I wonder how long the actors had the script before they started taping this one. As unspeaking, barely mobile ghosts Gerard and Daphne, James Storm and Kate Jackson didn’t need much prep time; as lunatics Carolyn Fredericks (neé Stoddard) and Quentin Collins, Nancy Barrett and David Selby probably didn’t need much more. But vampire Barnabas Collins has a lot of dialogue today, and Jonathan Frid rarely seems to be within a country mile of his scripted lines. That isn’t so unusual, but Grayson Hall’s trouble really stands out. Barnabas’ friend, Julia Hoffman, MD, is possessed by Gerard and is pleased that Barnabas keeps meeting with one failure after another. We are supposed to know this, Barnabas isn’t. But she has a huge grin on her face each time she gloats to Barnabas about one of his setbacks. The one time Frid is clearly delivering a line that was written for him, Barnabas tells a conspicuously blissed-out Julia that she seems “almost pleased.” Hall was a highly accomplished actress, and we would expect her to be able to do “secretly pleased” in her sleep. But when this line comes up, she gets a bad laugh.
Far and away the happiest we have ever seen Julia, this strikes Barnabas as “almost pleased.”
The episode ends with Barnabas going to the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in response to a note from Carolyn. He finds her sitting at the desk there. He talks to her for a moment, then notices that she is not moving. He touches her, and she falls over dead. The episode has its problems, but that is an extremely effective closing curtain.
Dark Shadows just spent sixteen weeks in an alternate universe where Quentin Collins was neither the family-annihilating ghost he was when first we saw him in December 1968 nor the charming rogue we got to know when the show went back in time in March 1969. Instead, he was a foul-tempered sourpuss who treated his wife like an irritating child and refused to learn anything from anyone. Like those previous iterations of the character, “Parallel Time” Quentin had a compulsion to choke people, but unlike them he was no fun to watch.
Now we have traveled forward in time to the year 1995. Here, Quentin is an escaped mental patient who is sometimes extremely docile and at other times just as extremely refractory. But one thing hasn’t changed, which is his zeal for strangling anyone who bothers him. He sees the elderly Timothy Eliot Stokes, expert in the supernatural, and at once grabs him by the throat. Quentin’s friend Barnabas Collins pulls him off of Stokes. Barnabas suggests that Dr Julia Hoffman should give Quentin a sedative. He responds “The only sedative I need is to get my hands around Stokes’s neck. I’ll be calm for the rest of my life!” That’s our Quentin.
Barnabas tries to keep Quentin from giving Stokes his signature Collinwood Handshake. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Quentin blames Stokes for the fact that the estate of Collinwood has been a demon-ridden ruin for the last 25 years. Stokes has been telling Julia and Barnabas that it was that way when he got there. He returned from a trip to Europe in the autumn of 1970, a few months after Barnabas and Julia left on their journey into the alternate universe and out to this future year, and found the place in its current condition and everyone associated with it destroyed in one way or another. But Quentin says that the real disaster came only when Stokes tried to exorcize a ghost. That just made the ghost angry.
Once Quentin is out of the way, Barnabas tells Stokes he believes that Quentin’s madness is a symptom of the ghost’s continued hegemony over Collinwood. He is determined to try another exorcism. Stokes advises him against it, but says he will try to help him if he does go ahead.
Meanwhile, the ghost, who according to the credits is named Gerard, has taken possession of Julia. The ghost has ordered Julia to do something she does not want to do. She keeps this from Barnabas. She tells Barnabas they should give up and go away. He refuses, and she sadly says that whatever will happen will happen. From the look on her face, it seems that the ghost has ordered her to do away with Barnabas and she is resigned to the idea that she will eventually obey this command.
There are other ghosts in the area as well. Yesterday Julia and Barnabas saw the ghosts of two teenagers who were apparently named Tad and Carrie while they danced a minuet and exchanged a chaste kiss, and they heard Quentin talking earnestly to an invisible person he called Daphne. A woman with long black hair briefly comes into Barnabas’ view in his parlor today; the credits confirm that she is Daphne. Anyone who watched US television in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s will already know that she is Kate Jackson, and might be interested to know that she is making her first screen appearance.
When Daphne appears, the air smells of lilacs. That comes as something of a relief. The opening voiceover told us that Collinwood is ruled by “a ghost whose mere presence corrupts the surrounding air.” That would suggest rather a less pleasant odor than that of lilac perfume.
The ghost of the gracious Josette was the chief supernatural presence on the show for its first 42 weeks, and an occasional visitor for some time after. Her signature was the scent of jasmine, so longtime viewers are getting a hint that Daphne will turn out to be important.
I say that David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles, as David and Vicki in the first 42 weeks of Dark Shadows, used nonverbal communication to triumph over poor writing to present an interesting story of a troubled boy and a young woman learning to trust each other. I then try to explain why Henesy was unable to repeat that success as Tad in the “Meet Gerard” segment of the series.
I praise the acting in this episode, naming Christopher Pennock, Jonathan Frid, Kate Jackson, and (wait for it) Keith Prentice. I speculate about what may have been keeping Prentice from doing his best work in other episodes.
Wherein I mention that the episode gives Grayson Hall her only moment in Dark Shadows where she’s allowed to be sexy, imagine what THE GRADUATE would have been like with her as Mrs Robinson and Keith Prentice as Benjamin, then reply to my own comment to mention my wife’s wish that Bramwell and Daphne would get divorced and that Daphne would get custody of the audience.
I explain to Danny Horn and his readers what I find so frustrating about this episode, identifying Kate Jackson’s Daphne as the brightest spot of 1841 PT and lamenting the final waste of the character.
Dark Shadows Commentary 