Maggie Evans is depressed about her marriage to drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins. In #1016, Maggie was getting ready to call a lawyer so she could put an end to their joyless union, but she changed her mind and decided to give it one more try. That has not worked out, and she has gone from contemplating divorce to attempting suicide. She is about to fling herself to her death from a window high in the great house of Collinwood when Quentin’s sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard enters the room and talks her out of it. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe, which is in some ways a mirror image of this one. This incident is a case in point. In the original continuity, it was Liz’ counterpart whom people kept interrupting while she was trying to do away with herself,* so she takes the reversed position in this universe.
Most of the episode is devoted to the activities of a visitor from the main continuity, Barnabas Collins. The only thing Barnabas has a motivation to do is to try to get back home, but he seems to have decided he’d rather meddle in the problems the people in this alien universe are having. He suspects that the houseguest at Collinwood who is generally accepted as Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of Quentin’s late first wife Angelique, is in fact Angelique herself risen from the dead. He also suspects that Maggie’s suicide attempt was the consequence of spells Angelique cast on her.
Barnabas is right about these things, but his grounds for believing them are thin. Angelique’s counterpart in his universe is a wicked witch who has long been the bane of his existence, and so he simply assumes that a woman with her face and voice will be the same. But for three weeks, Alexis really was staying at Collinwood, and Angelique really was in her tomb. Alexis looked and sounded exactly like Angelique. We saw that, while Alexis may not have been a one-dimensional innocent, she was not a witch and was not a direct threat to anyone’s life or liberty. Had Barnabas met Alexis before Angelique came back to life and murdered her, he would have had exactly the same suspicions about her that he has now about Angelique. It is purely a matter of luck that his suspicions coincide with the truth.
In the main continuity, Barnabas’ best friend and most frequent accomplice in his many crimes is mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia’s counterpart here is the housekeeper at Collinwood. Miss Julia Hoffman is as devoted to Angelique as the original Julia is devoted to Barnabas. As the first Julia shows great reluctance when Barnabas is about to murder someone and shows even greater efficiency in getting rid of the bodies afterward, so this Julia protested yesterday that she would have nothing to do with Angelique’s plan to drive Maggie to her death, but was waiting outside the room when she was about to jump.
After confronting Julia and Angelique, needlessly revealing to them his suspicions, Barnabas decides to get some hard evidence. So he goes to Angelique’s old bedroom and stares really hard at the portrait of her that hangs there. She is in another part of the house, but grows agitated. She runs to the room and screams at him to stop staring into her eyes. He breaks into a triumphant… not grin, exactly, it’s more of a simper. It may be the only triumphant simper ever seen. That suits the occasion. He knows he was right, but Angelique knows that he knows, and it is not clear what he either can do to fight her or what reason he has to want to fight her.
Jonathan Frid’s invention of a facial expression previously thought to be impossible is one of several bits of conspicuously good acting in this episode. He also gets to deliver brief enigmatic responses to a number of questions, such as “Perhaps” and “Did I?,” and he makes each of those words materialize in space in such an arresting way that even his scene partners can’t help but show how impressed they are. As Liz fussing over Maggie, Joan Bennett shows a maternal quality that brings her hitherto undefined character into a very sharp focus. Grayson Hall also adds greatly to Hoffman’s depth. Standing by while Maggie is trying to kill herself, she is bland and detached. When she tells Angelique that it really is better for them that Maggie did not succeed, she is the opposite, torn between a number of emotions, including relief that she has avoided responsibility for a death.
Angelique has several comic lines, for example a wistful lament that she doesn’t get to see Maggie’s corpse mangled on the rocks below her window. And she puts real fervor into her spellcasting directed at Maggie. My wife, Mrs Acilius, remembered that when Lara Parker first joined the cast she wished she were playing an ingenue, so much so that Frid had to keep reminding her that she was the villain. But now she has settled in and become part of the group. So when Angelique abuses Maggie, Parker and her friend Kathryn Leigh Scott turn into two little girls playing make-believe, and they have so much fun at it that they are irresistible to watch, no matter how miserable Maggie is.
When Dark Shadows began in June 1966, its biggest draw was movie star Joan Bennett as reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz was highly capable, and Bennett made her compelling to watch. When in #25 Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, grudgingly complimented her on her “neat way of managing people,” we could see that he was putting it mildly. But the show didn’t handle Liz’ storyline very well, and she soon became a blocking figure. As the owner of the estate of Collinwood and of the Collins family businesses, as a central player in all the stories they had started with, and as the powerful personality Bennett had created, Liz was such an important part of the show that when she became a brake on the action, there was a constant danger that it would be impossible for anything to happen ever again.
The arrival of Roger’s estranged wife Laura Murdoch Collins in #123 marked Dark Shadows’ transformation into a supernatural thriller. By the time Laura went up in smoke in #191, her story had absorbed two of the four original narrative themes, “The Revenge of Burke Devlin” and well-meaning governess Vicki’s growing friendship with strange and troubled boy David, and had undercut whatever interest we might still have had in the other two, the mystery of Liz’ decision to become a recluse and Vicki’s quest to learn her true identity. The emerging Dark Shadows 2.0 had little room for Liz, and she subsided to the margins. When the show traveled back in time and became a costume drama from November 1967 to March 1968 and again from March to November 1969, Bennett played other characters and was able to make a substantial contribution, but Liz would never again be a suitable vessel for her great talents.
For the last eight weeks, the show has been in another time travel segment. Now it has traveled, not back in time, but sideways. They are in an alternate universe. The show insists on calling this universe “Parallel Time.” It is 1970 here, as it is in the original continuity, but a different 1970 where people with the names and faces we already know are living very different lives.
The Elizabeth Collins Stoddard of Parallel Time is not the mistress of Collinwood or an effective businesswoman. This Liz entrusted her inheritance to her brother Roger, who turned out to be just as feckless as his counterpart in the original continuity. As the penniless Roger we met in 1966 lives in Liz’ house as her guest and works in Liz’ business as her employee, so this Liz and Roger both live at Collinwood as the dependents of their brother, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins.
In the original continuity, Quentin was not Liz and Roger’s brother, nor did he own anything. We got to know him when Dark Shadows was set in 1897, and he was a charming rogue, the younger brother of Judith and Edward Collins, who like Liz and Roger were played by Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds. So the parallel lines representing the two versions of 1970 take a bit of a swerve into that other epoch.
Today, Liz is busy organizing a costume ball to be held in the great house of Collinwood. They had such a ball every year at this time when Quentin was married to his first wife, the late Angelique Stokes Collins, and Liz thinks that having another one would be the perfect occasion for Quentin to introduce all of his friends to his new wife, the former Maggie Evans. Liz needs help getting this party going. She comes bustling into the drawing room today and addresses herself to Angelique’s identical twin sister, Alexis Stokes, announcing that the party is tonight and 14 of the guests have failed to RSVP. She bemoans her inability to get anything organized and pleads with Alexis to help her. Alexis agrees to do so and excuses herself from a chess game she had been playing with Barnabas Collins, a man who recently showed up and introduced himself as a distant cousin of the Collinses of Collinwood.
Quentin enters the drawing room and orders Liz to cancel the ball. She says that it is too late to do that. Quentin stalks off and goes outside. Liz turns to Barnabas and asks him to reason with Quentin. Barnabas is unsure that he is the right person, but he goes to the door anyway. He opens it just in time to hear Quentin peeling away in his car. Maggie appears at the head of the stairs and asks if Quentin has gone. Barnabas has to say that he has, and Maggie looks crushed. Liz is unable to help in any way.
Later, Liz returns to the drawing room in the middle of a conversation between Quentin and Maggie. She is carrying an enormous decanter containing some sherry and congratulating herself on calming the cook’s nerves by her bartending. Quentin excuses himself to go get into his costume.
Liz finds that Maggie has not yet chosen a costume. She urges her to do so at once. Maggie says she supposed that Angelique always picked out her costume weeks in advance. Liz knows that Maggie is intimidated living in Angelique’s shadow, and does not know what to say in response to that remark. She quickly changes the subject. She brightens, and says that Alexis has brought many lovely dresses down from the attic. She urges Maggie to go to Alexis’ room and choose one of them.
As the time for the guests to arrive comes near, Liz and Barnabas meet in the foyer. A portrait of the Barnabas Collins who died in 1830 hangs on the spot on the wall next to the front door where earlier this week we had seen a metal doodad that looks like a coat of arms. Barnabas is wearing the same outfit, and looks just like the man in the portrait. Liz is wearing a dress of the same vintage. She is overjoyed, and tells Barnabas that the period suits him. He thanks her, and returns the compliment. Quentin is wearing a blue federal coat; Liz and Barnabas tell him that he, too, is suited to the early 1800s. Alexis comes downstairs in a blue dress, and she receives the same commendation. Lastly Maggie makes her appearance. When Quentin sees her dress, he becomes very tense. He tells her to take it off, orders her never to wear it again, and smashes his glass on the floor. The camera pans from Barnabas’shocked expression to a flickering look of pleasure on Alexis’ face; Liz stands between them, and unfortunately we only see the top of her head.
What Liz does not know is that the person she thinks is Alexis is in fact Angelique risen from the grave. Angelique murdered Alexis, took her place, and is conspiring with housekeeper Julia Hoffman to drive Maggie and Quentin apart. The story is a souped-up version of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, in which the dead first wife is not only a memory that triggers anxiety in her successor but a supernatural being who rises from the dead to torment her directly. There is a scene with Maggie looking out the window of the drawing room that is an exact recreation of a shot in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film of Rebecca, and when Angelique and Hoffman trick Maggie into wearing the same dress Angelique wore to last year’s ball, prompting Quentin’s outburst, most grownups in the original audience would remember the same thing happening to the second Mrs de Winter in that film.
Angelique is the villain, and Maggie is the heroine. Still, we rather like Angelique. The sister-murdering is bad, of course, but Quentin is such a lousy husband that she is doing Maggie a big favor by trying to bring their intolerable marriage to its end as soon as possible. For example, today Quentin finds Maggie reading his old love letters to Angelique. He might justifiably have objected that those are private and say he wished she’d asked before reading them, but he doesn’t do that or anything else one adult would do when disappointed in another. Instead, he flies into a rage, accuses her of a variety of things she hasn’t done, and orders her to, and I quote, “Go to your room!”
Later, in the room they share, Quentin is still scolding Maggie for failing to admit that she was lying about how she found the letters. We know she had in fact told the truth. When she tells him so, he dismisses her with a shake of the head. When she brings up the fact that it is the anniversary of his wedding to Angelique, he shouts that she is forbidden to discuss the subject, then storms out and slams the door. This is when he goes downstairs, tells Liz to cancel the party, and drives away. We have never seen Maggie have a happy day with Quentin. He sometimes manages to be pleasant in the intervals between his tantrums, but even then he can’t let go of his habit of talking to Maggie as if she were a child and he were her somewhat weary guardian. If Angelique can hasten their final split, Maggie will owe her an enormous debt of gratitude.
Barnabas is not in fact a descendant of the man whose portrait now hangs in the foyer. He is a visitor from the main continuity. Angelique’s counterpart there is his great enemy, so it is fun to see him talking with this Angelique and playing chess with her.
David Selby has a problem with one of his lines, when Quentin winds up saying “I wonder where I got the illusion that an hour or two alone would settle one’s all of problems.” This is a fairly minor stumble by Dark Shadows standards, but it comes when Angelique is in closeup and Lara Parker’s left eyelid twitches when she hears “one’s all of problems.” That reaction is worth a laugh.
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.
Buffie doesn’t like what she sees.
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.
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.
Angelique Stokes Collins has risen from the dead, but her renewed existence may end within seconds. She is overwhelmingly cold, and can warm up only by draining the heat from the body of a living person. Someone is coming in the front door, just in time to be her victim and die in her stead. She wonders who it will be.
Almost all the characters currently on Dark Shadows are either so important to an ongoing story that their deaths would end a major arc or have so many connections to everyone else that their deaths would start a new one. So if she kills mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, his fiancée Sabrina Stuart, or barmaid Buffie Harrington, Angelique will be ending the Jekyll and Hyde story, or at least shifting it into a radically new phase. If she kills drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, his wife Maggie Evans Collins, or housekeeper Julia Hoffman, she will be ending the adaptation of Rebecca. If she kills Carolyn Loomis or her husband Will, she will be ending the restaging of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
If Angelique kills woebegone homebody Elizabeth Collins Stoddard or her brother, sardonic dandy Roger Collins, she won’t be ending any ongoing stories. But Liz and Roger are the counterparts of characters who were central to the life of the great house of Collinwood in the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows, when it was set in another universe, and are played by actors who have substantial followings. If either of them is murdered, the audience will expect major consequences. Angelique’s son Daniel Collins and Daniel’s cousin Amy Collins aren’t doing much just now, but if Angelique kills a child, especially her own son, the ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices would join the audience in insisting she face a serious reckoning that would take up a lot of screen time. This fit of heat vampirism came on Angelique too suddenly to make sense as the start of a new arc, so we can rule all of those candidates out.
There are also a couple of characters who were introduced to fill in for actors who were away the previous couple of months filming their parts in the theatrical feature House of Dark Shadows. Among those are Angelique’s Aunt Hannah and butler Mr Trask. They are possibilities, but are both played by actors who have enough going for them that it would be a bit surprising to bring them back just to kill them off. There are also a few miscellaneous day players whose characters would have no reason to let themselves into the great house of Collinwood- a bartender we saw in #991, a landlady we saw in #997, etc.
So it would seem that there are only two people who could be Angelique’s next meal. One is sleazy musician Bruno Hess, a former boyfriend of hers who lives in the cottage on the grounds of Collinwood and is friends with Cyrus, but who has been neither seen nor missed for some time. The other is Larry Chase, attorney at law.
Bruno is played by the dynamic Michael Stroka, who twice made a mark when cast in stories set in the other universe. Larry was written into the show as a last-minute substitute for a part played by an actor whose health problems made it impossible for him to continue. They didn’t have time for auditions, so they drafted associate director Ken McEwen for the part. McEwen was in the building, and he had a guild card because of some small parts he’d taken in TV shows he’d worked on in the 1950s. When he has enough time to rehearse, which is to say when he has had more time to rehearse than actors usually got on a show like Dark Shadows, McEwen gets his lines right, except for adding “Well…” at the beginning of every single one. You can tell he is making a sincere effort not to ruin the show. But that’s about all you can say for him. Even at his best he’s stiff and distracted, and when he hasn’t been able to get his part down, he disintegrates completely. So it isn’t much of a surprise that Larry is the one who opens the door. It wasn’t a surprise to me, I should say; writing these posts keeps all the details fresh in my mind. My wife, Mrs Acilius, looked at him for about thirty seconds and asked “Who’s that?”
Larry plays the same scene with Angelique that her second victim, Fred the transient handyman, had played with her in #1003, right down to telling her that he had wanted to hold her since he first saw her. Fred was played by Edmond Hashim, and anyone who sees the two versions of this scene side by side will come away with a new appreciation for Hashim’s talents as an actor. This is McEwen’s final on-screen appearance, though he will pinch hit as the opening narrator in three upcoming episodes. He will continue as an associate director through episode 1179/1180 in December.
Will enters to find Angelique screaming and Larry dead. Angelique, who is impersonating her late identical twin sister Alexis, claims that Larry was just standing there when he had an attack of some kind and dropped dead. Will touches the corpse and says that he is so cold he must have been dead for hours. “Alexis” insists he just died a moment before. Will calls Cyrus, who is the Collins family physician.
Cyrus is in his lab, looking at the potion which turns him into the Mr Hyde-like John Yaeger. He is about to capitulate to his craving when the telephone rings. Will tells him that Larry is dead and asks him to come to Collinwood. Cyrus puts the potion back in his safe and rejoices that he is “Saved!” Larry was Cyrus’ lawyer and apparently a social friend as well. We’ve already seen Cyrus do enough horrible things that this sociopathic reaction is no shock.
Back at Collinwood, Will and “Alexis” are talking with Barnabas Collins. Unknown to “Alexis,” Barnabas is a visitor from the other universe. Her counterpart in his world was the wicked witch who turned him into a vampire, so Barnabas cannot keep a hostile edge out of his voice and manner when he is talking to her. Will is one of Barnabas’ victims, and knows all of his secrets.
When they are alone in the drawing room, “Alexis” questions Will about Barnabas. Will denies knowing him particularly well. Barnabas is staying at Will’s house, and several years ago Will wrote a biography of Barnabas’ counterpart in this universe, a man who lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830. Barnabas claims to be a descendant of that Barnabas Collins, and to have come to Collinwood to meet the author of the biography. Will becomes more and more disturbed as “Alexis” presses him harder and harder for information. She is perplexed that he won’t tell her anything. Lara Parker and John Karlen have both been on the show for a long time, but this is the first substantial two scene between them, and it is terrific. Their acting styles were very different, but they couldn’t have meshed better.
Barnabas is sitting at a table in the Eagle tavern. There is a glass of reddish liquid in front of him. In view of his condition, one wonders what that liquid might be.
Barnabas invites Buffie to sit with him. Since there are no other customers, she agrees. He tells her he is from South America. The son of this universe’s Barnabas Collins whom he claims as his great-grandfather went to Peru; when he introduced himself to the family, he said that his forebear did not die in that country. But evidently his imaginary descendants stayed on the continent, somewhere.
The Eagle is the counterpart of the Blue Whale in the other continuity. In #3, Burke Devlin was sitting at a table in the Blue Whale with hard-working young fisherman Joe Haskell when he said that his success in life began when a strange man picked him up in a bar in Montevideo. That was the show’s only reference to Uruguay, but Burke, the Blue Whale, and Brazil came to be strongly associated with each other. The song “Aquarela do Brasil,” a big hit in the English speaking world in the 1960s under the title “Brazil,” played on the jukebox at the Blue Whale, and it became Burke’s theme song. Ultimately Burke would die on a business trip to Brazil. Barnabas and Burke were enemies; when he sits at this table and claims to have a South American background, longtime viewers may wonder if he is thinking that the new universe is a place where he can try out a new personality and maybe he will start by imitating Burke’s.
Burke was a dashing action hero, attractive to women. Barnabas’ attempt to imitate him breaks down almost immediately. He winds up mimicking another prominent bachelor from his native universe, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, when he asks Buffie if she’s ever heard of the theory of “Parallel Time.”
Buffie shakes her head no. Barnabas says that some people believe that there are many universes, and that a copy of each of us can be found in each of them. They may look the same, but they lead different lives because they have made different choices. Buffie laughs and says that she hopes her other selves are having more fun than she is. She hastens to say that she doesn’t mean she isn’t having fun at the moment, sharing a table with Barnabas; she means that her life in Collinsport, as viewed from the most all-encompassing perspective and analyzed in the most thorough philosophic manner, well and truly sucks shit. Barnabas says that the other Buffies in the multiverse might have left Collinsport* and had wonderful adventures.
Longtime viewers saw one of those other Buffies in #951, when we were still in the original continuity. She had a different name; she went by Nelle Gunston. And as befits a mirror universe, she moved in the opposite direction. Rather than leaving Collinsport to look for something new as Buffie wishes she had done, Nelle left her parents’ home in Virginia and went to Collinsport because she had joined a cult dedicated to the destruction of the human race and its replacement by a loathsome breed of Elder Gods known as the Leviathan People. Barnabas had been the leader of the Leviathan cult, and when Nelle came to town she sat with him by the same table where Buffie and Barnabas sit today. They even take the same seats.
Buffie is charmed by Barnabas’ talk; between the suavity that Jonathan Frid brings to his part today and the energy with which Elizabeth Eis presents Buffie’s enthusiasm for him, it is far easier than it usually is to believe that Barnabas is a sexy dude. Maybe we are supposed to think that role-playing as Burke has enabled him to loosen up.
The conversation is really warming up when the bell attached to the front door rings. “Customer,” Buffie ruefully says to Barnabas as she rises. It is Cyrus.
Barnabas invites Cyrus to sit with them. He declines, saying that he came only to ask Buffie if she had seen John Yaeger lately. She tenses up. Yaeger used to beat her up and force her to help him with his crimes. She says that Cyrus himself had told Buffie that Yaeger wouldn’t be back in Collinsport. Cyrus says that he did, but that he is worried he might not be able to predict Yaeger’s movements as well as he thought he could. He offers Barnabas a lift back to Collinwood. That’s a bit surprising, since Cyrus got uptight when he saw Barnabas. As Yaeger, Cyrus discovered that there is a coffin in the basement of Will and Carolyn’s house, and he suspects that Barnabas spends his days there. But longtime viewers can remember the days Barnabas and Burke had conversations at the Blue Whale that were just as tense as the one he and Cyrus have in the Eagle, and Burke never failed to observe the small graces. It’s just the done thing, I suppose.
Cyrus leaves, and Buffie remains standing. She and Barnabas keep talking. He gets close, and goes in for a bite. He stops himself at the last second, to her surprise and disappointment. She was apparently ready for a kiss on the neck. He says he has to go. She is even more disappointed by that, but he promises to come back at closing. He asks to walk her home, and she happily agrees.
Will and Cyrus are in the drawing room at Collinwood. Will urges Cyrus to join him in a drink. When Cyrus declines, Will reminisces about the old days at Collinwood, when the party would just be getting started at this hour. In those days, people would leave the great house in the small hours of the morning and continue their revels at the Eagle. Cyrus says he won’t find much company there tonight. When he says that the only people in the place earlier were “the girl who works there” and Barnabas, Will looks alarmed. All of his mannerisms that suggest drunkenness drop away, and he rushes out.
Will gets to the tavern, and finds Buffie alone. The alcoholic author is obviously one of her favorite and most lucrative customers, so even though she has already blown out the candles she tells him he is in time for last call. To her amazement, he is not interested in a drink. He asks her where Barnabas is. She says he’ll be back and that he is taking her home. He says no, and she asks what’s wrong. Before he can answer, Will hears Barnabas’ voice behind him, echoing Buffie’s question. Laboring under the vampire’s power, Will has no choice but to leave Buffie alone with Barnabas.
Nelle, too, had agreed left the tavern with Barnabas. She expected to meet the leader of the Leviathans at his place, and was unhappy to find that the two of them were alone. Buffie is again an inverted mirror image of her counterpart. She takes Barnabas to her place, and is quite happy to be alone with him. The two close in for an embrace. He bites her neck, and she collapses. He had bitten Nelle, too. At that moment, Cyrus enters the room.
Cyrus does not exactly have a counterpart in the other continuity, but Christopher Pennock did play the Leviathan leader whom Nelle expected to meet. Like Cyrus, that character was a murderous shape-shifter. So Cyrus’ unexpected arrival mirrors the Leviathan leader’s unexpected absence.
When we first cut to Buffie’s room, the camera lingers for several seconds on an extremely unusual prop. It is a television set. The only other time we have seen a television set on Dark Shadows was in #27, in the other universe, when Burke visited investigator Stuart Bronson in a hotel room in Bangor, Maine where there was a small portable unit. It looks like it might be the same set.
Bronson’s TVBuffie’s TV
The shot goes on so long, and the set is such an odd thing to see in the context of the show, that they must be making some kind of point with it. We have wondered why Buffie submitted to Yaeger’s abuse, when she is such a strong and intelligent person. Her reflection in Nelle suggests a partial answer. Nelle was drawn to the Leviathans, who offered to destroy her and all other humans. We can assume that Buffie, too, was following a self-destructive urge when she went along with Yaeger. Associated with her, the television is a symbol of the annihilation of the self. Turn the idiot box on, turn your mind off. If you aren’t careful, you may even wind up spending your weekdays staring glassy-eyed at ABC’s daytime lineup.
*He actually says “Collinwood.” Which is a blooper, but since Buffie mentioned in her first episode that she used to work at Collinwood it is kind of an interesting one. Maybe when another Buffie left her position as an upstairs maid or whatever she was, she got further than the nearest tavern.
Dave Woodard, MD, was on Dark Shadows from April to November 1967. Woodard was introduced as physician to Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie was the victim of vampire Barnabas Collins. Woodard was the show’s answer to Dr John Seward, the commonsensical local physician in Bram Stoker’s Dracula who called in his old mentor Dr Van Helsing when he found that his patients were suffering maladies he could not explain. Woodard’s call went to his medical school classmate, Dr Julia Hoffman. As Van Helsing was an incredible polymath, equally at home in several branches of medical science, of esoteric philosophy, and even in the law, Julia was dually qualified as a blood specialist and a psychiatrist and just so happened to have a theory about curing vampirism.
This Van Helsing proved a traitor to her patient and to her friend. In order to persuade Barnabas to agree to cooperate with her experiment, Julia betrayed Maggie, using her magical powers of hypnosis to erase Barnabas’ abuse from Maggie’s memory. As time went on, Woodard figured out Barnabas’ secret and Julia’s complicity in his crimes. To keep him quiet, Julia prepared a lethal poison and helped Barnabas administer it to Woodard in #341.
From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows traveled back in time and was a costume drama set in the 1790s, the period when Barnabas first became a vampire. It was then that we were introduced to wicked witch Angelique, who often caused pain to her victims by sticking pins in dolls. When suspicion spread that witchcraft was going on, Angelique framed well-meaning governess Victoria Winters for her own crimes.
Now, the show has traveled in time again, not backward but sideways. Barnabas has gone to an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” Maggie’s counterpart in this universe is married to drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, master of Collinwood. Angelique’s counterpart was Quentin’s first wife. She died last year, but has risen from the grave. When she was alive, Angelique built a cult around herself, some members of which reacted to her death with the firm conviction that she would come back to life. Now that she has done so, she has kept most of her devotees in the dark. She has told only two of them who she really is. Everyone else, friend and foe alike, thinks she is her identical twin sister Alexis.
One of the two people who knows Angelique’s true identity is her aunt, Hannah Stokes. Angelique forced Aunt Hannah to act as her henchman from #1003 until we saw her for the last time in #1014. In #1015, Angelique revealed herself to her most devoted follower, the housekeeper at Collinwood. This person is named Julia Hoffman.
Alexis really was staying at the great house of Collinwood from #984 to #1001, when Angelique rose from the dead, murdered her, and assumed her identity. When Alexis showed up, she found that Maggie was uncertain of her position in the house because everyone was so obsessed with Angelique. Hoffman deliberately and very blatantly worked to exacerbate Maggie’s insecurities, in the manner of Mrs Danvers in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. Unlike Maxim de Winter in the novel, Quentin caught on to what was happening and sent Hoffman away for a time. And unlike the second Mrs de Winter, Maggie refused to put up with Quentin’s miserable behavior, including his alarmingly affectionate relationship with Alexis, walked out on him and went to stay with her sister in New York. The absences of Hoffman and of Maggie coincided with the work Grayson Hall and Kathryn Leigh Scott, along with the other survivors from the summer 1967 cast, did in the feature film House of Dark Shadows.
Today, we open in Quentin and Maggie’s bedroom. Quentin is in the hospital, so Maggie is alone in bed. But she is not alone in the room. Barnabas is there, about to bite her. He bared his fangs and plunged his head into her pillow in the last scene of yesterday’s episode; he does the same in the opening reprise. But when we come back from the title sequence, he is showing us his teeth again, and there is no blood on them. Evidently he just wanted to rub his face in Maggie’s pillow for a second while he worked up his appetite.
Barnabas is going in for a second round when the doorknob starts to turn. He retreats into the shadows, then turns into a bat and flies away. Hoffman enters. Maggie wakes up. She is startled to find Hoffman in the room. Hoffman explains that she thought she heard a prowler. Maggie tells her she doesn’t believe her.
Indeed, it is hard for us to believe Hoffman. The only sound we could hear Barnabas make was his squeaking in his bat form. Any sounds of footsteps the microphone did not pick up must have been much quieter than the squeaking that was going on while Hoffman was already in the room. Hoffman does not appear to have heard the squeaking, so it would not seem she could possibly have heard anything that would lead her to believe there was a prowler. Later, we hear Hoffman on the telephone to Angelique, gleefully reporting that Maggie was unnerved to find her in her room. So apparently she did not hear Barnabas. She went into the room to advance her plan of making Maggie look foolish. When she brought up the idea of an intruder, she was only accidentally pointing towards the truth, not saying something she believed or had reason to believe.
In the hospital, Quentin meets with his doctor, Cyrus Longworth. Quentin had severe chest pains the night before, so bad that Cyrus was for a time certain he had only minutes to live. Cyrus is deeply disturbed when he comes into the consultation room. He tells Quentin that he has run every relevant test, and that the results prove beyond a doubt that there is nothing physically wrong with him. Quentin asks how that can be, and Cyrus says that his chest pains were probably the result of a supernatural influence. His preliminary diagnosis is that a witch pushed a pin into a doll. This is correct. Angelique did indeed push a pin into a doll representing Quentin.
It took Woodard months of exposure to a pile of evidence before he would use the word “supernatural” without hesitation. All Cyrus needs is to see a man who is sick one day and healthy the next, and he’s right there. In #985, we learned that Cyrus had worried his friends by presenting a paper on black magic at a scientific conference. He was a member of Angelique’s cult, and at her suggestion he devised a Jekyll and Hyde formula that he has used to indulge his sadistic desires, which include murder. He is a mad scientist, less Woodard than Julia.
Back at Collinwood, Maggie gets dressed and opens the front door. She finds Barnabas standing there, about to knock. She says she is on her way to the hospital to visit Quentin. The telephone rings, and she finds that Quentin is on his way home. Barnabas asks to stay with her while she waits for her husband to return, and she agrees.
The two have a remarkably cozy conversation. They are so close together that her hair bounces in his breath. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said it looked like Barnabas was about to kiss Maggie at any moment. “You mean bite her,” I said. “Same thing,” she responded.
This conversation includes one of the most interesting of all the show’s countless bloopers. Maggie confides her insecurities about succeeding Angelique as Mrs Quentin Collins. Barnabas asks “Did Quentin really love Josette?” We cut to a closeup of Maggie. For half a second, Kathryn Leigh Scott visibly struggles not to laugh. Cast members almost never corrected each other on camera, just delivering their next scripted line no matter how bad the preceding miscue had been, but this one was so extreme that she improvised “Josette? I think he loved Angelique.” Once she had contained her laugh, she slipped right back into character. It really sounds like Maggie is caught off guard by Barnabas’ stumble, not like Miss Scott is caught off guard by Jonathan Frid’s. And when we cut back to Barnabas, his face is just as it was when we cut away to the closeup. That is an impressive bit of professionalism.
“Did Quentin really love Josette?”
Quentin comes home, and Barnabas excuses himself while he and Maggie have their joyous reunion. Maggie tells Quentin that she wants him to dismiss Hoffman. When she describes the awkward moment in her room, he grows impatient and irritated. He refuses to dismiss “someone for walking into a room!” Hoffman enters. Quentin orders the two of them to feel better about each other.
This is puzzling in a way. Before Maggie left, Quentin had caught on to what Hoffman was doing, and he seemed to be thinking of firing her. But regular viewers will not be entirely surprised. The confrontation that led to Maggie’s departure was all about Quentin’s habit of treating her like a child, and the whole time she was away he kept saying that he was not going to indulge her childish behavior. Quentin has got so deep into the habit of belittling Maggie that he cannot resist doing it even when he knows that she is in the right.
In their room, Maggie is getting ready to go back to bed while Quentin looks in her suitcase. He finds the voodoo doll there. As Mrs Acilius pointed out, Maggie was still in New York when Quentin’s pains started, so she is not very likely to be the witch. Also, the room has been open and vacant all night, so anyone could have walked in and left the doll. No reasonable person could take this as any kind of evidence against Maggie, but Angelique and Hoffman don’t have to concern themselves with reasonable people- their target is Quentin.
Vampire Barnabas Collins has left the universe where the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows took place and found himself in a universe chiefly populated by counterparts of people he knows. His own counterpart lived a quiet life and died in 1830, so he won’t be running into him.
In his own universe, Barnabas had an affair with wicked witch Angelique Bouchard in the 1790s, dooming his chance to find happiness with his true love, the gracious Josette. We saw the events associated with this disaster from November 1967 to March 1968, when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in those days.
That Angelique came to the estate of Collinwood as a lady’s maid. In #372, she met much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes. Ben thought Angelique had a romantic interest in him, only to find that she had cast a spell to turn him into her slave in furtherance of her scheme to take Barnabas away from Josette.
In the current universe, it is 1970. Angelique’s counterpart was born in the village of Collinsport in 1939 and died at Collinwood in 1969. Three weeks ago, she came back to life, murdered her identical twin sister Alexis, and took her place as a houseguest at Collinwood. Angelique and Alexis’ maiden name was Stokes; their father is Tim Stokes, counterpart of Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, who is Ben’s descendant. Today, Barnabas talks with Angelique, who tells him that a Ben Stokes who was an indentured servant at Collinwood and an Angelique who came to the house as a lady’s maid in the 1790s are her ancestors. She also says that the Angelique of the 1790s is buried among the Stokes family. So we learn that we are in a “time-band” where Barnabas left Angelique alone and Ben wound up married to her.
The main event today is that Angelique reveals her true identity to Miss Julia Hoffman, housekeeper at Collinwood and most fanatical member of the cult Angelique built around herself in her lifetime. When Angelique admits she is not Alexis, she addresses Hoffman as “Julia,” the first time anyone has called her this. Julia admits that she is afraid of Angelique, since she is dead. Angelique orders Julia to hold her hand and feel her warmth. When she does, Julia asks how she managed to defeat death. Angelique resists telling her, but Julia insists. She dwells on the lack of sensation during the period when she was physically dead. In response to Julia’s continued prodding, Angelique says that her tomb was opened by her widower, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, with assistance from his friend, mad scientist Cyrus Longworth. Finally Julia can’t conceal her jubilation at the resurrection, and they cackle gleefully as they start discussing their plans to reestablish Angelique as Quentin’s wife and therefore as mistress of Collinwood. Angelique manages not to tell Julia that she murdered her sister.
The episode number “1015” signifies that this was the last episode of the 203rd week of Dark Shadows. There were some days in 1966-1971 when no episode of the show premiered on the ABC network. They skipped episode numbers on those days to keep the Friday episodes divisible by five. So far, there have been fifteen of these preemption days. That makes this the one thousandth episode aired. And therefore the one thousandth I have reviewed. A bit of a personal milestone, that.
Since late March, Dark Shadows has been set in a universe parallel to the one we saw in the preceding 196 weeks. One of the most important characters in that original continuity was Angelique, a wicked witch who has been wreaking havoc on the estate of Collinwood at irregular intervals over the last 175 years. Angelique’s counterpart in this universe was born in 1939 in the village of Collinsport. She died in 1969, and came back to life in #1000, in April 1970.
This Angelique had an identical twin sister named Alexis. Alexis stayed at Collinwood as a guest of Angelique’s widower, gloomy sourpuss Quentin Collins, from #984. In #1001, Angelique murdered Alexis and took her place. Though Angelique had assembled a cult around herself, the most devoted members of which expected her to rise from the dead, she has disclosed her true identity only to her aunt, Hannah Stokes, whom she has used to do some of the dirtiest of the dirty work she has needed done these last three weeks.
Lara Parker played Angelique and Alexis, Paula Laurence played Hannah. Laurence’s approach to the part has involved an imitation of the mannerisms Parker brought to her portrayal of Angelique in the original continuity. Laurence even imitated the laugh Parker developed for Angelique. This helped us to believe that Hannah was a relative of Angelique, and it worked very well indeed when Hannah and Alexis were opposite each other. Longtime viewers could see that Parker really was playing a different character.
It was tricky when Angelique and Hannah had their first scenes together, in #1003. They pulled it off, because Angelique was pretending to be Alexis at the beginning of the first scene and Hannah was reeling in shock after she learned the truth. So Parker could dial down her Angelique-isms, and Laurence could dial up some non-Angelique-derived business she does. But today the two of them share a scene where they are arguing about a spell Angelique wants Hannah to help her cast, and neither Parker nor Laurence has any choice but to go all in on the most distinctive qualities of Angelique’s line delivery. The result is a few minutes of Dueling Angeliques, and it is embarrassing.
A climactic moment in the Angelique-off.
There are a couple of stories underway in this one. The spell Angelique wants to cast is one that will inflame Quentin’s love for his second wife, the former Maggie Evans. She wants Quentin to persuade Maggie to come back to Collinwood and live with him again. She has decided that as long as Maggie is living with her sister in New York, Quentin will be obsessed with her and she will never be able to win him away from her. Hannah points out some of the flaws with this plan, and indeed the episode ends with Quentin, under the influence of the spell, about to stab Angelique.
Maggie’s portrait arrives from Paris. This mirrors the arrival of the portrait of the gracious Josette from Paris in #402. Unfortunately, this portrait is far inferior, not only to the portrait of Josette, but to most of the paintings that decorate the set, including the portrait of Angelique Stokes Collins that is one of the major props in the current segment. It looks like it was done by some photo-transfer process. I think Dan Curtis Productions probably just overspent on the portrait of the first Mrs Quentin Collins, but it makes it look like Quentin didn’t care enough about Maggie to hire a real artist to paint her.
A portrait of the second Mrs Quentin Collins.
Vampire Barnabas Collins has crossed over from the main continuity. Today he runs into strange and troubled teen Daniel Collins, who suspects something is wrong with him and is about to go report to Quentin. Barnabas does a “Look into my eyes!” and makes him forget they met. There are a couple of infelicities with that scene. We see Barnabas’ reflection in a mirror. The show has made a big point of his inability to cast a reflection, so it’s always awkward when that happens. This one is especially bad, because Barnabas tells Daniel to examine his own reflection in his eye, putting the concept of reflections front and center. They’ve been stressing that we are in a “Mirror Universe” by cramming every vertical surface with mirrors, so we’re going to see Barnabas’ reflection again.
Also, Quentin and others are aware that there is another universe near them, that someone named Barnabas Collins went missing from it recently, and that that Barnabas is under a “terrible curse.” Had Barnabas used the power we saw earlier in the episode and vanished into thin air as soon as Daniel saw him, he could have used that as evidence that he was a different Barnabas. He could explain the vanishing by suggesting that Daniel had glimpsed the other universe just as the portal that allows people to see into it was closing. Since the scene takes place in the very room where the portal is visible, the audience may well have been expecting him to do something like that, and it certainly would have been interesting to see him play it out.
Vampire Barnabas Collins has escaped from the continuity in which Dark Shadows took place until late March 1970 and found himself in an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” This universe is largely populated by people who remind Barnabas of their counterparts in his own world, but their personalities and relationships are very different from those he knew. His own counterpart is a case in point. That other Barnabas Collins never became a vampire, but lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830.
Barnabas’ first few weeks in Parallel Time were spent trapped in a coffin. Alcoholic novelist Will Loomis found out about Barnabas after he saw fang marks on the neck of his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard, and decided he could force Barnabas to give him a complete history of his career as a vampire. Will was under the impression this would make a good book. Will’s irresponsibility in keeping a vampire as a pet, his cruelty in exploiting a fellow creature for his own gain, and his lack of literary judgment in imagining that a recounting of the plot of weeks 43 through 196 of Dark Shadows would be both a bestseller and a critical favorite come back to bite him. More precisely, Barnabas comes to bite him when Will lets him out of his coffin and turns his back on him for a moment during their interview, taking the cross out of his sight and freeing Barnabas to attack.
Barnabas forces Will to burn all the pages he has already written. The idea of a book detailing Barnabas’ crimes featured in #326, #510, and #756, and may have planted the seed for the whole conception of Will Loomis.
Will and Carolyn live in the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, which in the original continuity belongs to Barnabas. The pages are still in the fireplace when drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, master of the great house of Collinwood and proprietor of the family businesses, bangs on the door and demands admittance.
Quentin interrogates Will. The name “Barnabas Collins” has been cropping up in the oddest connections lately, and Quentin is convinced Will knows why. Their exchange is getting quite warm when Barnabas enters and introduces himself.
Quentin is bewildered to see Barnabas. Through a time warp that occasionally manifests in the east wing of his house, he has caught a few glimpses of the original continuity, mostly in the form of people standing around talking about how Barnabas is missing and is under a terrible curse. So he is inclined to be leery of this fellow claiming to be a descendant of the Barnabas who died in 1830. Barnabas specifies that his great-grandfather was the son of that Barnabas, the son who went to Peru in the nineteenth century. Quentin had read that that son of Barnabas died while still in Peru. Barnabas says that he did not die in that country. He does not specify where his ancestor went after leaving Peru, but says he spent the rest of his life in poverty. He was so ashamed of this circumstance that neither he nor any member of his family could bear to reconnect with the rich Collinses in Maine. Barnabas claims that he has now made a fortune of his own, leading him to conclude that the time is right for a reunion. Barnabas invites himself to the great house in an hour. Quentin says that the morning would be better, to which Barnabas replies that he will not be free then. Quentin acquiesces.
Quentin exits, and Barnabas orders Will to accompany him to the grave of his counterpart. Longtime viewers will remember #660, when Barnabas managed to travel back in time by going to a grave and yelling at its occupant. Now he hopes to travel sideways in time, returning to his own universe, by the same technique.
Barnabas and Will enter a graveyard we have seen several times in the last seven weeks. It differs from the cemeteries we have seen in the original continuity in that none of the grave markers is in the form of a cross. Most of the graves in the cemetery from which Barnabas emerged were marked with crosses, and he strolled by them with perfect equanimity. The cemetery set was built for Barnabas, so evidently it was not the original plan that the cross would be formidable to him. It wasn’t until #450, 48 weeks after Barnabas debuted, that he was first held at bay with a cross. Even after that, he still strolled placidly through the field of crosses in Eagle Hill Cemetery. Now the apotropaic power of the cross is a major point, and they have designed the cemetery in this universe to accommodate Barnabas’ special needs.
Barnabas calls on his counterpart. He conjures up a spirit, but it is not that of Barnabas Collins (d. 1830.) It is Joshua Collins, father of that Barnabas. The sight prompts Barnabas to gasp “Father!” Joshua denies that Barnabas is any kin to him. Barnabas tries to explain that, while that is true, he is nonetheless Barnabas Collins, son of Joshua, eliciting an angry command “Do not profane those names!” Joshua tells Barnabas to take his vileness back where it came from. Before Barnabas can explain that is what he is trying to do, Joshua vanishes.
Joshua appeared to Quentin and Angelique in #1009. That turn was not particularly effective. The visual composition made it too clear that Louis Edmonds was standing in the same space as David Selby and Lara Parker for the actors to create any sense of the uncanny. And Joshua hung around too long and had too many lines for it to make sense that he couldn’t give any useful information. But this time Joshua is off to the side, lit by his own light, and he disappears after just a few seconds. It is a powerful scene, especially for longtime viewers who remember the relationship between Barnabas and Joshua we saw when the show was set in the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968.
Will is terrified. The apparition leaves him trembling and speechless. So far Will has cut an arrogant, self-assured figure. He handled his encounter with the vampire with aplomb. Even after Barnabas bit him, his resistance to the command to burn the pages showed that self-assured personality is still partly functional. But the ghost of Joshua has blasted away the last of it.
Barnabas tells Will that he now has only one way back to his own universe, the way he came. There is a room in the east wing of the great house that is bare and vacant in Barnabas’ universe, but that is fully furnished, richly decorated, and brightly lit here. When Quentin’s wife Angelique Stokes Collins was alive, it was her bedroom. Now Quentin has given it to Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis to occupy while she is his guest. The barrier between the universes is at its thinnest there. Barnabas could occasionally see into Angelique and Alexis’ room from the main continuity, and it was when he was looking through the doors to the room that Quentin has seen that other Collinwood. Barnabas was in the room when it changed, and found himself here. Now he wants to go back to the room, and make the opposite journey.
What neither Barnabas nor Quentin knows is that Angelique has returned from the dead and murdered Alexis. Angelique is now impersonating Alexis. In her life, Angelique had built a little cult of people who expected her to transcend death. The only one she has so far told that she has actually done so is her aunt, Hannah Stokes. Everyone else believes she is Alexis.
Barnabas enters the drawing room of the great house, where Quentin introduces him to “Alexis” and to housekeeper Julia Hoffman, the most devoted member of Angelique’s cult. Hoffman and “Alexis” had been talking about Barnabas before he arrived. Hoffman expressed certainty that Barnabas is a fraud. But after he and Quentin leave to examine the room where the Parallel Time phenomenon can sometimes be seen, she admits that his resemblance to the portrait of Barnabas is too strong to disregard. “Alexis” remembers what Quentin heard while he was watching the people in the room, and asks Hoffman if Barnabas looks like a man under a curse. She does not appear to have expected this question.
Quentin takes Barnabas to the room. Sure enough, the other continuity is visible. Barnabas’ best friend is there, talking to herself about how much she hopes to see him again. She is mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, counterpart of Hoffman. Julia is as devoted to Barnabas as Hoffman is to Angelique. Seeing her, we wonder how long Angelique can keep it a secret from her Julia Hoffman that she has returned.
From the time he joined the cast of characters in April 1967, vampire Barnabas Collins has been the most famous thing about Dark Shadows. We haven’t seen him in over a month. He passed through a cosmic rift in #980, leaving his native universe behind and arriving in another “time-band” populated largely by counterparts of people he knew. In the original continuity, Barnabas was freed from his coffin when dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis unchained it, believing he would extract from it a treasure in jewels that would make him rich. Here, Barnabas is trapped in his coffin when Willie’s counterpart, author William H. Loomis, chains it, believing he will extract a story from Barnabas that will make him rich.
We haven’t seen any of Will Loomis’ oral history sessions with Barnabas, since John Karlen and Jonathan Frid have both been in Tarrytown, New York. Along with many other key members of the cast, they have been filming their parts in the feature House of Dark Shadows. That production is nearing a wrap, and several other cast members have already come back. Today’s story is all about Barnabas’ impending return.
When Barnabas found himself in “Parallel Time,” the first person he met was Will’s wife, the counterpart of Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn Collins Stoddard. He told Carolyn that he was a descendant of the eighteenth century Barnabas Collins, of whom a portrait hangs in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. In his own universe, that portrait does hang there, and it has been Barnabas’ letter of introduction to the Collinses more than once. But Carolyn told him there was no such portrait there or, so far as she knows, anywhere else. So he bit her and made her his blood thrall.
Indeed, the other day we saw the spot on the wall where Barnabas’ portrait hangs in the main continuity, and it was not there. Instead, there was a metallic decoration reminiscent of a coat of arms. That decoration hung there before Barnabas’ portrait first appeared in #204. So few of the people watching at this point in 1970 had been in the audience in early 1967, and so few of those would have made note of what was hanging on the walls, that I can’t imagine one viewer in ten thousand would have caught the reference during the first broadcast. None of the writers currently with the show was on staff then, nor was line producer Peter Miner. It’s one of those moments when I suspect director Lela Swift and art director Sy Tomashoff were decorating the set for their own amusement.
Today, a portrait of Barnabas has taken the place of the coat of arms. Children Daniel and Amy Collins found it in the attic of Will and Carolyn’s house, and for some reason housekeeper Julia Hoffman and butler Mr Trask decided to hang it up by the front door. It is a copy of the one we have seen over the last three years. It depicts Barnabas’ counterpart in this universe, a man who lived a quiet life and died a natural death in 1830.
The master of Collinwood, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, is shocked to see the portrait, and orders it to be removed immediately. Daniel’s counterpart, strange and troubled boy David Collins, had been the first to speak Barnabas’ name when he called Willie’s attention to the portrait in #205. Shortly after, Willie heard a heartbeat coming from the portrait, which led him to make his fateful trip to open the coffin. In this continuity, it is Daniel who hears the heartbeat, and he will today try to find and open the coffin.
Quentin has caught two glimpses of the other universe in the room in the east wing that was his late wife Angelique’s bedroom. Unknown to Quentin, Angelique has returned from the dead and murdered her identical twin sister Alexis. Quentin thinks that it is Alexis who is his guest in the great house, staying in her sister’s old room. When he tells her today what he saw, “Alexis” thinks he is losing his mind. But she then sees the phenomenon herself. She sees Hoffman’s counterpart calling for Barnabas, as Quentin had seen her talking about Barnabas’ “terrible curse.” “Alexis” and Quentin decide that they and Hoffman should have a séance to contact the spirit of the Barnabas Collins who died in their universe in 1830, the only Barnabas Collins they know of.
In the main continuity, séances are a frequent occurrence; we have seen fourteen of them there, and heard a detailed account of a fifteenth. In the early days, there was always one participant who tried to break the circle, only to be sternly reproved by the leader. The characters stopped doing that as they got to be familiar with the procedure, but séances are rarer in this universe. As things start to get interesting, Hoffman can’t take it anymore. She breaks the circle and runs out. “Alexis” says that the presence she felt is gone. But then a ghost materializes in the corner of the room.
For five weeks, Dark Shadows has been set in a universe parallel to the one where the first 196 weeks took place. So far, “Parallel Time” has recapitulated the early development of the show. As the series began with an attempt to televise the atmosphere that made “Gothic romances” a best-selling genre of the mid-1960s, so the segment began with an adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, one of the basic texts of that genre. As it proceeded to the story of the return of undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, mother of strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy,) the segment has proceeded to the return of undead blonde fire witch Angelique Stokes Collins, mother of strange and troubled teen Daniel Collins (David Henesy.)
Between the early Gothic romance period and the Laura story, the show was a whodunit about the death of local man Bill Malloy. Bill would eventually become the first ghost to appear to another character on-screen on Dark Shadows. And throughout the first year, there was a lot of noise about a locked room in the basement of the great house of Collinwood where reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard believed her husband Paul’s body was buried. Parallel Time got around to an analogue for these two stories with the abrupt introduction of the ghost of Dameon Edwards in #994. Since then, various characters have been wondering who killed Dameon. Today, it is confirmed that Dameon’s body, unlike Paul’s, really was buried in an alcove in Collinwood’s basement.
As Daniel’s room is laid out as a mirror image of David’s, the basement in this Collinwood is laid out as a mirror image of the one in the original continuity. The alcove is on the opposite side of the set than was the locked room. Since we haven’t seen the basement since #273, this resonance is likely to be wasted on everyone except weirdos watching the show on a streaming service and writing several hundred words about each episode.
Even people like that aren’t likely to be much invested in Dameon. If the ghost of Paul’s counterpart appeared as Dennis Patrick, the actor who played Paul from #887 to #953, we would have had something to work with. If they had told us something about Dameon before he turned up as someone who was already dead, again, his story might have mattered. And if his haunting came as succession of frightening events in the lives of people we already cared about, as the haunting of Collinwood by the ghost of Quentin Collins came in late 1968 and early 1969, we would again have had a chance of getting into his story. But none of those things happened. We’ve never seen actor Jered Holmes before, Dameon came out of the blue, and he does nothing that is of the first importance to a major character. Whatever solution there might be to the mystery of his death is unlikely to do anything more than give them an easy way to write someone out of the show who was obviously leaving anyway.
The only thing we really know about Dameon is that he had some kind of connection with Angelique when they were both alive. Today, she specifies what that connection was. She says that he always annoyed her in those days. She goes on to say that with his ghostly apparitions, he has resumed annoying her. Lines like this make me suspect that the writers are in open rebellion against the story of Dameon Edwards.
In fact, Parallel Time is off to a very good start overall. The Dameon story is the only one that isn’t working, and even it benefits from the uniformly good acting. Indeed, all the performances are so good that we want to like it. This episode is mostly given over to plot mechanics advancing the Dameon story.
The remainder is about a story derived from Jekyll and Hyde. Chemist Horace Gladstone is doing business with mad scientist Cyrus Longworth. He meets with the undisguised Cyrus early in the episode, and later encounters him after he has taken the potion and changed his appearance. Cyrus has not told Gladstone what his project is, but Gladstone knows that the work cannot go on without a special synthesis only he can provide. He is wary of “John Yaeger,” and tells him that if he threatens him in any way he will not deliver any more of the synthesis.
Gladstone keeps his cool amid Yaeger’s threats. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Wiki.
There is a lot of action today, but nothing really new. No degree of busyness can keep the Dameon story from feeling slow, since the path it is speeding along has no destination. As for the Jekyll and Hyde material, we’ve already seen that Gladstone is suspicious of Cyrus, that Cyrus is addicted to the potion, and that, when he is in the form of Yaeger, Cyrus can be restrained from violence only by threats. So this is yet another specimen of Dark Shadows’ distinctive contribution to the soap opera, a Friday that is the dullest day of the week.
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