Yesterday we saw strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy) go to a mysterious cairn in the woods, the ceremonial center of the cult of the Leviathan people, and announce that he was now one of the cult. The cairn then opened, revealing a little gap. David crawled into the gap. The gap was not quite big enough for him, so that the episode ended with an extended sequence of David Henesy wiggling his rear end at the camera while he tried to wedge himself into place.
Today we learn that the carpenters were not the only ones who haven’t caught on that Mr Henesy isn’t nine years old anymore. David has followed the gap to an underground chamber with a steaming cauldron. He takes some vegetation out of the cauldron and recites a cryptic poem, all the while staring portentiously off into space. His manner, words, and actions would be effective as part of a creepy little kid sequence, but the thirteen year old Mr Henesy looks mature enough that we just chalk him up as one more member of the Leviathan cult.
The Trouble with Chris
Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard calls on drifter Chris Jennings in his cottage. They talk about someone named Sabrina who has told Carolyn that while Chris is a nice enough guy, he will, in spite of himself, kill her if she keeps hanging around him. Chris tells Carolyn that this is true and that he is “a monster.” He does not explain. She leaves, and he takes out a pistol. First-time viewers will wonder if Chris has a compulsion to fire his pistol at people. Regular viewers know that he is a werewolf, and that his particular case of lycanthropy is so advanced that he sometimes transforms even when the moon is not full. We can assume that he plans to use the pistol to put himself out of his misery.
Regular viewers also know that Chris was safely confined to a mental hospital until he checked himself out recently. When he returned to the great house of Collinwood, he told his psychiatrist, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, that he just couldn’t stand the conditions at the hospital. Since leaving the hospital means that Chris will resume killing at least one random person a month, this decision just about completely erased any sympathy we might have for him as a character. It also undercuts his motivation in this scene. If Chris really wants to stop killing, he is free to go back to the hospital at any time.
The ghost of Chris’ great-grandmother, Jenny Collins (Marie Wallace,) appears. She tells him not to commit suicide. Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897 from March to November 1969; in those days, we got to know Jenny as “Crazy Jenny,” who played nothing but one mad scene after another. She was sane and well-put-together just once, when she appeared as a ghost in #810 and #811. In this second postmortem appearance, Jenny is extra mad, wearing a disheveled wig that reaches heights few hairpieces have dared. She does not tell Chris to return to the hospital, but to find his great-grandfather, Quentin Collins. She says that she cannot help him, but Quentin can.
This confirms what the show has been hinting, that Quentin is alive. Chris doesn’t know that, nor does he know of his relationship to Quentin. He is left bewildered and helpless by Jenny’s pronouncement. His response would no doubt be more complex if he were up to date, but he has been so ineffective at managing his curse and so irresponsible generally that we can’t imagine he would do anything constructive even if he knew everything we do. The character seems to have reached a dead end.
The Trouble with Barnabas
Upset by her conversation with Chris, Carolyn goes to her distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. She enters his home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, and finds the front parlor empty. She hears Barnabas’ voice coming from behind a bookcase, repeating over and over that “There is no margin for error. Punishment is necessary.”
Longtime viewers know, not only that a room is hidden behind this bookcase, but that Carolyn knows about that room. Her friend, David’s well-meaning governess Vicki, was held prisoner there by a crazy man in December 1966, several months before Barnabas joined the show. Carolyn is moving her hands, as if she is looking for the release that makes the bookcase swing open, when Barnabas comes downstairs.
When Carolyn says that she heard his voice, Barnabas explains that he was simply keeping busy by “conducting an experiment in electronics.” The candles around the room will suffice to show that the house doesn’t have electricity, and even if Barnabas weren’t so resolutely technophobic it would still require explanation that the text he set his speakers to reproduce over and over was “There is no margin for error. Punishment is necessary.” Moreover, Carolyn knows Barnabas well, and she can’t have overlooked that he is not his usual self these days. He is distant, calm, and utterly self-possessed, a far cry from the fussy, excitable chap who so often stumbles over his words. He remains formidably well-composed as he reiterates his position that Chris is a dangerously unstable person whom Carolyn should avoid, and that she has a bright future ahead of her. He gently but firmly guides her to the front door, and she is out of the house in record time.
Carolyn does not know that Chris is the werewolf, but at least she knows that there is a werewolf. She does not know that the Leviathan cult exists, and so it is understandable that she does not suspect that Barnabas is acting as its leader. But as the story unfolds, others will no doubt catch on that something is up, and so many people have spent so much time with Barnabas that it is difficult to see how they can all fail to notice the drastic change in his personality and to connect it with the strange goings-on. Putting him in this position makes it likely that the writers will have a harder time managing the story’s pace than they would if his involvement were more subtle.
Once Carolyn has exited, Barnabas opens the bookcase and reveals Philip Todd, antique shop owner. He rewinds a reel-to-reel tape and replays “There is no margin for error. Punishment is necessary.” Philip and his wife Megan are members of the cult, entrusted with the care of many of its most sacred items. Yesterday Barnabas found out that one of these, a book, had gone missing. He summoned Philip to the cairn, and it seemed he might be about to kill Philip. But now, he sends Philip off to administer the punishment to someone else, presumably Megan.
The Trouble with Megan
Megan (Marie Wallace) has been in an extremely overwrought state ever since she found that the book was gone. Today’s episode ends with a long scene in which she is alone in the shop, feeling that someone is coming to kill her, reacting sharply to every noise.
Danny Horn devotes most of his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Dayto reasons why this scene does not work, among them the fact that a depiction of a person descending into madness requires that the person start off as something other than over-the-top loony. Megan has been so frenzied for the last few days that Miss Wallace has nowhere to go when she hears the ominous noises. Moreover, her first two characters on Dark Shadows, fiancée of Frankenstein Eve and Crazy Jenny, were both intense, overbearing characters who were so inflexible that they had little opportunity to respond to anything their scene partners might do. Longtime viewers therefore expect to see Miss Wallace screaming and carrying on by herself, so nothing she does here will unsettle us. They lampshade this iconography problem by showing us Crazy Jenny’s ghost today, but that doesn’t help at all.
Many fans compare this scene to episode #361. Most of #361 is devoted to a one-woman drama in which Julia is tormented by sights and sounds in her bedroom, suggesting that her mind is collapsing. I don’t think that episode is a success, but because Julia had always been in control of herself up to that point we can see what is supposed to be at stake in it. That’s more than we can say for Megan’s fearful turn.
In John and Christine Scoleri’s post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Christine points out the prominence of the taxidermied animals in the background, and speculates that the scene is an homage to The Night of the Living Dead. I wouldn’t have guessed that director Lela Swift or writer Violet Welles would have studied that film, but Christine provides screenshots from it and from the episode, and the parallels are so striking that I can’t see how she could be wrong.
Closing Miscellany
I think the tape recorder is the same one we saw in the summer of 1968, when it was part of the Frankenstein story. It also appears to be the one that parapsychologist Peter Guthrie brought to Collinwood early in 1967.
Her haunting of Chris marks Jenny’s final appearance. Miss Wallace reprised the role decades later in a couple of the Big Finish audio dramas.
During Megan’s big scene, the camera swings a bit to the left and we can see beyond the edge of the antique shop set. We get a good look at a tree that stands near the cairn in the woods. Making matters worse, when they turn the camera away from the tree they go too far right, showing a stage light on the other side.
As the opening credits begin to roll, the camera is pointed a bit too far to the right and a stagehand is visible, adding dry ice to the steaming cauldron in the underground chamber.
Dark Shadows committed itself to supernatural stories in late 1966 and early 1967, when the chief villain was undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Since the usual laws of nature weren’t going to restrain Laura, they needed another set of rules that could predict her behavior sufficiently to create suspense. One of the things they settled on was that the barrier between past and present grows thin on the anniversaries of deadly events. So when well-meaning governess Vicki and the team she had assembled to fight Laura discovered that, in a previous iteration, she had taken a young son of hers to his fiery death “exactly one hundred years ago,” they knew that the crisis was at hand.
Anniversaries continued to have this effect in subsequent periods. So when in January 1969 recovering vampire Barnabas Collins wanted to take a day trip to the 1790s, he stood in a graveyard and shouted at a man who had died exactly 172 years previously to ask for a ride. It worked.
Barnabas was using a different form of mumbo-jumbo at the end of February, trying to contact the ghost that had made the great house of Collinwood uninhabitable, when he came unstuck in time and found himself in the year 1897.
In the middle of Barnabas’ long stay in 1897, the show decided to take its conceit that two events occurring on the same date in different years were mystically connected and show us both sides of the link. In #835, Barnabas was locked up in a cell with a secretary cabinet that he knew would be in the front parlor of his home, the Old House at Collinwood, in 1969. He wrote a letter to his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, and hid it in a secret compartment of the secretary. We cut to the front parlor in 1969, exactly 172 years later, where a series of events leads Julia to discover the letter, travel back in time, and precipitate Barnabas’ rescue.
By #839, the events of 1897 had played out differently enough from whatever happened the first time through that year that the ghosts found peace. As we cut back and forth between that year and 1969, we saw that the 1960s characters remembered the haunting and the disasters that accompanied it and were relieved that they were over.
That gives us the present as the result, not of any one series of events in the past, but of a composite of many separate and mutually incompatible pasts. This idea is the logical culmination of substituting anniversaries for natural laws. In the first part of Barnabas’ trip to 1897, he had not yet done enough to lay the ghosts to rest. So the haunting continued, because it was happening on the anniversaries of events that were much the same as those that took place originally. By the time the living people of 1897 who would become the ghosts of 1969 had changed enough that they were no longer doomed to haunt the house, the date was one that would fall almost ten months into the haunting. In #836, Julia had a conversation in which one of the ghosts tells her about events in 1897 that could not have happened in the original timeline without Barnabas’ intervention, and which do not happen in #838 after Julia herself travels to that year. So each anniversary creates another past that becomes another ingredient in the stew that makes up the present.
This conception of the relationship between past and present shows the difference between a set of fantastic tales like Dark Shadows and a science fiction story exploring more-or-less plausible consequences of open questions in science. The “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics posits that the cosmos is made up of countless parallel universes, and that everything that could ever have happened did happen in at least one of those universes. Since that is a defensible position within science, an author can incorporate as much fact and reality as s/he likes in a story based on it. But since the idea that one period of history is the result of a confluence of many conflicting pasts is not only not a live option in science, but does not really make any practical sense except as a metaphor, the logic that really matters is dream logic. As dreams seem perfectly convincing to us when the only connections that lead from one moment to another are random similarities in names or shapes, so all that matters in a fantastic tale is that there is a pattern the audience can follow, whether or not that pattern corresponds to anything in the world where we spend our waking hours.
Now Barnabas has returned to 1969, brought back by a mysterious cult that has brainwashed him and adopted him as its leader. The characters he knew before he left are delighted to see him again. Today, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard comes to the Old House and is overjoyed that the haunting is over and that she and her family have been able to return to the great house. She is grateful to Barnabas for undertaking his harrowing journey back in time.
Liz and Barnabas talk about Chris Jennings, a young man in whom Liz’ daughter Carolyn is interested. Barnabas gives it as his firm opinion that Carolyn should avoid Chris, and he urges Liz to encourage her to do this. Barnabas knows that Chris is a werewolf, and we saw last week that the cult that has co-opted him has plans for Carolyn which do not include her death as one of Chris’ victims, so this will not surprise returning viewers.
Chris himself is another example of the weird metaphysics the show has stumbled upon. When Barnabas left 1969 for 1897, Chris was in his wolfish form all the time, apparently never to become human again. We learned during the 1897 segment that his lycanthropy is a curse inherited from his forebear, Quentin Collins. The version of 1897 we saw was changed sufficiently from the original that Quentin avoided his own death and was for a time relieved of the effects of the werewolf curse, though at the end of the segment it looked like they might be on their way back. That he is now human part of the time but still subject to transformation suggests that the difference in Quentin’s experiences in the later part of the 1897 stories had some effect on him. It’s unclear whether Chris’ condition fluctuated every time the date marked the 72nd anniversary of something happening to Quentin that hadn’t happened when he was living in a Barnabas-free zone, but it wouldn’t contradict anything we’ve seen if it did.
The Time to Come
Barnabas brought one object back with him from the past, a wooden box. The box must be opened only at a certain time, by certain people, for the cult’s plan to take effect. Today, Barnabas receives a visit from the people. They are Megan and Philip Todd, owners of the new antique shop in the village of Collinsport. Carolyn sent them, thinking that Barnabas would likely have some things they could add to their inventory. He sees that Megan is wearing a necklace with a symbol representing intertwined snakes, which Barnabas calls a “Naga.” When Megan is unable to explain just how she came into possession of the necklace, he shows them the box, which is topped with an oval in which the same symbol is carved. They are both thrilled at the prospect of buying the old furniture he has in the upstairs rooms of his house, but Megan is particularly fascinated by the box.
Later, Philip and Megan are back in their shop. They are confident they can buy a great deal of furniture from Barnabas, but are also sure that they wouldn’t be able to afford the box, even if he were willing to part from it. This is a bit odd- we get a good look at the box, and it is absolutely nothing special. The actors manage to sell the scene, but it would be better if they had either invested in a showier prop or been more sparing about putting it on camera.
Barnabas comes to the shop and gives Megan and Philip the box as a present. After he goes, Megan is overwhelmed by an urge to open the box, which is locked. She is so consumed by this urge that she actually says “Let’s force it!” Since they had just minutes before been talking about it as if it were more expensive than anything they have for sale in their shop, this is a startling line. But when Philip opens the envelope Barnabas left to look at the list of furniture he is willing to sell them, he finds a key.
Philip is reluctant to open the box, having a strange feeling that if they do, nothing will ever be the same for them again. The other day it was Megan who had a strange feeling of impending doom. She wanted to sell the shop and flee Collinsport forever, lest they suffer an irretrievable disaster. That time it was Philip’s turn to urge her to set her misgivings aside. We’ve seen this kind of back and forth before. At the end of 1968, the great house of Collinwood was coming under the control of ghosts. Children Amy Jennings and David Collins kept trading the roles of possessed agent of the ghosts and unwilling sidekick. That alternation showed that the ghosts were not yet powerful enough to possess both children at once, and it faded as the haunting became more intense. It built suspense by suggesting that possible avenues of escape were gradually but inexorably closing.
As Philip and Megan begin to open the box, there is a whistling sound. They are unsettled, but decide they have to finish opening it anyway. They do, and we see their reaction to whatever is inside. Longtime viewers have seen similar reactions as cliffhangers many times; always before, they have indicated amazement that the container is empty.
New People
One of the less appealing villains of the 1897 segment was magically gifted artist/ surly criminal lowlife Charles Delaware Tate. Tate lived in a house that in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s was known as “the Evans Cottage,” home to drunken artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. The cottage burned down in #883, leading us to wonder if it would still be there when the show returned to 1969.
Sam died last year, and Maggie now lives at Collinwood, where she is David and Amy’s governess. Today she goes to the cottage to prepare it for some tenants to whom she will be renting it. Evidently it must have been rebuilt before the Evanses moved in.
The only movable property in the cottage is a portrait of Maggie’s mother which her father painted. That portrait also appeared in the cottage a few times when Tate was living there; that was just carelessness on the part of the production staff, but it is kind of reassuring to see it again.
A man who has been in a couple of episodes knocks on the door. He identified himself as a friend of Sam’s and is saddened to hear of his death. He enters and asks Maggie to do him a favor. He keeps refusing to give her his name. We haven’t heard his name at all; evidently his identity is supposed to be a mystery to us. Word of that apparently did not reach the department responsible for making up the credits; they’ve been billing actor Dennis Patrick as Paul Stoddard, whom regular viewers know as the long-missing husband of matriarch Liz and father of Carolyn. They do that again today.
This is the last time we will see the Evans Cottage. In 1966 and 1967, the set was a symbol of the village of Collinsport, and scenes there showed the consequences that the doings of the rich people in the big house on the hill had for the working class who live in its shadow. By the time Maggie moved into Collinwood, they had long since given up on those kinds of stories. Dark Shadows is sometimes called “Star Trek for agoraphobes”; as we go, less and less of the action takes place anywhere other than Collinwood, and eventually they won’t even let us outside.
Liz agreed to let Barnabas live in the Old House in #218; by #223, she was talking about it, not only as his home, but as if he owned it and its contents. For while they went back and forth on the question of Barnabas’ legal status regarding the property, but when, at the suggestion of Liz’ daughter Carolyn, he gives the Todds a list of its furnishings that he is prepared to sell to them, I think we can take it for granted that Liz no longer has any claim on it.
In #701, broadcast at the beginning of March 1969, recovering vampire-turned-bumbling protagonist Barnabas Collins was trying to solve some problems his distant cousins were having, and inadvertently came unstuck in time. He found himself in the year 1897, where his vampirism was once more in full force. Barnabas spent the next eight months in that year, precipitating one disaster after another around the estate of Collinwood and the village of Collinsport.
As summer gave way to fall of 1897, Barnabas’ friends managed to put his vampirism back into remission. In #844, he met Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire. Despite what her title would suggest, Kitty was an American woman in her twenties. Barnabas recognized her as the reincarnation of his lost love Josette. In February of 1796, Josette found out that Barnabas had become a vampire and that he wanted to kill her and raise her from the dead as his vampire bride. She flung herself to her death from the cliff on Widows’ Hill rather than let him do that to her.
In the eight weeks following Kitty’s first appearance, Josette’s personality irrupted into her conscious mind more and more frequently. Josette wanted to live again and to be with Barnabas. By last week, Kitty could hear Josette’s voice talking to her through the portrait of her that hangs in the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. Josette suggested that if Kitty stopped resisting her, the two of them could both live, resolving themselves into a composite being.
In Thursday’s episode, the boundary between Kitty and Josette had become very indistinct. As Kitty, she agreed to marry Barnabas that night, later to wonder why she had done so. She was holding Josette’s white dress in her hand and struggling with the idea of putting it on when she abruptly found herself wearing it. Barnabas entered the room just in time to see her bodily assumed into the portrait. He reached up to the moving image of Kitty overlaid on the painted likeness of Josette, and both he and Kitty vanished at the same instant.
In Friday’s episode, Barnabas found himself lying on the ground, wearing clothes he had last put on in 1796. He learned that it was the night of Josette’s death. He is a vampire in this period, but he is confident he can again be free of the effects of the curse. He does not want to kill Josette, but to take her back to 1897 with him. His efforts to that end were not at all successful, and Friday ended with her on the edge of the cliff. She hears footsteps, which she and the audience have every reason to think are Barnabas’. If she sees him, she is prepared to jump.
Neither Kitty’s assumption into the portrait nor his own translation to 1796 prompt Barnabas to ask a single question about what forces are at work around him. Regular viewers would not expect him to. He lives in a universe where time travel is easy. Not only did he travel from March 1969 to 1897 without even trying to do so, but in #661 he managed to get from January 1969 to 1796 by standing in a graveyard at night and shouting for one of the residents to give him a ride. And in #365, he was present at a séance where the ghost of his little sister Sarah, speaking through well-meaning governess Vicki Winters, said that she would “tell the story from the beginning.” Vicki then vanished from the circle and Sarah’s governess, Phyllis Wick, materialized in her place. For the next four months the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s, where Vicki flailed about helplessly while Barnabas became a vampire, Sarah died of exposure, and Josette jumped off Widows’ Hill.
Barnabas and we also know that portraits are powerful in the universe of Dark Shadows. When he is in full vampire-mode, he communicates with his victims and potential victims through a portrait of him that hangs in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. Much of the action in the 1897 segment had to do with a magical portrait that keeps Barnabas’ distant cousin Quentin from turning into a werewolf. Quentin had a romance with Amanda Harris, a woman who came to life when another magical portrait was painted.
Barnabas knows, not only that portraits in general have power, but also that Josette’s portrait in particular is powerful. In his second episode, #212, he went to the Old House and talked with strange and troubled boy David Collins, who often communed with Josette through her portrait. After David left him alone there, Barnabas addressed the portrait and told Josette that she would no longer function as the tutelary spirit of the Collins family. At that point Josette was supposed to be Barnabas’ grandmother who sided against him in a fateful family battle, but even after she was retconned as his lost love he felt the portrait’s power. So in #287, Vicki had invited herself to spend the night at Barnabas’ house. While she slept, Barnabas entered the room, intending to bite her. But he looked at the portrait of Josette and found that something was stopping him from doing so.
Barnabas would not have any way of knowing it, but in #70 Dark Shadows‘ first major special effect came when we saw Josette’s ghost take shape in front of her portrait and take three steps down from it to the floor of the room where it was hanging then, the front parlor of the Old House. She then turned, looked at the portrait, and went outside, where she danced among the columns of the portico. Longtime viewers will see Kitty’s assumption into the portrait as a reversal of this momentous little journey.
Most people nowadays who have been watching the show for some time will therefore take the strange goings-on as much in stride as Barnabas does. But viewers at the time may have had a different reaction. Friday’s episode and today’s originally ended with announcements over the closing credits. These announcements were not on the original master videotapes from which Amazon Prime Video and Tubi and the other streaming apps take their copies of the episodes, and so most viewers these days don’t hear them. But evidently one of the DVD releases reproduces them as they were preserved on some kinescopes. One promises that in Tuesday’s episode “one of the most terrifying tales ever told” will begin; the other, that it will be “one of the most unusual tales ever told.”
A terrifying tale suggests a mighty villain. By the end of the 1897 segment, all the villains have either turned into protagonists, as Barnabas, Quentin, and wicked witch Angelique had done; been heavily defeated, as sorcerer Count Petofi had been; or were dead and forgotten. So “one of the most terrifying tales ever told” would seem to require a new villain, or perhaps a new group of villains. And if it is also “one of the most unusual tales ever told,” those villains will have to be strikingly different from anything we have seen before.
So, having heard those announcements, we will be less inclined to chalk Barnabas’ latest adventure in anachronism up to the usual way things are on Dark Shadows. We will be looking for signs that some previously unknown and hugely formidable malevolent force is luring him into a trap.
At first, no such signs seem to be forthcoming. The footsteps that alarm Josette turn out not to be Barnabas’, but those of her aunt, the Countess DuPrés. The countess talks Josette down and takes her back to the great house of Collinwood. Having saved Josette’s life, the countess takes her to a room occupied by fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. The countess asks Millicent to sit with Josette while she runs an errand.
Millicent means well, but always makes everything hilariously worse. Seeing that Josette is shaking, she observes that she is suffering a shock. She asks very earnestly “Was your shock a romantic one?” Josette responds by wailing. Millicent keeps talking about the dangers of love, causing Josette to get more and more upset. Longtime viewers will remember that Millicent will turn from a comic figure to a tragic one soon after this, when she falls in love with an evil man. That tinges our reaction with sadness, but Millicent’s total insensitivity to the effect she is having on Josette makes for an effective comedy scene. No matter how much the oblivious Millicent is worsening Josette’s mood, this hardly seems likely to be part of a grand evil scheme.
It turns out that the errand the countess had to run was a visit to Barnabas, who is waiting in Josette’s room. This time Barnabas has actually had a sensible idea. Rather than go to Josette on top of the cliff as he did the first time through these events, he asked the countess to go. The countess confronts him about his status as a walking dead man. Barnabas will not explain- how could he? He asks the countess if she thinks he is a ghost; she does not answer. He insists on seeing Josette; she says she will not allow it. He says he does not want to force her to help him; she declares that he cannot force her. Finally, he ends the exchange by biting her.
The countess goes to Millicent’s room and tells Josette to go back to her own room. Millicent is surprised the countess doesn’t go with her, protesting that Josette is in no condition to be left alone. The countess responds numbly.
The countess is one of three characters we have so far seen Grayson Hall play. The first, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, offered herself to Barnabas as a victim in #350; he declined the offer. Julia was motivated by a mixture of despair over the failure of her first attempt to cure Barnabas’ vampirism, an obligation to prevent him harming others, and her own unrequited love for him, so she was disappointed when he said no. The other, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, told Barnabas to “Bite me!” when they were at the grave of her husband, his onetime blood thrall. He refused to do that, too. Magda was angry and defiant, wanting to get something horrible over with, so her reaction was more ambiguous. The countess didn’t know Barnabas was a vampire until his fangs were in her neck, so she is just dazed.
That Hall’s other characters expected Barnabas to bite them, and in Julia’s case hoped he would do so, shows that no new force is needed to explain why he bites the countess. And bad as a vampire’s bite is, from what we have seen in previous segments of the show we can be sure that the countess will forget all about her experience as Barnabas’ victim once he leaves. Besides, when he came back in time in January Barnabas triggered a chain of events that led to the countess’ death- we can assume that whatever he has put in motion this time will have a different outcome for her. So while the bite still has its echoes of rape and is therefore a horror, it in no way shows the presence of any fresh villain that is about to set off “one of the most terrifying tales ever told.”
Josette is in her room. The secret panel opens, and Barnabas enters. She is shocked to see him. He assures her that he does not want to kill her and raise her as his vampire bride; after a bit of prodding, she gets him to admit that this was, at one point, his plan. He starts explaining to her that he has come to her after a sojourn in the 1890s. She reacts with disbelief and confusion. He keeps talking. He asks her if she remembers Kitty Soames. At first the name does not ring a bell, but as he goes on she recognizes what she had thought to be a dream in which she was talking with her portrait. He tells her that it was no dream, but that just a few hours before they were together in that other century.
Finally, Barnabas persuades Josette to meet him at the Old House. He says they must go separately, since he has to go to his friend Ben Stokes and ask him to stand guard for them while they disappear into the portrait. She wants to say goodbye to her aunt the countess, and Barnabas tells her to write a note. They kiss passionately. One wonders if Josette notices the taste of her aunt’s blood on Barnabas’ lips.
Barnabas’ decision to go to Ben and send Josette to the house on her own doesn’t make much sense. This is the first we have heard they need someone to stand guard, and there is no apparent reason why they should. Moreover, the countess is right there in the house with them, and she is under Barnabas’ power. The three of them can go to the house together, Josette can say goodbye to her there, and if they need someone to stand guard she can do it. Afterward she can tell Ben what she saw and tell lies to anyone else who has questions about where Josette went. Besides, regular viewers of Dark Shadows know that when two people are supposed to go to a place separately, they never actually meet there. A smart character who understood how things work in this universe would know that Barnabas’ decree that he and Josette must take their own paths to the house means that they are doomed. But contrary to the glimmers of brainpower Barnabas showed earlier, he has never been that smart. He is so much a creature of habit that his decision to send Josette to the Old House by herself bears no traces at all of any outside influence, least of all the influence of the new villain we are looking for.
Barnabas is on his way across the grounds of Collinwood to meet Ben when it dawns on him that he is lost. This is the first thing he has done today that is out of character. He has been on the estate for centuries, and knows it surpassingly well. He looks around and sees a cairn, a large stone structure. The cairn has a flat surface in the middle and is flanked with torches and decorated with carvings resembling coiled serpents. Though he does not know where he is, he knows he has been following the same path he used shortly before, and that no such thing was there at that time or in the area ever before. Hooded figures approach, a man and a woman. They make gestures that he cannot understand. He cannot see or feel anything binding him, but neither can he move his feet or use his vampire powers to dematerialize. At last we have encountered the new presence that is supposed to deliver “one of the most terrifying tales ever told.”
Back in the great house, Millicent and the countess discover that Josette is gone. They read the note. When Millicent reads that Josette has gone to be with Barnabas, she is puzzled. All she knows is that Barnabas is dead. As a visitor from light comedy, she assumes that death is a full-time occupation. She tells the countess that to be with Barnabas, Josette will have to die. The countess replies that “Many have died for love.” Millicent is shocked by the countess’ resigned tone, and declares that she will not give up on Josette even if the countess does.
It would have been impossible for Barnabas to explain the situation to the countess while she was actively opposing him, but one might have thought that after he had bitten her and broken her will he might have tried to reassure her that his plans for Josette were now benevolent. The utter hopelessness in her voice when she says that no one can help Josette suggests he didn’t even try. Again, it wouldn’t have taken the influence of any outside force to cause Barnabas to skip this. As a vampire, he is a metaphor for extreme selfishness, and when he is pressed for time he is especially unlikely to take other people’s feelings into account in any way. Though it is a bit of a shame he didn’t try to smooth things over with the countess, there is nothing in his behavior that needs explaining, and too little at stake here for us to imagine that the mysterious forces launching “one of the most terrifying tales ever told” would care much about it.
In the Old House, Josette is looking at her portrait and wondering why Barnabas is late. She talks herself into believing that he was lying when he told her the story about 1897. She jumps to the conclusion that he really is going to turn her into a vampire, and declares she has nothing left to live for. She takes out a vial she had with her when she was with Millicent and drinks it. It is poison, and she dies.
Back in the mysterious clearing in the woods, Barnabas loses consciousness. The hooded figures say some prayers to Mother Earth, then lay him on the cairn. They place some foliage on him. This action recalls the sprinkling of grain on the necks of animals led to altars in ancient Indo-European paganism, an act known in Latin as sacrificium- it was this ritual act, not the killing of the animal, that made the animal sacer, that is, set aside for the gods. The man declares that when Barnabas awakens he will recognize him and the woman, and that he will then lead them “to a new and everlasting life.” My wife, Mrs Acilius, and I reacted to the idea of Barnabas as a guide to enlightenment the same way every regular viewer of Dark Shadows would, viz. with gales of laughter.
If the hooded figures represent the force that has directed the events of this episode and Friday’s, the force that we have been promised will bring us “one of the most terrifying tales ever told,” then something that happened in them must have been a necessary precondition for the sacrifice of Barnabas. After all, that force had him under its power when he disappeared from 1897 and found himself lying on the ground. He could just as easily have materialized on the cairn, accompanied by the hooded figures with their foliage.
The only development in these two installments that would seem to be significant enough to qualify as such a precondition is Josette’s poisoning of herself. That Josette jumped to her death from Widows’ Hill is one of the most firmly established parts of the show’s continuity. Artist Sam Evans told Vicki about it in #5. In #185, a very different version of Sam saw Josette’s portrait for the first time and identified her as “the lady who went over the cliff.” In #233, Barnabas gave a vivid and rather indiscreet account of Josette’s death to Vicki and heiress Carolyn. We saw Josette make her leap in #425, and in #876 the leap was reenacted with maidservant Beth Chavez in Josette’s role and Quentin in Barnabas’. So having Josette poison herself instead of taking the jump is an example of something Dark Shadows did several times in the later phases of the 1897 segment, making a retcon into a self-conscious plot point. That leaves us with a puzzle. Why does it matter so much just how Josette went about killing herself?
Josette’s original death was a desperate flight from vampirism. It barely qualified as a suicide at all. Josette was cornered at the edge of the cliff, seeing no way but a mortal leap to escape transformation into a bloodsucking fiend. She went over the cliff in a spontaneous act that prevented the killings and enslavements that she would have inflicted on others had Barnabas succeeded in making her into the same kind of monster he was. This time, she has been keeping a vial of poison with her, so that her suicide is a premeditated act. Moreover, she drinks it when she is still alone, motivated not by a clear and present danger but by her purely intellectual, and as it so happens faulty, analysis of the situation. She still has options, and she is helping no one. So it could be that “one of the most terrifying tales ever told” is supposed to begin with the audience disapproving of Josette’s suicide on moral grounds.
This doesn’t seem very promising, but we should mention that writer Sam Hall probably did not approve of suicide. He was a churchgoer, serious enough about his Lutheran faith that he insisted Shirley Grossman convert from Judaism before they married and she became Grayson Hall. Christians have traditionally regarded despair as a sinful state and suicide as a religious offense. And Hall does seem to have been in a religious mood at this period. Lately his episodes have shown evidence that he was reading the novels of George MacDonald, a nineteenth century Congregationalist minister whose works of fantastic fiction were enormously popular in their day, but which are suffused with such a heavily Christian atmosphere that by the late 1960s their readership was a subset of that of such self-consciously Christian fans of MacDonald’s as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and W. H. Auden. Indeed, the three priests who hosted the podcast God and Comics admitted in a 2022 installment of their show that MacDonald’s novels reminded them a little too strongly of their day jobs to count as fun reading for them.
If Hall was feeling pious enough to keep reading MacDonald, he may well have seen Josette’s intentional and unnecessary self-poisoning as a prelude to “one of the most terrifying tales ever told.” Still, nothing we have seen so far explains just how that would work. Maybe we will find out later that Josette’s soul is in need of some kind of intervention from the other characters to avoid damnation. Lutherans aren’t supposed to think in those terms, but not even MacDonald, churchy as he was, ever let any kind of orthodoxy get between him and a good story.
Today marks the final appearance of both Millicent and the countess. It is also the last time we will visit the 1790s.
The hooded figures Barnabas meets today are identified in the credits as Oberon and Haza. Oberon, King of the Fairies, was a figure in medieval and Renaissance folklore whom Shakespeare used as a character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Also, MacDonald mentioned Oberon occasionally in his novels. I don’t know where Hall came up with “Haza.” Bookish people pick up vocabulary items all the time, so any of the various words in the world that take that form might have popped into his head when he was writing this episode.
Oberon is played by Peter Kirk Lombard, Haza by Robin Lane. Miss Lane’s acting career seems to have peaked with her turn as Haza, but for the last six years she has been releasing videos on various platforms under the title Badass Women 50+. As of this writing, her bio on YouTube says that she is 89 years old. Until 2022, her videos ran on a cable TV service in NYC, where she was still living then and for all I can tell is still living now.
Peter Lombard died in 2015. He worked steadily on Broadway for a couple of decades. From the point of view of a Dark Shadows enthusiast, the most interesting work he did there was in the original production of 1776, a cast which also included Dark Shadows alums David Ford, Daniel F. Keyes, Emory Bass, and Virginia Vestoff. Those four were all principal members of the cast, while Lombard was a stage manager and Ken Howard’s understudy in the role of Thomas Jefferson. When the cast appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, Howard was absent, but the part of Jefferson was played not by Lombard, but by Roy Poole. I think I can spot Lombard in the background in the costume worn by Poole’s main character, Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island.*
The old age makeup makes it impossible to be sure, but I suspect this is Lombard as Stephen Hopkins.
Lombard bore a resemblance to Carel Struycken, the actor who played the very tall man in Twin Peaks. So much so that when I first saw this episode I was certain he was the same person. But they aren’t related. I do wonder if David Lynch or Mark Frost or casting director Johanna Ray saw this episode and had Lombard in mind when they cast Mr Struycken as “The Fireman,” who like Oberon appears unexpectedly and represents a remote and mysterious world.
*Stephen Hopkins is not only a character in 1776, but also figures in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” Lovecraft says that (the fictional) Joseph Curwen had been a friend and supporter of his when (the historical) Hopkins was first governor of Rhode Island, but that when Curwen was exposed as a menace Hopkins personally took part in the raid on Curwen’s place. Since the story beginning today is based on another of Lovecraft’s tales, a connection between Lombard and Stephen Hopkins qualifies as a mildly amusing coincidence.
It is November 1897, and time traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is searching through the burned remains of a cottage recently occupied by famed artist/ criminal lowlife Charles Delaware Tate. Barnabas finds a pair of glasses just outside the front door and a length of chain just inside. The glasses belonged to Tate’s master, evil sorcerer Count Petofi, the chain to a creature named Garth Blackwood whom Petofi and Tate summoned from the depths of Hell. When Barnabas was last in the house, Blackwood had taken Petofi prisoner there and announced his intention to kill him. Petofi couldn’t get far without his glasses, and the chain was Blackwood’s very favorite murder weapon. So Barnabas has reason to believe both of them died in the fire.
Tate shows up. Barnabas demands he paint another portrait of Quentin Collins to replace the one destroyed in the fire. Quentin is Barnabas’ friend and distant cousin, and, because of some magical powers Petofi long ago gave Tate, the portrait kept Quentin from turning into a werewolf. Tate is a jerk about Barnabas’ demands, as he is a jerk about everything, but finally says he will comply. He tells Barnabas to come back to the ruins of the cottage at 10 PM to pick up the portrait. Barnabas is surprised to hear that Tate can work so quickly, and Tate does not explain why he needs so little time. But after all, the important thing is simply that the magic spell is renewed- the portrait doesn’t have to have any particular aesthetic quality. Perhaps a simple sketch will serve that purpose as effectively as did the full oil painting Tate did previously.
Meanwhile, back at the great house of Collinwood, Quentin’s sister Judith is busy with a project of her own. She is torturing her husband to death. He is the odious Gregory Trask, so she has the audience’s sympathy, at least up to a point. She has had Trask bricked up in Quentin’s old room. There is a telephone there which can receive incoming calls, but not make outgoing calls. Judith has been using it to torment Trask. Today, she directs Trask’s attention to two objects which he has somehow overlooked in his time in the room. One is a portrait of Amanda Harris, a woman he tried to seduce while he had Judith imprisoned in a sanitarium. The other is a loaded gun. When she calls him for the last time, she does not receive an answer, evidently because he has shot himself to death.
Judith is the third role Joan Bennett played on Dark Shadows. In the parts of the show set in the 1960s, she plays matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz is a depressive personality who keeps trying to kill herself. When from November 1967 to March 1968 the show was set in the 1790s, she played Naomi Collins, Barnabas’ mother, who actually did kill herself when she found out that her son was a vampire. Now she plays someone who, though she was introduced as a psychologically fragile individual, does not kill herself, but drives one of the major villains to commit suicide. Judith’s method of disposing of Trask is not morally defensible, but it is interesting to see Bennett playing a more assertive character.
Trask’s discovery of the portrait of Amanda leads to an interlude in New York City, a place the show hasn’t taken us since #8. Quentin is in a hotel lobby there, waiting for Amanda. She is surprised to see him. They had been lovers, and had planned to leave Collinsport together. He did not meet her at the train station. She had told him that if he did not, she would understand that he had given up on their relationship, so she had gone ahead without him. She says she is so overjoyed at the sight of him that she won’t ask for explanations, but he gives one anyway. He tells her about the portrait. Since she herself came to life as the result of another of Tate’s magical paintings, she can’t very well dismiss the story out of hand. He says that because he does not know where the portrait is, he cannot be sure he won’t become a mindless ravening beast at the next full moon, so he will have to leave her.
Oddly, Judith takes time out from her torture of Trask to perform the same function of motherly talk-to that Liz and Naomi often served. Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, has been staying at Collinwood for the last eight weeks, and is engaged to marry Judith’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward. Contrary to what her title would suggest, Kitty is an American woman in her twenties. Judith sees Kitty coming downstairs with two leather overnight bags. Kitty explains that she will be leaving at once and never returning. She has realized that she cannot marry Edward. She says that she has not told Edward this. Judith says that she is disappointed that they will not be sisters, but that she admires her for facing the truth and doing something about it.
Later, Barnabas comes to the great house. He finds Judith worried that Kitty’s bags are still in the foyer, though she has been gone for hours. He says that he knows where she is. She is waiting for him. They will be married later tonight. Judith is bewildered by this. Barnabas says that they will come back after their wedding and tell Edward what they have done, and that they will then leave Collinwood forever. She is sad to think that they will be going.
In fact, Kitty is two people at once. The young dowager shares her body with the soul of the late Josette DuPrés, whom Barnabas loved when he was a living being in the 1790s and whom he tried to recreate when he was a vampire in the 1960s. Ever since Kitty arrived at Collinwood in #844, Josette has been forcing her way into her conscious mind, triggering psychotic episodes and from time to time pushing Kitty aside and living through her body. Now Kitty is in the bedroom once meant for Josette in the Old House on the grounds of the estate. Josette’s voice keeps speaking to Kitty through the portrait of her that hangs there, urging her to let go and accept her place as part of a combined entity that will love Barnabas and live with him in the bonds of matrimony. Kitty struggles against the voice. For a time she hopes Barnabas will help her thwart Josette’s attempt to come back to life and take the leading part in their symbiotic existence, but when he enters he urges her to give up the fight and become Josette.
Kitty is alone in the room when she suddenly finds herself wearing Josette’s white dress. She floats off the floor and into the portrait. Barnabas enters just in time to see Kitty merge with the portrait. He reaches up to the Kitty/ Josette entity in the frame above the mantel, and he and Kitty both disappear from the screen at the same time.
Josette was first mentioned in #5 as the lady who went over the cliff at Widows’ Hill, and her ghost emerged as the tutelary spirit of Collinwood in the months that followed. In #70, our first view of the Old House involved the first truly ambitious special effect, when Josette’s ghost, who was Kathryn Leigh Scott in a veil and a white dress, emanated from the portrait and took three steps from it down to the floor. When Miss Scott’s Kitty rises up into the same portrait today, longtime viewers will see that momentous little journey in reverse.
Barnabas was not dreamed of until long after Josette’s ghost emerged. When we first saw him in the Old House in #212, he delivered a speech to her portrait telling her that her power on the estate was ended, and for several weeks afterward strange and troubled boy David Collins, who had been the ghost’s close friend, lamented that he could no longer feel her presence. In those days it sounded like Josette was Barnabas’ grandmother, and she had sided with his father in the fateful conflict that led to his becoming a vampire.
Later, Josette was retconned as Barnabas’ lost love. In a plot borrowed from the 1932 film The Mummy, Barnabas decided that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was Josette’s reincarnation, and he tried to torture her into accepting this fact. Maggie resisted Barnabas. She ultimately escaped, only to have her memory of his abuse wiped clean by her psychiatrist, Barnabas’ accomplice and future best friend Julia Hoffman, MD.
Maggie was another Kathryn Leigh Scott character. When Miss Scott played Josette in the 1790s segment, the show was sticking to its source material, in which Zita Johanns played Imhotep’s victim Helen Grosvenor in the contemporary sequences and his lost love, Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun, in the flashback to ancient Egypt. It also left us with the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps Barnabas was onto something when he devised his horrifying program of cruelty towards Maggie. Sure, his methods were wrong, but if she “really” was Josette, he wasn’t just crazy.
With Kitty, they take us a step further. Barnabas’ attempt to Josettify Maggie made the show so bleak for so many weeks that longtime viewers will flinch at the thought that Kitty would be right to yield to Josette’s importunings, and even more at the idea that this will lead to a happy marriage between the Kitty/ Josette symbiont and Barnabas. Yet within the context of what we have seen in the 1897 segment, these would seem to be plausible conclusions. The body they share is as much Josette’s as it is Kitty’s, and Kitty has nothing to lose by merging fully into the being who lurks in the substrata of her mind.
For his part, Barnabas’ relationship to Kitty represents almost as drastic a departure from the personality he showed in his relationships to Miss Scott’s previous characters as the reinvention of Josette as his lost love rather than his estranged grandmother did in his early days on the show. He does not abduct her, torture her, or even give her Josette’s hypnotic music box. It is Josette’s ghost, always before shown as a benevolent force, that keeps pressing the transformation on Kitty. Barnabas is a gentle and considerate lover to the Josette part of the Kitty/ Josette complex, and is solicitous to the Kitty part. When Barnabas disappears with Kitty, we reverse not only the walk Josette’s ghost took in #70, but also the speech he gave in #212. So far from wanting to expel Josette from the world of the living as he did then, or turn her into his vampire bride as he tried both with Maggie in 1967 and with the living Josette in 1796, he wants to revive her as herself.
Barnabas’ function on the show, both when he is an outright villain and when he is trying to be the good guy, is to create problems that other characters will have to solve. So this moment of benevolence and rationality cannot last. It is the ultimate indication that the 1897 segment has indeed ended. But it is a beautiful little thing, for the few minutes it lasts.
This episode marks the final appearance of Trask and of Judith. We will see Kitty again tomorrow, but only in a reuse of today’s closing scene. After that she will only be implied as a feature of Josette’s unconscious mind.
In the parts of Dark Shadows set in 1966 and 1967, the home of artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, was a frequent set. Sam and Maggie were important characters in several storylines, and in their cottage they represented the working class of the village of Collinsport, as against the rich people in the big house on the hill.
Now, the show is a costume drama set in 1897. In that year, the Evans Cottage is already an artist’s studio. It is occupied by Charles Delaware Tate, who became a nationally renowned painter by making a deal with evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Today, Petofi is staying in the cottage, and Tate is functioning as his goon.
Petofi is deep in a trance, trying to cast a spell that will cause him and handsome young rake Quentin Collins to switch bodies. Once he has accomplished this switch, he will cast another spell to take himself, in Quentin’s body, to the year 1969, leaving Quentin behind in 1897 to face the vengeance of Petofi’s mortal enemies.
Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye has caught on to what Petofi is attempting to do, and has sneaked into the cottage to stop him. He snaps out of his trance and declares he will punish her. She grabs his glasses and runs to the door; Tate enters and grabs her. At Petofi’s behest, Tate ties Pansy up. Petofi then sends Tate to the great house of Collinwood to fetch Quentin. He is to say that Petofi will kill Pansy unless Quentin comes within the hour.
At the great house, Tate finds that Quentin has fled and cannot be reached. Quentin’s friend and distant cousin, time traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, insists on going back to the cottage with him. When he arrives, it occurs to Petofi that Barnabas’ body is just as well suited to his purposes as is Quentin’s. He lists some of the characters who are waiting for Barnabas in 1969, and predicts they will receive him “with open arms” when he arrives in Barnabas’ form. Regular viewers are perhaps chilled, and certainly intrigued, by the idea that the show might go forward with Petofi impersonating Barnabas in a contemporary setting while a Barnabas who looks like Petofi tries to make his way back from the past, though there are so few surviving characters and unresolved story points left in 1897 that it is hard to imagine many more episodes even partially set in this period. Petofi uses his magic powers to knock Barnabas unconscious, and goes into a trance to effect the body swap.
The door swings open, and someone called Garth Blackwood enters. The other day, Petofi had Tate draw a picture of Blackwood, a picture endued with magical powers. It brought Blackwood back to life. Some years ago, Blackwood was a jailer murdered by an escaping convict named Aristide. Petofi found Aristide and took him on as a servant. Aristide has recently proven to be unreliable, and Petofi has decided he wants to be rid of him once and for all. He was amused by the idea of resurrecting Blackwood to perform the task. Blackwood has killed Aristide, but Petofi found on Monday that there is more to him than his own magical powers created. He cannot lay Blackwood to rest. Now, Blackwood has resolved to kill Petofi and Tate.
Tate flees at the sight of Blackwood. Pansy, free, asks if he is the police. He identifies himself as the master of Dartmoor Prison. Pansy, being English, is impressed. She points to Petofi and tells Blackwood that he must act against him. Blackwood puts handcuffs on Petofi, then slaps him until he comes out of his trance.
Petofi pleads with Blackwood to drop all charges against him, since he was the one who gave him the chance to kill Aristide. Barnabas comes to and asks what is going on. When Blackwood asks if he testifies for Petofi or against him, Barnabas gladly pronounces “Guilty!” He starts to say that Petofi must be killed immediately, and Blackwood cautions him against giving opinions. The witnesses are to offer only facts. So he asserts that Petofi and Aristide traveled the world together for years and committed every possible crime. At that, Blackwood bids him and Pansy leave. Once he is alone with Petofi, Blackwood picks up a metal can, douses the place with fluid, and lights a fire.
Back at the great house of Collinwood, Barnabas and Pansy talk about what just happened. Barnabas says he is confident Blackwood will kill Petofi, but he thinks he and Pansy may have to fight Blackwood later. Pansy has a vision of Blackwood and Petofi struggling with each other amid the flames in the Evans Cottage. She also sees the portrait of Quentin burning there. Since this portrait has a magical charge that keeps Quentin from turning into a werewolf, that’s bad news.
Petofi has been so powerful that it has long seemed likely that his destruction could come only as the result of his own action. When his right hand, the locus of most of his powers, was reattached to his wrist in #815, the show was giving hints it might wrap 1897 up soon. We kept hearing that the Hand had developed a mind of its own in the century it had been separated from Petofi; we could easily imagine it deciding to strangle him, and indeed in #841 it nearly did. But 1897 was such a big hit that they kept restarting it, and for some time now the Hand has done more or less what Petofi wanted it to do.
It would have been fitting had Pansy killed Petofi, since she is, in her present form, one of his creatures. The original Pansy Faye was killed in #771. In #819, Petofi erased the personality of minister’s daughter Charity Trask and gave Charity’s body to Pansy. Pansy’s light-heartedness and apparent harmlessness would have added to her suitability as the instrument of Petofi’s demise. The whole idea of the supernatural is that what appears to be weak is in fact irresistibly strong, so it would be fitting to have a tiny woman who is a character from very broad comedy conquer the great wizard.
Blackwood has only been on Dark Shadows since #878, was never previously mentioned, and is the shallowest character possible. But those weaknesses, too, give him a logical place as Petofi’s executioner. Petofi was never more smug in his self-assurance than he was when he used Tate to bring Blackwood into being in order to murder Aristide. Petofi has so easily defeated efforts by characters who had long records of dominating the action of the show, such as Barnabas and wicked witch Angelique, that we can understand why it would not occur to him that a day player could present him with any serious difficulty. That self-assurance leads him to carelessness, as he creates in Blackwood a being whose strength comes not only from him, but from the fires of Hell from which he came. Indeed, Petofi’s only thought when he brought Blackwood back from the dead was of the suffering he would inflict on Aristide, and his only feeling was delight in contemplating that suffering. Coming as the price of his overconfidence and his gleeful cruelty, it puts a moral at the end of the story when Petofi falls at Blackwood’s hands.
This episode marks the final appearance of the characters Petofi and Blackwood. It is also the final on-screen appearance of Pansy, though her voice will be heard once more, in an episode next week.
The dramatic date is November 1897. We open in an abandoned mill on the old North Road in Collinsport, Maine. The late Garth Blackwood, once the keeper of Britain’s Dartmoor Prison, is about to avenge his own murder. Blackwood was raised from the dead by sorcerer Count Petofi and Petofi’s stooge, artist Charles Delaware Tate. Petofi wants to be rid of his unreliable servant Aristide, and decided that Blackwood, whom Aristide killed while escaping from Dartmoor and has feared ever since, will be the one to slay him.
Blackwood is ready to strangle Aristide, who takes a moment to tell him that if he does so he will be endangering his own existence. He explains that there are others who conjured him up to perform the very task he is about to undertake, and that once he has completed it they will not need him anymore. Blackwood says that this is no problem. Once he has killed Aristide, he will kill them too. He pulls a chain tight around Aristide’s neck.
Tate is outside while this is happening. The set represents the exterior of the mill. The set is alternately in deep shadow and illuminated by lightning flashes. We haven’t seen it before, it is rather nice.
Tate hides while Blackwood leaves, then goes into the old mill and confirms that Aristide is dead. Aristide was a nasty and inept fellow, but Michael Stroka found so many ways to make him fun to watch that he will be missed.
Back in his studio, Tate tells Petofi what he saw. He also reminds Petofi that Blackwood has killed two other people, and that he will in all likelihood go on killing everyone he meets. Petofi doesn’t care about any of that. All that interests him is his plan to forcibly swap bodies with handsome young Quentin Collins and, as Quentin, to travel to the year 1969.
Blackwood storms in, declares that Petofi and Tate are his prisoners, and says that they are under sentence of death. Petofi tries to cast a spell to make Blackwood go away; he finds that there is more to Blackwood than his magic can control. He can only hold him at bay, and that only for a moment. Tate shoots Blackwood. The bullet wounds cause him to fall and briefly lose consciousness, but he is soon back on his feet. He leaves, and vows that he will return to finish what he started.
At the great house of Collinwood, Quentin is going through his belongings. Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye enters. Quentin explains that he will be leaving on the early morning train to get away from Petofi. Pansy is sad to see him go, but she well knows how dangerous Petofi is. Quentin further explains that he has been looking through all his old stuff to see if any of it is worth keeping. He doesn’t think any of it is, but she thinks a photograph of him at the age of ten is adorable, and is glad when he makes a gift of it to her. They share a really lovely moment, as she says that she still wishes they could have become lovers and he plays along. She says that if he’d married her, she’d even have given up her career for him. He says gravely that he never would have asked her to do that. Quentin never asked Pansy for any of what she wanted to give him, and her reaction to this line shows that it has reminded her of that fact. But she still cares about him, and it is still a sweet little exchange. They smile their unforgettable movie-star smiles at each other when they part.
Later, Pansy has a dream in which Quentin falls asleep and Petofi seizes his body the instant his guard is down. She awakes, and realizes she must rush downstairs to prevent this dream coming true.
In November 1897, wronged woman Judith Collins Trask has had her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, bricked up in her brother Quentin’s bedroom. While Gregory is taking this in, the ghost of another wronged woman appears to him. She is Quentin’s ex-fiancée Beth Chavez. Beth is looking for Quentin. Trask is initially frightened, but then urges Beth to go to Quentin and tell him to come up to the room.
Quentin is in the drawing room, and Beth does appear to him. She says that she cannot rest in peace until she has given him a message. We wonder if she is about to tell him about Trask, but no such thing. Instead, she tells Quentin she forgives him. Then she vanishes, and he shouts that he can’t forgive himself.
We first saw Beth and Quentin at the same time, when their ghosts appeared to children David Collins and Amy Jennings in Quentin’s room in #646. That was broadcast and set in December 1968. Since the show went to 1897 in March, the living beings Quentin and Beth have attracted very different responses from the audience. Quentin has become a huge breakout star, while Beth has faded into the background. She died Monday; this is her first return as a ghost, and her final appearance overall. It rounds things off nicely that her departure begins in the room where we first saw her.
Quentin’s skeleton had been in the room in late 1968. David and Amy removed it and buried it on the grounds. Now history has been changed. Trask’s skeleton may take its place when the show returns to contemporary dress, behind a brick wall there that wasn’t there before. In #839, we saw that while the changes in 1897 have brought peace to the ghosts of Quentin and Beth in 1969, the characters in that year still remember the haunting. So you’d expect the wall to be a puzzle to them, and if they tear it down the skeleton will be as well.
Judith enters and tells Quentin that he can’t go to his room, or to any other room in the west wing of the house. She explains that it cost a fortune to keep that wing open, so she has had it sealed off. She has moved all of his things to a bedroom in the main part of the house. Quentin asks Judith where Trask is; she claims he ran out in pursuit of two violent men who forced their way into the house and hasn’t been seen since, and asserts that she is terribly worried about him. She sounds sincere, but Quentin isn’t fooled. He smiles and asks if he is right to believe that Trask’s story is ended. Judith says that it isn’t, not quite.
Collinwood is supposed to be an immense house, literally. After the first year of Dark Shadows, when a story about the Collinses running out of money was complemented with some specifics about the size of the place,* they have been making it out to be unknowably large. So it seemed inexplicable yesterday that Judith would choose Quentin’s room as Trask’s place of immurement. We learn what her plans were today. There is a telephone in the room; that telephone had been important during the Haunting of Collinwood story. Evidently Judith has rigged it to receive incoming calls only. It rings, and Trask can hear her taunting him. He cannot call out to summon help.
In the first 55 weeks of Dark Shadows, Joan Bennett’s character Elizabeth Collins Stoddard was a recluse who hadn’t left Collinwood in 18 years, believing that she had killed her lousy husband and that his body was buried in a locked room in the basement. It turned out that she hadn’t killed him at all, and the whole recluse theme, and the blackmail plot that it led to, were just one big dead end. As Judith, Bennett is making up for Liz’ lost time.
Outside: Petofi, Aristide, Garth Blackwood, the Widow Romana**
Sorcerer Count Petofi has tired of his unreliable servant, a bungling sadist named Aristide. He has conjured up the ghost of the man Aristide most fears, a jailer named Garth Blackwood whom Aristide killed while escaping from Dartmoor Prison. Blackwood is now hunting Aristide. Blackwood and Aristide were the two violent men who surprised Judith in her bedroom, though Trask never went in pursuit of them.
Aristide ducks into an abandoned mill on the old North Road where he and Petofi had squatted. He hears someone hiding in the back room. A woman jumps out with a knife. Aristide disarms her. He realizes she is the widow of King Johnny Romana, a Rroma chieftain/ organized crime boss whom he killed in #827. Rather than killing her with her own knife, Aristide offers to betray Petofi to the Widow Romana if she will let him join her tribe. He gives her directions to Petofi’s current location. On her way there, she crosses paths with Blackwood, who kills her. Blackwood then makes his way to the mill, where we see him grabbing Aristide.
When King Johnny died, we learned that in a few days another Rroma somewhere would inherit his immunity to Petofi’s spells and his mission to kill him. That was eleven weeks ago, and we’ve been waiting. The Widow Romana’s appearance today is a gesture towards tying up that loose end.
*In #2, Liz tells well-meaning governess Vicki that there are a total of 40 rooms, most of them in the closed-off parts of the house; in #87, the opening voiceover says that there are 80 rooms.
**Her name is given in the credits as “The Widow Romano,” but “Romana,” which we had heard as King Johnny’s surname in earlier episodes, is a likelier Romany name.
The odious Gregory Trask is plotting to murder his fabulously wealthy wife, the former Judith Collins, before she can change her will. He has made an arrangement with Aristide, a sadist who is fleeing a demon his former master conjured up from the depths of Hell to stalk him. He promises to lay the demon to rest once Aristide has murdered Judith.
For her part, Judith has made an arrangement of her own with a man named Tim Shaw. Tim is not appreciably more scrupulous than Aristide, and he hates Trask with a passion. He is also free of the time constraints that the stalking demon imposes on Aristide.
Judith goes upstairs to her bedroom, where Aristide is lurking behind the curtains. The scene looks rather like that in the 1954 film Dial M for Murder, in which a man hides behind curtains while waiting to murder a woman whose husband is blackmailing him into the crime. It is likely that Dial M for Murder was on the minds of the makers of Dark Shadows at this time, since star Jonathan Frid had just missed four and a half weeks while playing the lead in a stage production of it in the Chicago area.
In Dial M for Murder, the wife survives the attempt, killing the would-be assassin. Judith also survives, but not through her own action. Instead, the demon, whose name is Garth Blackwood, bursts into the room. Aristide escapes through the window. Trask enters and finds Blackwood still in the room. Blackwood menaces him with a heavy chain he carries, then leaves in pursuit of Aristide.
Judith persuades Trask to join her in a glass of brandy. He takes a sip, she does not. He passes out, and Tim enters. When Trask awakens, he finds himself in a room in the west wing of the house. Tim is with him in the room. Tim tells Trask goodbye, then springs out the door and locks it behind him. When Trask opens the door shortly after, he finds that Tim and Judith are bricking him in.
It’s rather much to ask us to believe that the mortar dries instantly, leaving Trask unable to push the wall down. To be bricked up in Collinwood is the fate of all Trasks- Gregory’s ancestor, the original Reverend Trask, was bricked up in an alcove in the basement of the Old House on the estate in #442 by the vengeful Barnabas Collins. Barnabas chained that Trask up, giving the mortar time to set. Moreover, Barnabas chose a dark little out-of-the-way spot in a vacant house. This is in a bedroom suite that Judith’s brother Quentin uses. Most of Quentin’s stuff is out of the room, but there is still some furniture in there and a bunch of candles. You have to wonder what she will tell Quentin when he comes home. For some time they’ve been going on about how vast the great house is, at one point saying that no one had ever counted the number of rooms in it, so it is just bizarre that Judith picked a room that someone is on his way to sleep in.
Episode 174 of Dark Shadows, broadcast and set in February 1967, included a scene set in a police station and morgue in Phoenix, Arizona, where we met Lieutenant Costa of the Arizona State Police. Lieutenant Costa was played by John Harkins, who would become a ubiquitous TV presence in the decades to follow.
Harkins returns to the cast today as another law enforcement character. The show is set in 1897, and the action is almost entirely driven by supernatural doings. Harkins’ character, Garth Blackwood, is the late keeper of Dartmoor Prison. He is conjured up from the depths of Hell by sorcerer Count Petofi, who has decided to use him to kill his unreliable servant Aristide. Blackwood was heard but not seen yesterday, in a flashback set near Dartmoor. That flashback broke the record Harkins’ previous appearance had long held for the scene in the series set furthest from Collinsport, Maine.
Blackwood storms into the room where Petofi is recovering from a knife wound Aristide recently inflicted on him. He announces that his prisoner was seen entering the house and threatens Petofi with a heavy chain he carries. Petofi keeps smiling, but points out that he is injured and was unable to stop Aristide leaving. Blackwood exits. The threat suggests that conjuring him up may not have been Petofi’s wisest move. Petofi has such great powers that we have for some time suspected that he himself would have to be the source of his own destruction. Perhaps Blackwood will be the instrument who finishes him off.
At the great house of Collinwood, matriarch Judith Collins Trask tells her lawyer, Evan Hanley, that she is ready to put her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, in his place. She will be changing her will the next day to remove Trask as executor of her estate. Evan, a former co-conspirator of Trask’s in his evil schemes against Judith and others, is reluctant, but can tell there is no point in resisting Judith. He exits, and Trask enters. Judith tells him she will be rewriting her will to pass all of her wealth to worthy causes after she dies, and he is thunderstruck. He exits hastily.
Trask goes to Evan’s house. He tries to talk his onetime partner in crime into stopping Judith’s plan, but Evan says that her resolution is beyond his ability to change. Aristide bursts in. He pleads for help, and reveals that Petofi has conjured up a demon to stalk him. Evan knows Petofi’s power and wants nothing to do with the situation, but Trask does not know what he is dealing with. He promises to help Aristide in return for a favor. Evan leaves the room, and Trask tells Aristide he wants him to commit a murder for him. After he agrees, Evan returns and Trask persuades him to let Aristide stay in his house for an hour.
In Trask’s absence, Blackwood catches up with Aristide. He enters the house, and Aristide flees. He demands Evan let him search the house. Evan’s background as an attorney kicks in, and he declares he will not let Blackwood conduct a search without a warrant. Blackwood’s response is to strangle him with his chain. Evan has been one of the most consistently interesting characters in the 1897 segment; his death is another sign that we will soon be leaving this epoch.
In October 1897, sorcerer Count Petofi has used his powers to steal the body of handsome young Quentin Collins and to trap Quentin in his own aging form. 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.
Q-Petofi
We open outside a cave near the estate of Collinwood, where Q-Petofi’s henchman Aristide is on the ground, gradually coming back to consciousness. Q-Petofi had ordered Aristide to hold wicked witch Angelique prisoner in the cave. Shortly after Q-Petofi left, Angelique slipped out of the cave and ran past him. Aristide followed her, and she bashed him on the head with a rock.
Aristide’s eyes focus, and he sees time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins standing over him. The last time he saw Barnabas was in #842. Barnabas threatened to kill Aristide then, and he was so terrified that he ran away and didn’t come back until he heard that Barnabas had been staked in his coffin. The coffin is in the cave, and Aristide just saw Barnabas in it, the stake still in his heart, so he is shocked to see him up and about.
We cut to the great house of Collinwood, where Q-Petofi and Quentin’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward are recapping another storyline. Edward exits, and a telephone call comes from Ian Reade, MD. Dr Reade says that a strange man is in his office, asking for Edward. When he describes the man, Q-Petofi recognizes him as Barnabas. He takes a gun and goes to Dr Reade’s.
Q-Petofi finds Barnabas lying on Dr Reade’s exam table. He orders Dr Reade to leave. Dr Reade reminds Q-Petofi that they are in his office and refuses to comply with his commands. He does leave for a moment to call Edward again; when he comes back, he finds Q-Petofi holding Barnabas at gunpoint. He bravely tells Q-Petofi that if he wants to kill Barnabas, he will have to shoot him first.
Edward comes. Dr Reade trusts Edward and agrees to leave the room while he is there. After dawn breaks, Edward is astonished to see that Barnabas is still alive. Barnabas tells his old story that he is their cousin from England come to pay his respects. He says that when he first arrived, a man approached him in the dark woods, a man who, when he emerged from the shadows, proved to be his exact double. Until, that is, he opened his mouth and showed two long fangs. Barnabas says that he does not know what happened next or how much time has passed. All he knows is that this strange man kept him captive and dominated his will, from time to time appearing to him and repeating his original assault.
Edward is inclined to believe this story, Q-Petofi to shoot Barnabas on the spot. They compromise, and agree to take him to the cave. If Barnabas’ coffin is empty, they will shoot him. Dr Reade sees Edward and Q-Petofi carrying Barnabas out of his office, and objects that in his condition Barnabas may die if he is subjected to any exertion. When the question is asked if he is willing to go, Barnabas weakly croaks out a “yes.” At that, Dr Reade is willing to wash his hands of the whole thing. For someone who was willing to be shot a few minutes before, it’s quite a startling capitulation.
Q-Petofi does not know that Angelique and Aristide are no longer in the cave, so he insists on leading the way in. He finds that they are gone and the chains around Barnabas’ coffin have been broken. He invites Edward and Barnabas in. He takes it as obvious that the broken chains prove that the coffin is empty, but Edward, with his sense of fair play, insists on opening the coffin before they shoot Barnabas. The body is still there, the stake still in the chest. Barnabas reacts with horror, the others with amazement.
Doppelgänger time.
In #758, Angelique created a Doppelgänger of herself to trick an enemy into thinking that she had killed her, and in #842 she agreed to help Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman, MD in a plan to allow him to reestablish himself as a member of the Collins family. Julia was working on a medical intervention to free him of the effects of vampirism, and now we can see that Angelique contributed the grounds for the Collinses to believe that their cousin never labored under that curse.
When Dark Shadows was in production in the 1960s, the legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail had been fashionable topics in English departments for decades. That vogue was reflected not only in the coursework the writing staff likely did when they were in college, but also in the popularity of novels like The Once and Future King and the Broadway show based on it, Camelot. When I was hanging out in used book stores in the 1980s and 1990s, mass market paperbacks printed in that era collecting the Grail sagas were still a staple.
The coffin in the cave recalls a prominent figure in one of those sagas, a king named Amfortas. In Heinrich of Turlin’s The Crown, Amfortas did not requite the love the mighty sorceress Orgeluse had for him. The humiliated Orgeluse inflicted a wound that both paralyzed Amfortas and made him immortal. In that state, Amfortas was confined to a coffin that was hidden in a cave. Sir Gawain found the coffin and freed Amfortas both of his paralysis and of his immortality.*
Longtime viewers of Dark Shadows will see many parallels to the story of Barnabas and Angelique in Heinrich’s story of Amfortas and Orgeluse. During the part of the show made and set in 1968, two mad scientists played the role of Sir Gawain in returning Barnabas to humanity. The first was a man named Eric Lang, the second was Julia. Now, Angelique herself, who was the original source of the curse that made Barnabas a vampire, combines the functions of Orgeluse and of Gawain. She not only frees Barnabas, but also redeems herself. The Grail legends also abound in other elements that figure prominently in this part of the show. For example, Count Petofi was originally on the show as a severed hand with magical powers, later to be reunited with the rest of its body. Gawain’s most famous story is of his battle with the Green Knight, who starts off as a severed head. Doppelgänger abound in the Grail legends, especially the so-called Vulgate Lancelot where a double of Queen Guinevere sets off a whole arc.
Dr Reade is played by Alfred Hinckley. Hinckley was in plays on and off Broadway, and when the networks ran a lot of programming produced in New York, his was a frequent face on American television. He was in Dark Shadows episode #1 as the conductor of the train that brought well-meaning governess Vicki Winters and dashing action hero Burke Devlin to Collinsport. Longtime viewers were reminded of that train in #850; maybe the production staff was reminded of it too, and that was why they called Hinckley to make his second appearance on the series today. It’s also his final appearance.
Dr Reade, unintimidated by Q-PetofiThe conductor, unintimidated by Burke
*Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal features another version of the Amfortas legend, calling the sorceress by a different name, omitting Amfortas’ paralysis, leaving out the coffin in the cave, and giving the honor of healing Amfortas and succeeding him as king of the Grail to Percival rather than Gawain.
Dark Shadows Commentary 