portrait of quentin collins – 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 903: Rhinoceros

For eight months, from March through November of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897. Among the characters we got to know during that period were Amanda Harris (Donna McKechnie,) who came to life when an artist named Charles Delaware Tate used magical powers he didn’t know he had and painted a portrait of an imaginary woman. As long as the portrait exists, Amanda will live, remaining young and beautiful. Tate also painted a portrait of the rakish Quentin Collins. As Amanda’s story is a retelling of the ancient Greek tale of Pygmalion and Galatea, so Quentin’s portrait is a version of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Quentin had been a werewolf when Tate painted him, but as long as the portrait is intact it will change on moonlit nights, while Quentin remains human. Like Amanda, Quentin is immune from aging while his portrait lasts.

These two conditionally immortal beings found each other towards the end of the 1897 storyline and fell in love. They were going to run off together, but Tate had stolen Quentin’s portrait and Quentin couldn’t leave without it. Shortly before the show came back to contemporary dress, it seemed that the portrait had been destroyed when Tate’s cottage burned down, though we did not see this happen.

In September, mad scientist Julia Hoffman managed to travel back in time and spend a few weeks in 1897. She befriended Quentin and saw Amanda’s portrait. After returning to 1969, Julia found a mediocre landscape Tate painted in 1949 at an antique shop in the village of Collinsport and shelled out a ridiculous sum for it, hoping that it would help her find out whether Quentin is alive, where his portrait is, and whether Tate himself might be alive and able to help Quentin’s great-grandson Chris Jennings, who has inherited the werewolf curse.

Another woman is interested in the portrait. She is Olivia Corey (Donna McKechnie,) a famous Broadway actress. Olivia has come to Collinsport to try to persuade Julia to sell her the painting. Julia sees Olivia’s resemblance to Tate’s paintings of Amanda and suspects that the women are one and the same, but since she did not meet Amanda when she was in 1897 she cannot disprove Olivia’s story that she is Amanda’s granddaughter.

We fade in on Julia today, sitting with Olivia on a couch in Olivia’s suite in the Collinsport Inn. We can tell Olivia is staying there, because she has decorated it with a copy of her professional headshot, among other things.

What, don’t you set your headshot on a table when you stay in a hotel room? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The two are having a conversation in which they declare themselves to be devoted admirers of Tate’s works. We saw many of Tate’s works in the 1897 segment, and few of them were any better than the crummy landscape that has brought them together. When Julia found the painting, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard expressed amazement she would pay a hefty sum for such an undistinguished piece, and later today Olivia will say in so many words that it is of little interest to anyone but a Tate completist, so the show is not pretending that Tate’s pictures had great aesthetic value. We can therefore be sure that Olivia, like Julia, has an ulterior motive.

Olivia claims to be working with a figure in the fine art business in New York City who wants to stage an exhibition of Tate’s works. She refers to this figure as “he,” disappointing our hopes that she might be in league with the show’s most interesting character, NYC art dealer Portia Fitzsimmons, whom we met in #193. Then again, Olivia represented herself as “Mr Corey” in the telegrams she sent to the antique shop inquiring after the painting in an attempt to conceal her identity, so maybe she is doing the same thing on behalf of Mrs Fitzsimmons.

Olivia asks to be allowed to photograph the painting, and under the circumstances Julia can hardly refuse that request. Olivia asks when she can call at the great house on the estate of Collinwood, where Julia has been in residence since 1967. Julia says that she will have the chauffeur bring the painting to the hotel later that evening.

This is only the second time we have heard anything about a chauffeur at Collinwood. The first time was in #543, when Carolyn hired unsightly ex-convict Harry Johnson to help her manage Frankenstein’s monster Adam and covered up his true responsibilities by putting him on the payroll as chauffeur. We haven’t seen or heard of Harry since #669, which was also the only episode in which he was played by Edward Marshall. In previous episodes Harry had been played by Craig Slocum, usually pretty badly, but Mr Marshall did such a good job with the character we would be glad to see him again.

We have little hope this will happen, however. Not only is Harry generally forgotten after his long absence, he and Julia never had much to do with each other when he was on the show. Since her activities concerning the painting are a big secret, she would choose only an assistant whom she could trust. That means Chris.

Carolyn hired Chris as groundskeeper at Collinwood in #677, by which time he was already living in the cottage on the estate that goes with the job. By the time the show went to 1897, his lycanthropy had surpassed all bounds and he was a wolf at all times, even during the day. In #889, set in 1969, we saw that he had regained his human form and spent the eight months of the 1897 flashback confined to a mental hospital Julia controls. We also saw that Carolyn had no idea where he had been or what his problem was. That made it rather a surprise in #897, when we saw that he still lived in the cottage. Presumably he still has the job, as well. You’d think an unexplained absence of eight months, followed by a confrontation in which he told Carolyn that he was a monster who would kill her if she didn’t watch out, would lead to a firing, but evidently the Collinses have a relaxed attitude towards their staff.

When we cut to Julia after her scene with Olivia, we see her in the drawing room of the great house with Chris. She shows him a handwritten note from Amanda to Quentin, written in 1897, that she dug up someplace. He tells Chris that he is to take the painting to Olivia’s room and get a sample of her handwriting to compare to that standard. He is to present himself as the chauffeur at Collinwood. Since he is in fact the groundskeeper at Collinwood and he will give Olivia his right name, it’s hard to see what the point is of claiming to have a different position in the household. Chris is skeptical that Olivia and Amanda can be the same person, but Julia tells him that he of all people should be willing to accept the apparently impossible.

Chris is nervous in Olivia’s room, especially when she introduces him to a Mr Nakamura. She gives the painting to Mr Nakamura, who takes it to another room. She explains that Mr Nakamura is a professional photographer and will be taking the picture. She says she will call Chris when Mr Nakamura is finished. Chris says that Julia explicitly told him to wait for the painting. This is odd- if the goal is to get a sample of Olivia’s handwriting, why not insist on leaving it with her? Then she would have to write out a receipt.

Mr Nakamura takes a long time. Olivia takes out her silver tea service and keeps offering Chris more tea. It’s for just such situations that I take my silver tea service with me every time I check into a hotel, it really is a pity more people don’t think ahead like that. Eventually Chris gets restless and barges into the room where Mr Nakamura took the painting. He finds a fancy camera there, but no person and no painting. We don’t see much of the room, but from what we can see of the layout of the suite, there doesn’t appear to be any way Mr Nakamura could have exited except the way he went in. Chris is upset, but eventually Mr Nakamura comes back with the painting. He says that he had to go to a local shop to have it done, and shows Olivia a large photograph of the painting. She says that it is acceptable, and tells him that Chris is ready to call the police if they don’t return the painting to him at once.

Chris takes on a sheepish manner and apologizes for his nervousness. He tells Olivia he is an admirer of hers and asks for an autograph. She writes a little note for him. He takes it and the painting and goes.

Back at the great house, Chris delivers the painting and the autograph to Julia. She can see that Olivia’s handwriting is similar enough to Amanda’s to warrant an expert analysis. She thinks of her friend, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes is an expert on the occult, an expertise which typically arises in fields like history or classics that involve the study of manuscripts, so it makes sense that he would be trained in recognizing hands. Chris marvels at Olivia’s attractiveness.

Alone with Olivia, Mr Nakamura says that he found the best radiographer in Collinsport. He paid him to x-ray the painting and to keep quiet about it. Since Collinsport is supposed to be a very small town, one wonders how many radiographers Mr Nakamura had to choose from. At any rate, the x-ray confirms that there is another painting underneath the landscape. Olivia looks at the x-ray exposure, and says that it looks like a portrait.

Chris’ attraction to Olivia recalls the 1897 segment. Amanda came to Collinsport in the company of miserable schoolteacher-turned-unscrupulous adventurer Tim Shaw, who like Chris was played by Don Briscoe. Amanda and Tim stayed in the Collinsport Inn together, perhaps in this suite. We don’t know if Tim and Chris are supposed to resemble each other, and Olivia doesn’t show any signs of recognition. But regular viewers will enjoy seeing Briscoe and Donna McKechnie together in a situation so different from those they explored before.

Olivia’s conversation with Julia, like her headshot on the table, emphasizes that she is A Big Broadway Star. A few years after this episode, Miss McKechnie originated the role of Cassie in A Chorus Line, and actually became A Big Broadway Star. Watching this episode, I wonder if she found herself imitating Olivia when that happened to her.

Mr Nakamura is played by Sho Onodera. Onodera was born in Seattle in 1915 and died in New York in 1974. According to his obituary in The New York Times, Onodera served in US military intelligence during the Second World War, and was the court’s chief interpreter at the Tokyo war crimes trials after the war ended. In later years he.worked as a reporter for both American and Japanese news services. The Times does not mention that Onodera, like 120,000 other Americans of Japanese extraction, spent part of the period of US involvement in the war as an internee, in his case at the Manzanar camp. That fact is recorded in his IMDb biography. As an actor, he appeared in several television shows and a couple of movies, most notably the 1974 film The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, in which he took the role of Mr Matsumoto.

This episode marks Onodera’s only appearance on Dark Shadows. He was one of only three visibly non-white actors to appear in the series. The others were Beverly Hope Atkinson, who had a speaking role as an unnamed nurse in #563, and Henry Judd Baker (also known as Judd Henry Baker,) who was visually prominent but silent as Rroma tough guy Istvan in #821, #825, #826, and #827. From now on, the cast will be all-white. Granted, fishing villages in central Maine in the late 1960s and early 1970s didn’t tend to have a lot of racial diversity, but enough visitors come to town that you might think they could have found more opportunities than that to use the talents of the nonwhite actors who were working in New York in 1966-1971.

Episode 884: Departure date

It is November 1897, and time traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is searching through the burned remains of a cottage recently occupied by famed artist/ criminal lowlife Charles Delaware Tate. Barnabas finds a pair of glasses just outside the front door and a length of chain just inside. The glasses belonged to Tate’s master, evil sorcerer Count Petofi, the chain to a creature named Garth Blackwood whom Petofi and Tate summoned from the depths of Hell. When Barnabas was last in the house, Blackwood had taken Petofi prisoner there and announced his intention to kill him. Petofi couldn’t get far without his glasses, and the chain was Blackwood’s very favorite murder weapon. So Barnabas has reason to believe both of them died in the fire.

Tate shows up. Barnabas demands he paint another portrait of Quentin Collins to replace the one destroyed in the fire. Quentin is Barnabas’ friend and distant cousin, and, because of some magical powers Petofi long ago gave Tate, the portrait kept Quentin from turning into a werewolf. Tate is a jerk about Barnabas’ demands, as he is a jerk about everything, but finally says he will comply. He tells Barnabas to come back to the ruins of the cottage at 10 PM to pick up the portrait. Barnabas is surprised to hear that Tate can work so quickly, and Tate does not explain why he needs so little time. But after all, the important thing is simply that the magic spell is renewed- the portrait doesn’t have to have any particular aesthetic quality. Perhaps a simple sketch will serve that purpose as effectively as did the full oil painting Tate did previously.

Meanwhile, back at the great house of Collinwood, Quentin’s sister Judith is busy with a project of her own. She is torturing her husband to death. He is the odious Gregory Trask, so she has the audience’s sympathy, at least up to a point. She has had Trask bricked up in Quentin’s old room. There is a telephone there which can receive incoming calls, but not make outgoing calls. Judith has been using it to torment Trask. Today, she directs Trask’s attention to two objects which he has somehow overlooked in his time in the room. One is a portrait of Amanda Harris, a woman he tried to seduce while he had Judith imprisoned in a sanitarium. The other is a loaded gun. When she calls him for the last time, she does not receive an answer, evidently because he has shot himself to death.

Judith is the third role Joan Bennett played on Dark Shadows. In the parts of the show set in the 1960s, she plays matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz is a depressive personality who keeps trying to kill herself. When from November 1967 to March 1968 the show was set in the 1790s, she played Naomi Collins, Barnabas’ mother, who actually did kill herself when she found out that her son was a vampire. Now she plays someone who, though she was introduced as a psychologically fragile individual, does not kill herself, but drives one of the major villains to commit suicide. Judith’s method of disposing of Trask is not morally defensible, but it is interesting to see Bennett playing a more assertive character.

Trask’s discovery of the portrait of Amanda leads to an interlude in New York City, a place the show hasn’t taken us since #8. Quentin is in a hotel lobby there, waiting for Amanda. She is surprised to see him. They had been lovers, and had planned to leave Collinsport together. He did not meet her at the train station. She had told him that if he did not, she would understand that he had given up on their relationship, so she had gone ahead without him. She says she is so overjoyed at the sight of him that she won’t ask for explanations, but he gives one anyway. He tells her about the portrait. Since she herself came to life as the result of another of Tate’s magical paintings, she can’t very well dismiss the story out of hand. He says that because he does not know where the portrait is, he cannot be sure he won’t become a mindless ravening beast at the next full moon, so he will have to leave her.

Oddly, Judith takes time out from her torture of Trask to perform the same function of motherly talk-to that Liz and Naomi often served. Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, has been staying at Collinwood for the last eight weeks, and is engaged to marry Judith’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward. Contrary to what her title would suggest, Kitty is an American woman in her twenties. Judith sees Kitty coming downstairs with two leather overnight bags. Kitty explains that she will be leaving at once and never returning. She has realized that she cannot marry Edward. She says that she has not told Edward this. Judith says that she is disappointed that they will not be sisters, but that she admires her for facing the truth and doing something about it.

Later, Barnabas comes to the great house. He finds Judith worried that Kitty’s bags are still in the foyer, though she has been gone for hours. He says that he knows where she is. She is waiting for him. They will be married later tonight. Judith is bewildered by this. Barnabas says that they will come back after their wedding and tell Edward what they have done, and that they will then leave Collinwood forever. She is sad to think that they will be going.

In fact, Kitty is two people at once. The young dowager shares her body with the soul of the late Josette DuPrés, whom Barnabas loved when he was a living being in the 1790s and whom he tried to recreate when he was a vampire in the 1960s. Ever since Kitty arrived at Collinwood in #844, Josette has been forcing her way into her conscious mind, triggering psychotic episodes and from time to time pushing Kitty aside and living through her body. Now Kitty is in the bedroom once meant for Josette in the Old House on the grounds of the estate. Josette’s voice keeps speaking to Kitty through the portrait of her that hangs there, urging her to let go and accept her place as part of a combined entity that will love Barnabas and live with him in the bonds of matrimony. Kitty struggles against the voice. For a time she hopes Barnabas will help her thwart Josette’s attempt to come back to life and take the leading part in their symbiotic existence, but when he enters he urges her to give up the fight and become Josette.

Kitty is alone in the room when she suddenly finds herself wearing Josette’s white dress. She floats off the floor and into the portrait. Barnabas enters just in time to see Kitty merge with the portrait. He reaches up to the Kitty/ Josette entity in the frame above the mantel, and he and Kitty both disappear from the screen at the same time.

Josette puts Kitty in the picture. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Josette was first mentioned in #5 as the lady who went over the cliff at Widows’ Hill, and her ghost emerged as the tutelary spirit of Collinwood in the months that followed. In #70, our first view of the Old House involved the first truly ambitious special effect, when Josette’s ghost, who was Kathryn Leigh Scott in a veil and a white dress, emanated from the portrait and took three steps from it down to the floor. When Miss Scott’s Kitty rises up into the same portrait today, longtime viewers will see that momentous little journey in reverse.

Barnabas was not dreamed of until long after Josette’s ghost emerged. When we first saw him in the Old House in #212, he delivered a speech to her portrait telling her that her power on the estate was ended, and for several weeks afterward strange and troubled boy David Collins, who had been the ghost’s close friend, lamented that he could no longer feel her presence. In those days it sounded like Josette was Barnabas’ grandmother, and she had sided with his father in the fateful conflict that led to his becoming a vampire.

Later, Josette was retconned as Barnabas’ lost love. In a plot borrowed from the 1932 film The Mummy, Barnabas decided that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was Josette’s reincarnation, and he tried to torture her into accepting this fact. Maggie resisted Barnabas. She ultimately escaped, only to have her memory of his abuse wiped clean by her psychiatrist, Barnabas’ accomplice and future best friend Julia Hoffman, MD.

Maggie was another Kathryn Leigh Scott character. When Miss Scott played Josette in the 1790s segment, the show was sticking to its source material, in which Zita Johanns played Imhotep’s victim Helen Grosvenor in the contemporary sequences and his lost love, Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun, in the flashback to ancient Egypt. It also left us with the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps Barnabas was onto something when he devised his horrifying program of cruelty towards Maggie. Sure, his methods were wrong, but if she “really” was Josette, he wasn’t just crazy.

With Kitty, they take us a step further. Barnabas’ attempt to Josettify Maggie made the show so bleak for so many weeks that longtime viewers will flinch at the thought that Kitty would be right to yield to Josette’s importunings, and even more at the idea that this will lead to a happy marriage between the Kitty/ Josette symbiont and Barnabas. Yet within the context of what we have seen in the 1897 segment, these would seem to be plausible conclusions. The body they share is as much Josette’s as it is Kitty’s, and Kitty has nothing to lose by merging fully into the being who lurks in the substrata of her mind.

For his part, Barnabas’ relationship to Kitty represents almost as drastic a departure from the personality he showed in his relationships to Miss Scott’s previous characters as the reinvention of Josette as his lost love rather than his estranged grandmother did in his early days on the show. He does not abduct her, torture her, or even give her Josette’s hypnotic music box. It is Josette’s ghost, always before shown as a benevolent force, that keeps pressing the transformation on Kitty. Barnabas is a gentle and considerate lover to the Josette part of the Kitty/ Josette complex, and is solicitous to the Kitty part. When Barnabas disappears with Kitty, we reverse not only the walk Josette’s ghost took in #70, but also the speech he gave in #212. So far from wanting to expel Josette from the world of the living as he did then, or turn her into his vampire bride as he tried both with Maggie in 1967 and with the living Josette in 1796, he wants to revive her as herself.

Barnabas’ function on the show, both when he is an outright villain and when he is trying to be the good guy, is to create problems that other characters will have to solve. So this moment of benevolence and rationality cannot last. It is the ultimate indication that the 1897 segment has indeed ended. But it is a beautiful little thing, for the few minutes it lasts.

This episode marks the final appearance of Trask and of Judith. We will see Kitty again tomorrow, but only in a reuse of today’s closing scene. After that she will only be implied as a feature of Josette’s unconscious mind.

Episode 883: The stone of justice

In the parts of Dark Shadows set in 1966 and 1967, the home of artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, was a frequent set. Sam and Maggie were important characters in several storylines, and in their cottage they represented the working class of the village of Collinsport, as against the rich people in the big house on the hill.

Now, the show is a costume drama set in 1897. In that year, the Evans Cottage is already an artist’s studio. It is occupied by Charles Delaware Tate, who became a nationally renowned painter by making a deal with evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Today, Petofi is staying in the cottage, and Tate is functioning as his goon.

Petofi is deep in a trance, trying to cast a spell that will cause him and handsome young rake Quentin Collins to switch bodies. Once he has accomplished this switch, he will cast another spell to take himself, in Quentin’s body, to the year 1969, leaving Quentin behind in 1897 to face the vengeance of Petofi’s mortal enemies.

Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye has caught on to what Petofi is attempting to do, and has sneaked into the cottage to stop him. He snaps out of his trance and declares he will punish her. She grabs his glasses and runs to the door; Tate enters and grabs her. At Petofi’s behest, Tate ties Pansy up. Petofi then sends Tate to the great house of Collinwood to fetch Quentin. He is to say that Petofi will kill Pansy unless Quentin comes within the hour.

At the great house, Tate finds that Quentin has fled and cannot be reached. Quentin’s friend and distant cousin, time traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, insists on going back to the cottage with him. When he arrives, it occurs to Petofi that Barnabas’ body is just as well suited to his purposes as is Quentin’s. He lists some of the characters who are waiting for Barnabas in 1969, and predicts they will receive him “with open arms” when he arrives in Barnabas’ form. Regular viewers are perhaps chilled, and certainly intrigued, by the idea that the show might go forward with Petofi impersonating Barnabas in a contemporary setting while a Barnabas who looks like Petofi tries to make his way back from the past, though there are so few surviving characters and unresolved story points left in 1897 that it is hard to imagine many more episodes even partially set in this period. Petofi uses his magic powers to knock Barnabas unconscious, and goes into a trance to effect the body swap.

The door swings open, and someone called Garth Blackwood enters. The other day, Petofi had Tate draw a picture of Blackwood, a picture endued with magical powers. It brought Blackwood back to life. Some years ago, Blackwood was a jailer murdered by an escaping convict named Aristide. Petofi found Aristide and took him on as a servant. Aristide has recently proven to be unreliable, and Petofi has decided he wants to be rid of him once and for all. He was amused by the idea of resurrecting Blackwood to perform the task. Blackwood has killed Aristide, but Petofi found on Monday that there is more to him than his own magical powers created. He cannot lay Blackwood to rest. Now, Blackwood has resolved to kill Petofi and Tate.

Tate flees at the sight of Blackwood. Pansy, free, asks if he is the police. He identifies himself as the master of Dartmoor Prison. Pansy, being English, is impressed. She points to Petofi and tells Blackwood that he must act against him. Blackwood puts handcuffs on Petofi, then slaps him until he comes out of his trance.

Petofi pleads with Blackwood to drop all charges against him, since he was the one who gave him the chance to kill Aristide. Barnabas comes to and asks what is going on. When Blackwood asks if he testifies for Petofi or against him, Barnabas gladly pronounces “Guilty!” He starts to say that Petofi must be killed immediately, and Blackwood cautions him against giving opinions. The witnesses are to offer only facts. So he asserts that Petofi and Aristide traveled the world together for years and committed every possible crime. At that, Blackwood bids him and Pansy leave. Once he is alone with Petofi, Blackwood picks up a metal can, douses the place with fluid, and lights a fire.

Back at the great house of Collinwood, Barnabas and Pansy talk about what just happened. Barnabas says he is confident Blackwood will kill Petofi, but he thinks he and Pansy may have to fight Blackwood later. Pansy has a vision of Blackwood and Petofi struggling with each other amid the flames in the Evans Cottage. She also sees the portrait of Quentin burning there. Since this portrait has a magical charge that keeps Quentin from turning into a werewolf, that’s bad news.

Garth Blackwood and Count Petofi, battling in the blazes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Petofi has been so powerful that it has long seemed likely that his destruction could come only as the result of his own action. When his right hand, the locus of most of his powers, was reattached to his wrist in #815, the show was giving hints it might wrap 1897 up soon. We kept hearing that the Hand had developed a mind of its own in the century it had been separated from Petofi; we could easily imagine it deciding to strangle him, and indeed in #841 it nearly did. But 1897 was such a big hit that they kept restarting it, and for some time now the Hand has done more or less what Petofi wanted it to do.

It would have been fitting had Pansy killed Petofi, since she is, in her present form, one of his creatures. The original Pansy Faye was killed in #771. In #819, Petofi erased the personality of minister’s daughter Charity Trask and gave Charity’s body to Pansy. Pansy’s light-heartedness and apparent harmlessness would have added to her suitability as the instrument of Petofi’s demise. The whole idea of the supernatural is that what appears to be weak is in fact irresistibly strong, so it would be fitting to have a tiny woman who is a character from very broad comedy conquer the great wizard.

Blackwood has only been on Dark Shadows since #878, was never previously mentioned, and is the shallowest character possible. But those weaknesses, too, give him a logical place as Petofi’s executioner. Petofi was never more smug in his self-assurance than he was when he used Tate to bring Blackwood into being in order to murder Aristide. Petofi has so easily defeated efforts by characters who had long records of dominating the action of the show, such as Barnabas and wicked witch Angelique, that we can understand why it would not occur to him that a day player could present him with any serious difficulty. That self-assurance leads him to carelessness, as he creates in Blackwood a being whose strength comes not only from him, but from the fires of Hell from which he came. Indeed, Petofi’s only thought when he brought Blackwood back from the dead was of the suffering he would inflict on Aristide, and his only feeling was delight in contemplating that suffering. Coming as the price of his overconfidence and his gleeful cruelty, it puts a moral at the end of the story when Petofi falls at Blackwood’s hands.

This episode marks the final appearance of the characters Petofi and Blackwood. It is also the final on-screen appearance of Pansy, though her voice will be heard once more, in an episode next week.

Episode 851: Common cause

Rakish libertine Quentin Collins races to the train station to meet his fiancée, the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris. He thinks he sees her, but it is actually another young woman wearing a remarkably similar outfit. She tells him the train to New York City left a few minutes ago; Quentin knows Amanda was on it, and that she thinks his absence means that their relationship is over. The young woman was quite miffed when Quentin first approached her, but by the time he offers his second apology her look has gone from indignant to concerned to yearning. The guy’s got game, you have to grant him that.

It’s been less than a minute since he made a bad first impression on her, and she’s ready to run off with him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin was detained by a fistfight with a repulsive little man called Charles Delaware Tate. Tate is an artist whose works sometimes have magical powers. His portrait of Quentin, for example, keeps Quentin from turning into a werewolf and ensures him against physical harm. Since Tate is obsessed with Amanda, he stole the portrait from Quentin when he learned Amanda was planning to leave with him. Quentin dared not leave without it, and went to Tate’s studio to demand its return. He very satisfyingly beat Tate senseless, but he did not find the portrait, and now he fears he has lost Amanda forever.

We cut to Tate’s studio. Tate is lying on the floor where he fell when Quentin finished hitting him. Unfortunately, he gets up. Sorcerer Count Petofi, who granted Tate the power to make magical artworks some years ago, enters. He tells Tate that it was stupid to steal Quentin’s portrait. Tate pretends not to know what Petofi is talking about, irritating him and us. Petofi says that he will have to be punished. After he forces Tate to draw a sketch of a pretty woman, he squeezes his wrists, helps himself to Quentin’s portrait, and says what sounds very much like a final goodbye. He exits, and Tate sits down with his pad and pencil. He discovers that he is no longer able to draw, not even a straight line.

These days, Dark Shadows is a costume drama set in 1897. Most of the time between 1966 and 1968, it took place in a contemporary setting. In those days, the set now used as Tate’s studio was the Evans cottage, home to artist Sam Evans, a drunken sad sack, and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. In December of 1966 and January of 1967, the ghost of the gracious Josette compelled Sam to paint alarming images of Laura Murdoch Collins.

It turned out Josette was doing this because she knew the characters were not all that bright and she had to literally paint them a picture to explain that Laura was an undead fire witch bent on incinerating her young son David. Laura tried to thwart Josette’s plan by harming Sam. In #146, Laura caused a fire at the Evans cottage that burned Sam’s hands, temporarily depriving him of the ability to paint. Petofi’s disabling of Tate on the same set will bring this incident back to longtime viewers. Especially so, since Josette is in the air at this point in the show. In #844, a character named Kitty joined the cast. She keeps having mental flashbacks to things only Josette would remember, and Josette’s music box appeared on Kitty’s table at a time when Josette’s ghost seemed to be the likeliest agency to have put it there. Perhaps she will insert herself into Tate’s story for some reason.

When we were watching the scene between Tate and Petofi, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that she very much wished someone else were playing Tate. Violet Welles’ script gives whoever is playing Tate a lot of opportunity to show what he can do in that scene. Roger Davis is a highly trained actor who has a long list of stage and screen credits, but he is almost always very unpleasant to watch on Dark Shadows, and he wastes the potentially fascinating dialogue Welles gave him. When Mr Davis is particularly trying, I usually try to make the scenes bearable by imagining what Frederic Forrest, who was a featured background player in #137, would have done in his place. But the echo of the story about Sam makes me wonder what David Ford would have done as Tate. Ford was in his forties, smallish and pudgy, so a David Ford Tate could not believably have had a fistfight with a character played by the very tall and fit 28 year old David Selby. But he might have been a subtle enough villain that such an exchange would not have been called for. Moreover, the incestuous undertone of Tate’s desire for Amanda, who is the product of one of his magical paintings and therefore a kind of daughter to him, would have been all the more disturbing had Tate been played by the man we knew as Maggie’s father in the 1960s and, when the show was set in the 1790s, as Josette’s.

Back home at the great house of Collinwood, Quentin receives a visit from Tim Shaw, Amanda’s ex and a would-be sleazy operator. He demands Tim tell him what he knows about Amanda’s life in New York before they came to Collinwood. Tim declares he will tell him nothing, to which Quentin responds by choking him and flinging him to the floor. Tim then burbles out everything he knows, which turns out to be nothing of the slightest use. Quentin picks Tim up and throws him out the front door in the most humiliating possible way. We cheer this on almost as joyously as we cheered Quentin’s beating of Tate Friday, but for the opposite reason. Mr Davis is a genuinely disagreeable person who ruins episode after episode, and it was him we were angry with. We chanted at the screen, not “Quen-tin! Quen-tin! Quen-tin!,” but “Da-vid! Da-vid! Da-vid!” hoping Mr Selby would pay him back for all his on-screen assaults on the women and children in the cast. But Don Briscoe was as nice a guy as Tim has become despicable, and he and Mr Selby enjoyed working together. You can see Briscoe’s joy in performance in the way he holds on to a little yellow piece of paper representing a note from Amanda all through the beating Quentin administers. Even the shot of Quentin shoving Tim out with his buttocks prominent is the product of Briscoe’s enthusiastic use of his body to demonstrate Tim’s total defeat.

Quentin throws Tim’s sorry ass out the door. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin’s other fiancée, wicked witch Angelique, comes downstairs to ask what the ruckus was about. Quentin makes up a transparent lie about having a financial interest in some firm in Boston, and says that he and Tim were quarreling about the details of it. Angelique lets him go on with this for a while and to say that he is leaving for Boston, then insists that they set a date for their wedding. He begs off, claiming not to know how long he will be away.

Petofi enters, and tells Angelique about Quentin’s plan to go to New York and look for Amanda. He also tells her that they now have a common cause, and proposes an alliance. Each of them is so powerful, and so evil, that this is a sobering prospect.

When Quentin returns to the foyer, it is his turn to be alone with Petofi. Quentin knows that Petofi gave Tate both the power to create the portrait that freed him of his curse and the commission to do so, and that he is therefore beholden to Petofi for his continued humanity. Part of his motivation for fleeing to New York with Amanda was his hope that he could escape the slavery Petofi has imposed on him as the price of that benefice. When Petofi tells Quentin he has come to see him before he goes, Quentin is momentarily stunned, and then makes a brave little noise to the effect that Petofi can’t stop him. Petofi assures him that he does not want to stop him. It doesn’t matter in the least to him where Quentin is- he can control him from anywhere.

Petofi calls on Tim at his room in the inn. He deepens Tim’s misery by pretending he doesn’t believe what Tim told him about Tate’s magical powers. As he leaves, he takes a brooch that belonged to Amanda.

Quentin is at the train station. Angelique appears there, and tells him not to go. He says that he doesn’t care if she kills him. It will be consolation enough to have died walking away from her. She says that she will not harm him in any way. This causes him to open his eyes wide in terror as it dawns on him what she means. She produces Amanda’s brooch and a doll. She positions the pin of the brooch over the doll’s chest and says that no matter where Amanda is, she will die a horrible death when the pin impales the doll.

Closing Miscellany

The actress who plays the young woman Quentin meets at the train station is billed in the credits as “Amy Yaekerson,” the only person known to Google ever to be called “Yaekerson” and known only for this appearance. But in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, a commenter known as “miles” pointed out that there are lots of people named “Yakerson.” He went on to identify an Amy Yakerson born in New York City on 1 April 1946, and to find a 1966 notice of a play featuring an actress of that name and probably of that age in the New York Daily News. I followed that up with some Googling of my own; the only Amy Yakerson I can find who is online today was born in Connecticut in 1954, so I don’t know where Amy Yakerson, star of stage and screen, is now.

We saw some of Sam’s paintings in Tate’s studio Friday and today, twenty-some years before Sam was born. Tate hides the portrait of Quentin behind one of Sam’s seascapes, and Sam’s portrait of Maggie’s mother is on the floor next to him when we see him lying there in the aftermath of the fight. John and Christine Scoleri have the details in their post about Friday’s episode at Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 850: That’s your train, lady

In June 1966, Dark Shadows opened with a train carrying well-meaning governess Victoria Winters and dashing action hero Burke Devlin from New York City to Collinsport, Maine. Vicki and Burke first met at the train station in Collinsport. When she found that no one was waiting to take her to the great house of Collinwood, Burke volunteered to drive her there. We haven’t seen the train station since, and all subsequent references to mass transit to and from Collinsport in the 1960s have been about buses. That is to some extent an adjustment to real-world history. In our universe, passenger train service to central Maine had already stopped by 1966.

Now, the show is set in 1897. Devastatingly handsome reprobate Quentin Collins has talked the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris into joining him on the 6 PM train from Collinsport to NYC. Amanda and Quentin will remind viewers who have been with the show from the beginning of Vicki and Burke. Quentin is no hero, but he serves the plot function Burke did in those early days, antagonizing all the authority figures and fascinating all the women and children. Amanda takes part in some sleazy schemes, while Vicki was eventually forced to be an impossibly stainless model of virtue. But as Vicki was on a quest to learn the truth about her biological parents and felt she could know nothing about herself until she found out who they were, Amanda is tormented that she has no memories and no information about herself dating beyond two years into the past. And as in the first week Vicki was a savvy New York street kid who could keep smiling while she fended off the indecent advances of the lecherous Roger Collins, so Amanda sees right through the equally lecherous but toweringly hypocritical Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask.

Quentin and Amanda agree to meet at the train station. Amanda has to hide from Trask and from a repulsive little man named Charles Delaware Tate, and so she will spend the afternoon in a vacant house on Pine Road where a friend of Quentin’s is squatting. Quentin will settle his affairs at Collinwood. When they made this plan, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that Dark Shadows has so consistently shown that when its characters leave separately they do not meet each other at their intended destination that it would be a surprise if they get on the train together. Indeed, from the time Amanda leaves Collinwood the suspense is not about whether their reunion will be thwarted, but how.

Tate steals a portrait of Quentin. He knows that the portrait has magical powers and is of the utmost importance to Quentin. Quentin discovers that the portrait is missing. He writes a note saying that he may not be able to get to the train station by 6 PM and asks his nine year old niece, Nora Collins, to take it to Amanda at the house on Pine Road. Nora agrees to do so.

Quentin goes to Tate’s and demands he give the portrait back. They get into a fistfight. Quentin knocks Tate out and searches the house.

Trask catches Nora on her way to the house on Pine Road. He forces her to give him the note. He reads it, and goes to the house himself. He and Amanda have a confrontation. She tells Trask that she first approached him as part of a con game she was ashamed to take part in, but when she saw him leering at her she decided that he deserved to be cheated. He furiously denies being a lecher and she calls him a liar. Trask can intimidate most people into silence, so much so that his scenes are often suffocating to watch, and it is glorious to see Amanda dump the whole truth on him and not back down.

Trask does get in one more lie. He claims that he just saw Quentin getting ready to go out on a date with his other fiancée, Angelique. Amanda doesn’t believe him but she does know about Angelique. She also told Quentin that she wasn’t convinced she was right for him, and that if he didn’t show up she would understand that he had decided they didn’t have a future together after all. So when at the conclusion the conductor sees Amanda standing on the platform by herself and tells her that it’s time to get on the train, we are to assume that she thinks it is over between her and Quentin.

All aboard. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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.