Tag: closing credits

Episode 890: They will be strangers, but you will know them

Like many episodes of Dark Shadows, this one ran long and ended with credits only for the cast and for Dan Curtis Productions. The entry on the Dark Shadows wiki says that the director was Lela Swift. I am sure that it was in fact directed by Henry Kaplan. This shot of Nancy Barrett as heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is proof positive:

There is another flagrant Kaplanism in today’s first scene between antique shop owners Philip and Megan Todd (Christopher Bernau and Marie Wallace.) Philip enters from upstairs. He stops with his waist at the top of the frame. That’s where he stays for the first part of the scene, ending with Megan raising a paper that covers part of her face. Evidently what’s happening between the characters is none of the audience’s business.

Philip makes an entrance
Megan interacts with Philip

Swift was a talented and ambitious visual artist, Kaplan a sloppy and unimaginative one. He relied heavily on closeups. When it dawned on him that it was dull to hold the frame just beyond the edges of an actor’s face, his response was to zoom in and give us an extreme closeup of some part of the actor’s face. It’s above average for him that the first shot above includes Miss Barrett’s eyes- he specialized in shots displaying the face from the nostrils down, and often held them even after the actors had to move, leaving us with the sight of an ear drifting out of our view.

Even when Kaplan’s tight little frames do not keep us from figuring out what is happening in a scene, they deprive us of the energy that comes from seeing the players interact with each other. We don’t get statements and reactions simultaneously, and we don’t see the actors using the space between them to tell us how the characters feel about each other. Kaplan was also a pretty bad director of actors, regularly poking them with a stick as his way of telling them he wanted them to play a scene differently and on one occasion fastening a handle to a child actor so that he could physically place him on his mark during rehearsal. So perhaps his mania for closeups reflected a lack of awareness of what actors do and how the choices they make contribute to the audience’s experience. As a result of his insensitivity to these and other visual aspects of the medium, Kaplan’s episodes would often be better suited to radio than to television.

Fortunately, the dialogue today is peppered with snappy lines. So Danny Horn devotes his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day to a selection of memorable pieces of dialogue. That also makes me suspect the wiki is not entirely correct. It attributes the script to Gordon Russell, an able writer overall but one who is not at all given to bons mots. I use bits of dialogue whenever possible as the titles of these posts, and I often have to search very hard through Russell’s to find suitable ones. It was Violet Welles who excelled at producing those. Russell and Welles often collaborated, so it could be that he wrote a draft to which she added the quotable quotes.

The current story centers on a mysterious cult that has sent time traveler Barnabas Collins back to 1969 from a long sojourn in 1897, by way of a couple of days in 1796. Under the influence of the cult, Barnabas is being a real jerk to his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Barnabas was a vampire for a long time, and even when he is free of the effects of that curse he habitually resorts to murder to solve his problems. But the victims of those murders are imaginary, played by actors who will go on to find other work, so we don’t usually stay mad at him for any length of time when he commits them. His friendship with Julia, on the other hand, is the emotional core of the show. Barnabas’ coldness to her in yesterday’s episode and today’s leads us to see what the cult is doing to him as the greatest crime anyone has ever committed on Dark Shadows.

Barnabas was a pop culture phenomenon familiar to many millions of people who never saw a single minute of Dark Shadows. The show’s fanbase largely consisted of his devoted followers. So a story about a cult which co-opts him as its leader and changes his personality so that he is impossible to get along with directly addresses a fear that must have blacked out the mind of Dan Curtis every time the postal service truck loaded with Jonathan Frid’s fan mail backed up at ABC Studio 16.

Barnabas brought a box with him from his visit to the eighteenth century, and it is of the utmost importance to the vast eternal plan the cult is working on that the box not be opened until the right time. So Barnabas put it on the mantel in his living room, and when Julia was standing a few inches from him he lifted it from the mantel and placed it on a table in the middle of the room. When she asked what it was, he became flustered and refused to answer any questions about it.

When Julia left the house, Barnabas left the room, with the front door unlocked and the box still on the table. Today, we open with Julia coming back in, hearing the sound of breathing coming from the box, finding its key on the table next to it, and placing the key in its lock. Barnabas comes in just in time to stop her opening it, but we can see that the cult probably could have chosen an agent with a better sense of operational security. Barnabas’ function in the story is to make messes that other people will have to clean up, so as soon as we heard that the box must not under any circumstances be opened we expected him to leave it where it would inevitably fall into the hands of someone bent on opening it, though it is a bit disappointing he has done so this quickly.

After he has taken the box from her, Barnabas berates Julia, orders her from his house, and tells her he owes her nothing. He abruptly sweetens up and tells her that he is only carrying on that way because of some kind of temporal jet lag. He reminds her that when she traveled back in time in September, she was very ill for a while; he suggests that his surly mood might be the result of the same shock that caused that reaction. About a minute after he starts on this new tack, just as Julia has started smiling again, a knock comes at the door. It is Carolyn.

We don’t know what effect the cult’s co-optation of him has had on Barnabas, but regular viewers know that characters on Dark Shadows are always acquiring one magical power and losing another. For the last few months of the 1897 segment, the show’s main villain was sorcerer Count Petofi. One of Petofi’s signature moves was to become aware of visitors shortly before they arrived. It could be that the writers have decided to give the cultified Barnabas that power, and that it was because Carolyn was on her way that he wanted to put Julia in a good mood.

That interpretation is supported by what follows. Carolyn is delighted to see Barnabas; she hadn’t known he was back from his trip to 1897. She hugs him and he smiles, a stark contrast to his icy reaction when Julia hugged him yesterday. She wants to talk about Chris Jennings, a young man she dated a few times and whom she has been told is dangerous. Julia and Barnabas have befriended Chris and know that he is a werewolf. Julia thinks she can somehow control Chris’ transformations, and she urges Carolyn to think well of him. Barnabas tells her to trust her instincts and to avoid Chris. He keeps telling her that she is too important to be allowed to come to harm. Later, he visits Carolyn in her home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood, and he keeps going on and on about how important she is and how confident he is about her future. He also gives her a silver pentagram, an amulet to ward off werewolves, and urges her to wear it at all times. He subsequently has another scene with Julia in his own house, and he is just as cold and dismissive as he was in the first scene, exploding at her for being “irrational.” Evidently the cult has plans for Carolyn, but not for Julia.

Julia bought a painting from the Todds the other day, and now they have received a telegram offering to buy it regardless of price. Julia goes to their shop and discusses the telegram with them. She believes that the telegram, which is signed “Corey,” may actually be from Quentin Collins, a distant cousin of Barnabas’ whom he befriended during his time in 1897 and who may have been immortalized by a magical portrait painted by the same artist responsible for the picture Julia bought. She tells the Todds that she is not certain she wants to part with the painting, but that she would very much like to meet “Mr Corey,” and that she believes others in town would also like to do so. She urges them to reply to the telegram with an invitation.

Barnabas stands over the box. We hear his thoughts as he mulls over his questions about it. He suddenly declares “It is time!” Then he goes to his chair and sits down. Evidently, it is time to take a load off.

Barnabas has a vision of one of the hooded figures who inducted him into the cult. The figure, a man named Oberon, addresses him as “Master” and tells him that he is to give the box to people who wake him by knocking at his door. There is a knocking, he does awaken, and he goes to the door.

Episode 888: The place that he disappeared

The Prowler

Yesterday, we spent a lot of time watching an unidentifiable man wandering around the estate of Collinwood. We only saw him from the back; he was wearing a dark coat and hat, and had silver-gray hair. Evidently we were supposed to expect his face would mean something to us when it was finally revealed.

At the end of yesterday’s episode, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman caught the prowler coming out of the Old House on the grounds of the estate, home of her friend, missing person Barnabas Collins. She did not recognize the man, and he refused to identify himself. We see him in today’s opening reprise. His face would not be familiar to her, but it is instantly recognizable to longtime viewers. It is that of actor Dennis Patrick, who from March to July 1967 played seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Jason blackmailed reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard to the point of marriage. When Liz finally stood up to Jason, his scheme collapsed. On his way out of town, Jason went to the Old House hoping to steal jewels from Barnabas. That attempt also failed, and Barnabas strangled Jason.

We spend most of the episode wondering how Jason managed to rise from the dead. Near the end, Liz’ daughter Carolyn runs into the prowler. She gets a good look at him and talks to him for a few minutes, but does not recognize him. Carolyn would certainly recognize Jason, whom she was ready to shoot if Liz had gone through with the wedding. So Patrick must be playing another character. He does not give Carolyn his name, but his strong emotional reaction when she gives hers tells us that he has some kind of connection to her. We are again supposed to leave the episode wondering who he might be.

Unfortunately, word of that did not get to the people who make up the closing credits. Patrick is billed today as “Paul Stoddard.” Paul is Carolyn’s long-missing father, Liz’ ex-husband, and a close friend and partner in crime of the late Jason McGuire. This is not the first time on Dark Shadows the closing credits have identified a character whose identity was supposed to keep us guessing. For example, at the end of #124 we are supposed to be in suspense as to which of a few people a mysterious woman is, but the closing credits identify her as “Laura Collins,” a name which blows the secret completely for attentive longtime viewers. A mysterious little girl turns up in #255 and for a few episodes we are supposed to be in the dark as to who she is. But at her first appearance the character was billed as “Sarah Collins.”

It’s interesting to cast Patrick as Paul. Jason’s scheme was based on Liz’ belief that she had killed Paul, when in fact Paul and Jason had worked together to fake his death and swindle her of some money. Since Paul and Jason committed the two halves of the same crime, they merge together in the disastrous effects they have had on Liz’ life. So they may as well look and sound exactly alike.

Waiting for Barnabas

Barnabas vanished from his basement some time ago while he was involved with some supernatural doings. Julia has been hanging around the house for over a month, waiting for him to rematerialize. She explains to Carolyn that because he disappeared from the basement, it is the only place where he can reappear. They go into the house and Julia almost immediately suggests they leave. She is sure he isn’t there, because she locked the basement door. Evidently Julia has spent all this time waiting to hear Barnabas banging on that door demanding to be let out.

Carolyn points out that Barnabas might be unconscious, and if he is he would not be banging on the door even if he has come back. Julia exclaims “I hadn’t even thought of that! He- he could be down there now!” At this, my wife, Mrs Acilius, laughed and said “He could have been down there for a month!” By profession, Julia is a mad scientist. She knows how to cure vampirism, bring Frankenstein’s monsters to life, rewrite people’s memories at will, and travel back in time, but she has her blind spots.

Be that as it may, Julia checks the basement and finds Barnabas is not there.

The Antique Shop

Carolyn takes Julia to an antique shop that has just opened in the village of Colllinsport. Carolyn called the shop “divine” yesterday, and is still thrilled about it today. I suppose it reminds her of home- like all the unoccupied spaces in the great house of Collinwood, it is crammed with a lot of miscellaneous junk.

Carolyn may have a soft spot for the place, but she hasn’t lost all capacity for judgment. The proprietors, a young couple named Philip and Megan Todd, have just unpacked a painting they bought that morning. Philip says that when it came up for auction he couldn’t resist it. Carolyn widens her eyes, tilts her head back, and says in an incredulous voice, “Hmm, your taste must be quite different from mine, Philip. I could have resisted that.”

The painting Philip couldn’t resist.

Philip mentions that the artist’s name is Charles Delaware Tate. At that, Julia perks up. She asks Philip if he is certain that it is an authentic Tate; he assures her that he is. He astonishes her by saying that it was painted only about twenty years ago. Julia says that Tate would have been in his 80s then. Seeing that the painting is about as good as anything Tate ever did, she says that he was still at the height of his powers despite his advanced age. She wonders if, having been in such good shape so recently, he could still be alive. Philip doesn’t know about that.

Julia asks for the price. When Philip says he will part with the painting for $300, Julia takes out her checkbook. Carolyn looks on, amazed to see her shell out so much money so quickly for a mediocre picture. When it is time to go, Julia asks her if she is ready. Still agape, Carolyn replies “Yes.. for practically anything!”

For eight months, from #701 at the beginning of March to #884 last week, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897. In the second half of that segment, Tate was one of the minor villains. He had made a bargain with evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Petofi made him a nationally famous painter whose works were very much in demand. Many of his paintings also had magical powers. The magical powers were the result of Petofi’s spell, but it was never made entirely clear whether Tate’s fame was the result of a talent Petofi gave him to paint well or if Petofi’s intervention was more direct and he simply bewitched people into admiring Tate’s paintings and wanting to buy them. Indeed, if we had to classify the works of Tate that we saw, the most secure categorization would be “Nothing Special.” They certainly do not stand comparison to the best of the portraits that the ABC Network’s Art Department prepared for the Collinwood sets. Carolyn’s reaction today clearly suggests that once Petofi’s influence receded, the paintings lost their charm.

Julia’s interest in Tate is not aesthetic. Julia traveled back in time for a couple of weeks in September. She knows that Tate’s portrait of Quentin Collins prevented Quentin from turning into a werewolf. The prospect that Tate might still be alive leads her to hope that her friend Chris Jennings, a great-grandson of Quentin’s, might also be cured of lycanthropy.

The audience is unlikely to find much ground for optimism in the thought of more Tate. As is usual for characters played by Roger Davis, Tate is hard to watch. He delivers most of his lines in a shout, and he amplifies his voice by clenching his rectal sphincter muscles. The result is what Pauline Kael used to call an “anal screech.” He also has what we might tactfully call a poor sense of personal space; indeed, two of the tags that most often appear together on posts on this blog are “Roger Davis” and “Abusive Behavior on Camera.” So I would just as soon Julia give up her search for Tate.

The Todds

Megan and Philip exult over Julia’s purchase. They are in the middle of talking about how it is a good sign for their new business, when Megan is suddenly seized with a fit of foreboding. She wants to close the shop early; Philip protests that they still have time to make a few more sales. Megan then says she has a premonition that if they stay in Collinsport something terrible will happen to them. She says she wants to sell the shop and move away. Philip tries to soothe her. He puts his head against hers and kisses her. She just looks straight on, her eyes full of dread.

Philip working his way to Megan’s neck while it dawns on her that they are now characters on Dark Shadows.

Megan is the third role Marie Wallace played on Dark Shadows. Her first two were Eve, the Fiancée of Frankenstein, and Crazy Jenny Collins, Quentin’s estranged and deranged wife. Miss Wallace had a lot of fun with those parts, but neither of them gave her much opportunity to interact meaningfully with her scene partners. Eve was unyieldingly nasty to everyone, whatever they might say or do, and Jenny was just one long mad scene. As Megan, she gets to listen to Philip and react to what he says. That ends when she ignores his kissing her neck, but while it lasts it’s good to see.

Philip is played by Christopher Bernau. Some fans say that Bernau and Miss Wallace lacked “chemistry,” but their last shot today shows how misguided that criticism is. The key to chemistry is for one character to initiate a kiss and the other to kiss back. Megan is supposed to be too preoccupied with her premonition to notice anything in her environment, even her beloved husband kissing her. If she had responded to him at all, the whole point of the scene would have been lost.

It is true that Bernau does not perfectly embody a romantic lead in Philip’s scenes with Megan. As a happy couple, Philip and Megan constantly make little jokes with each other. The jokes in the script aren’t very good, and Bernau tries to put some life into them by imitating Jack Benny. In the 1920s and 1930s, Benny’s persona struck people as a spoiled rich kid, and in later years he was so famous that it just meant Jack Benny. But by the 1960s, any man other than Jack Benny would send a very different message if he were to speak with that drawl and walk with that mincing gait. When the man in question is an antique dealer wearing a belted sweater that looks suspiciously like a dress, it does not seem especially likely that he will passionately in love with his wife.

I think Philip borrowed this from Maggie Evans…

Several times in his career Bernau proved he could be effective in love scenes with women, most famously as ladies’ man Alan Spaulding on The Guiding Light. I mentioned that role in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day:

I was a kid when Bernau joined GUIDING LIGHT. My mother watched that show, and I had several times attempted to watch it with her, but it always defeated me after 5 or 10 minutes. It just seemed like a window into the deepest level of Hell, the frozen cavern where absolutely nothing happens. But Bernau caught my imagination. I could watch entire episodes if he was in them.

Years later, when I watched DARK SHADOWS on the Sci-Fi Channel, I realized what made Bernau so compelling on GUIDING LIGHT. He was doing a Jonathan Frid imitation. Within moments of first seeing Barnabas, I exclaimed “Alan Spaulding!” It was only years later that I learned Bernau had been on DARK SHADOWS.

Comment left 10 December 2020 by Acilius, on Danny Horn, “Episode 888: Little Shop,” 26 June 2016, Dark Shadows Every Day.

I’m very fond of John Gielgud’s story that from the time he first saw Claude Rains give a performance, his acting style consisted of imitating Claude Rains. Gielgud went on to say that this represented a great improvement over his previous style, which consisted of imitating Noël Coward. I doubt Bernau’s style ever depended entirely on either Jack Benny or Jonathan Frid, but he certainly learned a great deal by watching each of them.

Episode 851: Common cause

Rakish libertine Quentin Collins races to the train station to meet his fiancée, the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris. He thinks he sees her, but it is actually another young woman wearing a remarkably similar outfit. She tells him the train to New York City left a few minutes ago; Quentin knows Amanda was on it, and that she thinks his absence means that their relationship is over. The young woman was quite miffed when Quentin first approached her, but by the time he offers his second apology her look has gone from indignant to concerned to yearning. The guy’s got game, you have to grant him that.

It’s been less than a minute since he made a bad first impression on her, and she’s ready to run off with him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin was detained by a fistfight with a repulsive little man called Charles Delaware Tate. Tate is an artist whose works sometimes have magical powers. His portrait of Quentin, for example, keeps Quentin from turning into a werewolf and ensures him against physical harm. Since Tate is obsessed with Amanda, he stole the portrait from Quentin when he learned Amanda was planning to leave with him. Quentin dared not leave without it, and went to Tate’s studio to demand its return. He very satisfyingly beat Tate senseless, but he did not find the portrait, and now he fears he has lost Amanda forever.

We cut to Tate’s studio. Tate is lying on the floor where he fell when Quentin finished hitting him. Unfortunately, he gets up. Sorcerer Count Petofi, who granted Tate the power to make magical artworks some years ago, enters. He tells Tate that it was stupid to steal Quentin’s portrait. Tate pretends not to know what Petofi is talking about, irritating him and us. Petofi says that he will have to be punished. After he forces Tate to draw a sketch of a pretty woman, he squeezes his wrists, helps himself to Quentin’s portrait, and says what sounds very much like a final goodbye. He exits, and Tate sits down with his pad and pencil. He discovers that he is no longer able to draw, not even a straight line.

These days, Dark Shadows is a costume drama set in 1897. Most of the time between 1966 and 1968, it took place in a contemporary setting. In those days, the set now used as Tate’s studio was the Evans cottage, home to artist Sam Evans, a drunken sad sack, and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. In December of 1966 and January of 1967, the ghost of the gracious Josette compelled Sam to paint alarming images of Laura Murdoch Collins.

It turned out Josette was doing this because she knew the characters were not all that bright and she had to literally paint them a picture to explain that Laura was an undead fire witch bent on incinerating her young son David. Laura tried to thwart Josette’s plan by harming Sam. In #146, Laura caused a fire at the Evans cottage that burned Sam’s hands, temporarily depriving him of the ability to paint. Petofi’s disabling of Tate on the same set will bring this incident back to longtime viewers. Especially so, since Josette is in the air at this point in the show. In #844, a character named Kitty joined the cast. She keeps having mental flashbacks to things only Josette would remember, and Josette’s music box appeared on Kitty’s table at a time when Josette’s ghost seemed to be the likeliest agency to have put it there. Perhaps she will insert herself into Tate’s story for some reason.

When we were watching the scene between Tate and Petofi, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that she very much wished someone else were playing Tate. Violet Welles’ script gives whoever is playing Tate a lot of opportunity to show what he can do in that scene. Roger Davis is a highly trained actor who has a long list of stage and screen credits, but he is almost always very unpleasant to watch on Dark Shadows, and he wastes the potentially fascinating dialogue Welles gave him. When Mr Davis is particularly trying, I usually try to make the scenes bearable by imagining what Frederic Forrest, who was a featured background player in #137, would have done in his place. But the echo of the story about Sam makes me wonder what David Ford would have done as Tate. Ford was in his forties, smallish and pudgy, so a David Ford Tate could not believably have had a fistfight with a character played by the very tall and fit 28 year old David Selby. But he might have been a subtle enough villain that such an exchange would not have been called for. Moreover, the incestuous undertone of Tate’s desire for Amanda, who is the product of one of his magical paintings and therefore a kind of daughter to him, would have been all the more disturbing had Tate been played by the man we knew as Maggie’s father in the 1960s and, when the show was set in the 1790s, as Josette’s.

Back home at the great house of Collinwood, Quentin receives a visit from Tim Shaw, Amanda’s ex and a would-be sleazy operator. He demands Tim tell him what he knows about Amanda’s life in New York before they came to Collinwood. Tim declares he will tell him nothing, to which Quentin responds by choking him and flinging him to the floor. Tim then burbles out everything he knows, which turns out to be nothing of the slightest use. Quentin picks Tim up and throws him out the front door in the most humiliating possible way. We cheer this on almost as joyously as we cheered Quentin’s beating of Tate Friday, but for the opposite reason. Mr Davis is a genuinely disagreeable person who ruins episode after episode, and it was him we were angry with. We chanted at the screen, not “Quen-tin! Quen-tin! Quen-tin!,” but “Da-vid! Da-vid! Da-vid!” hoping Mr Selby would pay him back for all his on-screen assaults on the women and children in the cast. But Don Briscoe was as nice a guy as Tim has become despicable, and he and Mr Selby enjoyed working together. You can see Briscoe’s joy in performance in the way he holds on to a little yellow piece of paper representing a note from Amanda all through the beating Quentin administers. Even the shot of Quentin shoving Tim out with his buttocks prominent is the product of Briscoe’s enthusiastic use of his body to demonstrate Tim’s total defeat.

Quentin throws Tim’s sorry ass out the door. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin’s other fiancée, wicked witch Angelique, comes downstairs to ask what the ruckus was about. Quentin makes up a transparent lie about having a financial interest in some firm in Boston, and says that he and Tim were quarreling about the details of it. Angelique lets him go on with this for a while and to say that he is leaving for Boston, then insists that they set a date for their wedding. He begs off, claiming not to know how long he will be away.

Petofi enters, and tells Angelique about Quentin’s plan to go to New York and look for Amanda. He also tells her that they now have a common cause, and proposes an alliance. Each of them is so powerful, and so evil, that this is a sobering prospect.

When Quentin returns to the foyer, it is his turn to be alone with Petofi. Quentin knows that Petofi gave Tate both the power to create the portrait that freed him of his curse and the commission to do so, and that he is therefore beholden to Petofi for his continued humanity. Part of his motivation for fleeing to New York with Amanda was his hope that he could escape the slavery Petofi has imposed on him as the price of that benefice. When Petofi tells Quentin he has come to see him before he goes, Quentin is momentarily stunned, and then makes a brave little noise to the effect that Petofi can’t stop him. Petofi assures him that he does not want to stop him. It doesn’t matter in the least to him where Quentin is- he can control him from anywhere.

Petofi calls on Tim at his room in the inn. He deepens Tim’s misery by pretending he doesn’t believe what Tim told him about Tate’s magical powers. As he leaves, he takes a brooch that belonged to Amanda.

Quentin is at the train station. Angelique appears there, and tells him not to go. He says that he doesn’t care if she kills him. It will be consolation enough to have died walking away from her. She says that she will not harm him in any way. This causes him to open his eyes wide in terror as it dawns on him what she means. She produces Amanda’s brooch and a doll. She positions the pin of the brooch over the doll’s chest and says that no matter where Amanda is, she will die a horrible death when the pin impales the doll.

Closing Miscellany

The actress who plays the young woman Quentin meets at the train station is billed in the credits as “Amy Yaekerson,” the only person known to Google ever to be called “Yaekerson” and known only for this appearance. But in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, a commenter known as “miles” pointed out that there are lots of people named “Yakerson.” He went on to identify an Amy Yakerson born in New York City on 1 April 1946, and to find a 1966 notice of a play featuring an actress of that name and probably of that age in the New York Daily News. I followed that up with some Googling of my own; the only Amy Yakerson I can find who is online today was born in Connecticut in 1954, so I don’t know where Amy Yakerson, star of stage and screen, is now.

We saw some of Sam’s paintings in Tate’s studio Friday and today, twenty-some years before Sam was born. Tate hides the portrait of Quentin behind one of Sam’s seascapes, and Sam’s portrait of Maggie’s mother is on the floor next to him when we see him lying there in the aftermath of the fight. John and Christine Scoleri have the details in their post about Friday’s episode at Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 844: Some clean, fresh air

Adventurer Tim Shaw is in his hotel room with an apparently mute man, trying to get him to speak. The man is struggling to make a sound when artist Charles Delaware Tate enters and produces a revolver. Tate proclaims that the man will never speak. He fires, and the man falls dead to the floor.

The man’s body glows, then vanishes. Tim knows that Tate created the man earlier in the evening. Tate has a magical power that enables him to cause objects and people to pop into existence just by drawing them. Tim says that he ought to call the police, since Tate just murdered a man in cold blood in front of him. But there is no body, and the only other person who has seen the man is Tim’s traveling companion and occasional accomplice Amanda Harris, who turns out to be another of Tate’s creations. So instead Tim pours a drink, and Tate tells him all about how he gained his powers as the result of a bargain he struck with sorcerer Count Petofi.

Petofi is aware of several magical abilities he gave Tate, but does not know that he can bring his creations to life. Tim calls Petofi to his room and brings him up to date. He believes that this report will somehow establish a partnership between himself and Petofi. Since Tate made it clear that his powers are the result of Petofi’s own interventions, it is unclear why Tim would expect even a finder’s fee for this information. It certainly does not provide the basis for an ongoing relationship of any kind.

Meanwhile, a visitor is arriving at the great house of Collinwood. Her face is familiar to longtime viewers- she is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who has been in the cast from #1 as Maggie Evans, wisecracking waitress turned The Nicest Girl in Town. When from November 1967 to March 1968 the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s, Miss Scott played the gracious Josette; she had already played Josette’s ghost in some of the episodes in contemporary dress, and in the spring and summer of 1967 vampire Barnabas Collins had tried to brainwash Maggie into becoming Josette. We last saw Miss Scott from March to June in the first part of the still-ongoing segment set in 1897, when she was neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond.

Before we know the name of this new character, we see that she is wearing widow’s weeds. There is also a first- we hear her thoughts in an interior monologue before she interacts with another character. Whoever she is, the widow is telling herself that she has come to her big moment and she shouldn’t chicken out now. “No one will know,” she assures herself.

Neither Maggie, Josette, or Rachel ever used that facial expression.

The unknown widow knocks, and rakish libertine Quentin Collins lets her in. He appreciates her beauty and asks who in the house is fortunate enough to know her. She says that she and her late husband were friends of the stuffy Edward Collins. Quentin says that Edward is away, and identifies himself as his brother. “Quentin or Carl?” asks the widow. Quentin says, with a sad note, that Carl is dead. This is the first time anyone other than his onetime fiancée Pansy Faye has mentioned Carl’s name in the three months since his death.

The widow finally identifies herself as Kitty Soames, Countess to the late Earl of Hampshire. She says that she is an American, and that after her husband’s death she felt that she was a stranger in England and ought to return home. Quentin invites her to stay in the house.

Kitty is alone in the foyer when Petofi enters. She is horrified to see him. It becomes clear that her husband’s death was a suicide, and that Petofi’s threats prompted it. She goes out to take a walk in the woods.

Along the way, she meets Barnabas, who has traveled back in time from 1969. They have a brief talk. When she exits, he says that she is Josette, returned to him at last.

Back in the great house, Quentin finds Kitty looking at the spot on the wall next to the front door where Barnabas’ portrait has long hung. Some weeks ago, Edward learned that Barnabas was a vampire and ordered the portrait removed. There is a mirror there now, the same mirror that hung in that spot in #195, when the ABC art department was painting Barnabas’ portrait and another portrait was reflected in it. Kitty asks Quentin why Barnabas’ portrait was removed. Since she has never been in the house before, this question perplexes him. He asks how she knows about the portrait and how she knows of Barnabas. At first she is amused by the idea that she would not know of him, but a second later she returns to herself. She insists she has never met anyone named Barnabas and has no idea what Quentin is talking about. Perhaps this time, Barnabas is right- maybe Kitty really is a revenant of Josette.

Miss Scott was one of the biggest stars on the show. She tells a story nowadays about a trip she and her then-husband took to Africa in the late 1960s, when they were on a photo safari deep in the bush. Some people happened by, took one look at her, and all started saying excitedly “Maggie Evans!” So it is inexplicable that today’s closing credits misspell her name as “Kathryn Lee Scott.”

Episode 836: The grownup world

It is 8 September 1969, and the ghost of Quentin Collins has rendered the great house of Collinwood uninhabitable. The family, including permanent house guest Julia Hoffman, have been staying at the Old House on the estate while recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is on a trip back in time to 1897, when Quentin was killed and the trouble started. But Julia has received a letter Barnabas wrote to her in September 1897 indicating that, as of that date, his mission was about to end in total failure, and so she decides to take matters into her own hands. First, she must learn exactly how and when Quentin died.

Julia goes to the great house and follows the sound of Quentin’s theme song to the tower room. There, she finds the ghost of maidservant Beth, who was one of Quentin’s many lovers. When Beth is in a shadowy corner, she puts on a ghostly voice and tells Julia that her name would mean nothing to her. As soon as she comes into the light, Julia says that they’ve met several times, and soon she is calling her by name. Along with the fact that, as Beth, Terrayne Crawford is just standing there in the same light as Grayson Hall, with no practical effect whatsoever to suggest ghostliness, this deflates whatever feeling we are supposed to have that we are witnessing an encounter with the supernatural.

Julia insists Beth tell her how Quentin died. When the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah Collins was on the show from June to November 1967, she would often insist on the Ghost Rules and vanish if people put direct questions to her. But Beth just wanders around a little, moans to Quentin that she has no choice but to tell Julia what she wants to know, and starts dishing. Again, they aren’t making ghosts like they used to.

Beth tells Julia that on 10 September 1897, she found out Quentin was going to marry a woman named Angelique. Quentin did not tell her this news himself; he left it to Angelique to do so, making the blow fall all the more heavily. This will remind longtime viewers of #392, when Barnabas could not bring himself to tell his ex-fiancée Josette that he was engaged to Angelique, leaving Angelique to tell Josette herself in #393. Josette waited until #425 to leap to her death from the cliff at Widows’ Hill, but things move faster now. Beth went straight from her conversation with Angelique to her room, where she had a bottle labeled “Poison.”

Sensible shopper that she is, Beth buys her poison in the Generic section of the murder weapon store. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Before she could do away with herself, Beth was interrupted by a knock on the door from twelve year old Jamison Collins. Jamison came in to show her a puzzle he had solved, then saw the bottle. He demanded to know what was going on, and she admitted that she was planning to kill herself because Quentin was going to marry Angelique. He stopped her doing that, but after he left to confront Quentin she took a loaded revolver out of her dresser.

Jamison found Quentin in the drawing room, in Angelique’s arms. Angelique at first dismissed Jamison, saying that his uncle was too busy to speak with him, but Jamison held his ground and insisted on seeing Quentin alone. Quentin obliged, but would answer Jamison’s questions only with airy assertions that he is too young to understand the situation. Jamison is so composed and forceful, and Quentin’s behavior is so flagrantly irresponsible, that we might expect Jamison to ask to be spared lectures on maturity from a man so much more childish than he. Instead, Jamison simply becomes angry and tells Quentin that after what he has done to Beth, he wants nothing more to do with him.

In #767, Jamison had a dream in which Quentin’s ghost said that his death was preceded by three events. The first two events happened shortly after. The third event was that Jamison rejected him. This has now happened, and in the dream Quentin said that once that took place “There was almost no time left for Quentin Collins.” Indeed, shortly after Jamison stalks off Beth shows up with her revolver and shoots Quentin. He staggers from the drawing room and goes upstairs. Since the staircase is made of eleven steps and is eight feet tall, that’s some pretty fancy staggering for a man who has just taken a round to the midsection. Quentin keeps staggering all the way to the tower room, where Beth shoots him a few more times.

We cut back to 1969, where Beth tells Julia she killed herself the day after she killed Quentin. She doesn’t seem to be done talking when Julia excuses herself. Say what you will about Sarah, she always left them wanting more.

Julia finds twelve year old David Collins, Jamison’s grandson, in the drawing room with Quentin’s ghost. Since Barnabas took us back in time with him in #701, we’ve got to know the living Quentin quite well, and he is a charming rascal who has very little in common with the silent, family-annihilating ghost we saw late in 1968. Beth’s story does very little to explain how the one turned into the other. The ghost has been draining the life from David; Julia orders David to come away from him, and he does. David lies down on the couch, and Julia examines him. She finds that he is weak, but resting comfortably.

Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes enters. Quentin’s ghost has vanished. Stokes calls Julia by her first name, something he had not done prior to this episode, and asks after David. She at first says he will be all right, then checks on him again. She cannot find a pulse, and declares him dead. Julia has performed wonders in her work as a medical doctor, but her death pronouncements are so often wrong that this does not give much grounds for alarm. However, we then hear Quentin’s voice laughing maniacally, darkening David’s prospects.

Terrayne Crawford seems to be such a nice person that it distresses me to point out that she was not a very good actress. But in this one, Beth’s lack of supernatural quality and Julia’s bland reaction to her make it seem like writer Gordon Russell and director Lela Swift were conspiring to vent their exasperation with Miss Crawford’s limits. She can play one emotion at a time, so that when Beth is shocked to learn that Quentin is going to marry someone else she is only and entirely Shocked. When Beth is suicidal, she is only and entirely Sad; when she decides to take Quentin’s life instead of her own, she is only and entirely Gleeful; when she tells Julia that her vengeance did not relieve her sorrow over Quentin, we can see that’s true, because she is only and entirely Sorrowful. The result is like looking at a series of wood block cuts illustrating various emotions. It’s all very clear and quite vivid, but there’s no sense of development from one scene to the next. Had Miss Crawford been able to lay one emotion over another and play two or more of them at a time, the grin on Beth’s face when she kills Quentin would have shown us that all the layers of complexity of feeling had finally been stripped away and only hatred was left. That would have been a tremendous climax for the character. But since there was never any such complexity to start with, it’s just another block cut.

Often when I see disappointing performances on Dark Shadows, I think of other actors in the cast and try to imagine what they would have done with the part. Gail Strickland, like Miss Crawford, is a tall, thin woman whose chin juts out on a horizontal line, and she was on the show as doomed schoolteacher Dorcas Trilling for a couple of episodes in May. Dorcas’ role would have been well within Miss Crawford’s competence, and in her long and distinguished career Miss Strickland proved she could do just about anything. So on a day like this, I envision a different, much more nuanced Beth. The episode in my imagination is really stellar, I wish you could see it.

Today, David Henesy plays both his 1897 character Jamison Collins and his 1960s character David Collins. He is not credited for either of those roles, but for Daniel Collins, whom he played when the show was set in the 1790s back in late 1967 and early 1968.

Episode 793: All the revolted spirits

When wicked witch Angelique first turned Barnabas Collins into a vampire in the 1790s, he went to the waterfront and preyed on the women he found spending their nights there. When Barnabas traveled in time from the 1960s to the year 1897, he again made his way to the waterfront. Whether he bit the women or not, he choked them to death, earning the sobriquet “The Collinsport Strangler.”

Once he had become a vampire, Barnabas displayed so many traits he had come to have in common with Angelique that we suspect he is not only cursed by her, but possessed by her. More precisely, it often seems that when Angelique made Barnabas a vampire she created a copy of her own personality and put it in his mind, where it took control of him. We have further support for that interpretation in today’s opening reprise. We see Angelique on the same set where Barnabas has several times been the last person a young woman would encounter. This time, she encounters a young man. He flirts with her, as the women flirted with Barnabas. Before long, he is choking and within seconds of death because of her action. In this case, she has taken his handkerchief and is tightening it around the neck of a toy soldier that once belonged to Barnabas. She is threatening to kill him unless he tells her where he has hidden the legendary “Hand of Count Petofi.”

The man’s name is Aristide. He capitulates, telling her he buried the hand at the old cemetery, in a grave marked with a stone bearing the name of Townsend. She gives the handkerchief another tug, and he falls down, unconscious.

Later, we are in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Angelique comes down the stairs, carrying the box in which the hand is kept. Stuffy Edward Collins sees her. Regular viewers have seen the box on a table in the upstairs hallway many times, from the first week of the show onward. It is rather odd that Edward doesn’t ask her why she is carrying it around. Even if we decide to forget that the prop is familiar and decide to treat it as representing something Edward hasn’t seen before, people don’t usually walk around carrying wooden boxes in front of themselves.

Still, Edward does have other matters on his mind. Angelique had been introduced to the family as Barnabas’ fiancée, at a time when all the Collinses knew about Barnabas was that he was their distant cousin. She disappeared when he was exposed as a vampire. Edward tells her that the family’s lawyer, Evan Hanley, told him that he knew her before she met Barnabas, and that he believes that her association with him was innocent. Edward also says that he cannot believe that this is true. Angelique tells Edward a story about Barnabas biting her and making him her slave; Edward is convinced instantly, and declines her offer to leave at once. He urges her to stay at Collinwood until she can make new plans.

Meanwhile, we have learned that Aristide is alive and not seriously injured. A man in a set of whiskers that represent the aesthetic sensibilities of the late Victorian era developed to their uttermost extremity finds Aristide crumpled on the ground, rouses him from unconsciousness, and responds to his story about Angelique almost killing him with dismay that she stopped short. He tells Aristide not to do anything more. His own credentials are in order, and he will present them at Collinwood as he sets about his second attempt to get the hand.

The man does go to Collinwood. He gives Edward a letter from their “mutual friend,” the Earl of Hampshire. It attests to the good character of its bearer, Victor Fenn Gibbon. Edward insists that Fenn Gibbon stay in the house, and he accepts.

Angelique emerges from the drawing room, still carrying the box. Edward continues to ignore it; Fenn Gibbon can’t take his eyes off it. Edward introduces her as Angelique Duvall. This is the first time we have heard the name “Duvall” in connection with her; when we met her in the part of the show set in the 1790s, her name was Angelique Bouchard, and when she turned up in 1968 she called herself Cassandra Blair. Fenn Gibbon asks if she is French. She says that she was born in the USA, but that her forebears were French people who lived on Martinique. Indeed, when she was known as Angelique Bouchard she lived on that island, and it was there she met Barnabas. Fenn Gibbon tells her that lovely as France’s colonial possessions may be, none is as “exquisite” as she. She is charmed, and excuses herself. She leaves the house, taking the box with her.

While Fenn Gibbon regales Edward with tales of derring-do from the battle of Khartoum, Angelique takes the box to the Old House. There, she meets the rakish Quentin Collins, whose desperately handsome face has been severely disfigured by a previous encounter with the hand. Angelique dismisses Quentin’s girlfriend, maidservant Beth, telling her that she cannot be present during what she must now do for Quentin. Beth leaves, Angelique shows Quentin the hand, and Quentin demands that Angelique set to work curing him. She says there will be a price for her services. If she cures him, he will have to marry her. He has nothing to lose, and she looks exactly like Lara Parker, so of course he agrees.

Angelique picks up the hand and gets to work casting a spell, but the hand quickly escapes her control. She turns to find that it is on Quentin and he is in agony. He pleads with her to help, she cries out that she can do nothing, and we see Fenn Gibbon peering in through the window.

Fenn Gibbon looks on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Fenn Gibbon* is the fifth role Thayer David played on Dark Shadows. The first, second, and fourth were all closely associated with the Old House. They were crazed handyman Matthew Morgan, who holed up there after he killed local man Bill Malloy; much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes, who lived and worked there; and broad ethnic stereotype Sandor Rákóczi, who with his even more offensively conceived wife Magda lives at the Old House in 1897. With this iconography behind David, regular viewers will know that when they see Fenn Gibbon in the window of the Old House, they are seeing a man who knows his way around the place.

David’s third role sheds even more light on Fenn Gibbon. In the parts of the show set in 1968 and subsequent years, he plays Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, expert on the occult and descendant of Ben. Unlike most of the characters who made a splash on the show, Stokes has a functioning conscience. He does not always live within the law, but he always strives to do what is right. When we see that Fenn Gibbon knows about the hand and has orchestrated a criminal conspiracy to obtain it, we see that he is an evil version of Stokes. At once this makes him fascinating to regular viewers. Stokes himself is a reimagining of the show’s first academic specialist in the paranormal, Dr Peter Guthrie, who was killed by a witch in #186. He is a jovial and talkative eccentric, where Guthrie was a tight-lipped and understated Yankee. Fenn Gibbon seems to have inherited Stokes’ whimsical bent and exaggerated manner; we now have to wonder what Stokes would be like as a villain.

Even those who joined the show after it went to 1897 and who therefore do not know about Stokes will be intrigued when they see David as Fenn Gibbon. Sandor hasn’t appeared since #750, but he is still alive. This marks the first time Dark Shadows has cast the same actor as two living characters in the same time frame.** Sometimes an actor has doubled as a living character and as a ghost, or has appeared in two roles in parts of an episode set in different periods of history. But this is a new frontier for doubling on the show. Sandor is always a lot of fun, so we might hope that he will be back and that he and Fenn Gibbon just won’t have scenes together. But coming on the heels of his long absence, it does have an ominous ring.

In #758, Quentin backed Angelique against a wall and asked her why she preferred Barnabas to him. That was a very good question. The two of them are obviously attracted to each other, and have a lot of fun every time they are alone together. By contrast, the only emotions Barnabas has ever shown in response to Angelique are glumness and rage. Her maniacal insistence that Barnabas should love her drove Angelique to wreak immense havoc in the 1790s, and also motivated some story in 1968. But there is nothing to it beyond his misery and her self-absorption. When we see her turn her attentions to Quentin, longtime viewers will cheer at the hope that we are about to be freed from that dead end once and for all.

*He introduces himself today as “Fenn Gibbons,” which is how he is almost always addressed. But the closing credits leave the S off his name. The closing credits have been unreliable lately, identifying Edward as his grandson Roger and misspelling Aristide’s name. Still, “Fenn Gibbon” sounds better to me; “Fenn Gibbons” suggests a group of small apes found in a peat bog.

**Don Briscoe briefly played both werewolf Chris Jennings and Chris’ brother Tom, but that is only a partial exception- Tom was a vampire at that time.

Episode 792: No place. And every place.

Quentin Collins has devoted himself to the pursuit of evil, and as a result he has two intractable problems. When Quentin murdered his wife Jenny, her sister, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, turned him into a werewolf. Magda later found out that Jenny had borne twins to Quentin, and since the curse is hereditary she tried to lift it. She placed the magical “Hand of Count Petofi” on Quentin before his transformation. That didn’t stop him becoming a wolfman, but it did cause his face to be severely disfigured when he returned to human form.

Now Quentin has made his way to the house of Evan Hanley, his onetime friend and partner in Satanism. Evan had recently been disfigured in the same way Quentin is disfigured, also as a result of contact with the hand, and Quentin knows that Evan stole the hand from Magda to use in an attempt to de-uglify himself. When Quentin sees that Evan is handsome again, Evan denies that he used the hand to restore his looks. He claims not to know what happened. That is as frustrating for the audience as it is for Quentin. We were sure Evan would start looking like himself again, and they went to enough trouble to show that he was not able to correct his appearance by himself that we were expecting the cure to involve a significant plot point. When Evan presents us with “It just happened” as his explanation of how he got his old face back, we are quite sympathetic to Quentin’s decision to grab a blunt instrument and knock him out.

Quentin finds the hand in a box in Evan’s desk, and a strange man immediately enters. He demands Quentin give him the hand at once. Quentin is willing to surrender the hand once he has used it to become his desperately handsome self again, but the man will not wait. He pulls a knife to underline his point. The knife is a flat piece of wood cut in a shape with some pronounced curves and no sharp edges, and the man holds it loosely at the end of an arm that is directly over the box Quentin could easily raise to disarm him. So the audience has to help a bit to make the confrontation credible. Still, the acting is very good, and the dialogue, in which the man combines lethal threats with apparently sincere expressions of sympathy for Quentin’s plight and jokes at his expense, is complex and lively enough that we are glad to make the effort. Besides, the man goes to the trouble of telling Quentin that the knife is named “The Dancing Girl” and that it was made long ago by a Persian swordsmith, so he’s giving our imaginations something to work with. I, for one, didn’t have any trouble keeping a straight face when Quentin lost the fight and the man left with the box containing the hand.

Kids, if you are going to rob someone at knife-point, do not imitate what Aristide is doing here. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin goes to Magda at the Old House on the estate of Collinwood and reports what happened. She is frightened, since she herself stole the hand from a Romani chieftain/ organized crime boss named King Johnny Romana. When he says that a strange man came to take the hand, she assumes that he is an emissary of King Johnny’s, and that his next stop will be to kill her. When Quentin says that the man was young, Magda is puzzled- the recognized norms dictate that King Johnny send “an elder of the tribe” to complete such a task. She sets aside her plan to flee, and agrees to help Quentin in his attempt to summon wicked witch Angelique.

Quentin and Evan conjured Angelique up in #711. In previous segments of the show, when it was set in the 1790s and in the 1960s, Angelique established herself as one of its principal sources of action. But she hasn’t had much to do in 1897. She had a showdown with fellow undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins back in May, and has barely been seen since. Quentin and Magda speak for the audience when they wonder where she is and what she has been doing. They speculate that she might have gone home to the depths of Hell, and light some black candles to accompany an incantation meant to call her thence.

Angelique does appear, but not at the Old House. Evan finds her in his parlor when he comes to. One of the possible explanations for the restoration of Evan’s good looks was that he made some kind of bargain with Angelique; this is excluded, not only when he is surprised to see her, but when she asks questions that make it clear she knows nothing about the hand or anything that has happened since Magda brought it back with her. Angelique orders Evan to give her a complete briefing, and we cut back to the Old House.

Quentin is still in front of the black candles, fervently reciting his mumbo-jumbo, and Magda is telling him they have failed. After a moment, Angelique enters. Quentin jubilantly declares that he has succeeded in summoning her, and Angelique says that she is not aware of that. She tells him she was with Evan, and asks about the hand. Quentin tells her it was taken from him, and asks for her assistance. She says she is willing to help him, for a price, and that as a token of her good faith she will retrieve the hand. But first she insists he tells her everything he knows. We cut to the waterfront.

There, the man who took the hand from Quentin is standing alone in the fog. Angelique enters and flirts with him. He gives his name as Aristide. She says she is a puppeteer, and that if he lends her his handkerchief she will perform a trick. She wraps his handkerchief around the neck of a doll depicting a Continental soldier, a familiar prop from 1967 that became prominent during the 1790s segment, and squeezes it. Aristide begins choking, and Angelique orders him to give her the hand before he dies.

The Collinsport Strangler strikes again? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The closing credits bill Michael Stroka as playing “Aristede,” an unusual spelling. The following item, posted in the comments under Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, confirms my resolution to stick to the conventional spelling:

Factoid… I have the original script for episode 808, and Aristede is spelled throughout as Aristide.

Comment left 3 September 2017 by “Isaac from Studio 16 on W 53rd” on Danny Horn, “Episode 792: Dances with Wolves,” Posted at Dark Shadows Every Day, 19 December 2015.

In the same comment thread, Carol Zerucha goes on at length about Stroka’s ethnicity. He was Slovak, as she is, and she had a big crush on him when she was a kid watching the show. The characters in today’s episode assume that Aristide is Roma, but Ms Zerucha points out that we have no reason to assume they are right, and that he, too, might be Slovak.

Also in that thread, FotB “Straker” says that Aristide looks like William F. Buckley, Jr. I agree. I wish they had at some point cast him as a character who leaned way back in his chair and used polysyllabic words.

Episode 787: You said that, I said nothing

Dark Shadows fans like to make jokes about the inefficiency of law enforcement in the fictional town of Collinsport, but in this episode we see that the sheriff and his men really never had a chance. The ancient and esteemed Collins family controls everything in the area, and they will go to any lengths to keep the police from obtaining the information they need to do their job effectively.

Stuffy Edward Collins invokes the police when he demands that broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi vacate the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Magda laughs and says that if the police show up, she will tell them that Edward’s distant cousin Barnabas is a vampire. Horrified at the damage it would do to the Collins family name were word of Barnabas’ condition to get out, Edward backs down. Barnabas is at large and has been responsible for at least six homicides since traveling through time to the year 1897, including the murder of Edward’s brother Carl in the drawing room of their home just the other day. But evidently that is a small matter to Edward compared to the danger that the sheriff might be indiscreet.

Barnabas materializes at the police station, where a werewolf is being held in custody. A deputy is startled to see Barnabas in front of him all of a sudden. For only the third time in the series, Barnabas says “Look into my eyes!” and induces an hypnotic trance in someone not his blood thrall. It is the first time he has exercised this power on someone other than Edward’s nine year old daughter Nora. Barnabas tells the deputy that once he has completed his task, he will remember nothing. So he is following the family policy with regard to keeping the police in total ignorance.

Edward shows up and sees Barnabas. Edward is wearing a cross and holding a revolver loaded with six silver bullets, which on Dark Shadows are as effective against vampires as they are against werewolves. Barnabas hides behind the deputy and tells Edward that he is acting in the interests of the future of the Collins family. Edward says that he belongs to the past, not the future. Barnabas doesn’t explain anything; he vanishes.

Not exactly an heroic look for ol’ Barney. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas’ post-hypnotic suggestion has its effect, and the deputy is bewildered to find himself face to face with Edward. Edward tells him that they must watch the werewolf. The deputy starts to say something about the sheriff, and Edward replies “The sheriff doesn’t realize what this animal is!” Of course he doesn’t, no one will tell him anything about it.

Back in the Old House, Barnabas and Magda lament their failures. He could not take the werewolf from the cell in the police station to the cell in the basement of the house; she could not persuade lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley to return a severed hand he stole from them. They wanted to do these things because the werewolf is Edward’s brother Quentin, whom Magda is trying to free from his curse by means of the hand’s magical powers. Barnabas knows that if they do not succeed, terrible consequences will ensue in 1969.

Closing Miscellany

It is a serious mistake to show the werewolf when he is not in the act of committing a spectacular homicide. They didn’t have the budget to put him in full-body makeup, so he wears a tidy little suit, complete with a watch fob. He is so well put together that it is difficult to imagine him inspiring any fear other than the fear that one will not meet his apparently rather exacting standards of attire.

Whoooo’s a well-dressed doggie? You are! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is a noteworthy blooper in this one. Magda confronts Evan, declaring “The book, I know you took it from the Old House!” Usually actors roll with each other’s bobbled lines, but this is far enough out that Humbert Allen Astredo obviously has no idea where Grayson Hall is in the script. All he can do is ask “The book?” “The hand!” she corrects.

They also make a goof in the closing credits. This is one of three consecutive days when Louis Edmonds is billed not as Edward, but as Roger Collins, the role he plays in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. He’s been identified correctly throughout the first seventeen weeks of the 1897 segment and everyone else is identified correctly in these episodes, so it is not clear what happened.

Danny Horn’s posts at Dark Shadows Every Day are often laugh-out-loud funny, and the one for this episode is especially so. His description of the scene between Magda and Evan has some big laughs, and when he imagines the sheriff’s deputies trying to catch the werewolf by “putting on their alluring lady-werewolf disguises a la the Warner Brothers cartoons,” well that’s just super how could anyone improve on it.

Episode 760: A creature of fire

Diana Millay’s Laura Murdoch Collins was instrumental in two of the most important turns in the development of Dark Shadows. When she was on the show from December 1966 to March 1967, she was its first supernatural menace, marking its transition from the Gothic melodrama of its first months to the monster-driven thriller it became. And in her current tour of duty, in April and May of 1969, it is while doing battle against Laura that Barnabas and Quentin Collins become friends, a friendship that will be central to the show from now on.

Today is Laura’s final appearance. Her sendoff is startling. After she bursts into flames, we cut directly to the closing credits, already in progress with Jonathan Frid’s credit for the part of Barnabas scrolling over an image of the outside of the great house typically shown during the opening voiceover. The bottom of the image is atypically cut off, creating a letterbox effect. None of this is in itself spectacular, but each part of it is a deviation from the usual format. Taken together, it leaves us with the feeling that Laura must have exited by way of the control room.

In the opening reprise, Laura thinks she is waking her son Jamison. She pulls the covers back from Jamison’s bed, and finds that she has been talking to a pile of pillows. In the corner of the room, Laura’s fellow undead blonde fire witch Angelique bursts out laughing.

Well might Angelique laugh. Not only is it ridiculous to see an ancient and terrible creature like Laura fall for so childishly simple a trick, but heaping up pillows under covers to make it look like someone is in bed is a favorite practice of Angelique’s. In #402, Barnabas went to Angelique’s bedroom intending to stab her, only to find her in the corner laughing at him after he had chopped up some pillows under her blanket.

It is fitting that Angelique is the one who destroys Laura. Matthew Hall, son of Sam and Grayson Hall, writes in the essay he contributed to The Dark Shadows Companion that when he and his father were among the writers developing the reboot of Dark Shadows that aired briefly on NBC early in 1991, the idea of including a version of Laura was rejected because “the Phoenix was virtually a test run of all the ideas that would subsequently reach fruition in the character of Angelique. Thus: Laura’s ability to cast spells that set fire to distant things is but one if Angelique’s large arsenal of tricks. Of course, on the original show, advantage was taken of how evenly matched these two characters were: they fought viciously during one episode.” There are some odd things in this assessment, but it is certainly that a character like Laura, who was frightening precisely because she herself was unknowable and her presence implied a world that humans could never hope to understand, had no place on a show where the supernatural is represented by figures like Angelique and Barnabas, whose feelings and intentions are overwhelmingly obvious and all too relatable.

Laura’s children are hidden from her in a room in the east wing of Collinwood. It is in this room, in front of them, that she burns up. The east wing has been mentioned only a few times, mostly by actors who were supposed to say “west wing.” This is the first episode with a scene set in the east wing.

Episode 704: The sort of person relatives would want to meet

When vampire Barnabas Collins first came to the great house of Collinwood in April 1967, the living members of the Collins family were embattled, isolated, and desperate for friendship. In 1966, one of the major themes of Dark Shadows had been that the Collinses were running out of money and their nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin, was using his own fortune to buy up their outstanding debts and alienate the people of the village of Collinsport from the Collinses. Everywhere they turned, they met hostility in one form or another. Their two most devoted employees had been plant manager Bill Malloy and handyman Matthew Morgan; in a fit of rage, Matthew killed Bill, and went on to abduct and try to kill well-meaning governess Victoria Winters. Roger Collins’ estranged wife, Laura Murdoch Collins, showed up; she turned out to be an undead blonde fire witch out to kill their son, strange and troubled boy David. No sooner had Victoria rescued David from Laura than seagoing con man Jason McGuire presented himself and set about blackmailing matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Jason even forced Liz to give the bedroom next to her daughter Carolyn to his rapey sidekick, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis.

So when a man knocked on the door who looked exactly like the portrait of an ancestor who lived in a previous century and introduced himself as a distant cousin from England, a wealthy eccentric with courtly manners who wanted only to spend time on the estate where his forebears lived long ago, Liz and Roger were delighted to host him. Barnabas spent most of 1967 as a comic villain scrambling to maintain the pretense that he was native to the twentieth century, but as far as the adult residents of the great house were concerned his authenticity was established beyond doubt the first moment they saw him.

Now Barnabas has traveled back in time to the year 1897. In this period the Collinses of Collinwood are rich, powerful, and paranoid. Unknown to Barnabas, a woman named Magda Rákóczi, whom he had given a ruby ring as a bribe to secure her help after she learned that he was a vampire and that her husband Sandor was his blood thrall, had preceded him to the great house. Magda did not know why Barnabas had come to Collinwood, but she knew that he had some objective and that he would likely leave as soon as he had accomplished it. When Barnabas told Magda that he would keep giving her jewels as long as she helped him, he therefore gave her an incentive to slow him down as much as possible. She therefore told repressed spinster Judith Collins and Judith’s brother, libertine Quentin Collins, that they should beware of a “creature of darkness” who would be calling on them after sundown and who would claim to be “a friend, or perhaps a relative.”

Neither Judith nor Quentin has any respect for Magda, as much because of her Romani ethnicity as because of her mercenary ways. But when Barnabas introduces himself, Judith is deeply shaken. Quentin mocks her, suggesting that the resemblance between Magda’s prediction and Barnabas’ identification is as likely to be a coincidence as anything else, but as soon as he is alone with Barnabas Quentin pulls a sword, holds it at Barnabas’ throat, tells him he knows he is an impostor, and demands the truth within “five minutes” or he will run him through.

With this act, Quentin shows as little strategic nous as Barnabas had shown when he led Magda to believe that it was in her interest to make sure he stayed around for a while. Quentin does not know that Barnabas is a vampire, so that running him through with a sword would do nothing but give whoever saw it a story that he could not tell without branding himself a lunatic. But he does know that he is the black sheep of the family, and that his brothers and sister are eager to get him out of the way before their grandmother dies and her will goes into probate. If he kills a man in cold blood, they would have an excellent reason to have him committed to an asylum and whatever legacy he receives placed in a conservatorship they would control.

So Quentin’s threat is an empty one. Had Barnabas caved in and made a confession that he was a fraud, only Judith would have known of Quentin’s triumph, and she has made it clear that she is not about to yield a penny of her inheritance to him no matter what he does. At most, Quentin would have given Judith a new esteem for Magda, who herself has no use at all for him. And when Barnabas holds his ground, all Quentin can do is back down, losing face and making himself permanently ridiculous in his eyes.

The particulars of the scene are interesting, as well. Quentin tells Barnabas that he has “five minutes” to explain himself. When we heard that, my wife and I laughed out loud. Are we about to be treated to five minutes of silence while they hold their poses? Surely, we thought, it was a blooper- the scripted line must have been “five seconds.” But no! A moment later, Quentin says that “five minutes can go by rather quickly, when a man is about to die.” Had Barnabas been struck with terror at the sight of the weapon so close to him, he might have started confessing as soon as he saw it, but by the time Quentin doubles down on this “five minutes” it is obvious he has already lost the game.

Quentin tells Barnabas that he has just returned from a visit of about six months in England, during which time he discovered that he had no relatives there named Collins. This gives Barnabas an opportunity to insult Quentin, saying that his reputation may have preceded him and driven his relatives to make sure he did not find out about them. This stuns Quentin satisfactorily, but is not strictly necessary. There had been a great deal of migration from Ireland to England by the 1890s, more than enough that an Irish name as widespread as Collins would have been very familiar there. It is hardly likely that even if he had spent six months doing nothing but tracking down every Collins family in the country Quentin would have been able to have confidence that he had not overlooked some descendant of a Collins who had left Collinsport generations before. After all, they didn’t have ancestry dot com back then! It is clear that he must be lying.

Worst of all from Quentin’s perspective, he is still holding the sword at Barnabas’ throat when Judith comes in. At that sight, she has no choice but to set aside her own doubts about Barnabas. She demands Quentin apologize to Barnabas. Barnabas tells them that he can assure Quentin that he does not want any of the family’s money; in fact, he says, the English Collinses are quite comfortable financially and he plans to make some investments in local businesses while he is in Collinsport. Quentin perks up at this, no doubt seeing Barnabas as a possible mark for his next con game. Longtime viewers will remember that when Barnabas introduced himself to the 1960s iteration of the family, Roger was extremely interested in his apparent wealth and had several ideas about how he might help himself to a share of it.

Judith offers Barnabas a room at the great house. He says he would rather stay at the Old House on the estate. Judith breaks it to him that the current head of the family, dying nonagenarian Edith Collins, has let “Gypsies” live there. She makes it sound like a whole Romani clan has settled in, but in fact it is just Magda and Sandor. Barnabas feigns surprise, but still asks permission to inspect the house. Judith consents, and he sets out, alone

Danny Horn’s post about the episode on his Dark Shadows Every Day focuses on the ways it makes Quentin look like a child. I’d say it makes Judith look equally childish, even though she is clearly senior to Quentin. The two of them model one of Dark Shadows‘ signature pairings, that of Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother. Even when the big sister is in a position to exercise authority, as in the 1960s Liz was in a position to exercise authority over Roger, she winds up being merely bossy because however flagrantly he disobeys her, in the end she covers up his misdeeds and protects him from the punishment they merit. Longtime viewers suspect Judith will find herself doing the same.

In yesterday’s episode, Quentin entered maidservant Beth’s room and found her getting ready to go out. He asked if it was her day off; she said Judith gave her permission to run personal errands in town. He grabbed at her things and found an envelope with $300 cash. She claimed she saved this out of her salary, an obvious lie. He made leering insinuations about her relationship with his oldest brother Edward; she slapped his face.

Now, Beth is on her way back to Collinwood from her mysterious errand. Barnabas sees her in the woods and addresses her by name. She asks who he is and how he knows her. He introduces himself, and explains that he saw her photograph in an album at Collinwood. In fact, his friend Julia Hoffman saw such a photograph in 1969 and described it to him; Barnabas himself never saw it, but he did see Beth’s ghost. Evidently the photo had already been taken and put into the album, because Beth smiles when Barnabas talks about it. He asks Beth about the children at Collinwood. She mentions two; he asks about a third, and she says there is no third. He asks why he thought there was, and she seems uncomfortable. After she leaves, we hear his thoughts in a voiceover monologue. In 1969, Beth’s ghost led Barnabas’ friend Chris Jennings to an infant’s coffin; he wonders if that child has already died, and looks around, as if he might be standing on its grave.

Barnabas’ next stop is at the waterfront. When he was first a vampire in the late eighteenth century, Barnabas once found himself on the docks by chance and was overcome with thirst for the blood of the streetwalkers who worked there. This time he must have made a conscious decision to find a sex worker to drain of blood. Some wonder why he does not feed on Sandor and Magda, but longtime viewers know the answer to that one. When Barnabas was first on the show, Willie was his blood thrall, and each bite left Willie critically ill throughout the daylight hours. Barnabas needs Sandor and Magda to guard him during the day, so others will have to suffer to provide him with blood.

Barnabas picks up a small object from the pavement. He hears a soprano voice nearby, calling for an unseen “Charlie!” to help her find her lost makeup compact. The owner of the voice comes into view and introduces herself to Barnabas as Sophie Baker.* Barnabas gives her the compact. She thanks him and says it was a gift from a dear man, a Captain Strathmore. She asks Barnabas his name. He says he thinks it is best if he doesn’t give his name. “What an odd thing to say,” she responds. If she made her living the way Barnabas hoped the woman he found would make hers, it wouldn’t be odd at all; Sophie’s reaction is that of someone who has no idea that she is in a place where that trade is practiced. Evidently Sophie comes from a sufficiently comfortable background that prostitution does not impinge on her thoughts even as something other women do.

Barnabas tries to get away, and Sophie asks “Well, what’s the matter with me?” Charlie is hopelessly drunk, leaving Sophie without an escort. Barnabas is plainly alone, and the night is young. The pub is nearby- why don’t they stop in for a drink. Barnabas shows great reluctance, but finally agrees to walk Sophie to the door. She takes out her compact to freshen her face, looks in its mirror, and notices that Barnabas does not cast a reflection. She is stunned by this. Barnabas bares his fangs, and sates his bloodlust.

Sophie seals her fate. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The compact with a mirror was apparently a new invention when one was advertised in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue in 1908, so it is an anachronism in 1897. But it is a perfect touch. Sophie’s discovery that Barnabas does not cast a reflection turns the scene from a little bit of farce into a tale of horror in a fraction of a second. That the compact allows such an efficient use of time makes it no wonder that they used the same prop in 1967, when Julia glanced in her compact to confirm her hypothesis about Barnabas’ nature in #288.

This time, the compact also goes a long way towards explaining Barnabas’ attitude towards Sophie. It shows that she can afford to buy the latest and most sophisticated trinkets, and that she expects to be seen using them. Barnabas picks the compact up and returns it to Sophie as a gentleman might a lady’s handkerchief. Sophie’s personality may have led her to match the outgoing and uninhibited manner that is a professional requirement for sex workers and that made them easy targets for Barnabas, but when he sees that she is not of their class he becomes reluctant to attack her. Thus we learn that snobbery Barnabas has shown in some of his darker moments is not just an occasional failing, but that his whole career as a vampire is primarily a war on poor people.

Back at Collinwood, Quentin spots Beth taking a tray of food upstairs. He waylays her, uncovers the tray, and demands to know who it is for. She says it is for Edith, and he declares that his grandmother is far too ill to eat so much. When he finally lets her go, Beth goes to Edith’s room and tells Judith about Quentin’s interrogation. They confer about the matter in urgent whispers. Judith tells Beth they will have to be far more discreet now that Quentin is back. She urges her to take care Quentin does not see her when she takes the rest of the food “upstairs.” Evidently there is someone in the house Quentin does not know about, and Judith and Beth are conspiring to keep it that way.

Judith leaves the room, and Quentin slips in. He pretends to be Edward. Edith is not fooled, and expresses her annoyance with him. She says she is not as far gone as he thinks she is, and he assures her that she is. She will die tonight, and will tell him the family secret before she does. He seems to be threatening to kill her himself by the time the episode ends.

Every episode of Dark Shadows begins with a voiceover delivered by a member of the cast. This one reuses yesterday’s opening voiceover. I believe this is the first time they have done this.

*The closing credits give her name as “Sophie Barnes,” but she very clearly says “Baker.”