Tag: mr best

Episode 923: He kindly stopped for me

Yesterday, Amanda Harris told the story of a suicide attempt she made in 1897. A supernatural being whom she calls “Mr Best” thwarted this attempt, and told her that he would arrange for her not only to avoid death, but to remain young, for the years that it had been ordained she would live. If in that time she could reconnect with her lost love, rakish Quentin Collins, she and he would never die. Now it is 1970, and Amanda’s time is up. Mr Best is at her door. Amanda has found Quentin, but he has amnesia and is not ready to resume their relationship as Mr Best’s terms require.

Mr Best has changed startlingly since we met him in the flashback that showed us Amanda’s story. Then he was warm and solicitous; today he is truculent and cold. Even his makeup is different. A pale coloring suggests sunken cheeks, making him look corpse-like.

Not so friendly anymore. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Amanda has reversed her own attitude as well. In 1897, Mr Best lamented her wish for death and pleaded with her to stay alive; now it is Amanda’s turn to beg Mr Best for more time while he shows impatience with her. When she tells him about Quentin’s amnesia, he asks brusquely “Are you making this up?” It merits a laugh that the story of Dark Shadows has become so far-fetched that even Death Incarnate finds it hard to believe. But Mr Best does soften, and gives Amanda seven more days to get Quentin to tell her he loves her.

Quentin’s own perpetual youth is the result of a magical portrait that immunized him from the effects both of aging and of the werewolf curse that was placed on him in 1897. Quentin’s great-grandson Chris Jennings has inherited that curse. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman had learned that artist Charles Delaware Tate was still alive, and hoped he would paint a portrait of Chris that would free him from lycanthropy. Tate told Chris he no longer had the gift, but Chris forced him to paint his picture anyway. The moon rose, Chris transformed, and as the wolf he murdered Tate.

One of Chris’ surviving victims is his ex-fiancée, Sabrina Stuart. Sabrina saw him transform, and as a result was struck dumb for years and went prematurely gray. She can talk now, but she’s still gray. She shows up today at the great house of Collinwood where she calls on heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Carolyn tells Sabrina that she doesn’t love Chris and never will, but that she realizes Sabrina loves him. This adds to a growing list of reasons the show has given us to doubt that Chris will be on much longer. His premeditated murder of Tate establishes him as a pure villain. A villain’s function is to create problems for other characters to solve, and Chris has been too passive and too dependent on Julia to be an interesting villain. His relationship with Carolyn gave him a connection to the core cast, but Carolyn’s conversation with Sabrina makes it clear that that is gone now.

Sabrina insists Carolyn go on a road trip with her. She takes her to Tate’s house and leads her into the room where Chris murdered the artist. She tells her that a man was just killed there. Carolyn asks Sabrina if Chris did it. Sabrina looks pained, and says “Not Chris!” This further undermines Chris’ position. As long as Sabrina was mute, we could wonder whether she would blow the whistle on Chris once she regained the power of speech and if so what the consequences of that would be. But now we see that she is still in denial about him, and can set aside any hope that she might generate a story for him.

Carolyn asks Sabrina how she knows about the murder. No answer is forthcoming, and there doesn’t seem to be any way she could know. Evidently Sabrina has now developed some kind of clairvoyance about Chris’ murders. Since she is apparently determined to use that power to limit Chris’ relevance to the story, it is yet another reason to suspect he will be written out soon.

Sabrina making the most of her turn in the spotlight. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia enters the crime scene. She and Carolyn are surprised to see each other. Sabrina announces that Julia knows all about Chris, and gets upset about it. Julia, a psychiatrist by profession, slaps her in the face, the accepted treatment for angry women in 1960s television shows. Sabrina quiets down, and Julia sends her away with Carolyn. Once they are gone, she settles in at Tate’s desk and starts rummaging through his papers.

Julia wants to cure Quentin of his amnesia. She looked through an old Collins family photo album, and found that two pictures of him had gone missing. She is puzzled as to who took them; this is a continuity error, since in #686 and #687 there was a whole thing about ghosts removing photos relevant to Quentin from albums after Julia had looked through them. Be that as it may, Julia discovers in Tate’s papers that he had painted over Quentin’s portrait and that it is now in a big house on an island nearby.

We see a man holding a telephone and reciting lines of dialogue. He puts the phone down, looks at Julia, and recites more lines in the same unmodulated voice. Grayson Hall stays in character with her responses, and plays Julia asking to see the painting, but the man does not do anything that could be called acting. Dark Shadows has featured its share of lousy performances, but I cannot recall a member of the cast simply enunciating words as if he were in a neurologist’s office demonstrating that he had memorized the unrelated syllables given him to reproduce. It is genuinely bizarre.

The man’s name is Geoffrey Scott, and if anyone had told him he was supposed to act he would be playing a character called Sky Rumson. I suppose “Rumson” is a good name for a character who is identified with a house on the beach, since beach houses are what Rumson, New Jersey is known for, though the beach might not be front of mind in early January in central Maine. Sky is a go-go businessman, and his lines to Julia are about what a great hurry he is in.

Sky shows Julia the painting that covers the portrait of Quentin. He tells her that it isn’t very good. Indeed it is not particularly distinguished, but it is far superior to any of Tate’s other works, some of which they want us to regard as museum pieces. Sky says that he bought the painting for his wife, who has an unaccountable fondness for it. He shows Julia a painting of Mrs Rumson. Julia has seen the painting before, and knows the model very well. It is a portrait of her old frenemy, wicked witch Angelique.

For regular viewers, this ending will be as satisfying and as logical as Geoffrey Scott’s phonetic rendering of his dialogue is disconcerting and inexplicable. Eight weeks ago, the show returned to contemporary dress after a long stay in 1897, beginning a new clutch of stories. Angelique is often absent from the show for extended periods, but she always turns up sooner or later. None of the three major storylines- Chris’ werewolf curse, Amanda’s attempt to rekindle her romance with Quentin, and the menace of the secret cult devoted to supernatural beings known as the Leviathans- is very closely connected to either of the other two, and none of them has any particular sense of urgency. Angelique’s vast powers and maniacal narcissism make it easy for the writers to inject her into every plot and accelerate them all towards a common resolution. In the 1897 segment, they moderated both her might and her mania, so that they can now keep her on indefinitely without overwhelming the show. Angelique is not what Julia expected to find, but she may be just what the doctor ordered.

Episode 922: The beginning was another ending

For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897. In that year, we got to know rakish libertine Quentin Collins, who brought upon himself and his male descendants the curse of the werewolf. For reasons of his own, sorcerer Count Petofi ordered one of his underlings, a repellent little man named Charles Delaware Tate, to paint a portrait of Quentin. As long as the portrait is intact, Quentin is immune from the effects both of the curse and of aging.

Now the show has returned to a contemporary setting. Quentin has come back to the village of Collinsport, still alive, still youthful, still human on nights of the full moon. However, he suffers from total amnesia, and is unwilling to listen to anyone who tells him that he is 99 years old and is enmeshed in a long line of supernatural occurrences.

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, knows all about Quentin, in part because she traveled back in time from September 1969 to September 1897 and befriended him then. Julia has been trying to help Quentin’s great-grandson Chris Jennings to overcome his own lycanthropy, and when a couple of weeks ago she learned that Tate was still alive she hoped he would be able to paint a portrait that would do for Chris what Quentin’s portrait did for him. Tate refused. Chris subsequently went to Tate’s house on a day when the moon was full enough to turn him into the wolf. He locked himself in a room with Tate and ordered him to start painting. If he finished the painting before sunset, perhaps Chris would not become the animal and Tate would escape the murder he is threatening to commit.

When the 1897 segment ended in #884, Petofi appeared to have died. It was unclear what this meant for the spells he had cast. That his portrait has continued to protect Quentin would suggest that at least some of his powers have lived after him. Perhaps Tate, too, will prove to have kept the ability Petofi gave him to work magic by painting portraits.

But this turned out not to have been so. At the end of yesterday’s episode, Tate had completed a picture of Chris, but come nightfall Chris turned into the wolf and slashed him. Today, Quentin comes into Tate’s studio, finding the artist bleeding to death and the beast still in the room. Looking for a weapon, he turns from a heavy bronze statue to a small silver candlestick. The wolf runs away.

Tate calls Quentin by name and pleads with him for help. Tate doesn’t want him to leave, but Quentin points out that he cannot do anything for him himself. Since Tate has no telephone, he will have to go to a neighbor and call a doctor from there.

Quentin was not the only beneficiary of Tate’s magical paintings whom we met in 1897. Tate had painted many pictures of his ideal woman. Unknown to him, these paintings had caused the woman to pop into existence one day in 1895. The woman took the name Amanda Harris and found her way to Collinsport shortly after Tate took up residence there. When he met Amanda, Tate became obsessed with her and kept shouting in her face that she was his property and must come away with him. Amanda also met Quentin, who is not all that great a person but who is a lot easier to take than Tate, and she fell in love with him. The two of them were going to run off together to New York City, but when Quentin could not find his portrait he had to stay in Collinsport. In #884, we saw a brief encounter between Quentin and Amanda in NYC, during which he told them they could not be together until he found the portrait.

Now Amanda, too, has come back to Collinsport. She has been using the name Olivia Corey, and has become a big star on Broadway. Amusingly, she is played by Donna McKechnie, who would a few years later actually become a big star on Broadway. One wonders if Miss McKechnie felt she had to model herself on Amanda/ Olivia when she achieved that success.

Julia and Amanda met because they have both been collecting paintings by Tate in hopes that they will lead them to Quentin. Julia recognized Olivia as Amanda right off when she met her, rather oddly since they never met when they were both in 1897. We see Julia visiting Amanda in her suite at the Collinsport Inn, getting impatient with her continued refusal to admit her identity, when the phone rings. It is Quentin, asking Julia to come to Tate’s. Amanda volunteers to go along with her, which Julia says is a very good idea. Julia pauses to tell Amanda the alias Tate has been using in recent years, Harrison Monroe.

When Julia and Amanda arrive at Tate’s, Julia takes Quentin aside and very ostentatiously whispers in his ear. He replies that he does not understand what she has in mind, but that he will follow her directions anyway.

Julia goes to Tate. She asks him to tell her where Quentin’s portrait is; he says he will do so only if she saves his life. She looks sad, and he says that if she cannot do that, she has nothing to offer him in exchange for what she wants. She then calls Amanda in, and tells her to address “Harrison Monroe” by his first name- Charles. When he hears her voice and sees her face, he calls her Amanda, and says that she has come back to him. Before he can turn his attention back to Julia, he loses consciousness.

Julia pronounces Tate dead. Julia is in some ways the ablest doctor who ever lived- she has built Frankenstein’s monsters, cured vampirism, etc. But her death pronouncements are so often inaccurate that longtime viewers will expect Tate to spring up and contradict her. Only the fact that the opening voiceover said in so many words that Tate “has no future” allows us to believe that we really won’t be seeing him again.

Overwhelmed by emotion, Amanda bolts out Tate’s door and wanders into the woods. The werewolf comes at her; for some reason that is apparently none of the audience’s business, he decides not to attack her.

Back in Amanda’s suite, Quentin tells Julia that he reached for the small silver candlestick rather than the heavy piece of metal when confronted with the wolf. Julia declares that this proves his identity. Somewhere in his mind, beneath the amnesia, he knows that werewolves are averse to silver. He can’t disagree.

Later, Amanda returns to the suite and gives a soliloquy. Julia emerges from the bedroom where she has been eavesdropping. Amanda briefly protests at the invasion of her privacy, then admits her identity. She tells Julia a story about the last time she and Quentin saw each other in the nineteenth century.

When Amanda gets to the meat of her story, we zoom in on her face for an extreme closeup. An iris wipe starts from her left eyelid, growing into a stage set representing a bridge in New York City. She and Quentin have a conversation that covers the same ground as the one we saw in #884, and he leaves her alone on the bridge.

A man we have not seen before enters and tells Amanda that she ought not to jump from the bridge. He says that she is very beautiful, and that other men will love her. He says that “If I were… different… I’d love you myself.” The words of this kindly confirmed bachelor mean nothing to Amanda, who throws herself off the bridge.

The wipe does not fill the entire screen; the edges of the main image are covered with flickering little blue squares, and we can make out an image of Amanda’s suite on the right-hand side of the screen. This effect becomes distracting while the confirmed bachelor is talking to Amanda, when they are adjusting the camera for the shot that will follow the end of the insert. Not only does the image of the suite wobble jerkily, but it continues as we cut from the two shot to a closeup on the man, taking our attention away from his face at a crucial moment.

Amanda tells Julia that after she jumped off the bridge, she found herself in a hotel lobby. The confirmed bachelor, whom she calls “Mr Best,” met her there and explained that he wants her to live out the long life that she was originally destined to have. He says that she will have all of those years, and will remain young throughout them. If she can find Quentin again before she reaches the time she was meant to die, the two of them will go on living forever. If not, he will return for her at the appointed time. Julia leaves, determined to cure Quentin of his amnesia and return him to Amanda. A moment later, a knock comes at the door. It is Mr Best, telling Amanda her time is up.

A few days ago, Julia brought Amanda one of Tate’s portraits of her. She made no effort to buy it, saying it was of no interest to her. The story of Mr Best explains this indifference. Amanda believes that her supernatural youth is due to his intervention, not to the portrait. She does not know why Quentin has remained young, and has no reason to connect her situation with Tate’s works.

Mr Best is played by Emory Bass, who was at this time playing James Wilson in the original Broadway production of 1776. That cast, to be reunited in the 1972 film version of the musical, also featured Dark Shadows alums David Ford (Sam Evans #2, Andre DuPrés) as John Hancock, Daniel F. Keyes (Cemetery Caretaker) as Josiah Bartlett, Peter Lombard (Oberon) as a stage manager and understudy for the parts of Thomas Jefferson and Stephen Hopkins, and Virginia Vestoff (whom we will see several months from now as Samantha Collins) in the major role of Abigail Adams. With all that overlap, I tend to think of the whole cast of 1776 as having been available for parts on Dark Shadows, and vice versa. Whenever I get unhappy with a cast member, I wonder who from 1776 could have done a better job. Bass was great in 1776, and his arrestingly deliberate phrasing is perfectly suited to an angel of death, especially one like Mr Best who has far more discretion and a more idiosyncratic personality than do the angels described in the orthodox theological statements of the great monotheistic traditions.