to get his hands on her money. In #981, Parallel Liz mentions that she used to be quite wealthy, but that she entrusted her share of the Collins fortune to Roger, and as a result they are both penniless. Original Liz saw that fate as a distinct possibility, every time Roger was in the same wing of the house as her bank account information.

Parallel Liz and Parallel Roger live in the great house of Collinwood as the guests of their brother Quentin. Parallel Quentin is not at all the same person as Original Quentin. He is an entirely different person. Original Quentin was born in 1870, died in 1897, became a ghost haunting Collinwood in 1968 and 1969, and as the result of a time travel storyline in 1969 was both spared death and immunized against aging. Original Quentin was a riff on the early conception of Roger as a villain, and he was a huge hit with the viewing public during the part of the show set in 1897. Ever since Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress in late 1969, they’ve been at a loss what to do with him. Parallel Quentin is an attempt to reinvent the character to let him keep enough of his vices that he retains the roguish charm that the fans liked, but at the same time use those vices as motivation for him to act the part of the hero from time to time.

There is need for an action hero today. Quentin’s friend, dippy mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, has invented a Jekyll-and-Hyde potion and taken a swig of it. As the darkly mustachio’d John Yaeger, he has been persecuting barmaid Buffie Harrington and Buffie’s unlucky boyfriend, big galoot Steve. We open with Yaeger choking Buffie and telling her she needs to be beaten into submission. Later, Yaeger gets the jump on Steve in a dark alley behind the Greenfield Inn, an establishment that also fronts a sinister alley in the main continuity. He threatens him with his sword cane. Steve manages to get that weapon away from him, but Yaeger beats him down. Yaeger is choking Steve, apparently with the intention of murdering him, when he hears a police whistle and runs away.

Cyrus Longworth and John Yaeger are played by Christopher Pennock.* In the main continuity, Pennock played a character who asked to be called Jabe but wound up answering to “Jeb.” Jabe appeared to be a man in his twenties, but was in fact a shape-shifting monster who was only a few months old when he was destroyed. We’ve heard a good deal about what Cyrus was doing six months ago and more, and there are diplomas on the walls of his laboratory that show his history is nothing like Jabe’s.

Among the very few choices in Jabe’s short life was an attempt to renounce his shape-shifting abilities so that he could remain in human form at all times. In that way, he is the opposite of Cyrus, who chooses to take his potion knowing it will change him into Yaeger.

Also, Jabe was so obnoxious that even people brainwashed to regard him as a divine being come to fulfill a plan that more than justified the extermination of the human race found his personality too much to take and turned against him after a few encounters. But by the end of Jabe’s time on the show, it had become undeniable that there was a kernel of sweetness in his personality. In this regard, too, Cyrus is the opposite of Jabe. We hear his soft voice and see his diffident manner, and we assume that the single-minded scientist in his lab coat, toiling all hours on a project that he keeps saying will benefit humankind, is a well-meaning sort, though perhaps dangerously naïve. Cyrus’ dutiful assistant and devoted fiancée, the lovely Sabrina Stuart, encourages us in that assumption, insisting that Cyrus is thoroughly good, if hopelessly unworldly. But as the initially insufferable Jabe turned out to be endearing at the end, so the apparently innocent Cyrus is deliberately choosing to turn himself into Yaeger even after he knows what Yaeger is capable of. What’s more, he refuses to let anyone at all help him with his experiment, meaning there is no one to restrain Yaeger’s sprees.

Sabrina’s counterpart in the main continuity was the fiancée, not of Jabe, but of another dangerous shape-shifter. She was engaged to werewolf Chris Jennings. As this Sabrina is convinced Cyrus is good, so that one kept insisting Chris was good, even after she had learned that he repeatedly refused to be restrained on nights of the full Moon, so that the killings he committed in his lupine form were premeditated murders on his part. This Sabrina does not know the nature of Cyrus’ work, and she believes that Yaeger is an enemy of his who is holding him prisoner. Sabrina would appear to stand with Roger and Liz as a character who is in a meaningful sense the same person in both timelines, so we are in suspense as to how she might react if she finds out the truth about her man.

Sabrina’s part makes us wonder if the original plan were to cast Don Briscoe, who plays Chris in the main continuity, as Cyrus and Yaeger. At this time Briscoe was struggling with bipolar disorder. He was trying to self-medicate with street drugs, which not only made matters worse in itself, but also led him to get a severe beating one night while trying to score a fix in Central Park. Briscoe appears in Parallel Time as lawyer Chris Collins and has a small part in the concurrently filmed feature House of Dark Shadows, but his health problems ruled out a part as crucial as the lead in the Jekyll and Hyde story.

Buffie is played by Elizabeth Eis, who appeared in one episode set in the main continuity as Nelle Gunston. Nelle was a young woman from Virginia, bored by life with her parents, who had joined the cult that was meant to serve Jabe and the world-wrecking plan to which he was central. When she was asked if she would commit murder if that was what the cult required, she smiled pleasantly and said “Even that.” Nelle was killed before she could meet Jabe.

Buffie is not at all the same person as Nelle. She is not from Virginia, for one thing. When she thinks about leaving Collinsport to get away from Yaeger, she realizes she has only $13.40 to her name, and laughs at herself for a plan that wouldn’t get her any further than Worcester, Massachusetts. Naming Worcester as a synonym for “nowhere” would suggest that she is a New England girl, which would fit with her employment in a bar in a fishing village in central Maine. Buffie is the opposite of what they originally told us the characters in Parallel Time would be- she is not Nelle after she has made a different choice, she is a person who began differently than Nelle and is making a similar choice.

Buffie is in her room when her landlady, Mrs Duvall, comes for the rent. Buffie has a check ready. Mrs Duvall thanks Buffie for recommending her boarding house to a gentleman who has rented her four best rooms at a very handsome price. She tells Buffie that the man is a big step up from Steve. Buffie has no idea what she is talking about. Yaeger shows up, and Buffie realizes he is Mrs Duvall’s new prize boarder. Buffie is horrified, and demands her rent check back. Mrs Duvall refuses to return it. Yaeger points to a print hanging on the wall and instructs Mrs Duvall to take it away and burn it. She is doing so when Buffie protests that it is hers. At that, Mrs Duvall stops short of the door, but she does not put the print back on the wall. Eventually, Mrs Duvall does take Buffie’s print, and leaves her with Yaeger.

The telephone rings. It is Quentin, asking Buffie about Yaeger. Yaeger stands next to her and forces her to answer Quentin’s questions with lies. Later, Steve will come to Buffie’s room. She will tell him to give up on her and not to take any more beatings from Yaeger on her behalf. Steve asks if Yaeger is a superman; Buffie widens her eyes and says that he might be. This brings us back to Nelle, who renounced her life in Virginia and her connection to the human race because she was looking for a superman and thought she would find one in Jabe. Steve may not have had much to offer, but it’s a cinch he wasn’t as bad as Yaeger, and he’s gone from Buffie’s life after this scene.

The emptiness of Buffie’s life is represented today by a prop we have seen only once before on Dark Shadows, a television set. There was a set in a motel room in Bangor in #27; we never do see one in the Collinsport or the Collinwood of the main continuity. Perhaps the makers of the show are suggesting that people who have nothing better to do than to watch the idiot box are likely to fall prey to any fella who offers physical abuse and verbal intimidation.

Mrs Duvall is played by Camila Ashland. Ashland was a very distinguished stage actress who appeared in #928 as someone called Mrs Hutchins. A man from the cult around Jabe hired Mrs Hutchins to tell some lies to throw mad scientist Julia Hoffman off their trail. That didn’t work, but Julia admired Mrs Hutchins’ performance, as we suspect Grayson Hall admired Ashland’s. When the man from the cult paid Mrs Hutchins for her work, he was unpleasantly surprised at her questions and the uneasy conscience it reflected, responding roughly that she is being paid for a job and should leave it at that. He didn’t realize he was dealing with an artist. Mrs Duvall’s eagerness to please the obviously horrible Yaeger shows that she really is the crude mercenary the man from the cult assumed Mrs Hutchins was.

We cut to Cyrus’ laboratory. Yaeger has fled there from the police. He is about to take the re-Jekylling formula when Quentin shows up and demands to know where Cyrus is. We end with them in that standoff.

*Billed twice in the closing credits- as Christopher Pennock for Cyrus, and as Chris Pennock for Yaeger. Adorable!

Episode 995: Another slow Friday

Dark Shadows never followed the usual soap opera pattern of a week building to a slam-bang conclusion on a Friday. This one is a case in point. It aired on a Friday, and nothing new happens.

The actors are all very good, and each makes the most of their time on screen today. As child Amy Collins and drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, Denise Nickerson and David Selby do a good job reacting to the ghost of someone named Dameon Edwards, which they saw yesterday. As sleazy musician Bruno Hess and sneaky butler Mr Trask, Michael Stroka and Jerry Lacy do a good job being alarmed by the prospect that Dameon has returned to expose their guilty secrets. As mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, Christopher Pennock does a good job failing to perceive the consequences of his lunatic scheme. And as Cyrus’ blindly devoted assistant/ fiancée Sabrina Stuart, Lisa Blake Richards does a good job being trusting and optimistic.

I’ll just single out one moment, when Bruno sees his piano playing with the touch of visible fingers and realizes it is Dameon’s doing. Michael Stroka gives a memorable take.

If the piano starts playing itself, Bruno’s going to be out of a job.

Cyrus drinks the potion he has formulated to turn himself from a mild-mannered Jekyll into a brutish Hyde. As her did the first time we saw him do this, he cries out in pain and collapses. This time they add a lot of flaring green lights to illustrate his distress. The process is not effective at all- at first, I thought something had gone wrong with one of the cameras. At the end of the sequence, we fade from Pennock in his Cyrus look to him in his Hyde makeup, which we didn’t see the first time. The shot doesn’t line up, so it does not create the illusion of a transformation, and the prosthetic nose isn’t very firmly attached, so it takes a second to realize that it is supposed to be part of his face and not just something that landed on him while he was falling.

Episode 987: The possibilities of this synthesis

Q & A

Quentin Collins, master of the estate of Collinwood, is in an even grimmer mood than usual. His new wife, the former Maggie Evans, has left him after only a week in the great house. She had had all she was going to take of his patronizing attitude towards her and of everyone else’s preoccupation with his first wife, the late Angelique Stokes Collins. Maggie was particularly satiated with Quentin’s houseguest, Angelique’ unmarried identical twin sister, Alexis Stokes. Maggie had found Alexis in Angelique’s bedroom, wearing Angelique’s frilly nightgown, and reaching out to Quentin while suggesting in a soft voice that “Perhaps we can comfort each other.” When that sight moved Maggie to voice objections to the situation, Quentin responded by forbidding her, for her own good no less, from mentioning Angelique’s name ever again. He was amazed that this led Maggie to leave the house. Considering the provocation, it is indeed amazing that Quentin did not require medical attention to remove his brandy decanter from whatever part of his anatomy Maggie could reach.

We open today with Quentin and Alexis back in Angelique’s room. She is fully dressed this time, but they are sitting together on the piano bench. They move their heads together, and lock their lips in a passionate kiss.

Returning viewers know that we are visiting a universe parallel to the one in which the action was based for its first 196 weeks of the show. Angelique’s counterpart in the main continuity is a wicked witch who has returned from the dead quite a few times, so when we first crossed over here and heard her devotees saying that they were sure their Angelique would find a way to come back to life we did not doubt that they were right. Maggie wants nothing to do with Angelique or the cult she built up around herself, but she is among those who are convinced that Alexis is in fact Angelique redivivus. The show has done an excellent job keeping us guessing whether she is or isn’t, and we will still be guessing when we come to the end of today’s episode.

Alexis pulls away from Quentin and is visibly upset. He apologizes for kissing her. She says that she is disappointed in him- she had thought that he, of all people would know that she is not Angelique returned from the grave. He says he does not think that she is. We can believe him- his counterpart in the main continuity usually had two or three fiancées at a time, and they were rarely his only love interests. So he wouldn’t have to believe Alexis was Angelique, or indeed that she was anyone in particular, to start a make-out session with her. After they clear the air, she agrees to stay on in the house until she can meet Quentin and Angelique’s son, her nephew Daniel Collins, who is on a trip at the moment.

Bruno, Sabrina, Cyrus, Gladstone, and the Bunny

Quentin and Alexis aren’t the only ones dealing with frustrated sexual desire. We cut from them to a closeup of a bunny. This universally recognized symbol of amorous enthusiasm is alone in a cage.

The episode originally aired on the second Tuesday of Easter 1970, maybe the bunny was resting up after his big day.

The cage is in a laboratory. A young woman in a lab coat is trying to work on a large apparatus for chemical experimentation while a man wearing a purple suit, a low cut shirt, a large medallion, and a huge bouffant hairdo is pestering her with clumsy attempts at flirting. She keeps laughing off his verbal gambits and swatting away his physical approaches.

A tall young man in a lab coat enters and calls out a booming “Sabrina!” The lounge lizard and the experimenter stand up straighter and step away from each other. Returning viewers know the tall man as aspiring mad scientist Cyrus Longworth and the ill-clad masher as Bruno Hess, musician and hanger-on of the late Angelique. We have not seen the woman before, but we recognize the actress as Lisa Blake Richards, who played another woman named Sabrina in the main continuity. That Sabrina was trapped in a go-nowhere storyline. Before today is done we will have grounds to hope that this one will give Miss Richards a task more in keeping with her considerable talents.

Cyrus sends Sabrina upstairs to wait for a package. Bruno gets ready for his part in Cyrus’ experiment, which involves giving a blood sample. Bruno asks Cyrus why he was so calm when he saw him trying to put the moves on Sabrina. Cyrus replies that he trusts Sabrina too much to worry that Bruno could come between them. He then jabs the syringe into Bruno’s arm with great force and without even looking at the spot from which he is drawing the sample, causing Bruno to jump. He may trust Sabrina, but he wants Bruno to know who’s boss.

Bruno tries to interest Cyrus in his theory that Alexis is Angelique returned from the grave. He eventually manages to get Cyrus to give him a quizzical look, but stops at that point, saying that if Cyrus won’t explain his experiment, he won’t explain his.

Sabrina comes downstairs and says that the package has come and that its bearer insists on meeting Cyrus himself. Cyrus is annoyed by this, but when it develops that the man is Mr Horace Gladstone himself, the very chemist who devised the unusual compound he has brought, Cyrus sends Sabrina back upstairs and Bruno out the basement door so that he can meet with the man alone.

Friday, Cyrus explained to his friend Chris that he is trying to devise a process for separating a human being into two parts, one good and the other evil. His scenes with Chris hit all the obligatory mad scientist notes, right down to disparaging non-mad scientists as unimaginative dolts who may as well believe that the Earth is flat. He won’t tell Gladstone what he is trying to do, perhaps because he has the same last name as did the man who was prime minister of the UK when Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was first published and so he reminds him that he is a character in a derivative storyline. But Gladstone does warn Cyrus that the compound he has purchased is a potent and dangerous one. Gladstone hints at the nature of the hazard when he says that he stepped back from active research when he feared that, even within the bounds of chemistry, he was about to uncover truths best left unknown.

Gladstone is played by John Harkins, in his fourth role on Dark Shadows. As before, he is playing a stranger from far away. In #174, he played Lieutenant Costa of the Arizona State Police. We saw him in a scene set in Phoenix, the first time Dark Shadows took us outside the northeastern USA. We did not leave that region again until #877, when sorcerer Count Petofi thought back to an incident in England in 1885, when he first met his henchman Aristide. Like Bruno, Aristide was played by Michael Stroka. The incident in England involved a man named Garth Blackwood, whom Petofi would bring back from the dead to punish Aristide. Blackwood was played by Harkins.

Harkins’ third character came from even further away than Arizona or England. He was Mr Strak, the representative of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods long confined to the underworld. Strak appeared to Paul Stoddard in #899 and #900, and tricked Paul into selling his daughter Carolyn to the Leviathans. So far as Paul was concerned, Strak came from nowhere and disappeared to nowhere, so that he could never hope to explain to anyone what he had done, still less find a way to challenge the terms of the deal.

Gladstone is from Boston. Dark Shadows is set near the real-world location of Bar Harbor, Maine. The characters often mention Boston, but we’ve never had a scene set there. In #363, the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins was perfectly bland when her friend, strange and troubled boy David, said he had been to China. Sarah said that her father and his business associates were always sailing to China. When David told Sarah that he was joking and he had actually gone to Boston, Sarah was thrilled. She had been to Boston herself once, and considered it a far more exotic place than China could possibly be. Gordon Russell was credited with the script for #363, and Joe Caldwell, the freshly returned author of today’s script, had finished his first tour of duty on the show three weeks before it was taped. But Sarah’s excitement about Boston is so much the kind of character moment Caldwell specialized in that I suspect it was a leftover idea of his that Russell found a place for. Perhaps the casting of Harkins as a Hub man reflects Caldwell’s idea of what Boston would represent to people in a coastal village in central Maine.

Bruno and Alexis

We cut to Bruno, who is on the telephone. He is talking to a person in an office somewhere. He learns that no ships from Genoa have docked in New York in the last week. This information excites him, but his excitement soon gives way to terror as he feels himself choking.

Bruno runs into Angelique’s bedroom, where Alexis is back on the piano bench. He gasps and demands she stop obstructing his breathing. She appears to have no idea what he is talking about.

The Angelique we have known since late 1967 did specialize in casting spells that made her enemies choke. We saw her do that as recently as #955, when her husband tried to set fire to her and she stopped him by twisting a scarf around the neck of a statue. On the other hand, Alexis seems genuinely bewildered by the situation.

When Bruno starts breathing again, he confronts her with the fact that no registered passenger ships from Genoa arrived in New York harbor the week before. She asks him if he considered that she might have been a guest on the yacht of some wealthy friends. He is stumped by this. Again, this keeps the suspense about her true identity alive. Alexis has been established as the sort of person who would be found on someone else’s yacht, but she doesn’t actually say that that is how she got back to the States. She merely asks Bruno if he had thought of the possibility that she may have done so.

Cyrus and Sabrina

Back in the lab, we see Sabrina collecting some equipment while Cyrus tends to his notes. She finds a small box, and asks him if he put it there for her to find. When he says he did, she opens it and finds a ring. She asks if it is an engagement ring. He says he hopes it is. She throws her arms around him and tells him she loves him. He holds her and does not say that he loves her too. He merely says that she knows how he feels about her, an ill-omen if ever we saw one.

Cyrus tells Sabrina that she knows how completely his work consumes his energies, and she says that is one of the things she admires about him. She asks what exactly he is working on. He is reticent, and she tries to walk the question back. He goes into his mad scientist ravings, and she gives him a stunned look. He tries to reassure her, saying that when he gets carried away he talks in cliches. He says that no one has found good or evil in a test tube… “yet!” The crazed gleam comes back into his eyes.

This scene gives Miss Richards more to work with than she had had in her whole time in the main continuity. The look Sabrina gives at the end of Cyrus’ gust of lunacy is the first time she has had a chance to get a laugh, and she makes the most of it. As for Christopher Pennock, he had just been getting the hang of his previous part, hugely overgrown infant Jeb Hawkes, when he was written out. With Cyrus, he can to some extent pick up where he left off. Pennock had begun to find a way to suggest that there was a real sweetness bottled up inside one-man wrecking crew Jeb, and in Cyrus’ love for Sabrina he can play a character who is Jeb’s mirror image- abundantly sweet, but so deep inside his own head that he is about to become a monster.

Bruno

On Dark Shadows, wedding days usually come and go without anyone actually getting married. Typically, the ceremony is interrupted and someone has to go off and dig up a grave, in which they find an empty coffin.

Bruno has no manners and does not observe any of the recognized customs. So even though today is Sabrina and Cyrus’ engagement day, not their wedding day, he jumps the gun and starts opening Angelique’s grave, in which he believes he will find an empty coffin. We end with him chiseling at the wall of the mausoleum. I suppose you could say that he might be planning to work slowly, so that he won’t finish until the day of the wedding, but even if that were true it would be an outright violation of the accepted norm, and an undeniable sign that he is not the sort of person who can be expected to fit in at Collinwood.