Tag: dark shadows

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 850: That’s your train, lady

In June 1966, Dark Shadows opened with a train carrying well-meaning governess Victoria Winters and dashing action hero Burke Devlin from New York City to Collinsport, Maine. Vicki and Burke first met at the train station in Collinsport. When she found that no one was waiting to take her to the great house of Collinwood, Burke volunteered to drive her there. We haven’t seen the train station since, and all subsequent references to mass transit to and from Collinsport in the 1960s have been about buses. That is to some extent an adjustment to real-world history. In our universe, passenger train service to central Maine had already stopped by 1966.

Now, the show is set in 1897. Devastatingly handsome reprobate Quentin Collins has talked the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris into joining him on the 6 PM train from Collinsport to NYC. Amanda and Quentin will remind viewers who have been with the show from the beginning of Vicki and Burke. Quentin is no hero, but he serves the plot function Burke did in those early days, antagonizing all the authority figures and fascinating all the women and children. Amanda takes part in some sleazy schemes, while Vicki was eventually forced to be an impossibly stainless model of virtue. But as Vicki was on a quest to learn the truth about her biological parents and felt she could know nothing about herself until she found out who they were, Amanda is tormented that she has no memories and no information about herself dating beyond two years into the past. And as in the first week Vicki was a savvy New York street kid who could keep smiling while she fended off the indecent advances of the lecherous Roger Collins, so Amanda sees right through the equally lecherous but toweringly hypocritical Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask.

Quentin and Amanda agree to meet at the train station. Amanda has to hide from Trask and from a repulsive little man named Charles Delaware Tate, and so she will spend the afternoon in a vacant house on Pine Road where a friend of Quentin’s is squatting. Quentin will settle his affairs at Collinwood. When they made this plan, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that Dark Shadows has so consistently shown that when its characters leave separately they do not meet each other at their intended destination that it would be a surprise if they get on the train together. Indeed, from the time Amanda leaves Collinwood the suspense is not about whether their reunion will be thwarted, but how.

Tate steals a portrait of Quentin. He knows that the portrait has magical powers and is of the utmost importance to Quentin. Quentin discovers that the portrait is missing. He writes a note saying that he may not be able to get to the train station by 6 PM and asks his nine year old niece, Nora Collins, to take it to Amanda at the house on Pine Road. Nora agrees to do so.

Quentin goes to Tate’s and demands he give the portrait back. They get into a fistfight. Quentin knocks Tate out and searches the house.

Trask catches Nora on her way to the house on Pine Road. He forces her to give him the note. He reads it, and goes to the house himself. He and Amanda have a confrontation. She tells Trask that she first approached him as part of a con game she was ashamed to take part in, but when she saw him leering at her she decided that he deserved to be cheated. He furiously denies being a lecher and she calls him a liar. Trask can intimidate most people into silence, so much so that his scenes are often suffocating to watch, and it is glorious to see Amanda dump the whole truth on him and not back down.

Trask does get in one more lie. He claims that he just saw Quentin getting ready to go out on a date with his other fiancée, Angelique. Amanda doesn’t believe him but she does know about Angelique. She also told Quentin that she wasn’t convinced she was right for him, and that if he didn’t show up she would understand that he had decided they didn’t have a future together after all. So when at the conclusion the conductor sees Amanda standing on the platform by herself and tells her that it’s time to get on the train, we are to assume that she thinks it is over between her and Quentin.

All aboard. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 849: You wouldn’t expect me to forget a vampire

Once upon a time, an American girl named Kitty moved to England, where she joined the household of the Earl of Hampshire as a governess. The Earl married her, and she became his Countess. Now it is 1897. The Earl is dead, driven to suicide by sorcerer Count Petofi. Kitty has returned to America, without the stepchildren who were once her charges and with so little money that she writes a letter apologizing to her mother that she cannot pay the train fare from Maine to her home in Pennsylvania. She is staying in the great house on the estate of Collinwood, home to her late husband’s friend Edward Collins. Her hope is that Edward will marry her and allow her to go on living in the style to which she has grown accustomed.

Her hopes would seem to be well-founded. Edward was so devoted to the late Earl that for a time he was under the delusion that he was his valet, and he is smitten with Kitty. But there are several flies in the ointment. For one thing, regular viewers know that Edward is in fact penniless. His sister Judith inherited the whole of their grandmother’s estate. He lives in Judith’s house as a guest and works in her business as her employee, and while she is in the mental hospital he must take orders from her husband, the odious Gregory Trask.

Second, Petofi is in the area. It was he who cast the spell that prompted Edward to reveal his true self-image as the Earl’s manservant, and he has evil plans for many of the people with whom Kitty must deal. She met Petofi at Collinwood the day she arrived there, but has kept her acquaintance with him secret from Edward and everyone else.

Third, vampire Barnabas Collins saw Kitty and believed she was his lost love Josette come back to life. Shortly after, she had a psychological break suggesting he was right. A music box that Barnabas has given to several women whom he wanted to turn into Josette appeared in Kitty’s room the other day, after a woman who used to be Trask’s daughter Charity but has now been transformed into Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye had warned her it was a sign of great danger.

It seems unlikely Barnabas put the music box on Kitty’s table. For one thing, Charity/ Pansy had staked him shortly before, so that he is apparently hors de combat. Further, it was placed there during the daylight hours, when he is always out of operation. Also, it appeared while Kitty was sitting a few feet away, and she did not see anyone else in the room. Petofi stripped Barnabas of his power to materialize and dematerialize at will some time ago, so he would not have been able to manage that trick. The explanation that will occur to longtime viewers is that Josette’s ghost did it. She was very active at Collinwood before Barnabas made his first entrance in April 1967, when the show took place in a contemporary setting. Perhaps she is active in 1897, as well.

Kitty doesn’t know about any of that, so she assumes that Petofi is responsible. She marches over to Petofi’s residence, an abandoned mill. Originally this was a hideout, but by now most of the principal cast have visited him there at least once, so she could have stopped just about anyone on the street and asked for directions. She accuses him of having Charity/ Pansy give her a chilling warning about a particular music box, and of then causing that music box to appear in her room. He has no idea what she is talking about. She produces the music box and they play it. She then has another mental flash onto images of Barnabas. Petofi finds all of this most interesting, and walks Kitty back to Collinwood.

There, Kitty finds the devastatingly handsome reprobate Quentin Collins moping over a glass of liquor. She asks him if she has him to thank for the music box. He is shocked to see it. He says that it looks just like one that belonged to a distant relative of his, but that he doesn’t believe it can be the same one. She asks if the relative is Barnabas Collins, and he is shocked again. He asks how she knows that name. In response, Kitty introduces Quentin to the concept of “learning”: “I collect information, Mr. Collins, and I remember what I hear… I listen when people speak.” Quentin reacts as if it is the first time anyone has described these activities to him, which, considering the world he lives in, is not so unlikely.

Back in his squat, Petofi sees his servant Aristide for the first time in several days. Aristide went absent without leave when Barnabas threatened to kill him, and has come back now that he has heard Barnabas has been safely disposed of. Petofi is irked, not only at Aristide’s unauthorized departure, but even more at his failure to carry out the task he had entrusted to him. They had captured Julia Hoffman, MD, Barnabas’ friend, who followed him after he traveled back in time from 1969 to 1897. Petofi wanted to know how they managed this journey, and was convinced Julia was withholding the information he needed. Aristide rigged up a death trap that Barnabas triggered when he came to Julia’s rescue. Aristide did not stay to make sure it actually killed her.

Aristide shows Petofi that the gun he pointed at Julia’s heart did fire a bullet through the back of the chair to which he tied her. One would think that even a sorcerer, seeing that bullet hole, would conclude that Julia got out of the ropes while Aristide wasn’t looking. But instead he looks with a wild surmise and goes to Julia’s hiding place, in the old rectory on Pine Road.

Before Petofi enters, we see Julia holding a hypodermic and preparing an injection. She hides the needle when she hears the knock on the door. Julia had been giving Barnabas a series of shots meant to put his vampirism into remission. That she is still preparing the shots suggests to regular viewers that Barnabas’ staking was a trick of some kind, and that he is still in operation somewhere.

There are rules of etiquette in the universe of Dark Shadows that people follow no matter how absurd it is to do so. Julia lets Petofi into the room, even though he has tried to kill her. One cannot refuse admittance to anyone who knocks! She accepts a snifter of brandy from him and drinks it. One cannot refuse to share liquor with anyone who offers it!

As it happens, Petofi has put cyanide in the brandy. Enough cyanide, he says, to kill ten women. When he tells Julia this, she briefly tries to pretend that she is ill, then gives up. He declares that she cannot die. She admits that this is true. He figures out that only her “astral body” is in 1897, while her physical person remained in 1969. She confirms this.

Julia tries to make Petofi think he has succeeded by faking the symptoms of cyanide poisoning. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later, Petofi concludes that if he is to go to 1969, he will need to have a physical body there. Barnabas the vampire originally died in the 1790s and was in 1897 a body sealed in a coffin, so when he traveled back in time he could animate that body and be subject to all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Petofi decides that the body he wants is the best-looking available male one, which is Quentin’s. We have seen that Petofi can vacate his own body and take possession of another’s, as when in #801 he took up residence in twelve year old Jamison Collins. He has also, for reasons of his own, granted Quentin eternal youth. So it now seems logical to him that he should compel Quentin to make the exchange.

Of late, the editors of the Dark Shadows Wiki have taken to having discussions with each other in comments placed in parentheses and italicized. I couldn’t resist adding a comment myself to a discussion attached to the entry for this episode. My contribution is the fourth of the four below:

In 807, Aristede tells Charles Delaware Tate that if Petofi got his hand back, he would be able to live forever. As Petofi got his hand back, he must have a body in the future, so why would he need Quentin’s?

(Who would you rather look like?)

(Isn’t the point of the body-switch to evade the gypsies?)

(Yes, that is the point of the body-switch — but surely he only needs to switch bodies? If he can switch bodies now, and become unrecognisable, why does he need to go to the future as well?)

(Petofi says that he has many ambitious plans. If he carries them out, they may attract widespread attention. The Rroma have been keeping track of him for a long time, and may become suspicious if a known associate of Petofi’s starts doing all sorts of spectacular things.)

I expect this whole discussion to be deleted soon- it isn’t really in keeping with the purpose of the site, which is just to serve as ready reference for basic facts about each episode. But it does address a theme that often comes up in online discussions of this storyline, so I wanted to preserve it here.

Episode 848: You have no mortality

The year is 1897, and the mythological world described by the ancient Greeks seems very far away. The story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who loved a statue he had made depicting an imaginary woman so intensely that it came to life, answered to the name “Galatea,” and returned his affections, is no exception to that feeling of distance. But here is the lovely Amanda Harris, who used to wonder why she had total amnesia, but now knows that the reason she cannot remember anything prior to two years ago is that she didn’t exist before then. She popped into being when a painter named Charles Delaware Tate made a portrait of his ideal woman.

Tate told her about this and told her that he loved her, but Amanda, unlike Galatea, has no desire for her creator. Perhaps this is because his personality is absolutely intolerable, a common attribute of characters played by Roger Davis. Nor is she interested in Tim Shaw, who brought her to Collinsport to take part in a scam he wanted to run on his old enemies and abandoned her in Tate’s house once he learned of Tate’s powers and thought he saw a way to make more money than his original plan was likely to yield. Instead, she is in love with rakish libertine Quentin Collins. Quentin has asked Amanda to run away with him and get married, and she agrees.

Quentin is trying to control Amanda too, but at least he isn’t a total jerk about it like those other two guys. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Tim and Tate take turns intruding into Amanda’s room and telling her ugly things. Tate snarls at her that she belongs to him because he created her. This claim of ownership would be nasty however it was made, but Mr Davis’ gratingly unpleasant voice makes it truly nauseating to hear. Tim tells her that she isn’t really human, because if she is like another person Tate created she might die if someone shoots her. By that standard humans are extremely rare, but Tim goes on to explain that the man Tate created and then gunned down in cold blood while Tim watched vanished into thin air as soon as he died. So what he means is that Amanda will never be a corpse. In the context of Dark Shadows, a show that is so largely about the reanimation of the dead, this actually makes sense.

Quentin was cursed to be a werewolf, but was freed of the effects of that curse when Tate painted his portrait. When the Moon is full nowadays, the portrait changes, while Quentin himself stays the same. To extort Quentin into leaving Amanda to him, Tate steals the portrait. He tells himself that, if need be, he will destroy the portrait. If Quentin and Amanda stick with their plan of running as far away as possible very soon, they will know nothing about what Tate has done until the night of the next full Moon, when Quentin will turn into the werewolf, kill Amanda, and wake up covered in her blood. I suppose that would meet Tate’s objective of punishing Quentin, but it doesn’t fit very well with his professed belief that he loves Amanda.

Episode 847: Some new and astounding piece of information

Julia Hoffman, MD, has followed her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, on an uncertain and frightening journey into the past. They are now in the year 1897, where Barnabas hopes to prevent disasters that would befall the Collins family in 1969. Today, Julia is in their hiding place, the old rectory on Pine Road, trying to replicate the experimental treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into remission for a while early in 1968. A knock comes at the door.

It is Julia and Barnabas’ current arch-nemesis, sorcerer Count Petofi. Julia reacts to the sight of him with fear. Petofi assures Julia that he does not now have any intention of making another attempt on her life. He tells her that she is alive thanks to the incompetence of his henchman Aristide and to Barnabas’ bravery, but that if she finds herself in danger again she must not count on Barnabas to save her. When he tells her that this is because a woman drove a stake through Barnabas’ heart, Julia reacts with shock. She asks if Petofi plans to hand her back over to Aristide for another try; he says that his plan is rather to keep her under constant surveillance so that when she returns to 1969, he will go along with her.

Julia learns that Barnabas is dead, and not just because it is daytime. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia’s displays of fear and bravery are a bit of an attention-getter for returning viewers. Last week she learned that it is only her “astral body” that is in 1897, while her physical body is in 1969. She is therefore immune to any physical harm. It is tactically sound to keep this information from Petofi, of course, but characters on Dark Shadows do not always have sufficient discretion to observe this basic rule of gamesmanship. Barnabas particularly is in the habit of showing all his cards to his enemies while hiding everything from those who would like to help him, and even Julia, who is the smartest character on the show, has done the same thing from time to time. The most celebrated example is probably #619, when she marched into a hostile warlock’s living room, told him everything he wanted to know, and somehow walked away the winner. But today not only does she keep shtum during the scene, the show doesn’t even let the audience in on what she’s doing. First time viewers are as much in the dark as Petofi is.

Later, Julia goes to the great house of Collinwood to tell rakish libertine Quentin Collins that Barnabas had asked her to take a message to him in the event that he died. Quentin is in terrible danger from Petofi, and must flee at once. Quentin says that he has already come to that conclusion, and urges her to do the same. Julia tells him that she cannot. Barnabas left several tasks uncompleted that must be attended to for the future of the Collins family to take its necessary shape. She assures Quentin that she is not in as much danger as he is. She says that Petofi thinks she is his ticket to 1969, and that he will not kill her. Again, she does not even hint at her immunity to physical harm.

Earlier in the episode, Petofi had ordered Quentin to keep watch on Julia. When he resisted, Petofi reminded him that if it were not for his intervention, Quentin would be a werewolf and the lovely Amanda Harris, whom Quentin has asked to run off with him, would be lethally mauled the next time she is in his vicinity during a full Moon. Quentin has betrayed Barnabas and Julia on Petofi’s orders before, and we have little doubt that he will do so again.

Barnabas knew that Quentin was under Petofi’s control, and he shared his information with Julia. The other day he told Quentin where his coffin was kept during the day, leading directly to his staking. Longtime viewers may have taken this as another example of Barnabas showing his cards to his enemies. Those watching closely will have noticed an enigmatic look Barnabas gave Quentin as he was leaving the room at the end of that conversation, and will have asked if he was up to something. That Julia holds back the fact that she cannot be killed in 1897 suggests that she knows that whatever she tells Quentin will get back to Petofi. This will prompt us to ask the same question.

Last week, Julia made an agreement with wicked witch Angelique to fight Petofi together. Angelique would not tell her what her plan of action was, but when Julia looked in the mirror and saw, not her own reflection, but Angelique’s, she said that she understood what the plan was and knew that it would work. So if we have been watching regularly, we are likely confident that Julia, Angelique, and Barnabas have a surprise in store for Petofi.

One of Petofi’s vulnerabilities is prominently featured today. As a supervillain, he is committed to the idea of exercising as much control as possible over the world. With that commitment comes a blind spot. He is slow to understand events that take place outside anyone’s control. When he learned that Barnabas and Julia had traveled through time while meditating on I Ching wands, he himself cast such wands, meditated on them, and had a terrifying experience. He was convinced Julia had directed that experience, and it was when she could not tell him how she had done so or how to subject the consequences of meditation to his will that he ordered Aristide to kill her.

Petofi has now learned that Julia was telling the truth when she said that the effects of the meditative state were not within her power. But he is still experimenting with the wands, trying to develop a technique to subdue the power that meditation on them unlocks. He uses a man named Tim Shaw as the subject of his experiment today; Tim has a vision in which a masked man, who turns out to be Quentin, kills Amanda.

Tim had come to Petofi with the news of Barnabas’ death, hoping to collect some kind of reward from him. Petofi was quite cheerful at the news, but uninterested in the details until Tim told him that the killer was a woman he knows by the name Charity Trask. That threw Petofi for a loop, and he went to Quentin.

Petofi had ordered Quentin to stake Barnabas. He congratulated him on manipulating Charity into doing it for him, and was visibly disconcerted when Quentin said it was an accident Charity followed him- he hadn’t even known she was there. Again, Petofi’s overestimation of the efficacy of plans reveals a soft spot. If Angelique, Julia, and Barnabas can strike him there, they have an excellent chance of bringing him down.

Episode 846: Advantage of an unfortunate creature

Tim Shaw was a poor put-upon fellow when first we met him in #731, an episode set in April 1897. He had spent his childhood among the pupils imprisoned at Worthington Hall, a dungeon masquerading as a school, and when he was of age the headmaster, the evil Gregory Trask, coerced him into staying on as a teacher. In company with another man, Trask contrived to use Tim as an unwitting instrument in his plot to murder his wife Minerva. Trask’s plan to frame Tim for the murder fell apart, and Tim managed to keep his freedom. Not only that- he stole the legendary Hand of Count Petofi and took it to New York City, where within weeks he used its magical powers to make himself very rich. In August, he returned to Collinsport determined to take revenge on Trask.

Shortly after coming back to his hometown, Tim lost the Hand. (Which, to be clear, was an actual human hand severed from a sorcerer named Count Petofi a century before.) The 150 year old Petofi himself reclaimed it, and reattached it to his wrist. The ill-fortune Tim suffered in his youth left him a weak and cowardly man, who betrayed his only friend when Trask was looking for her. But his good fortune when he was in possession of the Hand has corrupted him much more severely. He used to be kind to children and even risked his life to rescue nine year old Nora Collins when Worthington Hall burned down in #736, but in #816 he violently shook Nora when he found that she had let the box containing the Hand out of her sight. In his pursuit of another gimmick that will enable him to continue getting rich, he has developed a number of schemes, the worst of which do not stop at murder.

This morning, Tim is sitting at a table in the Blue Whale, Collinsport’s tavern. The place isn’t open yet, and Tim does not appear to have any connection with it, so it is simply a mystery how he got in and why he wants to be there. The only other person in the room is sitting at the bar. She is a woman who used to be Trask’s daughter Charity, but who has since been transformed into Cockney showgirl and sometime mentalist Pansy Faye, who died in June.

Pansy’s presence makes some kind of sense, as she works at the tavern doing her act. But returning viewers know that she isn’t still there from the night before. After closing, she went back to the great house of Collinwood, where Trask and she live, and talked with the rakish and profoundly drunk Quentin Collins. After dawn, Pansy followed Quentin from the house to a cave. In the cave, she found a mallet and stake Quentin left behind, and next to them the coffin occupied by vampire Barnabas Collins. She drove the stake into Barnabas’ heart. Now she wants a good stiff drink, and she doesn’t care if she has to pour it herself.

Tim stops Pansy’s attempt to pilfer her employer’s stock, and she tells him that she has destroyed Barnabas. Dollar signs flash in his eyes as he calculates what it is worth to the Collins family to know that their single most embarrassing relative is no longer going to be exsanguinating the locals. Pansy does not want to go back to the great house or even to tell the Collinses what happened, and she steadfastly declares she does not want any of their money. But Tim insists.

At the house, stuffy Edward Collins makes it clear he wants nothing to do with Tim and that he regards Pansy as a lunatic. When Tim makes him listen to the story, Edward dismisses it out of hand. But Edward finally agrees to go to the cave with Tim while Pansy stays in the drawing room.

Edward sees that Pansy was telling the truth, and returns to Collinwood in time to see the aftermath of a strange conversation. Pansy meets Edward’s guest, a young American woman named Kitty Soames who is the widow of the Earl of Hampshire. Pansy’s reaction when the dowager countess introduces herself as “Lady Hampshire” is a very characteristic “Well, la-dee-dah!”

Pansy’s delighted smile and relaxed manner suggest that in Kitty she has recognized a kindred spirit. Returning viewers know she’s onto something- we’ve heard Kitty’s interior monologue as she’s screwed up her courage to try to connect with the rich Collinses. We also know that she and her husband were mixed up with Petofi, who is not an individual who often attracts the innocent. And while she is so quick to deny to Edward that her husband’s suicide had anything to do with business reverses that he assumes she is still imposingly rich, later today we will hear the text of a letter in which she tells her mother that if she doesn’t get something going with Edward, she won’t be able to raise enough money to pay the train fare from Maine to Pennsylvania. So Kitty’s presentation of herself is misleading, and she is not so different from the living Pansy, who was what in the parlance of the 1890s might have been called an adventuress.

In her letter to her mother, Kitty mentions that she first came to the earl’s home as the governess. This circumstance reminds us of two other characters played by the same actress. In the parts of Dark Shadows set in 1969, Kathryn Leigh Scott’s Maggie Evans was the governess at Collinwood. And in the first part of the 1897 segment, she took the role of neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond, who held the same job in that year.

Rachel was the friend whom Tim betrayed to Trask, and the contrast between her and Kitty reflects the change in Tim. Rachel and Tim were both well-meaning but helpless before Trask. They stood out in the 1897 segment as almost the only characters who weren’t playing an angle of their own. Rachel died in Tim’s arms, in the same room where he would later find the Hand. As his discovery of the Hand opened the way for Tim to become a schemer, so the death of Rachel allowed Miss Scott to return as a someone who could keep up with the quick-witted and merrily vicious characters who make 1897 such a delight. Moreover, we are in suspense as to what sort of person Kitty will turn out to be. She could end up being as innocent as Miss Scott’s previous roles, she could be as detestable as Tim has become, or she could land anywhere in between.

Pansy has a vision of a music box. She vocalizes its tune, and tells Kitty that if she ever receives one like it she must destroy it at once. If she does not, she will die. Kitty is upset by the whole conversation. Pansy tells Kitty that she ought to listen to her, because she has “powers.” “I guess… I didn’t use to have, but now I do.” Pansy often mentions this point, which harks back to her first appearance. In #771, the living Pansy came to Collinwood as the fiancée of the childlike Carl Collins. She was astounded to find that in the spirit-charged atmosphere of the estate her phony “mentalist” act really did conjure up a voice from the supernal realms. In turn, that echoed #400, when Charity’s ancestor, the fanatical Rev’d Mr Trask, was delighted that an exorcism he was performing seemed actually to work.

When Edward comes back, he assures Kitty that Pansy is mad and that he will “deal with her.” Kitty goes upstairs to her room, where she will later find that the music box Pansy described has materialized. This music box has a long history, and in 1967, when the show was set in contemporary times, Barnabas used it to try to convince girls that they were his lost love Josette. Even if Barnabas hadn’t been staked, we wouldn’t suspect him of planting the music box in Kitty’s room- it appears there during the daytime. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will remember that Josette’s ghost used to be quite active around Collinwood, and might wonder if she did it.

In the drawing room, Edward talks with Tim and Pansy. He refuses to call Pansy anything other than “Charity Trask”; she is indignant at being live-named, but he won’t relent. He asks her to stay in the house, and offers to provide her with the best possible mental health care. She angrily declares “I! Ain’t! Sick!”

Tim is sure his angle will open up any second now. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Tim says that he will see to it that Pansy doesn’t tell anyone about Barnabas; Edward doesn’t bother to conceal his contempt for Tim, and makes it clear that he will not pay him for this or any other service he might offer to perform. Pansy tells Tim that it is time for them to leave. She invites Edward to catch her act at the Blue Whale; he says he doesn’t expect to find the time, but that he is sure Tim will come back to Collinwood when he wants something.

When Tim first came back to town, he had a girlfriend named Amanda whom he planned to use in the game he was going to run on Trask. Eventually we learned that this plan was to involve the murders of the former Judith Collins, who is now Trask’s wife, and of Trask himself. Amanda would marry Trask after she had incited him to kill Judith, they would then kill Trask, and Tim would marry Amanda, thereby becoming the master of Collinwood. Amanda was never fully sold on the homicides, and she and Tim now seem to have gone their separate ways. So Tim is left without friends and without a plan. Nor does he seem to understand how dangerous the people he is dealing with truly are. He thinks that he can bluff his way into partnership with the enormously powerful and thoroughly evil Petofi, and is only dimly aware of the other monsters lurking in the area. One might surmise that Tim’s happiest days are firmly behind him.

Episode 845: Dance your cares away

Julia Hoffman is miserable. She has followed her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, and traveled back in time to the year 1897 on a mission to prevent terrible things that were happening in 1969. She has managed to come up with a treatment that is similar to one that briefly cured Barnabas of vampirism in March and April 1968, and is giving him regular injections in the course of that treatment. She is in hiding with him in an abandoned building, and has survived kidnapping and attempted murder. And what is her reward for all that? He is back on the same bullshit he was involved in when she first learned of his existence in 1967. He has met a girl and made up his mind to throw away all of their plans in an effort to convince her that she is the reincarnation of his lost love Josette. It’s no wonder Julia is so furious with him that she looks like she is the one with fangs.

Barnabas in danger.

Making matters worse, this time it seems Barnabas might be on to something. He pays a visit to his distant cousin, Quentin Collins, and asks who the girl is. Quentin says that she is Kitty Soames, widow of the late Earl of Hampshire, returned to her native USA after her husband’s death. When Barnabas starts in with his lunacy about Josette, Quentin becomes excited. He tells him that Kitty looked at the spot where his portrait hung until he was exposed as a vampire and asked what had become of it. When Quentin asked how she knew about that, since she had never been to the house before, she laughed and said that of course she knew the portrait, of course she was familiar with Barnabas. After a few seconds, she said she knew nothing of any portrait or of anyone named Barnabas.

Barnabas takes this as proof positive that Kitty is Josette returned to life, and that her memories of the 1790s are coming back to her. He asks Quentin to meet him at his hiding place so that they can arrange for him to meet her. He tells him where the hiding place is. Quentin agrees. Barnabas gives Quentin an enigmatic look before he exits.

Quentin is miserable. He is under the power of sorcerer Count Petofi, who has ordered him to kill Barnabas. Now that he knows where Barnabas keeps his coffin, there is nothing to stop him obeying. He will have to go there at dawn and stake his friend.

Barnabas has confronted Quentin about his subjection to Petofi, whom he knows to be his deadly foe. He has several times shown his distrust of Quentin. So people who started watching the show in the last year or so will be puzzled when he tells Quentin where to find him when he is helpless. Those who have been in the audience longer know that Barnabas not only has a habit of telling his enemies exactly what they need to know, but that he also loses all semblance of rationality where Josette is concerned. It is all too believable that he may have done this. Still, there is that look back at Quentin, suggesting that Barnabas knows that he is giving information to his enemies.

Quentin is in the drawing room of the great house, waiting for the dawn to bring with it his obligation to kill his friend. A woman who used to be Miss Charity Trask enters. Petofi erased Charity’s personality some time ago. Her body is now home to Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl, mentalist, and onetime fiancée of Quentin’s late brother, inveterate prankster Carl Collins.

Pansy is miserable. Pansy is cross that Quentin did not go to see her perform at the Blue Whale, a local tavern where she is doing her old act. But what really has her down is that it is exactly three months since Barnabas murdered Carl, and she is the only one who seems to remember him. When Kitty and Quentin spoke of Carl yesterday, they were the first characters other than Pansy to mention his name since the immediate aftermath of his death. She is irritated with Quentin for getting drunk, angry that Barnabas is still at large, and sorrowful that while the dawn means a new day for most, for people like her and Quentin it just means reliving the same day time and again. Quentin perks up when Pansy lists the many good reasons why someone ought to kill Barnabas, and for a moment it seems like he is going to tell her where he is and invite her to do it. She recognizes this, and keeps asking questions after he stops himself. The whole scene is beautiful from beginning to end, one of the highlights of the series. If they had had Daytime Emmys in 1969, it is the tape they should have sent to the voters to get the acting awards for Nancy Barrett and David Selby.

Dawn comes, and Quentin does go to the cave where Barnabas’ coffin is. He has a stake and mallet with him. He opens the coffin, sees Barnabas, places the stake over his heart, and raises the mallet. That’s as far as he can go. He throws the weapons aside and leaves the cave, vowing that if Barnabas can face whatever he has faced, he too can face his own destiny.

Shortly after, we hear footsteps. Pansy enters. She sees the coffin and opens it. She finds the mallet and stake. She drives the stake into Barnabas’ chest. Blood spurts out around the wound and out of his mouth. It would seem that Barnabas Collins is no more.

Quentin is a villain, but he is charming, and at this point David Selby is a breakout star to rival Jonathan Frid as Barnabas. Earlier, it had seemed Pansy might kill Quentin, and many fans hated her for that. No one seriously expected her to kill Barnabas, since he was a pop culture phenomenon familiar even to people who never saw the show. To this day, Dark Shadows is known (to those who know it at all) as “the vampire soap opera from the 1960s.” So having her kill Barnabas is certainly a twist worthy of ending a week.

Episode 844: Some clean, fresh air

Adventurer Tim Shaw is in his hotel room with an apparently mute man, trying to get him to speak. The man is struggling to make a sound when artist Charles Delaware Tate enters and produces a revolver. Tate proclaims that the man will never speak. He fires, and the man falls dead to the floor.

The man’s body glows, then vanishes. Tim knows that Tate created the man earlier in the evening. Tate has a magical power that enables him to cause objects and people to pop into existence just by drawing them. Tim says that he ought to call the police, since Tate just murdered a man in cold blood in front of him. But there is no body, and the only other person who has seen the man is Tim’s traveling companion and occasional accomplice Amanda Harris, who turns out to be another of Tate’s creations. So instead Tim pours a drink, and Tate tells him all about how he gained his powers as the result of a bargain he struck with sorcerer Count Petofi.

Petofi is aware of several magical abilities he gave Tate, but does not know that he can bring his creations to life. Tim calls Petofi to his room and brings him up to date. He believes that this report will somehow establish a partnership between himself and Petofi. Since Tate made it clear that his powers are the result of Petofi’s own interventions, it is unclear why Tim would expect even a finder’s fee for this information. It certainly does not provide the basis for an ongoing relationship of any kind.

Meanwhile, a visitor is arriving at the great house of Collinwood. Her face is familiar to longtime viewers- she is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who has been in the cast from #1 as Maggie Evans, wisecracking waitress turned The Nicest Girl in Town. When from November 1967 to March 1968 the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s, Miss Scott played the gracious Josette; she had already played Josette’s ghost in some of the episodes in contemporary dress, and in the spring and summer of 1967 vampire Barnabas Collins had tried to brainwash Maggie into becoming Josette. We last saw Miss Scott from March to June in the first part of the still-ongoing segment set in 1897, when she was neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond.

Before we know the name of this new character, we see that she is wearing widow’s weeds. There is also a first- we hear her thoughts in an interior monologue before she interacts with another character. Whoever she is, the widow is telling herself that she has come to her big moment and she shouldn’t chicken out now. “No one will know,” she assures herself.

Neither Maggie, Josette, or Rachel ever used that facial expression.

The unknown widow knocks, and rakish libertine Quentin Collins lets her in. He appreciates her beauty and asks who in the house is fortunate enough to know her. She says that she and her late husband were friends of the stuffy Edward Collins. Quentin says that Edward is away, and identifies himself as his brother. “Quentin or Carl?” asks the widow. Quentin says, with a sad note, that Carl is dead. This is the first time anyone other than his onetime fiancée Pansy Faye has mentioned Carl’s name in the three months since his death.

The widow finally identifies herself as Kitty Soames, Countess to the late Earl of Hampshire. She says that she is an American, and that after her husband’s death she felt that she was a stranger in England and ought to return home. Quentin invites her to stay in the house.

Kitty is alone in the foyer when Petofi enters. She is horrified to see him. It becomes clear that her husband’s death was a suicide, and that Petofi’s threats prompted it. She goes out to take a walk in the woods.

Along the way, she meets Barnabas, who has traveled back in time from 1969. They have a brief talk. When she exits, he says that she is Josette, returned to him at last.

Back in the great house, Quentin finds Kitty looking at the spot on the wall next to the front door where Barnabas’ portrait has long hung. Some weeks ago, Edward learned that Barnabas was a vampire and ordered the portrait removed. There is a mirror there now, the same mirror that hung in that spot in #195, when the ABC art department was painting Barnabas’ portrait and another portrait was reflected in it. Kitty asks Quentin why Barnabas’ portrait was removed. Since she has never been in the house before, this question perplexes him. He asks how she knows about the portrait and how she knows of Barnabas. At first she is amused by the idea that she would not know of him, but a second later she returns to herself. She insists she has never met anyone named Barnabas and has no idea what Quentin is talking about. Perhaps this time, Barnabas is right- maybe Kitty really is a revenant of Josette.

Miss Scott was one of the biggest stars on the show. She tells a story nowadays about a trip she and her then-husband took to Africa in the late 1960s, when they were on a photo safari deep in the bush. Some people happened by, took one look at her, and all started saying excitedly “Maggie Evans!” So it is inexplicable that today’s closing credits misspell her name as “Kathryn Lee Scott.”

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 842: Some kind of an unnatural creature

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has traveled back in time to the year 1897 to help her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins. Julia has fallen into the clutches of sorcerer Count Petofi and is bound and gagged in Petofi’s lair. A loaded revolver is tied to the doorknob, rigged to fire a round through her heart when the door opens.

Barnabas has learned where Julia is, but not about the death-trap in which she is ensconced. He storms into the building, turns the doorknob, and thereby discharges the gun. He sees Julia slumped over in her chair, and shouts at Petofi’s henchman that he will kill him. He then goes to Julia and finds that she is alive. There is a bullet-hole through the back of her chair, but she herself is unharmed.

Julia declares that there is only one explanation for this phenomenon that makes sense. Considering the kinds of stories that play out on Dark Shadows, we would think that an explanation that makes sense would be the one we could discard immediately, but Julia plows ahead. When she traveled back in time, only her “astral body” made the trip. Her physical body is still in 1969. For his part, Barnabas had a body in 1897, trapped in a sealed coffin. That body is hosting his personality, which is why he is subject to physical injury. But Julia is in no danger. When she later says that she can disregard Petofi’s threats, Barnabas says that if he finds out the truth, Petofi will just find another way to immobilize her, so she has to lie low.

Petofi is so powerful that Barnabas does not believe that he and Julia can fight him by themselves. So he tells Julia to summon wicked witch Angelique. Barnabas and Angelique have been enemies for centuries, but he thinks they have a common cause now. Angelique is determined to marry his cousin Quentin, whom he has befriended and Petofi has enslaved. So Barnabas expects she will agree to help fight Petofi.

Angelique does come in response to Julia’s message. She remembers Julia from time she herself spent in the 1960s, and is shocked to find her in 1897. Julia refuses to explain how she made her way back in time. She says that if Angelique can come to 1897 from 1968, she oughtn’t to be surprised she has come there from 1969. Angelique responds that Julia is not like herself and Barnabas. “I’m human,” says Julia. Since she is separated from her proper body, she isn’t fully human, not at the moment, but she still takes evident satisfaction in applying the label to herself. This marks a contrast with Angelique, who was offended earlier in the episode when Petofi laughed and taunted her for being “so human.” Julia and Angelique then snipe at each other about their respective relationships to Barnabas.

Julia says that it is essential Barnabas should “complete his mission” and solve the problems they were facing in 1969. Angelique responds that he will never be able to do that, because he has changed history too much in the time he has spent in 1897. This remark is intriguing for regular viewers. Barnabas’ six months of bungling around, picking fights, and committing murders must have had major consequences for what came after. That gives the show two ways forward. When Barnabas and Julia go back to a contemporary setting, they might meet an entirely different cast of characters and have to find a place for themselves in an alternate universe. Or they might do what they did when the show’s first time-travel story ended in March 1968, and dramatize the force of the Collins family’s propensity for denial. The head of the family in the 1790s decided to compel everyone in and around the village of Collinsport to pretend that none of the events we had seen had ever taken place, and when the costume drama segment ended we found that he had made that pretense stick ever since.

After Julia points out that it is to her advantage to emancipate Quentin from his bondage to Petofi, Angelique agrees to help. She still will not answer Julia’s questions. After she leaves the room, Julia looks in the mirror, sees an image of Angelique, and says that now she understands what she is going to do and believes it will work. That puts her one up on the audience.

Julia looks for an image of herself, and finds Angelique. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The scene pairs Julia and Angelique as two women whose lives have been shaped by their pursuit of Barnabas. Their bickering makes this similarity explicit. When Julia looks in the mirror and sees Angelique, they put very heavy emphasis on the similarity. In a brilliant, but now inaccessible, post on the great Collinsport Historical Society,* Wallace McBride wrote that “On Dark Shadows, your reflection always tells the truth.” He demonstrated that on the show, reflections are very strongly coded as true, so much so that they must be making a serious statement when they give us an image like this one. They are committing to the idea that Julia is, in some important way, the same as Angelique.

There are also a couple of scenes featuring the repulsive Roger Davis as artist Charles Delaware Tate. Mr Davis is especially hard to take in a scene with Donna McKechnie as the mysterious Amanda Harris. Miss McKechnie had already done outstanding work on Broadway as a singer and dancer by this time, but she felt herself to be a beginner as an actress, and she could not conceal her discomfort when Mr Davis shouted his lines. The 4:3 aspect ratio of old-time American television meant that the performers spent much of their time only a few inches from each other, and when Mr Davis yells in Miss McKechnie’s ear, she winces. He clutches at her arm, and she recoils; before she can relax from that invasion of her space, he slams down on a table, making a loud noise and causing her to jump.

Mr Davis’ incessant shouting will bring back memories for viewers who have been with the show from the beginning. The scene takes place on a set which is known in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s as the Evans Cottage. The Evans Cottage was home to drunken sad-sack Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Sam, like Tate, was an artist, and the artworks scattered around the set in the 1897 segment remind us of the cottage’s iconography.

The first seven times we saw Sam, between #5 and #22, he was played by an actor called Mark Allen. Like Mr Davis, Allen had considerable training as an actor and a long resume of stage and screen appearances. Also like him, he is just terrible. Mr Davis did have extensive skills and could on occasion give nuanced performances, though he rarely chose to do so. He much preferred spending his time roughing up the women and children in the cast.

But Allen never once did a good job of acting. In each of his episodes, he either shouted every line with the same ear-splitting bellow, or whined every line in the same putrid snivel. Allen didn’t assault his scene partners on camera, as Mr Davis routinely did, though Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played Maggie, has made it clear that she did not feel safe in scenes where they embraced. Moreover, in some corners of fandom there are persistent rumors about abusive behavior off-camera that led to Allen’s dismissal. People claim to have heard remarks cast members and others associated with the show let drop at Dark Shadows conventions over the years, and from those remarks they come to some alarming conclusions about what Allen did behind the scenes. Who knows if those conclusions are correct, or if the people who report the remarks even heard them clearly, but Allen was so unpleasant as a screen presence that it is tempting to believe the worst about him.

The point of Tate’s scene with Amanda is that she does not want to believe that she is an artificial being who came to life when he painted a portrait that looked like her. Tate’s success as an artist is the result of magic powers Petofi gave him; he just recently learned that he can make things pop into existence by drawing or painting them. To convince Amanda that he has this power, Tate sketches an imaginary man. She screams, and we see her looking at the man who has come into being.

This seems like a bad choice on Tate’s part. Why not draw an inanimate object instead? If he’d drawn a hat or a gold bar or a gemstone, he could just have given it to Amanda with his compliments. But now he has a 25 year old man whom he is obligated to help make his way in the world. If an inanimate object wasn’t a striking enough image to send the episode out with a dash of spectacle, then Tate could have created a farm animal, such as a donkey or a goat. If Amanda didn’t want such an animal, Tate could just shoo it outside and be confident someone would claim it- Collinsport is supposed to be a tiny town in the middle of a rural area, after all. But for all the irresponsible behavior we’ve come to accept from characters on Dark Shadows, we are not going to be able simply to forget about this human being. They are going to have to do something to account for him.

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