Tag: quentin collins

Episode 922: The beginning was another ending

For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897. In that year, we got to know rakish libertine Quentin Collins, who brought upon himself and his male descendants the curse of the werewolf. For reasons of his own, sorcerer Count Petofi ordered one of his underlings, a repellent little man named Charles Delaware Tate, to paint a portrait of Quentin. As long as the portrait is intact, Quentin is immune from the effects both of the curse and of aging.

Now the show has returned to a contemporary setting. Quentin has come back to the village of Collinsport, still alive, still youthful, still human on nights of the full moon. However, he suffers from total amnesia, and is unwilling to listen to anyone who tells him that he is 99 years old and is enmeshed in a long line of supernatural occurrences.

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, knows all about Quentin, in part because she traveled back in time from September 1969 to September 1897 and befriended him then. Julia has been trying to help Quentin’s great-grandson Chris Jennings to overcome his own lycanthropy, and when a couple of weeks ago she learned that Tate was still alive she hoped he would be able to paint a portrait that would do for Chris what Quentin’s portrait did for him. Tate refused. Chris subsequently went to Tate’s house on a day when the moon was full enough to turn him into the wolf. He locked himself in a room with Tate and ordered him to start painting. If he finished the painting before sunset, perhaps Chris would not become the animal and Tate would escape the murder he is threatening to commit.

When the 1897 segment ended in #884, Petofi appeared to have died. It was unclear what this meant for the spells he had cast. That his portrait has continued to protect Quentin would suggest that at least some of his powers have lived after him. Perhaps Tate, too, will prove to have kept the ability Petofi gave him to work magic by painting portraits.

But this turned out not to have been so. At the end of yesterday’s episode, Tate had completed a picture of Chris, but come nightfall Chris turned into the wolf and slashed him. Today, Quentin comes into Tate’s studio, finding the artist bleeding to death and the beast still in the room. Looking for a weapon, he turns from a heavy bronze statue to a small silver candlestick. The wolf runs away.

Tate calls Quentin by name and pleads with him for help. Tate doesn’t want him to leave, but Quentin points out that he cannot do anything for him himself. Since Tate has no telephone, he will have to go to a neighbor and call a doctor from there.

Quentin was not the only beneficiary of Tate’s magical paintings whom we met in 1897. Tate had painted many pictures of his ideal woman. Unknown to him, these paintings had caused the woman to pop into existence one day in 1895. The woman took the name Amanda Harris and found her way to Collinsport shortly after Tate took up residence there. When he met Amanda, Tate became obsessed with her and kept shouting in her face that she was his property and must come away with him. Amanda also met Quentin, who is not all that great a person but who is a lot easier to take than Tate, and she fell in love with him. The two of them were going to run off together to New York City, but when Quentin could not find his portrait he had to stay in Collinsport. In #884, we saw a brief encounter between Quentin and Amanda in NYC, during which he told them they could not be together until he found the portrait.

Now Amanda, too, has come back to Collinsport. She has been using the name Olivia Corey, and has become a big star on Broadway. Amusingly, she is played by Donna McKechnie, who would a few years later actually become a big star on Broadway. One wonders if Miss McKechnie felt she had to model herself on Amanda/ Olivia when she achieved that success.

Julia and Amanda met because they have both been collecting paintings by Tate in hopes that they will lead them to Quentin. Julia recognized Olivia as Amanda right off when she met her, rather oddly since they never met when they were both in 1897. We see Julia visiting Amanda in her suite at the Collinsport Inn, getting impatient with her continued refusal to admit her identity, when the phone rings. It is Quentin, asking Julia to come to Tate’s. Amanda volunteers to go along with her, which Julia says is a very good idea. Julia pauses to tell Amanda the alias Tate has been using in recent years, Harrison Monroe.

When Julia and Amanda arrive at Tate’s, Julia takes Quentin aside and very ostentatiously whispers in his ear. He replies that he does not understand what she has in mind, but that he will follow her directions anyway.

Julia goes to Tate. She asks him to tell her where Quentin’s portrait is; he says he will do so only if she saves his life. She looks sad, and he says that if she cannot do that, she has nothing to offer him in exchange for what she wants. She then calls Amanda in, and tells her to address “Harrison Monroe” by his first name- Charles. When he hears her voice and sees her face, he calls her Amanda, and says that she has come back to him. Before he can turn his attention back to Julia, he loses consciousness.

Julia pronounces Tate dead. Julia is in some ways the ablest doctor who ever lived- she has built Frankenstein’s monsters, cured vampirism, etc. But her death pronouncements are so often inaccurate that longtime viewers will expect Tate to spring up and contradict her. Only the fact that the opening voiceover said in so many words that Tate “has no future” allows us to believe that we really won’t be seeing him again.

Overwhelmed by emotion, Amanda bolts out Tate’s door and wanders into the woods. The werewolf comes at her; for some reason that is apparently none of the audience’s business, he decides not to attack her.

Back in Amanda’s suite, Quentin tells Julia that he reached for the small silver candlestick rather than the heavy piece of metal when confronted with the wolf. Julia declares that this proves his identity. Somewhere in his mind, beneath the amnesia, he knows that werewolves are averse to silver. He can’t disagree.

Later, Amanda returns to the suite and gives a soliloquy. Julia emerges from the bedroom where she has been eavesdropping. Amanda briefly protests at the invasion of her privacy, then admits her identity. She tells Julia a story about the last time she and Quentin saw each other in the nineteenth century.

When Amanda gets to the meat of her story, we zoom in on her face for an extreme closeup. An iris wipe starts from her left eyelid, growing into a stage set representing a bridge in New York City. She and Quentin have a conversation that covers the same ground as the one we saw in #884, and he leaves her alone on the bridge.

A man we have not seen before enters and tells Amanda that she ought not to jump from the bridge. He says that she is very beautiful, and that other men will love her. He says that “If I were… different… I’d love you myself.” The words of this kindly confirmed bachelor mean nothing to Amanda, who throws herself off the bridge.

The wipe does not fill the entire screen; the edges of the main image are covered with flickering little blue squares, and we can make out an image of Amanda’s suite on the right-hand side of the screen. This effect becomes distracting while the confirmed bachelor is talking to Amanda, when they are adjusting the camera for the shot that will follow the end of the insert. Not only does the image of the suite wobble jerkily, but it continues as we cut from the two shot to a closeup on the man, taking our attention away from his face at a crucial moment.

Amanda tells Julia that after she jumped off the bridge, she found herself in a hotel lobby. The confirmed bachelor, whom she calls “Mr Best,” met her there and explained that he wants her to live out the long life that she was originally destined to have. He says that she will have all of those years, and will remain young throughout them. If she can find Quentin again before she reaches the time she was meant to die, the two of them will go on living forever. If not, he will return for her at the appointed time. Julia leaves, determined to cure Quentin of his amnesia and return him to Amanda. A moment later, a knock comes at the door. It is Mr Best, telling Amanda her time is up.

A few days ago, Julia brought Amanda one of Tate’s portraits of her. She made no effort to buy it, saying it was of no interest to her. The story of Mr Best explains this indifference. Amanda believes that her supernatural youth is due to his intervention, not to the portrait. She does not know why Quentin has remained young, and has no reason to connect her situation with Tate’s works.

Mr Best is played by Emory Bass, who was at this time playing James Wilson in the original Broadway production of 1776. That cast, to be reunited in the 1972 film version of the musical, also featured Dark Shadows alums David Ford (Sam Evans #2, Andre DuPrés) as John Hancock, Daniel F. Keyes (Cemetery Caretaker) as Josiah Bartlett, Peter Lombard (Oberon) as a stage manager and understudy for the parts of Thomas Jefferson and Stephen Hopkins, and Virginia Vestoff (whom we will see several months from now as Samantha Collins) in the major role of Abigail Adams. With all that overlap, I tend to think of the whole cast of 1776 as having been available for parts on Dark Shadows, and vice versa. Whenever I get unhappy with a cast member, I wonder who from 1776 could have done a better job. Bass was great in 1776, and his arrestingly deliberate phrasing is perfectly suited to an angel of death, especially one like Mr Best who has far more discretion and a more idiosyncratic personality than do the angels described in the orthodox theological statements of the great monotheistic traditions.

Episode 918: Ways of remaining young

Mrs Acilius and I did our first watch-through of Dark Shadows on streaming starting in the spring of 2020, when there was no live theater to attend. When we got to the episodes introducing Barnabas Collins the vampire, I found Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day, which picks up with those and follows the series to its conclusion. I enjoyed Danny’s blog very much, and soon became one of his regular commenters. When we started this watch-through to coincide with the 56th anniversary, I looked for someplace to leave my comments on the episodes Danny didn’t cover, and found that all I could do was to start this blog of my own.

In his post about #412, Danny wrote: “This actor, Roger Davis, plays five roles on Dark Shadows, and they just get more and more angry. By the time we get to Harrison Monroe in late 1969, his character is literally an automaton sitting behind a desk, who yells at people nonstop until his head falls off. That is actually true.” I remember reading that in 2020 and doubting that it was actually true, but by the time we got to this episode and saw it happen, we had learned not to underestimate Dark Shadows. It is far and away the best Roger Davis moment on Dark Shadows. In fairness to Mr Davis, he is a highly trained actor who can do good work, but he chose to do so only a handful of times on the show. When we see that the writers are as sick of his obnoxiousness as we are, it’s an occasion to stand up and cheer.

Much of the episode is taken up with some business about whether matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her thirteen year old nephew David Collins are going to murder permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman. Liz and David have been absorbed into a secret cult devoted to unseen supernatural beings called the Leviathans, and Julia, who cannot be absorbed into the cult, is on track to uncover its existence. Liz takes a pistol and aims it at Julia’s back. Julia is absorbed in another crisis, and by the time she notices that someone else is in the room, Liz has put the pistol down.

Liz can’t bring herself to shoot Julia. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Liz tells David she can’t bring herself to kill Julia, who has been very helpful to the family in the past. David sternly tells her that they must put aside all such considerations and think only of their duty to the Leviathans. They consult a sacred book the Leviathans have entrusted to them, and read that they must not kill anyone, since the ghosts of their victims are more formidable to them than are living people. Since most of the principal characters on the show, including Julia, Liz, and David, have committed or at least attempted homicide, this prohibition would seem to imply that the Leviathans are the good guys.

There is also a story about Quentin Collins and his great-grandson Chris Jennings. Quentin was a werewolf in the nineteenth century and Chris has inherited that curse. In 1897, a repellent little man named Charles Delaware Tate painted Quentin’s portrait. The portrait had magical powers, relieving Quentin of the effects both of lycanthropy and of aging. Quentin recently came back to town, suffering from amnesia and refusing to listen to Julia or Chris when they try to tell him he is 99 years old. Julia and Chris hope that Tate will be able to do for Chris what he did for Quentin, and they have figured out that he is still alive and using the name Harrison Monroe.

The moon was full enough last night to trigger the werewolf transformation, and will be again tonight. Chris turns up. She had taken him to a mental hospital she controls, to be locked up securely while he is in his lupine form; he checked himself out, and says he can’t stand being caged. Since the alternative is killing at least one person at random, it is rather difficult to sympathize with Chris’ insistence on letting himself out.

For her part, Julia was already afraid that a werewolf was on the loose before she knew Chris had left the hospital. She suspects Quentin may have reverted to lycanthropy. She goes to the apartment of the woman who has been keeping Quentin and finds him there, his face soiled and his clothing tattered as it might be the morning after a fit of werewolfery. It turns out that he did not transform- he simply got into a bar fight. When she tells Chris about this, he goes to his great-granddad and demands he accompany him to Tate/ Monroe’s house. Quentin isn’t interested in Chris or his problem or Tate/ Monroe, but he is too drunk to hold his ground for long.

Tate/ Monroe doesn’t want to let anyone in, but when Quentin announces himself he opens the door. Chris and Quentin see a young man sitting at a desk in a darkened room. The young man sees Quentin’s apparent youth and yells “Liar!,” shouting that he is too young to be Quentin. Quentin points out that Tate/ Monroe looks just as young as he does, and Tate/ Monroe responds by shouting something about being a genius. Within seconds, he is shouting that of course he recognizes him as Quentin. Confusing as this transition is, I don’t think it is a flaw in the writing, but in the acting. I suspect Mr Davis was supposed to put some sort of inflection on the lines in between to show that Tate has figured something out, but doing that would not be compatible with his technique of delivering all of his lines in an unvarying petulant shout.

Quentin can’t take Tate’s personality any more than the audience can. He throws a vase at him and runs out of the room. It’s when the vase hits the automaton that the head falls off.

The Leviathan story is based on some of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories. Chris and Quentin do not appear to have a direct connection to the Leviathans, but Harrison Monroe, and today’s closing revelation that he is a pile of junk arranged to look like a person, are taken from Lovecraft’s novella The Whisperer in Darkness. So perhaps werewolves and Leviathans have something to do with each other after all.

Episode 916: Julia Hoffman has had her dream

Certain People

Six weeks ago, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins was absorbed into a group serving supernatural beings known as the Leviathans. Also in the group is matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Barnabas and Liz are worried that mad scientist Julia Hoffman, Barnabas’ sometime best friend and Liz’ permanent houseguest, is catching on to the truth about their group. They decide Julia must be absorbed into it.

Barnabas finds Julia on a couch in the drawing room, reading a book about lycanthropy. He strikes up a conversation about Chris Jennings, a young man who suffers from that condition. Julia replies bitterly that she still cares about Chris, unlike Barnabas. He tells her that he does care, and they quarrel a bit. He then strokes Julia’s cheek. He did the same thing with Chris’ little sister Amy in #912, at which point Amy fell asleep. Shortly after Amy woke up, she had become part of the Leviathan group. Julia gets a headache and goes to her room, where she does fall asleep.

We didn’t see a dream sequence when Amy fell asleep, but do see one for Julia today. The visuals alternate between two stock clips of lightning flashes as we hear Jonathan Frid give a dramatic reading of some portentous nonsense, then give way to Julia finding Barnabas in the drawing room inviting her to open a wooden box. We saw a dream of Liz’ in #904; she woke from it already transformed into a faithful devotee of the Leviathans. But when Julia wakes up, she just has a worse headache.

They’ve shown us this clip more times than I can count…
… but I don’t think we’ve seen this one before. It’s fascinating to me, like an image David Lynch would have used in Eraserhead or the third season of Twin Peaks.

Julia goes downstairs and find Liz holding the box from her dream. She is urging her to open it. Julia is confused by the situation. A knock comes at the door, and she rushes to answer it. It is Chris, saying that it is time for Julia to drive him to the institution where he is locked up on nights of the full moon. Julia calls back to Liz that she will be back later in the evening.

Barnabas enters and says that Julia will never be absorbed into the cult. If she were suited for absorption, the knock at the door would not have distracted her. He explains that “There are certain people, Elizabeth, whom we are not able to absorb. It has to do with their genetic structure. And Julia Hoffman is one of them.” As a former vampire who is now leading a cult that is trying to bring a race of Elder Gods back into the world where they will destroy and replace humankind, Barnabas is supposed to be strange and unnerving, but hearing him talk about “certain people” and their “genetic structure” is off-putting in a whole other way. Why not just say that she’s Jewish, we know you mean that she’s Jewish.

Barnabas then tells Liz that it is now up to her to handle Julia. So far as we know, Liz does not have any special powers like those Barnabas uses when he fondles people’s faces. Liz doesn’t even know what the cult is all about- today, she asks Barnabas what the goal is they are working for, and he tells her he isn’t at liberty to say. So when Barnabas tells her to deal with Julia, we can only remember the last time we saw Joan Bennett playing a character under the control of an uncanny force, when Judith Collins shot and killed neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond on the orders of vampire Dirk Wilkins in #776.

In #915, one Leviathan ordered Barnabas to kill Julia. When he refused, another caused him to have nightmares, then told him it was OK to leave Julia alive if he could find another way to keep her under control. That episode was written hurriedly and rushed into production at the last minute, three full weeks after this one was in the can, in response to complaints from fans dissatisfied with the Leviathan story in general and Barnabas’ coldness to Julia in particular. It’s anybody’s guess what they were originally planning to do with #915, but today’s episode makes it clear that it did not include the reset of Barnabas’ character that we saw yesterday. He is still leading the Leviathans, and when he delegates the problem to Liz murdering Julia is pretty obviously the likeliest solution.

Not a Portrait of Quentin Collins

Julia’s plan for Chris is to persuade an artist named Charles Delaware Tate to paint a portrait of him. Tate painted a portrait of Chris’ great-grandfather, Quentin Collins, in 1897. That portrait had magical powers. Once it was painted, Quentin’s own werewolf curse went into abeyance. It was the portrait that transformed on nights of the full moon, while Quentin himself remained human. Indeed, the portrait also caused Quentin to remain young and healthy. He returned to Collinsport a couple of weeks ago, and though he is 99 years old he still looks just like he did when he was 28. In #913/ 914, Julia found that Tate, also, is alive, and still looks like he did in 1897.

Quentin and Tate are not the only emigrés from 1897 currently sheltering in Collinsport. Another of Tate’s magical portraits, a concept piece depicting his ideal woman, caused its subject to pop into existence. In 1897, she went by the name Amanda Harris, met Quentin, and fell in love with him. She, too, is unchanged in 1969, though she now calls herself Olivia Corey.

Amanda/ Olivia and Julia are both hunting for paintings by Tate, and met each other through that pursuit. They have also met Quentin, and vied with each other to decide which would be the one to keep him. He has amnesia and knows only that he was carrying papers identifying him as Grant Douglas. He is open to the idea that this is not his real name, but he finds Julia’s attempt to convince him that he is a 99 year old man ludicrous and is frustrated with Amanda/ Olivia’s unwillingness to tell him when and where they first met.

Amanda/ Olivia comes back to her suite at the Collinsport Inn and finds Quentin there, swilling her booze and enormously drunk. He tells her that he finds his room depressing, because it doesn’t have a bar. He says he can’t stand not knowing who he is. She points out that he has taken this in his stride up to now, and asks why today is different. He says he doesn’t know why it is different, but it very much is. When the show was a costume drama set in 1897 and we saw Amanda, she did not know about Quentin’s lycanthropy, and now that she calls herself Olivia she still does not think of the full moon when she sees him in anguish.

Later, Julia shows up at Amanda/ Olivia’s door. She has brought one of Tate’s portraits of Amanda Harris. Amanda/ Olivia staggers back at the sight of it. She composes herself and says that it is of no interest to her, since she already has several of Tate’s paintings of her “grandmother.” Julia tells Amanda/ Olivia that the real reason she is not interested in it is that it is not a portrait of Quentin Collins. She replies that Julia is the one who is fascinated by Quentin, not she. Julia says that she wants to show the portrait to Quentin. Amanda/ Olivia does not bother pretending that his name is “Grant Douglas” or that it might be something other than “Quentin Collins”; she simply tells Julia that he is in his room sleeping off an alcoholic binge. Julia adopts her most unmistakably Mad Scientist manner when she responds “Then this is definitely the right time to see him!” She marches out, and Amanda/ Olivia follows her.

Julia had told Chris that if Quentin’s portrait has been destroyed, his lycanthropy will be back in force. If that is so, she wants to be with him when he transforms. This was a doubly confusing thing to say. First, if the portrait had been destroyed, Quentin would not only be a werewolf, he would also look his age. She therefore knows it is not so. Second, she does not have anything with her to protect her against werewolves. If she is with Quentin when he transforms, he will kill her immediately.

When Julia and Amanda/ Olivia let themselves into Quentin’s room, they find that it is a shambles and he is gone. As a closing cliffhanger, this is supposed to leave us with the fear that a werewolf is stalking Collinsport. But since we know what the portrait does for Quentin, it only leaves us wondering if Amanda/ Olivia will have to pay an extra housekeeping charge because he trashed the room she was renting for him.

When Julia met Tate in #913/914, she could not get him to engage her in any kind of conversation, much less agree to paint a portrait of Chris. She did not mention Amanda/ Olivia. Since Tate was maniacally obsessed with Amanda in 1897, Julia should have known that her acquaintance with her was the strongest card she had to play. So when she goes to Amanda/ Olivia’s suite today, returning viewers were hoping that she was going to propose they team up to persuade Tate to paint Chris. Perhaps that will still happen. If it does, it might be a lot more interesting than is the revelation that Quentin doesn’t keep his hotel room clean.

Episode 911: I might forget I’m dead

The Story So Far

In December 1968, children David Collins and Amy Jennings explored the long-deserted west wing of their home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood. They stirred up the ghost of Quentin Collins, who turned out to be David’s great-great uncle and Amy’s great-grandfather. For the next several weeks, Quentin steadily gained power and wrought ever graver havoc, until by the end of February the great house had become uninhabitable and David was hovering between life and death. At that point, David and Amy’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins did some mumbo-jumbo to try to contact Quentin’s ghost, only to come unstuck in time and find himself in the year 1897, when Quentin was a living being.

For the next eight months, Dark Shadows was primarily a costume drama set in 1897. Occasional glimpses of 1969 showed us that the haunting was continuing. In #839, we saw David lying dead before his father Roger, finally having succumbed to the effects of the haunting. But while Roger was lamenting him, David came back to life. The events in the part of the episode set in 1897 had changed the future, so that the ghost of Quentin found peace and Collinwood returned to its usual condition. But that took effect as of the anniversary of the change. Everyone’s memories of the ten months of Quentin’s haunting and of the eight months of Barnabas’ absence in the past are intact.

Not only is Quentin no longer a ghost, he isn’t even dead. In the altered version of 1897 that we saw, an artist named Charles Delaware Tate painted a portrait of Quentin that had the same magical effects on him that Dorian Gray’s portrait had in Oscar Wilde’s novel. Quentin looks, moves, and sounds exactly like he did when he was 28 years old. He has recently returned to Collinsport, and has amnesia. He was found carrying identity papers in the name of Grant Douglas. He’s open to the possibility that that may not be his right name, but when he finds Dr Julia Hoffman, MD trying to convince him he is the 99 year old Quentin, he is incredulous.

At Collinwood

We open today in Quentin’s old room in the west wing. Julia has persuaded Quentin to sit there and listen to his record player. In the unaltered timeline, he was obsessed with a sickly little waltz, listening to it over and over in 1897 and inflicting it on Collinwood when he was a ghost. Julia plays the record, and it doesn’t mean a thing to him. She becomes frustrated and accuses him of lying when he says that he doesn’t remember that he is Quentin.

The music does ring a bell for someone else in the house. The sound of it reaches David and wakes him. Alarmed, he makes his way to Quentin’s room. By the time he gets there, Quentin is hiding behind a curtain. Julia tells David she went in to look for a painting, and that she thoughtlessly started the record player. He accuses her of hiding Quentin. While she is denying it, he sees Quentin’s shoes sticking out from under the curtain.

Quentin’s shoes, as seen by David.

In 1963, philosopher Edmund Gettier published a little paper about the traditional definition of knowledge as “justified true belief.” He gave several examples of justified true beliefs that most people would not regard as knowledge. His examples were kind of far-fetched, but it is easy to come up with more plausible instances. For example, I first read Gettier’s paper when I was in college, and at the same time I was reading Anthony Trollope’s novel The Eustace Diamonds. The main point of that novel is that everyone believes that Lizzie Greystock has stolen some diamonds from her late husband’s estate. She has in fact done so, and they have good reason for believing that she did so, but those reasons are so mixed up with misunderstandings of Lizzie’s motives and other circumstances that we wouldn’t say any of them really knows anything about her. My epistemology professor was excited when I told her about the novel, since the example she gave to our class to show that Gettier’s contrivances were not the only cases illustrating his point was something overly elaborate about believing that you have recognized someone whom you have partially seen while he is hiding most of himself behind a curtain.

David’s claim that Julia is hiding Quentin is another Gettier case. He believes it, the sight of Quentin’s shoes in Quentin’s room provides compelling justification for believing it, and it is true. Yet the Quentin whom Julia is hiding does not have any of the characteristics that give David’s belief the significance that he draws from it. His presence is not a sign that the haunting has resumed and that David is back in mortal danger. He is not a ghost at all and is not a threat to David or anyone else in the house. So while David has a justified true belief that Julia is hiding Quentin, that belief is so deeply entangled with a severe misunderstanding of the situation that we wouldn’t count it as knowledge.

Once David is gone, Quentin emerges and demands answers from Julia. She tells him something about Quentin’s ghost; he already finds her insistence that he is 99 years old to be so preposterous that the additional detail that he used to be dead prompts a merry laugh. By the time he is at the front door ready to leave, he is stern and telling Julia that he expects a “full explanation” tomorrow. Lotsa luck on that- ghosts, time travel, magical portraits, and a universe where the present is a stew made up of the consequences of several mutually incompatible pasts? And those are just the elements you can’t avoid in the executive summary of the situation. A “full explanation” involves werewolves, vampires, a humanoid Phoenix bent on incinerating her children, demons conjured from the depths of Hell, a sorcerer who still misses his pet unicorn, and about a thousand other fantastical topics.

David eavesdrops on Quentin and Julia’s parting conversation. When he was a ghost, we never heard Quentin speak- he communicated telepathically with David and Amy, and they could apparently hear his voice on a particular telephone, but he never stood around and talked with anyone like this. So the mere fact of the conversation undermines David’s belief that the man he is looking at is Quentin’s ghost. When David hears Julia call Quentin “Mr Douglas,” he can see that whoever this person may be, he is not exactly Quentin, not as he knew him. He does recognize the name “Mr Douglas” as that of a man his cousin Carolyn Stoddard met at the antique shop in the village where she works and whom she visited in the hospital when he first had amnesia, so his attitude towards him changes.

In the Antique Store

Unknown to Julia or Carolyn, David has been assimilated to a cult that serves unseen supernatural beings known as the Leviathans. Carolyn’s mother, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, has also been absorbed into the cult, as has Barnabas. Megan and Philip Todd, the owners of the antique store, are members too, and they are fostering a mysterious creature who currently appears to be an eight year old boy and answers to the name Alexander. Liz takes David and Amy to the antique store, where they interrupt an uncomfortable conversation between Alexander and Julia.

Liz suggests to Julia that they should leave Amy and David in the store to play with Alexander. Julia doesn’t think this is such a hot idea, but Liz insists.

We then have the first scene on Dark Shadows populated by three child actors. It was a breakthrough when the ten year old David played with the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins in the spring and summer of 1967; their scenes, the first interaction between children on Dark Shadows, advanced it towards becoming a kids’ show. David had up to that point been the only child on the show. He was first a homicidal monster who threatened the adults, then a figure threatened by his mother Laura and in need of rescue. When we saw him with Sarah, the two of them built a relationship that was of importance in itself and that had consequences which grew to dominate the story, leading directly to the show’s first time travel segment in November 1967. In David and Sarah, the fans running home from elementary school to watch the show could see characters their own age driving the action.

The current phase has been very heavy in adult interest. This first three-scene among children might be expected to take us back to territory Sarah and David did so much to open, but it does nothing of the kind. The three children do not really interact with each other at all. David is under the control of the Leviathans, Alexander is a manifestation of their power, and Amy is at a loss to figure out what’s going on. The forces motivating the action are not on screen, any more than they would be if the boys’ parts were played by marionettes.

David, Amy, and Alexander

Amy finds that Alexander has a photograph of Carolyn as she was when she was eight. She realizes that he stole it from a photo album at Collinwood. She declares that she will take it back to the house. Alexander forbids her to do so, and David takes his side. Amy is puzzled by David’s attitude. David threatens to sic Quentin on her. That shakes her up, but she says that Quentin is gone. David says he isn’t, and he and Alexander force her to play hide and seek. Once she is out of the room, David tells Alexander to keep her away for a couple of minutes. He telephones “Grant Douglas” and asks him to come to the shop to pick up a book he left there.

Amy comes back just in time to see and recognize Quentin. She runs upstairs and goes into the room which belongs to Alexander. She hears a heavy breathing there and sees something that terrifies her. Returning viewers know that what she saw was some inhuman thing that is of the Leviathans.

For his part, David is quite calm with “Grant.” Though we saw at the beginning that his connection to the Leviathans has not removed his fear of Quentin, he has reached the conclusion that he doesn’t need to be afraid of “Grant Douglas.” Maybe he thinks that someone using the names of two such prominent Canadians can’t be all bad. He gives Quentin the book and assures him Amy will be all right.

Quentin accepts David’s assurance, but we cannot. Amy is absent from the cast for long periods, and is usually unmentioned during those intervals. The same was true of Nora Collins, the character Denise Nickerson played in the 1897 segment. The show seems to be deliberately telling us not to get used to having this fine young actress in the cast. And the Leviathans haven’t done anything truly horrible yet- they are due to murder a character we really like. So it is quite possible we will tune in tomorrow and find that Amy is dead. Again, the contrast with the David and Sarah story is telling. David Henesy was a core member of the cast from the first week of the show, and the ghost of Sarah was a key part of the show for months. Dark Shadows was as much their show as it was that of any of the adults on screen. Keeping both Amy and Denise Nickerson at the margins, they make it clear that the kids are going to be taking a back seat.

David Henesy and Denise Nickerson were both highly capable performers, but eight year old David Jay just stands on his mark and shouts his lines. That need not have been a problem. Alexander has only been in human form for a week or two, so we don’t expect subtlety from him, and to the extent that he sounds like a real child he is supposed to be a vicious little bully trying to figure out what he can get away with. Such children often do put on acts and sound awkward, so Mr Jay’s professional ineptitude dovetails with the requirements of his part. That’s similar to the way Sharon Smyth’s limitations fit with the part of Sarah. We were supposed to be unsure whether Sarah knew that she was a ghost, whether she knew what year it was, and what if anything she remembered from one appearance to the next. Since Miss Smyth* was, as she says now, “clueless” about the craft of acting, she did a great job keeping us guessing. Later we saw Sarah as a living being, and Miss Smyth’s performance was less satisfactory. We know that Alexander is likely to transform into a shape that is not compatible with David Jay soon, so his shortcomings aren’t a particular concern. But again, the fact that Alexander comes with an expiration date keeps us from regarding him as one of the main characters.

The Store Room

While the kids were alone in the antique shop, Liz took Julia to a store room in the west wing of Collinwood to show her some photographs she had been asking about. While there, they come upon a painting. Liz says that she bought it about a year before at a charity auction, and that when her brother Roger saw how lousy it was he said he hoped that it was a worthy cause. She took it directly to the store room. It is signed “Harrison Monroe” and dated 1968. We will learn tomorrow that it depicts a place called Indian Hill. Julia recognizes the painting as extremely similar to an equally undistinguished landscape she bought a few weeks ago.

Detail from “A View of Indian Hill,” Harrison Monroe, 1968.

That painting was the work of Charles Delaware Tate, executed about 20 years previously. That Tate had been alive and working as recently as that gave Julia the hope that he might still be around and able to help a friend of hers who has problems. Yesterday, an expert called on to remove the landscape and reveal the portrait underneath it said that Tate died in 1959. But this painting is apparently the product of the same hand. Julia hopes that “Harrison Monroe” is a pseudonym of Tate’s.

It has been clear to the audience ever since Julia found the first painting that Tate would be back. That can’t be welcome news to many people. Like all characters played by Roger Davis, Tate is a loathsome man who shouts his lines and assaults his scene partners. So this pseudonym, as strongly redolent of old Virginia as “Grant Douglas” is of twentieth century Canada, will bring a sinking feeling to much of the audience. Our reprieve that began when we left Tate in the nineteenth century five weeks ago cannot last much longer.

*Her name is Mrs Lentz nowadays, but that’s an odd title to give a nine year old. So I refer to her as Miss Smyth.

Episode 910: Know or suspect

For eight months in 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman traveled back in time from the 1960s to keep us company in that year. It was nice to have them around, but we didn’t really need them. Rakish Quentin Collins was the star then, and now that the show has returned to 1969 we are unsurprised that he has turned up, alive, well, and 28 years old.

Quentin has amnesia, which Julia is determined to cure. He spends all day today listing the things he doesn’t know about himself, such as his name, which of his hands is dominant, and why Julia and Broadway star Olivia Corey are fighting each other to see which one will keep him in the style to which he might like to become accustomed. He’s such a good-looking guy that this latter really can’t be all that mysterious to him, but maybe he’s just being tactful when he claims not to understand that part.

Quentin and Olivia go to her hotel room, which she has decorated with framed copies of her professional headshot and a bit of folded stage dressing that could be used to suggest windows. Apparently that’s just how actresses make themselves feel at home.

Quentin asks Olivia why she is interested in him. She tells him that they met a long time ago, but that she can’t tell him any more than that. This angers him; he knows nothing at all about his past, so it strikes him she is being cruel by withholding the information she has.

Regular viewers know that Olivia and Quentin were lovers in 1897, when she was known as Amanda Harris. Both of them owe their youth to magical paintings done by an artist named Charles Delaware Tate. Julia knows all about this, and has come into possession of a landscape Tate painted in the 1940s. Amanda/ Olivia came to Collinsport in hopes of getting the painting from her. The other day Amanda/ Olivia managed to have it x-rayed, and found that there was a portrait on the canvas underneath it. The x-ray could not show whose portrait it was. Later today, Julia will have the same examination made. When she gets the results, Julia arranges to have the landscape removed. It turns out that the underpainting is a portrait of Amanda Harris herself.

The expert who exposes the underpainting also brings bad news. He tells Julia’s sidekick Chris Jennings that Tate died about ten years before. Julia knows that Quentin’s portrait not only keeps him alive and youthful, but also prevents him turning into a werewolf. Since Chris is Quentin’s great-grandson and has inherited the werewolf curse, he and Julia were hoping that Tate was still alive and still empowered to paint magical portraits.

Closing Miscellany

Nowadays, Donna McKechnie says that, while she had been on Broadway as a singer and dancer before appearing on Dark Shadows, she was only a beginner in acting. It’s true that she is noticeably uncomfortable delivering her lines, but her scene partners- David Selby, Grayson Hall, and Don Briscoe- all give her such good support that she gets through it quite smoothly. Besides, she is so charming that the audience is willing to forgive her anything.

Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day is one of his occasional tours de force, a spoof of the postmodernist literary terminology that he learned in graduate school. I learned the same terminology when I was in graduate school, and I think his spoof of it is hilarious. But in the course of it, he has some really good insights. For example:

Chris:  Olivia Corey… I don’t get it! Why is she so interested in him?

Julia:  She must either know — or suspect! — that he is really Quentin Collins.

It’s telling that she puts the dramatic stress on the phrase “or suspect!” rather than the knowledge itself. To Dr. Hoffman, it’s the existence of suspicion! that is itself suspicious. Anybody can know something. It’s the act of suspecting! that reveals a new range of discursive positions.

Danny Horn, “Episode 910: Epistemology of the Portrait,” posted 8 August 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day

Which is a great point! When the characters know facts about each other, those facts don’t move the story an inch unless they are clues that they can use to build on the suspicions they have about them or tools they can use to manipulate them into doing what they want. So Julia knows that Quentin lived in a particular room in the long-deserted west wing of Collinwood and that he obsessively listened to a particular sickly little waltz on his record player. Those facts are nothing in themselves, but when she takes him to the room and plays the waltz on the record player at the end of today’s episode, we have hope that Quentin might become himself again soon.

Towards the end of the 1897 segment, Judith Collins Trask and Tim Shaw bricked the evil Gregory Trask up in Quentin’s room. In #884, we heard her telephone Tim and instruct him to remove the bricks. When Julia takes Quentin into the room today, there is no trace of bricks. Evidently Tim did a good job clearing them out.

By the time Julia became best friends with Barnabas in 1968, she was in the habit of addressing him as “Barnabas, Barnabas.” In the 1897 segment, she addressed Quentin as “Quentin, Quentin.” Now she and Barnabas are on the outs, and Quentin isn’t answering to his name no matter how often you repeat it. So she addresses her henchman Chris as “Chris, Chris.” Don Briscoe was a likable actor and Chris has his points, but the character has some weaknesses that tightly circumscribe his future on the show. I suppose the point is that Julia has a higher opinion of Chris’ potential than the other characters do, but she so frequently represents the audience’s state of knowledge that it is a bit odd she thinks he belongs in a category with those breakout stars.

I believe this episode also marks the first time Julia addresses matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard as “Liz.” She has been living in Liz’ house since the summer of 1967, so I guess it’s time she stop calling her “Mrs Stoddard.”

Episode 905: My darling now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s how you do the amnesia story.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 904: To have fun, like everybody else

Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Joan Bennett) was usually a blocking figure in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows, and when the pace of the stories picked up sufficiently that they didn’t need to slam on the brakes so often she drifted far to the margins. When she does show up, she is usually a talk-to for characters who might actually do something. The few times she has been the center of attention have been when she was so crushingly depressed she was a suicide risk. At one point she went beyond that, succumbing to a boredom so extreme that she lapsed into a catatonic state and was mistaken for dead.

Today, Liz is being atypically dynamic. She is trying to figure out what her nephew, strange and troubled boy David Collins, has been up to. Her investigations have shown her that David stole an old book from an antique shop and bought some clothes at a department store. These aren’t exactly the most thrilling discoveries of the age, especially when it appears that David has already returned the book to its rightful owners, but it represents a big step up from her usual activity level.

Liz walks in on David in his room, and finds him reading from a book. He denies that it is the book from the antique shop, but she doesn’t believe him. Later, Liz is poring over the book in her drawing room when her distant cousin Barnabas comes in. She tells him she doesn’t recognize the language or the script in which it is written, but that she has found certain blocks of text that are repeated throughout, in the manner of ritual language. She thinks it must be a religious book of some kind. Barnabas recognizes this as a remarkably intelligent observation. He offers to take the book to the antique shop himself. Liz happily accepts his offer, and goes upstairs to bed.

Liz has a dream. In the dream, David is wearing a fat suit. He takes her to a funhouse. At first the mirrors merely add to her chronic depression, but she brightens when she sees Barnabas in one of the mirrors. And when David recites a bit of doggerel- “Fat and Skinny had a race, all around the steeplechase./ Fat fell down and broke his face./ Skinny said, I won the race!” she laughs heartily. She wakes up. In her bed, she is staring into space, all jollity gone.

David’s fat suit. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Most of the dream is shot in a kaleidoscopic style, splitting the screen into many copies of the same image. Regular viewers know that Dark Shadows puts kaleidoscopic patterns on the screen when it is showing people submitting to one or another form of mind control. For example, when mad scientist Julia Hoffman hypnotizes people, we often see pictures that seem to come from inside a kaleidoscope. Liz herself asks David at the beginning of the dream if the mirrors will show her “all the people I could have been”; he says that no, “They’ll show you all the people you really are.” Since the dream is full of odd looking dolls and puppets, that suggests all the people she really is are controlled by someone other than herself. The cut from her laughing face at the end of the dream sequence to her blank expression when she wakes up would also suggest a discontinuity between the Liz who had the dream and the Liz who will rise from bed.

Over the last few weeks, the show has been developing a story about a cult devoted to mysterious supernatural beings known as the Leviathan people. The cult is secretly absorbing one person after another, enabling the Leviathans to act through them. Barnabas and David have taken turns leading the cult, and the owners of the antique shop are members of it. If Liz is no longer herself, we must conclude that she has now been coopted into the cult as well.

Liz’ daughter Carolyn works at the antique shop. Early in the episode, she met a man whom we could see only from the chest down. He was wearing a belted overcoat. In #902, we had the same view of a man wearing the same overcoat as he wandered into Liz’ house, straightened a portrait of Barnabas, hid from Carolyn, and wandered out again. Evidently this is the same man. Later, Barnabas went to the shop, and Carolyn told him she was smitten by the man and that he would be coming back when the shop closed, after 10 pm.

The man does come back as promised, but doesn’t quite make it into the shop. He is between the streetlight and the door, in a space which we must interpret as representing a sidewalk, when Barnabas runs him down with his car. Carolyn comes out of the shop and Barnabas claims that the man just darted out of nowhere, giving him no chance to stop. It is unclear when Barnabas learned to drive. When he was first on the show in April 1967, he was a vampire who had been sealed in a coffin since the 1790s. He was cured of the effects of vampirism in March 1968, and in #687 we heard about him driving. Perhaps his training in the rules of the road was irregular. Still, you would think he would have a better excuse for driving into a pedestrian than failing to expect him to be on the sidewalk.

The camera zooms in on the injured man’s face. We don’t see enough of it to be sure who it is. The closing credits tell us that “Unknown Man” is played by David Selby. It must be a goof that we don’t see much of Mr Selby’s face. Over the year he has been playing the rakish Quentin Collins, Mr Selby has become a huge breakout star, rivaling the fame Jonathan Frid has gained as Barnabas. Surely they wouldn’t put him on unless they wanted us to recognize him.

Quentin first came on the show as a ghost at the end of 1968, and found his greatest success from March to November 1969, when the show was set in the year 1897. Since the show returned to a contemporary setting, we have been sure that Quentin will be back, but we haven’t had any reason to expect him to return at any particular time. In #887, the first episode set in November 1969, we saw the back of a man prowling about the estate of Collinwood; we might have suspected he was Quentin. But he turned out to be Liz’ ex-husband Paul Stoddard, who had never before been a real character on the show and who has been unmentioned for more than two years. So when we are kept from seeing the face of another prowler, he could be anyone at all. Perhaps Frank Garner is training to be a ninja, or Ezra Hearne is having a personal crisis.

The closing credits run over this image from Liz’ dream. The dolls move while the credits are scrolling over them, the effect is hilarious. I didn’t think the dream sequence was particularly effective, but I wish every episode ended with these two figures doing their little act.

The real stars of today’s show. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 898: The keeper of the book

A cult devoted to the service of supernatural beings known as “the Leviathan people” is secretly establishing itself in and around Collinsport, Maine. Antique shop owners Megan and Philip Todd are members of the cult. Its acting leader, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, has entrusted them with several items sacred to the cult. The Todds are responsible for a scroll, a box, a book, and a baby. Now the book has gone missing, and the baby is sick. Yesterday, Barnabas responded to this situation by brainwashing Philip into killing Megan. Today, we open with Philip entering the antique shop and choking Megan.

Megan is Marie Wallace’s third character on Dark Shadows. Her first, fiancée of Frankenstein Eve, was strangled by her intended spouse Adam in #626. Her second, madwoman Jenny Collins, was strangled by her estranged husband Quentin in #748. The murder of Eve came at the end of the Monster Mash period of the show that stretched throughout most of 1968, while the murder of Jenny marked a turning point in the eight-month costume drama segment set in the year 1897. The Leviathan arc is just beginning, and Miss Wallace’s character is already being strangled by her husband. If we were hoping for fresh new story ideas, we couldn’t be more disappointed.

Until, that is, the strangulation is called off. Philip is holding Megan by the neck, reiterating that “There is no margin for error! Punishment is necessary!,” when strange and troubled boy David Collins appears on the staircase and announces “punishment is no longer necessary.” Philip releases Megan, and David informs them that he is now “the keeper of the book, and the protector of the baby.” He gives Megan and Philip medicine that will cure the baby of his illness. He tells them that if they need him, he will know and will appear.

Barnabas was a vampire when he joined the cast of characters in April 1967. As a villain he was unrivaled at giving everyone else things to do, whether as his victims, his accomplices, or his would-be destroyers. In March 1968, his curse was put into abeyance and he became human. He set out to be the good guy, but still had the personality of a metaphor for extreme selfishness. As a result, Barnabas the would-be hero created at least as many disasters as Barnabas the monster ever did. He thus remained the driving force of the show, as well as its star attraction.

While Barnabas can keep things going from day to day, Philip’s attack on Megan suggests that he cannot take the story in new directions. From episode #1, that has been David’s forte. The series began when well-meaning governess Vicki was called to Collinwood to take charge of David’s education, took its first turn towards grisly tales when David tried to murder his father, became a supernatural thriller when David’s mother the undead blonde fire witch came back for him, began its first time travel story when Barnabas was planning to kill David in November 1967, and was launched into both the “Haunting of Collinwood” that dominated the show from December 1968 through February 1969 and the 1897 segment that followed it by David’s involvement with the ghost of Quentin Collins. David was not always a highly active participant in the stories that began with him; indeed, he sometimes disappeared altogether for months at a time. But even from the outside, he is the instrument by which the basic architecture of the show is reshaped. Now that he is, apparently, the leader of the Leviathans, we can renew our hopes that something we haven’t seen before is still in store for us.

David is still in the shop when a gray-haired man enters. David greets him as “Mr Prescott,” the name by which he heard his cousin Carolyn address the man when he met her in the shop the other day. David has a smug look on his face that suggests he knows this is an alias. Indeed, we already know that the man is connected with the Leviathan cult, so the leader of the cult may well recognize him as Paul Stoddard, Carolyn’s long-missing father.

Paul asks the Todds to give a note to Carolyn. David says that he will be going home to the great house of Collinwood in a few minutes, and volunteers to take the note to her there. Paul gladly hands it to him.

At Collinwood, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman is conferring with mysterious drifter Chris Jennings. Yesterday, Jenny’s ghost appeared to Chris and told him that Quentin could help him with his big problem, which is that he is a werewolf. Jenny did not identify herself, and Chris had no clue who she was.

Julia shows him a Collins family photo album. She shows him a picture of maidservant Beth Chavez and asks if that is who he saw. He says it wasn’t, and they keep turning pages. It is interesting for regular viewers that they take a moment to put Beth’s picture on the screen and to make some remarks about her. Beth appeared several times during the “Haunting of Collinwood” segment, and was a major character during the 1897 flashback. The sight of her picture is the first reason we have had to suspect that either she or actress Terrayne Crawford will be back.

Chris and Julia look through a Collins family photo album. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Chris recognizes Jenny’s picture, Julia breaks the news to him that Jenny and Quentin were his great-grandparents, and that Quentin was the first to be afflicted with the werewolf curse. We know that Quentin and Jenny’s daughter was named Lenore, and that she was raised by a Mrs Fillmore. Chris confirms that his grandmother’s maiden name was Lenore Fillmore. Wondering how Quentin could help Chris, Julia decides they will hold a séance and contact Quentin’s spirit.

David enters, looking for Carolyn. Julia asks him to participate in the séance. He agrees, with the blandness appropriate in a house where séances have become almost routine. When Julia tells him that the spirit they are trying to reach is that of Quentin Collins, David becomes alarmed. As well he might- we left 1969 at the beginning of March, but in #839, broadcast and set in September, we saw that the haunting continued in the absence of the audience, and that Quentin’s ghost had killed David. That episode took place on the anniversary of an event in 1897 that was changed by time travelers from the 1960s, and so David came back to life and the haunting ended. But everyone at Collinwood still remembers the ten months that Quentin exercised his reign of terror, and David does not want to return to it.

Julia assures David he has nothing to be afraid of. She says that the past was changed as of September 1897/ September 1969, and that Quentin’s ghost was laid to rest forever. This doesn’t fit very well with her plan to disturb that rest, but David is still ready to go along with the plan.

When they have the séance, David goes into the trance. He speaks, not with Quentin’s voice, but with that of Jamison Collins, his own grandfather and Quentin’s favorite nephew. Jamison says that Quentin’s spirit is no longer available for personal appearances. He doesn’t know more than that, and excuses himself. When David comes to and asks what happened, Julia says she will tell him later and sends him to bed. Once he is gone, she tells Chris that she thinks Quentin may still be alive.

Quentin was a big hit when he was on the show as an unspeaking ghost during the “Haunting of Collinwood,” and became a breakout star to rival Barnabas when he was a living being during the 1897 segment. So the audience is not at all surprised that he will be coming back. But David’s behavior before, during, and after the séance is quite intriguing. He is not simply possessed by some spirit that is part of whatever it is the Leviathan cult serves. He is still David, is still afraid of Quentin’s ghost, and is still fascinated by séances. During the 1897 segment, Jamison was a living being; like David Collins, he was played by David Henesy. That Jamison can speak through his grandson and not express discomfort at the unfamiliarity of the atmosphere suggests that there are sizable expanses inside David which are still recognizably him.

There is a similar moment between Philip and Megan. She smiles at him and in a relaxed voice says she understands why he had to do what he did. Philip has no idea what she is talking about. She reminds him that he tried to strangle her earlier in the evening, and he suddenly becomes highly apologetic. She tells him he has nothing to apologize for, that it was his duty as a servant of their cause. He is still anguished about it. They share a tender embrace. Again, while the force that animates the Leviathan cult may have the final say over what Megan and Philip do, their personalities are still there, and the loving couple we met a not so long ago still exists. There is still something for us to care about concerning them.*

Paul also has a lot of activity today. He goes to the cairn in the woods that is the ceremonial center of the Leviathan cult and that only people associated with it can see. He wonders why he keeps being drawn to it. When he first returned to Collinwood in #887, he was watching when the cairn materialized in its place out of thin air. He didn’t react at all, but merely turned and continued on his stroll. That led us to believe he knew a great deal about the cult, enough that he not only expected to see this extraordinary sight, but knew he need take no action regarding it. But evidently his connection is more subtle, and he does not understand it himself.

In his hotel room, Paul goes into a trance and circles the date 4 December 1969 on his calendar. That was when the episode was first broadcast, so the original audience would have assumed he was merely circling the current date. But when it was taped, the makers of Dark Shadows had expected the episode to be shown on 3 December. In between, there had been a pre-emption when the ABC television network gave its news department the 4:00 PM timeslot to cover the end of the Apollo 12 lunar landing mission. So the intention had been that we would share Paul’s puzzlement as to what was so special about the next day.

Paul is already worked up because some unknown person left him a note at the antique shop reading “Payment Due, 4 December 1969.” By the end of the episode, he notices that a tattoo has appeared on his wrist. It is a symbol that the show refers to simply as “the Naga,” a group of intertwined snakes that represent the Leviathan cult. All of this combines to get him into quite a state.

* I should mention that Danny Horn made the same point in his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day: “And then they kiss, and the creepy thing is that I think they’re actually in there… So far, I’ve been critical of Chris Bernau, but he’s the one who pulls this moment together. As far as he’s concerned, the unpleasant incident is entirely forgotten — but when Megan brings up the fact that he was seconds away from killing her, his apology is entirely sincere.” Danny Horn, “Episode 989: Executive Child,” on Dark Shadows Every Day, 12 July 2016.

Episode 897: Restore our flesh and bones

The Trouble with David

Yesterday we saw strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy) go to a mysterious cairn in the woods, the ceremonial center of the cult of the Leviathan people, and announce that he was now one of the cult. The cairn then opened, revealing a little gap. David crawled into the gap. The gap was not quite big enough for him, so that the episode ended with an extended sequence of David Henesy wiggling his rear end at the camera while he tried to wedge himself into place.

Today we learn that the carpenters were not the only ones who haven’t caught on that Mr Henesy isn’t nine years old anymore. David has followed the gap to an underground chamber with a steaming cauldron. He takes some vegetation out of the cauldron and recites a cryptic poem, all the while staring portentiously off into space. His manner, words, and actions would be effective as part of a creepy little kid sequence, but the thirteen year old Mr Henesy looks mature enough that we just chalk him up as one more member of the Leviathan cult.

The Trouble with Chris

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard calls on drifter Chris Jennings in his cottage. They talk about someone named Sabrina who has told Carolyn that while Chris is a nice enough guy, he will, in spite of himself, kill her if she keeps hanging around him. Chris tells Carolyn that this is true and that he is “a monster.” He does not explain. She leaves, and he takes out a pistol. First-time viewers will wonder if Chris has a compulsion to fire his pistol at people. Regular viewers know that he is a werewolf, and that his particular case of lycanthropy is so advanced that he sometimes transforms even when the moon is not full. We can assume that he plans to use the pistol to put himself out of his misery.

Regular viewers also know that Chris was safely confined to a mental hospital until he checked himself out recently. When he returned to the great house of Collinwood, he told his psychiatrist, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, that he just couldn’t stand the conditions at the hospital. Since leaving the hospital means that Chris will resume killing at least one random person a month, this decision just about completely erased any sympathy we might have for him as a character. It also undercuts his motivation in this scene. If Chris really wants to stop killing, he is free to go back to the hospital at any time.

The ghost of Chris’ great-grandmother, Jenny Collins (Marie Wallace,) appears. She tells him not to commit suicide. Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897 from March to November 1969; in those days, we got to know Jenny as “Crazy Jenny,” who played nothing but one mad scene after another. She was sane and well-put-together just once, when she appeared as a ghost in #810 and #811. In this second postmortem appearance, Jenny is extra mad, wearing a disheveled wig that reaches heights few hairpieces have dared. She does not tell Chris to return to the hospital, but to find his great-grandfather, Quentin Collins. She says that she cannot help him, but Quentin can.

This confirms what the show has been hinting, that Quentin is alive. Chris doesn’t know that, nor does he know of his relationship to Quentin. He is left bewildered and helpless by Jenny’s pronouncement. His response would no doubt be more complex if he were up to date, but he has been so ineffective at managing his curse and so irresponsible generally that we can’t imagine he would do anything constructive even if he knew everything we do. The character seems to have reached a dead end.

The Trouble with Barnabas

Upset by her conversation with Chris, Carolyn goes to her distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. She enters his home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, and finds the front parlor empty. She hears Barnabas’ voice coming from behind a bookcase, repeating over and over that “There is no margin for error. Punishment is necessary.”

Longtime viewers know, not only that a room is hidden behind this bookcase, but that Carolyn knows about that room. Her friend, David’s well-meaning governess Vicki, was held prisoner there by a crazy man in December 1966, several months before Barnabas joined the show. Carolyn is moving her hands, as if she is looking for the release that makes the bookcase swing open, when Barnabas comes downstairs.

When Carolyn says that she heard his voice, Barnabas explains that he was simply keeping busy by “conducting an experiment in electronics.” The candles around the room will suffice to show that the house doesn’t have electricity, and even if Barnabas weren’t so resolutely technophobic it would still require explanation that the text he set his speakers to reproduce over and over was “There is no margin for error. Punishment is necessary.” Moreover, Carolyn knows Barnabas well, and she can’t have overlooked that he is not his usual self these days. He is distant, calm, and utterly self-possessed, a far cry from the fussy, excitable chap who so often stumbles over his words. He remains formidably well-composed as he reiterates his position that Chris is a dangerously unstable person whom Carolyn should avoid, and that she has a bright future ahead of her. He gently but firmly guides her to the front door, and she is out of the house in record time.

Carolyn does not know that Chris is the werewolf, but at least she knows that there is a werewolf. She does not know that the Leviathan cult exists, and so it is understandable that she does not suspect that Barnabas is acting as its leader. But as the story unfolds, others will no doubt catch on that something is up, and so many people have spent so much time with Barnabas that it is difficult to see how they can all fail to notice the drastic change in his personality and to connect it with the strange goings-on. Putting him in this position makes it likely that the writers will have a harder time managing the story’s pace than they would if his involvement were more subtle.

Once Carolyn has exited, Barnabas opens the bookcase and reveals Philip Todd, antique shop owner. He rewinds a reel-to-reel tape and replays “There is no margin for error. Punishment is necessary.” Philip and his wife Megan are members of the cult, entrusted with the care of many of its most sacred items. Yesterday Barnabas found out that one of these, a book, had gone missing. He summoned Philip to the cairn, and it seemed he might be about to kill Philip. But now, he sends Philip off to administer the punishment to someone else, presumably Megan.

The Trouble with Megan

Megan (Marie Wallace) has been in an extremely overwrought state ever since she found that the book was gone. Today’s episode ends with a long scene in which she is alone in the shop, feeling that someone is coming to kill her, reacting sharply to every noise.

Danny Horn devotes most of his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day to reasons why this scene does not work, among them the fact that a depiction of a person descending into madness requires that the person start off as something other than over-the-top loony. Megan has been so frenzied for the last few days that Miss Wallace has nowhere to go when she hears the ominous noises. Moreover, her first two characters on Dark Shadows, fiancée of Frankenstein Eve and Crazy Jenny, were both intense, overbearing characters who were so inflexible that they had little opportunity to respond to anything their scene partners might do. Longtime viewers therefore expect to see Miss Wallace screaming and carrying on by herself, so nothing she does here will unsettle us. They lampshade this iconography problem by showing us Crazy Jenny’s ghost today, but that doesn’t help at all.

Many fans compare this scene to episode #361. Most of #361 is devoted to a one-woman drama in which Julia is tormented by sights and sounds in her bedroom, suggesting that her mind is collapsing. I don’t think that episode is a success, but because Julia had always been in control of herself up to that point we can see what is supposed to be at stake in it. That’s more than we can say for Megan’s fearful turn.

In John and Christine Scoleri’s post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Christine points out the prominence of the taxidermied animals in the background, and speculates that the scene is an homage to The Night of the Living Dead. I wouldn’t have guessed that director Lela Swift or writer Violet Welles would have studied that film, but Christine provides screenshots from it and from the episode, and the parallels are so striking that I can’t see how she could be wrong.

Closing Miscellany

I think the tape recorder is the same one we saw in the summer of 1968, when it was part of the Frankenstein story. It also appears to be the one that parapsychologist Peter Guthrie brought to Collinwood early in 1967.

Her haunting of Chris marks Jenny’s final appearance. Miss Wallace reprised the role decades later in a couple of the Big Finish audio dramas.

During Megan’s big scene, the camera swings a bit to the left and we can see beyond the edge of the antique shop set. We get a good look at a tree that stands near the cairn in the woods. Making matters worse, when they turn the camera away from the tree they go too far right, showing a stage light on the other side.

The antique shop and the cairn. Screenshot by Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day.

As the opening credits begin to roll, the camera is pointed a bit too far to the right and a stagehand is visible, adding dry ice to the steaming cauldron in the underground chamber.

Closing credits blooper. Screenshot by Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day.

Episode 884: Departure date

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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