Tag: process shot

Episode 882: The show must go on. That’s the one and only rule there is.

Many fantastic tales dwell on a sense that dreams have a great power in the world, and so their characters are often afraid of falling asleep. Dark Shadows has several times referenced Edgar Allan Poe, who explored that fear in stories like “The Premature Burial,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Man of the Crowd.” The show brought up another writer of fantastic tales preoccupied with the fear of sleep in #808. Aristide, henchman of sorcerer Count Petofi, threatened an enemy of Petofi’s with “the mysterious shadow he can cast, the shadow that isn’t your own that follows you.” That was a reference to George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes, in which a man named Anodos is plagued by a shadow that moves about on its own, following him and blighting his existence. Not only does Anodos fear sleep from time to time in Phantastes, but the main theme of MacDonald’s other very popular novel, 1895’s Lilith, is Mr Vane’s long refusal to sleep and the great battle he must wage in the dream-world when he finally does allow himself to nod off.

Aristide’s threat suggested that the show was about to give us a story based on Anodos and the autonomous shadow. Aristide is dead now, and Petofi is running out of story, so that isn’t going to happen, at least not in the segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897. But today we do get a little bit of George MacDonald in the form of a battle against sleep. Petofi is casting a spell over himself and handsome young rake Quentin Collins. If Quentin loses conscious control of his mind for even a moment, he and Petofi will evacuate their respective bodies and be re-embodied as each other. Petofi will then transport himself, in Quentin’s body, to the year 1969. Quentin will be left behind in 1897, occupying Petofi’s aging form and waiting helplessly for Petofi’s mortal enemies to come and kill him, thinking they are taking their long-delayed revenge.

By the time Quentin finds out what’s going on, it is the wee hours of the morning, after he hasn’t slept for a couple of nights. His friends, Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye and time-traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, keep marching him around the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in an effort to keep him awake. They don’t brew up any coffee, strangely enough. But Barnabas does call on wicked witch Angelique and appeals to her to use her powers to put some kind of barrier between Quentin and Petofi.

Angelique tells Barnabas that she is reluctant to help Quentin because she is upset that he wants to go to New York and look for a woman named Amanda Harris. She had wanted Quentin to fall in love with her, and is jealous that he chose Amanda instead. Barnabas points out that if she doesn’t help Quentin, he won’t exist in the form that either she or Amanda knew. Angelique explains that she has a reason for her attitude:

Before I came here this time, I was in the everlasting pits of Hell, where other creatures of my kind live. Only, my stay here on Earth made me dissatisfied with my life there. I longed to come back here… To Earth, to become a human being. I begged my master for the chance.

Finally, he gave it to me on one condition and one condition only… That I make one man fall in love with me, without any use of supernatural spells or powers. One man, one chance. That’s what I was granted.

Since Quentin is the one man who represented Angelique’s one chance, letting him go to Amanda might mean that Angelique has to go back down. My favorite part of her speech is “Only, my stay here on Earth made me dissatisfied with my life there.” Sure, she could have been happy in the everlasting pits of Hell, as one is, but how ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Pa-ree. Or, since Angelique’s sojourns in the upper world have all brought her to Collinsport, after they’ve had the lobster roll at the Blue Whale.

While Barnabas is talking with Angelique, Pansy is on Quentin duty. She decides to keep him awake by compelling him to join in a performance of her song. A record of this song, performed by Nancy Barrett and David Selby, hit the stores the very day this episode was first broadcast, so this is product placement. But Pansy is doing exactly what she would do in this situation, Quentin is reacting just as he would react, and it is a charming moment.

The musical number is preceded by Pansy making what literary critics call a programmatic statement. “Feel like it or not, you gotta do it, the show must go on. That’s the one and only rule there is, love. So let’s have a bright chorus from that new team, Pansy Faye and Quentin Collins.” Pansy is not only a good pal and a gifted psychic, she is an accomplished scientist. She has indeed stated the complete physics, metaphysics, and every other operating principle of the universe of Dark Shadows when she says that “The show must go on.”

Angelique and Barnabas enter. Angelique insists on some time alone with Quentin. He says that once he gets to New York he most definitely will be looking for Amanda and that he has no interest in a relationship with Angelique. She looks away from him and talks herself into believing it will be OK if he falls in love with her after Amanda “has ceased to exist.” Longtime viewers can be fairly sure this means that Angelique is planning to murder Amanda, but at the moment the important thing is to get Angelique involved in helping Quentin against Petofi.

Angelique opens the door to the foyer, where we catch a glimpse of Nancy Barrett and Jonathan Frid doing a really marvelous mime depicting “intense conversation.” It’s one of those deliberately stagey bits of business that these twentieth century New York actors do so well.

Angelique opens the door on a silent “conversation.”

Angelique stares into the fire and tries to project psychic power Petofi-ward. We get a process shot simultaneously depicting Angelique in the drawing room and Petofi in his lair. The shot is not very successful, and Angelique explains that her efforts aren’t working either. She says that Petofi is in so deep a trance that she cannot reach him as she has done before.

Petofi’s surroundings are so heavily decorated that this shot just looks cluttered to me. I suppose having Petofi low in the shot and behind the flames is meant to remind us of Angelique’s old neighborhood, but the visual metaphor is spoiled by the cruddy 1960s TV color palette.
In black and white, as most viewers would have seen it in 1969, the shot has different problems- while the more abstract visual style does make the Petofi-as-Satan metaphor legible, it is less clear which shapes are in Angelique’s space and which are in Petofi’s.

Pansy, eavesdropping from the foyer, hears Angelique say that she will need to have something Petofi is wearing right now, something still warm from contact with him, in order to reach him with her powers. Pansy resolves to provide this, and she sneaks out. She makes her way to his lair, and is about to undo Petofi’s necktie when he comes out of his trance and tells Pansy she has interfered with his plans once too often. We have flashed to the motionless Petofi several times today, leading us to think that Thayer David was going to collect his fee without having to deliver a line. So it is quite effective when he springs into action.

Episode 340: Medical silence

Dave Woodard, MD, has learned that Barnabas Collins is a vampire and mad scientist Julia Hoffman is his co-conspirator. We see Barnabas at home, pressuring Julia into helping him murder Woodard before he can go to the authorities. After a great show of reluctance, Julia prepares a hypodermic of some potion or other that will induce cardiac arrest. When Barnabas insists she administer the lethal injection herself, Julia resumes her attempt to find a way out. Barnabas finally allows her to go to Woodard and tell him that his only options are to cooperate with them and make a great contribution to medical science, or to go out into the night and suffer an unimaginably horrible death when Barnabas catches him.

Julia does go to Woodard’s office, and does deliver this message. Woodard replies that he doesn’t have to go anywhere to tell the sheriff about Barnabas and Julia. He picks up his telephone and starts dialing. High-pitched sounds play, and Woodard sees the shadow of a bat at his window. Yesterday we heard that Julia considered Woodard the most brilliant student in their medical school class, and we can see why- even though this was decades before Covid-19 or Nipah or other bat-borne viruses were in the news, he is transfixed by the outline of the squeaky little guy.

Perhaps Woodard is less prescient about bats as vectors for disease than he is mindful of the experiences of his young friend, strange and troubled boy David Collins. In #330, Barnabas sent a large bat to frighten David in his bedroom. Today, Barnabas materializes inside Woodard’s office after the bat has done its thing outside. This is the first indication we have had that Barnabas has the power to transport himself through walls.

Unfortunately, the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians were on strike during principal photography for this episode. No doubt the process shot of Barnabas’ materialization was added after they came back to work, but they could do only so much with the footage that the network executives and other amateurs had left them. The Barnabas who appears in Woodard’s office today is about three feet tall and is missing a chunk of his head.

That mini-Bar doesn’t stock anything you want to drink. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Mini-Bar may be the funniest consequence of this attempt at strikebreaking, but there is another that isn’t amusing at all. Woodard is played by some stooge who took over the part when Robert Gerringer, who has been struggling valiantly since May to find something interesting to highlight in a character who usually doesn’t know anything and isn’t allowed to advance the plot, honored the NABET picket line. The scab annoys the audience every time he opens his mouth today, breathing directly onto his microphone, getting tangled up in trivial lines, and veering between a barking tone and a whine as high-pitched as the sounds the bat makes.

The result of his incompetence is that a conflict the audience is supposed to be experiencing as suspense does not come off. We’re supposed to be torn as Julia is torn, wanting Woodard’s threat to the continuation of the story to be removed, but feeling horror at the thought that he will be killed. Gerringer could have made us feel those incompatible desires, but this alleged actor makes us want nothing but that he be removed from our television screens as soon as possible and by any means necessary. So we find ourselves cheerfully rooting for the vampire and the mad scientist to get on with murder.