julia hoffman – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1018: The doctor’s verdict

Dave Woodard, MD, was on Dark Shadows from April to November 1967. Woodard was introduced as physician to Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie was the victim of vampire Barnabas Collins. Woodard was the show’s answer to Dr John Seward, the commonsensical local physician in Bram Stoker’s Dracula who called in his old mentor Dr Van Helsing when he found that his patients were suffering maladies he could not explain. Woodard’s call went to his medical school classmate, Dr Julia Hoffman. As Van Helsing was an incredible polymath, equally at home in several branches of medical science, of esoteric philosophy, and even in the law, Julia was dually qualified as a blood specialist and a psychiatrist and just so happened to have a theory about curing vampirism.

This Van Helsing proved a traitor to her patient and to her friend. In order to persuade Barnabas to agree to cooperate with her experiment, Julia betrayed Maggie, using her magical powers of hypnosis to erase Barnabas’ abuse from Maggie’s memory. As time went on, Woodard figured out Barnabas’ secret and Julia’s complicity in his crimes. To keep him quiet, Julia prepared a lethal poison and helped Barnabas administer it to Woodard in #341.

From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows traveled back in time and was a costume drama set in the 1790s, the period when Barnabas first became a vampire. It was then that we were introduced to wicked witch Angelique, who often caused pain to her victims by sticking pins in dolls. When suspicion spread that witchcraft was going on, Angelique framed well-meaning governess Victoria Winters for her own crimes.

Now, the show has traveled in time again, not backward but sideways. Barnabas has gone to an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” Maggie’s counterpart in this universe is married to drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, master of Collinwood. Angelique’s counterpart was Quentin’s first wife. She died last year, but has risen from the grave. When she was alive, Angelique built a cult around herself, some members of which reacted to her death with the firm conviction that she would come back to life. Now that she has done so, she has kept most of her devotees in the dark. She has told only two of them who she really is. Everyone else, friend and foe alike, thinks she is her identical twin sister Alexis.

One of the two people who knows Angelique’s true identity is her aunt, Hannah Stokes. Angelique forced Aunt Hannah to act as her henchman from #1003 until we saw her for the last time in #1014. In #1015, Angelique revealed herself to her most devoted follower, the housekeeper at Collinwood. This person is named Julia Hoffman.

Alexis really was staying at the great house of Collinwood from #984 to #1001, when Angelique rose from the dead, murdered her, and assumed her identity. When Alexis showed up, she found that Maggie was uncertain of her position in the house because everyone was so obsessed with Angelique. Hoffman deliberately and very blatantly worked to exacerbate Maggie’s insecurities, in the manner of Mrs Danvers in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. Unlike Maxim de Winter in the novel, Quentin caught on to what was happening and sent Hoffman away for a time. And unlike the second Mrs de Winter, Maggie refused to put up with Quentin’s miserable behavior, including his alarmingly affectionate relationship with Alexis, walked out on him and went to stay with her sister in New York. The absences of Hoffman and of Maggie coincided with the work Grayson Hall and Kathryn Leigh Scott, along with the other survivors from the summer 1967 cast, did in the feature film House of Dark Shadows.

Today, we open in Quentin and Maggie’s bedroom. Quentin is in the hospital, so Maggie is alone in bed. But she is not alone in the room. Barnabas is there, about to bite her. He bared his fangs and plunged his head into her pillow in the last scene of yesterday’s episode; he does the same in the opening reprise. But when we come back from the title sequence, he is showing us his teeth again, and there is no blood on them. Evidently he just wanted to rub his face in Maggie’s pillow for a second while he worked up his appetite.

Barnabas is going in for a second round when the doorknob starts to turn. He retreats into the shadows, then turns into a bat and flies away. Hoffman enters. Maggie wakes up. She is startled to find Hoffman in the room. Hoffman explains that she thought she heard a prowler. Maggie tells her she doesn’t believe her.

Indeed, it is hard for us to believe Hoffman. The only sound we could hear Barnabas make was his squeaking in his bat form. Any sounds of footsteps the microphone did not pick up must have been much quieter than the squeaking that was going on while Hoffman was already in the room. Hoffman does not appear to have heard the squeaking, so it would not seem she could possibly have heard anything that would lead her to believe there was a prowler. Later, we hear Hoffman on the telephone to Angelique, gleefully reporting that Maggie was unnerved to find her in her room. So apparently she did not hear Barnabas. She went into the room to advance her plan of making Maggie look foolish. When she brought up the idea of an intruder, she was only accidentally pointing towards the truth, not saying something she believed or had reason to believe.

In the hospital, Quentin meets with his doctor, Cyrus Longworth. Quentin had severe chest pains the night before, so bad that Cyrus was for a time certain he had only minutes to live. Cyrus is deeply disturbed when he comes into the consultation room. He tells Quentin that he has run every relevant test, and that the results prove beyond a doubt that there is nothing physically wrong with him. Quentin asks how that can be, and Cyrus says that his chest pains were probably the result of a supernatural influence. His preliminary diagnosis is that a witch pushed a pin into a doll. This is correct. Angelique did indeed push a pin into a doll representing Quentin.

It took Woodard months of exposure to a pile of evidence before he would use the word “supernatural” without hesitation. All Cyrus needs is to see a man who is sick one day and healthy the next, and he’s right there. In #985, we learned that Cyrus had worried his friends by presenting a paper on black magic at a scientific conference. He was a member of Angelique’s cult, and at her suggestion he devised a Jekyll and Hyde formula that he has used to indulge his sadistic desires, which include murder. He is a mad scientist, less Woodard than Julia.

Back at Collinwood, Maggie gets dressed and opens the front door. She finds Barnabas standing there, about to knock. She says she is on her way to the hospital to visit Quentin. The telephone rings, and she finds that Quentin is on his way home. Barnabas asks to stay with her while she waits for her husband to return, and she agrees.

The two have a remarkably cozy conversation. They are so close together that her hair bounces in his breath. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said it looked like Barnabas was about to kiss Maggie at any moment. “You mean bite her,” I said. “Same thing,” she responded.

This conversation includes one of the most interesting of all the show’s countless bloopers. Maggie confides her insecurities about succeeding Angelique as Mrs Quentin Collins. Barnabas asks “Did Quentin really love Josette?” We cut to a closeup of Maggie. For half a second, Kathryn Leigh Scott visibly struggles not to laugh. Cast members almost never corrected each other on camera, just delivering their next scripted line no matter how bad the preceding miscue had been, but this one was so extreme that she improvised “Josette? I think he loved Angelique.” Once she had contained her laugh, she slipped right back into character. It really sounds like Maggie is caught off guard by Barnabas’ stumble, not like Miss Scott is caught off guard by Jonathan Frid’s. And when we cut back to Barnabas, his face is just as it was when we cut away to the closeup. That is an impressive bit of professionalism.

Quentin comes home, and Barnabas excuses himself while he and Maggie have their joyous reunion. Maggie tells Quentin that she wants him to dismiss Hoffman. When she describes the awkward moment in her room, he grows impatient and irritated. He refuses to dismiss “someone for walking into a room!” Hoffman enters. Quentin orders the two of them to feel better about each other.

This is puzzling in a way. Before Maggie left, Quentin had caught on to what Hoffman was doing, and he seemed to be thinking of firing her. But regular viewers will not be entirely surprised. The confrontation that led to Maggie’s departure was all about Quentin’s habit of treating her like a child, and the whole time she was away he kept saying that he was not going to indulge her childish behavior. Quentin has got so deep into the habit of belittling Maggie that he cannot resist doing it even when he knows that she is in the right.

In their room, Maggie is getting ready to go back to bed while Quentin looks in her suitcase. He finds the voodoo doll there. As Mrs Acilius pointed out, Maggie was still in New York when Quentin’s pains started, so she is not very likely to be the witch. Also, the room has been open and vacant all night, so anyone could have walked in and left the doll. No reasonable person could take this as any kind of evidence against Maggie, but Angelique and Hoffman don’t have to concern themselves with reasonable people- their target is Quentin.

Episode 1015: A debt to be paid

Vampire Barnabas Collins has left the universe where the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows took place and found himself in a universe chiefly populated by counterparts of people he knows. His own counterpart lived a quiet life and died in 1830, so he won’t be running into him.

In his own universe, Barnabas had an affair with wicked witch Angelique Bouchard in the 1790s, dooming his chance to find happiness with his true love, the gracious Josette. We saw the events associated with this disaster from November 1967 to March 1968, when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in those days.

That Angelique came to the estate of Collinwood as a lady’s maid. In #372, she met much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes. Ben thought Angelique had a romantic interest in him, only to find that she had cast a spell to turn him into her slave in furtherance of her scheme to take Barnabas away from Josette.

In the current universe, it is 1970. Angelique’s counterpart was born in the village of Collinsport in 1939 and died at Collinwood in 1969. Three weeks ago, she came back to life, murdered her identical twin sister Alexis, and took her place as a houseguest at Collinwood. Angelique and Alexis’ maiden name was Stokes; their father is Tim Stokes, counterpart of Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, who is Ben’s descendant. Today, Barnabas talks with Angelique, who tells him that a Ben Stokes who was an indentured servant at Collinwood and an Angelique who came to the house as a lady’s maid in the 1790s are her ancestors. She also says that the Angelique of the 1790s is buried among the Stokes family. So we learn that we are in a “time-band” where Barnabas left Angelique alone and Ben wound up married to her.

The main event today is that Angelique reveals her true identity to Miss Julia Hoffman, housekeeper at Collinwood and most fanatical member of the cult Angelique built around herself in her lifetime. When Angelique admits she is not Alexis, she addresses Hoffman as “Julia,” the first time anyone has called her this. Julia admits that she is afraid of Angelique, since she is dead. Angelique orders Julia to hold her hand and feel her warmth. When she does, Julia asks how she managed to defeat death. Angelique resists telling her, but Julia insists. She dwells on the lack of sensation during the period when she was physically dead. In response to Julia’s continued prodding, Angelique says that her tomb was opened by her widower, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, with assistance from his friend, mad scientist Cyrus Longworth. Finally Julia can’t conceal her jubilation at the resurrection, and they cackle gleefully as they start discussing their plans to reestablish Angelique as Quentin’s wife and therefore as mistress of Collinwood. Angelique manages not to tell Julia that she murdered her sister.

Reunited at last. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The episode number “1015” signifies that this was the last episode of the 203rd week of Dark Shadows. There were some days in 1966-1971 when no episode of the show premiered on the ABC network. They skipped episode numbers on those days to keep the Friday episodes divisible by five. So far, there have been fifteen of these preemption days. That makes this the one thousandth episode aired. And therefore the one thousandth I have reviewed. A bit of a personal milestone, that.

Episode 1012: Does he look to you like a man under a curse?

Vampire Barnabas Collins has escaped from the continuity in which Dark Shadows took place until late March 1970 and found himself in an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” This universe is largely populated by people who remind Barnabas of their counterparts in his own world, but their personalities and relationships are very different from those he knew. His own counterpart is a case in point. That other Barnabas Collins never became a vampire, but lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830.

Barnabas’ first few weeks in Parallel Time were spent trapped in a coffin. Alcoholic novelist Will Loomis found out about Barnabas after he saw fang marks on the neck of his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard, and decided he could force Barnabas to give him a complete history of his career as a vampire. Will was under the impression this would make a good book. Will’s irresponsibility in keeping a vampire as a pet, his cruelty in exploiting a fellow creature for his own gain, and his lack of literary judgment in imagining that a recounting of the plot of weeks 43 through 196 of Dark Shadows would be both a bestseller and a critical favorite come back to bite him. More precisely, Barnabas comes to bite him when Will lets him out of his coffin and turns his back on him for a moment during their interview, taking the cross out of his sight and freeing Barnabas to attack.

Barnabas forces Will to burn all the pages he has already written. The idea of a book detailing Barnabas’ crimes featured in #326, #510, and #756, and may have planted the seed for the whole conception of Will Loomis.

Will and Carolyn live in the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, which in the original continuity belongs to Barnabas. The pages are still in the fireplace when drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, master of the great house of Collinwood and proprietor of the family businesses, bangs on the door and demands admittance.

Quentin interrogates Will. The name “Barnabas Collins” has been cropping up in the oddest connections lately, and Quentin is convinced Will knows why. Their exchange is getting quite warm when Barnabas enters and introduces himself.

Quentin is bewildered to see Barnabas. Through a time warp that occasionally manifests in the east wing of his house, he has caught a few glimpses of the original continuity, mostly in the form of people standing around talking about how Barnabas is missing and is under a terrible curse. So he is inclined to be leery of this fellow claiming to be a descendant of the Barnabas who died in 1830. Barnabas specifies that his great-grandfather was the son of that Barnabas, the son who went to Peru in the nineteenth century. Quentin had read that that son of Barnabas died while still in Peru. Barnabas says that he did not die in that country. He does not specify where his ancestor went after leaving Peru, but says he spent the rest of his life in poverty. He was so ashamed of this circumstance that neither he nor any member of his family could bear to reconnect with the rich Collinses in Maine. Barnabas claims that he has now made a fortune of his own, leading him to conclude that the time is right for a reunion. Barnabas invites himself to the great house in an hour. Quentin says that the morning would be better, to which Barnabas replies that he will not be free then. Quentin acquiesces.

Quentin exits, and Barnabas orders Will to accompany him to the grave of his counterpart. Longtime viewers will remember #660, when Barnabas managed to travel back in time by going to a grave and yelling at its occupant. Now he hopes to travel sideways in time, returning to his own universe, by the same technique.

Barnabas and Will enter a graveyard we have seen several times in the last seven weeks. It differs from the cemeteries we have seen in the original continuity in that none of the grave markers is in the form of a cross. Most of the graves in the cemetery from which Barnabas emerged were marked with crosses, and he strolled by them with perfect equanimity. The cemetery set was built for Barnabas, so evidently it was not the original plan that the cross would be formidable to him. It wasn’t until #450, 48 weeks after Barnabas debuted, that he was first held at bay with a cross. Even after that, he still strolled placidly through the field of crosses in Eagle Hill Cemetery. Now the apotropaic power of the cross is a major point, and they have designed the cemetery in this universe to accommodate Barnabas’ special needs.

Barnabas calls on his counterpart. He conjures up a spirit, but it is not that of Barnabas Collins (d. 1830.) It is Joshua Collins, father of that Barnabas. The sight prompts Barnabas to gasp “Father!” Joshua denies that Barnabas is any kin to him. Barnabas tries to explain that, while that is true, he is nonetheless Barnabas Collins, son of Joshua, eliciting an angry command “Do not profane those names!” Joshua tells Barnabas to take his vileness back where it came from. Before Barnabas can explain that is what he is trying to do, Joshua vanishes.

Joshua orders Barnabas to go back where he came from. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Joshua appeared to Quentin and Angelique in #1009. That turn was not particularly effective. The visual composition made it too clear that Louis Edmonds was standing in the same space as David Selby and Lara Parker for the actors to create any sense of the uncanny. And Joshua hung around too long and had too many lines for it to make sense that he couldn’t give any useful information. But this time Joshua is off to the side, lit by his own light, and he disappears after just a few seconds. It is a powerful scene, especially for longtime viewers who remember the relationship between Barnabas and Joshua we saw when the show was set in the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968.

Will is terrified. The apparition leaves him trembling and speechless. So far Will has cut an arrogant, self-assured figure. He handled his encounter with the vampire with aplomb. Even after Barnabas bit him, his resistance to the command to burn the pages showed that self-assured personality is still partly functional. But the ghost of Joshua has blasted away the last of it.

Barnabas tells Will that he now has only one way back to his own universe, the way he came. There is a room in the east wing of the great house that is bare and vacant in Barnabas’ universe, but that is fully furnished, richly decorated, and brightly lit here. When Quentin’s wife Angelique Stokes Collins was alive, it was her bedroom. Now Quentin has given it to Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis to occupy while she is his guest. The barrier between the universes is at its thinnest there. Barnabas could occasionally see into Angelique and Alexis’ room from the main continuity, and it was when he was looking through the doors to the room that Quentin has seen that other Collinwood. Barnabas was in the room when it changed, and found himself here. Now he wants to go back to the room, and make the opposite journey.

What neither Barnabas nor Quentin knows is that Angelique has returned from the dead and murdered Alexis. Angelique is now impersonating Alexis. In her life, Angelique had built a little cult of people who expected her to transcend death. The only one she has so far told that she has actually done so is her aunt, Hannah Stokes. Everyone else believes she is Alexis.

Barnabas enters the drawing room of the great house, where Quentin introduces him to “Alexis” and to housekeeper Julia Hoffman, the most devoted member of Angelique’s cult. Hoffman and “Alexis” had been talking about Barnabas before he arrived. Hoffman expressed certainty that Barnabas is a fraud. But after he and Quentin leave to examine the room where the Parallel Time phenomenon can sometimes be seen, she admits that his resemblance to the portrait of Barnabas is too strong to disregard. “Alexis” remembers what Quentin heard while he was watching the people in the room, and asks Hoffman if Barnabas looks like a man under a curse. She does not appear to have expected this question.

Quentin takes Barnabas to the room. Sure enough, the other continuity is visible. Barnabas’ best friend is there, talking to herself about how much she hopes to see him again. She is mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, counterpart of Hoffman. Julia is as devoted to Barnabas as Hoffman is to Angelique. Seeing her, we wonder how long Angelique can keep it a secret from her Julia Hoffman that she has returned.

Episode 1008: One obvious person

From the time he joined the cast of characters in April 1967, vampire Barnabas Collins has been the most famous thing about Dark Shadows. We haven’t seen him in over a month. He passed through a cosmic rift in #980, leaving his native universe behind and arriving in another “time-band” populated largely by counterparts of people he knew. In the original continuity, Barnabas was freed from his coffin when dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis unchained it, believing he would extract from it a treasure in jewels that would make him rich. Here, Barnabas is trapped in his coffin when Willie’s counterpart, author William H. Loomis, chains it, believing he will extract a story from Barnabas that will make him rich.

We haven’t seen any of Will Loomis’ oral history sessions with Barnabas, since John Karlen and Jonathan Frid have both been in Tarrytown, New York. Along with many other key members of the cast, they have been filming their parts in the feature House of Dark Shadows. That production is nearing a wrap, and several other cast members have already come back. Today’s story is all about Barnabas’ impending return.

When Barnabas found himself in “Parallel Time,” the first person he met was Will’s wife, the counterpart of Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn Collins Stoddard. He told Carolyn that he was a descendant of the eighteenth century Barnabas Collins, of whom a portrait hangs in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. In his own universe, that portrait does hang there, and it has been Barnabas’ letter of introduction to the Collinses more than once. But Carolyn told him there was no such portrait there or, so far as she knows, anywhere else. So he bit her and made her his blood thrall.

Indeed, the other day we saw the spot on the wall where Barnabas’ portrait hangs in the main continuity, and it was not there. Instead, there was a metallic decoration reminiscent of a coat of arms. That decoration hung there before Barnabas’ portrait first appeared in #204. So few of the people watching at this point in 1970 had been in the audience in early 1967, and so few of those would have made note of what was hanging on the walls, that I can’t imagine one viewer in ten thousand would have caught the reference during the first broadcast. None of the writers currently with the show was on staff then, nor was line producer Peter Miner. It’s one of those moments when I suspect director Lela Swift and art director Sy Tomashoff were decorating the set for their own amusement.

Today, a portrait of Barnabas has taken the place of the coat of arms. Children Daniel and Amy Collins found it in the attic of Will and Carolyn’s house, and for some reason housekeeper Julia Hoffman and butler Mr Trask decided to hang it up by the front door. It is a copy of the one we have seen over the last three years. It depicts Barnabas’ counterpart in this universe, a man who lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830.

Daniel and the portrait of Barnabas Collins (d. 1830.) Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The master of Collinwood, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, is shocked to see the portrait, and orders it to be removed immediately. Daniel’s counterpart, strange and troubled boy David Collins, had been the first to speak Barnabas’ name when he called Willie’s attention to the portrait in #205. Shortly after, Willie heard a heartbeat coming from the portrait, which led him to make his fateful trip to open the coffin. In this continuity, it is Daniel who hears the heartbeat, and he will today try to find and open the coffin.

Quentin has caught two glimpses of the other universe in the room in the east wing that was his late wife Angelique’s bedroom. Unknown to Quentin, Angelique has returned from the dead and murdered her identical twin sister Alexis. Quentin thinks that it is Alexis who is his guest in the great house, staying in her sister’s old room. When he tells her today what he saw, “Alexis” thinks he is losing his mind. But she then sees the phenomenon herself. She sees Hoffman’s counterpart calling for Barnabas, as Quentin had seen her talking about Barnabas’ “terrible curse.” “Alexis” and Quentin decide that they and Hoffman should have a séance to contact the spirit of the Barnabas Collins who died in their universe in 1830, the only Barnabas Collins they know of.

In the main continuity, séances are a frequent occurrence; we have seen fourteen of them there, and heard a detailed account of a fifteenth. In the early days, there was always one participant who tried to break the circle, only to be sternly reproved by the leader. The characters stopped doing that as they got to be familiar with the procedure, but séances are rarer in this universe. As things start to get interesting, Hoffman can’t take it anymore. She breaks the circle and runs out. “Alexis” says that the presence she felt is gone. But then a ghost materializes in the corner of the room.

Episode 1007: Accumulating guilts

Chemist Horace Gladstone has been selling a strange and powerful synthesis of his own invention to Cyrus Longworth, an independent medical researcher. Cyrus refuses to tell Gladstone what he is using the synthesis for. Gladstone has now figured it out for himself. Cyrus has concocted a potion which he drinks to change his appearance, disguising him so effectively that even the people who know him best do not recognize him. In that disguise, Cyrus calls himself “John Yaeger,” spends a lot of money, and indulges his sadistic impulses.

Gladstone comes to Cyrus’ lab and tells him what he knows. Cyrus tries to deny that he is Yaeger, and Gladstone lists the evidence he has collected proving that he is. Gladstone tells Cyrus that he doesn’t believe he can do without the thrills he gets from his activities as Yaeger. The story has been crafted as an account of addiction, so returning viewers are sure Gladstone is right. He says he will go on serving as Cyrus’ connection for the drug he craves, but the price has gone up. He demands $10,000.

Cyrus first learned Gladstone’s name from his late friend Angelique Stokes Collins. Angelique was a woman of vast learning in a variety of fields, much like the title character in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “Ligeia.” Also like Ligeia, Angelique has returned from the dead. She is now back in the great house of Collinwood, impersonating the identical twin sister whom she murdered on the night of her resurrection, and occupying her old room as the guest of her widower, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins.

Cyrus calls Gladstone a blackmailer. In reply, Gladstone makes a cryptic remark: “Why do you think my number was in Angelique Collins’ phone book? She’s led many lives. Each person only gets one. Good night.” We have indeed been wondering how Angelique came to know Gladstone, and now we wonder if he is aware of just how literally true it is that “She’s led many lives.” It doesn’t make any sense to follow “She’s led many lives” with “Each person only gets one,” but actor John Harkins was so precise in his delivery that I’m sure that was the scripted line. If there was a slip, it came from Sam Hall’s typewriter, not from Harkins’ tongue.

If it isn’t a slip, I think we would have to go out on a limb to explain what Gladstone could mean. Angelique built up a cult around herself, including several people who were firmly convinced that she was going to rise from the dead. When her sister Alexis came to Collinwood, housekeeper Julia Hoffman, sleazy musician Bruno Hess, and Angelique and Quentin’s son Daniel were certain that the prophecy had been fulfilled and they were seeing Angelique redivivus. This was also the first thought that came to Cyrus, to Quentin’s brother Roger, and to Angelique’s Aunt Hannah, though they were more easily persuaded that Alexis was a separate person. The cultists are impressive enough in their certainty that even people outside their ranks were sure Alexis was Angelique returned from the grave. Daniel’s cousin and playmate Amy Collins was horrified to see her for that reason, and Quentin’s second wife, the former Maggie Evans, fled the house in part because she could not shake her belief that Alexis was Angelique.

If Gladstone is familiar with Angelique’s cult and has been involved with it, he might be saying that each person gets to participate in only one of Angelique’s lives. We’ve already seen that is not the case, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t think it is. Angelique may at some point have taught her followers a doctrine like that. While Hoffman, Bruno, and Daniel expected Angelique to come back and rejoin them, Cyrus, Roger, and Hannah were unsure they would see her again, even though they were certain that she was not simply dead. Indeed, Angelique is still telling her most of her devotees that she is Alexis. The only one to whom she has fully revealed herself is Hannah. Perhaps she had a plan to transcend death, but did not know just how it would work. Or perhaps she has decided the rest are not yet ready to be initiated into the esoteric truth of her return.

Sam Hall was a serious Lutheran, so much so that he insisted Shirley Grossman convert from Judaism before she married him and became Grayson Hall. Christian studies in twentieth century academic institutions were largely taken up with speculation about differences of opinion in the church before the codification of the New Testament and the formulation of the creeds. This sort of thing is still prominent in divinity schools today, and is often heard from pulpits in mainline Protestant denominations. Hall must have been familiar with it, so he probably gave it some thought when he spent Easter season 1970 writing scripts about a figure whose followers sort of expected her to rise from the dead and who surprised them by the way in which she actually did so. I doubt he was making any particular point about the various schools of thought that seminary professors postulate in the primitive church, but when he presents Angelique’s cult as divided into several strains of opinion from the start he is developing an idea that he did not have to invent himself.

We cut from the scene between Cyrus and Gladstone to the basement of Collinwood. Angelique leads Quentin to a little chamber hidden behind an alcove. A human skeleton stands in the chamber. You may wonder how a skeleton can stand, but Quentin doesn’t. He is too busy being surprised that he didn’t realize this chamber was in his basement.

The skeleton is that of Dameon Edwards, a friend of Angelique’s who went missing about a year before. Dameon’s ghost has been haunting the place for a couple of weeks. Angelique tells Quentin that Hannah found the skeleton and exorcised the ghost. Yesterday, we saw Angelique exorcise the ghost. Returning viewers know that she is giving credit to Hannah because she is masquerading as Alexis, who did not share her sister’s interest in the occult or her aunt’s. Quentin thinks that Bruno probably killed Dameon. Indeed, the ghost confirmed this yesterday. Quentin very much wants to get rid of Bruno, so you might think he would be interested in bringing a murder charge against him. But he decides that would be too much trouble, and it hurts his feelings when “Alexis” snaps at him that he shouldn’t be wasting his time reporting Dameon’s murder when he isn’t doing anything to investigate Angelique’s. So he calls Cyrus, and the two of them bury the bones on the grounds of the estate.

Meanwhile, two long-absent characters have returned from trips out of town. Quentin sent Hoffman to visit friends of hers in Boston because she kept antagonizing Maggie. Quentin’s sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard also went away for a long stay in New York, where she visited Maggie. In off-screen reality, Grayson Hall and Joan Bennett were both in Tarrytown, New York with several other cast members, working on the feature film House of Dark Shadows. Liz complains that Hoffman didn’t meet her at the train station with a car, and Hoffman explains that she just got back herself.

Hoffman says she missed Collinwood terribly while she was in Boston; Liz says she can’t understand that. If she were in Quentin’s place, she would sell the house and move to the city. That will interest longtime viewers. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in a parallel universe, where Liz’ counterpart owned Collinwood. When the show started, she was a recluse who hadn’t left the house for eighteen years. Her brother Roger often urged her to sell the place so that they could live someplace less gloomy, but even after she stopped being a recluse Liz wouldn’t hear of that. She was a symbol of the family’s commitment to the house. We have already seen that this Liz is the opposite of her counterpart in other ways, and now we wonder how far they will take that mirror image motif.

Angelique is in the foyer, talking on the telephone to Hannah. Villains on Dark Shadows have remarkably little sense of OpSec, and this is a case in point. Quentin, Liz, and Hoffman are a few feet away from her in the drawing room, and each of them knows that Alexis and Hannah couldn’t stand each other. All Angelique has to do is call Hannah by name and she will raise their suspicions. Yet not only does she use Hannah’s name several times, she uses one incriminating expression after another about how no one will suspect what they are up to. If any of them listens in, or of anyone else in the house happens by on their way to the front door, Angelique will have tipped her hand.

It is Hoffman who eavesdrops on the call. After Angelique catches her, they have an awkward exchange and Hoffman goes upstairs. Angelique then stands at the door to the drawing room and eavesdrops on a conversation between Liz and Quentin. Liz wants Quentin to go to New York and ask Maggie to come home, he throws a tantrum and says that Maggie is too childish for him to do such a thing.

Hoffman is in Angelique’s old room, talking to the portrait of her that hangs there. The members of Angelique’s cult make a practice of coming to the room and carrying on conversations with the portrait; when Alexis was staying in the room, she sometimes walked in on them while they were confiding their thoughts to it. Angelique eavesdrops on the last part of Hoffman’s account that when she was in Boston, she felt a mystic assurance that when she returned to Collinwood she would find Angelique come back to life. When Hoffman says that everything seems to be the same as it was when she left, she is close to tears.

The resurrected Angelique eavesdrops on Hoffman’s conversation with the dead Angelique. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique takes a step forward, and Hoffman realizes she is not alone with the portrait. She apologizes to “Alexis,” and Angelique says she needs a friend she can trust. Hoffman claims to be such a friend. “Alexis” then launches into her reasons for believing that Angelique was murdered. After the first couple of sentences, returning viewers know what she is going to say, so we dissolve to Quentin and Cyrus in the drawing room.

Quentin and Cyrus have just buried the skeleton, prompting Quentin to feel sorry for himself. He then tries to explain to Cyrus something extremely weird he saw the other evening. He went to Angelique’s old room to see Alexis. He opened the door, and saw a space that lacked the room’s furniture, lights, and decor. He saw two children whom he took to be Daniel and Amy, and they said something about Barnabas Collins. The only person of that name of whom Quentin or Cyrus is aware died in 1830, but the children were talking about someone they knew. An invisible barrier kept Quentin from entering the room, and he could not attract the children’s attention. Regular viewers know that Quentin was catching a glimpse of the other continuity, and that the children were not Daniel and Amy Collins, but their counterparts David Collins and Amy Jennings. Cyrus hasn’t been watching the show, so all he can do is suggest Quentin take a vacation.

They’ve been experimenting with videotape editing, and they make a jump cut from the drawing room scene with Quentin and Cyrus to Quentin walking up to the doors of Angelique’s room. The effect is startling, I suspect intentionally so. Quentin opens the doors, and again sees the other universe.

This time Quentin sees the counterparts of Liz and Hoffman. As David and Amy had been, they are talking about Barnabas, who was last seen in this room. Hoffman, whom Liz addresses as Julia, says that they must keep the room open so that Barnabas will have a chance to return to them. She says she wants to stay there, because it makes her feel close to Barnabas. Liz excuses herself, and Julia calls out to Barnabas. As Hoffman had grown emotional talking to the Angelique whom she believed to be absent, Julia grows emotional when she talks to the missing Barnabas. She looks at the hallway, seeing not Quentin but the dark, empty space that is there in her universe. She asks if Barnabas is there, watching her. Grayson Hall plays these two scenes so similarly that we can have no doubt that whatever the one Julia Hoffman feels for Barnabas, the other feels for Angelique.

Quentin calls out to Hoffman’s counterpart, as he had called to Daniel and Amy’s counterparts. As the children had been unaware of his presence, so this other Julia Hoffman is unaware of him. And as Daniel and Amy had come to the hallway and asked why he was shouting for them, Hoffman comes to the hallway and asks why he is shouting for her.

Episode 996: His divided nature

The first expert in forbidden lore to join the cast of characters on Dark Shadows was Dr Peter Guthrie of Dartmouth College, parapsychologist. Guthrie was chief scientific advisor to well-meaning governess Victoria Winters as she assembled the forces of good and led them in battle against undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. In #184, Guthrie confronted Laura. He told her that he had figured out she was “The Undead,” the first appearance of that expression on Dark Shadows. He also offered to help her if she would desist from her plan to murder her young son David. Guthrie was nervous about making this offer, apparently fearing Laura might draw him into her web of evil. He needn’t have worried about that- she responded, not by corrupting Guthrie, but by killing him.

The second such expert was a straightforward mad scientist. She was Julia Hoffman, MD, who in #291 offered to cure vampire Barnabas Collins of his curse. Though Julia made it a condition of her offer that Barnabas stop preying on the living, as Guthrie had conditioned his offer to Laura on her allowing David to live, we could already see that Julia was far more deeply compromised than Guthrie had been. She had learned of Barnabas’ existence while treating his victim, Maggie Evans, and she could gain the time to make her experiment work only by betraying Maggie’s trust and preventing her from regaining her memory of what Barnabas was and what he had done to her. Before long, Julia acquiesced to Barnabas’ pressure and joined him in murdering her old medical school classmate, Dr Dave Woodard. Eventually, she and Barnabas would become the parents of a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam. The shocking abuse they heaped on Adam in his infancy left no doubt that as a mad scientist, Julia is as much a symbol of extreme selfishness as is a vampire.

Adam was the product of an experiment designed by another mad scientist, Dr Eric Lang. Lang was even more flagrantly evil than Julia. When he needed a head for the monster, he tied his assistant down and set about cutting his head off. Granted, the assistant was a character played by Roger Davis, so the audience could see where Lang was coming from. In fact, the writers themselves eventually got so fed up with Mr Davis they cut the head off the final character he introduced. Still, Lang’s impatient response to the assistant’s complaints showed that he was utterly lacking in human compassion.

Now, we are in a different universe than the one where Dark Shadows spent its first 196 weeks. The resident mad scientist in this “Parallel Time” is Dr Cyrus Longworth. Cyrus has developed a potion that turns him into a real jerk. That may not sound like much of an achievement compared to building a Frankenstein’s monster or curing vampirism or whatever it was Guthrie wanted to do for Laura. But that’s to be expected. By the time Guthrie came to the great estate of Collinwood early in 1967, monsters and black magic and the like had been fixtures there for over 171 years. It appears that such things are relatively new to this version of Collinwood, so Cyrus is doing the sort of modest project that tends to characterize a field when it is first starting.

When Cyrus drinks his potion, his red hair turns black, he grows a lot more of it, and a putty appliance materializes, dangling precariously from the bridge of his nose. In this form, he calls himself “John Yaeger.”

That nose may not be made of Silly Putty, but it certainly isn’t a serious putty. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

As Yaeger, he goes to the Eagle, a tavern in the village of Collinsport, where barmaid Buffie Harrington is fending off the advances of her boyfriend Steve. Steve keeps coming up behind Buffie and grabbing her by the waist, a move that doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination. Buffie seems to be at once excited by Steve’s aggressiveness and irritated that he is keeping her from getting her work done. When Yaeger shows up and orders Steve to vacate the premises, Buffie’s evening goes from complicated to disastrous. The men fight, Steve loses, and Yaeger bodily ejects him from the tavern. Buffie confronts Yaeger about the wreck he has made of the place.

Later, Yaeger returns with a check to cover the damages. Buffie sees that the check is signed “Cyrus Longworth.” She explains that she used to work for the Collins family, and she knows who Cyrus is. She doesn’t believe that Cyrus would be friendly with Yaeger, and is sure he wouldn’t give him a check to cover the expenses he had incurred in a bar fight. Yaeger tells her the check is legitimate, and insists she keep quiet about his connection to Cyrus. He leaves.

Later, Quentin Collins finds the battered Steve and brings him into the tavern. Steve refuses to call the police, vowing to find Yaeger and settle the score himself. He leaves, and Quentin asks Buffie what she knows about the man who beat Steve. She says she doesn’t know much about him, but that a friend of Quentin’s does. She shows him the check with Cyrus’ signature. Perplexed, Quentin leaves.

Suddenly, Yaeger appears from nowhere. He tells Buffie that she promised not to tell of his connection to Cyrus. He starts choking her.

This is Elizabeth Eis’ first appearance as Buffie. Eis was on Dark Shadows once when it was set in the main continuity, playing Nelle Gunston, a devotee of a sinister cult who met Barnabas in the Blue Whale, a bar that corresponds to the Eagle in that universe. Barnabas killed Nelle before her only episode was over. It’s good to have Eis back, she was fun as Nelle and is a commanding presence today.

George Strus plays Steve, in his first and only role on the show. Strus was primarily a stunt performer, but he had lines in a few productions, most notably as a tough in Shaft. His last imdb credit was as a stunt performer in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, made in 1991, twenty years after Shaft. Steve is supposed to be a big dumb galoot, and Strus pulls that off satisfactorily.

Christopher Pennock’s name appears in the closing credits for the role of Cyrus. He is credited as “Chris Pennock” for Yaeger, adorably enough.

Episode 980: I don’t want memories

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard has had a dream in which her new husband, whom she knows as Jeb Hawkes but who when we first saw him asked to be called Jabe, was in a fight on top of Widows’ Hill. His opponent, a stooge named Sky Rumson, threw him off the precipice to his death. When she awoke, Carolyn ran to the hill in search of Jabe. Instead, she found Sky. He told her that her dream was not complete, because it did not show her death. He then grabbed her by the throat.

Jabe rushes up and knocks Carolyn out of Sky’s grip. He and Sky fight, and Sky does throw him off the precipice. Carolyn escapes.

Back home at the great house of Collinwood, Carolyn finds her mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. It takes her a while to compose herself sufficiently to tell Liz and Julia what happened. Julia offers Carolyn a sedative, which prompts her to jump up and shout a verbal refusal. By the time Carolyn starts telling the story, her distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, has joined them in the drawing room. She interrupts herself to yell at Barnabas that he always hated Jabe and is probably glad he’s dead. When Carolyn finishes, Barnabas slips out. Liz calls the police, and Julia is surprised neither of them saw Barnabas leave.

For the last nineteen weeks, the show has been trying to make a story out of some themes drawn from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. That segment is usually called “the Leviathans,” after a race of Elder Gods who are behind the action. Jabe was central to the Leviathan segment. Sky is the only other character remaining from it. Barnabas appears in the house where Sky has been crashing and finds him packing his bag. Sky does not understand how Barnabas got in. Barnabas dismisses his question, merely saying that Sky knows there are things he can do that ordinary people cannot. Sky draws a revolver and fires two rounds at Barnabas point blank, without effect. Sky exclaims “Oh, no!” Barnabas is amused that none of Sky’s late colleagues told him that he is a vampire. He takes Sky’s hand, curls his arm back so that the gun is pointing at his heart, and squeezes Sky’s finger onto the trigger.

Back at the great house, Liz gets a telephone call from the sheriff. The police haven’t found Jabe’s body, and have surmised that it washed out to sea. They have found Sky, and have tentatively ruled his death a suicide. Later, Carolyn has another dream. In this one, Jabe shows up and confirms his death. That marks the end of the Leviathan segment. Carolyn will go on using the name “Mrs Hawkes” and saying she misses Jabe, but otherwise the last nineteen weeks will be forgotten.

Carolyn sees Jabe for the last time. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Before killing Sky, Barnabas had mentioned that he almost regrets not leaving him to the other person who is on her way to do him in. That is Sky’s estranged wife, wicked witch Angelique. Had the Leviathan segment been more successful, or had Geoffrey Scott been even marginally competent in his performance as Sky, they might have made something of the parallels between Sky and Jabe. They are both very tall men with blonde wives who are dissatisfied with them. Angelique is dissatisfied that Sky is a tool of the Leviathans and that he tried to set fire to her on the orders of their representative, and Carolyn is dissatisfied with Jabe because he keeps running away from dangers he has brought on himself by his rebellion against the Leviathans and he won’t tell her anything about himself. Sky is a mortal man, while Angelique may once have been human but has long since become a creature of the supernatural. Carolyn is a mortal woman, while Jabe is now human but was originally a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time.

But the ratings have been sinking throughout the Leviathan period, and the whole narrative structure of the arc keeps collapsing around them every time they try to do anything with it. So they are in too much of a hurry to move on to the next thing to do any exploring of the characters. Also, Scott is hopeless. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, put it, it isn’t that he is an actor with just one strategy. He keeps trying different things, and none of them comes close to working. We won’t see him again.

The new story has to do with an alternate universe that is occasionally visible in a room in the long disused east wing of Collinwood. Barnabas, Julia, and others have been spying on its inhabitants, and Barnabas is fixated on the idea that if he can cross over into it his vampirism will disappear. Since his bloodlust is overwhelming him, he is desperate to pursue this forlorn hope. He goes to the room when the alternate universe cannot be seen there, and a moment later finds that it has changed with him in it. Julia is in the hallway, looking in. At first she and Barnabas can see each other, and she can hear him, though he cannot hear her. After a moment, Carolyn’s alternate universe counterpart enters and demands to know who Barnabas is and what he is doing in the house.

Barnabas took Carolyn as his blood-thrall in October 1967. The show went back in time to 1795 the following month. In the 1790s segment, Nancy Barrett played fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. We saw that Barnabas first became a vampire in 1796; not long after, he took Millicent as his blood thrall. Shortly after the show returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, one of Julia’s colleagues in the mad science profession applied a treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into remission. That freed Carolyn of her connection to him, and at some point she forgot it ever happened.

For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was set in 1897. In that segment, Miss Barrett played repressed schoolmarm Charity Trask. Barnabas bit her, too. Carolyn’s counterpart in “Parallel Time,” known by her married name Carolyn Loomis, is the fourth character* Miss Barrett played on Dark Shadows; considering that Barnabas is so frantically hungry, it looks like she will follow in the footsteps of her predecessors and serve as his breakfast.

*Or fifth- in #819, sorcerer Count Petofi found Charity’s personality to be an irritant, so he erased it and replaced it with that of the late Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl/ mentalist. From that time on, Miss Barrett played Pansy, not Charity.

Episode 977: Before dawn

An information management day. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has told his distant cousin, Roger Collins, about a parallel universe that is occasionally visible in a room in the long disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood. Today, Roger tells his sister Elizabeth about the room. Liz owns the house. We might wonder if she will have questions about what effect the presence of a spare universe on the premises will have on her property taxes.

Roger talks about the phenomenon while standing in the room with permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. He is incredulous when he notices that Julia is not listening to him. She cannot tell him what has distracted her. Unknown to Roger and Liz, Barnabas is a vampire. Julia has devised a treatment that is supposed to put this curse in remission, but it is not working at all. She has given him the last of the injections, and the only difference in Barnabas is that he is getting sick and feeling an unusually intense bloodlust.

Caretaker Chris Jennings, another distant cousin, comes stumbling home to his cottage on the grounds of the estate. He finds his girlfriend and ex-fiancée Sabrina Stuart waiting for him. Chris is another patient Julia has been unable to help. He is a werewolf. There was a full moon last night. Sabrina tells Chris he killed a man named Bruno. Chris is distressed that he killed anyone, but Sabrina points out that Bruno knew of his secret and was trying to use him to kill others. He was holding her and a man named Rumson prisoner, and when the police searched Bruno’s premises after his death they found Sabrina and Rumson imprisoned there. Sabrina keeps telling Chris she wants to marry him. Most of the time they will live ordinary lives, but one night out of 28 she will just have to lock him up in a special cell. Chris won’t hear of this.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, is a great one for love stories and an admirer of actress Lisa Blake Richards. Chris and Sabrina have run out of road on Dark Shadows, and are obviously going to be written out soon. Mrs Acilius wishes they could ride off into the sunset accompanied by the sound of wedding bells. So when Chris refused to marry Sabrina, she exclaimed “Stupid man!” I pointed out something Chris knows but does not mention to Sabrina, that his curse is hereditary. Any male descendants he has will also be werewolves. Mrs A conceded that this does complicate matters.

Roger saw Chris at Bruno’s place when he rescued him and Carolyn shortly before moonrise last night. Chris was at that time in the throes that precede his transformation. Chris ran off before Roger or Carolyn could see what became of him. Roger comes to the cottage to check on him.

Chris is in the back changing out of his bloody clothes, so Sabrina answers the door. She tells Roger that Chris is there and that she was with him all night, watching over him because he was ill. After what he saw of Chris at Bruno’s, Roger has no doubt that Chris needed a nurse, and he tells Sabrina that he is glad he had such a charming one. The audience can understand that Sabrina wants to conceal Chris’ lycanthropy from Roger, but surely it cannot be wise for her to claim that she was in the cottage overnight. Not only are her true whereabouts known to everyone who was in or around the police station the night before, but since Roger was the one who found Bruno’s body and he found it on the grounds of Collinwood, even police as inept as the ones in Collinsport are likely to follow up with him. Besides, her imprisonment with Rumson is a sensational story, of interest to the press. Maybe we will move on to the next phase of the show before the facts come to light, but Sabrina can’t know that.

Sabrina is determined to persuade Chris to resume their engagement. She goes to the one person whose opinion Chris seems to respect, Barnabas. When she knocks on his door, Barnabas hides behind a partition. When Sabrina first arrived, she had seen Barnabas through the window of his front parlor, so she lets herself in. He finally gives up on hiding and pleads with her to leave. She ignores what he is saying and keeps talking. She plows ahead with her idea about how Barnabas can help her and Chris become a happy married couple. Barnabas struggles to resist his urge for blood, but cannot. He bites Sabrina, much to her surprise. Miss Richards’ understated exclamation of “Barnabas!” when he shows his fangs and goes for her neck is very nicely done, it really sounds like a woman puzzled that a trusted friend is violating her personal space.

Sabrina staggers back to Chris’ cottage. She collapses in his chair, and he sees the puncture wounds on her neck. They are much bigger than the marks we’ve seen on Barnabas’ previous victims. I suppose he really was a lot hungrier than usual. Chris doesn’t know that Barnabas is a vampire, and the cliffhanger leaves us wondering whether he can avoid finding out.

Probably the most memorable shot in the episode is a very impressive bit of videotape editing. Roger and Barnabas are standing at the door to the Parallel Time room, watching Roger’s counterpart interact with Liz’ and Chris’. Parallel Roger walks toward the door. He exits the room, not into the space Roger and Barnabas occupy, but into the hallway as it exists in Parallel Time. He vanishes from their view, and the effect also winks out in the room, leaving Roger and Barnabas looking into the bare, dark chamber it is in the house they know.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The videotape editors do not yet figure in the closing credits, which is a shame. They really are the stars of today’s show.

Episode 972: World beyond the doors

Vampire Barnabas Collins has discovered that he can occasionally see into a parallel universe through a doorway in the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood. He cannot enter that universe or get the attention of its inhabitants, but yesterday a book came flying out of it and landed at his feet. It is titled The Life and Death of Barnabas Collins, and its author is William Hollingshead Loomis.

The Barnabas of the book’s title is our Barnabas’ counterpart in the parallel universe. He never became a vampire, but married his great love Josette, enjoyed prosperity as head of the Collins family, and died a natural death in 1830. It sounds like Parallel Barnabas lived a quiet life of the sort that would make for a dull biography.

Author William Hollingshead Loomis is the counterpart of Willie Loomis, once Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall. Willie is back in Barnabas’ house, not as a slave, but as a volunteer in the battles Barnabas and Julia recently waged against the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who sort of wanted to retake the Earth and annihilate humankind, but who could never figure out a way to get started. The Leviathans have been defeated now, and Willie’s fiancée Roxanne expects him to leave with her. But Barnabas and Julia are still bullying Willie into sticking around while they clean up the messes they have made recently. Most notably, yesterday they made him stake Megan Todd, a victim whom Barnabas inadvertently made into a vampire. Today Willie is still talking about how traumatic it was for him to do that.

Parallel William H. Loomis is identified on the back of his book as the author of three best-selling novels that had been made into motion pictures, Pride of Lions, Gold Hatted Lover, and World Beyond the Doors. When Barnabas shows the book to our Willie, he reacts with panic. When he sees in the prefatory material that Parallel William dedicated the book to “the Clio who inspired” him, Willie declares that he doesn’t know anyone by that name. Barnabas contemptuously tells him that Clio was the Muse of History. Willie has never been represented as an especially literate fellow- when Frankenstein’s monster Adam began using standard grammar and diction in August 1968, Willie’s response was to ask “How come he talk so good?” While one suspects that a writer capable of publishing a book under the title Gold Hatted Lover is not exactly Thomas Hardy, Parallel William is clearly more bookish than is our Willie.

Barnabas tells occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes about the room and takes him there. Stokes is excited by the possibility of examining this direct evidence for the many-worlds hypothesis, but alarmed by Barnabas’ apparent determination to cross over into the parallel universe he has glimpsed. He tells him of the dangers involved, and Barnabas does not want to hear it.

Stokes examines the book. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is on her honeymoon with a man who once hoped people would call him Jabe. Like all his other hopes, that was summarily dashed, and he answers to Jeb. A leftover from the Leviathan arc, Jabe is plagued by an autonomous shadow that manifests itself to him in the manner of the shadow that plagues Anodos, the protagonist of George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes. Every time the shadow appears, Jabe insists on fleeing. Today, Carolyn sees the shadow herself, and finally understands why they haven’t been able to spend a whole night in any of the hotels they’ve checked into.

The shadow is not the most impressive special effect on Dark Shadows. In their post about the episode on their blog Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri said that the little dance the shadow does ought to be underscored with some Herb Alpert-style music, and they post a video to prove their point.

Episode 971: A twist of time

Out With the Old

Vampire Barnabas Collins inadvertently killed his victim Megan Todd the other night, turning her into a creature like himself. Now his chief enabler, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, is browbeating his ex-blood thrall Willie Loomis into destroying Megan. Willie is horrified by the prospect of driving a stake through a woman’s heart, and Julia gives him a pep talk. She says that staking Megan is the only way to free her of the curse and to free her blood thrall, Barnabas’ distant cousin Roger Collins, from bondage. But it is necessary to finish Megan off “most of all, for Barnabas.”

“Most of all, for Barnabas.” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The premise of Willie’s character at this point in Dark Shadows is that he regards Barnabas as a dear friend and valued patron. When Willie first knew Barnabas, from April to September 1967, Barnabas drank his blood, beat him savagely when he defied his fiendish commands, and framed him for his crimes. Barnabas had Julia fetch Willie back from the mental hospital she controls in May 1968, so he could use him to steal bodies to use in making a Frankenstein’s monster. Barnabas’ vampirism was in remission at that time, so he did not have any supernatural control over Willie. Willie’s attitude towards Barnabas then was rather insouciant, so he and Julia kept threatening to send him back to the ward for the criminally insane unless he obeyed them. Barnabas only seemed happy during this time once. That came in #560, when he saw the agony Willie went through when he persuaded him that it would be his fault if the monster murdered Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. I suppose people do rewrite their own pasts to make them bearable, so it is understandable that Willie has chosen to believe that his abuser was really his best buddy. Still, it does seem a bit much for Julia to tell Willie that he should destroy Megan “most of all, for Barnabas.”

Julia accompanies Willie to Megan’s hiding place in the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood. Willie breaks down outside the room where Roger is guarding her coffin, and Julia has to give him another motivational speech. She tells him he “mustn’t think of Megan as a person,” but as “a creature, an evil thing,” and besides that “You must help her to rest” and that staking is “the best thing for her.” While Willie struggles to hold back his tears, she warns him against waking Roger. By the time they enter the room, Roger is awake. He fights Willie and Julia to protect Megan, and Willie defeats him only by breaking a bottle over the back of his head.

Bonkus of the konkus. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia and Willie take Roger out of the room. Julia tends to Roger while we hear Megan’s screams. Once the staking is complete, Roger comes to, with no recollection of how he got to the east wing or what Megan did to him. This recovery tells us Megan is destroyed.

Later, Barnabas will tell Willie to bury Megan and all her belongings in a hole in the ground somewhere out in the woods. This shows longtime viewers that Barnabas has improved his post-murder game considerably. The first time he forced Willie into helping him cover up a killing came in #276. Barnabas had strangled Willie’s sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire. He had Willie help him bury Jason in the secret room in the old Collins family mausoleum, which would eventually cease to be much of a secret and which several people could connect with Barnabas. He also neglected to do anything about Jason’s belongings. Everyone thought Jason was leaving town and was glad to see him go, so there was no investigation. But in #277, Roger mentioned to his sister, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, that all of Jason’s stuff was still in the room he had been occupying at Collinwood. He told Liz that even Jason’s razor was still there. It was strictly a matter of luck that no one asked any questions about Jason- had they done so, Barnabas would have been in trouble almost immediately.

This episode marks, not only the end of Megan’s career as a vampire, but Marie Wallace’s final appearance on Dark Shadows. Miss Wallace was one of the most exuberant practitioners of the Dark Shadows house style of acting, a hyper-vehement manner of performance previously unknown in the history of the dramatic arts. It can take a bit of getting used to. But once Megan became a vampire, she suddenly became quiet and subtle, almost understated. Miss Wallace explains that by saying that the dentures they gave her to wear as fangs didn’t stay in her mouth very well, so she had to go small to keep them from flying across the room. As a result, her last few episodes are a revelation. The first time we watched the show I was impatient with Miss Wallace’s ultra-intense technique; I can appreciate it now, but her miniaturizing approach to Vampire Megan is so very effective that I wish we could have seen a couple hundred more episodes of her doing that kind of thing.

Miss Wallace tells the story of the day they shot this episode. She got a telephone call from her agent that they wanted her for a part on a soap called Somerset. She was thrilled, since there was no new part planned for her after Megan’s demise. From the few surviving bits of video showing her on Somerset, it doesn’t look like she decided to become a miniaturist.

In With the New

Megan is left over from an exhausted story. The new one is starting in another room in the east wing. The Collinses cram all of the deserted rooms in their buildings full of stuff- vases, paintings, books, furniture of all sorts. This room outdoes all the rest, and contains a whole parallel universe.

Barnabas has been peeping in on the doings in the parallel universe room for couple of days, but there is an invisible barrier which prevents him entering it or communicating with the people he sees and hears there. At the opening today, he sees Julia’s counterpart and Liz’ continuing a quarrel they had been having when he observed them before; at the close, he sees Willie’s counterpart and Julia’s having a similar quarrel.

Parallel Julia wears a maid’s uniform, but is full of commands for Parallel Liz and Parallel Willie. Parallel Liz’ response to her commands shows that she is not the mistress of the house, and cannot control Parallel Julia. Parallel Willie wears an ascot and a smoking jacket, and regards Parallel Julia with amused contempt.

Parallel Willie finds a book in the room that he wanted; Parallel Julia takes it from him, and tosses it into the hallway. The book passes through the barrier, and lands at Barnabas’ feet. The doors to the room close. Barnabas opens them again, and finds that the room is empty, devoid of the people, furnishings, and lights that had been visible there a moment before. Carrying the book, he goes in.

The title and author of the book stun him. It is titled The Life and Death of Barnabas Collins; its author is William Hollingshead Loomis.

In #326, Willie had been shot by the police, who blamed him for some of Barnabas’ crimes. Barnabas grew anxious as the hours passed and Willie failed to die. He complained to Julia of Willie’s “leech-like persistence” in remaining alive. Julia tried to reassure Barnabas that Willie was unlikely to survive much longer, and in response he raged that Willie might just as easily recover from his wounds and “write his memoirs!”

That line found an echo in #464, when we learned that Barnabas’ eighteenth century servant Ben Stokes had indeed written a memoir, though the extant manuscript was missing some parts about Barnabas. In #756, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins heard that Ben had secrets about Barnabas which he “took to his grave,” so she dug the grave up and, by golly, there were the missing passages explaining that Barnabas was a vampire. Now the same line is going to give rise to another William Loomis, one who has written a book about his world’s counterpart of Barnabas.