Tag: jenny collins

Episode 721: If he stays dead now

Well-meaning time-traveler/ bloodsucking fiend Barnabas Collins enters a cottage on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood to find thuggish groundskeeper Dirk Wilkins standing over the freshly stabbed corpse of the rakish Quentin Collins. Since Quentin’s cause of death is a long-bladed thrusting dagger, a weapon also known as a “dirk,” it would seem clear that Wilkins is the culprit. But as it happens, Barnabas saw Wilkins enter the cottage a moment before, so he can be fairly sure he did not kill Quentin.

Nonetheless, Barnabas threatens to go to the police and accuse Wilkins unless he answers “a lot of questions.” Barnabas doesn’t have any witnesses to back up his version of events, and though he claims to be a relative of the ancient and esteemed Collins family he only arrived in town a few weeks before. But Wilkins isn’t hard to intimidate, so he answers some of Barnabas’ questions about madwoman Jenny Collins. Most importantly, he tells Barnabas that Jenny is the estranged wife of Quentin, not of Quentin’s brother Edward as the audience had been led to believe in the four weeks leading up to Friday’s episode.

As Wilkins, actor Roger Davis has been getting very careless with his lines. Jonathan Frid always had a lot of trouble with his own dialogue, but he is clearly sticking with the script in an exchange like this:

Wilkins: Mr. Collins, you gotta understand that she’s crazy in the head! She could hurt herself — or somebody!

Barnabas: Who do you mean by “we”?

This comes to a head with one of Dark Shadows‘ most famous bloopers:

Barnabas: Tell them that you saw no one here.
Wilkins: Oh, that’s fine. What am I gonna tell ’em?
Barnabas: That you saw no one here!

Jenny is being kept in a cell in the basement of the great house on the estate. Wilkins and maidservant Beth were assigned to watch her. On Friday Jenny bashed Wilkins on the head with her dinner tray, unfortunately not hard enough to kill him and get the odious Mr Davis off the show. She did knock him out, though, and ran off to the cottage to stab Quentin. We cut to the cell, where Jenny is babbling to Beth. It gradually dawns on Beth that Jenny is telling her she stabbed Quentin and killed him. Beth locks Jenny in the cell and rushes off to the cottage.

In the cottage, Barnabas has summoned wicked witch Angelique and asked her to bring Quentin back to life. Angelique points out some of the flaws in Barnabas’ plan, and tells him that even if she does grant his wish the price for her services will be very high. They seem to be approaching a tentative agreement when Beth arrives at the door and Angelique vanishes.

Beth finds Barnabas in the cottage. He tries to keep her out. It has long since been established that, as a vampire, Barnabas is far stronger than any mortal man, yet Beth pushes past him without apparent difficulty. For that matter, we also know that he is as capable as Angelique of vanishing into thin air, yet he hangs around while Beth sees Quentin’s body. Barnabas insists she tell no one what she saw in the cottage, and he is staring at her with the same intensity that has sometimes exerted an hypnotic effect on people. This doesn’t work on Beth. She says that she will tell Judith Collins, the mistress of the estate, that Quentin is dead and that Barnabas was with him. Barnabas just watches Beth go. Evidently he has given up on using his vampiric powers. Terry Crawford’s literal acting style doesn’t win her much enthusiasm from the fans of Dark Shadows, but it does add a touch of humor to a scene like this. Vampire? What’s that? Sounds like bullshit, I’m gonna report this to the boss.

We cut to the drawing room of the great house, where Quentin’s body is laid out in a coffin with candles burning on high stands by its head and foot. Barnabas and Beth are there. Beth tells Barnabas she has not yet spoken to Judith. Apparently she just took Quentin’s body to the great house on her own? And found a coffin? And carried it into the drawing room where she put Quentin in it? And that’s how the family is going to find out Quentin is dead, by seeing him lying in state in the middle of the house?

I have questions. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas and Beth exit, and Angelique enters. She tells the corpse that she will raise him from the dead, and that once she does Barnabas will really be sorry.

Episode 720: The big, bad wolf

From #701, the episode in which Dark Shadows first became a costume drama set in the year 1897, they have been strongly hinting that Jenny Collins, the madwoman locked in the room on top of the tower in the great house of Collinwood, is the estranged wife of stuffy Edward Collins. Today, Jenny gets loose, and confronts Edward’s brother, rakish Quentin. It is only then that we learn that she is in fact Quentin’s wife. All of the clues that had led us to the other conclusion take on new meanings in that moment, making it one of the most effective twists on the show.

Man and wife, reunited, til death do them part. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Edward is the father of two children whom we have seen, twelve year old Jamison and nine year old Nora. Jenny has been preoccupied with some dolls she has with her in her prisons, which she calls “my babies.” She is afraid someone will take her “babies” from her.

We came to 1897 along with well-meaning adventurer/ bloodsucking ghoul Barnabas Collins, who in 1969 encountered the ghosts of Quentin and of maidservant Beth. Quentin’s ghost had made the great house uninhabitable and was in the process of killing strange and troubled boy David when Barnabas decided to resort to the mumbo-jumbo that has brought him back to this period. In 1969, Barnabas was not only trying to contain the damage Quentin’s ghost was doing; he was also trying to help drifter Chris Jennings, who was a werewolf. Beth’s ghost appeared to Chris and led him to an unmarked grave containing the remains of an infant wearing an amulet meant to ward off werewolves. This proved that there was a werewolf at Collinwood when Beth and Quentin were alive, and suggested that Chris’ curse was inherited from that person.

When Barnabas first met the living Beth in # 703, he asked if there were any children in the house other than Jamison and Nora. She said that there were not. He wondered if the newborn to whose grave Beth’s ghost led Chris had already died and been buried. But now that we know that Jenny is Quentin’s wife, we remember that in that same episode Quentin caught Beth with $300 and that in #707 we heard that she had taken the money to a “Mrs Fillmore” in town. Perhaps Jenny really did have babies who were taken from her, and perhaps Mrs Fillmore is taking care of them. Perhaps, too, the “Jennings” in Chris’ name indicates that he is a descendant of Jenny, and therefore of Quentin. We have already seen Quentin dabbling in black magic- perhaps he brings the curse of the werewolf on his descendants by means of it.

Jenny’s meeting with Quentin today does not come to a happy ending as far as he is concerned. She leaves him on the floor, with a dagger stuck in his chest.

While the search is on for Jenny, Beth tells another servant that Edward and Quentin’s sister Judith has searched the west wing and is now searching the east wing. This is only the second time the dialogue has made it unequivocally clear that there are two wings extending from the main house, and the first time it is established that the east wing exists prior to the twentieth century. There was a time when the writers had not settled on which side of the house the long-deserted wing lay; the first couple of appearances of the phrase “east wing” dated from then. Subsequently, there were slips of the tongue by actors who were supposed to say “west wing.” We may wonder when, if ever, the writers will find a use for this other part of the house.

Episode 719: Every person has a theme of music

Most of the characters in the part of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897 are villains of one sort of another, but we are supposed to take pleasure in watching them. One exception is the loutish Dirk Wilkins, groundskeeper on the estate of Collinwood. Dirk is humorless, unimaginative, violent, and surly. He is unpleasant to everyone, even his employers. When spinster Judith Collins, the owner of the estate, tells Dirk today that she has an opportunity for him to make some extra cash, he virtually sneers his acceptance. He says in so many words that all he cares about is money, and that he will do anything to get it.

The show didn’t really need to work so hard to make Dirk unlikeable. They’ve already cast instantly detestable actor Roger Davis in the part. But we can see why it was important to them that we have no sympathy for him. Judith hires Dirk to keep an eye on a madwoman named Jenny, whom she and her brother Edward are secretly keeping locked up in a cell in the basement of the great house. We know that Jenny is eagerly looking for someone to stab to death, and so we might be inclined to make excuses for her captors, no matter how screwy their approach. But when Jenny tricks Dirk into looking away from her and slams her dinner tray down on his head, she wins our enthusiastic support. We don’t particularly want her to kill anyone other than Dirk, but we cannot be satisfied with her situation.

Go Jenny go! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The reason Dark Shadows is now a costume drama set in 1897 is that the evil ghost of Quentin Collins overwhelmed every plot point in 1969. So well-meaning time traveler/ bloodsucking fiend from beyond the grave Barnabas Collins did some mumbo-jumbo and brought us back here. Part of Quentin’s reign of terror in the late 1960s was causing a sickly little waltz to resound incessantly throughout the halls of the great house. It turns out the living Quentin is equally insistent on playing the same crepuscular tune on his gramophone to the annoyance of everyone around him. Today Judith declares that the waltz is driving her mad. Quentin apparently thinks he is on a prime-time show where every character has a dedicated musical cue, and declares that “every person has a theme of music” and this creaky jingle is his, so he refuses to stop running it into the ground.

Judith can’t do anything to stop Quentin from playing the waltz over and over, but she isn’t the only one whom it bothers today. The sound of the gramophone leaks from Quentin’s room down to Jenny’s cell, and drives her into the homicidal frenzy that will carry through from her assault on Dirk to the the end of the episode, when she will be holding Quentin’s dagger and wearing a blissful grin. Quentin is so much fun to watch that even his unrelenting playing of the waltz isn’t enough to make us want Jenny to kill him, but if she could chop up his record player that’d be great.

Episode 717: I know what color a lie is

A showcase for the actors today. We begin in the room on top of the tower at the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Madwoman Jenny Collins, who has been locked up in that room for some time, is threatening to stab her sister-in-law Judith with a large pair of scissors. Judith and her brother Edward have been hiding Jenny and trying to keep the rest of the family in the dark about her presence in the house. For services to this secret, they have been paying maidservant Beth Chavez and, we heard in #707, someone named Mrs Fillmore. Beth comes in just in time to distract Jenny with talk about her “babies,” and thereby to prevent her from killing Judith. Jenny turns to some baby dolls, and cuddles them happily.

Judith goes downstairs and encounters newly hired governess Rachel Drummond. Rachel has caught on the someone is living in the tower room, and the other day sneaked up there and let Jenny out. Judith reprimands Rachel for seeing and hearing things that don’t exist. Rachel is a neurotic intellectual. Her insecurities compelled her to investigate the question of the tower room, and also make it plausible that she might eventually cave in to Judith’s attempt to gaslight her into believing that she didn’t really see what she saw.

Rachel goes out, and Beth enters. Judith shows how frustrated she is with the whole situation. This scene is a bit of a letdown. As Judith, Joan Bennett was brilliant opposite Marie Wallace’s Jenny, and brilliant again opposite Kathryn Leigh Scott’s Rachel. But she falls to pieces alone with Terrayne Crawford as Beth. So many of the fansites feature so much grousing about Miss Crawford’s literalist style of acting that I hate to pile on, but it is true that she did not give Bennett anything to play off of. When Miss Crawford delivers a line, its meaning is the dictionary meaning of the words that compose it, no more and no less. She never leaves you wondering what else is going on in Beth’s mind. Sharing a scene with her would be like sharing a scene with a sign labeled “No Right on Red.” Later, Miss Wallace will have a two-scene with Miss Crawford, but as a character in a psychotic state she doesn’t need support. Her lines in that scene are flowery gibberish that don’t work at all, but neither actress is to blame for that.

The master class in acting resumes as we cut to the Old House on the estate. The mysterious Barnabas Collins has recently arrived at Collinwood and is staying in the Old House as the guest of his distant cousins in the great house. Rachel and Barnabas are attracted to each other, and she tells him what has happened. He says that he believes her, and goes on to say that no one at Collinwood is what they seem. She pleasantly replies “Except for you!” He hesitates before agreeing.

More than meets the eye.

In fact, Barnabas has more than five hundred episodes of secrets he is keeping from Rachel and everyone else. Jonathan Frid’s work prior to Dark Shadows was almost entirely on stage, but he used his face like a movie actor, keeping every part of it but his eyes virtually immobile. With that, he can isolate emotions, playing just one feeling at a time. All anyone can see by looking at him in his scenes with Rachel today is that he is anguished. Rachel interprets that anguish as a sign that he cares about her, and she is delighted to think that she has such a straightforward and reliable friend.

Returning viewers know that Barnabas is in fact the most dangerous person Rachel has ever met. That knowledge on our part frees Miss Scott to play Rachel’s relief at Barnabas’ friendliness as broadly as she likes. Her unrestrained display of good cheer brightens the episode’s otherwise somber emotional palette, but the irony the audience finds in a woman having this reaction to Barnabas keeps the dramatic tension high.

Barnabas walks Rachel back to the great house. They have made a plan that she will bring him the key to the tower room and he will go up there to investigate. She impulsively kisses him on the cheek. Rachel goes in the house and finds to her surprise that Judith is still awake. Judith detains Rachel in the drawing room with a glass of sherry and a lot of disconnected talk. Judith doesn’t make eye contact with Rachel during this scene; she doesn’t want a conversation. She is simply enjoying her new position as head of the household. Rachel cannot get away until Beth enters and Judith abruptly dismisses her.

Barnabas has been watching the windows of the tower room and has seen lights go on and off. Nervous, he considers letting himself into the room without a key; he has the means to do that, but he would like to keep Rachel from knowing about his abilities, and so he resolves to wait for her.

After Rachel brings Barnabas the key, he goes to the tower room and uses it to let himself in. No one is there. He picks up the damaged, severed head of a doll, one of Jenny’s “babies.” Suddenly, he hears someone enter. He turns, and reacts with shock.

Episode 716: Someone who is not going to come

Governess Rachel Drummond has figured out that her employers, the Collins family of Collinwood, are keeping someone locked in the room atop the tower in the great house on the estate. Rachel has seemed frightened ever since we first saw her, in #705, and this information has added to her fear considerably. Rachel recently came to the conclusion that some unknown person was trying to harm her. She then let Romani stereotype Magda Rákóczi talk her into believing that the prisoner in the tower room was that person, and that her only hope was to choose the time of their confrontation.

Today, Rachel opens the door to the room and goes in. We know that the enemy Rachel ought to fear is wicked witch Angelique, and we can tell that the person in the room is not her. Instead, she is a madwoman named Jenny, and she is tall with red hair. Jenny attacks Rachel, pushes her back in the room, and flees, locking the door behind her and trapping Rachel.

The show has been dropping broad hints that Jenny is the estranged wife of stuffy Edward Collins and the mother of Edward’s children, Rachel’s charges Jamison and Nora. Once she is on the loose, Jenny slips into Nora’s room and looks at a framed picture of Edward there, expressing her hatred for him. Nora has been outside; she had a dream that her missing mother came home, and she went out to look for her. When Nora comes back into the room, Jenny dares not show herself, but stays in the shadows and longingly caresses a doll.

Jenny, in 1897, with a Raggedy Ann doll, first made in 1918. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

A servant named Dirk Wilkins figures in the episode a couple of times. He finds Nora outside, picks her up, and with considerable roughness carries her into the house. Perhaps this roughness is only apparent, but actor Roger Davis was notorious for physically abusing his scene-mates on camera, especially women and children. He may well have been even harder on Denise Nickerson than Dirk is on Nora.

One of my ways of making the show tolerable to watch when Mr Davis is on camera is to imagine someone else playing his part. Dirk is supposed to be unlikable; he sneers at everyone, even his employers. In the part of Dark Shadows set in 1968, a character named Harry Johnson had a similar manner, and even wore a costume like Dirk’s. The first actor to play Harry was Craig Slocum, who was pretty bad, but the second, Edward Marshall, took the same personality and made it quite amusing to watch. Mr Marshall might have made a fine Dirk. Other accomplished performers had small turns as background players on Dark Shadows and surely would have been glad to accept speaking roles. Among these, Harvey Keitel (Dancer at Blue Whale in #33) and David Groh (Ghost of One-Armed Man in #544 and Hangman’s Assistant in #664) went on to do outstanding work playing ill-tempered men, so in either of their hands Dirk might have become a breakout star.

Episode 713: The heart of the room

Vampire Barnabas Collins returns to his coffin at dawn to find it already occupied. Governess Rachel Drummond is resting there, and is under the impression that she is Barnabas’ lost love Josette. He exclaims that only his old enemy, wicked witch Angelique, could be “monstrous enough” to put Rachel in this position.

Longtime viewers remember that in #248 Barnabas forced Maggie Evans, who like Rachel is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, into this coffin because she refused to submit to his attempt to brainwash her into thinking she was Josette. So we know that Angelique is not all alone in the ranks of the sufficiently monstrous. On the other hand, we also know that it was Angelique who made Barnabas a vampire in the first place, and that like others who labor under Angelique’s curses he is in many ways a reflection of her. So perhaps his remark is not so preposterous an example of lack of self-awareness as it initially seems.

Shortly after, Rachel comes to in the front parlor of Barnabas’ home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, and is puzzled to find herself there with him. She has no idea how she got to the Old House, and certainly has no memory of the coffin in its basement. Barnabas tells Rachel he found her wandering in the woods. She goes to pieces, overwhelmed that she is not in control of her actions. He talks soothingly to her. Rachel collects herself, but is still struggling not to let Barnabas see her cry. He offers to walk her home to the great house on the estate. This offer is sheer bravado on his part- the sun has been up for some time, and he cannot possibly expect to survive outdoors all the way to the great house. Luckily for Barnabas, Rachel declines his offer. Unable to keep her emotions in check any longer, she hurries out the front door, walking herself home.

At the great house, Rachel sees maidservant Beth enter the foyer carrying a baby doll. Rachel says that her charge Nora will like the doll very much. Beth sputters at this remark, and spinster Judith Collins summons Beth to the drawing room. Rachel eavesdrops while Judith scolds Beth for her carelessness. Returning viewers know that Beth is helping Judith and Judith’s brother Edward keep someone prisoner in the room atop the tower of the great house, and that it is hugely important to Judith and Edward that no one knows about this. Beth’s sputtering response to Rachel told us also that the doll is not for Nora, but for this mysterious prisoner. Rachel does not have all the information about the matter that we do, but she has enough to suspect something very much like the truth, so we wonder what she gets out of the conversation she overhears.

Later, Rachel meets Beth in the foyer and urgently pleads with her for information about Edward’s wife, the mother of Nora and of her other charge, Jamison. Beth tells her what Edward has already made abundantly clear, that the topic is utterly forbidden. Rachel sidles up to Beth, bends her head at an angle, and speaks in an urgent whisper, something we have not seen from either Maggie or Miss Scott’s other role, Josette. Indeed, Rachel is quite a fresh character, impressively so from an actress whom longtime viewers already seen for so many hours.

Rachel pleads with Beth for more information.

Judith overhears Rachel’s questioning of Beth and Beth’s response that Rachel should leave the matter alone. Judith dismisses Beth and talks to Rachel, telling her that Beth has given her very good advice. Judith has figured so far as a stern and menacing figure; it is something of a surprise that she does not fire Rachel on the spot, and even more of a surprise that she indicates she will not report the conversation to Edward.

The opening voiceover will tell us in a couple of days that Rachel’s reckless curiosity is “spurred on by her own fears.” Miss Scott has been playing this motivation all along. When we first saw Rachel, she and Edward were in a train station. He was being courteous to her, but she was stiff and awkward, clearly very much afraid of something. She is often seen reading, and her dialogue is both filled with signs of intellectual ambition and delivered with a frantic edge, suggesting that her studiousness has its roots in her attempt to defend herself against some danger. We have no idea as yet what that danger was or how it formed Rachel before we met her, but we know that her reaction to the evidence that she has found that someone is being held prisoner in the tower room at Collinwood is a deepening of her long-established fears, not the sudden appearance of new fear.

For her part, Judith’s main concern is finding her late grandmother’s missing will. The late Mrs Collins kept the provisions of her will secret, and it was stolen shortly after her death by some people who wanted to forge a new will and get the estate for themselves.

A woman named Magda Rákóczi shows up at the house, claiming to be able to help Judith find the will. Judith is violently prejudiced against Magda for her Romani ethnicity, and dismisses her offer of help out of hand. But Magda persists. Knowing that her grandmother had a fondness for Magda, Judith lets her into the drawing room and sits behind her while she reads the tarot. Judith keeps protesting that the previous cases Magda cites as evidence that the tarot can tell the future prove nothing, and that in her interpretations of them she is “making no sense whatsoever.”

Magda then says that the arrangement of the cards means that the will is hidden in the room where Judith’s grandmother died, in “the heart of the room.” In an entirely different voice than she has been using so far, Judith asks “What is meant by the heart of the room?” With that, Magda knows that she has Judith in the palm of her hand, and she starts to ham it up. “The hearrrt of the roooom… is a booook! A book that was very important to your grandmother! A very, very oooolld booook!” Judith decides this must be the family history, and she tells Magda that she will look through it at once.

Magda goes over the top. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In fact, Barnabas found the will and hid it in the family history. He has sent Magda to tell Judith where to find it. It comes as no surprise to us when Judith comes downstairs with the will and is jubilant to find that she is the sole heir of her grandmother’s vast holdings. After all, Barnabas wants the original provisions of the will to be enacted, and the only way to ensure that result is to see that it comes to the hand of the person who is its chief beneficiary.

We end with Beth standing at the door to the tower room, holding the doll and addressing the person inside as “Jenny.” We learned in #701 that Beth was originally maid to a lady named Jenny, that everyone thinks Jenny has gone away, and that it is surprising Beth has stayed on at the house in Jenny’s absence. Now it is confirmed that Jenny is the prisoner in the tower room. The obvious inference is that Jenny is Edward’s estranged wife, and that she has become the sort of crazy lady who appreciates baby dolls.