dark shadows every day – Page 3 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 851: Common cause

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing Miscellany

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

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

Episode 843: The meaning of shadows

Beth and Petofi

This night in 1897, Beth Chavez has lost both her job as a maid in the great house on the estate of Collinwood and her hopes of marrying rakish libertine Quentin Collins. She goes to the lair of sorcerer Count Petofi and volunteers to work for him. Petofi makes it clear that the position Beth is applying for is that of slave. She accepts without hesitation, and he has her do some mumbo-jumbo on his behalf.

This story point would make sense if Beth were a deeply dependent person who couldn’t imagine life without Quentin or her old job. But we’ve known Beth for months and months, and this is the first we’ve heard that she is like that. Terrayne Crawford’s acting ability was limited to embodying one feeling at a time, and in no scene was she assigned to demonstrate “corrosive sense of personal incompleteness.” So we know she is hung up on Quentin and we know she likes her job, but we also know that as one event follows another she responds with the emotion we would expect a level-headed person to have. Even when she got carried away the other day and tried to shoot Quentin, it didn’t seem to be a sign of mental breakdown. After Petofi showed up and stopped her, he pointed out that the way Quentin treats women, it is a marvel that none of them had tried to kill him before. If anything, her attempt on Quentin’s life suggested Beth has enough strength of character to leave Collinsport and make a fresh start.

Tate and the Creatures

For much of 1968, when Dark Shadows was in a contemporary setting, Roger Davis played a man named Peter Bradford who very loudly insisted that everyone call him Jeff Clark. Peter/ Jeff had no memory of his life more than a year or two before the present. Well-meaning governess Vicki knew that Peter/ Jeff had lived in the 1790s, and his shouting about his preferred name often came in response to Vicki’s attempts to tell him what she knew. Peter/ Jeff was convinced that if there were something supernatural about him, he would be incapable of loving anyone or of being loved.

Peter/ Jeff spent most of 1968 entangled with the story of Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Peter/ Jeff had assisted mad scientist Eric Lang in digging up the corpses from which Lang assembled Adam’s body. After Lang’s death, another mad scientist, Julia Hoffman, completed his work, attaching the body of recovering vampire Barnabas Collins to the body to provide the “life force.”

Mad scientists and vampires are two metaphors for extreme selfishness, so it was no surprise that Julia and Barnabas were the worst parents the newborn Adam could possibly have had. Within an hour of Adam’s awakening, Barnabas had loaded a gun and was on his way to kill him. When he relented from that plan, he and Julia took Adam to the prison cell in the basement of Barnabas’ house, where they locked his ankle in a fetter chained to the wall. They kept him within the blank walls of that cell for weeks on end, giving him nothing to play with, nothing to learn from, and nothing soft to touch. Nor did they ever allow him human contact for more than a few minutes at a time. They delegated Adam’s feeding to Barnabas’ servant Willie, who taunted him cruelly. Unsurprisingly, when Adam escaped from the cell he was rough with everyone he met, and when he found someone he liked he abducted her and found a place to lock her up. That was the only form of human interaction the big guy had ever known.

Now, the show is set in 1897, and Mr Davis plays artist Charles Delaware Tate. Tate combines the most disagreeable elements of all the characters involved in the story of Adam. Like Lang and Julia, he has the power to bring people to life without the usual processes of reproduction and growth. In his case, he simply draws or paints someone, and they pop into existence. He did that two years ago, in 1895, with a beautiful young woman he had imagined. He made a sketch and then a painting, and suddenly there she was, walking along a sidewalk in New York City. She took the name Amanda Harris, and has recently made her way to Collinsport.

Tate wasn’t there to see Amanda’s instantiation. But he recognized her when he did see her, and he has since drawn some inanimate objects that he saw come into being. So he figured out what Amanda’s origin must have been, and he has been shouting at her about it for a while. As Peter/ Jeff did not want to believe Vicki when she told him he was not native to the twentieth century, so Amanda does not want to believe Tate when he tells her that she came into being in the way that, in Greek myth, Pygmalion brought the lovely Galatea to life. But yesterday Amanda went to Tate’s studio, and he drew an imaginary man. That man appeared while Amanda watched.

We open today in Tate’s studio. Amanda is gone, and Tate is screaming at the man and declaring that he will kill him. The man is just standing there- he is fully grown, apparently in his mid-twenties, but in reality he is only a few minutes old. He doesn’t seem to be able to talk. He reacts to Tate’s extreme hostility with bafflement.

Tate rips up the drawing, and is disappointed the man does not die. A knock comes at the door. He shoves the man in the closet and locks him in there. Within moments, he reenacts Barnabas’ attempt to shoot Adam and his confinement of Adam to the cell. Tate had not been written as especially evil before this, but now he takes his place among Dark Shadows‘ cruelest villains. We may wonder if the character would have been developed differently had he not been played by the bombastic Mr Davis. Perhaps if the writers had been scripting a role for a more pleasant actor, they could have let Tate be a relatively nice guy.

Tate opens the door. Amanda is there, standing behind her traveling companion and sometime partner-in-crime, adventurer Tim Shaw. Amanda has told Tim what Tate did, and Tim demands to see the man. Tim sees the closet doorknob turning, and insists Tate unlock it. Tate at first denies that he has a key, but Tim pulls a gun and forces him to comply. In his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn has a funny bit about this moment:

Now, if life was like a Tex Avery cartoon, and I think we can all agree that it should be, then Tate’s next move would be to grab his sketchpad and draw an even bigger gun. Then Tim would reach into his pocket and pull out a machine gun, and Tate would draw a rocket launcher, and we could go back and forth like that until somebody pushes down on a plunger detonator, and there’s an explosion that cracks the Earth in two. That would be a good scene.

Danny Horn, “Episode 843: I Can Make You a Man,” posted to Dark Shadows Every Day, 19 March 2016.

As it is, Tate just hands over the key. Tim unlocks the door, finds the man, and loses all interest in Amanda. He tells Tate that he is sure he will take good care of Amanda as he leaves with the man.

Tim is delighted with his new toy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Tate shouts at Amanda and grabs various parts of her body, adjusting their position as if she were an action figure. He’s hollering something about love when she pulls away from him and declares that, as an unnatural creature, she can neither love nor be loved. Again, longtime viewers remember Mr Davis as Peter/ Jeff, yelling the same sentiment. But Amanda goes further than Peter/ Jeff ever did with the affable Vicki. She says that can hate, and that she hates him very cordially indeed.

In his hotel room, Tim is trying to coax the man Tate created into speaking. The man tries to make a sound, but fails. Tate himself comes barging in. He has a gun, and points it at the camera. He announces that the man will never speak, because he is going to murder him forthwith.

In the comments section of Danny’s post, I left a long comment which is I suppose a first draft of this post. You can read it there.

Episode 835: A past that runs parallel to our present

Stuffy Edward Collins was under a spell for several weeks that prevented him from keeping up with what has been happening on the estate of Collinwood in 1897. He knows that his distant cousin Barnabas is a vampire who originally died in the 1790s and has come back to prey on the living. From this, he has drawn the eminently logical conclusion that he is a character in a horror story, and that it is his responsibility to be the hero who destroys the undead ghoul.

Barnabas is beside himself. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In fact, Dark Shadows stopped being that kind of show long ago. Others know that it is chiefly about time travel now. That point is made when we flash forward to the year 1969, from which Barnabas has traveled to prevent a disaster that had its roots in 1897. Barnabas’ friends Julia Hoffman and Timothy Eliot Stokes talk about the intersection of past and present, so that the events of 5 September 1897 are somehow also taking place on 5 September 1969. The show has been using anniversaries as substitutes for natural laws in this way since #157, broadcast and set in January 1967, and they spin this out much further today. In his post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn writes a big prose poem about the weirdness of the show’s conception of time at this point, it’s well worth reading.

When Barnabas first came on in the spring of 1967, it was set in contemporary times and the writers had a lot of fun with characters who mistook the genre of show they were on. Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis heard the plot of Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek, concluded he was part of a Gothic romance, and wound up freeing Barnabas and becoming his blood thrall. That mistake continued to shape Willie’s character. Willie was forced to be Barnabas’ accomplice in the abduction and attempted brainwashing of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Willie listened to Barnabas’ own rantings about his motive being an attempt to recreate his lost love Josette, and kept imagining that he would somehow overcome Barnabas to rescue Maggie and become her lover. Willie also harbored a deep hostility towards Burke Devlin, who was left over from a period when the show really was inspired by Gothic romance.

Willie’s sometime friend Jason McGuire made a similar mistake, believing that the show was still the noir crime drama it was when it spent weeks on the question of where Burke’s fountain pen had got to. So he sleuthed out signs of where Willie went when no one was looking and where Barnabas got his money. All that Barnabas could contribute to that kind of story was murder, and so he unceremoniously strangled Jason in #275.

Local physician Dr Dave Woodard thought he was on the usual daytime dramas of the period. Actor Robert Gerringer had a lot of fun playing Woodard as if he were on The Guiding Light. There were whole episodes built around that conceit- for example, we spend #235 in the Collinsport Hospital, where everyone acts just as you would expect them to on any other soap, except for Maggie, who is there being treated for vampire bites. Woodard notices that his friend Julia is growing close to Barnabas, and in #324 comes to the logical daytime conclusion- they are having an affair. Eventually Woodard finds out that he has misidentified the genre of the show, but it is too late- Barnabas and Julia murder him in #341.

Today, that is to say 5 September 1897, Edward catches Barnabas and locks him in the prison cell in the basement of the Old House at Collinwood. Barnabas kept Maggie in that cell when she was his prisoner, and the ghost of his little sister Sarah helped Maggie find a secret panel that led to a tunnel to the beach. In #260, Maggie escaped through that tunnel at the last minute before Barnabas could kill her, and Barnabas himself later used the same tunnel to escape from the cell in #616. In #781, Edward made it clear that he knew all about the tunnel and expected everyone else at Collinwood to know about it as well. So it is no surprise when he tells Barnabas that he has blocked it off. In fact, he says that he has blocked “all” of the secret passages- we may wonder just how many escape routes there are.

Edward leaves Barnabas alone in the cell, saying he will be back before dawn. There is a writing desk in the cell; Barnabas remembers that Willie moved that desk to the front parlor for him in 1967, and so he describes his predicament in a letter to Julia and closes it in a secret compartment of the desk.

In 1969, nine year old Amy Jennings is in the parlor, playing with her dolls. One of the dolls is named “Amanda”; this will catch the attention of returning viewers. The 1897 story features a character named Amanda, who is an oil painting come to life. If artist Charles Delaware Tate could make his paintings come to life, as in Greek myth the sculptor Pygmalion made a statue come to life as a woman named Galatea, then perhaps we should find out who made Amy’s doll before we let it out of our sight.

Amy first came on the show in November 1968, at the beginning of the story that led from contemporary dress to the 1897 segment. Her very first night at Collinwood, Amy went straight to the room where the magic objects were hidden that would trigger that story. She often delivers her lines directly into the camera, as if she knows perfectly well where the audience is. Amy is at the opposite pole from Edward and such earlier characters as Willie, Jason, and Woodard- she not only knows what genre the show is, she’s read the flimsies for next month’s episodes and is getting a head start on them.

Amy looks in the desk for a book to read to her dolls, and inadvertently opens the secret compartment. She eventually gives the letter to Julia; this is what prompts Julia and Stokes to have their talk about the ontological status of past events and what philosophers call “the reality of tense.” They know all about the time travel aspect of the show; Julia, in fact, has for some time been the closest thing the audience has in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s to a point of view character, one who knows everything we do. She was certainly the first one to know that the show was transitioning from vampire horror to quasi-science fiction. She surprised Barnabas in #291 with a proposal to develop a medical treatment that might put his vampirism into abeyance.

In the letter, Barnabas refers to his “secret.” Stokes does not know what this is, and is not satisfied with Julia’s lame attempts to answer his questions about it. This makes sense to regular viewers; shortly after Stokes arrived in Collinsport, another mad scientist got hold of Barnabas and succeeded where Julia had failed in putting the symptoms of the vampire curse into remission. For all the time he has known Barnabas, Stokes has seen him moving about in the day, casting reflections in mirrors, eating food not derived from human blood, etc. In 1968 and 1969, his ignorance of his Barnabas’ past vampirism is not much more serious than his ignorance of the details of the automobile accident that killed Mr Hanson in 1956. But the vampirism came back in full force when Barnabas went to the past, so Stokes is at a loss as to what the letter means.

Julia decides that she will try to travel into the past using the same mumbo-jumbo that transported Barnabas there. While Stokes reads up on that, Julia and Amy make a stop at the great house on the estate, which is impenetrably haunted by the ghost of Quentin Collins. That errand seems to be going sideways when the episode ends.

Episode 826: King Johnny’s court

Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana puts broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi on trial in the secret room of the old Collins family mausoleum. Evidently King Johnny has considerable magic powers; he conjures up the ghosts of several notorious murderers to serve as the jury. He also brings in the ghost of Magda’s husband to serve as the one witness for the defense.

The scenario is a remake of The Devil and Daniel Webster, a play that debuted at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1939. But the makers of Dark Shadows were likely thinking of a more recent Broadway production as well. From November 1964 to June 1965, a musical with a book by Ernest Kinoy and music by Walter Marks ran first at the Shubert Theatre, then at the Lunt-Fontanne, for a total of 232 Broadway performances. Its title is one of King Johnny’s favorite words- Bajour.

King Johnny keeps complaining that Magda tried to “pull the bajour on me!,” by which he means that she gave him one thing disguised as another. In the show, based on Joseph Mitchell’s stories of life among Rroma in the New York metropolitan area, bajour refers simply to a confidence trick with a big payoff for its perpetrators. The cast, saddled with a bunch of instantly forgettable songs, sings as joyously as it can about how the Rroma, to whom they of course refer as “gypsies,”* love nothing more than cheating lonely old women out of their life savings. This uninhibited celebration of racism reported losses of nearly a million dollars, more than twice the total amount of money invested in it. Perhaps the fictional Rroma weren’t the only ones who enjoyed running a good scam. Perhaps, too, Mel Brooks’ 1967 film The Producers wasn’t entirely a work of fiction.

The cast of Bajour does not appear to have overlapped with that of any episode of Dark Shadows. The closest link I can find to the cast at this period of the show is Michael Bennett, who danced in Bajour and later married Donna McKechnie. Many very distinguished performers appeared in Bajour, but I’m not tempted to do any imaginary recasting. I’m sure Chita Rivera and Herschel Bernardi were wonderful as leads Anyanka and Cockeye Johnny Dembo, but they couldn’t have outdone Grayson Hall and Thayer David as Magda and Sandor. Herbert Edelman was good in everything, and I’m sure his turn as “The King of Newark” was no exception, but no one could have done more than Paul Michael does to make the cartoonish role of King Johnny watchable. Paul Sorvino had a great career, and even has a screen credit in common with Henry Judd Baker- they both appeared in the disastrous 1980 film Cruising. I’m sure Sorvino would have been interesting as a replacement for Baker as Istvan, the mute Black Rroma, but that part is all about physical presence, and as was the case with Baker’s part in Cruising he is effective in a way that Sorvino could not have matched. Nancy Dussault is another performer who never lets an audience down, but Diana Davila’s approach to the character of Rroma maiden Julianka was so cleverly conceived that I couldn’t bear to think of anyone else taking the part.

While I’m on the topic of the Rroma, I want to bring up an oddity about my favorite Dark Shadows blog, Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day. When he was writing about these episodes, Danny often stopped to ridicule the idea of a Rroma tribe living in New England in 1897. Danny works for the Wikimedia Foundation; you’d think he’d be in the habit of checking Wikipedia, where the article “Romani People in the United States” would tell him that, while Rroma have been migrating to North America continually since 1498, the majority of the ancestors of the million or so Americans who now identify as Rroma came in the late nineteenth century. The new arrivals tended to take some time to assimilate to the ways of the USA; the article is, as of this writing, illustrated with a photo of a Rroma caravan near Portland, Oregon, in 1905:

Rroma caravan near Portland, Oregon, in 1905. Photograph by the Portland Oregonian, found on Wikipedia.

Most Romani-Americans are totally assimilated nowadays, so much so that many people in the USA don’t realize that there actually is such an ethnic group. But there are still Romani heritage festivals in many cities, and the last traditional caravans were still traveling the Great Plains as late as the 1940s. And in Maine in 1897, Romani caravans were a frequent sight, one that indeed aroused exactly the sort of zyganophobic** reactions Magda and Sandor encountered from virtually everyone in their first days on the show.

Even Istvan isn’t as hard to explain as Danny seems to think. In the early days of European settlement, Rroma were often brought across the Atlantic as slaves; that was the case for the people on Christopher Columbus’ third voyage in 1498. Some intermarried with enslaved people of African extraction. There are still Afro-Romani communities in Louisiana and Cuba.

I started writing about Dark Shadows in the comment sections on Danny’s blog. He made a great display of ignoring the first 42 weeks of the show, and consistently made the harshest possible judgments of the acting of Alexandra Moltke Isles, who played well-meaning governess Vicki. That created a space for me to point out when the show was harking back to its early days, and to defend Mrs Isles. I would be remiss in a post like this if I did not mention that Mrs Isles made a documentary feature in 2003 called Porraimos: Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust. I’ve never been able to get hold of a copy of the film, but the New York Times liked it when it was shown on PBS.

*Rroma sometimes call themselves Gypsies, but you can’t assume they’ll like it if an outsider uses that word.

**Zyganophobia- racism against Rroma.

Episode 825: Good at coming in room

A lot of action in this one. Rakish Quentin Collins bluffs sorcerer Count Petofi with a threat that his nemesis, Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana, will be coming. At the last moment, Petofi gives in and releases Quentin’s distant cousin, time traveling vampire Barnabas Collins, whom he has been holding prisoner.

Back in the great house of Collinwood, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi discovers maidservant Beth Chavez lying unconscious on the floor. Magda takes her pulse. She then picks up the snifter from which Beth had been drinking, holds it to her nose, and gives a look of discovery. All of a sudden, Grayson Hall looks very much like her first character on Dark Shadows, Julia Hoffman, MD.

Why, Magda- do you have a medical degree? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.

Somehow Magda gets Beth back to her room and saves her life. Beth tells her that she was poisoned by a woman called Charity. Magda leaves the room to look for Charity. Before she gets more than a few feet into the hall, King Johnny’s henchman Istvan springs out from the Shadows’ and grabs her.

Quentin comes into the foyer of the great house. Beth is there. He sees that she is upset and weak and asks what is wrong, but she will not explain. He asks if Barnabas can sneak to her bedroom without being observed. She leads the way to make sure no one who is involved in the vampire hunt sees him.

After Beth, Barnabas, and Quentin do some recapping, we see Magda in the woods with Istvan. She tries to talk him into running away with her, but he ignores her. He is supposed to bind and gag her. As we have seen many times on Dark Shadows, Magda has to hold the gag in her teeth. At the very end, an unseen figure approaches with a lantern, and Magda reacts with terror.

Preemption Day: Some videos of Dark Shadows-related gatherings on Youtube

No episode of Dark Shadows premiered on ABC 56 years ago today, since the network had decided to cover the visit of the Apollo 11 astronauts to Chicago instead. So I’ve decided to take this opportunity to link to videos of some interesting discussions about the show posted on Youtube.

They couldn’t have in-person conventions with panels including original cast members in the year 2020, what with Covid-19. So they had a big Zoom call instead. That one is especially interesting, because it brought out some people who hadn’t made themselves visible to fandom in decades. In the case of David Henesy, it may have been his first act of fanservice since the show went off the air. When Alexandra Moltke Isles says that her first encounter with a fan was with someone who grabbed her hair and tried to rip it out of her head, that absence is perhaps understandable. The video shows the meeting in speaker view. Fans who groan every time Roger Davis turns up will find it grimly appropriate that he couldn’t figure out how to mute his camera, and so he keeps flashing in when other people have the floor. I can’t embed it, but here is the link.

Another Zoom recording some might enjoy seeing is of an April 2021 gathering in honor of Danny Horn’s great blog Dark Shadows Every Day. I was there, under my off-screen name. The discussion got a bit awkward when some podcasters started vying with each other and with the actual host to take over the moderator’s role, but I think all of us who wanted to do so eventually made ourselves heard. It was a good time.

Since 2020, Dark Shadows fan gatherings have taken on the character and often the label of memorial services, since so many of the people who used to appear on the panels are either deceased or otherwise unable to travel. But some of them have maintained a jolly spirit even so. For example, in this 2024 panel appearance Marie Wallace and Donna Wandrey amusingly complain about some appalling behavior by director Henry Kaplan. Sharon Smyth, who wasn’t on the show when Kaplan was, listens.

This July, Danielle Gelehrter hosted Kathryn Leigh Scott and David Henesy for a Zoom chat under the aegis of her “Terror at Collinwood” podcast. Mr Henesy has his own stories about Kaplan’s misdeeds.

I wouldn’t want you to think that Mrs Acilius and I watch nothing but 56 year old TV shows. Why, this very night, after I’d written the above and scheduled it to go live at 4 PM on Wednesday the 13th, we watched a 61 year old episode of To Tell the Truth. One of the impostors had a voice that sounded terribly familiar to us, but a face we didn’t recognize at all. When the game was over, he said his name was “Bobby Lloyd, and I’m a TV announcer at WHEC TV in Rochester, New York!” Two years later, he was Bob Lloyd, and he was on staff as an announcer for the ABC network, where he would say “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis production.”

Episode 816: David Collins, who lives in the year 1969

From December 1968 to through February 1969, strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy) and his friend Amy Jennings (Denise Nickerson) were falling under the power of the malign ghost of Quentin Collins. Occasionally the children were possessed by the spirits of David’s grandfather Jamison and great-aunt Nora; at other times they were possessed by Quentin’s own spirit and that of Quentin’s sometime lover, maidservant Beth. In those same days, Amy’s brother Chris (Don Briscoe) was suffering from a curse that made him a werewolf.

As Quentin’s power over David and Amy grew, so did the frequency and duration of Chris’ spells in lupine form. By #700, Quentin so dominated the great house on the estate of Collinwood that its residents fled to the Old House on the estate, home of their distant cousin Barnabas Collins. David, entirely possessed by Jamison, was close to death. For his part, Chris was stuck in wolf form, apparently permanently, and Barnabas had locked him in a secret room in the old Collins family mausoleum.

Desperate to remedy the situation, Barnabas and his associate, occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes (Thayer David,) searched Quentin’s old room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house. They found some I Ching wands there. Under Stokes’ direction, Barnabas threw the wands, meditated on them, and found himself transported back in time to 1897. In that year, Quentin, Beth, Jamison, and Nora are alive, and Barnabas is a vampire.

Barnabas had no idea what led Quentin to become a malevolent ghost or what first brought the werewolf curse on Chris, but he had reason to believe that 1897 was an important year in the events leading up to both of those unhappy circumstances. So once he arrived in that period, he spent his nights meddling in all the affairs of the Collins family he found there. Vampires are not problem-solvers; their function in a story is to create problems that other characters will have to solve. So all of Barnabas’ well-intentioned interventions backfired badly. Even disregarding the many murders he committed for his own selfish ends, including the murder of Quentin’s brother Carl Collins, his trip would by any standard have to be considered a disaster.

Now, evil sorcerer Count Petofi (Thayer David) has found that Barnabas is a visitor from the future and is determined to go with him when he returns to 1969. When he demanded Barnabas tell him his secret, Barnabas quite truthfully told him he had no idea what was going on when he found himself transported from one period to another. Petofi did not believe him, and is trying to extort the information he wants by summoning the spirit of David to come from 1969 and possess Jamison (David Henesy) in 1897.

Not only is this an intriguing reversal of the 1968-1969 story in which the ghost of Quentin caused Jamison’s spirit to possess David, it also picks up on some recent hints that they might retcon the whole “Haunting of Collinwood” story to put Quentin’s ghost under the control of Petofi. Even if he can’t hitch a ride with Barnabas, perhaps Petofi will find a way to use Quentin to go back to 1969 with us.

Nora (Denise Nickerson) is with her brother Jamison when the possession takes hold. She is puzzled that he insists on calling her “Amy” and himself “David” and that he tells her to call Quentin on the telephone, even though he is in the house. When Quentin shows up, he recognizes the name David Collins from something Barnabas has told him about the future. But Barnabas has not told Quentin that he is fated to become a family-annihilating ghost, and so Quentin cannot understand how David knows who he is.

Meanwhile, a man named Tim Shaw (Don Briscoe) comes to the house and visits Nora in her room. Tim is Amy’s former teacher, and she considers him a friend. She does not know that since she first knew him, he has lost his moral compass, found the severed Hand of Count Petofi, stolen it, and used its magical powers to make a small fortune in New York City. Evidently all working-class Collinsport boys get rich quick when they go to NYC. In 1961, ex-fisherman Burke Devlin got out of prison and went to that city. By the time he returned to Collinsport in 1966, Burke was a big-time corporate raider who had to think for a moment when David Collins asked him if he’d already made his first $100,000,000. He answered “Not yet.” If he’d had the Hand, no doubt he would have passed that milestone long before.

A couple of days ago, Tim asked Nora to hide a box for him. Unknown to her, the box contained the Hand. Tim asks Nora to return the box to him. She tells him Jamison has it, and he flies into a rage. He gets very rough with her. Briscoe and Nickerson were both good actors, and we’ve seen them share tender moments both as Nora and Tim and as Amy and Chris, so the resulting scene is as uncomfortable as it needs to be to show us that Tim is no longer the long-suffering nice guy we once knew. Moreover, longtime viewers who recognize Tim’s echo of Burke and remember that Burke, though sometimes villainous, was always good with David, will be shocked that Tim does not mirror the earlier character’s consistent soft spot for children.

Tim roughs Nora up. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Tim goes downstairs and sees Quentin coming out of the drawing room. He demands to see Jamison. Quentin tells him that Jamison is ill, and it will be impossible for anyone to talk to him. Tim starts to get ugly about it, and Quentin cuts him off, saying that Jamison doesn’t have the Hand. Tim is shocked that Quentin knows about the Hand, but recovers sufficiently to ask who does. Quentin cheerfully tells Tim that if he goes to the abandoned mill at the end of the North Road, he will find his onetime acquaintance Aristide, and that Aristide will direct him to the man who has the Hand.

Tim knows Aristide only slightly, but he has a grudge against him. Aristide attacked Tim’s girlfriend Amanda and demanded she tell him where the Hand was. Even after he realized Amanda did not know what he was talking about, he beat her and threatened to kill her, forcing her to tell him whatever she did know that would help him retrace Tim’s steps. When Tim found Amanda, Aristide had left her unconscious, and Tim feared at first she might be dead.

We cut to the hideout in the mill, where Tim is waiting with a pistol and thinking that he would be justified in killing Aristide for what he did to Amanda. When Aristide comes, Tim holds him at gunpoint and demands the Hand be returned to him. Aristide tells him that is not possible. They quarrel until another man enters. It is Petofi, who shows Tim that the Hand has resumed its place at the end of his right arm.

That suffices to show Tim that the Hand is no longer available to him. Petofi tells him he should consider himself lucky that the Hand, which followed no one’s commands, chose to make him rich and happy. Tim says he is not happy, and will not be until he can take revenge on the hypocritical Rev’d Gregory Trask and lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley. This again reminds longtime viewers of Burke, whose original goal in returning to Collinsport was to wreak vengeance on Roger Collins. As Trask and Evan involved Tim in a homicide when he was not in his right mind and tried to make him alone pay the legal penalty for it, so Roger killed someone with Burke’s car while Burke was passed out drunk in the back seat and saw to it that the court concluded that Burke was driving.

Petofi laughs and congratulates Tim on his choice of enemies. Tim brightens and asks if Petofi will join with him in bringing Trask and Evan down. Petofi explains that he does nothing without a price. Tim says he has a lot of money, and Petofi says he doesn’t have any use for money. Petofi brings up Amanda, only to say that he doesn’t have a use for her either, at least not at the moment. He sends Tim along his way.

Aristide is talking when Petofi dismisses him. He tells him that two visitors are coming, and that he wants to be alone when they arrive. He will not explain further, and so Aristide is in rather a huff when he leaves.

The visitors are Quentin and Jamison/ David. Quentin is carrying his nephew/ great-great-nephew. He demands that Petofi cure Jamison of the possession, which seems to be killing him. Petofi refuses. When Jamison/ David calls Quentin by name, Petofi asks him how a boy who lives in 1969 knows who he is. Quentin’s bewildered reaction leaves us wondering how he will respond if Barnabas ever tells him just why he went to the past.

In the opening teaser, Petofi stood over the coffin in which he has trapped Barnabas. He told Aristide that he and Barnabas have been at war for what even he, at his immense age, considers to be a very long time. He says that they are now engaged in the final battle of that war.

Petofi’s remarks make absolutely no sense whatever in the context of what we have seen. It has been clear so far that Petofi’s presence at Collinwood is an accident, that Barnabas never heard of him before, and that Petofi only just learned that Barnabas has traveled through time. Many of the oddest dead ends on the show were left over from advance plans that hadn’t worked out; so when they were drawing up broad outlines six months before taping, or when they were writing episode summaries (called “flimsies”) thirteen weeks before, they would often include ideas that depended on story points that they never got around to making happen or characters who never worked out. Once in a while, the writers tasked with filling in the flimsies wouldn’t be able to make up a complete 22 minute script without incorporating some of this irrelevant material. So perhaps at some point in the planning process they meant to have stories about Barnabas going back to the eighteenth century and fighting Petofi there. They may still have been kicking that idea around when they shot this installment.

Danny Horn closes his post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day with this little poem, which he attributes to Petofi (though it may remind some of Puck from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream):

If Dark Shadows has offended,
Think but this, and all is mended —
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And now, a word from All Temperature Cheer.

Danny Horn, “Episode 816: Midsummer,” posted 1 February 2016 at Dark Shadows Every Day.

Episode 809: Back from your evening revels

Charity Trask finds Quentin Collins unconscious and disheveled in the woods. She kneels beside him in a show of concern, then notices a woman on the ground near him. The woman’s face is covered with what on a black and white television look like slash marks and her clothing is badly torn. She regains consciousness just long enough to say Quentin’s name. Charity notices that Quentin is holding a scrap of cloth that matches the woman’s dress, and realizes that he is the werewolf who has been terrorizing the area.

Quentin comes to, and Charity tells him they must get help for the injured woman. Quentin’s response is to threaten to kill Charity if she says anything to anyone about what she has seen. He says that he will look after the woman, and repeats his death threats to Charity.

Charity goes home to the great house of Collinwood, where her father, the overbearingly evil Gregory Trask, orders her to marry Quentin by the end of the week. She is horrified and tells him she will not. She cannot explain why. Before Gregory can corner Charity and force her to give him information, twelve year old Jamison Collins enters. Jamison reports seeing the injured woman in the woods, and says that Gregory must go to her at once if she is to survive. Gregory dismisses this as a “tall tale” and says he will not be distracted from punishing Jamison for his long unexplained absence from the house. Charity, on the point of sobbing, urges Trask to take Jamison seriously, and he reluctantly goes to see if there really is a woman in the woods.

We know more than do Charity or Trask. We saw Jamison meet Quentin in the woods next to the woman’s body, and talk to him in an amiable and condescending tone about the possibility of turning this unfortunate incident to their mutual advantage. He also makes it clear that, despite his appearance, he is not simply Jamison. He is a sorcerer named Count Petofi, in possession of Jamison and acting through his body. When Charity asks Jamison/ Petofi if the woman was alone when he found her, he replies that of course she was. Smiling, he asks who she thought he might have seen. Terribly agitated, she soon excuses herself and goes into the foyer. Jamison/ Petofi looks directly into the camera and smiles. David Henesy was the first actor on Dark Shadows to use this technique, back in 1966 when he was playing strange and troubled boy David Collins. He’s been doing it a lot lately, and is still very good at using it to unsettle the audience.

He looks young for 150, but he’s grown quite a bit since 1966. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin comes down the staircase, wearing a tidy new suit. Charity is shocked that he did nothing to help the injured woman; he resumes his menacing tone and demands to know whether she kept her side of the bargain. He eventually deduces that she did not tell what she saw, and allows her to go upstairs to her bedroom. Quentin is usually charming, often funny, and occasionally aligned with good against evil, but even before he became a monster he was established as a homicidal maniac. When we first met Quentin, he was a ghost haunting Collinwood in the late 1960s and he kept killing people there. The first week of our trip back in time to 1897, we saw him trying to strangle his grandmother in her bed. And his sister-in-law turned him into a werewolf as revenge after he murdered his wife Jenny. Since we are focused on the horror of Charity’s situation as her father is pressuring her to marry Quentin, of course his bloodthirstiness is the aspect of his personality we see most clearly today.

Trask returns, carrying the injured woman. Quentin asks if she was conscious. Trask says she is not conscious. Quentin specifies that he wants to know if she has been conscious at any point while with Trask. This arouses Trask’s suspicions; Quentin protests that it is information he will need when he telephones the doctor. Trask says that she was not, and carries her upstairs.

Quentin goes to the drawing room. Jamison/ Petofi is there, and has some business to discuss. Quentin is too unsettled by the fact of the possession to talk candidly. Jamison/ Petofi decides to humor him. “I’ll become that beautiful child you so want to see… Can we play a game, Uncle Quentin?” Quentin is stunned by Jamison/ Petofi’s sudden change of tone and bearing. It is indeed impressive to see David Henesy drop his mimicry of Thayer David as Petofi and resume his usual approach to the role of Jamison. We’d forgotten just how deeply he had come to inhabit that imitation.

Jamison/ Petofi declares that they will have a treasure hunt. He gives Quentin a series of clues in the form of cryptic rhymes. Quentin is completely stumped by all of them. Finally Jamison/ Petofi just points at the desk drawer he wants Quentin to open and tells him there is a document in it that he can use against Trask. Quentin opens the drawer and pulls out heap after heap of paper, then declares “There’s no paper here!”

Quentin is not especially brainy; much of his appeal comes from the joy David Selby, Ph.D., took in playing a character who at no point says or does anything to demonstrate intellectual prowess. But we are not supposed to believe that he is stupid, at least not so stupid that it is plausible that “There’s no paper here!” was the scripted line. Maybe it was a blooper for “There’s no paper like that here!” or “There’s no paper here I haven’t seen before!” or something like that.

A document bearing a wax seal and a couple of signatures materializes on top of the papers Quentin has pulled out of the desk. He reads it, and sees that it is a full confession to the murder of Trask’s first wife, signed by Trask and lawyer Evan Hanley. All Jamison/ Petofi has to say is “It can be very useful, can’t it? Especially since it’s true… Aren’t games fun, Uncle Quentin?” and Quentin catches on that the document gives him power he can use against Trask.

Meanwhile, the injured woman has briefly regained consciousness in the upstairs bedroom where Trask and Charity are attending her. She spoke Quentin’s name, and Trask sent Charity to fetch him. Trask confronts Quentin about this. Quentin says that the woman’s name is Tessie, that he talked to her a couple of times when they ran into each other at the Blue Whale tavern, and that he knows nothing more about her. He admits he didn’t call the police after he called the doctor; he claims he simply forgot, in the confusion of the moment. Trask says that he will go and make the call. In an accusing tone, he asks “Most unfortunate, isn’t it, that you were the one who forgot?” He leaves Quentin alone with Tessie.

Tessie regains consciousness, looks at Quentin, and reacts with dismay. He tells her he didn’t mean to do it. She moans and dies. As she flops over, her right breast comes perilously close to springing out of her décolletage. When he realizes she has died, Quentin says “Tessie!” with a note of exasperation, as if she’s always doing inconvenient things like that. Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud.

Downstairs, we see that Trask did not call the police after all. Charity is doing it from the telephone in the drawing room. Quentin enters through the secret panel behind her. We first saw him use this panel in #685, when it was 1969 and he was a silent but peculiarly corporeal ghost. He let himself into the drawing room and strangled silversmith Ezra Braithwaite, played by Abe Vigoda. A bit of an eldritch moment that the killer of Tessie is also the killer of a character played by the actor who would go on to play Tessio in the 1972 film The Godfather.

In Vigoda’s last scene in that movie, Tessio and Corleone Family consigliere Tom Hagen are at pains to assure each other that Tessio’s impending murder and the events that led up to it were strictly business, and that Tessio and his murderers still have the warmest regards for each other. Quentin’s attempt to deny his guilt to Tessie is of that same sort- he didn’t have any hostility towards her, his nature as a werewolf simply required that he kill the nearest person.

By contrast, Quentin’s interaction with Charity is intensely personal and intensely unpleasant. He takes the telephone out of her hand, something that men often do to women on Dark Shadows when they are trapping them, and moves deep into her personal space as he demands to know why she would want to call the police. She tells him her father ordered her to make the call; he says that Tessie will tell the police nothing now, because she is dead. Charity shouts that he killed Tessie, and that she will tell everything.

Danny Horn devotes much of his post about the episode at his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day to the absurdity of Quentin making a date with Tessie on a night when the Moon was full. In a comment, I pointed out that we have no reason to think he did make a date with her:

I don’t think it’s so hard to explain why Tessie was in the woods at dawn, though it does require a little fanfic.

Charity was in Quentin’s room in 806, inviting him to go for a walk on the beach when he’s busy getting drunk and listening to the same dreary little waltz over and over. To get Tessie into the woods, all we have to do is assume that shortly after that scene Quentin ran out of booze before he was drunk enough to stop caring about the upcoming full moon. Not wanting to deal with the Trasks, he didn’t go to the mansion’s liquor pantry, but staggered down to the Blue Whale.

There, Quentin met Tessie. She was upset with him for missing several dates in the last few days. He can’t very well explain what he’s been doing lately, and his refusal to answer Tessie’s questions angers her. She’s about to give Quentin a piece of her mind when he realizes that it will be dark soon, and rushes from the bar.

Now Tessie is really furious. She follows Quentin to the estate. Once there, she sees him change into the werewolf, and hides in terror for most of the night. Shortly before dawn, she thinks he is gone and leaves her hiding place. The werewolf appears and slashes away at her for a few minutes before changing back into human form and collapsing beside her.

And that’s when Charity finally takes her walk, and finds out.

Comment left 17 November 2020 by “Acilius” on Danny Horn, “Episode 808: Twice Burned,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 18 January 2016

Tessie is played by Deborah Loomis, and is the earliest screen credit on her IMDb page. Her next role listed there was in Hercules in New York, a 1970 film which also featured fellow Dark Shadows day player Erica Fitz Mears, who appeared in #594 and #595 as Leona Eltridge. Neither Miss Loomis nor Mrs Mears stuck with acting after the middle of the 1970s, but the two top billed members of the cast worked steadily for some years after. The first name in the credits was comedian Arnold Stang, who was best known at the time for a series of TV commercials for window screens ending with the tag “Arnold Stang says don’t get stung!” Second billed was Arnold Strong, a bodybuilder from Austria making his acting debut. Under his birth name of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arnold Strong would go on to roles in several later films. I know of no evidence he ever auditioned for a part on Dark Shadows.

Episode 807: An award-winning performance, wouldn’t you say?

From #1 to #274, each episode of Dark Shadows began with a voiceover narration by Alexandra Moltke Isles, usually in character as well-meaning governess Vicki. This identified Vicki with our point of view and suggested that she would sooner or later learn everything we knew.

Jonathan Frid joined the cast as vampire Barnabas Collins in #211, and quickly became the show’s great breakout star. If the upright Vicki found out what we knew about Barnabas, one of them would have to be destroyed. Vicki was the favorite of longtime viewers and Barnabas was attracting new ones, so that was out of the question. Therefore, other members of the cast started taking turns reading the voiceovers, and doing so not as their characters, but in the role of External Narrator.

Today marks the first time Frid himself reads the narration. His training first in Canada, then at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and later at Yale School of Drama prepared Frid well in the art of dramatic reading, and in later years he would concentrate on that aspect of his craft. Several of his colleagues are his equals in these voiceovers- I would particularly mention Kathryn Leigh Scott, whose conception of The Narrator is always arresting, and Thayer David, who could consistently achieve the most difficult of all effects in voice acting, a perfectly simple reading. So I can’t say I wish Frid had done all of them, but he is always good, and today’s performance is among his most gorgeous.

The action opens on a set known to longtime viewers as the Evans cottage, where from 1966 to 1968 artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie served as Dark Shadows‘ principal representatives of the working class of the village of Collinsport. In those days, it was on this set that we saw how the misdeeds of the ancient and esteemed Collins family had consequences that spilled out of the estate of Collinwood and warped the lives of people trying to make a more or less honest living nearby.

Now the dramatic date is 1897, and Sam hasn’t been born yet. But the cottage is already an artist’s studio. It is temporarily occupied by the nationally famous Charles Delaware Tate, who is painting a portrait of rakish libertine Quentin Collins at the behest of evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Charity Trask, a resident of the great house of Collinwood, is visiting Tate in the cottage when she sees the face in the portrait change from that of Quentin. It takes on a great deal of fur and long fangs, and reminds Charity of a wolf.

By the time Tate looks at the painting again, it has resumed its normal appearance. He tells Charity that the transformation must have been in her imagination. She is willing to consider the possibility, but we know better. Quentin is a werewolf, a condition Petofi knows how to cure. Portraits on Dark Shadows have had supernatural qualities at least since #70, including portraits we saw Sam execute on this set in 1966, 1967, and 1968, and the show has borrowed from The Picture of Dorian Gray before. Moreover, Tate’s reaction to Charity is one of barely controlled panic. Nancy Barrett has to ramp up Charity’s own emotional distress to the limit to make it plausible she would not notice Tate’s extreme agitation. Perhaps if Tate were played by a better actor than the ever-disappointing Roger Davis, his response might have been ambiguous enough that Miss Barrett could keep the tone a bit lower, but his unequivocal display of alarm leaves her nowhere to go but over the top.

Mr Davis was under no obligation to play the scene transparently, since Tate later goes to Petofi’s henchman Aristide and lays out in so many words his precise relationship to Petofi’s operations and his knowledge of them. Tate’s career is his reward for selling his soul to Petofi, and he has already experienced great sorrow as a result of that bargain. Tate knows that the portrait changed to reflect the full Moon’s influence on Quentin and that Petofi is currently in possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins. Aristide tells us that Petofi’s own body is in suspended animation while he acts through Jamison. He also says that it was in 1797 that Petofi’s right hand was cut off, and that if he does not reclaim the hand in a few weeks, by the date of the one hundredth anniversary of the amputation, he will die and so will Tate.

Jamison/ Petofi is in the prison cell in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas has traveled back in time from the 1960s with some vaguely good intentions and is hanging around 1897 causing one disaster after another. Now, he is doing battle with Petofi and has locked him, in the form of Jamison, in the cell. Barnabas’ reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, guards Jamison/ Petofi during the day. Early in the episode, Jamison/ Petofi calls Magda and pleads with her to release him. He tells her that he is “just a little boy” and that she is a “rather heartless creature.” She says she wishes he were a little boy again, but that she isn’t stupid and he won’t fool her. Indeed, the phrase “rather heartless creature” and Jamison/ Petofi’s manner in delivering it sound so much like Thayer David as Petofi that they hardly count as an attempt to deceive Magda.

Later, Jamison/ Petofi casts a spell to summon Aristide, then calls to Magda again. When Magda arrives, Jamison/ Petofi gives himself a better script than the one from which he had acted in his previous scene with her. He pretends not to remember how he got into the cell and to be shocked that Magda knows he is there. Perhaps the utter transparency of his earlier pleadings was an attempt to get Magda to underestimate his abilities as a trickster.

In #803, we saw that when Petofi took possession of him Jamison’s right hand disappeared from his wrist, matching Petofi’s own mutilated condition. When Jamison/ Petofi feigns the amnesia that might come upon recovery from possession, we might therefore expect Magda to demand that he remove his gloves to prove that he is himself again. But he plays the part of Jamison so convincingly that we are not really surprised he does fool Magda. She goes into the cell, embraces Jamison/ Petofi, and he kisses her on the cheek. It is this kiss that spreads his magical power, and she realizes too late that she has been had.

Aristide arrives a moment later, and Jamison/ Petofi calls his portrayal of an innocent boy “an award-winning performance.” Indeed, if there had been daytime Emmys in 1969, David Henesy might have won one for his portrayal of Thayer David playing Petofi playing Jamison.

Aristide wants to kill Magda; Jamison/ Petofi forbids this. Under his power, she announces that she is responsible for all the evil that has happened in 1897. She was responsible for releasing Barnabas and therefore for all the murders and other harm he has done; she made Quentin a werewolf, and is to blame for his killings in his lupine form and for the curse his descendants will inherit; she stole Petofi’s severed hand and is at fault for the deaths of Rroma maiden Julianka and of her own husband Sandor that resulted from the hand’s presence. She even takes the blame for Quentin’s murder of her sister Jenny, the act for which the werewolf curse was meant as vengeance. Magda says she must be punished. Jamison/ Petofi tells her that he is not interested in punishing her. He has another use in mind for Magda She will lead him and Aristide to Barnabas’ coffin today, and they will destroy him.

Longtime viewers will perk up twice when Aristide says that Petofi lost his hand in 1797 and that he has exactly one hundred years to recover it. From December 1966 to March 1967, Dark Shadows’ first supernatural menace was undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who at intervals of exactly one hundred years incinerated herself and a young son of hers, who was always named David, in an unholy ceremony that renewed her existence, but not that of the Davids. Since the usual laws of nature don’t apply, the show needs some other causal mechanism to create suspense, and anniversaries will do as well as anything else. Another iteration of Laura was on earlier in the 1897 segment. It was fun to see her again, but they could shoehorn her into that year only by retconning away the one hundred year pattern in her immolations. It’s reassuring in a way to see that Petofi is bringing centenaries back.

The date 1797 is also significant. It was in 1796 that Barnabas died and became a vampire. We flashed back to that period for the show’s first costume drama segment in November 1967 to March 1968, and Barnabas went back to 1796 for a week in January 1969. So we may go back again some day, and if Petofi was alive and in his prime in 1797, we might run into him there.

Barnabas and Petofi are not the only characters from the 1790s who might be on the minds of attentive longtime viewers. Barnabas’ little sister Sarah died in 1796, and as a ghost was an extremely important part of the show from June to November 1967. We’ve been getting reminders of Sarah for the last several days. In #792 wicked witch Angelique produced a toy soldier of Barnabas’ that Sarah gave to strange and troubled boy David in #331. In #805, Charity found Sarah’s recorder, a prop that often served as Sarah’s calling card in 1967, and talked about learning to play it. And today, we see a portrait standing on the floor of the Evans cottage, a set which Sarah visited in #260, depicting a girl wearing a bonnet very much like the one Sarah wore as a ghost in 1967 and a pink dress just like the one she wore when we saw her as a living being in the flashback to the 1790s.

I wonder if, when they were making up the flimsies for this part of the show, they had thought of reintroducing Sarah. That would have required a recasting of the part- Sharon Smyth was noticeably older when we saw Sarah die in January 1968 than she was when Sarah was a ghost in June 1967, and by now we would wonder what she has been eating in the afterlife that has made her get so much taller. Besides, Miss Smyth* had stopped acting by this point.

The process of planning the stories was in two stages, a rough sketching of themes six months in advance, and a capsule of each episode written thirteen weeks ahead of time. There was a lot of flexibility when it came to putting those plans into effect. Some stories that were supposed to end within thirteen weeks were extended over years, while others that were expected to be a big deal petered out before they got going. In an interview preserved by Danny Horn at his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, writer Violet Welles said that many of the moments on the show that made the least sense were those written when the plans hadn’t worked out: “toward the end of the cycle, you’d have characters who were really not a lot of interest who had to play scenes with other characters who really didn’t have a lot of interest, dealing with things that basically didn’t concern them. Those were hard to write.”

This episode was taped on 25 July 1969; thirteen weeks before that was 21 May. Six months before was 25 January. By 25 January, Denise Nickerson had been on the show for two months as Amy Jennings. Nickerson was actually born on 1 April 1957, but they several times say that Amy is nine years old. When the show goes to 1897, Nickerson plays Nora Collins, who is also nine. On 19 May, Nickerson taped #761, the last episode she would appear in until #782. She is currently in the middle of a second long absence from 1897, unseen between #783 and #812. Her characters were so important in the months leading up to the 1897 segment and she played them so well that we wonder what they were thinking leaving her in the background so long.

Maybe they were thinking of bringing her back as Sarah. Nickerson didn’t look all that much like Sharon Smyth, and was a far more accomplished young actress than was Miss Smyth, but she did have brown hair, and the show prioritized hair color above all else in recasting parts. For example, two actresses followed Mrs Isles in the role of Vicki, neither of whom had much in common with her either in acting style or in looks, but who both had black hair. So perhaps there was a time when they intended to travel between 1897 and the 1790s and to meet Sarah, played by Denise Nickerson. If Nickerson were still alive, perhaps someone would ask her if she posed for the portrait that is standing on the floor of the Evans cottage today.

*She’s been using her married name for decades now, but when talking about her as a child it’s pretty weird to refer to her as “Mrs Lentz.” Since I use surnames for people associated with the making of the show and attach courtesy titles to surnames of living people, I have to call her “Miss Smyth.”

Episode 794: The hand doesn’t always bring out the best in people

Soap operas usually have at least one set representing a public gathering place where characters can meet one another unexpectedly. By this point in the development of Dark Shadows, the population of its universe is so heavy with monsters and witches that unexpected meetings usually take place in graveyards, or basements, or out in the woods someplace. But for the first seventy three weeks of the show, one of the most important meeting places was a tavern called The Blue Whale, and as the bartender Bob O’Connell was a significant, though almost always silent, presence.

The Blue Whale has been mentioned occasionally since those days, most recently in #704, shortly after vampire Barnabas Collins traveled back in time to the year 1897. Today is the first time we visit the Blue Whale in the 1897 segment, and the first time we have seen Bob O’Connell as the man pouring since #439, when Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. In those days, the tavern was called The Eagle and O’Connell’s character’s name was Mr Mooney.

When we arrive at the tavern today, there is only one customer, a young man sitting at a table. When the bartender sets a drink in front of him, he orders a Chartreuse. The bartender moves to take the drink he has just served, apparently thinking the young man changed his mind, but the young man explains that he is waiting for someone else. This man, a heavyset fellow with gray side whiskers, enters a moment before the bartender brings his liqueur.

The bartender wonders if Aristide still wants the drink he originally ordered. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The younger man is known to returning viewers as a knife-wielding criminal named Aristide, the older as his master, who calls himself Victor Fenn Gibbon. The two urgently discuss a woman named Angelique. Fenn Gibbon tells Aristide that he can almost forgive him for being so distracted by Angelique’s beauty that he allowed her to take “the Hand” from him, and furthermore that she appears to have magical powers. He says that he showed forged papers to one Edward Collins, and that on the basis of those papers Edward concluded that he was “a member of the British aristocracy” and invited him to stay at the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Aristide will have to stay in the village of Collinsport, since Fenn Gibbon does not want their association to become known to the Collinses. Aristide is bitterly disappointed.

This will remind longtime viewers of seagoing con man Jason McGuire and his sidekick, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. Jason turned up in March 1967 with a sinister plan and soon took up residence as a guest at Collinwood. Shortly afterward, Willie joined him. At first Jason insisted Willie stay in town. He made that insistence while sitting at virtually the same spot Fenn Gibbon and Aristide occupy today, and Willie reacted with the same disappointment Aristide shows when he was told to stay in a flophouse when his co-conspirator was to be a guest in a mansion.

When Fenn Gibbon tells us that the letters he showed Edward were forgeries, he raises the question of his real name. He seems to have a whimsical sense of humor, and a double barreled name that sounds like a species of small ape found in a peat marsh would appeal to someone trying to test the credulity of an American impressed by the naming conventions of the British upper classes. And indeed, returning viewers know that Edward lacks a sense of humor, is quite a snob, and displays all the tell-tale signs of a hopeless case of Anglophilia.

A small young woman takes her place at the bar. Fenn Gibbon recognizes her as of Romani extraction. He becomes agitated and leaves, but directs Aristide to get to know her. Aristide, whom returning viewers saw meet with misfortune when he tried to pick up Angelique, gladly complies. She responds to his initial approach with a flat declaration that she isn’t interested, but when he mentions the other Romani people in the area, she perks up. She gives her name as Julianka, and asks if he knows a woman named Magda. He says he has met her.

This will intrigue returning viewers. The other day, Aristide robbed Edward’s brother Quentin of the legendary “Hand of Count Petofi,” a severed appendage which broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi had stolen from Romani chieftain/ organized crime boss King Johnny Romana and which she plans to use to lift a curse she had placed that made Quentin a werewolf. When Quentin told Magda what had happened, he described Aristide only as a “young man.” If Magda really has met Aristide, Quentin’s reticent reply would have cost him an opportunity to help Magda figure out who her enemies really are.

Whether or not Aristide has met Magda, he does know where she lives. He escorts her to the grounds of the Old House at Collinwood. He does not offer to accompany her into the house, but asks her to meet him later at the Blue Whale. As Angelique had responded to Aristide’s overtures by choking him within an inch of his life, Julianka responds to them by drawing a dagger. Aristide just doesn’t have game.

After Aristide parts from Julianka, the werewolf pounces on him. He is about to be devoured when Fenn Gibbon shows up. The sight of pretty little Julianka drove Fenn Gibbon away in a barely concealed panic, but the werewolf doesn’t scare him a bit. He talks calmly to the werewolf, and says that he has orders for him. The werewolf docilely complies. This would be a much bigger surprise if the werewolf were not an adorable little doggie wearing a tidy suit with a watch fob, but it still sends the message that Fenn Gibbon has very extensive powers.

In the Old House, Julianka meets Barnabas. She says that she can use the Hand of Count Petofi to cure Quentin. She also says that Magda’s husband Sandor is in Montreal. This point will be of interest to regular viewers. We haven’t seen Sandor since #750. We may well have been wondering whatever happened to him. We are particularly likely to have been wondering about that this week, since Thayer David, who plays him, is playing Fenn Gibbon. They don’t usually double actors within a time period, and so Fenn Gibbon’s introduction might have suggested they wanted us simply to forget about Sandor. If they are going to take the trouble to tell us he is in Montreal, perhaps we can hope he will return before long, and simply not share scenes with Fenn Gibbon.

Barnabas is in a glum mood. He always is, more or less, but especially so when he has had to deal with Angelique. She told him earlier that she has moved on from her centuries-long fixation on him and now wants to marry Quentin. Barnabas responds with disbelief, declaring that the only reason she would do that is to spite him. Since her obsession led her to turn him into a vampire and kill everyone he ever loved, you can see that Barnabas would have mixed feelings when she tells him that she is looking for a fresh start. On the one hand, it suggest the possibility that he might achieve some kind of freedom. But he’s still a bloodsucking ghoul, his sister and mother and true love and uncle and aunt and countless others are still dead, and the person behind all that doesn’t even care about it anymore.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that it is only appropriate that Angelique made Barnabas a vampire. Angelique too is phenomenally selfish, and whatever she creates becomes a replica of herself. So of course her greatest achievement is to turn a man into a metaphor for extreme selfishness. Barnabas’ selfishness tempers his rage at Angelique’s news; when Julianka comes to him, he is deep in thought, no doubt brooding about what it all means for him.

In his post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn shows that the relationship between Fenn Gibbon and Aristide is modeled on that between Gutman and Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon, and he and his commenters demonstrate that that novel and its 1941 film version included explicit hints that Gutman and Wilmer were occasional sex partners. Aristide has been so eager to connect with the ladies that it’s hard to see much gay subtext between him and Fenn Gibbon so far, but it’s early days for them on the show. Moreover, the echo of Jason and Willie reminds us of the hints the show dropped that those two had shared more than a firm handshake at some point in their seafaring days. The original series bible and the early drafts of the first scripts had referred to The Blue Whale as “The Rainbow Bar”; maybe Aristide and Fenn Gibbon are destined to bring that name back.