Like many episodes of Dark Shadows, this one ran long and ended with credits only for the cast and for Dan Curtis Productions. The entry on the Dark Shadows wiki says that the director was Lela Swift. I am sure that it was in fact directed by Henry Kaplan. This shot of Nancy Barrett as heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is proof positive:
There is another flagrant Kaplanism in today’s first scene between antique shop owners Philip and Megan Todd (Christopher Bernau and Marie Wallace.) Philip enters from upstairs. He stops with his waist at the top of the frame. That’s where he stays for the first part of the scene, ending with Megan raising a paper that covers part of her face. Evidently what’s happening between the characters is none of the audience’s business.
Philip makes an entranceMegan interacts with Philip
Swift was a talented and ambitious visual artist, Kaplan a sloppy and unimaginative one. He relied heavily on closeups. When it dawned on him that it was dull to hold the frame just beyond the edges of an actor’s face, his response was to zoom in and give us an extreme closeup of some part of the actor’s face. It’s above average for him that the first shot above includes Miss Barrett’s eyes- he specialized in shots displaying the face from the nostrils down, and often held them even after the actors had to move, leaving us with the sight of an ear drifting out of our view.
Even when Kaplan’s tight little frames do not keep us from figuring out what is happening in a scene, they deprive us of the energy that comes from seeing the players interact with each other. We don’t get statements and reactions simultaneously, and we don’t see the actors using the space between them to tell us how the characters feel about each other. Kaplan was also a pretty bad director of actors, regularly poking them with a stick as his way of telling them he wanted them to play a scene differently and on one occasion fastening a handle to a child actor so that he could physically place him on his mark during rehearsal. So perhaps his mania for closeups reflected a lack of awareness of what actors do and how the choices they make contribute to the audience’s experience. As a result of his insensitivity to these and other visual aspects of the medium, Kaplan’s episodes would often be better suited to radio than to television.
Fortunately, the dialogue today is peppered with snappy lines. So Danny Horn devotes his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Dayto a selection of memorable pieces of dialogue. That also makes me suspect the wiki is not entirely correct. It attributes the script to Gordon Russell, an able writer overall but one who is not at all given to bons mots. I use bits of dialogue whenever possible as the titles of these posts, and I often have to search very hard through Russell’s to find suitable ones. It was Violet Welles who excelled at producing those. Russell and Welles often collaborated, so it could be that he wrote a draft to which she added the quotable quotes.
The current story centers on a mysterious cult that has sent time traveler Barnabas Collins back to 1969 from a long sojourn in 1897, by way of a couple of days in 1796. Under the influence of the cult, Barnabas is being a real jerk to his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Barnabas was a vampire for a long time, and even when he is free of the effects of that curse he habitually resorts to murder to solve his problems. But the victims of those murders are imaginary, played by actors who will go on to find other work, so we don’t usually stay mad at him for any length of time when he commits them. His friendship with Julia, on the other hand, is the emotional core of the show. Barnabas’ coldness to her in yesterday’s episode and today’s leads us to see what the cult is doing to him as the greatest crime anyone has ever committed on Dark Shadows.
Barnabas was a pop culture phenomenon familiar to many millions of people who never saw a single minute of Dark Shadows. The show’s fanbase largely consisted of his devoted followers. So a story about a cult which co-opts him as its leader and changes his personality so that he is impossible to get along with directly addresses a fear that must have blacked out the mind of Dan Curtis every time the postal service truck loaded with Jonathan Frid’s fan mail backed up at ABC Studio 16.
Barnabas brought a box with him from his visit to the eighteenth century, and it is of the utmost importance to the vast eternal plan the cult is working on that the box not be opened until the right time. So Barnabas put it on the mantel in his living room, and when Julia was standing a few inches from him he lifted it from the mantel and placed it on a table in the middle of the room. When she asked what it was, he became flustered and refused to answer any questions about it.
When Julia left the house, Barnabas left the room, with the front door unlocked and the box still on the table. Today, we open with Julia coming back in, hearing the sound of breathing coming from the box, finding its key on the table next to it, and placing the key in its lock. Barnabas comes in just in time to stop her opening it, but we can see that the cult probably could have chosen an agent with a better sense of operational security. Barnabas’ function in the story is to make messes that other people will have to clean up, so as soon as we heard that the box must not under any circumstances be opened we expected him to leave it where it would inevitably fall into the hands of someone bent on opening it, though it is a bit disappointing he has done so this quickly.
After he has taken the box from her, Barnabas berates Julia, orders her from his house, and tells her he owes her nothing. He abruptly sweetens up and tells her that he is only carrying on that way because of some kind of temporal jet lag. He reminds her that when she traveled back in time in September, she was very ill for a while; he suggests that his surly mood might be the result of the same shock that caused that reaction. About a minute after he starts on this new tack, just as Julia has started smiling again, a knock comes at the door. It is Carolyn.
We don’t know what effect the cult’s co-optation of him has had on Barnabas, but regular viewers know that characters on Dark Shadows are always acquiring one magical power and losing another. For the last few months of the 1897 segment, the show’s main villain was sorcerer Count Petofi. One of Petofi’s signature moves was to become aware of visitors shortly before they arrived. It could be that the writers have decided to give the cultified Barnabas that power, and that it was because Carolyn was on her way that he wanted to put Julia in a good mood.
That interpretation is supported by what follows. Carolyn is delighted to see Barnabas; she hadn’t known he was back from his trip to 1897. She hugs him and he smiles, a stark contrast to his icy reaction when Julia hugged him yesterday. She wants to talk about Chris Jennings, a young man she dated a few times and whom she has been told is dangerous. Julia and Barnabas have befriended Chris and know that he is a werewolf. Julia thinks she can somehow control Chris’ transformations, and she urges Carolyn to think well of him. Barnabas tells her to trust her instincts and to avoid Chris. He keeps telling her that she is too important to be allowed to come to harm. Later, he visits Carolyn in her home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood, and he keeps going on and on about how important she is and how confident he is about her future. He also gives her a silver pentagram, an amulet to ward off werewolves, and urges her to wear it at all times. He subsequently has another scene with Julia in his own house, and he is just as cold and dismissive as he was in the first scene, exploding at her for being “irrational.” Evidently the cult has plans for Carolyn, but not for Julia.
Julia bought a painting from the Todds the other day, and now they have received a telegram offering to buy it regardless of price. Julia goes to their shop and discusses the telegram with them. She believes that the telegram, which is signed “Corey,” may actually be from Quentin Collins, a distant cousin of Barnabas’ whom he befriended during his time in 1897 and who may have been immortalized by a magical portrait painted by the same artist responsible for the picture Julia bought. She tells the Todds that she is not certain she wants to part with the painting, but that she would very much like to meet “Mr Corey,” and that she believes others in town would also like to do so. She urges them to reply to the telegram with an invitation.
Barnabas stands over the box. We hear his thoughts as he mulls over his questions about it. He suddenly declares “It is time!” Then he goes to his chair and sits down. Evidently, it is time to take a load off.
Barnabas has a vision of one of the hooded figures who inducted him into the cult. The figure, a man named Oberon, addresses him as “Master” and tells him that he is to give the box to people who wake him by knocking at his door. There is a knocking, he does awaken, and he goes to the door.
At the end of 1968 and beginning of 1969, two supernatural menaces were growing in tandem. The malign ghost of Quentin Collins was becoming steadily more powerful until it made the estate of Collinwood uninhabitable. As Quentin’s power grew, the curse that made Chris Jennings a werewolf also gained force, so that Chris could no longer be sure of keeping his human form even on nights without a full Moon. By the end of February, the Collins family had evacuated the great house on the estate, and Chris was in his lupine form permanently.
Trying to contact Quentin’s ghost, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins meditated on a set of I Ching wands. To his surprise, Barnabas found himself relocated in time to the year 1897, when he was a vampire and Quentin was a living being. Over the next eight months, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in that year. Barnabas learned that Quentin had been a werewolf, and that he was Chris’ great-grandfather. He also learned that a magical portrait painted by an artist named Charles Delaware Tate had freed Quentin of the effects of the werewolf curse. In #839, we saw that the characters in the 1960s are aware of time passing in Barnabas’ absence; we also saw the haunting of Collinwood break in that episode. The characters remember what happened in the previous episodes, and are relieved that Quentin has found peace and they can now move back into the great house. We did not hear anything about Chris at that time. Last we saw him he was locked up in the hidden chamber inside the old Collins mausoleum in the cemetery north of town. For all we know, he’s still there.
When Barnabas went to the past, his entranced body remained in place sitting before the I Ching wands in the basement of his home, the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. In September, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes were visiting the basement and saw Barnabas’ body vanish before their eyes. Julia then sat down to meditate on the wands, and found herself transported back to 1897. She was there for a couple of weeks, during which time she initiated a treatment for Barnabas like the one that had freed him of the effects of the vampire curse for a while early in 1968. She snapped back to 1969 before the treatment was completed, but other friends of his were able to pick up where Julia left off and finish it successfully.
The portrait of Quentin would appear to have been destroyed in a fire in #883. Some unspecified supernatural agency whisked Barnabas out of the year 1897 at the end of #884, but it did not send him to 1969. Instead, he found himself in 1796, the year he first became a vampire. Amid some sinister doings, Barnabas found himself in a mysterious clearing in the woods where he saw a massive stone structure. Two hooded figures stood by this cairn. He was unable to resist or escape them. He lost consciousness, and they laid him on the cairn. They used it as an altar, covering him with foliage and consecrating him to whatever unknown beings they served. When he awoke, he knew all about the hooded figures and the cult they represented. They greeted him as their master. He spoke a ritual formula, gave some orders, and prepared to leave the eighteenth century.
The Returns
On Tuesday, we saw that Julia has been hanging around the Old House for the five weeks since she returned to 1969. She explained to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard that Barnabas would have to reappear in the place from which he disappeared. So she locked the basement from the outside, evidently expecting to hear Barnabas calling to be let out. There is another way out of the basement, a tunnel from the prison cell there to the beach outside, but Julia must have forgotten about that.
At the opening of today’s episode, we learn that Julia was right about Barnabas reappearing in the place from which he disappeared. But she does not know that the last place the audience saw him was at the cairn. The cairn opens, and Barnabas materializes in front of it. He delivers an incantation, and goes on his way.
We cut to the great house at Collinwood, where Julia is showing Stokes a painting she bought yesterday. It is one of Tate’s works, a landscape painted sometime around 1949. Seeing that Tate was still doing work as good as any he ever did only twenty years ago, Julia wonders if he might still be alive in 1969. Stokes scoffs at this possibility, since Tate would be a hundred years old or more, but Julia is determined to search for him. When Stokes asks why she is so interested, she says that she cannot tell him, because it is a confidential favor she is doing for a friend.
While Stokes knows about the haunting of Collinwood and about Barnabas’ trip back in time, he does not know that Chris is the werewolf. If he did, he would probably turn him in to the police. So Julia can’t very well tell him that she is hoping Tate will be able to paint a portrait that will do for him what Quentin’s portrait did 72 years earlier. Fortunately for her, Stokes readily accepts her refusal to explain herself.
Stokes tells Julia about a project of his own. He says that local physician Dr Reeves has enlisted him to help with a patient. Stokes is a scholar of occult lore, not a clinician or therapist of any kind. Reeves’ decision to enlist Stokes’ aid would admit of either of two possible explanations. It could be something that often happens on soap operas, a genre in which all forms of authority tend to become interchangeable with each other, so that scholars can function as doctors, doctors can function as lawyers, and anyone who dresses up for work can function as a cop. The other possibility is that Reeves has caught on that the village of Collinsport is rife with supernatural phenomena and has decided that Stokes’ expertise might enable him to diagnose his patient. Julia’s amused disbelief when Stokes announces that he is going to see “a patient” counts against the first possibility. She is closer than any other character in the parts of Dark Shadows to a representative of the audience’s point of view, so if she is still aware of Stokes as someone whose competence is limited to a specific field we are as well. So we can assume that Dr Reeves has concluded that there is something uncanny about what ails his patient.
Stokes identifies the patient to Julia as Sabrina Stuart, a young woman who, a few years previously, was discovered with a head of white hair and without the ability to speak. He says that he and Reeves have managed to get her to start saying words but that she cannot describe the origin of her trauma. Julia knows that Sabrina’s trouble began when she saw Chris transform into the wolf, and so she is alarmed at the prospect that she will begin talking. She tries to persuade Stokes to give up, but he is nothing daunted.
Stokes exits, and Chris enters. Julia scolds him for having checked himself out of Windcliff, the mental hospital she controls. This is the first we learn that he left the hidden chamber in the mausoleum; it is also the first we learn that he has reverted to human form. He acknowledged that he can change back to the wolf at any time, and that something has to be done, but he can’t take solitary confinement any longer. Longtime viewers, remembering that every time he changes he kills people, will find this to be a stupefyingly selfish decision. It alienates whatever sympathy we may have for Chris.
Chris tells Julia that even if he is cured, he will not be truly free so long as Sabrina is around. He does not say what he plans to do about Sabrina, but if he is willing to commit all the murders that will surely follow from his decision to leave the hospital we can’t help but suspect it won’t be good for her.
We cut to Sabrina’s room in the facility where she is staying. Stokes is providing her with a sort of therapy. The audience will be surprised to see Sabrina again. Sabrina, played by Lisa Blake Richards, appeared in episodes #692, #697, and #698. The show went to 1897 in #701; Miss Richards could easily have been cast in a part in the costume drama segment, but was not. Surely no one could have expected that she would be waiting for us when we returned to contemporary dress, but here she is.
Miss Richards is pleasant enough, but she bears an ill omen. Julia and Stokes talk about Sabrina’s brother Ned, to whom Stokes refers as “a rather surly fellow.” That’s putting it mildly. Not only does he shout at his scene partners and violate their physical space, traits common to all characters played by Roger Davis, but he had a habit of groping his sister’s breasts and rubbing his cheeks on her face. These habits led us to wonder how much of Sabrina’s catatonia was a symptom of the shock of seeing Chris’ transformation and how much was the result of her brother’s constant abuse. Julia is already threatening to bring back Tate, another of Mr Davis’ characters. If Roger Davis winds up playing two parts concurrently, the show might become entirely unwatchable.
Dr Reeves is another character we haven’t seen for a long time. Fred Stewart appeared as Dr Reeves in #17, where he treats Roger Collins after an auto wreck, and in #158, where he examines Elizabeth Collins Stoddard after she has fallen down the stairs. Actors have been returning from long absences lately; Miss Richards’ surprising reappearance today reminds us of all-time champ Alfred Hinckley, unseen since his turn as a train conductor in episode #1, who came back as a doctor in #868, and of John Harkins, who played a policeman in a scene set in Phoenix, Arizona in #174 and returned as a very different law enforcement officer from another faraway place in #878. Perhaps the reference to Dr Reeves means that Stewart will rejoin the cast. Stewart didn’t have much to offer, but I’ll take a thousand of him over one Roger Davis any day.
Be that as it may, what I really wonder about is where writer Gordon Russell found Dr Reeves’ name. Neither he nor any other member of the writing staff was connected with the show when Dr Reeves appeared, and line producer Peter Miner just started three weeks ago. Executive producer Dan Curtis and director Lela Swift were with the show from the beginning, but Curtis was busy getting ready to make the feature film that became House of Dark Shadows at this time, and Swift doesn’t seem to have interacted much with the writers. Even Harriet Rohr, Costello’s assistant who often attended table reads and seems to have helped with continuity, wasn’t around much at this period. So there must have been pieces of paper floating around listing seldom-seen characters and other points of trivia for the writers’ reference. I’m sure fandom would go nuts if those papers ever turned up!
During their therapy session, Sabrina suddenly looks at Stokes and asks him who Carolyn Stoddard is. She then declares that Carolyn is in danger, and demands to meet with her at once.
As it happens, Carolyn dated Chris for a while around New Year’s 1969. Stokes knows Carolyn well enough that he must have been at least dimly aware of this. Ned is obsessed with his hostility to Chris and is rarely far from Sabrina, so Stokes must have heard about Chris and Sabrina’s relationship. But Stokes does not make the connection. He can’t imagine why Sabrina is suddenly talking about Carolyn.
Back at the great house, Chris and Carolyn have a conversation. She is irked that he went away for so long without a word to her. It’s understandable he does not want her to know that he is the werewolf, but why can’t he tell her he was confined to a mental institution? It isn’t as if he is worried about making a good impression on her. On the contrary, everything he says to her is part of his effort to convince her he does not want to renew their relationship.
That terrible beating
By this time, Julia has moved on to her chief concern. She has heard a heartbeat pounding from the portrait of Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house, a sign that he is near. Julia goes to the Old House and finds Barnabas coming down the stairs. She is delighted to see him, but puzzled he is not locked in the basement. He tells her he returned by means of the I Ching. She is sure this cannot be true.
Julia had already returned to 1969 when sorcerer Count Petofi used the I Ching to project himself into that year for a few minutes in #872 and #873 in a way altogether unlike the one Barnabas had used. No one in 1969 saw Petofi while he was then, nor did Barnabas or any of his allies know about the trip. But Julia herself went back to 1897 by yet another radically different I Ching-mediated path, and both of them really ought to be aware that they are dealing with forces that work unpredictably. So it does not make much sense that Julia is so certain whatever it is that is released when one contemplates the I Ching could send Barnabas only to the basement.
Barnabas does not return any of Julia’s warm emotional displays. When she bursts into a smile and hugs him, he stands still and stares icily ahead. This is quite startling to regular viewers, who have seen the two of them grow quite cozy over the last year and a half.
Barnabas also refuses to answer any of Julia’s questions about what happened in the last weeks of the 1897 story. This will be even more startling. Barnabas and Julia gave each other huge amounts of information even when they first met and he saw her as an enemy. Since they became fast friends in the summer of 1968, their conversations have been the heart of the show. The show burned through so much story in the final weeks of the 1897 segment that it brings us up very short when Barnabas declares that he is too tired to talk about any of it. He won’t even say that everything was settled- his only explanation of anything is that he returned because he wanted to. For all he tells Julia today, their enemies might have triumphed completely in 1897.
While Julia is looking at him, Barnabas picks up a box that he has placed on the mantel. This seems to be a way of calling her attention to it, so she politely asks what it is. He becomes flustered and demands she disregard it. Returning viewers know that it is the one thing he brought with him from his encounter with the hooded figures in 1796. In his conversation with them, he said that it must not be opened until the proper time, lest their whole vast eternal plan come to ruin. Barnabas’ function in the story is to make a mess of everything, so of course he leaves the box out in the open and waves it in front of the face of the world’s most inquisitive person.
Meanwhile, Carolyn visits Sabrina. Sabrina insists Stokes leave them alone; when he does, she insists Carolyn not repeat their conversation to Stokes. She tells Carolyn that Chris, even though he is good, will kill her if they stay together.
We would be hard put to defend the idea that Chris is good, or to regret it if Stokes or any other law-abiding person were in a position to end his reign of terror. It is also surprising that Sabrina, who can barely say her own name when Stokes is working with her, talks quite fluently once he is out of the room. Maybe Dr Reeves was not so wise to choose him as Sabrina’s therapist.
Back in the Old House, Julia tells Barnabas that “Today, I was given reason to believe that Charles Delaware Tate may still be alive.” Barnabas replies “There’s no reason to believe that’s true.” That flat contradiction, with the jarring repetition of the word “reason,” shows that Barnabas is not only evading Julia’s questions, he is rejecting her personally in a way that he did not do even before they became friends, when he kept plotting to kill her. At least in those days he always listened closely to what she said, knowing that her great intelligence made her a danger to him. In this exchange he is treating her as if her words were beneath notice.
Julia sticks with the topic, and Barnabas says that even if Tate were still alive he would be “a hundred and totally useless!” That’s pretty rich coming from Barnabas, who himself is at least twice that age and would be in an awkward spot if he had to explain what use he is to anyone. But Julia only says that they must look into the matter.
A careless lie
Chris enters. He is delighted to see Barnabas, on whom he has pinned all his hopes. Barnabas tells him that “In all the time I was in the past, I found no solution for you. I am afraid there’s nothing that I can possibly do.” He follows that with “I must ask you to excuse me, I’m very tired,” and toddles off to bed.
Julia and Chris leave the house together. She tells him why she thinks Barnabas was lying. Chris goes home, and Julia goes back into the house, through the unlocked front door. She picks up the box, which is still on the table in the middle of the living room. As she heard Barnabas’ heartbeat coming from his portrait in the great house, so she hears breathing coming from inside the box. One wonders what other bodily functions will audibly manifest in objets d’art around Collinwood.
Yesterday, we spent a lot of time watching an unidentifiable man wandering around the estate of Collinwood. We only saw him from the back; he was wearing a dark coat and hat, and had silver-gray hair. Evidently we were supposed to expect his face would mean something to us when it was finally revealed.
At the end of yesterday’s episode, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman caught the prowler coming out of the Old House on the grounds of the estate, home of her friend, missing person Barnabas Collins. She did not recognize the man, and he refused to identify himself. We see him in today’s opening reprise. His face would not be familiar to her, but it is instantly recognizable to longtime viewers. It is that of actor Dennis Patrick, who from March to July 1967 played seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Jason blackmailed reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard to the point of marriage. When Liz finally stood up to Jason, his scheme collapsed. On his way out of town, Jason went to the Old House hoping to steal jewels from Barnabas. That attempt also failed, and Barnabas strangled Jason.
We spend most of the episode wondering how Jason managed to rise from the dead. Near the end, Liz’ daughter Carolyn runs into the prowler. She gets a good look at him and talks to him for a few minutes, but does not recognize him. Carolyn would certainly recognize Jason, whom she was ready to shoot if Liz had gone through with the wedding. So Patrick must be playing another character. He does not give Carolyn his name, but his strong emotional reaction when she gives hers tells us that he has some kind of connection to her. We are again supposed to leave the episode wondering who he might be.
Unfortunately, word of that did not get to the people who make up the closing credits. Patrick is billed today as “Paul Stoddard.” Paul is Carolyn’s long-missing father, Liz’ ex-husband, and a close friend and partner in crime of the late Jason McGuire. This is not the first time on Dark Shadows the closing credits have identified a character whose identity was supposed to keep us guessing. For example, at the end of #124 we are supposed to be in suspense as to which of a few people a mysterious woman is, but the closing credits identify her as “Laura Collins,” a name which blows the secret completely for attentive longtime viewers. A mysterious little girl turns up in #255 and for a few episodes we are supposed to be in the dark as to who she is. But at her first appearance the character was billed as “Sarah Collins.”
It’s interesting to cast Patrick as Paul. Jason’s scheme was based on Liz’ belief that she had killed Paul, when in fact Paul and Jason had worked together to fake his death and swindle her of some money. Since Paul and Jason committed the two halves of the same crime, they merge together in the disastrous effects they have had on Liz’ life. So they may as well look and sound exactly alike.
Waiting for Barnabas
Barnabas vanished from his basement some time ago while he was involved with some supernatural doings. Julia has been hanging around the house for over a month, waiting for him to rematerialize. She explains to Carolyn that because he disappeared from the basement, it is the only place where he can reappear. They go into the house and Julia almost immediately suggests they leave. She is sure he isn’t there, because she locked the basement door. Evidently Julia has spent all this time waiting to hear Barnabas banging on that door demanding to be let out.
Carolyn points out that Barnabas might be unconscious, and if he is he would not be banging on the door even if he has come back. Julia exclaims “I hadn’t even thought of that! He- he could be down there now!” At this, my wife, Mrs Acilius, laughed and said “He could have been down there for a month!” By profession, Julia is a mad scientist. She knows how to cure vampirism, bring Frankenstein’s monsters to life, rewrite people’s memories at will, and travel back in time, but she has her blind spots.
Be that as it may, Julia checks the basement and finds Barnabas is not there.
The Antique Shop
Carolyn takes Julia to an antique shop that has just opened in the village of Colllinsport. Carolyn called the shop “divine” yesterday, and is still thrilled about it today. I suppose it reminds her of home- like all the unoccupied spaces in the great house of Collinwood, it is crammed with a lot of miscellaneous junk.
Carolyn may have a soft spot for the place, but she hasn’t lost all capacity for judgment. The proprietors, a young couple named Philip and Megan Todd, have just unpacked a painting they bought that morning. Philip says that when it came up for auction he couldn’t resist it. Carolyn widens her eyes, tilts her head back, and says in an incredulous voice, “Hmm, your taste must be quite different from mine, Philip. I could have resisted that.”
The painting Philip couldn’t resist.
Philip mentions that the artist’s name is Charles Delaware Tate. At that, Julia perks up. She asks Philip if he is certain that it is an authentic Tate; he assures her that he is. He astonishes her by saying that it was painted only about twenty years ago. Julia says that Tate would have been in his 80s then. Seeing that the painting is about as good as anything Tate ever did, she says that he was still at the height of his powers despite his advanced age. She wonders if, having been in such good shape so recently, he could still be alive. Philip doesn’t know about that.
Julia asks for the price. When Philip says he will part with the painting for $300, Julia takes out her checkbook. Carolyn looks on, amazed to see her shell out so much money so quickly for a mediocre picture. When it is time to go, Julia asks her if she is ready. Still agape, Carolyn replies “Yes.. for practically anything!”
For eight months, from #701 at the beginning of March to #884 last week, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897. In the second half of that segment, Tate was one of the minor villains. He had made a bargain with evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Petofi made him a nationally famous painter whose works were very much in demand. Many of his paintings also had magical powers. The magical powers were the result of Petofi’s spell, but it was never made entirely clear whether Tate’s fame was the result of a talent Petofi gave him to paint well or if Petofi’s intervention was more direct and he simply bewitched people into admiring Tate’s paintings and wanting to buy them. Indeed, if we had to classify the works of Tate that we saw, the most secure categorization would be “Nothing Special.” They certainly do not stand comparison to the best of the portraits that the ABC Network’s Art Department prepared for the Collinwood sets. Carolyn’s reaction today clearly suggests that once Petofi’s influence receded, the paintings lost their charm.
Julia’s interest in Tate is not aesthetic. Julia traveled back in time for a couple of weeks in September. She knows that Tate’s portrait of Quentin Collins prevented Quentin from turning into a werewolf. The prospect that Tate might still be alive leads her to hope that her friend Chris Jennings, a great-grandson of Quentin’s, might also be cured of lycanthropy.
The audience is unlikely to find much ground for optimism in the thought of more Tate. As is usual for characters played by Roger Davis, Tate is hard to watch. He delivers most of his lines in a shout, and he amplifies his voice by clenching his rectal sphincter muscles. The result is what Pauline Kael used to call an “anal screech.” He also has what we might tactfully call a poor sense of personal space; indeed, two of the tags that most often appear together on posts on this blog are “Roger Davis” and “Abusive Behavior on Camera.” So I would just as soon Julia give up her search for Tate.
The Todds
Megan and Philip exult over Julia’s purchase. They are in the middle of talking about how it is a good sign for their new business, when Megan is suddenly seized with a fit of foreboding. She wants to close the shop early; Philip protests that they still have time to make a few more sales. Megan then says she has a premonition that if they stay in Collinsport something terrible will happen to them. She says she wants to sell the shop and move away. Philip tries to soothe her. He puts his head against hers and kisses her. She just looks straight on, her eyes full of dread.
Philip working his way to Megan’s neck while it dawns on her that they are now characters on Dark Shadows.
Megan is the third role Marie Wallace played on Dark Shadows. Her first two were Eve, the Fiancée of Frankenstein, and Crazy Jenny Collins, Quentin’s estranged and deranged wife. Miss Wallace had a lot of fun with those parts, but neither of them gave her much opportunity to interact meaningfully with her scene partners. Eve was unyieldingly nasty to everyone, whatever they might say or do, and Jenny was just one long mad scene. As Megan, she gets to listen to Philip and react to what he says. That ends when she ignores his kissing her neck, but while it lasts it’s good to see.
Philip is played by Christopher Bernau. Some fans say that Bernau and Miss Wallace lacked “chemistry,” but their last shot today shows how misguided that criticism is. The key to chemistry is for one character to initiate a kiss and the other to kiss back. Megan is supposed to be too preoccupied with her premonition to notice anything in her environment, even her beloved husband kissing her. If she had responded to him at all, the whole point of the scene would have been lost.
It is true that Bernau does not perfectly embody a romantic lead in Philip’s scenes with Megan. As a happy couple, Philip and Megan constantly make little jokes with each other. The jokes in the script aren’t very good, and Bernau tries to put some life into them by imitating Jack Benny. In the 1920s and 1930s, Benny’s persona struck people as a spoiled rich kid, and in later years he was so famous that it just meant Jack Benny. But by the 1960s, any man other than Jack Benny would send a very different message if he were to speak with that drawl and walk with that mincing gait. When the man in question is an antique dealer wearing a belted sweater that looks suspiciously like a dress, it does not seem especially likely that he will passionately in love with his wife.
I think Philip borrowed this from Maggie Evans…
Several times in his career Bernau proved he could be effective in love scenes with women, most famously as ladies’ man Alan Spaulding on The Guiding Light. I mentioned that role in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day:
I was a kid when Bernau joined GUIDING LIGHT. My mother watched that show, and I had several times attempted to watch it with her, but it always defeated me after 5 or 10 minutes. It just seemed like a window into the deepest level of Hell, the frozen cavern where absolutely nothing happens. But Bernau caught my imagination. I could watch entire episodes if he was in them.
Years later, when I watched DARK SHADOWS on the Sci-Fi Channel, I realized what made Bernau so compelling on GUIDING LIGHT. He was doing a Jonathan Frid imitation. Within moments of first seeing Barnabas, I exclaimed “Alan Spaulding!” It was only years later that I learned Bernau had been on DARK SHADOWS.
Comment left 10 December 2020 by Acilius, on Danny Horn, “Episode 888: Little Shop,” 26 June 2016, Dark Shadows Every Day.
I’m very fond of John Gielgud’s story that from the time he first saw Claude Rains give a performance, his acting style consisted of imitating Claude Rains. Gielgud went on to say that this represented a great improvement over his previous style, which consisted of imitating Noël Coward. I doubt Bernau’s style ever depended entirely on either Jack Benny or Jonathan Frid, but he certainly learned a great deal by watching each of them.
One evening in 1796, time traveler Barnabas Collins has stumbled into a clearing in the woods where he finds a cairn and two hooded figures. He finds himself unable to resist the figures while they put him on the cairn. He loses consciousness. When he comes to, he suddenly knows everything about them and the religion they represent, and they hail him as their leader. He says that he will be leaving soon, and that they will accompany him only in spirit. The only thing he will take with him is “the Leviathan box.” This is the first time we have heard the word “Leviathan” on Dark Shadows. Barnabas also talks about a book that will be important, though apparently it will get to wherever he is going on its own.
The show is starting a new storyline this week; for the last few days, the episodes have ended with an announcement alternately promising that today would mark the beginning of “one of the most terrifying tales ever told” or at least “one of the most unusual tales ever told.” Dark Shadows often marks the beginning of a new story with the opening of a box. Barnabas was a vampire when he first joined the show; his story began in #210, when a would-be grave robber opened his coffin and got a nasty surprise. The story we just concluded kicked into high gear in #778, when broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi brought a box containing the severed hand of sorcerer Count Petofi to the estate of Collinwood. Books have also been important. The show’s first costume drama segment, when from November 1967 to March 1968 it was set in the 1790s, involved well-meaning governess Vicki Winters toting around a copy of the Collins family history. That volume was crucial to many subsequent plot developments. Apparently this time there will be both a box and a book.
We cut to 1969. Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman is moping around his house, the Old House at Collinwood. She does not know that he is in 1796, but does know that he has been traveling through time. He has spent the last eight months in the year 1897. Julia visited him there for a couple of weeks, but snapped back to 1969 over a month ago and has been waiting for him to come back. She has heard voices from the past occasionally, but not for the last couple of nights, and she is afraid she is losing touch with the rupture in space-time that stands between her and Barnabas. To take her mind off things, she goes to the great house on the estate and hangs out with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard.
We keep getting glimpses of a man strolling around the estate. We see him only from the back. He has silver-gray hair and is wearing a hat and coat we haven’t seen before. He peeks at Julia through the window of Barnabas’ house, then wanders off to the woods. The cairn materializes in a clearing while he watches. He looks at it calmly, then walks away. He must have expected to see it take shape before him. Presumably he has some connection with the cult represented by the hooded figures and now to be led by Barnabas.
In the great house, Julia hears the voices of two characters from the 1897 segment. They are Magda and Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye. Julia did not meet Magda during her trip to 1897; it would have required special effects for her to do so, since they are both played by Grayson Hall. Julia was once in the same room as Pansy, but would not remember her- she was unconscious at the time. So it is odd that she recognizes their voices.
Julia hears Pansy telling Magda that Barnabas and Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, went into the Old House the night before and haven’t been seen since. She goes on to say that stuffy but lovable Edward Collins searched the house, and could find no trace of either Barnabas or Kitty. They seem to have vanished.
Returning viewers know that they did indeed vanish. Kitty was assumed bodily into the portrait of the late Josette Collins that hangs in the Old House, and when Barnabas saw that this was happening he and she both disappeared completely. They were both transferred to 1796, Barnabas as he was when he was around in those days, Kitty in the form of a distant memory in Josette’s mind.
Knowing that, we will not be confused by Pansy and Magda’s conversation. Other knowledge of ours will have the opposite effect. When Magda says that the story of Barnabas and Kitty’s disappearance from the Old House has nothing to do with her, Pansy challenges her with “You live in the Old House, don’t you?” Magda admits she does. While Magda did live there when Barnabas first arrived in 1897 in #701, she wasn’t on the show much in the last couple of months of the 1897 segment, and in the last weeks of it characters were saying that no one lived in the Old House. She must have gone away. Moreover, she would have been most unlikely to return. Several mortal enemies of hers were already in the area, and she knew that kinsmen of late Rroma chieftain/ organized crime boss King Johnny Romana were on their way to Collinwood, seeking, among other things, to kill her. Clearly the makers of the show just wanted to use the voices of Grayson Hall and Nancy Barrett because Julia and Carolyn were already in the episode, but the result really is pretty sloppy.
Julia decides that the conversation between Pansy and Magda means that Barnabas is on his way back to the 1960s, and she hastens to the Old House to meet him. As she arrives there, she meets the gray-haired man in the hat and coat. She looks him in the face and asks who he is.
Julia knows virtually everything the audience knows about the parts of the show set in the late 1960s, so when she does not recognize him we wonder who he could be. Perhaps he is someone we met when the show was set in the 1790s or in the parts of the 1897 segment before or after Julia’s time in that year, or he could be someone who was on the show before she joined the cast in the summer of 1967. The only gray-haired men we saw in any of those periods were some doctors, lawyers, judges, and clergymen who appeared in one or two episodes, and we aren’t expecting to see any of them again. So either this man is a new character, or he is a character who has aged considerably since we last saw him. The trouble they took to hide his face suggests that they expect us to react when it is revealed to us. So even if he is a new character, he is probably going to be played by an actor we have seen before.
In #701, broadcast at the beginning of March 1969, recovering vampire-turned-bumbling protagonist Barnabas Collins was trying to solve some problems his distant cousins were having, and inadvertently came unstuck in time. He found himself in the year 1897, where his vampirism was once more in full force. Barnabas spent the next eight months in that year, precipitating one disaster after another around the estate of Collinwood and the village of Collinsport.
As summer gave way to fall of 1897, Barnabas’ friends managed to put his vampirism back into remission. In #844, he met Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire. Despite what her title would suggest, Kitty was an American woman in her twenties. Barnabas recognized her as the reincarnation of his lost love Josette. In February of 1796, Josette found out that Barnabas had become a vampire and that he wanted to kill her and raise her from the dead as his vampire bride. She flung herself to her death from the cliff on Widows’ Hill rather than let him do that to her.
In the eight weeks following Kitty’s first appearance, Josette’s personality irrupted into her conscious mind more and more frequently. Josette wanted to live again and to be with Barnabas. By last week, Kitty could hear Josette’s voice talking to her through the portrait of her that hangs in the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. Josette suggested that if Kitty stopped resisting her, the two of them could both live, resolving themselves into a composite being.
In Thursday’s episode, the boundary between Kitty and Josette had become very indistinct. As Kitty, she agreed to marry Barnabas that night, later to wonder why she had done so. She was holding Josette’s white dress in her hand and struggling with the idea of putting it on when she abruptly found herself wearing it. Barnabas entered the room just in time to see her bodily assumed into the portrait. He reached up to the moving image of Kitty overlaid on the painted likeness of Josette, and both he and Kitty vanished at the same instant.
In Friday’s episode, Barnabas found himself lying on the ground, wearing clothes he had last put on in 1796. He learned that it was the night of Josette’s death. He is a vampire in this period, but he is confident he can again be free of the effects of the curse. He does not want to kill Josette, but to take her back to 1897 with him. His efforts to that end were not at all successful, and Friday ended with her on the edge of the cliff. She hears footsteps, which she and the audience have every reason to think are Barnabas’. If she sees him, she is prepared to jump.
Neither Kitty’s assumption into the portrait nor his own translation to 1796 prompt Barnabas to ask a single question about what forces are at work around him. Regular viewers would not expect him to. He lives in a universe where time travel is easy. Not only did he travel from March 1969 to 1897 without even trying to do so, but in #661 he managed to get from January 1969 to 1796 by standing in a graveyard at night and shouting for one of the residents to give him a ride. And in #365, he was present at a séance where the ghost of his little sister Sarah, speaking through well-meaning governess Vicki Winters, said that she would “tell the story from the beginning.” Vicki then vanished from the circle and Sarah’s governess, Phyllis Wick, materialized in her place. For the next four months the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s, where Vicki flailed about helplessly while Barnabas became a vampire, Sarah died of exposure, and Josette jumped off Widows’ Hill.
Barnabas and we also know that portraits are powerful in the universe of Dark Shadows. When he is in full vampire-mode, he communicates with his victims and potential victims through a portrait of him that hangs in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. Much of the action in the 1897 segment had to do with a magical portrait that keeps Barnabas’ distant cousin Quentin from turning into a werewolf. Quentin had a romance with Amanda Harris, a woman who came to life when another magical portrait was painted.
Barnabas knows, not only that portraits in general have power, but also that Josette’s portrait in particular is powerful. In his second episode, #212, he went to the Old House and talked with strange and troubled boy David Collins, who often communed with Josette through her portrait. After David left him alone there, Barnabas addressed the portrait and told Josette that she would no longer function as the tutelary spirit of the Collins family. At that point Josette was supposed to be Barnabas’ grandmother who sided against him in a fateful family battle, but even after she was retconned as his lost love he felt the portrait’s power. So in #287, Vicki had invited herself to spend the night at Barnabas’ house. While she slept, Barnabas entered the room, intending to bite her. But he looked at the portrait of Josette and found that something was stopping him from doing so.
Barnabas would not have any way of knowing it, but in #70 Dark Shadows‘ first major special effect came when we saw Josette’s ghost take shape in front of her portrait and take three steps down from it to the floor of the room where it was hanging then, the front parlor of the Old House. She then turned, looked at the portrait, and went outside, where she danced among the columns of the portico. Longtime viewers will see Kitty’s assumption into the portrait as a reversal of this momentous little journey.
Most people nowadays who have been watching the show for some time will therefore take the strange goings-on as much in stride as Barnabas does. But viewers at the time may have had a different reaction. Friday’s episode and today’s originally ended with announcements over the closing credits. These announcements were not on the original master videotapes from which Amazon Prime Video and Tubi and the other streaming apps take their copies of the episodes, and so most viewers these days don’t hear them. But evidently one of the DVD releases reproduces them as they were preserved on some kinescopes. One promises that in Tuesday’s episode “one of the most terrifying tales ever told” will begin; the other, that it will be “one of the most unusual tales ever told.”
A terrifying tale suggests a mighty villain. By the end of the 1897 segment, all the villains have either turned into protagonists, as Barnabas, Quentin, and wicked witch Angelique had done; been heavily defeated, as sorcerer Count Petofi had been; or were dead and forgotten. So “one of the most terrifying tales ever told” would seem to require a new villain, or perhaps a new group of villains. And if it is also “one of the most unusual tales ever told,” those villains will have to be strikingly different from anything we have seen before.
So, having heard those announcements, we will be less inclined to chalk Barnabas’ latest adventure in anachronism up to the usual way things are on Dark Shadows. We will be looking for signs that some previously unknown and hugely formidable malevolent force is luring him into a trap.
At first, no such signs seem to be forthcoming. The footsteps that alarm Josette turn out not to be Barnabas’, but those of her aunt, the Countess DuPrés. The countess talks Josette down and takes her back to the great house of Collinwood. Having saved Josette’s life, the countess takes her to a room occupied by fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. The countess asks Millicent to sit with Josette while she runs an errand.
Millicent means well, but always makes everything hilariously worse. Seeing that Josette is shaking, she observes that she is suffering a shock. She asks very earnestly “Was your shock a romantic one?” Josette responds by wailing. Millicent keeps talking about the dangers of love, causing Josette to get more and more upset. Longtime viewers will remember that Millicent will turn from a comic figure to a tragic one soon after this, when she falls in love with an evil man. That tinges our reaction with sadness, but Millicent’s total insensitivity to the effect she is having on Josette makes for an effective comedy scene. No matter how much the oblivious Millicent is worsening Josette’s mood, this hardly seems likely to be part of a grand evil scheme.
It turns out that the errand the countess had to run was a visit to Barnabas, who is waiting in Josette’s room. This time Barnabas has actually had a sensible idea. Rather than go to Josette on top of the cliff as he did the first time through these events, he asked the countess to go. The countess confronts him about his status as a walking dead man. Barnabas will not explain- how could he? He asks the countess if she thinks he is a ghost; she does not answer. He insists on seeing Josette; she says she will not allow it. He says he does not want to force her to help him; she declares that he cannot force her. Finally, he ends the exchange by biting her.
The countess goes to Millicent’s room and tells Josette to go back to her own room. Millicent is surprised the countess doesn’t go with her, protesting that Josette is in no condition to be left alone. The countess responds numbly.
The countess is one of three characters we have so far seen Grayson Hall play. The first, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, offered herself to Barnabas as a victim in #350; he declined the offer. Julia was motivated by a mixture of despair over the failure of her first attempt to cure Barnabas’ vampirism, an obligation to prevent him harming others, and her own unrequited love for him, so she was disappointed when he said no. The other, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, told Barnabas to “Bite me!” when they were at the grave of her husband, his onetime blood thrall. He refused to do that, too. Magda was angry and defiant, wanting to get something horrible over with, so her reaction was more ambiguous. The countess didn’t know Barnabas was a vampire until his fangs were in her neck, so she is just dazed.
That Hall’s other characters expected Barnabas to bite them, and in Julia’s case hoped he would do so, shows that no new force is needed to explain why he bites the countess. And bad as a vampire’s bite is, from what we have seen in previous segments of the show we can be sure that the countess will forget all about her experience as Barnabas’ victim once he leaves. Besides, when he came back in time in January Barnabas triggered a chain of events that led to the countess’ death- we can assume that whatever he has put in motion this time will have a different outcome for her. So while the bite still has its echoes of rape and is therefore a horror, it in no way shows the presence of any fresh villain that is about to set off “one of the most terrifying tales ever told.”
Josette is in her room. The secret panel opens, and Barnabas enters. She is shocked to see him. He assures her that he does not want to kill her and raise her as his vampire bride; after a bit of prodding, she gets him to admit that this was, at one point, his plan. He starts explaining to her that he has come to her after a sojourn in the 1890s. She reacts with disbelief and confusion. He keeps talking. He asks her if she remembers Kitty Soames. At first the name does not ring a bell, but as he goes on she recognizes what she had thought to be a dream in which she was talking with her portrait. He tells her that it was no dream, but that just a few hours before they were together in that other century.
Finally, Barnabas persuades Josette to meet him at the Old House. He says they must go separately, since he has to go to his friend Ben Stokes and ask him to stand guard for them while they disappear into the portrait. She wants to say goodbye to her aunt the countess, and Barnabas tells her to write a note. They kiss passionately. One wonders if Josette notices the taste of her aunt’s blood on Barnabas’ lips.
Barnabas’ decision to go to Ben and send Josette to the house on her own doesn’t make much sense. This is the first we have heard they need someone to stand guard, and there is no apparent reason why they should. Moreover, the countess is right there in the house with them, and she is under Barnabas’ power. The three of them can go to the house together, Josette can say goodbye to her there, and if they need someone to stand guard she can do it. Afterward she can tell Ben what she saw and tell lies to anyone else who has questions about where Josette went. Besides, regular viewers of Dark Shadows know that when two people are supposed to go to a place separately, they never actually meet there. A smart character who understood how things work in this universe would know that Barnabas’ decree that he and Josette must take their own paths to the house means that they are doomed. But contrary to the glimmers of brainpower Barnabas showed earlier, he has never been that smart. He is so much a creature of habit that his decision to send Josette to the Old House by herself bears no traces at all of any outside influence, least of all the influence of the new villain we are looking for.
Barnabas is on his way across the grounds of Collinwood to meet Ben when it dawns on him that he is lost. This is the first thing he has done today that is out of character. He has been on the estate for centuries, and knows it surpassingly well. He looks around and sees a cairn, a large stone structure. The cairn has a flat surface in the middle and is flanked with torches and decorated with carvings resembling coiled serpents. Though he does not know where he is, he knows he has been following the same path he used shortly before, and that no such thing was there at that time or in the area ever before. Hooded figures approach, a man and a woman. They make gestures that he cannot understand. He cannot see or feel anything binding him, but neither can he move his feet or use his vampire powers to dematerialize. At last we have encountered the new presence that is supposed to deliver “one of the most terrifying tales ever told.”
Back in the great house, Millicent and the countess discover that Josette is gone. They read the note. When Millicent reads that Josette has gone to be with Barnabas, she is puzzled. All she knows is that Barnabas is dead. As a visitor from light comedy, she assumes that death is a full-time occupation. She tells the countess that to be with Barnabas, Josette will have to die. The countess replies that “Many have died for love.” Millicent is shocked by the countess’ resigned tone, and declares that she will not give up on Josette even if the countess does.
It would have been impossible for Barnabas to explain the situation to the countess while she was actively opposing him, but one might have thought that after he had bitten her and broken her will he might have tried to reassure her that his plans for Josette were now benevolent. The utter hopelessness in her voice when she says that no one can help Josette suggests he didn’t even try. Again, it wouldn’t have taken the influence of any outside force to cause Barnabas to skip this. As a vampire, he is a metaphor for extreme selfishness, and when he is pressed for time he is especially unlikely to take other people’s feelings into account in any way. Though it is a bit of a shame he didn’t try to smooth things over with the countess, there is nothing in his behavior that needs explaining, and too little at stake here for us to imagine that the mysterious forces launching “one of the most terrifying tales ever told” would care much about it.
In the Old House, Josette is looking at her portrait and wondering why Barnabas is late. She talks herself into believing that he was lying when he told her the story about 1897. She jumps to the conclusion that he really is going to turn her into a vampire, and declares she has nothing left to live for. She takes out a vial she had with her when she was with Millicent and drinks it. It is poison, and she dies.
Back in the mysterious clearing in the woods, Barnabas loses consciousness. The hooded figures say some prayers to Mother Earth, then lay him on the cairn. They place some foliage on him. This action recalls the sprinkling of grain on the necks of animals led to altars in ancient Indo-European paganism, an act known in Latin as sacrificium- it was this ritual act, not the killing of the animal, that made the animal sacer, that is, set aside for the gods. The man declares that when Barnabas awakens he will recognize him and the woman, and that he will then lead them “to a new and everlasting life.” My wife, Mrs Acilius, and I reacted to the idea of Barnabas as a guide to enlightenment the same way every regular viewer of Dark Shadows would, viz. with gales of laughter.
If the hooded figures represent the force that has directed the events of this episode and Friday’s, the force that we have been promised will bring us “one of the most terrifying tales ever told,” then something that happened in them must have been a necessary precondition for the sacrifice of Barnabas. After all, that force had him under its power when he disappeared from 1897 and found himself lying on the ground. He could just as easily have materialized on the cairn, accompanied by the hooded figures with their foliage.
The only development in these two installments that would seem to be significant enough to qualify as such a precondition is Josette’s poisoning of herself. That Josette jumped to her death from Widows’ Hill is one of the most firmly established parts of the show’s continuity. Artist Sam Evans told Vicki about it in #5. In #185, a very different version of Sam saw Josette’s portrait for the first time and identified her as “the lady who went over the cliff.” In #233, Barnabas gave a vivid and rather indiscreet account of Josette’s death to Vicki and heiress Carolyn. We saw Josette make her leap in #425, and in #876 the leap was reenacted with maidservant Beth Chavez in Josette’s role and Quentin in Barnabas’. So having Josette poison herself instead of taking the jump is an example of something Dark Shadows did several times in the later phases of the 1897 segment, making a retcon into a self-conscious plot point. That leaves us with a puzzle. Why does it matter so much just how Josette went about killing herself?
Josette’s original death was a desperate flight from vampirism. It barely qualified as a suicide at all. Josette was cornered at the edge of the cliff, seeing no way but a mortal leap to escape transformation into a bloodsucking fiend. She went over the cliff in a spontaneous act that prevented the killings and enslavements that she would have inflicted on others had Barnabas succeeded in making her into the same kind of monster he was. This time, she has been keeping a vial of poison with her, so that her suicide is a premeditated act. Moreover, she drinks it when she is still alone, motivated not by a clear and present danger but by her purely intellectual, and as it so happens faulty, analysis of the situation. She still has options, and she is helping no one. So it could be that “one of the most terrifying tales ever told” is supposed to begin with the audience disapproving of Josette’s suicide on moral grounds.
This doesn’t seem very promising, but we should mention that writer Sam Hall probably did not approve of suicide. He was a churchgoer, serious enough about his Lutheran faith that he insisted Shirley Grossman convert from Judaism before they married and she became Grayson Hall. Christians have traditionally regarded despair as a sinful state and suicide as a religious offense. And Hall does seem to have been in a religious mood at this period. Lately his episodes have shown evidence that he was reading the novels of George MacDonald, a nineteenth century Congregationalist minister whose works of fantastic fiction were enormously popular in their day, but which are suffused with such a heavily Christian atmosphere that by the late 1960s their readership was a subset of that of such self-consciously Christian fans of MacDonald’s as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and W. H. Auden. Indeed, the three priests who hosted the podcast God and Comics admitted in a 2022 installment of their show that MacDonald’s novels reminded them a little too strongly of their day jobs to count as fun reading for them.
If Hall was feeling pious enough to keep reading MacDonald, he may well have seen Josette’s intentional and unnecessary self-poisoning as a prelude to “one of the most terrifying tales ever told.” Still, nothing we have seen so far explains just how that would work. Maybe we will find out later that Josette’s soul is in need of some kind of intervention from the other characters to avoid damnation. Lutherans aren’t supposed to think in those terms, but not even MacDonald, churchy as he was, ever let any kind of orthodoxy get between him and a good story.
Today marks the final appearance of both Millicent and the countess. It is also the last time we will visit the 1790s.
The hooded figures Barnabas meets today are identified in the credits as Oberon and Haza. Oberon, King of the Fairies, was a figure in medieval and Renaissance folklore whom Shakespeare used as a character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Also, MacDonald mentioned Oberon occasionally in his novels. I don’t know where Hall came up with “Haza.” Bookish people pick up vocabulary items all the time, so any of the various words in the world that take that form might have popped into his head when he was writing this episode.
Oberon is played by Peter Kirk Lombard, Haza by Robin Lane. Miss Lane’s acting career seems to have peaked with her turn as Haza, but for the last six years she has been releasing videos on various platforms under the title Badass Women 50+. As of this writing, her bio on YouTube says that she is 89 years old. Until 2022, her videos ran on a cable TV service in NYC, where she was still living then and for all I can tell is still living now.
Peter Lombard died in 2015. He worked steadily on Broadway for a couple of decades. From the point of view of a Dark Shadows enthusiast, the most interesting work he did there was in the original production of 1776, a cast which also included Dark Shadows alums David Ford, Daniel F. Keyes, Emory Bass, and Virginia Vestoff. Those four were all principal members of the cast, while Lombard was a stage manager and Ken Howard’s understudy in the role of Thomas Jefferson. When the cast appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, Howard was absent, but the part of Jefferson was played not by Lombard, but by Roy Poole. I think I can spot Lombard in the background in the costume worn by Poole’s main character, Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island.*
The old age makeup makes it impossible to be sure, but I suspect this is Lombard as Stephen Hopkins.
Lombard bore a resemblance to Carel Struycken, the actor who played the very tall man in Twin Peaks. So much so that when I first saw this episode I was certain he was the same person. But they aren’t related. I do wonder if David Lynch or Mark Frost or casting director Johanna Ray saw this episode and had Lombard in mind when they cast Mr Struycken as “The Fireman,” who like Oberon appears unexpectedly and represents a remote and mysterious world.
*Stephen Hopkins is not only a character in 1776, but also figures in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” Lovecraft says that (the fictional) Joseph Curwen had been a friend and supporter of his when (the historical) Hopkins was first governor of Rhode Island, but that when Curwen was exposed as a menace Hopkins personally took part in the raid on Curwen’s place. Since the story beginning today is based on another of Lovecraft’s tales, a connection between Lombard and Stephen Hopkins qualifies as a mildly amusing coincidence.
We open with a reprise of yesterday’s closing scene. It is November 1897, and time traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is about to be reunited with his lost love, Josette DuPrés, who threw herself to her death from the cliff on Widows’ Hill in February 1796. Josette is now reincarnated in the person of Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire. Josette’s personality has been emerging from the substrata of Kitty’s unconscious mind in the eight weeks she has been staying at the great estate of Collinwood. Now Kitty and Josette are merging into a symbiont, and that combined being has agreed to marry Barnabas tonight. Kitty/ Josette is in the Old House on the estate, in the bedroom once meant for Josette, waiting for Barnabas to return from the great house where he has told his distant cousin Judith of their wedding plans.
Barnabas enters the bedroom just in time to see Kitty/ Josette assumed bodily into the portrait of Josette that hangs over the mantel. He reaches up to touch Kitty/ Josette, and the two of them both vanish.
Barnabas finds lying himself on the ground, wearing clothes he last put on in the 1790s. He stands up and calls out for Kitty. “Kitty! Kitty! Where are you, Kitty?” He calls her name several more times. Oddly, he stops short of calling out “Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!” In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, user “kosmo13” wrote “It would’ve been cool if they’d had a cat wander into the scene at that moment and had Barnabas say ‘No. Not you!'”*
Barnabas comes face to face with Ben Stokes, who was his indentured servant and fanatically devoted friend in the 1790s. Ben has no idea why Barnabas is talking as if they haven’t seen each other for a long time- they saw each other last night, as far as he is concerned. Barnabas realizes that he has traveled back in time again. He was in 1897 after being dislocated from the 1960s. Now he has returned to February 1796, to the very night Josette killed herself.
Barnabas tries frantically to keep Josette from repeating her suicide. He sends Ben to the great house of Collinwood to see if Josette is in her room there, as she is supposed to be. He is concerned that, since the trip through the portrait left him on the ground near the woods, there is no telling where it may have dropped Kitty/ Josette.
He needn’t have worried about that. We see Josette in bed, as she was in #425, the first time the show took us through this night. Her aunt Natalie, the Countess DuPrés, is with her, and is intensely afraid of a prophecy foretelling Josette’s death this night. That much is identical to what we saw in the previous timeline, when the show was set in the 1790s in February 1968. Josette does tell the countess that she had an odd dream in which she was wearing an unfamiliar dress and having a conversation with a portrait; that dream, which Josette herself dismisses as not at all important, is evidently the only trace of Kitty left in Josette’s conscious mind.
This scene plays on the iconography of these two actresses. From the moment Kathryn Leigh Scott showed up as Kitty in #844, her title has reminded us of Josette’s aunt. So it is with a nice sense of inevitability that we see the show’s first countess again. Moreover, Miss Scott first joined the cast as Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town; Grayson Hall as Maggie’s psychiatrist, Julia Hoffman, MD. So it seems right to us when the countess becomes a therapist and listens intently to Josette’s account of her dream, growing only more interested as Josette insists that the dream was unimportant.
The first time through, Barnabas was trying to kill Josette and turn her into his vampire bride. Wicked witch Angelique, who had made Barnabas a vampire in the first place, lured Josette to the top of Widows’ Hill and showed her a vision of herself as a vampire. When Barnabas showed up, Josette ran from him and jumped off the cliff, flinging herself to a death on the rocks below rather than let him make her what he was.
This time, Barnabas wants Josette to live. He knows what Angelique is planning. During his eight months in 1897, he and Angelique became allies, almost friends. So it is logical that he meets with her and asks her to leave Josette alone. But this is Angelique as she was in #425. She is enraged with Barnabas, and full of hate for Josette. She does listen to him, and for a moment she seems to be considering his request that she stay with him through the night. One wonders how she would have reacted had Barnabas leveled with her about what happened in 1897, explaining why he thinks they can be something other than enemies. But he holds back, telling her nothing. She makes a hostile remark, and vanishes.
Angelique does just what she did the first time- she tricks the countess into leaving Josette’s room, projects a voice that Josette mistakes for Barnabas’ voice calling her to go to Widow’s Hill, and causes Josette to see a vision of herself as a vampire once she is on top of the hill. At the end, we hear footsteps approaching. The last we saw Barnabas, he announced he was hastening to Widows’ Hill to keep Josette from jumping; if he arrives now, that is exactly what he will prompt her to do.
In the 1897 segment, Grayson Hall played broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi and also had a few weeks as Julia. Today she returns to the cast after an absence of more than five weeks. She spent that time in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, where she had a part in a movie called Adam at 6 AM. The cast included Michael Douglas, Joe Don Baker, Dana Elcar, Louise Latham, and Meg Foster. Actor Steve McQueen was one of the producers. Hall and Elcar were the only Dark Shadows alums in the company, though Foster later played an ultra-soapy story opposite David Selby in a miniseries called Washington: Behind Closed Doors.
We haven’t seen the countess since #666. In that one, Barnabas had traveled back to a night a few weeks after the one he arrives in today. He made a terrible mess of things, which is his function on the show, and Ben wound up inadvertently killing the countess. Seeing her today, regular viewers can hope that, whatever misfortunes Barnabas brings with him this time, at least that won’t happen. The countess is a likable character, and while there was a point to showing Ben becoming a murderer it is a point they have already made. They won’t lose anything if they imply that the events we are about to see prevent it from happening.
*Posted 25 December 2024 on Danny Horn, “Not in Canvas Anymore,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 21 June 2016.
It is November 1897, and time traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is searching through the burned remains of a cottage recently occupied by famed artist/ criminal lowlife Charles Delaware Tate. Barnabas finds a pair of glasses just outside the front door and a length of chain just inside. The glasses belonged to Tate’s master, evil sorcerer Count Petofi, the chain to a creature named Garth Blackwood whom Petofi and Tate summoned from the depths of Hell. When Barnabas was last in the house, Blackwood had taken Petofi prisoner there and announced his intention to kill him. Petofi couldn’t get far without his glasses, and the chain was Blackwood’s very favorite murder weapon. So Barnabas has reason to believe both of them died in the fire.
Tate shows up. Barnabas demands he paint another portrait of Quentin Collins to replace the one destroyed in the fire. Quentin is Barnabas’ friend and distant cousin, and, because of some magical powers Petofi long ago gave Tate, the portrait kept Quentin from turning into a werewolf. Tate is a jerk about Barnabas’ demands, as he is a jerk about everything, but finally says he will comply. He tells Barnabas to come back to the ruins of the cottage at 10 PM to pick up the portrait. Barnabas is surprised to hear that Tate can work so quickly, and Tate does not explain why he needs so little time. But after all, the important thing is simply that the magic spell is renewed- the portrait doesn’t have to have any particular aesthetic quality. Perhaps a simple sketch will serve that purpose as effectively as did the full oil painting Tate did previously.
Meanwhile, back at the great house of Collinwood, Quentin’s sister Judith is busy with a project of her own. She is torturing her husband to death. He is the odious Gregory Trask, so she has the audience’s sympathy, at least up to a point. She has had Trask bricked up in Quentin’s old room. There is a telephone there which can receive incoming calls, but not make outgoing calls. Judith has been using it to torment Trask. Today, she directs Trask’s attention to two objects which he has somehow overlooked in his time in the room. One is a portrait of Amanda Harris, a woman he tried to seduce while he had Judith imprisoned in a sanitarium. The other is a loaded gun. When she calls him for the last time, she does not receive an answer, evidently because he has shot himself to death.
Judith is the third role Joan Bennett played on Dark Shadows. In the parts of the show set in the 1960s, she plays matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz is a depressive personality who keeps trying to kill herself. When from November 1967 to March 1968 the show was set in the 1790s, she played Naomi Collins, Barnabas’ mother, who actually did kill herself when she found out that her son was a vampire. Now she plays someone who, though she was introduced as a psychologically fragile individual, does not kill herself, but drives one of the major villains to commit suicide. Judith’s method of disposing of Trask is not morally defensible, but it is interesting to see Bennett playing a more assertive character.
Trask’s discovery of the portrait of Amanda leads to an interlude in New York City, a place the show hasn’t taken us since #8. Quentin is in a hotel lobby there, waiting for Amanda. She is surprised to see him. They had been lovers, and had planned to leave Collinsport together. He did not meet her at the train station. She had told him that if he did not, she would understand that he had given up on their relationship, so she had gone ahead without him. She says she is so overjoyed at the sight of him that she won’t ask for explanations, but he gives one anyway. He tells her about the portrait. Since she herself came to life as the result of another of Tate’s magical paintings, she can’t very well dismiss the story out of hand. He says that because he does not know where the portrait is, he cannot be sure he won’t become a mindless ravening beast at the next full moon, so he will have to leave her.
Oddly, Judith takes time out from her torture of Trask to perform the same function of motherly talk-to that Liz and Naomi often served. Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, has been staying at Collinwood for the last eight weeks, and is engaged to marry Judith’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward. Contrary to what her title would suggest, Kitty is an American woman in her twenties. Judith sees Kitty coming downstairs with two leather overnight bags. Kitty explains that she will be leaving at once and never returning. She has realized that she cannot marry Edward. She says that she has not told Edward this. Judith says that she is disappointed that they will not be sisters, but that she admires her for facing the truth and doing something about it.
Later, Barnabas comes to the great house. He finds Judith worried that Kitty’s bags are still in the foyer, though she has been gone for hours. He says that he knows where she is. She is waiting for him. They will be married later tonight. Judith is bewildered by this. Barnabas says that they will come back after their wedding and tell Edward what they have done, and that they will then leave Collinwood forever. She is sad to think that they will be going.
In fact, Kitty is two people at once. The young dowager shares her body with the soul of the late Josette DuPrés, whom Barnabas loved when he was a living being in the 1790s and whom he tried to recreate when he was a vampire in the 1960s. Ever since Kitty arrived at Collinwood in #844, Josette has been forcing her way into her conscious mind, triggering psychotic episodes and from time to time pushing Kitty aside and living through her body. Now Kitty is in the bedroom once meant for Josette in the Old House on the grounds of the estate. Josette’s voice keeps speaking to Kitty through the portrait of her that hangs there, urging her to let go and accept her place as part of a combined entity that will love Barnabas and live with him in the bonds of matrimony. Kitty struggles against the voice. For a time she hopes Barnabas will help her thwart Josette’s attempt to come back to life and take the leading part in their symbiotic existence, but when he enters he urges her to give up the fight and become Josette.
Kitty is alone in the room when she suddenly finds herself wearing Josette’s white dress. She floats off the floor and into the portrait. Barnabas enters just in time to see Kitty merge with the portrait. He reaches up to the Kitty/ Josette entity in the frame above the mantel, and he and Kitty both disappear from the screen at the same time.
Josette was first mentioned in #5 as the lady who went over the cliff at Widows’ Hill, and her ghost emerged as the tutelary spirit of Collinwood in the months that followed. In #70, our first view of the Old House involved the first truly ambitious special effect, when Josette’s ghost, who was Kathryn Leigh Scott in a veil and a white dress, emanated from the portrait and took three steps from it down to the floor. When Miss Scott’s Kitty rises up into the same portrait today, longtime viewers will see that momentous little journey in reverse.
Barnabas was not dreamed of until long after Josette’s ghost emerged. When we first saw him in the Old House in #212, he delivered a speech to her portrait telling her that her power on the estate was ended, and for several weeks afterward strange and troubled boy David Collins, who had been the ghost’s close friend, lamented that he could no longer feel her presence. In those days it sounded like Josette was Barnabas’ grandmother, and she had sided with his father in the fateful conflict that led to his becoming a vampire.
Later, Josette was retconned as Barnabas’ lost love. In a plot borrowed from the 1932 film The Mummy, Barnabas decided that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was Josette’s reincarnation, and he tried to torture her into accepting this fact. Maggie resisted Barnabas. She ultimately escaped, only to have her memory of his abuse wiped clean by her psychiatrist, Barnabas’ accomplice and future best friend Julia Hoffman, MD.
Maggie was another Kathryn Leigh Scott character. When Miss Scott played Josette in the 1790s segment, the show was sticking to its source material, in which Zita Johanns played Imhotep’s victim Helen Grosvenor in the contemporary sequences and his lost love, Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun, in the flashback to ancient Egypt. It also left us with the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps Barnabas was onto something when he devised his horrifying program of cruelty towards Maggie. Sure, his methods were wrong, but if she “really” was Josette, he wasn’t just crazy.
With Kitty, they take us a step further. Barnabas’ attempt to Josettify Maggie made the show so bleak for so many weeks that longtime viewers will flinch at the thought that Kitty would be right to yield to Josette’s importunings, and even more at the idea that this will lead to a happy marriage between the Kitty/ Josette symbiont and Barnabas. Yet within the context of what we have seen in the 1897 segment, these would seem to be plausible conclusions. The body they share is as much Josette’s as it is Kitty’s, and Kitty has nothing to lose by merging fully into the being who lurks in the substrata of her mind.
For his part, Barnabas’ relationship to Kitty represents almost as drastic a departure from the personality he showed in his relationships to Miss Scott’s previous characters as the reinvention of Josette as his lost love rather than his estranged grandmother did in his early days on the show. He does not abduct her, torture her, or even give her Josette’s hypnotic music box. It is Josette’s ghost, always before shown as a benevolent force, that keeps pressing the transformation on Kitty. Barnabas is a gentle and considerate lover to the Josette part of the Kitty/ Josette complex, and is solicitous to the Kitty part. When Barnabas disappears with Kitty, we reverse not only the walk Josette’s ghost took in #70, but also the speech he gave in #212. So far from wanting to expel Josette from the world of the living as he did then, or turn her into his vampire bride as he tried both with Maggie in 1967 and with the living Josette in 1796, he wants to revive her as herself.
Barnabas’ function on the show, both when he is an outright villain and when he is trying to be the good guy, is to create problems that other characters will have to solve. So this moment of benevolence and rationality cannot last. It is the ultimate indication that the 1897 segment has indeed ended. But it is a beautiful little thing, for the few minutes it lasts.
This episode marks the final appearance of Trask and of Judith. We will see Kitty again tomorrow, but only in a reuse of today’s closing scene. After that she will only be implied as a feature of Josette’s unconscious mind.
In the parts of Dark Shadows set in 1966 and 1967, the home of artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, was a frequent set. Sam and Maggie were important characters in several storylines, and in their cottage they represented the working class of the village of Collinsport, as against the rich people in the big house on the hill.
Now, the show is a costume drama set in 1897. In that year, the Evans Cottage is already an artist’s studio. It is occupied by Charles Delaware Tate, who became a nationally renowned painter by making a deal with evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Today, Petofi is staying in the cottage, and Tate is functioning as his goon.
Petofi is deep in a trance, trying to cast a spell that will cause him and handsome young rake Quentin Collins to switch bodies. Once he has accomplished this switch, he will cast another spell to take himself, in Quentin’s body, to the year 1969, leaving Quentin behind in 1897 to face the vengeance of Petofi’s mortal enemies.
Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye has caught on to what Petofi is attempting to do, and has sneaked into the cottage to stop him. He snaps out of his trance and declares he will punish her. She grabs his glasses and runs to the door; Tate enters and grabs her. At Petofi’s behest, Tate ties Pansy up. Petofi then sends Tate to the great house of Collinwood to fetch Quentin. He is to say that Petofi will kill Pansy unless Quentin comes within the hour.
At the great house, Tate finds that Quentin has fled and cannot be reached. Quentin’s friend and distant cousin, time traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, insists on going back to the cottage with him. When he arrives, it occurs to Petofi that Barnabas’ body is just as well suited to his purposes as is Quentin’s. He lists some of the characters who are waiting for Barnabas in 1969, and predicts they will receive him “with open arms” when he arrives in Barnabas’ form. Regular viewers are perhaps chilled, and certainly intrigued, by the idea that the show might go forward with Petofi impersonating Barnabas in a contemporary setting while a Barnabas who looks like Petofi tries to make his way back from the past, though there are so few surviving characters and unresolved story points left in 1897 that it is hard to imagine many more episodes even partially set in this period. Petofi uses his magic powers to knock Barnabas unconscious, and goes into a trance to effect the body swap.
The door swings open, and someone called Garth Blackwood enters. The other day, Petofi had Tate draw a picture of Blackwood, a picture endued with magical powers. It brought Blackwood back to life. Some years ago, Blackwood was a jailer murdered by an escaping convict named Aristide. Petofi found Aristide and took him on as a servant. Aristide has recently proven to be unreliable, and Petofi has decided he wants to be rid of him once and for all. He was amused by the idea of resurrecting Blackwood to perform the task. Blackwood has killed Aristide, but Petofi found on Monday that there is more to him than his own magical powers created. He cannot lay Blackwood to rest. Now, Blackwood has resolved to kill Petofi and Tate.
Tate flees at the sight of Blackwood. Pansy, free, asks if he is the police. He identifies himself as the master of Dartmoor Prison. Pansy, being English, is impressed. She points to Petofi and tells Blackwood that he must act against him. Blackwood puts handcuffs on Petofi, then slaps him until he comes out of his trance.
Petofi pleads with Blackwood to drop all charges against him, since he was the one who gave him the chance to kill Aristide. Barnabas comes to and asks what is going on. When Blackwood asks if he testifies for Petofi or against him, Barnabas gladly pronounces “Guilty!” He starts to say that Petofi must be killed immediately, and Blackwood cautions him against giving opinions. The witnesses are to offer only facts. So he asserts that Petofi and Aristide traveled the world together for years and committed every possible crime. At that, Blackwood bids him and Pansy leave. Once he is alone with Petofi, Blackwood picks up a metal can, douses the place with fluid, and lights a fire.
Back at the great house of Collinwood, Barnabas and Pansy talk about what just happened. Barnabas says he is confident Blackwood will kill Petofi, but he thinks he and Pansy may have to fight Blackwood later. Pansy has a vision of Blackwood and Petofi struggling with each other amid the flames in the Evans Cottage. She also sees the portrait of Quentin burning there. Since this portrait has a magical charge that keeps Quentin from turning into a werewolf, that’s bad news.
Petofi has been so powerful that it has long seemed likely that his destruction could come only as the result of his own action. When his right hand, the locus of most of his powers, was reattached to his wrist in #815, the show was giving hints it might wrap 1897 up soon. We kept hearing that the Hand had developed a mind of its own in the century it had been separated from Petofi; we could easily imagine it deciding to strangle him, and indeed in #841 it nearly did. But 1897 was such a big hit that they kept restarting it, and for some time now the Hand has done more or less what Petofi wanted it to do.
It would have been fitting had Pansy killed Petofi, since she is, in her present form, one of his creatures. The original Pansy Faye was killed in #771. In #819, Petofi erased the personality of minister’s daughter Charity Trask and gave Charity’s body to Pansy. Pansy’s light-heartedness and apparent harmlessness would have added to her suitability as the instrument of Petofi’s demise. The whole idea of the supernatural is that what appears to be weak is in fact irresistibly strong, so it would be fitting to have a tiny woman who is a character from very broad comedy conquer the great wizard.
Blackwood has only been on Dark Shadows since #878, was never previously mentioned, and is the shallowest character possible. But those weaknesses, too, give him a logical place as Petofi’s executioner. Petofi was never more smug in his self-assurance than he was when he used Tate to bring Blackwood into being in order to murder Aristide. Petofi has so easily defeated efforts by characters who had long records of dominating the action of the show, such as Barnabas and wicked witch Angelique, that we can understand why it would not occur to him that a day player could present him with any serious difficulty. That self-assurance leads him to carelessness, as he creates in Blackwood a being whose strength comes not only from him, but from the fires of Hell from which he came. Indeed, Petofi’s only thought when he brought Blackwood back from the dead was of the suffering he would inflict on Aristide, and his only feeling was delight in contemplating that suffering. Coming as the price of his overconfidence and his gleeful cruelty, it puts a moral at the end of the story when Petofi falls at Blackwood’s hands.
This episode marks the final appearance of the characters Petofi and Blackwood. It is also the final on-screen appearance of Pansy, though her voice will be heard once more, in an episode next week.
Many fantastic tales dwell on a sense that dreams have a great power in the world, and so their characters are often afraid of falling asleep. Dark Shadows has several times referenced Edgar Allan Poe, who explored that fear in stories like “The Premature Burial,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Man of the Crowd.” The show brought up another writer of fantastic tales preoccupied with the fear of sleep in #808. Aristide, henchman of sorcerer Count Petofi, threatened an enemy of Petofi’s with “the mysterious shadow he can cast, the shadow that isn’t your own that follows you.” That was a reference to George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes, in which a man named Anodos is plagued by a shadow that moves about on its own, following him and blighting his existence. Not only does Anodos fear sleep from time to time in Phantastes, but the main theme of MacDonald’s other very popular novel, 1895’s Lilith, is Mr Vane’s long refusal to sleep and the great battle he must wage in the dream-world when he finally does allow himself to nod off.
Aristide’s threat suggested that the show was about to give us a story based on Anodos and the autonomous shadow. Aristide is dead now, and Petofi is running out of story, so that isn’t going to happen, at least not in the segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897. But today we do get a little bit of George MacDonald in the form of a battle against sleep. Petofi is casting a spell over himself and handsome young rake Quentin Collins. If Quentin loses conscious control of his mind for even a moment, he and Petofi will evacuate their respective bodies and be re-embodied as each other. Petofi will then transport himself, in Quentin’s body, to the year 1969. Quentin will be left behind in 1897, occupying Petofi’s aging form and waiting helplessly for Petofi’s mortal enemies to come and kill him, thinking they are taking their long-delayed revenge.
By the time Quentin finds out what’s going on, it is the wee hours of the morning, after he hasn’t slept for a couple of nights. His friends, Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye and time-traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, keep marching him around the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in an effort to keep him awake. They don’t brew up any coffee, strangely enough. But Barnabas does call on wicked witch Angelique and appeals to her to use her powers to put some kind of barrier between Quentin and Petofi.
Angelique tells Barnabas that she is reluctant to help Quentin because she is upset that he wants to go to New York and look for a woman named Amanda Harris. She had wanted Quentin to fall in love with her, and is jealous that he chose Amanda instead. Barnabas points out that if she doesn’t help Quentin, he won’t exist in the form that either she or Amanda knew. Angelique explains that she has a reason for her attitude:
Before I came here this time, I was in the everlasting pits of Hell, where other creatures of my kind live. Only, my stay here on Earth made me dissatisfied with my life there. I longed to come back here… To Earth, to become a human being. I begged my master for the chance.
Finally, he gave it to me on one condition and one condition only… That I make one man fall in love with me, without any use of supernatural spells or powers. One man, one chance. That’s what I was granted.
Since Quentin is the one man who represented Angelique’s one chance, letting him go to Amanda might mean that Angelique has to go back down. My favorite part of her speech is “Only, my stay here on Earth made me dissatisfied with my life there.” Sure, she could have been happy in the everlasting pits of Hell, as one is, but how ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Pa-ree. Or, since Angelique’s sojourns in the upper world have all brought her to Collinsport, after they’ve had the lobster roll at the Blue Whale.
While Barnabas is talking with Angelique, Pansy is on Quentin duty. She decides to keep him awake by compelling him to join in a performance of her song. A record of this song, performed by Nancy Barrett and David Selby, hit the stores the very day this episode was first broadcast, so this is product placement. But Pansy is doing exactly what she would do in this situation, Quentin is reacting just as he would react, and it is a charming moment.
The musical number is preceded by Pansy making what literary critics call a programmatic statement. “Feel like it or not, you gotta do it, the show must go on. That’s the one and only rule there is, love. So let’s have a bright chorus from that new team, Pansy Faye and Quentin Collins.” Pansy is not only a good pal and a gifted psychic, she is an accomplished scientist. She has indeed stated the complete physics, metaphysics, and every other operating principle of the universe of Dark Shadows when she says that “The show must go on.”
Angelique and Barnabas enter. Angelique insists on some time alone with Quentin. He says that once he gets to New York he most definitely will be looking for Amanda and that he has no interest in a relationship with Angelique. She looks away from him and talks herself into believing it will be OK if he falls in love with her after Amanda “has ceased to exist.” Longtime viewers can be fairly sure this means that Angelique is planning to murder Amanda, but at the moment the important thing is to get Angelique involved in helping Quentin against Petofi.
Angelique opens the door to the foyer, where we catch a glimpse of Nancy Barrett and Jonathan Frid doing a really marvelous mime depicting “intense conversation.” It’s one of those deliberately stagey bits of business that these twentieth century New York actors do so well.
Angelique opens the door on a silent “conversation.”
Angelique stares into the fire and tries to project psychic power Petofi-ward. We get a process shot simultaneously depicting Angelique in the drawing room and Petofi in his lair. The shot is not very successful, and Angelique explains that her efforts aren’t working either. She says that Petofi is in so deep a trance that she cannot reach him as she has done before.
Petofi’s surroundings are so heavily decorated that this shot just looks cluttered to me. I suppose having Petofi low in the shot and behind the flames is meant to remind us of Angelique’s old neighborhood, but the visual metaphor is spoiled by the cruddy 1960s TV color palette.In black and white, as most viewers would have seen it in 1969, the shot has different problems- while the more abstract visual style does make the Petofi-as-Satan metaphor legible, it is less clear which shapes are in Angelique’s space and which are in Petofi’s.
Pansy, eavesdropping from the foyer, hears Angelique say that she will need to have something Petofi is wearing right now, something still warm from contact with him, in order to reach him with her powers. Pansy resolves to provide this, and she sneaks out. She makes her way to his lair, and is about to undo Petofi’s necktie when he comes out of his trance and tells Pansy she has interfered with his plans once too often. We have flashed to the motionless Petofi several times today, leading us to think that Thayer David was going to collect his fee without having to deliver a line. So it is quite effective when he springs into action.
The dramatic date is November 1897. We open in an abandoned mill on the old North Road in Collinsport, Maine. The late Garth Blackwood, once the keeper of Britain’s Dartmoor Prison, is about to avenge his own murder. Blackwood was raised from the dead by sorcerer Count Petofi and Petofi’s stooge, artist Charles Delaware Tate. Petofi wants to be rid of his unreliable servant Aristide, and decided that Blackwood, whom Aristide killed while escaping from Dartmoor and has feared ever since, will be the one to slay him.
Blackwood is ready to strangle Aristide, who takes a moment to tell him that if he does so he will be endangering his own existence. He explains that there are others who conjured him up to perform the very task he is about to undertake, and that once he has completed it they will not need him anymore. Blackwood says that this is no problem. Once he has killed Aristide, he will kill them too. He pulls a chain tight around Aristide’s neck.
Tate is outside while this is happening. The set represents the exterior of the mill. The set is alternately in deep shadow and illuminated by lightning flashes. We haven’t seen it before, it is rather nice.
Tate hides while Blackwood leaves, then goes into the old mill and confirms that Aristide is dead. Aristide was a nasty and inept fellow, but Michael Stroka found so many ways to make him fun to watch that he will be missed.
Back in his studio, Tate tells Petofi what he saw. He also reminds Petofi that Blackwood has killed two other people, and that he will in all likelihood go on killing everyone he meets. Petofi doesn’t care about any of that. All that interests him is his plan to forcibly swap bodies with handsome young Quentin Collins and, as Quentin, to travel to the year 1969.
Blackwood storms in, declares that Petofi and Tate are his prisoners, and says that they are under sentence of death. Petofi tries to cast a spell to make Blackwood go away; he finds that there is more to Blackwood than his magic can control. He can only hold him at bay, and that only for a moment. Tate shoots Blackwood. The bullet wounds cause him to fall and briefly lose consciousness, but he is soon back on his feet. He leaves, and vows that he will return to finish what he started.
At the great house of Collinwood, Quentin is going through his belongings. Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye enters. Quentin explains that he will be leaving on the early morning train to get away from Petofi. Pansy is sad to see him go, but she well knows how dangerous Petofi is. Quentin further explains that he has been looking through all his old stuff to see if any of it is worth keeping. He doesn’t think any of it is, but she thinks a photograph of him at the age of ten is adorable, and is glad when he makes a gift of it to her. They share a really lovely moment, as she says that she still wishes they could have become lovers and he plays along. She says that if he’d married her, she’d even have given up her career for him. He says gravely that he never would have asked her to do that. Quentin never asked Pansy for any of what she wanted to give him, and her reaction to this line shows that it has reminded her of that fact. But she still cares about him, and it is still a sweet little exchange. They smile their unforgettable movie-star smiles at each other when they part.
Later, Pansy has a dream in which Quentin falls asleep and Petofi seizes his body the instant his guard is down. She awakes, and realizes she must rush downstairs to prevent this dream coming true.
Dark Shadows Commentary 