danielle roget – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 623: Her name was Gloria Winters!

An eighteenth century homicidal maniac named Danielle Roget was raised from the dead in 1968 to serve a warlock’s evil scheme. Today, she is taking a break. Another witch has sent her back to her original era for a short visit.

Danielle wants to see a man named Peter Bradford, who has also been raised from the dead and whom she has seen several times in 1968. Peter has a collection of intensely annoying habits which serve as a substitute for a personality. Among these is a tendency to fly into a rage whenever anyone calls him by his right name, and to insist that he be called “Jeff Clark” instead. Danielle has traveled back to the 1790s in search of some evidence that will convince him to desist from this tedious practice.

Today we open at the Collinsport gaol. Peter is in a cell, the gaoler and his assistant are reading Peter’s death warrant, and a gallows is under construction outside. Danielle materializes behind the gaolers, and talks with them for a while. They tell her that a woman named “Gloria Winters” was recently hanged for witchcraft. Danielle realizes that they are actually talking about Victoria Winters, who was the chief protagonist of Dark Shadows for about a year. In November 1967, Victoria came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. She was trapped there until March 1968. Victoria’s utter failure to adapt to her new surroundings led to her condemnation as a witch. At the last second she was whisked from the gallows and returned to her own time. The luckless person whose place she had taken when she arrived from the 1960s appeared at the end of the rope and died in her place.

Danielle asks to see Peter. The gaolers escort her into his cell, lock her in with him, and leave them alone together for several minutes. Peter is unhappy to see Danielle, to whom he was once engaged but whose murderous ways have alienated him. He tells her it saddens him that she is free while he, an innocent person, is about to be executed. Indeed, it was Victoria who killed the man Peter was convicted of murdering, and she did it only to prevent that man killing a child. She tried to tell the court what had happened, but since she was already sentenced to hang and was in love with Peter, her testimony did not persuade the judges.

Danielle offers to break Peter out of gaol. He agrees. She tells him she will go to the great house of Collinwood to enlist much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes in her scheme. Ben, she says, could refuse her nothing.

During the flashback that lasted from November 1967 to March 1968, Ben was ensorcelled by wicked witch Angelique. Now we learn that before Angelique came along, he had been under the influence of Danielle, another beautiful woman with an evil heart and a greatly heightened acting style. Perhaps Ben would do better if he looked for a homely, soft-spoken woman.

We cut to Collinwood, where haughty patriarch Joshua Collins is summoning Ben. They discuss Peter’s upcoming hanging and Victoria’s recent one, and lament the injustice of it all. Joshua calls Ben’s attention to a book Victoria brought with her from the twentieth century. It is a highly inaccurate history of the Collins family up to that time. Joshua says that he believes the book is an evil thing and that getting rid of it is the only hope of ending the cascade of horrors that have befallen the family and everyone they know since Victoria first arrived. Joshua orders Ben to take the book deep into the woods and burn it. He tells him something else- he has read the book thoroughly, and will see to it that posterity accepts all of its false reports as true. Rather than risk the world finding out that his son became a vampire, his wife committed suicide, and his cousin married a bounder, he will see that it is published that the son moved to England, the wife died of natural causes, and the cousin was a spinster all her life. Thus we learn how the events we saw during the 1795 segment were kept out of the historical record.

Ben is barely out the front door when Danielle stops him. He is dismayed to see her. He tells her she wasn’t supposed to come back, and refuses to look at her. She says she has a plan to spare Peter. Ben says that her plans always involve hurting someone, and she says that this time it is different. Ben asks if she intends to poison the gaoler. She tosses her head, laughs at the thought, and assures Ben all she will put in the gaoler’s drink is a “harmless drug.” Ben asks if she is sure the man won’t be hurt, and she assures him she has no grievance against him, only a desire for him to sleep long enough to get Peter to safety. At length, Ben agrees to take two horses to the gaol. There won’t be time for him to burn the book first; Danielle takes it from him for safekeeping.

We cut to the office of the gaol, where Danielle has been reading the book. She tells herself that Victoria must have brought it from the 1960s, and that it might be very valuable to her. The gaoler enters, and Danielle tells him she wants to see him after the hanging. He doesn’t understand why; she clarifies that she is making a pass at him. They are an unlikely couple, and he seems dubious of her interest in him. He tells her Peter is writing a note, probably for her, and sends her back to see him.

The gaoler has the look of a man who believes that if a thing seems too good to be true, it probably is. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Peter tells Danielle he has decided not to escape. He hands her a note which he predicts she will have trouble understanding. Delivered by another actor, this might have sounded like an apology for an unsuccessful effort to express a complicated idea, but Roger Davis has a way of spitting out his lines that makes it sound very much like he is telling Danielle she is stupid. The gaoler and his assistant come to take Peter off to be hanged, not a moment too soon.

In the office, Danielle reads the note and is pleased with it. She closes it in the book. Apparently she expects to be able to use both of those items to get Peter to stop boring everyone with his nonsense about being named “Jeff Clark.” The gaoler stands behind her and watches as she fades away, taking the book with her.

The gaoler is played by Tom Gorman. Gorman was on Dark Shadows at least 14 times, until now always as an uncredited background player. His first part was in November 1966, when each episode began with the words “My name is Victoria Winters.” So it really is remarkable when he proclaims “Her name was Gloria Winters!” Despite that spectacular blooper, he does a nifty job playing the gaoler’s confusion and skepticism about Danielle, and it is too bad this is his final appearance.

Episode 610: You are the angel of death

A woman named Eve sees a man standing on the terrace of the great house of Collinwood. She addresses the man as “Peter Bradford.” Regular viewers know that this is indeed his name, but we also know that he prefers to be called “Jeff Clark.” Peter/ Jeff has died and came back to life since he was first known as “Peter Bradford,” so I suppose you could say that’s a case of deadnaming. But while most transfolk tend to be patient when people inadvertently deadname them, Peter/ Jeff is a huge jerk about correcting people who use his former name. Yesterday twelve year old David Collins called him “Peter Bradford,” and he grabbed the boy and shook him until it looked like he had given him a concussion.

Eve is also a returnee from the world of the dead. Doubly so; her body is a Frankenstein creation made of parts salvaged from corpses, while her memories and personality are those of eighteenth century homicidal maniac Danielle Roget. Peter lived in that same era, and when Eve/ Danielle recognizes him we learn that they knew each other then. Peter/ Jeff doesn’t assault her as he did David; she’s his own size. He doesn’t recognize her, which she attributes to the fact that she looks different than she did when they knew each other. He keeps whining that his name is “Jeff Clark,” but she isn’t having it.

Meanwhile, Peter/ Jeff’s fiancée, well-meaning governess Vicki, is in the drawing room, having a conversation with matriarch Liz. There is a blooper in the middle of this conversation. Liz is supposed to say something like “Then you’ve resolved all your difficulties,” but Joan Bennett stumbles over the words. Alexandra Moltke Isles improvises a response that makes sense of it. That response is smooth enough, but she delivers the rest of her lines very quickly and with unusually little eye contact with her scene partner. Perhaps that is because she was afraid the improvised line was going to put the scene over time, or maybe she realized she had called attention to Bennett’s flub and was nervous because she had embarrassed a big star.

Or maybe Mrs Isles was nervous because her next scene was going to be with Peter/ Jeff, and she knew it would involve Roger Davis putting his hands on her. As they exit, Peter/ Jeff clutches Vicki by wrapping his arms around her in a remarkably awkward fashion, and she visibly squirms. This is most likely Mrs Isles’ discomfort arising from Mr Davis’ habit of physically assaulting his scene partners. A charitable viewer just might be able to believe that it is Vicki’s discomfort because Peter/ Jeff just spent the whole scene telling her transparent lies. He doesn’t want to tell her about his encounter with Eve/ Danielle, and makes up totally unconvincing excuses for his distracted state. Perhaps Mrs Isles channeled her unhappiness at being yoked with Mr Davis into her expression of Vicki’s dissatisfaction with the loathsome little man she is engaged to marry.

Once Vicki and Peter/ Jeff are gone, Eve/ Danielle emerges from the bushes whence she had been spying on them. Liz comes out to the terrace and sees Eve/ Danielle. She asks who she is. When she does not answer, Liz tells her that she knows- she is the angel of death. Eve/ Danielle is startled by this, and hurries away.

The next scene takes place in the house of suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Nicholas has been keeping Eve/ Danielle there since she came to life. She has returned from Collinwood. Nicholas is upset with her for going out without his permission. She taunts him, and he slaps her. He threatens to kill her, and she says that while she does not know what his plans are, it is clear to her that she figures too prominently in them for him to do that.

Coming so shortly after we saw an actress give strong signs of unease at contact with Roger Davis, Nicholas’ slap to Eve/ Danielle’s face is a lesson in how professional actors handle scenes involving physical violence. Eve/ Danielle is relaxed before the slap and in shock after it. Her reaction gives the scene its energy. If Marie Wallace had reason to believe Humbert Allen Astredo would actually hit her, she may well have been as tense before the slap as Mrs Isles was before Roger Davis slithered his arms around her, and the scene would have dribbled out as lifelessly as does Peter/ Jeff’s scene with Vicki.

Once Nicholas concedes that Eve/ Danielle is important to his plans, she relaxes again and decides she may as well tell him about her encounter with Peter/ Jeff. Nicholas is intrigued, and disturbed. He tells Eve/ Danielle that “If it is true that they are one and the same, then there are forces at work here that I don’t know about.” Eve/ Danielle’s memory of her previous existence is very incomplete, and she wants Nicholas to help her to learn more about herself. Once he has heard about Peter/ Jeff, he is eager to oblige. He hypnotizes her.

At this point, my wife, Mrs Acilius, expressed frustration. “He’s going to hypnotize her and afterward she won’t remember anything! It’s only interesting if she remembers.” Eve/ Danielle does have a flashback to 1795, but at the end she seems to come out of the trance on her own. She turns to Nicholas, calls him by name, and says that she remembers Peter Bradford and she loves him. Since Nicholas doesn’t give her a post-hypnotic suggestion and snap his fingers, it seems likely she will remember her past with Peter.

When Danielle was introduced, I assumed that the name “Roget” was a case of deadline-induced selection. She is based on Madame DuFarge from A Tale of Two Cities, so she had to be French. But the writer didn’t have a list of French surnames at his fingertips, so he looked at his desk, saw a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and went with that. Perhaps that was what happened, but today Eve/ Danielle lives up to her namesake and goes into the synonym business. She calls Peter/ Jeff by his original name. She is on the receiving end of synonymy from Liz, since “the angel of death” is as good a name for her as any. And one of the memory gaps Eve/ Danielle wants Nicholas to help her fill is her previous name.

Marie Wallace plays Danielle in the flashback, even though she had mentioned in the first act that she looked different in those days. This occasions much discussion on the fansites. Here is the debate on the Dark Shadows Wiki:

During the fiashback scene, Danielle Roget should have been played by Erica Fitz instead of Marie Wallace. Fitz had previously portrayed Danielle Roget in episode 594, so it would have made sense and for character continuity to continue using the same actress. [Addendum: There are strong reasons to argue otherwise as well. One could argue that this is a memory that Nicholas is conjuring in Eve, so it’s from Eve’s perspective, and she would naturally see herself in her current guise, not even knowing what Danielle Roget looked like. This is also a reasonable place for dramatic license to prevail. The scene is very short, and it wouldn’t have been especially practical to have an additional actress. It’s also possible that viewers may have been confused if another actress was in the scene–Erica Fitz was on the show for only two episodes, so viewers at the time might not even have seen or not fully remembered what she looked like. Aside from that, it’s also possible Erica Fitz was not available.]
Discussion under “Bloopers and Continuity Errors” in “610” on The Dark Shadows Wiki.

In a comment on his own post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn puts it more succinctly:

Yeah, I think the in-universe explanation is that the flashback pictured at the top of this post is Eve’s hypnosis-assisted memory of the event, so she’s picturing herself as she is now.

The real-world explanation is that Marie Wallace is playing Eve/Danielle now, and exactly nobody wants Erica Fitz to come back and appear in the flashback.
Comment left 23 March 2015 by Danny Horn on “Episode 610: Inexplicable You,” Dark Shadows Before I Die, 21 March 2015.

For my part, I’m sure Erica Fitz Mears is a very nice lady, and we should all give her money to help with her health problems. But no, she was not a good actress and I do not regret that she did not get more work on screen. Since Mrs Mears was only in two episodes, today’s flashback might have been an opportunity to give some other actress a chance to show what she could do as Danielle. But Miss Wallace does a very good job, and rounding the episode with two confrontations between the same pair of performers does a great deal to strengthen its structure. It would probably have been a mistake to cast anyone else in the flashback.

The flashback scene does come as bad news to longtime viewers, for reasons that have nothing to do with the casting of Danielle. When in November 1967 the show needed to develop a backstory for vampire Barnabas Collins, it took us back to 1795 and introduced Angelique, a maniacal ex-girlfriend who was determined to disrupt Barnabas’ new romance. That was a triumph that turned Barnabas from a stunt that boosted their ratings sufficiently to ward off cancellation into one of the major pop-culture phenomena of the 1960s, and Angelique herself became one of the show’s most important characters. That they are trying the same tactic with Peter/ Jeff, right down to a dramatic date of 1795, leads us to fear that they see him as a permanent part of the cast, and that they want to tie Eve/ Danielle as closely to him as Angelique is tied to Barnabas.

Episode 596: She can speak

An experimental procedure has killed one woman and brought another to life. Yesterday someone identifying herself as Leona Eltridge turned up out of the blue and volunteered to be the “life force” donor who would help animate a bride for Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Mad scientist Julia and old world gentleman Barnabas capitulated to Adam’s insistence and went through with the procedure. Leona died, but the Bride, whom Adam has taken to calling Eve, is alive.

After a few minutes in a daze, Eve starts talking. This surprises Julia, Barnabas, and Adam. When Adam came to life, he didn’t know any words or anything else. They puzzle over the difference. Even after Eve starts alluding to her previous existence, they do not remember the original plan when Adam was created. Barnabas was Adam’s “life force” donor, and it was expected his body would die and his spirit would awaken in Adam. Evidently this is what has happened with Eve. Her memory comes back in bits and pieces; she is bewildered to find herself in Barnabas’ basement, and is quite anxious for an explanation as to how she got there. Eve faints, and Adam takes her to the upstairs bedroom. Julia examines her there, and concludes that she will be all right.

Meanwhile, occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes has come to the house. In Friday’s episode, he reacted to the name “Leona Eltridge” by rushing off to do something terribly important. Today, we see that what he had to do was reenact a scene from Rosemary’s Baby. In that film, released 12 June 1968, Rosemary uses Scrabble tiles to figure out that two names are anagrams of each other. In this episode, recorded 30 September 1968, Stokes uses alphabetic refrigerator magnets to figure out that “Leona Eltridge” is an anagram of “Danielle Roget,” the name of an eighteenth century homicidal maniac. Barnabas and Julia don’t get to the movies much, so they don’t realize that this is proof positive that Eve is now the reincarnation of that hyper-violent personage.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the upstairs bedroom, Eve demands a kiss from Adam. He is shy at first, but obliges. After he leaves her alone to go downstairs and confront Barnabas, Julia, and Stokes, spooky music plays, wind blows the bedroom door open and lifts the window treatments, and we hear chimes. Eve is standing in front of a portrait of gracious lady Josette, who like Danielle Roget was a Frenchwoman of the late eighteenth century; when Eve reacts to the ghostly manifestations by saying “I remember you!” we might think that Josette’s ghost, a major presence in the first year of Dark Shadows, has returned to do battle with an old foe. Eve rules this out when she addresses the ghost as “mon petit,” not “ma petite.”

As soon as Marie Wallace starts delivering lines, it is obvious she is going to be on the show for a while. She is firmly in command of a larger than life acting style of the sort the directors liked, and she dominates every shot she is in. She also solves another riddle. Thursday and Friday, Erica Fitz played Danielle/Leona. A technical description of Miss Fitz’ approach to that role would be quite similar to one of Miss Wallace’s approach to Eve. Each woman speaks her lines one word at a time, often giving a special inflection to a particular word in the middle of a sentence. Their posture and basic facial expressions are also similar. But while Miss Fitz did a stupefyingly bad job, Miss Wallace holds the audience’s attention easily, and leaves us with the sense that we are seeing a character with a coherent set of motivations. I suspect Miss Fitz must have seen Miss Wallace rehearsing, and made a woeful attempt to mimic her style.

Miss Wallace’s prominence in this episode adds a special piquancy to the reference to Rosemary’s Baby. In a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day, “Rob Staeger” points out that “Marie was in Nobody Loves an Albatross — which is actually one of the plays Rosemary’s husband had in his credits in Rosemary’s Baby!” Which is true- Rosemary says that Guy “was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross and a lot of television plays and commercials.” That only two titles are given makes it quite a coincidence that one of the thirteen members of the opening night cast of one of them has her first lines in an episode that references the movie.

(I should mention that Barnard Hughes, a very distinguished actor who appeared in #27, was also in Nobody Loves an Albatross. I don’t know if he and Marie Wallace ever ran into each other and compared notes about their subsequent work on Dark Shadows.)

Episode 594: Ominous stillness

In yesterday’s episode, everyone was very upset about the death of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and frightened that Frankenstein’s monster Adam would react to it by murdering everyone in the great house of Collinwood. Then it turned out Adam was sitting peacefully under a tree and Carolyn was alive and well, so the upshot of it all was that the audience grew half an hour older.

Today, suave warlock Nicholas Blair tells Adam that it is thanks to his powers that Carolyn is alive. Nicholas also gets Carolyn to go to his basement and help him with a séance. This doesn’t take the same form as the show’s previous séances, nor is it meant to achieve the same purpose. Rather than putting questions to a ghost who has been trying to communicate, Nicholas wants to raise a spirit that he will then reinvest with flesh. It is the spirit of homicidal maniac Danielle Roget.

Danielle lived in France during the First Republic, and enjoyed sending people to the guillotine. Later, she came to America and, as Nicholas says, “died… here.” The emphasis he puts on the word “here” makes it sound like she died in the basement, though they don’t follow up on that. Nicholas tells Carolyn how evil Danielle was, and she is puzzled that he wants to raise such a spirit. It’s odd that she goes along with it. Maybe she is simply too tired to say no- after all, she just died a couple of hours ago, that must take a lot out of a person.

Carolyn’s temporary death was the result of an unsuccessful attempt to create a mate for Adam. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and old world gentleman Barnabas, with assistance from Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis and an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff, have built a woman’s body from parts scavenged from corpses and set up some very flashy equipment in Barnabas’ basement. The procedure needs a living woman to donate her “life force” to animate the constructed body. Under Nicholas’ influence, Carolyn volunteered to be that donor. Since everyone agrees that they shouldn’t kill Carolyn again tonight, Nicholas tells Adam that he will provide another woman. That is why he wants Danielle.

Regular viewers might have been surprised that Nicholas guided Carolyn to volunteer. In #575, he had said that the donor would have to be “the most evil woman who ever lived!” so that he could be sure she and Adam would produce a race of offspring loyal to the devil. Carolyn was tempestuous and selfish in the first six months of the show, but she was never really evil. Perhaps Nicholas not only brought Carolyn back from the dead and kept Adam from going on a murderous rampage, but also arranged the failure of the experiment so that Julia and Barnabas would have to use Danielle.

Danielle appears. She is disappointed Nicholas won’t let her kill Carolyn. Nicholas tells her to come back in a bodily form. She tells Nicholas that she can exist in that state for only a few hours; he tells her she will only need a few hours.

Barnabas is home alone, wondering where Julia is. A knock comes at his front door. It is Danielle, in modern dress, introducing herself as “Leona Eltridge.” She says Adam told her to come. The door opens further, and we see that Adam is standing next to her.

Erica Fitz as Danielle Roget, alias Leona Eltridge.

Danielle/ Leona is played by Erica Fitz. Miss Fitz’ IMDb page has a total of five credits, the earliest in 1966 and the latest in 1970. She is an unbelievably bad actress. She doesn’t deliver lines, but articulates her dialogue word by word as if she were presenting challenges to the contestants in a spelling bee. She seems to be a nice person, though. In 2017, a GoFundMe was posted in her name because she has an incurable form of cancer. Describing herself on it, she wrote: “My biggest ‘claims to fame’ were that I was in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first movie in the U.S. called Hercules in New York (we did not win an Oscar), a TV series entitled Dark Shadows, and a small part in a Broadway show entitled There’s a Girl in My Soup.” It doesn’t look like the fundraiser is still open, but she’s still around.

Nicholas refers to Adam’s mate today as “Eve.” This is the first time we have heard her called by that name.