The Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods, are planning to retake the Earth from humanity. Like all stories of Elder Gods, this one raises the question of why they lost the Earth in the first place. The answer seems to be clear. The first Leviathan to manifest himself is a shape-shifting monster who spends most of his time in the form of a tall young man who, when we were introduced to him, asked to be called “Jabe.” No one would call him that, so he settled for “Jeb.” The Leviathans have assembled a cult of people to serve them; Jabe’s personality has alienated many of them already, and seems likely to alienate more.
Among the ex-followers who were glad to join a plot to exterminate homo sapiens but who found Jabe too obnoxious to stomach are vampire Barnabas Collins and a crazed sadist known only as Bruno. Jabe’s onetime foster mother, Megan Todd, lost her allegiance to the Leviathans after Barnabas bit and enslaved her. Since Barnabas’ current bout of vampirism is the result of a curse Jabe placed on him during a tantrum, the cult’s loss of Megan is another strike against Jabe.
The Leviathans have two principal vulnerabilities. They can be destroyed by ghosts or by werewolves. Since they have chosen to start their campaign on the great estate of Collinwood, which is the world capital of both ghosts and werewolves, this would suggest that they are as bad at strategic planning as Jabe is at team-building.
Bruno has captured the current werewolf and lures Jabe to him. He also discovers that Megan is Barnabas’ blood thrall. Everything else today is filler, but it does give the actors a chance to show off. Bruno beats the werewolf with a whip to ensure that he will be angry enough “to rip a man to shreds!” He’s a werewolf, the whole idea is that he’s already disposed to rip anyone he meets to shreds, but as Bruno Michael Stroka puts so much zest into the whipping scene that we forget how ridiculous the furry rig Alex Stevens is wearing looks and feels sorry for the poor widdle doggie.
Barnabas summons Megan to his house and gives her some instructions that don’t make sense and that she won’t have the chance to follow. While she is there, she says she just wants him to suck her blood. He does. Marie Wallace plays Megan in this scene as if she is having a sexy dream.
Bruno left the late Sheriff Davenport, whom Jabe killed and then brought back as a zombie slave, to guard the werewolf. To keep the zombie from getting in the way of his plan to use the werewolf against Jabe, he tricks him into letting the werewolf destroy him. Davenport is the most garrulous zombie of all time; in his first postmortem appearance, when Jabe set him to hold prisoner Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, Davenport rambled on and on about everything he saw and heard, at one point launching into an explanation of some things his wife used to do that annoyed him. Today he has to argue with Bruno, demanding to know whether he has authorization from Jabe to leave the werewolf alive and giving his opinion that it isn’t a good idea to take too much initiative. Ed Riley does as much as anyone could to overcome the ludicrous overwriting of his part. No one could make a chatterbox like Zombie Davenport seem like a partially reanimated corpse, but when he isn’t saddled with excessive dialogue Riley manages to create the impression that he is at least somewhat weird. It’s too bad he won’t be back.
The residents of the estate of Collinwood are divided. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, her nephew David Collins, and their distant cousin, eleven year old Amy Jennings, have been brought under the power of the Leviathan People, an unseen race of Elder Gods who mean to retake the Earth from humankind. Liz has invited the harbinger of the Leviathans, a shape-shifting monster who in his human form is a young man who once revealed he wanted to be known as Jabe, to live in the carriage house on the estate. Jabe’s onetime foster mother Megan Todd is living as Liz’ guest in the main house.
The main house is also home to mad scientist Julia Hoffman and governess Maggie Evans, who have ranged themselves against the Leviathans. Yesterday Jabe was about to kill Maggie when he saw something outside Collinwood’s Tower Room that scared him off. Wanting to know what it was Jabe was afraid of, Julia went to the scene to investigate, and found Jabe lurking there. Before he could attack her, the mysterious presence returned, and Jabe ran off. Today, we see the presence- it is a dark shadow. It makes perfect sense that a reminder of which show he is on would terrify Jabe. The writers keep painting his character into a corner so that he won’t be able to continue once the current storyline ends.
The shadow appears to be that of a slim man wearing a comically oversized hat and a cape. The only character who dressed that way was painter Charles Delaware Tate. Tate was killed by a werewolf in #922. It seems unlikely that Tate’s ghost would haunt Jabe, since werewolves and Leviathans are each other’s implacable enemies. Granted, the Leviathans are also hostile to humans, but Tate was always something of a post-humanist himself. For a while he had magical powers that he used to blur the boundary between humans and their portraits, and in his later years he tried to replace himself with a robot. Besides, Tate was always such a jerk to every individual person he met that it is difficult to imagine him taking much trouble to defend humanity in the mass.
Jabe has murdered three people so far. He raised one of these, Sheriff Davenport, from the dead. He made Davenport into a peculiarly garrulous zombie and forced him to do his bidding. I don’t know of any stories where the same person manifests after death as both a zombie and a ghost, but then I’m no expert on tales of the supernatural. So I guess the shade could be Davenport’s.
Jabe also murdered Paul Stoddard, Liz’ ex-husband and father of her daughter Carolyn. Last week Jabe was afraid Paul’s ghost would come after him, so he dug his body up and burned it. Today we hear that the village of Collinsport is buzzing with talk about the fact that Paul’s body went missing. So Paul is a possibility. The third victim, Maine state police investigator Lawrence Guthrie, was a one-time character. It would seem a bit late to start developing him now.
At the end of the episode, the ghost appears to David in the form of a man hanging from the ceiling. We get a clear look at the ghost’s trouser legs and boots. This rules out, not only Davenport, Paul, and Guthrie, but almost all characters from the parts of Dark Shadows set in contemporary times. The only women who have worn trousers were Carolyn, in a couple of 1966 episodes, and Megan. Both of them are still alive. The only man who wore boots was motorcycle enthusiast Buzz, who dated Carolyn for a little while in 1967. Those longtime viewers who remember Buzz might be amused if it were to turn out that he was the Leviathans’ mightiest foe.
This episode also features Roger Collins, who is Liz’ brother and David’s father. Roger meets his distant cousin Quentin Collins. From December 1968 to September 1969, Quentin was a ghost who haunted Collinwood, rendering the place uninhabitable and killing David. There was a time travel story going on for most of that period, and in September 1897 events played out differently than they had the first time through. The result of that difference was that Quentin did not die. The haunting broke and David came back to life on the anniversary of the change. Some magic spells cast on him have kept Quentin alive and apparently twenty nine years old ever since, but the haunting still happened and Roger’s memory of it gives him a shock when he sees the living Quentin. He quickly composes himself; he has already heard of Quentin’s claim to be his own great-grandson, and accepts it cheerfully.
Amy is Quentin’s actual great-granddaughter, and she is not so easily persuaded. Both as a living being in the 1890s and as a ghost in the 1960s, Quentin was obsessed with a phonograph recording of a sickly little waltz and inflicted endless replays of it on the residents of Collinwood. While Quentin and Roger are chatting in the drawing room, she starts playing the waltz. Amy asks Quentin if he likes it. He zones out, and after a long interval declares that he likes it very much. She says she is going to play it again, and Roger forbids her.
Amy says she doesn’t have anything to do. Roger puts his hand on her shoulder, tells her that the house is full of good books, and marches her off to find one. I had remembered this scene with David as the one Roger takes to the library, and moreover had remembered it as their last scene together. When the show started, Roger was a villain and David was a budding psychopath, so it would have been touching to end their story on this note of loving paternal firmness.
Later, Amy goes upstairs to David’s room. David has for several weeks been using a wheelchair because of a broken leg, but it hasn’t occurred to anyone to move him to one of the vacant rooms on the first floor. She tells him about Quentin, and he tells her to get the sacred book of the Leviathan people from its hiding place on the top shelf of his bookcase. They search the book for guidance. Just as they find something promising, they feel a ghostly chill. The book flies off David’s desk and bursts into flames. The ghost has done its work; David observes that “The chill is gone.”
David keeps ordering Amy around the whole time they are on together. This is quite a change from the beginning of Amy’s time on the show, in the early days of Quentin’s haunting, when they bickered like an old married couple and took turns being the one in charge. Since then, Amy has been in steep decline, absent from the cast and unmentioned for months at a time. Indeed, today is the last episode in which Denise Nickerson will appear only as Amy Jennings. Amy will make two brief appearances in upcoming episodes where Nickerson plays another character, but this is the end of the road for her as a significant presence on the show. She started so strong and Nickerson was so talented that it is very sad to see her go like this. The chill is gone, baby.
Roger doesn’t know about the Leviathans, but he has caught on that something very strange is going on. He goes to the Old House on the estate, home to his distant cousin Barnabas Collins. He finds Quentin there. Quentin tells him Barnabas is not in. Roger tells Quentin about the strange goings-on, and Quentin says that he can explain them. He warns Roger that the knowledge he is about to impart to him will put him in deadly jeopardy.
Once Roger has heard the story, he says he wants to take David and flee. Quentin tells him this will not work- the Leviathans will kill both of them if they try it. All they can do is fight them. Roger is unconvinced of their chances, but does not have a better idea.
Roger was one of the last characters to hold out against the evidence that the show had become a supernatural thriller. Even after he was forced to accept that he was up against uncanny forces of evil, he would snap back to “Surely there is a logical explanation!” mode the minute the danger had passed. That changed when Quentin’s ghost forced the family out of the main house in #694. When he accepts Quentin’s story today, we can see that it will no longer be Roger’s function to slow the story down. That is good news and bad news- Dark Shadows long had too many speed bumps, and like all of Louis Edmonds’ characters, Roger is too delightful to be related to such a lowly rank. But not since he ceased to be a villain in #201 have the writers come up with anything else for him to do. We may be losing Roger altogether before much longer.
Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has fallen afoul of a shape-shifting monster from beyond time and space who once hoped people would call him “Jabe.” The monster, who has settled for the name “Jeb,” turns Barnabas back into what he was from the 1790s until 1968, a vampire.
Re-vamped, Barnabas suddenly gets a lot of gray in his hair and a much darker complexion. Makeup artist Vince Loscalzo deserves a lot of credit for these bits of color, they are placed perfectly to emphasize the look of anguish as Barnabas realizes what has happened to him and struggles to resist his urges. The actors’ faces were the medium of Loscalzo’s art, and he outdid himself with these complements to Jonathan Frid’s face.
People talk endlessly about the heroic makeup work Dick Smith did with Jonathan Frid one week in October 1967 and again on a feature film, but Vince Loscalzo did great stuff like this day in and day out for years. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
We see Barnabas sitting at a table in The Blue Whale, the tavern in the village of Collinsport. He is the only patron in the room. He has a glass of reddish liquid in front of him, and the bartender is moving around the room. The bartender looks at Barnabas, as if to ask, “How do you like your glass of AB negative, Mr Collins?” But he turns away and moves on.
A young woman enters. Barnabas invites her to join him at his table. He sees that she is wearing a pendant that identifies her as a member of the secret cult that serves Jabe and other creatures who intend to seize control of the Earth, supplanting humankind. Barnabas introduces himself, and says that he was the one who made it possible for Jabe to come to life. This is true, but it is also true that he has become disaffected from the cult. Even after Jabe turned him back into a vampire, Barnabas is still determined to thwart it.
The young woman introduces herself as Nelle Gunston, who was recruited into the cult while living a dreary life with her parents in Virginia. Nelle tells Barnabas that everything has changed for her since she joined the cult. She says that she will gladly do anything she can to advance its objectives, including murder. They have this conversation in nice loud voices while the bartender is nearby.
Barnabas’ friends, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and recovering werewolf Quentin Collins, enter. He introduces them to Nelle, then explains to them that he and Nelle have a private matter to discuss. Quentin and Julia go to the bar, where Quentin orders brandies. They talk about Nelle’s pendant and their fear that Barnabas is falling back under the power of the cult while the bartender is in their space serving them drinks. Evidently they’ve learned to rely on his discretion. They are still deep in conversation when Barnabas leaves with Nelle.
Barnabas takes Nelle back to his place on the pretext that Jabe will meet them there. She asks him why it is so dark in there; he asks her how she got into the cult. She catches on that Jabe is not coming and that Barnabas is not loyal to him. She draws a knife and is about to stab Barnabas when he bares his fangs to her.
Quentin and Julia let themselves into Barnabas’ house. They find Nelle dead on the floor and Barnabas wallowing in self-pity next to her. Julia takes a second look at Nelle and sees the puncture wounds on her neck. She tells Barnabas she will renew the treatments that first put his vampirism into remission two years before; he says there is something else he has to do first. After he rushes out, Quentin and Julia talk about how they will hide Nelle’s body.
Nelle was the perfect victim for Barnabas- no one in town knew her, no one expected her to come, no one will notice she is missing. And he is determined to weaken the cult, so reducing its numbers by one fits his goals.
Barnabas goes to the antique shop in the village. Jabe is in an upstairs room; Barnabas is convinced that Jabe can assume his true form and lay it down only in that room. We saw him do that in a house on an island many miles away in #946, and he told Barnabas that he had done so in #947, but apparently that doesn’t count, somehow. Jabe is far more powerful in his true form than he is when he is man-shaped, but he cannot mingle with humans in that form. So Barnabas believes that he will limit Jabe’s options if he destroys the room. He pours gasoline all around the first floor of the shop and sets a match to it.
Nelle is played by Elizabeth Eis, in her first appearance on Dark Shadows. They say that the first thing actors have to do to work effectively is to pay attention to each other. Eis shows how far this can take you. She listens ravenously to everything Frid says and never takes her eyes off him. The script doesn’t give her a huge amount to work with, but simply by giving her scene partner her total attention she creates a sensational performance. The producers noticed; she will be back later this year in two quite different roles.
This episode is the last time we see either the Blue Whale or Bob O’Connell as the Bartender. The Blue Whale was an important part of the show from its debut in June 1966 until the first costume drama insert began in November 1967. O’Connell appeared as the Bartender in 60 episodes (three of them as other bartenders in other periods of history) and had speaking parts in 6. It’s too bad he doesn’t get to say anything today, but at least he is in the closing credits.
Hail and farewell to Bob the Bartender, the jukebox, and the tavern. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Ten year old Amy Jennings is at home in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Evidently she’s in a literal mood- she’s in the drawing room, so she’s drawing. Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard sees Amy’s work and asks why she is doing it. Amy says she thinks the design is “pretty”; Carolyn replies that “pretty” is the last thing she would call it. That may seem rather rude, but as Amy hasn’t been seen since #912 I suppose she’ll take what she can get.
The design is one which on Dark Shadows is called simply a Naga. It is the secret emblem of a secret cult serving the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods. Secret cultist Megan Todd wears the Naga on a large pendant around her neck; Megan’s husband, secret cultist Philip, wears it on a shining ring; Carolyn’s mother, secret cultist Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, wears it as an oversized broach. Amy herself is a secret member of the secret cult, but she hasn’t yet acquired any conspicuous jewelry emblazoned with the secret symbol, leaving her to do her own artwork. Carolyn wonders aloud why so many people are so preoccupied with the design.
Quentin Collins enters. Amy is terrified. Starting in December 1968, Quentin’s ghost haunted Collinwood. By March, the house was uninhabitable and strange and troubled boy David Collins was near death. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins tried some mumbo-jumbo in hopes of communicating with Quentin; he came unstuck in time and found himself in the year 1897, where he remained for eight months. While Barnabas was flailing about in the late Victorian era, time continued to pass in 1969, and Quentin’s obsession of David finally killed him in September. But a sequence of events with which Barnabas had a tenuous connection changed the circumstances on the night in September 1897 when Quentin originally died, causing him to survive. That night, as it happened, was exactly 72 years before David’s death. On Dark Shadows, anniversaries have the power that laws of nature have in our world, so that caused the haunting to break and David to come back to life. Due to a series of spells cast on him during Barnabas’ sojourn in the past, Quentin is still alive and still apparently in his late twenties in 1970. But the haunting still happened between December 1968 and September 1969, and everyone who lived through it still remembers it.
Quentin has introduced himself to Carolyn as his own great-grandson. Since Carolyn never actually saw his ghost, she is willing to accept this. But Amy had more dealings with the ghost than anyone but David, and it is obvious to her that they are one and the same. She clings to Carolyn.
Carolyn laughs at Amy’s fear and tells her that this Quentin is not the ghost, but is “a cousin of ours.” This is intriguing to regular viewers. It was during the 1897 segment that the audience learned that Quentin was the great-grandfather of Amy and her brother Chris, and just a few weeks ago that Chris learned about that relationship. It is through their descent from Quentin that Amy and Chris are cousins to Carolyn. So if Amy knows she is a Collins, she must have been told that the ghost that tormented her and David was that of her great-grandfather. A scene in which someone gave her that information might have been a good use of Denise Nickerson’s considerable acting talent, but they didn’t bother to produce one.
Quentin tells Carolyn to leave him alone with Amy. Still chuckling, she complies. Once they are alone in the drawing room, Quentin kneels and touches Amy’s face, assuring her that he is “not that Quentin Collins.” David Selby brought immense charm to the role of Quentin, so this scene isn’t as revolting as it might have been, but it is still pretty bad, and we can’t be surprised that Amy is not satisfied.
Amy goes to the village of Collinsport to seek guidance from her spiritual advisor. He is a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time who usually takes the form of a very tall young man. When he first assumed that form, he invited people to “Call me Jabe,” but no one did. They call him “Jeb” instead, and he answers to it.
Jabe lives in a room above Megan and Philip’s antique shop, and when Amy enters the shop she finds him looking after the place. Apparently shape-shifting monsters from beyond space and time aren’t above doing a little work in retail now and then. She tells Jabe about her encounter with Quentin, and then tells him about a dream she had. In the dream, she went into the long-disused room where she and David first met Quentin. Quentin’s theme song, a sickly little waltz, was playing; she exclaims “It was terrible!” Longtime viewers know the feeling. The tune played incessantly during the “Haunting of Collinwood” period, and when they went back to 1897 characters kept complaining to the living Quentin that he was making them miserable by playing it on his phonograph all the time.
In the dream, Quentin appeared to Amy wearing the nineteenth century clothing and the angry scowl that he wore when he was a ghost. But when he was a ghost, he never spoke words the audience could hear. The only exception was a dream sequence in #767, when Quentin’s ghost spoke to David. That was also the only other dream sequence to be presented as this one is, in flashback as the dreamer is recounting it after the fact. That sequence marked a watershed, the first attempt to explain how Quentin the cranky ghost emerged from Quentin the charming scoundrel we had got to know in the 1897 segment.
This episode, also, has to do with the relationship between these two iterations of Quentin. Amy tells Jabe that Quentin’s ghost in the dream warned her against him by name, and says that she is therefore convinced that the living man she met in the drawing room today is in some way identical to the ghost who haunted the house for those ten months. Amy’s dream marks the final appearance of Quentin’s ghost, but we can see the ghost will not be forgotten.
A state police investigator named Lawrence Guthrie is in town looking into two murders Jabe has committed, those of Carolyn’s father Paul and of a law enforcement officer whose gravestone revealed that his given name was “Sheriff Davenport” (we never learn what Mr Davenport’s title was.) Jabe orders Philip to kill Guthrie. Philip calls Guthrie and asks him to come to the antique shop when Jabe will be out. Once Guthrie is there, Philip tells him that the upstairs room where Jabe stays is an important part of the story of the murders. He shows Guthrie into the room. He stays outside, and locks Guthrie in. Guthrie encounters Jabe there in his true form; Jabe kills him. This is quite effectively handled. My wife, Mrs Acilius, was completely caught off guard by the killing. She believed Philip really was trying to break free of the Leviathan cult, and wondered what Guthrie was supposed to find in the room.
Neither Jabe nor Philip is an especially well-developed character, but Christopher Bernau and Christopher Pennock were both fine actors, and they play off each other very well today. It is a tribute to their performances that Guthrie’s death scene comes as a surprise.
At the end, Quentin is at Collinwood trying to tell Carolyn that it was Jabe who killed her father and Mr S. Davenport. Inexplicably, Carolyn is interested in dating Jabe, and is unwilling to listen to this. Jabe bursts in and announces that there has been another murder, that the murderer is in custody, and that he has confessed to it and to the killings of Paul and Sheriff. That murderer, Jabe says, is Philip. That’s another surprise- after the murder of Guthrie, Jabe did tell Philip that he had another task to perform, and once we hear that he has confessed to the killings it makes perfect sense that that would have been what Jabe meant. But I don’t think anyone could have predicted it. It makes for a strong ending.
Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day is a lovely little bit of fanfic proceeding from the assumption that Lawrence Guthrie is the brother of Dr Peter Guthrie, the parapsychologist whom undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins killed in March 1967.
The closing credits again misspell writer Violet Welles’ name as “Wells.” They started doing that last week, around the same time the misspelling of wardrobe house Ohrbach’s as “Orhbach’s,” a frequent goof in the show’s first year, reappeared after a long absence.
The first ghost we saw on Dark Shadows was that of the gracious Josette Collins, who came down from her portrait and danced around the outside of the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood in #70. We had first heard of Josette in #5, when drunken sad sack Sam Evans told well-meaning governess Vicki Winters about her, and she had been mentioned many times in the first fourteen weeks. From #70 until #191, Josette’s ghost became a steadily bigger part of the story. She rallied the other ghosts of Collinwood to rescue Vicki from crazed handyman Matthew in #126, and from that point until #191 guided Vicki in her battle with undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. By the end of the Laura story, Josette was firmly established as the chief figure in the show’s supernatural back-world, a world which the action is continually tugging into view.
Vampire Barnabas Collins succeeded Laura as the show’s supernatural Big Bad. Josette was well-suited to do battle with the distant and indefinable Laura, but was too wispy to be very effective against the more dynamic Barnabas. In #212, Barnabas addressed Josette through her portrait in the Old House, which we had seen strange and troubled boy David Collins use to carry on conversations with her in #102 and #162. Barnabas spoke to Josette then as if she were his grandmother, who had sided with his father against him in a fateful conflict, and told her he was kicking her out of the house. Over the next few weeks, there were several episodes when David lamented Josette’s absence from the Old House, suggesting that Barnabas had succeeded in banishing her.
As it became clear Barnabas was a hit and would be kept on the show for a while, they decided to connect him to Josette. So they borrowed the story of the 1932 film The Mummy. As Boris Karloff’s undead Imhotep decided that Helen Grosvenor was the reincarnation of his lost love Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun, so Barnabas decided that Josette, retconned as his lost love, had been reincarnated as Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) daughter of Sam. As Imhotep abducted Helen and tried to turn her into Ankh-Esen-Amun, so Barnabas abducted Maggie and tortured her in an attempt to erase her personality and upload Josette’s in its place.
In the movie, Helen and Ankh-Esen-Amun were both played by Zita Johann. The original viewers wouldn’t have known it, but Miss Scott, wearing a veil, played the ghost of Josette in #70 and voiced Josette’s lines to Vicki in #126. In the scenes during the Laura story when we caught glimpses of Josette’s face, the ghost was played by frequent stand-in Rosemary McNamara, who looked enough like Miss Scott that viewers may have wondered if she was playing the role. So the idea of a connection between Maggie and Josette had been rattling around the writers’ room for a while. In #240, David saw Maggie wandering around Barnabas’ house. She was wearing Josette’s dress but no veil, in a daze and answering to Josette’s name. Afterward, David said that he had seen Josette and that she looked exactly the same as she did when he had seen her as a ghost. That confirmed that Maggie was at least a Josette lookalike, if not her reincarnation.
Maggie eventually escaped from Barnabas. Her psychiatrist, Julia Hoffman, saw in Barnabas her chance to make a career as a mad scientist, and so she sold Maggie out, using her magical power of hypnosis to delete her memory of what Barnabas did to her and leave her with a feeling of goodwill towards Barnabas. By that time, Barnabas had turned his attentions to Vicki, toying with the idea of Josettifying her. Josette’s ghost made it clear to him that she would try to stop any such effort when she spoke through Vicki at a séance in #280 and 281; after that, Barnabas gave her portrait another talking-to, telling her that she was lost to him forever and must let him live in the present. It sounded like he was going to stop trying to turn girls into Josette, but he kept pushing Josette’s hypnotic music box on Vicki, so if that’s what he meant he didn’t stick with it.
In November 1967, Vicki went back in time to the days when Barnabas and Josette were living human beings. From then until March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. Miss Scott was cast as the living Josette, completing the parallel with the flashbacks to ancient Egypt in The Mummy and suggesting that Barnabas, though he was appallingly cruel and thoroughly crazy, was onto something when he told Maggie she was Josette.
The whole idea of supernaturalism is that what appears to be powerless is in fact most powerful and vice versa, so having been powerful as a ghost, Josette has to be at least somewhat understated as a living being. Making matters worse for her, the 1790s segment moved at a breakneck speed, piling one bizarre disaster on top of another, so that there was no time to develop the kind of subtle strength a lady of her sort might be expected to have or to give us much of a look at Josette and Barnabas as a loving couple before everything went horribly wrong for them. She winds up as a pleasant but ineffectual person. The 1790s period was the show’s first great triumph, but it did knock Josette out of the spotlight permanently.
A couple of weeks after Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission and he tried to function as a good guy. His bumbling attempts at heroism generated as much trouble for everyone as had his villainy. Julia had made herself a permanent houseguest at Collinwood, and she was the one who was busiest with the work of containing his damage. Throughout the part of the show made and set in 1968, Josette was all but forgotten.
Early in 1969, Barnabas came unstuck in time and found himself in 1897, once more subject to the vampire curse. During his eight months in that period, he met two more characters played by Miss Scott. Each of them led him into a fresh bout of Josettery. He gave the music box to neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond; after her death, he met Kitty Soames, dowager countess of Hampshire, who despite her title was a young woman from Pennsylvania. The music box showed up in Kitty’s room at a time when Barnabas could not possibly have been around, and it became clear that this time, it was Josette herself who was trying to take possession of Kitty.
In #884, airing in November 1969, Kitty was assumed bodily into Josette’s portrait. Barnabas saw this happen. He then returned to the 1790s, to the night when Josette originally flung herself to her death from the cliff at Widows’ Hill rather than let Barnabas turn her into a vampire. Josette had only the vaguest memory of 1897 or of Kitty; as far as she is concerned, she was living through this night for the first time, and was experiencing time in the usual linear fashion.
Barnabas tried to prevent Josette’s suicide, but succeeded only in changing the method she used to do herself in. By the time he returned to the twentieth century, he had fallen under the sway of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who are trying to retake the Earth from humankind. For a time he led a cult that served them in this goal, but eventually became disaffected. He hesitates to take any very definite action against the Leviathans, because they told him they were “holding Josette prisoner in the past” and that they would inflict on her a more horrible death than either of those she has already died if he defied them in any way.
Vicki was written out of the show in 1968, and Maggie succeeded her as governess to the children at Collinwood. The Leviathans have sent a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time as the harbinger of their conquest. The monster usually takes the form of a young man who initially asked people to call him “Jabe,” but whom everyone instead calls “Jeb.” Jabe is always obnoxious and often homicidal, and has alienated many people from the Leviathans, including Barnabas. He abducted Maggie and thought he had brainwashed her into joining the cult; once he let her go, she made an alliance with Barnabas and Julia to fight the Leviathans.
Barnabas is convinced Jabe is about to do something especially horrible, and so he wants to open the battle. But his concern for Josette is still holding him back. He and Julia talk about this. It dawns on them that the Leviathans may have been lying, and that they may not have the power to make Josette re-die. The only way they can be sure is to ask Josette, so they decide to hold a séance. They enlist Maggie to be the third member of the circle.
The typical Dark Shadows séance involves three roles- the convener, who gives detailed instructions and barks about the importance of following them, even if everyone in the room has attended multiple séances already; the medium, who goes into the trance and channels the voice from the realm of the dead; and the objector, who tries to interrupt and is sternly hushed by the convener. Recent séances have omitted the objector; today, Julia keeps up a running commentary from the time Barnabas starts the incantations until Maggie goes into the trance, but she doesn’t object and Barnabas doesn’t hush her.
Through Maggie, Josette says she had a hard time getting to the séance, but that it had nothing to do with the Leviathans. She says she doesn’t even know the Leviathans. Barnabas doesn’t believe her, and she says that if he wants proof he should come to her grave.
He does. The tinkling tune of the music box plays on the soundtrack; Barnabas does not mention the original signature of Josette’s presence, the scent of jasmine. Her ghost manifests before him:
THE GHOST OF JOSETTE: It is I. And I will tell you what you must know, now and forever. You asked me if the Leviathans held me prisoner. They do not. But you hold me, just as I hold you with my love. But now the time has come for us both to go free.
BARNABAS: I cannot be free without you.
GHOST: But you must. For I belong to the past. For you there is a future with someone else.
BARNABAS: But I don’t want anyone else.
GHOST: Then you must be lonely, for you cannot have me. But you will find someone else. I know it. And when you do, give her this. The ring that you gave to me, give to her, whoever she may be. This ring is a sign of your freedom and of mine. (Returns her engagement ring to him and vanishes.)
This is Josette’s final appearance on Dark Shadows, not counting a parallel universe version of Josette who will feature in the last weeks of the show, played by another actress. As for the “someone else,” it would be logical for Barnabas to get with Julia, since the two of them are so deeply complicit in each other’s crimes that neither of them will ever be able to make a life with anyone else. But there have been some hints lately that romance might be budding between Barnabas and Maggie, and if that’s going to happen they are going to have to keep us from thinking very clearly about Josette and Barnabas’ attempts to recreate her. We might suppose that her farewell is meant to clear the path for such a development.
There’s also some business about the Leviathan story. In the opening reprise, Jabe catches a bat, which he plans to use to turn Barnabas back into a vampire.
After Barnabas gets the green light from Josette, he meets with Philip Todd, another person whom Jabe has driven out of the Leviathan cult. Philip tells Barnabas how much he hates Jabe and agrees to steal the Leviathan box, an object which does not play music but which is a lot more effective at controlling the minds of people who open it than was that box of Josette’s. At the end of the episode, Jabe catches Philip with the box.
A commenter on Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day who identifies herself as “Melissa”* wrote this lyric about Jabe in twocomments about the post covering today’s episode:
Come and listen to my story ’bout s man named Jeb, Poor Leviathan, barely kept his evil web. Then, one day, he and Barney had a spat, And out from the cage came a rubberized bat. (Vampire bat, that is: Nylon string, Terror teeth.)
Next thing you know,ol’ Jeb has got a girl. Cult folk said, “Jeb, come and rule the world!” They said, “In the attic is the place you want to be,” So they threw themselves a seance and they called on J.D.C. (Josette Collins, that is. Swimming fail. Newly scarred.)
Comments left 31 October 2016 by “Melissa” on Danny Horn “Episode 948: War Games,” posted 30 October 2016 at Dark Shadows Every Day.
I’m singing that aloud right now. I realize you might be reading this years after I wrote it, but believe me, I’m singing it right now.
We open with a reprise of the end of yesterday’s episode. Quentin Collins and Amanda Harris are reenacting the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. As in the ancient Greek story, they will live together if they can escape all the perils on the road from the realm of the dead to that of the living. Unlike that story, they are allowed to look at each other along the way, but they are not allowed to touch.
The teaser ends where Wednesday’s episode ended, with Amanda falling through a gap in a footbridge and Quentin crying out in anguish. After the opening title, we are surprised to find ourselves at the same scene. Amanda is not yet lost. Quentin pulls her up from the ravine she fell into. But that involves touch, so the ceiling of the cavern collapses and buries her. Suddenly, Quentin finds himself lying on the ground, in the upper world, with no sign of any way back to the place from which he just came.
Amanda’s demise marks Donna McKechnie’s final appearance on Dark Shadows. Miss McKechnie left to be in the original cast of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, paving the way for her enormous success on Broadway in the 1970s. Much later, Miss McKechnie would reprise the role of Amanda in a couple of Big Finish Productions’ Dark Shadows audio dramas, and nowadays she appears at the Dark Shadows conventions.
Any account of Donna McKechnie’s last day at 433 West 53rd Street would be incomplete without this story from Hamrick and Jamison’s book Barnabas and Company:
In rehearsal, we went through the scene with a few Styrofoam boulders and a little peat moss, no big deal. Nobody told me there was going to be ten times as much dropped during the taping. So, when it was time to tape the scene, I was looking up, and I just got buried. I got peat moss in my eyes and in my mouth and ears and nose… and I was covered in rocks. The way things worked at the studio, at the end of that scene, the lights went out, and the camera and crew and actors all moved on to the next scene, in another part of the studio. So there I was, laying under all those Styrofoam rocks and peat moss, and nobody helped me get out. I had to dig myself out, and that was my last experience on Dark Shadows.
Craig Hamrick and R. J. Jamison, BARNABAS AND COMPANY: THE CAST OF THE TV CLASSIC DARK SHADOWS (2nd edition, 2012) page 245.
They’ve been doing a bit of videotape editing recently, as several awkward cuts have made clear. One might think that the whole Underworld sequence, pre- and post-title, was edited in from tape left over from yesterday’s shoot. But Miss McKechnie’s story proves that is not so. The episodes were done in sequence, so if the last bit of tape they shot yesterday had been the crushing of Amanda there wouldn’t have been any next scene to run off to and Miss McKechnie would have had plenty of help digging herself out from under.
Some Sort of Monster was After Him
Meanwhile, the sheriff is at the home of occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, have called him in because a monster wrecked Stokes’ bedroom, in the process killing a man named Paul Stoddard.
No law enforcement officer on Dark Shadows has yet solved a case, and Sheriff Davenport seems likely to prove the most useless member of the fraternity yet. At no point does he interrogate Stokes and Julia, or even show much interest in what they were doing while Paul was being killed. He refuses to believe Julia when she says that he should be looking for a monster, even though Collinsport has been overrun with monsters for years now and he has acknowledged that the wreckage at Stokes’ is like nothing he has ever seen. Julia tells him that the monster lives in the room at the top of the stairs in the antique shop operated by Megan and Philip Todd. In response, he flatly states that “They wouldn’t have anything to do with his death.” He finally agrees to get a search warrant for the Todds’ place, but when he presents it to Philip he says that he will execute it “unless of course, you don’t want me to?”
The meatiest part of the episode is a long scene between Megan and Philip. She is exultant that the monster has killed Paul and certain that it will go on to do other, even more wonderful things. He’s scared to death of what the monster will do to them if it is not defeated and of the retribution that will come to them if it is. She sneers at him as a coward. He admits that he is a coward, but insists that they run away and count themselves fortunate if they can escape with their lives.
In her first role on Dark Shadows, as Eve, The Fiancée of Frankenstein, Marie Wallace was called upon to show an unbending, unvarying contempt for Adam, the patchwork man she was supposed to marry. Since that was the only feeling Eve had ever shown for Adam, it wasn’t very interesting. But Megan loved Philip when we first met them. The other day, when she told the monster that she had loved Philip for a long time, we could believe her. So her scorn today does carry some force, and no one knows better how to play scorn and play it to the hilt than does Miss Wallace.
The part of Philip has not been a particularly congenial one for Christopher Bernau up to this point, but he too excels in the scene. He has lots of lines you would expect a man to find it hard to say, calling himself a coward and so on, but he speaks them smoothly and fluently. He shows his hesitancy and anguish not in his delivery of the lines, but in his facial expressions and movements while Megan is speaking. You can see him deciding to put aside all male ego and say something that might get through to Megan, no matter how humiliating it is for him to say it. With lines proclaiming his cowardice, Bernau creates the image of a remarkably brave Philip.
That in turn makes it possible for the episode to end on a suspenseful note. The closing cliffhanger has Sheriff Davenport turning the doorknob to the monster’s room, while Philip is frenziedly trying to come up with a way to talk him out of entering it. When we watched that, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said to the screen “If you don’t tell him what’s in there, it’s murder,” in a tone that suggested she thought Philip actually might tell the sheriff the truth. That such an idea could even form is a testament to Bernau’s outstanding performance in this episode.
In the middle of The Odyssey, Odysseus and his companions enter a certain cave and follow a path that leads to the realm of the dead. There, Odysseus talks with several people whom he knew when they were alive, then comes back to the upper world. This passage, known in Greek as the νέκυια (nekyia,) led many subsequent epic poets to include journeys to and from the Underworld in their works. In the Aeneid, his Latin language response to the Iliad and the Odyssey, Vergil put Aeneas’ voyage to the Underworld in the same halfway spot where the nekyia stands in the Odyssey. The words of warning the Cumaean Sibyl speaks when she gives Aeneas directions to reach the Underworld by way of a path leading through the crater in Mount Avernus are quite famous:
Facilis descensus Averno: Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est.
The road down through Avernus is easy.
The doors of dark Dis lie open by day and by night.
But to reverse your stride and escape to the air above,
This is the achievement, this is the feat.
(Vergil, Aeneid 6:126-129, my translation.)
It wasn’t only warrior princes like Odysseus and Aeneas who had to go to the realm of the dead and back in the mythology of the ancient Mediterranean. The legendary poet Orpheus was so disconsolate when his wife Eurydice died that he journeyed to the Underworld to plead with the gods of the dead to let him take her back with him. As Ovid tells the story in Book 10 of his Metamorphoses, Orpheus made his case in a song that was so beautiful that the whole pantheon of deities who dwell among the ghosts of humans wept. Their chief, known by a long list of names including Pluto, Dis, and Hades, was no exception. Through his tears, he agreed to release Eurydice. But the god knew his business too well not to make conditions. First, Orpheus and Eurydice would have to take the hard and treacherous road that separates the shades of the dead from the world of the living. Second, they would have to complete the whole journey without once looking at each other.
They made it through all the ruggedness and the many snares. At the moment Orpheus felt the warmth of the sun on his cheeks once more, he became so excited that he forgot everything. He turned his head to face Eurydice and exclaim that they had succeeded. But she was still in the shadows. He saw only her silhouetted figure, and that only for an instant. She shrank from him at impossible speed, disappearing forever into the darkness of death.
Dark Shadows steals from every writer, sooner or later, and they’ve stolen a woman named Amanda Harris from a story that comes later in Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A sculptor named Pygmalion was a sour misogynist, who sought a substitute for the companionship of the real live women he so disliked by making a statue of a woman he thought he could get along with. Much to his surprise, the statue came to life and they fell in love, more or less.
In 1969, we learned that an artist named Charles Delaware Tate, who was every bit as unpleasant a person as Ovid’s Pygmalion, had painted a portrait of an imaginary woman and that, because of some magic powers Tate was unaware he had, that woman had popped into existence and started calling herself Amanda Harris. It was a couple of years after her inception that Amanda met Tate. Unlike Pygmalion’s statue, Amanda was as repulsed by her creator as one would expect her to be. Instead, she fell in love with the boundlessly charming, albeit none too admirable, Quentin Collins.
Now Amanda has died, and Quentin is willing to do anything to be reunited with her. A god of death named Mr Best has offered him a sporting proposition. If he and Amanda can walk the whole of the hard and treacherous road that separates the shades of the dead from the world of the living without once touching each other, they can share an eternal life. But if they do touch, or if either of them falls victim to one of the many traps along the way, they will be separated forever.
Their journey almost ends before it begins. Amanda sees Quentin looking out the door that opens on the road home, and reaches out to touch him. At the last second he tells her not to, explaining the conditions Mr Best had laid down. They set out. Along the way, Amanda is caught in a giant web where she is menaced by a giant spider, twists her ankle when she trips over some rocks, has to walk over a rickety rope bridge, and experiences a series of phobic reactions. She is just about to make it when, not looking down lest her fear of heights get the better of her, she puts her foot through a gap in the rope bridge and falls into oblivion.
It’s unclear what this will mean for Quentin. He has no direct connection to any other unresolved story, and while there are characters who care about him he isn’t particularly interested in having anything to do with them. He has been one of the show’s great breakout stars, second only to Jonathan Frid as occasional vampire Barnabas Collins, so it is hard to believe they won’t come up with something new for him to do, but it is not at all clear what that might be.
Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses does not seem like it will be very helpful. When Orpheus loses Eurydice, he can no longer stand the sight of any other woman, so to pass the time he invents male homosexuality. He has great success popularizing his invention throughout his homeland of Thrace. When the Thracian women find that many of their menfolk have lost interest in them, they signal their displeasure by killing Orpheus. I very much doubt that the American Broadcasting Company’s office of Standards and Practices would have been too happy at the idea of dramatizing that story five days a week at 4 PM in 1970. Besides, Dark Shadows has been so antiseptically sexless that the women of Collinsport wouldn’t be any worse off if the men devoted all their eroticism to each other, so you couldn’t use that ending.
The Orpheus and Eurydice story only takes up half of today’s episode. The rest recounts the final hours of the life of Mr Paul Stoddard. Paul has found out that a group of people in and around the village of Collinsport are in the service of invisible supernatural beings known as the Leviathans. Earlier this week he encountered a nonhuman creature that is central to the Leviathan cult. Contact with the creature caused his clothes to rot and stink and left him dazed and unable to speak.
Paul is currently sitting and staring into space in the apartment of Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, expert on the occult. When we cut to Stokes’ apartment from Quentin and Amanda on the way back to the world of the living, we see a bust of the poet Dante, reminding us that Christian poets followed ancient pagans in writing epics about visits to the realms of the dead. It also suggests that Quentin’s experience in Mr Best’s domain may give him some knowledge or power that will allow him to join Stokes and mad scientist Julia Hoffman in their battle against the Leviathans.
Dante watches over Paul and Stokes.
Stokes tries to get Paul to tell him what happened when he encountered the creature, but he will neither speak nor move. Stokes leaves the room for a moment, and Paul gets up to call the police. Stokes stops him doing that, for some reason. Paul runs to Stokes’ bedroom and locks himself in. Julia enters, and they try to persuade him to come out. Julia pretends to call the sheriff. A loud noise comes from the room, and Paul comes reeling out. He falls down and dies. Stokes reports that the room is entirely destroyed. Its ruins are covered with a slime that emits an unbearable stench. In a mild tone, he adds that perhaps it might now be a good idea to call the police after all.
This episode marks the final appearance of Dennis Patrick on Dark Shadows. We will see an extraordinary still photograph of Paul in #953, but the actor is gone. Patrick left to produce and appear in the movie Joe, which was quite an event in its day. Patrick got out of his contract by offering to punch Dan Curtis in the face; evidently Curtis didn’t take offer that too seriously, because he gave Patrick a small part in the feature film House of Dark Shadows later in 1970.
For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897. Among the characters we got to know were Quentin Collins, Charles Delaware Tate, Count Petofi, and Amanda Harris. Quentin was a rakish libertine and occasional murderer who was cursed to be a werewolf. Tate was an artist. Petofi was a sorcerer who had, for reasons of his own, given Tate the power to paint portraits with magical effects. Tate painted a portrait of Quentin that cured him of the effects both of lycanthropy and of aging. He painted a portrait of an imaginary woman, and she popped into being and became Amanda.
The story of Quentin’s portrait is borrowed from Oscar Wilde’s 1895 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. The story of Amanda is borrowed from the story of Pygmalion and Galatea that Ovid told in Book 10 of his Metamorphoses. While Pygmalion’s statue of the ideal woman loved him when it came to life, Amanda can’t stand Tate. That’s understandable; like all characters played by Roger Davis, Tate had an intolerable personality. Amanda fell in love with Quentin, who is cruel and evil, but very charming.
Now it is 1970. Quentin has come back to the village of Collinsport, still young and handsome, but suffering from amnesia and unwilling to believe that he is a hundred years old. Amanda is back too. She is also young, not because of the painting, but because a god of death named Mr Best gave her several decades to reconnect with Quentin, get him to say he loves her, and then live with him ever after, perhaps happily.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has been working with Amanda to restore Quentin’s memory. Julia, Amanda, and Quentin go to see Quentin’s portrait, which Julia has just had restored. It is suitably gruesome, and Amanda runs out screaming when she sees it. But Quentin examines it, and his memory comes back to him. Julia tells him about Amanda’s deal, and says that Mr Best is on his way. He could catch up with Amanda at any time. Quentin runs out to tell Amanda that he loves her, but gets to the scene a moment too late.
Quentin’s portrait, a face only a fan of EC Comics could love. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Mr Best takes Amanda to a hotel lobby. She described this lobby to Julia in #922 when she explained her arrangement with Mr Best, but he has to explain it to her today. In #922 he called it “The Stopping-Off Place”; today he calls it “A Passing-Through Place.” He excuses himself, since he has other souls to harvest.
Amanda is alone for a moment with a bellhop in a white costume with an accent that is supposed to be sort of Cockney, or perhaps Australian. The bellhop makes it clear that he used to be alive, and that his current job makes him nostalgic for his days as a human. When he mentions things he can’t do anymore, he looks Amanda up and down for a half second. The wistfulness of his tone, the frankness of his look, and the sadness with which he turns away from her leaves no doubt what he misses. It’s a surprisingly lovely moment, and a much more adult one than we expect from the show at this point.
Back in the land of the living, Quentin and Julia have a scene in Amanda’s suite at the Collinsport Inn. Julia leaves, and Quentin tries to kill himself. Mr Best stops him. He tells him that he knows he is alive “by courtesy of Count Petofi”; this is the first time we have heard Petofi’s name since the show came back from 1897, and the first vague hint that Petofi might have survived the fire that appeared to have killed him in #884. He says that it is not Quentin’s time to die.
Quentin says he doesn’t want to live without Amanda, and Mr Best gets a bright idea. He says he likes experiments, and he has one he will run with the two of them. He takes Quentin to The Stopping Off/ A Passing-Through Place. He explains his idea. As befits Amanda, it is derived from the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice which Ovid tells earlier in Book 10 of the Metamorphoses. As Orpheus was allowed to bring his wife Eurydice back from the realm of the dead so long as they could make the long, arduous journey without looking at each other, so Quentin will be allowed to bring Amanda back so long as they do not touch each other until they return to the sunlight. The episode ends with Quentin deep in thought about this proposition while Amanda walks up behind him, stretching her hand towards him.
Mr Best tells Quentin that if he and Amanda can make their way through the countless traps and perils of the journey back to the upper world, they will be together “for eternity- whatever that means.” It’s intriguing he doesn’t know- he explicitly identifies himself as an immortal being today, and he has such a wide range of discretion that he can only be called a god. Apparently writer Sam Hall is imagining a cosmos where even the gods are left guessing about the answers to the big questions.
The story of Orpheus and Eurydice has long been a popular favorite. In the 1960s, Jean Cocteau’s 1950 Orphée and the 1959 Brazilian hit Black Orpheus were both staples of art cinema and would have been familiar to NYC theater people like the makers of Dark Shadows, so it is hardly surprising that when they start looking to classical antiquity as a source of material that was one of the first stories to come to mind.
This is Emory Bass’ final appearance as Mr Best, and Brian Sturdivant’s only appearance as the bellboy from Hell. Each will return in another small part later this year.
The closing credits roll over an image of Quentin’s portrait. Most of them do, anyway. Sturdivant’s was cut into the middle of the roll over a black background. Apparently they forgot about him until the last minute.
For the first 55 weeks of Dark Shadows, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard was under the impression that she had killed her husband Paul and that Paul’s associate Jason McGuire had buried his corpse in the basement of the great house on the estate of Collinwood. She spent nineteen years at home, terrified that if she left the estate someone might find Paul’s grave and hold her to account for his killing. Finally it turned out that she had only stunned Paul. He and Jason had faked his death to trick Liz into giving them a lot of money. Soon, Liz was no longer a recluse and that whole story was forgotten.
Now, Paul has returned. He denies knowing anything about his fake death, claiming that Jason acted alone. Longtime viewers will be skeptical of this claim, and Liz certainly is. But she doesn’t care about it as much as you might expect. She is now part of a secret cult that serves mysterious supernatural forces known as the Leviathan People, who plan to take over the earth, supplanting the human race. Paul has learned that he inadvertently sold Carolyn Collins Stoddard, his daughter with Liz, to the Leviathans, and he has been trying to sound the alarm about them. As a serenely happy devotee of the Leviathan cult, Liz has agreed to keep Paul at Collinwood where she can drug him into immobility.
The power of the Leviathans has taken bodily form in a succession of children who live in an antique shop in the village of Collinsport. The shop’s owners, Megan and Philip Todd, were the first people inducted into the cult by Liz’ distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. The latest manifestation of this being, an apparently thirteen year old boy known as Michael, had been attracting attention that threatened to blow the cult’s cover, so Philip and Megan faked his death. They held a funeral this morning.
Michael is supposed to retire into his room above the antique shop and stay there until he has graduated to his next form. He comes out and tells Megan and Philip that he has decided not to go through with this plan. Philip picks him up and carries him there, putting a new lock on the outside of the door to keep him in until he has gone through another transformation.
Carolyn calls the Todds and extends her mother’s invitation to an evening at Collinwood. They accept.
Unknown to Liz or the Todds, Barnabas has become disaffected from the cult. He visits Paul in his room. He gives Paul clothes and a lot of money and urges him to go far away. Paul doesn’t trust Barnabas, and holds him at gunpoint throughout their entire conversation.
When the Leviathan cult first emerged, its members were siloed off from each other. Barnabas gave Philip and Megan their instructions in dream visitations. When they were awake, they would not recognize him as their leader. They and Liz were not aware of each other’s connection to the cult, though Liz did know that Barnabas was her leader and her nephew David Collins was a fellow cultist. It reminded us of secret operations in the real world, where only people who work with each other directly are allowed to know of their shared allegiance.
Now, all that security is out the window. Liz and the Todds stand around the drawing room at Collinwood having drinks and talking about what Barnabas has and has not told them about the Leviathans and their goals. They do still keep some secrets, however. Liz says that she can’t help but wonder what Carolyn’s role will be in the time to come. Barnabas and the Todds know that she is fated to be the bride of the force currently incarnated as Michael, but they are not allowed to tell Liz this. They look at each other with alarm, and Barnabas gives her some vague and hasty assurances.
There is an unintentionally hilarious moment during the cocktail party scene. Megan is seized by enthusiasm for the Leviathan project, and starts babbling all sorts of portentous phrases about the new world that is taking shape through their efforts. Marie Wallace was one of the most committed exponents of the Dark Shadows house style of acting, which consists largely of delivering your lines so vehemently that you are in constant danger of spraining your back. For her part, while Joan Bennett sometimes played to the balcony as Liz and her other characters, she never really let go of the urbane and relatively understated approach that made her one of the biggest movie stars of the late 1930s. When Liz responds to Megan with the amiable smile and subtly musical voice of a sophisticated society hostess, it all of a sudden strikes regular viewers who have got used to the show’s peculiarities just how incredibly bombastic Miss Wallace was.
Meanwhile, Paul goes through a lot of business with Barnabas and Carolyn in which he is told to wait an hour, no half an hour, no ten minutes, before leaving the house. He steals the keys from Megan’s purse and sneaks off to the antique shop. He has decided he must figure out what exactly is going on there. He lets himself into the room where the Leviathan force is kept when it is not embodied as a child. He hears a heavy breathing. The camera zooms in on his shocked face. With that, the episode closes. Paul’s future would appear to be extremely brief. On the day of Michael’s phony funeral, he seems likely to bring the show’s first fake death firmly into the realm of the actual.
Today marks Michael Maitland’s last appearance as Michael. He did a lot of acting as a child, including major roles on Broadway both before and after his run on Dark Shadows. Playing Michael didn’t give him much chance to show what he could do. His resume suggests that is a shame- he must have had a lot to offer to get all those big parts. And by all accounts, he was a very nice guy.
Michael Maitland died of cancer in 2014, at the age of 57. That means that three of the five child actors who appeared on Dark Shadows during the Leviathan segment have died. Denise Nickerson, who played Amy Jennings, was 62 when she died in 2019; Alyssa Mary Ross Eppich, who under the name Lisa Ross played the Leviathan child in the guise of an eight year old version of Carolyn in #909, was 60 when she died in 2020. David Henesy, who played David Collins, and David Jay, who played the Leviathan child as an eight year boy called Alexander, are still going strong. So too is Sharon Smyth Lentz, who played the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins in 31 episodes in 1967 and the living Sarah in six episodes in 1967 and early 1968.
In his post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Before I Die, Danny Horn remarks that this is one where you don’t need any background- as a first-time viewer, you tune in, see the characters confronting each other, and you’re so curious as to what it is all about that “you are now a person who watches Dark Shadows.” So I will try to write it up as if I were coming to it cold.
We open in a corridor where a girl aged about eleven is vowing not to be frightened. She hears heavy breathing coming from behind a door. She opens the door. She looks forward and screams in terror.
We cut to what appears to be the home of someone with a hoarding problem, but which we will later learn is an antique shop. A creepy looking man in a dark cape enters and scolds an eight year old boy whom he addresses as Alexander. He demands to know why Alexander let the girl, whose name we learn is Amy, go into the room. Alexander is defiant, the man cold. Alexander asks the man if someone named David told him what happened, and he responds that it does not matter who told him. He tells Alexander that he will obey him when he is grown, but that as long as he is a child he will give the orders. Alexander must not do anything to upset the plan which some group they are in is putting into effect. The man then announces that he is going off to solve the problem Alexander created when he let Amy enter the room.
We cut to a door surrounded by foliage. Amy knocks on it. Receiving no answer, she lets herself in.
We cut to the foyer of a large house. A man and woman are looking at a startlingly bad portrait in oils. They are talking about how good it is, leading us to wonder if we are supposed to think there is something wrong with them or if we are expected to suspend our disbelief and pretend the painting is actually good. Other paintings hang on the walls of the set, some of them so far superior to this one that we are inclined to the first interpretation.
The man’s name is Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, the woman’s Dr Julia Hoffman, MD. They appear to be friends, answering to the names “Eliot” and “Julia” respectively. The painting is the work of an artist named Charles Delaware Tate. Julia has found another painting, one executed just a year before, which she believes to be another work of Tate’s, even though it is signed “Harrison Monroe.” Stokes says that a friend of his who is an expert on Tate attended Tate’s funeral ten years previously. Julia says that she wants to go to a nearby cottage to tell someone named Chris Jennings about the paintings. Stokes is surprised that Chris is interested in late Victorian art, and Julia says that he is helping her with a project.
We cut to a room in a small house. Amy is there. A young man comes in. She is frightened when she hears him approach, but runs to him and embraces him when she sees who he is. He asks what’s wrong, and she cannot speak. She takes a paper, and writes the single word “SHOP.” This tells the man nothing.
Julia enters. She addresses the young man as Chris. When Chris tells Julia that Amy cannot speak and that she wrote the word “SHOP,” Julia reacts strongly. She orders Chris to go and make David tell him what happened to Amy in the antique shop. Chris goes, and Julia asks Amy if Alexander hurt her. Amy’s eyes widen and she looks away. Julia pleads with her to relax and then try to talk.
The creepy looking man in the dark cape enters. Julia calls him Barnabas. Barnabas asks if he frightened them; Julia says that he did not, an obvious lie. He smilingly sets about diagnosing Amy, touching her forehead and saying she has no fever. The girl manages to say that she is thirsty. Barnabas directs Julia to fetch a glass of water. Julia refuses, and insists Barnabas do so. He eventually capitulates. While he is away, Julia urgently whispers to Amy that she must say nothing while Barnabas is with them.
Barnabas returns with the water. Amy drinks it, and he fondles her face in a manner that might not be alarming if she and Julia weren’t so tense and he weren’t so languidly pleased with himself. As it is, it is like an assault. He tells Amy that she will feel better soon. She takes a few wandering steps to her left and sinks into a chair, asleep. He tells Julia that she should let Amy sleep, then excuses himself.
Chris returns. He says that he did not interrogate David, because Alexander was with him. He did get a story about a man named Grant entering the antique shop and frightening Amy because she thought he was someone named Quentin.
Stokes enters. They talk about calling on Harrison Monroe at his home some miles away. Stokes says that he has a lecture to deliver tonight, but that he will be glad to go with Julia to Monroe’s place tomorrow. Julia is determined to go tonight. Julia says that she will go to Monroe’s by herself, and we see Amy looking alarmed, shaking her head.
Back in the larger house, we see Alexander and Barnabas in a drawing room, looking at a box. Barnabas tells Alexander that Amy “is in the intermediate stage” and that if they have been successful she will open the box and become part of their group.
In the foyer, the front door opens. Chris and Amy enter. Chris tells Amy that it is his job to take care of her. She says she knows that it is, and hugs him. He leaves, and Amy heads for the drawing room. Alexander opens the doors to the drawing room and stands in the doorway. Amy approaches carefully. She sees the box, and without a word opens it. She gives Alexander a snapshot and apologizes for not returning it to him earlier. He accepts it with poor grace, and she repeats her apology. She exits.
We cut to another door surrounded by foliage. Julia knocks on it. A voice booms from a loudspeaker mounted above it, commanding her to leave. She says that she has come on business relating to “Delaware Tate.” The door opens, and she enters.
This episode marks the final appearance of David Jay as Alexander. His character will undergo a metamorphosis and return as another actor in the next episode. Two of Danny Horn’s commenters (here and here) identified themselves as personal friends of Mr Jay’s. They reported that “David Jay” was a stage name, and that as of March 2021 he was alive and well and living an intensely private life.
Julia’s scene at Monroe’s door recalls the end of #153, when well-meaning governess Vicki and instantly forgettable young lawyer Frank knocked on a door that opened by itself and went into a tomb. Longtime viewers can only hope that once inside Julia will meet a character as appealing as the one Vicki and Frank met in #154.
Dark Shadows Commentary 