evan hanley – Page 2 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 785: Time is my hobby

Early in 1969, the great estate of Collinwood became uninhabitable. The ghost of Quentin Collins took possession of the place and was about to kill strange and troubled boy David Collins. Quentin and David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins traveled back in time to the year 1897, when Quentin was a living being, and hoped to somehow prevent Quentin from becoming an evil spirit.

So far, Barnabas has managed to make everything much, much worse. As soon as he arrived in 1897, he found that he had become a vampire. So far, he has been responsible for at least six homicides that did not take place the first time through this period of history. He has also enslaved three people by biting them. He has not prevented a curse that has made Quentin a werewolf, which is evidently the origin of the disaster at Collinwood in 1969.

Moreover, Barnabas’ blunderings have caused Judith Collins, who owns Collinwood and the Collins family businesses, to become close to the hypocritical Rev’d Gregory Trask. Trask has responded to Judith’s interest in him by enlisting lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley to carry out a particularly cruel plan to murder Trask’s wife Minerva. Now Trask and Judith are married. Today she tells her brothers, Quentin and the stuffy Edward, that she is changing her will. Edward’s twelve year old son Jamison will still be her heir, but Gregory will administer the estate if Judith dies before Jamison is 21. Regular viewers know, not only that Gregory killed Minerva on the off-chance that he would thereby get a shot at taking Judith’s money, but that he is a sadist who takes special pleasure in making Jamison miserable. So this provision is a death sentence for Jamison. Since the residents of the great house at Collinwood in the 1960s are Jamison’s daughter Liz, son Roger, and grandchildren Carolyn and David, Trask will negate Dark Shadows‘ contemporary timeline if he murders Jamison.

It is not impossible that this might happen. The show is now chiefly about time travel, and the 1960s are not an indispensable destination. Barnabas did leave a few interesting characters behind when he traveled to the nineteenth century- sooner or later he is going to have to be reunited with mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, and occult expert Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes also has a lot to offer. But if Barnabas could find a way to come unstuck in time, Julia and Stokes can too. Wicked witch Angelique has already made her way to 1897. And anyone else we might miss can be replaced by the same actor playing a similar part. It does seem unlikely Collinwood will become Traskwood. But in April 1967 it seemed even less likely that the ABC network would devote thirty minutes of airtime five days a week to showing a vampire feeling sorry for himself, yet here we are.

Quentin is amused by Judith’s marriage to Trask, Edward appalled. Edward tells Judith that their grandmother’s will specified that he and Quentin would have the right to stay in the house as long as they wished, a point Judith concedes. This is a retcon. When the will was read in #714, it was made very clear that only Quentin was given a place in the house. Jamison was named as contingent heir. Edward was not mentioned at all. Neither was Carl Collins, another brother of Judith’s, whom Barnabas murdered a couple of days ago and who has already been forgotten.

Judith runs Edward and Quentin out of the drawing room. When she comes back in, she finds that the new will has been torn to shreds, a dagger has been stuck into a Bible under a verse lamenting the sufferings of the righteous, and there is a childish drawing tacked to the wall labeled “Mrs Trask.” Although “Mrs Trask” is now her own name, a fact which she proudly declared to Edward a few minutes before, she immediately assumes the drawing depicts Minerva.

Not the usual sort of portrait one finds on the walls of the great house. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This resonates with two stories that longtime viewers will remember. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. The ancestor of the future Collinses in that period was Daniel Collins, who like Jamison and David is played by David Henesy. Daniel’s big sister Millicent married roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes, who set about trying to murder Daniel in order to get all of Millicent’s wealth for himself.

Yesterday Judith saw Minerva’s ghost in the same part of the drawing room where these odd occurrences have taken place, and the Biblical verse is very much the sort of thing Minerva would have been likely to quote. So we are to assume that she is indulging in a little poltergeist activity. But the “Mrs Trask” drawing is so unlike anything the somber Minerva would have made herself that we can only assume she took it from some other spirit out in the unseen realm. Since “Mrs Trask” is Judith’s name now, the question of who that spirit might be brings up a second old story.

From March to July 1967, Liz was being blackmailed by seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Jason’s ultimate demand was that Liz should marry him, giving him control of the Collins family fortune. Liz’ daughter Carolyn was outraged when it looked like she was going to marry Jason, and in #252 she taunted her mother by shouting the name “Mrs McGuire!” over and again. Perhaps Minerva’s dead spirit has crossed paths with Carolyn’s unborn one, and Carolyn has drawn the picture as a way of rehearsing for that scene. Though Carolyn is an adult, Jamison had a dream in #767 in which he caught a glimpse of the Collinwood of 1969 and saw that Carolyn has a fondness for childish imagery.

There is also some business in this episode about broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi’s effort to lift the werewolf curse she placed on Quentin. Magda has stolen a severed hand that has magic powers and plans to put it on Quentin’s heart when he begins transforming tonight. Yesterday, Evan forced Magda to let him see the hand; when he looked at it, the hand grabbed him. It left him unconscious and severely disfigured. Now Magda is keeping Evan in her home, the Old House at Collinwood, and treating him with surprising tenderness. Quentin sees Evan there. He does not recognize him, even though he and Evan were close friends, Evan is wearing the same gray suit he always wore, and his very distinctive hair and beard are unchanged. Eventually Evan regains the ability to say his name, and Quentin freaks out. He does not want to go through with Magda’s plan, but when the transformation begins he drops his opposition.

Magda placed the hand on Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The hand looks very much like a Halloween decoration, so much so that I wonder if Dan Curtis hoped to make some money by getting copies of it into department stores by October 1969. It’s pretty disgusting to look at, but that’s the point.

One of the problems Dark Shadows had throughout its run was that it tended to veer between appealing exclusively to adults and exclusively to children. In the early months, its glacial pace, heavy atmosphere, psychological depth, and reliance on the star power of Joan Bennett drew a rather mature audience. As the supernatural and fantastic themes came to predominate, the average age of the viewers dropped towards the single digits. By the end of the big Monster Mash that ran through 1968, the show’s strongest demographic was probably elementary school pupils. Dividing an episode between the relatively adult melodrama of Edward’s reaction to the Judith/ Trask marriage and the undisguised kids’ stuff of The Hand of Count Petofi would seem to be a way of offering something to both the oldest and youngest viewers.

This episode originally aired on 27 June 1969. That was the third anniversary of the show’s premiere. That first installment, like 332 of those that followed it, revolved around the character of well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, played by Alexandra Moltke Isles. Mrs Isles left the show in November 1968; her son Adam Isles, who would in the 2000s become a top official of the USA’s Department of Homeland Security, was born this day. Mrs Isles has said in interviews that while she was recovering from the birth she tuned in to Dark Shadows, but that the show had changed so much in her time away from it that she couldn’t figure out what was going on.

I imagine Mrs Isles had changed a great deal as well. Like so many members of the cast and production staff, she was a fashionable, sophisticated New York society figure. While she was working on the show, she was immersed in its imaginary world, but after several months away she would have refocused her attention on the sorts of things she was raised to care about when she was growing up as the daughter of Countess Mab Moltke. One doubts that magical severed hands, werewolves, devil worshipers, and actors in brownface makeup would have ranked especially high on that list.

Episode 784: Impaled by a pin

Vampire Barnabas Collins has come unstuck in time and traveled from 1969 to 1897, a year in which he hopes to prevent a disaster. Unfortunately, Barnabas generates disasters with his every action, and so he has taken the grim situation he found upon his arrival and made it incalculably worse.

Now, Barnabas has been exposed as a vampire. Shortly before dawn, he returns to the cave where he has been hiding his coffin. There, he finds lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley (Humbert Allen Astredo) waiting for him, holding a cross. When Evan makes it clear he has no immediate plans to destroy him, Barnabas says that he does not want to be treated as an exhibit for the curious or a subject for research. This will remind longtime viewers of Barnabas’ initial response when in 1967 Dr Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) offered to develop a medical treatment for his vampirism. That treatment was not entirely successful, but it set Julia and Barnabas on a path that led them to become fast friends, and a later medical intervention did free him of the effects of his curse.

Barnabas needs all the friends he can get, and indeed there have been some signs that he is about to make new ones. But Evan is not going to be one of them. He knows that Barnabas has the famed “Hand of Count Petofi,” a relic of someone to whom Barnabas refers as “the most evil man who ever lived.” When Dark Shadows was set in 1968, Astredo played suave warlock Nicholas Blair, who was hung up on the idea of recruiting “the most evil woman who ever lived” to take part in one of his schemes, an idea which led directly to the failure of his mission and his own recall from Earth to Hell. Evan forces Barnabas and Barnabas’ reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi (Grayson Hall,) to let him look at the hand. That backfires immediately, and leaves Evan’s face severely disfigured. When Barnabas sees what has happened, he declares that Magda must not go through with her plan to use the hand to release rakish Quentin Collins from the werewolf curse she placed on him.

Evan uglified. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, the cruel and hypocritical Rev’d Gregory Trask proposes marriage to wealthy spinster Judith Collins (Joan Bennett.) In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Bennett plays reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz stayed in her house for 19 years because she thought she had murdered her husband Paul; only when seagoing con man Jason McGuire tried to use this belief to force Liz into marrying him and giving him control of the estate of Collinwood and the Collins family businesses did she confess to the killing. It then turned out that Paul wasn’t dead at all, and the whole thing was a cruel trick he and Jason played on Liz.

Unlike Liz, Judith actually has killed someone. She shot neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond to death in #775. Gregory prevented Judith from telling the police about this, persuading her that because she was under a vampire’s* power at the time she was not responsible. Since then, Judith has been putty in Trask’s hands. She accepts his proposal, and they are married by the end of the episode.

On Dark Shadows, wedding days are always occasions of horror and sorrow, and today is no exception. Trask’s wife Minerva was murdered in #773; unknown to Judith, Trask conspired with Evan to commit this crime and leave everyone thinking that a man named Tim Shaw did it. Trask’s plan to frame Tim fell apart in #777, when Tim showed up at Collinwood and revealed that he had seen Judith shoot Rachel. Since Trask killed Minerva in order to free himself to marry Judith and take control of Collinwood and the Collins businesses, he cannot risk Judith’s conviction on a murder charge, and so he tells the sheriff that Tim cannot have killed Minerva. When Trask and Judith come home from their wedding, Judith sees Minerva’s ghost in the drawing room. Evidently Minerva is not ready to rest and let Gregory reap the rewards of her murder.

*Not Barnabas, another one. Collinwood is crowded at night in 1897.

Episode 773: Tear up the card

A little over two weeks ago, Dark Shadows started an homage to The Manchurian Candidate, with some touches added from Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades. The overwhelmingly evil Rev’d Gregory Trask, keeper of a sadistic cult disguised as a boarding school, coerced Satanist Evan Hanley into casting a spell on Tim Shaw, one of the teachers at the school. When Tim sees the Queen of Spades, he will be prompted to poison Trask’s wife Minerva.

The whole point of employing an assassin is to give yourself an unbreakable alibi. Since Tim will not remember Evan or the spell once he has killed Minerva, the logical thing would seem to be to arrange it so that Tim poisons Minerva in front of several witnesses and that he still has the vial of poison on him when he is caught. But instead, Evan himself turns up as Minerva is in her death throes, and he is the only witness. After Evan erases Tim’s memory, Tim defeats Evan in a sword fight, then runs away, taking the poison with him. Tim flees to his only friend, fellow teacher Rachel Drummond, and tells her that if it is a matter of Evan’s word against his, he will have no chance in court. Later, Evan confronts Rachel and roughs her up, trying to intimidate her out of helping Tim in any way.

Evan is reduced to having a sword fight with Tim. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Absent witnesses to accuse Tim on his behalf or an alibi for himself, Evan may as well have skipped the whole brainwashing bit. Had he simply strangled Minerva and claimed he saw Tim do it, he would be in exactly the position he is in now.

The problem for Evan’s plan is that it is taking place at this point in the series. The segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897 is stuffed to bursting with vivid characters, each of them involved in at least one dynamic storyline. That makes it, from most points of view, the best part of the show, but it also makes it very difficult to get a bunch of people together. Any two characters you put in the same scene are likely to join plot threads together in new and consequential ways. That makes for a lot of excitement, but it makes it very difficult to do just one thing at a time.

For example, say Tim had insisted on bringing Minerva the poisoned tea while in the drawing room at the great house of Collinwood with rich spinster Judith Collins, Judith’s brother Edward, and Minerva’s daughter Charity, while maidservant Beth waits on the company. Trask is apparently scheming to marry Judith and get her money once Minerva is out of the way. Put her in Minerva’s death scene, and you accelerate that part of the story, perhaps beyond the pace you are prepared to follow up. Edward is starting to suspect that his distant cousin, recently arrived Barnabas Collins, might be a vampire. Those suspicions are the result of two qualities in which Edward is no more than average, his ability to notice the obvious and his concern for his son. But if you make him a participant in another story about a crime, any remarks he might make that would display any brainpower whatever would transform him into the show’s resident sleuth. Beth and Charity are both blood thralls of Barnabas’; if either of them were in the room while the poisoning took place, we would therefore expect them to go directly to him and start wondering how he would react to the news. That would shift our focus to him, subordinating the Tim and Minerva story to the Barnabas story. Virtually every other character is disqualified from serving as a witness for similar reasons, leaving Evan to do the honors himself.

In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, I summed up my view of both this story and of the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate:

Two of the things that make THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE work so well are that we don’t see any of Raymond Shaw’s training, and that when he sees the Queen of Diamonds he goes into a trance that strips him of all personality.

The training scenes here show why the first of those was so important. Not only are the scenes tedious, they force us to realize that the very idea we most have to take seriously is in fact preposterous. Whatever power you might imagine hypnosis or drugs or other conditioning techniques to have, they obviously couldn’t turn a human brain into a digital computer.

And Tim’s talkativeness while in his trance shows why the second element is essential. Raymond might do absolutely anything when he’s in his hyper-suggestible state. A bartender mentions the phrase “Go jump in a lake” and Raymond jumps in the nearest lake. That’s terrifying, because it is terrifying to think of what people might do who had no mind or will controlling their actions from moment to moment. But Tim’s endless chit-chat doesn’t suggest a soulless automaton. There seems to be a mind in there, it just isn’t a very nice or very interesting mind.

Don Briscoe’s performance doesn’t add much to this unpromising material. I can’t think of anything he might have done to make it work, and neither could he. Anyway, I’m glad it’s over.

Comment left 8 November 2020 by Acilius on “Episode 773: The Persecution and Assassination of Minerva Trask as Performed by Tim Shaw under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 21 November 2015

Episode 764: A primitive tribe

Odds and ends today:

The Kindest, Warmest, Bravest, Most Wonderful Human Being I’ve Ever Known in My Life

The show is doing an homage to The Manchurian Candidate this week, with schoolteacher Tim Shaw brainwashed into becoming an assassin when he sees the Queen of Spades. We open with the plan going awry. Lawyer/ warlock Evan Hanley did the brainwashing with the intention that Tim would kill someone else, but when he shows Tim the card, Tim tries to kill him. As Evan, Humbert Allen Astredo shows us a man suddenly becoming frightened and just as suddenly making up his mind to be brave. In other episodes, Astredo has already shown us Evan responding to fear in other ways. He really was a remarkably good actor, and it is a pleasure to see how much variety he can find in his parts.

Later, we see Judith Collins, the mistress of Collinwood, playing solitaire. Tim comes to the house. We know that each episode ends with a cliffhanger, and so this leads us to expect that we will end today with Tim’s hands around Judith’s throat. But that is a misdirection. In fact, Judith turns the Queen of Spades away from Tim at the last second, and he leaves the room without attacking her.

Slight Enough to Vanish, But Too Dense to Live

Tim’s brainwashing is a B-story on the show right now, and it would throw off the rhythm of the week to end two consecutive episodes with cliffhangers from it. The A-story is about the rakish Quentin Collins, who has been cursed to become a werewolf. There is a full moon tonight, and the sheriff’s department is roaming the grounds of the great estate of Collinwood with guns looking for the wolf who walks like a man. Joining in the search is Quentin’s distant cousin, Barnabas Collins, who is, unknown to all but a very few people, a vampire. Barnabas has traveled back in time to the year 1897, and among the things he is hoping to do is to learn how the werewolf curse that has afflicted his friend Chris Jennings in the 1960s first began.

Barnabas learned in 1969 that in 1897 Quentin and a woman named Beth Chavez paid a man named Ezra Braithwaite to make a silver pendant in the form of a pentagram and that a baby boy was buried in that year wearing that pendant. Tonight, Ezra telephones Barnabas at the great house of Collinwood and tells him that Beth just came in, ordered such a pendant, and told him to send the bill to Quentin.

Barnabas knows that the pentagram was an amulet meant to ward off werewolves. Beth is Quentin’s girlfriend, a fact that is no secret to anyone, not even Barnabas. So you might assume Barnabas would have figured out that Quentin is the werewolf. But apparently he has not. He materializes inside Beth’s room and demands she tells him who the werewolf is. When she refuses, he bites her. That bite is the cliffhanger.

Dear cousin Barnabas. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas occasionally makes remarks about how he wants to keep the original timeline intact so that the people he knew in the 1960s will still be there when he gets back. But he’s been feasting on the people he meets in 1897 with abandon. Beth is the fourth resident of Collinwood he has bitten, and he has killed at least two young women in the village. Moreover, his approach to every problem he encounters or imagines is to confront the most powerful person associated with it and antagonize them immediately. It’s hard to see how he expects anything to remain unchanged after he inserts this rampage into the history of the late Victorian age.

But You Wouldn’t Know Anything About That

Judith tells Barnabas today that Beth came to Collinwood as a lady’s maid two years ago. Beth claims to have a cousin in town to Judith today while lying to cover up her trip to Braithwaite’s, and when Barnabas asks Judith if Beth is from Collinsport she mentions this cousin as her reason for believing that she is. Judith clearly knows very little about Beth, and cares less.

The lady who brought Beth as her maid was Quentin’s then-wife, Jenny, who was secretly a member of the Romani people. In #701 it was hinted that Beth was concealing a Romani origin of her own. Casting the tall, blonde, blue-eyed, pale Terrayne Crawford as Beth would seem to indicate that they were not committed to following up this hint, but in today’s scenes with Judith they do go out of their way to emphasize that Beth’s background is a mystery.

The Woman Who Never Left

Beth has been helping the family hide the fact that Jenny went mad and bore twins after Quentin left her. Quentin murdered Jenny in #748, eliminating the need for a servant to cover up her existence, and the twins, about whom Quentin does not know, are firmly ensconced in the care of a woman in the village named Mrs Fillmore. In #750, Judith fired Beth, but it didn’t take. Beth never left the house, and after a while the family started giving her orders again. Today Beth tells Judith that Mrs Fillmore reports that the boy twin is feverish, and asks to be kept on staff until he gets well. Judith agrees.

Judith tells Beth that she has decided to tell Quentin about the twins. She hopes that is what will prompt her brother to cast aside his selfish ways and become a mature adult. Beth is horrified and begs her not to do so. Judith, puzzled, says that Beth has always urged her to tell Quentin. She asks why she has changed her mind, and she makes up something obviously false about Quentin being unable to cope with the news that his son has a fever.

Yesterday, Beth learned that Quentin’s curse is hereditary. Returning viewers might wonder if she is afraid that Quentin will also learn that, and that if he does he might kill his children to prevent them passing it on. He does keep saying that he would rather be dead than have the curse, so he might talk himself into regarding such a murder as an act of mercy.

Featuring Edward Marshall as Ezra Braithwaite

Edward Marshall plays Ezra, a part played in #684 and #685 as an 87 year old man living in the year 1969 by Abe Vigoda (who was 48 at the time, but he and the makeup department both knew their business well enough that he was entirely convincing.) Mr Marshall appeared in #669 as unsightly ex-convict Harry Johnson, a part originally created by the not-always-stellar Craig Slocum. Mr Marshall gave Harry the same attitude and many of the same mannerisms Slocum had given him, but was so much more fun to watch that I wanted to see a lot more of him.

Parts of Harry’s costume and most of his surly demeanor are recycled in the 1897 segment in the character of dimwitted groundskeeper Dirk Wilkins, played by the repulsive Roger Davis. Whenever Dirk is on screen, I imagine Mr Marshall in Mr Davis’ place. I recommend that bit of mental recasting, it goes a long way towards making Dirk bearable. Unfortunately this is Mr Marshall’s final appearance on Dark Shadows.

Episode 763: An afternoon of cards, a night of murder

Schoolteacher Tim Shaw was introduced in #731. The name “Shaw” is common enough that few viewers are likely to have found any significance in it at the time. It is true that Dark Shadows is at this point a costume drama set in 1897 and that George Bernard Shaw was coming into his own as a playwright in that year. The show was written, acted, and directed largely by theater people, and is so self-consciously stagy that it is possible there might be a reference of some kind to Bernard Shaw in a character’s name. But there doesn’t seem to be anything especially Shavian about Tim.

Today we learn the reason Tim was called Shaw. Satanist Evan Hanley gives Tim a potion that robs him of his will. He holds up a deck of playing cards and tells him that when he sees the Queen of Spades he will know it is time for him to murder someone. In Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, soldier Raymond Shaw was brainwashed into becoming an assassin when he saw the Queen of Hearts; in the John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film based on the novel, Raymond’s trigger was the Queen of Diamonds.

Frankenheimer’s film is one of the supreme examples of a movie that shouldn’t have worked, but did. No part of the plot stands up to rational analysis for one second, but when the tale is told through stark black and white imagery that puts us deep in the world of a nightmare it is spellbinding. Unfortunately, the irrationality of the plan the villains carry out and of the other characters’ responses to their evil deeds in The Manchurian Candidate are on full display in this homage, without the paranoid verve that makes the movie compelling. All by itself the potion puts Tim so deep in Evan’s power that he gladly goes to witch Magda Rákóczi to buy poison and insists she sell it to him even after she has pointed out that it is useful for nothing but murder. It doesn’t seem there is anything left for the card to add to the control Evan has over him.

It gets worse. Evan is acting as the agent of the evil Rev’d Gregory Trask. Trask is unhappily married to a woman named Minerva, and is blackmailing Evan into sending an assassin to kill her. When Evan shows Tim the card today, he confirms that the intended victim is a woman. But why not have him kill Trask? As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, if Trask dies, Evan will be free of the threat of blackmail. So if he is prepared to be a party to murder, you’d think he would forget Minerva and commit the crime he has a motive to commit.

The highlight of today’s episode doesn’t have anything to do with Evan, Tim, Minerva, or Trask. It is a scene between Magda and sometime maidservant Beth.

Beth has come to the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood to plead with Magda to lift a curse she has placed on Beth’s boyfriend, rakish Quentin Collins. Quentin murdered his estranged wife, Magda’s sister Jenny, and as revenge Magda turned him into a werewolf. Magda is unimpressed with anything Beth says until she tells her that in spite of everything, she will marry Quentin and go away with him. Magda marvels at this and asks Beth if she will really go through with it knowing that any son Quentin might have will suffer from the same curse. Shocked, Beth asks Magda if she means what she has said, and she repeats that Quentin’s son will also be a werewolf. Beth replies that in that case, Magda has laid a curse upon her own kin.

Magda dismisses this, saying that Jenny had no children by Quentin. Beth says she is wrong, that Jenny bore twins, a boy and a girl. Beth lays the story out systematically, and it dawns on Magda that she is telling the truth. Magda calls out to Jenny’s spirit and begs forgiveness, saying she did not know. Beth says that it is time to lift the curse, and Magda tells her to get a pentagram and make sure the boy wears it all the days of his life. Beth has her own moment of horrified realization. “And… you can’t end it? Can you?”

Beth realizes Magda does not know how to undo the curse.

Terrayne Crawford had some weaknesses as an actress that severely undercut her in her first weeks as Beth. But this scene is right in her wheelhouse. She is flawless as she portrays Beth’s progression from weepy begging to methodical explanation to utter shock. And Grayson Hall of course brings great power and vivid color to Magda.

We’ve been waiting for this scene since #642, months before Magda first appeared in #701, let alone before she placed the curse on Quentin in #750. In that episode, back in December 1968, the show took place in a contemporary setting. The characters had noticed some strange goings-on, and held a séance as part of their inquiry. The spirit they reached was Magda, who spoke regretfully of “my currrrse!” It’s taken more than 24 weeks, but Magda has finally learned what she already knew when we first heard from her.

Episode 762: You called the Devil, and you got me

In December 1967, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that month it introduced the Rev’d Mr Trask, a witch-hunter from Salem, Massachusetts, came to central Maine* to drive witchcraft out of the village of Collinsport and off the estate of Collinwood. Trask was bad at this job; wicked witch Angelique easily deceived him into blaming well-meaning governess Victoria Winters for her own crimes, leading to Vicki’s hanging and exacerbating the consequences of Angelique’s evil spells.

Now the show has relocated to the year 1897, and a descendant of Trask is among the villains. He is the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask, and he runs a boarding school along lines dictated by his own sadistic delight in punishing innocent children.

Fans often say that while the original Trask** was a sincere believer who did harm because of his fanaticism, Gregory is a hypocrite who uses a pretense of religion to enable his perversions and his greed. I think the truth is more complicated, and more interesting, than this. In #441, the original Trask found the strangled body of a professionally agreeable lady named Maude Browning in his bed; it had been placed there to frame him for Maude’s murder. Trask’s principles, were he to follow them, would seem to imply that he should go directly to the authorities. If the worst happened and they hanged him, to the extent that he was targeted because of his Christian witness his death would win for him an everlasting crown of martyrdom. But fear got the better of Trask. He enlisted a man named Nathan Forbes to help him hide Maude’s remains, and went on from there to expand his conspiracy to suborn Nathan’s perjured testimony against Vicki. Considering the emphasis the Reformed movement put on the Ten Commandments, Trask could not have been unaware of the sinfulness of bearing false witness against a neighbor.

I think Trask’s fanaticism led him to overestimate the importance of the success of his mission in this world. It is not enough that he will be vindicated in the courts of God; God must be vindicated through Trask’s success in the courts of Massachusetts. Thus it is his very sincerity that turns Trask into a hypocrite. Eric Hoffer’s book The True Believer was one of the most influential publications of the 1960s; Trask, the fanatic-turned-hypocrite, could easily have found a home in its pages.

Gregory Trask is certainly a hypocrite. Today we hear Gregory’s wife Minerva talk about women he has dallied with over the years. Gregory comes upon Satanists Quentin Collins and Evan Hanley in the act of summoning the Devil; Gregory’s response is to blackmail Evan into using his command of the black arts to cast a spell to brainwash hapless schoolteacher Tim Shaw into murdering Minerva. We have seen in previous episodes that Gregory has plans for spinster Judith Collins and her enormous fortune; Minerva’s death, if it can be arranged just so, will leave him well-positioned to marry Judith and become the Master of Collinwood.

Trask tells Evan the price of his silence. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

As his ancestor’s very sincerity turned him into a hypocrite, so Gregory’s hypocrisy occasionally turns him into a sincere believer in his own powers, if not exactly in God. We saw in #735 that Gregory does not take the same pleasure in reading the Bible that he does in leafing through his “Punishment Book,” a ledger which evidently details his abuse of the children attending his school. But he does read it and quote it, and when in #726 he encountered a case of possession, he immediately and with untroubled self-assurance set to work performing an exorcism. The possession was real, and so far as Gregory could tell his exorcism was successful. He reacted to that apparent success with a serenity that betrayed no suggestion that he had ever doubted that he was the right person to cast out the spiritual forces of darkness.

As the original Trask was a stranger to the routine play-acting that makes ordinary social life bearable and therefore gave himself permission to become a party to the most horrendous deceptions, so Gregory wears his mask so tightly that his face grows to fit it. Dark Shadows was often very self-conscious about showing characters who were acting; its greatest success, vampire Barnabas Collins, won over the audience when they saw him trying desperately hard to play the role of a living man native to the twentieth century. In the Trasks, we see men who do not know that they are acting and therefore cannot manage the effect that the parts they play in everyday life have on their personalities.

Gregory does have a tight mental focus on his projects. When he goes to Evan with his blackmail demands, Evan has learned of his eye for the ladies, and is hoping to use that information to lower his price. So his opening gambit is to describe himself as a man who drifts from one idea to another as other men drift from one woman to another. Three times he says the word “woman,” in each case as the last word of a sentence, in each case about twice as loudly as the words before it. Gregory is unimpressed, and Evan realizes he doesn’t have anything definite to use against Gregory. He crumbles and agrees to Gregory’s extreme demand.

Gregory’s academic standards seem considerably less exacting than are his expectations of his co-conspirators. He mentions to Tim today that when he was a young teacher, the first class he ever taught was in elementary Latin. He challenges Tim to translate the words amo, amas, amat; Tim wearily replies “I love, you love, he loves.” “Very good!” exclaims Gregory. Traditionally the first words students learned on the first day of Latin class were amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant– I love, you love, s/he loves, we love, you (plural) love, they love. “Very good!” would seem to be an outrageously inflated appraisal to apply to someone who has merely recognized the first three of those six words.

Gregory sends Tim to Evan’s house to read a Latin document that has some bearing on a legal matter that has come up in Evan’s work as an attorney. As it happens, I went to graduate school in ancient Greek and Latin at the University of Texas at Austin, and local attorneys would sometimes call our department asking for someone to help them translate Latin they had found in old Spanish legal documents. They would usually refer those calls to the ablest Latinists among us, since the legal Latin used in the Spanish Empire in the days it ruled Texas was rather a specialized form of the language. Tim can virtually speed-read Evan’s document, suggesting that “amo, amas, amat” was not a particularly stringent test of his abilities.

*Maine was part of Massachusetts until 1821.

**Who is never given a first name. One of the Big Finish audio dramas refers to him as “Vilorus Trask” and actor Jerry Lacy once said he thought his name should have been “Orville.” Neither of those sounds like a very plausible name for a junior-grade Puritan divine of the late eighteenth century. So we are left calling him “the original Trask.” My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that this seems to suggest that Gregory should be “the extra-crispy Trask.” Maybe he will die by fire, as others have done.

Episode 761: This is no time to try to understand anything!

In November 1968, the production staff of Dark Shadows was planning to introduce the Devil as a character. But a lot of fundamentalist Protestants and traditionalist Roman Catholics were making noise just then about the ungodly nature of network TV programming in general and of Dark Shadows in particular, so they decided to scale him back a little. In the scripts for #628 and #629, he was called “Balberith,” and in the credits he was listed as “Diabolos.” In The Dark Shadows Companion, writer Sam Hall is quoted as saying “We demoted him from the Devil to a devil, just one of Hell’s Associate Vice Presidents in Charge of Witchcraft.”

By the spring of 1969, the show had been a hit for quite a while, and the ratings were still climbing. So they could get away with things that had been off limits before. When vampire Barnabas Collins joined the cast in April 1967, ABC’s office of Standards and Practices decreed that he would have to bite his blood thrall, the luckless Willie Loomis, on the wrist rather than the neck, hoping that would keep the viewers from seeing anything homoerotic in their relationship. But when Barnabas traveled back in time to 1897 in #701, he immediately bit a man named Sandor Rákóczi on the neck, and yesterday we saw that he had bitten dimwitted servant Dirk Wilkins, again on the neck.

In this episode, a knock comes at the door while lawyer/ warlock Evan Hanley is asleep. Evan finds his friend and fellow Satanist Quentin Collins, profoundly drunk and asking for help. Quentin has been turned into a werewolf, and tomorrow night there will be another full moon. He pleads with Evan to help release him from the curse.

Evan says that he has no powers. In the course of his conversation with Quentin, it comes up that Evan is adept in black magic, and that the two of them have together managed to raise demonic spirits. So Evan suggests Quentin come back the next day for a ceremony in which they will summon “The supreme power of the underworld.” Quentin asks if Evan is referring to the Devil, and Evan affirms that he is. In the subsequent rite, Evan uses not only the word “Devil,” but says and repeats the name “Satan… Satan!”

Even Diabolos, whom I think of less as an Associate Vice President of Hell than as an assistant regional manager for upper New England in the black magic division of some company to which the Devil has outsourced some of his less urgent terrestrial operations, was irked when witches expected him to come to them. Their summoning ceremonies ended with them finding themselves in his office, which appeared to be located in space he had rented in a corner of Barnabas’ basement. So regular viewers will be skeptical of the closing cliffhanger, when a shadowed figure appears in the window at the climax of the ceremony meant to summon Old Scratch himself.

Mysterious stranger. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, gives another reason to doubt that the figure really will turn out to be Satan. The most potent villains on Dark Shadows have all been female. The first supernatural menace was undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who joined the show in December 1966 and transformed it from a more or less conventional soap into a thriller about the spiritual forces of darkness.

Barnabas came in Laura’s wake and brought a new audience, but the show was as slow-paced in his first months as it had been before Laura came. It was only when Barnabas teamed up with mad scientist Julia Hoffman in #291 that the plot started to move at a speed that could hold the attention of the preteen viewers Barnabas attracted.

From November 1967 to March 1968, the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s. We saw then that Barnabas became a vampire because of a curse placed on him by wicked witch Angelique. Angelique’s manic behavior kept the 1790s segment moving at breakneck speed, and the show never really slowed down again thereafter.

Late in 1968, we met the all-destroying ghost of Quentin Collins and the terrible werewolf Chris Jennings. Barnabas came to 1897 as a result of his efforts to find out what was behind these two menaces. What we have found is that they are both the products of a curse placed by another female character, Sandor’s wife, the charmingly amoral Magda.

Angelique herself has come to 1897 to plague Barnabas. Laura was present at the great estate of Collinwood in that year as well. Last week was devoted to a battle between Angelique and Laura, representing a contest between two versions of Dark Shadows. It was a foregone conclusion that Angelique would win that battle- no one believes we are going back to the sedate, atmospheric, tantalizingly spooky show that ran early in 1967. But the two women were far more compelling adversaries than were any two men who have squared off against each other on the show. If you put Satan on stage, you can’t very well top him with a bigger Big Bad, so once we see that the figure in the French windows is male, we can’t really believe that Evan and Quentin’s visitor is the one they have invited.

Episode 752: Matters other than the law

Libertine Quentin Collins murdered his wife Jenny the other day, shortly after he learned that she was the sister of broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi. Since Quentin is convinced that Magda has magical powers, this would seem to suggest a low degree of impulse control on his part.

Magda did place a curse on Quentin, and she refuses to tell him what it is. Last night he doubled over in pain, lost consciousness, and disappeared from the great house on the estate of Collinwood. This morning he has shown up in the foyer, flat on his back, his clothing in shreds and blood all over him. His girlfriend, Jenny’s former maid Beth, found him and helped him to his room. Neither of them can figure out what happened to him overnight.

Meanwhile, Collins family attorney Evan Hanley has come to meet with Quentin’s sister Judith, who owns the estate and the Collins family’s businesses. Judith is enraged that Quentin took $10,000 from her in return for signing an agreement to leave the house and never come back, but has refused either to leave or to return the money. Evan assures Judith he will take care of the matter at once. While he is still in the drawing room, Judith answers the telephone. She learns that a young woman named Dorcas Trilling was brutally killed on the estate the night before, her body ripped apart as if by a wild animal of some kind.

Unknown to Judith, Evan and Quentin are members of a Satanist coven. Evan does call on Quentin and Beth in Quentin’s room, and he does deliver Judith’s message. He and Quentin both ask Beth to leave so they can discuss another matter. At first she resists, but finally she does go. Quentin tells him what happened the night before and that he believes Magda has cursed him. Evan sees the bloody clothing in a pile on the floor, and his face shows a grim surmise. Nonetheless, he does not tell Quentin about Dorcas.

Quentin asks Evan to help him with Magda. Evan says that he will do so, but cautions Quentin that his help will come at a very high price. Quentin asks what happened to their friendship. Evan tells him that “There is no such thing as a friend” and laughs. That must come as quite a nasty shock to Quentin. You spend time with a fellow conjuring up demons, forging wills, and working together to impoverish half your family and kill the other half, and you think you mean something to each other. But no, it just isn’t that way with Evan.

Evan calls on Magda at the Old House on the estate. Magda is coy and does not tell him anything he does not already know, but he does notice that she is wearing a pendant in the form of a pentagram. She says it is just a bit of Romani jewelry, worth only a few cents. He offers her a hundred dollars for it. She refuses, saying that it was a gift from her late mother, and offers to show him other pieces of the same type. Evan tells her that he knows the pentagram can protect against many supernatural menaces, and asks which one she is guarding against at the moment. She keeps mum.

Back in Quentin’s room, Evan chalks a pentagram all over his rug. He tells Quentin and Beth that at nightfall, they must set two black candles burning, one in each of two points of the pentagram, and Quentin must take up a position in the center of the pentagram. He must not move from this spot until daybreak.

The year is 1897, and the first vacuum cleaner wasn’t invented until 1901. It’s going to be quite a job to clean that rug. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin is having an anxiety attack, and refuses to cooperate with Evan’s plan. This is consistent with his character as we have seen it so far. In #710, he and Evan summoned a creature to rise from Hell and smite one of their enemies, and when a form actually started to take shape, he panicked and tried to run away. Quentin is obsessed with black magic and the occult, but when it turns out there is something to all of his spells and incantations, he cannot bring himself to face the reality of it.

Quentin declares that he wants a plan that “makes sense.” He then says they have to kill Magda. Evan replies that that is the worst thing they could possibly do. If they kill Magda, there will never be any way to lift the curse.

Later that night, Beth and Quentin are still in the room. The pains come on Quentin again. She hurriedly picks up the chalk and redraws the parts pentagram that Quentin had smudged, then sets a chair in the middle. She tries to get Quentin into that chair, but he is unable to get himself onto the seat. She turns to look for the black candles, then hears snarling and growling. She turns to the spot off camera where Quentin is, and reacts with horror. We know that Quentin is a werewolf; now she knows it, too. As the closing credits roll, it does not seem likely that she will have much chance to make use of that knowledge.

Episode 711: Our beautiful black-hearted child of the angels

In the groundskeeper’s cottage on the estate of Collinwood, Satanists Evan Hanley and Quentin Collins call on the powers of Hell to send a demon to help them fight Quentin’s recently arrived and deeply mysterious distant cousin Barnabas. The call is answered by none other than our old friend Angelique the wicked witch.

Quentin and Evan have no idea who Angelique is, and she does not know them either. Evan introduces himself to her as a lawyer; he seems genuinely surprised that this does not impress her. Evan tells Angelique that he and Quentin summoned her from Hell and can send her back; she agrees that they summoned her, but is not so sure they can send her back. Quentin tells her that the year is 1897, that she is on an estate known as Collinwood, and that he and Evan have an enemy called Barnabas Collins. Angelique is intrigued by the year, familiar with the estate, and thrilled to hear about Barnabas. Evan starts making demands; Angelique causes him to choke and gasp. She is quite friendly to Quentin, and when Quentin suggests she let Evan breathe and speak again, she indulges him.

Evan is played by Humbert Allen Astredo, who in 1968 played suave warlock Nicholas Blair. He plays Evan with exactly the same bearing, tone of voice, and range of facial expressions he had brought to the role of Nicholas. Viewers who remember Nicholas have been bewildered by this. Barnabas knew Nicholas and fought him; when he met Evan the other day, his reaction left open the possibility that he recognized him as the same person. But Evan’s dabbling in the occult, as we saw it yesterday, shows only an infinitesimal fraction of Nicholas’ vast abilities in that field, and his buffoonish response when Angelique appears shows that he is no relation.

It is when Angelique strikes Evan dumb that we learn why Astredo played him in the same way he played Nicholas. Nicholas was introduced as Angelique’s boss, the master of magical powers much greater than hers. Since the main difficulty with fitting Angelique into a story was that she could easily accomplish any goal if she just kept her focus, adding a character who is even more powerful took the show to an absolute dead end. They had to box Nicholas up inside a lot of pointless business, and he quickly became a source of frustration to the audience. Seeing Astredo as another Nicholas reminds us of that frustration, and when Angelique brushes him aside with a flick of her finger our unease evaporates. We are assured that the plot will keep moving this time, and that Astredo will be free to show us what he can do as an actor.

At the end of Friday’s episode, it was Quentin who tried to stop the ceremony when Angelique’s visage began to take shape in the fire, fearing they had gone too far. Today Quentin realizes there is no turning back, but Evan keeps saying he wants to return Angelique whence she came. It’s hard to see what he expected- he was calling on the Devil to send a demon. I suppose he really is disappointed that Angelique is not excited to find herself in the company of a member of the bar.

Quentin goes home to the great house on the estate. He sneaks up behind governess Rachel Drummond while she is dozing on the sofa in the drawing room and puts his hand on her face. That wakes her. When she protests, he asks if he did it unpleasantly. She answers, “No… I mean, yes!… I don’t know.” That summarizes precisely the natural reaction to Quentin. His behavior is abominable in the extreme, but David Selby’s charisma and easy charm come through even in the character’s darkest moments, and the audience can no more want him to stay off-screen than the female characters can want him to leave them alone.

Quentin and Rachel sit together; his hands are on her face again when Barnabas shows up. Quentin gets up and twits Barnabas with his obvious closeness to Rachel, then excuses himself to go to bed.

Barnabas gives Rachel a music box that once belonged to the gracious Josette. This will induce further flashbacks in longtime viewers. Barnabas is a vampire, and as a living man in the 1790s he was in love with Josette. In May and June of 1967, Barnabas lived in contemporary times. He abducted Maggie Evans, who like Rachel in the portion of the show and like Josette in the portion set in the 1790s, is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. He tried to erase Maggie’s personality, overwrite it with a copy of Josette’s, and to turn her into his vampire bride. The music box played a crucial part in this remake of the 1932 film The Mummy.

When Barnabas urges Rachel to listen to the music box, we pan to the window and see Angelique peeking in. As Angelique’s great power is the main difficulty with fitting her into a plot, so her single-mindedness is the main difficulty with making an audience enjoy watching her. This shot of her does as much to enlist the sympathies of longtime viewers as does the moment when she shuts Evan up. The whole time Barnabas and Rachel are involved with the music box, we are groaning. It was during the imprisonment of Maggie that Dark Shadows first became a hit, and it is a story that the show has been strongly identified with ever since. But we do not need to see it again. Angelique once married Barnabas and is maniacally possessive of him, and she does not want to see it either.

Angelique is as dismayed as we are, though for a different reason.

In the 1790s segment, which ran from November 1967 to March 1968, we saw that Angelique was motivated at least as much by her hatred of Josette as by her desire for Barnabas. After she has seen Barnabas getting up to his old tricks with Josette-lookalike Rachel, Angelique visits the portrait of Josette which hangs above the mantel in the parlor of the Old House on the estate. Longtime viewers know that Josette’s ghost inhabits the portrait. In #70, the portrait glowed, her ghost (also played by Miss Scott) emerged from it, then went outside and danced among the pillars. In #102, strange and troubled boy David Collins stood in front of the portrait and had a lively conversation with it. We could hear only his side, but it was clear the portrait was answering him. Today Angelique stands where David stood then. She scowls at the portrait and declares “I am Angelique, and I hate you!” She then goes back to the cottage where Evan and Quentin conjured her up and chokes a cloth doll, causing Rachel to collapse. She mouths words, and Rachel speaks them. Hearing Rachel talk about Josette’s death, Barnabas cries out in anguish.

This was the first episode credited to writer Violet Welles, who worked as a Broadway publicist before and after working on Dark Shadows. Ms Welles had been an uncredited collaborator with Gordon Russell on a great many of his projects, including several episodes of Dark Shadows prior to this one. She was by far the best writer of dialogue on the show. It is no wonder that the “Memorable Quotes” section of the Dark Shadows wiki entry for this episode includes whole scenes; the lines glitter with wit. Now that she is with Dark Shadows as a senior writer under her own name, the show enters its most successful period, both artistically and commercially.

Episode 708: The merry chase begins

Matriarch Edith Collins has died. Her grandson Edward stands with recently arrived distant cousin Barnabas in the study of the great house of Collinwood, viewing Edith’s body. Edward asks Barnabas if Edith told him the family’s celebrated secret. Barnabas assures him she did not. Edward claims that the oldest son of the family has known the secret in every generation for a century. This does not appear to be true- Edward is the oldest son in his generation, and he has never known it. We have learned that the family has many false ideas about the secret. That it has been passed from father to son may well be one of these.

We cut to the foyer. Edward’s brother, libertine Quentin, enters with a character we have not seen before. He is lawyer Evan Hanley. Evan and Quentin conspire to replace Edith’s will with a forgery that will leave her money to Quentin. Quentin inveigles Evan into this plot by talking about their “meetings” and intimating that they may become known if he doesn’t get his way. Since Evan is played by Humbert Allen Astredo, whom longtime viewers know as warlock Nicholas Blair, and since Quentin was first introduced as the malevolent ghost of a man who may have been involved with black magic, we might assume that these “meetings” have something to do with the occult.

Quentin exits, and Barnabas and Edward enter. Edward introduces Barnabas to Evan, then he and Evan leave to attend to business. Barnabas gives them a hard look as they go. Barnabas’ conversation with Edward about the secret had grown quite heated, and returning viewers know that he has reason to be uncomfortable about the topic. He knows that the secret in fact concerns him, and that if the family learns it he will be in big trouble. So his expression may be entirely due to the apprehension he still feels as the result of that discussion. On the other hand, Barnabas did know Nicholas and do battle with him, and it is possible that he recognizes a trace of Nicholas in Evan. Astredo plays Evan as a subdued version of Nicholas, with no noticeable difference of posture or manner or cadence. Even if Barnabas can’t see that the two are played by the same actor, he may well have observed the similarity.

Barnabas hears laughter from the walkway at the top of the foyer stairs. He looks up to see twelve year old Jamison. Jamison says that Evan is lying when he says that he had a deep regard for Edith- they hated each other, since Evan knew that Edith believed he was a “shyster.” I’m sure it was possible in central Maine in 1897 for a rich Protestant kid with red hair and an Irish name to drop a shmekndik of Yiddish here and there, but it does get your attention.

Jamison tells Barnabas he is reluctant to view Edith’s body, as he has never seen a dead person. That’s what he thinks- Barnabas is a vampire, so he’s talking with a dead person right now. Barnabas asks Jamison if he likes Quentin. Something about his tone reveals to Jamison that Barnabas is hostile to Quentin, and so Jamison yells at him that he is “just like the others” who disapprove of his favorite uncle. He storms out.

Jamison yells at Barnabas. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Edith’s grandchildren are scrambling to find her will. Quentin suggests they make a game of the search; stuffy Edward objects that they most certainly will not make a game of it. Of course they will, since the search for a secret will is obviously a comedy plot.

Blackmailing Evan into joining his plot to forge a will in Edith’s name is not Quentin’s only crime today. He also assaults Edith’s friend Magda Rákóczi. Magda and her husband Sandor have been living in the Old House on the estate as Edith’s guests; now Barnabas is staying there. He has bitten Sandor and made him his slave, and bribed Magda into going along with his plans. Quentin calls at the Old House, where he chokes Magda and threatens her with a knife until she tells him where the will is. He then goes back to the great house and exploits Jamison’s trust to manipulate him into stealing the will and giving it to him. Quentin is such a horrible stinker that if he were played by any actor less charming than David Selby he would be intolerable to watch. As it is, we just keep wishing that Quentin would straighten up and fly right.

At the end of the episode, Barnabas accuses Quentin of having the will and threatens to do something “drastic” if he does not give it up. As a matter of fact, Jamison has not yet handed the will over to Quentin at this point, so what Barnabas says is not true. Worse, there is no tactical advantage for Barnabas in openly declaring himself to Quentin as an enemy at this point. Quite the contrary; he has traveled back in time to 1897 to prevent Quentin’s ghost haunting the great house in 1969 and making it uninhabitable, and has no idea what will be involved in doing that. He needs to be on friendly terms with as many people as possible to get the information he needs, and he particularly needs to get as close to Quentin as he can if he is to have any hope of thwarting whatever disaster is in store for him.

This isn’t the first time Barnabas has rashly shown his enemies what he thinks of them. When wicked witch Angelique returned to torment him in the spring of 1968, Barnabas repeatedly confronted her about her evil schemes, keeping her up to date on exactly what he did and did not know, while concealing everything from the people who wanted to help him fight her. Longtime viewers can see that there is no danger that Barnabas will learn anything from his experiences.