Tag: maggie evans

Episode 955: What I was and what I always shall be

What a First-Time Viewer Might See

A woman is in a bedroom, packing a bag. A man bursts in with a flaming torch. She exclaims:

Sky, what are you doing?

SKY: I wanted it to work out. I really wanted you to be with me, and I’m sorry you can’t. Goodbye Angelique.

Sky then charges at Angelique with the torch, and we break for the opening title. When we return, Angelique is dodging the flames and they are quarreling. She takes a statuette and tightens a cloth around its neck. Sky begins choking. Angelique orders him to put the torch in the fireplace. He does. She continues tightening the cloth, and he collapses. The actions combine with the eerie music on the soundtrack to tell us that Angelique is casting a spell on Sky. Angelique kneels over Sky and talks about how their marriage was all wrong from the beginning. She takes on a calm tone while allowing that they are equally at fault really; “We both kept from each other our darkest secrets.” She tells Sky she really did love him and wishes it could have worked out between them. All the while she delivers this speech in her mature, thoughtful voice, she is pulling the cloth ever tighter, apparently strangling Sky to death.

We cut to a terrace, where a sinister looking man is silently calling for someone named Maggie to come to him. A young woman comes and tells the sinister looking man she felt she had to come to that spot. She is Maggie, and she calls him Barnabas. She says he doesn’t look like himself, and asks if he has been ill. He is distressed at her questions. She says that sometimes he seems very warm, and other times it seems she doesn’t know him at all. He gives her a ring, and tells her it is very dear to him and a token of their deep friendship. They embrace. He looks at her neck and opens his mouth. His canines are unusually long. A young man calls out a sharp “Excuse me!”

The young man marches up, addresses Maggie as “Miss Evans,” and apologizes for interrupting the moment. He insists on talking with Barnabas alone. When Maggie Evans has left them, the young man sternly observes that “I don’t have to ask what would have happened if I hadn’t arrived when I did.” He tells Barnabas that he must stay away from Maggie, because “In your present state you can only hurt her, you know that.” He says that it is almost sunup. Because someone named “Julia” has been unable to locate someone named “Willie,” he will accompany Barnabas home and will spend the day there.

We cut to the young man dozing in a chair. He is awakened by a knock at the door. He answers it, and finds Angelique. He reacts to the sight of her with shock. She greets him with “Well, don’t just stand there, Quentin. Kiss me.” After a commercial break, she repeats the command. Quentin gives a tiny smooch to a spot of air a few inches in front of Angelique’s lips, prompting her to remark that “You never meant it before, but you used to do a lot better than that.”

Angelique tells Quentin that since they last saw each other, “We’re both a great deal older, and I hope one of us at least is wiser.” Neither of them looks to be much more than 30, so one might assume that by “a great deal older” she means that they are in very different stages of life than they were in the few years of their separation. Quentin tells Angelique that “Barnabas said you hadn’t grown any older, and he was right.” She responds that he also looks exactly the same as when last they met. Since we saw in the first scene that Angelique has the power to cast magic spells, this exchange raises the possibility that they may be much older than they look.

Quentin wonders why Angelique has come back. She says “Oh, Quentin, don’t look so apprehensive. Actually, I came here hoping that I’d be able to see Barnabas, that I’d be in time, but obviously, I’m not.” Quentin guardedly asks “What do you mean obviously?” She says that she knows what has happened. Barnabas went to her house the previous evening and told her that her husband had betrayed him to someone called “Jeb Hawkes.”

Quentin is startled to hear this about Sky. Angelique explains. “Barnabas has told you all about the Leviathans, hasn’t he?… Sky was one of them, before I met him. I left him tonight and I’m never going back to him.” Whatever the Leviathans are, it seems genuinely to sadden Quentin that Angelique found out she had unknowingly married one. He asks if there is anything he can do to help her.

Angelique tells him there is nothing he can do. She goes on to explain: “The truth is my interest in you in the past was never more than a device intended to upset Barnabas. I was very good at devices, always have been. Perhaps, in spite of my feelings for Sky, Barnabas has always been my one true love.” Since Quentin was so unhappy to see Angelique and she told him that his kisses were never sincere, it is not too surprising that this confession does not seem to wound his ego in any way. He tells her that he is sorry it is too late for her to see Barnabas, and he sounds like he means it. He is quick to agree when she says she wants to spend the day in the house, and he suggests she take a nap in an upstairs bedroom.

Angelique says that “It feels good to be back in this house.” She reminisces about a time when she lived there and was happy. She says “I’ll sleep in Ang-… I’ll sleep in Josette’s room.” It sounds like the name she checked herself partway through saying was her own. Since she did live there, it would make sense that there would be a room that others would call “Angelique’s room,” but she does not refer to herself in the third person at any other point in the episode, so we are left wondering if the actress just slipped.

The next scene takes place in the same room. Again Quentin is by himself, this time reading the newspaper. Again he is disturbed by a knock on the front door. He gets up, mutters “All right,” and opens it. To our surprise, he finds Sky. It had looked like Angelique killed Sky in the first act, but here he is, without so much as a frog in his throat to show that he was strangled nearly to death this morning.

Sky tells Quentin that he believes his wife is in the house, and asks if he may come in. Quentin says that he would of course let him in if his wife were there, and before he can deny that she is, Angelique comes downstairs. Quentin asks Angelique if she wants him to stay; she says he can go.

Sky tells Angelique that he has spent the day with someone named “Nicholas Blair.” This Nicholas told him all of Angelique’s secrets. Angelique says Nicholas would have done better to tell Sky about her “before you almost got yourself killed.” Sky ignores this and says that things haven’t really changed between them- he still loves her. She points out that just a few hours ago, she had to choke him out to stop him killing her, not a common event in happy marriages. He says that Nicholas has agreed to let them live together if “you become one of us.” Evidently Nicholas, too, is a “Leviathan,” and is inviting Angelique to become one. She rejects this, saying that she wants nothing to do with Nicholas or the Leviathans and would be interested in Sky only if he broke free of them. They part.

Barnabas enters, a tense expression on his face. He tells Angelique that Quentin told him she was there. Angelique praises Quentin for his kindness and understanding and tells Barnabas that he was right about everything. Calling herself a fool, she says that what has happened to him is her fault. She thought she could trust Sky with Barnabas’ secret, and it was Sky’s betrayal that brought his current misfortune upon Barnabas.

Barnabas relaxes, and tells Angelique that she didn’t hurt him deliberately. She concedes this point, but says that she did do so “the first time.” He says that was long ago and is best forgotten. She embraces him, then says that it is “ironic, how it happened in the same identical way.” The more she talks about whatever it is she is referring to, the more visibly uncomfortable Barnabas grows. Finally she says that maybe this means that “we could become closer friends than we were before… Perhaps it means that we can start again. Start at the beginning as we did the first time.” That’s too much for him, and he turns away from her. She keeps going on about how they are “both outcasts,” and he looks like he wants to run screaming into the night.

She mentions Nicholas, and suddenly Barnabas’ eyes are fixed on her again. She hadn’t known he hadn’t known Nicholas was involved. He declares that he must tell Maggie that Nicholas has returned, because when Nicholas was around before he tried to kill Maggie. Barnabas tells Angelique to wait for him, and rushes out to tell Maggie about the new danger she is in. Angelique gives snippy responses to each mention of Maggie’s name, and looks jealous when Barnabas leaves.

Back on the terrace, Barnabas tells Maggie about Nicholas in a quiet, urgent voice. She assures him she knows how to take care of herself. He tells her that “you mean far too much to me” for him to be happy when she is in the kind of danger Nicholas represents. We see Angelique eavesdropping from the shadows, fuming.

In the next scene, Angelique is still on the terrace, still eavesdropping, but Maggie is inside the house with Quentin. They address each other as “Miss Evans” and “Mr Collins.” Quentin Collins is urging Maggie to stay away from Barnabas “for your own good and for his.” He tells her that “the people he was involved with” are “out to kill him,” and that “if they know you are seeing him, they may do it through you,” by using her as the bait for a trap. Maggie will not agree to stop seeing Barnabas.

At this confirmation that Maggie and Barnabas have been “seeing each other,” Angelique turns to the camera. “You asked if there was any way you could help me, Quentin. Well, there is. Only, you’ll never be aware of it. I am what I was and what I shall always be. I call upon the powers of darkness to help me once again. Make a flame where there was no flame before and let that flame transmit the power of love to those who look into it.” The fireplace in the room where Maggie and Quentin are talking to each other flares up and they look into it. Angelique does some more spellcasting, and all of a sudden Maggie and Quentin are calling each other by their first names, embracing, and talking about their mad love for each other. They look at their hands and notice each of them now sports a trident-shaped symbol that had not been there before.

What a Longtime Viewer Might See

Barnabas’ trouble, unspecified in today’s dialogue, is that the Leviathans have turned him back into what he was from the 1790s until March 1968, a vampire. Barnabas was one of the pop culture crazes of the 1960s, and Dark Shadows was known to millions who never saw a second of the show as the soap opera with a vampire. So even first time viewers were unlikely to need an explanation. But not mentioning it will bring fond memories back for some longtime fans, since Barnabas had been on the show for 40 weeks before the word “vampire” was uttered.

Maggie is the governess to the children at the great house of Collinwood. In 1967, Barnabas abducted her, tortured her, and tried to erase her personality and replace it with that of his lost love Josette. Her memory of that experience has been wiped several times, once by Nicholas, and now she thinks Barnabas is just peachy. They’ve been getting very cozy for the last several weeks. The ring that he gives her today is Josette’s.

Maggie wearing Josette’s ring. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Considering their past, it’s pretty weird Barnabas has a shot with Maggie, but it wouldn’t be any less weird if Angelique had a shot with Barnabas. Not only did she kill him and raise him from the dead as a vampire, she was also responsible for the deaths of the people he cared most about, including Josette, his mother, and his little sister. Her approach to him today reminds us that they have so much in common that it often seems as if Barnabas were not only cursed by Angelique, but possessed by her.

Maggie’s predecessor as governess was the well-meaning Victoria Winters. Vicki was Dark Shadows‘ original audience identification character, and drove most of the action in the 42 weeks before Barnabas debuted in April 1967. When Barnabas replaced Vicki as the show’s big attraction, she kept putting herself in situations where it would be difficult for him not to bite her. It was as if Vicki knew that she was a character on a show of which Barnabas was the star, and she was working to establish herself in the A story. The terrace set made its first appearance in one of those situations, in #299. Vicki hugs Barnabas and moves her neck as close as she can get it to his fangs, before a friend shows up and interrupts him, pushing Vicki back out of the plot. Quentin’s interruption brings that scene back to the minds of those who saw that episode.

Angelique and Quentin got to know each other when Barnabas had traveled back in time to 1897 and the show was, for eight months in 1969, a costume drama set in that year. By the end of that period, she was as monomaniacally fixated on Quentin as she had previously been on Barnabas. She didn’t even care that Barnabas was off chasing another woman. So we might wonder if she is putting on a brave face when she tells Quentin that she merely used him as a means of getting Barnabas’ attention.

From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. That segment introduced Angelique as the witch who first made Barnabas a vampire. The spell she casts on Maggie and Quentin today is identical to one she cast on Josette and Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah in 1795, right down to the tridents on their hands. Since Maggie and Josette are both played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, the connection will be hard for longtime viewers to miss.

First time viewers might be puzzled by Maggie and Quentin’s protestations that their attraction to one another does not make sense. Even if Maggie has been “seeing” Barnabas, she and Quentin are such a gorgeous pair of young people that it would be weird if they didn’t get together sooner or later. But those who saw #691 will remember that at that point, Quentin was a ghost who tried to strangle Maggie. During the 1897 storyline, history was changed so that Quentin didn’t die, but after the manner of time on Dark Shadows that difference only took effect on the anniversary of the event. The haunting still took place, and Maggie and the others affected by it remember vividly what Quentin’s ghost did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BARNABAS: I cannot be free without you.

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

BARNABAS: But I don’t want anyone else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Apparently also an FotB here.

Episode 943: Moon Poppy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing Miscellany

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

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

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

Episode 942: Michael grown

Our Story So Far

The current A story revolves around a race of Elder Gods called the Leviathan People. The Leviathans have taken over the minds of several characters and formed them into a cult devoted to advancing their plan to return to Earth and supplant humankind. As part of this plan, a monster has taken up residence in the room above the antique shop in the village of Collinsport. The monster’s true form is bizarre, terrifying, and unseen. It can assume other forms, and as it was growing it went through the shapes of a series of children. Now its human guise is that of a man in his twenties who, when first we saw him, invited people to “Call me Jabe.”

Jabe is a blowhard, impatient, petulant, and unreflective. He is keen to take heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard as his bride and make her into the same kind of monster he is. Carolyn’s distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, was the Leviathans’ first choice as leader of the cult, and has now become disaffected from it. Working with another distant cousin, the perennially youthful Quentin Collins, Barnabas has for the moment put a stop to Jabe’s plans for Carolyn. Jabe has killed a couple of people, including Carolyn’s father Paul Stoddard and Sheriff Davenport, and plans to kill many more. He is fairly sure that Barnabas is working against him, but is afraid that if he strikes out at Barnabas his own superiors among the Leviathans will punish him. Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and her cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, are devoted members of the cult, as is Quentin’s great-granddaughter Amy Jennings, but none of them knows about Jabe’s plans for Carolyn.

When Jabe appeared to be a thirteen year old boy named Michael, he spent a substantial amount of time bullying David. He has continued this in his adult form, breaking David’s leg for no reason to which the audience was made privy. David’s governess, Maggie Evans, saw Michael’s mistreatment of David and tried to stop it, and in response he locked her up and tried to kill her. No one has told Maggie that Michael and Jabe are the same person, but she does know that that Jabe is at fault for David’s injury. She has also, in the last several days, seemed to be getting very cozy with Barnabas. Jabe has abducted Maggie and has her locked up in a big mausoleum someplace.

Meet Bruno

Jabe is in the antique shop when a man wearing a fur coat enters. Regular viewers recognize the actor as Michael Stroka. For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897, and Stroka played the sadistic Aristide, henchman to sorcerer Count Petofi. Petofi was a witty and whimsical villain, and Aristide spent a great deal of time as his straight man. Aristide also gave Stroka opportunities to show off his own formidable gift for deadpan comedy.

Bruno and Jabe. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The fur coat is so specific to 1970 that the sight of Stroka wearing it means that the show has very literally returned to “contemporary dress.” His character introduces himself to Jabe as Bruno, and says that he will help him in any way. Bruno shows considerable knowledge of the story so far; the other cultists didn’t come with that knowledge, leading us to wonder whether he is one of them or is some kind of supernatural being. As the episode goes on, we see that Bruno shares Aristide’s fascination with knives and his glee in threatening to kill and disfigure pretty girls, and is also about as ineffective when he sets about doing Jeb’s dirty work as Aristide was when he tried to do Petofi’s. So however he came to know what he knows, it seems safe to dismiss the idea that he is anything other than what Aristide was.

David and Barnabas

At the great house of Collinwood, David enters by means of wheelchair. He and Barnabas talk about Maggie’s unexplained absence. They consider the possibility that Jabe might be responsible for it.

Just the other day, adult characters not in on the secret of the Leviathan cult mentioned that David did not seem like “the same little boy” he had been. He isn’t a little boy at all- he’s thirteen. Barnabas talks to him in this scene as one adult to another. After all these years, it’s refreshing to see a sign that David might eventually be allowed to grow up.

Maggie’s First Tormenter

Maggie awakens to find herself in a mausoleum. Before she can make her way to the door, the late Sheriff Davenport enters. Jabe has raised him from the dead and made him his slave. Your typical zombie is an inarticulate sort, who, if moved to speech at all, might emit a faint groan of “Brai-i-i-ins.” Davenport is an exception to this norm. He is positively chatty. He talks about how uncomfortable his grave was, about his sympathy for Maggie, and even starts in with a story about his wife. The guy just won’t shut up.

David and Jabe

David goes to the antique shop. How he got himself from Collinwood to the village in a manual wheelchair designed for use in a hospital is not explained. He tells Jabe about his conversation with Barnabas, including the part where Barnabas told him to study the holy book of the Leviathans and look for information about Jabe’s weaknesses. He says that he found a passage saying that Jabe is vulnerable to werewolves. He didn’t tell Barnabas about this, but came straight to the shop. Jabe is terrified by the mention of werewolves, and relieved David didn’t talk to Barnabas. He tells him not to trust Barnabas.

Jabe and David. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is a werewolf on the show, Amy’s brother Chris Jennings, who inherited the curse from their great-grandfather Quentin. Quentin’s own lycanthropy was put into abeyance by the same magic spell that immunized him against aging. We haven’t seen Chris for about a month, when there was a full moon and he killed a character left over from an exhausted storyline. There were some hints early in the current story that Chris represented a threat to the Leviathans, and this is now confirmed.

Maggie’s Second Tormenter

Bruno shows up in the crypt where the late Sheriff Davenport is haranguing Maggie. He sends Davenport to guard the door. Maggie asks Bruno if he is dead, too. He assures her he isn’t, and is very unpleasant to her. Aristide was a lot of fun when he had someone to play off of, but where Petofi was sprightly, Jeb is monotonous. While Aristide would set his sights on victims who gave him more resistance than he bargained for, Maggie’s situation makes her tense and unwilling to volunteer anything. Maggie holds her ground and refuses to answer any of Bruno’s questions, so that he cannot afford to murder her as he had intended to do. That’s logical behavior on her part and a happy ending for the audience, but it does keep Bruno from doing anything to make us want to see him again.

Bruno meets David

Bruno goes to the antique shop. Jeb introduces him to David. He pushes David out of the shop with a brisk movement that is Stroka’s first opportunity to get a laugh as Bruno. He reports his failure to Jabe, who is too afraid of werewolves to rage at him as he has raged at everyone else who has told him things he didn’t want to hear.

Maggie’s Third Tormenter

Jabe goes to the crypt and sends Sheriff Davenport back out. He confronts Maggie, who tells him she recognizes him as “Michael grown up,” using the exact phrase David had used with Barnabas earlier. He tells her she will be all right if she opens a wooden box he has brought with him and looks in it. Returning viewers know that this is “the Leviathan Box,” and that it was by opening it and looking inside that Amy came under the power of the cult.

Episode 941: Barnabas, Quentin, and the Stopped Clock

Yesterday and today, a clock stopped at 8:00 featured prominently in shots when it was pivotal to the story that it was not 8:00. The clock is part of the merchandise in an antique shop, so it is understandable it does not run, but it is rather odd to see someone telling people that he didn’t wait for 8:00 when a clock face displaying that time looms over his shoulder. Today, it is important that a scene in the shop is taking place after 10:00. We open that scene with a view of a different clock, one that reads 10:20, but before long the stopped clock is back in full view.

At the great house of Collinwood, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is rushing to the front door. Governess Maggie Evans asks him where he is going. He says that he is going to the village of Collinsport. She says she is going there as well and that she will ride in with him. He says that he can’t take her. He refuses to explain why. The other day, Maggie and Barnabas held hands and leaned in close to each other, talking softly about how important their friendship was. This sudden refusal to communicate pulls Maggie up short. She demands to know whether Barnabas trusts her. He says he does. She marches up to him and orders him to “Prove it!” The tight aspect ratio of old time TV combines with director Henry Kaplan’s habit of putting the actors as close to the camera as he can get them to make it seem, in the moment, that the feelings Maggie expects Barnabas to prove are of an erotic nature.

Hubba-hubba. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie has been the governess at Collinwood for over a year now. Her predecessor, the well-meaning Vicki Winters, was written out of the show for a number of reasons, not least their inability to figure out an intelligible relationship between her and Barnabas. There was a long period when Vicki the character seemed to know that she was on a show starring Barnabas and she kept trying to involve herself in his storyline, even inviting herself to spend the night at his house. In theory, Barnabas was in love with Vicki and yearned for her, but no matter how flagrantly she threw herself at him he never did anything about it. Eventually they paired her off with an intolerable jerk, and the two of them disappeared into a rift in the space-time continuum.

Vicki never did take quite as direct an approach with Barnabas as Maggie does today. No matter how deeply Vicki drove the ball into his court, she always counted on him to show at least a little initiative. Maggie knows better than to rely on Barnabas, and she corners him into agreeing to see her and give some kind of explanation when he is done with the mission he is concealing from her, at 10:00 sharp.

Fans often fret about the “Vickification” Maggie undergoes while she is serving as governess. When it became clear that Vicki wasn’t going to matter to Barnabas, she couldn’t be allowed to affect the A story in any way. To keep her on the sidelines, she was written as an ever greater ninny.

Maggie is pretty bad at her job- she’s a squish when the children don’t want to do their lessons, which is every time we’ve seen her with them. But she’s still good with grownups, she’s smart, and she’s emphatically sexy. So she isn’t going to go down into irrelevance without a fight.

Maggie isn’t the only character insisting on her place in the story. A few weeks ago, it seemed that matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard would be a part of the main plot for the first time in ages when she was inducted into a secret cult serving a mysterious race of Elder Gods who are trying to regain control of the Earth. But she has drifted back to the sidelines, and has yet to meet the cult’s leader in his current form.

Barnabas was Liz’ preceptor in the cult, and she is indignant with him for the decline in her part:

Liz: Barnabas, I must speak to you.

Barnabas: Not now, Elizabeth.

Liz: Have I done something wrong? Just tell me that.

Barnabas: No, nothing at all.

Liz: I’ve tried to follow the rules, as many as I know. You yourself can testify to my faithfulness. But David sees our leader, you’ve seen him.

Barnabas: Jabez?

Liz: Is that what he calls himself now? Well, no matter what name, he’s the same boy who used to play here. Surely he must remember me with some affection.

Barnabas: He is only recently matured enough to appear to us.

Liz: Why have I been ignored? Barnabas? You haven’t answered my question.

Barnabas: You’ll meet him soon enough but now is not the time.

Liz: Does the book specify when I am to meet him? Is that why you’re against it now?

During the show’s costume drama segments, Joan Bennett got to play dynamic roles, but she has been excluded from the action in the contemporary parts for so long that she has a tremendous amount of passion to bring to this scene. It is great to see her cut loose for once.

Episode 939: You find me repulsive

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is mourning her father, who was recently murdered. She tells Maggie Evans, governess to the children in the great house of Collinwood, that she will not rest until she finds the killer. Maggie urges her to leave that up to the Maine State Police. Returning viewers know that the culprit is a monster from beyond space and time. We also know that the monster takes the form of a very tall young man who, when he first materialized, asked people to “Call me Jabe.” They called him “Jeb” instead.

Jabe has no impulse control, no awareness of other people’s feelings, and no long-range plans. He wants to marry Carolyn tomorrow, which, considering that a disagreeable encounter yesterday was the first time he met her while in his current form, she would be unlikely to agree to do even if her father had not just been killed.

Carolyn is taking the night air on Collinwood’s terrace when she hears some strange noises. Most of them are being produced by the late Sheriff Davenport, whom Jabe recently murdered then raised from the dead to serve him as a zombie. He’s hanging around in the bushes, idly watching.

Jabe shows up and says he’s sorry if he startled Carolyn. He tells her that they will be married tomorrow, exasperating her beyond endurance. She gives him a piece of her mind. She uses the word “crazy” to describe his behavior, prompting him to get very stiff and snarl “Don’t ever call me that!” She turns to go, and he grabs her arm. She tells him to let go. He refuses, and she threatens to scream. He still does not let go, but she breaks away and goes back inside.

Maggie sees a flustered Carolyn come rushing into the house. She asks her what’s wrong. Carolyn won’t answer. She hurries upstairs to her bedroom.

Carolyn’s distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, comes in. He and Maggie talk about Carolyn. Maggie says that she is deeply impressed by Barnabas’ concern for Carolyn. She takes his hand. They put their heads together and talk quietly about how important their friendship is to each of them while the camera zooms in on their hands. Barnabas used to be a vampire, and spent the spring and summer of 1967 torturing Maggie so viciously she suffered a complete mental collapse. Her psychiatrist, Julia Hoffman, saw in Barnabas her chance to pursue her dream career as a mad scientist, and so she sold Maggie out. She used her magical powers of hypnosis to rewrite Maggie’s memories so that she forgot all about what Barnabas had done to her. Her feelings of terror were replaced by warm friendliness towards him. Still, longtime viewers will find it a bit jolting to linger over this handclasp, with its suggestion that romance may be about to bloom between Maggie and Barnabas.

Maggie and Barnabas holding hands. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The next day, Carolyn finds a note of apology and some red roses in the drawing room. They are from Jabe. She is putting them in a vase when Barnabas turns up. He is concerned when she tells him the flowers are from Jabe. She says she is not sure what to make of Jabe.

We hear Barnabas thinking that if Carolyn starts seeing Jabe, there will be no hope for her. He’s thinking of Jabe’s monstrous nature and his association with the Elder Gods who are on their way to destroy the human race, but even first-time viewers who know nothing of those things have seen enough of Jabe to agree with him. Regular viewers know that, while there is, in an ontological sense, more to Jabe than Carolyn has seen, she has already taken the complete measure of his personality and temperament. If she winds up deciding he is an acceptable partner, it can only be because the writing staff has decided to sacrifice her character once and for all to the business of moving the plot forward.

Longtime viewers will find this prospect especially disturbing. The terrace was the scene of many grisly encounters between Maggie’s predecessor, well-meaning governess Vicki Winters, and Vicki’s boyfriend, a repellent little man named Peter who preferred to be called Jeff. Peter/ Jeff was not a monster from beyond space and time, he was something much worse- a character played by Roger Davis. At least when Jabe grabs Carolyn’s arm, it is only the characters who are in an abusive situation. When Peter/ Jeff clutched at Vicki, Mr Davis squeezed Alexandra Moltke Isles out of shape and blocked the camera’s view of her. Vicki, Dark Shadows‘ original protagonist, had been pushed to the margins of the story for a number of reasons, but it was her inexplicable insistence on sticking with the loathsome Peter/ Jeff that finally made it impossible for her to continue on the show.

For some unaccountable reason, the producers and directors seem to have liked Mr Davis. They kept him on the show for a couple of years, in a variety of roles, and allowed him to assault his scene partners with abandon. The writers seem to have caught on that he was not so good; his most recent character, Harrison Monroe, was a robot who just kept yelling at everyone until his head fell off. But the directors were still fans; when Christopher Pennock joined the cast as Jabe last week, they told him to imitate Roger Davis. To his credit, he instead conducted himself in a professional manner. However much of a dead-end Jabe is, you will never see Pennock hurting another member of the cast or obstructing her performance.

Episode 927: Reasons don’t matter

Permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, is in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood when a secret panel opens and a boy known as Michael comes strolling out. She asks him how he knew about the panel and the passages behind it; he says that thirteen year old David Collins told him. Julia asks if Michael knows what has become of David’s governess, the missing Maggie Evans. Michael tries to dodge her questions. When Maggie comes running into the room, screaming that she has been living a nightmare, Michael takes the opportunity to flee.

Michael emerges from the secret passage.

Returning viewers know that Michael is not really human, but is the latest in a series of manifestations of a monstrous force that has enlisted the support of several characters for its plan to supplant the human race. We also know that Michael trapped Maggie in the long-disused west wing of the house and tormented her there. She had been sure that Michael was her tormentor, but when Michael’s foster father, antique dealer Philip Todd, came to her rescue, Maggie beaned him with a small candlestick and jumped to the conclusion that he was to blame. She tells Julia that Michael is innocent and Philip is dead.

Maggie’s captivity is a remake of a story that ran from #84 to #87. In those days, the show’s liveliest villains were David and his father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger. David locked Maggie’s predecessor Victoria Winters up in a room in the west wing, where he hoped she would die. Eventually Roger used the secret panel from which Michael emerges today to go to the west wing and investigate. He went straight to the room where Vicki was trapped. Roger shared David’s ill-will towards Vicki, and had in #68 encouraged him to harm her. In the corridor outside her prison, he took advantage of the situation to terrorize her further, disguising his voice and pretending to be a ghost taunting her with her doom. When he finally opened the door, she flung herself into his arms and declared that he was right and David really was a monster.

That story dragged out for so long that we couldn’t help noticing several steps Vicki might have taken to get herself free. Her failure to try any of them was a major step towards the creation of the “Dumb Vicki” image that would in time destroy the character completely. Maggie doesn’t outdo Vicki in engineering ability, but at least part of her helplessness can be explained by a taunting voice that she hears, on and off, from the beginning of her captivity. This one really is supernatural in its origin, projected by Michael. Her misunderstanding of Philip’s motives and condition is as total as was Vicki’s of Roger’s, but she corrects it by the end of the episode, when she realizes that Philip was coming to rescue her from Michael, and that he is fine now. She goes to his shop to apologize for accusing him.

The contrast between the two stories sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses of the show in the days when they were made. In the first months, individual episodes might have so little action that there was nowhere to hide a logical problem like Vicki’s immediate resignation when she realized that the window in the room was slightly out of her reach, even though the room was full of materials she could stack up and stand on. Still, Vicki’s reaction when Roger enters was electrifying, one of the best moments of acting in the entire series, and the change in her relationship with David in the weeks after her release is pivotal to everything that happens from that point on.

The relative busyness of the stories now allow us to overlook Maggie’s absurd helplessness while she is in the room, and her quick reconciliation with Philip papers over her inexplicable failure to remember that she heard Michael’s voice taunting her. But as Philip points out, Maggie doesn’t really know him. Nor will her experience shape her future attitude to Michael in any interesting way- as a creature who rapidly changes his form, he comes with a built-in expiration date. The whole story vanishes without a trace once Maggie leaves the antique shop. The individual episodes may not seem as slow now as they did at first, but when we find ourselves weeks or months into a storyline and find that very little has happened that we have any need to remember, we are left with a sense of motionlessness.

Roger’s use of the secret panel in #87 was the first time we learned it existed, and we didn’t see or hear of it again for two years, when both David and the ghost of Quentin Collins used it during the “Haunting of Collinwood” segment. David ushered visiting psychic Madame Janet Findley through the panel, directly to her death; Quentin came out of it and killed elderly silversmith Ezra Braithwaite. So to longtime viewers, the panel represents both murderous intentions and an intimate knowledge of the layout of the house. When Michael comes sashaying out of it today, we are meant to be a deeply unsettled.

Philip is disaffected from the project Michael represents; his wife Megan is still all in, and she combines her fanaticism with a desperate love for Michael. She talks with Michael privately, and tells him that he has been making himself so conspicuous that he has raised suspicions in the minds of many people. They will have to take steps to quell these suspicions, steps which neither she nor Michael will like at all.

Michael becomes very ill, and Megan calls Julia to come to the shop to treat him. She finds that his heartbeat is irregular and his vital signs are fading. She is calling the hospital when he goes into some kind of crisis; she leaves the telephone and injects him with a stimulant to jolt him back into stability.

Recently, we have heard several references to “Dr Reeves,” a character who was on the show a couple of times in 1966. Dr Reeves did not appear on screen, much to the relief of longtime viewers who remember how annoying he was, but the sheer fact that his name came up sufficed to assure us that Julia is not the only doctor in Collinsport. Since the group around Michael has been unable to absorb Julia and sees her as a potential enemy, Megan must have chosen her for some reason to do with the plan she was telling Michael about.

Episode 926: I don’t want to know who you are

This episode has the same story as Friday’s.

The current A-story is about the coming of the Leviathans, mysterious beings who act through a cult that has absorbed several people in the village of Collinsport and on the estate of Collinwood. Antique shop owners Megan and Philip Todd have been entrusted with the care of a creature that has assumed the forms of several human children in succession. This creature, currently presenting itself as a thirteen year old boy named Michael, is extremely obnoxious to everyone for no apparent reason, prompting them all to reconsider their commitment to the program. Philip is ready to turn against the Leviathans; Megan from time to time admits that he is onto something, but by the end of yesterday’s episode was back under Michael’s control. She had said Philip needed to be got out of the way and picked up a gun.

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins goes to the Todds’ shop in the village. He finds Megan pointing her gun at Philip and orders her to cut it out. Barnabas had been the leader who initiated the Todds into the cult and as we hear his thoughts in internal monologues today we hear that he still has some loyalty to it, but Michael has been too much for him. When he tells Megan to listen to him instead of Michael, she is shocked at his sacrilegious words. He hastily claims that he was only testing her.

Barnabas and Philip have a staff conference. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.

For his part, Michael is at the great house of Collinwood. Last night he was there as the guest of strange and troubled boy David Collins, who has shared supervision of the Todds with his distant cousin Barnabas. David’s governess, Maggie Evans, is not a member of the cult, and she had done something that bothered Michael. So he trapped her in the house’s long-disused west wing. She is still trapped there, and he has returned to use his powers to torment her further. David is anguished about this, but does not feel he can oppose Michael.

Maggie’s captivity prompts us to ask just why it is so frustrating that this episode is essentially a duplicate of Friday’s. In May and June of 1967, Barnabas was a vampire, he was holding Maggie prisoner in his basement, and there were a number of duplicated episodes. It was during that period that the show first became a hit, and it is that story that every revival of the show, from the 1970 film House of Dark Shadows on, goes out of its way to incorporate.

I think what kept people coming back to watch Barnabas’ imprisonment of Maggie was not so much what he was doing to her, but his relationship with his blood thrall Willie. In the course of Barnabas’ abuse of Maggie, Willie went through all of the psychological phases that Megan, Philip, David, and Barnabas exhibit today. I think the actors playing all four of those characters live up to John Karlen’s performance as Willie; even those who disagree with me on that will have to concede that some of them do good work. So the problem is not with the performances.

Rather, these episodes fall short because the character of Michael does not have the depth Barnabas had in the spring and summer of 1967. We kept wondering what Barnabas was thinking, and the more we learned about him the more puzzled we became, since all his ideas were so crazy. In his role as Barnabas’ external conscience, Willie gave us grounds to hope that we would eventually reach a layer of his mind where the nonsense would give way to something intelligible. But we don’t wonder what Michael is thinking, because there’s no evidence Michael is thinking at all. He demands submission from all and sundry and flies into a rage the instant he encounters resistance. He is just a spoiled brat.

Moreover, as a vampire Barnabas needed people to protect him during the day and to surrender their blood to him at night. When David is slow to submit today, Michael tells him he doesn’t need him or anyone else. This seems to be all too true- nothing is at stake for Michael in any interaction. No matter what Michael Maitland brings to the part, no matter how well his four Willies play their roles, the character is a dead end.

One viewer who seems to have been carried away with his frustration with this one is Danny Horn, author of the great blog Dark Shadows Every Day. His post about it includes some rather obtuse remarks about the performances, some of which fit with his usual shortcomings (e.g., his habitual underestimate of David Henesy’s acting.) But in other comments he loses track of his own analysis. For example, time and again throughout the blog he stressed that the show was made for an audience that saw each episode only once, and that their memories of the images that had appeared on their television screens would drift over time. When a particular moment makes a big enough impact that it is frequently referred to in later episodes and is a topic of discussion among fans, the images of that moment that appeared on screen during the original broadcast are at most a starting point, something that the viewers build on in their imaginations, so that the pictures that memory supplies soon enough have little or nothing in common with what was actually produced.

Danny makes all of these points over and over. Yet his post on #926 ends with this objection to the invisible form Michael and the other Leviathan boys assume when they are supposed to be mighty:

Dark Shadows actually has a great track record at creating scary things out of not that much money. The legendary hand of Count Petofi was incredibly cool and memorable — a Halloween decoration that they invested with real power. The scariest thing about the legendary hand was that it wasn’t under anybody’s control, even Petofi’s; it would fly around on its own, doing unexpected things. Not an expensive or difficult effect, just good writing, using what they have to tell an interesting story.

Television is a visual medium; we need to see the thing that the story is about. “It’s better in your imagination” is just a way to weasel out of coming up with a compelling visual. If you can’t actually show us the monster, then maybe you should consider a non-visual medium like print, or radio. Or not doing it at all.

Danny Horn, “Episode 926: The Shark, and How to Jump It,” posted on Dark Shadows Every Day, 15 September 2016.

I reached that point in Danny’s blog more than four years after the post went up, but even so I felt compelled to join those who piled on him for those two paragraphs. Here’s what I wrote:

I don’t think there would be a point in showing the monster. If the monster had done anything really scary, our imaginations would be working overtime to frighten us. Any image they put on screen would let the steam out of our anxieties. And since it hasn’t done anything scary, we won’t be worked up when we see it. Looking at it calmly, we’ll just be examining a costume or a prop or a visual effect or whatever.

Now, you can show the audience a thing or a person that looks harmless, and then build up fear around it. That’s what they did with The Hand of Count Petofi, which Barnabas observes with utter contempt when Magda first shows it to him, but which then wreaks havoc. Or you can build up a fear, introduce a person, and suddenly connect the person with the fear in an unexpected way. That’s how they gave us Barnabas- Willie opens the box, there are vampire attacks, a pleasant man shows up wearing a hat and speaking with a mid-Atlantic accent, and then we see that man without his hat, waiting for Maggie in the cemetery. There are lots of ways to scare an audience, but showing a picture of something that’s supposed to be scary isn’t one of them.

Comment posted 17 December 2020 by “Acilius” on Danny Horn, “Episode 926: The Shark, and How to Jump It,” posted on Dark Shadows Every Day, 15 September 2016.

I still agree with that, more or less, though I suppose it makes the creative process sound a lot tidier than it ever is. I do wish I’d thought of the comparison I make above between the four disaffected cultists and Willie. Danny’s blog was still drawing comments in those days, and I think that would have attracted some responses.

Episode 908: Mollycoddle that monster

The current phase of Dark Shadows is focused on the threat to the human race posed by the Leviathans, unseen supernatural beings who have taken control of several characters on the show. Among their devoted servants are matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her nephew, strange and troubled boy David Collins. Today, Liz and David welcome a boy known as Alexander to the great house of Collinwood. Alexander appears to be an eight year old boy, but is in fact an extreme case of Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome. Last week he was an infant, and a few days before a whistling sound coming from a wooden box. Whatever Alexander may really be, he holds a key position in the Leviathans’ plan.

At times, Dark Shadows becomes so much a kids’ show that it loses much of its adult audience. The Leviathan story so far has gone to the opposite extreme. A scene in which Alexander orders the thirteen year old David to give up the transistor radio he had long wanted and that his father just gave him will probably get similar reactions from viewers of all ages, but when Alexander scolds Liz for asking questions and she apologizes, only those who remember Joan Bennett as the great star she was in the late 1930s and early 1940s will get the full force of the moment. In general, adults will probably feel the distress Alexander’s tyranny is supposed to induce, while the fans who are running home from elementary school to watch the show will likely be either annoyed with the kid or amused to see the grownups getting theirs.

Liz’ ex-husband Paul is being persecuted by the Leviathans and their human agents. Paul is staying at Collinwood, and he is outraged to find Alexander in the house. Paul carries on like a crazy man, prompting Liz to tell him that if he doesn’t compose himself he will end up in a mental hospital. He tells Maggie Evans, David’s governess, about his suspicions; she listens sympathetically until he catches Alexander eavesdropping and roughs the boy up. Maggie then freezes in horror, and Paul goes on shaking Alexander and yelling at him until Liz enters and puts a stop to it. While Liz and Maggie stand in the corridor and talk about Paul’s lunatic behavior, he paces in the drawing room, telling himself that he mustn’t “fly off the handle” again.

David enters and hands Paul a small photo album. He says that it has pictures of Paul and Liz’ daughter Carolyn when she was a child. Since Paul wasn’t around when Carolyn was growing up, David says it occurred to him that Paul might want to look through it. Paul thanks David for his thoughtfulness.

As Paul leafs through the album, we get a look at a picture depicting Carolyn as she was when she was about ten. We haven’t seen the model before. Dark Shadows had such a tight budget that regular viewers will be fairly sure they wouldn’t have brought a girl in only to pose for a single photograph, so we might start wondering when we will meet the ten year old Carolyn.

Child Carolyn. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We may also be wondering when we will see another girl of about the same age. Denise Nickerson, twelve years old in December 1969, has been in the cast for a year at this point, and has made major contributions every time we’ve seen her. We saw in #893 and #896 that her character Amy Jennings is still living at Collinwood and is still David’s chief playmate. But as is usual in episodes where she does not appear, Amy is unmentioned today. Liz tells Paul that David spends entirely too much time surrounded by adults, as if Amy does not exist. They followed the same pattern during the eight months of 1969 when Dark Shadows was set in 1897 and Nickerson played nine year old Nora Collins. When Nora was in the episode, she was often its brightest spot, but when she wasn’t her name never came up. It’s unnerving that the show does so little to reassure us that it will continue to make use of such a talented and appealing young actress.

Alexander sits on the bench that has been in the foyer at Collinwood throughout the whole series. The Dark Shadows wiki says this is only the second time the bench has been used. I want to say it is the third- I remember David sitting there in #176, when Maggie’s predecessor Vicki told him he could have two desserts, cake and ice cream, but I seem to recall either him or someone else sitting there at some point around that time. I’m not going to go back through those episodes to check, but if you’ve been watching them I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a note in the comments.

Episode 892: The chosen room

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has given a present to antique shop owners Megan and Philip Todd. It is a wooden box. This box has a strange effect on the Todds, filling them with a mixture of irresistible fascination and nameless dread.

When the Todds go to open the box, it makes a whistling noise. They find a book inside it. The book is noticeably larger than the box. It is written in a script they do not recognize. There is also a scroll. That is in English, but may as well not be- neither Philip nor Megan can understand it, though Megan does say that she feels as if she almost can.

Later, Megan has a dream. It is the sort of dream people had in the first year of the show, before there were special effects. Like the dreams in ancient Greek literature, it takes the form of someone standing by the bed and making a speech. The speaker is Barnabas, and he tells Megan to empty the bedroom of furniture, board up its windows, and let no outsiders enter it. She calls him “master,” and he tells her she will not recognize him as such when she is awake. When she does wake up, she finds that Philip is already following the instructions, and realizes they had the same dream.

Downstairs, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is minding the antique shop. She receives a telephone call from someone wanting to buy a cradle that is on the shop floor. At the end of the call, we hear Carolyn’s thoughts as she congratulates herself on making a sale. She is shocked when Megan comes down and tells her the cradle is not for sale. Philip comes afterward, and with a blank expression on his face carries the cradle upstairs. Carolyn is left to call the buyer back and apologize.

The chosen room, ready for the cradle. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Philip and Megan set the cradle in the special room. They are apparently in awe. They look like any new parents stunned by the fact that they have brought a new life into the world, but the cradle is empty. After they leave the room, it starts rocking by itself.

The cradle is an interesting choice of prop. It was important early in 1969 in the “Haunting of Collinwood” story, when it was associated with the ghosts and rocked by itself. We then saw it a couple of months later in the 1897 flashback, when we learned why it was haunted. Those stories have been resolved in such a way that it won’t occur to us that the consequences of the same tragic events are animating it this time. The cradle seems to have become a generic symbol of spookiness. Considering that its back is coffin-shaped, that’s an understandable association.

Meanwhile, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has come into the shop. Maggie is the governess in Carolyn’s home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood, and they are friends. Maggie notices the sacred book on a table and asks Carolyn what it is. Carolyn doesn’t know anything about it. Why the Todds would leave such a thing on a table in their shop, a placement that implies it is for sale, is not explained.

Maggie tries on a feather boa. Like the cradle, this prop was significant in the 1897 segment. In that part of the show, Nancy Barrett, who plays Carolyn, was introduced as a woman named Charity Trask. Charity’s body was eventually taken over by late Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye. She wore the boa to indicate that she was Pansy. We last saw Charity/ Pansy, boa and all, in #883, and heard her voice in #887, so when we see it in the shop regular viewers will have fresh memories of her. We may well hope Carolyn will put it on and start singing Pansy’s song. But Maggie is the only one who is interested in the boa, and she doesn’t seem possessed at all. She wants to buy it, but Megan comes in and prevents her doing even that. She declares she is going to be closing the shop early.

Maggie leans very heavily on Carolyn to join her for a drink at the local tavern, The Blue Whale. Even after she drags Carolyn there, Maggie keeps pressuring her to stay for another drink. This is not at all typical of Maggie. When we find out her reason, it turns out to be even less characteristic. A mysterious gray-haired man who has been lurking around Collinwood lately wants to sit with Carolyn. When he comes to the table, Maggie gets up and leaves Carolyn alone with him. She has a self-satisfied smirk on her face as she does so, not a look we have ever seen her give before.

The man introduces himself to Carolyn as Paul Stoddard, her father. Paul abandoned the family when Carolyn was an infant, in the process faking his own death and prompting Carolyn’s mother Liz to believe that she had killed him. That belief led Liz to confine herself in her home for nineteen years, terrified that she would be caught. So it is simply inexplicable that Maggie would think Carolyn would be happy about having this bomb dropped on her.

Paul’s introduction of himself to Carolyn is the first time he is identified in a scene, but it is not the first time viewers have been told who he is. His name appeared in the closing credits for #887 and #891, ruining the surprise that is supposed to give a punch to the ending of today’s episode.