Tag: dark shadows before i die

Episode 1045: Have you a medical degree?

We open in the room atop the tower of the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Wicked witch Angelique, enemy of the mysterious Barnabas Collins, confronts Will Loomis, Barnabas’ henchman. She demands Will tell her Barnabas’ secret. Returning viewers know that Barnabas is a vampire, and Will is his blood thrall. When Will tells Angelique that he is incapable of betraying Barnabas, we know that he is making a literal statement of fact. But Angelique has power over Will, too. Caught between these opposing forces, Will does the only thing he can. He opens the window and flings himself to his death.

John Karlen plays Will, Lara Parker Angelique. In his post about this episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn observes that Karlen approached all of his parts as if he were in a play by Tennessee Williams. In a comment I left under that post, I said that while most of Karlen’s scene partners stuck with their own distinctive styles of acting while playing opposite him, resulting in surprisingly effective mashups of techniques that you wouldn’t think could coexist on any stage, Parker followed his volcanic lead in today’s first act. Will’s anguish and Angelique’s vehemence both go way over the top, but the result is far from hammy. Orson Welles famously said that hamminess is not overacting, it is false acting. There is nothing false between Will and Angelique today.

Just before Will jumped out the window, Julia Hoffman entered the room. Furious that Will has died without telling her what sort of creature Barnabas is, Angelique accuses Hoffman of startling him and ruining everything. Wondering if Will may have survived his fall, she orders Hoffman to accompany her to the foot of the tower. Hoffman kneels down and says that Will’s spinal cord snapped on impact resulting in instant death. Angelique says that she is intrigued by Hoffman’s diagnosis. “Have you a medical degree?”

Unknown to Angelique, the true answer would be yes. Angelique believes herself to be with Hoffman the housekeeper, her most fanatical devotee. In fact, the woman is Hoffman’s counterpart from an alternate universe, Dr Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia has followed her best friend Barnabas into this continuity and is assisting Barnabas in his battle against Angelique. Julia killed Hoffman and assumed her identity. Julia responds to Angelique’s puzzlement with a story about an incident when she saw a man fall from a roof and land in the same twisted position Will now holds. She remembered the words the doctor said when examining that man and merely repeated them when she saw Will’s distorted neck. Angelique compliments Julia on her extraordinary memory, and proceeds as if she were telling the truth. There seems little else she could do.

I remembered the line “Have you a medical degree?” from the first time Mrs Acilius and I watched Dark Shadows. Angelique has noticed that Julia is different from the Hoffman she knows, and has been showing signs of impatience with her. But she has not suspected she is a different person, only that she is going soft on her enemies. “Have you a medical degree?” makes it seem that might be changing. Julia may be in grave danger before long.

Barnabas rises from his coffin in the basement of Will’s house. He goes upstairs and finds Angelique waiting for him. She says she came, not to see him, but to console the widow Loomis. Thus Barnabas learns that Will has died.

Barnabas tells Angelique that he will avenge Will’s death upon her, but she tells him that he is the one to blame. It was because his power over Will matched hers that Will could respond to her commands only by killing himself.

Angelique’s counterpart in Barnabas’ own universe placed the curse that first made him a vampire. She was also wholly or partially responsible for the deaths of his mother, sister, aunt, uncle, fiancée, and many other people he cared about. So he reacts to the sight of this Angelique with barely controlled rage. For her part, she has no idea who he is, and does not know why he is hostile to her. She, therefore, is much cooler. The contrast is fascinating to watch, far more interesting than are the scenes between Barnabas and the other Angelique and one of the joys of the “Parallel Time” segment.

Julia and Barnabas are busy with a science project. They have learned that Angelique returned from the grave because her father, evil barfly Tim Stokes, somehow established a remote connection between her and a woman named Roxanne whom he keeps in the back room of his apartment. This connection, whatever it is, drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. This creates a delicate situation. If Roxanne dies, all of her “life force,” including that which animates Angelique, will vanish. But if she regains any of the force that has been taken from her, even enough to flutter her eyelids, Angelique will collapse and, unless Roxanne is brought back down to the prescribed level of debility, re-die.

When Julia and Barnabas first came upon Roxanne, they planned to kill her to finish Angelique off. Barnabas put the kibosh on that when he saw how pretty Roxanne was. Then they thought of destroying Angelique by reviving Roxanne, but, for reasons too silly to explain, they’ve decided they want to keep Angelique around. So now Barnabas has decreed that they will manipulate Roxanne’s condition to slow Angelique down. They have taken her from Stokes’ place and put her on a table in Will’s basement, somewhere away from the coffin. They have connected her to a lot of mad science equipment that is supposed to act on the “life force.” Longtime viewers know all about this equipment, because Julia had it in 1968 when she was building a Frankenstein’s monster as part of a project to cure Barnabas of vampirism.

The doctor is in. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia runs the equipment. Roxanne’s condition does not change. Julia tells Barnabas that Angelique is expecting her back at the great house. In her absence, Barnabas takes Roxanne’s hand and stares at her. She opens her eyes and sits up. In the great house, Angelique weakens and collapses.

Many fans wonder where Julia could have got the “life force” equipment. In her own universe, she is a medical doctor and the head of a private hospital, so she could order anything she needed from a medical supply house. Here, her only identity is her imposture as Hoffman the housekeeper, who did not have a prescription pad.

I don’t see why people are so concerned with this. In 1968, the equipment originally belonged, not to Julia, but to another mad scientist, Dr Eric Lang. Barnabas and Julia simply stole it from Dr Lang’s house after he died. In this continuity, we haven’t heard about Dr Lang, but we hadn’t heard about him in the main continuity either until Barnabas fell into his clutches, at which point he already had all of his equipment. So we can presume Barnabas and Julia just found out when his counterpart would be out of the house and raided the place.

Will’s death marks his final appearance, but John Karlen will be back in a couple of months as Willie Loomis, the version of him we met in the main continuity. He will play other characters later, when the show will be set in other periods.

Episode 1044: A girl I’d like to meet

The whole idea of the supernatural is that what appears to be weak is able to overcome what appears to be strong. So, as far as we can tell the dead are infinitely weaker than the living, yet it is two dead characters, vampire Barnabas Collins and wicked witch Angelique Stokes Collins, who dominate all the living people they interact with today. Even dead characters who barely appear utterly outclass live ones. In the opening sequence, Barnabas and his blood thrall Will Loomis hear the voice of late housekeeper Julia Hoffman. Hoffman’s ghost does not manifest visibly; she is such a subtle presence that Will can’t tell the difference between her and a stray piece of purple cloth. Even so, he is helpless against the dead Hoffman. Only the equally dead Barnabas can talk her into getting out of their way.

As far as we can tell, people have more influence over each other when they are close together than when they are far away, and if one person is going to resuscitate another they have to be in physical contact. But Angelique’s father, a wizard known as Tim, somehow connected her to a girl named Roxanne when Roxanne was in the back room of his apartment and Angelique was sealed up in her tomb, miles away. That unexplained connection drained most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique, allowing Angelique to move among the living and reducing Roxanne to a vegetative state. Roxanne must remain in precisely her current state of debility, or Angelique will die again. Whenever Roxanne regains even a minuscule amount of strength, Angelique collapses. If Roxanne were herself to die, the whole of the “life-force,” including the share which animates Angelique, would vanish. The first and third letters of Roxanne’s name specify what she is to Angelique, the ℞ prescribed for her.

As far as we can tell, the actions we take in our lives have consequences while the actions we do not take have none. But 13 weeks ago Barnabas crossed over into an alternate universe where counterparts of the people he knows are living with the consequences of actions he did not take when he met his universe’s counterpart of Angelique in the 1790s. In his life, Barnabas had an affair with Angelique, then spurned her when he found that the gracious Josette was available to him. In revenge, Angelique turned him into a vampire and brought death and misfortune to many others. In this continuity, Barnabas’ counterpart left Angelique alone, married Josette, lived a quiet life, and died a natural death.

Hoffman’s counterpart in Barnabas’ native universe is as devoted to him as Hoffman was to Angelique. This Julia Hoffman is a medical doctor and a mad scientist. She has crossed over to the current continuity, killed her counterpart, and assumed her identity. She is working with Barnabas against Angelique.

Barnabas and Will take Roxanne from Stokes’ apartment to Will’s house on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas wants to control Angelique by periodically stimulating Roxanne a little, knocking Angelique out each time he does so. His original plan was to revive her altogether, destroying Angelique, but he has decided that if he does this he will have less of a chance of proving that Angelique, not foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins, was responsible for the death of a man called Bruno Hess. As far as we can tell, people who can move around and talk are better able to defend their reputations than are those who are rotting in their graves, but Barnabas seems to think that it is the other way around in Angelique’s case.

Julia has refused to aid Barnabas in this nonsensical scheme, but now that Roxanne is in the house she acquiesces. Before she can get to work, they hear a knock on the front door. Will leaves Julia and Barnabas with Roxanne in the secret room behind the bookcase in the front parlor. Angelique herself is the visitor, asking to see Barnabas. Will tells her that Barnabas is not in and that he won’t be back for some time. She goes to the bookcase and appears to be reaching for the lever that exposes the secret room, but simply takes a book. She sits down to read while she is waiting for Barnabas. Will claims that he has resolved to stop drinking and resume his work as a writer, and that he has to be alone to do so. Angelique can’t think of anything to say to that, so she goes.

Once Angelique has returned to the great house, Quentin’s young cousin Amy Collins comes to her in the drawing room to say that she saw a man scurry across the grounds and climb in through a window, and that a few minutes later she heard a man outside her bedroom door. She could not see the man, but thinks he might be Quentin. Angelique tries to persuade her she did not see what she saw. Amy has given up when Angelique grows faint, the result of what is happening to Roxanne. When Angelique’s head clears, she asks Amy in a very serious tone to repeat exactly what she told her. Any inclination the girl may have had to believe that she was mistaken vanishes with this.

We next see Amy exploring the long-disused west wing of the house. She hears someone moving around among the cobwebs and bric-a-brac. She does not find this person, but does discover the statuette Angelique used as a voodoo doll when she cast the spell that killed Bruno, Bruno’s scarf still tied around its neck.

Julia, masquerading as Hoffman, returns to the great house. Angelique scolds her for neither being at hand when she wanted her nor keeping close enough track of Barnabas to prevent him taking Roxanne away from her father’s apartment. Julia answers the first of these complaints by referring to her other duties. She answers the second by trying to say that another of Angelique’s enemies might have made off with Roxanne. Angelique has no patience with either of these statements.

Will comes to the great house. Amy tells him about the man she saw on the lawn, says that she believes he was Quentin, and shows him the statuette with the scarf around its neck. Regular viewers not only remember Angelique using the statuette to strangle Bruno from afar, but will also remember that her counterpart in the main continuity used the same statuette in the same way to cast a choking spell on her husband Sky Rumson in #955, when Sky was trying to set fire to her (theirs was an imperfect marriage.) But out of that context, there does not appear to be anything sinister about the statuette. That isn’t a flaw in the prop- it’s the whole point. As a supernatural intervention, the voodoo doll is not supposed to look like it could have anything to do with the consequences of the spell it is used to cast.

Amy shows Will the statuette. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Will recognizes the statuette as a voodoo doll, as his wife Carolyn had done when Maggie showed it to her the other day. That’s a breach of faith with the audience. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced form of technology is indistinguishable from magic. If the implements of witchcraft are things that could be sent off to the police lab for forensic analysis, they are not sufficiently advanced to stay outside the category of technology, and you are not telling a story about magic at all.

Will retraces Amy’s steps through the west wing, hoping to find Quentin and offer him his support. He makes his way to the tower room. The door opens, and he is startled to see who is entering.

Denise Nickerson was a splendid young actress. When she first joined the cast as Amy Jennings in the main continuity, she was central to the plot for months, and did a great job. We remember those days when she goes to the west wing looking for Quentin. It was Amy Jennings who, on her first night in the great house, entered the west wing and went straight to the room where the ghost of that universe’s version of Quentin was waiting for her. But she has been seen less and less. This is Nickerson’s first appearance in eight weeks, and it is hard to be optimistic that we will see much more of her in the future.

Episode 1043: The temperament to kill

In 1967, vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman settled in on the estate of Collinwood, Barnabas as the master of the Old House on the grounds and Julia as a permanent guest in the great house. Now they have both crossed over to an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” Barnabas has passed himself off to the residents of the great house on this universe’s version of Collinwood as their long-lost cousin from South America, as in the original continuity he persuaded their counterparts he was their cousin from England. He has bitten and enslaved the owners of the Old House, alcoholic writer Will Loomis and Will’s wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Julia met her own counterpart, a Julia Hoffman who never became a doctor or got entangled with Barnabas. This Hoffman was the housekeeper in the great house, and as fanatically devoted to the undead Angelique as the original Julia is to Barnabas. Julia greeted Hoffman by beating her to death, stealing her French maid outfit, and assuming her identity.

Yesterday, Carolyn told Julia that she had realized who killed Angelique the first time. Today, she clams up and refuses to say who it is. Julia tells Barnabas about this. He suspects she is protecting Will. He questions Will, who says he is innocent. Barnabas’ power precludes Will from lying to him, so he turns his attentions to Carolyn. He forces her to say that she believes the killer to be her mother, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Barnabas knows Liz’ counterpart in his own continuity and cannot imagine that any version of her would commit such a crime. Carolyn’s reason for accusing her mother is that the murder weapon was one of her hatpins. Barnabas points out that anyone in the house could have stolen the pin.

Angelique has returned from the dead. Impersonating her identical twin sister Alexis, she is staying in the great house as the guest of her widower, sourpuss Quentin Collins. Quentin is missing at the moment, on the run from the police after being charged with a murder of which he is more or less innocent. Barnabas and Julia know who Angelique is and what she is up to.

Angelique is being maintained in the world of the living by a procedure her father, Tim Stokes, invented. Stokes is keeping a comatose young woman named Roxanne in the back room of his apartment. Stokes has somehow established a remote link between Roxanne and Angelique. This link drains most of Roxanne’s “life force” into Angelique. Roxanne must remain in precisely her current state of debility for Angelique to continue her existence. If Roxanne dies, the force will vanish altogether, taking Angelique with it. If Roxanne regains her strength, the link will be broken and the whole force will revert to her.

Barnabas has devised a cockamamie scheme to take Roxanne’s body from Stokes’ place, hide it somewhere, and have Julia bring her back to life. He reminds Julia that she performed a similar procedure when she cured him of his first vampire curse by constructing a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam. She responds that what Stokes has done is altogether different from what she did, and that she has no idea whether she will be able to figure it out. Barnabas, who has no scientific education beyond whatever he picked up as a boy in the eighteenth century, vows to revive Roxanne himself if Julia will not help.

Julia points out the many flaws in Barnabas’ plan. As she does so, Jonathan Frid’s delivery of Barnabas’ responses gets more and more uncertain. He’s been doing quite well in recent episodes, but he’s so bad in this scene that before long Grayson Hall can no longer keep track of Julia’s lines. When, on his way out of the house, he proclaims that he is ready to do battle with Angelique, he is proposing a two-front war. He is already engaged in desperate combat with the coat rack holding his cane. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said that Barnabas’ plan is so ridiculous it’s no wonder the actors can’t get the words out.

Barnabas takes Will to the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town. He explains that there is a secret room there that was used to hide weapons from the British during the Revolutionary War. Will made a study of the Collins legends and is skeptical, but Barnabas opens the panel and ushers him in.

Once they are inside, it is Barnabas’ turn to be surprised. In his universe, he was locked in a chained coffin in the counterpart of this room, undiscovered for 171 years. But here, he finds furniture, a candelabra, a glass of fresh milk, and a drawing of Roxanne signed “Claude North.” Someone has been living there, someone connected with Roxanne. Will says out loud that they can’t keep her there. Barnabas says that they will find another place for her, and they carry on.

Will and Barnabas find the drawing. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas and Will enter Stokes’ apartment. Will assures Barnabas that Stokes won’t come back until after closing time at the local tavern, but a moment later claims that he feels a presence. Barnabas looks around. No sooner had he declared that Will is wrong than the ghostly voice of the late Miss Julia Hoffman fills the room, forbidding them from proceeding with their mission.

Roxanne is played by Donna Wandrey, whose short red hair, pale complexion, and strong chin are reminiscent of Grayson Hall. When we first saw her, we wondered if it would turn out that Roxanne was Hoffman’s secret daughter. The ghostly voice adds substance to the idea that there was something important linking Hoffman with Roxanne.

Episode 1042: Used as a voodoo doll, to cast spells

Vampire Barnabas Collins has crossed over from the universe where Dark Shadows took place for its first 196 weeks and established himself as a character on another soap opera with the same title, made by the same people and broadcast in the same time slot. His best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, has joined him in the cast of this new show. Barnabas is pretending to be a descendant of another Barnabas Collins, who in this continuity lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830. Julia is impersonating another Julia Hoffman, who was the housekeeper at the great house of Collinwood and a fanatical devotee of the undead Angelique until our Julia beat her to death and stole her French maid outfit.

Barnabas has taken three victims. These are alcoholic novelist Will Loomis; Will’s wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard; and masochistic barmaid Buffie Harrington. Will and Carolyn own the Old House on the grounds at Collinwood, which in his own universe was Barnabas’ home. He lives there now as their unwelcome guest. Buffie has not been seen since #1023, and is mentioned today for the first time since #1028. Will discovered Julia next to Barnabas’ coffin shortly after she killed Hoffman; when he saw the corpse, he realized who Julia was and was delighted to meet her. It becomes clear only today that Carolyn also knows who Julia is. It is Carolyn who brings up Buffie’s name in her conversation with Julia. Carolyn says that Buffie was working at Collinwood the previous year. She assumes that Julia will recognize Buffie’s name in connection with something other than her former employment on the estate, so it is plausible that she knows that she has been inducted into the sisterhood of the scarf, but it is not made explicit.

Staff conference. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn and Julia are talking about the séance at which Angelique died the first time. This séance was reenacted in #990. They made a big deal at that time about how everyone involved in the original séance was in attendance at the reenactment, with only two exceptions. Foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins, Angelique’s widower, refused to have anything to do with it. And since Angelique herself was in the tomb at that time, her identical twin sister Alexis sat in for her. Neither Carolyn nor Buffie was there; since someone has to tell Julia about the séance, it makes sense to retcon her into attendance. It is not immediately obvious why they have chosen to insert Buffie into it. Regular viewers may hope that means that we will see more of Elizabeth Eis’ fine performance in this role, but she doesn’t turn up today.

Two weeks after the reenactment of the séance, Angelique rose from the dead, murdered Alexis, and took her place. She has been impersonating her ever since. Barnabas and Julia know that the “Alexis” who is staying in the great house as Quentin’s guest is really Angelique, though they do not know about the sororicide. The conversation between Julia and Carolyn is the first time it is confirmed that they have shared their information with the Loomises.

Angelique suspects that Quentin killed her, and has decided to get revenge on him by annihilating his family (except for her own son by him.) As part of that plan, she used witchcraft to finish strangling a man named Bruno whom Quentin had just been choking. When a policeman in whose presence Quentin had a few minutes before vowed to kill Bruno with his bare hands strolled in and found Quentin over the body, he arrested him. Yesterday, Angelique talked Quentin into assaulting that policeman and escaping from jail so that he could interfere with the investigation into Bruno’s death. Apparently Quentin thinks courts love it when you do those things.

Angelique keeps needling Quentin’s current wife, the former Maggie Evans, by alternately describing the evidence of Quentin’s guilt and urging her to have total faith in his innocence. Maggie is already close to a breakdown, and this doesn’t help. Julia finds her outside Angelique’s old bedroom, where she is convinced she heard the piano playing. They enter the room, and find it vacant. Longtime viewers will remember early 1969, when supernatural forces tormented the living by making a sickly little waltz resound throughout the house, and will assume that Angelique is using magic to make Maggie to hear the music.

Julia urges Maggie to get out of the house for her sanity’s sake. As Maggie is starting to think that might be a good idea, Angelique enters. Angelique looks askance at Julia. Hoffman the housekeeper had not only been dedicated to her, but was barely able to control her loathing for Maggie. So far Angelique has not suspected that Julia is not who she appears to be. When she sees Julia’s sincere concern and hears a suggestion that Maggie do something other than fall into a trap, she wonders what is going on.

Julia returns to the Loomis house in time to see Carolyn have a vision of the fateful séance. When Carolyn comes out of the trance, she declares that she knows who killed Angelique.

Episode 1041: Called away on business

Foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins has been charged with murder. He has a visitor in jail. He believes her to be Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of his late wife Angelique. In fact, she is Angelique herself, come back to life and bent on revenge.

Angelique urges Quentin to escape from jail and set about proving his innocence. Quentin is not the brightest fellow, so this sounds like a good idea to him. When the policeman in charge of the place comes in, he jumps off a chair, delivers a karate chop to his neck, and runs out.

Quentin may not be smart, but he has style. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. Another iteration of Angelique figured then as a witch. That Angelique deflected suspicion from herself by framing well-meaning governess Victoria Winters for her crimes. Vicki had shown significant brainpower early in the series, but by that point had apparently been eating lead coins for breakfast or something. She reached her absolute nadir when she talked her boyfriend, an insufferable jerk named Peter Bradford, into helping her escape from the Collinsport Gaol so that she could prove her innocence. But dumb as that idea was, at least Vicki was able to come up with it on her own. Quentin is so dense he needs Angelique to suggest it to him.

Episode 1040: Probably wondering

From its first episode, one of the principal sets on Dark Shadows has been the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. So every violent death on the show has been pregnant with the possibility of a scene in which the characters gather on that set and a detective says that he supposes they are probably wondering why he asked them to join him there. We come as close to that scene today as we ever will.

The detective is Inspector Hamilton of the Collinsport police. That is itself a disappointment to regular viewers. In #1034, a detective played by Philip R. Allen made an appearance. He had little to do, but Allen was such a dynamic actor that it was gripping to watch him do it. When we heard that the police were on their way, we might have been excited to see Allen again. Inspector Hamilton is played by Colin Hamilton. It’s always a bad sign when the producers don’t trust an actor to answer to any name other than his own, and Hamilton’s performance is a case in point. The only note he strikes today is languid annoyance. Perhaps he had watched the Thin Man movies and been impressed by the use William Powell and Myrna Loy made of that note in their portrayals of Nick and Nora Charles in their drawing room reveals, but if so he had forgotten that Powell and Loy did other things as well.

Making matters worse, Inspector Hamilton does not actually have much to contribute. Sleazy musician Bruno Hess gave him photostats of a couple of pages of the journal of the late Cyrus Longworth, homicidal maniac, in which Cyrus speculates that his friend Quentin Collins murdered Angelique, his first wife. But Cyrus did not see Quentin commit that crime, so the papers are in no sense evidence.

Quentin gets very angry with Bruno. Standing next to Inspector Hamilton, he declares that Bruno will never make trouble for him again and that he will put a stop to him “with my bare hands!” He then rushes out of the house. At length, Inspector Hamilton moseys over to Bruno’s place.

The camera gets there before Inspector Hamilton does. We find Quentin crushing Bruno’s throat in his elbow. He releases him and shouts that he isn’t “worth killing!” A moment later, Bruno starts choking and falls to the floor. Quentin ridicules him, then kneels down and finds that he really seems to be unconscious. Inspector Hamilton then enters and says that he hopes for Quentin’s sake that Bruno isn’t dead. This line is a bit surprising; it would have fit with Colin Hamilton’s lazy performance had Inspector Hamilton said that he hopes Bruno is alive so he won’t have to stay up late doing paperwork.

As it happens, Angelique has returned from the grave and is impersonating her identical twin sister Alexis. None of the other characters in today’s episode are onto her. We see her flash a self-satisfied grin every time Quentin annoys Inspector Hamilton by proclaiming his intention of killing Bruno. We also see her cast the spell that causes Bruno to choke and die.

Quentin being innocent of strangling Bruno. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Bruno’s death is no great shock. He smacked Angelique around yesterday, a sure sign of a short and unhappy future, and had been absent from the action and unmentioned on screen for more than six weeks before he came back on Tuesday. Actor Michael Stroka will be back later as another character.

Angelique could be fairly sure that Quentin was in Bruno’s cottage and that Inspector Hamilton was on his way there when she was casting the spell, but she has no powers of remote viewing. For all she knew, Quentin may have been choking Bruno while she was casting the spell. Had that been the case, we would have been presented with a puzzle in logic. Bruno would have died of strangulation while Quentin was strangling him, but there would be a sense in which we could say that Quentin was not the strangler. That sense might not have made much difference to Quentin’s felony exposure, though Angelique would also be guilty of the killing.

This scenario should remind viewers who have been with the show from the beginning of the first murder mystery on Dark Shadows, the vehicular homicide of a man known only as Hansen. Hansen was walking by the road one night in 1956 when a car hit him and continued on. The owner of the car, Burke Devlin, was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison for five years. It later turned out that Burke had been blacked out drunk when he started driving the car away from a restaurant, and that he gave the keys to his passenger, Roger Collins, after they had gone some way. Roger was also heavily intoxicated, and he was behind the wheel when the car hit Hansen.

Burke claimed that Roger’s role in Hansen’s death exonerated him of guilt. But since Burke knew that Roger had had as much to drink as he had, handing the keys to him was scarcely more responsible than operating the vehicle himself. Indeed, by the time of the collision Burke had passed out, so if he had kept the keys the car would not have been moving and Hansen would have had nothing to fear. The fact that Roger was also guilty of a crime does nothing to clear Burke. Remembering that, we may wonder whether Angelique’s participation really clears Quentin.

The version of Quentin that became a major breakout hit was the one we saw in 1969, when the show was a costume drama set in the year 1897. That Quentin had all of the vices Roger had in 1966, and like Roger was witty and full of joie de vivre. The easygoing 27 year old David Selby had a sex appeal that reached young viewers who did not respond to Louis Edmonds in that way, and the show was free to make villains into permanent parts of the cast of characters at that point, so Quentin became what Roger might have been.

After the show returned to a contemporary setting in late 1969, it struggled to find a place for Quentin. Now they have crossed over into an alternate universe, and they have dabbled with the idea of turning his counterpart into an action hero like Burke. That hasn’t worked at all, but then Burke’s own arc of development fizzled out, so I suppose we can say that Parallel Quentin really is a mashup of Burke and Roger.

Episode 1037: An uncertain and frightening journey

In November 1967, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters participated in a séance. She came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. For the next four months, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. Viewers made the acquaintance of wicked witch Angelique and learned how old world gentleman Barnabas Collins first became a vampire.

Vicki herself learned nothing from her trip back in time. She spent the first part of it telling the actors about the parts they had played in the first 73 weeks of the show. After that incredibly stupid habit had burned away any goodwill the audience had for the character, Angelique framed Vicki for her own acts of sorcery. Vicki at first refused to take these charges seriously, an inexplicable response given both her knowledge of the period in which she found herself and her extensive experience with the supernatural in her own time, then kept looking for the most idiotic possible means of defending herself until she was sent to the gallows. In the nick of time, she was whisked back to the séance and to the 1960s, rope burns already visible on her neck. Vicki never regained the audience’s sympathy, and was written out later that year. Maggie Evans succeeded Vicki both as governess at Collinwood and as the perpetually imperiled heroine.

Now Barnabas has traveled in time, not backward, but sideways. He is in an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” Here, Maggie’s counterpart is married to foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins, the master of Collinwood. Angelique’s counterpart is Quentin’s late first wife, returned from the grave and scheming to get Maggie out of the way so that she can remarry her widower. Angelique casts a spell today that leads Quentin to confront Maggie and announce that he is certain that she is a witch.

The 1790s segment was in some ways one of the show’s greatest triumphs, but nothing about Vicki’s part in it was very good. So seeing this Angelique reenact the story that culminated in the witchcraft trial will bring a sinking feeling to longtime viewers. It doesn’t help that Maggie has made a number of inexplicably foolish decisions and quailed in the face of opposition she would seem to be able to overcome easily.

Moreover, Quentin is such a miserable husband to Maggie that we have no rooting interest in their marriage. He is being relatively nice to her at the beginning of the episode, because she was just abducted and imprisoned by a madman, and he feels vaguely guilty that he had jumped to the conclusion that she left voluntarily and berated everyone who suggested she might be in trouble. But even in those nice moments he maintains a paternalistic, condescending tone towards Maggie. When she wonders aloud what other crimes her abductor might have committed, he insists that there could not have been any others and becomes exasperated with her for raising the topic. That led my wife to yell at the screen “Quentin, you are the worst husband! There may be others who are also the worst, but you are the worst!”

Quentin pets Maggie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Quentin so quickly flips from acting like he is indulging the moods of his silly child-bride to accusing Maggie of witchcraft, he not only confirms Mrs Acilius’ assessment that he is “the worst.” Coming so shortly after the abduction story, he seems to be a man blaming his wife for being raped. Indeed, the man who abducted her had in #1022 and #1023 jumped her and sexually assaulted her in a dark alley, and she explained her decision to keep quiet about that attack by saying she was afraid Quentin would blame her. This is an important theme, but it would be a tricky one to explore on a show about witches and vampires and time travel and parallel universes where the median viewer is about ten years old.

Perhaps it would have been possible to have another take on the themes of the 1790s segment that would not have led us to this particular dead end. I think of a comment left in 2017 on Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day:

You know, [Parallel Time] might have had a very different feel with the following changes:

Alexandra [Moltke Isles] takes the role of Quentin’s evil first wife, Victoria Stokes Collins. There is no nice twin. She dabbles in “the black arts” but is not a full-on witch. She and Quentin have a son, David.

Lara Parker takes the role of Quentin’s new wife, Angelique “Angela” Evans. She’s kind-hearted and traditional and a romantic. She has no witchcraft powers. But not quite the pushover as time goes on.

And Kathryn Leigh Scott plays Margaret “Maggie” Evans still, but she’s now Angela’s sister and Cyrus’ lab assistant. She’s a modern woman — middle class, educated, confident, reluctant in matter of love.

Maggie and Angela are different — Maggie is the more confident, assertive, cynical of the two — but they are close and both “good” girls. Maggie doesn’t like Quentin.

Lisa Richards is looking for other work.

So in this version, there was a seance two years ago but instead of a murder, Victoria just simply vanished when the lights went out. They never learned what happened. There is no portrait. No one mentions her by name.

When Barnabas enters parallel time, Quentin has just brought Angela home, with Roger and Hoffman treating her like crap.

After about two weeks of establishing all these new relationships, they recreate the seance.

The lights go out, and when they come back on, there’s Victoria in clothing from the late 1700s. She has no memory of what happened — and doesn’t really care. She wants her rightful place as mistress of Collinwood back. (Explanation for her vanishing and returning: Daddy Stokes playing with I-Ching wands. Victoria kills her father when she learns he did that).

Can you imagine the shock for the audience to have “Vicky” just show up like that? And in the same manner RT Vicky did. And then to be evil?

That really could have been fun.

Comment left 29 July 2017 by “William” on “Episode 1056: The Parallel Sky,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day.

I like this idea very much. When she played Angelique’s identical twin Alexis, Lara Parker created a character who was not murderous, but far from a naif, and it is easy to imagine that a person like that would have stood up well enough to the kind of stresses that the wicked witch would bring against her to keep the drama going for some time. And it would be a nice inversion, not only to see the evil Vicki persecuting the innocent Angelique, but also to have his unresolved feelings for Vicki render the time traveler Barnabas as clueless in the evil Vicki’s proper world as the well-meaning Vicki was in Barnabas’ native time.

Moreover, these last two weeks the barrier between the universes has been getting leaky. So when the evil Vicki is finally thwarted here, she might escape into the original continuity and wreak havoc there. That would pick up on a road not taken in #872, when sorcerer Count Petofi escaped from the year 1897 and made his way to the Collinwood of the present day, only to be snatched back to the past after a few minutes.

I can’t wish that all of “William’s” dreams had come true. I like Lisa Blake Richards, so I’d want to leave her in the Jekyll and Hyde story and come up with another storyline to feature Kathryn Leigh Scott, either as Maggie or as another character. And it is a gift to viewers who have been with the show from the beginning that David Henesy’s character in Parallel Time is called Daniel Collins rather than David Collins, the name of his part in the other continuity, since the point was made in #153 and referenced later that David’s name was the result of events that wouldn’t have happened here. And while the séance gimmick is too good not to do, I would still like to see Mrs Isles play twins- the evil Victoria and her non-evil sister Veronica.*

*Mrs Acilius doesn’t like the name “Veronica” for this character. She’d rather call her Vanessa or Vivian.

Episode 1036: I am who I am

Housekeeper Julia Hoffman, fanatical devotee of the undead Angelique Stokes Collins, has discovered that Angelique’s enemy Barnabas Collins is a vampire. Hoffman is standing at Barnabas’ open coffin. In one hand she holds a stake on his chest, in the other a mallet upraised.

As Hoffman is about to rid the world of this loathsome abomination from beyond the grave, another woman strikes her dead. This woman appears to be Hoffman’s identical twin. Regular viewers know that she is another Julia Hoffman, a Doppelgänger intruding here from another universe. This Julia is a medical doctor by qualification and a mad scientist by vocation, and she is as committed to Barnabas as Hoffman is to Angelique.

Julia kills Hoffman. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia sees her own face on a corpse of her own slaying. She leaves the secret chamber and closes the panel that hides it. A man enters the house. He takes Julia to be Hoffman, and demands to know why she is there and why she is not wearing her French maid uniform. Julia says that she was running an errand, and that she is on her way into town. The man remarks that she does not seem like herself; she replies that “I am who I am.” The man does not give any sign that this assertion reminds him of either Popeye the Sailor or the God of the Book of Exodus. Longtime viewers will already have noticed more than a few parallels between Julia and each of these characters.

The man says he has come to the house to see its master, Will Loomis. He wants to ask Will for money so that he can leave town. When Julia says that Will is sleeping and may not be up for hours, the man turns his request to her. He says that he, Angelique, and others had paid her plenty over the years in return for her discretion, and he asks for $500. She says she doesn’t have any money with her. Indeed, she is not carrying a purse, and her bank account and other liquid assets are all located in a different universe. The man leaves.

Julia is back in the secret chamber trying to figure out what to do when Will comes home. He pulls a gun on her. He is one of Barnabas’ blood thralls, and is in charge of protecting him during the day. He knows that Hoffman and Angelique are Barnabas’ enemies. Thinking that Julia is Hoffman, he is prepared to kill her. She denies that she is Hoffman, and tells him that if he looks in the secret chamber he will know she is telling the truth. He does, and a look of recognition comes on his face. “You are Julia!” he says, delighted. Barnabas had told Will about her and others in his own universe, and he couldn’t be happier to meet her.

Julia decides to masquerade as Hoffman. She says that if she could fool the man who came by earlier, whose name is Bruno, she should be able to fool Angelique and the others. Will points out that fooling Bruno for a few minutes is not the same thing as fooling Angelique for an indefinite time, but Julia is nothing daunted.

Julia passes the first test. Angelique finds her in her room and demands where she has been all day. Julia says she was following Barnabas, as per her orders. That is the right answer. Angelique asks what she was talking about last night when she said on the telephone that she had discovered Barnabas’ big secret and would tell her what it was when they were face to face. Julia says that she thought she was onto something while following him around, but in the light of day it turns out to be pretty vague. Angelique is frustrated and orders her to resume snooping on Barnabas.

Meanwhile, Bruno has learned that his acquaintance Cyrus Longworth the mad scientist is dead. Cyrus had kidnapped Maggie Evans Collins, second wife of Angelique’s widower Quentin Collins. Barnabas killed Cyrus while rescuing Maggie.

Bruno knows that Cyrus kept a big wad of cash in the wall safe in his laboratory, in the sum of “thousands!” of dollars. He goes to the lab and rummages through the papers on the desk, certain that the combination to the wall safe is there. That seems like bad OpSec, but Cyrus wasn’t very shrewd, so it is no surprise that Bruno turns out to be right. He finds that the cash is gone. All that is in the safe is a notebook. Bruno is furious at the sight of the notebook, exclaiming “Why aren’t you money!?”

Bruno sees that the notebook is marked to be delivered unread to Quentin Collins in the event of Cyrus’ death. Bruno reads it and laughs joyously. He says that he was mistaken when he said there was no money in the safe. There is far more money than he hoped for.

Bruno telephones Angelique. Like almost everyone else, Bruno believes Angelique to be her identical twin sister Alexis. Angelique rose from the dead and murdered Alexis, who was already established as Quentin’s permanent guest in his home, the great house of Collinwood. Alexis was convinced that Angelique was murdered and was trying to investigate when Angelique killed her. For her part, Angelique knows she was murdered and very much wants to complete that investigation. Bruno happily tells “Alexis” that he knows who murdered Angelique.

Bruno’s claim that the notebook represents far more money than he had hoped for narrows the range of possible suspects to one. He hoped for thousands of dollars, so whatever message Cyrus wanted to deliver to Quentin must be something that can be leveraged for hundreds of thousands or millions. Quentin himself is the only person we’ve seen who has resources like that. He is too selfish to pay blackmail to conceal anyone else’s guilt, even that of his closest family members, so the notebook must contain an accusation against Quentin. Whether that accusation is correct, of course, remains to be seen.

Episode 1034: Time is our only weapon

Yesterday’s episode ended with a climactic moment in Dark Shadows‘ adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde. Sabrina Stuart, fiancée of mild-mannered scientist Cyrus Longworth, had discovered that Cyrus’ evil alter ego John Yaeger is holding Maggie Evans Collins prisoner in a dungeon outside the village of Collinsport. For some reason she drove to Maggie’s home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Cyrus/ Yaeger followed her there and choked her out in the drawing room. Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, who is Maggie’s sister-in-law and Sabrina’s friend, saw the strangling and screamed. Cyrus/ Yaeger dropped Sabrina to the floor and turned his attention to Liz.

It was unclear at that time if Sabrina was dead or merely unconscious. Today’s opening voiceover says flatly that “Yaeger killed her,” and in the first scene of act one housekeeper Julia Hoffman checks Sabrina’s body and declares that she is dead. Since the narrator and Hoffman are both played by Grayson Hall, longtime viewers will be cautious about accepting these pronouncements. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe. There, Hall played Hoffman’s counterpart, a medical doctor who has many abilities no other member of her profession can equal but who is curiously unreliable when she pronounces patients dead. Julia has been known to erroneously pronounce the same person dead twice in a single episode. So we have to reserve judgment for a bit about whether Sabrina will be wanting breakfast.

Liz locked Cyrus/ Yaeger in the drawing room before he could get his hands on her, and he smashed a window and ran out when he heard her talking with Hoffman in the foyer. Liz and Hoffman find that Cyrus/ Yaeger had torn the telephones in both the drawing room and the foyer out of their wall sockets. We’ve seen telephones in other parts of the house several times, but evidently those are out of order today. Hoffman says that she will go to the Old House on the grounds of the estate, home to Liz’ daughter Carolyn and Carolyn’s husband Will, and call the police from there. Hoffman assures Liz that Cyrus/ Yaeger must have left the estate and that he will present no danger on the fifteen minute walk to the Loomis house.

Hoffman’s confidence on this point puzzles Liz, who watches her leave carrying only a flashlight while she herself crouches in the drawing room holding a pistol. It may puzzle first-time viewers as well. Those who have been watching for several days know that Hoffman is in league with Cyrus/ Yaeger. Hoffman has been acting as a messenger between Cyrus/ Yaeger and her mistress Angelique, the undead first wife of Quentin Collins, who is Maggie’s husband and Liz’ brother. Angelique wants Maggie out of the way so that she can remarry Quentin, and is supporting Cyrus/ Yaeger’s plan to torture her into loving him.

At the Loomis house, Hoffman calls the police and reports exactly what Liz knows. When she is done with her call, she realizes that she is alone in the house. Earlier, she was peeking through the window when Carolyn and Will’s mysterious houseguest, a person named Barnabas Collins, opened the secret panel behind a bookcase. She takes advantage of the opportunity to find out what Barnabas is hiding. She sees a coffin in the chamber behind it. Without hesitation, she opens the coffin. She finds that it is empty. She closes the panel, wondering why Barnabas would keep an empty coffin in a hidden chamber. She is on her way out when Barnabas enters and demands to know what she is doing there. She tells him what happened in the drawing room of the great house, and he rushes out with her.

Cyrus/ Yaeger is in his laboratory. He takes out the antidote. This will puzzle regular viewers. Up to this point, it has seemed clear that Cyrus/Yaeger has only one potion, and that it effects both his Hyde-ification and his re-Jekyllizing. He threw all of that potion away a couple of weeks ago, after he tried to rape Maggie in a dark alley. He cannot make more, since it requires a compound that only one chemist could provide and Cyrus murdered that chemist when he learned his secret. His current Yaegerness is the result of a spontaneous transformation that took place without drinking the potion. So we are at a loss to explain why he still has any of it. He tells himself that there is only enough to change him once. By the time he starts drinking it, the police are knocking at his door.

At length, Cyrus lets the policeman in. He asks what took so long; Cyrus claims to have been asleep. He tells Cyrus that Yaeger has murdered Sabrina; Cyrus responds with genuine shock. The policeman apologizes for not having known that Cyrus was engaged to marry Sabrina, but insists that he answer his questions.

Most of Collinsport’s police officers have been farcically incompetent. The actors have responded to the challenge of playing these useless men in various ways. Dana Elcar, who in 1966 and 1967 was the first of four to play Sheriff George Patterson, kept you hoping that his character was just playing dumb. Some of the others either gave up and let us see their own contempt for the bumblers the scripts had saddled them with, as Vince O’Brien did towards the end of his own time as the last of the Sheriffs George Patterson. Dreariest of all was the first law enforcement officer on Dark Shadows, Constable Jonas Carter, whose flagrant incompetence at his job scarcely exceeded the incompetence Michael Currie brought to the role. This policeman doesn’t solve anything, but Philip R. Allen’s performance makes him seem like the greatest detective we’ve ever seen. Allen is spellbinding as he simultaneously depicts sincere empathy and an unbending determination to get at the facts. It’s too bad this is the only time we get to see this dynamic actor on Dark Shadows.

Outside the great house, Barnabas and Liz are watching the ambulance take Sabrina’s body away. Its flashing lights illuminate their faces. This is the first evidence we have seen that emergency vehicles exist in any iteration of Collinsport. Indeed, when the characters decide that someone is dead they usually take it for granted that there is no longer any point in calling the authorities, that they should just set about digging a grave and burying the body.

Barnabas and Liz watch the ambulance take Sabrina’s body away. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas asks Liz if she knew that Yaeger had threatened Maggie and that he has an unwholesome interest in her. She did not. Maggie had not told anyone at Collinwood about the incident in the dark alley. Barnabas tells her only that he heard about it in town. Regular viewers know that a woman named Buffie Harrington foiled Yaeger’s assault on Maggie when she happened by the alley. Barnabas can hardly tell Liz about his connection with Buffie, since he is a vampire and Buffie is his victim. They decide they must tell the police about Yaeger and Maggie, and they go back to the Loomis house to make a telephone call.

Cyrus is still in his lab. He knows that he might change back into Yaeger at any time. He decides to call Barnabas at the Loomis house and tell him where Maggie is. Barnabas holds the telephone so Liz can hear what Cyrus is saying. Barnabas asks Cyrus how he knows that Yaeger is holding Maggie; he says he can’t tell him. Barnabas and Liz rush out. They don’t think to call the police.

Speakerphone, 1970-style. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Back at Collinwood, Liz tells Hoffman she ought to go to the policemen outside the house and tell them what Cyrus told her and Barnabas. She also frets about Barnabas’ safety. Hoffman says she is quite sure that Barnabas Collins does not need anyone’s protection. Liz does not know what she means, but is in too much of a hurry to question her. Hoffman thinks to herself about how much has happened that she has not had a chance to tell Angelique.

In his lab, Cyrus raises a pistol to his head and puts his finger on the trigger. Before he can fire, he transforms into Yaeger.

Barnabas makes his way to Maggie’s dungeon. He searches it, finding her belongings but not her. She has picked the lock, untied the ropes in which Cyrus/ Yaeger bound her, and let herself out. She is hiding elsewhere in the basement. She can hear Barnabas’ steps, but does not know who it is. She assumes that it is Yaeger. When she hears him leave the basement, she starts to make her way out. Just as she emerges from the shadows, Yaeger appears on the steps and greets her. She screams, and he pounces.

Episode 1033: You’ll miss me whether I go or stay

Sabrina Stuart has been having a rough few weeks. Her fiancé, mild mannered scientist Cyrus Longworth, has been spending less and less time with her and is entangled with a strange, violent man named John Yaeger. The other day, she was with Cyrus in his laboratory and saw him transform into Yaeger. He confirmed that he had devised a potion to alter his appearance, and that Yaeger is merely a disguise he assumes to carry out crimes. The transformation Sabrina saw took place spontaneously, without a dose of the potion. Cyrus poured the potion down the drain a while ago, when he was feeling guilty about a rape he had committed as Yaeger, and we have seen him re-Jekyllize himself only by drinking another dose. So for all we know he will never resume his normal appearance. Sabrina pledged to stand by Cyrus no matter what; in response, he jeered and said he had no further use for her.

Tonight, Sabrina went out with her friend Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz took her to a concert. The two women come to Cyrus’ laboratory, where Sabrina has left her wallet. Sabrina apologizes and calls herself stupid for forgetting it, as she keeps apologizing and calling herself stupid throughout the episode. She is very nervous, as witness not only her forgetfulness but also her physical awkwardness, shown most strikingly in the frequent mismatch between her facial expressions and her circumstances.

In his post about this episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn makes several complaints about Lisa Blake Richards as an actress, saying that “I don’t understand what Sabrina does with her face most of the time. She acts like she just got it recently, and she hasn’t figured out how to use it yet.” I think Danny is unfair to Miss Richards generally, and that this is a case in point. As Danny documents, the episode is full of flubs and goofs of various kinds, so it is natural to write off any kind of awkwardness as just another mistake. But considering how distracted and anxiety-ridden Sabrina must be given what she knows about Cyrus, her disconcerting facial expressions suit her perfectly, and are an intelligent acting choice on Miss Richards’ part. That we first see her in a scene with Liz helps to underline this intelligence, since Joan Bennett is the only other member of the cast who seems to know her lines today. Her smooth performance gives Miss Richards something to play off of and spotlights Sabrina’s barely controlled panic.

Sabrina and Liz haven’t been in the lab very long when Cyrus enters, as Yaeger. He introduces himself to Liz as a close associate of Cyrus’, and asks Sabrina to stay and help him analyze some data. Sabrina agrees to do so, and Liz excuses herself.

Cyrus, as “Yaeger,” listens while Liz and Sabrina talk in the laboratory. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Cyrus tells Sabrina to mail some of his clothes and all of his money to New York. She asks if he is moving to New York permanently. In response, he rambles on about how big the world is and how little of it he knew before he assumed his current appearance. Apparently Cyrus retains his ignorance of geography when disguised as Yaeger. He simply tells Sabrina to send his belongings to New York, addressed to John Yaeger at General Delivery. Apparently he thinks there is only one post office location in the state of New York.

We next see Sabrina in the basement of an old farmhouse. Returning viewers know that Cyrus obtained this farmhouse last week by murdering the man who was about to sell it to him. Evidently, Sabrina has followed him there. She sees and hears him in a dungeon, tormenting Maggie Evans Collins, the wife of Liz’ brother Quentin. When Cyrus emerges from the dungeon, Sabrina runs away. He does not see her, but he finds the check he gave her to send to some post office randomly chosen from among the 1720 in New York State in 1970. It fell out of the pocket in her skirt* onto a stair.

We cut to Liz’ home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood. We hear a car screeching to a halt. Sabrina comes running in the foyer, calling the names of the residents of the house. Cyrus follows her. He marches her into the drawing room and asks a series of questions. When she tells him she put the check in a safe place, he produces it. She blurts out that she dropped it. She pleads with him to let Maggie go. He says it would be foolish to let someone go who knows what Maggie knows about him. Sabrina knows even more about Cyrus than Maggie does, and asks what he is going to do to her. He tells her she knows what he is going to do. He strangles her.

Liz enters and screams. Startled, Cyrus lets go of Sabrina’s neck. She falls to the floor, her eyes closed. Tomorrow it will be confirmed that she is dead.

Liz had a dream earlier. She and Sabrina entered Cyrus’ lab and found it a shambles. Sabrina started cleaning the place up, only to find Maggie’s dead body sprawled on a table. Liz told this dream to a person named Barnabas Collins, who introduced himself to her family a few weeks ago as a distant cousin from South America. While the rest of the Collinses believe that Maggie left of her own accord, Barnabas is convinced that she is being held prisoner. The dream convinces Liz that Barnabas is right. When she told him about the dream, she also told him she had met Yaeger. Barnabas knows how cruel and dangerous Yaeger is, and has since #1021 been trying to find out exactly what the connection is between Cyrus and Yaeger. He announced to Liz that there is only one way to find out whether Yaeger has abducted Maggie, and when we last saw him in this episode he was in Cyrus’ lab, looking at the wardrobe he keeps there to wear when he is disguised as Yaeger.

Sabrina’s death marks Lisa Blake Richards’ final appearance on Dark Shadows. Her quiet competence as an actress allowed her scene partners to dial the vehemence essential to the Dark Shadows house style of acting down to bearable levels, and it highlighted Sabrina’s clumsiness under the severe pressures to which the story subjected her. I was glad when, during a 2020 reunion of Dark Shadows cast members on Zoom, Mitch Ryan took a call from Miss Richards, who was at that time his fellow student in a writing class. I’ll miss her, even if Danny Horn doesn’t.

*That pocket gets a couple of closeups today; after watching the episode, my wife and I happened to see another video mentioning that there was a trend towards putting pockets in skirts in the early 1970s.