mrs acilius – Page 5 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 701: Welcome home the prodigal

We begin the part of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897 with an episode featuring a glittering script, a strong cast, and a hopeless director. Henry Kaplan’s visual style consisted of little more than one closeup after another. The first real scene in the episode introduces us to Sandor and Magda Rákóczi, a Romani couple who live in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. They bicker while Sandor throws knives at the wall. Thayer David really is throwing knives, but since we cut between closeups of the targets and of the actors we cannot see anything dynamic in that action. He may as well be whittling.

Magda ridicules Sandor’s pretensions as a knife-thrower and as a patent medicine salesman, and busies herself with a crystal ball. She tells him that when “the old lady” dies, they will have to leave Collinwood. He says he knows all about that. She wants him to steal the Collins family jewels so that they can leave with great riches. He eventually caves in and sets out for the great house on the estate, more to escape her nagging than out of greed.

Regular viewers will remember that we heard Magda’s name in December 1968. The show had introduced two storylines, one about the malevolent ghost of Quentin Collins and the other about werewolf Chris Jennings, and the characters were starting to notice the strange goings-on that Quentin and Chris generated. The adults in the great house had no idea that Quentin was haunting them or that Chris was a werewolf, so they held a séance in #642. Speaking through heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, Magda mentioned “My curse!” and said that “He must not come back!” It was clear in the context of the episode that the “He” who “must not come back” was Quentin. Chris was a participant in the séance, and he broke the circle before Magda could explain what she meant by her “curse.” Séances held in #170 and #281 were cut short by the person whose secret the medium was about to expose; that it is Chris who interrupts this one would suggest to longtime viewers that Magda not only knew Quentin, but that the curse she is about to explain was the one that made Chris a werewolf. Carolyn and her uncle Roger Collins talked a little about Magda in #643, and psychic investigator Janet Findley sensed the ghostly presence of a woman whose name started with an “M” in #648. We haven’t heard about Magda since.

As the living Magda, Grayson Hall manages rather a more natural accent than Nancy Barrett had when channeling her concerns about “my currrrrssssse.” The exaggerated costumes Hall and Thayer David wear make sense when we hear them reminiscing about the old days, when they made their livings as stage Gypsies with a knife-throwing act, Tarot card readings, and a magic elixir. Even the fact that Magda is peering into a crystal ball during this scene is understandable when they make it clear that they are staying in the Old House as guests of the mistress of the great house, an old, dying lady who enjoys their broadly stereotypical antics. But there is no way to reconcile twenty-first century sensibilities to Hall and David’s brownface makeup. Some time later, Hall would claim that one of her grandmothers was Romani. If that was a lie, it is telling that only someone as phenomenally sophisticated as Hall could in the 1970s see that she would need to invent a story to excuse playing such a character.

Objectionable as Sandor and Magda are, their dialogue is so well-written and so well delivered that we want to like them. Moreover, the year 1897 points to another reason fans of Dark Shadows might be happy enough to see Romani or Sinti characters that they will overlook the racist aspects of their portrayal. It was in 1897 that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published, and it depicted the evil Count as surrounded by “Gypsy” thralls. The character who has brought us on this journey into the past is Barnabas Collins, and upon his arrival he found that he was once more a vampire.

In addition to the strengths of the dialogue, the acting, and the intertext, there is also a weakness in this episode that softens the blow of the brownface. Today the picture is so muddy that it is possible to overlook the makeup. That’s Kaplan’s fault. It would often be the case that one or the other of the cameras wasn’t up to standard, but when the director was a visual artist as capable as Lela Swift or John Sedwick, there would always be at least some shots in a scene using the good camera, and others where the lighting would alleviate some of the consequences of the technical difficulties. But Kaplan doesn’t seem to have cared at all. He had made up his mind to use a particular camera to shoot the Old House parlor with a subdued lighting scheme, and if that camera was not picking up the full range of color, too bad. He’d photograph a lot of sludge and call it a day.

Meanwhile, a man knocks on the door of the great house. He is Quentin, and the person who opens the door is Beth Chavez. We first saw these two as ghosts in #646. Beth spoke some lines during the “Haunting of Collinwood” story, but Quentin’s voice was heard only in his menacing laugh.

We already know Quentin as the evil spirit who drove everyone from the house and is killing strange and troubled boy David Collins in February of 1969. His behavior in this scene is no less abominable than we might there by have come to expect. He pushes past Beth to force his way into the foyer, does not bother to deny that he has come back to persuade his dying grandmother to leave him her money, pretends to have forgotten someone named “Jenny,” makes Beth feel uncomfortable by saying that her association with Jenny makes her position in the house precarious, orders Beth to carry his bags, twists her arm, and leeringly tells her that she would be much happier if she would just submit to his charms. David Selby sells the scene, and we believe that Quentin is a villain who must be stopped. But Mr Selby himself is so charming, and the dialogue in which he makes his unforgivable declarations is so witty, that we don’t want him to go away. He establishes himself at once as The Man You Love to Hate.

In an upstairs bedroom, the aged Edith Collins is looking at Tarot cards. Quentin makes his way to her; she expresses her vigorous disapproval of him. She says that “When Jamison brought me the letter, I said to myself ‘He is the same. Quentin is using the child to get back.'” Quentin replies “But you let me come back.” She says that she did, and admits that he makes her feel young. With that, Edith identifies herself with the audience’s point of view.

The reference to Jamison and a letter reminds regular viewers of #643, when Magda’s ghost caused a letter from Quentin to fall into Roger’s hands. It was addressed to Roger’s father, Jamison, and was written in 1887. It read “Dear Jamison, You must return to Collinwood. I need your help. You must intercede with Oscar. Only you can save me.” They’ve revised the flimsies quite a bit since then; now it is 1897, Jamison is 12, and we don’t hear about anyone named Oscar.

Not about any character named Oscar, anyway. Edith tells Quentin that “Men who live as you do will not age well.” Quentin tells Edith that she ought not to believe in the Tarot, because “This card always has the same picture and people change, even I.” On Dark Shadows, which from its beginning has taken place on sets dominated by portraits, these two lines might make us wonder what it would be like if it were portraits that changed while their subjects remained the same. Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray was published in serial form in 1890 and as a novel in 1891, and it was a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. The dialogue is so witty that the characters must be well-read, making it quite plausible that Quentin’s remark was meant to remind Edith of the book. Especially so, since Wilde was released from prison in 1897, bringing him back to public notice in that year.

Edith tells Quentin that old and sick as she may be, she can still out-think him. She declares that all of her grandchildren will get what they deserve. All, that is, except Edward. Roger mentioned Edward in #697, naming him as his grandfather and Jamison’s father. Edith says that Edward is the eldest, and therefore she must tell him “the secret.” There is a note of horror in her voice as she says this; Quentin misses that note, and reflexively urges her to tell him the secret. She only shakes her head- the secret isn’t a prize to contend for, it is a burden to lament.

Isabella Hoopes plays this scene lying on her side in bed, a challenging position for any performer. Her delivery is a bit stilted at the beginning, but after she makes eye contact with David Selby she warms up and becomes very natural. I wonder if the initial awkwardness had to do with Kaplan. He held a conductor’s baton while directing, and he used to poke actresses with it. I can’t imagine a person in bed wearing a nightgown would have an easy time relaxing if her attention was focused on him. Once she can connect with Mr Selby, though, you can see what an outstanding professional she was.

Quentin goes to the drawing room, and finds Sandor behind the curtains. He threatens to call the police, and Sandor slinks back to the Old House. Magda berates him for his failure to steal the jewels, and he insists there are no jewels in the great house.

Meanwhile, Barnabas is in his coffin, trying to will someone to come and release him. In #210, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis had become obsessed with Barnabas’ portrait in the foyer of the great house, so much so that he could hear Barnabas’ heart beating through it. Barnabas called Willie to come to the secret chamber in the old Collins family mausoleum where his coffin was hidden. In his conscious mind, Willie thought he was going to steal a fortune in jewels. His face distorted with the gleeful expectation of that bonanza, he broke the chains that bound the coffin shut, and Barnabas’ hand darted out, choking him and pulling him down.

In the Old House, an image suddenly appears in the crystal ball. We can see it, the first time they have actually projected an image in such a ball since the first one made its debut in #48.

Picture in picture. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Magda notices the image, and tells Sandor to look. He recognizes the old mausoleum. She says that the jewels must be in “the room,” implying that they already know about the hidden panel and the secret chamber behind it. Sandor says it is absurd to imagine Edith going to and from the mausoleum to retrieve pieces of her jewelry collection. Magda ignores this, and urges him to go there. He reluctantly agrees to go with her.

The two of them are heading for the door when they hear a knock. It is Beth, come to say that Edith wants to see Magda. Edith wants what she always wants- to be told that Edward will return before she dies. Sandor says Magda can’t go, but Beth says she will regret it for the rest of her life if she does not. Magda tells Sandor to go on his way without her, and says that she will bring Edith some ancient Gypsy cards, cards older than the Tarot. When she talks about Romani lore, Magda taunts Beth- “but you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” Her sarcastic tone implies that Beth has tried to conceal her own Romani heritage.

Sandor opens the secret panel and looks at the chained coffin. He tells himself the jewels can’t be hidden there, then decides he may as well open it anyway- if he doesn’t, Magda will just send him back. Longtime viewers remembering the frenzy in which Willie opened the coffin in #210 will be struck by the utterly lackadaisical attitude with which Sandor performs the same task. Men’s lust for riches may release the vampire, but so too may their annoyance with the wife when she won’t stop carping on the same old thing.

When Willie opened the coffin, it lay across the frame lengthwise and he was behind it. When he raised the lid it blocked our view of his middle. We could see only his face when he realized what he had done, and could see nothing of Barnabas but his hand. The result was an iconic image.

Farewell, dangerously unstable ruffian- hello, sorely bedraggled blood thrall. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Sandor opens the coffin, its end is toward us. We see Barnabas at the same time he does. Barnabas’ hand darts up, and also for some reason his foot. The camera zooms in as Barnabas clutches Sandor’s throat. Unfortunately, the shot is so dimly lit that not all viewers will see this. My wife, Mrs Acilius, has eyesight that is in some ways a bit below average, and she missed it completely, even on a modern big-screen television. It’s anyone’s guess how many viewers would have known what was going on when they were watching it on the little TV sets of March 1969, on an ABC affiliate which was more likely than not the station that came in with the poorest picture quality in the area. As a result, the image that marks the relaunch of Barnabas’ career as a vampire is nothing at all. There is so much good stuff in the episode that it easily earns the “Genuinely Good” tag, but Kaplan’s bungling of this final shot is a severe failure.

Grab and kick, and one and two! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 686: Curious so many hearts should stop in this house

When Dark Shadows began in June 1966, we were introduced to Roger Collins as a high-born ne’er-do-well with no sense of responsibility to anyone or anything. Roger had squandered his entire inheritance; his sister, reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, nearly bankrupted herself trying to buy up his half of the family business to keep it from falling into outside hands. Roger and his son, strange and troubled boy David, lived in Liz’ house as her guests. Roger drew a salary from the business, but barely pretended to do any work for it. He made absolutely no pretense of concern for David; on the contrary, he expressed his hatred for his son openly, tried to persuade Liz to send him to a boarding school or an institution or any other place that was far away, and speculated out loud that David might be the natural son of his sworn enemy, dashing action hero Burke Devlin.

David’s mother, Roger’s estranged wife Laura Murdoch Collins, was on the show from December 1966 to March 1967. Roger schemed to get her to leave and take David with her. When he discovered that Laura was an undead fire witch whose plan was to burn David alive in order to secure her own peculiar immortality, he was shocked into a display of fatherly tenderness. He’s never been quite himself since.

By April 1968, the show had long since erased all signs of the financial crisis Roger’s crapulent youth had brought upon the family. Further, Roger had by that time shown so many signs of mature responsibility in his attitudes both towards his son and towards his work that we might have wondered if they were going to retcon away all of his vices. It was a genuine surprise when, in #474, Liz told Roger’s new wife Cassandra that Roger lived in her house as her guest, worked in her business as her employee, and owned nothing himself. Roger’s spendthrift past seemed to have no place in the story by that point.

Today, Roger is at his most conventionally respectable. He comes home from a long business trip, indicating his sober devotion to the work of Collins Enterprises. He finds David in his room, struggling with distant cousin Barnabas Collins and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman. After a commercial break, Roger says that he has heard about the many complicated events that took place while he was away. Barnabas explains that David had told him that silversmith Ezra Braithwaite came to the house to see him, bearing a ledger with information he wanted. David found Mr Braithwaite in the drawing room, dead of a heart attack. The ledger was nowhere to be found. Barnabas and Julia have come to David to ask if he can shed any light on what may have happened to the ledger, and the boy became violently upset. Roger insists Julia and Barnabas leave the room. He talks soothingly to David and tells him he does not believe any accusations against him.

Later, Roger confronts Barnabas and Julia in the drawing room. He finds the ledger on the desk where Mr Braithwaite was sitting when he died; he does not accept Julia and Barnabas’ assurance that it was not there earlier. He dismissively asks if they are suggesting that “a ghost” put it there. He demands they apologize to David, making it a condition for their continued presence in the house that they do so.

Barnabas is shocked when Roger threatens to revoke his great house privileges. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

As it happens, Barnabas and Julia strongly suspect that a ghost did put the ledger back on the desk, and the audience knows they are right. Roger has seen quite a bit of evidence of supernatural forces at work in and around Collinwood, as has Liz. But both of them consistently refuse to acknowledge this evidence. Each of them has had moments when the wall of denial started to crumble; notably in #88, Roger said to Liz, “I’ve seen and felt things, things I couldn’t actually explain. You can’t tell me it hasn’t happened to you, because I know better.” But they always snap back to form sooner or later, no matter how obvious the truth is, and there would obviously be no point in laying the facts before Roger when he is in this mood.

Julia and Barnabas have asked Liz to show them the old family archives. It is the middle of the night, everyone is very tired as the result of the fuss and bother that occurs when a corpse has to be removed from the house by lawful means, they will not tell her what topic they are researching, and they insist on starting work immediately. She asks if they expect her to go along with them on this basis, prompting Barnabas to smile as genially as he can and say “Of course!” You can’t expect to persuade crazy people to behave reasonably, so she gives in.

The archives are a dusty room somewhere in the great house that Julia somehow failed to enter during the months when she was staying at the house under the pretense of being an historian looking into the early years of the Collins family. The first book Julia picks up is an old photo album, and one of the first pages she turns to is a photograph of a woman whose ghost she and Barnabas saw the other night. The photo is dated 1897. The woman looks just as she did in her ghostly form, suggesting that she died not much later than that. There is some business with doors slamming shut and windows blowing open to fill the last thirty seconds of the episode, and the closing credits roll.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that Roger’s defensiveness concerning David serves the same purpose in the plot as does Barnabas and Julia’s ludicrously cack-handed approach to questioning him. The evil ghost is still quite weak, the ghost of the woman opposes him, and David and his friend Amy Jennings are desperate to escape from his influence. If any of the adults caught on to what was happening at this point, they could cut the Haunting of Collinwood story short. But it is just getting interesting, and there is only one other plot ongoing now. So we don’t want that. Roger and Liz have to be in full denial mode, Julia and Barnabas have to be terrible at talking with kids, and governess Maggie Evans has to be a squish who doesn’t know the first thing about discipline for the plot to work.

Fortunately, we have ample foundation for each of these character developments. Roger’s origin as a shockingly indifferent father makes it understandable that he would swing to the opposite extreme and treat David with excessive indulgence. As a former vampire and a mad scientist, Barnabas and Julia are metaphors for extreme selfishness, and when they were called upon to act as parents to Frankenstein’s monster Adam in April 1968 they did the worst possible job. Maggie is brand new to governessing; she has been on the show since #1, so we know that she was good at running the coffee shop in the Collinsport Inn, at containing the damage her father did by his alcoholism, at escaping from vampires and mad scientists, and at miscellaneous other tasks involving other adults. But she has never been responsible for children or trained as a teacher, and so it neither surprises us nor alienates us from her that she is bad at the job.

Episode 675: The best alibi you can have in this town

In #128, wisecracking waitress Maggie Evans opened a conversation in the diner at the Collinsport Inn with that old familiar ice-breaker, “Whaddaya hear from the morgue?” The show took us all the way to Phoenix, Arizona for a trip to that city’s morgue in #174, but it is only today we see the inside of Collinsport’s own morgue for the first time. Sheriff George Patterson brings heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in to identify a body found on her property. Carolyn is shocked to find that it is her friend, Donna Friedlander.

Last night, Carolyn and Donna were in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood with permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman and old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, who lives in the Old House on the same estate. Also in the room was Chris Jennings, a mysterious drifter who caught Carolyn’s fancy and who now lives in the caretaker’s cottage on the estate as her guest. Barnabas invited everyone to dinner at his house. The ladies delightedly accepted, but Chris begged off, saying he would have to leave immediately to keep an important business engagement in Bangor, Maine. Donna said that she was going home to Bangor and that she was ready to leave, and asked Chris for a ride. When he tried to squirm his way out of taking her, Barnabas looked on with smug self-satisfaction.

This morning in the morgue, Carolyn tells Sheriff Patterson that the last time she saw Donna, she was leaving with Chris. But she recoils from the implication. She cannot believe that Chris had anything to do with Donna’s death.

Carolyn does not know what Barnabas has figured out. Chris is a werewolf. When Barnabas told Julia that he had come to that conclusion, she was unconvinced. Barnabas’ dinner invitation was a ploy intended to elicit just the panicked reaction Chris did have. Barnabas’ look of triumph at Chris’ frantic attempts to ensure that he is alone on this night of the full Moon reflects his belief that he has been proved right.

Barnabas went to the cottage some time after the Moon rose, intending to use his silver-headed cane to take control of Chris in his werewolf form. But he delayed too long, and by the time he got there the cottage was vacant and Donna’s mangled corpse lay in the woods nearby.

We cut to the cottage, where we see a disheveled and bloodstained Chris come home. He has just had time to change his shirt and set some furniture right side up when Carolyn drops in. She has come to warn Chris that Sheriff Patterson is coming. The sheriff is right behind her. Carolyn leaves the two of them alone. Chris refuses to allow a search of the premises; when he spots Donna’s purse on his table, he throws a newspaper over it. The sheriff somehow fails to notice this, but takes Chris to his office for questioning.

In the drawing room, Barnabas and Julia are fretting over Donna’s death. Barnabas asks “Could we have stopped it?” He decides that they could not have, and that whatever sequence of events led to the killing must have been “Donna’s fault.” It is always fun to watch the scenes where Barnabas faces the horrific results his actions have on other people, strikes a noble pose while briefly considering the possibility that he may be partially responsible for them, and then agrees with Julia that it is pointless for him to blame himself. Julia and Barnabas’ self-exculpatory attitudes are so transparently absurd that you have to admire Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid for keeping straight faces while delivering their dialogue.

Meanwhile, Carolyn has called the Collins family lawyer, Richard Garner. Garner agrees to help Chris. We saw Garner and his son Frank a number of times in the first months of 1967, but he hasn’t been on screen since #246. He has only been mentioned a handful of times since then, most recently in #577. This is the last time his name will come up.

Back in the drawing room, Barnabas tells Julia that he can see “So many possibilities” for dealing with Chris’ problem. Frid’s delivery of this line made my wife, Mrs Acilius, shudder. She could hear the evil in his voice as he shows us Barnabas playing God.

Chris is in an interrogation room, telling Sheriff Patterson a series of mutually contradictory lies about what he did last night. The sheriff says he’s going to leave him alone for a few minutes so that he can come up with a more plausible story. You might think this was a sarcastic remark, but in this context it seems it might actually be sincere. Sheriff Patterson’s failure to notice Donna’s purse on Chris’ table is of a piece with the complete nonfeasance he has shown all along, and Vince O’Brien delivers the line so warmly it doesn’t sound like a joke. Moreover, Sheriff Patterson’s predecessor as Collinsport’s chief representative of law enforcement, Constable/ Sheriff Jonas Carter, capitulated to the Collins family’s directions to cover up a crime in his final appearance on the show, back in #32. Longtime viewers may suspect that Sheriff Patterson is as averse to the tough parts of his job as was Constable/ Sheriff Carter.

While Chris is alone in the interrogation room, he decides to tell Sheriff Patterson the truth when he comes back. He does in fact open his mouth and get the first few words of a confession out when the sheriff cuts him short. He says that Barnabas Collins called the office to tell him Chris was with him last night, and that Barnabas is “about the best alibi you can have in this town.” He shakes Chris’ hand and sends him on his way. Law enforcement characters on Dark Shadows are symbols of helplessness, and after that moment Sheriff Patterson has reached the zenith of that quality, achieving a measure of futility that cannot be surpassed. We never see him again.

Sheriff Patterson completes his quest. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Chris goes home and finds Barnabas waiting for him. Chris expresses his gratitude for the alibi Barnabas gave him, but keeps trying to get him to leave before the Moon rises. Barnabas tells him that when he leaves, Chris will leave with him. Barnabas closes the episode by telling him that he knows that he is not only Chris Jennings, but that “You are also the werewolf.”

This episode marks the final appearance not only of Sheriff Patterson, but also of Vince O’Brien. O’Brien joined the show in #148 as the second actor to play Lieutenant Dan Riley of the Maine State Police. O’Brien’s stolid manner suited the role of that ineffective investigator, but he was much less fun to watch than was the man who originated the part, the charming John Connell.

O’Brien took over as the second Sheriff Patterson in #328. He was again a step down from his predecessor; the first Sheriff Patterson was Dana Elcar, an extraordinary performer who always found a way to give the audience hope that his character was only playing dumb. Other actors filled in for O’Brien a couple of times, Angus Cairns in #341 and #342 and Alfred Sandor in #615, leading some fans to refer to “the Patterson brothers” (whose parents named all of their sons George) and others to speculate that for a time Collinsport allowed any man to be sheriff who was willing to change his name to “George Patterson.” Like O’Brien, Cairns and Sandor were accomplished professionals, but none could match Elcar’s gift for overcoming bad writing and keeping our attention focused on the sheriff.

Episode 673: Urgent business

This episode rests squarely on the shoulders of eleven year old Denise Nickerson, playing the role of nine year old Amy Jennings. A performer of any age could take pride in the results.

We first see Amy in the predawn hours of a night when a werewolf is prowling the grounds of the great estate of Collinwood. The werewolf has attacked heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard; old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is out hunting him. In the opening sequence, Barnabas fired a shotgun at the werewolf without result, then hit him with his silver-headed cane and drove him off. Barnabas is still outside, still tracking the werewolf. Barnabas’ friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, is nervously pacing in the drawing room of the great house.

Amy comes downstairs. Julia sees her and demands to know why she is up and dressed at such an hour. Amy says she must go to the caretaker’s cottage on the estate, where her grownup brother Chris lives. Julia forbids her to go out. Julia saw the werewolf attack Carolyn, but says nothing about the incident. She tells Amy only that it is dangerous in the woods at night. Amy says that she had a dream from which she drew the conclusion that “Something is happening to [Chris,] and it’s happening now!” Neither Amy nor Julia knows that Chris is the werewolf, but they both know that Amy has a paranormal sensitivity to whatever is going on with Chris. Julia offers to go to the cottage if Amy will stay in the house. Amy gladly agrees, and Julia gets a gun and goes.

This quarrel could have been quite annoying. Julia is withholding vital information from Amy, who is in her turn insistent on doing something she could not possibly expect to be permitted. The actresses make it interesting. Amy stands very still, locks her eyes on Julia’s, and enunciates each word carefully, showing every sign of an earnest attempt to persuade her. When she cannot, she does not display anger or frustration or irritation. The only emotion she projects is a sense of urgency. Unlike children throwing tantrums, who make conflicting demands because they are in the grip of conflicting feelings, Nickerson leads us to believe that Amy is pursuing a single coherent objective. We expect her to be part of action that will advance the story.

Grayson Hall emphasizes Julia’s attentive response to Amy’s words and her reluctance to physically restrain her. It is still inexplicable that Julia fails to tell Amy about the attack on Carolyn and about the fact that Barnabas is walking around with a gun ready to shoot at figures moving in the darkness, but those failures don’t bother us as much as we might expect them to do. We see her taking seriously information which we know to be accurate, and this gives us grounds to hope that she will do something intelligent.

Julia gets to Chris’ cottage and back without being eaten by the werewolf or shot by Barnabas. At the cottage, she finds that the furniture has all been overturned and Chris is not in. Back home, she smiles and tells Amy that she saw Chris and he was fine. Julia’s lies convince Amy. She brightens immediately and happily goes back to bed. This really is an amazing moment of acting on Nickerson’s part; Amy’s mood switches in a second from dread and gloom to a big glowing smile. Executing that lift on command is the equivalent of faking a loud laugh and having the result sound natural.

The next morning, Amy mentions to Julia that she and Carolyn have plans to go into town. That leaves Julia no choice but to level with Amy about the werewolf attack. Amy is shocked that Carolyn was hurt, and even more shocked that she might have been killed. Julia assures her that the wounds Carolyn did suffer were minor and that she will be all right after some rest, but Amy is deeply affected. She looks directly into the camera and tells the audience that she did not want Carolyn to be harmed.

Amy tells us she is sorry that Carolyn was hurt. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the first months of Dark Shadows, strange and troubled boy David Collins was the only character who looked directly into the camera. He did it several times in those days, and actor David Henesy’s talent for the role of Creepy Little Kid always made it pay dividends. He stopped looking into the camera in the autumn of 1966 when David Collins stopped being a menace, and various other actors have been called on to break the fourth wall from time to time since. Since Amy joined the show, eye contact with the audience has become her province, and Nickerson manages to deliver a jolt every time they have her do it.

First-time viewers won’t know why Amy is so eager for us to know that she did not wish Carolyn ill, but the way she addresses herself to us leaves no doubt that Julia is missing the point when she makes conventional remarks about how no one wanted anything bad to happen to Carolyn, no one could have prevented it, etc etc. The camera stays on Amy as Julia burbles through these lines, and the particular sadness on her face confirms what she indicated by looking at us, that she knows more about the incident that Julia imagines.

Returning viewers know that Amy and David are falling under the power of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins, and that Quentin ordered them to send Carolyn out the night before so that she would no longer obstruct his plans. We also know that Quentin, who had for many weeks been confined to the little room in the long-deserted west wing of Collinwood where David and Amy first saw him several weeks ago, was the other day able to manifest himself in Chris’ cottage. He is gaining strength, and Amy and Chris’ presence on the estate is part of the reason.

Amy talks Julia into letting her go outside. Again, this could be an annoying scene. As Julia points out, the animal that attacked Carolyn has not been captured, and Barnabas has not returned. Further, regular viewers know that Amy’s promise to stay within sight of the front door is worthless, since she and David have often broken similar promises. But Julia knows that Amy has an extraordinary awareness of the situation, and she knows also that in #639 the werewolf ran away when he saw Amy. So all Grayson Hall has to do is look at Amy with a searching gaze and talk to her in a hushed voice, and we get the idea that she has come to the conclusion that the child will be able to take care of herself.

Amy wanders deep into the woods, and comes to a spot where we earlier saw the werewolf transform back into Chris. When that happened, the camera caught the hem of a white dress and panned up to show the face of the woman wearing it. At first it was a puzzle who that might be. Wicked witch Angelique often wore white dresses, but she is not connected to the ongoing stories, and the last time we saw her she was killed in a way that suggests she won’t come back to life at least until this thirteen week cycle is over. The ghost of the gracious Josette was known in the first year of the show as “the woman in white,” but we saw her quite recently, and she doesn’t have anything to do with Chris and Amy.

The figure turned out to be the ghost of someone named Beth. We have seen her only once before, in #646. She was with Quentin, and like him could exist only in a little room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house. But now she, too, is able to roam about the estate. When Amy comes to the spot where Chris transformed, Beth appears to her. She begins crying. Amy sounds like any other sweet little girl when she urges Beth not to cry, and then suddenly becomes quite a different person. Her face goes blank, and she declares in a flat voice that she knows what she must do. This isn’t such a tricky transition as the one Nickerson achieved when Amy cheered up in response to Julia’s lie, but it certainly is effective.

Amy goes to Chris’ cottage. He is out. She finds his bloodstained shirt, puts it in the fireplace, and sets it alight. Chris comes in and sees her. She embraces him, and tells him she must be going. He asks why, and she seems genuinely surprised by the question. “Can’t you hear her?” Chris says he can’t, Amy says she can, and she hurries away.

Chris looks at the fireplace. One sleeve of his shirt is hanging out, a fire hazard; he puts it into the center of the hearth. He examines it, and with dismay exclaims “My shirt!” Don Briscoe delivers that line with the timing and inflection of Jack Benny, and it is hilarious. Mrs Acilius and I laughed long and loud at it; we are convinced that the humor must have been intentional, at least on the part of actor Don Briscoe, probably on that of director Lela Swift, and possibly on that of writer Ron Sproat as well. The episode belongs to Nickerson, but that final line leaves us with a strong memory and a deep fondness for Briscoe as well.

Episode 670: A nice couple

The only story that reliably worked in the first 38 weeks of Dark Shadows was the attempt of well-meaning governess Vicki Winters to befriend her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. Its success was less to do with the writers than with the actors. When we saw Vicki in David’s room giving him his lessons, her dialogue was as bad as anything else the actors found in the scripts, including one moment when she had to read a description of the coastline of Maine to him from a geography textbook. But Alexandra Moltke Isles and David Henesy used everything other than the words to show us a young woman and a hurting boy learning to trust each other. Their use of space, of body language, of facial expressions, of tones of voice, all showed us that process step by step, and it was fascinating to watch.

Vicki and David’s story reached its conclusion in #191, when David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, tried to lure David to his demise in a burning shack while Vicki tried to rescue him. At the end, David ran from the shack into Vicki’s arms. When he chose Vicki and life over his mother and death, there was nowhere left for their relationship to go. We saw a few more tutoring scenes in the spring and summer of 1967, when vampire Barnabas Collins was first on the show, but have seen none since. Mrs Isles left Dark Shadows in November, and the recast Vicki made her final appearance a week ago, in #665.

The new governess in the great house of Collinwood is Maggie Evans, who was introduced in #1 as a wisecracking waitress and a hardboiled representative of the working class of the village of Collinsport, but whom actress Kathryn Leigh Scott shortly afterward reinvented as The Nicest Girl in Town. The town barely exists anymore, so when Vicki disappeared into a rift in the fabric of time and space it was almost a foregone conclusion Maggie would move into Vicki’s room upstairs in the great house. After all, the room was first occupied in the 1790s by the gracious Josette, whom Miss Scott played in the parts of the show set in that period.

Today, we see our first tutoring scene in over a year and a half. David isn’t Maggie’s only charge; he has been joined by permanent houseguest Amy Jennings. Yesterday and the day before, we saw evidence that Maggie is a poor disciplinarian. We see further such evidence at the beginning of the tutoring scene, when the children complain about their lessons and Maggie quickly starts to explain herself and bargain with them. Amy and David are coming under the influence of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins. If the adult who is employed full-time to supervise David and Amy were up to her job, they wouldn’t be much help to him. So it’s no wonder the show three days in a row tells us that Maggie is a squish.

To advance a plan of Quentin’s, Amy pretends to be ill and to faint during the lesson. David Collins is almost as subtle an actor as is David Henesy; when he is pretending to see signs of illness in Amy’s face, he looks at her with one eye and speaks with a most convincing note of concern. By contrast, Amy’s performance is exaggerated, showing none of the easy fluency Denise Nickerson brought to her roles. My wife, Mrs Acilius, chuckled at Amy’s fake faint and at some of the fussing she and David do when they are left alone together. She said it was refreshing to see that David and Amy are still kids. It certainly adds to the poignancy of what we are seeing Quentin do to them when we think of them as real children whose innocence he is exploiting for his evil project.

Amy’s fake faint convinces Maggie, and it leads to a lot of running around, ending with Maggie going to the cottage on the estate where Amy’s big brother Chris is staying as a guest of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Chris is a werewolf and is about to transform, and Quentin’s goal was to get Carolyn to go to the cottage. David has been making terrible pronouncements to Amy about how Carolyn will never bother them again, and the two of them are distressed to hear that Maggie rather than Carolyn is going to see Chris. So we are supposed to take it that Quentin knows about Chris’ situation and wants him to attack Carolyn.

Episode 655: The doctor’s office

Hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell has been through a lot lately, and it is taking its toll. He was bitten and enslaved by a female vampire, with the result that he lost his job and his fiancée. He was still under her power when he realized that his cousin and close friend, Tom Jennings, was also a vampire. Now he has been attacked by a werewolf and has discovered that that werewolf is, on the few nights of the month when the moon is not full, Tom’s brother Chris. Last night he saw Chris transform in his lupine shape. He took Chris’ revolver and emptied it into the werewolf’s furry chest, but that only slowed him down. Joe escaped from the werewolf’s wrath, but we see today that he is never going to be right again.

Chris’ nine year old sister Amy is staying at the great house of Collinwood as the guest of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. As we open, Liz’ daughter Carolyn is in the drawing room, recently returned from a trip. She is terribly distraught to hear a recap of the last couple of weeks from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. While they talk, Joe slips into the house, crazy-eyed and bent-backed.

Joe makes his way up to the bedroom where Amy is asleep. He dwells on what her brothers became, then approaches her bed with his hands in strangling position. After a commercial break, he says “Save her!,” then agrees with himself that he ought to save Amy.

Joe calls on Amy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Joe wakes Amy, urges her to be silent, and starts packing her clothes. She asks if they are going to join Chris, and Joe becomes violently agitated. Amy grows frightened. Joe grabs her, puts his hand over her mouth, and carries her out of the house, leaving her half-packed bag behind.

In the woods, Joe hears sounds which he believes to be the werewolf. He starts shouting that he won’t let it have Amy. He is so absorbed in this that Amy gets loose and runs from him.

Joe’s derangement is entirely explainable as a natural response to the horrible and incomprehensible traumas he has undergone. The same could be said of the other mentally ill character in today’s episode, Liz, and in Monday’s episode Julia very nearly said it. Today, however, the show raises the possibility that Liz’ trouble might be the result of ongoing persecution by the spiritual forces of darkness.

Months ago, Liz fell afoul of her brother Roger’s wife. She called herself Cassandra, but was really an evil sorceress named Angelique wearing a black wig. This wiggéd witch cast a spell that caused Liz to sink into a deep depression, obsessed with the idea she would be buried alive. Twice before, Liz has sunk into similar depressions. The first was the result of a spell cast by Roger’s previous wife, Laura Murdoch Collins, who like Angelique/ Cassandra was an undead blonde fire witch. (Roger has a type.) The second was a response to a long blackmail to which a seagoing con man named Jason McGuire subjected her. For the last several weeks it has seemed that this third bout might be lifting, but it came back with a vengeance last week when well-meaning governess Victoria Winters dematerialized before Liz’ eyes.Vicki’s departure was as much a shock to Liz, in its own way, as Chris’ transformation was to Joe. Even before any spells were cast on her, Liz had shut herself up in the house and refused to leave for eighteen years. So we know that Liz is given to depression.

Today Liz has a nightmare. The dream sequence begins with a melody that for all the world sounds like “Rock-a-bye Baby” played on a kazoo, but which turns out to be a distorted recording of Amy singing that lullaby. Liz sees Amy atop the cliff on Widows Hill, a place associated with death and peril. In the past, several women have fallen to their deaths from Widows’ Hill; we have seen Liz and Vicki attempt suicide there. Amy’s image is as distorted as is the sound of her voice. She is swaying from side to side, perhaps dancing the hula; the visual effects exaggerate this sway.

Liz is trying to get Amy away from the cliff when she sees Angelique/ Cassandra. The witch tells her that she will fulfill her curse and see that Liz is buried alive. Liz finds that she can no longer communicate with Amy, for which Angelique/ Cassandra taunts her.

Shortly after Liz wakes up from her dream, Carolyn and Julia come to her room. They hear her crying out that “she” is a danger to her, but a moment later Liz cannot remember who that was. Julia mentions to Carolyn today that multiple psychiatrists have reported that Liz cannot remember how her depression started; that she sees Angelique/ Cassandra in the nightmare but cannot remember who she was so shortly after suggests that the nightmare is part of the depression. If Angelique/ Cassandra’s continued activity is causing the one, it must therefore be causing the other.

Liz says that she is afraid for Amy and asks Carolyn to check on her. When she finds Amy missing, she asks Julia what to tell her mother. Without missing a beat, Julia says “Lie to her!” This is perfectly fitting- Julia is the show’s most fluent and most accomplished liar. Julia and Carolyn begin a search. Julia is on the phone asking for the sheriff when Amy comes in the front door, followed by Joe.

Julia is at first relieved to see Amy with good ol’ Joe. But Amy is terrified of Joe, and when she runs upstairs Julia blocks the staircase to keep him from following. Joe says that he must take Amy far away from Collinsport at once. Julia says that if he can explain why, she will let him. Nothing he can put into words makes much sense to her, and he is so obviously unhinged that there is no way anyone would think he was the right person to assume responsibility for a child. Julia tells Joe that whatever he may have encountered in the village poses no threat to Amy in the mansion. He laughs, shakes his head, and mutters “You don’t know… you don’t know…”

Julia’s attempt to reassure Joe is interrupted by a blood-curdling scream from upstairs. She hurries up to see what is happening. Joe goes on laughing and muttering, wandering out of the house. That the scream coming from upstairs, where Amy is, does not catch his attention when he is so determined to protect Amy from imminent danger shows that he is truly lost, never to recover.

Julia finds a distraught Carolyn standing over an immobile Liz. She gives Liz a quick look, and tells Carolyn that she is dead. You might think Julia would be more careful about this. She has several times made erroneous death pronouncements, most recently when she pronounced Liz herself dead in #604. That incident led Julia to conclude that Liz had an unusual disorder that could cause her to appear to be dead. Especially since Julia knows about Liz’ overwhelming fear that she will be mistakenly thought dead and be buried alive, this hasty diagnosis is bizarre. Of course we end with a shot of Liz on the floor and hear her voice on the soundtrack saying “I’m not dead! I’m not dead!”

Liz had collapsed after she had a vision of Angelique/ Cassandra appearing in her room and touching her. This would seem to be a strong suggestion that the show wants us to think that Liz is still actively hag-ridden, and that her depression is therefore among Dark Shadows‘ supernatural storylines. On the other hand, the vision might have been an hallucination on Liz’ part, and her apparent death might be the result of a psychological syndrome. There may not be any mental process in our world that can induce a seizure so complete that it would fool doctors into thinking that a patient was dead, but in the world of Dark Shadows Julia, whose abilities are all supposed to be strictly the result of her scientific training, can use hypnosis to erase and rewrite people’s memories at will. If the power of suggestion is that great in this fictional universe, it is easy to suppose that self-hypnosis could conceal anyone’s vital signs from the most sophisticated examination.

This was the first episode directed by Henry Kaplan. Lela Swift directed the first twenty episodes of the show, and half of the rest. From #21, she shared directing duties with John Sedwick, usually trading off from one week to the next. Sedwick left the show in June, and several other men have taken turns as Swift’s relief. Kaplan will occupy that spot until the end of the series.

Swift and Sedwick were both ambitious and accomplished visual artists, and the others have more or less lived up to the standard they set. Today’s episode doesn’t look particularly bad, but a great many of the hundreds of segments Kaplan would go on to direct would be made up of one closeup after another, most of them badly out of focus. Swift will continue to work at her usual high level, but the sludge Kaplan dumps on our screens day after day will go a long way towards breaking people of the habit of watching Dark Shadows and discrediting it in the eyes of critics and television professionals.

Moreover, Kaplan did not work well with actors. Many of the cast hated Kaplan for his habit of using a stick, not only to point to their marks, but often to prod them physically. Others hated him for the verbal abuse he casually heaped on them. In a recent panel discussion, Marie Wallace and Donna Wandrey share stories about the difficulties of working with this disagreeable hack. The performances in this one do not show Kaplan’s malign influence. Joel Crothers does a marvelous job as Joe. While the actresses step on each others’ lines so often that it is clear they are nervous, that is not so very unusual.

Episode 647: Her own sensitivities

This is first of three consecutive episodes featuring Cavada Humphrey as Madame Janet Findley, a medium recruited to investigate the strange goings-on at the great house of Collinwood. Humphrey’s performance dominates these segments completely. Her style is more akin to pantomime than to anything native to spoken drama; she uses every muscle of her body to strike a series of exaggerated poses. Since that includes the muscles of the vocal tract, words occasionally come out in the course of her performance. The result is as bizarre as it sounds like it would be, and on Dark Shadows it is magnificent.

Granted, it is a shock when Humphrey reads the opening voiceover. Without seeing her, it is difficult to know what to make of her speech. When we watched it this time, I tried to make Mrs Acilius laugh by mimicking the poses a person might strike while speaking that way. So far from making the monologue sound silly, that just made it clear to us what Humphrey was doing, and left us both taking her performance seriously.

I’ll make a couple of random remarks about the non-Cavada Humphrey parts of the episode. Under the influence of the ghost of Quentin Collins, children David Collins and Amy Jennings have tried to murder David’s father Roger. Yesterday David took the lead in setting the trap that caused Roger to fall down the stairs while Amy showed reluctance in helping him. Today, the children see that Roger is not seriously hurt. David is relieved and wants to stop doing Quentin’s bidding, while Amy insists that they continue. Denise Nickerson delivers one of Amy’s monologues with her eyes fixed on the camera; the effect is unsettling in the extreme, suggesting as it does that Amy and David have taken leave of the other characters and are now in a dramatic space of their own where they may as well communicate directly with the audience.

Amy tells David and us that Quentin must be obeyed.

On his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn derides David and Amy’s exchange of roles in their conspiracy. He says that the reason they take turns being “Executive Child” is merely sloppiness on the part of the writing staff:

You can handwave and say that seeing his injured father shocked young David out of his temporary hypno trance, but really the explanation is that Gordon Russell wrote yesterday’s episode and Sam Hall wrote today’s, and they didn’t really bother to synch up on David’s emotional throughline. It happens. This is the “good enough for rock ‘n roll” approach to soap opera dramaturgy.
Danny Horn, “Episode 647: The Wire,” posted 12 May 2015 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

I disagree. There’s nothing hand-wavey about an appeal to David’s motivation. However little attention Hall paid to yesterday’s episode, David’s visit to his father, during which he all but begs for a way to help him in his recovery, leaves no doubt that he meant for us to think that David was relieved that he failed to kill his father and that, having seen where Quentin’s spell would lead, he wanted to break free of it.

And the actual effect of seeing the children waver back and forth in the intensity of their subjection to Quentin, alternating between attempts to break free and turns as “Executive Child” enforcing Quentin’s will on the other, is to show us that we are early in the process of obsession and to create suspense as to whether it will progress all the way to possession. So far, Quentin can dominate only one of the children at a time, while he just tugs at the other. In Madame Findley’s intervention, and for that matter in David’s scene with Roger, we can see paths still open that would lead to breaking his power altogether before he grows strong enough to fully control Amy and David simultaneously.

There is a similarity between David and Amy’s relationship to Quentin at this point and Amy’s brother’s relationship to his curse. Chris has been a drifter for a few years, suggesting that he has been a werewolf for that long, but he is still looking for ways to keep himself from hurting anyone when the Moon is full. The supernatural menaces the show has presented up to this point were introduced as already fully committed to the destruction it was ordained they would cause. David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was an collection of several entities, some of them more purposeful than others, when she joined the show in December 1966, but it was always her fate to lure David to a fiery death. Vampire Barnabas Collins would eventually become a nuanced character and has now been freed of his curse and become human again, but when he first showed up in April 1967 he was all-in on being a creature of the night. Wicked witch Angelique started her murderous rampage shortly after her arrival in November 1967, and all of the various villains of the Monster Mash period that ran from mid-April to early December 1968 showed up loaded and ready to do their thing. But Chris’ curse has only drawn him halfway into monsterdom, as Quentin’s obsession has only drawn Amy and David halfway into his world of evil.

One inconsistency that may be most profitably explained by carelessness comes when Amy tells David that Quentin calls him by the name “Jamison.” Jamison was the name of David’s grandfather, who was Quentin’s nephew. Earlier, David had, under Quentin’s influence, told Amy to call him “Quentin.” It might have been better if they had decided in advance just who it was whose personality was supposed to overwrite David’s, though I don’t think it is a major flaw.

Episode 646: Morbid games children play

The ghost of Quentin Collins has lured children Amy Jennings and David Collins to the room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood where his skeleton is hidden. For the first time, Quentin appears. Later, a woman in a white dress will also materialize.

Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

An old gramophone starts playing a sickly waltz, and David snaps into an odd mental state. He is slow to respond when Amy calls him by name, and tells her she knows that the waltz is his favorite piece of music. She does not know this, and is puzzled to hear it, since he hadn’t heard the waltz until the night before. Soon it becomes apparent that David is coming to be possessed by Quentin. He tells Amy that they have things they must do, including a conversation with “Roger.” Roger is David’s father; this is the first time we have heard him refer to him by name, and it makes it clear to regular viewers that David is not himself. Later, they are wearing clothes of the same period as those Quentin and the woman in the white dress wore, and they decide to address each other as “Quentin” and “Beth.”

Longtime viewers will also recognize the motif of a piece of music as a device with the power to overwrite a character’s personality. In #155, David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura, gave him a music box, apparently as part of her plan to prepare him to follow her to a fiery doom.

Another music box became much more famous a little later. In the summer and fall of 1967, David’s distant cousin Barnabas was a vampire, and he was determined to re-create his lost love, the gracious Josette. His plan involved forcing a young woman to listen to Josette’s music box incessantly. Barnabas hoped that someone who spent enough time listening to the box would forget her old habits and memories and turn into Josette. The music box did seem to have some measure of the power Barnabas had in mind. First Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, then Vicki, David’s well-meaning governess, did spend substantial amounts of time listening to the music box with a vacant look on her face. Episode #303 ended with Vicki’s boyfriend Burke listening to the music box and staring off into space; Mrs Acilius wondered if that meant Burke was going to think he was Josette. Burke wouldn’t have looked so good in the dress that comes with the part, but who knows, maybe he and Barnabas would have been happy together.

David and Amy carry a chest out the front door of the great house. Roger and his sister, matriarch Liz, see them do this and ask what is in the chest. David says that it is full of his toys, and that he and Amy want to play with them outdoors. Roger points out that David has never taken a chest full of toys outdoors before, and asks what has led him to do so now. David tells him it is a military secret. Amy explains that one of David’s toy soldiers is broken and they are going to bury him with full military honors. Amused by this idea, Roger holds the front door open and salutes the children as they carry the chest past. In fact, the chest holds, not a toy soldier, but Quentin’s skeleton. It is that which Amy and David bury.

At night, Roger is about to go to sleep when a knock comes on his bedroom door. It is Amy, telling him she heard from sounds from the downstairs that made her suspect someone might be trying to break into the house. Roger takes this concern seriously enough that he retrieves a pistol from his nightstand and carries it as he goes to investigate.

David ties a wire across the second stair from the top of the case from the bedrooms to the foyer, opens the front door, then hides. Roger enters. He is alarmed to see that the front door is open. He stumbles on the trap David has set. He lies unconscious and bleeding at the foot of the stairs. Amy and David enter, see his condition, and nod at each other gravely.

This is the second time David has tried to kill Roger. The first time, in #15, he had sabotaged the brakes on Roger’s car. As he watched the car pull away, he called to his mother. Laura was not physically present, and would not be for another 22 weeks, but when those who watch the show from the beginning learn of her supernatural character they will ask if she influenced David to patricide. Today there is no doubt that David and Amy are doing the bidding of the ghosts, and so we wonder again if David was under Laura’s power when he took the bleeder valve from the wheel cylinder of Roger’s car.

I don’t know how much of a spoiler it is to tell someone reading a Dark Shadows blog that in the spring of 1969 Quentin would become a major breakout star, rivaling Barnabas’ popularity. Quentin would be such a big part of the show’s appeal that Dan Ross would give the last 16 of the 32 original Dark Shadows novels he wrote under his wife Marilyn’s name titles beginning with the words “Barnabas, Quentin, and the.” They were:

Barnabas, Quentin, and the Mummy’s Curse, April 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Avenging Ghost, May 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Nightmare Assassin, June 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Crystal Coffin, July 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Witch’s Curse, August 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Haunted Cave, September 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Frightened Bride, October 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Scorpio Curse, November 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Serpent, December 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Magic Potion, January 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Body Snatchers, February 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and Dr Jekyll’s Son, April 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Grave Robbers, June 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Sea Ghost, August 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Mad Magician, October 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Hidden Tomb, December 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Vampire Beauty, March 1972

My first choice is always to title these entries after lines of dialogue from the episodes, and “morbid games children play” was so perfect that I couldn’t pass it up. But Barnabas, Quentin, and the Bleeder Valve was also very tempting, and I do suspect I will use at least a few Barnabas, Quentin, and the titles in the next two and a half years.

Episode 641: Your time is now

In #2, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins saw governess Victoria Winters standing at the edge of a high cliff overlooking the ocean. She didn’t know he was there until he startled her by asking her if she was planning to jump. As the weeks go on, Vicki will learn of other women who have leapt to their deaths from that spot, including a story that over the years two governesses were among them and that legend says a third will someday follow suit. The cliff is the face of Widows’ Hill, named after women whose husbands never returned home from the sea; several times during storms an eerie note sounds in the wind, a note known as “The Widows’ Wail,” which the locals believe to be the ghosts of the Widows announcing that a tragic death will soon take place.

Vicki stands at the edge of the cliff again at the end of this installment while the Widows’ Wail sounds. She is distraught that she has herself become a widow and is dwelling on the idea that she can be reunited with her husband in death.

Though occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes told her earlier in the episode that “Your time is now!,” Vicki’s time as a lively part of the show in fact ran out in March 1967, with the resolution of the story about her effort to befriend her charge, Roger’s strange and troubled young son David. Actress Alexandra Moltke Isles finally gave up on the character and left Dark Shadows after #627. Her successor in the role, Betsy Durkin, has essentially nothing to work with. We do not share her grief for the husband she is mourning; he was one of Dark Shadows‘ most repellent characters, and it is such a relief that he is away that we sympathize only too much with everyone who tells her to stop bringing him up. Nor do we have any other reason to care about her, since she is relevant to no ongoing plotlines. Even longtime viewers who remember the foreshadowing of Vicki’s possible death by a jump off the cliff will not react strongly to the sight of her there, since Miss Durkin is not Mrs Isles and does not bring her screen iconography to the reprise of the theme.

This phase of the show actually belongs to a character introduced in #632, eleven year old Amy Jennings. When Amy meets Stokes today she announces that she likes him because he is funny; he replies that he is pleased to find that “My appeal extends to all ages now.” Indeed it does; in its first year, Dark Shadows was very much aimed at adults, some of whom remembered Joan Bennett as one of the great movie stars of the 1930s and 1940s and were impressed by her presence in the cast as matriarch Liz, some of whom appreciated it as a specimen of slow-paced, highly atmospheric Gothic romance, and some of whom were fascinated by the story of Vicki and David and its theme of a grownup trying to make a difference in the life of a troubled child. But by the time Stokes arrived in #464, Dark Shadows had become a kids’ show. As Thayer David plays him, Stokes is amusing enough that anyone can like him, but the absolute seriousness with which he regularly expounds the most preposterous mumbo-jumbo is designed to make him a favorite of the very young.

Amy likes Stokes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Amy’s friendship with David develops in scenes that kids will find engaging, as they go exploring the big haunted house of Collinwood and find their way into spooky adventures. She also takes the lead in her relationships with adults more consistently than David ever did. While in the first year and a half of the show David often knew things the adults didn’t know, that was usually because he accepted the facts they refused to see. No matter what he said or did, he couldn’t move them from their habits of denial and evasion. But Amy has sources of information that the grownups around her don’t have. So today she has a vision of her brother Chris in some kind of terrible trouble. When she tells Vicki and Liz about her vision, Liz tries to telephone Chris and is deeply disturbed when he doesn’t answer. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, it is after one o’clock in the morning, so you wouldn’t expect her to attach great importance to his failure to pick up the phone. That she does suggests that she is taking Amy seriously.

Returning viewers know that Amy’s vision is correct. Chris is a werewolf, and he just killed a barmaid. That Amy not only has a paranormal means of knowing how Chris is doing, but that she is also able to get through to the adults and influence their actions, suggests that she will have a major impact on the werewolf story as long as it continues. Indeed, she already has- the werewolf was about to eat Liz the other day, but backed off when he saw Amy nearby.

Amy is central to the other storyline that is beginning at this point. That is “The Haunting of Collinwood,” in which the ghost of Liz and Roger’s’ great-uncle Quentin Collins is going to be creating difficulties for everyone. Amy and David went into the long-deserted west wing of the house and retrieved an antique telephone from a room there. Though its cord is cut, Amy can sometimes hear Quentin’s voice through its receiver. When she is alone and worried about Chris, she picks the telephone up and asks for Quentin. She is disappointed he does not answer. None of the adults knows about Quentin’s ghost or the telephone. Not even David has heard more than Quentin’s breathing through the receiver. Again, Amy is uniquely positioned to understand and affect the action.

According to the closing credits, this week’s five episodes were directed by “Penberry Jones.” The name “Penberry Jones” is unknown to Google aside from these credits, and it sounds like a joke of some sort. Though the fansites all mention the improbability of Jones’ name and the likelihood that it is a pseudonym, none that I could find offers any clue as to who might have been behind that pseudonym. From the early 1970s until the quarantines of Covid-19 in 2020, Dark Shadows fans would organize festivals a couple of times every year at which panels of people who had been involved in making the show took questions from the audience. If any of those audiences asked who Penberry Jones was, either they did not get an answer or that answer was not recorded.

The name “Penberry” may remind longtime viewers of Dark Shadows of episode #83, which is about Roger burying a pen. Roger was a major villain then, and his part gave actor Louis Edmonds an opportunity to show what he could do. Roger has long since been demoted to occasional comic relief; one might imagine that Edmonds wanted to take a turn in the director’s chair, and that he chose his whimsical pseudonym as a nod to his character’s origins. Appealing as that idea may be, it does not seem at all likely. So many of the panel discussions among cast members abounded in fond stories about Edmonds that surely someone would have mentioned it if he had directed five episodes.

Indeed, most of the longer-lived members of the cast participated in so many of those panels that they all had moments when they had to grope more or less desperately for something fresh to say. If anyone whose name fans would recognize and who worked closely with the cast were “Penberry Jones,” it’s hard to imagine that one or another of them wouldn’t have brought it up in one of those moments.

Whoever it was must have been known to executive producer Dan Curtis and line producer Bob Costello, and probably quite well known to them. The Directors Guild of America does allow its members to change the names under which they are credited, as for example John Walter Sullivan was allowed to direct several episodes of Dark Shadows as “Jack Sullivan” and several more as “Sean Dhu Sullivan.” But it does not allow them simply to use pseudonyms at will. It wasn’t until 1969 that directors working in features could be billed as “Alan Smithee,” and then they had to prove that they did not really have control of the final product before they were allowed to substitute that name for their own. The first television production credited to “Alan Smithee” didn’t appear until 1970. So it is unlikely that “Penberry Jones” directed any screen productions under any other name. Curtis and Costello probably wouldn’t have chosen a first-time director with no imminent prospects of other screen work unless it were someone they already knew and trusted.

If “Penberry Jones” didn’t cover anyone the cast knew well or a director who worked under another name, but was someone who was close to Dan Curtis or Bob Costello, it should be possible to compile a short list of suspects. I’m not so deeply immersed in the behind-the-scenes lore that I can compile that list myself, but maybe you are. If so, I’d like to hear from you in the comments!

The director’s name isn’t the only puzzle in the closing credits. Every previous episode of Dark Shadows ended with the credits playing in front of a stationary shot of one or another set. It was always one shot per closing credits sequence. This time they start with a stationary shot of Vicki’s room, then cut to a stationary shot of the foyer. It’s hard to see what the point of that transition is. Perhaps we could ask “Penberry Jones,” if we had any idea who that was.

Episode 611: She must come willingly

Suave warlock Nicholas Blair proposes to Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie declines, citing her concern for her troubled ex-fiancé Joe Haskell. Nicholas has a man named Harry Johnson under his power, and a vial of poison he wants to give to Joe. After his disappointing date with Maggie, Nicholas goes home and takes a firm grip on his Harry Johnson. He orders Harry to slip the poison to Joe.

That was all I had to say about the episode, but my wife, Mrs Acilius, had a great deal more. She saw it as an essay about free will.

In the opening scenes, Nicholas talks with Frankenstein’s monsters named Adam and Eve. Adam was created in May, in a procedure that used parts salvaged from corpses and a “life force” extracted from recovering vampire Barnabas Collins. When Nicholas found out about Adam, he came up with the idea of a humanoid species bred from patchwork people and loyal to his master Satan. He schemed to have Eve created as Adam’s mate. Nicholas decided that the donor of Eve’s “life force” should be “the most evil woman who ever lived”; he therefore conjured up Danielle Roget, an eighteenth century homicidal maniac based on Madame DuFarge from A Tale of Two Cities, and assigned her the task. Now he finds that Eve has Danielle’s memories and personality, and that she hates Adam. She has found a man she recognized as the reincarnation of someone she was involved with when she was Danielle, and has made up her mind that they will love each other.

Nicholas is frustrated he cannot control Eve. He turns from her and looks into the camera, as if appealing to the audience for sympathy. Nicholas does not seem to understand what went wrong. He had the basic ingredients for his new species- a male and a female. He had not reckoned on one of them disregarding his plan and choosing a direction of her own.

Adam sees Eve storm out of the house as he is going to see Nicholas. He asks Nicholas where she is going, and is astonished when Nicholas tells him he doesn’t know. Adam is unhappy that Eve does not want him, and thinks that a change of scene would help. Still upset about his conversation with Eve, Nicholas is slow to focus his attention on Adam. When Adam complains Nicholas thinks that he and Eve belong to him, Nicholas turns to him and starts telling him what he wants to hear. Evidently it is dawning on Nicholas that Adam, too, might start to make his own decisions.

The man Eve has chosen is named Peter, but he prefers to be called Jeff. Eve shows up at his apartment, refuses to leave, and tells him that they are going to be together from now on. Roger Davis’ inadequacies as an actor leave this scene flat. Eve keeps talking about signs of doubts and irresolution she sees in Peter/ Jeff’s face, none of which Mr Davis is able to manifest. All he does is yell and pout. But as Eve, Marie Wallace manages to make the point that Eve is no more interested in anyone else’s free will than is Nicholas. She wants Peter/ Jeff to love her, and that is all there is to it so far as she is concerned.

For his part, Nicholas has learned nothing from the failure of his attempt to match Adam and Eve. He thinks all he has to do is get Joe out of the way and Maggie will come to him “willingly.” He even seems to underestimate Harry. He doesn’t bother lying to Harry about what he wants him to do to Joe, and Harry is horrified at the idea of complicity in murder. Harry is a career criminal, and several times we have seen him try to get money out of people by blackmail, extortion, or spying. Nicholas could easily have told him he is about to commit a crime he is used to committing and avoid all resistance. For example, he might have said that the potion was a truth serum and once Joe took it he would have to tell him some secret they could use against him. But it simply doesn’t occur to him to take Harry’s sensibilities into account, and he winds up having to threaten him to gain his compliance. A villain who is supposed to have subtle but irresistible powers loses a piece of his menace every time he resorts to an “or else!,” so this is a significant setback for the character of Nicholas.