Maggie Evans is depressed about her marriage to drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins. In #1016, Maggie was getting ready to call a lawyer so she could put an end to their joyless union, but she changed her mind and decided to give it one more try. That has not worked out, and she has gone from contemplating divorce to attempting suicide. She is about to fling herself to her death from a window high in the great house of Collinwood when Quentin’s sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard enters the room and talks her out of it. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe, which is in some ways a mirror image of this one. This incident is a case in point. In the original continuity, it was Liz’ counterpart whom people kept interrupting while she was trying to do away with herself,* so she takes the reversed position in this universe.
Most of the episode is devoted to the activities of a visitor from the main continuity, Barnabas Collins. The only thing Barnabas has a motivation to do is to try to get back home, but he seems to have decided he’d rather meddle in the problems the people in this alien universe are having. He suspects that the houseguest at Collinwood who is generally accepted as Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of Quentin’s late first wife Angelique, is in fact Angelique herself risen from the dead. He also suspects that Maggie’s suicide attempt was the consequence of spells Angelique cast on her.
Barnabas is right about these things, but his grounds for believing them are thin. Angelique’s counterpart in his universe is a wicked witch who has long been the bane of his existence, and so he simply assumes that a woman with her face and voice will be the same. But for three weeks, Alexis really was staying at Collinwood, and Angelique really was in her tomb. Alexis looked and sounded exactly like Angelique. We saw that, while Alexis may not have been a one-dimensional innocent, she was not a witch and was not a direct threat to anyone’s life or liberty. Had Barnabas met Alexis before Angelique came back to life and murdered her, he would have had exactly the same suspicions about her that he has now about Angelique. It is purely a matter of luck that his suspicions coincide with the truth.
In the main continuity, Barnabas’ best friend and most frequent accomplice in his many crimes is mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia’s counterpart here is the housekeeper at Collinwood. Miss Julia Hoffman is as devoted to Angelique as the original Julia is devoted to Barnabas. As the first Julia shows great reluctance when Barnabas is about to murder someone and shows even greater efficiency in getting rid of the bodies afterward, so this Julia protested yesterday that she would have nothing to do with Angelique’s plan to drive Maggie to her death, but was waiting outside the room when she was about to jump.
After confronting Julia and Angelique, needlessly revealing to them his suspicions, Barnabas decides to get some hard evidence. So he goes to Angelique’s old bedroom and stares really hard at the portrait of her that hangs there. She is in another part of the house, but grows agitated. She runs to the room and screams at him to stop staring into her eyes. He breaks into a triumphant… not grin, exactly, it’s more of a simper. It may be the only triumphant simper ever seen. That suits the occasion. He knows he was right, but Angelique knows that he knows, and it is not clear what he either can do to fight her or what reason he has to want to fight her.
Jonathan Frid’s invention of a facial expression previously thought to be impossible is one of several bits of conspicuously good acting in this episode. He also gets to deliver brief enigmatic responses to a number of questions, such as “Perhaps” and “Did I?,” and he makes each of those words materialize in space in such an arresting way that even his scene partners can’t help but show how impressed they are. As Liz fussing over Maggie, Joan Bennett shows a maternal quality that brings her hitherto undefined character into a very sharp focus. Grayson Hall also adds greatly to Hoffman’s depth. Standing by while Maggie is trying to kill herself, she is bland and detached. When she tells Angelique that it really is better for them that Maggie did not succeed, she is the opposite, torn between a number of emotions, including relief that she has avoided responsibility for a death.
Angelique has several comic lines, for example a wistful lament that she doesn’t get to see Maggie’s corpse mangled on the rocks below her window. And she puts real fervor into her spellcasting directed at Maggie. My wife, Mrs Acilius, remembered that when Lara Parker first joined the cast she wished she were playing an ingenue, so much so that Frid had to keep reminding her that she was the villain. But now she has settled in and become part of the group. So when Angelique abuses Maggie, Parker and her friend Kathryn Leigh Scott turn into two little girls playing make-believe, and they have so much fun at it that they are irresistible to watch, no matter how miserable Maggie is.
Angelique Stokes Collins has risen from the dead, but her renewed existence may end within seconds. She is overwhelmingly cold, and can warm up only by draining the heat from the body of a living person. Someone is coming in the front door, just in time to be her victim and die in her stead. She wonders who it will be.
Almost all the characters currently on Dark Shadows are either so important to an ongoing story that their deaths would end a major arc or have so many connections to everyone else that their deaths would start a new one. So if she kills mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, his fiancée Sabrina Stuart, or barmaid Buffie Harrington, Angelique will be ending the Jekyll and Hyde story, or at least shifting it into a radically new phase. If she kills drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, his wife Maggie Evans Collins, or housekeeper Julia Hoffman, she will be ending the adaptation of Rebecca. If she kills Carolyn Loomis or her husband Will, she will be ending the restaging of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
If Angelique kills woebegone homebody Elizabeth Collins Stoddard or her brother, sardonic dandy Roger Collins, she won’t be ending any ongoing stories. But Liz and Roger are the counterparts of characters who were central to the life of the great house of Collinwood in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows, when it was set in another universe, and are played by actors who have substantial followings. If either of them is murdered, the audience will expect major consequences. Angelique’s son Daniel Collins and Daniel’s cousin Amy Collins aren’t doing much just now, but if Angelique kills a child, especially her own son, the ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices would join the audience in insisting she face a serious reckoning that would take up a lot of screen time. This fit of heat vampirism came on Angelique too suddenly to make sense as the start of a new arc, so we can rule all of those candidates out.
There are also a couple of characters who were introduced to fill in for actors who were away the previous couple of months filming their parts in the theatrical feature House of Dark Shadows. Among those are Angelique’s Aunt Hannah and butler Mr Trask. They are possibilities, but are both played by actors who have enough going for them that it would be a bit surprising to bring them back just to kill them off. There are also a few miscellaneous day players whose characters would have no reason to let themselves into the great house of Collinwood- a bartender we saw in #991, a landlady we saw in #997, etc.
So it would seem that there are only two people who could be Angelique’s next meal. One is sleazy musician Bruno Hess, a former boyfriend of hers who lives in the cottage on the grounds of Collinwood and is friends with Cyrus, but who has been neither seen nor missed for some time. The other is Larry Chase, attorney at law.
Bruno is played by the dynamic Michael Stroka, who twice made a mark when cast in stories set in the other universe. Larry was written into the show as a last-minute substitute for a part played by an actor whose health problems made it impossible for him to continue. They didn’t have time for auditions, so they drafted associate director Ken McEwen for the part. McEwen was in the building, and he had a guild card because of some small parts he’d taken in TV shows he’d worked on in the 1950s. When he has enough time to rehearse, which is to say when he has had more time to rehearse than actors usually got on a show like Dark Shadows, McEwen gets his lines right, except for adding “Well…” at the beginning of every single one. You can tell he is making a sincere effort not to ruin the show. But that’s about all you can say for him. Even at his best he’s stiff and distracted, and when he hasn’t been able to get his part down, he disintegrates completely. So it isn’t much of a surprise that Larry is the one who opens the door. It wasn’t a surprise to me, I should say; writing these posts keeps all the details fresh in my mind. My wife, Mrs Acilius, looked at him for about thirty seconds and asked “Who’s that?”
Larry plays the same scene with Angelique that her second victim, Fred the transient handyman, had played with her in #1003, right down to telling her that he had wanted to hold her since he first saw her. Fred was played by Edmond Hashim, and anyone who sees the two versions of this scene side by side will come away with a new appreciation for Hashim’s talents as an actor. This is McEwen’s final on-screen appearance, though he will pinch hit as the opening narrator in three upcoming episodes. He will continue as an associate director through episode 1179/1180 in December.
Will enters to find Angelique screaming and Larry dead. Angelique, who is impersonating her late identical twin sister Alexis, claims that Larry was just standing there when he had an attack of some kind and dropped dead. Will touches the corpse and says that he is so cold he must have been dead for hours. “Alexis” insists he just died a moment before. Will calls Cyrus, who is the Collins family physician.
Cyrus is in his lab, looking at the potion which turns him into the Mr Hyde-like John Yaeger. He is about to capitulate to his craving when the telephone rings. Will tells him that Larry is dead and asks him to come to Collinwood. Cyrus puts the potion back in his safe and rejoices that he is “Saved!” Larry was Cyrus’ lawyer and apparently a social friend as well. We’ve already seen Cyrus do enough horrible things that this sociopathic reaction is no shock.
Back at Collinwood, Will and “Alexis” are talking with Barnabas Collins. Unknown to “Alexis,” Barnabas is a visitor from the other universe. Her counterpart in his world was the wicked witch who turned him into a vampire, so Barnabas cannot keep a hostile edge out of his voice and manner when he is talking to her. Will is one of Barnabas’ victims, and knows all of his secrets.
When they are alone in the drawing room, “Alexis” questions Will about Barnabas. Will denies knowing him particularly well. Barnabas is staying at Will’s house, and several years ago Will wrote a biography of Barnabas’ counterpart in this universe, a man who lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830. Barnabas claims to be a descendant of that Barnabas Collins, and to have come to Collinwood to meet the author of the biography. Will becomes more and more disturbed as “Alexis” presses him harder and harder for information. She is perplexed that he won’t tell her anything. Lara Parker and John Karlen have both been on the show for a long time, but this is the first substantial two scene between them, and it is terrific. Their acting styles were very different, but they couldn’t have meshed better.
Barnabas is sitting at a table in the Eagle tavern. There is a glass of reddish liquid in front of him. In view of his condition, one wonders what that liquid might be.
Barnabas invites Buffie to sit with him. Since there are no other customers, she agrees. He tells her he is from South America. The son of this universe’s Barnabas Collins whom he claims as his great-grandfather went to Peru; when he introduced himself to the family, he said that his forebear did not die in that country. But evidently his imaginary descendants stayed on the continent, somewhere.
The Eagle is the counterpart of the Blue Whale in the other continuity. In #3, Burke Devlin was sitting at a table in the Blue Whale with hard-working young fisherman Joe Haskell when he said that his success in life began when a strange man picked him up in a bar in Montevideo. That was the show’s only reference to Uruguay, but Burke, the Blue Whale, and Brazil came to be strongly associated with each other. The song “Aquarela do Brasil,” a big hit in the English speaking world in the 1960s under the title “Brazil,” played on the jukebox at the Blue Whale, and it became Burke’s theme song. Ultimately Burke would die on a business trip to Brazil. Barnabas and Burke were enemies; when he sits at this table and claims to have a South American background, longtime viewers may wonder if he is thinking that the new universe is a place where he can try out a new personality and maybe he will start by imitating Burke’s.
Burke was a dashing action hero, attractive to women. Barnabas’ attempt to imitate him breaks down almost immediately. He winds up mimicking another prominent bachelor from his native universe, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, when he asks Buffie if she’s ever heard of the theory of “Parallel Time.”
Buffie shakes her head no. Barnabas says that some people believe that there are many universes, and that a copy of each of us can be found in each of them. They may look the same, but they lead different lives because they have made different choices. Buffie laughs and says that she hopes her other selves are having more fun than she is. She hastens to say that she doesn’t mean she isn’t having fun at the moment, sharing a table with Barnabas; she means that her life in Collinsport, as viewed from the most all-encompassing perspective and analyzed in the most thorough philosophic manner, well and truly sucks shit. Barnabas says that the other Buffies in the multiverse might have left Collinsport* and had wonderful adventures.
Longtime viewers saw one of those other Buffies in #951, when we were still in the original continuity. She had a different name; she went by Nelle Gunston. And as befits a mirror universe, she moved in the opposite direction. Rather than leaving Collinsport to look for something new as Buffie wishes she had done, Nelle left her parents’ home in Virginia and went to Collinsport because she had joined a cult dedicated to the destruction of the human race and its replacement by a loathsome breed of Elder Gods known as the Leviathan People. Barnabas had been the leader of the Leviathan cult, and when Nelle came to town she sat with him by the same table where Buffie and Barnabas sit today. They even take the same seats.
Buffie is charmed by Barnabas’ talk; between the suavity that Jonathan Frid brings to his part today and the energy with which Elizabeth Eis presents Buffie’s enthusiasm for him, it is far easier than it usually is to believe that Barnabas is a sexy dude. Maybe we are supposed to think that role-playing as Burke has enabled him to loosen up.
The conversation is really warming up when the bell attached to the front door rings. “Customer,” Buffie ruefully says to Barnabas as she rises. It is Cyrus.
Barnabas invites Cyrus to sit with them. He declines, saying that he came only to ask Buffie if she had seen John Yaeger lately. She tenses up. Yaeger used to beat her up and force her to help him with his crimes. She says that Cyrus himself had told Buffie that Yaeger wouldn’t be back in Collinsport. Cyrus says that he did, but that he is worried he might not be able to predict Yaeger’s movements as well as he thought he could. He offers Barnabas a lift back to Collinwood. That’s a bit surprising, since Cyrus got uptight when he saw Barnabas. As Yaeger, Cyrus discovered that there is a coffin in the basement of Will and Carolyn’s house, and he suspects that Barnabas spends his days there. But longtime viewers can remember the days Barnabas and Burke had conversations at the Blue Whale that were just as tense as the one he and Cyrus have in the Eagle, and Burke never failed to observe the small graces. It’s just the done thing, I suppose.
Cyrus leaves, and Buffie remains standing. She and Barnabas keep talking. He gets close, and goes in for a bite. He stops himself at the last second, to her surprise and disappointment. She was apparently ready for a kiss on the neck. He says he has to go. She is even more disappointed by that, but he promises to come back at closing. He asks to walk her home, and she happily agrees.
Will and Cyrus are in the drawing room at Collinwood. Will urges Cyrus to join him in a drink. When Cyrus declines, Will reminisces about the old days at Collinwood, when the party would just be getting started at this hour. In those days, people would leave the great house in the small hours of the morning and continue their revels at the Eagle. Cyrus says he won’t find much company there tonight. When he says that the only people in the place earlier were “the girl who works there” and Barnabas, Will looks alarmed. All of his mannerisms that suggest drunkenness drop away, and he rushes out.
Will gets to the tavern, and finds Buffie alone. The alcoholic author is obviously one of her favorite and most lucrative customers, so even though she has already blown out the candles she tells him he is in time for last call. To her amazement, he is not interested in a drink. He asks her where Barnabas is. She says he’ll be back and that he is taking her home. He says no, and she asks what’s wrong. Before he can answer, Will hears Barnabas’ voice behind him, echoing Buffie’s question. Laboring under the vampire’s power, Will has no choice but to leave Buffie alone with Barnabas.
Nelle, too, had agreed left the tavern with Barnabas. She expected to meet the leader of the Leviathans at his place, and was unhappy to find that the two of them were alone. Buffie is again an inverted mirror image of her counterpart. She takes Barnabas to her place, and is quite happy to be alone with him. The two close in for an embrace. He bites her neck, and she collapses. He had bitten Nelle, too. At that moment, Cyrus enters the room.
Cyrus does not exactly have a counterpart in the other continuity, but Christopher Pennock did play the Leviathan leader whom Nelle expected to meet. Like Cyrus, that character was a murderous shape-shifter. So Cyrus’ unexpected arrival mirrors the Leviathan leader’s unexpected absence.
When we first cut to Buffie’s room, the camera lingers for several seconds on an extremely unusual prop. It is a television set. The only other time we have seen a television set on Dark Shadows was in #27, in the other universe, when Burke visited investigator Stuart Bronson in a hotel room in Bangor, Maine where there was a small portable unit. It looks like it might be the same set.
Bronson’s TVBuffie’s TV
The shot goes on so long, and the set is such an odd thing to see in the context of the show, that they must be making some kind of point with it. We have wondered why Buffie submitted to Yaeger’s abuse, when she is such a strong and intelligent person. Her reflection in Nelle suggests a partial answer. Nelle was drawn to the Leviathans, who offered to destroy her and all other humans. We can assume that Buffie, too, was following a self-destructive urge when she went along with Yaeger. Associated with her, the television is a symbol of the annihilation of the self. Turn the idiot box on, turn your mind off. If you aren’t careful, you may even wind up spending your weekdays staring glassy-eyed at ABC’s daytime lineup.
*He actually says “Collinwood.” Which is a blooper, but since Buffie mentioned in her first episode that she used to work at Collinwood it is kind of an interesting one. Maybe when another Buffie left her position as an upstairs maid or whatever she was, she got further than the nearest tavern.
Quentin Collins finds a voodoo doll in his wife Maggie’s suitcase. She tells him she hasn’t seen it before. At length it dawns on him that it is physically possible for a person to place an object in someone else’s suitcase. He remembers that housekeeper Julia Hoffman was in the room for no good reason last night while Maggie was sleeping. Several weeks ago, he was able to see the abundant evidence that Julia was trying to drive Maggie out of the house. He knows that Julia was fanatically devoted to his late wife Angelique and must know that Angelique was involved in black magic, so that Julia would be the obvious suspect in an awkward situation concerning Maggie and a voodoo doll.
The next day, Quentin talks the situation over with Cyrus Longworth, his physician and an expert in black magic. Later, he confronts Julia; she denies leaving anything in the room. He does not have any further evidence to use to challenge her denials, so he leaves it at that.
What Julia knows that Maggie, Quentin, and Cyrus do not is that Angelique has returned from the dead. She murdered her identical twin sister Alexis and took Alexis’ place as Quentin’s houseguest. Julia and Angelique are conspiring to drive Maggie and Quentin apart so that Angelique can resume her place as Quentin’s wife and the mistress of the great house of Collinwood. Julia and Angelique keep congratulating themselves on how upset Maggie is getting, apparently not noticing that Quentin is suspicious of Julia and thinking of firing her.
Angelique, masquerading as Alexis, calls on Maggie in the master bedroom. She says that she realizes her presence in the house has been stressful for Maggie, and offers to leave if she wants her to do so. Maggie says that she is not stressed now, because she realizes that she is Alexis. She describes herself as childish and hysterical in her initial reaction, when she thought she was Angelique returned from the dead, and tells her to stay in the house as long as she likes. “Alexis” takes this statement at face value, and goes on to explain her belief that Angelique was murdered and her determination to find the person responsible.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that there is more going on in this scene than Angelique knows. Quentin has a habit of calling Maggie childish and hysterical, and she rejects those labels. So when she applies them to herself, regular viewers know that she is not giving her sincere opinion.
Moreover, being accepted as Alexis is not the winner with Maggie that Angelique believes it is. In #985, Maggie found Quentin and Alexis in Angelique’s old bedroom. Alexis was wearing Angelique’s frilly nightgown, pressing herself to Quentin, stretching her hand to him, looking into his eyes, and saying softly “Perhaps we can comfort each other.” Maggie ran from that sight to the drawing room, followed by Quentin. He tried to tell her she did not see what she saw. She told him that she would no longer be treated like a child, and left to spend the next six weeks at her sister’s place in New York. Angelique was in her grave at that time, and neither Alexis, Quentin, nor Maggie told her about it. So she does not know that by impersonating Alexis she is inviting Maggie’s distrust. She does not understand the warning Maggie is giving her when she tells her that she knows she is Alexis.
Maggie’s view of Alexis as a rival for Quentin also explains why she characterized her decision to go to stay with her sister as motivated solely by her own irrationality. Alexis is the last person with whom she wants to discuss her differences with Quentin, so of course she claims total responsibility for their earlier rift.
Angelique’s resurrection can last only so long as she can keep warm, and she can do that only by draining heat from the bodies of the living. Now the cold comes up on Angelique again. It strikes her during her scene with Maggie. Maggie can see that “Alexis” is ill, and reaches a friendly hand towards her. Angelique says this is just something that happens to her occasionally, and that she has to get under some blankets as soon as possible. She rushes out.
When she is in this condition, all Angelique has to do is touch a person and they will be an icy corpse. It is interesting that she chooses to pass up her chance to kill Maggie. Perhaps she is afraid that doing so would lead to her exposure. Alexis was her first unwilling heat donor; a handyman named Fred, who had the ill fortune to cross Angelique’s path in #1003, was the second. Angelique has concealed Alexis’ death by impersonating her, and Fred was due to leave town anyway. So no one has missed either of them. But there would be no covering up Maggie’s death.
Through the first half of the scene, Lara Parker’s hair and Kathryn Leigh Scott’s keep fluttering. The window on the set is closed, so that just makes us wonder how high the air conditioning was in the studio. After they come back from commercial, that problem is solved, but it was conspicuous enough to add a bad laugh to Angelique’s heat vampire symptoms.
Angelique runs down to the foyer, crying out for Julia. When she comes, Angelique orders her to fetch a victim whose body heat she can consume. Julia refuses, and Angelique tells her that if she doesn’t provide someone else she will herself be the next donor. Julia goes.
A moment later, Angelique feels she is about to succumb to the cold. She sees the doorknob turning, and resolves to claim whoever is about to enter. “Who will it be?” she asks, “Who… will… it… be?” There aren’t many candidates. There have been periods when the show had a bunch of characters in reserve who were not directly connected to any ongoing stories, but there are only a handful of those now, and only one or two would be likely to let himself or herself into Collinwood.
Five and a half years ago, I defended the episode in a comment I left on Danny Horn’s great blog, Dark Shadows Every Day. This segment of Dark Shadows is set in a different universe than the one where the first 196 weeks took place; the show insists on calling it “Parallel Time.” So the letters “PT” are sometimes put in front of the characters’ names to differentiate them from the versions of the characters we met in the original continuity. Danny and many of his commenters were getting impatient with Parallel Time by this point, and some compared it unfavorably to the trips the show took back in time within the main continuity, especially the costume drama segment set in the 1790s that ran from November 1967 to March 1968.
I’m liking it.
PT Angelique’s harebrained scheme isn’t really any worse than were most of Angelique-Prime’s schemes. So the difference between PT Maggie and Quentin on the one hand and 1795 Josette and Jeremiah on the other is that Maggie and Quentin have some brains. They talk to each other about what they’ve seen, confront Miss Hoffman, and consult with the resident Doctor of Spookology. For viewers who had seen 1795, that must have come both as a relief- thank goodness they aren’t going to simply recycle that story- and as a source of suspense- when Angelique sees her first evil plan fail, what other, even more evil plan will she devise?
Comment left by “Acilius,” 12 January 2021, on Danny Horn, “Episode 1019: Peer at a Prop,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 7 May 2017
I would have gone on to talk about all the stuff between Maggie and Angelique, but Mrs Acilius only pointed that out to me this time through. I’m sure that while I was watching the scene I responded emotionally to the nuances in Miss Scott’s performance, but I didn’t have it in mind after the episode was over.
The closing credits still bill Lara Parker as “Alexis Stokes,” a month after Angelique killed Alexis and took her place. Mrs Acilius explains this by reminding me of all the times when actors have strolled onto the set during the credits. She imagines someone walking on, seeing the credit that identifies Angelique, and reacting with shock.
Dave Woodard, MD, was on Dark Shadows from April to November 1967. Woodard was introduced as physician to Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie was the victim of vampire Barnabas Collins. Woodard was the show’s answer to Dr John Seward, the commonsensical local physician in Bram Stoker’s Dracula who called in his old mentor Dr Van Helsing when he found that his patients were suffering maladies he could not explain. Woodard’s call went to his medical school classmate, Dr Julia Hoffman. As Van Helsing was an incredible polymath, equally at home in several branches of medical science, of esoteric philosophy, and even in the law, Julia was dually qualified as a blood specialist and a psychiatrist and just so happened to have a theory about curing vampirism.
This Van Helsing proved a traitor to her patient and to her friend. In order to persuade Barnabas to agree to cooperate with her experiment, Julia betrayed Maggie, using her magical powers of hypnosis to erase Barnabas’ abuse from Maggie’s memory. As time went on, Woodard figured out Barnabas’ secret and Julia’s complicity in his crimes. To keep him quiet, Julia prepared a lethal poison and helped Barnabas administer it to Woodard in #341.
From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows traveled back in time and was a costume drama set in the 1790s, the period when Barnabas first became a vampire. It was then that we were introduced to wicked witch Angelique, who often caused pain to her victims by sticking pins in dolls. When suspicion spread that witchcraft was going on, Angelique framed well-meaning governess Victoria Winters for her own crimes.
Now, the show has traveled in time again, not backward but sideways. Barnabas has gone to an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” Maggie’s counterpart in this universe is married to drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, master of Collinwood. Angelique’s counterpart was Quentin’s first wife. She died last year, but has risen from the grave. When she was alive, Angelique built a cult around herself, some members of which reacted to her death with the firm conviction that she would come back to life. Now that she has done so, she has kept most of her devotees in the dark. She has told only two of them who she really is. Everyone else, friend and foe alike, thinks she is her identical twin sister Alexis.
One of the two people who knows Angelique’s true identity is her aunt, Hannah Stokes. Angelique forced Aunt Hannah to act as her henchman from #1003 until we saw her for the last time in #1014. In #1015, Angelique revealed herself to her most devoted follower, the housekeeper at Collinwood. This person is named Julia Hoffman.
Alexis really was staying at the great house of Collinwood from #984 to #1001, when Angelique rose from the dead, murdered her, and assumed her identity. When Alexis showed up, she found that Maggie was uncertain of her position in the house because everyone was so obsessed with Angelique. Hoffman deliberately and very blatantly worked to exacerbate Maggie’s insecurities, in the manner of Mrs Danvers in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. Unlike Maxim de Winter in the novel, Quentin caught on to what was happening and sent Hoffman away for a time. And unlike the second Mrs de Winter, Maggie refused to put up with Quentin’s miserable behavior, including his alarmingly affectionate relationship with Alexis, walked out on him and went to stay with her sister in New York. The absences of Hoffman and of Maggie coincided with the work Grayson Hall and Kathryn Leigh Scott, along with the other survivors from the summer 1967 cast, did in the feature film House of Dark Shadows.
Today, we open in Quentin and Maggie’s bedroom. Quentin is in the hospital, so Maggie is alone in bed. But she is not alone in the room. Barnabas is there, about to bite her. He bared his fangs and plunged his head into her pillow in the last scene of yesterday’s episode; he does the same in the opening reprise. But when we come back from the title sequence, he is showing us his teeth again, and there is no blood on them. Evidently he just wanted to rub his face in Maggie’s pillow for a second while he worked up his appetite.
Barnabas is going in for a second round when the doorknob starts to turn. He retreats into the shadows, then turns into a bat and flies away. Hoffman enters. Maggie wakes up. She is startled to find Hoffman in the room. Hoffman explains that she thought she heard a prowler. Maggie tells her she doesn’t believe her.
Indeed, it is hard for us to believe Hoffman. The only sound we could hear Barnabas make was his squeaking in his bat form. Any sounds of footsteps the microphone did not pick up must have been much quieter than the squeaking that was going on while Hoffman was already in the room. Hoffman does not appear to have heard the squeaking, so it would not seem she could possibly have heard anything that would lead her to believe there was a prowler. Later, we hear Hoffman on the telephone to Angelique, gleefully reporting that Maggie was unnerved to find her in her room. So apparently she did not hear Barnabas. She went into the room to advance her plan of making Maggie look foolish. When she brought up the idea of an intruder, she was only accidentally pointing towards the truth, not saying something she believed or had reason to believe.
In the hospital, Quentin meets with his doctor, Cyrus Longworth. Quentin had severe chest pains the night before, so bad that Cyrus was for a time certain he had only minutes to live. Cyrus is deeply disturbed when he comes into the consultation room. He tells Quentin that he has run every relevant test, and that the results prove beyond a doubt that there is nothing physically wrong with him. Quentin asks how that can be, and Cyrus says that his chest pains were probably the result of a supernatural influence. His preliminary diagnosis is that a witch pushed a pin into a doll. This is correct. Angelique did indeed push a pin into a doll representing Quentin.
It took Woodard months of exposure to a pile of evidence before he would use the word “supernatural” without hesitation. All Cyrus needs is to see a man who is sick one day and healthy the next, and he’s right there. In #985, we learned that Cyrus had worried his friends by presenting a paper on black magic at a scientific conference. He was a member of Angelique’s cult, and at her suggestion he devised a Jekyll and Hyde formula that he has used to indulge his sadistic desires, which include murder. He is a mad scientist, less Woodard than Julia.
Back at Collinwood, Maggie gets dressed and opens the front door. She finds Barnabas standing there, about to knock. She says she is on her way to the hospital to visit Quentin. The telephone rings, and she finds that Quentin is on his way home. Barnabas asks to stay with her while she waits for her husband to return, and she agrees.
The two have a remarkably cozy conversation. They are so close together that her hair bounces in his breath. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said it looked like Barnabas was about to kiss Maggie at any moment. “You mean bite her,” I said. “Same thing,” she responded.
This conversation includes one of the most interesting of all the show’s countless bloopers. Maggie confides her insecurities about succeeding Angelique as Mrs Quentin Collins. Barnabas asks “Did Quentin really love Josette?” We cut to a closeup of Maggie. For half a second, Kathryn Leigh Scott visibly struggles not to laugh. Cast members almost never corrected each other on camera, just delivering their next scripted line no matter how bad the preceding miscue had been, but this one was so extreme that she improvised “Josette? I think he loved Angelique.” Once she had contained her laugh, she slipped right back into character. It really sounds like Maggie is caught off guard by Barnabas’ stumble, not like Miss Scott is caught off guard by Jonathan Frid’s. And when we cut back to Barnabas, his face is just as it was when we cut away to the closeup. That is an impressive bit of professionalism.
“Did Quentin really love Josette?”
Quentin comes home, and Barnabas excuses himself while he and Maggie have their joyous reunion. Maggie tells Quentin that she wants him to dismiss Hoffman. When she describes the awkward moment in her room, he grows impatient and irritated. He refuses to dismiss “someone for walking into a room!” Hoffman enters. Quentin orders the two of them to feel better about each other.
This is puzzling in a way. Before Maggie left, Quentin had caught on to what Hoffman was doing, and he seemed to be thinking of firing her. But regular viewers will not be entirely surprised. The confrontation that led to Maggie’s departure was all about Quentin’s habit of treating her like a child, and the whole time she was away he kept saying that he was not going to indulge her childish behavior. Quentin has got so deep into the habit of belittling Maggie that he cannot resist doing it even when he knows that she is in the right.
In their room, Maggie is getting ready to go back to bed while Quentin looks in her suitcase. He finds the voodoo doll there. As Mrs Acilius pointed out, Maggie was still in New York when Quentin’s pains started, so she is not very likely to be the witch. Also, the room has been open and vacant all night, so anyone could have walked in and left the doll. No reasonable person could take this as any kind of evidence against Maggie, but Angelique and Hoffman don’t have to concern themselves with reasonable people- their target is Quentin.
There are a number of buildings on the estate of Collinwood. There is the Old House, a big mansion where the Collinses lived until the 1790s, and the great house, an even bigger mansion where they have lived since. These days, the Old House is home to hard-drinking writer William H. Loomis and his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Sometimes the place is called “Loomis House” in recognition of its inhabitants. We learn today that the Loomises have a servant. His name is Wilfred Block, but everyone knows him as Fred.
Fred hears some noise coming from the attic. He goes up there and finds two kids who belong at the great house. They are Amy Collins and her cousin, Daniel Collins. Amy is out cold, and Fred asks Daniel what he did to her. Daniel claims to be innocent. He says that Amy just looked at a portrait and fainted. That’s the sort of thing the Collinses do all the time, so Fred accepts it. He carries Amy back to the great house. Daniel follows.
There, Daniel tells his father, Quentin Collins, the same story he told Fred. Fred tells Quentin that he couldn’t get any answers out of Amy. She just kept repeating the words “chained” and “trapped.” Quentin thanks Fred.
On his way out, Fred sees a woman whom he greets as “Miss Alexis.” He tells Alexis that he misses her visits to the Loomis House. She walks up very close to him and says she is feeling cold. He says he knows what to do about that, and hugs her. She holds the embrace for quite a while. He says he’s wanted to do that ever since he first saw her. She tells him to kiss her. Before he can comply, they hear Quentin coming. They separate and look nonchalant. Quentin is surprised Fred is still there. Fred hastens out.
Later, Alexis’ aunt, Hannah Stokes, would go to Fred at the Loomis House and ask him to come to her place, telling him Alexis wanted to see him there. That scene took place out of our view. The next time we do see Fred, Hannah is leading him into her parlor. Fred tells Alexis that he’d been planning to see her at Collinwood, but she says it is better at Hannah’s. Hannah leaves them alone together. They embrace, and Fred kisses Alexis. He feels cold. She tells him he will go on feeling cold, but bids him embrace her again. He does. He collapses.
Hannah was close to one of her nieces, Quentin’s late wife Angelique Stokes Collins. But she never got along with Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis. Angelique had shared Hannah’s interest in the occult, and had been her pupil in that area, while Alexis scorned such matters. Alexis came to stay at Collinwood four and a half weeks ago, and spoke to Hannah only once during that time, when Hannah invited herself to the great house. That was a tense meeting which ended with Alexis all but ordering Hannah to go.
Hannah is taken aback today when she answers her door. She sees Alexis. She makes sarcastic remarks about Alexis, which do not deter her visitor from entering. The visitor asks Hannah to tell her fortune. Hannah resists, but the visitor keeps telling her it is something she wants very much. Hannah starts laying out the Tarot, but the first two cards disturb her so deeply she stops and cannot be persuaded to resume. She tells her visitor that they mean that she has no future. The visitor responds with a placid look and an insistence that Hannah read her palm. Hannah does not want to see the same message there, but the visitor will not be denied. When she looks at her palm, Hannah has a realization. “You are not Alexis! You are Angelique!”
Hannah is horrified that Angelique has returned from the dead. She does not want to know how it was done. Angelique seems eager to tell her everything; if Hannah were willing to listen, she might even volunteer that she murdered Alexis by draining the warmth from her body to heat her own undead frame. Angelique asks Hannah to bring her up to date on some things that happened while Alexis was at Collinwood and she was in the tomb. She then explains that her own death was also a murder, and that she wants to avenge it, though she does not yet know who the murderer was. She also has plans for Quentin, though she does not make it clear at this time what those are. She tells Hannah to bring Fred to her so that she can drain the warmth from him. Hannah protests, but Angelique tells her she has no choice. If she does not deliver Fred to her, she will haunt Hannah as long as Hannah lives.
After Fred collapses, Angelique calls her aunt back to the parlor. She tells her that she is all right now. Hannah finds that Fred is dead. Angelique agrees that he is, and repeats that she is warm again. She goes on: “That’s the way it must be now. This is the way I will live now. And when Quentin comes to join me, he will live this way, too. For eternity.” Evidently she is now a vampire, only instead of blood she drains heat from her victims. Also, she will be killing someone every 24 hours. Collinsport has been established as a very small town, so if she and Quentin are both going to be keeping up that pace it’s hard to see how it can last even for a year, let alone for eternity.
Quentin Collins
Quentin does not suspect that Angelique has risen from the dead, killed her sister, and taken her place. He has problems of his own. At the beginning of today’s episode, he is standing at the door to Angelique’s old bedroom in the east wing of Collinwood, where Alexis stayed during her visit and which Angelique now occupies again under Alexis’ name. He is looking into the room, but does not see it. Instead, he sees an entirely different space. Unlike Angelique’s richly decorated room, it is bare and dark.
Quentin sees two children in the room. They look and sound exactly like Daniel and Amy, though they are wearing clothing he does not recognize. He calls the names Daniel and Amy, but even though they are just a few feet away from him they do not seem to hear him or to be aware of his presence. An invisible barrier of some kind keeps him from entering the room.
Though the children cannot hear Quentin, he can hear what they are saying. The boy says that according to his father, “Dr Hoffman” said that “Barnabas got caught” in the room. The girl is alarmed and says that she does not want to get caught. She does not want to be in the room at all, but would rather be asleep in bed.
Quentin keeps calling the names Daniel and Amy. After a moment, he hears Daniel’s voice coming from somewhere other than the room. He turns, and sees Daniel and Amy standing behind him in the hallway. They don’t know what he is talking about when he asks them if they have been in the room, and he doesn’t know how to explain what he saw.
The Hoffman likeliest to come to Quentin’s mind is Julia Hoffman, Angelique’s fanatically devoted servant, who is the housekeeper at the great house of Collinwood and is certainly not a doctor. The only Barnabas he can think of is Barnabas Collins, an ancestor who died in 1830 and who was the subject of a biography Will Loomis wrote five years ago. Amy has told him that Will has started another book about that Barnabas. Quentin read Will’s original book, and was puzzled as to what could possibly be left to be said about its subject. So the conversation he has overheard makes no more sense to him than does the setting in which it took place.
Quentin shoos the children away and goes into the room. It is furnished as it always is. Angelique, whom he believes to be Alexis, is lounging in the middle of it. He tries to explain the phenomenon to her, and she does not take him at all seriously. He tells her enough that she should know that if it was an hallucination, it was a remarkably involved one, the sort that occurs only to people with grave mental illnesses. Even so, she could not be less interested in it. She wants to know what Quentin is doing to investigate her murder. He says that he doesn’t believe Angelique was murdered, to which she replies that he is a fool. This conversation does not have an obvious track forward, and Quentin quickly excuses himself.
Barnabas Collins
Barnabas Collins went to the island of Martinique in the 1790s on a business trip for his father’s shipping concern. While there, he met two lovely young women. One was Josette DuPrés, daughter of the richest sugar planter on the island. He was captivated by Josette, but did not believe she could love him. Josette’s aunt, the exiled Countess DuPrés, had brought a lady’s maid with her when she escaped from the French Revolution. This maid, named Angelique, was quite as beautiful as Josette, and made it clear that she was available to Barnabas. He consoled the sadness that he felt when he supposed Josette to be unreachable in a light-hearted love affair with Angelique. When it turned out that Josette was not unreachable at all, he forgot about Angelique and turned to her. Soon, he and Josette were engaged to be married.
When Josette and her father came to Collinwood for the wedding in 1795, the countess and Angelique came along. Angelique was sure that Barnabas was marrying Josette only to conceal his true intention, which was to keep her as his real partner. When she discovered that this was not the case, Angelique vowed to do something about it. She had learned black magic, and was ready to wreak a terrible vengeance.
Angelique managed to end Barnabas’ engagement to Josette, and had caused many disasters by the time Barnabas agreed to marry her. Before long, he discovered that she was a witch. He made several farcically inept attempts to kill her. When he shot her with a gun, she thought he had succeeded. As she lay bleeding, Angelique cursed Barnabas to become a vampire. It turned out her wounds were only superficial, but the curse was not. Barnabas was eventually trapped and chained in his coffin until 1967, when he was accidentally freed once more to prey upon the living.
That Barnabas Collins was not the one Will wrote his 1965 book about, and that Angelique is not the one who has returned from her coffin to stay in Quentin’s house. They were residents of a parallel universe. It was in their universe that the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows took place. There, the east wing of Collinwood has long been vacant and disused. Barnabas happened to be there when the bare dark room Quentin sees today was replaced by Angelique’s room from this universe. He and several other residents of the original continuity saw the phenomenon a number of times over the next few days.
Barnabas became preoccupied with the forlorn hope that if he could enter the other “time-band,” he might be freed of the vampire curse and become human again. His closest friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, tried to dissuade him from this plan, but he was nothing daunted. Barnabas finally did manage to find a way through the barrier.
Once in “Parallel Time,” Barnabas’ hopes were instantly disappointed. He was still a vampire. The first person he met was Carolyn Stoddard Loomis. He bit her and made her his thrall. Will found out about this very shortly after, and trapped Barnabas in a chained coffin. He is using him as a source of material for a new book.
The children Quentin saw talking about Barnabas were not Daniel and Amy Collins, but David Collins and Amy Jennings from the main continuity. They don’t know that Barnabas is a vampire; so far as they are concerned, he is their kindly cousin from England, an old world gentleman with some eccentric habits.
Amy Collins
Amy had stayed with the Loomises for a few days recently when there was some trouble in the great house. She took Daniel to their attic because she wanted him to join her in her favorite pastime while she was there, going through the trunks. Daniel declares that only girls would be interested in an activity like that. Amy doesn’t refute his claim when she says that the trunks have all sorts of interesting old stuff in them, such as dolls.
Daniel asks Amy about the basement of the Loomis House. She tells him that Will has the only key, and that he refuses to let even Carolyn go down there. We know that the basement is where Will keeps Barnabas’ coffin. Daniel says that there is a tunnel that leads from the beach right into the basement, and that he likes to play there. He says that it has been sealed up lately, but suggests Amy come with him to unseal it and explore. She says “Not at night,” and turns away. He calls her a scared-y-cat. Longtime viewers know that the same tunnel exists in the main continuity and that it has been a hugely important part of the story more than once, and will wonder if they can again match the excitement associated with it in those past episodes.
Amy tells Daniel that there is a sword somewhere in the attic, a real one. This does not exactly thrill Daniel, but at least he asks if it is a saber or a fencing foil, which is more than he had to offer in response to the prospect of digging up some antique dolls. He goes to look for the sword behind some paintings. When he turns up the portrait of Barnabas Collins, he hears a heartbeat. Longtime viewers will remember that characters have several times heard a heartbeat when looking at the portrait of Barnabas in the main continuity, and that this means that Barnabas is going to be on the show before much longer. Amy can’t hear the heartbeat, but she does have a strong reaction. It is at this point that she faints and the ill-fated Fred enters.
Regular viewers know that Amy’s muttering of the words “chained” and “trapped” mean that she has a mystical perception of Barnabas’ situation. But Quentin doesn’t have the slightest idea what to make of it. Amy comes to in the drawing room and tells Quentin that when she saw the eyes in the portrait of Barnabas, she realized he needed help. Quentin says that Barnabas has been dead for a very long time.* Amy says she knows, and leaves it at that.
Ben Stokes
In the 1790s, the Barnabas of the main continuity befriended much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes. Barnabas’ father, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, made Ben’s life miserable. Barnabas took pity on Ben, teaching him to read and write and standing up for him when he was wrongly accused of misconduct. In return, Ben gave Barnabas his absolute loyalty.
When Angelique came to Collinwood in 1795 and hatched her evil schemes, she decided she needed a henchman. She chose Ben. She pretended to find Ben attractive. He matter-of-factly walked up to her and took hold of her, as if women who look like movie stars come on to indentured servants every day. She soon used his excitement to cast her spell on him. He found himself helping Angelique to do great harm to Barnabas and everyone he cared about, grieving him very deeply.
Eventually, Ben broke free of Angelique. He went on to be freed from his indenture and to have children. One of his descendants is Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, an expert on the occult and a frequent ally of Barnabas and Dr Hoffman.
Fred’s response to Angelique today reminds us of Ben so long ago. Once Ben gathered that Angelique was propositioning him, he didn’t see any need to talk at all. They both had work to get back to, so he was ready to get down to business straightaway. But Fred keeps telling Angelique how beautiful she is and how he always hoped something would develop between them. His dialogue and Edmund Hashim’s delivery of it are as realistic and unadorned as Angelique’s lines and Lara Parker’s style are florid and over the top. The contrast is deliberate, as the contrast between the monosyllabic working-class “Fred” and the ornate and ethereal “Angelique” is deliberate. Just as Ben did not know what kind of world he had stumbled into when he reached for the original Angelique, Fred has no idea that he lives in a place where beings such as this Angelique can exist.
When Barnabas first came to this universe, Carolyn Loomis told him that Angelique and Alexis were the daughters of “Tim Stokes,” the counterpart of his old acquaintance Timothy Eliot Stokes. We have yet to see Tim Stokes, but we can be sure he will played by Thayer David. We know what Thayer David looks like. Alexandra Moltke Isles, who was in 333 episodes as well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, dated critic John Simon in the 1970s. Simon was a college classmate of Thayer David, and told her that in their day David was “the handsomest man at Harvard.” When I mention that to my wife, Mrs Acilius, she says that those must have been rough days for Harvard. David may have been better looking before he put on weight, but he never bore anything that could be mistaken for a family resemblance to the dazzling Lara Parker.
Longtime viewers, thinking back to what we saw when the show was set in 1795, might have an idea. Will’s book proves that the timelines diverged in the 1790s, when the Barnabas of the current timeline left Angelique alone and had a happy marriage with Josette. Perhaps in that continuity Ben really did pair off with Angelique. If so, Angelique and Alexis might be their descendants. They were lucky to inherit all of the genes governing their appearance from her.
The thought of the counterparts of Ben and Angelique as the forebears of the Stokes family in the current continuity might shed some light on its members. We’ve heard not only that Hannah and Alexis had no use for each other, but that Alexis and her father have not spoken for a long time. Like Hannah, Tim shared Angelique’s interest in the occult and doted on Angelique, while scorning Alexis. The new Angelique certainly qualifies as the Evil Twin, and is very much a continuation of the Angelique we already know from the main continuity. From what we know about them, Hannah and Tim seem to be the sort of people Angelique would naturally turn to for help in her deadly doings.
As for Alexis, she seems to have set her cap for Quentin, and succeeded in driving Quentin’s current wife Maggie out of Collinwood when she caught Alexis and Quentin in rather a compromising position. Alexis kept saying it would be easier for the new Mrs Collins to come home if she were to leave, but she never did leave. On a conventional soap, Alexis would have the makings of a Vixen, but it takes more than husband-stealing to join the ranks of the villains on Dark Shadows. Alexis would seem to take more after Ben, who had been indentured because he was a thief and was bewitched by Angelique because he disregarded sexual morality. She may have those sorts of flaws, but compared to the evils around her they seem like minor foibles indeed.
Edmund Hashim
Fred is played by character actor Edmund Hashim, making his only appearance on Dark Shadows. Hashim does a fine job. Fred had to be played with strict naturalism, so that the only resource Hashim could draw on to hold anyone’s attention against the flamboyant Parker was skilled and truthful acting. He pulls it off. It’s a shame we won’t see him again. He died in 1974 at the age of 41, one of the first cast members to pass away. The only ones who predeceased him were Fred Stewart (1970, aged 64,) House Jameson (1971, aged 68) George Mitchell (1972, aged 66) and Patrick McVey (1973, aged 63.)
*In fact, he says that Barnabas has been dead for “over 200 years.” It’s 1970, as the wardrobe makes unmistakably clear, and they have explicitly said that the Barnabas Quentin has heard of died in 1830. So he’s bad at math.
The show has been keeping us in suspense as to whether Lara Parker is playing wealthy socialite Alexis Stokes or Alexis’ identical twin sister, the late Angelique Stokes Collins. Regular viewers know that the title “the late” is no impediment to a major part for a character on Dark Shadows. In the universe where the action took place for the first 196 weeks, Angelique’s counterpart was a wicked witch who returned from the dead countless times, and the clues are mounting that Alexis’ sister is active on the estate of Collinwood in this continuity, whether in her form or a more ethereal one.
While with Angelique’s widower Quentin Collins, Alexis has witnessed a series of odd occurrences that have led her to become distraught and to protest that Angelique is haunting them. She has questions, and takes those questions to two of Angelique’s acquaintances, medical researcher Cyrus Longworth and Cyrus’ assistant/ fiancée, Sabrina Stuart. That would seem to support the premise that she is Alexis, but she keeps the suspense alive for regular viewers when she approaches Cyrus’ laboratory by its courtyard door. The other day, the police were watching Cyrus’ house, and they did not notice that there was a door in the courtyard. When a detective came inside and spoke with him, Cyrus pointed the door out to him and told him that only a few people knew of it. Angelique was very close to Cyrus and was involved in his work, so we can assume she was one of those few people. It is not at all clear who could have told Alexis about the door.
Ms A. Stokes comes in through the courtyard door.
On Friday, Alexis joined a group assembled in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood to reenact the séance at which Angelique died. Sabrina went into the trance and started shouting about murder. Ever since, Alexis has been sure Angelique was murdered. When she questions Sabrina today, Sabrina first asks her what she knows about the original séance.
Alexis says she has heard that Sabrina went into a trance and started speaking for a man. In the séances we have seen in the main continuity, the spirits have always spoken through a medium of the same sex. My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that if this universe is a mirror image of that one, it makes sense that they would speak through one of the opposite sex. Alexis says that the man who spoke through Sabrina said something that angered Quentin, prompting him to rise from the table and start strangling Angelique. At that moment, the lights went out. When they came back on, Angelique was dead. The authorities would rule the death the result of a stroke.
Sabrina says that in her vision at the second séance, she saw those same events. But she also saw another figure standing near Angelique. Alexis declares that she must identify that other figure, since that must be the person who murdered Angelique. Quentin was much too busy strangling her to be the murderer, apparently.
Quentin’s counterpart in the main continuity lived in 1897. We saw him strangle his own wife, Jenny, to death in #748. Jenny had a sister named Magda, but they were not twins. Magda placed a curse on Quentin when she found out what he had done.
For his part, Quentin is also trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. He has asked Alexis and Angelique’s spooky aunt Hannah, who was introduced yesterday as one of his least favorite people, to come to Collinwood and exorcise the spirit that has been bothering everyone. Just as Hannah is getting ready to do some mumbo-jumbo, she starts choking. The Angelique from the main continuity was forever casting spells to choke people remotely, so regular viewers will assume that Hannah’s niece is behind her discomfiture.
Quentin talks with Alexis about taking everyone and fleeing the house to escape from the ghost. Alexis says he can do what he thinks best, but that she is not leaving until she finds out more. Before we went back in time in the original continuity and saw Quentin as a living being in 1897, he was a ghost who drove everyone out of Collinwood, so when this Quentin thinks of taking the family and fleeing a ghost we see another inversion.
Later, Quentin is alone. Angelique’s theme song starts playing from everywhere in the house. He cannot escape it. Regular viewers will remember that the ghost of the other Quentin persecuted the residents of the great house by playing a phonograph recording of a sickly little waltz over and over. In 1897, we found that the living Quentin obsessively played the same recording, occasioning protest from all the other characters. This may be a different Quentin, but we can’t help take a certain satisfaction in seeing him get a taste of the medicine his counterpart dished out so cruelly to the other characters and to the audience.
We meet Hannah Stokes, aunt of identical twins Alexis Stokes and Angelique Stokes Collins. Hannah is in the cottage on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, home to sleazy musician Bruno Hess. When we first see her, Hannah is casting a horoscope. Later she reads tarot cards. Still later she sprinkles some bone meal on a stolen handkerchief and says an incantation over it. The point of all this mumbo-jumbo is to determine whether the blonde woman living in the great house on the estate is Angelique or Alexis. Since Angelique died six months previously, this question would seem to have an obvious answer, but Bruno and Hannah seem to know that death is seldom a major disability among characters on Dark Shadows.
Hannah laughs at Bruno, who shares her hairstyle but does not appreciate her talents.
Hannah goes to the great house to see her niece. Alexis hated Hannah, so if she is the woman she could be expected to receive the visit coldly. Angelique was close to her, but knew of Alexis’ attitude. So if she is the woman, she could be expected to behave in exactly the same way. Indeed, the episode began with Angelique’s son Daniel and her widower Quentin noticing little things Alexis did just as her sister would do them, prompting her to point out that they were raised by the same mother and picked up many habits from her. So if a resurrected Angelique is trying to imitate Alexis, she has enough material to work with that not even her aunt can tell them apart.
Hannah goes back to the cottage. None of her black magic answers the question of which sister is living in the great house, but she is sure that Angelique is present on the estate in some form, perhaps visible, perhaps ghostly. Bruno is convinced Angelique is present in her own form and using Alexis’ name. Quentin overhears their conversation and believes for a moment that Bruno is right, before talking himself out of it. Later, he and Alexis see Angelique’s piano playing itself in her old bedroom, and Alexis believes that Angelique’s ghost is playing it.
The most interesting thing about this episode is Paula Laurence’s turn as Hannah. Her whole performance today is an imitation of Lara Parker as Angelique. Laurence was such a different physical type from Parker I couldn’t put my finger on what she was doing until she was about to exit the cottage at the end of her first scene and she laughed at Bruno. She recreated the very distinctive laugh Parker uses as Angelique. At that, my wife and I simultaneously said “The same laugh!” From then on, it was impossible to miss the imitation. It comes across as a family resemblance, of a piece with Alexis and Angelique trimming plants the same way or humming the same tune while fluffing pillows.
The cottage is the place for spooky doings. We are in a different universe today than the one where the show was based for its first 196 weeks. In the main continuity, we first saw the cottage as the home of crazed handyman Matthew Morgan, who would be scared to death by ghosts. Matthew was succeeded as a resident of the cottage by undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Laura was central to the storyline that picked up where the ghosts who killed Matthew left off. Most of the major narrative loose ends, such as the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc, were wrapped up as points within her story, while the ghosts were pulled out of the unseen back-world behind the action and brought into the spotlight. By the time Laura went up in smoke, the back-world of uncanny beings and the front-world of business stories and estranged spouses had reversed their places, and Dark Shadows had become a supernatural thriller.
The cottage was vacant for a long time after Laura. The next inhabitant was werewolf Chris Jennings. He was haunted there by the ghost of the main continuity’s counterpart of Quentin, who had lived and died in 1897. Quentin’s ghost seemed to have greater power in the cottage than elsewhere on the grounds of the estate. When the show traveled back in time to 1897, we found that Quentin and his fellow Satanist Evan Hanley had spent time there working black magic. At one point Quentin and Evan asked for a spirit to come from Hell to join them in an evil plan, and the one who appeared was Angelique’s counterpart, who like Laura was an undead blonde fire witch. Also in 1897, we learned that Quentin had been entangled with another iteration of Laura, and that the cottage had been one of their places.
Vague as Hannah’s findings are, they combine with Angelique’s iconography and that of the cottage to assure us that her ghost is active on the estate and that she will be returning in physical form. They are still keeping us guessing about how Alexis fits into all of that, but it seems more and more likely that she is at least sincere in her belief that she is not Angelique. Maybe she is an entirely separate entity who will eventually meet her reanimated sister, or maybe it will turn out that she and Angelique are inhabiting the same body. The spirits of the dead have been known to sublet space from the living on Dark Shadows, so that is one of many possible outcomes.
Drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins and wealthy socialite Alexis Stokes enter the mausoleum where Angelique, Quentin’s late wife and Angelique’s identical twin sister, is entombed. They find a fancifully dressed man named Bruno Hess driving a chisel into the wall beside Angelique’s nameplate. When they demand to know what Bruno is doing, he explains that he is going to open the vault, show that Angelique’s body is not there, and thereby prove that Alexis is in reality Angelique come back to life.
Quentin says he will call the police if Bruno does not desist from his efforts. Bruno says that he does not believe that Quentin wants to involve the police, since that might raise questions that he would rather leave unasked. In response to this, Quentin looks down, and Alexis asks what on earth he is talking about. Quentin says it is an empty threat. He offers Bruno $25,000 to go away, rather a large amount of money to offer someone who has just made an empty threat. Bruno says he will go away without payment if he is allowed to open the vault and it turns out Angelique’s remains are there. Alexis is horrified by this idea, and she and Quentin manage to run Bruno off.
Returning viewers know that these characters are part of a story mashing up Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca with Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 story Ligeia. Maxim de Winter put up with the presence of Jack Favell, his late wife Rebecca’s lover, on his estate because Maxim knew that Favell was willing to spread the rumor that Maxim had murdered Rebecca, and he feared that Favell might be able to prove that the rumor was true. Bruno was Angelique’s lover, and is ensconced on the estate of Collinwood. Quentin’s look down when Bruno scoffs at the idea of him calling the police suggests that he has the same exposure in regard to Angelique’s death that Maxim had in regard to Rebecca’s.
This part of the show is set in a universe parallel to the one where it spent its first 196 weeks. Angelique’s counterpart in the main continuity is a wicked witch who has returned from the dead many times. Poe’s Ligeia, like Du Maurier’s Rebecca and like the Angelique of the current continuity, was a great beauty who fascinated those who knew her and remained an inescapable presence in her husband’s house after her death and his remarriage. Unlike Rebecca, but like the Angelique of the main continuity, Ligeia was a woman of vast knowledge who could transcend death. At the end of Poe’s story, the unnamed narrator finds that his second wife, who has died, has come back to life, and that both her physical appearance and her personality have been transformed into those of Ligeia. Bruno, like other devotees of Angelique, is unshakably convinced that Alexis is lying when she says that she is not the resurrected Angelique.
Bruno is a subject in an experiment being conducted by aspiring mad scientist Cyrus Longworth. Cyrus was himself an admirer of Angelique’s. When he first saw Alexis, he too believed that she was Angelique risen from the dead. But he has accepted that she is who she says she is, and has immersed himself in his work, an attempt to create a potion that will turn whoever drinks it into a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-like duality. Last week, we learned that this somewhat questionable project was Angelique’s idea.
We see Bruno in Cyrus’ laboratory, telling him about his activities in the mausoleum. Cyrus is amused by the story, and tells Bruno he wishes he had his daring. He makes fun of Bruno for getting caught, and turns back to his notes. Frustrated that he cannot enlist Cyrus in his attempt to prove that Alexis is Angelique redivivus, Bruno exits.
Bruno’s a pretty weird guy, but you’d think even he would hesitate before getting into that outfit. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Later, Bruno shows up in Angelique’s old bedroom at the great house of Collinwood, where Alexis is staying. She demands he leave, and he demands she admit to being Angelique. She says that if he refuses to go, she will resort to force. He invites her to do so.
The Angelique we know in the main continuity has vast magic powers, and would be hard put to keep herself from turning Bruno into a toadstool. We don’t know if the Angelique who once occupied this room is a match for her, but the widespread belief among people who knew her well that she will transcend death suggests that she does have some kind of extraordinary ability, and a moment yesterday when Bruno believed she had cast a spell to interfere with his breathing confirms that she shared at least some of our Angelique’s talents. Bruno believes he will expose her true identity by provoking her into using them. My wife, Mrs Acilius, says that she found herself torn at this point. Returning viewers have ample reasons to dislike Bruno, and his invasion of Alexis’ personal space reinforces all of them. At the same time, she is very much inclined to believe that Alexis is Angelique. So even while she roots against Bruno, she also hopes he will succeed in this attempt.
Alexis does not cast a spell. Instead, she goes to the drawing room and tells Quentin that Bruno has invaded her room. Our Angelique would probably find it galling to have to turn to some guy and report that a meanie was bothering her, so if Alexis is an impostor we can believe she is an exceptionally well-disciplined one.
Bruno follows her. He and Quentin confront each other. Bruno taunts Quentin, saying that he always knew Angelique better than he did. Quentin reminds Bruno that he is not allowed in the house and forbids him to pester Alexis. Bruno mentions that Angelique died during a séance; this piques Alexis’ interest, and after Bruno leaves she asks Quentin about it. He doesn’t want to answer, and she drops the subject.
Cyrus goes to his laboratory late at night and finds evidence of an intruder. He discovers that the man is still there. Cyrus tells him to come out of the shadows so he can see him face to face. It is Horace Gladstone, a chemist from Boston who formulated an extremely exotic compound Cyrus bought as an ingredient in his potion. Cyrus asks Gladstone if he satisfied his curiosity when he was reading through his notes. Gladstone said he didn’t, because Cyrus’ handwriting is so bad. Gladstone says that if Cyrus will tell him what he is working on, he can be of great assistance to him. Cyrus keeps refusing, and Gladstone warns him that he is about to take “a lonely and dangerous journey.”
When he is alone, Cyrus drinks the potion. He makes noises suggesting acute gastric distress and collapses.
Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard has had a dream in which her new husband, whom she knows as Jeb Hawkes but who when we first saw him asked to be called Jabe, was in a fight on top of Widows’ Hill. His opponent, a stooge named Sky Rumson, threw him off the precipice to his death. When she awoke, Carolyn ran to the hill in search of Jabe. Instead, she found Sky. He told her that her dream was not complete, because it did not show her death. He then grabbed her by the throat.
Jabe rushes up and knocks Carolyn out of Sky’s grip. He and Sky fight, and Sky does throw him off the precipice. Carolyn escapes.
Back home at the great house of Collinwood, Carolyn finds her mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. It takes her a while to compose herself sufficiently to tell Liz and Julia what happened. Julia offers Carolyn a sedative, which prompts her to jump up and shout a verbal refusal. By the time Carolyn starts telling the story, her distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, has joined them in the drawing room. She interrupts herself to yell at Barnabas that he always hated Jabe and is probably glad he’s dead. When Carolyn finishes, Barnabas slips out. Liz calls the police, and Julia is surprised neither of them saw Barnabas leave.
For the last nineteen weeks, the show has been trying to make a story out of some themes drawn from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. That segment is usually called “the Leviathans,” after a race of Elder Gods who are behind the action. Jabe was central to the Leviathan segment. Sky is the only other character remaining from it. Barnabas appears in the house where Sky has been crashing and finds him packing his bag. Sky does not understand how Barnabas got in. Barnabas dismisses his question, merely saying that Sky knows there are things he can do that ordinary people cannot. Sky draws a revolver and fires two rounds at Barnabas point blank, without effect. Sky exclaims “Oh, no!” Barnabas is amused that none of Sky’s late colleagues told him that he is a vampire. He takes Sky’s hand, curls his arm back so that the gun is pointing at his heart, and squeezes Sky’s finger onto the trigger.
Back at the great house, Liz gets a telephone call from the sheriff. The police haven’t found Jabe’s body, and have surmised that it washed out to sea. They have found Sky, and have tentatively ruled his death a suicide. Later, Carolyn has another dream. In this one, Jabe shows up and confirms his death. That marks the end of the Leviathan segment. Carolyn will go on using the name “Mrs Hawkes” and saying she misses Jabe, but otherwise the last nineteen weeks will be forgotten.
Before killing Sky, Barnabas had mentioned that he almost regrets not leaving him to the other person who is on her way to do him in. That is Sky’s estranged wife, wicked witch Angelique. Had the Leviathan segment been more successful, or had Geoffrey Scott been even marginally competent in his performance as Sky, they might have made something of the parallels between Sky and Jabe. They are both very tall men with blonde wives who are dissatisfied with them. Angelique is dissatisfied that Sky is a tool of the Leviathans and that he tried to set fire to her on the orders of their representative, and Carolyn is dissatisfied with Jabe because he keeps running away from dangers he has brought on himself by his rebellion against the Leviathans and he won’t tell her anything about himself. Sky is a mortal man, while Angelique may once have been human but has long since become a creature of the supernatural. Carolyn is a mortal woman, while Jabe is now human but was originally a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time.
But the ratings have been sinking throughout the Leviathan period, and the whole narrative structure of the arc keeps collapsing around them every time they try to do anything with it. So they are in too much of a hurry to move on to the next thing to do any exploring of the characters. Also, Scott is hopeless. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, put it, it isn’t that he is an actor with just one strategy. He keeps trying different things, and none of them comes close to working. We won’t see him again.
The new story has to do with an alternate universe that is occasionally visible in a room in the long disused east wing of Collinwood. Barnabas, Julia, and others have been spying on its inhabitants, and Barnabas is fixated on the idea that if he can cross over into it his vampirism will disappear. Since his bloodlust is overwhelming him, he is desperate to pursue this forlorn hope. He goes to the room when the alternate universe cannot be seen there, and a moment later finds that it has changed with him in it. Julia is in the hallway, looking in. At first she and Barnabas can see each other, and she can hear him, though he cannot hear her. After a moment, Carolyn’s alternate universe counterpart enters and demands to know who Barnabas is and what he is doing in the house.
Barnabas took Carolyn as his blood-thrall in October 1967. The show went back in time to 1795 the following month. In the 1790s segment, Nancy Barrett played fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. We saw that Barnabas first became a vampire in 1796; not long after, he took Millicent as his blood thrall. Shortly after the show returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, one of Julia’s colleagues in the mad science profession applied a treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into remission. That freed Carolyn of her connection to him, and at some point she forgot it ever happened.
For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was set in 1897. In that segment, Miss Barrett played repressed schoolmarm Charity Trask. Barnabas bit her, too. Carolyn’s counterpart in “Parallel Time,” known by her married name Carolyn Loomis, is the fourth character* Miss Barrett played on Dark Shadows; considering that Barnabas is so frantically hungry, it looks like she will follow in the footsteps of her predecessors and serve as his breakfast.
*Or fifth- in #819, sorcerer Count Petofi found Charity’s personality to be an irritant, so he erased it and replaced it with that of the late Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl/ mentalist. From that time on, Miss Barrett played Pansy, not Charity.
An information management day. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has told his distant cousin, Roger Collins, about a parallel universe that is occasionally visible in a room in the long disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood. Today, Roger tells his sister Elizabeth about the room. Liz owns the house. We might wonder if she will have questions about what effect the presence of a spare universe on the premises will have on her property taxes.
Roger talks about the phenomenon while standing in the room with permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. He is incredulous when he notices that Julia is not listening to him. She cannot tell him what has distracted her. Unknown to Roger and Liz, Barnabas is a vampire. Julia has devised a treatment that is supposed to put this curse in remission, but it is not working at all. She has given him the last of the injections, and the only difference in Barnabas is that he is getting sick and feeling an unusually intense bloodlust.
Caretaker Chris Jennings, another distant cousin, comes stumbling home to his cottage on the grounds of the estate. He finds his girlfriend and ex-fiancée Sabrina Stuart waiting for him. Chris is another patient Julia has been unable to help. He is a werewolf. There was a full moon last night. Sabrina tells Chris he killed a man named Bruno. Chris is distressed that he killed anyone, but Sabrina points out that Bruno knew of his secret and was trying to use him to kill others. He was holding her and a man named Rumson prisoner, and when the police searched Bruno’s premises after his death they found Sabrina and Rumson imprisoned there. Sabrina keeps telling Chris she wants to marry him. Most of the time they will live ordinary lives, but one night out of 28 she will just have to lock him up in a special cell. Chris won’t hear of this.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, is a great one for love stories and an admirer of actress Lisa Blake Richards. Chris and Sabrina have run out of road on Dark Shadows, and are obviously going to be written out soon. Mrs Acilius wishes they could ride off into the sunset accompanied by the sound of wedding bells. So when Chris refused to marry Sabrina, she exclaimed “Stupid man!” I pointed out something Chris knows but does not mention to Sabrina, that his curse is hereditary. Any male descendants he has will also be werewolves. Mrs A conceded that this does complicate matters.
Roger saw Chris at Bruno’s place when he rescued him and Carolyn shortly before moonrise last night. Chris was at that time in the throes that precede his transformation. Chris ran off before Roger or Carolyn could see what became of him. Roger comes to the cottage to check on him.
Chris is in the back changing out of his bloody clothes, so Sabrina answers the door. She tells Roger that Chris is there and that she was with him all night, watching over him because he was ill. After what he saw of Chris at Bruno’s, Roger has no doubt that Chris needed a nurse, and he tells Sabrina that he is glad he had such a charming one. The audience can understand that Sabrina wants to conceal Chris’ lycanthropy from Roger, but surely it cannot be wise for her to claim that she was in the cottage overnight. Not only are her true whereabouts known to everyone who was in or around the police station the night before, but since Roger was the one who found Bruno’s body and he found it on the grounds of Collinwood, even police as inept as the ones in Collinsport are likely to follow up with him. Besides, her imprisonment with Rumson is a sensational story, of interest to the press. Maybe we will move on to the next phase of the show before the facts come to light, but Sabrina can’t know that.
Sabrina is determined to persuade Chris to resume their engagement. She goes to the one person whose opinion Chris seems to respect, Barnabas. When she knocks on his door, Barnabas hides behind a partition. When Sabrina first arrived, she had seen Barnabas through the window of his front parlor, so she lets herself in. He finally gives up on hiding and pleads with her to leave. She ignores what he is saying and keeps talking. She plows ahead with her idea about how Barnabas can help her and Chris become a happy married couple. Barnabas struggles to resist his urge for blood, but cannot. He bites Sabrina, much to her surprise. Miss Richards’ understated exclamation of “Barnabas!” when he shows his fangs and goes for her neck is very nicely done, it really sounds like a woman puzzled that a trusted friend is violating her personal space.
Sabrina staggers back to Chris’ cottage. She collapses in his chair, and he sees the puncture wounds on her neck. They are much bigger than the marks we’ve seen on Barnabas’ previous victims. I suppose he really was a lot hungrier than usual. Chris doesn’t know that Barnabas is a vampire, and the cliffhanger leaves us wondering whether he can avoid finding out.
Probably the most memorable shot in the episode is a very impressive bit of videotape editing. Roger and Barnabas are standing at the door to the Parallel Time room, watching Roger’s counterpart interact with Liz’ and Chris’. Parallel Roger walks toward the door. He exits the room, not into the space Roger and Barnabas occupy, but into the hallway as it exists in Parallel Time. He vanishes from their view, and the effect also winks out in the room, leaving Roger and Barnabas looking into the bare, dark chamber it is in the house they know.
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