kathryn leigh scott – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 948: A sign of your freedom, and of mine

The first ghost we saw on Dark Shadows was that of the gracious Josette Collins, who came down from her portrait and danced around the outside of the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood in #70. We had first heard of Josette in #5, when drunken sad sack Sam Evans told well-meaning governess Vicki Winters about her, and she had been mentioned many times in the first fourteen weeks. From #70 until #191, Josette’s ghost became a steadily bigger part of the story. She rallied the other ghosts of Collinwood to rescue Vicki from crazed handyman Matthew in #126, and from that point until #191 guided Vicki in her battle with undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. By the end of the Laura story, Josette was firmly established as the chief figure in the show’s supernatural back-world, a world which the action is continually tugging into view.

Vampire Barnabas Collins succeeded Laura as the show’s supernatural Big Bad. Josette was well-suited to do battle with the distant and indefinable Laura, but was too wispy to be very effective against the more dynamic Barnabas. In #212, Barnabas addressed Josette through her portrait in the Old House, which we had seen strange and troubled boy David Collins use to carry on conversations with her in #102 and #162. Barnabas spoke to Josette then as if she were his grandmother, who had sided with his father against him in a fateful conflict, and told her he was kicking her out of the house. Over the next few weeks, there were several episodes when David lamented Josette’s absence from the Old House, suggesting that Barnabas had succeeded in banishing her.

As it became clear Barnabas was a hit and would be kept on the show for a while, they decided to connect him to Josette. So they borrowed the story of the 1932 film The Mummy. As Boris Karloff’s undead Imhotep decided that Helen Grosvenor was the reincarnation of his lost love Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun, so Barnabas decided that Josette, retconned as his lost love, had been reincarnated as Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) daughter of Sam. As Imhotep abducted Helen and tried to turn her into Ankh-Esen-Amun, so Barnabas abducted Maggie and tortured her in an attempt to erase her personality and upload Josette’s in its place.

In the movie, Helen and Ankh-Esen-Amun were both played by Zita Johann. The original viewers wouldn’t have known it, but Miss Scott, wearing a veil, played the ghost of Josette in #70 and voiced Josette’s lines to Vicki in #126. In the scenes during the Laura story when we caught glimpses of Josette’s face, the ghost was played by frequent stand-in Rosemary McNamara, who looked enough like Miss Scott that viewers may have wondered if she was playing the role. So the idea of a connection between Maggie and Josette had been rattling around the writers’ room for a while. In #240, David saw Maggie wandering around Barnabas’ house. She was wearing Josette’s dress but no veil, in a daze and answering to Josette’s name. Afterward, David said that he had seen Josette and that she looked exactly the same as she did when he had seen her as a ghost. That confirmed that Maggie was at least a Josette lookalike, if not her reincarnation.

Maggie eventually escaped from Barnabas. Her psychiatrist, Julia Hoffman, saw in Barnabas her chance to make a career as a mad scientist, and so she sold Maggie out, using her magical power of hypnosis to delete her memory of what Barnabas did to her and leave her with a feeling of goodwill towards Barnabas. By that time, Barnabas had turned his attentions to Vicki, toying with the idea of Josettifying her. Josette’s ghost made it clear to him that she would try to stop any such effort when she spoke through Vicki at a séance in #280 and 281; after that, Barnabas gave her portrait another talking-to, telling her that she was lost to him forever and must let him live in the present. It sounded like he was going to stop trying to turn girls into Josette, but he kept pushing Josette’s hypnotic music box on Vicki, so if that’s what he meant he didn’t stick with it.

In November 1967, Vicki went back in time to the days when Barnabas and Josette were living human beings. From then until March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. Miss Scott was cast as the living Josette, completing the parallel with the flashbacks to ancient Egypt in The Mummy and suggesting that Barnabas, though he was appallingly cruel and thoroughly crazy, was onto something when he told Maggie she was Josette.

The whole idea of supernaturalism is that what appears to be powerless is in fact most powerful and vice versa, so having been powerful as a ghost, Josette has to be at least somewhat understated as a living being. Making matters worse for her, the 1790s segment moved at a breakneck speed, piling one bizarre disaster on top of another, so that there was no time to develop the kind of subtle strength a lady of her sort might be expected to have or to give us much of a look at Josette and Barnabas as a loving couple before everything went horribly wrong for them. She winds up as a pleasant but ineffectual person. The 1790s period was the show’s first great triumph, but it did knock Josette out of the spotlight permanently.

A couple of weeks after Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission and he tried to function as a good guy. His bumbling attempts at heroism generated as much trouble for everyone as had his villainy. Julia had made herself a permanent houseguest at Collinwood, and she was the one who was busiest with the work of containing his damage. Throughout the part of the show made and set in 1968, Josette was all but forgotten.

Early in 1969, Barnabas came unstuck in time and found himself in 1897, once more subject to the vampire curse. During his eight months in that period, he met two more characters played by Miss Scott. Each of them led him into a fresh bout of Josettery. He gave the music box to neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond; after her death, he met Kitty Soames, dowager countess of Hampshire, who despite her title was a young woman from Pennsylvania. The music box showed up in Kitty’s room at a time when Barnabas could not possibly have been around, and it became clear that this time, it was Josette herself who was trying to take possession of Kitty.

In #884, airing in November 1969, Kitty was assumed bodily into Josette’s portrait. Barnabas saw this happen. He then returned to the 1790s, to the night when Josette originally flung herself to her death from the cliff at Widows’ Hill rather than let Barnabas turn her into a vampire. Josette had only the vaguest memory of 1897 or of Kitty; as far as she is concerned, she was living through this night for the first time, and was experiencing time in the usual linear fashion.

Barnabas tried to prevent Josette’s suicide, but succeeded only in changing the method she used to do herself in. By the time he returned to the twentieth century, he had fallen under the sway of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who are trying to retake the Earth from humankind. For a time he led a cult that served them in this goal, but eventually became disaffected. He hesitates to take any very definite action against the Leviathans, because they told him they were “holding Josette prisoner in the past” and that they would inflict on her a more horrible death than either of those she has already died if he defied them in any way.

Vicki was written out of the show in 1968, and Maggie succeeded her as governess to the children at Collinwood. The Leviathans have sent a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time as the harbinger of their conquest. The monster usually takes the form of a young man who initially asked people to call him “Jabe,” but whom everyone instead calls “Jeb.” Jabe is always obnoxious and often homicidal, and has alienated many people from the Leviathans, including Barnabas. He abducted Maggie and thought he had brainwashed her into joining the cult; once he let her go, she made an alliance with Barnabas and Julia to fight the Leviathans.

Barnabas is convinced Jabe is about to do something especially horrible, and so he wants to open the battle. But his concern for Josette is still holding him back. He and Julia talk about this. It dawns on them that the Leviathans may have been lying, and that they may not have the power to make Josette re-die. The only way they can be sure is to ask Josette, so they decide to hold a séance. They enlist Maggie to be the third member of the circle.

The typical Dark Shadows séance involves three roles- the convener, who gives detailed instructions and barks about the importance of following them, even if everyone in the room has attended multiple séances already; the medium, who goes into the trance and channels the voice from the realm of the dead; and the objector, who tries to interrupt and is sternly hushed by the convener. Recent séances have omitted the objector; today, Julia keeps up a running commentary from the time Barnabas starts the incantations until Maggie goes into the trance, but she doesn’t object and Barnabas doesn’t hush her.

Through Maggie, Josette says she had a hard time getting to the séance, but that it had nothing to do with the Leviathans. She says she doesn’t even know the Leviathans. Barnabas doesn’t believe her, and she says that if he wants proof he should come to her grave.

He does. The tinkling tune of the music box plays on the soundtrack; Barnabas does not mention the original signature of Josette’s presence, the scent of jasmine. Her ghost manifests before him:

THE GHOST OF JOSETTE: It is I. And I will tell you what you must know, now and forever. You asked me if the Leviathans held me prisoner. They do not. But you hold me, just as I hold you with my love. But now the time has come for us both to go free.

BARNABAS: I cannot be free without you.

GHOST: But you must. For I belong to the past. For you there is a future with someone else.

BARNABAS: But I don’t want anyone else.

GHOST: Then you must be lonely, for you cannot have me. But you will find someone else. I know it. And when you do, give her this. The ring that you gave to me, give to her, whoever she may be. This ring is a sign of your freedom and of mine. (Returns her engagement ring to him and vanishes.)

Josette says goodbye. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This is Josette’s final appearance on Dark Shadows, not counting a parallel universe version of Josette who will feature in the last weeks of the show, played by another actress. As for the “someone else,” it would be logical for Barnabas to get with Julia, since the two of them are so deeply complicit in each other’s crimes that neither of them will ever be able to make a life with anyone else. But there have been some hints lately that romance might be budding between Barnabas and Maggie, and if that’s going to happen they are going to have to keep us from thinking very clearly about Josette and Barnabas’ attempts to recreate her. We might suppose that her farewell is meant to clear the path for such a development.

There’s also some business about the Leviathan story. In the opening reprise, Jabe catches a bat, which he plans to use to turn Barnabas back into a vampire.

After Barnabas gets the green light from Josette, he meets with Philip Todd, another person whom Jabe has driven out of the Leviathan cult. Philip tells Barnabas how much he hates Jabe and agrees to steal the Leviathan box, an object which does not play music but which is a lot more effective at controlling the minds of people who open it than was that box of Josette’s. At the end of the episode, Jabe catches Philip with the box.

A commenter on Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day who identifies herself as “Melissa”* wrote this lyric about Jabe in two comments about the post covering today’s episode:

Come and listen to my story ’bout s man named Jeb,
Poor Leviathan, barely kept his evil web.
Then, one day, he and Barney had a spat,
And out from the cage came a rubberized bat.
(Vampire bat, that is:
Nylon string,
Terror teeth.)

Next thing you know,ol’ Jeb has got a girl.
Cult folk said, “Jeb, come and rule the world!”
They said, “In the attic is the place you want to be,”
So they threw themselves a seance and they called on J.D.C.
(Josette Collins, that is.
Swimming fail.
Newly scarred.)

Comments left 31 October 2016 by “Melissa” on Danny Horn “Episode 948: War Games,” posted 30 October 2016 at Dark Shadows Every Day.

I’m singing that aloud right now. I realize you might be reading this years after I wrote it, but believe me, I’m singing it right now.

*Apparently also an FotB here.

Episode 943: Moon Poppy

Maggie Evans, governess in the great house on the estate of Collinwood, is being held prisoner in a big mausoleum somewhere. Her captor appears to be a young man, but is actually a monster from beyond space and time. He is associated with the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who are planning to take the earth away from humankind with the aid of some people whom they control and whom they have formed into a cult. The cultists call the monster Jeb, even though when we first saw him he said he wanted to be called Jabe.

Jabe orders Maggie to open a wooden box and look inside. He makes it clear to her that she is supposed to be under his control after she has done this, so she plays along. He lets her go, with orders that she is to spy on old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, a leader of the cult who has become disaffected from it and is working against Jabe.

Back in the great house, Maggie tells Barnabas what happened. Barnabas’ best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, enters; he tells Julia that Maggie is their new ally in the fight against the Leviathans. When Barnabas was still loyal to the Leviathans, he tried to absorb Julia into the cult. That effort failed, and Barnabas explained that “certain people” were immune from absorption because of their “genetic structure.” Since Julia is the only Jewish character on the show, this sounded jarringly like a claim that the Leviathans were a restricted club. Evidently Maggie is now among those “certain people.” Since Maggie has a Welsh name and is played by a Minnesota-born actress of Scandinavian descent, that retroactively takes some of the anti-Semitic edge off Barnabas’ earlier remark for viewers who remember that episode (unless she converted.)

Maggie had taken an apologetic tone when she told Julia she wanted to be alone with Barnabas; Julia is very circumspect when she comes in at the end of their conversation. For a long time now, the show has been working on the idea that Julia wants a romantic relationship with Barnabas and is sad that he does not share her desire; for the last couple of weeks, they have been hinting that Barnabas and Maggie are getting pretty cozy. Regular viewers will be interested to see Grayson Hall playing Julia being a good sport about losing Barnabas to Maggie, and Kathryn Leigh Scott playing Maggie wishing she didn’t have to hurt her friend’s feelings.

We learned yesterday that Jabe is vulnerable to werewolves. As luck would have it, there is a werewolf at large in the Collinsport area. He is Chris Jennings, and Barnabas and Julia have been trying to cure him of the effects of his curse. He had been spending the nights of the full moon in a cell at Windcliff, a mental hospital Julia is in charge of, but last month came back to the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of Collinwood. He couldn’t stand being cooped up, and chose to go back to his old practice of killing someone at random every month.

Julia and Barnabas don’t know that Chris is a weapon they can use against Jabe, and they want him to go back to Windcliff. The moon will be full tonight, so they are particularly anxious. But his onetime fiancée, Sabrina Stuart, has a different idea. She has been in contact with an expert on lycanthropy, and he has shipped her the only surviving specimen of the Moon Poppy. She brings the potted plant to Chris and tells him that the flower will open when the moon starts to rise. If he eats it while it is blooming, he will be cured. Otherwise, he will lose his chance- the plant will be dead before morning.

Sabrina pleads with Chris. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Chris’ transformation begins with moonrise, and once he has become the wolf he has no will of his own. When Barnabas stops by to take him to Windcliff, he points this out to Chris. But Chris is determined to try Sabrina’s cure. He is like every addict who talks himself into believing that this time, it will be different. Of course his determination fails him at the last moment, and by the time he can reach for the opening flower, it is a hairy paw, not a hand, that stretches towards it.

The flower cure and Chris the unlikable protagonist are both borrowings from the 1941 film The Wolf Man. Jabe lives in an antique shop; there’s an antique shop in that movie, too. There were some hints early on that werewolves were a threat to the Leviathans; evidently they had planned to bring these two stories together all along.

Closing Miscellany

Sometimes the closing credits are on cards, one after another; other times, they are on a continuous roll. Through the first year of the show, when they were on a roll costume supplier Ohrbach’s would be misspelled “Orhbach’s.” We haven’t seen that misspelling for a long time, but it’s back today. It will keep cropping up for the rest of the series.

Barnabas and Julia find a fake letter from Maggie saying that she’s been away visiting her Aunt Louise in Quebec. This is the first time we’ve heard of any members of Maggie’s family other than her late parents. Since the letter is a phony meant to cover up her abduction and neither Julia nor Barnabas seems to have heard of Louise before, it is possible there is no such person. Still, Maggie has been a major character since the first episode, so it does get longtime viewers thinking about how little we know about her background.

This is only marginally relevant to the episode, but I can’t resist bringing it up. The other day, a Twitter user named Zach Wilson (whose bio describes him as “watcher of TV, all of it, one episode at a time”) posted an image of pages of TV Guide from 22 April 1966 with the question “What would you watch?” An Educational TV station in whatever market it was running a WGBH-Boston produced telecast of the Boston Theater Company’s production of Gertrude Stein’s “Yes is for a Very Young Man,” starring Lisa Blake Richards. The Harvard Crimson had reviewed the stage production in November 1965; they said that “the play was lousy,” but they praised the cast for making the most of a bad script, singling out Miss Richards for the “outstanding job” she did “with a whining, pathetic character.” Sabrina isn’t exactly Lady MacBeth, either, and Miss Richards had her work cut out for her finding a way to make us want to see more of her.

Episode 925: Not like other boys

In #891, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins gave a present to antique shop owners Megan and Philip Todd. It was a wooden box. When the Todds opened the box, it made a whistling sound. By #893, the whistling sound had taken the form of a newborn baby whom Megan introduced to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard under the name “Joseph.” In #905, Joseph had taken the shape of an eight year old boy, and was going by “Alexander.” In #909, Alexander briefly shape-shifted. He kept his apparent age and mass, but his body became that of a girl. In particular, s/he was for an hour or two a perfect double of Carolyn as she was at eight. In that shape, s/he tormented Carolyn’s father Paul, who had been absent throughout Carolyn’s childhood. In #913/914, Alexander gave way to a thirteen year old who insisted on being called “Michael.”

Clearly, none of these children is really human. They are manifestations of a supernatural force known as “the Leviathans.” The Leviathans operate through a secret cult that is gradually taking over people in and around the estate of Collinwood and the nearby village of Collinsport. Barnabas, the Todds, Carolyn’s mother Liz, and her cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, are among the members of the cult. Paul is one of its enemies, and others are coming into their sights.

As he was when he was Alexander, Michael is a bully, monotonous in his hostility and demands for obedience. Philip has had about enough of this. He spanks Michael today, and tells Megan that it is time they think about quitting the Leviathan cult. Megan is appalled by Philip’s apostasy. She and Michael talk alone. He caresses her face, exciting a physical response from her. She then agrees that Philip should be got rid of, and picks up a gun.

Michael caresses Megan’s face. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We have seen Barnabas caress the faces of people whom he wanted to bring under the control of the Leviathans, so the makers of the show could tell the ABC network’s Standards and Practices Office that Michael was doing a magic trick when he did that to Megan. But in a period when Sigmund Freud was the among most cited nonfiction authors in the English-speaking world, few adults in the audience could have failed to notice the erotic charge in the contact between Michael and his (foster) mother as they plot the murder of his (foster) father.

Freud has turned up on the show before. In September 1968, Carolyn hid Frankenstein’s monster Adam in a room in the dusty and long-disused west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Adam spent most of his time alone, with little to do but read. When Carolyn brought him a meal there in #577, Adam was disappointed she was not prepared to discuss Freud’s works with him. She mentioned that she was dealing with some family troubles, at which Adam invited her to sit down and to “Tell me about your mother.”

Adam is long gone, but we see today that the west wing is still dusty. Maggie, David’s governess, fell afoul of Michael yesterday and is wandering around there, hopelessly lost. For some time, Adam held Maggie’s predecessor Vicki prisoner in his room; evidently writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell see some kind of connection between Freudian psychoanalysis and governesses stuck in the west wing.

Like Adam, Michael came into being otherwise than by sexual reproduction, and the arrangement of his anatomy is the result of a series of conscious acts of will. Also like Adam, he has an intense crush on Carolyn, one which does not exclude violence. In #549, Adam attempted to rape Carolyn. In #919/920/921, Michael introduced himself to Carolyn by creeping up behind her and putting his hands over her eyes; moments later, he was yelling at her and demanding “How dare you” when she would not go along with an idea of his. Since Carolyn is virtually the same height as Michael, his disregard of her personal space and his unrestrained bullying come off not only as bratty, but as rape-adjacent.

Furthermore, Marie Wallace, who plays Megan, first joined the show as patchwork woman Eve, Adam’s intended spouse. Megan’s desperate indulgence towards Michael puts her at the opposite extreme from Eve’s total rejection of Adam, but it is equally inflexible, and when she takes up her gun today it seems likely to lead to an equally disastrous ending. Whatever point Hall and Russell were making by associating Adam with Freud is apparently in their minds again when Michael and Megan play out their little Oedipal dance.

Closing Miscellany

When Maggie is first trapped in the west wing, she reaches up to bang on the closed panel. When her shoulders rise, the high hem of the outfit Junior Sophisticates provided Kathryn Leigh Scott exposes parts of her that performers on daytime television in the USA in 1970 did not customarily display.

Yesterday and today, David and Michael play a game they call “Wall Street.” They use Monopoly money and a playing surface which, when Michael overturns it today, proves to be a checkerboard with a backgammon board on the reverse. A board game called The World of Wall Street really was around in those days; it was produced in 1969 by Hasbro and NBC. The dialogue David and Michael exchange during the game sounds like things you might say while playing it. Perhaps the script called for the boys to play that game, but ABC vetoed it since the rival NBC network’s logo appeared prominently on the box.

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 884: Departure date

It is November 1897, and time traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is searching through the burned remains of a cottage recently occupied by famed artist/ criminal lowlife Charles Delaware Tate. Barnabas finds a pair of glasses just outside the front door and a length of chain just inside. The glasses belonged to Tate’s master, evil sorcerer Count Petofi, the chain to a creature named Garth Blackwood whom Petofi and Tate summoned from the depths of Hell. When Barnabas was last in the house, Blackwood had taken Petofi prisoner there and announced his intention to kill him. Petofi couldn’t get far without his glasses, and the chain was Blackwood’s very favorite murder weapon. So Barnabas has reason to believe both of them died in the fire.

Tate shows up. Barnabas demands he paint another portrait of Quentin Collins to replace the one destroyed in the fire. Quentin is Barnabas’ friend and distant cousin, and, because of some magical powers Petofi long ago gave Tate, the portrait kept Quentin from turning into a werewolf. Tate is a jerk about Barnabas’ demands, as he is a jerk about everything, but finally says he will comply. He tells Barnabas to come back to the ruins of the cottage at 10 PM to pick up the portrait. Barnabas is surprised to hear that Tate can work so quickly, and Tate does not explain why he needs so little time. But after all, the important thing is simply that the magic spell is renewed- the portrait doesn’t have to have any particular aesthetic quality. Perhaps a simple sketch will serve that purpose as effectively as did the full oil painting Tate did previously.

Meanwhile, back at the great house of Collinwood, Quentin’s sister Judith is busy with a project of her own. She is torturing her husband to death. He is the odious Gregory Trask, so she has the audience’s sympathy, at least up to a point. She has had Trask bricked up in Quentin’s old room. There is a telephone there which can receive incoming calls, but not make outgoing calls. Judith has been using it to torment Trask. Today, she directs Trask’s attention to two objects which he has somehow overlooked in his time in the room. One is a portrait of Amanda Harris, a woman he tried to seduce while he had Judith imprisoned in a sanitarium. The other is a loaded gun. When she calls him for the last time, she does not receive an answer, evidently because he has shot himself to death.

Judith is the third role Joan Bennett played on Dark Shadows. In the parts of the show set in the 1960s, she plays matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz is a depressive personality who keeps trying to kill herself. When from November 1967 to March 1968 the show was set in the 1790s, she played Naomi Collins, Barnabas’ mother, who actually did kill herself when she found out that her son was a vampire. Now she plays someone who, though she was introduced as a psychologically fragile individual, does not kill herself, but drives one of the major villains to commit suicide. Judith’s method of disposing of Trask is not morally defensible, but it is interesting to see Bennett playing a more assertive character.

Trask’s discovery of the portrait of Amanda leads to an interlude in New York City, a place the show hasn’t taken us since #8. Quentin is in a hotel lobby there, waiting for Amanda. She is surprised to see him. They had been lovers, and had planned to leave Collinsport together. He did not meet her at the train station. She had told him that if he did not, she would understand that he had given up on their relationship, so she had gone ahead without him. She says she is so overjoyed at the sight of him that she won’t ask for explanations, but he gives one anyway. He tells her about the portrait. Since she herself came to life as the result of another of Tate’s magical paintings, she can’t very well dismiss the story out of hand. He says that because he does not know where the portrait is, he cannot be sure he won’t become a mindless ravening beast at the next full moon, so he will have to leave her.

Oddly, Judith takes time out from her torture of Trask to perform the same function of motherly talk-to that Liz and Naomi often served. Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, has been staying at Collinwood for the last eight weeks, and is engaged to marry Judith’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward. Contrary to what her title would suggest, Kitty is an American woman in her twenties. Judith sees Kitty coming downstairs with two leather overnight bags. Kitty explains that she will be leaving at once and never returning. She has realized that she cannot marry Edward. She says that she has not told Edward this. Judith says that she is disappointed that they will not be sisters, but that she admires her for facing the truth and doing something about it.

Later, Barnabas comes to the great house. He finds Judith worried that Kitty’s bags are still in the foyer, though she has been gone for hours. He says that he knows where she is. She is waiting for him. They will be married later tonight. Judith is bewildered by this. Barnabas says that they will come back after their wedding and tell Edward what they have done, and that they will then leave Collinwood forever. She is sad to think that they will be going.

In fact, Kitty is two people at once. The young dowager shares her body with the soul of the late Josette DuPrés, whom Barnabas loved when he was a living being in the 1790s and whom he tried to recreate when he was a vampire in the 1960s. Ever since Kitty arrived at Collinwood in #844, Josette has been forcing her way into her conscious mind, triggering psychotic episodes and from time to time pushing Kitty aside and living through her body. Now Kitty is in the bedroom once meant for Josette in the Old House on the grounds of the estate. Josette’s voice keeps speaking to Kitty through the portrait of her that hangs there, urging her to let go and accept her place as part of a combined entity that will love Barnabas and live with him in the bonds of matrimony. Kitty struggles against the voice. For a time she hopes Barnabas will help her thwart Josette’s attempt to come back to life and take the leading part in their symbiotic existence, but when he enters he urges her to give up the fight and become Josette.

Kitty is alone in the room when she suddenly finds herself wearing Josette’s white dress. She floats off the floor and into the portrait. Barnabas enters just in time to see Kitty merge with the portrait. He reaches up to the Kitty/ Josette entity in the frame above the mantel, and he and Kitty both disappear from the screen at the same time.

Josette puts Kitty in the picture. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Josette was first mentioned in #5 as the lady who went over the cliff at Widows’ Hill, and her ghost emerged as the tutelary spirit of Collinwood in the months that followed. In #70, our first view of the Old House involved the first truly ambitious special effect, when Josette’s ghost, who was Kathryn Leigh Scott in a veil and a white dress, emanated from the portrait and took three steps from it down to the floor. When Miss Scott’s Kitty rises up into the same portrait today, longtime viewers will see that momentous little journey in reverse.

Barnabas was not dreamed of until long after Josette’s ghost emerged. When we first saw him in the Old House in #212, he delivered a speech to her portrait telling her that her power on the estate was ended, and for several weeks afterward strange and troubled boy David Collins, who had been the ghost’s close friend, lamented that he could no longer feel her presence. In those days it sounded like Josette was Barnabas’ grandmother, and she had sided with his father in the fateful conflict that led to his becoming a vampire.

Later, Josette was retconned as Barnabas’ lost love. In a plot borrowed from the 1932 film The Mummy, Barnabas decided that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was Josette’s reincarnation, and he tried to torture her into accepting this fact. Maggie resisted Barnabas. She ultimately escaped, only to have her memory of his abuse wiped clean by her psychiatrist, Barnabas’ accomplice and future best friend Julia Hoffman, MD.

Maggie was another Kathryn Leigh Scott character. When Miss Scott played Josette in the 1790s segment, the show was sticking to its source material, in which Zita Johanns played Imhotep’s victim Helen Grosvenor in the contemporary sequences and his lost love, Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun, in the flashback to ancient Egypt. It also left us with the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps Barnabas was onto something when he devised his horrifying program of cruelty towards Maggie. Sure, his methods were wrong, but if she “really” was Josette, he wasn’t just crazy.

With Kitty, they take us a step further. Barnabas’ attempt to Josettify Maggie made the show so bleak for so many weeks that longtime viewers will flinch at the thought that Kitty would be right to yield to Josette’s importunings, and even more at the idea that this will lead to a happy marriage between the Kitty/ Josette symbiont and Barnabas. Yet within the context of what we have seen in the 1897 segment, these would seem to be plausible conclusions. The body they share is as much Josette’s as it is Kitty’s, and Kitty has nothing to lose by merging fully into the being who lurks in the substrata of her mind.

For his part, Barnabas’ relationship to Kitty represents almost as drastic a departure from the personality he showed in his relationships to Miss Scott’s previous characters as the reinvention of Josette as his lost love rather than his estranged grandmother did in his early days on the show. He does not abduct her, torture her, or even give her Josette’s hypnotic music box. It is Josette’s ghost, always before shown as a benevolent force, that keeps pressing the transformation on Kitty. Barnabas is a gentle and considerate lover to the Josette part of the Kitty/ Josette complex, and is solicitous to the Kitty part. When Barnabas disappears with Kitty, we reverse not only the walk Josette’s ghost took in #70, but also the speech he gave in #212. So far from wanting to expel Josette from the world of the living as he did then, or turn her into his vampire bride as he tried both with Maggie in 1967 and with the living Josette in 1796, he wants to revive her as herself.

Barnabas’ function on the show, both when he is an outright villain and when he is trying to be the good guy, is to create problems that other characters will have to solve. So this moment of benevolence and rationality cannot last. It is the ultimate indication that the 1897 segment has indeed ended. But it is a beautiful little thing, for the few minutes it lasts.

This episode marks the final appearance of Trask and of Judith. We will see Kitty again tomorrow, but only in a reuse of today’s closing scene. After that she will only be implied as a feature of Josette’s unconscious mind.

Episode 873: Charming and exquisitely dangerous

In October 1897, sorcerer Count Petofi has used his magical powers to swap bodies with Quentin Collins. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

We open with Q-Petofi meditating on a lineup of I Ching wands. He goes into a trance which unlocks a cosmic force that transports him to the great house of Collinwood in 1969. He wanders into the drawing room, finds a newspaper dated 28 October of that year, and starts exulting. Maggie Evans, governess in the great house in the late 60s, hears him and comes downstairs.

As the segment of Dark Shadows set in 1897 winds down, we’ve been thinking of ways they might have moved forward. Some of the possibilities involve splitting the week between episodes set in 1897 and others set in 1969. Maggie has been on the show from episode #1, and has been central to several of the storylines that take place in contemporary dress. The last of these stories before the move to 1897 centered on Quentin’s malevolent ghost haunting Collinwood and making it impossible for anyone to live there. In the course of that, he appeared to Maggie several times. In #682, Maggie had a dream in which Quentin’s ghost strangled her to death. Though the events we have seen in 1897 have changed the future, we saw in #839 that the 1960s characters remember Quentin’s haunting. So when Maggie is on her way to meet someone who is to all outward appearances Quentin, we have a hint that a story might be brewing in which Q-Petofi finds himself carrying the can for all of the horrors Quentin’s ghost wrought between December 1968 and September 1969.

Alas, it is not to be. By the time Maggie reaches the drawing room, Q-Petofi has vanished. A few moments after he left 1897, maidservant Beth scattered the wands and brought him back. He is furious when he comes to, and she explains that she had to do it. The magical portrait that keeps Quentin, and presumably also Q-Petofi, from becoming a werewolf is not in the suitcase Q-Petofi gave her earlier in the evening to bury. Q-Petofi has been in possession of Quentin’s body and of his portrait for weeks, and he has vast powers of sorcery, so you’d think he would have hidden the portrait long before. His magic powers would seem to give him the ability to do anything at all to hide it. My favorite idea is that he would impose onto Quentin’s portrait an exact copy of the portrait that hangs above the mantel in the drawing room of the great house and hang it in its place, so that it would be hidden in plain sight for years to come.

Besides, if Q-Petofi was going to bury the portrait surely he would at least have put it in something airtight and made of metal, not a wooden suitcase that doesn’t close all the way and that will likely rot to dust in a year or two. Apparently he isn’t as big on long-term plans as he led us to believe when he claimed he was working on a design to become the ruler of the cosmos.

Q-Petofi orders Beth to bring Pansy Faye, a deceased Cockney showgirl/ mentalist who has for some time been inhabiting the body once occupied by the stunningly dreary Charity Trask, to Quentin’s room at Collinwood. He demands information which she refuses to give. She storms out.

Pansy has a dream in which she and Quentin dance in the drawing room of Collinwood while a specially recorded version of her song, I Wanna Dance for You, featuring the voices of Nancy Barrett and David Selby, plays in the background. Colors flare on the screen while we hear them sing. Miss Barrett was an excellent singer, Mr Selby an adequate one. He does speak a few of his lines, which damages the rhythm of the song, and the flaring colors often obscure the actors completely. Mr Selby and Miss Barrett are so lovable that we very much want to overlook these flaws in the number’s conception.

The dream ends with Quentin turning into Petofi and laughing evilly at Pansy. She awakes in horror. She has known for some days that Q-Petofi isn’t Quentin, and she knows enough about Petofi that it is strange she hasn’t already figured out that he is the one hiding inside his body. But when she sits up with a gasp, we know that she has finally put it all together.

Time-traveler Barnabas Collins, a recovering vampire, meets Q-Petofi in the drawing room at Collinwood. Q-Petofi is convinced that Barnabas stole the portrait of Quentin, and is very aggressive about pressing his suspicions. Barnabas has been playing dumb ever since his vampirism went into remission, but after a couple of minutes of Q-Petofi’s hectoring he addresses him as “Count Petofi.” When Barnabas cannot tell him what he wants to hear, Q-Petofi declares that he will restore the vampire curse to its full potency. He touches Barnabas’ forehead with the right hand in which his powers are concentrated. Barnabas squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, then opens them with a look of triumph. He asks Q-Petofi what has become of his powers.

The rest of the episode revolves around yet another possessed person. Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, is also Josette DuPrés, who plunged to her death from the cliff at Widow’s Hill 101 years before. Barnabas was supposed to marry Josette at one point, and he has been obsessed with recreating her ever since.

In May and June of 1967, when the show was set in the present, Barnabas abducted Maggie and tried to brainwash her into becoming Josette. In those days, the show was ambiguous about why Barnabas picked Maggie. Strange and troubled boy David Collins was an intimate friend of Josette’s ghost, and when he saw Maggie in Josette’s dress in #240 and #241, he thought she was Josette, looking just as she always did. Indeed, Miss Scott had played the ghost a few times, always behind a veil. When Barnabas was about to give up on Maggie in #260 he very earnestly told her “But you are Josette!” Yet after Maggie escaped, he picked another girl and planned to repeat the experiment with her, explaining to his sorely-bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #274 that all you have to do is “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure, and a new personality is created.”

But when the show made its first trip back in time, visiting the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968, Kathryn Leigh Scott played Josette. That was a bold move. Longtime viewers were left with the uncomfortable feeling that Barnabas may have had a point when he devised the horrifying program of torture that made the show so terribly bleak for several weeks. When we see Miss Scott playing Kitty, who really is Josette and really does have to accept that fact, longtime viewers can only squirm as they remember Barnabas shoving Maggie into his old coffin and later walking down the long gray corridors of his basement on his way to the prison cell where he was going to murder her. We’ve since come to know Barnabas as an endearingly ineffectual comic villain, but it is a stretch to remind us of him as he was in those grim days and ask us to concede that he was in any sense right.

Kitty confronts Barnabas at Collinwood and accuses him of orchestrating her Josettifying psychosis. He denies that he is responsible, and claims to know that Josette’s spirit lives in her and that she ought to yield to it. When she asks how he knows, he makes up a story about being a boy in England, falling in love with a portrait of Josette, and reading her diaries. She is unconvinced.

Later, Josette goes to P-Quentin in Petofi’s old squat, the abandoned mill on the North Road. She believes he is Petofi, and asks him to use his power to resolve her identity crisis. He tries to explain that he only looks like Petofi, and has none of his power, but she refuses to believe him. Having nothing to lose, he decides to play along. He tells the right hand to tell Kitty the truth about herself, and touches her forehead. She suddenly realizes that she is both Josette and Kitty. P-Quentin just as suddenly realizes that Petofi’s power has returned to the body in which he is now an unwilling tenant.

Kitty/ Josette keeps telling P-Quentin that she remembers what he was able to do with his right hand when he was staying with her and her late husband in England a few years before. This is a pretty bad continuity error. For eight weeks from #778, the most dynamic story on the show centered on the fact that Petofi’s hand was cut off in 1797 and kept in a box by a Romani tribe for the hundred years since, until broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi stole it in an attempt to lift the werewolf curse from Quentin. It was only in #815, in August, that Petofi reattached his hand and with it regained the bulk of his power. Granted, #815 is eleven and a half weeks ago, but the show now takes so little time to onboard new viewers by recapping that the writers are clearly counting on the audience to have a great deal of information about the story so far in their heads. As such, it is very surprising that they would break from established continuity on such a major point of the recent months.

Episode 870: Your Josette, always

In October 1897, the estate of Collinwood and all of the other assets of the Collins family are the property of Judith Collins Trask. Judith has just returned from a stay of more than thirteen weeks in a mental hospital, but even when she was having the breakdown that put her there she was not one of the show’s principal sources of that great motive force of Soap Opera Land, Crazy Lady Energy (CLE.)

In #819, sorcerer Count Petofi erased the personality of Judith’s stepdaughter Charity Trask and gave her body to the late Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl/ mentalist. Since then, Pansy has been a reliable provider of CLE. But today, she serves as the baseline of sanity.

We open in a bedroom occupied by the mysterious Barnabas Collins. Months ago, the Collinses discovered that their distant cousin Barnabas was a vampire who originally lived in the 1790s. Pansy staked Barnabas in his coffin in #845, and for the four and a half weeks after the characters believed he was destroyed. Now a sickly man has shown up who looks and sounds just like Barnabas. He claims to have been the vampire’s victim. He lives in the daylight, casts a reflection, does not recoil from the sign of the cross, and eats food not derived from human blood. He has been seen alongside the staked vampire. So Judith’s brother Edward has accepted the sickly Barnabas’ story. At Edward’s invitation, he is a guest at Collinwood, resting after his ordeal. Edward wins Judith over to his point of view, and she is glad to welcome Barnabas as a dinner guest.

Another resident of the great house is not so sure. He appears to be Judith and Edward’s brother Quentin. He is in fact Petofi, who has cast a spell to hijack Quentin’s body and confine Quentin to his own aging and pudgy form. Q-Petofi has seen all the evidence that Edward has, including the two Barnabases side by side. But he also knows that Barnabas is a time traveler who came to 1897 from 1969, and that several magical beings and science fiction types are in his orbit. So he is looking for a trick. He has coaxed Pansy into the room, telling her that only she can make the final determination about who the man in the bed is. Pansy looks at Barnabas and declares that he is not the vampire. Q-Petofi is still unconvinced, and is about to put some kind of spell on Barnabas when Edward enters.

Downstairs, Pansy meets with Judith. Judith has figured out that her husband, Charity’s father Gregory Trask, gaslighted her into the breakdown that put her in the hospital, and that among his many misdeeds while she was there was his attempt to seduce a woman named Amanda Harris. In #864, Pansy bought a portrait of Amanda for an eye-wateringly large sum; yesterday, she set it up in the drawing room at Collinwood, causing Trask to fly into a rage. We learn in this scene that Judith put Pansy up to buying the portrait as part of a plan to get back at Trask. The two of them share some amusingly salty dialogue, showing us a worldly wise side of Judith that we have not seen before.

Today’s dose of CLE comes from a houseguest, Kitty Soames. Kitty is a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire. She is Edward’s guest, and she came to the house in #844 intending to lure Edward into a marriage that would relieve the financial distress she has been in since the late Earl’s bankruptcy. But since the day she arrived, she has been having fits of madness caused by the irruption into her consciousness of the mind of the late Josette, lost love of Barnabas. The conflict between Kitty/ Josette’s two personalities gives her one mad scene after another today.

Kitty enters the foyer, where a portrait of Barnabas hangs. She sees the portrait’s eyes glow and hears a heartbeat, something which has been happening to people under Barnabas’ influence since #205. She has a panic attack. Pansy and Judith come from the drawing room and cluster around her. Pansy walks her upstairs to her bedroom and tries to persuade her to have a cup of broth. Kitty raves about the danger that an antique music box in her room presents to her. After a bit, Edward enters and dismisses Pansy.

Kitty tells Edward that she thinks she ought to leave Collinwood, since she has been suffering from a severe mental illness throughout her stay. Edward says that he does not believe that the problem is psychological, since the music box and other objects that she finds disturbing have in fact materialized around her inexplicably. He says that to the extent that her problems are rooted in her feelings, a therapy he will suggest might be just the thing to cure them. He asks her to marry him. She agrees, and they kiss.

Edward’s first wife was the former Laura Murdoch, an undead blonde fire witch. Laura was quite calm and rational in her way, but she embodied a principle of insanity in the universe. Quentin was married to a woman named Jenny, who may have seemed mentally healthy when they met but who went immensely insane after Quentin ran off with Laura. I suppose that, with that kind of family history, Edward is just cutting out some of the preliminaries by proposing to a lunatic while she is in the middle of a psychotic episode.

Edward and Kitty announce their engagement after dinner. Q-Petofi notices that Barnabas is shocked; he apologizes, smiles, and stands, a champagne glass in his hand and congratulations on his lips. He then excuses himself, saying that he still feels weak and thinks he ought to retire for the evening.

If any longtime viewers harbored doubts that Q-Petofi is right and this Barnabas is our old friend, they are dispelled when we see him in his room moaning about how he doesn’t want to lose Josette again. We end with a blissed-out Kitty entering his room, telling him she heard him calling, and declaring that she will be his Josette always. They share a passionate kiss.

Edward is the third major role Louis Edmonds has played on the show; he has been a principal member of the cast since episode #1. This is his first on-screen kiss on Dark Shadows. Some fans like to show off their knowledge of the actors’ sexual orientations by speculating about a correlation between their private lives and their on-screen kissing of opposite sex scene partners. This particularly settles on Anthony George, who was on the show for a while in 1967 and whose attempts to kiss women always went horribly wrong. But that is obvious nonsense. Jonathan Frid was gay, and the actresses all attested that he was the best kisser in the cast; Barnabas’ kiss with Kitty/ Josette today is a case in point. Joel Crothers, a regular from 1966 to 1968, was gay too, and he was another expert smoocher. Roger Davis is as straight as they come, and rivaled George for traumatic lip collisions. Kitty and Edward’s kiss shows that, while Edmonds might not have been interested in taking Kathryn Leigh Scott home, he was the equal of any heterosexual actor at playing love scenes with women when the cameras were rolling. I believe that what men like Edmonds, Frid, and Crothers did is known as “acting.”

Episode 861: Complete control of my faculties

Judith Collins Trask, owner of the estate of Collinwood and all the Collins family businesses, has returned home after more than thirteen weeks confined to a sanitarium. Her return is supposed to be a big shock, but they spoil it by having Joan Bennett do the opening voiceover. They really should have paid more attention to that sort of thing.

Judith’s husband, the odious Gregory Trask, gaslighted her into the sanitarium, and has been exercising control over the Collins family’s wealth ever since. Today, Judith tells her stuffy but lovable brother Edward that Trask never visited her during her time as a mental patient. Edward is surprised, telling her that Trask left the house for an overnight stay every week during that period, and presented these absences as visits to her. In fact, he is on such a trip now. She does not want to hear any more, and says she will give Gregory a chance to explain himself when he comes back to Collinwood.

Judith claims to be entirely herself. That puts her in the minority today. When she left Collinwood in July, Judith had a stepdaughter named Charity Trask. When she enters today, she sees someone who is to all appearances Charity leading Edward and a lady named Kitty Soames in a séance. The body is indeed Charity’s, but sorcerer Count Petofi erased Charity’s personality in #819 and replaced it with that of the late Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl and “mentalist” whom Judith met in #771, when Judith’s late brother Carl brought her to Collinwood as his fiancée. Pansy noticed Judith’s disapproval of her when she was alive, and is quite indignant about it now. That Judith keeps live-naming her, calling her “Charity,” doesn’t help.

Judith does manage to do something Edward failed to do a while ago, and talks Pansy into moving back into the great house of Collinwood. She agrees to give up the apartment she rented in the village of Collinsport after she took a job doing her old act at the local tavern, the Blue Whale. We saw her at the Blue Whale in Friday’s episode; it was shortly before nine PM, and she was the only person in the place. So perhaps her income as a cabaret performer is not particularly lavish, and the mansion is a more appealing place to live than the apartment that job would pay for.

For her part, Kitty is still, most of the time, the dowager countess of Hampshire. But the ghost of Josette Collins has been possessing her off and on ever since she arrived at Collinwood in #844, and the trend is definitely towards “on.” In Friday’s scene at the Blue Whale, Kathryn Leigh Scott played Kitty quietly and let Nancy Barrett’s Pansy provide the scene with all its Crazy Lady Energy; today, it is Miss Barrett’s turn to stand back and let Miss Scott show that Kitty is Pansy’s match in that department.

Crazy Lady Energy, also known as “CLE,” the main driving force of Soap Opera Land. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Judith and Edward’s brother Quentin is in an even stranger predicament than are Pansy and what’s left of Kitty. Between #854 and #856, Petofi forced Quentin to swap bodies with him, so that David Selby now plays Petofi and Thayer David plays Quentin. I call Mr Selby’s portrayal of Petofi “Q-Petofi,” and Thayer David’s portrayal of Quentin “P-Quentin.”

Kitty with P-Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The initial shock of finding himself estranged from his own body and trapped in Petofi’s left P-Quentin bewildered. All he could do was go to one person after another and tell the true story of what had happened, which produced only a widespread belief that Count Petofi had gone mad. Now he is starting to figure out how to use his resources.

P-Quentin’s first attempt to take advantage of the fact that everyone thinks he is Petofi was not successful. In #859, he exploited Kitty’s fear of Petofi and threatened to make her vanish if she did not bring him a portrait of Quentin later that night. Kitty tried to comply, but failed, and now it is long past the deadline. Soon she will realize that his threat was an empty one, and so far from being useful to him as a cat’s paw, she will be in a position to expose him as powerless.

Today, P-Quentin runs a smarter game. He introduces himself to Judith as Petofi, and claims to have psychic abilities. He pretends to read her palm, and tells her a story from their childhood that very few people could know. She is delighted, and decides that Count Petofi is someone she wants to see more of.

P-Quentin and Judith. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In her bedroom upstairs at Collinwood, Kitty has another fit of Josettification. She opens the trunk at the foot of her bed and finds Josette’s wedding dress. She puts it on and wraps a red cloak around it. She goes to the top of Widow’s Hill, the cliff from which Josette jumped to her death in the 1790s. The ghost of Josette’s husband Jeremiah appears to her.

The show is set in 1897 now. It was set in the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968. Miss Scott played Josette then, and for most of the segment Anthony George played Jeremiah. After Jeremiah’s death, Timothy Gordon played his ghost in a memorable part of the 1790s story. Gordon made two appearances as the ghost after the show returned to contemporary dress, playing him in #462 and #512. This is Jeremiah’s first appearance in 1897, and the second time, after #462, that Gordon’s name appeared in an on-screen credit on Dark Shadows.

Episode 860: I just say things

Edward Collins isn’t what he seems. His stuffy manner is real enough, as are his kind impulses when he sees people in distress. But he allows those who meet him to believe that he is the heir to the vast Collins family fortune, which in fact belongs in its entirety to his sister Judith. Judith is currently an inmate in a mental hospital. During her absence, her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, exercises control of all the family’s assets. Edward hopes to get out from under Trask’s thumb by marrying the dowager countess of Hampshire, a young American woman named Kitty Soames. He befriended Kitty while a houseguest of the late Earl’s, and now that she is widowed and is his guest at the great house of Collinwood he sees an opportunity to take over the Hampshire interests.

Kitty isn’t what she seems. The Earl was bankrupt when he died. He had lost all his wealth and been driven to suicide by sorcerer Count Petofi. Kitty wrote a letter to her mother the other day saying that unless she marries Edward and becomes the mistress of Collinwood she didn’t think she could raise train fare from central Maine to her home in Pennsylvania. Nor is this all. If Kitty were simply without funds, she and Edward would be on an even footing. But she is not what she seems in a metaphysical sense as well as a financial one. She is intermittently possessed by the ghost of the late Josette Collins. Regular viewers have reason to believe that she is Josette’s reincarnation, and that the fits of possession are part of the process by which Josette is reuniting her spirit with her body. But the characters don’t know what we know. As far as they are concerned, Kitty seems to be a plain lunatic.

At rise, Edward catches Kitty in his brother Quentin’s room. She is rummaging through an armoire, apparently looking for something. He asks her what she is doing, and she feigns one of her fits. Kitty is not nearly as good an actress as Kathryn Leigh Scott; she doesn’t fool us for a minute. But Edward believes her. He gently escorts her out of the room. As they leave, we see a face peering at them from the shadows. It is Quentin’s face.

Downstairs, we hear Kitty’s thoughts as she takes satisfaction in having fooled Edward into thinking she was having a fit. Mental health professionals often talk about how people learn to use the resources they have, so that patients who carry diagnoses of major disturbances will sometimes find ways to exaggerate their symptoms for effect. It’s true that psychotic episodes are not usually an asset in the husband-hunting business, but everyone in the segment of Dark Shadows set in 1897 has some issue or other, and Edward really does have a soft spot for mentally ill women (unless they are married to Quentin, but that’s another thing altogether.) So Kitty may as well play up her particular case of dissociative identity disorder.

Kitty was in Quentin’s room trying to steal a portrait of him. She was doing this from her fear of Petofi, whom she believed to have ordered her to bring him the portrait before 9 PM lest he use his magical powers and make her vanish. It is almost that time now, and she has no idea how to find the portrait, let alone get it to him before the deadline. While she is worrying about this situation, a woman named Angelique enters.

Angelique isn’t what she seems. She is one of Quentin’s fiancées, and Edward takes her to be an innocent woman, about 30 years old, who has been hard done by in the course of the supernatural doings of the last several months. In fact, she is a wicked witch who wrought immense destruction the first time she was at Collinwood, in the 1790s, and again the second time, in 1968. She has traveled back in time to 1897, and has been one of the most powerful participants in all of the strange goings-on.

Kitty tells Angelique that she saw Petofi in the vacant rectory on Pine Road, and that he told her the woman who had been squatting there vanished into thin air before his eyes. At this, Angelique turns and rushes off to investigate. It dawns on Kitty that Angelique knows more than she is saying. We cut to the drawing room, where Edward is bracing for a conversation with Quentin.

Quentin isn’t what he seems. In fact, he isn’t Quentin at all. Petofi forcibly swapped bodies with him a few days ago. It is Petofi, using Quentin’s body as a disguise, who confronts Edward and demands to know what he and Kitty were doing in the room. I refer to this form of Petofi as Q-Petofi, and the Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

Q-Petofi confronts Edward. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Edward tells Q-Petofi that Kitty had had a “seizure.” Q-Petofi expresses skepticism about this claim. He proceeds to tell Edward that Kitty’s late husband died in poverty, shortly after being released from prison for a jewel theft. Edward is thunderstruck. He calls the story a lie, and forbids Q-Petofi from repeating it to anyone.

Kitty goes to the village of Collinsport, and pays a visit to The Blue Whale, the local tavern. She wants to see the entertainer, Miss Pansy Faye.

Pansy isn’t what she seems. She has met the Collinses twice. Miss Charity Trask, daughter of Gregory and enforcer in his operation, came to the great house in #727 and took up residence when her father married Judith. Pansy Faye, mentalist and Cockney showgirl, came to the estate in #771 as the coldly cynical fiancée of the childlike Carl Collins. Pansy was killed the night she arrived. A few weeks later, Pansy started to take possession of Charity, and in #819 Petofi erased Charity’s personality altogether and gave her body over to Pansy.

When Kitty enters, Pansy is alone in the bar. She is picking out her theme song on the piano. When Petofi was in the process of switching bodies with Quentin, Quentin was with Pansy in this room. Petofi took control of him briefly and played the same song on this piano. He played it very impressively.

Kitty is desperate to find out what is happening to her, and she knows that Pansy has powers. Once Pansy assures her that she doesn’t work for Count Petofi, Kitty offers her a diamond-encrusted brooch in return for information. Pansy is offended. She says that she will take a gift in return for her services after she has rendered them, but that she does not accept payment in advance. She tells Kitty that there is one way to find out what is happening to her, which is to have a séance. Kitty gets up to leave, and Pansy presses the brooch on her.

The diamond brooch is a puzzle. Perhaps Kitty was lying to her mother when she said that she couldn’t buy a train ticket to Pennsylvania? Or perhaps the brooch is part of the late Earl’s ill-gotten gains, and Kitty doesn’t want to show it to anyone more reputable than Pansy.

Nancy Barrett’s approach to all her roles on Dark Shadows was to throw herself completely into whatever the character was doing at any given moment. That isn’t to say that her performances lacked nuance or that she didn’t support her scene partners, but that her method was to take her part from the outside in, letting the action supply the motivation. As Kitty, Miss Scott has opportunities to take this same approach. But in Kitty and Pansy’s scene in the Blue Whale, she deliberately lets Miss Barrett drive the action. Since Pansy has already completed a process of possession and transformation like that into which Kitty is now entering, Miss Scott can convey a great deal of information about Kitty’s state of mind by giving rather subtle reactions to Pansy’s behavior.

Back at Collinwood, Edward and Q-Petofi are drinking. Edward shakes his head at his brother’s ability alternately to enrage him and charm him. Q-Petofi asks him to be the best man at his wedding to Angelique; Edward agrees at once. Angelique enters, and Edward exits.

Angelique says that she doesn’t want to get married after all. Q-Petofi insists they go ahead. She points out that it was her idea, and he was extremely reluctant to agree to it. This is true- the engagement was part of Angelique’s price for invoking the power of Satan to break spells Petofi had cast on Edward and his son Jamison. While Q-Petofi has managed to copy Quentin’s behavior towards Edward almost exactly, his behavior towards Angelique has been radically different than was Quentin’s. We don’t know what Angelique has made of this.

Edward finds Kitty and Pansy preparing the séance. After an initial protest, he declares he will join them. It ends with a visual quote from Dark Shadows‘ first séance, back in #170. As in that episode, a hooded figure appears in the doorway.

The hooded figure in #170 turned out to be undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Another iteration of Laura was on the show as Edward’s estranged wife in April and May. It seems unlikely she is coming back, so longtime viewers are in suspense as to the significance of the allusion.

The hooded figure today is Natalie Norwick, making the last of her seven appearances as an uncredited stand-in on Dark Shadows. Norwick was in many plays on Broadway, as the lead in more than one, appeared in three feature films, and worked steadily in television from 1945 until the mid 1960s. She retired from acting in 1982, returning to the Broadway stage as understudy to her friend Julie Harris in 145 performances of The Gin Game from 1997 and 1998 when she was in her mid-70s. When Harris had a fall in 1999, Norwick took over the part, playing it in Florida and Washington, DC. She was chiefly based in Los Angeles in the late 1960s; perhaps she took the stand-in work to pay some bills during visits back east.

Norwick is best remembered for a single supporting performance on television in 1966. She appeared in “The Conscience of the King,” an episode of the original Star Trek, as Martha Leighton, the wife of Captain Kirk’s troubled friend Tom. She didn’t get much screen time, but she made the most of it. After Tom is murdered, she plays Martha’s understated reaction with a quietness that startles you no matter how many times you’ve seen it. Norwick is another of the significant talents one wishes Dark Shadows had found more to do with.

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.