fanfic – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 899: How well I remember that charm of yours

When Dark Shadows debuted in June 1966, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Joan Bennett) had not left the estate of Collinwood in eighteen years. We soon gathered that Liz was afraid that if she strayed far from the house someone might open the locked room in the basement and discover that her husband Paul was buried there, dead of a blow she dealt him when he was trying to run off with a chunk of her patrimony.

Liz’ reclusiveness was a major theme of Dark Shadows‘ first 55 weeks. After the show committed itself to becoming a supernatural thriller with the story of Laura the humanoid Phoenix, which ran from December 1966 to March 1967, they brought in Paul’s old friend and partner in crime Jason McGuire (Dennis Patrick) as an in-betweener to sweep away the few miscellaneous this-worldly narrative threads not already subsumed in the Laura story and to help introduce the next uncanny Big Bad, vampire Barnabas Collins.

It turned out Jason was the one who agreed to bury Paul for Liz, in return for the money Paul had been trying to steal from her. Upon his return to Collinwood, Jason blackmailed Liz with this information. Time and again she caved in to his demands. Liz let him stay in the great house, gave him money, hired him for a lucrative non-job in the family business, let his rapey sidekick Willie Loomis stay in a room just down the hall from those occupied by her daughter Carolyn Stoddard and her all-but-acknowledged daughter, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, and was in the middle of a wedding ceremony meant to unite her with Jason when she finally burst out with the truth. When she did that, Carolyn dropped the loaded pistol with which she had planned to prevent Jason becoming her stepfather. For his part, Jason said that Paul wasn’t dead, and that he hadn’t buried him. Perhaps the whole thing started when Jason said “cranberry sauce,” and Liz misheard it as “I buried Paul.” With that, the wedding was off, and a few days later Barnabas killed Jason. Since Jason was on his way out of town and had no friends left, no one missed him. He has barely been mentioned since.

Now, Paul himself has come back. Like Jason, he is played by Dennis Patrick. He has charmed Carolyn into thinking he had nothing to do with faking his own death, and she is falling over herself in her eagerness to establish a relationship with the father who left the family when she was an infant. Carolyn and Liz are on their way out the front door of the great house, heading to a committee in charge of raising funds for the hospital, when the phone rings. It is Paul, asking Carolyn to come to his hotel room at once. She agrees. She gives her mother a vague excuse, irking her, and the women leave the house separately.

In the hotel room, Paul tells Carolyn that he is in some kind of trouble that he can’t explain. Someone is trying to do something terrible to him, but he does not know who or what. Carolyn takes a firm tone when she urges him to tell her what he does know, and when she tells him that whatever is happening she will help him.

Father and daughter embrace, and Liz enters. She is furious to see Paul. She demands Carolyn leave the room. Only when Paul says that he and Liz need a moment together does Carolyn comply. The ex-spouses have a confrontation in which Liz gets to voice her righteous indignation with Paul. She tells him that she expects him to be on the next train out of town. She lists some of the people she will call if he isn’t. Among these is the proprietor of the hotel, who will presumably throw him out in the street at her behest.

In its first months, Dark Shadows tended to attract an aging audience, largely composed of people who still thought of Joan Bennett as the star she was in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Now, with its cast of vampires and werewolves and witches and ghosts and zombies and mad scientists and heaven knows what, it is more of a kid’s show. By the end of the costume drama segment set in the year 1897 that ran from March to November of 1969, viewers over the age of twelve would find themselves reacting to more and more episodes with little more than an indulgent chuckle.

Now that they have returned to contemporary dress, they have swung sharply back towards an adult audience. Carolyn was supposed to be a teenager when the show started; Nancy Barrett was significantly older than the character, and they let Carolyn catch up to her age after a while. But having her spend her evenings serving alongside her mother on the hospital’s fundraising board suggests that they’ve aged her up quite a bit further than that, foreclosing any youth-oriented stories. The conventionally soapy situation the Stoddards find themselves in today is of course something that will be of little interest to the elementary school students who are running home to see the show at this period. And while the main overall story is supernatural, about a cult controlled by unseen beings called the Leviathans that assimilates to itself one character after another, it is understated in tone, allegorical in development, and densely allusive in its relation to its literary antecedents. However many older viewers the show may have lost in the second half of the 1897 segment, they are in danger of shaking off an even larger number of their very young fans if they continue down this road.

In Art Wallace’s original story bible for Dark Shadows, titled “Shadows on the Wall,” the blackmail story was to be followed immediately by Paul’s return. Wallace called for Paul to be a man pursued by dark forces from his past. They made major changes to “Shadows on the Wall” long before they taped the first episode, and it has been almost entirely forgotten for years now. Indeed writer Ron Sproat, who was with the show from October 1966 to January 1969, said that executive producer Dan Curtis told him when he joined the staff that they were going to be leaving “Shadows on the Wall” behind and never let him see it. But they did dip into it in the case of Paul’s return- he is indeed being pursued by dark forces from his past. The Leviathan cult is after him.

After his confrontation with Liz, we see Paul sitting at the bar in the Blue Whale tavern. The jukebox plays a tune familiar from the early days of the show, when the Blue Whale was a frequent set and there were usually extras dancing in the background. Today the only people we see there are Paul and a middle aged sailor sitting next to him.

The sailor keeps looking at Paul. We hear Paul’s thoughts as he wonders if the sailor is “one of them.” Paul irritably asks him why he is looking at him. The sailor says that he wants to buy Paul a drink. Paul angrily snaps back that “I buy my own drinks!” After some sharp words, the two men warm to each other. They wind up getting handsy with each other and disappear for some private time together.

Paul and his new fella. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This scene turns out to be motivated by the two men’s mutual awareness of the Leviathan cult. Over the years, I’ve seen lots of guys in bars interact with each other in exactly this way. I don’t know what that’s all about, maybe the Leviathans are real.

Since I mentioned “Shadows on the Wall” above, I should say that the tavern figures in there as well. Only it isn’t called “The Blue Whale,” but “The Rainbow Bar.” I don’t know, somehow I think Paul and the sailor might not have got off to such a rocky start if the show had gone with that name. Sounds friendlier, somehow, at least to lonesome sailors and the mature men for whom they want to buy drinks.

Paul’s new buddy, unnamed in the dialogue, is identified in the closing credits as “Jack Long.” He is played by Kenneth McMillan, in his first screen credit. In the 1970s and 1980s, McMillan was one of the busiest television actors in the USA. I always mixed him up with Dolph Sweet, who was a similar physical type. Sweet appeared on Dark Shadows once, in #99. He played Ezra Hearne, the most loyal employee at Liz’ cannery. Sweet was a tremendous actor, McMillan a very good one, and they occasionally worked together. So long as they are doing normal soap opera stuff, it would have been nice if they could have had a little story about Ezra’s reunion with his long-lost cousin Jack. Maybe Jack could have introduced Paul to Ezra, we could have seen how he’d fit in with the family.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 855: The winds of change

The Point of Return

Barnabas Collins went into a trance at the end of February 1969 and came to in March 1897, a time when he was a vampire. Barnabas took the audience with him, so that Dark Shadows has been a costume drama set in 1897 ever since. We’ve had a few glimpses of 1969- we can see that time is passing there, that twelve year old David Collins has been saved from death, that the ghosts of rakish libertine Quentin Collins and maidservant Beth Chavez have stopped haunting the great house of Collinwood, and that Barnabas’ physical body has vanished, leaving him no avenue of return to the 1960s. We’ve also had indications at several points that the show was about to put the 1897 segment into its climactic crisis, each of which was followed by a restart of that segment. Some of those false signs probably reflected long-range plans that were abandoned when they saw how popular 1897 was.

Now, they are in a position when they can go back to 1969 whenever they wish. There are only a few unresolved story points in 1897. Most of those can be wrapped up quickly, and the rest can be forgotten. If they wanted to, they could write a single slam-bang episode in which the evil Gregory Trask is forced to accept the annulment of his marriage to Judith Collins and to relinquish control of Collinwood, the family is persuaded that Barnabas never really was a vampire after all, and Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, turns into Barnabas’ lost love Josette and finds a way to leave him that will make him even more miserable than he already is. Sorcerer Count Petofi might be left watching helplessly as Barnabas, his friend Julia Hoffman, and the living Quentin all escape into the future. We could then assume that the rest of the characters just toddled off and led quiet lives.

They could equally well take another tack on their way back to contemporary dress. Barnabas and Julia came to 1897 separately; there is no reason why they, or any other characters, should have to go to 1969 together. Today, Petofi is performing some kind of mumbo-jumbo that is supposed to lead to a body swap that will cause him to trade forms with Quentin. After that, he is confident he will travel to 1969 and be safe from his foes, the Rroma people. He seems to be succeeding. So perhaps a Petofi who looks and sounds like Quentin will appear in 1969, in a Collinwood based on the events that have taken place so far in 1897.

In that pocket universe, Collinwood would be known as Traskwood. Its owner in 1969 would be Trask’s son by a subsequent marriage. Call him Gregory, Junior. It would be unclear at first what happened to Judith and to her presumptive heir, her twelve year old nephew Jamison. The revelation of their fates could set us up for some big twists and the introduction of new characters with familiar faces.

Since Gregory, Junior would be in his sixties, he could have a couple of adult children who would carry on some story points. Gregory III could be played by Jerry Lacy without old age makeup, and could be a morally ambiguous character who might emerge as a protagonist and would certainly become prominent in the pages of the fan magazines. None of the Trasks would have any legal obligation to let Quentin stay in any of their houses or to work for any of their businesses, nor would any surviving Collinses. Moreover, everyone in the area would know full well that there used to be a vampire on the estate named Barnabas Collins, and no one would ever have heard of Julia.

Petofi begins his incantation. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

If the show goes that direction, we could spend half of each week with Petofi-as-Quentin while he makes a place for himself in that pocket universe version of 1969, while we would spend the other half with Barnabas and perhaps Julia back in 1897, where they are in an uneasy alliance with wicked witch Angelique as they try to set history right. Kitty’s Josettification would threaten to destroy this alliance, since Barnabas is obsessed with his love for Josette and Angelique is equally obsessed with her hatred for her.

The body-swap theme of today’s episode, along with the emphasis on the procedure Petofi is following, will remind longtime viewers of The Experiment, a theme that ran from April to May 1968. Barnabas and Julia built a Frankenstein’s monster with the intention of killing Barnabas and bringing him to life again in the new body. Some viewers may have wondered if Jonathan Frid was actually going to leave the show, and if the actor playing the monster was going to take over the role of Barnabas.

This time a larger fraction of the viewers are likely to think the transfer might work, since it would not require a popular star to leave the show. On the contrary, casting David Selby as Petofi in an altered twentieth century would give him the chance to wear up-to-date clothing, have magical powers, inflict cruel punishments on people who get in his way, run con games, hint at an ambiguous sexual orientation, and generally have a wonderful time. Since Mr Selby had by this point become the pin-up of a huge percentage of America’s teenaged and preteen girls, that sounds like a recipe for sky-high ratings. Meanwhile, casting Thayer David as a Quentin estranged from his body and his social environment would present an expert character actor with a challenge worthy of his skills.

It might sound like it would be too confusing to intercut between a parallel version of 1969 and a continuation of 1897, but the show will try almost exactly the same tactic a couple of years from now, as they set up for the storyline that carries the series through its final nine weeks. That closing bit is not widely regarded as one of the better phases of Dark Shadows, but the intercutting timelines that lead to it are an intriguing gambit. Maybe the idea for it came when they were trying to figure out how to get from 1897 back to 1969, in which case it is possible that the scenario I have outlined above may be very much like what the writers had in mind at some point in the development of the story.

Corridors of Trial and Error

We do get a few hints today about what we might see in the 1897 half of the show if it does split. Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi shows up for the first time since #834, before Julia came to 1897. We had begun to fear we wouldn’t see her again. It’s good to have her back, but since Magda is also played by Grayson Hall, it raises the possibility that Julia might go away for a long time. Maybe the action will be split between 1897 and 1969 for some months, and during those months Julia will be in 1969, running her hospital, entirely unaware that there ever was a Barnabas Collins.

Beth is a servant of Petofi’s now, and she spends the episode bickering with her colleague Aristide. It turns out that she still has feelings for Quentin. At the end, she runs out of Petofi’s lair to try to help Quentin. This suggests that Beth’s conflicted loyalties will be a source of drama. Aristide shouts after her not to go, then says that “You’ll ruin everything.” He delivers this line in such a mild tone that the resulting laugh must have been intentional. This raises the possibility of Aristide emerging as a source of laughs. In the hands of actor Michael Stroka, that is a distinct possibility.

Quentin rambles into the Blue Whale, the tavern in the village of Collinsport. It’s after hours, and the only person in the barroom to tell him to stop knocking on the door is cabaret performer Pansy Faye, whose body Quentin first met when it was occupied by Trask’s daughter Charity. He still calls her Charity, which she overlooks because she has the hots for him. Pansy lets Quentin in, and invites him to her place.

Charity lived at Collinwood with her father, and after Pansy took over she stayed on there for some time. The other day she talked about wanting to leave Collinwood and go “home,” but it was not at all clear what that meant. Her invitation to Quentin is the first time she explicitly says that she has her own apartment now. Perhaps, if we stay in 1897, we will see that apartment. Maybe when Thayer David takes over the part of Quentin, Pansy’s psychic gifts will enable her to recognize who he really is, and she will take him in. In those days, of course, a man and a woman would have to get married to rent a lodging, so presumably that would have involved a wedding. Since Quentin would appear to be Petofi, Pansy would thereby become a countess, Kitty’s equal in rank. It already makes Kitty exceedingly uncomfortable to be around Pansy, so that would be an occasion for a great deal of comedy. Moreover, any viewer who saw that both women had the same title and both were involved in supernatural changes of personality would be convinced that the writers had planned that phase of their story all along.

Pansy goes into her act. She sings her song; Quentin is seized with a fit of brio. He gives a little speech addressed to the absent bartender, picks Pansy up, spins her around, kisses her passionately, then sits down at the piano and bangs out the tune of her song. She admires his piano playing and he says that he used to be able to play quite well, before “they” came. Then he suddenly sinks back into his previous depression. He denies that he ever played the piano in his life. We know that it was Petofi who had that moment of brightness, and that Petofi’s mood darkened when he remembered the Rroma who cut his hand off 100 years before. Quentin has no recollection of anything his body does or says when Petofi is using it.

A piano is prominently featured in the drawing room at Collinwood in the 1960s- perhaps there will also be one there when the estate is renamed Traskwood, and when Petofi, as played by David Selby, wangles an invitation to the great house, he will play it. That might set us up for a moment when Quentin returns to his proper body, tries to explain what has happened, and finds that his inability to play the piano marks him as an impostor. You could build a lot of story on that- you might make it look for a while like Quentin could find a home in the Traskwood universe, then show that no, the people back in 1897 have to reset the past before anything can work again.

Episode 816: David Collins, who lives in the year 1969

From December 1968 to through February 1969, strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy) and his friend Amy Jennings (Denise Nickerson) were falling under the power of the malign ghost of Quentin Collins. Occasionally the children were possessed by the spirits of David’s grandfather Jamison and great-aunt Nora; at other times they were possessed by Quentin’s own spirit and that of Quentin’s sometime lover, maidservant Beth. In those same days, Amy’s brother Chris (Don Briscoe) was suffering from a curse that made him a werewolf.

As Quentin’s power over David and Amy grew, so did the frequency and duration of Chris’ spells in lupine form. By #700, Quentin so dominated the great house on the estate of Collinwood that its residents fled to the Old House on the estate, home of their distant cousin Barnabas Collins. David, entirely possessed by Jamison, was close to death. For his part, Chris was stuck in wolf form, apparently permanently, and Barnabas had locked him in a secret room in the old Collins family mausoleum.

Desperate to remedy the situation, Barnabas and his associate, occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes (Thayer David,) searched Quentin’s old room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house. They found some I Ching wands there. Under Stokes’ direction, Barnabas threw the wands, meditated on them, and found himself transported back in time to 1897. In that year, Quentin, Beth, Jamison, and Nora are alive, and Barnabas is a vampire.

Barnabas had no idea what led Quentin to become a malevolent ghost or what first brought the werewolf curse on Chris, but he had reason to believe that 1897 was an important year in the events leading up to both of those unhappy circumstances. So once he arrived in that period, he spent his nights meddling in all the affairs of the Collins family he found there. Vampires are not problem-solvers; their function in a story is to create problems that other characters will have to solve. So all of Barnabas’ well-intentioned interventions backfired badly. Even disregarding the many murders he committed for his own selfish ends, including the murder of Quentin’s brother Carl Collins, his trip would by any standard have to be considered a disaster.

Now, evil sorcerer Count Petofi (Thayer David) has found that Barnabas is a visitor from the future and is determined to go with him when he returns to 1969. When he demanded Barnabas tell him his secret, Barnabas quite truthfully told him he had no idea what was going on when he found himself transported from one period to another. Petofi did not believe him, and is trying to extort the information he wants by summoning the spirit of David to come from 1969 and possess Jamison (David Henesy) in 1897.

Not only is this an intriguing reversal of the 1968-1969 story in which the ghost of Quentin caused Jamison’s spirit to possess David, it also picks up on some recent hints that they might retcon the whole “Haunting of Collinwood” story to put Quentin’s ghost under the control of Petofi. Even if he can’t hitch a ride with Barnabas, perhaps Petofi will find a way to use Quentin to go back to 1969 with us.

Nora (Denise Nickerson) is with her brother Jamison when the possession takes hold. She is puzzled that he insists on calling her “Amy” and himself “David” and that he tells her to call Quentin on the telephone, even though he is in the house. When Quentin shows up, he recognizes the name David Collins from something Barnabas has told him about the future. But Barnabas has not told Quentin that he is fated to become a family-annihilating ghost, and so Quentin cannot understand how David knows who he is.

Meanwhile, a man named Tim Shaw (Don Briscoe) comes to the house and visits Nora in her room. Tim is Amy’s former teacher, and she considers him a friend. She does not know that since she first knew him, he has lost his moral compass, found the severed Hand of Count Petofi, stolen it, and used its magical powers to make a small fortune in New York City. Evidently all working-class Collinsport boys get rich quick when they go to NYC. In 1961, ex-fisherman Burke Devlin got out of prison and went to that city. By the time he returned to Collinsport in 1966, Burke was a big-time corporate raider who had to think for a moment when David Collins asked him if he’d already made his first $100,000,000. He answered “Not yet.” If he’d had the Hand, no doubt he would have passed that milestone long before.

A couple of days ago, Tim asked Nora to hide a box for him. Unknown to her, the box contained the Hand. Tim asks Nora to return the box to him. She tells him Jamison has it, and he flies into a rage. He gets very rough with her. Briscoe and Nickerson were both good actors, and we’ve seen them share tender moments both as Nora and Tim and as Amy and Chris, so the resulting scene is as uncomfortable as it needs to be to show us that Tim is no longer the long-suffering nice guy we once knew. Moreover, longtime viewers who recognize Tim’s echo of Burke and remember that Burke, though sometimes villainous, was always good with David, will be shocked that Tim does not mirror the earlier character’s consistent soft spot for children.

Tim roughs Nora up. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Tim goes downstairs and sees Quentin coming out of the drawing room. He demands to see Jamison. Quentin tells him that Jamison is ill, and it will be impossible for anyone to talk to him. Tim starts to get ugly about it, and Quentin cuts him off, saying that Jamison doesn’t have the Hand. Tim is shocked that Quentin knows about the Hand, but recovers sufficiently to ask who does. Quentin cheerfully tells Tim that if he goes to the abandoned mill at the end of the North Road, he will find his onetime acquaintance Aristide, and that Aristide will direct him to the man who has the Hand.

Tim knows Aristide only slightly, but he has a grudge against him. Aristide attacked Tim’s girlfriend Amanda and demanded she tell him where the Hand was. Even after he realized Amanda did not know what he was talking about, he beat her and threatened to kill her, forcing her to tell him whatever she did know that would help him retrace Tim’s steps. When Tim found Amanda, Aristide had left her unconscious, and Tim feared at first she might be dead.

We cut to the hideout in the mill, where Tim is waiting with a pistol and thinking that he would be justified in killing Aristide for what he did to Amanda. When Aristide comes, Tim holds him at gunpoint and demands the Hand be returned to him. Aristide tells him that is not possible. They quarrel until another man enters. It is Petofi, who shows Tim that the Hand has resumed its place at the end of his right arm.

That suffices to show Tim that the Hand is no longer available to him. Petofi tells him he should consider himself lucky that the Hand, which followed no one’s commands, chose to make him rich and happy. Tim says he is not happy, and will not be until he can take revenge on the hypocritical Rev’d Gregory Trask and lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley. This again reminds longtime viewers of Burke, whose original goal in returning to Collinsport was to wreak vengeance on Roger Collins. As Trask and Evan involved Tim in a homicide when he was not in his right mind and tried to make him alone pay the legal penalty for it, so Roger killed someone with Burke’s car while Burke was passed out drunk in the back seat and saw to it that the court concluded that Burke was driving.

Petofi laughs and congratulates Tim on his choice of enemies. Tim brightens and asks if Petofi will join with him in bringing Trask and Evan down. Petofi explains that he does nothing without a price. Tim says he has a lot of money, and Petofi says he doesn’t have any use for money. Petofi brings up Amanda, only to say that he doesn’t have a use for her either, at least not at the moment. He sends Tim along his way.

Aristide is talking when Petofi dismisses him. He tells him that two visitors are coming, and that he wants to be alone when they arrive. He will not explain further, and so Aristide is in rather a huff when he leaves.

The visitors are Quentin and Jamison/ David. Quentin is carrying his nephew/ great-great-nephew. He demands that Petofi cure Jamison of the possession, which seems to be killing him. Petofi refuses. When Jamison/ David calls Quentin by name, Petofi asks him how a boy who lives in 1969 knows who he is. Quentin’s bewildered reaction leaves us wondering how he will respond if Barnabas ever tells him just why he went to the past.

In the opening teaser, Petofi stood over the coffin in which he has trapped Barnabas. He told Aristide that he and Barnabas have been at war for what even he, at his immense age, considers to be a very long time. He says that they are now engaged in the final battle of that war.

Petofi’s remarks make absolutely no sense whatever in the context of what we have seen. It has been clear so far that Petofi’s presence at Collinwood is an accident, that Barnabas never heard of him before, and that Petofi only just learned that Barnabas has traveled through time. Many of the oddest dead ends on the show were left over from advance plans that hadn’t worked out; so when they were drawing up broad outlines six months before taping, or when they were writing episode summaries (called “flimsies”) thirteen weeks before, they would often include ideas that depended on story points that they never got around to making happen or characters who never worked out. Once in a while, the writers tasked with filling in the flimsies wouldn’t be able to make up a complete 22 minute script without incorporating some of this irrelevant material. So perhaps at some point in the planning process they meant to have stories about Barnabas going back to the eighteenth century and fighting Petofi there. They may still have been kicking that idea around when they shot this installment.

Danny Horn closes his post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day with this little poem, which he attributes to Petofi (though it may remind some of Puck from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream):

If Dark Shadows has offended,
Think but this, and all is mended —
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And now, a word from All Temperature Cheer.

Danny Horn, “Episode 816: Midsummer,” posted 1 February 2016 at Dark Shadows Every Day.

Episode 809: Back from your evening revels

Charity Trask finds Quentin Collins unconscious and disheveled in the woods. She kneels beside him in a show of concern, then notices a woman on the ground near him. The woman’s face is covered with what on a black and white television look like slash marks and her clothing is badly torn. She regains consciousness just long enough to say Quentin’s name. Charity notices that Quentin is holding a scrap of cloth that matches the woman’s dress, and realizes that he is the werewolf who has been terrorizing the area.

Quentin comes to, and Charity tells him they must get help for the injured woman. Quentin’s response is to threaten to kill Charity if she says anything to anyone about what she has seen. He says that he will look after the woman, and repeats his death threats to Charity.

Charity goes home to the great house of Collinwood, where her father, the overbearingly evil Gregory Trask, orders her to marry Quentin by the end of the week. She is horrified and tells him she will not. She cannot explain why. Before Gregory can corner Charity and force her to give him information, twelve year old Jamison Collins enters. Jamison reports seeing the injured woman in the woods, and says that Gregory must go to her at once if she is to survive. Gregory dismisses this as a “tall tale” and says he will not be distracted from punishing Jamison for his long unexplained absence from the house. Charity, on the point of sobbing, urges Trask to take Jamison seriously, and he reluctantly goes to see if there really is a woman in the woods.

We know more than do Charity or Trask. We saw Jamison meet Quentin in the woods next to the woman’s body, and talk to him in an amiable and condescending tone about the possibility of turning this unfortunate incident to their mutual advantage. He also makes it clear that, despite his appearance, he is not simply Jamison. He is a sorcerer named Count Petofi, in possession of Jamison and acting through his body. When Charity asks Jamison/ Petofi if the woman was alone when he found her, he replies that of course she was. Smiling, he asks who she thought he might have seen. Terribly agitated, she soon excuses herself and goes into the foyer. Jamison/ Petofi looks directly into the camera and smiles. David Henesy was the first actor on Dark Shadows to use this technique, back in 1966 when he was playing strange and troubled boy David Collins. He’s been doing it a lot lately, and is still very good at using it to unsettle the audience.

He looks young for 150, but he’s grown quite a bit since 1966. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin comes down the staircase, wearing a tidy new suit. Charity is shocked that he did nothing to help the injured woman; he resumes his menacing tone and demands to know whether she kept her side of the bargain. He eventually deduces that she did not tell what she saw, and allows her to go upstairs to her bedroom. Quentin is usually charming, often funny, and occasionally aligned with good against evil, but even before he became a monster he was established as a homicidal maniac. When we first met Quentin, he was a ghost haunting Collinwood in the late 1960s and he kept killing people there. The first week of our trip back in time to 1897, we saw him trying to strangle his grandmother in her bed. And his sister-in-law turned him into a werewolf as revenge after he murdered his wife Jenny. Since we are focused on the horror of Charity’s situation as her father is pressuring her to marry Quentin, of course his bloodthirstiness is the aspect of his personality we see most clearly today.

Trask returns, carrying the injured woman. Quentin asks if she was conscious. Trask says she is not conscious. Quentin specifies that he wants to know if she has been conscious at any point while with Trask. This arouses Trask’s suspicions; Quentin protests that it is information he will need when he telephones the doctor. Trask says that she was not, and carries her upstairs.

Quentin goes to the drawing room. Jamison/ Petofi is there, and has some business to discuss. Quentin is too unsettled by the fact of the possession to talk candidly. Jamison/ Petofi decides to humor him. “I’ll become that beautiful child you so want to see… Can we play a game, Uncle Quentin?” Quentin is stunned by Jamison/ Petofi’s sudden change of tone and bearing. It is indeed impressive to see David Henesy drop his mimicry of Thayer David as Petofi and resume his usual approach to the role of Jamison. We’d forgotten just how deeply he had come to inhabit that imitation.

Jamison/ Petofi declares that they will have a treasure hunt. He gives Quentin a series of clues in the form of cryptic rhymes. Quentin is completely stumped by all of them. Finally Jamison/ Petofi just points at the desk drawer he wants Quentin to open and tells him there is a document in it that he can use against Trask. Quentin opens the drawer and pulls out heap after heap of paper, then declares “There’s no paper here!”

Quentin is not especially brainy; much of his appeal comes from the joy David Selby, Ph.D., took in playing a character who at no point says or does anything to demonstrate intellectual prowess. But we are not supposed to believe that he is stupid, at least not so stupid that it is plausible that “There’s no paper here!” was the scripted line. Maybe it was a blooper for “There’s no paper like that here!” or “There’s no paper here I haven’t seen before!” or something like that.

A document bearing a wax seal and a couple of signatures materializes on top of the papers Quentin has pulled out of the desk. He reads it, and sees that it is a full confession to the murder of Trask’s first wife, signed by Trask and lawyer Evan Hanley. All Jamison/ Petofi has to say is “It can be very useful, can’t it? Especially since it’s true… Aren’t games fun, Uncle Quentin?” and Quentin catches on that the document gives him power he can use against Trask.

Meanwhile, the injured woman has briefly regained consciousness in the upstairs bedroom where Trask and Charity are attending her. She spoke Quentin’s name, and Trask sent Charity to fetch him. Trask confronts Quentin about this. Quentin says that the woman’s name is Tessie, that he talked to her a couple of times when they ran into each other at the Blue Whale tavern, and that he knows nothing more about her. He admits he didn’t call the police after he called the doctor; he claims he simply forgot, in the confusion of the moment. Trask says that he will go and make the call. In an accusing tone, he asks “Most unfortunate, isn’t it, that you were the one who forgot?” He leaves Quentin alone with Tessie.

Tessie regains consciousness, looks at Quentin, and reacts with dismay. He tells her he didn’t mean to do it. She moans and dies. As she flops over, her right breast comes perilously close to springing out of her décolletage. When he realizes she has died, Quentin says “Tessie!” with a note of exasperation, as if she’s always doing inconvenient things like that. Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud.

Downstairs, we see that Trask did not call the police after all. Charity is doing it from the telephone in the drawing room. Quentin enters through the secret panel behind her. We first saw him use this panel in #685, when it was 1969 and he was a silent but peculiarly corporeal ghost. He let himself into the drawing room and strangled silversmith Ezra Braithwaite, played by Abe Vigoda. A bit of an eldritch moment that the killer of Tessie is also the killer of a character played by the actor who would go on to play Tessio in the 1972 film The Godfather.

In Vigoda’s last scene in that movie, Tessio and Corleone Family consigliere Tom Hagen are at pains to assure each other that Tessio’s impending murder and the events that led up to it were strictly business, and that Tessio and his murderers still have the warmest regards for each other. Quentin’s attempt to deny his guilt to Tessie is of that same sort- he didn’t have any hostility towards her, his nature as a werewolf simply required that he kill the nearest person.

By contrast, Quentin’s interaction with Charity is intensely personal and intensely unpleasant. He takes the telephone out of her hand, something that men often do to women on Dark Shadows when they are trapping them, and moves deep into her personal space as he demands to know why she would want to call the police. She tells him her father ordered her to make the call; he says that Tessie will tell the police nothing now, because she is dead. Charity shouts that he killed Tessie, and that she will tell everything.

Danny Horn devotes much of his post about the episode at his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day to the absurdity of Quentin making a date with Tessie on a night when the Moon was full. In a comment, I pointed out that we have no reason to think he did make a date with her:

I don’t think it’s so hard to explain why Tessie was in the woods at dawn, though it does require a little fanfic.

Charity was in Quentin’s room in 806, inviting him to go for a walk on the beach when he’s busy getting drunk and listening to the same dreary little waltz over and over. To get Tessie into the woods, all we have to do is assume that shortly after that scene Quentin ran out of booze before he was drunk enough to stop caring about the upcoming full moon. Not wanting to deal with the Trasks, he didn’t go to the mansion’s liquor pantry, but staggered down to the Blue Whale.

There, Quentin met Tessie. She was upset with him for missing several dates in the last few days. He can’t very well explain what he’s been doing lately, and his refusal to answer Tessie’s questions angers her. She’s about to give Quentin a piece of her mind when he realizes that it will be dark soon, and rushes from the bar.

Now Tessie is really furious. She follows Quentin to the estate. Once there, she sees him change into the werewolf, and hides in terror for most of the night. Shortly before dawn, she thinks he is gone and leaves her hiding place. The werewolf appears and slashes away at her for a few minutes before changing back into human form and collapsing beside her.

And that’s when Charity finally takes her walk, and finds out.

Comment left 17 November 2020 by “Acilius” on Danny Horn, “Episode 808: Twice Burned,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 18 January 2016

Tessie is played by Deborah Loomis, and is the earliest screen credit on her IMDb page. Her next role listed there was in Hercules in New York, a 1970 film which also featured fellow Dark Shadows day player Erica Fitz Mears, who appeared in #594 and #595 as Leona Eltridge. Neither Miss Loomis nor Mrs Mears stuck with acting after the middle of the 1970s, but the two top billed members of the cast worked steadily for some years after. The first name in the credits was comedian Arnold Stang, who was best known at the time for a series of TV commercials for window screens ending with the tag “Arnold Stang says don’t get stung!” Second billed was Arnold Strong, a bodybuilder from Austria making his acting debut. Under his birth name of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arnold Strong would go on to roles in several later films. I know of no evidence he ever auditioned for a part on Dark Shadows.

Episode 780: Carl was not mad

In yesterday’s episode, inveterate prankster Carl Collins told his brother, the rakishly handsome Quentin, that their distant cousin Barnabas was a vampire. Quentin has problems of his own, and he is counting on Barnabas to help him. So he locked Carl up in Barnabas’ hiding place, expecting that when night came Barnabas would prune one more branch off the Collins family tree.

Today, Quentin finds that Carl has escaped. He goes to Barnabas and tells him what has happened. Carl’s practical jokes annoy Barnabas intensely, and Barnabas has never bothered to conceal his disdain for him. He reacts to Quentin’s news with fury and a lot of orders. When Quentin later finds Barnabas standing by Carl’s corpse in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, he is really torn up about his brother’s death for almost a whole minute.

Quentin mourns for Carl- blink and you’ll miss it. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

A knock comes at the door; it is the oppressively evil Rev’d Gregory Trask. Quentin keeps Trask in the foyer for a bit while Barnabas hides Carl’s body. When Trask forces his way into the drawing room, Barnabas is gone. Carl’s body is cunningly hidden… behind the curtains, propped upright. Of course it falls out almost immediately. Earlier in the episode, Carl took Trask to Barnabas’ hiding place, and we saw that Barnabas had single-handedly lugged his coffin and the structure on which it rests some distance away. If he is strong enough to do that, surely he could have tossed Carl’s body out the window. And regular viewers know that there is a secret panel in this room, of which Barnabas has repeatedly shown that he is well aware. They would probably have expected him to hide the body there. That he just stashes it behind the curtains where it is certain to come into Trask’s view suggests that he isn’t even trying to get away with this particular murder.

Closing Miscellany

John Karlen is breathing pretty deeply during Carl’s big closeup as a corpse. It’s really confusing, I thought they were telling us he wasn’t dead yet.

I don’t know what the writers planned for Carl in the flimsies they sketched out six months before this episode was made, though there is so little room for him in subsequent plot-lines that I suspect he was supposed to die at about this point in the story. Still, his death was accelerated because Karlen had other things to do. He won’t be back on the show until #956, in February of next year.

The creaky little waltz that Quentin listens to obsessively was released as a single in June of 1969 and would hit #13 on the Billboard Hot 100 in August. Regular viewers may be sick of it already, and the characters certainly wish Quentin would get another record. It’s Trask’s turn to complain about it today, giving him something in common with Barnabas.

Trask wears a cross which he uses as a weapon against Barnabas. The show is oddly inconsistent about the effect of the cross on vampires. We’ve seen other characters use crosses against them, and at one point it was said that a cross inside the lid of Barnabas’ coffin immobilized him. But his hiding place is in the middle of a cemetery full of grave markers in the shape of huge crosses, and we see several of them today. Barnabas just walks right past those with no problem. You might think that since the show was made in the USA, where sincerity is so highly regarded, that the cross might be effective against him only if it is wielded by the pure of heart. But Trask is every bit as evil as are Barnabas and Quentin, and it works for him. It’s a puzzlement.

In a long comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, I responded to a discussion about whether there is a point in thinking of Barnabas as someone possessed by demons:

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

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

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

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

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

Comment left 10 November 2020 by “Acilius” on “Episode 780: The Establishment Vampire,” posted 2 December 2015 by Danny Horn at Dark Shadows Every Day

Episode 756: A bizarre activity for a beautiful woman

Undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins realizes that Barnabas Collins is a vampire, and that when he was alive he was the “strange, dreamy boy with sad eyes” she was fond of in the 1760s, when she was married to his uncle. Laura and Barnabas confront each other in a graveyard at the beginning of the episode; she tells him he is not human. He passes up the opportunity to reply “So few people are, these days.” At the end of the episode, Laura and her witless henchman Dirk let themselves into Barnabas’ house after dawn. She has a mallet and stake, he has a pistol to ensure no one interferes.

It means something to longtime viewers that we end today with Laura poised to destroy Barnabas. It was Laura who cleared the way for Barnabas’ first introduction. She was the show’s first supernatural menace when she was on from December 1966 to March 1967, and her story was structured very much like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That was successful enough that the following month they introduced Barnabas as Dracula Mark II. That Laura knew Barnabas in the 1760s when she was already what she is and he was still a boy also nods to this history.

Laura went up in smoke in March 1967, when the show took place in a contemporary setting, and reappeared in April 1969, when it was a costume drama set in 1897. In the interval, Dark Shadows changed from a slow-paced, moody Gothic drama meant for an audience largely consisting of people who were fans of Joan Bennett’s in the 1930’s to a slam-bang supernatural thriller with a huge following among preteens. In her first tour as Laura, Diana Millay could focus on her strengths in dry comedy and subtle psychological drama. This time around, she recognizes the new demographic and plays Laura like a villain on Batman. At times it seems odd that Dirk isn’t wearing a jumpsuit with his name stenciled on it.

Perhaps when she hits the stake with the mallet, the word “Whack!” will be printed in a bubble on the screen. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, Barnabas materializes inside a classroom at a school where Laura’s nine-year old daughter Nora is alone. Nora tells Barnabas that she is not happy at the school and that she and her twelve year old brother Jamison want to leave with their mother. Barnabas tells her to “Look into my eyes!” and he puts the zap on her. When he is done, he tells her that their conversation will be their secret. She smiles, looks directly into the camera, and tells the audience “I like secrets!” Denise Nickerson had a talent for delivering lines to the camera, and ever since she joined the show in November 1968 they’ve had her do that quite often. Rather too often, I’m sorry to say- it can chill the audience to see a character who is so disconnected from everyone else that they just start talking to us if the effect is used sparingly, but they have her do it so frequently that it has lost its force by now.

Nora and Jamison’s school is a miserable place, less a center of learning than a dungeon where the sadistic Rev’d Gregory Trask gleefully inflicts unwarranted and cruel punishments on both children and teachers. Trask’s daughter Charity is a member of the faculty, and since #727 she has also been Barnabas’ blood thrall. In #753, we saw Charity acting as her father’s second in command at the school, enforcing a particularly vicious sanction against Jamison. It did not then seem that her subjection to Barnabas had modified her role in her father’s operation at all.

When Charity enters and finds Barnabas with Nora, her two enslavements come into conflict. Barnabas tells her that Laura will be coming to the school to see Nora soon, and orders her to let her in. Charity is very confused and starts talking about her father and his rules. Barnabas bites her, leaving her more tranquil but quite weak.

Laura knocks on the door. Charity finds that Barnabas has vanished, and lets her in. She demands to see Nora, saying that she will take her away. Charity says that no relatives are allowed to visit the children at night, and that she will need permission from others to allow Laura to take Nora. Laura insists, and eventually Charity complies. She sends Nora down, and brings her packed suitcase. But Nora has told her mother that she does not want to go. We saw in 1967 that Laura’s children must go with her willingly if she is to perform her evil mission, and so she has to yield. She looks at the collar Charity has drawn up to cover her neck, and says that she will not tell her father that two of Nora’s relatives have visited her tonight.

Some of the actors have trouble with the names “Laura” and “Nora” today. It really was a mistake to give Nickerson’s character a name that rhymes with “Laura.” In #354, set in 1967, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard told her daughter Carolyn that “Aunt Catherine” would be overjoyed to host her in her home in Boston, and that this never-before mentioned aunt gives wonderful parties attended by men Carolyn’s own age. Catherine cannot have been Elizabeth’s sister or a member of Carolyn’s father’s family; she must be Elizabeth’s own aunt. Nora is the only one of Elizabeth’s aunts we ever hear about, and she would have been 79 in 1967. As a grande dame of Boston society, she might still have been giving big parties featuring people of all ages, and so naming the character “Catherine” would have closed that loop.

It would also have opened the door for another story to add some action to the rather slow period leading up to the 1897 flashback. Aunt Catherine could have come to Collinwood from Boston in 1969 and met the evil ghost of the roguish Quentin Collins. Recognizing her favorite uncle but knowing that he came to a dark and mysterious end, that would have set up a confrontation that might have led to an enigmatic conclusion. Quentin killed other adults who knew about him, but his relationship with Catherine would have made it maladroit to bring their encounter to so straightforward a climax. Better to have her disappear inexplicably. That disappearance would be followed by signs that the disturbances in the house had suddenly grown far more dangerous. We would wonder if Catherine had joined with Quentin as another evil spirit, or if the two of them were doing battle in some unseen realm and inflicting collateral damage in the world of the living.

I have an idea who they should have cast as Aunt Catherine. Isabella Hoopes played dying matriarch Edith Collins at the beginning of the 1897 segment, and she was great fun. Had we been introduced to Hoopes as the spry and sophisticated Aunt Catherine, her turn as Edith would have been even richer. When Quentin chokes and threatens to kill Edith, we would try to read their interaction as a clue to what happened between him and Catherine before her disappearance. When Edith haunts Quentin after her death, we would look for clues as to what happened to Catherine after her disappearance. And of course Nickerson’s role as Catherine’s younger self would have gained another dimension, not only as we watch her interactions with Quentin, but also as we compare her personality at the age of nine to that of the octogenarian we had met previously.

I even have some dialogue Catherine could have exchanged with the Collinses of 1969:

Catherine: Roger, I hear you have married again. Will you present me to your wife this time? I must admit I took it rather personally that I could never meet Laura.

Roger: I’m sorry, Aunt Catherine. Cassandra and I have already gone our separate ways.

Catherine: Oh, I’m the one who should be sorry- it was tactless of me not to know… We Collinses have never have had much luck in marriage, have we?

Elizabeth: You and Uncle Ambrose were happy.

Catherine: Yes. Happy… But there wasn’t much luck to that. After all, he was my fourth husband and I was his third wife. We simply applied the lessons of experience.

Carolyn: So there is hope. After your disappointments, you found your grand passion.

Catherine (a look of frank disbelief on her face): Not exactly. (Pause.) Carolyn, your mother told me some time ago you were the one involved in a grand passion. His name is- what- Bud?

Carolyn: Buzz?

Catherine: Yes, Buzz. I should have remembered that, I once knew a Navy flyer who went by that name. If your Uncle Roger won’t be introducing me to anyone, will you at least present me to Buzz?

Carolyn: Oh, it ended between me and Buzz some time back. He’s left town.

Catherine: Ah, too bad. I’d have liked to meet another Buzz, the one I knew was so elegant.

Elizabeth: This one was hardly elegant. He rode a motorcycle, and that was his whole life. He always wore leather clothing and dark glasses, with a long beard and a ragged mop of hair. You never saw the like, Aunt Catherine.

Catherine: On the contrary, I have seen the like every often. Just such men make up your cousin William’s preferred milieu.

Carolyn (laughing): I once told mother I was going to marry Buzz, but that was an empty threat. Buzz isn’t the sort of man who really wants a wife.

Catherine: Neither is William.

(Elizabeth, Roger, and Carolyn fall silent. After a moment, they all start talking at once.)

Elizabeth: Have you seen-

Roger: How is old Mr-

Carolyn: Was your trip-

(They fall silent again. Another awkward pause ensues.)

Elizabeth: Do you know that there is another Collins at Collinwood?

Catherine: Oh?

Elizabeth: Yes, a distant cousin of ours, from England. His name is Barnabas Collins.

Catherine (furrows her brow): Barnabas Collins? Named for the man in the foyer?

Elizabeth: Yes, the portrait is of his ancestor.

Catherine: How odd. When I was a girl, I asked the old people around here about all of the portraits. They were happy to go on at length about all the others, but they were always tongue-tied when we got to that one. Left me with the impression there was something exceptionally sinister about it, or about the man. Of course that only piqued my curiosity.

Carolyn (suddenly defensive): There is certainly nothing sinister about our Barnabas!

Catherine: Nothing sinister? Are you sure he is a Collins?

(Roger and Elizabeth chuckle, Carolyn flushes.)

Elizabeth: Oh, he is a Collins, all right. He’s quite an expert on the family’s past. I’m sure the two of you would have a great deal to talk about.

Catherine: I’m sure. But I would rather choose another topic. At my age I can’t forget that I will soon be part of the past. I would like to keep my eyes on the future while I still have one.

This scene would have left longtime viewers with some suspense-generating questions. Why did Roger’s wife Laura go out of her way to avoid Catherine? Who were the “old people” at Collinwood in Catherine’s childhood? What did they know about Barnabas? Further, Laura and Buzz were so emblematic of two of the early phases of Dark Shadows that involving Catherine in a conversation referring to both of them would promise that she will be woven in with the whole narrative structure of the show.

Moreover, seeing a Collins who had spent decades far from Collinwood might give us a fresh perspective on the main characters. We see only those whose minds and hearts have been deformed by the many curses that loom over the estate. Meeting one who has been outside their influence for so long would suggest what it has cost the others to stay on the estate. We might then feel anew the tragedy that we have been taking for granted.

Episode 710: The raven and the viper and all the dark creatures

Libertine Quentin Collins has stolen his late grandmother Edith’s will, intending to forge a substitute that will give him control of her vast estate. His distant cousin, the recently arrived and thoroughly mysterious Barnabas, has warned Quentin that Edith’s ghost will haunt him if he persists in this plan. Quentin hears a loud pounding emanating from the walls of the great house of Collinwood. He goes to the study, where Edith lies in her coffin. He sees her there, grinning at him. Quentin returns to his room; the still-grinning Edith sashays in and taunts him. He tells her she is dead; this does not seem to bother her. She just keeps on grinning.

Edith may be dead, but she is clearly having a blast. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.

Quentin strangles Edith. She falls into an armchair in his room, unmoving but still grinning. He buries her somewhere on the grounds of the estate; her hand sticks up from the earth. He wakes up.

Quentin’s friend, unethical lawyer Evan Hanley, comes calling. Evan asks Quentin to give him the will so he can take it to a forger of his acquaintance. Quentin tells Evan about the dream, and how shaken he is. He also tells him about Barnabas, and his concern that Barnabas is a formidable enemy who may have uncanny powers. When Evan tries to dismiss Quentin’s worries, Quentin responds that he is the last person who should make light of the supernatural. When Quentin speaks of Evan’s “devil-callings,” we learn that the clandestine “meetings” they spoke of the other day are Satanist ceremonies. Evan agrees to meet Quentin at 8:00 that night in the groundskeeper’s cottage on the estate to summon one of the spiritual forces of darkness to fight Barnabas.

Returning viewers know that Quentin is right to fear Barnabas’ connections to the supernatural. Barnabas is a vampire, and his powers include the ability to send hallucinations to torment people with guilty consciences. He is also a time-traveler, who has come to 1897 from 1969 on a mission to prevent Quentin from becoming a ghost who will drive the Collins family of that year out of the great house and plague strange and troubled boy David Collins to the point of death.

First time viewers will not learn that today; aside from the opening voiceover, this episode tells us nothing about Barnabas. It does tell us something about Quentin and Evan. They are super-racist against Romani and Sinti people.

Evan has decided to hire Sandor Rákóczi to forge the will. Sandor and his wife Magda have been staying at the Old House on the estate for some time as Edith’s guests. Quentin’s brother Edward and sister Judith are offended by the presence of these “gypsies” in their midst. Unknown to Evan and Quentin, and unmentioned in today’s episode, Barnabas has bitten Sandor, enslaving him. Presumably Sandor has no secrets from Barnabas, making him a bad choice to be Quentin and Evan’s henchman.

Three times today, Evan addresses Sandor as “Gypsy.” When he is putting it to him that he wants him to forge the will, he barks at him with “Now, one moment, Gypsy.” He insists Sandor fix his price in advance. When Sandor tells Evan he is sad that he does not trust him, he replies “Well, then, be sad, Gypsy, but give me your price, now!” Later, Sandor will express curiosity about Quentin and Evan’s plans, to which Evan will reply “Well, don’t be curious, Gypsy, just do as you’re told.”

Evan told Quentin that the “devil-calling” at the cottage should involve twelve year old Jamison Collins as a “sacrificial lamb.” Quentin sincerely cares about his nephew Jamison, and he protests that he won’t do anything to hurt him. Evan assures him that Jamison will simply be a symbol of the innocence that their dark lord exists to despoil and that the boy himself will not be harmed. When Quentin is talking Jamison into joining him and Evan for a secret meeting that night, he tells him they will look into the future. Jamison asks”How, with a crystal ball?” Quentin replies “No, of course not. That kind of thing is for gypsies. It’s not for men, like you and me.” Scripted television in the US in the 1960s rarely gave such flagrantly racist remarks to recurring characters, not only because the audience included members of minority groups, but also because they are so unattractive that they limit the utility of the characters who make them. In this case, Quentin and Evan are already in league with the Devil, and Quentin is on track to die soon and become a ghost. So we know that they are due for a comeuppance. Moreover, their prejudices may lead them to underestimate Sandor, both on his own account and as a tool of Barnabas, so it is useful to the plot that they are in the grip of such ugly attitudes.

Sandor is in the cottage, preparing to forge a new will for Edith, when Jamison drops in. Jamison does not see what he is doing. He and Sandor spend a couple of minutes sparring verbally. Sandor ends the match when he points out to Jamison that it is getting dark. The boy looks alarmed and runs home while Sandor laughs.

In #701, Sandor and Magda mentioned that the Collinses were afraid of the night. Shortly after, they found out about Barnabas, and learned that they had good reason to be. But Sandor can still laugh when he sees that a boy as old as Jamison runs away at the news that the sun is setting.

Sandor is still in the cottage when Quentin brings Jamison by. Evidently Evan plans to let Sandor participate in the ceremony. Regular viewers will remember that in 1969 the first place Quentin manifested himself outside the little room in the great house where David and his friend Amy discovered him was in the cottage, and that he showed considerable power there. That he and Evan have their Satanic “meetings” in the cottage suggests that the evil he did in 1969 has its roots in what he did during them.

Evan directs Jamison to stare into the fire burning in the hearth. This will ring another bell for longtime viewers. Jamison is played by David Henesy, as is David Collins. From December 1966 through March 1967, David Collins’ mother Laura Murdoch Collins lived in the cottage. She was an undead blonde fire witch, and her plan was to lure David to join her in a fiery death. She would rise from the dead as a humanoid Phoenix, as she had done at least twice before. On each of those previous occasions, she went into the flames with a son named David; the Davids did not rise again, as becomes clear when one of them is available to speak in a séance in #186. Laura often urged David to join her in her favorite pastime, staring into fire. So when Evan urges Jamison to do the same, we wonder if Jamison, too, is in danger of being consumed by its fascination.

As the ceremony goes on, Jamison becomes alarmed. He runs out, and Evan orders Sandor to follow him. Quentin, too, runs to the door and protests that they have gone too far. He points to the flames, in which the likeness of a skull wearing a wig takes shape. We may wonder if more will be added to the skull, perhaps so much as to make up a whole woman, and if this woman will be someone we have met before.

Edith’s role in Quentin’s dream unfortunately marks Isabella Hoopes’ final appearance on Dark Shadows. She was just terrific. I wish they had done a parallel time story set around the period of the Civil War in which Hoopes played an aged Sarah Collins. Her nose, chin, and cheekbones resembled those of Sharon Smyth sufficiently that you can imagine an elderly Sarah looking like her, and she had a playfulness that would make longtime viewers remember the nine year old ghost we met in June 1967.

Episode 648: Her name is Madame

This is the second of three episodes featuring Cavada Humphrey as Madame Janet Findley, a medium called in to investigate the strange goings-on at the great house of Collinwood. Humphrey’s performance so utterly dominates the segment, and I have so little to add to what I said about her style in yesterday’s post, that all I can do is make a series of more or less miscellaneous observations about its other aspects.

Today Madame Findley meets children David Collins and Amy Jennings. Amy and David are coming under the influence of evil spirit Quentin Collins. She questions them in the drawing room, and finds a hidden panel that leads to the long-abandoned west wing of the house. Over the children’s objections, she enters the secret passage. As soon as she is in, they hurriedly close the panel, locking her in. Evidently their objections were part of a ruse designed to lead her to Quentin’s stronghold. All too often on Dark Shadows, the audience knows too much about what characters are trying to do. This scene stands out, because they really do keep us guessing whether the children want Madame Findley to go into the secret passage. We don’t really know what their goals are until we see them shut her in.

Madame Findley goes into the darkness. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Earlier in the episode, Amy’s brother Chris dropped in. He was very eager to see permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. Amy mentioned to Chris that there was another visitor in the house. When Chris asked who it was, Amy replied, “Her name is Madame- Madame something- at least that’s what they call her.”

I heard these lines in the voice of T. S. Eliot. The rhythm is reminiscent of a section of his poem The Waste Land, which in 1968 was an extremely familiar text to people with literary ambitions:

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.

It was indeed a mysterious Tarot card that prompted matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard to call for help, and that call brought Madame Findley to the house. The card she interprets is the Tower of Destruction, which unlike the cards Eliot’s Madame Sostris describes actually appears in existing Tarot decks. She doesn’t have a cold, and she isn’t in the business of selling horoscopes door to door. On the contrary, as Humphrey plays her she is a dazzling presence.

Liz did not call Madame Findley directly. She telephoned occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes, who introduced her to La Findley. At first sight, Stokes appears to be a stuffy academic with an impossible Anglophile manner, but as we get to know him he turns out to be very much at home in the bizarre netherworld in which the show takes place, so much so that his supernatural adversaries fear that he may have powers surpassing theirs. T(homas) St(earn)s Eliot was so much like T(imothy) Eliot St(oke)s in the first impression he made, so highly regarded by the sort of people who wrote Dark Shadows, and so generally famous in the 1960s that it is very likely that Stokes’ name was at least partly inspired by him.

It’s true that Madame Findley’s name lacks the exotic glamour Eliot gave his character. I suppose if you have all of Europe to choose from, you can take your stray Tarot cards to someone named “Madame Sosostris,” but if you are limited to central Maine, you have to settle for “Janet Findley.”

I made a remark about Madame Findley’s name in the comments on Danny Horn’s post about episode #647 on his great Dark Shadows Every Day:

It’s just delightful that they introduce an otherworldly, mystical character, played with an actress who brings a genuinely eerie note to her performance, and her name is… “Janet Findley.” It’s like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when they meet the wizard who is known as “Tim.”

I wonder if there’s any connection between the name “Janet Findley” and the name “Janet Fisher,” whom Carolyn mentioned as a friend once of twice in the first season. Seems like a lot of Janet Fs. For that matter, I wonder if there’s a connection between Tim the Wizard from Monty Python and Tim(othy Eliot) Stokes, who a couple of episodes back had to tell Vicki that he isn’t a wizard.

–Comment left by Acilius, 8 October 2020, on Danny Horn, “Episode 647: The Wire,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 12 May 2015

That remark drew a response from a commenter who posts as “Mary”:

Findley is a popular name on Dark Shadows. In addition to Janet, Margaret Findley is one of the ghostly widows, Thomas Findley is one of Jeb’s zombies in the Leviathan storyline and Findley’s cove is the location of Carolyn’s cottage in 1995.
Comment left by “Mary,” 18 February 2021, on Danny Horn, “Episode 647: The Wire,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 12 May 2015

When Madame Findley asks about the closed-off parts of the house, Liz tells her about both the west wing and an east wing. The phrase “east wing” had come up a couple of times in the first year of the show, but it always seemed to be either a case of the writers not having made up their minds which side of the house the deserted wing was on or a slip of the tongue by the actors. This is the first time the show makes it clear that the house really does have two deserted wings.

Humphrey was too perfect for Dark Shadows to play only one role. In a comment on Danny’s post about this episode, I indulged in a little fanfic about another part that would have been right for her:

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

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

Comment left by Acilius, 8 October 2020, on Danny Horn, “Episode 648: Astral Disturbances,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 14 May 2015.

I’m very fond of Sharon Smyth, and Sarah’s last appearance in the 1795 segment was so poignant it would have been a substantial loss for her not to have been in it. On the other hand, she had so much less to do when she was playing a living being than she did in the preceding months when Sarah was a ghost, and so much of what she did get to do was outside her rather sharply limited range, that it is not difficult to imagine a different kind of Sarah making the eighteenth century insert a more compelling drama.

Episode 622: A position to help each other

Well-meaning governess Vicki is on the terrace of the great estate of Collinwood. A man known variously as Peter and Jeff keeps clutching at Vicki’s arms so sharply that her biceps pulse, then holds her with one hand and paws her with the other as she stands rigidly still. First time viewers, knowing only that Dark Shadows features stories of monsters and crime, would think that the man had some power over the woman and that they were seeing him abuse that power. They would be right. Unfortunately, the man and woman are not Peter/ Jeff and Vicki, but actors Roger Davis and Alexandra Moltke Isles. Vicki is supposed to be in love with Peter/ Jeff and reluctant to part from him, but the instant she has spoken her last line she turns her face from him and runs away, without the slightest attempt to suggest that she wants to linger.

After Vicki escapes from Peter/ Jeff’s repellent attentions, a woman named Eve emerges from the bushes. Peter/ Jeff is angry with her. He grabs her roughly and throws her out of the frame. Peter/ Jeff then stalks off. Eve comes back into the frame. It’s a relief to see her upright and well-put-together- Mr Davis shoved Marie Wallace so hard she had to struggle to right herself as she spun out of view. It looked like she might have slammed her head against the floor.

Marie Wallace using her arm to regain her balance and keep from sustaining a serious injury.

In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Marc Masse reports what happened when this scene came up at a panel discussion at a Dark Shadows convention many years later:

This was the episode where Grabby Davis got so overly excited in his scene with Marie Wallace on the terrace that he grabbed her by the arms and threw her completely out of frame. You see her struggling to remain on her feet as she stumbles off to the right. Some 20 years later at a fan convention (it’s in Dark Shadows 25th Anniversary Special from the disc set that has the last episode of the series), Marie Wallace brought this up as Roger Davis was telling the audience of how they (or rather he) would cut up and laugh and have fun while they were making the episode, and of how they would just laugh off their flubs. Wallace then broke in to remind Davis of episode 622 as she recalled, “Hey, Roger? I didn’t laugh when you threw me out of frame in that scene, on camera. Remember that? Several times?” She explained to the audience how all during dress rehearsal he’d never touch her and then when he’d done it on camera he’d come up to her and apologize profusely, but Wallace told him then and there at the convention that she never believed him.
Marc Masse, as “Prisoner of the Night,” in a comment left 8 April 2015 on “Episode 622: Heated Conversations on Somebody Else’s Lawn,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 8 April 2015.

In a response to another post of Danny’s, Marc added that in the same video you can see actress Donna Wandrey’s appalled reaction to Mr Davis’ statement, and her increasingly visible disdain for him as Miss Wallace makes her case against him.

After Peter/ Jeff is gone, another visitor comes and addresses Eve by name. She is Angelique. Angelique is not a Roger Davis character, she is merely a vampire, so everyone can relax.

Regular viewers have been wondering what would happen when Angelique shared a scene with Eve. Marie Wallace’s style as Eve relies on many of the same techniques Lara Parker uses as Angelique. Both use an elevated style with many catches of breath, changes of volume in mid-sentence, and striking of oratorical poses. Each was capable of making this exaggerated method work, but no one could conceal its profound silliness, and a scene consisting of two characters both using it would be too ridiculous even to make a good joke in a cartoon. What actually happens is that Parker demonstrates the quietest possible version of the style, while Miss Wallace shows a more typically brassy version. Recognizing their approaches as two poles of the same axis, we are not only interested in their encounter, but also in what they show us about the craft of acting.

Angelique persuades Eve to join her in an alliance against warlock Nicholas. This might be an exciting development. Nicholas is the show’s chief villain at the moment, and between them Angelique and Eve just might be able to bring him down. It is also the first alliance we have seen take shape in a long time. Many characters have tried to control other characters, to deceive them, to imprison them, to enslave them, to brain-wash them. But the only group working towards a common end is made up of old world gentleman Barnabas, mad scientist Julia, occult expert Stokes, and servant Willie. That team formed long ago, has not managed to get anywhere lately, and is, at the moment, immobilized by Barnabas’ absence. Yesterday Julia tried to form an alliance with Nicholas against Angelique, but at the last minute his inability to talk with her forthrightly aborted that effort. So it is refreshing to see that the show is still capable of imagining a new alliance.

Danny’s post about this one is one of his very best, a composition in free verse weaving together quotes from the dialogue with retellings of the overarching narrative with meditations on a number of topics that the episode touches on. If you are a Dark Shadows fan and haven’t read Dark Shadows Every Day, this is a fine post to start with. It’s like a song- you may not understand all the lyrics the first time you hear it, but the sound of it will carry you along.

The comments below it include some great stuff too. I’ve already mentioned Marc Masse’s remark about Marie Wallace’s confrontation with Roger Davis. There are also two fanfic ideas about how the show might have resolved the question of who Vicki’s parents were. Someone posting under the name “William” had this plausible one:

My own theory: Victoria the daughter of Jamison Collins and Betty Hanscomb. So she’s Roger and Liz’s half-sister. Liz knows and Roger doesn’t.

Jamison aggressively seduces Betty, on whom Roger had teenage crush. He makes her pregnant and then coldly casts her out. A pregnant Betty shows up at Collinwood and tells Liz and Roger about what happened.

Roger confronts his father in a fit of rage in the Tower Room during one of Collinwood’s famous storms.

Jamison Collins has a heart attack during the confrontation, and Roger leaves him in the room to die. Roger staggers out, and Liz finds her father dead.

Roger has a complete breakdown and is sent to Windcliff, where Dr. Julius Hoffman, uncle of Julia Hoffman, wipes out his memory of that night in the summer of 1946.

Liz, with the help of new guy in town Paul Stoddard, pays off Betty Hanscomb to leave town and arranges for her half-sister to be raised at the foundling home in New York. Grateful to Paul for his help, Liz starts to fall for his charms …

(And this is why Liz is so fond of Victoria, but not like she is with Carolyn. And this is why she refuses to tell Roger anything about why she brought Victoria back).

–“William,” in a comment left 22 August 2016 on “Episode 622: Heated Conversations on Somebody Else’s Lawn,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 8 April 2015.

That has a lot of potential. Liz doesn’t seem ever to have loved Paul, she did marry him shortly after her father’s death, and Roger’s attitude towards Vicki in the first months of the show was a strange mixture of extreme hostility and obvious attraction. “William’s” story would account for all of those things. But it doesn’t hold a pale blue candle to this theory posted by Pedro Cabezuelo:

Everybody, we’re missing the obvious! Vicki IS Betty Hanscombe!!!!! Somehow she managed to time travel AGAIN and ended up in Collinsport circa the 1940s and adopted the Betty Hanscombe identity, working her way as a servant at Collinwood. She had an affair with Paul Stoddard, gave birth to herself (at which point the adult Vicki ceased to exist) and THAT’S what caused all the irreperable harm to the time stream/parallel time/anything else you want to blame on Vicki.
Pedro Cabezuelo, in a comment left 10 April 2015 on “Episode 622: Heated Conversations on Somebody Else’s Lawn, Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 8 April 2015.

I have my own fanfic idea about Vicki’s origin. I’ve shared it here before, and will again. But Pedro’s is so good I want it to be the last word today.