philip todd – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 935: Call me Jabe

Sheriff Davenport and his new sidekick, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, have come to the top of the stairs above Philip and Megan Todd’s antique shop in the village of Collinsport. The sheriff has a search warrant that specifies the room by the landing as a place of interest in connection with the violent death of one Paul Stoddard. Philip begs the sheriff not to enter the room, saying that a boy who lived there recently died and that any disturbance would “defile” it. He swears the room is entirely empty. The sheriff expresses his sympathy, but opens the door anyway.

Inside is a young man. Philip seems as surprised at the sight of him as are the sheriff and Julia. He gives his name as “Hawkes, Jeb Hawkes. Short for Jabez… Call me Jabe.” No one calls him Jabe, which seems a bit rude. Jabe claims that he came by earlier when Megan was in and Philip was out, and that she offered to let him live in the room.

The room does not contain any furniture, any luggage, or any other movable property whatsoever. Moreover, while it is possible Megan might have rented the room without mentioning it to Philip, it is difficult to see what Jabe has been doing up there since she left, and since Philip has been moving around the rest of the building it is even more difficult to suppose Jabe could have left his belongings elsewhere without attracting Philip’s notice. Jabe claims to be a photographer, but does not appear to have any camera equipment. Moreover, the sheriff will later tell Julia that he noticed a distinctive odor on Jabe that was prominent on Paul’s corpse, and that he found one of Paul’s cufflinks, damaged as by fire, on the floor of the antique shop. In the finest traditions of Collinsport law enforcement, the sheriff does not take Jabe or Philip into custody, question either of them more than cursorily, or close off the antique shop for a further search. He does come back later to tell Jabe that he should think about finding another apartment.

Jabe is the latest embodiment of a mysterious creature that has previously taken the form of a newborn boy, an eight year old boy, an eight year old girl, and a thirteen year old boy. The boys were vicious little tyrants who did not seem to think at all, only to follow impulses to dominate and humiliate whomever they met. The girl was a Doppelgänger of Paul’s daughter Carolyn as she was when she was eight, and she existed specifically to make Paul feel worthless because he was a deadbeat dad. None of these children engaged with another character in a way that meant there was anything at stake for them in any scene. They as much as tell us that the same will be true of Jabe. When Philip complains today that he has put him and Megan in a difficult position by failing to tell them of his plans, Jabe answers “Maybe I just didn’t want to let you know. Maybe I just wanted to see you sweat it out.”

The only time one of the children did anything surprising in an effort to take on an adversary was when the eight year old boy shape-shifted and became the young Carolyn. Had the sheriff not shown the clownish ineptitude typical of his office, but instead done what a real cop would do and arrested Jabe and Philip, they might have created a situation in which Jabe would have to surprise us again. It might be interesting to see him turn into the grown-up Carolyn, for example. As it is, Jabe just insults Philip, goes to the police station, and murders the sheriff.

Jabe berates Philip. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This puts a new spin on Roger Ebert’s category of “Idiot Plot.” Ebert said that a movie had an Idiot Plot when its story would end immediately if any of the characters had the brains of an average member of the audience. In this case, the story stays stuck in an angry and utterly predictable rut because of the sheriff’s inexplicable nonfeasance.

The first time Mrs Acilius and I watched Dark Shadows through, we hated Jabe and didn’t want to see Christopher Pennock again. Later, Pennock will return in several quite different roles, each of them more appealing than the one before. By the end of the series he had become one of our favorites, and it occurred to us that even as Jabe he managed to do a lot of things right. But there is only so much an actor can do to work around a script problem, and as written Jabe is barely a character at all. His actions cause problems for several other people, but nothing we see him do or hear him say makes us care about why he takes those actions as opposed to any others. It certainly doesn’t help that half of his episodes, including this one, are directed by Henry Kaplan, whose idea of visual composition was to shove a camera so close to an actor’s face that you can see about one half of one cheekbone.

It didn’t have to be that way. Not only was Pennock a fine actor when he had something to work with, but in this episode we have a scene between Julia and rakish libertine Quentin Collins that shows how a character with a bizarre backstory and a record of evil deeds can become an audience favorite. Quentin is down in the dumps because he just failed to rescue his one true love, Amanda Harris, from the realm of the dead. Julia urges him to reconnect with the Collinses of Collinwood. He asks how he can possibly explain that he is 72 years older than he looks and is now alive, even though his ghost carried out a protracted and deadly haunting of the estate. This dialogue shows that Quentin’s origins require us to believe any number of impossible things, and longtime viewers remember that he is a murderer who killed his wife in cold blood, among other unspeakable acts. But all we see in this scene are his charm and the affection that he and Julia have for each other, and we want to see more of that, as much as they can give us. With similar material, Pennock could have achieved similar results. But it is already clear that he won’t get it as Jabe.

Postscript

In his scene with Julia, Quentin says that no one at the hotel where he and Amanda have been staying remembers her, and that all traces of the alias she had been using seem to have disappeared. Julia speculates that when he lost her in the underworld, the last 72 years of Amanda’s life were negated, that the past was reset so that she did in fact die on a night in the 1890s when she might have died had one of the gods of the dead not intervened.

This raises two questions. First, Amanda has been keeping Quentin. If they are now in a timeline where she never came to town, who’s paying his hotel bill and buying his liquor? It’s a standard feature of soap operas that unless they are telling a story about conflicts over ownership of a business or a house or some other valuable property, everyone just has an inexhaustible supply of money, but they put enough time into Amanda and Julia’s squabble as to which one of them would be Quentin’s sugar mama that you might have expected a line or two about this question.

Second, if everyone else has forgotten Amanda, how does Julia remember her? Quentin journeyed through the infernal regions with her, and so I suppose it makes a kind of sense that from that supernatural location he would have a perspective that would transcend our perception of time and space. But Julia was in and around Collinsport the whole time Quentin and Amanda were harrowing the abode of the permanently unavailable. I suppose the real answer is that she is the audience’s point of view character, and as such knows everything we know. But it does leave us wondering if, in the course of her adventures, some kind of uncanny power may have rubbed off on her.

Episode 934: Some plans we could spoil

Last Experience

We open with a reprise of the end of yesterday’s episode. Quentin Collins and Amanda Harris are reenacting the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. As in the ancient Greek story, they will live together if they can escape all the perils on the road from the realm of the dead to that of the living. Unlike that story, they are allowed to look at each other along the way, but they are not allowed to touch.

The teaser ends where Wednesday’s episode ended, with Amanda falling through a gap in a footbridge and Quentin crying out in anguish. After the opening title, we are surprised to find ourselves at the same scene. Amanda is not yet lost. Quentin pulls her up from the ravine she fell into. But that involves touch, so the ceiling of the cavern collapses and buries her. Suddenly, Quentin finds himself lying on the ground, in the upper world, with no sign of any way back to the place from which he just came.

Amanda’s demise marks Donna McKechnie’s final appearance on Dark Shadows. Miss McKechnie left to be in the original cast of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, paving the way for her enormous success on Broadway in the 1970s. Much later, Miss McKechnie would reprise the role of Amanda in a couple of Big Finish Productions’ Dark Shadows audio dramas, and nowadays she appears at the Dark Shadows conventions.

Any account of Donna McKechnie’s last day at 433 West 53rd Street would be incomplete without this story from Hamrick and Jamison’s book Barnabas and Company:

In rehearsal, we went through the scene with a few Styrofoam boulders and a little peat moss, no big deal. Nobody told me there was going to be ten times as much dropped during the taping. So, when it was time to tape the scene, I was looking up, and I just got buried. I got peat moss in my eyes and in my mouth and ears and nose… and I was covered in rocks. The way things worked at the studio, at the end of that scene, the lights went out, and the camera and crew and actors all moved on to the next scene, in another part of the studio. So there I was, laying under all those Styrofoam rocks and peat moss, and nobody helped me get out. I had to dig myself out, and that was my last experience on Dark Shadows.

Craig Hamrick and R. J. Jamison, BARNABAS AND COMPANY: THE CAST OF THE TV CLASSIC DARK SHADOWS (2nd edition, 2012) page 245.

They’ve been doing a bit of videotape editing recently, as several awkward cuts have made clear. One might think that the whole Underworld sequence, pre- and post-title, was edited in from tape left over from yesterday’s shoot. But Miss McKechnie’s story proves that is not so. The episodes were done in sequence, so if the last bit of tape they shot yesterday had been the crushing of Amanda there wouldn’t have been any next scene to run off to and Miss McKechnie would have had plenty of help digging herself out from under.

Some Sort of Monster was After Him

Meanwhile, the sheriff is at the home of occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, have called him in because a monster wrecked Stokes’ bedroom, in the process killing a man named Paul Stoddard.

No law enforcement officer on Dark Shadows has yet solved a case, and Sheriff Davenport seems likely to prove the most useless member of the fraternity yet. At no point does he interrogate Stokes and Julia, or even show much interest in what they were doing while Paul was being killed. He refuses to believe Julia when she says that he should be looking for a monster, even though Collinsport has been overrun with monsters for years now and he has acknowledged that the wreckage at Stokes’ is like nothing he has ever seen. Julia tells him that the monster lives in the room at the top of the stairs in the antique shop operated by Megan and Philip Todd. In response, he flatly states that “They wouldn’t have anything to do with his death.” He finally agrees to get a search warrant for the Todds’ place, but when he presents it to Philip he says that he will execute it “unless of course, you don’t want me to?”

The meatiest part of the episode is a long scene between Megan and Philip. She is exultant that the monster has killed Paul and certain that it will go on to do other, even more wonderful things. He’s scared to death of what the monster will do to them if it is not defeated and of the retribution that will come to them if it is. She sneers at him as a coward. He admits that he is a coward, but insists that they run away and count themselves fortunate if they can escape with their lives.

In her first role on Dark Shadows, as Eve, The Fiancée of Frankenstein, Marie Wallace was called upon to show an unbending, unvarying contempt for Adam, the patchwork man she was supposed to marry. Since that was the only feeling Eve had ever shown for Adam, it wasn’t very interesting. But Megan loved Philip when we first met them. The other day, when she told the monster that she had loved Philip for a long time, we could believe her. So her scorn today does carry some force, and no one knows better how to play scorn and play it to the hilt than does Miss Wallace.

The part of Philip has not been a particularly congenial one for Christopher Bernau up to this point, but he too excels in the scene. He has lots of lines you would expect a man to find it hard to say, calling himself a coward and so on, but he speaks them smoothly and fluently. He shows his hesitancy and anguish not in his delivery of the lines, but in his facial expressions and movements while Megan is speaking. You can see him deciding to put aside all male ego and say something that might get through to Megan, no matter how humiliating it is for him to say it. With lines proclaiming his cowardice, Bernau creates the image of a remarkably brave Philip.

Philip divided. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

That in turn makes it possible for the episode to end on a suspenseful note. The closing cliffhanger has Sheriff Davenport turning the doorknob to the monster’s room, while Philip is frenziedly trying to come up with a way to talk him out of entering it. When we watched that, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said to the screen “If you don’t tell him what’s in there, it’s murder,” in a tone that suggested she thought Philip actually might tell the sheriff the truth. That such an idea could even form is a testament to Bernau’s outstanding performance in this episode.

Episode 929: The convergence

For the first 55 weeks of Dark Shadows, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard was under the impression that she had killed her husband Paul and that Paul’s associate Jason McGuire had buried his corpse in the basement of the great house on the estate of Collinwood. She spent nineteen years at home, terrified that if she left the estate someone might find Paul’s grave and hold her to account for his killing. Finally it turned out that she had only stunned Paul. He and Jason had faked his death to trick Liz into giving them a lot of money. Soon, Liz was no longer a recluse and that whole story was forgotten.

Now, Paul has returned. He denies knowing anything about his fake death, claiming that Jason acted alone. Longtime viewers will be skeptical of this claim, and Liz certainly is. But she doesn’t care about it as much as you might expect. She is now part of a secret cult that serves mysterious supernatural forces known as the Leviathan People, who plan to take over the earth, supplanting the human race. Paul has learned that he inadvertently sold Carolyn Collins Stoddard, his daughter with Liz, to the Leviathans, and he has been trying to sound the alarm about them. As a serenely happy devotee of the Leviathan cult, Liz has agreed to keep Paul at Collinwood where she can drug him into immobility.

The power of the Leviathans has taken bodily form in a succession of children who live in an antique shop in the village of Collinsport. The shop’s owners, Megan and Philip Todd, were the first people inducted into the cult by Liz’ distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. The latest manifestation of this being, an apparently thirteen year old boy known as Michael, had been attracting attention that threatened to blow the cult’s cover, so Philip and Megan faked his death. They held a funeral this morning.

Michael is supposed to retire into his room above the antique shop and stay there until he has graduated to his next form. He comes out and tells Megan and Philip that he has decided not to go through with this plan. Philip picks him up and carries him there, putting a new lock on the outside of the door to keep him in until he has gone through another transformation.

Carolyn calls the Todds and extends her mother’s invitation to an evening at Collinwood. They accept.

Unknown to Liz or the Todds, Barnabas has become disaffected from the cult. He visits Paul in his room. He gives Paul clothes and a lot of money and urges him to go far away. Paul doesn’t trust Barnabas, and holds him at gunpoint throughout their entire conversation.

When the Leviathan cult first emerged, its members were siloed off from each other. Barnabas gave Philip and Megan their instructions in dream visitations. When they were awake, they would not recognize him as their leader. They and Liz were not aware of each other’s connection to the cult, though Liz did know that Barnabas was her leader and her nephew David Collins was a fellow cultist. It reminded us of secret operations in the real world, where only people who work with each other directly are allowed to know of their shared allegiance.

Now, all that security is out the window. Liz and the Todds stand around the drawing room at Collinwood having drinks and talking about what Barnabas has and has not told them about the Leviathans and their goals. They do still keep some secrets, however. Liz says that she can’t help but wonder what Carolyn’s role will be in the time to come. Barnabas and the Todds know that she is fated to be the bride of the force currently incarnated as Michael, but they are not allowed to tell Liz this. They look at each other with alarm, and Barnabas gives her some vague and hasty assurances.

There is an unintentionally hilarious moment during the cocktail party scene. Megan is seized by enthusiasm for the Leviathan project, and starts babbling all sorts of portentous phrases about the new world that is taking shape through their efforts. Marie Wallace was one of the most committed exponents of the Dark Shadows house style of acting, which consists largely of delivering your lines so vehemently that you are in constant danger of spraining your back. For her part, while Joan Bennett sometimes played to the balcony as Liz and her other characters, she never really let go of the urbane and relatively understated approach that made her one of the biggest movie stars of the late 1930s. When Liz responds to Megan with the amiable smile and subtly musical voice of a sophisticated society hostess, it all of a sudden strikes regular viewers who have got used to the show’s peculiarities just how incredibly bombastic Miss Wallace was.

Meanwhile, Paul goes through a lot of business with Barnabas and Carolyn in which he is told to wait an hour, no half an hour, no ten minutes, before leaving the house. He steals the keys from Megan’s purse and sneaks off to the antique shop. He has decided he must figure out what exactly is going on there. He lets himself into the room where the Leviathan force is kept when it is not embodied as a child. He hears a heavy breathing. The camera zooms in on his shocked face. With that, the episode closes. Paul’s future would appear to be extremely brief. On the day of Michael’s phony funeral, he seems likely to bring the show’s first fake death firmly into the realm of the actual.

Paul gets more than he bargained for. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Today marks Michael Maitland’s last appearance as Michael. He did a lot of acting as a child, including major roles on Broadway both before and after his run on Dark Shadows. Playing Michael didn’t give him much chance to show what he could do. His resume suggests that is a shame- he must have had a lot to offer to get all those big parts. And by all accounts, he was a very nice guy.

Michael Maitland died of cancer in 2014, at the age of 57. That means that three of the five child actors who appeared on Dark Shadows during the Leviathan segment have died. Denise Nickerson, who played Amy Jennings, was 62 when she died in 2019; Alyssa Mary Ross Eppich, who under the name Lisa Ross played the Leviathan child in the guise of an eight year old version of Carolyn in #909, was 60 when she died in 2020. David Henesy, who played David Collins, and David Jay, who played the Leviathan child as an eight year boy called Alexander, are still going strong. So too is Sharon Smyth Lentz, who played the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins in 31 episodes in 1967 and the living Sarah in six episodes in 1967 and early 1968.

Episode 928: Strange, disposable little boys

Antique dealers Megan and Philip Todd have called Julia Hoffman, MD, to the apartment above their shop in the village of Collinsport. They have been looking after a boy named Michael, and Michael has suddenly been taken very ill. Julia examines Michael and picks up the telephone to call for an ambulance. Before she can finish dialing, Michael has a seizure. She gives the boy a shot, but it does not stabilize him. She pronounces him dead.

Julia has many abilities that far exceed those of any other doctor- she can build Frankenstein’s monsters and bring them to life, cure vampirism, rewrite people’s memories with a wave of her medallion, and, when the occasion calls for it, transcend time and space and treat patients located in bygone centuries. But she has a curious shortcoming regarding death pronouncements. She has pronounced at least a dozen people dead, and almost all of them turned out to be alive and well. The death toll on Dark Shadows is so high that no category of character has as good a chance of survival as those who have been pronounced dead by Julia. So it isn’t much of a surprise when Michael comes downstairs into the shop at the end of the episode, none the worse for his experience.

Philip and Megan are members of a cult devoted to serving a supernatural force of which Michael is an embodiment. They have plotted to fake his death, perhaps to involve the actual death of his body in preparation for his reemergence in another form, to allay the suspicions that Julia and others have started to show. As a further step in this plot, Megan mentions the town of Coleyville, where a woman named Mrs Hutchins lives. She tells Julia that Mrs Hutchins took care of Michael before he came to live with her and Philip, and Julia goes to see her.

Violet Welles, writer of today’s script, likes to take us out of town. All we see of Coleyville is Mrs Hutchins’ living room and the area around her front door, but even so it is good to get away from Collinsport for a little while.

Mrs Hutchins tells Julia that Michael’s family were “the Hacketts.” The name “Hackett” has a history on Dark Shadows. In #223, dashing action hero Burke Devlin met with matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard in the study of the great house of Collinwood and tried to talk her out of selling some properties to a man called “Hackett,” never heard of before or since. We also saw the name on screen twice. A few weeks after Burke tried to talk Liz out of the Hackett deal, her daughter Carolyn started dating a motorcycle enthusiast identified in the credits for #252 and #257 as “Buzz Hackett,” though in his other appearances he was listed simply as “Buzz” and his surname was never mentioned in the dialogue. Hackett is hardly a rare name, but it isn’t so common that this is likely to be a coincidence. Maybe Dan Curtis was a fan of comic Buddy Hackett, he was a big deal in those days.

Returning viewers know that everything Mrs Hutchins tells Julia is a lie. Michael did not exist until he took shape in an upstairs room of Megan and Philip’s shop in #913/914. Therefore, we pay close attention to Camila Ashland’s acting. She is a bit larger than life, but that is nothing unusual on Dark Shadows. After Julia exits, Philip enters and pays Mrs Hutchins for her performance; she asks him if there really was a little boy who died, and he sternly reproves her for asking questions. Ashland tones her performance down for Mrs Hutchins’ scene with Philip, suggesting that with Julia she really had been playing the role of an actress at work.

Julia admires Mrs Hutchins’ acting, while we admire Camila Ashland’s.

Philip leaves by the front door, and of course Julia is waiting behind the shrubbery to see him go. She goes to her friend Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes and tells him what she has learned. Stokes later goes to the antique shop to meet the Todds. He tells them he is in a hurry, but they peek out their window a few minutes after he has gone and see him across the street, looking at them. No one on Dark Shadows has much of a flair for OpSec, so this isn’t a great surprise.

The closing credits run over a shot of Mrs Hutchins’ birdcage. The parakeet moves around as they roll. It is a charming shot, almost as good as the motorized puppets under the credits at the end of #904. That was another Violet Welles script, I suppose she was the one who decided to liven up the credits.

Episode 927: Reasons don’t matter

Permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, is in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood when a secret panel opens and a boy known as Michael comes strolling out. She asks him how he knew about the panel and the passages behind it; he says that thirteen year old David Collins told him. Julia asks if Michael knows what has become of David’s governess, the missing Maggie Evans. Michael tries to dodge her questions. When Maggie comes running into the room, screaming that she has been living a nightmare, Michael takes the opportunity to flee.

Michael emerges from the secret passage.

Returning viewers know that Michael is not really human, but is the latest in a series of manifestations of a monstrous force that has enlisted the support of several characters for its plan to supplant the human race. We also know that Michael trapped Maggie in the long-disused west wing of the house and tormented her there. She had been sure that Michael was her tormentor, but when Michael’s foster father, antique dealer Philip Todd, came to her rescue, Maggie beaned him with a small candlestick and jumped to the conclusion that he was to blame. She tells Julia that Michael is innocent and Philip is dead.

Maggie’s captivity is a remake of a story that ran from #84 to #87. In those days, the show’s liveliest villains were David and his father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger. David locked Maggie’s predecessor Victoria Winters up in a room in the west wing, where he hoped she would die. Eventually Roger used the secret panel from which Michael emerges today to go to the west wing and investigate. He went straight to the room where Vicki was trapped. Roger shared David’s ill-will towards Vicki, and had in #68 encouraged him to harm her. In the corridor outside her prison, he took advantage of the situation to terrorize her further, disguising his voice and pretending to be a ghost taunting her with her doom. When he finally opened the door, she flung herself into his arms and declared that he was right and David really was a monster.

That story dragged out for so long that we couldn’t help noticing several steps Vicki might have taken to get herself free. Her failure to try any of them was a major step towards the creation of the “Dumb Vicki” image that would in time destroy the character completely. Maggie doesn’t outdo Vicki in engineering ability, but at least part of her helplessness can be explained by a taunting voice that she hears, on and off, from the beginning of her captivity. This one really is supernatural in its origin, projected by Michael. Her misunderstanding of Philip’s motives and condition is as total as was Vicki’s of Roger’s, but she corrects it by the end of the episode, when she realizes that Philip was coming to rescue her from Michael, and that he is fine now. She goes to his shop to apologize for accusing him.

The contrast between the two stories sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses of the show in the days when they were made. In the first months, individual episodes might have so little action that there was nowhere to hide a logical problem like Vicki’s immediate resignation when she realized that the window in the room was slightly out of her reach, even though the room was full of materials she could stack up and stand on. Still, Vicki’s reaction when Roger enters was electrifying, one of the best moments of acting in the entire series, and the change in her relationship with David in the weeks after her release is pivotal to everything that happens from that point on.

The relative busyness of the stories now allow us to overlook Maggie’s absurd helplessness while she is in the room, and her quick reconciliation with Philip papers over her inexplicable failure to remember that she heard Michael’s voice taunting her. But as Philip points out, Maggie doesn’t really know him. Nor will her experience shape her future attitude to Michael in any interesting way- as a creature who rapidly changes his form, he comes with a built-in expiration date. The whole story vanishes without a trace once Maggie leaves the antique shop. The individual episodes may not seem as slow now as they did at first, but when we find ourselves weeks or months into a storyline and find that very little has happened that we have any need to remember, we are left with a sense of motionlessness.

Roger’s use of the secret panel in #87 was the first time we learned it existed, and we didn’t see or hear of it again for two years, when both David and the ghost of Quentin Collins used it during the “Haunting of Collinwood” segment. David ushered visiting psychic Madame Janet Findley through the panel, directly to her death; Quentin came out of it and killed elderly silversmith Ezra Braithwaite. So to longtime viewers, the panel represents both murderous intentions and an intimate knowledge of the layout of the house. When Michael comes sashaying out of it today, we are meant to be a deeply unsettled.

Philip is disaffected from the project Michael represents; his wife Megan is still all in, and she combines her fanaticism with a desperate love for Michael. She talks with Michael privately, and tells him that he has been making himself so conspicuous that he has raised suspicions in the minds of many people. They will have to take steps to quell these suspicions, steps which neither she nor Michael will like at all.

Michael becomes very ill, and Megan calls Julia to come to the shop to treat him. She finds that his heartbeat is irregular and his vital signs are fading. She is calling the hospital when he goes into some kind of crisis; she leaves the telephone and injects him with a stimulant to jolt him back into stability.

Recently, we have heard several references to “Dr Reeves,” a character who was on the show a couple of times in 1966. Dr Reeves did not appear on screen, much to the relief of longtime viewers who remember how annoying he was, but the sheer fact that his name came up sufficed to assure us that Julia is not the only doctor in Collinsport. Since the group around Michael has been unable to absorb Julia and sees her as a potential enemy, Megan must have chosen her for some reason to do with the plan she was telling Michael about.

Episode 926: I don’t want to know who you are

This episode has the same story as Friday’s.

The current A-story is about the coming of the Leviathans, mysterious beings who act through a cult that has absorbed several people in the village of Collinsport and on the estate of Collinwood. Antique shop owners Megan and Philip Todd have been entrusted with the care of a creature that has assumed the forms of several human children in succession. This creature, currently presenting itself as a thirteen year old boy named Michael, is extremely obnoxious to everyone for no apparent reason, prompting them all to reconsider their commitment to the program. Philip is ready to turn against the Leviathans; Megan from time to time admits that he is onto something, but by the end of yesterday’s episode was back under Michael’s control. She had said Philip needed to be got out of the way and picked up a gun.

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins goes to the Todds’ shop in the village. He finds Megan pointing her gun at Philip and orders her to cut it out. Barnabas had been the leader who initiated the Todds into the cult and as we hear his thoughts in internal monologues today we hear that he still has some loyalty to it, but Michael has been too much for him. When he tells Megan to listen to him instead of Michael, she is shocked at his sacrilegious words. He hastily claims that he was only testing her.

Barnabas and Philip have a staff conference. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.

For his part, Michael is at the great house of Collinwood. Last night he was there as the guest of strange and troubled boy David Collins, who has shared supervision of the Todds with his distant cousin Barnabas. David’s governess, Maggie Evans, is not a member of the cult, and she had done something that bothered Michael. So he trapped her in the house’s long-disused west wing. She is still trapped there, and he has returned to use his powers to torment her further. David is anguished about this, but does not feel he can oppose Michael.

Maggie’s captivity prompts us to ask just why it is so frustrating that this episode is essentially a duplicate of Friday’s. In May and June of 1967, Barnabas was a vampire, he was holding Maggie prisoner in his basement, and there were a number of duplicated episodes. It was during that period that the show first became a hit, and it is that story that every revival of the show, from the 1970 film House of Dark Shadows on, goes out of its way to incorporate.

I think what kept people coming back to watch Barnabas’ imprisonment of Maggie was not so much what he was doing to her, but his relationship with his blood thrall Willie. In the course of Barnabas’ abuse of Maggie, Willie went through all of the psychological phases that Megan, Philip, David, and Barnabas exhibit today. I think the actors playing all four of those characters live up to John Karlen’s performance as Willie; even those who disagree with me on that will have to concede that some of them do good work. So the problem is not with the performances.

Rather, these episodes fall short because the character of Michael does not have the depth Barnabas had in the spring and summer of 1967. We kept wondering what Barnabas was thinking, and the more we learned about him the more puzzled we became, since all his ideas were so crazy. In his role as Barnabas’ external conscience, Willie gave us grounds to hope that we would eventually reach a layer of his mind where the nonsense would give way to something intelligible. But we don’t wonder what Michael is thinking, because there’s no evidence Michael is thinking at all. He demands submission from all and sundry and flies into a rage the instant he encounters resistance. He is just a spoiled brat.

Moreover, as a vampire Barnabas needed people to protect him during the day and to surrender their blood to him at night. When David is slow to submit today, Michael tells him he doesn’t need him or anyone else. This seems to be all too true- nothing is at stake for Michael in any interaction. No matter what Michael Maitland brings to the part, no matter how well his four Willies play their roles, the character is a dead end.

One viewer who seems to have been carried away with his frustration with this one is Danny Horn, author of the great blog Dark Shadows Every Day. His post about it includes some rather obtuse remarks about the performances, some of which fit with his usual shortcomings (e.g., his habitual underestimate of David Henesy’s acting.) But in other comments he loses track of his own analysis. For example, time and again throughout the blog he stressed that the show was made for an audience that saw each episode only once, and that their memories of the images that had appeared on their television screens would drift over time. When a particular moment makes a big enough impact that it is frequently referred to in later episodes and is a topic of discussion among fans, the images of that moment that appeared on screen during the original broadcast are at most a starting point, something that the viewers build on in their imaginations, so that the pictures that memory supplies soon enough have little or nothing in common with what was actually produced.

Danny makes all of these points over and over. Yet his post on #926 ends with this objection to the invisible form Michael and the other Leviathan boys assume when they are supposed to be mighty:

Dark Shadows actually has a great track record at creating scary things out of not that much money. The legendary hand of Count Petofi was incredibly cool and memorable — a Halloween decoration that they invested with real power. The scariest thing about the legendary hand was that it wasn’t under anybody’s control, even Petofi’s; it would fly around on its own, doing unexpected things. Not an expensive or difficult effect, just good writing, using what they have to tell an interesting story.

Television is a visual medium; we need to see the thing that the story is about. “It’s better in your imagination” is just a way to weasel out of coming up with a compelling visual. If you can’t actually show us the monster, then maybe you should consider a non-visual medium like print, or radio. Or not doing it at all.

Danny Horn, “Episode 926: The Shark, and How to Jump It,” posted on Dark Shadows Every Day, 15 September 2016.

I reached that point in Danny’s blog more than four years after the post went up, but even so I felt compelled to join those who piled on him for those two paragraphs. Here’s what I wrote:

I don’t think there would be a point in showing the monster. If the monster had done anything really scary, our imaginations would be working overtime to frighten us. Any image they put on screen would let the steam out of our anxieties. And since it hasn’t done anything scary, we won’t be worked up when we see it. Looking at it calmly, we’ll just be examining a costume or a prop or a visual effect or whatever.

Now, you can show the audience a thing or a person that looks harmless, and then build up fear around it. That’s what they did with The Hand of Count Petofi, which Barnabas observes with utter contempt when Magda first shows it to him, but which then wreaks havoc. Or you can build up a fear, introduce a person, and suddenly connect the person with the fear in an unexpected way. That’s how they gave us Barnabas- Willie opens the box, there are vampire attacks, a pleasant man shows up wearing a hat and speaking with a mid-Atlantic accent, and then we see that man without his hat, waiting for Maggie in the cemetery. There are lots of ways to scare an audience, but showing a picture of something that’s supposed to be scary isn’t one of them.

Comment posted 17 December 2020 by “Acilius” on Danny Horn, “Episode 926: The Shark, and How to Jump It,” posted on Dark Shadows Every Day, 15 September 2016.

I still agree with that, more or less, though I suppose it makes the creative process sound a lot tidier than it ever is. I do wish I’d thought of the comparison I make above between the four disaffected cultists and Willie. Danny’s blog was still drawing comments in those days, and I think that would have attracted some responses.

Episode 925: Not like other boys

In #891, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins gave a present to antique shop owners Megan and Philip Todd. It was a wooden box. When the Todds opened the box, it made a whistling sound. By #893, the whistling sound had taken the form of a newborn baby whom Megan introduced to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard under the name “Joseph.” In #905, Joseph had taken the shape of an eight year old boy, and was going by “Alexander.” In #909, Alexander briefly shape-shifted. He kept his apparent age and mass, but his body became that of a girl. In particular, s/he was for an hour or two a perfect double of Carolyn as she was at eight. In that shape, s/he tormented Carolyn’s father Paul, who had been absent throughout Carolyn’s childhood. In #913/914, Alexander gave way to a thirteen year old who insisted on being called “Michael.”

Clearly, none of these children is really human. They are manifestations of a supernatural force known as “the Leviathans.” The Leviathans operate through a secret cult that is gradually taking over people in and around the estate of Collinwood and the nearby village of Collinsport. Barnabas, the Todds, Carolyn’s mother Liz, and her cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, are among the members of the cult. Paul is one of its enemies, and others are coming into their sights.

As he was when he was Alexander, Michael is a bully, monotonous in his hostility and demands for obedience. Philip has had about enough of this. He spanks Michael today, and tells Megan that it is time they think about quitting the Leviathan cult. Megan is appalled by Philip’s apostasy. She and Michael talk alone. He caresses her face, exciting a physical response from her. She then agrees that Philip should be got rid of, and picks up a gun.

Michael caresses Megan’s face. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We have seen Barnabas caress the faces of people whom he wanted to bring under the control of the Leviathans, so the makers of the show could tell the ABC network’s Standards and Practices Office that Michael was doing a magic trick when he did that to Megan. But in a period when Sigmund Freud was the among most cited nonfiction authors in the English-speaking world, few adults in the audience could have failed to notice the erotic charge in the contact between Michael and his (foster) mother as they plot the murder of his (foster) father.

Freud has turned up on the show before. In September 1968, Carolyn hid Frankenstein’s monster Adam in a room in the dusty and long-disused west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Adam spent most of his time alone, with little to do but read. When Carolyn brought him a meal there in #577, Adam was disappointed she was not prepared to discuss Freud’s works with him. She mentioned that she was dealing with some family troubles, at which Adam invited her to sit down and to “Tell me about your mother.”

Adam is long gone, but we see today that the west wing is still dusty. Maggie, David’s governess, fell afoul of Michael yesterday and is wandering around there, hopelessly lost. For some time, Adam held Maggie’s predecessor Vicki prisoner in his room; evidently writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell see some kind of connection between Freudian psychoanalysis and governesses stuck in the west wing.

Like Adam, Michael came into being otherwise than by sexual reproduction, and the arrangement of his anatomy is the result of a series of conscious acts of will. Also like Adam, he has an intense crush on Carolyn, one which does not exclude violence. In #549, Adam attempted to rape Carolyn. In #919/920/921, Michael introduced himself to Carolyn by creeping up behind her and putting his hands over her eyes; moments later, he was yelling at her and demanding “How dare you” when she would not go along with an idea of his. Since Carolyn is virtually the same height as Michael, his disregard of her personal space and his unrestrained bullying come off not only as bratty, but as rape-adjacent.

Furthermore, Marie Wallace, who plays Megan, first joined the show as patchwork woman Eve, Adam’s intended spouse. Megan’s desperate indulgence towards Michael puts her at the opposite extreme from Eve’s total rejection of Adam, but it is equally inflexible, and when she takes up her gun today it seems likely to lead to an equally disastrous ending. Whatever point Hall and Russell were making by associating Adam with Freud is apparently in their minds again when Michael and Megan play out their little Oedipal dance.

Closing Miscellany

When Maggie is first trapped in the west wing, she reaches up to bang on the closed panel. When her shoulders rise, the high hem of the outfit Junior Sophisticates provided Kathryn Leigh Scott exposes parts of her that performers on daytime television in the USA in 1970 did not customarily display.

Yesterday and today, David and Michael play a game they call “Wall Street.” They use Monopoly money and a playing surface which, when Michael overturns it today, proves to be a checkerboard with a backgammon board on the reverse. A board game called The World of Wall Street really was around in those days; it was produced in 1969 by Hasbro and NBC. The dialogue David and Michael exchange during the game sounds like things you might say while playing it. Perhaps the script called for the boys to play that game, but ABC vetoed it since the rival NBC network’s logo appeared prominently on the box.

Episode 898: The keeper of the book

A cult devoted to the service of supernatural beings known as “the Leviathan people” is secretly establishing itself in and around Collinsport, Maine. Antique shop owners Megan and Philip Todd are members of the cult. Its acting leader, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, has entrusted them with several items sacred to the cult. The Todds are responsible for a scroll, a box, a book, and a baby. Now the book has gone missing, and the baby is sick. Yesterday, Barnabas responded to this situation by brainwashing Philip into killing Megan. Today, we open with Philip entering the antique shop and choking Megan.

Megan is Marie Wallace’s third character on Dark Shadows. Her first, fiancée of Frankenstein Eve, was strangled by her intended spouse Adam in #626. Her second, madwoman Jenny Collins, was strangled by her estranged husband Quentin in #748. The murder of Eve came at the end of the Monster Mash period of the show that stretched throughout most of 1968, while the murder of Jenny marked a turning point in the eight-month costume drama segment set in the year 1897. The Leviathan arc is just beginning, and Miss Wallace’s character is already being strangled by her husband. If we were hoping for fresh new story ideas, we couldn’t be more disappointed.

Until, that is, the strangulation is called off. Philip is holding Megan by the neck, reiterating that “There is no margin for error! Punishment is necessary!,” when strange and troubled boy David Collins appears on the staircase and announces “punishment is no longer necessary.” Philip releases Megan, and David informs them that he is now “the keeper of the book, and the protector of the baby.” He gives Megan and Philip medicine that will cure the baby of his illness. He tells them that if they need him, he will know and will appear.

Barnabas was a vampire when he joined the cast of characters in April 1967. As a villain he was unrivaled at giving everyone else things to do, whether as his victims, his accomplices, or his would-be destroyers. In March 1968, his curse was put into abeyance and he became human. He set out to be the good guy, but still had the personality of a metaphor for extreme selfishness. As a result, Barnabas the would-be hero created at least as many disasters as Barnabas the monster ever did. He thus remained the driving force of the show, as well as its star attraction.

While Barnabas can keep things going from day to day, Philip’s attack on Megan suggests that he cannot take the story in new directions. From episode #1, that has been David’s forte. The series began when well-meaning governess Vicki was called to Collinwood to take charge of David’s education, took its first turn towards grisly tales when David tried to murder his father, became a supernatural thriller when David’s mother the undead blonde fire witch came back for him, began its first time travel story when Barnabas was planning to kill David in November 1967, and was launched into both the “Haunting of Collinwood” that dominated the show from December 1968 through February 1969 and the 1897 segment that followed it by David’s involvement with the ghost of Quentin Collins. David was not always a highly active participant in the stories that began with him; indeed, he sometimes disappeared altogether for months at a time. But even from the outside, he is the instrument by which the basic architecture of the show is reshaped. Now that he is, apparently, the leader of the Leviathans, we can renew our hopes that something we haven’t seen before is still in store for us.

David is still in the shop when a gray-haired man enters. David greets him as “Mr Prescott,” the name by which he heard his cousin Carolyn address the man when he met her in the shop the other day. David has a smug look on his face that suggests he knows this is an alias. Indeed, we already know that the man is connected with the Leviathan cult, so the leader of the cult may well recognize him as Paul Stoddard, Carolyn’s long-missing father.

Paul asks the Todds to give a note to Carolyn. David says that he will be going home to the great house of Collinwood in a few minutes, and volunteers to take the note to her there. Paul gladly hands it to him.

At Collinwood, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman is conferring with mysterious drifter Chris Jennings. Yesterday, Jenny’s ghost appeared to Chris and told him that Quentin could help him with his big problem, which is that he is a werewolf. Jenny did not identify herself, and Chris had no clue who she was.

Julia shows him a Collins family photo album. She shows him a picture of maidservant Beth Chavez and asks if that is who he saw. He says it wasn’t, and they keep turning pages. It is interesting for regular viewers that they take a moment to put Beth’s picture on the screen and to make some remarks about her. Beth appeared several times during the “Haunting of Collinwood” segment, and was a major character during the 1897 flashback. The sight of her picture is the first reason we have had to suspect that either she or actress Terrayne Crawford will be back.

Chris and Julia look through a Collins family photo album. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Chris recognizes Jenny’s picture, Julia breaks the news to him that Jenny and Quentin were his great-grandparents, and that Quentin was the first to be afflicted with the werewolf curse. We know that Quentin and Jenny’s daughter was named Lenore, and that she was raised by a Mrs Fillmore. Chris confirms that his grandmother’s maiden name was Lenore Fillmore. Wondering how Quentin could help Chris, Julia decides they will hold a séance and contact Quentin’s spirit.

David enters, looking for Carolyn. Julia asks him to participate in the séance. He agrees, with the blandness appropriate in a house where séances have become almost routine. When Julia tells him that the spirit they are trying to reach is that of Quentin Collins, David becomes alarmed. As well he might- we left 1969 at the beginning of March, but in #839, broadcast and set in September, we saw that the haunting continued in the absence of the audience, and that Quentin’s ghost had killed David. That episode took place on the anniversary of an event in 1897 that was changed by time travelers from the 1960s, and so David came back to life and the haunting ended. But everyone at Collinwood still remembers the ten months that Quentin exercised his reign of terror, and David does not want to return to it.

Julia assures David he has nothing to be afraid of. She says that the past was changed as of September 1897/ September 1969, and that Quentin’s ghost was laid to rest forever. This doesn’t fit very well with her plan to disturb that rest, but David is still ready to go along with the plan.

When they have the séance, David goes into the trance. He speaks, not with Quentin’s voice, but with that of Jamison Collins, his own grandfather and Quentin’s favorite nephew. Jamison says that Quentin’s spirit is no longer available for personal appearances. He doesn’t know more than that, and excuses himself. When David comes to and asks what happened, Julia says she will tell him later and sends him to bed. Once he is gone, she tells Chris that she thinks Quentin may still be alive.

Quentin was a big hit when he was on the show as an unspeaking ghost during the “Haunting of Collinwood,” and became a breakout star to rival Barnabas when he was a living being during the 1897 segment. So the audience is not at all surprised that he will be coming back. But David’s behavior before, during, and after the séance is quite intriguing. He is not simply possessed by some spirit that is part of whatever it is the Leviathan cult serves. He is still David, is still afraid of Quentin’s ghost, and is still fascinated by séances. During the 1897 segment, Jamison was a living being; like David Collins, he was played by David Henesy. That Jamison can speak through his grandson and not express discomfort at the unfamiliarity of the atmosphere suggests that there are sizable expanses inside David which are still recognizably him.

There is a similar moment between Philip and Megan. She smiles at him and in a relaxed voice says she understands why he had to do what he did. Philip has no idea what she is talking about. She reminds him that he tried to strangle her earlier in the evening, and he suddenly becomes highly apologetic. She tells him he has nothing to apologize for, that it was his duty as a servant of their cause. He is still anguished about it. They share a tender embrace. Again, while the force that animates the Leviathan cult may have the final say over what Megan and Philip do, their personalities are still there, and the loving couple we met a not so long ago still exists. There is still something for us to care about concerning them.*

Paul also has a lot of activity today. He goes to the cairn in the woods that is the ceremonial center of the Leviathan cult and that only people associated with it can see. He wonders why he keeps being drawn to it. When he first returned to Collinwood in #887, he was watching when the cairn materialized in its place out of thin air. He didn’t react at all, but merely turned and continued on his stroll. That led us to believe he knew a great deal about the cult, enough that he not only expected to see this extraordinary sight, but knew he need take no action regarding it. But evidently his connection is more subtle, and he does not understand it himself.

In his hotel room, Paul goes into a trance and circles the date 4 December 1969 on his calendar. That was when the episode was first broadcast, so the original audience would have assumed he was merely circling the current date. But when it was taped, the makers of Dark Shadows had expected the episode to be shown on 3 December. In between, there had been a pre-emption when the ABC television network gave its news department the 4:00 PM timeslot to cover the end of the Apollo 12 lunar landing mission. So the intention had been that we would share Paul’s puzzlement as to what was so special about the next day.

Paul is already worked up because some unknown person left him a note at the antique shop reading “Payment Due, 4 December 1969.” By the end of the episode, he notices that a tattoo has appeared on his wrist. It is a symbol that the show refers to simply as “the Naga,” a group of intertwined snakes that represent the Leviathan cult. All of this combines to get him into quite a state.

* I should mention that Danny Horn made the same point in his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day: “And then they kiss, and the creepy thing is that I think they’re actually in there… So far, I’ve been critical of Chris Bernau, but he’s the one who pulls this moment together. As far as he’s concerned, the unpleasant incident is entirely forgotten — but when Megan brings up the fact that he was seconds away from killing her, his apology is entirely sincere.” Danny Horn, “Episode 989: Executive Child,” on Dark Shadows Every Day, 12 July 2016.

Episode 897: Restore our flesh and bones

The Trouble with David

Yesterday we saw strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy) go to a mysterious cairn in the woods, the ceremonial center of the cult of the Leviathan people, and announce that he was now one of the cult. The cairn then opened, revealing a little gap. David crawled into the gap. The gap was not quite big enough for him, so that the episode ended with an extended sequence of David Henesy wiggling his rear end at the camera while he tried to wedge himself into place.

Today we learn that the carpenters were not the only ones who haven’t caught on that Mr Henesy isn’t nine years old anymore. David has followed the gap to an underground chamber with a steaming cauldron. He takes some vegetation out of the cauldron and recites a cryptic poem, all the while staring portentiously off into space. His manner, words, and actions would be effective as part of a creepy little kid sequence, but the thirteen year old Mr Henesy looks mature enough that we just chalk him up as one more member of the Leviathan cult.

The Trouble with Chris

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard calls on drifter Chris Jennings in his cottage. They talk about someone named Sabrina who has told Carolyn that while Chris is a nice enough guy, he will, in spite of himself, kill her if she keeps hanging around him. Chris tells Carolyn that this is true and that he is “a monster.” He does not explain. She leaves, and he takes out a pistol. First-time viewers will wonder if Chris has a compulsion to fire his pistol at people. Regular viewers know that he is a werewolf, and that his particular case of lycanthropy is so advanced that he sometimes transforms even when the moon is not full. We can assume that he plans to use the pistol to put himself out of his misery.

Regular viewers also know that Chris was safely confined to a mental hospital until he checked himself out recently. When he returned to the great house of Collinwood, he told his psychiatrist, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, that he just couldn’t stand the conditions at the hospital. Since leaving the hospital means that Chris will resume killing at least one random person a month, this decision just about completely erased any sympathy we might have for him as a character. It also undercuts his motivation in this scene. If Chris really wants to stop killing, he is free to go back to the hospital at any time.

The ghost of Chris’ great-grandmother, Jenny Collins (Marie Wallace,) appears. She tells him not to commit suicide. Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897 from March to November 1969; in those days, we got to know Jenny as “Crazy Jenny,” who played nothing but one mad scene after another. She was sane and well-put-together just once, when she appeared as a ghost in #810 and #811. In this second postmortem appearance, Jenny is extra mad, wearing a disheveled wig that reaches heights few hairpieces have dared. She does not tell Chris to return to the hospital, but to find his great-grandfather, Quentin Collins. She says that she cannot help him, but Quentin can.

This confirms what the show has been hinting, that Quentin is alive. Chris doesn’t know that, nor does he know of his relationship to Quentin. He is left bewildered and helpless by Jenny’s pronouncement. His response would no doubt be more complex if he were up to date, but he has been so ineffective at managing his curse and so irresponsible generally that we can’t imagine he would do anything constructive even if he knew everything we do. The character seems to have reached a dead end.

The Trouble with Barnabas

Upset by her conversation with Chris, Carolyn goes to her distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. She enters his home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, and finds the front parlor empty. She hears Barnabas’ voice coming from behind a bookcase, repeating over and over that “There is no margin for error. Punishment is necessary.”

Longtime viewers know, not only that a room is hidden behind this bookcase, but that Carolyn knows about that room. Her friend, David’s well-meaning governess Vicki, was held prisoner there by a crazy man in December 1966, several months before Barnabas joined the show. Carolyn is moving her hands, as if she is looking for the release that makes the bookcase swing open, when Barnabas comes downstairs.

When Carolyn says that she heard his voice, Barnabas explains that he was simply keeping busy by “conducting an experiment in electronics.” The candles around the room will suffice to show that the house doesn’t have electricity, and even if Barnabas weren’t so resolutely technophobic it would still require explanation that the text he set his speakers to reproduce over and over was “There is no margin for error. Punishment is necessary.” Moreover, Carolyn knows Barnabas well, and she can’t have overlooked that he is not his usual self these days. He is distant, calm, and utterly self-possessed, a far cry from the fussy, excitable chap who so often stumbles over his words. He remains formidably well-composed as he reiterates his position that Chris is a dangerously unstable person whom Carolyn should avoid, and that she has a bright future ahead of her. He gently but firmly guides her to the front door, and she is out of the house in record time.

Carolyn does not know that Chris is the werewolf, but at least she knows that there is a werewolf. She does not know that the Leviathan cult exists, and so it is understandable that she does not suspect that Barnabas is acting as its leader. But as the story unfolds, others will no doubt catch on that something is up, and so many people have spent so much time with Barnabas that it is difficult to see how they can all fail to notice the drastic change in his personality and to connect it with the strange goings-on. Putting him in this position makes it likely that the writers will have a harder time managing the story’s pace than they would if his involvement were more subtle.

Once Carolyn has exited, Barnabas opens the bookcase and reveals Philip Todd, antique shop owner. He rewinds a reel-to-reel tape and replays “There is no margin for error. Punishment is necessary.” Philip and his wife Megan are members of the cult, entrusted with the care of many of its most sacred items. Yesterday Barnabas found out that one of these, a book, had gone missing. He summoned Philip to the cairn, and it seemed he might be about to kill Philip. But now, he sends Philip off to administer the punishment to someone else, presumably Megan.

The Trouble with Megan

Megan (Marie Wallace) has been in an extremely overwrought state ever since she found that the book was gone. Today’s episode ends with a long scene in which she is alone in the shop, feeling that someone is coming to kill her, reacting sharply to every noise.

Danny Horn devotes most of his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day to reasons why this scene does not work, among them the fact that a depiction of a person descending into madness requires that the person start off as something other than over-the-top loony. Megan has been so frenzied for the last few days that Miss Wallace has nowhere to go when she hears the ominous noises. Moreover, her first two characters on Dark Shadows, fiancée of Frankenstein Eve and Crazy Jenny, were both intense, overbearing characters who were so inflexible that they had little opportunity to respond to anything their scene partners might do. Longtime viewers therefore expect to see Miss Wallace screaming and carrying on by herself, so nothing she does here will unsettle us. They lampshade this iconography problem by showing us Crazy Jenny’s ghost today, but that doesn’t help at all.

Many fans compare this scene to episode #361. Most of #361 is devoted to a one-woman drama in which Julia is tormented by sights and sounds in her bedroom, suggesting that her mind is collapsing. I don’t think that episode is a success, but because Julia had always been in control of herself up to that point we can see what is supposed to be at stake in it. That’s more than we can say for Megan’s fearful turn.

In John and Christine Scoleri’s post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Christine points out the prominence of the taxidermied animals in the background, and speculates that the scene is an homage to The Night of the Living Dead. I wouldn’t have guessed that director Lela Swift or writer Violet Welles would have studied that film, but Christine provides screenshots from it and from the episode, and the parallels are so striking that I can’t see how she could be wrong.

Closing Miscellany

I think the tape recorder is the same one we saw in the summer of 1968, when it was part of the Frankenstein story. It also appears to be the one that parapsychologist Peter Guthrie brought to Collinwood early in 1967.

Her haunting of Chris marks Jenny’s final appearance. Miss Wallace reprised the role decades later in a couple of the Big Finish audio dramas.

During Megan’s big scene, the camera swings a bit to the left and we can see beyond the edge of the antique shop set. We get a good look at a tree that stands near the cairn in the woods. Making matters worse, when they turn the camera away from the tree they go too far right, showing a stage light on the other side.

The antique shop and the cairn. Screenshot by Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day.

As the opening credits begin to roll, the camera is pointed a bit too far to the right and a stagehand is visible, adding dry ice to the steaming cauldron in the underground chamber.

Closing credits blooper. Screenshot by Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day.

Episode 894/ 895: The time of the Leviathan people

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has become the leader of a mysterious cult. Antique shop owners Megan and Philip Todd are members of the cult, and they have a magical baby who materialized after Barnabas gave them a sacred box. Inside the box was a book that is also of tremendous importance to the cult. Philip and Megan left the book on a table in their shop, so that it appeared to be for sale. Yesterday strange and troubled boy David Collins stole the book. In its absence, the baby has developed a high fever. When Megan and Philip found that the book was gone, they flew into a panic and declared that they would have to kill the person who took it.

Many stories on Dark Shadows start with David, so it could be that the uncanny and sinister forces behind the cult want him to have the book. If so, Barnabas doesn’t know any more about it than do Philip and Megan. He finds out today that the book is missing, and takes Philip to a cairn in the woods. He tells him he will have to be punished for losing it.

When Philip first saw the cairn, he remarked that he had been that way before, but never noticed it. Barnabas explains that only people connected with the Leviathan cult can see it. This casts the minds of returning viewers to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, Barnabas’ distant cousin. In #888, Carolyn saw the cairn and ran into a prowler there. The prowler refused to identify himself to her; the closing credits told us he was Paul Stoddard, Carolyn’s long missing father. We had seen him from behind the day before, when he saw the cairn materialize, then simply walked off. His blasé response told us that he expected to see what he saw, which can only mean he was connected with the cult. Carolyn doesn’t know anything about the Leviathans, but what Barnabas says to Philip today confirms that she is nonetheless associated with them in some sense. Indeed, Barnabas has been very solicitous of Carolyn’s well-being ever since he joined up with the Leviathans and keeps telling her that she has an extraordinary future.

Philip and Barnabas at the cairn. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is also some business going on between Paul and Carolyn. On the surface it would seem to be a typical soap opera story, in which the daughter is trying to reintroduce her errant father into the family circle and has to keep secrets from her mother and young cousin to pull it off. Given what we know about Paul’s awareness of the Leviathans and their interest in Carolyn, we can see that it is in fact part of the supernatural A story.

There are no closing credits today, only the logo of Dan Curtis Productions. The Dark Shadows wiki says that this one was directed by Henry Kaplan. I am certain this is false. Kaplan was very clumsy with the camera, resorting to closeup after closeup and then to ever-more extreme closeups until you have scenes played by one actor’s left ear opposite another’s right nostril. Today, there is a scene between Carolyn, David, and Barnabas in the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood, a scene in which Carolyn presses David with questions about the book, that is so expertly choreographed that only Lela Swift could have blocked it. My wife, Mrs Acilius, marveled at the dance that Nancy Barrett, David Henesy, and Jonathan Frid execute so flawlessly.

This episode is double numbered to make up for a planned pre-emption, when the ABC television network showed football at 4 PM on the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day. Every Friday’s episode was supposed to have a number that ended with a five or zero, so that all you had to do was divide by five and you would get the number of weeks the show had been on. That didn’t work this time, because there was also an unplanned pre-emption when the network’s nes division took the 4 PM slot to cover the return of the Apollo 12 mission. They are producing episodes well ahead of their airdates at this point, in a couple of cases over five weeks ahead, so it will be a long while before they can get back in sync.