jerry lacy – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1000: All people have a reason for their fears

Trask the butler is surprised to see young Amy Collins in the great house of Collinwood. Amy’s cousin Quentin, the master of Collinwood, sent her to stay in the Old House on the estate, home to Will and Carolyn Loomis. The visibly uncomfortable Trask tells Amy she is not supposed to come back until Quentin sends for her. Amy says that she can’t stand it at the Loomises. Trask snaps at her for making life more complicated “at a time like this.” Amy asks what’s so unusual about this time, and Trask claims that he just means that he has been working hard. After an awkward silence, Amy asks if there has been any news about someone called Dameon Edwards. At Edwards’ name, Trask flies out of control. He grabs Amy by the shoulders, leans down so that his nose is in her face, and shouts that she has seen Edwards again. Terrified, she says she hasn’t. He shakes her and shouts louder, she freezes tighter and tighter. It’s getting pretty disturbing when the front door opens. Quentin enters, with two other adults, and demands to know what Trask thinks he’s doing.

Jerry Lacy and Denise Nickerson do a great job in this scene, which comes as no surprise to longtime viewers. For much of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897. In that segment, Nickerson and Mr Lacy played Nora Collins and the evil Gregory Trask. They were terrific together then, as they are today.

Gregory was cruel to children, including Nora. Gregory’s goal was to take control of Collinwood and all its residents, and for a time he seemed to be succeeding. As such, Gregory’s abuse of Nora left us feeling helpless. This Trask is not in control of anything, least of all himself. We don’t know exactly what secret he is frantically trying to keep in connection with Edwards, but we know he believes that it might be exposed at any moment and that when it is he will be ruined. He is acting from panic. Outrageous as Trask’s attack on Amy is, we can see that it is not likely to be repeated and it does not fill us with despair.

Quentin takes Amy to the drawing room and talks with her privately. She is absorbed in her dislike of the Loomises’ house. She says she has a feeling that something terrible is happening there, but she can’t give any reason why she should feel that way. She says that Will spends all of his time writing a new book. This surprises Quentin, who says that Will hasn’t written a word in five years. Amy says that he is busy now, and mentions that she stole a couple of pages from his wastebasket. Quentin asks if she still has them. She hands them over, and he reads them avidly.

Quentin is so enthusiastic about joining Amy in spying on Will’s new project that he forgets all about Trask. Amy seems to have forgotten him as well. When Quentin walked in and found Trask getting rough with her, it looked like he was going to dismiss him on the spot, but now it seems Trask will keep his job for a while longer.

The two who entered with Quentin were Cyrus Longworth and Alexis Stokes. Alexis is the identical twin sister of Quentin’s late wife, Angelique. Cyrus was a friend of Angelique’s, and is a fool. He is a scientist by occupation, and unknown to any of the other characters in today’s episode has been taking a potion of his own devising to turn himself into a hairier and more openly sadistic version of himself. That Jekyll and Hyde potion was the end product of an idea he got from Angelique. Cyrus tells Alexis today that Angelique was his teacher in matters of the occult, with which he is fascinated.

Quentin, Cyrus, and Alexis have returned from Angelique’s tomb. Alexis went there to try to prevent the men from unsealing the tomb and opening the coffin. They were so caught up in the idea that she was really Angelique come back to life that there was no point in her trying to talk sense to them. When they had done their work, they were astounded to find, not only that Angelique’s body was where it was supposed to be, but that it was perfectly preserved six months after her death. Quentin twice asked Cyrus how that could be, first appealing to his expertise as a scientist, then to his studies in occult lore, and each time Cyrus responded with a declaration that what they were seeing could not possibly exist.

The men are now convinced that Alexis is not Angelique, and they tell Trask this. He never thought she was, and is entirely absorbed in his fears about Dameon Edwards. All he says in reply is that he believes there is an evil presence in the house.

Quentin and Cyrus want to cremate Angelique’s body. They announced this plan while they were still in the tomb, prompting Alexis to remind them that her sister’s will specified that she be buried and to threaten to take them to court if they go against Angelique’s wishes.

Cyrus talks with Alexis in Angelique’s old bedroom, telling her that the body’s extraordinarily uncorrupted state has persuaded him that Angelique survives in some uncanny way. He urges her to let the body be destroyed. She continues to demur.

Cyrus says that when she was alive, Angelique had a “rapport with the unnatural” that inclines him to believe she might come “back from the death.” These awkward phrases were probably just line bobbles by Christopher Pennock, but they suit Cyrus well. He’s supposed to be an intellectual who spends little time talking to anyone, and such people do indeed tend to stumble over their words.

Later, Alexis summons Trask. She asks him to drive her to the cemetery and to keep their trip there a secret from Quentin. He acquiesces.

At the mausoleum, Trask is worried about an impending storm. He says he will go back to the car to get an umbrella, but Alexis tells him to forget about that. He is simply to wait for her in the car. She plans to spend only ten minutes with her sister’s remains.

Alexis looks in the coffin and talks to Angelique. She has bad news for her:

I don’t know what your secret was, Angelique, or why you still look as you did in life. I only know that it is wrong. It goes against the natural order of things. I don’t want to do what I have to do now. Quentin and Cyrus are right. Your body must be destroyed.

Distraught, Alexis puts her hand on Angelique’s shoulder, touching her sister one last time. We cut to a closeup of Angelique lying in her coffin. Her eyes pop open, and her lips curl into a smile. For a half a second, these motions look like they might be mechanical reflexes taking place within a dead body as it begins to decompose. But then she speaks: “My dear Alexis, you were always so right. Someone must be destroyed, but it won’t be me. It will be you.”

The show has kept us in suspense for three weeks as to whether Alexis was Angelique. Now, they’ve settled that question, and we know who Alexis is. Unfortunately for her, it seems we just have time to say goodbye.

In our world, bodies do sometimes turn up long after death showing no visible signs of decay. There were several vampire panics in Europe in the early modern era when exhumed corpses were found still looking fresh after months in the grave. Cyrus does not know of any such events in his world’s history, so he and Quentin have to come up with the idea of a panicked response on their own.

It has also been traditional in many branches of Christianity to regard a long-uncorrupted corpse as a count in favor of putting the person on the calendar of saints. Dostoevsky was hugely fashionable in the USA in the Cold War years of the 1950s and 1960s, and it is probable that the writing staff had at least a nodding acquaintance with The Brothers Karamazov. One of the central episodes of that novel comes when the admirers of the godly Father Zosima insist on leaving his body unburied for a long period, certain that it will remain uncorrupt and prove that the anniversary of his passing should be kept as a feast day. To their horror, his remains rot in the usual way. We’ve only been in this particular universe for four weeks, and the only indication we have so far had that Christianity even exists here came early on, when Will used the sign of the cross to immobilize and trap a vampire. So it is no surprise that Quentin, Cyrus, and Alexis never consider that the perfect preservation of Angelique’s body might suggest that she has taken a place among the saints.

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 994: I might as well be glad

Amy Collins twice sees the ghost of Dameon Edwards, whom she and others at the great house of Collinwood apparently knew when he was alive a year or so previously. At that time, Dark Shadows was set in a different universe than the one it has been showing us for the last few weeks, so the first thing the audience has ever heard about Dameon is that he is dead. Nor do we learn much more about him today. He looks at people with a vaguely sad expression, wanders off, and vanishes into thin air, never speaking a word. His part reminds me of G. K. Chesterton’s line that “Journalism consists largely in saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”

When Amy sees Dameon the second time, he leads her to the basement of Collinwood. This is a bit of a treat for longtime viewers. We may only have been in this universe for a few weeks, but the house is supposed to be laid out similarly to the one where we spent the previous 196 weeks, and the basement of that house was a significant set in the first year of the show. We haven’t been to that basement since #273, when it was revealed that reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard was mistaken in her belief that she had killed her husband Paul and that he was buried in a locked storeroom there. It turned out Paul wasn’t dead at all. Liz was so embarrassed when her mistake was revealed that no one ever mentioned it again.

Dameon reminds us of that storeroom when he leads Amy, not to the spot where it was, but to an alcove in the wall opposite it. Amy’s cousin Daniel’s bedroom is a mirror image of his counterpart David’s bedroom in the other continuity. If the basement is a mirror image as well, the alcove to which Dameon leads Amy corresponds to the locked storeroom. Dameon turns towards the door, and vanishes as he walks into it. Amy screams.

He wasn’t there again today. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Dameon is completely new to the audience, and the story of Liz’ belief that Paul was buried in the basement is so old that the reference will be lost on anyone who hasn’t been writing up notices about every episode of the show for the last few years. So the whole thing is pretty ineffective. Indeed, while Amy is screaming Denise Nickerson is visibly struggling not to laugh out loud.

Oh I am *sooo* scared! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I’m sure this episode is the result of a failed plan. Dameon must represent a character who would have meant something to us. Since most of the people we have seen in the last few weeks have the same names and are played by the same actors as counterparts from the original continuity, that character would likely have been a familiar face. The one face that would have brought the locked room in Liz’ basement to the minds of longtime viewers would have been that of Dennis Patrick. Patrick was in #273 as Jason McGuire, the seagoing con man who first convinced Liz that Paul was buried in her basement and then returned to exploit that belief by blackmailing her, and returned late in 1969 as Paul himself. Liz’ counterpart in the current universe is named Mrs Stoddard, so Paul must have existed there as well.

Patrick and his wife Barbara Cason were at this time in Tarrytown, New York, playing supporting roles in the feature film House of Dark Shadows. Patrick’s role as the sheriff puts him in only a few scenes, and Dan Curtis may well have hoped that once he’d got Patrick back to the East Coast he would be able to persuade him to return to the show for a short stint as Parallel Paul’s ghost. But Patrick was based in Los Angeles at this time, busy there as a producer and in demand as an actor, and he had no interest in coming back to a daytime drama taped in NYC for any length of time. So Dameon may have been a last-minute patch to cover Parallel Paul’s absence.

If Plan A had been that today’s ghost would represent Parallel Paul, Plan B appears to have been that he would remind longtime viewers of Quentin’s counterpart in the main continuity. Quentin was introduced late in 1968 as a ghost who did not speak. He first appeared to the children at Collinwood. Those were Amy’s counterpart, Amy Jennings, and her friend, strange and troubled boy David Collins, whose counterpart here is Daniel. Quentin’s ghost beckoned Amy and David into hidden rooms where they would, as they called it, “play the game.” When Dameon beckons Amy to the basement today, she asks if this is another of the games he used to play with her and Daniel.

The echo of the “Haunting of Collinwood” story is clear. But a revisiting of it that would have been effective would have taken some time to set up, especially since there is a living, speaking Quentin at the center of the show now. By the time they got to this topic, David Henesy had left to start his own stay in Tarrytown for House of Dark Shadows, so we won’t be seeing Daniel for a while. The most they can do is what we see here.

The upshot of these two aborted plans is a situation that does not seem to belong on the show at all, and it is no wonder Nickerson can’t keep a straight face. Even more than it reminds me of “Lord Jones is dead,” this installment reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1920 poem “The Penitent“:

I had a little Sorrow,

Born of a little Sin,

I found a room all damp with gloom

And shut us all within;

And, “Little Sorrow, weep,” said I,

“And, Little Sin, pray God to die,

And I upon the floor will lie

And think how bad I’ve been!”

Alas for pious planning —

It mattered not a whit!

As far as gloom went in that room,

The lamp might have been lit!

My Little Sorrow would not weep,

My Little Sin would go to sleep —

To save my soul I could not keep

My graceless mind on it!

So up I got in anger,

And took a book I had,

And put a ribbon on my hair

To please a passing lad.

And, “One thing there’s no getting by —

I’ve been a wicked girl,” said I;

“But if I can’t be sorry, why,

I might as well be glad!”

I don’t know if Amy had been a wicked girl, but the other characters today all seem to have secrets that it would behoove them to feel sorry for when Dameon shows up. There is drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, who like Amy sees Dameon twice; sleazy musician Bruno Hess, whom Quentin suspects of having killed Dameon; and butler Mr Trask, who, when Quentin mentions Dameon, frantically denies knowing anything about him, and who, when Amy says she saw Dameon, squeezes a drinking glass so tightly it shatters in his hand.

This is the first time we see Mr Trask. He is the fourth character played by Jerry Lacy. Mr Lacy first joined the cast in the fall of 1967 to do his celebrated Humphrey Bogart imitation as lawyer Tony Peterson before finding immortality as overheated witch-hunter Reverend Trask in the 1790s flashback that ran from November 1967 to March 1968. That first Trask came to his end sealed in a basement alcove not so different from the one into which Dameon disappears today. That incident made a big impression, and was referenced several times on the show and time and again in spin-offs of Dark Shadows in other media. Mr Trask’s debut today may, in the original, never-developed plan, have been intended to remind viewers of it. Perhaps Mr Trask would be the one to open the alcove and find Parallel Paul’s remains. That would be a fitting way to join the story that introduced the idea of a basement burial to Dark Shadows with the famous story that showed one taking place.

Mr Lacy matched his triumph as the first Trask when he returned as his hypocritical descendant Gregory in the 1897 segment that spanned most of 1969. Today’s Mr Trask is in part a placeholder for sinister housekeeper Miss Hoffman. Quentin explains today that he sent Miss Hoffman to visit her friends. Mr Lacy was in one scene of House of Dark Shadows, a funeral sequence shot on the first day of principal photography, and unlike Dennis Patrick he was still living in NYC. So he was available for a couple of weeks of fill-in work. The role is thin on paper, but Mr Lacy gives the part a lot of life.

Episode 869: The man who walks in the day

In October 1897, the hypocritical Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask is married to the vastly wealthy Judith Collins, owner of the estate of Collinwood and of the Collins family businesses. For more than thirteen weeks, everything seemed to be going Trask’s way. He had gaslighted Judith into a mental hospital and had almost free rein over all of her assets. In her absence, he invited the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris to stay in the great house on the estate, and set out to seduce her.

Piece by piece, Trask’s little corner of paradise fell apart. First, 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi orchestrated a series of events that led Trask to sign a confession to the murder of his first wife, and no matter how many times he destroyed the confession new copies of it kept materializing. Then Petofi erased the personality of Trask’s daughter and enforcer Charity, replacing it with that of late Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye. Later, Amanda fell in love with Judith’s brother Quentin, told Trask off, and wound up leaving for New York by herself. Now, Judith has returned from the mental hospital, all sane and deeply suspicious.

The front door of the great house is Trask’s enemy today. No sooner does he enter it than he finds Pansy in the foyer, singing her song. He demands she stop and tells her he is her father. She laughs at this claim, and reminisces about the late Bertie Faye. Trask goes into the drawing room, and to his horror sees a large oil painting of Amanda on an easel. We saw Pansy setting it up earlier in the episode, and saw her buy it a few days ago. But Trask didn’t see those things, and when she tells him she doesn’t know anything about it, he seems to accept her denials. She exits upstairs.

The front door opens again, and Judith’s brother Edward enters with two other men. One appears to be Quentin, but is in fact Petofi in possession of Quentin’s body. The other appears to be time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins.

Trask and Edward both believe that Petofi is Quentin; since he is played by David Selby, I call him Q-Petofi. The man who appears to be Barnabas is very weak. He says that his name is indeed Barnabas Collins, but that he is not the vampire. He claims to have arrived from England, to have been attacked by a vampire who looked just like him, and to have little memory of what happened after.

In #845, Pansy went into a cave and found a coffin containing what appeared to be Barnabas. She drove a stake through his heart. When Edward and Q-Petofi met this weak Barnabas yesterday in the doctor’s office, they were skeptical of his story. They took him to the cave, opened the coffin, and saw the body Pansy had staked inside, the stake still lodged in its heart. Since they could see the two of them side by side, Edward could only conclude that the weak man is different from the vampire, and that his story is therefore true. Q-Petofi, well aware of the many magical and science-fictional entities in Barnabas’ orbit, is not at all convinced.

Trask sees the weak Barnabas and is enraged that Edward and Q-Petofi have brought the vampire back from the dead. While Q-Petofi takes the weak Barnabas upstairs to a bedroom, Edward tries to reason with Trask. This is seldom a fruitful exercise. When Edward finally points out that it is broad daylight and the weak Barnabas is alive and moving, Trask is left speechless.

Alone with the weak Barnabas, Q-Petofi tries to trick him into believing that he is Quentin and that he can trust him. When Q-Petofi goes on about all the secrets that Barnabas and Quentin have shared, the weak Barnabas responds only with bewilderment.

Q-Petofi goes back to the cave and sets the coffin on fire, acting on the hypothesis that the destruction of the staked Barnabas will have some kind of effect on the weak Barnabas. We cut back to Collinwood and see that it has none. Trask lets himself into the bedroom. After some small talk, he thrusts a large wooden cross at the weak Barnabas’ face and stands silently for a moment. The weak Barnabas looks up from his bed and asks if Trask is all right. He hurriedly says that he only brought the cross to help him pray for his recovery. The weak Barnabas observes that this is very kind, and closes his eyes while Trask kneels beside the bed.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that not only the actor Jerry Lacy, but the character Gregory Trask, seems to enjoy himself very much when there is something to be righteously indignant about. Not only does Trask have a whole set of self-aggrandizing mannerisms and techniques for silencing everyone else when he is furious, but as a con man an atmosphere of crisis provides him with an opportunity to think on his feet and devise new schemes for bilking people out of whatever they have that he wants. Mr Lacy’s joy in performance runs throughout the whole episode, but Trask’s goes through wild fluctuations, peaking each time he thinks he has found a new way to present himself as the champion of The Almighty and plummeting each time his understanding of the situation is deflated. In his first several appearances, Trask was so overwhelmingly evil and so frequently successful that he was hard to watch. When we see him repeatedly brought up short in an episode like this, all of the discomfort of those early days pays off.

In the drawing room, Edward tells Pansy that there is a sick man in a bed upstairs who looks like the vampire Barnabas and is named Barnabas Collins, but is not the man she staked. She is horrified at the thought. Barnabas was indirectly responsible for the death of Pansy as a physical being, and later murdered her fiancé, the childlike Carl Collins. He also took Charity as one of his victims for a time. Besides, in her manner of dress, quantity of makeup, working-class accent, and brashly friendly manner Pansy is the representative of all the “girls at the docks” upon whom Barnabas has fed down the centuries. So no one has more reason to fear Barnabas than does Pansy in the form of Charity. Edward reassures her as best he can, then goes up to look in on the patient.

Pansy absorbs the news that another Barnabas Collins is in the house.

The scene between Pansy and Edward will remind longtime viewers of the characters the same actors played between November 1967 and
March 1968, when Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. Nancy Barrett was fluttery heiress Millicent Collins, while Louis Edmonds was haughty overlord Joshua Collins. In #450, Millicent had discovered the horrible truth about Barnabas and it had proven to be too much for her rather fragile grip on sanity. She decided that the vampire was not her cousin, but an impostor, and she told Joshua that it was wrong of him to have “That man who says he is Barnabas” in the house.

Not only is Pansy’s horror at the thought of a man who says that he is Barnabas staying at Collinwood reminiscent of Millicent, but her relationship to Charity also reflects the development of Millicent throughout the 1790s segment. Millicent’s transformation from a lighter-than-air comedy character to a darkly mad victim, first of her wicked husband Nathan, then of Barnabas, marked the transition to the climactic phase of the 1790s segment. Charity’s replacement by Pansy in #819 came at a time when the show was flashing many signals that the 1897 segment was nearing its end. Those signals may well have reflected an earlier plan, but 1897 was such a hit that they kept passing by the off-ramps back to the 1960s and restarting the uncertain and frightening journey into the past. Now it seems they really are getting ready to move on, and Pansy’s prominence reminds us of just how radically different a place Collinwood is now than it was when we arrived in this period in #701, at the beginning of March.

Pansy is still quaking at the thought of another Barnabas Collins when Q-Petofi enters and closes the doors of the drawing room behind him. Pansy hasn’t quite figured out his true identity, but she knows that he is not really Quentin, and that he does not mean her well. She is terrified and says she will scream unless he opens the doors.

Regular viewers have reason to believe Pansy will do more than scream. In #829, she tried to stab Quentin. And those who have been with the show for a long time will remember what happened in #204, broadcast and set in April 1967. Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, another Nancy Barrett character, found herself in the drawing room with dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. When Willie closed the doors and refused to open them, Carolyn didn’t bother screaming- she pulled a loaded gun on him.

Q-Petofi has magical powers that neither Quentin nor Willie could match, so he is not in mortal jeopardy as they would be were they to put themselves in his position. But he has created a volatile situation, and unless he resolves it within a few seconds he is likely to find himself with a huge mess on his hands. Rather than falling back on his occult talents, Q-Petofi takes a page from Quentin’s book and charms Pansy into cooperating. He tells her that he is as frightened of Barnabas as she is. That intrigues her sufficiently that she starts listening to him. He tells her that only she can discern whether the man in the sick bed upstairs is what he claims to be. A moment later, Q-Petofi has persuaded Pansy to go with him to see the weak Barnabas. The episode ends with Pansy looking at the weak Barnabas lying in bed, her eyes widening in a strong but unspecified reaction. We will have to wait until tomorrow to find out whether she is terrified at the sight of her nemesis or amazed to see an innocent man wearing the hated face.

Episode 833: We don’t have any secrets in Collinwood

There once was a woman named Miss Charity Trask. Charity was desperate to please her father, the hypocritical and overwhelmingly evil Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask. She faced the world as Trask’s enforcer, and was herself so fiercely repressed that she drained the joy out of every group she joined.

There is no longer such a person as Miss Charity Trask. Sorcerer Count Petofi caused the spirit of the late Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl and fake psychic, to take up residence in Charity’s body. Charity/ Pansy still lives in the great house of Collinwood, of which Trask has established himself as master, but since her only functioning mind is that of the deceased Pansy, she doesn’t understand why people insist on livenaming her.

Charity/ Pansy enters the drawing room and finds Amanda Harris. Amanda greets her as “Miss Trask,” alienating her at once. Charity/ Pansy demands to know what Amanda is doing at Collinwood. Amanda says that she lives there as Trask’s guest. Charity/ Pansy calls for Trask. She leans out the door of the drawing room and in the loudest, harshest voice Nancy Barrett could manage shouts “Hey, Trask! Trask!” It takes Trask a moment to answer, perhaps because Jerry Lacy had the same trouble we had while watching and couldn’t stop laughing. It is one of the top ten intentional comedy moments in the series, maybe top five.

Charity/ Pansy can see that Trask has designs on Amanda, as can everyone else. But she doesn’t care about that. She is convinced Amanda has come to the house to seduce rakish libertine Quentin Collins, whom she herself is determined to marry.

Amanda had no such plans when she first came to the house, but she meets Quentin today, and a few minutes later they are locked in a passionate kiss. Trask surprises them, and declares that he will protect Amanda from her weaknesses.

For his part, Quentin is busy trying to figure out what is happening to him. He is a werewolf, and there is a full Moon tonight, yet he did not transform. He finds a portrait in his room. It bears a plate with his name and the current year- “Quentin Collins, 1897.” But it depicts him as he is when he is in his lupine form. He knows that it is the work of artist Charles Delaware Tate, and goes to confront Tate in his studio in the nearby village of Collinsport.

Quentin handles Tate roughly and demands to know why he painted a wolf on the canvas with his nameplate. Tate says that Charity saw the painting and thought it looked like a wolf, but that when he looked at it himself he saw only Quentin’s face. Quentin takes Tate to his room and shows him the painting; Tate is shocked to see that it is, indeed, the wolf.

Tate gets another shock before he leaves the house. He meets Amanda, and Trask asks him to paint her portrait. Tate has never seen Amanda before, but he has painted her many times. Returning viewers know that Tate’s painting abilities are a gift from Petofi, and that with them comes the power to conjure into existence that which he paints. Amanda is Tate’s creation.

Tate doesn’t want to accept this fact, and so he flees the house. He rushes back to his studio, and tries to take his mind off what is happening by sketching a still life. He adds an imaginary vase to the arrangement of fruit on the table before him. To his dismay, the vase materializes.

Tate painted Amanda into existence two years prior, and has been working steadily as a visual artist since. So you might wonder why he is only now noticing that things pop into being when he draws or paints them.

One possible explanation that comes to mind is about Petofi, the source of Tate’s abilities. Petofi’s right hand was cut off a hundred years ago, in 1797, and most of his power went with it. He was just recently reunited with the Hand. It once more grows from his wrist, and he is restored to his former might. Perhaps when Petofi first gave Tate his abilities, he could give him just enough to create Amanda and a great deal of commercial success. But now he is stronger, and perhaps Tate is stronger too. Petofi had better hope Tate doesn’t think of painting a picture of an avenger putting him to death for the many crimes he has committed against the Rroma people.

Episode 830: Up in the tower room, all bloody

We open in the woods on the estate of Collinwood, where a young woman in heavy makeup and bright clothing is crying. Another woman in even heavier makeup and even brighter clothing approaches and asks her what is wrong. The first woman says that she had a vision which told her that the rakish Quentin Collins will die of stab wounds twelve days from now, on 10 September 1897.

The first woman used to be Charity Trask, the miserably repressed daughter of the evil Gregory Trask. She is now possessed by the spirit of Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye. Charity knew that Quentin was a werewolf, and wanted nothing to do with him. Evidently Pansy did not acquire that knowledge when she took up residence in Charity’s body, and has decided that she will marry Quentin. Quentin has no interest in either Charity or Pansy, and already has two other fiancées, one of whom he loves, at least after his fashion, and the other of whom is sealed to him by a pact with the Devil. Yesterday Charity/ Pansy learned of the second engagement, and tried to kill Quentin to prevent it coming about; week before last, she tried to end the first engagement by killing the fiancée. Pansy had her faults, but she wasn’t inclined to physical violence. That part seems to be Charity’s contribution to the symbiont.

The other woman is broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi. Magda was the one who made Quentin a werewolf in the first place. She cursed him for murdering his wife Jenny, who was her sister. It was only after she had placed the curse that Magda learned that Jenny had given birth to Quentin’s twin children, a boy and a girl. Since the curse is hereditary, Magda is now desperate to lift it, and she and Quentin have become allies.

Some time ago, we learned that if Quentin dies, there will be no hope of lifting the curse. So Magda is terrified when Charity/ Pansy tells her of her vision of Quentin’s death. She takes her back home to the great house on the estate, where her father and Quentin are bickering while they recap yesterday’s story. Trask tries to deny that Charity/ Pansy is insane or that she is capable of killing, but when she enters and announces that she will murder the first person who comes between her and Quentin he has to admit that it might be time to find a place for her in residential care.

We turn our attention to the upstairs of the great house. We see Charity/ Pansy in bed, with Magda sitting in a chair beside. The gramophone is playing a record of Pansy Faye’s theme song. Regular viewers will wonder where Charity/ Pansy could possibly have found such a thing. Charity never met the living Pansy, who was killed the very evening she arrived at Collinwood. Perhaps Pansy’s fiancé, the childlike Carl Collins, bought the record when he met Pansy in Atlantic City and brought it back with him. Carl himself was killed well before the possession began, but perhaps Charity or Charity/ Pansy found it among Carl’s effects.

Charity asks Magda if she likes the tune. “I only like Gypsy music,” she replies. Charity/ Pansy and Quentin both reiterate their theme songs endlessly, but few other characters in the 1897 segment have so much as a dedicated entrance cue. This line of Magda’s makes us wonder what the show might have been like if they had given every major character a theme song.

Trask has a crisis in the drawing room. He hears a ghostly voice warning him that there will be another killing soon. He starts shouting the name “Minerva!” and pleading for mercy. First time viewers might not know what to make of this. Those who have been with the show for a while know that Minerva was Trask’s wife and Charity’s mother, and that he instigated a plot to murder her so that he could marry wealthy spinster Judith Collins and become master of Collinwood. When the voice starts to talk about “the beast that walks like a man,” Trask says “You’re… not Minerva?” Jerry Lacy is an expert comic actor, and his delivery of that line is laugh-out-loud funny.

The same ghost appears visibly to Quentin in his room. He recognizes it as that of Tessie Kincaid, a woman he killed in a recent fit of lycanthropy. He knows that she is appearing to him because tonight there will be a full Moon.

Tessie appears to Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Magda enters and finds Quentin writing a suicide note. She tells him he must not kill himself. She chains him to a post in his room and stands by with a pistol. Trask enters and finds them in this compromising position. Mrs Acilius and I laughed as we imagined how Magda and Quentin might have claimed they were planning to spend the evening.

But there is no point in lying to Trask. Between what Tessie’s ghost told him and what he overheard while eavesdropping on a conversation Quentin and Magda had earlier in the drawing room, he has figured out Quentin’s problem. He takes the gun from Magda and recognizes the bullets with which it is loaded as silver. He announces that he will wait until the Moon rises and see what happens.

Tessie’s turn today marks Deborah Loomis’ third and final appearance on Dark Shadows. Miss Loomis didn’t get to do very much, but she made the most of all of it, and I wish we had seen more of her.

Episode 822: I’ll give you some spins

For some time after the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask first appeared in #725, he projected an intense evil that overshadowed everything around him. Trask’s daughter Charity debuted in #727. Charity was Trask’s enforcer, and was herself so intensely joyless that her mere presence could drain the life out of anyone she disapproved of. The Trasks are triumphs of acting by Jerry Lacy and Nancy Barrett, but they are so intense they threaten to overload the show. So even as devoted a fan as my wife, Mrs Acilius, chose to skip many of the Trask-driven episodes on this watch-through.

In #771, inveterate prankster Carl Collins brought Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye home to the estate of Collinwood. At that point, Dark Shadows was quite somber; when Pansy starts singing and dancing, she seems to have wandered in from another universe altogether. Pansy bills herself as a mentalist; when she tries to do her act at Collinwood, an actual message from the supernatural interrupts her, much to her astonishment.

Pansy was killed by a vampire named Dirk Wilkins the very night she arrived at Collinwood, leading us to assume that the note of brightness she represented was at an end. But strangely, she has now returned. Charity and Pansy never met; when Carl was looking for Pansy in #772, he asked Charity if she had seen her, and the sheer idea of the two of them sharing a scene was enough to raise a chuckle. But now they share more than that. Sorcerer Count Petofi has cast a spell causing Pansy’s spirit to take up residence in Charity’s body. Now, Charity’s personality seems to have faded away altogether, and all that’s left is Pansy.

Charity/ Pansy has a scene with Trask that blasts away the excessive tension he once introduced. He keeps demanding that she behave as he is used to seeing Charity behave, and she keeps singing, dancing, and making fun of him. Miss Barrett and Mr Lacy are both highly accomplished comic actors, and this scene is among their finest achievements in that field.

It also includes a serious moment that further confirms Charity really is channeling Pansy, not acting out some kind of delusion. At one point she becomes very still and prophesies the circumstances of Trask’s death. As she completes this pronouncement, she says that it is different now when she speaks of things unseen. It used to be a game, but now she hears another voice and reports what it tells her. This picks up on Pansy’s astonishment at her own success in #771, something Charity could not possibly have known about.

Charity/ Pansy puts the “boom” in Ta-Ra-Boom-De-Yay. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 811: A man’s investment in the future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 805: The shocking condition of your face

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 791: Roomful of spirits

The evil Gregory Trask coerced lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley into helping him murder his wife, Minerva, so that he could marry wealthy spinster Judith Collins. Now Trask and Evan have conjured up a magical simulacrum of Minerva and caused it to hang around Judith. They claim they can’t see it, which, coupled with some other troubles Judith has had, leads her to believe that she has lost her mind. Trask and Evan strong-arm Judith into signing a paper, Trask locks her up in the tower room, and Evan makes the simulacrum disappear.

In case you can’t tell, these guys are villains. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, Judith’s brother Quentin is at large. Quentin is a werewolf, and when he returned to human form this morning his face was disfigured. This worked to his advantage. He was in jail at the time, and he was being watched. The sheriff’s deputy had not recognized Quentin’s brother Edward when he came to jail that night, so it isn’t so surprising he doesn’t recognize Quentin, even though he is six foot four, has a distinctive hairdo and prominent mutton chop sideburns, and is wearing the same blue suit with a frock coat that he always wears. It is surprising that Edward doesn’t recognize him either, but this may be the result of a congenital problem the Collinses have. Not only was Quentin himself stumped when the equally identifiable Evan had a similar glob of makeup on his face recently, but Judith fails to recognize Quentin today when he comes to the drawing room. When Judith found him, Quentin was listening to his favorite record and reciting its lyrics in his unaltered voice, and he identified himself to her by name. Still, she couldn’t see it.

Quentin bursts into Evan’s room shortly after he finishes dissolving the simulacrum of Minerva. He sees that Evan’s face is no longer disfigured, and assumes that he used the magical Hand of Count Petofi to restore his appearance. Evan tells him he did not- he can’t explain why his face reverted, it just did so on its own. This does not satisfy Quentin, and it will not satisfy returning viewers. We saw Evan struggle to fix his problem for some time, and when he found himself in a crisis situation he suddenly turned up looking like his old self. So we’ve been in suspense for several days wondering what the explanation would be for his cure, and we are no more inclined to settle for a non-explanation than is Quentin.

Quentin knocks Evan out with a candlestick; the background music is a cue we have previously heard during on-camera murders, leading us to wonder if Evan will survive the blow. Quentin rummages around for a moment and finds the hand. He is looking at it, wondering how to use it to restore his appearance, when a man in a wool cap enters and orders him to surrender the hand at once.

This episode features one of Dark Shadows‘ all-time great goofs. When Evan is casting the spell to dissolve the simulacrum, a black-clad figure dashes past in front of him. A voice can be clearly heard exclaiming “Jesus, Lacy!” Evidently actor Jerry Lacy was in such a hurry to get from one set to another that he didn’t realize he was crossing a live camera.