david henesy – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1100: What it’s like to be alive

The ghosts of four people who died in 1841 have been haunting the great house of Collinwood. They represent teenagers Carrie Stokes and Tad Collins; Carrie and Tad’s governess, Daphne Harridge; and a sometime pirate captain known as Gerard Stiles. Three of these four have now assumed corporeal form. Tad and Hallie have taken possession of their lookalikes, David Collins and Hallie Stokes. They then performed a ceremony that caused Daphne to come back to life in a body of her own. We open with these three repeating the ceremony in order to conjure Gerard back into existence as a living being.

When Carrie and Tad performed the ceremony the first time, they did not know whether they would raise Daphne or Gerard. That episode ended with a knock at the door, leaving us to wonder along with them who would come. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said it would be funny if it were someone else. She suggested the writers might take a page from Let’s Make a Deal and have Tad and Carrie find a donkey behind Door Number Three.

Today, the ceremony again ends with a rapping on the door. But it is not Gerard. It isn’t a donkey, either. It is Willie Loomis, servant to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. John Karlen always finds a way to bring out humor in his characters’ predicaments, and the rough-hewn Willie does deflate the grandiosity of Carrie, Tad, and Daphne’s meddling in God’s realm.

Scrambling to cover up the signs of the ceremony before he has to open the door to Willie, Tad calls out “We were sleeping! (pause) I was sleeping!” David Henesy plays this absolutely straight, so that we can see it dawning on Tad that he and Carrie aren’t supposed to be sleeping together. Karlen wasn’t the only actor who knew how to find the laughs hidden in his lines.

Daphne hides. Tad opens the door. Willie sees the pentagram on the floor with the candles at its points and says he recognizes it as a device of black magic. He forestalls the teens’ attempt to pretend to be Hallie and David by calling Tad by name. Tad then turns to Carrie and makes fun of Willie’s twentieth century vocabulary in an attempt to intimidate him by a display of social superiority. This collapses immediately, and Willie says that Tad and Carrie have to come with him because he is bigger than they are.

Willie detains Carrie and Tad in the drawing room, waiting for Barnabas to come back. He has to leave them when he hears Maggie Evans, governess to the late David and Hallie, coming downstairs. Maggie is the victim of a vampire, and Willie is part of the crew that is keeping her from going off to get her blood sucked.

Willie rushes to the foyer and asks Maggie why housekeeper Mrs Johnson isn’t keeping her in her room. Maggie does not respond. The true answer would be that Clarice Blackburn has a writing job on another soap now and isn’t available to play the part, so they leave Mrs Johnson’s absence unexplained.

While Willie gets Maggie back to her room, Tad and Carrie listen to the dogs howling outside. Carrie says she has never heard howling like that before, and Tad contradicts her. He says that if she searches her memory, she will find that they heard just that sound in their own time. He gives a somber look, as if he knows what the howling means. The show has been making it clear that we will be going back in time to 1840 sooner or later. These lines of Tad’s tell us that we will find a vampire in operation when we get there.

In Maggie’s bedroom, Willie explains that Hallie and David have been possessed by Carrie and Tad. Maggie has seen enough in her time at Collinwood that she finds this instantly credible. She blames herself, saying that if she were not ill she would have been able to prevent the possession. Willie asks what she could have done, and she cannot think of anything. He presses her to tell him who the vampire is. She claims he cannot understand what she is going through. He cannot tell her that he himself was once the victim of a vampire, since that vampire was Barnabas and the show will implode if Maggie is ever told about that. So they are left at a stalemate.

Meanwhile, Daphne takes shelter in a deserted mansion once known as Rose Cottage. Gerard confronts her there. He is cranky about still being dead. She tells him it’s no one’s fault that the ceremony didn’t work. They will reenact it tonight, when the stars are back in the right alignment. She also tells him that they don’t need Tad and Carrie to accomplish their goal. This line is unfortunate- to the extent that the story has generated suspense, it has involved us wondering how Carrie and Tad are involved in whatever it is Gerard wants to do. When we hear they aren’t involved at all, it lets the air out of an already badly under-inflated set of tires.

Gerard vanishes from Daphne’s presence and materializes in a mysterious chamber known as The Playroom. The Playroom intermittently appears in a little-used part of the great house, behind a door that usually opens on a linen closet. There is a dollhouse in The Playroom that is a scale model of Rose Cottage and that is, in some supernatural sense, identical to it. Gerard sets fire to the room in the dollhouse that corresponds to the room in Rose Cottage where Daphne is. He uses his finger to hold closed the door corresponding to the one from which she could escape a fire in the room.

Gerard holds the door shut. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Daphne finds that the room she is in is engulfed in flames and she cannot open the door. Apparently Gerard has decided that if Daphne is going to tell him they don’t need Tad and Carrie, he doesn’t need Daphne, either. Daphne, being as she is played by Kate Jackson, is impossible not to care about, so this cliffhanger does make us want to come back Monday and see her escape. But since it implies that none of the relationships among the ghosts means anything, and since we’ve already seen that none of the living characters can mount an effective resistance to the ghosts, it also brings us to the conclusion that the whole Re-Haunting of Collinwood story is at a dead end.

Episode 1096: Goodbye, David. Goodbye, Hallie.

Dark Shadows began in June 1966, when well-meaning governess Victoria Winters was on her way to the great house of Collinwood to take charge of the education of strange and troubled boy David Collins. David’s aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, had written to Vicki to offer her the job; his father, Liz’ brother Roger Collins, was opposed to Vicki’s hiring. Roger’s opposition rose from mild disapproval to paranoid fervor when he learned that his arch-nemesis, Burke Devlin, rode into the village of Collinsport on the same train as Vicki.

In the months that followed, the only story that consistently worked was Vicki’s attempt to build a friendship with David in spite of his vicious and at times murderous hostility towards her. Later, David met Burke, and the two of them quickly bonded over their shared hatred of Roger. For his part, Roger was haunted by the thought that Burke was David’s biological father, a thought which Liz forbade him to express.

For a long time, David continued to be the pivot on which the story turned. Crazed handyman Matthew Morgan abducted Vicki and tried to kill her; that crisis reached its emotional peak when David found Vicki bound and gagged in Matthew’s hiding place and refused to rescue her. David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, came back to claim him, which would have meant his death. That arc ended when David ran from the fishing shack Laura had set ablaze and flung himself into Vicki’s arms. With that, he chose Vicki and life over Laura and death, appointing Vicki as his new mother. That marked the conclusion, not only of the David and Vicki story, but of Dark Shadows 1.0.

As the show reinvented itself, David remained the key to the action. The two long costume drama inserts that established Dark Shadows as, first and foremost, a show about time travel, the trip to the 1790s that lasted from November 1967 to March 1968 and the trip to 1897 that ran from March to November 1969, were both prompted by attempts to protect David from a looming supernatural menace. Though he was not an active participant in either of those stories, it was his peril that triggered them, and attempts to protect him and his analogues in previous generations of the Collins family that set the boundaries of the possible action.

As of this episode, all of the characters mentioned above are off the show. Vicki made her final appearance in #665*; Matthew made his in #123; Laura in #191**; Burke in #344; Roger, in #979***. Liz made her last substantive appearance on Friday; she will have one brief scene in #1198, simply to mark the end of a storyline. David leaves the show today.

In the early parts of today’s episode, David and his fellow teenager, houseguest Hallie Stokes, are being led through the woods by the unspeaking ghosts of two people who died in 1841. David’s psychopomp is the late Gerard Stiles, who was apparently a pirate when he was alive but has become a landlubber in death. Hallie’s is the late Daphne Harridge, who was once the governess at the great house. Daphne’s charges were Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes. Hallie and David have spent vast amounts of time moaning about how the ghosts of Carrie and Tad are going to take possession of their bodies and erase them from existence. Much of this moaning has taken place in a mysterious room which they call “The Playroom.” The Playroom intermittently exists in a obscure corner of the great house. When it materializes, it can be found behind a door that at other times opens onto a linen closet. Gerard, Daphne, Tad, and Carrie have free rein in The Playroom.

There is a dollhouse in The Playroom that the ghosts like to play with when David and Hallie aren’t looking. This dollhouse is a scale model of Rose Cottage, a mansion which stood somewhere near Collinwood in 1840. It is in some supernatural sense identical with that mansion. In #1082 and again in #1093, it was made clear to Hallie and David that they are fated to become dolls confined to this dollhouse, and that any living that is left for their bodies to do will be done by Carrie and Tad.

Daphne and Gerard take Hallie and David to a full-sized version of Rose Cottage that stands in the woods. It is unclear whether this mansion is visible all the time, or if it comes and goes as does The Playroom. The latter would seem more likely, since it is such a big place it is hard to imagine it would have escaped the notice of the people who have heard the expression “Rose Cottage” and have recently been trying to figure out which of the big houses in the area was around in 1840 and could have been known by that name in that year.

Gerard gets David to Rose Cottage while Daphne and Hallie are still making their way through the woods. David takes a nap in the corridor outside the upstairs parlor where the dolls are kept. He has another dream like the one he and Hallie both had in #1082, in which they are in the upstairs parlor. Daphne is in his dream. She smiles. Her smile is more unsettling than Gerard’s sneer. David wakes up and finds that Daphne is there, with Hallie.

David says they must resist; Hallie says it is too late. Then there is a commercial break. When we come back, they are in the upstairs parlor. Hallie notices the dolls are gone. David says they are no longer needed. Hallie says they must resist; David says it is too late. David Henesy manages to make David Collins’ part in these two scenes work. In the corridor, David is conflicted, trying to sound brave as he says the words about resisting but looking helpless as his eyes turn to the ghosts. In the parlor, he is simply defeated. His performance sketches a clear line between these two emotional states.

Kathleen Cody is less successful as Hallie. She seems to have come to terms with the reality while in the corridor. In the parlor, she flips back into Hallie’s usual mode, maximum possible tension. It doesn’t help that her dialogue is a bunch of questions about why they can’t resist. In context, those questions are just nonsense, and Hallie’s abrupt switch from quiet resignation to extreme plangency is inexplicable. My wife, Mrs Acilius, asked if they were trying to make us root for the ghosts who promise to shut Hallie up.

This story is the second time Dark Shadows has adapted Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. The first time through, in late 1968 and early 1969, David and his friend Amy Jennings took turns in the role of Child Who Enforces the Will of the Ghosts and Child Who Resists the Will of the Ghosts. That got to be frustrating, but at least they waited until the episode was over to switch roles. Switching them during a commercial break is just a slap in the face of the audience. Miss Cody’s decision to play Hallie at such a high level of agitation so much of the time was a costly mistake, but no performer could really have saved the part.

The ghosts indicate that David and Hallie are to take their seats at the table where the dolls usually sit. When they do so, we jump to a somewhat lower camera angle. This cut does indeed make it look like Hallie and David are small figures inside a small space. Henry Kaplan directed this episode. I usually have a lot of complaints about Kaplan. His preferred visual strategy was to cut from a closeup of one face to a closeup of another face to an extreme closeup that shows at most part of a face. But this shot achieves a subtle effect, and that effect tells the whole story. I can’t suppress a suspicion that Lela Swift stepped in and set the shot up for Kaplan, but even if she did he deserves credit for not fouling it up.

Carrie and Tad come into view. Carrie superimposes herself on Hallie’s body, Tad superimposes himself on David’s, and both ghosts fade out. As they do, we hear Tad say “Goodbye, David,” and Carrie say “Goodbye, Hallie.” We will see Carrie and Tad in the persons of Hallie and David for some time, but will never see either David or Hallie again.

Final farewell. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I remembered this closing image vividly from our previous watch-through of the series. I misremembered the lines, though. I recalled David and Hallie saying goodbye to each other, not the ghosts saying goodbye to the teenagers as they took possession of them. I think it is better the way it is. We are supposed to be horrified at Carrie and Tad’s thoughtless cruelty as they annihilate Hallie and David, and denying them even the opportunity to bid each other farewell serves that purpose. Unsatisfactory as are the rest of the episode and indeed the rest of the David and Hallie story, this closing shot is highly effective.

*Alexandra Moltke Isles last played the character in #627. Two other actresses succeeded Mrs Isles in the role.

**Another iteration of the character appeared in 20 episodes between #729 and #760.

***Another version of the character appeared in 17 episodes between #975 and #1055.

Episode 1091: Whoever did this

David Henesy has been in the cast of Dark Shadows since the first week, yet today is the first time he has been called upon to deliver the opening voiceover narration, after dozens of other cast members have had their turns. He does a great job with it, he should have done it every time.

As the voiceover concludes, we dissolve to an extreme closeup of a fixture that has been on the show even longer than has Mr Henesy, the clock in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. We see that there is a little painting in the body of the clock, above its face. It is a rustic landscape centered on a small church. I believe this is the first time we have been able to see this painting; certainly it is the first time it has received such emphasis. The episode will end with a closeup of a cross that heroine Julia Hoffman is carrying as she goes off to confront a vampire. Opening with a picture of a church and closing with a cross would suggest that there is some kind of Christian content in between, though it escapes me what it might be.

Today’s story is a whodunit. Governess Maggie Evans has been bitten by a vampire. Julia suspects her best friend, Barnabas Collins. Barnabas denies that he is the guilty party. They have three conversations which we might call soulful, if it weren’t tactless to remind Barnabas that he has no soul. When Julia sees Maggie’s indifferent response to Barnabas when he visits her in her sickroom, she is convinced of his innocence. That does raise the question of how Barnabas has been getting his nutrition lately, a question the show does absolutely nothing to answer or forestall.

Teenager Hallie Stokes fears that the ghost of the evil Gerard Stiles is responsible for Maggie’s condition. Her friend David Collins conjures up, not the ghost of Gerard, but that of Hallie’s lookalike Carrie Stokes, who indicates that Gerard had nothing to do with it.

So we know that we now have a B-story to complement the A-story of Gerard’s haunting of Collinwood, and that the villain in that B-story is a vampire who is new in town. Barnabas mentions that astrologer Sebastian Shaw arrived in Collinsport only recently; Julia rules Sebastian out as a potential vampire, since she has seen him during the day.

Sebastian arrived with a woman named Roxanne. Barnabas does not mention Roxanne as a suspect, perhaps because he is deeply infatuated with her and does not want to believe she shares his curse. But returning viewers know that Roxanne appears only at night that she has some hold over Sebastian that makes him miserable, and that just before Maggie showed up with the puncture marks on her neck Roxanne was quarreling with Sebastian about a date he had had with Maggie. Roxanne alluded to mysterious powers that she has and looked self-satisfied when she said she had further plans to use those powers. So I think we have to classify Roxanne as the prime suspect in the latest attack on Maggie.

Episode 1087: How can I go to sleep in a house like this?

For several months starting in late 1968, the great house of Collinwood was haunted by the unspeaking ghost of Quentin Collins. The Haunting of Collinwood posed a grave danger to children David Collins and Amy Jennings. At the end of March 1969, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins tried to communicate with Quentin’s ghost in hopes of saving David’s life. Barnabas came unstuck in time and found himself in 1897, where he met Quentin as a living being. For the next eight months Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in that year. David Selby’s charm made Quentin a breakout hit. In the course of Barnabas’ bungling, history was changed so that Quentin did not die. Instead, he was immunized against aging, so that when the show returned to contemporary dress he showed up alive, well, and apparently a bit under 30.

Now, this storyline is being recycled. In the Re-Haunting of Collinwood, the unspeaking ghost of Gerard Stiles takes the place of the unspeaking ghost of Quentin. Hallie Stokes takes the place of Amy. David is reenacting his original part.

David Henesy does a good job today playing David’s frustration at finding himself in the same situation over and over. He is in his bedroom when Gerard stands in front of him menacingly. He screams. Permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman lets herself into the room. Julia knows about Gerard, and tells David she can feel that “he” has been in the room. David feigns ignorance. Julia has withheld her knowledge of the ghosts from David, so she cannot give him an answer when he asks who she is talking about. She stays on the offensive, asking him to tell her. He won’t, so she asks him why he was screaming. He tells her he had a nightmare. She demands he stop lying and claims that she has always told him the truth. In fact, she has never told him the truth, and her failure to let him in on what she knows about Gerard and the other ghosts is a case of dishonesty that has kept the show on a treadmill for three and a half weeks now, so this is just a bizarre claim.

David becomes angry with Julia. When she tells him that it is important he report anything unusual to her, he explodes:

DAVID: What’s so unusual about a dream? Nothing. Or a kid having one? I can’t do anything around here without one of you jumping on my back, asking me about unusual things. Well, the unusual things around here are you, and Barnabas, and Quentin.

JULIA David, just be calm.

DAVID: No, you calm down! Pretty soon somebody’s going to come in here and say, ‘David, why aren’t you asleep yet?’ How could I go to sleep in a house like this, with all of you people crawling all over the halls?

David is right when he says that he is questioned in just about every episode in which he appears, and right that there have been countless scenes in which someone comes into his bedroom and asks him why he is still up. He’s also right that people at Collinwood keep odd hours. Most episodes are set at night, and involve people running into each other at four in the morning and exchanging stories about how they are out running errands and have to rush off to keep an appointment. And he is certainly right about Julia, Barnabas, and Quentin being unusual. Julia is a mad scientist, Barnabas is a vampire, and Quentin is an ex-ghost, ex-zombie, and ex-werewolf. All three of them have made weird journeys through time and into the world of the dead, and each is guilty of several murders.

Later, David opens the door to his bedroom and finds Julia examining his belongings. He’s had as much of that kind of thing as he plans to take:

DAVID (sharply): What are you doing here?

JULIA (oblivious to David’s irritation): Oh, David, David, this flag, it was never here before.

DAVID (angrier): Well, I don’t think that’s any of your business.

JULIA (still oblivious): I was just curious.

DAVID (making an effort to control his anger): Well, you have no right to be here.

JULIA (finally aware that David is upset): David!

DAVID (really blowing his stack): I’ve got a right to some privacy, don’t I? Do I have to put signs up?

JULIA (sincerely puzzled at his reaction): David, there’s no reason for you to be this angry.

DAVID (firm): Well, you can just get out of here. You don’t have to come back until you’re invited, and I can guarantee you won’t be, because I’m tired of all of your questions and snooping. Tired!

JULIA (seeming to realize she is in the wrong): I’m sorry.

Later, David goes to the drawing room and apologizes to Julia for his harshness. She says that he was right to object to her letting herself into his room when he wasn’t there. She assures him it won’t happen again. David says that he is glad she isn’t angry, because he can’t stand to be on bad terms with anyone. What if something happens and they never have a chance to make up? Julia shows signs of concern when he first says this, but then smiles and says she is sure that she and David will have many opportunities to fight and make up. As in all scenes where Julia talks to a child character in a happy and relaxed tone, we can see that Grayson Hall must have been great with kids. Julia offers David a hug at the end, but he is too deep in his thoughts to embrace her. They exit together.

Looking forward to future fights and makings-up.

The episode ends with Gerard in corporeal form, standing behind Quentin and preparing to strangle him with a cord. Gerard is played by James Storm, who like David Selby is a darkly handsome man. Mr Storm is much shorter than Mr Selby. This has some practical advantages. Mr Selby is well over six feet tall, so that it was often beyond the abilities of the makers of the show to keep the studio lights out of frame when they were shooting him from the perspective of a scene partner. But when we see the two of them together, I can think of Gerard only as mini-Quentin. It rather undercuts the effectiveness of the closing cliffhanger.

Episode 1086: Their ridiculous prophecies

Teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes are intermittently subject to possession by the ghosts of Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes. They fear that the ghosts will soon take them over permanently, erasing their own personalities once and for all. We have seen the future, and know that unless something changes not only will the bodies of Hallie and David become vessels for Carrie and Tad, but those bodies will die and the ghosts will haunt the uninhabitable ruins of the great house of Collinwood for years to come.

Previously, Tad and Carrie had been unaware of David and Hallie. When one of them was possessed, the ghost would not know whom the other meant when addressing them by the name of the living person. But yesterday Carrie and Tad simultaneously took possession of Hallie and David, and they talked to each other about how much they liked them and how puzzled they were that they were afraid of them. They went to the ghost of their governess, Daphne Harridge, and asked her if she knew why David and Hallie were afraid of them. For a moment we might have hoped that communication would take place and the story of the haunting would finally pick up steam, but that hope was dashed when Daphne responded to Tad and Carrie with silence. Daphne had been silent in her interactions with the living characters until Hallie and David heard her laugh in a dream they both had in #1082. It’s depressing that she can’t talk even to her fellow ghosts.

Any hopes we may have had for Hallie or Carrie also suffered yesterday from Kathleen Cody’s poor performance. Miss Cody gets a lot of hate from fandom, much of it unfair. She is good sometimes. But called upon to draw a bright line between the frightened Hallie and the cheerful Carrie, she went way overboard in both parts. The excessively ebullient Carrie is easy to ignore, while the heavily distraught Hallie is tiresome in the extreme. Even the usually reliable David Henesy occasionally got caught up in Miss Cody’s hamminess and overplayed David Collins. He pulled himself back each time, but it is hard to look forward to heaven knows how much more of this story when that keeps happening.

Today we get another David and Hallie/ Tad and Carrie episode, and it is little better than yesterday’s. Miss Cody is even more monotonous than she was yesterday. Mr Henesy does keep from following her into the dead end where she is stuck, and he manages to introduce a touch of comedy. The ghosts lock David in his room with Hallie, and his response is go directly to the window, open it, and climb out. His room appears to be on the third floor of the house and to overlook a cliff, but if that’s the only alternative to spending an hour locked up with Hallie I don’t think anyone can blame him.

David climbs out the window to get the hell away from Hallie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The highlight comes when David sees his distant cousin, Quentin Collins, standing by the brandy decanter. David has overheard Quentin muttering about a mysterious stranger and has questions:

David: Who are you talking to?

Quentin (drunk): The dregs, David…the dregs of this glass. That’s where all the answers are.

David: I thought you said something about a stranger.

Quentin: Oh, well, I’m in immediate danger of becoming a stranger to my glass, but that can be easily remedied. Yes, it can be. [Pours drink.] Ah ha ha…friends again.

Quentin was a malevolent ghost when we first got to know him, late in 1968. We then traveled back in time to 1897, where we met him as a living being. He was an utterly irresponsible rascal, selfish, cruel, cowardly, and shameless, and everyone who saw him fell in love with him at once. His death was prevented, he was immunized against aging, and when the show returned to contemporary dress there he was, none the worse for his 100 years. But they couldn’t find much of a place for him in the story. He may not be making many things happen these days, but in this exchange we find that he is still an alcoholic. As long as he has that going for him, he will always be the Quentin we can’t get enough of.

Episode 1080: It’s going to be uneventful

Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, studying a horoscope that astrologer Sebastian Shaw prepared for her. Liz’ daughter Carolyn asks what the horoscope says will happen today. Liz responds that it predicts the day will pass without incident. She adds that the horoscope has made the same prediction about each of the last several days, and that it has been right so far. The audience can agree with Liz’ assessment of the last several episodes, though we might wonder at what the makers of the show were thinking when they chose to make this explicit.

Carolyn is struck by the fact that Sebastian looks just like her late husband Jabe, whom she and others insisted on calling Jeb. So much so, in fact, that they are played by the same actor. Jabe died some time ago, and Sebastian has already denied that he rose from the grave. But two years ago Carolyn’s friend Vicki met her own late fiancé, an unpleasant man called Peter, after he had come back to life. Vicki found that Peter had lost his memory, refused to believe anything he told her about their past, and wanted to be known as Jeff. After several tedious months Peter/ Jeff admitted his true identity and he and Vicki went away and stopped bothering us. So Carolyn has grounds for hoping that the astrologer is not merely Sebastian, but will turn out to be Seb/ Jeb. We are forcefully reminded of Peter/ Jeff when Carolyn picks up the telephone to call Sebastian. She is standing next to a sculpture of a horse. The camera zooms in on that part of a horse which Peter/ Jeff brought to mind every time we saw him.

When Carolyn makes the call, she says “I’d like to speak with Sebastian Shaw, please.” When Liz commissioned her horoscope, she went to Sebastian’s apartment, which was clearly his only premises. He is a prickly sort, unlikely to let a visitor answer his telephone for him, so this line suggests that someone else has regular access to Sebastian’s place. Nothing we have seen so far has given us a hint who this might be.

Sebastian is alone when Carolyn calls on him. She asks him where he is from. He says that he is from New York City, then asks why she is so inquisitive. Liz told him that he looks remarkably like Jeb, so Carolyn could easily answer that she wonders if he might be related to him. That would put him on the defensive if he withheld the basic facts about himself. But Carolyn simply says that she was idly curious, giving him an opportunity to shut her down immediately. Longtime viewers know that Jeb was originally a formless monster from beyond space and time and therefore had no relatives in the usual sense. But Carolyn doesn’t know that, and even if she did she would have no reason to suspect that Sebastian knew it.

Meanwhile, teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes are falling under the influence of some ghosts who resemble them as strongly as Seb resembles Jeb. Longtime viewers may not believe that this contradicts Sebastian’s prediction that nothing noteworthy would happen, since it is a rehash of a story we saw eighteen months ago, when David and his friend Amy fell under the influence of some other ghosts and, as in that story, they keep going in circles as to how they feel about it and what they should do.

In the course of The Re-Haunting of Collinwood, a mysterious room sometimes materializes in a disused part of the great house. Hallie goes to that room today. She sees David wearing clothes from the 1840s and making vigorous use of a rocking horse. She talks to him, but he does not respond to her at all. She gets steadily more upset. She turns and leaves the room, exclaiming “All right then!” as she does so. In the hallway outside, she then sees David, wearing his usual clothes and smiling at her. She gasps in amazement.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, said that this closing could have been a lot more effective had Kathleen Cody read a single line differently. Hallie’s mounting agitation as the person whom she believes to be David so totally ignores her is fine, but if at the end of it she had just relaxed a little and said “All right then” in a quiet voice, she would have had somewhere to go when Hallie sees David in the hallway. As it is, she is already at maximum tension, so her gasp adds nothing to the scene.

The mysterious room is stocked with toys and known as “The Playroom.” The fans often complain that the toys are meant for kids much younger than Hallie and David. When David Henesy joined the cast of Dark Shadows in 1966, he was nine and could pass for six; by this point he is about to turn fourteen and could pass for sixteen. Miss Cody is at this point about to turn sixteen, and looks about that age. It is not likely that a person their age would take much interest in a rocking horse, or a miniature carousel, or a stuffed animal. But as Mrs Acilius points out, that is as it should be. We are not supposed to like this situation. It is unsettling that teenagers would become fascinated with those things, and that is the point. The ghosts were the ages David and Hallie are now when they died, and evidently they were hung up on the toys in The Playroom; that suggests that they represent some kind of arrested development, that even when they were alive they were stuck in the past. If Hallie and David are going to have a future, they will have to break free of the ghosts and everything they stand for.

Episode 1074: Talking doesn’t help

For the first six months of Dark Shadows, reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard kept the story from moving by refusing to tell anyone what she knew about the major storylines. With the introduction of undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins in #123, the show became a supernatural thriller. The characters driving the new storylines took care to exclude Liz from the action by never letting her find out what was going on.

Now, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have returned to 1970 after a visit to 1995. They have told Liz and others what they saw in that future year, warning that a terrible disaster is impending that will destroy the great house of Collinwood and everyone in it. Julia and Barnabas are not sure just what will happen or when, but they know it will occur before the year is out and that it will center on teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes.

The adults have decided to keep the relevant information from Hallie and David themselves. That’s the whole problem today- a series of uncanny events occur that David and Hallie would recognize as signs of the disaster and about which they would be able at least to sound the alarm had they been given the relevant information. Since they have been kept in the dark, they are helpless and the events are pointless.

Not only are the characters not learning from each other, Liz and David have forgotten a great deal that they used to know. From the first week of the show, David was on intimate terms with the ghosts of Collinwood. But today he mentions to Hallie that when he saw a ghost he was not afraid, and he cannot understand why he wasn’t afraid. Liz’ daughter Carolyn mentions that she found Hallie wearing an antique dress. Liz responds that putting on an antique dress can hardly precipitate the kind of disaster Barnabas is talking about. Yet precisely the kind of disaster Barnabas is talking about already befell Collinwood in March 1969, and the first step towards it came when David and his friend Amy Jennings played dress-up, wearing antique clothes under the influence of the malign ghost who would eventually drive everyone out of the great house.

At moments, the script seems to acknowledge that the whole episode is a waste of time. Liz asks Carolyn if she believes in astrology. Carolyn says she doesn’t believe in anything, so she might as well pay attention to her horoscope. It’s no more meaningless than anything else.

The opening scene, in which David and Hallie spend what seems like an hour hanging around the gazebo and talking about the fact that she doesn’t remember putting on her dress, is particularly bad. I’m reluctant to complain about any of the actors, since the conditions under which they had to work were extremely difficult. I’m especially reluctant to single out performers like Kathleen Cody, who gets a lot of negative comment from fandom. But she is very bad in this scene, just terrible, loud and fake and hard to put up with. Not that I can see what anyone could have done to make the scene interesting, but the situation is so slight it cannot for one moment bear the emotional load Miss Cody piles on it.

There are a few moments of unintentional comedy today revolving around wardrobe. David wears a sweater over a sports shirt and a pair of trousers with the belt fastened somewhere above his navel. David Henesy is in his late 60s now; he still isn’t old enough to wear that outfit. But combined with David’s grouchy attitude, the costume makes him seem like some old guy from New England.

Why don’t nobody know how to make clam chowdah no more? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Chris Pennock shows up as astrologer Sebastian Shaw. Sebastian’s costume was bizarre even by the very generous standards of 1970. John and Christine Scoleri labeled some of its more unusual features in their post about it at Dark Shadows Before I Die:

I mean *really*. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The utter preposterousness of Sebastian’s getup goes some way towards relieving another bad taste in the mouths of longtime viewers. Pennock also played Carolyn’s late husband Jabe, whom everyone insisted on calling Jeb. When Carolyn first sees Sebastian, she is shocked at the resemblance. The show first went all-in on its repertory approach to casting in November 1967, when well-meaning governess Vicki traveled back in time to the 1790s. She found that the characters she met in that epoch were played by actors she knew from the first 73 weeks of the show, and tried everyone’s patience by telling them about their previous parts. That unbelievably stupid habit marred the 1790s segment and utterly destroyed the audience’s interest in Vicki. Carolyn’s recognition that Pennock was Jeb before he was Seb brings that unpleasant memory back, and any distraction from it is welcome.

At one point Liz finds David standing over Hallie while she is in bed in the small hours of the morning. Liz demands to know what he’s doing there, and is particularly indignant that he is “still dressed.” Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud at that. It’s better he should be naked?

Episode 983: Sing to me again

When Dark Shadows premiered in June 1966, strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy) was obsessed with his absent mother and determined to get rid of his new governess, the well-meaning Victoria Winters. In #15, David had tampered with his father Roger’s car. As he stood at the window and watched Roger drive down the narrow, twisting mountain road away from the great house of Collinwood, he said “He’s going to die, mother, he’s going to die!” When Roger survived and it was discovered that someone had removed the bleeder valve from his braking system, David planted the valve in Vicki’s room in an attempt to frame her for the murder attempt. Later, Roger would come to fear that Vicki was about to expose a dark secret of his own, and would encourage David to try to kill her.

David eventually gave up on homicide, and dropped his hostility to Vicki. One of the more benevolent influences on him was his best friend, the ghost of the gracious Josette. In #102, we saw David in the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, carrying on a conversation with the portrait of Josette that hung above the mantel. We could not hear Josette’s side of the conversation, but it certainly sounded like David could. We already knew at that point that Josette was real- we saw her emanate from the portrait, walk out of the house, and dance among the columns outside it in #70, when David first took Vicki to the Old House. In #126, we would see and hear Josette when she led the ghosts of Collinwood in rescuing Vicki from crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. That rescue was not only a good deed for Vicki, but also a favor to David, who had stumbled upon Vicki in the secret room where Matthew had her tied up and, in a panic, left her to her fate.

In #153, we learned that David’s mother, the former Laura Murdoch, was the one who chose his name, one which no previous Collins had borne. Roger had wanted to call David “Charles Andrew,” in honor of some Collins ancestors. In #181, Vicki and her allies learned that two previous women given the name Laura Murdoch at birth had died by fire, one in 1867 and the other in 1767, each accompanied by her young son, and that each of those boys was named David. It would eventually become clear that Laura was an undead fire witch, a humanoid Phoenix who went into a pyre with her sons at intervals of exactly 100 years, gaining immortality for herself, though not for the Davids. In #288, they had forgotten the lore about David’s name, and mentioned a previous David Collins, but in #685 and #767, it was back to being a first in the family. Between those two episodes, from #729 to #760, another iteration of Laura was on the show, suggesting that the writers brushed up on their knowledge of her original storyline.

By the time Vicki saved David from Laura, he had moved out of the villain category altogether. When his third cousin Amy Jennings (Denise Nickerson) moved into Collinwood at the end of 1968, David was as pleasant to her as one could expect. But his behavior towards her and others changed when the two of them stirred up the ghost of Quentin Collins, Amy’s great-grandfather and David’s great-great-uncle. As Quentin gathered strength, he intermittently possessed first one child and then the other. While David was under Quentin’s control in #679, he twisted Amy’s arm to force her to go to a secret room and join in their vengeful ancestor’s evil plans for their governess, Vicki’s successor Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott.) The camera lingered on that act of bullying, meant to shock us with evidence that Quentin’s dire influence had overwhelmed David’s kindly nature.

The arm-twisting incident made an impression on the viewers. In #813, set in the year 1897 when Quentin was alive, Henesy and Nickerson played brother and sister Jamison and Nora Collins, nephew and niece of Quentin, grandfather and great-aunt to David. Jamison, possessed by sorcerer Count Petofi, twisted Nora’s arm to force her to give him information, a reference which shows that the writers were confident that many viewers would see David Henesy’s character abusing Denise Nickerson’s in that way and read it as a sign that he is under the power of an outside force.

Now, it is 1970, but we are not in the main continuity at all. We have traveled to an alternate universe, which on Dark Shadows is known as “Parallel Time.” In this “time-band,” to use another bit of Collinsport English, Quentin is alive and the master of Collinwood. His first wife, the counterpart of wicked witch Angelique, has died, and he has remarried. The new Mrs Collins is the former Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott.) Quentin and Angelique’s son, strange and troubled boy Daniel (David Henesy,) is obsessed with his absent mother and determined to get rid of his new stepmother.

Apparently the writers still remember the connection between David’s name and the first Phoenix story, because Daniel is the only character we have yet seen in Parallel Time answering to a different first name than his counterpart in the main continuity. Angelique and Quentin gave him the name of the Collins ancestor whom Mr Henesy played in early 1968, when the show was set in the year 1796. We know that the timelines diverged in that period, so it follows that it was the counterpart of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Daniel who was this Daniel’s namesake.

When we first saw Daniel, he was carrying on a one-sided conversation with his mother’s portrait, which hangs in her old bedroom. Today, he devises a plan to use the portrait to frighten Maggie. The plan requires the cooperation of his cousin, Amy Collins (Denise Nickerson.) When Amy refuses, he twists her arm until she agrees to go to a secret room and sing, making Maggie think the portrait is coming to life. This attack is shown only for a few seconds, and Amy’s arm is out of frame. They have already established that Daniel is cruel, and do not need to dwell on the act of abuse.

Daniel twists Amy’s arm. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Daniel claims that his father often goes to Angelique’s room to meditate and talk to the portrait. That lures Maggie to the room, where Daniel is waiting. They have a confrontation. When she says she wishes she could “make him understand-,” he interrupts her and asks if what she wants him to understand is that his mother is dead and is never coming back. She looks at him and answers with a flat “Yes.” He tells her she is wrong, and pleads with the portrait to sing to him. Maggie says she can’t stand to see him like this, and turns to go. Before she gets out of the room, we hear a woman’s voice singing a lullaby. Maggie and Daniel hear it too. She turns around, shocked, and runs from the room. Daniel laughs that his plan worked so well.

Amy comes rushing into the room. Daniel congratulates her on her performance, and asks how she got in from the secret room so quickly. She explains that she never went to the secret room- her brother Chris intercepted her before she could do so. It wasn’t her voice Daniel and Maggie heard. He absorbs her message, and looks at the portrait in wonderment.

The audience could tell it wasn’t Denise Nickerson singing- she had such a high-pitched voice when she was twelve that she had to work hard to keep it in a range that would sound good on television, while the pre-recorded voice we heard singing was definitely that of a grown woman. Angelique was played by Lara Parker; Parker did some very distinctive things with her voice on Dark Shadows, none of which shows up in the lullaby, so I’m sure it wasn’t her. Several fansites attribute the singing to Joan Bennett, who is in this episode, but I’ve heard Bennett sing and she didn’t get from one note to another the way this voice does. I think the singer must be Kathryn Leigh Scott.

Early in the episode, Daniel and Amy had a scene in his bedroom. David’s bedroom was a frequent set in the first 38 weeks of the show, and was occasionally seen thereafter. Daniel’s room is the same set, with the same furnishings and decorations, but they are arranged in the opposite direction from the pattern we see in David’s. His bed is at stage right rather than stage left, and everything else is also transposed. Seeing this mirror image, regular viewers will appreciate this reminder that we are in a Mirror Universe.

Episode 937: The list of the expendables

A monster from beyond space and time has taken the form of a vicious man-child and asked people to call it “Jabe.” A cult devoted to the Leviathan People, mysterious Elder Gods who brought the monster to Earth, have decided to put up with its murders and depredations, but even they draw the line at calling the monster “Jabe.” It answers to “Jeb” instead.

Jabe’s latest pointless act of cruelty was to break the leg of one of his faithful servants, thirteen year old David Collins. A couple of times today, Jabe is about to explain why he broke David’s leg, and each time they cut away to some other scene. At one point we cut back to Jabe telling David that “Now you know why I had to do that, don’t you?,” to which David agrees that he does. That just lampshades the fact that the writers couldn’t come up with a reason.

David wants Maggie to be the first to sign his cast.

The actual reason David Collins is wearing a cast and using a wheelchair is that actor David Henesy took a nasty spill on the ice. And since Jabe’s untrammeled violence is the big menace on the show right now, it makes sense that they would have him be at fault. It certainly makes more sense than does the fact that the family insists on David climbing the stairs to his bedroom with crutches, when they have a whole disused wing of servants’ bedrooms on the first floor in any one of which he could stay while he recuperates. On the other hand, that insistence does produce a moment of real hilarity. The instant David begins his ascent, governess Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott) and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman start talking as if he weren’t there. He must be lumbering up the stairs a couple of feet from them the whole time they are carrying on this conversation.

For his part, Jabe doesn’t generate any laughs. Nor is he pursuing any goals that lead us to wonder what he will do next. We just know that if he has a chance to do something nasty, he’ll probably take it.

If they want Jabe to be a character in whom we take an interest, they ought to give him some kind of cockamamie motivation that is intelligible only to him. That’s what they did in 1967, when vampire Barnabas Collins held Maggie prisoner and tortured her. They showed us that Barnabas thought he was going to turn Maggie into his lost love Josette. That idea, borrowed from the 1932 film The Mummy, was so utterly bonkers the show eventually decided to run with it, casting Miss Scott as Josette when they went back in time to explain how Barnabas became a vampire. Meanwhile, the ever-mounting zaniness kept viewers tuning in, wondering if they would ever expose a layer of Barnabas’ psychology that was composed of something other than nonsense.

The opening voiceover today labels Jabe “evil”; that’s no problem, all the most popular characters, including David, started off as appallingly evil, and they have retained their popularity to the extent that they stayed in touch with their roots. But Jabe is not only evil, he is monotonous, and that makes him a deadly threat to the show’s entertainment value.

Barnabas is not currently subject to the effects of the vampire curse, and Julia long ago used her powers as a mad scientist to erase Maggie’s memory of his crimes against her. Barnabas was the original leader of the Leviathan cult, but has become disaffected. Jabe tells Barnabas today that he wants to kill just about everyone at Collinwood, including ten year old Amy Jennings, who is a faithful member of the cult. He also wants to marry heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Barnabas goes to Collinwood and warns Maggie that Carolyn is in danger. He asks her to keep an eye on Carolyn and to urge her to go away. He does not mention Amy. At least Amy’s name comes up in this episode- when she is on camera she is often the best thing in the show, but throughout her long absences she usually goes unmentioned.

Julia goes to Amy’s great-grandfather, centenarian Quentin Collins, who has recently returned to Collinsport after an absence of many decades and who, because of a series of spells that were cast on him, looks like he is not quite 29 years old. Julia recruits Quentin to dig up the grave of Michael Hackett, Jabe’s previous incarnation. This gives us the first exhumation scene on Dark Shadows since, if I recall correctly, #820. It’s the longest the show has gone without digging up a coffin since the first exhumation scene, in #179. It feels like a homecoming when Quentin sticks his shovel in the plot. Of course they find an empty coffin.

As is usual when digging up a coffin, Quentin wears a three-piece suit with dress shoes, none of which is smudged in the process. Less typically, his coat appears to be somewhat wrinkled.

Afterward, Julia confronts Barnabas. When she tells him how much she already knows, he gives in and says he will tell her everything. With that, we have the promise that Barnabas and Julia will resume the partnership that has been the single most dynamic narrative element on Dark Shadows.

Episode 924: Afraid of the dark

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman finds that wicked witch Angelique has married a businessman who has a house on an island off the coast of central Maine. Angelique tells Julia that her husband’s love has freed her to live as a human being, and that for the sake of that love she has renounced her powers. In #882, set in the year 1897, Angelique said that she would soon have to return to the underworld unless she could find a man who would love her. The show has since returned to a contemporary setting, and she met her husband less than a year before, sometime in 1969. Evidently her time wasn’t running as short as she led us to believe it was.

In the 1897 segment, the show was quite clear that Angelique was aligned with Satan and that the underworld she was talking about was a Hell that Dante or Milton or other Christians would have recognized. The deal she described with her master therefore made little sense then. But Dark Shadows has drawn freely on the mythologies of many cultures and has made up stories about supernatural worlds of its own. The borrowings from the Christian tradition are a relatively minor part of the universe they have been patching together, and they have recently given us reason to suspect it is something they are backing away from. So I don’t think we are under any obligation to reconcile Angelique’s account of the lord of the damned with the teachings of any church.

Angelique is afraid that Julia has come to reenlist her in the cosmic battles surrounding the estate of Collinwood. In fact, Julia had no idea she would find Angelique. She went to the island because she had figured out that a painting she was looking for was there. It is a magical portrait of rakish Quentin Collins, obscured by a landscape painted over it. Quentin has amnesia, and Julia apparently thinks that if she shows him the portrait she will be able to jar some memories loose.

Angelique agrees to let Julia take the painting and expose Quentin’s portrait, on condition that the overpainting be exactly reproduced on another canvas and brought back to the house on the island before her husband knows it was gone. Julia suggests they tell him a lie that will give them more flexibility, but Angelique says he is “a very thorough man” and would ask too many follow-up questions if they gave him any information at all.

Before and after her scene with Julia, we see Angelique with her husband. The first scene begins with some very awkward kissing. The awkwardness is partly due to Geoffrey Scott’s total incompetence as an actor; he stands stiffly while Lara Parker simultaneously kisses him and nudges him to his mark, making it look like she is moving a couch. But part of the blame must rest with director Lela Swift, who set up the shot from an angle that puts the emphasis on the straining muscles in Parker’s neck and back. Perhaps Swift overestimated Scott’s abilities.

“Move three inches back and to the right, dummy, you’re supposed to be in the center of the frame!”

This scene is accompanied by some music for a small string ensemble; I don’t believe we have heard the track since the very early days of the show. It feels jarringly old-fashioned. All of Dark Shadows’ orchestral score strikes 21st century viewers as a relic of an earlier era, but it set it apart from other daytime soaps of the 1960s and early 70s, most of which had an organ playing on the soundtrack. Compared to the organ accompaniment, which today’s audiences would find simply intolerable, I suppose even these creaky old violins are relatively modern.

The second scene ends with a more successful kiss. It is accompanied by a woodwind piece that used to be associated strongly with well-meaning governess Vicki and her doomed love for dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Burke was written out of the show in 1967, Vicki in 1968, and this music cropped up occasionally in 1969 during sentimental moments. It is still noticeably more old-fashioned than the rest of the score, albeit more dynamic than the string serenade that went along with the first kiss.

Meanwhile, in the great house at Collinwood, strange and troubled boy David Collins is coming down with a cold. David’s governess, Vicki’s successor Maggie Evans, is trying to get him to take his schoolwork seriously. A boy known as Michael appears in the house and announces that he and David will be playing now. Maggie explains that it is not a good time, and Michael bullies both her and David into giving him his way.

Michael is not really human, but is a manifestation of a supernatural force that has subjugated David and many other people. Seeing Michael push Maggie around, we might remember May and June of 1967, when Maggie was the prisoner of vampire Barnabas Collins. Those episodes were bleak and at moments painful to watch, but they also drew a new audience and made Dark Shadows, for the first time, a hit.

Barnabas attracted a crowd, not simply because he was cruel to Maggie, but because we wondered how others would react to his evil deeds, because his motives were unbelievably zany, and because actor Jonathan Frid took a visible joy in playing him. He became a breakout star, familiar to millions who never saw a single episode of Dark Shadows or knew anything else about it, because he generated stories that allowed the whole cast to shine, followed his crazy ideas to the point where many of them became the realities of the show’s narrative universe, and had quirks that dovetailed perfectly with Frid’s strengths.

Michael has none of these things going for him. When he is nasty to Maggie, he does not produce any suspense as to what others will do. Not only do most characters assume that as a teacher she will be able to handle an obstreperous child by herself, but most of the people to whom she would likely turn for support are among Michael’s subordinates. There are no crazy ideas bursting out of him- he is just a little tyrant, who at no point seems to have any hidden motives or nuances of feeling. And Michael Maitland seems depressed the whole time he is on screen. As a result, Michael is as straightforward and tedious as Barnabas was luridly intriguing.

When Barnabas was holding Maggie prisoner, his blood-thrall Willie felt sorry for her. He occasionally made efforts to help her, none of which did anything but make her situation even worse. John Karlen’s portrayal of the feckless Willie brought him almost as much fan mail as Jonathan Frid received during that period. Today it is David’s turn to play Willie to Michael’s Barnabas, and he does not disappoint. Thirteen year old David Henesy plays David Collins’ conflicted feelings more subtly than Karlen had played Willie’s, and as a result we watch him very closely. Disappointed as we may be in Michael, Mr Henesy’s triumph in these scenes brings the episode to a strong close.