Tag: gerard stiles

Episode 1107: Bury me not

A lot happens in this one, and all the actors do a good job. Even so, it feels very slow. None of the incidents seems to connect with any of the others.

Ill-dressed man Sebastian Shaw lets himself into the secret room where vampire Barnabas Collins keeps a coffin. It is not the coffin where Barnabas spends his days, but is the resting place of another vampire. Its occupant is Roxanne Drew, whom Barnabas loves and Sebastian hates. Sebastian opens the coffin, pulls a pistol, and aims it at Roxanne. He is about to fire when another figure appears in the corner of the room. Regular viewers recognize this figure as the ghost of pirate Gerard Stiles. Sebastian does not know that Gerard is a ghost. He fires two shots at him, of course without effect.

Barnabas enters. He disarms Sebastian, who tells him he was going to destroy Roxanne but that a man stopped him. Barnabas recognizes his description of Gerard. Sebastian shows Barnabas the bite marks on his neck, and explains he was under Roxanne’s power until recently. She lost her control of him when she began feeding on governess Maggie Evans. Longtime viewers have often wondered why Barnabas didn’t build an army by biting everyone who got in his way and turning them into his blood slaves; this is the first explicit statement on the show that a vampire risks losing control over one victim by taking another. We’ve seen examples of Barnabas’ power weakening when he takes an additional victim, but this has been far from consistent.

Sebastian shouts so loudly the microphone distorts his voice in a way we’ve never heard before on the show. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas asks if Roxanne ever mentioned the name Gerard Stiles. Sebastian says that he believes she did, but that he can’t remember in what connection it came up. We’ve had a few hints recently that Roxanne has some kind of association with Gerard and the other ghosts who are taking over the great house of Collinwood. This doesn’t give any substance to these hints, but it does confirm that the writers plan to keep dropping them.

Upstairs, Barnabas visits the other undead female he is keeping in his house, former ghost Daphne Harridge. He questions Daphne, who confirms that there was a girl named Roxanne Drew around Collinwood when she and Gerard were alive in 1840. She doesn’t remember much about Roxanne, but does recall that there was some drastic change in her that got people talking in that year. The show is obviously preparing for a trip back in time to 1840, so with this we learn that Roxanne will figure in that segment and that we will see how she became a vampire.

Another rehumanized ghost, Quentin Collins, enters. Barnabas orders Daphne to leave with Quentin, going far away from Collinwood before Gerard can get at her. Quentin tells Daphne to take Barnabas’ orders. When she protests, he says “Daphhh-neee” in a slow, condescending voice. David Selby started doing this in March to July 1970, when Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe and he played a different Quentin Collins, one who was married to Maggie’s counterpart. That Quentin was an insufferable jerk who often scolded Maggie with a slow, condescending “Maaaa-ggie.” Hearing him say Daphne’s name in that tonal format this time, I finally realized what it reminded me of. Ted Knight, as pompous newsman Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore show, would often pronounce the two-syllable names of people he was addressing using the same intonation. All of a sudden I could hear Quentin telling “Murrr-ray!” he shouldn’t put such complicated words in the copy he writes, or “Georrr-gette” not to be so independent. When I mentioned the resonance to my wife, Mrs Acilius, she laughed and said she couldn’t believed she hadn’t noticed it herself.

Barnabas leaves Daphne alone with Quentin. They toast their future life. Daphne abruptly collapses, and Quentin clutches his stomach. Gerard appears, and Quentin asks him why he has poisoned them. Quentin is an expert on ghosts who poison the living. In #677, he was himself a ghost, and he put strychnine in a drink his great-grandson Chris Jennings took. Barnabas’ buddy, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, saved Chris then. Now, Julia is with Barnabas when he returns to the room. Daphne is on the floor, unconscious but still alive. Quentin is nowhere to be seen.

Barnabas goes to the great house, searching for Quentin. He finds heiress Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes, playing a mad scene. Nancy Barrett and Jonathan Frid make Carolyn and Barnabas sound like Ophelia and Claudius in Act 4, Scene 5 of Hamlet, for a little while anyway. When Barnabas tells Carolyn that they must stop what is happening, she replies “I cannot stop anything. Whatever gave you the impression that I could?” It really is lovely.

Barnabas goes back to his house. Julia has treated Daphne, who is resting comfortably, aside from glycerin tears streaking her face at several angles, none of them convincing. Carolyn enters and demands to be left alone with Daphne. Julia and Barnabas know that Carolyn is intermittently possessed by a ghost known as Leticia, who is somehow associated with Gerard and Daphne, and are therefore reluctant to comply with this demand. But they apparently don’t think they have much to lose, so they go along with it.

Carolyn/ Leticia gives Daphne a dress. It is the dress she wore when she was a ghost. Daphne cries out to Gerard, asking if the time has really come. She then goes and hides in the closet. There was a lot of dull business with clothes when Quentin was a ghost, late in 1968, and they recycled that early in the current haunting, five weeks ago. This moment is easier to take, both because it is mercifully brief and because the dress is clearly legible as a sign of imminent story progression in the form of Daphne’s next death.

Quentin and Gerard are in a graveyard. Quentin has recovered from the poisoning sufficiently to smile lovingly at Gerard and say that he can’t imagine why he ever thought he was his enemy. He examines the tombstones in the fenced-off part of the graveyard and reminisces about the men buried under them, men who were underlings of Gerard’s in 1840. Since Quentin is only 100 years old, he is puzzled that he has memories from 130 years ago, but when he takes another look at Gerard’s smiling face his anxiety dissipates. He looks at a blank tombstone and puzzles as to why it is blank. At Gerard’s bidding, he digs up the grave and opens the coffin. He is delighted to realize that it was meant for Quentin Collins, and that the time has come for him to get into it. He briefly resists the idea of burying himself alive, but then looks at Gerard, says “You are Death. Whatever made me think I could run away from you?,” and complies. We end with Gerard putting the dirt back on top of the grave, Quentin securely inhumed.

Longtime viewers know that Quentin is alive because of a magical portrait that immunized him against aging, lycanthropy, and injury. So we are left wondering whether he is also covered for asphyxiation. If he is, Gerard is going to be pretty embarrassed when Quentin makes his way out of the ground.

Episode 1104: When a body meets a body

Time travelers Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman are doing battle with two distinct supernatural menaces. One of these is the ghost of Gerard Stiles, who, as they learned while visiting the far-off future year 1995, is destined to destroy the great house of Collinwood and the people who call it home before the end of the current year, 1970. The other is a vampire whom they have not identified, but who has been feeding on their friend and frequent victim, Maggie Evans.

In the drawing room, housekeeper Mrs Johnson sees Gerard. Gerard takes control of her, as he does when he meets people in that room. She goes upstairs, where Julia is keeping vigil over Maggie. Mrs Johnson says she woke up from a frightening nightmare in which Barnabas was suffering. She describes the setting of the nightmare. Julia recognizes it as Rose Cottage, the deserted mansion where Barnabas has gone to confront Gerard. Julia tells Mrs Johnson to take over for her in Maggie’s room, and rushes off to her friend’s side.

Julia bursts into the room where Barnabas is standing around, his confrontation with Gerard having come and gone without noticeable result. Barnabas is surprised to see her. As she explains what Mrs Johnson told her, the room bursts into flames. They try to escape, only to find that the door will not open. All seems lost, until the door opens from the other side. A woman named Roxanne Drew has come to their rescue.

Before their sojourn in 1995, Julia and Barnabas spent a while in an alternate universe which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” In Parallel Time, Barnabas met Roxanne’s counterpart while she was comatose. Charmed by her immobility and silence, he fell in love with her. Even after she came to and started moving around and speaking, Barnabas remained attached to that Roxanne. Barnabas and Julia escaped from Parallel Time through a room in a burning house; we learned in #1071 that Roxanne followed Barnabas and Julia into the burning room too late for them to rescue her. We can only assume she died in the fire. In the current universe, an inverted mirror image of that one, this other Roxanne is the one who rescues Julia and Barnabas from a burning room.

Roxanne separates from Barnabas and Julia in the woods, saying she has something else to do. They return to Collinwood. They find Mrs Johnson unconscious and Maggie missing. In the woods, Maggie approaches a shrouded figure, whom we assume to be the vampire and who appears to be Roxanne.

Maggie meets the bloodsucker. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This episode marks the final appearance of the character Mrs Johnson and of the actress Clarice Blackburn. Blackburn had taken a writing job on another soap by this time and was not available for acting work on a regular basis. She was an outstanding performer; Nancy Barrett says that Blackburn was the single best actor in the entire cast of Dark Shadows. Since Miss Barrett herself is a serious contender for this title, that is not an opinion to be taken lightly.

In the 1995 segment, Mrs Johnson died in the episode broadcast on 23 July 1970. That would suggest a dramatic date of 23 July 1995, very close to Blackburn’s actual date of death, 5 August 1995. But it gets eerier than that. In #1071, when charming rogue Quentin Collins says that he looked into Parallel Time and saw Roxanne trapped in the burning room, he goes on to fix the date of Julia and Barnabas’ departure from Parallel Time as 3 August, two weeks after the broadcast date. That would be the date of their arrival in 1995, and would mean that the third night of their time in that year, the night when Mrs Johnson died, would have been 5 August 1995.

Episode 1100: What it’s like to be alive

The ghosts of four people who died in 1841 have been haunting the great house of Collinwood. They represent teenagers Carrie Stokes and Tad Collins; Carrie and Tad’s governess, Daphne Harridge; and a sometime pirate captain known as Gerard Stiles. Three of these four have now assumed corporeal form. Tad and Hallie have taken possession of their lookalikes, David Collins and Hallie Stokes. They then performed a ceremony that caused Daphne to come back to life in a body of her own. We open with these three repeating the ceremony in order to conjure Gerard back into existence as a living being.

When Carrie and Tad performed the ceremony the first time, they did not know whether they would raise Daphne or Gerard. That episode ended with a knock at the door, leaving us to wonder along with them who would come. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said it would be funny if it were someone else. She suggested the writers might take a page from Let’s Make a Deal and have Tad and Carrie find a donkey behind Door Number Three.

Today, the ceremony again ends with a rapping on the door. But it is not Gerard. It isn’t a donkey, either. It is Willie Loomis, servant to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. John Karlen always finds a way to bring out humor in his characters’ predicaments, and the rough-hewn Willie does deflate the grandiosity of Carrie, Tad, and Daphne’s meddling in God’s realm.

Scrambling to cover up the signs of the ceremony before he has to open the door to Willie, Tad calls out “We were sleeping! (pause) I was sleeping!” David Henesy plays this absolutely straight, so that we can see it dawning on Tad that he and Carrie aren’t supposed to be sleeping together. Karlen wasn’t the only actor who knew how to find the laughs hidden in his lines.

Daphne hides. Tad opens the door. Willie sees the pentagram on the floor with the candles at its points and says he recognizes it as a device of black magic. He forestalls the teens’ attempt to pretend to be Hallie and David by calling Tad by name. Tad then turns to Carrie and makes fun of Willie’s twentieth century vocabulary in an attempt to intimidate him by a display of social superiority. This collapses immediately, and Willie says that Tad and Carrie have to come with him because he is bigger than they are.

Willie detains Carrie and Tad in the drawing room, waiting for Barnabas to come back. He has to leave them when he hears Maggie Evans, governess to the late David and Hallie, coming downstairs. Maggie is the victim of a vampire, and Willie is part of the crew that is keeping her from going off to get her blood sucked.

Willie rushes to the foyer and asks Maggie why housekeeper Mrs Johnson isn’t keeping her in her room. Maggie does not respond. The true answer would be that Clarice Blackburn has a writing job on another soap now and isn’t available to play the part, so they leave Mrs Johnson’s absence unexplained.

While Willie gets Maggie back to her room, Tad and Carrie listen to the dogs howling outside. Carrie says she has never heard howling like that before, and Tad contradicts her. He says that if she searches her memory, she will find that they heard just that sound in their own time. He gives a somber look, as if he knows what the howling means. The show has been making it clear that we will be going back in time to 1840 sooner or later. These lines of Tad’s tell us that we will find a vampire in operation when we get there.

In Maggie’s bedroom, Willie explains that Hallie and David have been possessed by Carrie and Tad. Maggie has seen enough in her time at Collinwood that she finds this instantly credible. She blames herself, saying that if she were not ill she would have been able to prevent the possession. Willie asks what she could have done, and she cannot think of anything. He presses her to tell him who the vampire is. She claims he cannot understand what she is going through. He cannot tell her that he himself was once the victim of a vampire, since that vampire was Barnabas and the show will implode if Maggie is ever told about that. So they are left at a stalemate.

Meanwhile, Daphne takes shelter in a deserted mansion once known as Rose Cottage. Gerard confronts her there. He is cranky about still being dead. She tells him it’s no one’s fault that the ceremony didn’t work. They will reenact it tonight, when the stars are back in the right alignment. She also tells him that they don’t need Tad and Carrie to accomplish their goal. This line is unfortunate- to the extent that the story has generated suspense, it has involved us wondering how Carrie and Tad are involved in whatever it is Gerard wants to do. When we hear they aren’t involved at all, it lets the air out of an already badly under-inflated set of tires.

Gerard vanishes from Daphne’s presence and materializes in a mysterious chamber known as The Playroom. The Playroom intermittently appears in a little-used part of the great house, behind a door that usually opens on a linen closet. There is a dollhouse in The Playroom that is a scale model of Rose Cottage and that is, in some supernatural sense, identical to it. Gerard sets fire to the room in the dollhouse that corresponds to the room in Rose Cottage where Daphne is. He uses his finger to hold closed the door corresponding to the one from which she could escape a fire in the room.

Gerard holds the door shut. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Daphne finds that the room she is in is engulfed in flames and she cannot open the door. Apparently Gerard has decided that if Daphne is going to tell him they don’t need Tad and Carrie, he doesn’t need Daphne, either. Daphne, being as she is played by Kate Jackson, is impossible not to care about, so this cliffhanger does make us want to come back Monday and see her escape. But since it implies that none of the relationships among the ghosts means anything, and since we’ve already seen that none of the living characters can mount an effective resistance to the ghosts, it also brings us to the conclusion that the whole Re-Haunting of Collinwood story is at a dead end.

Episode 1094: Our hearts will beat in tune

Carolyn Hawkes comes to the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood and announces to her mother, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, that she is about to do something special and they must light candles to provide the appropriate ambiance. Liz gets very unsettled by Carolyn’s attitude and keeps insisting that she go to bed, but Carolyn is nothing daunted. She stands behind the candles, apologizes for being out of practice, and starts to sing. Earlier, Liz had told permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman that Carolyn could not sing at all, and she seems quite surprised to be so abruptly proved wrong. Julia comes running in and shouts “Carolyn! ST-A-A-AAP!”

Carolyn in position for her concert. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia recently came unstuck in time and spent a couple of weeks in the far-off future year of 1995, where Collinwood was in ruins as the result of a mysterious disaster that is due to occur sometime before 1970 is out. Some residents of the great house, including Liz, vanished in that disaster; others, including Carolyn, went insane.

Carolyn would then be murdered by one of the ghosts who rule Collinwood in 1995. She left behind a note consisting of six cryptic phrases, which Julia and her friend Barnabas Collins have taken to refer to events that led up to the disaster in 1970. One of those phrases was “The night I sang my song.” It was in a conversation about that phrase that Liz told Julia Carolyn was incapable of song, and it is because the singing represents a step towards the disaster that Julia is so desperate for Carolyn to stop.

At the beginning of the episode, the evil Gerard Stiles, the ghost whom we saw kill the older Carolyn in 1995, took possession of Carolyn. As a result of the possession, she developed “second sight,” a mind-reading ability she had never had before. This will remind longtime viewers of another character played by Nancy Barrett, Miss Pansy Faye. We first met Pansy in #771, set in the year 1897, when she was played by Kay Frye. Pansy was a Cockney showgirl and fraudulent mentalist who came to Collinwood as the fiancée of daffy Carl Collins. To her amazement, Pansy found that in the ghost-packed atmosphere of Collinwood she really did have the psychic powers she had long pretended to have. Pansy didn’t live very long, but she returned to the show in the person of Miss Barrett when evil sorcerer Count Petofi caused her spirit to take over the body of the repressed and vicious Charity Trask. The song Carolyn sings in the drawing room today was Pansy’s song in both of her incarnations.

Pansy was fun the first time we watched the 1897 episodes, and she only got more enjoyable the second time through. It was prophesied yesterday that Carolyn would be taken over by a ghost named Leticia; if Leticia is like Pansy, that’s something to look forward to.

The reminder of Petofi is even more welcome. The story has been going nowhere for the last five weeks. Villains are supposed to create situations to which the other characters will respond, whether heroically or pitiably. Gerard is not a villain- he has been established as evil, but he has not given anyone else anything interesting to do. Petofi generated story all the time, so if Gerard is going to start taking pages from his book, we can hope that the show will come back to life. It’s even possible that when we travel back in time to 1840 to meet Gerard, Leticia, and the rest of them as living beings, as the show has been making it clear will happen sooner or later, it will turn out that Gerard is Petofi in disguise.

Episode 1089: Why hasn’t anything happened?

It’s often said that the most compelling villains of stage and screen are played by the nicest actors. That’s often explained by saying that the audience can pick up on a sweetness in the actor even when the character is doing the most vile things, making it possible for us to enjoy watching actions that sound like they would be unbearable even to think about.

I suppose there is some truth to that. Certainly Jonathan Frid’s abundant kindliness helped to make the fiendish Barnabas Collins a pop culture sensation in the 1960s, as David Selby’s sunny good nature made the thoroughly deplorable Quentin Collins almost as popular. But it is also the case that the function of a villain is to focus attention on other cast members. The villain makes things happen that get us wondering what the heroic characters will do to oppose them, how vulnerable characters will elicit our pity and admiration by their noble suffering, and which differently vulnerable characters will wrestle with their consciences as they are drawn into the villain’s web of sin. That function is one that might be expected to appeal to the most generous members of the profession, those most eager to help their fellow players show what they can do.

The villain in this portion of Dark Shadows is supposed to be the ghost of Gerard Stiles. Gerard is played by James Storm, who is by all accounts as adorable a human being as Jonathan Frid, David Selby, or anyone else. If the actor’s lovableness were all it took to make a villain a hit, Mr Storm’s face would have been on the cover of every issue of 16 magazine from the summer of 1970 on.

But in fact, the writers have let us down. Gerard is not doing what we expect of a villain. Today he takes possession of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. As a result of that possession, Liz becomes an emotionless drone and checks out of the story. That’s the common theme of all Gerard’s possessions- he stops his victims from exchanging information with others, slowing everything down and leaving them with nothing to do. He does not really serve the villain’s function at all. So far from bringing out the best in the whole cast as Barnabas did in his heyday or Quentin in his, Gerard has caused the plot to grind to a halt, leaving the characters playing out variations on the same few scenes over and again. He is a non-villain in the middle of a non-story.

Longtime viewers know that Dark Shadows has been chiefly about time travel since November 1967. When we see the ghosts, dwell on their wardrobe, and hear living characters tell us what they’ve been reading in documents from the years 1840 and 1841, we know that the show is getting ready to take us to that period for an extended costume drama segment. To the extent that the current haunting generates any suspense at all, that suspense comes from our wondering what explanation we will find in that upcoming segment for the activities of the ghosts. What was it about teenagers Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes when they were alive that makes their ghosts want to take possession of their lookalikes David Collins and Hallie Stokes, why will that possession result in the deaths of Hallie and David, and why will Tad and Carrie’s ghosts merge with theirs and appear in clothing from 1970? What goal does Gerard have that will be advanced by the possession and death of Hallie and David? What exactly is the relationship between Gerard and the ghost of Tad and Carrie’s governess Daphne Harridge? Are Daphne’s dealings with Quentin and the teens entirely in service of Gerard’s aims, or does she have goals of her own? The ongoing story has been laboring mightily to raise these questions, and it has been made very clear that none of them will be resolved until we get to 1840.

We do pick up a couple more bits of information today that we will have questions about in 1840. The show’s chief heroine and audience identification character, Julia Hoffman, reads that Gerard’s ship, the Java Queen, was a pirate vessel. That may remind us of #208, when David told dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis of a legend about a pirate who fell in love with a lady at Collinwood and brought her jewels. That story was a nod to Daphne Du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek, one of the “Gothic romance” novels that had inspired Dark Shadows in its early days. Willie found out too late that Dark Shadows wasn’t that kind of show anymore when he opened a chained coffin and found, not jewels, but Barnabas. Maybe when we get to know him as a living being, Gerard will bring in a little bit more of the “Gothic” element. Or at least we can hope that he will reveal his piratical background by overemphasizing the Rs in his name. Avast, ye mateys, beware of Gerrr-ARRRRd!

Moreover, Julia reads that the Java Queen wrecked off Collinsport exactly 129 years ago, on Thursday, 27 August 1841. In our universe, 27 August 1841 was a Friday, but apparently the calendar is aligned a little bit differently in the continuity where Dark Shadows takes place. I suppose there must have been a readjustment sometime between 1841 and 1970, because today is Thursday, 27 August 1970, which matches the day on which that date fell in our world.

Be that as it may, anniversaries have had the power to make things happen on Dark Shadows ever since it first became a supernatural thriller with the introduction of undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins in late 1966. Laura was going to incinerate herself with her son David on a particular date in 1967 because other women named Laura Murdoch had incinerated themselves with their young sons named David on the same date in 1767 and 1867. When you don’t follow the laws that science lays out for us, you have to come up with some other mechanism of cause and effect to keep the audience in suspense, and anniversaries will serve as well as anything else.

Julia reads on in her book. The captain of the Java Queen was widely feared, though his name was never known. He was the sole survivor of the crash off Collinsport, and he vowed that he would raise his men from the dead and resume his reign of terror.

David takes Hallie to Gerard’s grave. Cemeteries have been hotspots on the Collinsport dating scene since well-meaning governess Vicki insisted her boyfriend, instantly forgettable lawyer Frank Garner, take her to the old cemetery north of town in #153, but David and Hallie are not a couple and this is no mere social outing. David has told Hallie that you can tell whether the dead are at rest by standing on their graves at the stroke of midnight.

While they are waiting for the appointed time, Hallie notices a fenced-in area in the middle of the old cemetery and asks who is buried there. David tells her that that is where criminals were buried in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mostly in unmarked graves. He says that there are a lot of legends about how vicious they all were. He goes on to say that their spirits are supposed to be restless because they are so vile that Hell won’t have them. Hallie is, as usual, teetering on the brink of a fit of the screaming meemees, and this story makes her teeter even more rapidly.

At midnight, Gerard shows up. He approaches Hallie and David. They run away. When he was walking towards them, Gerard had his arms in front of him, bent at an angle that suggested he was hoping one of them would lead him in a waltz. When they run away, he has a disappointed look that makes us wonder if that’s all he wanted.

You lead. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Back at the great house, David and Hallie run into Julia. She demands to know what they were doing outside. David says they were out for a walk. Julia says that people do not take walks at one in the morning. That’s right, characters on Dark Shadows usually wait until three o’clock to start roaming about. Julia takes quite an authoritative tone for someone who is staying in the house as a permanent guest. While Julia is focusing her sternness on Hallie, whom she really seems to dislike, David sees a note tucked in the book Julia was reading. He slips the note in his pocket. He then asks Julia whether she is going to tell his Aunt Liz that she caught him and Hallie sneaking into the house so late. Julia agrees not to, and David thanks her.

Hallie and David go to her bedroom. As you would expect a teenage boy and girl to do when alone in a bedroom in the small hours of the morning, they conduct paleographic research. They examine the note, commenting on the age of the paper and features of the handwriting. They see that it concludes with the siglum “G,” which they hypothesize may indicate that it was written by Gerard. They read the text: “Know ye who do not rest in the town of Collinsport! In the dead of night watch for the signal, as ever before the green flag in the window. Three times shall it wave, as it did in days of yore!” Hallie claims that she doesn’t understand “a word of it!” For a second it seems like David might start explaining words Hallie might not be familiar with, such as “flag” and “green,” but he thinks better of it and assures her that he, too, finds the note puzzling.

David says that he thinks there might be a green flag in the tower room at Collinwood. I don’t know how he got that from the note, but if getting clarification requires Hallie to deliver more dialogue I’m just as happy to leave it unexplained. David goes to the tower room, finds a green polyester flag wedged into something attached to the ceiling, and starts waving it out the window. We cut back to the cemetery, where the soil on top of one of the graves in the enclosure is heaving. In view of the power of anniversaries in the universe of Dark Shadows, it makes perfect sense that polyester would have a profoundly disquieting effect on people who died in 1841, since polyester was invented in 1941- exactly one hundred years later.

Episode 1088: Why do I have to see Collinwood again?

Julia Hoffman and her friend Barnabas Collins have seen the future. They know that before 1970 is out, a mysterious disaster will leave the great house of Collinwood in ruins, inhabited only by ghosts. In the course of the disaster, teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes will die, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard will vanish, and the rakish Quentin Collins will go insane.

Liz has forbidden Julia from telling Hallie and David what she knows. The ghosts have stepped in and asserted an influence over David and Hallie, preventing them from telling Julia or anyone else what they know. One of the ghosts has taken Quentin into her power, preventing him from doing anything to move the story forward. Astrologer/ psychic Sebastian Shaw knows that a disaster is in store, but he is under the influence of a woman named Roxanne Drew, who wants him to string Liz along with happy talk until they can bilk her of a lot more money.

Today Sebastian has a vision while he is alone with Liz. He describes a room and tells her she must not enter it. He then rushes out. When Liz repeats Sebastian’s description to Quentin and Julia, they recognize the room as one they had been in earlier. Julia wants to go there at once, but Quentin points out that if Sebastian’s words are of value that is what they ought not to do. Julia agrees with this. Liz says that she can’t very well accept being told not to go into a room in her own house. Julia and Quentin take a very stern tone with her, speaking to her as if she were a naughty child.

Liz is too well-bred to point out that both of them live in her house as her guests, but she does object and does go to the room. All Sebastian told her about the room was that it had been out of use for a long time, the walls are green, and there is a small figurine in it of a woman bending over a child. All Quentin and Julia told her was that they had been there. Yet she goes directly there. In the room, she encounters the ghost of the malign Gerard Stiles.

Liz senses Gerard’s presence. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Liz had called Sebastian to Collinwood because the horoscope he prepared for her predicted that on this night an enemy would become a friend. We know enough about Gerard to be sure that his “friendship” means only his control. So if the prediction means anything, it can only be that Liz will cease to be a potential adversary to Gerard and will fall under his control. That, in turn, means that she, too, will be sidelined into a refusal to communicate, becoming yet another brake on a story that has been going nowhere for weeks.

Episode 1069: The sheriff’s place

Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have come unstuck in time and found themselves in the year 1995. The estate of Collinwood is in ruins, dominated by an evil ghost named Gerard. Barnabas’ distant cousins Carolyn Fredericks (née Stoddard) and Quentin Collins are insane. Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes is sometimes openly hostile, sometimes apparently helpful, but never his usual trustworthy self. Everyone else they knew in 1970 has either gone missing or died. Julia has fallen under the possession of Gerard and turned against Barnabas. Most unaccountable of all, the sheriff of Collinsport is not completely useless at his job.

Barnabas has received a note from Carolyn asking him to meet her in what remains of the great house. He and Julia enter the house; she insists on waiting in the foyer. While he goes into the drawing room, she stares up at Gerard, standing in his usual perch on the walkway at the top of the stairs. Barnabas looked right at Gerard there yesterday and did not see him, so apparently he can be selective about making himself visible.

Barnabas finds Carolyn sitting at the desk in the drawing room. She falls over dead. He calls for Julia. Gerard shakes his head, and she does not respond. Barnabas goes to the foyer and brings her to the spot where Carolyn had lain a moment before; she has vanished. The note she was writing is still on the desk; it is made up of six cryptic phrases which Barnabas declares to be clues as to what happened in 1970. He reads them aloud- “The night of the sun and the moon,” “The night Rose Cottage was destroyed,” “The unfinished horoscope,” “The night I sang my song,” “The picnic,” “The murder.” Julia keeps interrupting him, declaring that the phrases are meaningless and Carolyn was mad. He keeps wondering why she has become so uncooperative.

Barnabas tells Julia to find a telephone and call the sheriff. Often on Dark Shadows, people dismiss the idea of calling the police when someone turns up dead, saying that it’s too late to do anything but bury them and move on. But after a lot of back and forth, Julia goes off and does place the call.

Barnabas goes to open the secret panel in the drawing room to see if Gerard stashed Carolyn’s remains there. Gerard himself appears to Barnabas. Barnabas yells at him for a while. Julia comes back, and Gerard disappears. Julia wonders why Gerard did not try to harm Barnabas; Barnabas says that he knows he cannot harm him. This seems to be news to Julia. In 1970, Quentin knew that Barnabas was a vampire. We learned the other day that his contact with Gerard erased this knowledge. We may wonder if this fact has also slipped Julia’s mind.

Barnabas goes upstairs, and asks Julia to bring the sheriff to him when he gets to the house. She agrees. Once he is out of earshot, she asks Gerard if he had to kill Carolyn. She seems sad about it.

Barnabas is at the door of the one room at Collinwood that is in good repair, a mysterious playroom on an upper floor. He can’t get the door open. Julia brings the sheriff, and Barnabas says that the door wasn’t locked when he was there earlier. The sheriff says he has some questions and Barnabas angrily responds “Not now!” Cops don’t love it when you answer them that way, in my experience, but the sheriff does seem to be a bit cowed by the surroundings and he lets it pass.

Barnabas asks the sheriff to try the door. He does, and the knob turns easily. He turns to Barnabas and asks sternly “How much of this is in your imagination, Mr Collins?”

Barnabas’ embarrassment doesn’t last long. Carolyn is laid out on a table in the middle of the room, a spray of flowers on her chest. The sheriff remembers how lovely Carolyn was when she was young; Barnabas stalks around the room yelling at the invisible Gerard. When the sheriff says it is time to go, Julia insists on sitting with Carolyn for a while. The sheriff tells her she’s crazy to want to stay in the middle of the house. He’s not exactly sane himself, leaving her alone at what is after all a crime scene. Once the sheriff and Barnabas have gone, Julia receives further instructions from Gerard.

Barnabas, the sheriff, and Julia pay their respects to the late Ms Fredericks. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The sheriff finds Quentin at the Old House on the estate. He questions him, and gets some very strange answers. Quentin has worked himself into a state when Julia comes back. She announces that she is a doctor and will now give Quentin a sedative. The sheriff takes her word for her professional credentials, and tries to wrestle Quentin into position for her to give him an injection. He can’t manage it, but Julia speaks to Quentin in a tone that is sufficiently authoritative it calms him down right away. Once he is sedated, Quentin asks the sheriff to take him back to the psychiatric facility from which he recently escaped. The sheriff agrees.

The sheriff turns to Julia and asks where Barnabas is. In lieu of an answer, she tells him to come back to the house immediately before sunset. We cut to Barnabas opening the lid of his coffin. The sheriff is there, sticking a cross in his face, and announcing “I know all about you, Barnabas Collins!” Odd as his behavior in the playroom may have been, this sheriff clearly has more on the ball than did any of his predecessors. It’s a good thing the others weren’t up to his standards. If Sheriff Patterson had been as quick to catch on to what was going on around him in April 1967, Barnabas would have been staked by the end of the month and Dark Shadows would never have become a hit.

Sheriff Patterson may be on the minds of longtime viewers. Sometimes fans wonder what Barnabas’ ultimate plan was when he returned to prey upon the living in 1967. Weren’t the Collinses going to catch on that there was something a bit odd about their “cousin from England” sooner or later, as girls kept disappearing or turning up drained of blood? I think the answer is what we see in these two weeks of episodes, and also in the feature film House of Dark Shadows. Had Barnabas gotten his own way, eventually all living people would have fled Collinwood and no one from the village would have dared approach the estate. He’d have ventured forth occasionally to take fresh victims, but otherwise Collinwood would have been entirely cut off from the outside world. The buildings would have decayed and the grounds been overgrown. It was only because Julia showed up and devised a way to limit his consumption of human blood and to give him hope his curse could be put into remission that he himself did not long ago reduce Collinwood to the condition to which Gerard has brought it.

Episode 1068: Almost pleased

I wonder how long the actors had the script before they started taping this one. As unspeaking, barely mobile ghosts Gerard and Daphne, James Storm and Kate Jackson didn’t need much prep time; as lunatics Carolyn Fredericks (neé Stoddard) and Quentin Collins, Nancy Barrett and David Selby probably didn’t need much more. But vampire Barnabas Collins has a lot of dialogue today, and Jonathan Frid rarely seems to be within a country mile of his scripted lines. That isn’t so unusual, but Grayson Hall’s trouble really stands out. Barnabas’ friend, Julia Hoffman, MD, is possessed by Gerard and is pleased that Barnabas keeps meeting with one failure after another. We are supposed to know this, Barnabas isn’t. But she has a huge grin on her face each time she gloats to Barnabas about one of his setbacks. The one time Frid is clearly delivering a line that was written for him, Barnabas tells a conspicuously blissed-out Julia that she seems “almost pleased.” Hall was a highly accomplished actress, and we would expect her to be able to do “secretly pleased” in her sleep. But when this line comes up, she gets a bad laugh.

Far and away the happiest we have ever seen Julia, this strikes Barnabas as “almost pleased.”

The episode ends with Barnabas going to the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in response to a note from Carolyn. He finds her sitting at the desk there. He talks to her for a moment, then notices that she is not moving. He touches her, and she falls over dead. The episode has its problems, but that is an extremely effective closing curtain.

Episode 1067: Collinwood works on all our imaginations

Dark Shadows just spent sixteen weeks in an alternate universe where Quentin Collins was neither the family-annihilating ghost he was when first we saw him in December 1968 nor the charming rogue we got to know when the show went back in time in March 1969. Instead, he was a foul-tempered sourpuss who treated his wife like an irritating child and refused to learn anything from anyone. Like those previous iterations of the character, “Parallel Time” Quentin had a compulsion to choke people, but unlike them he was no fun to watch.

Now we have traveled forward in time to the year 1995. Here, Quentin is an escaped mental patient who is sometimes extremely docile and at other times just as extremely refractory. But one thing hasn’t changed, which is his zeal for strangling anyone who bothers him. He sees the elderly Timothy Eliot Stokes, expert in the supernatural, and at once grabs him by the throat. Quentin’s friend Barnabas Collins pulls him off of Stokes. Barnabas suggests that Dr Julia Hoffman should give Quentin a sedative. He responds “The only sedative I need is to get my hands around Stokes’s neck. I’ll be calm for the rest of my life!” That’s our Quentin.

Barnabas tries to keep Quentin from giving Stokes his signature Collinwood Handshake. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin blames Stokes for the fact that the estate of Collinwood has been a demon-ridden ruin for the last 25 years. Stokes has been telling Julia and Barnabas that it was that way when he got there. He returned from a trip to Europe in the autumn of 1970, a few months after Barnabas and Julia left on their journey into the alternate universe and out to this future year, and found the place in its current condition and everyone associated with it destroyed in one way or another. But Quentin says that the real disaster came only when Stokes tried to exorcize a ghost. That just made the ghost angry.

Once Quentin is out of the way, Barnabas tells Stokes he believes that Quentin’s madness is a symptom of the ghost’s continued hegemony over Collinwood. He is determined to try another exorcism. Stokes advises him against it, but says he will try to help him if he does go ahead.

Meanwhile, the ghost, who according to the credits is named Gerard, has taken possession of Julia. The ghost has ordered Julia to do something she does not want to do. She keeps this from Barnabas. She tells Barnabas they should give up and go away. He refuses, and she sadly says that whatever will happen will happen. From the look on her face, it seems that the ghost has ordered her to do away with Barnabas and she is resigned to the idea that she will eventually obey this command.

There are other ghosts in the area as well. Yesterday Julia and Barnabas saw the ghosts of two teenagers who were apparently named Tad and Carrie while they danced a minuet and exchanged a chaste kiss, and they heard Quentin talking earnestly to an invisible person he called Daphne. A woman with long black hair briefly comes into Barnabas’ view in his parlor today; the credits confirm that she is Daphne. Anyone who watched US television in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s will already know that she is Kate Jackson, and might be interested to know that she is making her first screen appearance.

When Daphne appears, the air smells of lilacs. That comes as something of a relief. The opening voiceover told us that Collinwood is ruled by “a ghost whose mere presence corrupts the surrounding air.” That would suggest rather a less pleasant odor than that of lilac perfume.

The ghost of the gracious Josette was the chief supernatural presence on the show for its first 42 weeks, and an occasional visitor for some time after. Her signature was the scent of jasmine, so longtime viewers are getting a hint that Daphne will turn out to be important.

Episode 1066: And all that

For many months starting in late 1968, the estate of Collinwood was haunted by the ghost of Quentin Collins. Quentin’s presence became steadily more intolerable until the living members of the Collins family had to abandon the great house in #694. At the end of that episode, we saw Quentin standing on the walkway at the top of the foyer stairs, laughing in triumph.

Vampire Barnabas Collins traveled back in time in #701 and blundered around until history was changed. In #838, set in September 1897, Quentin’s death was prevented. On the anniversary of that event in September 1969, the haunting broke, though the people who lived through it remembered Quentin’s ghost and the events of the haunting. A magic spell was cast on Quentin keeping him forever young, and late in 1969 he took his place among the Collinses whom he had once driven from the family home.

Now, Barnabas and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, have come unstuck in time again. They find themselves in Collinwood in the year 1995. The house is in ruins, the members of the family either dead, missing, or insane, and the village of Collinsport full of people who won’t answer any of their questions. Quentin is around, having escaped from a psychiatric facility and come back to the estate. Today, Barnabas and Julia have taken him to the great house to try to get him to tell them something useful.

Julia and Barnabas want Quentin to see an upstairs room that is in much better shape than the rest of the house. They open the door, and see a ghost which appears to be strange and troubled teen David Collins. Quentin flees in terror and makes his way to the foyer while Barnabas and Julia watch the ghost vanish.

Quentin finds that he cannot open the front doors. He sees the ghost of a young man staring at him from the walkway at the top of the stairs. Like Quentin during “The Haunting of Collinwood,” this ghost has lots of curly black hair, does not speak, and wears a dark suit from the nineteenth century. Since David Selby is very tall and James Storm is rather the other thing, I can’t help but think of him as Mini-Quentin. The credits tell us that his name is Gerard.

Quentin cannot abide the sight of Mini-Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin rolls around on the floor, terrified of Gerard. Barnabas and Julia come and try to calm him down. Quentin says the doors won’t open; Barnabas opens them. Quentin runs out. Julia says she senses an evil presence, which, considering that every character we’ve seen so far is a murderer, is not too surprising. She and Barnabas leave.

Two ghosts dance a minuet by the gazebo. Julia and Barnabas think that one of the ghosts is David; the other is a blonde girl whom they do not recognize. The ghosts kiss each other. They walk towards the woods and vanish.

Barnabas and Julia go to the Old House on the estate. They find Quentin, and overhear him talking in an anguished voice to someone named “Daphne.” He tells them that the ghost they saw was not David Collins, but was named Tad. Julia remembers that they found a birthday card addressed to “Tad” and signed “Carrie.” If the ghost who looks like David is actually Tad, one might assume that the blonde girl is Carrie, though she could be Daphne or some other personage.

The next afternoon, Quentin finds Julia sleeping in an armchair in the parlor of the Old House. He asks to see Barnabas. Julia reacts with puzzlement. She says Quentin knows perfectly well that Barnabas cannot rise until the sun sets. He says he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Julia is shocked. Once you’ve learned that a fellow is a vampire, that information doesn’t usually slip your mind. But he seems quite sincere. He wanders off.

The blonde girl appears at the window and beckons to Julia. Julia follows her, silently. It seems at first that Julia is in a trance, since she does not call to the girl by the names “Carrie” or “Daphne.” But when the girl leads her into the great house, Julia keeps moving her head around as she watches her step, making it clear she is wide awake. The girl leads her into the strangely intact room, where Gerard is waiting for her.

Danny Horn’s post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day is full of remarks about how cleverly they blur the line between soundtrack music that the characters can’t hear and atmospheric sounds that they can, disorienting us in a way that adds greatly to the effect of the scares and confusion. It is indeed powerful, and there is a lot of other good stuff in this one.

But this is the first episode of the 1995 segment I wouldn’t show to someone new to Dark Shadows to entice them into watching the show. The pacing is just too slow for the material. We have time to start asking questions that take us out of the story. For example, Julia and Barnabas lament that they have no idea what is going on and are desperate for Quentin to tell them what he knows. But as soon as he volunteers a piece of information, telling him that they saw Tad’s ghost rather than David’s they flatly contradict him. Also, Julia gives Quentin a sedative. We wonder where she got it, since her prescription pad is 25 years out of date and any samples she had in her bag have been sitting out, unrefrigerated and exposed to dry rot, for that same period. Those and other incongruities are the sorts of things we could easily overlook if we were moving as fast as we moved in all five episodes last week, but when events move as leisurely as they do today they mean trouble.