picture of dorian gray – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 905: My darling now

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard has been hung up on mysterious drifter Chris Jennings for a while. Unknown to Carolyn, Chris is her third cousin, the great-grandson of her great-great uncle Quentin Collins. That is a distant enough relation that it needn’t be an obstacle to romance. But Chris is keeping another secret that presents a more definite obstacle. He inherited from Quentin a curse that makes him a werewolf.

From March to November 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman traveled back in time from 1969 to that year, and befriended the living Quentin. They learned that Quentin had been freed of the effects of the werewolf curse when a magical portrait was painted of him. As long as the portrait remains intact, Quentin will not only retain his human form on the nights of the full moon, but will also be immune to injury, aging, and death. Julia and Barnabas know of Chris’ condition, and early in 1969 they were working together to cure him of it. Julia now hopes that another portrait can be painted to do for Chris what his great-grandfather’s portrait did for him.

Barnabas came back from the past wanting nothing to do with Chris. He has secretly been absorbed into a cult devoted to mysterious supernatural beings called the Leviathan people. When Barnabas first saw Chris after his return to 1969, he told him there was no hope for him. Since then, he has been cold and distant both to Chris and to Julia. He has urged Carolyn to forget Chris, and keeps telling her that she has a great future in store for her. We have had other indications that this future will involve a special role in the Leviathans’ plan to take over the world.

Now, Carolyn has met the living Quentin and become smitten with him. She does not know his true identity, but did tell Barnabas about him and that he was coming to meet her. Barnabas’ response was to run Quentin over with his car, claiming afterward that it was an accident.

Now, Quentin is in the hospital with a bandage on his head. He does not speak in today’s episode, but anyone who has seen a soap opera knows that a bandage wrapped around the head is a sure sign of amnesia. Indeed, when Julia addresses him as “Quentin,” he looks at her blankly.

Quentin wearing the amnesia badge. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In his post about the episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn reminds us of another amnesia plot that followed a time travel story. That one dragged on for eight months, was never at all interesting, and ended with the two characters most directly involved being hustled off the show. Remembering it, longtime viewers will shudder at the sight of Quentin’s bandage. But amnesia stories are a staple of soaps, and Danny explains how they can work well by imagining a different version of that dismal flop:

Jeff Clark… might or might not have been a reincarnation of Peter Bradford, Vicki’s boyfriend from 1795. Somehow, they managed to spin that mystery out for a full eight months, until they finally decided that nobody cared, and then they wrote Jeff, Peter and Vicki off the show forever.

The real problem with the Jeff/Peter mystery — and this is important, for the Quentin/Grant Douglas conundrum — is that Jeff Clark was just an empty suit of clothes. Jeff had no memories, and he arrived on the scene with no family, and very little in the way of a storyline.

Worst of all, Jeff’s primary characteristic — being in love with Vicki — was also Peter’s primary characteristic, so it was a distinction without a difference. It didn’t really matter whether he was called Jeff or Peter, so they could just let it drift for month after month, with no appreciable impact on story progress.

Here’s how you do the amnesia story: Think of it as two people inhabiting the same body, and create a conflict between those people. If Peter’s in love with Vicki, then “Jeff” should be cold and distant. “Jeff” didn’t experience any of the events that brought Vicki and Peter together, so her clumsy attempts to revive his memory should upset and frustrate him.

At that point, you can take as long as you’d like to bring his memory back, because the longer this goes on, the more damage “Jeff” can do to Peter’s life. The ideal way to end that story is to have “Jeff” fall in love with Vicki’s worst enemy, and news of their engagement makes Vicki turn to someone new for support and understanding.

Then it should be obvious to everyone that his memory comes back on the day of his wedding, during or immediately after the vows. Suddenly, “Jeff” is Peter again, horrified to discover that he’s married to someone that he doesn’t like, and the love of his life is involved with somebody else.

That’s how you do the amnesia story.

Danny Horn, “Episode 905: Waiting for Quentin,” posted 27 July 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

The sheer fact that Quentin is in a coma as a result of a collision with a car is a puzzle for attentive fans. In #844, sorcerer Count Petofi scraped Quentin’s cheek with a jagged piece of glass. That did not leave a mark on Quentin himself, but a scar appeared on the portrait in the place corresponding to the spot Petofi scratched. Since violence against Quentin leaves him as he was but marks the portrait, why is he hurt now? One of Danny’s commenters tackled this problem:

Yeah, why is he even hurt at all? The painting should have absorbed all the trauma of Barnabas’ reckless attempt at mayhem; the portrait should have amnesia. (Oh, but then it wouldn’t be protecting Quentin any more, since it wouldn’t remember who it’s a picture OF – which is why Quentin has the amnesia and injuries! How’s that for a fanwank?)…

Is it explained later just WHY Quentin thinks he’s Grant Douglas? Did he already have amnesia? And now he has double amnesia? (If I remember sitcom amnesia correctly, the second trauma should have reversed the first – but soap opera amnesia may be different.)

Comment left 29 December 2018 by “John E. Comelately” on Danny Horn, “Episode 905: Waiting for Quentin,” posted 27 July 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

Later, Carolyn is at the antique shop where she has been working. The shop’s owner, Carolyn’s friend Megan Todd, makes a bunch of cryptic remarks about having discovered something greater than happiness. Carolyn wonders about the baby that Megan and her husband Philip have been looking after. She hears a ball bouncing in the upstairs room where the baby has been sleeping, and Megan orders her to ignore it. Eventually the ball comes rolling downstairs, and an eight year old boy follows it. Megan declares the boy to be her darling.

Returning viewers know that the baby was in fact some kind of creature associated with the Leviathans, and Megan has a scene in which Barnabas tells her that the creature is going to be undergoing a change. So we know that this boy and the baby are in fact one and the same.

That two consecutive men who attracted Carolyn turned out to be werewolves is interesting in light of the frequent references to the big plans the Leviathans have for her. The Leviathans have clearly not been giving their devotees a lot of background information about the tasks they make them perform, so that even if Barnabas did not know who Quentin was when he tried to kill him, the unseen forces manipulating him may have been well aware of that. Perhaps the show is suggesting that there is some kind of enmity between the Leviathans and werewolves.

Quentin’s ghost haunted the great house of Collinwood from December 1968 to September 1969 and wrought great havoc there. The haunting broke on the anniversary of an event in 1897 that went differently than it had originally because Barnabas and Julia had traveled back in time. But it was made clear when we returned to contemporary dress that the 1960s characters all remember the events of those ten months, and that Quentin’s ghost still frightens them. Carolyn was one of the few major characters who did not see the ghost, so I suppose it makes sense she isn’t afraid when she sees the living Quentin. But one does wonder what the reaction will be when the other residents of the great house meet him.

The Leviathan boy is played by David Jay, and is named in the credits as “Alexander.” Born in 1961, Mr Jay is the youngest person ever to have appeared on Dark Shadows. He acted off and on until the early 1980s. Evidently he is alive and well, but he never appeared at any of the Dark Shadows conventions and does not do the podcasts on which other cast members occasionally guest. Not one for the fandom, he.

Episode 848: You have no mortality

The year is 1897, and the mythological world described by the ancient Greeks seems very far away. The story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who loved a statue he had made depicting an imaginary woman so intensely that it came to life, answered to the name “Galatea,” and returned his affections, is no exception to that feeling of distance. But here is the lovely Amanda Harris, who used to wonder why she had total amnesia, but now knows that the reason she cannot remember anything prior to two years ago is that she didn’t exist before then. She popped into being when a painter named Charles Delaware Tate made a portrait of his ideal woman.

Tate told her about this and told her that he loved her, but Amanda, unlike Galatea, has no desire for her creator. Perhaps this is because his personality is absolutely intolerable, a common attribute of characters played by Roger Davis. Nor is she interested in Tim Shaw, who brought her to Collinsport to take part in a scam he wanted to run on his old enemies and abandoned her in Tate’s house once he learned of Tate’s powers and thought he saw a way to make more money than his original plan was likely to yield. Instead, she is in love with rakish libertine Quentin Collins. Quentin has asked Amanda to run away with him and get married, and she agrees.

Quentin is trying to control Amanda too, but at least he isn’t a total jerk about it like those other two guys. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Tim and Tate take turns intruding into Amanda’s room and telling her ugly things. Tate snarls at her that she belongs to him because he created her. This claim of ownership would be nasty however it was made, but Mr Davis’ gratingly unpleasant voice makes it truly nauseating to hear. Tim tells her that she isn’t really human, because if she is like another person Tate created she might die if someone shoots her. By that standard humans are extremely rare, but Tim goes on to explain that the man Tate created and then gunned down in cold blood while Tim watched vanished into thin air as soon as he died. So what he means is that Amanda will never be a corpse. In the context of Dark Shadows, a show that is so largely about the reanimation of the dead, this actually makes sense.

Quentin was cursed to be a werewolf, but was freed of the effects of that curse when Tate painted his portrait. When the Moon is full nowadays, the portrait changes, while Quentin himself stays the same. To extort Quentin into leaving Amanda to him, Tate steals the portrait. He tells himself that, if need be, he will destroy the portrait. If Quentin and Amanda stick with their plan of running as far away as possible very soon, they will know nothing about what Tate has done until the night of the next full Moon, when Quentin will turn into the werewolf, kill Amanda, and wake up covered in her blood. I suppose that would meet Tate’s objective of punishing Quentin, but it doesn’t fit very well with his professed belief that he loves Amanda.

Episode 839: Second chance

Twenty-eight weeks ago, the ghost of Quentin Collins had made life intolerable on the great estate of Collinwood. Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, in an attempt to contact Quentin and persuade him to make peace before his haunting killed his twelve year old great-great-nephew David Collins, accidentally traveled back in time to 1897, where he met and befriended the living Quentin.

In that time, he learned that Quentin was a werewolf. In 1969, Barnabas and his friend Julia Hoffman, MD, had been trying to cure a man named Chris Jennings of lycanthropy. Now, Barnabas has figured out that Chris inherited his curse from Quentin, whose infant daughter Lenore will grow up to be Chris’ grandmother.

Julia herself has now traveled back in time. The journey left her dazed and, astonishing to behold, unable to speak. Today, Barnabas and Quentin at her bedside in the hiding place Barnabas has found, and she started talking. She has a vision of 1969. She sees David lying dead and his father Roger mourning him. Suddenly David comes back to life and announces that Quentin’s ghost and that of maidservant Beth are no longer haunting the house. When Julia regains her senses, she tells Barnabas that this means that they should both go back to 1969- their mission in the past is complete.

Barnabas declares that they cannot leave, because Chris is still a werewolf. He doesn’t actually know this. Chris wasn’t in Julia’s vision. His transformations became more frequent and longer lasting as Quentin’s ghost gained power; when Quentin achieved total control over the great house at Collinwood, Chris took on wolf form permanently. For all Barnabas knows, the end of Quentin’s obsession of Collinwood might mean Chris’ return to normal. He also knows that Quentin himself remained human the last time the Moon was full, suggesting that something has happened to the curse. Perhaps if they return to their own time, he and Julia will find that Chris is not a werewolf and never was one.

Barnabas tells Julia that, while she and a fellow mad scientist had managed to free him of the effects of vampirism in the 1960s, he is fully subject to them in 1897. Moreover, everyone knows that he is a vampire, and he is being hunted. And there is an evil sorcerer in the area, Count Petofi, who is closely connected with Quentin and who has malign intentions towards Barnabas. Julia points out that all of these are reasons to return to 1969 at once.

Barnabas demands that Julia develop a treatment that will once more put his vampirism into remission. Julia calls this impossible. The drugs and devices she used to accomplish this in the 1960s have not yet been invented, and even in that time she was just barely able to make the treatments work. In the story we actually saw in 1968, treatments of the kind Julia is talking about worked only for a little while, and the lasting cure came only when Barnabas was hooked up to a Frankenstein’s monster. There clearly is no time to create an abomination of that kind.

But there is no reasoning with Barnabas. Julia concedes this- “I always lose with you, don’t I?” She agrees to stay and to do her best.

Barnabas suspects that Quentin is working for Petofi. This is true. Not only did Petofi save Quentin’s life yesterday, but he also arranged the painting of a portrait which, like the one in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, changes while Quentin remains the same. When Quentin realizes that Petofi has the power to make him human or return him to lycanthropy, he caves in to his demand that he act as his spy in his dealings with Barnabas.

Julia has managed to concoct an injection for Barnabas and is planning to give him another when he insists on rushing out. She says this will ruin the treatment; he says he will be back before dawn.

Julia gives Barnabas a shot. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas goes to see Quentin. He finds the portrait, puts two and two together, and confronts Quentin about his relationship with Petofi. Quentin lies, and Barnabas goes back to the hiding place. It has been ransacked, and Julia is gone.

Episode 838: Your part in this drama is finished

In #836, the ghost of maidservant Beth Chavez appeared to Julia Hoffman in the year 1969. Beth told Julia what happened on the night in 1897 when she shot the rakish Quentin Collins to death.

Regular viewers would have recognized the events Beth described as different from what would have happened when Quentin originally died in 1897. For the last 28 weeks, the show has been set in that year because Julia’s friend, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, accidentally traveled back in time while trying to figure out why Quentin had become a ghost bringing death and misery to everyone on the estate of Collinwood. In 1897, Barnabas met the living Quentin and befriended him, but also changed the history of the period substantially. So a wicked witch named Angelique, who was not at Collinwood the first time through 1897, is there on this iteration of events. Beth’s night took the turn that would lead her to shoot Quentin when Angelique told her that her engagement to Quentin was off and that Angelique would be marrying Quentin instead.

After Beth told her what happened in the latest version of 1897, Julia herself traveled back in time, determined to rescue both Quentin and Barnabas. Once she got to her destination, she was too dazed to speak. But Quentin found a letter in her pocket that Barnabas had written, and it led him to Barnabas. Barnabas was able to tell Quentin that he was fated to be killed tonight, after his nephew Jamison rejected him. He had no more to tell him, nor could he restore Julia’s ability to speak.

We open today with Quentin holed up in his room, waiting for midnight to come and go. Sorcerer Count Petofi knocks on his door; Quentin jumps to the conclusion that it is Petofi who will kill him. In fact, Petofi has learned of Quentin’s current fate, and offers to help save him. Quentin has ample reason to distrust Petofi, and refuses the offer.

Jamison then knocks. Quentin lets him in; the two have a happy talk about how much they enjoy each other’s company, and Quentin decides he won’t stay in his room after all. This leads directly to the reenactment of the scenes Beth had described, including Beth’s conversation with Angelique, Jamison’s discovery of Beth in the act of attempting suicide, Jamison’s consequent rejection of Quentin, and Beth’s pointing a loaded pistol at Quentin while she declares that she has decided to kill him.

Quentin’s time in his room shows that his behavior afterward is the direct result, not only of Barnabas’ intervention, but of Julia’s as well. So what we are seeing today is not what happened the first time through 1897 or the second, but is yet a third version of events. It does end quite differently- Petofi turns up in the nick of time and prevents Beth from shooting Quentin. The whole basis of the fantasy of going back in time to change events is the experience of rewriting stories, of what fandoms call “retroactive continuity” (“retcons” for short.) In the contrast between the two versions of the night of 10 September 1897 that Dark Shadows shows us, and in the contrast between each of those and the original events that we never saw, the story merges into the process of writing the scripts, and the characters explicitly create their own retcons.

Petofi tells Beth that she ought to leave Collinwood at once and go as far away as possible, because “Your part in this drama is ended.” The incorporation of retcons as an overt story element shows that metatheatricality can be fun, but I have to say it was pretty cold of Dan Curtis to delegate the job of firing actress Terrayne Crawford to the character Petofi.

Count Petofi tells Terrayne Crawford she won’t be getting another contract.

Petofi then goes to Quentin’s room and tells him the price for his services- Quentin must betray Barnabas. Quentin resists this demand until Petofi shows what else he has already done for him. Petofi commissioned a portrait of Quentin. Quentin saw the portrait the other night when there was a full Moon, and he was horrified by what he saw. The portrait bore, not his usual features, but those of a wolf. Since Quentin is a werewolf, he thought the portrait was a cruel reminder of his curse. But when Petofi bids him look at the portrait again tonight, Quentin sees his accustomed face. Petofi explains that the reason Quentin remained human that previous night was that the portrait changed, and that as long as the portrait remains intact Quentin will be free of the effects of the curse. Quentin’s blissful reaction to that news suggests that Petofi was right to tell him that he belonged to him now and would be able to refuse him nothing.

Sadly, this episode marks the last appearance of the character Jamison Collins. David Henesy plays the same scenes with the same dialogue he had on Monday, but he did a great job then and does an equally great one today. He’ll be back tomorrow for a brief appearance as his 1960s character, David Collins, then will be absent from the cast for almost 11 weeks. We’ll miss him while he is away.

Episode 834: Gentlemanly greetings

Stuffy Edward Collins arrives at the cottage in the village of Collinsport which artist Charles Delaware Tate is currently occupying. He has come in response to an invitation apparently from Tate.

Tate lets Edward into the cottage, but he cannot explain what occasioned the invitation. Another man enters and says that it was he, not Tate who sent the invitation. Edward is visibly displeased.

Edward once knew the man as Victor Fenn-Gibbon, friend of the English aristocracy, but subsequently learned that he was actually Count Andreas Petofi, Hungarian nobleman and reputed sorcerer. When Edward tells Petofi that his brother Quentin Collins told him that he was the cause of the spells that have recently been cast on many members of the Collins family, including himself and his son, Petofi asks him if he believes everything Quentin says. That earns him a hearing.

Petoi tells Edward that he knows the greatest threat to the Collinses is one of their own number- Barnabas Collins. Edward insists on playing dumb, and Petofi has to say out loud that Barnabas is a vampire. We see Tate eavesdropping on this conversation, and wonder what effect it will have on the story that he now knows Barnabas’ secret.

Edward agrees to work with Petofi to find and destroy Barnabas. Meanwhile, we see that Barnabas is hiding out under Edward’s own roof, in the great house of Collinwood. He and broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi are in Quentin’s room. They know that Quentin is a werewolf, Quentin and Magda know that Barnabas is a vampire, and all of them are working together to frustrate justice and keep the show fun.

Barnabas and Magda see a portrait that Tate painted of Quentin. There is a full Moon tonight; Quentin did not change. But the portrait did. The year is 1897, and The Picture of Dorian Gray has been in the bookstores for seven years. Moreover, Barnabas is a time traveler from the 1960s, so he had even more opportunity to read it. He catches on right away, and explains to Magda that from now on it will be the portrait that changes, while Quentin remains the same.

Barnabas made his voyage from 1969 by accident. Collinwood was uninhabitable because Quentin’s ghost was haunting it so aggressively that everyone was dying. Barnabas went to Quentin’s old room, and found some I Ching wands. Under the guidance of occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes, he cast the wands, meditated on them, and his “astral body” found itself animating the physical body that lay in a hidden, sealed coffin in 1897. Now Barnabas looks through the room again, searching for the wands. He finds them, and with Magda goes to the basement of the Old House on the estate. He explains that this is where he did his thing in 1969, and that he will do the same thing on the same spot in order to contact Quentin’s ghost in 1969 and ask him what’s going to happen next. He also says that his physical person will be sitting there motionless, perhaps for several days. Since Edward and Petofi are on their way, and they both know that the basement of the Old House is Barnabas’ very favorite hangout, this would seem to be rather a hazardous plan.

Barnabas settles in for a nice long sit. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 832: The stamp of Petofi

As the full Moon is about to rise, hypocritical Rev’d Gregory Trask is standing outside the prison cell in the basement of the great house of Collinwood. He is taunting its inmate, rakish libertine Quentin Collins. Trask knows that Quentin is a werewolf, and is reveling in the prospect of watching him transform, then going to the police.

To Trask’s great disappointment, Quentin stays human. Once the Moon has been up for a while, Quentin grows jubilant. He threatens to contact the police himself, and points out that Trask is committing a number of felonies by holding him in the cell. With singularly poor grace, Trask lets him out. The scene between them is hilarious.

In the foyer, Quentin meets 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi. He grabs Petofi by the neck, trying the old fellow’s patience. Petofi says that it is quite silly of Quentin to behave as if he can do him physical harm, and that he ought to learn to curb his temper. “But you’re also rather charming, which means there’ll always be somebody who’ll help you.” Of course Quentin is enormously charming- he is played by David Selby. When we first met him, Quentin was a ghost who never spoke but spent months abusing children, murdering day players, threatening to kill our favorite characters, and bringing every storyline screeching to a halt. Still, enough of Mr Selby’s inherently adorable personality came peeking through that Quentin was already a fan favorite long before he delivered a word of dialogue.

Something similar is going on with Amanda Harris, who is an oil painting come to life. Amanda is much nicer than the ghost of Quentin was, but she is a bit shaky in execution. Future Broadway star Donna McKechnie admits nowadays that, while she was a highly trained dancer and singer by 1969, she was still something of a beginner at acting, and that does show when Amanda has a lot to say. But her limited skills really don’t matter at all. Even when Miss McKechnie looks at a scene partner, takes a deep breath, and shouts a whole speech, she is so appealing that your only question is why Amanda acts that way. Maybe that’s how all oil paintings behave two years after they’ve come to life.

In her two-dimensional form, Amanda was the product of Charles Delaware Tate, an artist who received great talents as the result of a Faustian bargain with Petofi. Tate is in the village of Collinsport now. Petofi summoned him to paint a portrait of Quentin. We’ve had many heavy-handed clues that the portrait would function like the picture of Dorian Gray, and that on nights of the full Moon it would transform and leave Quentin as a human. Today Quentin finds the portrait in his room, and it indeed looks like the werewolf. Unfortunately for the show, the werewolf is a cute doggie who wears a tidy little suit, and unless you see him in the act of killing someone it is impossible for us to be afraid of him. As a painting, he wouldn’t pass muster as a set decoration for the walls of an ostensibly haunted house on Scooby Doo Where Are You.

You *must* answer me- who is the goodest boy? *Who!?* Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 820: The music and the mirror

Help Me Return to the World of the Living

In Dark Shadows #1, set in 1966, two people came to Collinsport, Maine. They were the well-meaning Vicki Winters and dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Vicki had taken a job as the governess in the great house of Collinwood, hoping that she would find the answers to questions she had about her own mysterious origins. Those questions had left her feeling that she knew nothing about herself.

Burke was a working class boy from Collinsport who had gone to New York City five years before, fresh out of prison and penniless. By 1966 he was a corporate raider, a millionaire many times over. He came back to his hometown because he wanted revenge on high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, who used Burke’s car to kill someone while Burke was passed out drunk in the backseat, then persuaded the court that Burke was solely responsible for the homicide. Burke and Vicki ultimately became a couple, but for some months Burke strung Roger’s niece Carolyn along and used her to cause trouble for the Collinses.

Now the show is set in 1897, and Burke and Vicki are both long gone. Carolyn and Roger are waiting for us when the show returns to contemporary dress, and the actors who play them are in the cast in other roles. But we’ve been reminded of Burke recently. Tim Shaw is a working class boy from Collinsport who, after spending time as a teacher at a miserable boarding school run by the evil Rev’d Gregory Trask, was chosen by Trask to take the fall for the murder of his wife, Minerva Trask. As Burke was physically present but mentally compromised at the killing for which he went to prison, so Tim was present at the killing of Minerva, but not in his right mind. The show is about the supernatural now, so it was a magic spell, not booze, that kept Tim from knowing what was going on when he poisoned Minerva. And the pace is too fast for arrests and trials, so Trask’s plan went wrong and he had to tell the police Tim wasn’t guilty after all. So Tim went straight to New York, and just a few weeks later came back to Collinsport, very rich and out for revenge.

Like Burke, Tim arrives in Collinsport with a woman. Unlike Vicki, Amanda Harris knew Tim before they got on the train. But we learn today that Amanda, like Vicki, is tormented by her ignorance of her own background. Again, the starker palette in which the show draws its stories at this period means that instead of not knowing who her birth parents were, Amanda has no memories at all prior to two years ago.

Amanda first appeared as a hardboiled operator who was attached, not to Tim, but to his money, and who gave him expert assistance in the con game he was running on Trask. As Tim was an elaboration on Don Briscoe’s W. C. Fields’ imitation, Amanda was a nod to Mae West. But the show has decided to make Amanda a long-term addition to the cast, and they already have an all-villain cast. So they soften Amanda’s edges. We see her packing her bags and telling Tim she is going to leave because he doesn’t really care about her and she can’t stand what she is doing with Trask. When she complains that Tim is just using her, she echoes speeches Carolyn made after her bitter realization about Burke’s true intentions. Now that her relationship to Tim mirrors both Vicki and Carolyn’s relationships to Burke, Amanda can inherit the goodwill longtime viewers have towards both of those characters.

To Have Something I Can Believe In

Tim’s sudden wealth came from his possession of a magical object, The Hand of Count Petofi. When Amanda first heard of the Hand, she asked if it was a piece of jewelry or some other kind of artifact. It did not occur to her that it was literally the severed hand of a Hungarian nobleman. This gruesome thing had been cut a century before, in 1797, by nine Rroma men, and had ever since been in the custody of the leader of their tribe.

In #778, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi returned to her home in the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. She had gone to Boston, where King Johnny Romana, possessor of the Hand, was staying with his caravan. She had pleaded with King Johnny to help her remove a curse she had placed that made rakish libertine Quentin Collins and all his male descendants into werewolves. Magda had not known when she placed the curse that Quentin was the father of her sister Jenny’s children. She hoped that King Johnny would take pity on the Rroma children and use the Hand to end the curse. When he did not, she stole it, intending to use its powers herself. Magda soon found that the Hand did no one’s bidding. It helped some people, hurt others, and was stolen by each of a long series of scheming characters.

After Tim brought the Hand back to Collinsport, it was stolen again. This time, the thief turned out to be none other than Count Petofi himself, 150 years old and on the point of death. Once he had the Hand back, it reattached itself to his wrist and he regained his health.

Petofi has some sort of plans for Quentin. He has retained one of his minions, nationally renowned artist Charles Delaware Tate, to paint a portrait of Quentin. That project is finished, but Tate is still living in a cottage he has rented in Collinsport. Today Petofi visits Tate there.

Petofi finds Tate sketching an imaginary woman, one he has been obsessively drawing and painting for about two years. Petofi sets himself up as Tate’s analyst. “Only little boys invent ideal women,” says he. He has a plan to relieve Tate’s childish fixation. It is another project. If Tate had seen A Chorus Line, he might appreciate Petofi’s theory of work as therapy, as explained in the lyric “Give me a job and you instantly get me involved, if you give me a job then the rest of the crap will get solved.” But that show won’t premiere for another 78 years, so Tate resists.

It doesn’t help that the job Petofi has in mind involves another severed hand. The Rroma are on their way, and they want the Hand back. Petofi, whose magical powers were formidable even when he was one-handed, is much mightier now, but the thought of the Rroma agitates him violently. Evidently they know about some weakness of his that enables them to defeat him. King Johnny and his men don’t know that Petofi is in Collinsport. He has cast a spell to silence Magda, but they won’t leave the area without the Hand. Several people know about Petofi and have no reason to protect him. If the Rroma start asking questions, it won’t be long before they close in. So Petofi has exhumed a recently deceased local man, cut off his right hand, and brought it to Tate for detailing.

Tate owes his talents, and his life, to Petofi, so the outcome of their meeting is never really in doubt. His next encounter does involve a surprise. Amanda comes to Petofi’s hiding place, sent by Tim, and asks for his help. Petofi tells Amanda that Tim has a poor strategic sense. Indeed, Petofi has already told Tim that, lovely as Amanda is, he has no use for her at the present time. But when he sees her face to face, Petofi recognizes her as the imaginary woman in Tate’s pictures.

Returning viewers already know that Tate’s portrait of Quentin takes on the features of a wolf when the Moon is full, so it is no surprise that his works, like several other portraits we have seen on Dark Shadows, have magical powers. When we learn that Tate first painted Amanda two years ago and she has no history prior to that time, we figure out that he inadvertently used those powers to conjure her into being.

Tate is played by Roger Davis, an unpleasant man who figured as Vicki’s love interest in her last, woefully ill-conceived storyline. In that arc, made and set in 1968, Mr Davis’ part was variously known as Peter Bradford and Jeff Clark. He had amnesia, and Vicki kept trying to help him recover memories which would prove to him that he has no roots in the 1960s, but that he is an uncanny being who was brought to life by an adventure she had outside the bounds of space and time. Once we recognize what they are suggesting about Amanda’s origin, longtime viewers might expect an inversion of that story, with Mr Davis playing the person trying to persuade his lover that he accidentally created her by a magical process he himself did not understand.

Somebody to Dance For

While all of this action is taking place downstream of Count Petofi, the person who set in motion the events that first brought Petofi to town is in big trouble. Magda comes home to find King Johnny himself waiting for her. He menaces her, calls her names, and twice hits her in the face very hard.

King Johnny closes in on Magda. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Ever since Violet Welles joined the writing staff, men have been slapping women quite a bit on Dark Shadows. Welles was by far the best writer of dialogue on the show, but I for one could do without the slapping. Fortunately King Johnny is played by Paul Michael, a well-trained actor; no matter how brutally King Johnny abuses Magda, Grayson Hall is in no danger. One could never say the same of Mr Davis’ screen partners.

King Johnny tells Magda that he will take her back to his caravan in Boston to stand trial for the death of Julianka, a Rroma maiden whom he sent to kill her some weeks ago. Since Magda cannot say Petofi’s name, she cannot tell King Johnny that it was he who killed Julianka. Magda is terrified of the trial, and King Johnny tells her that there is a way she can avoid it. If she does not give him the Hand, he will slit her throat immediately.

King Johnny searches the house, and does not find the Hand. He is about to carry out his promise to kill Magda when he sees the wooden box in which the Hand was long kept lying on the floor. He opens it. What he sees inside resembles the Hand closely enough to convince him, and keep Magda alive for another day. Clever as she has been so far, we may wonder how many days are left for her. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around to throw Magda a rope to grab onto.

Episode 818: I have but one, and his name is Petofi

The disastrously repressed Charity Trask knows that rakish libertine Quentin Collins is a werewolf, and she wants to warn everyone about him without actually saying the facts out loud. She corners maidservant Beth Chavez in the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood and urges Beth to end her romance with Quentin.

Charity keeps saying that there is something about Quentin that Beth does not know. In fact, Beth not only knows everything Charity does about Quentin’s curse, but a great deal more. She was the very first person to know that Quentin was a werewolf, before Quentin himself knew. She was with him the first time he transformed, and when he became human again in the morning she refused to tell him what she had seen. She had previously seen Quentin murder his wife Jenny, she knows that Jenny’s sister Magda placed the curse as vengeance for that murder, and she was the one who told Magda that Jenny had borne children to Quentin who would inherit their father’s curse. Beth is the foremost authority on Quentin’s condition. But she is protecting him anyway.

Charity then goes to a set known to longtime viewers as the Evans cottage. In the parts of Dark Shadows set between 1966 and 1968, this set is home to artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Today the dramatic date is 1897, but the cottage is already an artist’s studio. It is occupied by Charles Delaware Tate, a nationally renowned painter who was commanded by the evil sorcerer Count Petofi to execute Quentin’s portrait. When we first saw Tate in the cottage, he said that he rented it because he’d heard about it from a friend who had stayed there some time before.

The cottage is full of paintings and sculptures. This is odd for a rental. Several possible explanations come to mind. Did Tate bring a dozen or more of his own works to keep him company? Did his friend or other artists who had rented it leave their completed pieces behind? Did the landlords display their own collection there for the edification of their tenants? Easy as these explanations are to think of, none of them seems very likely, and the question is never addressed in the show. The out-of-universe explanation is of course that when the audience looks at an artist’s studio, it expects to see a lot of artwork, and the artwork here gives director Lela Swift a chance to make good use of color.

At any rate, the set is gorgeous today, full of bright greens and mixed reds. Swift was a highly ambitious visual artist, and she outdoes herself here. The first shot in the cottage begins with a closeup of the portrait of Quentin. It then pulls back further than any previous shot of this very familiar set, showing us a lattice that used to be part of the set representing the kitchen/ breakfast nook area at Collinwood. Behind it is a plant with some large, intensely green foliage. We then track around the set to see several sculpted pieces in black, paintings in a variety of tones, and a whole array of vivid colors in the furniture and other decorations. Dark Shadows has come a long way from the clumsiness that marked its use of color when it first switched from black and white in #295.

Charity is unaware that she and Tate are not alone. Tate’s master, Petofi, is in the next room eavesdropping. Charity is horrified to see the portrait of Quentin, and reminds Tate that she saw Quentin’s features in the portrait change into those of a wolf when she visited the cottage on the night of a full Moon. Tate tries to convince her she did not really see such a thing, but she will not have it. Charity gives Tate a warning somewhat less incoherent than the one she had given Beth. After she exits, Petofi and Tate talk. Tate had suspected Quentin was a werewolf, and now is sure. Petofi says that his plans for Quentin are none of Tate’s concern.

Petofi goes to the great house. Quentin confronts him there, demanding to know by what gods he swears. He replies “I have but one, and his name is Petofi!” Charity sees Petofi and vehemently demands he leave. I don’t know why she does this. As far as I can recall, Charity knows Petofi only as Victor Fenn-Gibbon, an honored guest of the Collins family. He did cast rather a nasty spell on her when he was using that alias, but I don’t see why she would realize that he was to blame for it, or for any of his other misdeeds.

Whatever the motive for Charity’s angry reaction to him, Petofi responds by magically robbing her of the power of speech. When he tells her that he has a healing touch, his manner and the background music indicate that after he touches her, what Charity will say will never again be up to her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 806: You’re not thinking of the foolish things

Charity Trask walks into the drawing room of the great house on the estate of Collinwood and finds a paper on the desk. It is a full confession to the murder of her mother, the late Minerva Trask, signed by her father Gregory and by Collins family attorney Evan Hanley. It also bears a red seal.

Trask enters and Charity tells him what she has read. He rants and raves for a while, claiming that she must be under the Devil’s power if she believes the confession. He forces her onto her knees and orders her to pray, then tries to destroy the paper.

Charity prays. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later, Gregory Trask is alone in the drawing room. It goes dark, a violent storm suddenly breaks out, the windows blow open, and the flames surge much higher in the fireplace than we have ever seen them. Trask cries out for Minerva to leave him alone. When he calls himself an innocent man, the storm rages more fiercely than ever.

The storm ends as quickly as it began, and a man appears in the doorway. He asks who Trask was talking to, and Trask denies that he was talking to anyone. Trask mentions the storm, and the man says there hasn’t been a bit of wind all day. Trask turns and sees that the window is closed and there is no sign of a storm outside.

The man identifies himself as Charles Delaware Tate. Trask recognizes the name as that of a nationally famous painter. Tate explains that the late Edith Collins commissioned him to paint a portrait of her grandson, Quentin Collins, but that Quentin has refused to sit for him. He asks Trask for a photograph of Quentin. Trask remembers that there is such a photograph in a drawer in the desk. When he opens the drawer, the confession falls out, undestroyed.

Returning viewers know that Tate is associated with a 150 year old sorcerer known as Count Petofi. We also know that Petofi is currently residing in the body of twelve year old Jamison Collins and is casting spells to expose the secrets of various people connected with Collinwood. Jamison’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins the vampire is doing battle with Petofi, and has locked Jamison/ Petofi in the prison cell in the basement of the Old House on the estate. That has done little to curb his power; from the cell, he was able to project himself into a dream of Evan’s, cast a spell on him, and compel him to draw up the paper Trask keeps trying to destroy. Jamison/ Petofi does seem anxious to get out of the cell, however. He offers to cure Quentin of lycanthropy if he lets him out. When broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi talks Quentin out of accepting the offer, Jamison/ Petofi growls a threat at her.

We do not know why Petofi wants Tate to paint a portrait of Quentin, but we get a clue at the end of the episode. Tate has rented a house which longtime viewers will recognize as the Evans cottage. For the first two years of the show, the Evans cottage was a frequent set. It was home to artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. In December 1966 and January 1967, an unseen force compelled Sam to paint portraits of undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Those portraits had supernatural powers. They were not alone. Portraits have been a prominent part of the show’s set decoration from the very beginning, and have been a gateway between the world of the living and the world of the dead since #70. We may well assume, then, that Tate’s portrait of Quentin will also have uncanny powers.

Charity is visiting Tate in the cottage and looking at the portrait. He has only been working for a day or two, and he says it will take him about two weeks to finish. Yet the figure is almost finished now. As Charity studies it, Quentin’s face turns into that of the werewolf. In May and June of 1968, they did a story partly based on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and in #701, the very first episode in which he could speak, Quentin compared pictures and people, saying that one changes while the other stays the same. So we are prepared to see Quentin’s curse transferred from his body to his portrait.