Tag: john e comelately

Episode 905: My darling now

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard has been hung up on mysterious drifter Chris Jennings for a while. Unknown to Carolyn, Chris is her third cousin, the great-grandson of her great-great uncle Quentin Collins. That is a distant enough relation that it needn’t be an obstacle to romance. But Chris is keeping another secret that presents a more definite obstacle. He inherited from Quentin a curse that makes him a werewolf.

From March to November 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman traveled back in time from 1969 to that year, and befriended the living Quentin. They learned that Quentin had been freed of the effects of the werewolf curse when a magical portrait was painted of him. As long as the portrait remains intact, Quentin will not only retain his human form on the nights of the full moon, but will also be immune to injury, aging, and death. Julia and Barnabas know of Chris’ condition, and early in 1969 they were working together to cure him of it. Julia now hopes that another portrait can be painted to do for Chris what his great-grandfather’s portrait did for him.

Barnabas came back from the past wanting nothing to do with Chris. He has secretly been absorbed into a cult devoted to mysterious supernatural beings called the Leviathan people. When Barnabas first saw Chris after his return to 1969, he told him there was no hope for him. Since then, he has been cold and distant both to Chris and to Julia. He has urged Carolyn to forget Chris, and keeps telling her that she has a great future in store for her. We have had other indications that this future will involve a special role in the Leviathans’ plan to take over the world.

Now, Carolyn has met the living Quentin and become smitten with him. She does not know his true identity, but did tell Barnabas about him and that he was coming to meet her. Barnabas’ response was to run Quentin over with his car, claiming afterward that it was an accident.

Now, Quentin is in the hospital with a bandage on his head. He does not speak in today’s episode, but anyone who has seen a soap opera knows that a bandage wrapped around the head is a sure sign of amnesia. Indeed, when Julia addresses him as “Quentin,” he looks at her blankly.

Quentin wearing the amnesia badge. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In his post about the episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn reminds us of another amnesia plot that followed a time travel story. That one dragged on for eight months, was never at all interesting, and ended with the two characters most directly involved being hustled off the show. Remembering it, longtime viewers will shudder at the sight of Quentin’s bandage. But amnesia stories are a staple of soaps, and Danny explains how they can work well by imagining a different version of that dismal flop:

Jeff Clark… might or might not have been a reincarnation of Peter Bradford, Vicki’s boyfriend from 1795. Somehow, they managed to spin that mystery out for a full eight months, until they finally decided that nobody cared, and then they wrote Jeff, Peter and Vicki off the show forever.

The real problem with the Jeff/Peter mystery — and this is important, for the Quentin/Grant Douglas conundrum — is that Jeff Clark was just an empty suit of clothes. Jeff had no memories, and he arrived on the scene with no family, and very little in the way of a storyline.

Worst of all, Jeff’s primary characteristic — being in love with Vicki — was also Peter’s primary characteristic, so it was a distinction without a difference. It didn’t really matter whether he was called Jeff or Peter, so they could just let it drift for month after month, with no appreciable impact on story progress.

Here’s how you do the amnesia story: Think of it as two people inhabiting the same body, and create a conflict between those people. If Peter’s in love with Vicki, then “Jeff” should be cold and distant. “Jeff” didn’t experience any of the events that brought Vicki and Peter together, so her clumsy attempts to revive his memory should upset and frustrate him.

At that point, you can take as long as you’d like to bring his memory back, because the longer this goes on, the more damage “Jeff” can do to Peter’s life. The ideal way to end that story is to have “Jeff” fall in love with Vicki’s worst enemy, and news of their engagement makes Vicki turn to someone new for support and understanding.

Then it should be obvious to everyone that his memory comes back on the day of his wedding, during or immediately after the vows. Suddenly, “Jeff” is Peter again, horrified to discover that he’s married to someone that he doesn’t like, and the love of his life is involved with somebody else.

That’s how you do the amnesia story.

Danny Horn, “Episode 905: Waiting for Quentin,” posted 27 July 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

The sheer fact that Quentin is in a coma as a result of a collision with a car is a puzzle for attentive fans. In #844, sorcerer Count Petofi scraped Quentin’s cheek with a jagged piece of glass. That did not leave a mark on Quentin himself, but a scar appeared on the portrait in the place corresponding to the spot Petofi scratched. Since violence against Quentin leaves him as he was but marks the portrait, why is he hurt now? One of Danny’s commenters tackled this problem:


Yeah, why is he even hurt at all? The painting should have absorbed all the trauma of Barnabas’ reckless attempt at mayhem; the portrait should have amnesia. (Oh, but then it wouldn’t be protecting Quentin any more, since it wouldn’t remember who it’s a picture OF – which is why Quentin has the amnesia and injuries! How’s that for a fanwank?)…

Is it explained later just WHY Quentin thinks he’s Grant Douglas? Did he already have amnesia? And now he has double amnesia? (If I remember sitcom amnesia correctly, the second trauma should have reversed the first – but soap opera amnesia may be different.)

Comment left 29 December 2018 by “John E. Comelately” on Danny Horn, “Episode 905: Waiting for Quentin,” posted 27 July 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

Later, Carolyn is at the antique shop where she has been working. The shop’s owner, Carolyn’s friend Megan Todd, makes a bunch of cryptic remarks about having discovered something greater than happiness. Carolyn wonders about the baby that Megan and her husband Philip have been looking after. She hears a ball bouncing in the upstairs room where the baby has been sleeping, and Megan orders her to ignore it. Eventually the ball comes rolling downstairs, and an eight year old boy follows it. Megan declares the boy to be her darling.

Returning viewers know that the baby was in fact some kind of creature associated with the Leviathans, and Megan has a scene in which Barnabas tells her that the creature is going to be undergoing a change. So we know that this boy and the baby are in fact one and the same.

That two consecutive men who attracted Carolyn turned out to be werewolves is interesting in light of the frequent references to the big plans the Leviathans have for her. The Leviathans have clearly not been giving their devotees a lot of background information about the tasks they make them perform, so that even if Barnabas did not know who Quentin was when he tried to kill him, the unseen forces manipulating him may have been well aware of that. Perhaps the show is suggesting that there is some kind of enmity between the Leviathans and werewolves.

Quentin’s ghost haunted the great house of Collinwood from December 1968 to September 1969 and wrought great havoc there. The haunting broke on the anniversary of an event in 1897 that went differently than it had originally because Barnabas and Julia had traveled back in time. But it was made clear when we returned to contemporary dress that the 1960s characters all remember the events of those ten months, and that Quentin’s ghost still frightens them. Carolyn was one of the few major characters who did not see the ghost, so I suppose it makes sense she isn’t afraid when she sees the living Quentin. But one does wonder what the reaction will be when the other residents of the great house meet him.

The Leviathan boy is played by David Jay, and is named in the credits as “Alexander.” Born in 1961, Mr Jay is the youngest person ever to have appeared on Dark Shadows. He acted off and on until the early 1980s. Evidently he is alive and well, but he never appeared at any of the Dark Shadows conventions and does not do the podcasts on which other cast members occasionally guest. Not one for the fandom, he.

Episode 680: Chicken Little was right

Strange and troubled boy David Collins and nine year old Amy Jennings are falling under the sway of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins. Quentin has been gaining strength gradually; at first he was confined to a small chamber hidden behind a wall in a storage room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood, and was dependent on Amy and David to do his bidding elsewhere. Now he can move around the estate and do things for himself. He is still able to control only one of the children at a time, though, and when Amy found out that Quentin had poisoned her brother Chris she made up her mind to fight him.

Today, David goes to the west wing to tell Quentin that Amy will cooperate with him if he promises to leave Chris alone. When David puts this to Quentin, he nods in agreement. If Quentin is still weak enough that he must give in to Amy on this point, he is still weak enough to be stopped before he does any great harm. That builds suspense- the show has invested so much time in building up the threat Quentin poses that it would feel like a cheat if he were defeated now, but we can look forward to seeing him survive a series of close calls between now and the time when his storyline approaches its climax.

David was not the only one who went from the main part of the house to the west wing. Governess Maggie saw him go there, in direct defiance of her orders that he stay in his room. Maggie followed David down the corridor and saw him go into the storage room. By the time she entered that room, David had gone into Quentin’s secret chamber and closed the panel behind him, leaving Maggie baffled as to where he could be. She went back to the main part of the house to wait for David.

In David’s room, Maggie sits in the armchair by the wall. She is still there when David comes back. This recreates a pair of scenes in #667, when David sat in the chair and was still there when Amy entered. That was supposed to be a power move, and it worked, more or less. David asserted his role as Quentin’s spokesman, and Amy acquiesced.

But Maggie can’t pull it off. She doesn’t give in to David when he denies everything, tells her her eyesight must be failing, claims that she doesn’t have the right to punish him, and yells at her that he will “get even.” But her visible nervousness encourages him to try each of these tactics. It’s only when she reminds him that he had his flashlight with him when he went into the west wing and says she will look for it in the storage room that she shuts him down, and then only for a moment.

David protests his innocence to Maggie, but he tells us that the sky is falling.

Maggie goes back to the west wing, where she sees Quentin. David looks directly into the camera and recites the epigram “I do not love thee, Dr Fell.” In the first months of the show, David was the only character who made eye contact with the audience. He stopped doing that late in 1966, when he stopped being a menace, and several other characters have been called on to do it since. It’s good to see him revisit the technique, and he is quite effective at it today.

Closing Miscellany

As my screen name may have led you to suspect, I make my living as a Latin teacher. So I would be remiss if I did not mention that “I do not love thee, Dr Fell” is a translation of a piece often used on the first day of introductory Latin classes, Martial’s Epigram 32:

Non amo te, Sabidi, nec dicere possum quare.

Hoc tantum possum dicere: non amo te.

When poet Tom Brown translated the epigram in 1680, he changed the name “Sabidius” to “Dr Fell” in memory of the dean of the Oxford college which he had briefly attended. A literal translation should enable you to figure out the meaning of each of the Latin words: “I do not love you, Sabidius, and I cannot say why. I can say only this: I do not love you.”

In a conversation with housekeeper Mrs Johnson, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard says that “David is twelve years old.” This is the first time in a while David’s age has been specified explicitly.

Liz orders Mrs Johnson to take David’s dinner to him on a tray and sit in his room while he eats. Longtime viewers may remember that when Mrs Johnson started working in the house in #77 and #79, David was afraid she would be his “jailer”; in #189, she actually did sit in his room and function as his jailer for a little while. She is reluctant to do that again today, because she has caught on that David and Amy are involved with something uncanny and she is afraid of them.

Danny Horn devotes his post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day to a tour of the props and decor of David’s room. It’s a lot of fun. One of his commenters, “Jayson O’Neill,” links to a 2014 post on the Dark Shadows News blogspot page focusing on David’s posters; another, “John E. Comelately,” points out that famed rock and roll band The Turtles released a track in 1967 called “Chicken Little Was Right.” I made a comment myself finding fault with the acting and blaming director Dan Curtis for it; I don’t agree with that anymore, but you’re welcome to read it if you want.