iconography – Page 4 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 811: A man’s investment in the future

In #797, the ghost of Rroma maiden Julianka appeared and placed a curse on her fellow grievous ethnic stereotype, Magda Rákóczi. Julianka blamed Magda for her death, and decreed that everyone Magda loved would die. Today, Magda is trying to prevent Julianka’s curse from taking the life of her desperately ill infant niece Lenore, daughter of her late sister Jenny. Magda goes to Lenore’s crib in company with Lenore’s father, Quentin Collins. Magda and Quentin try to conjure up Julianka’s ghost to plead for Lenore’s life, but instead they get the ghost of another Rroma woman- Jenny.

Jenny assumes physical form. She picks up Lenore and sings the lullaby “All the Pretty Little Horses.” We’ve heard Jenny sing this almost every time she has been on the show. It appears to be the only song she knows. For his part, Quentin has a phonograph and only one record, which he plays obsessively over and over. When they lived together, their home must have been a pretty grim place, playlist-wise.

Jenny lifts Lenore’s illness, and says that if Quentin looks into his heart he will know what he must do to ensure that Lenore has a bright future. She vanishes, and Quentin mutters dismissively at the idea that his heart will be a source of useful information.

Later, Quentin will have a dream while sleeping in the drawing room at the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Jenny visits and tells him that he must have nothing to do with Lenore and that she must grow up far from Collinwood. So far, dream sequences on Dark Shadows have always represented visits from the supernatural, but this one might be an exception. Jenny did say that the information Quentin needed to help Lenore was already in his heart. He is clearly not the stuff of which good fathers are made, and as Jenny explicitly says in the dream no one has ever been happy at Collinwood. So the advice she gives does seem to be correct. Perhaps this is just Quentin’s own knowledge taking a shape he can recognize.

Quentin goes on dreaming that his brother Edward is choking him. He wakes up to find that Edward is in fact choking him. This might seem like a prophetic dream, but it too might just be a natural expression of Quentin’s own unprocessed knowledge. Edward, because of a magic spell not directly connected with today’s events, is under the mistaken impression that he is a valet formerly in the service of the Earl of Hampshire. Quentin has followed the Collinses’ long-established protocol for dealing with mentally ill family members, and locked Edward up in the room on top of the tower in the great house. He knows this makes Edward miserable, and it is reasonable to suppose that he would expect Edward to express anger about it. Strangulation is Quentin’s own preferred method of expressing anger, especially towards members of his immediate family, so it can’t have been hard for him to see that coming.

Edward’s motivation is not as simple as Quentin’s would be if their positions were reversed. The evil Gregory Trask has been visiting Edward in the tower room, and has told him that Quentin is determined to keep him imprisoned in that room forever. He asks him to kill Quentin. Edward apparently has decided to comply.

Earlier in the episode, Edward had been more punctilious about cooperating with Trask. Trask presented him with a document to sign, promising that by signing it he would secure his freedom. Edward read the document, even after Trask very loudly insisted that it was unnecessary to do so. When Edward saw that it involved making Trask guardian of his son, Edward protested that he had no son. Trask said that this did not matter, but Edward would not be moved. Edward later tells Quentin about this encounter.

The tower room is a re-dress of the set used as the bedroom of strange and troubled boy David Collins in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. Today it includes the bed from that set, and we see Edward trying to sleep in it. This is a powerful image for longtime viewers. Louis Edmonds plays Edward in this costume drama segment and David’s father Roger in contemporary dress. Edward is the father of Jamison, who like David Collins is played by David Henesy. Not only has the spell robbed Edward of the memory of Jamison and of his role as a father, it has reduced him to curling up in a bed made for a boy rather than a man.

Edward in the child’s bed. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Roger was, for the first year of Dark Shadows, a spectacularly bad father. He openly hated David and exploited David’s miseries to try to manipulate him into doing his own criminal dirty work. He was indifferent to the family’s name and the fate of its businesses, would go to any lengths to hide from the consequences of his actions, had killed someone, and was an alcoholic. Edward shares none of these shortcomings. On the contrary, he goes to the opposite extreme. He is as brave as Roger is cowardly and tenderly loves his children, Jamison and Nora. But he is also stuffy, name-proud, and money-grubbing. The contrast with Roger shows these failings, not simply as negatives, but as the overgrowth of the virtues that separate Edward from Roger. Though Louis Edmonds and Jerry Lacy are such accomplished comic actors that Edward’s scenes with Trask are funny enough to be worthy of a staging of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, Edward’s loss of his identity as father of Jamison and Nora is a genuine tragedy.

Quentin is fond of Jamison, and once he learns that his children exist he seems to wish them well. Nonetheless, he shares most of the other vices of early Roger. As Edward shows us what Roger might have been had he had stronger moral fiber, Quentin is Roger with his vices magnified by black magic. When Jenny tells Quentin that he must not raise Lenore, longtime viewers remember Roger as he was when first we knew him, and remember how grim David’s future seemed at that time. It was only after well-meaning governess Vicki became the chief adult influence in his life that we could have hopes for David. So we cannot doubt that Jenny is right.

This is the last of 21 episodes of Dark Shadows directed by executive producer Dan Curtis. When Curtis first took the helm in #457, he had no experience as a director, and it showed. But he learned very quickly. This one looks great and the scenes play very smoothly. He would later direct the feature films House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows, as well as six episodes of the 1991 prime time revival of Dark Shadows and many other productions.

Episode 805: The shocking condition of your face

The 150 year old evil sorcerer Count Petofi has taken possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins. Jamison/ Petofi has been casting spells to make the various residents of the estate of Collinwood reveal their true selves. Jamison’s distant cousin, Barnabas the vampire, has locked Jamison/ Petofi in the prison cell in the basement of the Old House on the estate. When Barnabas says that he will let Jamison out once Petofi has vacated his body, Jamison/ Petofi replies “If that is what you intend to do, Mr Collins, I’m afraid that you are stupid and incompetent.” There is no need to cast a spell on Barnabas- Maker of Stupid and Incompetent Plans is his true self, and we love him for it.

The great house on the estate is currently under the legal authority of the evil Rev’d Gregory Trask, husband of Judith Collins, who is a patient in a mental hospital. Jamison/ Petofi’s spell has caused Trask’s daughter Charity to be intermittently possessed by the spirit of Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye. Trask is horror-stricken by the makeup, clothes, and hairstyle Charity wears when Pansy is in charge of her, and her East London accent, insouciant attitude towards him, and tendency to sing and dance escalate this horror further. Nancy Barrett and Jerry Lacy are both talented comic actors, and their scenes as Charity/ Pansy and Trask are hilarious.

Trask is appalled to see Charity/ Pansy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Collins family lawyer Evan Hanley is at home. Barnabas appears in Evan’s drawing room and asks for some information which Evan denies having. Evan tells Barnabas he has renounced his former interest in black magic and Satanism. Barnabas is skeptical, and Evan replies that his latest forays resulted in a gruesome disfigurement of his face. This disfigurement was later relieved, how we (frustratingly) do not know. But he wants nothing more to do with the occult, since he values the ability to look at himself in the mirror. Barnabas reminds Evan that he cannot see himself in a mirror, implying that he will use his vampire powers against him if he does not cooperate.

Trask comes to Evan’s house. He asks him to draw up papers that will complete his plan to seize control of all the Collins family’s assets. He mentions in passing that Jamison thinks he is Petofi. Evan knows enough about Petofi to be terrified. He tells Trask that neither of them has a chance in a battle with Petofi, and refuses to draw up the papers. Trask responds contemptuously.

Alone in the cell, Jamison/ Petofi decides to have some fun with Evan. We see Evan dozing in his armchair. He has a dream in which Jamison appears. Jamison kisses him; it is by his kisses that Petofi spreads the “true self” spell. Later, Evan goes to the great house at Collinwood and presents Trask with a paper to sign. Trask signs it eagerly, assuming it is the document he asked Evan to bring him. Instead, Evan has prepared a full confession to the murder of Trask’s first wife Minerva. The two of them plotted this murder together, and Trask is horrified when he sees his signature on it. He throws the paper in the fire; after he leaves the room, it rematerializes on the desk, complete with signatures.

During Trask’s confrontation with Charity/ Pansy Faye, the picture suddenly changes from color to sepia tone. After about a half a minute, it changes back. Evidently there was a fault in the videotape master at this point, and an excerpt from the kinescope was used to patch it. The color comes back right after Trask slaps Charity/ Pansy, causing Pansy to release Charity for a bit. It creates the eerie feeling that Trask somehow fixed our TV set by slapping her.

Dark Shadows continually comments on itself as it goes along. In the early days, all the episodes were scripted by Art Wallace. Wallace’s favorite method of composition was a sort of diptych, in which two sets of characters faced similar situations and responded to them differently, highlighting the contrast between their personalities. Petofi’s “true self” spell is of course another way of creating similar contrasts between characters played by the same actor.

As the show came to focus on time travel stories, they could cast actors as characters who represent alternative versions of parts they played in other periods, again putting characters played by the same actors in contrast with one another. And as Wallace would juxtapose similar situations within a single episode, the multiple times periods allowed them to take themes that had been developed in one way in a story set in one year and develop them differently in a story set in another. So Jamison/ Petofi’s contagious curse is a reworking of the “Dream Curse,” which dragged on from April to July 1968. The Dream Curse involved a lot of repetition and very little variety of tone. Jamison/ Petofi’s spells all get right to the point, and are sometimes scary, sometimes bizarre, and often quite funny. So the second time is definitely the charm here.

At one point Charity holds a recorder and tells her father she wants to learn how to play it. The first time we saw this prop was in #260. That episode was set in 1967, and Barnabas was holding Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, prisoner in the cell where Jamison/ Petofi is today. The ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah befriended Maggie, and materialized in the cell playing “London Bridge” on that recorder. Over the next several months, the recorder came to be a symbol of Sarah, one that she occasionally left behind as a sign that she had been in a place. Longtime fans will likely remember that, and see it as an indication that what is happening to Charity is going to have permanent consequences, as Sarah’s haunting had permanent consequences.

Episode 801/802: Ignore the truth whenever you can

In the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi accuses a man who calls himself Victor Fenn Gibbon of being Count Petofi, a sorcerer who, a hundred years before, was cured of lycanthropy at the price of his right hand and most of his magical powers. Fenn Gibbon denies the charge, and fills the awkward silence with a story that Petofi’s saddest morning came when he awoke to find that his pet unicorn was dead, killed by the wolf. Also in the room is the desperately handsome Quentin Collins, who is himself a werewolf. Quentin says that after they return to human form, werewolves do not remember what they did the night before. Since Fenn Gibbon’s story reveals his knowledge of that fact, Quentin takes it as confirmation that he is indeed Petofi.

Petofi’s severed hand is still in existence, and still carries with it great power. Magda stole the hand from Romani tribal leader/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana several weeks ago in hopes that she could use it to lift the werewolf curse from Quentin. Since then it has been stolen by one person after another, none of whom has much benefited from it. Now schoolteacher-turned-adventurer Tim Shaw has taken the hand and skipped town. Petofi threatens to use his remaining powers to harm Quentin and Magda unless they find the hand and return it to him by morning; they have to admit they have no idea where it is.

At the end of the episode, we are in the great house on the estate. Petofi makes a series of ominous remarks to Magda and Quentin as he takes his suitcase and goes out the front door. Quentin’s twelve year old nephew Jamison appears at the top of the staircase. He is speaking in a raspy voice, continually suppressing a chuckle at his own witty remarks, and squinting by tightening his eyelids in the middle. He addresses Quentin as “Mr Collins,” says he is not in the habit of being interrupted, and walks downstairs with a slow gait, raising himself slightly from the hips as he comes to each step. We recognize an imitation of Petofi, and Magda declares that the boy is possessed.

David Henesy as Count Petofi. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Regular viewers will be intrigued to see Jamison as a medium for Petofi. Jamison is played by David Henesy, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s plays strange and troubled boy David Collins. In #186, David Collins participated in a séance during which he channeled the spirit of David Radcliffe, a boy who was burned alive by his mother in March 1867, exactly one hundred years before. In December 1968, David Collins was intermittently possessed by the ghosts of Quentin and Jamison, and when Quentin was temporarily dead and his body was a zombie in April 1969 Quentin possessed Jamison. So by this time Mr Henesy has substantial experience playing a boy who is being used as the vehicle for another spirit.

Mr Henesy is also deeply familiar with the style and manner of Thayer David, who plays Petofi. Thayer David’s first role on the show was crazed handyman Matthew Morgan, who had many scenes with David Collins, and his second was much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes, who when the show was set in the 1790s shared screen time with Mr Henesy’s character Daniel Collins. Thayer David’s third role, Ben’s descendant and occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes, crosses paths with David Collins only occasionally, but he was on so much that all Mr Henesy would have to do to keep up his status as an expert on Thayer David would be to watch the show on his days off. So it is exciting to see what Mr Henesy’s interpretation of Thayer David’s Petofi will be.

David Collins is always on the minds of longtime fans when Mr Henesy appears, and is especially so today. Magda has a crystal ball into which she occasionally peers; she gets melodramatically frustrated with it shortly before we cut to Jamison and Petofi today. This ball originally belonged to David Collins. He received it as a gift from dashing action hero Burke Devlin in #48, and thereafter used it several times to get information to advance the plot and to establish himself as a link between the visible action of the show and the supernatural forces which at that point lurked in an unseen back-world. Magda’s failed attempt at scrying today may seem like a throwaway to relatively recent fans, but when those who have been with the show from the beginning see the ball and then see Jamison so shortly afterward, they will know that something spooky is coming.

Thayer David might never have been cast on Dark Shadows if he had acted under the name he was given at birth. He was originally called David Thayer Hersey. It’s hard to imagine a producer adding David Thayer Hersey to the cast of a show that had already for eight weeks featured David Thomas Henesy.

Episode 793: All the revolted spirits

When wicked witch Angelique first turned Barnabas Collins into a vampire in the 1790s, he went to the waterfront and preyed on the women he found spending their nights there. When Barnabas traveled in time from the 1960s to the year 1897, he again made his way to the waterfront. Whether he bit the women or not, he choked them to death, earning the sobriquet “The Collinsport Strangler.”

Once he had become a vampire, Barnabas displayed so many traits he had come to have in common with Angelique that we suspect he is not only cursed by her, but possessed by her. More precisely, it often seems that when Angelique made Barnabas a vampire she created a copy of her own personality and put it in his mind, where it took control of him. We have further support for that interpretation in today’s opening reprise. We see Angelique on the same set where Barnabas has several times been the last person a young woman would encounter. This time, she encounters a young man. He flirts with her, as the women flirted with Barnabas. Before long, he is choking and within seconds of death because of her action. In this case, she has taken his handkerchief and is tightening it around the neck of a toy soldier that once belonged to Barnabas. She is threatening to kill him unless he tells her where he has hidden the legendary “Hand of Count Petofi.”

The man’s name is Aristide. He capitulates, telling her he buried the hand at the old cemetery, in a grave marked with a stone bearing the name of Townsend. She gives the handkerchief another tug, and he falls down, unconscious.

Later, we are in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Angelique comes down the stairs, carrying the box in which the hand is kept. Stuffy Edward Collins sees her. Regular viewers have seen the box on a table in the upstairs hallway many times, from the first week of the show onward. It is rather odd that Edward doesn’t ask her why she is carrying it around. Even if we decide to forget that the prop is familiar and decide to treat it as representing something Edward hasn’t seen before, people don’t usually walk around carrying wooden boxes in front of themselves.

Still, Edward does have other matters on his mind. Angelique had been introduced to the family as Barnabas’ fiancée, at a time when all the Collinses knew about Barnabas was that he was their distant cousin. She disappeared when he was exposed as a vampire. Edward tells her that the family’s lawyer, Evan Hanley, told him that he knew her before she met Barnabas, and that he believes that her association with him was innocent. Edward also says that he cannot believe that this is true. Angelique tells Edward a story about Barnabas biting her and making him her slave; Edward is convinced instantly, and declines her offer to leave at once. He urges her to stay at Collinwood until she can make new plans.

Meanwhile, we have learned that Aristide is alive and not seriously injured. A man in a set of whiskers that represent the aesthetic sensibilities of the late Victorian era developed to their uttermost extremity finds Aristide crumpled on the ground, rouses him from unconsciousness, and responds to his story about Angelique almost killing him with dismay that she stopped short. He tells Aristide not to do anything more. His own credentials are in order, and he will present them at Collinwood as he sets about his second attempt to get the hand.

The man does go to Collinwood. He gives Edward a letter from their “mutual friend,” the Earl of Hampshire. It attests to the good character of its bearer, Victor Fenn Gibbon. Edward insists that Fenn Gibbon stay in the house, and he accepts.

Angelique emerges from the drawing room, still carrying the box. Edward continues to ignore it; Fenn Gibbon can’t take his eyes off it. Edward introduces her as Angelique Duvall. This is the first time we have heard the name “Duvall” in connection with her; when we met her in the part of the show set in the 1790s, her name was Angelique Bouchard, and when she turned up in 1968 she called herself Cassandra Blair. Fenn Gibbon asks if she is French. She says that she was born in the USA, but that her forebears were French people who lived on Martinique. Indeed, when she was known as Angelique Bouchard she lived on that island, and it was there she met Barnabas. Fenn Gibbon tells her that lovely as France’s colonial possessions may be, none is as “exquisite” as she. She is charmed, and excuses herself. She leaves the house, taking the box with her.

While Fenn Gibbon regales Edward with tales of derring-do from the battle of Khartoum, Angelique takes the box to the Old House. There, she meets the rakish Quentin Collins, whose desperately handsome face has been severely disfigured by a previous encounter with the hand. Angelique dismisses Quentin’s girlfriend, maidservant Beth, telling her that she cannot be present during what she must now do for Quentin. Beth leaves, Angelique shows Quentin the hand, and Quentin demands that Angelique set to work curing him. She says there will be a price for her services. If she cures him, he will have to marry her. He has nothing to lose, and she looks exactly like Lara Parker, so of course he agrees.

Angelique picks up the hand and gets to work casting a spell, but the hand quickly escapes her control. She turns to find that it is on Quentin and he is in agony. He pleads with her to help, she cries out that she can do nothing, and we see Fenn Gibbon peering in through the window.

Fenn Gibbon looks on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Fenn Gibbon* is the fifth role Thayer David played on Dark Shadows. The first, second, and fourth were all closely associated with the Old House. They were crazed handyman Matthew Morgan, who holed up there after he killed local man Bill Malloy; much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes, who lived and worked there; and broad ethnic stereotype Sandor Rákóczi, who with his even more offensively conceived wife Magda lives at the Old House in 1897. With this iconography behind David, regular viewers will know that when they see Fenn Gibbon in the window of the Old House, they are seeing a man who knows his way around the place.

David’s third role sheds even more light on Fenn Gibbon. In the parts of the show set in 1968 and subsequent years, he plays Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, expert on the occult and descendant of Ben. Unlike most of the characters who made a splash on the show, Stokes has a functioning conscience. He does not always live within the law, but he always strives to do what is right. When we see that Fenn Gibbon knows about the hand and has orchestrated a criminal conspiracy to obtain it, we see that he is an evil version of Stokes. At once this makes him fascinating to regular viewers. Stokes himself is a reimagining of the show’s first academic specialist in the paranormal, Dr Peter Guthrie, who was killed by a witch in #186. He is a jovial and talkative eccentric, where Guthrie was a tight-lipped and understated Yankee. Fenn Gibbon seems to have inherited Stokes’ whimsical bent and exaggerated manner; we now have to wonder what Stokes would be like as a villain.

Even those who joined the show after it went to 1897 and who therefore do not know about Stokes will be intrigued when they see David as Fenn Gibbon. Sandor hasn’t appeared since #750, but he is still alive. This marks the first time Dark Shadows has cast the same actor as two living characters in the same time frame.** Sometimes an actor has doubled as a living character and as a ghost, or has appeared in two roles in parts of an episode set in different periods of history. But this is a new frontier for doubling on the show. Sandor is always a lot of fun, so we might hope that he will be back and that he and Fenn Gibbon just won’t have scenes together. But coming on the heels of his long absence, it does have an ominous ring.

In #758, Quentin backed Angelique against a wall and asked her why she preferred Barnabas to him. That was a very good question. The two of them are obviously attracted to each other, and have a lot of fun every time they are alone together. By contrast, the only emotions Barnabas has ever shown in response to Angelique are glumness and rage. Her maniacal insistence that Barnabas should love her drove Angelique to wreak immense havoc in the 1790s, and also motivated some story in 1968. But there is nothing to it beyond his misery and her self-absorption. When we see her turn her attentions to Quentin, longtime viewers will cheer at the hope that we are about to be freed from that dead end once and for all.

*He introduces himself today as “Fenn Gibbons,” which is how he is almost always addressed. But the closing credits leave the S off his name. The closing credits have been unreliable lately, identifying Edward as his grandson Roger and misspelling Aristide’s name. Still, “Fenn Gibbon” sounds better to me; “Fenn Gibbons” suggests a group of small apes found in a peat bog.

**Don Briscoe briefly played both werewolf Chris Jennings and Chris’ brother Tom, but that is only a partial exception- Tom was a vampire at that time.

Episode 789: We are going to create a thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screenshots by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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

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

Episode 785: Time is my hobby

Early in 1969, the great estate of Collinwood became uninhabitable. The ghost of Quentin Collins took possession of the place and was about to kill strange and troubled boy David Collins. Quentin and David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins traveled back in time to the year 1897, when Quentin was a living being, and hoped to somehow prevent Quentin from becoming an evil spirit.

So far, Barnabas has managed to make everything much, much worse. As soon as he arrived in 1897, he found that he had become a vampire. So far, he has been responsible for at least six homicides that did not take place the first time through this period of history. He has also enslaved three people by biting them. He has not prevented a curse that has made Quentin a werewolf, which is evidently the origin of the disaster at Collinwood in 1969.

Moreover, Barnabas’ blunderings have caused Judith Collins, who owns Collinwood and the Collins family businesses, to become close to the hypocritical Rev’d Gregory Trask. Trask has responded to Judith’s interest in him by enlisting lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley to carry out a particularly cruel plan to murder Trask’s wife Minerva. Now Trask and Judith are married. Today she tells her brothers, Quentin and the stuffy Edward, that she is changing her will. Edward’s twelve year old son Jamison will still be her heir, but Gregory will administer the estate if Judith dies before Jamison is 21. Regular viewers know, not only that Gregory killed Minerva on the off-chance that he would thereby get a shot at taking Judith’s money, but that he is a sadist who takes special pleasure in making Jamison miserable. So this provision is a death sentence for Jamison. Since the residents of the great house at Collinwood in the 1960s are Jamison’s daughter Liz, son Roger, and grandchildren Carolyn and David, Trask will negate Dark Shadows‘ contemporary timeline if he murders Jamison.

It is not impossible that this might happen. The show is now chiefly about time travel, and the 1960s are not an indispensable destination. Barnabas did leave a few interesting characters behind when he traveled to the nineteenth century- sooner or later he is going to have to be reunited with mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, and occult expert Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes also has a lot to offer. But if Barnabas could find a way to come unstuck in time, Julia and Stokes can too. Wicked witch Angelique has already made her way to 1897. And anyone else we might miss can be replaced by the same actor playing a similar part. It does seem unlikely Collinwood will become Traskwood. But in April 1967 it seemed even less likely that the ABC network would devote thirty minutes of airtime five days a week to showing a vampire feeling sorry for himself, yet here we are.

Quentin is amused by Judith’s marriage to Trask, Edward appalled. Edward tells Judith that their grandmother’s will specified that he and Quentin would have the right to stay in the house as long as they wished, a point Judith concedes. This is a retcon. When the will was read in #714, it was made very clear that only Quentin was given a place in the house. Jamison was named as contingent heir. Edward was not mentioned at all. Neither was Carl Collins, another brother of Judith’s, whom Barnabas murdered a couple of days ago and who has already been forgotten.

Judith runs Edward and Quentin out of the drawing room. When she comes back in, she finds that the new will has been torn to shreds, a dagger has been stuck into a Bible under a verse lamenting the sufferings of the righteous, and there is a childish drawing tacked to the wall labeled “Mrs Trask.” Although “Mrs Trask” is now her own name, a fact which she proudly declared to Edward a few minutes before, she immediately assumes the drawing depicts Minerva.

Not the usual sort of portrait one finds on the walls of the great house. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This resonates with two stories that longtime viewers will remember. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. The ancestor of the future Collinses in that period was Daniel Collins, who like Jamison and David is played by David Henesy. Daniel’s big sister Millicent married roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes, who set about trying to murder Daniel in order to get all of Millicent’s wealth for himself.

Yesterday Judith saw Minerva’s ghost in the same part of the drawing room where these odd occurrences have taken place, and the Biblical verse is very much the sort of thing Minerva would have been likely to quote. So we are to assume that she is indulging in a little poltergeist activity. But the “Mrs Trask” drawing is so unlike anything the somber Minerva would have made herself that we can only assume she took it from some other spirit out in the unseen realm. Since “Mrs Trask” is Judith’s name now, the question of who that spirit might be brings up a second old story.

From March to July 1967, Liz was being blackmailed by seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Jason’s ultimate demand was that Liz should marry him, giving him control of the Collins family fortune. Liz’ daughter Carolyn was outraged when it looked like she was going to marry Jason, and in #252 she taunted her mother by shouting the name “Mrs McGuire!” over and again. Perhaps Minerva’s dead spirit has crossed paths with Carolyn’s unborn one, and Carolyn has drawn the picture as a way of rehearsing for that scene. Though Carolyn is an adult, Jamison had a dream in #767 in which he caught a glimpse of the Collinwood of 1969 and saw that Carolyn has a fondness for childish imagery.

There is also some business in this episode about broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi’s effort to lift the werewolf curse she placed on Quentin. Magda has stolen a severed hand that has magic powers and plans to put it on Quentin’s heart when he begins transforming tonight. Yesterday, Evan forced Magda to let him see the hand; when he looked at it, the hand grabbed him. It left him unconscious and severely disfigured. Now Magda is keeping Evan in her home, the Old House at Collinwood, and treating him with surprising tenderness. Quentin sees Evan there. He does not recognize him, even though he and Evan were close friends, Evan is wearing the same gray suit he always wore, and his very distinctive hair and beard are unchanged. Eventually Evan regains the ability to say his name, and Quentin freaks out. He does not want to go through with Magda’s plan, but when the transformation begins he drops his opposition.

Magda placed the hand on Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The hand looks very much like a Halloween decoration, so much so that I wonder if Dan Curtis hoped to make some money by getting copies of it into department stores by October 1969. It’s pretty disgusting to look at, but that’s the point.

One of the problems Dark Shadows had throughout its run was that it tended to veer between appealing exclusively to adults and exclusively to children. In the early months, its glacial pace, heavy atmosphere, psychological depth, and reliance on the star power of Joan Bennett drew a rather mature audience. As the supernatural and fantastic themes came to predominate, the average age of the viewers dropped towards the single digits. By the end of the big Monster Mash that ran through 1968, the show’s strongest demographic was probably elementary school pupils. Dividing an episode between the relatively adult melodrama of Edward’s reaction to the Judith/ Trask marriage and the undisguised kids’ stuff of The Hand of Count Petofi would seem to be a way of offering something to both the oldest and youngest viewers.

This episode originally aired on 27 June 1969. That was the third anniversary of the show’s premiere. That first installment, like 332 of those that followed it, revolved around the character of well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, played by Alexandra Moltke Isles. Mrs Isles left the show in November 1968; her son Adam Isles, who would in the 2000s become a top official of the USA’s Department of Homeland Security, was born this day. Mrs Isles has said in interviews that while she was recovering from the birth she tuned in to Dark Shadows, but that the show had changed so much in her time away from it that she couldn’t figure out what was going on.

I imagine Mrs Isles had changed a great deal as well. Like so many members of the cast and production staff, she was a fashionable, sophisticated New York society figure. While she was working on the show, she was immersed in its imaginary world, but after several months away she would have refocused her attention on the sorts of things she was raised to care about when she was growing up as the daughter of Countess Mab Moltke. One doubts that magical severed hands, werewolves, devil worshipers, and actors in brownface makeup would have ranked especially high on that list.

Episode 784: Impaled by a pin

Vampire Barnabas Collins has come unstuck in time and traveled from 1969 to 1897, a year in which he hopes to prevent a disaster. Unfortunately, Barnabas generates disasters with his every action, and so he has taken the grim situation he found upon his arrival and made it incalculably worse.

Now, Barnabas has been exposed as a vampire. Shortly before dawn, he returns to the cave where he has been hiding his coffin. There, he finds lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley (Humbert Allen Astredo) waiting for him, holding a cross. When Evan makes it clear he has no immediate plans to destroy him, Barnabas says that he does not want to be treated as an exhibit for the curious or a subject for research. This will remind longtime viewers of Barnabas’ initial response when in 1967 Dr Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) offered to develop a medical treatment for his vampirism. That treatment was not entirely successful, but it set Julia and Barnabas on a path that led them to become fast friends, and a later medical intervention did free him of the effects of his curse.

Barnabas needs all the friends he can get, and indeed there have been some signs that he is about to make new ones. But Evan is not going to be one of them. He knows that Barnabas has the famed “Hand of Count Petofi,” a relic of someone to whom Barnabas refers as “the most evil man who ever lived.” When Dark Shadows was set in 1968, Astredo played suave warlock Nicholas Blair, who was hung up on the idea of recruiting “the most evil woman who ever lived” to take part in one of his schemes, an idea which led directly to the failure of his mission and his own recall from Earth to Hell. Evan forces Barnabas and Barnabas’ reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi (Grayson Hall,) to let him look at the hand. That backfires immediately, and leaves Evan’s face severely disfigured. When Barnabas sees what has happened, he declares that Magda must not go through with her plan to use the hand to release rakish Quentin Collins from the werewolf curse she placed on him.

Evan uglified. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, the cruel and hypocritical Rev’d Gregory Trask proposes marriage to wealthy spinster Judith Collins (Joan Bennett.) In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Bennett plays reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz stayed in her house for 19 years because she thought she had murdered her husband Paul; only when seagoing con man Jason McGuire tried to use this belief to force Liz into marrying him and giving him control of the estate of Collinwood and the Collins family businesses did she confess to the killing. It then turned out that Paul wasn’t dead at all, and the whole thing was a cruel trick he and Jason played on Liz.

Unlike Liz, Judith actually has killed someone. She shot neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond to death in #775. Gregory prevented Judith from telling the police about this, persuading her that because she was under a vampire’s* power at the time she was not responsible. Since then, Judith has been putty in Trask’s hands. She accepts his proposal, and they are married by the end of the episode.

On Dark Shadows, wedding days are always occasions of horror and sorrow, and today is no exception. Trask’s wife Minerva was murdered in #773; unknown to Judith, Trask conspired with Evan to commit this crime and leave everyone thinking that a man named Tim Shaw did it. Trask’s plan to frame Tim fell apart in #777, when Tim showed up at Collinwood and revealed that he had seen Judith shoot Rachel. Since Trask killed Minerva in order to free himself to marry Judith and take control of Collinwood and the Collins businesses, he cannot risk Judith’s conviction on a murder charge, and so he tells the sheriff that Tim cannot have killed Minerva. When Trask and Judith come home from their wedding, Judith sees Minerva’s ghost in the drawing room. Evidently Minerva is not ready to rest and let Gregory reap the rewards of her murder.

*Not Barnabas, another one. Collinwood is crowded at night in 1897.

Episode 779: Our cousin, who always appears at dusk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 777: Two murderers at Collinwood

The opening voiceover, delivered by Kay Frye, tells us that a vampire named Dirk Wilkins has been destroyed. We hear that Dirk was the pawn of someone called Barnabas Collins, who hoped to use him to conceal a secret of his own. The narrator also says that “certain things cannot be forgotten, as Judith Collins will learn this day.” This implies that the day’s action will center on challenges in information management.

Returning viewers may not recognize Miss Frye’s voice. We have seen her as Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl, improbable fiancée of prankster Carl Collins, and victim of Dirk’s first murder. As narrator, Miss Frye forgoes Pansy’s rather uncertain East London accent. She also takes a different approach to the role of narrator than she had to that of Pansy. When we first saw her, Pansy was putting on an act for Carl’s benefit, and Pansy is a terrible actress. When Carl left, Pansy dropped her act and we could see that Miss Frye is as capable a performer as the character is a poor one. Today’s voiceover gives Miss Frye a still better role. The crass and cynical Pansy did not call for much nuance. But as narrator, Miss Frye speaks with a quiet urgency and subtle modulation of the voice that leaves us wondering what might have been had she been cast in a bigger part.

We cut to what regular viewers recognize as the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in the year 1897, where a man in a cassock is talking tenderly with a woman in a colorful dress. The man is very affectionate, even stroking the woman’s neck with two fingers.

Trask fingers Judith’s neck. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The woman is the Judith Collins mentioned in the opening voiceover; the man is the Rev’d Gregory Trask. It is not mentioned in the episode, but Trask is the keeper of a boarding school called Worthington Hall. Also unmentioned is that Trask conspired with a Satanist named Evan Hanley to brainwash a young man named Tim Shaw, one of the teachers at Worthington Hall, and that once he was under their control they used Tim to murder Trask’s wife Minerva. Trask wanted Minerva out of the way, evidently because he plans to marry Judith and take control of her vast fortune.

Judith is disconsolate at the thought that she was under Dirk’s control. While Trask is talking sweetly to Judith, Tim enters. Trask pulls a gun on him and instructs Judith to call the police and report that Minerva’s murderer has been captured.

Tim, who has up to this point ranged from mousy to timid to utterly defeated, is suddenly assertive. He tells Judith that she won’t want to telephone the sheriff. He says that there are two murderers at Collinwood, and she is one of them.

Tim says that he came upon Judith in the act of shooting neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond to death. Returning viewers know that this is true; Tim, Judith, and Rachel were all under Dirk’s power at the time, and for reasons that made sense only to the dim-witted Dirk he ordered Judith to kill Rachel. A vague memory comes back to Judith and prompts her to confess; when Trask realizes that Tim will not back down from his accusation and Judith will not participate in a cover-up, he tells Tim he will make a deal with him.

Trask calls the sheriff. He addresses himself to “Sheriff Furman,” a name we have not heard before. It quickly becomes clear that we are not likely to hear it again. He tells the sheriff that Tim was out of town the night Minerva was poisoned and that, in his grief, he had forgotten this fact. Returning viewers know that Evan has told the sheriff that he saw Tim with Minerva while she was dying. One might assume that Trask would at least have to call Evan first to ensure that he gave the sheriff a story to account for this discrepancy, but Trask doesn’t bother to contact Evan at all. Evidently the sheriff is such an abysmal moron that Trask can safely assume he won’t think of any questions.

Sheriff Furman’s manifest incompetence prompts one of Danny Horn’s funniest posts at Dark Shadows Every Day, in which he writes a series of hypothetical police reports about the killings we have seen so far in the 1897 segment. One of Danny’s recurring themes is that law enforcement characters on Dark Shadows serve only to delay the plot. There is so much story in 1897 that the producers saw no need to slow things down, so it shouldn’t be surprising that neither Sheriff Furman nor any of his deputies appear on-screen.

For my part, I wish they had stayed in 1897 considerably longer, so I would have liked to spend one day a week or so without much forward narrative movement. That might have included some episodes when the police show up and you do a lot of recapping, some built around character studies of the type Joe Caldwell wrote so well in 1967, some in which we reconnect with Collinwood as it is on the night in 1969 when Barnabas left for the past, and so on. Not only would that have extended the show’s strongest period and helped new viewers catch up to what is going on, it would also have enabled them to make more use of the many fine actors whom we go weeks on end without seeing. Even David Selby, whose handsome rake Quentin Collins is breaking out as a pop culture sensation at this point, hasn’t been on the show since #768. Other fan favorites are in the midst of even longer unexplained absences; for example, Lara Parker’s wicked witch Angelique has not been seen since #760.

Tim, who was out of the room while Trask was on the phone, returns. He “gladly!” agrees to leave Trask’s employ, and at first says that he will “gladly” leave the village of Collinsport. But then it dawns on him that he needs a job, and he blackmails Judith into assuring him that she will find a place for him in her business.

This will remind longtime viewers of the spring and early summer of 1967. At that time, Dark Shadows took place in a contemporary setting, and there were two major storylines. One was the introduction of the vampire Barnabas Collins. The other was the blackmail of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard by seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Like Judith, Liz owns all of the Collins family’s assets; also like her, she is played by Joan Bennett. Threatening to expose the terrible secret that she was a murderer, Jason forced Liz to take him into her home, pay his debts, give him a job, and agree to marry him. When she finally balked rather than go through with the marriage, it turned out Liz wasn’t a murderer after all, the whole thing was a scam Jason cooked up.

Jason was a short-term character brought on to tie up the last non-supernatural narrative loose ends and fill time while Barnabas found his footing, as witness the casting of Dennis Patrick, who refused to sign a contract for the role since he wanted to be free to move to Los Angeles without giving more than 24 hours notice. But in those days, before the internet or soap opera magazines, the audience had no way of knowing that. They may well have thought that Barnabas would be destroyed and Jason’s oppression of Liz would become the show’s backbone.

In yesterday’s episode, a vampire was in fact destroyed. In May and June 1967, Barnabas’ chief victim was Maggie Evans, who like Rachel was played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. It was possible then that he would kill Maggie and that she would rise as a vampire, as Lucy Westenra did in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, compelling the good guys to stake her. Rachel doesn’t become a vampire, but Trask does tell the sheriff that it was the men hunting Dirk who shot her, accidentally. So when the final appearances of Dirk and Rachel lead to Judith both submitting to blackmail because of her mistaken belief that she is a murderer and taking steps towards marrying an overwhelmingly evil man, longtime viewers will remember a resolution that seemed to be on the horizon back in 1967.

Carl enters. Judith has no patience for her childish brother, and dismisses his concerns about Pansy. She tells Carl to go with Tim to the Old House on the estate. Tim took Rachel to the Old House when she was dying. Barnabas, who has traveled back in time to 1897, is staying there, and he had befriended Rachel. Tim had hoped Barnabas would help them, but it was daylight and he was not available. Rachel died in the Old House, and Tim left her corpse there when he came to the great house.

When Carl and Tim leave, Trask warns Judith that she almost gave herself away. “You must be more cautious, Judith! Even Carl was suspicious.” Judith agrees, showing that Trask is luring her into his world of lies.

We see Tim and Carl at the Old House. Rachel’s body is no longer there. Who took it, and why didn’t Tim and Carl leave with them? We are not told. Carl goes on about how wonderful Pansy is, and says he is going to the police because he thinks someone at Collinwood has done her harm. Evidently Carl’s suspicions are more highly developed than Trask realizes. Trask underestimates Carl because he is focused exclusively on Rachel and Tim. He never met Pansy, and knows nothing about her.

Carl leaves the house, and Pansy’s ghost appears to Tim. Tim is bewildered, and asks Pansy if she is looking for Barnabas. That is a natural assumption- after all, it is Barnabas’ house and Tim has no idea who Pansy is. When she vanishes into thin air, he shouts for Carl. He finds Carl not far outside the door, and describes the woman he saw. Carl jumps to the conclusion that she is Pansy, and starts calling for her. He sends Tim along to the great house, and continues searching for Pansy.

Evidently Carl’s search did not take long, because we see him standing next to Tim in the drawing room at the great house in the next shot. It is Rachel’s funeral.

Trask delivers a eulogy in which he says of Rachel that “The littlest angels have a new teacher.” Even first-time viewers are likely to laugh out loud at this ridiculous turn of phrase, and those who have been with the show for a while will see more in it than that. From childhood on, Rachel was Trask’s prisoner, first as one of the pupils imprisoned in his horrible school, then when he extorted her into staying on as a teacher with threats that he would have her prosecuted on false charges of theft and murder if she tried to leave. He made flagrant sexual advances to her as well, all the more hideous because he has been responsible for her since she was a small girl. In Rachel and Tim’s helpless personalities, we saw what can happen when a criminal like Trask is given an opportunity to turn a person into filet of human being, and an ominous sign of what might lie in store for Judith’s nephew and niece Jamison and Nora, who are currently among the inmates at Worthington Hall.

Tim and Carl bury Rachel themselves. My wife, Mrs Acilius, asked “Isn’t this usually handled by professionals?” Presumably whoever took Rachel’s body from the Old House would have been a better choice for the work than are Tim and Carl, but that isn’t the Collins way.

Tim announces his intention to get drunk. Carl brings up other things they might do, and Tim says that those will have to wait until after he gets drunk. After Tim leaves to pursue his eminently sound plan, Carl hears Pansy singing. He wonders if she is dead. He realizes that her voice is coming from the mausoleum which we know to have been Barnabas’ longtime home. Carl is played by John Karlen, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s plays the luckless Willie Loomis. It was Willie who inadvertently released Barnabas from the mausoleum, so longtime viewers who see this actor on this set will expect something important to happen in the story.

Episode 775: Call it a vampire or whatever you like

Neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond is the third character Kathryn Leigh Scott has played on Dark Shadows, and today she joins the other two in becoming the victim of a vampire. In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Miss Scott plays Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Vampire Barnabas Collins took Maggie as his victim in May and June of 1967, and tried to brainwash her into believing she was his lost love Josette. At first Maggie responded to the vampire’s bite with the same addictive behavior it prompted in others, but eventually she shook loose of Barnabas’ power and rebelled against him. She tried to stake Barnabas, and when that failed she escaped from him. It was only because her psychiatrist betrayed her to become Barnabas’ co-conspirator and to hypnotize Maggie into forgetting her experience that she did not expose Barnabas.

When Dark Shadows flashed back to the 1790s to show how Barnabas became a vampire and to suggest that he might still be interesting if he weren’t one, Miss Scott played Josette. After he had brought the vampire curse on himself, Barnabas bit Josette, who like Maggie at first responded blissfully. When Josette realized Barnabas wanted to make her into a vampire as well, she, like Maggie, resolved to escape. Maggie’s escape took her from the prison cell in Barnabas’ basement through a tunnel to the beach below the cliff of Widow’s Hill; Josette’s escape led to very nearly the same spot, but it began, not in the cell, but at the top of the cliff, and it involved her flinging herself to her death on the rocks below.

Early in 1968, Barnabas was freed of the effects of his vampirism, and he set about battling other supernatural menaces. In the course of one such battle, he has come unstuck in time, and taken us with him to the year 1897. In that year, he is once again a vampire. One of his victims was dim-witted servant Dirk Wilkins. Since Barnabas was beginning to attract suspicion, he allowed Dirk to die and rise as a vampire, planning to tip people off to Dirk’s hiding place so that he would be found and destroyed and everyone would attribute all the vampire attacks of the previous few months to him. This plan fell apart immediately, when Barnabas lost track of Dirk as soon as he first rose.

Rachel has stumbled into Dirk’s hiding place. She asks him if he knows what happened to her friend Tim, and he bites her. She shows some signs of a blissful initial reaction to the bite, but still has some questions about Tim. Dirk tells her to forget about Tim and to stay where she is. He returns before dawn to find her waiting. She brings Tim up again, and he ignores her. She helps him close the lid of his coffin, caressing it. Though Rachel is obedient, this does not mean that she is any more under Dirk’s power than Maggie was under Barnabas’ power when she rebelled against him or Josette was when she jumped off Widow’s Hill. Rachel’s personality is something that takes place deep inside her head and prevents her from asserting herself against other people. Even if Dirk were not a vampire, she would probably have been just as compliant.

While Rachel is sitting dutifully in his hiding place, Dirk calls upon Barnabas. He tells Barnabas that he will kill Rachel unless he brings blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins back to life before dawn. Returning viewers know that Barnabas has no idea how to revive Laura. We also know that no one else is going to bring Laura back, because she was running out of story when she vanished in #760 and they already have more characters than they can fully use. Even a fan favorite like Miss Scott is absent from the show for dozens of episodes at a time. So it seems that Rachel is doomed.

Meanwhile, Barnabas has another problem to deal with. His distant cousin, stuffy Edward Collins, has summoned him to the great house of Collinwood. Edward suspects Barnabas of vampirism, and has told him so. Edward’s sister, spinster Judith, has turned up with bite marks on her neck and an oddly subdued affect. Edward brings Barnabas face to face with Judith. When she does not react to him as Edward expects a victim to react to the vampire who bit her, Edward is embarrassed and stumbles through a series of half-expressed apologies. Barnabas declares that he will resume the search for Dirk, and instructs Edward to stay with Judith at all times. He hopes that Judith will lead Edward to Dirk’s lair.

Edward does sit with Judith for a time, but when he hears some noises in the foyer he leaves the room to investigate. He wanders all through the house for a number of minutes, long enough that the recorded background music plays beyond the cues we are used to hearing and gets to some tunes we haven’t heard in months.

While Edward is conducting this journey, Dirk sneaks up behind him on the walkway at the top of the foyer stairs and grabs him by the neck, knocking him out. Dirk then appears in Judith’s room, gives her a gun, and tells her he will have a job for her to do soon. He dematerializes before Edward comes back and finds Judith still in bed.

Later, Edward leaves again to make tea, and when he brings the tray back Judith is gone. In its first months, one of the themes of Dark Shadows was that the Collinses of 1966 were running out of money, so it made sense that they were chronically short of servants. In this period, however, the Collinses are supposed to be at the zenith of their wealth and power. It is simply a flaw in the story that Edward himself has to leave Judith to find out what the noises were in the foyer or to fetch her tea.

The task Dirk set for Judith was to murder Rachel. After dawn, she goes to the hiding place, pulls the gun, and tells Rachel she is sorry for what she must do. In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Joan Bennett plays matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. In #569 and #570, it looked like Liz might be bitten by vampire Tom Jennings. But the show is firmly committed to a prohibition against involving Liz directly in the plot, so that came to nothing. When Judith presents herself as Rachel’s designated assassin, longtime viewers will be glad to see that Judith is not subject to the same restrictions.