For sixteen weeks, Dark Shadows kept gearing up to tell us about the Leviathan People, a Lovecraftian race of Elder Gods who had a plan to retake the Earth and destroy humankind. During that time, the show gave us several good scenes, some striking images, a few thrilling moments, and many outstanding performances. But it never came together into anything that could be called a story. Today, they officially run up the white flag.
The harbinger of the Leviathans is a shape shifting monster from beyond space and time. The monster settled into the form of a tall young man, fell in love with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, and decided he just wanted to be human and marry her. Nicholas Blair, high priest of the cult devoted to the service of the Leviathans, wants to join him and Carolyn, not in marriage, but in a ceremony that will turn her into the same kind of squamous, rugose, and paleogean creature the monster is when he is relaxed. The monster disrupts that ceremony, and suddenly the whole Leviathan project crumbles.
Nicholas tells the monster that he will die soon, since he can no longer change out of his humanoid form. The monster doesn’t understand what he means. Nicholas explains that the body through which he once invited people to “Call me Jabe” cannot live on its own. Since he can no longer shift shape, the monster’s future as Jabe is extremely limited.
Meanwhile, Nicholas’ henchman Bruno is hanging around the carriage house on the estate of Collinwood, where Jabe has been staying. He peels an apple and sits in a chair next to a zombie. We’ve seen plenty of zombies, but no one on the show has had anything to eat since the diner at the Collinsport Inn was a frequent set in 1966 and early 1967, so the apple is noteworthy.
In a different role, Michael Stroka visited the diner in its one post 1967 appearance, in #813. No one was being served that time, though.
Bruno finds that there is a fire raging in the back room, and orders the zombie to help him put it out. As he gives this order, the zombie’s flesh and clothing disappear. All that is left of him is a skeleton. Bruno goes to the woods and finds another skeleton, this one with eyes in its sockets and clothes around it. He sees Nicholas, and tells him that “All our dead have turned into skeletons!” Nicholas explains that the power of the Leviathans is broken, and their time is up.
Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins takes his distant cousin Carolyn back to her home in the great house of Collinwood. Barnabas tells Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, that Carolyn is in a trance. They take Carolyn upstairs and put her in bed.
Liz has been under the control of the Leviathans, a dedicated and ruthless member of their cult. She asks Barnabas what is going on, and he launches into a denunciation of the Leviathans. She responds with complete bewilderment. Barnabas realizes that Liz is not only free of the Leviathans, but that she does not remember them or anything she did for their sake.
This may disappoint longtime viewers. Throughout 1967 and 1968, the show kept Liz firmly shielded from any knowledge of the supernatural stories, let alone active involvement in them. For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897, and Joan Bennett played Judith Collins. Unlike Liz, Judith was allowed to know what was going on and to take part in the action. She was under mind-control when she shot governess Rachel Drummond to death, but when she was released from that control she remembered what she had done and was desperate to cover it up. In that desperation, she became a player in several plot-lines and we saw what Bennett could do when she had something to work with.
Liz hasn’t actually killed anyone, but she did lock governess Maggie Evans up to keep her from getting in Jabe’s way, and, when it looked like Jabe would kill Maggie, Liz’ greatest worry was that the resulting publicity would exonerate the man who has been framed for the murders Jabe had already committed. So if she came out of the cult remembering what she had done, Liz would be free to become a full participant in any story. Now, she snaps right back into her usual place, which is nowhere at all.
Jabe comes to Carolyn’s room. He orders Liz to get out of his way. As a cultist, she had responded to this sort of thing with dutiful obedience, but now she is quite properly indignant. Jabe is pleased to see that she has changed, but he keeps insisting she let him talk privately with Carolyn, and never thinks to say “please.” At Carolyn’s request, Liz finally agrees to this.
Jabe tells Carolyn that he will die soon unless he goes far away. He refuses to explain why this will happen, as he has consistently refused to answer any of Carolyn’s questions about him. But she somehow loves him anyway, so she agrees to marry him in the morning and leave town with him immediately after. Carolyn writes a farewell note to her mother, then falls asleep.
Carolyn has a dream in which she and Jabe go to the drawing room at Collinwood to get married. They find Nicholas there, and he starts in on the same Satanic invocation he had made before Jabe put the kibosh on the whole Leviathan segment. This was so incongruous that Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud. Carolyn’s own shocked reaction absorbs the incongruity into the drama. Barnabas interrupts the ceremony and demands that Jabe admit that he murdered Carolyn’s father, Paul Stoddard.
Three times, Carolyn has had dreams in which Jabe made it clearer and clearer that he murdered Paul. Another distant cousin, Quentin Collins, came to her during waking hours and told her the same thing in so many words. But somehow it hasn’t clicked yet. In this dream, Jabe’s reaction to Barnabas finally gets the message through to her. Carolyn says she knows that Jabe killed Paul, and in response Jabe puts his hands around her throat and starts choking her.
Carolyn wakes up. She goes to the carriage house and tells Jabe she can’t marry him. She won’t explain why. Jabe is enraged by this. He puts his hands around her throat and starts choking her.
Christopher Pennock was a fine actor and a seriously nice guy, and in the last few days he has made us want to believe that Jabe has turned over a new leaf. But this closing makes it clear that he is still a no-goodnik. The Leviathan material is all they have had on the show lately; there are some other characters who have problems that could be developed into something, problems such as lycanthropy and vampirism, but those have been completely subordinated to the Leviathans and are in any case nothing new to Dark Shadows. So despite Nicholas’ assurance that Jabe can’t exist much longer, it is hard to see an end to a period when all they have to offer are Jabe’s tantrums.
When Jabe is choking Carolyn, the camera drifts a bit and exposes the “Property of ABC-TV” stencil on the side of the scenery:
The Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods, plan to retake the Earth and destroy humankind, and their harbinger is a shape-shifting monster who has taken the form of a tall young man and asked people to call him Jabe. Their plan requires that Jabe join himself to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in an unholy ceremony that will transform Carolyn into the same kind of squamous, rugose, and paleogean creature Jabe defaults to being. Jabe has fallen in love with Carolyn, but so far from redoubling his determination to fulfill the plan his feelings have turned him against it. He wants to renounce his powers, become truly human, and make a life with Carolyn as she is. Though Jabe’s personality has been so obnoxious that even people brainwashed into supporting the Leviathans’ whole program have gotten fed up with him and become his enemies, he has somehow won Carolyn’s heart. She doesn’t know that he is a monster from beyond space and time, still less that he murdered her father and several other people. She is in love with the man he appears to be, and he wants to become that man in fact.
I first shared my thoughts about Dark Shadows online in the comments section of Danny Horn’s great blog Dark Shadows Every Day. In his post about #962, Danny identifies a major problem with the relationship between Carolyn and Jabe:
But both sides have apparently agreed to shield Carolyn from the big sinister secret, so in practice, she hasn’t had very much to do, except to fall passionately in love with Jeb, because of reasons.
As I’ve said before, I don’t know why Carolyn likes Jeb, and I’ve been scratching at that itch for a while. But today, I think I figured out the real problem with her character arc, and it’s all about the let’s-break-antiques scene.
This was Carolyn and Jeb’s first date, back in episode 940. I didn’t write about it at the time, because I had other things to say, and I didn’t realize how important it was until now.
The scene takes place in the antique shop, and it starts with Jeb gazing at her, and sighing, “I’m going to be very happy with you.”
She’s puzzled. “What made you say that?”
“Because I felt it,” he shrugs. “Haven’t you ever said or done what you felt?”
“Sometimes I do.”
“I do it all the time,” Jeb smirks, and swaggers across the room. “Everybody should. I always do what I feel. Right now, I feel like doing this.”
And then he picks up a porcelain figurine from a nearby display, and smashes it on the floor.
Carolyn is horrified, obviously. “Jeb, you shouldn’t have done that!”
He smiles. “Why not?”
“That was an antique, and it didn’t even belong to you!”
“Haven’t you ever felt like breaking something?”
She stops short. “Yes,” she says, “but…”
“Well, then, let’s see you break this.”
Then he picks up another figurine.
“Go on,” he says, offering it to her. “Break it.”
She looks into his eyes, and says, “I wish I could begin to understand you.”
“Maybe you can,” he says, “if you just free yourself. Go on. Just let it drop from your hand.”
[Smash]
He smiles, and opens a bottle of wine. She asks what he’s doing, and he says, “We’re going to celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?”
“Your liberation.”
“I don’t understand.”
He hands her the drink. “Oh, you will… soon.”
It’s a weird scene, and it should have been followed immediately by a dozen more weird scenes along the same lines. This should have been the storyline.
After all, the whole point of the Leviathan threat is that they’re going to take Carolyn, a character that we love and root for, and turn her into a hideous gargantuan, rutting with her blasphemous mate and raising a brood of ambidextrous deathstalkers.
And in the let’s-break-antiques scene, they set up the idea that Jeb is going to change Carolyn’s personality, leading her step by step into his dark world, in the service of her “liberation” from boring traditional values, like respect for other people’s ugly decor. We should have seen her going down that path, becoming more and more estranged from the family and friends who aren’t part of this nightmare death cult.
Except they didn’t. The champagne was drugged, and she blacked out, and since then, they haven’t even touched on the idea that Jeb might be leaving a stain on Carolyn’s soul.
Now, this is a show that’s explored a dozen varieties of hypnosis and possession in minute detail, so it’s not like they don’t know how to write a story like that. They just didn’t. To the extent that we believe that Carolyn loves Jeb, it’s an entirely innocent, human infatuation with a handsome stranger, who she’s unfortunately not really allowed to know very much about.
Because they can’t change Carolyn.
This is an enormous problem for the show, and it’ll be one of the key pieces to the puzzle of Who Killed Dark Shadows. There are four core family members, and they are untouchable. They don’t experience any lasting change, starting around early 1968 and continuing until the end of the show. Sure, they have moments of temporary hypnosis and possession, everybody does, but they don’t actually change.
And if Carolyn can’t change, even a little, then that means there’s no future, just a status quo that leads inexorably towards entropy, and the heat death of this fictional universe.
My main role in Danny’s comments was to draw connections between the episodes he discussed and the episodes from the first 42 weeks of the show, which he made a point of not discussing. In response to the above, I wrote:
It is too bad that the show got to the point where the only stories that counted were the supernatural ones. Not that those shouldn’t always have been the A stories, but there should have been room for B stories where we explore the characters’ personalities and see how humans might react if they were to find themselves living in a world like that of DARK SHADOWS.
As it turned out, it was difficult to do much with human characters even within the supernatural stories. Danny’s hypothetical series of scenes between Carolyn and Jabe where we see Carolyn being seduced to the dark side could have been very powerful if we’d been tracing Carolyn’s evolution from tempestuous, self-centered, spoiled rich girl of 1966 and 1967 to the relatively calm, responsible young woman we saw in 1968 and 1969. They could then keep us in continual suspense- would Carolyn continue to grow into a powerful matriarch, or would the shock of one otherworldly horror after another shatter all her progress and send her reeling back to her most unsympathetic moments? Since we haven’t had scenes focusing on Carolyn’s personality and relationships since Jason McGuire was on the show, and we aren’t expecting any to come ever again, hav[ing] a thread like that on the show at this point would seem as out of place as does a week spent documenting in exhaustive detail the evolution of Bruno’s attitude towards Jeb.
Nancy Barrett is a superb actor, and while she is on camera we believe that Carolyn loves Jabe. But she has to create this impression from the ground up every time she appears. Nothing that is happening reinforces it. Not only does her love for Jabe pop into being out of nowhere, but because she is not involved with anything he is doing it cannot motivate her to take any significant actions. Today Jabe and Carolyn stand before an altar while a high priest of the cult devoted to the Leviathans is performing the ceremony meant to unite them in horrid monstrosity. But Carolyn is there, not because of any decisions she has made or feelings she has, but because she has been hypnotized by the high priest.
I am reminded of the 2006 film Idiocracy. An average man from the early twenty first century suddenly finds himself in a future where everyone has a very low mentality. He goes to the movies and discovers that the most popular film of the era is called Ass. It is a 90 minute closeup of a pair of flatulent buttocks. When he becomes head of state, the protagonist explains that in his day there was something called a “story.” He describes a story as “a way of making you care whose ass it is and why it is farting.” That’s what the Leviathans segment lacks. The execution is good enough to make us believe that particular things are happening, but there is nothing to make us care who is making them happen or why they want them to happen.
One of the few forms of narrative that is still cultivated in the world of Idiocracy is professional wrestling, a dramatic genre in which villainous characters often have changes of heart and become heroic. This is known as the “heel-face turn” (as opposed to the “face-heel turn,” which is the opposite character development.) They have been working on Jabe’s heel-face turn for a few days. Yesterday he asked mad scientist Julia Hoffman to cure him of whatever it is that makes him revert to his monstrous form. Christopher Pennock and Grayson Hall played that scene so well that we wished we could ignore everything else in the episode and believe in it. Jabe started the episode by ordering four zombies whom he had raised from the dead to murder five people: Julia; her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins; two distant cousins of Barnabas’, Quentin Collins and Roger Collins; and Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis. Jabe told Julia he would not kill her or Barnabas if she complied with his request, but at the end of the episode he had the zombies stuff Quentin in a coffin and bury him alive. After that, we could hardly believe that Jabe had changed at all.
Today, Barnabas is at home when Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, bursts into his front parlor. She tells him she is sure Quentin is trapped somewhere and has no more than an hour to live. Barnabas has no idea how Maggie can know this, and she can’t explain it herself. The camera zooms in on a trident drawn on her hand, and regular viewers know what is going on. A while ago, Barnabas’ ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique, cast a spell on Maggie and Quentin causing them to feel an overwhelming love for each other at irregular intervals. Angelique thought this would make Barnabas unhappy, but he hasn’t noticed it, and he has so much else going on right now it seems unlikely he’d care much one way or the other if he did. The spell enables Maggie to lead Barnabas to the grave where Quentin is trapped and to tell Barnabas to dig it up. Quentin is fine when they exhume him, so if anything Barnabas should be glad of Angelique’s spell.
When Quentin comes out of the coffin, he says his only problem is that his legs hurt. Since he is 6’4″ tall and the coffin is at most 5′ long, that’s understandable. He says that Jabe told him he had something out of the ordinary in store for him. Now he knows that whatever else Jabe may be, “he’s a man of his word!” Usually David Selby’s accent raises a bit of a puzzle- why is the rakish scion of an aristocratic old New England family also an amiable West Virginian? But Mr Selby’s delivery of this line, with its note of appreciation for Jabe’s forthrightness, is so perfect that you could never wish him different in any way.
The high priest of the Leviathan cult whom we will see presiding at Jabe and Carolyn’s joining ceremony is none other than suave warlock Nicholas Blair, who was well known around the great estate of Collinwood in 1968. Nicholas finds Julia working on a chemistry experiment preparatory to her project of humanizing Jabe; he smashes her equipment and says he will let her live if she goes away and does not interfere with the Leviathans’ project.
When Nicholas calls on Carolyn to hypnotize her, she recognizes him and expresses mild surprise that he is back. When she insists on addressing him as “Mr Blair,” he tells her that her mother called him by his first name. She replies, “Well, that’s my mother’s business,” and asks him again why he is there.
Jabe visits Julia at Barnabas’ house and pleads with her to do something for him tonight. She says that even if that were possible, she would refuse to do it, since she knows that he buried Quentin alive a few hours ago. He says that she must believe that he is “a changed man” who is willing to “live and let live,” though he is not free to explain what has brought this change on. Barnabas comes downstairs and gives Jabe a dirty look.
The joining is underway at a cairn in the woods. Only people associated with the Leviathans can see the cairn. A small wooden box sits on the cairn; Jabe originally emerged from that box, four months ago, back when he was nothing more than a whistling sound. Nicholas stands to one side, obscured by branches, reciting a lot of mumbo-jumbo and waving a long rod. Jabe and Carolyn stand together on the other side. Nicholas orders Jabe to take the rod. He does. He stands behind the raised part of the cairn that serves as an altar and faces the box.
At that moment, Jabe shouts “Now, Barnabas! Get her now, Barnabas!” Barnabas leaps from behind the foliage, grabs Carolyn by the arm, and runs off with her; Jabe brings the rod down on the box, smashing it. Nicholas exclaims “You fool, do you know what you’ve done!? Better leave now or we’ll both go up in it!” The cairn glows and collapses; Nicholas and Jabe stand together off to the side, watching. Jabe clutches himself by the middle, groans, and passes out.
Watching it this time, I was not only surprised by Jabe’s “Now, Barnabas! Get her now, Barnabas!”; I remembered being surprised by it last time we watched the show through. It really is a thrilling moment, one of many in the Leviathans segment. But since it exhausts all of the elements in that segment from which a story could have been built, and since there is absolutely no other storyline going just now, I’m afraid the comparison to Idiocracy’s movie-in-a-movie Ass has to stand.
We are approaching the end of the sixteenth week of a segment made up of material drawn from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. Central to this is the idea of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who want to retake the Earth and eliminate humankind. There has been a lot of good stuff in these episodes, but it hasn’t come together as a unit. At this point, the narrative seems to be falling apart completely.
The harbinger of the Leviathans, who appears to be a tall man in his mid twenties named Jeb but is in fact a four-month old shape-shifting monster who would rather be called Jabe, has lost interest in the plan and wishes he could be a real boy. Jabe has alienated virtually everyone with whom he has come into contact, including people who were under heavy mind-control meant to turn them into his slaves, and has been reduced to raising four recently deceased men to serve him as zombies.
Yesterday, he ordered the zombies to kill five of his enemies. The targets he listed were mad scientist Julia Hoffman, vampire Barnabas Collins, Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis, and Barnabas’ distant cousins Roger Collins and Quentin Collins. The zombies have abducted Julia and brought her to Jabe’s house. She is welcomed there by a man named Sky Rumson. Sky is not a zombie, but may as well be for all the skill Geoffrey Scott brings to the role. When Scott recites his dialogue, you get the impression that he is telling you what an actor would say had they cast one in the part. Grayson Hall could fill any stage without support, making Julia’s scene with Sky relatively painless, but if it was meant to have any significance the audience will never know what that was.
Sky and a zombie force Julia into the back room of the house, where Jabe is in the squamous, rugose, and paleogean form of the true Leviathan. She is terrified by the sight. Jabe resumes his human shape. He and Julia go back to the living room, where he confides in her that he doesn’t want to take his Leviathan form ever again. He wants to renounce his powers and become human. He knows that Julia is giving Barnabas treatments to put his vampirism into remission, and that she succeeded with such treatments when Barnabas was under a different vampire curse in 1968. He asks her to help him rid himself of his Leviathan side. She is unsure she will be able to do so, but can’t resist the challenge. By the end of the scene, she is figuring out what tests she will have to run to diagnose the biochemical basis of Jabe’s condition.
Christopher Pennock really was a fine actor, and he is outstanding in this scene. He sounds like a deeply lonely, helplessly confused young boy who can’t figure out how to overcome the consequences of his own abuse of the people around him. Jabe’s request for Julia’s help and his agreement to lay off Barnabas as the price for it doesn’t fit with the orders he gave the zombies yesterday, the actions he takes later today, or anything else in the Leviathan story, and is a sign that the plot is falling apart faster than the writers can patch it up. But he and Hall are so splendid in showing Jabe’s neediness and Julia’s response to it that it doesn’t matter.
Meanwhile, Sky is at the great house of Collinwood, looking for Jabe’s foster mother-turned-makeout partner Megan Todd (it was 1970, everyone took Freud very seriously.) He meets Roger and Quentin there. They hold him at sword point until he tells them where Julia is and how to get past the zombies. To the extent that there is a reason for Sky to be on the show, it is to illustrate how total the control is the Leviathans have over the minds of the people they have co-opted, so when he gives in so quickly to Quentin’s threat to give him a scar (not even to kill him, just to compromise his potential as a model for deodorant ads) he dissolves the last prospect that the Leviathans themselves will be a danger we can care about.
Quentin goes off to rescue Julia, and Roger assumes responsibility for holding the sword. He is momentarily distracted when he sees Megan in the window, and Sky takes advantage, disarming Roger and running out of the house. Outside, he meets Megan and tells her that Jabe is upset with her for some reason. She asks if he is afraid of her. He is puzzled by the question, and tells her she is very beautiful. She invites him to look at her. As he does, she opens her mouth, revealing vampire’s fangs. She bites him.
Quentin arrives at Jabe’s house. Jabe is surprised to see him, but not surprised Sky was too chicken to keep any of his secrets. He orders the zombies to seize Quentin. The tall, portly, shaven headed zombie, who wears a mustache that keeps him from being mistaken for Tor Johnson in Plan 9 from Outer Space, slaps Quentin in the face a single time. With this, Quentin instantly loses consciousness. Yesterday, other zombies slapped Julia and Roger in the face, each a single time, and each of them instantly lost consciousness as well. Great ones with slaps, the zombies.
Jabe instructs the zombies to stuff Quentin into a coffin that is about three feet too short for him, and then has them carry it all the way to the cemetery. He has them bury Quentin in a grave that one of them had recently vacated. I suppose real-estate flipping has been interesting to TV viewers for longer than I had thought.
There is a famous goof in today’s episode. When Quentin grabs the sword out of its display on the wall of the Collinwood drawing room*, the lamp underneath it falls off the table and smashes on the floor. You know this wasn’t supposed to happen because it takes place out of frame and you can hear the stagehands sweeping the floor while Sky is pinned to the wall. Also, Dan Curtis was way too tight with a buck to break a lamp for the sake of a scene that’s mainly about a character as minor as Sky Rumson. It’s a shame they couldn’t have pulled the camera back and shown the lamp shattering, it would have been perfectly suited to the moment. And if they had to sweep up the wreckage right then, well, it would have been hilarious if housekeeper Mrs Johnson had come in with her broom and dustpan, taken care of the mess, and left without a word about what Quentin and Roger were doing to Sky.
The residents of the estate of Collinwood are divided. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, her nephew David Collins, and their distant cousin, eleven year old Amy Jennings, have been brought under the power of the Leviathan People, an unseen race of Elder Gods who mean to retake the Earth from humankind. Liz has invited the harbinger of the Leviathans, a shape-shifting monster who in his human form is a young man who once revealed he wanted to be known as Jabe, to live in the carriage house on the estate. Jabe’s onetime foster mother Megan Todd is living as Liz’ guest in the main house.
The main house is also home to mad scientist Julia Hoffman and governess Maggie Evans, who have ranged themselves against the Leviathans. Yesterday Jabe was about to kill Maggie when he saw something outside Collinwood’s Tower Room that scared him off. Wanting to know what it was Jabe was afraid of, Julia went to the scene to investigate, and found Jabe lurking there. Before he could attack her, the mysterious presence returned, and Jabe ran off. Today, we see the presence- it is a dark shadow. It makes perfect sense that a reminder of which show he is on would terrify Jabe. The writers keep painting his character into a corner so that he won’t be able to continue once the current storyline ends.
The shadow appears to be that of a slim man wearing a comically oversized hat and a cape. The only character who dressed that way was painter Charles Delaware Tate. Tate was killed by a werewolf in #922. It seems unlikely that Tate’s ghost would haunt Jabe, since werewolves and Leviathans are each other’s implacable enemies. Granted, the Leviathans are also hostile to humans, but Tate was always something of a post-humanist himself. For a while he had magical powers that he used to blur the boundary between humans and their portraits, and in his later years he tried to replace himself with a robot. Besides, Tate was always such a jerk to every individual person he met that it is difficult to imagine him taking much trouble to defend humanity in the mass.
Jabe has murdered three people so far. He raised one of these, Sheriff Davenport, from the dead. He made Davenport into a peculiarly garrulous zombie and forced him to do his bidding. I don’t know of any stories where the same person manifests after death as both a zombie and a ghost, but then I’m no expert on tales of the supernatural. So I guess the shade could be Davenport’s.
Jabe also murdered Paul Stoddard, Liz’ ex-husband and father of her daughter Carolyn. Last week Jabe was afraid Paul’s ghost would come after him, so he dug his body up and burned it. Today we hear that the village of Collinsport is buzzing with talk about the fact that Paul’s body went missing. So Paul is a possibility. The third victim, Maine state police investigator Lawrence Guthrie, was a one-time character. It would seem a bit late to start developing him now.
At the end of the episode, the ghost appears to David in the form of a man hanging from the ceiling. We get a clear look at the ghost’s trouser legs and boots. This rules out, not only Davenport, Paul, and Guthrie, but almost all characters from the parts of Dark Shadows set in contemporary times. The only women who have worn trousers were Carolyn, in a couple of 1966 episodes, and Megan. Both of them are still alive. The only man who wore boots was motorcycle enthusiast Buzz, who dated Carolyn for a little while in 1967. Those longtime viewers who remember Buzz might be amused if it were to turn out that he was the Leviathans’ mightiest foe.
This episode also features Roger Collins, who is Liz’ brother and David’s father. Roger meets his distant cousin Quentin Collins. From December 1968 to September 1969, Quentin was a ghost who haunted Collinwood, rendering the place uninhabitable and killing David. There was a time travel story going on for most of that period, and in September 1897 events played out differently than they had the first time through. The result of that difference was that Quentin did not die. The haunting broke and David came back to life on the anniversary of the change. Some magic spells cast on him have kept Quentin alive and apparently twenty nine years old ever since, but the haunting still happened and Roger’s memory of it gives him a shock when he sees the living Quentin. He quickly composes himself; he has already heard of Quentin’s claim to be his own great-grandson, and accepts it cheerfully.
Amy is Quentin’s actual great-granddaughter, and she is not so easily persuaded. Both as a living being in the 1890s and as a ghost in the 1960s, Quentin was obsessed with a phonograph recording of a sickly little waltz and inflicted endless replays of it on the residents of Collinwood. While Quentin and Roger are chatting in the drawing room, she starts playing the waltz. Amy asks Quentin if he likes it. He zones out, and after a long interval declares that he likes it very much. She says she is going to play it again, and Roger forbids her.
Amy says she doesn’t have anything to do. Roger puts his hand on her shoulder, tells her that the house is full of good books, and marches her off to find one. I had remembered this scene with David as the one Roger takes to the library, and moreover had remembered it as their last scene together. When the show started, Roger was a villain and David was a budding psychopath, so it would have been touching to end their story on this note of loving paternal firmness.
Later, Amy goes upstairs to David’s room. David has for several weeks been using a wheelchair because of a broken leg, but it hasn’t occurred to anyone to move him to one of the vacant rooms on the first floor. She tells him about Quentin, and he tells her to get the sacred book of the Leviathan people from its hiding place on the top shelf of his bookcase. They search the book for guidance. Just as they find something promising, they feel a ghostly chill. The book flies off David’s desk and bursts into flames. The ghost has done its work; David observes that “The chill is gone.”
David keeps ordering Amy around the whole time they are on together. This is quite a change from the beginning of Amy’s time on the show, in the early days of Quentin’s haunting, when they bickered like an old married couple and took turns being the one in charge. Since then, Amy has been in steep decline, absent from the cast and unmentioned for months at a time. Indeed, today is the last episode in which Denise Nickerson will appear only as Amy Jennings. Amy will make two brief appearances in upcoming episodes where Nickerson plays another character, but this is the end of the road for her as a significant presence on the show. She started so strong and Nickerson was so talented that it is very sad to see her go like this. The chill is gone, baby.
Roger doesn’t know about the Leviathans, but he has caught on that something very strange is going on. He goes to the Old House on the estate, home to his distant cousin Barnabas Collins. He finds Quentin there. Quentin tells him Barnabas is not in. Roger tells Quentin about the strange goings-on, and Quentin says that he can explain them. He warns Roger that the knowledge he is about to impart to him will put him in deadly jeopardy.
Once Roger has heard the story, he says he wants to take David and flee. Quentin tells him this will not work- the Leviathans will kill both of them if they try it. All they can do is fight them. Roger is unconvinced of their chances, but does not have a better idea.
Roger was one of the last characters to hold out against the evidence that the show had become a supernatural thriller. Even after he was forced to accept that he was up against uncanny forces of evil, he would snap back to “Surely there is a logical explanation!” mode the minute the danger had passed. That changed when Quentin’s ghost forced the family out of the main house in #694. When he accepts Quentin’s story today, we can see that it will no longer be Roger’s function to slow the story down. That is good news and bad news- Dark Shadows long had too many speed bumps, and like all of Louis Edmonds’ characters, Roger is too delightful to be related to such a lowly rank. But not since he ceased to be a villain in #201 have the writers come up with anything else for him to do. We may be losing Roger altogether before much longer.
The Leviathan People are an unseen race of Elder Gods who want to displace humankind and retake the Earth. To that end, they have assembled a secret cult of people who are under their control.
One of the most fervently devoted cultists is Megan Todd. Megan is standing on the terrace of the great house of Collinwood. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, former leader of the cult, appears. Megan tells Barnabas he is a traitor to the Leviathans. Barnabas tells her he is more than that- he has become a vampire. He bites Megan, breaking the Leviathans’ grip on her and taking her into his own power.
In the 1790s, Barnabas was briefly married to a wicked witch named Angelique. It was Angelique who, in those days, first made him a vampire. She has mellowed considerably since then. She has renounced the use of her powers and is living on an island off the coast of central Maine with her husband, a businessman named Sky Rumson. Barnabas turns up in Angelique’s bedroom and tells her that the Leviathans have made him a vampire again. He also tells her that Sky was the one who tipped off the Leviathans that he had become disaffected from the cult. She does not want to believe this.
Sky introduces Angelique to a man named Nicholas Blair. Sky tells Angelique that Nicholas is responsible for all his success. Angelique and Nicholas are surprised to see each other. He was her boss when she was working in Satan’s upper New England operation, back in 1968. Later, Sky will confirm to Angelique that he is a member of the Leviathan cult, and will tell her that his dearest wish is that she should also join it.
While Angelique is in her room packing to leave, Nicholas tells Sky that she cannot become a member of the cult, and gives him a flaming torch to use to kill her. Sky says that he really loves Angelique and doesn’t want to comply. Nicholas insists. We cut to Angelique. Sky bursts in, the torch in his hand, not noticeably shorter than it was when Nicholas gave him his orders. Evidently it didn’t take long for him to pick a side.
Dark Shadows never explicitly used the bit of lore that says vampires cannot cross flowing water, so I don’t suppose we can say it was an inconsistency for them to have Barnabas get himself onto an island and back to the mainland. I’m a bit disappointed they didn’t incorporate it into the story- it’s a familiar bit, and Angelique is so powerful that if she and Barnabas are going to be on the same side they need to put as many obstacles between them as they can to keep the suspense going. Otherwise she can just turn all of his adversaries into toadstools.
For most of 1968, Dark Shadows was a shapeless mess. The makers of the show had caught on that the audience liked monsters, so they kept tossing one monster after another into the mix, hoping to repeat the popular success they had had with vampire Barnabas Collins the year before. One of the storylines that ended up disappointing this hope most completely was that centering on 6’4″ Frankenstein’s monster Adam; another was the “Dream Curse” that was supposed to revive Barnabas’ vampirism after it had been put into remission by the mad scientists who created Adam.
Suave warlock Nicholas Blair was on the show in those days. Nicholas appeared to be a regional manager for Satan’s operations in upper New England. He found out about Adam and came up with the idea of using him as the progenitor of a new species that would displace humankind and win the Earth for his master. Adam met heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and fell hard for her. He also developed an interest in the writings of Sigmund Freud. But he never clicked with the audience, and Nicholas’ plan didn’t make any sense in the context of the show. So the plan flopped and Nicholas was called to the main office. He’s back today.
The A story for the last fourteen weeks has been the effort of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods, to use a 6’4″ shape-shifting monster as the progenitor of a new species that will displace humankind and win the Earth for them. The monster, who once invited people to call him Jabe, met Carolyn and fell hard for her. The Leviathans want Jabe to take Carolyn as his bride and turn her into a creature like himself, but he would rather be human and take Carolyn out on dates. Jabe isn’t the reader Adam was. Adam might be interested in Jabe’s current projects, though. When he was growing into his adult form, Jabe’s foster parents were antique dealers Philip and Megan Todd. He has now arranged to kill Philip, and as we open today he is passionately kissing Megan.
The door opens, and Nicholas enters. He tells Jabe that he is his boss, and that the Leviathan takeover of the Earth was his idea. It is the same idea that didn’t work last time he was on the show, and when he tells Jabe that he failed that time he adds that he does not intend to be punished for failing again.
Nicholas bullies Jabe into going to his room and turning into the inhuman monster he really is. Henchman Bruno shows up to consult with Nicholas while Jabe is in the room. Nicholas tells Bruno it is his responsibility to see to it that Jabe doesn’t kill anyone else. Nicholas leaves, and Bruno goes into Jabe’s room. Less than a minute after Nicholas told him to keep Jabe from further killing, Bruno is standing before the monster, apparently about to be killed.
Bruno manages to get out of the room alive. Jabe returns to human form and follows him. Bruno gasps that Jabe was going to kill him. Jabe replies that he wasn’t, “it was.” Adam might have found significance in this remark. One of Freud’s central concepts was a division between the ego (from the Latin pronoun equivalent to the English “I”) and the id (from the Latin for “it.”) People repress their unacceptable urges and attribute them to something separate from themselves. So, I don’t want to kill my father and marry my mother, it does. Bruno tells Jabe that in the room, he is “it,” and moreover that he himself, as a devotee of the Leviathans, wants to become something like “it.” Evidently the Leviathans’ promise to their followers is that they will replace their ambiguous and divided personalities with pure unreasoning id.
Jabe tells Bruno that he wants to be human. Bruno is horrified by this, commanding “Don’t even say that!” Indeed, Nicholas had said that for the Leviathan People, wanting to be human is the ultimate sin. That suggests a backstory which, if developed, might make the Leviathans scarier than they are. All tales of Elder Gods who want to take the Earth back raise the question of how they lost it in the first place. If our remote ancestors figured out a way to take it from them, surely we, who can learn everything they knew and add to it knowledge they lacked, will be able to prevail against them at least as easily.
But if it was envy of early humans that wrecked the Leviathan world order, a couple of possibilities open up. It could be that some of them defected to join us, so that their final defeat was mostly a struggle between Leviathans with our forebears as helpless on-lookers. In that case, it would remain to be seen whether humans could beat Leviathans. It could also be that the Leviathans who joined the human side have descendants among humans today, and that some of those descendants are vulnerable to co-optation by the Leviathans who are trying to reclaim their former position. There is a hint today that this might turn out to be the case- Bruno asks Nicholas why the estate of Collinwood is so important, and Nicholas, looking uncomfortable, tells him that there is a reason, but that he cannot explain it. Perhaps the members of the Collins family have some Leviathan blood that makes them at once receptive to the appeals of their estranged kinfolk and peculiarly dangerous to them if they are antagonized.
Nicholas is a logical choice to represent the idea that the greatest weakness of the Leviathan People is the temptation to become human. At the zenith of his power in 1968, he would reprove his subordinate Angelique for her romantic feelings for Barnabas, sneering that they made her “so human.” His downfall began when he fell in love with Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and found himself being humanized. So if Jabe is going to meet his doom because his desire for Carolyn makes him renounce his Leviathan form, he is going to remind longtime viewers of Nicholas, and we may as well have Nicholas on the show.
They may have had another reason to want Humbert Allen Astredo back in the cast. Lara Parker used to say that none of her acting lessons really took, and that it was only when Astredo would explain various techniques to her between rehearsals of their scenes as Nicholas and Angelique in 1968 that it all finally clicked for her. I’m sure Parker was exaggerating to make a self-deprecating joke, but it is undeniably true that her performances improved greatly after she had been working with Astredo for a while. So maybe the producers were hoping that some of the less experienced actors in the cast would benefit from time with this outstanding teacher.
The Dream Curse involved more than a dozen repetitions of a sequence over a period of months while one character after another had the same basic nightmare. The sequence involved opening a bunch of doors and seeing enigmatic images. Each time another character had the dream a little bit was added. At the end, it turned out that the curse was not able to renew Barnabas’ vampirism, so there was no point to any of it. For some reason, this did not go over very well with the fans.
Lately, Carolyn has been having a recurring nightmare. We see it for the third time today. The first time she had it, Jabe told her all about himself, and she saw that he had killed someone. Not too long after she woke up, her distant cousin Quentin came by and told her that Jabe had murdered her father Paul. The next time she went to sleep, she had the dream again, and it was clearer that Paul was one of the people Jabe had murdered. This time she even opens Paul’s coffin. She can’t figure out what the dream means. Too bad Adam isn’t around, by now he must have read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and enough of the case studies to apply his technique. If she told him the dream, he would be able to explain to her that the dream means that she is an hysterical female who needs to keep coming to him at least twice a week.
Jabe visits Carolyn, who tells him all about the dream. Not being trained in psychoanalysis, Jabe doesn’t tell her about her unresolved Electra complex or even send her a bill. He just rushes out to exhume Paul’s coffin. This leads to one of the most extraordinary images in Dark Shadows. They wanted to show that Paul’s body was there, but actor Dennis Patrick was by this time in California, producing and taking a role in the movie Joe. So they superimpose a photo of Patrick’s face on a still of a plush-lined box. The resulting image defies all description:
I’d remembered this as an image they flashed on the screen for a moment, but no, they hold it for quite a while. And then they go in for a closeup! Which is the last thing we see before the credits roll!
An old friend of mine has a brother who was hung up on Dark Shadows for a while, he apparently got the DVDs and watched them obsessively for months. When I told him that I was writing this blog, he claimed that this picture of Paul was the only thing he remembered about the show. I can believe it, really. I often try to figure out what they were thinking when they put the episodes together; as you can see with my speculation above about how the Leviathans lost the power they used to have over the Earth, sometimes I resort to some fairly elaborate fanfic to try to puzzle it out. But why they believed it was appropriate to put this image on national television, let alone to linger over it, cut back to it in closeup, and leave it as the climactic episode-ender, that stumps me completely.
We are in the fourteenth week of a story about the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who are planning to retake the Earth from humankind. At first, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins was a zealous acolyte of the Leviathans and the faithful leader of a cult devoted to their service. The first chapter of the story came to an end when a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time, the harbinger of the Leviathans’ return, ordered Barnabas to kill his best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Barnabas refused that order and became disaffected from the cult, held in line only by the Leviathans’ threats.
The shape-shifting monster has grown, and now spends most of his time as a young man whom everyone calls Jeb, despite his initial request to be called Jabe. Barnabas learned the other day that some of the threats the Leviathans had been making were empty, and so tried to smash a small wooden box that is important to them. Jabe stopped him, and punished the attempt by turning Barnabas back into what he was from the 1790s until 1968, a vampire.
Jabe’s home is a room above an antique shop owned by cultists Megan and Philip Todd. There is a lot of talk about this room as the only place where Jabe can change form. This is confusing to regular viewers. We saw him change from boy to girl while visiting the great house of Collinwood in #909, and in #946 and #947 he changed from his true, non-human, form into Jabe while at a house on an island many miles from the village of Collinsport. Today, Barnabas burns the antique shop down in order to destroy the room; Jabe says that he left the room through the window when the fire started, and changed from his true form into his human shape while outside. I keep trying to give them the benefit of the doubt about this, but at this point the whole theme of the “Chosen Room” falls apart completely.
Nonetheless, the antique shop sets and the troubled relationship between Philip and Megan have been signatures of the Leviathan story so far. Now the shop is gone, and Megan is gleeful that Philip is in jail, having confessed to three murders Jabe committed and unlikely ever to live with her again. So we can say that chapter two of the Leviathan story is over.
Barnabas’ re-vamping marks a transition in more than this storyline. He is the central character of the show and its main attraction; whether or not he is a vampire determines a great deal about what kind of show it is. You could periodize the show into segments depending on whether he is a vampire or not. I’ll risk a spoiler and tell you we have now begun a long segment of Barnabas-as-vampire.
Barnabas goes to the jail and has a conference with Philip. Jabe overtaxed Philip’s allegiance to the Leviathans, as he overtaxed Barnabas’. Philip has confessed to Jabe’s murders only because he loves Megan, believes she still loves him, and fears that if he does not do what Jabe commands he will kill Megan. Barnabas tells him that in fact Megan no longer cares about him at all, but is entirely devoted to Jabe.
In the real world, the state of Maine did away with capital punishment in 1887, a fact which applied to the universe of Dark Shadows in 1966. In #101, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins disappointed his son, strange and troubled boy David, by mentioning it. But the prospect of a gallows is more melodramatic than is that of any prison sentence, however long, and so Philip announces that he is going to be hanged for Jabe’s murders.
Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, owner of the great estate of Collinwood and of the businesses that employ most of the people in and around the village of Collinsport, is a devoted member of the Leviathan cult. Liz gives Jabe the carriage house on the estate to live in, telling him its back room will be suited to take the place of the now-destroyed Chosen Room. He tells her that Barnabas has betrayed the cult, but that she need not act against him yet. The carriage house was mentioned a few times in 1969, when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897 and the Collinses were still traveling by carriage. I believe this is our first confirmation that the carriage house still exists in the twentieth century.
Megan comes to visit Jabe at the carriage house. She is exultant that Philip is in jail. Jabe tells her he has no intention of resuming his true form; she is appalled. The plan has been that he will take Liz’ daughter Carolyn as his bride, and that she will then turn into the same kind of being he is. If he is going to be humanoid all the time, then he will just be taking Carolyn out on dates. Megan says that this was not the point. Jabe dismisses her objections, and tells her that their own relationship is different now than it was when he was first taking shape and she and Philip were his foster parents. He pulls her close to him and gives her a passionate kiss.
Jabe spent several weeks in the form of a succession of children. The children showed violent hostility towards Philip and remarkably little sense of boundaries in their relationship with Megan; the reference to the Freudian Oedipus complex was not subtle then, and the kiss he gives to Megan while he is setting Philip up for a judicial murder makes the connection explicit.
Ten year old Amy Jennings is at home in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Evidently she’s in a literal mood- she’s in the drawing room, so she’s drawing. Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard sees Amy’s work and asks why she is doing it. Amy says she thinks the design is “pretty”; Carolyn replies that “pretty” is the last thing she would call it. That may seem rather rude, but as Amy hasn’t been seen since #912 I suppose she’ll take what she can get.
The design is one which on Dark Shadows is called simply a Naga. It is the secret emblem of a secret cult serving the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods. Secret cultist Megan Todd wears the Naga on a large pendant around her neck; Megan’s husband, secret cultist Philip, wears it on a shining ring; Carolyn’s mother, secret cultist Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, wears it as an oversized broach. Amy herself is a secret member of the secret cult, but she hasn’t yet acquired any conspicuous jewelry emblazoned with the secret symbol, leaving her to do her own artwork. Carolyn wonders aloud why so many people are so preoccupied with the design.
Quentin Collins enters. Amy is terrified. Starting in December 1968, Quentin’s ghost haunted Collinwood. By March, the house was uninhabitable and strange and troubled boy David Collins was near death. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins tried some mumbo-jumbo in hopes of communicating with Quentin; he came unstuck in time and found himself in the year 1897, where he remained for eight months. While Barnabas was flailing about in the late Victorian era, time continued to pass in 1969, and Quentin’s obsession of David finally killed him in September. But a sequence of events with which Barnabas had a tenuous connection changed the circumstances on the night in September 1897 when Quentin originally died, causing him to survive. That night, as it happened, was exactly 72 years before David’s death. On Dark Shadows, anniversaries have the power that laws of nature have in our world, so that caused the haunting to break and David to come back to life. Due to a series of spells cast on him during Barnabas’ sojourn in the past, Quentin is still alive and still apparently in his late twenties in 1970. But the haunting still happened between December 1968 and September 1969, and everyone who lived through it still remembers it.
Quentin has introduced himself to Carolyn as his own great-grandson. Since Carolyn never actually saw his ghost, she is willing to accept this. But Amy had more dealings with the ghost than anyone but David, and it is obvious to her that they are one and the same. She clings to Carolyn.
Carolyn laughs at Amy’s fear and tells her that this Quentin is not the ghost, but is “a cousin of ours.” This is intriguing to regular viewers. It was during the 1897 segment that the audience learned that Quentin was the great-grandfather of Amy and her brother Chris, and just a few weeks ago that Chris learned about that relationship. It is through their descent from Quentin that Amy and Chris are cousins to Carolyn. So if Amy knows she is a Collins, she must have been told that the ghost that tormented her and David was that of her great-grandfather. A scene in which someone gave her that information might have been a good use of Denise Nickerson’s considerable acting talent, but they didn’t bother to produce one.
Quentin tells Carolyn to leave him alone with Amy. Still chuckling, she complies. Once they are alone in the drawing room, Quentin kneels and touches Amy’s face, assuring her that he is “not that Quentin Collins.” David Selby brought immense charm to the role of Quentin, so this scene isn’t as revolting as it might have been, but it is still pretty bad, and we can’t be surprised that Amy is not satisfied.
Amy goes to the village of Collinsport to seek guidance from her spiritual advisor. He is a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time who usually takes the form of a very tall young man. When he first assumed that form, he invited people to “Call me Jabe,” but no one did. They call him “Jeb” instead, and he answers to it.
Jabe lives in a room above Megan and Philip’s antique shop, and when Amy enters the shop she finds him looking after the place. Apparently shape-shifting monsters from beyond space and time aren’t above doing a little work in retail now and then. She tells Jabe about her encounter with Quentin, and then tells him about a dream she had. In the dream, she went into the long-disused room where she and David first met Quentin. Quentin’s theme song, a sickly little waltz, was playing; she exclaims “It was terrible!” Longtime viewers know the feeling. The tune played incessantly during the “Haunting of Collinwood” period, and when they went back to 1897 characters kept complaining to the living Quentin that he was making them miserable by playing it on his phonograph all the time.
In the dream, Quentin appeared to Amy wearing the nineteenth century clothing and the angry scowl that he wore when he was a ghost. But when he was a ghost, he never spoke words the audience could hear. The only exception was a dream sequence in #767, when Quentin’s ghost spoke to David. That was also the only other dream sequence to be presented as this one is, in flashback as the dreamer is recounting it after the fact. That sequence marked a watershed, the first attempt to explain how Quentin the cranky ghost emerged from Quentin the charming scoundrel we had got to know in the 1897 segment.
This episode, also, has to do with the relationship between these two iterations of Quentin. Amy tells Jabe that Quentin’s ghost in the dream warned her against him by name, and says that she is therefore convinced that the living man she met in the drawing room today is in some way identical to the ghost who haunted the house for those ten months. Amy’s dream marks the final appearance of Quentin’s ghost, but we can see the ghost will not be forgotten.
A state police investigator named Lawrence Guthrie is in town looking into two murders Jabe has committed, those of Carolyn’s father Paul and of a law enforcement officer whose gravestone revealed that his given name was “Sheriff Davenport” (we never learn what Mr Davenport’s title was.) Jabe orders Philip to kill Guthrie. Philip calls Guthrie and asks him to come to the antique shop when Jabe will be out. Once Guthrie is there, Philip tells him that the upstairs room where Jabe stays is an important part of the story of the murders. He shows Guthrie into the room. He stays outside, and locks Guthrie in. Guthrie encounters Jabe there in his true form; Jabe kills him. This is quite effectively handled. My wife, Mrs Acilius, was completely caught off guard by the killing. She believed Philip really was trying to break free of the Leviathan cult, and wondered what Guthrie was supposed to find in the room.
Neither Jabe nor Philip is an especially well-developed character, but Christopher Bernau and Christopher Pennock were both fine actors, and they play off each other very well today. It is a tribute to their performances that Guthrie’s death scene comes as a surprise.
At the end, Quentin is at Collinwood trying to tell Carolyn that it was Jabe who killed her father and Mr S. Davenport. Inexplicably, Carolyn is interested in dating Jabe, and is unwilling to listen to this. Jabe bursts in and announces that there has been another murder, that the murderer is in custody, and that he has confessed to it and to the killings of Paul and Sheriff. That murderer, Jabe says, is Philip. That’s another surprise- after the murder of Guthrie, Jabe did tell Philip that he had another task to perform, and once we hear that he has confessed to the killings it makes perfect sense that that would have been what Jabe meant. But I don’t think anyone could have predicted it. It makes for a strong ending.
Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day is a lovely little bit of fanfic proceeding from the assumption that Lawrence Guthrie is the brother of Dr Peter Guthrie, the parapsychologist whom undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins killed in March 1967.
The closing credits again misspell writer Violet Welles’ name as “Wells.” They started doing that last week, around the same time the misspelling of wardrobe house Ohrbach’s as “Orhbach’s,” a frequent goof in the show’s first year, reappeared after a long absence.
Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins comes home shortly after dawn and finds that the window of his front parlor has been smashed in. Entering the house, he finds two young men passed out. He knows both of these men, and knows that neither is what he seems to be. The taller of them, who once asked to be called Jabe, is in his true form an indescribable monster from beyond space and time, the harbinger of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who mean to retake the Earth and destroy humankind. The other, Chris Jennings, is a werewolf. The Leviathans are vulnerable to werewolves, and Barnabas realizes that Chris reverted to his human form when the sun rose, just as he was about to kill Jabe.
Chris comes to, and Barnabas hustles him out of the house. He then wakes Jabe. He tells Jabe that he fought the werewolf off, killing it and saving Jabe’s life. Barnabas was the original leader of a cult devoted to serving the Leviathans, but has since become disaffected. Jabe had seen evidence of this, and set out for Barnabas’ house meaning to punish him for his disloyalty. But by the time the werewolf chased him into the house he was crying out for Barnabas to help him, so he is ready to believe the story. Taking credit for things he had nothing to do with is one of Barnabas’ core competencies, so it is no surprise to longtime viewers that Jabe decides that he can trust Barnabas after all.
Barnabas’ ex-wife Angelique is now married to a man named Sky Rumson. She does not believe that Sky knows anything about her past or about anything supernatural, but the audience has seen over the last few episodes that he is an agent of the Leviathans. Angelique put Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn up in a house she and Sky have on an island to help Barnabas in his fight against the Leviathans while Sky was away on a business trip. At the end of that trip, Sky called to ask Angelique to pick him up at an airport far from the island house. When she got to the airport, she found he had already left. She wound up spending several hours alone on the road. Returning viewers know that Sky’s call was a trick to get her away from the house so Jabe could come and have his way with Carolyn. We also know that Jabe chickened out of his evil plan when he actually saw Carolyn, and that she is fine now.
Angelique comes home from her long wild goose chase and asks Sky what happened. He said he had an important phone call coming at the house, so he had to leave early. Angelique accepts this surprisingly easily. Barnabas shows up to take Carolyn home. He and Sky meet. After Barnabas is gone, Sky asks what the deal is with Carolyn. He presses the point, and Angelique tells him everything she knows about Barnabas and the Leviathans, including that he is now “their most dedicated enemy and he means to use every power he has to stop them.”
This scene is bad news for Barnabas, but it is worse for the audience’s image of Angelique. She used to be a wicked witch of vast destructive power, and was supposed to be the ultimate Soap Opera Vixen. But you wouldn’t have to be a witch, or even a vixen, to avoid the situation Angelique puts herself in. Leaving the airport when he knew she was on the way was a colossal act of thoughtlessness, and no husband who committed it could expect to hear a word from his wife about anything else for at least a week. After that, there will be a long period when she will have an unanswerable source of material to keep him off his guard any time he tries to bring up topics she doesn’t want to discuss. By the time Sky is able to start asking questions about why Angelique had Carolyn spend the night, it will probably be another full moon.
That isn’t even the worst of it. Angelique believes that Sky is simply a denizen of the sunlit world known to us in our everyday experience and explained well by science, and she further believes that he sees her in the same way. That makes it all but impossible for her to tell him what she tells him here. She launches right in with “the Leviathans, they’re terribly dangerous creatures, completely evil and they mean to start a whole new society.” If he really were a total naïf in supernatural matters, this story would lead him to pick up the telephone and call the men in the white coats to come and take Angelique to a place where she could get a good long rest.
I don’t think Angelique’s scene with Sky could have worked in any case, but Geoffrey Scott’s limitations as an actor make it even worse than it had to be. He underacted so severely that he could hardly be said to be giving a performance at all. That makes a stark contrast with Lara Parker, who as Angelique fully embraced the hyper-intense Dark Shadows house style of acting, which, in honor of her own hilarious explanation of it, is sometimes known as “Go back to your grave!” That contrast is interesting at a technical level. It goes a long way towards explaining what Orson Welles meant when he said that hamminess was not overacting, but false acting. Parker goes as far over the top as she can, but there is rarely anything false about Angelique, while every tinny note Scott strikes in his flat recitation of his lines is thoroughly fake.
A charismatic actor might have been wasted as Sky, as Parker is wasted today. But the audience might have been able to meet the show halfway if we could believe that Sky was so fascinating to Angelique that she didn’t realize what she was saying. As it is, Scott looks so much like he is modeling menswear for the Sears catalogue that it is always a bit of a surprise when he moves and speaks. However much Angelique might enjoy Sky’s company, it never occurs to us that he would be a match for her in any sense.
Sky goes to Jabe and repeats what Angelique told him about Barnabas. There is an exchange which looks fine in print, but which Scott’s delivery makes sound like a blooper:
JABE: So everything he told me this morning was a lie! And I thought he had saved my life!
SKY: Evidently, everything he told you was a lie.
You would deliver Sky’s line with an emphasis on “everything,” as would I, as would anyone else. But Scott emphasizes “Evidently” and pauses slightly after “you,” making it sound as if he hadn’t heard Jabe. For a fraction of a second, you can see the amazement in Christopher Pennock’s face as he reacts to this clanger.
Jabe carries a cage with him as he goes to an old graveyard. The camera locks in on him in closeup as he shouts that, while death might be an adequate punishment for a mere murderer, Barnabas must suffer “More! MORE! MO-O-O-ORE!!!” More, more, more, how do you like it, how do you like it….
The first time I saw this scene, I regarded it as a low point- I imagined someone tuning in to Dark Shadows for the first time at that moment, and instantly turning it off, believing ever after that only people of an extremely low mentality could like the show. I still think it’s pretty embarrassing writing, but having seen him in other roles I’ve come to realize that Pennock was in fact a good actor and that as Jabe he was saddled with an impossible task. Also, I’ve seen video of him on panels of original cast members at Dark Shadows conventions, and it is obvious that he was as sweet as Jabe is vicious. So watching the scene today, I ignored Jabe and looked at Christopher Pennock, studying his face to see what he was thinking as he struggled to find a way to give the audience something worth their while.
Jabe makes an incantation, and a bat comes flying to him. He catches it in the cage. We get a closeup of the bat puppet in the cage, which looks very much like a humane trap from Havahart. We know that Jabe plans to use the bat to make Barnabas back into a vampire, which he was for 172 years, but the realistic cage and the adorable little puppet prevent the situation from generating any terror. Dan Curtis said that when he was producing Dark Shadows, his young daughters used to urge him to make the show more frightening. When we were chuckling at the sight of the bat today, Mrs Acilius imitated a child saying “Make it scary, Daddy!”
In May and June of 1967, vampire Barnabas Collins held Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, prisoner. He drank her blood, tortured her, and drove her insane. When Maggie escaped, he turned his attentions to well-meaning governess Vicki Winters. Maggie’s imprisonment was the storyline that first made Dark Shadows a hit, but it was bleak and often difficult to watch, and if its horrors had shortly after been reenacted with Vicki as the victim many viewers would likely have given up on the show. So Barnabas decided that he wanted Vicki to come to him of her own will. That avoided the problem, but left the show stuck in a rut. For the next several months, Barnabas did not have a coherent goal. Since he was the main figure in the A story, that left Dark Shadows spinning in circles.
They escaped from that rut in November 1967, when Vicki went back in time to the 1790s. The audience followed her there, and we found out how Barnabas first became a vampire. He had fallen afoul of wicked witch Angelique. Angelique wanted Barnabas to love her. Since her enormous powers were explicitly shown to include the ability to make people fall in love with each other, we wondered why she didn’t simply use that ability on Barnabas. They answered that question by having Angelique declare that she wanted him to come to her of his own will. She tried to attract his love by casting a series of spells on everyone around him, spells that resulted in death and ruin for the people he most cared about. When Barnabas found out what was going on and tried to kill Angelique, she turned him into a vampire.
Now it is January 1970, and Barnabas’ vampire curse is in abeyance. A race of Elder Gods called the Leviathan People are trying to retake the Earth from humankind, and have threatened to reactivate the curse if he does not help them. The Leviathans control a group of people whom they have formed into a cult devoted to their service. The Leviathans have brought a shape-shifting monster to life, and it is written that the monster will marry Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn Collins Stoddard and turn her into a creature like himself.
Angelique has renounced her powers and is trying to live as a mortal woman. The other day, Barnabas asked her to help him protect Carolyn from the Leviathans. Angelique no longer wants anything to do with Barnabas or anyone else from the estate of Collinwood, but she understands the threat the Leviathans pose and is willing to help Barnabas against them, provided she can do so without losing what she has in her current life. Barnabas arranged for Carolyn and her mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, to hide out at Angelique’s house while he tried to figure out a way of fighting the monster. Liz is a dedicated member of the cult, and believes Barnabas to be its faithful leader, so when Barnabas told her to take Carolyn to Angelique’s she complied at once.
Unknown to Angelique, her husband, hard-charging businessman Sky Rumson, is himself a member of the Leviathan cult. Thursday, he telephoned the monster and told him Carolyn was at the house; Friday he opened the door to the monster, and the monster went to Carolyn. Today, the monster decides that he will not impose the transformation on Carolyn after all. Instead, he will wait for her to come to him of her own will. This keeps the story from ending here, but it makes it unclear where it can go.
The monster’s decision poses a deeper problem for him as a presence on the show than the similar decisions did for Barnabas and Angelique. They pursued identifiable goals, and were influenced by thoughts and feelings they had while they interacted with others. The only goal the monster has is to take possession of Carolyn, and now it is unclear what that means. Nor is anything at stake for him in any encounter with another person. He keeps saying that he doesn’t need anyone, and that seems to be true- there is no reason to pay attention to him in any scene. He has, in short, been established not as a character at all, but simply as a function. All he has ever been is Threat. Now that he has decided to be nice to Carolyn, he will no longer even fulfill that function. His future would appear to be quite limited.
Sky also appears to be a short-timer. When Dark Shadows started, one of its most dynamic characters was hard-charging businessman Burke Devlin, played ably by the charismatic Mitchell Ryan. Despite all of Ryan’s magnetism, they could never come up with anything very interesting for Burke to do. Hard-charging businessman just isn’t a type they have much use for. They signal that Sky won’t be around long by casting Geoffrey Scott in the role. Scott was very handsome and would go on to a long career on screen, but in early 1970 he did not appear to have any skills of any kind as an actor. Not only does he deliver his dialogue as if he were reading a series of nonsense syllables aloud, but he is noticeably bad at hitting his mark. For example, on Friday Sky at one point backed away from Carolyn during a conversation. He took a step too far, with the result that his rear end was a few inches from a hearth with a vigorously burning fire. It was hard not to watch the seat of his pants and wait for it to ignite. There were times when they cast actors who still needed a lot of training and kept them around for quite a while, but Scott was at this point in his career so amazingly inept that it is hard to imagine they meant to use him for anything more than the decorative value his good looks offered.
Liz is at home in the great house of Collinwood when a man she has not seen before appears on the walkway above the foyer and starts giving her orders. He comes down and introduces himself to her by the name Bruno. He shows her that he is wearing a ring that identifies him as a member of the Leviathan cult. Liz says that he must have come to give her instructions. He confirms that this is so.
A howling resounds outside, and Bruno asks Liz about it. She tells him that she long ago met a wolf-like creature in the woods, and she suspects the howling comes from that creature. Returning viewers know that the Leviathans are vulnerable to werewolves and that the monster is terrified of them. Bruno knows this too, so he goes out to hunt for it.
The monster, in the form of a tall young man, comes to the great house to introduce himself to Liz. She is concerned when he tells her to stop taking orders from Barnabas, but delighted when he says that Carolyn has a future with “us.” Carolyn telephones from Angelique’s house, and Liz puts the monster on the phone.
Carolyn is all smiles when she is talking to the monster. They’ve met a few times, and he has been nothing but a jerk to her. She had objected to his behavior, and his responses had ranged from frightening to slimy. That she is all of a sudden attracted to him undercuts her character almost as badly as nerfing his threat to her undercuts his position on the show.
After the phone call, Bruno returns. He tells the monster he couldn’t find the werewolf. The monster declares that he will go to the Old House on the estate to confront Barnabas, whom he labels a traitor. Bruno points out that it is almost daybreak, and if he waits just a little while he will not be in danger from the werewolf. The monster says that it is too important to wait.
The werewolf chases the monster through the woods. By the time the monster gets to the Old House, he is shouting for Barnabas, the “traitor” he was planning to deal with, to come and help him. Barnabas is nowhere to be seen, and we end with the werewolf bursting through the window. The werewolf got a few closeups earlier in the episode, when he was nosing around in the woods. These always make him look like a cute widdle doggie. If they hadn’t given us those ridiculous images, his entrance through the window might have been a genuinely scary moment.
Carolyn’s scene at the beginning involves a couple of notable wardrobe-related points. She went to bed Friday fully dressed, even wearing shoes, and is still that way when she is back in bed today. Several times we have seen men go to bed shoes and all, but usually the women wear nighties. I think this is the first time we have seen a shod woman asleep in bed.
Carolyn falls on her back in the opening reprise. She is wearing a very short skirt, and this fall exposes her underwear. She is lying on the bed in several subsequent shots, and it must have taken some doing to keep the undies from making another unscheduled guest appearance.
Dark Shadows Commentary 
