Wicked witch Angelique has died, again. While she still dwelt among the living, Angelique locked Julia Hoffman up in a dungeon and left her to die of thirst. Julia’s buddy Barnabas Collins and a dimwitted policeman called Inspector Hamilton are looking for her. She is struggling to stay awake. The episode devotes so much time to a go-nowhere story about a non-character named Roxanne that we can sympathize with this struggle.
Julia nods off just as Barnabas and the inspector pass by the hidden wall of her dungeon. She does not hear them, and by the time she wakes up and starts calling out they are gone.
While asleep, Julia has a dream in which Barnabas and Roxanne decide that she must be dead. They are going to leave for the alternate universe from which Julia and Barnabas originally came. Julia has given up everything in her life to help Barnabas, and she has an unrequited love for him. For his part, Barnabas has conceived a mad passion for Roxanne, who is young and pretty but has no personality. Roxanne’s short red hair, pale complexion, and strong chin make her look like she could be Julia’s daughter. Indeed, when first we saw her it seemed likely she would be revealed to be the daughter of Julia’s counterpart in this universe. Barnabas is so thoughtless about throwing other women in Julia’s face that it would be like him to cast her aside for the daughter she might have had, Grayson Hall would have done a great job playing the anguish this would have inflicted on Julia, and it would have given Donna Wandrey something to work with as Roxanne. It’s a shame they didn’t run with it.
This is Colin Hamilton’s final appearance as Inspector Hamilton. It is always a bad sign when writers give a character the actor’s name; it suggests they don’t trust him to answer to anything else. They may have been right about Colin Hamilton. He will be back as a doctor in #1219. That is the only episode of Dark Shadows of which no video survives. There is an audio recording, so we can hear that Hamilton delivered the doctor’s dialogue in the same bored, impatient tone he used for the inspector.
Wicked witch Angelique Stokes Collins has cast a spell on Maggie Collins, compelling Maggie to shoot her husband Quentin. Angelique herself dwells among the living because of another spell, one cast by her father, a wizard known as Tim. This spell drains the “life force” from a woman named Roxanne into Angelique, revivifying her after Quentin’s brother Roger drove a hatpin into her brain nine months ago. Angelique has kept her identity secret, in part because Quentin and a friend of his had a panic attack some time ago and destroyed her coffin, keeping the physical evidence from telling its tales. They were two loonies, quelling caskets.
Occasionally Roxanne manages to reclaim enough of her “life force” to make Angelique weak and cold. When this happens, Angelique can perk herself up by hugging a man and kissing him, thereby making all of his body heat flow into her, leaving him an icy corpse. The kiss appears to have become essential to this transfer; her kissing equates coolness. Yesterday she gave Roger this treatment, avenging her own murder.
The spell on Roxanne will break when she speaks, and her pushy ex-boyfriend Claude is about to make her do that. So Angelique has only moments to live. Quentin is on the run from the law, charged with the murder of a man named Bruno. Angelique’s enemy, Barnabas Collins, demands she sign a confession admitting that Bruno was actually killed by a spell she cast using a cravat of his. Quentin is innocent in these loose necktie squallings.
Angelique refuses to sign any such document. Later, Barnabas will tell the whole story to a police inspector whose incredulous response makes it clear that it would not have persuaded anyone had she done so. More urgent is a question he puts to her about the whereabouts of his faithful companion, Julia Hoffman. Angelique has locked Julia in a dungeon and left her to die of thirst. The door to this chamber swings shut silently, and apparently it does not let Julia’s cries for help be heard outside. Many of the places of confinement we have seen on Dark Shadows are the looniest squeaking cells you could imagine, but this one is grimly soundproof.
Roxanne speaks and Angelique dies, defiant to the end. Cloaking queenliest loss, her refusal to bend invests the character with a perverse grandeur.
Barnabas remembers an Angelique who lived on the island of Martinique. For him, all the other Angeliques are just successors to what she brewed up there, Antilles cooking sequels, as it were. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
With Angelique’s death, her spell over Maggie breaks. Maggie collapses and drops the revolver she had trained on Quentin. One of the themes of the show has been that a person who casts a spell creates an alternate version of herself and that version takes possession of the person against whom they direct it. Lara Parker and Kathryn Leigh Scott play Angelique and Maggie’s collapses in the same way; seeing these back to back, we cannot miss the point that what we are really seeing is the simultaneous death of two Angeliques. Sometimes the alternate selves created by the spells outlive the spellcaster, and there is no telling where they will drive the victim. The accursed who wander about the earth, whether they became vampires like Barnabas or zombies like his uncle Jeremiah, are lockless antique legions, unrestricted in their physical movement, unlimited in the duration of their afflictions, uncounted in their numbers.
Miffed that Maggie pointed a gun at him, Quentin leaves the room. He finds Barnabas, who explains everything that has been going on. Quentin goes back to Maggie. She says that she realizes he could never love her or any other woman as he loved Angelique when she was alive. He tells her he never loved Angelique, but that he “hated the ground she walked on” and never shared a happy day with her because she was so cruel to him when they were married. When the same scene played out between Maxim de Winter and his second wife in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and in Alfred Hitchcock’s film based on the novel, we could take it as grounds for hoping that their marriage would take a turn for the better. But Quentin seems never to have loved Maggie, and we have never seen them share a happy day. They speak lovely words as they embrace; kissing allots eloquence. But Quentin’s declaration that he wasn’t any happier in his first marriage than he has been in his second comes only as confirmation of our suspicion that things will only go from bad to worse as long as he and Maggie stay together.
Barnabas and the inspector look for Roxanne. They don’t find her, and the inspector dismisses Barnabas’ whole story. The law moves a lot faster in Soap Opera Land than it does in our world, but only the looniest legal quickness could get Quentin out of trouble in the time that seems to be remaining in this storyline. Later, the inspector catches up to Quentin and arrests him, and Barnabas finds Claude stabbed to death in the woods.
This episode marks the final appearance of Angelique Stokes Collins. Lara Parker, that member of the queenliest looking class, will be back later as another witch named Angelique. It is also the final appearance of actor Brian Sturdivant and of the character Claude North. Sturdivant’s performance has many problems, most obviously his wildly uncertain accent. At times he manages to enunciate a few words in the old “mid-Atlantic accent” stage performers were trained to use in the first half of the twentieth century, but he never keeps it up for a whole line.
Angelique Stokes Collins has returned from the grave to take vengeance on her murderer. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know who that is. For the last several weeks, she has been operating on the assumption that she was killed by her widower, foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins. She has managed to get Quentin charged with one murder and suspected of several others; under her influence, he assaulted a police officer and broke out of jail. She has persuaded him that his current wife, the former Maggie Evans, is a witch and is responsible for all his troubles. He is lurking about the great house on the estate of Collinwood, where yesterday he encountered Maggie and told her he would kill her.
Angelique herself is residing in the great house. Eleven weeks ago she killed her identical twin sister Alexis, assumed Alexis’ identity, and took her place as Quentin’s houseguest. Maggie now thinks of “Alexis” as her friend.
Others in and around the house know better. High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, Quentin’s brother, has seen through her imposture. Two visitors from the alternate universe where Dark Shadows was set for its first 196 weeks, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and vampire Barnabas Collins, knew her counterpart in their world and are onto her tricks.
Angelique hears some noise in her old bedroom in the east wing of the great house. She finds the door locked and hears Roger’s voice. She demands to be let in. He opens the door and she forces her way past him. She finds Maggie in a heap on the floor. Roger rushes out. Maggie tells “Alexis” that Roger tried to strangle her after confessing to three murders, including Angelique’s. Angelique and Maggie decide to call the police.
Julia and Barnabas learned that Angelique’s father, evil barfly Tim Stokes, made it possible for her to rise from the dead by using a mixture of medical science and black magic to establish a remote connection between Angelique and a woman named Roxanne. Through this connection, Stokes drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. Julia and Barnabas have taken Roxanne from the back room of Stokes’ apartment and hooked her up to some mad science equipment in the basement of the Old House at Collinwood. They hope to manipulate Roxanne’s condition as a means of controlling Angelique.
Angelique has locked Julia in a dungeon off the basement of the great house and left her there to die of thirst. Barnabas is sure Angelique has captured her, but cannot begin to guess where she might be. He takes a shot at using the mad science equipment to revive Roxanne sufficiently to knock Angelique out. He cannot see any effect, and goes out to try to look for Julia.
As Barnabas goes out, a man peers at him from behind a tree. Since Barnabas never under any circumstances locks his front door, the man strolls into the house as soon as Barnabas is out of sight.
The man is Claude North, a mysterious person somehow connected with Roxanne. Barnabas comes back to the basement and finds Claude trying to get Roxanne to talk. He tells him that she must not do so just yet, because at her first word Angelique will die and there are some things he has to take care of before that happens. Claude cares nothing for this. Barnabas is afraid that if he attacks Claude, Roxanne will be startled into speaking, so he withdraws.
The other day, we saw a grave marker in Claude’s name, and we have seen that he has the same power Barnabas does to mesmerize people when they follow his command to “Look into my eyes!” He had also been staying in a hidden chamber identical to the one where Barnabas’ coffin was kept for his first 171 years as a vampire. And he had some kind of mystical power over Roxanne, as Barnabas has over his victims. So we thought Claude might be a vampire, too. But today he explains that the grave was his grandfather’s, he clearly doesn’t recognize Barnabas as a fellow bloodsucker, and when cornered he doesn’t flash fangs. So we’re left thinking he’s probably just Roxanne’s overconfident ex.
Meanwhile, Angelique is feeling cold and weak because Roxanne has reclaimed so much of her “life force.” She has cast a spell to cause Roger to slip past the police swarming the estate and make his way to her in her old room. Once they are together, she warms herself up for a while by hugging and kissing him. First time viewers may think this is an odd thing for her to do, but returning viewers know that she is a heat vampire who can by those actions drain the warmth from a living body and leave it an icy corpse. Louis Edmonds has been doing some great work these last few weeks, and he plays Roger’s death scene especially well.
Downstairs in the drawing room, Angelique is still shivering. Maggie enters and sees that “Alexis” is ill. Maggie insists on helping, and Angelique suggests she walk her to the fireplace. They sit together beside it. We learned Wednesday that Angelique has magical hypnotic powers, and Maggie’s counterpart in the main continuity was subjected to frequent mind-wipes. So there is a nice sense of inevitability when Angelique puts her into a trance and orders her to get a gun and prepare to shoot Quentin.
Angelique is still sitting by the fire, still feeling miserable, when Barnabas comes back. He tells her that Claude is with Roxanne and that Roxanne will be speaking at any moment. He writes up a confession and orders her to sign it, saying it will clear Quentin of the murder with which he was charged. He says that this will allow her to find peace. She says she doesn’t want peace. We may wonder how the confession could possibly clear Quentin. All she could do would be to admit that the man Quentin is charged with killing actually died because she cast a magic spell on him. We have already seen that the policeman in charge of the case has zero patience for talk about magic, and there is no end of evidence pointing to Quentin’s guilt.
We end where we began, in Angelique’s room with a homicide in the offing. Then it was Roger with his hands around Maggie’s neck; now it is Maggie pointing her revolver at the door as the knob turns. That isn’t all that suspenseful a situation. I’m sure Maggie would feel bad if she had killed Quentin, but he’s so hyper-violent that no one would doubt she acted in self-defense and has been such a bad husband to her that it’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t get over it in short order. If Quentin dies, there will be so few characters left that the show couldn’t go on, but we will probably be leaving this universe in a few days in any case. So this isn’t much of a Friday cliffhanger.
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.
In the first months of Dark Shadows, characters several times shared meals in the kitchen in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. In that intimate setting, they would often exchange information that made it possible for them to advance the story. As time went on, the show developed more ways to get knowledge flowing, and the kitchen lost its importance. We haven’t seen it since #208.
Now, the show is set in an alternate universe, which it calls “Parallel Time.” We see the kitchen in this reality’s Collinwood today, the last glimpse we get of the room in any version of the place. Young Amy Collins visits butler Mr Trask there while he is sharpening a large knife. She tells him a man is living in the tower room. He leaves to investigate, leaving the knife on the countertop. The camera zooms in on the implement, lingering over it while an ominous cue plays on the soundtrack.
Later, Amy returns to the kitchen with the matronly Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz is upset that dinner is not ready and Trask is nowhere to be found. Amy notices that the knife is not where Trask left it hours before. Liz is unimpressed with this fact, as anyone would be who had not seen the zoom shot and heard the melodramatic music. We cut to the tower room, where Liz’ daughter Carolyn Loomis greets someone we cannot see. We cut to a hand holding a knife very much like the one Trask had sharpened. The hand brings the knife down, and Carolyn screams.
It is Carolyn who is the main source of information for the other characters in today’s show. Carolyn’s husband was killed the other day in a conflict between two supernatural beings. The other characters in today’s episode have no idea that such beings dwell among them, and think that those two in particular are simply members of their extended family. Carolyn has had all she can take of this situation. She claims “to know all the secrets” of Collinwood, and is far too drunk to keep many of them to herself.
Trask learned several secrets from Carolyn in Act One, when he was leaning up against the door to the drawing room, his ear pressed hard to it, eavesdropping ferociously on her conversation with her uncle, Roger Collins. Carolyn taunts Roger with his failure to recognize someone he loves desperately. She declares that she can prove that the houseguest who has been staying in the great house lately is not Alexis Stokes, but Alexis’ identical twin sister, Angelique Stokes Collins.
Roger rejects this claim. Since Angelique died last year, one might expect Roger to be confident in his rejection, but he is high-strung and defensive about it. Carolyn does not deny that Angelique is dead. Indeed, she says that if anyone were to look at the base of “Alexis'” skull, they would find a scar where the killer drove in the hatpin that killed Angelique, proving that “Alexis” is Angelique’s reanimated corpse. This makes more sense to Roger than one might expect. When he first saw Alexis in #990 she had to give him her hand and talk soothingly to him for some time before he would accept that she was not Angelique risen from the grave.
As it happens, Carolyn is right. Two weeks after she met Roger, Alexis saw Angelique lying in the tomb. Alexis touched her sister to bid her a final farewell, only to find that all of the heat was draining from her body into Angelique’s. Moments later, Alexis was dead and Angelique was standing over her icy corpse. Angelique put on Alexis’ clothes, did her hair in the style Alexis wore, and met Trask, who accompanied her to the great house. Ever since, Angelique has been passing herself off as Alexis.
Amy interrupted Trask while he was eavesdropping. He ordered her to leave him alone, getting quite surly about it. If he can hear everything Carolyn and Roger are saying, we wonder why they can’t hear him being nasty to a member of the family. But apparently they can’t. She goes away, and he presses himself even closer to the door.
Carolyn is still talking to Roger and Trask is still eavesdropping when “Alexis” comes by. She reproves Trask, opens the doors to the drawing room, and exposes him to Roger and Carolyn. Roger is too shocked by the sight of “Alexis” and Carolyn is too amused by it all for either of them to do anything about Trask’s misconduct.
Later, Carolyn returns to the drawing room and finds her mother talking with “Alexis.” She leans down way into “Alexis'” personal space, making her hilariously uncomfortable.
“Alexis” leaves them alone. Carolyn tells her mother that she knows who murdered Angelique. She says that she had suspected her, and is greatly relieved to know that she was wrong. Roger eavesdrops on this conversation, and turns around to see the shadow of yet another eavesdropper.
Carolyn tells Liz that she not only knows who the murderer is, she has talked to “him” recently. That doesn’t narrow it down. She has talked to all three current suspects, and all of them are men. Roger gets very agitated whenever the topic of Angelique’s murderer comes up; his reaction is one of many heavy-handed clues the show has been giving lately that he did it. They had not suggested Trask might be the culprit when he was last on the show, in #1004, but they couldn’t be more obvious about it today. The third suspect is Quentin Collins, brother to Roger and Liz, who is currently a fugitive from justice, having escaped from jail after he was charged with another murder. Quentin is the man living in the tower room; Carolyn saw him there the other day, and he took a threatening tone with her. So any of those three men might be the one wielding the knife in the final shot.
This is a day for final appearances. Not only do we bid the kitchen adieu, but also Carolyn Loomis, Mr Trask, and Amy Collins. Nancy Barrett and Jerry Lacy will be back as other characters, but Denise Nickerson is gone from the cast as of today. After a great run in her first couple of months on the show, she was criminally underused. Still, whenever they did put her on she was typically the highlight of the day, so it is sad to lose her.
Liz mentions someone named “Dr Blum” today. We never see Dr Blum. The only character in the whole series who seems to be Jewish is Dr Julia Hoffman, who like the unseen Dr Blum is a psychiatrist. It was less than a year after this episode aired, on 26 May 1971, that President Richard Nixon said in a conversation with his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman that the reason he was unpopular with Jewish voters was that “Most of them are psychiatrists.” Ever since the tape of that conversation was released in 2002, people have been trying to figure out what Nixon meant to say. Perhaps the White House taping system malfunctioned, and picked up some audio not from the Richard Nixon of our universe, but from one who lived in one of the universes where Dark Shadows took place. There, he might have been making a simple statement of fact.
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.
From its first episode, one of the principal sets on Dark Shadows has been the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. So every violent death on the show has been pregnant with the possibility of a scene in which the characters gather on that set and a detective says that he supposes they are probably wondering why he asked them to join him there. We come as close to that scene today as we ever will.
The detective is Inspector Hamilton of the Collinsport police. That is itself a disappointment to regular viewers. In #1034, a detective played by Philip R. Allen made an appearance. He had little to do, but Allen was such a dynamic actor that it was gripping to watch him do it. When we heard that the police were on their way, we might have been excited to see Allen again. Inspector Hamilton is played by Colin Hamilton. It’s always a bad sign when the producers don’t trust an actor to answer to any name other than his own, and Hamilton’s performance is a case in point. The only note he strikes today is languid annoyance. Perhaps he had watched the Thin Man movies and been impressed by the use William Powell and Myrna Loy made of that note in their portrayals of Nick and Nora Charles in their drawing room reveals, but if so he had forgotten that Powell and Loy did other things as well.
Making matters worse, Inspector Hamilton does not actually have much to contribute. Sleazy musician Bruno Hess gave him photostats of a couple of pages of the journal of the late Cyrus Longworth, homicidal maniac, in which Cyrus speculates that his friend Quentin Collins murdered Angelique, his first wife. But Cyrus did not see Quentin commit that crime, so the papers are in no sense evidence.
Quentin gets very angry with Bruno. Standing next to Inspector Hamilton, he declares that Bruno will never make trouble for him again and that he will put a stop to him “with my bare hands!” He then rushes out of the house. At length, Inspector Hamilton moseys over to Bruno’s place.
The camera gets there before Inspector Hamilton does. We find Quentin crushing Bruno’s throat in his elbow. He releases him and shouts that he isn’t “worth killing!” A moment later, Bruno starts choking and falls to the floor. Quentin ridicules him, then kneels down and finds that he really seems to be unconscious. Inspector Hamilton then enters and says that he hopes for Quentin’s sake that Bruno isn’t dead. This line is a bit surprising; it would have fit with Colin Hamilton’s lazy performance had Inspector Hamilton said that he hopes Bruno is alive so he won’t have to stay up late doing paperwork.
As it happens, Angelique has returned from the grave and is impersonating her identical twin sister Alexis. None of the other characters in today’s episode are onto her. We see her flash a self-satisfied grin every time Quentin annoys Inspector Hamilton by proclaiming his intention of killing Bruno. We also see her cast the spell that causes Bruno to choke and die.
Bruno’s death is no great shock. He smacked Angelique around yesterday, a sure sign of a short and unhappy future, and had been absent from the action and unmentioned on screen for more than six weeks before he came back on Tuesday. Actor Michael Stroka will be back later as another character.
Angelique could be fairly sure that Quentin was in Bruno’s cottage and that Inspector Hamilton was on his way there when she was casting the spell, but she has no powers of remote viewing. For all she knew, Quentin may have been choking Bruno while she was casting the spell. Had that been the case, we would have been presented with a puzzle in logic. Bruno would have died of strangulation while Quentin was strangling him, but there would be a sense in which we could say that Quentin was not the strangler. That sense might not have made much difference to Quentin’s felony exposure, though Angelique would also be guilty of the killing.
This scenario should remind viewers who have been with the show from the beginning of the first murder mystery on Dark Shadows, the vehicular homicide of a man known only as Hansen. Hansen was walking by the road one night in 1956 when a car hit him and continued on. The owner of the car, Burke Devlin, was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison for five years. It later turned out that Burke had been blacked out drunk when he started driving the car away from a restaurant, and that he gave the keys to his passenger, Roger Collins, after they had gone some way. Roger was also heavily intoxicated, and he was behind the wheel when the car hit Hansen.
Burke claimed that Roger’s role in Hansen’s death exonerated him of guilt. But since Burke knew that Roger had had as much to drink as he had, handing the keys to him was scarcely more responsible than operating the vehicle himself. Indeed, by the time of the collision Burke had passed out, so if he had kept the keys the car would not have been moving and Hansen would have had nothing to fear. The fact that Roger was also guilty of a crime does nothing to clear Burke. Remembering that, we may wonder whether Angelique’s participation really clears Quentin.
The version of Quentin that became a major breakout hit was the one we saw in 1969, when the show was a costume drama set in the year 1897. That Quentin had all of the vices Roger had in 1966, and like Roger was witty and full of joie de vivre. The easygoing 27 year old David Selby had a sex appeal that reached young viewers who did not respond to Louis Edmonds in that way, and the show was free to make villains into permanent parts of the cast of characters at that point, so Quentin became what Roger might have been.
After the show returned to a contemporary setting in late 1969, it struggled to find a place for Quentin. Now they have crossed over into an alternate universe, and they have dabbled with the idea of turning his counterpart into an action hero like Burke. That hasn’t worked at all, but then Burke’s own arc of development fizzled out, so I suppose we can say that Parallel Quentin really is a mashup of Burke and Roger.
Housekeeper Julia Hoffman, fanatical devotee of the undead Angelique Stokes Collins, has discovered that Angelique’s enemy Barnabas Collins is a vampire. Hoffman is standing at Barnabas’ open coffin. In one hand she holds a stake on his chest, in the other a mallet upraised.
As Hoffman is about to rid the world of this loathsome abomination from beyond the grave, another woman strikes her dead. This woman appears to be Hoffman’s identical twin. Regular viewers know that she is another Julia Hoffman, a Doppelgänger intruding here from another universe. This Julia is a medical doctor by qualification and a mad scientist by vocation, and she is as committed to Barnabas as Hoffman is to Angelique.
Julia sees her own face on a corpse of her own slaying. She leaves the secret chamber and closes the panel that hides it. A man enters the house. He takes Julia to be Hoffman, and demands to know why she is there and why she is not wearing her French maid uniform. Julia says that she was running an errand, and that she is on her way into town. The man remarks that she does not seem like herself; she replies that “I am who I am.” The man does not give any sign that this assertion reminds him of either Popeye the Sailor or the God of the Book of Exodus. Longtime viewers will already have noticed more than a few parallels between Julia and each of these characters.
The man says he has come to the house to see its master, Will Loomis. He wants to ask Will for money so that he can leave town. When Julia says that Will is sleeping and may not be up for hours, the man turns his request to her. He says that he, Angelique, and others had paid her plenty over the years in return for her discretion, and he asks for $500. She says she doesn’t have any money with her. Indeed, she is not carrying a purse, and her bank account and other liquid assets are all located in a different universe. The man leaves.
Julia is back in the secret chamber trying to figure out what to do when Will comes home. He pulls a gun on her. He is one of Barnabas’ blood thralls, and is in charge of protecting him during the day. He knows that Hoffman and Angelique are Barnabas’ enemies. Thinking that Julia is Hoffman, he is prepared to kill her. She denies that she is Hoffman, and tells him that if he looks in the secret chamber he will know she is telling the truth. He does, and a look of recognition comes on his face. “You are Julia!” he says, delighted. Barnabas had told Will about her and others in his own universe, and he couldn’t be happier to meet her.
Julia decides to masquerade as Hoffman. She says that if she could fool the man who came by earlier, whose name is Bruno, she should be able to fool Angelique and the others. Will points out that fooling Bruno for a few minutes is not the same thing as fooling Angelique for an indefinite time, but Julia is nothing daunted.
Julia passes the first test. Angelique finds her in her room and demands where she has been all day. Julia says she was following Barnabas, as per her orders. That is the right answer. Angelique asks what she was talking about last night when she said on the telephone that she had discovered Barnabas’ big secret and would tell her what it was when they were face to face. Julia says that she thought she was onto something while following him around, but in the light of day it turns out to be pretty vague. Angelique is frustrated and orders her to resume snooping on Barnabas.
Meanwhile, Bruno has learned that his acquaintance Cyrus Longworth the mad scientist is dead. Cyrus had kidnapped Maggie Evans Collins, second wife of Angelique’s widower Quentin Collins. Barnabas killed Cyrus while rescuing Maggie.
Bruno knows that Cyrus kept a big wad of cash in the wall safe in his laboratory, in the sum of “thousands!” of dollars. He goes to the lab and rummages through the papers on the desk, certain that the combination to the wall safe is there. That seems like bad OpSec, but Cyrus wasn’t very shrewd, so it is no surprise that Bruno turns out to be right. He finds that the cash is gone. All that is in the safe is a notebook. Bruno is furious at the sight of the notebook, exclaiming “Why aren’t you money!?”
Bruno sees that the notebook is marked to be delivered unread to Quentin Collins in the event of Cyrus’ death. Bruno reads it and laughs joyously. He says that he was mistaken when he said there was no money in the safe. There is far more money than he hoped for.
Bruno telephones Angelique. Like almost everyone else, Bruno believes Angelique to be her identical twin sister Alexis. Angelique rose from the dead and murdered Alexis, who was already established as Quentin’s permanent guest in his home, the great house of Collinwood. Alexis was convinced that Angelique was murdered and was trying to investigate when Angelique killed her. For her part, Angelique knows she was murdered and very much wants to complete that investigation. Bruno happily tells “Alexis” that he knows who murdered Angelique.
Bruno’s claim that the notebook represents far more money than he had hoped for narrows the range of possible suspects to one. He hoped for thousands of dollars, so whatever message Cyrus wanted to deliver to Quentin must be something that can be leveraged for hundreds of thousands or millions. Quentin himself is the only person we’ve seen who has resources like that. He is too selfish to pay blackmail to conceal anyone else’s guilt, even that of his closest family members, so the notebook must contain an accusation against Quentin. Whether that accusation is correct, of course, remains to be seen.
Since #1021, Barnabas Collins has been trying to figure out what links mild-mannered scientist Cyrus Longworth with a strange and violent man known as John Yaeger. Yesterday, Cyrus telephoned Barnabas and told him that Yaeger was holding Maggie Collins prisoner in an old farmhouse. Today, Barnabas finds Yaeger choking Maggie in the basement of that farmhouse.
Barnabas orders Yaeger to unhand Maggie, saying that he will kill him if he does not. Maggie gives an ecstatic look, then Yaeger flings her to the floor. He and Barnabas start fighting. Yaeger’s weapon of choice is a heavy cane that conceals a bayonet. The other day, Barnabas was looking at his own heavy cane and thinking about what an effective weapon it is, setting us up to expect a cane fight between him and Yaeger. Returning viewers will therefore be puzzled that Barnabas doesn’t even have his cane. Barnabas’ cane is one of his signature gimmicks, so maybe the makers of the show didn’t want to risk damaging it.
Yaeger exposes the bayonet in his cane and stabs Barnabas with it. Barnabas pulls it out of his chest and keeps coming. Yaeger asks “What kind of creature are you?,” to which Barnabas replies that he will never know. Barnabas strangles Yaeger to death. Barnabas’ threatening statements to Yaeger combine with the fact that he keeps choking him well after he becomes unconscious to leave us no label for this act other than willful murder.
Maggie gets up and goes into the room where Barnabas has just finished killing Yaeger. As she does so, there is a bad goof in the production, as a gap in the panel behind her exposes another set, the one representing the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. Watching Dark Shadows is an education in how resilient an audience’s suspension of disbelief can be, but the idea that the farmhouse is very far from the great house is so important to the suspense that this one really does undercut the rest of the episode.
Maggie should just have clicked her heels and said “There’s no place like home.”
Maggie and Barnabas watch in amazement as the dead Yaeger transforms into Cyrus. Once they have absorbed the implication that Yaeger was just Cyrus in disguise, Barnabas takes Maggie home to the great house.
Maggie is walking when Barnabas gets her in the front door, but she is unconscious by the time he puts her on the couch in the drawing room. Housekeeper Julia Hoffman and Carolyn Stoddard Loomis, a cousin of Maggie’s husband Quentin, are astounded to see them, and have many questions. Barnabas confirms that Yaeger was holding Maggie prisoner and that he is now dead, then orders Hoffman to bring a blanket for her mistress.
Quentin comes home. Barnabas tells him they must go to the farmhouse at once. There, they see Cyrus’ body. Thinking of what Barnabas and Maggie saw, Quentin realizes that the experiment Cyrus had been so secretive about must have been the creation of a Jekyll and Hyde formula. He decides that they should tell the police everything, in spite of the damage it will do to Cyrus’ posthumous reputation and the risk that Barnabas might be inconvenienced in some way for having murdered him.
Quentin has only known Barnabas for a few weeks, and has been wary of him. He has been especially impatient over the last several days with Barnabas’ insistence that Maggie was in danger when he was under the impression that she had merely left the house. This scene shows us Quentin’s remorse at having disbelieved Barnabas, and marks the beginning of a friendship between the two.
Back in the great house, Hoffman is in a brightly lit, richly decorated room, making a telephone call. She is telling the person on the other end of the line that she has learned a crucial secret about Barnabas, and that this secret might be just what they have been looking for. She promises to tell the other person what the secret is once they can talk face to face. Returning viewers know that Hoffman is talking to Quentin’s undead first wife, Angelique, who has been staying in the great house in the guise of her identical twin sister Alexis. The two of them have been scheming to split Maggie and Quentin up so that Angelique can remarry Quentin and resume her place as the mistress of Collinwood. They were in league with Cyrus/ Yaeger, and are afraid that their enemy Barnabas may have picked up some information from him that he can use against them.
Later, Hoffman is on her way back to the same room, perhaps to place another call to Angelique. She finds she cannot pass through the doorway. A phenomenon is occurring that others have seen before. Hoffman sees, not the room that is in that space as she knows it, but dark, bare walls. There are two people there, whom she can see and hear though they are not aware of her. They appear to be herself and Quentin, and they are talking about Barnabas. The man says that Barnabas will be doomed if the “people in that other time” find out that he is a vampire.
Regular viewers know that the man and woman are Julia Hoffman and Quentin Collins, but not the Hoffman and Quentin we have come to know over the last eleven weeks. They are part of another universe altogether. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in that universe, and most of the current characters are counterparts of characters we met there. Barnabas crossed over from that continuity to this one in the futile hope that by doing so he would escape the vampire curse and become human again. Hoffman’s counterpart in the original continuity, Julia Hoffman MD, is as devoted to the undead Barnabas as Hoffman herself is to the undead Angelique. Quentin’s is best friend and confidant to Barnabas and Julia, and is neither the master of Collinwood nor married to his world’s version of Maggie, who is the governess at Collinwood.
Earlier this week, Barnabas popped back to his own reality for a few minutes and talked with Julia. It is his fault that she and Quentin are talking about his vampirism where Hoffman can hear them. He knew that the room as it is in the original universe occasionally becomes perceptible to people in the current universe, since he and Quentin themselves saw it when Julia was standing there talking about him. He just did not think to mention that fact to her.
In the foyer, Barnabas tells Carolyn to stay with Maggie. Carolyn points out that her husband Will Loomis is going to be away until mid-morning, so Barnabas will be alone in their house for several hours. He says he will be all right. While she eavesdrops on this conversation from the drawing room, Hoffman uses the mirror in Carolyn’s compact to confirm that Barnabas does not cast a reflection.
This is precisely the same method Julia used in the original continuity, in #288, to make sure Barnabas was a vampire. The feature film House of Dark Shadows wrapped principal photography several weeks ago; Julia does the same thing there. It is somewhat undercut for returning viewers, not so much by the many times Jonathan Frid’s reflection is inadvertently captured in the many mirrors that decorate the sets in this “mirror universe,” but by the deliberate choice the show made in #1033 to show us an inverted reflection of Barnabas in a magnifying glass in Cyrus’ laboratory. Also, longtime viewers will remember a period in 1968 when Angelique’s counterpart in the main continuity was a vampire. They went out of their way to show us her reflection several times. They never explained what point that was supposed to be making, but it was obviously intentional. If we were confused then, we will be confused again this week.
Julia learned earlier this week that Barnabas keeps an empty coffin behind a secret panel in Carolyn and Will’s house. So she knows where to go this morning. She opens the coffin, places a stake on Barnabas’ chest, and raises a hammer to drive it through his heart. Roll credits!
This cliffhanger leaves us wondering who will interrupt Hoffman and save Barnabas in the first scene of act one on Monday. Carolyn and Will are Barnabas’ victims and are in charge of protecting him, so it would be logical for one or both of them to come home earlier than expected. That would be an anticlimax, but the characters are on the show so rarely and the actors are so dynamic that it would have its compensations. Barnabas has a third victim, Buffie Harrington. We haven’t seen Buffie since #1023 or heard her name since #1028, but regular viewers were reminded of her yesterday when Barnabas mentioned an incident he could have learned about only from her. So it would make sense for her to show up, and it would certainly be nice to see her again.
There are also a few long-shot possibilities. The show spent much of 1969 explaining how Barnabas and Quentin became friends; today Quentin’s counterpart accepts Barnabas as a friend. Perhaps this continuity’s Quentin will somehow save Barnabas. Also, Barnabas’ brief visit home suggests that the barrier between the universes is getting leakier, so we can’t discount the possibility that the original Quentin, the original Julia, or perhaps Will’s counterpart or another character from the old days may happen by.
Sabrina Stuart has been having a rough few weeks. Her fiancé, mild mannered scientist Cyrus Longworth, has been spending less and less time with her and is entangled with a strange, violent man named John Yaeger. The other day, she was with Cyrus in his laboratory and saw him transform into Yaeger. He confirmed that he had devised a potion to alter his appearance, and that Yaeger is merely a disguise he assumes to carry out crimes. The transformation Sabrina saw took place spontaneously, without a dose of the potion. Cyrus poured the potion down the drain a while ago, when he was feeling guilty about a rape he had committed as Yaeger, and we have seen him re-Jekyllize himself only by drinking another dose. So for all we know he will never resume his normal appearance. Sabrina pledged to stand by Cyrus no matter what; in response, he jeered and said he had no further use for her.
Tonight, Sabrina went out with her friend Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz took her to a concert. The two women come to Cyrus’ laboratory, where Sabrina has left her wallet. Sabrina apologizes and calls herself stupid for forgetting it, as she keeps apologizing and calling herself stupid throughout the episode. She is very nervous, as witness not only her forgetfulness but also her physical awkwardness, shown most strikingly in the frequent mismatch between her facial expressions and her circumstances.
In his post about this episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn makes several complaints about Lisa Blake Richards as an actress, saying that “I don’t understand what Sabrina does with her face most of the time. She acts like she just got it recently, and she hasn’t figured out how to use it yet.” I think Danny is unfair to Miss Richards generally, and that this is a case in point. As Danny documents, the episode is full of flubs and goofs of various kinds, so it is natural to write off any kind of awkwardness as just another mistake. But considering how distracted and anxiety-ridden Sabrina must be given what she knows about Cyrus, her disconcerting facial expressions suit her perfectly, and are an intelligent acting choice on Miss Richards’ part. That we first see her in a scene with Liz helps to underline this intelligence, since Joan Bennett is the only other member of the cast who seems to know her lines today. Her smooth performance gives Miss Richards something to play off of and spotlights Sabrina’s barely controlled panic.
Sabrina and Liz haven’t been in the lab very long when Cyrus enters, as Yaeger. He introduces himself to Liz as a close associate of Cyrus’, and asks Sabrina to stay and help him analyze some data. Sabrina agrees to do so, and Liz excuses herself.
Cyrus, as “Yaeger,” listens while Liz and Sabrina talk in the laboratory. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Cyrus tells Sabrina to mail some of his clothes and all of his money to New York. She asks if he is moving to New York permanently. In response, he rambles on about how big the world is and how little of it he knew before he assumed his current appearance. Apparently Cyrus retains his ignorance of geography when disguised as Yaeger. He simply tells Sabrina to send his belongings to New York, addressed to John Yaeger at General Delivery. Apparently he thinks there is only one post office location in the state of New York.
We next see Sabrina in the basement of an old farmhouse. Returning viewers know that Cyrus obtained this farmhouse last week by murdering the man who was about to sell it to him. Evidently, Sabrina has followed him there. She sees and hears him in a dungeon, tormenting Maggie Evans Collins, the wife of Liz’ brother Quentin. When Cyrus emerges from the dungeon, Sabrina runs away. He does not see her, but he finds the check he gave her to send to some post office randomly chosen from among the 1720 in New York State in 1970. It fell out of the pocket in her skirt* onto a stair.
We cut to Liz’ home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood. We hear a car screeching to a halt. Sabrina comes running in the foyer, calling the names of the residents of the house. Cyrus follows her. He marches her into the drawing room and asks a series of questions. When she tells him she put the check in a safe place, he produces it. She blurts out that she dropped it. She pleads with him to let Maggie go. He says it would be foolish to let someone go who knows what Maggie knows about him. Sabrina knows even more about Cyrus than Maggie does, and asks what he is going to do to her. He tells her she knows what he is going to do. He strangles her.
Liz enters and screams. Startled, Cyrus lets go of Sabrina’s neck. She falls to the floor, her eyes closed. Tomorrow it will be confirmed that she is dead.
Liz had a dream earlier. She and Sabrina entered Cyrus’ lab and found it a shambles. Sabrina started cleaning the place up, only to find Maggie’s dead body sprawled on a table. Liz told this dream to a person named Barnabas Collins, who introduced himself to her family a few weeks ago as a distant cousin from South America. While the rest of the Collinses believe that Maggie left of her own accord, Barnabas is convinced that she is being held prisoner. The dream convinces Liz that Barnabas is right. When she told him about the dream, she also told him she had met Yaeger. Barnabas knows how cruel and dangerous Yaeger is, and has since #1021 been trying to find out exactly what the connection is between Cyrus and Yaeger. He announced to Liz that there is only one way to find out whether Yaeger has abducted Maggie, and when we last saw him in this episode he was in Cyrus’ lab, looking at the wardrobe he keeps there to wear when he is disguised as Yaeger.
Sabrina’s death marks Lisa Blake Richards’ final appearance on Dark Shadows. Her quiet competence as an actress allowed her scene partners to dial the vehemence essential to the Dark Shadows house style of acting down to bearable levels, and it highlighted Sabrina’s clumsiness under the severe pressures to which the story subjected her. I was glad when, during a 2020 reunion of Dark Shadows cast members on Zoom, Mitch Ryan took a call from Miss Richards, who was at that time his fellow student in a writing class. I’ll miss her, even if Danny Horn doesn’t.
*That pocket gets a couple of closeups today; after watching the episode, my wife and I happened to see another video mentioning that there was a trend towards putting pockets in skirts in the early 1970s.
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