The opening voiceover tells us that vampire Barnabas Collins is about to “find an innocent victim, who will not only add to his grief and guilt, but also to his immediate peril.” Innocent victims can be so inconsiderate that way.
Barnabas has taken barmaid Buffie Harrington back to her apartment. She asks if she can give him a drink. He moves closer, and she takes him in her arms. He takes a drink, all right. She screams and collapses. As she hits the floor, Cyrus Longworth, MD, lets himself into the room and makes eye contact with Barnabas.
Barnabas claims that he ran into the room when he heard Buffie’s scream, which is not one of his more convincing lies. Cyrus insists on examining Buffie. In the nick of time, Buffie wakes up. She agrees with Barnabas that she is fine. Barnabas offers to stay with her. Cyrus does the same, to which Barnabas replies that he must have some business to attend to if he is in this part of town so late at night. Cyrus can’t deny that, and leaves.
Barnabas gives his new blood thrall some quick instructions, including strict orders to stay away from Cyrus. The next evening, Cyrus drops by Buffie’s place again, and she is as cold and unfriendly as Barnabas could have wished. As Cyrus is going, Buffie asks if he has heard from his friend John Yaeger lately. He says he hasn’t, but that she will be the first to know if he does. He leaves.
Barnabas materializes. Buffie is surprised that he was eavesdropping. Now that he knows Cyrus is close to Yaeger, he rescinds his order for her to avoid him. He says that Yaeger knows where his coffin is, and he wants to know everything he can about Yaeger for his own protection.
The next evening, Cyrus is back at Buffie’s. He is surprised she invited him. She says she hadn’t meant to be so rude the evening before. She asks about Yaeger, explaining that she has some things of his and is keen to get them back to him as soon as possible. Cyrus says only that he is sure Yaeger will be back soon. He leaves, and Buffie asks herself why Cyrus is protecting Yaeger.
Returning viewers know what Buffie and Barnabas do not. Yaeger does not exist. Cyrus has developed a potion which alters his appearance so drastically that even those closest to him do not recognize him when he is under its influence. Thus disguised, he calls himself “John Yaeger” and indulges his sadistic impulses. With this episode, the show sets Barnabas and Cyrus on a collision course. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde meet Dracula, here we come.
In the great house of Collinwood, another bizarre imposture is underway. Angelique Stokes Collins, the late wife of Quentin Collins, has returned from the dead, murdered her identical twin sister Alexis, and taken Alexis’ place as a houseguest. Her goal is to alienate Quentin from his new wife, the former Maggie Evans, and return to her previous place as mistress of Collinwood.
“Alexis” has been telling everyone that Angelique was murdered, which she in fact believes herself to have been. Since the coroner’s report ruled Angelique’s death the result of a stroke, Quentin does not take this idea seriously. “Alexis” has managed to persuade Maggie to do so, however, and when first we see them they are having a testy exchange over the question.
“Alexis” is happy to overhear this conversation. When the drawing room doors open, she presents Maggie with a bunch of flowers she has picked from the gardens on the grounds of the estate. Since the estate belongs to Maggie and Quentin, this is rather a childish gesture, but it pleases Maggie. “Alexis” goes to fetch a vase.
Cyrus shows up. Maggie goes upstairs while Cyrus and Quentin go to the drawing room. The men talk about Larry Chase, an attorney who represented both of them. Larry died in the foyer at Collinwood yesterday. At that time Quentin and Maggie were out together, so Larry was alone with “Alexis.” Cyrus says that Larry somehow froze to death in the foyer.
Angelique is alone with the flowers. She casts a spell causing them to shrivel and die. She then turns to the camera, looks directly at the audience, and gives her best “Ain’t I a stinker?” look.
In #346, Barnabas touched a bouquet of flowers, causing them to shrivel and die. That embarrassed Barnabas, as if he had lost control of his gastrointestinal system for a moment. It also alarmed well-meaning governess Vicki, but she never mentioned it again, and it certainly didn’t tip her off that Barnabas was a vampire. This incident shocks and befuddles Quentin and Maggie, but when he brings it up in their bedroom later she has already forgotten all about it and he agrees it wasn’t very important.
Even if it had made as big an impression as Angelique was hoping it would, destroying the flowers would probably not have advanced her goal of making Quentin suspect that Maggie is a supernatural force of darkness. He does notice the similarity to what happened to Larry, but since Angelique was with Larry when he died and Quentin and Maggie were together somewhere else, and since Angelique was in contact with the flowers for far longer than Maggie was, any suspicion it would raise would most logically be directed at herself.
“Alexis” has more success persuading Maggie to suspect Quentin of the murder of Angelique. Maggie has a dream about the séance at which Angelique died. It ends with Quentin choking Angelique. She wakes up screaming that he shouldn’t have murdered his wife.
In fact, Quentin did choke Angelique at the séance, but Angelique has discounted that as a possible cause of her death. She thinks that someone else drove a pin into her head while Quentin was busy strangling her. How the autopsy missed that, she hasn’t told us.
Last week the show credited its videotape editors for the first time, the team of Danny Rosenson and Robert Steinback. Today is the first credit for another pair of videotape editors, Chuck Gardner and Indra Sadoo.
The music under the closing credits sounds quite different than it has the last couple of years. We were wondering if it was an old tape, and then, about halfway through, came the voice that used to end every episode- ABC staff man Bob Lloyd intoning “Dark Shadows… is a Dan Curtis Production.” I was delighted to hear him again, if only on an old recording used by mistake.
Angelique Stokes Collins has risen from the dead, but her renewed existence may end within seconds. She is overwhelmingly cold, and can warm up only by draining the heat from the body of a living person. Someone is coming in the front door, just in time to be her victim and die in her stead. She wonders who it will be.
Almost all the characters currently on Dark Shadows are either so important to an ongoing story that their deaths would end a major arc or have so many connections to everyone else that their deaths would start a new one. So if she kills mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, his fiancée Sabrina Stuart, or barmaid Buffie Harrington, Angelique will be ending the Jekyll and Hyde story, or at least shifting it into a radically new phase. If she kills drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, his wife Maggie Evans Collins, or housekeeper Julia Hoffman, she will be ending the adaptation of Rebecca. If she kills Carolyn Loomis or her husband Will, she will be ending the restaging of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
If Angelique kills woebegone homebody Elizabeth Collins Stoddard or her brother, sardonic dandy Roger Collins, she won’t be ending any ongoing stories. But Liz and Roger are the counterparts of characters who were central to the life of the great house of Collinwood in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows, when it was set in another universe, and are played by actors who have substantial followings. If either of them is murdered, the audience will expect major consequences. Angelique’s son Daniel Collins and Daniel’s cousin Amy Collins aren’t doing much just now, but if Angelique kills a child, especially her own son, the ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices would join the audience in insisting she face a serious reckoning that would take up a lot of screen time. This fit of heat vampirism came on Angelique too suddenly to make sense as the start of a new arc, so we can rule all of those candidates out.
There are also a couple of characters who were introduced to fill in for actors who were away the previous couple of months filming their parts in the theatrical feature House of Dark Shadows. Among those are Angelique’s Aunt Hannah and butler Mr Trask. They are possibilities, but are both played by actors who have enough going for them that it would be a bit surprising to bring them back just to kill them off. There are also a few miscellaneous day players whose characters would have no reason to let themselves into the great house of Collinwood- a bartender we saw in #991, a landlady we saw in #997, etc.
So it would seem that there are only two people who could be Angelique’s next meal. One is sleazy musician Bruno Hess, a former boyfriend of hers who lives in the cottage on the grounds of Collinwood and is friends with Cyrus, but who has been neither seen nor missed for some time. The other is Larry Chase, attorney at law.
Bruno is played by the dynamic Michael Stroka, who twice made a mark when cast in stories set in the other universe. Larry was written into the show as a last-minute substitute for a part played by an actor whose health problems made it impossible for him to continue. They didn’t have time for auditions, so they drafted associate director Ken McEwen for the part. McEwen was in the building, and he had a guild card because of some small parts he’d taken in TV shows he’d worked on in the 1950s. When he has enough time to rehearse, which is to say when he has had more time to rehearse than actors usually got on a show like Dark Shadows, McEwen gets his lines right, except for adding “Well…” at the beginning of every single one. You can tell he is making a sincere effort not to ruin the show. But that’s about all you can say for him. Even at his best he’s stiff and distracted, and when he hasn’t been able to get his part down, he disintegrates completely. So it isn’t much of a surprise that Larry is the one who opens the door. It wasn’t a surprise to me, I should say; writing these posts keeps all the details fresh in my mind. My wife, Mrs Acilius, looked at him for about thirty seconds and asked “Who’s that?”
Larry plays the same scene with Angelique that her second victim, Fred the transient handyman, had played with her in #1003, right down to telling her that he had wanted to hold her since he first saw her. Fred was played by Edmond Hashim, and anyone who sees the two versions of this scene side by side will come away with a new appreciation for Hashim’s talents as an actor. This is McEwen’s final on-screen appearance, though he will pinch hit as the opening narrator in three upcoming episodes. He will continue as an associate director through episode 1179/1180 in December.
Will enters to find Angelique screaming and Larry dead. Angelique, who is impersonating her late identical twin sister Alexis, claims that Larry was just standing there when he had an attack of some kind and dropped dead. Will touches the corpse and says that he is so cold he must have been dead for hours. “Alexis” insists he just died a moment before. Will calls Cyrus, who is the Collins family physician.
Cyrus is in his lab, looking at the potion which turns him into the Mr Hyde-like John Yaeger. He is about to capitulate to his craving when the telephone rings. Will tells him that Larry is dead and asks him to come to Collinwood. Cyrus puts the potion back in his safe and rejoices that he is “Saved!” Larry was Cyrus’ lawyer and apparently a social friend as well. We’ve already seen Cyrus do enough horrible things that this sociopathic reaction is no shock.
Back at Collinwood, Will and “Alexis” are talking with Barnabas Collins. Unknown to “Alexis,” Barnabas is a visitor from the other universe. Her counterpart in his world was the wicked witch who turned him into a vampire, so Barnabas cannot keep a hostile edge out of his voice and manner when he is talking to her. Will is one of Barnabas’ victims, and knows all of his secrets.
When they are alone in the drawing room, “Alexis” questions Will about Barnabas. Will denies knowing him particularly well. Barnabas is staying at Will’s house, and several years ago Will wrote a biography of Barnabas’ counterpart in this universe, a man who lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830. Barnabas claims to be a descendant of that Barnabas Collins, and to have come to Collinwood to meet the author of the biography. Will becomes more and more disturbed as “Alexis” presses him harder and harder for information. She is perplexed that he won’t tell her anything. Lara Parker and John Karlen have both been on the show for a long time, but this is the first substantial two scene between them, and it is terrific. Their acting styles were very different, but they couldn’t have meshed better.
Barnabas is sitting at a table in the Eagle tavern. There is a glass of reddish liquid in front of him. In view of his condition, one wonders what that liquid might be.
Barnabas invites Buffie to sit with him. Since there are no other customers, she agrees. He tells her he is from South America. The son of this universe’s Barnabas Collins whom he claims as his great-grandfather went to Peru; when he introduced himself to the family, he said that his forebear did not die in that country. But evidently his imaginary descendants stayed on the continent, somewhere.
The Eagle is the counterpart of the Blue Whale in the other continuity. In #3, Burke Devlin was sitting at a table in the Blue Whale with hard-working young fisherman Joe Haskell when he said that his success in life began when a strange man picked him up in a bar in Montevideo. That was the show’s only reference to Uruguay, but Burke, the Blue Whale, and Brazil came to be strongly associated with each other. The song “Aquarela do Brasil,” a big hit in the English speaking world in the 1960s under the title “Brazil,” played on the jukebox at the Blue Whale, and it became Burke’s theme song. Ultimately Burke would die on a business trip to Brazil. Barnabas and Burke were enemies; when he sits at this table and claims to have a South American background, longtime viewers may wonder if he is thinking that the new universe is a place where he can try out a new personality and maybe he will start by imitating Burke’s.
Burke was a dashing action hero, attractive to women. Barnabas’ attempt to imitate him breaks down almost immediately. He winds up mimicking another prominent bachelor from his native universe, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, when he asks Buffie if she’s ever heard of the theory of “Parallel Time.”
Buffie shakes her head no. Barnabas says that some people believe that there are many universes, and that a copy of each of us can be found in each of them. They may look the same, but they lead different lives because they have made different choices. Buffie laughs and says that she hopes her other selves are having more fun than she is. She hastens to say that she doesn’t mean she isn’t having fun at the moment, sharing a table with Barnabas; she means that her life in Collinsport, as viewed from the most all-encompassing perspective and analyzed in the most thorough philosophic manner, well and truly sucks shit. Barnabas says that the other Buffies in the multiverse might have left Collinsport* and had wonderful adventures.
Longtime viewers saw one of those other Buffies in #951, when we were still in the original continuity. She had a different name; she went by Nelle Gunston. And as befits a mirror universe, she moved in the opposite direction. Rather than leaving Collinsport to look for something new as Buffie wishes she had done, Nelle left her parents’ home in Virginia and went to Collinsport because she had joined a cult dedicated to the destruction of the human race and its replacement by a loathsome breed of Elder Gods known as the Leviathan People. Barnabas had been the leader of the Leviathan cult, and when Nelle came to town she sat with him by the same table where Buffie and Barnabas sit today. They even take the same seats.
Buffie is charmed by Barnabas’ talk; between the suavity that Jonathan Frid brings to his part today and the energy with which Elizabeth Eis presents Buffie’s enthusiasm for him, it is far easier than it usually is to believe that Barnabas is a sexy dude. Maybe we are supposed to think that role-playing as Burke has enabled him to loosen up.
The conversation is really warming up when the bell attached to the front door rings. “Customer,” Buffie ruefully says to Barnabas as she rises. It is Cyrus.
Barnabas invites Cyrus to sit with them. He declines, saying that he came only to ask Buffie if she had seen John Yaeger lately. She tenses up. Yaeger used to beat her up and force her to help him with his crimes. She says that Cyrus himself had told Buffie that Yaeger wouldn’t be back in Collinsport. Cyrus says that he did, but that he is worried he might not be able to predict Yaeger’s movements as well as he thought he could. He offers Barnabas a lift back to Collinwood. That’s a bit surprising, since Cyrus got uptight when he saw Barnabas. As Yaeger, Cyrus discovered that there is a coffin in the basement of Will and Carolyn’s house, and he suspects that Barnabas spends his days there. But longtime viewers can remember the days Barnabas and Burke had conversations at the Blue Whale that were just as tense as the one he and Cyrus have in the Eagle, and Burke never failed to observe the small graces. It’s just the done thing, I suppose.
Cyrus leaves, and Buffie remains standing. She and Barnabas keep talking. He gets close, and goes in for a bite. He stops himself at the last second, to her surprise and disappointment. She was apparently ready for a kiss on the neck. He says he has to go. She is even more disappointed by that, but he promises to come back at closing. He asks to walk her home, and she happily agrees.
Will and Cyrus are in the drawing room at Collinwood. Will urges Cyrus to join him in a drink. When Cyrus declines, Will reminisces about the old days at Collinwood, when the party would just be getting started at this hour. In those days, people would leave the great house in the small hours of the morning and continue their revels at the Eagle. Cyrus says he won’t find much company there tonight. When he says that the only people in the place earlier were “the girl who works there” and Barnabas, Will looks alarmed. All of his mannerisms that suggest drunkenness drop away, and he rushes out.
Will gets to the tavern, and finds Buffie alone. The alcoholic author is obviously one of her favorite and most lucrative customers, so even though she has already blown out the candles she tells him he is in time for last call. To her amazement, he is not interested in a drink. He asks her where Barnabas is. She says he’ll be back and that he is taking her home. He says no, and she asks what’s wrong. Before he can answer, Will hears Barnabas’ voice behind him, echoing Buffie’s question. Laboring under the vampire’s power, Will has no choice but to leave Buffie alone with Barnabas.
Nelle, too, had agreed left the tavern with Barnabas. She expected to meet the leader of the Leviathans at his place, and was unhappy to find that the two of them were alone. Buffie is again an inverted mirror image of her counterpart. She takes Barnabas to her place, and is quite happy to be alone with him. The two close in for an embrace. He bites her neck, and she collapses. He had bitten Nelle, too. At that moment, Cyrus enters the room.
Cyrus does not exactly have a counterpart in the other continuity, but Christopher Pennock did play the Leviathan leader whom Nelle expected to meet. Like Cyrus, that character was a murderous shape-shifter. So Cyrus’ unexpected arrival mirrors the Leviathan leader’s unexpected absence.
When we first cut to Buffie’s room, the camera lingers for several seconds on an extremely unusual prop. It is a television set. The only other time we have seen a television set on Dark Shadows was in #27, in the other universe, when Burke visited investigator Stuart Bronson in a hotel room in Bangor, Maine where there was a small portable unit. It looks like it might be the same set.
Bronson’s TVBuffie’s TV
The shot goes on so long, and the set is such an odd thing to see in the context of the show, that they must be making some kind of point with it. We have wondered why Buffie submitted to Yaeger’s abuse, when she is such a strong and intelligent person. Her reflection in Nelle suggests a partial answer. Nelle was drawn to the Leviathans, who offered to destroy her and all other humans. We can assume that Buffie, too, was following a self-destructive urge when she went along with Yaeger. Associated with her, the television is a symbol of the annihilation of the self. Turn the idiot box on, turn your mind off. If you aren’t careful, you may even wind up spending your weekdays staring glassy-eyed at ABC’s daytime lineup.
*He actually says “Collinwood.” Which is a blooper, but since Buffie mentioned in her first episode that she used to work at Collinwood it is kind of an interesting one. Maybe when another Buffie left her position as an upstairs maid or whatever she was, she got further than the nearest tavern.
Quentin Collins finds a voodoo doll in his wife Maggie’s suitcase. She tells him she hasn’t seen it before. At length it dawns on him that it is physically possible for a person to place an object in someone else’s suitcase. He remembers that housekeeper Julia Hoffman was in the room for no good reason last night while Maggie was sleeping. Several weeks ago, he was able to see the abundant evidence that Julia was trying to drive Maggie out of the house. He knows that Julia was fanatically devoted to his late wife Angelique and must know that Angelique was involved in black magic, so that Julia would be the obvious suspect in an awkward situation concerning Maggie and a voodoo doll.
The next day, Quentin talks the situation over with Cyrus Longworth, his physician and an expert in black magic. Later, he confronts Julia; she denies leaving anything in the room. He does not have any further evidence to use to challenge her denials, so he leaves it at that.
What Julia knows that Maggie, Quentin, and Cyrus do not is that Angelique has returned from the dead. She murdered her identical twin sister Alexis and took Alexis’ place as Quentin’s houseguest. Julia and Angelique are conspiring to drive Maggie and Quentin apart so that Angelique can resume her place as Quentin’s wife and the mistress of the great house of Collinwood. Julia and Angelique keep congratulating themselves on how upset Maggie is getting, apparently not noticing that Quentin is suspicious of Julia and thinking of firing her.
Angelique, masquerading as Alexis, calls on Maggie in the master bedroom. She says that she realizes her presence in the house has been stressful for Maggie, and offers to leave if she wants her to do so. Maggie says that she is not stressed now, because she realizes that she is Alexis. She describes herself as childish and hysterical in her initial reaction, when she thought she was Angelique returned from the dead, and tells her to stay in the house as long as she likes. “Alexis” takes this statement at face value, and goes on to explain her belief that Angelique was murdered and her determination to find the person responsible.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that there is more going on in this scene than Angelique knows. Quentin has a habit of calling Maggie childish and hysterical, and she rejects those labels. So when she applies them to herself, regular viewers know that she is not giving her sincere opinion.
Moreover, being accepted as Alexis is not the winner with Maggie that Angelique believes it is. In #985, Maggie found Quentin and Alexis in Angelique’s old bedroom. Alexis was wearing Angelique’s frilly nightgown, pressing herself to Quentin, stretching her hand to him, looking into his eyes, and saying softly “Perhaps we can comfort each other.” Maggie ran from that sight to the drawing room, followed by Quentin. He tried to tell her she did not see what she saw. She told him that she would no longer be treated like a child, and left to spend the next six weeks at her sister’s place in New York. Angelique was in her grave at that time, and neither Alexis, Quentin, nor Maggie told her about it. So she does not know that by impersonating Alexis she is inviting Maggie’s distrust. She does not understand the warning Maggie is giving her when she tells her that she knows she is Alexis.
Maggie’s view of Alexis as a rival for Quentin also explains why she characterized her decision to go to stay with her sister as motivated solely by her own irrationality. Alexis is the last person with whom she wants to discuss her differences with Quentin, so of course she claims total responsibility for their earlier rift.
Angelique’s resurrection can last only so long as she can keep warm, and she can do that only by draining heat from the bodies of the living. Now the cold comes up on Angelique again. It strikes her during her scene with Maggie. Maggie can see that “Alexis” is ill, and reaches a friendly hand towards her. Angelique says this is just something that happens to her occasionally, and that she has to get under some blankets as soon as possible. She rushes out.
When she is in this condition, all Angelique has to do is touch a person and they will be an icy corpse. It is interesting that she chooses to pass up her chance to kill Maggie. Perhaps she is afraid that doing so would lead to her exposure. Alexis was her first unwilling heat donor; a handyman named Fred, who had the ill fortune to cross Angelique’s path in #1003, was the second. Angelique has concealed Alexis’ death by impersonating her, and Fred was due to leave town anyway. So no one has missed either of them. But there would be no covering up Maggie’s death.
Through the first half of the scene, Lara Parker’s hair and Kathryn Leigh Scott’s keep fluttering. The window on the set is closed, so that just makes us wonder how high the air conditioning was in the studio. After they come back from commercial, that problem is solved, but it was conspicuous enough to add a bad laugh to Angelique’s heat vampire symptoms.
Angelique runs down to the foyer, crying out for Julia. When she comes, Angelique orders her to fetch a victim whose body heat she can consume. Julia refuses, and Angelique tells her that if she doesn’t provide someone else she will herself be the next donor. Julia goes.
A moment later, Angelique feels she is about to succumb to the cold. She sees the doorknob turning, and resolves to claim whoever is about to enter. “Who will it be?” she asks, “Who… will… it… be?” There aren’t many candidates. There have been periods when the show had a bunch of characters in reserve who were not directly connected to any ongoing stories, but there are only a handful of those now, and only one or two would be likely to let himself or herself into Collinwood.
Five and a half years ago, I defended the episode in a comment I left on Danny Horn’s great blog, Dark Shadows Every Day. This segment of Dark Shadows is set in a different universe than the one where the first 196 weeks took place; the show insists on calling it “Parallel Time.” So the letters “PT” are sometimes put in front of the characters’ names to differentiate them from the versions of the characters we met in the original continuity. Danny and many of his commenters were getting impatient with Parallel Time by this point, and some compared it unfavorably to the trips the show took back in time within the main continuity, especially the costume drama segment set in the 1790s that ran from November 1967 to March 1968.
I’m liking it.
PT Angelique’s harebrained scheme isn’t really any worse than were most of Angelique-Prime’s schemes. So the difference between PT Maggie and Quentin on the one hand and 1795 Josette and Jeremiah on the other is that Maggie and Quentin have some brains. They talk to each other about what they’ve seen, confront Miss Hoffman, and consult with the resident Doctor of Spookology. For viewers who had seen 1795, that must have come both as a relief- thank goodness they aren’t going to simply recycle that story- and as a source of suspense- when Angelique sees her first evil plan fail, what other, even more evil plan will she devise?
Comment left by “Acilius,” 12 January 2021, on Danny Horn, “Episode 1019: Peer at a Prop,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 7 May 2017
I would have gone on to talk about all the stuff between Maggie and Angelique, but Mrs Acilius only pointed that out to me this time through. I’m sure that while I was watching the scene I responded emotionally to the nuances in Miss Scott’s performance, but I didn’t have it in mind after the episode was over.
The closing credits still bill Lara Parker as “Alexis Stokes,” a month after Angelique killed Alexis and took her place. Mrs Acilius explains this by reminding me of all the times when actors have strolled onto the set during the credits. She imagines someone walking on, seeing the credit that identifies Angelique, and reacting with shock.
There are a number of buildings on the estate of Collinwood. There is the Old House, a big mansion where the Collinses lived until the 1790s, and the great house, an even bigger mansion where they have lived since. These days, the Old House is home to hard-drinking writer William H. Loomis and his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Sometimes the place is called “Loomis House” in recognition of its inhabitants. We learn today that the Loomises have a servant. His name is Wilfred Block, but everyone knows him as Fred.
Fred hears some noise coming from the attic. He goes up there and finds two kids who belong at the great house. They are Amy Collins and her cousin, Daniel Collins. Amy is out cold, and Fred asks Daniel what he did to her. Daniel claims to be innocent. He says that Amy just looked at a portrait and fainted. That’s the sort of thing the Collinses do all the time, so Fred accepts it. He carries Amy back to the great house. Daniel follows.
There, Daniel tells his father, Quentin Collins, the same story he told Fred. Fred tells Quentin that he couldn’t get any answers out of Amy. She just kept repeating the words “chained” and “trapped.” Quentin thanks Fred.
On his way out, Fred sees a woman whom he greets as “Miss Alexis.” He tells Alexis that he misses her visits to the Loomis House. She walks up very close to him and says she is feeling cold. He says he knows what to do about that, and hugs her. She holds the embrace for quite a while. He says he’s wanted to do that ever since he first saw her. She tells him to kiss her. Before he can comply, they hear Quentin coming. They separate and look nonchalant. Quentin is surprised Fred is still there. Fred hastens out.
Later, Alexis’ aunt, Hannah Stokes, would go to Fred at the Loomis House and ask him to come to her place, telling him Alexis wanted to see him there. That scene took place out of our view. The next time we do see Fred, Hannah is leading him into her parlor. Fred tells Alexis that he’d been planning to see her at Collinwood, but she says it is better at Hannah’s. Hannah leaves them alone together. They embrace, and Fred kisses Alexis. He feels cold. She tells him he will go on feeling cold, but bids him embrace her again. He does. He collapses.
Hannah was close to one of her nieces, Quentin’s late wife Angelique Stokes Collins. But she never got along with Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis. Angelique had shared Hannah’s interest in the occult, and had been her pupil in that area, while Alexis scorned such matters. Alexis came to stay at Collinwood four and a half weeks ago, and spoke to Hannah only once during that time, when Hannah invited herself to the great house. That was a tense meeting which ended with Alexis all but ordering Hannah to go.
Hannah is taken aback today when she answers her door. She sees Alexis. She makes sarcastic remarks about Alexis, which do not deter her visitor from entering. The visitor asks Hannah to tell her fortune. Hannah resists, but the visitor keeps telling her it is something she wants very much. Hannah starts laying out the Tarot, but the first two cards disturb her so deeply she stops and cannot be persuaded to resume. She tells her visitor that they mean that she has no future. The visitor responds with a placid look and an insistence that Hannah read her palm. Hannah does not want to see the same message there, but the visitor will not be denied. When she looks at her palm, Hannah has a realization. “You are not Alexis! You are Angelique!”
Hannah is horrified that Angelique has returned from the dead. She does not want to know how it was done. Angelique seems eager to tell her everything; if Hannah were willing to listen, she might even volunteer that she murdered Alexis by draining the warmth from her body to heat her own undead frame. Angelique asks Hannah to bring her up to date on some things that happened while Alexis was at Collinwood and she was in the tomb. She then explains that her own death was also a murder, and that she wants to avenge it, though she does not yet know who the murderer was. She also has plans for Quentin, though she does not make it clear at this time what those are. She tells Hannah to bring Fred to her so that she can drain the warmth from him. Hannah protests, but Angelique tells her she has no choice. If she does not deliver Fred to her, she will haunt Hannah as long as Hannah lives.
After Fred collapses, Angelique calls her aunt back to the parlor. She tells her that she is all right now. Hannah finds that Fred is dead. Angelique agrees that he is, and repeats that she is warm again. She goes on: “That’s the way it must be now. This is the way I will live now. And when Quentin comes to join me, he will live this way, too. For eternity.” Evidently she is now a vampire, only instead of blood she drains heat from her victims. Also, she will be killing someone every 24 hours. Collinsport has been established as a very small town, so if she and Quentin are both going to be keeping up that pace it’s hard to see how it can last even for a year, let alone for eternity.
Quentin Collins
Quentin does not suspect that Angelique has risen from the dead, killed her sister, and taken her place. He has problems of his own. At the beginning of today’s episode, he is standing at the door to Angelique’s old bedroom in the east wing of Collinwood, where Alexis stayed during her visit and which Angelique now occupies again under Alexis’ name. He is looking into the room, but does not see it. Instead, he sees an entirely different space. Unlike Angelique’s richly decorated room, it is bare and dark.
Quentin sees two children in the room. They look and sound exactly like Daniel and Amy, though they are wearing clothing he does not recognize. He calls the names Daniel and Amy, but even though they are just a few feet away from him they do not seem to hear him or to be aware of his presence. An invisible barrier of some kind keeps him from entering the room.
Though the children cannot hear Quentin, he can hear what they are saying. The boy says that according to his father, “Dr Hoffman” said that “Barnabas got caught” in the room. The girl is alarmed and says that she does not want to get caught. She does not want to be in the room at all, but would rather be asleep in bed.
Quentin keeps calling the names Daniel and Amy. After a moment, he hears Daniel’s voice coming from somewhere other than the room. He turns, and sees Daniel and Amy standing behind him in the hallway. They don’t know what he is talking about when he asks them if they have been in the room, and he doesn’t know how to explain what he saw.
The Hoffman likeliest to come to Quentin’s mind is Julia Hoffman, Angelique’s fanatically devoted servant, who is the housekeeper at the great house of Collinwood and is certainly not a doctor. The only Barnabas he can think of is Barnabas Collins, an ancestor who died in 1830 and who was the subject of a biography Will Loomis wrote five years ago. Amy has told him that Will has started another book about that Barnabas. Quentin read Will’s original book, and was puzzled as to what could possibly be left to be said about its subject. So the conversation he has overheard makes no more sense to him than does the setting in which it took place.
Quentin shoos the children away and goes into the room. It is furnished as it always is. Angelique, whom he believes to be Alexis, is lounging in the middle of it. He tries to explain the phenomenon to her, and she does not take him at all seriously. He tells her enough that she should know that if it was an hallucination, it was a remarkably involved one, the sort that occurs only to people with grave mental illnesses. Even so, she could not be less interested in it. She wants to know what Quentin is doing to investigate her murder. He says that he doesn’t believe Angelique was murdered, to which she replies that he is a fool. This conversation does not have an obvious track forward, and Quentin quickly excuses himself.
Barnabas Collins
Barnabas Collins went to the island of Martinique in the 1790s on a business trip for his father’s shipping concern. While there, he met two lovely young women. One was Josette DuPrés, daughter of the richest sugar planter on the island. He was captivated by Josette, but did not believe she could love him. Josette’s aunt, the exiled Countess DuPrés, had brought a lady’s maid with her when she escaped from the French Revolution. This maid, named Angelique, was quite as beautiful as Josette, and made it clear that she was available to Barnabas. He consoled the sadness that he felt when he supposed Josette to be unreachable in a light-hearted love affair with Angelique. When it turned out that Josette was not unreachable at all, he forgot about Angelique and turned to her. Soon, he and Josette were engaged to be married.
When Josette and her father came to Collinwood for the wedding in 1795, the countess and Angelique came along. Angelique was sure that Barnabas was marrying Josette only to conceal his true intention, which was to keep her as his real partner. When she discovered that this was not the case, Angelique vowed to do something about it. She had learned black magic, and was ready to wreak a terrible vengeance.
Angelique managed to end Barnabas’ engagement to Josette, and had caused many disasters by the time Barnabas agreed to marry her. Before long, he discovered that she was a witch. He made several farcically inept attempts to kill her. When he shot her with a gun, she thought he had succeeded. As she lay bleeding, Angelique cursed Barnabas to become a vampire. It turned out her wounds were only superficial, but the curse was not. Barnabas was eventually trapped and chained in his coffin until 1967, when he was accidentally freed once more to prey upon the living.
That Barnabas Collins was not the one Will wrote his 1965 book about, and that Angelique is not the one who has returned from her coffin to stay in Quentin’s house. They were residents of a parallel universe. It was in their universe that the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows took place. There, the east wing of Collinwood has long been vacant and disused. Barnabas happened to be there when the bare dark room Quentin sees today was replaced by Angelique’s room from this universe. He and several other residents of the original continuity saw the phenomenon a number of times over the next few days.
Barnabas became preoccupied with the forlorn hope that if he could enter the other “time-band,” he might be freed of the vampire curse and become human again. His closest friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, tried to dissuade him from this plan, but he was nothing daunted. Barnabas finally did manage to find a way through the barrier.
Once in “Parallel Time,” Barnabas’ hopes were instantly disappointed. He was still a vampire. The first person he met was Carolyn Stoddard Loomis. He bit her and made her his thrall. Will found out about this very shortly after, and trapped Barnabas in a chained coffin. He is using him as a source of material for a new book.
The children Quentin saw talking about Barnabas were not Daniel and Amy Collins, but David Collins and Amy Jennings from the main continuity. They don’t know that Barnabas is a vampire; so far as they are concerned, he is their kindly cousin from England, an old world gentleman with some eccentric habits.
Amy Collins
Amy had stayed with the Loomises for a few days recently when there was some trouble in the great house. She took Daniel to their attic because she wanted him to join her in her favorite pastime while she was there, going through the trunks. Daniel declares that only girls would be interested in an activity like that. Amy doesn’t refute his claim when she says that the trunks have all sorts of interesting old stuff in them, such as dolls.
Daniel asks Amy about the basement of the Loomis House. She tells him that Will has the only key, and that he refuses to let even Carolyn go down there. We know that the basement is where Will keeps Barnabas’ coffin. Daniel says that there is a tunnel that leads from the beach right into the basement, and that he likes to play there. He says that it has been sealed up lately, but suggests Amy come with him to unseal it and explore. She says “Not at night,” and turns away. He calls her a scared-y-cat. Longtime viewers know that the same tunnel exists in the main continuity and that it has been a hugely important part of the story more than once, and will wonder if they can again match the excitement associated with it in those past episodes.
Amy tells Daniel that there is a sword somewhere in the attic, a real one. This does not exactly thrill Daniel, but at least he asks if it is a saber or a fencing foil, which is more than he had to offer in response to the prospect of digging up some antique dolls. He goes to look for the sword behind some paintings. When he turns up the portrait of Barnabas Collins, he hears a heartbeat. Longtime viewers will remember that characters have several times heard a heartbeat when looking at the portrait of Barnabas in the main continuity, and that this means that Barnabas is going to be on the show before much longer. Amy can’t hear the heartbeat, but she does have a strong reaction. It is at this point that she faints and the ill-fated Fred enters.
Regular viewers know that Amy’s muttering of the words “chained” and “trapped” mean that she has a mystical perception of Barnabas’ situation. But Quentin doesn’t have the slightest idea what to make of it. Amy comes to in the drawing room and tells Quentin that when she saw the eyes in the portrait of Barnabas, she realized he needed help. Quentin says that Barnabas has been dead for a very long time.* Amy says she knows, and leaves it at that.
Ben Stokes
In the 1790s, the Barnabas of the main continuity befriended much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes. Barnabas’ father, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, made Ben’s life miserable. Barnabas took pity on Ben, teaching him to read and write and standing up for him when he was wrongly accused of misconduct. In return, Ben gave Barnabas his absolute loyalty.
When Angelique came to Collinwood in 1795 and hatched her evil schemes, she decided she needed a henchman. She chose Ben. She pretended to find Ben attractive. He matter-of-factly walked up to her and took hold of her, as if women who look like movie stars come on to indentured servants every day. She soon used his excitement to cast her spell on him. He found himself helping Angelique to do great harm to Barnabas and everyone he cared about, grieving him very deeply.
Eventually, Ben broke free of Angelique. He went on to be freed from his indenture and to have children. One of his descendants is Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, an expert on the occult and a frequent ally of Barnabas and Dr Hoffman.
Fred’s response to Angelique today reminds us of Ben so long ago. Once Ben gathered that Angelique was propositioning him, he didn’t see any need to talk at all. They both had work to get back to, so he was ready to get down to business straightaway. But Fred keeps telling Angelique how beautiful she is and how he always hoped something would develop between them. His dialogue and Edmund Hashim’s delivery of it are as realistic and unadorned as Angelique’s lines and Lara Parker’s style are florid and over the top. The contrast is deliberate, as the contrast between the monosyllabic working-class “Fred” and the ornate and ethereal “Angelique” is deliberate. Just as Ben did not know what kind of world he had stumbled into when he reached for the original Angelique, Fred has no idea that he lives in a place where beings such as this Angelique can exist.
When Barnabas first came to this universe, Carolyn Loomis told him that Angelique and Alexis were the daughters of “Tim Stokes,” the counterpart of his old acquaintance Timothy Eliot Stokes. We have yet to see Tim Stokes, but we can be sure he will played by Thayer David. We know what Thayer David looks like. Alexandra Moltke Isles, who was in 333 episodes as well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, dated critic John Simon in the 1970s. Simon was a college classmate of Thayer David, and told her that in their day David was “the handsomest man at Harvard.” When I mention that to my wife, Mrs Acilius, she says that those must have been rough days for Harvard. David may have been better looking before he put on weight, but he never bore anything that could be mistaken for a family resemblance to the dazzling Lara Parker.
Longtime viewers, thinking back to what we saw when the show was set in 1795, might have an idea. Will’s book proves that the timelines diverged in the 1790s, when the Barnabas of the current timeline left Angelique alone and had a happy marriage with Josette. Perhaps in that continuity Ben really did pair off with Angelique. If so, Angelique and Alexis might be their descendants. They were lucky to inherit all of the genes governing their appearance from her.
The thought of the counterparts of Ben and Angelique as the forebears of the Stokes family in the current continuity might shed some light on its members. We’ve heard not only that Hannah and Alexis had no use for each other, but that Alexis and her father have not spoken for a long time. Like Hannah, Tim shared Angelique’s interest in the occult and doted on Angelique, while scorning Alexis. The new Angelique certainly qualifies as the Evil Twin, and is very much a continuation of the Angelique we already know from the main continuity. From what we know about them, Hannah and Tim seem to be the sort of people Angelique would naturally turn to for help in her deadly doings.
As for Alexis, she seems to have set her cap for Quentin, and succeeded in driving Quentin’s current wife Maggie out of Collinwood when she caught Alexis and Quentin in rather a compromising position. Alexis kept saying it would be easier for the new Mrs Collins to come home if she were to leave, but she never did leave. On a conventional soap, Alexis would have the makings of a Vixen, but it takes more than husband-stealing to join the ranks of the villains on Dark Shadows. Alexis would seem to take more after Ben, who had been indentured because he was a thief and was bewitched by Angelique because he disregarded sexual morality. She may have those sorts of flaws, but compared to the evils around her they seem like minor foibles indeed.
Edmund Hashim
Fred is played by character actor Edmund Hashim, making his only appearance on Dark Shadows. Hashim does a fine job. Fred had to be played with strict naturalism, so that the only resource Hashim could draw on to hold anyone’s attention against the flamboyant Parker was skilled and truthful acting. He pulls it off. It’s a shame we won’t see him again. He died in 1974 at the age of 41, one of the first cast members to pass away. The only ones who predeceased him were Fred Stewart (1970, aged 64,) House Jameson (1971, aged 68) George Mitchell (1972, aged 66) and Patrick McVey (1973, aged 63.)
*In fact, he says that Barnabas has been dead for “over 200 years.” It’s 1970, as the wardrobe makes unmistakably clear, and they have explicitly said that the Barnabas Quentin has heard of died in 1830. So he’s bad at math.
Wealthy socialite Alexis Stokes is looking at her identical twin sister, the late Angelique Stokes Collins. Angelique has been dead and in her coffin these six months, but hasn’t decayed visibly. This has led Angelique’s widower, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, to the conclusion that Angelique is an uncanny being whose remains must be burned. Quentin’s friend, foolish scientist Cyrus Longworth, heartily concurs with this opinion. Alexis sits by the coffin and tells her late sister that she has, with great regret, come to share Quentin and Cyrus’ conclusion. She touches Angelique’s shoulder. At this, Angelique’s eyes pop open. She speaks, and tells Alexis that she is half right. Someone must be destroyed, but it will be Alexis, not Angelique.
Angelique and Alexis stand facing each other in the tomb. Angelique explains that all she needed to come back to life was a touch. Now that Alexis has given her that, the warmth has begun to drain from her body into Angelique’s. Soon all of Alexis’ body heat will be transferred to Angelique. She will then die, and Angelique will trade places with her. The “heat vampire” idea was one the show explored briefly in April 1969, when undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins drained the warmth from the bodies of the living to keep herself alive. Now Angelique will return from the grave as another heat vampire. Alexis will lie in the coffin, and Angelique will move back in to the great house of Collinwood, where Alexis has for the last three weeks been staying as Quentin’s guest.
Footage of the dress rehearsal for this scene survives. The only other surviving videotape from any episode of Dark Shadows not originally released for broadcast are the opening slates of the episodes.* The confrontation between Alexis and Angelique not only involves the most complicated videotape editing they’ve done so far, it also requires Lara Parker to do some intricate acting work as she plays off a version of herself she can neither see nor hear. In the rehearsal footage, she several times breaks character and turns to director Lela Swift to report on things that aren’t going right. We can hear Swift’s responses over the control room microphone. Some crew members are in and out of the shot, and at the end two people come to help Parker out of the coffin. It’s fascinating for hard-core fans, a must-watch:
By the time Mr Trask, the butler in the great house at Collinwood, comes to the mausoleum to see what’s taking so long, Angelique has changed into Alexis’ short bluish gray suit and chignon hairstyle with a tight spiral twist at the back, the look that the mysterious Madeleine wore in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. She has changed Alexis into her own gown and loose hairdo, and has put Alexis into her coffin. She is closing the lid of the coffin when Trask enters. Trask asks if she is ready to return to Collinwood, and she says she is looking forward to it.
We cut to the drawing room at Collinwood, where Quentin is yelling at the wind. He is convinced that it is really a ghost expressing discontent, and he demands to know what the trouble is. He doesn’t get any answers.
Angelique and Trask enter the house. Posing as Alexis, Angelique dismisses Trask, and tells Quentin she now agrees with him and Cyrus. The body in the tomb must be destroyed.
Cyrus is in his laboratory. He is talking with his lawyer, Quentin’s cousin Chris Collins. Chris has questions about Cyrus’ instructions to open a bank account in the name of John Yaeger and deposit $5000 in it. He asks if Yaeger is a pseudonym Cyrus is planning to use. Cyrus denies this, and says that Yaeger is a man he met recently who is helping him with his current experiments. In #985, Cyrus responded to Chris’ questions about these experiments with a lot of mad scientist ravings that alarmed him. Since Cyrus offers no information about Yaeger aside from his connection to this dubious project, Chris is reluctant to comply with Cyrus’ directives. Cyrus agrees that Chris should meet Yaeger first. Chris says “I’m looking forward to meeting him. See you, Cyrus,” and exits. This is the last time we will ever see Chris. Actor Don Briscoe’s health problems were catching up to him, and he was not able to return to the show.
While Quentin and Cyrus burn the coffin, Angelique is in her old bedroom. Alexis had been staying there, so Angelique is right at home. Trask tells her it is as if Angelique never left. Later, Quentin comes to invite her to join him and Cyrus for a drink downstairs. She declines, saying she would like to be alone.
Lara Parker’s performance as the newly returned Angelique is marvelous, her best work so far. We can see that she is a different person than the one who left the house earlier in the evening, and we can believe that the other characters don’t see it. In a closeup, she wrinkles her face like the Grinch, suggesting that Angelique has come to steal Christmas. The supernatural element of her confrontation with Alexis suggests Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia,” which the show has been drawing on for the last few weeks, and reminds longtime viewers of Laura’s April 1969 storyline. But the idea of a woman killing her identical twin and taking her place would have been familiar to much of the audience from the 1964 film Dead Ringer, in which Bette Davis played the sisters in that sad situation. Bette Davis is one of the people frequently mentioned when film buffs name The Greatest Screen Actor of All Time, but not even she could have done better than Parker does today.
In the drawing room, Cyrus is alone. He was reluctant to accept Quentin’s invitation to stay for a drink, and is pacing and fidgeting. What Quentin does not know is that Cyrus is in the middle of a Jekyll and Hyde project, and he wants to get back to his lab to take the potion and change himself into the brutal John Yaeger. He revels in Yaeger’s cruelty and is addicted to the transformation.
Music begins playing on the soundtrack we have not heard before, a jagged piano theme. Cyrus suddenly feels the pains that he has felt after taking the potion. He sees Yaeger’s dark hair springing into place on his arms. He looks in the mirror and sees that he has become Yaeger, without taking the potion. He goes to flee the house, but realizes Quentin is already approaching. He retreats to the drawing room and locks the door. Quentin knocks, asking what on earth is wrong with Cyrus.
This is not only the first time Cyrus has changed without drinking the potion, it is also the first time he has appeared without a putty appliance precariously attached to the bridge of his nose. He looks far more convincing without it, though of course he is even more instantly recognizable as Cyrus.
In his post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn points out both that the videotape editing is extremely ambitious today, with the confrontation between Alexis and Angelique at the beginning and the pretaped sequence of the Cyrus-to-Yaeger transformation at the end, and that that the editing in between these heroic shots looks ragged. The jump cut to Cyrus and Quentin’s approach to the mausoleum makes it look like Cyrus’ laboratory opens onto the cemetery, the first sequence of Angelique in her old room begins and ends with unusually long sequences of her pruning some extremely unhealthy looking flowers, and Cyrus spends a surprisingly large amount of time in the drawing room pacing about. Danny guesses that they did not know how long the process shots would run, so they inserted filler that could be removed if they went long.
That could be, but I like the episode the way it is. The jump cuts give the whole thing a dreamlike quality that works well with the subject matter. That’s certainly the case with the cut to the cemetery- we don’t know where Cyrus’ lab is, but we do know that only death is likely to come from the work being done there, so that jump makes a grim symbolic sense. Moreover, the actors use the sequences Danny identifies as filler to shed light on the characters and situate the scenes in the story. Angelique is so absorbed in her plant that you can believe she came back from the dead specifically to work on it, and nothing Trask or Quentin has to say is going to distract her for long. Cyrus’ pacing makes it clear he feels trapped at Collinwood, which adds considerably to the force of the moment when, as Yaeger, he has to hide from Quentin.
*I should mention that we have the dress rehearsal for #584. What we don’t have is a finished episode- they never made one. They just sent the tape of the dress rehearsal to the ABC network, and that was broadcast.
We open in the cottage on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, where the rakish Quentin Collins has triumphantly confronted his sister-in-law and sometime lover, Laura Murdoch Collins, with a telegram from the authorities in Alexandria, Egypt, declaring that she died in that city the year before. Laura points out that the fact that she is standing in front of him and breathing would tend to limit the credence such a document might be expected to command. Quentin hadn’t thought of that. He looks puzzled for a moment, then says that even if no one else is convinced, he is now sure that she is dead.
Laura, unable to believe that Quentin really is this stupid. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Viewers who have been with Dark Shadows from the beginning will particularly enjoy this exchange. Another iteration of Laura, also played by Diana Millay, was on the show from December 1966 to March 1967, when the dramatic date was contemporary with the broadcast date. In those days, the authorities in Phoenix, Arizona, kept sending messages to the residents of the great estate of Collinwood concerning their reasons for believing that Laura was dead. Most of those messages were received with a laugh, then with irritation that a bunch of brain-dead bureaucrats wouldn’t stop pestering them with reports that were obviously false. But there were a few times when characters took them with an inexplicable seriousness. It’s a relief to see that this part of the show, set in the year 1897, will not include any of those jarringly foolish reactions.
Quentin and Laura argue about her children. She wants to take them and leave Collinwood; he asks what she will accept instead. Quentin’s pretense that he would have anything to offer her that might be tempting so amuses Laura that she doesn’t bother to be insulted. When he says that he will give her money, she laughs. The penniless Quentin says that he will steal any amount she names. He claims to “have powers.” Before Laura returned to Collinwood in #729, we twice saw Quentin take part in unholy summoning rituals on this set (#711 and #718,) each of which did result in communication with the spiritual forces of darkness. It does seem to be a bit of an exaggeration for him to claim to “have powers,” though. Especially so when he is talking to someone whom he believes to have transcended death.
A male servant comes to the door. Quentin believes this man to be Laura’s lover, and nearly says so today. In fact, Quentin has severely underestimated Laura in every way. She did die in Alexandria. But she has also died in other places, at other times, and will do so again. She is an undead fire witch who periodically incinerates herself and rises from the ashes as a humanoid Phoenix. The man is not her lover in any human sense. Rather, one of the ways she keeps herself more or less alive is by draining heat from his body in a kind of dry vampirism.
Quentin leaves Laura alone with the servant. Opposite David Selby, Diana Millay had shown her gift for dry comedy to great advantage. Once he exits and she is alone with the servant, her manner shifts abruptly. She suddenly starts overacting and sounding false. I think that is down to the actor who plays the servant, Roger Davis. Mr Davis was notoriously abusive of his female scene partners, and she has to play her scene in his arms. It would have been difficult for anyone to relax sufficiently to give a good performance when she was stuck in that unenviable position.
Laura is not the only vampiric presence at Collinwood these days. Time-traveler Barnabas Collins is the old-fashioned blood-sucking kind, and we see him rise from his coffin. He summons his blood thrall Charity Trask to come to him at the Old House on the estate. Charity comes. Several of Barnabas’ female victims have gone through a particular series of stages. First, they are elated at their new connection with Barnabas, and want to devote themselves to him as slavishly as possible. Then, they become reluctant to go on serving as his breakfast, and make anguished protests about wanting to return to their previous lives. Finally, they rebel. Charity has entered the second stage. She says that her father expects her. Barnabas has seen all this before, and has learned to have fun with it. He tells Charity that he needs her more than her father does. He bares his fangs and bites her, after which she is back to elated servility.
Barnabas tells Charity that she will be assisting him in a ceremony. She waits in the Old House while Barnabas goes to the great house on the estate to fetch something he needs for that ceremony.
We cut to Quentin’s room in the great house, where we see a mirror. It shows the reflection of Quentin kissing maidservant Beth. When we first saw them talk to each other in #701, Beth was fighting her attraction to Quentin and trying to resist his attempts to seduce her. That’s what was supposed to be going on, anyway, but we didn’t actually see it. Terrayne Crawford played Beth’s lines according to the literal meaning of the words, with the result that for the first six weeks of the part of Dark Shadows set in 1897 Beth seemed sincerely uninterested in Quentin, and his overtures were just sexual harassment. Now Ms Crawford no longer has to play conflicting emotions. Beth is simply in love with Quentin. She gets that point across adequately.
Beth pulls away from Quentin, explaining that she has to get back to work. He talks about ending his marriage so that they can be together permanently; he says that it may serve their cause to stop being so discreet, since a little scandal may prompt the rest of his family to drop their opposition to any change in the status quo. While they get ready to part, we see the window, outside of which a bat is squeaking incessantly. They exit, and Barnabas appears.
Barnabas rummages through Quentin’s desk and finds a book. Beth reenters and catches him. He tells her he came for the book and was planning to leave a note. A smirk on her face, Beth says that it will not be necessary to do so, as she will tell Quentin all about what she has seen.
Beth goes downstairs and meets Quentin in the foyer. Quentin asks what book it was Barnabas took. She says that all she saw of the title was the word “dead.” Evidently Quentin has quite a few books with the word “dead” in the title, because he has to ask where exactly Barnabas found it. She says it was in the desk, and he rushes off to the Old House.
It was the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and Barnabas used it to perform a rite calling on Amun-Ra to cause the spirit of one of Laura’s previous incarnations to appear before him. At that, we cut to the cottage, where the currently alive-ish Laura grows weak and vanishes. Back in the Old House, we see the ghost take shape. Charity sees it too, and runs screaming out the front door. Quentin enters just in time to see the end of Barnabas’ conversation with the phantasmal Laura. The phantom looks at Quentin, screams, and disappears.
On Friday, Laura said that no one knew just how deeply Quentin was obsessed with the occult. His own absurd claim today to “have powers” so great that he could make it worth Laura’s while to leave without her children confirms that he is very far gone in this obsession. So when he sees that Barnabas is not only doing battle with the same adversary whom he is trying to confront, but is also able to conjure up spirits from the vasty deep, we can be confident that Quentin’s hostility to his recently arrived “cousin from England” will soon be evaporating. As Tony Peterson might say, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
This episode ends with one of the most thrilling moments in all of Dark Shadows.
The show’s first supernatural menace was undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who was on it from December 1966 to March 1967. Its second was vampire Barnabas Collins, who first appeared in April 1967. Laura herself was presented with many tropes that conventionally mark vampires; for example, they laid great emphasis on the fact that Laura was never seen eating or drinking. And Laura’s story was structured very much like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with well-meaning governess Vicki taking Mina’s role as the driving force behind the opposition to her. Presumably, if Barnabas had been staked and destroyed as the original plan envisioned, Vicki would have led the fight against him as well, and in #275 driven the stake into his heart. But Barnabas brought the show a new audience, and so Vicki was never called on to go to battle with him. Her character withered and was written out, and he replaced her as its chief protagonist.
In early 1967, Vicki learned that Laura had appeared at least twice before, and had died in strikingly similar ways each time. In 1767, Laura Murdoch Stockbridge was burned to death with her young son David; in 1867, Laura Murdoch Radcliffe was burned to death with her young son David; and in 1967, Vicki found Laura Murdoch Collins beckoning her young son David to join her in the flames consuming a wooden building. At the last second, Vicki broke through David’s trance and he ran to her, escaping the flames.
In November 1967, the show established that Barnabas lived on the great estate of Collinwood as a human in 1795, and that he became a vampire as a result of the tragic events of that year. If Barnabas were the same age in 1795 that Jonathan Frid was in 1967, he would have been born late in 1752, meaning that he would have been a teenager when Laura Murdoch Stockbridge and little David Stockbridge went up in smoke. The Stockbridges were a very wealthy family, so they would likely have been on familiar terms with Barnabas and the other rich Collinses of Collinsport, and the deaths of Laura and David would have been one of the major events in the area in those days. So longtime viewers have been wondering ever since whether Barnabas knew Laura, and if so what he knew about her.
Now Barnabas has traveled back in time to the year 1897, and there he meets another incarnation of Laura. He is thunderstruck at the sight of her. In her bland, enigmatic way, she expresses curiosity about his reaction, and he collects himself sufficiently to make some flattering remarks about her beauty. As soon as he is alone with his blood thrall, Miss Charity Trask, he declares that Laura has been dead for over a hundred years. So has he, but apparently when a woman rises from the dead to prey on the living that’s different, somehow. We saw this same old double standard a couple of weeks ago, when libertine Quentin Collins expressed shock at Laura’s return from the dead, when he himself had died and been a zombie just the week before.
If Laura did know Barnabas when she was as she is now and he was an adolescent, it is no wonder she does not seem to recognize him. She knows that there is a Barnabas Collins on the estate, and has heard that he is a descendant of the eighteenth century bearer of the same name. She would expect him to resemble the boy she knew, but would not necessarily know what that boy looked like when he was in his forties.
This is the first time we’ve seen Charity since Barnabas bit her in #727. She lives in the town of Rockport, which in the 1960s was far enough away from Collinwood that in #521 it was worthy of note that you could dial telephone numbers there directly. In 1897, when automobiles were rare and roads weren’t made for the few that did exist, a long-distance relationship between vampire and blood thrall would seem quite impractical. Still, in #732 we saw a character make two round trips between Rockport and Collinwood in a single evening, so I suppose it could be managed.
Barnabas’ recognition of Laura is a fitting conclusion to a fine episode. Much of it is devoted to a three-cornered confrontation between Laura, her twelve year old son Jamison Collins, and her brother-in-law/ ex-lover/ mortal enemy, Quentin. Danny Horn analyzes this in his post about the episode at Dark Shadows Every Day. I recommend that post highly. All I would add is that as it plays out today, the confrontation makes me suspect that the writers of the show may have done more planning than Danny usually credits them with. Jamison is the only person Quentin loves, and so far we have seen that Jamison loves Quentin back. When he learns that Quentin is his mother’s foe, Jamison turns against Quentin. Barnabas traveled back in time after Quentin’s ghost had made life impossible for everyone in 1969. The evil of Quentin’s spirit fell heaviest on David Collins, whom Quentin had possessed, turned into another version of Jamison, and was in the process of killing. Nothing yet has explained why Quentin’s ghost would focus its malignity on the image of Jamison. Actress Diana Millay used to claim that Laura was added to the 1897 segment at the last minute because she told Dan Curtis she wanted to work, but Millay famously enjoyed testing the credulity of Dark Shadows fans with outlandish remarks. I wonder if a falling-out between Quentin and Jamison over Laura was in the flimsies all along.
Charity makes her first entrance in the great house of Collinwood. Quentin is apologizing to her for some boorish behavior when he realizes she hasn’t been listening to him at all. She is completely absorbed in the eighteenth century portrait of Barnabas that hangs in the foyer. She excuses herself and wafts out the front door.
In Barnabas’ house, Charity says that he makes her feel beautiful, and that she wants to see herself in a mirror. Barnabas is a bit sheepish about the particulars of vampirism, and so he changes the subject. We cut from this exchange to Laura’s room in the great house, where she is with a servant named Dirk whom she has enthralled to serve as a source of body heat. That scene opens with a shot in a mirror, making the point that Laura’s relationship with Dirk is a reflection of Barnabas’ relationship with Charity. Earlier, there had been a clumsy attempt at an artsy shot of Laura reflected in Quentin’s sherry glass. That does show us that Laura casts a reflection and that her relationship with Quentin has been affected by his drinking, but it calls too much attention to itself to do much more than that.
The portrait in the foyer is hugely important to Barnabas. It made its debut on the show in #204, the day before his name was first mentioned and more than a week before he himself premiered. His thralls stare at it and receive his commands through it. He himself uses it as a passport, appealing to his resemblance to it as proof that he is a descendant of its subject and therefore a member of the Collins family. Today, Barnabas is surprised when Charity comes to his house; he wasn’t transmitting a message through the portrait summoning her. Instead, it was functioning as another mirror, in which Charity, who has become a part of Barnabas, could see the motivating force within her own personality.
Dirk is played by Roger Davis, a most unappealing actor. At one point he makes this face while Dirk is involved in some kind of mumbo-jumbo:
At one point today, Quentin tells Jamison that he shouldn’t be afraid of telling the servants what to do, since after all he will someday be the master of Collinwood. Jamison takes this altogether too much to heart, and spends the rest of the episode ordering everyone around. David Henesy is a good enough actor to extract the comic value from this. For example, when he turns to Quentin, says “I’ll talk to you later!,” and keeps walking, we laughed out loud.
Dark Shadows Commentary 