parallel time – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1039: This is the body

Dark Shadows spent yesterday and the day before showing us how much her relationship with vampire Barnabas Collins has cost Dr Julia Hoffman. Once a superlatively capable, masterfully poised scientist, Julia has become so ragged and dependent that she reacts to the sight of Barnabas rising from his coffin with a puppyish delight. She has followed him into an alternate universe, cutting herself off from everyone she knows and everything she has. Once in that universe, her first act was to kill her own Doppelgänger, leaving her face to face with a dead version of herself. She has set out to gather intelligence that might help Barnabas in his madcap schemes by impersonating that Doppelgänger, who was the housekeeper at the great house of Collinwood. In that persona, she wears a French maid outfit and disclaims all of her professional and educational attainments. Yesterday, Barnabas was briefly impressed by how much Julia had sacrificed for him; for a second or two, it looked like her love for him might be requited, at least to the extent of one kiss. But he turned his attention elsewhere, and now they are busy on a monster-slaying expedition.

The monster is Angelique Stokes Collins, undead first wife of foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins, master of Collinwood. Angelique’s father, a wizard known as Tim (but he’ll always be “Stokes” to us,) has somehow established an invisible connection between her and a woman he keeps in the back room of his apartment. We learn in the closing credits that this woman’s name is Roxanne. Roxanne is in a coma. Stokes has drained most of Roxanne’s “life-force” into Angelique. Occasionally Roxanne perks up a bit and regains some of her strength. When this happens, Angelique weakens. If Roxanne gets too vigorous, Angelique will die, but that will also happen if Roxanne herself dies. Stokes keeps busy trying to maintain Roxanne in her precise state of debility.

We find Julia and Barnabas in the room with Roxanne. They have learned the secret and come here to kill Roxanne, finishing off Angelique. They talk for a moment about Stokes, who is likely to find another way to revive Angelique if they kill Roxanne. They imply that they will kill him, too. That raises a question. Yesterday Julia saw Angelique collapse and become altogether helpless when Roxanne gained just a tiny bit of strength. If they are going to kill Stokes anyway, why not do that first? Then they can neutralize Angelique by giving Roxanne a little TLC and drop her off at the hospital on their way back to their native universe.

Barnabas doesn’t think of that, but neither does he go through with the murder. He sees Roxanne, raves about her looks, and says in a world full of ugliness they have no right to destroy such beauty. Julia just keeps insisting that they finish her off, and says that if they don’t the blood of Angelique’s future victims will be on Barnabas. That is further evidence of what Julia has lost in her time at Barnabas’ side. Up to this point, she has consistently shown reluctance when he was planning a murder.

Barnabas says that he has never seen a face like Roxanne’s. He’s the only one. With her short red hair, pale skin, and strong chin, Roxanne looks very much like Julia. Indeed, the fans sometimes refer to Donna Wandrey as “Grayson Hall, Junior.” When we see the two together, we wonder if it will turn out that Roxanne is the daughter of the late housekeeper Julia Hoffman. It would be typical of Barnabas to reward Julia’s extreme devotion to him by forgetting all about her and chasing after a girl whose mother she might have been.

There’s also a lot of business today about two minor villains, sleazy musician Bruno Hess and high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Michael Stroka and Louis Edmonds were always fun to watch, but Roger and Bruno are absent and unmentioned for such long stretches that it is hard to believe that anything important is at stake in what they do. Like most of the characters, Bruno believes Angelique’s cover story that she is her identical twin sister Alexis. Acting under this impression, he smacks her around a couple of times. So we can see that he is going to be dead soon, though she will likely make him wish it were a lot sooner.

Roger announces that he has been named executor of the estate of the late Dr Cyrus Longworth. This means he will be coming into some money and perhaps learning some secrets. Quentin’s current wife, the former Maggie Evans, is lonely because her husband is a hopeless jerk. She tries to be friendly to Bruno, and he gets fresh. While he is grabbing her, Roger enters and sneers at Maggie.

Episode 1038: A family that is finished

Julia Hoffman joined the cast of characters in the summer of 1967 as a supremely confident professional, a medical doctor doubly qualified as a psychiatrist and a blood specialist and the head of a private hospital. Julia came to the estate of Collinwood because she had figured out that Barnabas Collins, master of the Old House on its grounds, was a vampire. She had a plan for curing vampirism and believed that if she succeeded she would change the way science defines life and death, thereby revolutionizing medicine.

Julia’s plan was not successful. She came to be so closely entwined with Barnabas and so deeply complicit in his crimes that she could not hope for any future that did not revolve around him. She decided to make the best of this, and set about falling in love with Barnabas. At first he mocked her cruelly for this. Eventually his response to her signs of romantic interest softened into an embarrassed sympathy.

In #980, Barnabas crossed over into an alternate universe, hoping that he would escape his curse there. He found he was still a vampire, and that he was surrounded by strangers. He has now persuaded the Collinses in the great house at Collinwood that he is their long-lost cousin from South America. He has once more established himself in the Old House, this time by biting and enslaving its owners. He quickly made enemies, most notably the undead Angelique Stokes Collins. The housekeeper in the great house was Angelique’s most fanatical devotee and deadliest enforcer. Her name was Julia Hoffman.

Yesterday, Hoffman had learned that Barnabas was a vampire, found his coffin, placed a stake on his chest, and raised a hammer to drive it through his heart. At the last second, a blow was struck from behind, killing Hoffman and saving Barnabas. The killer was Julia, who had made her way into this universe to take her place at Barnabas’ side.

In #351, Julia offered to guard Barnabas during the day. Since Barnabas had previously given this task only to domestic servants, he was shocked to hear a medical doctor volunteer to perform it. Julia smiled and said “I am not offering to be your maid.” Now, Julia is wearing Hoffman’s French maid outfit and posing as her in an attempt to find out what Angelique is up to. Long before Julia killed Hoffman, she had destroyed her old self in the course of her relationship with Barnabas.

Julia is waiting by Barnabas’ coffin when night falls. The lid opens, and she looks delighted. This image is hilarious, but again contrasts with her earlier behavior to show how ragged her personality has become after all this time as a vampire’s henchman. In #289, Julia made her way to Barnabas’ coffin during the day, opened it, looked inside, and staggered back, shivering with a mixture of terror and triumph. She was at once fantastically intrepid and apparently sane. We did not then know what her intentions were, but the daring action combines with Grayson Hall’s masterful performance to persuade us that Julia might be equal to almost any task.

Now, Julia has become so dependent on Barnabas that she neither sees the horror of the situation nor remembers that he is dangerous to her. The very first we saw of Barnabas was his hand darting out of his coffin to choke someone who woke him unexpectedly, and the second time someone did that, in #275, the choking was lethal. Moreover, Barnabas knew that Hoffman was his deadly foe, so even if he’d been up for a while he could be expected to kill Julia before she had a chance to utter a word if he found her in his hiding place dressed as she is.

Fortunately for Julia, Barnabas has developed a habit of standing around and pontificating before his murders. So she has a chance to explain who she is. She shows him the stake and hammer Hoffman was holding when she found her, and he is convinced. He seems impressed that she killed her Doppelgänger for his sake, and they look more like they are about to kiss than they ever have before.

Barnabas and Julia, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!

Julia goes to the great house to report to Angelique, who is staying there in the guise of her identical twin sister Alexis. Angelique irritably asks where Julia has been all day. Julia makes an excuse, and Angelique starts talking about the progress of her evil plans. Before she gets very deep into it, she has a seizure of some kind. Julia asks what she can do to help, and Angelique tells her that she knows very well what to do. The only useful information Julia can get out of her are the word “father” and the sentence “He is doing this!” She decides to call on Angelique’s father, Tim Stokes. She looks Stokes’ address up in the telephone directory, and sets out.

When Stokes answers his door, he expresses surprise, not that Julia is there, but that she bothered to knock before entering. He makes some remarks which Julia cannot even pretend to understand. He says that Angelique must surely have told her about the situation; she says that she did, but that she is very confused about all of it. Stokes ushers her into his back room to give his own explanation.

A blanket covers the body of a woman lying on a table in the back room. Stokes explains to Julia that the woman is not dead. He drained her “life force” to enable Angelique to transcend death, but she retains enough vitality that she keeps pulling that force back to herself from Angelique. That is what causes Angelique to have her seizures. The woman must remain in precisely her current state if Angelique is to exist in the world of the living. The more of her strength she regains, the weaker Angelique will become, and if she dies, Angelique will return to the grave. He has given the woman an injection; he tells Julia that when she returns to the great house she will find that Angelique has recovered.

Julia does indeed find this. She urges Angelique to have Stokes over and repair her relationship with him. Since everyone else is out of the house, tonight would be the perfect time for such a tête–à–tête. Angelique agrees.

While Angelique is mixing martinis for Stokes, Julia is with Barnabas. She goes to the Old House and tells him what she has discovered. He produces a short knife and says that it should take care of the matter. In Stokes’ apartment, he stops and talks about all the time he has spent trying to find Angelique’s vulnerabilities, and wonders that now they have found such a simple method for getting rid of her once and for all. It sounded to my wife as if he was upset that Julia had beaten him to the answer.

In the back room, Julia hands Barnabas the knife. He again goes into a pre-murder soliloquy. Julia peps him up by telling him that the woman isn’t really alive, and that her continued existence means death and destruction for many others. Barnabas agrees. He lifts the blanket and prepares to strike.

The first murder in which Julia participated directly was that of her onetime friend and medical school classmate Dr Dave Woodard in #341. Woodard had learned that Barnabas was a vampire and that Julia was helping him, and was going to expose them both. After resisting the idea for several days, Julia complied with Barnabas’ demand that she prepare a lethal injection for Woodard. She handed him the hypodermic then, as she hands him the knife now. In those days, Barnabas and Julia were not yet friends, and Barnabas replied that she would have to administer the shot herself. In the end, he wound up giving Woodard the fatal dose while Julia stood in the doorway and blocked their victim’s escape. Afterward, Barnabas taunted Julia with her new status as a murderer, making her miserable. Now, they like each other fine, and he accepts the weapon as a matter of course.

It is not surprising that Barnabas, confronted with a problem, chooses murder as the solution. That is always his Plan A, and usually his Plan B and Plan C as well. Indeed, when he wonders what Stokes will do when Angelique is dead he implies that he will murder him too, lamenting that “It never ends does it, when one begins to unravel evil?” Barnabas looks utterly hopeless when he says this. He always feels deeply sorry for himself when he thinks about killing someone.

But this is a new step for Julia. She usually puts up at least a show of reluctance when Barnabas is planning a murder, even if her immediate response when she finds a corpse in his vicinity is to arrange for its secret disposal. What Stokes told her about the “life force” logically entails that bringing the woman out of her coma would destroy Angelique as surely as killing her would. Their resources in this universe are so limited that this may not be a viable course of action, but on her previous form you would expect Julia at least to suggest it. We may wonder if something inside her finally broke when she looked at someone she had killed and saw her own dead face looking back at her.

Episode 1037: An uncertain and frightening journey

In November 1967, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters participated in a séance. She came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. For the next four months, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. Viewers made the acquaintance of wicked witch Angelique and learned how old world gentleman Barnabas Collins first became a vampire.

Vicki herself learned nothing from her trip back in time. She spent the first part of it telling the actors about the parts they had played in the first 73 weeks of the show. After that incredibly stupid habit had burned away any goodwill the audience had for the character, Angelique framed Vicki for her own acts of sorcery. Vicki at first refused to take these charges seriously, an inexplicable response given both her knowledge of the period in which she found herself and her extensive experience with the supernatural in her own time, then kept looking for the most idiotic possible means of defending herself until she was sent to the gallows. In the nick of time, she was whisked back to the séance and to the 1960s, rope burns already visible on her neck. Vicki never regained the audience’s sympathy, and was written out later that year. Maggie Evans succeeded Vicki both as governess at Collinwood and as the perpetually imperiled heroine.

Now Barnabas has traveled in time, not backward, but sideways. He is in an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” Here, Maggie’s counterpart is married to foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins, the master of Collinwood. Angelique’s counterpart is Quentin’s late first wife, returned from the grave and scheming to get Maggie out of the way so that she can remarry her widower. Angelique casts a spell today that leads Quentin to confront Maggie and announce that he is certain that she is a witch.

The 1790s segment was in some ways one of the show’s greatest triumphs, but nothing about Vicki’s part in it was very good. So seeing this Angelique reenact the story that culminated in the witchcraft trial will bring a sinking feeling to longtime viewers. It doesn’t help that Maggie has made a number of inexplicably foolish decisions and quailed in the face of opposition she would seem to be able to overcome easily.

Moreover, Quentin is such a miserable husband to Maggie that we have no rooting interest in their marriage. He is being relatively nice to her at the beginning of the episode, because she was just abducted and imprisoned by a madman, and he feels vaguely guilty that he had jumped to the conclusion that she left voluntarily and berated everyone who suggested she might be in trouble. But even in those nice moments he maintains a paternalistic, condescending tone towards Maggie. When she wonders aloud what other crimes her abductor might have committed, he insists that there could not have been any others and becomes exasperated with her for raising the topic. That led my wife to yell at the screen “Quentin, you are the worst husband! There may be others who are also the worst, but you are the worst!”

Quentin pets Maggie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Quentin so quickly flips from acting like he is indulging the moods of his silly child-bride to accusing Maggie of witchcraft, he not only confirms Mrs Acilius’ assessment that he is “the worst.” Coming so shortly after the abduction story, he seems to be a man blaming his wife for being raped. Indeed, the man who abducted her had in #1022 and #1023 jumped her and sexually assaulted her in a dark alley, and she explained her decision to keep quiet about that attack by saying she was afraid Quentin would blame her. This is an important theme, but it would be a tricky one to explore on a show about witches and vampires and time travel and parallel universes where the median viewer is about ten years old.

Perhaps it would have been possible to have another take on the themes of the 1790s segment that would not have led us to this particular dead end. I think of a comment left in 2017 on Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day:

You know, [Parallel Time] might have had a very different feel with the following changes:

Alexandra [Moltke Isles] takes the role of Quentin’s evil first wife, Victoria Stokes Collins. There is no nice twin. She dabbles in “the black arts” but is not a full-on witch. She and Quentin have a son, David.

Lara Parker takes the role of Quentin’s new wife, Angelique “Angela” Evans. She’s kind-hearted and traditional and a romantic. She has no witchcraft powers. But not quite the pushover as time goes on.

And Kathryn Leigh Scott plays Margaret “Maggie” Evans still, but she’s now Angela’s sister and Cyrus’ lab assistant. She’s a modern woman — middle class, educated, confident, reluctant in matter of love.

Maggie and Angela are different — Maggie is the more confident, assertive, cynical of the two — but they are close and both “good” girls. Maggie doesn’t like Quentin.

Lisa Richards is looking for other work.

So in this version, there was a seance two years ago but instead of a murder, Victoria just simply vanished when the lights went out. They never learned what happened. There is no portrait. No one mentions her by name.

When Barnabas enters parallel time, Quentin has just brought Angela home, with Roger and Hoffman treating her like crap.

After about two weeks of establishing all these new relationships, they recreate the seance.

The lights go out, and when they come back on, there’s Victoria in clothing from the late 1700s. She has no memory of what happened — and doesn’t really care. She wants her rightful place as mistress of Collinwood back. (Explanation for her vanishing and returning: Daddy Stokes playing with I-Ching wands. Victoria kills her father when she learns he did that).

Can you imagine the shock for the audience to have “Vicky” just show up like that? And in the same manner RT Vicky did. And then to be evil?

That really could have been fun.

Comment left 29 July 2017 by “William” on “Episode 1056: The Parallel Sky,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day.

I like this idea very much. When she played Angelique’s identical twin Alexis, Lara Parker created a character who was not murderous, but far from a naif, and it is easy to imagine that a person like that would have stood up well enough to the kind of stresses that the wicked witch would bring against her to keep the drama going for some time. And it would be a nice inversion, not only to see the evil Vicki persecuting the innocent Angelique, but also to have his unresolved feelings for Vicki render the time traveler Barnabas as clueless in the evil Vicki’s proper world as the well-meaning Vicki was in Barnabas’ native time.

Moreover, these last two weeks the barrier between the universes has been getting leaky. So when the evil Vicki is finally thwarted here, she might escape into the original continuity and wreak havoc there. That would pick up on a road not taken in #872, when sorcerer Count Petofi escaped from the year 1897 and made his way to the Collinwood of the present day, only to be snatched back to the past after a few minutes.

I can’t wish that all of “William’s” dreams had come true. I like Lisa Blake Richards, so I’d want to leave her in the Jekyll and Hyde story and come up with another storyline to feature Kathryn Leigh Scott, either as Maggie or as another character. And it is a gift to viewers who have been with the show from the beginning that David Henesy’s character in Parallel Time is called Daniel Collins rather than David Collins, the name of his part in the other continuity, since the point was made in #153 and referenced later that David’s name was the result of events that wouldn’t have happened here. And while the séance gimmick is too good not to do, I would still like to see Mrs Isles play twins- the evil Victoria and her non-evil sister Veronica.*

*Mrs Acilius doesn’t like the name “Veronica” for this character. She’d rather call her Vanessa or Vivian.

Episode 1036: I am who I am

Housekeeper Julia Hoffman, fanatical devotee of the undead Angelique Stokes Collins, has discovered that Angelique’s enemy Barnabas Collins is a vampire. Hoffman is standing at Barnabas’ open coffin. In one hand she holds a stake on his chest, in the other a mallet upraised.

As Hoffman is about to rid the world of this loathsome abomination from beyond the grave, another woman strikes her dead. This woman appears to be Hoffman’s identical twin. Regular viewers know that she is another Julia Hoffman, a Doppelgänger intruding here from another universe. This Julia is a medical doctor by qualification and a mad scientist by vocation, and she is as committed to Barnabas as Hoffman is to Angelique.

Julia kills Hoffman. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia sees her own face on a corpse of her own slaying. She leaves the secret chamber and closes the panel that hides it. A man enters the house. He takes Julia to be Hoffman, and demands to know why she is there and why she is not wearing her French maid uniform. Julia says that she was running an errand, and that she is on her way into town. The man remarks that she does not seem like herself; she replies that “I am who I am.” The man does not give any sign that this assertion reminds him of either Popeye the Sailor or the God of the Book of Exodus. Longtime viewers will already have noticed more than a few parallels between Julia and each of these characters.

The man says he has come to the house to see its master, Will Loomis. He wants to ask Will for money so that he can leave town. When Julia says that Will is sleeping and may not be up for hours, the man turns his request to her. He says that he, Angelique, and others had paid her plenty over the years in return for her discretion, and he asks for $500. She says she doesn’t have any money with her. Indeed, she is not carrying a purse, and her bank account and other liquid assets are all located in a different universe. The man leaves.

Julia is back in the secret chamber trying to figure out what to do when Will comes home. He pulls a gun on her. He is one of Barnabas’ blood thralls, and is in charge of protecting him during the day. He knows that Hoffman and Angelique are Barnabas’ enemies. Thinking that Julia is Hoffman, he is prepared to kill her. She denies that she is Hoffman, and tells him that if he looks in the secret chamber he will know she is telling the truth. He does, and a look of recognition comes on his face. “You are Julia!” he says, delighted. Barnabas had told Will about her and others in his own universe, and he couldn’t be happier to meet her.

Julia decides to masquerade as Hoffman. She says that if she could fool the man who came by earlier, whose name is Bruno, she should be able to fool Angelique and the others. Will points out that fooling Bruno for a few minutes is not the same thing as fooling Angelique for an indefinite time, but Julia is nothing daunted.

Julia passes the first test. Angelique finds her in her room and demands where she has been all day. Julia says she was following Barnabas, as per her orders. That is the right answer. Angelique asks what she was talking about last night when she said on the telephone that she had discovered Barnabas’ big secret and would tell her what it was when they were face to face. Julia says that she thought she was onto something while following him around, but in the light of day it turns out to be pretty vague. Angelique is frustrated and orders her to resume snooping on Barnabas.

Meanwhile, Bruno has learned that his acquaintance Cyrus Longworth the mad scientist is dead. Cyrus had kidnapped Maggie Evans Collins, second wife of Angelique’s widower Quentin Collins. Barnabas killed Cyrus while rescuing Maggie.

Bruno knows that Cyrus kept a big wad of cash in the wall safe in his laboratory, in the sum of “thousands!” of dollars. He goes to the lab and rummages through the papers on the desk, certain that the combination to the wall safe is there. That seems like bad OpSec, but Cyrus wasn’t very shrewd, so it is no surprise that Bruno turns out to be right. He finds that the cash is gone. All that is in the safe is a notebook. Bruno is furious at the sight of the notebook, exclaiming “Why aren’t you money!?”

Bruno sees that the notebook is marked to be delivered unread to Quentin Collins in the event of Cyrus’ death. Bruno reads it and laughs joyously. He says that he was mistaken when he said there was no money in the safe. There is far more money than he hoped for.

Bruno telephones Angelique. Like almost everyone else, Bruno believes Angelique to be her identical twin sister Alexis. Angelique rose from the dead and murdered Alexis, who was already established as Quentin’s permanent guest in his home, the great house of Collinwood. Alexis was convinced that Angelique was murdered and was trying to investigate when Angelique killed her. For her part, Angelique knows she was murdered and very much wants to complete that investigation. Bruno happily tells “Alexis” that he knows who murdered Angelique.

Bruno’s claim that the notebook represents far more money than he had hoped for narrows the range of possible suspects to one. He hoped for thousands of dollars, so whatever message Cyrus wanted to deliver to Quentin must be something that can be leveraged for hundreds of thousands or millions. Quentin himself is the only person we’ve seen who has resources like that. He is too selfish to pay blackmail to conceal anyone else’s guilt, even that of his closest family members, so the notebook must contain an accusation against Quentin. Whether that accusation is correct, of course, remains to be seen.

Episode 1035: Terrified at his own duality

Since #1021, Barnabas Collins has been trying to figure out what links mild-mannered scientist Cyrus Longworth with a strange and violent man known as John Yaeger. Yesterday, Cyrus telephoned Barnabas and told him that Yaeger was holding Maggie Collins prisoner in an old farmhouse. Today, Barnabas finds Yaeger choking Maggie in the basement of that farmhouse.

Barnabas orders Yaeger to unhand Maggie, saying that he will kill him if he does not. Maggie gives an ecstatic look, then Yaeger flings her to the floor. He and Barnabas start fighting. Yaeger’s weapon of choice is a heavy cane that conceals a bayonet. The other day, Barnabas was looking at his own heavy cane and thinking about what an effective weapon it is, setting us up to expect a cane fight between him and Yaeger. Returning viewers will therefore be puzzled that Barnabas doesn’t even have his cane. Barnabas’ cane is one of his signature gimmicks, so maybe the makers of the show didn’t want to risk damaging it.

Yaeger exposes the bayonet in his cane and stabs Barnabas with it. Barnabas pulls it out of his chest and keeps coming. Yaeger asks “What kind of creature are you?,” to which Barnabas replies that he will never know. Barnabas strangles Yaeger to death. Barnabas’ threatening statements to Yaeger combine with the fact that he keeps choking him well after he becomes unconscious to leave us no label for this act other than willful murder.

Maggie gets up and goes into the room where Barnabas has just finished killing Yaeger. As she does so, there is a bad goof in the production, as a gap in the panel behind her exposes another set, the one representing the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. Watching Dark Shadows is an education in how resilient an audience’s suspension of disbelief can be, but the idea that the farmhouse is very far from the great house is so important to the suspense that this one really does undercut the rest of the episode.

Maggie should just have clicked her heels and said “There’s no place like home.”

Maggie and Barnabas watch in amazement as the dead Yaeger transforms into Cyrus. Once they have absorbed the implication that Yaeger was just Cyrus in disguise, Barnabas takes Maggie home to the great house.

Maggie is walking when Barnabas gets her in the front door, but she is unconscious by the time he puts her on the couch in the drawing room. Housekeeper Julia Hoffman and Carolyn Stoddard Loomis, a cousin of Maggie’s husband Quentin, are astounded to see them, and have many questions. Barnabas confirms that Yaeger was holding Maggie prisoner and that he is now dead, then orders Hoffman to bring a blanket for her mistress.

Quentin comes home. Barnabas tells him they must go to the farmhouse at once. There, they see Cyrus’ body. Thinking of what Barnabas and Maggie saw, Quentin realizes that the experiment Cyrus had been so secretive about must have been the creation of a Jekyll and Hyde formula. He decides that they should tell the police everything, in spite of the damage it will do to Cyrus’ posthumous reputation and the risk that Barnabas might be inconvenienced in some way for having murdered him.

Quentin has only known Barnabas for a few weeks, and has been wary of him. He has been especially impatient over the last several days with Barnabas’ insistence that Maggie was in danger when he was under the impression that she had merely left the house. This scene shows us Quentin’s remorse at having disbelieved Barnabas, and marks the beginning of a friendship between the two.

Back in the great house, Hoffman is in a brightly lit, richly decorated room, making a telephone call. She is telling the person on the other end of the line that she has learned a crucial secret about Barnabas, and that this secret might be just what they have been looking for. She promises to tell the other person what the secret is once they can talk face to face. Returning viewers know that Hoffman is talking to Quentin’s undead first wife, Angelique, who has been staying in the great house in the guise of her identical twin sister Alexis. The two of them have been scheming to split Maggie and Quentin up so that Angelique can remarry Quentin and resume her place as the mistress of Collinwood. They were in league with Cyrus/ Yaeger, and are afraid that their enemy Barnabas may have picked up some information from him that he can use against them.

Later, Hoffman is on her way back to the same room, perhaps to place another call to Angelique. She finds she cannot pass through the doorway. A phenomenon is occurring that others have seen before. Hoffman sees, not the room that is in that space as she knows it, but dark, bare walls. There are two people there, whom she can see and hear though they are not aware of her. They appear to be herself and Quentin, and they are talking about Barnabas. The man says that Barnabas will be doomed if the “people in that other time” find out that he is a vampire.

Regular viewers know that the man and woman are Julia Hoffman and Quentin Collins, but not the Hoffman and Quentin we have come to know over the last eleven weeks. They are part of another universe altogether. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in that universe, and most of the current characters are counterparts of characters we met there. Barnabas crossed over from that continuity to this one in the futile hope that by doing so he would escape the vampire curse and become human again. Hoffman’s counterpart in the original continuity, Julia Hoffman MD, is as devoted to the undead Barnabas as Hoffman herself is to the undead Angelique. Quentin’s is best friend and confidant to Barnabas and Julia, and is neither the master of Collinwood nor married to his world’s version of Maggie, who is the governess at Collinwood.

Earlier this week, Barnabas popped back to his own reality for a few minutes and talked with Julia. It is his fault that she and Quentin are talking about his vampirism where Hoffman can hear them. He knew that the room as it is in the original universe occasionally becomes perceptible to people in the current universe, since he and Quentin themselves saw it when Julia was standing there talking about him. He just did not think to mention that fact to her.

In the foyer, Barnabas tells Carolyn to stay with Maggie. Carolyn points out that her husband Will Loomis is going to be away until mid-morning, so Barnabas will be alone in their house for several hours. He says he will be all right. While she eavesdrops on this conversation from the drawing room, Hoffman uses the mirror in Carolyn’s compact to confirm that Barnabas does not cast a reflection.

This is precisely the same method Julia used in the original continuity, in #288, to make sure Barnabas was a vampire. The feature film House of Dark Shadows wrapped principal photography several weeks ago; Julia does the same thing there. It is somewhat undercut for returning viewers, not so much by the many times Jonathan Frid’s reflection is inadvertently captured in the many mirrors that decorate the sets in this “mirror universe,” but by the deliberate choice the show made in #1033 to show us an inverted reflection of Barnabas in a magnifying glass in Cyrus’ laboratory. Also, longtime viewers will remember a period in 1968 when Angelique’s counterpart in the main continuity was a vampire. They went out of their way to show us her reflection several times. They never explained what point that was supposed to be making, but it was obviously intentional. If we were confused then, we will be confused again this week.

Julia learned earlier this week that Barnabas keeps an empty coffin behind a secret panel in Carolyn and Will’s house. So she knows where to go this morning. She opens the coffin, places a stake on Barnabas’ chest, and raises a hammer to drive it through his heart. Roll credits!

This cliffhanger leaves us wondering who will interrupt Hoffman and save Barnabas in the first scene of act one on Monday. Carolyn and Will are Barnabas’ victims and are in charge of protecting him, so it would be logical for one or both of them to come home earlier than expected. That would be an anticlimax, but the characters are on the show so rarely and the actors are so dynamic that it would have its compensations. Barnabas has a third victim, Buffie Harrington. We haven’t seen Buffie since #1023 or heard her name since #1028, but regular viewers were reminded of her yesterday when Barnabas mentioned an incident he could have learned about only from her. So it would make sense for her to show up, and it would certainly be nice to see her again.

There are also a few long-shot possibilities. The show spent much of 1969 explaining how Barnabas and Quentin became friends; today Quentin’s counterpart accepts Barnabas as a friend. Perhaps this continuity’s Quentin will somehow save Barnabas. Also, Barnabas’ brief visit home suggests that the barrier between the universes is getting leakier, so we can’t discount the possibility that the original Quentin, the original Julia, or perhaps Will’s counterpart or another character from the old days may happen by.

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 1031: Some way of getting there

In 1968, vampire Barnabas Collins fell into the hands of mad scientist Eric Lang. Like Julia Hoffman, the mad scientist into whose hands Barnabas had previously fallen, Lang wanted to cure Barnabas of vampirism. Unlike Julia, Lang had a plan that actually worked. First, he gave him a treatment that temporarily arrested the symptoms of the curse. Then he built a Frankenstein’s monster which he planned to bring to life with an infusion of Barnabas’ “life force.” Wicked witch Angelique killed Lang before he could complete this experiment. Julia took over, and succeeded. The monster, named Adam, drained Barnabas’ affliction from him permanently.

Julia and Barnabas turned out to be the worst parents imaginable, and Adam grew to hate them. The big guy found kindness in the form of Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, an expert on the supernatural. Stokes taught Adam to speak and to read, and tried to introduce him to the social graces. In #636, Adam was in Stokes’ apartment when an enemy knocked on the door. Stokes told him to hide in the back room. He did, and was never seen and barely ever mentioned again. Only in #933, when another guest of Stokes’ had an unfortunate experience in that room, did we get confirmation that Adam wasn’t still waiting there.

Now, we are beginning the eleventh week of an arc set in a different universe than the one where the show spent its first 196 weeks. Barnabas, again a vampire because of a new curse, had discovered that a particular room in the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood sometimes changes its appearance. Standing in the hall and looking through the door, he could see, not the bare dark walls that are there in his world, but a fully furnished, richly decorated, brightly lit room. People with the same appearances and voices as those he knew would come and go in that room, but they could not see or hear him, nor could he pass through the invisible barrier in the doorway to join them. Stokes explained the many-worlds hypothesis, which he calls “Parallel Time.” Hoping that he might be freed from his curse if he could enter the other universe, Barnabas stood in the room while it was in its normal state. It changed around him, and he found himself in that other continuity.

Barnabas was disappointed to find that he was still a vampire. He bit and enslaved the first person he met. Now he has come to know many people, among them counterparts of Angelique, Julia, and Stokes. Angelique is a wicked witch here as well. She has returned from the dead, murdered her identical twin sister Alexis, and taken Alexis’ place as a permanent houseguest at Collinwood. He knows who she really is and she knows that he knows, but neither is in a position to fight the other. He does not know that Angelique killed Alexis, nor does he know that she, like he, is a vampire. She does not steal blood from the living, but warmth. And her attacks, when they provide her with enough warmth to keep her going, are invariably fatal.

Julia is Angelique’s most fanatical devotee. She is reluctant to bring victims for her to quick-freeze, but is happy enough to serve her in every other way. The portal occasionally opens in the room on this side too, so that inhabitants of the current timeline can catch glimpses of the main continuity as those in the main continuity can catch glimpses of what is happening here. That’s given the show opportunities to contrast this Julia with the one we first met. They have made it very clear that this Julia has the same feelings for Angelique that the original Julia has for Barnabas. Since we know that the other Julia has been Barnabas’ constant helper through all his murders and other activities, we can assume that this Julia will be Angelique’s deadliest enforcer.

Stokes has played a parental role in Angelique’s life. Originally he was identified as Angelique and Alexis’ father, and that is how he is described today. In between there were a couple of days when he was their stepfather, but that didn’t fit with other information we had, and we can hope they will drop that point. At any rate, Stokes disliked Alexis and forgot all about her four seconds after Angelique told him she had killed her. He delights in Angelique. He is an evil mirror image of his virtuous opposite number in the other universe.

Yesterday, Stokes and Angelique were in his apartment, which is the same as the one his counterpart occupies. He told her that he used his unsurpassed mastery of the occult to make it possible for her to return from the dead. Angelique wanted him to cure her of the need to steal the warmth from the living, but he said neither he nor anyone else knows how to do that. When he told her that someone else was involved in the process, she brightened and asked to meet this other person. Stokes looked sad, even ashamed. He indicated that the person is in the back room of his apartment, and Angelique went to its door.

Today, Angelique enters the room. She finds a blanket covering a woman’s body. Stokes enters. Angelique asks if the woman is alive; Stokes says she is more alive than Angelique is. He took much of her “life force” to make it possible for Angelique to overcome death. She retains enough of this force to stay alive. If she dies, all of her “life force” will disappear, including the portion which animates Angelique. But as long as she lives, the woman will keep pulling that portion back to herself. At moments when the woman is drawing on it most effectively, Angelique is overwhelmed with the desperate need for warmth and can right herself only by consuming a victim.

Was this your card? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This story is the reversed mirror image of Adam and Barnabas. As Adam cured Barnabas of vampirism by absorbing his “life force” and coming to life, so the unnamed woman causes Angelique’s heat vampirism by reclaiming her own “life force” and staying alive. Adam had a female companion, an intended Bride of Frankenstein named Eve. Eve was played by Marie Wallace. The original audience was in a position to know that whoever is under the blanket, she will not be played by Miss Wallace. Somerset had premiered opposite Dark Shadows on NBC at the end of March, and she was an original member of its cast.

Evidently, the show does not want us to miss the echo of Adam. Angelique goes back to the apartment later in the episode, and finds Stokes playing chess against himself. First-time viewers will recognize this as a symbol of Stokes’ attempt to manipulate those around him for the sake of an elaborate plan, but those who have been with the show for a long time will also remember Adam’s habit of passing the time with solitaire games of chess.

Meanwhile, in the original continuity, Julia is looking into the room where the portal between universes sometimes becomes visible. She sees her own counterpart talking with Angelique. She is horrified to hear them decide that they must destroy Barnabas, and despairs that she cannot pierce the invisible barrier that separates the two worlds.

Later, Barnabas is in the room. He finds Angelique’s diary and turns to her account of how “he” has a plan to defeat death. Barnabas wonders who “he” is, and decides to take the diary someplace where he can study it. He sets it down. When he looks up, the room is dark and bare. He is back in his own universe, without the diary. Julia enters and welcomes him home.

Without missing a beat, Barnabas exclaims that he must not stay. He has discovered that Maggie Evans Collins, counterpart of someone important to him in his own world, is in danger, and he has to go back to the other universe to rescue her. This is a typical moment. Julia has given up everything she has and any hope of a meaningful relationship with anyone else in her devotion to Barnabas, and in return he keeps throwing other women in her face. The story in “Parallel Time” is getting more complicated and the sufferings of the characters there are getting more urgent, so we can be sure Barnabas will find a way back. But longtime viewers will remember that when Barnabas traveled back in time to 1897, Julia eventually found a way to join him there. So when he travels sideways in time and returns to the other continuity, we can hope that Julia will somehow manage to take her place at his side.

The closing credits bill Grayson Hall twice, once as “Julia Hoffman” and once as “Dr Julia Hoffman.” Julia was in hundreds of episodes before the “Parallel Time” story began, and has appeared a couple of times in episodes where Miss Hoffman the housekeeper also figured. This is the first time her degree makes it on screen.

Episode 1027: A look of surprise

Vampire Barnabas Collins discovers that the woman introduced to him as Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of the late Angelique Stokes Collins, is in fact Angelique herself risen from the grave. He confronts Angelique, and the two find themselves at a stalemate. Angelique calls her stepfather, Tim Stokes, tells him who she really is, and enlists his help against Barnabas. Angelique’s widower, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, comes home to the great house on the estate of Collinwood and refuses to have an adult conversation with his current wife, the former Maggie Evans, about his temper tantrums and other bad habits that are ruining their marriage.

Meanwhile, mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, who has been conducting a Jekyll and Hyde experiment on himself, transforms into his Hyde form in front of his fiancée Sabrina Stuart. She tries to reason with him, and he responds with a lot of sneering and threats. Cyrus sneaks into the great house and lets himself into the master bedroom while Maggie is asleep there. He tricked Maggie into meeting him on the waterfront last week, and tried to rape her there. Apparently he has decided to make another attempt.

Writer Joe Caldwell takes a surprising approach to tying this big bundle of disparate content together. In each encounter, he has the characters talk about the way they are looking at each other. This sounds extremely unpromising, like a recipe for the dullest possible essay about literary theory, but when they put the script on its legs it works well enough.

Barnabas learns Angelique’s secret by going to her old bedroom in the east wing of the great house and staring really hard at the eyes in the portrait of Angelique that hangs there. “Alexis” comes running in, wailing that he is staring into her eyes and it burns. Barnabas goggles at her and she admits to being Angelique come back to life. He refuses to explain his powers of remote viewing.

The eyes of Angelique S. Collins. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique telephones Stokes, who was named in #981 as her father but whom we see for the first time today. He thinks she is Alexis. He wearily tells her there is no point in the two of them having a conversation. She tells him she has something to tell him about Angelique, and he comes right over.

In her room, Angelique identifies herself to Stokes. He is overjoyed that the twin he liked is alive. She tells him that when she rose from the grave, she drained the warmth from Alexis’ body, killing her. Stokes frowns and says he didn’t want Alexis to die. He seems genuinely sad for a period. I timed this period; it lasts precisely four seconds. That season of mourning complete, Stokes and Angelique are again beaming and laughing and moving about in a circular pattern that looks very much like a dance around the May pole.

This scene includes some deeply puzzling information. Stokes says that he was stepfather to Alexis and Angelique. The other day, Angelique told Barnabas that her family’s burial grounds is the final resting place of her namesake, a woman named Angelique who came to Collinwood in the late eighteenth century as a domestic, and that another servant at Collinwood in those days, Ben Stokes, was her several times great-grandfather in the male line. Perhaps Angelique’s remarks about Ben and her namesake are being retconned away, but there doesn’t seem to be any point in doing so.

For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe. The show insists on calling the current continuity “Parallel Time.” Stokes’ counterpart in the other universe, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, is a descendant of his version of Ben, though that Ben never married his coeval Angelique. Professor Stokes is an expert on the occult and a good guy, and it was he who first explained the theory of “Parallel Time” when characters started catching glimpses of it through a warp in Angelique’s bedroom here. Now the same warp is making the original continuity visible to the current characters, and it falls to Tim Stokes to explain the same theory to his (step)daughter. The Parallel Time phenomenon, like Barnabas’ remote viewing of Angelique through her portrait, is a case of one-way visibility. When the warp occurs, people can see into the other universe, but the people they are watching are not aware of them.

Shortly before dawn, Stokes lets himself into the Old House on the estate, where Barnabas is staying. Barnabas sees Stokes in the parlor. Barnabas asks Stokes who he is and what he is doing alone in someone else’s house at such an unusual hour. Stokes responds to these questions as he sees fit, then asks if he and Barnabas have met before. He characterizes Barnabas’ look upon seeing him as one of recognition. Barnabas replies that on the contrary, it was the shock of non-recognition. One does not expect to see a stranger in such circumstances. This little conversation about the act of seeing turns out to be the main part of the scene.

Quentin shows up in the master bedroom and stares at Maggie while she sleeps. She wakes up and is relieved to see that he is back. Then they have their frustrating little conversation. Maggie may as well have kept sleeping; at least Quentin wasn’t making things between them worse when she didn’t know he was there.

After he attacked Maggie on the docks, Cyrus threw away the potion that turns him into his Mr Hyde form, which he calls “John Yaeger.” He does not have the means to make more of it, since he murdered the chemist who alone was able to supply one of the key ingredients. He uses the same potion to re-Jekyllize himself, and since he had already transformed spontaneously once before it seems pretty reckless to throw it out. Sabrina is with Cyrus in his laboratory when the transformation happens again. She is horrified to discover that Yaeger, whom she has met and has reason to hate, is in fact Cyrus in disguise.

In the other universe, Sabrina’s counterpart was engaged to another murderous shape-shifter, a werewolf named Chris Jennings. When the other Sabrina saw Chris change into his lupine form, her hair turned white and she lost the power of speech for several years. This Sabrina is more resilient, and she tries to reason with Cyrus. He keeps telling her how dumb she is, then leaves. At the end, we see him standing where Quentin had stood earlier, at the foot of Maggie’s bed, watching while she sleeps. We hear his internal monologue as he tells himself “Now, John Yaeger, now!”

This episode was made not long after the feature film House of Dark Shadows finished principal photography. The very large number of story points crammed into its 22 minutes may show the influence of that production. It wouldn’t be unusual to see this much action in two reels of a theatrical release, but it is far more than we are accustomed to seeing at 4 PM on weekdays.

Episode 1026: The spectacle of Barnabas Collins trying to prove anything

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.

Barnabas’ triumphant simper. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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.

*For example, in #266, #267, and #268, and #569.

Episode 1024: Chance and Mrs Stoddard are identical twins

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 brings the party. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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.