Tag: good acting trumps bad writing

Episode 965: The charred and blackened stars

The Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods, plan to retake the Earth and destroy humankind, and their harbinger is a shape-shifting monster who has taken the form of a tall young man and asked people to call him Jabe. Their plan requires that Jabe join himself to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in an unholy ceremony that will transform Carolyn into the same kind of squamous, rugose, and paleogean creature Jabe defaults to being. Jabe has fallen in love with Carolyn, but so far from redoubling his determination to fulfill the plan his feelings have turned him against it. He wants to renounce his powers, become truly human, and make a life with Carolyn as she is. Though Jabe’s personality has been so obnoxious that even people brainwashed into supporting the Leviathans’ whole program have gotten fed up with him and become his enemies, he has somehow won Carolyn’s heart. She doesn’t know that he is a monster from beyond space and time, still less that he murdered her father and several other people. She is in love with the man he appears to be, and he wants to become that man in fact.

I first shared my thoughts about Dark Shadows online in the comments section of Danny Horn’s great blog Dark Shadows Every Day. In his post about #962, Danny identifies a major problem with the relationship between Carolyn and Jabe:

But both sides have apparently agreed to shield Carolyn from the big sinister secret, so in practice, she hasn’t had very much to do, except to fall passionately in love with Jeb, because of reasons.

As I’ve said before, I don’t know why Carolyn likes Jeb, and I’ve been scratching at that itch for a while. But today, I think I figured out the real problem with her character arc, and it’s all about the let’s-break-antiques scene.

This was Carolyn and Jeb’s first date, back in episode 940. I didn’t write about it at the time, because I had other things to say, and I didn’t realize how important it was until now.

The scene takes place in the antique shop, and it starts with Jeb gazing at her, and sighing, “I’m going to be very happy with you.”

She’s puzzled. “What made you say that?”

“Because I felt it,” he shrugs. “Haven’t you ever said or done what you felt?”

“Sometimes I do.”

“I do it all the time,” Jeb smirks, and swaggers across the room. “Everybody should. I always do what I feel. Right now, I feel like doing this.”

And then he picks up a porcelain figurine from a nearby display, and smashes it on the floor.

Carolyn is horrified, obviously. “Jeb, you shouldn’t have done that!”

He smiles. “Why not?”

“That was an antique, and it didn’t even belong to you!”

“Haven’t you ever felt like breaking something?”

She stops short. “Yes,” she says, “but…”

“Well, then, let’s see you break this.”

Then he picks up another figurine.

“Go on,” he says, offering it to her. “Break it.”

She looks into his eyes, and says, “I wish I could begin to understand you.”

“Maybe you can,” he says, “if you just free yourself. Go on. Just let it drop from your hand.”

[Smash]

He smiles, and opens a bottle of wine. She asks what he’s doing, and he says, “We’re going to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“Your liberation.”

“I don’t understand.”

He hands her the drink. “Oh, you will… soon.”

It’s a weird scene, and it should have been followed immediately by a dozen more weird scenes along the same lines. This should have been the storyline.

After all, the whole point of the Leviathan threat is that they’re going to take Carolyn, a character that we love and root for, and turn her into a hideous gargantuan, rutting with her blasphemous mate and raising a brood of ambidextrous deathstalkers.

And in the let’s-break-antiques scene, they set up the idea that Jeb is going to change Carolyn’s personality, leading her step by step into his dark world, in the service of her “liberation” from boring traditional values, like respect for other people’s ugly decor. We should have seen her going down that path, becoming more and more estranged from the family and friends who aren’t part of this nightmare death cult.

Except they didn’t. The champagne was drugged, and she blacked out, and since then, they haven’t even touched on the idea that Jeb might be leaving a stain on Carolyn’s soul.

Now, this is a show that’s explored a dozen varieties of hypnosis and possession in minute detail, so it’s not like they don’t know how to write a story like that. They just didn’t. To the extent that we believe that Carolyn loves Jeb, it’s an entirely innocent, human infatuation with a handsome stranger, who she’s unfortunately not really allowed to know very much about.

Because they can’t change Carolyn.

This is an enormous problem for the show, and it’ll be one of the key pieces to the puzzle of Who Killed Dark Shadows. There are four core family members, and they are untouchable. They don’t experience any lasting change, starting around early 1968 and continuing until the end of the show. Sure, they have moments of temporary hypnosis and possession, everybody does, but they don’t actually change.

And if Carolyn can’t change, even a little, then that means there’s no future, just a status quo that leads inexorably towards entropy, and the heat death of this fictional universe.

Danny Horn, “Episode 962: The Second Law of Thermodynamics,” posted 30 November 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

My main role in Danny’s comments was to draw connections between the episodes he discussed and the episodes from the first 42 weeks of the show, which he made a point of not discussing. In response to the above, I wrote:

It is too bad that the show got to the point where the only stories that counted were the supernatural ones. Not that those shouldn’t always have been the A stories, but there should have been room for B stories where we explore the characters’ personalities and see how humans might react if they were to find themselves living in a world like that of DARK SHADOWS.

As it turned out, it was difficult to do much with human characters even within the supernatural stories. Danny’s hypothetical series of scenes between Carolyn and Jabe where we see Carolyn being seduced to the dark side could have been very powerful if we’d been tracing Carolyn’s evolution from tempestuous, self-centered, spoiled rich girl of 1966 and 1967 to the relatively calm, responsible young woman we saw in 1968 and 1969. They could then keep us in continual suspense- would Carolyn continue to grow into a powerful matriarch, or would the shock of one otherworldly horror after another shatter all her progress and send her reeling back to her most unsympathetic moments? Since we haven’t had scenes focusing on Carolyn’s personality and relationships since Jason McGuire was on the show, and we aren’t expecting any to come ever again, hav[ing] a thread like that on the show at this point would seem as out of place as does a week spent documenting in exhaustive detail the evolution of Bruno’s attitude towards Jeb.

Comment left 29 December 2020 by “Acilius” on Danny Horn, “Episode 962: The Second Law of Thermodynamics,” posted 30 November 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

Nancy Barrett is a superb actor, and while she is on camera we believe that Carolyn loves Jabe. But she has to create this impression from the ground up every time she appears. Nothing that is happening reinforces it. Not only does her love for Jabe pop into being out of nowhere, but because she is not involved with anything he is doing it cannot motivate her to take any significant actions. Today Jabe and Carolyn stand before an altar while a high priest of the cult devoted to the Leviathans is performing the ceremony meant to unite them in horrid monstrosity. But Carolyn is there, not because of any decisions she has made or feelings she has, but because she has been hypnotized by the high priest.

I am reminded of the 2006 film Idiocracy. An average man from the early twenty first century suddenly finds himself in a future where everyone has a very low mentality. He goes to the movies and discovers that the most popular film of the era is called Ass. It is a 90 minute closeup of a pair of flatulent buttocks. When he becomes head of state, the protagonist explains that in his day there was something called a “story.” He describes a story as “a way of making you care whose ass it is and why it is farting.” That’s what the Leviathans segment lacks. The execution is good enough to make us believe that particular things are happening, but there is nothing to make us care who is making them happen or why they want them to happen.

One of the few forms of narrative that is still cultivated in the world of Idiocracy is professional wrestling, a dramatic genre in which villainous characters often have changes of heart and become heroic. This is known as the “heel-face turn” (as opposed to the “face-heel turn,” which is the opposite character development.) They have been working on Jabe’s heel-face turn for a few days. Yesterday he asked mad scientist Julia Hoffman to cure him of whatever it is that makes him revert to his monstrous form. Christopher Pennock and Grayson Hall played that scene so well that we wished we could ignore everything else in the episode and believe in it. Jabe started the episode by ordering four zombies whom he had raised from the dead to murder five people: Julia; her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins; two distant cousins of Barnabas’, Quentin Collins and Roger Collins; and Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis. Jabe told Julia he would not kill her or Barnabas if she complied with his request, but at the end of the episode he had the zombies stuff Quentin in a coffin and bury him alive. After that, we could hardly believe that Jabe had changed at all.

Today, Barnabas is at home when Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, bursts into his front parlor. She tells him she is sure Quentin is trapped somewhere and has no more than an hour to live. Barnabas has no idea how Maggie can know this, and she can’t explain it herself. The camera zooms in on a trident drawn on her hand, and regular viewers know what is going on. A while ago, Barnabas’ ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique, cast a spell on Maggie and Quentin causing them to feel an overwhelming love for each other at irregular intervals. Angelique thought this would make Barnabas unhappy, but he hasn’t noticed it, and he has so much else going on right now it seems unlikely he’d care much one way or the other if he did. The spell enables Maggie to lead Barnabas to the grave where Quentin is trapped and to tell Barnabas to dig it up. Quentin is fine when they exhume him, so if anything Barnabas should be glad of Angelique’s spell.

When Quentin comes out of the coffin, he says his only problem is that his legs hurt. Since he is 6’4″ tall and the coffin is at most 5′ long, that’s understandable. He says that Jabe told him he had something out of the ordinary in store for him. Now he knows that whatever else Jabe may be, “he’s a man of his word!” Usually David Selby’s accent raises a bit of a puzzle- why is the rakish scion of an aristocratic old New England family also an amiable West Virginian? But Mr Selby’s delivery of this line, with its note of appreciation for Jabe’s forthrightness, is so perfect that you could never wish him different in any way.

The high priest of the Leviathan cult whom we will see presiding at Jabe and Carolyn’s joining ceremony is none other than suave warlock Nicholas Blair, who was well known around the great estate of Collinwood in 1968. Nicholas finds Julia working on a chemistry experiment preparatory to her project of humanizing Jabe; he smashes her equipment and says he will let her live if she goes away and does not interfere with the Leviathans’ project.

When Nicholas calls on Carolyn to hypnotize her, she recognizes him and expresses mild surprise that he is back. When she insists on addressing him as “Mr Blair,” he tells her that her mother called him by his first name. She replies, “Well, that’s my mother’s business,” and asks him again why he is there.

Jabe visits Julia at Barnabas’ house and pleads with her to do something for him tonight. She says that even if that were possible, she would refuse to do it, since she knows that he buried Quentin alive a few hours ago. He says that she must believe that he is “a changed man” who is willing to “live and let live,” though he is not free to explain what has brought this change on. Barnabas comes downstairs and gives Jabe a dirty look.

The joining is underway at a cairn in the woods. Only people associated with the Leviathans can see the cairn. A small wooden box sits on the cairn; Jabe originally emerged from that box, four months ago, back when he was nothing more than a whistling sound. Nicholas stands to one side, obscured by branches, reciting a lot of mumbo-jumbo and waving a long rod. Jabe and Carolyn stand together on the other side. Nicholas orders Jabe to take the rod. He does. He stands behind the raised part of the cairn that serves as an altar and faces the box.

Perhaps not Carolyn’s dream wedding. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

At that moment, Jabe shouts “Now, Barnabas! Get her now, Barnabas!” Barnabas leaps from behind the foliage, grabs Carolyn by the arm, and runs off with her; Jabe brings the rod down on the box, smashing it. Nicholas exclaims “You fool, do you know what you’ve done!? Better leave now or we’ll both go up in it!” The cairn glows and collapses; Nicholas and Jabe stand together off to the side, watching. Jabe clutches himself by the middle, groans, and passes out.

The cairn’s last moment. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The pair that is actually joined by the ceremony. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Watching it this time, I was not only surprised by Jabe’s “Now, Barnabas! Get her now, Barnabas!”; I remembered being surprised by it last time we watched the show through. It really is a thrilling moment, one of many in the Leviathans segment. But since it exhausts all of the elements in that segment from which a story could have been built, and since there is absolutely no other storyline going just now, I’m afraid the comparison to Idiocracy’s movie-in-a-movie Ass has to stand.

Episode 964: Plan 9 from Down East

We are approaching the end of the sixteenth week of a segment made up of material drawn from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. Central to this is the idea of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who want to retake the Earth and eliminate humankind. There has been a lot of good stuff in these episodes, but it hasn’t come together as a unit. At this point, the narrative seems to be falling apart completely.

The harbinger of the Leviathans, who appears to be a tall man in his mid twenties named Jeb but is in fact a four-month old shape-shifting monster who would rather be called Jabe, has lost interest in the plan and wishes he could be a real boy. Jabe has alienated virtually everyone with whom he has come into contact, including people who were under heavy mind-control meant to turn them into his slaves, and has been reduced to raising four recently deceased men to serve him as zombies.

Yesterday, he ordered the zombies to kill five of his enemies. The targets he listed were mad scientist Julia Hoffman, vampire Barnabas Collins, Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis, and Barnabas’ distant cousins Roger Collins and Quentin Collins. The zombies have abducted Julia and brought her to Jabe’s house. She is welcomed there by a man named Sky Rumson. Sky is not a zombie, but may as well be for all the skill Geoffrey Scott brings to the role. When Scott recites his dialogue, you get the impression that he is telling you what an actor would say had they cast one in the part. Grayson Hall could fill any stage without support, making Julia’s scene with Sky relatively painless, but if it was meant to have any significance the audience will never know what that was.

Sky and a zombie force Julia into the back room of the house, where Jabe is in the squamous, rugose, and paleogean form of the true Leviathan. She is terrified by the sight. Jabe resumes his human shape. He and Julia go back to the living room, where he confides in her that he doesn’t want to take his Leviathan form ever again. He wants to renounce his powers and become human. He knows that Julia is giving Barnabas treatments to put his vampirism into remission, and that she succeeded with such treatments when Barnabas was under a different vampire curse in 1968. He asks her to help him rid himself of his Leviathan side. She is unsure she will be able to do so, but can’t resist the challenge. By the end of the scene, she is figuring out what tests she will have to run to diagnose the biochemical basis of Jabe’s condition.

Christopher Pennock really was a fine actor, and he is outstanding in this scene. He sounds like a deeply lonely, helplessly confused young boy who can’t figure out how to overcome the consequences of his own abuse of the people around him. Jabe’s request for Julia’s help and his agreement to lay off Barnabas as the price for it doesn’t fit with the orders he gave the zombies yesterday, the actions he takes later today, or anything else in the Leviathan story, and is a sign that the plot is falling apart faster than the writers can patch it up. But he and Hall are so splendid in showing Jabe’s neediness and Julia’s response to it that it doesn’t matter.

Meanwhile, Sky is at the great house of Collinwood, looking for Jabe’s foster mother-turned-makeout partner Megan Todd (it was 1970, everyone took Freud very seriously.) He meets Roger and Quentin there. They hold him at sword point until he tells them where Julia is and how to get past the zombies. To the extent that there is a reason for Sky to be on the show, it is to illustrate how total the control is the Leviathans have over the minds of the people they have co-opted, so when he gives in so quickly to Quentin’s threat to give him a scar (not even to kill him, just to compromise his potential as a model for deodorant ads) he dissolves the last prospect that the Leviathans themselves will be a danger we can care about.

Quentin goes off to rescue Julia, and Roger assumes responsibility for holding the sword. He is momentarily distracted when he sees Megan in the window, and Sky takes advantage, disarming Roger and running out of the house. Outside, he meets Megan and tells her that Jabe is upset with her for some reason. She asks if he is afraid of her. He is puzzled by the question, and tells her she is very beautiful. She invites him to look at her. As he does, she opens her mouth, revealing vampire’s fangs. She bites him.

Megan finds breakfast. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin arrives at Jabe’s house. Jabe is surprised to see him, but not surprised Sky was too chicken to keep any of his secrets. He orders the zombies to seize Quentin. The tall, portly, shaven headed zombie, who wears a mustache that keeps him from being mistaken for Tor Johnson in Plan 9 from Outer Space, slaps Quentin in the face a single time. With this, Quentin instantly loses consciousness. Yesterday, other zombies slapped Julia and Roger in the face, each a single time, and each of them instantly lost consciousness as well. Great ones with slaps, the zombies.

Jabe instructs the zombies to stuff Quentin into a coffin that is about three feet too short for him, and then has them carry it all the way to the cemetery. He has them bury Quentin in a grave that one of them had recently vacated. I suppose real-estate flipping has been interesting to TV viewers for longer than I had thought.

There is a famous goof in today’s episode. When Quentin grabs the sword out of its display on the wall of the Collinwood drawing room*, the lamp underneath it falls off the table and smashes on the floor. You know this wasn’t supposed to happen because it takes place out of frame and you can hear the stagehands sweeping the floor while Sky is pinned to the wall. Also, Dan Curtis was way too tight with a buck to break a lamp for the sake of a scene that’s mainly about a character as minor as Sky Rumson. It’s a shame they couldn’t have pulled the camera back and shown the lamp shattering, it would have been perfectly suited to the moment. And if they had to sweep up the wreckage right then, well, it would have been hilarious if housekeeper Mrs Johnson had come in with her broom and dustpan, taken care of the mess, and left without a word about what Quentin and Roger were doing to Sky.

A fine lamp about to meet its doom. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

*Something he first did in #703, when he and Barnabas first met. He knocked a lamp over then, too.

Episode 949: Not that Quentin Collins

Ten year old Amy Jennings is at home in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Evidently she’s in a literal mood- she’s in the drawing room, so she’s drawing. Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard sees Amy’s work and asks why she is doing it. Amy says she thinks the design is “pretty”; Carolyn replies that “pretty” is the last thing she would call it. That may seem rather rude, but as Amy hasn’t been seen since #912 I suppose she’ll take what she can get.

The design is one which on Dark Shadows is called simply a Naga. It is the secret emblem of a secret cult serving the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods. Secret cultist Megan Todd wears the Naga on a large pendant around her neck; Megan’s husband, secret cultist Philip, wears it on a shining ring; Carolyn’s mother, secret cultist Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, wears it as an oversized broach. Amy herself is a secret member of the secret cult, but she hasn’t yet acquired any conspicuous jewelry emblazoned with the secret symbol, leaving her to do her own artwork. Carolyn wonders aloud why so many people are so preoccupied with the design.

Quentin Collins enters. Amy is terrified. Starting in December 1968, Quentin’s ghost haunted Collinwood. By March, the house was uninhabitable and strange and troubled boy David Collins was near death. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins tried some mumbo-jumbo in hopes of communicating with Quentin; he came unstuck in time and found himself in the year 1897, where he remained for eight months. While Barnabas was flailing about in the late Victorian era, time continued to pass in 1969, and Quentin’s obsession of David finally killed him in September. But a sequence of events with which Barnabas had a tenuous connection changed the circumstances on the night in September 1897 when Quentin originally died, causing him to survive. That night, as it happened, was exactly 72 years before David’s death. On Dark Shadows, anniversaries have the power that laws of nature have in our world, so that caused the haunting to break and David to come back to life. Due to a series of spells cast on him during Barnabas’ sojourn in the past, Quentin is still alive and still apparently in his late twenties in 1970. But the haunting still happened between December 1968 and September 1969, and everyone who lived through it still remembers it.

Quentin has introduced himself to Carolyn as his own great-grandson. Since Carolyn never actually saw his ghost, she is willing to accept this. But Amy had more dealings with the ghost than anyone but David, and it is obvious to her that they are one and the same. She clings to Carolyn.

Amy knows a Quentin when she sees one. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn laughs at Amy’s fear and tells her that this Quentin is not the ghost, but is “a cousin of ours.” This is intriguing to regular viewers. It was during the 1897 segment that the audience learned that Quentin was the great-grandfather of Amy and her brother Chris, and just a few weeks ago that Chris learned about that relationship. It is through their descent from Quentin that Amy and Chris are cousins to Carolyn. So if Amy knows she is a Collins, she must have been told that the ghost that tormented her and David was that of her great-grandfather. A scene in which someone gave her that information might have been a good use of Denise Nickerson’s considerable acting talent, but they didn’t bother to produce one.

Quentin tells Carolyn to leave him alone with Amy. Still chuckling, she complies. Once they are alone in the drawing room, Quentin kneels and touches Amy’s face, assuring her that he is “not that Quentin Collins.” David Selby brought immense charm to the role of Quentin, so this scene isn’t as revolting as it might have been, but it is still pretty bad, and we can’t be surprised that Amy is not satisfied.

Amy goes to the village of Collinsport to seek guidance from her spiritual advisor. He is a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time who usually takes the form of a very tall young man. When he first assumed that form, he invited people to “Call me Jabe,” but no one did. They call him “Jeb” instead, and he answers to it.

Jabe lives in a room above Megan and Philip’s antique shop, and when Amy enters the shop she finds him looking after the place. Apparently shape-shifting monsters from beyond space and time aren’t above doing a little work in retail now and then. She tells Jabe about her encounter with Quentin, and then tells him about a dream she had. In the dream, she went into the long-disused room where she and David first met Quentin. Quentin’s theme song, a sickly little waltz, was playing; she exclaims “It was terrible!” Longtime viewers know the feeling. The tune played incessantly during the “Haunting of Collinwood” period, and when they went back to 1897 characters kept complaining to the living Quentin that he was making them miserable by playing it on his phonograph all the time.

In the dream, Quentin appeared to Amy wearing the nineteenth century clothing and the angry scowl that he wore when he was a ghost. But when he was a ghost, he never spoke words the audience could hear. The only exception was a dream sequence in #767, when Quentin’s ghost spoke to David. That was also the only other dream sequence to be presented as this one is, in flashback as the dreamer is recounting it after the fact. That sequence marked a watershed, the first attempt to explain how Quentin the cranky ghost emerged from Quentin the charming scoundrel we had got to know in the 1897 segment.

This episode, also, has to do with the relationship between these two iterations of Quentin. Amy tells Jabe that Quentin’s ghost in the dream warned her against him by name, and says that she is therefore convinced that the living man she met in the drawing room today is in some way identical to the ghost who haunted the house for those ten months. Amy’s dream marks the final appearance of Quentin’s ghost, but we can see the ghost will not be forgotten.

A state police investigator named Lawrence Guthrie is in town looking into two murders Jabe has committed, those of Carolyn’s father Paul and of a law enforcement officer whose gravestone revealed that his given name was “Sheriff Davenport” (we never learn what Mr Davenport’s title was.) Jabe orders Philip to kill Guthrie. Philip calls Guthrie and asks him to come to the antique shop when Jabe will be out. Once Guthrie is there, Philip tells him that the upstairs room where Jabe stays is an important part of the story of the murders. He shows Guthrie into the room. He stays outside, and locks Guthrie in. Guthrie encounters Jabe there in his true form; Jabe kills him. This is quite effectively handled. My wife, Mrs Acilius, was completely caught off guard by the killing. She believed Philip really was trying to break free of the Leviathan cult, and wondered what Guthrie was supposed to find in the room.

Neither Jabe nor Philip is an especially well-developed character, but Christopher Bernau and Christopher Pennock were both fine actors, and they play off each other very well today. It is a tribute to their performances that Guthrie’s death scene comes as a surprise.

At the end, Quentin is at Collinwood trying to tell Carolyn that it was Jabe who killed her father and Mr S. Davenport. Inexplicably, Carolyn is interested in dating Jabe, and is unwilling to listen to this. Jabe bursts in and announces that there has been another murder, that the murderer is in custody, and that he has confessed to it and to the killings of Paul and Sheriff. That murderer, Jabe says, is Philip. That’s another surprise- after the murder of Guthrie, Jabe did tell Philip that he had another task to perform, and once we hear that he has confessed to the killings it makes perfect sense that that would have been what Jabe meant. But I don’t think anyone could have predicted it. It makes for a strong ending.

Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day is a lovely little bit of fanfic proceeding from the assumption that Lawrence Guthrie is the brother of Dr Peter Guthrie, the parapsychologist whom undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins killed in March 1967.

The closing credits again misspell writer Violet Welles’ name as “Wells.” They started doing that last week, around the same time the misspelling of wardrobe house Ohrbach’s as “Orhbach’s,” a frequent goof in the show’s first year, reappeared after a long absence.

Episode 827: Magnificent, ain’t I?

Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana and his Afro-Romani henchman Istvan have cornered broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi on top of the cliff at Widows’ Hill. King Johnny declares that he will now kill Magda. She is a major character, it’s a Tuesday, and this is the resolution of yesterday’s cliffhanger, so we have three reasons for expecting her to survive.

However, none of the three reasons is as strong as it might at first appear. First, while Magda precipitated every major storyline in the segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897, none of those stories needs any further action from her to continue right now. We’ve also had an indication that Grayson Hall’s original character, Julia Hoffman, will soon be returning to the cast. Second, Dark Shadows never followed the traditional soap opera format in which important developments were reserved for week-ending finales. Third, while the great majority of episode-ending cliffhangers fizzled out in the opening seconds of the next installment, occasionally they did go ahead and resolve one with a death. Besides, as my wife Mrs Acilius points out, Magda laid her husband Sandor’s ghost to rest at the top of the episode, and it is called Widows’ Hill because widows go there to die. So there actually is some suspense as to whether King Johnny will make good on his threat.

Time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins shows up at the last moment and orders King Johnny to release Magda. King Johnny refuses and orders Istvan to throw Barnabas off the cliff. Barnabas looks into Istvan’s eyes, using his power of hypnosis. Once Istvan is under his control, Barnabas compels him to walk off the cliff. King Johnny then realizes who Barnabas is. He holds Barnabas at bay with a cross. Barnabas tells him that he can reclaim what Magda stole from him, but only if he lets her go. At that, King Johnny becomes cooperative. Too bad Barnabas didn’t open with that- Istvan could have lived. Fortunately for Barnabas and Magda, King Johnny forgets about Istvan instantly.

King Johnny shows off his hand-chopping clothes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

For a hundred years, King Johnny’s tribe kept as its most prized possession The Hand of Count Petofi. This was literally a severed hand, cut from a Hungarian nobleman. Count Petofi was a sorcerer, and when nine Rroma men severed his right hand in a forest one night in 1797, most of his power went with it. Magda stole the Hand in hopes that she could use that power to undo a spell she herself had cast, but found that the Hand would not obey her. Now Count Petofi himself, 150 years of age, has reclaimed the Hand, and it is once more attached to his wrist. He is hugely powerful and a great problem for Barnabas.

Barnabas tells King Johnny what has happened. King Johnny turns out to be the one person in the world over whom Petofi has no power. In return for Petofi’s location, King Johnny agrees to return with the Hand and lift the curse Magda regrets. In his purple robe, King Johnny goes to Petofi’s hiding place. He and Petofi have a long and rather pointless conversation. Finally, Petofi is strapped to his chair and King Johnny raises his sacred scimitar, ready to re-sever the Hand.

This is a less suspenseful cliffhanger than yesterday’s. Petofi is still generating story; in fact, he is the only character who is. The hideout is Petofi’s territory; we have seen him thwarted there, but the defeats he suffered only confirmed that it is not a place where major changes take place in the direction of the narrative. And the meandering dialogue between Petofi and King Johnny deflates all the dramatic tension. Returning viewers have plenty of time to remember that, while Petofi’s magic may be useless against King Johnny, Petofi’s henchman Aristide is somewhere around, and he is quick with a knife. Without Istvan to run interference for him, King Johnny will be vulnerable to Aristide the whole time he’s dawdling around.

As King Johnny, Paul Michael has a very hard job. Not only is the character an egregious stereotype, but he really is scandalously ill-written. Violet Welles was far and away the best writer of dialogue on the show, and she manages to give a few glittering lines even to King Johnny. Still, he is ridiculous from beginning to end, a lot of menacing poses held together with a sinister laugh. That he is watchable at all is a tribute to Michael’s mastery of his craft. In his facial expressions and body language, we can see evidence of thought that is entirely absent from his words.

Episode 826: King Johnny’s court

Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana puts broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi on trial in the secret room of the old Collins family mausoleum. Evidently King Johnny has considerable magic powers; he conjures up the ghosts of several notorious murderers to serve as the jury. He also brings in the ghost of Magda’s husband to serve as the one witness for the defense.

The scenario is a remake of The Devil and Daniel Webster, a play that debuted at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1939. But the makers of Dark Shadows were likely thinking of a more recent Broadway production as well. From November 1964 to June 1965, a musical with a book by Ernest Kinoy and music by Walter Marks ran first at the Shubert Theatre, then at the Lunt-Fontanne, for a total of 232 Broadway performances. Its title is one of King Johnny’s favorite words- Bajour.

King Johnny keeps complaining that Magda tried to “pull the bajour on me!,” by which he means that she gave him one thing disguised as another. In the show, based on Joseph Mitchell’s stories of life among Rroma in the New York metropolitan area, bajour refers simply to a confidence trick with a big payoff for its perpetrators. The cast, saddled with a bunch of instantly forgettable songs, sings as joyously as it can about how the Rroma, to whom they of course refer as “gypsies,”* love nothing more than cheating lonely old women out of their life savings. This uninhibited celebration of racism reported losses of nearly a million dollars, more than twice the total amount of money invested in it. Perhaps the fictional Rroma weren’t the only ones who enjoyed running a good scam. Perhaps, too, Mel Brooks’ 1967 film The Producers wasn’t entirely a work of fiction.

The cast of Bajour does not appear to have overlapped with that of any episode of Dark Shadows. The closest link I can find to the cast at this period of the show is Michael Bennett, who danced in Bajour and later married Donna McKechnie. Many very distinguished performers appeared in Bajour, but I’m not tempted to do any imaginary recasting. I’m sure Chita Rivera and Herschel Bernardi were wonderful as leads Anyanka and Cockeye Johnny Dembo, but they couldn’t have outdone Grayson Hall and Thayer David as Magda and Sandor. Herbert Edelman was good in everything, and I’m sure his turn as “The King of Newark” was no exception, but no one could have done more than Paul Michael does to make the cartoonish role of King Johnny watchable. Paul Sorvino had a great career, and even has a screen credit in common with Henry Judd Baker- they both appeared in the disastrous 1980 film Cruising. I’m sure Sorvino would have been interesting as a replacement for Baker as Istvan, the mute Black Rroma, but that part is all about physical presence, and as was the case with Baker’s part in Cruising he is effective in a way that Sorvino could not have matched. Nancy Dussault is another performer who never lets an audience down, but Diana Davila’s approach to the character of Rroma maiden Julianka was so cleverly conceived that I couldn’t bear to think of anyone else taking the part.

While I’m on the topic of the Rroma, I want to bring up an oddity about my favorite Dark Shadows blog, Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day. When he was writing about these episodes, Danny often stopped to ridicule the idea of a Rroma tribe living in New England in 1897. Danny works for the Wikimedia Foundation; you’d think he’d be in the habit of checking Wikipedia, where the article “Romani People in the United States” would tell him that, while Rroma have been migrating to North America continually since 1498, the majority of the ancestors of the million or so Americans who now identify as Rroma came in the late nineteenth century. The new arrivals tended to take some time to assimilate to the ways of the USA; the article is, as of this writing, illustrated with a photo of a Rroma caravan near Portland, Oregon, in 1905:

Rroma caravan near Portland, Oregon, in 1905. Photograph by the Portland Oregonian, found on Wikipedia.

Most Romani-Americans are totally assimilated nowadays, so much so that many people in the USA don’t realize that there actually is such an ethnic group. But there are still Romani heritage festivals in many cities, and the last traditional caravans were still traveling the Great Plains as late as the 1940s. And in Maine in 1897, Romani caravans were a frequent sight, one that indeed aroused exactly the sort of zyganophobic** reactions Magda and Sandor encountered from virtually everyone in their first days on the show.

Even Istvan isn’t as hard to explain as Danny seems to think. In the early days of European settlement, Rroma were often brought across the Atlantic as slaves; that was the case for the people on Christopher Columbus’ third voyage in 1498. Some intermarried with enslaved people of African extraction. There are still Afro-Romani communities in Louisiana and Cuba.

I started writing about Dark Shadows in the comment sections on Danny’s blog. He made a great display of ignoring the first 42 weeks of the show, and consistently made the harshest possible judgments of the acting of Alexandra Moltke Isles, who played well-meaning governess Vicki. That created a space for me to point out when the show was harking back to its early days, and to defend Mrs Isles. I would be remiss in a post like this if I did not mention that Mrs Isles made a documentary feature in 2003 called Porraimos: Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust. I’ve never been able to get hold of a copy of the film, but the New York Times liked it when it was shown on PBS.

*Rroma sometimes call themselves Gypsies, but you can’t assume they’ll like it if an outsider uses that word.

**Zyganophobia- racism against Rroma.

Episode 789: We are going to create a thing

In #762, the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask walked in on lawyer Evan Hanley and handsome rake Quentin Collins as they were performing a Satanic rite. Trask’s response was to blackmail Evan. Trask wanted his wife Minerva out of the way so that he could marry rich spinster Judith Collins, Quentin’s sister. Threatened with exposure, Evan cast a spell on an unfortunate young man named Tim Shaw. He brainwashed Tim into reenacting the plot of The Manchurian Candidate, with Trask in the Angela Lansbury role and Evan as the People’s Republic of China. As Evan and Trask planned, Tim killed Minerva. Shortly after, Trask married Judith.

On their wedding day, Judith saw Minerva’s ghost in the corner of the drawing room in the great house of Collinwood. In yesterday’s episode, Minerva’s ghost took possession of Judith, and the closing cliffhanger showed the possessed Judith about to stab Evan with a letter opener to avenge Minerva’s death. As we open today, Judith’s brother Edward enters and prevents the stabbing, and Judith is released from possession. She can remember nothing that happened while she was under Minerva’s power, and Edward is convinced that she has gone mad.

Edward takes Judith to her room, and Trask enters. Evan tells him that Minerva’s ghost has been in touch with Judith. The ghost knows what they did, and if the contact continues Judith will know as well. Trask demands that Evan do something to prevent that, and Evan says that he can cast a spell that may turn the haunting to their advantage and neutralize Judith permanently.

The plan turns out to be the creation of a “black ghost.” The only Black actor to have had a speaking part on Dark Shadows was Beverley Hope Atkinson, who played an unnamed nurse in one scene in #563, almost a year ago. Humbert Allen Astredo, who plays Evan, was also in that scene, playing suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Atkinson was terrific, and it would be great to see her again, but it turns out that the “black ghost” is not actually black. Nor is it a ghost. This misnamed entity is a simulacrum of Minerva, a kind of supernatural hologram that Evan will fabricate and that will appear when Judith is around. This will lead Judith to believe that she is insane, thereby causing her actually to become insane and to cease to be an obstacle to Trask’s enjoyment of her wealth.

The simulacrum first shows up in a transparent form in Judith’s bedroom. Judith screams. In the drawing room, Trask and Edward hear her scream and break off a conversation in which Edward has been urging Trask to agree to annul his marriage to the obviously disturbed Judith. Judith comes downstairs. She is reluctant to explain why she screamed, and tells Edward and Trask that nothing is wrong. She and Trask go to the drawing room and talk privately. He has to prod her a bit before she will admit she saw Minerva. He tells her it was just her imagination. She considers this; after all, she was in bed when she saw the image, so it may have been a dream. But then the simulacrum appears in the drawing room, near the spot where she saw Minerva’s ghost on her wedding day. Judith sees Minerva sitting quietly and sewing. Trask pretends he does not see anything; after a bit, Judith pretends she can’t see the image either. Trask leaves Judith alone with the simulacrum. Judith goes upstairs, and the simulacrum follows her. When they reach the top of the staircase, Judith cries out in fear and tells the simulacrum to stay away from her.

Though it is disappointing to be reminded that Beverley Hope Atkinson isn’t coming back, it is always good to see Clarice Blackburn. In her interviews with the authors of the book Barnabas and Company, Nancy Barrett said that Blackburn was the best performer in the entire cast of Dark Shadows. She doesn’t have a lot to do today- she delivers the opening voiceover, we see a snapshot of her, and as the simulacrum she stands motionless in a corner, sews placidly, then is seen from behind as she follows Judith up the stairs. But if there ever was a case to prove the old cliche that no part is small when a big enough actor plays it, Blackburn makes each of these little turns into a moment viewers will remember.

Screenshots by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

As Judith, Joan Bennett also deserves a great deal of credit for getting the gaslighting plot off to a good start. For example, there is an embarrassingly ill-written scene when Judith is in her room, pacing back and forth while some vibes play on the soundtrack. A knock comes at the door, and the music stops. Judith opens the door, and no one is there. The music resumes, and she starts pacing again. There is another knock. Again the music stops, again Judith opens the door, and again no one is there. The music resumes, and she’s back to pacing. The knock comes a third time. A third time the music stops, and a third time Judith turns to the door. This time she asks who’s there. It’s Trask. She lets him in, and he denies having knocked before. Knocking on doors and running away is a pretty crude tactic even on a show with an audience consisting largely of kids aged twelve and under, and the apparent complicity of the music in Trask’s plot is the kind of thing they ridiculed in Looney Tunes cartoons. But Bennett’s soulful performance holds our attention throughout.

This is the second time Dark Shadows has shown us an adventurer trying to gaslight his new wife so that she will go away and give him unfettered access to her fortune. The first time was in March 1968, when the show was set in 1796. Naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes had married fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. Nathan discovered that Millicent had transferred all her assets to her little brother Daniel. Nathan then set about driving Millicent out of her mind so that he could take her place as Daniel’s legal guardian. That plot also featured some weak writing, but Joel Crothers and Nancy Barrett were so irresistible as Nathan and Millicent that it hardly mattered. Perhaps the writers wanted to revisit the gaslighting theme to show that this time they could consistently write scripts worthy of their outstanding cast.

Episode 743: A person of the supernatural

Rakish Quentin and time traveling vampire Barnabas have each been fighting undead blonde fire witch Laura, and today they agree to team up. This marks the beginning of their friendship, which will be central to Dark Shadows for the next 90 weeks.

The script has some problems. The dialogue between Quentin and Barnabas runs in circles, and there are scenes where, for no apparent reason, the two of them go back and forth between Barnabas’ house and the cottage where Laura is staying. But the episode is still fun. The actors deserve a lot of credit for that. David Selby and Jonathan Frid both turn in such fine performances that even the most unnecessary scenes between Quentin and Barnabas hold our interest, and Diana Millay finds ways to make Laura intriguing even when she is saddled with the disagreeable Roger Davis as her only scene partner.

There is also a happy accident with a special effect. Barnabas has called on Laura to appear in his house as a ghost; she is before him as a transparency when Quentin enters. Quentin’s presence breaks the spell, and she vanishes. In the cottage where she has been staying, a male servant whom she has bewitched is waiting for her. She reappears there; she materializes and passes out. The image of her overlaid on the picture is a little too small and a little too high in the frame, so that when she collapses she doesn’t quite reach the floor.

The result turns out to be better than it would if the effect had worked as intended. Laura’s appearance and her fainting seem to play out in a window briefly opened between one world and another.

The episode ends with Laura sending a telepathic message to Quentin’s estranged wife, madwoman Jenny. The scene plays out with Laura in voiceover while Jenny is alone in the cell where Quentin’s brother and sister have been keeping her. Laura wants Jenny to escape and kill Quentin. Again the dialogue is awkward and repetitive, but Millay and Marie Wallace save it.

Episode 729: A tired family

Libertine Quentin Collins has learned that his estranged wife, madwoman Jenny, is being kept locked up somewhere in the great house of Collinwood. He learned this when Jenny escaped and stabbed him. He also learned that his brother, stuffy Edward, and maidservant Beth Chavez are involved in the plot to keep Jenny in confinement. He spends time today trying to find out where Jenny is, openly telling both Beth and Edward that when he finds her, he will kill her.

Edward is estranged from his own wife, and just yesterday we learned that her name is Laura. Evidently she is the same sort of creature as we came to know from December 1966 to March 1967. In those days Dark Shadows was set in contemporary times, and Edward’s grandson Roger Collins was dismayed at the return of his estranged wife, who was also named Laura. That Laura was an undead blonde fire witch, a humanoid Phoenix who sought to be incinerated with her son, strange and troubled boy David Collins, so that her own life could be renewed.

Today, the year is 1897 and Edward and Laura’s nine year old daughter Nora is convinced that her mother will return after a year when she has been away and it has been forbidden to mention her name. Nora has a vision of Laura’s face in the fireplace, a vision of flames in the corridor, and a dream in which she meets Laura in the woods outside the house. At the end of the episode she wakes up, sneaks out to the woods, and finds the cloak Laura was wearing in her dream lying on the ground.

All of this is recapped from previous episodes, but actors David Selby, Louis Edmonds, and Denise Nickerson make it worth watching. As Beth, Terrayne Crawford is stiff and literal, and her awkward performance does detract from her scenes. But everyone else is so good that you don’t notice her weaknesses too much.

This episode marks the second time we hear the name “Mrs Fillmore.” In #707, we learned that Beth took substantial sums of money into the village of Collinsport to a lady of that name as part of the plot to cover up Jenny’s presence in the house. Today Beth has to remind Edward of that fact, and Quentin looks through the envelope with hundreds of dollars in banknotes meant for Mrs Fillmore.

When Nora screams that there is a fire in the upstairs hallway, Edward and Beth run towards it. Quentin just sulks in the drawing room; evidently the idea that the house is on fire bores him. By the time Beth and Edward get upstairs, the flames Nora saw have vanished, and nothing is burned. She swears that there was a fire, they cannot believe her. This echoes #400, when wicked witch Angelique cast a spell that caused time-traveling governess Vicki to see flames in her room in the Old House on the estate, and subsequently Vicki’s friends were puzzled that there was no indication there of anything burned. That confusion led to trouble for Vicki, and longtime viewers can imagine it is a sign of trouble for Nora as well.

Yesterday, Nora drew a series of Egyptian hieroglyphics saying that her mother was coming home. At the beginning of her dream, a maniacal Edward holds an oversized copy of that drawing and rips it up, declaring Laura will never be back. The oversized drawing harks back all the way to episode #722, when Nora’s governess, neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond, had a dream in which the daffy Carl Collins held a gigantic pocket watch. That was a striking enough image that not even the Vaseline almost entirely covering the lens could ruin it. But today even less of the picture is legible, and the gambit isn’t fresh anymore. Louis Edmonds does do a fine job of laughing maniacally, though, I will grant that.

The picture really does look like that, and it is supposed to look like that. Director Henry Kaplan was not much of a visual artist. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 592: Why isn’t it showing some sign of life?

Frankenstein’s monster Adam has threatened to go on a murder spree unless old world gentleman Barnabas and mad scientist Julia build him a mate. He has further demanded that heiress Carolyn donate the “life force” that will animate his bride. We open today with a reprise of yesterday’s ending in which the experiment begins and immediately goes wrong. Julia announces that unless the mate comes to life in the next sixty seconds, Carolyn will die. They show us a clock. Sixty seconds pass, and the mate doesn’t come to life. So I guess Carolyn is dead now.

When we return from the opening titles, Adam insists on taking Carolyn from the laboratory. Julia says that Carolyn is in a bad way. Using a bit of Collinsport English, she says that Carolyn’s “pulsebeat” is decreasing. Alarmed, Barnabas asks if she might die. Julia reluctantly admits that it is possible. Evidently the opening titles wiped their memories clean of her earlier statement about the sixty seconds that would determine Carolyn’s fate.

Adam and Carolyn share a scene in the upstairs bedroom. Robert Rodan and Nancy Barrett do a wonderful job of acting, enough to save the episode from the “Stinkers” label. As Carolyn describes what she saw while she was unconscious during the experiment, images of sculpted pieces depicting body parts are superimposed on the screen over her face. She says she “saw something in the fog… hazy forms, floating in the air. They began to take shape. A collection of dead things, disconnected, coming toward me, wanting something from me-wanting life. My life!” The superimposed images don’t lead to anything, anymore than anything else in the episode does. But they are typical of the bold visual artistry of director Lela Swift, and evocative of the sort of thing you would see in the more ambitious low-budget films of the period.

One of the images that illustrates Carolyn’s account. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn loses consciousness just before Julia comes in with her medical bag. Julia pronounces Carolyn dead. Adam goes to the basement, where he tells Barnabas he is ready to start his murder spree. Barnabas tries to stop him, and Adam easily beats him down. Adam storms out of the house, passing Julia in the foyer on his way to the great house of Collinwood. Barnabas staggers upstairs and tells Julia what happened. She goes upstairs to retrieve her bag so she can treat his wounds, and finds that Carolyn’s body has vanished from the bed.

Episode 591: Frightened of new things

When suave warlock Nicholas learned that a tall man named Adam was a Frankenstein’s monster, he decided to use him to found a new race of people who would owe their creation to the spiritual forces of darkness. Nicholas wormed his way into Adam’s confidence and persuaded him to demand that a mate be created for him. Adam put this demand to old world gentleman Barnabas. Barnabas donated the “life force” that animated Adam, and mad scientist Julia performed the experiment. When Adam tells Barnabas that he will kill everyone he cares about if he does not provide him with an artificially constructed woman, he and Julia acquiesce.

The Bride of Frankenstein story has been stalled for several days. The body has been built, the equipment is ready, and heiress Carolyn has volunteered to serve as “life force” donor. Today, Barnabas and Julia tell Adam, Carolyn, and each other that they would rather not perform the experiment. Adam talks with Carolyn, whom he loves and who cannot deny that she loves him; he tells her that there is no need for the experiment, that the two of them can simply go away together. Carolyn insists on doing the experiment, for reasons she does not explain. She doesn’t really want it, either- Nicholas has put a spell on her to compel her to volunteer.

Adam and Carolyn share a tender moment in front of the portrait of Josette. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Nicholas is the only character who wants the experiment. It makes little sense that he would want it. Assuming that Adam and his mate are both fertile, assuming that they in fact produce children, and assuming that those children are any more subject to sin than are the descendants of the first Adam, it would take years for them to grow up. Even if they all developed severe cases of Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome, it would be many years before they would be ready to supplant H. Sap. The show can’t very well expect us to wait that long for the next story point.

There is one fresh thing in today’s episode, and that is the scene between Adam and Carolyn. Robert Rodan projects an overwhelming warmth and gentleness, and Nancy Barrett shows us every twist of Carolyn’s torment and confusion.