Dark Shadows never followed the usual soap opera pattern of a week building to a slam-bang conclusion on a Friday. This one is a case in point. It aired on a Friday, and nothing new happens.
The actors are all very good, and each makes the most of their time on screen today. As child Amy Collins and drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, Denise Nickerson and David Selby do a good job reacting to the ghost of someone named Dameon Edwards, which they saw yesterday. As sleazy musician Bruno Hess and sneaky butler Mr Trask, Michael Stroka and Jerry Lacy do a good job being alarmed by the prospect that Dameon has returned to expose their guilty secrets. As mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, Christopher Pennock does a good job failing to perceive the consequences of his lunatic scheme. And as Cyrus’ blindly devoted assistant/ fiancée Sabrina Stuart, Lisa Blake Richards does a good job being trusting and optimistic.
I’ll just single out one moment, when Bruno sees his piano playing with the touch of visible fingers and realizes it is Dameon’s doing. Michael Stroka gives a memorable take.
If the piano starts playing itself, Bruno’s going to be out of a job.
Cyrus drinks the potion he has formulated to turn himself from a mild-mannered Jekyll into a brutish Hyde. As her did the first time we saw him do this, he cries out in pain and collapses. This time they add a lot of flaring green lights to illustrate his distress. The process is not effective at all- at first, I thought something had gone wrong with one of the cameras. At the end of the sequence, we fade from Pennock in his Cyrus look to him in his Hyde makeup, which we didn’t see the first time. The shot doesn’t line up, so it does not create the illusion of a transformation, and the prosthetic nose isn’t very firmly attached, so it takes a second to realize that it is supposed to be part of his face and not just something that landed on him while he was falling.
Quentin Collins, master of the estate of Collinwood, is in an even grimmer mood than usual. His new wife, the former Maggie Evans, has left him after only a week in the great house. She had had all she was going to take of his patronizing attitude towards her and of everyone else’s preoccupation with his first wife, the late Angelique Stokes Collins. Maggie was particularly satiated with Quentin’s houseguest, Angelique’ unmarried identical twin sister, Alexis Stokes. Maggie had found Alexis in Angelique’s bedroom, wearing Angelique’s frilly nightgown, and reaching out to Quentin while suggesting in a soft voice that “Perhaps we can comfort each other.” When that sight moved Maggie to voice objections to the situation, Quentin responded by forbidding her, for her own good no less, from mentioning Angelique’s name ever again. He was amazed that this led Maggie to leave the house. Considering the provocation, it is indeed amazing that Quentin did not require medical attention to remove his brandy decanter from whatever part of his anatomy Maggie could reach.
We open today with Quentin and Alexis back in Angelique’s room. She is fully dressed this time, but they are sitting together on the piano bench. They move their heads together, and lock their lips in a passionate kiss.
Returning viewers know that we are visiting a universe parallel to the one in which the action was based for its first 196 weeks of the show. Angelique’s counterpart in the main continuity is a wicked witch who has returned from the dead quite a few times, so when we first crossed over here and heard her devotees saying that they were sure their Angelique would find a way to come back to life we did not doubt that they were right. Maggie wants nothing to do with Angelique or the cult she built up around herself, but she is among those who are convinced that Alexis is in fact Angelique redivivus. The show has done an excellent job keeping us guessing whether she is or isn’t, and we will still be guessing when we come to the end of today’s episode.
Alexis pulls away from Quentin and is visibly upset. He apologizes for kissing her. She says that she is disappointed in him- she had thought that he, of all people would know that she is not Angelique returned from the grave. He says he does not think that she is. We can believe him- his counterpart in the main continuity usually had two or three fiancées at a time, and they were rarely his only love interests. So he wouldn’t have to believe Alexis was Angelique, or indeed that she was anyone in particular, to start a make-out session with her. After they clear the air, she agrees to stay on in the house until she can meet Quentin and Angelique’s son, her nephew Daniel Collins, who is on a trip at the moment.
Bruno, Sabrina, Cyrus, Gladstone, and the Bunny
Quentin and Alexis aren’t the only ones dealing with frustrated sexual desire. We cut from them to a closeup of a bunny. This universally recognized symbol of amorous enthusiasm is alone in a cage.
The episode originally aired on the second Tuesday of Easter 1970, maybe the bunny was resting up after his big day.
The cage is in a laboratory. A young woman in a lab coat is trying to work on a large apparatus for chemical experimentation while a man wearing a purple suit, a low cut shirt, a large medallion, and a huge bouffant hairdo is pestering her with clumsy attempts at flirting. She keeps laughing off his verbal gambits and swatting away his physical approaches.
A tall young man in a lab coat enters and calls out a booming “Sabrina!” The lounge lizard and the experimenter stand up straighter and step away from each other. Returning viewers know the tall man as aspiring mad scientist Cyrus Longworth and the ill-clad masher as Bruno Hess, musician and hanger-on of the late Angelique. We have not seen the woman before, but we recognize the actress as Lisa Blake Richards, who played another woman named Sabrina in the main continuity. That Sabrina was trapped in a go-nowhere storyline. Before today is done we will have grounds to hope that this one will give Miss Richards a task more in keeping with her considerable talents.
Cyrus sends Sabrina upstairs to wait for a package. Bruno gets ready for his part in Cyrus’ experiment, which involves giving a blood sample. Bruno asks Cyrus why he was so calm when he saw him trying to put the moves on Sabrina. Cyrus replies that he trusts Sabrina too much to worry that Bruno could come between them. He then jabs the syringe into Bruno’s arm with great force and without even looking at the spot from which he is drawing the sample, causing Bruno to jump. He may trust Sabrina, but he wants Bruno to know who’s boss.
Bruno tries to interest Cyrus in his theory that Alexis is Angelique returned from the grave. He eventually manages to get Cyrus to give him a quizzical look, but stops at that point, saying that if Cyrus won’t explain his experiment, he won’t explain his.
Sabrina comes downstairs and says that the package has come and that its bearer insists on meeting Cyrus himself. Cyrus is annoyed by this, but when it develops that the man is Mr Horace Gladstone himself, the very chemist who devised the unusual compound he has brought, Cyrus sends Sabrina back upstairs and Bruno out the basement door so that he can meet with the man alone.
Friday, Cyrus explained to his friend Chris that he is trying to devise a process for separating a human being into two parts, one good and the other evil. His scenes with Chris hit all the obligatory mad scientist notes, right down to disparaging non-mad scientists as unimaginative dolts who may as well believe that the Earth is flat. He won’t tell Gladstone what he is trying to do, perhaps because he has the same last name as did the man who was prime minister of the UK when Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was first published and so he reminds him that he is a character in a derivative storyline. But Gladstone does warn Cyrus that the compound he has purchased is a potent and dangerous one. Gladstone hints at the nature of the hazard when he says that he stepped back from active research when he feared that, even within the bounds of chemistry, he was about to uncover truths best left unknown.
Gladstone is played by John Harkins, in his fourth role on Dark Shadows. As before, he is playing a stranger from far away. In #174, he played Lieutenant Costa of the Arizona State Police. We saw him in a scene set in Phoenix, the first time Dark Shadows took us outside the northeastern USA. We did not leave that region again until #877, when sorcerer Count Petofi thought back to an incident in England in 1885, when he first met his henchman Aristide. Like Bruno, Aristide was played by Michael Stroka. The incident in England involved a man named Garth Blackwood, whom Petofi would bring back from the dead to punish Aristide. Blackwood was played by Harkins.
Harkins’ third character came from even further away than Arizona or England. He was Mr Strak, the representative of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods long confined to the underworld. Strak appeared to Paul Stoddard in #899 and #900, and tricked Paul into selling his daughter Carolyn to the Leviathans. So far as Paul was concerned, Strak came from nowhere and disappeared to nowhere, so that he could never hope to explain to anyone what he had done, still less find a way to challenge the terms of the deal.
Gladstone is from Boston. Dark Shadows is set near the real-world location of Bar Harbor, Maine. The characters often mention Boston, but we’ve never had a scene set there. In #363, the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins was perfectly bland when her friend, strange and troubled boy David, said he had been to China. Sarah said that her father and his business associates were always sailing to China. When David told Sarah that he was joking and he had actually gone to Boston, Sarah was thrilled. She had been to Boston herself once, and considered it a far more exotic place than China could possibly be. Gordon Russell was credited with the script for #363, and Joe Caldwell, the freshly returned author of today’s script, had finished his first tour of duty on the show three weeks before it was taped. But Sarah’s excitement about Boston is so much the kind of character moment Caldwell specialized in that I suspect it was a leftover idea of his that Russell found a place for. Perhaps the casting of Harkins as a Hub man reflects Caldwell’s idea of what Boston would represent to people in a coastal village in central Maine.
Bruno and Alexis
We cut to Bruno, who is on the telephone. He is talking to a person in an office somewhere. He learns that no ships from Genoa have docked in New York in the last week. This information excites him, but his excitement soon gives way to terror as he feels himself choking.
Bruno runs into Angelique’s bedroom, where Alexis is back on the piano bench. He gasps and demands she stop obstructing his breathing. She appears to have no idea what he is talking about.
The Angelique we have known since late 1967 did specialize in casting spells that made her enemies choke. We saw her do that as recently as #955, when her husband tried to set fire to her and she stopped him by twisting a scarf around the neck of a statue. On the other hand, Alexis seems genuinely bewildered by the situation.
When Bruno starts breathing again, he confronts her with the fact that no registered passenger ships from Genoa arrived in New York harbor the week before. She asks him if he considered that she might have been a guest on the yacht of some wealthy friends. He is stumped by this. Again, this keeps the suspense about her true identity alive. Alexis has been established as the sort of person who would be found on someone else’s yacht, but she doesn’t actually say that that is how she got back to the States. She merely asks Bruno if he had thought of the possibility that she may have done so.
Cyrus and Sabrina
Back in the lab, we see Sabrina collecting some equipment while Cyrus tends to his notes. She finds a small box, and asks him if he put it there for her to find. When he says he did, she opens it and finds a ring. She asks if it is an engagement ring. He says he hopes it is. She throws her arms around him and tells him she loves him. He holds her and does not say that he loves her too. He merely says that she knows how he feels about her, an ill-omen if ever we saw one.
Cyrus tells Sabrina that she knows how completely his work consumes his energies, and she says that is one of the things she admires about him. She asks what exactly he is working on. He is reticent, and she tries to walk the question back. He goes into his mad scientist ravings, and she gives him a stunned look. He tries to reassure her, saying that when he gets carried away he talks in cliches. He says that no one has found good or evil in a test tube… “yet!” The crazed gleam comes back into his eyes.
Sabrina is shocked by Cyrus’ ravings
This scene gives Miss Richards more to work with than she had had in her whole time in the main continuity. The look Sabrina gives at the end of Cyrus’ gust of lunacy is the first time she has had a chance to get a laugh, and she makes the most of it. As for Christopher Pennock, he had just been getting the hang of his previous part, hugely overgrown infant Jeb Hawkes, when he was written out. With Cyrus, he can to some extent pick up where he left off. Pennock had begun to find a way to suggest that there was a real sweetness bottled up inside one-man wrecking crew Jeb, and in Cyrus’ love for Sabrina he can play a character who is Jeb’s mirror image- abundantly sweet, but so deep inside his own head that he is about to become a monster.
Bruno
On Dark Shadows, wedding days usually come and go without anyone actually getting married. Typically, the ceremony is interrupted and someone has to go off and dig up a grave, in which they find an empty coffin.
Bruno has no manners and does not observe any of the recognized customs. So even though today is Sabrina and Cyrus’ engagement day, not their wedding day, he jumps the gun and starts opening Angelique’s grave, in which he believes he will find an empty coffin. We end with him chiseling at the wall of the mausoleum. I suppose you could say that he might be planning to work slowly, so that he won’t finish until the day of the wedding, but even if that were true it would be an outright violation of the accepted norm, and an undeniable sign that he is not the sort of person who can be expected to fit in at Collinwood.
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.
Wicked witch Angelique made her first appearance in #368/369, set in the year 1795. We first saw Angelique when she entered the doors of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, working as a lady’s maid and hiding her powers.
Today, it is 1970 and Angelique is back in the Old House. Her ex-husband, vampire Barnabas Collins, has summoned her and asked her to lift a curse she placed on Jabe, the husband of his distant cousin Carolyn. Barnabas tells Angelique that her quarrel was never with Jabe, but with suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Earlier in the episode we had seen Angelique and Nicholas having a discussion about how much they hate each other. He taunted her by claiming she has not changed in the last 200 years. When Barnabas invites Angelique to redirect her wrath towards Nicholas, she perks up. She orders Barnabas to fetch Carolyn’s husband and leave him alone in the Old House with her.
Angelique sits by the fire with Jabe and explains that she cannot simply liquidate the curse. It must end with someone’s death. But the good news is that it does not have to be his death. He can transfer it to someone else. He says he doesn’t want to kill anyone. She tells him that the person she has in mind is Nicholas. Suddenly he’s all ears as she explains the process for handing the curse over.
Angelique finds the limit of Jabe’s newfound reverence for life. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Longtime viewers know that Nicholas was quite wrong to say Angelique has never changed. She was monomaniacal and utterly narcissistic in 1795. She wasn’t so very different when we next saw her in 1968, though the show’s pace was a bit slower at that point and so Lara Parker was free to play her with more nuance. That made a difference that the show underlined early in 1969, when Barnabas took a brief trip back in time to the 1790s and ran into Angelique as she was when first we knew her. Even though they were still enemies in 1968, they occasionally had to tell each other the truth, and occasionally had to leave each other alone to fight other adversaries. The unbending hostility the eighteenth century version of Angelique showed Barnabas startled him and us after we had seen the relatively circumspect approach she took to conducting a cold war against him.
Throughout most of 1969, Dark Shadows was set in 1897. Angelique showed up then, and she remembered the events of 1968. Barnabas and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, were there as time travelers. Julia actually befriended Angelique, and Angelique became Barnabas’ ally in the battles he attempted to wage in that period. Angelique even let go of her erotic obsession with Barnabas, transferring her affections to his distant cousin Quentin Collins.
After the show came back to contemporary dress, Julia stumbled upon Angelique. She found that Angelique had sworn not to use her powers, had married a man who made her happy, and had lost all interest in Barnabas or anyone else at Collinwood. She was as relaxed and attentive to others as in 1795 she had been frantic and self-absorbed. Only after it turned out the same supernatural enemies Barnabas and Julia were fighting had corrupted her husband did Angelique start casting spells again, and then in pursuit of more rational, identifiable goals than she had ever sought in the eighteenth century.
That arc of character development ends with this episode. We will see Lara Parker as several more characters up to and beyond the end of the series, some of them named Angelique, but none of whom went through the transformations we have seen.
Today also marks the final appearances of werewolf Chris Jennings and his girlfriend Sabrina Stuart. Evidently the makers of the show planned to bring them back in a few months, after an upcoming story plays out, but by that time actor Don Briscoe was unable to work. He had bipolar personality disorder and tried to self-medicate with street drugs.
Quentin was such a big hit in 1897 that they had a magic spell put on him that immunized him against aging and brought him intact to the contemporary setting. Today, Barnabas takes Quentin to a room in the long disused east wing of Collinwood where you can occasionally catch glimpses of an alternate universe. The effect manifests while they are looking in, then winks out, leaving the dark, bare room that is in that space in their universe. Once that happens, Barnabas announces “You have just seen Parallel Time.” Those of us who have been watching from the beginning know that he got the line wrong. You’re supposed to say “Parallel Time is a Dan Curtis Production.”
An information management day. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has told his distant cousin, Roger Collins, about a parallel universe that is occasionally visible in a room in the long disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood. Today, Roger tells his sister Elizabeth about the room. Liz owns the house. We might wonder if she will have questions about what effect the presence of a spare universe on the premises will have on her property taxes.
Roger talks about the phenomenon while standing in the room with permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. He is incredulous when he notices that Julia is not listening to him. She cannot tell him what has distracted her. Unknown to Roger and Liz, Barnabas is a vampire. Julia has devised a treatment that is supposed to put this curse in remission, but it is not working at all. She has given him the last of the injections, and the only difference in Barnabas is that he is getting sick and feeling an unusually intense bloodlust.
Caretaker Chris Jennings, another distant cousin, comes stumbling home to his cottage on the grounds of the estate. He finds his girlfriend and ex-fiancée Sabrina Stuart waiting for him. Chris is another patient Julia has been unable to help. He is a werewolf. There was a full moon last night. Sabrina tells Chris he killed a man named Bruno. Chris is distressed that he killed anyone, but Sabrina points out that Bruno knew of his secret and was trying to use him to kill others. He was holding her and a man named Rumson prisoner, and when the police searched Bruno’s premises after his death they found Sabrina and Rumson imprisoned there. Sabrina keeps telling Chris she wants to marry him. Most of the time they will live ordinary lives, but one night out of 28 she will just have to lock him up in a special cell. Chris won’t hear of this.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, is a great one for love stories and an admirer of actress Lisa Blake Richards. Chris and Sabrina have run out of road on Dark Shadows, and are obviously going to be written out soon. Mrs Acilius wishes they could ride off into the sunset accompanied by the sound of wedding bells. So when Chris refused to marry Sabrina, she exclaimed “Stupid man!” I pointed out something Chris knows but does not mention to Sabrina, that his curse is hereditary. Any male descendants he has will also be werewolves. Mrs A conceded that this does complicate matters.
Roger saw Chris at Bruno’s place when he rescued him and Carolyn shortly before moonrise last night. Chris was at that time in the throes that precede his transformation. Chris ran off before Roger or Carolyn could see what became of him. Roger comes to the cottage to check on him.
Chris is in the back changing out of his bloody clothes, so Sabrina answers the door. She tells Roger that Chris is there and that she was with him all night, watching over him because he was ill. After what he saw of Chris at Bruno’s, Roger has no doubt that Chris needed a nurse, and he tells Sabrina that he is glad he had such a charming one. The audience can understand that Sabrina wants to conceal Chris’ lycanthropy from Roger, but surely it cannot be wise for her to claim that she was in the cottage overnight. Not only are her true whereabouts known to everyone who was in or around the police station the night before, but since Roger was the one who found Bruno’s body and he found it on the grounds of Collinwood, even police as inept as the ones in Collinsport are likely to follow up with him. Besides, her imprisonment with Rumson is a sensational story, of interest to the press. Maybe we will move on to the next phase of the show before the facts come to light, but Sabrina can’t know that.
Sabrina is determined to persuade Chris to resume their engagement. She goes to the one person whose opinion Chris seems to respect, Barnabas. When she knocks on his door, Barnabas hides behind a partition. When Sabrina first arrived, she had seen Barnabas through the window of his front parlor, so she lets herself in. He finally gives up on hiding and pleads with her to leave. She ignores what he is saying and keeps talking. She plows ahead with her idea about how Barnabas can help her and Chris become a happy married couple. Barnabas struggles to resist his urge for blood, but cannot. He bites Sabrina, much to her surprise. Miss Richards’ understated exclamation of “Barnabas!” when he shows his fangs and goes for her neck is very nicely done, it really sounds like a woman puzzled that a trusted friend is violating her personal space.
Sabrina staggers back to Chris’ cottage. She collapses in his chair, and he sees the puncture wounds on her neck. They are much bigger than the marks we’ve seen on Barnabas’ previous victims. I suppose he really was a lot hungrier than usual. Chris doesn’t know that Barnabas is a vampire, and the cliffhanger leaves us wondering whether he can avoid finding out.
Probably the most memorable shot in the episode is a very impressive bit of videotape editing. Roger and Barnabas are standing at the door to the Parallel Time room, watching Roger’s counterpart interact with Liz’ and Chris’. Parallel Roger walks toward the door. He exits the room, not into the space Roger and Barnabas occupy, but into the hallway as it exists in Parallel Time. He vanishes from their view, and the effect also winks out in the room, leaving Roger and Barnabas looking into the bare, dark chamber it is in the house they know.
A werewolf is prowling through the woods on the great estate of Collinwood, and Sabrina Stuart, a young woman with white hair, sees him. She knows that when the moon is not full, the werewolf is her ex-fiancé Chris Jennings. She screams at the sight of him. This would be an understandable reaction if the werewolf were scary looking, but since he is a man whose face and hands are covered with hairy makeup appliances while the rest of him is wearing clothes, he is a just cute little doggie who might like a bickie. Television, they say, is a visual medium; that means that the images you put on the screen will stimulate the audience’s imaginations. If you are telling a story about a monster, you must show only enough of him to get them to wonder what terrible things he might do. Once you’ve shown so much that they start to laugh, you’re sunk.
Sabrina composes herself, and tries to reason with the werewolf. He stands there listening to her attentively, being the goodest little boy. This ends when a man emerges from the brush and jumps him. The man shoots the werewolf, who yips and runs away. Sabrina is upset with the man, who is surprised she does not regard him as her rescuer. She identifies herself by name.
The man’s name is Bruno, and he works for another monster, one whom we see only when he is masquerading as a young man. That monster once said he wanted to be called Jabe, but everyone very inconsiderately keeps calling him Jeb instead. Jabe has told Bruno that he is vulnerable to werewolves. Bruno disregarded Jabe’s report that only silver bullets can kill a werewolf, and fired regular ammunition. Jabe is upset about this.
Bruno tells him all is not lost. Since Sabrina was not afraid of the werewolf, his human form must be that of a man to whom she is close. Bruno says Sabrina has a brother, and thinks out loud that he ought to just go ahead and kill him. Regular viewers know that Sabrina’s brother, though he is not a werewolf, is a character played by Roger Davis, so we’re all for Bruno’s idea. But Jabe vetoes it, saying that if a werewolf is killed while in human form he will turn into the wolf and remain in that form forever. That’s new information on Dark Shadows, though there had been so many werewolf movies by 1970 I can’t imagine it was original.
Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins stops by the antique shop where Jabe lives. Barnabas had been the leader of the cult that serves Jabe, but has become disaffected. Jabe knows this. Each wants to kill the other, but neither has been able to make a substantive move. Jabe demands Barnabas do something about the werewolf, in the process exposing his vulnerability. Barnabas is friendly with Chris and knows all about him, so this exposure makes it possible for him and Jabe to join battle.
In the closing credits, writer Violet Welles’ name is misspelled “Wells.” Today’s script is not up to her usual standards; maybe “Violet Wells” was her guild-approved pseudonym.
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.
At the end of 1968 and beginning of 1969, two supernatural menaces were growing in tandem. The malign ghost of Quentin Collins was becoming steadily more powerful until it made the estate of Collinwood uninhabitable. As Quentin’s power grew, the curse that made Chris Jennings a werewolf also gained force, so that Chris could no longer be sure of keeping his human form even on nights without a full Moon. By the end of February, the Collins family had evacuated the great house on the estate, and Chris was in his lupine form permanently.
Trying to contact Quentin’s ghost, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins meditated on a set of I Ching wands. To his surprise, Barnabas found himself relocated in time to the year 1897, when he was a vampire and Quentin was a living being. Over the next eight months, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in that year. Barnabas learned that Quentin had been a werewolf, and that he was Chris’ great-grandfather. He also learned that a magical portrait painted by an artist named Charles Delaware Tate had freed Quentin of the effects of the werewolf curse. In #839, we saw that the characters in the 1960s are aware of time passing in Barnabas’ absence; we also saw the haunting of Collinwood break in that episode. The characters remember what happened in the previous episodes, and are relieved that Quentin has found peace and they can now move back into the great house. We did not hear anything about Chris at that time. Last we saw him he was locked up in the hidden chamber inside the old Collins mausoleum in the cemetery north of town. For all we know, he’s still there.
When Barnabas went to the past, his entranced body remained in place sitting before the I Ching wands in the basement of his home, the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. In September, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes were visiting the basement and saw Barnabas’ body vanish before their eyes. Julia then sat down to meditate on the wands, and found herself transported back to 1897. She was there for a couple of weeks, during which time she initiated a treatment for Barnabas like the one that had freed him of the effects of the vampire curse for a while early in 1968. She snapped back to 1969 before the treatment was completed, but other friends of his were able to pick up where Julia left off and finish it successfully.
The portrait of Quentin would appear to have been destroyed in a fire in #883. Some unspecified supernatural agency whisked Barnabas out of the year 1897 at the end of #884, but it did not send him to 1969. Instead, he found himself in 1796, the year he first became a vampire. Amid some sinister doings, Barnabas found himself in a mysterious clearing in the woods where he saw a massive stone structure. Two hooded figures stood by this cairn. He was unable to resist or escape them. He lost consciousness, and they laid him on the cairn. They used it as an altar, covering him with foliage and consecrating him to whatever unknown beings they served. When he awoke, he knew all about the hooded figures and the cult they represented. They greeted him as their master. He spoke a ritual formula, gave some orders, and prepared to leave the eighteenth century.
The Returns
On Tuesday, we saw that Julia has been hanging around the Old House for the five weeks since she returned to 1969. She explained to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard that Barnabas would have to reappear in the place from which he disappeared. So she locked the basement from the outside, evidently expecting to hear Barnabas calling to be let out. There is another way out of the basement, a tunnel from the prison cell there to the beach outside, but Julia must have forgotten about that.
At the opening of today’s episode, we learn that Julia was right about Barnabas reappearing in the place from which he disappeared. But she does not know that the last place the audience saw him was at the cairn. The cairn opens, and Barnabas materializes in front of it. He delivers an incantation, and goes on his way.
We cut to the great house at Collinwood, where Julia is showing Stokes a painting she bought yesterday. It is one of Tate’s works, a landscape painted sometime around 1949. Seeing that Tate was still doing work as good as any he ever did only twenty years ago, Julia wonders if he might still be alive in 1969. Stokes scoffs at this possibility, since Tate would be a hundred years old or more, but Julia is determined to search for him. When Stokes asks why she is so interested, she says that she cannot tell him, because it is a confidential favor she is doing for a friend.
While Stokes knows about the haunting of Collinwood and about Barnabas’ trip back in time, he does not know that Chris is the werewolf. If he did, he would probably turn him in to the police. So Julia can’t very well tell him that she is hoping Tate will be able to paint a portrait that will do for him what Quentin’s portrait did 72 years earlier. Fortunately for her, Stokes readily accepts her refusal to explain herself.
Stokes tells Julia about a project of his own. He says that local physician Dr Reeves has enlisted him to help with a patient. Stokes is a scholar of occult lore, not a clinician or therapist of any kind. Reeves’ decision to enlist Stokes’ aid would admit of either of two possible explanations. It could be something that often happens on soap operas, a genre in which all forms of authority tend to become interchangeable with each other, so that scholars can function as doctors, doctors can function as lawyers, and anyone who dresses up for work can function as a cop. The other possibility is that Reeves has caught on that the village of Collinsport is rife with supernatural phenomena and has decided that Stokes’ expertise might enable him to diagnose his patient. Julia’s amused disbelief when Stokes announces that he is going to see “a patient” counts against the first possibility. She is closer than any other character in the parts of Dark Shadows to a representative of the audience’s point of view, so if she is still aware of Stokes as someone whose competence is limited to a specific field we are as well. So we can assume that Dr Reeves has concluded that there is something uncanny about what ails his patient.
Stokes identifies the patient to Julia as Sabrina Stuart, a young woman who, a few years previously, was discovered with a head of white hair and without the ability to speak. He says that he and Reeves have managed to get her to start saying words but that she cannot describe the origin of her trauma. Julia knows that Sabrina’s trouble began when she saw Chris transform into the wolf, and so she is alarmed at the prospect that she will begin talking. She tries to persuade Stokes to give up, but he is nothing daunted.
Stokes exits, and Chris enters. Julia scolds him for having checked himself out of Windcliff, the mental hospital she controls. This is the first we learn that he left the hidden chamber in the mausoleum; it is also the first we learn that he has reverted to human form. He acknowledged that he can change back to the wolf at any time, and that something has to be done, but he can’t take solitary confinement any longer. Longtime viewers, remembering that every time he changes he kills people, will find this to be a stupefyingly selfish decision. It alienates whatever sympathy we may have for Chris.
Chris tells Julia that even if he is cured, he will not be truly free so long as Sabrina is around. He does not say what he plans to do about Sabrina, but if he is willing to commit all the murders that will surely follow from his decision to leave the hospital we can’t help but suspect it won’t be good for her.
We cut to Sabrina’s room in the facility where she is staying. Stokes is providing her with a sort of therapy. The audience will be surprised to see Sabrina again. Sabrina, played by Lisa Blake Richards, appeared in episodes #692, #697, and #698. The show went to 1897 in #701; Miss Richards could easily have been cast in a part in the costume drama segment, but was not. Surely no one could have expected that she would be waiting for us when we returned to contemporary dress, but here she is.
Miss Richards is pleasant enough, but she bears an ill omen. Julia and Stokes talk about Sabrina’s brother Ned, to whom Stokes refers as “a rather surly fellow.” That’s putting it mildly. Not only does he shout at his scene partners and violate their physical space, traits common to all characters played by Roger Davis, but he had a habit of groping his sister’s breasts and rubbing his cheeks on her face. These habits led us to wonder how much of Sabrina’s catatonia was a symptom of the shock of seeing Chris’ transformation and how much was the result of her brother’s constant abuse. Julia is already threatening to bring back Tate, another of Mr Davis’ characters. If Roger Davis winds up playing two parts concurrently, the show might become entirely unwatchable.
Dr Reeves is another character we haven’t seen for a long time. Fred Stewart appeared as Dr Reeves in #17, where he treats Roger Collins after an auto wreck, and in #158, where he examines Elizabeth Collins Stoddard after she has fallen down the stairs. Actors have been returning from long absences lately; Miss Richards’ surprising reappearance today reminds us of all-time champ Alfred Hinckley, unseen since his turn as a train conductor in episode #1, who came back as a doctor in #868, and of John Harkins, who played a policeman in a scene set in Phoenix, Arizona in #174 and returned as a very different law enforcement officer from another faraway place in #878. Perhaps the reference to Dr Reeves means that Stewart will rejoin the cast. Stewart didn’t have much to offer, but I’ll take a thousand of him over one Roger Davis any day.
Be that as it may, what I really wonder about is where writer Gordon Russell found Dr Reeves’ name. Neither he nor any other member of the writing staff was connected with the show when Dr Reeves appeared, and line producer Peter Miner just started three weeks ago. Executive producer Dan Curtis and director Lela Swift were with the show from the beginning, but Curtis was busy getting ready to make the feature film that became House of Dark Shadows at this time, and Swift doesn’t seem to have interacted much with the writers. Even Harriet Rohr, Costello’s assistant who often attended table reads and seems to have helped with continuity, wasn’t around much at this period. So there must have been pieces of paper floating around listing seldom-seen characters and other points of trivia for the writers’ reference. I’m sure fandom would go nuts if those papers ever turned up!
During their therapy session, Sabrina suddenly looks at Stokes and asks him who Carolyn Stoddard is. She then declares that Carolyn is in danger, and demands to meet with her at once.
As it happens, Carolyn dated Chris for a while around New Year’s 1969. Stokes knows Carolyn well enough that he must have been at least dimly aware of this. Ned is obsessed with his hostility to Chris and is rarely far from Sabrina, so Stokes must have heard about Chris and Sabrina’s relationship. But Stokes does not make the connection. He can’t imagine why Sabrina is suddenly talking about Carolyn.
Back at the great house, Chris and Carolyn have a conversation. She is irked that he went away for so long without a word to her. It’s understandable he does not want her to know that he is the werewolf, but why can’t he tell her he was confined to a mental institution? It isn’t as if he is worried about making a good impression on her. On the contrary, everything he says to her is part of his effort to convince her he does not want to renew their relationship.
That terrible beating
By this time, Julia has moved on to her chief concern. She has heard a heartbeat pounding from the portrait of Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house, a sign that he is near. Julia goes to the Old House and finds Barnabas coming down the stairs. She is delighted to see him, but puzzled he is not locked in the basement. He tells her he returned by means of the I Ching. She is sure this cannot be true.
Julia had already returned to 1969 when sorcerer Count Petofi used the I Ching to project himself into that year for a few minutes in #872 and #873 in a way altogether unlike the one Barnabas had used. No one in 1969 saw Petofi while he was then, nor did Barnabas or any of his allies know about the trip. But Julia herself went back to 1897 by yet another radically different I Ching-mediated path, and both of them really ought to be aware that they are dealing with forces that work unpredictably. So it does not make much sense that Julia is so certain whatever it is that is released when one contemplates the I Ching could send Barnabas only to the basement.
Barnabas does not return any of Julia’s warm emotional displays. When she bursts into a smile and hugs him, he stands still and stares icily ahead. This is quite startling to regular viewers, who have seen the two of them grow quite cozy over the last year and a half.
Barnabas also refuses to answer any of Julia’s questions about what happened in the last weeks of the 1897 story. This will be even more startling. Barnabas and Julia gave each other huge amounts of information even when they first met and he saw her as an enemy. Since they became fast friends in the summer of 1968, their conversations have been the heart of the show. The show burned through so much story in the final weeks of the 1897 segment that it brings us up very short when Barnabas declares that he is too tired to talk about any of it. He won’t even say that everything was settled- his only explanation of anything is that he returned because he wanted to. For all he tells Julia today, their enemies might have triumphed completely in 1897.
While Julia is looking at him, Barnabas picks up a box that he has placed on the mantel. This seems to be a way of calling her attention to it, so she politely asks what it is. He becomes flustered and demands she disregard it. Returning viewers know that it is the one thing he brought with him from his encounter with the hooded figures in 1796. In his conversation with them, he said that it must not be opened until the proper time, lest their whole vast eternal plan come to ruin. Barnabas’ function in the story is to make a mess of everything, so of course he leaves the box out in the open and waves it in front of the face of the world’s most inquisitive person.
Meanwhile, Carolyn visits Sabrina. Sabrina insists Stokes leave them alone; when he does, she insists Carolyn not repeat their conversation to Stokes. She tells Carolyn that Chris, even though he is good, will kill her if they stay together.
We would be hard put to defend the idea that Chris is good, or to regret it if Stokes or any other law-abiding person were in a position to end his reign of terror. It is also surprising that Sabrina, who can barely say her own name when Stokes is working with her, talks quite fluently once he is out of the room. Maybe Dr Reeves was not so wise to choose him as Sabrina’s therapist.
Back in the Old House, Julia tells Barnabas that “Today, I was given reason to believe that Charles Delaware Tate may still be alive.” Barnabas replies “There’s no reason to believe that’s true.” That flat contradiction, with the jarring repetition of the word “reason,” shows that Barnabas is not only evading Julia’s questions, he is rejecting her personally in a way that he did not do even before they became friends, when he kept plotting to kill her. At least in those days he always listened closely to what she said, knowing that her great intelligence made her a danger to him. In this exchange he is treating her as if her words were beneath notice.
Julia sticks with the topic, and Barnabas says that even if Tate were still alive he would be “a hundred and totally useless!” That’s pretty rich coming from Barnabas, who himself is at least twice that age and would be in an awkward spot if he had to explain what use he is to anyone. But Julia only says that they must look into the matter.
A careless lie
Chris enters. He is delighted to see Barnabas, on whom he has pinned all his hopes. Barnabas tells him that “In all the time I was in the past, I found no solution for you. I am afraid there’s nothing that I can possibly do.” He follows that with “I must ask you to excuse me, I’m very tired,” and toddles off to bed.
Julia and Chris leave the house together. She tells him why she thinks Barnabas was lying. Chris goes home, and Julia goes back into the house, through the unlocked front door. She picks up the box, which is still on the table in the middle of the living room. As she heard Barnabas’ heartbeat coming from his portrait in the great house, so she hears breathing coming from inside the box. One wonders what other bodily functions will audibly manifest in objets d’art around Collinwood.
Barnabas Collins, old world gentleman extraordinaire, and Julia Hoffman, MD, are helping mysterious drifter Chris Jennings cover up the fact that he is a werewolf, responsible for a great many violent deaths. Lately Chris has started transforming into his lupine shape even on nights when the moon is not full, and this morning they find that he has not changed back even after dawn.
As if that did not present enough difficulty to Julia and Barnabas, one of Chris’ surviving victims is in town. She is his onetime fiancée, Sabrina Stuart. Two years ago, Sabrina saw Chris as the werewolf. She hasn’t told anyone about him, because she hasn’t been able to speak since. Her hair turned white, her skin turned pale, and she has been nearly catatonic.
Others have encountered the werewolf, and none has had this reaction. It’s true that Chris’ cousin Joe had to be taken to a mental hospital after he saw the transformation, but Joe had just been through a very long train of supernaturally induced traumas that had shattered his sensibilities and taken away everything he cared about. Seeing Chris change was just the last step in that process. Sabrina, as we see in a flashback segment today, was fine until she encountered Chris as the werewolf, and she didn’t even see the transformation itself. Yet here she is two years later, unspeaking, immobilized, and wearing the same makeup that Eli Wallach wore as Mr Freeze in the 1960s Batman TV show.
In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, “Cole” speculates that the show might have meant to tell us that the real reason Sabrina’s condition is less to do with what happened that on night in Chris’ apartment than with her brother and sole caretaker, Ned, played by Roger Davis:
I am once more getting through the Ned/Sabrina scenes thanks to this blog and the comments here; and although I still have to frequently avert my eyes from the screen to hold back the nausea, I keep concentrating on the dialogue while speculating further on JRM’s theory.
It does seem that we– and Julia– might be meant to feel especially concerned by Ned’s refusal to even consider allowing Sabrina to stay at Windcliff. He even says (or, rather, since it is Roger Davis, he SCREAMS), ”I won’t be separated from her!”
I don’t think his character is meant to be overly suspicious of Julia and Barnabas so the vehemence behind his already rather alarming declaration becomes more baffling unless the viewer concludes he has … extremely unnatural feelings of possessiveness towards sad, PTSD-afflicted Sabrina.
It is almost half as frustrating as it is disturbing because, with any other actors, we would surely know for certain how to interpret these scenes.
We would perhaps recognize that when Sabrina stares pleadingly at Julia once Ned leaves the room, that her muteness is caused as much by her horror at being an ongoing victim of her brother’s unspeakable abuse as by having once witnessed Chris’s transformation into a werewolf. We wouldn’t wonder, instead if the actress, Lisa Richards, is actually pleading with Hall to help her endure Davis’s deliberate act of molesting and assaulting her through out these scenes.
If it wasn’t Roger Davis in this role, we would know who Ned is really meant to be since there is no way any of the other regular male cast members would willingly subject their costars to type of abuse Davis is inflicting on Richards.
If it were … say, Jerry Lacy who was currently playing “Ned Stuart” in a manner even remotely similar to Roger Davis’s ‘interpretation’ of the role, we would recognize at once that the character of Ned is obviously scripted to be an incestuous rapist (and I am sure Lacy would still keep his hands professionally and respectfully away from Lisa Richards’s/”Sabrina’s” breasts, instead using actual acting techniques to portray his character’s warped nature). But with Davis ..
It really could be, as Mary commented below, that he is trying to get the poor actress to break character. And how could we expect other than that he would use his usual disgusting and violent Drumph-like/”‘you can grab them by the pussy” sense of Curtis-granted entitlement to assault her as “Ned,” regardless of the intent of the writer and director.
Either way, what a horrifically mistaken choice in casting.
Lisa Richards: fifty years later, I am thinking of you and hoping you weren’t forced to endure PTSD after filming these scenes with Davis.
Comment left 29 August 2021 by “Cole” on “Episode 698: Sister Act,” Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn, 8 August 2015
When I mentally recast the many parts Roger Davis played on Dark Shadows, I divide them between two men who were background players in the show’s first months. I imagine Fredric Forrest playing the two characters with aliases, Peter Bradford (a.k.a. Jeff Clark) and Charles Delaware Tate (a.k.a. Harrison Monroe.) Forrest excelled both as a quietly intense man under pressure and as a sweet, goofy, overgrown kid. In the hands of an actor who, unlike Mr Davis, could project those qualities, those two unloved characters might both have become fan favorites. His other two parts, Ned Stuart and Dirk Wilkins, would have been perfect for Harvey Keitel, who is unsurpassed as a man who is agitated by a deep anger that he himself barely understands and that he certainly cannot explain to anyone else. Not that it’s any secret why Ned is angry at Chris, but when he takes a break from pawing at Sabrina’s face and breasts he handles her so roughly that he is obviously angry with her, and that is something he isn’t going to be giving any thought.
Mr Davis’ behavior wasn’t much better in episodes directed by Lela Swift and others, but it is little surprise director Henry Kaplan didn’t rein him in. Kaplan directed with a conductor’s baton, and actresses complain that he would jab them with it. When the person in charge has that light a regard for women’s personal space, it’s no wonder a creep like Mr Davis felt free to rub himself all over Ms Richards.
Chris Jennings is a werewolf, a fact which old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is helping him conceal. Two years ago, Chris’ fiancée Sabrina Stuart chanced to see him transform; she hasn’t been able to speak since. Her hair turned white, and she is in a nearly catatonic state. Sabrina’s brother, a very loud man named Ned, has brought her to the village of Collinsport and keeps demanding that Chris visit them and explain what happened.
There is a full moon tonight, so Barnabas has sealed Chris up in the secret chamber hidden in the old Collins family mausoleum. He tells Chris that he will try to persuade the Stuarts to leave town and forget about him. Chris tells him that is impossible; Barnabas seems to believe he can pull it off.
In the Stuarts’ suite at the Collinsport Inn, Barnabas tells Ned that he is harming Sabrina by taking her along on his mission to confront Chris and that he ought to take her home and move on with his life. Preposterous as this is, Ned makes it seem credible. To be more precise, it is actor Roger Davis who makes it seem credible. He rubs himself all over Lisa Blake Richards’ scalp, face, and chest while she is required to remain motionless. To the extent that we accept them as their characters, we are forced to think of Ned as a caretaker who abuses his disabled sister sexually; to the extent that we recognize Mr Davis’ behavior as typical of his previous performances on Dark Shadows, we wonder how bad things were for women in show business in the late 1960s that Miss Richards didn’t contact the union and bring him up on charges. It isn’t every performer who can make an audience sympathize with an ex-vampire’s attempt to keep a woman in a comatose state lest she endanger his werewolf buddy, but you can always trust Mr Davis to enlist the viewers’ support for any plot development that will get him off the screen.
I wonder how much of that look is Barnabas reacting to Ned’s story and how much is Jonathan Frid wondering if he should stop tape and call Equity. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
There are also some indications that the show is firming up some of its world-building. For the first time, we hear the name “Edward Collins” as the grandfather of the senior generation now resident at the great house of Collinwood. We hear that Edward was the father of Jamison Collins and the brother of Quentin Collins. Quentin was first mentioned months ago as Jamison’s uncle, but on Friday Barnabas had a line identifying him as his brother, suggesting some behind-the-scenes wavering about this point. Quentin’s ghost is the chief villain in the current A story, and we heard several weeks ago that he wants to turn strange and troubled boy David Collins into a replica of Jamison, so these relationships are important to the action.
Longtime viewers will have fond memories when stuffy Roger Collins sees a book open by itself on the table in the drawing room of the great house. The same book opened itself on the same table in #52, one of the first unmistakable signs that ghosts were at work. No one but the audience was around to see that, but when it happened again in #182, Roger was there. It jolted him out of his refusal to face the facts about the supernatural menace operating at that time.
Dark Shadows Commentary 