In #425, broadcast in February 1968 and set in February 1796, the gracious Josette was near the cliff on the top of Widow’s Hill when she saw her lost love, Barnabas Collins. Wicked witch Angelique had turned Barnabas into a vampire, and Barnabas planned to kill Josette and raise her from the dead with the same curse. Angelique sent a vision to Josette of what her existence would be like after she rose from the grave to prey on the living. While Barnabas watched helplessly, Josette flung herself to her death onto the rocks far below the cliff.
Barnabas spent the next centuries telling himself that Josette’s suicide was the result of a misunderstanding. In #233, broadcast and set in May 1967, he was masquerading as his own descendant, a cousin from England come to visit the Collinses of Collinsport, Maine. He told heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and well-meaning governess Vicki Winters that Josette jumped from the cliff because she did not realize that her lover had come with only good intentions for her. By that time, it seemed he might actually have convinced himself it was true.
Today, it is 1897, and rakish libertine Quentin Collins and his sometime lover, maidservant Beth Chavez, reenact Josette’s suicide. They, however, follow the script which had previously applied only in Barnabas’ head. For several weeks, sorcerer Count Petofi has been occupying Quentin’s body, having confined Quentin to his own aging form. Beth was for a time in thrall to Petofi, and is terrified of him. Petofi was still Quentin-shaped yesterday when he chased Beth onto the top of Widows’ Hill. He collapsed in the woods, and a moment later the spell was broken and the body was Quentin’s again. Quentin, restored to his own person, wanders up to the summit and is surprised to see Beth there.
Quentin tries to tell Beth that he is himself, but she is not disposed to listen. Thinking that he has come to do something worse than simply kill her, she leaps from the cliff.
Terry Crawford says that when they first did this scene, they wanted her to emphasize the drama of Beth’s suicide by really flinging herself down hard. Since the floor was only a couple of feet below the set, the springy mattress that she flung herself on bounced her back into the frame, and they had to retake the shot. I wish we had that out-take, it must have been hilarious.
Quentin returns to the great house of Collinwood, in shock. He doesn’t notify the police or anyone else of Beth’s death- apparently the seascape just isn’t complete without a dead maidservant or two strewn carelessly about.
Barnabas, who has traveled back in time from 1969 to 1897 and who is currently free of the effects of the vampire curse, enters. He has befriended Quentin, and is at war with Petofi. He knew about the body swap, and had urged Quentin to make the effort that reversed it. He does not know how that effort turned out. He is happy to hear that Quentin is himself again, unhappy to learn of Beth’s demise, and insistent that Quentin must go far away before Petofi can get at him again.
We cut to a studio occupied by artist Charles Delaware Tate, a stooge of Petofi’s. We can see that Tate stole the magical portrait that keeps Quentin from turning into a werewolf. He covers the portrait with white paint. A visitor enters. It is Petofi’s servant Aristide. Aristide’s face is covered with dirt. Petofi has turned against Aristide, who has been in hiding. Tate agrees to help Aristide get a bath and clean clothes, but will not intercede with Petofi on his behalf.
Aristide does not know that the body swap is over. He goes to Collinwood, finds Quentin, and assumes that he is Petofi. When he offers to do whatever is necessary to restore himself to his master’s good graces, Quentin tells Aristide to find the man who appears to be Petofi and kill him. Aristide, a sadistic fiend, is delighted to receive this sort of command. He goes back to Tate’s, finds the real Petofi there, and stabs him in the chest.
Aristide getting ready to stab Petofi. Still not using his favorite knife, “The Dancing Girl” (alias “The Dancing Lady.”) Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
At the beginning of March 1969, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins meditated on some I Ching wands and found himself transported back in time to 1897. Ever since, Dark Shadows has been a costume drama set in that year. For the first several months of the 1897 arc, there were multiple intertwined storylines, each involving several characters, threatening to negate the version of the Collins family we see in the parts of the show set in the 1960s, and requiring a lot of intricate action to unravel.
Now, the original stories are all resolved. Most of the things keeping us from returning to a contemporary setting qualify as fairly minor loose ends- we can see that Judith Collins will get rid of her evil husband Gregory Trask one way or another, and we can see that Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, will realize she is really the reincarnation of Barnabas’ lost love Josette and will then become unavailable to him. Both of these could be wrapped up in the same episode, and the fates of the other characters don’t need any further explanation. The one exception is the story about sorcerer Count Petofi and rakish Quentin Collins. Petofi has used his magic powers to swap bodies with Quentin. I refer to the villainous Petofi who has hijacked Quentin’s body as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin trapped in Petofi’s aging form as P-Quentin.
Now, Q-Petofi has found out that meditating on the right lineup of I Ching wands releases powers that can transport a person to a different period of history, and he makes arrangements for a departure to 1969. Barnabas tries to stop him, but at the end of the episode we see him standing in the drawing room of Collinwood in that year.
Episodes like this present a challenge to someone blogging about the 1897 segment of Dark Shadows. It’s taken up with intricate plot mechanics that depend on story points that would sound ridiculous if you explained them to someone who hasn’t been watching for the last few months, and as Danny Horn explains in his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, many of the scenes don’t make logical sense if you stop and think about them. But it is well-paced, the dialogue is good, the through-line of Q-Petofi’s busyness and Barnabas’ scheming is effectively realized, Nancy Barrett has some charming scenes as Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye, and the image of Q-Petofi in 1969 is a strong ending. So it really is a half hour well spent, but if you aren’t going to watch it you will just have to take my word for that.
The drawing room figures in five scenes set in 1897 before it appears in its 1969 configuration. Since the show was done live-to-tape, the stage hands had to change the furniture gradually in between those scenes. Danny lists the changes we can see:
The drawing room set changes from the 1897 set to the 1969 set over the course of the episode, but the change actually happens in stages rather than all at once. The couch and chairs are replaced while they’re still doing 1897 scenes, and then the lamps, telephone and desk are changed for the final scene.
There are six scenes set in the drawing room, but in some of them, you only see a small part of the set, so it’s hard to say exactly when the switches are made. But here’s what you can see:
Act 1, Tate tells Pansy that he’s seen the future: She’s sitting on a red couch. There are red padded chairs facing the couch. Various round lamps around the room, old telephone on the credenza. Act 2 picks up with Tate and Pansy again, no visible change to the set dressing.
Act 3, Barnabas tells Pansy a secret: They huddle in a corner of the drawing room, where you can’t see much. It’s all shot by one camera.
Act 3, Petofi and Pansy drink champagne: The couch has changed from the 1897 red couch to a green 1969 model. We still see the round lamps and the old telephone.
Act 3, Barnabas finds Pansy’s drunk the rest of the champagne: There are now green chairs facing the green couch. There’s also a sideboard with a clock and a green shaded lamp.
Act 3 finish, Petofi enters the 1969 drawing room: All of the lamps have been changed to modern style, and the old telephone has become a modern telephone. The green chairs are facing the green couch. The sideboard has been replaced with a desk, holding some books, a lamp, and the newspaper.
Danny Horn, “Episode 872: Tick Tock,” posted 4 June 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.
There is one important set decoration they left in its 1897 position. In the 1960s, a portrait of Jeremiah Collins hangs above the mantel; in 1897, a portrait identified in #3 as that of Isaac Collins hangs there. Isaac is still in place when Q-Petofi enters the 1969 drawing room.
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.
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.
Edward Collins isn’t what he seems. His stuffy manner is real enough, as are his kind impulses when he sees people in distress. But he allows those who meet him to believe that he is the heir to the vast Collins family fortune, which in fact belongs in its entirety to his sister Judith. Judith is currently an inmate in a mental hospital. During her absence, her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, exercises control of all the family’s assets. Edward hopes to get out from under Trask’s thumb by marrying the dowager countess of Hampshire, a young American woman named Kitty Soames. He befriended Kitty while a houseguest of the late Earl’s, and now that she is widowed and is his guest at the great house of Collinwood he sees an opportunity to take over the Hampshire interests.
Kitty isn’t what she seems. The Earl was bankrupt when he died. He had lost all his wealth and been driven to suicide by sorcerer Count Petofi. Kitty wrote a letter to her mother the other day saying that unless she marries Edward and becomes the mistress of Collinwood she didn’t think she could raise train fare from central Maine to her home in Pennsylvania. Nor is this all. If Kitty were simply without funds, she and Edward would be on an even footing. But she is not what she seems in a metaphysical sense as well as a financial one. She is intermittently possessed by the ghost of the late Josette Collins. Regular viewers have reason to believe that she is Josette’s reincarnation, and that the fits of possession are part of the process by which Josette is reuniting her spirit with her body. But the characters don’t know what we know. As far as they are concerned, Kitty seems to be a plain lunatic.
At rise, Edward catches Kitty in his brother Quentin’s room. She is rummaging through an armoire, apparently looking for something. He asks her what she is doing, and she feigns one of her fits. Kitty is not nearly as good an actress as Kathryn Leigh Scott; she doesn’t fool us for a minute. But Edward believes her. He gently escorts her out of the room. As they leave, we see a face peering at them from the shadows. It is Quentin’s face.
Downstairs, we hear Kitty’s thoughts as she takes satisfaction in having fooled Edward into thinking she was having a fit. Mental health professionals often talk about how people learn to use the resources they have, so that patients who carry diagnoses of major disturbances will sometimes find ways to exaggerate their symptoms for effect. It’s true that psychotic episodes are not usually an asset in the husband-hunting business, but everyone in the segment of Dark Shadows set in 1897 has some issue or other, and Edward really does have a soft spot for mentally ill women (unless they are married to Quentin, but that’s another thing altogether.) So Kitty may as well play up her particular case of dissociative identity disorder.
Kitty was in Quentin’s room trying to steal a portrait of him. She was doing this from her fear of Petofi, whom she believed to have ordered her to bring him the portrait before 9 PM lest he use his magical powers and make her vanish. It is almost that time now, and she has no idea how to find the portrait, let alone get it to him before the deadline. While she is worrying about this situation, a woman named Angelique enters.
Angelique isn’t what she seems. She is one of Quentin’s fiancées, and Edward takes her to be an innocent woman, about 30 years old, who has been hard done by in the course of the supernatural doings of the last several months. In fact, she is a wicked witch who wrought immense destruction the first time she was at Collinwood, in the 1790s, and again the second time, in 1968. She has traveled back in time to 1897, and has been one of the most powerful participants in all of the strange goings-on.
Kitty tells Angelique that she saw Petofi in the vacant rectory on Pine Road, and that he told her the woman who had been squatting there vanished into thin air before his eyes. At this, Angelique turns and rushes off to investigate. It dawns on Kitty that Angelique knows more than she is saying. We cut to the drawing room, where Edward is bracing for a conversation with Quentin.
Quentin isn’t what he seems. In fact, he isn’t Quentin at all. Petofi forcibly swapped bodies with him a few days ago. It is Petofi, using Quentin’s body as a disguise, who confronts Edward and demands to know what he and Kitty were doing in the room. I refer to this form of Petofi as Q-Petofi, and the Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.
Edward tells Q-Petofi that Kitty had had a “seizure.” Q-Petofi expresses skepticism about this claim. He proceeds to tell Edward that Kitty’s late husband died in poverty, shortly after being released from prison for a jewel theft. Edward is thunderstruck. He calls the story a lie, and forbids Q-Petofi from repeating it to anyone.
Kitty goes to the village of Collinsport, and pays a visit to The Blue Whale, the local tavern. She wants to see the entertainer, Miss Pansy Faye.
Pansy isn’t what she seems. She has met the Collinses twice. Miss Charity Trask, daughter of Gregory and enforcer in his operation, came to the great house in #727 and took up residence when her father married Judith. Pansy Faye, mentalist and Cockney showgirl, came to the estate in #771 as the coldly cynical fiancée of the childlike Carl Collins. Pansy was killed the night she arrived. A few weeks later, Pansy started to take possession of Charity, and in #819 Petofi erased Charity’s personality altogether and gave her body over to Pansy.
When Kitty enters, Pansy is alone in the bar. She is picking out her theme song on the piano. When Petofi was in the process of switching bodies with Quentin, Quentin was with Pansy in this room. Petofi took control of him briefly and played the same song on this piano. He played it very impressively.
Kitty is desperate to find out what is happening to her, and she knows that Pansy has powers. Once Pansy assures her that she doesn’t work for Count Petofi, Kitty offers her a diamond-encrusted brooch in return for information. Pansy is offended. She says that she will take a gift in return for her services after she has rendered them, but that she does not accept payment in advance. She tells Kitty that there is one way to find out what is happening to her, which is to have a séance. Kitty gets up to leave, and Pansy presses the brooch on her.
The diamond brooch is a puzzle. Perhaps Kitty was lying to her mother when she said that she couldn’t buy a train ticket to Pennsylvania? Or perhaps the brooch is part of the late Earl’s ill-gotten gains, and Kitty doesn’t want to show it to anyone more reputable than Pansy.
Nancy Barrett’s approach to all her roles on Dark Shadows was to throw herself completely into whatever the character was doing at any given moment. That isn’t to say that her performances lacked nuance or that she didn’t support her scene partners, but that her method was to take her part from the outside in, letting the action supply the motivation. As Kitty, Miss Scott has opportunities to take this same approach. But in Kitty and Pansy’s scene in the Blue Whale, she deliberately lets Miss Barrett drive the action. Since Pansy has already completed a process of possession and transformation like that into which Kitty is now entering, Miss Scott can convey a great deal of information about Kitty’s state of mind by giving rather subtle reactions to Pansy’s behavior.
Back at Collinwood, Edward and Q-Petofi are drinking. Edward shakes his head at his brother’s ability alternately to enrage him and charm him. Q-Petofi asks him to be the best man at his wedding to Angelique; Edward agrees at once. Angelique enters, and Edward exits.
Angelique says that she doesn’t want to get married after all. Q-Petofi insists they go ahead. She points out that it was her idea, and he was extremely reluctant to agree to it. This is true- the engagement was part of Angelique’s price for invoking the power of Satan to break spells Petofi had cast on Edward and his son Jamison. While Q-Petofi has managed to copy Quentin’s behavior towards Edward almost exactly, his behavior towards Angelique has been radically different than was Quentin’s. We don’t know what Angelique has made of this.
Edward finds Kitty and Pansy preparing the séance. After an initial protest, he declares he will join them. It ends with a visual quote from Dark Shadows‘ first séance, back in #170. As in that episode, a hooded figure appears in the doorway.
Episode 170Episode 860
The hooded figure in #170 turned out to be undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Another iteration of Laura was on the show as Edward’s estranged wife in April and May. It seems unlikely she is coming back, so longtime viewers are in suspense as to the significance of the allusion.
The hooded figure today is Natalie Norwick, making the last of her seven appearances as an uncredited stand-in on Dark Shadows. Norwick was in many plays on Broadway, as the lead in more than one, appeared in three feature films, and worked steadily in television from 1945 until the mid 1960s. She retired from acting in 1982, returning to the Broadway stage as understudy to her friend Julie Harris in 145 performances of The Gin Game from 1997 and 1998 when she was in her mid-70s. When Harris had a fall in 1999, Norwick took over the part, playing it in Florida and Washington, DC. She was chiefly based in Los Angeles in the late 1960s; perhaps she took the stand-in work to pay some bills during visits back east.
Norwick is best remembered for a single supporting performance on television in 1966. She appeared in “The Conscience of the King,” an episode of the original Star Trek, as Martha Leighton, the wife of Captain Kirk’s troubled friend Tom. She didn’t get much screen time, but she made the most of it. After Tom is murdered, she plays Martha’s understated reaction with a quietness that startles you no matter how many times you’ve seen it. Norwick is another of the significant talents one wishes Dark Shadows had found more to do with.
Nine year old Nora Collins enters the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. She walks in on her father, the stuffy but lovable Edward, embracing Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire. She gives them a dirty look and says she supposes Edward is too busy to join her in a game of checkers. He says he does have to run an errand, but suggests that Nora play with Kitty.
Kitty is eager to ingratiate herself with Nora, who clearly wants nothing to do with her. Nora asks, in an icy voice, if the reason Kitty wants to be her friend is that she is planning to marry her father. Returning viewers suspect she is right. Kitty and Edward have more in common than they know. Both are penniless, each is sure the other is very rich, and each imagines marriage to the other will solve all their problems. Kitty can’t very well level with Nora about this, so she claims that the women in the Collins family, being outnumbered by the men, have to stick together. Nora does not hide her distaste at Kitty’s inclusion of herself among the women of the family. Kitty asks Nora if she wants her father to be happy. Nora drills her eyes into Kitty’s face and says in a firm, flat voice “I want that.”
Nora asks Kitty if she is just letting her win at checkers. While she is asking this, Nora moves twice in one turn and takes three of Kitty’s pieces. Kitty watches this without protest and denies that she is letting her win. She then says she wants to concede the game and listen to whatever information Nora is willing to share about the family.
Edward comes back from his errand to find Nora packing up the checkers and the board. He asks if she enjoyed her game with Kitty. Not looking up, Nora says they never finished it. Kitty hastens back in and asks if she wants to finish it now. Edward points out that it is getting close to Nora’s bedtime. He kisses her, and bids her say goodnight to Lady Hampshire. Kitty asks Nora to call her by her first name. Nora pointedly says “Good night, Lady Hampshire.”
It doesn’t show in her scenes with Nora, but Kitty seems to be suffering from a severe mental health crisis. Returning viewers know that the ghost of Josette Collins is taking possession of her, and suspect that she will turn out to be a reincarnation of Josette. Edward knows enough about the supernatural doings on the estate of Collinwood that he might give Kitty the benefit of the doubt when, for example, she comes running in today and is shrieking about a haunted house, a vanishing woman, and a curse that follows her everywhere. But she is so often so highly distraught that Nora must have noticed that she is not right in the head, and she can hardly look forward to having such a person as a stepmother.
Shortly before Nora enters, Edward calls Kitty “Katie.” This is a small enough slip of the tongue, but Kathryn Leigh Scott’s friends call her Katie, so it is a case of an actor’s name in place of the character’s. I think I can see Louis Edmonds blush a little when he realizes what he has done.
This episode marks the final appearance of Nora, and very nearly the last time we will hear Nora’s name. I think she was badly underused, disappointingly so after the outstanding work Denise Nickerson did as Amy Jennings in the months leading up to the segment set in 1897. She will be back later, in other parts.
Director Henry Kaplan was not much of a visual artist, and his deficiencies are particularly glaring today. Especially during Kitty and Nora’s first scene, the camera keeps drifting up to the actors until we see a randomly selected two-thirds of their faces in extreme closeup. Once the shot excludes the eyes or the mouth, it abruptly pulls back. Even the successfully framed closeups are rarely in focus, and you can forget about finding coherent visual storytelling in any kind of shot other than a closeup. The actors themselves do a good job, in spite of Kaplan’s notoriously unpleasant behavior towards them, but aside from a few evocative facial expressions, most of them by Nickerson, it may as well have been a radio play.
Sorcerer Count Petofi has forced the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins to trade bodies with him. So Thayer David is now playing Quentin, a forlorn and helpless figure who goes around begging people to listen to his lunatic story, while David Selby plays Petofi as a gleefully cruel young man who takes advantage of all the pleasures available to Quentin. I will refer to Thayer David’s character as P-Quentin and David Selby’s as Q-Petofi.
P-QuentinQ-Petofi
Q-Petofi goes to Beth Chavez, who used to be a maidservant in the great house of Collinwood and is now one of Quentin’s fiancées, more or less. Beth is in what she identifies as her room. It looks very much like the set that represented her room in the servants quarters of Collinwood, but it is explicitly stated that this room is somewhere else. Maybe she took it with her as part of her severance package.
Beth is terrified of the count, whose slave she was for a while after she left Collinwood. P-Quentin manages to get her to take note of his words, though she seems sure that what he is saying is another of the count’s tricks. He tells the story of how twelve year old Jamison Collins found her about to commit suicide because of what his Uncle Quentin did to her and has refused to speak to him since. He pleads with her to go to Collinwood and see if the man who appears to be Quentin knows the same story.
Beth does go, and she does put Q-Petofi to the test. He has no idea what she is talking about, and tries to bluff his way out by saying that Jamison’s estrangement from him is too painful to discuss. He then yells at Beth, declaring that he knows the count put her up to asking him about Jamison. That means that he and Beth both know that he failed the test. Beth might become P-Quentin’s first ally. Unless, that is, Q-Petofi kills her before she can- there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping him.
P-Quentin does have other potential allies. One is Julia Hoffman, MD. A mad scientist from the twentieth century, Julia followed her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, after he had traveled through time from the year 1969 here to 1897. An experimental treatment briefly freed Barnabas from the effects of vampirism in the spring of 1968; when she arrived from the future, Julia began trying to replicate that treatment. Most people now think that Barnabas has been destroyed, staked in his coffin in #845. But in #849 we saw that Julia was still working on the treatment, and in #853 someone named Kitty Soames barged into Julia’s hiding place and, possessed by the ghost of Barnabas’ lost love Josette, identified the room where Barnabas was hiding. Quentin, at that time still occupying his own body, was with Kitty at the time and realized that she was right. This alarmed Julia, because even though she and Barnabas regarded Quentin as a friend, they knew that he was already under Petofi’s influence and could not be trusted to keep a secret from him.
Another person who might come to P-Quentin’s aid against Q-Petofi is Angelique, the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire in the first place. At this point in 1897, Angelique is another of Quentin’s fiancées. Resenting Petofi’s influence over her prospective husband, she met with Julia in #842 and devised the plan they have been following since. Angelique has a couple of scenes with Q-Petofi in the drawing room at Collinwood today; she notices that his behavior is very different from what Quentin’s has been, but does not suspect that it is Petofi’s mind behind the face.
Angelique calls on Julia in her hiding place. Julia keeps hearing some sound effects we last heard during The Experiment, a storyline that ran through May and June of 1968, when she was building a Frankenstein’s monster in order to permanently cure Barnabas’ vampirism. She describes them as sounding like wind. Angelique cannot hear them, nor can she hear the voices which Julia also hears. When Julia recognizes the voices as occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes and sarcastic dandy Roger Collins, she realizes that they are coming from 1969. The reason she can hear them and Angelique cannot is that she has a physical body in that year, while Angelique is all here, in 1897. Julia tells Angelique she cannot stay in 1897 much longer, and Angelique agrees to take over her part in what remains of their plan.
After Angelique has left her alone, Julia finds that Stokes and Roger can hear her if she shouts. This only lasts for a moment. The sounds fade, and she loses the connection altogether.
P-Quentin comes to Julia’s place. Thinking he is Petofi, she declines to speak to him. He insists he is Quentin. When he tells her some information they had shared privately, she decides he is telling the truth and starts calling him Quentin. In fact, she calls him “Quentin, Quentin,” as she often calls Barnabas “Barnabas, Barnabas.” She is about to tell him the next steps of the plan when she vanishes.
The first time traveler we saw vanish in this way was an unpleasant man named Peter Bradford whose personality largely consisted of yelling at people that he preferred to be called “Jeff Clark.” Peter/ Jeff was from the 1790s, but tried everyone’s patience for much of 1968, when the show took place in a contemporary setting. He faded away, returning to his own time, in #637. We didn’t hear any sound effects before he disappeared. The Experiment was still very fresh in our minds at that point, so the sound effects we hear today would not have been available, and besides, no one cares what the world sounds like to Peter/ Jeff. It was just a relief that he was finally gone.
Julia is as appealing a character as Peter/ Jeff was repellent, and it’s sad to see her go. We’ve had some signs lately that the 1897 segment will soon be ending, but we’ve had those signs before, and they’ve kept restarting it. If Julia isn’t coming back to this period, we can only hope that if it goes on much longer, they will find a way to intercut episodes set in 1897 with others set in 1969, where we will be able to spend time with her.
Sorcerer Count Petofi is wearing the body of rakish libertine Quentin Collins as a disguise, while Quentin is trapped in Petofi’s own aging and pudgy form. I will call the villainous Petofi played by David Selby Q-Petofi, and the forlorn Quentin as played by Thayer David P-Quentin.
Q-PetofiP-Quentin
We open with Q-Petofi at the front door of the great house of Collinwood. Yesterday we saw P-Quentin on the same spot, and heard David Selby’s voice articulating the miserable thoughts that showed on Thayer David’s face. Today the roles are reversed, and we see Mr Selby looking exultant while the voice of Thayer David talks about the glories of his situation.
We see that Q-Petofi is accompanied by his henchman, Aristide. He dismisses Aristide’s fear that he will somehow reveal his true identity to the occupants of the great house. He twits Aristide for a little while, pretending that he will use him as a guinea pig in a dangerous experiment he has planned for later in the evening, then sends him off to find someone else to serve that purpose.
Q-Petofi walks in on an argument in the drawing room between stuffy Edward Collins and the overbearing Gregory Trask. Trask is in charge of the house while his wife, Edward’s sister Judith, is in a mental hospital. Trask is going over the household accounts and complaining that Edward is spending too much on his houseguest, Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire. Edward asks Q-Petofi to explain Collinwood’s tradition of hospitality to Trask, setting Trask off with a rant about Quentin’s relationship with Trask’s own former houseguest, the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris. Q-Petofi’s indifference to the whole discussion strikes both Trask and Edward as odd, but it really is quite typical of the old Quentin.
After Trask exits, Edward tells Q-Petofi that he thinks he can subdue Trask by marrying Kitty. He says that it takes money to run Collinwood, and the late Earl’s estate gives Kitty ownership of half the county of Hampshire. Returning viewers know that the Earl died bankrupt, and so far from owning great swathes of southern England Kitty doesn’t even have train fare to get from Collinwood in central Maine to her mother’s house in Pennsylvania. So we have confirmation that Kitty has been less than fully honest with Edward. On the other hand, Kitty is under the impression that Edward is rich, while in fact their grandmother left every penny to Judith. So neither is leveling with the other about their financial status. Q-Petofi knows all of this, but it has nothing to do with his plans, and so he struggles to feign interest.
For his part, P-Quentin is sitting in the caretaker’s cottage on the estate. It seems right to longtime viewers that a character played by Thayer David should seek refuge here. When we first saw the cottage, it belonged to handyman Matthew Morgan, who was at that time played by George Mitchell. In #38, Mitchell was replaced in the part of Matthew by Thayer David, in the first of the many roles he would play on Dark Shadows. When Matthew had to leave the cottage for the last time in #112, his whole world fell apart. So when Aristide comes in and brutally evicts him, we can feel the full weight of the disaster that has befallen P-Quentin.
With nowhere else to go, P-Quentin returns to the great house. Once again it is Thayer David’s turn to look soulfully at the camera while David Selby’s voice speaks desperate words in voiceover. He tells himself that his brother Edward will have to believe him when he tells him the truth.
As it happens, Edward likes Petofi and is glad when he believes he is receiving a visit from him. Based on Edward’s earlier remarks about Collinwood’s tradition of hospitality, we could be quite sure that if P-Quentin presented himself as Petofi, Edward would be glad to offer him a place to stay. But P-Quentin plunges right in and tries to tell Edward the whole story. Of course Edward is not convinced. He treats it as a joke in questionable taste, and offers P-Quentin a brandy. When P-Quentin tells him to forget the brandy, he says that if he really were Quentin, he would never forget the brandy.
P-Quentin insists on going ahead with the lunatic tale, and keeps clutching at Edward’s arm. Edward finds the whole experience revolting, and firmly escorts him to the door. If it has occurred to P-Quentin to tell Edward any of the little stories of childhood that only he and Edward would know, it is too late now to do so. Edward orders P-Quentin to stop talking and go home. Little does he know that P-Quentin has no home to go to.
At the waterfront, the fog machine is working overtime, and so is one of the locals. In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, user “Goddess of Transitory” remarks:
I was remarking to my husband about the really remarkable size and relative wealth of the hooker population of Collinsport. They may hang at the docks (makes sense in a port town–you troll for lonely sailors) but they all have really nice clothes and jewelry and no matter how many of them Barnabas et al. tear through, there’s always more.
Makes you wonder what modern day Collinsport’s main economic generator really is…
Comment by “Goddess of Transitory,” left 7 April 2021 on Danny Horn, “Episode 857: All of Him,” 5 May 2016, Dark Shadows Every Day.
We find today’s well-bathed, well-coiffed, well-made-up young woman of professionally agreeable disposition drinking from a flask. Aristide emerges from the fog and takes the flask from her. When she protests, he says that if she follows him, she will be drinking champagne, and her protests subside. Her name is Wanda Paisley.
Aristide takes Wanda to the cottage, where Q-Petofi is waiting. Wanda is quite pleased at the prospect of sharing her favors with two handsome young men at once, but less pleased when Q-Petofi says that before the festivities get underway she will have to throw some I Ching wands and meditate on them. He assures her that she will be well paid for whatever services she may render, and asks her to agree that this is what really matters. Wanda’s agreement is not forthcoming. When Q-Petofi keeps yammering on about the wands and the hexagrams and the trance and the doors, it dawns on Wanda that this evening is not going to be what she signed up for, and she gets up to leave. Aristide grabs her, and Q-Petofi uses his magical powers to coerce her into cooperating.
Wanda casts the wands and meditates on them. She has a vision of a skeleton with big plastic eyeballs reaching its arm bones out to her. She screams. Where she had been sitting is another skeleton with big plastic eyeballs, this one also wearing a dress and a wig. Q-Petofi tells Aristide that “beyond the door anything is possible.”
Her turn as Wanda today marks Karen Lynn’s only appearance on Dark Shadows. She’s very good, it’s a shame they couldn’t find more for her. Her only other screen credit is a 1963 feature called The Orgy at Lil’s, which an IMDb reviewer says made history as “the first roughie.” I don’t know what a “roughie” is, and based on the description of The Orgy at Lil’s I rather doubt that my education in cinematic history would be significantly deepened by finding out. At any rate, it sounds like Miss Lynn was well-prepared to portray Wanda’s enthusiastic response when Q-Petofi first joined her and Aristide.
I made a contribution of my own to the comment thread on Danny’s post:
This has to be the archetypal Dark Shadows episode. It has Jerry Lacy modeling the style of acting he and Lara Parker invented for the show, Louis Edmonds being sarcastic, a squabble about control of Collinwood, people drinking brandy, a prostitute picked up on the docks while the [fog] machine runs, several kinds of supernatural mumbo-jumbo presented as if we will of course understand them, a dream sequence, and a skeleton in a wig. The next episode opens with a grave-digging scene, which is pretty nearly the only thing missing from this one.
Comment left by “Acilius,” 3 December 2020, on Danny Horn, “Episode 857: All of Him,” 5 May 2016, Dark Shadows Every Day.
It’s true no actors blow their lines, none of the boom mic shadows obstruct our view of anything crucial, and there is only one audible cough from a crew member, so it is an unusual episode in some ways. But I could have mentioned another very typical thing- a practical effect they try for the first time. I believe the split screen shot of Q-Petofi in the drawing room and P-Quentin at the cottage is the first time the show has used this device. It doesn’t work very well, but they were always pushing to do something new:
Evil sorcerer Count Petofi has cast a spell causing his mind to take over the body of rakish Quentin Collins, while Quentin is confined to Petofi’s own body. So David Selby begins playing a youthful and handsome Petofi, while Thayer David plays an aging and pudgy Quentin.
In their post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri use a wide variety of expressions to refer to the characters Thayer David and David Selby play today. I will just call Thayer David’s character P-Quentin and David Selby’s Q-Petofi.
P-QuentinQ-Petofi
Both of those actors give superb performances today; David Selby makes Q-Petofi’s preening arrogance suitably repellent, while the 42 year old Thayer David shows us P-Quentin reduced to the total helplessness of a despised man in extreme old age. There is a scene that Mrs Acilius and I found particularly hard to watch when Q-Petofi’s henchman Aristide takes the thick glasses without which P-Quentin is effectively blind and holds them away from him.
Q-Petofi and Aristide’s gleeful cruelty to P-Quentin make us wonder how the count and his henchman feel about the body they are looking at. The show’s earlier body swap story, in which vampire Barnabas Collins had hoped to die and come back to life in the form of Frankenstein’s monster Adam, led Adam to ask Barnabas in #587 “How could you hate yourself so much that you wanted to change your body?” We hadn’t known that that the count hated himself at all until we saw this scene, but he must have done to take such delight in tormenting P-Quentin, and Aristide’s revelry shows that he, too, harbors more hostility to his master than he ever dared expose.
P-Quentin staggers away from the lair of Q-Petofi and Aristide and meets broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi in the woods. He tries to explain his true identity to Magda, who has experience with magic and has for some time now been his ally. But Magda’s fear of the count keeps her from listening to the far-fetched tale, and she rushes off.
P-Quentin makes his way to the door of his home, the great house of Collinwood. He stands there, and we hear his thoughts, in David Selby’s voice. He tells himself he cannot go in, because no one there would believe him if he told them who he was. He slinks off to the caretaker’s cottage, where he meets maidservant Beth, who is his sometime fiancée. He tries to tell her the story, but she too is terrified of the count. When Q-Petofi shows up, she leaves with him.
Magda is a wonderful character, and what we have seen has given us every reason to hope she will be a substantial part of the show for a while yet. Unfortunately, this is her final on-screen appearance. We will hear her voice once more, six weeks from now. The show has always been visually ambitious, and lately they’ve managed to pull some neat tricks with videotape that led me to hope we would see at least one scene in which Grayson Hall appears opposite herself as both Magda and time-traveling physician Julia Hoffman. When Hall appeared in the 1970 film End of the Road, she said that it was a relief from playing Julia, to whom she apparently referred as “that tight-ass doctor.” Magda is earthy enough that it would have been fun to see how Hall would have used her to demonstrate the same attitude towards Julia, even if she had to stick to words approved by the ABC network’s Standards and Practices office, and Julia’s reaction to Magda would doubtless have been just as much fun.
Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager Countess of Hampshire, is gradually turning into Josette DuPrés, who has been dead for 101 years. Kitty is staying at the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Also among the houseguests is Angelique, the immortal, time-traveling wicked witch who was responsible for Josette’s death.
Kitty has been getting information about Angelique, apparently from Josette’s ghost. She interrogates Angelique’s fiancé, rakish libertine Quentin Collins. Quentin does not give her any useful information about Angelique. When Kitty asks if Angelique has ever lived in England, Angelique herself enters and says that she has not. Kitty asks Angelique if she was ever a servant. Angelique made it quite clear yesterday that she knows perfectly well what is happening to Kitty, but she regards the transformation as a nuisance and does not want to help it along. She chooses to pretend that Kitty is being a snob, and says that Quentin is not marrying beneath his station. With that, Kitty has nowhere to go but back to her room.
Angelique has made an alliance with Julia Hoffman, MD, a fellow time-traveler from the late 1960s. Julia followed her friend and the object of Angelique’s lunatic obsessions, vampire Barnabas Collins, to 1897. Barnabas is now believed to have been destroyed, but we’ve already seen that Julia is continuing work replicating the experimental procedure that put his vampirism into abeyance for a little while in the spring of 1968. Today, Angelique brings some medical supplies to Julia in her hiding place, and Julia asks if she can come a little earlier the next day.
The two women sit down and have a friendly chat. Longtime viewers will find this breathtaking. Angelique was at Collinwood in 1968, wearing a black wig, calling herself Cassandra, and functioning as Julia and Barnabas’ bitterest enemy. Now that Angelique has turned to Quentin and has let go of her drive to dominate Barnabas, she and Julia have made an alliance against sorcerer Count Petofi. Their animosity set aside, they can commiserate about the difficulty of a life yoked to Barnabas.
“Ugh, vampires, all the good ones are either obsessed with recreating their dead ex or gay.” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Angelique wants to liberate Quentin, whom Petofi has enslaved. Julia is horrified today when Kitty, in Josette mode, bursts into her hiding place and demands to see Barnabas. Quentin follows her in and hears her ask why she is keeping Barnabas in the next room. Neither Kitty nor Quentin believe Julia when she keeps insisting that Barnabas is no more. If Quentin knows that Barnabas is still around, Petofi will soon know it as well, and that can only be bad news.
Petofi is not content keeping Quentin as a slave. He wants to abuse him even more totally. We saw the other day that Petofi wants to swap bodies with Quentin as his means of escaping from his deadly enemies, the Rroma people. Petofi visits Quentin in the drawing room at Collinwood this evening and gives him a scalp massage. Quentin notices Petofi’s ring, and agrees that he would like a new life. He falls asleep, then wakes up to find Petofi’s ring on his finger. To his alarm, he cannot take it off. My wife, Mrs Acilius, called out to the screen to suggest he spray some Windex on his finger, but that wasn’t invented until 1933 and the dramatic date is 1897. Presumably the transfer of the ring is the first step towards Quentin’s eviction from his own body and his replacement in it by Petofi.
Closing Miscellany
Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Dayis a study of Kathryn Leigh Scott’s facial expressions. His thesis is that Miss Scott is imitating Grayson Hall, who plays Julia. Later in the series there will be a moment when Miss Scott imitates Hall in a scene they play together; Hall’s reaction then will be hilarious.
Kitty sees the portrait of Barnabas Collins hanging in the foyer on the spot by the front door. She Josettifies and becomes fascinated by it. Stuffy but lovable Edward Collins had the portrait removed when Barnabas was exposed as a vampire some time ago, and is shocked to find that it has returned. Presumably whatever supernatural agency is Josettifying Kitty put it there. Longtime viewers, who remember how active Josette’s own ghost was at Collinwood before Barnabas first appeared on the show, will think she is the likeliest suspect.
When Kitty/ Josette is kneeling beside the grave of Josette’s husband Jeremiah Collins (spelled “Jerimiah” on the marker,) Edward shows up and tells her that she was married, not to Jeremiah, but to the late Gerald Soames Earl of Hampshire. That was the first time it dawned on me that both Josette and Kitty married guys named Jerry.
Angelique’s intrusion into the scene between Quentin and Kitty might have been more effective if the camera hadn’t swung wide and shown her standing outside the door waiting to make her entrance. We don’t see Angelique eavesdropping, but Lara Parker standing well upstage waiting to make her entrance.
Dark Shadows Commentary 