In October 1897, sorcerer Count Petofi has hijacked the body of Quentin Collins and banished Quentin to his own aging form. I call the villainous Petofi played by David Selby Q-Petofi, and the forlorn Quentin played by Thayer David P-Quentin.
P-QuentinQ-Petofi
Today, wicked witch Angelique explains to P-Quentin how she and mad scientist Julia Hoffman cured time-traveler Barnabas Collins of vampirism, created a Doppelgänger of Barnabas, and used that Doppelgänger to persuade Quentin’s family in the great house of Collinwood that Barnabas never really was a vampire. Later, artist Charles Delaware Tate mistakes P-Quentin for Petofi, and tries to kill him. Q-Petofi then enters and takes control of Tate, using him for a project of his own.
Petofi stripped Angelique of her powers in #865, and deprived Tate of his ability to paint in #851. Angelique has been such an important part of the show for so long that regular viewers are confident she will be back eventually, but the 1897 segment seems to be lurching towards its close, and after her last exit there was no urgent reason in the story for her to come back. It’s good to see that she is still part of this arc.
Tate’s continued presence is rather less good news. Like all characters played by Roger Davis, he has an obnoxious personality and a grating voice, with a disturbing habit of invading his scene partners’ personal space. Today, he keeps grabbing at Q-Petofi’s coat while Q-Petofi bats him away; this is so irritating that it is unclear whether the line “You’ve got trouble with your hands” was scripted for Q-Petofi or ad libbed by David Selby.
For the last couple of weeks, we have had grounds for hope that Tate would just go away. When he sold the portrait of the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris in #864, he lost his last connection to an ongoing plot point. We saw in that same scene that he had a lot of paintings he could sell for high prices if he took them back to New York or another major city. We also know that he has no friends or potential sources of income in the small town of Collinsport. So evidently he is just sticking around to punish the audience for watching the show.
In October 1897, the hypocritical Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask is married to the vastly wealthy Judith Collins, owner of the estate of Collinwood and of the Collins family businesses. For more than thirteen weeks, everything seemed to be going Trask’s way. He had gaslighted Judith into a mental hospital and had almost free rein over all of her assets. In her absence, he invited the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris to stay in the great house on the estate, and set out to seduce her.
Piece by piece, Trask’s little corner of paradise fell apart. First, 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi orchestrated a series of events that led Trask to sign a confession to the murder of his first wife, and no matter how many times he destroyed the confession new copies of it kept materializing. Then Petofi erased the personality of Trask’s daughter and enforcer Charity, replacing it with that of late Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye. Later, Amanda fell in love with Judith’s brother Quentin, told Trask off, and wound up leaving for New York by herself. Now, Judith has returned from the mental hospital, all sane and deeply suspicious.
The front door of the great house is Trask’s enemy today. No sooner does he enter it than he finds Pansy in the foyer, singing her song. He demands she stop and tells her he is her father. She laughs at this claim, and reminisces about the late Bertie Faye. Trask goes into the drawing room, and to his horror sees a large oil painting of Amanda on an easel. We saw Pansy setting it up earlier in the episode, and saw her buy it a few days ago. But Trask didn’t see those things, and when she tells him she doesn’t know anything about it, he seems to accept her denials. She exits upstairs.
The front door opens again, and Judith’s brother Edward enters with two other men. One appears to be Quentin, but is in fact Petofi in possession of Quentin’s body. The other appears to be time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins.
Trask and Edward both believe that Petofi is Quentin; since he is played by David Selby, I call him Q-Petofi. The man who appears to be Barnabas is very weak. He says that his name is indeed Barnabas Collins, but that he is not the vampire. He claims to have arrived from England, to have been attacked by a vampire who looked just like him, and to have little memory of what happened after.
In #845, Pansy went into a cave and found a coffin containing what appeared to be Barnabas. She drove a stake through his heart. When Edward and Q-Petofi met this weak Barnabas yesterday in the doctor’s office, they were skeptical of his story. They took him to the cave, opened the coffin, and saw the body Pansy had staked inside, the stake still lodged in its heart. Since they could see the two of them side by side, Edward could only conclude that the weak man is different from the vampire, and that his story is therefore true. Q-Petofi, well aware of the many magical and science-fictional entities in Barnabas’ orbit, is not at all convinced.
Trask sees the weak Barnabas and is enraged that Edward and Q-Petofi have brought the vampire back from the dead. While Q-Petofi takes the weak Barnabas upstairs to a bedroom, Edward tries to reason with Trask. This is seldom a fruitful exercise. When Edward finally points out that it is broad daylight and the weak Barnabas is alive and moving, Trask is left speechless.
Alone with the weak Barnabas, Q-Petofi tries to trick him into believing that he is Quentin and that he can trust him. When Q-Petofi goes on about all the secrets that Barnabas and Quentin have shared, the weak Barnabas responds only with bewilderment.
Q-Petofi goes back to the cave and sets the coffin on fire, acting on the hypothesis that the destruction of the staked Barnabas will have some kind of effect on the weak Barnabas. We cut back to Collinwood and see that it has none. Trask lets himself into the bedroom. After some small talk, he thrusts a large wooden cross at the weak Barnabas’ face and stands silently for a moment. The weak Barnabas looks up from his bed and asks if Trask is all right. He hurriedly says that he only brought the cross to help him pray for his recovery. The weak Barnabas observes that this is very kind, and closes his eyes while Trask kneels beside the bed.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that not only the actor Jerry Lacy, but the character Gregory Trask, seems to enjoy himself very much when there is something to be righteously indignant about. Not only does Trask have a whole set of self-aggrandizing mannerisms and techniques for silencing everyone else when he is furious, but as a con man an atmosphere of crisis provides him with an opportunity to think on his feet and devise new schemes for bilking people out of whatever they have that he wants. Mr Lacy’s joy in performance runs throughout the whole episode, but Trask’s goes through wild fluctuations, peaking each time he thinks he has found a new way to present himself as the champion of The Almighty and plummeting each time his understanding of the situation is deflated. In his first several appearances, Trask was so overwhelmingly evil and so frequently successful that he was hard to watch. When we see him repeatedly brought up short in an episode like this, all of the discomfort of those early days pays off.
In the drawing room, Edward tells Pansy that there is a sick man in a bed upstairs who looks like the vampire Barnabas and is named Barnabas Collins, but is not the man she staked. She is horrified at the thought. Barnabas was indirectly responsible for the death of Pansy as a physical being, and later murdered her fiancé, the childlike Carl Collins. He also took Charity as one of his victims for a time. Besides, in her manner of dress, quantity of makeup, working-class accent, and brashly friendly manner Pansy is the representative of all the “girls at the docks” upon whom Barnabas has fed down the centuries. So no one has more reason to fear Barnabas than does Pansy in the form of Charity. Edward reassures her as best he can, then goes up to look in on the patient.
Pansy absorbs the news that another Barnabas Collins is in the house.
The scene between Pansy and Edward will remind longtime viewers of the characters the same actors played between November 1967 and March 1968, when Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. Nancy Barrett was fluttery heiress Millicent Collins, while Louis Edmonds was haughty overlord Joshua Collins. In #450, Millicent had discovered the horrible truth about Barnabas and it had proven to be too much for her rather fragile grip on sanity. She decided that the vampire was not her cousin, but an impostor, and she told Joshua that it was wrong of him to have “That man who says he is Barnabas” in the house.
Not only is Pansy’s horror at the thought of a man who says that he is Barnabas staying at Collinwood reminiscent of Millicent, but her relationship to Charity also reflects the development of Millicent throughout the 1790s segment. Millicent’s transformation from a lighter-than-air comedy character to a darkly mad victim, first of her wicked husband Nathan, then of Barnabas, marked the transition to the climactic phase of the 1790s segment. Charity’s replacement by Pansy in #819 came at a time when the show was flashing many signals that the 1897 segment was nearing its end. Those signals may well have reflected an earlier plan, but 1897 was such a hit that they kept passing by the off-ramps back to the 1960s and restarting the uncertain and frightening journey into the past. Now it seems they really are getting ready to move on, and Pansy’s prominence reminds us of just how radically different a place Collinwood is now than it was when we arrived in this period in #701, at the beginning of March.
Pansy is still quaking at the thought of another Barnabas Collins when Q-Petofi enters and closes the doors of the drawing room behind him. Pansy hasn’t quite figured out his true identity, but she knows that he is not really Quentin, and that he does not mean her well. She is terrified and says she will scream unless he opens the doors.
Regular viewers have reason to believe Pansy will do more than scream. In #829, she tried to stab Quentin. And those who have been with the show for a long time will remember what happened in #204, broadcast and set in April 1967. Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, another Nancy Barrett character, found herself in the drawing room with dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. When Willie closed the doors and refused to open them, Carolyn didn’t bother screaming- she pulled a loaded gun on him.
Q-Petofi has magical powers that neither Quentin nor Willie could match, so he is not in mortal jeopardy as they would be were they to put themselves in his position. But he has created a volatile situation, and unless he resolves it within a few seconds he is likely to find himself with a huge mess on his hands. Rather than falling back on his occult talents, Q-Petofi takes a page from Quentin’s book and charms Pansy into cooperating. He tells her that he is as frightened of Barnabas as she is. That intrigues her sufficiently that she starts listening to him. He tells her that only she can discern whether the man in the sick bed upstairs is what he claims to be. A moment later, Q-Petofi has persuaded Pansy to go with him to see the weak Barnabas. The episode ends with Pansy looking at the weak Barnabas lying in bed, her eyes widening in a strong but unspecified reaction. We will have to wait until tomorrow to find out whether she is terrified at the sight of her nemesis or amazed to see an innocent man wearing the hated face.
In October 1897, sorcerer Count Petofi has used his powers to steal the body of handsome young Quentin Collins and to trap Quentin in his own aging form. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.
Q-Petofi
We open outside a cave near the estate of Collinwood, where Q-Petofi’s henchman Aristide is on the ground, gradually coming back to consciousness. Q-Petofi had ordered Aristide to hold wicked witch Angelique prisoner in the cave. Shortly after Q-Petofi left, Angelique slipped out of the cave and ran past him. Aristide followed her, and she bashed him on the head with a rock.
Aristide’s eyes focus, and he sees time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins standing over him. The last time he saw Barnabas was in #842. Barnabas threatened to kill Aristide then, and he was so terrified that he ran away and didn’t come back until he heard that Barnabas had been staked in his coffin. The coffin is in the cave, and Aristide just saw Barnabas in it, the stake still in his heart, so he is shocked to see him up and about.
We cut to the great house of Collinwood, where Q-Petofi and Quentin’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward are recapping another storyline. Edward exits, and a telephone call comes from Ian Reade, MD. Dr Reade says that a strange man is in his office, asking for Edward. When he describes the man, Q-Petofi recognizes him as Barnabas. He takes a gun and goes to Dr Reade’s.
Q-Petofi finds Barnabas lying on Dr Reade’s exam table. He orders Dr Reade to leave. Dr Reade reminds Q-Petofi that they are in his office and refuses to comply with his commands. He does leave for a moment to call Edward again; when he comes back, he finds Q-Petofi holding Barnabas at gunpoint. He bravely tells Q-Petofi that if he wants to kill Barnabas, he will have to shoot him first.
Edward comes. Dr Reade trusts Edward and agrees to leave the room while he is there. After dawn breaks, Edward is astonished to see that Barnabas is still alive. Barnabas tells his old story that he is their cousin from England come to pay his respects. He says that when he first arrived, a man approached him in the dark woods, a man who, when he emerged from the shadows, proved to be his exact double. Until, that is, he opened his mouth and showed two long fangs. Barnabas says that he does not know what happened next or how much time has passed. All he knows is that this strange man kept him captive and dominated his will, from time to time appearing to him and repeating his original assault.
Edward is inclined to believe this story, Q-Petofi to shoot Barnabas on the spot. They compromise, and agree to take him to the cave. If Barnabas’ coffin is empty, they will shoot him. Dr Reade sees Edward and Q-Petofi carrying Barnabas out of his office, and objects that in his condition Barnabas may die if he is subjected to any exertion. When the question is asked if he is willing to go, Barnabas weakly croaks out a “yes.” At that, Dr Reade is willing to wash his hands of the whole thing. For someone who was willing to be shot a few minutes before, it’s quite a startling capitulation.
Q-Petofi does not know that Angelique and Aristide are no longer in the cave, so he insists on leading the way in. He finds that they are gone and the chains around Barnabas’ coffin have been broken. He invites Edward and Barnabas in. He takes it as obvious that the broken chains prove that the coffin is empty, but Edward, with his sense of fair play, insists on opening the coffin before they shoot Barnabas. The body is still there, the stake still in the chest. Barnabas reacts with horror, the others with amazement.
Doppelgänger time.
In #758, Angelique created a Doppelgänger of herself to trick an enemy into thinking that she had killed her, and in #842 she agreed to help Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman, MD in a plan to allow him to reestablish himself as a member of the Collins family. Julia was working on a medical intervention to free him of the effects of vampirism, and now we can see that Angelique contributed the grounds for the Collinses to believe that their cousin never labored under that curse.
When Dark Shadows was in production in the 1960s, the legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail had been fashionable topics in English departments for decades. That vogue was reflected not only in the coursework the writing staff likely did when they were in college, but also in the popularity of novels like The Once and Future King and the Broadway show based on it, Camelot. When I was hanging out in used book stores in the 1980s and 1990s, mass market paperbacks printed in that era collecting the Grail sagas were still a staple.
The coffin in the cave recalls a prominent figure in one of those sagas, a king named Amfortas. In Heinrich of Turlin’s The Crown, Amfortas did not requite the love the mighty sorceress Orgeluse had for him. The humiliated Orgeluse inflicted a wound that both paralyzed Amfortas and made him immortal. In that state, Amfortas was confined to a coffin that was hidden in a cave. Sir Gawain found the coffin and freed Amfortas both of his paralysis and of his immortality.*
Longtime viewers of Dark Shadows will see many parallels to the story of Barnabas and Angelique in Heinrich’s story of Amfortas and Orgeluse. During the part of the show made and set in 1968, two mad scientists played the role of Sir Gawain in returning Barnabas to humanity. The first was a man named Eric Lang, the second was Julia. Now, Angelique herself, who was the original source of the curse that made Barnabas a vampire, combines the functions of Orgeluse and of Gawain. She not only frees Barnabas, but also redeems herself. The Grail legends also abound in other elements that figure prominently in this part of the show. For example, Count Petofi was originally on the show as a severed hand with magical powers, later to be reunited with the rest of its body. Gawain’s most famous story is of his battle with the Green Knight, who starts off as a severed head. Doppelgänger abound in the Grail legends, especially the so-called Vulgate Lancelot where a double of Queen Guinevere sets off a whole arc.
Dr Reade is played by Alfred Hinckley. Hinckley was in plays on and off Broadway, and when the networks ran a lot of programming produced in New York, his was a frequent face on American television. He was in Dark Shadows episode #1 as the conductor of the train that brought well-meaning governess Vicki Winters and dashing action hero Burke Devlin to Collinsport. Longtime viewers were reminded of that train in #850; maybe the production staff was reminded of it too, and that was why they called Hinckley to make his second appearance on the series today. It’s also his final appearance.
Dr Reade, unintimidated by Q-PetofiThe conductor, unintimidated by Burke
*Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal features another version of the Amfortas legend, calling the sorceress by a different name, omitting Amfortas’ paralysis, leaving out the coffin in the cave, and giving the honor of healing Amfortas and succeeding him as king of the Grail to Percival rather than Gawain.
The dramatic date is October 1897. Sorcerer Count Petofi is using the body of Quentin Collins as a disguise. While he is doing this, I call him Q-Petofi.
Q-Petofi has stripped witch Angelique of her powers and confined her in the cave where the chained coffin of vampire Barnabas Collins is kept. In #845, we saw Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye open this coffin and drive a stake. Now, Angelique starts banging away at the lock on the chains with a rock. When Q-Petofi’s servant Aristide comes to investigate the noise, Angelique talks about pulling the stake out of Barnabas’ heart so that he will rise again. Aristide dismisses this idea.
Longtime viewers won’t be so sure that pulling the stake out will not bring Barnabas back. In #630, broadcast and set in November 1968, warlock Nicholas Blair pulled a stake from the heart of vampire Tom Jennings and put him back into operation. That came to mind in #846 when Quentin’s brother, stuffy but lovable Edward Collins, learned that Pansy had staked Barnabas and decreed, not that Barnabas’ body be taken out into the sunlight and allowed to disintegrate, but that the coffin be chained and the cave sealed up.
Presenting the stake in the vampire’s heart as an on/ off switch lets a lot of the suspense out of the show, and it feels like a cheat. But however bad the idea is, apparently it was not original to Dark Shadows. Two frequent commenters bring this out under Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day. “Courtley Manor” (also an FotB here) writes:
Well, in some vampire legends the stake through the heart (or often the stomach or solar plexus) served a two-fold purpose. Believing a corpse was bloated due to ingestion of blood (which we now know is rather caused by gases produced by microscopic organisms during decomposition), the vampire slayer would deprive the bloodsucker of its recent meal and also the ability to consume more blood by, in effect, bursting it like a balloon. Also, the stake pinned the nightwalker to the earth or coffin so it couldn’t roam about anymore. Dan Curtis and/or the writers may have been drawing on these older legends, and figured that removing the stake could conceivably allow the vampire to heal from its wound and rise again.
Comment left 9 March 2021 by “Courtley Manor” on Danny Horn, “Episode 867: Nothing Up My Sleeve,” 26 May 2016, at Dark Shadows Every Day.
“Goddess of Transitory” added this remark to “Courtley Manor’s”:
John Carradine played exactly this in the old film House of Dracula–he starts out as a skeleton in a coffin with a stake in its rib cage as part of a sideshow but when the stake is removed, he’s back–cape, hat, and bat transforming powers intact.
Comment left 12 April 2021 by “Goddess of Transitory” on Danny Horn, “Episode 867: Nothing Up My Sleeve,” 26 May 2016, at Dark Shadows Every Day.
Meanwhile, back at the great house of Collinwood, Q-Petofi is passing as Quentin. Edward is fretting that his girlfriend Kitty Soames is missing. Kitty, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, has been having psychotic episodes ever since she arrived at Collinwood in #844. Unknown to Edward, these are the result of the spirit of the late Josette Collins taking possession of her. Q-Petofi found Kitty in Josette’s room at the Old House on the estate earlier, and lost track of her when she ran out into the woods.
Kitty/ Josette comes wandering into the drawing room. She claims to have seen Barnabas in the woods. When she says where in the woods she saw him, Q-Petofi says “Near the cave!” Edward wants to go to the cave to see if Barnabas is still in his coffin. Q-Petofi, not wanting Edward to walk in on Angelique and Aristide, volunteers to go. When Edward says he thinks he ought to handle the matter himself, Q-Petofi causes Kitty/ Josette to feel a chill. She asks Edward to stay with her, and he agrees to let Quentin go.
Q-Petofi finds Aristide holding a gun on Angelique. Aristide tells him what has been going on, and they open the coffin. They find Barnabas still inside. We see him there, the stake still in his chest.
Hello, Barney, well, hello, Barney! It’s so nice to have you back where you belong.
This is the first time we have seen Jonathan Frid since #845. He’s been in Chicago doing a play. Clearly Dan Curtis isn’t going to pay his fee just to have him lie in the coffin and breathe rapidly while the others talk about how dead he is, so we know that Barnabas is back.
Q-Petofi says that he will come back later and that he and Aristide will destroy the coffin and the body. To keep Angelique from making any more trouble, he casts a spell and surrounds her with magical flames.
While Q-Petofi is back at Collinwood reassuring Edward and Kitty/ Josette that Barnabas is dead, Angelique offers to tell Aristide secrets that no mortal man knows if he will release her from the magic flames. Aristide has no supernatural powers or occult knowledge; he is just a lummox whom Q-Petofi employs because he likes his looks and finds his sadism useful when he wants someone tortured to death. But somehow Aristide is able to stop the flames. Before Angelique can start talking, he pulls a knife on her and tells her that he doesn’t want her secrets- he just wants to kill her. Aristide has a special knife that he makes a fetish of. He calls it “The Dancing Girl.” Except when he calls it “The Dancing Lady.” At any rate, this isn’t it.
Aristide is inefficient about taking the knife out of its hiding place. He gives Angelique time to run out of the cave. He runs after her, and she hits him in the head with a rock, knocking him out. When he comes to, Aristide sees a man standing over him, asking for help. It is Barnabas.
It is 20 October 1897. Angelique, immortal witch and time-traveler, has discovered that her sometime fiancé, Quentin Collins, is not himself. He is 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi, and Petofi is him, having used his magic powers to force Quentin to trade bodies with him. I will refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.
Q-Petofi
Yesterday, Q-Petofi caught Angelique trying to help P-Quentin. He attacked her, and we open today in a cave where he has imprisoned her. He tells her he has stripped her of her powers. He demands she tell him what she and time-traveling mad scientist Julia Hoffman have been doing. Regular viewers know that Julia is gone, having vanished from 1897 and returned to the 1960s in #858. That Q-Petofi does not know this is one of the few signs we have had recently that he has limitations.
Q-Petofi leaves Angelique in the cave with a chained coffin. He tells her that it is the one in which her ex-husband, vampire Barnabas Collins, was staked (#845.) She looks at the coffin and gives a little soliloquy about how she needs Barnabas, but he cannot help her.
Q-Petofi is not the only resident of the great house of Collinwood who is not the person he seems to be. Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, came to Collinwood intending to get Quentin’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward Collins to marry her by concealing some key facts about her financial status. But the very day she arrived, in #844, Kitty found that she was the one most gravely deprived of information about herself. As soon as she saw the portrait of Barnabas that hangs by the front door in the foyer, she became possessed by the spirit of Barnabas’ lost love Josette.
Kitty’s episodes of Josettification have continued. Today’s begins with another look at the portrait and a longing sigh. As sight of the chained coffin sets off Angelique’s yearning for Barnabas, so the portrait is the visual cue that triggers Josette to come to the surface of Kitty’s mind. By the end of the episode, she will be in Josette’s bedroom at the Old House on the estate, telling an unseen person that she is waiting for him.
Kitty is still herself most of the time. And we can assume that sooner or later, Petofi will be defeated and Quentin will return to his right body. But a third resident of the great house has made a permanent and irreversible change of spirit. Her body is that of Charity Trask, whose father, the odious Gregory Trask, is married to Quentin and Edward’s sister Judith. But in #819, Petofi annihilated Charity’s personality and replaced it with that of Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl/ mentalist who came to Collinwood in #771 and was killed that very night, without ever having met Charity.
Angelique and Kitty/ Josette yearn for Barnabas’ return. Increasingly, the audience does too- there doesn’t seem to be anywhere the story can go until he comes back. That sets them and us against Pansy. She doesn’t share our concern for narrative progression- she is such a daffy invention she can amuse us all by herself. And she knows that Barnabas was a vampire, who preyed on Charity and was ultimately, if indirectly, responsible for Pansy’s death. Indeed, it was she who drove the stake in #845. So Barnabas is absolutely the last person Pansy wants to see again. But now someone else has emerged in next to last place.
On Friday, Pansy looked at Q-Petofi and realized that he was not Quentin. She confronted him with questions that Quentin could answer but he couldn’t, exposing him to Angelique as an impostor. When Pansy shut herself in her room, Q-Petofi went upstairs and through her door threatened that if she didn’t keep quiet “her days [would be] numbered.” Now, she has passed a note to Edward reporting on the incident. Edward and Q-Petofi meet with Pansy in her room. She tells Edward about the visions and sensings that led her to conclude that the man with him is not really Quentin. Edward thinks Pansy is just a delusion Charity is having, and so cannot ascribe much evidentiary value to these experiences. Q-Petofi claims that when he said “her days are numbered” he meant that her days as a resident of the house were numbered if she went on saying bizarre things about him. Edward asks Pansy if she might be mistaken in her interpretation of her psychic data. She says she never has been before, but allows, in a very reasonable tone, that it is possible she could be this time.
Pansy is, at the moment, the only person who could possibly be an ally for P-Quentin in his attempt to return to his own body. She does not seem to be a match for Q-Petofi’s magical powers, and so others would have to be recruited to help in the fight. But if she is now as unsure as it seems, P-Quentin doesn’t even have a place to start.
When Kitty/ Josette is in the room at the Old House, she looks at the portrait of Josette and sees that it is signed and dated. We’ve seen the portrait many times since its first appearance in #70, and it has never before borne either a signature or a date. The signature is “Coswell,” which is as good as any.
The date on the portrait is 1797, which is rather less good. In #402, set early in January 1796, we saw the portrait delivered to the Old House. Moreover, it was in #425, set in February 1796, that Josette flung herself to her death from the top of Widows’ Hill. So if this portrait is a replacement for the original, it was painted at a time when the subject was unavailable for further sittings.
Moreover, Kitty misstates the current date as 1797 in a letter to her mother, which is supposed to be a sign of her Josettification. Viewers who remember the 1790s flashback will just be puzzled by this, while those who do not are unlikely to see much significance in the date at all. It is hard to see why they’ve decided to retcon this particular point.
In October of 1897, the estate of Collinwood is the property of Judith Collins Trask. If Judith were to list the people resident in the great house on the estate, she would include two who are only apparently there. Contrary to Judith’s beliefs, neither her brother Quentin nor her step-daughter Charity is in fact on the premises.
In #819, 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi erased Charity’s personality and replaced it with that of the late Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl and “mentalist” who was engaged to Judith’s brother Carl at the time of her death in #771. When they were both alive, Charity and Pansy never met, and they were polar opposites in every way. Now that Pansy lives again in the person of Charity, she not only retains all of the memories and habits she had before her death, but the phony psychic act she used to do has been replaced by a true second sight.
In #854 through #856, Petofi cast another, still more complicated spell. He switched bodies with Quentin. Now Quentin is shambling about in the aged and feeble form of Petofi, while Petofi is reveling in Quentin’s youth and vigor. During the body swap, I shall refer to the Petofi who appears to be Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the Quentin who appears to be Petofi as P-Quentin.
Q-PetofiP-Quentin
We open today in the foyer of Collinwood. Pansy has been bickering with a houseguest named Angelique. Pansy wants to marry Quentin, and was irked when he became engaged to Angelique. Now the engagement is off, a fact which Pansy has been annoying Angelique by gloating about. Q-Petofi enters, and Angelique gives him a peck on the cheek. He exits, and Angelique sees that Pansy looks alarmed. Before Angelique can take satisfaction in having silenced her, Pansy declares “It ain’t him! It ain’t Quentin!”
Angelique has noticed that her onetime fiancé has been very different these last weeks, which was why she called off their engagement. So when Pansy tells her about her visions and sensings, she listens. Q-Petofi returns, and Pansy asks him to answer a series of questions to which she and Quentin would know the answer. He responds with bluster about not taking her orders. Pansy says that he doesn’t know the answers because he isn’t Quentin; Angelique suggests he just give the answers to quiet Pansy down. Pansy storms out, and Angelique tells him he handled the situation very badly. She says he oughtn’t have let himself become angry with a mentally ill person; we can see that she means more than that, and so can Q-Petofi.
Pansy’s vision gave Angelique all the information she needed to find P-Quentin. She calls on him, and he tells her everything. She agrees to take him with her on an errand she must run. Before they can go, Q-Petofi enters. He tells Angelique that she has made a grave error. If she had married him, she could have enjoyed both the mind of Petofi and the body of Quentin Collins. But instead, she has become his enemy. P-Quentin toddles off and sits in the corner, looking down helplessly.
Q-Petofi summons his servant Aristide, who threatens her with a torch. Angelique is a witch and has great powers, but we saw in #665 that she can be defeated by fire. So she cannot focus her energies on holding Q-Petofi at bay. He touches her with his right hand, where his magic powers are concentrated. She cries out and collapses.
Angelique had seemed to be P-Quentin’s last best hope to be restored to his own body. His first ally, time-traveling mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, vanished in front of him, returning to the 1960s mere moments after she realized what had happened to him. His second ally was his old friend and fellow Satanist, lawyer Evan Hanley. Evan attempted to invoke Satan to intervene and return Quentin and Petofi to their original bodies, but no help was forthcoming from the old fellow and Q-Petofi punished Evan for the attempt by enslaving him. Another of Quentin’s ex-fiancées, maidservant Beth Chavez, probably knows what has happened and would certainly like to help him. But Beth is terrified of Petofi and without resources to use against him, and there would be nothing to stop him from killing her if she made herself inconvenient to him in any way. So P-Quentin’s only potential ally at the moment is Pansy, and it is hard to see what power she might have that would be formidable to Q-Petofi. It has not even been proven that Pansy has the capacity to dance Q-Petofi’s cares away, let alone overcome his sorcery. The future looks grim indeed for P-Quentin.
Lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley has displeased Q-Petofi. Q-Petofi has put the zap on Evan and made him dig his own grave. Evan begs for his life, but does so in a stilted, robotic voice that suggests he is struggling against Q-Petofi’s power. It is a neat job of acting by Humbert Allen Astredo.
Evan points out that it would raise suspicions if Q-Petofi were seen with his servant Aristide, especially inside the great house of Collinwood. Evan himself, however, is the Collins family’s attorney, trusted by everyone in the house. If anyone there has suspicions about Q-Petofi, they will confide in him. Q-Petofi decides that he may as well let Evan live, and orders him to keep tabs on wicked witch Angelique.
We cut to the foyer of Collinwood, where Angelique is staying. She is on the telephone trying to reach the local pharmacy, and is annoyed that the meds she wants are not yet available. Another houseguest, Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye, enters. Angelique hurriedly ends the call. Pansy taunts Angelique for the end of her engagement to Quentin. After Pansy exits, Angelique gets back on the phone and resumes talking to the pharmacist. Q-Petofi enters, and Angelique pretends she is talking to someone else, then hangs up.
Returning viewers know that Angelique is carrying on a medical intervention designed by time-traveling mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia’s friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, made his way from 1969 to 1897, and she followed him. Julia had recreated an experimental treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into abeyance for a little while early in 1968 when she snapped back to her own time, vanishing from 1897. Shortly before Julia disappeared, Angelique agreed to complete the procedure and turn Barnabas into a real boy.
Angelique seems less powerful than usual today. Her dealings with the pharmacy are a logical consequence of her agreement to take over Julia’s plan, but she doesn’t usually have to get exasperated with people over the telephone, and not since her early days as a witch in the 1790s has she been so vulnerable to discovery by random passersby. Later, she goes to Barnabas’ hiding place, and Evan follows her. There have been times when Angelique could materialize and dematerialize at will, and it was impossible for any mere mortal to keep track of her whereabouts, but evidently she doesn’t feel up to that today. She does tell Q-Petofi she has a headache, maybe that’s true.
Pansy has a scene in the studio of artist Charles Delaware Tate. She tells Tate she wants to buy one of his paintings; he tells her that everything is for sale, but that his prices are high. She picks out a portrait of the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris; he throws a tantrum and doesn’t want to sell it to her. When she reminds him that he said all the paintings are for sale, he names the ridiculously high price of $5000. That would be well over $150,000 in 2025. Without missing a beat, Pansy pulls out a few large-denomination bills and fans them under Tate’s nose.
Pansy’s only source of income was a cabaret act she recently did at the Blue Whale, a tavern in the village of Collinsport. We saw her there the other day shortly before nine PM, when she was the only person in the barroom. So it doesn’t seem likely she could have earned that quantity of cash there. Nor is there any apparent reason why Pansy would want a portrait of Amanda, whom she saw as a rival for Quentin’s affections. It seems likely that someone else put her up to buying it.
The obvious candidate would be Judith Collins Trask, owner of Collinwood and all the Collins family businesses. Judith is married to the odious Gregory Trask, whose late daughter Charity provided the host body through which Pansy, who died in #771, has been interacting with the world of the living since Petofi erased Charity’s personality in #819. Judith has persuaded Pansy to move back into Collinwood. Judith has herself recently returned to the great house after Trask had her confined to a mental hospital for a period of more than thirteen weeks. Her stuffy but lovable brother Edward told Judith that Trask spent much of that time trying to seduce Amanda, and Judith wants to get the facts about what went on in her absence.
Closing Miscellany
Director Henry Kaplan was not in good form in this one. In the opening, studio lights are clearly visible right in the middle of the screen, between Evan and Q-Petofi. The same thing happened in yesterday’s episode. The other directors might have made a mistake like that once, but I don’t think any of them would have done it two days in a row.
The camera is also frequently out of focus, as is typical of Kaplan’s shows, and it moves unsteadily. He must have been trying to get the camera operators to do something he hadn’t prepared them for, it looks really bad.
There are a couple of notable bloopers that aren’t particularly Kaplan’s fault. When Angelique makes a remark about Q-Petofi’s attitude towards brandy, David Selby says “Don’t you think it’s possible for one’s…change…or one’s taste to change in brandy?” That is followed by a silent beat, as both he and Lara Parker are stunned by the nonsense that just came out of his mouth.
When Tate lets Pansy into his studio, the shade falls out of the window. He looks at it for a second, then the scene goes on. It is one of the all-time great goofs.
In episodes #853-#856, Sorcerer Count Petofi (Thayer David) used his powers to force the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins (David Selby) to trade bodies with him. Ever since, Quentin (Thayer David) has been trying to persuade someone to believe his story about Petofi (David Selby.) For the duration of the switch, I shall refer to Thayer David’s version of Quentin as P-Quentin, and David Selby’s version of Petofi as Q-Petofi.
P-QuentinQ-Petofi
Yesterday, P-Quentin persuaded his old friend and fellow Satanist, Evan Hanley, of what had happened. Evan agreed to conduct a ceremony to call upon their dark lord and ask for the transfer to be broken. They trick Q-Petofi into coming to Evan’s house and knock him out with chloroform. Then Evan begins an odd incantation:
Oh, Lucifer…
Great God of man and beast, look upon us with favor. Help us correct this evil which has been done in defiance of you.
Renew our bondage as your servants. Grant us the power we need this night, and we will be yours for eternity.
For Baal, who guides your mind.
For Beelzebub, who rules your spirit.
The robber of a soul must not be spared. The robbed must be avenged.
I exorcise thee.
Oh, impure spirit, who is the mind of the enemy, by the holy rite of Hecate, I conjure thee that thou do immediately hear and obey my command. Leave this man’s body, that he may return… Oh, yes, spirits of invisibility, I conjure and constrain thee herewith to consecrate this ceremony. So that surely and without trickery, thou may return each, to the body of [its] origin.
So be it.
Oh, Lucifer, so be it.
So be it…
I charge thee. I conjure thee. I command thee. Answer my demand.
Depart from these alien bodies and return to those from whence you came.
Depart.
So be it.
So be it.
So be it.
Oh, Lucifer, we give thee thanks.
Evan and P-Quentin seem to have the wrong guy. Whatever Satan’s powers may be, undoing evil, restoring property to its rightful owners, and enforcing justice are not exactly among the old fellow’s core competencies. Of course the ceremony fails. Q-Petofi wakes up from the chloroform, tells Evan he has made the greatest and last mistake of his life, and puts the zap on his brain. The next we see him, Evan is digging a grave, refusing P-Quentin’s offer to help him, and listening to Q-Petofi announce that he is about to be buried alive.
Q-Petofi’s announcement is the closing cliffhanger, suggesting that Evan has a somewhat longer life expectancy than we might have imagined when the ceremony fell apart. But once in a while cliffhangers really are resolved with the death of the character who is in peril, and that would seem to be a possibility in this case. Yesterday was Evan’s first appearance after an absence of more than eleven weeks, and he is not associated with any major loose ends in the plot. His alliance with the odious Gregory Trask, husband of Judith Collins Trask, may have given him a foothold now that Judith is back from her own long absence and is looking on Trask with suspicion, but yesterday he seemed to back off from siding with Trask in whatever fight might be coming up. So if the makers of the show are thinking it’s time for Q-Petofi to confirm his credentials as a major villain by killing a familiar character, Evan would be the obvious choice.
Judith confronts Trask today. He lies to her to cover up his misdeeds during the more than thirteen weeks she was confined to a mental hospital. She does not contradict all of his lies, and invites him to embrace her. He seems to think he has regained his control over her, but she tells him two things that make him uncomfortable. First, she says that she has persuaded his daughter to leave her apartment in the village and move back into the great house of Collinwood. When he protests that “She is not my daughter!,” Judith calmly replies that she is, closing the subject and leaving him looking like a petulant child. She also says that she hopes he has not bought or sold any stocks in her name lately, since she has revoked his power of attorney over her holdings. Again, he can say nothing in response.
Judith’s brother, the stuffy but lovable Edward, does not hear the details of this conversation. After Judith leaves the drawing room, Edward enters and tells Trask that he has won again. Trask perks up at this, and becomes his usual overbearing self. But he is just as quickly deflated when Edward tells him that he is looking into what he has been doing for the last thirteen weeks, and that when he finds out he will make a full report to Judith.
When Dark Shadows first became a costume drama set in 1897, Edward assumed he was to inherit the estate of Collinwood and all the family’s businesses. He was haughty and commanding, and Judith was a fragile spinster. But then their grandmother died, and the will left everything to Judith. She fell victim to Trask’s machinations and married him; he gaslighted her into the madhouse. Now that she has come home, Judith has found a new strength, sufficient to hold her own in the household if not to uphold justice and right on the scale which her position in the community would seem to demand. Edward’s dependent financial position, coupled with the many supernatural horrors he has witnessed, have gradually reduced him to a childlike state. In their scenes today, we see that the two of them have come to embody that signature dynamic of Dark Shadows, the relationship between Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother.
In yesterday’s episode, Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, found a note on the dresser in the room where she has been staying in the great house of Collinwood. It read “Know yourself, be who you must be.” The dramatic date is 1897, 1504 years after the Delphic oracle went out of business, so it is unlikely that its management sent the message as a translation of and commentary on their motto γνῶθι σεαυτόν.* It was also 83 years before the US Army adopted the slogan “Be all you can be,” so we can rule out the idea that a recruiting sergeant was trying to get Kitty to enlist. The US Army didn’t even accept countesses in those days, not even if, like Kitty, they originally came from Pennsylvania and are now in Maine.
Ever since she arrived at Collinwood in #844, the ghost of the gracious Josette has been taking possession of Kitty from time to time. The note prompts another spell of Josettification. Kitty puts on Josette’s wedding dress and wraps a red cloak around it. She mutters that “He is waiting for me,” not specifying who “he” is. She goes to the top of Widows’ Hill, the precipice from which Josette flung herself to her death a century before.
Josette was married to Jeremiah Collins. Jeremiah’s ghost appears to Kitty/ Josette. He urges her to leave Collinwood at once, lest “he” kill her. By this time the possession has worn off, and Kitty has no more idea who Jeremiah means by “he” than anyone overhearing her earlier would have known who Kitty/ Josette meant when she said that “he” was waiting for her.
Jeremiah’s ghost reaches out to Kitty.
Be on Guard Against Your Enemies**
Jeremiah vanishes, and Kitty is joined by a man she believes to be Count Petofi, the sorcerer who drove her husband to suicide. She fears Petofi and hates him, and is unhappy to find herself standing next to him at the top of a cliff, especially when she is in a confused frame of mind.
In fact, the man is not Petofi. Two weeks ago, Petofi used magic to force the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins to change bodies with him. Now Petofi occupies Quentin’s strong young form, while Quentin is trapped in Petofi’s aging and feeble one. While this predicament lasts, I refer to Quentin as played by Thayer David as P-Quentin, and Petofi as played by David Selby as Q-Petofi.
P-Quentin meets Kitty.
P-Quentin tells Kitty that he saw Jeremiah’s ghost and assures her he did not cause it to appear. He tells her he is going to Collinwood, and firmly recommends she accompany him. She waits a moment, but seeing no alternative, she goes his way.
Do Not Fight an Absent Foe***
When P-Quentin first found himself estranged from his own body and encased in Petofi’s, he was too stunned to show much tactical sense. He went around blurting out what had happened, earning nothing but a reputation as a lunatic. Now he has learned to let people believe he is Petofi and to conduct himself as befits that role. So yesterday, he found that his sister, Judith Collins Trask, had returned to the house after a long absence. She had not met Petofi, so he introduced himself to her by that name and used his memories of their childhood to befriend her.
Back at Collinwood, P-Quentin enters the drawing room and tells Judith that Kitty is resting comfortably upstairs. Judith is impressed with his thoughtfulness, and leaves him alone in the drawing room while she goes to Kitty’s room. He sees that she is preparing a note for her attorney, Evan Hanley. It occurs to him that Evan can be of use to him, and he sets out for his house.
Give the Advice the Time Calls For ****
P-Quentin knocks on Evan’s door. Evan never met Petofi, and does not recognize him. He and Quentin were for a long time close friends and fellow Satanists, and when he identifies himself as Quentin he does not gain credence. He pushes his way in, and eventually persuades Evan to take him seriously. Evan agrees to go to Collinwood and see if the man who appears to be Quentin knows him, and, if he does not do so, to trick him into participating in a ceremony to reverse the body-swap.
Judith comes. While P-Quentin hides on the terrace, she tells Evan that she wants to revoke the power of attorney she granted to her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, while she was away. Evan makes excuses, but she insists, and he agrees to follow her directions. She exits.
P-Quentin returns, and tells him that if he has involved himself with Trask’s evil schemes, it is time for him to disentangle himself from them.
Act Like a Stranger, If You Are One*****
Back at Collinwood, Q-Petofi opens the drawing room door and sees Judith. Petofi never met Judith, and Quentin has not seen her since she left more than thirteen weeks ago. Not knowing who she is, Q-Petofi simply apologizes, says he didn’t know anyone was in there, and leaves. Thinking he is her brother, Judith is of course indignant.
Q-Petofi walks in on Judith.
Judith goes to the foyer and says she expected a warmer greeting. Not having the faintest idea who she is, the best Q-Petofi can manage is “Welcome to Collinwood.” When she protests that even their rather distant brother-sister relationship entitles her to expect better than that, the light comes to him and he calls her by name. This does not appease her.
There is a knock at the front door. Judith is enraged to see Q-Petofi standing still, and orders him to answer it. He does, and lets Evan in. When he does not speak to his old friend, Judith demands to know if he doesn’t recognize Evan either. Q-Petofi pretends to know him, and is powerless to do anything but agree when Evan asks him if he remembers the meeting at his house tonight.
Q-Petofi had been cruising along unchallenged so far. How could he not, when the secret he is concealing is so bizarre? But his interaction with Judith, though it has not exposed his identity, has antagonized someone whose support would be useful to him, and now Evan knows that P-Quentin was telling him the truth.
Know Your Chance ******
Q-Petofi shows up at Evan’s. After some verbal jousting, Evan tells Q-Petofi to take a seat with his back to the room. He says that he has been chosen to preside over the festivities. P-Quentin sneaks up and chloroforms him. Evan says that he doesn’t know how long the chloroform will last, so they must proceed with the ceremony at once.
Honor Good Men *******
When Jeremiah’s ghost fades away, we see Timothy Gordon for the last time. Gordon was a frequent stand-in and background player starting in July 1966. His right hand, which he extends to Kitty in the screenshot above, was the hand that shot out of the coffin Willie Loomis was trying to plunder in #210. In mischievous moments, I think that makes him “Barnabas Collins #1,” in imdb terms. Then again, Jonathan Frid had posed for the face of the portrait of Barnabas some weeks before, and producer Robert Costello modeled for the portrait’s body before that. Many of his fellow extras went on to big careers, but Gordon’s turn as Jeremiah’s ghost made him the only performer to graduate from background player to credited member of the main cast of Dark Shadows. So I think of him as their representative.
*Greek for “Know yourself,” one of 150 maxims inscribed in the walls at the oracle. Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnōthi seauton) was one of two inscribed at the entrance, the other being Μηδεν ἄγαν (mēden agan,) “nothing in excess.” The maxims are preserved in a book by a fifth century CE author named Stobaeus; many of them appear on stones that archaeologists have found at Delphi. There’s a handy list of them on Wikipedia, pairing the Greek with some more or less OK translations. The eighth maxim on Stobaeus’ list is Σαυτον ἴσθι (sauton isthi,) “Be who you are,” which sounds a bit like the second half of the note on Kitty’s dresser.
**Stobaeus’ twenty-ninth maxim is Ἐχθρους ἀμύνου (ekhthrous amynou,) “Be on guard against your enemies.”
***Stobaeus’ 125th maxim is Ἀπόντι μὴ μάχου (aponti mē makhou,) “Do not wage a battle against one who is absent.”
****Stobaeus’ 103rd maxim is Βουλεύου χρόνῳ (bouleuou kronoi,) “Give the advice right for the time.”
*****Stobaeus’ twelfth maxim is Ξένος ὢν ἴσθι (xenos ōn isthi,) which we would translate word for word as “Stranger being, be.” The idiom plays on two senses of the verb εἰμί- the participle ὢν means “If you in fact are,” while the imperative ἴσθι is “assume the character of.” It is the same kind of play on words that you see in the word “like” in the English sentence “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.”
******Stobaeus’ tenth maxim is Καιρον γνῶθι (kairon gnōthi,) “Know the proper time.”
*******Stobaeus’ sixty fifth maxim is Ἀγαθους τίμα (agathous tima,) “Give honors to the good.”
Judith Collins Trask, owner of the estate of Collinwood and all the Collins family businesses, has returned home after more than thirteen weeks confined to a sanitarium. Her return is supposed to be a big shock, but they spoil it by having Joan Bennett do the opening voiceover. They really should have paid more attention to that sort of thing.
Judith’s husband, the odious Gregory Trask, gaslighted her into the sanitarium, and has been exercising control over the Collins family’s wealth ever since. Today, Judith tells her stuffy but lovable brother Edward that Trask never visited her during her time as a mental patient. Edward is surprised, telling her that Trask left the house for an overnight stay every week during that period, and presented these absences as visits to her. In fact, he is on such a trip now. She does not want to hear any more, and says she will give Gregory a chance to explain himself when he comes back to Collinwood.
Judith claims to be entirely herself. That puts her in the minority today. When she left Collinwood in July, Judith had a stepdaughter named Charity Trask. When she enters today, she sees someone who is to all appearances Charity leading Edward and a lady named Kitty Soames in a séance. The body is indeed Charity’s, but sorcerer Count Petofi erased Charity’s personality in #819 and replaced it with that of the late Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl and “mentalist” whom Judith met in #771, when Judith’s late brother Carl brought her to Collinwood as his fiancée. Pansy noticed Judith’s disapproval of her when she was alive, and is quite indignant about it now. That Judith keeps live-naming her, calling her “Charity,” doesn’t help.
Judith does manage to do something Edward failed to do a while ago, and talks Pansy into moving back into the great house of Collinwood. She agrees to give up the apartment she rented in the village of Collinsport after she took a job doing her old act at the local tavern, the Blue Whale. We saw her at the Blue Whale in Friday’s episode; it was shortly before nine PM, and she was the only person in the place. So perhaps her income as a cabaret performer is not particularly lavish, and the mansion is a more appealing place to live than the apartment that job would pay for.
For her part, Kitty is still, most of the time, the dowager countess of Hampshire. But the ghost of Josette Collins has been possessing her off and on ever since she arrived at Collinwood in #844, and the trend is definitely towards “on.” In Friday’s scene at the Blue Whale, Kathryn Leigh Scott played Kitty quietly and let Nancy Barrett’s Pansy provide the scene with all its Crazy Lady Energy; today, it is Miss Barrett’s turn to stand back and let Miss Scott show that Kitty is Pansy’s match in that department.
Crazy Lady Energy, also known as “CLE,” the main driving force of Soap Opera Land. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Judith and Edward’s brother Quentin is in an even stranger predicament than are Pansy and what’s left of Kitty. Between #854 and #856, Petofi forced Quentin to swap bodies with him, so that David Selby now plays Petofi and Thayer David plays Quentin. I call Mr Selby’s portrayal of Petofi “Q-Petofi,” and Thayer David’s portrayal of Quentin “P-Quentin.”
The initial shock of finding himself estranged from his own body and trapped in Petofi’s left P-Quentin bewildered. All he could do was go to one person after another and tell the true story of what had happened, which produced only a widespread belief that Count Petofi had gone mad. Now he is starting to figure out how to use his resources.
P-Quentin’s first attempt to take advantage of the fact that everyone thinks he is Petofi was not successful. In #859, he exploited Kitty’s fear of Petofi and threatened to make her vanish if she did not bring him a portrait of Quentin later that night. Kitty tried to comply, but failed, and now it is long past the deadline. Soon she will realize that his threat was an empty one, and so far from being useful to him as a cat’s paw, she will be in a position to expose him as powerless.
Today, P-Quentin runs a smarter game. He introduces himself to Judith as Petofi, and claims to have psychic abilities. He pretends to read her palm, and tells her a story from their childhood that very few people could know. She is delighted, and decides that Count Petofi is someone she wants to see more of.
In her bedroom upstairs at Collinwood, Kitty has another fit of Josettification. She opens the trunk at the foot of her bed and finds Josette’s wedding dress. She puts it on and wraps a red cloak around it. She goes to the top of Widow’s Hill, the cliff from which Josette jumped to her death in the 1790s. The ghost of Josette’s husband Jeremiah appears to her.
The show is set in 1897 now. It was set in the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968. Miss Scott played Josette then, and for most of the segment Anthony George played Jeremiah. After Jeremiah’s death, Timothy Gordon played his ghost in a memorable part of the 1790s story. Gordon made two appearances as the ghost after the show returned to contemporary dress, playing him in #462 and #512. This is Jeremiah’s first appearance in 1897, and the second time, after #462, that Gordon’s name appeared in an on-screen credit on Dark Shadows.
Dark Shadows Commentary 