Episode 174 of Dark Shadows, broadcast and set in February 1967, included a scene set in a police station and morgue in Phoenix, Arizona, where we met Lieutenant Costa of the Arizona State Police. Lieutenant Costa was played by John Harkins, who would become a ubiquitous TV presence in the decades to follow.
Harkins returns to the cast today as another law enforcement character. The show is set in 1897, and the action is almost entirely driven by supernatural doings. Harkins’ character, Garth Blackwood, is the late keeper of Dartmoor Prison. He is conjured up from the depths of Hell by sorcerer Count Petofi, who has decided to use him to kill his unreliable servant Aristide. Blackwood was heard but not seen yesterday, in a flashback set near Dartmoor. That flashback broke the record Harkins’ previous appearance had long held for the scene in the series set furthest from Collinsport, Maine.
Blackwood storms into the room where Petofi is recovering from a knife wound Aristide recently inflicted on him. He announces that his prisoner was seen entering the house and threatens Petofi with a heavy chain he carries. Petofi keeps smiling, but points out that he is injured and was unable to stop Aristide leaving. Blackwood exits. The threat suggests that conjuring him up may not have been Petofi’s wisest move. Petofi has such great powers that we have for some time suspected that he himself would have to be the source of his own destruction. Perhaps Blackwood will be the instrument who finishes him off.
At the great house of Collinwood, matriarch Judith Collins Trask tells her lawyer, Evan Hanley, that she is ready to put her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, in his place. She will be changing her will the next day to remove Trask as executor of her estate. Evan, a former co-conspirator of Trask’s in his evil schemes against Judith and others, is reluctant, but can tell there is no point in resisting Judith. He exits, and Trask enters. Judith tells him she will be rewriting her will to pass all of her wealth to worthy causes after she dies, and he is thunderstruck. He exits hastily.
Trask goes to Evan’s house. He tries to talk his onetime partner in crime into stopping Judith’s plan, but Evan says that her resolution is beyond his ability to change. Aristide bursts in. He pleads for help, and reveals that Petofi has conjured up a demon to stalk him. Evan knows Petofi’s power and wants nothing to do with the situation, but Trask does not know what he is dealing with. He promises to help Aristide in return for a favor. Evan leaves the room, and Trask tells Aristide he wants him to commit a murder for him. After he agrees, Evan returns and Trask persuades him to let Aristide stay in his house for an hour.
In Trask’s absence, Blackwood catches up with Aristide. He enters the house, and Aristide flees. He demands Evan let him search the house. Evan’s background as an attorney kicks in, and he declares he will not let Blackwood conduct a search without a warrant. Blackwood’s response is to strangle him with his chain. Evan has been one of the most consistently interesting characters in the 1897 segment; his death is another sign that we will soon be leaving this epoch.
Lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley has displeased Q-Petofi. Q-Petofi has put the zap on Evan and made him dig his own grave. Evan begs for his life, but does so in a stilted, robotic voice that suggests he is struggling against Q-Petofi’s power. It is a neat job of acting by Humbert Allen Astredo.
Evan points out that it would raise suspicions if Q-Petofi were seen with his servant Aristide, especially inside the great house of Collinwood. Evan himself, however, is the Collins family’s attorney, trusted by everyone in the house. If anyone there has suspicions about Q-Petofi, they will confide in him. Q-Petofi decides that he may as well let Evan live, and orders him to keep tabs on wicked witch Angelique.
We cut to the foyer of Collinwood, where Angelique is staying. She is on the telephone trying to reach the local pharmacy, and is annoyed that the meds she wants are not yet available. Another houseguest, Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye, enters. Angelique hurriedly ends the call. Pansy taunts Angelique for the end of her engagement to Quentin. After Pansy exits, Angelique gets back on the phone and resumes talking to the pharmacist. Q-Petofi enters, and Angelique pretends she is talking to someone else, then hangs up.
Returning viewers know that Angelique is carrying on a medical intervention designed by time-traveling mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia’s friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, made his way from 1969 to 1897, and she followed him. Julia had recreated an experimental treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into abeyance for a little while early in 1968 when she snapped back to her own time, vanishing from 1897. Shortly before Julia disappeared, Angelique agreed to complete the procedure and turn Barnabas into a real boy.
Angelique seems less powerful than usual today. Her dealings with the pharmacy are a logical consequence of her agreement to take over Julia’s plan, but she doesn’t usually have to get exasperated with people over the telephone, and not since her early days as a witch in the 1790s has she been so vulnerable to discovery by random passersby. Later, she goes to Barnabas’ hiding place, and Evan follows her. There have been times when Angelique could materialize and dematerialize at will, and it was impossible for any mere mortal to keep track of her whereabouts, but evidently she doesn’t feel up to that today. She does tell Q-Petofi she has a headache, maybe that’s true.
Pansy has a scene in the studio of artist Charles Delaware Tate. She tells Tate she wants to buy one of his paintings; he tells her that everything is for sale, but that his prices are high. She picks out a portrait of the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris; he throws a tantrum and doesn’t want to sell it to her. When she reminds him that he said all the paintings are for sale, he names the ridiculously high price of $5000. That would be well over $150,000 in 2025. Without missing a beat, Pansy pulls out a few large-denomination bills and fans them under Tate’s nose.
Pansy’s only source of income was a cabaret act she recently did at the Blue Whale, a tavern in the village of Collinsport. We saw her there the other day shortly before nine PM, when she was the only person in the barroom. So it doesn’t seem likely she could have earned that quantity of cash there. Nor is there any apparent reason why Pansy would want a portrait of Amanda, whom she saw as a rival for Quentin’s affections. It seems likely that someone else put her up to buying it.
The obvious candidate would be Judith Collins Trask, owner of Collinwood and all the Collins family businesses. Judith is married to the odious Gregory Trask, whose late daughter Charity provided the host body through which Pansy, who died in #771, has been interacting with the world of the living since Petofi erased Charity’s personality in #819. Judith has persuaded Pansy to move back into Collinwood. Judith has herself recently returned to the great house after Trask had her confined to a mental hospital for a period of more than thirteen weeks. Her stuffy but lovable brother Edward told Judith that Trask spent much of that time trying to seduce Amanda, and Judith wants to get the facts about what went on in her absence.
Closing Miscellany
Director Henry Kaplan was not in good form in this one. In the opening, studio lights are clearly visible right in the middle of the screen, between Evan and Q-Petofi. The same thing happened in yesterday’s episode. The other directors might have made a mistake like that once, but I don’t think any of them would have done it two days in a row.
The camera is also frequently out of focus, as is typical of Kaplan’s shows, and it moves unsteadily. He must have been trying to get the camera operators to do something he hadn’t prepared them for, it looks really bad.
There are a couple of notable bloopers that aren’t particularly Kaplan’s fault. When Angelique makes a remark about Q-Petofi’s attitude towards brandy, David Selby says “Don’t you think it’s possible for one’s…change…or one’s taste to change in brandy?” That is followed by a silent beat, as both he and Lara Parker are stunned by the nonsense that just came out of his mouth.
When Tate lets Pansy into his studio, the shade falls out of the window. He looks at it for a second, then the scene goes on. It is one of the all-time great goofs.
In episodes #853-#856, Sorcerer Count Petofi (Thayer David) used his powers to force the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins (David Selby) to trade bodies with him. Ever since, Quentin (Thayer David) has been trying to persuade someone to believe his story about Petofi (David Selby.) For the duration of the switch, I shall refer to Thayer David’s version of Quentin as P-Quentin, and David Selby’s version of Petofi as Q-Petofi.
P-QuentinQ-Petofi
Yesterday, P-Quentin persuaded his old friend and fellow Satanist, Evan Hanley, of what had happened. Evan agreed to conduct a ceremony to call upon their dark lord and ask for the transfer to be broken. They trick Q-Petofi into coming to Evan’s house and knock him out with chloroform. Then Evan begins an odd incantation:
Oh, Lucifer…
Great God of man and beast, look upon us with favor. Help us correct this evil which has been done in defiance of you.
Renew our bondage as your servants. Grant us the power we need this night, and we will be yours for eternity.
For Baal, who guides your mind.
For Beelzebub, who rules your spirit.
The robber of a soul must not be spared. The robbed must be avenged.
I exorcise thee.
Oh, impure spirit, who is the mind of the enemy, by the holy rite of Hecate, I conjure thee that thou do immediately hear and obey my command. Leave this man’s body, that he may return… Oh, yes, spirits of invisibility, I conjure and constrain thee herewith to consecrate this ceremony. So that surely and without trickery, thou may return each, to the body of [its] origin.
So be it.
Oh, Lucifer, so be it.
So be it…
I charge thee. I conjure thee. I command thee. Answer my demand.
Depart from these alien bodies and return to those from whence you came.
Depart.
So be it.
So be it.
So be it.
Oh, Lucifer, we give thee thanks.
Evan and P-Quentin seem to have the wrong guy. Whatever Satan’s powers may be, undoing evil, restoring property to its rightful owners, and enforcing justice are not exactly among the old fellow’s core competencies. Of course the ceremony fails. Q-Petofi wakes up from the chloroform, tells Evan he has made the greatest and last mistake of his life, and puts the zap on his brain. The next we see him, Evan is digging a grave, refusing P-Quentin’s offer to help him, and listening to Q-Petofi announce that he is about to be buried alive.
Q-Petofi’s announcement is the closing cliffhanger, suggesting that Evan has a somewhat longer life expectancy than we might have imagined when the ceremony fell apart. But once in a while cliffhangers really are resolved with the death of the character who is in peril, and that would seem to be a possibility in this case. Yesterday was Evan’s first appearance after an absence of more than eleven weeks, and he is not associated with any major loose ends in the plot. His alliance with the odious Gregory Trask, husband of Judith Collins Trask, may have given him a foothold now that Judith is back from her own long absence and is looking on Trask with suspicion, but yesterday he seemed to back off from siding with Trask in whatever fight might be coming up. So if the makers of the show are thinking it’s time for Q-Petofi to confirm his credentials as a major villain by killing a familiar character, Evan would be the obvious choice.
Judith confronts Trask today. He lies to her to cover up his misdeeds during the more than thirteen weeks she was confined to a mental hospital. She does not contradict all of his lies, and invites him to embrace her. He seems to think he has regained his control over her, but she tells him two things that make him uncomfortable. First, she says that she has persuaded his daughter to leave her apartment in the village and move back into the great house of Collinwood. When he protests that “She is not my daughter!,” Judith calmly replies that she is, closing the subject and leaving him looking like a petulant child. She also says that she hopes he has not bought or sold any stocks in her name lately, since she has revoked his power of attorney over her holdings. Again, he can say nothing in response.
Judith’s brother, the stuffy but lovable Edward, does not hear the details of this conversation. After Judith leaves the drawing room, Edward enters and tells Trask that he has won again. Trask perks up at this, and becomes his usual overbearing self. But he is just as quickly deflated when Edward tells him that he is looking into what he has been doing for the last thirteen weeks, and that when he finds out he will make a full report to Judith.
When Dark Shadows first became a costume drama set in 1897, Edward assumed he was to inherit the estate of Collinwood and all the family’s businesses. He was haughty and commanding, and Judith was a fragile spinster. But then their grandmother died, and the will left everything to Judith. She fell victim to Trask’s machinations and married him; he gaslighted her into the madhouse. Now that she has come home, Judith has found a new strength, sufficient to hold her own in the household if not to uphold justice and right on the scale which her position in the community would seem to demand. Edward’s dependent financial position, coupled with the many supernatural horrors he has witnessed, have gradually reduced him to a childlike state. In their scenes today, we see that the two of them have come to embody that signature dynamic of Dark Shadows, the relationship between Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother.
In yesterday’s episode, Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, found a note on the dresser in the room where she has been staying in the great house of Collinwood. It read “Know yourself, be who you must be.” The dramatic date is 1897, 1504 years after the Delphic oracle went out of business, so it is unlikely that its management sent the message as a translation of and commentary on their motto γνῶθι σεαυτόν.* It was also 83 years before the US Army adopted the slogan “Be all you can be,” so we can rule out the idea that a recruiting sergeant was trying to get Kitty to enlist. The US Army didn’t even accept countesses in those days, not even if, like Kitty, they originally came from Pennsylvania and are now in Maine.
Ever since she arrived at Collinwood in #844, the ghost of the gracious Josette has been taking possession of Kitty from time to time. The note prompts another spell of Josettification. Kitty puts on Josette’s wedding dress and wraps a red cloak around it. She mutters that “He is waiting for me,” not specifying who “he” is. She goes to the top of Widows’ Hill, the precipice from which Josette flung herself to her death a century before.
Josette was married to Jeremiah Collins. Jeremiah’s ghost appears to Kitty/ Josette. He urges her to leave Collinwood at once, lest “he” kill her. By this time the possession has worn off, and Kitty has no more idea who Jeremiah means by “he” than anyone overhearing her earlier would have known who Kitty/ Josette meant when she said that “he” was waiting for her.
Jeremiah’s ghost reaches out to Kitty.
Be on Guard Against Your Enemies**
Jeremiah vanishes, and Kitty is joined by a man she believes to be Count Petofi, the sorcerer who drove her husband to suicide. She fears Petofi and hates him, and is unhappy to find herself standing next to him at the top of a cliff, especially when she is in a confused frame of mind.
In fact, the man is not Petofi. Two weeks ago, Petofi used magic to force the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins to change bodies with him. Now Petofi occupies Quentin’s strong young form, while Quentin is trapped in Petofi’s aging and feeble one. While this predicament lasts, I refer to Quentin as played by Thayer David as P-Quentin, and Petofi as played by David Selby as Q-Petofi.
P-Quentin meets Kitty.
P-Quentin tells Kitty that he saw Jeremiah’s ghost and assures her he did not cause it to appear. He tells her he is going to Collinwood, and firmly recommends she accompany him. She waits a moment, but seeing no alternative, she goes his way.
Do Not Fight an Absent Foe***
When P-Quentin first found himself estranged from his own body and encased in Petofi’s, he was too stunned to show much tactical sense. He went around blurting out what had happened, earning nothing but a reputation as a lunatic. Now he has learned to let people believe he is Petofi and to conduct himself as befits that role. So yesterday, he found that his sister, Judith Collins Trask, had returned to the house after a long absence. She had not met Petofi, so he introduced himself to her by that name and used his memories of their childhood to befriend her.
Back at Collinwood, P-Quentin enters the drawing room and tells Judith that Kitty is resting comfortably upstairs. Judith is impressed with his thoughtfulness, and leaves him alone in the drawing room while she goes to Kitty’s room. He sees that she is preparing a note for her attorney, Evan Hanley. It occurs to him that Evan can be of use to him, and he sets out for his house.
Give the Advice the Time Calls For ****
P-Quentin knocks on Evan’s door. Evan never met Petofi, and does not recognize him. He and Quentin were for a long time close friends and fellow Satanists, and when he identifies himself as Quentin he does not gain credence. He pushes his way in, and eventually persuades Evan to take him seriously. Evan agrees to go to Collinwood and see if the man who appears to be Quentin knows him, and, if he does not do so, to trick him into participating in a ceremony to reverse the body-swap.
Judith comes. While P-Quentin hides on the terrace, she tells Evan that she wants to revoke the power of attorney she granted to her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, while she was away. Evan makes excuses, but she insists, and he agrees to follow her directions. She exits.
P-Quentin returns, and tells him that if he has involved himself with Trask’s evil schemes, it is time for him to disentangle himself from them.
Act Like a Stranger, If You Are One*****
Back at Collinwood, Q-Petofi opens the drawing room door and sees Judith. Petofi never met Judith, and Quentin has not seen her since she left more than thirteen weeks ago. Not knowing who she is, Q-Petofi simply apologizes, says he didn’t know anyone was in there, and leaves. Thinking he is her brother, Judith is of course indignant.
Q-Petofi walks in on Judith.
Judith goes to the foyer and says she expected a warmer greeting. Not having the faintest idea who she is, the best Q-Petofi can manage is “Welcome to Collinwood.” When she protests that even their rather distant brother-sister relationship entitles her to expect better than that, the light comes to him and he calls her by name. This does not appease her.
There is a knock at the front door. Judith is enraged to see Q-Petofi standing still, and orders him to answer it. He does, and lets Evan in. When he does not speak to his old friend, Judith demands to know if he doesn’t recognize Evan either. Q-Petofi pretends to know him, and is powerless to do anything but agree when Evan asks him if he remembers the meeting at his house tonight.
Q-Petofi had been cruising along unchallenged so far. How could he not, when the secret he is concealing is so bizarre? But his interaction with Judith, though it has not exposed his identity, has antagonized someone whose support would be useful to him, and now Evan knows that P-Quentin was telling him the truth.
Know Your Chance ******
Q-Petofi shows up at Evan’s. After some verbal jousting, Evan tells Q-Petofi to take a seat with his back to the room. He says that he has been chosen to preside over the festivities. P-Quentin sneaks up and chloroforms him. Evan says that he doesn’t know how long the chloroform will last, so they must proceed with the ceremony at once.
Honor Good Men *******
When Jeremiah’s ghost fades away, we see Timothy Gordon for the last time. Gordon was a frequent stand-in and background player starting in July 1966. His right hand, which he extends to Kitty in the screenshot above, was the hand that shot out of the coffin Willie Loomis was trying to plunder in #210. In mischievous moments, I think that makes him “Barnabas Collins #1,” in imdb terms. Then again, Jonathan Frid had posed for the face of the portrait of Barnabas some weeks before, and producer Robert Costello modeled for the portrait’s body before that. Many of his fellow extras went on to big careers, but Gordon’s turn as Jeremiah’s ghost made him the only performer to graduate from background player to credited member of the main cast of Dark Shadows. So I think of him as their representative.
*Greek for “Know yourself,” one of 150 maxims inscribed in the walls at the oracle. Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnōthi seauton) was one of two inscribed at the entrance, the other being Μηδεν ἄγαν (mēden agan,) “nothing in excess.” The maxims are preserved in a book by a fifth century CE author named Stobaeus; many of them appear on stones that archaeologists have found at Delphi. There’s a handy list of them on Wikipedia, pairing the Greek with some more or less OK translations. The eighth maxim on Stobaeus’ list is Σαυτον ἴσθι (sauton isthi,) “Be who you are,” which sounds a bit like the second half of the note on Kitty’s dresser.
**Stobaeus’ twenty-ninth maxim is Ἐχθρους ἀμύνου (ekhthrous amynou,) “Be on guard against your enemies.”
***Stobaeus’ 125th maxim is Ἀπόντι μὴ μάχου (aponti mē makhou,) “Do not wage a battle against one who is absent.”
****Stobaeus’ 103rd maxim is Βουλεύου χρόνῳ (bouleuou kronoi,) “Give the advice right for the time.”
*****Stobaeus’ twelfth maxim is Ξένος ὢν ἴσθι (xenos ōn isthi,) which we would translate word for word as “Stranger being, be.” The idiom plays on two senses of the verb εἰμί- the participle ὢν means “If you in fact are,” while the imperative ἴσθι is “assume the character of.” It is the same kind of play on words that you see in the word “like” in the English sentence “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.”
******Stobaeus’ tenth maxim is Καιρον γνῶθι (kairon gnōthi,) “Know the proper time.”
*******Stobaeus’ sixty fifth maxim is Ἀγαθους τίμα (agathous tima,) “Give honors to the good.”
The 150 year old evil sorcerer Count Petofi has taken possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins. Jamison/ Petofi has been casting spells to make the various residents of the estate of Collinwood reveal their true selves. Jamison’s distant cousin, Barnabas the vampire, has locked Jamison/ Petofi in the prison cell in the basement of the Old House on the estate. When Barnabas says that he will let Jamison out once Petofi has vacated his body, Jamison/ Petofi replies “If that is what you intend to do, Mr Collins, I’m afraid that you are stupid and incompetent.” There is no need to cast a spell on Barnabas- Maker of Stupid and Incompetent Plans is his true self, and we love him for it.
The great house on the estate is currently under the legal authority of the evil Rev’d Gregory Trask, husband of Judith Collins, who is a patient in a mental hospital. Jamison/ Petofi’s spell has caused Trask’s daughter Charity to be intermittently possessed by the spirit of Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye. Trask is horror-stricken by the makeup, clothes, and hairstyle Charity wears when Pansy is in charge of her, and her East London accent, insouciant attitude towards him, and tendency to sing and dance escalate this horror further. Nancy Barrett and Jerry Lacy are both talented comic actors, and their scenes as Charity/ Pansy and Trask are hilarious.
Collins family lawyer Evan Hanley is at home. Barnabas appears in Evan’s drawing room and asks for some information which Evan denies having. Evan tells Barnabas he has renounced his former interest in black magic and Satanism. Barnabas is skeptical, and Evan replies that his latest forays resulted in a gruesome disfigurement of his face. This disfigurement was later relieved, how we (frustratingly) do not know. But he wants nothing more to do with the occult, since he values the ability to look at himself in the mirror. Barnabas reminds Evan that he cannot see himself in a mirror, implying that he will use his vampire powers against him if he does not cooperate.
Trask comes to Evan’s house. He asks him to draw up papers that will complete his plan to seize control of all the Collins family’s assets. He mentions in passing that Jamison thinks he is Petofi. Evan knows enough about Petofi to be terrified. He tells Trask that neither of them has a chance in a battle with Petofi, and refuses to draw up the papers. Trask responds contemptuously.
Alone in the cell, Jamison/ Petofi decides to have some fun with Evan. We see Evan dozing in his armchair. He has a dream in which Jamison appears. Jamison kisses him; it is by his kisses that Petofi spreads the “true self” spell. Later, Evan goes to the great house at Collinwood and presents Trask with a paper to sign. Trask signs it eagerly, assuming it is the document he asked Evan to bring him. Instead, Evan has prepared a full confession to the murder of Trask’s first wife Minerva. The two of them plotted this murder together, and Trask is horrified when he sees his signature on it. He throws the paper in the fire; after he leaves the room, it rematerializes on the desk, complete with signatures.
During Trask’s confrontation with Charity/ Pansy Faye, the picture suddenly changes from color to sepia tone. After about a half a minute, it changes back. Evidently there was a fault in the videotape master at this point, and an excerpt from the kinescope was used to patch it. The color comes back right after Trask slaps Charity/ Pansy, causing Pansy to release Charity for a bit. It creates the eerie feeling that Trask somehow fixed our TV set by slapping her.
Dark Shadows continually comments on itself as it goes along. In the early days, all the episodes were scripted by Art Wallace. Wallace’s favorite method of composition was a sort of diptych, in which two sets of characters faced similar situations and responded to them differently, highlighting the contrast between their personalities. Petofi’s “true self” spell is of course another way of creating similar contrasts between characters played by the same actor.
As the show came to focus on time travel stories, they could cast actors as characters who represent alternative versions of parts they played in other periods, again putting characters played by the same actors in contrast with one another. And as Wallace would juxtapose similar situations within a single episode, the multiple times periods allowed them to take themes that had been developed in one way in a story set in one year and develop them differently in a story set in another. So Jamison/ Petofi’s contagious curse is a reworking of the “Dream Curse,” which dragged on from April to July 1968. The Dream Curse involved a lot of repetition and very little variety of tone. Jamison/ Petofi’s spells all get right to the point, and are sometimes scary, sometimes bizarre, and often quite funny. So the second time is definitely the charm here.
At one point Charity holds a recorder and tells her father she wants to learn how to play it. The first time we saw this prop was in #260. That episode was set in 1967, and Barnabas was holding Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, prisoner in the cell where Jamison/ Petofi is today. The ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah befriended Maggie, and materialized in the cell playing “London Bridge” on that recorder. Over the next several months, the recorder came to be a symbol of Sarah, one that she occasionally left behind as a sign that she had been in a place. Longtime fans will likely remember that, and see it as an indication that what is happening to Charity is going to have permanent consequences, as Sarah’s haunting had permanent consequences.
When broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi learned that her sister Jenny had been murdered, she placed a curse on the murderer, Jenny’s husband Quentin Collins. The curse makes Quentin and his male descendants werewolves. In #763, Magda learned that Jenny had given birth to Quentin’s twin children, and ever since she has been trying desperately to lift the curse. It was only this week Quentin found out about the children, after another witch’s curse had already claimed the life of the boy twin. Now he and Magda are debating what risks they should take in their further efforts to save Quentin and any descendants his infant daughter may have.
In #778, Magda returned to her home in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. She had gone to Boston because she had heard that a Rroma group was in the area and that an old woman who knew how to cure werewolves might be among them. The woman wasn’t there, so Magda did the next best thing. She infiltrated the private quarters of a tribal leader/ organized crime boss known as King Johnny Romana and stole his prized possession. This is a severed hand in a wooden box. It is known as “The Hand of Count Petofi,” after a Hungarian nobleman from whom it was detached over hundred years before, and it has magic powers.
Neither Magda nor anyone she knows has the slightest idea how to control the hand. It has not cured Quentin, briefly disfigured him and his sometime friend Evan Hanley, led to the death of a young woman named Julianka, has been stolen by one person after another, and must soon bring an emissary of King Johnny tasked with Magda’s murder. Moreover, two mysterious and unsavory men known as Aristide and Victor Fenn Gibbon have come to town intent on stealing the hand; at Fenn Gibbon’s bidding, Aristide tortured Quentin and tried to kill him last week, and now he is trying to lure him into a deal.
Magda tells Quentin he is a fool to do business with Aristide and Fenn Gibbon, but Quentin says they have nothing to lose. Aristide implied that Fenn Gibbon can lift the curse; no one else can. They find Fenn Gibbon and Aristide ransacking the Old House. Magda recognizes a design on one of Fenn Gibbon’s buttons. Fenn Gibbon and Quentin struggle, and Fenn Gibbon loses a prosthetic right hand. We have known all along that he was not using his right name, and Magda tells us who he really is. He is Count Petofi himself, still alive more than a century after his mutilation, come to reclaim the hand and all its powers.
Quentin seizes, not the Hand of Count Petofi, but the Hand of Mr Fenn Gibbon. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Magda and Quentin don’t actually have the hand or know where it is. It has been stolen yet again. This time it is in the possession of Tim Shaw, schoolteacher turned junior executive for the Collins family enterprises. Tim took the hand from the Old House when Magda was out. He takes it to Evan today. Evan is terrified of the hand. Tim threatens him with it. Evan tells Tim what he knows about the hand, and also confesses that he and the evil Gregory Trask brainwashed Tim some time ago and used him to murder Trask’s wife Minerva.
When Evan and Trask decided to use Tim for their evil scheme, he was an innocent. The audience may have known that Tim had the same last name as Raymond Shaw, the main character in The Manchurian Candidate, but nothing else about him suggested he was likely to be of use to sinister figures like Evan and Trask. With his theft of the hand and his interrogation of Evan, we see that Tim has lost his innocence. The stuffy and repressed pedagogue whom we first met was a better fit for Don Briscoe’s heavily interiorized acting style than were the parts he played when the show was set in 1968 and 1969, accursed brothers Tom and Chris Jennings. Briscoe often seemed to be at sea as a vampire or a werewolf, but when he has to show a tortured soul peeking out from inside a three-piece suit he does an expert job. Now that Tim is capable of driving the story, we have a chance to see what Briscoe can do with a starring role crafted for his particular strengths as an actor.
Quentin Collins has devoted himself to the pursuit of evil, and as a result he has two intractable problems. When Quentin murdered his wife Jenny, her sister, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, turned him into a werewolf. Magda later found out that Jenny had borne twins to Quentin, and since the curse is hereditary she tried to lift it. She placed the magical “Hand of Count Petofi” on Quentin before his transformation. That didn’t stop him becoming a wolfman, but it did cause his face to be severely disfigured when he returned to human form.
Now Quentin has made his way to the house of Evan Hanley, his onetime friend and partner in Satanism. Evan had recently been disfigured in the same way Quentin is disfigured, also as a result of contact with the hand, and Quentin knows that Evan stole the hand from Magda to use in an attempt to de-uglify himself. When Quentin sees that Evan is handsome again, Evan denies that he used the hand to restore his looks. He claims not to know what happened. That is as frustrating for the audience as it is for Quentin. We were sure Evan would start looking like himself again, and they went to enough trouble to show that he was not able to correct his appearance by himself that we were expecting the cure to involve a significant plot point. When Evan presents us with “It just happened” as his explanation of how he got his old face back, we are quite sympathetic to Quentin’s decision to grab a blunt instrument and knock him out.
Quentin finds the hand in a box in Evan’s desk, and a strange man immediately enters. He demands Quentin give him the hand at once. Quentin is willing to surrender the hand once he has used it to become his desperately handsome self again, but the man will not wait. He pulls a knife to underline his point. The knife is a flat piece of wood cut in a shape with some pronounced curves and no sharp edges, and the man holds it loosely at the end of an arm that is directly over the box Quentin could easily raise to disarm him. So the audience has to help a bit to make the confrontation credible. Still, the acting is very good, and the dialogue, in which the man combines lethal threats with apparently sincere expressions of sympathy for Quentin’s plight and jokes at his expense, is complex and lively enough that we are glad to make the effort. Besides, the man goes to the trouble of telling Quentin that the knife is named “The Dancing Girl” and that it was made long ago by a Persian swordsmith, so he’s giving our imaginations something to work with. I, for one, didn’t have any trouble keeping a straight face when Quentin lost the fight and the man left with the box containing the hand.
Kids, if you are going to rob someone at knife-point, do not imitate what Aristide is doing here. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Quentin goes to Magda at the Old House on the estate of Collinwood and reports what happened. She is frightened, since she herself stole the hand from a Romani chieftain/ organized crime boss named King Johnny Romana. When he says that a strange man came to take the hand, she assumes that he is an emissary of King Johnny’s, and that his next stop will be to kill her. When Quentin says that the man was young, Magda is puzzled- the recognized norms dictate that King Johnny send “an elder of the tribe” to complete such a task. She sets aside her plan to flee, and agrees to help Quentin in his attempt to summon wicked witch Angelique.
Quentin and Evan conjured Angelique up in #711. In previous segments of the show, when it was set in the 1790s and in the 1960s, Angelique established herself as one of its principal sources of action. But she hasn’t had much to do in 1897. She had a showdown with fellow undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins back in May, and has barely been seen since. Quentin and Magda speak for the audience when they wonder where she is and what she has been doing. They speculate that she might have gone home to the depths of Hell, and light some black candles to accompany an incantation meant to call her thence.
Angelique does appear, but not at the Old House. Evan finds her in his parlor when he comes to. One of the possible explanations for the restoration of Evan’s good looks was that he made some kind of bargain with Angelique; this is excluded, not only when he is surprised to see her, but when she asks questions that make it clear she knows nothing about the hand or anything that has happened since Magda brought it back with her. Angelique orders Evan to give her a complete briefing, and we cut back to the Old House.
Quentin is still in front of the black candles, fervently reciting his mumbo-jumbo, and Magda is telling him they have failed. After a moment, Angelique enters. Quentin jubilantly declares that he has succeeded in summoning her, and Angelique says that she is not aware of that. She tells him she was with Evan, and asks about the hand. Quentin tells her it was taken from him, and asks for her assistance. She says she is willing to help him, for a price, and that as a token of her good faith she will retrieve the hand. But first she insists he tells her everything he knows. We cut to the waterfront.
There, the man who took the hand from Quentin is standing alone in the fog. Angelique enters and flirts with him. He gives his name as Aristide. She says she is a puppeteer, and that if he lends her his handkerchief she will perform a trick. She wraps his handkerchief around the neck of a doll depicting a Continental soldier, a familiar prop from 1967 that became prominent during the 1790s segment, and squeezes it. Aristide begins choking, and Angelique orders him to give her the hand before he dies.
The closing credits bill Michael Stroka as playing “Aristede,” an unusual spelling. The following item, posted in the comments under Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, confirms my resolution to stick to the conventional spelling:
Factoid… I have the original script for episode 808, and Aristede is spelled throughout as Aristide.
Comment left 3 September 2017 by “Isaac from Studio 16 on W 53rd” on Danny Horn, “Episode 792: Dances with Wolves,” Posted at Dark Shadows Every Day, 19 December 2015.
In the same comment thread, Carol Zerucha goes on at length about Stroka’s ethnicity. He was Slovak, as she is, and she had a big crush on him when she was a kid watching the show. The characters in today’s episode assume that Aristide is Roma, but Ms Zerucha points out that we have no reason to assume they are right, and that he, too, might be Slovak.
Also in that thread, FotB “Straker” says that Aristide looks like William F. Buckley, Jr. I agree. I wish they had at some point cast him as a character who leaned way back in his chair and used polysyllabic words.
The evil Gregory Trask coerced lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley into helping him murder his wife, Minerva, so that he could marry wealthy spinster Judith Collins. Now Trask and Evan have conjured up a magical simulacrum of Minerva and caused it to hang around Judith. They claim they can’t see it, which, coupled with some other troubles Judith has had, leads her to believe that she has lost her mind. Trask and Evan strong-arm Judith into signing a paper, Trask locks her up in the tower room, and Evan makes the simulacrum disappear.
Meanwhile, Judith’s brother Quentin is at large. Quentin is a werewolf, and when he returned to human form this morning his face was disfigured. This worked to his advantage. He was in jail at the time, and he was being watched. The sheriff’s deputy had not recognized Quentin’s brother Edward when he came to jail that night, so it isn’t so surprising he doesn’t recognize Quentin, even though he is six foot four, has a distinctive hairdo and prominent mutton chop sideburns, and is wearing the same blue suit with a frock coat that he always wears. It is surprising that Edward doesn’t recognize him either, but this may be the result of a congenital problem the Collinses have. Not only was Quentin himself stumped when the equally identifiable Evan had a similar glob of makeup on his face recently, but Judith fails to recognize Quentin today when he comes to the drawing room. When Judith found him, Quentin was listening to his favorite record and reciting its lyrics in his unaltered voice, and he identified himself to her by name. Still, she couldn’t see it.
Quentin bursts into Evan’s room shortly after he finishes dissolving the simulacrum of Minerva. He sees that Evan’s face is no longer disfigured, and assumes that he used the magical Hand of Count Petofi to restore his appearance. Evan tells him he did not- he can’t explain why his face reverted, it just did so on its own. This does not satisfy Quentin, and it will not satisfy returning viewers. We saw Evan struggle to fix his problem for some time, and when he found himself in a crisis situation he suddenly turned up looking like his old self. So we’ve been in suspense for several days wondering what the explanation would be for his cure, and we are no more inclined to settle for a non-explanation than is Quentin.
Quentin knocks Evan out with a candlestick; the background music is a cue we have previously heard during on-camera murders, leading us to wonder if Evan will survive the blow. Quentin rummages around for a moment and finds the hand. He is looking at it, wondering how to use it to restore his appearance, when a man in a wool cap enters and orders him to surrender the hand at once.
This episode features one of Dark Shadows‘ all-time great goofs. When Evan is casting the spell to dissolve the simulacrum, a black-clad figure dashes past in front of him. A voice can be clearly heard exclaiming “Jesus, Lacy!” Evidently actor Jerry Lacy was in such a hurry to get from one set to another that he didn’t realize he was crossing a live camera.
In #762, the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask walked in on lawyer Evan Hanley and handsome rake Quentin Collins as they were performing a Satanic rite. Trask’s response was to blackmail Evan. Trask wanted his wife Minerva out of the way so that he could marry rich spinster Judith Collins, Quentin’s sister. Threatened with exposure, Evan cast a spell on an unfortunate young man named Tim Shaw. He brainwashed Tim into reenacting the plot of The Manchurian Candidate, with Trask in the Angela Lansbury role and Evan as the People’s Republic of China. As Evan and Trask planned, Tim killed Minerva. Shortly after, Trask married Judith.
On their wedding day, Judith saw Minerva’s ghost in the corner of the drawing room in the great house of Collinwood. In yesterday’s episode, Minerva’s ghost took possession of Judith, and the closing cliffhanger showed the possessed Judith about to stab Evan with a letter opener to avenge Minerva’s death. As we open today, Judith’s brother Edward enters and prevents the stabbing, and Judith is released from possession. She can remember nothing that happened while she was under Minerva’s power, and Edward is convinced that she has gone mad.
Edward takes Judith to her room, and Trask enters. Evan tells him that Minerva’s ghost has been in touch with Judith. The ghost knows what they did, and if the contact continues Judith will know as well. Trask demands that Evan do something to prevent that, and Evan says that he can cast a spell that may turn the haunting to their advantage and neutralize Judith permanently.
The plan turns out to be the creation of a “black ghost.” The only Black actor to have had a speaking part on Dark Shadows was Beverley Hope Atkinson, who played an unnamed nurse in one scene in #563, almost a year ago. Humbert Allen Astredo, who plays Evan, was also in that scene, playing suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Atkinson was terrific, and it would be great to see her again, but it turns out that the “black ghost” is not actually black. Nor is it a ghost. This misnamed entity is a simulacrum of Minerva, a kind of supernatural hologram that Evan will fabricate and that will appear when Judith is around. This will lead Judith to believe that she is insane, thereby causing her actually to become insane and to cease to be an obstacle to Trask’s enjoyment of her wealth.
The simulacrum first shows up in a transparent form in Judith’s bedroom. Judith screams. In the drawing room, Trask and Edward hear her scream and break off a conversation in which Edward has been urging Trask to agree to annul his marriage to the obviously disturbed Judith. Judith comes downstairs. She is reluctant to explain why she screamed, and tells Edward and Trask that nothing is wrong. She and Trask go to the drawing room and talk privately. He has to prod her a bit before she will admit she saw Minerva. He tells her it was just her imagination. She considers this; after all, she was in bed when she saw the image, so it may have been a dream. But then the simulacrum appears in the drawing room, near the spot where she saw Minerva’s ghost on her wedding day. Judith sees Minerva sitting quietly and sewing. Trask pretends he does not see anything; after a bit, Judith pretends she can’t see the image either. Trask leaves Judith alone with the simulacrum. Judith goes upstairs, and the simulacrum follows her. When they reach the top of the staircase, Judith cries out in fear and tells the simulacrum to stay away from her.
Though it is disappointing to be reminded that Beverley Hope Atkinson isn’t coming back, it is always good to see Clarice Blackburn. In her interviews with the authors of the book Barnabas and Company, Nancy Barrett said that Blackburn was the best performer in the entire cast of Dark Shadows. She doesn’t have a lot to do today- she delivers the opening voiceover, we see a snapshot of her, and as the simulacrum she stands motionless in a corner, sews placidly, then is seen from behind as she follows Judith up the stairs. But if there ever was a case to prove the old cliche that no part is small when a big enough actor plays it, Blackburn makes each of these little turns into a moment viewers will remember.
Screenshots by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
As Judith, Joan Bennett also deserves a great deal of credit for getting the gaslighting plot off to a good start. For example, there is an embarrassingly ill-written scene when Judith is in her room, pacing back and forth while some vibes play on the soundtrack. A knock comes at the door, and the music stops. Judith opens the door, and no one is there. The music resumes, and she starts pacing again. There is another knock. Again the music stops, again Judith opens the door, and again no one is there. The music resumes, and she’s back to pacing. The knock comes a third time. A third time the music stops, and a third time Judith turns to the door. This time she asks who’s there. It’s Trask. She lets him in, and he denies having knocked before. Knocking on doors and running away is a pretty crude tactic even on a show with an audience consisting largely of kids aged twelve and under, and the apparent complicity of the music in Trask’s plot is the kind of thing they ridiculed in Looney Tunes cartoons. But Bennett’s soulful performance holds our attention throughout.
This is the second time Dark Shadows has shown us an adventurer trying to gaslight his new wife so that she will go away and give him unfettered access to her fortune. The first time was in March 1968, when the show was set in 1796. Naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes had married fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. Nathan discovered that Millicent had transferred all her assets to her little brother Daniel. Nathan then set about driving Millicent out of her mind so that he could take her place as Daniel’s legal guardian. That plot also featured some weak writing, but Joel Crothers and Nancy Barrett were so irresistible as Nathan and Millicent that it hardly mattered. Perhaps the writers wanted to revisit the gaslighting theme to show that this time they could consistently write scripts worthy of their outstanding cast.
A day of transformations. At dawn, the werewolf in the cell at the Collinsport jail turned into Quentin Collins. Edward Collins, Quentin’s stuffy brother, witnessed the transformation, and when we first see him he is staring at Quentin in bewilderment. Quentin is wearing the same blue suit he always wears, with the same distinctive hairstyle. But he has a glob of makeup on his face, and that’s enough to stymie Edward’s ability to recognize him.
This may reflect a hereditary disability of some kind. In #784, Quentin’s old friend and fellow Satanist, Evan Hanley, tried to steal the magical Hand of Count Petofi. The hand raised itself to Evan’s face and disfigured him, leaving his gray suit and highly identifiable hair and beard unchanged. But when Quentin saw Evan in #785, he was completely stumped as to who he might be.
Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi enters. Edward accuses her of knowing who the man in the cell before them is. Magda does not share the Collinses’ peculiar inability to recognize people wearing facial appliances, so of course she does know. But she denies it. Edward does not believe her denials, and leaves in a huff.
Magda talks to Quentin, and he begins to speak. But he is not replying to her. Instead, he delivers lines that Count Petofi himself might have spoken when he was dwelling on the loss of his hand. He murmurs about “the forest of Ojden” and “the nine Gypsies” and suchlike. Magda realizes that Quentin has no idea who he is or what is going on.
Magda had placed the hand on Quentin’s heart the night before, as the moon was rising, hoping it would prevent the transformation. It didn’t do that, but by inflicting the same kind of facial disfigurement on Quentin that it had previously brought to Evan it does keep the werewolf story going beyond what might seem like a natural conclusion. When Magda leaves Quentin, she says that come nightfall she will consult with Quentin’s distant cousin, time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins. “He will know what to do!” she declares. Barnabas has been the central character of the show for more than two years, and he has yet to have a non-disastrous idea. Ya gotta have hope, I guess.
At home in the great house of Collinwood, Edward tries to interest his sister Judith in the fact that he just saw a wolf turn into a human. She impatiently declares that she is not going to spend all day thinking about such a thing. Edward starts to remind Judith that she saw the wolf herself. He might have mentioned that she has seen it more than once, including in the very room where they are standing, but she says that it is “morbid” to go on paying attention to the topic once the creature has been caught and they can believe that they are safe.
Judith tells Edward that she had a bad dream. She won’t talk with him about that either. He needles her about her recent marriage to the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask, which he calls “ridiculous.” She says that she does not regret her marriage, and that even if she did it would not be any more ridiculous than his own marriage. Since Edward’s wife was an undead fire witch who tried to incinerate their children to prolong her existence, all he can say to that is “Touché.”
Edward exits, and Judith dwells on her dream. It concerned Trask’s late wife Minerva. Minerva died in #773; Judith married Trask in #784. Judith knows that a young man named Tim Shaw poisoned Minerva, and that Trask gave Tim an alibi. She believes that Trask has forsworn justice for Minerva’s death for her sake. Tim knew that Judith, while under a magic spell, had shot his girlfriend Rachel Drummond to death, and he threatened to expose her if Trask handed him over to the police. What Judith did not know, and what is not mentioned today, is that Tim himself had acted under a spell. Trask and Evan connived to brainwash Tim so that when the Queen of Spades turned up in a card game he would poison Minerva. In her dream, Minerva told Judith that there was danger, then repeated the phrase “Queen of Spades” several times.
Judith turns around and looks at a table. It had been bare when last she saw it, and there was no one else in the room. But now a solitaire game is laid out there. She screams, and Edward comes. Judith turns up the Queen of Spades, and walks out the front door. Edward follows her to Minerva’s grave.
Judith tells Edward her dream, and he transforms into a psychoanalyst. “Your dream is nothing more than a manifestation of your own guilt.” Judith asks Edward what he imagines her to feel guilty about, and he says that she married Trask so shortly after Minerva’s death. She dismisses this, and soon goes into a trance. She wavers back and forth from the waist for a moment, then straightens up with a jolt. When Edward calls to her by her first name, she replies “I will thank you to call me Mrs Trask!” Edward doesn’t know what to make of this demand, but the audience knows that Minerva has taken possession of Judith.
Back at Collinwood, Edward meets Magda. She tells him that she is there to see maidservant Beth. Edward says that he hasn’t seen her all day. That puts him up on the audience; we haven’t seen her since #771. When they were setting up for the trip to this period, Beth was presented as a major character, and her ghost haunted the Collinwood of 1969 along with Quentin’s. When Barnabas and we first arrived in the year 1897 in #701, Beth figured very largely in the story for several weeks. But Terrayne Crawford’s limitations as an actress required Beth to be written as someone who says just what she means, no more and no less. Since the rest of the cast is able to rise to the task of portraying complex motivations and multilayered communication, and since Dark Shadows finally has a writing staff that can provide those things consistently, Miss Crawford has faded further and further into the background.
Edward goes to the drawing room and telephones Evan. Magda eavesdrops. She knows of Evan’s disfigurement, Edward does not. Edward tells Evan he must come over at once, that there is an emergency he must address in his capacity as Collins family attorney. Evan does not want anyone to see his face, and so he tries to beg off. Edward threatens to fire him if he does not show up. Evan has been making vain efforts to restore his appearance for days; he looks at himself in the mirror, and returning viewers might draw the conclusion that his goose is cooked.
That Evan’s face is still disfigured after we have seen Quentin’s disfigurement raises the possibility that the show is heading towards an all-disfigured cast. Evan is played by the conspicuously handsome Humbert Allen Astredo, and as Quentin David Selby’s good looks have become one of the show’s very biggest draws. If they are both going to be uglified for the duration, then there is nothing to stop anyone from having some plastic glued onto their face.
Judith enters. She does not recognize Magda and announces that she is Minerva. She closes herself in the drawing room.
Evan arrives, looking like his old self. Magda is astonished. When they have a moment alone together, he responds to her questions by saying that he will never tell her what happened to undo the hand’s work. That will hook returning viewers more effectively than any cliffhanger is likely to do- Evan’s case had seemed absolutely hopeless.
When Edward tells Evan what Judith has been doing, Evan starts playing psychiatrist, picking up where Edward had left off. “Well now, tell me exactly how she has been behaving. In what way is this delusion manifesting itself?” Edward sends Evan in to see for himself. Minerva/ Judith reacts to the sight of him with horror. She says that he was the one who made Tim Shaw poison her. Minerva did not know this in life, but it has long since been established on Dark Shadows that the dead pick up a lot of information in the afterlife. The murders have been coming thick and fast in 1897, and if all the victims talk to each other they would have a pretty easy time piecing together what has been happening behind closed doors. We end with Minerva/ Judith holding a letter opener over her head, walking towards Evan with evident intent of stabbing him.
Dark Shadows Commentary 