Tag: paula laurence

Episode 1005: No danger, just a lot of confusion

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.

Episode 992: What form she has, I do not know

We meet Hannah Stokes, aunt of identical twins Alexis Stokes and Angelique Stokes Collins. Hannah is in the cottage on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, home to sleazy musician Bruno Hess. When we first see her, Hannah is casting a horoscope. Later she reads tarot cards. Still later she sprinkles some bone meal on a stolen handkerchief and says an incantation over it. The point of all this mumbo-jumbo is to determine whether the blonde woman living in the great house on the estate is Angelique or Alexis. Since Angelique died six months previously, this question would seem to have an obvious answer, but Bruno and Hannah seem to know that death is seldom a major disability among characters on Dark Shadows.

Hannah laughs at Bruno, who shares her hairstyle but does not appreciate her talents.

Hannah goes to the great house to see her niece. Alexis hated Hannah, so if she is the woman she could be expected to receive the visit coldly. Angelique was close to her, but knew of Alexis’ attitude. So if she is the woman, she could be expected to behave in exactly the same way. Indeed, the episode began with Angelique’s son Daniel and her widower Quentin noticing little things Alexis did just as her sister would do them, prompting her to point out that they were raised by the same mother and picked up many habits from her. So if a resurrected Angelique is trying to imitate Alexis, she has enough material to work with that not even her aunt can tell them apart.

Hannah goes back to the cottage. None of her black magic answers the question of which sister is living in the great house, but she is sure that Angelique is present on the estate in some form, perhaps visible, perhaps ghostly. Bruno is convinced Angelique is present in her own form and using Alexis’ name. Quentin overhears their conversation and believes for a moment that Bruno is right, before talking himself out of it. Later, he and Alexis see Angelique’s piano playing itself in her old bedroom, and Alexis believes that Angelique’s ghost is playing it.

The most interesting thing about this episode is Paula Laurence’s turn as Hannah. Her whole performance today is an imitation of Lara Parker as Angelique. Laurence was such a different physical type from Parker I couldn’t put my finger on what she was doing until she was about to exit the cottage at the end of her first scene and she laughed at Bruno. She recreated the very distinctive laugh Parker uses as Angelique. At that, my wife and I simultaneously said “The same laugh!” From then on, it was impossible to miss the imitation. It comes across as a family resemblance, of a piece with Alexis and Angelique trimming plants the same way or humming the same tune while fluffing pillows.

The cottage is the place for spooky doings. We are in a different universe today than the one where the show was based for its first 196 weeks. In the main continuity, we first saw the cottage as the home of crazed handyman Matthew Morgan, who would be scared to death by ghosts. Matthew was succeeded as a resident of the cottage by undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Laura was central to the storyline that picked up where the ghosts who killed Matthew left off. Most of the major narrative loose ends, such as the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc, were wrapped up as points within her story, while the ghosts were pulled out of the unseen back-world behind the action and brought into the spotlight. By the time Laura went up in smoke, the back-world of uncanny beings and the front-world of business stories and estranged spouses had reversed their places, and Dark Shadows had become a supernatural thriller.

The cottage was vacant for a long time after Laura. The next inhabitant was werewolf Chris Jennings. He was haunted there by the ghost of the main continuity’s counterpart of Quentin, who had lived and died in 1897. Quentin’s ghost seemed to have greater power in the cottage than elsewhere on the grounds of the estate. When the show traveled back in time to 1897, we found that Quentin and his fellow Satanist Evan Hanley had spent time there working black magic. At one point Quentin and Evan asked for a spirit to come from Hell to join them in an evil plan, and the one who appeared was Angelique’s counterpart, who like Laura was an undead blonde fire witch. Also in 1897, we learned that Quentin had been entangled with another iteration of Laura, and that the cottage had been one of their places.

Vague as Hannah’s findings are, they combine with Angelique’s iconography and that of the cottage to assure us that her ghost is active on the estate and that she will be returning in physical form. They are still keeping us guessing about how Alexis fits into all of that, but it seems more and more likely that she is at least sincere in her belief that she is not Angelique. Maybe she is an entirely separate entity who will eventually meet her reanimated sister, or maybe it will turn out that she and Angelique are inhabiting the same body. The spirits of the dead have been known to sublet space from the living on Dark Shadows, so that is one of many possible outcomes.