The dramatic date is November 1897. We open in an abandoned mill on the old North Road in Collinsport, Maine. The late Garth Blackwood, once the keeper of Britain’s Dartmoor Prison, is about to avenge his own murder. Blackwood was raised from the dead by sorcerer Count Petofi and Petofi’s stooge, artist Charles Delaware Tate. Petofi wants to be rid of his unreliable servant Aristide, and decided that Blackwood, whom Aristide killed while escaping from Dartmoor and has feared ever since, will be the one to slay him.
Blackwood is ready to strangle Aristide, who takes a moment to tell him that if he does so he will be endangering his own existence. He explains that there are others who conjured him up to perform the very task he is about to undertake, and that once he has completed it they will not need him anymore. Blackwood says that this is no problem. Once he has killed Aristide, he will kill them too. He pulls a chain tight around Aristide’s neck.
Tate is outside while this is happening. The set represents the exterior of the mill. The set is alternately in deep shadow and illuminated by lightning flashes. We haven’t seen it before, it is rather nice.
Tate hides while Blackwood leaves, then goes into the old mill and confirms that Aristide is dead. Aristide was a nasty and inept fellow, but Michael Stroka found so many ways to make him fun to watch that he will be missed.
Back in his studio, Tate tells Petofi what he saw. He also reminds Petofi that Blackwood has killed two other people, and that he will in all likelihood go on killing everyone he meets. Petofi doesn’t care about any of that. All that interests him is his plan to forcibly swap bodies with handsome young Quentin Collins and, as Quentin, to travel to the year 1969.
Blackwood storms in, declares that Petofi and Tate are his prisoners, and says that they are under sentence of death. Petofi tries to cast a spell to make Blackwood go away; he finds that there is more to Blackwood than his magic can control. He can only hold him at bay, and that only for a moment. Tate shoots Blackwood. The bullet wounds cause him to fall and briefly lose consciousness, but he is soon back on his feet. He leaves, and vows that he will return to finish what he started.
At the great house of Collinwood, Quentin is going through his belongings. Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye enters. Quentin explains that he will be leaving on the early morning train to get away from Petofi. Pansy is sad to see him go, but she well knows how dangerous Petofi is. Quentin further explains that he has been looking through all his old stuff to see if any of it is worth keeping. He doesn’t think any of it is, but she thinks a photograph of him at the age of ten is adorable, and is glad when he makes a gift of it to her. They share a really lovely moment, as she says that she still wishes they could have become lovers and he plays along. She says that if he’d married her, she’d even have given up her career for him. He says gravely that he never would have asked her to do that. Quentin never asked Pansy for any of what she wanted to give him, and her reaction to this line shows that it has reminded her of that fact. But she still cares about him, and it is still a sweet little exchange. They smile their unforgettable movie-star smiles at each other when they part.
Later, Pansy has a dream in which Quentin falls asleep and Petofi seizes his body the instant his guard is down. She awakes, and realizes she must rush downstairs to prevent this dream coming true.
In #425, broadcast in February 1968 and set in February 1796, the gracious Josette was near the cliff on the top of Widow’s Hill when she saw her lost love, Barnabas Collins. Wicked witch Angelique had turned Barnabas into a vampire, and Barnabas planned to kill Josette and raise her from the dead with the same curse. Angelique sent a vision to Josette of what her existence would be like after she rose from the grave to prey on the living. While Barnabas watched helplessly, Josette flung herself to her death onto the rocks far below the cliff.
Barnabas spent the next centuries telling himself that Josette’s suicide was the result of a misunderstanding. In #233, broadcast and set in May 1967, he was masquerading as his own descendant, a cousin from England come to visit the Collinses of Collinsport, Maine. He told heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and well-meaning governess Vicki Winters that Josette jumped from the cliff because she did not realize that her lover had come with only good intentions for her. By that time, it seemed he might actually have convinced himself it was true.
Today, it is 1897, and rakish libertine Quentin Collins and his sometime lover, maidservant Beth Chavez, reenact Josette’s suicide. They, however, follow the script which had previously applied only in Barnabas’ head. For several weeks, sorcerer Count Petofi has been occupying Quentin’s body, having confined Quentin to his own aging form. Beth was for a time in thrall to Petofi, and is terrified of him. Petofi was still Quentin-shaped yesterday when he chased Beth onto the top of Widows’ Hill. He collapsed in the woods, and a moment later the spell was broken and the body was Quentin’s again. Quentin, restored to his own person, wanders up to the summit and is surprised to see Beth there.
Quentin tries to tell Beth that he is himself, but she is not disposed to listen. Thinking that he has come to do something worse than simply kill her, she leaps from the cliff.
Terry Crawford says that when they first did this scene, they wanted her to emphasize the drama of Beth’s suicide by really flinging herself down hard. Since the floor was only a couple of feet below the set, the springy mattress that she flung herself on bounced her back into the frame, and they had to retake the shot. I wish we had that out-take, it must have been hilarious.
Quentin returns to the great house of Collinwood, in shock. He doesn’t notify the police or anyone else of Beth’s death- apparently the seascape just isn’t complete without a dead maidservant or two strewn carelessly about.
Barnabas, who has traveled back in time from 1969 to 1897 and who is currently free of the effects of the vampire curse, enters. He has befriended Quentin, and is at war with Petofi. He knew about the body swap, and had urged Quentin to make the effort that reversed it. He does not know how that effort turned out. He is happy to hear that Quentin is himself again, unhappy to learn of Beth’s demise, and insistent that Quentin must go far away before Petofi can get at him again.
We cut to a studio occupied by artist Charles Delaware Tate, a stooge of Petofi’s. We can see that Tate stole the magical portrait that keeps Quentin from turning into a werewolf. He covers the portrait with white paint. A visitor enters. It is Petofi’s servant Aristide. Aristide’s face is covered with dirt. Petofi has turned against Aristide, who has been in hiding. Tate agrees to help Aristide get a bath and clean clothes, but will not intercede with Petofi on his behalf.
Aristide does not know that the body swap is over. He goes to Collinwood, finds Quentin, and assumes that he is Petofi. When he offers to do whatever is necessary to restore himself to his master’s good graces, Quentin tells Aristide to find the man who appears to be Petofi and kill him. Aristide, a sadistic fiend, is delighted to receive this sort of command. He goes back to Tate’s, finds the real Petofi there, and stabs him in the chest.
Aristide getting ready to stab Petofi. Still not using his favorite knife, “The Dancing Girl” (alias “The Dancing Lady.”) Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Barnabas Collins went into a trance at the end of February 1969 and came to in March 1897, a time when he was a vampire. Barnabas took the audience with him, so that Dark Shadows has been a costume drama set in 1897 ever since. We’ve had a few glimpses of 1969- we can see that time is passing there, that twelve year old David Collins has been saved from death, that the ghosts of rakish libertine Quentin Collins and maidservant Beth Chavez have stopped haunting the great house of Collinwood, and that Barnabas’ physical body has vanished, leaving him no avenue of return to the 1960s. We’ve also had indications at several points that the show was about to put the 1897 segment into its climactic crisis, each of which was followed by a restart of that segment. Some of those false signs probably reflected long-range plans that were abandoned when they saw how popular 1897 was.
Now, they are in a position when they can go back to 1969 whenever they wish. There are only a few unresolved story points in 1897. Most of those can be wrapped up quickly, and the rest can be forgotten. If they wanted to, they could write a single slam-bang episode in which the evil Gregory Trask is forced to accept the annulment of his marriage to Judith Collins and to relinquish control of Collinwood, the family is persuaded that Barnabas never really was a vampire after all, and Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, turns into Barnabas’ lost love Josette and finds a way to leave him that will make him even more miserable than he already is. Sorcerer Count Petofi might be left watching helplessly as Barnabas, his friend Julia Hoffman, and the living Quentin all escape into the future. We could then assume that the rest of the characters just toddled off and led quiet lives.
They could equally well take another tack on their way back to contemporary dress. Barnabas and Julia came to 1897 separately; there is no reason why they, or any other characters, should have to go to 1969 together. Today, Petofi is performing some kind of mumbo-jumbo that is supposed to lead to a body swap that will cause him to trade forms with Quentin. After that, he is confident he will travel to 1969 and be safe from his foes, the Rroma people. He seems to be succeeding. So perhaps a Petofi who looks and sounds like Quentin will appear in 1969, in a Collinwood based on the events that have taken place so far in 1897.
In that pocket universe, Collinwood would be known as Traskwood. Its owner in 1969 would be Trask’s son by a subsequent marriage. Call him Gregory, Junior. It would be unclear at first what happened to Judith and to her presumptive heir, her twelve year old nephew Jamison. The revelation of their fates could set us up for some big twists and the introduction of new characters with familiar faces.
Since Gregory, Junior would be in his sixties, he could have a couple of adult children who would carry on some story points. Gregory III could be played by Jerry Lacy without old age makeup, and could be a morally ambiguous character who might emerge as a protagonist and would certainly become prominent in the pages of the fan magazines. None of the Trasks would have any legal obligation to let Quentin stay in any of their houses or to work for any of their businesses, nor would any surviving Collinses. Moreover, everyone in the area would know full well that there used to be a vampire on the estate named Barnabas Collins, and no one would ever have heard of Julia.
If the show goes that direction, we could spend half of each week with Petofi-as-Quentin while he makes a place for himself in that pocket universe version of 1969, while we would spend the other half with Barnabas and perhaps Julia back in 1897, where they are in an uneasy alliance with wicked witch Angelique as they try to set history right. Kitty’s Josettification would threaten to destroy this alliance, since Barnabas is obsessed with his love for Josette and Angelique is equally obsessed with her hatred for her.
The body-swap theme of today’s episode, along with the emphasis on the procedure Petofi is following, will remind longtime viewers of The Experiment, a theme that ran from April to May 1968. Barnabas and Julia built a Frankenstein’s monster with the intention of killing Barnabas and bringing him to life again in the new body. Some viewers may have wondered if Jonathan Frid was actually going to leave the show, and if the actor playing the monster was going to take over the role of Barnabas.
This time a larger fraction of the viewers are likely to think the transfer might work, since it would not require a popular star to leave the show. On the contrary, casting David Selby as Petofi in an altered twentieth century would give him the chance to wear up-to-date clothing, have magical powers, inflict cruel punishments on people who get in his way, run con games, hint at an ambiguous sexual orientation, and generally have a wonderful time. Since Mr Selby had by this point become the pin-up of a huge percentage of America’s teenaged and preteen girls, that sounds like a recipe for sky-high ratings. Meanwhile, casting Thayer David as a Quentin estranged from his body and his social environment would present an expert character actor with a challenge worthy of his skills.
It might sound like it would be too confusing to intercut between a parallel version of 1969 and a continuation of 1897, but the show will try almost exactly the same tactic a couple of years from now, as they set up for the storyline that carries the series through its final nine weeks. That closing bit is not widely regarded as one of the better phases of Dark Shadows, but the intercutting timelines that lead to it are an intriguing gambit. Maybe the idea for it came when they were trying to figure out how to get from 1897 back to 1969, in which case it is possible that the scenario I have outlined above may be very much like what the writers had in mind at some point in the development of the story.
Corridors of Trial and Error
We do get a few hints today about what we might see in the 1897 half of the show if it does split. Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi shows up for the first time since #834, before Julia came to 1897. We had begun to fear we wouldn’t see her again. It’s good to have her back, but since Magda is also played by Grayson Hall, it raises the possibility that Julia might go away for a long time. Maybe the action will be split between 1897 and 1969 for some months, and during those months Julia will be in 1969, running her hospital, entirely unaware that there ever was a Barnabas Collins.
Beth is a servant of Petofi’s now, and she spends the episode bickering with her colleague Aristide. It turns out that she still has feelings for Quentin. At the end, she runs out of Petofi’s lair to try to help Quentin. This suggests that Beth’s conflicted loyalties will be a source of drama. Aristide shouts after her not to go, then says that “You’ll ruin everything.” He delivers this line in such a mild tone that the resulting laugh must have been intentional. This raises the possibility of Aristide emerging as a source of laughs. In the hands of actor Michael Stroka, that is a distinct possibility.
Quentin rambles into the Blue Whale, the tavern in the village of Collinsport. It’s after hours, and the only person in the barroom to tell him to stop knocking on the door is cabaret performer Pansy Faye, whose body Quentin first met when it was occupied by Trask’s daughter Charity. He still calls her Charity, which she overlooks because she has the hots for him. Pansy lets Quentin in, and invites him to her place.
Charity lived at Collinwood with her father, and after Pansy took over she stayed on there for some time. The other day she talked about wanting to leave Collinwood and go “home,” but it was not at all clear what that meant. Her invitation to Quentin is the first time she explicitly says that she has her own apartment now. Perhaps, if we stay in 1897, we will see that apartment. Maybe when Thayer David takes over the part of Quentin, Pansy’s psychic gifts will enable her to recognize who he really is, and she will take him in. In those days, of course, a man and a woman would have to get married to rent a lodging, so presumably that would have involved a wedding. Since Quentin would appear to be Petofi, Pansy would thereby become a countess, Kitty’s equal in rank. It already makes Kitty exceedingly uncomfortable to be around Pansy, so that would be an occasion for a great deal of comedy. Moreover, any viewer who saw that both women had the same title and both were involved in supernatural changes of personality would be convinced that the writers had planned that phase of their story all along.
Pansy goes into her act. She sings her song; Quentin is seized with a fit of brio. He gives a little speech addressed to the absent bartender, picks Pansy up, spins her around, kisses her passionately, then sits down at the piano and bangs out the tune of her song. She admires his piano playing and he says that he used to be able to play quite well, before “they” came. Then he suddenly sinks back into his previous depression. He denies that he ever played the piano in his life. We know that it was Petofi who had that moment of brightness, and that Petofi’s mood darkened when he remembered the Rroma who cut his hand off 100 years before. Quentin has no recollection of anything his body does or says when Petofi is using it.
A piano is prominently featured in the drawing room at Collinwood in the 1960s- perhaps there will also be one there when the estate is renamed Traskwood, and when Petofi, as played by David Selby, wangles an invitation to the great house, he will play it. That might set us up for a moment when Quentin returns to his proper body, tries to explain what has happened, and finds that his inability to play the piano marks him as an impostor. You could build a lot of story on that- you might make it look for a while like Quentin could find a home in the Traskwood universe, then show that no, the people back in 1897 have to reset the past before anything can work again.
From April to July 1968, Dark Shadows was bogged down in a repetitious story called “The Dream Curse.” Each of a dozen characters had the same nightmare, in which they were in a small room with several doors. Behind each door they saw something that was supposed to be frightening.
When occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes (Thayer David) had the dream in #508, he defied its rules, caused wicked witch Angelique to appear in it, and brought the curse to a halt. Angelique had to cast another spell later to restart it.
Now the show has gone back in time and is a costume drama set in 1897. Thayer David plays sorcerer Count Petofi, who is among other things a vision of what Stokes might have been as a supervillain. Petofi has learned that both vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have traveled to 1897 from 1969. Petofi is convinced that they would not have made this journey unless they knew exactly what they were doing and had a foolproof plan for getting home. Petofi does not know Barnabas and Julia very well.
Petofi and his servant Aristide are holding Julia prisoner in their home, an old mill. This might be called a hiding place, except that virtually everyone in the village of Collinsport and its environs has visited Petofi and Aristide there at least once. There’s so much foot traffic in and out of it someone could make a fortune if they set up a food cart outside the door.
Yesterday, Petofi forced Julia to tell him that she and Barnabas each came back in time by meditating on a set of I Ching wands. Petofi then cast the wands, and his “astral body” was transported to a room very much like that in which the nightmares of the Dream Curse took place. At first it seems that he will match Stokes’ performance when he had The Dream. There is in the world one person over whom Petofi has no power and who is sworn to kill him. All Petofi knows is that this person is Rroma by ethnicity, and is going to try to use a particular scimitar to cut off his right hand, where his magical powers are concentrated. As Petofi is entering the room, he sees the scimitar. When the unseen person holding the scimitar points it at Petofi’s throat rather than his wrist, he realizes that he is not in jeopardy, and he orders the wielder of the scimitar to be gone.
In the room, Petofi opens a couple of doors. Behind one is Barnabas baring his fangs; behind the other, a wall of fire. One of the notable features of the room are red velvet curtains hanging from the ceiling to the floor. Fans of Twin Peaks sometimes say that “Once you learn to see it, the Red Room is everywhere”; I guess they’re right.
Petofi keeps his cool when he sees the gimmicks behind Door #1 and Door #2, but he does seem uncomfortable when he hears the voices of a male chorus singing a Romani song. After a moment, he finds his magical right hand squeezing his throat. All of a sudden he is back in his physical body, with Julia and Aristide by him, strangling himself. Petofi’s powers are so great that there are times when it seems that he will overwhelm all opposition and leave the show without a story to tell; the image of him crushing his own windpipe with his right hand suggests that he will ultimately be a victim of his own power.
Petofi recovers. He is sure Julia created his experience; he cannot conceive of events taking place outside anyone’s control. This marks a contrast with Stokes. Stokes, an upright and decent man, knows that Barnabas and Julia are keeping many secrets from him. When he has to work with them, he grumbles about this and makes it clear that he has dark suspicions. But though Stokes wishes he knew more about them, he does not press them very hard to reveal what they are hiding. Further, he was the one who explained the I Ching to them, including that meditation is a process of giving up control. Unlike Petofi, Stokes can easily accept that there are things that happen whether or not anyone wants them to.
When Julia cannot answer any of his questions, Petofi tells her why he keeps Aristide around:
Look at Aristide here. In point of fact, I don’t need a servant. The boy himself is no intellectual giant. He detests all forms of culture. Why then do I keep him on? Because I am a man who by nature shuns all forms of violence. I loathe the sight of blood. Aristide, on the other hand, has no such scruples. He revels in every form of torture and bloodshed known to the mind of man. I believe he even invented a few himself. He kills without the slightest feeling for his victims. He will kill you, Dr. Hoffman, if you do not tell me what I want to know.
As Aristide, Michael Stroka’s reactions when Petofi delivers this speech are quite funny. He looks really wounded when Petofi says that he is “no intellectual giant” and that he “detests all forms of culture,” but when he starts talking about how sadistic he is, he brightens up. When Petofi tells Julia that Aristide will kill her unless she tells him what he wants to know, he looks positively blissful.
Since Julia has nothing to tell, Petofi leaves Aristide to do his worst. He ties her to a chair in the back room. He rigs a string to the trigger of a revolver so that turning the doorknob will fire a round into Julia. He tells Julia that he hopes Barnabas will come to her rescue and therefore be her executioner.
Barnabas does shows up and confront Aristide. He turns the knob. We hear a shot, and see Julia slumped over in the chair.
One of the recurring faults on Dark Shadows is that when people are bound and gagged, they often have to use their teeth to hold the gags in place. Today they don’t even bother wrapping the cloth around Grayson Hall’s head- Michael Stroka just tucks it into her mouth. The suspense as Barnabas approaches the door depends on Julia’s inability to warn him not to turn the knob, and the closing shot loses its shock value when we can see Julia still biting down on the cloth. So this time it really is a problem.
A MacGuffin day today, as everyone is busy trying to get hold of the magical Hand of Count Petofi. Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi stole the Hand, which incidentally is a literal severed hand, from Romani chieftain/ organized crime boss King Johnny Romana. She hoped to use it to cure handsome rake Quentin Collins of the werewolf curse she placed on him, but found that she was unable to master its powers. Several people have stolen it from each other since then; at the beginning of the episode it is in the possession of wicked witch Angelique, who is also unable to figure out how to use it to solve Quentin’s problem.
Today, a man named Aristide is holding Quentin prisoner. He straps Quentin to a table under a descending pendulum with what we are supposed to imagine is a razor sharp blade. He goes to Angelique and tells her that Quentin will die in minutes unless she gives him the hand. Since Angelique can’t see Quentin and Aristide doesn’t even describe the predicament, it isn’t clear why Aristide went to all this trouble, but it does create a memorable image and a nice homage to the works of Edgar Allan Poe. It would also warm the hearts of viewers mourning the end of the Batman TV series.
Meanwhile, a small and pretty young woman named Julianka has told Quentin’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins that she can cure Quentin if she has the Hand. He gets it from Angelique and takes it back to his house, where Julianka is waiting. She pulls a knife on him and declares that she is an emissary of King Johnny. She will not cure Quentin, and will stab Barnabas if he does not surrender the Hand. Barnabas calmly offers her money and the Hand if she will cure Quentin before she goes, but she refuses. He gives her the Hand. After she goes, we hear his thoughts as he is feeling sorry for her.
In the woods, Julianka hears a squeaking bat. She reacts with horror as the bat turns into Barnabas in front of her. She asks what he is; he tells her that he believes she knows what he is. He does not bite her, but she does become docile. It seems that Barnabas is using the “Look into my eyes!” vampiric power that he only recently acquired. It also seems that, while Julianka was lying when she originally claimed she had come to Collinwood to cure Quentin, she was telling the truth when she said that she was able to do so.
The Hand recently disfigured Quentin’s face, as it had a few days before disfigured the face of Quentin’s onetime friend Evan Hanley. Evan’s good looks returned after a while, and we have not been told why. Today Quentin’s do as well, and when he asks Aristide for an explanation the best he can do is to suggest it may just be luck. They spent quite a bit of time showing Evan’s efforts to cure himself, and even more time showing Quentin feeling sorry for himself, so this is not at all a satisfactory payoff.
In an original cast panel at a Dark Shadows convention in the 80s or 90s, David Selby reminisced about today’s scene between Quentin and Aristede. He said that when the cameras started rolling, he knew what actions he and Michael Stroka were supposed to perform, that he was supposed to end up tied to the table, and that it was supposed to take a certain number of minutes and seconds. He also knew that there was some dialogue they were to speak in the midst of all that, but he couldn’t remember any of it. The teleprompter was out of view. He looked at Stroka, hoping to see something in his face to jog his memory, and what he actually saw was the same blankness he was himself experiencing. So the two of them improvised their way through it. When they were done, they looked at the clock and saw that they had filled exactly the allotted time. But not a word of what they said was in the script. The resulting scene includes some awkward lines, but it has a great energy to it, just the sort of thing that gets you hooked on live theater.
Quentin Collins has devoted himself to the pursuit of evil, and as a result he has two intractable problems. When Quentin murdered his wife Jenny, her sister, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, turned him into a werewolf. Magda later found out that Jenny had borne twins to Quentin, and since the curse is hereditary she tried to lift it. She placed the magical “Hand of Count Petofi” on Quentin before his transformation. That didn’t stop him becoming a wolfman, but it did cause his face to be severely disfigured when he returned to human form.
Now Quentin has made his way to the house of Evan Hanley, his onetime friend and partner in Satanism. Evan had recently been disfigured in the same way Quentin is disfigured, also as a result of contact with the hand, and Quentin knows that Evan stole the hand from Magda to use in an attempt to de-uglify himself. When Quentin sees that Evan is handsome again, Evan denies that he used the hand to restore his looks. He claims not to know what happened. That is as frustrating for the audience as it is for Quentin. We were sure Evan would start looking like himself again, and they went to enough trouble to show that he was not able to correct his appearance by himself that we were expecting the cure to involve a significant plot point. When Evan presents us with “It just happened” as his explanation of how he got his old face back, we are quite sympathetic to Quentin’s decision to grab a blunt instrument and knock him out.
Quentin finds the hand in a box in Evan’s desk, and a strange man immediately enters. He demands Quentin give him the hand at once. Quentin is willing to surrender the hand once he has used it to become his desperately handsome self again, but the man will not wait. He pulls a knife to underline his point. The knife is a flat piece of wood cut in a shape with some pronounced curves and no sharp edges, and the man holds it loosely at the end of an arm that is directly over the box Quentin could easily raise to disarm him. So the audience has to help a bit to make the confrontation credible. Still, the acting is very good, and the dialogue, in which the man combines lethal threats with apparently sincere expressions of sympathy for Quentin’s plight and jokes at his expense, is complex and lively enough that we are glad to make the effort. Besides, the man goes to the trouble of telling Quentin that the knife is named “The Dancing Girl” and that it was made long ago by a Persian swordsmith, so he’s giving our imaginations something to work with. I, for one, didn’t have any trouble keeping a straight face when Quentin lost the fight and the man left with the box containing the hand.
Kids, if you are going to rob someone at knife-point, do not imitate what Aristide is doing here. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Quentin goes to Magda at the Old House on the estate of Collinwood and reports what happened. She is frightened, since she herself stole the hand from a Romani chieftain/ organized crime boss named King Johnny Romana. When he says that a strange man came to take the hand, she assumes that he is an emissary of King Johnny’s, and that his next stop will be to kill her. When Quentin says that the man was young, Magda is puzzled- the recognized norms dictate that King Johnny send “an elder of the tribe” to complete such a task. She sets aside her plan to flee, and agrees to help Quentin in his attempt to summon wicked witch Angelique.
Quentin and Evan conjured Angelique up in #711. In previous segments of the show, when it was set in the 1790s and in the 1960s, Angelique established herself as one of its principal sources of action. But she hasn’t had much to do in 1897. She had a showdown with fellow undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins back in May, and has barely been seen since. Quentin and Magda speak for the audience when they wonder where she is and what she has been doing. They speculate that she might have gone home to the depths of Hell, and light some black candles to accompany an incantation meant to call her thence.
Angelique does appear, but not at the Old House. Evan finds her in his parlor when he comes to. One of the possible explanations for the restoration of Evan’s good looks was that he made some kind of bargain with Angelique; this is excluded, not only when he is surprised to see her, but when she asks questions that make it clear she knows nothing about the hand or anything that has happened since Magda brought it back with her. Angelique orders Evan to give her a complete briefing, and we cut back to the Old House.
Quentin is still in front of the black candles, fervently reciting his mumbo-jumbo, and Magda is telling him they have failed. After a moment, Angelique enters. Quentin jubilantly declares that he has succeeded in summoning her, and Angelique says that she is not aware of that. She tells him she was with Evan, and asks about the hand. Quentin tells her it was taken from him, and asks for her assistance. She says she is willing to help him, for a price, and that as a token of her good faith she will retrieve the hand. But first she insists he tells her everything he knows. We cut to the waterfront.
There, the man who took the hand from Quentin is standing alone in the fog. Angelique enters and flirts with him. He gives his name as Aristide. She says she is a puppeteer, and that if he lends her his handkerchief she will perform a trick. She wraps his handkerchief around the neck of a doll depicting a Continental soldier, a familiar prop from 1967 that became prominent during the 1790s segment, and squeezes it. Aristide begins choking, and Angelique orders him to give her the hand before he dies.
The closing credits bill Michael Stroka as playing “Aristede,” an unusual spelling. The following item, posted in the comments under Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, confirms my resolution to stick to the conventional spelling:
Factoid… I have the original script for episode 808, and Aristede is spelled throughout as Aristide.
Comment left 3 September 2017 by “Isaac from Studio 16 on W 53rd” on Danny Horn, “Episode 792: Dances with Wolves,” Posted at Dark Shadows Every Day, 19 December 2015.
In the same comment thread, Carol Zerucha goes on at length about Stroka’s ethnicity. He was Slovak, as she is, and she had a big crush on him when she was a kid watching the show. The characters in today’s episode assume that Aristide is Roma, but Ms Zerucha points out that we have no reason to assume they are right, and that he, too, might be Slovak.
Also in that thread, FotB “Straker” says that Aristide looks like William F. Buckley, Jr. I agree. I wish they had at some point cast him as a character who leaned way back in his chair and used polysyllabic words.
The evil Gregory Trask coerced lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley into helping him murder his wife, Minerva, so that he could marry wealthy spinster Judith Collins. Now Trask and Evan have conjured up a magical simulacrum of Minerva and caused it to hang around Judith. They claim they can’t see it, which, coupled with some other troubles Judith has had, leads her to believe that she has lost her mind. Trask and Evan strong-arm Judith into signing a paper, Trask locks her up in the tower room, and Evan makes the simulacrum disappear.
Meanwhile, Judith’s brother Quentin is at large. Quentin is a werewolf, and when he returned to human form this morning his face was disfigured. This worked to his advantage. He was in jail at the time, and he was being watched. The sheriff’s deputy had not recognized Quentin’s brother Edward when he came to jail that night, so it isn’t so surprising he doesn’t recognize Quentin, even though he is six foot four, has a distinctive hairdo and prominent mutton chop sideburns, and is wearing the same blue suit with a frock coat that he always wears. It is surprising that Edward doesn’t recognize him either, but this may be the result of a congenital problem the Collinses have. Not only was Quentin himself stumped when the equally identifiable Evan had a similar glob of makeup on his face recently, but Judith fails to recognize Quentin today when he comes to the drawing room. When Judith found him, Quentin was listening to his favorite record and reciting its lyrics in his unaltered voice, and he identified himself to her by name. Still, she couldn’t see it.
Quentin bursts into Evan’s room shortly after he finishes dissolving the simulacrum of Minerva. He sees that Evan’s face is no longer disfigured, and assumes that he used the magical Hand of Count Petofi to restore his appearance. Evan tells him he did not- he can’t explain why his face reverted, it just did so on its own. This does not satisfy Quentin, and it will not satisfy returning viewers. We saw Evan struggle to fix his problem for some time, and when he found himself in a crisis situation he suddenly turned up looking like his old self. So we’ve been in suspense for several days wondering what the explanation would be for his cure, and we are no more inclined to settle for a non-explanation than is Quentin.
Quentin knocks Evan out with a candlestick; the background music is a cue we have previously heard during on-camera murders, leading us to wonder if Evan will survive the blow. Quentin rummages around for a moment and finds the hand. He is looking at it, wondering how to use it to restore his appearance, when a man in a wool cap enters and orders him to surrender the hand at once.
This episode features one of Dark Shadows‘ all-time great goofs. When Evan is casting the spell to dissolve the simulacrum, a black-clad figure dashes past in front of him. A voice can be clearly heard exclaiming “Jesus, Lacy!” Evidently actor Jerry Lacy was in such a hurry to get from one set to another that he didn’t realize he was crossing a live camera.
Dark Shadows Commentary 