henry kaplan – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 976: Roger Collins

When Dark Shadows began, its most dangerous villain was high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Since the plan was to kill Roger off after his crimes were exposed, writer Art Wallace and actor Louis Edmonds were free to present him as gruesomely as they pleased. That turned out to be so much fun for all concerned that it soon became impossible to imagine the show without Roger, and the plan changed.

Once Roger was established as a permanent part of the ensemble, they toned his wickedness down. He still did and said awful things, but they would pull him back whenever he might risk alienating the audience. So, he at first openly expressed his hatred for his young son, strange and troubled boy David, and in #68 and #83 coldly exploited David’s mental health problems to manipulate him into trying to murder well-meaning governess Vicki. But when David got Vicki into a situation that might actually have resulted in her death, Roger rescued her. When Roger’s estranged wife Laura showed up and wanted to take David away with her, Roger was so delighted at the prospect of getting rid of the boy that he willfully ignored one sign after another that something was seriously wrong with Laura. But when Vicki finally proved to him that Laura was an undead fire witch who intended to incinerate David, Roger joined in the effort to save him, and was so shaken by the experience that he would never again be overtly hostile to David.

Nor was his attitude towards David the only sign of Roger’s pathological lack of family feeling. He had squandered his inheritance, selling his half of the family business to finance his extravagant lifestyle. His sister, reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, went deep into debt buying back what Roger had sold. When Roger ran out of money, Liz took him and David in at the great house of Collinwood. When in #41 Liz reproved Roger for the difficult position she had put him in, he proudly declared that he had “enjoyed” his inheritance, and twitted her for her dreary ways. Liz gave Roger a job in the business, but the only time we saw him visiting his office he answered his phone and told the caller that what he was asking was someone else’s job. When in #273 Roger found that seagoing con man Jason McGuire had tricked Liz into believing that she had a terrible secret that she could keep only by surrendering her whole fortune to him in blackmail payments, he admitted to his sister that if she had confided her troubles in him, he would probably have done the same thing.

When vampire Barnabas Collins succeeded Laura as Dark Shadows‘ supernatural Big Bad, Roger was pushed to the margins of the story. From that time on, he had two things to contribute. The first were sarcastic remarks, many of them very funny, that established him as the show’s sardonic gay uncle. The second, which gave him what little function he retained in the plot, were ostentatious refusals to believe the evidence piling up on all sides that the family was beset by a procession of bloodthirsty monsters. Since several other characters, Liz among them, also refused to face these facts, the show could go long periods of time without featuring Roger at all.

In November 1967, Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. From then until March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in that period. The segment was a hit in the ratings, and a triumph for Louis Edmonds, who was cast as haughty overlord Joshua Collins. Joshua was the opposite of Roger- as protective of the family’s position as Roger was careless of it, as committed to making money as Roger was thoughtless in spending it, as courageous in the face of physical danger as Roger was cowardly. The 1790s segment became The Tragedy of Joshua Collins, as we saw how Joshua’s best qualities led him to create the dark and twisted world in which his descendants would grow up to be weak, selfish men like Roger.

When the show came back from the 1790s, Roger was obsessed with a portrait painted in those days. The portrait’s subject was Angelique, the wicked witch who precipitated the disasters that annihilated Joshua’s family. Before long, Angelique herself returned, wearing a wig, using a false name, and married to Roger. The spell Angelique cast to win Roger occasionally caused him to think he was Joshua, and by the time that story ended Roger had become, if not the imperious tycoon Joshua was, certainly a hard-working, conscientious family man. He still had a languid manner and a way with a quip, but was otherwise unrecognizable as the show’s original Man You Love to Hate.

Evil spirits drove the Collinses out of the great house of Collinwood in #694. That episode marked the end of Roger’s function as one of the “There must be a logical explanation!” people. He was the last member of the family to insist that everyone else was being silly, but when he finally accepted the reality of the situation and was on his way out of the house, he turned to declare to the ghosts that the living would be back to reclaim what was rightfully theirs. From that moment on, Roger was no longer a narrative brake pad.

For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was set in 1897. In that year, we got to know Quentin Collins, who as a ghost would be chiefly responsible for the haunting that had driven the Collinses out of Collinwood. We saw that the living Quentin was a charming rogue, a spendthrift who cheerfully tells his sober-minded sister Judith that he can waste money faster than she can give it to him, inclined to violence when it serves his purposes and quick to run away when he is in danger of being called to account for his crimes. In short, he is what Roger originally was, only played by a younger, sexier actor, and with an unlimited future on a show that has discovered the characters won’t alienate the audience by being evil, only by being dull.

In the 1897 segment, Edmonds played Quentin’s brother Edward, who was not dull, but not evil either. Edward was stuffy and hypocritical. He was occasionally cruel, sometimes because of greed, sometimes because of prejudice, and sometimes because he flew into a panic in the face of an unexpected danger. But he was sincerely devoted to his children, and he had a sense of decency that would assert itself even after he had done awful things. For all his faults, Edward was ultimately one of the most lovable characters Dark Shadows ever created. If 1795 was The Tragedy of Joshua Collins, 1897 was largely the Comedy of Edward.

After 1897, Dark Shadows spent several months bogged down in an attempt to make a story out of some themes drawn from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. Roger showed up in this part of the show just a few times. Quentin, brought into contemporary dress intact due to his great popularity in the 1897 segment, told Roger what was going on in #958. Rather than scoff as he would have in 1967 or 1968, Roger accepted Quentin’s account at once and helped him in the battle. Roger had by that point turned into Edward. His habit of denial was gone, and with it all of his languor and most of his wit.

Now the show is clearing out the last villains left over from the Lovecraft project and launching a story about a parallel universe that is occasionally visible through a doorway in the long-disused east wing of the great house. Roger is active in both of these plots today.

Even when he was a villain who cared nothing for his son, his sister, his family name, or Collinsport Enterprises, Roger very much enjoyed the company of his niece, Carolyn Collins Stoddard. On Friday, he was hugging Carolyn while she wept about the difficulties she was having in her new marriage; he called her “Kitten,” a term of endearment he has used with her since #4. In those early days, the show was heavy with hints that Roger and Carolyn’s relationship verged on incest. She often answered to “Kitten” in the moments when those hints were most insistent. But there was nothing unwholesome about Roger’s embrace of Carolyn on Friday, and he is irreproachably fatherly in his attitude towards her today.

At rise, Carolyn is in a trap. A man named Bruno, one of the leftover villains introduced while the show was dealing with the Lovecraft-derived material, has tricked her into entering a room where he has already imprisoned her old friend Chris Jennings. Bruno locked the door, and Carolyn saw that Chris was on the floor, writhing in pain. She asks him what is wrong, he won’t answer. Carolyn doesn’t know it, but Chris is a werewolf. The moon is rising, and his pains are the first stage of his transformation.

Bruno’s master wants Carolyn’s husband dead, and has decided that if the werewolf kills Carolyn he will lose the will to live. Since it would have been at least as easy to get the husband into the room as it was to get Carolyn there, and since one of the main things they have told us about the husband is that he is vulnerable to werewolf attacks, this scheme is unnecessarily complicated, marked for the audience as likely to fail. Indeed, since Bruno, his master, and Carolyn’s husband are all short-timers who don’t really need to be on the show anymore, while Carolyn has been a core member of the cast since #2, we can be quite sure it will fail, and if we have spent time over the weekend wondering about the cliffhanger, we’ve spent it wondering what will save Carolyn.

What saves Carolyn turns out to be well-timed intervention by her Uncle Roger. Roger was worried that she wouldn’t tell him why she was crying about her marriage, and followed her to Bruno’s place. He saw her enter, and after a few minutes let himself in. He confronted Bruno in his parlor, heard Carolyn and Chris in the back room, and found that the door to the back room was locked. When Bruno told him the door would stay locked, Roger hit him on the head with a candlestick, knocking him out. He took Bruno’s key, unlocked the door, and freed Carolyn. While Roger telephoned Collinwood to ask for permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, Chris jumped out of the back room’s window. Roger then decided that he and Carolyn should go home.

It may strike first-time viewers as odd that Roger calls Julia and not the police. Established fans will be unsurprised, knowing that the Collinsport Sheriff’s office is one of the world’s most useless organizations and that Julia is a mad scientist whose powers know few limits. Still, once Roger gets Carolyn home he does tell her they should call the sheriff. She refuses, and also forbids him to tell her mother Liz anything about what has happened.

Roger finds Liz moping in the drawing room. He strikes up a conversation about Carolyn’s troubles. He says that he and Liz both made unhappy marriages, and that it is disappointing to see that the next generation seems determined to repeat their mistakes. He says that he wishes Carolyn would confide in one of them. Liz says that all she knows is that someone or something is threatening Carolyn’s husband, and that she refuses to discuss it. The camera pulls back, and we see that Carolyn is right there. Director Henry Kaplan was pretty bad at moving the actors around and even worse at figuring out where to point the camera, but he deserves credit for this shot. When we suddenly see Carolyn standing there, we realize that Roger and Liz are so deep in their worries that they are oblivious to their surroundings.

Carolyn insists on going to the carriage house on the grounds of the estate to see her husband. Since Bruno is at large, Roger objects. He can’t mention Bruno in front of Liz, since Carolyn has decreed that her mother must not be told what happened earlier in the evening, so he is powerless to stop her going.

Bruno does catch up with Carolyn, and he tells her he is going to kill her. Before he can do so, the werewolf springs out, pushes Carolyn aside, and slashes Bruno. She goes home and tells Roger and Liz what happened. From Carolyn’s description, Liz recognizes the werewolf as the same creature they encountered in late 1968 and early 1969, and Roger rushes out.

Roger finds Bruno on the ground. He tells Bruno he will call a doctor. Bruno says it’s too late. He says a few words (“animal… not an animal…”) and loses consciousness.

Back in the great house, Roger says that the police are searching the grounds for the werewolf. He says it’s terrible that Carolyn should have met with such an incident on top of what has already happened to her. Liz asks what he means, and Carolyn glares at him, appalled at his indiscretion. He stammers out something about how she’s having marital problems, then announces he has to go because he promised to do something for Barnabas.

Roger and Liz never have figured out that Barnabas is a vampire, and though Carolyn was briefly his blood thrall she’s forgotten all about it. So far as the Collinses are concerned, their distant cousin Barnabas is just a night person. Several times now, Barnabas has looked into a room in the east wing and has seen, not the dark space, bare floor, and sparsely decorated walls that are there in his universe, but an alternative version of the room, brightly lit, fully furnished, and heavily decorated. He has seen people with the same looks, voices, and names as people he knows, but with different personalities and relationships. He has reported this to Julia and her friend, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, who have explained to him the many-worlds hypothesis.

On Friday, Barnabas told Roger about the room and about Julia and Stokes’ theory. The Roger of 1967 and 1968 would have jeered at Barnabas before he had spoken five words, but in 1970 he believed him readily enough. Barnabas expressed surprise at Roger’s openness to his outlandish account, and Roger acknowledges that “a year ago” he would have dismissed it. It was thirteen months ago that Roger turned and told the ghosts that the living would someday reconquer the great house; when he says “a year ago,” perhaps Roger is rounding down. Roger agreed then to come back and check the room.

When Barnabas showed Roger the room on Friday, it was bare. When Roger goes there himself today, he finds that the parallel universe is there. He cannot pass the invisible barrier in the doorway to enter it, nor can he communicate with the people there, but he can see them and hear them.

The first resident of the parallel universe Roger sees is Bruno’s counterpart. Astonished, he exclaims “I just saw him die!” Parallel Bruno is looking at the portrait of Parallel Angelique that dominates the room and telling it that the music he wrote for her will make her immortal. Roger does not appear to recognize the portrait’s resemblance to his second wife, much less to remember that he himself used to carry on similarly one-sided conversations with her eighteenth century portrait.

Parallel Liz enters and demands to know what Parallel Bruno is doing in the room. He says he belongs there. She tells him he is the only one who thinks so. She tells him that the master of the house, who is Quentin’s counterpart, will be coming home soon, and that he will never tolerate Bruno’s presence. Bruno says that he has heard that Quentin has remarried. When Liz says this is so, Bruno declares that Angelique will never allow another woman in the house. Liz is exasperated that people keep talking about Angelique as if she were still alive. Bruno exits.

Stunned by what he has seen, Roger looks away for a moment. He thinks of going to fetch Barnabas. His attention returns when he hears a conversation between Liz’ counterpart and his own.

Barnabas saw Parallel Roger on Friday; he was talking to the portrait in a way that suggested an obsession not so different from the one which the eighteenth century portrait had inspired in the Roger we knew. Today, Parallel Roger talks to Parallel Liz about Parallel Bruno in an airy, superior manner quite out of keeping with what we have had from our Roger today, but which sounds exactly like him as he was in 1967 and 1968.

PARALLEL ROGER: Was that Bruno, the terrible-tempered boy wonder I saw just now?

PARALLEL LIZ: Yes, he’s come back.

PARALLEL ROGER: Back to compose more of his morbid music and bore us with his tiresome memories of her? Well… It’ll be worth seeing the look on Quentin’s face when he finds out, won’t it?

Alliterative series such as “terrible-tempered” and “more morbid music” were characteristic of the old Roger’s verbal cleverness, as sarcastic expressions like “boy wonder” and complaints of boredom were typical of his habit of advertising his contempt for everyone and everything. Even Parallel Roger’s closing hope of “seeing the look on Quentin’s face,” as opposed to any thought of action he might himself take, is of a piece with the old Roger’s cowardice and laziness. Our Roger is horrified by the sight of his double.

Evidently the makers of the show have decided that Roger’s development has brought him to a dead end, and they are going to use the journey into “Parallel Time” to reintroduce the original villain. That Parallel Roger shares a scene with Parallel Liz suggests that we will again see the dynamic that their counterparts in the main “time-band” pioneered on the show, the conflict between Bratty Little Brother and Bossy Big Sister. This type of conflict is still one of Dark Shadows‘ signature elements, represented most prominently by Barnabas and Julia. The 1897 segment benefited from a similar conflict between Quentin and Judith; the 1795 segment lacked such a conflict, and in its absence they had to lean pretty hard on stories that put individual characters into isolation from the rest of the cast, burning them up one by one. Perhaps they plan to use the old standoff between Bratty Roger and Bossy Liz to keep the Parallel Time story spinning if the overall narrative hits some rough patches.

This episode marks the final appearance of the main “time-band” version of Bruno; the werewolf really did kill him. It is also the last time we will see the werewolf. Alex Stevens was billed as “Stunt Coordinator” when he played the werewolf. He will stay with the show as a stuntman, but won’t get his name in the credits again.

Episode 974: The has-beens

Dark Shadows spent a few months trying to put a story together from some themes drawn from the works of H. P. Lovecraft. A race of Elder Gods known as the Leviathan People wanted to escape from their long captivity in the underworld, retake the Earth, and destroy humankind. To that end, they controlled the minds of several people in and around the village of Collinsport, formed them into a cult, and entrusted them with the care of a fast-growing, shape-shifting monster. When the monster was able to assume the form of a grown man, he was supposed to be joined to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in an unholy ceremony that would transform Carolyn into the same sort of being he was, and mark the beginning of the Time of the Leviathan People.

In #965, the unholy ceremony was underway. But the monster, who when he first appeared as an adult invited people to “Call me Jabe,” had decided he would rather become a human than turn Carolyn into a Leviathan. So he called to Carolyn’s distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, to whisk her away from the scene while he used the Leviathan sceptre to smash the Leviathan box, causing the Leviathan altar to explode and the Leviathan high priest to declare that the time of the Leviathans was over. He told Jabe that he had not only ruined the Leviathans’ grand design, but had doomed himself. His squamous, rugose, and paleogean form was his only true form; the tall young man is just a projection that cannot survive on its own.

Evidently, the original plan was that Jabe’s rebellion would begin a second half of the Leviathan arc. In that half, the chief villain would be a Leviathan who had been roaming the Earth for centuries and who wielded powers as great as Jabe’s even though he could not fulfill Jabe’s intended role as harbinger of Leviathan world dominion. The battle that Barnabas, Jabe, and their allies waged against that villain would involve a trip back in time to the 1790s, during a brief visit to which period Barnabas had first encountered the Leviathans. That return to the 1790s would tie the Leviathans into the tales that have become basic to the show’s backstory, including the stories of the gracious Josette, well-meaning governess Vicki, and Barnabas’ first vampire curse.

They abandoned that plan in some haste. The Leviathan arc never came together as a coherent story, and it was a flop in the ratings. So they never introduced the second Leviathan villain. In his place, they brought back suave warlock Nicholas Blair, who had been one of the villains in 1968, and made him the high priest of the cult and Jabe’s supervisor. When we hear about past deeds that Nicholas could not have done, they nonsensically attribute them either to Mr Strak, a character whose whole point was that he was only on the show once and could never be seen or heard of again, or to Jabe himself, who is four months old. The ghost who was supposed to usher in the return to the eighteenth century turns up in two episodes, does some shouting, then meets wicked witch Angelique, who tells him that he is irrelevant to the story and causes him to disappear forever.

Now, the show is gearing up to tell a story about a parallel universe that Barnabas has found in the east wing of the great house of Collinwood. But all the actors we need to kick that story off are in the cast of the film House of Dark Shadows, which had started principal photography by the time this episode was taped. So we have to find a way to take the characters left over from the Leviathan arc and make a story out of whatever it is they are doing.

Even though Nicholas has said in so many words that the Leviathan segment is over, he and his henchman Bruno are still hanging around Collinsport. They are joined by a third stooge, Angelique’s estranged husband Sky Rumson. Sky had been a fabulously successful publisher because of the deal he made when he met Nicholas and sold his soul to him, but now that the Leviathans have been defeated his enterprises are going under. Sky has apparently been crashing at Bruno’s place.

Bruno and Sky are holding a young woman named Sabrina Stuart prisoner. Sabrina had shown up and offered Bruno a packet of cash to leave Collinsport and forget about her fiancé, Chris Jennings, whom he knows to be a werewolf. Bruno refused to leave, saying that he hopes to exploit Chris’ curse for his own evil purposes. Sabrina then drew a gun on him. Before she could shoot, Sky bumbled in and distracted her. Bruno ordered Sky to guard Sabrina while he contacted Nicholas. Sky resented Bruno’s commands, but obeyed them anyway.

When Sky gets Sabrina into Bruno’s back room, she asks him what they are going to do to Chris. Sky lampshades the fact that there is no reason for him to be on the show when he says that he has never heard of Chris and has no idea what is going on. After Bruno and Nicholas have conferred, Sabrina tells Sky that they seem to have forgotten about him. Sky protests that this is impossible, since Nicholas had promised to talk with him about his future. He goes out to the front room, and sees that Sabrina was right. Bruno and Nicholas have in fact left without him.

Sky finds Angelique sitting in the corner, waiting for him. She left him when she learned that he was a pawn of the Leviathans and he tried to set fire to her. She taunts him for his reduced circumstances:

ANGELIQUE: From tycoon to lackey. My, how the mighty are fallen.

SKY: Angelique, what are you doing here?

ANGELIQUE: Oh, I came to see you, Sky.

SKY: How did you know where to find me?

ANGELIQUE: Oh, I’ve been keeping a very close watch on your activities. Tell me-how does it feel to be a has-been?

SKY: What are you talking about?

ANGELIQUE: That’s what you are, you know.

SKY: I said, what are you talking about?

ANGELIQUE: Every one of your business ventures is a disaster. There’s nothing you can do about it, because all you are now is Nicholas Blair’s slave.

SKY: That’s not true! I’m very important to him!

ANGELIQUE: Oh, don’t be absurd. Consider right now, what you’re doing- what he has you doing. Keeping guard over a helpless young girl. You’re not important to Nicholas. He doesn’t care anything about you.

SKY: That’s not true.

ANGELIQUE: What does Nicholas plan to do with that girl anyway? Or hasn’t he consulted you?

SKY: Angelique, shut up!

ANGELIQUE: What’s the matter, Sky? Am I making you unhappy?

SKY: Get off my back!

ANGELIQUE: [Chuckling] Oh, you’ve grown quite thin-skinned in your declining days, haven’t you?

Shall I tell you how it’s all going to end? Nicholas is going to find some ingenious way of doing himself in, he always does. And then you’re going to be alone. All alone. With no one to turn to. And then… Someone’s going to put you out of your misery. Who knows? It may even be me. Well, I better not keep you any longer. I know you have an important job to do in the next room.

Angelique tells Sky off. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique’s sarcastic characterization of guarding Sabrina as “an important job” not only reflects the lowly status of the work compared to the executive responsibilities Sky recently had as the head of a big business. The story has passed Sabrina and Chris by as completely as it has passed by Sky, Nicholas, and Bruno. Chris knows that on nights of the full moon, he will become an animal who, if not restrained, will kill at least one random person. Both magical and scientific means to relieve him of his curse have failed, but he has friends who will keep him cooped up on those nights so that he doesn’t hurt anyone. Yet he persistently refuses to let them do so. He is deliberately choosing to be a serial murderer. Not only is there no moral ambiguity about him, he has no plans or goals to draw our curiosity and win our sympathies in spite of ourselves. He is a simply and tediously bad person, and to the extent that livelier characters go along with him we like them less. Since Sabrina has no interest in anything other than her relationship with Chris, the two of them are both useless.

Nicholas is puzzled that Jabe continues to exist. He thinks that Jabe’s love for Carolyn, whom he has married, is giving him such a strong will to live that he has managed to hold onto his humanoid form for so long. As Angelique indicated when she told Sky that “Nicholas is going to find some ingenious way of doing himself in, he always does,” Nicholas’ run on the show in 1968 ended with the total failure of all his efforts and his abrupt recall to Hell. But he hopes that he can turn things around for himself. He was only seconded to the Leviathans by his real boss, Satan. He thinks he might be able to get his career back on track in Satan’s organization if he can be the one to destroy Jabe. To that end, he wants to use the werewolf to kill Carolyn, thereby depriving Jabe of his zest for life and making him fade away.

Siccing the werewolf on Carolyn is a typical Nicholas scheme. Even in his monstrous form, Jabe was defenseless against werewolves. So all Nicholas has to do is set the werewolf on him. Bringing Carolyn into it only increases the chances of failure. Moreover, Jabe is likely to be killed off soon, so we might have been willing to believe Nicholas would be the one to do it. But Carolyn has been a core member of the cast since the first week, so once Nicholas promulgates a scheme that involves her death, regular viewers know nothing will come of it.

Moreover, Nicholas has only a short time to make good his designs on Jabe. Angelique blames Jabe for Sky’s involvement with the Leviathans, and has taken a page from George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes by plaguing him with an autonomous shadow that occasionally appears to him. The shadow that attached itself to Anodos, MacDonald’s protagonist, was an allegory for anxiety as a consequence of unredeemed sin, but the shadow Angelique imposes on Jabe is a direct threat to his physical survival. It grows in size and intensity at each appearance, and when it engulfs Jabe entirely it will kill him.

In the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, Jabe calls on Angelique to relieve him of the shadow. Nicholas comes instead. Jabe asks him for help against the shadow. He refuses. He does say that he very much hopes that he, not Angelique, is the one who finishes Jabe off, but he will not try to remove the shadow even to improve his own odds of success. Again, we are left wondering why the camera keeps settling on Nicholas if he won’t take action to change the direction of the plot.

Angelique appears to Jabe after Nicholas has gone. Jabe pleads with her to lift the shadow, and she says no. He tells her he had nothing to do with Sky’s recruitment to the Leviathan cult, and that he barely knows Sky. Angelique knows these things to be true, so she pauses before she answers him. She tells him he was the center of the Leviathan conspiracy, so she blames him for everything done in the course of it.

We end up at Bruno’s place. Sky has told Chris that Sabrina is being held prisoner there, and has given him the key. Chris lets himself in and opens a closet. He finds Sky in it, strung up by his wrists and bleeding. Sky begs for help, and Bruno appears. He holds a gun on Chris and greets him with “Good evening, Mr Jennings! Sabrina and I have been waiting for you.”

Writer Gordon Russell deserves a lot of credit for taking this unpromising material and coming up with a well-constructed script with a fast pace and intelligent dialogue. The actors also do a good job, all of them except the woefully inept Geoffrey Scott as Sky.

But director Henry Kaplan really does let everyone down. The episode starts with a fantastically bad job of blocking. Bruno and Sabrina are standing at right angles to each other, enabling us to see both of their faces.

Unfortunately, this pose means that when Sabrina draws her gun, she is not pointing it at Bruno, but holding it in front of him and threatening to fire it into the wall. Kaplan’s habit of relying heavily on closeups in lieu of a visual strategy does nothing to obscure this, and viewers who missed yesterday may be genuinely puzzled as to who or what Bruno is afraid Sabrina will shoot.

Episode 941: Barnabas, Quentin, and the Stopped Clock

Yesterday and today, a clock stopped at 8:00 featured prominently in shots when it was pivotal to the story that it was not 8:00. The clock is part of the merchandise in an antique shop, so it is understandable it does not run, but it is rather odd to see someone telling people that he didn’t wait for 8:00 when a clock face displaying that time looms over his shoulder. Today, it is important that a scene in the shop is taking place after 10:00. We open that scene with a view of a different clock, one that reads 10:20, but before long the stopped clock is back in full view.

At the great house of Collinwood, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is rushing to the front door. Governess Maggie Evans asks him where he is going. He says that he is going to the village of Collinsport. She says she is going there as well and that she will ride in with him. He says that he can’t take her. He refuses to explain why. The other day, Maggie and Barnabas held hands and leaned in close to each other, talking softly about how important their friendship was. This sudden refusal to communicate pulls Maggie up short. She demands to know whether Barnabas trusts her. He says he does. She marches up to him and orders him to “Prove it!” The tight aspect ratio of old time TV combines with director Henry Kaplan’s habit of putting the actors as close to the camera as he can get them to make it seem, in the moment, that the feelings Maggie expects Barnabas to prove are of an erotic nature.

Hubba-hubba. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie has been the governess at Collinwood for over a year now. Her predecessor, the well-meaning Vicki Winters, was written out of the show for a number of reasons, not least their inability to figure out an intelligible relationship between her and Barnabas. There was a long period when Vicki the character seemed to know that she was on a show starring Barnabas and she kept trying to involve herself in his storyline, even inviting herself to spend the night at his house. In theory, Barnabas was in love with Vicki and yearned for her, but no matter how flagrantly she threw herself at him he never did anything about it. Eventually they paired her off with an intolerable jerk, and the two of them disappeared into a rift in the space-time continuum.

Vicki never did take quite as direct an approach with Barnabas as Maggie does today. No matter how deeply Vicki drove the ball into his court, she always counted on him to show at least a little initiative. Maggie knows better than to rely on Barnabas, and she corners him into agreeing to see her and give some kind of explanation when he is done with the mission he is concealing from her, at 10:00 sharp.

Fans often fret about the “Vickification” Maggie undergoes while she is serving as governess. When it became clear that Vicki wasn’t going to matter to Barnabas, she couldn’t be allowed to affect the A story in any way. To keep her on the sidelines, she was written as an ever greater ninny.

Maggie is pretty bad at her job- she’s a squish when the children don’t want to do their lessons, which is every time we’ve seen her with them. But she’s still good with grownups, she’s smart, and she’s emphatically sexy. So she isn’t going to go down into irrelevance without a fight.

Maggie isn’t the only character insisting on her place in the story. A few weeks ago, it seemed that matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard would be a part of the main plot for the first time in ages when she was inducted into a secret cult serving a mysterious race of Elder Gods who are trying to regain control of the Earth. But she has drifted back to the sidelines, and has yet to meet the cult’s leader in his current form.

Barnabas was Liz’ preceptor in the cult, and she is indignant with him for the decline in her part:

Liz: Barnabas, I must speak to you.

Barnabas: Not now, Elizabeth.

Liz: Have I done something wrong? Just tell me that.

Barnabas: No, nothing at all.

Liz: I’ve tried to follow the rules, as many as I know. You yourself can testify to my faithfulness. But David sees our leader, you’ve seen him.

Barnabas: Jabez?

Liz: Is that what he calls himself now? Well, no matter what name, he’s the same boy who used to play here. Surely he must remember me with some affection.

Barnabas: He is only recently matured enough to appear to us.

Liz: Why have I been ignored? Barnabas? You haven’t answered my question.

Barnabas: You’ll meet him soon enough but now is not the time.

Liz: Does the book specify when I am to meet him? Is that why you’re against it now?

During the show’s costume drama segments, Joan Bennett got to play dynamic roles, but she has been excluded from the action in the contemporary parts for so long that she has a tremendous amount of passion to bring to this scene. It is great to see her cut loose for once.

Episode 935: Call me Jabe

Sheriff Davenport and his new sidekick, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, have come to the top of the stairs above Philip and Megan Todd’s antique shop in the village of Collinsport. The sheriff has a search warrant that specifies the room by the landing as a place of interest in connection with the violent death of one Paul Stoddard. Philip begs the sheriff not to enter the room, saying that a boy who lived there recently died and that any disturbance would “defile” it. He swears the room is entirely empty. The sheriff expresses his sympathy, but opens the door anyway.

Inside is a young man. Philip seems as surprised at the sight of him as are the sheriff and Julia. He gives his name as “Hawkes, Jeb Hawkes. Short for Jabez… Call me Jabe.” No one calls him Jabe, which seems a bit rude. Jabe claims that he came by earlier when Megan was in and Philip was out, and that she offered to let him live in the room.

The room does not contain any furniture, any luggage, or any other movable property whatsoever. Moreover, while it is possible Megan might have rented the room without mentioning it to Philip, it is difficult to see what Jabe has been doing up there since she left, and since Philip has been moving around the rest of the building it is even more difficult to suppose Jabe could have left his belongings elsewhere without attracting Philip’s notice. Jabe claims to be a photographer, but does not appear to have any camera equipment. Moreover, the sheriff will later tell Julia that he noticed a distinctive odor on Jabe that was prominent on Paul’s corpse, and that he found one of Paul’s cufflinks, damaged as by fire, on the floor of the antique shop. In the finest traditions of Collinsport law enforcement, the sheriff does not take Jabe or Philip into custody, question either of them more than cursorily, or close off the antique shop for a further search. He does come back later to tell Jabe that he should think about finding another apartment.

Jabe is the latest embodiment of a mysterious creature that has previously taken the form of a newborn boy, an eight year old boy, an eight year old girl, and a thirteen year old boy. The boys were vicious little tyrants who did not seem to think at all, only to follow impulses to dominate and humiliate whomever they met. The girl was a Doppelgänger of Paul’s daughter Carolyn as she was when she was eight, and she existed specifically to make Paul feel worthless because he was a deadbeat dad. None of these children engaged with another character in a way that meant there was anything at stake for them in any scene. They as much as tell us that the same will be true of Jabe. When Philip complains today that he has put him and Megan in a difficult position by failing to tell them of his plans, Jabe answers “Maybe I just didn’t want to let you know. Maybe I just wanted to see you sweat it out.”

The only time one of the children did anything surprising in an effort to take on an adversary was when the eight year old boy shape-shifted and became the young Carolyn. Had the sheriff not shown the clownish ineptitude typical of his office, but instead done what a real cop would do and arrested Jabe and Philip, they might have created a situation in which Jabe would have to surprise us again. It might be interesting to see him turn into the grown-up Carolyn, for example. As it is, Jabe just insults Philip, goes to the police station, and murders the sheriff.

Jabe berates Philip. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This puts a new spin on Roger Ebert’s category of “Idiot Plot.” Ebert said that a movie had an Idiot Plot when its story would end immediately if any of the characters had the brains of an average member of the audience. In this case, the story stays stuck in an angry and utterly predictable rut because of the sheriff’s inexplicable nonfeasance.

The first time Mrs Acilius and I watched Dark Shadows through, we hated Jabe and didn’t want to see Christopher Pennock again. Later, Pennock will return in several quite different roles, each of them more appealing than the one before. By the end of the series he had become one of our favorites, and it occurred to us that even as Jabe he managed to do a lot of things right. But there is only so much an actor can do to work around a script problem, and as written Jabe is barely a character at all. His actions cause problems for several other people, but nothing we see him do or hear him say makes us care about why he takes those actions as opposed to any others. It certainly doesn’t help that half of his episodes, including this one, are directed by Henry Kaplan, whose idea of visual composition was to shove a camera so close to an actor’s face that you can see about one half of one cheekbone.

It didn’t have to be that way. Not only was Pennock a fine actor when he had something to work with, but in this episode we have a scene between Julia and rakish libertine Quentin Collins that shows how a character with a bizarre backstory and a record of evil deeds can become an audience favorite. Quentin is down in the dumps because he just failed to rescue his one true love, Amanda Harris, from the realm of the dead. Julia urges him to reconnect with the Collinses of Collinwood. He asks how he can possibly explain that he is 72 years older than he looks and is now alive, even though his ghost carried out a protracted and deadly haunting of the estate. This dialogue shows that Quentin’s origins require us to believe any number of impossible things, and longtime viewers remember that he is a murderer who killed his wife in cold blood, among other unspeakable acts. But all we see in this scene are his charm and the affection that he and Julia have for each other, and we want to see more of that, as much as they can give us. With similar material, Pennock could have achieved similar results. But it is already clear that he won’t get it as Jabe.

Postscript

In his scene with Julia, Quentin says that no one at the hotel where he and Amanda have been staying remembers her, and that all traces of the alias she had been using seem to have disappeared. Julia speculates that when he lost her in the underworld, the last 72 years of Amanda’s life were negated, that the past was reset so that she did in fact die on a night in the 1890s when she might have died had one of the gods of the dead not intervened.

This raises two questions. First, Amanda has been keeping Quentin. If they are now in a timeline where she never came to town, who’s paying his hotel bill and buying his liquor? It’s a standard feature of soap operas that unless they are telling a story about conflicts over ownership of a business or a house or some other valuable property, everyone just has an inexhaustible supply of money, but they put enough time into Amanda and Julia’s squabble as to which one of them would be Quentin’s sugar mama that you might have expected a line or two about this question.

Second, if everyone else has forgotten Amanda, how does Julia remember her? Quentin journeyed through the infernal regions with her, and so I suppose it makes a kind of sense that from that supernatural location he would have a perspective that would transcend our perception of time and space. But Julia was in and around Collinsport the whole time Quentin and Amanda were harrowing the abode of the permanently unavailable. I suppose the real answer is that she is the audience’s point of view character, and as such knows everything we know. But it does leave us wondering if, in the course of her adventures, some kind of uncanny power may have rubbed off on her.

Episode 890: They will be strangers, but you will know them

Like many episodes of Dark Shadows, this one ran long and ended with credits only for the cast and for Dan Curtis Productions. The entry on the Dark Shadows wiki says that the director was Lela Swift. I am sure that it was in fact directed by Henry Kaplan. This shot of Nancy Barrett as heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is proof positive:

There is another flagrant Kaplanism in today’s first scene between antique shop owners Philip and Megan Todd (Christopher Bernau and Marie Wallace.) Philip enters from upstairs. He stops with his waist at the top of the frame. That’s where he stays for the first part of the scene, ending with Megan raising a paper that covers part of her face. Evidently what’s happening between the characters is none of the audience’s business.

Swift was a talented and ambitious visual artist, Kaplan a sloppy and unimaginative one. He relied heavily on closeups. When it dawned on him that it was dull to hold the frame just beyond the edges of an actor’s face, his response was to zoom in and give us an extreme closeup of some part of the actor’s face. It’s above average for him that the first shot above includes Miss Barrett’s eyes- he specialized in shots displaying the face from the nostrils down, and often held them even after the actors had to move, leaving us with the sight of an ear drifting out of our view.

Even when Kaplan’s tight little frames do not keep us from figuring out what is happening in a scene, they deprive us of the energy that comes from seeing the players interact with each other. We don’t get statements and reactions simultaneously, and we don’t see the actors using the space between them to tell us how the characters feel about each other. Kaplan was also a pretty bad director of actors, regularly poking them with a stick as his way of telling them he wanted them to play a scene differently and on one occasion fastening a handle to a child actor so that he could physically place him on his mark during rehearsal. So perhaps his mania for closeups reflected a lack of awareness of what actors do and how the choices they make contribute to the audience’s experience. As a result of his insensitivity to these and other visual aspects of the medium, Kaplan’s episodes would often be better suited to radio than to television.

Fortunately, the dialogue today is peppered with snappy lines. So Danny Horn devotes his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day to a selection of memorable pieces of dialogue. That also makes me suspect the wiki is not entirely correct. It attributes the script to Gordon Russell, an able writer overall but one who is not at all given to bons mots. I use bits of dialogue whenever possible as the titles of these posts, and I often have to search very hard through Russell’s to find suitable ones. It was Violet Welles who excelled at producing those. Russell and Welles often collaborated, so it could be that he wrote a draft to which she added the quotable quotes.

The current story centers on a mysterious cult that has sent time traveler Barnabas Collins back to 1969 from a long sojourn in 1897, by way of a couple of days in 1796. Under the influence of the cult, Barnabas is being a real jerk to his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Barnabas was a vampire for a long time, and even when he is free of the effects of that curse he habitually resorts to murder to solve his problems. But the victims of those murders are imaginary, played by actors who will go on to find other work, so we don’t usually stay mad at him for any length of time when he commits them. His friendship with Julia, on the other hand, is the emotional core of the show. Barnabas’ coldness to her in yesterday’s episode and today’s leads us to see what the cult is doing to him as the greatest crime anyone has ever committed on Dark Shadows.

Barnabas was a pop culture phenomenon familiar to many millions of people who never saw a single minute of Dark Shadows. The show’s fanbase largely consisted of his devoted followers. So a story about a cult which co-opts him as its leader and changes his personality so that he is impossible to get along with directly addresses a fear that must have blacked out the mind of Dan Curtis every time the postal service truck loaded with Jonathan Frid’s fan mail backed up at ABC Studio 16.

Barnabas brought a box with him from his visit to the eighteenth century, and it is of the utmost importance to the vast eternal plan the cult is working on that the box not be opened until the right time. So Barnabas put it on the mantel in his living room, and when Julia was standing a few inches from him he lifted it from the mantel and placed it on a table in the middle of the room. When she asked what it was, he became flustered and refused to answer any questions about it.

When Julia left the house, Barnabas left the room, with the front door unlocked and the box still on the table. Today, we open with Julia coming back in, hearing the sound of breathing coming from the box, finding its key on the table next to it, and placing the key in its lock. Barnabas comes in just in time to stop her opening it, but we can see that the cult probably could have chosen an agent with a better sense of operational security. Barnabas’ function in the story is to make messes that other people will have to clean up, so as soon as we heard that the box must not under any circumstances be opened we expected him to leave it where it would inevitably fall into the hands of someone bent on opening it, though it is a bit disappointing he has done so this quickly.

After he has taken the box from her, Barnabas berates Julia, orders her from his house, and tells her he owes her nothing. He abruptly sweetens up and tells her that he is only carrying on that way because of some kind of temporal jet lag. He reminds her that when she traveled back in time in September, she was very ill for a while; he suggests that his surly mood might be the result of the same shock that caused that reaction. About a minute after he starts on this new tack, just as Julia has started smiling again, a knock comes at the door. It is Carolyn.

We don’t know what effect the cult’s co-optation of him has had on Barnabas, but regular viewers know that characters on Dark Shadows are always acquiring one magical power and losing another. For the last few months of the 1897 segment, the show’s main villain was sorcerer Count Petofi. One of Petofi’s signature moves was to become aware of visitors shortly before they arrived. It could be that the writers have decided to give the cultified Barnabas that power, and that it was because Carolyn was on her way that he wanted to put Julia in a good mood.

That interpretation is supported by what follows. Carolyn is delighted to see Barnabas; she hadn’t known he was back from his trip to 1897. She hugs him and he smiles, a stark contrast to his icy reaction when Julia hugged him yesterday. She wants to talk about Chris Jennings, a young man she dated a few times and whom she has been told is dangerous. Julia and Barnabas have befriended Chris and know that he is a werewolf. Julia thinks she can somehow control Chris’ transformations, and she urges Carolyn to think well of him. Barnabas tells her to trust her instincts and to avoid Chris. He keeps telling her that she is too important to be allowed to come to harm. Later, he visits Carolyn in her home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood, and he keeps going on and on about how important she is and how confident he is about her future. He also gives her a silver pentagram, an amulet to ward off werewolves, and urges her to wear it at all times. He subsequently has another scene with Julia in his own house, and he is just as cold and dismissive as he was in the first scene, exploding at her for being “irrational.” Evidently the cult has plans for Carolyn, but not for Julia.

Julia bought a painting from the Todds the other day, and now they have received a telegram offering to buy it regardless of price. Julia goes to their shop and discusses the telegram with them. She believes that the telegram, which is signed “Corey,” may actually be from Quentin Collins, a distant cousin of Barnabas’ whom he befriended during his time in 1897 and who may have been immortalized by a magical portrait painted by the same artist responsible for the picture Julia bought. She tells the Todds that she is not certain she wants to part with the painting, but that she would very much like to meet “Mr Corey,” and that she believes others in town would also like to do so. She urges them to reply to the telegram with an invitation.

Barnabas stands over the box. We hear his thoughts as he mulls over his questions about it. He suddenly declares “It is time!” Then he goes to his chair and sits down. Evidently, it is time to take a load off.

Barnabas has a vision of one of the hooded figures who inducted him into the cult. The figure, a man named Oberon, addresses him as “Master” and tells him that he is to give the box to people who wake him by knocking at his door. There is a knocking, he does awaken, and he goes to the door.

Episode 864: Shipwreck Point

Sorcerer Count Petofi is currently occupying the body of rakish Quentin Collins. When he is in this form, I refer to him as Q-Petofi.

Q-Petofi. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley has displeased Q-Petofi. Q-Petofi has put the zap on Evan and made him dig his own grave. Evan begs for his life, but does so in a stilted, robotic voice that suggests he is struggling against Q-Petofi’s power. It is a neat job of acting by Humbert Allen Astredo.

Evan points out that it would raise suspicions if Q-Petofi were seen with his servant Aristide, especially inside the great house of Collinwood. Evan himself, however, is the Collins family’s attorney, trusted by everyone in the house. If anyone there has suspicions about Q-Petofi, they will confide in him. Q-Petofi decides that he may as well let Evan live, and orders him to keep tabs on wicked witch Angelique.

We cut to the foyer of Collinwood, where Angelique is staying. She is on the telephone trying to reach the local pharmacy, and is annoyed that the meds she wants are not yet available. Another houseguest, Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye, enters. Angelique hurriedly ends the call. Pansy taunts Angelique for the end of her engagement to Quentin. After Pansy exits, Angelique gets back on the phone and resumes talking to the pharmacist. Q-Petofi enters, and Angelique pretends she is talking to someone else, then hangs up.

Returning viewers know that Angelique is carrying on a medical intervention designed by time-traveling mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia’s friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, made his way from 1969 to 1897, and she followed him. Julia had recreated an experimental treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into abeyance for a little while early in 1968 when she snapped back to her own time, vanishing from 1897. Shortly before Julia disappeared, Angelique agreed to complete the procedure and turn Barnabas into a real boy.

Angelique seems less powerful than usual today. Her dealings with the pharmacy are a logical consequence of her agreement to take over Julia’s plan, but she doesn’t usually have to get exasperated with people over the telephone, and not since her early days as a witch in the 1790s has she been so vulnerable to discovery by random passersby. Later, she goes to Barnabas’ hiding place, and Evan follows her. There have been times when Angelique could materialize and dematerialize at will, and it was impossible for any mere mortal to keep track of her whereabouts, but evidently she doesn’t feel up to that today. She does tell Q-Petofi she has a headache, maybe that’s true.

Pansy has a scene in the studio of artist Charles Delaware Tate. She tells Tate she wants to buy one of his paintings; he tells her that everything is for sale, but that his prices are high. She picks out a portrait of the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris; he throws a tantrum and doesn’t want to sell it to her. When she reminds him that he said all the paintings are for sale, he names the ridiculously high price of $5000. That would be well over $150,000 in 2025. Without missing a beat, Pansy pulls out a few large-denomination bills and fans them under Tate’s nose.

Pansy’s only source of income was a cabaret act she recently did at the Blue Whale, a tavern in the village of Collinsport. We saw her there the other day shortly before nine PM, when she was the only person in the barroom. So it doesn’t seem likely she could have earned that quantity of cash there. Nor is there any apparent reason why Pansy would want a portrait of Amanda, whom she saw as a rival for Quentin’s affections. It seems likely that someone else put her up to buying it.

The obvious candidate would be Judith Collins Trask, owner of Collinwood and all the Collins family businesses. Judith is married to the odious Gregory Trask, whose late daughter Charity provided the host body through which Pansy, who died in #771, has been interacting with the world of the living since Petofi erased Charity’s personality in #819. Judith has persuaded Pansy to move back into Collinwood. Judith has herself recently returned to the great house after Trask had her confined to a mental hospital for a period of more than thirteen weeks. Her stuffy but lovable brother Edward told Judith that Trask spent much of that time trying to seduce Amanda, and Judith wants to get the facts about what went on in her absence.

Closing Miscellany

Director Henry Kaplan was not in good form in this one. In the opening, studio lights are clearly visible right in the middle of the screen, between Evan and Q-Petofi. The same thing happened in yesterday’s episode. The other directors might have made a mistake like that once, but I don’t think any of them would have done it two days in a row.

The camera is also frequently out of focus, as is typical of Kaplan’s shows, and it moves unsteadily. He must have been trying to get the camera operators to do something he hadn’t prepared them for, it looks really bad.

There are a couple of notable bloopers that aren’t particularly Kaplan’s fault. When Angelique makes a remark about Q-Petofi’s attitude towards brandy, David Selby says “Don’t you think it’s possible for one’s…change…or one’s taste to change in brandy?” That is followed by a silent beat, as both he and Lara Parker are stunned by the nonsense that just came out of his mouth.

When Tate lets Pansy into his studio, the shade falls out of the window. He looks at it for a second, then the scene goes on. It is one of the all-time great goofs.

Episode 859: Not this grownup

Nine year old Nora Collins enters the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. She walks in on her father, the stuffy but lovable Edward, embracing Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire. She gives them a dirty look and says she supposes Edward is too busy to join her in a game of checkers. He says he does have to run an errand, but suggests that Nora play with Kitty.

Kitty is eager to ingratiate herself with Nora, who clearly wants nothing to do with her. Nora asks, in an icy voice, if the reason Kitty wants to be her friend is that she is planning to marry her father. Returning viewers suspect she is right. Kitty and Edward have more in common than they know. Both are penniless, each is sure the other is very rich, and each imagines marriage to the other will solve all their problems. Kitty can’t very well level with Nora about this, so she claims that the women in the Collins family, being outnumbered by the men, have to stick together. Nora does not hide her distaste at Kitty’s inclusion of herself among the women of the family. Kitty asks Nora if she wants her father to be happy. Nora drills her eyes into Kitty’s face and says in a firm, flat voice “I want that.”

Nora asks Kitty if she is just letting her win at checkers. While she is asking this, Nora moves twice in one turn and takes three of Kitty’s pieces. Kitty watches this without protest and denies that she is letting her win. She then says she wants to concede the game and listen to whatever information Nora is willing to share about the family.

Nora is not impressed with Her Ladyship. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Edward comes back from his errand to find Nora packing up the checkers and the board. He asks if she enjoyed her game with Kitty. Not looking up, Nora says they never finished it. Kitty hastens back in and asks if she wants to finish it now. Edward points out that it is getting close to Nora’s bedtime. He kisses her, and bids her say goodnight to Lady Hampshire. Kitty asks Nora to call her by her first name. Nora pointedly says “Good night, Lady Hampshire.”

It doesn’t show in her scenes with Nora, but Kitty seems to be suffering from a severe mental health crisis. Returning viewers know that the ghost of Josette Collins is taking possession of her, and suspect that she will turn out to be a reincarnation of Josette. Edward knows enough about the supernatural doings on the estate of Collinwood that he might give Kitty the benefit of the doubt when, for example, she comes running in today and is shrieking about a haunted house, a vanishing woman, and a curse that follows her everywhere. But she is so often so highly distraught that Nora must have noticed that she is not right in the head, and she can hardly look forward to having such a person as a stepmother.

Shortly before Nora enters, Edward calls Kitty “Katie.” This is a small enough slip of the tongue, but Kathryn Leigh Scott’s friends call her Katie, so it is a case of an actor’s name in place of the character’s. I think I can see Louis Edmonds blush a little when he realizes what he has done.

This episode marks the final appearance of Nora, and very nearly the last time we will hear Nora’s name. I think she was badly underused, disappointingly so after the outstanding work Denise Nickerson did as Amy Jennings in the months leading up to the segment set in 1897. She will be back later, in other parts.

Director Henry Kaplan was not much of a visual artist, and his deficiencies are particularly glaring today. Especially during Kitty and Nora’s first scene, the camera keeps drifting up to the actors until we see a randomly selected two-thirds of their faces in extreme closeup. Once the shot excludes the eyes or the mouth, it abruptly pulls back. Even the successfully framed closeups are rarely in focus, and you can forget about finding coherent visual storytelling in any kind of shot other than a closeup. The actors themselves do a good job, in spite of Kaplan’s notoriously unpleasant behavior towards them, but aside from a few evocative facial expressions, most of them by Nickerson, it may as well have been a radio play.

Episode 803: As soon as you’re finished with the mumbo-jumbo

The spirit of evil sorcerer Count Petofi has taken possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins, much to everyone’s consternation. David Henesy spends most of the episode mimicking Thayer David’s Petofi, with hilarious results.

Jamison/ Petofi sipping a glass of “mineral water… for the digestion.” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We see Jamison’s favorite uncle, Quentin the Satanist, trying to cast a spell to break Petofi’s possession of Jamison. As he always does when he is calling on the dark powers of the unseen realms, Quentin gets very fervent. We pan to Jamison/ Petofi, standing next to Quentin in a state of utter boredom, asking if Quentin will bring him a glass of mineral water once he’s “finished with all the mumbo-jumbo.”

Twice, Jamison/ Petofi pretends he is not possessed, but is his usual preteen self. He does this in order to trick people into letting him kiss them, which is how Petofi’s power spreads to them. This gives Mr Henesy the challenge of showing how Thayer David would play Petofi playing Jamison. That’s the sort of thing an actor needs a director’s help to pull off. Unfortunately, the woeful Henry Kaplan was at the helm today, so we discover that Petofi’s imitation of Jamison sounds exactly like the original, who is in turn uncannily like Jamison’s grandson David Collins and his great-great-grandfather Daniel Collins, who are also played by Mr Henesy.

Those whom Jamison/ Petofi kisses reveal their “true selves.” So maidservant Beth reveals that she was under the power of Jamison’s distant cousin, vampire Barnabas Collins. When Jamison’s father Edward passes this word along to Quentin, Quentin tells him is going to confront Barnabas. Edward has been hunting Barnabas, and by saying this Quentin implies that he knows where Barnabas is and that he has been helping to hide him. For some reason, Edward only smiles in response to this revelation.

Petofi wears a prosthesis in place of his right hand; Edward finds that Jamison’s right hand has also been replaced with a prosthesis. After this horrifying discovery, Jamison/ Petofi kisses Edward. Quentin returns shortly after, and finds that Edward does not recognize him or know the name of the house. Edward identifies himself as a newcomer to the area, and says that he would be glad of any work the family might hire him to do. Evidently his “true self” is a guy who needs a job. Since he has not inherited any assets or accumulated enough to live on, I don’t suppose we can disagree with whatever force it was that declared this to be Edward’s reality.

Episode 729: A tired family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 722: Too good-looking to die from old age

Another drab-looking outing from director Henry Kaplan, enlivened with some witty writing by Violet Welles and sprightly acting by John Karlen and David Henesy.

Daft prankster Carl Collins (Karlen) goes to the suite in the west wing of the great house of Collinwood recently occupied by his brother, the late Quentin Collins. Carl finds his nephew, twelve year-old Jamison Collins (Henesy) sitting by Quentin’s gramophone, listening to a sickly sweet waltz of which Quentin was fond. Carl mutters and rambles, claiming at one moment that Quentin is not really dead and at the next that he has a theory about who really killed him. Jamison just stares in response. Carl, agitated, demands that Jamison turn off the gramophone. When he does not answer, Carl declares that he is Jamison’s uncle. Jamison calmly replies that Carl is not his uncle, but his brother.

Carl comes back with his sister Judith. They question Jamison, who seems to know things only Quentin would know. Judith declares that “The child is possessed!” and flounces out of the room.

Jamison’s governess, Rachel Drummond, has a dream in which Jamison and Judith make her uncomfortable. She tries to go to the drawing room, only to find Carl blocking her way. He is wearing a railroad conductor’s hat and holding Jamison’s toy locomotive. He tells her it is too late to pass this point, and shows her a gigantic pocket watch to prove the point. She wakes up to find Quentin’s body sitting in a rocking chair next to her bed.