Tag: julia hoffman

Episode 890: They will be strangers, but you will know them

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 entrance
Megan 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 Day to 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.

Episode 889: Remember the night

The Departures

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.

Julia welcomes Barnabas back to the 1960s. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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.

Episode 888: The place that he disappeared

The Prowler

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.

Episode 887: The man in the medium-sized black hat

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.

The mystery man is unexcited by the cairn. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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.

Episode 885: The girl in the portrait

We open with a reprise of yesterday’s closing scene. It is November 1897, and time traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is about to be reunited with his lost love, Josette DuPrés, who threw herself to her death from the cliff on Widows’ Hill in February 1796. Josette is now reincarnated in the person of Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire. Josette’s personality has been emerging from the substrata of Kitty’s unconscious mind in the eight weeks she has been staying at the great estate of Collinwood. Now Kitty and Josette are merging into a symbiont, and that combined being has agreed to marry Barnabas tonight. Kitty/ Josette is in the Old House on the estate, in the bedroom once meant for Josette, waiting for Barnabas to return from the great house where he has told his distant cousin Judith of their wedding plans.

Barnabas enters the bedroom just in time to see Kitty/ Josette assumed bodily into the portrait of Josette that hangs over the mantel. He reaches up to touch Kitty/ Josette, and the two of them both vanish.

Barnabas finds lying himself on the ground, wearing clothes he last put on in the 1790s. He stands up and calls out for Kitty. “Kitty! Kitty! Where are you, Kitty?” He calls her name several more times. Oddly, he stops short of calling out “Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!” In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, user “kosmo13” wrote “It would’ve been cool if they’d had a cat wander into the scene at that moment and had Barnabas say ‘No. Not you!'”*

Barnabas comes face to face with Ben Stokes, who was his indentured servant and fanatically devoted friend in the 1790s. Ben has no idea why Barnabas is talking as if they haven’t seen each other for a long time- they saw each other last night, as far as he is concerned. Barnabas realizes that he has traveled back in time again. He was in 1897 after being dislocated from the 1960s. Now he has returned to February 1796, to the very night Josette killed herself.

Barnabas tries frantically to keep Josette from repeating her suicide. He sends Ben to the great house of Collinwood to see if Josette is in her room there, as she is supposed to be. He is concerned that, since the trip through the portrait left him on the ground near the woods, there is no telling where it may have dropped Kitty/ Josette.

He needn’t have worried about that. We see Josette in bed, as she was in #425, the first time the show took us through this night. Her aunt Natalie, the Countess DuPrés, is with her, and is intensely afraid of a prophecy foretelling Josette’s death this night. That much is identical to what we saw in the previous timeline, when the show was set in the 1790s in February 1968. Josette does tell the countess that she had an odd dream in which she was wearing an unfamiliar dress and having a conversation with a portrait; that dream, which Josette herself dismisses as not at all important, is evidently the only trace of Kitty left in Josette’s conscious mind.

Josette tells the countess about her dream. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This scene plays on the iconography of these two actresses. From the moment Kathryn Leigh Scott showed up as Kitty in #844, her title has reminded us of Josette’s aunt. So it is with a nice sense of inevitability that we see the show’s first countess again. Moreover, Miss Scott first joined the cast as Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town; Grayson Hall as Maggie’s psychiatrist, Julia Hoffman, MD. So it seems right to us when the countess becomes a therapist and listens intently to Josette’s account of her dream, growing only more interested as Josette insists that the dream was unimportant.

The first time through, Barnabas was trying to kill Josette and turn her into his vampire bride. Wicked witch Angelique, who had made Barnabas a vampire in the first place, lured Josette to the top of Widows’ Hill and showed her a vision of herself as a vampire. When Barnabas showed up, Josette ran from him and jumped off the cliff, flinging herself to a death on the rocks below rather than let him make her what he was.

This time, Barnabas wants Josette to live. He knows what Angelique is planning. During his eight months in 1897, he and Angelique became allies, almost friends. So it is logical that he meets with her and asks her to leave Josette alone. But this is Angelique as she was in #425. She is enraged with Barnabas, and full of hate for Josette. She does listen to him, and for a moment she seems to be considering his request that she stay with him through the night. One wonders how she would have reacted had Barnabas leveled with her about what happened in 1897, explaining why he thinks they can be something other than enemies. But he holds back, telling her nothing. She makes a hostile remark, and vanishes.

Angelique does just what she did the first time- she tricks the countess into leaving Josette’s room, projects a voice that Josette mistakes for Barnabas’ voice calling her to go to Widow’s Hill, and causes Josette to see a vision of herself as a vampire once she is on top of the hill. At the end, we hear footsteps approaching. The last we saw Barnabas, he announced he was hastening to Widows’ Hill to keep Josette from jumping; if he arrives now, that is exactly what he will prompt her to do.

In the 1897 segment, Grayson Hall played broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi and also had a few weeks as Julia. Today she returns to the cast after an absence of more than five weeks. She spent that time in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, where she had a part in a movie called Adam at 6 AM. The cast included Michael Douglas, Joe Don Baker, Dana Elcar, Louise Latham, and Meg Foster. Actor Steve McQueen was one of the producers. Hall and Elcar were the only Dark Shadows alums in the company, though Foster later played an ultra-soapy story opposite David Selby in a miniseries called Washington: Behind Closed Doors.

We haven’t seen the countess since #666. In that one, Barnabas had traveled back to a night a few weeks after the one he arrives in today. He made a terrible mess of things, which is his function on the show, and Ben wound up inadvertently killing the countess. Seeing her today, regular viewers can hope that, whatever misfortunes Barnabas brings with him this time, at least that won’t happen. The countess is a likable character, and while there was a point to showing Ben becoming a murderer it is a point they have already made. They won’t lose anything if they imply that the events we are about to see prevent it from happening.

*Posted 25 December 2024 on Danny Horn, “Not in Canvas Anymore,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 21 June 2016.

Episode 858: Despite all appearances

Sorcerer Count Petofi has forced the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins to trade bodies with him. So Thayer David is now playing Quentin, a forlorn and helpless figure who goes around begging people to listen to his lunatic story, while David Selby plays Petofi as a gleefully cruel young man who takes advantage of all the pleasures available to Quentin. I will refer to Thayer David’s character as P-Quentin and David Selby’s as Q-Petofi.

P-Quentin
Q-Petofi

Q-Petofi goes to Beth Chavez, who used to be a maidservant in the great house of Collinwood and is now one of Quentin’s fiancées, more or less. Beth is in what she identifies as her room. It looks very much like the set that represented her room in the servants quarters of Collinwood, but it is explicitly stated that this room is somewhere else. Maybe she took it with her as part of her severance package.

Beth is terrified of the count, whose slave she was for a while after she left Collinwood. P-Quentin manages to get her to take note of his words, though she seems sure that what he is saying is another of the count’s tricks. He tells the story of how twelve year old Jamison Collins found her about to commit suicide because of what his Uncle Quentin did to her and has refused to speak to him since. He pleads with her to go to Collinwood and see if the man who appears to be Quentin knows the same story.

Beth does go, and she does put Q-Petofi to the test. He has no idea what she is talking about, and tries to bluff his way out by saying that Jamison’s estrangement from him is too painful to discuss. He then yells at Beth, declaring that he knows the count put her up to asking him about Jamison. That means that he and Beth both know that he failed the test. Beth might become P-Quentin’s first ally. Unless, that is, Q-Petofi kills her before she can- there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping him.

P-Quentin does have other potential allies. One is Julia Hoffman, MD. A mad scientist from the twentieth century, Julia followed her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, after he had traveled through time from the year 1969 here to 1897. An experimental treatment briefly freed Barnabas from the effects of vampirism in the spring of 1968; when she arrived from the future, Julia began trying to replicate that treatment. Most people now think that Barnabas has been destroyed, staked in his coffin in #845. But in #849 we saw that Julia was still working on the treatment, and in #853 someone named Kitty Soames barged into Julia’s hiding place and, possessed by the ghost of Barnabas’ lost love Josette, identified the room where Barnabas was hiding. Quentin, at that time still occupying his own body, was with Kitty at the time and realized that she was right. This alarmed Julia, because even though she and Barnabas regarded Quentin as a friend, they knew that he was already under Petofi’s influence and could not be trusted to keep a secret from him.

Another person who might come to P-Quentin’s aid against Q-Petofi is Angelique, the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire in the first place. At this point in 1897, Angelique is another of Quentin’s fiancées. Resenting Petofi’s influence over her prospective husband, she met with Julia in #842 and devised the plan they have been following since. Angelique has a couple of scenes with Q-Petofi in the drawing room at Collinwood today; she notices that his behavior is very different from what Quentin’s has been, but does not suspect that it is Petofi’s mind behind the face.

Angelique calls on Julia in her hiding place. Julia keeps hearing some sound effects we last heard during The Experiment, a storyline that ran through May and June of 1968, when she was building a Frankenstein’s monster in order to permanently cure Barnabas’ vampirism. She describes them as sounding like wind. Angelique cannot hear them, nor can she hear the voices which Julia also hears. When Julia recognizes the voices as occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes and sarcastic dandy Roger Collins, she realizes that they are coming from 1969. The reason she can hear them and Angelique cannot is that she has a physical body in that year, while Angelique is all here, in 1897. Julia tells Angelique she cannot stay in 1897 much longer, and Angelique agrees to take over her part in what remains of their plan.

After Angelique has left her alone, Julia finds that Stokes and Roger can hear her if she shouts. This only lasts for a moment. The sounds fade, and she loses the connection altogether.

P-Quentin comes to Julia’s place. Thinking he is Petofi, she declines to speak to him. He insists he is Quentin. When he tells her some information they had shared privately, she decides he is telling the truth and starts calling him Quentin. In fact, she calls him “Quentin, Quentin,” as she often calls Barnabas “Barnabas, Barnabas.” She is about to tell him the next steps of the plan when she vanishes.

The lady vanishes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The first time traveler we saw vanish in this way was an unpleasant man named Peter Bradford whose personality largely consisted of yelling at people that he preferred to be called “Jeff Clark.” Peter/ Jeff was from the 1790s, but tried everyone’s patience for much of 1968, when the show took place in a contemporary setting. He faded away, returning to his own time, in #637. We didn’t hear any sound effects before he disappeared. The Experiment was still very fresh in our minds at that point, so the sound effects we hear today would not have been available, and besides, no one cares what the world sounds like to Peter/ Jeff. It was just a relief that he was finally gone.

Julia is as appealing a character as Peter/ Jeff was repellent, and it’s sad to see her go. We’ve had some signs lately that the 1897 segment will soon be ending, but we’ve had those signs before, and they’ve kept restarting it. If Julia isn’t coming back to this period, we can only hope that if it goes on much longer, they will find a way to intercut episodes set in 1897 with others set in 1969, where we will be able to spend time with her.

Episode 853: Strange and horrifying spirits

Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager Countess of Hampshire, is gradually turning into Josette DuPrés, who has been dead for 101 years. Kitty is staying at the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Also among the houseguests is Angelique, the immortal, time-traveling wicked witch who was responsible for Josette’s death.

Kitty has been getting information about Angelique, apparently from Josette’s ghost. She interrogates Angelique’s fiancé, rakish libertine Quentin Collins. Quentin does not give her any useful information about Angelique. When Kitty asks if Angelique has ever lived in England, Angelique herself enters and says that she has not. Kitty asks Angelique if she was ever a servant. Angelique made it quite clear yesterday that she knows perfectly well what is happening to Kitty, but she regards the transformation as a nuisance and does not want to help it along. She chooses to pretend that Kitty is being a snob, and says that Quentin is not marrying beneath his station. With that, Kitty has nowhere to go but back to her room.

Angelique has made an alliance with Julia Hoffman, MD, a fellow time-traveler from the late 1960s. Julia followed her friend and the object of Angelique’s lunatic obsessions, vampire Barnabas Collins, to 1897. Barnabas is now believed to have been destroyed, but we’ve already seen that Julia is continuing work replicating the experimental procedure that put his vampirism into abeyance for a little while in the spring of 1968. Today, Angelique brings some medical supplies to Julia in her hiding place, and Julia asks if she can come a little earlier the next day.

The two women sit down and have a friendly chat. Longtime viewers will find this breathtaking. Angelique was at Collinwood in 1968, wearing a black wig, calling herself Cassandra, and functioning as Julia and Barnabas’ bitterest enemy. Now that Angelique has turned to Quentin and has let go of her drive to dominate Barnabas, she and Julia have made an alliance against sorcerer Count Petofi. Their animosity set aside, they can commiserate about the difficulty of a life yoked to Barnabas.

“Ugh, vampires, all the good ones are either obsessed with recreating their dead ex or gay.” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique wants to liberate Quentin, whom Petofi has enslaved. Julia is horrified today when Kitty, in Josette mode, bursts into her hiding place and demands to see Barnabas. Quentin follows her in and hears her ask why she is keeping Barnabas in the next room. Neither Kitty nor Quentin believe Julia when she keeps insisting that Barnabas is no more. If Quentin knows that Barnabas is still around, Petofi will soon know it as well, and that can only be bad news.

Petofi is not content keeping Quentin as a slave. He wants to abuse him even more totally. We saw the other day that Petofi wants to swap bodies with Quentin as his means of escaping from his deadly enemies, the Rroma people. Petofi visits Quentin in the drawing room at Collinwood this evening and gives him a scalp massage. Quentin notices Petofi’s ring, and agrees that he would like a new life. He falls asleep, then wakes up to find Petofi’s ring on his finger. To his alarm, he cannot take it off. My wife, Mrs Acilius, called out to the screen to suggest he spray some Windex on his finger, but that wasn’t invented until 1933 and the dramatic date is 1897. Presumably the transfer of the ring is the first step towards Quentin’s eviction from his own body and his replacement in it by Petofi.

Closing Miscellany

Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day is a study of Kathryn Leigh Scott’s facial expressions. His thesis is that Miss Scott is imitating Grayson Hall, who plays Julia. Later in the series there will be a moment when Miss Scott imitates Hall in a scene they play together; Hall’s reaction then will be hilarious.

Kitty sees the portrait of Barnabas Collins hanging in the foyer on the spot by the front door. She Josettifies and becomes fascinated by it. Stuffy but lovable Edward Collins had the portrait removed when Barnabas was exposed as a vampire some time ago, and is shocked to find that it has returned. Presumably whatever supernatural agency is Josettifying Kitty put it there. Longtime viewers, who remember how active Josette’s own ghost was at Collinwood before Barnabas first appeared on the show, will think she is the likeliest suspect.

When Kitty/ Josette is kneeling beside the grave of Josette’s husband Jeremiah Collins (spelled “Jerimiah” on the marker,) Edward shows up and tells her that she was married, not to Jeremiah, but to the late Gerald Soames Earl of Hampshire. That was the first time it dawned on me that both Josette and Kitty married guys named Jerry.

Angelique’s intrusion into the scene between Quentin and Kitty might have been more effective if the camera hadn’t swung wide and shown her standing outside the door waiting to make her entrance. We don’t see Angelique eavesdropping, but Lara Parker standing well upstage waiting to make her entrance.

Episode 849: You wouldn’t expect me to forget a vampire

Once upon a time, an American girl named Kitty moved to England, where she joined the household of the Earl of Hampshire as a governess. The Earl married her, and she became his Countess. Now it is 1897. The Earl is dead, driven to suicide by sorcerer Count Petofi. Kitty has returned to America, without the stepchildren who were once her charges and with so little money that she writes a letter apologizing to her mother that she cannot pay the train fare from Maine to her home in Pennsylvania. She is staying in the great house on the estate of Collinwood, home to her late husband’s friend Edward Collins. Her hope is that Edward will marry her and allow her to go on living in the style to which she has grown accustomed.

Her hopes would seem to be well-founded. Edward was so devoted to the late Earl that for a time he was under the delusion that he was his valet, and he is smitten with Kitty. But there are several flies in the ointment. For one thing, regular viewers know that Edward is in fact penniless. His sister Judith inherited the whole of their grandmother’s estate. He lives in Judith’s house as a guest and works in her business as her employee, and while she is in the mental hospital he must take orders from her husband, the odious Gregory Trask.

Second, Petofi is in the area. It was he who cast the spell that prompted Edward to reveal his true self-image as the Earl’s manservant, and he has evil plans for many of the people with whom Kitty must deal. She met Petofi at Collinwood the day she arrived there, but has kept her acquaintance with him secret from Edward and everyone else.

Third, vampire Barnabas Collins saw Kitty and believed she was his lost love Josette come back to life. Shortly after, she had a psychological break suggesting he was right. A music box that Barnabas has given to several women whom he wanted to turn into Josette appeared in Kitty’s room the other day, after a woman who used to be Trask’s daughter Charity but has now been transformed into Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye had warned her it was a sign of great danger.

It seems unlikely Barnabas put the music box on Kitty’s table. For one thing, Charity/ Pansy had staked him shortly before, so that he is apparently hors de combat. Further, it was placed there during the daylight hours, when he is always out of operation. Also, it appeared while Kitty was sitting a few feet away, and she did not see anyone else in the room. Petofi stripped Barnabas of his power to materialize and dematerialize at will some time ago, so he would not have been able to manage that trick. The explanation that will occur to longtime viewers is that Josette’s ghost did it. She was very active at Collinwood before Barnabas made his first entrance in April 1967, when the show took place in a contemporary setting. Perhaps she is active in 1897, as well.

Kitty doesn’t know about any of that, so she assumes that Petofi is responsible. She marches over to Petofi’s residence, an abandoned mill. Originally this was a hideout, but by now most of the principal cast have visited him there at least once, so she could have stopped just about anyone on the street and asked for directions. She accuses him of having Charity/ Pansy give her a chilling warning about a particular music box, and of then causing that music box to appear in her room. He has no idea what she is talking about. She produces the music box and they play it. She then has another mental flash onto images of Barnabas. Petofi finds all of this most interesting, and walks Kitty back to Collinwood.

There, Kitty finds the devastatingly handsome reprobate Quentin Collins moping over a glass of liquor. She asks him if she has him to thank for the music box. He is shocked to see it. He says that it looks just like one that belonged to a distant relative of his, but that he doesn’t believe it can be the same one. She asks if the relative is Barnabas Collins, and he is shocked again. He asks how she knows that name. In response, Kitty introduces Quentin to the concept of “learning”: “I collect information, Mr. Collins, and I remember what I hear… I listen when people speak.” Quentin reacts as if it is the first time anyone has described these activities to him, which, considering the world he lives in, is not so unlikely.

Back in his squat, Petofi sees his servant Aristide for the first time in several days. Aristide went absent without leave when Barnabas threatened to kill him, and has come back now that he has heard Barnabas has been safely disposed of. Petofi is irked, not only at Aristide’s unauthorized departure, but even more at his failure to carry out the task he had entrusted to him. They had captured Julia Hoffman, MD, Barnabas’ friend, who followed him after he traveled back in time from 1969 to 1897. Petofi wanted to know how they managed this journey, and was convinced Julia was withholding the information he needed. Aristide rigged up a death trap that Barnabas triggered when he came to Julia’s rescue. Aristide did not stay to make sure it actually killed her.

Aristide shows Petofi that the gun he pointed at Julia’s heart did fire a bullet through the back of the chair to which he tied her. One would think that even a sorcerer, seeing that bullet hole, would conclude that Julia got out of the ropes while Aristide wasn’t looking. But instead he looks with a wild surmise and goes to Julia’s hiding place, in the old rectory on Pine Road.

Before Petofi enters, we see Julia holding a hypodermic and preparing an injection. She hides the needle when she hears the knock on the door. Julia had been giving Barnabas a series of shots meant to put his vampirism into remission. That she is still preparing the shots suggests to regular viewers that Barnabas’ staking was a trick of some kind, and that he is still in operation somewhere.

There are rules of etiquette in the universe of Dark Shadows that people follow no matter how absurd it is to do so. Julia lets Petofi into the room, even though he has tried to kill her. One cannot refuse admittance to anyone who knocks! She accepts a snifter of brandy from him and drinks it. One cannot refuse to share liquor with anyone who offers it!

As it happens, Petofi has put cyanide in the brandy. Enough cyanide, he says, to kill ten women. When he tells Julia this, she briefly tries to pretend that she is ill, then gives up. He declares that she cannot die. She admits that this is true. He figures out that only her “astral body” is in 1897, while her physical person remained in 1969. She confirms this.

Julia tries to make Petofi think he has succeeded by faking the symptoms of cyanide poisoning. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later, Petofi concludes that if he is to go to 1969, he will need to have a physical body there. Barnabas the vampire originally died in the 1790s and was in 1897 a body sealed in a coffin, so when he traveled back in time he could animate that body and be subject to all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Petofi decides that the body he wants is the best-looking available male one, which is Quentin’s. We have seen that Petofi can vacate his own body and take possession of another’s, as when in #801 he took up residence in twelve year old Jamison Collins. He has also, for reasons of his own, granted Quentin eternal youth. So it now seems logical to him that he should compel Quentin to make the exchange.

Of late, the editors of the Dark Shadows Wiki have taken to having discussions with each other in comments placed in parentheses and italicized. I couldn’t resist adding a comment myself to a discussion attached to the entry for this episode. My contribution is the fourth of the four below:

In 807, Aristede tells Charles Delaware Tate that if Petofi got his hand back, he would be able to live forever. As Petofi got his hand back, he must have a body in the future, so why would he need Quentin’s?

(Who would you rather look like?)

(Isn’t the point of the body-switch to evade the gypsies?)

(Yes, that is the point of the body-switch — but surely he only needs to switch bodies? If he can switch bodies now, and become unrecognisable, why does he need to go to the future as well?)

(Petofi says that he has many ambitious plans. If he carries them out, they may attract widespread attention. The Rroma have been keeping track of him for a long time, and may become suspicious if a known associate of Petofi’s starts doing all sorts of spectacular things.)

I expect this whole discussion to be deleted soon- it isn’t really in keeping with the purpose of the site, which is just to serve as ready reference for basic facts about each episode. But it does address a theme that often comes up in online discussions of this storyline, so I wanted to preserve it here.

Episode 847: Some new and astounding piece of information

Julia Hoffman, MD, has followed her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, on an uncertain and frightening journey into the past. They are now in the year 1897, where Barnabas hopes to prevent disasters that would befall the Collins family in 1969. Today, Julia is in their hiding place, the old rectory on Pine Road, trying to replicate the experimental treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into remission for a while early in 1968. A knock comes at the door.

It is Julia and Barnabas’ current arch-nemesis, sorcerer Count Petofi. Julia reacts to the sight of him with fear. Petofi assures Julia that he does not now have any intention of making another attempt on her life. He tells her that she is alive thanks to the incompetence of his henchman Aristide and to Barnabas’ bravery, but that if she finds herself in danger again she must not count on Barnabas to save her. When he tells her that this is because a woman drove a stake through Barnabas’ heart, Julia reacts with shock. She asks if Petofi plans to hand her back over to Aristide for another try; he says that his plan is rather to keep her under constant surveillance so that when she returns to 1969, he will go along with her.

Julia learns that Barnabas is dead, and not just because it is daytime. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia’s displays of fear and bravery are a bit of an attention-getter for returning viewers. Last week she learned that it is only her “astral body” that is in 1897, while her physical body is in 1969. She is therefore immune to any physical harm. It is tactically sound to keep this information from Petofi, of course, but characters on Dark Shadows do not always have sufficient discretion to observe this basic rule of gamesmanship. Barnabas particularly is in the habit of showing all his cards to his enemies while hiding everything from those who would like to help him, and even Julia, who is the smartest character on the show, has done the same thing from time to time. The most celebrated example is probably #619, when she marched into a hostile warlock’s living room, told him everything he wanted to know, and somehow walked away the winner. But today not only does she keep shtum during the scene, the show doesn’t even let the audience in on what she’s doing. First time viewers are as much in the dark as Petofi is.

Later, Julia goes to the great house of Collinwood to tell rakish libertine Quentin Collins that Barnabas had asked her to take a message to him in the event that he died. Quentin is in terrible danger from Petofi, and must flee at once. Quentin says that he has already come to that conclusion, and urges her to do the same. Julia tells him that she cannot. Barnabas left several tasks uncompleted that must be attended to for the future of the Collins family to take its necessary shape. She assures Quentin that she is not in as much danger as he is. She says that Petofi thinks she is his ticket to 1969, and that he will not kill her. Again, she does not even hint at her immunity to physical harm.

Earlier in the episode, Petofi had ordered Quentin to keep watch on Julia. When he resisted, Petofi reminded him that if it were not for his intervention, Quentin would be a werewolf and the lovely Amanda Harris, whom Quentin has asked to run off with him, would be lethally mauled the next time she is in his vicinity during a full Moon. Quentin has betrayed Barnabas and Julia on Petofi’s orders before, and we have little doubt that he will do so again.

Barnabas knew that Quentin was under Petofi’s control, and he shared his information with Julia. The other day he told Quentin where his coffin was kept during the day, leading directly to his staking. Longtime viewers may have taken this as another example of Barnabas showing his cards to his enemies. Those watching closely will have noticed an enigmatic look Barnabas gave Quentin as he was leaving the room at the end of that conversation, and will have asked if he was up to something. That Julia holds back the fact that she cannot be killed in 1897 suggests that she knows that whatever she tells Quentin will get back to Petofi. This will prompt us to ask the same question.

Last week, Julia made an agreement with wicked witch Angelique to fight Petofi together. Angelique would not tell her what her plan of action was, but when Julia looked in the mirror and saw, not her own reflection, but Angelique’s, she said that she understood what the plan was and knew that it would work. So if we have been watching regularly, we are likely confident that Julia, Angelique, and Barnabas have a surprise in store for Petofi.

One of Petofi’s vulnerabilities is prominently featured today. As a supervillain, he is committed to the idea of exercising as much control as possible over the world. With that commitment comes a blind spot. He is slow to understand events that take place outside anyone’s control. When he learned that Barnabas and Julia had traveled through time while meditating on I Ching wands, he himself cast such wands, meditated on them, and had a terrifying experience. He was convinced Julia had directed that experience, and it was when she could not tell him how she had done so or how to subject the consequences of meditation to his will that he ordered Aristide to kill her.

Petofi has now learned that Julia was telling the truth when she said that the effects of the meditative state were not within her power. But he is still experimenting with the wands, trying to develop a technique to subdue the power that meditation on them unlocks. He uses a man named Tim Shaw as the subject of his experiment today; Tim has a vision in which a masked man, who turns out to be Quentin, kills Amanda.

Tim had come to Petofi with the news of Barnabas’ death, hoping to collect some kind of reward from him. Petofi was quite cheerful at the news, but uninterested in the details until Tim told him that the killer was a woman he knows by the name Charity Trask. That threw Petofi for a loop, and he went to Quentin.

Petofi had ordered Quentin to stake Barnabas. He congratulated him on manipulating Charity into doing it for him, and was visibly disconcerted when Quentin said it was an accident Charity followed him- he hadn’t even known she was there. Again, Petofi’s overestimation of the efficacy of plans reveals a soft spot. If Angelique, Julia, and Barnabas can strike him there, they have an excellent chance of bringing him down.

Episode 845: Dance your cares away

Julia Hoffman is miserable. She has followed her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, and traveled back in time to the year 1897 on a mission to prevent terrible things that were happening in 1969. She has managed to come up with a treatment that is similar to one that briefly cured Barnabas of vampirism in March and April 1968, and is giving him regular injections in the course of that treatment. She is in hiding with him in an abandoned building, and has survived kidnapping and attempted murder. And what is her reward for all that? He is back on the same bullshit he was involved in when she first learned of his existence in 1967. He has met a girl and made up his mind to throw away all of their plans in an effort to convince her that she is the reincarnation of his lost love Josette. It’s no wonder Julia is so furious with him that she looks like she is the one with fangs.

Barnabas in danger.

Making matters worse, this time it seems Barnabas might be on to something. He pays a visit to his distant cousin, Quentin Collins, and asks who the girl is. Quentin says that she is Kitty Soames, widow of the late Earl of Hampshire, returned to her native USA after her husband’s death. When Barnabas starts in with his lunacy about Josette, Quentin becomes excited. He tells him that Kitty looked at the spot where his portrait hung until he was exposed as a vampire and asked what had become of it. When Quentin asked how she knew about that, since she had never been to the house before, she laughed and said that of course she knew the portrait, of course she was familiar with Barnabas. After a few seconds, she said she knew nothing of any portrait or of anyone named Barnabas.

Barnabas takes this as proof positive that Kitty is Josette returned to life, and that her memories of the 1790s are coming back to her. He asks Quentin to meet him at his hiding place so that they can arrange for him to meet her. He tells him where the hiding place is. Quentin agrees. Barnabas gives Quentin an enigmatic look before he exits.

Quentin is miserable. He is under the power of sorcerer Count Petofi, who has ordered him to kill Barnabas. Now that he knows where Barnabas keeps his coffin, there is nothing to stop him obeying. He will have to go there at dawn and stake his friend.

Barnabas has confronted Quentin about his subjection to Petofi, whom he knows to be his deadly foe. He has several times shown his distrust of Quentin. So people who started watching the show in the last year or so will be puzzled when he tells Quentin where to find him when he is helpless. Those who have been in the audience longer know that Barnabas not only has a habit of telling his enemies exactly what they need to know, but that he also loses all semblance of rationality where Josette is concerned. It is all too believable that he may have done this. Still, there is that look back at Quentin, suggesting that Barnabas knows that he is giving information to his enemies.

Quentin is in the drawing room of the great house, waiting for the dawn to bring with it his obligation to kill his friend. A woman who used to be Miss Charity Trask enters. Petofi erased Charity’s personality some time ago. Her body is now home to Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl, mentalist, and onetime fiancée of Quentin’s late brother, inveterate prankster Carl Collins.

Pansy is miserable. Pansy is cross that Quentin did not go to see her perform at the Blue Whale, a local tavern where she is doing her old act. But what really has her down is that it is exactly three months since Barnabas murdered Carl, and she is the only one who seems to remember him. When Kitty and Quentin spoke of Carl yesterday, they were the first characters other than Pansy to mention his name since the immediate aftermath of his death. She is irritated with Quentin for getting drunk, angry that Barnabas is still at large, and sorrowful that while the dawn means a new day for most, for people like her and Quentin it just means reliving the same day time and again. Quentin perks up when Pansy lists the many good reasons why someone ought to kill Barnabas, and for a moment it seems like he is going to tell her where he is and invite her to do it. She recognizes this, and keeps asking questions after he stops himself. The whole scene is beautiful from beginning to end, one of the highlights of the series. If they had had Daytime Emmys in 1969, it is the tape they should have sent to the voters to get the acting awards for Nancy Barrett and David Selby.

Dawn comes, and Quentin does go to the cave where Barnabas’ coffin is. He has a stake and mallet with him. He opens the coffin, sees Barnabas, places the stake over his heart, and raises the mallet. That’s as far as he can go. He throws the weapons aside and leaves the cave, vowing that if Barnabas can face whatever he has faced, he too can face his own destiny.

Shortly after, we hear footsteps. Pansy enters. She sees the coffin and opens it. She finds the mallet and stake. She drives the stake into Barnabas’ chest. Blood spurts out around the wound and out of his mouth. It would seem that Barnabas Collins is no more.

Quentin is a villain, but he is charming, and at this point David Selby is a breakout star to rival Jonathan Frid as Barnabas. Earlier, it had seemed Pansy might kill Quentin, and many fans hated her for that. No one seriously expected her to kill Barnabas, since he was a pop culture phenomenon familiar even to people who never saw the show. To this day, Dark Shadows is known (to those who know it at all) as “the vampire soap opera from the 1960s.” So having her kill Barnabas is certainly a twist worthy of ending a week.