opening voiceover – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1093: It’s just gonna happen anyway

In July, vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman came unstuck in time and found themselves in the far-off future year 1995. Julia and Barnabas found that the great house of Collinwood had been in ruins ever since some mysterious disaster took place on an unspecified night in 1970. Some residents of the great house went missing that night, others died, and two of them, Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes and Quentin Collins, went insane. The mad Carolyn of 1995 apparently knew that Barnabas was a vampire; she had known that for a while in 1967, when she was his victim, but appeared to have forgotten it when he was relieved of the effects of his curse for a while starting in March 1968. Towards the end of Barnabas and Julia’s time in 1995, Carolyn left a note for them, consisting of six cryptic phrases, shortly before the ghosts who rule Collinwood killed her. They decided the phrases were clues to the disaster, and ever since returning to 1970 have been trying without success to use them to figure out what is going on.

One thing that is clear is that the disaster will involve the deaths of teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins and the merger of their ghosts with the ghosts of their lookalikes from the year 1840, Carrie Stokes and Tad Collins. David and Hallie are aware of this and spend all their time moaning about how helpless they are to do anything about it. Their headquarters for this operation is a room that intermittently materializes behind a door that usually leads to a linen closet. The room is much too large to fit into the space the linen closet occupies, is stocked with high-end antique toys, and is frequented by the ghosts. Hallie and David call it “The Playroom.” In 1995, Julia and Barnabas found that The Playroom was in existence all the time and that anyone could enter it, but until today only David, Hallie, and the ghosts have been able to go there. Everyone else just sees the linen closet when they open the door.

Hallie and David are in The Playroom, bummed out because Carrie has revealed to them that they are fated to become dolls in the dollhouse that is there. This was previously revealed to them in #1082, but Dark Shadows has been losing teenage viewers lately, so perhaps David and Hallie weren’t watching that day. A miniature carousel starts turning and playing music; David is influenced by the music, and says that perhaps their future in the dollhouse won’t be so bad.

Meanwhile, Carolyn is in the corridor outside The Playroom. We see her after the camera pans out from a closeup of the stained glass work above the door that sometimes opens on The Playroom. We notice that it depicts roses. The dollhouse is a scale model of a house that was known as Rose Cottage in 1840, and is in some sense identical to that house. One of the clues Carolyn left in 1995 was “The night Rose Cottage was destroyed,” which has led Barnabas and Julia to ask everyone if they’ve ever heard of Rose Cottage and to work feverishly to try to locate it. You might think they would remember the roses above the door to The Playroom and to think of the toys they saw there in 1995, but no such luck.

Carolyn hears the carousel’s music and wonders where it is coming from. She opens the door to The Playroom. She still hears the music, but sees only the linen closet. It is a haunting moment. We know that she is glimpsing an aperture between her world and another, but nothing she can see could lead her to conclude that anything at all extraordinary is happening. It might leave us wondering what it would be like if we were in the presence of some utterly bizarre phenomenon- would we notice?

Carolyn returns to the corridor. Her back is turned when David opens the door. We see The Playroom behind him. We wonder if Carolyn would be able to see it if she were facing the right way. David closes the door silently. Carolyn turns and is startled to see him. He says he is looking for Hallie. Carolyn asks him about the music; he claims he cannot hear it. He suggests someone may have left a radio playing in another part of the house.

The sequence reminded me of the 2017 season of Twin Peaks, as does the whole idea of The Playroom. As Agent Cooper disappeared into the mysterious, intermittently existent Red Room and the Black Lodge beyond, so the ghosts threaten to absorb the living characters into the mysterious, intermittently visible Playroom and the ruinous world of 1995 beyond. As Deputy Hawk once caught a glimpse of the curtains of the Red Room in the clouds above the spot deep in the woods where the worlds sometimes open onto each other, a glimpse so brief and vague that someone unfamiliar with the legends of the Black Lodge would likely either ignore it completely or assume it was a reflection of the clouds from some water on the ground, so the music from the miniature carousel gives Carolyn a glimpse so subtle and vague that anyone who had not been briefed by Julia and Barnabas would immediately accept David’s idea that it is just a radio. I doubt that this part of the show had a direct influence on Twin Peaks– more likely, the shared imagery is just the logical endpoint of a sense that there is more to the world than we can readily perceive with commonplace fears of being trapped in unfamiliar places. But I do think the two shows can shed light on each other.

Under the influence of the ghosts, Hallie and David make a doll with bright yellow hair and put it in the dollhouse. It represents someone named “Leticia” who will join them when they are living in the dollhouse. Since the only blonde character on the show other than Hallie is Carolyn, we have to assume that a ghost named Leticia has the same designs on Carolyn that Carrie has on Hallie and Tad has on David.

In 1995, Carolyn had not disappeared into the dollhouse, but was living in a shack by Finley’s Cove. She even went in and out of The Playroom from time to time, interacting with Tad and Carrie. This is the first indication we’ve had that the ghosts’ will is not entirely ineluctable. There may be nothing the characters can do to keep a disaster from occurring, but perhaps there is some hope that we might see them do something to shape the particulars of the disaster that will befall them.

Carolyn is busy looking after David and Hallie’s governess, Maggie Evans. Maggie is ill, having been bitten by a vampire. When he found out about this, Barnabas was surprised to learn he isn’t the only vampire in town, and he and Julia have been trying to figure out who has been feeding on Maggie. Carolyn and Maggie talk about the previous vampire attacks. There is an electric moment when each of them looks like she is trying very hard to remember something that is hidden way down in the recesses of her mind. Several times in 1968, Nancy Barrett played Carolyn as if she remembered a lot more about Barnabas than he knew. The script didn’t give her any support in that, and she eventually had to give it up. Maggie was Barnabas’ victim in May and June of 1967; that experience has been wiped from her memory several times, and we may wonder if it will emerge one more time. In light of what we saw about Carolyn’s knowledge in 1995 and the similarity of what Maggie is going through now to what she went through in 1967, this moment is highly effective.

Miss Barrett also manages to get a laugh from regular viewers today. She has a scene with Christopher Pennock as astrologer Sebastian Shaw. Pennock also played Carolyn’s late husband Jabe (alias “Jeb”) Hawkes. The two characters are supposed to resemble each other strongly, and for a while Carolyn hoped Sebastian would turn out to be Jabe. But she’s given up on that, and Sebastian wants to date Maggie.

Sebastian comes to Collinwood. Carolyn tells him Maggie is very sick and cannot receive visitors. Sebastian wants to see her anyway. Carolyn tells him that is impossible. He becomes angry and declares that she will see him sooner or later, no matter what! Sebastian storms out of the house, and Carolyn watches him go with a sad little smile. Sebastian is violent, irrational, controlling, and childish, just like Jabe. Her look shows us how much she misses those things about him.

Aww, what a wonderful dangerously unstable man-child he is!

Carolyn can’t get the tune the little carousel plays out of her head. She goes back to the door and opens it. Now, it opens on The Playroom. The circle the ghosts have drawn around Hallie and David now encloses her as well. We can start to see how she might have known enough to leave the clues she left in 1995 for Barnabas and Julia.

The vampire story is new and has some promise, but the haunting has been going in a tight little circle for five weeks, with no progress in sight. The miniature carousel is all-too-apt a symbol of that. Even the opening voiceover seems to acknowledge that the show is in a rut. It breaks off in mid-sentence. We hear Kathryn Leigh Scott telling us that David and Hallie have discovered “a secret world- a world populated by the dead. And this night, they learn…” That’s it, the audio stops abruptly at that point. What do David and Hallie learn? What does it matter, whatever it is can’t possibly affect the story in any way.

Episode 1091: Whoever did this

David Henesy has been in the cast of Dark Shadows since the first week, yet today is the first time he has been called upon to deliver the opening voiceover narration, after dozens of other cast members have had their turns. He does a great job with it, he should have done it every time.

As the voiceover concludes, we dissolve to an extreme closeup of a fixture that has been on the show even longer than has Mr Henesy, the clock in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. We see that there is a little painting in the body of the clock, above its face. It is a rustic landscape centered on a small church. I believe this is the first time we have been able to see this painting; certainly it is the first time it has received such emphasis. The episode will end with a closeup of a cross that heroine Julia Hoffman is carrying as she goes off to confront a vampire. Opening with a picture of a church and closing with a cross would suggest that there is some kind of Christian content in between, though it escapes me what it might be.

Today’s story is a whodunit. Governess Maggie Evans has been bitten by a vampire. Julia suspects her best friend, Barnabas Collins. Barnabas denies that he is the guilty party. They have three conversations which we might call soulful, if it weren’t tactless to remind Barnabas that he has no soul. When Julia sees Maggie’s indifferent response to Barnabas when he visits her in her sickroom, she is convinced of his innocence. That does raise the question of how Barnabas has been getting his nutrition lately, a question the show does absolutely nothing to answer or forestall.

Teenager Hallie Stokes fears that the ghost of the evil Gerard Stiles is responsible for Maggie’s condition. Her friend David Collins conjures up, not the ghost of Gerard, but that of Hallie’s lookalike Carrie Stokes, who indicates that Gerard had nothing to do with it.

So we know that we now have a B-story to complement the A-story of Gerard’s haunting of Collinwood, and that the villain in that B-story is a vampire who is new in town. Barnabas mentions that astrologer Sebastian Shaw arrived in Collinsport only recently; Julia rules Sebastian out as a potential vampire, since she has seen him during the day.

Sebastian arrived with a woman named Roxanne. Barnabas does not mention Roxanne as a suspect, perhaps because he is deeply infatuated with her and does not want to believe she shares his curse. But returning viewers know that Roxanne appears only at night that she has some hold over Sebastian that makes him miserable, and that just before Maggie showed up with the puncture marks on her neck Roxanne was quarreling with Sebastian about a date he had had with Maggie. Roxanne alluded to mysterious powers that she has and looked self-satisfied when she said she had further plans to use those powers. So I think we have to classify Roxanne as the prime suspect in the latest attack on Maggie.

Episode 1034: Time is our only weapon

Yesterday’s episode ended with a climactic moment in Dark Shadows‘ adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde. Sabrina Stuart, fiancée of mild-mannered scientist Cyrus Longworth, had discovered that Cyrus’ evil alter ego John Yaeger is holding Maggie Evans Collins prisoner in a dungeon outside the village of Collinsport. For some reason she drove to Maggie’s home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Cyrus/ Yaeger followed her there and choked her out in the drawing room. Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, who is Maggie’s sister-in-law and Sabrina’s friend, saw the strangling and screamed. Cyrus/ Yaeger dropped Sabrina to the floor and turned his attention to Liz.

It was unclear at that time if Sabrina was dead or merely unconscious. Today’s opening voiceover says flatly that “Yaeger killed her,” and in the first scene of act one housekeeper Julia Hoffman checks Sabrina’s body and declares that she is dead. Since the narrator and Hoffman are both played by Grayson Hall, longtime viewers will be cautious about accepting these pronouncements. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe. There, Hall played Hoffman’s counterpart, a medical doctor who has many abilities no other member of her profession can equal but who is curiously unreliable when she pronounces patients dead. Julia has been known to erroneously pronounce the same person dead twice in a single episode. So we have to reserve judgment for a bit about whether Sabrina will be wanting breakfast.

Liz locked Cyrus/ Yaeger in the drawing room before he could get his hands on her, and he smashed a window and ran out when he heard her talking with Hoffman in the foyer. Liz and Hoffman find that Cyrus/ Yaeger had torn the telephones in both the drawing room and the foyer out of their wall sockets. We’ve seen telephones in other parts of the house several times, but evidently those are out of order today. Hoffman says that she will go to the Old House on the grounds of the estate, home to Liz’ daughter Carolyn and Carolyn’s husband Will, and call the police from there. Hoffman assures Liz that Cyrus/ Yaeger must have left the estate and that he will present no danger on the fifteen minute walk to the Loomis house.

Hoffman’s confidence on this point puzzles Liz, who watches her leave carrying only a flashlight while she herself crouches in the drawing room holding a pistol. It may puzzle first-time viewers as well. Those who have been watching for several days know that Hoffman is in league with Cyrus/ Yaeger. Hoffman has been acting as a messenger between Cyrus/ Yaeger and her mistress Angelique, the undead first wife of Quentin Collins, who is Maggie’s husband and Liz’ brother. Angelique wants Maggie out of the way so that she can remarry Quentin, and is supporting Cyrus/ Yaeger’s plan to torture her into loving him.

At the Loomis house, Hoffman calls the police and reports exactly what Liz knows. When she is done with her call, she realizes that she is alone in the house. Earlier, she was peeking through the window when Carolyn and Will’s mysterious houseguest, a person named Barnabas Collins, opened the secret panel behind a bookcase. She takes advantage of the opportunity to find out what Barnabas is hiding. She sees a coffin in the chamber behind it. Without hesitation, she opens the coffin. She finds that it is empty. She closes the panel, wondering why Barnabas would keep an empty coffin in a hidden chamber. She is on her way out when Barnabas enters and demands to know what she is doing there. She tells him what happened in the drawing room of the great house, and he rushes out with her.

Cyrus/ Yaeger is in his laboratory. He takes out the antidote. This will puzzle regular viewers. Up to this point, it has seemed clear that Cyrus/Yaeger has only one potion, and that it effects both his Hyde-ification and his re-Jekyllizing. He threw all of that potion away a couple of weeks ago, after he tried to rape Maggie in a dark alley. He cannot make more, since it requires a compound that only one chemist could provide and Cyrus murdered that chemist when he learned his secret. His current Yaegerness is the result of a spontaneous transformation that took place without drinking the potion. So we are at a loss to explain why he still has any of it. He tells himself that there is only enough to change him once. By the time he starts drinking it, the police are knocking at his door.

At length, Cyrus lets the policeman in. He asks what took so long; Cyrus claims to have been asleep. He tells Cyrus that Yaeger has murdered Sabrina; Cyrus responds with genuine shock. The policeman apologizes for not having known that Cyrus was engaged to marry Sabrina, but insists that he answer his questions.

Most of Collinsport’s police officers have been farcically incompetent. The actors have responded to the challenge of playing these useless men in various ways. Dana Elcar, who in 1966 and 1967 was the first of four to play Sheriff George Patterson, kept you hoping that his character was just playing dumb. Some of the others either gave up and let us see their own contempt for the bumblers the scripts had saddled them with, as Vince O’Brien did towards the end of his own time as the last of the Sheriffs George Patterson. Dreariest of all was the first law enforcement officer on Dark Shadows, Constable Jonas Carter, whose flagrant incompetence at his job scarcely exceeded the incompetence Michael Currie brought to the role. This policeman doesn’t solve anything, but Philip R. Allen’s performance makes him seem like the greatest detective we’ve ever seen. Allen is spellbinding as he simultaneously depicts sincere empathy and an unbending determination to get at the facts. It’s too bad this is the only time we get to see this dynamic actor on Dark Shadows.

Outside the great house, Barnabas and Liz are watching the ambulance take Sabrina’s body away. Its flashing lights illuminate their faces. This is the first evidence we have seen that emergency vehicles exist in any iteration of Collinsport. Indeed, when the characters decide that someone is dead they usually take it for granted that there is no longer any point in calling the authorities, that they should just set about digging a grave and burying the body.

Barnabas and Liz watch the ambulance take Sabrina’s body away. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas asks Liz if she knew that Yaeger had threatened Maggie and that he has an unwholesome interest in her. She did not. Maggie had not told anyone at Collinwood about the incident in the dark alley. Barnabas tells her only that he heard about it in town. Regular viewers know that a woman named Buffie Harrington foiled Yaeger’s assault on Maggie when she happened by the alley. Barnabas can hardly tell Liz about his connection with Buffie, since he is a vampire and Buffie is his victim. They decide they must tell the police about Yaeger and Maggie, and they go back to the Loomis house to make a telephone call.

Cyrus is still in his lab. He knows that he might change back into Yaeger at any time. He decides to call Barnabas at the Loomis house and tell him where Maggie is. Barnabas holds the telephone so Liz can hear what Cyrus is saying. Barnabas asks Cyrus how he knows that Yaeger is holding Maggie; he says he can’t tell him. Barnabas and Liz rush out. They don’t think to call the police.

Speakerphone, 1970-style. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Back at Collinwood, Liz tells Hoffman she ought to go to the policemen outside the house and tell them what Cyrus told her and Barnabas. She also frets about Barnabas’ safety. Hoffman says she is quite sure that Barnabas Collins does not need anyone’s protection. Liz does not know what she means, but is in too much of a hurry to question her. Hoffman thinks to herself about how much has happened that she has not had a chance to tell Angelique.

In his lab, Cyrus raises a pistol to his head and puts his finger on the trigger. Before he can fire, he transforms into Yaeger.

Barnabas makes his way to Maggie’s dungeon. He searches it, finding her belongings but not her. She has picked the lock, untied the ropes in which Cyrus/ Yaeger bound her, and let herself out. She is hiding elsewhere in the basement. She can hear Barnabas’ steps, but does not know who it is. She assumes that it is Yaeger. When she hears him leave the basement, she starts to make her way out. Just as she emerges from the shadows, Yaeger appears on the steps and greets her. She screams, and he pounces.

Episode 1028: Those detestable traits of his

Mad scientist Cyrus Longworth developed a potion that changed his appearance so drastically that even people who knew him well cannot recognize him when he is under its influence. He used this disguise to carry out beatings, rapes, and murders. Now, he has spontaneously transformed in front of his fiancée, Sabrina Stuart. Cyrus had fooled Sabrina into thinking that his disguise was a separate person named “John Yaeger.” Sabrina had reason to hate Yaeger and fear him. She was shocked to learn that Yaeger and Cyrus were one and the same, and Cyrus ridiculed her for her continued attachment to him. Nonetheless, Sabrina pledged to support Cyrus come what may, and she does keep his secret today. Even after he threatens her with the sword in his cane, a threat which seems all too real since Christopher Pennock holds the prop too close to Lisa Blake Richards’ face when he pops the sharp blade out, she still stands by her man.

Cyrus has slipped into the great house of Collinwood and entered the master bedroom. He is watching the lady of the house, Maggie Evans Collins, while she sleeps. Cyrus tried to rape Maggie in a dark alley last week, and apparently he has decided to finish the job while she is in her own bed. At the last moment, Maggie’s stepson, strange and troubled teen Daniel Collins, enters. Cyrus hides behind the curtains while Daniel asks for his father.

Cyrus has ot chosen a particularly good hiding place. The light is on him, and he is directly in Daniel’s line of sight. It is preposterous enough that an armed intruder as physically prepossessing and as unscrupulous as Cyrus would hide from Maggie and Daniel, and this slip emphasizes that Cyrus, however much he may revel in the harm he has done as when in his disguise, is basically a coward.

Hey Daniel, notice that very tall man peeking out from behind the curtains directly in front of you? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Daniel has been bitterly hostile to Maggie up to this point. Today they are suddenly great friends. He says sadly that he sometimes gets a premonition when something evil is about to happen in the house, and that he has such a premonition now. She talks to him affectionately, so softly that we can’t tell whether she is calling him “Daniel” or “Dan,” and touches his hair. Regular viewers have seen these two actors play friends in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows, when the action took place in a different universe and they were various other characters. It’s good to see them pick up where they left off, and exciting to think of what they might be able to do to breathe more life into Maggie’s stories. Alas, this is the last time we will see Daniel.

Later, Cyrus meets with someone we’ve never seen before. The closing credits will identify this man as Aldon Wicks. Cyrus says he wants to buy an old farmhouse from Wicks. He is particularly interested in a room in the basement, which he wants to outfit with an extra-heavy door. Wicks puts the door Cyrus wants on the room. When the time comes to pay up, Cyrus asks Wicks a bunch of questions, the answers to which all imply that no one knows where he is or will miss him if he disappears. So Cyrus stabs him to death with his cane. That’s certainly one way to cut costs on a real estate transaction.

The opening voiceover is delivered by associate director Ken McEwen. In the first 54 weeks of Dark Shadows, every voiceover was delivered by Alexandra Moltke Isles in character as well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, whether Vicki was in the episode or not. Between them and today, the narrator has always been an actor who appears in the episode. McEwen was drafted to appear in a few episodes as lawyer Larry Chase when Don Briscoe’s health problems caught up to him and forced him to leave the cast. Maybe they gave McEwen a contract to appear in three episodes more than turned out to include parts for Larry, and that explains his voice responsibilities in this one, #1079, and #1082.

A third pair of videotape editors are credited today, Carl Pollack and Fred Labib, joining the teams of Indra Sadoo and Chuck Gardner and Dan Rosenson and Robert Steinback.

Episode 1022: Do any of us know where our dreams come from?

Angelique Stokes Collins, late wife of gloomy sourpuss Quentin Collins, has risen from the grave, murdered her identical twin sister Alexis, and taken Alexis’ place as Quentin’s houseguest in his mansion, the great house of Collinwood. Impersonating Alexis, she has been busy with a lot of cackhanded schemes to drive a wedge between Quentin and his new wife, the former Maggie Evans. As recently as yesterday, Quentin and Maggie were keeping their cool and showing signs that they might catch on to what “Alexis” was up to, but today they both melt down completely. Quentin has a fit when he sees Maggie reading a book about witchcraft that Angelique left in the drawing room, and Maggie goes to Quentin’s friend Cyrus Longworth to ask some questions about Quentin’s role in Angelique’s death.

Cyrus is pretty nutty himself. He is a mad scientist who has developed and become addicted to a Jekyll and Hyde potion. When he drinks it, his appearance changes so drastically that even the people closest to him cannot recognize him. Thus disguised, he goes by the name “John Yaeger” and indulges his sadistic impulses.

Cyrus assures Maggie that Quentin did not murder Angelique. She leaves his laboratory feeling relieved. She forgets her gloves. He picks them up, and spends eight seconds rubbing them on his face, sniffing them, and looking ecstatic. Eight seconds is quite a long period to devote to that particular pastime.

Buffie Harrington comes to Cyrus’ lab. When he is masquerading as Yaeger, Cyrus’ favorite hobby has been beating Buffie and ridiculing her. She has a self-destructive streak that led her to submit to that treatment. Unknown to Cyrus and unmentioned in today’s episode, Buffie has a new dominator. Vampire Barnabas Collins has bitten her, made her his slave, and ordered her to find out whatever she can about Yaeger from Cyrus.

Buffie is very much in charge of her scene with Cyrus. She runs through a long list of emotions- anger and impatience with Cyrus, attraction to him and pity for him, contempt for Yaeger and admiration for him, pity and anger towards herself, all portrayed clearly and convincingly by Elizabeth Eis. Returning viewers who realize that Buffie is on a mission from Barnabas to get Cyrus to tell her what he knows about Yaeger will be impressed that Buffie is as good an actress as Eis was. She is looking for the note that will crack the glass holding Cyrus’ secrets, and striking each one perfectly.

When Buffie finds out that the gloves are Maggie’s, she mentions that she knew Maggie when they were growing up in the village of Collinsport. She says that Maggie was always a special person, obviously destined for greater things. Looking at herself in the mirror, Buffie says that Maggie probably doesn’t hate herself when she sees her reflection. Buffie may still be acting, trying to elicit Cyrus’ sympathy, but we don’t see his reaction when she says these things, only two images of her face. And her words do fit with the self-destructive streak she has shown in her relationship with “Yaeger.” Not only Elizabeth Eis’ extraordinary good looks, but also her forceful and intelligent manner, make it shocking to see Buffie looking at herself and hear her saying such things. The show never explains where Buffie’s urge to destroy herself came from, but Eis makes us both believe that it keeps overwhelming her and wish that she could escape it.

Cyrus stops by Collinwood to return Maggie’s gloves. When she sees him, Maggie brightens up and starts moving fluidly from the hips up in a way that suggests sexual attraction. She is disappointed he won’t stay. Considering how close Cyrus got to Maggie when they were in his lab and how he gazed longingly into her eyes until she asked him if something were wrong, it’s hard to see how he can fail to find her excitement encouraging.

Cyrus drinks his potion. Once Yaegerized, he telephones Maggie. He refuses to identify himself, but says that if she meets him at the docks at 6 PM sharp he will give her information about Angelique’s death. Maggie is initially appalled by the idea of a strange man asking her to meet him at the docks, but she is still carried away with the suspicions Angelique planted in her mind that Quentin is a wife-killer. She can’t resist.

Yaeger is at the docks when Buffie happens by on her way to work at the Eagle tavern. She speaks to him. He jeers at her until she leaves. Cyrus keeps telling himself what Buffie told him in their scene today, that Yaeger enjoys life. All I can say is that there are far more enjoyable things to do with a beautiful young woman than to beat her, insult her, and drive her away. Yaeger seems to me to be an utterly miserable sort, as strongly bent away from life towards death as is Buffie.

Maggie shows up shortly after Buffie has gone. Yaeger doesn’t tell her anything she doesn’t know. He moves in close and starts talking about wanting her favors. She says she will be going, and he grabs her from behind. He puts his hand over her mouth to stifle her screams while he does a series of pelvic thrusts. His facial expression gets more and more distorted until his tongue pops out.

Cyrus, in his “John Yaeger” disguise, rapes Maggie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I suppose Cyrus/ Yaeger is rather an intelligent depiction of a rapist. He craves cruelty for its own sake. Any sexual thrill he may get is a side effect of the pleasure he derives from hurting women. Cyrus is engaged to a lovely young woman who is devoted to him, his lab assistant Sabrina Stuart. Sabrina’s name doesn’t even come up today. When Buffie was under his influence, she would have gone along with just about any sort of relationship he wanted to develop, either as Cyrus or in the guise of Yaeger. All he wanted to do was use her as a punching bag and then laugh at the bruises he left on her. Maggie is clearly attracted to Cyrus today, and however loyal she may be to Quentin is at the least available for some very pleasant flirting. But all Cyrus can think to do is to conceal his identity so that he can humiliate her in the alley where the streetwalkers pick up their johns.

The conceit that Cyrus and Yaeger are different people helps writer Joe Caldwell make today’s script into an essay about rape. Had Maggie recognized Cyrus in the alley, he might have claimed that he took her earlier response to him to be an invitation to sex. It is certainly easy to imagine a husband as uncharitable as Quentin taking such a claim seriously. But when Cyrus disguises himself as Yaeger, he shows that he has no wish to accept an invitation of any kind from Maggie. All he wants is to avoid punishment for the crime he is planning to commit against her. Indeed, when she sees Cyrus as Yaeger, Maggie shows nothing but distaste and a desire to flee. Cyrus evidently prefers those reactions to the enthusiasm Maggie showed for him when he was being sweet and friendly.

The Yaeger makeup is not very consistent from day to day. This time, the hairline is so high that he kept making me think of John Cazale as Fredo Corleone. Also, Christopher Pennock’s acting is not up to its usual standard; he overacts so severely that he keeps stumbling over his words. He even botches the opening voiceover. Perhaps he was too nice a guy to really get into a character who is the distilled essence of Rapist. At this point, Cazale had done only one TV show, a guest spot on NYPD, a series made in New York that featured Dark Shadows cast members in about half its episodes. Maybe Cazale would have been available for the role of Cyrus/ Yaeger. He too was a famously nice guy, but was perhaps a more accomplished actor than Pennock and better able to handle a part like this one.

Episode 1021: At the window, looking in

The opening voiceover tells us that vampire Barnabas Collins is about to “find an innocent victim, who will not only add to his grief and guilt, but also to his immediate peril.” Innocent victims can be so inconsiderate that way.

Barnabas has taken barmaid Buffie Harrington back to her apartment. She asks if she can give him a drink. He moves closer, and she takes him in her arms. He takes a drink, all right. She screams and collapses. As she hits the floor, Cyrus Longworth, MD, lets himself into the room and makes eye contact with Barnabas.

Barnabas claims that he ran into the room when he heard Buffie’s scream, which is not one of his more convincing lies. Cyrus insists on examining Buffie. In the nick of time, Buffie wakes up. She agrees with Barnabas that she is fine. Barnabas offers to stay with her. Cyrus does the same, to which Barnabas replies that he must have some business to attend to if he is in this part of town so late at night. Cyrus can’t deny that, and leaves.

Barnabas gives his new blood thrall some quick instructions, including strict orders to stay away from Cyrus. The next evening, Cyrus drops by Buffie’s place again, and she is as cold and unfriendly as Barnabas could have wished. As Cyrus is going, Buffie asks if he has heard from his friend John Yaeger lately. He says he hasn’t, but that she will be the first to know if he does. He leaves.

Barnabas materializes. Buffie is surprised that he was eavesdropping. Now that he knows Cyrus is close to Yaeger, he rescinds his order for her to avoid him. He says that Yaeger knows where his coffin is, and he wants to know everything he can about Yaeger for his own protection.

The next evening, Cyrus is back at Buffie’s. He is surprised she invited him. She says she hadn’t meant to be so rude the evening before. She asks about Yaeger, explaining that she has some things of his and is keen to get them back to him as soon as possible. Cyrus says only that he is sure Yaeger will be back soon. He leaves, and Buffie asks herself why Cyrus is protecting Yaeger.

Returning viewers know what Buffie and Barnabas do not. Yaeger does not exist. Cyrus has developed a potion which alters his appearance so drastically that even those closest to him do not recognize him when he is under its influence. Thus disguised, he calls himself “John Yaeger” and indulges his sadistic impulses. With this episode, the show sets Barnabas and Cyrus on a collision course. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde meet Dracula, here we come.

In the great house of Collinwood, another bizarre imposture is underway. Angelique Stokes Collins, the late wife of Quentin Collins, has returned from the dead, murdered her identical twin sister Alexis, and taken Alexis’ place as a houseguest. Her goal is to alienate Quentin from his new wife, the former Maggie Evans, and return to her previous place as mistress of Collinwood.

“Alexis” has been telling everyone that Angelique was murdered, which she in fact believes herself to have been. Since the coroner’s report ruled Angelique’s death the result of a stroke, Quentin does not take this idea seriously. “Alexis” has managed to persuade Maggie to do so, however, and when first we see them they are having a testy exchange over the question.

“Alexis” is happy to overhear this conversation. When the drawing room doors open, she presents Maggie with a bunch of flowers she has picked from the gardens on the grounds of the estate. Since the estate belongs to Maggie and Quentin, this is rather a childish gesture, but it pleases Maggie. “Alexis” goes to fetch a vase.

Cyrus shows up. Maggie goes upstairs while Cyrus and Quentin go to the drawing room. The men talk about Larry Chase, an attorney who represented both of them. Larry died in the foyer at Collinwood yesterday. At that time Quentin and Maggie were out together, so Larry was alone with “Alexis.” Cyrus says that Larry somehow froze to death in the foyer.

Angelique is alone with the flowers. She casts a spell causing them to shrivel and die. She then turns to the camera, looks directly at the audience, and gives her best “Ain’t I a stinker?” look.

In #346, Barnabas touched a bouquet of flowers, causing them to shrivel and die. That embarrassed Barnabas, as if he had lost control of his gastrointestinal system for a moment. It also alarmed well-meaning governess Vicki, but she never mentioned it again, and it certainly didn’t tip her off that Barnabas was a vampire. This incident shocks and befuddles Quentin and Maggie, but when he brings it up in their bedroom later she has already forgotten all about it and he agrees it wasn’t very important.

Even if it had made as big an impression as Angelique was hoping it would, destroying the flowers would probably not have advanced her goal of making Quentin suspect that Maggie is a supernatural force of darkness. He does notice the similarity to what happened to Larry, but since Angelique was with Larry when he died and Quentin and Maggie were together somewhere else, and since Angelique was in contact with the flowers for far longer than Maggie was, any suspicion it would raise would most logically be directed at herself.

“Alexis” has more success persuading Maggie to suspect Quentin of the murder of Angelique. Maggie has a dream about the séance at which Angelique died. It ends with Quentin choking Angelique. She wakes up screaming that he shouldn’t have murdered his wife.

In fact, Quentin did choke Angelique at the séance, but Angelique has discounted that as a possible cause of her death. She thinks that someone else drove a pin into her head while Quentin was busy strangling her. How the autopsy missed that, she hasn’t told us.

Last week the show credited its videotape editors for the first time, the team of Danny Rosenson and Robert Steinback. Today is the first credit for another pair of videotape editors, Chuck Gardner and Indra Sadoo.

The music under the closing credits sounds quite different than it has the last couple of years. We were wondering if it was an old tape, and then, about halfway through, came the voice that used to end every episode- ABC staff man Bob Lloyd intoning “Dark Shadows… is a Dan Curtis Production.” I was delighted to hear him again, if only on an old recording used by mistake.

Episode 963: A very bizarre practice

The reigning chief villain on Dark Shadows is a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time. He refuses to shift his shape, since he likes being a tall young man. He isn’t interested in any part of space or time not connected with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, with whom he has fallen in love. He can’t persuade anyone to call him by his preferred name, “Jabe,” so has resigned himself to going by “Jeb.”

As we open, Jabe is raising four men from the dead. That he can do such a thing might suggest that he is a formidable menace, but the introductory voiceover explains that he has no choice about it, since he is “unable to trust one living human being.” Whatever powers he may have, Jabe is surrounded by enemies whom he can battle only by resorting to the most desperate means. We are left wondering how much longer the show can keep the storyline going if it depends on such a feeble menace.

Jabe and one of the zombies are peeking through the window of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, home to vampire Barnabas Collins, a distant cousin of Carolyn’s. Jabe sees Barnabas’ best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, giving him an injection. He realizes that Julia is trying to treat Barnabas’ vampirism.

Jabe goes to the great house on the estate and orders Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, to keep watch over Barnabas’ blood thrall Megan Todd. Liz is one of Jabe’s few remaining followers. He is crude and abusive towards her; she protests that they are in her house, and when he responds to this with a sneer she gives him a look of disbelief. First-time viewers can understand how Jabe came to be so isolated.

When Barnabas was first on the show, from April 1967 to March 1968, Liz never figured out that he was a vampire. The show depended on keeping Liz in the dark about Barnabas’ curse, because she was too civic-minded to let him stay in a house on her estate if she had known that he was an abomination risen from the depths of Hell to prey upon the living, even if he was her cousin. In those days, the show seemed determined to keep Liz on the shelf lest she be stained by contact with the main story, and so they took care to give Barnabas’ adversaries reasons to keep from telling Liz about him.

Now, Liz is under the control of the forces Jabe represents. She is already hostile to Barnabas, and has told Jabe she would try to evict him from Collinwood if that is what he wants her to do. Jabe does not have any reason to withhold from her the fact that his enemy is a vampire.

Moreover, Liz is no longer the symbol of lawful goodness she was two years ago. In #956, she told eleven year old Amy Jennings that she hoped Jabe wouldn’t murder Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Her first reason for not wanting this to happen was that it would remind people of the other murders Jabe has committed. The second, and more important, was that it would tend to exonerate the person they have framed to keep the heat off Jabe. It seems likely that Jabe will soon defeated and Liz will be released from the spell under which she has been laboring, but if she comes out of that remembering what Barnabas is she will also remember that she herself is complicit in some pretty serious felonies, all of them well-known to Barnabas. Since Liz knows that Barnabas is invested in her position in the community and puts a high priority on protecting it, the show wouldn’t have a hard time explaining why she keeps him around, and she would be available to take part in whatever stories they might have going.

Liz is sitting with Megan. She can see that Megan is ill and goes to fetch her a glass of water. When she returns, Megan has gone. We see Megan at Barnabas’ house. Barnabas is intensely hungry. But he does not want to bite her. He knows that if he does so, she will die. She insists, and he gives in.

Julia enters and pronounces Megan dead. Barnabas is in a panic; he had earlier lied when Julia asked him if he had bitten anyone, and he flies directly into hysteria, accusing Julia of implying that he acted deliberately. She keeps her cool and assures him she does not see it that way. Usually Julia’s quickness to make excuses for Barnabas’ murders is an opportunity for Grayson Hall to amaze us with the spectacle of a brilliant woman rationalizing the behavior of a hopelessly evil man, but this scene is a showcase for Jonathan Frid. So they have taken care to establish that Barnabas was overpowered by the need for blood and have shown him taking steps to avoid biting Megan, allowing us to take Julia’s behavior more seriously and focus on Barnabas’ panic.

Barnabas tells Julia that to prevent Megan rising as a vampire they will have to drive a wooden stake through her heart. Previously Barnabas has simply strangled his victims or broken their necks after they died, and that has kept them from coming back. He did this as recently as #951, when he fed on Jabe’s would-be devotee Nelle Gunston. Regular viewers will know that the trip he and Julia make to the basement to fetch a stake is just a setup for them to return and find Megan already gone. Before that happens, there is a strange moment when Barnabas and Julia have the stake and are talking about driving it through Megan’s heart. Barnabas wants to spare Julia that horror, but she smiles warmly as if assuring him that it is her pleasure to join in the act.

Togetherness. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Jabe dispatches his four zombie henchmen into the great house, saying that he has given them their orders and now it is time to “Carry them out!” Julia lives in the great house, and is working with some test tubes in her bedroom. It’s the first time we’ve seen Julia’s room in years, and the first time we have seen scientific apparatus of any kind there. One of the zombies knocks on her door, another emerges from behind the curtains, and a third comes up and slaps her in the face. Perhaps remembering Jabe’s words as he sent them into the house, they carry her out.

You can’t say the zombies don’t follow instructions. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

One of the zombies is named Thomas Findley. Longtime viewers will remember Madame Janet Findley, a psychic who made a big impression in three episodes in December 1968, and Margaret Findley, who was one of the ghostly Widows who were prominent in the show’s supernatural back-world in its first 26 weeks. Another zombie is a large bald man who will remind many viewers of Tor Johnson in Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Danny Horn’s post about this one at his great Dark Shadows Every Day is a fascinating comparison of the episode with four issues of Gold Key’s Dark Shadows comic book. Other commentators have mentioned that the graveyard scenes often evoke the sensibility of EC Comics, particularly in the character of The Caretaker, but Danny’s in-depth discussion of what this episode has in common with those four issues is far and away the most substantive analysis I have seen of the overlap between the visual grammar of Dark Shadows and that of comic books.

Episode 913/914: An abominable boy

Episodes 1 through 274 of Dark Shadows opened with voiceovers by Alexandra Moltke Isles, usually in character as well-meaning governess Victoria Winters. What followed was therefore in some sense a story told by Vicki, implying that she would eventually learn everything that happened in it. Indeed, this was the case for the first 39 weeks of the show. Vicki represented our point of view, and nothing remained secret from her for long.

That changed after vampire Barnabas Collins joined the cast in #211. Originally it seemed that Barnabas would be merely the second in a series of supernatural Big Bads, and that like his predecessor, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, he would meet with defeat after Vicki caught on to his true nature and rallied the other characters against him. But Barnabas drew a whole new audience to the show. After a few weeks, he had raised Dark Shadows from its place at the bottom of the daytime ratings; by the summer, the show was a sort of hit. It was out of the question to destroy him. They had to find a way to keep him on the show indefinitely. Since the core of Vicki’s character was her trustworthiness, she could not possibly know about a vampire and fail to destroy him. So she ceased doing the narrations, ceased functioning as the audience’s representative, and after a while ceased to have any reason to be on the show at all. Vicki was written out late in 1968, and is now almost entirely forgotten.

Mrs Isles’ final episode as Vicki was #627. In our last glimpse of her, she was talking with Julia Hoffman, a permanent houseguest in the mansion of Collinwood. That shot represented the hand-off from one audience point of view character to another.

Julia first joined the show in the summer of 1967 as a psychiatrist treating one of Barnabas’ victims, then came to Collinwood to join forces with Barnabas as she left psychiatry to pursue her true calling as a mad scientist. Julia soon knew everything about the horrors Barnabas and the other monsters who joined the cast perpetrated. As deceptive as Vicki was truthful, as incriminated as she was pure, Julia was perfectly at home in the all-villain cast that is the hallmark of the show’s strongest periods.

Julia was absent from the show for most of 1969, when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897. She traveled back in time to that year and took part in the action for much of September, but for the other seven months we were in suspense as to when she would find out what had happened and what she would do with the news. When her friend Barnabas returned to 1969 from his long stay in 1897, she expected him to bring her up to date. We knew that he had come under the influence of a mysterious group and was likely to be distant towards her, but were still shocked when he refused to tell her anything at all.

Today, Julia’s function as the character who knows what the audience knows is dramatized when matriarch Elzabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother Roger are in the drawing room at Collinwood having a conversation about Roger’s son David. Julia is on the stairs in the foyer, heading to her room, when she sneaks back down and places her ear to the door. In no way does this conversation concern Julia; she eavesdrops only to reassure us that she will know what is happening.

Julia’s friendship with Barnabas has been her starting point in most of the stories so far. She is so well established on the show that she doesn’t really need him, but she does need someone to talk to about her investigations and discoveries. A flunky who will follow her orders will suffice to serve that purpose for now, and so she has taken troubled drifter Chris Jennings on in that capacity.

When Vicki was leading the fight against Laura, she needed a flunky. So they gave her a boyfriend named Frank Garner. Every character has to have some connection to the ancient and esteemed Collins family; Frank and his father were the lawyers representing the family in its business dealings. Long before they were introduced, the show had moved on from the business stories of its first months. By that time, all we hear about the Collinses’ money is that they have an inexhaustible supply of it, and it occasionally attracts unwelcome attention. Conard Fowkes was a capable actor and did what he could with the part, but there was so little to it that he wound up doing a very convincing imitation of a person you might meet in a law office in Bangor, Maine in 1966, with no more entertainment value than you might expect such a person to offer.

Chris gives the writers far more to work with than Frank ever did. He is related to the Collinses through his great-grandfather Quentin Collins, and like Quentin is a werewolf. Chris and heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard dated before his lycanthropy took hold, and they still have not resolved their feelings for each other. His little sister Amy lives at Collinwood, and is often involved in the stories. He hopes that Julia will be able to cure him of his curse.

Julia’s plan for accomplishing this goal centers on a man named Charles Delaware Tate. When Julia was in 1897, she befriended Quentin and learned that Tate had painted a portrait of him. On nights of the full moon the portrait becomes that of a wolf while Quentin remains human. In fact, Quentin himself came back to Collinsport a few days ago, still alive and to all appearances 28 years old. He has amnesia and refuses to believe any of the preposterous facts Julia tells him about himself, but is quite obviously Quentin. Julia has found two almost identical paintings done in recent years, one signed “C. D. Tate” and the other “Harrison Monroe.” Julia has tracked Monroe down in the hope that he really is Tate and that he will be able to paint a portrait that will do for Chris what was done for Quentin.

Yesterday, Julia had told Chris she wanted to go to Monroe’s place to see if he was Tate. Later, we simply cut to her in front of the door. She rang the doorbell, and a voice from a loudspeaker mounted above the door-frame told her to go away. She said she had a message from “Delaware Tate,” and the door drifted open. She entered the door as the episode ended.

Today’s opening reprise recreates the scene at the door, with a different voice coming through the loudspeaker and Grayson Hall remembering to put the “Charles” in front of “Delaware Tate.” When we come back from the main title sequence, she is wandering around inside a darkened house while a voice from another loudspeaker gives her directions.

Julia makes her way into a room where a young man sits at a desk. The room is as dark as the rest of the house, but she can see him clearly. She recognizes him as Tate, his appearance unchanged from what we saw in 1897. It is not entirely clear how she knows who he is- she and Tate did not meet during her sojourn in the past- but viewers who are faithful enough to know this also know that she represents our point of view. Since we saw far more of this unappealing character than we wanted, we are untroubled that Julia knows him.

The mysterious group that has coopted Barnabas is generating a story based on H. P. Lovecraft’s novella The Dunwich Horror. Fans of Lovecraft who are happy about this will recognize the shadowy figure in a corner of a room who speaks through an electronic amplifier as an homage to his The Whisperer in Darkness, throughout which the protagonist consults with a man who meets that description. Julia and we get a much closer look at Tate today than Professor Albert Wilmarth gets of Henry Wentworth Akeley until the conclusion of the story, at which point Akeley’s true appearance represents a twist ending.

Tate looks down throughout their conversation and keeps shouting at Julia that she should go away. His mouth moves in time with the words booming from the loudspeaker. He responds to everything she says with an announcement that it is of no interest to him. When she mentions that she has “transcended time” and compares that feat with Tate’s apparent success at finding “a way to suspend time,” he is as gruffly indifferent as if she had said she had washed her car and he has changed the oil in his. She tells him what he did for Quentin; he shouts that the story is “only a legend.” Finally, Tate looks up, he laughs, the lights flicker, a noise sounds, and he looks back down. Julia takes this as her cue to leave.

Accompanied as it is by the sound and lighting effects that precipitate Julia’s exit, I take it that the laugh is supposed to be maniacal or unearthly or something. Roger Davis had extensive training as an actor and has had a huge career on screen, so one supposes he could deliver such an effect had he chosen to do so. Instead, what he actually does is stick out his upper lip and emit a throaty guffaw, sounding very much like the Disney character Goofy.

I was left wondering why Julia left this meeting while still holding the strongest card in her hand. Quentin is not the only person who has come to town recently whom Tate knew in 1897. A woman calling herself Olivia Corey is actually Amanda Harris, who popped into existence one day in 1895 when Tate was painting a portrait of his ideal woman. Like Quentin, Amanda appears to be the same age she was when she was in Collinsport in 1897. Tate was obsessed with her then, but she and Quentin fell in love with each other. She still loves Quentin, and has now met him and set about trying to restore his memory. Julia knows all about Amanda, and has even come into possession of one of the portraits Tate painted of her. Had she said that she knew where he could find Amanda Harris, Julia could have expected a strong reaction from Tate. I suppose we can expect to see Julia team up with Amanda and then pay another visit to Tate.

The Whisperer in Darkness is not the only work of fiction Julia’s meeting with Tate recalls. It will also remind longtime viewers of #153 and #154, when Vicki and Frank went to a building in the old cemetery north of town and met the cemetery’s caretaker. Much of #153 was taken up with what writers call “shoe leather,” material showing how characters get from one scene to another. There was a whole act about Vicki and Frank setting out on a date for dinner in a restaurant, riding in his car, and her developing a vague sense they should go somewhere else instead. They quarrel about her vague sense, then he capitulates and takes a series of turns she dictates. It gradually dawns on her that the ghost of Josette Collins is feeding the directions into her mind. They find themselves in the cemetery, and Vicki relays further directions from Josette until they find themselves at the door. They knock, wait around, and are about to leave. Then, the door drifts open. They stand there staring inside. That’s the end of the episode.

Vicki and Frank were still at the front door in the reprise that opened #154. They were met there by the caretaker of the cemetery, who asked them if they were ghosts. The conversation got weirder from there, but he did let them into the building. Frank faded into the background during that scene, but his unfailingly rational, serviceably masculine presence did rule out any possibility that Vicki would be in any serious danger during the scene. Had Vicki been alone with the caretaker, there would have been some suspense as to what would happen between them. The setting is eerie enough that he might turn out to be a ghost himself, or some other kind of being who will be a threat to her. As it is, he is labeled a harmless old crank from the first moment we see him.

Yesterday’s episode dispensed with all of #153’s shoe leather. We’ve heard Julia wants to visit Monroe, we cut to her pressing a doorbell, and we assume that she drove to Monroe’s house. The door drifted open at the end of yesterday’s episode just as it did at the end of that one, but Julia actually went inside. She goes alone, so that she will not have anyone to help her fight any enemy she may find there or to corroborate her version of whatever events she may witness.

In those ways, these two episodes are an improvement over what we saw in #153 and #154. There is another way, however, in which they are a deep step down. The doddering old caretaker, played by Daniel F. Keyes, was hilarious, a refugee from EC Comics who got laughs every minute he was on screen. Tate, like other Roger Davis characters, elicits impatience at best and revulsion all too often. Julia, and we, deserve better than to have to see him again.

Episode 861: Complete control of my faculties

Judith Collins Trask, owner of the estate of Collinwood and all the Collins family businesses, has returned home after more than thirteen weeks confined to a sanitarium. Her return is supposed to be a big shock, but they spoil it by having Joan Bennett do the opening voiceover. They really should have paid more attention to that sort of thing.

Judith’s husband, the odious Gregory Trask, gaslighted her into the sanitarium, and has been exercising control over the Collins family’s wealth ever since. Today, Judith tells her stuffy but lovable brother Edward that Trask never visited her during her time as a mental patient. Edward is surprised, telling her that Trask left the house for an overnight stay every week during that period, and presented these absences as visits to her. In fact, he is on such a trip now. She does not want to hear any more, and says she will give Gregory a chance to explain himself when he comes back to Collinwood.

Judith claims to be entirely herself. That puts her in the minority today. When she left Collinwood in July, Judith had a stepdaughter named Charity Trask. When she enters today, she sees someone who is to all appearances Charity leading Edward and a lady named Kitty Soames in a séance. The body is indeed Charity’s, but sorcerer Count Petofi erased Charity’s personality in #819 and replaced it with that of the late Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl and “mentalist” whom Judith met in #771, when Judith’s late brother Carl brought her to Collinwood as his fiancée. Pansy noticed Judith’s disapproval of her when she was alive, and is quite indignant about it now. That Judith keeps live-naming her, calling her “Charity,” doesn’t help.

Judith does manage to do something Edward failed to do a while ago, and talks Pansy into moving back into the great house of Collinwood. She agrees to give up the apartment she rented in the village of Collinsport after she took a job doing her old act at the local tavern, the Blue Whale. We saw her at the Blue Whale in Friday’s episode; it was shortly before nine PM, and she was the only person in the place. So perhaps her income as a cabaret performer is not particularly lavish, and the mansion is a more appealing place to live than the apartment that job would pay for.

For her part, Kitty is still, most of the time, the dowager countess of Hampshire. But the ghost of Josette Collins has been possessing her off and on ever since she arrived at Collinwood in #844, and the trend is definitely towards “on.” In Friday’s scene at the Blue Whale, Kathryn Leigh Scott played Kitty quietly and let Nancy Barrett’s Pansy provide the scene with all its Crazy Lady Energy; today, it is Miss Barrett’s turn to stand back and let Miss Scott show that Kitty is Pansy’s match in that department.

Crazy Lady Energy, also known as “CLE,” the main driving force of Soap Opera Land. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Judith and Edward’s brother Quentin is in an even stranger predicament than are Pansy and what’s left of Kitty. Between #854 and #856, Petofi forced Quentin to swap bodies with him, so that David Selby now plays Petofi and Thayer David plays Quentin. I call Mr Selby’s portrayal of Petofi “Q-Petofi,” and Thayer David’s portrayal of Quentin “P-Quentin.”

Kitty with P-Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The initial shock of finding himself estranged from his own body and trapped in Petofi’s left P-Quentin bewildered. All he could do was go to one person after another and tell the true story of what had happened, which produced only a widespread belief that Count Petofi had gone mad. Now he is starting to figure out how to use his resources.

P-Quentin’s first attempt to take advantage of the fact that everyone thinks he is Petofi was not successful. In #859, he exploited Kitty’s fear of Petofi and threatened to make her vanish if she did not bring him a portrait of Quentin later that night. Kitty tried to comply, but failed, and now it is long past the deadline. Soon she will realize that his threat was an empty one, and so far from being useful to him as a cat’s paw, she will be in a position to expose him as powerless.

Today, P-Quentin runs a smarter game. He introduces himself to Judith as Petofi, and claims to have psychic abilities. He pretends to read her palm, and tells her a story from their childhood that very few people could know. She is delighted, and decides that Count Petofi is someone she wants to see more of.

P-Quentin and Judith. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In her bedroom upstairs at Collinwood, Kitty has another fit of Josettification. She opens the trunk at the foot of her bed and finds Josette’s wedding dress. She puts it on and wraps a red cloak around it. She goes to the top of Widow’s Hill, the cliff from which Josette jumped to her death in the 1790s. The ghost of Josette’s husband Jeremiah appears to her.

The show is set in 1897 now. It was set in the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968. Miss Scott played Josette then, and for most of the segment Anthony George played Jeremiah. After Jeremiah’s death, Timothy Gordon played his ghost in a memorable part of the 1790s story. Gordon made two appearances as the ghost after the show returned to contemporary dress, playing him in #462 and #512. This is Jeremiah’s first appearance in 1897, and the second time, after #462, that Gordon’s name appeared in an on-screen credit on Dark Shadows.

Episode 807: An award-winning performance, wouldn’t you say?

From #1 to #274, each episode of Dark Shadows began with a voiceover narration by Alexandra Moltke Isles, usually in character as well-meaning governess Vicki. This identified Vicki with our point of view and suggested that she would sooner or later learn everything we knew.

Jonathan Frid joined the cast as vampire Barnabas Collins in #211, and quickly became the show’s great breakout star. If the upright Vicki found out what we knew about Barnabas, one of them would have to be destroyed. Vicki was the favorite of longtime viewers and Barnabas was attracting new ones, so that was out of the question. Therefore, other members of the cast started taking turns reading the voiceovers, and doing so not as their characters, but in the role of External Narrator.

Today marks the first time Frid himself reads the narration. His training first in Canada, then at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and later at Yale School of Drama prepared Frid well in the art of dramatic reading, and in later years he would concentrate on that aspect of his craft. Several of his colleagues are his equals in these voiceovers- I would particularly mention Kathryn Leigh Scott, whose conception of The Narrator is always arresting, and Thayer David, who could consistently achieve the most difficult of all effects in voice acting, a perfectly simple reading. So I can’t say I wish Frid had done all of them, but he is always good, and today’s performance is among his most gorgeous.

The action opens on a set known to longtime viewers as the Evans cottage, where from 1966 to 1968 artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie served as Dark Shadows‘ principal representatives of the working class of the village of Collinsport. In those days, it was on this set that we saw how the misdeeds of the ancient and esteemed Collins family had consequences that spilled out of the estate of Collinwood and warped the lives of people trying to make a more or less honest living nearby.

Now the dramatic date is 1897, and Sam hasn’t been born yet. But the cottage is already an artist’s studio. It is temporarily occupied by the nationally famous Charles Delaware Tate, who is painting a portrait of rakish libertine Quentin Collins at the behest of evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Charity Trask, a resident of the great house of Collinwood, is visiting Tate in the cottage when she sees the face in the portrait change from that of Quentin. It takes on a great deal of fur and long fangs, and reminds Charity of a wolf.

By the time Tate looks at the painting again, it has resumed its normal appearance. He tells Charity that the transformation must have been in her imagination. She is willing to consider the possibility, but we know better. Quentin is a werewolf, a condition Petofi knows how to cure. Portraits on Dark Shadows have had supernatural qualities at least since #70, including portraits we saw Sam execute on this set in 1966, 1967, and 1968, and the show has borrowed from The Picture of Dorian Gray before. Moreover, Tate’s reaction to Charity is one of barely controlled panic. Nancy Barrett has to ramp up Charity’s own emotional distress to the limit to make it plausible she would not notice Tate’s extreme agitation. Perhaps if Tate were played by a better actor than the ever-disappointing Roger Davis, his response might have been ambiguous enough that Miss Barrett could keep the tone a bit lower, but his unequivocal display of alarm leaves her nowhere to go but over the top.

Mr Davis was under no obligation to play the scene transparently, since Tate later goes to Petofi’s henchman Aristide and lays out in so many words his precise relationship to Petofi’s operations and his knowledge of them. Tate’s career is his reward for selling his soul to Petofi, and he has already experienced great sorrow as a result of that bargain. Tate knows that the portrait changed to reflect the full Moon’s influence on Quentin and that Petofi is currently in possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins. Aristide tells us that Petofi’s own body is in suspended animation while he acts through Jamison. He also says that it was in 1797 that Petofi’s right hand was cut off, and that if he does not reclaim the hand in a few weeks, by the date of the one hundredth anniversary of the amputation, he will die and so will Tate.

Jamison/ Petofi is in the prison cell in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas has traveled back in time from the 1960s with some vaguely good intentions and is hanging around 1897 causing one disaster after another. Now, he is doing battle with Petofi and has locked him, in the form of Jamison, in the cell. Barnabas’ reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, guards Jamison/ Petofi during the day. Early in the episode, Jamison/ Petofi calls Magda and pleads with her to release him. He tells her that he is “just a little boy” and that she is a “rather heartless creature.” She says she wishes he were a little boy again, but that she isn’t stupid and he won’t fool her. Indeed, the phrase “rather heartless creature” and Jamison/ Petofi’s manner in delivering it sound so much like Thayer David as Petofi that they hardly count as an attempt to deceive Magda.

Later, Jamison/ Petofi casts a spell to summon Aristide, then calls to Magda again. When Magda arrives, Jamison/ Petofi gives himself a better script than the one from which he had acted in his previous scene with her. He pretends not to remember how he got into the cell and to be shocked that Magda knows he is there. Perhaps the utter transparency of his earlier pleadings was an attempt to get Magda to underestimate his abilities as a trickster.

In #803, we saw that when Petofi took possession of him Jamison’s right hand disappeared from his wrist, matching Petofi’s own mutilated condition. When Jamison/ Petofi feigns the amnesia that might come upon recovery from possession, we might therefore expect Magda to demand that he remove his gloves to prove that he is himself again. But he plays the part of Jamison so convincingly that we are not really surprised he does fool Magda. She goes into the cell, embraces Jamison/ Petofi, and he kisses her on the cheek. It is this kiss that spreads his magical power, and she realizes too late that she has been had.

Aristide arrives a moment later, and Jamison/ Petofi calls his portrayal of an innocent boy “an award-winning performance.” Indeed, if there had been daytime Emmys in 1969, David Henesy might have won one for his portrayal of Thayer David playing Petofi playing Jamison.

Aristide wants to kill Magda; Jamison/ Petofi forbids this. Under his power, she announces that she is responsible for all the evil that has happened in 1897. She was responsible for releasing Barnabas and therefore for all the murders and other harm he has done; she made Quentin a werewolf, and is to blame for his killings in his lupine form and for the curse his descendants will inherit; she stole Petofi’s severed hand and is at fault for the deaths of Rroma maiden Julianka and of her own husband Sandor that resulted from the hand’s presence. She even takes the blame for Quentin’s murder of her sister Jenny, the act for which the werewolf curse was meant as vengeance. Magda says she must be punished. Jamison/ Petofi tells her that he is not interested in punishing her. He has another use in mind for Magda She will lead him and Aristide to Barnabas’ coffin today, and they will destroy him.

Longtime viewers will perk up twice when Aristide says that Petofi lost his hand in 1797 and that he has exactly one hundred years to recover it. From December 1966 to March 1967, Dark Shadows’ first supernatural menace was undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who at intervals of exactly one hundred years incinerated herself and a young son of hers, who was always named David, in an unholy ceremony that renewed her existence, but not that of the Davids. Since the usual laws of nature don’t apply, the show needs some other causal mechanism to create suspense, and anniversaries will do as well as anything else. Another iteration of Laura was on earlier in the 1897 segment. It was fun to see her again, but they could shoehorn her into that year only by retconning away the one hundred year pattern in her immolations. It’s reassuring in a way to see that Petofi is bringing centenaries back.

The date 1797 is also significant. It was in 1796 that Barnabas died and became a vampire. We flashed back to that period for the show’s first costume drama segment in November 1967 to March 1968, and Barnabas went back to 1796 for a week in January 1969. So we may go back again some day, and if Petofi was alive and in his prime in 1797, we might run into him there.

Barnabas and Petofi are not the only characters from the 1790s who might be on the minds of attentive longtime viewers. Barnabas’ little sister Sarah died in 1796, and as a ghost was an extremely important part of the show from June to November 1967. We’ve been getting reminders of Sarah for the last several days. In #792 wicked witch Angelique produced a toy soldier of Barnabas’ that Sarah gave to strange and troubled boy David in #331. In #805, Charity found Sarah’s recorder, a prop that often served as Sarah’s calling card in 1967, and talked about learning to play it. And today, we see a portrait standing on the floor of the Evans cottage, a set which Sarah visited in #260, depicting a girl wearing a bonnet very much like the one Sarah wore as a ghost in 1967 and a pink dress just like the one she wore when we saw her as a living being in the flashback to the 1790s.

I wonder if, when they were making up the flimsies for this part of the show, they had thought of reintroducing Sarah. That would have required a recasting of the part- Sharon Smyth was noticeably older when we saw Sarah die in January 1968 than she was when Sarah was a ghost in June 1967, and by now we would wonder what she has been eating in the afterlife that has made her get so much taller. Besides, Miss Smyth* had stopped acting by this point.

The process of planning the stories was in two stages, a rough sketching of themes six months in advance, and a capsule of each episode written thirteen weeks ahead of time. There was a lot of flexibility when it came to putting those plans into effect. Some stories that were supposed to end within thirteen weeks were extended over years, while others that were expected to be a big deal petered out before they got going. In an interview preserved by Danny Horn at his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, writer Violet Welles said that many of the moments on the show that made the least sense were those written when the plans hadn’t worked out: “toward the end of the cycle, you’d have characters who were really not a lot of interest who had to play scenes with other characters who really didn’t have a lot of interest, dealing with things that basically didn’t concern them. Those were hard to write.”

This episode was taped on 25 July 1969; thirteen weeks before that was 21 May. Six months before was 25 January. By 25 January, Denise Nickerson had been on the show for two months as Amy Jennings. Nickerson was actually born on 1 April 1957, but they several times say that Amy is nine years old. When the show goes to 1897, Nickerson plays Nora Collins, who is also nine. On 19 May, Nickerson taped #761, the last episode she would appear in until #782. She is currently in the middle of a second long absence from 1897, unseen between #783 and #812. Her characters were so important in the months leading up to the 1897 segment and she played them so well that we wonder what they were thinking leaving her in the background so long.

Maybe they were thinking of bringing her back as Sarah. Nickerson didn’t look all that much like Sharon Smyth, and was a far more accomplished young actress than was Miss Smyth, but she did have brown hair, and the show prioritized hair color above all else in recasting parts. For example, two actresses followed Mrs Isles in the role of Vicki, neither of whom had much in common with her either in acting style or in looks, but who both had black hair. So perhaps there was a time when they intended to travel between 1897 and the 1790s and to meet Sarah, played by Denise Nickerson. If Nickerson were still alive, perhaps someone would ask her if she posed for the portrait that is standing on the floor of the Evans cottage today.

*She’s been using her married name for decades now, but when talking about her as a child it’s pretty weird to refer to her as “Mrs Lentz.” Since I use surnames for people associated with the making of the show and attach courtesy titles to surnames of living people, I have to call her “Miss Smyth.”