dark shadows every day – Page 4 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 792: No place. And every place.

Quentin Collins has devoted himself to the pursuit of evil, and as a result he has two intractable problems. When Quentin murdered his wife Jenny, her sister, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, turned him into a werewolf. Magda later found out that Jenny had borne twins to Quentin, and since the curse is hereditary she tried to lift it. She placed the magical “Hand of Count Petofi” on Quentin before his transformation. That didn’t stop him becoming a wolfman, but it did cause his face to be severely disfigured when he returned to human form.

Now Quentin has made his way to the house of Evan Hanley, his onetime friend and partner in Satanism. Evan had recently been disfigured in the same way Quentin is disfigured, also as a result of contact with the hand, and Quentin knows that Evan stole the hand from Magda to use in an attempt to de-uglify himself. When Quentin sees that Evan is handsome again, Evan denies that he used the hand to restore his looks. He claims not to know what happened. That is as frustrating for the audience as it is for Quentin. We were sure Evan would start looking like himself again, and they went to enough trouble to show that he was not able to correct his appearance by himself that we were expecting the cure to involve a significant plot point. When Evan presents us with “It just happened” as his explanation of how he got his old face back, we are quite sympathetic to Quentin’s decision to grab a blunt instrument and knock him out.

Quentin finds the hand in a box in Evan’s desk, and a strange man immediately enters. He demands Quentin give him the hand at once. Quentin is willing to surrender the hand once he has used it to become his desperately handsome self again, but the man will not wait. He pulls a knife to underline his point. The knife is a flat piece of wood cut in a shape with some pronounced curves and no sharp edges, and the man holds it loosely at the end of an arm that is directly over the box Quentin could easily raise to disarm him. So the audience has to help a bit to make the confrontation credible. Still, the acting is very good, and the dialogue, in which the man combines lethal threats with apparently sincere expressions of sympathy for Quentin’s plight and jokes at his expense, is complex and lively enough that we are glad to make the effort. Besides, the man goes to the trouble of telling Quentin that the knife is named “The Dancing Girl” and that it was made long ago by a Persian swordsmith, so he’s giving our imaginations something to work with. I, for one, didn’t have any trouble keeping a straight face when Quentin lost the fight and the man left with the box containing the hand.

Kids, if you are going to rob someone at knife-point, do not imitate what Aristide is doing here. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin goes to Magda at the Old House on the estate of Collinwood and reports what happened. She is frightened, since she herself stole the hand from a Romani chieftain/ organized crime boss named King Johnny Romana. When he says that a strange man came to take the hand, she assumes that he is an emissary of King Johnny’s, and that his next stop will be to kill her. When Quentin says that the man was young, Magda is puzzled- the recognized norms dictate that King Johnny send “an elder of the tribe” to complete such a task. She sets aside her plan to flee, and agrees to help Quentin in his attempt to summon wicked witch Angelique.

Quentin and Evan conjured Angelique up in #711. In previous segments of the show, when it was set in the 1790s and in the 1960s, Angelique established herself as one of its principal sources of action. But she hasn’t had much to do in 1897. She had a showdown with fellow undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins back in May, and has barely been seen since. Quentin and Magda speak for the audience when they wonder where she is and what she has been doing. They speculate that she might have gone home to the depths of Hell, and light some black candles to accompany an incantation meant to call her thence.

Angelique does appear, but not at the Old House. Evan finds her in his parlor when he comes to. One of the possible explanations for the restoration of Evan’s good looks was that he made some kind of bargain with Angelique; this is excluded, not only when he is surprised to see her, but when she asks questions that make it clear she knows nothing about the hand or anything that has happened since Magda brought it back with her. Angelique orders Evan to give her a complete briefing, and we cut back to the Old House.

Quentin is still in front of the black candles, fervently reciting his mumbo-jumbo, and Magda is telling him they have failed. After a moment, Angelique enters. Quentin jubilantly declares that he has succeeded in summoning her, and Angelique says that she is not aware of that. She tells him she was with Evan, and asks about the hand. Quentin tells her it was taken from him, and asks for her assistance. She says she is willing to help him, for a price, and that as a token of her good faith she will retrieve the hand. But first she insists he tells her everything he knows. We cut to the waterfront.

There, the man who took the hand from Quentin is standing alone in the fog. Angelique enters and flirts with him. He gives his name as Aristide. She says she is a puppeteer, and that if he lends her his handkerchief she will perform a trick. She wraps his handkerchief around the neck of a doll depicting a Continental soldier, a familiar prop from 1967 that became prominent during the 1790s segment, and squeezes it. Aristide begins choking, and Angelique orders him to give her the hand before he dies.

The Collinsport Strangler strikes again? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The closing credits bill Michael Stroka as playing “Aristede,” an unusual spelling. The following item, posted in the comments under Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, confirms my resolution to stick to the conventional spelling:

Factoid… I have the original script for episode 808, and Aristede is spelled throughout as Aristide.

Comment left 3 September 2017 by “Isaac from Studio 16 on W 53rd” on Danny Horn, “Episode 792: Dances with Wolves,” Posted at Dark Shadows Every Day, 19 December 2015.

In the same comment thread, Carol Zerucha goes on at length about Stroka’s ethnicity. He was Slovak, as she is, and she had a big crush on him when she was a kid watching the show. The characters in today’s episode assume that Aristide is Roma, but Ms Zerucha points out that we have no reason to assume they are right, and that he, too, might be Slovak.

Also in that thread, FotB “Straker” says that Aristide looks like William F. Buckley, Jr. I agree. I wish they had at some point cast him as a character who leaned way back in his chair and used polysyllabic words.

Episode 787: You said that, I said nothing

Dark Shadows fans like to make jokes about the inefficiency of law enforcement in the fictional town of Collinsport, but in this episode we see that the sheriff and his men really never had a chance. The ancient and esteemed Collins family controls everything in the area, and they will go to any lengths to keep the police from obtaining the information they need to do their job effectively.

Stuffy Edward Collins invokes the police when he demands that broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi vacate the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Magda laughs and says that if the police show up, she will tell them that Edward’s distant cousin Barnabas is a vampire. Horrified at the damage it would do to the Collins family name were word of Barnabas’ condition to get out, Edward backs down. Barnabas is at large and has been responsible for at least six homicides since traveling through time to the year 1897, including the murder of Edward’s brother Carl in the drawing room of their home just the other day. But evidently that is a small matter to Edward compared to the danger that the sheriff might be indiscreet.

Barnabas materializes at the police station, where a werewolf is being held in custody. A deputy is startled to see Barnabas in front of him all of a sudden. For only the third time in the series, Barnabas says “Look into my eyes!” and induces an hypnotic trance in someone not his blood thrall. It is the first time he has exercised this power on someone other than Edward’s nine year old daughter Nora. Barnabas tells the deputy that once he has completed his task, he will remember nothing. So he is following the family policy with regard to keeping the police in total ignorance.

Edward shows up and sees Barnabas. Edward is wearing a cross and holding a revolver loaded with six silver bullets, which on Dark Shadows are as effective against vampires as they are against werewolves. Barnabas hides behind the deputy and tells Edward that he is acting in the interests of the future of the Collins family. Edward says that he belongs to the past, not the future. Barnabas doesn’t explain anything; he vanishes.

Not exactly an heroic look for ol’ Barney. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas’ post-hypnotic suggestion has its effect, and the deputy is bewildered to find himself face to face with Edward. Edward tells him that they must watch the werewolf. The deputy starts to say something about the sheriff, and Edward replies “The sheriff doesn’t realize what this animal is!” Of course he doesn’t, no one will tell him anything about it.

Back in the Old House, Barnabas and Magda lament their failures. He could not take the werewolf from the cell in the police station to the cell in the basement of the house; she could not persuade lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley to return a severed hand he stole from them. They wanted to do these things because the werewolf is Edward’s brother Quentin, whom Magda is trying to free from his curse by means of the hand’s magical powers. Barnabas knows that if they do not succeed, terrible consequences will ensue in 1969.

Closing Miscellany

It is a serious mistake to show the werewolf when he is not in the act of committing a spectacular homicide. They didn’t have the budget to put him in full-body makeup, so he wears a tidy little suit, complete with a watch fob. He is so well put together that it is difficult to imagine him inspiring any fear other than the fear that one will not meet his apparently rather exacting standards of attire.

*Whoooo’s* a well-dressed doggie? You are! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is a noteworthy blooper in this one. Magda confronts Evan, declaring “The book, I know you took it from the Old House!” Usually actors roll with each other’s bobbled lines, but this is far enough out that Humbert Allen Astredo obviously has no idea where Grayson Hall is in the script. All he can do is ask “The book?” “The hand!” she corrects.

They also make a goof in the closing credits. This is one of three consecutive days when Louis Edmonds is billed not as Edward, but as Roger Collins, the role he plays in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. He’s been identified correctly throughout the first seventeen weeks of the 1897 segment and everyone else is identified correctly in these episodes, so it is not clear what happened.

Danny Horn’s posts at Dark Shadows Every Day are often laugh-out-loud funny, and the one for this episode is especially so. His description of the scene between Magda and Evan has some big laughs, and when he imagines the sheriff’s deputies trying to catch the werewolf by “putting on their alluring lady-werewolf disguises a la the Warner Brothers cartoons,” well that’s just super how could anyone improve on it.

Episode 786: Dreams of long ago

The evil Gregory Trask has married Judith Collins and become the master of the estate of Collinwood. Trask shows his daughter, the repressed Charity, her new home in the great house. In the drawing room, Trask tells Charity that he wants her to marry Judith’s brother, the rakish Quentin, to whom he refers as the one eligible bachelor remaining in the Collins family. This is odd- like his brother Quentin, Edward Collins is a widower, and unlike Quentin Edward is sufficiently conscious of the appearance of propriety that it would be relatively easy for the sanctimonious Trask to control him. Besides, Edward’s son Jamison is Judith’s heir, giving Trask a reason to keep a close eye on both of them.

Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi enters and announces that she wants to speak with maidservant Beth Chavez. Trask says that he wants to talk to Magda alone in the drawing room. Charity wants to leave anyway; she hasn’t visited her mother’s grave today. Trask is worried because it is dark and both a vampire and a werewolf are loose on the grounds of the estate, but he and Charity decide it will probably be fine, so off she goes.

Trask gives Magda 24 hours to vacate her home in the Old House on the estate. She tells him she can prove that he murdered his first wife, prompting Trask to reconsider the eviction notice.

Magda lowers the boom on Trask. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the woods, Charity sees the werewolf, whom we know to be Quentin. She runs back home in a panic. Trask initially opposes Magda’s offer to walk Charity to her bedroom, but when she insists he crumbles. While Charity rests, Magda takes out her tarot deck and tells Charity she will read the cards for her. She brushes Charity’s objections aside as lightly as she had her father’s. She finds that Charity will be paired with an attractive man, but that this man is evil and that she must avoid him at all costs.

Charity has a dream in which she and Quentin speak tenderly to each other and kiss, only for him to zone out while a werewolf appears. The bulk of Charity’s dream consists of her and Quentin striking poses while the soundtrack plays the sickly little waltz Quentin obsessively plays on his gramophone, and David Selby’s voice recites some dreary lyrics that apparently go with it. This does nothing to explain the characters’ in-universe motivations, but it does explain the real-world reason why Dan Curtis wanted the writers to get the audience thinking of Charity and Quentin as a potential couple and to have her encounter the werewolf. In his post about the episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn explains that the sequence is product placement for some records that were released around this time. It’s interesting that Charity has inherited so much of her father’s money-mindedness that she sells advertising time in her dreams, but the actual sequence is unbelievably tedious to watch.

Episode 780: Carl was not mad

In yesterday’s episode, inveterate prankster Carl Collins told his brother, the rakishly handsome Quentin, that their distant cousin Barnabas was a vampire. Quentin has problems of his own, and he is counting on Barnabas to help him. So he locked Carl up in Barnabas’ hiding place, expecting that when night came Barnabas would prune one more branch off the Collins family tree.

Today, Quentin finds that Carl has escaped. He goes to Barnabas and tells him what has happened. Carl’s practical jokes annoy Barnabas intensely, and Barnabas has never bothered to conceal his disdain for him. He reacts to Quentin’s news with fury and a lot of orders. When Quentin later finds Barnabas standing by Carl’s corpse in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, he is really torn up about his brother’s death for almost a whole minute.

Quentin mourns for Carl- blink and you’ll miss it. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

A knock comes at the door; it is the oppressively evil Rev’d Gregory Trask. Quentin keeps Trask in the foyer for a bit while Barnabas hides Carl’s body. When Trask forces his way into the drawing room, Barnabas is gone. Carl’s body is cunningly hidden… behind the curtains, propped upright. Of course it falls out almost immediately. Earlier in the episode, Carl took Trask to Barnabas’ hiding place, and we saw that Barnabas had single-handedly lugged his coffin and the structure on which it rests some distance away. If he is strong enough to do that, surely he could have tossed Carl’s body out the window. And regular viewers know that there is a secret panel in this room, of which Barnabas has repeatedly shown that he is well aware. They would probably have expected him to hide the body there. That he just stashes it behind the curtains where it is certain to come into Trask’s view suggests that he isn’t even trying to get away with this particular murder.

Closing Miscellany

John Karlen is breathing pretty deeply during Carl’s big closeup as a corpse. It’s really confusing, I thought they were telling us he wasn’t dead yet.

I don’t know what the writers planned for Carl in the flimsies they sketched out six months before this episode was made, though there is so little room for him in subsequent plot-lines that I suspect he was supposed to die at about this point in the story. Still, his death was accelerated because Karlen had other things to do. He won’t be back on the show until #956, in February of next year.

The creaky little waltz that Quentin listens to obsessively was released as a single in June of 1969 and would hit #13 on the Billboard Hot 100 in August. Regular viewers may be sick of it already, and the characters certainly wish Quentin would get another record. It’s Trask’s turn to complain about it today, giving him something in common with Barnabas.

Trask wears a cross which he uses as a weapon against Barnabas. The show is oddly inconsistent about the effect of the cross on vampires. We’ve seen other characters use crosses against them, and at one point it was said that a cross inside the lid of Barnabas’ coffin immobilized him. But his hiding place is in the middle of a cemetery full of grave markers in the shape of huge crosses, and we see several of them today. Barnabas just walks right past those with no problem. You might think that since the show was made in the USA, where sincerity is so highly regarded, that the cross might be effective against him only if it is wielded by the pure of heart. But Trask is every bit as evil as are Barnabas and Quentin, and it works for him. It’s a puzzlement.

In a long comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, I responded to a discussion about whether there is a point in thinking of Barnabas as someone possessed by demons:

I think of the climax of the Iliad. As Achilles moves in to kill Hector, Athena takes hold of his spear and drives it in, delivering the fatal wound herself.

For modern readers, this may ruin the story. The whole poem has been leading up to this moment; we’ve spent a lot of time with Achilles, listening to him try to figure out what it would mean for him to kill Hector. So why have the goddess take over at the last minute? Isn’t it an evasion of Achilles’ responsibility for his actions, and a cheat for us as we’ve been observing his psychological development?

For the original audience, it was not. They actually believed in their gods. Athena really existed, as far as they were concerned. When an event was important enough, they took a interest. If it was really huge, they would get involved. Moreover, the gods worked closely with each other. So much so that you didn’t pray to one at a time, but always to groups of them. When Athena joins Achilles in his fight, it isn’t her pushing him aside- it’s him doing something so important it blurs the boundary between human and divine.

Something like that is at work in the traditional, pre-modern, conception of demonic possession. To say that a person is possessed is a way of looking at behavior that is reducible neither to moralistic judgment nor to psychological analysis. It isn’t individualistic in the way that those modes of discourse are. Rather, it suggests that the boundaries between the person and the spiritual forces of darkness have broken down. Perhaps the person is partly to blame for that breakdown, but the whole point is that s/he is no longer a distinct being, but is merging into those supernatural forces.

So, imagine a version of Dark Shadows where Elizabeth Collins Stoddard really was the main character. Her whole approach to life is denial. So, you could have had a story with a beginning, middle, and end. In the beginning, we see the lengths she has gone to in her quest to keep from ever having to have an embarrassing conversation. In the middle, we see various horrors take place around her, each worse than the one before, each more obvious than the one before, and each time she finds a way to convince herself it doesn’t exist. At the end, a couple of innocent characters go to her in the drawing room of Collinwood to rescue her from the monsters who are running rampant there. She looks at them placidly and tells them she sees nothing wrong. Why ever do they think she would want to leave her home? All the while leathery-winged demons are fluttering about her head. She doesn’t see them, and they have no choice but to flee.

Comment left 10 November 2020 by “Acilius” on “Episode 780: The Establishment Vampire,” posted 2 December 2015 by Danny Horn at Dark Shadows Every Day

Episode 777: Two murderers at Collinwood

The opening voiceover, delivered by Kay Frye, tells us that a vampire named Dirk Wilkins has been destroyed. We hear that Dirk was the pawn of someone called Barnabas Collins, who hoped to use him to conceal a secret of his own. The narrator also says that “certain things cannot be forgotten, as Judith Collins will learn this day.” This implies that the day’s action will center on challenges in information management.

Returning viewers may not recognize Miss Frye’s voice. We have seen her as Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl, improbable fiancée of prankster Carl Collins, and victim of Dirk’s first murder. As narrator, Miss Frye forgoes Pansy’s rather uncertain East London accent. She also takes a different approach to the role of narrator than she had to that of Pansy. When we first saw her, Pansy was putting on an act for Carl’s benefit, and Pansy is a terrible actress. When Carl left, Pansy dropped her act and we could see that Miss Frye is as capable a performer as the character is a poor one. Today’s voiceover gives Miss Frye a still better role. The crass and cynical Pansy did not call for much nuance. But as narrator, Miss Frye speaks with a quiet urgency and subtle modulation of the voice that leaves us wondering what might have been had she been cast in a bigger part.

We cut to what regular viewers recognize as the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in the year 1897, where a man in a cassock is talking tenderly with a woman in a colorful dress. The man is very affectionate, even stroking the woman’s neck with two fingers.

Trask fingers Judith’s neck. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The woman is the Judith Collins mentioned in the opening voiceover; the man is the Rev’d Gregory Trask. It is not mentioned in the episode, but Trask is the keeper of a boarding school called Worthington Hall. Also unmentioned is that Trask conspired with a Satanist named Evan Hanley to brainwash a young man named Tim Shaw, one of the teachers at Worthington Hall, and that once he was under their control they used Tim to murder Trask’s wife Minerva. Trask wanted Minerva out of the way, evidently because he plans to marry Judith and take control of her vast fortune.

Judith is disconsolate at the thought that she was under Dirk’s control. While Trask is talking sweetly to Judith, Tim enters. Trask pulls a gun on him and instructs Judith to call the police and report that Minerva’s murderer has been captured.

Tim, who has up to this point ranged from mousy to timid to utterly defeated, is suddenly assertive. He tells Judith that she won’t want to telephone the sheriff. He says that there are two murderers at Collinwood, and she is one of them.

Tim says that he came upon Judith in the act of shooting neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond to death. Returning viewers know that this is true; Tim, Judith, and Rachel were all under Dirk’s power at the time, and for reasons that made sense only to the dim-witted Dirk he ordered Judith to kill Rachel. A vague memory comes back to Judith and prompts her to confess; when Trask realizes that Tim will not back down from his accusation and Judith will not participate in a cover-up, he tells Tim he will make a deal with him.

Trask calls the sheriff. He addresses himself to “Sheriff Furman,” a name we have not heard before. It quickly becomes clear that we are not likely to hear it again. He tells the sheriff that Tim was out of town the night Minerva was poisoned and that, in his grief, he had forgotten this fact. Returning viewers know that Evan has told the sheriff that he saw Tim with Minerva while she was dying. One might assume that Trask would at least have to call Evan first to ensure that he gave the sheriff a story to account for this discrepancy, but Trask doesn’t bother to contact Evan at all. Evidently the sheriff is such an abysmal moron that Trask can safely assume he won’t think of any questions.

Sheriff Furman’s manifest incompetence prompts one of Danny Horn’s funniest posts at Dark Shadows Every Day, in which he writes a series of hypothetical police reports about the killings we have seen so far in the 1897 segment. One of Danny’s recurring themes is that law enforcement characters on Dark Shadows serve only to delay the plot. There is so much story in 1897 that the producers saw no need to slow things down, so it shouldn’t be surprising that neither Sheriff Furman nor any of his deputies appear on-screen.

For my part, I wish they had stayed in 1897 considerably longer, so I would have liked to spend one day a week or so without much forward narrative movement. That might have included some episodes when the police show up and you do a lot of recapping, some built around character studies of the type Joe Caldwell wrote so well in 1967, some in which we reconnect with Collinwood as it is on the night in 1969 when Barnabas left for the past, and so on. Not only would that have extended the show’s strongest period and helped new viewers catch up to what is going on, it would also have enabled them to make more use of the many fine actors whom we go weeks on end without seeing. Even David Selby, whose handsome rake Quentin Collins is breaking out as a pop culture sensation at this point, hasn’t been on the show since #768. Other fan favorites are in the midst of even longer unexplained absences; for example, Lara Parker’s wicked witch Angelique has not been seen since #760.

Tim, who was out of the room while Trask was on the phone, returns. He “gladly!” agrees to leave Trask’s employ, and at first says that he will “gladly” leave the village of Collinsport. But then it dawns on him that he needs a job, and he blackmails Judith into assuring him that she will find a place for him in her business.

This will remind longtime viewers of the spring and early summer of 1967. At that time, Dark Shadows took place in a contemporary setting, and there were two major storylines. One was the introduction of the vampire Barnabas Collins. The other was the blackmail of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard by seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Like Judith, Liz owns all of the Collins family’s assets; also like her, she is played by Joan Bennett. Threatening to expose the terrible secret that she was a murderer, Jason forced Liz to take him into her home, pay his debts, give him a job, and agree to marry him. When she finally balked rather than go through with the marriage, it turned out Liz wasn’t a murderer after all, the whole thing was a scam Jason cooked up.

Jason was a short-term character brought on to tie up the last non-supernatural narrative loose ends and fill time while Barnabas found his footing, as witness the casting of Dennis Patrick, who refused to sign a contract for the role since he wanted to be free to move to Los Angeles without giving more than 24 hours notice. But in those days, before the internet or soap opera magazines, the audience had no way of knowing that. They may well have thought that Barnabas would be destroyed and Jason’s oppression of Liz would become the show’s backbone.

In yesterday’s episode, a vampire was in fact destroyed. In May and June 1967, Barnabas’ chief victim was Maggie Evans, who like Rachel was played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. It was possible then that he would kill Maggie and that she would rise as a vampire, as Lucy Westenra did in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, compelling the good guys to stake her. Rachel doesn’t become a vampire, but Trask does tell the sheriff that it was the men hunting Dirk who shot her, accidentally. So when the final appearances of Dirk and Rachel lead to Judith both submitting to blackmail because of her mistaken belief that she is a murderer and taking steps towards marrying an overwhelmingly evil man, longtime viewers will remember a resolution that seemed to be on the horizon back in 1967.

Carl enters. Judith has no patience for her childish brother, and dismisses his concerns about Pansy. She tells Carl to go with Tim to the Old House on the estate. Tim took Rachel to the Old House when she was dying. Barnabas, who has traveled back in time to 1897, is staying there, and he had befriended Rachel. Tim had hoped Barnabas would help them, but it was daylight and he was not available. Rachel died in the Old House, and Tim left her corpse there when he came to the great house.

When Carl and Tim leave, Trask warns Judith that she almost gave herself away. “You must be more cautious, Judith! Even Carl was suspicious.” Judith agrees, showing that Trask is luring her into his world of lies.

We see Tim and Carl at the Old House. Rachel’s body is no longer there. Who took it, and why didn’t Tim and Carl leave with them? We are not told. Carl goes on about how wonderful Pansy is, and says he is going to the police because he thinks someone at Collinwood has done her harm. Evidently Carl’s suspicions are more highly developed than Trask realizes. Trask underestimates Carl because he is focused exclusively on Rachel and Tim. He never met Pansy, and knows nothing about her.

Carl leaves the house, and Pansy’s ghost appears to Tim. Tim is bewildered, and asks Pansy if she is looking for Barnabas. That is a natural assumption- after all, it is Barnabas’ house and Tim has no idea who Pansy is. When she vanishes into thin air, he shouts for Carl. He finds Carl not far outside the door, and describes the woman he saw. Carl jumps to the conclusion that she is Pansy, and starts calling for her. He sends Tim along to the great house, and continues searching for Pansy.

Evidently Carl’s search did not take long, because we see him standing next to Tim in the drawing room at the great house in the next shot. It is Rachel’s funeral.

Trask delivers a eulogy in which he says of Rachel that “The littlest angels have a new teacher.” Even first-time viewers are likely to laugh out loud at this ridiculous turn of phrase, and those who have been with the show for a while will see more in it than that. From childhood on, Rachel was Trask’s prisoner, first as one of the pupils imprisoned in his horrible school, then when he extorted her into staying on as a teacher with threats that he would have her prosecuted on false charges of theft and murder if she tried to leave. He made flagrant sexual advances to her as well, all the more hideous because he has been responsible for her since she was a small girl. In Rachel and Tim’s helpless personalities, we saw what can happen when a criminal like Trask is given an opportunity to turn a person into filet of human being, and an ominous sign of what might lie in store for Judith’s nephew and niece Jamison and Nora, who are currently among the inmates at Worthington Hall.

Tim and Carl bury Rachel themselves. My wife, Mrs Acilius, asked “Isn’t this usually handled by professionals?” Presumably whoever took Rachel’s body from the Old House would have been a better choice for the work than are Tim and Carl, but that isn’t the Collins way.

Tim announces his intention to get drunk. Carl brings up other things they might do, and Tim says that those will have to wait until after he gets drunk. After Tim leaves to pursue his eminently sound plan, Carl hears Pansy singing. He wonders if she is dead. He realizes that her voice is coming from the mausoleum which we know to have been Barnabas’ longtime home. Carl is played by John Karlen, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s plays the luckless Willie Loomis. It was Willie who inadvertently released Barnabas from the mausoleum, so longtime viewers who see this actor on this set will expect something important to happen in the story.

Episode 776: We used to sing sea shanties

Vampire Dirk Wilkins has bitten neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond, fugitive schoolteacher Tim Shaw, and wealthy spinster Judith Collins. As we open, it is early morning and all three of them are gathered in Dirk’s hiding place. At Dirk’s command, Judith shoots Rachel. Tim does not know of Dirk’s wishes for Rachel, whom he loves. He is shocked by Judith’s deed, and takes Rachel to the Old House on Judith’s estate, Collinwood. The Old House is currently home to Judith’s distant cousin, Barnabas Collins. Tim knows that Barnabas is fond of Rachel, and hopes he will help them. But Barnabas is not available, and Rachel dies in Tim’s arms.

In the great house on the estate, Judith’s brother Edward and overwhelmingly evil charlatan Gregory Trask are fretting about the situation. Edward says that Barnabas believes that the vampire is Dirk; Trask replies “Then I would tend to believe it is not.” In #774, Trask found that Judith was bleeding from wounds on her neck and was in a robot-like daze; he had heard her calling Dirk’s name, and drew the conclusion that Dirk was the vampire. But his prejudice against Barnabas is so strong that he forgets about that.

Judith comes back, holding her revolver. Edward takes the gun and finds that it has recently been fired, and three chambers are missing their bullets. Edward leads Judith to her bedroom, and Trask goes into the drawing room, where by himself and in evident sincerity he calls on God to help him smite the forces of evil.

Returning viewers might be amazed at Trask’s attitude. He just completed a deal with a Satanist to use black magic to murder his wife; how can he believe himself to be God’s chosen instrument for this sort of work? But we have already seen that Trask’s hypocrisy is so extreme that it has given rise to its opposite. He has fooled himself, and is capable of the most earnest faith. In this he is the mirror image of his ancestor, whom we came to know between November 1967 and March 1968, when the show was set in the 1790s. That Rev’d Trask was such a true-believing fanatic that he became a hypocrite, so convinced of the rightness of his ends that he could not see how rotten the means were by which he was pursuing them.

Trask prays for God’s help against evil. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later, Dirk summons Judith. Edward follows her to Dirk’s hiding place, where he manages to stake the vampire, destroying him. He strikes quite a few inches below the heart, pretty well in the mid-gut region, but that apparently suffices.

This is perhaps the bloodiest episode of Dark Shadows so far. Rachel’s blouse is covered with blood, and blood spurts out of Dirk’s mouth while Edward is driving the stake into his belly. There is a good deal of discussion of this in the comments section of Danny Horn’s post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day. Many who were too young to remember the original broadcast wondered if there was public pushback against the graphic violence. The original fans among the commenters responded that no, to the extent that people were worried about the content of daytime TV at the time their concerns were focused on sex, not violence. One of the most memorable responses came from Friend of the Blog Percy’s Owner:

Not really. My dad remarried a woman with very conservative ideas about what I should watch and read. She had to prescreen everything. She worked and got home after DS, so she couldn’t have stopped me from watching it, but once I assured her that no one was having sex, she was FINE with it. She actually asked me if this was the soap with the woman who didn’t know who the father of her baby was. When I was able to say with absolute truth that there were no babies at all on DS she didn’t care.

Comment left by “Percy’s Owner,” 24 November 2015, on Danny Horn, “Episode 776: Blood Sports,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 23 November 2015.

I didn’t participate in that part of the discussion, but I did join in on another topic. Some commenters expressed the opinion that the portion of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897 went on too long, and that too many actors played multiple roles in it. I said that I was of the opposite view:

Oh, I disagree- I wish 1897 had gone on longer and had included a lot more doubling. For example, I’d have liked to see John Karlen come back as a suave, smooth-talking fellow. And Don Briscoe as a straight-up imitation of W. C. Fields, in the same way that Tony Peterson gave Jerry Lacy a chance to do a straight-up imitation of Humphrey Bogart. And Clarice Blackburn as the diametric opposite of Abigail/ Minerva- she could have been Magda’s black sheep cousin, the shameless woman.

Comment left by “Acilius” 9 November 2020 on Danny Horn, “Episode 776: Blood Sports,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 23 November 2015.

Episode 774: Sometimes people change their roles in life

Tim Shaw, uptight teacher turned victim of brainwashing turned fugitive murder suspect, makes his way into an abandoned root cellar. He finds a coffin there. Naturally, he opens the coffin. That’s what everyone does on Dark Shadows when they find a coffin where one shouldn’t be. You meet the most interesting people that way.

Tim finds that the coffin is empty, and goes into a dark corner to hide. Someone comes to the door, and Tim gets up to greet whoever it might be. He hasn’t been a fugitive very long, and hasn’t quite perfected all the skills that the status calls for.

Tim sees Dirk Wilkins, a dimwitted servant of the ancient and esteemed Collins family who has been missing for several days. Tim calls out “Dirk!” This is the first time we learn the two men know each other. They are unlikely to have been friends. Tim rarely left the school where he worked. The school has been housed in a building on the Collins family’s estate for several weeks, so it makes sense that he and Dirk would have met, but Dirk has been unpleasant to everyone we have seen him with, including his employers and pretty girls he wants to attract. It is hard to imagine the painfully shy Tim befriending him.

Dirk turns out to be a vampire, and he bites Tim. We then cut back to the school. The headmaster, the overwhelmingly evil Gregory Trask, is browbeating Tim’s fellow teacher and onetime girlfriend, neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond. Returning viewers will recall that Trask has made flagrant passes at Rachel, and also know that Trask conspired with a local Satanist to cast a spell on Tim which caused him to kill Trask’s wife Minerva. Trask is pretending to be upset about Minerva’s murder and to believe that Rachel plotted with Tim to commit it. He tells Rachel that if she does not leave the school, he will accept that she is innocent. She goes to her room, distraught. Later in the episode, Trask will telephone his co-conspirator, gloating that the authorities are on their side.

Spinster Judith Collins, sole proprietor of all her family’s great wealth, shows up to offer her condolences to Trask. They find that Rachel is gone, and he tells her that she must have gone with Tim. Trask realizes that Tim and Rachel have no money, and wonders if there is anyone who might give them enough to allow them to flee the state. Judith says that her distant cousin Barnabas Collins, who is currently staying at the Old House on the estate, is very fond of Rachel and that he might give them some money. She says that she will get in her carriage and go to the Old House before Rachel can get there. She will tell Barnabas about the murder and about Tim and Rachel’s involvement in it, thereby ensuring that he will not give them any money.

Judith consoles he new widower. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Judith knocks on the front door of the Old House and gets no answer. She enters, and finds the house empty. She is still in the front parlor when Dirk enters. She chastises him for staying on her property after she dismissed him, and tells him she will call the police if he is not gone within 24 hours. He walks towards her, backing her against the wall and ignoring her demands that he let her leave. He says that he is no longer her servant, but that she will soon be his. He bites her.

Judith was right when she told Trask that Rachel would go to the Old House. Rachel does go there. She peeks in the window, sees Judith sitting in a chair, and scurries off. This is rather an odd moment- Judith told Trask just a few minutes before that she would go to the Old House in her carriage. It seems unlikely that she drove her own carriage and there is no driver waiting outside, but even if if she did the carriage must still be sitting there in full view. How did Rachel fail to notice it?

Trask comes to the Old House and tells Judith he wanted to offer her his support in her conversation with Barnabas. Trask knows how fond Barnabas is of Rachel, and may well suppose that he would want more details about Minerva’s death than Judith could offer before he agreed to regard Rachel as a criminal. Judith says Dirk’s name when Trask enters, and when Trask notices the bleeding wounds on her neck he quickly realizes that Dirk inflicted them.

We cut back to the root cellar, which we see Rachel entering. She sees the coffin, and of course opens it. That’s just good manners. She turns, and sees Dirk in the entryway.

In his post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn transcribes a conversation among Roger Davis, Jerry Lacy, and director Lela Swift captured on video when the three were on a panel at a convention:

Roger Davis: I do remember being very excited when I got to be a vampire on the show, so excited, and the first person that I got to bite was Joan Bennett, and I was so enthusiastic and excited I knocked her over — flat on her back!

Jerry Lacy: I remember when you did it, it was rehearsal in the morning.

Roger: Was it?

Jerry: Yeah. You grabbed her, and you bit her, and then you just threw her. And she was already sixty years old then.

Lela Swift: Then we had to pick Joan up and put her together again.

Danny Horn, “Episode 774: What’s Up, Dirk,” posted at Dark Shadows Every Day, 21 November 2015.

To which my comment is, fuck that guy. I don’t make a habit of swearing, but there are not enough curse words in the language to express my reaction to Mr Davis chortling through his reminiscences of physically abusing his female scene partners. He can fuck off straight to hell.

This story gives an extra dimension to the scene between Judith and Trask in the Old House. Mr Lacy plays Trask’s relentless evil so effectively that he is difficult to watch; my wife, Mrs Acilius, refuses to watch his episodes this time through the series. It usually makes a viewer’s skin crawl to see Trask posing as a representative of something good. But knowing that behind Trask in the position of standing by Judith after she had been attacked by Dirk was Jerry Lacy standing by Joan Bennett after she had been attacked by Roger Davis, our response is much more complex. After all the times we might have wondered how anyone could fail to see through Trask’s blatant hypocrisy, this time enough of the thoroughly decent humanity of Jerry Lacy peeks through that we can understand why Judith has been so supportive of Trask.

The cast went into makeup after the morning rehearsal. From the looks of Dirk’s fake mustache and artificial pallor, makeup artist Vincent LoScalzo must not have brought his usual enthusiasm to his work when Mr Davis sat in his chair. The mustache in particular is so crudely affixed that it looks like Mr Davis might have done his own makeup today.

Episode 773: Tear up the card

A little over two weeks ago, Dark Shadows started an homage to The Manchurian Candidate, with some touches added from Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades. The overwhelmingly evil Rev’d Gregory Trask, keeper of a sadistic cult disguised as a boarding school, coerced Satanist Evan Hanley into casting a spell on Tim Shaw, one of the teachers at the school. When Tim sees the Queen of Spades, he will be prompted to poison Trask’s wife Minerva.

The whole point of employing an assassin is to give yourself an unbreakable alibi. Since Tim will not remember Evan or the spell once he has killed Minerva, the logical thing would seem to be to arrange it so that Tim poisons Minerva in front of several witnesses and that he still has the vial of poison on him when he is caught. But instead, Evan himself turns up as Minerva is in her death throes, and he is the only witness. After Evan erases Tim’s memory, Tim defeats Evan in a sword fight, then runs away, taking the poison with him. Tim flees to his only friend, fellow teacher Rachel Drummond, and tells her that if it is a matter of Evan’s word against his, he will have no chance in court. Later, Evan confronts Rachel and roughs her up, trying to intimidate her out of helping Tim in any way.

Evan is reduced to having a sword fight with Tim. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Absent witnesses to accuse Tim on his behalf or an alibi for himself, Evan may as well have skipped the whole brainwashing bit. Had he simply strangled Minerva and claimed he saw Tim do it, he would be in exactly the position he is in now.

The problem for Evan’s plan is that it is taking place at this point in the series. The segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897 is stuffed to bursting with vivid characters, each of them involved in at least one dynamic storyline. That makes it, from most points of view, the best part of the show, but it also makes it very difficult to get a bunch of people together. Any two characters you put in the same scene are likely to join plot threads together in new and consequential ways. That makes for a lot of excitement, but it makes it very difficult to do just one thing at a time.

For example, say Tim had insisted on bringing Minerva the poisoned tea while in the drawing room at the great house of Collinwood with rich spinster Judith Collins, Judith’s brother Edward, and Minerva’s daughter Charity, while maidservant Beth waits on the company. Trask is apparently scheming to marry Judith and get her money once Minerva is out of the way. Put her in Minerva’s death scene, and you accelerate that part of the story, perhaps beyond the pace you are prepared to follow up. Edward is starting to suspect that his distant cousin, recently arrived Barnabas Collins, might be a vampire. Those suspicions are the result of two qualities in which Edward is no more than average, his ability to notice the obvious and his concern for his son. But if you make him a participant in another story about a crime, any remarks he might make that would display any brainpower whatever would transform him into the show’s resident sleuth. Beth and Charity are both blood thralls of Barnabas’; if either of them were in the room while the poisoning took place, we would therefore expect them to go directly to him and start wondering how he would react to the news. That would shift our focus to him, subordinating the Tim and Minerva story to the Barnabas story. Virtually every other character is disqualified from serving as a witness for similar reasons, leaving Evan to do the honors himself.

In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, I summed up my view of both this story and of the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate:

Two of the things that make THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE work so well are that we don’t see any of Raymond Shaw’s training, and that when he sees the Queen of Diamonds he goes into a trance that strips him of all personality.

The training scenes here show why the first of those was so important. Not only are the scenes tedious, they force us to realize that the very idea we most have to take seriously is in fact preposterous. Whatever power you might imagine hypnosis or drugs or other conditioning techniques to have, they obviously couldn’t turn a human brain into a digital computer.

And Tim’s talkativeness while in his trance shows why the second element is essential. Raymond might do absolutely anything when he’s in his hyper-suggestible state. A bartender mentions the phrase “Go jump in a lake” and Raymond jumps in the nearest lake. That’s terrifying, because it is terrifying to think of what people might do who had no mind or will controlling their actions from moment to moment. But Tim’s endless chit-chat doesn’t suggest a soulless automaton. There seems to be a mind in there, it just isn’t a very nice or very interesting mind.

Don Briscoe’s performance doesn’t add much to this unpromising material. I can’t think of anything he might have done to make it work, and neither could he. Anyway, I’m glad it’s over.

Comment left 8 November 2020 by Acilius on “Episode 773: The Persecution and Assassination of Minerva Trask as Performed by Tim Shaw under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 21 November 2015

Episode 769: All dead things look the same

Second consecutive episode ruined by Roger Davis’ performance as crazed groundskeeper Dirk Wilkins. Crazy Dirk has more fans than do any of Mr Davis’ other roles on Dark Shadows, which I do not understand. He is such a swivel-eyed loon from the first shot to the last that he is useless as a character- he doesn’t respond to anything anyone else does or says, just carries on with a chortling mania. The unvarying bombast suggests a desperate actor, and it leaves Mr Davis’ scene partners with nothing to do.

Roger Davis attempts to act. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In a comment I left under Danny Horn’s post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, I talked about my mental habit of imagining different actors playing parts that were not well executed:

I amuse myself during weak bits by wondering how characters would have come off if played by other actors. A character as well-written as Dirk, played by an actor as competent as Robert Rodan? Second only to Quentin Collins among the fans! Played by David Groh? Bigger breakout star than Barnabas! Played by Harvey Keitel? Such a hit the show is still in production!

Who knows how they would actually have done- maybe they would have made some kind of unfortunate choice and bungled it. And who knows what effect they would have had on the rest of the show- maybe if Dirk had been a massive hit and they’d rebuilt Dark Shadows around him, the result would have been a less interesting show. But the imaginary show in my head is good enough to get me through some pretty dire segments.

This time through I’ve been imagining Edward Marshall, who wore some of the wardrobe that became Dirk’s when he was cast as petulant ex-convict Harry Johnson in #669, in Mr Davis’ place. Mr Marshall took over the part of Harry from the not reliably brilliant Craig Slocum. He preserved the attitude and a great many of the mannerisms Slocum had given the part, but was substantially more interesting than Slocum ever was. Before he became violently insane, Dirk shared so many of Harry’s qualities that Mr Marshall would have been an obvious choice for the role. I’m sure he would have been better than Mr Davis, though perhaps not on a par with Robert Rodan, David Groh, or Harvey Keitel.

Today’s big plot point comes when Dirk tells twelve year old Jamison Collins that he has killed Barnabas Collins and that Barnabas was a vampire. Dirk is mistaken about the first of these points; he did not harm Barnabas at all. But he is right that he is a vampire.

This part of Dark Shadows is a costume drama set in the year 1897. Barnabas traveled to that year from 1969 while doing battle with some supernatural menaces. In the parts of the show set in the 1960s, the adults in the great house of Collinwood are Jamison’s daughter Liz and son Roger. Liz and Roger have accepted Barnabas’ story that he is their distant cousin from England and have let him take up residence in the Old House on the estate. If Jamison finds out that Barnabas is actually a bloodsucking ghoul, it is unlikely that his children will be sufficiently hospitable to him to allow the parts of the show in contemporary dress to exist. So when Jamison goes to the Old House to check on Dirk’s story and finds a coffin in the basement, we know that something will have to change if the show is to continue.

Episode 765: The animal in the woods

In the spring of 1969, the twin crises created by the malign ghost of Quentin Collins and the werewolf curse upon drifter Chris Jennings had combined to kill a number of people, bring others to the point of death, and make life on the estate of Collinwood utterly intolerable. Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins and his friends found some I Ching wands in Quentin’s old room and tried to use them to communicate with the ghost. Instead, they caused Barnabas to come unstuck in time. In #701, Barnabas found himself in the year 1897, his own curse of vampirism once again in full force.

Today, Barnabas bites Quentin’s girlfriend, maidservant Beth Chavez, and makes her tell him everything she knows about the werewolf curse. He was in a position to know all of this before he bit her; much of it he could have figured out if he had been paying attention to the information available to him in the late 1960s. But the show has been gaining lots of new viewers lately, and they probably appreciate the recap.

Quentin was married to a woman named Jenny, who unknown to him was the sister of ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi. Quentin left Jenny in 1895. Neither Quentin nor Magda knew at that time that Jenny was pregnant. Quentin’s siblings Edward and Judith put the story out that Jenny had gone away, and locked her up in a room hidden in the house. They enlisted Beth, her former maid, to be Jenny’s keeper. By the time she gave birth to boy-girl twins, Jenny had gone entirely insane.

In #720, Jenny escaped and stabbed Quentin. She escaped again in #748, and Quentin strangled her. When Magda found out that Quentin had killed Jenny, she cursed him and his male descendants to be werewolves. In #763, Beth told Magda about the twins; Magda’s reaction made it clear to Beth that she was powerless to lift the curse. Regular viewers already know that. The audience first heard Magda’s name months before she appeared on the show, when she spoke at a séance in #642 and expressed deep regret about “my currrrrse,” which we knew to be connected to both Quentin and the werewolf. In #684 and #685, Barnabas found a silver pentagram that Quentin and Beth bought in 1897 on a chain around the neck of a dead baby, and identified it as an amulet to ward off werewolves. Barnabas learned yesterday that Beth had bought the pentagram, and she confirms today that it is for Quentin’s son to wear. She also bought a similar pendant for herself, and is wearing it.

There is a full moon tonight, and most of the episode is taken up with the mechanics of people getting ready to go into the woods to hunt the werewolf, coming back from the woods where they have been hunting the werewolf, and telephoning to ask others to join in hunting the werewolf.

Magda has a pistol and loads it with silver bullets. Some wonder where Magda came up with silver bullets, but in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at Dark Shadows Every Day someone posting as “cslh324” reminds us that in #757 Magda persuaded undead blonde fire witch Laura to give her the money to buy silver bullets with which to shoot Barnabas. One of Magda’s purposes in putting this plan forward was to get Laura to leave her alone in the room so that she could steal a magical doodad from her, but it turns out Magda really did buy the silver bullets.

The werewolf gets into the great house of Collinwood and attacks Judith. Beth shows up in the nick of time and shows the werewolf her pentagram. He flees. Judith asks why the werewolf would run away from her, and Beth refuses to explain. At first she denies that it happened, then she asserts that the werewolf is probably as afraid of them as they are of him.

The confrontation between Judith and the werewolf includes a spectacular stunt. The werewolf jumps over the railing on the walkway above the foyer and holds a stationary two-point landing on the floor twelve feet below. Alex Stevens deserves high praise for that.

When we hear the sound effects associated with the werewolf or see the consequences of his attacks or catch a glimpse of him as a blur in the middle of a cloud of shattering glass, we can be afraid of him. Unfortunately, the show often gives us a long look at him, and he is not scary at all. They didn’t have the schedule or the makeup budget to cover his whole body in fur, so he wears Quentin’s suit. Seeing him standing there in that little outfit you don’t want Magda to shoot him with her silver bullets. At most, you might swat him with a rolled-up newspaper and tell him he is a bad doggie.

You have to stop killing people, or you won’t get any more bickies! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Beth does not want Judith to suspect that Quentin is the werewolf, but it really doesn’t make any sense that she won’t tell her about the apotropaic power of the silver pentagram. You’d think she would want everyone on the estate and in the neighboring village of Collinsport to wear such pendants for the duration of Quentin’s curse. Surely she could come up with some explanation as to how she knew about the silver pentagram that wouldn’t invite questions she couldn’t answer.