nancy barrett – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 902: I heard breathing

Heiress Carolyn Stoddard is working for her friends, Megan and Philip Todd, in their antique shop. She goes upstairs to tell Megan that Philip has telephoned. Carolyn hears heavy breathing coming from the room where a baby the Todds are taking care of sleeps. Megan comes out of the room and in a most imperious tone demands to know what Carolyn is doing there. She tells her Philip called, and asks about the breathing sounds. Megan sweetens up and says “It’s the radiator!” She says she’ll have to call the plumber about it. Carolyn is unconvinced.

Downstairs in the shop, Carolyn and Megan notice someone looking in the window. The shop is open for business and there is merchandise displayed in the window, but for some reason it unnerves them that they have attracted the notice of a potential customer. All we can see of the man is his clean-shaven upper lip. When Carolyn approaches the window, he runs away. The only sneaky man we have met so far in the current phase of the show is Carolyn’s long-absent and recently returned father Paul. Since Paul wears a mustache, the upper lip is enough to show us that this is a new character, at least new to the ongoing stories.

No mustache. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn and her mother Liz live in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Also among the residents of the great house are Liz’ brother Roger Collins and Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David. We cut to David’s bedroom, where a book opens by itself. We have seen books do this before on Dark Shadows, but I believe this is the first time I couldn’t see a cord being pulled. They really have come a long way with practical effects.

David reads aloud from the book, something about a child being cloaked in radiant garments. He is interrupted by his Aunt Liz. She asks him to notice that she knocked on the door, and tells him that she is learning to respect his privacy. She says she heard him reading aloud, and asks what it was. He says it was a school book. She starts talking about how terribly cold it is in his room. He brings up her ex-husband, Paul. Liz hadn’t known David was aware of Paul’s return, and gets very uncomfortable. She says he needs friends his own age, and hurries out of the room. Once she is gone, he goes through the room and gathers a lot of cash. Evidently David raised the subject of Paul to get the room to himself.

David does have one friend his own age, Amy Jennings. Amy lives in the great house, down the hall. We just saw Amy in #893 and #896, but she tends to be unmentioned in between appearances. Amy is a favorite of mine, and when they don’t use her name for long stretches I worry they are about to drop her from the show. It would have reassured me if Liz had named Amy as someone David ought to spend more time with.

Joan Bennett tends to do a lot of acting with her eyes when she plays a two-scene with David Henesy, and this is a good example. When Liz is pointing out her own good manners in knocking, it is her eyes that convey her mild amusement at the situation; when she is offering to help David with his schoolwork, her eyes follow him so closely that we notice all of the little movements he makes as he tries to get out of a tutoring session; when she talks about the coldness in the room, she looks from side to side, searching for the open window with increasing consternation; when he asks about Paul, her eyes bulge in their sockets, showing deep alarm. When she tells him he needs friends his own age, she raises her eyebrows, making it sound like a threat. Bennett had been so famous for so long that many of her scene partners would not react to what she was actually doing, but to what they expected her to do, forcing her to add Joan Bennett-isms to her performances. With Mr Henesy, she was free to work simply, and the result was consistently very effective.

Downstairs, Liz answers the telephone. To her disgust, Paul is calling. He tells her that if she doesn’t meet with him for a talk, she is in danger of losing Carolyn. She agrees to go to his hotel. Carolyn enters in time to catch the end of the conversation. Liz doesn’t want to talk about Paul with her any more than she did with David, and she exits.

Carolyn and David have a scene in the drawing room. She tells him he should go to bed; he says he wants to read the newspaper. He asks her if she hasn’t noticed that he has grown. Since the thirteen year old David Henesy was about the same height as Nancy Barrett, this question is worth a chuckle. David gets excited when he sees that Brewster’s Department Store in the village of Collinsport is going to be open nights until Christmas. He tears the Brewster’s ad out of the paper while Carolyn reminds him he can’t leave the house tonight. He says that of course he can’t, it’s late.

In his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn asked if David’s reaction to the Brewster’s ad is the only reference to Christmas in the whole series. His commenters responded that Christmas is also mentioned in #92, #123, #257, #810 (twice,) #887, and #1050. It’s hilarious to read through the thread and see the citations mount up. I sympathize with Danny, though- I tagged my posts about the first couple of episodes on that list with “Christmas,” because I, too, was sure that the holiday was only named once or twice in Dark Shadows.

Carolyn exits, and David sneaks out the front door. As he does, a man in a belted overcoat walks into the house. We see him only from the midsection down. He straightens the portrait of the Collinses’ distant cousin Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house. This suggests that whoever he is, he has some connection with Barnabas. Carolyn comes back, and the man hides behind the curtains in the drawing room. This has been a favored hiding place for the last several months, suggesting that the man knows the house. Carolyn leaves, and the man goes out. If all he wanted to do was straighten that portrait, he could count his journey a success. Otherwise, it’s hard to see what the point of it was.

At the hotel, Paul struggles to explain his concerns to Liz. He is hampered by his own ignorance- he does not know exactly who is after him or what they want to do, but he knows they have some kind of sinister plan for Carolyn. Paul admits that Liz has no reason to believe anything he says, after his total failure as a husband, but he keeps urging her to take Carolyn and go far away, not telling anyone that they are going. She is exasperated with what she takes to be yet another of his scams, and tells him that “I’ll never figure out this latest plot of yours.” Indeed, the story is taking shape slowly enough that some viewers will have been saying the same thing.

Bennett and Dennis Patrick had many scenes together from March to July 1967, when he played seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Liz’ relationship with Jason was one-dimensional, consisting of nothing but a series of blackmail threats from him followed by capitulations from her. As her ex-husband, Paul offers far more for Liz to react against, and this scene is far richer and more satisfying than was anything we saw in the dreary Liz/ Jason story.

Liz goes out of the Collinsport Inn and sees David entering the antique shop across the street. The Inn has been part of the show from episode #1, but this is the first time we see a set representing its outside. Cutting between that set and the set representing the exterior of the antique shop, they make an attempt to create a sense of Collinsport as a place. When the show was in black and white, they would occasionally insert video they had taken at various locations in upstate New York and southern New England to achieve that effect, but they haven’t left 433 West 53rd Street since they went to color in August 1967. This quick cut between minimally decorated parts of the studio doesn’t work as well as that footage did, but it is a valiant effort in its own way.

Liz goes into the antique shop and insists Megan let her search the place for David. Since Liz essentially owns the town, Megan can’t say no. We conclude with Liz outside the door of the room upstairs from which Carolyn heard the breathing when we began. We hear the breathing again. David is inside the room, telling some unseen presence that it will like what he bought for it at Brewster’s. Perhaps he found it in the Unseen Presences section of the store. It’s in Collinsport, after all. David stops talking when he hears Liz’ voice; the breathing cuts out at the same time.

Episode 901: In Collinsport, where your only hope lies

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard thinks that her recently returned father, Paul Stoddard, is mentally ill. She knows that her mother Liz and Liz’ brother Roger are deeply hostile to Paul, and thinks that her distant cousin Barnabas is friendly to him.

We open in the Blue Whale tavern, where Carolyn has been pleased to discover Paul and Barnabas sitting together at a table. Barnabas says that Carolyn is her father’s most precious possession, and she happily agrees. Paul angrily denies that this is the case, and jumps up. He asks Carolyn to go away with him, and leaves the tavern.

Carolyn is bewildered by this reaction, and annoyed when Roger enters. She exits to follow Paul, and Roger goes to the table to warn Barnabas that friendship with Paul would mean trouble with Liz. Barnabas assures him they are not friends.

In Paul’s hotel room, Carolyn tells her father that his troubles are all in his head. She says that she will try to help him, and mentions Julia Hoffman, a psychiatrist who is permanently in residence at the great house of Collinwood. Paul insists that he really does have enemies, and pleads with Carolyn to join him in running far away. She refuses, and insists that he must solve his problems where he is.

Carolyn goes home to the great house. She and Roger have a confrontation. He gives her a check for $5000, payable to Paul. He tells her that the only reason Paul has come back is that he wants to get money out of the Collinses, and that if she gives him that check, he will leave again.

Carolyn goes to the antique shop where she has been working for her friends Megan and Philip Todd. Megan is holding a baby, whom she identified to Carolyn as her nephew Joseph, her sister’s son. Barnabas is with Megan and the baby. Carolyn apologizes to Megan for being late to work, and tells Barnabas she has been late many times. Megan says that it isn’t a problem, that she couldn’t have got away from the shop any earlier even if Carolyn had been there. Barnabas exits.

Carolyn tells Megan that is strange to be reunited with a father who left when she was a newborn. Megan says that she was close to her own father growing up, and that she was an only child. Carolyn furrows her brow, looks at the baby, and asks if he isn’t her sister’s son. Megan scrambles for a second, then claims that Joseph’s mother is her stepsister, one of two daughters of the widow her father married.

Megan takes the baby to his bedroom upstairs. Carolyn answers the telephone, and tells Philip that she will have Megan call him right back. She waits a moment, then goes upstairs. She hears a loud breathing sound coming from the baby’s room, as if a gigantic obscene telephone call were in progress.

Unknown to Carolyn, her father’s troubles are not imaginary, and Barnabas is not his friend. Between her two scenes in the antique shop, we saw Paul in his room. A true Collinsporter, he was in bed fully clothed, wearing even his tie and his shoes, but still he had difficulty sleeping. Barnabas entered the room and told him it was odd to sleep on such a sunny day. To demonstrate the day’s sunniness, he turns a light on. He also ruffles the window-shades, but does not open them. Evidently that would be a little too on-the-nose.

Paul aims a revolver at Barnabas and says that he will kill him if he doesn’t leave him alone. Barnabas says that if he kills him, someone else will be sent in his place. Paul says that he will also kill that person, and he squeezes the trigger several times. That only makes a clicking sound. Barnabas tells him that “we” knew about the gun, as “we” know about everything Paul might do before he does it, and that the ammunition was therefore removed. He also tells Paul that if he leaves Collinsport without permission from whomever it is Barnabas represents, Carolyn will suffer.

The telephone rings, and Barnabas orders Paul to answer it. It is Carolyn. He tells her that he is feeling better, and that he does not want to go away. Barnabas praises him for beginning to see things “our way.”

Paul telling Carolyn that everything is just great with him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Today’s closing credits are the first headed by “Starring Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins.” From now on, Frid will get the “Starring” designation unless Joan Bennett is in the day’s cast, in which case she gets “Starring” and he follows with “Also Starring.”

Episode 893: We serve him now

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is sitting at a table in the Blue Whale, a tavern. A man who refused to give his name when she caught him trespassing on her property invites himself to sit down with her. She objects to this. He identifies himself as her father, the long-missing Paul Stoddard. She objects far more strenuously to that. Not only did Paul leave the family when Carolyn was an infant, he and his friend Jason McGuire faked his death. Jason convinced Carolyn’s mother, Liz, that she had killed Paul and he had buried the corpse in the basement. In response, Liz immured herself in the house for nineteen years. Only after Jason came back and was blackmailing Liz into marrying him did the truth come out and Liz break free of her reclusive ways.

Paul tells Carolyn that he didn’t know Jason told Liz that she had killed him. Longtime viewers may suspect this is a lie, not least because Paul and Jason are both played by Dennis Patrick. Nonetheless, Carolyn falls for it. Soon she is agreeing to sound Liz out to see how she might react were she to hear that Paul had returned. He walks her home to the great house on the estate of Collinwood. He can’t go in, but gives her a goodnight kiss on the forehead.

Carolyn’s young cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, sees Paul kissing her. When she goes inside, he asks who her new boyfriend is. Carolyn is vexed. She refuses to tell David anything, and sends him to bed.

Carolyn’s friend Philip Todd comes to the door. He tells her that he and his wife Megan want Carolyn to work at their antique shop in the village. It may seem rather odd for the keeper of a little shop to go to a vast mansion and ask the daughter of its proprietor to take a job as his assistant, but Carolyn loves the shop and was volunteering there yesterday. She agrees happily, and mentions that a man might be leaving messages for her there.

In the shop the next morning, Carolyn sees that Megan has a baby. Megan says it is her sister’s son. Carolyn asks his name. Megan thinks for quite a while before coming up with “Joseph!”

Carolyn is alone in the shop when David comes in with his friend and fellow resident of Collinwood, Amy Jennings. We haven’t seen Amy since #835; that in turn was her first appearance since #700. For eight months, from #701 to #884, Dark Shadows was set in the year 1897, with only a few brief glimpses of the 1960s. In the 1897 segment, Denise Nickerson played Nora Collins, whose own final appearance was in #859. Both Nora and Amy had long absences from the cast, and were usually unmentioned while they were away. So we’ve been afraid that we wouldn’t see Amy or any other Nickerson character again. It’s good to have her back. She even pulls her signature move and gives a meaningful look directly into the camera at one point.

Amy and David see a doll that longtime viewers will recognize as Samantha, favorite plaything of the late Sarah Collins both when we saw her as a living being in the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968 and before that, when she was a ghost haunting Collinwood and its environs in 1967. There are also a couple of toy soldiers from “The Regiment,” which Sarah’s brother Barnabas played with when he was a young boy and which Sarah gave to people in 1967 as protection against Barnabas, who was at that time a vampire. Barnabas did sell a bunch of things to Megan and Philip the other day, but neither Samantha nor the members of The Regiment were in Barnabas’ possession when last we saw them. Presumably the camera lingers on the toys, not because we are supposed to know how Philip and Megan got them, but because we are supposed to be pleased with ourselves for recognizing them.

Paul comes into the shop. David recognizes him as the man he saw kissing Carolyn. Carolyn addresses Paul as “Mr Prescott,” sends him into a back room, and hustles the children out of the shop. She tells Paul who David is, and explains that he saw them together, complicating their plans.

When Carolyn was minding the shop yesterday, her friend Maggie noticed an old book on a table. Neither of them knew what it was, but viewers knew it was an object of great importance to a cult into which Philip and Megan have been inducted. It seemed inexplicable that they would leave it on a table in their shop, as if it were for sale. We get a hint today as to what they may have been thinking. In his room at Collinwood, David shows Amy that he has stolen the book. She asks why he would want it. He explains that Carolyn said that if they damaged anything in the shop, his father, Roger, would have to pay for it, and he creased a page in the book. David’s fear that his father would punish him drove several stories in the early months of the show. Roger has mellowed enormously since then, but evidently David is still so afraid of him that he will make a bad situation worse rather than face his wrath.

Indeed, many major storylines have begun with David. The 1897 flashback started because Barnabas was trying to keep a ghost from killing David, as the 1790s segment started when David’s governess Vicki participated in a séance meant to solve a mystery concerning him. For that matter, the whole show started when Vicki was summoned to Collinwood to take charge of David’s education. David doesn’t always have a lot to do in the stories, and when they are over it is often as not forgotten that he was in peril when they began. But he is so often the catalyst that we can suppose that David was supposed to find the book so that the current story could move into its major phase.

If that was the intention, Megan and Philip didn’t know about it. When they discover that the book is gone from the shop, they fly into a panic and declare that whoever took it must be killed. It may turn out that the mysterious forces behind the cult want David to become involved and that they created a situation in which he would find the book and take it with him, but if so, those forces are operating outside the cognizance of anyone in today’s episode.

Episode 892: The chosen room

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has given a present to antique shop owners Megan and Philip Todd. It is a wooden box. This box has a strange effect on the Todds, filling them with a mixture of irresistible fascination and nameless dread.

When the Todds go to open the box, it makes a whistling noise. They find a book inside it. The book is noticeably larger than the box. It is written in a script they do not recognize. There is also a scroll. That is in English, but may as well not be- neither Philip nor Megan can understand it, though Megan does say that she feels as if she almost can.

Later, Megan has a dream. It is the sort of dream people had in the first year of the show, before there were special effects. Like the dreams in ancient Greek literature, it takes the form of someone standing by the bed and making a speech. The speaker is Barnabas, and he tells Megan to empty the bedroom of furniture, board up its windows, and let no outsiders enter it. She calls him “master,” and he tells her she will not recognize him as such when she is awake. When she does wake up, she finds that Philip is already following the instructions, and realizes they had the same dream.

Downstairs, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is minding the antique shop. She receives a telephone call from someone wanting to buy a cradle that is on the shop floor. At the end of the call, we hear Carolyn’s thoughts as she congratulates herself on making a sale. She is shocked when Megan comes down and tells her the cradle is not for sale. Philip comes afterward, and with a blank expression on his face carries the cradle upstairs. Carolyn is left to call the buyer back and apologize.

The chosen room, ready for the cradle. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Philip and Megan set the cradle in the special room. They are apparently in awe. They look like any new parents stunned by the fact that they have brought a new life into the world, but the cradle is empty. After they leave the room, it starts rocking by itself.

The cradle is an interesting choice of prop. It was important early in 1969 in the “Haunting of Collinwood” story, when it was associated with the ghosts and rocked by itself. We then saw it a couple of months later in the 1897 flashback, when we learned why it was haunted. Those stories have been resolved in such a way that it won’t occur to us that the consequences of the same tragic events are animating it this time. The cradle seems to have become a generic symbol of spookiness. Considering that its back is coffin-shaped, that’s an understandable association.

Meanwhile, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has come into the shop. Maggie is the governess in Carolyn’s home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood, and they are friends. Maggie notices the sacred book on a table and asks Carolyn what it is. Carolyn doesn’t know anything about it. Why the Todds would leave such a thing on a table in their shop, a placement that implies it is for sale, is not explained.

Maggie tries on a feather boa. Like the cradle, this prop was significant in the 1897 segment. In that part of the show, Nancy Barrett, who plays Carolyn, was introduced as a woman named Charity Trask. Charity’s body was eventually taken over by late Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye. She wore the boa to indicate that she was Pansy. We last saw Charity/ Pansy, boa and all, in #883, and heard her voice in #887, so when we see it in the shop regular viewers will have fresh memories of her. We may well hope Carolyn will put it on and start singing Pansy’s song. But Maggie is the only one who is interested in the boa, and she doesn’t seem possessed at all. She wants to buy it, but Megan comes in and prevents her doing even that. She declares she is going to be closing the shop early.

Maggie leans very heavily on Carolyn to join her for a drink at the local tavern, The Blue Whale. Even after she drags Carolyn there, Maggie keeps pressuring her to stay for another drink. This is not at all typical of Maggie. When we find out her reason, it turns out to be even less characteristic. A mysterious gray-haired man who has been lurking around Collinwood lately wants to sit with Carolyn. When he comes to the table, Maggie gets up and leaves Carolyn alone with him. She has a self-satisfied smirk on her face as she does so, not a look we have ever seen her give before.

The man introduces himself to Carolyn as Paul Stoddard, her father. Paul abandoned the family when Carolyn was an infant, in the process faking his own death and prompting Carolyn’s mother Liz to believe that she had killed him. That belief led Liz to confine herself in her home for nineteen years, terrified that she would be caught. So it is simply inexplicable that Maggie would think Carolyn would be happy about having this bomb dropped on her.

Paul’s introduction of himself to Carolyn is the first time he is identified in a scene, but it is not the first time viewers have been told who he is. His name appeared in the closing credits for #887 and #891, ruining the surprise that is supposed to give a punch to the ending of today’s episode.

Episode 890: They will be strangers, but you will know them

Like many episodes of Dark Shadows, this one ran long and ended with credits only for the cast and for Dan Curtis Productions. The entry on the Dark Shadows wiki says that the director was Lela Swift. I am sure that it was in fact directed by Henry Kaplan. This shot of Nancy Barrett as heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is proof positive:

There is another flagrant Kaplanism in today’s first scene between antique shop owners Philip and Megan Todd (Christopher Bernau and Marie Wallace.) Philip enters from upstairs. He stops with his waist at the top of the frame. That’s where he stays for the first part of the scene, ending with Megan raising a paper that covers part of her face. Evidently what’s happening between the characters is none of the audience’s business.

Swift was a talented and ambitious visual artist, Kaplan a sloppy and unimaginative one. He relied heavily on closeups. When it dawned on him that it was dull to hold the frame just beyond the edges of an actor’s face, his response was to zoom in and give us an extreme closeup of some part of the actor’s face. It’s above average for him that the first shot above includes Miss Barrett’s eyes- he specialized in shots displaying the face from the nostrils down, and often held them even after the actors had to move, leaving us with the sight of an ear drifting out of our view.

Even when Kaplan’s tight little frames do not keep us from figuring out what is happening in a scene, they deprive us of the energy that comes from seeing the players interact with each other. We don’t get statements and reactions simultaneously, and we don’t see the actors using the space between them to tell us how the characters feel about each other. Kaplan was also a pretty bad director of actors, regularly poking them with a stick as his way of telling them he wanted them to play a scene differently and on one occasion fastening a handle to a child actor so that he could physically place him on his mark during rehearsal. So perhaps his mania for closeups reflected a lack of awareness of what actors do and how the choices they make contribute to the audience’s experience. As a result of his insensitivity to these and other visual aspects of the medium, Kaplan’s episodes would often be better suited to radio than to television.

Fortunately, the dialogue today is peppered with snappy lines. So Danny Horn devotes his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day to a selection of memorable pieces of dialogue. That also makes me suspect the wiki is not entirely correct. It attributes the script to Gordon Russell, an able writer overall but one who is not at all given to bons mots. I use bits of dialogue whenever possible as the titles of these posts, and I often have to search very hard through Russell’s to find suitable ones. It was Violet Welles who excelled at producing those. Russell and Welles often collaborated, so it could be that he wrote a draft to which she added the quotable quotes.

The current story centers on a mysterious cult that has sent time traveler Barnabas Collins back to 1969 from a long sojourn in 1897, by way of a couple of days in 1796. Under the influence of the cult, Barnabas is being a real jerk to his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Barnabas was a vampire for a long time, and even when he is free of the effects of that curse he habitually resorts to murder to solve his problems. But the victims of those murders are imaginary, played by actors who will go on to find other work, so we don’t usually stay mad at him for any length of time when he commits them. His friendship with Julia, on the other hand, is the emotional core of the show. Barnabas’ coldness to her in yesterday’s episode and today’s leads us to see what the cult is doing to him as the greatest crime anyone has ever committed on Dark Shadows.

Barnabas was a pop culture phenomenon familiar to many millions of people who never saw a single minute of Dark Shadows. The show’s fanbase largely consisted of his devoted followers. So a story about a cult which co-opts him as its leader and changes his personality so that he is impossible to get along with directly addresses a fear that must have blacked out the mind of Dan Curtis every time the postal service truck loaded with Jonathan Frid’s fan mail backed up at ABC Studio 16.

Barnabas brought a box with him from his visit to the eighteenth century, and it is of the utmost importance to the vast eternal plan the cult is working on that the box not be opened until the right time. So Barnabas put it on the mantel in his living room, and when Julia was standing a few inches from him he lifted it from the mantel and placed it on a table in the middle of the room. When she asked what it was, he became flustered and refused to answer any questions about it.

When Julia left the house, Barnabas left the room, with the front door unlocked and the box still on the table. Today, we open with Julia coming back in, hearing the sound of breathing coming from the box, finding its key on the table next to it, and placing the key in its lock. Barnabas comes in just in time to stop her opening it, but we can see that the cult probably could have chosen an agent with a better sense of operational security. Barnabas’ function in the story is to make messes that other people will have to clean up, so as soon as we heard that the box must not under any circumstances be opened we expected him to leave it where it would inevitably fall into the hands of someone bent on opening it, though it is a bit disappointing he has done so this quickly.

After he has taken the box from her, Barnabas berates Julia, orders her from his house, and tells her he owes her nothing. He abruptly sweetens up and tells her that he is only carrying on that way because of some kind of temporal jet lag. He reminds her that when she traveled back in time in September, she was very ill for a while; he suggests that his surly mood might be the result of the same shock that caused that reaction. About a minute after he starts on this new tack, just as Julia has started smiling again, a knock comes at the door. It is Carolyn.

We don’t know what effect the cult’s co-optation of him has had on Barnabas, but regular viewers know that characters on Dark Shadows are always acquiring one magical power and losing another. For the last few months of the 1897 segment, the show’s main villain was sorcerer Count Petofi. One of Petofi’s signature moves was to become aware of visitors shortly before they arrived. It could be that the writers have decided to give the cultified Barnabas that power, and that it was because Carolyn was on her way that he wanted to put Julia in a good mood.

That interpretation is supported by what follows. Carolyn is delighted to see Barnabas; she hadn’t known he was back from his trip to 1897. She hugs him and he smiles, a stark contrast to his icy reaction when Julia hugged him yesterday. She wants to talk about Chris Jennings, a young man she dated a few times and whom she has been told is dangerous. Julia and Barnabas have befriended Chris and know that he is a werewolf. Julia thinks she can somehow control Chris’ transformations, and she urges Carolyn to think well of him. Barnabas tells her to trust her instincts and to avoid Chris. He keeps telling her that she is too important to be allowed to come to harm. Later, he visits Carolyn in her home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood, and he keeps going on and on about how important she is and how confident he is about her future. He also gives her a silver pentagram, an amulet to ward off werewolves, and urges her to wear it at all times. He subsequently has another scene with Julia in his own house, and he is just as cold and dismissive as he was in the first scene, exploding at her for being “irrational.” Evidently the cult has plans for Carolyn, but not for Julia.

Julia bought a painting from the Todds the other day, and now they have received a telegram offering to buy it regardless of price. Julia goes to their shop and discusses the telegram with them. She believes that the telegram, which is signed “Corey,” may actually be from Quentin Collins, a distant cousin of Barnabas’ whom he befriended during his time in 1897 and who may have been immortalized by a magical portrait painted by the same artist responsible for the picture Julia bought. She tells the Todds that she is not certain she wants to part with the painting, but that she would very much like to meet “Mr Corey,” and that she believes others in town would also like to do so. She urges them to reply to the telegram with an invitation.

Barnabas stands over the box. We hear his thoughts as he mulls over his questions about it. He suddenly declares “It is time!” Then he goes to his chair and sits down. Evidently, it is time to take a load off.

Barnabas has a vision of one of the hooded figures who inducted him into the cult. The figure, a man named Oberon, addresses him as “Master” and tells him that he is to give the box to people who wake him by knocking at his door. There is a knocking, he does awaken, and he goes to the door.

Episode 887: The man in the medium-sized black hat

One evening in 1796, time traveler Barnabas Collins has stumbled into a clearing in the woods where he finds a cairn and two hooded figures. He finds himself unable to resist the figures while they put him on the cairn. He loses consciousness. When he comes to, he suddenly knows everything about them and the religion they represent, and they hail him as their leader. He says that he will be leaving soon, and that they will accompany him only in spirit. The only thing he will take with him is “the Leviathan box.” This is the first time we have heard the word “Leviathan” on Dark Shadows. Barnabas also talks about a book that will be important, though apparently it will get to wherever he is going on its own.

The show is starting a new storyline this week; for the last few days, the episodes have ended with an announcement alternately promising that today would mark the beginning of “one of the most terrifying tales ever told” or at least “one of the most unusual tales ever told.” Dark Shadows often marks the beginning of a new story with the opening of a box. Barnabas was a vampire when he first joined the show; his story began in #210, when a would-be grave robber opened his coffin and got a nasty surprise. The story we just concluded kicked into high gear in #778, when broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi brought a box containing the severed hand of sorcerer Count Petofi to the estate of Collinwood. Books have also been important. The show’s first costume drama segment, when from November 1967 to March 1968 it was set in the 1790s, involved well-meaning governess Vicki Winters toting around a copy of the Collins family history. That volume was crucial to many subsequent plot developments. Apparently this time there will be both a box and a book.

We cut to 1969. Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman is moping around his house, the Old House at Collinwood. She does not know that he is in 1796, but does know that he has been traveling through time. He has spent the last eight months in the year 1897. Julia visited him there for a couple of weeks, but snapped back to 1969 over a month ago and has been waiting for him to come back. She has heard voices from the past occasionally, but not for the last couple of nights, and she is afraid she is losing touch with the rupture in space-time that stands between her and Barnabas. To take her mind off things, she goes to the great house on the estate and hangs out with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard.

We keep getting glimpses of a man strolling around the estate. We see him only from the back. He has silver-gray hair and is wearing a hat and coat we haven’t seen before. He peeks at Julia through the window of Barnabas’ house, then wanders off to the woods. The cairn materializes in a clearing while he watches. He looks at it calmly, then walks away. He must have expected to see it take shape before him. Presumably he has some connection with the cult represented by the hooded figures and now to be led by Barnabas.

The mystery man is unexcited by the cairn. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the great house, Julia hears the voices of two characters from the 1897 segment. They are Magda and Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye. Julia did not meet Magda during her trip to 1897; it would have required special effects for her to do so, since they are both played by Grayson Hall. Julia was once in the same room as Pansy, but would not remember her- she was unconscious at the time. So it is odd that she recognizes their voices.

Julia hears Pansy telling Magda that Barnabas and Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, went into the Old House the night before and haven’t been seen since. She goes on to say that stuffy but lovable Edward Collins searched the house, and could find no trace of either Barnabas or Kitty. They seem to have vanished.

Returning viewers know that they did indeed vanish. Kitty was assumed bodily into the portrait of the late Josette Collins that hangs in the Old House, and when Barnabas saw that this was happening he and she both disappeared completely. They were both transferred to 1796, Barnabas as he was when he was around in those days, Kitty in the form of a distant memory in Josette’s mind.

Knowing that, we will not be confused by Pansy and Magda’s conversation. Other knowledge of ours will have the opposite effect. When Magda says that the story of Barnabas and Kitty’s disappearance from the Old House has nothing to do with her, Pansy challenges her with “You live in the Old House, don’t you?” Magda admits she does. While Magda did live there when Barnabas first arrived in 1897 in #701, she wasn’t on the show much in the last couple of months of the 1897 segment, and in the last weeks of it characters were saying that no one lived in the Old House. She must have gone away. Moreover, she would have been most unlikely to return. Several mortal enemies of hers were already in the area, and she knew that kinsmen of late Rroma chieftain/ organized crime boss King Johnny Romana were on their way to Collinwood, seeking, among other things, to kill her. Clearly the makers of the show just wanted to use the voices of Grayson Hall and Nancy Barrett because Julia and Carolyn were already in the episode, but the result really is pretty sloppy.

Julia decides that the conversation between Pansy and Magda means that Barnabas is on his way back to the 1960s, and she hastens to the Old House to meet him. As she arrives there, she meets the gray-haired man in the hat and coat. She looks him in the face and asks who he is.

Julia knows virtually everything the audience knows about the parts of the show set in the late 1960s, so when she does not recognize him we wonder who he could be. Perhaps he is someone we met when the show was set in the 1790s or in the parts of the 1897 segment before or after Julia’s time in that year, or he could be someone who was on the show before she joined the cast in the summer of 1967. The only gray-haired men we saw in any of those periods were some doctors, lawyers, judges, and clergymen who appeared in one or two episodes, and we aren’t expecting to see any of them again. So either this man is a new character, or he is a character who has aged considerably since we last saw him. The trouble they took to hide his face suggests that they expect us to react when it is revealed to us. So even if he is a new character, he is probably going to be played by an actor we have seen before.

Episode 882: The show must go on. That’s the one and only rule there is.

Many fantastic tales dwell on a sense that dreams have a great power in the world, and so their characters are often afraid of falling asleep. Dark Shadows has several times referenced Edgar Allan Poe, who explored that fear in stories like “The Premature Burial,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Man of the Crowd.” The show brought up another writer of fantastic tales preoccupied with the fear of sleep in #808. Aristide, henchman of sorcerer Count Petofi, threatened an enemy of Petofi’s with “the mysterious shadow he can cast, the shadow that isn’t your own that follows you.” That was a reference to George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes, in which a man named Anodos is plagued by a shadow that moves about on its own, following him and blighting his existence. Not only does Anodos fear sleep from time to time in Phantastes, but the main theme of MacDonald’s other very popular novel, 1895’s Lilith, is Mr Vane’s long refusal to sleep and the great battle he must wage in the dream-world when he finally does allow himself to nod off.

Aristide’s threat suggested that the show was about to give us a story based on Anodos and the autonomous shadow. Aristide is dead now, and Petofi is running out of story, so that isn’t going to happen, at least not in the segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897. But today we do get a little bit of George MacDonald in the form of a battle against sleep. Petofi is casting a spell over himself and handsome young rake Quentin Collins. If Quentin loses conscious control of his mind for even a moment, he and Petofi will evacuate their respective bodies and be re-embodied as each other. Petofi will then transport himself, in Quentin’s body, to the year 1969. Quentin will be left behind in 1897, occupying Petofi’s aging form and waiting helplessly for Petofi’s mortal enemies to come and kill him, thinking they are taking their long-delayed revenge.

By the time Quentin finds out what’s going on, it is the wee hours of the morning, after he hasn’t slept for a couple of nights. His friends, Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye and time-traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, keep marching him around the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in an effort to keep him awake. They don’t brew up any coffee, strangely enough. But Barnabas does call on wicked witch Angelique and appeals to her to use her powers to put some kind of barrier between Quentin and Petofi.

Angelique tells Barnabas that she is reluctant to help Quentin because she is upset that he wants to go to New York and look for a woman named Amanda Harris. She had wanted Quentin to fall in love with her, and is jealous that he chose Amanda instead. Barnabas points out that if she doesn’t help Quentin, he won’t exist in the form that either she or Amanda knew. Angelique explains that she has a reason for her attitude:

Before I came here this time, I was in the everlasting pits of Hell, where other creatures of my kind live. Only, my stay here on Earth made me dissatisfied with my life there. I longed to come back here… To Earth, to become a human being. I begged my master for the chance.

Finally, he gave it to me on one condition and one condition only… That I make one man fall in love with me, without any use of supernatural spells or powers. One man, one chance. That’s what I was granted.

Since Quentin is the one man who represented Angelique’s one chance, letting him go to Amanda might mean that Angelique has to go back down. My favorite part of her speech is “Only, my stay here on Earth made me dissatisfied with my life there.” Sure, she could have been happy in the everlasting pits of Hell, as one is, but how ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Pa-ree. Or, since Angelique’s sojourns in the upper world have all brought her to Collinsport, after they’ve had the lobster roll at the Blue Whale.

While Barnabas is talking with Angelique, Pansy is on Quentin duty. She decides to keep him awake by compelling him to join in a performance of her song. A record of this song, performed by Nancy Barrett and David Selby, hit the stores the very day this episode was first broadcast, so this is product placement. But Pansy is doing exactly what she would do in this situation, Quentin is reacting just as he would react, and it is a charming moment.

The musical number is preceded by Pansy making what literary critics call a programmatic statement. “Feel like it or not, you gotta do it, the show must go on. That’s the one and only rule there is, love. So let’s have a bright chorus from that new team, Pansy Faye and Quentin Collins.” Pansy is not only a good pal and a gifted psychic, she is an accomplished scientist. She has indeed stated the complete physics, metaphysics, and every other operating principle of the universe of Dark Shadows when she says that “The show must go on.”

Angelique and Barnabas enter. Angelique insists on some time alone with Quentin. He says that once he gets to New York he most definitely will be looking for Amanda and that he has no interest in a relationship with Angelique. She looks away from him and talks herself into believing it will be OK if he falls in love with her after Amanda “has ceased to exist.” Longtime viewers can be fairly sure this means that Angelique is planning to murder Amanda, but at the moment the important thing is to get Angelique involved in helping Quentin against Petofi.

Angelique opens the door to the foyer, where we catch a glimpse of Nancy Barrett and Jonathan Frid doing a really marvelous mime depicting “intense conversation.” It’s one of those deliberately stagey bits of business that these twentieth century New York actors do so well.

Angelique opens the door on a silent “conversation.”

Angelique stares into the fire and tries to project psychic power Petofi-ward. We get a process shot simultaneously depicting Angelique in the drawing room and Petofi in his lair. The shot is not very successful, and Angelique explains that her efforts aren’t working either. She says that Petofi is in so deep a trance that she cannot reach him as she has done before.

Petofi’s surroundings are so heavily decorated that this shot just looks cluttered to me. I suppose having Petofi low in the shot and behind the flames is meant to remind us of Angelique’s old neighborhood, but the visual metaphor is spoiled by the cruddy 1960s TV color palette.

In black and white, as most viewers would have seen it in 1969, the shot has different problems- while the more abstract visual style does make the Petofi-as-Satan metaphor legible, it is less clear which shapes are in Angelique’s space and which are in Petofi’s.

Pansy, eavesdropping from the foyer, hears Angelique say that she will need to have something Petofi is wearing right now, something still warm from contact with him, in order to reach him with her powers. Pansy resolves to provide this, and she sneaks out. She makes her way to his lair, and is about to undo Petofi’s necktie when he comes out of his trance and tells Pansy she has interfered with his plans once too often. We have flashed to the motionless Petofi several times today, leading us to think that Thayer David was going to collect his fee without having to deliver a line. So it is quite effective when he springs into action.

Episode 873: Charming and exquisitely dangerous

In October 1897, sorcerer Count Petofi has used his magical powers to swap bodies with Quentin Collins. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

We open with Q-Petofi meditating on a lineup of I Ching wands. He goes into a trance which unlocks a cosmic force that transports him to the great house of Collinwood in 1969. He wanders into the drawing room, finds a newspaper dated 28 October of that year, and starts exulting. Maggie Evans, governess in the great house in the late 60s, hears him and comes downstairs.

As the segment of Dark Shadows set in 1897 winds down, we’ve been thinking of ways they might have moved forward. Some of the possibilities involve splitting the week between episodes set in 1897 and others set in 1969. Maggie has been on the show from episode #1, and has been central to several of the storylines that take place in contemporary dress. The last of these stories before the move to 1897 centered on Quentin’s malevolent ghost haunting Collinwood and making it impossible for anyone to live there. In the course of that, he appeared to Maggie several times. In #682, Maggie had a dream in which Quentin’s ghost strangled her to death. Though the events we have seen in 1897 have changed the future, we saw in #839 that the 1960s characters remember Quentin’s haunting. So when Maggie is on her way to meet someone who is to all outward appearances Quentin, we have a hint that a story might be brewing in which Q-Petofi finds himself carrying the can for all of the horrors Quentin’s ghost wrought between December 1968 and September 1969.

Alas, it is not to be. By the time Maggie reaches the drawing room, Q-Petofi has vanished. A few moments after he left 1897, maidservant Beth scattered the wands and brought him back. He is furious when he comes to, and she explains that she had to do it. The magical portrait that keeps Quentin, and presumably also Q-Petofi, from becoming a werewolf is not in the suitcase Q-Petofi gave her earlier in the evening to bury. Q-Petofi has been in possession of Quentin’s body and of his portrait for weeks, and he has vast powers of sorcery, so you’d think he would have hidden the portrait long before. His magic powers would seem to give him the ability to do anything at all to hide it. My favorite idea is that he would impose onto Quentin’s portrait an exact copy of the portrait that hangs above the mantel in the drawing room of the great house and hang it in its place, so that it would be hidden in plain sight for years to come.

Besides, if Q-Petofi was going to bury the portrait surely he would at least have put it in something airtight and made of metal, not a wooden suitcase that doesn’t close all the way and that will likely rot to dust in a year or two. Apparently he isn’t as big on long-term plans as he led us to believe when he claimed he was working on a design to become the ruler of the cosmos.

Q-Petofi orders Beth to bring Pansy Faye, a deceased Cockney showgirl/ mentalist who has for some time been inhabiting the body once occupied by the stunningly dreary Charity Trask, to Quentin’s room at Collinwood. He demands information which she refuses to give. She storms out.

Pansy has a dream in which she and Quentin dance in the drawing room of Collinwood while a specially recorded version of her song, I Wanna Dance for You, featuring the voices of Nancy Barrett and David Selby, plays in the background. Colors flare on the screen while we hear them sing. Miss Barrett was an excellent singer, Mr Selby an adequate one. He does speak a few of his lines, which damages the rhythm of the song, and the flaring colors often obscure the actors completely. Mr Selby and Miss Barrett are so lovable that we very much want to overlook these flaws in the number’s conception.

The dream ends with Quentin turning into Petofi and laughing evilly at Pansy. She awakes in horror. She has known for some days that Q-Petofi isn’t Quentin, and she knows enough about Petofi that it is strange she hasn’t already figured out that he is the one hiding inside his body. But when she sits up with a gasp, we know that she has finally put it all together.

Time-traveler Barnabas Collins, a recovering vampire, meets Q-Petofi in the drawing room at Collinwood. Q-Petofi is convinced that Barnabas stole the portrait of Quentin, and is very aggressive about pressing his suspicions. Barnabas has been playing dumb ever since his vampirism went into remission, but after a couple of minutes of Q-Petofi’s hectoring he addresses him as “Count Petofi.” When Barnabas cannot tell him what he wants to hear, Q-Petofi declares that he will restore the vampire curse to its full potency. He touches Barnabas’ forehead with the right hand in which his powers are concentrated. Barnabas squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, then opens them with a look of triumph. He asks Q-Petofi what has become of his powers.

The rest of the episode revolves around yet another possessed person. Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, is also Josette DuPrés, who plunged to her death from the cliff at Widow’s Hill 101 years before. Barnabas was supposed to marry Josette at one point, and he has been obsessed with recreating her ever since.

In May and June of 1967, when the show was set in the present, Barnabas abducted Maggie and tried to brainwash her into becoming Josette. In those days, the show was ambiguous about why Barnabas picked Maggie. Strange and troubled boy David Collins was an intimate friend of Josette’s ghost, and when he saw Maggie in Josette’s dress in #240 and #241, he thought she was Josette, looking just as she always did. Indeed, Miss Scott had played the ghost a few times, always behind a veil. When Barnabas was about to give up on Maggie in #260 he very earnestly told her “But you are Josette!” Yet after Maggie escaped, he picked another girl and planned to repeat the experiment with her, explaining to his sorely-bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #274 that all you have to do is “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure, and a new personality is created.”

But when the show made its first trip back in time, visiting the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968, Kathryn Leigh Scott played Josette. That was a bold move. Longtime viewers were left with the uncomfortable feeling that Barnabas may have had a point when he devised the horrifying program of torture that made the show so terribly bleak for several weeks. When we see Miss Scott playing Kitty, who really is Josette and really does have to accept that fact, longtime viewers can only squirm as they remember Barnabas shoving Maggie into his old coffin and later walking down the long gray corridors of his basement on his way to the prison cell where he was going to murder her. We’ve since come to know Barnabas as an endearingly ineffectual comic villain, but it is a stretch to remind us of him as he was in those grim days and ask us to concede that he was in any sense right.

Kitty confronts Barnabas at Collinwood and accuses him of orchestrating her Josettifying psychosis. He denies that he is responsible, and claims to know that Josette’s spirit lives in her and that she ought to yield to it. When she asks how he knows, he makes up a story about being a boy in England, falling in love with a portrait of Josette, and reading her diaries. She is unconvinced.

Later, Josette goes to P-Quentin in Petofi’s old squat, the abandoned mill on the North Road. She believes he is Petofi, and asks him to use his power to resolve her identity crisis. He tries to explain that he only looks like Petofi, and has none of his power, but she refuses to believe him. Having nothing to lose, he decides to play along. He tells the right hand to tell Kitty the truth about herself, and touches her forehead. She suddenly realizes that she is both Josette and Kitty. P-Quentin just as suddenly realizes that Petofi’s power has returned to the body in which he is now an unwilling tenant.

Kitty/ Josette keeps telling P-Quentin that she remembers what he was able to do with his right hand when he was staying with her and her late husband in England a few years before. This is a pretty bad continuity error. For eight weeks from #778, the most dynamic story on the show centered on the fact that Petofi’s hand was cut off in 1797 and kept in a box by a Romani tribe for the hundred years since, until broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi stole it in an attempt to lift the werewolf curse from Quentin. It was only in #815, in August, that Petofi reattached his hand and with it regained the bulk of his power. Granted, #815 is eleven and a half weeks ago, but the show now takes so little time to onboard new viewers by recapping that the writers are clearly counting on the audience to have a great deal of information about the story so far in their heads. As such, it is very surprising that they would break from established continuity on such a major point of the recent months.

Episode 870: Your Josette, always

In October 1897, the estate of Collinwood and all of the other assets of the Collins family are the property of Judith Collins Trask. Judith has just returned from a stay of more than thirteen weeks in a mental hospital, but even when she was having the breakdown that put her there she was not one of the show’s principal sources of that great motive force of Soap Opera Land, Crazy Lady Energy (CLE.)

In #819, sorcerer Count Petofi erased the personality of Judith’s stepdaughter Charity Trask and gave her body to the late Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl/ mentalist. Since then, Pansy has been a reliable provider of CLE. But today, she serves as the baseline of sanity.

We open in a bedroom occupied by the mysterious Barnabas Collins. Months ago, the Collinses discovered that their distant cousin Barnabas was a vampire who originally lived in the 1790s. Pansy staked Barnabas in his coffin in #845, and for the four and a half weeks after the characters believed he was destroyed. Now a sickly man has shown up who looks and sounds just like Barnabas. He claims to have been the vampire’s victim. He lives in the daylight, casts a reflection, does not recoil from the sign of the cross, and eats food not derived from human blood. He has been seen alongside the staked vampire. So Judith’s brother Edward has accepted the sickly Barnabas’ story. At Edward’s invitation, he is a guest at Collinwood, resting after his ordeal. Edward wins Judith over to his point of view, and she is glad to welcome Barnabas as a dinner guest.

Another resident of the great house is not so sure. He appears to be Judith and Edward’s brother Quentin. He is in fact Petofi, who has cast a spell to hijack Quentin’s body and confine Quentin to his own aging and pudgy form. Q-Petofi has seen all the evidence that Edward has, including the two Barnabases side by side. But he also knows that Barnabas is a time traveler who came to 1897 from 1969, and that several magical beings and science fiction types are in his orbit. So he is looking for a trick. He has coaxed Pansy into the room, telling her that only she can make the final determination about who the man in the bed is. Pansy looks at Barnabas and declares that he is not the vampire. Q-Petofi is still unconvinced, and is about to put some kind of spell on Barnabas when Edward enters.

Downstairs, Pansy meets with Judith. Judith has figured out that her husband, Charity’s father Gregory Trask, gaslighted her into the breakdown that put her in the hospital, and that among his many misdeeds while she was there was his attempt to seduce a woman named Amanda Harris. In #864, Pansy bought a portrait of Amanda for an eye-wateringly large sum; yesterday, she set it up in the drawing room at Collinwood, causing Trask to fly into a rage. We learn in this scene that Judith put Pansy up to buying the portrait as part of a plan to get back at Trask. The two of them share some amusingly salty dialogue, showing us a worldly wise side of Judith that we have not seen before.

Today’s dose of CLE comes from a houseguest, Kitty Soames. Kitty is a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire. She is Edward’s guest, and she came to the house in #844 intending to lure Edward into a marriage that would relieve the financial distress she has been in since the late Earl’s bankruptcy. But since the day she arrived, she has been having fits of madness caused by the irruption into her consciousness of the mind of the late Josette, lost love of Barnabas. The conflict between Kitty/ Josette’s two personalities gives her one mad scene after another today.

Kitty enters the foyer, where a portrait of Barnabas hangs. She sees the portrait’s eyes glow and hears a heartbeat, something which has been happening to people under Barnabas’ influence since #205. She has a panic attack. Pansy and Judith come from the drawing room and cluster around her. Pansy walks her upstairs to her bedroom and tries to persuade her to have a cup of broth. Kitty raves about the danger that an antique music box in her room presents to her. After a bit, Edward enters and dismisses Pansy.

Kitty tells Edward that she thinks she ought to leave Collinwood, since she has been suffering from a severe mental illness throughout her stay. Edward says that he does not believe that the problem is psychological, since the music box and other objects that she finds disturbing have in fact materialized around her inexplicably. He says that to the extent that her problems are rooted in her feelings, a therapy he will suggest might be just the thing to cure them. He asks her to marry him. She agrees, and they kiss.

Edward’s first wife was the former Laura Murdoch, an undead blonde fire witch. Laura was quite calm and rational in her way, but she embodied a principle of insanity in the universe. Quentin was married to a woman named Jenny, who may have seemed mentally healthy when they met but who went immensely insane after Quentin ran off with Laura. I suppose that, with that kind of family history, Edward is just cutting out some of the preliminaries by proposing to a lunatic while she is in the middle of a psychotic episode.

Edward and Kitty announce their engagement after dinner. Q-Petofi notices that Barnabas is shocked; he apologizes, smiles, and stands, a champagne glass in his hand and congratulations on his lips. He then excuses himself, saying that he still feels weak and thinks he ought to retire for the evening.

If any longtime viewers harbored doubts that Q-Petofi is right and this Barnabas is our old friend, they are dispelled when we see him in his room moaning about how he doesn’t want to lose Josette again. We end with a blissed-out Kitty entering his room, telling him she heard him calling, and declaring that she will be his Josette always. They share a passionate kiss.

Edward is the third major role Louis Edmonds has played on the show; he has been a principal member of the cast since episode #1. This is his first on-screen kiss on Dark Shadows. Some fans like to show off their knowledge of the actors’ sexual orientations by speculating about a correlation between their private lives and their on-screen kissing of opposite sex scene partners. This particularly settles on Anthony George, who was on the show for a while in 1967 and whose attempts to kiss women always went horribly wrong. But that is obvious nonsense. Jonathan Frid was gay, and the actresses all attested that he was the best kisser in the cast; Barnabas’ kiss with Kitty/ Josette today is a case in point. Joel Crothers, a regular from 1966 to 1968, was gay too, and he was another expert smoocher. Roger Davis is as straight as they come, and rivaled George for traumatic lip collisions. Kitty and Edward’s kiss shows that, while Edmonds might not have been interested in taking Kathryn Leigh Scott home, he was the equal of any heterosexual actor at playing love scenes with women when the cameras were rolling. I believe that what men like Edmonds, Frid, and Crothers did is known as “acting.”

Episode 869: The man who walks in the day

In October 1897, the hypocritical Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask is married to the vastly wealthy Judith Collins, owner of the estate of Collinwood and of the Collins family businesses. For more than thirteen weeks, everything seemed to be going Trask’s way. He had gaslighted Judith into a mental hospital and had almost free rein over all of her assets. In her absence, he invited the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris to stay in the great house on the estate, and set out to seduce her.

Piece by piece, Trask’s little corner of paradise fell apart. First, 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi orchestrated a series of events that led Trask to sign a confession to the murder of his first wife, and no matter how many times he destroyed the confession new copies of it kept materializing. Then Petofi erased the personality of Trask’s daughter and enforcer Charity, replacing it with that of late Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye. Later, Amanda fell in love with Judith’s brother Quentin, told Trask off, and wound up leaving for New York by herself. Now, Judith has returned from the mental hospital, all sane and deeply suspicious.

The front door of the great house is Trask’s enemy today. No sooner does he enter it than he finds Pansy in the foyer, singing her song. He demands she stop and tells her he is her father. She laughs at this claim, and reminisces about the late Bertie Faye. Trask goes into the drawing room, and to his horror sees a large oil painting of Amanda on an easel. We saw Pansy setting it up earlier in the episode, and saw her buy it a few days ago. But Trask didn’t see those things, and when she tells him she doesn’t know anything about it, he seems to accept her denials. She exits upstairs.

The front door opens again, and Judith’s brother Edward enters with two other men. One appears to be Quentin, but is in fact Petofi in possession of Quentin’s body. The other appears to be time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins.

Trask and Edward both believe that Petofi is Quentin; since he is played by David Selby, I call him Q-Petofi. The man who appears to be Barnabas is very weak. He says that his name is indeed Barnabas Collins, but that he is not the vampire. He claims to have arrived from England, to have been attacked by a vampire who looked just like him, and to have little memory of what happened after.

In #845, Pansy went into a cave and found a coffin containing what appeared to be Barnabas. She drove a stake through his heart. When Edward and Q-Petofi met this weak Barnabas yesterday in the doctor’s office, they were skeptical of his story. They took him to the cave, opened the coffin, and saw the body Pansy had staked inside, the stake still lodged in its heart. Since they could see the two of them side by side, Edward could only conclude that the weak man is different from the vampire, and that his story is therefore true. Q-Petofi, well aware of the many magical and science-fictional entities in Barnabas’ orbit, is not at all convinced.

Trask sees the weak Barnabas and is enraged that Edward and Q-Petofi have brought the vampire back from the dead. While Q-Petofi takes the weak Barnabas upstairs to a bedroom, Edward tries to reason with Trask. This is seldom a fruitful exercise. When Edward finally points out that it is broad daylight and the weak Barnabas is alive and moving, Trask is left speechless.

Alone with the weak Barnabas, Q-Petofi tries to trick him into believing that he is Quentin and that he can trust him. When Q-Petofi goes on about all the secrets that Barnabas and Quentin have shared, the weak Barnabas responds only with bewilderment.

Q-Petofi goes back to the cave and sets the coffin on fire, acting on the hypothesis that the destruction of the staked Barnabas will have some kind of effect on the weak Barnabas. We cut back to Collinwood and see that it has none. Trask lets himself into the bedroom. After some small talk, he thrusts a large wooden cross at the weak Barnabas’ face and stands silently for a moment. The weak Barnabas looks up from his bed and asks if Trask is all right. He hurriedly says that he only brought the cross to help him pray for his recovery. The weak Barnabas observes that this is very kind, and closes his eyes while Trask kneels beside the bed.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that not only the actor Jerry Lacy, but the character Gregory Trask, seems to enjoy himself very much when there is something to be righteously indignant about. Not only does Trask have a whole set of self-aggrandizing mannerisms and techniques for silencing everyone else when he is furious, but as a con man an atmosphere of crisis provides him with an opportunity to think on his feet and devise new schemes for bilking people out of whatever they have that he wants. Mr Lacy’s joy in performance runs throughout the whole episode, but Trask’s goes through wild fluctuations, peaking each time he thinks he has found a new way to present himself as the champion of The Almighty and plummeting each time his understanding of the situation is deflated. In his first several appearances, Trask was so overwhelmingly evil and so frequently successful that he was hard to watch. When we see him repeatedly brought up short in an episode like this, all of the discomfort of those early days pays off.

In the drawing room, Edward tells Pansy that there is a sick man in a bed upstairs who looks like the vampire Barnabas and is named Barnabas Collins, but is not the man she staked. She is horrified at the thought. Barnabas was indirectly responsible for the death of Pansy as a physical being, and later murdered her fiancé, the childlike Carl Collins. He also took Charity as one of his victims for a time. Besides, in her manner of dress, quantity of makeup, working-class accent, and brashly friendly manner Pansy is the representative of all the “girls at the docks” upon whom Barnabas has fed down the centuries. So no one has more reason to fear Barnabas than does Pansy in the form of Charity. Edward reassures her as best he can, then goes up to look in on the patient.

Pansy absorbs the news that another Barnabas Collins is in the house.

The scene between Pansy and Edward will remind longtime viewers of the characters the same actors played between November 1967 and
March 1968, when Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. Nancy Barrett was fluttery heiress Millicent Collins, while Louis Edmonds was haughty overlord Joshua Collins. In #450, Millicent had discovered the horrible truth about Barnabas and it had proven to be too much for her rather fragile grip on sanity. She decided that the vampire was not her cousin, but an impostor, and she told Joshua that it was wrong of him to have “That man who says he is Barnabas” in the house.

Not only is Pansy’s horror at the thought of a man who says that he is Barnabas staying at Collinwood reminiscent of Millicent, but her relationship to Charity also reflects the development of Millicent throughout the 1790s segment. Millicent’s transformation from a lighter-than-air comedy character to a darkly mad victim, first of her wicked husband Nathan, then of Barnabas, marked the transition to the climactic phase of the 1790s segment. Charity’s replacement by Pansy in #819 came at a time when the show was flashing many signals that the 1897 segment was nearing its end. Those signals may well have reflected an earlier plan, but 1897 was such a hit that they kept passing by the off-ramps back to the 1960s and restarting the uncertain and frightening journey into the past. Now it seems they really are getting ready to move on, and Pansy’s prominence reminds us of just how radically different a place Collinwood is now than it was when we arrived in this period in #701, at the beginning of March.

Pansy is still quaking at the thought of another Barnabas Collins when Q-Petofi enters and closes the doors of the drawing room behind him. Pansy hasn’t quite figured out his true identity, but she knows that he is not really Quentin, and that he does not mean her well. She is terrified and says she will scream unless he opens the doors.

Regular viewers have reason to believe Pansy will do more than scream. In #829, she tried to stab Quentin. And those who have been with the show for a long time will remember what happened in #204, broadcast and set in April 1967. Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, another Nancy Barrett character, found herself in the drawing room with dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. When Willie closed the doors and refused to open them, Carolyn didn’t bother screaming- she pulled a loaded gun on him.

Q-Petofi has magical powers that neither Quentin nor Willie could match, so he is not in mortal jeopardy as they would be were they to put themselves in his position. But he has created a volatile situation, and unless he resolves it within a few seconds he is likely to find himself with a huge mess on his hands. Rather than falling back on his occult talents, Q-Petofi takes a page from Quentin’s book and charms Pansy into cooperating. He tells her that he is as frightened of Barnabas as she is. That intrigues her sufficiently that she starts listening to him. He tells her that only she can discern whether the man in the sick bed upstairs is what he claims to be. A moment later, Q-Petofi has persuaded Pansy to go with him to see the weak Barnabas. The episode ends with Pansy looking at the weak Barnabas lying in bed, her eyes widening in a strong but unspecified reaction. We will have to wait until tomorrow to find out whether she is terrified at the sight of her nemesis or amazed to see an innocent man wearing the hated face.