Six months ago, in the spring of the year 1840, a man named Gerard Stiles came to the great house of Collinwood bearing a sad tale. Quentin Collins, heir to the house and all the family’s fortune, had been washed off the deck of a ship at sea with his son, Tad Collins. Gerard had done what he could to rescue them, but Quentin and Tad could be presumed dead. Gerard was invited to stay at the great house as a guest, and that is where he has been ever since. Quentin’s widow Samantha has married Gerard, and Quentin’s father Daniel has said he thinks he should adopt Gerard. The couple stands to inherit everything once meant for Quentin, much to the dismay of Quentin’s younger brother Gabriel.
Now, Quentin turns up at the house, alive and well. The audience might have seen this coming, but the audience is familiar with the story of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Enoch Arden,” either from reading it in school or from seeing one of the many plays and movies based on it. Since that poem won’t be published until 1864, the characters are at a disadvantage.
Enoch Arden saw how happy his wife was with her new husband and decided to slink off into the darkness, never telling them he was alive. Quentin is even more gallant, telling Samantha that he will respect whatever decision she makes. If she chooses to resume her life with him, he will do his best to make a go of it; if she chooses to stay with Gerard, she can go with his blessing.
Quentin goes to the drawing room, and sees a man whom he recognizes as a distant cousin recently come to the house from England. He has been told that Barnabas Collins is visiting, and that he is a dead ringer for the portrait of his late father that hangs in an upstairs bedroom. What he does not understand is why Barnabas reacts to the sight of him with a shocked exclamation of “Quentin!” He asks how he knows him, and Barnabas claims to have seen a drawing of him.
The truth is that Barnabas is a time-traveler from the year 1970. In that year, Gerard’s ghost will precipitate a disaster that will destroy Collinwood and everyone in it. He recognizes Quentin because Quentin looks just like his great nephew, another Quentin Collins who is a friend of Barnabas’ in that future time.
Another ghost who was prominent in 1970 but who has not yet been seen in this period is that of governess Daphne Harridge. In fact, none of the 1840 characters has heard of Daphne, and the governess at Collinwood is someone named Hortense. Returning viewers have been in suspense as to when we would see Daphne. That suspense is ruined today when Kate Jackson does the opening narration. Barnabas spots a figure skulking about in the woods at the end of the episode; he’s the only one who is surprised to see that it’s Daphne.
Three ghosts who have been hanging around the great house of Collinwood for the last several weeks have assumed corporeal form. Teenagers Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes have taken possession of the bodies of David Collins and Hallie Stokes. Once embodied, Carrie and Tad cast a spell that brought their governess, Daphne Harridge, back to life in a body of her own.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman confronts Daphne and demands she help David and Hallie resume their place among the living. Daphne angrily refuses. “I’m not going to let you destroy Tad and Carrie to bring David and Hallie back!” Carrie and Tad were already destroyed, when they died in 1841; it was Daphne who robbed Hallie and David of their rightful place among the living when she helped Carrie and Tad possess them. That possession is a murder, and one of the victims of that murder, David, has been a central character since the show’s first week in 1966, and the show has often been driven by our concern for his well-being. Daphne’s protest, voiced in a righteous tone that makes it clear David and Hallie mean nothing at all to her, marks Daphne as a villain whose motivations are entirely hostile to everything we could care about. But Daphne is, among other things, Kate Jackson. As such, it is impossible for an audience not to fall in love with her. Though Daphne’s presence in the story can lead to nothing but disaster for the human characters, we cannot want her to go away.
Among Julia’s many powers is mastery of a preternatural form of hypnosis that enables her to mold people’s memories as easily as a potter can shape clay. Until today, we have seen her use this power only on humans. But Daphne is human now, at least technically, so Julia gives it a shot. She takes out her magical medallion and shows it to Daphne. Once Daphne is in a trance, Julia asks her questions. They are not questions about Daphne’s memories of the past, but about events that will take place in the future. Somehow Daphne knows the answers to those. They suggest that the final catastrophe is very near at hand.
Julia introduces our new friend Daphne to our old friend, the magical medallion. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Carrie and Tad have been inmates at Windcliff, a psychiatric facility Julia controls. Daphne had reached them there, driven in a car by charming rogue Quentin Collins. When Windcliff was first introduced in the summer of 1967, it was made explicit that it was located a hundred miles north of Collinwood. It lay far enough away that Julia could be sure no one on the estate or in the village of Collinsport would recognize her face or name when she showed up in town in #284. It was an unmistakable sign of supernatural agency when Maggie Evans was able to make it from Windcliff to Collinsport on foot in a single night in #295. And after hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell was sent to Windcliff in #658, everyone seemed to forget all about him, as they had forgotten about sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis after he was set there in #329. The place was the functional equivalent of the far side of the moon.
Today, Tad and Carrie escape from Windcliff and Tad remarks that Collinwood is “only a few miles” away. This is quite a severe retcon. It does strip away the sense that Windcliff is a safe place where the characters can take refuge from the impending catastrophe, raising the stakes and heightening the tension. But it also leaves us wondering why they don’t just go someplace else further away. The Collinses are supposed to be terribly rich, so there’s nothing stopping them from buying a place in California or Hawai’i or Bugtussle, Oklahoma and moving there while the ghosts have their way at Collinwood.
There are two storylines running on Dark Shadows at the moment. The A story began as an adaptation of Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw. Since they already adapted The Turn of the Screw as a Dark Shadows storyline in late 1968 and early 1969, it was rather grim for longtime viewers to see the same thing coming up again, but they’ve taken a fresh angle on it these last couple of weeks. The Miss Jessel equivalent, late governess Daphne Harridge, has taken the form of a living woman. That the living woman is the young Kate Jackson means that the audience instantly falls in love with her, which is very helpful since she is on a lot and the scripts do not give her an intelligible motivation for any two actions.
The characters corresponding to children Miles and Flora are teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes. The ghosts of Daphne’s charges Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes have taken over the bodies of David and Hallie. Daphne, Carrie, and Tad keep trying to perform a magic spell that will give corporeal form to the fourth ghost, Peter Quint equivalent Gerard Stiles. Gerard is even more blatantly evil than are the other three, and they keep getting interrupted before they can turn him into a real boy. Today, Carrie and Tad are inmates at Windcliff, a psychiatric facility under the control of mad scientist/ heroine Julia Hoffman, and at the end of the episode Julia catches Daphne in Tad’s room, making another attempt to get through the spell.
The interiors of Windcliff look very much like an old mansion, prompting many commenters to say that the production staff had mounted so many scenes in the great house of Collinwood that they have forgotten how to depict any other kind of setting. But when we first saw Windcliff in #265, there was an exterior shot that made it look very much like a big old house that had been converted to use as a public facility. There’s no reason why the patients’ rooms shouldn’t still have looked like bedrooms.
Windcliff.
The B story is also heating up. There is a vampire prowling around the estate of Collinwood, and it isn’t Julia’s buddy Barnabas Collins. This new vampire has been feeding on Hallie and David’s governess Maggie Evans, and Maggie is so low on blood she may die if she is bitten again. Julia was guarding Maggie in the opening reprise of yesterday’s close, when the vampire appeared in the room, caused Julia to fall asleep, and drew Maggie out of bed. Today, charming rogue Quentin Collins enters in the nick of time to prevent Maggie being bitten again.
Quentin is distressed he did not get a good look at the vampire and still does not know who it is. They’ve made a big enough deal about the vampire’s identity that it must be someone we have already met, and we could see that the vampire is shorter than Maggie, which rules out all of the men in the cast. The only female character we haven’t seen in the daytime is the mysterious Roxanne Drew, so regular viewers don’t have a long list of suspects to work with.
One puzzle that hasn’t been solved is why Maggie is not at Windcliff. Windcliff was introduced as the place she was kept when she escaped from Barnabas after a time as his victim. Barnabas believed she was dead at that time, but as a vampire he had difficulty traveling any distance from Collinwood and he did show a tendency to lose interest in people who went away for any period of time. So if the new vampire operates along the same lines now that Barnabas did then, it would seem much wiser to send Maggie to Windcliff than to keep her in the great house.
This is the last of 63 episodes credited to writer Joe Caldwell. Caldwell made uncredited contributions to the show for some time before his name first appeared onscreen in #245. He specialized in intimate character studies; the slow pace of the show in 1967 gave him an opportunity to write many episodes of that type, all of them among the highlights of a very uneven period. He left in October 1967, and returned in 1970 when Violet Welles left the writing staff.
Even though very little really happened in the early part of the Re-Haunting of Collinwood segment, the show was so busy spinning in its tight little circles that it left Caldwell no opportunity to write the sorts of finely crafted miniatures in which he excelled. As a result, his second tour of duty on Dark Shadows does not include many memorable scripts. He will not be replaced, leaving Gordon Russell and Sam Hall as the only two credited writers for the remainder of the series. Others continued to make uncredited contributions from time to time, and in Welles’ case some of those contributions are instantly recognizable. But for the most part, it’s just those two guys locked in a room with executive producer Dan Curtis from now on.
For several months starting in late 1968, Dark Shadows did an adaptation of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. This segment is often called “The Haunting of Collinwood.” For the last six weeks, they’ve been doing a second adaptation of that same novella. I call the current segment “The Re-Haunting of Collinwood.”
So far, the remake has been so close to the original that it is little more than a test of the patience of longtime viewers. The last few days, they’ve been deviating a bit. So the ghosts of teenagers Tad and Carrie have erased the personalities of their lookalikes, David Collins and Hallie Stokes, and are now operating as living beings in their bodies. That didn’t quite happen in 1968 and 1969, when David and his friend Amy Jennings were beset by ghosts who were excited by their resemblance to their late ancestors Jamison and Nora Collins.
Carrie and Tad have cast a spell that has conjured up their old governess, Daphne Harridge, as a living woman. Amy and David never even tried to bring lady’s maid Beth Chavez back to life. She remained an unspeaking ghost until the show went back in time to 1897 and we met her in her proper lifetime. Today, Daphne orders Tad and Carrie to go through the same spellcasting procedure to bring the other ghost, the evil Gerard Stiles, back to life. Again, David and Amy did not try to bring Quentin Collins back to life. He is alive today only because he was immunized against death and aging in the 1897 segment, since he was such a hit with the audience.
Yesterday, David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins questioned Carrie and Tad and revealed their true identities. Neither of them was able to name the parents of the person they were possessing. Tad was also unable to name David’s former governess Victoria Winters. Through the show’s first year, Vicki was the chief protagonist and main audience identification character. She was written out in 1968, and Barnabas’ question was the first reference to her in months. She comes up again today. Carrie brings some contemporary clothes for Daphne to wear. She explains to Tad that “They belong to a governess that was here once… Her name was Victoria or something.” She says that the current governess told Hallie that Victoria left the clothes behind, but did not explain why.
Two consecutive episodes alluding to Vicki will be enough to get longtime viewers wondering if we will see her again. They had run out of things for Vicki to do in the story long before she left the show, and there is no clear opening for her now. When Carrie calls attention to the fact that there is a mystery around the circumstances of Vicki’s departure, she reminds us that that Vicki disappeared into a time warp. Since The Re-Haunting of Collinwood seems to be heading into a trip back through time to the year 1840, that might lead us to hope that what we find in that year will have something to do with Vicki. Then again, if all the ghosts are going to turn into living people, maybe they will be able to cancel their reservations for the journey to the past and stay in contemporary dress. Perhaps in that case, Vicki will find her way back as well. We might imagine that we will find tomorrow that they have failed to bring Gerard to life, but have conjured up Vicki instead. Maybe the summoning procedure only brings up governesses with long black hair.
Daphne is played by Kate Jackson, in her first screen role. Miss Jackson would go on to star in primetime series such as The Rookies, Charlie’s Angels, and Scarecrow and Mrs King.
Dark Shadows began in June 1966, when well-meaning governess Victoria Winters was on her way to the great house of Collinwood to take charge of the education of strange and troubled boy David Collins. David’s aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, had written to Vicki to offer her the job; his father, Liz’ brother Roger Collins, was opposed to Vicki’s hiring. Roger’s opposition rose from mild disapproval to paranoid fervor when he learned that his arch-nemesis, Burke Devlin, rode into the village of Collinsport on the same train as Vicki.
In the months that followed, the only story that consistently worked was Vicki’s attempt to build a friendship with David in spite of his vicious and at times murderous hostility towards her. Later, David met Burke, and the two of them quickly bonded over their shared hatred of Roger. For his part, Roger was haunted by the thought that Burke was David’s biological father, a thought which Liz forbade him to express.
For a long time, David continued to be the pivot on which the story turned. Crazed handyman Matthew Morgan abducted Vicki and tried to kill her; that crisis reached its emotional peak when David found Vicki bound and gagged in Matthew’s hiding place and refused to rescue her. David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, came back to claim him, which would have meant his death. That arc ended when David ran from the fishing shack Laura had set ablaze and flung himself into Vicki’s arms. With that, he chose Vicki and life over Laura and death, appointing Vicki as his new mother. That marked the conclusion, not only of the David and Vicki story, but of Dark Shadows 1.0.
As the show reinvented itself, David remained the key to the action. The two long costume drama inserts that established Dark Shadows as, first and foremost, a show about time travel, the trip to the 1790s that lasted from November 1967 to March 1968 and the trip to 1897 that ran from March to November 1969, were both prompted by attempts to protect David from a looming supernatural menace. Though he was not an active participant in either of those stories, it was his peril that triggered them, and attempts to protect him and his analogues in previous generations of the Collins family that set the boundaries of the possible action.
As of this episode, all of the characters mentioned above are off the show. Vicki made her final appearance in #665*; Matthew made his in #123; Laura in #191**; Burke in #344; Roger, in #979***. Liz made her last substantive appearance on Friday; she will have one brief scene in #1198, simply to mark the end of a storyline. David leaves the show today.
In the early parts of today’s episode, David and his fellow teenager, houseguest Hallie Stokes, are being led through the woods by the unspeaking ghosts of two people who died in 1841. David’s psychopomp is the late Gerard Stiles, who was apparently a pirate when he was alive but has become a landlubber in death. Hallie’s is the late Daphne Harridge, who was once the governess at the great house. Daphne’s charges were Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes. Hallie and David have spent vast amounts of time moaning about how the ghosts of Carrie and Tad are going to take possession of their bodies and erase them from existence. Much of this moaning has taken place in a mysterious room which they call “The Playroom.” The Playroom intermittently exists in a obscure corner of the great house. When it materializes, it can be found behind a door that at other times opens onto a linen closet. Gerard, Daphne, Tad, and Carrie have free rein in The Playroom.
There is a dollhouse in The Playroom that the ghosts like to play with when David and Hallie aren’t looking. This dollhouse is a scale model of Rose Cottage, a mansion which stood somewhere near Collinwood in 1840. It is in some supernatural sense identical with that mansion. In #1082 and again in #1093, it was made clear to Hallie and David that they are fated to become dolls confined to this dollhouse, and that any living that is left for their bodies to do will be done by Carrie and Tad.
Daphne and Gerard take Hallie and David to a full-sized version of Rose Cottage that stands in the woods. It is unclear whether this mansion is visible all the time, or if it comes and goes as does The Playroom. The latter would seem more likely, since it is such a big place it is hard to imagine it would have escaped the notice of the people who have heard the expression “Rose Cottage” and have recently been trying to figure out which of the big houses in the area was around in 1840 and could have been known by that name in that year.
Gerard gets David to Rose Cottage while Daphne and Hallie are still making their way through the woods. David takes a nap in the corridor outside the upstairs parlor where the dolls are kept. He has another dream like the one he and Hallie both had in #1082, in which they are in the upstairs parlor. Daphne is in his dream. She smiles. Her smile is more unsettling than Gerard’s sneer. David wakes up and finds that Daphne is there, with Hallie.
David says they must resist; Hallie says it is too late. Then there is a commercial break. When we come back, they are in the upstairs parlor. Hallie notices the dolls are gone. David says they are no longer needed. Hallie says they must resist; David says it is too late. David Henesy manages to make David Collins’ part in these two scenes work. In the corridor, David is conflicted, trying to sound brave as he says the words about resisting but looking helpless as his eyes turn to the ghosts. In the parlor, he is simply defeated. His performance sketches a clear line between these two emotional states.
Kathleen Cody is less successful as Hallie. She seems to have come to terms with the reality while in the corridor. In the parlor, she flips back into Hallie’s usual mode, maximum possible tension. It doesn’t help that her dialogue is a bunch of questions about why they can’t resist. In context, those questions are just nonsense, and Hallie’s abrupt switch from quiet resignation to extreme plangency is inexplicable. My wife, Mrs Acilius, asked if they were trying to make us root for the ghosts who promise to shut Hallie up.
This story is the second time Dark Shadows has adapted Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. The first time through, in late 1968 and early 1969, David and his friend Amy Jennings took turns in the role of Child Who Enforces the Will of the Ghosts and Child Who Resists the Will of the Ghosts. That got to be frustrating, but at least they waited until the episode was over to switch roles. Switching them during a commercial break is just a slap in the face of the audience. Miss Cody’s decision to play Hallie at such a high level of agitation so much of the time was a costly mistake, but no performer could really have saved the part.
The ghosts indicate that David and Hallie are to take their seats at the table where the dolls usually sit. When they do so, we jump to a somewhat lower camera angle. This cut does indeed make it look like Hallie and David are small figures inside a small space. Henry Kaplan directed this episode. I usually have a lot of complaints about Kaplan. His preferred visual strategy was to cut from a closeup of one face to a closeup of another face to an extreme closeup that shows at most part of a face. But this shot achieves a subtle effect, and that effect tells the whole story. I can’t suppress a suspicion that Lela Swift stepped in and set the shot up for Kaplan, but even if she did he deserves credit for not fouling it up.
Carrie and Tad come into view. Carrie superimposes herself on Hallie’s body, Tad superimposes himself on David’s, and both ghosts fade out. As they do, we hear Tad say “Goodbye, David,” and Carrie say “Goodbye, Hallie.” We will see Carrie and Tad in the persons of Hallie and David for some time, but will never see either David or Hallie again.
I remembered this closing image vividly from our previous watch-through of the series. I misremembered the lines, though. I recalled David and Hallie saying goodbye to each other, not the ghosts saying goodbye to the teenagers as they took possession of them. I think it is better the way it is. We are supposed to be horrified at Carrie and Tad’s thoughtless cruelty as they annihilate Hallie and David, and denying them even the opportunity to bid each other farewell serves that purpose. Unsatisfactory as are the rest of the episode and indeed the rest of the David and Hallie story, this closing shot is highly effective.
*Alexandra Moltke Isles last played the character in #627. Two other actresses succeeded Mrs Isles in the role.
**Another iteration of the character appeared in 20 episodes between #729 and #760.
***Another version of the character appeared in 17 episodes between #975 and #1055.
Teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes are intermittently subject to possession by the ghosts of Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes. They fear that the ghosts will soon take them over permanently, erasing their own personalities once and for all. We have seen the future, and know that unless something changes not only will the bodies of Hallie and David become vessels for Carrie and Tad, but those bodies will die and the ghosts will haunt the uninhabitable ruins of the great house of Collinwood for years to come.
Previously, Tad and Carrie had been unaware of David and Hallie. When one of them was possessed, the ghost would not know whom the other meant when addressing them by the name of the living person. But yesterday Carrie and Tad simultaneously took possession of Hallie and David, and they talked to each other about how much they liked them and how puzzled they were that they were afraid of them. They went to the ghost of their governess, Daphne Harridge, and asked her if she knew why David and Hallie were afraid of them. For a moment we might have hoped that communication would take place and the story of the haunting would finally pick up steam, but that hope was dashed when Daphne responded to Tad and Carrie with silence. Daphne had been silent in her interactions with the living characters until Hallie and David heard her laugh in a dream they both had in #1082. It’s depressing that she can’t talk even to her fellow ghosts.
Any hopes we may have had for Hallie or Carrie also suffered yesterday from Kathleen Cody’s poor performance. Miss Cody gets a lot of hate from fandom, much of it unfair. She is good sometimes. But called upon to draw a bright line between the frightened Hallie and the cheerful Carrie, she went way overboard in both parts. The excessively ebullient Carrie is easy to ignore, while the heavily distraught Hallie is tiresome in the extreme. Even the usually reliable David Henesy occasionally got caught up in Miss Cody’s hamminess and overplayed David Collins. He pulled himself back each time, but it is hard to look forward to heaven knows how much more of this story when that keeps happening.
Today we get another David and Hallie/ Tad and Carrie episode, and it is little better than yesterday’s. Miss Cody is even more monotonous than she was yesterday. Mr Henesy does keep from following her into the dead end where she is stuck, and he manages to introduce a touch of comedy. The ghosts lock David in his room with Hallie, and his response is go directly to the window, open it, and climb out. His room appears to be on the third floor of the house and to overlook a cliff, but if that’s the only alternative to spending an hour locked up with Hallie I don’t think anyone can blame him.
David climbs out the window to get the hell away from Hallie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The highlight comes when David sees his distant cousin, Quentin Collins, standing by the brandy decanter. David has overheard Quentin muttering about a mysterious stranger and has questions:
David: Who are you talking to?
Quentin (drunk): The dregs, David…the dregs of this glass. That’s where all the answers are.
David: I thought you said something about a stranger.
Quentin: Oh, well, I’m in immediate danger of becoming a stranger to my glass, but that can be easily remedied. Yes, it can be. [Pours drink.] Ah ha ha…friends again.
Quentin was a malevolent ghost when we first got to know him, late in 1968. We then traveled back in time to 1897, where we met him as a living being. He was an utterly irresponsible rascal, selfish, cruel, cowardly, and shameless, and everyone who saw him fell in love with him at once. His death was prevented, he was immunized against aging, and when the show returned to contemporary dress there he was, none the worse for his 100 years. But they couldn’t find much of a place for him in the story. He may not be making many things happen these days, but in this exchange we find that he is still an alcoholic. As long as he has that going for him, he will always be the Quentin we can’t get enough of.
Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman have returned to 1970 from a cosmic journey that took them first to a parallel universe, then to the future year 1995. In the parallel universe, they met a comatose woman named Roxanne Drew. Barnabas was immediately smitten with Roxanne, and was still attracted to her even after she gained the ability to open her eyes and move around. By the time she was able to speak, he was in love. Roxanne couldn’t come along when they left her universe, and he’s been down in the dumps about that. Barnabas could always go to the hospital and look for another comatose woman, but I suppose that might not be quite the same, somehow.
Now, Barnabas has met Roxanne’s counterpart in his own universe. She is attached to astrologer Sebastian Shaw, whom Barnabas had been pestering for reasons having to do with the efforts he and Julia have been making to prevent a mysterious disaster they learned about during their stay in 1995. Sebastian was so fed up with Barnabas that he walked out of his own living room, leaving Barnabas alone there. Then the door opened, and a Roxanne Drew entered, carrying a brown paper grocery bag. Barnabas greeted her by name, to her puzzlement.
When Barnabas explains that he knew another Roxanne Drew who looked exactly like her “in another time,” Roxanne assumes he means many years ago. He allows her to proceed under this assumption, which does seem less likely to prompt a call to the police than introducing yourself to a stranger with a story about how you’ve been traveling between parallel universes and back and forth in time. Roxanne comes out with a theory that two people with the same name born on the same day in different parts of the USA might become “astral twins” and look just alike. This idea may not be less plausible than what Julia and Barnabas have actually done, but it does seem considerably less likely to be useful in making up interesting stories. So it comes as a great relief when Roxanne stops talking about it.
Barnabas asks Roxanne to meet him for dinner at 10 PM. This is an odd invitation, since Barnabas is a vampire. Where is he going to take her, the blood bank? She hesitates, but at length agrees to meet him “there.” They haven’t named a place.
Later, Roxanne calls the great house of Collinwood. Julia answers. Roxanne identifies herself, and Julia reacts with amazement. Roxanne says she must be thinking of “that other Roxanne Drew.” She says that she won’t be able to meet Barnabas for dinner “there” after all.
Barnabas enters. He is excited to tell Julia about Roxanne. She tells him she already knows about her, and gives him Roxanne’s message. Julia reminds him that some people in the parallel universe were radically different from their counterparts in this universe, giving herself and her counterpart as an example. Barnabas refuses to admit that this Roxanne Drew is not the same person as the one whose immobility and silence so charmed him in the other continuity. Julia keeps warning him, and he declares that “I haven’t been wrong very often when it comes to judgment of people.” This remark will astound regular viewers. Barnabas is a worse judge of character than any figure in all human history. I myself can’t claim to be all that perspicacious, but neither I nor anyone else I know has ever misjudged a person so desperately we were turned into vampires as a result. That has happened to Barnabas twice. Julia is so stunned by Barnabas’ bizarre remark that all she can do is humor him and say that she agrees with his assessment of himself.
Barnabas goes back to Sebastian’s apartment and speaks to Roxanne. She says he must not have received her message. He says he did, but asks to come in anyway. She allows it, and he gets strangely aggressive with his insistence that they will eventually go out together. He’s usually a lot more pleasant with people, unless he’s been feeding on their blood or threatening to kill them. He wants to charm Roxanne, so we may wonder why he gets in her face, adopts a sullen tone, and vows that she will someday date him. The other Roxanne had an obnoxious ex-boyfriend named Claude North. In his sulky and petulant refusal to take no for an answer, or even for an indication that he has to change tactics, Barnabas sounds a lot like Claude.
Meanwhile, Julia has been trying to find out which house in the area was known as “Rose Cottage” in 1840. During their sojourn in 1995, she and Barnabas received some cryptic clues about the disaster that will befall the great house of Collinwood and everyone in it later in 1970, one of which was the phrase “the night Rose Cottage was destroyed.” Also during that trip they saw the ghosts of some people who lived in 1840, and since returning have found a document from that year that mentions a house called Rose Cottage, but does not say which house it was.
Teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins had died in the version of 1995 Barnabas and Julia visited. They saw ghosts who looked just like them, but were in fact those of figures from 1840 named Carrie and Tad. Julia suspects that David and Hallie are withholding information from her about paranormal occurrences in the house, as she and Barnabas are withholding information from them. Rather than leveling with Hallie and David about what they learned in 1995 and asking them to reciprocate, Julia has decided to be as inexplicably harsh and aggressive with Hallie as Barnabas is with Roxanne.
Hallie finds Julia going through some old tax records today. When Julia says that she is trying to figure out what house in the area used to be known as “Rose Cottage,” Hallie mentions that Julia had previously asked her if she’d ever heard of such a place. Julia takes that remark as an opportunity to fix Hallie with an unwavering stare and drill her with question after question. During this bizarre interrogation, the ghost of Tad and Carrie’s governess Daphne Harridge appears to Hallie, reminding her not to answer. Julia loses interest in Hallie and turns back to the tax records. Hallie excuses herself and follows Daphne out of the room.
David has a dream in which he finds Hallie in an unfamiliar corridor. He asks her where they are. She says they are in Rose Cottage. She tells him to follow her to a birthday party. He is unhappy that he has not brought a present; she laughs a little at this. They go into a small room and see two dummies sitting opposite each other at a table. Hallie says that they will sit in the other two places at the table. There are placecards identifying them as Carrie and Tad. They sit down, and Daphne’s gigantic face appears at the window. Daphne has been silent in all her appearances so far. She breaks her silence in this dream, laughing maniacally at the sight of David and Hallie sitting with the dummies.
David wakes up. He goes to a little-used part of the house. He finds Hallie in front of a door behind which there is usually a linen closet. Sometimes, however, the space transforms into a larger room stocked with antique toys. Hallie and David refer to that room as “The Playroom.” They have seen Daphne there several times and have sensed the presence of another, more blatantly hostile spirit, one which Julia and Barnabas came to know in 1995 as Gerard Stiles. Hallie asks David why he has joined her. He tells her about his dream. It turns out she had the same dream. They resign themselves to entering The Playroom. Inside, they see a dollhouse that has previously been set up with its facade towards them is now set on a lower table with its interior on display. There is a room that looks just like the one in their dream, complete with dolls sitting at the table.
Barnabas and Julia visited The Playroom several times in the future, and the dollhouse was there then. It always seemed likely that the dollhouse was a model of Rose Cottage. Now, it is confirmed that it is not merely a model of it, but is in some sense identical with it. Perhaps it is a ghostly survival of a house that no longer exists, or perhaps it is a mystical reflection of a haunted house that stands somewhere else in the area. One way or another, it seems that Hallie and David are fated to lose their independent existence and become inert playthings confined to an inaccessible space.
David, Hallie, Daphne, and Gerard are part of a recycled story. In late 1968 and early 1969, Dark Shadows adapted Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw with David and his friend Amy in the roles of the children Miles and Flora and the ghosts of Quentin Collins and Beth Chavez as the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. The whole point of the novella is that it is an open question whether the ghosts are real and the new governess is heroically trying to save the children from them or the ghosts are figments of the imagination of the governess, a crazy woman who is a mortal threat to her charges. Benjamin Britten’s opera preserves that ambiguity to some extent, but screen adaptations tend to come down firmly in favor of the ghosts being real. The first “Haunting of Collinwood” left no room for doubt on that score, and the current Re-Haunting of Collinwood is just as emphatic.
The ghosts of Quentin and Beth were silent when we first saw them in 1968, as Daphne’s ghost has been silent until she laughs maniacally today. They made their first appearance in #646, but neither of them made a sound until Quentin laughed maniacally in #689. Gerard has yet to make himself heard, though actor James Storm read the opening voiceover narration in #1066.
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.
