Tag: dark shadows

My usual themes: Lela Swift

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. Several times I brought up the contribution Lela Swift made to Dark Shadows. Swift directed 595 of the show’s 1225 episodes, including the first and last installments, and she also served as line producer of the last 127 episodes. Only series creator and executive producer Dan Curtis could be said to have had more impact on Dark Shadows than did Swift, and very few people could be said to have had as much.

Danny’s background, like mine, is in literary study. I know I have a tendency to overemphasize the writer’s contribution to a dramatic work at the expense of the director and other visual artists, and I think he does too. Many of my remarks about Swift reflected my conscious effort to overcome this bias of mine, and incidentally involved my disagreeing with him.

Here’s a comment I made about episode 299. In the original post, Danny argued that the writers must by that point have intended to present mad scientist Dr Julia Hoffman as suffering from unrequited love for vampire Barnabas Collins. Some posters in the comment thread pointed out the visual similarity between the scene from which Danny draws his evidence and a scene in The Sound of Music in which a love triangle is developed. I tried to make the point that these similarities are more to do with elements under the control of the director than of the writers. So, while there is a reason to think that there was an intention to tell that story, we can’t be sure exactly whose intention that was:

THE SOUND OF MUSIC was such a big hit, so fresh in people’s minds in 1967, and the way the actors are positioned on this new set looks so much like it that I can’t believe the resonance wasn’t intentional. I don’t know if that means that the Barnabas/ Vicki/ Julia love triangle was already intentional at this point on the part of the writers, but it is strong evidence that it was on the part of director Lela Swift.

In a comment on episode 1116, I say that the new burst of energy that many in the comment threads had found at the beginning of the segment of the show set in the year 1840 came just as Swift was made producer, and suggest that she may deserve credit for it.

In a comment on episode 1166, I rebut one of her detractors:

“If Lela had been the executive producer, Dark Shadows would have been off the air after the first 13 weeks.” Perhaps so. But without her as the principal director, it’s doubtful there would have been a single episode anyone would have remembered. The endlessly ambitious visual compositions and the hyper-intense acting style originated with her, and she had as much as anyone to do with the fact that there was always an episode in the can ready to go on the air at 4 PM five days a week.

In a comment on episode 1244, I compare Swift to the only other director on Dark Shadows in its dying days, the woefully inept Henry Kaplan:

This episode and the one before also show that, even though television is famously Not A Director’s Medium, a director can have great importance from time to time. Episode 1243 was really rather good, and that is entirely to the credit of Lela Swift. The pacing is rapid, the visual composition tells as much of the story as we could want it to do, and she elicits good performances from all the actors, even Keith Prentice.

In this one, Henry Kaplan keeps moving the actors around in tight little spaces, with the result that they have to shuffle from one set of marks to another. Even worse, he indulges himself in a series of dissolves, each of which would probably have looked cluttered and been distracting under the best of circumstances, but with the camera faults in this episode it’s as if the TV screen is at the bottom of a pond. Poor Keith Prentice, finally doing a good job of acting for a second consecutive episode, winds up looking like the world’s biggest idiot when a closeup of him laughing in wicked triumph dissolves to a shot of the cobwebbed room.

My usual themes: Supernaturalism

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. Several times I made remarks about the concept of the supernatural that Dark Shadows develops with all its ghosts, witches, and other weird beings.

In this remark about Danny’s post on episode 659, I respond to a discussion in the comment thread in which several people dismissed the idea that it was the ghost of Sarah Collins who sent Vicki back in time in episode 364, precipitating the show’s first time travel storyline:

It makes sense to me that Sarah sent Vicki back. The whole thing with the supernatural is that what seems weakest is actually strongest. The dead are stronger than the living, children stronger than adults, etc. So it fits the conceit that a long-dead and not especially bright little girl is the greatest power. It fits the dramatic development as well- throughout her time as a ghost Sarah steadily reveals more and more powers, and by the time of the seance we’re wondering what she will show us next. Moreover, her whole approach throughout 1967 is an attempt to curb Barnabas’ murderousness and to shield him from accountability at the same time. Vicki’s return from 1795 storyline precipitates events that achieve precisely that goal, and it is the goal to which Julia (Sarah’s successor as a sister to Barnabas) devotes herself for the rest of Barnabas’ time on the show.

I enlarged on my thoughts about Sarah’s ghost in a response to a post about an episode in which she actually appears, number 294:

“I don’t really think the writers are sure who Sarah is, or what she wants.” I don’t think that either we or she are supposed to know what Sarah wants. Up to this point she’s been very mysterious- for the first few episodes it was unclear what she remembered from one appearance to the next. And of course she several times expresses puzzlement that she can’t find her parents in the Old House, and she doesn’t know why David and the others think her clothes are old-fashioned. So they leave open the possibility that she was just a projection from the past with no intentions and no ability to learn in the present.

By now it’s clear that she is a character interacting with other characters, but still unsettled as to whether she knows she’s a ghost, or what happened to any of the people from her corporeal days, or what century it is. It still could be that her presence is just a side-effect of Barnabas’ revival, that she represents some kind of energy that was released into the world when he came out of the box. In the Phoenix storyline, they played with that same kind of ambiguity- Laura’s presence in the house coincided with other disturbances, over which she had no control and of which she was not aware.

Later it will become clearer that Sarah knows a fair bit, but right up to the moment Vicki vanishes from the seance she is trying to figure out a way to curb Barnabas’ murderousness without betraying him. Indeed, the speech Sarah gives speaking through Vicki at that seance is the climax of that whole development- Sarah is deep in her own thoughts, trying to solve an impossible problem, and taking a gamble on something amazing of which the most she can say is that “maybe” it will work out.

In a comment on episode 639, I said a bit more about the idea that Sarah herself is supposed to seem uncertain about her nature, her powers, and her goals, finding actress Sharon Smyth the perfect choice to play such a character:

When she first starts showing up, Sarah is a total mystery to us- it’s pretty clear she’s a ghost, but do ghosts form memories? That is, can she remember during one appearance what happened in her previous appearances, or does she know only what she learned in life? Does she have plans and intentions, or are her appearances simply the result of invisible forces? … young Sharon Smyth’s confused demeanor (nowadays she sums her performance up in “one word- clueless”) plays right into all those questions.

In a comment responding to the post about 730, I commented on how the original Phoenix storyline of episodes 126-192 (what I call the “Meet Laura” period of the show) set the stage for the supernatural tales that would come to dominate the show after the vampire shows up in episode 211:

Laura is the first paranormal being who sets a story in motion. Ghosts had been in the background from the beginning and had played important roles in ending Vicki’s first two imprisonments, but they hadn’t started any plotlines. The Phoenix story is bounded by the supernatural on all sides. At the end of it, virtually all the characters concede that they have just seen something that cannot be explained and tacitly agree never to speak of it again.

One of my less well-formed comments was a rambling half-essay about ways that particular kinds of Christians might be expected to respond to particular supernatural stories that I contributed to the thread responding to episode 1017. It was one of those internet moments where you click “Post” because it’s the only way you can imagine yourself letting go of something you’ve already wasted too much time on. Unsatisfactory as that comment wound up being, I can defend my motivation for writing it. Several contributors had made blanket assertions about what Christianity teaches concerning various matters, and someone really ought to have objected that different groups of Christians teach different things.

A story idea: Adam in New York

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

In a number of these comments, I explained particular ways I had of correcting Dark Shadows in my head while I watched it. I rarely bothered telling people about times when I didn’t notice bloopers because I had put the words in the right order while hearing them, or other small corrections. I did mention times when I thought out major changes. Many of those changes could only be called fanfic.

Perhaps the most ambitious piece of fanfic I shared there, and certainly the longest, was my response to the show’s failure to resolve the story of Adam, the Frankenstein’s monster-like creature. My idea, if presented at the right time, would also have tied up the show’s most embarrassing loose end:

Here’s an idea I had today for a story that would save Vicki.

It would be a TV movie airing late in 1969. Start with a prologue set in Collinwood at that time. Adam returns, looking for Barnabas and Julia. He’s very well-spoken and accomplished now, but still socially awkward, still prone to fits of anger, and in need of help to get papers that he needs to establish a legal identity.

He finds that Barnabas and Julia are gone. He also happens upon some mumbo-jumbo that dislocates him in time and space.

It plops him down in NYC in 1945. With his facial scars, everyone assumes he’s a returning GI injured in the war. He meets a young woman, supporting herself by work at a magazine about handheld machines, trying to establish independence from her wealthy family back in Maine. This woman, played by Alexandra Moltke Isles, is Elizabeth [Collins.]*

Adam and Elizabeth slide into a love affair. She has another boyfriend, a dashing young naval officer named Paul Stoddard. Elizabeth is frustrated with both Adam and Paul; Adam refuses to talk about his background, and while Paul says many words when asked about himself, he doesn’t really give significantly more information than Adam does. Paul is slick, charming, and familiar with all the most fashionable night spots, but he does show signs of a nasty side. Besides, he rooms with a disreputable young sailor named Jason McGuire who keeps turning up at the most disconcerting moments.

For his part, Adam is sincere, passionate, and attentive, but given to quick flashes of anger. He’s just as quick to apologize and sometimes blubbers like a giant baby with remorse for his harsh words, but he’s so big and so strong that when he is carried away in his fits of anger Elizabeth can’t help but be afraid of him. Besides, he’s not a lot of fun on a Saturday night. He doesn’t have a nickel to his name, and his idea of an exciting weekend is an impromptu seminar on Freud’s TOTEM AND TABOO, followed by a couple of games of chess.

Elizabeth’s mother, played by Joan Bennett, comes to town. Mrs Collins is appalled by Adam’s scars, impatient with his refusal to discuss his background, and contemptuous of his obvious poverty. Paul’s effortless charm and sparkling wit, packaged in the naval dress uniform he makes sure he’s wearing when she first sees him, fit far more tidily into her vision of a son-in-law. Mrs Collins presses her daughter to spurn Adam and pursue Paul, and for a time Elizabeth tries to comply with her wishes.

Yet she cannot forget Adam. Paul realizes this, and sees his chance at an easy life slipping away. We see him in a dive in Greenwich Village telling Jason McGuire that Elizabeth and her inheritance are going to end up with the scar-faced scholar. He and McGuire review Adam’s weaknesses, and decide they can exploit Elizabeth’s concern about his temper. They trick her into believing that Adam is on the run from the law, having beaten his wife to death. They lead her to believe that it’s just a matter of time before his occasional verbal outbursts give way to physical abuse, and that when that happens it will be too late- he will kill her. Believing this, Elizabeth gives Paul another chance, but still cannot break things off with Adam.

Adam does not know what Paul and Jason have led Elizabeth to believe. He knows only that she has become distant from him, and that she is still seeing Paul. He becomes angry and shouts at Elizabeth. He reaches for an object; she believes it is a blunt instrument with which he will kill her. In a moment of panic, she grabs a gun she has been studying for an article the magazine has assigned her to write and shoots him. As he lies motionless on her floor, she discovers that he wasn’t reaching for a weapon at all- he was reaching for a love letter that he had written to her. She realizes that he was no threat to her, that she has shot him for no reason.

She flees to Paul and Jason’s apartment, telling them that she has killed Adam. Paul calms her and promises to take care of matters so that she will not be suspected of any crime. Paul and Jason go to her apartment and find it empty. There are bloodstains on the carpet where Adam fell, and a trail of bloodstains leading down the hallway out the front door. They follow the stains and find Adam nursing a serious, but clearly not fatal, wound. They lead Adam back to Elizabeth’s apartment. They draw on their naval training to remove the bullet, clean and dress the wound. After a conversation. Adam admits that there is no point in his pursuing Elizabeth, and he agrees to leave town. Paul gives Adam some money and promises to tell Elizabeth that he is all right and that he doesn’t hold a grudge. Adam shakes Paul’s hand and leaves.

Paul and Jason clean the bloodstains. They then return to their own apartment. On the way they exchange a look that begins as nervous, and ends with two broad grins. Elizabeth asks why they were away so long. They tell her that it takes quite a while to dispose of a corpse. She sobs. Paul holds her.

Paul and Elizabeth announce their engagement. A few weeks later, the doctor informs Elizabeth that she is pregnant. The child must be Adam’s. Paul is not interested in raising any child, and certainly not interested in splitting the estate with a child not even his own. He orders Elizabeth to give the baby up. She refuses. He points out that she wouldn’t be able to do much mothering if she were in prison for murder. She sobs. In the final scene, we see Elizabeth outside on a snowy day, holding a basket and writing a note. In voiceover, we hear the contents of the note: “Her name is Victoria. I cannot take care of her.”

*Originally I wrote “Stoddard” here.

My usual themes: Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. Several times it occurred to me that a Dark Shadows features a number of older sisters who clean up messes that their misbehaving younger brothers make, and that a variety of male-female relationships on the show take on the dynamic of a bossy big sister and her bratty little brother. Danny doesn’t cover the first 209 episodes of the show, when we learn that Roger Collins has managed to squander his entire inheritance, half of the family fortune, and that his older sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard has gone deeply into debt to contain the damage that his irresponsibility has done to the family business. Elizabeth takes Roger into her house, and alternates between demanding that he reform his ways and enabling his ongoing bad conduct. She takes charge of the raising of Roger’s son David and puts Roger to work in the family business, setting bounds to Roger’s crapulence but also insulating him from its consequences.

My first remarks about this theme were in a comment on episode 565:

Watching this episode, I just realized the main relationship in DARK SHADOWS- Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother. Liz and Roger are literally that, and each one’s struggle to safeguard their relationship by keeping the other in the dark about their shameful secrets is the background of every storyline in the first 209 episodes. Carolyn and David become the functional equivalent of a Bossy Big Sister and a Bratty Little Brother, and that’s the development that makes Carolyn a relatable character.

In Julia and Barnabas, we have the supreme example of such a relationship. They fall into it naturally; Julia is used to giving orders, and Barnabas is used to disobeying them. From the moment Julia lit her cigarette on the candles in the old house, she’s been Barnabas’ Bossy Big Sister, pursuing one plan after another meant for his own good. He’s been alternately pouting at her, raging against her, and clinging to her, at once resenting her demands on him and craving her validation for his narcissism. The climax of the episode, when they both know that a he-vampire is roaming about in search of a victim but it occurs to neither Julia nor Barnabas that Julia might be in danger, shows how deeply they have embedded themselves in these roles. Barnabas won’t even let Vicki walk to her car alone, and Julia, hearing the dognoise, understands why. But when Julia tells Barnabas that she will close up the lab and leave shortly after he goes out to join Willie, implying that she’s going to walk all the way back to the Great House by herself, he just leaves. Of course nothing will happen to Big Sis, she’ll always be OK.

That’s also why I don’t see how slashfic positing a sexual relationship between Barnabas and Julia can work. They are so much Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother that no matter how much time they spent telling themselves that they aren’t actually related, it would still be impossibly weird to try to be something else to each other.

I returned to the theme in a remark about episode 572, where Jonathan Frid gives a line-reading so pouty that I wonder if he was consciously trying to depict Barnabas as a bratty little brother to Julia:

I love the way Jonathan Frid pouts the line “I was afraid your visit would be pointless.” He’s every inch the bratty little brother upset that his big sister went out when he didn’t want her to go.

By episode 648, the idea has moved me to fanfic:

Cavada Humphrey looks quite a bit like Jonathan Frid. I wonder what 1795 would have been like if Barnabas had had an older sister who bossed him around, stood around during his ridiculously childish fits of petulance, occasionally acted as his conscience, and time and again serve as his enabler and protector. It would have been funny to see Grayson Hall’s Countess express disapproval of such a relationship.

Heck, that older sister could have been Sarah. Just because she’s a child in her ghost form doesn’t mean she has to have died at that age. Maybe she comes back in the form in which her relationship to her brother took its permanent shape, when she was about nine and he was about seven. Of course, that possibility is foreclosed at Sarah’s first appearance, when she tells Maggie not to let her “big brother” know she saw her, but I suppose they could have retconned that away with a phony flashback where she says “little brother.”

I revisited these points a few times- Danny’s blog consists of over a thousand posts, one each for episodes 210-1245, plus a few dozen about properties related to Dark Shadows, and each post has its own discussion thread. So it isn’t bad netiquette to repeat yourself a bit from one thread to another- there is always a chance someone who didn’t see a comment previously posted elsewhere will take an interest when you post a similar one. But I did try to keep from making a bore of myself to those who read everything.

I could have mentioned some other bossy big sister/ bratty little brother combos. In a comment on the 1897 storyline, I alluded to the relationship between Judith Collins Trask and her feckless younger brothers. Judith’s arc doesn’t really allow her to be a bossy big sister to any of her three bratty little brothers. But each of them does find himself attached to at least one woman who is stronger than he is, and who might well treat him as Elizabeth does Roger and as Julia does Barnabas.

It’s a shame Terry Crawford wasn’t a more accomplished actress in the 1960s- in the scripts Beth fluctuates between indulging Quentin in his every vice and insisting that he clean up his act. That’s the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic we’ve seen so many times, but unlike any previous pair who have enacted it Beth and Quentin are lovers and are not social equals. It would be interesting to explore the dynamic in that context, but Ms Crawford’s performance is so wooden that you sometimes have to think about her scenes after it is over and call to memory the dialogue and the visual composition before it strikes you what the point was.

Pansy Faye isn’t on the show very long, unfortunately but she’s clearly in the driver’s seat in her relationship with her thoroughly clownish husband Carl Collins. And Edward Collins is much the weaker personality in his connections with both his estranged wife Laura and with Kitty Soames. So each of those men was looking for a woman who was forceful enough to take charge of him, but indulgent enough to allow him to continue in all his established habits.

I also made only one brief reference to the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic in the discussions of the 1840 storyline. That’s rather odd- after all, in that one Julia actually presents herself to the family as Barnabas’ sister, and he is forced to go along with the pretense.

I did not refer to the theme in my comments on posts about “The Haunting of Collinwood” by the ghost of Quentin, and I made only a single reference to it in my comments on posts about the “Re-Haunting of Collinwood” by the ghost of mini-Quentin Gerard. Indeed, that single reference is to Julia’s failure to focus her bossiness on Barnabas. I dropped the ball there, I think- the relationship between David and Amy in the original “Haunting of Collinwood” is at its most interesting when it mixes elements of the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic with other types of interaction, while the bland, lifeless relationships between David and Hallie on the one hand and between Tad and Carrie on the other in the “Re-Haunting of Collinwood” could benefit from some kind of structure.

I also left the theme unmentioned in my comments regarding the show’s dying days, the 1841 Parallel Time storyline of episodes 1199-1245. That’s understandable- the show did not develop any bossy big sister/ bratty little brother relationships in that period. But there was an implicit one- Miss Julia Collins was the sister of Justin Collins, and she had functioned as head of the household during his years of madness. Justin dies a few episodes into the story, without sharing a scene with Julia, and she is left as a bossy big sister with no bratty brother to whom she can attach herself. Meanwhile, Bramwell is a thoroughly bratty man with no big sister. It’s rather sad for the loyal audience, having enjoyed so many scenes in which Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid had enormous fun with the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother pattern, seeing them drift separately through these dreary episodes.

The closest we get to a bossy big sister/ bratty little brother scene in the dying days of the show is also the one genuinely irresistible moment of that segment. In episode 1215, Flora Collins (Joan Bennett) and her son Morgan (Keith Prentice) are walking through the woods on their way to Biddleford’s Creek. He whines about the pointlessness of the trip, she scolds him, and we get a brilliant little glimpse of what their relationship must have been like since he first learned to talk. That authoritative mother/ whiny son moment left me, not only wanting more such scenes between them, but also wishing it had been presented in contrast with a bossy big sister/ bratty little brother relationship elsewhere in the show.

My usual themes: Denial and the demonic

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. I frequently refer to denial, the psychological defense mechanism, as a story point on Dark Shadows, and more than once I connect it with the show’s supernatural themes.

From the very beginning, the show focuses on the Collinses as a family addicted to denial. Elizabeth hasn’t left her house for 19 years because she’s guarding a secret; she’s summoned Vicki to live with the family for reasons she conceals so deeply that we never find out what they are; she almost loses the house, the business, and everything else as she gives in to the demands Jason McGuire makes in return for his silence. For his part, Roger is terrified that Burke will reveal the secret they share, and goes to extreme lengths to keep that secret hidden; he openly hates his son, but can tell no one why; his estranged wife is a profoundly mysterious figure, whose own secret is so powerful as to imply that the consensus view of reality prevailing in the community where the show is set is an elaborate lie. David sees ghosts; eventually the audience also sees them, and we know that some of the adult characters can see them, too. Yet all of the adult characters hotly deny that the ghosts exist until Vicki breaks the embargo after she sees the ghost of Bill Malloy in episode 126. Not until Carolyn tells David about her childhood friend Randy in episode 344 will another adult even allow David to suspect that she thinks ghosts might be real.

Here’s a concise statement about denial as a theme in the show, from a comment I made on one of Danny’s posts about the “Re-Haunting of Collinwood” segment:

Of course it doesn’t make much difference that Gerard possesses Liz. Liz’ whole thing, from episode 1 on, is that she refuses to acknowledge painful realities. That’s what Gerard wants her to do, so all she needs is a little nudge to go back to her usual state. Even though she isn’t on the show much, I think of Liz as the main character in the sense she embodies denial, and the show is very largely an exploration of what can happen when people are deep enough in denial.

And here’s a somewhat more developed remark, this time from a post about the first “Haunting of Collinwood”:

Roger’s angry dismissal of Barnabas and Julia’s concerns this time, combined with Liz’s triumphant reaction to the sight of Mr Jughans at the end of last Monday’s episode, actually do make sense both of Barnabas and Julia’s refusal to tell her what they’re up to and of Liz’s own acquiescence in their absurd behavior. The Collinses may reside in the state of Maine, but the state in which they hold their true citizenship and to which they give their sole allegiance is the state of denial. If Barnabas and Julia tell Liz what’s going on, she will have to build some structure of lies to conceal it from herself and from everyone else, regardless of the cost. If they simply act like lunatics and impose on her with nonsensical demands, however, she can set about convincing herself that it is somehow all right to have Barnabas and Julia around her house.

Here’s a response to another post about the original haunting of Collinwood, this time dissenting from the view of several others in the thread that the writers had simply lost track of which characters knew what and ended up presenting Liz and Roger as memory-free, “goldfish” characters:

I don’t think Roger and Liz are goldfish in the way that so many characters were in earlier episodes. They’re people in deep denial about the nature of the world in which they find themselves. That’s what makes their scenes powerful in the two or three weeks leading up to this installment. They refuse to believe in ghosts, and so they think they are protecting the children from Maggie, Mrs Johnson, Julia, and Barnabas when those characters talk about what’s going on. In fact, they are enabling Quentin’s abuse of the children. When Liz and Roger break down and face facts, they relieve us from involvement in that terrible situation. They also stun us, especially if we’ve been watching from Episode 1, because we’ve seen the immense price each of them has paid to avoid dealing with unhappy realities.

Both the original haunting of Collinwood by the ghost of Quentin and its re-haunting by the ghost of mini-Quentin Gerard mainly take the form of child abuse. The Collinses respond to that child abuse with a solid wall of denial:

Of course, it is abuse to coerce children into harming their loved ones, so it isn’t just allegorical. It’s realistic to show this form of child abuse working in the same ways as do other forms.

The Collinses are such a wretched bunch that the children of the family must have been the objects of a great deal of abuse over the centuries, yet the show wimps out of exploring that topic at the climax of the Phoenix story, when Roger and Carolyn stop openly proclaiming their hatred for David. For the next 500 or so episodes, the only abuse inflicted on the few Collins children we see is the occasional attempt to murder one of them. In this fictional universe, being the target of a murder plot is a so routine an experience for so wide a variety of people that it seem odd to describe it specifically as “child abuse.”

We don’t really have to think about Collins children being abused until the Haunting of Collinwood story. Then we go to 1897, when the show finally takes child abuse seriously and connects it to the Collinses’ addiction to secrecy and their desperate unhappiness.

In a thread about the 1897 storyline, I go into some depth connecting the show’s theme of denial with its depiction of dark supernatural forces. I compare those depictions with understandings of the supernatural found in some familiar traditions and end with fanfic:

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

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

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

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

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

Made as it was to be shown on the ABC television network from 1966-1971, it is unsurprising that Dark Shadows is, off and on, vaguely Christian in its worldview. At one point they even imply that the Collinses are affiliated with a specific Christian denomination, The Episcopal Church. Of course, the view of the world they present is not exactly orthodox, but the idea of an individual human personality as something that can gradually become less distinct from various spiritual forces is a familiar one, not only to Christians, but to others who are invested in the idea of a supernatural realm.

My usual themes: Gay subtext

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. Several times, I picked up on one of Danny’s favorite topics, gay subtext in Dark Shadows. Usually I claimed that there was even more of this in the show than he identified.

Danny writes intricate, deeply considered analyses of episodes 210 through 1245 of Dark Shadows. He does not cover episodes 1-209, and frequently claims that there are many episodes among them he has never seen. He does refer several times to a plot point that stretched across many episodes in those 42 weeks, the story of Roger Collins and his obsessive interest in where Burke Devlin’s pen is. Burke has sworn to expose the nature of his former relationship with Roger, exposure which Roger fears will lead to his disgrace and imprisonment.

Driven by that fear, Roger alternately takes and loses Burke’s pen. He keeps returning to where the pen is, and his obsessive attention to the pen, moving it from one hiding place to another, holding it in his hands, staring at it, shifting it between his coat pocket and his pants pocket, dropping it out of his clothes to a place where people can see it, putting it in darkened corners of his house, burying it in the soil of the grounds of his home, digging it up again to put it in yet another place, leads directly to his arrest. Danny does not appear to find any gay subtext in this, even in the post in which he gives synopses of 21 episodes where Burke’s pen is the main theme. Instead, Burke’s pen is, for him, a symbol of the dangerous boring-ness of the first 42 weeks of the show. For an audience in 1966, watching what was at that point a rather ambitiously literate show and living in a country where Freudianism was enormously influential, I suspect a man obsessed with where another man’s pen is would have seemed likely to be dealing with psychological issues concerning male genitalia, even if he weren’t played by Louis Edmonds.

Though there may not be any posts about the first 209 episodes, the comment threads range over the whole series and over topics far beyond it. So, the Burke/ Roger relationship came up in a thread responding to Danny’s post on episode 1008. In response to that discussion, I wrote the following:

There is a dispute among the characters as to whether Burke or Roger was driving when the car hit Hanson. This hardly matters. It was Burke’s car, and even if he gave the keys to Roger, he would have done so knowing that Roger was as drunk and as unfit to drive as he was. A fact like that wouldn’t necessarily have kept Burke out of jail even if it were known at the time, and ten years later, after witnesses’ memories had faded, physical evidence had been lost, and statutes of limitations had expired, the whole basis of the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline is sheer nonsense.

But let’s look at another question about the identities of the people in that car. The public story is that the three people in it were a pair of lovers and their friend, and that after the collision the lovers broke up and one of them ended up married to the friend. Maybe that’s true- but maybe the lovers were Roger and Burke, and Laura was the friend who was along for the ride. That’s the secret Roger is so desperate to cover up when Burke comes back to town.

It also explains why Burke “investigates” the matter personally, rather than handing it over to the high-priced private investigating firms the show goes out of its way to tell us he is in the habit of retaining. He isn’t trying to uncover established facts about the past- he’s trying to fabricate a new past, in which will stand a different sort of relationship than the one he and Roger actually shared. Perhaps, as a deeply closeted 1960s guy, Devlin has it in mind to remake the past so that he and Roger did not have a sexual relationship at all; by rewriting his history with Roger, he may hope to free himself of his same-sex desires and the threat they pose to his macho identity. Perhaps, at another level of his mind, he wants to free himself, not of his desires, but of that macho identity, and of the social norms and personal inhibitions that keep him from living openly as a gay man. In that way, Burke is the first of Dark Shadows’ would-be time travelers, embarking on a quest to erase a past he cannot tolerate and to replace it with one that will enable him to have a sustainable set of intimate relationships.

This would also explain Burke’s attitude towards other major characters. Carolyn and Laura are nothing to him but weapons to use against Roger and instruments to use in inscribing a new past. His relationship with Vicki doesn’t really get started until there’s no reason for either of them to be on the show anymore; it’s boring for that reason, but if we think of Burke using Vicki as a beard we can find an interest in its very lifelessness.

Moreover, we can connect Burke’s closeted homosexuality to his weirdly feckless efforts against Barnabas. He never figures out what Barnabas is, but he immediately sees what Barnabas is not- that is, he is not trying to be a perfect example of Heterosexual Male, 1960s edition. He responds to Barnabas with undisguised loathing, but not with any real jealousy about his attentions to Vicki. It’s Barnabas’ freedom from convention that he envies. Once we postulate a B/R sexual relationship before the crash that killed Hanson, we can draw a direct line from Burke’s return to town in episode 1 to the night he spent hiding behind a tree near the Old House waiting to see Barnabas come and go in episode 304.

I suppose there might be a reason they chose the name “Burke Devlin” for the character- not only was the actor who played “Burke Devlin” in the film “The Tarnished Angels” Rock Hudson, but that Burke Devlin is involved in a love triangle in which his strongest feelings seem to be for the husband of the woman with whom he is ostensibly involved. That Devlin is at first fascinated by the husband, has a falling-out with him, then turns his attentions to the wife.

Strong as the gay subtext in the whole development of Burke Devlin’s character is, there are other times when it is even closer to the surface. I wrote this about the beginning of the “Leviathans” storyline:

So far, this has been the gayest storyline the show has taken on yet.

In 899, the sailor offers to buy Paul a drink, and Paul shouts “I buy my own drinks!” This isn’t subtext- any man getting that reaction in a bar will know that the other fellow has interpreted his offer as including more than the drink. Paul apologizes and becomes friendly, indicating that he is willing to abandon that interpretation and set aside the hostility that accompanied it.

In this episode, we’re back in the same bar. Barnabas beckons Paul to his table with his index finger. I invite any man who doesn’t think we are intended to read this as a reference to a sexual come-on to try that move on a homophobic tough guy in a bar.

Paul’s face shows his inner struggle as he tries to resist Barnabas’ advances, but he can’t. Barnabas coaxes him into reminiscing about yet another night in the same bar, when a casual encounter with yet another guy led to something that seemed at the time like a little harmless tomfoolery, but that has now grown into a threat to his relationship with his family, his standing in the community, his physical well-being, and everything else.

Indeed, there are moments in the Leviathans story when the gay men in the cast seem to be having a bit of fun with the barely-coded gay themes:

Every time Barnabas addresses Philip as “Philip,” I see a little twinkle in Jonathan Frid’s eyes. By 1969, female impersonators had been imitating Bette Davis’ commands to Leslie Howard in OF HUMAN BONDAGE, where his character’s name is “Philip,” for thirty years. I knew gay men who were still making each other laugh as late as the 1980s by quoting lines beginning “Philip!” If Bernau hadn’t stayed so perfectly in character, I doubt Frid would have been able to keep from a giggling fit that would have brought the house down.

Christopher Bernau’s decision to play an antique dealer using a voice and mannerisms derived from a Jack Benny imitation led many of Danny’s commenters to bring up Bernau’s own sexuality and wonder whether he was simply incapable of staying in the closet. As it sometimes does in discussions of obviously gay actors playing men partnered with women on American TV in this period, The Paul Lynde Show (1972-1973) came up. I had altogether too much to say about this:

The reference to Paul Lynde in the original post reminds me of THE PAUL LYNDE SHOW, a sitcom which aired on ABC in the 1972-1973 season. It’s a fascinating artifact. Lynde’s character has a wife and two daughters. The opening sequence sets the tone- it flashes through several readily identifiable scenario (falling off a bicycle, etc) which end with Lynde falling into one or another kind of trap. Lynde plays each of those little vignettes with the same series of expressions on his face, the first a grim look of deep-seated misery, the last an explosion of panic. Each episode focuses on Lynde’s character stumbling into some kind of excruciatingly awkward situation, suffering through a rapidly escalating series of embarrassments, and finally escaping from it with his dignity annihilated but his wife and daughters feeling sorry for him.

It’s routine for people to cite that show as an example of how clueless the entertainment industry and the public who consumed its products were about gay people in the old days, but it is so plausible a version of what it might have been like for Paul Lynde to have married a woman that can’t imagine it wasn’t intentional on some level. You can read it as an exploration of a gay man and a woman who’ve ended up married to each other for whatever reason, and who have resolved to do what they can to make a marriage work. After all, they like each other, they want their daughters to know where home is, and they have a position to maintain within the community. They show the result as something that’s pretty nearly tolerable for all concerned, but at no point does it look like something great. Lynde’s daily frustrations, confusions, and humiliations are the basis of the comedy, but they could just as easily have been explored in a drama that makes their source explicit. It certainly gives academics interested in Queer Theory a lot to write about.

If the public wasn’t in fact as oblivious to gayness as is sometimes suggested, it would have been even more daring- or more clueless- to cast Christopher Bernau as a married man than you suggest. Especially so considering that he’s supposed to be an antique dealer, an occupation often stereotyped as a province of gay men. His performance in this episode is not as obviously gay as was his performance in episode 890- even if you were in an all-male porn video, it would be a challenge to be as obviously gay as Bernau is in episode 890- but it’s pretty darned flamboyant.

Maybe they had seen so many other gay actors play heterosexual characters convincingly enough that it didn’t occur to them that he would have a problem. Joel Crothers has been mentioned several times, but I would also bring up Louis Edmonds. As Edward Collins, he is perfectly credible in his scenes with Kathryn Leigh Scott’s Kitty Soames. And as Roger in 1966, he was credible both as a slimy guy coming on to Vicki and as the estranged husband of Laura.

The reference at the beginning of the last paragraph above to the late Mr Bernau having “a problem” is rather silly, and I regret it. It hadn’t struck me yet that he was doing a Jack Benny imitation, or that he would have expected a Jack Benny imitation to read in something like the way Jack Benny’s own performances did in his heyday. That the Jack Benny type shifted from an image of a rich, ineffectual man to an image of a gay man, and that Bernau was not thinking in terms of that shift at the end of the 1960s, is itself an interesting topic, far more so than my crude underestimate of Bernau’s acting ability (ability with which I was quite familiar!)

The Leviathans storyline was followed by the 1970 Parallel Time storyline, to which I usually refer as “Meet Another Angelique.” The A-story throughout that segment is an adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. I engaged in a bit of imaginary recasting concerning that story:

Daphne du Maurier was bisexual, and a lot of people have written a lot of criticism of REBECCA based on the idea that what drove de Winter to kill his wife was that she was sleeping with women as well as with other men.

I’m skeptical about that interpretation. Maybe du Maurier had planned to put that in the book, but once the story turned out to be about the second Mrs de Winter’s struggle with feelings of inadequacy, the events that actually took place between Rebecca and Maxim during their marriage are relegated to a secondary importance. As for Mrs Danvers, the most important thing about her in the novel is her ambiguity. The second Mrs de Winter is terrified of her, but she would be terrified of anyone. Since she is the narrator, we have no way of knowing what Mrs Danvers is actually thinking or doing.

Of course, Hitchcock and Judith Anderson made Mrs Danvers’ erotic attachment to Rebecca the central theme of the movie. The second Mrs de Winter finds that Maxim has become unavailable to her as soon as they arrived at Manderley. The only powerful emotion she encounters anywhere in her new environment is Mrs Danvers’ passionate attachment to Rebecca. That passion is just one more thing she can’t understand.

Grayson Hall is good as Hoffman, but I wish Clarice Blackburn had played the housekeeper. First, because she joined the cast thinking that Mrs Johnson would be based on Mrs Danvers, so that she had spent a few years preparing for the role. Second, she was in real life partnered with a woman, so it would have been good to see an actual lesbian play a homoerotic-inflected role.

My usual themes: Alexandra Moltke Isles, David Henesy, and other underrated actors

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. A number of times I argued that Danny and other contributors to the discussion threads were unduly harsh in their assessments of various actors on Dark Shadows, especially Alexandra Moltke Isles (who played Victoria Winters) and David Henesy (who played David Collins and various other members of the Collins families.)

I argue that Mrs Isles and Mr Henesy were the best thing about the first 42 weeks of the show:

I always liked Alexandra Moltke Isles; her scenes with David are not only the only things that work in the first two hundred episodes, they are also the purest example in the whole series of performers overcoming weak writing. Even when the scene begins with David accurately describing something that we, and Vicki, saw happen a few moments before and Vicki replying “That’s! Not! True!,” the two of them still manage to display deep enough emotions to carry us through. Her relatively quiet style doesn’t give her much scope as the show goes on and the “Go back to your grave!” school of acting becomes mandatory, but she always makes the most of whatever chances she has.

Nor are her performances in the first 42 weeks of the show all I find to praise in Mrs Isles’ work. I say that she made the most of the few opportunities the scripts gave her in the period of the show I call “Monster Mash” (episodes 466-626):

I’m not at all sure you’re being fair to Alexandra Moltke. She turns in some nice little performances in her scenes in this part of the series. She’s arrestingly fierce in her confrontations with Cassandra-lique, and in the confusion of her references to what she kind of remembers from 1795 she finds a kind of music. Each time she brings up her half-memory that the original Barnabas never went to England, but died in 1795, it’s a theme that resonates a little differently with everything else around it. Yes, Vicki was a dead-end character after the end of the Phoenix storyline, but I do wish the Countess had done a bit more screen acting.

Furthermore, I wish Vicki and Adam had a number of scenes together. The only thing that worked in the first 209 episodes was the relationship between Vicki and David, a theme crowned by the Phoenix storyline. Alexandra Moltke Isles and David Henesy made it work because they are both actors who excel at precisely crafted, quietly realized little scenes, and it was in scenes of that sort that the story of David learning to trust Vicki moved forward. When the vampire comes in and the overwrought style of acting (“Go back to your grave!”) takes over, the show doesn’t have room for many scenes like that. So often Isles and Henesy seem like chamber violinists trying to accompany a heavy metal band. Robert Rodan is of the same type.

As I say above, I believe Isles found a way to have an impact on a heavy metal concert with her chamber violin, and the others did as well. But it would have been satisfying in a different way if the chamber musicians had been paired with each other on a regular basis. Scenes with Vicki helping Adam could have been as compelling as the first season scenes of Vicki giving David his lessons were, as could scenes of David interacting with Adam.

I amplified my point about the Phoenix storyline (a.k.a. “Meet Laura,” episodes 126-192) here:

I liked the original Phoenix storyline… it was the payoff of the only thing that worked in the first 210 episodes, which was the development of a friendship between Vicki and David. The scene on the cliff, when David is clutching Vicki while Vicki urges him to go to Laura, is among the most emotionally powerful in the whole series because it shows us how far this development has come.

I wasn’t Mrs Isles’ only defender in the comment threads. Another commenter suggested a doozy of a rewrite of the “Meet Another Angelique” storyline (episodes 969-1060, also known as “1970 Parallel Time) in which Mrs Isles would play the villain and Lara Parker the damsel in distress, reversing their roles from the original “Meet Angelique” storyline (episodes 365-466, set in the year 1795.) Several people, including me, replied to that suggestion, all of us with an enthusiasm that showed our certainty that Mrs Isles could play the part brilliantly.

Like Mrs Isles, Mr Henesy was ill-served by the scripts and the house acting style that prevailed after the vampire was introduced (the “Go back to your grave!” style.) That ill service created a major problems later in the series. The “Haunting of Collinwood” storyline (episodes 639-700, which I usually group as part of the “Meet Amy” segment) turns on complex feelings of anxiety and dread that grip David Collins and Amy Jennings (played by Denise Nickerson.) The scenes between David and Amy work well enough; these two young actors not only convey the intricate malaise of people driven by obsession and fear, but even manage to find unexpected humor in their roles, turning into a grumpy old married couple after a few scenes together. But when Mr Henesy plays opposite an adult actor he often finds himself in an impossible situation. I give an example in this comment on episode 680:

This episode shows what Joel Crothers was talking about when he said he was glad to leave Dark Shadows because they had started spending so much time setting up special effects that the actors could no longer rehearse properly. You see it in the confrontation between David and Maggie, after he finds her waiting for him in his room. Kathryn Leigh Scott doesn’t have many lines, and only one emotion to express, sternness. She does a great job. But David Henesy has lots of complicated lines, and is trying to show us a character who is lying and who feels conflicted about lying. It would take a lot of practice for any actor to figure out a way to get all that across, and he doesn’t seem to have had the chance for it. Compare that scene with the many times he and Alexandra Moltke Isles overcame the drab dialogue they had to work with in their scenes together in the same setting, and it’s hard not to lament the missed opportunity.

Things got even worse for Mr Henesy when he was cast as Tad Collins in the 1840 segment of the show, for reasons I try to explain:

The writing isn’t the whole problem with Tad.

David and Vicki becoming friends is the only story that works in the first 42 weeks of the show, and it works in spite of the fact that the writers give the actors nothing at all to work with. We cut from a drawing room scene where Roger loudly declares to Vicki that “Yes, I’ve always HATED David!” to a scene where David looks up from his desk and tells Vicki “My father hates me,” and she responds “David, THAT’S! NOT! TRUE!” But whatever idiotic lines the script may require them to speak to each other, the body language and tone of voice between David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles gets steadily warmer as the weeks go on, and you really believe that they are learning to care about each other. By the time Laura shows up, it makes perfect sense that Vicki is the referee between David and his mother, and it is inevitable that Vicki will be the one to pull him out of the burning shack.

As Tad, Henesy didn’t have the screen time it took to triumph over the writing like that, and frankly neither Kathleen Cody nor Kate Jackson was the sort of partner he needed to pull it off. Alexandra Isles worked very much from the inside out, feeling her way into the character’s emotions and letting them out through whatever parts of her were on camera, while the two K’s worked outside in, starting with the dialogue and putting the words on display. That may have made them a more natural fit for the Dark Shadows house style of acting (“Go back to your grave!”,) but it left everyone high and dry when the scripts stank.

For all that was against him, Mr Henesy did manage to create some bright spots in the later episodes. For example, his performance as evil sorceror Count Petofi speaking through the body of young Jamison Collins features some terrific moments, as I note in this comment on episode 803:

Much is asked of David Henesy in this episode. There are moments when he has to do a Thayer David impression. Those he carries off splendidly- “mineral water, for the digestion.”

At other moments, Petofi is tricking people into thinking that Jamison is free of his influence. That requires him not only to show the other characters a convincing likeness of Jamison, but also to show the audience the wheels turning in his devious mind. Sometimes that works- when he tricks Edward into letting him kiss him, he does create suspense as we wait to see his evil plan work itself out. Other times it doesn’t. When he tells Beth that “I just want people to like me,” he sounds so much like David Collins circa December 1966 that it just seems like he’s forgotten that he’s supposed to be possessed.

From time to time I spoke up in favor of other much-maligned cast members. In addition to the favorable reference to him above, I several times listed Robert Rodan among those I wished we had seen more on the show, and those references sometimes brought enthusiastic agreement from other commenters, suggesting that the negative remarks others made about him had more to do with the dead-end his character, the Frankenstein’s monster-like Adam, found himself written into than with the late Mr Rodan’s interpretation of the role.

Other actors may have left something to be desired from time to time, but did turn in good performances. I tried to call attention to those positive moments when others were venting about the less successful ones. For example, Lisa Blake Richards’ turn as Sabrina Stuart before and after the 1897 storyline is not widely admired, but I thought she was a substantial asset to the show in the “Meet Another Angelique” period.

Terry Crawford’s turn as Beth Chavez during the 1897 storyline is the object of a great deal of very harsh criticism, most of it justified. How many women could there have been who could not convince an audience that they were attracted to the young David Selby? But she did have one or two good moments then, and when she returned as Edith Collins in the 1840 segment she was very nearly competent.

Kathleen Cody also gets a lot of grief. I grant that Ms Cody was bad in the first episode in which she had lines to deliver (#1071,) but say that she was OK after that, and attribute the hostility to her to a mix of that bad first impression with a general distaste for the last 150 episodes of the show.

An actress who tends to be, not indeed denounced, but simply overlooked, is Elizabeth Eis. That puzzles me; I think she was phenomenal in all three of the parts she played. She had a one-episode spot as a devotee of the sinister Leviathan cult in #951; the character isn’t much, a cliched hillbilly teenager cribbed from Tobacco Road, and her main function is to serve as breakfast for the vampire. But in Elizabeth Eis’ hands, she bursts off the screen.

In “Meet Another Angelique,” she plays Buffie Harrington, a woman so lonely that she owns a television set (the only one we see in the entire series) and submits to life as a slave of the evil half of the Dr Jekyll/ Mr Hyde character. In that role, the late Ms Eis is so magnetic she makes a love scene with Jonathan Frid seem sexy.

In her final role, as jailer Mildred Ward in the 1840 segment, Ms Eis earned a spot in the Dark Shadows Hall of Fame by excelling in one of the show’s characteristic parts:

And another fine moment from Elizabeth Eis. Quentin, who is in jail on suspicion of strangling someone, grabs the constable’s wife through the bars of his cell and starts strangling her. The part of “person being strangled” isn’t an easy one to play, as Dark Shadows shows us two or three times a week, and she does it as well as any of them. You can see her cycle through about a half dozen emotions while she’s struggling for breath.

A few episodes later, Ms Eis reprised the role of Person-Being-Strangled, and she outdid even her previous performance:

Compare her scene getting strangled by Gerard in this episode with her scene getting strangled by Quentin last week… In the scene with Quentin, she cycles through a half dozen emotions while being choked; in this one, she digs down deep and shows a very specific form of terrified disbelief.

My usual themes: Continuity

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. A number of times I argued that the show was not so discontinuous as people were making it out to be. To be sure, the creative process is very close to the surface, so that viewers have to do a lot of re-writing in their heads to make sense of what they’re watching. Sometimes the writers just lost track of the story and contradicted themselves from one episode to the next, and other times they changed their minds abruptly. But there were other times when alleged contradictions can be reconciled without having to invent anything drastic.

For example, Danny and many of his regular commenters from time to time mock the depiction of Dr Julia Hoffman as sometimes a blood specialist, sometimes a psychiatrist. I think that’s a pretty easy one to resolve. In this comment, I added some fanfic of my own to sell the idea that she started as a hematologist and retained an interest in that field after switching to psychiatry:

The story I made up for myself is that Julia started out as a blood specialist but switched to psychiatry. She was interested in rare diseases, the rarer the better. She found that in hematology, there’s so much money to be made from developing treatments for the most widespread disorders that a researcher with an emphasis in the exotic is constantly fighting an uphill battle for funding and recognition.* Even those colleagues who had an abstract appreciation of the importance of studying rare disorders had to work within a system where all the institutions push them towards the biggest projects possible.

Psychiatry, on the other hand, always had room for the unusual.** In fact, Julia discovered that high-strung rich people would pay a great deal of money to be told that whatever happens to be bothering them at the moment is not the same kind of problem that one of their servants might have, but is a mental aberration hitherto unattested in the annals of psychiatry.*** So she switched to that field and quickly made enough money to open her own, hugely profitable, mental hospital. But she never stopped working in rare blood diseases, and the experiments she was able to finance by flattering the vanity of her wealthier patients earned her such a reputation in a male-dominated field that even her old acquaintance Dave Woodard would commit sexist slips of the tongue and say of “Hoffman” that “he” is “the top man in the field” of rare blood diseases.

Lucrative as Windcliff was, Julia’s true love was never money, or even science per se, but the exotic. When she found herself as the best friend/ frequent accomplice/ bossy big sister of an honest-to-wickedness vampire, surrounded by ghosts and witches and werewolves and Frankensteins and time travelers and interdimensional anomalies and who knows what else, there was never any question of her going back to the office.

*I have no reason to believe this was true in the real world in the middle decades of the twentieth century, or that it is true today. It’s simply part of the fictional world in which I see Julia.
**(Same note)
***(Same note)

In this comment, I devised a much more modest bit of fanfic to answer a simpler question. Quentin has a girlfriend named Tessie, and at some point in the night he had, in his werewolf form, attacked her in the woods. Why was she in the woods? Danny and his commenters had proposed various awkward scenarios to answer this question, but I suggest she just followed Quentin after she saw him in town looking for booze.

In the “1995” segment, Mrs Johnson and Carolyn talk about how Mrs Johnson brushed Carolyn’s hair for her when she was a little girl. Some say this was a continuity error, because Mrs Johnson didn’t come to work at Collinwood until episode 81. Before that, she’d been housekeeper to Collins family retainer Bill Malloy. However, I say that she still could have brushed little Carolyn’s hair while working for Malloy:

I have a theory that could explain Mrs Johnson brushing Carolyn’s hair when she was little.

In the early episodes, Carolyn talks about having gone to school in town. How did she get there?

She can’t have walked; it was miles away, much of it along a winding road with several blind curves. Her mother never left the grounds during those years, she couldn’t have driven her. Roger was living in Augusta with Laura. The only servant was Matthew. Matthew and Carolyn don’t seem at all close; it doesn’t seem likely that he drove her to school every morning. If a school bus came up the hill to Collinwood day after day, the kids who rode it couldn’t have maintained the attitude Carolyn describes, whispering behind her back about her living with the witch in the haunted house. Sooner or later they’d have started talking to her face to face about it.

Carolyn also talks about Bill Malloy being more like a father to her than any other man, and the two of them do have a cozy relationship. Carolyn is also very quick to fall in with Mrs Johnson when Burke pitches the idea of her joining the household staff at Collinwood. So I think we have to conclude that Bill Malloy and his housekeeper were in charge of getting Carolyn to school in the mornings. Malloy was on the fishing boats, so that would require an early start to the day. There were probably many days when little Carolyn was still in her pajamas when she got to the Malloy house. On those days, Mrs Johnson brushed her hair while the water came to a boil for breakfast.

Several times I explained my theory about how the “Meet Gerard” segment (episodes 1061-1198, including “1995,” “The Re-Haunting of Collinwood,” and “1840”) fits together. This iteration also suggests ways to resolve a couple of puzzles about Angelique:

For me, a lot can be explained by the smile of satisfaction Gerard gives when he sees Julia and Barnabas take the staircase from 1995 to 1970. The dark power he represents called them to 1995 from Parallel 1970, and is now sending them back in time, first to 1970, then to 1840 to make it possible for the future they see in 1995 to exist.

This is analogous to what the Leviathans did at the end of 1897. First Quentin’s ghost, then Barnabas and Julia’s I Ching trips, had created a rift in the order of things that made it possible for the Leviathans to erupt from the underworld into the human world, and to send Barnabas to 1969 as their agent. So too have the journeys Barnabas and Julia took into Parallel Time torn open the fabric of time and space, and made it possible for Judah Zachery to bring a Frankenstein maker back to his time.

Attributing to Zachery the same power to exploit disruptions in time to shuttle people between past and future and thereby to rewrite his own history that the Leviathans had shown, we also have a way to resolve the Angelique/ Miranda paradox. Perhaps Angelique really was relatively new to witchcraft in 1795. Perhaps also, in her early naive attempts, she stumbled into the same kind of trouble Barnabas stumbled into with his time-travel. That’s what Zachery had in mind when he shouted at her during his trial that she ought to tell the truth, that she had come to him of her own accord- it was only because she had already worked in the black arts that he could call her to him, from the days after she first left Collinwood in 1796 to a nearby town 104 years before. And perhaps, with the first beheading of Zachery, his spell broke returning her to a time shortly after the “Burn Witch Burn!” moment in the tower room.

Come to think of it, that might also put sense into Angelique’s remark that she is “consigned to this century forever.” There were a few days after Zachery calls her to 1692 and before she returns from 1692, and until Barnabas and Ben torched her, she was sentenced to relive those few days over and over again, Bill Murray-style.

That’s a comment on Danny’s post for episode 1140. Just four episodes later, the show will kick away the explanation I offer for Angelique‘s various incarnations in the main continuity, but leave open the rest of it.

The logic that counts the most in the show isn’t so much the kind of sequential reasoning that I’ve done in these posts as it is the associational logic of a dream. An image or situation or word reminds a dreamer of something, and suddenly the dreamer is in the middle of that something. You dream about polishing your Ford with Turtle Wax, and the next thing you know Polish turtles are whacking away at a shallow spot in a river. You tell a story about rich, selfish people who obsessively keep secrets and set a dreary tone for their town, and the next thing you know your main character is a vampire. I left an unreasonably long comment where I natter on about the concept of dream logic.

Dividing Dark Shadows into Periods

In the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog Dark Shadows Every Day. Unlike most daytime serials, Dark Shadows tended to restart itself from time to time, dividing the show into major periods. I’ve tagged most of these posts with the periods of the show to which they refer. 

There are several ways of periodizing the show. The scheme I use is this: 

Episodes 1-45 “Meet Vicki” 

Episodes 46-126 “Meet Matthew”

Episodes 127-192 “Meet Laura”

Episodes 193-209 “Meet Jason”

Episodes 210-260 “Meet Barnabas”

Episodes 261-365 “Meet Julia”

Episodes 366-466 “Meet Angelique”

Episodes 467-626 “Monster Mash”

Episodes 627-700 “Meet Amy” (subdivided into “Chris the Werewolf,” 627-638, and “The Haunting of Collinwood,” 639-700)

Episodes 701-885 “1897″ (subdivided into “Meet Quentin,” 701-748, and “Meet Petofi,” 749-885)

Episodes 886-969 “Leviathans”

Episodes 970-1060, “Meet Another Angelique” 

Episodes 1061-1198, “Meet Gerard” (subdivided into “1995,″ 1061-1070, “The Re-Haunting of Collinwood,” 1071-1109, and “1840,″ 1110-1198)

Episodes 1199-1245, “Dying Days”