jekyll and hyde – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1010: At the scene of the murder

Mad scientist Cyrus Longworth has devised a potion that alters his appearance so that even the people who know him best, including his fiancée Sabrina Stuart and his attorney Larry Chase, cannot recognize him. When he is thus disguised he calls himself “John Yaeger” and indulges his sadistic impulses. One of his favorite hobbies is beating and intimidating a woman named Buffie Harrington, who submits to his abuse for psychological reasons the show never explains, but for clues to which Elizabeth’s Eis’ performance keeps us watching closely. Buffie does not know that Yaeger is really Cyrus. As Sabrina and Larry have not recognized Cyrus when they saw him as Yaeger, so Buffie has not recognized Cyrus when she has met him undisguised.

The only person who has so far figured out Cyrus’ secret is chemist Horace Gladstone. Cyrus bought a vital ingredient for his potion from Gladstone, who knows that it can be used to change a person’s appearance. He has had dealings with Cyrus when he was presenting himself as Yaeger, has seen his handwriting in both states, and has questioned both Sabrina and Buffie. Combined with several other pieces of evidence, Gladstone was able to build an overwhelming case that Yaeger is merely Cyrus in disguise. Yesterday he demanded Cyrus pay him $10,000 in return for a continued supply of the ingredient and his silence. Cyrus responded by drinking the potion to assume his disguise, going to a dark alley where he had gleaned from an indiscretion on Larry’s part Gladstone would be waiting, and murdering him. Larry arrived at the scene a moment later and pursued “Yaeger” on foot from the alley to the courtyard behind Cyrus’ place. He saw “Yaeger” jump the fence into the courtyard.

As Yaeger, Cyrus enters his laboratory through the door in the courtyard. He is about to take the antidote to change his appearance back to normal when he hears Sabrina and Larry coming downstairs. He hastens out the way he came. Eavesdropping through the courtyard door, he is relieved to hear Larry say that he did not get a good enough look at him to be able to make a positive identification. He hears Larry place a call to the police, and exits.

Cyrus goes back to the alley where he killed Gladstone. Buffie enters, getting off her shift as a barmaid at the Eagle tavern. The tavern abuts the alley, but evidently the police didn’t think it was necessary to bother her with news of the murder. He demands she do him a favor. She says she is too tired to do anything tonight; he says it’s better to be tired than dead. Whatever it is that compels Buffie to keep coming back to Cyrus in his Yaeger form is strong enough that this death threat does not drive her away. She protests that she does not have a criminal record and wants to keep it that way; he tells her she won’t get caught. He gives her the keys to his lab and the combination to his safe and orders her to take the bottle containing the antidote. He tells her to bring the bottle to him in a cave on the beach below the estate of Collinwood.

Buffie goes to the courtyard door. She is about to open it when she hears Sabrina and Larry inside the lab, talking about Gladstone’s murder. When the name “John Yaeger” comes up as a suspect, she looks down. We can see a forlornness in her face. She is as much addicted to his hard domination of her as Cyrus is addicted to violence, but she still does not want to think of herself as a criminal, certainly not as an accessory to murder.

Buffie hears about Yaeger as a murder suspect. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Wiki.

When Sabrina and Larry go upstairs, Buffie lets herself in to the lab. She has removed the painting that covers the safe and is starting to turn the dial for the combination when she hears Sabrina tell Larry she has to go back downstairs to retrieve something she left in the lab. Buffie hides by the door while Sabrina collects her purse. The purse is right next to the painting, but the room is dark. We are in suspense whether Sabrina will see it. She doesn’t, she leaves, and Buffie gets the bottle.

Buffie hides from Sabrina. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Wiki.

In the cave, Cyrus notices footprints going up to a pile of stones that appear to be a natural part of the cave wall. He realizes that the stones must be hiding a secret passage. He is curious where it leads, and figures it will be at least half an hour before Buffie comes. So he starts pulling the stones down.

Cyrus follows the path into the basement of the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. This house is currently occupied by writer Will Loomis and his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Cyrus realizes where he is, and finds a chained coffin. He wonders what secret Will might be hiding from the world. He decides that if the secret is shameful enough, it might come in handy. He breaks the first chain, intending to open the coffin.

The opening voiceover, delivered arrestingly by Eis, told us what is in the coffin. It is a visitor from a parallel universe. He is named Barnabas Collins, and he is a vampire. Will is holding Barnabas prisoner in the coffin and taking an oral history from him, which he plans to use as the basis of his next book. Longtime viewers of Dark Shadows are familiar with Barnabas’ native universe; the first 196 weeks of the show were set there. As Will put chains on Barnabas’ coffin in the hope of finding a fortune in his stories, Will’s counterpart, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis, took the chains off Barnabas’ coffin in hopes of finding a fortune in jewels. In his universe, Barnabas is the master of the Old House and he keeps his coffin in the space where Will has it here. It has occasionally been opened by intruders; the first time we saw that happen was in #275, when Willie’s sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, lifted the lid at sunset, only to be greeted by Barnabas’ hand darting out and crushing his throat. If Cyrus gets the coffin open, Gladstone’s death might be avenged sooner than anyone could expect.

Gladstone’s death marks the final appearance of John Harkins. Harkins’ first appearance was in #174, in which he played Lieutenant Costa of the Arizona State Police. The most famous of his dozens of screen roles was in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, when he played the clergyman who officiates at the funeral of Chuckles the Clown. He also had a recurring role on Cagney & Lacey as Mansfield the drug kingpin. Harkins didn’t have any scenes with John Karlen, who was a regular both on that show and on Dark Shadows.

The Dark Shadows Wiki tells us that this is one of only six episodes with no cast member who appeared in 200 or more episodes. It lists the others as 168, 172, 180, 1141, and 1182. It also says that there is no one in it who joined the cast before David Selby’s debut as Quentin, but since Harkins was on almost two years before Mr Selby that is not so.

Episode 1005: No danger, just a lot of confusion

For five weeks, Dark Shadows has been set in a universe parallel to the one where the first 196 weeks took place. So far, “Parallel Time” has recapitulated the early development of the show. As the series began with an attempt to televise the atmosphere that made “Gothic romances” a best-selling genre of the mid-1960s, so the segment began with an adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, one of the basic texts of that genre. As it proceeded to the story of the return of undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, mother of strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy,) the segment has proceeded to the return of undead blonde fire witch Angelique Stokes Collins, mother of strange and troubled teen Daniel Collins (David Henesy.)

Between the early Gothic romance period and the Laura story, the show was a whodunit about the death of local man Bill Malloy. Bill would eventually become the first ghost to appear to another character on-screen on Dark Shadows. And throughout the first year, there was a lot of noise about a locked room in the basement of the great house of Collinwood where reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard believed her husband Paul’s body was buried. Parallel Time got around to an analogue for these two stories with the abrupt introduction of the ghost of Dameon Edwards in #994. Since then, various characters have been wondering who killed Dameon. Today, it is confirmed that Dameon’s body, unlike Paul’s, really was buried in an alcove in Collinwood’s basement.

As Daniel’s room is laid out as a mirror image of David’s, the basement in this Collinwood is laid out as a mirror image of the one in the original continuity. The alcove is on the opposite side of the set than was the locked room. Since we haven’t seen the basement since #273, this resonance is likely to be wasted on everyone except weirdos watching the show on a streaming service and writing several hundred words about each episode.

Even people like that aren’t likely to be much invested in Dameon. If the ghost of Paul’s counterpart appeared as Dennis Patrick, the actor who played Paul from #887 to #953, we would have had something to work with. If they had told us something about Dameon before he turned up as someone who was already dead, again, his story might have mattered. And if his haunting came as succession of frightening events in the lives of people we already cared about, as the haunting of Collinwood by the ghost of Quentin Collins came in late 1968 and early 1969, we would again have had a chance of getting into his story. But none of those things happened. We’ve never seen actor Jered Holmes before, Dameon came out of the blue, and he does nothing that is of the first importance to a major character. Whatever solution there might be to the mystery of his death is unlikely to do anything more than give them an easy way to write someone out of the show who was obviously leaving anyway.

The only thing we really know about Dameon is that he had some kind of connection with Angelique when they were both alive. Today, she specifies what that connection was. She says that he always annoyed her in those days. She goes on to say that with his ghostly apparitions, he has resumed annoying her. Lines like this make me suspect that the writers are in open rebellion against the story of Dameon Edwards.

In fact, Parallel Time is off to a very good start overall. The Dameon story is the only one that isn’t working, and even it benefits from the uniformly good acting. Indeed, all the performances are so good that we want to like it. This episode is mostly given over to plot mechanics advancing the Dameon story.

The remainder is about a story derived from Jekyll and Hyde. Chemist Horace Gladstone is doing business with mad scientist Cyrus Longworth. He meets with the undisguised Cyrus early in the episode, and later encounters him after he has taken the potion and changed his appearance. Cyrus has not told Gladstone what his project is, but Gladstone knows that the work cannot go on without a special synthesis only he can provide. He is wary of “John Yaeger,” and tells him that if he threatens him in any way he will not deliver any more of the synthesis.

Gladstone keeps his cool amid Yaeger’s threats. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Wiki.

There is a lot of action today, but nothing really new. No degree of busyness can keep the Dameon story from feeling slow, since the path it is speeding along has no destination. As for the Jekyll and Hyde material, we’ve already seen that Gladstone is suspicious of Cyrus, that Cyrus is addicted to the potion, and that, when he is in the form of Yaeger, Cyrus can be restrained from violence only by threats. So this is yet another specimen of Dark Shadows’ distinctive contribution to the soap opera, a Friday that is the dullest day of the week.

Episode 1001: Dead Ringer

Wealthy socialite Alexis Stokes is looking at her identical twin sister, the late Angelique Stokes Collins. Angelique has been dead and in her coffin these six months, but hasn’t decayed visibly. This has led Angelique’s widower, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, to the conclusion that Angelique is an uncanny being whose remains must be burned. Quentin’s friend, foolish scientist Cyrus Longworth, heartily concurs with this opinion. Alexis sits by the coffin and tells her late sister that she has, with great regret, come to share Quentin and Cyrus’ conclusion. She touches Angelique’s shoulder. At this, Angelique’s eyes pop open. She speaks, and tells Alexis that she is half right. Someone must be destroyed, but it will be Alexis, not Angelique.

Angelique and Alexis stand facing each other in the tomb. Angelique explains that all she needed to come back to life was a touch. Now that Alexis has given her that, the warmth has begun to drain from her body into Angelique’s. Soon all of Alexis’ body heat will be transferred to Angelique. She will then die, and Angelique will trade places with her. The “heat vampire” idea was one the show explored briefly in April 1969, when undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins drained the warmth from the bodies of the living to keep herself alive. Now Angelique will return from the grave as another heat vampire. Alexis will lie in the coffin, and Angelique will move back in to the great house of Collinwood, where Alexis has for the last three weeks been staying as Quentin’s guest.

Hi, sis. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Footage of the dress rehearsal for this scene survives. The only other surviving videotape from any episode of Dark Shadows not originally released for broadcast are the opening slates of the episodes.* The confrontation between Alexis and Angelique not only involves the most complicated videotape editing they’ve done so far, it also requires Lara Parker to do some intricate acting work as she plays off a version of herself she can neither see nor hear. In the rehearsal footage, she several times breaks character and turns to director Lela Swift to report on things that aren’t going right. We can hear Swift’s responses over the control room microphone. Some crew members are in and out of the shot, and at the end two people come to help Parker out of the coffin. It’s fascinating for hard-core fans, a must-watch:

By the time Mr Trask, the butler in the great house at Collinwood, comes to the mausoleum to see what’s taking so long, Angelique has changed into Alexis’ short bluish gray suit and chignon hairstyle with a tight spiral twist at the back, the look that the mysterious Madeleine wore in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. She has changed Alexis into her own gown and loose hairdo, and has put Alexis into her coffin. She is closing the lid of the coffin when Trask enters. Trask asks if she is ready to return to Collinwood, and she says she is looking forward to it.

We cut to the drawing room at Collinwood, where Quentin is yelling at the wind. He is convinced that it is really a ghost expressing discontent, and he demands to know what the trouble is. He doesn’t get any answers.

Angelique and Trask enter the house. Posing as Alexis, Angelique dismisses Trask, and tells Quentin she now agrees with him and Cyrus. The body in the tomb must be destroyed.

Cyrus is in his laboratory. He is talking with his lawyer, Quentin’s cousin Chris Collins. Chris has questions about Cyrus’ instructions to open a bank account in the name of John Yaeger and deposit $5000 in it. He asks if Yaeger is a pseudonym Cyrus is planning to use. Cyrus denies this, and says that Yaeger is a man he met recently who is helping him with his current experiments. In #985, Cyrus responded to Chris’ questions about these experiments with a lot of mad scientist ravings that alarmed him. Since Cyrus offers no information about Yaeger aside from his connection to this dubious project, Chris is reluctant to comply with Cyrus’ directives. Cyrus agrees that Chris should meet Yaeger first. Chris says “I’m looking forward to meeting him. See you, Cyrus,” and exits. This is the last time we will ever see Chris. Actor Don Briscoe’s health problems were catching up to him, and he was not able to return to the show.

While Quentin and Cyrus burn the coffin, Angelique is in her old bedroom. Alexis had been staying there, so Angelique is right at home. Trask tells her it is as if Angelique never left. Later, Quentin comes to invite her to join him and Cyrus for a drink downstairs. She declines, saying she would like to be alone.

Lara Parker’s performance as the newly returned Angelique is marvelous, her best work so far. We can see that she is a different person than the one who left the house earlier in the evening, and we can believe that the other characters don’t see it. In a closeup, she wrinkles her face like the Grinch, suggesting that Angelique has come to steal Christmas. The supernatural element of her confrontation with Alexis suggests Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia,” which the show has been drawing on for the last few weeks, and reminds longtime viewers of Laura’s April 1969 storyline. But the idea of a woman killing her identical twin and taking her place would have been familiar to much of the audience from the 1964 film Dead Ringer, in which Bette Davis played the sisters in that sad situation. Bette Davis is one of the people frequently mentioned when film buffs name The Greatest Screen Actor of All Time, but not even she could have done better than Parker does today.

In the drawing room, Cyrus is alone. He was reluctant to accept Quentin’s invitation to stay for a drink, and is pacing and fidgeting. What Quentin does not know is that Cyrus is in the middle of a Jekyll and Hyde project, and he wants to get back to his lab to take the potion and change himself into the brutal John Yaeger. He revels in Yaeger’s cruelty and is addicted to the transformation.

Music begins playing on the soundtrack we have not heard before, a jagged piano theme. Cyrus suddenly feels the pains that he has felt after taking the potion. He sees Yaeger’s dark hair springing into place on his arms. He looks in the mirror and sees that he has become Yaeger, without taking the potion. He goes to flee the house, but realizes Quentin is already approaching. He retreats to the drawing room and locks the door. Quentin knocks, asking what on earth is wrong with Cyrus.

This is not only the first time Cyrus has changed without drinking the potion, it is also the first time he has appeared without a putty appliance precariously attached to the bridge of his nose. He looks far more convincing without it, though of course he is even more instantly recognizable as Cyrus.

In his post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn points out both that the videotape editing is extremely ambitious today, with the confrontation between Alexis and Angelique at the beginning and the pretaped sequence of the Cyrus-to-Yaeger transformation at the end, and that that the editing in between these heroic shots looks ragged. The jump cut to Cyrus and Quentin’s approach to the mausoleum makes it look like Cyrus’ laboratory opens onto the cemetery, the first sequence of Angelique in her old room begins and ends with unusually long sequences of her pruning some extremely unhealthy looking flowers, and Cyrus spends a surprisingly large amount of time in the drawing room pacing about. Danny guesses that they did not know how long the process shots would run, so they inserted filler that could be removed if they went long.

That could be, but I like the episode the way it is. The jump cuts give the whole thing a dreamlike quality that works well with the subject matter. That’s certainly the case with the cut to the cemetery- we don’t know where Cyrus’ lab is, but we do know that only death is likely to come from the work being done there, so that jump makes a grim symbolic sense. Moreover, the actors use the sequences Danny identifies as filler to shed light on the characters and situate the scenes in the story. Angelique is so absorbed in her plant that you can believe she came back from the dead specifically to work on it, and nothing Trask or Quentin has to say is going to distract her for long. Cyrus’ pacing makes it clear he feels trapped at Collinwood, which adds considerably to the force of the moment when, as Yaeger, he has to hide from Quentin.

*I should mention that we have the dress rehearsal for #584. What we don’t have is a finished episode- they never made one. They just sent the tape of the dress rehearsal to the ABC network, and that was broadcast.

Episode 999: It’s the same as it was, you were different then

Quentin Collins walks into the bedroom once occupied by his late wife Angelique, where Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis is staying. Quentin arrives just in time to see sleazy musician Bruno Hess strangling Alexis. He interrupts this process. Bruno is convinced that Alexis is Angelique returned from the grave, and that she is responsible for many strange and unhappy occurrences that have taken place on the estate of Collinwood since her arrival.

Bruno holds the deed to a cottage on the grounds of the estate and lives there, to Quentin’s intense annoyance. He hates Bruno, who had an affair with Angelique, a fact he likes to throw in Quentin’s face. You might think Quentin would call the police and report Bruno’s assault on Alexis. Not only would that result in a felony charge, but if Bruno bursts out with his suspicions it should be easy to get a civil commitment order that will earn him a a long stay in a home for the very nervous. But Quentin leaves Alexis and Angelique’s room without calling the sheriff. What’s more, when he goes to the drawing room and finds Bruno still in his house he has a lengthy conversation with him and waits for him to go. He never does telephone the police.

By the end of the episode, Quentin has convinced himself to take Bruno’s theory seriously. Alexis overhears him talking about it with his friend Cyrus Longworth. Quentin tells Cyrus that they must open Angelique’s tomb and look in her coffin.

Alexis finds them there, the coffin already out of its niche. She objects to the desecration of her sister’s resting place. She promises to leave Collinwood immediately if they will let Angelique rest in peace. Quentin refuses. He opens the box. Whatever he finds inside prompts a reaction of shock on his face and on Alexis’ as they look inside.

Between these scenes, we spend time in Cyrus’ laboratory. He is a mad scientist who has devised a Jekyll and Hyde potion. His alter ego goes by the name John Yaeger. Cyrus’ fiancée Sabrina Stuart is a sweet, trusting young woman who is determined to believe the best of Cyrus, but she has heard so much about Cyrus’ involvement with the brutal Yaeger that she is certain something is terribly wrong. We know that Cyrus was close to Angelique, and that she put him up to the Jekyll and Hyde experiment. Sabrina doesn’t know what Cyrus’ project is, but his withdrawn and irritable manner reminds her of the influence Angelique had on him. She says “It’s the same as it was when Angelique was alive- you were different then, and you’re different now.” I’m sure that was the scripted line, too.

Sabrina demands Cyrus stop lying to her and tell the truth about who Yaeger is and what hold he has over him. We saw yesterday that Cyrus’ attitude towards the potion and towards his time as Yaeger is already that of an addict towards his drug, and he sullenly refuses to answer any of Sabrina’s questions, even with more lies. She grows more and more exasperated.

Sabrina’s time with Cyrus is cut short when barmaid Buffie Harrington enters and insists on talking with Cyrus alone. Yaeger gave Buffie a check signed by Cyrus to cover the damages he did to her place of employment in a bar fight the other night; she wants to know if the check is authentic. Cyrus confirms that it is, much to Buffie’s delight. She mentions that her sometime boyfriend Steve is in the hospital because of a beating Yaeger gave him; Cyrus hands her a pile of cash to cover Steve’s hospital expenses. Buffie tells Cyrus that Yaeger has taken rooms in the boarding house where she stays, and that he frightens her. She does not tell him that Yaeger has hit her, choked her, and threatened her every time they have met. We know that he knows that- he has met her only when he was in the form of Yaeger, and he recognizes her on sight, showing that he remembers their encounters. Buffie asks if Yaeger works for Cyrus. He smiles with great satisfaction and says that he does.

That smile is a key moment. Yesterday’s episode gave the Jekyll and Hyde story a new lease on life by confirming that it will indeed be about addiction. That’s the usual thing with that material, but Dark Shadows has taken familiar tales in such weird directions that we could by no means take it for granted that its version would follow the typical pattern. Cyrus’ response to the thought that he controls Yaeger, who has put Steve in the hospital and is terrorizing Buffie, confirms something else. Cyrus’ diffident manner and scientific preoccupations help Sabrina hold onto the idea that he is a sweet man whose only flaw is naïveté, but Christopher Pennock’s rendering of that smile leaves no doubt that Yaeger is Cyrus’ means of indulging his own sadistic impulses.

As Buffie is leaving, Cyrus asks her if she likes Yaeger. Holding her head high, she says that sometimes she does. She sounds like she means it. Buffie was a commanding presence when first we saw her, and she is forceful throughout this scene. But she has given up on fighting back against Yaeger or even trying to run away from him. Her line suggests that she is not simply giving in to fear, but is drawn to a masochistic fantasy. Yaeger has been so vicious and Cyrus is so sinister that there is no prospect this fantasy is going to be channeled into any kind of consensual game- Buffie is drifting into a situation that can lead only to her destruction.

This episode includes one of the all-time great bloopers. The closing credits run over a shot of Angelique and Alexis’s room. For the first minute or so, we see a man sitting in a chair, chewing on something. Whoever he was, apparently he decided he’d found a good spot for lunch. Eventually the camera zooms in on the portrait of Angelique that dominates the room. This is so obviously an attempt to get the lunch-eater out of the frame that it only adds to the hilarity.

Who he is and what he is eating, I don’t know. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 997: How pretty your tears

We are in the fourth week of an arc set in a different universe than the one we saw in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows. This universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time,” was originally introduced as a realm populated by Doppelgänger of the characters we have known. They are the same people, but have made different choices and are therefore living different lives.

Some of the Parallel Time characters fit this description. So, we have known matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother Roger Collins from episode #1. In the early days of the show, much was made of the Collinses’ straitened financial circumstances, the result of Roger squandering the half of the family’s assets he had inherited and Liz scrambling to keep control of the business. Roger lived in Liz’ house as her guest and worked in the business as her employee, and she kept a wary eye on any move he made to get his hands on her money. In #981, Parallel Liz mentions that she used to be quite wealthy, but that she entrusted her share of the Collins fortune to Roger, and as a result they are both penniless. Original Liz saw that fate as a distinct possibility, every time Roger was in the same wing of the house as her bank account information.

Parallel Liz and Parallel Roger live in the great house of Collinwood as the guests of their brother Quentin. Parallel Quentin is not at all the same person as Original Quentin. He is an entirely different person. Original Quentin was born in 1870, died in 1897, became a ghost haunting Collinwood in 1968 and 1969, and as the result of a time travel storyline in 1969 was both spared death and immunized against aging. Original Quentin was a riff on the early conception of Roger as a villain, and he was a huge hit with the viewing public during the part of the show set in 1897. Ever since Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress in late 1969, they’ve been at a loss what to do with him. Parallel Quentin is an attempt to reinvent the character to let him keep enough of his vices that he retains the roguish charm that the fans liked, but at the same time use those vices as motivation for him to act the part of the hero from time to time.

There is need for an action hero today. Quentin’s friend, dippy mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, has invented a Jekyll-and-Hyde potion and taken a swig of it. As the darkly mustachio’d John Yaeger, he has been persecuting barmaid Buffie Harrington and Buffie’s unlucky boyfriend, big galoot Steve. We open with Yaeger choking Buffie and telling her she needs to be beaten into submission. Later, Yaeger gets the jump on Steve in a dark alley behind the Greenfield Inn, an establishment that also fronts a sinister alley in the main continuity. He threatens him with his sword cane. Steve manages to get that weapon away from him, but Yaeger beats him down. Yaeger is choking Steve, apparently with the intention of murdering him, when he hears a police whistle and runs away.

Cyrus Longworth and John Yaeger are played by Christopher Pennock.* In the main continuity, Pennock played a character who asked to be called Jabe but wound up answering to “Jeb.” Jabe appeared to be a man in his twenties, but was in fact a shape-shifting monster who was only a few months old when he was destroyed. We’ve heard a good deal about what Cyrus was doing six months ago and more, and there are diplomas on the walls of his laboratory that show his history is nothing like Jabe’s.

Among the very few choices in Jabe’s short life was an attempt to renounce his shape-shifting abilities so that he could remain in human form at all times. In that way, he is the opposite of Cyrus, who chooses to take his potion knowing it will change him into Yaeger.

Also, Jabe was so obnoxious that even people brainwashed to regard him as a divine being come to fulfill a plan that more than justified the extermination of the human race found his personality too much to take and turned against him after a few encounters. But by the end of Jabe’s time on the show, it had become undeniable that there was a kernel of sweetness in his personality. In this regard, too, Cyrus is the opposite of Jabe. We hear his soft voice and see his diffident manner, and we assume that the single-minded scientist in his lab coat, toiling all hours on a project that he keeps saying will benefit humankind, is a well-meaning sort, though perhaps dangerously naïve. Cyrus’ dutiful assistant and devoted fiancée, the lovely Sabrina Stuart, encourages us in that assumption, insisting that Cyrus is thoroughly good, if hopelessly unworldly. But as the initially insufferable Jabe turned out to be endearing at the end, so the apparently innocent Cyrus is deliberately choosing to turn himself into Yaeger even after he knows what Yaeger is capable of. What’s more, he refuses to let anyone at all help him with his experiment, meaning there is no one to restrain Yaeger’s sprees.

Sabrina’s counterpart in the main continuity was the fiancée, not of Jabe, but of another dangerous shape-shifter. She was engaged to werewolf Chris Jennings. As this Sabrina is convinced Cyrus is good, so that one kept insisting Chris was good, even after she had learned that he repeatedly refused to be restrained on nights of the full Moon, so that the killings he committed in his lupine form were premeditated murders on his part. This Sabrina does not know the nature of Cyrus’ work, and she believes that Yaeger is an enemy of his who is holding him prisoner. Sabrina would appear to stand with Roger and Liz as a character who is in a meaningful sense the same person in both timelines, so we are in suspense as to how she might react if she finds out the truth about her man.

Sabrina’s part makes us wonder if the original plan were to cast Don Briscoe, who plays Chris in the main continuity, as Cyrus and Yaeger. At this time Briscoe was struggling with bipolar disorder. He was trying to self-medicate with street drugs, which not only made matters worse in itself, but also led him to get a severe beating one night while trying to score a fix in Central Park. Briscoe appears in Parallel Time as lawyer Chris Collins and has a small part in the concurrently filmed feature House of Dark Shadows, but his health problems ruled out a part as crucial as the lead in the Jekyll and Hyde story.

Buffie is played by Elizabeth Eis, who appeared in one episode set in the main continuity as Nelle Gunston. Nelle was a young woman from Virginia, bored by life with her parents, who had joined the cult that was meant to serve Jabe and the world-wrecking plan to which he was central. When she was asked if she would commit murder if that was what the cult required, she smiled pleasantly and said “Even that.” Nelle was killed before she could meet Jabe.

Buffie is not at all the same person as Nelle. She is not from Virginia, for one thing. When she thinks about leaving Collinsport to get away from Yaeger, she realizes she has only $13.40 to her name, and laughs at herself for a plan that wouldn’t get her any further than Worcester, Massachusetts. Naming Worcester as a synonym for “nowhere” would suggest that she is a New England girl, which would fit with her employment in a bar in a fishing village in central Maine. Buffie is the opposite of what they originally told us the characters in Parallel Time would be- she is not Nelle after she has made a different choice, she is a person who began differently than Nelle and is making a similar choice.

Buffie is in her room when her landlady, Mrs Duvall, comes for the rent. Buffie has a check ready. Mrs Duvall thanks Buffie for recommending her boarding house to a gentleman who has rented her four best rooms at a very handsome price. She tells Buffie that the man is a big step up from Steve. Buffie has no idea what she is talking about. Yaeger shows up, and Buffie realizes he is Mrs Duvall’s new prize boarder. Buffie is horrified, and demands her rent check back. Mrs Duvall refuses to return it. Yaeger points to a print hanging on the wall and instructs Mrs Duvall to take it away and burn it. She is doing so when Buffie protests that it is hers. At that, Mrs Duvall stops short of the door, but she does not put the print back on the wall. Eventually, Mrs Duvall does take Buffie’s print, and leaves her with Yaeger.

The telephone rings. It is Quentin, asking Buffie about Yaeger. Yaeger stands next to her and forces her to answer Quentin’s questions with lies. Later, Steve will come to Buffie’s room. She will tell him to give up on her and not to take any more beatings from Yaeger on her behalf. Steve asks if Yaeger is a superman; Buffie widens her eyes and says that he might be. This brings us back to Nelle, who renounced her life in Virginia and her connection to the human race because she was looking for a superman and thought she would find one in Jabe. Steve may not have had much to offer, but it’s a cinch he wasn’t as bad as Yaeger, and he’s gone from Buffie’s life after this scene.

The emptiness of Buffie’s life is represented today by a prop we have seen only once before on Dark Shadows, a television set. There was a set in a motel room in Bangor in #27; we never do see one in the Collinsport or the Collinwood of the main continuity. Perhaps the makers of the show are suggesting that people who have nothing better to do than to watch the idiot box are likely to fall prey to any fella who offers physical abuse and verbal intimidation.

Mrs Duvall is played by Camila Ashland. Ashland was a very distinguished stage actress who appeared in #928 as someone called Mrs Hutchins. A man from the cult around Jabe hired Mrs Hutchins to tell some lies to throw mad scientist Julia Hoffman off their trail. That didn’t work, but Julia admired Mrs Hutchins’ performance, as we suspect Grayson Hall admired Ashland’s. When the man from the cult paid Mrs Hutchins for her work, he was unpleasantly surprised at her questions and the uneasy conscience it reflected, responding roughly that she is being paid for a job and should leave it at that. He didn’t realize he was dealing with an artist. Mrs Duvall’s eagerness to please the obviously horrible Yaeger shows that she really is the crude mercenary the man from the cult assumed Mrs Hutchins was.

We cut to Cyrus’ laboratory. Yaeger has fled there from the police. He is about to take the re-Jekylling formula when Quentin shows up and demands to know where Cyrus is. We end with them in that standoff.

*Billed twice in the closing credits- as Christopher Pennock for Cyrus, and as Chris Pennock for Yaeger. Adorable!

Episode 996: His divided nature

The first expert in forbidden lore to join the cast of characters on Dark Shadows was Dr Peter Guthrie of Dartmouth College, parapsychologist. Guthrie was chief scientific advisor to well-meaning governess Victoria Winters as she assembled the forces of good and led them in battle against undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. In #184, Guthrie confronted Laura. He told her that he had figured out she was “The Undead,” the first appearance of that expression on Dark Shadows. He also offered to help her if she would desist from her plan to murder her young son David. Guthrie was nervous about making this offer, apparently fearing Laura might draw him into her web of evil. He needn’t have worried about that- she responded, not by corrupting Guthrie, but by killing him.

The second such expert was a straightforward mad scientist. She was Julia Hoffman, MD, who in #291 offered to cure vampire Barnabas Collins of his curse. Though Julia made it a condition of her offer that Barnabas stop preying on the living, as Guthrie had conditioned his offer to Laura on her allowing David to live, we could already see that Julia was far more deeply compromised than Guthrie had been. She had learned of Barnabas’ existence while treating his victim, Maggie Evans, and she could gain the time to make her experiment work only by betraying Maggie’s trust and preventing her from regaining her memory of what Barnabas was and what he had done to her. Before long, Julia acquiesced to Barnabas’ pressure and joined him in murdering her old medical school classmate, Dr Dave Woodard. Eventually, she and Barnabas would become the parents of a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam. The shocking abuse they heaped on Adam in his infancy left no doubt that as a mad scientist, Julia is as much a symbol of extreme selfishness as is a vampire.

Adam was the product of an experiment designed by another mad scientist, Dr Eric Lang. Lang was even more flagrantly evil than Julia. When he needed a head for the monster, he tied his assistant down and set about cutting his head off. Granted, the assistant was a character played by Roger Davis, so the audience could see where Lang was coming from. In fact, the writers themselves eventually got so fed up with Mr Davis they cut the head off the final character he introduced. Still, Lang’s impatient response to the assistant’s complaints showed that he was utterly lacking in human compassion.

Now, we are in a different universe than the one where Dark Shadows spent its first 196 weeks. The resident mad scientist in this “Parallel Time” is Dr Cyrus Longworth. Cyrus has developed a potion that turns him into a real jerk. That may not sound like much of an achievement compared to building a Frankenstein’s monster or curing vampirism or whatever it was Guthrie wanted to do for Laura. But that’s to be expected. By the time Guthrie came to the great estate of Collinwood early in 1967, monsters and black magic and the like had been fixtures there for over 171 years. It appears that such things are relatively new to this version of Collinwood, so Cyrus is doing the sort of modest project that tends to characterize a field when it is first starting.

When Cyrus drinks his potion, his red hair turns black, he grows a lot more of it, and a putty appliance materializes, dangling precariously from the bridge of his nose. In this form, he calls himself “John Yaeger.”

That nose may not be made of Silly Putty, but it certainly isn’t a serious putty. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

As Yaeger, he goes to the Eagle, a tavern in the village of Collinsport, where barmaid Buffie Harrington is fending off the advances of her boyfriend Steve. Steve keeps coming up behind Buffie and grabbing her by the waist, a move that doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination. Buffie seems to be at once excited by Steve’s aggressiveness and irritated that he is keeping her from getting her work done. When Yaeger shows up and orders Steve to vacate the premises, Buffie’s evening goes from complicated to disastrous. The men fight, Steve loses, and Yaeger bodily ejects him from the tavern. Buffie confronts Yaeger about the wreck he has made of the place.

Later, Yaeger returns with a check to cover the damages. Buffie sees that the check is signed “Cyrus Longworth.” She explains that she used to work for the Collins family, and she knows who Cyrus is. She doesn’t believe that Cyrus would be friendly with Yaeger, and is sure he wouldn’t give him a check to cover the expenses he had incurred in a bar fight. Yaeger tells her the check is legitimate, and insists she keep quiet about his connection to Cyrus. He leaves.

Later, Quentin Collins finds the battered Steve and brings him into the tavern. Steve refuses to call the police, vowing to find Yaeger and settle the score himself. He leaves, and Quentin asks Buffie what she knows about the man who beat Steve. She says she doesn’t know much about him, but that a friend of Quentin’s does. She shows him the check with Cyrus’ signature. Perplexed, Quentin leaves.

Suddenly, Yaeger appears from nowhere. He tells Buffie that she promised not to tell of his connection to Cyrus. He starts choking her.

This is Elizabeth Eis’ first appearance as Buffie. Eis was on Dark Shadows once when it was set in the main continuity, playing Nelle Gunston, a devotee of a sinister cult who met Barnabas in the Blue Whale, a bar that corresponds to the Eagle in that universe. Barnabas killed Nelle before her only episode was over. It’s good to have Eis back, she was fun as Nelle and is a commanding presence today.

George Strus plays Steve, in his first and only role on the show. Strus was primarily a stunt performer, but he had lines in a few productions, most notably as a tough in Shaft. His last imdb credit was as a stunt performer in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, made in 1991, twenty years after Shaft. Steve is supposed to be a big dumb galoot, and Strus pulls that off satisfactorily.

Christopher Pennock’s name appears in the closing credits for the role of Cyrus. He is credited as “Chris Pennock” for Yaeger, adorably enough.

Episode 995: Another slow Friday

Dark Shadows never followed the usual soap opera pattern of a week building to a slam-bang conclusion on a Friday. This one is a case in point. It aired on a Friday, and nothing new happens.

The actors are all very good, and each makes the most of their time on screen today. As child Amy Collins and drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, Denise Nickerson and David Selby do a good job reacting to the ghost of someone named Dameon Edwards, which they saw yesterday. As sleazy musician Bruno Hess and sneaky butler Mr Trask, Michael Stroka and Jerry Lacy do a good job being alarmed by the prospect that Dameon has returned to expose their guilty secrets. As mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, Christopher Pennock does a good job failing to perceive the consequences of his lunatic scheme. And as Cyrus’ blindly devoted assistant/ fiancée Sabrina Stuart, Lisa Blake Richards does a good job being trusting and optimistic.

I’ll just single out one moment, when Bruno sees his piano playing with the touch of visible fingers and realizes it is Dameon’s doing. Michael Stroka gives a memorable take.

If the piano starts playing itself, Bruno’s going to be out of a job.

Cyrus drinks the potion he has formulated to turn himself from a mild-mannered Jekyll into a brutish Hyde. As her did the first time we saw him do this, he cries out in pain and collapses. This time they add a lot of flaring green lights to illustrate his distress. The process is not effective at all- at first, I thought something had gone wrong with one of the cameras. At the end of the sequence, we fade from Pennock in his Cyrus look to him in his Hyde makeup, which we didn’t see the first time. The shot doesn’t line up, so it does not create the illusion of a transformation, and the prosthetic nose isn’t very firmly attached, so it takes a second to realize that it is supposed to be part of his face and not just something that landed on him while he was falling.

Episode 989: This tacky little drama again

Dark Shadows has taken us to a parallel universe where the A story is a mashup of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca with Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 story “Ligeia,” and the B story is a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Today we also get a good look at the C story, another mashup. The ingredients in this one are Dracula and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Drunken novelist William H. Loomis and his disappointed wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard, take the roles of George and Martha. The parts of Nick, of Honey, and of George and Martha’s imaginary son are combined in vampire Barnabas Collins.

Honey is present at two conversations with George and Martha. She flees from each, moved to vomit by their cruelties, and after the second is never seen again. One session with Will and Carolyn was enough for Barnabas. The circumstances of his exit were rather different from those of Honey’s. Barnabas did not become physically ill when he saw Will and Carolyn quarreling, and is willing to keep skulking in and out of their basement when he is not out preying upon the living. But Will has other ideas. He has chained Barnabas in his coffin in the basement of their house and is planning to force him to tell him his life story, which Will thinks he will be able to use as material for a book that will restore his fortunes. In this he is the mirror image of his counterpart in the main continuity, who broke the chains that held Barnabas in his coffin in his own attempt to get rich quick.

As Martha taunts George for the dead end his career has reached, Carolyn is in the habit of taunting Will with his inability to write new books of his own. As Martha flirts aggressively with Nick in front of George, so Carolyn wants Will to release Barnabas so that he can drink her blood again. As George and Martha’s son turns out to be imaginary, not part of their material reality, so Barnabas is a visitor from the main continuity, not a part of this universe. Inasmuch as Jonathan Frid is away for several weeks making the feature House of Dark Shadows, Barnabas is present only as a topic in Will and Carolyn’s quarrels.

Will pours himself a glass of something, perhaps bergin and water. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

One might wonder if the idea of casting John Karlen as an analogue of George in an adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? occurred to the makers of the show around the time of #706. In that episode, Karlen played inveterate prankster Carl Collins, who held a gun at Barnabas’ head and threatened to shoot him. When he pulled the trigger, a flag labeled FIB! sprang out. George fires a rifle at Martha in Act One of the play, only to produce a similar effect with a Chinese parasol.

Later, Carolyn is eavesdropping outside the drawing room in the great house of Collinwood while Will is flirting with a lovely houseguest, a central character in the Rebecca/ Ligeia mashup. Carolyn stands in the doorway, in Will’s line of sight when he tries to make a date with the woman. Will has already rubbed Carolyn’s face in the intimate nature of her connection to Barnabas, and as his victim she can’t very well recreate Martha and Nick’s threat to cuckold George with any other male. So if we are going to have another scene built around that kind of insult, it will have to be Will who plays it with another woman.

Will makes sure Carolyn can see him at work. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn also spends some time with her friend Sabrina Stuart, who is part of the Jekyll and Hyde story. Sabrina is engaged to Dr Cyrus Longworth, the Jekyll character, and did not recognize him when last night he invaded her home and assaulted her in the persona of John Yaeger, the Mr Hyde character. Cyrus himself is puzzled when he comes to his laboratory in the morning and finds a terrible mess there, along with an IOU from Yaeger. A policeman shows up and asks him some questions, assuring him that he does not match the description of Yaeger. In his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn points out that this scene is recycled beat for beat from Dan Curtis’ 1968 TV movie adaption of Jekyll and Hyde.

Carolyn marches into Cyrus’ lab and tells him Sabrina is missing. She is angry with him for leaving Sabrina alone when the man who attacked her is still at large. He tries to assure her that Sabrina is in no danger, but since he cannot explain why he would believe that he only exasperates her further. She insists they go looking for Sabrina, and he acquiesces. It turns out Sabrina is in the great house of Collinwood, in a trance, trying to reenact the séance at which the Rebecca analogue died.

In the main continuity, Carolyn’s counterpart was married to someone whom she believed to be a man named Jeb. Like Cyrus, he was played by Christopher Pennock. Also like Cyrus, he was a shape-shifter who in his other form committed horrific acts of violence. Carolyn accepted Jeb’s refusal to tell him anything about himself, as Sabrina accepts Cyrus’ refusal to tell her anything that might lead her to suspect the nature of the potion he has developed. It is refreshing to see this Carolyn taking Sabrina’s side and insisting Cyrus do things a reasonable person might do.

Episode 988: Breaking in

Drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins and wealthy socialite Alexis Stokes enter the mausoleum where Angelique, Quentin’s late wife and Angelique’s identical twin sister, is entombed. They find a fancifully dressed man named Bruno Hess driving a chisel into the wall beside Angelique’s nameplate. When they demand to know what Bruno is doing, he explains that he is going to open the vault, show that Angelique’s body is not there, and thereby prove that Alexis is in reality Angelique come back to life.

Quentin says he will call the police if Bruno does not desist from his efforts. Bruno says that he does not believe that Quentin wants to involve the police, since that might raise questions that he would rather leave unasked. In response to this, Quentin looks down, and Alexis asks what on earth he is talking about. Quentin says it is an empty threat. He offers Bruno $25,000 to go away, rather a large amount of money to offer someone who has just made an empty threat. Bruno says he will go away without payment if he is allowed to open the vault and it turns out Angelique’s remains are there. Alexis is horrified by this idea, and she and Quentin manage to run Bruno off.

Returning viewers know that these characters are part of a story mashing up Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca with Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 story Ligeia. Maxim de Winter put up with the presence of Jack Favell, his late wife Rebecca’s lover, on his estate because Maxim knew that Favell was willing to spread the rumor that Maxim had murdered Rebecca, and he feared that Favell might be able to prove that the rumor was true. Bruno was Angelique’s lover, and is ensconced on the estate of Collinwood. Quentin’s look down when Bruno scoffs at the idea of him calling the police suggests that he has the same exposure in regard to Angelique’s death that Maxim had in regard to Rebecca’s.

This part of the show is set in a universe parallel to the one where it spent its first 196 weeks. Angelique’s counterpart in the main continuity is a wicked witch who has returned from the dead many times. Poe’s Ligeia, like Du Maurier’s Rebecca and like the Angelique of the current continuity, was a great beauty who fascinated those who knew her and remained an inescapable presence in her husband’s house after her death and his remarriage. Unlike Rebecca, but like the Angelique of the main continuity, Ligeia was a woman of vast knowledge who could transcend death. At the end of Poe’s story, the unnamed narrator finds that his second wife, who has died, has come back to life, and that both her physical appearance and her personality have been transformed into those of Ligeia. Bruno, like other devotees of Angelique, is unshakably convinced that Alexis is lying when she says that she is not the resurrected Angelique.

Bruno is a subject in an experiment being conducted by aspiring mad scientist Cyrus Longworth. Cyrus was himself an admirer of Angelique’s. When he first saw Alexis, he too believed that she was Angelique risen from the dead. But he has accepted that she is who she says she is, and has immersed himself in his work, an attempt to create a potion that will turn whoever drinks it into a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-like duality. Last week, we learned that this somewhat questionable project was Angelique’s idea.

We see Bruno in Cyrus’ laboratory, telling him about his activities in the mausoleum. Cyrus is amused by the story, and tells Bruno he wishes he had his daring. He makes fun of Bruno for getting caught, and turns back to his notes. Frustrated that he cannot enlist Cyrus in his attempt to prove that Alexis is Angelique redivivus, Bruno exits.

Bruno’s a pretty weird guy, but you’d think even he would hesitate before getting into that outfit. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later, Bruno shows up in Angelique’s old bedroom at the great house of Collinwood, where Alexis is staying. She demands he leave, and he demands she admit to being Angelique. She says that if he refuses to go, she will resort to force. He invites her to do so.

The Angelique we know in the main continuity has vast magic powers, and would be hard put to keep herself from turning Bruno into a toadstool. We don’t know if the Angelique who once occupied this room is a match for her, but the widespread belief among people who knew her well that she will transcend death suggests that she does have some kind of extraordinary ability, and a moment yesterday when Bruno believed she had cast a spell to interfere with his breathing confirms that she shared at least some of our Angelique’s talents. Bruno believes he will expose her true identity by provoking her into using them. My wife, Mrs Acilius, says that she found herself torn at this point. Returning viewers have ample reasons to dislike Bruno, and his invasion of Alexis’ personal space reinforces all of them. At the same time, she is very much inclined to believe that Alexis is Angelique. So even while she roots against Bruno, she also hopes he will succeed in this attempt.

Alexis does not cast a spell. Instead, she goes to the drawing room and tells Quentin that Bruno has invaded her room. Our Angelique would probably find it galling to have to turn to some guy and report that a meanie was bothering her, so if Alexis is an impostor we can believe she is an exceptionally well-disciplined one.

Bruno follows her. He and Quentin confront each other. Bruno taunts Quentin, saying that he always knew Angelique better than he did. Quentin reminds Bruno that he is not allowed in the house and forbids him to pester Alexis. Bruno mentions that Angelique died during a séance; this piques Alexis’ interest, and after Bruno leaves she asks Quentin about it. He doesn’t want to answer, and she drops the subject.

Cyrus goes to his laboratory late at night and finds evidence of an intruder. He discovers that the man is still there. Cyrus tells him to come out of the shadows so he can see him face to face. It is Horace Gladstone, a chemist from Boston who formulated an extremely exotic compound Cyrus bought as an ingredient in his potion. Cyrus asks Gladstone if he satisfied his curiosity when he was reading through his notes. Gladstone said he didn’t, because Cyrus’ handwriting is so bad. Gladstone says that if Cyrus will tell him what he is working on, he can be of great assistance to him. Cyrus keeps refusing, and Gladstone warns him that he is about to take “a lonely and dangerous journey.”

When he is alone, Cyrus drinks the potion. He makes noises suggesting acute gastric distress and collapses.

Episode 987: The possibilities of this synthesis

Q & A

Quentin Collins, master of the estate of Collinwood, is in an even grimmer mood than usual. His new wife, the former Maggie Evans, has left him after only a week in the great house. She had had all she was going to take of his patronizing attitude towards her and of everyone else’s preoccupation with his first wife, the late Angelique Stokes Collins. Maggie was particularly satiated with Quentin’s houseguest, Angelique’ unmarried identical twin sister, Alexis Stokes. Maggie had found Alexis in Angelique’s bedroom, wearing Angelique’s frilly nightgown, and reaching out to Quentin while suggesting in a soft voice that “Perhaps we can comfort each other.” When that sight moved Maggie to voice objections to the situation, Quentin responded by forbidding her, for her own good no less, from mentioning Angelique’s name ever again. He was amazed that this led Maggie to leave the house. Considering the provocation, it is indeed amazing that Quentin did not require medical attention to remove his brandy decanter from whatever part of his anatomy Maggie could reach.

We open today with Quentin and Alexis back in Angelique’s room. She is fully dressed this time, but they are sitting together on the piano bench. They move their heads together, and lock their lips in a passionate kiss.

Returning viewers know that we are visiting a universe parallel to the one in which the action was based for its first 196 weeks of the show. Angelique’s counterpart in the main continuity is a wicked witch who has returned from the dead quite a few times, so when we first crossed over here and heard her devotees saying that they were sure their Angelique would find a way to come back to life we did not doubt that they were right. Maggie wants nothing to do with Angelique or the cult she built up around herself, but she is among those who are convinced that Alexis is in fact Angelique redivivus. The show has done an excellent job keeping us guessing whether she is or isn’t, and we will still be guessing when we come to the end of today’s episode.

Alexis pulls away from Quentin and is visibly upset. He apologizes for kissing her. She says that she is disappointed in him- she had thought that he, of all people would know that she is not Angelique returned from the grave. He says he does not think that she is. We can believe him- his counterpart in the main continuity usually had two or three fiancées at a time, and they were rarely his only love interests. So he wouldn’t have to believe Alexis was Angelique, or indeed that she was anyone in particular, to start a make-out session with her. After they clear the air, she agrees to stay on in the house until she can meet Quentin and Angelique’s son, her nephew Daniel Collins, who is on a trip at the moment.

Bruno, Sabrina, Cyrus, Gladstone, and the Bunny

Quentin and Alexis aren’t the only ones dealing with frustrated sexual desire. We cut from them to a closeup of a bunny. This universally recognized symbol of amorous enthusiasm is alone in a cage.

The episode originally aired on the second Tuesday of Easter 1970, maybe the bunny was resting up after his big day.

The cage is in a laboratory. A young woman in a lab coat is trying to work on a large apparatus for chemical experimentation while a man wearing a purple suit, a low cut shirt, a large medallion, and a huge bouffant hairdo is pestering her with clumsy attempts at flirting. She keeps laughing off his verbal gambits and swatting away his physical approaches.

A tall young man in a lab coat enters and calls out a booming “Sabrina!” The lounge lizard and the experimenter stand up straighter and step away from each other. Returning viewers know the tall man as aspiring mad scientist Cyrus Longworth and the ill-clad masher as Bruno Hess, musician and hanger-on of the late Angelique. We have not seen the woman before, but we recognize the actress as Lisa Blake Richards, who played another woman named Sabrina in the main continuity. That Sabrina was trapped in a go-nowhere storyline. Before today is done we will have grounds to hope that this one will give Miss Richards a task more in keeping with her considerable talents.

Cyrus sends Sabrina upstairs to wait for a package. Bruno gets ready for his part in Cyrus’ experiment, which involves giving a blood sample. Bruno asks Cyrus why he was so calm when he saw him trying to put the moves on Sabrina. Cyrus replies that he trusts Sabrina too much to worry that Bruno could come between them. He then jabs the syringe into Bruno’s arm with great force and without even looking at the spot from which he is drawing the sample, causing Bruno to jump. He may trust Sabrina, but he wants Bruno to know who’s boss.

Bruno tries to interest Cyrus in his theory that Alexis is Angelique returned from the grave. He eventually manages to get Cyrus to give him a quizzical look, but stops at that point, saying that if Cyrus won’t explain his experiment, he won’t explain his.

Sabrina comes downstairs and says that the package has come and that its bearer insists on meeting Cyrus himself. Cyrus is annoyed by this, but when it develops that the man is Mr Horace Gladstone himself, the very chemist who devised the unusual compound he has brought, Cyrus sends Sabrina back upstairs and Bruno out the basement door so that he can meet with the man alone.

Friday, Cyrus explained to his friend Chris that he is trying to devise a process for separating a human being into two parts, one good and the other evil. His scenes with Chris hit all the obligatory mad scientist notes, right down to disparaging non-mad scientists as unimaginative dolts who may as well believe that the Earth is flat. He won’t tell Gladstone what he is trying to do, perhaps because he has the same last name as did the man who was prime minister of the UK when Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was first published and so he reminds him that he is a character in a derivative storyline. But Gladstone does warn Cyrus that the compound he has purchased is a potent and dangerous one. Gladstone hints at the nature of the hazard when he says that he stepped back from active research when he feared that, even within the bounds of chemistry, he was about to uncover truths best left unknown.

Gladstone is played by John Harkins, in his fourth role on Dark Shadows. As before, he is playing a stranger from far away. In #174, he played Lieutenant Costa of the Arizona State Police. We saw him in a scene set in Phoenix, the first time Dark Shadows took us outside the northeastern USA. We did not leave that region again until #877, when sorcerer Count Petofi thought back to an incident in England in 1885, when he first met his henchman Aristide. Like Bruno, Aristide was played by Michael Stroka. The incident in England involved a man named Garth Blackwood, whom Petofi would bring back from the dead to punish Aristide. Blackwood was played by Harkins.

Harkins’ third character came from even further away than Arizona or England. He was Mr Strak, the representative of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods long confined to the underworld. Strak appeared to Paul Stoddard in #899 and #900, and tricked Paul into selling his daughter Carolyn to the Leviathans. So far as Paul was concerned, Strak came from nowhere and disappeared to nowhere, so that he could never hope to explain to anyone what he had done, still less find a way to challenge the terms of the deal.

Gladstone is from Boston. Dark Shadows is set near the real-world location of Bar Harbor, Maine. The characters often mention Boston, but we’ve never had a scene set there. In #363, the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins was perfectly bland when her friend, strange and troubled boy David, said he had been to China. Sarah said that her father and his business associates were always sailing to China. When David told Sarah that he was joking and he had actually gone to Boston, Sarah was thrilled. She had been to Boston herself once, and considered it a far more exotic place than China could possibly be. Gordon Russell was credited with the script for #363, and Joe Caldwell, the freshly returned author of today’s script, had finished his first tour of duty on the show three weeks before it was taped. But Sarah’s excitement about Boston is so much the kind of character moment Caldwell specialized in that I suspect it was a leftover idea of his that Russell found a place for. Perhaps the casting of Harkins as a Hub man reflects Caldwell’s idea of what Boston would represent to people in a coastal village in central Maine.

Bruno and Alexis

We cut to Bruno, who is on the telephone. He is talking to a person in an office somewhere. He learns that no ships from Genoa have docked in New York in the last week. This information excites him, but his excitement soon gives way to terror as he feels himself choking.

Bruno runs into Angelique’s bedroom, where Alexis is back on the piano bench. He gasps and demands she stop obstructing his breathing. She appears to have no idea what he is talking about.

The Angelique we have known since late 1967 did specialize in casting spells that made her enemies choke. We saw her do that as recently as #955, when her husband tried to set fire to her and she stopped him by twisting a scarf around the neck of a statue. On the other hand, Alexis seems genuinely bewildered by the situation.

When Bruno starts breathing again, he confronts her with the fact that no registered passenger ships from Genoa arrived in New York harbor the week before. She asks him if he considered that she might have been a guest on the yacht of some wealthy friends. He is stumped by this. Again, this keeps the suspense about her true identity alive. Alexis has been established as the sort of person who would be found on someone else’s yacht, but she doesn’t actually say that that is how she got back to the States. She merely asks Bruno if he had thought of the possibility that she may have done so.

Cyrus and Sabrina

Back in the lab, we see Sabrina collecting some equipment while Cyrus tends to his notes. She finds a small box, and asks him if he put it there for her to find. When he says he did, she opens it and finds a ring. She asks if it is an engagement ring. He says he hopes it is. She throws her arms around him and tells him she loves him. He holds her and does not say that he loves her too. He merely says that she knows how he feels about her, an ill-omen if ever we saw one.

Cyrus tells Sabrina that she knows how completely his work consumes his energies, and she says that is one of the things she admires about him. She asks what exactly he is working on. He is reticent, and she tries to walk the question back. He goes into his mad scientist ravings, and she gives him a stunned look. He tries to reassure her, saying that when he gets carried away he talks in cliches. He says that no one has found good or evil in a test tube… “yet!” The crazed gleam comes back into his eyes.

This scene gives Miss Richards more to work with than she had had in her whole time in the main continuity. The look Sabrina gives at the end of Cyrus’ gust of lunacy is the first time she has had a chance to get a laugh, and she makes the most of it. As for Christopher Pennock, he had just been getting the hang of his previous part, hugely overgrown infant Jeb Hawkes, when he was written out. With Cyrus, he can to some extent pick up where he left off. Pennock had begun to find a way to suggest that there was a real sweetness bottled up inside one-man wrecking crew Jeb, and in Cyrus’ love for Sabrina he can play a character who is Jeb’s mirror image- abundantly sweet, but so deep inside his own head that he is about to become a monster.

Bruno

On Dark Shadows, wedding days usually come and go without anyone actually getting married. Typically, the ceremony is interrupted and someone has to go off and dig up a grave, in which they find an empty coffin.

Bruno has no manners and does not observe any of the recognized customs. So even though today is Sabrina and Cyrus’ engagement day, not their wedding day, he jumps the gun and starts opening Angelique’s grave, in which he believes he will find an empty coffin. We end with him chiseling at the wall of the mausoleum. I suppose you could say that he might be planning to work slowly, so that he won’t finish until the day of the wedding, but even if that were true it would be an outright violation of the accepted norm, and an undeniable sign that he is not the sort of person who can be expected to fit in at Collinwood.