Tag: pt amy collins

Episode 994: I might as well be glad

Amy Collins twice sees the ghost of Dameon Edwards, whom she and others at the great house of Collinwood apparently knew when he was alive a year or so previously. At that time, Dark Shadows was set in a different universe than the one it has been showing us for the last few weeks, so the first thing the audience has ever heard about Dameon is that he is dead. Nor do we learn much more about him today. He looks at people with a vaguely sad expression, wanders off, and vanishes into thin air, never speaking a word. His part reminds me of G. K. Chesterton’s line that “Journalism consists largely in saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”

When Amy sees Dameon the second time, he leads her to the basement of Collinwood. This is a bit of a treat for longtime viewers. We may only have been in this universe for a few weeks, but the house is supposed to be laid out similarly to the one where we spent the previous 196 weeks, and the basement of that house was a significant set in the first year of the show. We haven’t been to that basement since #273, when it was revealed that reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard was mistaken in her belief that she had killed her husband Paul and that he was buried in a locked storeroom there. It turned out Paul wasn’t dead at all. Liz was so embarrassed when her mistake was revealed that no one ever mentioned it again.

Dameon reminds us of that storeroom when he leads Amy, not to the spot where it was, but to an alcove in the wall opposite it. Amy’s cousin Daniel’s bedroom is a mirror image of his counterpart David’s bedroom in the other continuity. If the basement is a mirror image as well, the alcove to which Dameon leads Amy corresponds to the locked storeroom. Dameon turns towards the door, and vanishes as he walks into it. Amy screams.

He wasn’t there again today. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Dameon is completely new to the audience, and the story of Liz’ belief that Paul was buried in the basement is so old that the reference will be lost on anyone who hasn’t been writing up notices about every episode of the show for the last few years. So the whole thing is pretty ineffective. Indeed, while Amy is screaming Denise Nickerson is visibly struggling not to laugh out loud.

Oh I am sooo scared! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I’m sure this episode is the result of a failed plan. Dameon must represent a character who would have meant something to us. Since most of the people we have seen in the last few weeks have the same names and are played by the same actors as counterparts from the original continuity, that character would likely have been a familiar face. The one face that would have brought the locked room in Liz’ basement to the minds of longtime viewers would have been that of Dennis Patrick. Patrick was in #273 as Jason McGuire, the seagoing con man who first convinced Liz that Paul was buried in her basement and then returned to exploit that belief by blackmailing her, and returned late in 1969 as Paul himself. Liz’ counterpart in the current universe is named Mrs Stoddard, so Paul must have existed there as well.

Patrick and his wife Barbara Cason were at this time in Tarrytown, New York, playing supporting roles in the feature film House of Dark Shadows. Patrick’s role as the sheriff puts him in only a few scenes, and Dan Curtis may well have hoped that once he’d got Patrick back to the East Coast he would be able to persuade him to return to the show for a short stint as Parallel Paul’s ghost. But Patrick was based in Los Angeles at this time, busy there as a producer and in demand as an actor, and he had no interest in coming back to a daytime drama taped in NYC for any length of time. So Dameon may have been a last-minute patch to cover Parallel Paul’s absence.

If Plan A had been that today’s ghost would represent Parallel Paul, Plan B appears to have been that he would remind longtime viewers of Quentin’s counterpart in the main continuity. Quentin was introduced late in 1968 as a ghost who did not speak. He first appeared to the children at Collinwood. Those were Amy’s counterpart, Amy Jennings, and her friend, strange and troubled boy David Collins, whose counterpart here is Daniel. Quentin’s ghost beckoned Amy and David into hidden rooms where they would, as they called it, “play the game.” When Dameon beckons Amy to the basement today, she asks if this is another of the games he used to play with her and Daniel.

The echo of the “Haunting of Collinwood” story is clear. But a revisiting of it that would have been effective would have taken some time to set up, especially since there is a living, speaking Quentin at the center of the show now. By the time they got to this topic, David Henesy had left to start his own stay in Tarrytown for House of Dark Shadows, so we won’t be seeing Daniel for a while. The most they can do is what we see here.

The upshot of these two aborted plans is a situation that does not seem to belong on the show at all, and it is no wonder Nickerson can’t keep a straight face. Even more than it reminds me of “Lord Jones is dead,” this installment reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1920 poem “The Penitent“:

I had a little Sorrow,

Born of a little Sin,

I found a room all damp with gloom

And shut us all within;

And, “Little Sorrow, weep,” said I,

“And, Little Sin, pray God to die,

And I upon the floor will lie

And think how bad I’ve been!”

Alas for pious planning —

It mattered not a whit!

As far as gloom went in that room,

The lamp might have been lit!

My Little Sorrow would not weep,

My Little Sin would go to sleep —

To save my soul I could not keep

My graceless mind on it!

So up I got in anger,

And took a book I had,

And put a ribbon on my hair

To please a passing lad.

And, “One thing there’s no getting by —

I’ve been a wicked girl,” said I;

“But if I can’t be sorry, why,

I might as well be glad!”

I don’t know if Amy had been a wicked girl, but the other characters today all seem to have secrets that it would behoove them to feel sorry for when Dameon shows up. There is drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, who like Amy sees Dameon twice; sleazy musician Bruno Hess, whom Quentin suspects of having killed Dameon; and butler Mr Trask, who, when Quentin mentions Dameon, frantically denies knowing anything about him, and who, when Amy says she saw Dameon, squeezes a drinking glass so tightly it shatters in his hand.

This is the first time we see Mr Trask. He is the fourth character played by Jerry Lacy. Mr Lacy first joined the cast in the fall of 1967 to do his celebrated Humphrey Bogart imitation as lawyer Tony Peterson before finding immortality as overheated witch-hunter Reverend Trask in the 1790s flashback that ran from November 1967 to March 1968. That first Trask came to his end sealed in a basement alcove not so different from the one into which Dameon disappears today. That incident made a big impression, and was referenced several times on the show and time and again in spin-offs of Dark Shadows in other media. Mr Trask’s debut today may, in the original, never-developed plan, have been intended to remind viewers of it. Perhaps Mr Trask would be the one to open the alcove and find Parallel Paul’s remains. That would be a fitting way to join the story that introduced the idea of a basement burial to Dark Shadows with the famous story that showed one taking place.

Mr Lacy matched his triumph as the first Trask when he returned as his hypocritical descendant Gregory in the 1897 segment that spanned most of 1969. Today’s Mr Trask is in part a placeholder for sinister housekeeper Miss Hoffman. Quentin explains today that he sent Miss Hoffman to visit her friends. Mr Lacy was in one scene of House of Dark Shadows, a funeral sequence shot on the first day of principal photography, and unlike Dennis Patrick he was still living in NYC. So he was available for a couple of weeks of fill-in work. The role is thin on paper, but Mr Lacy gives the part a lot of life.

Episode 986: I saw her in the casket myself

In #949, eleven year old Amy Jennings saw twenty-nine year old Quentin Collins. She reacted with terror, certain that he was the ghost of her great grandfather, the ghost who had persecuted her and everyone else at the great house of Collinwood from December 1968 to September 1969. Heiress Carolyn Collins laughed at Amy and told her that he was not a ghost, but was a cousin of theirs, another descendant of Quentin’s. In fact, Quentin was Amy’s great-grandfather and Carolyn’s great-great-uncle, but he wasn’t a ghost, and he meant no harm to Amy.

Amy refused to accept Carolyn and Quentin’s assurances that he was “not that Quentin Collins.” That refusal highlighted Quentin’s convoluted backstory. The show went back in time in March 1969 to the year 1897, and during an eight-month costume drama segment it introduced us to Quentin as he was before he died. He was a charming rascal who immediately became a huge breakout star. During the 1897 segment, they showed history being changed so that Quentin never died and was the beneficiary of a magic spell that immunized him against aging. Ever since early 1967, Dark Shadows has been operating on a model of the cosmos in which the usual laws of cause and effect are replaced with anniversaries. So in #839, we saw that Quentin’s haunting of Collinwood had gone on for ten months and had finally resulted in the death of strange and troubled boy David Collins. But that day was also the 72nd anniversary of the change in history which prevented Quentin’s death, so the haunting broke and David came back to life. When Quentin showed up in 1969 as a living being, everyone remembered the haunting. Most characters accepted Quentin’s claim to be his own great-grandson, but Amy saw the truth, that he and the ghost were two continuations of one man.

The show’s metaphysics probably didn’t bother anyone who watched it the first time it was broadcast. The characters just take them for granted, as in our world we take hard-to-explain phenomena like gravity and magnetism for granted, and the story keeps on going as if they somehow made sense. What the writers were worried about when Amy saw the living Quentin was not that their model of the universe lacked plausibility, but that they hadn’t found a way to keep Quentin at the center of the story. He’d made a hit in the 1897 segment because he was connected to everyone and was naturally involved in everything that was happening, but in 1969 and 1970 he is a visitor, a distant relative who has come wandering in from who knows where. When Amy tries to figure out in what sense he is “that Quentin Collins,” she is trying to solve a puzzle that the show has to solve to keep him generating heat in the ratings.

Now, Dark Shadows has crossed over to an alternate universe. Here, we have met yet another iteration of Quentin. This Quentin Collins is the Master of Collinwood. Amy lives in the house in this continuity as well, but she really is Quentin’s cousin, and her last name is Collins.

Parallel Quentin hasn’t thought to tell Amy that there is a houseguest staying at Collinwood. She is Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of his late wife Angelique. Since there are a lot of people around the estate who keep saying that Angelique is going to come back to life, the sight of Alexis comes as quite a shock to everyone. Amy sees Alexis today, and reacts with terror, certain that she is the ghost of Angelique. She does not accept Quentin’s belated explanations, anymore than her counterpart accepted Carolyn’s. Amy Jennings had specialized in looking directly into the camera; as Amy Collins, Denise Nickerson has a moment after Quentin and Alexis have explained the situation to her when it looks like she is about to make this move, but she does not.

Amy terrified. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Amy has two more scenes today. She opens the front door and lets Angelique’s associate, sleazy musician Bruno Hess, into the house. Amy greets Bruno with “She’s upstairs.” He asks how she knows who he came to see, and she tells him he always came to see “her” before. She wonders if “they” will make Bruno call the woman “Alexis.” Perhaps she thinks all adults are in on this scam, pretending that the dead can be counted on to leave the living alone. Later, she gives Quentin a telegram. When he scolds her for having opened it, she is at once sincerely remorseful about what she has done and indignant about what is going on upstairs. She says that while opening other people’s mail is indeed bad, what “she” has done is even worse.

On Friday, the show hinted that Alexis might be Angelique. Today, Bruno starts an investigation to check up on Alexis’ report that she arrived in New York from Genoa a couple of days before. They spend enough time on Bruno’s activities that it would be surprising if her story simply held up, so that keeps the question alive.

Quentin’s new wife, the former Maggie Evans, left him and went to her sister Jennifer’s place in New York on Friday. She was fed up with Quentin’s high-handed attitude, with everyone’s preoccupation with Angelique, and with Alexis’ presence in the house. Quentin picks up a telephone today, says “Operator, this is a person to person call. Mrs Collins!” And they connect him to Jennifer’s place! In spite of this magical power, he still can’t persuade Maggie to come to the phone. By the end of the call, he and Jennifer are mad at each other, too.

When this episode was taped, principal photography was underway for the feature film House of Dark Shadows. Many of the best-known members of the cast are going to be in Tarrytown, New York for the next six weeks. When Quentin talks to Jennifer Evans, he offers to go to Maggie in New York- we might assume he means NYC, but I suppose Jennifer might live in Tarrytown, and Maggie’s real reason for staying with her is that she doesn’t want to be separated from Kathryn Leigh Scott.

As Quentin and Alexis, David Selby and Lara Parker are the biggest names currently on Dark Shadows, and they are playing characters quite different from those that made them famous. This Quentin intermittently displays the charm which the one from the main continuity exudes so effortlessly, but he is a downer at least half the time, and his position as Master of Collinwood keeps him from being the lovable rascal who has been a fixture on the cover of the fan magazines for a year now. And even if Alexis is Angelique, she is an Angelique who has not gone through any of the development that has held the fans’ attention for over two years. Angelique was a story dynamo from her introduction at the end of 1967, but what has made her indispensable in arc after arc is that she usually knows everything the audience knows about what is happening and has some crazy scheme that no one else would have thought of as to how she can make it all much worse. And over the last year, she has shown an ability to learn and grow that has made her a much more interesting character. A new Angelique, starting from scratch, won’t match the audience’s understanding of the situation, and won’t remember anything that gave her new depth in 1969 and early 1970.

You may wonder if these two can carry the show for a month and a half. The writers certainly did, as witness a conversation between Alexis and Quentin today. She goes on at length about how difficult it was to grow up in her sister’s shadow, saying that she tried to imitate Angelique but could never make it. The harder she tried to copy the habits that attracted everyone to Angelique, the more embarrassed their reactions were.

Not only does Alexis tell us explicitly that she isn’t as appealing as Angelique, Quentin couldn’t be less interested what she is saying. He is preoccupied with a dispute he is having with Bruno. That dispute, were Alexis aware of it, would probably interest her as little as what she is saying interests Quentin. In their scene together, Alexis does not give any sign that she recognizes Bruno. After he leaves, she looks at a picture of him on some sheet music he composed, as she would do if she never had seen him before. So, if she is Angelique returned from the grave, she would appear to have lost her memory of Bruno along the way. And whoever she is, her attitude towards him throughout is one of amused tolerance. We can’t imagine her being particularly invested in a conflict about whether Bruno has a right to live in the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of Collinwood. So the scene between Angelique and Quentin, in which neither has anything to say that is of concern to the other, seems to be something like the opposite of a programmatic statement. Rather than telling us what they plan to do, the writers are telling us what they are afraid we will think they have done.

Not that they have despaired of making it work. By the end, Quentin and Alexis have drawn each other’s attention sufficiently to do some pretty firm smooching. Maggie has been a fan favorite from episode #1, and many of the nine year old girls in the audience probably identify with her and are excited about the idea of her being married to Quentin. The image of him cheating on Maggie with the wicked witch will outrage them enough to keep them tuning in.

The prospect of an affair between Quentin and Alexis presents something of a puzzle in logic. If she really is who she says she is, he is cheating on Maggie with her. But if she is Angelique, he has been cheating on her with Maggie, albeit unknowingly. One way or another, it is far from gentlemanly behavior on his part. As for Alexis, what we know so far would tend to confirm our initial assumption that Angelique is an Evil Twin, but seeing her go after Maggie’s husband will keep regular viewers from labeling her the Good Twin.

Episode 983: Sing to me again

When Dark Shadows premiered in June 1966, strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy) was obsessed with his absent mother and determined to get rid of his new governess, the well-meaning Victoria Winters. In #15, David had tampered with his father Roger’s car. As he stood at the window and watched Roger drive down the narrow, twisting mountain road away from the great house of Collinwood, he said “He’s going to die, mother, he’s going to die!” When Roger survived and it was discovered that someone had removed the bleeder valve from his braking system, David planted the valve in Vicki’s room in an attempt to frame her for the murder attempt. Later, Roger would come to fear that Vicki was about to expose a dark secret of his own, and would encourage David to try to kill her.

David eventually gave up on homicide, and dropped his hostility to Vicki. One of the more benevolent influences on him was his best friend, the ghost of the gracious Josette. In #102, we saw David in the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, carrying on a conversation with the portrait of Josette that hung above the mantel. We could not hear Josette’s side of the conversation, but it certainly sounded like David could. We already knew at that point that Josette was real- we saw her emanate from the portrait, walk out of the house, and dance among the columns outside it in #70, when David first took Vicki to the Old House. In #126, we would see and hear Josette when she led the ghosts of Collinwood in rescuing Vicki from crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. That rescue was not only a good deed for Vicki, but also a favor to David, who had stumbled upon Vicki in the secret room where Matthew had her tied up and, in a panic, left her to her fate.

In #153, we learned that David’s mother, the former Laura Murdoch, was the one who chose his name, one which no previous Collins had borne. Roger had wanted to call David “Charles Andrew,” in honor of some Collins ancestors. In #181, Vicki and her allies learned that two previous women given the name Laura Murdoch at birth had died by fire, one in 1867 and the other in 1767, each accompanied by her young son, and that each of those boys was named David. It would eventually become clear that Laura was an undead fire witch, a humanoid Phoenix who went into a pyre with her sons at intervals of exactly 100 years, gaining immortality for herself, though not for the Davids. In #288, they had forgotten the lore about David’s name, and mentioned a previous David Collins, but in #685 and #767, it was back to being a first in the family. Between those two episodes, from #729 to #760, another iteration of Laura was on the show, suggesting that the writers brushed up on their knowledge of her original storyline.

By the time Vicki saved David from Laura, he had moved out of the villain category altogether. When his third cousin Amy Jennings (Denise Nickerson) moved into Collinwood at the end of 1968, David was as pleasant to her as one could expect. But his behavior towards her and others changed when the two of them stirred up the ghost of Quentin Collins, Amy’s great-grandfather and David’s great-great-uncle. As Quentin gathered strength, he intermittently possessed first one child and then the other. While David was under Quentin’s control in #679, he twisted Amy’s arm to force her to go to a secret room and join in their vengeful ancestor’s evil plans for their governess, Vicki’s successor Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott.) The camera lingered on that act of bullying, meant to shock us with evidence that Quentin’s dire influence had overwhelmed David’s kindly nature.

The arm-twisting incident made an impression on the viewers. In #813, set in the year 1897 when Quentin was alive, Henesy and Nickerson played brother and sister Jamison and Nora Collins, nephew and niece of Quentin, grandfather and great-aunt to David. Jamison, possessed by sorcerer Count Petofi, twisted Nora’s arm to force her to give him information, a reference which shows that the writers were confident that many viewers would see David Henesy’s character abusing Denise Nickerson’s in that way and read it as a sign that he is under the power of an outside force.

Now, it is 1970, but we are not in the main continuity at all. We have traveled to an alternate universe, which on Dark Shadows is known as “Parallel Time.” In this “time-band,” to use another bit of Collinsport English, Quentin is alive and the master of Collinwood. His first wife, the counterpart of wicked witch Angelique, has died, and he has remarried. The new Mrs Collins is the former Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott.) Quentin and Angelique’s son, strange and troubled boy Daniel (David Henesy,) is obsessed with his absent mother and determined to get rid of his new stepmother.

Apparently the writers still remember the connection between David’s name and the first Phoenix story, because Daniel is the only character we have yet seen in Parallel Time answering to a different first name than his counterpart in the main continuity. Angelique and Quentin gave him the name of the Collins ancestor whom Mr Henesy played in early 1968, when the show was set in the year 1796. We know that the timelines diverged in that period, so it follows that it was the counterpart of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Daniel who was this Daniel’s namesake.

When we first saw Daniel, he was carrying on a one-sided conversation with his mother’s portrait, which hangs in her old bedroom. Today, he devises a plan to use the portrait to frighten Maggie. The plan requires the cooperation of his cousin, Amy Collins (Denise Nickerson.) When Amy refuses, he twists her arm until she agrees to go to a secret room and sing, making Maggie think the portrait is coming to life. This attack is shown only for a few seconds, and Amy’s arm is out of frame. They have already established that Daniel is cruel, and do not need to dwell on the act of abuse.

Daniel twists Amy’s arm. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Daniel claims that his father often goes to Angelique’s room to meditate and talk to the portrait. That lures Maggie to the room, where Daniel is waiting. They have a confrontation. When she says she wishes she could “make him understand-,” he interrupts her and asks if what she wants him to understand is that his mother is dead and is never coming back. She looks at him and answers with a flat “Yes.” He tells her she is wrong, and pleads with the portrait to sing to him. Maggie says she can’t stand to see him like this, and turns to go. Before she gets out of the room, we hear a woman’s voice singing a lullaby. Maggie and Daniel hear it too. She turns around, shocked, and runs from the room. Daniel laughs that his plan worked so well.

Amy comes rushing into the room. Daniel congratulates her on her performance, and asks how she got in from the secret room so quickly. She explains that she never went to the secret room- her brother Chris intercepted her before she could do so. It wasn’t her voice Daniel and Maggie heard. He absorbs her message, and looks at the portrait in wonderment.

The audience could tell it wasn’t Denise Nickerson singing- she had such a high-pitched voice when she was twelve that she had to work hard to keep it in a range that would sound good on television, while the pre-recorded voice we heard singing was definitely that of a grown woman. Angelique was played by Lara Parker; Parker did some very distinctive things with her voice on Dark Shadows, none of which shows up in the lullaby, so I’m sure it wasn’t her. Several fansites attribute the singing to Joan Bennett, who is in this episode, but I’ve heard Bennett sing and she didn’t get from one note to another the way this voice does. I think the singer must be Kathryn Leigh Scott.

Early in the episode, Daniel and Amy had a scene in his bedroom. David’s bedroom was a frequent set in the first 38 weeks of the show, and was occasionally seen thereafter. Daniel’s room is the same set, with the same furnishings and decorations, but they are arranged in the opposite direction from the pattern we see in David’s. His bed is at stage right rather than stage left, and everything else is also transposed. Seeing this mirror image, regular viewers will appreciate this reminder that we are in a Mirror Universe.