The current storyline on Dark Shadows revolves around the evil machinations of a cult that serves mysterious supernatural beings known as the Leviathan people. We haven’t seen the Leviathans themselves, and the humans who make up the cult have not yet done anything spectacularly destructive.
The vagueness of the Leviathans’ threat is lampshaded a couple of times today. We open with old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, a leader of the cult, standing over the hospital bed of his distant cousin Quentin Collins. He tried to kill Quentin, but managed only to give him a head wound resulting in massive amnesia. In our world that would represent an extremely severe injury, but in Soap Opera Land everyone gets amnesia from time to time. It’s like the common cold, only with a more definite prospect of complete recovery. Now he is thinking of finishing the job. He decides that since Quentin once saved his life, he will take a pass on killing him for now. We hear his thoughts as he counts that a payment in full of his debt to Quentin. Evidently he now considers himself free to kill Quentin at his next chance. That anticlimax sums up the whole story so far- lots of ominous suggestion, no resolutions.
The Leviathan cult has been menacing Paul Stoddard, a shady fellow who, in the late 1940s, married heiress Elizabeth Collins, sired her daughter Carolyn, and deserted the family after he realized he wouldn’t be getting his hands on Liz’ money. The night he ran off, he unwittingly made a Faustian bargain with a representative of the cult, handing Carolyn over to them. It is unclear why they have been so unpleasant to him lately, since he made his agreement twenty years before.
Now, Liz has been absorbed into the Leviathan cult. She has taken Paul back into her home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood. She told him yesterday that she wanted him close to her so that they could work together to fight his unseen enemies, but it dawns on him today that this is not her intention. She tells him that she and Carolyn have concluded that he is mentally ill and they want to get him help. He goes to telephone the police. Liz asks what crime he will report to them, and he realizes that he knows of none that has been committed.
Paul catches permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, eavesdropping on his conversation with Liz. He angrily accuses her of being “one of them.” Since Liz is talking about treating Paul as a mental patient and Julia is a psychiatrist in residence at Liz’ house, this is a natural assumption on his part. Before long, he realizes that Julia is in fact his likeliest ally. Between the summer of 1968 and the autumn of 1969, Julia and Barnabas were inseparably close friends. His absorption into the Leviathan cult put a stop to that, and now he can barely tolerate her presence. She does not know what is going on, but is avidly interested in whatever suspicions Paul can share concerning the change in Barnabas. Before they can get very far, Barnabas enters and Paul runs off. Julia faces Barnabas down, then goes after Paul.
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.
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.
For eight months, from March through November of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897. Among the characters we got to know during that period were Amanda Harris (Donna McKechnie,) who came to life when an artist named Charles Delaware Tate used magical powers he didn’t know he had and painted a portrait of an imaginary woman. As long as the portrait exists, Amanda will live, remaining young and beautiful. Tate also painted a portrait of the rakish Quentin Collins. As Amanda’s story is a retelling of the ancient Greek tale of Pygmalion and Galatea, so Quentin’s portrait is a version of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Quentin had been a werewolf when Tate painted him, but as long as the portrait is intact it will change on moonlit nights, while Quentin remains human. Like Amanda, Quentin is immune from aging while his portrait lasts.
These two conditionally immortal beings found each other towards the end of the 1897 storyline and fell in love. They were going to run off together, but Tate had stolen Quentin’s portrait and Quentin couldn’t leave without it. Shortly before the show came back to contemporary dress, it seemed that the portrait had been destroyed when Tate’s cottage burned down, though we did not see this happen.
In September, mad scientist Julia Hoffman managed to travel back in time and spend a few weeks in 1897. She befriended Quentin and saw Amanda’s portrait. After returning to 1969, Julia found a mediocre landscape Tate painted in 1949 at an antique shop in the village of Collinsport and shelled out a ridiculous sum for it, hoping that it would help her find out whether Quentin is alive, where his portrait is, and whether Tate himself might be alive and able to help Quentin’s great-grandson Chris Jennings, who has inherited the werewolf curse.
Another woman is interested in the portrait. She is Olivia Corey (Donna McKechnie,) a famous Broadway actress. Olivia has come to Collinsport to try to persuade Julia to sell her the painting. Julia sees Olivia’s resemblance to Tate’s paintings of Amanda and suspects that the women are one and the same, but since she did not meet Amanda when she was in 1897 she cannot disprove Olivia’s story that she is Amanda’s granddaughter.
We fade in on Julia today, sitting with Olivia on a couch in Olivia’s suite in the Collinsport Inn. We can tell Olivia is staying there, because she has decorated it with a copy of her professional headshot, among other things.
What, don’t you set your headshot on a table when you stay in a hotel room? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The two are having a conversation in which they declare themselves to be devoted admirers of Tate’s works. We saw many of Tate’s works in the 1897 segment, and few of them were any better than the crummy landscape that has brought them together. When Julia found the painting, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard expressed amazement she would pay a hefty sum for such an undistinguished piece, and later today Olivia will say in so many words that it is of little interest to anyone but a Tate completist, so the show is not pretending that Tate’s pictures had great aesthetic value. We can therefore be sure that Olivia, like Julia, has an ulterior motive.
Olivia claims to be working with a figure in the fine art business in New York City who wants to stage an exhibition of Tate’s works. She refers to this figure as “he,” disappointing our hopes that she might be in league with the show’s most interesting character, NYC art dealer Portia Fitzsimmons, whom we met in #193. Then again, Olivia represented herself as “Mr Corey” in the telegrams she sent to the antique shop inquiring after the painting in an attempt to conceal her identity, so maybe she is doing the same thing on behalf of Mrs Fitzsimmons.
Olivia asks to be allowed to photograph the painting, and under the circumstances Julia can hardly refuse that request. Olivia asks when she can call at the great house on the estate of Collinwood, where Julia has been in residence since 1967. Julia says that she will have the chauffeur bring the painting to the hotel later that evening.
This is only the second time we have heard anything about a chauffeur at Collinwood. The first time was in #543, when Carolyn hired unsightly ex-convict Harry Johnson to help her manage Frankenstein’s monster Adam and covered up his true responsibilities by putting him on the payroll as chauffeur. We haven’t seen or heard of Harry since #669, which was also the only episode in which he was played by Edward Marshall. In previous episodes Harry had been played by Craig Slocum, usually pretty badly, but Mr Marshall did such a good job with the character we would be glad to see him again.
We have little hope this will happen, however. Not only is Harry generally forgotten after his long absence, he and Julia never had much to do with each other when he was on the show. Since her activities concerning the painting are a big secret, she would choose only an assistant whom she could trust. That means Chris.
Carolyn hired Chris as groundskeeper at Collinwood in #677, by which time he was already living in the cottage on the estate that goes with the job. By the time the show went to 1897, his lycanthropy had surpassed all bounds and he was a wolf at all times, even during the day. In #889, set in 1969, we saw that he had regained his human form and spent the eight months of the 1897 flashback confined to a mental hospital Julia controls. We also saw that Carolyn had no idea where he had been or what his problem was. That made it rather a surprise in #897, when we saw that he still lived in the cottage. Presumably he still has the job, as well. You’d think an unexplained absence of eight months, followed by a confrontation in which he told Carolyn that he was a monster who would kill her if she didn’t watch out, would lead to a firing, but evidently the Collinses have a relaxed attitude towards their staff.
When we cut to Julia after her scene with Olivia, we see her in the drawing room of the great house with Chris. She shows him a handwritten note from Amanda to Quentin, written in 1897, that she dug up someplace. He tells Chris that he is to take the painting to Olivia’s room and get a sample of her handwriting to compare to that standard. He is to present himself as the chauffeur at Collinwood. Since he is in fact the groundskeeper at Collinwood and he will give Olivia his right name, it’s hard to see what the point is of claiming to have a different position in the household. Chris is skeptical that Olivia and Amanda can be the same person, but Julia tells him that he of all people should be willing to accept the apparently impossible.
Chris is nervous in Olivia’s room, especially when she introduces him to a Mr Nakamura. She gives the painting to Mr Nakamura, who takes it to another room. She explains that Mr Nakamura is a professional photographer and will be taking the picture. She says she will call Chris when Mr Nakamura is finished. Chris says that Julia explicitly told him to wait for the painting. This is odd- if the goal is to get a sample of Olivia’s handwriting, why not insist on leaving it with her? Then she would have to write out a receipt.
Mr Nakamura takes a long time. Olivia takes out her silver tea service and keeps offering Chris more tea. It’s for just such situations that I take my silver tea service with me every time I check into a hotel, it really is a pity more people don’t think ahead like that. Eventually Chris gets restless and barges into the room where Mr Nakamura took the painting. He finds a fancy camera there, but no person and no painting. We don’t see much of the room, but from what we can see of the layout of the suite, there doesn’t appear to be any way Mr Nakamura could have exited except the way he went in. Chris is upset, but eventually Mr Nakamura comes back with the painting. He says that he had to go to a local shop to have it done, and shows Olivia a large photograph of the painting. She says that it is acceptable, and tells him that Chris is ready to call the police if they don’t return the painting to him at once.
Chris takes on a sheepish manner and apologizes for his nervousness. He tells Olivia he is an admirer of hers and asks for an autograph. She writes a little note for him. He takes it and the painting and goes.
Back at the great house, Chris delivers the painting and the autograph to Julia. She can see that Olivia’s handwriting is similar enough to Amanda’s to warrant an expert analysis. She thinks of her friend, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes is an expert on the occult, an expertise which typically arises in fields like history or classics that involve the study of manuscripts, so it makes sense that he would be trained in recognizing hands. Chris marvels at Olivia’s attractiveness.
Alone with Olivia, Mr Nakamura says that he found the best radiographer in Collinsport. He paid him to x-ray the painting and to keep quiet about it. Since Collinsport is supposed to be a very small town, one wonders how many radiographers Mr Nakamura had to choose from. At any rate, the x-ray confirms that there is another painting underneath the landscape. Olivia looks at the x-ray exposure, and says that it looks like a portrait.
Chris’ attraction to Olivia recalls the 1897 segment. Amanda came to Collinsport in the company of miserable schoolteacher-turned-unscrupulous adventurer Tim Shaw, who like Chris was played by Don Briscoe. Amanda and Tim stayed in the Collinsport Inn together, perhaps in this suite. We don’t know if Tim and Chris are supposed to resemble each other, and Olivia doesn’t show any signs of recognition. But regular viewers will enjoy seeing Briscoe and Donna McKechnie together in a situation so different from those they explored before.
Olivia’s conversation with Julia, like her headshot on the table, emphasizes that she is A Big Broadway Star. A few years after this episode, Miss McKechnie originated the role of Cassie in A Chorus Line, and actually became A Big Broadway Star. Watching this episode, I wonder if she found herself imitating Olivia when that happened to her.
Mr Nakamura is played by Sho Onodera. Onodera was born in Seattle in 1915 and died in New York in 1974. According to his obituary in The New York Times, Onodera served in US military intelligence during the Second World War, and was the court’s chief interpreter at the Tokyo war crimes trials after the war ended. In later years he.worked as a reporter for both American and Japanese news services. The Times does not mention that Onodera, like 120,000 other Americans of Japanese extraction, spent part of the period of US involvement in the war as an internee, in his case at the Manzanar camp. That fact is recorded in his IMDb biography. As an actor, he appeared in several television shows and a couple of movies, most notably the 1974 film The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, in which he took the role of Mr Matsumoto.
This episode marks Onodera’s only appearance on Dark Shadows. He was one of only three visibly non-white actors to appear in the series. The others were Beverly Hope Atkinson, who had a speaking role as an unnamed nurse in #563, and Henry Judd Baker (also known as Judd Henry Baker,) who was visually prominent but silent as Rroma tough guy Istvan in #821, #825, #826, and #827. From now on, the cast will be all-white. Granted, fishing villages in central Maine in the late 1960s and early 1970s didn’t tend to have a lot of racial diversity, but enough visitors come to town that you might think they could have found more opportunities than that to use the talents of the nonwhite actors who were working in New York in 1966-1971.
We open with the sight of a man (Dennis Patrick) sitting nervously on a chair placed in the middle of a pentagram marked on a rug. At each point of the pentagram there is a candle. The man is Paul Stoddard.
Regular viewers will remember #752, in which Quentin Collins was told to sit on a chair in the middle of a similar pentagram. Quentin’s friend, amateur warlock Evan Hanley, told him that by doing this he could keep from turning into a werewolf. Paul isn’t afraid of turning into a werewolf, and he doesn’t have a friend like Evan. His worry is vague, but urgent- he knows that someone is after him, that if that someone catches up to him they will do something horrible, and that whoever it is keeps sending him messages that it is time for him to pay his debt. But he has no idea who that is, what they will do, or what the debt they are talking about. Sitting in the pentagram was a suggestion that came from a sailor who cruised him in a gay bar met him in a local tavern.
Paul’s pursuers are a cult associated with mysterious beings known as “the Leviathan people.” It has been made clear to us that both Paul and his daughter, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, are, unknown to themselves, part of its orbit. In #888, Paul and Carolyn ran into each other at a cairn that is the cult’s ceremonial center and looked at it. Carolyn had been on its site many times, and could not understand why she had not seen it before. In #894/895, the cult’s acting leader, Carolyn’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins, took antique shop owner Philip Todd to the cairn. Philip told Barnabas he had walked past the site a few days before and that the cairn was not there then; Barnabas explained that only those connected with the Leviathan cult can see it. Barnabas has also been highly solicitous of Carolyn’s well-being since he became part of the cult, and he keeps telling her that he knows she has an extraordinary future ahead of her. So we know that the cult has plans for her, and Paul’s distress suggests that they have less attractive plans for him.
Paul sees the doorknob turning. He is terrified. Instead of the enemy Paul expects, Carolyn enters. He yells at her to leave. She stays. When he is unable to explain what he is afraid of, but that the pentagram on the floor will protect him, she notices that it is the same as the symbol she has been wearing on a chain around her neck. Barnabas gave it to her some days ago and urged her to wear it always. The audience knows, but she does not, that he intends it to protect her from the local werewolf. When she sees the similarity, the show invites us to wonder what the Leviathans have to do with werewolves. Carolyn tells Paul that if the symbol will protect him from his enemies in the form of chalk or gaffer tape on the floor, it will also protect him when it is composed of a silver pendant. He puts the pendant on and declares that he feels much better. He can no longer hear the voices that have been telling him his payment is due immediately. He embraces Carolyn and tells her he trusts only her.
When Carolyn mentioned Barnabas to Paul, he responded “Who is Barnabas?” Carolyn seems surprised he does not know, since she saw him near Barnabas’ house. Indeed, we saw him enter Barnabas’ house and wander through it the night he first returned to Collinwood, after an absence of twenty years. But he doesn’t remember anything about that.
Not that Carolyn’s own long acquaintance with Barnabas is all that enlightening to her just now. Ever since the Leviathans adopted him as one of their own, he has not been himself at all. We see him in his front parlor with mad scientist Julia Hoffman, who has for a year and a half been his inseparable best friend. She is trying to interest him in some information she has gathered about another storyline, and he makes it clear he could not be less interested in it or in her. She demands to know what he is interested in, and he refuses to answer. Carolyn enters, and suddenly Barnabas is all ears. Julia, frustrated, snaps that now she can see what he does care about.
In the autumn of 1967, Barnabas was a vampire and Julia had failed in an attempt to make him human again. He bit Carolyn and made her his blood thrall. He also decided that he would kill Julia to prevent her exposing him. Julia soon learned that Carolyn was both a wily operator and a most devoted servant. Julia had already realized that she was in so deep with Barnabas that she would be unlikely ever to make a life with anyone else, and so she conceived an unrequited love for him. In her dealings with Carolyn in those days, terror mingled with jealousy. Her bitter remark when she sees that Barnabas, who has been so dismissive of her, is now so concerned with Carolyn, reminds longtime viewers of that jealousy. Combined with the story of a daughter reunited with her long-absent and none too respectable father, this faint suggestion of a love triangle is enough to remind us that we are watching a daytime soap.
For her part, Carolyn was freed of her subservience to Barnabas as soon as he was freed of the effects of the vampire curse in March 1968. For some time, Nancy Barrett went out of her way to play Carolyn in a way that left us wondering if Carolyn remembered her time in his power. The scripts didn’t give her a lot of support in that endeavor, but the closeness she feels towards him combines with Julia’s jealousy to bring it back to our minds.
Carolyn has come to ask Julia to help Paul. Julia is back in the great house of Collinwood getting her medical bag to take to Paul’s hotel room when Paul himself bursts in. He demands to see Carolyn. Julia tells him that she left a little while ago to go to his hotel, and is probably there now. The telephone rings. Julia answers it, and tells Paul it is for him. This doesn’t strike her as odd, even though he hasn’t set foot there in twenty years, not since the night he left his wife Liz thinking she had killed him. Julia hands the phone to Paul. He expects to hear Carolyn, but instead hears the same voice that has been taunting him, saying that his bill is due now. He hangs up, and it starts ringing again. He forbids Julia to answer it, and runs out. We cut to his hotel room, and see that this time it is Carolyn trying to reach her father. Later, Carolyn will come home and Julia will tell her that Paul doesn’t seem to want help, however much he may need it.
Paul goes back to his room, and hears the phone there ringing. Terrified, he runs out, returning to the bar where he’d picked up trade met a new friend the night before. He sees another stranger sitting at a table, looking him over and beckoning him by rolling back one finger. The stranger is Barnabas.
Paul reluctantly goes to the table, and Barnabas introduces himself. Paul says he doesn’t know Barnabas, but Barnabas makes it clear he knows all about Paul. He asks him to think back to the night he left Collinwood in 1949. We dissolve to a flashback.
Paul is at the bar, and another strange man strikes up a conversation with him. The man encourages him to assume that he has the power to grant any wish Paul might make in return for a price they would agree on. Paul says that in that case, he will ask for twenty years of boundless prosperity. At the end of those twenty years, Paul will give up anything he has, even his “most precious possession.” They shake hands on this deal. Paul laughs, and says he has won the game. He said that he would surrender anything he has, present tense- not anything he might gain in the course of his successful future, but anything he has as of 4 December 1949. On that date, Paul assures the man, he has nothing anyone could possibly want. The man laughs, and wants to drink to congratulate Paul on his cleverness.
Back in the present, Barnabas is laughing as heartily as the other man did twenty years before. He finds it preposterous that Paul could have forgotten such an important encounter. Paul can’t see anything important in it- it was just a silly little game, and its only consequence was that a strange man bought him a drink. Barnabas says that on the contrary, the bargain he struck was quite real. The Leviathans kept their side of it by giving him the success he has had over the last twenty years. Now that the twenty years are up, the time has come for them to claim the most precious possession he had the night he fled Collinwood.
Paul says that he supposes Barnabas is talking about his soul. He laughs heartily at that, and tells Barnabas that he is welcome to it. He is telling Paul that that is not what he meant as Carolyn enters. Paul is still laughing, and is delighted to see his daughter. She says she is relieved that the two of them found each other, and he tells her everything will be all right now. Barnabas says that Carolyn is her father’s most precious possession.
The scenes of Paul rushing around in a steadily mounting panic he is unable to explain are highly reminiscent of The Twilight Zone. The last line is a twist worthy of that classic series, especially as delivered by Jonathan Frid. His icy performance as Barnabas in these early episodes of the Leviathan arc not only recalls the malign representatives of alien powers on that show, but is superb in itself. He stumbles a little over his words in Barnabas’ scene with Julia, but is perfectly composed otherwise, and the effect is quite frightening.
I remarked on the gay subtext of the barroom scenes in the comment thread on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day:
So far, this has been the gayest storyline the show has taken on yet.
In 899, the sailor offers to buy Paul a drink, and Paul shouts “I buy my own drinks!” This isn’t subtext- any man getting that reaction in a bar will know that the other fellow has interpreted his offer as including more than the drink. Paul apologizes and becomes friendly, indicating that he is willing to abandon that interpretation and set aside the hostility that accompanied it.
In this episode, we’re back in the same bar. Barnabas beckons Paul to his table with his index finger. I invite any man who doesn’t think we are intended to read this as a reference to a sexual come-on to try that move on a homophobic tough guy in a bar.
Paul’s face shows his inner struggle as he tries to resist Barnabas’ advances, but he can’t. Barnabas coaxes him into reminiscing about yet another night in the same bar, when a casual encounter with yet another guy led to something that seemed at the time like a little harmless tomfoolery, but that has now grown into a threat to his relationship with his family, his standing in the community, his physical well-being, and everything else.
Comment by “Acilius,” left 12 December 2020 on Danny Horn, “Episode 900: The Long Con,” posted on Dark Shadows Every Day, 18 July 2016.
In response to someone who said some kind words about that comment, I made a remark that I no longer think is very good:
Thanks! It’s a bit of a puzzle- so far as I know, none of the writers on the show at this time was gay, so I’m not sure why they decided to go so deep into these themes just then.
Comment by “Acilius,” left 11 April 2021 on Danny Horn, “Episode 900: The Long Con,” posted on Dark Shadows Every Day, 18 July 2016.
What I think now, and probably would have thought then if I had stopped and considered it for a minute before I hit “Post Comment,” is that the writing staff’s sexuality has nothing to do with it. They were worldly, sophisticated people with long experience in the theatrical profession in New York City. They all probably had many gay friends, and when they are called upon to write a story about people being drawn into a secret underworld and learning uncomfortable truths about themselves in the process their minds will naturally turn to themes having to do with closeted homosexuality. Granted, that doesn’t fully account for Christopher Bernau’s decision to play Philip as a much queenier version of Paul Lynde, but it is hardly a “puzzle” that the writers would draw on motifs suggestive of the closet when that’s the story they have to work with.
The man who met Paul in the bar in 1949 is unnamed in today’s dialogue, but will later be referred to as Mr Strak. Strak is played by John Harkins, who appeared in #174 as Lieutenant Costa of the Arizona State Police and in #878, 879, 880, 881, and 883 as Garth Blackwood, formerly the keeper of England’s Dartmoor Prison, and by that time a creature raised from Hell to wreak vengeance on an escaped prisoner and anyone else who caught his attention.
Strak’s name may remind longtime viewers of another minor character whom we saw in episodes #1 and #2, Wilbur Strake, private eye. We saw Strake in this same bar, where he gave reports about Carolyn and other members of the Collins family to his employer, Burke Devlin. Like Strak, Strake was a rather smug, sardonic sort. Add to this the rarity of the names “Strak” and “Strake” and the fact that they sound so much alike, and it seems obvious that there is an intentional reference of some kind. Paul’s presence in this storyline is the result of the writers reaching back to the show’s early days to find a loose end they could attach to this storyline to incorporate it into the Collins family saga, so they probably were looking through the scripts from the first week. Still, I can’t imagine they thought many people would remember Wilbur Strake by this point. Likely the reference is an inside joke, but who was on the inside and what the point of the joke was, I can’t begin to guess.
I wasn’t writing detailed posts with background information when I covered the first weeks of the show, so I will mention here Strake was played by Joseph Julian, who later became a regular on Somerset, a soap that aired on NBC opposite Dark Shadows for the last year of its run. The cast of Somerset included several Dark Shadows alums, including Dennis Patrick, Joel Crothers, and Christopher Pennock in major roles, and, as day players, Dolph Sweet and Humbert Allen Astredo.
A cult devoted to the service of supernatural beings known as “the Leviathan people” is secretly establishing itself in and around Collinsport, Maine. Antique shop owners Megan and Philip Todd are members of the cult. Its acting leader, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, has entrusted them with several items sacred to the cult. The Todds are responsible for a scroll, a box, a book, and a baby. Now the book has gone missing, and the baby is sick. Yesterday, Barnabas responded to this situation by brainwashing Philip into killing Megan. Today, we open with Philip entering the antique shop and choking Megan.
Megan is Marie Wallace’s third character on Dark Shadows. Her first, fiancée of Frankenstein Eve, was strangled by her intended spouse Adam in #626. Her second, madwoman Jenny Collins, was strangled by her estranged husband Quentin in #748. The murder of Eve came at the end of the Monster Mash period of the show that stretched throughout most of 1968, while the murder of Jenny marked a turning point in the eight-month costume drama segment set in the year 1897. The Leviathan arc is just beginning, and Miss Wallace’s character is already being strangled by her husband. If we were hoping for fresh new story ideas, we couldn’t be more disappointed.
Until, that is, the strangulation is called off. Philip is holding Megan by the neck, reiterating that “There is no margin for error! Punishment is necessary!,” when strange and troubled boy David Collins appears on the staircase and announces “punishment is no longer necessary.” Philip releases Megan, and David informs them that he is now “the keeper of the book, and the protector of the baby.” He gives Megan and Philip medicine that will cure the baby of his illness. He tells them that if they need him, he will know and will appear.
Barnabas was a vampire when he joined the cast of characters in April 1967. As a villain he was unrivaled at giving everyone else things to do, whether as his victims, his accomplices, or his would-be destroyers. In March 1968, his curse was put into abeyance and he became human. He set out to be the good guy, but still had the personality of a metaphor for extreme selfishness. As a result, Barnabas the would-be hero created at least as many disasters as Barnabas the monster ever did. He thus remained the driving force of the show, as well as its star attraction.
While Barnabas can keep things going from day to day, Philip’s attack on Megan suggests that he cannot take the story in new directions. From episode #1, that has been David’s forte. The series began when well-meaning governess Vicki was called to Collinwood to take charge of David’s education, took its first turn towards grisly tales when David tried to murder his father, became a supernatural thriller when David’s mother the undead blonde fire witch came back for him, began its first time travel story when Barnabas was planning to kill David in November 1967, and was launched into both the “Haunting of Collinwood” that dominated the show from December 1968 through February 1969 and the 1897 segment that followed it by David’s involvement with the ghost of Quentin Collins. David was not always a highly active participant in the stories that began with him; indeed, he sometimes disappeared altogether for months at a time. But even from the outside, he is the instrument by which the basic architecture of the show is reshaped. Now that he is, apparently, the leader of the Leviathans, we can renew our hopes that something we haven’t seen before is still in store for us.
David is still in the shop when a gray-haired man enters. David greets him as “Mr Prescott,” the name by which he heard his cousin Carolyn address the man when he met her in the shop the other day. David has a smug look on his face that suggests he knows this is an alias. Indeed, we already know that the man is connected with the Leviathan cult, so the leader of the cult may well recognize him as Paul Stoddard, Carolyn’s long-missing father.
Paul asks the Todds to give a note to Carolyn. David says that he will be going home to the great house of Collinwood in a few minutes, and volunteers to take the note to her there. Paul gladly hands it to him.
At Collinwood, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman is conferring with mysterious drifter Chris Jennings. Yesterday, Jenny’s ghost appeared to Chris and told him that Quentin could help him with his big problem, which is that he is a werewolf. Jenny did not identify herself, and Chris had no clue who she was.
Julia shows him a Collins family photo album. She shows him a picture of maidservant Beth Chavez and asks if that is who he saw. He says it wasn’t, and they keep turning pages. It is interesting for regular viewers that they take a moment to put Beth’s picture on the screen and to make some remarks about her. Beth appeared several times during the “Haunting of Collinwood” segment, and was a major character during the 1897 flashback. The sight of her picture is the first reason we have had to suspect that either she or actress Terrayne Crawford will be back.
Chris and Julia look through a Collins family photo album. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
When Chris recognizes Jenny’s picture, Julia breaks the news to him that Jenny and Quentin were his great-grandparents, and that Quentin was the first to be afflicted with the werewolf curse. We know that Quentin and Jenny’s daughter was named Lenore, and that she was raised by a Mrs Fillmore. Chris confirms that his grandmother’s maiden name was Lenore Fillmore. Wondering how Quentin could help Chris, Julia decides they will hold a séance and contact Quentin’s spirit.
David enters, looking for Carolyn. Julia asks him to participate in the séance. He agrees, with the blandness appropriate in a house where séances have become almost routine. When Julia tells him that the spirit they are trying to reach is that of Quentin Collins, David becomes alarmed. As well he might- we left 1969 at the beginning of March, but in #839, broadcast and set in September, we saw that the haunting continued in the absence of the audience, and that Quentin’s ghost had killed David. That episode took place on the anniversary of an event in 1897 that was changed by time travelers from the 1960s, and so David came back to life and the haunting ended. But everyone at Collinwood still remembers the ten months that Quentin exercised his reign of terror, and David does not want to return to it.
Julia assures David he has nothing to be afraid of. She says that the past was changed as of September 1897/ September 1969, and that Quentin’s ghost was laid to rest forever. This doesn’t fit very well with her plan to disturb that rest, but David is still ready to go along with the plan.
When they have the séance, David goes into the trance. He speaks, not with Quentin’s voice, but with that of Jamison Collins, his own grandfather and Quentin’s favorite nephew. Jamison says that Quentin’s spirit is no longer available for personal appearances. He doesn’t know more than that, and excuses himself. When David comes to and asks what happened, Julia says she will tell him later and sends him to bed. Once he is gone, she tells Chris that she thinks Quentin may still be alive.
Quentin was a big hit when he was on the show as an unspeaking ghost during the “Haunting of Collinwood,” and became a breakout star to rival Barnabas when he was a living being during the 1897 segment. So the audience is not at all surprised that he will be coming back. But David’s behavior before, during, and after the séance is quite intriguing. He is not simply possessed by some spirit that is part of whatever it is the Leviathan cult serves. He is still David, is still afraid of Quentin’s ghost, and is still fascinated by séances. During the 1897 segment, Jamison was a living being; like David Collins, he was played by David Henesy. That Jamison can speak through his grandson and not express discomfort at the unfamiliarity of the atmosphere suggests that there are sizable expanses inside David which are still recognizably him.
There is a similar moment between Philip and Megan. She smiles at him and in a relaxed voice says she understands why he had to do what he did. Philip has no idea what she is talking about. She reminds him that he tried to strangle her earlier in the evening, and he suddenly becomes highly apologetic. She tells him he has nothing to apologize for, that it was his duty as a servant of their cause. He is still anguished about it. They share a tender embrace. Again, while the force that animates the Leviathan cult may have the final say over what Megan and Philip do, their personalities are still there, and the loving couple we met a not so long ago still exists. There is still something for us to care about concerning them.*
Paul also has a lot of activity today. He goes to the cairn in the woods that is the ceremonial center of the Leviathan cult and that only people associated with it can see. He wonders why he keeps being drawn to it. When he first returned to Collinwood in #887, he was watching when the cairn materialized in its place out of thin air. He didn’t react at all, but merely turned and continued on his stroll. That led us to believe he knew a great deal about the cult, enough that he not only expected to see this extraordinary sight, but knew he need take no action regarding it. But evidently his connection is more subtle, and he does not understand it himself.
In his hotel room, Paul goes into a trance and circles the date 4 December 1969 on his calendar. That was when the episode was first broadcast, so the original audience would have assumed he was merely circling the current date. But when it was taped, the makers of Dark Shadows had expected the episode to be shown on 3 December. In between, there had been a pre-emption when the ABC television network gave its news department the 4:00 PM timeslot to cover the end of the Apollo 12 lunar landing mission. So the intention had been that we would share Paul’s puzzlement as to what was so special about the next day.
Paul is already worked up because some unknown person left him a note at the antique shop reading “Payment Due, 4 December 1969.” By the end of the episode, he notices that a tattoo has appeared on his wrist. It is a symbol that the show refers to simply as “the Naga,” a group of intertwined snakes that represent the Leviathan cult. All of this combines to get him into quite a state.
* I should mention that Danny Horn made the same point in his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day: “And then they kiss, and the creepy thing is that I think they’re actually in there… So far, I’ve been critical of Chris Bernau, but he’s the one who pulls this moment together. As far as he’s concerned, the unpleasant incident is entirely forgotten — but when Megan brings up the fact that he was seconds away from killing her, his apology is entirely sincere.” Danny Horn, “Episode 989: Executive Child,” on Dark Shadows Every Day, 12 July 2016.
Strange and troubled boy David Collins has stolen an old book from an antique shop. He didn’t want the book, but had damaged it slightly and was terrified that he would be punished if this was discovered and his father had to pay for the rare volume.
David’s friend and fellow resident of the great house of Collinwood, Amy Jennings, catches him with the book in the drawing room. He tells her he is going to burn it in order to conceal his crime. She points out that this will make a bad situation much worse. As a creature of Soap Opera Land, David can have no higher calling than to make bad situations worse, so this does not deter him.
While Amy offers to take the book to the nearest grownup and to claim that she was the one who stole it, David opens it to a page depicting a group of intertwined snakes, a symbol the show refers to simply as “the Naga.” He is transfixed by the symbol. His whole manner changes. His posture becomes more rigid, his voice grave and authoritative. He tells Amy he no longer wants to burn the book. Instead, he will read it. Since the book is written in a script neither of them has seen before, Amy tells David he cannot read it, but he assures her he can. She asks him to read it to her, and he says that it is forbidden for her to hear any of it. She says that she doesn’t like the game David is playing and would rather turn to another; he says it is no game. She leaves him alone with the book.
The book was not in fact part of the antique shop’s merchandise, though it was on a display table there. The owners of the shop, Megan and Philip Todd, have been inducted into a mysterious cult led by David’s distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, and the book is one of that cult’s most sacred objects. The Todds flew into a panic when they realized the book was missing, and Barnabas told Philip that he faced a severe penalty for losing it. Those reactions make it hard to understand why Philip and Megan left the book on the table in the first place.
Longtime viewers know that many of the major plot-lines on Dark Shadows start with David. So we may suspect that the supernatural forces behind the cult, unknown to Barnabas or the Todds, caused the book to be left on the table and led David to take it so that he could become part of the story. Indeed, once he is alone with the book David intones a statement from it: “And then those who have been hidden so long shall rise and show themselves, and the others will know their time is ended and the time of the people of the Leviathan will begin.” Later, he goes to the mysterious cairn in the woods that is the center of the Leviathan cult’s ceremonial activity, and announces that he is one of them now. The stones at the bottom of the cairn part, revealing a small opening. David crawls into it. The words are solemn, the music melodramatic, the action of the boy stuffing himself into the little hole preposterous. It is the perfect Dark Shadows sequence.
David Henesy was nine years old when the show started, and was thirteen by this time. It would seem no one told the carpenters he had grown in the interval. That gap is such a tight fit for him that he has to wiggle his rear end at the camera for quite a while as he tries to wedge himself into it. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
We Actresses are Vain
As David is leaving to go to the cairn, he has to refuse a request from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman. Julia wants him to go to the Old House on the estate and give a note to Barnabas. She keeps telling him that it is urgent, but he tells her he is already on his way to do something urgent.
Julia does not know about the Leviathan cult, much less about Barnabas’ connection with it. All she knows is that Barnabas has been her best friend for a year and a half, and when last they had a chance to spend time together they were concerned with the rakish Quentin Collins, whose whereabouts they do not know. Now it is 4:45 PM, and Julia is expecting a Mr Corey to come to the house at 5:00 and look at a painting she bought from the Todds a little while ago. She thinks this Mr Corey might be Quentin, and is keen for Barnabas to meet him.
When David cannot help her, Julia decides to take the note to the Old House herself. The show is usually fairly vague and inconsistent about the geography of Collinwood, but several times they have said that it takes about fifteen minutes to walk between the great house and the Old House. They stick with this today. Julia leaves at 4:45, and returns as the clock is striking 5:15. Barnabas was not at home, so she just turned right around.
Julia hears voices in the drawing room. They are heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and another woman. Julia gathers that Mr Corey is actually Ms Olivia Corey. When she enters the room, she sees that Olivia is a dead ringer for Amanda Harris, a woman who lived in 1897. Julia became aware of Amanda in September, when she and Barnabas were traveling in time and met each other in that year. Julia did not meet Amanda, but evidently must have seen at least one of the many portraits of her that magical artist/ dreary goon Charles Delaware Tate painted. She mentions these portraits to Olivia, who claims that Amanda was her grandmother. Amanda was in love with Quentin, and Julia takes an excited breath when she asks Olivia who her grandfather was. Olivia gives his name as Langley. Quentin may well have used an alias, so that doesn’t rule out the possibility that Olivia may be his granddaughter, though Dark Shadows fans looking back in these later days will think of another member of the Collins family when they hear that name.
Olivia is a famous New York actress. Julia tells her that she has seen her on stage and has seen her photograph in the newspapers, but that she never noticed her resemblance to Amanda. Olivia asks where Julia heard about Amanda; she says that she must have read about her somewhere in connection with one of the portraits. She also tells Olivia that she isn’t likely to want the painting, since it is not a portrait. Olivia says that she wants any painting of Tate’s she can get. Julia tells her there is no portrait of Quentin Collins in the house; Olivia pauses for a fraction of a second, then blandly asks if she is supposed to know who that is.
Some of Tate’s paintings had supernatural effects. When Tate painted pictures of his ideal woman, Amanda came into being as their embodiment, like Galatea emerging from Pygmalion’s statue. And when he painted Quentin’s portrait, Quentin was freed of the effects of the werewolf curse. Like a Halloween version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the portrait turned into a wolf on the nights of the full moon, while Quentin remained human.
As long as the portraits of Amanda and Quentin are intact, they themselves will remain alive and well and youthful. So Julia’s hope that Quentin might still be traveling the world and using false names 72 years after the period when she and Barnabas knew him is not ill-founded, and her surmise that Olivia might be, not Amanda’s granddaughter, but Amanda herself, is also plausible.
Like many episodes of Dark Shadows, this one ran long and ended with credits only for the cast and for Dan Curtis Productions. The entry on the Dark Shadows wiki says that the director was Lela Swift. I am sure that it was in fact directed by Henry Kaplan. This shot of Nancy Barrett as heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is proof positive:
There is another flagrant Kaplanism in today’s first scene between antique shop owners Philip and Megan Todd (Christopher Bernau and Marie Wallace.) Philip enters from upstairs. He stops with his waist at the top of the frame. That’s where he stays for the first part of the scene, ending with Megan raising a paper that covers part of her face. Evidently what’s happening between the characters is none of the audience’s business.
Philip makes an entranceMegan interacts with Philip
Swift was a talented and ambitious visual artist, Kaplan a sloppy and unimaginative one. He relied heavily on closeups. When it dawned on him that it was dull to hold the frame just beyond the edges of an actor’s face, his response was to zoom in and give us an extreme closeup of some part of the actor’s face. It’s above average for him that the first shot above includes Miss Barrett’s eyes- he specialized in shots displaying the face from the nostrils down, and often held them even after the actors had to move, leaving us with the sight of an ear drifting out of our view.
Even when Kaplan’s tight little frames do not keep us from figuring out what is happening in a scene, they deprive us of the energy that comes from seeing the players interact with each other. We don’t get statements and reactions simultaneously, and we don’t see the actors using the space between them to tell us how the characters feel about each other. Kaplan was also a pretty bad director of actors, regularly poking them with a stick as his way of telling them he wanted them to play a scene differently and on one occasion fastening a handle to a child actor so that he could physically place him on his mark during rehearsal. So perhaps his mania for closeups reflected a lack of awareness of what actors do and how the choices they make contribute to the audience’s experience. As a result of his insensitivity to these and other visual aspects of the medium, Kaplan’s episodes would often be better suited to radio than to television.
Fortunately, the dialogue today is peppered with snappy lines. So Danny Horn devotes his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Dayto a selection of memorable pieces of dialogue. That also makes me suspect the wiki is not entirely correct. It attributes the script to Gordon Russell, an able writer overall but one who is not at all given to bons mots. I use bits of dialogue whenever possible as the titles of these posts, and I often have to search very hard through Russell’s to find suitable ones. It was Violet Welles who excelled at producing those. Russell and Welles often collaborated, so it could be that he wrote a draft to which she added the quotable quotes.
The current story centers on a mysterious cult that has sent time traveler Barnabas Collins back to 1969 from a long sojourn in 1897, by way of a couple of days in 1796. Under the influence of the cult, Barnabas is being a real jerk to his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Barnabas was a vampire for a long time, and even when he is free of the effects of that curse he habitually resorts to murder to solve his problems. But the victims of those murders are imaginary, played by actors who will go on to find other work, so we don’t usually stay mad at him for any length of time when he commits them. His friendship with Julia, on the other hand, is the emotional core of the show. Barnabas’ coldness to her in yesterday’s episode and today’s leads us to see what the cult is doing to him as the greatest crime anyone has ever committed on Dark Shadows.
Barnabas was a pop culture phenomenon familiar to many millions of people who never saw a single minute of Dark Shadows. The show’s fanbase largely consisted of his devoted followers. So a story about a cult which co-opts him as its leader and changes his personality so that he is impossible to get along with directly addresses a fear that must have blacked out the mind of Dan Curtis every time the postal service truck loaded with Jonathan Frid’s fan mail backed up at ABC Studio 16.
Barnabas brought a box with him from his visit to the eighteenth century, and it is of the utmost importance to the vast eternal plan the cult is working on that the box not be opened until the right time. So Barnabas put it on the mantel in his living room, and when Julia was standing a few inches from him he lifted it from the mantel and placed it on a table in the middle of the room. When she asked what it was, he became flustered and refused to answer any questions about it.
When Julia left the house, Barnabas left the room, with the front door unlocked and the box still on the table. Today, we open with Julia coming back in, hearing the sound of breathing coming from the box, finding its key on the table next to it, and placing the key in its lock. Barnabas comes in just in time to stop her opening it, but we can see that the cult probably could have chosen an agent with a better sense of operational security. Barnabas’ function in the story is to make messes that other people will have to clean up, so as soon as we heard that the box must not under any circumstances be opened we expected him to leave it where it would inevitably fall into the hands of someone bent on opening it, though it is a bit disappointing he has done so this quickly.
After he has taken the box from her, Barnabas berates Julia, orders her from his house, and tells her he owes her nothing. He abruptly sweetens up and tells her that he is only carrying on that way because of some kind of temporal jet lag. He reminds her that when she traveled back in time in September, she was very ill for a while; he suggests that his surly mood might be the result of the same shock that caused that reaction. About a minute after he starts on this new tack, just as Julia has started smiling again, a knock comes at the door. It is Carolyn.
We don’t know what effect the cult’s co-optation of him has had on Barnabas, but regular viewers know that characters on Dark Shadows are always acquiring one magical power and losing another. For the last few months of the 1897 segment, the show’s main villain was sorcerer Count Petofi. One of Petofi’s signature moves was to become aware of visitors shortly before they arrived. It could be that the writers have decided to give the cultified Barnabas that power, and that it was because Carolyn was on her way that he wanted to put Julia in a good mood.
That interpretation is supported by what follows. Carolyn is delighted to see Barnabas; she hadn’t known he was back from his trip to 1897. She hugs him and he smiles, a stark contrast to his icy reaction when Julia hugged him yesterday. She wants to talk about Chris Jennings, a young man she dated a few times and whom she has been told is dangerous. Julia and Barnabas have befriended Chris and know that he is a werewolf. Julia thinks she can somehow control Chris’ transformations, and she urges Carolyn to think well of him. Barnabas tells her to trust her instincts and to avoid Chris. He keeps telling her that she is too important to be allowed to come to harm. Later, he visits Carolyn in her home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood, and he keeps going on and on about how important she is and how confident he is about her future. He also gives her a silver pentagram, an amulet to ward off werewolves, and urges her to wear it at all times. He subsequently has another scene with Julia in his own house, and he is just as cold and dismissive as he was in the first scene, exploding at her for being “irrational.” Evidently the cult has plans for Carolyn, but not for Julia.
Julia bought a painting from the Todds the other day, and now they have received a telegram offering to buy it regardless of price. Julia goes to their shop and discusses the telegram with them. She believes that the telegram, which is signed “Corey,” may actually be from Quentin Collins, a distant cousin of Barnabas’ whom he befriended during his time in 1897 and who may have been immortalized by a magical portrait painted by the same artist responsible for the picture Julia bought. She tells the Todds that she is not certain she wants to part with the painting, but that she would very much like to meet “Mr Corey,” and that she believes others in town would also like to do so. She urges them to reply to the telegram with an invitation.
Barnabas stands over the box. We hear his thoughts as he mulls over his questions about it. He suddenly declares “It is time!” Then he goes to his chair and sits down. Evidently, it is time to take a load off.
Barnabas has a vision of one of the hooded figures who inducted him into the cult. The figure, a man named Oberon, addresses him as “Master” and tells him that he is to give the box to people who wake him by knocking at his door. There is a knocking, he does awaken, and he goes to the door.
At the end of 1968 and beginning of 1969, two supernatural menaces were growing in tandem. The malign ghost of Quentin Collins was becoming steadily more powerful until it made the estate of Collinwood uninhabitable. As Quentin’s power grew, the curse that made Chris Jennings a werewolf also gained force, so that Chris could no longer be sure of keeping his human form even on nights without a full Moon. By the end of February, the Collins family had evacuated the great house on the estate, and Chris was in his lupine form permanently.
Trying to contact Quentin’s ghost, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins meditated on a set of I Ching wands. To his surprise, Barnabas found himself relocated in time to the year 1897, when he was a vampire and Quentin was a living being. Over the next eight months, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in that year. Barnabas learned that Quentin had been a werewolf, and that he was Chris’ great-grandfather. He also learned that a magical portrait painted by an artist named Charles Delaware Tate had freed Quentin of the effects of the werewolf curse. In #839, we saw that the characters in the 1960s are aware of time passing in Barnabas’ absence; we also saw the haunting of Collinwood break in that episode. The characters remember what happened in the previous episodes, and are relieved that Quentin has found peace and they can now move back into the great house. We did not hear anything about Chris at that time. Last we saw him he was locked up in the hidden chamber inside the old Collins mausoleum in the cemetery north of town. For all we know, he’s still there.
When Barnabas went to the past, his entranced body remained in place sitting before the I Ching wands in the basement of his home, the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. In September, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes were visiting the basement and saw Barnabas’ body vanish before their eyes. Julia then sat down to meditate on the wands, and found herself transported back to 1897. She was there for a couple of weeks, during which time she initiated a treatment for Barnabas like the one that had freed him of the effects of the vampire curse for a while early in 1968. She snapped back to 1969 before the treatment was completed, but other friends of his were able to pick up where Julia left off and finish it successfully.
The portrait of Quentin would appear to have been destroyed in a fire in #883. Some unspecified supernatural agency whisked Barnabas out of the year 1897 at the end of #884, but it did not send him to 1969. Instead, he found himself in 1796, the year he first became a vampire. Amid some sinister doings, Barnabas found himself in a mysterious clearing in the woods where he saw a massive stone structure. Two hooded figures stood by this cairn. He was unable to resist or escape them. He lost consciousness, and they laid him on the cairn. They used it as an altar, covering him with foliage and consecrating him to whatever unknown beings they served. When he awoke, he knew all about the hooded figures and the cult they represented. They greeted him as their master. He spoke a ritual formula, gave some orders, and prepared to leave the eighteenth century.
The Returns
On Tuesday, we saw that Julia has been hanging around the Old House for the five weeks since she returned to 1969. She explained to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard that Barnabas would have to reappear in the place from which he disappeared. So she locked the basement from the outside, evidently expecting to hear Barnabas calling to be let out. There is another way out of the basement, a tunnel from the prison cell there to the beach outside, but Julia must have forgotten about that.
At the opening of today’s episode, we learn that Julia was right about Barnabas reappearing in the place from which he disappeared. But she does not know that the last place the audience saw him was at the cairn. The cairn opens, and Barnabas materializes in front of it. He delivers an incantation, and goes on his way.
We cut to the great house at Collinwood, where Julia is showing Stokes a painting she bought yesterday. It is one of Tate’s works, a landscape painted sometime around 1949. Seeing that Tate was still doing work as good as any he ever did only twenty years ago, Julia wonders if he might still be alive in 1969. Stokes scoffs at this possibility, since Tate would be a hundred years old or more, but Julia is determined to search for him. When Stokes asks why she is so interested, she says that she cannot tell him, because it is a confidential favor she is doing for a friend.
While Stokes knows about the haunting of Collinwood and about Barnabas’ trip back in time, he does not know that Chris is the werewolf. If he did, he would probably turn him in to the police. So Julia can’t very well tell him that she is hoping Tate will be able to paint a portrait that will do for him what Quentin’s portrait did 72 years earlier. Fortunately for her, Stokes readily accepts her refusal to explain herself.
Stokes tells Julia about a project of his own. He says that local physician Dr Reeves has enlisted him to help with a patient. Stokes is a scholar of occult lore, not a clinician or therapist of any kind. Reeves’ decision to enlist Stokes’ aid would admit of either of two possible explanations. It could be something that often happens on soap operas, a genre in which all forms of authority tend to become interchangeable with each other, so that scholars can function as doctors, doctors can function as lawyers, and anyone who dresses up for work can function as a cop. The other possibility is that Reeves has caught on that the village of Collinsport is rife with supernatural phenomena and has decided that Stokes’ expertise might enable him to diagnose his patient. Julia’s amused disbelief when Stokes announces that he is going to see “a patient” counts against the first possibility. She is closer than any other character in the parts of Dark Shadows to a representative of the audience’s point of view, so if she is still aware of Stokes as someone whose competence is limited to a specific field we are as well. So we can assume that Dr Reeves has concluded that there is something uncanny about what ails his patient.
Stokes identifies the patient to Julia as Sabrina Stuart, a young woman who, a few years previously, was discovered with a head of white hair and without the ability to speak. He says that he and Reeves have managed to get her to start saying words but that she cannot describe the origin of her trauma. Julia knows that Sabrina’s trouble began when she saw Chris transform into the wolf, and so she is alarmed at the prospect that she will begin talking. She tries to persuade Stokes to give up, but he is nothing daunted.
Stokes exits, and Chris enters. Julia scolds him for having checked himself out of Windcliff, the mental hospital she controls. This is the first we learn that he left the hidden chamber in the mausoleum; it is also the first we learn that he has reverted to human form. He acknowledged that he can change back to the wolf at any time, and that something has to be done, but he can’t take solitary confinement any longer. Longtime viewers, remembering that every time he changes he kills people, will find this to be a stupefyingly selfish decision. It alienates whatever sympathy we may have for Chris.
Chris tells Julia that even if he is cured, he will not be truly free so long as Sabrina is around. He does not say what he plans to do about Sabrina, but if he is willing to commit all the murders that will surely follow from his decision to leave the hospital we can’t help but suspect it won’t be good for her.
We cut to Sabrina’s room in the facility where she is staying. Stokes is providing her with a sort of therapy. The audience will be surprised to see Sabrina again. Sabrina, played by Lisa Blake Richards, appeared in episodes #692, #697, and #698. The show went to 1897 in #701; Miss Richards could easily have been cast in a part in the costume drama segment, but was not. Surely no one could have expected that she would be waiting for us when we returned to contemporary dress, but here she is.
Miss Richards is pleasant enough, but she bears an ill omen. Julia and Stokes talk about Sabrina’s brother Ned, to whom Stokes refers as “a rather surly fellow.” That’s putting it mildly. Not only does he shout at his scene partners and violate their physical space, traits common to all characters played by Roger Davis, but he had a habit of groping his sister’s breasts and rubbing his cheeks on her face. These habits led us to wonder how much of Sabrina’s catatonia was a symptom of the shock of seeing Chris’ transformation and how much was the result of her brother’s constant abuse. Julia is already threatening to bring back Tate, another of Mr Davis’ characters. If Roger Davis winds up playing two parts concurrently, the show might become entirely unwatchable.
Dr Reeves is another character we haven’t seen for a long time. Fred Stewart appeared as Dr Reeves in #17, where he treats Roger Collins after an auto wreck, and in #158, where he examines Elizabeth Collins Stoddard after she has fallen down the stairs. Actors have been returning from long absences lately; Miss Richards’ surprising reappearance today reminds us of all-time champ Alfred Hinckley, unseen since his turn as a train conductor in episode #1, who came back as a doctor in #868, and of John Harkins, who played a policeman in a scene set in Phoenix, Arizona in #174 and returned as a very different law enforcement officer from another faraway place in #878. Perhaps the reference to Dr Reeves means that Stewart will rejoin the cast. Stewart didn’t have much to offer, but I’ll take a thousand of him over one Roger Davis any day.
Be that as it may, what I really wonder about is where writer Gordon Russell found Dr Reeves’ name. Neither he nor any other member of the writing staff was connected with the show when Dr Reeves appeared, and line producer Peter Miner just started three weeks ago. Executive producer Dan Curtis and director Lela Swift were with the show from the beginning, but Curtis was busy getting ready to make the feature film that became House of Dark Shadows at this time, and Swift doesn’t seem to have interacted much with the writers. Even Harriet Rohr, Costello’s assistant who often attended table reads and seems to have helped with continuity, wasn’t around much at this period. So there must have been pieces of paper floating around listing seldom-seen characters and other points of trivia for the writers’ reference. I’m sure fandom would go nuts if those papers ever turned up!
During their therapy session, Sabrina suddenly looks at Stokes and asks him who Carolyn Stoddard is. She then declares that Carolyn is in danger, and demands to meet with her at once.
As it happens, Carolyn dated Chris for a while around New Year’s 1969. Stokes knows Carolyn well enough that he must have been at least dimly aware of this. Ned is obsessed with his hostility to Chris and is rarely far from Sabrina, so Stokes must have heard about Chris and Sabrina’s relationship. But Stokes does not make the connection. He can’t imagine why Sabrina is suddenly talking about Carolyn.
Back at the great house, Chris and Carolyn have a conversation. She is irked that he went away for so long without a word to her. It’s understandable he does not want her to know that he is the werewolf, but why can’t he tell her he was confined to a mental institution? It isn’t as if he is worried about making a good impression on her. On the contrary, everything he says to her is part of his effort to convince her he does not want to renew their relationship.
That terrible beating
By this time, Julia has moved on to her chief concern. She has heard a heartbeat pounding from the portrait of Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house, a sign that he is near. Julia goes to the Old House and finds Barnabas coming down the stairs. She is delighted to see him, but puzzled he is not locked in the basement. He tells her he returned by means of the I Ching. She is sure this cannot be true.
Julia had already returned to 1969 when sorcerer Count Petofi used the I Ching to project himself into that year for a few minutes in #872 and #873 in a way altogether unlike the one Barnabas had used. No one in 1969 saw Petofi while he was then, nor did Barnabas or any of his allies know about the trip. But Julia herself went back to 1897 by yet another radically different I Ching-mediated path, and both of them really ought to be aware that they are dealing with forces that work unpredictably. So it does not make much sense that Julia is so certain whatever it is that is released when one contemplates the I Ching could send Barnabas only to the basement.
Barnabas does not return any of Julia’s warm emotional displays. When she bursts into a smile and hugs him, he stands still and stares icily ahead. This is quite startling to regular viewers, who have seen the two of them grow quite cozy over the last year and a half.
Barnabas also refuses to answer any of Julia’s questions about what happened in the last weeks of the 1897 story. This will be even more startling. Barnabas and Julia gave each other huge amounts of information even when they first met and he saw her as an enemy. Since they became fast friends in the summer of 1968, their conversations have been the heart of the show. The show burned through so much story in the final weeks of the 1897 segment that it brings us up very short when Barnabas declares that he is too tired to talk about any of it. He won’t even say that everything was settled- his only explanation of anything is that he returned because he wanted to. For all he tells Julia today, their enemies might have triumphed completely in 1897.
While Julia is looking at him, Barnabas picks up a box that he has placed on the mantel. This seems to be a way of calling her attention to it, so she politely asks what it is. He becomes flustered and demands she disregard it. Returning viewers know that it is the one thing he brought with him from his encounter with the hooded figures in 1796. In his conversation with them, he said that it must not be opened until the proper time, lest their whole vast eternal plan come to ruin. Barnabas’ function in the story is to make a mess of everything, so of course he leaves the box out in the open and waves it in front of the face of the world’s most inquisitive person.
Meanwhile, Carolyn visits Sabrina. Sabrina insists Stokes leave them alone; when he does, she insists Carolyn not repeat their conversation to Stokes. She tells Carolyn that Chris, even though he is good, will kill her if they stay together.
We would be hard put to defend the idea that Chris is good, or to regret it if Stokes or any other law-abiding person were in a position to end his reign of terror. It is also surprising that Sabrina, who can barely say her own name when Stokes is working with her, talks quite fluently once he is out of the room. Maybe Dr Reeves was not so wise to choose him as Sabrina’s therapist.
Back in the Old House, Julia tells Barnabas that “Today, I was given reason to believe that Charles Delaware Tate may still be alive.” Barnabas replies “There’s no reason to believe that’s true.” That flat contradiction, with the jarring repetition of the word “reason,” shows that Barnabas is not only evading Julia’s questions, he is rejecting her personally in a way that he did not do even before they became friends, when he kept plotting to kill her. At least in those days he always listened closely to what she said, knowing that her great intelligence made her a danger to him. In this exchange he is treating her as if her words were beneath notice.
Julia sticks with the topic, and Barnabas says that even if Tate were still alive he would be “a hundred and totally useless!” That’s pretty rich coming from Barnabas, who himself is at least twice that age and would be in an awkward spot if he had to explain what use he is to anyone. But Julia only says that they must look into the matter.
A careless lie
Chris enters. He is delighted to see Barnabas, on whom he has pinned all his hopes. Barnabas tells him that “In all the time I was in the past, I found no solution for you. I am afraid there’s nothing that I can possibly do.” He follows that with “I must ask you to excuse me, I’m very tired,” and toddles off to bed.
Julia and Chris leave the house together. She tells him why she thinks Barnabas was lying. Chris goes home, and Julia goes back into the house, through the unlocked front door. She picks up the box, which is still on the table in the middle of the living room. As she heard Barnabas’ heartbeat coming from his portrait in the great house, so she hears breathing coming from inside the box. One wonders what other bodily functions will audibly manifest in objets d’art around Collinwood.
Yesterday, we spent a lot of time watching an unidentifiable man wandering around the estate of Collinwood. We only saw him from the back; he was wearing a dark coat and hat, and had silver-gray hair. Evidently we were supposed to expect his face would mean something to us when it was finally revealed.
At the end of yesterday’s episode, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman caught the prowler coming out of the Old House on the grounds of the estate, home of her friend, missing person Barnabas Collins. She did not recognize the man, and he refused to identify himself. We see him in today’s opening reprise. His face would not be familiar to her, but it is instantly recognizable to longtime viewers. It is that of actor Dennis Patrick, who from March to July 1967 played seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Jason blackmailed reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard to the point of marriage. When Liz finally stood up to Jason, his scheme collapsed. On his way out of town, Jason went to the Old House hoping to steal jewels from Barnabas. That attempt also failed, and Barnabas strangled Jason.
We spend most of the episode wondering how Jason managed to rise from the dead. Near the end, Liz’ daughter Carolyn runs into the prowler. She gets a good look at him and talks to him for a few minutes, but does not recognize him. Carolyn would certainly recognize Jason, whom she was ready to shoot if Liz had gone through with the wedding. So Patrick must be playing another character. He does not give Carolyn his name, but his strong emotional reaction when she gives hers tells us that he has some kind of connection to her. We are again supposed to leave the episode wondering who he might be.
Unfortunately, word of that did not get to the people who make up the closing credits. Patrick is billed today as “Paul Stoddard.” Paul is Carolyn’s long-missing father, Liz’ ex-husband, and a close friend and partner in crime of the late Jason McGuire. This is not the first time on Dark Shadows the closing credits have identified a character whose identity was supposed to keep us guessing. For example, at the end of #124 we are supposed to be in suspense as to which of a few people a mysterious woman is, but the closing credits identify her as “Laura Collins,” a name which blows the secret completely for attentive longtime viewers. A mysterious little girl turns up in #255 and for a few episodes we are supposed to be in the dark as to who she is. But at her first appearance the character was billed as “Sarah Collins.”
It’s interesting to cast Patrick as Paul. Jason’s scheme was based on Liz’ belief that she had killed Paul, when in fact Paul and Jason had worked together to fake his death and swindle her of some money. Since Paul and Jason committed the two halves of the same crime, they merge together in the disastrous effects they have had on Liz’ life. So they may as well look and sound exactly alike.
Waiting for Barnabas
Barnabas vanished from his basement some time ago while he was involved with some supernatural doings. Julia has been hanging around the house for over a month, waiting for him to rematerialize. She explains to Carolyn that because he disappeared from the basement, it is the only place where he can reappear. They go into the house and Julia almost immediately suggests they leave. She is sure he isn’t there, because she locked the basement door. Evidently Julia has spent all this time waiting to hear Barnabas banging on that door demanding to be let out.
Carolyn points out that Barnabas might be unconscious, and if he is he would not be banging on the door even if he has come back. Julia exclaims “I hadn’t even thought of that! He- he could be down there now!” At this, my wife, Mrs Acilius, laughed and said “He could have been down there for a month!” By profession, Julia is a mad scientist. She knows how to cure vampirism, bring Frankenstein’s monsters to life, rewrite people’s memories at will, and travel back in time, but she has her blind spots.
Be that as it may, Julia checks the basement and finds Barnabas is not there.
The Antique Shop
Carolyn takes Julia to an antique shop that has just opened in the village of Colllinsport. Carolyn called the shop “divine” yesterday, and is still thrilled about it today. I suppose it reminds her of home- like all the unoccupied spaces in the great house of Collinwood, it is crammed with a lot of miscellaneous junk.
Carolyn may have a soft spot for the place, but she hasn’t lost all capacity for judgment. The proprietors, a young couple named Philip and Megan Todd, have just unpacked a painting they bought that morning. Philip says that when it came up for auction he couldn’t resist it. Carolyn widens her eyes, tilts her head back, and says in an incredulous voice, “Hmm, your taste must be quite different from mine, Philip. I could have resisted that.”
The painting Philip couldn’t resist.
Philip mentions that the artist’s name is Charles Delaware Tate. At that, Julia perks up. She asks Philip if he is certain that it is an authentic Tate; he assures her that he is. He astonishes her by saying that it was painted only about twenty years ago. Julia says that Tate would have been in his 80s then. Seeing that the painting is about as good as anything Tate ever did, she says that he was still at the height of his powers despite his advanced age. She wonders if, having been in such good shape so recently, he could still be alive. Philip doesn’t know about that.
Julia asks for the price. When Philip says he will part with the painting for $300, Julia takes out her checkbook. Carolyn looks on, amazed to see her shell out so much money so quickly for a mediocre picture. When it is time to go, Julia asks her if she is ready. Still agape, Carolyn replies “Yes.. for practically anything!”
For eight months, from #701 at the beginning of March to #884 last week, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897. In the second half of that segment, Tate was one of the minor villains. He had made a bargain with evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Petofi made him a nationally famous painter whose works were very much in demand. Many of his paintings also had magical powers. The magical powers were the result of Petofi’s spell, but it was never made entirely clear whether Tate’s fame was the result of a talent Petofi gave him to paint well or if Petofi’s intervention was more direct and he simply bewitched people into admiring Tate’s paintings and wanting to buy them. Indeed, if we had to classify the works of Tate that we saw, the most secure categorization would be “Nothing Special.” They certainly do not stand comparison to the best of the portraits that the ABC Network’s Art Department prepared for the Collinwood sets. Carolyn’s reaction today clearly suggests that once Petofi’s influence receded, the paintings lost their charm.
Julia’s interest in Tate is not aesthetic. Julia traveled back in time for a couple of weeks in September. She knows that Tate’s portrait of Quentin Collins prevented Quentin from turning into a werewolf. The prospect that Tate might still be alive leads her to hope that her friend Chris Jennings, a great-grandson of Quentin’s, might also be cured of lycanthropy.
The audience is unlikely to find much ground for optimism in the thought of more Tate. As is usual for characters played by Roger Davis, Tate is hard to watch. He delivers most of his lines in a shout, and he amplifies his voice by clenching his rectal sphincter muscles. The result is what Pauline Kael used to call an “anal screech.” He also has what we might tactfully call a poor sense of personal space; indeed, two of the tags that most often appear together on posts on this blog are “Roger Davis” and “Abusive Behavior on Camera.” So I would just as soon Julia give up her search for Tate.
The Todds
Megan and Philip exult over Julia’s purchase. They are in the middle of talking about how it is a good sign for their new business, when Megan is suddenly seized with a fit of foreboding. She wants to close the shop early; Philip protests that they still have time to make a few more sales. Megan then says she has a premonition that if they stay in Collinsport something terrible will happen to them. She says she wants to sell the shop and move away. Philip tries to soothe her. He puts his head against hers and kisses her. She just looks straight on, her eyes full of dread.
Philip working his way to Megan’s neck while it dawns on her that they are now characters on Dark Shadows.
Megan is the third role Marie Wallace played on Dark Shadows. Her first two were Eve, the Fiancée of Frankenstein, and Crazy Jenny Collins, Quentin’s estranged and deranged wife. Miss Wallace had a lot of fun with those parts, but neither of them gave her much opportunity to interact meaningfully with her scene partners. Eve was unyieldingly nasty to everyone, whatever they might say or do, and Jenny was just one long mad scene. As Megan, she gets to listen to Philip and react to what he says. That ends when she ignores his kissing her neck, but while it lasts it’s good to see.
Philip is played by Christopher Bernau. Some fans say that Bernau and Miss Wallace lacked “chemistry,” but their last shot today shows how misguided that criticism is. The key to chemistry is for one character to initiate a kiss and the other to kiss back. Megan is supposed to be too preoccupied with her premonition to notice anything in her environment, even her beloved husband kissing her. If she had responded to him at all, the whole point of the scene would have been lost.
It is true that Bernau does not perfectly embody a romantic lead in Philip’s scenes with Megan. As a happy couple, Philip and Megan constantly make little jokes with each other. The jokes in the script aren’t very good, and Bernau tries to put some life into them by imitating Jack Benny. In the 1920s and 1930s, Benny’s persona struck people as a spoiled rich kid, and in later years he was so famous that it just meant Jack Benny. But by the 1960s, any man other than Jack Benny would send a very different message if he were to speak with that drawl and walk with that mincing gait. When the man in question is an antique dealer wearing a belted sweater that looks suspiciously like a dress, it does not seem especially likely that he will passionately in love with his wife.
I think Philip borrowed this from Maggie Evans…
Several times in his career Bernau proved he could be effective in love scenes with women, most famously as ladies’ man Alan Spaulding on The Guiding Light. I mentioned that role in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day:
I was a kid when Bernau joined GUIDING LIGHT. My mother watched that show, and I had several times attempted to watch it with her, but it always defeated me after 5 or 10 minutes. It just seemed like a window into the deepest level of Hell, the frozen cavern where absolutely nothing happens. But Bernau caught my imagination. I could watch entire episodes if he was in them.
Years later, when I watched DARK SHADOWS on the Sci-Fi Channel, I realized what made Bernau so compelling on GUIDING LIGHT. He was doing a Jonathan Frid imitation. Within moments of first seeing Barnabas, I exclaimed “Alan Spaulding!” It was only years later that I learned Bernau had been on DARK SHADOWS.
Comment left 10 December 2020 by Acilius, on Danny Horn, “Episode 888: Little Shop,” 26 June 2016, Dark Shadows Every Day.
I’m very fond of John Gielgud’s story that from the time he first saw Claude Rains give a performance, his acting style consisted of imitating Claude Rains. Gielgud went on to say that this represented a great improvement over his previous style, which consisted of imitating Noël Coward. I doubt Bernau’s style ever depended entirely on either Jack Benny or Jonathan Frid, but he certainly learned a great deal by watching each of them.
One evening in 1796, time traveler Barnabas Collins has stumbled into a clearing in the woods where he finds a cairn and two hooded figures. He finds himself unable to resist the figures while they put him on the cairn. He loses consciousness. When he comes to, he suddenly knows everything about them and the religion they represent, and they hail him as their leader. He says that he will be leaving soon, and that they will accompany him only in spirit. The only thing he will take with him is “the Leviathan box.” This is the first time we have heard the word “Leviathan” on Dark Shadows. Barnabas also talks about a book that will be important, though apparently it will get to wherever he is going on its own.
The show is starting a new storyline this week; for the last few days, the episodes have ended with an announcement alternately promising that today would mark the beginning of “one of the most terrifying tales ever told” or at least “one of the most unusual tales ever told.” Dark Shadows often marks the beginning of a new story with the opening of a box. Barnabas was a vampire when he first joined the show; his story began in #210, when a would-be grave robber opened his coffin and got a nasty surprise. The story we just concluded kicked into high gear in #778, when broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi brought a box containing the severed hand of sorcerer Count Petofi to the estate of Collinwood. Books have also been important. The show’s first costume drama segment, when from November 1967 to March 1968 it was set in the 1790s, involved well-meaning governess Vicki Winters toting around a copy of the Collins family history. That volume was crucial to many subsequent plot developments. Apparently this time there will be both a box and a book.
We cut to 1969. Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman is moping around his house, the Old House at Collinwood. She does not know that he is in 1796, but does know that he has been traveling through time. He has spent the last eight months in the year 1897. Julia visited him there for a couple of weeks, but snapped back to 1969 over a month ago and has been waiting for him to come back. She has heard voices from the past occasionally, but not for the last couple of nights, and she is afraid she is losing touch with the rupture in space-time that stands between her and Barnabas. To take her mind off things, she goes to the great house on the estate and hangs out with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard.
We keep getting glimpses of a man strolling around the estate. We see him only from the back. He has silver-gray hair and is wearing a hat and coat we haven’t seen before. He peeks at Julia through the window of Barnabas’ house, then wanders off to the woods. The cairn materializes in a clearing while he watches. He looks at it calmly, then walks away. He must have expected to see it take shape before him. Presumably he has some connection with the cult represented by the hooded figures and now to be led by Barnabas.
In the great house, Julia hears the voices of two characters from the 1897 segment. They are Magda and Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye. Julia did not meet Magda during her trip to 1897; it would have required special effects for her to do so, since they are both played by Grayson Hall. Julia was once in the same room as Pansy, but would not remember her- she was unconscious at the time. So it is odd that she recognizes their voices.
Julia hears Pansy telling Magda that Barnabas and Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, went into the Old House the night before and haven’t been seen since. She goes on to say that stuffy but lovable Edward Collins searched the house, and could find no trace of either Barnabas or Kitty. They seem to have vanished.
Returning viewers know that they did indeed vanish. Kitty was assumed bodily into the portrait of the late Josette Collins that hangs in the Old House, and when Barnabas saw that this was happening he and she both disappeared completely. They were both transferred to 1796, Barnabas as he was when he was around in those days, Kitty in the form of a distant memory in Josette’s mind.
Knowing that, we will not be confused by Pansy and Magda’s conversation. Other knowledge of ours will have the opposite effect. When Magda says that the story of Barnabas and Kitty’s disappearance from the Old House has nothing to do with her, Pansy challenges her with “You live in the Old House, don’t you?” Magda admits she does. While Magda did live there when Barnabas first arrived in 1897 in #701, she wasn’t on the show much in the last couple of months of the 1897 segment, and in the last weeks of it characters were saying that no one lived in the Old House. She must have gone away. Moreover, she would have been most unlikely to return. Several mortal enemies of hers were already in the area, and she knew that kinsmen of late Rroma chieftain/ organized crime boss King Johnny Romana were on their way to Collinwood, seeking, among other things, to kill her. Clearly the makers of the show just wanted to use the voices of Grayson Hall and Nancy Barrett because Julia and Carolyn were already in the episode, but the result really is pretty sloppy.
Julia decides that the conversation between Pansy and Magda means that Barnabas is on his way back to the 1960s, and she hastens to the Old House to meet him. As she arrives there, she meets the gray-haired man in the hat and coat. She looks him in the face and asks who he is.
Julia knows virtually everything the audience knows about the parts of the show set in the late 1960s, so when she does not recognize him we wonder who he could be. Perhaps he is someone we met when the show was set in the 1790s or in the parts of the 1897 segment before or after Julia’s time in that year, or he could be someone who was on the show before she joined the cast in the summer of 1967. The only gray-haired men we saw in any of those periods were some doctors, lawyers, judges, and clergymen who appeared in one or two episodes, and we aren’t expecting to see any of them again. So either this man is a new character, or he is a character who has aged considerably since we last saw him. The trouble they took to hide his face suggests that they expect us to react when it is revealed to us. So even if he is a new character, he is probably going to be played by an actor we have seen before.
Dark Shadows Commentary 