Maggie Evans Collins is upset. Her husband, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, has stormed out of the house yet again, as usual for a reason he refuses to explain to her. Quentin’s brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, taunts her with invidious comparisons to Quentin’s first wife, the late Angelique. Housekeeper Julia Hoffman keeps setting Maggie up to remind Quentin of Angelique, one of the most reliable methods of triggering his tantrums. Worst of all, but unknown to Maggie, Angelique herself has come back to life and is casting spells on her. Angelique murdered her identical twin sister Alexis and took Alexis’ place as Quentin’s houseguest. Maggie is desperate for a friend and keeps behaving as if “Alexis” were one, leaving her exposed to attack. We end today with Maggie standing at an open window, hearing Alexis’ voice urging her to jump. The angle makes it look like Maggie is already in her coffin and is opening its lid.
Dark Shadows was unusual among soap operas in that Friday’s episode was often the least eventful of the week. This one is a case in point. It doesn’t feel slow, though. The dialogue is well-crafted and expertly delivered, leaving us with the feeling that we are getting to know Maggie and each of her tormentors better with each scene.
When Dark Shadows began in June 1966, its biggest draw was movie star Joan Bennett as reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz was highly capable, and Bennett made her compelling to watch. When in #25 Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, grudgingly complimented her on her “neat way of managing people,” we could see that he was putting it mildly. But the show didn’t handle Liz’ storyline very well, and she soon became a blocking figure. As the owner of the estate of Collinwood and of the Collins family businesses, as a central player in all the stories they had started with, and as the powerful personality Bennett had created, Liz was such an important part of the show that when she became a brake on the action, there was a constant danger that it would be impossible for anything to happen ever again.
The arrival of Roger’s estranged wife Laura Murdoch Collins in #123 marked Dark Shadows’ transformation into a supernatural thriller. By the time Laura went up in smoke in #191, her story had absorbed two of the four original narrative themes, “The Revenge of Burke Devlin” and well-meaning governess Vicki’s growing friendship with strange and troubled boy David, and had undercut whatever interest we might still have had in the other two, the mystery of Liz’ decision to become a recluse and Vicki’s quest to learn her true identity. The emerging Dark Shadows 2.0 had little room for Liz, and she subsided to the margins. When the show traveled back in time and became a costume drama from November 1967 to March 1968 and again from March to November 1969, Bennett played other characters and was able to make a substantial contribution, but Liz would never again be a suitable vessel for her great talents.
For the last eight weeks, the show has been in another time travel segment. Now it has traveled, not back in time, but sideways. They are in an alternate universe. The show insists on calling this universe “Parallel Time.” It is 1970 here, as it is in the original continuity, but a different 1970 where people with the names and faces we already know are living very different lives.
The Elizabeth Collins Stoddard of Parallel Time is not the mistress of Collinwood or an effective businesswoman. This Liz entrusted her inheritance to her brother Roger, who turned out to be just as feckless as his counterpart in the original continuity. As the penniless Roger we met in 1966 lives in Liz’ house as her guest and works in Liz’ business as her employee, so this Liz and Roger both live at Collinwood as the dependents of their brother, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins.
In the original continuity, Quentin was not Liz and Roger’s brother, nor did he own anything. We got to know him when Dark Shadows was set in 1897, and he was a charming rogue, the younger brother of Judith and Edward Collins, who like Liz and Roger were played by Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds. So the parallel lines representing the two versions of 1970 take a bit of a swerve into that other epoch.
Today, Liz is busy organizing a costume ball to be held in the great house of Collinwood. They had such a ball every year at this time when Quentin was married to his first wife, the late Angelique Stokes Collins, and Liz thinks that having another one would be the perfect occasion for Quentin to introduce all of his friends to his new wife, the former Maggie Evans. Liz needs help getting this party going. She comes bustling into the drawing room today and addresses herself to Angelique’s identical twin sister, Alexis Stokes, announcing that the party is tonight and 14 of the guests have failed to RSVP. She bemoans her inability to get anything organized and pleads with Alexis to help her. Alexis agrees to do so and excuses herself from a chess game she had been playing with Barnabas Collins, a man who recently showed up and introduced himself as a distant cousin of the Collinses of Collinwood.
Quentin enters the drawing room and orders Liz to cancel the ball. She says that it is too late to do that. Quentin stalks off and goes outside. Liz turns to Barnabas and asks him to reason with Quentin. Barnabas is unsure that he is the right person, but he goes to the door anyway. He opens it just in time to hear Quentin peeling away in his car. Maggie appears at the head of the stairs and asks if Quentin has gone. Barnabas has to say that he has, and Maggie looks crushed. Liz is unable to help in any way.
Later, Liz returns to the drawing room in the middle of a conversation between Quentin and Maggie. She is carrying an enormous decanter containing some sherry and congratulating herself on calming the cook’s nerves by her bartending. Quentin excuses himself to go get into his costume.
Liz finds that Maggie has not yet chosen a costume. She urges her to do so at once. Maggie says she supposed that Angelique always picked out her costume weeks in advance. Liz knows that Maggie is intimidated living in Angelique’s shadow, and does not know what to say in response to that remark. She quickly changes the subject. She brightens, and says that Alexis has brought many lovely dresses down from the attic. She urges Maggie to go to Alexis’ room and choose one of them.
As the time for the guests to arrive comes near, Liz and Barnabas meet in the foyer. A portrait of the Barnabas Collins who died in 1830 hangs on the spot on the wall next to the front door where earlier this week we had seen a metal doodad that looks like a coat of arms. Barnabas is wearing the same outfit, and looks just like the man in the portrait. Liz is wearing a dress of the same vintage. She is overjoyed, and tells Barnabas that the period suits him. He thanks her, and returns the compliment. Quentin is wearing a blue federal coat; Liz and Barnabas tell him that he, too, is suited to the early 1800s. Alexis comes downstairs in a blue dress, and she receives the same commendation. Lastly Maggie makes her appearance. When Quentin sees her dress, he becomes very tense. He tells her to take it off, orders her never to wear it again, and smashes his glass on the floor. The camera pans from Barnabas’shocked expression to a flickering look of pleasure on Alexis’ face; Liz stands between them, and unfortunately we only see the top of her head.
What Liz does not know is that the person she thinks is Alexis is in fact Angelique risen from the grave. Angelique murdered Alexis, took her place, and is conspiring with housekeeper Julia Hoffman to drive Maggie and Quentin apart. The story is a souped-up version of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, in which the dead first wife is not only a memory that triggers anxiety in her successor but a supernatural being who rises from the dead to torment her directly. There is a scene with Maggie looking out the window of the drawing room that is an exact recreation of a shot in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film of Rebecca, and when Angelique and Hoffman trick Maggie into wearing the same dress Angelique wore to last year’s ball, prompting Quentin’s outburst, most grownups in the original audience would remember the same thing happening to the second Mrs de Winter in that film.
Angelique is the villain, and Maggie is the heroine. Still, we rather like Angelique. The sister-murdering is bad, of course, but Quentin is such a lousy husband that she is doing Maggie a big favor by trying to bring their intolerable marriage to its end as soon as possible. For example, today Quentin finds Maggie reading his old love letters to Angelique. He might justifiably have objected that those are private and say he wished she’d asked before reading them, but he doesn’t do that or anything else one adult would do when disappointed in another. Instead, he flies into a rage, accuses her of a variety of things she hasn’t done, and orders her to, and I quote, “Go to your room!”
Later, in the room they share, Quentin is still scolding Maggie for failing to admit that she was lying about how she found the letters. We know she had in fact told the truth. When she tells him so, he dismisses her with a shake of the head. When she brings up the fact that it is the anniversary of his wedding to Angelique, he shouts that she is forbidden to discuss the subject, then storms out and slams the door. This is when he goes downstairs, tells Liz to cancel the party, and drives away. We have never seen Maggie have a happy day with Quentin. He sometimes manages to be pleasant in the intervals between his tantrums, but even then he can’t let go of his habit of talking to Maggie as if she were a child and he were her somewhat weary guardian. If Angelique can hasten their final split, Maggie will owe her an enormous debt of gratitude.
Barnabas is not in fact a descendant of the man whose portrait now hangs in the foyer. He is a visitor from the main continuity. Angelique’s counterpart there is his great enemy, so it is fun to see him talking with this Angelique and playing chess with her.
David Selby has a problem with one of his lines, when Quentin winds up saying “I wonder where I got the illusion that an hour or two alone would settle one’s all of problems.” This is a fairly minor stumble by Dark Shadows standards, but it comes when Angelique is in closeup and Lara Parker’s left eyelid twitches when she hears “one’s all of problems.” That reaction is worth a laugh.
Quentin Collins finds a voodoo doll in his wife Maggie’s suitcase. She tells him she hasn’t seen it before. At length it dawns on him that it is physically possible for a person to place an object in someone else’s suitcase. He remembers that housekeeper Julia Hoffman was in the room for no good reason last night while Maggie was sleeping. Several weeks ago, he was able to see the abundant evidence that Julia was trying to drive Maggie out of the house. He knows that Julia was fanatically devoted to his late wife Angelique and must know that Angelique was involved in black magic, so that Julia would be the obvious suspect in an awkward situation concerning Maggie and a voodoo doll.
The next day, Quentin talks the situation over with Cyrus Longworth, his physician and an expert in black magic. Later, he confronts Julia; she denies leaving anything in the room. He does not have any further evidence to use to challenge her denials, so he leaves it at that.
What Julia knows that Maggie, Quentin, and Cyrus do not is that Angelique has returned from the dead. She murdered her identical twin sister Alexis and took Alexis’ place as Quentin’s houseguest. Julia and Angelique are conspiring to drive Maggie and Quentin apart so that Angelique can resume her place as Quentin’s wife and the mistress of the great house of Collinwood. Julia and Angelique keep congratulating themselves on how upset Maggie is getting, apparently not noticing that Quentin is suspicious of Julia and thinking of firing her.
Angelique, masquerading as Alexis, calls on Maggie in the master bedroom. She says that she realizes her presence in the house has been stressful for Maggie, and offers to leave if she wants her to do so. Maggie says that she is not stressed now, because she realizes that she is Alexis. She describes herself as childish and hysterical in her initial reaction, when she thought she was Angelique returned from the dead, and tells her to stay in the house as long as she likes. “Alexis” takes this statement at face value, and goes on to explain her belief that Angelique was murdered and her determination to find the person responsible.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that there is more going on in this scene than Angelique knows. Quentin has a habit of calling Maggie childish and hysterical, and she rejects those labels. So when she applies them to herself, regular viewers know that she is not giving her sincere opinion.
Moreover, being accepted as Alexis is not the winner with Maggie that Angelique believes it is. In #985, Maggie found Quentin and Alexis in Angelique’s old bedroom. Alexis was wearing Angelique’s frilly nightgown, pressing herself to Quentin, stretching her hand to him, looking into his eyes, and saying softly “Perhaps we can comfort each other.” Maggie ran from that sight to the drawing room, followed by Quentin. He tried to tell her she did not see what she saw. She told him that she would no longer be treated like a child, and left to spend the next six weeks at her sister’s place in New York. Angelique was in her grave at that time, and neither Alexis, Quentin, nor Maggie told her about it. So she does not know that by impersonating Alexis she is inviting Maggie’s distrust. She does not understand the warning Maggie is giving her when she tells her that she knows she is Alexis.
Maggie’s view of Alexis as a rival for Quentin also explains why she characterized her decision to go to stay with her sister as motivated solely by her own irrationality. Alexis is the last person with whom she wants to discuss her differences with Quentin, so of course she claims total responsibility for their earlier rift.
Angelique’s resurrection can last only so long as she can keep warm, and she can do that only by draining heat from the bodies of the living. Now the cold comes up on Angelique again. It strikes her during her scene with Maggie. Maggie can see that “Alexis” is ill, and reaches a friendly hand towards her. Angelique says this is just something that happens to her occasionally, and that she has to get under some blankets as soon as possible. She rushes out.
When she is in this condition, all Angelique has to do is touch a person and they will be an icy corpse. It is interesting that she chooses to pass up her chance to kill Maggie. Perhaps she is afraid that doing so would lead to her exposure. Alexis was her first unwilling heat donor; a handyman named Fred, who had the ill fortune to cross Angelique’s path in #1003, was the second. Angelique has concealed Alexis’ death by impersonating her, and Fred was due to leave town anyway. So no one has missed either of them. But there would be no covering up Maggie’s death.
Through the first half of the scene, Lara Parker’s hair and Kathryn Leigh Scott’s keep fluttering. The window on the set is closed, so that just makes us wonder how high the air conditioning was in the studio. After they come back from commercial, that problem is solved, but it was conspicuous enough to add a bad laugh to Angelique’s heat vampire symptoms.
Angelique runs down to the foyer, crying out for Julia. When she comes, Angelique orders her to fetch a victim whose body heat she can consume. Julia refuses, and Angelique tells her that if she doesn’t provide someone else she will herself be the next donor. Julia goes.
A moment later, Angelique feels she is about to succumb to the cold. She sees the doorknob turning, and resolves to claim whoever is about to enter. “Who will it be?” she asks, “Who… will… it… be?” There aren’t many candidates. There have been periods when the show had a bunch of characters in reserve who were not directly connected to any ongoing stories, but there are only a handful of those now, and only one or two would be likely to let himself or herself into Collinwood.
Five and a half years ago, I defended the episode in a comment I left on Danny Horn’s great blog, Dark Shadows Every Day. This segment of Dark Shadows is set in a different universe than the one where the first 196 weeks took place; the show insists on calling it “Parallel Time.” So the letters “PT” are sometimes put in front of the characters’ names to differentiate them from the versions of the characters we met in the original continuity. Danny and many of his commenters were getting impatient with Parallel Time by this point, and some compared it unfavorably to the trips the show took back in time within the main continuity, especially the costume drama segment set in the 1790s that ran from November 1967 to March 1968.
I’m liking it.
PT Angelique’s harebrained scheme isn’t really any worse than were most of Angelique-Prime’s schemes. So the difference between PT Maggie and Quentin on the one hand and 1795 Josette and Jeremiah on the other is that Maggie and Quentin have some brains. They talk to each other about what they’ve seen, confront Miss Hoffman, and consult with the resident Doctor of Spookology. For viewers who had seen 1795, that must have come both as a relief- thank goodness they aren’t going to simply recycle that story- and as a source of suspense- when Angelique sees her first evil plan fail, what other, even more evil plan will she devise?
Comment left by “Acilius,” 12 January 2021, on Danny Horn, “Episode 1019: Peer at a Prop,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 7 May 2017
I would have gone on to talk about all the stuff between Maggie and Angelique, but Mrs Acilius only pointed that out to me this time through. I’m sure that while I was watching the scene I responded emotionally to the nuances in Miss Scott’s performance, but I didn’t have it in mind after the episode was over.
The closing credits still bill Lara Parker as “Alexis Stokes,” a month after Angelique killed Alexis and took her place. Mrs Acilius explains this by reminding me of all the times when actors have strolled onto the set during the credits. She imagines someone walking on, seeing the credit that identifies Angelique, and reacting with shock.
Dave Woodard, MD, was on Dark Shadows from April to November 1967. Woodard was introduced as physician to Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie was the victim of vampire Barnabas Collins. Woodard was the show’s answer to Dr John Seward, the commonsensical local physician in Bram Stoker’s Dracula who called in his old mentor Dr Van Helsing when he found that his patients were suffering maladies he could not explain. Woodard’s call went to his medical school classmate, Dr Julia Hoffman. As Van Helsing was an incredible polymath, equally at home in several branches of medical science, of esoteric philosophy, and even in the law, Julia was dually qualified as a blood specialist and a psychiatrist and just so happened to have a theory about curing vampirism.
This Van Helsing proved a traitor to her patient and to her friend. In order to persuade Barnabas to agree to cooperate with her experiment, Julia betrayed Maggie, using her magical powers of hypnosis to erase Barnabas’ abuse from Maggie’s memory. As time went on, Woodard figured out Barnabas’ secret and Julia’s complicity in his crimes. To keep him quiet, Julia prepared a lethal poison and helped Barnabas administer it to Woodard in #341.
From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows traveled back in time and was a costume drama set in the 1790s, the period when Barnabas first became a vampire. It was then that we were introduced to wicked witch Angelique, who often caused pain to her victims by sticking pins in dolls. When suspicion spread that witchcraft was going on, Angelique framed well-meaning governess Victoria Winters for her own crimes.
Now, the show has traveled in time again, not backward but sideways. Barnabas has gone to an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” Maggie’s counterpart in this universe is married to drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, master of Collinwood. Angelique’s counterpart was Quentin’s first wife. She died last year, but has risen from the grave. When she was alive, Angelique built a cult around herself, some members of which reacted to her death with the firm conviction that she would come back to life. Now that she has done so, she has kept most of her devotees in the dark. She has told only two of them who she really is. Everyone else, friend and foe alike, thinks she is her identical twin sister Alexis.
One of the two people who knows Angelique’s true identity is her aunt, Hannah Stokes. Angelique forced Aunt Hannah to act as her henchman from #1003 until we saw her for the last time in #1014. In #1015, Angelique revealed herself to her most devoted follower, the housekeeper at Collinwood. This person is named Julia Hoffman.
Alexis really was staying at the great house of Collinwood from #984 to #1001, when Angelique rose from the dead, murdered her, and assumed her identity. When Alexis showed up, she found that Maggie was uncertain of her position in the house because everyone was so obsessed with Angelique. Hoffman deliberately and very blatantly worked to exacerbate Maggie’s insecurities, in the manner of Mrs Danvers in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. Unlike Maxim de Winter in the novel, Quentin caught on to what was happening and sent Hoffman away for a time. And unlike the second Mrs de Winter, Maggie refused to put up with Quentin’s miserable behavior, including his alarmingly affectionate relationship with Alexis, walked out on him and went to stay with her sister in New York. The absences of Hoffman and of Maggie coincided with the work Grayson Hall and Kathryn Leigh Scott, along with the other survivors from the summer 1967 cast, did in the feature film House of Dark Shadows.
Today, we open in Quentin and Maggie’s bedroom. Quentin is in the hospital, so Maggie is alone in bed. But she is not alone in the room. Barnabas is there, about to bite her. He bared his fangs and plunged his head into her pillow in the last scene of yesterday’s episode; he does the same in the opening reprise. But when we come back from the title sequence, he is showing us his teeth again, and there is no blood on them. Evidently he just wanted to rub his face in Maggie’s pillow for a second while he worked up his appetite.
Barnabas is going in for a second round when the doorknob starts to turn. He retreats into the shadows, then turns into a bat and flies away. Hoffman enters. Maggie wakes up. She is startled to find Hoffman in the room. Hoffman explains that she thought she heard a prowler. Maggie tells her she doesn’t believe her.
Indeed, it is hard for us to believe Hoffman. The only sound we could hear Barnabas make was his squeaking in his bat form. Any sounds of footsteps the microphone did not pick up must have been much quieter than the squeaking that was going on while Hoffman was already in the room. Hoffman does not appear to have heard the squeaking, so it would not seem she could possibly have heard anything that would lead her to believe there was a prowler. Later, we hear Hoffman on the telephone to Angelique, gleefully reporting that Maggie was unnerved to find her in her room. So apparently she did not hear Barnabas. She went into the room to advance her plan of making Maggie look foolish. When she brought up the idea of an intruder, she was only accidentally pointing towards the truth, not saying something she believed or had reason to believe.
In the hospital, Quentin meets with his doctor, Cyrus Longworth. Quentin had severe chest pains the night before, so bad that Cyrus was for a time certain he had only minutes to live. Cyrus is deeply disturbed when he comes into the consultation room. He tells Quentin that he has run every relevant test, and that the results prove beyond a doubt that there is nothing physically wrong with him. Quentin asks how that can be, and Cyrus says that his chest pains were probably the result of a supernatural influence. His preliminary diagnosis is that a witch pushed a pin into a doll. This is correct. Angelique did indeed push a pin into a doll representing Quentin.
It took Woodard months of exposure to a pile of evidence before he would use the word “supernatural” without hesitation. All Cyrus needs is to see a man who is sick one day and healthy the next, and he’s right there. In #985, we learned that Cyrus had worried his friends by presenting a paper on black magic at a scientific conference. He was a member of Angelique’s cult, and at her suggestion he devised a Jekyll and Hyde formula that he has used to indulge his sadistic desires, which include murder. He is a mad scientist, less Woodard than Julia.
Back at Collinwood, Maggie gets dressed and opens the front door. She finds Barnabas standing there, about to knock. She says she is on her way to the hospital to visit Quentin. The telephone rings, and she finds that Quentin is on his way home. Barnabas asks to stay with her while she waits for her husband to return, and she agrees.
The two have a remarkably cozy conversation. They are so close together that her hair bounces in his breath. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said it looked like Barnabas was about to kiss Maggie at any moment. “You mean bite her,” I said. “Same thing,” she responded.
This conversation includes one of the most interesting of all the show’s countless bloopers. Maggie confides her insecurities about succeeding Angelique as Mrs Quentin Collins. Barnabas asks “Did Quentin really love Josette?” We cut to a closeup of Maggie. For half a second, Kathryn Leigh Scott visibly struggles not to laugh. Cast members almost never corrected each other on camera, just delivering their next scripted line no matter how bad the preceding miscue had been, but this one was so extreme that she improvised “Josette? I think he loved Angelique.” Once she had contained her laugh, she slipped right back into character. It really sounds like Maggie is caught off guard by Barnabas’ stumble, not like Miss Scott is caught off guard by Jonathan Frid’s. And when we cut back to Barnabas, his face is just as it was when we cut away to the closeup. That is an impressive bit of professionalism.
“Did Quentin really love Josette?”
Quentin comes home, and Barnabas excuses himself while he and Maggie have their joyous reunion. Maggie tells Quentin that she wants him to dismiss Hoffman. When she describes the awkward moment in her room, he grows impatient and irritated. He refuses to dismiss “someone for walking into a room!” Hoffman enters. Quentin orders the two of them to feel better about each other.
This is puzzling in a way. Before Maggie left, Quentin had caught on to what Hoffman was doing, and he seemed to be thinking of firing her. But regular viewers will not be entirely surprised. The confrontation that led to Maggie’s departure was all about Quentin’s habit of treating her like a child, and the whole time she was away he kept saying that he was not going to indulge her childish behavior. Quentin has got so deep into the habit of belittling Maggie that he cannot resist doing it even when he knows that she is in the right.
In their room, Maggie is getting ready to go back to bed while Quentin looks in her suitcase. He finds the voodoo doll there. As Mrs Acilius pointed out, Maggie was still in New York when Quentin’s pains started, so she is not very likely to be the witch. Also, the room has been open and vacant all night, so anyone could have walked in and left the doll. No reasonable person could take this as any kind of evidence against Maggie, but Angelique and Hoffman don’t have to concern themselves with reasonable people- their target is Quentin.
Vampire Barnabas Collins has left the universe where the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows took place and found himself in a universe chiefly populated by counterparts of people he knows. His own counterpart lived a quiet life and died in 1830, so he won’t be running into him.
In his own universe, Barnabas had an affair with wicked witch Angelique Bouchard in the 1790s, dooming his chance to find happiness with his true love, the gracious Josette. We saw the events associated with this disaster from November 1967 to March 1968, when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in those days.
That Angelique came to the estate of Collinwood as a lady’s maid. In #372, she met much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes. Ben thought Angelique had a romantic interest in him, only to find that she had cast a spell to turn him into her slave in furtherance of her scheme to take Barnabas away from Josette.
In the current universe, it is 1970. Angelique’s counterpart was born in the village of Collinsport in 1939 and died at Collinwood in 1969. Three weeks ago, she came back to life, murdered her identical twin sister Alexis, and took her place as a houseguest at Collinwood. Angelique and Alexis’ maiden name was Stokes; their father is Tim Stokes, counterpart of Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, who is Ben’s descendant. Today, Barnabas talks with Angelique, who tells him that a Ben Stokes who was an indentured servant at Collinwood and an Angelique who came to the house as a lady’s maid in the 1790s are her ancestors. She also says that the Angelique of the 1790s is buried among the Stokes family. So we learn that we are in a “time-band” where Barnabas left Angelique alone and Ben wound up married to her.
The main event today is that Angelique reveals her true identity to Miss Julia Hoffman, housekeeper at Collinwood and most fanatical member of the cult Angelique built around herself in her lifetime. When Angelique admits she is not Alexis, she addresses Hoffman as “Julia,” the first time anyone has called her this. Julia admits that she is afraid of Angelique, since she is dead. Angelique orders Julia to hold her hand and feel her warmth. When she does, Julia asks how she managed to defeat death. Angelique resists telling her, but Julia insists. She dwells on the lack of sensation during the period when she was physically dead. In response to Julia’s continued prodding, Angelique says that her tomb was opened by her widower, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, with assistance from his friend, mad scientist Cyrus Longworth. Finally Julia can’t conceal her jubilation at the resurrection, and they cackle gleefully as they start discussing their plans to reestablish Angelique as Quentin’s wife and therefore as mistress of Collinwood. Angelique manages not to tell Julia that she murdered her sister.
The episode number “1015” signifies that this was the last episode of the 203rd week of Dark Shadows. There were some days in 1966-1971 when no episode of the show premiered on the ABC network. They skipped episode numbers on those days to keep the Friday episodes divisible by five. So far, there have been fifteen of these preemption days. That makes this the one thousandth episode aired. And therefore the one thousandth I have reviewed. A bit of a personal milestone, that.
From the time he joined the cast of characters in April 1967, vampire Barnabas Collins has been the most famous thing about Dark Shadows. We haven’t seen him in over a month. He passed through a cosmic rift in #980, leaving his native universe behind and arriving in another “time-band” populated largely by counterparts of people he knew. In the original continuity, Barnabas was freed from his coffin when dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis unchained it, believing he would extract from it a treasure in jewels that would make him rich. Here, Barnabas is trapped in his coffin when Willie’s counterpart, author William H. Loomis, chains it, believing he will extract a story from Barnabas that will make him rich.
We haven’t seen any of Will Loomis’ oral history sessions with Barnabas, since John Karlen and Jonathan Frid have both been in Tarrytown, New York. Along with many other key members of the cast, they have been filming their parts in the feature House of Dark Shadows. That production is nearing a wrap, and several other cast members have already come back. Today’s story is all about Barnabas’ impending return.
When Barnabas found himself in “Parallel Time,” the first person he met was Will’s wife, the counterpart of Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn Collins Stoddard. He told Carolyn that he was a descendant of the eighteenth century Barnabas Collins, of whom a portrait hangs in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. In his own universe, that portrait does hang there, and it has been Barnabas’ letter of introduction to the Collinses more than once. But Carolyn told him there was no such portrait there or, so far as she knows, anywhere else. So he bit her and made her his blood thrall.
Indeed, the other day we saw the spot on the wall where Barnabas’ portrait hangs in the main continuity, and it was not there. Instead, there was a metallic decoration reminiscent of a coat of arms. That decoration hung there before Barnabas’ portrait first appeared in #204. So few of the people watching at this point in 1970 had been in the audience in early 1967, and so few of those would have made note of what was hanging on the walls, that I can’t imagine one viewer in ten thousand would have caught the reference during the first broadcast. None of the writers currently with the show was on staff then, nor was line producer Peter Miner. It’s one of those moments when I suspect director Lela Swift and art director Sy Tomashoff were decorating the set for their own amusement.
Today, a portrait of Barnabas has taken the place of the coat of arms. Children Daniel and Amy Collins found it in the attic of Will and Carolyn’s house, and for some reason housekeeper Julia Hoffman and butler Mr Trask decided to hang it up by the front door. It is a copy of the one we have seen over the last three years. It depicts Barnabas’ counterpart in this universe, a man who lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830.
The master of Collinwood, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, is shocked to see the portrait, and orders it to be removed immediately. Daniel’s counterpart, strange and troubled boy David Collins, had been the first to speak Barnabas’ name when he called Willie’s attention to the portrait in #205. Shortly after, Willie heard a heartbeat coming from the portrait, which led him to make his fateful trip to open the coffin. In this continuity, it is Daniel who hears the heartbeat, and he will today try to find and open the coffin.
Quentin has caught two glimpses of the other universe in the room in the east wing that was his late wife Angelique’s bedroom. Unknown to Quentin, Angelique has returned from the dead and murdered her identical twin sister Alexis. Quentin thinks that it is Alexis who is his guest in the great house, staying in her sister’s old room. When he tells her today what he saw, “Alexis” thinks he is losing his mind. But she then sees the phenomenon herself. She sees Hoffman’s counterpart calling for Barnabas, as Quentin had seen her talking about Barnabas’ “terrible curse.” “Alexis” and Quentin decide that they and Hoffman should have a séance to contact the spirit of the Barnabas Collins who died in their universe in 1830, the only Barnabas Collins they know of.
In the main continuity, séances are a frequent occurrence; we have seen fourteen of them there, and heard a detailed account of a fifteenth. In the early days, there was always one participant who tried to break the circle, only to be sternly reproved by the leader. The characters stopped doing that as they got to be familiar with the procedure, but séances are rarer in this universe. As things start to get interesting, Hoffman can’t take it anymore. She breaks the circle and runs out. “Alexis” says that the presence she felt is gone. But then a ghost materializes in the corner of the room.
Chemist Horace Gladstone has been selling a strange and powerful synthesis of his own invention to Cyrus Longworth, an independent medical researcher. Cyrus refuses to tell Gladstone what he is using the synthesis for. Gladstone has now figured it out for himself. Cyrus has concocted a potion which he drinks to change his appearance, disguising him so effectively that even the people who know him best do not recognize him. In that disguise, Cyrus calls himself “John Yaeger,” spends a lot of money, and indulges his sadistic impulses.
Gladstone comes to Cyrus’ lab and tells him what he knows. Cyrus tries to deny that he is Yaeger, and Gladstone lists the evidence he has collected proving that he is. Gladstone tells Cyrus that he doesn’t believe he can do without the thrills he gets from his activities as Yaeger. The story has been crafted as an account of addiction, so returning viewers are sure Gladstone is right. He says he will go on serving as Cyrus’ connection for the drug he craves, but the price has gone up. He demands $10,000.
Cyrus first learned Gladstone’s name from his late friend Angelique Stokes Collins. Angelique was a woman of vast learning in a variety of fields, much like the title character in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “Ligeia.” Also like Ligeia, Angelique has returned from the dead. She is now back in the great house of Collinwood, impersonating the identical twin sister whom she murdered on the night of her resurrection, and occupying her old room as the guest of her widower, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins.
Cyrus calls Gladstone a blackmailer. In reply, Gladstone makes a cryptic remark: “Why do you think my number was in Angelique Collins’ phone book? She’s led many lives. Each person only gets one. Good night.” We have indeed been wondering how Angelique came to know Gladstone, and now we wonder if he is aware of just how literally true it is that “She’s led many lives.” It doesn’t make any sense to follow “She’s led many lives” with “Each person only gets one,” but actor John Harkins was so precise in his delivery that I’m sure that was the scripted line. If there was a slip, it came from Sam Hall’s typewriter, not from Harkins’ tongue.
If it isn’t a slip, I think we would have to go out on a limb to explain what Gladstone could mean. Angelique built up a cult around herself, including several people who were firmly convinced that she was going to rise from the dead. When her sister Alexis came to Collinwood, housekeeper Julia Hoffman, sleazy musician Bruno Hess, and Angelique and Quentin’s son Daniel were certain that the prophecy had been fulfilled and they were seeing Angelique redivivus. This was also the first thought that came to Cyrus, to Quentin’s brother Roger, and to Angelique’s Aunt Hannah, though they were more easily persuaded that Alexis was a separate person. The cultists are impressive enough in their certainty that even people outside their ranks were sure Alexis was Angelique returned from the grave. Daniel’s cousin and playmate Amy Collins was horrified to see her for that reason, and Quentin’s second wife, the former Maggie Evans, fled the house in part because she could not shake her belief that Alexis was Angelique.
If Gladstone is familiar with Angelique’s cult and has been involved with it, he might be saying that each person gets to participate in only one of Angelique’s lives. We’ve already seen that is not the case, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t think it is. Angelique may at some point have taught her followers a doctrine like that. While Hoffman, Bruno, and Daniel expected Angelique to come back and rejoin them, Cyrus, Roger, and Hannah were unsure they would see her again, even though they were certain that she was not simply dead. Indeed, Angelique is still telling her most of her devotees that she is Alexis. The only one to whom she has fully revealed herself is Hannah. Perhaps she had a plan to transcend death, but did not know just how it would work. Or perhaps she has decided the rest are not yet ready to be initiated into the esoteric truth of her return.
Sam Hall was a serious Lutheran, so much so that he insisted Shirley Grossman convert from Judaism before she married him and became Grayson Hall. Christian studies in twentieth century academic institutions were largely taken up with speculation about differences of opinion in the church before the codification of the New Testament and the formulation of the creeds. This sort of thing is still prominent in divinity schools today, and is often heard from pulpits in mainline Protestant denominations. Hall must have been familiar with it, so he probably gave it some thought when he spent Easter season 1970 writing scripts about a figure whose followers sort of expected her to rise from the dead and who surprised them by the way in which she actually did so. I doubt he was making any particular point about the various schools of thought that seminary professors postulate in the primitive church, but when he presents Angelique’s cult as divided into several strains of opinion from the start he is developing an idea that he did not have to invent himself.
We cut from the scene between Cyrus and Gladstone to the basement of Collinwood. Angelique leads Quentin to a little chamber hidden behind an alcove. A human skeleton stands in the chamber. You may wonder how a skeleton can stand, but Quentin doesn’t. He is too busy being surprised that he didn’t realize this chamber was in his basement.
The skeleton is that of Dameon Edwards, a friend of Angelique’s who went missing about a year before. Dameon’s ghost has been haunting the place for a couple of weeks. Angelique tells Quentin that Hannah found the skeleton and exorcised the ghost. Yesterday, we saw Angelique exorcise the ghost. Returning viewers know that she is giving credit to Hannah because she is masquerading as Alexis, who did not share her sister’s interest in the occult or her aunt’s. Quentin thinks that Bruno probably killed Dameon. Indeed, the ghost confirmed this yesterday. Quentin very much wants to get rid of Bruno, so you might think he would be interested in bringing a murder charge against him. But he decides that would be too much trouble, and it hurts his feelings when “Alexis” snaps at him that he shouldn’t be wasting his time reporting Dameon’s murder when he isn’t doing anything to investigate Angelique’s. So he calls Cyrus, and the two of them bury the bones on the grounds of the estate.
Meanwhile, two long-absent characters have returned from trips out of town. Quentin sent Hoffman to visit friends of hers in Boston because she kept antagonizing Maggie. Quentin’s sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard also went away for a long stay in New York, where she visited Maggie. In off-screen reality, Grayson Hall and Joan Bennett were both in Tarrytown, New York with several other cast members, working on the feature film House of Dark Shadows. Liz complains that Hoffman didn’t meet her at the train station with a car, and Hoffman explains that she just got back herself.
Hoffman says she missed Collinwood terribly while she was in Boston; Liz says she can’t understand that. If she were in Quentin’s place, she would sell the house and move to the city. That will interest longtime viewers. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in a parallel universe, where Liz’ counterpart owned Collinwood. When the show started, she was a recluse who hadn’t left the house for eighteen years. Her brother Roger often urged her to sell the place so that they could live someplace less gloomy, but even after she stopped being a recluse Liz wouldn’t hear of that. She was a symbol of the family’s commitment to the house. We have already seen that this Liz is the opposite of her counterpart in other ways, and now we wonder how far they will take that mirror image motif.
Angelique is in the foyer, talking on the telephone to Hannah. Villains on Dark Shadows have remarkably little sense of OpSec, and this is a case in point. Quentin, Liz, and Hoffman are a few feet away from her in the drawing room, and each of them knows that Alexis and Hannah couldn’t stand each other. All Angelique has to do is call Hannah by name and she will raise their suspicions. Yet not only does she use Hannah’s name several times, she uses one incriminating expression after another about how no one will suspect what they are up to. If any of them listens in, or of anyone else in the house happens by on their way to the front door, Angelique will have tipped her hand.
It is Hoffman who eavesdrops on the call. After Angelique catches her, they have an awkward exchange and Hoffman goes upstairs. Angelique then stands at the door to the drawing room and eavesdrops on a conversation between Liz and Quentin. Liz wants Quentin to go to New York and ask Maggie to come home, he throws a tantrum and says that Maggie is too childish for him to do such a thing.
Hoffman is in Angelique’s old room, talking to the portrait of her that hangs there. The members of Angelique’s cult make a practice of coming to the room and carrying on conversations with the portrait; when Alexis was staying in the room, she sometimes walked in on them while they were confiding their thoughts to it. Angelique eavesdrops on the last part of Hoffman’s account that when she was in Boston, she felt a mystic assurance that when she returned to Collinwood she would find Angelique come back to life. When Hoffman says that everything seems to be the same as it was when she left, she is close to tears.
The resurrected Angelique eavesdrops on Hoffman’s conversation with the dead Angelique. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Angelique takes a step forward, and Hoffman realizes she is not alone with the portrait. She apologizes to “Alexis,” and Angelique says she needs a friend she can trust. Hoffman claims to be such a friend. “Alexis” then launches into her reasons for believing that Angelique was murdered. After the first couple of sentences, returning viewers know what she is going to say, so we dissolve to Quentin and Cyrus in the drawing room.
Quentin and Cyrus have just buried the skeleton, prompting Quentin to feel sorry for himself. He then tries to explain to Cyrus something extremely weird he saw the other evening. He went to Angelique’s old room to see Alexis. He opened the door, and saw a space that lacked the room’s furniture, lights, and decor. He saw two children whom he took to be Daniel and Amy, and they said something about Barnabas Collins. The only person of that name of whom Quentin or Cyrus is aware died in 1830, but the children were talking about someone they knew. An invisible barrier kept Quentin from entering the room, and he could not attract the children’s attention. Regular viewers know that Quentin was catching a glimpse of the other continuity, and that the children were not Daniel and Amy Collins, but their counterparts David Collins and Amy Jennings. Cyrus hasn’t been watching the show, so all he can do is suggest Quentin take a vacation.
They’ve been experimenting with videotape editing, and they make a jump cut from the drawing room scene with Quentin and Cyrus to Quentin walking up to the doors of Angelique’s room. The effect is startling, I suspect intentionally so. Quentin opens the doors, and again sees the other universe.
This time Quentin sees the counterparts of Liz and Hoffman. As David and Amy had been, they are talking about Barnabas, who was last seen in this room. Hoffman, whom Liz addresses as Julia, says that they must keep the room open so that Barnabas will have a chance to return to them. She says she wants to stay there, because it makes her feel close to Barnabas. Liz excuses herself, and Julia calls out to Barnabas. As Hoffman had grown emotional talking to the Angelique whom she believed to be absent, Julia grows emotional when she talks to the missing Barnabas. She looks at the hallway, seeing not Quentin but the dark, empty space that is there in her universe. She asks if Barnabas is there, watching her. Grayson Hall plays these two scenes so similarly that we can have no doubt that whatever the one Julia Hoffman feels for Barnabas, the other feels for Angelique.
Quentin calls out to Hoffman’s counterpart, as he had called to Daniel and Amy’s counterparts. As the children had been unaware of his presence, so this other Julia Hoffman is unaware of him. And as Daniel and Amy had come to the hallway and asked why he was shouting for them, Hoffman comes to the hallway and asks why he is shouting for her.
This is the last script that will be credited to writer Violet Welles. Welles had done a substantial amount of rewriting on scripts attributed to her friend Gordon Russell before her name first showed up in the credits with #711, and she will do more ghosting for Russell later.
Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day is a tribute to Welles; I recommend it highly. Welles was far and away the best author of dialogue among the nine writers credited through the show’s 249 weeks, so much so that her uncredited contributions are easy to recognize. I will mention a week very close to the end of the series in 1971, a long time after the wheels came off, when all of a sudden characters start making witty remarks and developing interesting relationships. Then it’s back to the dreariness of a bunch of go-nowhere stories.
Welles rated herself low as an inventor of plot-lines. I don’t know what went on during the long hours she spent in story conferences with Russell and Sam Hall, but it was when she was in the room that the most fertile planning sessions Dark Shadows ever had took place. They sketched out flimsies thirteen weeks at a time, and from the time Welles became a regular part of the staff until thirteen weeks after she left, the show was packed with more lively ideas than at any other time. So if she was correct in that harsh self-assessment of what she did in the writers’ room, it was only in the narrowest sense.
Welles also spoke disparagingly of herself as a designer of dramatic structure at the level of individual episodes, but today’s installment shows that this was simply wrong. There is a tremendous amount happening in these 22 minutes, it is crystal-clear throughout what is happening and why we should care, and the actors get to do some of the best work they ever did do. We see two stories, one a mashup of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca with Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 short story “Ligeia,”* the other a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, also with a dash of “Ligeia.”
The episode is set in a different universe than the one in which the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows took place, and most of the characters are “Parallel Time” counterparts of those we met in the main continuity. In the Rebecca/ Ligeia mashup, we today see Quentin Collins, master of the estate of Collinwood, owner of Collinsport Enterprises, and gloomy drunkard; Quentin’s new wife, Maggie Evans Collins; housekeeper Julia Hoffman, fanatical devotee of Quentin’s late first wife Angelique; and Alexis Stokes, Angelique’s freshly arrived identical twin sister. The bit from the Jekyll and Hyde story features scientist Cyrus Longworth and attorney Chris Collins. Angelique comes up in Cyrus and Chris’ conversation, and she is emerging in the role of Ligeia. Like the eponymous character in Poe’s story, she is a celebrated beauty who is dead but expected to return. Alexis herself brings up yet another reference. She wears a short bluish gray suit and chignon hairstyle with a tight spiral twist at the back, the look that the mysterious Madeleine wore and her impostor copied in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Jekyll and Hyde Meet Ligeia
I’ll start with the Jekyll and Hyde story, since it is the simpler one today. Chris is the estate manager at Collinwood, and his responsibilities include custodianship of Angelique’s personal effects. His friend Cyrus has called Chris to his basement laboratory to ask for a favor. Angelique had told him about a chemist in Boston who could help him with some obscure formula he needs for his current experiments. She gave him the man’s contact information, but he lost it, and he wants to look for it in Angelique’s address book.
Before they start talking about the address book, Cyrus tells Chris that he saw Angelique in town today. He tells him he was driving past the drug store and saw her walking down the street. He called to her and she did not answer, but he is certain it was she. Chris does not yet know that Angelique’s identical twin sister is in town, so he does not tell Cyrus about Alexis. He starts with a philosophical approach, then veers towards the explanation medical:
CHRIS: Cyrus, you’re a scientist. A scientist deals in established principle and fact. One thing we have to accept is that death is the end.
CYRUS: I often wonder. People used to believe that the world was flat. They believed that, that the sun revolved around the earth, and these were facts to them.
CHRIS: Uh, what are you saying?
CYRUS: I’m saying that I saw Angelique. I saw her walking down the street.
CHRIS: Well, I wish to submit that there’s an explanation for it. All of this.
CYRUS: What do you mean by that?
CHRIS: You’ve been working yourself too hard. You’ve been locked in this laboratory for over a year. Whatever you’re doing it can’t be worth your health and your peace of mind. It might even damage your mind.
Cyrus tells Chris what he is trying to do:
CYRUS: Let me begin by saying that, that man is chemical in his composition. Now, if the proper compound was distilled, and administered to a human being, this chemical composition could be radically changed, radically altered, and I’ve been working on this composition.
CHRIS: Why, why alter a human being?
CYRUS: Now let me also say this. That man is not one person, he is two. One is good, and the other is, oh, let us say for scientific conversation, the other is evil. Now, these two people are within each of us, and they are always fighting against each other. But if these elements could be separated, just imagine the possibilities. Evil could go its own way, completely free of any aspirations or remorse that are foreign to it. And good, good can have its own life, free of any struggle against, against evil impulses or hostile thoughts. My god, just imagine what a person…
Chris is horrified by this idea, and is glad to be an obstacle to it. Director Lela Swift reinforces Chris’ conviction that Cyrus is destroying himself by placing Christopher Pennock next to a mirror during the most perfervid part of his mad scientist’s programmatic statement, a visual metaphor telling us that Cyrus is splitting himself in two.
Chris tells Cyrus that he won’t help him bury himself even more deeply in the strictly private world he has created. Cyrus says that it is not private, that it is something he shares with Angelique:
CYRUS: Angelique believed in this theory. She believed it could be done. And she was the one who started me on, on all these experiments. Separating good and evil.
CHRIS: (sourly) There is no doubt in my mind which of the two appealed to her.
Chris tells Cyrus that he has been anxious to see him. He has heard that he presented a paper on black magic to a scientific society, and that the news led him to fear that Cyrus’ mind is becoming unbalanced:
CHRIS: I admire your devotion, Cyrus, but not your direction. It can only lead to trouble.
CYRUS: It can only lead to glory. And it will. Very fast, if you’ll just give me the name of that chemist.
CHRIS: No. I’m sorry to withhold it from you, but it’s the only way I can stop you. And I think I have to stop you. I desperately think that.
Angelique was not only a great beauty and a gracious matron, but was also a scientific mind who inspired Cyrus to pursue his scheme. She could introduce an experimenter to chemists whose specialties are so obscure that they cannot be found in any published directory, and her influence leads to the study of black magic and a skeptical view of the finality of death. In these matters, Angelique recalls Ligeia. The unnamed narrator of Poe’s story, Ligeia’s widower, says of her:
I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense –such as I have never known in woman. In the classical tongues was she deeply proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to the modern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault. Indeed upon any theme of the most admired, because simply the most abstruse of the boasted erudition of the academy, have I ever found Ligeia at fault? How singularly –how thrillingly, this one point in the nature of my wife has forced itself, at this late period only, upon my attention! I said her knowledge was such as I have never known in woman –but where breathes the man who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science? I saw not then what I now clearly perceive, that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding; yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast a triumph –with how vivid a delight –with how much of all that is ethereal in hope –did I feel, as she bent over me in studies but little sought –but less known –that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!
At the end of Poe’s story, the narrator’s second wife appears to die. Her body is eventually reanimated with the personality and even in the likeness of Ligeia. Cyrus’ un-nuanced belief that the woman he saw was Angelique come to life suggests that he expects her to follow in the footsteps of that other learned woman.
There is a poignancy now in seeing Don Briscoe play Chris’ concern for Cyrus. Briscoe suffered from bipolar disorder, and was at this time trying to self-medicate with street drugs. After he was violently mugged while trying to score a fix late at night in Central Park, he wound up leaving acting and moved into his parents’ house in Tennessee. He died there, morbidly obese, at the age of 64. I suppose what Dr Jekyll wanted was to come up with a drug that could sort the contents of the mind into orderly batches, so that people like Briscoe could live the lives they deserved to live.
Ligeia at Manderley
Meanwhile, at Collinwood, Quentin has been extremely stingy with information Maggie should know, and has neglected to tell her that Angelique had an identical twin. Hoffman and others on the estate are convinced that Angelique will somehow come back to life, and in their obsession with this idea they have made Maggie exceedingly uncomfortable in her imposing new home. Making matters worse, night before last Maggie heard a voice that she can believe to have been part of a prank played on her by Quentin’s son, strange and troubled boy Daniel, but which Daniel and we have reason to believe was actually Angelique’s ghost. So when Maggie opens the doors to the drawing room and sees Quentin giving a glass of sherry to a woman who, to all appearances, can only be Angelique, she flees in panic.
Quentin goes to Maggie in her bedroom. He explains that the woman she has seen is Angelique’s twin Alexis. At first he is relaxed and soothing, as charming as the Quentin of the main continuity has always been, almost as charming as David Selby is. But as Maggie insists on being left alone, his mood darkens. Alexis sticks her head in and suggests they should clear things up right away; Quentin asks her to wait downstairs. When Maggie refuses to be formally introduced to Alexis and play hostess to her, Quentin becomes stiff, grouchy, and patronizing, ordering her to do her duty as mistress of the house. She does not bend, and he leaves the room in a huff.
Back in the drawing room, Alexis tells Quentin she ought to leave rather than go on upsetting Maggie. Quentin dismisses Maggie’s concerns and proclaims that he alone makes decisions at Collinwood. Alexis is visibly startled by Quentin’s claim to autocracy, and doesn’t know where to look or what to do with her hands as she stammers out “Of course… you… make the decisions.” She goes along with Quentin’s decree that she will stay in the house starting tonight, before she can get her luggage back from the inn in the village.
Hoffman enters. At the sight of Alexis, she gasps “It- it’s you!” Hoffman composes herself quickly, and says that Angelique often spoke of her sister. She asks Alexis if she received the letter she sent her when Angelique died. Alexis says she missed it. Hoffman had sent it to her address in Tangier, but Alexis had moved from there to Florence by that time. Alexis does not seem to be in any particular business, and she describes her decision to return to Collinsport as motivated by a vague feeling of personal obligation, so we can assume that her long stays in these famous cities are a sign that she and Angelique have private resources that amount, if not to a fortune, at least to a competence. Hoffman suggests that Alexis stay in Angelique’s old room. Quentin does not object, and Alexis agrees.
Alone in the drawing room, Quentin wishes Alexis did not resemble Angelique so uncannily. In a gruff tone, he tells himself “I’m as bad as Maggie, I’m behaving like a frightened child.” Quentin’s attitude when he was lecturing Maggie about Alexis had indeed been that of an impatient adult ordering a child to stop having an inconvenient emotion. Since he does not believe he handled that exchange badly, it’s jarring to hear him say explicitly that he saw it that way. He pours himself a stiff drink.
In Angelique’s room, Hoffman tells Alexis she doesn’t have to lie to her. She may have her reasons to pretend with the others, but with her she can talk openly about the fact that she is Angelique risen from the grave. Alexis is thunderstruck by this, and tries to reason with her:
ALEXIS: You thought Angelique would come back? But that’s impossible, she’s dead.
HOFFMAN: She is not like others.
ALEXIS: She certainly wasn’t like anyone else. Nevertheless, she is dead. Do you hear me? She’s dead, and I’m her sister.
Hoffman tries to trip Alexis up by asking which nightgown she would like from Angelique’s dresser. Alexis points out that she has never seen any of them, so she can’t very well answer. Hoffman starts to apologize for her bizarre conduct:
HOFFMAN: I’m sorry, Miss Stokes, I’m sorry if I’ve said anything–
ALEXIS: It’s perfectly all right. I can understand how much you must miss her. But I wouldn’t intimate such a thing to anyone else if I were you. They might be very distressed by it, and so might you.
This exchange is very effective, particularly for regular viewers. Up to this point, Lara Parker has been playing Alexis quite differently than she played Angelique. Even when Angelique had been defeated in a conflict or was trying to seem like a wounded innocent, she always maintained eye contact with her scene partners and found a way to put a little more drama into her voice than any other performer would have thought to do. But Alexis looks down when she is confused, talks in a soft and casual tone when she thinks she understands what’s going on, and asks questions to which she obviously does not already know the answer. We can believe she really is a different character. But her last two sentences to Hoffman are exactly what Angelique would have said. When Alexis lifts her head and delivers them with her right eye fixed on Hoffman, we are suddenly in suspense as to whether Ligeia has already returned.
On her way out of the room, Hoffman passes Maggie. Without turning to face her, she explains that Alexis is staying, at Quentin’s orders. This brief scene is blocked as an homage to Hitchcock, whose 1940 film of Rebecca will have come to mind when Hoffman mentioned Angelique’s nightgowns. The censors tried to prevent the release of that movie, because of a scene in which obsessed housekeeper Mrs Danvers took a nightgown out of a wardrobe positioned in the same spot of the late Rebecca’s room as is the wardrobe in Angelique’s. Mrs Danvers went on and on about how sheer the nightgown was, how “You can see my hand through the material,” etc. Dark Shadows isn’t quite as bold with the homoerotic subtext of Hoffman’s devotion to Angelique as Du Maurier and Hitchcock were with that of Mrs Danvers’ devotion to Rebecca, but the shot is so much in his style and the movie was so famous that a large percentage of the grownups in the audience would likely have picked up on the reference.
Maggie goes to the drawing room, and finds that the decanter Quentin was drinking from is empty and lying on its side. She goes to Angelique’s room. She arrives just in time to see her obviously intoxicated husband in his first wife’s bedroom, with a woman who looks exactly like that first wife who is wearing a frilly nightgown, putting her hand on his shoulder, and saying in a soft voice “Perhaps we can comfort one another.” When we saw this, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that she would not be especially pleased if she were to find me in such a situation.
Maggie and Quentin have a showdown about this in the drawing room. It’s a sensational scene, one of the best in the series. Selby plays Quentin as a drunken, condescending grouch, trying to tell Maggie she didn’t see what she clearly saw. Kathryn Leigh Scott is spellbinding as she plays Maggie’s rage. I think it’s her best moment since #265, when the Maggie of the main continuity was a mental patient and went completely nuts while singing “London Bridge.” That, I think, was the scariest scene they ever did, making us think our old pal Maggie was never going to be all right again.
This time Miss Scott doesn’t sound like any character we’ve heard her play before. In fact, she sounds more like a real person than anyone else ever does on Dark Shadows when Quentin has forbidden her to mention Angelique’s name and she responds “You forbid me! Forbid me like a child, and I am not a child, and I refuse to be treated like a child. Not by you or by anyone. I know what I heard and I know what I saw!” At that, Maggie Collins becomes a distinct character and the Parallel Time storyline jumps to a new level.
Quentin whines that Maggie isn’t giving him a chance, and she lets him have it:
MAGGIE: Nobody’s given me a chance. No. This is Angelique’s house, not mine, you’re Angelique’s husband, not mine.
QUENTIN: All right, if that’s the way you feel about it, get out of here!
MAGGIE: All right, Quentin.
QUENTIN: Leave Angelique’s house and leave Angelique’s husband!
MAGGIE: That’s exactly what I’ll do. That is exactly what I will do!
And to Quentin’s bewilderment, that’s exactly what she does. She rushes out the front door. After a bit, Quentin staggers after her. He looks outside. Alexis comes downstairs, in her sister’s frilly nightie, and asks what happened. Quentin frets that “She actually went out that door.” Alexis asks if he is going after her, and he says “No, why should I? She behaved like a child!” He’s still holding onto the idea that it is right and proper for him to regard his wife as a temperamental child. He wonders if perhaps Alexis is right, then hears Maggie drive away and announces that it’s too late to do anything. He wanders back towards the drawing room while Alexis looks on. We are left wondering if she is Angelique masquerading as her sister, or if Alexis, contrary to appearances, was actually the Evil Twin all along.
*I am indebted to Danny Horn’s commenter “Riccardo” for pointing out the connection to “Ligeia.”
The protagonist and narrator of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca is the second wife of the enigmatic Maxim de Winter. The theme of the story is the protagonist’s timidity. She never introduces herself to us or reports a conversation in which anyone addresses her by name, so that we can call her only “the second Mrs de Winter.” Many people around her have something to say about Maxim’s first wife, the late Rebecca, though Maxim himself never mentions Rebecca and becomes upset when anyone reminds him of her. From this, the second Mrs de Winter concludes that Rebecca was an unsurpassably glamorous being and that Maxim is still in love with her and always will be. She is terrified of housekeeper Mrs Danvers, but since she would be terrified of anyone, this does not constitute evidence that Mrs Danvers actually represents a threat to her. In fact, the main thing about Mrs Danvers is her ambiguity. We have no way of knowing what she is thinking. Nor do we know what she is doing until the end of the book, when it turns out she is more dangerous even than the narrator had feared. It is also at the end that the second Mrs de Winter finds that Maxim’s hang-up is not his unquenched love for Rebecca. He never loved Rebecca, and would have been glad when she drowned were he not afraid of being prosecuted for his role in her death.
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Rebecca had to make several things definite that the novel could leave unsettled. So, while in the novel Mrs Danvers is a figure we glimpse in the course of her narrator’s confused attempts to remember what happened in her early days in the mansion, in the film she is a major character in several scenes. So we saw from relatively early on that Mrs Danvers was deliberately playing on the second Mrs de Winter’s insecurities in an attempt to get rid of her.
The film deviates even further from the book in showing Mrs Danvers’ motivation. Du Maurier was herself bisexual and may have started Rebecca with a plan to sketch Mrs Danvers as a mind warped by life in the closet, but as the story turned out it did not shed any light on the roots or structure of Mrs Danvers’ very intense feelings for Rebecca. It was just one more item on the endless list of things that the second Mrs de Winter could not hope to understand. But Judith Anderson’s performance of Mrs Danvers’ fixation on Rebecca struck film censor Joseph Breen as providing a “quite inescapable inference of sex perversion.” Anderson would deny then and in later years that she meant to play the character that way, but her body language throughout, most famously in the scene where Mrs Danvers handles Rebecca’s intimate apparel, makes those denials laughable.
Now, the A story of Dark Shadows is an adaptation of Rebecca. We are in an alternate universe, where the counterparts of Maggie Evans, Quentin Collins, Julia Hoffman, and wicked witch Angelique are cast in the roles of, respectively, the second Mrs de Winter, Maxim, Mrs Danvers, and Rebecca.
There is even less ambiguity here than in Hitchcock’s film. So after Miss Hoffman sets up a moment to enrage Quentin and confuse Maggie, Maggie goes to Angelique’s old room and hears Miss Hoffman telling the portrait of Angelique that hangs there how inadequate she had exposed her as being, cackling with glee all the while. Today Miss Hoffman sets up another such moment, suggesting Maggie give Quentin’s son Daniel a particular record that she knows Quentin will fly into a rage upon hearing. Miss Hoffman is so blatant that Quentin catches on to what she is doing and orders her to apologize to Maggie. When she does, she drifts off halfway through into a rhapsody about how irresistibly beautiful Angelique was. Grayson Hall had played lesbian characters in two films, Satan in High Heels (1962,) which became a cult favorite, and Night of the Iguana (1964,) for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. So she is on familiar ground when Miss Hoffman’s craving for Angelique becomes a spoof of Mrs Danvers’ homoerotic attachment to Rebecca.
It is not only in the character of Miss Hoffman that this version of Rebecca is less subtle than were those that preceded it. Maggie is even slower on the uptake than was the second Mrs de Winter. Even after she heard Miss Hoffman cackle about her deficiencies, and even after multiple people have made it clear that they are siding with her against Miss Hoffman, she still takes her advice and buys the record. Quentin is quite reasonable today, but that’s a first- so far, he has been even more miserly with information than Maxim was. And where Rebecca was an intimidating memory that became an inconvenient corpse, we end today’s episode with Maggie opening the doors to the drawing room and seeing Quentin offering a glass of sherry to someone who, for all she sees, can only be Angelique come back to life.
UPDATE: Thanks to FotB Melissa Snyder for pointing out a mistake in the original post. You can get the details in the comments below!
In #210, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis found a coffin wrapped in chains in an old mausoleum and jumped to the conclusion that it was full of jewels. He broke the chains and opened the coffin, only to find that it actually contained vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas bit Willie and enslaved him.
Now, Barnabas has traveled to an alternate universe. In this “Parallel Time,” Willie’s counterpart is a writer, the author of several novels and of a biography of Barnabas’ own counterpart, who died a natural death in 1830. This Will Loomis lives in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, which corresponds to Barnabas’ home in his own universe. Will’s wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard, was the first person Barnabas met upon arriving in Parallel Time. Barnabas took Carolyn as his blood thrall, and he has shown her a room in the basement of the Old House that she never knew existed. He stashed a coffin there.
Three of Will’s novels were bestsellers made into feature films, but he and Carolyn are now acutely short of funds. We see why today. Carolyn explains to Barnabas that Will won’t be home until the Eagle closes. Barnabas asks what the Eagle is. He should know- that was the name of the tavern in his Collinsport in the 1790s and again in 1897, and he knew it in both eras. The same place was called the Blue Whale in the 1960s in the main continuity, but evidently it kept its old name here.
Will comes staggering home. He recognizes Barnabas’ profile from a sketch of the subject of the biography he wrote. Carolyn explains that Barnabas is that man’s descendant. When Barnabas says that he read Will’s book and admires it, Will brightens, as authors do, and says that the occasion calls for a drink. At first he insists on putting Barnabas up as a houseguest, free of charge, but Carolyn persuades him to let Barnabas pay rent. It’s anyone’s guess how Barnabas will be paying for anything- he stumbled into “Parallel Time” quite inadvertently, without stuffing his pockets or putting on a money belt or making any other preparations. But Will and Carolyn have an extensive discussion about charging Barnabas rent in this scene, and they bring it up again later. Evidently the writers want us to think about it.
The next day, Will suggests that he and Carolyn go to the great house on the estate to meet the new mistress, the bride of Carolyn’s uncle Quentin. Carolyn pleads a migraine, and Will goes by himself. Housekeeper Julia Hoffman is about to introduce him when he cuts her off. He tells the new Mrs Collins that he knew her father. She is the former Maggie Evans. The past tense about her father Sam is news to returning viewers- yesterday Sam was mentioned in terms that left it unclear whether he was still alive, and we might have hoped to see him. In the main continuity, Sam was killed by a Frankenstein’s monster in June 1968, but that monster would not have existed in this universe.
Will says that he and Sam spent many a night drinking together at the Eagle. The new Mrs Collins is not visibly pleased to be reminded of her father’s drinking habit. She offers Will a cup of tea, and he refuses. He avers that tannic acid is bad for the health. Hoffman is at hand with a glass of brandy, and she chuckles when she agrees with him that she can tell Maggie his views about beverages. Hoffman leaves, and Will urgently whispers to Maggie that he must not trust Hoffman.
Later, Maggie will go to Angelique’s old room in the east wing of the house and overhear Hoffman telling the portrait of Angelique that hangs there that she has her on the run. Hoffman cackles with glee at Maggie’s discomfort. Maggie opens the door and asks her what’s going on; Hoffman quickly composes herself and says that the staff hasn’t had a chance to tidy up the east wing sufficiently to welcome the new mistress.
Back in the Old House, Will wonders why Carolyn seems so weak. She passes out, and he sees the puncture wounds on her neck. At daybreak, Will waiting for Barnabas by the coffin. He holds him at bay with a large cross and forces him to explain who he is and where he came from. Barnabas tells Will to let him die. Will says he has other plans. He orders Barnabas to open the coffin. There is an even larger cross mounted inside the lid. He says that he will get a book out of Barnabas, and that that book will be his salvation. He makes Barnabas get in the coffin, and chains it shut. To the extent that this universe is a mirror image of the one we have known, we might have expected that Will would believe he could obtain a fortune by putting chains on the coffin, as Willie thought he could obtain one by smashing them off.
The scene between Will and Maggie brings out several of the problems with the current A story, a reworking of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca in which Maggie is the second Mrs de Winter and Hoffman is Mrs Danvers. Maggie Prime has an iconography that goes back to #1, which makes it hard for us to believe that would be overwhelmed by the subtle intimidations that overwhelm Du Maurier’s anxiety-ridden heroine. When we met the Sam of the original continuity in June 1966, he was an alcoholic. Even after the story that was supposed to make Sam’s alcoholism interesting fizzled out and he was retconned as a social drinker, Maggie retained many Adult Child of an Alcoholic traits, such as beginning each utterance with an irrelevant laugh. So Maggie’s reaction to Will’s reminiscence about boozing it up with Parallel Sam goes a long way to confirming that this is the same ol’ Maggie we’ve known all along and leads us to expect her to be as capable as Maggie would be of meeting the challenges before her.
Also, while Kathryn Leigh Scott is a wonderful actress and a great asset to the show, she makes a bad choice in playing Maggie Collins. In the costume drama segment set in 1897, Miss Scott started out as neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond. Rachel was terribly fragile, the survivor of an abusive childhood that left her with paralyzingly low self-esteem. Miss Scott went small as Rachel, taking a subtle approach that required us to watch her closely as we tried to figure out what she was feeling and thinking. But as Maggie Collins, Miss Scott cycles through five or six facial expressions per minute and crafts a distinctive emphasis on multiple syllables per sentence. The directors famously didn’t give the actors much guidance on Dark Shadows– John Karlen said that when he first took on the role of Willie, all Lela Swift told him was “Go!” But either Swift or today’s helmsman, Henry Kaplan, should have taken Miss Scott aside and told her she was overacting and giving Maggie Collins too vivid a personality.
Further, Will is only one of many allies who present themselves to Maggie in her showdown with the memory of Quentin’s first wife, the glamorous Angelique. The second Mrs de Winter feels herself all alone at the estate of Manderley, but Maggie can’t very well feel that way at Collinwood. Not only do people who live there keep making it clear they are on her side, she has a sister to whom she starts writing a letter today, who represents support from and connection with the outside world.
Worst of all, Hoffman is absolutely transparent. In the novel, it is not clear until the very end whether Mrs Danvers is even hostile to the second Mrs de Winter. Du Maurier keeps us guessing for 400 pages whether the whole thing is in the protagonist’s fevered imagination. But the cackling Maggie overhears when Hoffman is having her conversation with the portrait is not even the most flagrant sign she has so far given of her plans.
Dark Shadows Commentary 