Tag: intercutting timelines

Episode 829: Miss Moon Eyes

The dramatic date is 28 August 1897. On 23 July, in #803, sorcerer Count Petofi cast a spell on stuffy Edward Collins. Ever since, Edward has believed he was a valet recently separated from the service of the Earl of Hampshire. This led Edward’s brother, the rakish Quentin, to follow the Collinses’ long-established procedure for responding to mental illness and lock him up in the room on top of the tower in the great house of Collinwood.

In #816, broadcast on 11 August 1969 and therefore set on 11 August 1897, Petofi brought something even stranger on Edward’s twelve year old son Jamison. He called the spirit of Jamison’s grandson David to project itself from 1969 and to take possession of Jamison. In 1969, David is deathly ill because Quentin’s ghost had besieged him and everyone else at Collinwood. Now, Jamison too is dying, and in the moments he has been able to speak he has let the living Quentin in on the fact that he will eventually become a family-annihilating ghost.

Wicked witch Angelique has made a bargain with Quentin. She will try to restore Jamison and Edward to their usual selves, and if she succeeds Quentin will marry her. We see her beside Jamison, talking earnestly with him, praying loudly to “the Master of Darkness” to cure him and Edward so that she and Quentin can devote themselves to the service of that supernatural personage. In 1968, when the show was in contemporary dress, Angelique and others used a lot of euphemisms like “Master of Darkness,” but lately the ratings are high enough that the ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices has been letting them say the name “Satan.” I suppose Angelique’s persistence in the former phrasing shows that she’s still devoted to the old time religion.

Satan comes through, and Jamison and Edward are freed. This leads to a bit of awkwardness in each case. Quentin and Edward’s step-niece Charity Trask has lost her personality as the result of another of Petofi’s spells, and is now hosting that of the late Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl and onetime fiancée of Quentin and Edward’s late brother Carl. Charity/ Pansy is exploring the great house when she comes to the locked door of the tower room. She hears Edward inside calling for help. He is still in his valet persona, and he is delighted with her when she promises to get a key and let him out. Edward returns to himself, with no memory of anything that has happened since 23 July, while Charity/ Pansy is away. When she comes back up and opens the door, she finds that he is in a foul mood and that he disapproves of her intensely. She is understandably miffed at his apparent fickleness and ingratitude.

For his part, Jamison’s quite different experience has left him with some memories. He tells Angelique of images that are floating around in his mind. She recognizes them as things associated with Petofi, and is distressed. She tells him he is better off not knowing what they are. Quentin is more distressed when Jamison looks at him and asks why he is trying to kill David Collins. Jamison can’t explain who David Collins is or how he learned that Quentin was trying to kill him, but this does confirm everything Quentin has gathered about his post-mortem destiny.

While Edward comforts Jamison in the study, Quentin and Angelique meet in the drawing room. She asks if he will honor his end of their deal; he says that he will, though he makes abundant protests about his reluctance to do so. Charity/ Pansy eavesdrops at the door. She has decided that she will marry Quentin, and is horrified to hear this conversation.

Edward enters and asks Angelique to excuse him and his brother. She exits, and Edward declares that the first order of business must be to hunt and destroy vampire Barnabas Collins. Quentin is appalled at this. He tries to tell Edward that Petofi is their most immediate threat; after he explains who Petofi is, Edward agrees that they will get around to fighting him at the appropriate time, but he insists that Barnabas is their main concern.

Edward exits, and Charity/ Pansy enters. She tells Quentin that she overheard his conversation with Angelique. She says that he will not marry Angelique. Quentin bitterly responds that he will, and that there is nothing she can do to stop it. At this, Charity/ Pansy picks up a knife and tries to stab Quentin. Quentin holds her at bay, and Edward enters in time to see what is happening and to get Charity/ Pansy off of Quentin. Quentin says that Charity/ Pansy’s condition is further evidence of the need to focus on fighting Petofi, but Edward will not swerve from his determination to concentrate on Barnabas. Moreover, he decides that he will now quiet Charity/ Pansy himself. He sends Quentin out of the room and prepares to give Charity/ Pansy a stern talking-to.

Charity/ Pansy’s attempt to prevent Quentin’s marriage to Angelique by stabbing him is of a piece with her attempt to break up Quentin’s relationship with maidservant Beth in #823/824 by poisoning Beth’s brandy. The original Pansy, whom we saw as a live person in #771, was not exactly nice. She was cold, hard, and cynical, trying to exploit the childlike Carl. But she didn’t seem to be bent towards physical violence. That appears to be Charity’s contribution to the composite being that the two of them now make up.

Before Edward can deliver whatever lecture he had planned to give Charity/ Pansy, she goes into a trance. The live Pansy had done a stage act as a “mentalist” and fortune teller, and was astonished in #771 when she tried to do her act at Collinwood and found herself actually channeling spirits from the great beyond. Now Charity/ Pansy routinely acts as a medium.

Charity/ Pansy announces that something terrible will happen on 10 September. Countdowns don’t usually work as a source of suspense on soaps. They might be all right in a play or a feature film, where we know that there will be a final curtain or a last frame after which the imaginary universe will cease to exist, but so long as the series is scheduled to come on every weekday at 4 PM, we know that there is always going to be room to move any deadline a little further out. Besides, since Dark Shadows was done virtually live to tape, they could rarely predict with any accuracy just how many ticks of the clock it would take to get all the movements made and dialogue spoken before the crisis is supposed to be reached. But “10 September” is in a slightly different category. Quentin explicitly says on screen that today is 28 August, which was indeed the original broadcast date in 1969. And when Edward says that his last memories are of 23 July, he is indeed referencing the original broadcast date of #803. So when Charity/ Pansy says “10 September,” she is committing the show to something in the real world. We may well sit up and take notice.

Charity/ Pansy has a vision of what will happen on that date. She sees Angelique looking at a portrait of Quentin in the drawing room. Red paint is dripping from the figure’s chest into a pool on the floor. That pool is next to a trail of other drops of red. In her mind’s eye, Charity/ Pansy follows the drops into the foyer, up the stairs, and into the tower. There, she sees Angelique opening the door to the tower room and finding Quentin sprawled, a sheet of red plastic, or perhaps construction paper, on his chest. Charity/ Pansy screams and runs out. From the dramatic music and Charity/ Pansy’s agitated reaction, I take it the object lying on Quentin’s chest is meant to suggest blood.

Through Charity/ Pansy’s eyes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The acting is all very strong today. I was fascinated with Nancy Barrett’s use of her face to highlight Charity/ Pansy’s makeup. She relaxes her jaw muscles slightly more than usual, causing the dark treatment around her eyes to stand out. That in turn creates a visual metaphor labeling Charity/ Pansy a “painted lady.”

My wife, Mrs Acilius, was particularly impressed with Louis Edmonds’ realization of Edward. When the spell breaks and he becomes himself again, Edward is alone in an empty room. He has no dialogue, no props, and no scene partner to work with. Yet he instantly conveys what has happened. Even first time viewers will understand that the obliging servant has now become a stuffy authority figure.

Edward’s towering indignation when Quentin first tells him he was the one who locked him in the tower room gives way instantly when Quentin explains that he was under a delusion at the time. Edmonds executes that transition so smoothly that first time viewers will not notice the oddness of it, but longtime fans who remember the many previous occasions when the Collinses locked each other there as a response to mental illness will chuckle.

One of the prominent features of Edward’s personality is his warm relationship with his children. This sets him apart from the first two characters Louis Edmonds played on the show, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins and haughty overlord Joshua Collins. Edward’s dialogue in his scene alone with Jamison involves several discrete points of information, and it would have been understandable if the affection he displays for Jamison while he getting all of those words across had been either perfunctory or mawkish. But he and David Henesy get the emotions exactly right while also delivering the lines very clearly.

Edward’s preoccupation with Barnabas is a delicious little bit of commentary on the show itself. Dark Shadows‘ ratings, chronically low during its first 42 weeks on the air, perked up when it added Barnabas to the cast in April 1967. That summer, schoolkids curious to see a vampire on daytime TV made it into a hit, and not long after Barnabas became one of the pop culture sensations of the 1960s, instantly recognizable to many millions of people who never watched the show. To this day, people who have heard of Dark Shadows are likely to refer to it as “the vampire soap opera from the 60s.” It was Barnabas who took us with him to 1897, when he traveled back in time in the course of his attempt to rescue David from Quentin’s ghost, and for the first months of the 1897 storyline he was the only character who knew what was at stake for the 1969 version of the Collinses in the events going on around him.

But now Barnabas is on the fringes of the story, and Quentin, Angelique, and Petofi all know about 1969. Edward’s idea that the action has to focus on Barnabas is evidence that he hasn’t been watching the show. Petofi is the principal antagonist now, Quentin the chief protagonist, and Barnabas can be absent for weeks at a time while they and others find all sorts of things to do. This represents, not Barnabas’ failure, but his ultimate success. Before he was introduced, every story revolved around well-meaning governess Vicki, the main character. A soap opera can’t really have a main character. It needs to keep multiple storylines running at once, occasionally intersecting with each other, often running for long periods with little or no interaction. When one person had to be at the center of every development, the result was slow and claustrophobic.

Barnabas blew that confining structure open, because as a vampire his function in the story was not to solve problems, but to create problems for other people to solve. So no matter how much time they spent focusing on him, he always directed our attention towards everyone else. We wondered who would catch on to his secret, who would fall victim to his malign intentions, who would find a way to fight him, etc. When a mad scientist managed to free Barnabas of the effects of the vampire curse, he retained his function as a problem-maker, even when he set out to be a problem solver. Every time he announced that he had a plan, we looked forward to seeing how the rest of the cast would react to that plan’s rapid and catastrophic collapse.

Barnabas is as hapless in 1897 as he has been in every other time period, as witness the fact that he has been exposed as a vampire and driven into hiding. But he isn’t even the show’s Screw-Up-in-Chief now. That title belongs to broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi. In #807, Petofi compelled Magda to review the preceding 22 weeks of the show and admit that she had precipitated every plotline. The first of those was the release of Barnabas into the world of 1897, so that his crimes and misadventures are just a subcategory of hers. Since Magda is played by Grayson Hall, who in her original role of Julia Hoffman is waiting for us in 1969, we can be confident she won’t be coming back to contemporary dress with us, but for the moment she has relegated Barnabas to the status of a secondary character.

Episode 815: The gentleman he appears to be

One night in 1797, nine Rroma men trapped sorcerer Count Petofi in the forest of Ojden. They amputated his right hand, and with it took most of his magical powers. Some time after, Petofi learned that he had exactly one hundred years to reattach the hand. If he managed it within that time, he would become immortal. Otherwise, he would die on the anniversary of the amputation.

Now that anniversary has come, and Petofi has succeeded in regaining his hand with only minutes to spare. Time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins and his distant cousin, desperately handsome werewolf Quentin, have decided that because Petofi’s spirit is in possession of Quentin’s twelve year old nephew Jamison and Jamison is as close to death as is Petofi himself, only by surrendering the hand to Petofi can they save the boy. Barnabas did get Petofi’s servant Aristide to promise to free Quentin of lycanthropy once he has the hand back, but he put little faith in that promise.

Now Petofi is jubilant and Jamison is still sick. Barnabas tells Petofi about the deal Aristide made, and also says that he wants Jamison and the rest of the Collinses to be freed from the ill effects Petofi has had on them. Petofi could not be less interested. Instead, he wants Barnabas to tell him how he traveled in time from 1969 and how he will travel back there.

Petofi lets slip that he is anxious to go to another period of history because he is afraid of the Rroma people who are still after him. We know, not only that it was Rroma who cut off his hand, but that when Petofi saw a young Rroma woman in a tavern in #794 he couldn’t get out fast enough. While it may have taken nine Rroma men to take his hand, evidently a single Rroma woman, and a tiny one at that, is capable of doing him considerable harm. Barnabas has a Rroma friend, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, who has considerable magic powers of her own, and he knows of a Romany band currently camped near Boston. So Petofi’s apparently well-founded ziganophobia is a sign that Barnabas may be able to defeat him, even though Petofi’s powers were formidable even before he was reunited with his hand.

Petofi says that he will cure Jamison only if Barnabas explains how he traveled to 1897 from 1969. Barnabas tells Petofi he has no idea how he made that journey. This is so. He meditated on some I Ching wands, a process which he was told might have any of an infinite number of effects, and found himself in 1897. Nor does he have any idea how to get back. He might have enlarged on the theme of his complete lack of useful knowledge in this area. In 1968, Barnabas traveled back to his original era, the 1790s, by going to the grave of a man named Peter Bradford on the anniversary of Bradford’s death. Bradford’s ghost had been haunting him, and Barnabas called for Bradford to take him back to the year 1796. After he did so, Barnabas found that he could return to the 1960s only by having himself sealed in his coffin and waiting inside it for 172 years until friends let him out. He doesn’t tell Petofi about that incident, but it does not seem likely to be of any more help to him than the story about the I Ching would be.

Petofi does not believe that Barnabas is so hapless. First he squeezes Barnabas’ hand, depriving him of the power to dematerialize. Then he opens a cupboard and tells Barnabas to look in it. It takes a while to warm up, but eventually it gets an ABC affiliate showing Dark Shadows. Barnabas sees the parlor of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood in 1969. His best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, is sitting there reading a book. We haven’t seen Julia since #700, but she might be on our minds today. At one point Aristide lights his cigar on a candle burning in a large candelabra. In #296, Julia very memorably did the same thing with her cigarette.

Barnabas sees strange and troubled boy David Collins come staggering downstairs, raving deliriously about Quentin. Julia tells him to reject Quentin, who in 1969 is a ghost haunting Collinwood and draining the life from David. David passes out, and Julia injects him with a powerful sedative, as you do with unconscious children.

The cupboard loses the channel, and Barnabas asks Petofi what else is happening in 1969. Petofi cannot answer any questions; it quickly becomes clear that he couldn’t see or hear the scene. Barnabas is intrigued to learn of another of Petofi’s weaknesses, and walks out.

Aristide then speculates that Barnabas might be telling the truth. Petofi rejects this at once, reveals more of his cupboard’s limitations:

No, he’s not a fool, Aristide. He thinks he can win, accomplish whatever he wants to do here, and disappear without me…

Had Petofi ever seen even one episode of Dark Shadows, it would not occur to him to say that Barnabas is “not a fool.” Nor would he surmise that Barnabas is pursuing a plan that includes a plausible method of escape. If Barnabas had a plan of any kind, Petofi would know all about it, since it would have failed spectacularly the moment he took the first step towards putting it into effect.

Petofi and Aristide then go to the Old House. They find Magda there. At the moment, she is under Petofi’s power. Like Julia, Magda is played by Grayson Hall. We may have thought the glimpse into 1969 was a videotaped insert, but evidently it was done live, because Magda is not wearing her usual heavy brownface makeup. She may have a bit of an artificial tan, but Julia’s blue eyeshadow is clearly visible through it.

Magda, looking more like an actual Rroma woman than she ever has before.

Petofi forces Magda to lead her to Barnabas’ hiding place. He has a cross and Aristide has a chain and a padlock. Petofi puts the cross inside the coffin, and orders Aristide to chain the coffin closed. Petofi declares that Barnabas is in for a long journey.

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 767: Birthdays are for people who get older

For the first several months of Dark Shadows, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard made no attempt to conceal her loathing of her young cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy.) That changed at the beginning of 1967, during the storyline centered on David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Laura cast a spell that caused Carolyn’s mother, reclusive matriarch Liz (Joan Bennett,) to enter a catatonic state. When that happened, Carolyn assumed responsibility for the family’s properties and enterprises. In that position, Carolyn took on a new maturity, and the capricious and often thoughtlessly cruel character we knew in the early days was gone forever.

Laura went up in smoke in March 1967, and the next month vampire Barnabas Collins succeeded her as the show’s supernatural menace. The adults in the great house of Collinwood- Liz, Carolyn, David’s father Roger, and well-meaning governess Vicki- were all taken with Barnabas. Liz gave him the Old House on the estate to live in, and none of them could see the abundant evidence that their distant cousin was a bloodsucking ghoul from beyond the grave. But the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah appeared to David and led him to suspect that something was off about the new arrival. By late September, David had all but solved the puzzle, and was trying to get the grownups to see the obvious.

In #335, broadcast in October 1967, a psychiatrist named Dr Fisher came from Boston to examine David. Dr Fisher explained Sarah as an imaginary friend David had created in his attempt to control the fear of death he had developed after seeing his mother burn up, and his claim that Barnabas was an undead monster as that fear reasserting itself. We know that this is entirely wrong as far as David goes, but it does go a long way towards explaining the appeal Dark Shadows has for its audience.

In November 1967, Vicki came unstuck in time and Dark Shadows turned into a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. When she came home and the show returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, David’s understanding of Barnabas and the resulting danger Barnabas would kill David, which had been the chief driving force of the action when she left, had been forgotten. Later that month Barnabas was freed from the effects of the vampire curse, and he set about fighting other uncanny monsters.

Now we are in the fourteenth week of the show’s second major costume drama segment. In late 1968 and early 1969, the malign ghost of Quentin Collins ruined things for everyone. David was under his possession and on the point of death when Barnabas decided the time had come to sit in his basement, throw some I Ching wands, and meditate on them. As a result, he found himself in the year 1897, when Quentin was a living being.

Barnabas has again managed to install himself as master of the Old House, though the Collinses of 1897 are a much less trusting lot than are their descendants in the 1960s. Barnabas and Quentin are becoming friends, but Quentin is increasingly irritated with Barnabas’ refusal to tell him anything about himself beyond the cover story that he concocted when he arrived. The owner of the house, spinster Judith Collins (Joan Bennett,) is more or less satisfied with that story, but her nephew and presumptive heir, twelve year old Jamison Collins (David Henesy,) has come to share Quentin’s belief that there is far more to Barnabas than meets the eye.

Today, Judith approaches Barnabas with a question. She says that Jamison has awoken from a terrible nightmare, and that while he was thrashing about in bed he called out “David Collins is dead!” This comes as a shock to Barnabas, suggesting a message from the future that he has already failed in his weird mission.

Judith has never heard of anyone named “David Collins” and can find no record of such a person, and asks Barnabas if he, who seems to know so much about the family history, has ever heard of an ancestor with that name. This will be of interest to longtime viewers. In #153, it was established that David was the first of his name in the Collins family, and that his mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura, had insisted on calling him that. This would eventually become evidence that Laura’s evil plans for David were in place long before he was born. But in #288, David would see a portrait of a long-forgotten ancestor named “David Collins” in an old volume, and would wonder if he was named for him. The name “David” had such a profound significance in the Laura story that it seemed like a major retcon when David delivered the line, but nothing came of it. Another iteration of Laura was on the show recently, and it seems we are back to the original understanding of how David got his name.

Shaken, Barnabas says that “David Collins is no one who exists!” Judith reacts to his obvious shock and his odd phraseology with the suspicion you would expect it to elicit, but still urges Barnabas to talk with Jamison. By the time she gets the boy to the drawing room, Quentin has joined Barnabas there and is sniping at him about his interest in the family. When Barnabas asks Judith and Quentin to leave him alone with Jamison, Quentin resists, demanding to know why they can’t stay. Barnabas doesn’t give much of an explanation, and it seems to be only Judith’s unwillingness to let Quentin win any argument that leads her to insist that Barnabas get his way.

As it turns out, the reason Judith and Quentin had to leave is that the dream will be played for us as a flashback, and Joan Bennett and David Selby feature in it. We have seen a great many dream sequences on Dark Shadows, but this is the first time one has been presented in retrospect while the dreamer is telling us about it. All previous dream sequences have begun with a character in bed and have shared that character’s experience with us. Several times, including the countless sequences during the “Dream Curse” storyline of April to July 1968, there was a vague possibility that the person would either die during the dream or wake from it irreversibly changed. So even longtime viewers might be surprised when Jamison sits down with Barnabas, starts talking, and we find ourselves in his dream.

Jamison doesn’t know it, but his dream is set in 1969. After Quentin’s ghost made the great house uninhabitable, the family took refuge in the Old House. Jamison goes to its basement, where he sees Barnabas immobilized before the I Ching wands. Unable to get his attention, he goes upstairs to the front parlor, where Carolyn, Liz, and Roger are preparing a birthday party for David. Carolyn is opposed to the exercise. She manipulates a hand puppet while making unpleasant remarks in a high-pitched voice, and says that “Birthdays are for people who get older!” Evidently time is passing in 1969 while Barnabas is struggling with his mission in 1897.

When Vicki was in the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968, we did not catch any glimpses of the period she had left. Only for a few minutes immediately after she vanished and a few more immediately before she reappeared did we see the drawing room at the great house, and those minutes represented the whole passage of time the contemporary characters experienced during the four months of Vicki’s absence. We’ve already been in 1897 longer than we were in 1795-1796 then, and Jamison’s dream suggests that contemporary time is passing more rapidly now. Since David was within hours of death when Barnabas departed so many weeks ago, his prognosis would seem grim.

The dream is one longtime viewers can imagine David having. Carolyn has been friendly to her little cousin since early 1967, but she was so nasty to him in 1966 that he might well imagine her being impatient with his failure to finish dying sooner. Roger was even more openly hostile to David in those days, and only began to show normal fatherly feeling for him after he realized that he had narrowly escaped death at Laura’s hands. But even though David returned Roger’s open hatred and tried to kill him, he did after all retain a wish for a healthier relationship with him, and so it is not surprising that Roger would appear in a dream of his as someone wishing him well.

David wonders where Barnabas and Quentin are. The adults say that Barnabas is away, but do not recognize Quentin’s name. Roger looks Quentin up in a volume of family history, and finds that there is no entry for him. He declares that this means that there can never have been any such person. Again, if we think of this as a dream of David’s that has intruded itself onto Jamison’s consciousness, it makes sense that Roger, and for that matter Liz and Carolyn, are clueless about what is really going on around them.

Roger can find no reference to Quentin in the family history. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin appears, at first as the unspeaking ghost he was in when we first saw him from December 1968 to March 1969. Roger, Liz, and Carolyn vanish, and David talks with Quentin. Quentin says that the Roger, Liz, and Carolyn could not see him because he is dead, and that David can see him because he will soon be dead.

Quentin tells David that his own death was preceded by three events, and that if he had understood the significance of any of those events at the time he might have survived. The first event was the discovery of a silver bullet at Collinwood. The second was the murder of someone who might have been able to help him. The third was the turning of the one person he truly loved against Quentin; when that happened “there was almost no time left for Quentin Collins.”

Jamison asks Barnabas what the dream means. Barnabas claims not to know. Jamison replies that he thinks Barnabas knows exactly what it means, and is very upset with him for refusing to share his knowledge. In #660, David had said that “Barnabas knows lots of things he doesn’t tell anyone”; Jamison has already caught on to this same fact.

One of the people with whom Barnabas will not share his knowledge is Quentin. Even though Quentin’s ghost explicitly said in Jamison’s dream that his own demise could have been prevented, and Barnabas’ mission therefore completed, had he known about the three upcoming events, Barnabas flatly refuses to tell Quentin about them. Even when the silver bullet is discovered at Collinwood at the end of the episode, Barnabas still will not pass the dream’s warning on to Quentin.

Instead, Barnabas reenacts Dr Fisher’s part from #335. He seizes in Jamison’s description of the 1960s wardrobe he saw David, Roger, Liz, and Carolyn wearing, and says that it is the key- it shows that the whole scene is a masquerade. As Dr Fisher had said that Sarah Collins was an imaginary figure David had fabricated to contain the fear of death that had afflicted him since he saw his mother Laura die, so Barnabas claims that David Collins is a figure Jamison has fabricated to contain the fear of death that had afflicted him since he saw his mother Laura die. As Dr Fisher’s interpretation was all wrong in-universe but was quite plausible as an explanation of the audience’s responses to the show, so Barnabas’ interpretation is a grotesque lie in-universe but is quite plausible as writer Violet Welles’ description of the creative process that led to the decision to reuse Laura in the 1897 segment of the show. It allows them to pair David with Jamison and Roger with Edward, comparing and contrasting their personalities.

Episode 666: Barnabas isn’t like anyone else

Thayer David joined the cast of Dark Shadows in August 1966, taking over the role of moody handyman Matthew Morgan from George Mitchell starting with #38. In that first episode, Matthew brawled in a barroom and left dashing action hero Burke Devlin gasping. The main storyline of the next few months was the investigation into the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy; it turned out Matthew had unintentionally killed Bill when they got into a fight and Matthew didn’t know his own strength.

Those two events explain the recast. George Mitchell was a slender little man whose white hair and craggy face made him look older than his 61 years. He was a fine actor, but no one would have believed that he could win a fight with Burke or that he was so strong that he would accidentally kill Bill. David was Mitchell’s equal in acting ability, but more importantly was a burly fellow in his late 30s.

Today, we hark back to David’s original function on the show. The setting is the year 1796; vampire Barnabas Collins has traveled back from the 1960s to rescue his fellow time traveler, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, from death by hanging. David plays another servant. As Matthew was fanatically loyal to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, so Ben Stokes is utterly devoted to Barnabas. Ben finds roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes and visiting Countess Natalie DuPrés about to drive a stake through Barnabas’ heart. Ben demands they stop; Nathan aims his pistol in Ben’s direction and squeezes the trigger. The gun misfires. Ben reflexively clutches at his chest, but finding he is not hurt he advances on Nathan. They fight. As Matthew was so strong he could not fight Bill without accidentally killing him, so Ben accidentally kills Nathan. Ben then tells the countess he doesn’t want to hurt her and that she will be all right if she stays put until he can figure out what to do; she is unable to assure him she will do so, and in his attempt to restrain her he inadvertently kills her, too.

Barnabas had originally lived in the eighteenth century. He passed from that time into the 1960s because he was chained in his coffin in 1796 and discovered in 1967 by would-be grave-robber Willie Loomis. Now, he has rescued Victoria, and he is eager to go back to 1969, when he is free of the effects of the vampire curse. He traveled back by standing in an old graveyard and calling to the spirit of Vicki’s boyfriend, an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff, to pull him into the past. He went to the same graveyard yesterday and tried the same trick in reverse. Peter/ Jeff isn’t in 1969, so he calls instead to his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. That didn’t work, so he decided to have Ben chain him in the coffin and take the long way back.

Barnabas is unhappy to wake up this evening. He leaves his crypt to find Ben using a shovel to pat down some earth nearby. He asks why Ben did not chain the coffin as he was instructed. Ben tells him about Nathan and the countess; evidently he is only now finishing their shallow graves. Ben has never murdered anyone before, so he asks Barnabas’ expert opinion about the next steps. Barnabas tells him to get rid of the countess’ things and to tell whoever asks that she left for Paris.

The reference to Paris is a bit unexpected to longtime viewers. When the countess first appeared in #368/369, she said that she chose to live on the island of Martinique because metropolitan France had become a republic. She and her servant Angelique came to Collinwood along with the countess’ brother André DuPrés and André’s daughter Josette, who was at that time engaged to marry the still-human Barnabas. André is identified as the owner of a sugar plantation on Martinique.

In 1796, France was of course still a republic. But the Terror had ended shortly after the execution of Robespierre in the summer of 1794. Among the beneficiaries were the real-world counterparts of the DuPrés family, the vaguely aristocratic owners of a sugar plantation on Martinique. Their name was Tascher; the daughter of the family was named, not Josette, but Josephine, the widow of the Vicomte de Beauharnais. Josephine was imprisoned in Paris during the Terror, but she was freed, reunited with her son, and restored to her property by June 1795. In May of 1796, Josephine would marry an up-and-coming artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. It would indeed be plausible that the countess would want to go back to Paris and take the opportunity to reestablish a life there.

After the story of Matthew Morgan and the consequences of the death of Bill Malloy ended in December 1966, Dark Shadows was for 13 weeks dominated by the battle between undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins and the forces of good, led by Victoria with assistance from the ghost of Josette. Laura was the show’s first supernatural menace.

The ghost of Josette had been introduced in #70 as the tutelary spirit of the long-deserted Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Matthew held Victoria prisoner in the Old House late in 1966, and in #126 he decided to kill her. Josette led the other ghosts out of the supernatural back-world that exists somewhere behind the action to save Victoria by scaring Matthew to death. During the Laura story, Josette’s ghost was deeply involved in the action, literally painting a picture to explain to the characters what was going on.

Prompted by Josette’s ghost, Victoria figured out that Laura was going to burn her son, strange and troubled boy David Collins, to death on the anniversary of similar immolations. This would turn out to be a key turn in Dark Shadows’ world-building. When you are telling stories about supernatural beings, you can’t rely on the laws of nature or logic to shape the audience’s expectations. You need to give them some other mechanism of cause and effect if you are going to create suspense. So from that point on, the show would use anniversaries as causal forces. “It happened exactly one hundred years ago tomorrow night!” means it will happen again then.

That was the basis of Barnabas’ trip to 1796 and of his hope to return by standing on the same spot. Tombstones indicating that Victoria and Peter/ Jeff had been hanged materialized at times related to the anniversaries of those events, and Barnabas must leave 1969 at a certain point to arrive at a certain point in 1796. Eight o’clock on a given night in 1796 corresponds to eight o’clock on a given night in 1969, and those are the times when Barnabas and Julia go to the graveyard from which he vanished and call out to each other.

Even though the conjoined eight o’clocks don’t facilitate Barnabas’ return trip, the structure of today’s episode plays on the same idea of intercutting timelines. We alternate between scenes of Barnabas and Ben in 1796, and of Julia and Willie in 1969. Barnabas bit Willie and enslaved him when he opened his coffin; by the time Barnabas was cured of the effects of the vampire curse, Willie had let go of any hard feelings about that. Barnabas has made the Old House his home, and Willie voluntarily lives there as his servant. Julia has been a permanent guest in the great house on the estate since 1967, but now is apparently staying at Barnabas’.

Julia is determined that Barnabas will return by rematerializing on the spot from which he vanished, and she keeps going back there. Willie doesn’t believe this will happen, but in a long interior monologue comes up with the idea that he might reappear in his old coffin. In her turn, Julia dismisses that idea. They quarrel about these competing absurdities, and Willie decides to put his hypothesis to the test. He goes to the old mausoleum to check on the coffin, and finds it empty. He returns to the house to report this to Julia.

Julia decides it’s time to sleep, so she goes upstairs- apparently to her own bedroom. Seconds later, a ghost appears to Willie. He recognizes it as Josette. She vanishes, and he calls Julia. When Julia comes he tells her that Josette had never appeared to either of them unless Barnabas was in danger. As far as I can recall the audience has never known Josette to appear to Willie or Julia at all, and Barnabas is always in danger, so that remark is a bit of a mystery to longtime viewers.

In the days leading up to Willie’s discovery of Barnabas in April 1967, he, and he alone, heard a heartbeat coming from the eighteenth century portrait of Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house. While he is talking with Julia, Willie turns to the portrait of Barnabas that artist Sam Evans painted in May 1967 and hears the heartbeat again. Julia cannot hear the heartbeat. Willie combines the sound of the heartbeat with the sight of Josette and concludes that Barnabas has returned and the old coffin is no longer empty. We cut to the hidden room in the mausoleum. Chains materialize around the coffin, and we see Barnabas inside it, struggling to escape.

Willie realizes what’s going on and tells Julia about it. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We may wonder if Barnabas has been struggling that way every night since he was chained there in his attempt to return to the 1960s. That would be 173 years, added to the 171 years the first time. It would seem that 344 years confined to a box would make Barnabas even screwier than he is. In a much later episode, we will see Barnabas released after a long entombment and he will be surprised that more than one day has passed. The 2012 film adaptation of Dark Shadows includes a humorous scene based on the idea that time does not pass for Barnabas while he is chained in his coffin. But when he was first released in April 1967, there were indications that he had undergone a nightly torment through the centuries, and the closing image of Barnabas in the box today echoes those indications.

Nathan’s death marks the final appearance of actor Joel Crothers, who has been one of Dark Shadows’ most valuable cast members since his debut in #3, when he played hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. We said goodbye to Joe last week; it was nice to have another glimpse of Crothers in his villainous role before he left for the last time.

Episode 662: The course of history

Vampire Barnabas Collins has traveled back in time to the year 1796, where he plans to change what happened on one crucial night.

Yesterday’s episode was a clip show excerpted from #456-#460, the last full week of a period when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. Today’s consists largely of reenactments of those scenes. It all pays off in the last minute, when a confrontation between Barnabas and roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes ends differently than it had the first time round. As before, Nathan loads a crossbow with a wooden bolt and waits for Barnabas to come to him, hoping that he will shoot the bolt through Barnabas’ heart and thereby achieve the same effect as a wooden stake. The first time, Nathan missed Barnabas’ heart and Barnabas killed him. Unlike the first time, Barnabas knows what Nathan is planning. So he opens the door, but does not enter the room. Nathan can hear Barnabas’ voice, but cannot see him. Finally Barnabas jumps Nathan from behind, evidently biting him.

Barnabas originally killed Nathan as revenge for Nathan’s role in his mother’s death. This time he is willing to let Nathan live. He wants to take control of him and force him to tell the authorities that he lied when he testified against governess Victoria Winters and her boyfriend, an unpleasant man named Peter. Victoria is herself a time-traveler, and Barnabas got to be quite fond of her in her original period, the 1960s. She is scheduled to be hanged tonight for her many crimes, and Peter is also condemned to the gallows. Barnabas has come to rescue them.

During the opening title sequence, Thayer David announces that “Today the part of Victoria Winters will be played by Carolyn Groves.” When we first see her, Victoria is asleep in her cell at the Collinsport gaol, and her face looks very much like that of Alexandra Moltke Isles, the original Victoria.

A rude awakening for Vicki C. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas wakes Victoria. She is puzzled to see him. He has never told her that he was a vampire; even when he was biting her on the neck and sucking her blood for a week in March 1968, she didn’t seem to catch on. She just seemed to think he had a particularly aggressive make-out technique. She thinks that the Barnabas she knew in the 1960s was a descendant of the one she knew in the 1790s, and that the one from the 1790s is dead. Barnabas would rather not get into the weeds about his personal history, such as the countless murders he has committed, and gives Victoria a truncated account of how he, the man from the 1790s, is laboring under a curse that made it seem that he was dead. He doesn’t explain how he got into her cell, how he knows who Peter is, or how he plans to free the two of them from their death sentences. He asks her to take all of that on faith.

Miss Groves plays Victoria as so happy to see Barnabas she smiles all through her account of her imminent and, she believes, inevitable execution. That’s odd to see, but it fits so perfectly with the delight Victoria always took in Barnabas’ company that it shouldn’t bother longtime viewers.

Mrs Isles was cast as the original Victoria in large part because she looked so much like Joan Bennett that Bennett famously mistook her for her daughter when she first saw her. In the Collinsport Historical Society’s 30 December 2017 post for this episode, Patrick McCray not only tells us that Miss Groves appeared in a play with Joan Bennett in 1960, but provides a still of the cast in which the two women look like they could be mother and daughter:

Screenshot from The Collinsport Historical Society, 30 December 2017.

The show spent much of its first year hinting heavily that Victoria was the unacknowledged daughter of Bennett’s character, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. They never collected those hints and built them into a story, and the question of Victoria’s parentage was left as one of Dark Shadows’ most annoying loose ends. Perhaps Miss Groves’ casting is a sign that the failure to resolve that question bothered the makers of the show as much as it did the audience.