pt roger collins – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1055: The man who murdered Angelique

Angelique Stokes Collins has returned from the grave to take vengeance on her murderer. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know who that is. For the last several weeks, she has been operating on the assumption that she was killed by her widower, foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins. She has managed to get Quentin charged with one murder and suspected of several others; under her influence, he assaulted a police officer and broke out of jail. She has persuaded him that his current wife, the former Maggie Evans, is a witch and is responsible for all his troubles. He is lurking about the great house on the estate of Collinwood, where yesterday he encountered Maggie and told her he would kill her.

Angelique herself is residing in the great house. Eleven weeks ago she killed her identical twin sister Alexis, assumed Alexis’ identity, and took her place as Quentin’s houseguest. Maggie now thinks of “Alexis” as her friend.

Others in and around the house know better. High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, Quentin’s brother, has seen through her imposture. Two visitors from the alternate universe where Dark Shadows was set for its first 196 weeks, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and vampire Barnabas Collins, knew her counterpart in their world and are onto her tricks.

Angelique hears some noise in her old bedroom in the east wing of the great house. She finds the door locked and hears Roger’s voice. She demands to be let in. He opens the door and she forces her way past him. She finds Maggie in a heap on the floor. Roger rushes out. Maggie tells “Alexis” that Roger tried to strangle her after confessing to three murders, including Angelique’s. Angelique and Maggie decide to call the police.

Julia and Barnabas learned that Angelique’s father, evil barfly Tim Stokes, made it possible for her to rise from the dead by using a mixture of medical science and black magic to establish a remote connection between Angelique and a woman named Roxanne. Through this connection, Stokes drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. Julia and Barnabas have taken Roxanne from the back room of Stokes’ apartment and hooked her up to some mad science equipment in the basement of the Old House at Collinwood. They hope to manipulate Roxanne’s condition as a means of controlling Angelique.

Angelique has locked Julia in a dungeon off the basement of the great house and left her there to die of thirst. Barnabas is sure Angelique has captured her, but cannot begin to guess where she might be. He takes a shot at using the mad science equipment to revive Roxanne sufficiently to knock Angelique out. He cannot see any effect, and goes out to try to look for Julia.

As Barnabas goes out, a man peers at him from behind a tree. Since Barnabas never under any circumstances locks his front door, the man strolls into the house as soon as Barnabas is out of sight.

The man is Claude North, a mysterious person somehow connected with Roxanne. Barnabas comes back to the basement and finds Claude trying to get Roxanne to talk. He tells him that she must not do so just yet, because at her first word Angelique will die and there are some things he has to take care of before that happens. Claude cares nothing for this. Barnabas is afraid that if he attacks Claude, Roxanne will be startled into speaking, so he withdraws.

The other day, we saw a grave marker in Claude’s name, and we have seen that he has the same power Barnabas does to mesmerize people when they follow his command to “Look into my eyes!” He had also been staying in a hidden chamber identical to the one where Barnabas’ coffin was kept for his first 171 years as a vampire. And he had some kind of mystical power over Roxanne, as Barnabas has over his victims. So we thought Claude might be a vampire, too. But today he explains that the grave was his grandfather’s, he clearly doesn’t recognize Barnabas as a fellow bloodsucker, and when cornered he doesn’t flash fangs. So we’re left thinking he’s probably just Roxanne’s overconfident ex.

Meanwhile, Angelique is feeling cold and weak because Roxanne has reclaimed so much of her “life force.” She has cast a spell to cause Roger to slip past the police swarming the estate and make his way to her in her old room. Once they are together, she warms herself up for a while by hugging and kissing him. First time viewers may think this is an odd thing for her to do, but returning viewers know that she is a heat vampire who can by those actions drain the warmth from a living body and leave it an icy corpse. Louis Edmonds has been doing some great work these last few weeks, and he plays Roger’s death scene especially well.

So long, Rodgie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Downstairs in the drawing room, Angelique is still shivering. Maggie enters and sees that “Alexis” is ill. Maggie insists on helping, and Angelique suggests she walk her to the fireplace. They sit together beside it. We learned Wednesday that Angelique has magical hypnotic powers, and Maggie’s counterpart in the main continuity was subjected to frequent mind-wipes. So there is a nice sense of inevitability when Angelique puts her into a trance and orders her to get a gun and prepare to shoot Quentin.

Angelique is still sitting by the fire, still feeling miserable, when Barnabas comes back. He tells her that Claude is with Roxanne and that Roxanne will be speaking at any moment. He writes up a confession and orders her to sign it, saying it will clear Quentin of the murder with which he was charged. He says that this will allow her to find peace. She says she doesn’t want peace. We may wonder how the confession could possibly clear Quentin. All she could do would be to admit that the man Quentin is charged with killing actually died because she cast a magic spell on him. We have already seen that the policeman in charge of the case has zero patience for talk about magic, and there is no end of evidence pointing to Quentin’s guilt.

We end where we began, in Angelique’s room with a homicide in the offing. Then it was Roger with his hands around Maggie’s neck; now it is Maggie pointing her revolver at the door as the knob turns. That isn’t all that suspenseful a situation. I’m sure Maggie would feel bad if she had killed Quentin, but he’s so hyper-violent that no one would doubt she acted in self-defense and has been such a bad husband to her that it’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t get over it in short order. If Quentin dies, there will be so few characters left that the show couldn’t go on, but we will probably be leaving this universe in a few days in any case. So this isn’t much of a Friday cliffhanger.

Episode 1054: The room keeps changing

Yesterday, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard overheard her brother Roger Collins having a conversation with the portrait of wicked witch Angelique. When Roger told the portrait that he murdered not only Angelique herself but also Liz’ daughter Carolyn, Liz stormed into the room. Roger then strangled Liz and stuffed her corpse under a window seat. Today, he is in the room fretting about what to do with Liz’ body. It strikes him that his brother Quentin is currently a fugitive from justice, suspected of three murders, including those of Angelique and Carolyn. He decides to pin Liz’ murder on Quentin as well.

Angelique has come back from the dead and is impersonating her identical twin sister Alexis, whom she herself murdered in #1001. She has persuaded Quentin that his new wife Maggie, whom he does not seem ever to have liked very much, is a witch, Quentin now believes that Maggie, by use of the black arts, committed all of the murders. Maggie has looked at the publicly available evidence and concluded that Quentin has gone insane. She believes that he, by use of his hands and some sharp objects, committed at least some of the murders.

Roger has figured out that “Alexis” is really Angelique. They have a couple of awkward conversations. He asks the portrait why he can talk so freely to it when he is so stilted in his interactions with “Alexis,” since they are “one and the same.”

Roger cannot be frank with the three dimensional version of Angelique. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie has started getting everyone to evacuate the house. When she goes to her room to pack, she finds Quentin waiting for her. He is holding a handkerchief monogrammed “ECS.” He tells her it was Liz’. He demands that she tells him where “the doll” is. She has no idea what he is talking about. He looks directly at her and says in a slow, level voice that he will kill her. She runs away, somehow not persuaded of his innocence.

Maggie flees to the room where Roger killed Liz. She finds Roger there, and tells him Quentin is in the house. Roger locks the door to keep him out. There is no telephone in the room; they talk a bit about how to get across the hall so they can call the police. Maggie falls into Roger’s arms and starts crying. He starts burbling about all the terrible things that have happened. He mentions that Liz was killed in the room. Maggie looks up and says Liz was found in a different room, and that the police think she was killed there. Roger tries to say he was just rambling, but Maggie puts two and two together. She realizes Roger is the murderer, and he realizes that she has realized it. We end with his hands on her throat.

Louis Edmonds is simply amazing as Roger today. The rest of the cast gives him first-rate support, but it is a magnificent turn. If the Daytime Emmys had been around in 1970, this was the episode they should have sent to Academy voters to get him his award.

Episode 1053: To have the final word

For some time, wicked witch Angelique Stokes Collins has been dissatisfied with her minion Julia Hoffman. What she most wants from Hoffman is information about her new enemy, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Yet Hoffman has told her nothing useful about Barnabas. The only time she brings him up is to claim that she was busy following him when Angelique needed her to do something else. Even then, her reports are no more substantive than “He went into town,” without so much as a single name of a person he met or building he entered while there. Hoffman keeps showing friendliness to people to whom Angelique wants her to be hostile, asking questions to which she ought already know the answer, and resisting orders she would usually be eager to follow. Whatever is wrong with Hoffman, Angelique does not propose to put up with it indefinitely.

Yesterday, Angelique found the solution to the puzzle. She learned that she has not been dealing with Hoffman at all, but with her Doppelgänger from an alternate universe. Barnabas came from that universe as well. This Julia is as devoted to Barnabas as Hoffman was to Angelique, and followed him to this reality to take her place at his side. Today, Angelique traps Julia in a secret chamber off the basement of the great house of Collinwood and demands to know what she has done with Hoffman. At length Julia confirms her true identity and admits that she killed Hoffman, but she will not answer any of Angelique’s questions about Barnabas.

Angelique takes out a medallion and tells Julia to look at it. Julia gasps and turns away. She says that she knows about hypnosis and knows how to resist it. Angelique says that if she knows how to resist, there is no reason for her not to look at the medallion, but Julia keeps looking away. Julia was first introduced as a psychiatrist, whose talent for hypnosis was of magical proportions. By showing her medallion to a person, she could erase and rewrite that person’s memory as easily and as completely as one could erase and rewrite a chalkboard. Julia is the heroine of the show now, but longtime viewers will still find it fitting that Angelique turns the tables on her.

Upstairs in the same house, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins is having a conversation with Angelique’s portrait. This is one of several habits Roger has that recall Waldo Lydecker, the sarcastic dandy in the 1943 novel and 1944 film Laura. Lydecker turned out to have murdered a woman with whom he had a strange obsession.

Roger is overwrought, telling the Angelique in the portrait that he should have known she would come back from the dead. If he had, he would have realized it was a waste of time to kill her. He only made things worse by doing that; for one thing, it made it necessary for him to kill his niece Carolyn. As he says this, his sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Carolyn’s mother, overhears. She storms in. He tries to deny that meant anything he said, but Liz won’t be stopped. As Roger presses his hands on Liz’ shoulders, Joan Bennett plays the part of someone being strangled. Louis Edmonds’ fingers are nowhere near her throat. You can’t believe that Roger is hurting Liz, but you can easily believe that Edmonds and Bennett are a brother and sister playing pretend. They look like they’re about six.

Just as Roger closes Liz’ body into the storage space under the window seat, Barnabas enters. Roger is on the point of tears, a circumstance Barnabas notices. Roger keeps urging Barnabas to leave the room with him, but he replies that what he has to say will take only a moment. Barnabas says that he is worried about Liz. Roger gets even more upset, and Barnabas finally agrees to go downstairs with him.

For longtime viewers, this scene makes a poignant contrast with #446. In that episode, set in the year 1796, Edmonds played haughty overlord Joshua Collins, father of Barnabas. Joshua discovered that Barnabas had become a vampire. Joshua confronted his son in his hiding place. Joshua was at once horrified and shattered, but in no way intimidated by Barnabas, who was for his part alternately ashamed and petulant. Edmonds and Jonathan Frid made that scene into one of the high points of the series. Now, it is Edmonds’ turn to be the murderer dejected by the knowledge of his own inexpungable guilt, and Frid’s turn to be the upright family man. Barnabas does not know Roger’s secret as Joshua knew his, but in Roger’s inability to face him we see the fear of the same righteous condemnation Joshua had felt it his duty to proclaim.

At one point in this conversation Frid has so much trouble with his lines that the words dissolve into a buzzing sound. I told my wife, Mrs Acilius, that it sounded like Barnabas had briefly turned into Bob Dylan. She roared with laughter and said that was exactly what she was going to say.

This is the first “Parallel Time” episode in which Lara Parker is credited as playing Angelique. Previously she had been billed as Alexis Stokes, the identical twin sister whom Angelique killed when she rose from the dead ten and a half weeks ago and whom she has been impersonating ever since. Several times in the series, cast members have wandered onto the set while the credits were rolling.* Referring to this, Mrs Acilius had explained that they kept using Alexis’ name in case any characters who didn’t know who she really was wandered in while the credits were rolling. She imagined them looking up, widening their eyes, and pointing. She meant that hypothesis as a joke. But since the only character in today’s episode who didn’t know Angelique’s true identity was Liz, who was dead by the time the credits rolled, I think we have to take it as proven.

*Most conspicuously in #703, #635, #510, and #328. There are also moments when crew members can be seen during the closing credits, most spectacularly in #999, when a man is just sitting there eating a sandwich.

Episode 1050: How to bring you half alive

Late in 1968, the ghost of Quentin Collins began haunting the great house on the estate of Collinwood. The ghost gradually waxed more powerful and more malevolent, killing some people and tormenting others. By March of 1969, the great house had become altogether uninhabitable. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, trying to contact Quentin, traveled back in time to 1897, when Quentin was a living being. During the eight months the show was set in that year, we got to know a Quentin who was selfish, cowardly, untrustworthy, cruel, and supremely charming. Barnabas’ interventions changed history. In the revised timeline, Quentin did not become a malevolent ghost. He didn’t even die. A spell was cast on him that immunized him against aging, so that when the show returned to a contemporary setting in November 1969 he was alive, well, and to all appearances 28 years old.

In 1969 and 1970, Quentin still had all the lovableness that came from being played by David Selby. But the writers were stumped when it came time to give Quentin something to do. They kept him in a holding pattern for a month or so with a case of amnesia, and used him and one of his girlfriends to tell a version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. When Barnabas and his best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, were doing battle with an unseen race of monsters from beyond space and time, they occasionally turned to Quentin for help. When Barnabas’ old nemesis, wicked witch Angelique, grew jealous of his interest in governess Maggie Evans, she cast a spell to cause Quentin and Maggie to conceive a wild passion for each other, something which came and went and which Barnabas never noticed. None of that activity made an impression on the audience or gave the character room to grow.

The evil but irresistible Quentin of 1897 had a great deal in common with high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, who was in 1966 the show’s first true villain. As played by Louis Edmonds, Roger was so much fun to watch that it was soon out of the question to follow the original plan and kill him off when his crimes were exposed, so they nerfed him. Roger turned into a sarcastic but harmless snob. When in November 1967 the show went back in time to 1795, Edmonds played haughty overlord Joshua Collins, a man as strong as Roger was weak. In a tragic turn Aristotle would have admired, it was Joshua’s virtues that led to disaster for himself and everyone he loved. In the 1897 segment, Edmonds played the stuffy but lovable Edward Collins, who had many faults but was devoted to his family and committed to doing the honorable thing. Under the influence of these roles, Roger himself had by the time the show was done with him transformed into an upright family man.

The makers of the show have apparently decided that if traveling in time and casting Edmonds in other roles could change Roger so profoundly, finding a setting where they can present us with a different version of Quentin might be a path to reinvigorating that character. To that end, they have traveled, not backward in time, but sideways in time. We are now in a different universe than the one where the first 196 weeks of the show took place. The show insists on calling this universe “Parallel Time.”

Here, Quentin is the master of Collinwood and Maggie is his wife. This Quentin is something his counterpart never was, an authority figure. But authority does not come naturally to him, as it did to Joshua and Edward. He holds onto it in his relationship with Maggie by treating her as a child, with the result that their marriage is all but dead. He ignores his son Daniel, caves in to the servants when they stand their ground against him, and throws tantrums and runs away when he encounters serious opposition. In those moments he reminds us of the cowardice Quentin showed in 1897. On occasion, however, he has shown physical courage, as when he stood up to an evil man called John Yaeger. As Joshua suffered from the overgrowth of his virtues, so Quentin’s better deeds seem to be the accidental byproduct of his vices. What we have seen in Parallel Time makes it easy to imagine that when we get back to the main continuity, we will see Quentin as a sometime action hero who must at all costs be kept from taking charge of anything. Had the segment caught on as 1795 and 1897 did and been expanded beyond the bounds originally planned for it, who knows what other paths it might have opened for the character.

Angelique was Quentin’s first wife, who was murdered nine months ago but has risen from the dead, assumed the identity of her identical twin sister Alexis, and set about taking revenge on her killer. She doesn’t know who that was, though for now she is operating on the assumption it was Quentin.

Roger and the matronly Elizabeth Collins Stoddard are Quentin’s siblings. While in the main continuity Liz kept her share of the inheritance as Roger was squandering his, here she entrusted her money to Roger, so that they are both penniless dependents on Quentin.

Barnabas and Julia have crossed over from the main continuity. Barnabas is pretending to be a long-lost cousin of the Collinses, while Julia is impersonating her own counterpart. That other Julia Hoffman was the housekeeper at Collinwood and Angelique’s most fanatical devotee until Julia showed up, beat her to death, and stole her French maid outfit.

At this point, Quentin is on the run from the law, suspected of the murder of sleazy musician Bruno Hess. He was choking Bruno shortly before his death, but is in a sense innocent of the crime, since it was a spell Angelique cast that completed the fatal strangulation. Liz’ daughter Carolyn is in mourning for her husband Will, who found himself caught between Angelique’s magical powers and Barnabas’ and could do nothing but fling himself to his death from a high window. Yesterday Carolyn announced that she knew and could prove who had killed Angelique. She went to the room on top of the tower attached to the great house. A man entered. She greeted him. He drew a knife and she screamed.

Today, Roger tells Liz and Julia that he heard Carolyn’s scream, ran to the tower room, and found her stabbed to death. Presumably the same man killed her who killed Angelique. The three current suspects are Roger himself, Quentin, and butler Mr Trask.

Yesterday’s episode hinted heavily that Trask was the culprit, and Liz says that he has been missing since Carolyn was killed. We had not seen or heard of Trask in more than eight weeks, and in none of the handful of episodes in which he appeared before that hiatus was it suggested he might have killed Angelique. If it does turn out that the butler did it, therefore, it would be obvious that the show had originally planned to pin the crime on a major character and chickened out at the last minute. We do see a man lurking about today who might be Trask and almost certainly is the mysterious and terrible “Claude North” whom we have heard about recently; if Trask and North are one and the same, that might lead somewhere, but it would hardly be a logical culmination of what we have seen so far.

The whole point of the “Parallel Time” segment is to reconceive Quentin. Making him the killer of Angelique might fit with that. The Quentin of the main continuity murdered his wife Jenny in 1897,* and Angelique is much less sympathetic than Jenny was. Quentin does not have to be admirable, or even defensible. He just has to be attractive. If they can find a way to occasionally make his vices into motives for good deeds, all the better. But Carolyn’s counterpart in the main continuity has been a central figure on the show since the first week, and like all characters played by Nancy Barrett she is a fan favorite. If this Quentin deliberately kills Carolyn, especially by hacking her to bits with a kitchen knife, it is hard to see how the Quentin of the main continuity will benefit. It is true the present Quentin is such a gloomy sourpuss and such a miserable failure as a husband to Maggie that he has already alienated the audience, so they might have decided they had nothing to lose by turning him into Jack the Ripper.

That leaves Roger. He has been painted in the colors of his counterpart as he was in 1966, making him a possible murderer. Even at his coldest, the Roger of the main continuity was close to Carolyn, whom he called “Kitten.” But when we first saw the characters from the current universe in #975, they were hostile and impatient with each other, and Roger took a menacing tone with his niece. The only person for whom this iteration of Roger has any affection is Angelique, and all of that flows to a version of her that exists only in his imagination. Roger seems to be describing himself in both universes when he tells Liz that “The sum total of my life seems to be that I can never help anyone.” So we can certainly believe he killed both Angelique and Carolyn, and that he might kill again.

Liz and Roger’s counterparts have been on the fringes of the action in the main continuity for years, and today we see that this Liz and Roger are also excluded from much that is happening. They visit the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town scouting out potential resting places for Carolyn. Unknown to them, there is a hidden chamber in the back of this mausoleum, and Claude North is lurking there, a dagger in his hand, while they chat in the publicly visible part. They then go to Carolyn’s home, the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, to look for anything she might have written that would give a clue as to who killed her. Unknown to them, Julia is in the basement of the house, conducting a mad science procedure to weaken Angelique by reviving a woman named Roxanne on whose “life force” she is feeding. One wonders where else they will stop on their way home, and of what other uncanny doings they will be oblivious while there.

We hear Julia’s thoughts as she is preparing to revive Roxanne. She tells herself that this is the procedure that brought Adam and Eve to life. She is not thinking of some obscure midrash about the book of Genesis, but about two Frankenstein’s monsters she loosed upon the world in 1968.

*Jenny must have been in someone’s mind when they were making this episode. We catch a glimpse of a gravestone in her name during a cemetery scene:

Poor Jenny, bright as a penny. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.

Episode 1049: Evening brings another secret

In the first months of Dark Shadows, characters several times shared meals in the kitchen in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. In that intimate setting, they would often exchange information that made it possible for them to advance the story. As time went on, the show developed more ways to get knowledge flowing, and the kitchen lost its importance. We haven’t seen it since #208.

Now, the show is set in an alternate universe, which it calls “Parallel Time.” We see the kitchen in this reality’s Collinwood today, the last glimpse we get of the room in any version of the place. Young Amy Collins visits butler Mr Trask there while he is sharpening a large knife. She tells him a man is living in the tower room. He leaves to investigate, leaving the knife on the countertop. The camera zooms in on the implement, lingering over it while an ominous cue plays on the soundtrack.

Later, Amy returns to the kitchen with the matronly Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz is upset that dinner is not ready and Trask is nowhere to be found. Amy notices that the knife is not where Trask left it hours before. Liz is unimpressed with this fact, as anyone would be who had not seen the zoom shot and heard the melodramatic music. We cut to the tower room, where Liz’ daughter Carolyn Loomis greets someone we cannot see. We cut to a hand holding a knife very much like the one Trask had sharpened. The hand brings the knife down, and Carolyn screams.

It is Carolyn who is the main source of information for the other characters in today’s show. Carolyn’s husband was killed the other day in a conflict between two supernatural beings. The other characters in today’s episode have no idea that such beings dwell among them, and think that those two in particular are simply members of their extended family. Carolyn has had all she can take of this situation. She claims “to know all the secrets” of Collinwood, and is far too drunk to keep many of them to herself.

Trask learned several secrets from Carolyn in Act One, when he was leaning up against the door to the drawing room, his ear pressed hard to it, eavesdropping ferociously on her conversation with her uncle, Roger Collins. Carolyn taunts Roger with his failure to recognize someone he loves desperately. She declares that she can prove that the houseguest who has been staying in the great house lately is not Alexis Stokes, but Alexis’ identical twin sister, Angelique Stokes Collins.

Trask eavesdropping. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Roger rejects this claim. Since Angelique died last year, one might expect Roger to be confident in his rejection, but he is high-strung and defensive about it. Carolyn does not deny that Angelique is dead. Indeed, she says that if anyone were to look at the base of “Alexis'” skull, they would find a scar where the killer drove in the hatpin that killed Angelique, proving that “Alexis” is Angelique’s reanimated corpse. This makes more sense to Roger than one might expect. When he first saw Alexis in #990 she had to give him her hand and talk soothingly to him for some time before he would accept that she was not Angelique risen from the grave.

As it happens, Carolyn is right. Two weeks after she met Roger, Alexis saw Angelique lying in the tomb. Alexis touched her sister to bid her a final farewell, only to find that all of the heat was draining from her body into Angelique’s. Moments later, Alexis was dead and Angelique was standing over her icy corpse. Angelique put on Alexis’ clothes, did her hair in the style Alexis wore, and met Trask, who accompanied her to the great house. Ever since, Angelique has been passing herself off as Alexis.

Amy interrupted Trask while he was eavesdropping. He ordered her to leave him alone, getting quite surly about it. If he can hear everything Carolyn and Roger are saying, we wonder why they can’t hear him being nasty to a member of the family. But apparently they can’t. She goes away, and he presses himself even closer to the door.

Carolyn is still talking to Roger and Trask is still eavesdropping when “Alexis” comes by. She reproves Trask, opens the doors to the drawing room, and exposes him to Roger and Carolyn. Roger is too shocked by the sight of “Alexis” and Carolyn is too amused by it all for either of them to do anything about Trask’s misconduct.

Later, Carolyn returns to the drawing room and finds her mother talking with “Alexis.” She leans down way into “Alexis'” personal space, making her hilariously uncomfortable.

Hello there. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

“Alexis” leaves them alone. Carolyn tells her mother that she knows who murdered Angelique. She says that she had suspected her, and is greatly relieved to know that she was wrong. Roger eavesdrops on this conversation, and turns around to see the shadow of yet another eavesdropper.

The Shadows’ knows. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn tells Liz that she not only knows who the murderer is, she has talked to “him” recently. That doesn’t narrow it down. She has talked to all three current suspects, and all of them are men. Roger gets very agitated whenever the topic of Angelique’s murderer comes up; his reaction is one of many heavy-handed clues the show has been giving lately that he did it. They had not suggested Trask might be the culprit when he was last on the show, in #1004, but they couldn’t be more obvious about it today. The third suspect is Quentin Collins, brother to Roger and Liz, who is currently a fugitive from justice, having escaped from jail after he was charged with another murder. Quentin is the man living in the tower room; Carolyn saw him there the other day, and he took a threatening tone with her. So any of those three men might be the one wielding the knife in the final shot.

This is a day for final appearances. Not only do we bid the kitchen adieu, but also Carolyn Loomis, Mr Trask, and Amy Collins. Nancy Barrett and Jerry Lacy will be back as other characters, but Denise Nickerson is gone from the cast as of today. After a great run in her first couple of months on the show, she was criminally underused. Still, whenever they did put her on she was typically the highlight of the day, so it is sad to lose her.

Liz mentions someone named “Dr Blum” today. We never see Dr Blum. The only character in the whole series who seems to be Jewish is Dr Julia Hoffman, who like the unseen Dr Blum is a psychiatrist. It was less than a year after this episode aired, on 26 May 1971, that President Richard Nixon said in a conversation with his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman that the reason he was unpopular with Jewish voters was that “Most of them are psychiatrists.” Ever since the tape of that conversation was released in 2002, people have been trying to figure out what Nixon meant to say. Perhaps the White House taping system malfunctioned, and picked up some audio not from the Richard Nixon of our universe, but from one who lived in one of the universes where Dark Shadows took place. There, he might have been making a simple statement of fact.

Episode 1048: There are a lot of closets, baby!

The police are looking into the murder of Angelique Stokes Collins. Angelique has risen from the grave and is available to assist with the investigation, though Inspector Hamilton, like most of the other people in the village of Collinsport and on the estate of Collinwood, thinks she is her identical twin sister Alexis.

Hamilton is impatient with everyone, a bad quality in an investigator. So when he accuses “Alexis” of helping Angelique’s widower Quentin to burn Angelique’s body in order to cover up evidence that Quentin murdered her, she responds with a more or less true account of what happened, omitting only that it was Alexis’ body Quentin burned. Hamilton cuts her off in mid-sentence, proclaiming that he won’t listen to any more of it.

Hamilton was once a close friend of Julia Hoffman, the housekeeper at the great house on the estate and Angelique’s most fanatical devotee. What neither he nor Angelique knows is that Hoffman is dead. Her Doppelgänger has come from an alternate universe, killed her, and assumed her identity. This other Julia Hoffman is working in concert with another interloper from the same universe, vampire Barnabas Collins, to defeat Angelique and end her presence among the living.

Hamilton questions Julia about the night of Angelique’s death. That was many months ago and Hoffman was not present at the scene, so Julia is able to fake her way through the questioning without major slips. But when Hamilton starts talking about old times, Julia is at a total loss. Hamilton mentions to “Alexis” that she does not seem like the Julia Hoffman he knows. Since Angelique has begun to notice differences in Julia’s behavior from what she would expect of Hoffman, this indiscreet remark represents a considerable danger to her.

At the Old House on the estate, Hamilton questions Carolyn Loomis. Carolyn’s husband was caught between Angelique’s powers and Barnabas’ the other day, and all he could do to resolve the strain was to fling himself to his death from a high window. Carolyn is hugely drunk. She raves at Hamilton that “Collinwood is not exactly a picture book house by the sea. There’s a skeleton in every closet, and there are a lot of closets, baby! Let me put it this way, Inspector- Collinwood is a nice place to visit, but you would not want to live there.” He seems to regard this as the sort of unseemly thing it is best to pass over in silence.

Carolyn is not overawed by the dignity of Hamilton’s badge. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There are several strong hints today, as there have been over the last couple of weeks, that Carolyn’s uncle Roger Collins murdered Angelique. They can drop as many hints to that effect as they like, and longtime viewers will still be surprised if it turns out to be true. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in the universe from which Julia and Barnabas came. Roger’s counterpart there was indeed a potentially deadly villain in the first months of the show, but he was eventually nerfed. By the time we decamped for this continuity, it had been more than three years since he was a menace to anyone. They’ve been painting this character in the colors of the 1966 Roger, and his languidly sarcastic manner combines with his relationship to the portrait of Angelique to remind us of Waldo Lydecker in the 1944 film Laura. But we saw so much of Roger the harmless gay uncle in 1967 and Roger the conscientious family man in 1968 and 1969 that it is still hard to imagine that he will turn out actually to be a killer.

The show was done live to tape for years, and even after post-production editing became an important part of it they were slow to credit the videotape editors. They’ve been making up for that lately, though. Today they credit their fourth pair of editors, Alex Moskovic and Rene Labat. Still other teams will be named in the weeks ahead, but Moskovic and Labat are the last ones I will mention here, unless there is something special about the cutting of a given episode.

Episode 1039: This is the body

Dark Shadows spent yesterday and the day before showing us how much her relationship with vampire Barnabas Collins has cost Dr Julia Hoffman. Once a superlatively capable, masterfully poised scientist, Julia has become so ragged and dependent that she reacts to the sight of Barnabas rising from his coffin with a puppyish delight. She has followed him into an alternate universe, cutting herself off from everyone she knows and everything she has. Once in that universe, her first act was to kill her own Doppelgänger, leaving her face to face with a dead version of herself. She has set out to gather intelligence that might help Barnabas in his madcap schemes by impersonating that Doppelgänger, who was the housekeeper at the great house of Collinwood. In that persona, she wears a French maid outfit and disclaims all of her professional and educational attainments. Yesterday, Barnabas was briefly impressed by how much Julia had sacrificed for him; for a second or two, it looked like her love for him might be requited, at least to the extent of one kiss. But he turned his attention elsewhere, and now they are busy on a monster-slaying expedition.

The monster is Angelique Stokes Collins, undead first wife of foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins, master of Collinwood. Angelique’s father, a wizard known as Tim (but he’ll always be “Stokes” to us,) has somehow established an invisible connection between her and a woman he keeps in the back room of his apartment. We learn in the closing credits that this woman’s name is Roxanne. Roxanne is in a coma. Stokes has drained most of Roxanne’s “life-force” into Angelique. Occasionally Roxanne perks up a bit and regains some of her strength. When this happens, Angelique weakens. If Roxanne gets too vigorous, Angelique will die, but that will also happen if Roxanne herself dies. Stokes keeps busy trying to maintain Roxanne in her precise state of debility.

We find Julia and Barnabas in the room with Roxanne. They have learned the secret and come here to kill Roxanne, finishing off Angelique. They talk for a moment about Stokes, who is likely to find another way to revive Angelique if they kill Roxanne. They imply that they will kill him, too. That raises a question. Yesterday Julia saw Angelique collapse and become altogether helpless when Roxanne gained just a tiny bit of strength. If they are going to kill Stokes anyway, why not do that first? Then they can neutralize Angelique by giving Roxanne a little TLC and drop her off at the hospital on their way back to their native universe.

Barnabas doesn’t think of that, but neither does he go through with the murder. He sees Roxanne, raves about her looks, and says in a world full of ugliness they have no right to destroy such beauty. Julia just keeps insisting that they finish her off, and says that if they don’t the blood of Angelique’s future victims will be on Barnabas. That is further evidence of what Julia has lost in her time at Barnabas’ side. Up to this point, she has consistently shown reluctance when he was planning a murder.

Barnabas says that he has never seen a face like Roxanne’s. He’s the only one. With her short red hair, pale skin, and strong chin, Roxanne looks very much like Julia. Indeed, the fans sometimes refer to Donna Wandrey as “Grayson Hall, Junior.” When we see the two together, we wonder if it will turn out that Roxanne is the daughter of the late housekeeper Julia Hoffman. It would be typical of Barnabas to reward Julia’s extreme devotion to him by forgetting all about her and chasing after a girl whose mother she might have been.

There’s also a lot of business today about two minor villains, sleazy musician Bruno Hess and high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Michael Stroka and Louis Edmonds were always fun to watch, but Roger and Bruno are absent and unmentioned for such long stretches that it is hard to believe that anything important is at stake in what they do. Like most of the characters, Bruno believes Angelique’s cover story that she is her identical twin sister Alexis. Acting under this impression, he smacks her around a couple of times. So we can see that he is going to be dead soon, though she will likely make him wish it were a lot sooner.

Roger announces that he has been named executor of the estate of the late Dr Cyrus Longworth. This means he will be coming into some money and perhaps learning some secrets. Quentin’s current wife, the former Maggie Evans, is lonely because her husband is a hopeless jerk. She tries to be friendly to Bruno, and he gets fresh. While he is grabbing her, Roger enters and sneers at Maggie.

Episode 1030: As though I had touched death

Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is fretting about her brother Quentin’s childish behavior. Quentin’s wife, the former Maggie Evans, has left the house abruptly, without her purse, and has been away for some time. Liz is sure something bad has happened to Maggie, but Quentin refuses to look for her.

Liz tries to interest Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of Quentin’s late first wife Angelique, in Quentin and Maggie’s troubles. She does not know that the person she is talking to is not Alexis at all, but Angelique herself. Angelique rose from the dead, murdered Alexis, and took Alexis’ place as a permanent houseguest in the great house of Collinwood as part of her plan to win Quentin back. To that end, Angelique is conspiring with a man she knows as John Yaeger. He has abducted Maggie and is holding her in a dungeon out in the country, hoping that after enough time alone with him she will forget all about Quentin and fall in love with him.

“Alexis” is pacing around the drawing room while Liz talks about Maggie and Quentin. She is half listening when she approaches a window and sees Yaeger waiting outside. She suddenly tells Liz that she is going to go out herself and look for Maggie. Liz tells her this is too dangerous, but she rushes out. She confers with Yaeger in the gazebo.* Yaeger is despairing of his plan, much to Angelique’s annoyance.

Angelique, alias Alexis, sees Yaeger at the window. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There is no such person as Yaeger, any more than there is a living Alexis Stokes. The man is really Cyrus Longworth in disguise. Maggie and Quentin think of Cyrus as a friend, a mild-mannered scientist who means well, though he is sometimes strangely naive. Cyrus has developed a potion which changes his appearance so drastically that not even those who know him best can recognize him when he is under its influence. After Cyrus tried to rape Maggie last week while disguised as Yaeger, he threw the potion away. But he then transformed spontaneously, without drinking it. Since he cannot re-Jekyllize himself without it, we are left wondering if he will remain in his Yaeger form permanently. We may also wonder what he will do if he reverts to his usual appearance in front of Maggie. He has admitted to himself that he and Yaeger are not separate people, but still seems to want to hold onto some sense that they are. He can’t very well do that if Maggie knows he is the one keeping her locked up.

Liz stays in the drawing room after “Alexis” leaves. Roger Collins enters and helps himself to some brandy. Liz picks up with her brother where she had left off with “Alexis.” Roger doesn’t even pretend to care about Maggie. He was fixated on Angelique when she was alive, and cannot forgive Maggie for not being her. He is glad Maggie is gone, and nothing Liz says about her can stir his interest. Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds played different versions of these characters starting in #1, and it is always great to see them together.

Angelique has a problem of her own. She can stay out of the tomb only so long as she finds living bodies to drain of their warmth. She’s already killed three people that way. The first two were Alexis, whom she is successfully impersonating, and a handyman named Fred, who was expected to leave town anyway. Neither of them has been missed. The third, lawyer Larry Chase, caused puzzlement when his ice cold corpse was found in front of her, but as an isolated occurrence no one seems to have found a way to start solving that puzzle. So “Alexis” is not currently suspected of being a vampiric creature.

The need for warmth suddenly comes over Angelique. She goes to the drawing room and huddles in front of the fire. Roger sees her and remarks on how much she, “Alexis,” reminds him of Angelique. She says she doesn’t want to talk about her sister, then approaches Roger and embraces him. He says he feels terribly cold. She asks him to kiss her. That’s all it took to kill Fred and Larry, and a lot more contact than it took to kill Alexis. Roger is about to do it when Liz enters. They break their clinch and Angelique makes haste to go out. Roger is still feeling extreme cold, but he has no idea his sister just saved his life.

We see Angelique in the apartment of her (step?)father, Tim Stokes. She tells him she killed some stranger on her way over. By this time, his body will have been discovered, so cold that it will be assumed he had been dead for days. She tells Stokes that it was his occult prowess that enabled her to return from the dead, and asks if he can free her of her heat vampirism. He says that he cannot, and that he is so much the greatest expert in this sort of thing that there is no point in looking for anyone else who might be able to do so. She presses, and he mentions that someone else was involved in the process. She demands to see this person; he tells her the person is in the back room of the apartment. She eagerly goes to the door, unbothered by his pained refusal to accompany her.

Stokes’ apartment is laid out like the apartment of Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, his counterpart in the parallel universe where Dark Shadows was set for its first 196 weeks. Two people had important connections with that other Stokes’ back room. One was Frankenstein’s monster Adam, who was last seen going in there. Adam’s creation was a means of freeing another vampire of his curse; longtime viewers may therefore wonder if we are about to meet his counterpart. The other was Paul Stoddard, ex-husband of Liz’ counterpart, who was attacked and killed in that room by a murderous shape-shifter who, like Cyrus Longworth/ John Yaeger, was played by Christopher Pennock. Perhaps whoever is waiting for Angelique in the room is somehow connected with Cyrus/ Yaeger.

There are other possibilities. Angelique’s counterpart in the other continuity was for a time subordinated to suave warlock Nicholas Blair. We have not seen a counterpart of Nicholas here; my wife, Mrs Acilius, thinks that we will meet another Nicholas tomorrow.

*Which she pronounces “ga-ZAY-bo,” a bit of Collinsport English Lara Parker introduced way back in #489. It’s fun to hear it again.

Episode 1025: Go to the window

Maggie Evans Collins is upset. Her husband, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, has stormed out of the house yet again, as usual for a reason he refuses to explain to her. Quentin’s brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, taunts her with invidious comparisons to Quentin’s first wife, the late Angelique. Housekeeper Julia Hoffman keeps setting Maggie up to remind Quentin of Angelique, one of the most reliable methods of triggering his tantrums. Worst of all, but unknown to Maggie, Angelique herself has come back to life and is casting spells on her. Angelique murdered her identical twin sister Alexis and took Alexis’ place as Quentin’s houseguest. Maggie is desperate for a friend and keeps behaving as if “Alexis” were one, leaving her exposed to attack. We end today with Maggie standing at an open window, hearing Alexis’ voice urging her to jump. The angle makes it look like Maggie is already in her coffin and is opening its lid.

Maggie looks for escape. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.

Dark Shadows was unusual among soap operas in that Friday’s episode was often the least eventful of the week. This one is a case in point. It doesn’t feel slow, though. The dialogue is well-crafted and expertly delivered, leaving us with the feeling that we are getting to know Maggie and each of her tormentors better with each scene.

Episode 1023: The lady wanted a certain piece of information

Barmaid Buffie Harrington sees a man assaulting a woman in the alley next to the tavern. She recognizes the man as ruffian John Yaeger. Yaeger used to buy Buffie gifts, then beat her and laugh at her bruises. She recognizes the woman as her childhood friend Maggie Evans. Maggie moved away from the village of Collinsport when she was very young, and came back recently as the wife of Quentin Collins, drunken sourpuss and master of the estate of Collinwood. Buffie orders Yaeger to unhand Maggie. He sneers at the women, threatening to make a stink if they go to the police. Buffie stands her ground, and at length Yaeger backs down and leaves.

Maggie goes to Quentin’s friend Cyrus Longworth in his laboratory. She tells Cyrus that Buffie rescued her from Yaeger. She asks Cyrus if it is true that Yaeger is his friend. Cyrus looks pained, and says that for some time he has considered Yaeger his enemy. Maggie had never seen Yaeger before; she was at the docks because he called her anonymously and promised her some information relevant to her suspicion that Quentin murdered his first wife, Angelique Stokes Collins. Nor did he identify himself to her. Buffie did not call him by name. So Maggie and Buffie must have had a conversation afterward in which she told him who Yaeger was and that he and Cyrus are connected to each other.

What neither Buffie nor Maggie knows is that Yaeger does not exist. He is simply a disguise Cyrus assumes when he wants to hurt someone. Cyrus never meant to tell Maggie anything about Quentin; he called Maggie to meet him at the docks because he wanted to rape and abduct her. Cyrus has devised a potion that causes his hair to turn darker and sprout all over his body, his shoulders to broaden, and his skin tone to change. John Yaeger is the alias he uses when in this disguise. After Maggie leaves, he tells himself that he and Yaeger are the same person, and that he is responsible for all of Yaeger’s crimes. He smashes up his lab equipment and burns his notes. All he really needed to do was pour out the potion. One of the essential ingredients is a compound he can’t make himself. He murdered the only known supplier, so once it is gone, it will be gone for good.

Cyrus is only the first character today to use Maggie’s need for information about Quentin to trap and hurt her. Quentin’s brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, keeps baiting her with references to the cause of Quentin’s current fit of bad temper. She finally insists he tells her what he means, and he says it is the anniversary of his wedding to Angelique.

The other character is Angelique herself. Unknown to any other character in today’s episode, Angelique has risen from the grave, murdered her identical twin sister Alexis, and taken Alexis’ place as Quentin’s houseguest in his mansion, the great house of Collinwood.

Maggie turns to “Alexis” for information about Quentin and Angelique’s marriage. When she asks if Angelique often wrote her when she was living in Florence, “Alexis” replies “Not often, but when she did she made up for it.” We know this is a lie, and Maggie should too. When the real Alexis first came to the Collinwood, housekeeper Julia Hoffman asked if she received the letter she sent informing her of Angelique’s death. She said she did not. It turned out that the last address Angelique had for Alexis was in Tangier, a city she had left some time before moving to Florence. Maggie takes “Alexis'” statement at face value, and also believes her when she says that Angelique wrote only of how wonderful her marriage to Quentin was. Further, she believes that Angelique was telling the truth in those supposed letters. Since her own marriage to Quentin has been miserable from the first day we saw them together, this depresses Maggie.

Maggie goes to sleep, and Angelique casts a spell to send her a dream. In the dream, Maggie goes to Angelique’s old bedroom and opens a hidden compartment in a small table. She finds a packet of letters there. She wakes up, goes to the room, and finds not only that there is such a compartment but that it does contain the letters. Presumably she will read these and add to her misery.

As Yaeger’s former punching bag and current blood thrall of vampire Barnabas Collins, Buffie is central to two of the ongoing stories. When she rescues Maggie, we can assume that they will renew their friendship, putting her close to the heart of all the other stories. The episode thus promises to usher in the Age of Buffie. But in fact, this is the character’s final appearance.

I suspect that the writers and producers were impressed with Elizabeth Eis’ performance and expanded Buffie’s part beyond what they originally intended. There were several cast members whom Dan Curtis Productions was contractually obligated to use in a certain number of episodes per month, and for the first weeks of the current segment most of those were off in Tarrytown, New York, doing principal photography on the feature House of Dark Shadows. That gave the show a greater flexibility with new performers than they have now that those people are back.

Moreover, the writers projected the plot out thirteen weeks at a time, in documents divided into 65 parts for the 65 episodes of that period. These projections were known in the soap opera business as “flimsies.” The show would scrap its plans completely when a story drew a different reaction from the audience than they had expected, most famously when Barnabas was introduced in April 1967 and was such a hit that they dropped the original idea to stake him at the end of a number of weeks. But Buffie isn’t that kind of a hit, and with the return to the jigsaw puzzle they have to solve every day to get the name actors their required appearances, the writers have to stick close to the flimsies for a while. By the time they could find room for Eis, the story had moved on and Buffie was no longer particularly relevant. Eis will be back later, when the show is set in a different version of Collinsport, playing a character who shows up in only three episodes.