dark shadows – Page 4 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 880: I like all of my stories to have endings

Collinwood: Judith, Trask, Beth, Quentin

In November 1897, wronged woman Judith Collins Trask has had her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, bricked up in her brother Quentin’s bedroom. While Gregory is taking this in, the ghost of another wronged woman appears to him. She is Quentin’s ex-fiancée Beth Chavez. Beth is looking for Quentin. Trask is initially frightened, but then urges Beth to go to Quentin and tell him to come up to the room.

Quentin is in the drawing room, and Beth does appear to him. She says that she cannot rest in peace until she has given him a message. We wonder if she is about to tell him about Trask, but no such thing. Instead, she tells Quentin she forgives him. Then she vanishes, and he shouts that he can’t forgive himself.

We first saw Beth and Quentin at the same time, when their ghosts appeared to children David Collins and Amy Jennings in Quentin’s room in #646. That was broadcast and set in December 1968. Since the show went to 1897 in March, the living beings Quentin and Beth have attracted very different responses from the audience. Quentin has become a huge breakout star, while Beth has faded into the background. She died Monday; this is her first return as a ghost, and her final appearance overall. It rounds things off nicely that her departure begins in the room where we first saw her.

Quentin’s skeleton had been in the room in late 1968. David and Amy removed it and buried it on the grounds. Now history has been changed. Trask’s skeleton may take its place when the show returns to contemporary dress, behind a brick wall there that wasn’t there before. In #839, we saw that while the changes in 1897 have brought peace to the ghosts of Quentin and Beth in 1969, the characters in that year still remember the haunting. So you’d expect the wall to be a puzzle to them, and if they tear it down the skeleton will be as well.

Judith enters and tells Quentin that he can’t go to his room, or to any other room in the west wing of the house. She explains that it cost a fortune to keep that wing open, so she has had it sealed off. She has moved all of his things to a bedroom in the main part of the house. Quentin asks Judith where Trask is; she claims he ran out in pursuit of two violent men who forced their way into the house and hasn’t been seen since, and asserts that she is terribly worried about him. She sounds sincere, but Quentin isn’t fooled. He smiles and asks if he is right to believe that Trask’s story is ended. Judith says that it isn’t, not quite.

Collinwood is supposed to be an immense house, literally. After the first year of Dark Shadows, when a story about the Collinses running out of money was complemented with some specifics about the size of the place,* they have been making it out to be unknowably large. So it seemed inexplicable yesterday that Judith would choose Quentin’s room as Trask’s place of immurement. We learn what her plans were today. There is a telephone in the room; that telephone had been important during the Haunting of Collinwood story. Evidently Judith has rigged it to receive incoming calls only. It rings, and Trask can hear her taunting him. He cannot call out to summon help.

In the first 55 weeks of Dark Shadows, Joan Bennett’s character Elizabeth Collins Stoddard was a recluse who hadn’t left Collinwood in 18 years, believing that she had killed her lousy husband and that his body was buried in a locked room in the basement. It turned out that she hadn’t killed him at all, and the whole recluse theme, and the blackmail plot that it led to, were just one big dead end. As Judith, Bennett is making up for Liz’ lost time.

Outside: Petofi, Aristide, Garth Blackwood, the Widow Romana**

Sorcerer Count Petofi has tired of his unreliable servant, a bungling sadist named Aristide. He has conjured up the ghost of the man Aristide most fears, a jailer named Garth Blackwood whom Aristide killed while escaping from Dartmoor Prison. Blackwood is now hunting Aristide. Blackwood and Aristide were the two violent men who surprised Judith in her bedroom, though Trask never went in pursuit of them.

Aristide ducks into an abandoned mill on the old North Road where he and Petofi had squatted. He hears someone hiding in the back room. A woman jumps out with a knife. Aristide disarms her. He realizes she is the widow of King Johnny Romana, a Rroma chieftain/ organized crime boss whom he killed in #827. Rather than killing her with her own knife, Aristide offers to betray Petofi to the Widow Romana if she will let him join her tribe. He gives her directions to Petofi’s current location. On her way there, she crosses paths with Blackwood, who kills her. Blackwood then makes his way to the mill, where we see him grabbing Aristide.

Aristide draws a map for the Widow. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When King Johnny died, we learned that in a few days another Rroma somewhere would inherit his immunity to Petofi’s spells and his mission to kill him. That was eleven weeks ago, and we’ve been waiting. The Widow Romana’s appearance today is a gesture towards tying up that loose end.

*In #2, Liz tells well-meaning governess Vicki that there are a total of 40 rooms, most of them in the closed-off parts of the house; in #87, the opening voiceover says that there are 80 rooms.

**Her name is given in the credits as “The Widow Romano,” but “Romana,” which we had heard as King Johnny’s surname in earlier episodes, is a likelier Romany name.

Episode 879: A room of one’s own

The odious Gregory Trask is plotting to murder his fabulously wealthy wife, the former Judith Collins, before she can change her will. He has made an arrangement with Aristide, a sadist who is fleeing a demon his former master conjured up from the depths of Hell to stalk him. He promises to lay the demon to rest once Aristide has murdered Judith.

For her part, Judith has made an arrangement of her own with a man named Tim Shaw. Tim is not appreciably more scrupulous than Aristide, and he hates Trask with a passion. He is also free of the time constraints that the stalking demon imposes on Aristide.

Judith goes upstairs to her bedroom, where Aristide is lurking behind the curtains. The scene looks rather like that in the 1954 film Dial M for Murder, in which a man hides behind curtains while waiting to murder a woman whose husband is blackmailing him into the crime. It is likely that Dial M for Murder was on the minds of the makers of Dark Shadows at this time, since star Jonathan Frid had just missed four and a half weeks while playing the lead in a stage production of it in the Chicago area.

In Dial M for Murder, the wife survives the attempt, killing the would-be assassin. Judith also survives, but not through her own action. Instead, the demon, whose name is Garth Blackwood, bursts into the room. Aristide escapes through the window. Trask enters and finds Blackwood still in the room. Blackwood menaces him with a heavy chain he carries, then leaves in pursuit of Aristide.

Judith persuades Trask to join her in a glass of brandy. He takes a sip, she does not. He passes out, and Tim enters. When Trask awakens, he finds himself in a room in the west wing of the house. Tim is with him in the room. Tim tells Trask goodbye, then springs out the door and locks it behind him. When Trask opens the door shortly after, he finds that Tim and Judith are bricking him in.

So long, Gregory. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

It’s rather much to ask us to believe that the mortar dries instantly, leaving Trask unable to push the wall down. To be bricked up in Collinwood is the fate of all Trasks- Gregory’s ancestor, the original Reverend Trask, was bricked up in an alcove in the basement of the Old House on the estate in #442 by the vengeful Barnabas Collins. Barnabas chained that Trask up, giving the mortar time to set. Moreover, Barnabas chose a dark little out-of-the-way spot in a vacant house. This is in a bedroom suite that Judith’s brother Quentin uses. Most of Quentin’s stuff is out of the room, but there is still some furniture in there and a bunch of candles. You have to wonder what she will tell Quentin when he comes home. For some time they’ve been going on about how vast the great house is, at one point saying that no one had ever counted the number of rooms in it, so it is just bizarre that Judith picked a room that someone is on his way to sleep in.

Episode 878: The moors are my domain

Episode 174 of Dark Shadows, broadcast and set in February 1967, included a scene set in a police station and morgue in Phoenix, Arizona, where we met Lieutenant Costa of the Arizona State Police. Lieutenant Costa was played by John Harkins, who would become a ubiquitous TV presence in the decades to follow.

Harkins returns to the cast today as another law enforcement character. The show is set in 1897, and the action is almost entirely driven by supernatural doings. Harkins’ character, Garth Blackwood, is the late keeper of Dartmoor Prison. He is conjured up from the depths of Hell by sorcerer Count Petofi, who has decided to use him to kill his unreliable servant Aristide. Blackwood was heard but not seen yesterday, in a flashback set near Dartmoor. That flashback broke the record Harkins’ previous appearance had long held for the scene in the series set furthest from Collinsport, Maine.

Blackwood storms into the room where Petofi is recovering from a knife wound Aristide recently inflicted on him. He announces that his prisoner was seen entering the house and threatens Petofi with a heavy chain he carries. Petofi keeps smiling, but points out that he is injured and was unable to stop Aristide leaving. Blackwood exits. The threat suggests that conjuring him up may not have been Petofi’s wisest move. Petofi has such great powers that we have for some time suspected that he himself would have to be the source of his own destruction. Perhaps Blackwood will be the instrument who finishes him off.

At the great house of Collinwood, matriarch Judith Collins Trask tells her lawyer, Evan Hanley, that she is ready to put her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, in his place. She will be changing her will the next day to remove Trask as executor of her estate. Evan, a former co-conspirator of Trask’s in his evil schemes against Judith and others, is reluctant, but can tell there is no point in resisting Judith. He exits, and Trask enters. Judith tells him she will be rewriting her will to pass all of her wealth to worthy causes after she dies, and he is thunderstruck. He exits hastily.

Trask goes to Evan’s house. He tries to talk his onetime partner in crime into stopping Judith’s plan, but Evan says that her resolution is beyond his ability to change. Aristide bursts in. He pleads for help, and reveals that Petofi has conjured up a demon to stalk him. Evan knows Petofi’s power and wants nothing to do with the situation, but Trask does not know what he is dealing with. He promises to help Aristide in return for a favor. Evan leaves the room, and Trask tells Aristide he wants him to commit a murder for him. After he agrees, Evan returns and Trask persuades him to let Aristide stay in his house for an hour.

In Trask’s absence, Blackwood catches up with Aristide. He enters the house, and Aristide flees. He demands Evan let him search the house. Evan’s background as an attorney kicks in, and he declares he will not let Blackwood conduct a search without a warrant. Blackwood’s response is to strangle him with his chain. Evan has been one of the most consistently interesting characters in the 1897 segment; his death is another sign that we will soon be leaving this epoch.

Garth Blackwood dispatches Evan Hanley. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 877: Put down that sword

Throughout October 1897, which at 4 PM on participating stations of the ABC television network coincided with October 1969, 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi occupied the body of handsome young Quentin Collins and banished Quentin to his own aging form. Last week Quentin broke that spell, and now the two of them are themselves again.

News of the restoration has not reached everyone, however. On Friday and Monday, Quentin’s lover, maidservant Beth, saw him at the top of Widows’ Hill. Thinking he was Petofi, she flung herself to her death on the rocks below rather than submit to whatever evil magic he had in store for her. Yesterday, Petofi’s unreliable servant Aristide went to Quentin, thinking he was his master, and begged for a task by which he could earn his way back into his good graces. Quentin sent him to murder Petofi, which he is trying to do when we open today.

The attempt takes place in the studio of artist Charles Delaware Tate, an unpleasant man who is tied to Petofi. Tate finds Aristide plunging a knife into Petofi’s chest. He stops the attack and gets through to Aristide that the swap is over and he is stabbing Petofi himself. Desperate to undo his latest offense, Aristide hastens back to the great house of Collinwood, intending to kill Quentin.

Petofi comes to and tells Tate that he intends to repossess Quentin’s body and use it to escape his enemies. When Tate tells him what Aristide has gone to do, he sends him to stop him. He does so, showing up in the drawing room at Collinwood in the nick of time and, at gunpoint, forcing Aristide to lay down the sword with which he was about to run Quentin through.

Back in the studio, Petofi instructs Tate to draw a magical sketch. The sketch depicts a man called Garth Blackwood, a cruel jailer whom Aristide killed when he escaped from prison in England. Petofi remembers meeting Aristide for the first time the night he escaped Blackwood’s prison. In #854 Petofi had said he met Aristide in an alley near the Thames in London, but this time we flash back to a meeting on the moors in the county of Devon. Petofi recalls that Aristide pledged his fealty to him in return for freedom from Blackwood’s ghost.

Once Tate has drawn his sketch, Blackwood will come back to life, determined to take his vengeance on Aristide. Aristide returns to the studio to resume begging for mercy, and Petofi takes great pleasure in showing him the sketch and telling him what is in store for him.

Episode 876: The gift again

In #425, broadcast in February 1968 and set in February 1796, the gracious Josette was near the cliff on the top of Widow’s Hill when she saw her lost love, Barnabas Collins. Wicked witch Angelique had turned Barnabas into a vampire, and Barnabas planned to kill Josette and raise her from the dead with the same curse. Angelique sent a vision to Josette of what her existence would be like after she rose from the grave to prey on the living. While Barnabas watched helplessly, Josette flung herself to her death onto the rocks far below the cliff.

Barnabas spent the next centuries telling himself that Josette’s suicide was the result of a misunderstanding. In #233, broadcast and set in May 1967, he was masquerading as his own descendant, a cousin from England come to visit the Collinses of Collinsport, Maine. He told heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and well-meaning governess Vicki Winters that Josette jumped from the cliff because she did not realize that her lover had come with only good intentions for her. By that time, it seemed he might actually have convinced himself it was true.

Today, it is 1897, and rakish libertine Quentin Collins and his sometime lover, maidservant Beth Chavez, reenact Josette’s suicide. They, however, follow the script which had previously applied only in Barnabas’ head. For several weeks, sorcerer Count Petofi has been occupying Quentin’s body, having confined Quentin to his own aging form. Beth was for a time in thrall to Petofi, and is terrified of him. Petofi was still Quentin-shaped yesterday when he chased Beth onto the top of Widows’ Hill. He collapsed in the woods, and a moment later the spell was broken and the body was Quentin’s again. Quentin, restored to his own person, wanders up to the summit and is surprised to see Beth there.

Quentin tries to tell Beth that he is himself, but she is not disposed to listen. Thinking that he has come to do something worse than simply kill her, she leaps from the cliff.

Terry Crawford says that when they first did this scene, they wanted her to emphasize the drama of Beth’s suicide by really flinging herself down hard. Since the floor was only a couple of feet below the set, the springy mattress that she flung herself on bounced her back into the frame, and they had to retake the shot. I wish we had that out-take, it must have been hilarious.

Quentin returns to the great house of Collinwood, in shock. He doesn’t notify the police or anyone else of Beth’s death- apparently the seascape just isn’t complete without a dead maidservant or two strewn carelessly about.

Barnabas, who has traveled back in time from 1969 to 1897 and who is currently free of the effects of the vampire curse, enters. He has befriended Quentin, and is at war with Petofi. He knew about the body swap, and had urged Quentin to make the effort that reversed it. He does not know how that effort turned out. He is happy to hear that Quentin is himself again, unhappy to learn of Beth’s demise, and insistent that Quentin must go far away before Petofi can get at him again.

We cut to a studio occupied by artist Charles Delaware Tate, a stooge of Petofi’s. We can see that Tate stole the magical portrait that keeps Quentin from turning into a werewolf. He covers the portrait with white paint. A visitor enters. It is Petofi’s servant Aristide. Aristide’s face is covered with dirt. Petofi has turned against Aristide, who has been in hiding. Tate agrees to help Aristide get a bath and clean clothes, but will not intercede with Petofi on his behalf.

Aristide does not know that the body swap is over. He goes to Collinwood, finds Quentin, and assumes that he is Petofi. When he offers to do whatever is necessary to restore himself to his master’s good graces, Quentin tells Aristide to find the man who appears to be Petofi and kill him. Aristide, a sadistic fiend, is delighted to receive this sort of command. He goes back to Tate’s, finds the real Petofi there, and stabs him in the chest.

Aristide getting ready to stab Petofi. Still not using his favorite knife, “The Dancing Girl” (alias “The Dancing Lady.”) Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 875: Barnabas, Quentin, and the difficulty of being oneself

This is the first episode credited to Peter Miner as line producer. Dark Shadows was being taped way out of sequence at this period, so Robert Costello’s name will appear in the credits several more times in the next few weeks. The role of the line producers is one of the most under-discussed aspects of the show’s history; writer Ron Sproat, for example, was in a 1985 festival appearance unable to remember ever receiving any input from Costello. So far as he could recall, the writers interacted exclusively with executive producer Dan Curtis.

Even if Sproat’s memory were accurate, I suspect that much of Curtis’ own time working on the show was spent in meetings with Costello. He was there from the beginning, and was around throughout the long periods when Curtis was away in London and other places working on other projects. When the show makes deep cuts into its early stages of development, referring to story points that played out long before any of the current staff of writers came aboard, I always suspect it was Costello who suggested the idea. Now that he is leaving, we will see if those references become rarer. If they don’t, maybe it is Curtis’ own memory that has been at work. On the other hand, even if they do dry up it may just be that they had run out of things to say about those old themes. Whatever happens, Costello had a hard job and clearly did it better than almost anyone else could have, it’s sad to see him go.

Today’s story is about the results of a spell that 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi cast a few weeks ago. Petofi forcibly swapped bodies with handsome young Quentin Collins. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

Yesterday, maidservant Beth Chavez found out about the body swap. In love with Quentin and terrified of Petofi, she was horrified by it. Today, she searches desperately for someone she can trust, and makes the singularly unfortunate choice of weak-willed schoolteacher turned unscrupulous adventurer Tim Shaw. She goes to Tim’s hotel room, tells him the story, and asks for help. Uncharacteristically, he does not look for a way to sell the information Beth gives him. He simply goes to Q-Petofi, whom he believes to be Quentin, in what can only be a sincere effort to do the right thing. He brings Q-Petofi back to his room, where Beth is waiting. She soon manages to escape, and Q-Petofi chases her.

For his part, P-Quentin made a happy discovery yesterday and the day before. When Petofi executed the body swap, he took his powers with him into Quentin’s form. But now P-Quentin finds that the powers have returned to Petofi’s own rightful body, which is to say to him. After consulting with his friend and distant cousin, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, P-Quentin decides to will himself back into his own body.

This works. Quentin awakes as himself, in the woods on Widows’ Hill. He finds Beth at the summit of the hill, near the cliff from which so many people have leapt or fallen to their deaths. She thinks he is Petofi, and flees to the edge while he tries to reassure her of his true identity. The closing cliffhanger leaves her inches from death.

A few years ago, I posted a fanfic idea in the comments on Danny Horn’s post about this episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day. I still like it:

This is one of the episodes that could have been novelized by “Marilyn” Ross under the title “Barnabas, Quentin, and the Dumbest Possible Plan.” Rather than will himself into his own body right away, thus returning Petofi to his body and for all they know to his full powers, a character with brains might have tried swapping places with someone relatively harmless. Beth would seem to be the obvious person. If she comes to in Petofi’s body, Beth would seem to be the person most likely to accept the situation and least likely to use the powers of Petofi to destroy Our Heroes. Playing Quentin may have been just the challenge Terry Crawford really needed to show off her acting talents, and I’m sure Thayer David would have done wonders as Beth.

Quentin/ Beth/ Petofi could have been the first in a whole series of body swaps. Some of those swaps could have led to villains getting their comeuppance, helping to clear the decks for the end of the 1897 segment. So, while inhabiting the body of a villain, Quentin tries to do something heroic, winds up in mortal peril, and at the last second snaps back to his previous host, just in time for the villain to be the one who dies.

Comment posted 6 December 2020 on Danny Horn, “Episode 875: Switchback,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 8 June 2016.

Fans if the original Star Trek will recognize the source of my inspiration. The episode titled “Return to Tomorrow” features a malevolent alien squatting in Mr Spock’s body. Spock hides his consciousness in the brain of Nurse Christine Chapel, whom the alien once controlled, as Petofi once controlled Beth, and who has a crush on Spock as Beth does on Quentin. And Spock and Nurse Chapel, as a composite being, deliver the fatal blow that kills the alien.

Episode 874: Makes a girl feel creepy

Ever since its first time-travel storyline, when it spent November 1967 through March 1969 visiting the 1790s, Dark Shadows has been committed to treating its cast as a repertory theater company. Now, we are coming to the end of the 35th week of an arc set in 1897, and most of the actors are not only playing characters unique to that year but are playing two characters at once. So David Selby joined the cast as rakish libertine Quentin Collins, and Thayer David, who has played several parts on the show, had been playing sorcerer Count Petofi. But a few weeks ago Petofi cast a spell to trade bodies with Quentin. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

In #819, Petofi found uptight minister’s daughter Charity Trask to be an irritant, and so he erased her personality. He replaced it with that of late Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye, whom Charity had never met. Pansy has been residing in Charity’s body ever since. Charity had run out of story, and Pansy is a lot of fun, so it would be a pure loss if this transformation were reversed.

Pansy Faye, occupying the former body of Charity Trask.

In #844, a young American woman named Kitty Soames arrived at the great house of Collinwood. Kitty is the dowager countess of Hampshire. The late Earl was a friend of Quentin’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward, and because of his involvement with Petofi he died penniless. Kitty is hoping to marry Edward and rescue her financial position. Since Edward is also penniless and looking for a way out of his troubles, we might look forward to a comedy resolution where each finds out about the other’s poverty on their wedding day.

But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards. From the day of her arrival, Kitty has been having psychotic episodes. These are triggered by the irruption into her consciousness of the mind of the late Josette DuPrés. In the 1790s, Josette was engaged to marry Barnabas Collins. A wicked witch sabotaged their engagement, turned Barnabas into a vampire, and drove Josette to kill herself. Barnabas became obsessed with recreating Josette; in 1967, when the show was set in contemporary times, he tried to achieve this by abducting women and torturing them. Now Barnabas has traveled back in time to 1897, and he is apparently not being evil when he urges Kitty to allow Josette to take over as her primary consciousness.

Barnabas and Kitty, under Josette’s watchful eyes.

Petofi’s magical powers are concentrated in his right hand, and he took them with him when he moved into Quentin’s body. Today we see that he is losing these powers. Q-Petofi confronts Barnabas, who is for the time being free of the effects of the vampire curse. Q-Petofi announces he will restore those effects and touches Barnabas’ forehead with his right hand. When nothing happens, Barnabas taunts him. Later, Q-Petofi confronts Pansy, who has figured out about the body swap. He announces he will turn her back into Charity. He touches her with his right hand, and again nothing happens. She complains that he makes her feel creepy acting like that. The scene between Q-Petofi and Pansy really is hilarious.

For her part, Kitty/ Josette has gone to P-Quentin, whom she believes to be Petofi. She insists he touch her with his magic hand and clear up her identity crisis; unable to convince her he has no powers, he plays along. To his amazement and delight, it works. She realizes she is both Kitty and Josette, and he realizes that he now has Petofi’s powers.

Kitty/ Josette goes to her room in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Josette has communicated with the living through her portrait since its first appearance in #70; longtime viewers will remember a one-sided conversation strange and troubled boy David Collins had with it in #102. Kitty hears the portrait talking to her, urging her to become Josette, assuring her they will be happy once they meld into a symbiont. Barnabas shows up, and Kitty/ Josette has a candid and endearing conversation with him. She realizes the whole truth about him; she knows everything Josette knows. She cannot decide what she ought to do.

Episode 873: Charming and exquisitely dangerous

In October 1897, sorcerer Count Petofi has used his magical powers to swap bodies with Quentin Collins. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

We open with Q-Petofi meditating on a lineup of I Ching wands. He goes into a trance which unlocks a cosmic force that transports him to the great house of Collinwood in 1969. He wanders into the drawing room, finds a newspaper dated 28 October of that year, and starts exulting. Maggie Evans, governess in the great house in the late 60s, hears him and comes downstairs.

As the segment of Dark Shadows set in 1897 winds down, we’ve been thinking of ways they might have moved forward. Some of the possibilities involve splitting the week between episodes set in 1897 and others set in 1969. Maggie has been on the show from episode #1, and has been central to several of the storylines that take place in contemporary dress. The last of these stories before the move to 1897 centered on Quentin’s malevolent ghost haunting Collinwood and making it impossible for anyone to live there. In the course of that, he appeared to Maggie several times. In #682, Maggie had a dream in which Quentin’s ghost strangled her to death. Though the events we have seen in 1897 have changed the future, we saw in #839 that the 1960s characters remember Quentin’s haunting. So when Maggie is on her way to meet someone who is to all outward appearances Quentin, we have a hint that a story might be brewing in which Q-Petofi finds himself carrying the can for all of the horrors Quentin’s ghost wrought between December 1968 and September 1969.

Alas, it is not to be. By the time Maggie reaches the drawing room, Q-Petofi has vanished. A few moments after he left 1897, maidservant Beth scattered the wands and brought him back. He is furious when he comes to, and she explains that she had to do it. The magical portrait that keeps Quentin, and presumably also Q-Petofi, from becoming a werewolf is not in the suitcase Q-Petofi gave her earlier in the evening to bury. Q-Petofi has been in possession of Quentin’s body and of his portrait for weeks, and he has vast powers of sorcery, so you’d think he would have hidden the portrait long before. His magic powers would seem to give him the ability to do anything at all to hide it. My favorite idea is that he would impose onto Quentin’s portrait an exact copy of the portrait that hangs above the mantel in the drawing room of the great house and hang it in its place, so that it would be hidden in plain sight for years to come.

Besides, if Q-Petofi was going to bury the portrait surely he would at least have put it in something airtight and made of metal, not a wooden suitcase that doesn’t close all the way and that will likely rot to dust in a year or two. Apparently he isn’t as big on long-term plans as he led us to believe when he claimed he was working on a design to become the ruler of the cosmos.

Q-Petofi orders Beth to bring Pansy Faye, a deceased Cockney showgirl/ mentalist who has for some time been inhabiting the body once occupied by the stunningly dreary Charity Trask, to Quentin’s room at Collinwood. He demands information which she refuses to give. She storms out.

Pansy has a dream in which she and Quentin dance in the drawing room of Collinwood while a specially recorded version of her song, I Wanna Dance for You, featuring the voices of Nancy Barrett and David Selby, plays in the background. Colors flare on the screen while we hear them sing. Miss Barrett was an excellent singer, Mr Selby an adequate one. He does speak a few of his lines, which damages the rhythm of the song, and the flaring colors often obscure the actors completely. Mr Selby and Miss Barrett are so lovable that we very much want to overlook these flaws in the number’s conception.

The dream ends with Quentin turning into Petofi and laughing evilly at Pansy. She awakes in horror. She has known for some days that Q-Petofi isn’t Quentin, and she knows enough about Petofi that it is strange she hasn’t already figured out that he is the one hiding inside his body. But when she sits up with a gasp, we know that she has finally put it all together.

Time-traveler Barnabas Collins, a recovering vampire, meets Q-Petofi in the drawing room at Collinwood. Q-Petofi is convinced that Barnabas stole the portrait of Quentin, and is very aggressive about pressing his suspicions. Barnabas has been playing dumb ever since his vampirism went into remission, but after a couple of minutes of Q-Petofi’s hectoring he addresses him as “Count Petofi.” When Barnabas cannot tell him what he wants to hear, Q-Petofi declares that he will restore the vampire curse to its full potency. He touches Barnabas’ forehead with the right hand in which his powers are concentrated. Barnabas squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, then opens them with a look of triumph. He asks Q-Petofi what has become of his powers.

The rest of the episode revolves around yet another possessed person. Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, is also Josette DuPrés, who plunged to her death from the cliff at Widow’s Hill 101 years before. Barnabas was supposed to marry Josette at one point, and he has been obsessed with recreating her ever since.

In May and June of 1967, when the show was set in the present, Barnabas abducted Maggie and tried to brainwash her into becoming Josette. In those days, the show was ambiguous about why Barnabas picked Maggie. Strange and troubled boy David Collins was an intimate friend of Josette’s ghost, and when he saw Maggie in Josette’s dress in #240 and #241, he thought she was Josette, looking just as she always did. Indeed, Miss Scott had played the ghost a few times, always behind a veil. When Barnabas was about to give up on Maggie in #260 he very earnestly told her “But you are Josette!” Yet after Maggie escaped, he picked another girl and planned to repeat the experiment with her, explaining to his sorely-bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #274 that all you have to do is “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure, and a new personality is created.”

But when the show made its first trip back in time, visiting the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968, Kathryn Leigh Scott played Josette. That was a bold move. Longtime viewers were left with the uncomfortable feeling that Barnabas may have had a point when he devised the horrifying program of torture that made the show so terribly bleak for several weeks. When we see Miss Scott playing Kitty, who really is Josette and really does have to accept that fact, longtime viewers can only squirm as they remember Barnabas shoving Maggie into his old coffin and later walking down the long gray corridors of his basement on his way to the prison cell where he was going to murder her. We’ve since come to know Barnabas as an endearingly ineffectual comic villain, but it is a stretch to remind us of him as he was in those grim days and ask us to concede that he was in any sense right.

Kitty confronts Barnabas at Collinwood and accuses him of orchestrating her Josettifying psychosis. He denies that he is responsible, and claims to know that Josette’s spirit lives in her and that she ought to yield to it. When she asks how he knows, he makes up a story about being a boy in England, falling in love with a portrait of Josette, and reading her diaries. She is unconvinced.

Later, Josette goes to P-Quentin in Petofi’s old squat, the abandoned mill on the North Road. She believes he is Petofi, and asks him to use his power to resolve her identity crisis. He tries to explain that he only looks like Petofi, and has none of his power, but she refuses to believe him. Having nothing to lose, he decides to play along. He tells the right hand to tell Kitty the truth about herself, and touches her forehead. She suddenly realizes that she is both Josette and Kitty. P-Quentin just as suddenly realizes that Petofi’s power has returned to the body in which he is now an unwilling tenant.

Kitty/ Josette keeps telling P-Quentin that she remembers what he was able to do with his right hand when he was staying with her and her late husband in England a few years before. This is a pretty bad continuity error. For eight weeks from #778, the most dynamic story on the show centered on the fact that Petofi’s hand was cut off in 1797 and kept in a box by a Romani tribe for the hundred years since, until broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi stole it in an attempt to lift the werewolf curse from Quentin. It was only in #815, in August, that Petofi reattached his hand and with it regained the bulk of his power. Granted, #815 is eleven and a half weeks ago, but the show now takes so little time to onboard new viewers by recapping that the writers are clearly counting on the audience to have a great deal of information about the story so far in their heads. As such, it is very surprising that they would break from established continuity on such a major point of the recent months.

Episode 872: Favors for enemies

At the beginning of March 1969, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins meditated on some I Ching wands and found himself transported back in time to 1897. Ever since, Dark Shadows has been a costume drama set in that year. For the first several months of the 1897 arc, there were multiple intertwined storylines, each involving several characters, threatening to negate the version of the Collins family we see in the parts of the show set in the 1960s, and requiring a lot of intricate action to unravel.

Now, the original stories are all resolved. Most of the things keeping us from returning to a contemporary setting qualify as fairly minor loose ends- we can see that Judith Collins will get rid of her evil husband Gregory Trask one way or another, and we can see that Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, will realize she is really the reincarnation of Barnabas’ lost love Josette and will then become unavailable to him. Both of these could be wrapped up in the same episode, and the fates of the other characters don’t need any further explanation. The one exception is the story about sorcerer Count Petofi and rakish Quentin Collins. Petofi has used his magic powers to swap bodies with Quentin. I refer to the villainous Petofi who has hijacked Quentin’s body as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin trapped in Petofi’s aging form as P-Quentin.

Now, Q-Petofi has found out that meditating on the right lineup of I Ching wands releases powers that can transport a person to a different period of history, and he makes arrangements for a departure to 1969. Barnabas tries to stop him, but at the end of the episode we see him standing in the drawing room of Collinwood in that year.

Q-Petofi in 1969. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episodes like this present a challenge to someone blogging about the 1897 segment of Dark Shadows. It’s taken up with intricate plot mechanics that depend on story points that would sound ridiculous if you explained them to someone who hasn’t been watching for the last few months, and as Danny Horn explains in his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, many of the scenes don’t make logical sense if you stop and think about them. But it is well-paced, the dialogue is good, the through-line of Q-Petofi’s busyness and Barnabas’ scheming is effectively realized, Nancy Barrett has some charming scenes as Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye, and the image of Q-Petofi in 1969 is a strong ending. So it really is a half hour well spent, but if you aren’t going to watch it you will just have to take my word for that.

The drawing room figures in five scenes set in 1897 before it appears in its 1969 configuration. Since the show was done live-to-tape, the stage hands had to change the furniture gradually in between those scenes. Danny lists the changes we can see:

The drawing room set changes from the 1897 set to the 1969 set over the course of the episode, but the change actually happens in stages rather than all at once. The couch and chairs are replaced while they’re still doing 1897 scenes, and then the lamps, telephone and desk are changed for the final scene.

There are six scenes set in the drawing room, but in some of them, you only see a small part of the set, so it’s hard to say exactly when the switches are made. But here’s what you can see:

Act 1, Tate tells Pansy that he’s seen the future: She’s sitting on a red couch. There are red padded chairs facing the couch. Various round lamps around the room, old telephone on the credenza. Act 2 picks up with Tate and Pansy again, no visible change to the set dressing.

Act 3, Barnabas tells Pansy a secret: They huddle in a corner of the drawing room, where you can’t see much. It’s all shot by one camera.

Act 3, Petofi and Pansy drink champagne: The couch has changed from the 1897 red couch to a green 1969 model. We still see the round lamps and the old telephone.

Act 3, Barnabas finds Pansy’s drunk the rest of the champagne: There are now green chairs facing the green couch. There’s also a sideboard with a clock and a green shaded lamp.

Act 3 finish, Petofi enters the 1969 drawing room: All of the lamps have been changed to modern style, and the old telephone has become a modern telephone. The green chairs are facing the green couch. The sideboard has been replaced with a desk, holding some books, a lamp, and the newspaper.

Danny Horn, “Episode 872: Tick Tock,” posted 4 June 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

There is one important set decoration they left in its 1897 position. In the 1960s, a portrait of Jeremiah Collins hangs above the mantel; in 1897, a portrait identified in #3 as that of Isaac Collins hangs there. Isaac is still in place when Q-Petofi enters the 1969 drawing room.

Episode 871: The twin of life

In October 1897, sorcerer Count Petofi has hijacked the body of Quentin Collins and banished Quentin to his own aging form. I call the villainous Petofi played by David Selby Q-Petofi, and the forlorn Quentin played by Thayer David P-Quentin.

Today, wicked witch Angelique explains to P-Quentin how she and mad scientist Julia Hoffman cured time-traveler Barnabas Collins of vampirism, created a Doppelgänger of Barnabas, and used that Doppelgänger to persuade Quentin’s family in the great house of Collinwood that Barnabas never really was a vampire. Later, artist Charles Delaware Tate mistakes P-Quentin for Petofi, and tries to kill him. Q-Petofi then enters and takes control of Tate, using him for a project of his own.

Petofi stripped Angelique of her powers in #865, and deprived Tate of his ability to paint in #851. Angelique has been such an important part of the show for so long that regular viewers are confident she will be back eventually, but the 1897 segment seems to be lurching towards its close, and after her last exit there was no urgent reason in the story for her to come back. It’s good to see that she is still part of this arc.

Tate’s continued presence is rather less good news. Like all characters played by Roger Davis, he has an obnoxious personality and a grating voice, with a disturbing habit of invading his scene partners’ personal space. Today, he keeps grabbing at Q-Petofi’s coat while Q-Petofi bats him away; this is so irritating that it is unclear whether the line “You’ve got trouble with your hands” was scripted for Q-Petofi or ad libbed by David Selby.

For the last couple of weeks, we have had grounds for hope that Tate would just go away. When he sold the portrait of the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris in #864, he lost his last connection to an ongoing plot point. We saw in that same scene that he had a lot of paintings he could sell for high prices if he took them back to New York or another major city. We also know that he has no friends or potential sources of income in the small town of Collinsport. So evidently he is just sticking around to punish the audience for watching the show.