The sun has set, and vampire Barnabas Collins is opening the lid of his coffin in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Suddenly a cross is thrust in his face. He recoils from it, crying in pain and becoming immobile. The cross is wielded by the sheriff of Collinsport, who announces “I know all about you, Barnabas Collins!”
Before the sheriff can take matters any further, a teenage girl appears nearby. Shocked to see her, he reels away from the coffin. He jabbers at her, saying that he recognizes her and pleading with her not to come closer. Barnabas grabs him from behind and strangles him to death.
Barnabas didn’t have anything against the sheriff, but can’t deny that it feels good to use the old strangling muscles again. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Barnabas goes upstairs and finds his best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. He tells Julia that the sheriff’s gun was loaded with silver bullets, and that only the manifestation of the ghost of Carrie prevented his destruction. The police know about him, and more officers will be coming any time. Julia admits that she told the sheriff about Barnabas. Shocked, he says “You betrayed me?” He has said these words many times, always as a prelude to extreme violence. Julia braces herself, expecting the same. But to her amazement, Barnabas is gentle and understanding. He realizes she is under the sway of an evil ghost named Gerard. She says that she will betray Barnabas again and again, and urges him to leave without her. He says he will never do that. She embraces him, weeping, and he comforts her. For most people, a day that begins with the murder of a policeman is a day when nothing goes well, but Barnabas is not like most people. This is far and away the most mature behavior we have ever seen on his part.
The year is 1995; Barnabas and Julia have come unstuck in time and found themselves at Collinwood 25 years after a mysterious disaster wrecked the great house on the estate, ruined its inhabitants, and left Gerard in charge. They believe they can travel back to 1970 and prevent the disaster from ever occurring, if only they can find out what it was. Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn left him a note yesterday consisting of six cryptic phrases which he took to be clues, but Gerard killed Carolyn before Barnabas could ask her to explain them.
Barnabas has brought occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes to the Old House. We find Stokes exclaiming to Barnabas “You killed the sheriff?” Barnabas confirms, “Yes, I killed him.” Stokes replies, “Everyone’s going mad. It’s the effect of this place. I’m not surprised at your terrible story. Horrified, not surprised.” One wonders what the story was that Julia and Barnabas told. Stokes’ role in the parts of the show set in contemporary times was always limited, because he is too decent and law-abiding to be a party to the continued existence of a vampire. He could never be allowed to learn the truth about Barnabas. He stays in the room, chatting amiably with Barnabas and Julia, so clearly they haven’t told him now, either. Perhaps they just told him that the sheriff was going to shoot Barnabas, and let him assume that the reason was that Gerard was making him do it.
Be that as it may, Stokes is still aware of the situation. “Do you realize that I will be implicated in all this if the police come here?” he asks. They say that they do, but that they desperately need him to make a third for a séance. He dismisses as hopelessly naive the idea that Gerard would allow a séance to succeed, but Barnabas says that Gerard may not have the power to prevent Carolyn’s spirit coming through and telling them what her note meant. The idea of one spirit trying to block another from emerging out of the supernatural back-world and speaking at a séance harks back to the very first séance on Dark Shadows, in #170 and #171, when undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins used her powers to impede the spirit of the gracious Josette from warning the company about her. Stokes gives in and agrees to participate; Julia, self-conscious because of her compromised position, is reluctant, but Barnabas proclaims that if Carolyn is to speak it will be through her.*
The séance begins. Julia goes into the trance, and starts speaking in what appears to be Carolyn’s voice. If this is Grayson Hall’s Nancy Barrett imitation, it is terrible. Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud at it. But the voice does not give any useful information, and Julia is under Gerard’s power, so it is also possible she is faking the trance to throw Barnabas off. In that case, it is Julia’s Carolyn imitation, and it reminds us of the ups and downs in the relationship between those two characters.
When the séance is over, Stokes says he feels a presence. He rises from the table, drifts towards the window, and sees Gerard watching him from outside. Gerard touches the pane. Stokes staggers back, descends into a chair, and becomes still. Barnabas finds that he is dead. He looks up and realizes that Julia has fled the house.
Julia has gone to the great house. She is in a mysterious playroom with Gerard. Gerard gives her a dagger. She asks if she “must.” She is reluctant, but finally works herself up to joy as she says that she always knew it would come to this, that now she will be with Gerard as he wants her. She lifts the dagger to stab herself in the heart.
Barnabas enters. He confronts Gerard. As the two beings from beyond the grave stare each other down, Julia drops the dagger. Barnabas tells Gerard he cannot stop them leaving. Gerard looks offended at this. He touches Julia, who collapses. She is not dead, but she and Barnabas fear she is dying. Gerard leaves the room and takes his time locking the door from the outside.
Carrie’s ghost materializes to Julia and Barnabas. She beckons to them, then walks out through the wall. They stare at the wall, and a door appears. They pass through the door, and find themselves on a staircase. They follow the staircase, and come to another door. They exit in the same corridor outside the playroom; they have gone in a circle. In space, anyway- the time appears to be different. The corridor is in severe decay in 1995, but is in good repair now. And they see a girl who looks exactly like Carrie, but is alive. She asks them who they are.
This is the final episode set in 1995. It is also the last we will see of Don Crabtree. Previous sheriffs of Collinsport have been ridiculously ineffective. Crabtree’s sheriff doesn’t chalk up many successes either, but no one else meets with anything but failure in these two weeks. Every death and defeat we see reinforces the sense that the evil which Gerard represents is overwhelming. As the penultimate victim of the 1995 curse, the sheriff is second only to Stokes as someone who would have been able to make a positive difference, if anyone could have, and Crabtree makes us believe that he belongs in that position.
*In the main continuity of Dark Shadows, spirits at séances always speak through a medium of the same sex as themselves. In the séance in #990, when the show was set in a mirror universe, the spirit chose a medium of the opposite sex.
Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have come unstuck in time and found themselves in 1995, 25 years ahead of their proper period. The great house on the estate of Collinwood is in ruins. Some of the people they knew are missing, some are dead, and the rest are determined not to help them find out what happened when disaster struck in 1970.
In his post about the episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn writes that “if this is July 1995, then Barnabas and Julia are on completely the wrong track. They want to know where Elizabeth and Roger and Maggie are, and the answer is obvious — they’re watching the O.J. trial. Where else would they be?”
Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn owns Collinwood now, and she doesn’t have cable. So she is in the great house, a demon-haunted wreck which most people avoid. Julia and Barnabas have followed her there. They hear Carolyn talking and laughing inside an upstairs room that didn’t exist in 1970. They let themselves in. Unlike the rest of the great house and every other structure on the estate, the room is in perfect repair, well-lit and full of luxury items. Carolyn has repeatedly told Barnabas and Julia to stay off her property, even sending the sheriff to arrest them on one of their previous trespassing expeditions to the great house, and she is outraged at this latest intrusion. She demands how dare they follow her into the room, and they respond by praising themselves for their good intentions.
Julia and Barnabas finally leave the room, and Carolyn relaxes. She turns and starts talking to someone who, to her surprise, is not there. She is all the more furious that Barnabas and Julia have driven this person away.
Not content with one home invasion, Julia and Barnabas go to the apartment of their former friend Timothy Eliot Stokes. Before they pushed past him into his parlor, Stokes had been reading a letter from a psychiatric facility where Barnabas and Carolyn’s distant cousin Quentin is a patient. His interior monologue read the part to us about Quentin having taken a turn for the worse. While Barnabas hectors Stokes, Julia leans way down and reads the letter. It turns out Quentin has escaped from the facility. At length, Stokes tells them that he was out of town when the disaster occurred in 1970 and that he doesn’t know much about it. He agrees to help them.
Later in the episode, two scenes take place between Stokes and Carolyn. Carolyn enters Stokes’ apartment and reproves him for collaborating with the enemy. She laments that Julia and Barnabas ruined the birthday party, and that there won’t be another birthday party for a year. He has no idea what she is talking about and tries to reason with her. He finally takes her home. These, like every scene with Carolyn in the 1995 segment, are spectacularly good. Nancy Barrett is an excellent actress, Dark Shadows suited her strengths perfectly, and crazy lady Carolyn Fredericks was as good a part as any performer could wish for. Thayer David was terrific also, and the two of them are unforgettable together today.
Barnabas and Julia return to the playroom, since they haven’t been arrested yet tonight. They find a brand new birthday card addressed to “Tad” and signed “Carrie.” Barnabas has never heard those names in connection with Collinwood and wonder who they could be.
Barnabas says that he wants to question Quentin. Julia responds “Barnabas, If Quentin has been in a mental institution, he can’t help us.” It’s true that it takes special training and considerable experience to gain useful information by questioning severely disturbed people, but Julia has those qualifications. She is a psychiatrist who, when we first saw her in #265, was conducting an examination of a barely verbal patient. Over the last three years, everything that Julia had in those days has been stripped from her, a theme the show has been exploring heavily for the last six weeks. This line seems like a throwaway, but it underlines the transformation we have seen.
Quentin’s existence depends on a magical portrait painted in the year 1897. In an upstairs room at the Old House, Julia and Barnabas find this portrait intact. At that very moment, Quentin himself rushes in with a knife and tries to slash it. Barnabas thwarts him.
Quentin won’t believe that Barnabas and Julia are who they appear to be. He babbles as if he were still in the psychiatric facility. He claims never to have heard of the playroom, then insists the playroom was always there. They take him to the playroom, their third trip there today. Quentin looks in the room and flees in terror. Barnabas and Julia stay, and see the ghost of strange and troubled teen David Collins. The appearance of David’s ghost is one of the most forceful week-ending images in the series, up there with Barnabas’ hand darting out of its coffin in #210 or the Old House in sunlight in #365.
Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have come unstuck in time and found themselves 25 years in the future, in the year 1995. The great house of Collinwood is in ruins. They are trying to find someone who can tell them what happened after they left in 1970.
They meet Carolyn Collins Stoddard Hawkes, who has changed her name to Carolyn Fredericks. Carolyn now lives in an old shack on the beach. She is offended that Julia and Barnabas look the same as they did in 1970. She refuses to answer any of their questions and orders them to leave her house.
During the day, Barnabas takes shelter in his coffin in the secret chamber hidden in the old Collins family mausoleum. Julia leaves the mausoleum and finds Carolyn waiting outside. Carolyn warns her that she and Barnabas must leave the area. Julia goes on her way, and occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes comes out of the shadows and talks with Carolyn. Carolyn had seemed to be drifting in and out of lucidity while talking to Julia, but she is crystal clear while she and Stokes discuss the need to get rid of the new arrivals.
Julia goes to the county building and tries to get the clerk to answer questions about what happened in 1970. He is frightened by the mention of the date and claims that there are no records of any kind from that year. She finds Stokes in the corridor outside the clerk’s office. She greets him joyously. He tells her to go away, lest he and others be “forced to act.”
After nightfall, Julia and Barnabas decide to visit a man named Victor Flagler, whose name the clerk had mentioned. As Barnabas and Julia leave the mausoleum, Stokes and the clerk watch them go and speculate as to their destination. Evidently the secret chamber is no longer secret at all.
Victor is in his 30s; he has a framed picture of his wife Jeanne that appears to have been taken during the Coolidge administration. Some fans complain that everyone in the 1995 segment dresses in clothes that might have been found at Ohrbach’s in 1970, but I don’t think that’s a problem. The Collinses of Collinwood had a stranglehold on the economy of the village of Collinsport in the 1960s, and if they were annihilated in 1970 and their assets left to rot it stands to reason people in the area would still be wearing the clothes they bought then. But the antique style of this photograph really does take me out of the show:
Victor initially resists having anything to do with Julia and Barnabas, but finally tells his story. He and Jeanne went into Collinwood on a dare, believing it to be just a big empty house. They felt an evil presence there, and something pushed a heavy object from the top of the foyer stairs onto Jeanne’s head, killing her. When Victor found that Jeanne was dead, he heard laughter resounding through the house.
Barnabas and Julia go back to the mausoleum, only to find that the door to the secret chamber is standing wide open. They wonder who knows about it.
The clerk’s name is Ed. He is played by Ronald Dawson, who also appeared in #910 as art restorer Henry Osmund. This is Ed’s only episode, and Dawson’s final appearance. It is also Victor’s only episode, and Cliff Cudney’s final appearance. Cudney played a zombie in #963, 964, and 965. Both Dawson and Cudney have much better chances today to show us what they could do than those earlier parts afforded them. Indeed, all the actors are on top form. All roles played by Nancy Barrett are serious contenders for the title Best Character Ever, and in her scene with Barnabas and Julia in the little house on the beach, we can see that Carolyn Fredericks will be no exception.
The episode opens with a seldom seen still of the exterior of the mansion representing the great house of Collinwood, suggesting we are going to be seeing things from a new angle today.
This part of the place is in fairly good shape.
Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have escaped an alternate universe where a fire was raging around them. They find themselves unsinged and in their own timeline, back in the room at the great house where they first passed through the aperture that connects the universes. Barnabas is plunged into self-pity, since he wasn’t able to bring a girl he met while he was in the other universe home with him. She was comatose when they first met, and he goes on about how much he loved that. “She’s the only woman who ever made me forget my dear lost Josette. The moment I saw her, so still, so helpless, I felt a love I haven’t felt since I first met Josette.” Barnabas himself is dead half the time, so necrophilia is not inappropriate or even kinky in his case, but this is still a pretty funny line.
Julia has given up everything in her life for Barnabas’ sake, and she is so deeply implicated in his countless crimes that there is no way she can build a meaningful relationship with anyone else. She has decided to make the best of this, and has fallen in love with him. He does not requite this love in the slightest. When Julia first let Barnabas see how she felt, in 1967, he ridiculed her for it and reveled in showing her that nothing could ever develop between them. Now he is friendlier, most of the time, but still keeps expecting her to assist him while he chases after other women. When he rants about how he has lost his one chance at love, she looks up at him adoringly. She chokes back tears while she says “We forget how rare a life of love can be. You’re not the only one who’s had so little hope. It’s something one learns to live with. We can get used to anything if we have to.”
Barnabas reacts to this anguished little speech with a flash of outrage. He then turns from Julia and resumes lamenting his fate. He seems deeply offended that she started talking about trivial stuff like her feelings when the topic was supposed to be the most important thing in the world, his feelings. Barnabas and Julia’s exchange is not an example of anything that you will ever see described as good scene construction, but between the two of them, as we know them to be, it is magnificently constructed. It’s exactly the kind of non-conversation you would expect to take place between a colossal narcissist and someone who can’t even hope to get free of him.
Barnabas is appalled at Julia’s interruption.
Julia and Barnabas realize that the room is damp and musty, not at all like it was when last they were there. They find that the house is in a state of collapse. The foyer and drawing room is the only permanent set on Dark Shadows; it is extremely impressive by the standards of 1960s daytime TV, and has always looked very solid. Longtime viewers will find the images of it in ruins unforgettable.
Julia left for the other universe only five weeks ago; she and Barnabas cannot imagine what could have caused the destruction they see in such a short period. Julia wonders if a hurricane or a war is responsible for the damage. When they find some note paper that has yellowed and begun to crumble, Barnabas speculates that some kind of radiation may have accelerated its decay. Barnabas grew up in the eighteenth century and takes only a desultory interest in anything more recent than the Washington administration, so it is rather jarring for regular viewers to hear him talking about radiation and wondering if a thermonuclear exchange has taken place.
Barnabas and Julia go to the cemetery to find a coffin for him to spend his days in. They see a freshly dug grave with a marker giving the current year as 1995. That explains how the decay at Collinwood could have happened in the time after Julia followed Barnabas into the alternate universe in 1970. The aperture returned them to their own universe, but to a later period of time. They also find a grave marked as that of strange and troubled teen David Collins, whose date of death is given as 1970.
A gray-haired woman cries out to Julia and Barnabas to leave David’s grave alone. They recognize her as Mrs Johnson, housekeeper at Collinwood from 1966 to 1970. Mrs Johnson recognizes them too, and sees that they have not changed since last she saw them. She takes them to be ghosts, and demands they stop haunting David’s place of rest.
Barnabas and Julia deny that they are ghosts and ask Mrs Johnson what happened after they left. She starts telling transparent lies, claiming that the adult members of the Collins family are alive and well and living overseas. She rushes off, but as she goes she says the name “Fredericks” and “The old shack at Finley’s Cove.” Clarice Blackburn was always excellent, and this scene is one of her very finest turns.
Julia and Barnabas let themselves into a small house at Finley’s Cove. Julia remarks that the house was always vacant when she knew the area. Barnabas says that in the other universe, it was his comatose girlfriend’s house. They notice that the place is chock-a-block with objets d’art from Collinwood. Julia is excited that whoever lives there knew the place; Barnabas surmises that they may have been its destroyers, and that they might have looted the stuff from it. The doorknob turns, and Julia says that they will soon know who lives in the house.
For some time, wicked witch Angelique Stokes Collins has been dissatisfied with her minion Julia Hoffman. What she most wants from Hoffman is information about her new enemy, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Yet Hoffman has told her nothing useful about Barnabas. The only time she brings him up is to claim that she was busy following him when Angelique needed her to do something else. Even then, her reports are no more substantive than “He went into town,” without so much as a single name of a person he met or building he entered while there. Hoffman keeps showing friendliness to people to whom Angelique wants her to be hostile, asking questions to which she ought already know the answer, and resisting orders she would usually be eager to follow. Whatever is wrong with Hoffman, Angelique does not propose to put up with it indefinitely.
Yesterday, Angelique found the solution to the puzzle. She learned that she has not been dealing with Hoffman at all, but with her Doppelgänger from an alternate universe. Barnabas came from that universe as well. This Julia is as devoted to Barnabas as Hoffman was to Angelique, and followed him to this reality to take her place at his side. Today, Angelique traps Julia in a secret chamber off the basement of the great house of Collinwood and demands to know what she has done with Hoffman. At length Julia confirms her true identity and admits that she killed Hoffman, but she will not answer any of Angelique’s questions about Barnabas.
Angelique takes out a medallion and tells Julia to look at it. Julia gasps and turns away. She says that she knows about hypnosis and knows how to resist it. Angelique says that if she knows how to resist, there is no reason for her not to look at the medallion, but Julia keeps looking away. Julia was first introduced as a psychiatrist, whose talent for hypnosis was of magical proportions. By showing her medallion to a person, she could erase and rewrite that person’s memory as easily and as completely as one could erase and rewrite a chalkboard. Julia is the heroine of the show now, but longtime viewers will still find it fitting that Angelique turns the tables on her.
Upstairs in the same house, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins is having a conversation with Angelique’s portrait. This is one of several habits Roger has that recall Waldo Lydecker, the sarcastic dandy in the 1943 novel and 1944 film Laura. Lydecker turned out to have murdered a woman with whom he had a strange obsession.
Roger is overwrought, telling the Angelique in the portrait that he should have known she would come back from the dead. If he had, he would have realized it was a waste of time to kill her. He only made things worse by doing that; for one thing, it made it necessary for him to kill his niece Carolyn. As he says this, his sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Carolyn’s mother, overhears. She storms in. He tries to deny that meant anything he said, but Liz won’t be stopped. As Roger presses his hands on Liz’ shoulders, Joan Bennett plays the part of someone being strangled. Louis Edmonds’ fingers are nowhere near her throat. You can’t believe that Roger is hurting Liz, but you can easily believe that Edmonds and Bennett are a brother and sister playing pretend. They look like they’re about six.
Oh, oh, I’m being strangggled!
Just as Roger closes Liz’ body into the storage space under the window seat, Barnabas enters. Roger is on the point of tears, a circumstance Barnabas notices. Roger keeps urging Barnabas to leave the room with him, but he replies that what he has to say will take only a moment. Barnabas says that he is worried about Liz. Roger gets even more upset, and Barnabas finally agrees to go downstairs with him.
For longtime viewers, this scene makes a poignant contrast with #446. In that episode, set in the year 1796, Edmonds played haughty overlord Joshua Collins, father of Barnabas. Joshua discovered that Barnabas had become a vampire. Joshua confronted his son in his hiding place. Joshua was at once horrified and shattered, but in no way intimidated by Barnabas, who was for his part alternately ashamed and petulant. Edmonds and Jonathan Frid made that scene into one of the high points of the series. Now, it is Edmonds’ turn to be the murderer dejected by the knowledge of his own inexpungable guilt, and Frid’s turn to be the upright family man. Barnabas does not know Roger’s secret as Joshua knew his, but in Roger’s inability to face him we see the fear of the same righteous condemnation Joshua had felt it his duty to proclaim.
At one point in this conversation Frid has so much trouble with his lines that the words dissolve into a buzzing sound. I told my wife, Mrs Acilius, that it sounded like Barnabas had briefly turned into Bob Dylan. She roared with laughter and said that was exactly what she was going to say.
This is the first “Parallel Time” episode in which Lara Parker is credited as playing Angelique. Previously she had been billed as Alexis Stokes, the identical twin sister whom Angelique killed when she rose from the dead ten and a half weeks ago and whom she has been impersonating ever since. Several times in the series, cast members have wandered onto the set while the credits were rolling.* Referring to this, Mrs Acilius had explained that they kept using Alexis’ name in case any characters who didn’t know who she really was wandered in while the credits were rolling. She imagined them looking up, widening their eyes, and pointing. She meant that hypothesis as a joke. But since the only character in today’s episode who didn’t know Angelique’s true identity was Liz, who was dead by the time the credits rolled, I think we have to take it as proven.
*Most conspicuously in #703, #635, #510, and #328. There are also moments when crew members can be seen during the closing credits, most spectacularly in #999, when a man is just sitting there eating a sandwich.
We open in the room atop the tower of the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Wicked witch Angelique, enemy of the mysterious Barnabas Collins, confronts Will Loomis, Barnabas’ henchman. She demands Will tell her Barnabas’ secret. Returning viewers know that Barnabas is a vampire, and Will is his blood thrall. When Will tells Angelique that he is incapable of betraying Barnabas, we know that he is making a literal statement of fact. But Angelique has power over Will, too. Caught between these opposing forces, Will does the only thing he can. He opens the window and flings himself to his death.
John Karlen plays Will, Lara Parker Angelique. In his post about this episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn observes that Karlen approached all of his parts as if he were in a play by Tennessee Williams. In a comment I left under that post, I said that while most of Karlen’s scene partners stuck with their own distinctive styles of acting while playing opposite him, resulting in surprisingly effective mashups of techniques that you wouldn’t think could coexist on any stage, Parker followed his volcanic lead in today’s first act. Will’s anguish and Angelique’s vehemence both go way over the top, but the result is far from hammy. Orson Welles famously said that hamminess is not overacting, it is false acting. There is nothing false between Will and Angelique today.
Just before Will jumped out the window, Julia Hoffman entered the room. Furious that Will has died without telling her what sort of creature Barnabas is, Angelique accuses Hoffman of startling him and ruining everything. Wondering if Will may have survived his fall, she orders Hoffman to accompany her to the foot of the tower. Hoffman kneels down and says that Will’s spinal cord snapped on impact resulting in instant death. Angelique says that she is intrigued by Hoffman’s diagnosis. “Have you a medical degree?”
Unknown to Angelique, the true answer would be yes. Angelique believes herself to be with Hoffman the housekeeper, her most fanatical devotee. In fact, the woman is Hoffman’s counterpart from an alternate universe, Dr Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia has followed her best friend Barnabas into this continuity and is assisting Barnabas in his battle against Angelique. Julia killed Hoffman and assumed her identity. Julia responds to Angelique’s puzzlement with a story about an incident when she saw a man fall from a roof and land in the same twisted position Will now holds. She remembered the words the doctor said when examining that man and merely repeated them when she saw Will’s distorted neck. Angelique compliments Julia on her extraordinary memory, and proceeds as if she were telling the truth. There seems little else she could do.
I remembered the line “Have you a medical degree?” from the first time Mrs Acilius and I watched Dark Shadows. Angelique has noticed that Julia is different from the Hoffman she knows, and has been showing signs of impatience with her. But she has not suspected she is a different person, only that she is going soft on her enemies. “Have you a medical degree?” makes it seem that might be changing. Julia may be in grave danger before long.
Barnabas rises from his coffin in the basement of Will’s house. He goes upstairs and finds Angelique waiting for him. She says she came, not to see him, but to console the widow Loomis. Thus Barnabas learns that Will has died.
Barnabas tells Angelique that he will avenge Will’s death upon her, but she tells him that he is the one to blame. It was because his power over Will matched hers that Will could respond to her commands only by killing himself.
Angelique’s counterpart in Barnabas’ own universe placed the curse that first made him a vampire. She was also wholly or partially responsible for the deaths of his mother, sister, aunt, uncle, fiancée, and many other people he cared about. So he reacts to the sight of this Angelique with barely controlled rage. For her part, she has no idea who he is, and does not know why he is hostile to her. She, therefore, is much cooler. The contrast is fascinating to watch, far more interesting than are the scenes between Barnabas and the other Angelique and one of the joys of the “Parallel Time” segment.
Julia and Barnabas are busy with a science project. They have learned that Angelique returned from the grave because her father, evil barfly Tim Stokes, somehow established a remote connection between her and a woman named Roxanne whom he keeps in the back room of his apartment. This connection, whatever it is, drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. This creates a delicate situation. If Roxanne dies, all of her “life force,” including that which animates Angelique, will vanish. But if she regains any of the force that has been taken from her, even enough to flutter her eyelids, Angelique will collapse and, unless Roxanne is brought back down to the prescribed level of debility, re-die.
When Julia and Barnabas first came upon Roxanne, they planned to kill her to finish Angelique off. Barnabas put the kibosh on that when he saw how pretty Roxanne was. Then they thought of destroying Angelique by reviving Roxanne, but, for reasons too silly to explain, they’ve decided they want to keep Angelique around. So now Barnabas has decreed that they will manipulate Roxanne’s condition to slow Angelique down. They have taken her from Stokes’ place and put her on a table in Will’s basement, somewhere away from the coffin. They have connected her to a lot of mad science equipment that is supposed to act on the “life force.” Longtime viewers know all about this equipment, because Julia had it in 1968 when she was building a Frankenstein’s monster as part of a project to cure Barnabas of vampirism.
Julia runs the equipment. Roxanne’s condition does not change. Julia tells Barnabas that Angelique is expecting her back at the great house. In her absence, Barnabas takes Roxanne’s hand and stares at her. She opens her eyes and sits up. In the great house, Angelique weakens and collapses.
Many fans wonder where Julia could have got the “life force” equipment. In her own universe, she is a medical doctor and the head of a private hospital, so she could order anything she needed from a medical supply house. Here, her only identity is her imposture as Hoffman the housekeeper, who did not have a prescription pad.
I don’t see why people are so concerned with this. In 1968, the equipment originally belonged, not to Julia, but to another mad scientist, Dr Eric Lang. Barnabas and Julia simply stole it from Dr Lang’s house after he died. In this continuity, we haven’t heard about Dr Lang, but we hadn’t heard about him in the main continuity either until Barnabas fell into his clutches, at which point he already had all of his equipment. So we can presume Barnabas and Julia just found out when his counterpart would be out of the house and raided the place.
Will’s death marks his final appearance, but John Karlen will be back in a couple of months as Willie Loomis, the version of him we met in the main continuity. He will play other characters later, when the show will be set in other periods.
Julia Hoffman joined the cast of characters in the summer of 1967 as a supremely confident professional, a medical doctor doubly qualified as a psychiatrist and a blood specialist and the head of a private hospital. Julia came to the estate of Collinwood because she had figured out that Barnabas Collins, master of the Old House on its grounds, was a vampire. She had a plan for curing vampirism and believed that if she succeeded she would change the way science defines life and death, thereby revolutionizing medicine.
Julia’s plan was not successful. She came to be so closely entwined with Barnabas and so deeply complicit in his crimes that she could not hope for any future that did not revolve around him. She decided to make the best of this, and set about falling in love with Barnabas. At first he mocked her cruelly for this. Eventually his response to her signs of romantic interest softened into an embarrassed sympathy.
In #980, Barnabas crossed over into an alternate universe, hoping that he would escape his curse there. He found he was still a vampire, and that he was surrounded by strangers. He has now persuaded the Collinses in the great house at Collinwood that he is their long-lost cousin from South America. He has once more established himself in the Old House, this time by biting and enslaving its owners. He quickly made enemies, most notably the undead Angelique Stokes Collins. The housekeeper in the great house was Angelique’s most fanatical devotee and deadliest enforcer. Her name was Julia Hoffman.
Yesterday, Hoffman had learned that Barnabas was a vampire, found his coffin, placed a stake on his chest, and raised a hammer to drive it through his heart. At the last second, a blow was struck from behind, killing Hoffman and saving Barnabas. The killer was Julia, who had made her way into this universe to take her place at Barnabas’ side.
In #351, Julia offered to guard Barnabas during the day. Since Barnabas had previously given this task only to domestic servants, he was shocked to hear a medical doctor volunteer to perform it. Julia smiled and said “I am not offering to be your maid.” Now, Julia is wearing Hoffman’s French maid outfit and posing as her in an attempt to find out what Angelique is up to. Long before Julia killed Hoffman, she had destroyed her old self in the course of her relationship with Barnabas.
The joyous reunion.
Julia is waiting by Barnabas’ coffin when night falls. The lid opens, and she looks delighted. This image is hilarious, but again contrasts with her earlier behavior to show how ragged her personality has become after all this time as a vampire’s henchman. In #289, Julia made her way to Barnabas’ coffin during the day, opened it, looked inside, and staggered back, shivering with a mixture of terror and triumph. She was at once fantastically intrepid and apparently sane. We did not then know what her intentions were, but the daring action combines with Grayson Hall’s masterful performance to persuade us that Julia might be equal to almost any task.
Now, Julia has become so dependent on Barnabas that she neither sees the horror of the situation nor remembers that he is dangerous to her. The very first we saw of Barnabas was his hand darting out of his coffin to choke someone who woke him unexpectedly, and the second time someone did that, in #275, the choking was lethal. Moreover, Barnabas knew that Hoffman was his deadly foe, so even if he’d been up for a while he could be expected to kill Julia before she had a chance to utter a word if he found her in his hiding place dressed as she is.
Fortunately for Julia, Barnabas has developed a habit of standing around and pontificating before his murders. So she has a chance to explain who she is. She shows him the stake and hammer Hoffman was holding when she found her, and he is convinced. He seems impressed that she killed her Doppelgänger for his sake, and they look more like they are about to kiss than they ever have before.
Barnabas and Julia, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
Julia goes to the great house to report to Angelique, who is staying there in the guise of her identical twin sister Alexis. Angelique irritably asks where Julia has been all day. Julia makes an excuse, and Angelique starts talking about the progress of her evil plans. Before she gets very deep into it, she has a seizure of some kind. Julia asks what she can do to help, and Angelique tells her that she knows very well what to do. The only useful information Julia can get out of her are the word “father” and the sentence “He is doing this!” She decides to call on Angelique’s father, Tim Stokes. She looks Stokes’ address up in the telephone directory, and sets out.
When Stokes answers his door, he expresses surprise, not that Julia is there, but that she bothered to knock before entering. He makes some remarks which Julia cannot even pretend to understand. He says that Angelique must surely have told her about the situation; she says that she did, but that she is very confused about all of it. Stokes ushers her into his back room to give his own explanation.
A blanket covers the body of a woman lying on a table in the back room. Stokes explains to Julia that the woman is not dead. He drained her “life force” to enable Angelique to transcend death, but she retains enough vitality that she keeps pulling that force back to herself from Angelique. That is what causes Angelique to have her seizures. The woman must remain in precisely her current state if Angelique is to exist in the world of the living. The more of her strength she regains, the weaker Angelique will become, and if she dies, Angelique will return to the grave. He has given the woman an injection; he tells Julia that when she returns to the great house she will find that Angelique has recovered.
Julia does indeed find this. She urges Angelique to have Stokes over and repair her relationship with him. Since everyone else is out of the house, tonight would be the perfect time for such a tête–à–tête. Angelique agrees.
While Angelique is mixing martinis for Stokes, Julia is with Barnabas. She goes to the Old House and tells him what she has discovered. He produces a short knife and says that it should take care of the matter. In Stokes’ apartment, he stops and talks about all the time he has spent trying to find Angelique’s vulnerabilities, and wonders that now they have found such a simple method for getting rid of her once and for all. It sounded to my wife as if he was upset that Julia had beaten him to the answer.
In the back room, Julia hands Barnabas the knife. He again goes into a pre-murder soliloquy. Julia peps him up by telling him that the woman isn’t really alive, and that her continued existence means death and destruction for many others. Barnabas agrees. He lifts the blanket and prepares to strike.
The first murder in which Julia participated directly was that of her onetime friend and medical school classmate Dr Dave Woodard in #341. Woodard had learned that Barnabas was a vampire and that Julia was helping him, and was going to expose them both. After resisting the idea for several days, Julia complied with Barnabas’ demand that she prepare a lethal injection for Woodard. She handed him the hypodermic then, as she hands him the knife now. In those days, Barnabas and Julia were not yet friends, and Barnabas replied that she would have to administer the shot herself. In the end, he wound up giving Woodard the fatal dose while Julia stood in the doorway and blocked their victim’s escape. Afterward, Barnabas taunted Julia with her new status as a murderer, making her miserable. Now, they like each other fine, and he accepts the weapon as a matter of course.
It is not surprising that Barnabas, confronted with a problem, chooses murder as the solution. That is always his Plan A, and usually his Plan B and Plan C as well. Indeed, when he wonders what Stokes will do when Angelique is dead he implies that he will murder him too, lamenting that “It never ends does it, when one begins to unravel evil?” Barnabas looks utterly hopeless when he says this. He always feels deeply sorry for himself when he thinks about killing someone.
But this is a new step for Julia. She usually puts up at least a show of reluctance when Barnabas is planning a murder, even if her immediate response when she finds a corpse in his vicinity is to arrange for its secret disposal. What Stokes told her about the “life force” logically entails that bringing the woman out of her coma would destroy Angelique as surely as killing her would. Their resources in this universe are so limited that this may not be a viable course of action, but on her previous form you would expect Julia at least to suggest it. We may wonder if something inside her finally broke when she looked at someone she had killed and saw her own dead face looking back at her.
Angelique Stokes Collins, late wife of gloomy sourpuss Quentin Collins, has risen from the grave, murdered her identical twin sister Alexis, and taken Alexis’ place as Quentin’s houseguest in his mansion, the great house of Collinwood. Impersonating Alexis, she has been busy with a lot of cackhanded schemes to drive a wedge between Quentin and his new wife, the former Maggie Evans. As recently as yesterday, Quentin and Maggie were keeping their cool and showing signs that they might catch on to what “Alexis” was up to, but today they both melt down completely. Quentin has a fit when he sees Maggie reading a book about witchcraft that Angelique left in the drawing room, and Maggie goes to Quentin’s friend Cyrus Longworth to ask some questions about Quentin’s role in Angelique’s death.
Cyrus is pretty nutty himself. He is a mad scientist who has developed and become addicted to a Jekyll and Hyde potion. When he drinks it, his appearance changes so drastically that even the people closest to him cannot recognize him. Thus disguised, he goes by the name “John Yaeger” and indulges his sadistic impulses.
Cyrus assures Maggie that Quentin did not murder Angelique. She leaves his laboratory feeling relieved. She forgets her gloves. He picks them up, and spends eight seconds rubbing them on his face, sniffing them, and looking ecstatic. Eight seconds is quite a long period to devote to that particular pastime.
Buffie Harrington comes to Cyrus’ lab. When he is masquerading as Yaeger, Cyrus’ favorite hobby has been beating Buffie and ridiculing her. She has a self-destructive streak that led her to submit to that treatment. Unknown to Cyrus and unmentioned in today’s episode, Buffie has a new dominator. Vampire Barnabas Collins has bitten her, made her his slave, and ordered her to find out whatever she can about Yaeger from Cyrus.
Buffie is very much in charge of her scene with Cyrus. She runs through a long list of emotions- anger and impatience with Cyrus, attraction to him and pity for him, contempt for Yaeger and admiration for him, pity and anger towards herself, all portrayed clearly and convincingly by Elizabeth Eis. Returning viewers who realize that Buffie is on a mission from Barnabas to get Cyrus to tell her what he knows about Yaeger will be impressed that Buffie is as good an actress as Eis was. She is looking for the note that will crack the glass holding Cyrus’ secrets, and striking each one perfectly.
When Buffie finds out that the gloves are Maggie’s, she mentions that she knew Maggie when they were growing up in the village of Collinsport. She says that Maggie was always a special person, obviously destined for greater things. Looking at herself in the mirror, Buffie says that Maggie probably doesn’t hate herself when she sees her reflection. Buffie may still be acting, trying to elicit Cyrus’ sympathy, but we don’t see his reaction when she says these things, only two images of her face. And her words do fit with the self-destructive streak she has shown in her relationship with “Yaeger.” Not only Elizabeth Eis’ extraordinary good looks, but also her forceful and intelligent manner, make it shocking to see Buffie looking at herself and hear her saying such things. The show never explains where Buffie’s urge to destroy herself came from, but Eis makes us both believe that it keeps overwhelming her and wish that she could escape it.
Buffie doesn’t like what she sees.
Cyrus stops by Collinwood to return Maggie’s gloves. When she sees him, Maggie brightens up and starts moving fluidly from the hips up in a way that suggests sexual attraction. She is disappointed he won’t stay. Considering how close Cyrus got to Maggie when they were in his lab and how he gazed longingly into her eyes until she asked him if something were wrong, it’s hard to see how he can fail to find her excitement encouraging.
Cyrus drinks his potion. Once Yaegerized, he telephones Maggie. He refuses to identify himself, but says that if she meets him at the docks at 6 PM sharp he will give her information about Angelique’s death. Maggie is initially appalled by the idea of a strange man asking her to meet him at the docks, but she is still carried away with the suspicions Angelique planted in her mind that Quentin is a wife-killer. She can’t resist.
Yaeger is at the docks when Buffie happens by on her way to work at the Eagle tavern. She speaks to him. He jeers at her until she leaves. Cyrus keeps telling himself what Buffie told him in their scene today, that Yaeger enjoys life. All I can say is that there are far more enjoyable things to do with a beautiful young woman than to beat her, insult her, and drive her away. Yaeger seems to me to be an utterly miserable sort, as strongly bent away from life towards death as is Buffie.
Maggie shows up shortly after Buffie has gone. Yaeger doesn’t tell her anything she doesn’t know. He moves in close and starts talking about wanting her favors. She says she will be going, and he grabs her from behind. He puts his hand over her mouth to stifle her screams while he does a series of pelvic thrusts. His facial expression gets more and more distorted until his tongue pops out.
I suppose Cyrus/ Yaeger is rather an intelligent depiction of a rapist. He craves cruelty for its own sake. Any sexual thrill he may get is a side effect of the pleasure he derives from hurting women. Cyrus is engaged to a lovely young woman who is devoted to him, his lab assistant Sabrina Stuart. Sabrina’s name doesn’t even come up today. When Buffie was under his influence, she would have gone along with just about any sort of relationship he wanted to develop, either as Cyrus or in the guise of Yaeger. All he wanted to do was use her as a punching bag and then laugh at the bruises he left on her. Maggie is clearly attracted to Cyrus today, and however loyal she may be to Quentin is at the least available for some very pleasant flirting. But all Cyrus can think to do is to conceal his identity so that he can humiliate her in the alley where the streetwalkers pick up their johns.
The conceit that Cyrus and Yaeger are different people helps writer Joe Caldwell make today’s script into an essay about rape. Had Maggie recognized Cyrus in the alley, he might have claimed that he took her earlier response to him to be an invitation to sex. It is certainly easy to imagine a husband as uncharitable as Quentin taking such a claim seriously. But when Cyrus disguises himself as Yaeger, he shows that he has no wish to accept an invitation of any kind from Maggie. All he wants is to avoid punishment for the crime he is planning to commit against her. Indeed, when she sees Cyrus as Yaeger, Maggie shows nothing but distaste and a desire to flee. Cyrus evidently prefers those reactions to the enthusiasm Maggie showed for him when he was being sweet and friendly.
The Yaeger makeup is not very consistent from day to day. This time, the hairline is so high that he kept making me think of John Cazale as Fredo Corleone. Also, Christopher Pennock’s acting is not up to its usual standard; he overacts so severely that he keeps stumbling over his words. He even botches the opening voiceover. Perhaps he was too nice a guy to really get into a character who is the distilled essence of Rapist. At this point, Cazale had done only one TV show, a guest spot on NYPD, a series made in New York that featured Dark Shadows cast members in about half its episodes. Maybe Cazale would have been available for the role of Cyrus/ Yaeger. He too was a famously nice guy, but was perhaps a more accomplished actor than Pennock and better able to handle a part like this one.
Angelique Stokes Collins has risen from the dead, but her renewed existence may end within seconds. She is overwhelmingly cold, and can warm up only by draining the heat from the body of a living person. Someone is coming in the front door, just in time to be her victim and die in her stead. She wonders who it will be.
Almost all the characters currently on Dark Shadows are either so important to an ongoing story that their deaths would end a major arc or have so many connections to everyone else that their deaths would start a new one. So if she kills mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, his fiancée Sabrina Stuart, or barmaid Buffie Harrington, Angelique will be ending the Jekyll and Hyde story, or at least shifting it into a radically new phase. If she kills drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, his wife Maggie Evans Collins, or housekeeper Julia Hoffman, she will be ending the adaptation of Rebecca. If she kills Carolyn Loomis or her husband Will, she will be ending the restaging of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
If Angelique kills woebegone homebody Elizabeth Collins Stoddard or her brother, sardonic dandy Roger Collins, she won’t be ending any ongoing stories. But Liz and Roger are the counterparts of characters who were central to the life of the great house of Collinwood in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows, when it was set in another universe, and are played by actors who have substantial followings. If either of them is murdered, the audience will expect major consequences. Angelique’s son Daniel Collins and Daniel’s cousin Amy Collins aren’t doing much just now, but if Angelique kills a child, especially her own son, the ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices would join the audience in insisting she face a serious reckoning that would take up a lot of screen time. This fit of heat vampirism came on Angelique too suddenly to make sense as the start of a new arc, so we can rule all of those candidates out.
There are also a couple of characters who were introduced to fill in for actors who were away the previous couple of months filming their parts in the theatrical feature House of Dark Shadows. Among those are Angelique’s Aunt Hannah and butler Mr Trask. They are possibilities, but are both played by actors who have enough going for them that it would be a bit surprising to bring them back just to kill them off. There are also a few miscellaneous day players whose characters would have no reason to let themselves into the great house of Collinwood- a bartender we saw in #991, a landlady we saw in #997, etc.
So it would seem that there are only two people who could be Angelique’s next meal. One is sleazy musician Bruno Hess, a former boyfriend of hers who lives in the cottage on the grounds of Collinwood and is friends with Cyrus, but who has been neither seen nor missed for some time. The other is Larry Chase, attorney at law.
Bruno is played by the dynamic Michael Stroka, who twice made a mark when cast in stories set in the other universe. Larry was written into the show as a last-minute substitute for a part played by an actor whose health problems made it impossible for him to continue. They didn’t have time for auditions, so they drafted associate director Ken McEwen for the part. McEwen was in the building, and he had a guild card because of some small parts he’d taken in TV shows he’d worked on in the 1950s. When he has enough time to rehearse, which is to say when he has had more time to rehearse than actors usually got on a show like Dark Shadows, McEwen gets his lines right, except for adding “Well…” at the beginning of every single one. You can tell he is making a sincere effort not to ruin the show. But that’s about all you can say for him. Even at his best he’s stiff and distracted, and when he hasn’t been able to get his part down, he disintegrates completely. So it isn’t much of a surprise that Larry is the one who opens the door. It wasn’t a surprise to me, I should say; writing these posts keeps all the details fresh in my mind. My wife, Mrs Acilius, looked at him for about thirty seconds and asked “Who’s that?”
Larry plays the same scene with Angelique that her second victim, Fred the transient handyman, had played with her in #1003, right down to telling her that he had wanted to hold her since he first saw her. Fred was played by Edmond Hashim, and anyone who sees the two versions of this scene side by side will come away with a new appreciation for Hashim’s talents as an actor. This is McEwen’s final on-screen appearance, though he will pinch hit as the opening narrator in three upcoming episodes. He will continue as an associate director through episode 1179/1180 in December.
Will enters to find Angelique screaming and Larry dead. Angelique, who is impersonating her late identical twin sister Alexis, claims that Larry was just standing there when he had an attack of some kind and dropped dead. Will touches the corpse and says that he is so cold he must have been dead for hours. “Alexis” insists he just died a moment before. Will calls Cyrus, who is the Collins family physician.
Cyrus is in his lab, looking at the potion which turns him into the Mr Hyde-like John Yaeger. He is about to capitulate to his craving when the telephone rings. Will tells him that Larry is dead and asks him to come to Collinwood. Cyrus puts the potion back in his safe and rejoices that he is “Saved!” Larry was Cyrus’ lawyer and apparently a social friend as well. We’ve already seen Cyrus do enough horrible things that this sociopathic reaction is no shock.
Back at Collinwood, Will and “Alexis” are talking with Barnabas Collins. Unknown to “Alexis,” Barnabas is a visitor from the other universe. Her counterpart in his world was the wicked witch who turned him into a vampire, so Barnabas cannot keep a hostile edge out of his voice and manner when he is talking to her. Will is one of Barnabas’ victims, and knows all of his secrets.
When they are alone in the drawing room, “Alexis” questions Will about Barnabas. Will denies knowing him particularly well. Barnabas is staying at Will’s house, and several years ago Will wrote a biography of Barnabas’ counterpart in this universe, a man who lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830. Barnabas claims to be a descendant of that Barnabas Collins, and to have come to Collinwood to meet the author of the biography. Will becomes more and more disturbed as “Alexis” presses him harder and harder for information. She is perplexed that he won’t tell her anything. Lara Parker and John Karlen have both been on the show for a long time, but this is the first substantial two scene between them, and it is terrific. Their acting styles were very different, but they couldn’t have meshed better.
Barnabas is sitting at a table in the Eagle tavern. There is a glass of reddish liquid in front of him. In view of his condition, one wonders what that liquid might be.
Barnabas invites Buffie to sit with him. Since there are no other customers, she agrees. He tells her he is from South America. The son of this universe’s Barnabas Collins whom he claims as his great-grandfather went to Peru; when he introduced himself to the family, he said that his forebear did not die in that country. But evidently his imaginary descendants stayed on the continent, somewhere.
The Eagle is the counterpart of the Blue Whale in the other continuity. In #3, Burke Devlin was sitting at a table in the Blue Whale with hard-working young fisherman Joe Haskell when he said that his success in life began when a strange man picked him up in a bar in Montevideo. That was the show’s only reference to Uruguay, but Burke, the Blue Whale, and Brazil came to be strongly associated with each other. The song “Aquarela do Brasil,” a big hit in the English speaking world in the 1960s under the title “Brazil,” played on the jukebox at the Blue Whale, and it became Burke’s theme song. Ultimately Burke would die on a business trip to Brazil. Barnabas and Burke were enemies; when he sits at this table and claims to have a South American background, longtime viewers may wonder if he is thinking that the new universe is a place where he can try out a new personality and maybe he will start by imitating Burke’s.
Burke was a dashing action hero, attractive to women. Barnabas’ attempt to imitate him breaks down almost immediately. He winds up mimicking another prominent bachelor from his native universe, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, when he asks Buffie if she’s ever heard of the theory of “Parallel Time.”
Buffie shakes her head no. Barnabas says that some people believe that there are many universes, and that a copy of each of us can be found in each of them. They may look the same, but they lead different lives because they have made different choices. Buffie laughs and says that she hopes her other selves are having more fun than she is. She hastens to say that she doesn’t mean she isn’t having fun at the moment, sharing a table with Barnabas; she means that her life in Collinsport, as viewed from the most all-encompassing perspective and analyzed in the most thorough philosophic manner, well and truly sucks shit. Barnabas says that the other Buffies in the multiverse might have left Collinsport* and had wonderful adventures.
Longtime viewers saw one of those other Buffies in #951, when we were still in the original continuity. She had a different name; she went by Nelle Gunston. And as befits a mirror universe, she moved in the opposite direction. Rather than leaving Collinsport to look for something new as Buffie wishes she had done, Nelle left her parents’ home in Virginia and went to Collinsport because she had joined a cult dedicated to the destruction of the human race and its replacement by a loathsome breed of Elder Gods known as the Leviathan People. Barnabas had been the leader of the Leviathan cult, and when Nelle came to town she sat with him by the same table where Buffie and Barnabas sit today. They even take the same seats.
Buffie is charmed by Barnabas’ talk; between the suavity that Jonathan Frid brings to his part today and the energy with which Elizabeth Eis presents Buffie’s enthusiasm for him, it is far easier than it usually is to believe that Barnabas is a sexy dude. Maybe we are supposed to think that role-playing as Burke has enabled him to loosen up.
The conversation is really warming up when the bell attached to the front door rings. “Customer,” Buffie ruefully says to Barnabas as she rises. It is Cyrus.
Barnabas invites Cyrus to sit with them. He declines, saying that he came only to ask Buffie if she had seen John Yaeger lately. She tenses up. Yaeger used to beat her up and force her to help him with his crimes. She says that Cyrus himself had told Buffie that Yaeger wouldn’t be back in Collinsport. Cyrus says that he did, but that he is worried he might not be able to predict Yaeger’s movements as well as he thought he could. He offers Barnabas a lift back to Collinwood. That’s a bit surprising, since Cyrus got uptight when he saw Barnabas. As Yaeger, Cyrus discovered that there is a coffin in the basement of Will and Carolyn’s house, and he suspects that Barnabas spends his days there. But longtime viewers can remember the days Barnabas and Burke had conversations at the Blue Whale that were just as tense as the one he and Cyrus have in the Eagle, and Burke never failed to observe the small graces. It’s just the done thing, I suppose.
Cyrus leaves, and Buffie remains standing. She and Barnabas keep talking. He gets close, and goes in for a bite. He stops himself at the last second, to her surprise and disappointment. She was apparently ready for a kiss on the neck. He says he has to go. She is even more disappointed by that, but he promises to come back at closing. He asks to walk her home, and she happily agrees.
Will and Cyrus are in the drawing room at Collinwood. Will urges Cyrus to join him in a drink. When Cyrus declines, Will reminisces about the old days at Collinwood, when the party would just be getting started at this hour. In those days, people would leave the great house in the small hours of the morning and continue their revels at the Eagle. Cyrus says he won’t find much company there tonight. When he says that the only people in the place earlier were “the girl who works there” and Barnabas, Will looks alarmed. All of his mannerisms that suggest drunkenness drop away, and he rushes out.
Will gets to the tavern, and finds Buffie alone. The alcoholic author is obviously one of her favorite and most lucrative customers, so even though she has already blown out the candles she tells him he is in time for last call. To her amazement, he is not interested in a drink. He asks her where Barnabas is. She says he’ll be back and that he is taking her home. He says no, and she asks what’s wrong. Before he can answer, Will hears Barnabas’ voice behind him, echoing Buffie’s question. Laboring under the vampire’s power, Will has no choice but to leave Buffie alone with Barnabas.
Nelle, too, had agreed left the tavern with Barnabas. She expected to meet the leader of the Leviathans at his place, and was unhappy to find that the two of them were alone. Buffie is again an inverted mirror image of her counterpart. She takes Barnabas to her place, and is quite happy to be alone with him. The two close in for an embrace. He bites her neck, and she collapses. He had bitten Nelle, too. At that moment, Cyrus enters the room.
Cyrus does not exactly have a counterpart in the other continuity, but Christopher Pennock did play the Leviathan leader whom Nelle expected to meet. Like Cyrus, that character was a murderous shape-shifter. So Cyrus’ unexpected arrival mirrors the Leviathan leader’s unexpected absence.
When we first cut to Buffie’s room, the camera lingers for several seconds on an extremely unusual prop. It is a television set. The only other time we have seen a television set on Dark Shadows was in #27, in the other universe, when Burke visited investigator Stuart Bronson in a hotel room in Bangor, Maine where there was a small portable unit. It looks like it might be the same set.
Bronson’s TVBuffie’s TV
The shot goes on so long, and the set is such an odd thing to see in the context of the show, that they must be making some kind of point with it. We have wondered why Buffie submitted to Yaeger’s abuse, when she is such a strong and intelligent person. Her reflection in Nelle suggests a partial answer. Nelle was drawn to the Leviathans, who offered to destroy her and all other humans. We can assume that Buffie, too, was following a self-destructive urge when she went along with Yaeger. Associated with her, the television is a symbol of the annihilation of the self. Turn the idiot box on, turn your mind off. If you aren’t careful, you may even wind up spending your weekdays staring glassy-eyed at ABC’s daytime lineup.
*He actually says “Collinwood.” Which is a blooper, but since Buffie mentioned in her first episode that she used to work at Collinwood it is kind of an interesting one. Maybe when another Buffie left her position as an upstairs maid or whatever she was, she got further than the nearest tavern.
This is the last script that will be credited to writer Violet Welles. Welles had done a substantial amount of rewriting on scripts attributed to her friend Gordon Russell before her name first showed up in the credits with #711, and she will do more ghosting for Russell later.
Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day is a tribute to Welles; I recommend it highly. Welles was far and away the best author of dialogue among the nine writers credited through the show’s 249 weeks, so much so that her uncredited contributions are easy to recognize. I will mention a week very close to the end of the series in 1971, a long time after the wheels came off, when all of a sudden characters start making witty remarks and developing interesting relationships. Then it’s back to the dreariness of a bunch of go-nowhere stories.
Welles rated herself low as an inventor of plot-lines. I don’t know what went on during the long hours she spent in story conferences with Russell and Sam Hall, but it was when she was in the room that the most fertile planning sessions Dark Shadows ever had took place. They sketched out flimsies thirteen weeks at a time, and from the time Welles became a regular part of the staff until thirteen weeks after she left, the show was packed with more lively ideas than at any other time. So if she was correct in that harsh self-assessment of what she did in the writers’ room, it was only in the narrowest sense.
Welles also spoke disparagingly of herself as a designer of dramatic structure at the level of individual episodes, but today’s installment shows that this was simply wrong. There is a tremendous amount happening in these 22 minutes, it is crystal-clear throughout what is happening and why we should care, and the actors get to do some of the best work they ever did do. We see two stories, one a mashup of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca with Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 short story “Ligeia,”* the other a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, also with a dash of “Ligeia.”
The episode is set in a different universe than the one in which the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows took place, and most of the characters are “Parallel Time” counterparts of those we met in the main continuity. In the Rebecca/ Ligeia mashup, we today see Quentin Collins, master of the estate of Collinwood, owner of Collinsport Enterprises, and gloomy drunkard; Quentin’s new wife, Maggie Evans Collins; housekeeper Julia Hoffman, fanatical devotee of Quentin’s late first wife Angelique; and Alexis Stokes, Angelique’s freshly arrived identical twin sister. The bit from the Jekyll and Hyde story features scientist Cyrus Longworth and attorney Chris Collins. Angelique comes up in Cyrus and Chris’ conversation, and she is emerging in the role of Ligeia. Like the eponymous character in Poe’s story, she is a celebrated beauty who is dead but expected to return. Alexis herself brings up yet another reference. She wears a short bluish gray suit and chignon hairstyle with a tight spiral twist at the back, the look that the mysterious Madeleine wore and her impostor copied in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Jekyll and Hyde Meet Ligeia
I’ll start with the Jekyll and Hyde story, since it is the simpler one today. Chris is the estate manager at Collinwood, and his responsibilities include custodianship of Angelique’s personal effects. His friend Cyrus has called Chris to his basement laboratory to ask for a favor. Angelique had told him about a chemist in Boston who could help him with some obscure formula he needs for his current experiments. She gave him the man’s contact information, but he lost it, and he wants to look for it in Angelique’s address book.
Before they start talking about the address book, Cyrus tells Chris that he saw Angelique in town today. He tells him he was driving past the drug store and saw her walking down the street. He called to her and she did not answer, but he is certain it was she. Chris does not yet know that Angelique’s identical twin sister is in town, so he does not tell Cyrus about Alexis. He starts with a philosophical approach, then veers towards the explanation medical:
CHRIS: Cyrus, you’re a scientist. A scientist deals in established principle and fact. One thing we have to accept is that death is the end.
CYRUS: I often wonder. People used to believe that the world was flat. They believed that, that the sun revolved around the earth, and these were facts to them.
CHRIS: Uh, what are you saying?
CYRUS: I’m saying that I saw Angelique. I saw her walking down the street.
CHRIS: Well, I wish to submit that there’s an explanation for it. All of this.
CYRUS: What do you mean by that?
CHRIS: You’ve been working yourself too hard. You’ve been locked in this laboratory for over a year. Whatever you’re doing it can’t be worth your health and your peace of mind. It might even damage your mind.
Cyrus tells Chris what he is trying to do:
CYRUS: Let me begin by saying that, that man is chemical in his composition. Now, if the proper compound was distilled, and administered to a human being, this chemical composition could be radically changed, radically altered, and I’ve been working on this composition.
CHRIS: Why, why alter a human being?
CYRUS: Now let me also say this. That man is not one person, he is two. One is good, and the other is, oh, let us say for scientific conversation, the other is evil. Now, these two people are within each of us, and they are always fighting against each other. But if these elements could be separated, just imagine the possibilities. Evil could go its own way, completely free of any aspirations or remorse that are foreign to it. And good, good can have its own life, free of any struggle against, against evil impulses or hostile thoughts. My god, just imagine what a person…
Chris is horrified by this idea, and is glad to be an obstacle to it. Director Lela Swift reinforces Chris’ conviction that Cyrus is destroying himself by placing Christopher Pennock next to a mirror during the most perfervid part of his mad scientist’s programmatic statement, a visual metaphor telling us that Cyrus is splitting himself in two.
Chris tells Cyrus that he won’t help him bury himself even more deeply in the strictly private world he has created. Cyrus says that it is not private, that it is something he shares with Angelique:
CYRUS: Angelique believed in this theory. She believed it could be done. And she was the one who started me on, on all these experiments. Separating good and evil.
CHRIS: (sourly) There is no doubt in my mind which of the two appealed to her.
Chris tells Cyrus that he has been anxious to see him. He has heard that he presented a paper on black magic to a scientific society, and that the news led him to fear that Cyrus’ mind is becoming unbalanced:
CHRIS: I admire your devotion, Cyrus, but not your direction. It can only lead to trouble.
CYRUS: It can only lead to glory. And it will. Very fast, if you’ll just give me the name of that chemist.
CHRIS: No. I’m sorry to withhold it from you, but it’s the only way I can stop you. And I think I have to stop you. I desperately think that.
Angelique was not only a great beauty and a gracious matron, but was also a scientific mind who inspired Cyrus to pursue his scheme. She could introduce an experimenter to chemists whose specialties are so obscure that they cannot be found in any published directory, and her influence leads to the study of black magic and a skeptical view of the finality of death. In these matters, Angelique recalls Ligeia. The unnamed narrator of Poe’s story, Ligeia’s widower, says of her:
I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense –such as I have never known in woman. In the classical tongues was she deeply proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to the modern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault. Indeed upon any theme of the most admired, because simply the most abstruse of the boasted erudition of the academy, have I ever found Ligeia at fault? How singularly –how thrillingly, this one point in the nature of my wife has forced itself, at this late period only, upon my attention! I said her knowledge was such as I have never known in woman –but where breathes the man who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science? I saw not then what I now clearly perceive, that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding; yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast a triumph –with how vivid a delight –with how much of all that is ethereal in hope –did I feel, as she bent over me in studies but little sought –but less known –that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!
At the end of Poe’s story, the narrator’s second wife appears to die. Her body is eventually reanimated with the personality and even in the likeness of Ligeia. Cyrus’ un-nuanced belief that the woman he saw was Angelique come to life suggests that he expects her to follow in the footsteps of that other learned woman.
There is a poignancy now in seeing Don Briscoe play Chris’ concern for Cyrus. Briscoe suffered from bipolar disorder, and was at this time trying to self-medicate with street drugs. After he was violently mugged while trying to score a fix late at night in Central Park, he wound up leaving acting and moved into his parents’ house in Tennessee. He died there, morbidly obese, at the age of 64. I suppose what Dr Jekyll wanted was to come up with a drug that could sort the contents of the mind into orderly batches, so that people like Briscoe could live the lives they deserved to live.
Ligeia at Manderley
Meanwhile, at Collinwood, Quentin has been extremely stingy with information Maggie should know, and has neglected to tell her that Angelique had an identical twin. Hoffman and others on the estate are convinced that Angelique will somehow come back to life, and in their obsession with this idea they have made Maggie exceedingly uncomfortable in her imposing new home. Making matters worse, night before last Maggie heard a voice that she can believe to have been part of a prank played on her by Quentin’s son, strange and troubled boy Daniel, but which Daniel and we have reason to believe was actually Angelique’s ghost. So when Maggie opens the doors to the drawing room and sees Quentin giving a glass of sherry to a woman who, to all appearances, can only be Angelique, she flees in panic.
Quentin goes to Maggie in her bedroom. He explains that the woman she has seen is Angelique’s twin Alexis. At first he is relaxed and soothing, as charming as the Quentin of the main continuity has always been, almost as charming as David Selby is. But as Maggie insists on being left alone, his mood darkens. Alexis sticks her head in and suggests they should clear things up right away; Quentin asks her to wait downstairs. When Maggie refuses to be formally introduced to Alexis and play hostess to her, Quentin becomes stiff, grouchy, and patronizing, ordering her to do her duty as mistress of the house. She does not bend, and he leaves the room in a huff.
Back in the drawing room, Alexis tells Quentin she ought to leave rather than go on upsetting Maggie. Quentin dismisses Maggie’s concerns and proclaims that he alone makes decisions at Collinwood. Alexis is visibly startled by Quentin’s claim to autocracy, and doesn’t know where to look or what to do with her hands as she stammers out “Of course… you… make the decisions.” She goes along with Quentin’s decree that she will stay in the house starting tonight, before she can get her luggage back from the inn in the village.
Hoffman enters. At the sight of Alexis, she gasps “It- it’s you!” Hoffman composes herself quickly, and says that Angelique often spoke of her sister. She asks Alexis if she received the letter she sent her when Angelique died. Alexis says she missed it. Hoffman had sent it to her address in Tangier, but Alexis had moved from there to Florence by that time. Alexis does not seem to be in any particular business, and she describes her decision to return to Collinsport as motivated by a vague feeling of personal obligation, so we can assume that her long stays in these famous cities are a sign that she and Angelique have private resources that amount, if not to a fortune, at least to a competence. Hoffman suggests that Alexis stay in Angelique’s old room. Quentin does not object, and Alexis agrees.
Alone in the drawing room, Quentin wishes Alexis did not resemble Angelique so uncannily. In a gruff tone, he tells himself “I’m as bad as Maggie, I’m behaving like a frightened child.” Quentin’s attitude when he was lecturing Maggie about Alexis had indeed been that of an impatient adult ordering a child to stop having an inconvenient emotion. Since he does not believe he handled that exchange badly, it’s jarring to hear him say explicitly that he saw it that way. He pours himself a stiff drink.
In Angelique’s room, Hoffman tells Alexis she doesn’t have to lie to her. She may have her reasons to pretend with the others, but with her she can talk openly about the fact that she is Angelique risen from the grave. Alexis is thunderstruck by this, and tries to reason with her:
ALEXIS: You thought Angelique would come back? But that’s impossible, she’s dead.
HOFFMAN: She is not like others.
ALEXIS: She certainly wasn’t like anyone else. Nevertheless, she is dead. Do you hear me? She’s dead, and I’m her sister.
Hoffman tries to trip Alexis up by asking which nightgown she would like from Angelique’s dresser. Alexis points out that she has never seen any of them, so she can’t very well answer. Hoffman starts to apologize for her bizarre conduct:
HOFFMAN: I’m sorry, Miss Stokes, I’m sorry if I’ve said anything–
ALEXIS: It’s perfectly all right. I can understand how much you must miss her. But I wouldn’t intimate such a thing to anyone else if I were you. They might be very distressed by it, and so might you.
This exchange is very effective, particularly for regular viewers. Up to this point, Lara Parker has been playing Alexis quite differently than she played Angelique. Even when Angelique had been defeated in a conflict or was trying to seem like a wounded innocent, she always maintained eye contact with her scene partners and found a way to put a little more drama into her voice than any other performer would have thought to do. But Alexis looks down when she is confused, talks in a soft and casual tone when she thinks she understands what’s going on, and asks questions to which she obviously does not already know the answer. We can believe she really is a different character. But her last two sentences to Hoffman are exactly what Angelique would have said. When Alexis lifts her head and delivers them with her right eye fixed on Hoffman, we are suddenly in suspense as to whether Ligeia has already returned.
On her way out of the room, Hoffman passes Maggie. Without turning to face her, she explains that Alexis is staying, at Quentin’s orders. This brief scene is blocked as an homage to Hitchcock, whose 1940 film of Rebecca will have come to mind when Hoffman mentioned Angelique’s nightgowns. The censors tried to prevent the release of that movie, because of a scene in which obsessed housekeeper Mrs Danvers took a nightgown out of a wardrobe positioned in the same spot of the late Rebecca’s room as is the wardrobe in Angelique’s. Mrs Danvers went on and on about how sheer the nightgown was, how “You can see my hand through the material,” etc. Dark Shadows isn’t quite as bold with the homoerotic subtext of Hoffman’s devotion to Angelique as Du Maurier and Hitchcock were with that of Mrs Danvers’ devotion to Rebecca, but the shot is so much in his style and the movie was so famous that a large percentage of the grownups in the audience would likely have picked up on the reference.
Maggie goes to the drawing room, and finds that the decanter Quentin was drinking from is empty and lying on its side. She goes to Angelique’s room. She arrives just in time to see her obviously intoxicated husband in his first wife’s bedroom, with a woman who looks exactly like that first wife who is wearing a frilly nightgown, putting her hand on his shoulder, and saying in a soft voice “Perhaps we can comfort one another.” When we saw this, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that she would not be especially pleased if she were to find me in such a situation.
Maggie and Quentin have a showdown about this in the drawing room. It’s a sensational scene, one of the best in the series. Selby plays Quentin as a drunken, condescending grouch, trying to tell Maggie she didn’t see what she clearly saw. Kathryn Leigh Scott is spellbinding as she plays Maggie’s rage. I think it’s her best moment since #265, when the Maggie of the main continuity was a mental patient and went completely nuts while singing “London Bridge.” That, I think, was the scariest scene they ever did, making us think our old pal Maggie was never going to be all right again.
This time Miss Scott doesn’t sound like any character we’ve heard her play before. In fact, she sounds more like a real person than anyone else ever does on Dark Shadows when Quentin has forbidden her to mention Angelique’s name and she responds “You forbid me! Forbid me like a child, and I am not a child, and I refuse to be treated like a child. Not by you or by anyone. I know what I heard and I know what I saw!” At that, Maggie Collins becomes a distinct character and the Parallel Time storyline jumps to a new level.
Quentin whines that Maggie isn’t giving him a chance, and she lets him have it:
MAGGIE: Nobody’s given me a chance. No. This is Angelique’s house, not mine, you’re Angelique’s husband, not mine.
QUENTIN: All right, if that’s the way you feel about it, get out of here!
MAGGIE: All right, Quentin.
QUENTIN: Leave Angelique’s house and leave Angelique’s husband!
MAGGIE: That’s exactly what I’ll do. That is exactly what I will do!
And to Quentin’s bewilderment, that’s exactly what she does. She rushes out the front door. After a bit, Quentin staggers after her. He looks outside. Alexis comes downstairs, in her sister’s frilly nightie, and asks what happened. Quentin frets that “She actually went out that door.” Alexis asks if he is going after her, and he says “No, why should I? She behaved like a child!” He’s still holding onto the idea that it is right and proper for him to regard his wife as a temperamental child. He wonders if perhaps Alexis is right, then hears Maggie drive away and announces that it’s too late to do anything. He wanders back towards the drawing room while Alexis looks on. We are left wondering if she is Angelique masquerading as her sister, or if Alexis, contrary to appearances, was actually the Evil Twin all along.
*I am indebted to Danny Horn’s commenter “Riccardo” for pointing out the connection to “Ligeia.”
Dark Shadows Commentary 