julia hoffman – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 970: Another road

Yesterday, Barnabas Collins went to the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood to search for the coffin that vampire Megan Todd occupies during the day. Barnabas is himself the vampire who ended Megan’s human life, passing his curse along to her. When his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, makes a characteristic remark and tells him “you must not feel personally about Megan Todd,” Barnabas asks “How can I feel any other way?” Most of Barnabas’ feelings, in this or any other matter, consist of pity for himself, but there is a trace of sympathy for Megan in there someplace, probably.

Now, Barnabas has taken Julia to a spot that he happened upon while looking for Megan. While Julia was in the carriage house on the estate with matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Barnabas saw two women who looked and sounded exactly like them in a brightly lit, fully furnished, heavily decorated room behind a pair of doors in the otherwise dark and empty east wing. Julia’s double was wearing a French maid outfit and giving orders to Liz’, which is probably someone’s fetish but which is totally out of character for the women Barnabas knows.

In #351, Barnabas was without a blood-thrall. Julia offered to guard his coffin during the day. They were not really friends at that point, and he reacted to her offer warily. Among his objections was that it was not suitable for her, as a medical doctor, to fill such a position. She assured him that she was not volunteering “to be your maid.” Longtime viewers might remember that line when they see Parallel Julia in her livery.

There was an invisible barrier in the doorway that Barnabas could not cross, and he was unable to attract the attention of the women who were so near to him, even when he shouted what he supposed to be their names. The doors closed, and when they opened again the barrier was gone, but so were the doubles of Julia and Liz, along with all the furnishings and lights that had surrounded them.

Thinking of what Barnabas has told her about the room, Julia hesitates to enter it with him. She dismisses her concern as “silly.” Regular viewers will perk up at this- labeling a fear as “silly” is the surest way of marking it as the basis of an upcoming major story point. Once inside the bare room, Julia starts thinking out loud:

JULIA: I was at Eliot Stokes’ house one night, oh, last spring. We were having a brandy after dinner and he started talking about time… He was complaining that we all simply accept it. We don’t have much choice, I thought.

But Eliot had been reading a theory. It sounded insane to me. A theory of parallel time… we live on this universe in 1970, right? We accept the fact that our time is the only time that we can truly know. Suppose time is like a road and parallel to it there’s another road. On one we live the lives we know, but on the other road our lives are different because we’re in a different time-band* and we’ve made different choices. For example, in that other band of time I could’ve made a different choice when I was at college. Instead of being a doctor I could’ve married and had children.

Barnabas, you don’t actually think through some warp in the time band that you have actually seen us living other lives?

BARNABAS: I don’t know, there’s got to be a more rational explanation.

JULIA: Must there?

So, now we know that we are about to launch a new kind of time travel story. The show has taken us back in time for long costume drama inserts, most notably from November 1967 to March 1968 when it was set in the 1790s and from March to November 1969 when it was set in 1897. Now they are going to travel sideways in time, and take us to a parallel universe where Julia is a maid and Liz is not the lady of the house.

Time bandits. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

At the end of the episode, Barnabas sees the room change again. Parallel Time Liz and Parallel Time Julia uncover a portrait that hangs there, the portrait of a woman whom PT Liz insists is dead and PT Julia insists is still the rightful mistress of the room. Barnabas recognizes the subject as the Parallel Time counterpart of his ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique.

With this, the behavior of PT Liz and PT Julia falls into place. We’re about to see a story derived from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. PT Julia is Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper maniacally devoted to Rebecca, the late wife of Maxim de Winter. PT Angelique is the one whose death and continued ownership of the room have been a point of contention between PT Julia and PT Liz. We’ve seen a photograph of Parallel Time counterparts of Barnabas’ distant cousin Quentin Collins and strange and troubled boy David Collins, signed “Your loving husband, Quentin.” PT Quentin is the one whom we have heard Liz say is returning with a new wife. In the main “time-band,” Quentin is a penniless rogue with a long supernatural backstory, but his counterpart is the master of Collinwood, and Liz ranks somewhere below the uniformed domestics in the household hierarchy. The David we know is the son of Liz’ brother Roger and a blonde fire witch named Laura Murdoch, but evidently his Parallel Time counterpart is the son of the counterparts of Quentin and Angelique. We have had no indication of who Quentin’s new wife is to be.

This is not the first reference to Rebecca on the show. When Clarice Blackburn joined the cast as housekeeper Mrs Johnson in September 1966, she was supposed to model the character on Mrs Danvers. Mrs Johnson came to Collinwood as a spy for Collins family nemesis Burke Devlin, driven by her certainty that Roger was responsible for the death of her beloved former employer Bill Malloy. Bill, like Rebecca, had drowned under suspicious circumstances, though he didn’t have much else in common with her. By the time the “Death of Bill Malloy” story played out, Mrs Johnson had taken on a new function as an inveterate gossip who made narrative progression possible by blabbing everything she knew to everyone she met. Blackburn’s outstanding talents made her a significant part of the show for quite some time; it’s a shame she isn’t going to be part of the upcoming segment.

Rebecca was not the only Du Maurier novel to inspire a story on Dark Shadows. Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis first freed Barnabas to prey upon the living after David and Mrs Johnson told him the plot of Du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek and claimed that it happened to one of the Collins ancestors. Searching for the treasure the pirate gave to the lady, Willie stumbled upon Barnabas’ coffin. He opened it, earning a bite that made him the vampire’s slave.

Willie’s mistake was that he did not know what kind of show he was on. When Dark Shadows began, executive producer Dan Curtis and ABC vice president for daytime programming Leonard Goldberg** meant for it to be the television equivalent of the “Gothic romance” novels that were so popular in those days. Du Maurier’s novels were among the cornerstones of the Gothic romance genre, and if it were still that kind of show in April 1967 Willie would have been on solid ground in his expectation that there might be a lot of jewels hidden in an unmarked coffin in the old mausoleum. But when Laura was on the show from December 1966 to March 1967, her story subsumed all the major plot threads into a tale of the supernatural. Willie and his sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, were on the show as in-betweeners to sweep up the last non-paranormal odds and ends and help introduce the next uncanny menace.

Now, the show is heading in the opposite direction, and Willie is back to help take us there. In Parallel Time, Dark Shadows will finally do the Daphne Du Maurier adaptation that didn’t work out in the Bill Malloy story and that was never meant to work out for Willie. But Megan has to be destroyed before Barnabas can decamp for Parallel Time, and he and Julia order Willie to destroy her.

It was not a foregone conclusion that Julia and Barnabas would want to stake Megan. At the moment, Julia is giving Barnabas injections meant to relieve him of the effects of the vampire curse. Similar injections had worked in 1968 and again during the 1897 segment. Julia shows Barnabas the cross she wears to ward Megan off, and he does not recoil from it. That suggests the injections are having some effect on him, even though he keeps complaining that they aren’t doing anything to curb his bloodlust. When Julia and Barnabas find Megan in the east wing, she refuses the injections. When they find that she is feeding on Roger, they conclude that she cannot be allowed to see another night.

Willie is horrified by the command to drive a stake through Megan’s heart. He protests that he doesn’t even know her. As Barnabas and Julia tell him of the nightmare that awaits everyone if he doesn’t do as they say, he starts to talk about his fiancée Roxanne and the secrets he has been keeping from her. He worries about the image she will have of him if she finds out that he is the former blood-thrall of one vampire and the destroyer of another. “I mean, she’s gonna be thinkin’ I’m weird or somethin’!” I suppose that would be an occupational hazard for blood-thralls.

Willie is worried Roxanne might get the wrong idea about him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is an odd moment when Julia is asking Liz about the east wing. Liz tells her that Roger knows more about the legends of the house than she does. When Julia was first on the show, she was posing as an historian looking into the old families of New England. In those days, Liz mentioned that Roger knew far less about the Collins past than she did, which fit with the original keynote of Roger’s character, an extreme lack of family feeling. But by this point, Roger has merged with the roles Louis Edmonds played in the 1790s and 1897 segments, both of whom were dedicated to the honor of the Collins name.

*The first appearance of this bit of Collinsport English.

**Not to be confused with his then-boss, network president Leonard Goldenson.

Episode 969: On the same side at last

Wedding Day

On Dark Shadows, weddings are usually stopped when one of the couple makes a decision in the middle of the ceremony that leads to the exhumation of an empty coffin. In #270, the first wedding followed that pattern, when instead of saying her vows matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard announced that she and her intended, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, had killed her first husband, Paul Stoddard. That led the sheriff to dig up the spot in the basement of the great house of Collinwood where Liz said Jason had buried Paul, only to discover an empty box. It turned out Paul wasn’t dead at all.

The next wedding we saw was in #397, set in the year 1796. Scion Barnabas Collins and wicked witch Angelique Bouchard managed to get through the ceremony, but before the night was out Angelique had been abducted by the late Jeremiah Collins, whom she had raised from the dead as a zombie. Jeremiah dug up his own grave, opened his empty coffin, and put Angelique in it.

In #625, well-meaning governess Vicki was supposed to marry an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff. Peter/ Jeff left the ceremony to dig up another grave, and find another empty coffin.

For sixteen weeks, Dark Shadows was dominated by an effort to take some themes from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft and build them into a story. We kept hearing about the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who were trying to retake the Earth and destroy humankind. The Leviathan material never coalesced into a story, and they gave up on it last week.

The last event in the Leviathan segment was an attempted wedding between Liz’ daughter Carolyn and someone who appears to be a very tall young man, but is in fact a shape-shifting creature from beyond space and time. When he first assumed the form of the tall young man, the creature asked people to call him Jabe. That didn’t come off, so he answers to “Jeb” instead. The Leviathan plan has always called for Jabe to join himself with Carolyn in an unholy ceremony that would cause her to become the same sort of creature he is, and last Friday they stood by an altar in the woods while Nicholas Blair, the high priest of a cult devoted to the service of the Leviathans’ project, called on Jabe to take his place behind the altar. There, Jabe deviated from the rubrics of the ceremony. He smashed a small wooden box and called for Barnabas to rescue Carolyn. The wooden box was empty, but it was not exactly a coffin- it was the matrix from which Jabe first emerged, four months ago, when he was nothing more than a whistling.

After their traditional Collinwood non-wedding in #625, Vicki and Peter/ Jeff had a second ceremony in #637. They completed it, but shortly afterward the supernatural powers that allowed Peter/ Jeff to exist in the 1960s lost their grip and he vanished into a rift in time and space. Today Jabe and Carolyn also complete a second ceremony, but it seems their marriage is approaching a similar crisis. When Jabe smashed the box, Nicholas told him that his humanoid appearance was all that was left of him, and that it was only a projection from a true form that was destroyed with the box. He could not continue to exist as Jabe for very long. As Peter/ Jeff prolonged his time in the 1960s by force of will, Jabe has prolonged his own existence beyond what Nicholas had thought possible, but returning viewers will still expect him to vanish at any moment.

Moreover, Jabe has made many powerful enemies. One of them is Angelique. She has taken a cue from George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes and plagued him with a shadow that he does not cast but that follows him about. The shadow menaces Jabe a couple of times today, and each time it prompts him to shriek to Carolyn that they must flee. Since he won’t explain to her what is going on, we can only wonder if he will meet his demise before she concludes that he is an abject lunatic and files for an annulment.

Jabe faces his dark shadow. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, Barnabas and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, are on a vampire hunt. Barnabas is a vampire himself; Angelique turned him into one when their marriage didn’t work out, Julia and another mad scientist cured him of the effects of that curse in 1968, and then Jabe placed another vampire curse on him more recently. Barnabas has bitten a woman named Megan Todd and accidentally turned her into a vampire. One of Megan’s victims, a man named Sky Rumson, tips Barnabas and Julia off that her coffin is hidden somewhere in the long-disused east wing of the great house. Barnabas conducts a search there while Julia goes with Liz to inspect the carriage house on the estate, where Jabe has been staying.

In the first months of the show, they went back and forth on whether the great house had a vacant west wing or a vacant east wing. They eventually settled on a west wing, and the west wing was an important locale at various points. Once in a while actors would slip and refer to an east wing. It was not until #648 that the show made it unequivocally clear that the house had both east and west wings, and not until #760 that we had a look inside the east wing. This is the first reference to it since then.

Barnabas is walking through a dark, dusty corridor, thinking that no one had been down it in “years.” Double doors open, and Barnabas sees a fully furnished, brightly lit room. He tries to enter, and suddenly turns into a mime struggling to escape from an invisible cage. He sees a framed photograph on a table in the room. The photograph appears to show his distant cousin Quentin sitting next to Liz’ nephew, strange and troubled boy David. It is signed “Your loving husband, Quentin.” Barnabas knows that Quentin and David have not been photographed together, and Quentin’s only marriage ended when he murdered his wife long before David was born, so neither the photograph nor the writing on it make any sense to him.

Barnabas sees Liz enter the room from a doorway on the other side. She is wearing a completely different outfit than she had on when Barnabas saw her shortly before. She does not see Barnabas or hear him, even though he is standing only a few feet away and calling out to her. She opens a closet and examines some clothes.

Julia enters, wearing a French maid outfit. She demands to know what Liz is doing. Since Barnabas knows Liz as the owner of Collinwood and Julia as a houseguest there, albeit one of unlimited tenure and an overpowering nature, her tone is as inexplicable as her attire. She orders Liz to leave the clothes alone. They argue about a person to whom they refer only as “she.” Liz says that “she” is dead, Julia insists that “she” will return. Liz wants to prepare the room for someone else’s use, Julia declares that only “she” will ever possess it.

Hoffman confronts Liz. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The doors close. Barnabas cries out to Liz and Julia. He opens the doors again, only to find that the room is entirely bare. It has no furniture, no carpeting, no lights, no decoration of any kind. It is as dark and as dusty as the rest of the east wing, and appears to have been unvisited for as long.

Barnabas returns to the main part of the house. He sees Liz and Julia returning through the front door, dressed as they had been before they left for the carriage house and talking to each other in the same relaxed, friendly manner. Flummoxed, he asks Julia if they went anywhere other than the carriage house. She says they did not. He tells her he did not find Megan’s coffin, and tries to explain what he did in fact see.

The Man Who Wasn’t There

It would seem that whatever phenomenon Barnabas is seeing when he looks into this room is going to mark the beginning of the next phase of Dark Shadows. When Jabe smashed the box, he ended the Lovecraft segment. But the show had not set up any story to follow it. For the last few days, we’ve passed the time watching him and some other characters left over from it flounder about helplessly. Peter/ Jeff’s ghost showed up and claimed to have a grudge against Jabe that dated from the 1790s. Since Jabe did not exist in those days, I suspect the tale Peter/ Jeff tells is a remnant of some story they planned long ago but never developed, with Jabe hastily put in the place of some character they projected but did not introduce.

I’m not sure what the untold story and never-introduced character were, but there may be a clue in this episode. Sky Rumson was at one point under the power of the Leviathans. Barnabas tells Sky that Jabe has smashed the box and everyone is now free of their power, which fits with what we have seen and with what Nicholas told his henchman Bruno. Sky is indeed disconnected from the Leviathans- he now figures only as Megan’s victim. But for no reason that has to do with today’s events, he denies that and says “My deal was with Mr Strak.”

In #899 and #900, there was a flashback to the year 1949. We saw that Paul Stoddard unwittingly sold his daughter Carolyn to the Leviathans that year, and that their agent was a Mr Strak. Strak was played by John Harkins, who had played a monster in several episodes not long before. The whole point of Strak as a character seemed to be that he was someone Paul could never find again, so that he was entirely helpless in the face of the deal he had struck. The casting of Hankins reinforced that for viewers who recognized him, since he was pretty obviously there to use up the last two episodes on his contract. It would seem to defeat the purpose to bring his name up again, yet Sky’s reference to Strak marks the second time we have heard his name recently. Doomed Leviathan cultist Nelle Gunston told Barnabas in #951 that Strak had recruited Bruno.

Nicholas’ association with the Leviathans is also hard to explain. He was on the show in 1968 as Angelique’s boss. At that time the show was taking a peculiar sort of Christian turn, and it was very clear that Nicholas was in the employ of Satan. Indeed, just last week he invoked Satan at the ceremony to join Carolyn and Jabe. But the Leviathans are rooted in Lovecraft’s resolutely non-Christian cosmology, and when Jabe himself performed an incantation to raise some dead men to serve him as zombies he called upon multiple “gods of the underworld,” not Satan. Moreover, we know that Nicholas was at Collinwood in 1968, and Nicholas tells Jabe that he has been confined to the underworld since then. It is therefore nonsensical when Sky treats Nicholas as his long-established supervisor in the Leviathan cult.

I suspect that Nicholas’ role, the references to Strak, and Peter/ Jeff’s complaint against Jabe are all traces of a single never-introduced character. They may have intended, in the early stages of planning the Leviathan segment, to bring in a second Leviathan, one who had been lurking on the Earth for a long time and had great powers, though he could not fill Jabe’s intended place as harbinger of the new age. This projected character would have been the main villain of the second half of the Leviathan segment, which would have involved another trip in time back to the late eighteenth century. When the ratings sagged, they often scrapped a lot of what they had written and everything they had planned to get to something fresh. Since the Leviathan segment was a flop, it certainly would not be surprising if they had chucked that new villain, along with the second half of the Leviathan segment and its time-travel story, plugging in Nicholas, the references to Strak, and Peter/Jeff’s complaint to Jabe to cover what they tore out.

Closing Miscellany

The clergyman who marries Jabe and Carolyn is called “the Reverend Brand.” The clergyman who married Barnabas and Angelique in 1796 was called “the Reverend Bland.” Those names are similar enough that I have to suppose there was some point to it. Perhaps an inside joke between writers Gordon Russell and Sam Hall.

The show has been ambiguous about the Collinses’ precise religious affiliation. In the 1790s, we saw that repressed spinster Abigail Collins was a very extreme sort of Congregationalist, but the other members of the family pointedly referred to “Cousin Abigail’s religion” as one of the things that set her apart from the rest of the family. As the name suggests, Congregationalists vary quite a bit from place to place, so the other Collinses’ differences with Abigail do not mean that they were not of that tradition in the 1790s. As upper crust New Englanders of an early vintage, they would likely have been Congregationalists at some point, though by the 1790s, they may well have been Unitarians or Presbyterians. By the 1960s they could have been just about any kind of Protestant without occasioning comment. Today, Liz mentions that the Reverend Brand has a “vestry meeting” to attend. Only Anglicans call the lay leadership of their parishes a “vestry,” and the only Anglican denomination the Collinses could plausibly have belonged to in 1970 was The Episcopal Church.

We see Jabe and Carolyn asleep in bed together on their wedding night. This is the first time we see a couple sharing a bed on Dark Shadows. What’s more, while most sleepers we have seen have been fully clothed under their bedsheets, even wearing shoes, Jabe is wearing only pajama bottoms, and those are tugged down noticeably below his waist when he first gets out of bed. You can say goodbye to the uptight Sixties, it’s the Seventies now, baby.

The Sexual Revolution reaches the Collinses. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

During the joining ceremony between Jabe and Carolyn, Bruno was in the carriage house. There was a magical room there where Jabe changed between his human form and his rugose, paleogean one. When Jabe smashed the box, Bruno saw that room suddenly engulfed in flames. Later, he and Nicholas examined the room, and could not find any sign there had ever been a fire there. Nicholas explained that the fire was a supernatural manifestation, and that what it consumed was not any of the material aspects of the room, but its character as Jabe’s changing station. But Liz tells Julia she is going to the carriage house to inspect fire damage, and when they come back they say that they have seen such damage.

Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day is a particular delight. It’s so full of spoilers about the story that begins today that I can’t say much about it. I’ll tell you it is written from the perspective of a person who would be familiar with the versions of Liz and Julia that Barnabas encounters in the east wing, but not with him. Danny is writing from an imaginary world in which actor David Selby went into politics and was elected president of the United States in 2016.

Episode 965: The charred and blackened stars

The Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods, plan to retake the Earth and destroy humankind, and their harbinger is a shape-shifting monster who has taken the form of a tall young man and asked people to call him Jabe. Their plan requires that Jabe join himself to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in an unholy ceremony that will transform Carolyn into the same kind of squamous, rugose, and paleogean creature Jabe defaults to being. Jabe has fallen in love with Carolyn, but so far from redoubling his determination to fulfill the plan his feelings have turned him against it. He wants to renounce his powers, become truly human, and make a life with Carolyn as she is. Though Jabe’s personality has been so obnoxious that even people brainwashed into supporting the Leviathans’ whole program have gotten fed up with him and become his enemies, he has somehow won Carolyn’s heart. She doesn’t know that he is a monster from beyond space and time, still less that he murdered her father and several other people. She is in love with the man he appears to be, and he wants to become that man in fact.

I first shared my thoughts about Dark Shadows online in the comments section of Danny Horn’s great blog Dark Shadows Every Day. In his post about #962, Danny identifies a major problem with the relationship between Carolyn and Jabe:

But both sides have apparently agreed to shield Carolyn from the big sinister secret, so in practice, she hasn’t had very much to do, except to fall passionately in love with Jeb, because of reasons.

As I’ve said before, I don’t know why Carolyn likes Jeb, and I’ve been scratching at that itch for a while. But today, I think I figured out the real problem with her character arc, and it’s all about the let’s-break-antiques scene.

This was Carolyn and Jeb’s first date, back in episode 940. I didn’t write about it at the time, because I had other things to say, and I didn’t realize how important it was until now.

The scene takes place in the antique shop, and it starts with Jeb gazing at her, and sighing, “I’m going to be very happy with you.”

She’s puzzled. “What made you say that?”

“Because I felt it,” he shrugs. “Haven’t you ever said or done what you felt?”

“Sometimes I do.”

“I do it all the time,” Jeb smirks, and swaggers across the room. “Everybody should. I always do what I feel. Right now, I feel like doing this.”

And then he picks up a porcelain figurine from a nearby display, and smashes it on the floor.

Carolyn is horrified, obviously. “Jeb, you shouldn’t have done that!”

He smiles. “Why not?”

“That was an antique, and it didn’t even belong to you!”

“Haven’t you ever felt like breaking something?”

She stops short. “Yes,” she says, “but…”

“Well, then, let’s see you break this.”

Then he picks up another figurine.

“Go on,” he says, offering it to her. “Break it.”

She looks into his eyes, and says, “I wish I could begin to understand you.”

“Maybe you can,” he says, “if you just free yourself. Go on. Just let it drop from your hand.”

[Smash]

He smiles, and opens a bottle of wine. She asks what he’s doing, and he says, “We’re going to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“Your liberation.”

“I don’t understand.”

He hands her the drink. “Oh, you will… soon.”

It’s a weird scene, and it should have been followed immediately by a dozen more weird scenes along the same lines. This should have been the storyline.

After all, the whole point of the Leviathan threat is that they’re going to take Carolyn, a character that we love and root for, and turn her into a hideous gargantuan, rutting with her blasphemous mate and raising a brood of ambidextrous deathstalkers.

And in the let’s-break-antiques scene, they set up the idea that Jeb is going to change Carolyn’s personality, leading her step by step into his dark world, in the service of her “liberation” from boring traditional values, like respect for other people’s ugly decor. We should have seen her going down that path, becoming more and more estranged from the family and friends who aren’t part of this nightmare death cult.

Except they didn’t. The champagne was drugged, and she blacked out, and since then, they haven’t even touched on the idea that Jeb might be leaving a stain on Carolyn’s soul.

Now, this is a show that’s explored a dozen varieties of hypnosis and possession in minute detail, so it’s not like they don’t know how to write a story like that. They just didn’t. To the extent that we believe that Carolyn loves Jeb, it’s an entirely innocent, human infatuation with a handsome stranger, who she’s unfortunately not really allowed to know very much about.

Because they can’t change Carolyn.

This is an enormous problem for the show, and it’ll be one of the key pieces to the puzzle of Who Killed Dark Shadows. There are four core family members, and they are untouchable. They don’t experience any lasting change, starting around early 1968 and continuing until the end of the show. Sure, they have moments of temporary hypnosis and possession, everybody does, but they don’t actually change.

And if Carolyn can’t change, even a little, then that means there’s no future, just a status quo that leads inexorably towards entropy, and the heat death of this fictional universe.

Danny Horn, “Episode 962: The Second Law of Thermodynamics,” posted 30 November 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

My main role in Danny’s comments was to draw connections between the episodes he discussed and the episodes from the first 42 weeks of the show, which he made a point of not discussing. In response to the above, I wrote:

It is too bad that the show got to the point where the only stories that counted were the supernatural ones. Not that those shouldn’t always have been the A stories, but there should have been room for B stories where we explore the characters’ personalities and see how humans might react if they were to find themselves living in a world like that of DARK SHADOWS.

As it turned out, it was difficult to do much with human characters even within the supernatural stories. Danny’s hypothetical series of scenes between Carolyn and Jabe where we see Carolyn being seduced to the dark side could have been very powerful if we’d been tracing Carolyn’s evolution from tempestuous, self-centered, spoiled rich girl of 1966 and 1967 to the relatively calm, responsible young woman we saw in 1968 and 1969. They could then keep us in continual suspense- would Carolyn continue to grow into a powerful matriarch, or would the shock of one otherworldly horror after another shatter all her progress and send her reeling back to her most unsympathetic moments? Since we haven’t had scenes focusing on Carolyn’s personality and relationships since Jason McGuire was on the show, and we aren’t expecting any to come ever again, hav[ing] a thread like that on the show at this point would seem as out of place as does a week spent documenting in exhaustive detail the evolution of Bruno’s attitude towards Jeb.

Comment left 29 December 2020 by “Acilius” on Danny Horn, “Episode 962: The Second Law of Thermodynamics,” posted 30 November 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

Nancy Barrett is a superb actor, and while she is on camera we believe that Carolyn loves Jabe. But she has to create this impression from the ground up every time she appears. Nothing that is happening reinforces it. Not only does her love for Jabe pop into being out of nowhere, but because she is not involved with anything he is doing it cannot motivate her to take any significant actions. Today Jabe and Carolyn stand before an altar while a high priest of the cult devoted to the Leviathans is performing the ceremony meant to unite them in horrid monstrosity. But Carolyn is there, not because of any decisions she has made or feelings she has, but because she has been hypnotized by the high priest.

I am reminded of the 2006 film Idiocracy. An average man from the early twenty first century suddenly finds himself in a future where everyone has a very low mentality. He goes to the movies and discovers that the most popular film of the era is called Ass. It is a 90 minute closeup of a pair of flatulent buttocks. When he becomes head of state, the protagonist explains that in his day there was something called a “story.” He describes a story as “a way of making you care whose ass it is and why it is farting.” That’s what the Leviathans segment lacks. The execution is good enough to make us believe that particular things are happening, but there is nothing to make us care who is making them happen or why they want them to happen.

One of the few forms of narrative that is still cultivated in the world of Idiocracy is professional wrestling, a dramatic genre in which villainous characters often have changes of heart and become heroic. This is known as the “heel-face turn” (as opposed to the “face-heel turn,” which is the opposite character development.) They have been working on Jabe’s heel-face turn for a few days. Yesterday he asked mad scientist Julia Hoffman to cure him of whatever it is that makes him revert to his monstrous form. Christopher Pennock and Grayson Hall played that scene so well that we wished we could ignore everything else in the episode and believe in it. Jabe started the episode by ordering four zombies whom he had raised from the dead to murder five people: Julia; her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins; two distant cousins of Barnabas’, Quentin Collins and Roger Collins; and Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis. Jabe told Julia he would not kill her or Barnabas if she complied with his request, but at the end of the episode he had the zombies stuff Quentin in a coffin and bury him alive. After that, we could hardly believe that Jabe had changed at all.

Today, Barnabas is at home when Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, bursts into his front parlor. She tells him she is sure Quentin is trapped somewhere and has no more than an hour to live. Barnabas has no idea how Maggie can know this, and she can’t explain it herself. The camera zooms in on a trident drawn on her hand, and regular viewers know what is going on. A while ago, Barnabas’ ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique, cast a spell on Maggie and Quentin causing them to feel an overwhelming love for each other at irregular intervals. Angelique thought this would make Barnabas unhappy, but he hasn’t noticed it, and he has so much else going on right now it seems unlikely he’d care much one way or the other if he did. The spell enables Maggie to lead Barnabas to the grave where Quentin is trapped and to tell Barnabas to dig it up. Quentin is fine when they exhume him, so if anything Barnabas should be glad of Angelique’s spell.

When Quentin comes out of the coffin, he says his only problem is that his legs hurt. Since he is 6’4″ tall and the coffin is at most 5′ long, that’s understandable. He says that Jabe told him he had something out of the ordinary in store for him. Now he knows that whatever else Jabe may be, “he’s a man of his word!” Usually David Selby’s accent raises a bit of a puzzle- why is the rakish scion of an aristocratic old New England family also an amiable West Virginian? But Mr Selby’s delivery of this line, with its note of appreciation for Jabe’s forthrightness, is so perfect that you could never wish him different in any way.

The high priest of the Leviathan cult whom we will see presiding at Jabe and Carolyn’s joining ceremony is none other than suave warlock Nicholas Blair, who was well known around the great estate of Collinwood in 1968. Nicholas finds Julia working on a chemistry experiment preparatory to her project of humanizing Jabe; he smashes her equipment and says he will let her live if she goes away and does not interfere with the Leviathans’ project.

When Nicholas calls on Carolyn to hypnotize her, she recognizes him and expresses mild surprise that he is back. When she insists on addressing him as “Mr Blair,” he tells her that her mother called him by his first name. She replies, “Well, that’s my mother’s business,” and asks him again why he is there.

Jabe visits Julia at Barnabas’ house and pleads with her to do something for him tonight. She says that even if that were possible, she would refuse to do it, since she knows that he buried Quentin alive a few hours ago. He says that she must believe that he is “a changed man” who is willing to “live and let live,” though he is not free to explain what has brought this change on. Barnabas comes downstairs and gives Jabe a dirty look.

The joining is underway at a cairn in the woods. Only people associated with the Leviathans can see the cairn. A small wooden box sits on the cairn; Jabe originally emerged from that box, four months ago, back when he was nothing more than a whistling sound. Nicholas stands to one side, obscured by branches, reciting a lot of mumbo-jumbo and waving a long rod. Jabe and Carolyn stand together on the other side. Nicholas orders Jabe to take the rod. He does. He stands behind the raised part of the cairn that serves as an altar and faces the box.

Perhaps not Carolyn’s dream wedding. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

At that moment, Jabe shouts “Now, Barnabas! Get her now, Barnabas!” Barnabas leaps from behind the foliage, grabs Carolyn by the arm, and runs off with her; Jabe brings the rod down on the box, smashing it. Nicholas exclaims “You fool, do you know what you’ve done!? Better leave now or we’ll both go up in it!” The cairn glows and collapses; Nicholas and Jabe stand together off to the side, watching. Jabe clutches himself by the middle, groans, and passes out.

The cairn’s last moment. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The pair that is actually joined by the ceremony. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Watching it this time, I was not only surprised by Jabe’s “Now, Barnabas! Get her now, Barnabas!”; I remembered being surprised by it last time we watched the show through. It really is a thrilling moment, one of many in the Leviathans segment. But since it exhausts all of the elements in that segment from which a story could have been built, and since there is absolutely no other storyline going just now, I’m afraid the comparison to Idiocracy’s movie-in-a-movie Ass has to stand.

Episode 964: Plan 9 from Down East

We are approaching the end of the sixteenth week of a segment made up of material drawn from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. Central to this is the idea of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who want to retake the Earth and eliminate humankind. There has been a lot of good stuff in these episodes, but it hasn’t come together as a unit. At this point, the narrative seems to be falling apart completely.

The harbinger of the Leviathans, who appears to be a tall man in his mid twenties named Jeb but is in fact a four-month old shape-shifting monster who would rather be called Jabe, has lost interest in the plan and wishes he could be a real boy. Jabe has alienated virtually everyone with whom he has come into contact, including people who were under heavy mind-control meant to turn them into his slaves, and has been reduced to raising four recently deceased men to serve him as zombies.

Yesterday, he ordered the zombies to kill five of his enemies. The targets he listed were mad scientist Julia Hoffman, vampire Barnabas Collins, Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis, and Barnabas’ distant cousins Roger Collins and Quentin Collins. The zombies have abducted Julia and brought her to Jabe’s house. She is welcomed there by a man named Sky Rumson. Sky is not a zombie, but may as well be for all the skill Geoffrey Scott brings to the role. When Scott recites his dialogue, you get the impression that he is telling you what an actor would say had they cast one in the part. Grayson Hall could fill any stage without support, making Julia’s scene with Sky relatively painless, but if it was meant to have any significance the audience will never know what that was.

Sky and a zombie force Julia into the back room of the house, where Jabe is in the squamous, rugose, and paleogean form of the true Leviathan. She is terrified by the sight. Jabe resumes his human shape. He and Julia go back to the living room, where he confides in her that he doesn’t want to take his Leviathan form ever again. He wants to renounce his powers and become human. He knows that Julia is giving Barnabas treatments to put his vampirism into remission, and that she succeeded with such treatments when Barnabas was under a different vampire curse in 1968. He asks her to help him rid himself of his Leviathan side. She is unsure she will be able to do so, but can’t resist the challenge. By the end of the scene, she is figuring out what tests she will have to run to diagnose the biochemical basis of Jabe’s condition.

Christopher Pennock really was a fine actor, and he is outstanding in this scene. He sounds like a deeply lonely, helplessly confused young boy who can’t figure out how to overcome the consequences of his own abuse of the people around him. Jabe’s request for Julia’s help and his agreement to lay off Barnabas as the price for it doesn’t fit with the orders he gave the zombies yesterday, the actions he takes later today, or anything else in the Leviathan story, and is a sign that the plot is falling apart faster than the writers can patch it up. But he and Hall are so splendid in showing Jabe’s neediness and Julia’s response to it that it doesn’t matter.

Meanwhile, Sky is at the great house of Collinwood, looking for Jabe’s foster mother-turned-makeout partner Megan Todd (it was 1970, everyone took Freud very seriously.) He meets Roger and Quentin there. They hold him at sword point until he tells them where Julia is and how to get past the zombies. To the extent that there is a reason for Sky to be on the show, it is to illustrate how total the control is the Leviathans have over the minds of the people they have co-opted, so when he gives in so quickly to Quentin’s threat to give him a scar (not even to kill him, just to compromise his potential as a model for deodorant ads) he dissolves the last prospect that the Leviathans themselves will be a danger we can care about.

Quentin goes off to rescue Julia, and Roger assumes responsibility for holding the sword. He is momentarily distracted when he sees Megan in the window, and Sky takes advantage, disarming Roger and running out of the house. Outside, he meets Megan and tells her that Jabe is upset with her for some reason. She asks if he is afraid of her. He is puzzled by the question, and tells her she is very beautiful. She invites him to look at her. As he does, she opens her mouth, revealing vampire’s fangs. She bites him.

Megan finds breakfast. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin arrives at Jabe’s house. Jabe is surprised to see him, but not surprised Sky was too chicken to keep any of his secrets. He orders the zombies to seize Quentin. The tall, portly, shaven headed zombie, who wears a mustache that keeps him from being mistaken for Tor Johnson in Plan 9 from Outer Space, slaps Quentin in the face a single time. With this, Quentin instantly loses consciousness. Yesterday, other zombies slapped Julia and Roger in the face, each a single time, and each of them instantly lost consciousness as well. Great ones with slaps, the zombies.

Jabe instructs the zombies to stuff Quentin into a coffin that is about three feet too short for him, and then has them carry it all the way to the cemetery. He has them bury Quentin in a grave that one of them had recently vacated. I suppose real-estate flipping has been interesting to TV viewers for longer than I had thought.

There is a famous goof in today’s episode. When Quentin grabs the sword out of its display on the wall of the Collinwood drawing room*, the lamp underneath it falls off the table and smashes on the floor. You know this wasn’t supposed to happen because it takes place out of frame and you can hear the stagehands sweeping the floor while Sky is pinned to the wall. Also, Dan Curtis was way too tight with a buck to break a lamp for the sake of a scene that’s mainly about a character as minor as Sky Rumson. It’s a shame they couldn’t have pulled the camera back and shown the lamp shattering, it would have been perfectly suited to the moment. And if they had to sweep up the wreckage right then, well, it would have been hilarious if housekeeper Mrs Johnson had come in with her broom and dustpan, taken care of the mess, and left without a word about what Quentin and Roger were doing to Sky.

A fine lamp about to meet its doom. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

*Something he first did in #703, when he and Barnabas first met. He knocked a lamp over then, too.

Episode 963: A very bizarre practice

The reigning chief villain on Dark Shadows is a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time. He refuses to shift his shape, since he likes being a tall young man. He isn’t interested in any part of space or time not connected with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, with whom he has fallen in love. He can’t persuade anyone to call him by his preferred name, “Jabe,” so has resigned himself to going by “Jeb.”

As we open, Jabe is raising four men from the dead. That he can do such a thing might suggest that he is a formidable menace, but the introductory voiceover explains that he has no choice about it, since he is “unable to trust one living human being.” Whatever powers he may have, Jabe is surrounded by enemies whom he can battle only by resorting to the most desperate means. We are left wondering how much longer the show can keep the storyline going if it depends on such a feeble menace.

Jabe and one of the zombies are peeking through the window of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, home to vampire Barnabas Collins, a distant cousin of Carolyn’s. Jabe sees Barnabas’ best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, giving him an injection. He realizes that Julia is trying to treat Barnabas’ vampirism.

Jabe goes to the great house on the estate and orders Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, to keep watch over Barnabas’ blood thrall Megan Todd. Liz is one of Jabe’s few remaining followers. He is crude and abusive towards her; she protests that they are in her house, and when he responds to this with a sneer she gives him a look of disbelief. First-time viewers can understand how Jabe came to be so isolated.

When Barnabas was first on the show, from April 1967 to March 1968, Liz never figured out that he was a vampire. The show depended on keeping Liz in the dark about Barnabas’ curse, because she was too civic-minded to let him stay in a house on her estate if she had known that he was an abomination risen from the depths of Hell to prey upon the living, even if he was her cousin. In those days, the show seemed determined to keep Liz on the shelf lest she be stained by contact with the main story, and so they took care to give Barnabas’ adversaries reasons to keep from telling Liz about him.

Now, Liz is under the control of the forces Jabe represents. She is already hostile to Barnabas, and has told Jabe she would try to evict him from Collinwood if that is what he wants her to do. Jabe does not have any reason to withhold from her the fact that his enemy is a vampire.

Moreover, Liz is no longer the symbol of lawful goodness she was two years ago. In #956, she told eleven year old Amy Jennings that she hoped Jabe wouldn’t murder Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Her first reason for not wanting this to happen was that it would remind people of the other murders Jabe has committed. The second, and more important, was that it would tend to exonerate the person they have framed to keep the heat off Jabe. It seems likely that Jabe will soon defeated and Liz will be released from the spell under which she has been laboring, but if she comes out of that remembering what Barnabas is she will also remember that she herself is complicit in some pretty serious felonies, all of them well-known to Barnabas. Since Liz knows that Barnabas is invested in her position in the community and puts a high priority on protecting it, the show wouldn’t have a hard time explaining why she keeps him around, and she would be available to take part in whatever stories they might have going.

Liz is sitting with Megan. She can see that Megan is ill and goes to fetch her a glass of water. When she returns, Megan has gone. We see Megan at Barnabas’ house. Barnabas is intensely hungry. But he does not want to bite her. He knows that if he does so, she will die. She insists, and he gives in.

Julia enters and pronounces Megan dead. Barnabas is in a panic; he had earlier lied when Julia asked him if he had bitten anyone, and he flies directly into hysteria, accusing Julia of implying that he acted deliberately. She keeps her cool and assures him she does not see it that way. Usually Julia’s quickness to make excuses for Barnabas’ murders is an opportunity for Grayson Hall to amaze us with the spectacle of a brilliant woman rationalizing the behavior of a hopelessly evil man, but this scene is a showcase for Jonathan Frid. So they have taken care to establish that Barnabas was overpowered by the need for blood and have shown him taking steps to avoid biting Megan, allowing us to take Julia’s behavior more seriously and focus on Barnabas’ panic.

Barnabas tells Julia that to prevent Megan rising as a vampire they will have to drive a wooden stake through her heart. Previously Barnabas has simply strangled his victims or broken their necks after they died, and that has kept them from coming back. He did this as recently as #951, when he fed on Jabe’s would-be devotee Nelle Gunston. Regular viewers will know that the trip he and Julia make to the basement to fetch a stake is just a setup for them to return and find Megan already gone. Before that happens, there is a strange moment when Barnabas and Julia have the stake and are talking about driving it through Megan’s heart. Barnabas wants to spare Julia that horror, but she smiles warmly as if assuring him that it is her pleasure to join in the act.

Togetherness. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Jabe dispatches his four zombie henchmen into the great house, saying that he has given them their orders and now it is time to “Carry them out!” Julia lives in the great house, and is working with some test tubes in her bedroom. It’s the first time we’ve seen Julia’s room in years, and the first time we have seen scientific apparatus of any kind there. One of the zombies knocks on her door, another emerges from behind the curtains, and a third comes up and slaps her in the face. Perhaps remembering Jabe’s words as he sent them into the house, they carry her out.

You can’t say the zombies don’t follow instructions. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

One of the zombies is named Thomas Findley. Longtime viewers will remember Madame Janet Findley, a psychic who made a big impression in three episodes in December 1968, and Margaret Findley, who was one of the ghostly Widows who were prominent in the show’s supernatural back-world in its first 26 weeks. Another zombie is a large bald man who will remind many viewers of Tor Johnson in Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Danny Horn’s post about this one at his great Dark Shadows Every Day is a fascinating comparison of the episode with four issues of Gold Key’s Dark Shadows comic book. Other commentators have mentioned that the graveyard scenes often evoke the sensibility of EC Comics, particularly in the character of The Caretaker, but Danny’s in-depth discussion of what this episode has in common with those four issues is far and away the most substantive analysis I have seen of the overlap between the visual grammar of Dark Shadows and that of comic books.

Episode 958: A house of lies

The residents of the estate of Collinwood are divided. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, her nephew David Collins, and their distant cousin, eleven year old Amy Jennings, have been brought under the power of the Leviathan People, an unseen race of Elder Gods who mean to retake the Earth from humankind. Liz has invited the harbinger of the Leviathans, a shape-shifting monster who in his human form is a young man who once revealed he wanted to be known as Jabe, to live in the carriage house on the estate. Jabe’s onetime foster mother Megan Todd is living as Liz’ guest in the main house.

The main house is also home to mad scientist Julia Hoffman and governess Maggie Evans, who have ranged themselves against the Leviathans. Yesterday Jabe was about to kill Maggie when he saw something outside Collinwood’s Tower Room that scared him off. Wanting to know what it was Jabe was afraid of, Julia went to the scene to investigate, and found Jabe lurking there. Before he could attack her, the mysterious presence returned, and Jabe ran off. Today, we see the presence- it is a dark shadow. It makes perfect sense that a reminder of which show he is on would terrify Jabe. The writers keep painting his character into a corner so that he won’t be able to continue once the current storyline ends.

Julia sees a dark shadow. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The shadow appears to be that of a slim man wearing a comically oversized hat and a cape. The only character who dressed that way was painter Charles Delaware Tate. Tate was killed by a werewolf in #922. It seems unlikely that Tate’s ghost would haunt Jabe, since werewolves and Leviathans are each other’s implacable enemies. Granted, the Leviathans are also hostile to humans, but Tate was always something of a post-humanist himself. For a while he had magical powers that he used to blur the boundary between humans and their portraits, and in his later years he tried to replace himself with a robot. Besides, Tate was always such a jerk to every individual person he met that it is difficult to imagine him taking much trouble to defend humanity in the mass.

Jabe has murdered three people so far. He raised one of these, Sheriff Davenport, from the dead. He made Davenport into a peculiarly garrulous zombie and forced him to do his bidding. I don’t know of any stories where the same person manifests after death as both a zombie and a ghost, but then I’m no expert on tales of the supernatural. So I guess the shade could be Davenport’s.

Jabe also murdered Paul Stoddard, Liz’ ex-husband and father of her daughter Carolyn. Last week Jabe was afraid Paul’s ghost would come after him, so he dug his body up and burned it. Today we hear that the village of Collinsport is buzzing with talk about the fact that Paul’s body went missing. So Paul is a possibility. The third victim, Maine state police investigator Lawrence Guthrie, was a one-time character. It would seem a bit late to start developing him now.

At the end of the episode, the ghost appears to David in the form of a man hanging from the ceiling. We get a clear look at the ghost’s trouser legs and boots. This rules out, not only Davenport, Paul, and Guthrie, but almost all characters from the parts of Dark Shadows set in contemporary times. The only women who have worn trousers were Carolyn, in a couple of 1966 episodes, and Megan. Both of them are still alive. The only man who wore boots was motorcycle enthusiast Buzz, who dated Carolyn for a little while in 1967. Those longtime viewers who remember Buzz might be amused if it were to turn out that he was the Leviathans’ mightiest foe.

“If you FEEL it… Sit it!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This episode also features Roger Collins, who is Liz’ brother and David’s father. Roger meets his distant cousin Quentin Collins. From December 1968 to September 1969, Quentin was a ghost who haunted Collinwood, rendering the place uninhabitable and killing David. There was a time travel story going on for most of that period, and in September 1897 events played out differently than they had the first time through. The result of that difference was that Quentin did not die. The haunting broke and David came back to life on the anniversary of the change. Some magic spells cast on him have kept Quentin alive and apparently twenty nine years old ever since, but the haunting still happened and Roger’s memory of it gives him a shock when he sees the living Quentin. He quickly composes himself; he has already heard of Quentin’s claim to be his own great-grandson, and accepts it cheerfully.

Amy is Quentin’s actual great-granddaughter, and she is not so easily persuaded. Both as a living being in the 1890s and as a ghost in the 1960s, Quentin was obsessed with a phonograph recording of a sickly little waltz and inflicted endless replays of it on the residents of Collinwood. While Quentin and Roger are chatting in the drawing room, she starts playing the waltz. Amy asks Quentin if he likes it. He zones out, and after a long interval declares that he likes it very much. She says she is going to play it again, and Roger forbids her.

Amy says she doesn’t have anything to do. Roger puts his hand on her shoulder, tells her that the house is full of good books, and marches her off to find one. I had remembered this scene with David as the one Roger takes to the library, and moreover had remembered it as their last scene together. When the show started, Roger was a villain and David was a budding psychopath, so it would have been touching to end their story on this note of loving paternal firmness.

Later, Amy goes upstairs to David’s room. David has for several weeks been using a wheelchair because of a broken leg, but it hasn’t occurred to anyone to move him to one of the vacant rooms on the first floor. She tells him about Quentin, and he tells her to get the sacred book of the Leviathan people from its hiding place on the top shelf of his bookcase. They search the book for guidance. Just as they find something promising, they feel a ghostly chill. The book flies off David’s desk and bursts into flames. The ghost has done its work; David observes that “The chill is gone.”

David keeps ordering Amy around the whole time they are on together. This is quite a change from the beginning of Amy’s time on the show, in the early days of Quentin’s haunting, when they bickered like an old married couple and took turns being the one in charge. Since then, Amy has been in steep decline, absent from the cast and unmentioned for months at a time. Indeed, today is the last episode in which Denise Nickerson will appear only as Amy Jennings. Amy will make two brief appearances in upcoming episodes where Nickerson plays another character, but this is the end of the road for her as a significant presence on the show. She started so strong and Nickerson was so talented that it is very sad to see her go like this. The chill is gone, baby.

Roger doesn’t know about the Leviathans, but he has caught on that something very strange is going on. He goes to the Old House on the estate, home to his distant cousin Barnabas Collins. He finds Quentin there. Quentin tells him Barnabas is not in. Roger tells Quentin about the strange goings-on, and Quentin says that he can explain them. He warns Roger that the knowledge he is about to impart to him will put him in deadly jeopardy.

Once Roger has heard the story, he says he wants to take David and flee. Quentin tells him this will not work- the Leviathans will kill both of them if they try it. All they can do is fight them. Roger is unconvinced of their chances, but does not have a better idea.

Roger was one of the last characters to hold out against the evidence that the show had become a supernatural thriller. Even after he was forced to accept that he was up against uncanny forces of evil, he would snap back to “Surely there is a logical explanation!” mode the minute the danger had passed. That changed when Quentin’s ghost forced the family out of the main house in #694. When he accepts Quentin’s story today, we can see that it will no longer be Roger’s function to slow the story down. That is good news and bad news- Dark Shadows long had too many speed bumps, and like all of Louis Edmonds’ characters, Roger is too delightful to be related to such a lowly rank. But not since he ceased to be a villain in #201 have the writers come up with anything else for him to do. We may be losing Roger altogether before much longer.

Episode 957: That’s a bad sign

Willie Loomis has come back to the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, where he once lived as the sorely bedraggled blood thrall of vampire Barnabas Collins. Willie intends to stay only for a short time, answering an invitation from Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Willie is engaged to marry a woman named Roxanne, and Roxanne expects to leave with him in the morning. But he finds out that Barnabas and Julia, along with the kindly Maggie Evans and some other people, are locked in battle with a vast and incomprehensible evil. So Willie announces that he cannot leave. He will stay and help Barnabas and Julia fight.

At the beginning and end, a shape-shifting monster sees something that terrifies him. Pondering this, Barnabas remembers that the two things which frighten the monster are ghosts and werewolves. Since Collinwood is the world capital of both ghosts and werewolves, that raises the question of why the monster wants to be there. The disturbance can’t be a werewolf- the first time it occurs, it prevents the monster from attacking Willie and Maggie, and if it were a werewolf it would just have gone on to attack them itself. The second time, Julia comes face to face with it. It casts a glowing light on her, and she asks what it is. One might assume she would recognize a werewolf, who in any case don’t glow. The show does a good job making us wonder just what the phenomenon is and making us hope we will find out tomorrow.

When Barnabas first enslaved Willie in 1967, he was extremely cruel and Willie was miserable beyond imagining. When Willie came back in 1968 after a stay in Windcliff, the mental hospital Julia controls, Barnabas’ vampirism was in remission and Willie took rather an insouciant attitude towards him. In those days, Barnabas put up with Willie’s insubordinate attitude with relatively mild displays of annoyance. Barnabas finally brought Willie to heel in #560, when he convinced Willie that his disobedience was putting Maggie in danger and Willie responded with agony. Torturing Willie in that way made Barnabas smile for the first time in ages. He was glad to return at last to his happy place.

Now, Barnabas is a vampire again, but Willie is full of friendship and goodwill towards him. He talks warmly to Julia about how Barnabas helped him in the past. In turn, Barnabas is genuinely concerned for Willie’s well-being, telling him that the current situation is too dangerous for him and that he should go live his own life. This new coziness leads to some intentionally funny moments. At one point, Willie walks in on Barnabas saying out loud that he doesn’t understand what’s going on. He tells the vampire “You’re talking to yourself, Barnabas. That’s a bad sign!” As if that’s the part he needs to worry about!

Willie has a conversation with Maggie that verges on the poetic. When he tells her “I never knew how awful it was to be alone until I wasn’t,” we find ourselves wanting him to go directly to Roxanne and run as far as he can as fast as he can.

There is a big mirror on the wall at the foot of the stairs in Barnabas’ house. At one point he walks in front of it and casts a reflection. Sometimes they have been very emphatic that vampires don’t cast reflections. Most famously, Julia confirmed that Barnabas was a vampire in #288, when she contrived to open her compact and point the mirror at him. The same prop was used in #704, when it exposed Barnabas’ secret to the luckless Sophie Baker, prompting him to murder her. On the other hand, when wicked witch Angelique became a vampire for a while in 1968, there were some shots that were obviously deliberate in their composition that prominently featured her reflection in mirrors, making the point that she was an exception to this rule. The mirror doesn’t have to be on the wall, but if it is we will inevitably see Jonathan Frid reflected in it, suggesting that they put it there on purpose to show that he is now another exception to the rule.

Willie was off the show for a year, from #696 (broadcast 24 February 1969) to #956 (broadcast 23 February 1970.) His absence during that period was not explained. Today he mentions to Julia that he has been working at another hospital, as he once worked for her at Windcliff. Indeed, she had offered him a job there in #537. Since Julia did not know about this other hospital job, he must have taken it sometime after leaving his position at Windcliff and without a reference from her. Before Barnabas enslaved him, Willie was a dangerously unstable ruffian, wanted by the police, so they are likely the first employers he has had who would have provided a usable reference. So he probably left Collinwood for the job at Windcliff not much later than March 1969 and held a job in some third place before getting back into hospital work more recently.

In the first year of the show, only David Henesy, as strange and troubled boy David Collins, looked directly into the camera; in the last year, that move has been the signature of Denise Nickerson as David’s young friend Amy Jennings. Today, just about every member of the cast does it. I believe it is the first time Jonathan Frid has done so, though there have been times when his examination of the teleprompter has moved him perilously close to an unintentional soliloquy.

Barnabas tells Julia that their enemies will never find his coffin “where it is now.” The first time we heard that was in 1967, and back then it made us wonder why, if he has an impregnable hiding place for his coffin, he usually just leaves it in the middle of his basement where no one coming downstairs could avoid seeing it. Barnabas spent most of 1969 as a time traveler visiting 1897. His vampirism was exposed in that year, and he was hunted. He assured his allies that no one could find his coffin where it was hidden then; they found it immediately. So longtime viewers aren’t so sure that Barnabas will escape detection during the day.

As Julia, Grayson Hall has a new hairdo today. It is a bit longer than it has been, and is swept up in front.

Episode 952: Every inhuman creature has one vulnerability

We are in the fourteenth week of a story about the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who are planning to retake the Earth from humankind. At first, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins was a zealous acolyte of the Leviathans and the faithful leader of a cult devoted to their service. The first chapter of the story came to an end when a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time, the harbinger of the Leviathans’ return, ordered Barnabas to kill his best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Barnabas refused that order and became disaffected from the cult, held in line only by the Leviathans’ threats.

The shape-shifting monster has grown, and now spends most of his time as a young man whom everyone calls Jeb, despite his initial request to be called Jabe. Barnabas learned the other day that some of the threats the Leviathans had been making were empty, and so tried to smash a small wooden box that is important to them. Jabe stopped him, and punished the attempt by turning Barnabas back into what he was from the 1790s until 1968, a vampire.

Jabe’s home is a room above an antique shop owned by cultists Megan and Philip Todd. There is a lot of talk about this room as the only place where Jabe can change form. This is confusing to regular viewers. We saw him change from boy to girl while visiting the great house of Collinwood in #909, and in #946 and #947 he changed from his true, non-human, form into Jabe while at a house on an island many miles from the village of Collinsport. Today, Barnabas burns the antique shop down in order to destroy the room; Jabe says that he left the room through the window when the fire started, and changed from his true form into his human shape while outside. I keep trying to give them the benefit of the doubt about this, but at this point the whole theme of the “Chosen Room” falls apart completely.

Nonetheless, the antique shop sets and the troubled relationship between Philip and Megan have been signatures of the Leviathan story so far. Now the shop is gone, and Megan is gleeful that Philip is in jail, having confessed to three murders Jabe committed and unlikely ever to live with her again. So we can say that chapter two of the Leviathan story is over.

Barnabas’ re-vamping marks a transition in more than this storyline. He is the central character of the show and its main attraction; whether or not he is a vampire determines a great deal about what kind of show it is. You could periodize the show into segments depending on whether he is a vampire or not. I’ll risk a spoiler and tell you we have now begun a long segment of Barnabas-as-vampire.

Barnabas goes to the jail and has a conference with Philip. Jabe overtaxed Philip’s allegiance to the Leviathans, as he overtaxed Barnabas’. Philip has confessed to Jabe’s murders only because he loves Megan, believes she still loves him, and fears that if he does not do what Jabe commands he will kill Megan. Barnabas tells him that in fact Megan no longer cares about him at all, but is entirely devoted to Jabe.

In the real world, the state of Maine did away with capital punishment in 1887, a fact which applied to the universe of Dark Shadows in 1966. In #101, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins disappointed his son, strange and troubled boy David, by mentioning it. But the prospect of a gallows is more melodramatic than is that of any prison sentence, however long, and so Philip announces that he is going to be hanged for Jabe’s murders.

Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, owner of the great estate of Collinwood and of the businesses that employ most of the people in and around the village of Collinsport, is a devoted member of the Leviathan cult. Liz gives Jabe the carriage house on the estate to live in, telling him its back room will be suited to take the place of the now-destroyed Chosen Room. He tells her that Barnabas has betrayed the cult, but that she need not act against him yet. The carriage house was mentioned a few times in 1969, when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897 and the Collinses were still traveling by carriage. I believe this is our first confirmation that the carriage house still exists in the twentieth century.

Megan comes to visit Jabe at the carriage house. She is exultant that Philip is in jail. Jabe tells her he has no intention of resuming his true form; she is appalled. The plan has been that he will take Liz’ daughter Carolyn as his bride, and that she will then turn into the same kind of being he is. If he is going to be humanoid all the time, then he will just be taking Carolyn out on dates. Megan says that this was not the point. Jabe dismisses her objections, and tells her that their own relationship is different now than it was when he was first taking shape and she and Philip were his foster parents. He pulls her close to him and gives her a passionate kiss.

Oedipal kiss. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Jabe spent several weeks in the form of a succession of children. The children showed violent hostility towards Philip and remarkably little sense of boundaries in their relationship with Megan; the reference to the Freudian Oedipus complex was not subtle then, and the kiss he gives to Megan while he is setting Philip up for a judicial murder makes the connection explicit.

Episode 951: Do something with the body

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has fallen afoul of a shape-shifting monster from beyond time and space who once hoped people would call him “Jabe.” The monster, who has settled for the name “Jeb,” turns Barnabas back into what he was from the 1790s until 1968, a vampire.

Re-vamped, Barnabas suddenly gets a lot of gray in his hair and a much darker complexion. Makeup artist Vince Loscalzo deserves a lot of credit for these bits of color, they are placed perfectly to emphasize the look of anguish as Barnabas realizes what has happened to him and struggles to resist his urges. The actors’ faces were the medium of Loscalzo’s art, and he outdid himself with these complements to Jonathan Frid’s face.

People talk endlessly about the heroic makeup work Dick Smith did with Jonathan Frid one week in October 1967 and again on a feature film, but Vince Loscalzo did great stuff like this day in and day out for years. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We see Barnabas sitting at a table in The Blue Whale, the tavern in the village of Collinsport. He is the only patron in the room. He has a glass of reddish liquid in front of him, and the bartender is moving around the room. The bartender looks at Barnabas, as if to ask, “How do you like your glass of AB negative, Mr Collins?” But he turns away and moves on.

A young woman enters. Barnabas invites her to join him at his table. He sees that she is wearing a pendant that identifies her as a member of the secret cult that serves Jabe and other creatures who intend to seize control of the Earth, supplanting humankind. Barnabas introduces himself, and says that he was the one who made it possible for Jabe to come to life. This is true, but it is also true that he has become disaffected from the cult. Even after Jabe turned him back into a vampire, Barnabas is still determined to thwart it.

The young woman introduces herself as Nelle Gunston, who was recruited into the cult while living a dreary life with her parents in Virginia. Nelle tells Barnabas that everything has changed for her since she joined the cult. She says that she will gladly do anything she can to advance its objectives, including murder. They have this conversation in nice loud voices while the bartender is nearby.

Barnabas’ friends, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and recovering werewolf Quentin Collins, enter. He introduces them to Nelle, then explains to them that he and Nelle have a private matter to discuss. Quentin and Julia go to the bar, where Quentin orders brandies. They talk about Nelle’s pendant and their fear that Barnabas is falling back under the power of the cult while the bartender is in their space serving them drinks. Evidently they’ve learned to rely on his discretion. They are still deep in conversation when Barnabas leaves with Nelle.

Barnabas takes Nelle back to his place on the pretext that Jabe will meet them there. She asks him why it is so dark in there; he asks her how she got into the cult. She catches on that Jabe is not coming and that Barnabas is not loyal to him. She draws a knife and is about to stab Barnabas when he bares his fangs to her.

Quentin and Julia let themselves into Barnabas’ house. They find Nelle dead on the floor and Barnabas wallowing in self-pity next to her. Julia takes a second look at Nelle and sees the puncture wounds on her neck. She tells Barnabas she will renew the treatments that first put his vampirism into remission two years before; he says there is something else he has to do first. After he rushes out, Quentin and Julia talk about how they will hide Nelle’s body.

Nelle was the perfect victim for Barnabas- no one in town knew her, no one expected her to come, no one will notice she is missing. And he is determined to weaken the cult, so reducing its numbers by one fits his goals.

Barnabas goes to the antique shop in the village. Jabe is in an upstairs room; Barnabas is convinced that Jabe can assume his true form and lay it down only in that room. We saw him do that in a house on an island many miles away in #946, and he told Barnabas that he had done so in #947, but apparently that doesn’t count, somehow. Jabe is far more powerful in his true form than he is when he is man-shaped, but he cannot mingle with humans in that form. So Barnabas believes that he will limit Jabe’s options if he destroys the room. He pours gasoline all around the first floor of the shop and sets a match to it.

Nelle is played by Elizabeth Eis, in her first appearance on Dark Shadows. They say that the first thing actors have to do to work effectively is to pay attention to each other. Eis shows how far this can take you. She listens ravenously to everything Frid says and never takes her eyes off him. The script doesn’t give her a huge amount to work with, but simply by giving her scene partner her total attention she creates a sensational performance. The producers noticed; she will be back later this year in two quite different roles.

This episode is the last time we see either the Blue Whale or Bob O’Connell as the Bartender. The Blue Whale was an important part of the show from its debut in June 1966 until the first costume drama insert began in November 1967. O’Connell appeared as the Bartender in 60 episodes (three of them as other bartenders in other periods of history) and had speaking parts in 6. It’s too bad he doesn’t get to say anything today, but at least he is in the closing credits.

Hail and farewell to Bob the Bartender, the jukebox, and the tavern. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 948: A sign of your freedom, and of mine

The first ghost we saw on Dark Shadows was that of the gracious Josette Collins, who came down from her portrait and danced around the outside of the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood in #70. We had first heard of Josette in #5, when drunken sad sack Sam Evans told well-meaning governess Vicki Winters about her, and she had been mentioned many times in the first fourteen weeks. From #70 until #191, Josette’s ghost became a steadily bigger part of the story. She rallied the other ghosts of Collinwood to rescue Vicki from crazed handyman Matthew in #126, and from that point until #191 guided Vicki in her battle with undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. By the end of the Laura story, Josette was firmly established as the chief figure in the show’s supernatural back-world, a world which the action is continually tugging into view.

Vampire Barnabas Collins succeeded Laura as the show’s supernatural Big Bad. Josette was well-suited to do battle with the distant and indefinable Laura, but was too wispy to be very effective against the more dynamic Barnabas. In #212, Barnabas addressed Josette through her portrait in the Old House, which we had seen strange and troubled boy David Collins use to carry on conversations with her in #102 and #162. Barnabas spoke to Josette then as if she were his grandmother, who had sided with his father against him in a fateful conflict, and told her he was kicking her out of the house. Over the next few weeks, there were several episodes when David lamented Josette’s absence from the Old House, suggesting that Barnabas had succeeded in banishing her.

As it became clear Barnabas was a hit and would be kept on the show for a while, they decided to connect him to Josette. So they borrowed the story of the 1932 film The Mummy. As Boris Karloff’s undead Imhotep decided that Helen Grosvenor was the reincarnation of his lost love Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun, so Barnabas decided that Josette, retconned as his lost love, had been reincarnated as Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) daughter of Sam. As Imhotep abducted Helen and tried to turn her into Ankh-Esen-Amun, so Barnabas abducted Maggie and tortured her in an attempt to erase her personality and upload Josette’s in its place.

In the movie, Helen and Ankh-Esen-Amun were both played by Zita Johann. The original viewers wouldn’t have known it, but Miss Scott, wearing a veil, played the ghost of Josette in #70 and voiced Josette’s lines to Vicki in #126. In the scenes during the Laura story when we caught glimpses of Josette’s face, the ghost was played by frequent stand-in Rosemary McNamara, who looked enough like Miss Scott that viewers may have wondered if she was playing the role. So the idea of a connection between Maggie and Josette had been rattling around the writers’ room for a while. In #240, David saw Maggie wandering around Barnabas’ house. She was wearing Josette’s dress but no veil, in a daze and answering to Josette’s name. Afterward, David said that he had seen Josette and that she looked exactly the same as she did when he had seen her as a ghost. That confirmed that Maggie was at least a Josette lookalike, if not her reincarnation.

Maggie eventually escaped from Barnabas. Her psychiatrist, Julia Hoffman, saw in Barnabas her chance to make a career as a mad scientist, and so she sold Maggie out, using her magical power of hypnosis to delete her memory of what Barnabas did to her and leave her with a feeling of goodwill towards Barnabas. By that time, Barnabas had turned his attentions to Vicki, toying with the idea of Josettifying her. Josette’s ghost made it clear to him that she would try to stop any such effort when she spoke through Vicki at a séance in #280 and 281; after that, Barnabas gave her portrait another talking-to, telling her that she was lost to him forever and must let him live in the present. It sounded like he was going to stop trying to turn girls into Josette, but he kept pushing Josette’s hypnotic music box on Vicki, so if that’s what he meant he didn’t stick with it.

In November 1967, Vicki went back in time to the days when Barnabas and Josette were living human beings. From then until March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. Miss Scott was cast as the living Josette, completing the parallel with the flashbacks to ancient Egypt in The Mummy and suggesting that Barnabas, though he was appallingly cruel and thoroughly crazy, was onto something when he told Maggie she was Josette.

The whole idea of supernaturalism is that what appears to be powerless is in fact most powerful and vice versa, so having been powerful as a ghost, Josette has to be at least somewhat understated as a living being. Making matters worse for her, the 1790s segment moved at a breakneck speed, piling one bizarre disaster on top of another, so that there was no time to develop the kind of subtle strength a lady of her sort might be expected to have or to give us much of a look at Josette and Barnabas as a loving couple before everything went horribly wrong for them. She winds up as a pleasant but ineffectual person. The 1790s period was the show’s first great triumph, but it did knock Josette out of the spotlight permanently.

A couple of weeks after Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission and he tried to function as a good guy. His bumbling attempts at heroism generated as much trouble for everyone as had his villainy. Julia had made herself a permanent houseguest at Collinwood, and she was the one who was busiest with the work of containing his damage. Throughout the part of the show made and set in 1968, Josette was all but forgotten.

Early in 1969, Barnabas came unstuck in time and found himself in 1897, once more subject to the vampire curse. During his eight months in that period, he met two more characters played by Miss Scott. Each of them led him into a fresh bout of Josettery. He gave the music box to neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond; after her death, he met Kitty Soames, dowager countess of Hampshire, who despite her title was a young woman from Pennsylvania. The music box showed up in Kitty’s room at a time when Barnabas could not possibly have been around, and it became clear that this time, it was Josette herself who was trying to take possession of Kitty.

In #884, airing in November 1969, Kitty was assumed bodily into Josette’s portrait. Barnabas saw this happen. He then returned to the 1790s, to the night when Josette originally flung herself to her death from the cliff at Widows’ Hill rather than let Barnabas turn her into a vampire. Josette had only the vaguest memory of 1897 or of Kitty; as far as she is concerned, she was living through this night for the first time, and was experiencing time in the usual linear fashion.

Barnabas tried to prevent Josette’s suicide, but succeeded only in changing the method she used to do herself in. By the time he returned to the twentieth century, he had fallen under the sway of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who are trying to retake the Earth from humankind. For a time he led a cult that served them in this goal, but eventually became disaffected. He hesitates to take any very definite action against the Leviathans, because they told him they were “holding Josette prisoner in the past” and that they would inflict on her a more horrible death than either of those she has already died if he defied them in any way.

Vicki was written out of the show in 1968, and Maggie succeeded her as governess to the children at Collinwood. The Leviathans have sent a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time as the harbinger of their conquest. The monster usually takes the form of a young man who initially asked people to call him “Jabe,” but whom everyone instead calls “Jeb.” Jabe is always obnoxious and often homicidal, and has alienated many people from the Leviathans, including Barnabas. He abducted Maggie and thought he had brainwashed her into joining the cult; once he let her go, she made an alliance with Barnabas and Julia to fight the Leviathans.

Barnabas is convinced Jabe is about to do something especially horrible, and so he wants to open the battle. But his concern for Josette is still holding him back. He and Julia talk about this. It dawns on them that the Leviathans may have been lying, and that they may not have the power to make Josette re-die. The only way they can be sure is to ask Josette, so they decide to hold a séance. They enlist Maggie to be the third member of the circle.

The typical Dark Shadows séance involves three roles- the convener, who gives detailed instructions and barks about the importance of following them, even if everyone in the room has attended multiple séances already; the medium, who goes into the trance and channels the voice from the realm of the dead; and the objector, who tries to interrupt and is sternly hushed by the convener. Recent séances have omitted the objector; today, Julia keeps up a running commentary from the time Barnabas starts the incantations until Maggie goes into the trance, but she doesn’t object and Barnabas doesn’t hush her.

Through Maggie, Josette says she had a hard time getting to the séance, but that it had nothing to do with the Leviathans. She says she doesn’t even know the Leviathans. Barnabas doesn’t believe her, and she says that if he wants proof he should come to her grave.

He does. The tinkling tune of the music box plays on the soundtrack; Barnabas does not mention the original signature of Josette’s presence, the scent of jasmine. Her ghost manifests before him:

THE GHOST OF JOSETTE: It is I. And I will tell you what you must know, now and forever. You asked me if the Leviathans held me prisoner. They do not. But you hold me, just as I hold you with my love. But now the time has come for us both to go free.

BARNABAS: I cannot be free without you.

GHOST: But you must. For I belong to the past. For you there is a future with someone else.

BARNABAS: But I don’t want anyone else.

GHOST: Then you must be lonely, for you cannot have me. But you will find someone else. I know it. And when you do, give her this. The ring that you gave to me, give to her, whoever she may be. This ring is a sign of your freedom and of mine. (Returns her engagement ring to him and vanishes.)

Josette says goodbye. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This is Josette’s final appearance on Dark Shadows, not counting a parallel universe version of Josette who will feature in the last weeks of the show, played by another actress. As for the “someone else,” it would be logical for Barnabas to get with Julia, since the two of them are so deeply complicit in each other’s crimes that neither of them will ever be able to make a life with anyone else. But there have been some hints lately that romance might be budding between Barnabas and Maggie, and if that’s going to happen they are going to have to keep us from thinking very clearly about Josette and Barnabas’ attempts to recreate her. We might suppose that her farewell is meant to clear the path for such a development.

There’s also some business about the Leviathan story. In the opening reprise, Jabe catches a bat, which he plans to use to turn Barnabas back into a vampire.

After Barnabas gets the green light from Josette, he meets with Philip Todd, another person whom Jabe has driven out of the Leviathan cult. Philip tells Barnabas how much he hates Jabe and agrees to steal the Leviathan box, an object which does not play music but which is a lot more effective at controlling the minds of people who open it than was that box of Josette’s. At the end of the episode, Jabe catches Philip with the box.

A commenter on Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day who identifies herself as “Melissa”* wrote this lyric about Jabe in two comments about the post covering today’s episode:

Come and listen to my story ’bout s man named Jeb,
Poor Leviathan, barely kept his evil web.
Then, one day, he and Barney had a spat,
And out from the cage came a rubberized bat.
(Vampire bat, that is:
Nylon string,
Terror teeth.)

Next thing you know,ol’ Jeb has got a girl.
Cult folk said, “Jeb, come and rule the world!”
They said, “In the attic is the place you want to be,”
So they threw themselves a seance and they called on J.D.C.
(Josette Collins, that is.
Swimming fail.
Newly scarred.)

Comments left 31 October 2016 by “Melissa” on Danny Horn “Episode 948: War Games,” posted 30 October 2016 at Dark Shadows Every Day.

I’m singing that aloud right now. I realize you might be reading this years after I wrote it, but believe me, I’m singing it right now.

*Apparently also an FotB here.