Maggie Evans is depressed about her marriage to drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins. In #1016, Maggie was getting ready to call a lawyer so she could put an end to their joyless union, but she changed her mind and decided to give it one more try. That has not worked out, and she has gone from contemplating divorce to attempting suicide. She is about to fling herself to her death from a window high in the great house of Collinwood when Quentin’s sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard enters the room and talks her out of it. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe, which is in some ways a mirror image of this one. This incident is a case in point. In the original continuity, it was Liz’ counterpart whom people kept interrupting while she was trying to do away with herself,* so she takes the reversed position in this universe.
Most of the episode is devoted to the activities of a visitor from the main continuity, Barnabas Collins. The only thing Barnabas has a motivation to do is to try to get back home, but he seems to have decided he’d rather meddle in the problems the people in this alien universe are having. He suspects that the houseguest at Collinwood who is generally accepted as Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of Quentin’s late first wife Angelique, is in fact Angelique herself risen from the dead. He also suspects that Maggie’s suicide attempt was the consequence of spells Angelique cast on her.
Barnabas is right about these things, but his grounds for believing them are thin. Angelique’s counterpart in his universe is a wicked witch who has long been the bane of his existence, and so he simply assumes that a woman with her face and voice will be the same. But for three weeks, Alexis really was staying at Collinwood, and Angelique really was in her tomb. Alexis looked and sounded exactly like Angelique. We saw that, while Alexis may not have been a one-dimensional innocent, she was not a witch and was not a direct threat to anyone’s life or liberty. Had Barnabas met Alexis before Angelique came back to life and murdered her, he would have had exactly the same suspicions about her that he has now about Angelique. It is purely a matter of luck that his suspicions coincide with the truth.
In the main continuity, Barnabas’ best friend and most frequent accomplice in his many crimes is mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia’s counterpart here is the housekeeper at Collinwood. Miss Julia Hoffman is as devoted to Angelique as the original Julia is devoted to Barnabas. As the first Julia shows great reluctance when Barnabas is about to murder someone and shows even greater efficiency in getting rid of the bodies afterward, so this Julia protested yesterday that she would have nothing to do with Angelique’s plan to drive Maggie to her death, but was waiting outside the room when she was about to jump.
After confronting Julia and Angelique, needlessly revealing to them his suspicions, Barnabas decides to get some hard evidence. So he goes to Angelique’s old bedroom and stares really hard at the portrait of her that hangs there. She is in another part of the house, but grows agitated. She runs to the room and screams at him to stop staring into her eyes. He breaks into a triumphant… not grin, exactly, it’s more of a simper. It may be the only triumphant simper ever seen. That suits the occasion. He knows he was right, but Angelique knows that he knows, and it is not clear what he either can do to fight her or what reason he has to want to fight her.
Jonathan Frid’s invention of a facial expression previously thought to be impossible is one of several bits of conspicuously good acting in this episode. He also gets to deliver brief enigmatic responses to a number of questions, such as “Perhaps” and “Did I?,” and he makes each of those words materialize in space in such an arresting way that even his scene partners can’t help but show how impressed they are. As Liz fussing over Maggie, Joan Bennett shows a maternal quality that brings her hitherto undefined character into a very sharp focus. Grayson Hall also adds greatly to Hoffman’s depth. Standing by while Maggie is trying to kill herself, she is bland and detached. When she tells Angelique that it really is better for them that Maggie did not succeed, she is the opposite, torn between a number of emotions, including relief that she has avoided responsibility for a death.
Angelique has several comic lines, for example a wistful lament that she doesn’t get to see Maggie’s corpse mangled on the rocks below her window. And she puts real fervor into her spellcasting directed at Maggie. My wife, Mrs Acilius, remembered that when Lara Parker first joined the cast she wished she were playing an ingenue, so much so that Frid had to keep reminding her that she was the villain. But now she has settled in and become part of the group. So when Angelique abuses Maggie, Parker and her friend Kathryn Leigh Scott turn into two little girls playing make-believe, and they have so much fun at it that they are irresistible to watch, no matter how miserable Maggie is.
Quentin Collins finds a voodoo doll in his wife Maggie’s suitcase. She tells him she hasn’t seen it before. At length it dawns on him that it is physically possible for a person to place an object in someone else’s suitcase. He remembers that housekeeper Julia Hoffman was in the room for no good reason last night while Maggie was sleeping. Several weeks ago, he was able to see the abundant evidence that Julia was trying to drive Maggie out of the house. He knows that Julia was fanatically devoted to his late wife Angelique and must know that Angelique was involved in black magic, so that Julia would be the obvious suspect in an awkward situation concerning Maggie and a voodoo doll.
The next day, Quentin talks the situation over with Cyrus Longworth, his physician and an expert in black magic. Later, he confronts Julia; she denies leaving anything in the room. He does not have any further evidence to use to challenge her denials, so he leaves it at that.
What Julia knows that Maggie, Quentin, and Cyrus do not is that Angelique has returned from the dead. She murdered her identical twin sister Alexis and took Alexis’ place as Quentin’s houseguest. Julia and Angelique are conspiring to drive Maggie and Quentin apart so that Angelique can resume her place as Quentin’s wife and the mistress of the great house of Collinwood. Julia and Angelique keep congratulating themselves on how upset Maggie is getting, apparently not noticing that Quentin is suspicious of Julia and thinking of firing her.
Angelique, masquerading as Alexis, calls on Maggie in the master bedroom. She says that she realizes her presence in the house has been stressful for Maggie, and offers to leave if she wants her to do so. Maggie says that she is not stressed now, because she realizes that she is Alexis. She describes herself as childish and hysterical in her initial reaction, when she thought she was Angelique returned from the dead, and tells her to stay in the house as long as she likes. “Alexis” takes this statement at face value, and goes on to explain her belief that Angelique was murdered and her determination to find the person responsible.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that there is more going on in this scene than Angelique knows. Quentin has a habit of calling Maggie childish and hysterical, and she rejects those labels. So when she applies them to herself, regular viewers know that she is not giving her sincere opinion.
Moreover, being accepted as Alexis is not the winner with Maggie that Angelique believes it is. In #985, Maggie found Quentin and Alexis in Angelique’s old bedroom. Alexis was wearing Angelique’s frilly nightgown, pressing herself to Quentin, stretching her hand to him, looking into his eyes, and saying softly “Perhaps we can comfort each other.” Maggie ran from that sight to the drawing room, followed by Quentin. He tried to tell her she did not see what she saw. She told him that she would no longer be treated like a child, and left to spend the next six weeks at her sister’s place in New York. Angelique was in her grave at that time, and neither Alexis, Quentin, nor Maggie told her about it. So she does not know that by impersonating Alexis she is inviting Maggie’s distrust. She does not understand the warning Maggie is giving her when she tells her that she knows she is Alexis.
Maggie’s view of Alexis as a rival for Quentin also explains why she characterized her decision to go to stay with her sister as motivated solely by her own irrationality. Alexis is the last person with whom she wants to discuss her differences with Quentin, so of course she claims total responsibility for their earlier rift.
Angelique’s resurrection can last only so long as she can keep warm, and she can do that only by draining heat from the bodies of the living. Now the cold comes up on Angelique again. It strikes her during her scene with Maggie. Maggie can see that “Alexis” is ill, and reaches a friendly hand towards her. Angelique says this is just something that happens to her occasionally, and that she has to get under some blankets as soon as possible. She rushes out.
When she is in this condition, all Angelique has to do is touch a person and they will be an icy corpse. It is interesting that she chooses to pass up her chance to kill Maggie. Perhaps she is afraid that doing so would lead to her exposure. Alexis was her first unwilling heat donor; a handyman named Fred, who had the ill fortune to cross Angelique’s path in #1003, was the second. Angelique has concealed Alexis’ death by impersonating her, and Fred was due to leave town anyway. So no one has missed either of them. But there would be no covering up Maggie’s death.
Through the first half of the scene, Lara Parker’s hair and Kathryn Leigh Scott’s keep fluttering. The window on the set is closed, so that just makes us wonder how high the air conditioning was in the studio. After they come back from commercial, that problem is solved, but it was conspicuous enough to add a bad laugh to Angelique’s heat vampire symptoms.
Angelique runs down to the foyer, crying out for Julia. When she comes, Angelique orders her to fetch a victim whose body heat she can consume. Julia refuses, and Angelique tells her that if she doesn’t provide someone else she will herself be the next donor. Julia goes.
A moment later, Angelique feels she is about to succumb to the cold. She sees the doorknob turning, and resolves to claim whoever is about to enter. “Who will it be?” she asks, “Who… will… it… be?” There aren’t many candidates. There have been periods when the show had a bunch of characters in reserve who were not directly connected to any ongoing stories, but there are only a handful of those now, and only one or two would be likely to let himself or herself into Collinwood.
Five and a half years ago, I defended the episode in a comment I left on Danny Horn’s great blog, Dark Shadows Every Day. This segment of Dark Shadows is set in a different universe than the one where the first 196 weeks took place; the show insists on calling it “Parallel Time.” So the letters “PT” are sometimes put in front of the characters’ names to differentiate them from the versions of the characters we met in the original continuity. Danny and many of his commenters were getting impatient with Parallel Time by this point, and some compared it unfavorably to the trips the show took back in time within the main continuity, especially the costume drama segment set in the 1790s that ran from November 1967 to March 1968.
I’m liking it.
PT Angelique’s harebrained scheme isn’t really any worse than were most of Angelique-Prime’s schemes. So the difference between PT Maggie and Quentin on the one hand and 1795 Josette and Jeremiah on the other is that Maggie and Quentin have some brains. They talk to each other about what they’ve seen, confront Miss Hoffman, and consult with the resident Doctor of Spookology. For viewers who had seen 1795, that must have come both as a relief- thank goodness they aren’t going to simply recycle that story- and as a source of suspense- when Angelique sees her first evil plan fail, what other, even more evil plan will she devise?
Comment left by “Acilius,” 12 January 2021, on Danny Horn, “Episode 1019: Peer at a Prop,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 7 May 2017
I would have gone on to talk about all the stuff between Maggie and Angelique, but Mrs Acilius only pointed that out to me this time through. I’m sure that while I was watching the scene I responded emotionally to the nuances in Miss Scott’s performance, but I didn’t have it in mind after the episode was over.
The closing credits still bill Lara Parker as “Alexis Stokes,” a month after Angelique killed Alexis and took her place. Mrs Acilius explains this by reminding me of all the times when actors have strolled onto the set during the credits. She imagines someone walking on, seeing the credit that identifies Angelique, and reacting with shock.
Dave Woodard, MD, was on Dark Shadows from April to November 1967. Woodard was introduced as physician to Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie was the victim of vampire Barnabas Collins. Woodard was the show’s answer to Dr John Seward, the commonsensical local physician in Bram Stoker’s Dracula who called in his old mentor Dr Van Helsing when he found that his patients were suffering maladies he could not explain. Woodard’s call went to his medical school classmate, Dr Julia Hoffman. As Van Helsing was an incredible polymath, equally at home in several branches of medical science, of esoteric philosophy, and even in the law, Julia was dually qualified as a blood specialist and a psychiatrist and just so happened to have a theory about curing vampirism.
This Van Helsing proved a traitor to her patient and to her friend. In order to persuade Barnabas to agree to cooperate with her experiment, Julia betrayed Maggie, using her magical powers of hypnosis to erase Barnabas’ abuse from Maggie’s memory. As time went on, Woodard figured out Barnabas’ secret and Julia’s complicity in his crimes. To keep him quiet, Julia prepared a lethal poison and helped Barnabas administer it to Woodard in #341.
From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows traveled back in time and was a costume drama set in the 1790s, the period when Barnabas first became a vampire. It was then that we were introduced to wicked witch Angelique, who often caused pain to her victims by sticking pins in dolls. When suspicion spread that witchcraft was going on, Angelique framed well-meaning governess Victoria Winters for her own crimes.
Now, the show has traveled in time again, not backward but sideways. Barnabas has gone to an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” Maggie’s counterpart in this universe is married to drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, master of Collinwood. Angelique’s counterpart was Quentin’s first wife. She died last year, but has risen from the grave. When she was alive, Angelique built a cult around herself, some members of which reacted to her death with the firm conviction that she would come back to life. Now that she has done so, she has kept most of her devotees in the dark. She has told only two of them who she really is. Everyone else, friend and foe alike, thinks she is her identical twin sister Alexis.
One of the two people who knows Angelique’s true identity is her aunt, Hannah Stokes. Angelique forced Aunt Hannah to act as her henchman from #1003 until we saw her for the last time in #1014. In #1015, Angelique revealed herself to her most devoted follower, the housekeeper at Collinwood. This person is named Julia Hoffman.
Alexis really was staying at the great house of Collinwood from #984 to #1001, when Angelique rose from the dead, murdered her, and assumed her identity. When Alexis showed up, she found that Maggie was uncertain of her position in the house because everyone was so obsessed with Angelique. Hoffman deliberately and very blatantly worked to exacerbate Maggie’s insecurities, in the manner of Mrs Danvers in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. Unlike Maxim de Winter in the novel, Quentin caught on to what was happening and sent Hoffman away for a time. And unlike the second Mrs de Winter, Maggie refused to put up with Quentin’s miserable behavior, including his alarmingly affectionate relationship with Alexis, walked out on him and went to stay with her sister in New York. The absences of Hoffman and of Maggie coincided with the work Grayson Hall and Kathryn Leigh Scott, along with the other survivors from the summer 1967 cast, did in the feature film House of Dark Shadows.
Today, we open in Quentin and Maggie’s bedroom. Quentin is in the hospital, so Maggie is alone in bed. But she is not alone in the room. Barnabas is there, about to bite her. He bared his fangs and plunged his head into her pillow in the last scene of yesterday’s episode; he does the same in the opening reprise. But when we come back from the title sequence, he is showing us his teeth again, and there is no blood on them. Evidently he just wanted to rub his face in Maggie’s pillow for a second while he worked up his appetite.
Barnabas is going in for a second round when the doorknob starts to turn. He retreats into the shadows, then turns into a bat and flies away. Hoffman enters. Maggie wakes up. She is startled to find Hoffman in the room. Hoffman explains that she thought she heard a prowler. Maggie tells her she doesn’t believe her.
Indeed, it is hard for us to believe Hoffman. The only sound we could hear Barnabas make was his squeaking in his bat form. Any sounds of footsteps the microphone did not pick up must have been much quieter than the squeaking that was going on while Hoffman was already in the room. Hoffman does not appear to have heard the squeaking, so it would not seem she could possibly have heard anything that would lead her to believe there was a prowler. Later, we hear Hoffman on the telephone to Angelique, gleefully reporting that Maggie was unnerved to find her in her room. So apparently she did not hear Barnabas. She went into the room to advance her plan of making Maggie look foolish. When she brought up the idea of an intruder, she was only accidentally pointing towards the truth, not saying something she believed or had reason to believe.
In the hospital, Quentin meets with his doctor, Cyrus Longworth. Quentin had severe chest pains the night before, so bad that Cyrus was for a time certain he had only minutes to live. Cyrus is deeply disturbed when he comes into the consultation room. He tells Quentin that he has run every relevant test, and that the results prove beyond a doubt that there is nothing physically wrong with him. Quentin asks how that can be, and Cyrus says that his chest pains were probably the result of a supernatural influence. His preliminary diagnosis is that a witch pushed a pin into a doll. This is correct. Angelique did indeed push a pin into a doll representing Quentin.
It took Woodard months of exposure to a pile of evidence before he would use the word “supernatural” without hesitation. All Cyrus needs is to see a man who is sick one day and healthy the next, and he’s right there. In #985, we learned that Cyrus had worried his friends by presenting a paper on black magic at a scientific conference. He was a member of Angelique’s cult, and at her suggestion he devised a Jekyll and Hyde formula that he has used to indulge his sadistic desires, which include murder. He is a mad scientist, less Woodard than Julia.
Back at Collinwood, Maggie gets dressed and opens the front door. She finds Barnabas standing there, about to knock. She says she is on her way to the hospital to visit Quentin. The telephone rings, and she finds that Quentin is on his way home. Barnabas asks to stay with her while she waits for her husband to return, and she agrees.
The two have a remarkably cozy conversation. They are so close together that her hair bounces in his breath. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said it looked like Barnabas was about to kiss Maggie at any moment. “You mean bite her,” I said. “Same thing,” she responded.
This conversation includes one of the most interesting of all the show’s countless bloopers. Maggie confides her insecurities about succeeding Angelique as Mrs Quentin Collins. Barnabas asks “Did Quentin really love Josette?” We cut to a closeup of Maggie. For half a second, Kathryn Leigh Scott visibly struggles not to laugh. Cast members almost never corrected each other on camera, just delivering their next scripted line no matter how bad the preceding miscue had been, but this one was so extreme that she improvised “Josette? I think he loved Angelique.” Once she had contained her laugh, she slipped right back into character. It really sounds like Maggie is caught off guard by Barnabas’ stumble, not like Miss Scott is caught off guard by Jonathan Frid’s. And when we cut back to Barnabas, his face is just as it was when we cut away to the closeup. That is an impressive bit of professionalism.
“Did Quentin really love Josette?”
Quentin comes home, and Barnabas excuses himself while he and Maggie have their joyous reunion. Maggie tells Quentin that she wants him to dismiss Hoffman. When she describes the awkward moment in her room, he grows impatient and irritated. He refuses to dismiss “someone for walking into a room!” Hoffman enters. Quentin orders the two of them to feel better about each other.
This is puzzling in a way. Before Maggie left, Quentin had caught on to what Hoffman was doing, and he seemed to be thinking of firing her. But regular viewers will not be entirely surprised. The confrontation that led to Maggie’s departure was all about Quentin’s habit of treating her like a child, and the whole time she was away he kept saying that he was not going to indulge her childish behavior. Quentin has got so deep into the habit of belittling Maggie that he cannot resist doing it even when he knows that she is in the right.
In their room, Maggie is getting ready to go back to bed while Quentin looks in her suitcase. He finds the voodoo doll there. As Mrs Acilius pointed out, Maggie was still in New York when Quentin’s pains started, so she is not very likely to be the witch. Also, the room has been open and vacant all night, so anyone could have walked in and left the doll. No reasonable person could take this as any kind of evidence against Maggie, but Angelique and Hoffman don’t have to concern themselves with reasonable people- their target is Quentin.
This is the last script that will be credited to writer Violet Welles. Welles had done a substantial amount of rewriting on scripts attributed to her friend Gordon Russell before her name first showed up in the credits with #711, and she will do more ghosting for Russell later.
Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day is a tribute to Welles; I recommend it highly. Welles was far and away the best author of dialogue among the nine writers credited through the show’s 249 weeks, so much so that her uncredited contributions are easy to recognize. I will mention a week very close to the end of the series in 1971, a long time after the wheels came off, when all of a sudden characters start making witty remarks and developing interesting relationships. Then it’s back to the dreariness of a bunch of go-nowhere stories.
Welles rated herself low as an inventor of plot-lines. I don’t know what went on during the long hours she spent in story conferences with Russell and Sam Hall, but it was when she was in the room that the most fertile planning sessions Dark Shadows ever had took place. They sketched out flimsies thirteen weeks at a time, and from the time Welles became a regular part of the staff until thirteen weeks after she left, the show was packed with more lively ideas than at any other time. So if she was correct in that harsh self-assessment of what she did in the writers’ room, it was only in the narrowest sense.
Welles also spoke disparagingly of herself as a designer of dramatic structure at the level of individual episodes, but today’s installment shows that this was simply wrong. There is a tremendous amount happening in these 22 minutes, it is crystal-clear throughout what is happening and why we should care, and the actors get to do some of the best work they ever did do. We see two stories, one a mashup of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca with Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 short story “Ligeia,”* the other a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, also with a dash of “Ligeia.”
The episode is set in a different universe than the one in which the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows took place, and most of the characters are “Parallel Time” counterparts of those we met in the main continuity. In the Rebecca/ Ligeia mashup, we today see Quentin Collins, master of the estate of Collinwood, owner of Collinsport Enterprises, and gloomy drunkard; Quentin’s new wife, Maggie Evans Collins; housekeeper Julia Hoffman, fanatical devotee of Quentin’s late first wife Angelique; and Alexis Stokes, Angelique’s freshly arrived identical twin sister. The bit from the Jekyll and Hyde story features scientist Cyrus Longworth and attorney Chris Collins. Angelique comes up in Cyrus and Chris’ conversation, and she is emerging in the role of Ligeia. Like the eponymous character in Poe’s story, she is a celebrated beauty who is dead but expected to return. Alexis herself brings up yet another reference. She wears a short bluish gray suit and chignon hairstyle with a tight spiral twist at the back, the look that the mysterious Madeleine wore and her impostor copied in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Jekyll and Hyde Meet Ligeia
I’ll start with the Jekyll and Hyde story, since it is the simpler one today. Chris is the estate manager at Collinwood, and his responsibilities include custodianship of Angelique’s personal effects. His friend Cyrus has called Chris to his basement laboratory to ask for a favor. Angelique had told him about a chemist in Boston who could help him with some obscure formula he needs for his current experiments. She gave him the man’s contact information, but he lost it, and he wants to look for it in Angelique’s address book.
Before they start talking about the address book, Cyrus tells Chris that he saw Angelique in town today. He tells him he was driving past the drug store and saw her walking down the street. He called to her and she did not answer, but he is certain it was she. Chris does not yet know that Angelique’s identical twin sister is in town, so he does not tell Cyrus about Alexis. He starts with a philosophical approach, then veers towards the explanation medical:
CHRIS: Cyrus, you’re a scientist. A scientist deals in established principle and fact. One thing we have to accept is that death is the end.
CYRUS: I often wonder. People used to believe that the world was flat. They believed that, that the sun revolved around the earth, and these were facts to them.
CHRIS: Uh, what are you saying?
CYRUS: I’m saying that I saw Angelique. I saw her walking down the street.
CHRIS: Well, I wish to submit that there’s an explanation for it. All of this.
CYRUS: What do you mean by that?
CHRIS: You’ve been working yourself too hard. You’ve been locked in this laboratory for over a year. Whatever you’re doing it can’t be worth your health and your peace of mind. It might even damage your mind.
Cyrus tells Chris what he is trying to do:
CYRUS: Let me begin by saying that, that man is chemical in his composition. Now, if the proper compound was distilled, and administered to a human being, this chemical composition could be radically changed, radically altered, and I’ve been working on this composition.
CHRIS: Why, why alter a human being?
CYRUS: Now let me also say this. That man is not one person, he is two. One is good, and the other is, oh, let us say for scientific conversation, the other is evil. Now, these two people are within each of us, and they are always fighting against each other. But if these elements could be separated, just imagine the possibilities. Evil could go its own way, completely free of any aspirations or remorse that are foreign to it. And good, good can have its own life, free of any struggle against, against evil impulses or hostile thoughts. My god, just imagine what a person…
Chris is horrified by this idea, and is glad to be an obstacle to it. Director Lela Swift reinforces Chris’ conviction that Cyrus is destroying himself by placing Christopher Pennock next to a mirror during the most perfervid part of his mad scientist’s programmatic statement, a visual metaphor telling us that Cyrus is splitting himself in two.
Chris tells Cyrus that he won’t help him bury himself even more deeply in the strictly private world he has created. Cyrus says that it is not private, that it is something he shares with Angelique:
CYRUS: Angelique believed in this theory. She believed it could be done. And she was the one who started me on, on all these experiments. Separating good and evil.
CHRIS: (sourly) There is no doubt in my mind which of the two appealed to her.
Chris tells Cyrus that he has been anxious to see him. He has heard that he presented a paper on black magic to a scientific society, and that the news led him to fear that Cyrus’ mind is becoming unbalanced:
CHRIS: I admire your devotion, Cyrus, but not your direction. It can only lead to trouble.
CYRUS: It can only lead to glory. And it will. Very fast, if you’ll just give me the name of that chemist.
CHRIS: No. I’m sorry to withhold it from you, but it’s the only way I can stop you. And I think I have to stop you. I desperately think that.
Angelique was not only a great beauty and a gracious matron, but was also a scientific mind who inspired Cyrus to pursue his scheme. She could introduce an experimenter to chemists whose specialties are so obscure that they cannot be found in any published directory, and her influence leads to the study of black magic and a skeptical view of the finality of death. In these matters, Angelique recalls Ligeia. The unnamed narrator of Poe’s story, Ligeia’s widower, says of her:
I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense –such as I have never known in woman. In the classical tongues was she deeply proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to the modern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault. Indeed upon any theme of the most admired, because simply the most abstruse of the boasted erudition of the academy, have I ever found Ligeia at fault? How singularly –how thrillingly, this one point in the nature of my wife has forced itself, at this late period only, upon my attention! I said her knowledge was such as I have never known in woman –but where breathes the man who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science? I saw not then what I now clearly perceive, that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding; yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast a triumph –with how vivid a delight –with how much of all that is ethereal in hope –did I feel, as she bent over me in studies but little sought –but less known –that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!
At the end of Poe’s story, the narrator’s second wife appears to die. Her body is eventually reanimated with the personality and even in the likeness of Ligeia. Cyrus’ un-nuanced belief that the woman he saw was Angelique come to life suggests that he expects her to follow in the footsteps of that other learned woman.
There is a poignancy now in seeing Don Briscoe play Chris’ concern for Cyrus. Briscoe suffered from bipolar disorder, and was at this time trying to self-medicate with street drugs. After he was violently mugged while trying to score a fix late at night in Central Park, he wound up leaving acting and moved into his parents’ house in Tennessee. He died there, morbidly obese, at the age of 64. I suppose what Dr Jekyll wanted was to come up with a drug that could sort the contents of the mind into orderly batches, so that people like Briscoe could live the lives they deserved to live.
Ligeia at Manderley
Meanwhile, at Collinwood, Quentin has been extremely stingy with information Maggie should know, and has neglected to tell her that Angelique had an identical twin. Hoffman and others on the estate are convinced that Angelique will somehow come back to life, and in their obsession with this idea they have made Maggie exceedingly uncomfortable in her imposing new home. Making matters worse, night before last Maggie heard a voice that she can believe to have been part of a prank played on her by Quentin’s son, strange and troubled boy Daniel, but which Daniel and we have reason to believe was actually Angelique’s ghost. So when Maggie opens the doors to the drawing room and sees Quentin giving a glass of sherry to a woman who, to all appearances, can only be Angelique, she flees in panic.
Quentin goes to Maggie in her bedroom. He explains that the woman she has seen is Angelique’s twin Alexis. At first he is relaxed and soothing, as charming as the Quentin of the main continuity has always been, almost as charming as David Selby is. But as Maggie insists on being left alone, his mood darkens. Alexis sticks her head in and suggests they should clear things up right away; Quentin asks her to wait downstairs. When Maggie refuses to be formally introduced to Alexis and play hostess to her, Quentin becomes stiff, grouchy, and patronizing, ordering her to do her duty as mistress of the house. She does not bend, and he leaves the room in a huff.
Back in the drawing room, Alexis tells Quentin she ought to leave rather than go on upsetting Maggie. Quentin dismisses Maggie’s concerns and proclaims that he alone makes decisions at Collinwood. Alexis is visibly startled by Quentin’s claim to autocracy, and doesn’t know where to look or what to do with her hands as she stammers out “Of course… you… make the decisions.” She goes along with Quentin’s decree that she will stay in the house starting tonight, before she can get her luggage back from the inn in the village.
Hoffman enters. At the sight of Alexis, she gasps “It- it’s you!” Hoffman composes herself quickly, and says that Angelique often spoke of her sister. She asks Alexis if she received the letter she sent her when Angelique died. Alexis says she missed it. Hoffman had sent it to her address in Tangier, but Alexis had moved from there to Florence by that time. Alexis does not seem to be in any particular business, and she describes her decision to return to Collinsport as motivated by a vague feeling of personal obligation, so we can assume that her long stays in these famous cities are a sign that she and Angelique have private resources that amount, if not to a fortune, at least to a competence. Hoffman suggests that Alexis stay in Angelique’s old room. Quentin does not object, and Alexis agrees.
Alone in the drawing room, Quentin wishes Alexis did not resemble Angelique so uncannily. In a gruff tone, he tells himself “I’m as bad as Maggie, I’m behaving like a frightened child.” Quentin’s attitude when he was lecturing Maggie about Alexis had indeed been that of an impatient adult ordering a child to stop having an inconvenient emotion. Since he does not believe he handled that exchange badly, it’s jarring to hear him say explicitly that he saw it that way. He pours himself a stiff drink.
In Angelique’s room, Hoffman tells Alexis she doesn’t have to lie to her. She may have her reasons to pretend with the others, but with her she can talk openly about the fact that she is Angelique risen from the grave. Alexis is thunderstruck by this, and tries to reason with her:
ALEXIS: You thought Angelique would come back? But that’s impossible, she’s dead.
HOFFMAN: She is not like others.
ALEXIS: She certainly wasn’t like anyone else. Nevertheless, she is dead. Do you hear me? She’s dead, and I’m her sister.
Hoffman tries to trip Alexis up by asking which nightgown she would like from Angelique’s dresser. Alexis points out that she has never seen any of them, so she can’t very well answer. Hoffman starts to apologize for her bizarre conduct:
HOFFMAN: I’m sorry, Miss Stokes, I’m sorry if I’ve said anything–
ALEXIS: It’s perfectly all right. I can understand how much you must miss her. But I wouldn’t intimate such a thing to anyone else if I were you. They might be very distressed by it, and so might you.
This exchange is very effective, particularly for regular viewers. Up to this point, Lara Parker has been playing Alexis quite differently than she played Angelique. Even when Angelique had been defeated in a conflict or was trying to seem like a wounded innocent, she always maintained eye contact with her scene partners and found a way to put a little more drama into her voice than any other performer would have thought to do. But Alexis looks down when she is confused, talks in a soft and casual tone when she thinks she understands what’s going on, and asks questions to which she obviously does not already know the answer. We can believe she really is a different character. But her last two sentences to Hoffman are exactly what Angelique would have said. When Alexis lifts her head and delivers them with her right eye fixed on Hoffman, we are suddenly in suspense as to whether Ligeia has already returned.
On her way out of the room, Hoffman passes Maggie. Without turning to face her, she explains that Alexis is staying, at Quentin’s orders. This brief scene is blocked as an homage to Hitchcock, whose 1940 film of Rebecca will have come to mind when Hoffman mentioned Angelique’s nightgowns. The censors tried to prevent the release of that movie, because of a scene in which obsessed housekeeper Mrs Danvers took a nightgown out of a wardrobe positioned in the same spot of the late Rebecca’s room as is the wardrobe in Angelique’s. Mrs Danvers went on and on about how sheer the nightgown was, how “You can see my hand through the material,” etc. Dark Shadows isn’t quite as bold with the homoerotic subtext of Hoffman’s devotion to Angelique as Du Maurier and Hitchcock were with that of Mrs Danvers’ devotion to Rebecca, but the shot is so much in his style and the movie was so famous that a large percentage of the grownups in the audience would likely have picked up on the reference.
Maggie goes to the drawing room, and finds that the decanter Quentin was drinking from is empty and lying on its side. She goes to Angelique’s room. She arrives just in time to see her obviously intoxicated husband in his first wife’s bedroom, with a woman who looks exactly like that first wife who is wearing a frilly nightgown, putting her hand on his shoulder, and saying in a soft voice “Perhaps we can comfort one another.” When we saw this, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that she would not be especially pleased if she were to find me in such a situation.
Maggie and Quentin have a showdown about this in the drawing room. It’s a sensational scene, one of the best in the series. Selby plays Quentin as a drunken, condescending grouch, trying to tell Maggie she didn’t see what she clearly saw. Kathryn Leigh Scott is spellbinding as she plays Maggie’s rage. I think it’s her best moment since #265, when the Maggie of the main continuity was a mental patient and went completely nuts while singing “London Bridge.” That, I think, was the scariest scene they ever did, making us think our old pal Maggie was never going to be all right again.
This time Miss Scott doesn’t sound like any character we’ve heard her play before. In fact, she sounds more like a real person than anyone else ever does on Dark Shadows when Quentin has forbidden her to mention Angelique’s name and she responds “You forbid me! Forbid me like a child, and I am not a child, and I refuse to be treated like a child. Not by you or by anyone. I know what I heard and I know what I saw!” At that, Maggie Collins becomes a distinct character and the Parallel Time storyline jumps to a new level.
Quentin whines that Maggie isn’t giving him a chance, and she lets him have it:
MAGGIE: Nobody’s given me a chance. No. This is Angelique’s house, not mine, you’re Angelique’s husband, not mine.
QUENTIN: All right, if that’s the way you feel about it, get out of here!
MAGGIE: All right, Quentin.
QUENTIN: Leave Angelique’s house and leave Angelique’s husband!
MAGGIE: That’s exactly what I’ll do. That is exactly what I will do!
And to Quentin’s bewilderment, that’s exactly what she does. She rushes out the front door. After a bit, Quentin staggers after her. He looks outside. Alexis comes downstairs, in her sister’s frilly nightie, and asks what happened. Quentin frets that “She actually went out that door.” Alexis asks if he is going after her, and he says “No, why should I? She behaved like a child!” He’s still holding onto the idea that it is right and proper for him to regard his wife as a temperamental child. He wonders if perhaps Alexis is right, then hears Maggie drive away and announces that it’s too late to do anything. He wanders back towards the drawing room while Alexis looks on. We are left wondering if she is Angelique masquerading as her sister, or if Alexis, contrary to appearances, was actually the Evil Twin all along.
*I am indebted to Danny Horn’s commenter “Riccardo” for pointing out the connection to “Ligeia.”
The protagonist and narrator of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca is the second wife of the enigmatic Maxim de Winter. The theme of the story is the protagonist’s timidity. She never introduces herself to us or reports a conversation in which anyone addresses her by name, so that we can call her only “the second Mrs de Winter.” Many people around her have something to say about Maxim’s first wife, the late Rebecca, though Maxim himself never mentions Rebecca and becomes upset when anyone reminds him of her. From this, the second Mrs de Winter concludes that Rebecca was an unsurpassably glamorous being and that Maxim is still in love with her and always will be. She is terrified of housekeeper Mrs Danvers, but since she would be terrified of anyone, this does not constitute evidence that Mrs Danvers actually represents a threat to her. In fact, the main thing about Mrs Danvers is her ambiguity. We have no way of knowing what she is thinking. Nor do we know what she is doing until the end of the book, when it turns out she is more dangerous even than the narrator had feared. It is also at the end that the second Mrs de Winter finds that Maxim’s hang-up is not his unquenched love for Rebecca. He never loved Rebecca, and would have been glad when she drowned were he not afraid of being prosecuted for his role in her death.
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Rebecca had to make several things definite that the novel could leave unsettled. So, while in the novel Mrs Danvers is a figure we glimpse in the course of her narrator’s confused attempts to remember what happened in her early days in the mansion, in the film she is a major character in several scenes. So we saw from relatively early on that Mrs Danvers was deliberately playing on the second Mrs de Winter’s insecurities in an attempt to get rid of her.
The film deviates even further from the book in showing Mrs Danvers’ motivation. Du Maurier was herself bisexual and may have started Rebecca with a plan to sketch Mrs Danvers as a mind warped by life in the closet, but as the story turned out it did not shed any light on the roots or structure of Mrs Danvers’ very intense feelings for Rebecca. It was just one more item on the endless list of things that the second Mrs de Winter could not hope to understand. But Judith Anderson’s performance of Mrs Danvers’ fixation on Rebecca struck film censor Joseph Breen as providing a “quite inescapable inference of sex perversion.” Anderson would deny then and in later years that she meant to play the character that way, but her body language throughout, most famously in the scene where Mrs Danvers handles Rebecca’s intimate apparel, makes those denials laughable.
Now, the A story of Dark Shadows is an adaptation of Rebecca. We are in an alternate universe, where the counterparts of Maggie Evans, Quentin Collins, Julia Hoffman, and wicked witch Angelique are cast in the roles of, respectively, the second Mrs de Winter, Maxim, Mrs Danvers, and Rebecca.
There is even less ambiguity here than in Hitchcock’s film. So after Miss Hoffman sets up a moment to enrage Quentin and confuse Maggie, Maggie goes to Angelique’s old room and hears Miss Hoffman telling the portrait of Angelique that hangs there how inadequate she had exposed her as being, cackling with glee all the while. Today Miss Hoffman sets up another such moment, suggesting Maggie give Quentin’s son Daniel a particular record that she knows Quentin will fly into a rage upon hearing. Miss Hoffman is so blatant that Quentin catches on to what she is doing and orders her to apologize to Maggie. When she does, she drifts off halfway through into a rhapsody about how irresistibly beautiful Angelique was. Grayson Hall had played lesbian characters in two films, Satan in High Heels (1962,) which became a cult favorite, and Night of the Iguana (1964,) for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. So she is on familiar ground when Miss Hoffman’s craving for Angelique becomes a spoof of Mrs Danvers’ homoerotic attachment to Rebecca.
It is not only in the character of Miss Hoffman that this version of Rebecca is less subtle than were those that preceded it. Maggie is even slower on the uptake than was the second Mrs de Winter. Even after she heard Miss Hoffman cackle about her deficiencies, and even after multiple people have made it clear that they are siding with her against Miss Hoffman, she still takes her advice and buys the record. Quentin is quite reasonable today, but that’s a first- so far, he has been even more miserly with information than Maxim was. And where Rebecca was an intimidating memory that became an inconvenient corpse, we end today’s episode with Maggie opening the doors to the drawing room and seeing Quentin offering a glass of sherry to someone who, for all she sees, can only be Angelique come back to life.
UPDATE: Thanks to FotB Melissa Snyder for pointing out a mistake in the original post. You can get the details in the comments below!
When Dark Shadows premiered in June 1966, it was supposed to bring the sensibility of the then-fashionable “Gothic romances” to the small screen. That did not prove to be much of a ratings draw, so six months later they introduced undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who was at the center of a story that by March 1967 had swallowed up all of the major loose ends and committed the show to becoming a supernatural thriller.
Now, vampire Barnabas Collins has crossed over to an alternate universe. We have seen enough of “Parallel Time” over the last several episodes to know that it will feature a story derived from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, one of the foundational works of the “Gothic romance” genre. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will be intrigued at this return to its starting point.
The first person Barnabas meets is the counterpart of his distant cousin and onetime blood thrall, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. This Carolyn finds him in a room deep in the great house of Collinwood and demands to know who he is and what he is doing there. He starts in on the “cousin from England” jazz that won him his place at Collinwood in the continuity we have been following so far. He cites the portrait of him that hangs in the foyer in the familiar timeline, only to be told that there is no such portrait in this house and that his story does not add up. Carolyn marches off to blow the whistle on the intruder, and Barnabas bites her. We can see that Parallel Time is going to move fast- it took Barnabas 28 weeks to attack Carolyn in the other universe.
This Carolyn is married to the counterpart of Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis. While Willie is an uneducated ruffian, Will Loomis is the author of several books, including three bestselling novels and a biography of Barnabas’ late counterpart, who died a natural death in 1830. Will and Carolyn live in the Old House, which corresponds to Barnabas’ own house in the main continuity. Quentin Collins, another distant cousin, is the master of Collinwood here, and widower of Angelique, who corresponds to the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire in 1796 but was apparently a mortal woman and a native of the twentieth century here. Other characters we see today include: Julia Hoffman, in the other universe, a mad scientist and Barnabas’ best friend, but here a uniformed domestic and Angelique’s fanatical devotee, Mrs Danvers to her Rebecca; Carolyn’s mother Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, who is not the owner of Collinwood and the Collins family businesses but a guest in Quentin’s house; and Quentin’s new wife, Maggie Evans Collins. We also hear that Angelique’s father is “Tim Stokes,” the counterpart of Barnabas’ sometime ally, occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes.
What we had seen of “Parallel Time” before Barnabas arrived let us know that Quentin was bringing a new bride home, much to the displeasure of Hoffman and Angelique’s other acolytes. We also knew about the Loomises. So that left us with two candidates to play the part of the intimidated, anxiety ridden “second Mrs de Winter.” Those were Kathryn Leigh Scott, who has been Maggie in the main continuity since episode #1 and has played other parts in time travel segments and as a ghost, and Lisa Blake Richards, who plays Sabrina Stuart, girlfriend of werewolf Chris Jennings.
I love Miss Scott, but I was hoping Miss Richards would be the overpowered new wife. Miss Scott has one of the deepest iconographies of any cast member. No matter how far Miss Scott dials down the big brassy Dark Shadows style of acting, regular viewers simply will not believe that she, answering to the name of Maggie, is going to be reduced to the position that the second Mrs de Winter finds herself in, where she is grateful to her own servants for allowing her a piece of bread and butter when she hasn’t eaten all day. It took all the abuse Barnabas could heap on her, supported by Julia’s magical powers of hypnosis, to break Maggie in 1967. Miss Scott was successful as neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond when the show was set in 1897, but they went out of their way to show that Rachel was not Maggie. The second Mrs Quentin Collins not only has the same name as the wised-up representative of Collinsport’s working class whom we met long ago, we even hear today that her father was an artist who lived in the village, as our Maggie’s was.
Miss Richards, by contrast, would come in clean. Sabrina, stuck in a dead-end story where her character was a mute for a long time, has made relatively little impression. Miss Richards specialized in a very precise, understated approach. She would be the perfect choice to tackle the job Alfred Hitchcock gave Joan Fontaine in his 1940 feature adaptation of Rebecca and depict a character succumbing to obscure anxieties.
We hear today that this Maggie has a sister, which ours never did. Perhaps Miss Richards will appear as that character. We do not hear whether Sam Evans is still alive. He is dead in the main continuity, but that was the result of an attack by a monster who would not have existed in this one. Longtime fans might get their hopes up that we will see David Ford again as Sam’s counterpart. Carolyn Loomis tells Barnabas today that the idea of widowhood is not as unattractive to her as he seems to imagine; since Nancy Barrett had divorced Ford a few months before this episode was taped, bringing him back into the cast might have helped her add some zest to this aspect of her character.
The blocking does not always take into account the dimensions of the brief outfits Junior Sophisticates provided Miss Scott. So when Quentin carries Maggie into the great house today, the camera looks right up her miniskirt. The ratings were still high during this period, but you can tell no one was watching who worked for either ABC’s Standards and Practices Office or the Federal Communications Commission.
Today we see Willie Loomis, much-put-upon servant of old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, for the first time since #696. We have heard no explanation of where he has been during the year in between. Long before his absence began, in #537, Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman had offered Willie a job at Windcliff, a mental hospital which she controls and where he was once a patient. Maybe he went off to work there.
Willie makes his first entrance today in conversation with Amy Jennings, a child who was herself a patient at Windcliff until she moved to the great house on the estate of Collinwood in #639. Willie knows Amy and expects her to know him, presumably from the time they overlapped on the estate, though perhaps they may have met at the hospital as well. Amy lets Willie in the house, but is in a hurry to go outside. He asks where she is going at such a late hour; she says that she left her bicycle outside and has to put it away before it starts raining.
Next we see Willie, he is on the telephone, making kissing noises. “Oh, oh, well you know, I can’t help it, precious. Oh, I mean your ol’ William, he wants to be with you so bad, but I just gotta wait. Well, sure I’ll hurry, I’ll get back as soon as I can.” Willie has always been much given to referring to himself in the third person, even in his first week on the show, when he was played by James Hall. This is the first time he has called himself “William,” and the first time we have had evidence that there is a woman anywhere in the world who reciprocates his romantic feelings.
Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard enters. Liz had unpleasant dealings with Willie in his early days, and like most other people in and around Collinsport believes that he abducted Maggie Evans,The Nicest Girl in Town, and held her prisoner in May and June of 1967. She is disgusted to see him in her house. He tells her that Barnabas and Julia asked him to come to Collinwood. He says that he went to the Old House on the estate, where Barnabas lives, and that he is not at home. He asks if Julia still lives in the great house; Liz says that she does, but that she isn’t in at the moment. Maggie is the governess at Collinwood now, and is in the minority of Collinsporters who don’t believe Willie was her kidnapper. She doesn’t know what happened to her in that period, since Julia used her magical power of hypnosis to wipe Maggie’s mind clear of the memories of the period to cover up the fact that Barnabas was the guilty party. Nonetheless, she is sure Willie was not to blame, and she considers him a friend. Willie asks to see Maggie, and Liz says that she, also, is out. He tells Liz he is getting married; she could not be less interested.
Liz and Amy meet in the drawing room and confer about Maggie. They have locked her in the room on top of the great house’s tower, because she is opposed to a conspiracy they are involved in. Amy says that she has told their leader about Maggie, and that he is on his way to take care of Maggie. The leader is a shape-shifting monster. Liz says she hopes he won’t come in the form he assumes when he is in his room, because that would involve killing Maggie. They have managed to frame someone else for the murders the monster has already committed, so if he kills Maggie it will reveal that that man is innocent.
Willie overhears the end of this conversation, and Liz and Amy realize he has overheard them. He sneaks up to the tower room to free Maggie. He gets into the room, but Amy closes and locks it, trapping them inside. Amy makes her signature move, looking directly into the camera and smiling at the audience. We hear the monster approaching, and Willie and Maggie clutch at each other.
Denise Nickerson was good at lots of things, especially playing Creepy Little Kid.
A woman is in a bedroom, packing a bag. A man bursts in with a flaming torch. She exclaims:
Sky, what are you doing?
SKY: I wanted it to work out. I really wanted you to be with me, and I’m sorry you can’t. Goodbye Angelique.
Sky then charges at Angelique with the torch, and we break for the opening title. When we return, Angelique is dodging the flames and they are quarreling. She takes a statuette and tightens a cloth around its neck. Sky begins choking. Angelique orders him to put the torch in the fireplace. He does. She continues tightening the cloth, and he collapses. The actions combine with the eerie music on the soundtrack to tell us that Angelique is casting a spell on Sky. Angelique kneels over Sky and talks about how their marriage was all wrong from the beginning. She takes on a calm tone while allowing that they are equally at fault really; “We both kept from each other our darkest secrets.” She tells Sky she really did love him and wishes it could have worked out between them. All the while she delivers this speech in her mature, thoughtful voice, she is pulling the cloth ever tighter, apparently strangling Sky to death.
We cut to a terrace, where a sinister looking man is silently calling for someone named Maggie to come to him. A young woman comes and tells the sinister looking man she felt she had to come to that spot. She is Maggie, and she calls him Barnabas. She says he doesn’t look like himself, and asks if he has been ill. He is distressed at her questions. She says that sometimes he seems very warm, and other times it seems she doesn’t know him at all. He gives her a ring, and tells her it is very dear to him and a token of their deep friendship. They embrace. He looks at her neck and opens his mouth. His canines are unusually long. A young man calls out a sharp “Excuse me!”
The young man marches up, addresses Maggie as “Miss Evans,” and apologizes for interrupting the moment. He insists on talking with Barnabas alone. When Maggie Evans has left them, the young man sternly observes that “I don’t have to ask what would have happened if I hadn’t arrived when I did.” He tells Barnabas that he must stay away from Maggie, because “In your present state you can only hurt her, you know that.” He says that it is almost sunup. Because someone named “Julia” has been unable to locate someone named “Willie,” he will accompany Barnabas home and will spend the day there.
We cut to the young man dozing in a chair. He is awakened by a knock at the door. He answers it, and finds Angelique. He reacts to the sight of her with shock. She greets him with “Well, don’t just stand there, Quentin. Kiss me.” After a commercial break, she repeats the command. Quentin gives a tiny smooch to a spot of air a few inches in front of Angelique’s lips, prompting her to remark that “You never meant it before, but you used to do a lot better than that.”
Angelique tells Quentin that since they last saw each other, “We’re both a great deal older, and I hope one of us at least is wiser.” Neither of them looks to be much more than 30, so one might assume that by “a great deal older” she means that they are in very different stages of life than they were in the few years of their separation. Quentin tells Angelique that “Barnabas said you hadn’t grown any older, and he was right.” She responds that he also looks exactly the same as when last they met. Since we saw in the first scene that Angelique has the power to cast magic spells, this exchange raises the possibility that they may be much older than they look.
Quentin wonders why Angelique has come back. She says “Oh, Quentin, don’t look so apprehensive. Actually, I came here hoping that I’d be able to see Barnabas, that I’d be in time, but obviously, I’m not.” Quentin guardedly asks “What do you mean obviously?” She says that she knows what has happened. Barnabas went to her house the previous evening and told her that her husband had betrayed him to someone called “Jeb Hawkes.”
Quentin is startled to hear this about Sky. Angelique explains. “Barnabas has told you all about the Leviathans, hasn’t he?… Sky was one of them, before I met him. I left him tonight and I’m never going back to him.” Whatever the Leviathans are, it seems genuinely to sadden Quentin that Angelique found out she had unknowingly married one. He asks if there is anything he can do to help her.
Angelique tells him there is nothing he can do. She goes on to explain: “The truth is my interest in you in the past was never more than a device intended to upset Barnabas. I was very good at devices, always have been. Perhaps, in spite of my feelings for Sky, Barnabas has always been my one true love.” Since Quentin was so unhappy to see Angelique and she told him that his kisses were never sincere, it is not too surprising that this confession does not seem to wound his ego in any way. He tells her that he is sorry it is too late for her to see Barnabas, and he sounds like he means it. He is quick to agree when she says she wants to spend the day in the house, and he suggests she take a nap in an upstairs bedroom.
Angelique says that “It feels good to be back in this house.” She reminisces about a time when she lived there and was happy. She says “I’ll sleep in Ang-… I’ll sleep in Josette’s room.” It sounds like the name she checked herself partway through saying was her own. Since she did live there, it would make sense that there would be a room that others would call “Angelique’s room,” but she does not refer to herself in the third person at any other point in the episode, so we are left wondering if the actress just slipped.
The next scene takes place in the same room. Again Quentin is by himself, this time reading the newspaper. Again he is disturbed by a knock on the front door. He gets up, mutters “All right,” and opens it. To our surprise, he finds Sky. It had looked like Angelique killed Sky in the first act, but here he is, without so much as a frog in his throat to show that he was strangled nearly to death this morning.
Sky tells Quentin that he believes his wife is in the house, and asks if he may come in. Quentin says that he would of course let him in if his wife were there, and before he can deny that she is, Angelique comes downstairs. Quentin asks Angelique if she wants him to stay; she says he can go.
Sky tells Angelique that he has spent the day with someone named “Nicholas Blair.” This Nicholas told him all of Angelique’s secrets. Angelique says Nicholas would have done better to tell Sky about her “before you almost got yourself killed.” Sky ignores this and says that things haven’t really changed between them- he still loves her. She points out that just a few hours ago, she had to choke him out to stop him killing her, not a common event in happy marriages. He says that Nicholas has agreed to let them live together if “you become one of us.” Evidently Nicholas, too, is a “Leviathan,” and is inviting Angelique to become one. She rejects this, saying that she wants nothing to do with Nicholas or the Leviathans and would be interested in Sky only if he broke free of them. They part.
Barnabas enters, a tense expression on his face. He tells Angelique that Quentin told him she was there. Angelique praises Quentin for his kindness and understanding and tells Barnabas that he was right about everything. Calling herself a fool, she says that what has happened to him is her fault. She thought she could trust Sky with Barnabas’ secret, and it was Sky’s betrayal that brought his current misfortune upon Barnabas.
Barnabas relaxes, and tells Angelique that she didn’t hurt him deliberately. She concedes this point, but says that she did do so “the first time.” He says that was long ago and is best forgotten. She embraces him, then says that it is “ironic, how it happened in the same identical way.” The more she talks about whatever it is she is referring to, the more visibly uncomfortable Barnabas grows. Finally she says that maybe this means that “we could become closer friends than we were before… Perhaps it means that we can start again. Start at the beginning as we did the first time.” That’s too much for him, and he turns away from her. She keeps going on about how they are “both outcasts,” and he looks like he wants to run screaming into the night.
She mentions Nicholas, and suddenly Barnabas’ eyes are fixed on her again. She hadn’t known he hadn’t known Nicholas was involved. He declares that he must tell Maggie that Nicholas has returned, because when Nicholas was around before he tried to kill Maggie. Barnabas tells Angelique to wait for him, and rushes out to tell Maggie about the new danger she is in. Angelique gives snippy responses to each mention of Maggie’s name, and looks jealous when Barnabas leaves.
Back on the terrace, Barnabas tells Maggie about Nicholas in a quiet, urgent voice. She assures him she knows how to take care of herself. He tells her that “you mean far too much to me” for him to be happy when she is in the kind of danger Nicholas represents. We see Angelique eavesdropping from the shadows, fuming.
In the next scene, Angelique is still on the terrace, still eavesdropping, but Maggie is inside the house with Quentin. They address each other as “Miss Evans” and “Mr Collins.” Quentin Collins is urging Maggie to stay away from Barnabas “for your own good and for his.” He tells her that “the people he was involved with” are “out to kill him,” and that “if they know you are seeing him, they may do it through you,” by using her as the bait for a trap. Maggie will not agree to stop seeing Barnabas.
At this confirmation that Maggie and Barnabas have been “seeing each other,” Angelique turns to the camera. “You asked if there was any way you could help me, Quentin. Well, there is. Only, you’ll never be aware of it. I am what I was and what I shall always be. I call upon the powers of darkness to help me once again. Make a flame where there was no flame before and let that flame transmit the power of love to those who look into it.” The fireplace in the room where Maggie and Quentin are talking to each other flares up and they look into it. Angelique does some more spellcasting, and all of a sudden Maggie and Quentin are calling each other by their first names, embracing, and talking about their mad love for each other. They look at their hands and notice each of them now sports a trident-shaped symbol that had not been there before.
What a Longtime Viewer Might See
Barnabas’ trouble, unspecified in today’s dialogue, is that the Leviathans have turned him back into what he was from the 1790s until March 1968, a vampire. Barnabas was one of the pop culture crazes of the 1960s, and Dark Shadows was known to millions who never saw a second of the show as the soap opera with a vampire. So even first time viewers were unlikely to need an explanation. But not mentioning it will bring fond memories back for some longtime fans, since Barnabas had been on the show for 40 weeks before the word “vampire” was uttered.
Maggie is the governess to the children at the great house of Collinwood. In 1967, Barnabas abducted her, tortured her, and tried to erase her personality and replace it with that of his lost love Josette. Her memory of that experience has been wiped several times, once by Nicholas, and now she thinks Barnabas is just peachy. They’ve been getting very cozy for the last several weeks. The ring that he gives her today is Josette’s.
Considering their past, it’s pretty weird Barnabas has a shot with Maggie, but it wouldn’t be any less weird if Angelique had a shot with Barnabas. Not only did she kill him and raise him from the dead as a vampire, she was also responsible for the deaths of the people he cared most about, including Josette, his mother, and his little sister. Her approach to him today reminds us that they have so much in common that it often seems as if Barnabas were not only cursed by Angelique, but possessed by her.
Maggie’s predecessor as governess was the well-meaning Victoria Winters. Vicki was Dark Shadows‘ original audience identification character, and drove most of the action in the 42 weeks before Barnabas debuted in April 1967. When Barnabas replaced Vicki as the show’s big attraction, she kept putting herself in situations where it would be difficult for him not to bite her. It was as if Vicki knew that she was a character on a show of which Barnabas was the star, and she was working to establish herself in the A story. The terrace set made its first appearance in one of those situations, in #299. Vicki hugs Barnabas and moves her neck as close as she can get it to his fangs, before a friend shows up and interrupts him, pushing Vicki back out of the plot. Quentin’s interruption brings that scene back to the minds of those who saw that episode.
Angelique and Quentin got to know each other when Barnabas had traveled back in time to 1897 and the show was, for eight months in 1969, a costume drama set in that year. By the end of that period, she was as monomaniacally fixated on Quentin as she had previously been on Barnabas. She didn’t even care that Barnabas was off chasing another woman. So we might wonder if she is putting on a brave face when she tells Quentin that she merely used him as a means of getting Barnabas’ attention.
From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. That segment introduced Angelique as the witch who first made Barnabas a vampire. The spell she casts on Maggie and Quentin today is identical to one she cast on Josette and Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah in 1795, right down to the tridents on their hands. Since Maggie and Josette are both played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, the connection will be hard for longtime viewers to miss.
First time viewers might be puzzled by Maggie and Quentin’s protestations that their attraction to one another does not make sense. Even if Maggie has been “seeing” Barnabas, she and Quentin are such a gorgeous pair of young people that it would be weird if they didn’t get together sooner or later. But those who saw #691 will remember that at that point, Quentin was a ghost who tried to strangle Maggie. During the 1897 storyline, history was changed so that Quentin didn’t die, but after the manner of time on Dark Shadows that difference only took effect on the anniversary of the event. The haunting still took place, and Maggie and the others affected by it remember vividly what Quentin’s ghost did.
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.)
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 twocomments 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.
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.
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.
Dark Shadows Commentary 