Mad scientist Cyrus Longworth has devised a potion that alters his appearance so that even the people who know him best, including his fiancée Sabrina Stuart and his attorney Larry Chase, cannot recognize him. When he is thus disguised he calls himself “John Yaeger” and indulges his sadistic impulses. One of his favorite hobbies is beating and intimidating a woman named Buffie Harrington, who submits to his abuse for psychological reasons the show never explains, but for clues to which Elizabeth’s Eis’ performance keeps us watching closely. Buffie does not know that Yaeger is really Cyrus. As Sabrina and Larry have not recognized Cyrus when they saw him as Yaeger, so Buffie has not recognized Cyrus when she has met him undisguised.
The only person who has so far figured out Cyrus’ secret is chemist Horace Gladstone. Cyrus bought a vital ingredient for his potion from Gladstone, who knows that it can be used to change a person’s appearance. He has had dealings with Cyrus when he was presenting himself as Yaeger, has seen his handwriting in both states, and has questioned both Sabrina and Buffie. Combined with several other pieces of evidence, Gladstone was able to build an overwhelming case that Yaeger is merely Cyrus in disguise. Yesterday he demanded Cyrus pay him $10,000 in return for a continued supply of the ingredient and his silence. Cyrus responded by drinking the potion to assume his disguise, going to a dark alley where he had gleaned from an indiscretion on Larry’s part Gladstone would be waiting, and murdering him. Larry arrived at the scene a moment later and pursued “Yaeger” on foot from the alley to the courtyard behind Cyrus’ place. He saw “Yaeger” jump the fence into the courtyard.
As Yaeger, Cyrus enters his laboratory through the door in the courtyard. He is about to take the antidote to change his appearance back to normal when he hears Sabrina and Larry coming downstairs. He hastens out the way he came. Eavesdropping through the courtyard door, he is relieved to hear Larry say that he did not get a good enough look at him to be able to make a positive identification. He hears Larry place a call to the police, and exits.
Cyrus goes back to the alley where he killed Gladstone. Buffie enters, getting off her shift as a barmaid at the Eagle tavern. The tavern abuts the alley, but evidently the police didn’t think it was necessary to bother her with news of the murder. He demands she do him a favor. She says she is too tired to do anything tonight; he says it’s better to be tired than dead. Whatever it is that compels Buffie to keep coming back to Cyrus in his Yaeger form is strong enough that this death threat does not drive her away. She protests that she does not have a criminal record and wants to keep it that way; he tells her she won’t get caught. He gives her the keys to his lab and the combination to his safe and orders her to take the bottle containing the antidote. He tells her to bring the bottle to him in a cave on the beach below the estate of Collinwood.
Buffie goes to the courtyard door. She is about to open it when she hears Sabrina and Larry inside the lab, talking about Gladstone’s murder. When the name “John Yaeger” comes up as a suspect, she looks down. We can see a forlornness in her face. She is as much addicted to his hard domination of her as Cyrus is addicted to violence, but she still does not want to think of herself as a criminal, certainly not as an accessory to murder.
Buffie hears about Yaeger as a murder suspect. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Wiki.
When Sabrina and Larry go upstairs, Buffie lets herself in to the lab. She has removed the painting that covers the safe and is starting to turn the dial for the combination when she hears Sabrina tell Larry she has to go back downstairs to retrieve something she left in the lab. Buffie hides by the door while Sabrina collects her purse. The purse is right next to the painting, but the room is dark. We are in suspense whether Sabrina will see it. She doesn’t, she leaves, and Buffie gets the bottle.
In the cave, Cyrus notices footprints going up to a pile of stones that appear to be a natural part of the cave wall. He realizes that the stones must be hiding a secret passage. He is curious where it leads, and figures it will be at least half an hour before Buffie comes. So he starts pulling the stones down.
Cyrus follows the path into the basement of the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. This house is currently occupied by writer Will Loomis and his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Cyrus realizes where he is, and finds a chained coffin. He wonders what secret Will might be hiding from the world. He decides that if the secret is shameful enough, it might come in handy. He breaks the first chain, intending to open the coffin.
The opening voiceover, delivered arrestingly by Eis, told us what is in the coffin. It is a visitor from a parallel universe. He is named Barnabas Collins, and he is a vampire. Will is holding Barnabas prisoner in the coffin and taking an oral history from him, which he plans to use as the basis of his next book. Longtime viewers of Dark Shadows are familiar with Barnabas’ native universe; the first 196 weeks of the show were set there. As Will put chains on Barnabas’ coffin in the hope of finding a fortune in his stories, Will’s counterpart, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis, took the chains off Barnabas’ coffin in hopes of finding a fortune in jewels. In his universe, Barnabas is the master of the Old House and he keeps his coffin in the space where Will has it here. It has occasionally been opened by intruders; the first time we saw that happen was in #275, when Willie’s sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, lifted the lid at sunset, only to be greeted by Barnabas’ hand darting out and crushing his throat. If Cyrus gets the coffin open, Gladstone’s death might be avenged sooner than anyone could expect.
Gladstone’s death marks the final appearance of John Harkins. Harkins’ first appearance was in #174, in which he played Lieutenant Costa of the Arizona State Police. The most famous of his dozens of screen roles was in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, when he played the clergyman who officiates at the funeral of Chuckles the Clown. He also had a recurring role on Cagney & Lacey as Mansfield the drug kingpin. Harkins didn’t have any scenes with John Karlen, who was a regular both on that show and on Dark Shadows.
The Dark Shadows Wiki tells us that this is one of only six episodes with no cast member who appeared in 200 or more episodes. It lists the others as 168, 172, 180, 1141, and 1182. It also says that there is no one in it who joined the cast before David Selby’s debut as Quentin, but since Harkins was on almost two years before Mr Selby that is not so.
The show has been spending a lot of time lately trying to interest us in the ghost of Dameon Edwards, a man who doesn’t seem to have had much going for him even when he was alive. They went through the motions of a murder mystery concerning Dameon’s death. The episode that introduced him also hinted that he was killed by sleazy musician Bruno Hess with the complicity of butler Mr Trask, and those hints are confirmed today. So the mystery was never much of a puzzle. Besides, Bruno and Trask are the counterparts of homicidal villains whom we saw in the universe where Dark Shadows was set for its first 196 weeks, so we’ve expected all along that they would turn out to have someone’s blood on their hands. And neither of them is the central figure in an ongoing story, so even if they had been brought to justice for their crimes it would only be an easy way for the writers to dispose of characters who were going to be written out anyway.
Today, wicked witch Angelique finds Dameon’s skeleton sealed up in an alcove in the basement of the great house of Collinwood. She summons his ghost and dismisses him. That’s it for Dameon. What will happen to the skeleton, or to Bruno, or to Trask, or to the alcove, we don’t yet know.
The sight of the skeleton standing in the alcove does remind us of one of Trask’s alternate universe counterparts, a fanatical witchfinder who was sealed up in a basement alcove elsewhere on the estate in 1796. Since Trask is involved in this little arc, it’s a nice touch to connect it to that other Trask.
Most of the episode is devoted to a far more interesting story, an adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde. They’ve been focusing on the addiction angle. Mad scientist Cyrus Longworth is hooked on the potion that changes his appearance and allows him to fool even people who know him well into believing that he is a separate person by the name of John Yaeger. He enjoys the violence that he commits as Yaeger.
Today, three people try to save Cyrus from himself. Lawyer Larry Chase resists Cyrus’ instructions to transfer $5000 to Yaeger and to rewrite his willin Yaeher’s favor; chemist Horace Gladstone is reluctant to keep selling Cyrus a volatile synthesis he needs for the potion, and figures out that he and Yaeger are one and the same; and Buffie Harrington, who is exploring her masochistic side by submitting to beatings from Cyrus as Yaeger but still thinks the two are different people, goes to Cyrus to urge him to be more careful in his dealings with Yaeger. Dark Shadows has dealt intelligently and sensitively with the theme of addiction from its earliest days, and today’s focus on people who care about the addict trying to help him achieves a real poignancy.
We may wonder if drug abuse was a particularly timely topic behind the scenes of Dark Shadows at this point. Larry is a substitute for the character of Chris Collins, who was played by Don Briscoe. Briscoe would eventually be diagnosed with bipolar personality disorder, and in 1970 was trying to self-medicate with street drugs.
The makers of the show didn’t give up on Briscoe until the absolute last minute. This episode was taped very close to airtime, after episodes that would be broadcast weeks later were already in the can, giving Briscoe as much time as possible to get himself together. The part of Larry was played by Ken McEwen. McEwen joined the show in August 1968 as an associate director. He had a guild card due to small parts he had taken in a couple of TV shows in the 50s, but had never been an actor full-time. And he clearly hasn’t had much time to learn his dialogue. He is perfectly competent in the first of his two scenes, when Larry is in The Eagle tavern with Yaeger, Gladstone, and Buffie. There are no major bobbles and you can tell exactly what is on his mind. But when Larry returns and meets with Cyrus in his laboratory, McEwen stumbles over every line and never develops a coherent attitude.
The music is interesting today. The Eagle in the current universe corresponds to the Blue Whale, Collinsport’s tavern in the main continuity, and while we are there we hear the jukebox music that was prominent in the show’s first year. There is a scene between Gladstone and Buffie in her apartment; when that opens, we hear some music I don’t believe we’ve heard before. If they’ve written a theme for Buffie, it gives us hope we will see a lot more of Elizabeth Eis’ excellent performance in this role.
The original videotape master of this episode was lost. We have it on a kinescope. I love the kinescopes; I wish all the episodes were available in that format, as well as the videotapes. We haven’t seen one since #813, and will see only one more, #1017. You can always set the options on your device to display in black and white, but the kinescope comes with some visual blurring and sound distortions. Those are usually flaws, of course, but when the show has already given you the feeling that you are catching a glimpse of another reality they can add to the eeriness and yearning for what might have been.
Wealthy socialite Alexis Stokes is looking at her identical twin sister, the late Angelique Stokes Collins. Angelique has been dead and in her coffin these six months, but hasn’t decayed visibly. This has led Angelique’s widower, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, to the conclusion that Angelique is an uncanny being whose remains must be burned. Quentin’s friend, foolish scientist Cyrus Longworth, heartily concurs with this opinion. Alexis sits by the coffin and tells her late sister that she has, with great regret, come to share Quentin and Cyrus’ conclusion. She touches Angelique’s shoulder. At this, Angelique’s eyes pop open. She speaks, and tells Alexis that she is half right. Someone must be destroyed, but it will be Alexis, not Angelique.
Angelique and Alexis stand facing each other in the tomb. Angelique explains that all she needed to come back to life was a touch. Now that Alexis has given her that, the warmth has begun to drain from her body into Angelique’s. Soon all of Alexis’ body heat will be transferred to Angelique. She will then die, and Angelique will trade places with her. The “heat vampire” idea was one the show explored briefly in April 1969, when undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins drained the warmth from the bodies of the living to keep herself alive. Now Angelique will return from the grave as another heat vampire. Alexis will lie in the coffin, and Angelique will move back in to the great house of Collinwood, where Alexis has for the last three weeks been staying as Quentin’s guest.
Footage of the dress rehearsal for this scene survives. The only other surviving videotape from any episode of Dark Shadows not originally released for broadcast are the opening slates of the episodes.* The confrontation between Alexis and Angelique not only involves the most complicated videotape editing they’ve done so far, it also requires Lara Parker to do some intricate acting work as she plays off a version of herself she can neither see nor hear. In the rehearsal footage, she several times breaks character and turns to director Lela Swift to report on things that aren’t going right. We can hear Swift’s responses over the control room microphone. Some crew members are in and out of the shot, and at the end two people come to help Parker out of the coffin. It’s fascinating for hard-core fans, a must-watch:
By the time Mr Trask, the butler in the great house at Collinwood, comes to the mausoleum to see what’s taking so long, Angelique has changed into Alexis’ short bluish gray suit and chignon hairstyle with a tight spiral twist at the back, the look that the mysterious Madeleine wore in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. She has changed Alexis into her own gown and loose hairdo, and has put Alexis into her coffin. She is closing the lid of the coffin when Trask enters. Trask asks if she is ready to return to Collinwood, and she says she is looking forward to it.
We cut to the drawing room at Collinwood, where Quentin is yelling at the wind. He is convinced that it is really a ghost expressing discontent, and he demands to know what the trouble is. He doesn’t get any answers.
Angelique and Trask enter the house. Posing as Alexis, Angelique dismisses Trask, and tells Quentin she now agrees with him and Cyrus. The body in the tomb must be destroyed.
Cyrus is in his laboratory. He is talking with his lawyer, Quentin’s cousin Chris Collins. Chris has questions about Cyrus’ instructions to open a bank account in the name of John Yaeger and deposit $5000 in it. He asks if Yaeger is a pseudonym Cyrus is planning to use. Cyrus denies this, and says that Yaeger is a man he met recently who is helping him with his current experiments. In #985, Cyrus responded to Chris’ questions about these experiments with a lot of mad scientist ravings that alarmed him. Since Cyrus offers no information about Yaeger aside from his connection to this dubious project, Chris is reluctant to comply with Cyrus’ directives. Cyrus agrees that Chris should meet Yaeger first. Chris says “I’m looking forward to meeting him. See you, Cyrus,” and exits. This is the last time we will ever see Chris. Actor Don Briscoe’s health problems were catching up to him, and he was not able to return to the show.
While Quentin and Cyrus burn the coffin, Angelique is in her old bedroom. Alexis had been staying there, so Angelique is right at home. Trask tells her it is as if Angelique never left. Later, Quentin comes to invite her to join him and Cyrus for a drink downstairs. She declines, saying she would like to be alone.
Lara Parker’s performance as the newly returned Angelique is marvelous, her best work so far. We can see that she is a different person than the one who left the house earlier in the evening, and we can believe that the other characters don’t see it. In a closeup, she wrinkles her face like the Grinch, suggesting that Angelique has come to steal Christmas. The supernatural element of her confrontation with Alexis suggests Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia,” which the show has been drawing on for the last few weeks, and reminds longtime viewers of Laura’s April 1969 storyline. But the idea of a woman killing her identical twin and taking her place would have been familiar to much of the audience from the 1964 film Dead Ringer, in which Bette Davis played the sisters in that sad situation. Bette Davis is one of the people frequently mentioned when film buffs name The Greatest Screen Actor of All Time, but not even she could have done better than Parker does today.
In the drawing room, Cyrus is alone. He was reluctant to accept Quentin’s invitation to stay for a drink, and is pacing and fidgeting. What Quentin does not know is that Cyrus is in the middle of a Jekyll and Hyde project, and he wants to get back to his lab to take the potion and change himself into the brutal John Yaeger. He revels in Yaeger’s cruelty and is addicted to the transformation.
Music begins playing on the soundtrack we have not heard before, a jagged piano theme. Cyrus suddenly feels the pains that he has felt after taking the potion. He sees Yaeger’s dark hair springing into place on his arms. He looks in the mirror and sees that he has become Yaeger, without taking the potion. He goes to flee the house, but realizes Quentin is already approaching. He retreats to the drawing room and locks the door. Quentin knocks, asking what on earth is wrong with Cyrus.
This is not only the first time Cyrus has changed without drinking the potion, it is also the first time he has appeared without a putty appliance precariously attached to the bridge of his nose. He looks far more convincing without it, though of course he is even more instantly recognizable as Cyrus.
In his post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn points out both that the videotape editing is extremely ambitious today, with the confrontation between Alexis and Angelique at the beginning and the pretaped sequence of the Cyrus-to-Yaeger transformation at the end, and that that the editing in between these heroic shots looks ragged. The jump cut to Cyrus and Quentin’s approach to the mausoleum makes it look like Cyrus’ laboratory opens onto the cemetery, the first sequence of Angelique in her old room begins and ends with unusually long sequences of her pruning some extremely unhealthy looking flowers, and Cyrus spends a surprisingly large amount of time in the drawing room pacing about. Danny guesses that they did not know how long the process shots would run, so they inserted filler that could be removed if they went long.
That could be, but I like the episode the way it is. The jump cuts give the whole thing a dreamlike quality that works well with the subject matter. That’s certainly the case with the cut to the cemetery- we don’t know where Cyrus’ lab is, but we do know that only death is likely to come from the work being done there, so that jump makes a grim symbolic sense. Moreover, the actors use the sequences Danny identifies as filler to shed light on the characters and situate the scenes in the story. Angelique is so absorbed in her plant that you can believe she came back from the dead specifically to work on it, and nothing Trask or Quentin has to say is going to distract her for long. Cyrus’ pacing makes it clear he feels trapped at Collinwood, which adds considerably to the force of the moment when, as Yaeger, he has to hide from Quentin.
*I should mention that we have the dress rehearsal for #584. What we don’t have is a finished episode- they never made one. They just sent the tape of the dress rehearsal to the ABC network, and that was broadcast.
We are in the fourth week of an arc set in a different universe than the one we saw in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows. This universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time,” was originally introduced as a realm populated by Doppelgänger of the characters we have known. They are the same people, but have made different choices and are therefore living different lives.
Some of the Parallel Time characters fit this description. So, we have known matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother Roger Collins from episode #1. In the early days of the show, much was made of the Collinses’ straitened financial circumstances, the result of Roger squandering the half of the family’s assets he had inherited and Liz scrambling to keep control of the business. Roger lived in Liz’ house as her guest and worked in the business as her employee, and she kept a wary eye on any move he made to get his hands on her money. In #981, Parallel Liz mentions that she used to be quite wealthy, but that she entrusted her share of the Collins fortune to Roger, and as a result they are both penniless. Original Liz saw that fate as a distinct possibility, every time Roger was in the same wing of the house as her bank account information.
Parallel Liz and Parallel Roger live in the great house of Collinwood as the guests of their brother Quentin. Parallel Quentin is not at all the same person as Original Quentin. He is an entirely different person. Original Quentin was born in 1870, died in 1897, became a ghost haunting Collinwood in 1968 and 1969, and as the result of a time travel storyline in 1969 was both spared death and immunized against aging. Original Quentin was a riff on the early conception of Roger as a villain, and he was a huge hit with the viewing public during the part of the show set in 1897. Ever since Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress in late 1969, they’ve been at a loss what to do with him. Parallel Quentin is an attempt to reinvent the character to let him keep enough of his vices that he retains the roguish charm that the fans liked, but at the same time use those vices as motivation for him to act the part of the hero from time to time.
There is need for an action hero today. Quentin’s friend, dippy mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, has invented a Jekyll-and-Hyde potion and taken a swig of it. As the darkly mustachio’d John Yaeger, he has been persecuting barmaid Buffie Harrington and Buffie’s unlucky boyfriend, big galoot Steve. We open with Yaeger choking Buffie and telling her she needs to be beaten into submission. Later, Yaeger gets the jump on Steve in a dark alley behind the Greenfield Inn, an establishment that also fronts a sinister alley in the main continuity. He threatens him with his sword cane. Steve manages to get that weapon away from him, but Yaeger beats him down. Yaeger is choking Steve, apparently with the intention of murdering him, when he hears a police whistle and runs away.
Cyrus Longworth and John Yaeger are played by Christopher Pennock.* In the main continuity, Pennock played a character who asked to be called Jabe but wound up answering to “Jeb.” Jabe appeared to be a man in his twenties, but was in fact a shape-shifting monster who was only a few months old when he was destroyed. We’ve heard a good deal about what Cyrus was doing six months ago and more, and there are diplomas on the walls of his laboratory that show his history is nothing like Jabe’s.
Among the very few choices in Jabe’s short life was an attempt to renounce his shape-shifting abilities so that he could remain in human form at all times. In that way, he is the opposite of Cyrus, who chooses to take his potion knowing it will change him into Yaeger.
Also, Jabe was so obnoxious that even people brainwashed to regard him as a divine being come to fulfill a plan that more than justified the extermination of the human race found his personality too much to take and turned against him after a few encounters. But by the end of Jabe’s time on the show, it had become undeniable that there was a kernel of sweetness in his personality. In this regard, too, Cyrus is the opposite of Jabe. We hear his soft voice and see his diffident manner, and we assume that the single-minded scientist in his lab coat, toiling all hours on a project that he keeps saying will benefit humankind, is a well-meaning sort, though perhaps dangerously naïve. Cyrus’ dutiful assistant and devoted fiancée, the lovely Sabrina Stuart, encourages us in that assumption, insisting that Cyrus is thoroughly good, if hopelessly unworldly. But as the initially insufferable Jabe turned out to be endearing at the end, so the apparently innocent Cyrus is deliberately choosing to turn himself into Yaeger even after he knows what Yaeger is capable of. What’s more, he refuses to let anyone at all help him with his experiment, meaning there is no one to restrain Yaeger’s sprees.
Sabrina’s counterpart in the main continuity was the fiancée, not of Jabe, but of another dangerous shape-shifter. She was engaged to werewolf Chris Jennings. As this Sabrina is convinced Cyrus is good, so that one kept insisting Chris was good, even after she had learned that he repeatedly refused to be restrained on nights of the full Moon, so that the killings he committed in his lupine form were premeditated murders on his part. This Sabrina does not know the nature of Cyrus’ work, and she believes that Yaeger is an enemy of his who is holding him prisoner. Sabrina would appear to stand with Roger and Liz as a character who is in a meaningful sense the same person in both timelines, so we are in suspense as to how she might react if she finds out the truth about her man.
Sabrina’s part makes us wonder if the original plan were to cast Don Briscoe, who plays Chris in the main continuity, as Cyrus and Yaeger. At this time Briscoe was struggling with bipolar disorder. He was trying to self-medicate with street drugs, which not only made matters worse in itself, but also led him to get a severe beating one night while trying to score a fix in Central Park. Briscoe appears in Parallel Time as lawyer Chris Collins and has a small part in the concurrently filmed feature House of Dark Shadows, but his health problems ruled out a part as crucial as the lead in the Jekyll and Hyde story.
Buffie is played by Elizabeth Eis, who appeared in one episode set in the main continuity as Nelle Gunston. Nelle was a young woman from Virginia, bored by life with her parents, who had joined the cult that was meant to serve Jabe and the world-wrecking plan to which he was central. When she was asked if she would commit murder if that was what the cult required, she smiled pleasantly and said “Even that.” Nelle was killed before she could meet Jabe.
Buffie is not at all the same person as Nelle. She is not from Virginia, for one thing. When she thinks about leaving Collinsport to get away from Yaeger, she realizes she has only $13.40 to her name, and laughs at herself for a plan that wouldn’t get her any further than Worcester, Massachusetts. Naming Worcester as a synonym for “nowhere” would suggest that she is a New England girl, which would fit with her employment in a bar in a fishing village in central Maine. Buffie is the opposite of what they originally told us the characters in Parallel Time would be- she is not Nelle after she has made a different choice, she is a person who began differently than Nelle and is making a similar choice.
Buffie is in her room when her landlady, Mrs Duvall, comes for the rent. Buffie has a check ready. Mrs Duvall thanks Buffie for recommending her boarding house to a gentleman who has rented her four best rooms at a very handsome price. She tells Buffie that the man is a big step up from Steve. Buffie has no idea what she is talking about. Yaeger shows up, and Buffie realizes he is Mrs Duvall’s new prize boarder. Buffie is horrified, and demands her rent check back. Mrs Duvall refuses to return it. Yaeger points to a print hanging on the wall and instructs Mrs Duvall to take it away and burn it. She is doing so when Buffie protests that it is hers. At that, Mrs Duvall stops short of the door, but she does not put the print back on the wall. Eventually, Mrs Duvall does take Buffie’s print, and leaves her with Yaeger.
Mrs Duvall leaves with Buffie’s print.
The telephone rings. It is Quentin, asking Buffie about Yaeger. Yaeger stands next to her and forces her to answer Quentin’s questions with lies. Later, Steve will come to Buffie’s room. She will tell him to give up on her and not to take any more beatings from Yaeger on her behalf. Steve asks if Yaeger is a superman; Buffie widens her eyes and says that he might be. This brings us back to Nelle, who renounced her life in Virginia and her connection to the human race because she was looking for a superman and thought she would find one in Jabe. Steve may not have had much to offer, but it’s a cinch he wasn’t as bad as Yaeger, and he’s gone from Buffie’s life after this scene.
The emptiness of Buffie’s life is represented today by a prop we have seen only once before on Dark Shadows, a television set. There was a set in a motel room in Bangor in #27; we never do see one in the Collinsport or the Collinwood of the main continuity. Perhaps the makers of the show are suggesting that people who have nothing better to do than to watch the idiot box are likely to fall prey to any fella who offers physical abuse and verbal intimidation.
Mrs Duvall is played by Camila Ashland. Ashland was a very distinguished stage actress who appeared in #928 as someone called Mrs Hutchins. A man from the cult around Jabe hired Mrs Hutchins to tell some lies to throw mad scientist Julia Hoffman off their trail. That didn’t work, but Julia admired Mrs Hutchins’ performance, as we suspect Grayson Hall admired Ashland’s. When the man from the cult paid Mrs Hutchins for her work, he was unpleasantly surprised at her questions and the uneasy conscience it reflected, responding roughly that she is being paid for a job and should leave it at that. He didn’t realize he was dealing with an artist. Mrs Duvall’s eagerness to please the obviously horrible Yaeger shows that she really is the crude mercenary the man from the cult assumed Mrs Hutchins was.
We cut to Cyrus’ laboratory. Yaeger has fled there from the police. He is about to take the re-Jekylling formula when Quentin shows up and demands to know where Cyrus is. We end with them in that standoff.
*Billed twice in the closing credits- as Christopher Pennock for Cyrus, and as Chris Pennock for Yaeger. Adorable!
Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard has had a dream in which her new husband, whom she knows as Jeb Hawkes but who when we first saw him asked to be called Jabe, was in a fight on top of Widows’ Hill. His opponent, a stooge named Sky Rumson, threw him off the precipice to his death. When she awoke, Carolyn ran to the hill in search of Jabe. Instead, she found Sky. He told her that her dream was not complete, because it did not show her death. He then grabbed her by the throat.
Jabe rushes up and knocks Carolyn out of Sky’s grip. He and Sky fight, and Sky does throw him off the precipice. Carolyn escapes.
Back home at the great house of Collinwood, Carolyn finds her mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. It takes her a while to compose herself sufficiently to tell Liz and Julia what happened. Julia offers Carolyn a sedative, which prompts her to jump up and shout a verbal refusal. By the time Carolyn starts telling the story, her distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, has joined them in the drawing room. She interrupts herself to yell at Barnabas that he always hated Jabe and is probably glad he’s dead. When Carolyn finishes, Barnabas slips out. Liz calls the police, and Julia is surprised neither of them saw Barnabas leave.
For the last nineteen weeks, the show has been trying to make a story out of some themes drawn from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. That segment is usually called “the Leviathans,” after a race of Elder Gods who are behind the action. Jabe was central to the Leviathan segment. Sky is the only other character remaining from it. Barnabas appears in the house where Sky has been crashing and finds him packing his bag. Sky does not understand how Barnabas got in. Barnabas dismisses his question, merely saying that Sky knows there are things he can do that ordinary people cannot. Sky draws a revolver and fires two rounds at Barnabas point blank, without effect. Sky exclaims “Oh, no!” Barnabas is amused that none of Sky’s late colleagues told him that he is a vampire. He takes Sky’s hand, curls his arm back so that the gun is pointing at his heart, and squeezes Sky’s finger onto the trigger.
Back at the great house, Liz gets a telephone call from the sheriff. The police haven’t found Jabe’s body, and have surmised that it washed out to sea. They have found Sky, and have tentatively ruled his death a suicide. Later, Carolyn has another dream. In this one, Jabe shows up and confirms his death. That marks the end of the Leviathan segment. Carolyn will go on using the name “Mrs Hawkes” and saying she misses Jabe, but otherwise the last nineteen weeks will be forgotten.
Before killing Sky, Barnabas had mentioned that he almost regrets not leaving him to the other person who is on her way to do him in. That is Sky’s estranged wife, wicked witch Angelique. Had the Leviathan segment been more successful, or had Geoffrey Scott been even marginally competent in his performance as Sky, they might have made something of the parallels between Sky and Jabe. They are both very tall men with blonde wives who are dissatisfied with them. Angelique is dissatisfied that Sky is a tool of the Leviathans and that he tried to set fire to her on the orders of their representative, and Carolyn is dissatisfied with Jabe because he keeps running away from dangers he has brought on himself by his rebellion against the Leviathans and he won’t tell her anything about himself. Sky is a mortal man, while Angelique may once have been human but has long since become a creature of the supernatural. Carolyn is a mortal woman, while Jabe is now human but was originally a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time.
But the ratings have been sinking throughout the Leviathan period, and the whole narrative structure of the arc keeps collapsing around them every time they try to do anything with it. So they are in too much of a hurry to move on to the next thing to do any exploring of the characters. Also, Scott is hopeless. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, put it, it isn’t that he is an actor with just one strategy. He keeps trying different things, and none of them comes close to working. We won’t see him again.
The new story has to do with an alternate universe that is occasionally visible in a room in the long disused east wing of Collinwood. Barnabas, Julia, and others have been spying on its inhabitants, and Barnabas is fixated on the idea that if he can cross over into it his vampirism will disappear. Since his bloodlust is overwhelming him, he is desperate to pursue this forlorn hope. He goes to the room when the alternate universe cannot be seen there, and a moment later finds that it has changed with him in it. Julia is in the hallway, looking in. At first she and Barnabas can see each other, and she can hear him, though he cannot hear her. After a moment, Carolyn’s alternate universe counterpart enters and demands to know who Barnabas is and what he is doing in the house.
Barnabas took Carolyn as his blood-thrall in October 1967. The show went back in time to 1795 the following month. In the 1790s segment, Nancy Barrett played fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. We saw that Barnabas first became a vampire in 1796; not long after, he took Millicent as his blood thrall. Shortly after the show returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, one of Julia’s colleagues in the mad science profession applied a treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into remission. That freed Carolyn of her connection to him, and at some point she forgot it ever happened.
For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was set in 1897. In that segment, Miss Barrett played repressed schoolmarm Charity Trask. Barnabas bit her, too. Carolyn’s counterpart in “Parallel Time,” known by her married name Carolyn Loomis, is the fourth character* Miss Barrett played on Dark Shadows; considering that Barnabas is so frantically hungry, it looks like she will follow in the footsteps of her predecessors and serve as his breakfast.
*Or fifth- in #819, sorcerer Count Petofi found Charity’s personality to be an irritant, so he erased it and replaced it with that of the late Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl/ mentalist. From that time on, Miss Barrett played Pansy, not Charity.
Suave warlock Nicholas Blair first joined the cast of characters in June 1968, posing as the brother of Cassandra, wife of Roger Collins. Since Cassandra was an alias that 200 year old wicked witch Angelique was using, we knew right away this could not be so. Nicholas asserted himself as Angelique’s boss, faced down the ghost of the fanatical Reverend Trask, and kept saying that he had a plan that was far more important than Angelique’s petty little scheme to establish herself in the great house of Collinwood and turn Roger’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins back into a vampire. As played by Humbert Allen Astredo, Nicholas kept us believing for weeks that we would be in awe once we heard his plan.
Eventually, Nicholas stumbled upon the fact that Barnabas’ best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, had constructed a Frankenstein’s monster in the course of a project to keep his vampirism in remission. From that point on, Nicholas declared that his plan was to force Julia to make a female Frankenstein’s monster, to mate the already existing monster to her, and thereby to breed a new race of people loyal only to his master, Satan. He’d been on the show so long at that point that his sudden parachuting into the Frankenstein story only revealed that up to that point, all his talk about his grand design had been empty boasting.
Moreover, Nicholas’ plan for the patchwork people did not make sense in the context of the show. In a novel or movie like Rosemary’s Baby, the audience sees the heroine raped with the acquiescence of her husband, and our horror at that crime gives force to the premise that she will bear Satan’s only begotten son, who, in an inversion of the Christian story, will transform the whole world by the very fact of his birth. Stealing fresh corpses, chopping them up, and stitching them together isn’t the same horror as rape, but it is a pretty disgusting way to spend an evening, so I suppose that will get you off to some kind of start. But if your show is on the air for half an hour a day across the board Monday through Friday, your audience has time to sit with Nicholas’ scheme and think through all of the practicalities it implies. The new race is going to take many years to grow and multiply and overtake H. Sap., even if its members all have Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome. What are we all supposed to do in the interim, watch the Frankenbabies through nanny cams? It isn’t an idea for series television.
Nicholas not only saddled himself with a plan that obviously wasn’t going to work, he didn’t deliver on his claim to be a surpassingly talented sorcerer. In #528, Angelique asked him to slip a potion to one of her adversaries. He complained that “I am much too talented to spend my time drugging drinks,” but he complied with the request. Not only did that turn out to be a waste of time, later he would on his own initiative drug a couple of other people’s drinks, again without the results he wanted.
Eventually, Nicholas fell in love with Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. That amused Angelique, who taunted him with all the times when he had sneered at her for the humanity she showed in her emotional attachment to Barnabas. As Nicholas grew fonder of Maggie, his powers became less reliable, and his involvement with the main plot became more tenuous. No longer able to make Angelique obey him, Nicholas was reduced to using unsightly ex-convict Harry Johnson as his henchman. By the time the Frankenstein project collapsed and Satan called Nicholas back to Hell, not even Astredo’s considerable acting talent could make us take him seriously.
Nicholas returned in February 1970, just over five weeks ago. At that point the show was mainly concerned with an attempt the writers were making to take some material from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft and make a story out of them. The Leviathan People are Elder Gods who want to reconquer the Earth and destroy humankind. Their harbinger was a shape-shifting monster who had taken the form of a tall young man and invited people to call him Jabe. Jabe was supposed to join with Roger’s niece Carolyn to produce a new race of people.
The Lovecraft material never came together, and by the middle of February the makers of the show were scrambling to find a new direction. Nicholas appears to have been a last-minute replacement for a different sort of villain who was supposed to take over as the chief menace in the second half of the segment. Now they have thrown out that second half and are trying to get to something else before the ratings drop any further. So they brought back an already established character and plugged him into the scenes originally meant to be played by the one they never got around to introducing.
Bringing Nicholas in to the Leviathan arc makes it hard for longtime viewers to ignore the similarities between the Leviathans’ plan to breed a new race and his 1968 plan for the patchwork people, including the shared weakness that if either plan were successful, it wouldn’t leave you anything to put on a daytime soap. Also, Nicholas explicitly acknowledges that he has already failed in one such project, lampshading the problem but not alleviating it. He also keeps bringing up his “Master,” who is clearly still Satan. No other character in the Leviathan arc makes reference to any themes derived from Christianity- everyone else is living in the determinedly non-Christian world of Lovecraft’s imagination. So he seems out of place from the beginning.
The Leviathans’ plan was already nearing collapse when Nicholas showed up. Every time Jabe has used his powers, the results have backfired on him. His personality has alienated all of his allies. And now he doesn’t even want to be a shape-shifting monster anymore- he fell in love with Carolyn, and just wanted to take her on dates and then marry her. Nicholas is supposed to be the trouble-shooter who will turn this troubled operation around, but nothing about him inspires confidence that he is the right person for that job.
Since Nicholas arrived, things have gone downhill for the Leviathan cause even faster than they had been before. In #966, Nicholas watched in horror as Jabe smashed the box from which he originally emanated, causing all of the Leviathans’ other visible belongings to vanish. Nicholas then declared that everything was over, and that the time of the Leviathans was no more. But they still didn’t have another story ready to go, so he and Jabe have continued to hang around. Nicholas still has one follower, Angelique’s estranged husband Sky Rumson, but since there is no reason for Sky to be on the show either, that isn’t much of a basis for Nicholas’ continued presence. On his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn called Nicholas a “failure demon”; all in all, that would seem an apt classification.
Today, Jabe turns up at Nicholas’ place. Nicholas knows that Angelique cursed Jabe to be plagued by a mysterious shadow not his own that follows him and drives him mad. This much is borrowed from George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes, but unlike the Reverend MacDonald’s allegory of sin and anxiety this shadow is a physical weapon that will kill Jabe when it grows strong enough. Jabe asked Nicholas to use his powers to lift Angelique’s spell the other day, but Nicholas refused, even though he claimed that he could and he acknowledged that it would have been to his advantage to do so. The opening voiceover today reminds us that Nicholas knows all about the shadow.
Now, Jabe is telling Nicholas that he was wrong to turn against him, wrong to smash the box, wrong to give up his destiny of leading the Leviathans to global dominion. Nicholas dwells on his exhaustive knowledge of the shadow and tells Jabe he can take the shadow from him and set it on Angelique. He begins to hypnotize Jabe. When he seems to have Jabe in a trance, he tells him he does not give second chances, and that he is going to kill him and Carolyn. Jabe suddenly produces the paper cutout Angelique used to place the shadow curse on him and places it on Nicholas’ jacket. He then runs out of the room. The shadow appears and envelopes Nicholas, who collapses. Even though he knew in advance exactly what was going on, Nicholas still could not avoid death as the result of getting slapped on the chest with a piece of construction paper. He dies as he lived, a failure demon to the end.
Sky enters. Jabe returns, and Sky tells him Nicholas is dead. Sky whines that because Nicholas was not human, his death will not be the end of him and Jabe will not get away with killing him. Geoffrey Scott’s appallingly bad acting reinforces the image of Nicholas as a colossal loser- if this was the only ally he had left at the end, he must have been an even more hopeless stumblebum than we had thought. Jabe exits. A moment later, Nicholas’ ghost appears to Sky and tells him to kill Jabe.
Jabe goes back to the great house of Collinwood to tell Carolyn that he is rid of the shadow. They are married now, but have spent very little time together because the shadow has kept chasing Jabe off. She is puzzled by the whole thing, in part because Jabe refuses to tell her anything about his situation, and is unenthusiastic about Jabe’s renewed insistence that they go away immediately. She agrees to leave with him in the morning.
Carolyn goes upstairs. In the drawing room, Jabe hears Nicholas’ voice telling him that he will never escape. Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David Collins, enters; Jabe tells him that he and Carolyn are going on a trip tonight.
Jabe sent Carolyn upstairs with orders to pack and tell her mother they were leaving, but it would seem she has not complied. She is snoozing in a chair in her room. She has a dream. It begins with Nicholas’ voice rasping at her that it will all end at Widows’ Hill. She then sees Jabe and Sky, lit in groovy psychedelic colors, arguing about Nicholas and fighting near the precipice. Sky throws Jabe over the edge.
Carolyn awakens, calls for Jabe, and rushes out. On her way she tells David that she is going to Widows’ Hill. A moment later Jabe comes along, and David relays this information to him.
Carolyn gets to the top of Widows’ Hill, where Sky is waiting for her. He tells her that the dream Nicholas sent her stopped short of its end, because he did not want her to see her own death. He grabs her by the throat.
Meanwhile, in another universe…
While Jabe, Nicholas, and Carolyn are cleaning up the messes the Leviathan segment left behind, Roger is busy getting the new storyline off the ground. There is a room in the long disused east wing of the great house in which an alternate universe is occasionally visible. Roger goes there, and sees the counterparts of Carolyn and David. They are talking about the boy’s parents, whom Roger ascertains to be, not himself and undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch, but the counterparts of his distant cousin Quentin Collins and of Angelique. Everyone else we have seen in “Parallel Time” has the same first name as their counterpart in the main continuity, but David’s is named “Daniel.”
Roger never found out who Cassandra really was, so it is a puzzle for longtime viewers how he knows Angelique’s name. Carolyn and her mother met her under that name at the house she and Sky shared, but somehow did not recognize her as Cassandra. She visited them at Collinwood after her marriage to Sky broke up, but did not see Roger there.
Arrivals and Departures
This is the first time we see this Daniel Collins, but not the first time we are exposed to his name. The closing credits for #958 billed David Henesy not as David Collins, the role he played that day, but as Daniel Collins. I don’t know whether they had already decided that would be his name in Parallel Time and the person making up the credit roll got confused about it, or if the writers thought the goof was funny and gave the character the name as an inside joke.
Also, Mr Henesy played a character named Daniel Collins in February and March 1968, when the show was set in the year 1796. Since they have established that the two universes diverged during that Daniel’s lifetime, he may be this Daniel’s namesake. There is another connection, an accidental one I’m sure but an accident with a bit of an eldritch quality to it. In #350, three weeks before the 1790s segment began and more than sixteen weeks before Daniel made his first appearance, a slip of Nancy Barrett’s tongue left Carolyn referring to David as “Daniel.” It’s odd that the two Daniels were both heralded by these small inadvertences.
This episode marks, not only the final appearance of Nicholas, but also that of Roger. Louis Edmonds will play Roger’s counterpart in the Parallel Time segment, and as these episodes are being taped he is playing still another iteration of Roger on the feature film House of Dark Shadows. He will also be back in another role later on. But all the character development Roger has gone through since we first saw him in episode 1 is at an end.
Monday’s episode gave Roger his real sendoff, and my post about it summed up his history. I will just mention here that when I first saw Dark Shadows, Roger was something of a puzzle to me. That was the 1990s, when I saw it on what was then The SciFi Channel. The first episode I saw was #193, featuring art dealer Portia Fitzsimmons, but I didn’t have a chance to watch it at all regularly until a month or so after that, when Barnabas had already joined the cast. By that point Roger was already very much confined to the margins.
Curious as to when the dazzling Mrs Fitzsimmons would return, I looked online and found what is now the Dark Shadows wiki. I was disappointed to find that she was a one-off character. I also found that her function was to bring to a head a major story centering on Roger. I then looked through the episode summaries of the first weeks of the show. Those were quite terse and indigestible, meant to remind people who had seen the episodes of points they had forgotten. But one thing I did gather from them was that Roger had been a major character when the show started, indeed its chief villain. I couldn’t imagine the sardonic but lovable Roger of 1967 and 1968 in that capacity, and when I finally saw those episodes many years later I was thrilled by Edmonds’ performance.
One of the strongest themes of Roger’s character in his early days as a villain was his open hatred of David. It is nice for longtime viewers that he makes his final exit with an affectionate fatherly hand on David’s shoulder.
Wicked witch Angelique made her first appearance in #368/369, set in the year 1795. We first saw Angelique when she entered the doors of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, working as a lady’s maid and hiding her powers.
Today, it is 1970 and Angelique is back in the Old House. Her ex-husband, vampire Barnabas Collins, has summoned her and asked her to lift a curse she placed on Jabe, the husband of his distant cousin Carolyn. Barnabas tells Angelique that her quarrel was never with Jabe, but with suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Earlier in the episode we had seen Angelique and Nicholas having a discussion about how much they hate each other. He taunted her by claiming she has not changed in the last 200 years. When Barnabas invites Angelique to redirect her wrath towards Nicholas, she perks up. She orders Barnabas to fetch Carolyn’s husband and leave him alone in the Old House with her.
Angelique sits by the fire with Jabe and explains that she cannot simply liquidate the curse. It must end with someone’s death. But the good news is that it does not have to be his death. He can transfer it to someone else. He says he doesn’t want to kill anyone. She tells him that the person she has in mind is Nicholas. Suddenly he’s all ears as she explains the process for handing the curse over.
Angelique finds the limit of Jabe’s newfound reverence for life. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Longtime viewers know that Nicholas was quite wrong to say Angelique has never changed. She was monomaniacal and utterly narcissistic in 1795. She wasn’t so very different when we next saw her in 1968, though the show’s pace was a bit slower at that point and so Lara Parker was free to play her with more nuance. That made a difference that the show underlined early in 1969, when Barnabas took a brief trip back in time to the 1790s and ran into Angelique as she was when first we knew her. Even though they were still enemies in 1968, they occasionally had to tell each other the truth, and occasionally had to leave each other alone to fight other adversaries. The unbending hostility the eighteenth century version of Angelique showed Barnabas startled him and us after we had seen the relatively circumspect approach she took to conducting a cold war against him.
Throughout most of 1969, Dark Shadows was set in 1897. Angelique showed up then, and she remembered the events of 1968. Barnabas and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, were there as time travelers. Julia actually befriended Angelique, and Angelique became Barnabas’ ally in the battles he attempted to wage in that period. Angelique even let go of her erotic obsession with Barnabas, transferring her affections to his distant cousin Quentin Collins.
After the show came back to contemporary dress, Julia stumbled upon Angelique. She found that Angelique had sworn not to use her powers, had married a man who made her happy, and had lost all interest in Barnabas or anyone else at Collinwood. She was as relaxed and attentive to others as in 1795 she had been frantic and self-absorbed. Only after it turned out the same supernatural enemies Barnabas and Julia were fighting had corrupted her husband did Angelique start casting spells again, and then in pursuit of more rational, identifiable goals than she had ever sought in the eighteenth century.
That arc of character development ends with this episode. We will see Lara Parker as several more characters up to and beyond the end of the series, some of them named Angelique, but none of whom went through the transformations we have seen.
Today also marks the final appearances of werewolf Chris Jennings and his girlfriend Sabrina Stuart. Evidently the makers of the show planned to bring them back in a few months, after an upcoming story plays out, but by that time actor Don Briscoe was unable to work. He had bipolar personality disorder and tried to self-medicate with street drugs.
Quentin was such a big hit in 1897 that they had a magic spell put on him that immunized him against aging and brought him intact to the contemporary setting. Today, Barnabas takes Quentin to a room in the long disused east wing of Collinwood where you can occasionally catch glimpses of an alternate universe. The effect manifests while they are looking in, then winks out, leaving the dark, bare room that is in that space in their universe. Once that happens, Barnabas announces “You have just seen Parallel Time.” Those of us who have been watching from the beginning know that he got the line wrong. You’re supposed to say “Parallel Time is a Dan Curtis Production.”
When Dark Shadows began, its most dangerous villain was high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Since the plan was to kill Roger off after his crimes were exposed, writer Art Wallace and actor Louis Edmonds were free to present him as gruesomely as they pleased. That turned out to be so much fun for all concerned that it soon became impossible to imagine the show without Roger, and the plan changed.
Once Roger was established as a permanent part of the ensemble, they toned his wickedness down. He still did and said awful things, but they would pull him back whenever he might risk alienating the audience. So, he at first openly expressed his hatred for his young son, strange and troubled boy David, and in #68 and #83 coldly exploited David’s mental health problems to manipulate him into trying to murder well-meaning governess Vicki. But when David got Vicki into a situation that might actually have resulted in her death, Roger rescued her. When Roger’s estranged wife Laura showed up and wanted to take David away with her, Roger was so delighted at the prospect of getting rid of the boy that he willfully ignored one sign after another that something was seriously wrong with Laura. But when Vicki finally proved to him that Laura was an undead fire witch who intended to incinerate David, Roger joined in the effort to save him, and was so shaken by the experience that he would never again be overtly hostile to David.
Nor was his attitude towards David the only sign of Roger’s pathological lack of family feeling. He had squandered his inheritance, selling his half of the family business to finance his extravagant lifestyle. His sister, reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, went deep into debt buying back what Roger had sold. When Roger ran out of money, Liz took him and David in at the great house of Collinwood. When in #41 Liz reproved Roger for the difficult position she had put him in, he proudly declared that he had “enjoyed” his inheritance, and twitted her for her dreary ways. Liz gave Roger a job in the business, but the only time we saw him visiting his office he answered his phone and told the caller that what he was asking was someone else’s job. When in #273 Roger found that seagoing con man Jason McGuire had tricked Liz into believing that she had a terrible secret that she could keep only by surrendering her whole fortune to him in blackmail payments, he admitted to his sister that if she had confided her troubles in him, he would probably have done the same thing.
When vampire Barnabas Collins succeeded Laura as Dark Shadows‘ supernatural Big Bad, Roger was pushed to the margins of the story. From that time on, he had two things to contribute. The first were sarcastic remarks, many of them very funny, that established him as the show’s sardonic gay uncle. The second, which gave him what little function he retained in the plot, were ostentatious refusals to believe the evidence piling up on all sides that the family was beset by a procession of bloodthirsty monsters. Since several other characters, Liz among them, also refused to face these facts, the show could go long periods of time without featuring Roger at all.
In November 1967, Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. From then until March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in that period. The segment was a hit in the ratings, and a triumph for Louis Edmonds, who was cast as haughty overlord Joshua Collins. Joshua was the opposite of Roger- as protective of the family’s position as Roger was careless of it, as committed to making money as Roger was thoughtless in spending it, as courageous in the face of physical danger as Roger was cowardly. The 1790s segment became The Tragedy of Joshua Collins, as we saw how Joshua’s best qualities led him to create the dark and twisted world in which his descendants would grow up to be weak, selfish men like Roger.
When the show came back from the 1790s, Roger was obsessed with a portrait painted in those days. The portrait’s subject was Angelique, the wicked witch who precipitated the disasters that annihilated Joshua’s family. Before long, Angelique herself returned, wearing a wig, using a false name, and married to Roger. The spell Angelique cast to win Roger occasionally caused him to think he was Joshua, and by the time that story ended Roger had become, if not the imperious tycoon Joshua was, certainly a hard-working, conscientious family man. He still had a languid manner and a way with a quip, but was otherwise unrecognizable as the show’s original Man You Love to Hate.
Evil spirits drove the Collinses out of the great house of Collinwood in #694. That episode marked the end of Roger’s function as one of the “There must be a logical explanation!” people. He was the last member of the family to insist that everyone else was being silly, but when he finally accepted the reality of the situation and was on his way out of the house, he turned to declare to the ghosts that the living would be back to reclaim what was rightfully theirs. From that moment on, Roger was no longer a narrative brake pad.
For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was set in 1897. In that year, we got to know Quentin Collins, who as a ghost would be chiefly responsible for the haunting that had driven the Collinses out of Collinwood. We saw that the living Quentin was a charming rogue, a spendthrift who cheerfully tells his sober-minded sister Judith that he can waste money faster than she can give it to him, inclined to violence when it serves his purposes and quick to run away when he is in danger of being called to account for his crimes. In short, he is what Roger originally was, only played by a younger, sexier actor, and with an unlimited future on a show that has discovered the characters won’t alienate the audience by being evil, only by being dull.
In the 1897 segment, Edmonds played Quentin’s brother Edward, who was not dull, but not evil either. Edward was stuffy and hypocritical. He was occasionally cruel, sometimes because of greed, sometimes because of prejudice, and sometimes because he flew into a panic in the face of an unexpected danger. But he was sincerely devoted to his children, and he had a sense of decency that would assert itself even after he had done awful things. For all his faults, Edward was ultimately one of the most lovable characters Dark Shadows ever created. If 1795 was The Tragedy of Joshua Collins, 1897 was largely the Comedy of Edward.
After 1897, Dark Shadows spent several months bogged down in an attempt to make a story out of some themes drawn from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. Roger showed up in this part of the show just a few times. Quentin, brought into contemporary dress intact due to his great popularity in the 1897 segment, told Roger what was going on in #958. Rather than scoff as he would have in 1967 or 1968, Roger accepted Quentin’s account at once and helped him in the battle. Roger had by that point turned into Edward. His habit of denial was gone, and with it all of his languor and most of his wit.
Now the show is clearing out the last villains left over from the Lovecraft project and launching a story about a parallel universe that is occasionally visible through a doorway in the long-disused east wing of the great house. Roger is active in both of these plots today.
Even when he was a villain who cared nothing for his son, his sister, his family name, or Collinsport Enterprises, Roger very much enjoyed the company of his niece, Carolyn Collins Stoddard. On Friday, he was hugging Carolyn while she wept about the difficulties she was having in her new marriage; he called her “Kitten,” a term of endearment he has used with her since #4. In those early days, the show was heavy with hints that Roger and Carolyn’s relationship verged on incest. She often answered to “Kitten” in the moments when those hints were most insistent. But there was nothing unwholesome about Roger’s embrace of Carolyn on Friday, and he is irreproachably fatherly in his attitude towards her today.
At rise, Carolyn is in a trap. A man named Bruno, one of the leftover villains introduced while the show was dealing with the Lovecraft-derived material, has tricked her into entering a room where he has already imprisoned her old friend Chris Jennings. Bruno locked the door, and Carolyn saw that Chris was on the floor, writhing in pain. She asks him what is wrong, he won’t answer. Carolyn doesn’t know it, but Chris is a werewolf. The moon is rising, and his pains are the first stage of his transformation.
Bruno’s master wants Carolyn’s husband dead, and has decided that if the werewolf kills Carolyn he will lose the will to live. Since it would have been at least as easy to get the husband into the room as it was to get Carolyn there, and since one of the main things they have told us about the husband is that he is vulnerable to werewolf attacks, this scheme is unnecessarily complicated, marked for the audience as likely to fail. Indeed, since Bruno, his master, and Carolyn’s husband are all short-timers who don’t really need to be on the show anymore, while Carolyn has been a core member of the cast since #2, we can be quite sure it will fail, and if we have spent time over the weekend wondering about the cliffhanger, we’ve spent it wondering what will save Carolyn.
What saves Carolyn turns out to be well-timed intervention by her Uncle Roger. Roger was worried that she wouldn’t tell him why she was crying about her marriage, and followed her to Bruno’s place. He saw her enter, and after a few minutes let himself in. He confronted Bruno in his parlor, heard Carolyn and Chris in the back room, and found that the door to the back room was locked. When Bruno told him the door would stay locked, Roger hit him on the head with a candlestick, knocking him out. He took Bruno’s key, unlocked the door, and freed Carolyn. While Roger telephoned Collinwood to ask for permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, Chris jumped out of the back room’s window. Roger then decided that he and Carolyn should go home.
It may strike first-time viewers as odd that Roger calls Julia and not the police. Established fans will be unsurprised, knowing that the Collinsport Sheriff’s office is one of the world’s most useless organizations and that Julia is a mad scientist whose powers know few limits. Still, once Roger gets Carolyn home he does tell her they should call the sheriff. She refuses, and also forbids him to tell her mother Liz anything about what has happened.
Roger finds Liz moping in the drawing room. He strikes up a conversation about Carolyn’s troubles. He says that he and Liz both made unhappy marriages, and that it is disappointing to see that the next generation seems determined to repeat their mistakes. He says that he wishes Carolyn would confide in one of them. Liz says that all she knows is that someone or something is threatening Carolyn’s husband, and that she refuses to discuss it. The camera pulls back, and we see that Carolyn is right there. Director Henry Kaplan was pretty bad at moving the actors around and even worse at figuring out where to point the camera, but he deserves credit for this shot. When we suddenly see Carolyn standing there, we realize that Roger and Liz are so deep in their worries that they are oblivious to their surroundings.
Carolyn insists on going to the carriage house on the grounds of the estate to see her husband. Since Bruno is at large, Roger objects. He can’t mention Bruno in front of Liz, since Carolyn has decreed that her mother must not be told what happened earlier in the evening, so he is powerless to stop her going.
Bruno does catch up with Carolyn, and he tells her he is going to kill her. Before he can do so, the werewolf springs out, pushes Carolyn aside, and slashes Bruno. She goes home and tells Roger and Liz what happened. From Carolyn’s description, Liz recognizes the werewolf as the same creature they encountered in late 1968 and early 1969, and Roger rushes out.
Roger finds Bruno on the ground. He tells Bruno he will call a doctor. Bruno says it’s too late. He says a few words (“animal… not an animal…”) and loses consciousness.
Back in the great house, Roger says that the police are searching the grounds for the werewolf. He says it’s terrible that Carolyn should have met with such an incident on top of what has already happened to her. Liz asks what he means, and Carolyn glares at him, appalled at his indiscretion. He stammers out something about how she’s having marital problems, then announces he has to go because he promised to do something for Barnabas.
Roger and Liz never have figured out that Barnabas is a vampire, and though Carolyn was briefly his blood thrall she’s forgotten all about it. So far as the Collinses are concerned, their distant cousin Barnabas is just a night person. Several times now, Barnabas has looked into a room in the east wing and has seen, not the dark space, bare floor, and sparsely decorated walls that are there in his universe, but an alternative version of the room, brightly lit, fully furnished, and heavily decorated. He has seen people with the same looks, voices, and names as people he knows, but with different personalities and relationships. He has reported this to Julia and her friend, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, who have explained to him the many-worlds hypothesis.
On Friday, Barnabas told Roger about the room and about Julia and Stokes’ theory. The Roger of 1967 and 1968 would have jeered at Barnabas before he had spoken five words, but in 1970 he believed him readily enough. Barnabas expressed surprise at Roger’s openness to his outlandish account, and Roger acknowledges that “a year ago” he would have dismissed it. It was thirteen months ago that Roger turned and told the ghosts that the living would someday reconquer the great house; when he says “a year ago,” perhaps Roger is rounding down. Roger agreed then to come back and check the room.
When Barnabas showed Roger the room on Friday, it was bare. When Roger goes there himself today, he finds that the parallel universe is there. He cannot pass the invisible barrier in the doorway to enter it, nor can he communicate with the people there, but he can see them and hear them.
The first resident of the parallel universe Roger sees is Bruno’s counterpart. Astonished, he exclaims “I just saw him die!” Parallel Bruno is looking at the portrait of Parallel Angelique that dominates the room and telling it that the music he wrote for her will make her immortal. Roger does not appear to recognize the portrait’s resemblance to his second wife, much less to remember that he himself used to carry on similarly one-sided conversations with her eighteenth century portrait.
Parallel Liz enters and demands to know what Parallel Bruno is doing in the room. He says he belongs there. She tells him he is the only one who thinks so. She tells him that the master of the house, who is Quentin’s counterpart, will be coming home soon, and that he will never tolerate Bruno’s presence. Bruno says that he has heard that Quentin has remarried. When Liz says this is so, Bruno declares that Angelique will never allow another woman in the house. Liz is exasperated that people keep talking about Angelique as if she were still alive. Bruno exits.
Stunned by what he has seen, Roger looks away for a moment. He thinks of going to fetch Barnabas. His attention returns when he hears a conversation between Liz’ counterpart and his own.
Barnabas saw Parallel Roger on Friday; he was talking to the portrait in a way that suggested an obsession not so different from the one which the eighteenth century portrait had inspired in the Roger we knew. Today, Parallel Roger talks to Parallel Liz about Parallel Bruno in an airy, superior manner quite out of keeping with what we have had from our Roger today, but which sounds exactly like him as he was in 1967 and 1968.
PARALLEL ROGER: Was that Bruno, the terrible-tempered boy wonder I saw just now?
PARALLEL LIZ: Yes, he’s come back.
PARALLEL ROGER: Back to compose more of his morbid music and bore us with his tiresome memories of her? Well… It’ll be worth seeing the look on Quentin’s face when he finds out, won’t it?
Alliterative series such as “terrible-tempered” and “more morbid music” were characteristic of the old Roger’s verbal cleverness, as sarcastic expressions like “boy wonder” and complaints of boredom were typical of his habit of advertising his contempt for everyone and everything. Even Parallel Roger’s closing hope of “seeing the look on Quentin’s face,” as opposed to any thought of action he might himself take, is of a piece with the old Roger’s cowardice and laziness. Our Roger is horrified by the sight of his double.
Evidently the makers of the show have decided that Roger’s development has brought him to a dead end, and they are going to use the journey into “Parallel Time” to reintroduce the original villain. That Parallel Roger shares a scene with Parallel Liz suggests that we will again see the dynamic that their counterparts in the main “time-band” pioneered on the show, the conflict between Bratty Little Brother and Bossy Big Sister. This type of conflict is still one of Dark Shadows‘ signature elements, represented most prominently by Barnabas and Julia. The 1897 segment benefited from a similar conflict between Quentin and Judith; the 1795 segment lacked such a conflict, and in its absence they had to lean pretty hard on stories that put individual characters into isolation from the rest of the cast, burning them up one by one. Perhaps they plan to use the old standoff between Bratty Roger and Bossy Liz to keep the Parallel Time story spinning if the overall narrative hits some rough patches.
This episode marks the final appearance of the main “time-band” version of Bruno; the werewolf really did kill him. It is also the last time we will see the werewolf. Alex Stevens was billed as “Stunt Coordinator” when he played the werewolf. He will stay with the show as a stuntman, but won’t get his name in the credits again.
Vampire Barnabas Collins inadvertently killed his victim Megan Todd the other night, turning her into a creature like himself. Now his chief enabler, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, is browbeating his ex-blood thrall Willie Loomis into destroying Megan. Willie is horrified by the prospect of driving a stake through a woman’s heart, and Julia gives him a pep talk. She says that staking Megan is the only way to free her of the curse and to free her blood thrall, Barnabas’ distant cousin Roger Collins, from bondage. But it is necessary to finish Megan off “most of all, for Barnabas.”
The premise of Willie’s character at this point in Dark Shadows is that he regards Barnabas as a dear friend and valued patron. When Willie first knew Barnabas, from April to September 1967, Barnabas drank his blood, beat him savagely when he defied his fiendish commands, and framed him for his crimes. Barnabas had Julia fetch Willie back from the mental hospital she controls in May 1968, so he could use him to steal bodies to use in making a Frankenstein’s monster. Barnabas’ vampirism was in remission at that time, so he did not have any supernatural control over Willie. Willie’s attitude towards Barnabas then was rather insouciant, so he and Julia kept threatening to send him back to the ward for the criminally insane unless he obeyed them. Barnabas only seemed happy during this time once. That came in #560, when he saw the agony Willie went through when he persuaded him that it would be his fault if the monster murdered Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. I suppose people do rewrite their own pasts to make them bearable, so it is understandable that Willie has chosen to believe that his abuser was really his best buddy. Still, it does seem a bit much for Julia to tell Willie that he should destroy Megan “most of all, for Barnabas.”
Julia accompanies Willie to Megan’s hiding place in the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood. Willie breaks down outside the room where Roger is guarding her coffin, and Julia has to give him another motivational speech. She tells him he “mustn’t think of Megan as a person,” but as “a creature, an evil thing,” and besides that “You must help her to rest” and that staking is “the best thing for her.” While Willie struggles to hold back his tears, she warns him against waking Roger. By the time they enter the room, Roger is awake. He fights Willie and Julia to protect Megan, and Willie defeats him only by breaking a bottle over the back of his head.
Julia and Willie take Roger out of the room. Julia tends to Roger while we hear Megan’s screams. Once the staking is complete, Roger comes to, with no recollection of how he got to the east wing or what Megan did to him. This recovery tells us Megan is destroyed.
Later, Barnabas will tell Willie to bury Megan and all her belongings in a hole in the ground somewhere out in the woods. This shows longtime viewers that Barnabas has improved his post-murder game considerably. The first time he forced Willie into helping him cover up a killing came in #276. Barnabas had strangled Willie’s sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire. He had Willie help him bury Jason in the secret room in the old Collins family mausoleum, which would eventually cease to be much of a secret and which several people could connect with Barnabas. He also neglected to do anything about Jason’s belongings. Everyone thought Jason was leaving town and was glad to see him go, so there was no investigation. But in #277, Roger mentioned to his sister, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, that all of Jason’s stuff was still in the room he had been occupying at Collinwood. He told Liz that even Jason’s razor was still there. It was strictly a matter of luck that no one asked any questions about Jason- had they done so, Barnabas would have been in trouble almost immediately.
This episode marks, not only the end of Megan’s career as a vampire, but Marie Wallace’s final appearance on Dark Shadows. Miss Wallace was one of the most exuberant practitioners of the Dark Shadows house style of acting, a hyper-vehement manner of performance previously unknown in the history of the dramatic arts. It can take a bit of getting used to. But once Megan became a vampire, she suddenly became quiet and subtle, almost understated. Miss Wallace explains that by saying that the dentures they gave her to wear as fangs didn’t stay in her mouth very well, so she had to go small to keep them from flying across the room. As a result, her last few episodes are a revelation. The first time we watched the show I was impatient with Miss Wallace’s ultra-intense technique; I can appreciate it now, but her miniaturizing approach to Vampire Megan is so very effective that I wish we could have seen a couple hundred more episodes of her doing that kind of thing.
Miss Wallace tells the story of the day they shot this episode. She got a telephone call from her agent that they wanted her for a part on a soap called Somerset. She was thrilled, since there was no new part planned for her after Megan’s demise. From the few surviving bits of video showing her on Somerset, it doesn’t look like she decided to become a miniaturist.
In With the New
Megan is left over from an exhausted story. The new one is starting in another room in the east wing. The Collinses cram all of the deserted rooms in their buildings full of stuff- vases, paintings, books, furniture of all sorts. This room outdoes all the rest, and contains a whole parallel universe.
Barnabas has been peeping in on the doings in the parallel universe room for couple of days, but there is an invisible barrier which prevents him entering it or communicating with the people he sees and hears there. At the opening today, he sees Julia’s counterpart and Liz’ continuing a quarrel they had been having when he observed them before; at the close, he sees Willie’s counterpart and Julia’s having a similar quarrel.
Parallel Julia wears a maid’s uniform, but is full of commands for Parallel Liz and Parallel Willie. Parallel Liz’ response to her commands shows that she is not the mistress of the house, and cannot control Parallel Julia. Parallel Willie wears an ascot and a smoking jacket, and regards Parallel Julia with amused contempt.
Parallel Willie finds a book in the room that he wanted; Parallel Julia takes it from him, and tosses it into the hallway. The book passes through the barrier, and lands at Barnabas’ feet. The doors to the room close. Barnabas opens them again, and finds that the room is empty, devoid of the people, furnishings, and lights that had been visible there a moment before. Carrying the book, he goes in.
The title and author of the book stun him. It is titled The Life and Death of Barnabas Collins; its author is William Hollingshead Loomis.
In #326, Willie had been shot by the police, who blamed him for some of Barnabas’ crimes. Barnabas grew anxious as the hours passed and Willie failed to die. He complained to Julia of Willie’s “leech-like persistence” in remaining alive. Julia tried to reassure Barnabas that Willie was unlikely to survive much longer, and in response he raged that Willie might just as easily recover from his wounds and “write his memoirs!”
That line found an echo in #464, when we learned that Barnabas’ eighteenth century servant Ben Stokes had indeed written a memoir, though the extant manuscript was missing some parts about Barnabas. In #756, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins heard that Ben had secrets about Barnabas which he “took to his grave,” so she dug the grave up and, by golly, there were the missing passages explaining that Barnabas was a vampire. Now the same line is going to give rise to another William Loomis, one who has written a book about his world’s counterpart of Barnabas.
In #808, set in the year 1897, the chief villain was sorcerer Count Petofi. Petofi’s henchman Aristide threatened an enemy with “the mysterious shadow he can cast, the shadow that isn’t your own that follows you.” That suggested a borrowing from George MacDonald’s once-famous 1858 novel Phantastes, one of the forerunners of the “fantasy” genre. MacDonald’s protagonist, Anodos (whose name comes from the Greek for “No Way,”) travels through Fairyland. Anodos falls afoul of an ash tree, which uses its magical powers to plague him with an autonomous shadow. The shadow comes and goes as Anodos makes his journey; at times he finds himself morbidly attached to it, at other times full of despair at the sight of it. In a climactic section, he is trapped in a tower, alone with the shadow and afraid he will remain solitary forevermore. He is freed of the shadow in the end.
Though MacDonald’s popularity faded as the years went on, he was still quite popular in some circles in the 1960s, a beneficiary of the enthusiastic endorsements of writers like C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and W. H. Auden, who admired not only his manner of evoking a dream but also his intense Christian fervor. He still has a following today. Writer Meredith Finch and artists Christine Norrie and Andrew Pepoy adapted Phantastes into a graphic novel in 2022.
Shortly after the shadow is attached to him, Anodos happens upon a cottage in the woods. He enters, and meets a wise woman. She tells him what has happened:
The woman never raised her face, the upper part of which alone I could see distinctly; but, as soon as I stepped within the threshold, she began to read aloud, in a low and not altogether unpleasing voice, from an ancient little volume which she held open with one hand on the table upon which stood the lamp. What she read was something like this:
“So, then, as darkness had no beginning, neither will it ever have an end. So, then, is it eternal. The negation of aught else, is its affirmation. Where the light cannot come, there abideth the darkness. The light doth but hollow a mine out of the infinite extension of the darkness. And ever upon the steps of the light treadeth the darkness; yea, springeth in fountains and wells amidst it, from the secret channels of its mighty sea. Truly, man is but a passing flame, moving unquietly amid the surrounding rest of night; without which he yet could not be, and whereof he is in part compounded.”
As I drew nearer, and she read on, she moved a little to turn a leaf of the dark old volume, and I saw that her face was sallow and slightly forbidding. Her forehead was high, and her black eyes repressedly quiet. But she took no notice of me. This end of the cottage, if cottage it could be called, was destitute of furniture, except the table with the lamp, and the chair on which the woman sat. In one corner was a door, apparently of a cupboard in the wall, but which might lead to a room beyond. Still the irresistible desire which had made me enter the building urged me: I must open that door, and see what was beyond it. I approached, and laid my hand on the rude latch. Then the woman spoke, but without lifting her head or looking at me: “You had better not open that door.” This was uttered quite quietly; and she went on with her reading, partly in silence, partly aloud; but both modes seemed equally intended for herself alone. The prohibition, however, only increased my desire to see; and as she took no further notice, I gently opened the door to its full width, and looked in. At first, I saw nothing worthy of attention. It seemed a common closet, with shelves on each hand, on which stood various little necessaries for the humble uses of a cottage. In one corner stood one or two brooms, in another a hatchet and other common tools; showing that it was in use every hour of the day for household purposes. But, as I looked, I saw that there were no shelves at the back, and that an empty space went in further; its termination appearing to be a faintly glimmering wall or curtain, somewhat less, however, than the width and height of the doorway where I stood. But, as I continued looking, for a few seconds, towards this faintly luminous limit, my eyes came into true relation with their object. All at once, with such a shiver as when one is suddenly conscious of the presence of another in a room where he has, for hours, considered himself alone, I saw that the seemingly luminous extremity was a sky, as of night, beheld through the long perspective of a narrow, dark passage, through what, or built of what, I could not tell. As I gazed, I clearly discerned two or three stars glimmering faintly in the distant blue. But, suddenly, and as if it had been running fast from a far distance for this very point, and had turned the corner without abating its swiftness, a dark figure sped into and along the passage from the blue opening at the remote end. I started back and shuddered, but kept looking, for I could not help it. On and on it came, with a speedy approach but delayed arrival; till, at last, through the many gradations of approach, it seemed to come within the sphere of myself, rushed up to me, and passed me into the cottage. All I could tell of its appearance was, that it seemed to be a dark human figure. Its motion was entirely noiseless, and might be called a gliding, were it not that it appeared that of a runner, but with ghostly feet. I had moved back yet a little to let him pass me, and looked round after him instantly. I could not see him.
“Where is he?” I said, in some alarm, to the woman, who still sat reading.
“There, on the floor, behind you,” she said, pointing with her arm half-outstretched, but not lifting her eyes. I turned and looked, but saw nothing. Then with a feeling that there was yet something behind me, I looked round over my shoulder; and there, on the ground, lay a black shadow, the size of a man. It was so dark, that I could see it in the dim light of the lamp, which shone full upon it, apparently without thinning at all the intensity of its hue.
“I told you,” said the woman, “you had better not look into that closet.”
“What is it?” I said, with a growing sense of horror.
“It is only your shadow that has found you,” she replied. “Everybody’s shadow is ranging up and down looking for him. I believe you call it by a different name in your world: yours has found you, as every person’s is almost certain to do who looks into that closet, especially after meeting one in the forest, whom I dare say you have met.”
Here, for the first time, she lifted her head, and looked full at me: her mouth was full of long, white, shining teeth; and I knew that I was in the house of the ogre. I could not speak, but turned and left the house, with the shadow at my heels. “A nice sort of valet to have,” I said to myself bitterly, as I stepped into the sunshine, and, looking over my shoulder, saw that it lay yet blacker in the full blaze of the sunlight. Indeed, only when I stood between it and the sun, was the blackness at all diminished. I was so bewildered—stunned—both by the event itself and its suddenness, that I could not at all realise to myself what it would be to have such a constant and strange attendance; but with a dim conviction that my present dislike would soon grow to loathing, I took my dreary way through the wood.
The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald: Lilith and Phantastes, edited by Anne Fremantle (Noonday Press, 1954) pages 311-314*
Petofi never got round to casting the mysterious shadow on any of his enemies or doing anything else to remind people of MacDonald’s works. But today wicked witch Angelique picks up on Aristide’s suggestion. One-man wrecking crew Jeb Hawkes, alias Jabe, comes home to the carriage house on the estate of Colllinwood and finds Angelique waiting for him. She tells Jabe she blames him for something that happened to her husband. He denies responsibility. Ignoring his protests, she trims a piece of black construction paper into a crude figure. She places the figure on his chest and tells him it will spell his doom.
Jabe has no idea how this could be. Angelique thinks aloud for a moment about keeping him guessing, then decides she may as well tell him. She instructs him to look into the fire. When he does, he has a vision of himself asleep in bed (fully clothed, of course, it’s Collinsport) when a shadow in the form of Angelique’s cutout appears, engulfs him, and makes him scream. We cut back to the carriage house, where Jabe keeps telling Angelique that she while she may be able to make him have visions, she can’t cause such a thing to happen in reality. She assures him she can.
The carriage house is a cottage in the woods, so in this scene Angelique combines the roles of the wise woman who explains the shadow curse to Anodos and the ash tree that places it. The cutout is a much sillier visual than was the image Anodos saw in chapter four of Phantastes, when his curse began:
When [the Moon] shone out again, with a brilliancy increased by the contrast, I saw plainly on the path before me—from around which at this spot the trees receded, leaving a small space of green sward—the shadow of a large hand, with knotty joints and protuberances here and there. Especially I remarked, even in the midst of my fear, the bulbous points of the fingers. I looked hurriedly all around, but could see nothing from which such a shadow should fall. Now, however, that I had a direction, however undetermined, in which to project my apprehension, the very sense of danger and need of action overcame that stifling which is the worst property of fear. I reflected in a moment, that if this were indeed a shadow, it was useless to look for the object that cast it in any other direction than between the shadow and the moon. I looked, and peered, and intensified my vision, all to no purpose. I could see nothing of that kind, not even an ash-tree in the neighbourhood. Still the shadow remained; not steady, but moving to and fro, and once I saw the fingers close, and grind themselves close, like the claws of a wild animal, as if in uncontrollable longing for some anticipated prey. There seemed but one mode left of discovering the substance of this shadow. I went forward boldly, though with an inward shudder which I would not heed, to the spot where the shadow lay, threw myself on the ground, laid my head within the form of the hand, and turned my eyes towards the moon. Good heavens! what did I see? I wonder that ever I arose, and that the very shadow of the hand did not hold me where I lay until fear had frozen my brain. I saw the strangest figure; vague, shadowy, almost transparent, in the central parts, and gradually deepening in substance towards the outside, until it ended in extremities capable of casting such a shadow as fell from the hand, through the awful fingers of which I now saw the moon. The hand was uplifted in the attitude of a paw about to strike its prey. But the face, which throbbed with fluctuating and pulsatory visibility—not from changes in the light it reflected, but from changes in its own conditions of reflecting power, the alterations being from within, not from without—it was horrible. I do not know how to describe it. It caused a new sensation. Just as one cannot translate a horrible odour, or a ghastly pain, or a fearful sound, into words, so I cannot describe this new form of awful hideousness. I can only try to describe something that is not it, but seems somewhat parallel to it; or at least is suggested by it. It reminded me of what I had heard of vampires; for the face resembled that of a corpse more than anything else I can think of; especially when I can conceive such a face in motion, but not suggesting any life as the source of the motion. The features were rather handsome than otherwise, except the mouth, which had scarcely a curve in it. The lips were of equal thickness; but the thickness was not at all remarkable, even although they looked slightly swollen. They seemed fixedly open, but were not wide apart. Of course I did not remark these lineaments at the time: I was too horrified for that. I noted them afterwards, when the form returned on my inward sight with a vividness too intense to admit of my doubting the accuracy of the reflex. But the most awful of the features were the eyes. These were alive, yet not with life.
They seemed lighted up with an infinite greed. A gnawing voracity, which devoured the devourer, seemed to be the indwelling and propelling power of the whole ghostly apparition. I lay for a few moments simply imbruted with terror; when another cloud, obscuring the moon, delivered me from the immediately paralysing effects of the presence to the vision of the object of horror, while it added the force of imagination to the power of fear within me; inasmuch as, knowing far worse cause for apprehension than before, I remained equally ignorant from what I had to defend myself, or how to take any precautions: he might be upon me in the darkness any moment. I sprang to my feet, and sped I knew not whither, only away from the spectre. I thought no longer of the path, and often narrowly escaped dashing myself against a tree, in my headlong flight of fear.
The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald: Lilith and Phantastes, edited by Anne Fremantle (Noonday Press, 1954) pages 284-286
The only images of the sky we ever see on Dark Shadows are stock footage and stills; a massive translucent figure looming in front of the moon, an immense shadow itself casting a shadow on the ground below, is far beyond anything they have attempted. So we can understand why they decided to go to the opposite extreme, and try to build an initially unprepossessing prop into something powerful. Moreover, the show at this point has an audience consisting very largely of elementary school students, so the sight of a major character using scissors to trim a figure out of construction paper will be relatable.
The shadow that follows Anodos does not develop the ability to cause physical harm to him. It wears him down psychologically, and is the Reverend MacDonald’s allegory for anxiety resulting from sin. Jabe’s vision tells us that this story will deviate from the source material, and that his shadow will grow in size and intensity until it kills Jabe.
Of course, a story about a dark shadow involves the show making reference to its own title. Around the time Dark Shadows was on the air, it was a fad for teenagers in movie theaters to cheer whenever a character said the title of the film. I wonder if the appearances of Jabe’s unwanted companion prompted many members of the original audience to cheer.
Closing Miscellany
There is a moment that may not mean much to first-time viewers, but that will astonish confirmed fans. Jabe goes into the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard introduces him to Angelique, whom she knows only as a fellow rich lady. When Liz starts telling Jabe about Angelique’s stately home, Angelique volunteers that Jabe has been there and that he is close to her husband. Throughout the preceding 193 weeks, characters have been able to count on their enemies to keep their secrets for them. Disclosing information relevant to the plot to Liz is particularly inconceivable, even in the most desperate circumstances. When Angelique disregards these rules, she is going so far against the grain that my wife, Mrs Acilius, wondered for a second if Lara Parker had decided to throw the script away and blow up the show.
Today marks the final appearance of two actors on Dark Shadows. Roger Davis first appeared in #404 as an unpleasant man named Peter Bradford; today he is Peter’s ghost. Mr Davis played several other parts in the interval, all of them selfish, handsy men with an irritating habit of shouting their lines in a voice rising, not from the diaphragm, but from tightened rectal sphincters. Making matters even worse, Mr Davis is a highly trained, accomplished actor who is capable of doing excellent work. Once in a rare while, he deigns to put his skills to use on Dark Shadows, and he was part of one or two of the best scenes on the show. But most of the time, he chooses to put all of that aside and instead assaults his female scene partners on camera and subjects us to his unvarying anal screech. When Angelique dismisses him, we forgive her all her past misdeeds. Mr Davis will be back as the juvenile lead in the feature House of Dark Shadows, but at least we no longer have to dread 4:00 PM on weekdays.
Christopher Bernau also makes his departure as Philip Todd, Jabe’s onetime foster father. The part of Philip didn’t give Bernau much to work with, and he compounded the difficulties by playing him as if he were Jack Benny. But Bernau, too, was a very capable actor, and he was a true professional. A few times he has shown us what he can do, and he will be missed. Later in the 1970s Bernau achieved fame in two parts that harked back to Dark Shadows. He played Dracula on Broadway in 1977. That same year, he joined the cast of The Guiding Light as womanizing rogue Alan Spaulding, a part he played for several years until his death, of AIDS, in 1989. I reminisced about Bernau’s Alan Spaulding on Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day:
I was a kid when Bernau joined GUIDING LIGHT. My mother watched that show, and I had several times attempted to watch it with her, but it always defeated me after 5 or 10 minutes. It just seemed like a window into the deepest level of Hell, the frozen cavern where absolutely nothing happens. But Bernau caught my imagination. I could watch entire episodes if he was in them.
Years later, when I watched DARK SHADOWS on the Sci-Fi Channel, I realized what made Bernau so compelling on GUIDING LIGHT. He was doing a Jonathan Frid imitation. Within moments of first seeing Barnabas, I exclaimed “Alan Spaulding!” It was only years later that I learned Bernau had been on DARK SHADOWS.
Comment left 10 December 2020 by Acilius, on Danny Horn, “Episode 888: Little Shop,” 26 June 2016, Dark Shadows Every Day.
Alan Spaulding was such a hit for Bernau that there can be no doubt a Jonathan Frid imitation was a better starting place for him than was a Jack Benny imitation, at least in daytime.
The closing credits run over a view of the landing at the top of the foyer stairs. We see this space straight-on, an unusual angle. Typically they tilt the camera way back and look up at it. Perhaps they are showing off some new equipment.
*I first heard of Phantastes from a January 2022 episode of God and Comics, a podcast that three Episcopal priests did until shortly after one of them flaked off and became a Roman Catholic. When they talked about Anodos’ shadow, I wished I had a Dark Shadows blog, so I could tell people about the connection to this story.
My copy of The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald is one I came across at a charity book sale in May of 2025. I’ve had it on the table next to the spot where I sit when I write these posts ever since. It isn’t my kind of writing. I usually enjoy dry, matter-of-fact prose, while MacDonald was rarely less florid than in the passages above. Besides which, MacDonald was a sometime clergyman whose evangelistic zeal led even the Reverend Misters hosting God and Comics to admit that his books reminded them too much of their day jobs for their taste. For my part, I say there’s a place for everything, and the proper place for MacDonald’s heavy-handed style of preaching is a pulpit in a church I don’t attend.
**As the saying goes, people who call Twitter “X” would have turned you in to the Stasi.
Dark Shadows Commentary 