mrs acilius – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1120: A son who can sail the ships

Gabriel Collins is frustrated by his lot in life. His father, the demented Daniel Collins, had planned to leave the family’s entire fortune to Gabriel’s brother Quentin. When Quentin’s friend, Gerard Stiles, reported that Quentin and his son Tad had been washed overboard during a storm at sea and were to be presumed dead, Daniel saw no need to change his will. Quentin’s widow Samantha is now Daniel’s sole heir. Gabriel, his wife Edith, and their two children are to receive nothing. As a wheelchair user, Gabriel’s prospects for employment in the year 1840 are quite dim, to say the least.

Over the last few days, Gabriel has been trying to improve his odds of inheriting by blackmailing Gerard into murdering Samantha. Now, Gerard and Samantha have come back from a trip to the village of Collinsport. Gabriel is disappointed to find that Samantha is still alive, and shocked that she and Gerard have married. He recovers his composure and tells the happy couple that Daniel will surely disinherit Samantha now.

Gabriel goes to Daniel’s room, the locked cell at the top of the tower on the great house at Collinwood. Daniel is kept there because of his unfortunate habit of mistaking women for his late wife and trying to murder them as he did her. How Gabrel got his wheelchair up the stairs to the tower room is not explained. Indeed, he is continually turning up by himself in rooms on every floor of the house, which no one asks any questions about.

Daniel tells Gabriel that Gerard asked him for Samantha’s hand in marriage and that he gave his blessing. Gabriel says that has has a complete dossier proving that Gerard is guilty of many crimes, probably including murder. This does not impress Daniel in the least. Daniel says that he ought to adopt Gerard, who is the sort of man who should be his son.

Gabriel has somehow got himself back downstairs to the drawing room. He tells Samantha that he knows facts about Gerard that she does not know. She refuses to listen to him, and leaves the room with an airy laugh.

Gerard enters and gloats about Samantha’s loyalty to him. Gabriel tries to leave the room. Gerard grabs the back of his wheelchair and holds him in place. Yesterday, Samantha slapped Gabriel in the face, and it was proof of Christopher Pennock’s success at making Gabriel a man we love to hate that we could sympathize with her. But that sympathy also grew from our fondness for Samantha. We’ve seen Gerard do nothing but run con games, and we know that he is fated to be the face of a terrible disaster at Collinwood in 1970. Appealing as James Storm is, Gerard has shown us nothing we can like. His assault on Gabriel is therefore much more outrageous than was Samantha’s. That’s as it should be- we’re supposed to be outraged. Gerard tells Gabriel that he has to be “a good boy” if he knows what’s good for him. There’s no way saying that can make us root for Gerard, no matter how much we may loath Gabriel.

Gerard takes hold of Gabriel’s chair, imprisoning him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Gabriel’s cousin Desmond enters. He congratulates Gerard, but soon makes it clear he does not approve of the marriage. Gerard storms out, and Gabriel asks Desmond to run an errand for him. He gives Desmond a letter and says that if he presents it at the bank, they will give him his safe deposit box. Desmond agrees to bring Gabriel the box.

Gerard calls on Daniel in the tower room. Daniel tells Gerard that he reminds him of Quentin. This is rather a bold move on the part of the writers. The first version of Quentin we met was an evil ghost who haunted the great house starting late in 1968; we first met Gerard as an evil ghost haunting Collinwood earlier this year. The stories of the two hauntings were both adaptations of Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw, and had a great deal more in common with each other than with the source material. James Storm’s costume and hairstyle as Gerard even evokes David Selby’s as that original Quentin.

In March 1969, the show traveled back in time to 1897 and we met that Quentin as a living being. He was the great-nephew of the Quentin who preceded Gerard as Samantha’s husband. He was a violent, drunken wastrel. We saw him with his siblings and other denizens of the great house who already knew all about those lamentable qualities, so he wasn’t trying to fool anyone. Since the 1897 Quentin had David Selby’s charm and easy manner and spoke in the witty dialogue of Violet Welles, we couldn’t help but like him. We saw that for all his faults, he truly loved his young nephew Jamison Collins, and we could root for that relationship. It was hardly a surprise that Quentin soon caught on with a large audience, making Mr Selby Dark Shadows’ second major breakout star.

The first such star was of course Jonathan Frid as vampire Barnabas Collins. Though Gerard may look like a miniaturized version of Quentin, so far in the 1840 segment he has been more like Barnabas. As Barnabas presented himself to the Collinses in the great house in 1967 as a living man, their long-lost cousin from England, so Gerard is continually pretending to be something he is not. We first heard of Barnabas as, in the words of the opening voiceover, “the strangest, darkest secret of all,” first learned of his supernatural presence as a disembodied heartbeat emanating from his portrait, and first saw him as a hand clutching the throat of the luckless Willie Loomis, so we knew that he was a monster; likewise, we first saw Gerard as an immensely destructive ghost.

The major difference between Gerard and Barnabas is that we still haven’t got to know Gerard. Barnabas set aside his “cousin from England” act when we saw him alone with Willie, whom he terrorized and beat unmercifully. The contrast between Barnabas’ savage cruelty to Willie and his suave pretense with everyone else kept us interested until the collapse of his first crazy scheme, his attempt to erase the personality of Maggie Evans and replace it with that of his lost love Josette. Then, we saw some glimmers of recognizable human emotions coming through his horrible personality, and we started wondering what sort of person could become what Barnabas was.

Gerard’s mask has slipped a couple of times, but only to reveal other masks underneath. We’ve seen that he was cheating Gabriel when he led him to think he was going to murder Samantha for him, and even his assault on Gabriel today is cloaked in passive-aggression, holding his wheelchair instead of hitting his body. In #1113, we saw him alone with Cockney showgirl Leticia Faye, whom he had brought with him to Collinwood as part of a scheme to get money out of the Collinses. The more he talked to her about that money, the more sure she seemed to be that she wasn’t going to see any of it, whatever Gerard managed to do for himself. So far, Gerard has been a type, Con Man, and a function, Villain. We have yet to see any reason to expect that he will become a character. Though Gerard is the face of The Destruction of Collinwood as we saw it a couple of weeks ago, before the trip back in time to 1840, Gabriel seems to be a much more promising addition to the cast at this point.

Gabriel and Samantha are in the drawing room. He tells her that his wedding present for her should be arriving at any moment. He also tells her that he hired Gerard to kill her, which she immediately dismisses as a lie. She tells Gabriel that he is as insane as his father. A few seconds later, Gerard brings Daniel downstairs. It is not clear whether Daniel heard her; if so, we wonder whether he would be more offended at being used as an exemplar of insanity or at being compared to Gabriel, the son whom he hates with such an unreasoning passion.

Gabriel objects that it is unsafe to let Daniel out of the locked room. Daniel replies that Gabriel is just like his mother. Since Daniel is obsessed with his murder of Gabriel’s mother, that response goes a long way towards explaining why he hates Gabriel so much.

Desmond shows up with Gabriel’s safe deposit box. Gabriel opens it in front of everyone, with much ado about how its contents will expose Gerard for what he really is. The box turns out to be empty. We remember that Gerard and Samantha went to the bank before their wedding, and wonder how he got into the vault and emptied the box. Though if we are wondering whether we will ever see Gerard do anything other than run games on people, the emptiness of the box may strike us as a suitable comment on what Gerard really is.

It seems that nothing can stop Gerard. Samantha embraces him and tells him he has made her forget all about Quentin. At that, the doors swing open and there’s Quentin, saying “I’m home!” As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, we’ve seen so many people eavesdrop through those doors over the last four years that it is hard to believe Quentin did not hear Samantha telling Gerard she was no longer thinking of him.

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1864 narrative poem “Enoch Arden,” about a man lost at sea who returns to find that his wife has remarried in his absence, was hugely popular for a century after its publication, inspiring plays and movies, and prompting legislative bodies around the world to adopt laws defining the period after which a missing person could be declared legally dead. Dark Shadows adapted so many other hits of nineteenth century English literature that it is frankly a bit surprising it’s taken them this long to get around to it.

Episode 1118: Relics of the Anti-Saints

From March to June 1969, during a segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897, John Karlen played inveterate prankster Carl Collins. Carl could barely contain the manic glee his own practical jokes inspired in him, even though they rarely moved anyone else to more than irritation. A childlike man, Carl quickly dissolved into helplessness before even the slightest challenge.

Now, the dramatic date is 1840. Karlen is Desmond Collins. We met Desmond yesterday, and he seemed to be cut from the same cloth as Carl. He has returned from a trip to East Asia, and has brought a severed human head in a glass display case. His mother Flora reacted to this object with horror, as one would expect. In response, Desmond kept insisting that there was nothing frightening about the head and averring that he could not understand Flora’s reaction. His demeanor is calm and mature, setting him apart from Carl. But as regards the head, his judgment seems to be just as ludicrously poor.

Desmond does show good sense in one matter. Yesterday, Desmond expressed distrust of two people who have recently presented themselves at the great house of Collinwood under the names Barnabas and Julia Collins. Julia and Barnabas have identified themselves as brother and sister, and have said that their father was the Barnabas Collins who lived on the estate in the late eighteenth century and left for England in the 1790s. Desmond talks with Barnabas in the drawing room of the great house today, and is still openly suspicious.

The two people at Collinwood now who were there in the 1790s are Ben Stokes, an old man who was an indentured servant at Collinwood back then, and Daniel Collins, who was a child then and is now the master of the house. Daniel reacts with amazement to the sight of Barnabas. He is convinced he is the same man, unchanged after four and a half decades. Barnabas tells him he is the son of that Barnabas. There is still a note of suspicion in Desmond’s voice when he remarks that it is Barnabas’ night for being mistaken for his father, but he can hardly keep doubting that he is a member of the family.

As it happens, Daniel’s first impression was right. Barnabas is the person he knew long ago. Julia is not related to the Collinses at all. Barnabas has not aged, because he was turned into a vampire in the 1790s and was sealed in a coffin from that time until Julia released him a few nights ago. She is a time traveler from the year 1970, where she and Barnabas are friends. Barnabas is also a time traveler of a sort; he used some mumbo-jumbo to project his 1970 personality into his 1840 body, so that he and Julia are on the same page now. They have traveled into the past in hopes of preventing a disaster that will befall the Collins family in 1970, so their motives are good. But after all, one of them is a vampire and the other is a mad scientist. They are not likely to be an unmixed blessing to any house they enter.

Ben is visiting Flora at the house she and Desmond share, a mansion near Collinwood known as Rose Cottage. He sees the head, and recognizes it as something that figured in a series of murders many years before. Those murders took place in and around a town called Bedford, and are therefore known as The Bedford Atrocity. Ben asks Daniel if he remembers the matter. He certainly does, and mentions that his late sister Millicent had a book that included a chapter about it. He suggests Ben look for the book in the attic.

Ben finds the book there, and he is sure that if he shows it to Desmond he will convince Desmond to destroy the head. He takes the book to Rose Cottage. No one is home. He leaves the book in the room where the head is kept and writes a note for Desmond. He explains to the head that he is going to destroy it. This turns out to have been an unwise move. When Ben is walking home through the woods, an image of the head is superimposed over him and he reacts with distress.

In a day concerned with nautical mishaps, it is somehow fitting that Ben gets stuck in the head. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There are a couple of other points worthy of mention. Daniel is conscious of his position as master of Collinwood, but he is not the haughty overlord Louis Edmonds played when he was Joshua Collins in the part of the show set in the 1790s or the stuffy but lovable figure he created as Edward Collins in the 1897 segment. He is dignified, courteous, and kindly. But he is also gravely mentally ill. When first we saw him, he tried to kill Julia, not for any of the good reasons anyone might have to do such a thing, but because he thought she was his late wife, whom he killed years ago and keeps trying to kill again every time she shows up disguised as someone else. He cannot remember who is alive and who is dead, or what year it is. (In fairness, these are very difficult things to keep track of on Dark Shadows.) It’s a cliche that Jonathan Frid played Barnabas “as if he were playing King Lear.” In his scenes today, Edmonds quite literally is playing King Lear. Mrs Acilius and I marveled at the depth and complexity of the characterization.

Barnabas meets the evil Gerard Stiles. Barnabas knows that Gerard’s ghost will cause the destruction of the great house and its residents in 1970 and that he will still preside over its ruins in 1995. Gerard tells Daniel a story about the deaths of his son and grandson, Quentin and Tad Collins. Barnabas is in the room when Gerard tells this story, and has reason to disbelieve it. Later, he is alone with Gerard and challenges his story. Barnabas learns nothing from this encounter, but Gerard learns that Barnabas is his enemy. Barnabas very often introduces himself to his foes by showing his cards in this way. That habit does keep the plot moving, but it is frustrating that the protagonist does not even try to ingratiate himself to his adversaries and get information from them he can use to advance his goals.

Episode 1117: That Hideous Strength

The Signal of Another Start*

In June 1970, Dark Shadows was set in a universe other than the one where it usually takes place. The show insisted on calling that other continuity “Parallel Time.”

In the main continuity, mad scientist Julia Hoffman is the friend and enabler of vampire Barnabas Collins. When Barnabas crossed over to Parallel Time, he found that Julia’s counterpart there was as devoted to wicked witch Angelique as the Julia he knew was to him. He made himself Angelique’s enemy, and in #1036 Hoffman was poised over him with a stake and a hammer, ready to destroy him. In the nick of time, Julia arrived from the main continuity and saved Barnabas. She bashed Hoffman’s head in, stole her clothes, and set about impersonating her. When Barnabas first saw Julia in Parallel Time, he thought she was her Doppelgänger, and since she was in his hiding place he was going to kill her. Fortunately for Julia, Barnabas had got into the habit of making speeches to people before he murdered them, so she was able to tell him who she was. With that, the murder was off and their friendship was back on track.

Now, it is Julia who has crossed over into another world. She has traveled back to the year 1840, and has told the family in the great house of Collinwood at that time that she is the daughter of the Barnabas Collins who supposedly left for England in the 1790s. She has also told them to expect her brother, Barnabas Junior, who, she says, looks just like their old man.

In a moment of extreme folly, Julia went to the room where Barnabas was sealed in his coffin in the 1790s and released him. This mirrored the folly of her waiting around in his hiding place after she killed Hoffman in Parallel Time. The Barnabas of 1840 had no idea that any time had passed since he was imprisoned four and a half decades before, and certainly did not know what Julia was talking about when she claimed that they had met in 1967 and become friends in 1968. He was about to kill her when his old friend Ben Stokes turned up in the nick of time and stopped him.

Now, Barnabas has discovered that Julia is interfering in his plans. He has bitten the lovely Roxanne Drew, intending for her to die and rise as his vampire bride. Julia and Ben found Roxanne and brought her to the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. Julia is giving Roxanne a blood transfusion which has prevented her death. When Barnabas sees what is going on, he grabs Julia and is about to bite her.

Barnabas is already flashing his fangs when he has a seizure and collapses. He stands back up and finds Julia holding a cross at him. He tells her that he is the Barnabas of 1970, projected into his 1840 body by some mumbo-jumbo involving the I Ching. He could be making that up based on things she has already told him, so she keeps holding the cross. He goes on to give specific facts about several people they know in 1970. She realizes he is telling the truth. She puts the cross down, and gives him a hug. As Julia came from the main continuity and destroyed her own Doppelgänger to save Barnabas, so Barnabas has come from the future and destroyed his previous self to save Julia.**

Embraceable vampire. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The 1970 model Barnabas does not want Roxanne to be a vampire, and he is ashamed of his earlier self for having tried to make her one. Roxanne comes to, sees him, and is delighted to think he has come to bite her again. When he says that things have changed, she is disappointed and he is embarrassed. He goes away.

Julia has a superhuman power of hypnosis that she has often used to erase people’s memories and overwrite them with information that will not incriminate Barnabas. She tries this on Roxanne. She is halfway through the process when some noises outside prompt her to leave the room and investigate. The room is at the top of the stairs, and has been a major set for years. We’ve caught glimpses of the door that opens to it a couple of times, but this is the first time there is set built all the way to the railing.

Julia goes to the railing and calls downstairs, asking if anyone is there. No one answers, so she goes back into the room. Roxanne has somehow got away.

Barnabas goes to the great house and introduces himself as Julia’s brother. Julia comes. They get a private moment, during which Julia tells him that Roxanne escaped and that she does not know whether the hypnosis was successful. Roxanne enters, looks at Barnabas, and announces to the assembled Collinses that she knows who he is. She is escorted upstairs. Barnabas and Julia are on the verge of panic until Roxanne’s sister, Samantha Drew Collins, comes down and says that Roxanne doesn’t remember anything of the last couple nights.

The Gods are Weak at First*

The 1970 version of Barnabas is not the only character to make his grand entrance today. We also meet Desmond Collins and an acquaintance of his.

Desmond is the son of Flora Collins, a lady novelist and all-around silly person who lives in the nearby mansion called Rose Cottage. He has just returned from a long journey with a present for his friend, Quentin Collins, husband of Samantha and heir to the Collins estate. Flora breaks the sad news that Quentin and his son Tad Collins were lost at sea some time ago, that they have been missing ever since, and that they are now presumed dead.

The present is in a large cube that is covered with a cloth. Desmond removes the cloth and exposes a glass box holding a severed head. Flora reacts with horror; Desmond laughs and says that it is surely a carved figure of some sort, entirely harmless. We know better; the episode ends with the head opening its eyes.

The perfect gift for the man who has everything, except a sense of decency. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In 1945, C. S. Lewis published the third volume of his “Space Trilogy,” a novel called That Hideous Strength. It was a commercial success at the time, and has been in print ever since. I have mixed feelings about Lewis’ writings; I essentially agree with his religious views, but he often expressed them in a cutesy-poo style that is still endemic among Anglican writers and that makes me wish I were a Zoroastrian or a Buddhist or something whenever I encounter it.

But the first fifty pages of That Hideous Strength are terrific. I teach in a university, and the account of life inside the fictional University of Edgestow is the most insightful depiction of campus politics I’ve ever read. The place is dominated by a clique of administrators who keep talking to each other about what “Our Head” wants them to do. In British institutions of higher education, “Head” is a title for a permanent director of a department or institute, so that’s what you think they are talking about. But no, it’s an actual severed head through which the voice of Satan speaks to them. They worship the head and follow the commands they receive from its mouth.

That Hideous Strength was certainly popular enough that it is likely the writers of Dark Shadows had looked to it as a source of material. In particular, Sam Hall was a serious enough Protestant that he persuaded Shirley Grossman to convert from Judaism and join him in the Lutheran church before they married and she became Grayson Hall. Lewis was so celebrated for his apologetics that it would be rather odd if his name did not attract Hall’s notice. So we can expect that Desmond and others will form a cult of some sort and that the Head will give them diabolical orders to follow.

The Head is that of Michael McGuire, making the first of scores of television appearances. One of my favorite parts of his was Sumner Sloan, the prominent academic who dumped Diane Chambers in the first episode of Cheers and came back for her in her last episode as a regular part of the cast of characters. McGuire also appeared in my favorite episode of Columbo, “A Friend in Deed,” in which his character tries to confess to killing his wife in a fit of rage only to find himself involved in a plot to kill another man’s wife in cold blood. I suppose one of McGuire’s specialties was “Do Not Date This Man.” I’ve never heard that he was anything other than a nice guy in real life, though.

*These section titles are taken from William Dickey’s 1961 poem, “Continued in Our Next”:

Over the quiet paper, in light that is

Interested only in a casual way,

All quite polite, the neat pen idly marries

Third sons to princesses.

They go away,

To the widest margin, to a land of white,

Wholly uninhabited until they came,

And from the sacks with which they are provided

Stock it with leaping trout and huntable game.

Hounds to be cursed at when the blood trail falters,

Eventually, reasons why the hounds went wrong.

Then to the reasons they establish altars.

The gods are weak at first.

When they grow strong

They bring into the world their choicest thunders.

Plagues, curses color the narrow countryside.

The peasantry speaks of horned, unnatural wonders,

And in the violence takes a natural pride.

But all the while the map-makers are busy.

Faint explorations die in the savage hills,

Others go on to the farthest fabled city,

Where for six months the sun is lost, and the cold kills.

Geometers prove the world, and it is conquered.

Truth overtakes the aborigine.

The gods depart. Mankind is anchored

To clear historical necessity.

Until one day at midday

When the sun ought to be loudest in the shouting sky

Shadow occludes it. Suddenly life is done.

The fire goes out. The constellations die.

Only, above the following page, the pen,

Whose quality is not to have taken part,

Hovers in uncommittedness again,

Poised for the signal of another start

Towards some fresh country, princesses more golden,

And younger sons who wage a bolder fight,

Stags nobler, hounds more diligent than the olden,

The page lies empty in the easy light.

This poem reminds me of Dark Shadows. The creative process is so close to the surface of the show that an image of a writer with pen and paper is a suitable way to start a description of it. When the third sons and the princesses are moved to the “widest margin, to the land of white” it’s ambiguous if that just means the writer is making notes on the otherwise blank edge of the paper or whether the characters are going off to the Arctic. We see the same ambiguity in “the pen whose quality is not to have taken part.” That brings to mind both the characters visiting from other times or other universes and the writers who use those cosmic journeys to start the story fresh.

The “natural pride” that the “peasantry” takes in the crimes of the “unnatural wonders” explains both why there are characters who are willing to go on living in Collinsport and why the audience keeps coming back to the show. The wish for “princesses more golden” and for “younger sons who wage a bolder fight” casts our minds to stories like the conflict between Barnabas and Jeremiah Collins over the love of the gracious Josette and the ongoing scheme Gabriel Collins has devised to do away with his sister-in-law Samantha, grubby little imbroglios that never could lead to anything but sorrow, and leaves us wondering why we choose to follow this show rather than seeking out happier and more glorious tales.

**My wife, Mrs Acilius, had a lot to say about this inverted parallel.

Episode 1114: I am the stranger

In June, Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe to which vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman had traveled. Julia and Barnabas found a comatose woman. Barnabas took one look at her, saw how silent and immobile she was, and fell in love. He’s dead half the time, so we can’t judge him for that reaction.

The woman’s name was Roxanne Drew, and Barnabas’ love for her survived even after she regained the ability to walk and talk. Roxanne didn’t make it to the original continuity when Barnabas and Julia returned there in July. Barnabas’ sorrow for her was lightened in #1081, when he met Roxanne’s counterpart in his native universe. Their relationship took a turn for the worse in #1106, when he discovered that she, too, was a vampire. In #1107, he found out that Roxanne was alive in 1840, and that she underwent a mysterious and terrible change in that year.

Now, Barnabas is keeping Roxanne chained in her coffin in the secret room behind his bookcase. Julia has traveled back in time to 1840 and hopes to prevent a disaster that has destroyed the great house of Collinwood and its residents. Trying some mumbo-jumbo that he hopes will lead him to join Julia in the past, Barnabas has a vision of a tombstone saying that she died on 6 October 1840. He and his friend Timothy Eliot Stokes go to the graveyard and see such a tombstone there. Barnabas says that 6 October is three days away; the episode was originally broadcast on 1 October 1970, which is more than three days from 6 October. But there is a weekend in between, and days when the show isn’t on don’t count.

The stones. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas says that he must find a way to travel back in time before 6 October. Stokes asks why, and Barnabas says he himself doesn’t understand how it works. But regular viewers know that anniversaries have a power in the cosmos of Dark Shadows that physical laws have in our world. If an event took place exactly 130 years ago, or any other number of years ago, it is possible for people in the present to interact with that event in ways they cannot on other days of the year. That has been the case ever since undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins was on the show, before Barnabas made his first appearance.

Julia’s grave is next to one commemorating Minerva Trask, a hateful biddy who was one of the most effective villains during the period in 1969 when the show was set in 1897. That turns out to be foreshadowing. The scenes with Barnabas and Stokes in a contemporary setting are a prologue to an episode set mostly in 1840. Julia meets the living Roxanne, who is accompanied by Lamar Trask, a kinsman of Minerva’s loathsome husband Gregory.

Julia is a guest at Collinwood, impersonating Barnabas’ imaginary daughter and telling the family to await the arrival of her brother, Barnabas Junior, who looks remarkably like their late father. Julia is in the drawing room, talking to herself about how much she misses Barnabas, when Roxanne enters. Roxanne makes a little joke about talking to inanimate objects, and introduces herself as the sister of Samantha Drew Collins, wife of the missing Quentin Collins and lady of the house.

Trask enters. Julia is startled to see him. Roxanne asks Julia to guess what business Trask is in. She says she could not possibly, and Trask protests that guessing games are silly. That’s a shame. Julia must have seen What’s My Line?; we can imagine her asking “Is there a product connected with what you do? Is the product bigger than a bread box? Is the product alive? Are your services equally available to men and women?” etc.

Roxanne says that Lamar is an undertaker. She spits the word out, and asks him sarcastically if he prefers to be called a mortician. She reviles his profession in quite vigorous language. The dramatic date may be 1840, but at this moment we are very clearly in the aftermath of Jessica Mitford’s 1963 book The American Way of Death, an extremely influential polemic against the mortuary industry.

Lamar insists that Roxanne go out on the terrace to talk with him privately. When they are gone, Julia wonders to herself what will happen later this year to turn Roxanne into a vampire. She really ought to know. She released Barnabas from his chained coffin the other day, hoping that he would already be her friend returned from the future. But instead he was the same monster sealed up there in the 1790s, who had no idea who she was. Had his old friend Ben Stokes not shown up in the nick of time, Barnabas would have killed Julia then and there. He has gone on to take other victims, killing some of them, and remains at large. So it seems quite likely that Barnabas will bite Roxanne to death, causing her to rise as a vampire. When that happens, Julia will be to blame.

This is a temporal paradox. Julia hadn’t traveled back to 1840 when she first met the vampiric Roxanne, and Barnabas hadn’t been out of his coffin between the 1790s and 1897 at that point. Roxanne’s vampirism was involved in the circumstances that led to Julia’s trip to 1840. So the vampirism caused the trip that caused the vampirism. And Roxanne the vampire had clearly never seen Barnabas before when she met him in 1970. Of course it doesn’t make logical sense, but so much of the story is made up of the consequences of Julia and Barnabas’ bungling that it would be wrong if it were any other way.

On the terrace, Lamar asks Roxanne to marry him. She refuses, angrily. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said that it was odd Lamar wanted to marry Roxanne, since she obviously hates him. I pointed out that he seems to hate her as well. Many married couples come to hate each other over the years, so I suppose it is a time-saver of a kind if two people get married who already hate each other.

Lamar keeps telling Roxanne that he made a deal with her father to marry her, and she keeps telling him that she doesn’t care. She wants to marry a mysterious stranger who will sweep her off her feet and show her a new life. Barnabas is eavesdropping from behind the wrought iron fence. He has not met Roxanne before, and cannot see her well, but he can well imagine himself being a mysterious stranger who will change everything in a woman’s life. Moreover, Barnabas hears her raging at Trask, whose late father was an enemy whom Barnabas killed with an even higher degree of sadism than is usual for him. Since Trask Junior looks and sounds just like Trask Senior, Roxanne’s hostility to him is enough to make Barnabas feel a special closeness to her.

Barnabas approaches Roxanne after Lamar has left. He persuades her to invite him to her home. When Barnabas was first on the show in April and May of 1967, they made good use of the trope that vampires can enter only where they are invited, but they soon became very inconsistent about that. It places a restriction on Barnabas’ movements that can be story-productive though, so I’m always happy when it seems they will be bringing it back.

In her room, Roxanne is disappointed Barnabas did not call. He materializes inside her window. She can’t very well be happy about that, but he talks her out of screaming. She looks into his eyes and falls into a trance. He bares his fangs, and she tilts her head to offer him her neck. Her fate would appear to be sealed.

This is the first episode credited to Lela Swift as line producer. Swift has been with the show as its principal director from the beginning. Even though Henry Kaplan is listed as director today, it has the crisp look and inventive compositions that characterize Swift’s style, not the muddy images and extreme closeups with which Kaplan was content to fill the time. We can hope that, with Swift in the driver’s seat, the show will consistently meet her high standards of visual strategy.

Episode 1113: Do you smell the smoke?

From March to November 1969, Dark Shadows was mostly set in the year 1897, to which time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins had made his way. Barnabas’ friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, would join him for several weeks towards the end of the 1897 segment.

While Barnabas and Julia were busy in the past, the show cut to a contemporary setting a few times to show us that time was passing there and that the actions taking place in 1897 were changing the circumstances at the great house of Collinwood in the twentieth century. When Barnabas returned to the contemporary setting, the other characters knew where he had been and remembered both the events he went back in time hoping to prevent and those that had replaced them.

The 1897 segment was so good I wished it had gone on longer. One way I imagined they might have been able to stretch it out would have been to do more with the intercutting timelines. So perhaps spend a week in 1897, then a week in 1969. Obviously that would have required a lot more advance planning than they ever managed to do, since they would have had to keep redressing the sets to represent the different periods, but I thought it might have been worthwhile.

Today, we have evidence that some idea like this also occurred to the makers of the show. Julia has gone back in time to 1840 to keep a series of events from starting that will lead to the ruination of Collinwood and its inhabitants in 1970. Barnabas was unable to join her. We spend time today with Julia in 1840, and then with Barnabas in 1970.

Arriving in 1840, Julia’s first act was to make contact with Barnabas’ old friend Ben Stokes. Ben believed her story and made himself incredibly helpful to her effort to establish herself at Collinwood. But she convinced herself that Barnabas had magically projected himself from 1970 into his body as it is in 1840. So she went to the secret room of the old Collins family mausoleum, unchained his coffin, and released him. He was about to kill her when Ben showed up and stopped him. Ben persuaded Barnabas to let Julia leave the room alive, and repeated her story to him. Barnabas reacted with incredulity, telling Ben that he had gone mad to accept such a tale, but Ben insisted Julia was their friend. Now Barnabas has resumed killing people, and Julia is terribly afraid that unless he stops he might be caught.

Barnabas is in the bedroom at the Old House at Collinwood once meant for Josette DuPrés to call her own after she married him. He takes Josette’s portrait off the wall and tells her that he must go on without her. We’ve heard that before. In #281, he stood in the same room and spoke to the same portrait, telling Josette that her ghost must go away and never come back so that he could face the world with someone else. We soon found that his plan was to turn that someone else into a simulacrum of Josette, and later he kept deciding that other women were reincarnations of Josette, so that speech did not represent the emotional growth we might have hoped to see. Finally, Josette’s ghost appeared to Barnabas in #948 and told him to lose her number, and his next love interest was a woman who did not remind him of her. That new woman was comatose, and Barnabas rhapsodized about how much beauty he found in her silence and immobility. Also, there was a bit of a problematic age gap, since she was 22 and he was well over 200. Baby steps, baby steps.

Barnabas has a heart to heart with Josette’s portrait. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Ben enters and tries to talk Barnabas into returning to his coffin and allowing himself to be chained back in. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, he doesn’t even mention that murder is bad. He knows Barnabas well enough to know he’d roll his eyes at that kind of talk. He just focuses on the danger Barnabas is putting himself in. Barnabas says that Ben does not know how horrible it is to spend years trapped in the darkness. Returning viewers may smile at this, since Barnabas doesn’t know that either. When Julia opened his coffin, he had no idea more than a single day had passed since he was chained there in the 1790s. He flounces off to take more victims.

In the drawing room of the great house, Julia meets Cockney psychic Leticia Faye. She asks Leticia if she can tell what will happen in that room in 1970. Leticia laughs and says her visions don’t extend that far. She adds that there wouldn’t be much point in them if they did, since no one alive today will be around to see if they came true. Julia claims to have had a dream about 1970, and Leticia humors her. She goes into a trance, and smells smoke. That’s about it, and when Leticia comes out of it she is still laughing, perhaps thinking that it didn’t amount to much. But it reminds Julia of the disaster she escaped, and leaves her wondering what Barnabas is doing in 1970.

We cut to Barnabas’ house in that year. He is doing what he does best, sitting around feeling sorry for himself. Ben’s descendant, occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes, is there. They are talking about the funeral held that afternoon for the residents of the great house killed in the disaster. Stokes does not know that Barnabas is a vampire, and so Barnabas has to make an excuse for his absence from this daytime event. He simply says he was too upset to attend.

Heiress Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes and charming rogue Quentin Collins survived the disaster and are in the Old House, both quite insane. Barnabas and Stokes cart them off to a psychiatric facility. This is the final appearance on Dark Shadows of either of these characters, each of whom has been enormously important to the show.

Carolyn is played by Nancy Barrett, who also plays Leticia. Quentin is played by David Selby. We had expected to see Mr Selby in 1840 as another character named Quentin Collins, but when Julia arrived she learned that Quentin was missing and presumed dead after a nautical mishap. This glimpse of Quentin doesn’t add much to the story, but it does serve to reassure us that Mr Selby has not left the cast and that we will be seeing the 1840 version of Quentin sooner or later.

Barnabas decides to cast some I Ching wands. That’s what got him back to 1897, and the wands fall in the same pattern this time as they did then. He meditates on them. He sees a door, and seems to pass through it. On the other side, he sees a tombstone engraved “Julia Hoffman Collins 6 October 1840.”

Julia is masquerading as the daughter Barnabas had after he left for England in the 1790s, and has been telling the Collinses to expect her brother, Barnabas Junior. We haven’t heard her give “Hoffman” as a middle name. Of course it had to be there for Barnabas to be shocked by the stone. Otherwise, he would just have wondered who “Julia Collins” was.

It strikes me that they missed an opportunity. Julia has said that she moved from England to Philadelphia. Even though she lived there for so many years that she picked up an eastern Pennsylvania accent, she did not contact the family at Collinwood. Eventually they are likely to find out that she has a great deal of medical expertise, most unusual for a lady in 1840. Had she introduced herself as Julia Collins Hoffman, she might have explained that she met her late husband Dr Samuel Hoffman while he was studying in London, married him there, and lived with him in his hometown, Philadelphia. At the name “Dr Samuel Hoffman,” a theremin might have played on the soundtrack. Electronic music enthusiasts would laugh at the nod to the real Dr Samuel J. Hoffman (1903-1967,) the great player of and composer for the theremin. And fans of Dark Shadows would be happy that Julia’s imaginary husband has the same first name as Grayson Hall’s real husband, series writer Sam Hall.

This episode marks not only the final appearances of Carolyn and the original Quentin, but also the last time Peter Miner’s name will appear in the credits as line producer. Starting tomorrow, Lela Swift will be in command at 433 West 53rd Street. Swift was the principal director since the beginning of the show, chiefly responsible for the show’s often striking visual composition. It will be exciting to see what she can do now that she has a wider scope of action.

Episode 1112: There are people here who do remember Barnabas Collins

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has traveled back in time from 1970 to 1840. Julia’s best friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, was unable to follow her into the past. Julia and Barnabas met in 1967 and became friends in 1968. In this period, Barnabas has been trapped in a chained coffin in the secret room of the old Collins family mausoleum for decades. She misses him so deeply that she convinces herself he must have used some mumbo-jumbo to project himself from 1970 into his body as it is in this time. She unchains the coffin and lets him out. He does not recognize her, and within seconds has his hands on her throat.

In the nick of time, Barnabas’ old retainer Ben Stokes shows up and tells him to let Julia go. Barnabas is shocked to see that Ben is far older than he was when last he saw him. Ben explains that 45 years have passed since he chained the coffin. Barnabas’ reaction settles a question that the vampire lore we have so far seen on Dark Shadows had left open. We have not known whether Barnabas experiences the passage of time while he is sealed in his coffin. Now, we see that he does not. That doesn’t stop him from throwing a big fit when Ben tells him that for the sake of all that is holy he must let himself be sealed back in; he pouts that he has already spent 45 years there, as if he had suffered consciously through all of them. That point will be exploited to broadly comic effect in Tim Burton’s 2012 feature film titled Dark Shadows, in which Johnny Depp’s version of Barnabas is closed in his coffin for a minute and a half and when the lid is reopened wails “How many centuries!?” This scene is played more subtly, but regular viewers will be just as inclined to laugh at Barnabas’ extravagant self-pity.

Ben tells Barnabas Julia’s preposterous story of a journey back in time from a future in which she is his fast friend. Barnabas tells Ben that he has gone mad, but Ben insists that he believes the story, bizarre as it is. Indeed, as a vampire Barnabas is hardly in a position to dismiss tales of the supernatural.

We got to know Ben from November 1967 to March 1968, when Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. Young Daniel Collins was also a character on the show then. Daniel is in the cast of characters again now. He is the master of the great house of Collinwood, but is a man old before his time because of a severe mental illness and a heart condition that nineteenth century medicine is powerless to treat. When we saw that Ben and Daniel were in the story, longtime viewers realized that the 1840 segment would be a sequel to the 1790s segment. And indeed, Barnabas’ manner and tone of voice when he rises from his coffin are an exact match for what they were at the end of that part of the show. Jonathan Frid picks up right where he left off in #460. I know classically trained actors are taught to do things like that, but he pulls it off so brilliantly that I can’t help but wonder just how it was done.

Ben had laid out a plan for Julia in yesterday’s episode. He told her to present herself at the great house of Collinwood as Julia Collins. She was to tell the Collinses that she was the daughter of the Barnabas Collins who left for England in the 1790s, that she has been living in America, near Philadelphia, for many years, while her brother, Barnabas Junior, had stayed in England. She was to say that Barnabas Junior has written to her saying that he wanted to meet her at Collinwood and to feign surprise that her brother is not already there. She would say that her bags were at the Collinsport Inn. They might then invite her to stay at Collinwood.

Julia leaves the mausoleum. When Barnabas rushes out to claim more victims, she peeks out from behind a tree and watches him go. She now has nowhere to turn but Collinwood and no plan to follow but Ben’s.

Samantha Collins, daughter-in-law of Daniel and the lady of the house at Collinwood, is in the woods when she senses a malign presence. She starts running, and we see Barnabas. By the time Samantha bursts into the front door of the great house, she is on the point of tears. She tells her brother-in-law Gabriel Collins and houseguest Gerard Stiles that she felt that something evil was in the woods. She didn’t see whatever it was, but has somehow come to the conclusion that it was “tall.” Yesterday Gerard, who is a clairvoyant, had a vision of Julia; he described her as tall. Neither Jonathan Frid nor Grayson Hall was much above average height, while the cast included several actors who were. For example, Christopher Pennock, who plays Gabriel, was well over six feet. Gabriel uses a wheelchair, so this role does not emphasize his tallness, but we can’t help noticing it when they keep banging on about the great height of two medium-sized people.

Gerard says that he will go into the woods to investigate. Samantha tells him not to, that she wants him to stay with her and make her feel safe. She tilts her head towards his chest. Samantha’s husband, whose name is Quentin Collins, is missing at sea and presumed dead. In this moment, we see that she is considering Gerard as Quentin’s successor.

Gabriel speaks up. He tells Samantha and Gerard that there is no reason to investigate, since the police are all over the grounds. A woman was found dead earlier in the evening, her corpse drained of all blood. The presence Samantha sensed must have been, not a man, but the animal that killed that woman.

By opening the coffin, not only did Julia needlessly expose herself to the gravest possible danger and release a monster who has already taken one human life and will doubtless take more. She also put an additional obstacle in the way of her own effort to establish herself at Collinwood. That she will present herself and announce Barnabas to the Collinses on the very night the vampire attacks start makes it all but impossible for them not to connect the two of them with those attacks.

Samantha answers a knock at the front door and finds Julia. Julia feigns surprise that Samantha does not recognize her name. She is startled to see Gerard, whose ghost she met in terrible moments in the years 1970 and 1995, but composes herself quickly. Samantha invites Julia in. She tells the story Ben had crafted for her and expresses surprise the Collinses had not received the letters she sent.

Ben shows up and Julia makes a show of recognizing his name. She says that her late father often spoke warmly of him, and that he will be impressed by how much Barnabas Junior looks like his old man. They embrace. By that point, Samantha and Gabriel are sold. Samantha insists Julia stay at Collinwood, and sends Gerard to the inn to fetch her bags. Gerard pounces when Julia says Barnabas Junior will be glad to see Collinwood “again”; she explains that their father told them so much about the place that it feels like they’ve been there before.

A toast to the new arrival. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Gerard does fetch a set of bags from the inn. Apparently Ben had supplied those, as he had earlier supplied the period-appropriate clothing Julia is wearing. He’s a very handy fellow to have on your side, that Ben.

In the morning, Ben joins Julia as she is returning to the mausoleum. He tells her sternly that they must chain the coffin back up and that she must never return to the secret room, no matter how sure she is that her version of Barnabas is summoning her.

They find they are too late. The coffin is gone. Both Julia and Ben know that Barnabas has a compulsion to stash his coffin at the foot of the cellar stairs in the Old House at Collinwood, and Julia also knows that Barnabas’ second choice for a hiding place is behind the bookcase in the parlor of that same house. Julia also knows of a cave near the beach where Barnabas has hidden his coffin a couple of times. So it would seem that they should be able to take the chains with them to those places, find the coffin, and take care of the matter before lunch. But for some reason they just give up.

Back in the great house, Gerard confronts Julia with an earring he found on the dresser in her room when he was putting her bags away. He tells her its mate was found in the long-disused playroom upstairs two nights ago, and asks her how long she has been lurking around. She denies everything, failing to quell his suspicions. Freeing Barnabas to prey upon the living may have been the most foolish thing Julia could possibly have done, but it was not much wiser of her to leave one extremely distinctive earring in such a conspicuous place when she has lost its mate she knows not where.

It was Gabriel who found the earring. He showed it to Gerard shortly after, prompting Gerard to have his vision of the “tall” Julia. Gerard and Gabriel have a scene early in today’s episode, before they meet Julia, in which they go back over the matter of the earring. We can see not only that Gerard is onto Julia, but also that Gabriel has a plan of some kind in which he is planning to involve Gerard. Combined with Samantha’s obvious interest in Gerard, that in turn suggests that we will see how multiple members of the household entangle themselves with him and put him in a position from which he can become a threat to the future of Collinwood.

In the closing credits, Grayson Hall is billed as “Julia Collins.” It has been their custom to list characters by the names they use, even when the audience knows those names to be false. So after Angelique Collins rose from the dead, killed her sister Alexis Stokes, and assumed Alexis’ identity in #1000, when the show was set in an alternate universe, Lara Parker kept being billed as Alexis until all the characters who were fooled by her imposture were off the show. Actors sometimes wander onto the set during the closing credits. My wife, Mrs Acilius, imagines someone doing so while still in character, looking at a credit that gives away someone’s true identity, and pointing at it with wide eyes and an “Aha!” Maybe they were trying to protect Julia from that.

Episode 1107: Bury me not

A lot happens in this one, and all the actors do a good job. Even so, it feels very slow. None of the incidents seems to connect with any of the others.

Ill-dressed man Sebastian Shaw lets himself into the secret room where vampire Barnabas Collins keeps a coffin. It is not the coffin where Barnabas spends his days, but is the resting place of another vampire. Its occupant is Roxanne Drew, whom Barnabas loves and Sebastian hates. Sebastian opens the coffin, pulls a pistol, and aims it at Roxanne. He is about to fire when another figure appears in the corner of the room. Regular viewers recognize this figure as the ghost of pirate Gerard Stiles. Sebastian does not know that Gerard is a ghost. He fires two shots at him, of course without effect.

Barnabas enters. He disarms Sebastian, who tells him he was going to destroy Roxanne but that a man stopped him. Barnabas recognizes his description of Gerard. Sebastian shows Barnabas the bite marks on his neck, and explains he was under Roxanne’s power until recently. She lost her control of him when she began feeding on governess Maggie Evans. Longtime viewers have often wondered why Barnabas didn’t build an army by biting everyone who got in his way and turning them into his blood slaves; this is the first explicit statement on the show that a vampire risks losing control over one victim by taking another. We’ve seen examples of Barnabas’ power weakening when he takes an additional victim, but this has been far from consistent.

Sebastian shouts so loudly the microphone distorts his voice in a way we’ve never heard before on the show. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas asks if Roxanne ever mentioned the name Gerard Stiles. Sebastian says that he believes she did, but that he can’t remember in what connection it came up. We’ve had a few hints recently that Roxanne has some kind of association with Gerard and the other ghosts who are taking over the great house of Collinwood. This doesn’t give any substance to these hints, but it does confirm that the writers plan to keep dropping them.

Upstairs, Barnabas visits the other undead female he is keeping in his house, former ghost Daphne Harridge. He questions Daphne, who confirms that there was a girl named Roxanne Drew around Collinwood when she and Gerard were alive in 1840. She doesn’t remember much about Roxanne, but does recall that there was some drastic change in her that got people talking in that year. The show is obviously preparing for a trip back in time to 1840, so with this we learn that Roxanne will figure in that segment and that we will see how she became a vampire.

Another rehumanized ghost, Quentin Collins, enters. Barnabas orders Daphne to leave with Quentin, going far away from Collinwood before Gerard can get at her. Quentin tells Daphne to take Barnabas’ orders. When she protests, he says “Daphhh-neee” in a slow, condescending voice. David Selby started doing this in March to July 1970, when Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe and he played a different Quentin Collins, one who was married to Maggie’s counterpart. That Quentin was an insufferable jerk who often scolded Maggie with a slow, condescending “Maaaa-ggie.” Hearing him say Daphne’s name in that tonal format this time, I finally realized what it reminded me of. Ted Knight, as pompous newsman Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore show, would often pronounce the two-syllable names of people he was addressing using the same intonation. All of a sudden I could hear Quentin telling “Murrr-ray!” he shouldn’t put such complicated words in the copy he writes, or “Georrr-gette” not to be so independent. When I mentioned the resonance to my wife, Mrs Acilius, she laughed and said she couldn’t believed she hadn’t noticed it herself.

Barnabas leaves Daphne alone with Quentin. They toast their future life. Daphne abruptly collapses, and Quentin clutches his stomach. Gerard appears, and Quentin asks him why he has poisoned them. Quentin is an expert on ghosts who poison the living. In #677, he was himself a ghost, and he put strychnine in a drink his great-grandson Chris Jennings took. Barnabas’ buddy, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, saved Chris then. Now, Julia is with Barnabas when he returns to the room. Daphne is on the floor, unconscious but still alive. Quentin is nowhere to be seen.

Barnabas goes to the great house, searching for Quentin. He finds heiress Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes, playing a mad scene. Nancy Barrett and Jonathan Frid make Carolyn and Barnabas sound like Ophelia and Claudius in Act 4, Scene 5 of Hamlet, for a little while anyway. When Barnabas tells Carolyn that they must stop what is happening, she replies “I cannot stop anything. Whatever gave you the impression that I could?” It really is lovely.

Barnabas goes back to his house. Julia has treated Daphne, who is resting comfortably, aside from glycerin tears streaking her face at several angles, none of them convincing. Carolyn enters and demands to be left alone with Daphne. Julia and Barnabas know that Carolyn is intermittently possessed by a ghost known as Leticia, who is somehow associated with Gerard and Daphne, and are therefore reluctant to comply with this demand. But they apparently don’t think they have much to lose, so they go along with it.

Carolyn/ Leticia gives Daphne a dress. It is the dress she wore when she was a ghost. Daphne cries out to Gerard, asking if the time has really come. She then goes and hides in the closet. There was a lot of dull business with clothes when Quentin was a ghost, late in 1968, and they recycled that early in the current haunting, five weeks ago. This moment is easier to take, both because it is mercifully brief and because the dress is clearly legible as a sign of imminent story progression in the form of Daphne’s next death.

Quentin and Gerard are in a graveyard. Quentin has recovered from the poisoning sufficiently to smile lovingly at Gerard and say that he can’t imagine why he ever thought he was his enemy. He examines the tombstones in the fenced-off part of the graveyard and reminisces about the men buried under them, men who were underlings of Gerard’s in 1840. Since Quentin is only 100 years old, he is puzzled that he has memories from 130 years ago, but when he takes another look at Gerard’s smiling face his anxiety dissipates. He looks at a blank tombstone and puzzles as to why it is blank. At Gerard’s bidding, he digs up the grave and opens the coffin. He is delighted to realize that it was meant for Quentin Collins, and that the time has come for him to get into it. He briefly resists the idea of burying himself alive, but then looks at Gerard, says “You are Death. Whatever made me think I could run away from you?,” and complies. We end with Gerard putting the dirt back on top of the grave, Quentin securely inhumed.

Longtime viewers know that Quentin is alive because of a magical portrait that immunized him against aging, lycanthropy, and injury. So we are left wondering whether he is also covered for asphyxiation. If he is, Gerard is going to be pretty embarrassed when Quentin makes his way out of the ground.

Episode 1100: What it’s like to be alive

The ghosts of four people who died in 1841 have been haunting the great house of Collinwood. They represent teenagers Carrie Stokes and Tad Collins; Carrie and Tad’s governess, Daphne Harridge; and a sometime pirate captain known as Gerard Stiles. Three of these four have now assumed corporeal form. Tad and Hallie have taken possession of their lookalikes, David Collins and Hallie Stokes. They then performed a ceremony that caused Daphne to come back to life in a body of her own. We open with these three repeating the ceremony in order to conjure Gerard back into existence as a living being.

When Carrie and Tad performed the ceremony the first time, they did not know whether they would raise Daphne or Gerard. That episode ended with a knock at the door, leaving us to wonder along with them who would come. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said it would be funny if it were someone else. She suggested the writers might take a page from Let’s Make a Deal and have Tad and Carrie find a donkey behind Door Number Three.

Today, the ceremony again ends with a rapping on the door. But it is not Gerard. It isn’t a donkey, either. It is Willie Loomis, servant to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. John Karlen always finds a way to bring out humor in his characters’ predicaments, and the rough-hewn Willie does deflate the grandiosity of Carrie, Tad, and Daphne’s meddling in God’s realm.

Scrambling to cover up the signs of the ceremony before he has to open the door to Willie, Tad calls out “We were sleeping! (pause) I was sleeping!” David Henesy plays this absolutely straight, so that we can see it dawning on Tad that he and Carrie aren’t supposed to be sleeping together. Karlen wasn’t the only actor who knew how to find the laughs hidden in his lines.

Daphne hides. Tad opens the door. Willie sees the pentagram on the floor with the candles at its points and says he recognizes it as a device of black magic. He forestalls the teens’ attempt to pretend to be Hallie and David by calling Tad by name. Tad then turns to Carrie and makes fun of Willie’s twentieth century vocabulary in an attempt to intimidate him by a display of social superiority. This collapses immediately, and Willie says that Tad and Carrie have to come with him because he is bigger than they are.

Willie detains Carrie and Tad in the drawing room, waiting for Barnabas to come back. He has to leave them when he hears Maggie Evans, governess to the late David and Hallie, coming downstairs. Maggie is the victim of a vampire, and Willie is part of the crew that is keeping her from going off to get her blood sucked.

Willie rushes to the foyer and asks Maggie why housekeeper Mrs Johnson isn’t keeping her in her room. Maggie does not respond. The true answer would be that Clarice Blackburn has a writing job on another soap now and isn’t available to play the part, so they leave Mrs Johnson’s absence unexplained.

While Willie gets Maggie back to her room, Tad and Carrie listen to the dogs howling outside. Carrie says she has never heard howling like that before, and Tad contradicts her. He says that if she searches her memory, she will find that they heard just that sound in their own time. He gives a somber look, as if he knows what the howling means. The show has been making it clear that we will be going back in time to 1840 sooner or later. These lines of Tad’s tell us that we will find a vampire in operation when we get there.

In Maggie’s bedroom, Willie explains that Hallie and David have been possessed by Carrie and Tad. Maggie has seen enough in her time at Collinwood that she finds this instantly credible. She blames herself, saying that if she were not ill she would have been able to prevent the possession. Willie asks what she could have done, and she cannot think of anything. He presses her to tell him who the vampire is. She claims he cannot understand what she is going through. He cannot tell her that he himself was once the victim of a vampire, since that vampire was Barnabas and the show will implode if Maggie is ever told about that. So they are left at a stalemate.

Meanwhile, Daphne takes shelter in a deserted mansion once known as Rose Cottage. Gerard confronts her there. He is cranky about still being dead. She tells him it’s no one’s fault that the ceremony didn’t work. They will reenact it tonight, when the stars are back in the right alignment. She also tells him that they don’t need Tad and Carrie to accomplish their goal. This line is unfortunate- to the extent that the story has generated suspense, it has involved us wondering how Carrie and Tad are involved in whatever it is Gerard wants to do. When we hear they aren’t involved at all, it lets the air out of an already badly under-inflated set of tires.

Gerard vanishes from Daphne’s presence and materializes in a mysterious chamber known as The Playroom. The Playroom intermittently appears in a little-used part of the great house, behind a door that usually opens on a linen closet. There is a dollhouse in The Playroom that is a scale model of Rose Cottage and that is, in some supernatural sense, identical to it. Gerard sets fire to the room in the dollhouse that corresponds to the room in Rose Cottage where Daphne is. He uses his finger to hold closed the door corresponding to the one from which she could escape a fire in the room.

Gerard holds the door shut. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Daphne finds that the room she is in is engulfed in flames and she cannot open the door. Apparently Gerard has decided that if Daphne is going to tell him they don’t need Tad and Carrie, he doesn’t need Daphne, either. Daphne, being as she is played by Kate Jackson, is impossible not to care about, so this cliffhanger does make us want to come back Monday and see her escape. But since it implies that none of the relationships among the ghosts means anything, and since we’ve already seen that none of the living characters can mount an effective resistance to the ghosts, it also brings us to the conclusion that the whole Re-Haunting of Collinwood story is at a dead end.

House of Dark Shadows

Vampire Barnabas Collins joined the cast of Dark Shadows in April 1967. Barnabas introduced himself to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her family as their distant cousin from England. Soon, Liz had given him run of the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, and she was treating that house and its contents as though they were Barnabas’ property.

In May and June of 1967, Barnabas took Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, as his new victim. He did not merely want to drink Maggie’s blood. He wanted to erase her personality and overwrite it with that of his lost love Josette. At the climax of this plan, he would make her into a vampire like himself, and the two of them would go forth to prey upon the living.

Barnabas’ plan failed. Maggie recovered her will and escaped from Barnabas. She would have exposed him, had her psychiatrist Julia Hoffman not betrayed her and magically mind-wiped her memory of what Barnabas was and what he had done. Julia attached herself to Barnabas as his personal physician, making it possible for him to go long periods without biting anyone. Barnabas continued to make his home at the Old House and to pass as a live Englishman. In time, the relationship between Julia and Barnabas became the core of Dark Shadows, and its most important stories were their adventures.

With Barnabas’ introduction, the show became a hit. By the time 1968 turned into 1969, it was one of the major pop culture fads of the period. That gave executive producer Dan Curtis an opening to pitch a Dark Shadows feature film to Hollywood studios. The one that bought the idea was MGM, headed at that time by Kirk Kerkorian, a tycoon who was trying to get out of the movie business and put MGM’s brand and other resources in service of his chief goal in life, making himself the king of Las Vegas. Kerkorian still had contracts with distributors that obligated him to provide a certain number of features a year. Dark Shadows already had a fan base, so that a film version of it wouldn’t require as much spending on advertising and promotion as would a new product, and the show was done so cheaply that Curtis couldn’t very well argue that he needed a big budget for production. So Kerkorian saw a way to meet his legal obligations at minimal financial risk.

The movie that resulted from this business decision is slow-paced, confusing, and amateurishly shot. I love it.

Most of the events and characters are drawn from the first seven months Barnabas was on the show. There are lots of Easter eggs for fans of the show. Almost all of the music is recycled from the show, including a brief bit of one of the rock and roll numbers that often played on the jukebox at The Blue Whale tavern in the first year but that have rarely been heard since. Both Maggie, in the opening scenes, and the sheriff later on point flashlights directly into the camera. The sheriff and his deputies display the same clownish ineptitude that distinguished them on the show. My favorite example comes after a deputy has driven his car directly into a tree. The sheriff says that he wouldn’t have done that unless he saw something, prompting us to think that a Collinsport law enforcement officer probably would be more comfortable driving with his eyes closed.

The events do not take place in the same sequence as they did on the show, and some of the characters are jumbled as well. So in 1967, the governess in the great house was the well-meaning Victoria Winters and her boyfriend was dashing action hero-turned hopeless schlub Burke Devlin. Vicki and Burke were already past their peak of interest in April 1967, and have been gone and forgotten for years at this point. Maggie is the governess on the show now, and she is the governess in this version of Collinwood as well.

Maggie’s last steady boyfriend was hardworking fisherman Joe Haskell, who left the show when he was the victim of a vampire in 1968. So in this Collinwood, Maggie is engaged to Jeff Clark, who corresponds to the character who married Vicki after Burke was lost in a plane crash. Like his namesake on the show, this Jeff is played by the repellent Roger Davis. There is a costume party in the movie, as there was in the show. Jeff wears an eighteenth century naval uniform that was originally worn on television by Nathan Forbes, a character who, like Joe, was played by Joel Crothers. It is as if Curtis is acknowledging that we would rather see Maggie and Joe, but rubbing our faces in the fact that we’re getting more Roger Davis instead.

Julia is not Maggie’s psychiatrist in this universe. When Barnabas is freed from his coffin, she is already at Collinwood, researching the Collins family history. She claimed to be doing that as a cover story in 1967, but here it is apparently the truth, for some reason. She confirms that Barnabas is a vampire when she sees that he does not cast a reflection in the mirror in her compact, the same gimmick she used on the show. She makes her offer to cure Barnabas of vampirism 56 minutes into this 96 minute movie, after he has killed several people and thrown the whole area into an uproar. She falls in love with him shortly after, to his embarrassment. When the treatments misfire by causing him to age rapidly, as they did in the show, he deviates from the original by killing her.

That sets off the final crisis. Barnabas takes Maggie to his hiding place and tries to Josettify her. Several characters set out to hunt him. Jeff finds that Barnabas has killed some of them and turned them into vampires. He kills two of these, then finds Barnabas and destroys him just as he is about to turn Maggie into a vampire.

We had barely seen Jeff and Maggie together, and in their few shared scenes they had no chemistry at all. Nor has he been involved in any of the other action sequences. Indeed, he begins the climactic sequence by being woken and told that he has overslept, which serves to underline his peripheral position in the plot up to that point. So it is entirely unsatisfying that he comes out of the blue and is the rescuer in the grand finale.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that we have seen Maggie interact quite a bit with Roger Collins, brother to Liz and father of strange and troubled boy David. Roger also took an active part in the first destruction of a vampire, when his niece Carolyn was staked. So it would make sense for him to be the rescuer, and for Mr Davis’ character to be left out of the movie altogether. A romance between Roger and Maggie would hark back to the early days of the show, when there were a few hints that Vicki, a Jane Eyre analogue, might start dating Roger, whose position as father of her charge and whose very name recall Mr Rochester.

Fans often wonder what Barnabas’ long-term plan was in the Spring and Summer of 1967. Maggie was known to everyone and her disappearance was big news, so he could hardly have presented her to the family once she was Josettified. And his own operations as a vampire were an ongoing disaster that had everyone in the Collinsport area on edge. Add a second vampire to the household, and the situation would become entirely unsustainable.

The show indicated what would probably have happened had Barnabas succeeded, first in February 1969, and then in more depth in July 1970. In #694, the ghost of Quentin Collins takes control of the great house, forcing all of its residents to flee for their lives. In episodes #1061-#1070, Julia and Barnabas come unstuck in time and find themselves in the far-off future year 1995, where another ghost has taken control of Collinwood. The great house is in ruins, the grounds overgrown, and the residents of Collinsport are unwilling even to mention the estate, let alone go there. Surely those were the only surroundings in which Barnabas and a vampiric, Josettified Maggie could have gone on existing.

That’s very much the situation that is about to come into being at the end of this film. We don’t see the great house. Instead, Jeff encounters occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes on an island overgrown with weeds, finds that he has become a vampire, and destroys him. He then goes to a building in ruins, apparently located on the same island (though the scraps of film that make up this movie are so confusingly pieced together that you can never be quite sure where anyone is supposed to be at any time,) and finds Roger sitting on a sort of throne. Roger is also a vampire, and Jeff destroys him too. From there he goes to the Old House, probably, where he confronts Barnabas in a big space that is also in ruins. The structures we do see show us what would happen to the great house if Barnabas survived, and what may happen to it anyway. The only living members of the family are Liz, who was catatonic after she found out that her daughter had become a vampire and doesn’t seem likely to make much of a recovery, and David, who was already pretty screwy when the movie started. It’s hard to see how either of them is going to keep such a big place up.

Episode 1096: Goodbye, David. Goodbye, Hallie.

Dark Shadows began in June 1966, when well-meaning governess Victoria Winters was on her way to the great house of Collinwood to take charge of the education of strange and troubled boy David Collins. David’s aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, had written to Vicki to offer her the job; his father, Liz’ brother Roger Collins, was opposed to Vicki’s hiring. Roger’s opposition rose from mild disapproval to paranoid fervor when he learned that his arch-nemesis, Burke Devlin, rode into the village of Collinsport on the same train as Vicki.

In the months that followed, the only story that consistently worked was Vicki’s attempt to build a friendship with David in spite of his vicious and at times murderous hostility towards her. Later, David met Burke, and the two of them quickly bonded over their shared hatred of Roger. For his part, Roger was haunted by the thought that Burke was David’s biological father, a thought which Liz forbade him to express.

For a long time, David continued to be the pivot on which the story turned. Crazed handyman Matthew Morgan abducted Vicki and tried to kill her; that crisis reached its emotional peak when David found Vicki bound and gagged in Matthew’s hiding place and refused to rescue her. David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, came back to claim him, which would have meant his death. That arc ended when David ran from the fishing shack Laura had set ablaze and flung himself into Vicki’s arms. With that, he chose Vicki and life over Laura and death, appointing Vicki as his new mother. That marked the conclusion, not only of the David and Vicki story, but of Dark Shadows 1.0.

As the show reinvented itself, David remained the key to the action. The two long costume drama inserts that established Dark Shadows as, first and foremost, a show about time travel, the trip to the 1790s that lasted from November 1967 to March 1968 and the trip to 1897 that ran from March to November 1969, were both prompted by attempts to protect David from a looming supernatural menace. Though he was not an active participant in either of those stories, it was his peril that triggered them, and attempts to protect him and his analogues in previous generations of the Collins family that set the boundaries of the possible action.

As of this episode, all of the characters mentioned above are off the show. Vicki made her final appearance in #665*; Matthew made his in #123; Laura in #191**; Burke in #344; Roger, in #979***. Liz made her last substantive appearance on Friday; she will have one brief scene in #1198, simply to mark the end of a storyline. David leaves the show today.

In the early parts of today’s episode, David and his fellow teenager, houseguest Hallie Stokes, are being led through the woods by the unspeaking ghosts of two people who died in 1841. David’s psychopomp is the late Gerard Stiles, who was apparently a pirate when he was alive but has become a landlubber in death. Hallie’s is the late Daphne Harridge, who was once the governess at the great house. Daphne’s charges were Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes. Hallie and David have spent vast amounts of time moaning about how the ghosts of Carrie and Tad are going to take possession of their bodies and erase them from existence. Much of this moaning has taken place in a mysterious room which they call “The Playroom.” The Playroom intermittently exists in a obscure corner of the great house. When it materializes, it can be found behind a door that at other times opens onto a linen closet. Gerard, Daphne, Tad, and Carrie have free rein in The Playroom.

There is a dollhouse in The Playroom that the ghosts like to play with when David and Hallie aren’t looking. This dollhouse is a scale model of Rose Cottage, a mansion which stood somewhere near Collinwood in 1840. It is in some supernatural sense identical with that mansion. In #1082 and again in #1093, it was made clear to Hallie and David that they are fated to become dolls confined to this dollhouse, and that any living that is left for their bodies to do will be done by Carrie and Tad.

Daphne and Gerard take Hallie and David to a full-sized version of Rose Cottage that stands in the woods. It is unclear whether this mansion is visible all the time, or if it comes and goes as does The Playroom. The latter would seem more likely, since it is such a big place it is hard to imagine it would have escaped the notice of the people who have heard the expression “Rose Cottage” and have recently been trying to figure out which of the big houses in the area was around in 1840 and could have been known by that name in that year.

Gerard gets David to Rose Cottage while Daphne and Hallie are still making their way through the woods. David takes a nap in the corridor outside the upstairs parlor where the dolls are kept. He has another dream like the one he and Hallie both had in #1082, in which they are in the upstairs parlor. Daphne is in his dream. She smiles. Her smile is more unsettling than Gerard’s sneer. David wakes up and finds that Daphne is there, with Hallie.

David says they must resist; Hallie says it is too late. Then there is a commercial break. When we come back, they are in the upstairs parlor. Hallie notices the dolls are gone. David says they are no longer needed. Hallie says they must resist; David says it is too late. David Henesy manages to make David Collins’ part in these two scenes work. In the corridor, David is conflicted, trying to sound brave as he says the words about resisting but looking helpless as his eyes turn to the ghosts. In the parlor, he is simply defeated. His performance sketches a clear line between these two emotional states.

Kathleen Cody is less successful as Hallie. She seems to have come to terms with the reality while in the corridor. In the parlor, she flips back into Hallie’s usual mode, maximum possible tension. It doesn’t help that her dialogue is a bunch of questions about why they can’t resist. In context, those questions are just nonsense, and Hallie’s abrupt switch from quiet resignation to extreme plangency is inexplicable. My wife, Mrs Acilius, asked if they were trying to make us root for the ghosts who promise to shut Hallie up.

This story is the second time Dark Shadows has adapted Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. The first time through, in late 1968 and early 1969, David and his friend Amy Jennings took turns in the role of Child Who Enforces the Will of the Ghosts and Child Who Resists the Will of the Ghosts. That got to be frustrating, but at least they waited until the episode was over to switch roles. Switching them during a commercial break is just a slap in the face of the audience. Miss Cody’s decision to play Hallie at such a high level of agitation so much of the time was a costly mistake, but no performer could really have saved the part.

The ghosts indicate that David and Hallie are to take their seats at the table where the dolls usually sit. When they do so, we jump to a somewhat lower camera angle. This cut does indeed make it look like Hallie and David are small figures inside a small space. Henry Kaplan directed this episode. I usually have a lot of complaints about Kaplan. His preferred visual strategy was to cut from a closeup of one face to a closeup of another face to an extreme closeup that shows at most part of a face. But this shot achieves a subtle effect, and that effect tells the whole story. I can’t suppress a suspicion that Lela Swift stepped in and set the shot up for Kaplan, but even if she did he deserves credit for not fouling it up.

Carrie and Tad come into view. Carrie superimposes herself on Hallie’s body, Tad superimposes himself on David’s, and both ghosts fade out. As they do, we hear Tad say “Goodbye, David,” and Carrie say “Goodbye, Hallie.” We will see Carrie and Tad in the persons of Hallie and David for some time, but will never see either David or Hallie again.

Final farewell. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I remembered this closing image vividly from our previous watch-through of the series. I misremembered the lines, though. I recalled David and Hallie saying goodbye to each other, not the ghosts saying goodbye to the teenagers as they took possession of them. I think it is better the way it is. We are supposed to be horrified at Carrie and Tad’s thoughtless cruelty as they annihilate Hallie and David, and denying them even the opportunity to bid each other farewell serves that purpose. Unsatisfactory as are the rest of the episode and indeed the rest of the David and Hallie story, this closing shot is highly effective.

*Alexandra Moltke Isles last played the character in #627. Two other actresses succeeded Mrs Isles in the role.

**Another iteration of the character appeared in 20 episodes between #729 and #760.

***Another version of the character appeared in 17 episodes between #975 and #1055.