gabriel collins – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1130: A better place to imagine than to live in

Dark Shadows featured several long costume drama segments depicting stories of time travel. From November 1967 to March 1968, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters bumbled around in the years 1795 and 1796, convincing the people of Collinsport that they should hang her. Meanwhile, we learned how old world gentleman Barnabas Collins first became a vampire.

From March to November 1969, Barnabas was the one making poor decisions in an era not his own when he found himself in the year 1897. Those eight months were by most measures the show’s most successful period. From March to July 1970, the show traveled sideways in time to an alternate universe where Barnabas and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, meddled in the problems of the family who lived on that version of the estate of Collinwood. The show insisted on calling that alternate universe “Parallel Time.”

Now, Julia and Barnabas have made their way to the year 1840. They know that something or other happened in that year that would lead to the destruction of the great house of Collinwood and its residents in 1970. They have no very clear idea what that fateful event was, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the writers don’t have any good ideas about it either.

While Barnabas, Julia, and the writers cast about in the darkness, we keep meeting characters who remind us of earlier phases of the show. Early on, we met Ben Stokes and Daniel Collins, two people left over from the 1790s segment. Ben helped Julia and Barnabas establish themselves with the current crop of Collinses by corroborating their story that they were cousins from England (or Philadelphia, whichever.) Daniel, who was a boy in the 1790s and is now the master of Collinwood, greeted them warmly and invited Barnabas to stay in the Old House at Collinwood as long as he liked. The presence of Daniel and Ben not only helped graft Barnabas and Julia onto the new stories, but also told longtime viewers that the 1840 segment will be a sequel to the 1790s segment.

We also see mergers of characters from the 1897 segment with those from Parallel Time. For example, charming rogue Quentin Collins became a huge breakout star in 1897; in Parallel Time, Quentin’s counterpart was the grumpy and irascible master of Collinwood. In 1840, Quentin is Daniel’s older son and sole heir, in charge of the house due to his father’s many problems. He is again grumpy and irascible, again in a loveless marriage. But like the 1897 Quentin, he is fascinated by the occult and creates trouble by his reckless involvement with it. Quentin’s best friend and fellow occultist is his cousin Desmond Collins, played by John Karlen. Desmond shares the irresponsibility of Karlen’s 1897 character, inveterate prankster Carl Collins. But Desmond has none of the extreme childlike quality that it made seem Carl had a cognitive impairment of some sort. He has the manner and bearing of Karlen’s Parallel Time character, drunken novelist Will Loomis.

Will was married to Carolyn Collins Stoddard, played by Nancy Barrett. In 1897, Miss Barrett played a villain named Charity Trask who fell afoul of evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Petofi erased Charity’s personality and replaced it with that of Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye. Carl had brought Pansy to Collinwood as his fiancée. Pansy was killed before she ever met Charity, who never had any use for Carl. Carl himself was killed before Petofi took Charity’s body away from her and gave it to Pansy. Miss Barrett’s acting style is to throw herself completely into each of her roles, so we quickly accepted her as Pansy. But when we heard Miss Barrett’s Pansy pine for her poor lost Carl, we were reminded that Petofi had murdered Charity and reanimated her form with Pansy’s mind.

In 1840, Miss Barrett is Leticia Faye, who is barely distinguishable from Pansy. She was brought to Collinwood by the evil Gerard Stiles to play some part in his never-explained scheme to cheat the Collilnses out of their money. When we first saw her, Leticia confronted Gerard over her suspicions that if he ever did get his hands on any of the Collins money, she wouldn’t see any of it. Then Gerard humiliated her by marrying Quentin’s widow Samantha, which promptly redounded to his own humiliation when Quentin turned up alive and well. Leticia confronted him again, brandishing her own pain and mocking his in what sounded very much like the sorts of things Carolyn used to say to Will. Now, Leticia has set her cap for Desmond, but also become involved in his occult mischief.

Most of the action in the 1790s was driven by wicked witch Angelique. A maniacal villain then, Angelique appeared in 1897 and became a multilayered personality. Angelique rejoined the cast of characters at the end of yesterday’s episode. We saw her enter the hidden chamber where Barnabas’ chained coffin was kept from the 1790s on and discover that it was no longer there.

Angelique’s counterpart in Parallel Time had a sidekick, a housekeeper modeled on Mrs Danvers from Rebecca who was herself Julia’s Doppelgänger. We didn’t get to see a great deal of that relationship, since Grayson Hall was off for principal photography for the feature film House of Dark Shadows during most of the first half of the Parallel Time segment. Today, we see that we will be getting another look at how Angelique handles a sidekick. Angelique Model 1840 has a servant, a man named Laszlo Ferrari.

Laszlo’s appearance evokes the 1897 segment. He is played by Michael Stroka, wearing the astrakhan hat that he wore when we first saw him as Aristide, servant of Count Petofi. His attitude towards Angelique is very much like Aristide’s towards Petofi, asking a question in a vaguely belligerent tone, occasionally making a show of defiance, and quickly collapsing into cringing obedience. So he asks Angelique why they keep coming to the tomb every year, and why she isn’t as happy as she usually is when she emerges from the secret room. She snaps at him in response, saying that she would have expected him to stop asking her questions by now, since she has never yet given him any answers. She orders him to go to the great house at Collinwood and find out if a man named Barnabas Collins has been around recently. Reluctant to go, he asks who Barnabas is. She says he is the only man she ever loved. He says “Other than me, of course!” and she agrees in a sarcastic tone. It’s all in very joking, but he scurries away to obey her. All that is missing is him addressing her as “Excellency!” and her remarking on his good looks, and we’d be right back with Aristide and Petofi.

At Collinwood, Laszlo meets Quentin’s younger brother, Gabriel Collins. Gabriel is amused by Laszlo’s attempt to persuade him that he can see into the future, and tells him that the pressing need is for someone who can see into the present. There is a headless body wandering the estate killing people, and if Laszlo can tell them how to put a stop to that he’ll be onto something. Barnabas shows up and scowls at Laszlo, who leaves.

Barnabas doesn’t like the looks of Laszlo. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, we learn that Leticia knows a great deal about the headless body. It used to be attached to a severed head that Desmond brought back from Macau as a gift for Quentin. That separates Desmond from Carl, who brought Pansy back from Atlantic City to be his own bride. Leticia is now keeping the head in her own room, and is acting under its influence.

The head and body are those of warlock Judah Zachery, executed in 1692. The head has turned up occasionally in the years since, each time figuring in a series of brutal murders. Apparently the situation will get even worse if the head can be reattached to the body. This also harks back to Petofi, whose hand had been cut from his wrist in the 1790s and had carried on its own career of malignity in the years before Petofi stuck it back onto the end of his arm in 1897. Since Angelique joined forces with Barnabas and Julia to fight Petofi then, showing a new and extremely engaging side of her character, longtime viewers may hope that she and Laszlo will be part of an alliance with our protagonists against Judah Zachery in this period.

Laszlo’s name evokes the movie Casablanca, in which the most morally upright character is French Résistance leader Victor Laszlo while the most morally debased character is crime boss Signor Ferrari. We can imagine Jerry Lacy breaking his character as overbearing undertaker Lamar Trask, putting on his celebrated Humphrey Bogart imitation, and saying of Angelique that “Of all the temporal anomalies in all the multiverse, she had to walk into mine.”

The Petofi/ Aristide relationship was based on one memorialized in another Humphrey Bogart film, Gutman and Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon. As Sydney Greenstreet played Ferrari in Casablanca, so he played Gutman in The Maltese Falcon. It may have been a bit on-the-nose to cast portly gentleman Thayer David as an analogue of Greenstreet, a criticism which cannot be leveled at the choice of the svelte and dazzling Lara Parker. In another departure from the Petofi/ Aristide model, Laszlo is a member of the Romani or Sinti people, the ethnicities often slurred as “Gypsies.” Petofi was vulnerable to certain Romani, and was deathly afraid of all of them.

Aristide was a lot of fun. Stroka came back in 1970 as two characters very like Aristide, first in the original continuity as a hitman known only as Bruno, then in Parallel Time as failed composer Bruno Hess, a member of a little cult that had grown up around that universe’s version of Angelique. The two Brunos were so similar to each other and to Aristide that regular viewers might be disappointed to see Stroka working the old stand one more time.

The essence of Aristide and the Brunos was an insecurity that rode very close to the surface of the character. Each man sneers as he asserts himself against his victims or puffs himself up as he attempts to assert himself against his superiors, then dissolves immediately into frantic backpedaling when he encounters opposition. Stroka made as much as anyone could of those parts, and I had hoped to see him in a role where the insecurity lies deeper in the character’s personality. I wanted to see him as an authority figure whose pompous self-satisfaction can withstand a fair amount of battering and whose eventual defeats prompt a more complex response from him than Aristide/ Bruno’s hectic flailing.

The two characters we have seen who meet that description were Joshua Collins in the 1790s segment and Edward Collins in the 1897 segment, both played brilliantly by Louis Edmonds. In 1840, Edmonds plays Daniel, who is the legal owner of the Collins fortune but whose mental and physical infirmities keep him from exercising much authority. In #1074 and #1076, an ancestor called Abner Collins was associated with the events of 1840; I wish that Barnabas and Julia had found that Abner, rather than Quentin, was Daniel’s eldest son and was in charge of Collinwood and the businesses. Quentin would then be free to be the insouciant wastrel who was such a hit in 1897, rather than a retread of the foul-tempered sourpuss who was a consistent downer in Parallel Time.

As Abner, Stroka could have taken advantage of his striking facial resemblance to William F. Buckley, Junior, making clever-sounding but specious arguments in defense of the family’s most objectionable business practices, littering his speech with seldom-heard polysyllabic words and, when he makes what he believes to be a persuasive argument, leaning way back in his chair and fluttering his eyelids. Buckley was a prominent figure nationally and especially in NYC in 1970. He had been hosting a nationally syndicated television show ever since his unsuccessful bid for mayor of New York in 1965, and in 1970 his brother James would defeat the Democratic and Republican nominees to be elected to the US Senate from New York as the candidate of the Buckley family’s Conservative Party. A spoof of him would therefore be something that grownups in the audience would likely find amusing, and that the New York based makers of the show would surely have enjoyed creating.

In the early days of the show, the most prominent supernatural presences were the ghosts of The Widows, women who flung themselves to their deaths after their husbands were lost at sea due to the inhumane practices of the Collins whaling fleet. The story of The Widows came forward as the first explanation of the origin of the Collins family curse. The whaling industry in New England was approaching its zenith in 1840; it was in the following decades that it finally surpassed cod fishing in the region’s economy. It would close the loop on that early story to present Abner as the man who ensured that the Collinses would be enormously rich for a long time to come by switching the focus of the fleet from a mature market to a rapidly growing one, but who also ensured that they would be the object of undying wrath among many in Collinsport by switching from a decentralized business in which many men had a realistic chance of becoming independent operators to a capital-intensive one in which a handful of magnates control everyone else’s destiny. Abner could become callous to conditions on the whaling ships, because he would see the men as easily replaceable parts of a single machine, not as professionals who had to use their judgment to track down the fish and who might at any time strike out on their own as his colleagues or competitors.

The switch from cod fishing to whaling and its consequences for the life of the village would hark back not only to The Widows, but also to the business stories incorporated in the early storyline of “The Revenge of Burke Devlin.” The theme of those stories was that the Collinses had trapped the people of Collinsport in a situation where the only way for an ambitious young man to improve his lot in life was to leave town. If the 1840 story went on long enough, they might have been able to explore that theme in some depth. Not only would that have appealed to the taste for social and political relevance that was so much in the air in the early 1970s, but by depicting Collinsport as a place full of people who are involved in the story it would also relieve the claustrophobia that stems from the all-Collins episodes that come up so often in the later phases of the show.

Episode 1127: Dear Tad, you’re going to have two fathers now

Quentin Collins, sole heir to the Collins family fortune, took his young son Tad with him and sailed away on a cruise meant to take them and Quentin’s friend Gerard Stiles around the world. He left his wife Samantha, Tad’s mother, behind in the great house at Collinwood.

Six months ago, in the spring of 1840, Gerard came to the great house with sad news. Quentin and Tad had been washed overboard off the coast of Brazil. He had tried to save them, but could not. They must be presumed dead. To the dismay of Quentin’s younger brother Gabriel, his father Daniel decided not to change his will when told of Quentin’s death. Samantha remains as sole heiress of all Daniel’s vast holdings.

Gerard was invited to stay in the great house as a guest, and did so. In #1119, Samantha decided that her period of mourning had gone on long enough and married Gerard. In #1120, Gabriel found that not even this had moved Daniel to change his will in favor of him and his children. On the contrary, Daniel says that he ought to adopt Gerard, who is the son he should have had. It seemed that all the Collins wealth was fated to pass from the family with Daniel.

Before Samantha and Gerard had been married a whole day, Quentin turned up, alive and well and reporting that Tad would be along as soon as he recuperated from a mild fever. They had spent the last six months as penniless tramps making their way through South America on foot. It quickly emerged that Quentin had no particular feeling for Samantha; he regarded the Enoch Ardenesque situation as a comedy. He invited Samantha to choose between him and Gerard. If she chose to resume their life together, he would endeavor to make a go of it. If she preferred to start fresh with Gerard, there would be no hard feelings.

Samantha is having trouble deciding. Today, Gabriel taunts her, imagining how she broke the news to Tad: “Dear Tad, there is something I must tell you. You’re going to have two fathers now.” In fact, this doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. Quentin and Samantha cannot be bothered even to pretend they love each other, and whatever Gerard may feel for Samantha pales by comparison to his yearning to live at Collinwood and enjoy the family’s riches. If all had gone according to Quentin’s original plan, he and Tad would probably still be living with Gerard on board ship at this time, with Samantha just an increasingly distant memory. And despite the awkward situation in which they find themselves, Quentin still regards Gerard as a friend. His memories of their time together before the accident at sea must be very warm indeed to prompt that attitude.

I now pronounce you… Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The whole situation will remind longtime viewers of the conflict between high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins and dashing action hero Burke Devlin that ran through the first 40 weeks of the show, when it was set in 1966. Burke and Roger fought over many things, not least their past involvements with Laura Murdoch Collins, David’s mother and Roger’s estranged wife. Each man suspected that Burke was David’s true father. Roger and Burke noisily hated each other, but as Louis Edmonds and Mitch Ryan played them they seemed to have some very complicated feelings for each other that came from places other than wounded pride or class conflict or jealousy about Laura. When Laura joined the cast of characters, Diana Millay joined Ryan and Edmonds in making it crystal clear that Burke and Roger had always been more focused on each other than either was on her. In #139, they fought in front of Laura and forgot she was in the room. She rolled her eyes, telling the audience that it was the same as it ever was.

Laura turned out to be an undead fire witch come to immolate David in order to perpetuate her own supernatural existence. When that dawned on Roger and Burke, they set their hostility aside and worked together to protect David. In #187, the two of them took their places beside David’s bed and gave him some important news. They looked so natural together that it was as if they had been raising David together all of his life. Up to that point Roger had been unnervingly cold and evil, remarkably cruel to David and potentially deadly to well-meaning governess Vicki. After we see him and Burke co-parent David so tenderly, Roger is never a villain again.

Tad is no likelier than David was to end up with two dads. Long before the show traveled back in time to 1840, we saw that Gerard’s ghost was the face of a disaster that reduced Collinwood to ruins in 1970 and was still taking the lives of those who dared venture there in 1995. We learned from other ghosts of those who had been on the estate in 1840 that Gerard murdered several people, Quentin and Tad among them. If history is to unfold again as it did that first time, Gerard will have to change. We have seen that he is greedy, dishonest, and cruel, but he hasn’t shown any enthusiasm for murder. And Quentin’s continued friendliness towards him suffices to show that he has a more agreeable side.

When the present-day characters were researching the Collinwood of 1840, they were surprised to find that there had been a man named Quentin Collins there at that time. They could find no reference to Tad or Samantha, and the only evidence of Gerard was his tombstone. So a resolution that leaves Quentin and Gerard living together happily ever after, but the rest of the family so scandalized by them that Daniel writes them out of history and leaves his estate to Gabriel and Gabriel’s children, would prevent the disaster while leaving in place a timeline in which the characters we know could be born and live the lives we have seen. I can imagine a story in which Gerard committed the murders only because he fell under the power of an evil spirit that promised to cure him of his same-sex desires. The disaster could then be prevented when he and Quentin decide to throw the conventional morals of the nineteenth century aside and commit themselves to each other.

Episode 1125: All the rotten apples

The narrative voiceover that opened #202 told us that a new addition to the cast of characters, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis, was destined to “awaken and unleash a force that will affect the lives of everyone.” In #209, the voiceover identified this “force” as “the darkest and strangest secret of them all.”

In his first five appearances, Willie was played by Mississippian James Hall. In #205, Hall’s Willie was escorted to a portrait we had seen for the first time under the previous day’s closing credits. Strange and troubled boy David Collins identified its subject to Willie as Barnabas Collins, a name we had not heard before. Soon Willie started to hear a heartbeat coming from the portrait, and it led him to a mausoleum in a rarely visited part of the old cemetery north of town. In #210, Willie, now played by John Karlen, inadvertently opened a secret panel in that mausoleum and found a chained coffin in the secret chamber behind it. He opened that coffin, hoping to find the jewels that once belonged to Barnabas. In fact, he found Barnabas himself, a vampire who would enslave him.

In the fall of 1970, the feature film House of Dark Shadows was playing in theaters around the USA. In that movie, Karlen again plays Willie. That version of the character is led to the mausoleum not by a heartbeat he hears through a the portrait of Barnabas, but by a riddle he finds in an old book:

The Madonnas rest high above

The Lion’s head watches the dove

And in the womb beneath the hill

A blazing light glows bright and still.

As in the show, so in the movie Willie opens the coffin expecting to find a fortune in jewels, only to find Barnabas’ hand darting for his throat. As in the show, the movie version of Willie becomes a slave whom Barnabas beats unmercifully.

Now, the show is set in the year 1840. Karlen plays Desmond Collins. An evil spirit emanating from a severed head Desmond brought home with him from Macau has taken control of him. As Willie heard the heartbeat from the portrait of Barnabas, so Desmond hears a voice from the head. The head wants to be reunited with its body, which is buried somewhere in the Collinsport area. Yesterday Desmond brought a man named Otis Greene to his room. Greene was under the head’s control in 1803, when he brutally murdered four people. Desmond showed the head to Otis, who was horrified. Desmond demanded to know where the body was, and kept shouting in Otis’ ear even after Otis clutched his chest and started gasping. He managed to get a few cryptic remarks out of Otis before he fell dead to the floor: “The noose, a ring of gold, the stairs, top of the hill, direct line, an unmarked stone.”

A woman named Leticia Faye enters. Leticia sees Otis’ body on the floor and asks Desmond why he killed him. Leticia has psychic powers, so she quickly realizes that it was not really Desmond, but the head that is responsible. Desmond menaces her and demands she keep quiet.

Later, Leticia returns to the room and notices the body is gone. When she asked “Where’s the body?,” my wife, Mrs Acilius, laughed out loud. It’s as if she is noticing that Desmond has removed a piece of furniture. Desmond says that Otis’ son came and took it away. One might wonder how that went. There were no telephones in 1840, and we haven’t seen any servants at Desmond’s house. So Desmond must have gone to Greene’s son in person, told him he had his father’s body in his room, and asked him to come fetch it.

Leticia herself is a reference to Willie’s early days on the show. As seagoing con man Jason McGuire brought Willie to Collinwood to play a never-specified part in his plan to cheat the Collinses out of their money, so seagoing con man Gerard Stiles brought Leticia to play a never-specified part in his pursuit of the same objective. Before we saw Willie, we saw Jason talking on the telephone to someone named Chris who wanted to join him at Collinwood and with whom he had an ambivalent relationship. We might have assumed that “Chris” was short for some such name as Christine or Christabel and that she was a girlfriend or wife who was going to complicate Jason’s plans to impose himself on matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. When the name Chris was dropped and Willie put in its place, we saw it wasn’t quite that way, but as Dennis Patrick played Jason and both James Hall and John Karlen played Willie, we wondered if it might have been somewhat that way. There was something a lot more complicated in the emotions they showed in their scenes together than what could be explained by what we saw.

Leticia is upset with Gerard these days. He married Samantha Collins, widow of Quentin Collins, lady of the great house of Collinwood, and sole heiress to the Collins fortune. That seemed to seal his triumph, and left Leticia out in the cold. The marriage was only a few hours old when it turned out Samantha wasn’t a widow after all. Quentin turned up alive and well six months after he went missing during a mishap at sea. Now Samantha has to decide whether to go back to Quentin, leaving Gerard where he started, or to go with Gerard, going him a wife to support somehow. Leticia mocks Gerard bitterly for the dismal alternatives he now faces.

House of Dark Shadows left the audience to do a lot of guesswork as to how the characters got from one place to another, and indeed as to where exactly any given scene was supposed to be taking place. Among other things, it never explained how the riddle led Willie to the mausoleum. Today, Desmond goes to his cousin Gabriel Collins to ask for help deciphering Otis’ cryptic remarks. Gabriel mentions a place called Gallows Hill; that reminds Desmond that Otis said his grandfather was the executioner, and between them they figure out where to go.

In both #210 and House of Dark Shadows, Willie opened the secret panel in the mausoleum in the old cemetery by pulling a ring that was connected to a cable. Today, Desmond pulls a ring on a small headstone in an old cemetery and opens a secret panel on the ground next to it. As Willie walked down stone steps and found a chained coffin behind the panel, Desmond walks down stone steps and finds a coffin. This coffin is held shut, not by chains, but by a large cross wedged between it and the ceiling of the chamber.

The underground chamber. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Desmond finds that the lid of the coffin is divided into two parts. He can open the small part at one end. inside it, he finds what Willie had hoped to find, many precious jewels. They are embedded in a golden face mask.

Episode 1122: The drama will begin to unfold

A disaster destroyed the great house of Collinwood and everyone in it in 1970. The ghosts of some people who were alive in 1840 were part of this disaster. Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have traveled back in time in hopes of preventing the disaster.

One of the ghosts was that of governess Daphne Harridge. When Julia and Barnabas first arrived in 1840, they were bewildered to find that no one at Collinwood had heard of Daphne. Now, Barnabas has found Daphne skulking about in the woods on the grounds of the estate. He confronts her, and demands she answer a series of questions. Desmond Collins, a cousin of the Collinses who live in the great house, shows up just in time to hear Barnabas threatening to force Daphne to tell him what he wants to know. Desmond asks why he would do that, and Barnabas has no choice but to back down. Desmond and Daphne walk away together.

Barnabas has a habit of introducing himself to his adversaries by declaring that he has come to fight them. He did that when he met the evil Gerard Stiles, whose ghost he saw as the face of the disaster in 1970. But the living Gerard has no idea who Barnabas is. For all Barnabas knows, it might be possible for him to get close enough to Gerard to pick up a great deal of information from him that he can use to reshape the future. Daphne doesn’t recognize him either, but when in the twentieth century he and Julia interacted with her ghost and with a resurrected version of her, Daphne was often helpful to them. Barnabas’ aggressive manner in this scene blows any chance he may have had to build the same kind of relationship in this period. Even worse, when Desmond walks in on the encounter what he sees confirms the suspicions he has already expressed, costing Barnabas another possible ally.

My frustration with Barnabas’ part in this scene drove me to fanfic a few years ago. In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, I wrote:

One of my pet peeves is Barnabas’ habit of introducing himself to people as their enemy. He does it with Daphne in this episode, and he did it with Gerard last week. Not only is it irritatingly stupid, but it creates a pacing problem. They establish the enmity right away, then they have nothing to do while we sit around for weeks and weeks waiting for a confrontation. If he’d made an effort to charm Gerard, we could watch that effort crumble, and the last part of its collapse could coincide with their showdown.

The scene where Barnabas meets Daphne calls out for a different sort of fix. Everyone watching the show knows that Barnabas is a vampire, and everyone who saw the cliffhanger at the end of #1121 knows that Daphne is going to be important. So have him do a “Look into my eyes!” bit. Then we are in suspense- will he get useful information? Will he bite her? They show us Desmond approaching, and the suspense shifts- will Desmond catch them in a compromising situation? If he does, will Barnabas kill him? Even if the scene ends up doing as little to advance the plot as the scene they shot in fact does, the result would be an exciting sequence that promises big developments later on.

Comment by “Acilius,” 10 February 2021, on “Episode 1121: The Lost World,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 31 January 2018

In the great house, Julia is having a conversation with Gabriel Collins. She has told the family that she is a medical doctor. Nine more years will pass before Elizabeth Blackwell is admitted to that profession in 1849, making Julia the first woman to practice medicine in the United States. Extraordinary as her claim to be a doctor is, everyone accepts it equably enough. Gabriel says that one of these days Julia will have to see if she can do anything about his legs, which haven’t been able to bear his weight since an accident he had when he was a child. He starts to explain what his brother Quentin did to cause that accident. He is chattering away happily when he suddenly falls silent and drops his teacup. He is stunned to see Quentin entering the room.

Gabriel had thought Quentin was dead. Everyone thought that until a day or two ago, when Quentin returned after an absence of six months. He explained that while it is true that he and his son Tad were washed off the deck of a ship in a storm, they survived and made their way through South America by a highly circuitous route. Julia knows this, and greets Quentin calmly. But no one bothered to tell Gabriel. If that were not enough to tell us where Gabriel ranks in the hierarchy at Collinwood, it is made abundantly clear after Julia excuses herself and leaves the brothers to talk. Quentin says that he always felt guilty about his part in Gabriel’s injury, which is why he has put up with him so much longer than anyone else. But now, even he has had enough of Gabriel’s intolerable personality.

We see Daphne and Desmond sharing one of two circular tables covered with checkered cloths in front of a fireplace. On the wall above the fireplace is a metallic decoration in the shape of an eagle. In the foreground is a bar with a rack of drinking glasses. Longtime viewers know that the tavern in Collinsport was in the eighteenth and nineteenth century known as The Eagle, and that its tables were covered with checkered cloths even in the 1790s.

Daphne was prominent in the twentieth century segments that led us to 1840, while Desmond was never mentioned. His very existence seems to be omitted from the documents that Barnabas and Julia examined when they were trying to figure out what happened in 1840. So it is clear to us that he doesn’t have a shot with Daphne, but not to him. He’s dialed the charm up to 11, or would have if he weren’t such a grouchy New Englander that the most charming manner he can produce rises to about 4. She won’t answer any of his questions, but finally agrees not to check out of the Collinsport Inn and leave town until tomorrow.

Desmond goes home to a mansion known as Rose Cottage. He has brought a curio from his recent trip to southeastern China, intending it as a gift for Quentin. It is a human head in a glass box. When his mother reacted to the sight of this blasphemous thing with horror, Desmond told her that he was sure it was “a carving of some sort,” not an actual body part, and asserted that there was nothing frightening about it. He has since had second thoughts, though the head keeps waiting for Desmond to look away before it opens its eyes.

Quentin turns up and tells Desmond that he has come for the present he had told him he has for him. Desmond has changed his mind about giving the head to Quentin, so he has to scramble to come up with another present. Finally, he tells Quentin that the present is a couple of books about the occult. Quentin is delighted with them. He says he has been eager to get back into the study of “the lost world that we can’t understand, or even see.” He sits down and starts reading them right there, and Desmond suggests that it is time to go. Quentin is disappointed to have to wait to get home to read the books, but goes anyway.

Barnabas shows up and pesters Desmond about Daphne. Desmond is unimpressed with Barnabas, but does tell him that, contrary to the promise she made at the Eagle, Daphne has checked out of the inn and left no forwarding address. He shoos Barnabas away.

Back at Collinwood, Julia and Barnabas are in the drawing room. The doors to the rest of the house are wide open as they declaim loudly about how they are pretending to be people they are not and dare trust no one with their terrible secrets. Fortunately for them, the only person who overhears them is Daphne, who is sneaking into the house to leave a note in the foyer for Quentin.

Back at Rose Cottage, Desmond is yelling at the head. An image of the head is superimposed over him, and he shows signs of distress. We saw aged retainer Ben Stokes have a similar reaction the other day when the image of the head was superimposed on him; Ben died as a result. Desmond hears a voice telling him that he will follow its commands. We are to take it that he is now possessed by the head.

Episode 1120: A son who can sail the ships

Gabriel Collins is frustrated by his lot in life. His father, the demented Daniel Collins, had planned to leave the family’s entire fortune to Gabriel’s brother Quentin. When Quentin’s friend, Gerard Stiles, reported that Quentin and his son Tad had been washed overboard during a storm at sea and were to be presumed dead, Daniel saw no need to change his will. Quentin’s widow Samantha is now Daniel’s sole heir. Gabriel, his wife Edith, and their two children are to receive nothing. As a wheelchair user, Gabriel’s prospects for employment in the year 1840 are quite dim, to say the least.

Over the last few days, Gabriel has been trying to improve his odds of inheriting by blackmailing Gerard into murdering Samantha. Now, Gerard and Samantha have come back from a trip to the village of Collinsport. Gabriel is disappointed to find that Samantha is still alive, and shocked that she and Gerard have married. He recovers his composure and tells the happy couple that Daniel will surely disinherit Samantha now.

Gabriel goes to Daniel’s room, the locked cell at the top of the tower on the great house at Collinwood. Daniel is kept there because of his unfortunate habit of mistaking women for his late wife and trying to murder them as he did her. How Gabrel got his wheelchair up the stairs to the tower room is not explained. Indeed, he is continually turning up by himself in rooms on every floor of the house, which no one asks any questions about.

Daniel tells Gabriel that Gerard asked him for Samantha’s hand in marriage and that he gave his blessing. Gabriel says that has has a complete dossier proving that Gerard is guilty of many crimes, probably including murder. This does not impress Daniel in the least. Daniel says that he ought to adopt Gerard, who is the sort of man who should be his son.

Gabriel has somehow got himself back downstairs to the drawing room. He tells Samantha that he knows facts about Gerard that she does not know. She refuses to listen to him, and leaves the room with an airy laugh.

Gerard enters and gloats about Samantha’s loyalty to him. Gabriel tries to leave the room. Gerard grabs the back of his wheelchair and holds him in place. Yesterday, Samantha slapped Gabriel in the face, and it was proof of Christopher Pennock’s success at making Gabriel a man we love to hate that we could sympathize with her. But that sympathy also grew from our fondness for Samantha. We’ve seen Gerard do nothing but run con games, and we know that he is fated to be the face of a terrible disaster at Collinwood in 1970. Appealing as James Storm is, Gerard has shown us nothing we can like. His assault on Gabriel is therefore much more outrageous than was Samantha’s. That’s as it should be- we’re supposed to be outraged. Gerard tells Gabriel that he has to be “a good boy” if he knows what’s good for him. There’s no way saying that can make us root for Gerard, no matter how much we may loath Gabriel.

Gerard takes hold of Gabriel’s chair, imprisoning him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Gabriel’s cousin Desmond enters. He congratulates Gerard, but soon makes it clear he does not approve of the marriage. Gerard storms out, and Gabriel asks Desmond to run an errand for him. He gives Desmond a letter and says that if he presents it at the bank, they will give him his safe deposit box. Desmond agrees to bring Gabriel the box.

Gerard calls on Daniel in the tower room. Daniel tells Gerard that he reminds him of Quentin. This is rather a bold move on the part of the writers. The first version of Quentin we met was an evil ghost who haunted the great house starting late in 1968; we first met Gerard as an evil ghost haunting Collinwood earlier this year. The stories of the two hauntings were both adaptations of Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw, and had a great deal more in common with each other than with the source material. James Storm’s costume and hairstyle as Gerard even evokes David Selby’s as that original Quentin.

In March 1969, the show traveled back in time to 1897 and we met that Quentin as a living being. He was the great-nephew of the Quentin who preceded Gerard as Samantha’s husband. He was a violent, drunken wastrel. We saw him with his siblings and other denizens of the great house who already knew all about those lamentable qualities, so he wasn’t trying to fool anyone. Since the 1897 Quentin had David Selby’s charm and easy manner and spoke in the witty dialogue of Violet Welles, we couldn’t help but like him. We saw that for all his faults, he truly loved his young nephew Jamison Collins, and we could root for that relationship. It was hardly a surprise that Quentin soon caught on with a large audience, making Mr Selby Dark Shadows’ second major breakout star.

The first such star was of course Jonathan Frid as vampire Barnabas Collins. Though Gerard may look like a miniaturized version of Quentin, so far in the 1840 segment he has been more like Barnabas. As Barnabas presented himself to the Collinses in the great house in 1967 as a living man, their long-lost cousin from England, so Gerard is continually pretending to be something he is not. We first heard of Barnabas as, in the words of the opening voiceover, “the strangest, darkest secret of all,” first learned of his supernatural presence as a disembodied heartbeat emanating from his portrait, and first saw him as a hand clutching the throat of the luckless Willie Loomis, so we knew that he was a monster; likewise, we first saw Gerard as an immensely destructive ghost.

The major difference between Gerard and Barnabas is that we still haven’t got to know Gerard. Barnabas set aside his “cousin from England” act when we saw him alone with Willie, whom he terrorized and beat unmercifully. The contrast between Barnabas’ savage cruelty to Willie and his suave pretense with everyone else kept us interested until the collapse of his first crazy scheme, his attempt to erase the personality of Maggie Evans and replace it with that of his lost love Josette. Then, we saw some glimmers of recognizable human emotions coming through his horrible personality, and we started wondering what sort of person could become what Barnabas was.

Gerard’s mask has slipped a couple of times, but only to reveal other masks underneath. We’ve seen that he was cheating Gabriel when he led him to think he was going to murder Samantha for him, and even his assault on Gabriel today is cloaked in passive-aggression, holding his wheelchair instead of hitting his body. In #1113, we saw him alone with Cockney showgirl Leticia Faye, whom he had brought with him to Collinwood as part of a scheme to get money out of the Collinses. The more he talked to her about that money, the more sure she seemed to be that she wasn’t going to see any of it, whatever Gerard managed to do for himself. So far, Gerard has been a type, Con Man, and a function, Villain. We have yet to see any reason to expect that he will become a character. Though Gerard is the face of The Destruction of Collinwood as we saw it a couple of weeks ago, before the trip back in time to 1840, Gabriel seems to be a much more promising addition to the cast at this point.

Gabriel and Samantha are in the drawing room. He tells her that his wedding present for her should be arriving at any moment. He also tells her that he hired Gerard to kill her, which she immediately dismisses as a lie. She tells Gabriel that he is as insane as his father. A few seconds later, Gerard brings Daniel downstairs. It is not clear whether Daniel heard her; if so, we wonder whether he would be more offended at being used as an exemplar of insanity or at being compared to Gabriel, the son whom he hates with such an unreasoning passion.

Gabriel objects that it is unsafe to let Daniel out of the locked room. Daniel replies that Gabriel is just like his mother. Since Daniel is obsessed with his murder of Gabriel’s mother, that response goes a long way towards explaining why he hates Gabriel so much.

Desmond shows up with Gabriel’s safe deposit box. Gabriel opens it in front of everyone, with much ado about how its contents will expose Gerard for what he really is. The box turns out to be empty. We remember that Gerard and Samantha went to the bank before their wedding, and wonder how he got into the vault and emptied the box. Though if we are wondering whether we will ever see Gerard do anything other than run games on people, the emptiness of the box may strike us as a suitable comment on what Gerard really is.

It seems that nothing can stop Gerard. Samantha embraces him and tells him he has made her forget all about Quentin. At that, the doors swing open and there’s Quentin, saying “I’m home!” As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, we’ve seen so many people eavesdrop through those doors over the last four years that it is hard to believe Quentin did not hear Samantha telling Gerard she was no longer thinking of him.

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1864 narrative poem “Enoch Arden,” about a man lost at sea who returns to find that his wife has remarried in his absence, was hugely popular for a century after its publication, inspiring plays and movies, and prompting legislative bodies around the world to adopt laws defining the period after which a missing person could be declared legally dead. Dark Shadows adapted so many other hits of nineteenth century English literature that it is frankly a bit surprising it’s taken them this long to get around to it.

Episode 1119: Where the Devil is everybody.

Ben Stokes

From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that period, we learned how scion Barnabas Collins first became the vampire we had met in April 1967, and more importantly learned that he could be interesting even if he were not a vampire.

We also met much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes. Ben was played by Thayer David, who first joined the cast of Dark Shadows in 1966 as crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. Matthew was so maniacally devoted to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard that he inadvertently killed a friend of hers whom he imagined to be her enemy and was about to deliberately murder another of her favorite people, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, when the ghosts who haunt the estate of Collinwood emerged from the background and did him in. When we met Ben, he was as open-hearted and kindly as Matthew was dark and twisted.

Barnabas was the one member of the Collins family who took a liking to Ben. He taught Ben to read. Later, Barnabas would press his father, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, to free Ben from his indenture. When Barnabas became a vampire, Ben repaid his kindness by protecting him and abetting his crimes. Eventually, Ben’s devotion to “Mistah Bah-nah-bahs” led him to recreate the very crimes that triggered Matthew’s destruction, killing a man in the course of a struggle and murdering a woman in cold blood. We saw that he and Matthew were two versions of the same character. Ben became what Matthew was after a few months in the shadow of the Collins family curse. Matthew had spent his entire life in the shadow of that curse, and so he was doomed from the beginning.

Barnabas brought the vampire curse on himself when he met the gracious Josette, jumped to the conclusion that she could never love him, and consoled himself in a brief affair with her aunt’s maid Angelique. Unknown to Barnabas, Angelique had a talent for witchcraft. When it turned out that Josette did love Barnabas and agreed to marry him, Barnabas cast Angelique aside. Humiliated and enraged, Angelique used her powers of witchcraft to make him into a ghoul and sentence him to exist forever without love. The vampire curse was dramatically satisfying, because Barnabas had been so selfish that it was fitting he should be reduced to a metaphor for extreme selfishness. And Angelique’s declaration that anyone who loved him would die gave an extra pathos to his underestimate of his own lovableness.

As his involvement with Angelique led to Barnabas’ destruction, so Ben’s involvement with her blighted his life. He met Angelique in #372, and thought she was making a sexual overture to him. Without further ado, he walked up to her and took her in his arms. She gave him something to drink first, which made him the victim of a spell that subjected him to her will. As Angelique’s slave, he did harm to Barnabas and others whom he loved, filling him with anguish and self-loathing. Ben did not share Barnabas’ selfishness, so there would have been little point in making him a vampire. But his desperate response to Barnabas’ kindnesses suggests that he, too, believes himself to be unlovable.

Now, the show has traveled back in time again. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman, Barnabas’ devoted friend in 1970, escaped a disaster in that year by passing through a time warp that took her to 1840, when the seeds of the disaster were planted. Barnabas used some mumbo-jumbo to project his 1970 personality into his body as it was in 1840 and joined her there. The two of them needed help establishing themselves in the Collinwood of that period. They found that Ben was living there and that he was still devoted to Barnabas. Ben was very old, but also amazingly resourceful. He was able to provide Julia with contemporary clothing and a set of luggage that she seemed to have left at the Collinsport Inn, and to substantiate the story that Barnabas and Julia were the son and daughter of the original Barnabas Collins. Now they are securely ensconced in the bosom of the Collins family. At the rate Ben has enabled them to go, Julia and Barnabas should be able to solve all the problems they face in another week or two.

Of course, it cannot be so. Ben sees that Desmond Collins, a cousin of the Collinses who live in the great house, has brought a severed head back from a trip to the southeastern coast of China. Ben recognizes this loathsome thing as an object that was mentioned in connection with a series of murders many years before. He has gone to Desmond’s home, a mansion known as Rose Cottage, and left a book with a chapter about the murders and a note urging him to destroy the head. He also spent some time looking at the head and telling it he was going to see to it that it was destroyed. That turns out to have been unwise; when Ben is walking home through the woods, the head appears to him and he cries out in distress. The next morning, Ben’s corpse is found. It looks as if he tried to cut his own head off.

The Happy Couple

In March 1969, Barnabas began the longest of all Dark Shadows’ excursions backward in time when he went to the year 1897. When he arrived at Collinwood, the matriarch of the house was dying. She was Edith Collins, nonagenarian widow of Gabriel Collins. On her deathbed, Edith reminisced about the difficult relationship she and her darling Gabriel had with Gabriel’s father, Daniel Collins, master of Collinwood. At the time, that startled longtime viewers. We had seen Daniel as a twelve year old boy in the 1790s segment, and he seemed pleasant enough. But if we were to believe that he was the man his daughter-in-law remembered decades after his death, he grew up to be bitter and estranged from his own nearest kin.

We have met the adult Daniel, and he is indeed a difficult sort. He is confined to the tower room in the great house because of his unfortunate tendency to mistake women for his late wife and to try to kill them as he killed her. He also has dementia, so that people have to keep telling him which members of the family are dead and what year it is. In fairness to Daniel, these points are extremely difficult for anyone to keep track of on Dark Shadows. We’ve also heard that Daniel has a heart condition that medical science as of 1840 is powerless to do anything about.

We have met Gabriel, too. He uses a manual wheelchair to get around; apparently he is quite skilled with it, since he keeps appearing in rooms on every floor of the house without any apparent assistance getting up and down stairs. He is a vicious bully, a characteristic Edith did not bring up in her deathbed reminiscences.

Today, we meet the young Edith. She is played by Terrayne Crawford, who in the 1897 segment played lady’s maid Beth Chavez. We haven’t seen her on the show since Beth’s final appearance in #880, though she did have a small part in the feature film House of Dark Shadows which was in theaters at this time.

Unlike the dying Edith of 1897, this version of the character despises Gabriel. There is an amusing idea in there. Perhaps in the 57 years between what we see today and what we saw then, Edith talked herself into believing that she and Gabriel had a lovely marriage and that only Daniel’s hostility gave them trouble.

If that was an idea they were planning to develop, they probably should not have given the part of Edith to Miss Crawford. She seems to be a very nice person, but she had severe limitations as an actress. All of the roles in the 1897 segment included dialogue which called for the depiction of multiple layers of feeling at once, and Miss Crawford was alone among the cast in failing to meet this challenge even a single time. So when Beth tells a devastatingly handsome married man that she doesn’t want him to make passes at her, that’s all there is to it- she simply does not want that, and he simply is a jerk for continuing to do it. We can see no conflict within her to set up a story in the course of which she will stop resisting his charms and begin an affair with him.

Eventually they started writing Beth as a one-dimensional character. That allowed Beth to be part of the story, but they did have to sacrifice some themes they had apparently meant to develop. So in her first appearance, Beth reacted with alarm when a Romani character dropped a hint that she was going to reveal to the Collinses that Beth was Romani, too. That fit with Beth’s origin as a servant who had come to Collinwood in the train of Jenny Collins, who was herself secretly Romani. But delivering on it would have required Beth to have more complicated feelings than Miss Crawford could be relied on to portray, so that was laid quietly to one side.

Showing the audience that Edith is the sort of person who will, in her own mind, eventually retcon her crappy marriage into a great but haunted romance would place even greater demands on a performer than would showing that Beth is hiding the facts about her ethnic background. But as we see her today, Miss Crawford seems to have become an even worse actress than she was playing Beth a year ago. She keeps changing her tone of voice in the middle of her lines for no apparent reason, making us wonder if she is trying to suppress the hiccups. That isn’t because she is tense- on the contrary, she is relaxed and comfortable, with a big grin on her face, an inexplicable affect when every conversation Edith has consists of everyone reviling and threatening everyone else.

Gabriel is in a good mood despite Edith’s loathing for him. He is blackmailing the evil Gerard Stiles into murdering Samantha Drew Collins, widow of his brother Quentin Collins. This will leave Daniel with no choice but to leave the Collins fortune to Gabriel. Samantha has no suspicion that anything like this is going on, but she does know that Gabriel hates her and cordially returns his hatred.

Gerard has told Gabriel that he will give Samantha a poison that will cause her to have a fatal stroke while he and she are in the village and Gabriel is at home, so that she will die in front of witnesses and no one will suspect him even if it is discovered that the stroke was artificially induced.

Gerard comes back to Collinwood. Gabriel menacingly says that “If you tell me anything went wrong…” Gerard replies that nothing went wrong. It is done. Delighted, Gabriel asks for all the details. Gerard says that he and Samantha made a stop at the police station to arrange for Ben’s body to be released for burial. Gabriel asks if it happened at the police station. Gerard says no, then goes on to say that they went from there to the bank. Gabriel asks if it happened at the bank. Gerard says no. He then says that they went to the courthouse. Gabriel is thrilled at the idea that it happened at the courthouse, and Gerard confirms that it did happen at the courthouse.

Gabriel asks where the body is now. Before Gerard can answer, the front door opens and the body comes walking in. What happened at the courthouse was not Samantha’s death. It was Gerard and Samantha’s wedding. Gabriel is dumbfounded.

Gabriel absorbs the news of the wedding. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When he first joined the show in January 1970, Christopher Pennock had some troubles with line delivery that limited him almost as badly as Miss Crawford’s weaknesses limited her. But he has grown by leaps and bounds over the last ten months, and he really breaks through as Gabriel. The three “It happened in the–” questions and his responses to the answers they elicit are pattern from a bit that was old when Gallagher and Shean did it in vaudeville in 1910, but he and James Storm execute it so well that it feels fresh today. The expression on his face when he learns that Samantha has married Gerard is just exquisite.

The measure of Pennock’s success came earlier in the episode, when Samantha slapped Gabriel in the face. Virginia Vestoff is likable enough that her characters can get away with almost anything, but not even she could sell an audience on an able-bodied person who physically assaults a wheelchair user. But Pennock has established Gabriel as such an utter louse that we can see Samantha’s point.

Also in this episode, Samantha clears the toys out of a space known as “The Playroom.” It is explicitly acknowledged that her son Tad had outgrown the toys in it long before, a point the fans like to make whenever The Playroom is mentioned. Samantha has set aside her earlier resolution to leave the room unchanged to honor Tad, who was washed away in a storm at sea and is presumed dead, along with his father Quentin. She has decided the time has come to move on from the past.

The time warp that brought Julia to 1840 was localized in The Playroom, so we wonder what clearing it out will do to the prospects for a return trip. Also, The Playroom occasionally popped into being, complete with Tad’s old toys, in 1970 and in 1995, due to the influence of a bunch of ghosts of people from this period. So while first-time viewers will not likely find any significance in Samantha’s redecoration project, returning viewers may have many questions about it.

Episode 1115: The woman in question

The year is 1840. Vampire Barnabas Collins summons his latest victim, Roxanne Drew. They meet at the gazebo on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood. He says he has a way they can be together forever. She says she would die for him. That’s what he had in mind. He bites her, drains her body of blood, and lets her fall to the floor of the gazebo. He tells her corpse that it will be found tomorrow, and that Roxanne will be mourned. The following night, she will rise as a vampire. He walks off, leaving her.

Roxanne, left like a cat leaves a mouse for its people to find.

Roxanne’s sister Samantha also has a new relationship, and may also be murdered as a result. Her husband, whose name is Quentin Collins, is missing and presumed dead after a shipwreck. Quentin and Samantha’s son Tad was with his father and is also missing. Quentin’s friend Gerard Stiles has been a guest at the great house of Collinwood for some time. We saw the other day that Samantha turns to Gerard when she needs comforting, and they kiss today.

After Gerard and Samantha’s love scene, Gerard is alone in the drawing room with Quentin’s brother Gabriel. He is in the act of walking out on Gabriel when Gabriel addresses him as “Mr Miller.” Gabriel leafs through a stack of papers about the life of crime Gerard led under his original name, Ivan Miller. Gerard grabs the papers from Gabriel. Gabriel clutches at Gerard’s arm and squeezes it so hard Gerard falls to his knees. Gerard is stunned by Gabriel’s strength. Gabriel gets around by pushing himself in a manual wheelchair, which does indeed build the muscles in the arms and upper back, so it is a believable moment.

Gabriel then hands Gerard the papers and says that they are his copy. He has another copy stashed where it will go to the authorities should any harm befall him. He says that he will hold them back provided Gerard makes himself useful to him. First he dispatches Gerard to acquire a large packet of arsenic. Then he tells Gerard that his next duty will be to poison Samantha with the arsenic a little bit at a time, so that she dies a painful, lingering death. Gerard says that he would rather just leave Collinwood and make a fresh start somewhere else rather than do that. Gabriel says that since Samantha’s death will make him the heir to his terminally ill father’s vast estate, he will be able to pay Gerard very handsomely for the task. He offers him 10% of the Collins fortune. Since Gerard apparently murdered a woman in Portugal a few years back, Gabriel is quite sure he will not be squeamish about murdering another woman, especially when he stands to profit so richly. Gerard says they have a deal.

In #1077, set in 1970, another Quentin Collins was reading the family history when he learned for the first time that he had a “grand uncle” who lived in 1840 who was also named Quentin Collins. Not even the family history mentioned Tad’s name. Since that Quentin was born in 1870 (though he looked much younger than his hundred years,) we could take it that neither Grand Uncle Quentin nor his widow was the one through whom ownership of the Collins family wealth passed to the other generations we have seen. Indeed, longtime viewers may recall that in #701 and #702, set in 1897, Quentin’s very elderly grandmother Edith Collins reminisced on her deathbed about her husband Gabriel. So we know that Gabriel and Edith are the parents of a son who will sire that other Quentin and his siblings, among them Edward Collins, whose son Jamison will go on to be the father of Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and Roger Collins, the adults at the great house in the 1960s.

As of this day in 1840, however, Gabriel’s father Daniel Collins has named his son Quentin his sole heir, with Tad in second place and Samantha in third. Told that Quentin and his son are dead, Daniel has refused to rewrite the will in Gabriel’s favor. Early in the episode, Samantha tells Gabriel that when Daniel dies, it will be up to her to take care of him and his wife, and that she will do so provided they behave themselves. Knowing that it does not work out that way, we can believe Gerard will actually carry out the assignment Gabriel gives him today.

The disappearance of Quentin and Samantha from the Collins family’s memory by the late nineteenth century is only the first of four reasons we might believe Gabriel’s plan will come to fruition. The second is the casting of Samantha. Virginia Vestoff was a splendid actress whose performance lets a great deal of fresh air into every scene she appears in. However, Samantha is Vestoff’s first role on Dark Shadows. If she were a member of the show’s established repertory company, we might be confident that Gerard will disappoint Gabriel and let her live. But first timers, even spectacularly talented ones with solid backgrounds on Broadway and in daytime television, often turn out to be short-timers. So her presence adds to the suspense about her character’s future.

The third reason is an echo of the circumstances of one of Dark Shadows‘ most prominent on-screen murders. In 1967, Barnabas coerced his associate, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, into preparing a lethal injection for her old friend Dave Woodard, who was threatening to expose their crimes. As Gerard brings the arsenic to Gabriel today, only to be shocked to hear that he will have to commit the murder himself, so Julia offered the hypodermic to Barnabas, only to be told that she would administer the deadly shot. The murder of Woodard actually came off, so longtime viewers have another reason to expect that Samantha, too, might die. And of course that Gabriel pulls the same maneuver on Gerard that Barnabas pulled on Julia shows that they really are members of the same family and that they are bearers of that family’s curse.

The fourth reason grows from what we have seen of the future of Collinwood. In segments set in 1970 and 1995, we have seen that Gerard’s ghost will destroy Collinwood and rule over its uninhabitable ruins for decades after. Today that starts to make sense. If Gabriel’s descendants own the house and hold their position in the community as the result of a hideous crime their ancestor committed through Gerard, then it is fitting that Gerard should be the face of the long-delayed reckoning for that crime.

I should mention that Vestoff is not alone in giving an excellent performance today. Christopher Pennock was pretty hard to take when he first joined the show as monstrous man-child Jabez Hawkes in #935; he moved well, but he delivered his dialogue with so much bombast that he stood out even among the cast of Dark Shadows. He was noticeably better as Jekyll/ Hyde characters Dr Cyrus Longworth and John Yaeger from #985, but still enunciated his lines too self-consciously to really draw the audience in. As astrologer Sebastian Shaw from #1073, he was a little more natural, but Sebastian was such a poorly conceived character that he couldn’t really show his stuff.

As Gabriel, Pennock finally comes into his own. He is smooth as silk in Gabriel’s scenes with Gerard today; it’s a pleasure to listen to him sidle his way from one syllable to the next. He’s just as pitch-perfect projecting Gabriel’s humiliation and uncontrolled rage in his scene with Samantha as he is at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum with Gerard. Certainly Vestoff and James Storm are first-rate scene partners; they may deserve a share of the credit for Pennock’s fine work. Or maybe he just needed to sit down, I don’t know.

It’s no news to fans of Dark Shadows that Jonathan Frid was capable of great work. He’s been on top form this week. The other day, Barnabas’ aged friend Ben Stokes told him a bizarre story, to which Barnabas replied “You’re mad, old man.” No actor could deliver Henry V’s dismissal of Falstaff, “I know thee not, old man” more heart-breakingly than Frid delivers that line. And watching his face as Roxanne falls dead in Barnabas’ arms, you can feel the terror and the awe of the moment. The murders sometimes come so thick and fast on Dark Shadows that watching them we can feel like we are seeing the coyote raise yet another the mushroom cloud at the end of his fall after failing to catch the roadrunner, and Barnabas himself often takes killing very lightly. But there is nothing cartoonish about what he does to Roxanne.

Episode 1112: There are people here who do remember Barnabas Collins

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has traveled back in time from 1970 to 1840. Julia’s best friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, was unable to follow her into the past. Julia and Barnabas met in 1967 and became friends in 1968. In this period, Barnabas has been trapped in a chained coffin in the secret room of the old Collins family mausoleum for decades. She misses him so deeply that she convinces herself he must have used some mumbo-jumbo to project himself from 1970 into his body as it is in this time. She unchains the coffin and lets him out. He does not recognize her, and within seconds has his hands on her throat.

In the nick of time, Barnabas’ old retainer Ben Stokes shows up and tells him to let Julia go. Barnabas is shocked to see that Ben is far older than he was when last he saw him. Ben explains that 45 years have passed since he chained the coffin. Barnabas’ reaction settles a question that the vampire lore we have so far seen on Dark Shadows had left open. We have not known whether Barnabas experiences the passage of time while he is sealed in his coffin. Now, we see that he does not. That doesn’t stop him from throwing a big fit when Ben tells him that for the sake of all that is holy he must let himself be sealed back in; he pouts that he has already spent 45 years there, as if he had suffered consciously through all of them. That point will be exploited to broadly comic effect in Tim Burton’s 2012 feature film titled Dark Shadows, in which Johnny Depp’s version of Barnabas is closed in his coffin for a minute and a half and when the lid is reopened wails “How many centuries!?” This scene is played more subtly, but regular viewers will be just as inclined to laugh at Barnabas’ extravagant self-pity.

Ben tells Barnabas Julia’s preposterous story of a journey back in time from a future in which she is his fast friend. Barnabas tells Ben that he has gone mad, but Ben insists that he believes the story, bizarre as it is. Indeed, as a vampire Barnabas is hardly in a position to dismiss tales of the supernatural.

We got to know Ben from November 1967 to March 1968, when Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. Young Daniel Collins was also a character on the show then. Daniel is in the cast of characters again now. He is the master of the great house of Collinwood, but is a man old before his time because of a severe mental illness and a heart condition that nineteenth century medicine is powerless to treat. When we saw that Ben and Daniel were in the story, longtime viewers realized that the 1840 segment would be a sequel to the 1790s segment. And indeed, Barnabas’ manner and tone of voice when he rises from his coffin are an exact match for what they were at the end of that part of the show. Jonathan Frid picks up right where he left off in #460. I know classically trained actors are taught to do things like that, but he pulls it off so brilliantly that I can’t help but wonder just how it was done.

Ben had laid out a plan for Julia in yesterday’s episode. He told her to present herself at the great house of Collinwood as Julia Collins. She was to tell the Collinses that she was the daughter of the Barnabas Collins who left for England in the 1790s, that she has been living in America, near Philadelphia, for many years, while her brother, Barnabas Junior, had stayed in England. She was to say that Barnabas Junior has written to her saying that he wanted to meet her at Collinwood and to feign surprise that her brother is not already there. She would say that her bags were at the Collinsport Inn. They might then invite her to stay at Collinwood.

Julia leaves the mausoleum. When Barnabas rushes out to claim more victims, she peeks out from behind a tree and watches him go. She now has nowhere to turn but Collinwood and no plan to follow but Ben’s.

Samantha Collins, daughter-in-law of Daniel and the lady of the house at Collinwood, is in the woods when she senses a malign presence. She starts running, and we see Barnabas. By the time Samantha bursts into the front door of the great house, she is on the point of tears. She tells her brother-in-law Gabriel Collins and houseguest Gerard Stiles that she felt that something evil was in the woods. She didn’t see whatever it was, but has somehow come to the conclusion that it was “tall.” Yesterday Gerard, who is a clairvoyant, had a vision of Julia; he described her as tall. Neither Jonathan Frid nor Grayson Hall was much above average height, while the cast included several actors who were. For example, Christopher Pennock, who plays Gabriel, was well over six feet. Gabriel uses a wheelchair, so this role does not emphasize his tallness, but we can’t help noticing it when they keep banging on about the great height of two medium-sized people.

Gerard says that he will go into the woods to investigate. Samantha tells him not to, that she wants him to stay with her and make her feel safe. She tilts her head towards his chest. Samantha’s husband, whose name is Quentin Collins, is missing at sea and presumed dead. In this moment, we see that she is considering Gerard as Quentin’s successor.

Gabriel speaks up. He tells Samantha and Gerard that there is no reason to investigate, since the police are all over the grounds. A woman was found dead earlier in the evening, her corpse drained of all blood. The presence Samantha sensed must have been, not a man, but the animal that killed that woman.

By opening the coffin, not only did Julia needlessly expose herself to the gravest possible danger and release a monster who has already taken one human life and will doubtless take more. She also put an additional obstacle in the way of her own effort to establish herself at Collinwood. That she will present herself and announce Barnabas to the Collinses on the very night the vampire attacks start makes it all but impossible for them not to connect the two of them with those attacks.

Samantha answers a knock at the front door and finds Julia. Julia feigns surprise that Samantha does not recognize her name. She is startled to see Gerard, whose ghost she met in terrible moments in the years 1970 and 1995, but composes herself quickly. Samantha invites Julia in. She tells the story Ben had crafted for her and expresses surprise the Collinses had not received the letters she sent.

Ben shows up and Julia makes a show of recognizing his name. She says that her late father often spoke warmly of him, and that he will be impressed by how much Barnabas Junior looks like his old man. They embrace. By that point, Samantha and Gabriel are sold. Samantha insists Julia stay at Collinwood, and sends Gerard to the inn to fetch her bags. Gerard pounces when Julia says Barnabas Junior will be glad to see Collinwood “again”; she explains that their father told them so much about the place that it feels like they’ve been there before.

A toast to the new arrival. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Gerard does fetch a set of bags from the inn. Apparently Ben had supplied those, as he had earlier supplied the period-appropriate clothing Julia is wearing. He’s a very handy fellow to have on your side, that Ben.

In the morning, Ben joins Julia as she is returning to the mausoleum. He tells her sternly that they must chain the coffin back up and that she must never return to the secret room, no matter how sure she is that her version of Barnabas is summoning her.

They find they are too late. The coffin is gone. Both Julia and Ben know that Barnabas has a compulsion to stash his coffin at the foot of the cellar stairs in the Old House at Collinwood, and Julia also knows that Barnabas’ second choice for a hiding place is behind the bookcase in the parlor of that same house. Julia also knows of a cave near the beach where Barnabas has hidden his coffin a couple of times. So it would seem that they should be able to take the chains with them to those places, find the coffin, and take care of the matter before lunch. But for some reason they just give up.

Back in the great house, Gerard confronts Julia with an earring he found on the dresser in her room when he was putting her bags away. He tells her its mate was found in the long-disused playroom upstairs two nights ago, and asks her how long she has been lurking around. She denies everything, failing to quell his suspicions. Freeing Barnabas to prey upon the living may have been the most foolish thing Julia could possibly have done, but it was not much wiser of her to leave one extremely distinctive earring in such a conspicuous place when she has lost its mate she knows not where.

It was Gabriel who found the earring. He showed it to Gerard shortly after, prompting Gerard to have his vision of the “tall” Julia. Gerard and Gabriel have a scene early in today’s episode, before they meet Julia, in which they go back over the matter of the earring. We can see not only that Gerard is onto Julia, but also that Gabriel has a plan of some kind in which he is planning to involve Gerard. Combined with Samantha’s obvious interest in Gerard, that in turn suggests that we will see how multiple members of the household entangle themselves with him and put him in a position from which he can become a threat to the future of Collinwood.

In the closing credits, Grayson Hall is billed as “Julia Collins.” It has been their custom to list characters by the names they use, even when the audience knows those names to be false. So after Angelique Collins rose from the dead, killed her sister Alexis Stokes, and assumed Alexis’ identity in #1000, when the show was set in an alternate universe, Lara Parker kept being billed as Alexis until all the characters who were fooled by her imposture were off the show. Actors sometimes wander onto the set during the closing credits. My wife, Mrs Acilius, imagines someone doing so while still in character, looking at a credit that gives away someone’s true identity, and pointing at it with wide eyes and an “Aha!” Maybe they were trying to protect Julia from that.

Episode 1111: The healer himself

Dark Shadows has been drifting downward in the ratings and the writing staff has been repeating material. If it is to survive, the show needs a new villain who will generate fresh story points and another breakout star to grab the attention of the public as Jonathan Frid did when he joined the cast as vampire Barnabas Collins in 1967 and as David Selby did when he came along as the dangerous Quentin Collins late in 1968 and early in 1969. They are gambling that they will be able to fulfill both of these requirements with James Storm as the evil Gerard Stiles.

Gerard has been on the show as an unspeaking ghost for twelve weeks. He makes his first appearance as a living being today, and delivers his first lines. He makes less of an impression than does any other member of the cast, which I believe is intentional.

Yesterday, mad scientist Julia Hoffman traveled back in time to 1840. Previous time-travel segments have begun with episodes mounted on the biggest scale of production the show could manage, but yesterday they tried a new approach. Most of the episode took place in one little section of the great house of Collinwood, with Julia hiding behind partitions in darkened rooms while she eavesdropped on random conversations. That structure suggested that 1840 is going to open out gradually, introducing new characters and situations a little bit at a time. So far from whisking us into the new world with a torrent of additional information, they subtracted from what we came in thinking we knew. When they revealed that governess Daphne Harridge is unknown in the great house, and Quentin Collins* and his son Tad are missing at sea and presumed dead, we found that this is a very different place from what we were led to expect. That was as good a way as any of ensuring we would come back on Monday.

Gerard makes his entrance in the middle of a scene between fluttery novelist Flora Collins and evil-tempered bully Gabriel Collins. Gabriel is not as cruel to Flora as we have seen him be with others, and he even pretends to take her latest novel seriously. But when she describes Gerard as “The Healer” and claims that he has supernatural powers, Gabriel has had enough. He insists that Flora ought not to waste her time with a man who, if he were not a transparent fraud, could only be a practitioner of the black arts. Flora is appalled by Gabriel’s description of Gerard as a possible Satanist.

Gerard enters and Flora tells him she is coming down with a migraine. She coquettishly asks him to do his thing for her. He rubs her forehead for a bit, and she proclaims that she is cured. After she exits, wheelchair user Gabriel tells Gerard that if he really has a miraculous gift of healing he would welcome him using it to restore his own ability to walk. Gerard angrily refuses.

Gabriel then tells Gerard that Flora claims more for him even than a gift for healing. She says that he is clairvoyant. Gerard says that he does have such a gift. Gabriel shows him an earring he found in the upstairs playroom and asks if he can identify it. Gerard goes into a trance and says that he sees “a tall woman… not dressed as a woman should be.” The earring belongs to Julia, whom we heard a clairvoyant describe as “a tall woman” in #1059, and she is indeed wearing the clothes she had on when she came from 1970. So we know that Gerard is a real clairvoyant, and expect that he will recognize Julia when he meets her. But Gabriel hasn’t been watching the show, so he laughs out loud and tells Gerard that he is indeed a fraud.

Gerard gets even angrier than he was a moment before, and tells Gabriel that he will not abide being laughed at. That suggests a complicated existence for a character on Dark Shadows, a show that has a lot of great stuff in it but that rarely goes more than ten minutes at a time without making at least one member of the cast look ridiculous.

Gabriel is unimpressed with Gerard. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Of course, no one is easier to laugh at than people who take themselves absolutely seriously, which is one of the reasons Barnabas and Julia were such big hits. But most of the characters who demand to be regarded with solemnity have had an expiration date, no matter how much value they added while they were on the show. So the fanatical witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask was one of the highlights of the show when it was set in the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968, but no one could have expected Trask to stay in the cast when it returned to contemporary dress. Those who have lasted and have helped to grow the audience have had a sense of humor about themselves. By the middle of 1968, even wicked witch Angelique could crack the occasional joke at her own expense. Unless Gerard gains the same ability, he would seem unlikely to rise above Trask’s level in the hierarchy of characters.

Meanwhile, the aged Ben Stokes has befriended Julia. In the 1790s segment, Ben was a much-put-upon indentured servant whose extreme regard for Barnabas led him to become complicit in Barnabas’ crimes in his first nights as a vampire. When we revisited the 1790s in January 1969, Ben followed the footsteps of the first character Thayer David played on the show, crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. Matthew’s fanatical devotion to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard led him to inadvertently kill a man who was the head of the Collins fishing fleet and to attempt the deliberate murder of a woman who was played by the daughter of a countess. In #666, Ben inadvertently killed roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes, who was in Collinsport to do some executive work associated with the Collins family’s ships, and then deliberately murdered Natalie DuPrés, a character who bore the title countess. We saw that the kindly, sensible, open-hearted Ben whom we met before the great curse was placed on the Collins family had been deformed into the same shape that a century and a half in the shadow of that curse had inflicted on Collinsport dweller Matthew. Now, we see that Ben has lived on into his eighties and has recovered much of the goodness that was his hallmark when first we met him.

Julia tells Ben the insane story of her travels through time and her friendship with Barnabas, and he decides to help her find a place in 1840. He digs up a period-appropriate gown for her. It’s too big for his granddaughter Carrie and too small for him, so it does not seem likely to have been in his possession. He doesn’t have time to make a gown. He doesn’t leave the house, so even if there had been shops in central Maine in 1840 that sold ladies’ formal wear off the rack, he wouldn’t have been able to buy it at one of those. And any of the ladies in the house would surely notice if one of their dresses went missing and a stranger showed up wearing one exactly like it. So I suppose it must have belonged to a lady no longer resident in the house who left it behind in a disused room.

Ben drills Julia in a plan he has devised. She is to present herself at the front door of the great house of Collinwood at 8:30 PM, wearing the gown he has provided. She is to say that her name is Julia Collins, daughter of Barnabas, and that she has been living in America for ten years. Her brother, Barnabas Junior, is still based in England, where their father died some time ago. He wrote her a letter saying he was coming to the States and she was to meet him at Collinwood. Her bags are at the Collinsport Inn, where she is staying.

Julia is reluctant to follow Ben’s plan. She is preoccupied with Barnabas. She expects him to use some mumbo-jumbo to project himself from 1970 into his body as it is in 1840. Since that body is in a chained coffin in the secret room of the old Collins family mausoleum, she wants to go there and release him.

Ben points out that Julia’s desire is preposterous. Barnabas won’t meet Julia for another 127 years. The vampire in that coffin has no idea who she is, and if she lets him out she will be only the first of many victims in a renewed rampage of murder and enslavement.

Of course Julia goes to the mausoleum; of course she opens the panel to the secret room. If she were capable of taking good advice when it was offered, there wouldn’t be a show. We end with Julia trying to communicate with Barnabas through the coffin. She has already said that she has a sense that he might be calling her, a sense that she admits might be her imagination. So we know that it is unlikely that she will fail to discern the summons she so desperately wants to hear.

*Not the one we eat in 1968 and 1969, though apparently he is also David Selby.

Episode 1110: A room filled with toys

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has escaped from a band of zombies who were wrecking the great house of Collinwood. From her perspective, it is a few moments after she saw her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, wrestling with the zombies and urging her to save herself by walking down a mysterious staircase. But she soon discovers that she has left the year 1970 and made her way to 1840, when both the zombies and the ghosts who have triggered their destructive actions were living human beings.

Julia enters the staircase from a playroom that is only intermittently present in 1970 and walks down its two flights. She exits into the same playroom, which is a normal presence in 1840. We saw this same distortion of space in #1070 and #1071, when Julia and Barnabas used the staircase to escape from the far-off future year of 1995 and return to 1970. It was an effective way of expressing the magical nature of the staircase and the playroom then, and is still effective the second time.

When they opened the playroom door on their return to 1970, Barnabas and Julia saw a girl in the corridor. That girl appeared to be a ghost named Carrie whom they had met in 1995, but turned out to be a living girl named Hallie Stokes who had moved into Collinwood while they were away on their bizarre cosmic journey. Now, Julia opens the door and sees the living Carrie in the same corridor.

Hallie was the niece of occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes and therefore a descendant of much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes, whom we got to know from November 1967 to March 1968, when the show was set in the 1790s. We learn today that Carrie is Ben’s granddaughter, and that he and she are staying in the great house as the guests of Daniel Collins.

We saw Daniel in the 1790s segment. He was played then by David Henesy, who was eleven years old at the time. Mr Henesy looked a lot older in September 1970 than he had three years before, and he was an accomplished young actor. But it would likely have been beyond even his abilities to play a character well into middle age, so when we see Daniel from the knees down later in the episode we can be fairly sure he will turn out to be someone else.

Julia sees a confrontation between Carrie and a tall young man in a wheelchair. The man turns out to be Daniel’s son Gabriel. He insists Carrie open the door to her grandfather’s bedroom and push him in. Carrie objects, and Gabriel sneers that she is not to tell a Collins what to do at Collinwood. He berates her, saying that while others may indulge her because they are impressed by her good looks he sees only her impudence. She capitulates to his demands.

In the room, Gabriel turns his abusiveness against Ben. He orders Ben to break some bad news to Daniel. Word has come that Daniel’s son Quentin and Quentin’s son Tad have been lost at sea. Ben protests that Daniel is in no condition to receive such news. Gabriel digresses and says that he cannot make his own living; Ben tells him that many men in worse condition than he is have done, which only makes him angrier than he was to start with. Gabriel regrets his inability to stand up and strangle Ben. We can see that he’s a true Collins; they are a strangley bunch. He then says that he is now likely to become Daniel’s heir, and threatens to evict Ben and Carrie from Collinwood when he does. He menaces Ben with the prospect that he will use his position to make Carrie’s life difficult if he does not obey him now. Ben gives in.

Gabriel bullies Ben. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Ben returns to his room he finds Quentin’s wife, Samantha Drew Collins, waiting for him there. He tells her that the news did not prompt Daniel to change his will. She is still in line to inherit the estate when Daniel dies.

Samantha goes to the drawing room, where she finds Gabriel playing a one-handed game of chess. She is smugly pleased with his dismayed reaction to the news that Daniel has not changed his will. She exits and later returns with word that Daniel has escaped from the tower room. The Collinses have always made a practice of keeping mentally ill family members in that room, and Samantha and Gabriel are so frightened by his escape that we can assume Daniel’s illness disposes him to violence.

Julia emerges from the shadows in Ben’s room. Ben is alarmed to see her, and horrified when she identifies herself a friend of Barnabas’. She claims that she is not a monster, which is a defensible claim, given a very narrow definition of “monster.” When she tells him about traveling back in time from a future period when Barnabas is free to prey upon the living and she is his best friend, he says that she is mad. She denies being mad, which is what a person would do when they are as far from sanity as she is. Ben is leery, but agrees to help her. He escorts her back to the playroom and tells her to stay there until morning. Of course she leaves the room very shortly thereafter, and as soon as she enters the corridor Daniel grabs her by the throat.

The drawing room is downstairs; Ben’s room and the playroom are upstairs. No one seems to be helping Gabriel get from one floor to another, and there is no sign of any ramp or other contrivance that would make it possible for wheelchair users to get themselves from one floor of the house to another without help. Odd as this is, it is not a first on Dark Shadows. In January and February 1970, strange and troubled boy David Collins used a wheelchair in a few episodes because David Henesy had actually suffered a leg injury. David kept going up and down stairs by himself, without explanation of how such a thing was possible. I suppose they got few enough letters complaining about the illogic of that movement that they decide they could get away with it again.

Carrie has three scenes. In addition to her encounter with Gabriel, she talks with Samantha in the playroom and with her grandfather in his room. As Hallie, Kathleen Cody was in a state of maximum nervous tension from the start, so that she had nowhere to go in response to anything that might happen. As Carrie’s ghost, she often swung to the opposite extreme, being so blandly cheerful that she made no impression at all. She did put in a few good performances in the 1970 segment, however, and she is quite good as Carrie today.

Samantha is played by Virginia Vestoff, making her Dark Shadows debut. Vestoff was a distinguished performer who is now remembered chiefly for her role as Abigail Adams in the original Broadway cast of 1776 and of the 1972 film based on that musical. The Broadway cast also included several other Dark Shadows alums- David Ford (Sam Evans #2, Andre DuPres) as John Hancock, Emory Bass (Mr Best) as James Wilson, Daniel F. Keyes (The Cemetery Caretaker) as Josiah Bartlett, and Peter Lombard (Oberon) as a stage manager and understudy for the roles of Stephen Hopkins and Thomas Jefferson. All of those, aside from Lombard, also appeared in the film. Vestoff died of cancer in 1983, aged 42, a major loss to the world of the theater.

A great deal of emphasis is placed today on Samantha’s maiden name, Drew. We have in the last few months met two characters named Roxanne Drew; we can take it that Samantha will turn out to be related to one of those in some way.

Longtime viewers, learning that Daniel and Ben are in the 1840 story, will readjust their expectations. Most of what we saw in the ten weeks leading up to this uncertain and frightening journey into the past was recycled from a story that ran from December 1968 to March 1969 and culminated in a trip to the year 1897. So we may have come in thinking there would be a retelling of 1897. But seeing Ben and Daniel, we have the prospect of a sequel to the 1790s segment. That does sound like a fresher idea.

The episode is certainly structured very differently than were the first episodes of either the 1790s segment or the 1897 segment. Those featured a relatively wide variety of brightly lit sets full of busy people, getting us off to a fast start in a new world. Today most of the action takes place in the playroom, Ben’s room, and the corridor between them, with a couple of brief glimpses of the drawing room. We keep cutting to Julia standing very still behind one partition or another as she eavesdrops on the dialogue. We are operating within a very small space, but hearing about people who are far outside that space and whom we are confident we will meet soon. So rather than leading with the equivalent of a panorama of our new surroundings, they are opening the space up for us a little bit at a time. That makes it easier to keep the action moving rapidly and clearly, and also leaves us wanting more.