graveyard scene – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 953: Every move unwise

For most of 1968, Dark Shadows was a shapeless mess. The makers of the show had caught on that the audience liked monsters, so they kept tossing one monster after another into the mix, hoping to repeat the popular success they had had with vampire Barnabas Collins the year before. One of the storylines that ended up disappointing this hope most completely was that centering on 6’4″ Frankenstein’s monster Adam; another was the “Dream Curse” that was supposed to revive Barnabas’ vampirism after it had been put into remission by the mad scientists who created Adam.

Suave warlock Nicholas Blair was on the show in those days. Nicholas appeared to be a regional manager for Satan’s operations in upper New England. He found out about Adam and came up with the idea of using him as the progenitor of a new species that would displace humankind and win the Earth for his master. Adam met heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and fell hard for her. He also developed an interest in the writings of Sigmund Freud. But he never clicked with the audience, and Nicholas’ plan didn’t make any sense in the context of the show. So the plan flopped and Nicholas was called to the main office. He’s back today.

The A story for the last fourteen weeks has been the effort of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods, to use a 6’4″ shape-shifting monster as the progenitor of a new species that will displace humankind and win the Earth for them. The monster, who once invited people to call him Jabe, met Carolyn and fell hard for her. The Leviathans want Jabe to take Carolyn as his bride and turn her into a creature like himself, but he would rather be human and take Carolyn out on dates. Jabe isn’t the reader Adam was. Adam might be interested in Jabe’s current projects, though. When he was growing into his adult form, Jabe’s foster parents were antique dealers Philip and Megan Todd. He has now arranged to kill Philip, and as we open today he is passionately kissing Megan.

The door opens, and Nicholas enters. He tells Jabe that he is his boss, and that the Leviathan takeover of the Earth was his idea. It is the same idea that didn’t work last time he was on the show, and when he tells Jabe that he failed that time he adds that he does not intend to be punished for failing again.

Nicholas bullies Jabe into going to his room and turning into the inhuman monster he really is. Henchman Bruno shows up to consult with Nicholas while Jabe is in the room. Nicholas tells Bruno it is his responsibility to see to it that Jabe doesn’t kill anyone else. Nicholas leaves, and Bruno goes into Jabe’s room. Less than a minute after Nicholas told him to keep Jabe from further killing, Bruno is standing before the monster, apparently about to be killed.

Bruno manages to get out of the room alive. Jabe returns to human form and follows him. Bruno gasps that Jabe was going to kill him. Jabe replies that he wasn’t, “it was.” Adam might have found significance in this remark. One of Freud’s central concepts was a division between the ego (from the Latin pronoun equivalent to the English “I”) and the id (from the Latin for “it.”) People repress their unacceptable urges and attribute them to something separate from themselves. So, I don’t want to kill my father and marry my mother, it does. Bruno tells Jabe that in the room, he is “it,” and moreover that he himself, as a devotee of the Leviathans, wants to become something like “it.” Evidently the Leviathans’ promise to their followers is that they will replace their ambiguous and divided personalities with pure unreasoning id.

Jabe tells Bruno that he wants to be human. Bruno is horrified by this, commanding “Don’t even say that!” Indeed, Nicholas had said that for the Leviathan People, wanting to be human is the ultimate sin. That suggests a backstory which, if developed, might make the Leviathans scarier than they are. All tales of Elder Gods who want to take the Earth back raise the question of how they lost it in the first place. If our remote ancestors figured out a way to take it from them, surely we, who can learn everything they knew and add to it knowledge they lacked, will be able to prevail against them at least as easily.

But if it was envy of early humans that wrecked the Leviathan world order, a couple of possibilities open up. It could be that some of them defected to join us, so that their final defeat was mostly a struggle between Leviathans with our forebears as helpless on-lookers. In that case, it would remain to be seen whether humans could beat Leviathans. It could also be that the Leviathans who joined the human side have descendants among humans today, and that some of those descendants are vulnerable to co-optation by the Leviathans who are trying to reclaim their former position. There is a hint today that this might turn out to be the case- Bruno asks Nicholas why the estate of Collinwood is so important, and Nicholas, looking uncomfortable, tells him that there is a reason, but that he cannot explain it. Perhaps the members of the Collins family have some Leviathan blood that makes them at once receptive to the appeals of their estranged kinfolk and peculiarly dangerous to them if they are antagonized.

Nicholas is a logical choice to represent the idea that the greatest weakness of the Leviathan People is the temptation to become human. At the zenith of his power in 1968, he would reprove his subordinate Angelique for her romantic feelings for Barnabas, sneering that they made her “so human.” His downfall began when he fell in love with Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and found himself being humanized. So if Jabe is going to meet his doom because his desire for Carolyn makes him renounce his Leviathan form, he is going to remind longtime viewers of Nicholas, and we may as well have Nicholas on the show.

They may have had another reason to want Humbert Allen Astredo back in the cast. Lara Parker used to say that none of her acting lessons really took, and that it was only when Astredo would explain various techniques to her between rehearsals of their scenes as Nicholas and Angelique in 1968 that it all finally clicked for her. I’m sure Parker was exaggerating to make a self-deprecating joke, but it is undeniably true that her performances improved greatly after she had been working with Astredo for a while. So maybe the producers were hoping that some of the less experienced actors in the cast would benefit from time with this outstanding teacher.

The Dream Curse involved more than a dozen repetitions of a sequence over a period of months while one character after another had the same basic nightmare. The sequence involved opening a bunch of doors and seeing enigmatic images. Each time another character had the dream a little bit was added. At the end, it turned out that the curse was not able to renew Barnabas’ vampirism, so there was no point to any of it. For some reason, this did not go over very well with the fans.

Lately, Carolyn has been having a recurring nightmare. We see it for the third time today. The first time she had it, Jabe told her all about himself, and she saw that he had killed someone. Not too long after she woke up, her distant cousin Quentin came by and told her that Jabe had murdered her father Paul. The next time she went to sleep, she had the dream again, and it was clearer that Paul was one of the people Jabe had murdered. This time she even opens Paul’s coffin. She can’t figure out what the dream means. Too bad Adam isn’t around, by now he must have read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and enough of the case studies to apply his technique. If she told him the dream, he would be able to explain to her that the dream means that she is an hysterical female who needs to keep coming to him at least twice a week.

Jabe visits Carolyn, who tells him all about the dream. Not being trained in psychoanalysis, Jabe doesn’t tell her about her unresolved Electra complex or even send her a bill. He just rushes out to exhume Paul’s coffin. This leads to one of the most extraordinary images in Dark Shadows. They wanted to show that Paul’s body was there, but actor Dennis Patrick was by this time in California, producing and taking a role in the movie Joe. So they superimpose a photo of Patrick’s face on a still of a plush-lined box. The resulting image defies all description:

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I’d remembered this as an image they flashed on the screen for a moment, but no, they hold it for quite a while. And then they go in for a closeup! Which is the last thing we see before the credits roll!

An old friend of mine has a brother who was hung up on Dark Shadows for a while, he apparently got the DVDs and watched them obsessively for months. When I told him that I was writing this blog, he claimed that this picture of Paul was the only thing he remembered about the show. I can believe it, really. I often try to figure out what they were thinking when they put the episodes together; as you can see with my speculation above about how the Leviathans lost the power they used to have over the Earth, sometimes I resort to some fairly elaborate fanfic to try to puzzle it out. But why they believed it was appropriate to put this image on national television, let alone to linger over it, cut back to it in closeup, and leave it as the climactic episode-ender, that stumps me completely.

Episode 948: A sign of your freedom, and of mine

The first ghost we saw on Dark Shadows was that of the gracious Josette Collins, who came down from her portrait and danced around the outside of the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood in #70. We had first heard of Josette in #5, when drunken sad sack Sam Evans told well-meaning governess Vicki Winters about her, and she had been mentioned many times in the first fourteen weeks. From #70 until #191, Josette’s ghost became a steadily bigger part of the story. She rallied the other ghosts of Collinwood to rescue Vicki from crazed handyman Matthew in #126, and from that point until #191 guided Vicki in her battle with undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. By the end of the Laura story, Josette was firmly established as the chief figure in the show’s supernatural back-world, a world which the action is continually tugging into view.

Vampire Barnabas Collins succeeded Laura as the show’s supernatural Big Bad. Josette was well-suited to do battle with the distant and indefinable Laura, but was too wispy to be very effective against the more dynamic Barnabas. In #212, Barnabas addressed Josette through her portrait in the Old House, which we had seen strange and troubled boy David Collins use to carry on conversations with her in #102 and #162. Barnabas spoke to Josette then as if she were his grandmother, who had sided with his father against him in a fateful conflict, and told her he was kicking her out of the house. Over the next few weeks, there were several episodes when David lamented Josette’s absence from the Old House, suggesting that Barnabas had succeeded in banishing her.

As it became clear Barnabas was a hit and would be kept on the show for a while, they decided to connect him to Josette. So they borrowed the story of the 1932 film The Mummy. As Boris Karloff’s undead Imhotep decided that Helen Grosvenor was the reincarnation of his lost love Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun, so Barnabas decided that Josette, retconned as his lost love, had been reincarnated as Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) daughter of Sam. As Imhotep abducted Helen and tried to turn her into Ankh-Esen-Amun, so Barnabas abducted Maggie and tortured her in an attempt to erase her personality and upload Josette’s in its place.

In the movie, Helen and Ankh-Esen-Amun were both played by Zita Johann. The original viewers wouldn’t have known it, but Miss Scott, wearing a veil, played the ghost of Josette in #70 and voiced Josette’s lines to Vicki in #126. In the scenes during the Laura story when we caught glimpses of Josette’s face, the ghost was played by frequent stand-in Rosemary McNamara, who looked enough like Miss Scott that viewers may have wondered if she was playing the role. So the idea of a connection between Maggie and Josette had been rattling around the writers’ room for a while. In #240, David saw Maggie wandering around Barnabas’ house. She was wearing Josette’s dress but no veil, in a daze and answering to Josette’s name. Afterward, David said that he had seen Josette and that she looked exactly the same as she did when he had seen her as a ghost. That confirmed that Maggie was at least a Josette lookalike, if not her reincarnation.

Maggie eventually escaped from Barnabas. Her psychiatrist, Julia Hoffman, saw in Barnabas her chance to make a career as a mad scientist, and so she sold Maggie out, using her magical power of hypnosis to delete her memory of what Barnabas did to her and leave her with a feeling of goodwill towards Barnabas. By that time, Barnabas had turned his attentions to Vicki, toying with the idea of Josettifying her. Josette’s ghost made it clear to him that she would try to stop any such effort when she spoke through Vicki at a séance in #280 and 281; after that, Barnabas gave her portrait another talking-to, telling her that she was lost to him forever and must let him live in the present. It sounded like he was going to stop trying to turn girls into Josette, but he kept pushing Josette’s hypnotic music box on Vicki, so if that’s what he meant he didn’t stick with it.

In November 1967, Vicki went back in time to the days when Barnabas and Josette were living human beings. From then until March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. Miss Scott was cast as the living Josette, completing the parallel with the flashbacks to ancient Egypt in The Mummy and suggesting that Barnabas, though he was appallingly cruel and thoroughly crazy, was onto something when he told Maggie she was Josette.

The whole idea of supernaturalism is that what appears to be powerless is in fact most powerful and vice versa, so having been powerful as a ghost, Josette has to be at least somewhat understated as a living being. Making matters worse for her, the 1790s segment moved at a breakneck speed, piling one bizarre disaster on top of another, so that there was no time to develop the kind of subtle strength a lady of her sort might be expected to have or to give us much of a look at Josette and Barnabas as a loving couple before everything went horribly wrong for them. She winds up as a pleasant but ineffectual person. The 1790s period was the show’s first great triumph, but it did knock Josette out of the spotlight permanently.

A couple of weeks after Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission and he tried to function as a good guy. His bumbling attempts at heroism generated as much trouble for everyone as had his villainy. Julia had made herself a permanent houseguest at Collinwood, and she was the one who was busiest with the work of containing his damage. Throughout the part of the show made and set in 1968, Josette was all but forgotten.

Early in 1969, Barnabas came unstuck in time and found himself in 1897, once more subject to the vampire curse. During his eight months in that period, he met two more characters played by Miss Scott. Each of them led him into a fresh bout of Josettery. He gave the music box to neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond; after her death, he met Kitty Soames, dowager countess of Hampshire, who despite her title was a young woman from Pennsylvania. The music box showed up in Kitty’s room at a time when Barnabas could not possibly have been around, and it became clear that this time, it was Josette herself who was trying to take possession of Kitty.

In #884, airing in November 1969, Kitty was assumed bodily into Josette’s portrait. Barnabas saw this happen. He then returned to the 1790s, to the night when Josette originally flung herself to her death from the cliff at Widows’ Hill rather than let Barnabas turn her into a vampire. Josette had only the vaguest memory of 1897 or of Kitty; as far as she is concerned, she was living through this night for the first time, and was experiencing time in the usual linear fashion.

Barnabas tried to prevent Josette’s suicide, but succeeded only in changing the method she used to do herself in. By the time he returned to the twentieth century, he had fallen under the sway of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who are trying to retake the Earth from humankind. For a time he led a cult that served them in this goal, but eventually became disaffected. He hesitates to take any very definite action against the Leviathans, because they told him they were “holding Josette prisoner in the past” and that they would inflict on her a more horrible death than either of those she has already died if he defied them in any way.

Vicki was written out of the show in 1968, and Maggie succeeded her as governess to the children at Collinwood. The Leviathans have sent a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time as the harbinger of their conquest. The monster usually takes the form of a young man who initially asked people to call him “Jabe,” but whom everyone instead calls “Jeb.” Jabe is always obnoxious and often homicidal, and has alienated many people from the Leviathans, including Barnabas. He abducted Maggie and thought he had brainwashed her into joining the cult; once he let her go, she made an alliance with Barnabas and Julia to fight the Leviathans.

Barnabas is convinced Jabe is about to do something especially horrible, and so he wants to open the battle. But his concern for Josette is still holding him back. He and Julia talk about this. It dawns on them that the Leviathans may have been lying, and that they may not have the power to make Josette re-die. The only way they can be sure is to ask Josette, so they decide to hold a séance. They enlist Maggie to be the third member of the circle.

The typical Dark Shadows séance involves three roles- the convener, who gives detailed instructions and barks about the importance of following them, even if everyone in the room has attended multiple séances already; the medium, who goes into the trance and channels the voice from the realm of the dead; and the objector, who tries to interrupt and is sternly hushed by the convener. Recent séances have omitted the objector; today, Julia keeps up a running commentary from the time Barnabas starts the incantations until Maggie goes into the trance, but she doesn’t object and Barnabas doesn’t hush her.

Through Maggie, Josette says she had a hard time getting to the séance, but that it had nothing to do with the Leviathans. She says she doesn’t even know the Leviathans. Barnabas doesn’t believe her, and she says that if he wants proof he should come to her grave.

He does. The tinkling tune of the music box plays on the soundtrack; Barnabas does not mention the original signature of Josette’s presence, the scent of jasmine. Her ghost manifests before him:

THE GHOST OF JOSETTE: It is I. And I will tell you what you must know, now and forever. You asked me if the Leviathans held me prisoner. They do not. But you hold me, just as I hold you with my love. But now the time has come for us both to go free.

BARNABAS: I cannot be free without you.

GHOST: But you must. For I belong to the past. For you there is a future with someone else.

BARNABAS: But I don’t want anyone else.

GHOST: Then you must be lonely, for you cannot have me. But you will find someone else. I know it. And when you do, give her this. The ring that you gave to me, give to her, whoever she may be. This ring is a sign of your freedom and of mine. (Returns her engagement ring to him and vanishes.)

Josette says goodbye. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This is Josette’s final appearance on Dark Shadows, not counting a parallel universe version of Josette who will feature in the last weeks of the show, played by another actress. As for the “someone else,” it would be logical for Barnabas to get with Julia, since the two of them are so deeply complicit in each other’s crimes that neither of them will ever be able to make a life with anyone else. But there have been some hints lately that romance might be budding between Barnabas and Maggie, and if that’s going to happen they are going to have to keep us from thinking very clearly about Josette and Barnabas’ attempts to recreate her. We might suppose that her farewell is meant to clear the path for such a development.

There’s also some business about the Leviathan story. In the opening reprise, Jabe catches a bat, which he plans to use to turn Barnabas back into a vampire.

After Barnabas gets the green light from Josette, he meets with Philip Todd, another person whom Jabe has driven out of the Leviathan cult. Philip tells Barnabas how much he hates Jabe and agrees to steal the Leviathan box, an object which does not play music but which is a lot more effective at controlling the minds of people who open it than was that box of Josette’s. At the end of the episode, Jabe catches Philip with the box.

A commenter on Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day who identifies herself as “Melissa”* wrote this lyric about Jabe in two comments about the post covering today’s episode:

Come and listen to my story ’bout s man named Jeb,
Poor Leviathan, barely kept his evil web.
Then, one day, he and Barney had a spat,
And out from the cage came a rubberized bat.
(Vampire bat, that is:
Nylon string,
Terror teeth.)

Next thing you know,ol’ Jeb has got a girl.
Cult folk said, “Jeb, come and rule the world!”
They said, “In the attic is the place you want to be,”
So they threw themselves a seance and they called on J.D.C.
(Josette Collins, that is.
Swimming fail.
Newly scarred.)

Comments left 31 October 2016 by “Melissa” on Danny Horn “Episode 948: War Games,” posted 30 October 2016 at Dark Shadows Every Day.

I’m singing that aloud right now. I realize you might be reading this years after I wrote it, but believe me, I’m singing it right now.

*Apparently also an FotB here.

Episode 947: More! MORE! MO-O-O-RE!!!

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins comes home shortly after dawn and finds that the window of his front parlor has been smashed in. Entering the house, he finds two young men passed out. He knows both of these men, and knows that neither is what he seems to be. The taller of them, who once asked to be called Jabe, is in his true form an indescribable monster from beyond space and time, the harbinger of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who mean to retake the Earth and destroy humankind. The other, Chris Jennings, is a werewolf. The Leviathans are vulnerable to werewolves, and Barnabas realizes that Chris reverted to his human form when the sun rose, just as he was about to kill Jabe.

Chris comes to, and Barnabas hustles him out of the house. He then wakes Jabe. He tells Jabe that he fought the werewolf off, killing it and saving Jabe’s life. Barnabas was the original leader of a cult devoted to serving the Leviathans, but has since become disaffected. Jabe had seen evidence of this, and set out for Barnabas’ house meaning to punish him for his disloyalty. But by the time the werewolf chased him into the house he was crying out for Barnabas to help him, so he is ready to believe the story. Taking credit for things he had nothing to do with is one of Barnabas’ core competencies, so it is no surprise to longtime viewers that Jabe decides that he can trust Barnabas after all.

Barnabas’ ex-wife Angelique is now married to a man named Sky Rumson. She does not believe that Sky knows anything about her past or about anything supernatural, but the audience has seen over the last few episodes that he is an agent of the Leviathans. Angelique put Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn up in a house she and Sky have on an island to help Barnabas in his fight against the Leviathans while Sky was away on a business trip. At the end of that trip, Sky called to ask Angelique to pick him up at an airport far from the island house. When she got to the airport, she found he had already left. She wound up spending several hours alone on the road. Returning viewers know that Sky’s call was a trick to get her away from the house so Jabe could come and have his way with Carolyn. We also know that Jabe chickened out of his evil plan when he actually saw Carolyn, and that she is fine now.

Angelique comes home from her long wild goose chase and asks Sky what happened. He said he had an important phone call coming at the house, so he had to leave early. Angelique accepts this surprisingly easily. Barnabas shows up to take Carolyn home. He and Sky meet. After Barnabas is gone, Sky asks what the deal is with Carolyn. He presses the point, and Angelique tells him everything she knows about Barnabas and the Leviathans, including that he is now “their most dedicated enemy and he means to use every power he has to stop them.”

This scene is bad news for Barnabas, but it is worse for the audience’s image of Angelique. She used to be a wicked witch of vast destructive power, and was supposed to be the ultimate Soap Opera Vixen. But you wouldn’t have to be a witch, or even a vixen, to avoid the situation Angelique puts herself in. Leaving the airport when he knew she was on the way was a colossal act of thoughtlessness, and no husband who committed it could expect to hear a word from his wife about anything else for at least a week. After that, there will be a long period when she will have an unanswerable source of material to keep him off his guard any time he tries to bring up topics she doesn’t want to discuss. By the time Sky is able to start asking questions about why Angelique had Carolyn spend the night, it will probably be another full moon.

That isn’t even the worst of it. Angelique believes that Sky is simply a denizen of the sunlit world known to us in our everyday experience and explained well by science, and she further believes that he sees her in the same way. That makes it all but impossible for her to tell him what she tells him here. She launches right in with “the Leviathans, they’re terribly dangerous creatures, completely evil and they mean to start a whole new society.” If he really were a total naïf in supernatural matters, this story would lead him to pick up the telephone and call the men in the white coats to come and take Angelique to a place where she could get a good long rest.

I don’t think Angelique’s scene with Sky could have worked in any case, but Geoffrey Scott’s limitations as an actor make it even worse than it had to be. He underacted so severely that he could hardly be said to be giving a performance at all. That makes a stark contrast with Lara Parker, who as Angelique fully embraced the hyper-intense Dark Shadows house style of acting, which, in honor of her own hilarious explanation of it, is sometimes known as “Go back to your grave!” That contrast is interesting at a technical level. It goes a long way towards explaining what Orson Welles meant when he said that hamminess was not overacting, but false acting. Parker goes as far over the top as she can, but there is rarely anything false about Angelique, while every tinny note Scott strikes in his flat recitation of his lines is thoroughly fake.

A charismatic actor might have been wasted as Sky, as Parker is wasted today. But the audience might have been able to meet the show halfway if we could believe that Sky was so fascinating to Angelique that she didn’t realize what she was saying. As it is, Scott looks so much like he is modeling menswear for the Sears catalogue that it is always a bit of a surprise when he moves and speaks. However much Angelique might enjoy Sky’s company, it never occurs to us that he would be a match for her in any sense.

Sky goes to Jabe and repeats what Angelique told him about Barnabas. There is an exchange which looks fine in print, but which Scott’s delivery makes sound like a blooper:

JABE: So everything he told me this morning was a lie! And I thought he had saved my life!

SKY: Evidently, everything he told you was a lie.

You would deliver Sky’s line with an emphasis on “everything,” as would I, as would anyone else. But Scott emphasizes “Evidently” and pauses slightly after “you,” making it sound as if he hadn’t heard Jabe. For a fraction of a second, you can see the amazement in Christopher Pennock’s face as he reacts to this clanger.

Jabe carries a cage with him as he goes to an old graveyard. The camera locks in on him in closeup as he shouts that, while death might be an adequate punishment for a mere murderer, Barnabas must suffer “More! MORE! MO-O-O-ORE!!!” More, more, more, how do you like it, how do you like it….

More more more. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The first time I saw this scene, I regarded it as a low point- I imagined someone tuning in to Dark Shadows for the first time at that moment, and instantly turning it off, believing ever after that only people of an extremely low mentality could like the show. I still think it’s pretty embarrassing writing, but having seen him in other roles I’ve come to realize that Pennock was in fact a good actor and that as Jabe he was saddled with an impossible task. Also, I’ve seen video of him on panels of original cast members at Dark Shadows conventions, and it is obvious that he was as sweet as Jabe is vicious. So watching the scene today, I ignored Jabe and looked at Christopher Pennock, studying his face to see what he was thinking as he struggled to find a way to give the audience something worth their while.

Jabe makes an incantation, and a bat comes flying to him. He catches it in the cage. We get a closeup of the bat puppet in the cage, which looks very much like a humane trap from Havahart. We know that Jabe plans to use the bat to make Barnabas back into a vampire, which he was for 172 years, but the realistic cage and the adorable little puppet prevent the situation from generating any terror. Dan Curtis said that when he was producing Dark Shadows, his young daughters used to urge him to make the show more frightening. When we were chuckling at the sight of the bat today, Mrs Acilius imitated a child saying “Make it scary, Daddy!”

Behold and tremble! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 937: The list of the expendables

A monster from beyond space and time has taken the form of a vicious man-child and asked people to call it “Jabe.” A cult devoted to the Leviathan People, mysterious Elder Gods who brought the monster to Earth, have decided to put up with its murders and depredations, but even they draw the line at calling the monster “Jabe.” It answers to “Jeb” instead.

Jabe’s latest pointless act of cruelty was to break the leg of one of his faithful servants, thirteen year old David Collins. A couple of times today, Jabe is about to explain why he broke David’s leg, and each time they cut away to some other scene. At one point we cut back to Jabe telling David that “Now you know why I had to do that, don’t you?,” to which David agrees that he does. That just lampshades the fact that the writers couldn’t come up with a reason.

David wants Maggie to be the first to sign his cast.

The actual reason David Collins is wearing a cast and using a wheelchair is that actor David Henesy took a nasty spill on the ice. And since Jabe’s untrammeled violence is the big menace on the show right now, it makes sense that they would have him be at fault. It certainly makes more sense than does the fact that the family insists on David climbing the stairs to his bedroom with crutches, when they have a whole disused wing of servants’ bedrooms on the first floor in any one of which he could stay while he recuperates. On the other hand, that insistence does produce a moment of real hilarity. The instant David begins his ascent, governess Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott) and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman start talking as if he weren’t there. He must be lumbering up the stairs a couple of feet from them the whole time they are carrying on this conversation.

For his part, Jabe doesn’t generate any laughs. Nor is he pursuing any goals that lead us to wonder what he will do next. We just know that if he has a chance to do something nasty, he’ll probably take it.

If they want Jabe to be a character in whom we take an interest, they ought to give him some kind of cockamamie motivation that is intelligible only to him. That’s what they did in 1967, when vampire Barnabas Collins held Maggie prisoner and tortured her. They showed us that Barnabas thought he was going to turn Maggie into his lost love Josette. That idea, borrowed from the 1932 film The Mummy, was so utterly bonkers the show eventually decided to run with it, casting Miss Scott as Josette when they went back in time to explain how Barnabas became a vampire. Meanwhile, the ever-mounting zaniness kept viewers tuning in, wondering if they would ever expose a layer of Barnabas’ psychology that was composed of something other than nonsense.

The opening voiceover today labels Jabe “evil”; that’s no problem, all the most popular characters, including David, started off as appallingly evil, and they have retained their popularity to the extent that they stayed in touch with their roots. But Jabe is not only evil, he is monotonous, and that makes him a deadly threat to the show’s entertainment value.

Barnabas is not currently subject to the effects of the vampire curse, and Julia long ago used her powers as a mad scientist to erase Maggie’s memory of his crimes against her. Barnabas was the original leader of the Leviathan cult, but has become disaffected. Jabe tells Barnabas today that he wants to kill just about everyone at Collinwood, including ten year old Amy Jennings, who is a faithful member of the cult. He also wants to marry heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Barnabas goes to Collinwood and warns Maggie that Carolyn is in danger. He asks her to keep an eye on Carolyn and to urge her to go away. He does not mention Amy. At least Amy’s name comes up in this episode- when she is on camera she is often the best thing in the show, but throughout her long absences she usually goes unmentioned.

Julia goes to Amy’s great-grandfather, centenarian Quentin Collins, who has recently returned to Collinsport after an absence of many decades and who, because of a series of spells that were cast on him, looks like he is not quite 29 years old. Julia recruits Quentin to dig up the grave of Michael Hackett, Jabe’s previous incarnation. This gives us the first exhumation scene on Dark Shadows since, if I recall correctly, #820. It’s the longest the show has gone without digging up a coffin since the first exhumation scene, in #179. It feels like a homecoming when Quentin sticks his shovel in the plot. Of course they find an empty coffin.

As is usual when digging up a coffin, Quentin wears a three-piece suit with dress shoes, none of which is smudged in the process. Less typically, his coat appears to be somewhat wrinkled.

Afterward, Julia confronts Barnabas. When she tells him how much she already knows, he gives in and says he will tell her everything. With that, we have the promise that Barnabas and Julia will resume the partnership that has been the single most dynamic narrative element on Dark Shadows.

Episode 936: Behind that closed door

The Leviathan People, a mysterious race of Elder Gods, are planning to retake the Earth from humankind. They’ve started small, putting together a secret cult of devotees in and around the village of Collinsport, Maine, and placing a rapidly growing creature in a room above an antique shop there. Now the creature has taken the form of a 24 year old man, murdered a couple of people, and lost interest in the plan. All he wants is his intended bride, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, and he wants her by Friday. Since she does not know the creature and is in mourning for her father Paul Stoddard, whom the creature murdered a couple of days ago, he would seem to have put some obstacles in his own way.

When he is in human form, the creature calls himself Jabez Hawkes. When we first saw him, he told people to “Call me Jabe.” Everyone called him Jeb instead. “Jabe” is such an unusual name, and the creature is so obnoxious and uninteresting, that it is understandable they would disregard his wishes in this matter, but I believe in calling people by the names they choose, so I’ll call him Jabe.

The Leviathan story has so far been pitched to an adult audience far more heavily than most segments of Dark Shadows, and today’s episode is a case in point. Carolyn’s family gathers in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood, ready to depart for Paul’s funeral. They have a big scene where Carolyn gets upset with her mother and uncle because they didn’t like Paul, and the bad feelings flare up again after the funeral, when they are at the graveside. That’s typical fare for soap operas meant for grownups, but we’ve never seen anything like it before on Dark Shadows, where graves are less often places of mourning than targets for robbing.

Jabe spies on Carolyn from behind the tombstone of Crazy Jenny Collins. For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897. Marie Wallace played Crazy Jenny then. Since the show returned to contemporary dress, Miss Wallace has been Megan Todd, fanatically devoted Leviathan cultist and foster mother to the creature now known as Jabe. They’ve had some fun depicting an erotic dimension to the relationship between Megan and the creature; Jabe clings to the tombstone suggestively, echoing this hint of Oedipal tension.

Jabe clings to Jenny’s stone. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn goes to the antique shop to leave a note thanking Megan and her husband Philip for attending the funeral. Jabe sneaks up behind her and puts his hands over her eyes by way of introduction. You might think that Jabe, being just a couple of months old, would be ignorant enough to expect Carolyn to be charmed by this invasion of her space. But he pulled the same stunt on her when he was in the form of a thirteen year old boy, and she objected to it fiercely then. When she reacts just as negatively now, it leaves regular viewers with the sense that Jabe is going to keep doing the same pointless things over and again, not learning anything from his experiences. By the end of the scene she is showing some signs of attraction for Jabe, but she’s the only one. They haven’t given the audience any reason to expect him to be worth watching.

Later, Jabe tells old world gentleman Barnabas Collins that when the time comes, all members of the Leviathan cult will share his shape-shifting abilities, that “each one of you will be able to take on any form.” We know that Jabe is sometimes an inhuman monster, and that he once assumed the form of Carolyn as she was when she was eight, but this is our first confirmation that he can turn into anything he wants. It is also the first suggestion that the Leviathans’ human accomplices will receive any benefits at all from their triumph.

Episode 819: You’re a bit of all right, you are!

Evil sorcerer Count Petofi tells the disastrously repressed Charity Trask that he will show her a vision of her own death. He’s tried that twice before on other characters, with mixed success, and it doesn’t work at all with Charity. He can’t see the visions he causes her to have; when she describes them to him, he is afraid that she has seen, not her own impending demise, but his. He casts a spell on her and rushes out.

Petofi meets his boyfriend Aristide and takes him on a shopping trip through the cemetery. What he wants with the body he orders Aristide to exhume is not made clear.

The importance of the episode is in the spell Petofi casts on Charity. He effectively murders her. For the rest of the segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897, Nancy Barrett will play, not Charity, but Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl who came to the great estate of Collinwood as the fiancée of the daffy Carl Collins. The show often tends towards the somber, so it is a joyous thing to see Charity/ Pansy enthusiastically shake her moneymaker.

It is sometimes said that Petofi makes Charity believe that she is Pansy, but this is not correct. Charity never met Pansy, and barely knew the late Carl. She certainly never saw Pansy perform on stage. Yet she sings Pansy’s theme song word for word and note for note as she did, and does the dance that went with it just as Pansy did it. She has Pansy’s garish sense of style, her not-very-convincing East London accent, and her memories of Carl. Petofi has caused Pansy to take possession of Charity and to live again through her body, as he has caused David Collins, strange and troubled boy indigenous to the mid-twentieth century, to take possession of his grandfather Jamison Collins. While David’s spirit is killing Jamison’s body, Pansy seems to be having a wonderful time in Charity’s person, certainly far more than Charity ever had herself. As for Charity’s mind, that seems no longer to exist.

Episode 798: A gift from the unicorn

In the first few decades of commercial television, ambitious shows tended to imitate live theater; since, they’ve tended to imitate feature films. Today’s episode is one of Dark Shadows’ stagiest, and it is a strong one.

The rakish Quentin Collins has lost his hopes of being cured of werewolf-ism, and is moping in the gazebo on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood. He is staring at a revolver, trying to talk himself into committing suicide. He hears two men approaching, and takes cover in some nearby bushes. The men are known to Quentin by the names “Aristide” and “Victor Fenn Gibbon.”* The set is so small that the actors are only a few feet away from each other, but we are supposed to believe that Quentin can’t quite hear what Aristide and Fenn Gibbon are saying. So when the camera is placed at Quentin’s point of view, Michael Stroka and Thayer David vigorously mime the act of talking.

Quentin listens in from a great distance. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin sees Fenn Gibbon slap Aristide’s face. Aristide responds, not with violence of his own, but with a continuation of the talking he had been doing before, showing Quentin that Fenn Gibbon is Aristide’s boss. The other day, Aristide tied Quentin to a table and tried to kill him by reenacting Poe’s “Pit and the Pendulum,” so this tells Quentin that Fenn Gibbon is his deadly enemy.

We hear some of Aristide and Fenn Gibbon’s dialogue. Fenn Gibbon and Aristide are based on Gutman and Wilmer from The Maltese Falcon. In their previous appearances, Aristide has been eager to connect with every attractive young woman he sees, suggesting that we would not see the strong suggestions of a sexual relationship that come with Gutman and Wilmer both in Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel and the 1941 film. But today, Aristide’s unshocked reaction to Fenn Gibbon’s slap shows that he is accustomed to robust forms of physical contact with him, and when Fenn Gibbon tells Aristide that “I’m aware of your charms, my dear Aristide, but I know only too well conversation is not among them,” we can see that there is going to be a substantial gay subtext.

Fenn Gibbon is one of two roles Thayer David plays today. He appears in the opening teaser as broad ethnic stereotype Sandor Rákóczi, husband of the even more offensively conceived Magda. Yesterday, Magda was placed under a curse. At that time, the curse was that everyone who loved Magda would die, but today it is that everyone she loves will die. When Magda talks about the curse with visiting vampire Barnabas Collins, he says that he is under the same curse, which is exactly true- in #705, he was told that everyone who loved him would die, and from the next episode on it was said that everyone he loved would die. Whichever way the curse is put, one would expect it to strike terror in Magda’s heart regarding Sandor. They are a happily married couple, the only one we ever see on Dark Shadows, and so one would expect him to be the first victim of the curse.

The curse was supposed to start when Magda heard three knocks on the front door of her home, the Old House at Collinwood. She hears the knocks, opens the door, and sees Sandor. She immediately falls into the same pattern she exhibits every time she sees Sandor, accusing him of infidelity, accusing him of coming back to her only because he has run out of money, telling him not to bother to lie to her, and generally having a wonderful time. But he is standing rigidly still, his eyes are glazed over, and he can speak only a few words, none of them the usual insults they exchange. He falls dead, a knife in his back. Barnabas touches his body, and says that it is cold, as if he had been dead a long time.

Later, Magda goes to Mrs Fillmore, a woman in the village of Collinsport. Quentin’s late wife Jenny was Magda’s sister. Unknown to Quentin, Jenny gave birth to twins after he left her, and his brother Edward decreed that the twins would be raised by Mrs Fillmore. Magda has never seen the twins, but she loves them nevertheless- the boy twin, anyway; she tells Barnabas that “Gypsies do not prize girls.” When she comes back to the Old House, Magda tells Barnabas and Quentin that the boy twin is dead. Mrs Fillmore said he was perfectly healthy that evening, then she heard a mysterious scream from the children’s bedroom and she found him dead in his crib. His body was cold, as if he had been dead a long time. Quentin is numb, bewildered to learn that he was a father and simultaneously to learn that he has outlived his son.

There have been other episodes in which an actor played one character as a living being and another as a ghost. There have also been episodes that jumped between two periods in history, and in those there were actors who played one character in one time frame and a different one in the other. Thayer David’s doubling as Sandor and as Fenn Gibbon makes this the first episode in which the same actor plays two living beings contemporary with each other in the same episode.

Sandor’s death and Fenn Gibbon’s ascent to prominence mark a transition in the show. They are in the middle of a bloodbath, killing off a great many of the characters who have defined the first twenty weeks of the 1897 flashback. Previously, that has meant they were getting ready to reset the show and go back to contemporary dress. But 1897 has been such a hit that a transition need not mean a return to the 1960s. There is still enough going on in this period that they can introduce a bunch of new characters, develop some new stories, and get a new phase of Dark Shadows started right here in the late Victorian era. Who knows- if they play their cards right, this period might be the new home base for the show, and the 1960s might be an afterthought.

The contemporary world does make one appearance today. Before their encounter at the gazebo, Fenn Gibbon meets Quentin in the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood. Quentin is studying the Moon. The two of them have a little exchange about Quentin’s fascination with the Moon; considering that this episode aired a few hours after Apollo 11 lifted off on the journey that would put the first crew on the Moon, that fascination must have been pretty widely shared by the original audience.

*In this episode, everyone says “Fenn Gibbons,” which we have heard before. But the credits read “Fenn Gibbon,” so I’m sticking with that version.

Episode 788: From a beast to a man

A day of transformations. At dawn, the werewolf in the cell at the Collinsport jail turned into Quentin Collins. Edward Collins, Quentin’s stuffy brother, witnessed the transformation, and when we first see him he is staring at Quentin in bewilderment. Quentin is wearing the same blue suit he always wears, with the same distinctive hairstyle. But he has a glob of makeup on his face, and that’s enough to stymie Edward’s ability to recognize him.

Who could it possibly be? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This may reflect a hereditary disability of some kind. In #784, Quentin’s old friend and fellow Satanist, Evan Hanley, tried to steal the magical Hand of Count Petofi. The hand raised itself to Evan’s face and disfigured him, leaving his gray suit and highly identifiable hair and beard unchanged. But when Quentin saw Evan in #785, he was completely stumped as to who he might be.

Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi enters. Edward accuses her of knowing who the man in the cell before them is. Magda does not share the Collinses’ peculiar inability to recognize people wearing facial appliances, so of course she does know. But she denies it. Edward does not believe her denials, and leaves in a huff.

Magda talks to Quentin, and he begins to speak. But he is not replying to her. Instead, he delivers lines that Count Petofi himself might have spoken when he was dwelling on the loss of his hand. He murmurs about “the forest of Ojden” and “the nine Gypsies” and suchlike. Magda realizes that Quentin has no idea who he is or what is going on.

Magda had placed the hand on Quentin’s heart the night before, as the moon was rising, hoping it would prevent the transformation. It didn’t do that, but by inflicting the same kind of facial disfigurement on Quentin that it had previously brought to Evan it does keep the werewolf story going beyond what might seem like a natural conclusion. When Magda leaves Quentin, she says that come nightfall she will consult with Quentin’s distant cousin, time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins. “He will know what to do!” she declares. Barnabas has been the central character of the show for more than two years, and he has yet to have a non-disastrous idea. Ya gotta have hope, I guess.

At home in the great house of Collinwood, Edward tries to interest his sister Judith in the fact that he just saw a wolf turn into a human. She impatiently declares that she is not going to spend all day thinking about such a thing. Edward starts to remind Judith that she saw the wolf herself. He might have mentioned that she has seen it more than once, including in the very room where they are standing, but she says that it is “morbid” to go on paying attention to the topic once the creature has been caught and they can believe that they are safe.

Judith tells Edward that she had a bad dream. She won’t talk with him about that either. He needles her about her recent marriage to the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask, which he calls “ridiculous.” She says that she does not regret her marriage, and that even if she did it would not be any more ridiculous than his own marriage. Since Edward’s wife was an undead fire witch who tried to incinerate their children to prolong her existence, all he can say to that is “Touché.”

Edward exits, and Judith dwells on her dream. It concerned Trask’s late wife Minerva. Minerva died in #773; Judith married Trask in #784. Judith knows that a young man named Tim Shaw poisoned Minerva, and that Trask gave Tim an alibi. She believes that Trask has forsworn justice for Minerva’s death for her sake. Tim knew that Judith, while under a magic spell, had shot his girlfriend Rachel Drummond to death, and he threatened to expose her if Trask handed him over to the police. What Judith did not know, and what is not mentioned today, is that Tim himself had acted under a spell. Trask and Evan connived to brainwash Tim so that when the Queen of Spades turned up in a card game he would poison Minerva. In her dream, Minerva told Judith that there was danger, then repeated the phrase “Queen of Spades” several times.

Judith turns around and looks at a table. It had been bare when last she saw it, and there was no one else in the room. But now a solitaire game is laid out there. She screams, and Edward comes. Judith turns up the Queen of Spades, and walks out the front door. Edward follows her to Minerva’s grave.

Judith tells Edward her dream, and he transforms into a psychoanalyst. “Your dream is nothing more than a manifestation of your own guilt.” Judith asks Edward what he imagines her to feel guilty about, and he says that she married Trask so shortly after Minerva’s death. She dismisses this, and soon goes into a trance. She wavers back and forth from the waist for a moment, then straightens up with a jolt. When Edward calls to her by her first name, she replies “I will thank you to call me Mrs Trask!” Edward doesn’t know what to make of this demand, but the audience knows that Minerva has taken possession of Judith.

Back at Collinwood, Edward meets Magda. She tells him that she is there to see maidservant Beth. Edward says that he hasn’t seen her all day. That puts him up on the audience; we haven’t seen her since #771. When they were setting up for the trip to this period, Beth was presented as a major character, and her ghost haunted the Collinwood of 1969 along with Quentin’s. When Barnabas and we first arrived in the year 1897 in #701, Beth figured very largely in the story for several weeks. But Terrayne Crawford’s limitations as an actress required Beth to be written as someone who says just what she means, no more and no less. Since the rest of the cast is able to rise to the task of portraying complex motivations and multilayered communication, and since Dark Shadows finally has a writing staff that can provide those things consistently, Miss Crawford has faded further and further into the background.

Edward goes to the drawing room and telephones Evan. Magda eavesdrops. She knows of Evan’s disfigurement, Edward does not. Edward tells Evan he must come over at once, that there is an emergency he must address in his capacity as Collins family attorney. Evan does not want anyone to see his face, and so he tries to beg off. Edward threatens to fire him if he does not show up. Evan has been making vain efforts to restore his appearance for days; he looks at himself in the mirror, and returning viewers might draw the conclusion that his goose is cooked.

That Evan’s face is still disfigured after we have seen Quentin’s disfigurement raises the possibility that the show is heading towards an all-disfigured cast. Evan is played by the conspicuously handsome Humbert Allen Astredo, and as Quentin David Selby’s good looks have become one of the show’s very biggest draws. If they are both going to be uglified for the duration, then there is nothing to stop anyone from having some plastic glued onto their face.

Judith enters. She does not recognize Magda and announces that she is Minerva. She closes herself in the drawing room.

Evan arrives, looking like his old self. Magda is astonished. When they have a moment alone together, he responds to her questions by saying that he will never tell her what happened to undo the hand’s work. That will hook returning viewers more effectively than any cliffhanger is likely to do- Evan’s case had seemed absolutely hopeless.

When Edward tells Evan what Judith has been doing, Evan starts playing psychiatrist, picking up where Edward had left off. “Well now, tell me exactly how she has been behaving. In what way is this delusion manifesting itself?” Edward sends Evan in to see for himself. Minerva/ Judith reacts to the sight of him with horror. She says that he was the one who made Tim Shaw poison her. Minerva did not know this in life, but it has long since been established on Dark Shadows that the dead pick up a lot of information in the afterlife. The murders have been coming thick and fast in 1897, and if all the victims talk to each other they would have a pretty easy time piecing together what has been happening behind closed doors. We end with Minerva/ Judith holding a letter opener over her head, walking towards Evan with evident intent of stabbing him.

Episode 779: Our cousin, who always appears at dusk

Vampire Barnabas Collins has stashed his coffin in its old hiding place, the hidden chamber inside the mausoleum where his parents and sister are buried. As dawn approaches, he tells his reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, that this is the last day he will have to leave the coffin there. The suspicions that had recently surrounded him have cleared, and he will move the coffin back to the basement of Magda’s home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, when he next arises.

The graveyard is immersed in a heavy fog. As Barnabas approaches the mausoleum, a familiar voice calls to him. His old nemesis and ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique, implores him to come with her and leave the year 1897. She warns him that he must return to 1969 now, or it will be too late. Barnabas tells Angelique that he has not accomplished the goals for which he came to the past, and that he will not leave until he has done so.

Longtime viewers may be puzzled when Angelique tells Barnabas that she has helped him before. In #757, Angelique did prevent her fellow undead blonde fire witch, Laura Murdoch Collins, from staking Barnabas, but that did not seem to be intended as a service to Barnabas. Rather, it recalled #417, in which Angelique prevented Barnabas’ friend Ben Stokes from staking him and freeing him of the effects of the vampire curse she had placed upon him. She told Ben that she wanted Barnabas to suffer forever, and nothing she says to Laura indicates that she has changed. Indeed, the only time she ever seemed to act out of goodwill towards Barnabas was in #410, when Barnabas was about to rise as a vampire for the first time and she, regretting the curse, tried to stake him herself. Perhaps there is a retcon coming up, in which it will be made possible for Barnabas and Angelique to join forces against some new enemy.

It certainly seems that the show is about to take a new turn of some kind. The major storylines with which the 1897 segment began are all approaching their natural conclusions, and a number of major characters have already been killed off. Longtime viewers will recognize an acknowledgement of these facts, not only in Angelique’s explicit statement that the proper time for Barnabas’ stay in the late nineteenth century is almost up, but also in the doings of another character in the graveyard.

Inveterate prankster Carl Collins suspects Barnabas of being a vampire, and in a dream visitation his late fiancée Pansy directed his attention to the mausoleum. Lurking outside it, he sees Barnabas open the secret panel and go into the chamber where the coffin is kept. Carl declares that “We’ll get him tonight! We’ll get cousin Barnabas… TONIGHT!”

Carl is played by John Karlen, who first appeared on Dark Shadows as the luckless Willie Loomis. It was Willie who, in a misbegotten attempt at jewel theft, inadvertently freed Barnabas to prey upon the living in #210. In consequence, Barnabas bit Willie and enslaved him. When Willie first served him, Barnabas would control him not only by the usual vampiric practices of blood-drinking and telepathic summoning, but also by frequent heavy beatings with his cane. Later, Willie would come to feel that Barnabas was his friend; it was never clear that Barnabas reciprocated this feeling.

Carl first met Barnabas in #706. He introduced himself by holding a gun to Barnabas’ head and threatening to shoot him if he did not admit that his story of being a long-lost cousin from England was a lie. The gun turned out to be loaded with a flag labeled “FIB,” and the whole thing was Carl’s idea of a joke. Barnabas’ icy response, starting with his incredulous tone while asking if “YOU are a COLLINS?,” set the tone for all of his subsequent dealings with Carl, in which his attitude ranged from undisguised contempt to barely disguised contempt. Yet Carl remained convinced that he and Barnabas were going to be great friends, and he even asked Barnabas to be the best man at his wedding to Pansy. Carl is much more enthusiastic about his supposed friendship with Barnabas than Willie is about his, and Barnabas is far more open about his hostility towards him, making the Carl/ Barnabas relationship a spoof of the Willie/ Barnabas one.

Ever since Pansy’s death, Carl’s thoughts about Barnabas have taken a darker cast. When we see him in the mausoleum, watching the panel open, we know that his plan to “get cousin Barnabas” will take him into the chamber where Willie forever lost his freedom. We know, too, that Willie’s misfortune revolutionized the show; when it puts this actor on this set, Dark Shadows is promising to make major changes.

We cut to the drawing room of the great house on the estate. Rakishly handsome Quentin Collins is talking with Magda. As Angelique cursed Barnabas to be a vampire, so Magda cursed Quentin to be a werewolf. Angelique placed her curse because she was upset that Barnabas did not love her and was under the impression she was about to die. Magda placed hers because Quentin had married and then murdered her sister Jenny. Magda did not know then that Jenny had borne twins to Quentin, a son and a daughter. Since the curse is hereditary, Magda has been trying desperately to reverse it ever since she learned of the children’s existence.

The children are still secret from Quentin, and so he does not understand why Magda is trying to help him. When he demands she tell him, she says “I. Did. Not. KNOWWW!” in exactly the same intonation she had used when she first heard about the children in #763. First time viewers don’t know any more than Quentin does what she is talking about- the children are not mentioned today. Magda makes up an obvious lie, saying that she hadn’t known how much Jenny loved him. That isn’t meant to fool the audience, and doesn’t fool Quentin. But when Carl enters, Quentin drops the subject and leaves new viewers in suspense about what Magda now knows that they do not.

Carl knows that Magda lives with Barnabas, and refuses to talk in front of her. She teasingly asks “Mr Carl” if he “don’t like me any more,” and walks out with a bold stride, suggesting that Carl may at some point have shown signs of liking her rather too avidly for her husband’s comfort. Once she is gone, Carl tells Quentin that there is a vampire in their midst. Quentin dismisses this out of hand, telling him that their brother Edward staked a vampire named Dirk and told him about it in vast and gory detail. Carl asks who made Dirk a vampire; Quentin says that it was Laura. No, says Carl, Barnabas made Dirk a vampire, and Barnabas is a vampire himself.

Quentin begins to laugh, but within seconds realizes that there is a great deal of evidence in plain sight to support Carl’s assertion. He agrees to go with Carl to the mausoleum, but we hear his thoughts as he reflects that Barnabas’ efforts to help him are the only hope he has of release from the werewolf curse.

In the mausoleum, Carl wonders aloud where Barnabas came from. Quentin supposes that he was there all along. Carl is horrified at the thought that he is “the real Barnabas- our ancestor! Oh God, that makes it worse!” Quentin orders Carl to open the panel, and Carl obeys. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, John Karlen once again plays the servant’s role.

In the hidden chamber, the brothers open the coffin, finding the diurnally deceased Barnabas. Quentin tells Carl to hand over the gun he has brought; Carl obeys. Quentin asks Carl if he knows how to get out of the chamber. When Carl says that he does not, Quentin turns the gun on him and forces him to stay. Quentin shuts his brother up in the chamber with the vampire.

Quentin consigns Carl to death by vampire. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In #384, set in the 1790s, Barnabas shot and killed his uncle Jeremiah. Barnabas and Jeremiah were about the same age, and had been very close; they were often compared to brothers. Barnabas was not yet under a curse when he committed that fratricide; it was an act entirely of his own will. Angelique was also partly responsible; she had cast spells on Jeremiah and on Barnabas’ fiancée Josette, causing them to conceive a mad passion for each other and to run off and get married. Enraged, Barnabas broke from the customs of New England and challenged Jeremiah to a duel. Consumed with guilt, Jeremiah deloped and let Barnabas kill him.

Barnabas’ killing of Jeremiah was murder under the laws which prevailed at the time in Maine, which was until 1821 part of Massachusetts. Indeed, Massachusetts’ anti-dueling act of 1730 provided that anyone who had either been killed in a duel or been put to death for winning a duel would “be given an unchristian burial at a gallows or crossroads, with a stake driven through their body.” Since the audience knows that Barnabas is fated to become a vampire, there is a chilling irony in seeing him volunteer for a staked burial.

Dark as was the shadow the duel cast over the subsequent history of the Collinses, at least Barnabas’ act showed a kind of twisted courage. But when Quentin uses Barnabas as a weapon to kill his brother, he is acting from the most abject cowardice. In the century that they have been subject to black magic, the Collinses have sunk from tragic grandeur to infantile squalor.

Quentin goes to the Old House and tells Magda what he has done. Magda is horrified at another murder. “No! Too many people are suspicious now. We’ve got to stop it or we’ll all be found out!” Since Magda is not a member of the Collins family, she is often the straight man reacting to revelations of their misdeeds and monstrosities. And since she is played by the charismatic Grayson Hall, the audience tends to adopt her point of view. So it is easy for us to forget that she is a functional sociopath. Despite all the killings we know to have resulted from her actions, it is still startling that Magda’s only objection to Quentin’s attempt to murder his brother is that she is afraid of getting caught.

We cut to another scene on the same set. Magda has summoned Angelique to the front parlor of the Old House. She asks Angelique to erase Carl’s memory so that Barnabas will not choose to kill him. Angelique taunts Magda as an “amateur” in the occult arts, and declares that she is done helping Barnabas. Magda says that she has read the Tarot, and that the cards tell her that Angelique loves Barnabas. She renews her plea to prevent the killing of Carl, but Angelique will not yield.

The reference to the Tarot rings a bell for longtime viewers. In the 1790s segment, Hall played the Countess DuPrés, Josette’s aunt. Angelique was introduced in that segment; she was the countess’ maidservant, and appeared to be a beginner in witchcraft. The countess was oblivious to Angelique’s sideline, and in #393 declared her to be an uninteresting woman whom she had known ever since she was an uninteresting child. The countess spent most of her time in the front parlor of the Old House reading the Tarot. That Angelique speaks so haughtily to the Tarot reader and “amateur” witch Magda on the same set highlights the reversal of roles in this segment.

Meanwhile, Carl searches the hidden chamber for a way to escape. He finds that one of the stones in the steps slides and reveals a lever. He turns the lever, opening the panel. He runs out and vows to destroy Barnabas, in the process almost knocking over a large tombstone that wobbles as if it were made of Styrofoam.

In episodes #310-315, made and set in 1967, strange and troubled boy David Collins was trapped in the hidden chamber for a whole week. He never did find the release lever- the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah finally took pity on him, materializing and showing it to him. The show avoids the implication that David is drastically dumber than his great-great uncle Carl by showing that the stone concealing the lever is already slightly ajar.

Episode 772: Apologies are the Devil’s invention

The opening voiceover plays over this image, a type of visual effect we have not seen before at the beginning of an episode:

A transparent sticker of Barnabas superimposed on the exterior of the Old House. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas Collins has bitten dimwitted servant Dirk Wilkins, turning Dirk into a vampire like himself. Barnabas has been out all night, searching for Dirk’s hiding place. He hopes to expose Dirk and frame him for his own crimes.

Barnabas comes home to the Old House on the estate of Collinwood to find that Dirk seems to be trying to do the same thing to him. There is a blood-drained corpse in an armchair in his front parlor. It is that of Miss Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl and Dirk’s first victim.

Barnabas’ distant cousins live in the great house on the estate. One of them, prankster Carl Collins, brought Pansy home with the intention of making her his bride. No sooner does Barnabas discover Pansy’s remains than Carl starts banging on the front door, shouting that he wants to speak with her.

Barnabas hides what’s left of Pansy in a secret chamber behind a bookcase, then lets Carl in. Grisly as the circumstances are, one person lying to another about the presence of a third nearby is a stock situation from farce, and John Karlen and Jonathan Frid play the scene with the particular brand of desperate seriousness that only works in farce. Barnabas persuades Carl to go away and search the grounds of the estate.

That takes a few minutes, starting from what the opening voiceover told us in so many words was “an hour before dawn.” In what remains of that hour, Barnabas takes Pansy’s body to a cemetery and buries her in a shallow grave between tombstones, telling her to “rest in peace.”

Barnabas buries Pansy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas comes home, and finds Carl, who has in the interval not only gone to the great house, the groundskeeper’s cottage, and a house on the estate which is currently occupied by a school, but has also gone into the village of Collinsport and made inquiries about Pansy. A speedy bunch, the Collinses.

Before Barnabas returned to the house, Carl had heard Pansy’s disembodied voice singing the song she had so memorably performed for Barnabas in yesterday’s episode. He had spoken to Pansy’s voice telling her that his grandmother’s will gave him a house to live in and that she could live there with him. This is puzzling for returning viewers. In #714, it was made perfectly clear that the will did not mention Carl at all. Edith Collins left her entire estate to Carl’s sister Judith, and the only one of the brothers who was mentioned was Quentin, who received no money or negotiable assets of any kind but who was guaranteed the right to stay at Collinwood as long as he pleased. Perhaps they are retconning that away, perhaps Carl is lying to Pansy, or perhaps Carl is losing his grip on reality.

Whether or not we are supposed to doubt Carl’s sanity, Barnabas talks Carl into suspecting that he might have hallucinated Pansy’s voice. Carl leaves, and Barnabas has time to return to his coffin before dawn.

The rest of the episode is taken up with doings at the school Carl had visited. We saw Carl questioning Charity Trask, daughter of the school’s master, the overwhelmingly evil Gregory Trask. The prim Charity was exasperated that Carl kept asking about Pansy after she had already denied having seen her. The scene is an interesting one- Charity and Pansy are such total opposites that it is a shame they never met. It would be amusing to see them juxtaposed.

Charity is engaged to marry Tim Shaw, a teacher at the school. Neither of them is happy about this situation. Tim was in love with Rachel Drummond, another of the teachers, and Charity is Barnabas’ blood thrall. But Gregory blackmailed Tim and bullied Charity into accepting the arrangement.

Charity’s mother, prudish Minerva Trask, does not like Tim or want him as a son-in-law. She urges Charity to set her sights on Carl. Charity says that she would rather marry Barnabas; Minerva says that her instincts are sound, but that she ought not to settle for a cousin of the rich Collinses when one of the brothers is available. Even if they have retconned Carl into owning a house, he is clearly not a rich man, so this reveals that Minerva knows as little about his financial position as she does about the curse under which Barnabas labors.

Charity tries to engage Tim in conversation, and is baffled that he is not willing to talk to her. Indeed, he does not seem like himself at all. Not only is he dismissive with Charity, but when Minerva confronts him he is bold and insolent, a far cry from the broken man we have seen interacting with the Trasks previously. When Charity tells him their engagement is off, he does not express the relief that she and we expect, but puts on a stagey voice we have not heard him use before and marches off to apologize to her mother.

There is a reason for Tim’s behavior. Gregory enlisted warlock Evan Hanley to brainwash Tim so that he would kill Minerva. There is some business with the Queen of Spades, first when Tim mutters the phrase “Queen of Spades,” then when Evan sends him a note on which is scrawled “Queen of Spades,” and lastly when he walks in on Minerva playing solitaire and sees her turn up the Queen of Spades. Many viewers in 1969 would have remembered Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate and its 1962 film version. In Condon’s novel, Raymond Shaw became a robot capable of murder when he saw the Queen of Hearts; in the film, the card was the Queen of Diamonds. Many first time viewers, seeing Tim Shaw’s reaction to the Queen of Spades, would have made the connection and understood why he ends the episode by poisoning Minerva’s tea.

Is this your card? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Tim Shaw differs from Raymond Shaw in that he is under a spell for a long while, including the whole time we see him today, and he can talk and act independently while it operates on him. Raymond simply became catatonic when he saw the card and remained that way until he heard a command. He then executed the command and came back to himself once he was finished. Tim’s behavior may suggest a nod to another literary work, Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades.” That tale, which Tchaikovsky turned into an opera and which in 1949 was made into a feature film, is about a timid man who inadvertently kills a powerful woman and loses control of himself as a consequence. Like Tim, Captain Herman is coerced into marrying a woman he does not love. Presented with an opportunity to get out of the marriage, he finds himself making extraordinary efforts to go through with it, efforts which bring about his ultimate downfall.