Tag: claude north

Episode 1055: The man who murdered Angelique

Angelique Stokes Collins has returned from the grave to take vengeance on her murderer. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know who that is. For the last several weeks, she has been operating on the assumption that she was killed by her widower, foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins. She has managed to get Quentin charged with one murder and suspected of several others; under her influence, he assaulted a police officer and broke out of jail. She has persuaded him that his current wife, the former Maggie Evans, is a witch and is responsible for all his troubles. He is lurking about the great house on the estate of Collinwood, where yesterday he encountered Maggie and told her he would kill her.

Angelique herself is residing in the great house. Eleven weeks ago she killed her identical twin sister Alexis, assumed Alexis’ identity, and took her place as Quentin’s houseguest. Maggie now thinks of “Alexis” as her friend.

Others in and around the house know better. High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, Quentin’s brother, has seen through her imposture. Two visitors from the alternate universe where Dark Shadows was set for its first 196 weeks, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and vampire Barnabas Collins, knew her counterpart in their world and are onto her tricks.

Angelique hears some noise in her old bedroom in the east wing of the great house. She finds the door locked and hears Roger’s voice. She demands to be let in. He opens the door and she forces her way past him. She finds Maggie in a heap on the floor. Roger rushes out. Maggie tells “Alexis” that Roger tried to strangle her after confessing to three murders, including Angelique’s. Angelique and Maggie decide to call the police.

Julia and Barnabas learned that Angelique’s father, evil barfly Tim Stokes, made it possible for her to rise from the dead by using a mixture of medical science and black magic to establish a remote connection between Angelique and a woman named Roxanne. Through this connection, Stokes drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. Julia and Barnabas have taken Roxanne from the back room of Stokes’ apartment and hooked her up to some mad science equipment in the basement of the Old House at Collinwood. They hope to manipulate Roxanne’s condition as a means of controlling Angelique.

Angelique has locked Julia in a dungeon off the basement of the great house and left her there to die of thirst. Barnabas is sure Angelique has captured her, but cannot begin to guess where she might be. He takes a shot at using the mad science equipment to revive Roxanne sufficiently to knock Angelique out. He cannot see any effect, and goes out to try to look for Julia.

As Barnabas goes out, a man peers at him from behind a tree. Since Barnabas never under any circumstances locks his front door, the man strolls into the house as soon as Barnabas is out of sight.

The man is Claude North, a mysterious person somehow connected with Roxanne. Barnabas comes back to the basement and finds Claude trying to get Roxanne to talk. He tells him that she must not do so just yet, because at her first word Angelique will die and there are some things he has to take care of before that happens. Claude cares nothing for this. Barnabas is afraid that if he attacks Claude, Roxanne will be startled into speaking, so he withdraws.

The other day, we saw a grave marker in Claude’s name, and we have seen that he has the same power Barnabas does to mesmerize people when they follow his command to “Look into my eyes!” He had also been staying in a hidden chamber identical to the one where Barnabas’ coffin was kept for his first 171 years as a vampire. And he had some kind of mystical power over Roxanne, as Barnabas has over his victims. So we thought Claude might be a vampire, too. But today he explains that the grave was his grandfather’s, he clearly doesn’t recognize Barnabas as a fellow bloodsucker, and when cornered he doesn’t flash fangs. So we’re left thinking he’s probably just Roxanne’s overconfident ex.

Meanwhile, Angelique is feeling cold and weak because Roxanne has reclaimed so much of her “life force.” She has cast a spell to cause Roger to slip past the police swarming the estate and make his way to her in her old room. Once they are together, she warms herself up for a while by hugging and kissing him. First time viewers may think this is an odd thing for her to do, but returning viewers know that she is a heat vampire who can by those actions drain the warmth from a living body and leave it an icy corpse. Louis Edmonds has been doing some great work these last few weeks, and he plays Roger’s death scene especially well.

So long, Rodgie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Downstairs in the drawing room, Angelique is still shivering. Maggie enters and sees that “Alexis” is ill. Maggie insists on helping, and Angelique suggests she walk her to the fireplace. They sit together beside it. We learned Wednesday that Angelique has magical hypnotic powers, and Maggie’s counterpart in the main continuity was subjected to frequent mind-wipes. So there is a nice sense of inevitability when Angelique puts her into a trance and orders her to get a gun and prepare to shoot Quentin.

Angelique is still sitting by the fire, still feeling miserable, when Barnabas comes back. He tells her that Claude is with Roxanne and that Roxanne will be speaking at any moment. He writes up a confession and orders her to sign it, saying it will clear Quentin of the murder with which he was charged. He says that this will allow her to find peace. She says she doesn’t want peace. We may wonder how the confession could possibly clear Quentin. All she could do would be to admit that the man Quentin is charged with killing actually died because she cast a magic spell on him. We have already seen that the policeman in charge of the case has zero patience for talk about magic, and there is no end of evidence pointing to Quentin’s guilt.

We end where we began, in Angelique’s room with a homicide in the offing. Then it was Roger with his hands around Maggie’s neck; now it is Maggie pointing her revolver at the door as the knob turns. That isn’t all that suspenseful a situation. I’m sure Maggie would feel bad if she had killed Quentin, but he’s so hyper-violent that no one would doubt she acted in self-defense and has been such a bad husband to her that it’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t get over it in short order. If Quentin dies, there will be so few characters left that the show couldn’t go on, but we will probably be leaving this universe in a few days in any case. So this isn’t much of a Friday cliffhanger.

Episode 1050: How to bring you half alive

Late in 1968, the ghost of Quentin Collins began haunting the great house on the estate of Collinwood. The ghost gradually waxed more powerful and more malevolent, killing some people and tormenting others. By March of 1969, the great house had become altogether uninhabitable. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, trying to contact Quentin, traveled back in time to 1897, when Quentin was a living being. During the eight months the show was set in that year, we got to know a Quentin who was selfish, cowardly, untrustworthy, cruel, and supremely charming. Barnabas’ interventions changed history. In the revised timeline, Quentin did not become a malevolent ghost. He didn’t even die. A spell was cast on him that immunized him against aging, so that when the show returned to a contemporary setting in November 1969 he was alive, well, and to all appearances 28 years old.

In 1969 and 1970, Quentin still had all the lovableness that came from being played by David Selby. But the writers were stumped when it came time to give Quentin something to do. They kept him in a holding pattern for a month or so with a case of amnesia, and used him and one of his girlfriends to tell a version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. When Barnabas and his best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, were doing battle with an unseen race of monsters from beyond space and time, they occasionally turned to Quentin for help. When Barnabas’ old nemesis, wicked witch Angelique, grew jealous of his interest in governess Maggie Evans, she cast a spell to cause Quentin and Maggie to conceive a wild passion for each other, something which came and went and which Barnabas never noticed. None of that activity made an impression on the audience or gave the character room to grow.

The evil but irresistible Quentin of 1897 had a great deal in common with high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, who was in 1966 the show’s first true villain. As played by Louis Edmonds, Roger was so much fun to watch that it was soon out of the question to follow the original plan and kill him off when his crimes were exposed, so they nerfed him. Roger turned into a sarcastic but harmless snob. When in November 1967 the show went back in time to 1795, Edmonds played haughty overlord Joshua Collins, a man as strong as Roger was weak. In a tragic turn Aristotle would have admired, it was Joshua’s virtues that led to disaster for himself and everyone he loved. In the 1897 segment, Edmonds played the stuffy but lovable Edward Collins, who had many faults but was devoted to his family and committed to doing the honorable thing. Under the influence of these roles, Roger himself had by the time the show was done with him transformed into an upright family man.

The makers of the show have apparently decided that if traveling in time and casting Edmonds in other roles could change Roger so profoundly, finding a setting where they can present us with a different version of Quentin might be a path to reinvigorating that character. To that end, they have traveled, not backward in time, but sideways in time. We are now in a different universe than the one where the first 196 weeks of the show took place. The show insists on calling this universe “Parallel Time.”

Here, Quentin is the master of Collinwood and Maggie is his wife. This Quentin is something his counterpart never was, an authority figure. But authority does not come naturally to him, as it did to Joshua and Edward. He holds onto it in his relationship with Maggie by treating her as a child, with the result that their marriage is all but dead. He ignores his son Daniel, caves in to the servants when they stand their ground against him, and throws tantrums and runs away when he encounters serious opposition. In those moments he reminds us of the cowardice Quentin showed in 1897. On occasion, however, he has shown physical courage, as when he stood up to an evil man called John Yaeger. As Joshua suffered from the overgrowth of his virtues, so Quentin’s better deeds seem to be the accidental byproduct of his vices. What we have seen in Parallel Time makes it easy to imagine that when we get back to the main continuity, we will see Quentin as a sometime action hero who must at all costs be kept from taking charge of anything. Had the segment caught on as 1795 and 1897 did and been expanded beyond the bounds originally planned for it, who knows what other paths it might have opened for the character.

Angelique was Quentin’s first wife, who was murdered nine months ago but has risen from the dead, assumed the identity of her identical twin sister Alexis, and set about taking revenge on her killer. She doesn’t know who that was, though for now she is operating on the assumption it was Quentin.

Roger and the matronly Elizabeth Collins Stoddard are Quentin’s siblings. While in the main continuity Liz kept her share of the inheritance as Roger was squandering his, here she entrusted her money to Roger, so that they are both penniless dependents on Quentin.

Barnabas and Julia have crossed over from the main continuity. Barnabas is pretending to be a long-lost cousin of the Collinses, while Julia is impersonating her own counterpart. That other Julia Hoffman was the housekeeper at Collinwood and Angelique’s most fanatical devotee until Julia showed up, beat her to death, and stole her French maid outfit.

At this point, Quentin is on the run from the law, suspected of the murder of sleazy musician Bruno Hess. He was choking Bruno shortly before his death, but is in a sense innocent of the crime, since it was a spell Angelique cast that completed the fatal strangulation. Liz’ daughter Carolyn is in mourning for her husband Will, who found himself caught between Angelique’s magical powers and Barnabas’ and could do nothing but fling himself to his death from a high window. Yesterday Carolyn announced that she knew and could prove who had killed Angelique. She went to the room on top of the tower attached to the great house. A man entered. She greeted him. He drew a knife and she screamed.

Today, Roger tells Liz and Julia that he heard Carolyn’s scream, ran to the tower room, and found her stabbed to death. Presumably the same man killed her who killed Angelique. The three current suspects are Roger himself, Quentin, and butler Mr Trask.

Yesterday’s episode hinted heavily that Trask was the culprit, and Liz says that he has been missing since Carolyn was killed. We had not seen or heard of Trask in more than eight weeks, and in none of the handful of episodes in which he appeared before that hiatus was it suggested he might have killed Angelique. If it does turn out that the butler did it, therefore, it would be obvious that the show had originally planned to pin the crime on a major character and chickened out at the last minute. We do see a man lurking about today who might be Trask and almost certainly is the mysterious and terrible “Claude North” whom we have heard about recently; if Trask and North are one and the same, that might lead somewhere, but it would hardly be a logical culmination of what we have seen so far.

The whole point of the “Parallel Time” segment is to reconceive Quentin. Making him the killer of Angelique might fit with that. The Quentin of the main continuity murdered his wife Jenny in 1897,* and Angelique is much less sympathetic than Jenny was. Quentin does not have to be admirable, or even defensible. He just has to be attractive. If they can find a way to occasionally make his vices into motives for good deeds, all the better. But Carolyn’s counterpart in the main continuity has been a central figure on the show since the first week, and like all characters played by Nancy Barrett she is a fan favorite. If this Quentin deliberately kills Carolyn, especially by hacking her to bits with a kitchen knife, it is hard to see how the Quentin of the main continuity will benefit. It is true the present Quentin is such a gloomy sourpuss and such a miserable failure as a husband to Maggie that he has already alienated the audience, so they might have decided they had nothing to lose by turning him into Jack the Ripper.

That leaves Roger. He has been painted in the colors of his counterpart as he was in 1966, making him a possible murderer. Even at his coldest, the Roger of the main continuity was close to Carolyn, whom he called “Kitten.” But when we first saw the characters from the current universe in #975, they were hostile and impatient with each other, and Roger took a menacing tone with his niece. The only person for whom this iteration of Roger has any affection is Angelique, and all of that flows to a version of her that exists only in his imagination. Roger seems to be describing himself in both universes when he tells Liz that “The sum total of my life seems to be that I can never help anyone.” So we can certainly believe he killed both Angelique and Carolyn, and that he might kill again.

Liz and Roger’s counterparts have been on the fringes of the action in the main continuity for years, and today we see that this Liz and Roger are also excluded from much that is happening. They visit the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town scouting out potential resting places for Carolyn. Unknown to them, there is a hidden chamber in the back of this mausoleum, and Claude North is lurking there, a dagger in his hand, while they chat in the publicly visible part. They then go to Carolyn’s home, the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, to look for anything she might have written that would give a clue as to who killed her. Unknown to them, Julia is in the basement of the house, conducting a mad science procedure to weaken Angelique by reviving a woman named Roxanne on whose “life force” she is feeding. One wonders where else they will stop on their way home, and of what other uncanny doings they will be oblivious while there.

We hear Julia’s thoughts as she is preparing to revive Roxanne. She tells herself that this is the procedure that brought Adam and Eve to life. She is not thinking of some obscure midrash about the book of Genesis, but about two Frankenstein’s monsters she loosed upon the world in 1968.

*Jenny must have been in someone’s mind when they were making this episode. We catch a glimpse of a gravestone in her name during a cemetery scene:

Poor Jenny, bright as a penny. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.

Episode 1047: Extraordinary enemies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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