quentin collins – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 969: On the same side at last

Wedding Day

On Dark Shadows, weddings are usually stopped when one of the couple makes a decision in the middle of the ceremony that leads to the exhumation of an empty coffin. In #270, the first wedding followed that pattern, when instead of saying her vows matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard announced that she and her intended, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, had killed her first husband, Paul Stoddard. That led the sheriff to dig up the spot in the basement of the great house of Collinwood where Liz said Jason had buried Paul, only to discover an empty box. It turned out Paul wasn’t dead at all.

The next wedding we saw was in #397, set in the year 1796. Scion Barnabas Collins and wicked witch Angelique Bouchard managed to get through the ceremony, but before the night was out Angelique had been abducted by the late Jeremiah Collins, whom she had raised from the dead as a zombie. Jeremiah dug up his own grave, opened his empty coffin, and put Angelique in it.

In #625, well-meaning governess Vicki was supposed to marry an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff. Peter/ Jeff left the ceremony to dig up another grave, and find another empty coffin.

For sixteen weeks, Dark Shadows was dominated by an effort to take some themes from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft and build them into a story. We kept hearing about the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who were trying to retake the Earth and destroy humankind. The Leviathan material never coalesced into a story, and they gave up on it last week.

The last event in the Leviathan segment was an attempted wedding between Liz’ daughter Carolyn and someone who appears to be a very tall young man, but is in fact a shape-shifting creature from beyond space and time. When he first assumed the form of the tall young man, the creature asked people to call him Jabe. That didn’t come off, so he answers to “Jeb” instead. The Leviathan plan has always called for Jabe to join himself with Carolyn in an unholy ceremony that would cause her to become the same sort of creature he is, and last Friday they stood by an altar in the woods while Nicholas Blair, the high priest of a cult devoted to the service of the Leviathans’ project, called on Jabe to take his place behind the altar. There, Jabe deviated from the rubrics of the ceremony. He smashed a small wooden box and called for Barnabas to rescue Carolyn. The wooden box was empty, but it was not exactly a coffin- it was the matrix from which Jabe first emerged, four months ago, when he was nothing more than a whistling.

After their traditional Collinwood non-wedding in #625, Vicki and Peter/ Jeff had a second ceremony in #637. They completed it, but shortly afterward the supernatural powers that allowed Peter/ Jeff to exist in the 1960s lost their grip and he vanished into a rift in time and space. Today Jabe and Carolyn also complete a second ceremony, but it seems their marriage is approaching a similar crisis. When Jabe smashed the box, Nicholas told him that his humanoid appearance was all that was left of him, and that it was only a projection from a true form that was destroyed with the box. He could not continue to exist as Jabe for very long. As Peter/ Jeff prolonged his time in the 1960s by force of will, Jabe has prolonged his own existence beyond what Nicholas had thought possible, but returning viewers will still expect him to vanish at any moment.

Moreover, Jabe has made many powerful enemies. One of them is Angelique. She has taken a cue from George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes and plagued him with a shadow that he does not cast but that follows him about. The shadow menaces Jabe a couple of times today, and each time it prompts him to shriek to Carolyn that they must flee. Since he won’t explain to her what is going on, we can only wonder if he will meet his demise before she concludes that he is an abject lunatic and files for an annulment.

Jabe faces his dark shadow. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, Barnabas and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, are on a vampire hunt. Barnabas is a vampire himself; Angelique turned him into one when their marriage didn’t work out, Julia and another mad scientist cured him of the effects of that curse in 1968, and then Jabe placed another vampire curse on him more recently. Barnabas has bitten a woman named Megan Todd and accidentally turned her into a vampire. One of Megan’s victims, a man named Sky Rumson, tips Barnabas and Julia off that her coffin is hidden somewhere in the long-disused east wing of the great house. Barnabas conducts a search there while Julia goes with Liz to inspect the carriage house on the estate, where Jabe has been staying.

In the first months of the show, they went back and forth on whether the great house had a vacant west wing or a vacant east wing. They eventually settled on a west wing, and the west wing was an important locale at various points. Once in a while actors would slip and refer to an east wing. It was not until #648 that the show made it unequivocally clear that the house had both east and west wings, and not until #760 that we had a look inside the east wing. This is the first reference to it since then.

Barnabas is walking through a dark, dusty corridor, thinking that no one had been down it in “years.” Double doors open, and Barnabas sees a fully furnished, brightly lit room. He tries to enter, and suddenly turns into a mime struggling to escape from an invisible cage. He sees a framed photograph on a table in the room. The photograph appears to show his distant cousin Quentin sitting next to Liz’ nephew, strange and troubled boy David. It is signed “Your loving husband, Quentin.” Barnabas knows that Quentin and David have not been photographed together, and Quentin’s only marriage ended when he murdered his wife long before David was born, so neither the photograph nor the writing on it make any sense to him.

Barnabas sees Liz enter the room from a doorway on the other side. She is wearing a completely different outfit than she had on when Barnabas saw her shortly before. She does not see Barnabas or hear him, even though he is standing only a few feet away and calling out to her. She opens a closet and examines some clothes.

Julia enters, wearing a French maid outfit. She demands to know what Liz is doing. Since Barnabas knows Liz as the owner of Collinwood and Julia as a houseguest there, albeit one of unlimited tenure and an overpowering nature, her tone is as inexplicable as her attire. She orders Liz to leave the clothes alone. They argue about a person to whom they refer only as “she.” Liz says that “she” is dead, Julia insists that “she” will return. Liz wants to prepare the room for someone else’s use, Julia declares that only “she” will ever possess it.

Hoffman confronts Liz. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The doors close. Barnabas cries out to Liz and Julia. He opens the doors again, only to find that the room is entirely bare. It has no furniture, no carpeting, no lights, no decoration of any kind. It is as dark and as dusty as the rest of the east wing, and appears to have been unvisited for as long.

Barnabas returns to the main part of the house. He sees Liz and Julia returning through the front door, dressed as they had been before they left for the carriage house and talking to each other in the same relaxed, friendly manner. Flummoxed, he asks Julia if they went anywhere other than the carriage house. She says they did not. He tells her he did not find Megan’s coffin, and tries to explain what he did in fact see.

The Man Who Wasn’t There

It would seem that whatever phenomenon Barnabas is seeing when he looks into this room is going to mark the beginning of the next phase of Dark Shadows. When Jabe smashed the box, he ended the Lovecraft segment. But the show had not set up any story to follow it. For the last few days, we’ve passed the time watching him and some other characters left over from it flounder about helplessly. Peter/ Jeff’s ghost showed up and claimed to have a grudge against Jabe that dated from the 1790s. Since Jabe did not exist in those days, I suspect the tale Peter/ Jeff tells is a remnant of some story they planned long ago but never developed, with Jabe hastily put in the place of some character they projected but did not introduce.

I’m not sure what the untold story and never-introduced character were, but there may be a clue in this episode. Sky Rumson was at one point under the power of the Leviathans. Barnabas tells Sky that Jabe has smashed the box and everyone is now free of their power, which fits with what we have seen and with what Nicholas told his henchman Bruno. Sky is indeed disconnected from the Leviathans- he now figures only as Megan’s victim. But for no reason that has to do with today’s events, he denies that and says “My deal was with Mr Strak.”

In #899 and #900, there was a flashback to the year 1949. We saw that Paul Stoddard unwittingly sold his daughter Carolyn to the Leviathans that year, and that their agent was a Mr Strak. Strak was played by John Harkins, who had played a monster in several episodes not long before. The whole point of Strak as a character seemed to be that he was someone Paul could never find again, so that he was entirely helpless in the face of the deal he had struck. The casting of Hankins reinforced that for viewers who recognized him, since he was pretty obviously there to use up the last two episodes on his contract. It would seem to defeat the purpose to bring his name up again, yet Sky’s reference to Strak marks the second time we have heard his name recently. Doomed Leviathan cultist Nelle Gunston told Barnabas in #951 that Strak had recruited Bruno.

Nicholas’ association with the Leviathans is also hard to explain. He was on the show in 1968 as Angelique’s boss. At that time the show was taking a peculiar sort of Christian turn, and it was very clear that Nicholas was in the employ of Satan. Indeed, just last week he invoked Satan at the ceremony to join Carolyn and Jabe. But the Leviathans are rooted in Lovecraft’s resolutely non-Christian cosmology, and when Jabe himself performed an incantation to raise some dead men to serve him as zombies he called upon multiple “gods of the underworld,” not Satan. Moreover, we know that Nicholas was at Collinwood in 1968, and Nicholas tells Jabe that he has been confined to the underworld since then. It is therefore nonsensical when Sky treats Nicholas as his long-established supervisor in the Leviathan cult.

I suspect that Nicholas’ role, the references to Strak, and Peter/ Jeff’s complaint against Jabe are all traces of a single never-introduced character. They may have intended, in the early stages of planning the Leviathan segment, to bring in a second Leviathan, one who had been lurking on the Earth for a long time and had great powers, though he could not fill Jabe’s intended place as harbinger of the new age. This projected character would have been the main villain of the second half of the Leviathan segment, which would have involved another trip in time back to the late eighteenth century. When the ratings sagged, they often scrapped a lot of what they had written and everything they had planned to get to something fresh. Since the Leviathan segment was a flop, it certainly would not be surprising if they had chucked that new villain, along with the second half of the Leviathan segment and its time-travel story, plugging in Nicholas, the references to Strak, and Peter/Jeff’s complaint to Jabe to cover what they tore out.

Closing Miscellany

The clergyman who marries Jabe and Carolyn is called “the Reverend Brand.” The clergyman who married Barnabas and Angelique in 1796 was called “the Reverend Bland.” Those names are similar enough that I have to suppose there was some point to it. Perhaps an inside joke between writers Gordon Russell and Sam Hall.

The show has been ambiguous about the Collinses’ precise religious affiliation. In the 1790s, we saw that repressed spinster Abigail Collins was a very extreme sort of Congregationalist, but the other members of the family pointedly referred to “Cousin Abigail’s religion” as one of the things that set her apart from the rest of the family. As the name suggests, Congregationalists vary quite a bit from place to place, so the other Collinses’ differences with Abigail do not mean that they were not of that tradition in the 1790s. As upper crust New Englanders of an early vintage, they would likely have been Congregationalists at some point, though by the 1790s, they may well have been Unitarians or Presbyterians. By the 1960s they could have been just about any kind of Protestant without occasioning comment. Today, Liz mentions that the Reverend Brand has a “vestry meeting” to attend. Only Anglicans call the lay leadership of their parishes a “vestry,” and the only Anglican denomination the Collinses could plausibly have belonged to in 1970 was The Episcopal Church.

We see Jabe and Carolyn asleep in bed together on their wedding night. This is the first time we see a couple sharing a bed on Dark Shadows. What’s more, while most sleepers we have seen have been fully clothed under their bedsheets, even wearing shoes, Jabe is wearing only pajama bottoms, and those are tugged down noticeably below his waist when he first gets out of bed. You can say goodbye to the uptight Sixties, it’s the Seventies now, baby.

The Sexual Revolution reaches the Collinses. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

During the joining ceremony between Jabe and Carolyn, Bruno was in the carriage house. There was a magical room there where Jabe changed between his human form and his rugose, paleogean one. When Jabe smashed the box, Bruno saw that room suddenly engulfed in flames. Later, he and Nicholas examined the room, and could not find any sign there had ever been a fire there. Nicholas explained that the fire was a supernatural manifestation, and that what it consumed was not any of the material aspects of the room, but its character as Jabe’s changing station. But Liz tells Julia she is going to the carriage house to inspect fire damage, and when they come back they say that they have seen such damage.

Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day is a particular delight. It’s so full of spoilers about the story that begins today that I can’t say much about it. I’ll tell you it is written from the perspective of a person who would be familiar with the versions of Liz and Julia that Barnabas encounters in the east wing, but not with him. Danny is writing from an imaginary world in which actor David Selby went into politics and was elected president of the United States in 2016.

Episode 965: The charred and blackened stars

The Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods, plan to retake the Earth and destroy humankind, and their harbinger is a shape-shifting monster who has taken the form of a tall young man and asked people to call him Jabe. Their plan requires that Jabe join himself to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in an unholy ceremony that will transform Carolyn into the same kind of squamous, rugose, and paleogean creature Jabe defaults to being. Jabe has fallen in love with Carolyn, but so far from redoubling his determination to fulfill the plan his feelings have turned him against it. He wants to renounce his powers, become truly human, and make a life with Carolyn as she is. Though Jabe’s personality has been so obnoxious that even people brainwashed into supporting the Leviathans’ whole program have gotten fed up with him and become his enemies, he has somehow won Carolyn’s heart. She doesn’t know that he is a monster from beyond space and time, still less that he murdered her father and several other people. She is in love with the man he appears to be, and he wants to become that man in fact.

I first shared my thoughts about Dark Shadows online in the comments section of Danny Horn’s great blog Dark Shadows Every Day. In his post about #962, Danny identifies a major problem with the relationship between Carolyn and Jabe:

But both sides have apparently agreed to shield Carolyn from the big sinister secret, so in practice, she hasn’t had very much to do, except to fall passionately in love with Jeb, because of reasons.

As I’ve said before, I don’t know why Carolyn likes Jeb, and I’ve been scratching at that itch for a while. But today, I think I figured out the real problem with her character arc, and it’s all about the let’s-break-antiques scene.

This was Carolyn and Jeb’s first date, back in episode 940. I didn’t write about it at the time, because I had other things to say, and I didn’t realize how important it was until now.

The scene takes place in the antique shop, and it starts with Jeb gazing at her, and sighing, “I’m going to be very happy with you.”

She’s puzzled. “What made you say that?”

“Because I felt it,” he shrugs. “Haven’t you ever said or done what you felt?”

“Sometimes I do.”

“I do it all the time,” Jeb smirks, and swaggers across the room. “Everybody should. I always do what I feel. Right now, I feel like doing this.”

And then he picks up a porcelain figurine from a nearby display, and smashes it on the floor.

Carolyn is horrified, obviously. “Jeb, you shouldn’t have done that!”

He smiles. “Why not?”

“That was an antique, and it didn’t even belong to you!”

“Haven’t you ever felt like breaking something?”

She stops short. “Yes,” she says, “but…”

“Well, then, let’s see you break this.”

Then he picks up another figurine.

“Go on,” he says, offering it to her. “Break it.”

She looks into his eyes, and says, “I wish I could begin to understand you.”

“Maybe you can,” he says, “if you just free yourself. Go on. Just let it drop from your hand.”

[Smash]

He smiles, and opens a bottle of wine. She asks what he’s doing, and he says, “We’re going to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“Your liberation.”

“I don’t understand.”

He hands her the drink. “Oh, you will… soon.”

It’s a weird scene, and it should have been followed immediately by a dozen more weird scenes along the same lines. This should have been the storyline.

After all, the whole point of the Leviathan threat is that they’re going to take Carolyn, a character that we love and root for, and turn her into a hideous gargantuan, rutting with her blasphemous mate and raising a brood of ambidextrous deathstalkers.

And in the let’s-break-antiques scene, they set up the idea that Jeb is going to change Carolyn’s personality, leading her step by step into his dark world, in the service of her “liberation” from boring traditional values, like respect for other people’s ugly decor. We should have seen her going down that path, becoming more and more estranged from the family and friends who aren’t part of this nightmare death cult.

Except they didn’t. The champagne was drugged, and she blacked out, and since then, they haven’t even touched on the idea that Jeb might be leaving a stain on Carolyn’s soul.

Now, this is a show that’s explored a dozen varieties of hypnosis and possession in minute detail, so it’s not like they don’t know how to write a story like that. They just didn’t. To the extent that we believe that Carolyn loves Jeb, it’s an entirely innocent, human infatuation with a handsome stranger, who she’s unfortunately not really allowed to know very much about.

Because they can’t change Carolyn.

This is an enormous problem for the show, and it’ll be one of the key pieces to the puzzle of Who Killed Dark Shadows. There are four core family members, and they are untouchable. They don’t experience any lasting change, starting around early 1968 and continuing until the end of the show. Sure, they have moments of temporary hypnosis and possession, everybody does, but they don’t actually change.

And if Carolyn can’t change, even a little, then that means there’s no future, just a status quo that leads inexorably towards entropy, and the heat death of this fictional universe.

Danny Horn, “Episode 962: The Second Law of Thermodynamics,” posted 30 November 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

My main role in Danny’s comments was to draw connections between the episodes he discussed and the episodes from the first 42 weeks of the show, which he made a point of not discussing. In response to the above, I wrote:

It is too bad that the show got to the point where the only stories that counted were the supernatural ones. Not that those shouldn’t always have been the A stories, but there should have been room for B stories where we explore the characters’ personalities and see how humans might react if they were to find themselves living in a world like that of DARK SHADOWS.

As it turned out, it was difficult to do much with human characters even within the supernatural stories. Danny’s hypothetical series of scenes between Carolyn and Jabe where we see Carolyn being seduced to the dark side could have been very powerful if we’d been tracing Carolyn’s evolution from tempestuous, self-centered, spoiled rich girl of 1966 and 1967 to the relatively calm, responsible young woman we saw in 1968 and 1969. They could then keep us in continual suspense- would Carolyn continue to grow into a powerful matriarch, or would the shock of one otherworldly horror after another shatter all her progress and send her reeling back to her most unsympathetic moments? Since we haven’t had scenes focusing on Carolyn’s personality and relationships since Jason McGuire was on the show, and we aren’t expecting any to come ever again, hav[ing] a thread like that on the show at this point would seem as out of place as does a week spent documenting in exhaustive detail the evolution of Bruno’s attitude towards Jeb.

Comment left 29 December 2020 by “Acilius” on Danny Horn, “Episode 962: The Second Law of Thermodynamics,” posted 30 November 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

Nancy Barrett is a superb actor, and while she is on camera we believe that Carolyn loves Jabe. But she has to create this impression from the ground up every time she appears. Nothing that is happening reinforces it. Not only does her love for Jabe pop into being out of nowhere, but because she is not involved with anything he is doing it cannot motivate her to take any significant actions. Today Jabe and Carolyn stand before an altar while a high priest of the cult devoted to the Leviathans is performing the ceremony meant to unite them in horrid monstrosity. But Carolyn is there, not because of any decisions she has made or feelings she has, but because she has been hypnotized by the high priest.

I am reminded of the 2006 film Idiocracy. An average man from the early twenty first century suddenly finds himself in a future where everyone has a very low mentality. He goes to the movies and discovers that the most popular film of the era is called Ass. It is a 90 minute closeup of a pair of flatulent buttocks. When he becomes head of state, the protagonist explains that in his day there was something called a “story.” He describes a story as “a way of making you care whose ass it is and why it is farting.” That’s what the Leviathans segment lacks. The execution is good enough to make us believe that particular things are happening, but there is nothing to make us care who is making them happen or why they want them to happen.

One of the few forms of narrative that is still cultivated in the world of Idiocracy is professional wrestling, a dramatic genre in which villainous characters often have changes of heart and become heroic. This is known as the “heel-face turn” (as opposed to the “face-heel turn,” which is the opposite character development.) They have been working on Jabe’s heel-face turn for a few days. Yesterday he asked mad scientist Julia Hoffman to cure him of whatever it is that makes him revert to his monstrous form. Christopher Pennock and Grayson Hall played that scene so well that we wished we could ignore everything else in the episode and believe in it. Jabe started the episode by ordering four zombies whom he had raised from the dead to murder five people: Julia; her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins; two distant cousins of Barnabas’, Quentin Collins and Roger Collins; and Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis. Jabe told Julia he would not kill her or Barnabas if she complied with his request, but at the end of the episode he had the zombies stuff Quentin in a coffin and bury him alive. After that, we could hardly believe that Jabe had changed at all.

Today, Barnabas is at home when Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, bursts into his front parlor. She tells him she is sure Quentin is trapped somewhere and has no more than an hour to live. Barnabas has no idea how Maggie can know this, and she can’t explain it herself. The camera zooms in on a trident drawn on her hand, and regular viewers know what is going on. A while ago, Barnabas’ ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique, cast a spell on Maggie and Quentin causing them to feel an overwhelming love for each other at irregular intervals. Angelique thought this would make Barnabas unhappy, but he hasn’t noticed it, and he has so much else going on right now it seems unlikely he’d care much one way or the other if he did. The spell enables Maggie to lead Barnabas to the grave where Quentin is trapped and to tell Barnabas to dig it up. Quentin is fine when they exhume him, so if anything Barnabas should be glad of Angelique’s spell.

When Quentin comes out of the coffin, he says his only problem is that his legs hurt. Since he is 6’4″ tall and the coffin is at most 5′ long, that’s understandable. He says that Jabe told him he had something out of the ordinary in store for him. Now he knows that whatever else Jabe may be, “he’s a man of his word!” Usually David Selby’s accent raises a bit of a puzzle- why is the rakish scion of an aristocratic old New England family also an amiable West Virginian? But Mr Selby’s delivery of this line, with its note of appreciation for Jabe’s forthrightness, is so perfect that you could never wish him different in any way.

The high priest of the Leviathan cult whom we will see presiding at Jabe and Carolyn’s joining ceremony is none other than suave warlock Nicholas Blair, who was well known around the great estate of Collinwood in 1968. Nicholas finds Julia working on a chemistry experiment preparatory to her project of humanizing Jabe; he smashes her equipment and says he will let her live if she goes away and does not interfere with the Leviathans’ project.

When Nicholas calls on Carolyn to hypnotize her, she recognizes him and expresses mild surprise that he is back. When she insists on addressing him as “Mr Blair,” he tells her that her mother called him by his first name. She replies, “Well, that’s my mother’s business,” and asks him again why he is there.

Jabe visits Julia at Barnabas’ house and pleads with her to do something for him tonight. She says that even if that were possible, she would refuse to do it, since she knows that he buried Quentin alive a few hours ago. He says that she must believe that he is “a changed man” who is willing to “live and let live,” though he is not free to explain what has brought this change on. Barnabas comes downstairs and gives Jabe a dirty look.

The joining is underway at a cairn in the woods. Only people associated with the Leviathans can see the cairn. A small wooden box sits on the cairn; Jabe originally emerged from that box, four months ago, back when he was nothing more than a whistling sound. Nicholas stands to one side, obscured by branches, reciting a lot of mumbo-jumbo and waving a long rod. Jabe and Carolyn stand together on the other side. Nicholas orders Jabe to take the rod. He does. He stands behind the raised part of the cairn that serves as an altar and faces the box.

Perhaps not Carolyn’s dream wedding. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

At that moment, Jabe shouts “Now, Barnabas! Get her now, Barnabas!” Barnabas leaps from behind the foliage, grabs Carolyn by the arm, and runs off with her; Jabe brings the rod down on the box, smashing it. Nicholas exclaims “You fool, do you know what you’ve done!? Better leave now or we’ll both go up in it!” The cairn glows and collapses; Nicholas and Jabe stand together off to the side, watching. Jabe clutches himself by the middle, groans, and passes out.

The cairn’s last moment. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The pair that is actually joined by the ceremony. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Watching it this time, I was not only surprised by Jabe’s “Now, Barnabas! Get her now, Barnabas!”; I remembered being surprised by it last time we watched the show through. It really is a thrilling moment, one of many in the Leviathans segment. But since it exhausts all of the elements in that segment from which a story could have been built, and since there is absolutely no other storyline going just now, I’m afraid the comparison to Idiocracy’s movie-in-a-movie Ass has to stand.

Episode 964: Plan 9 from Down East

We are approaching the end of the sixteenth week of a segment made up of material drawn from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. Central to this is the idea of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who want to retake the Earth and eliminate humankind. There has been a lot of good stuff in these episodes, but it hasn’t come together as a unit. At this point, the narrative seems to be falling apart completely.

The harbinger of the Leviathans, who appears to be a tall man in his mid twenties named Jeb but is in fact a four-month old shape-shifting monster who would rather be called Jabe, has lost interest in the plan and wishes he could be a real boy. Jabe has alienated virtually everyone with whom he has come into contact, including people who were under heavy mind-control meant to turn them into his slaves, and has been reduced to raising four recently deceased men to serve him as zombies.

Yesterday, he ordered the zombies to kill five of his enemies. The targets he listed were mad scientist Julia Hoffman, vampire Barnabas Collins, Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis, and Barnabas’ distant cousins Roger Collins and Quentin Collins. The zombies have abducted Julia and brought her to Jabe’s house. She is welcomed there by a man named Sky Rumson. Sky is not a zombie, but may as well be for all the skill Geoffrey Scott brings to the role. When Scott recites his dialogue, you get the impression that he is telling you what an actor would say had they cast one in the part. Grayson Hall could fill any stage without support, making Julia’s scene with Sky relatively painless, but if it was meant to have any significance the audience will never know what that was.

Sky and a zombie force Julia into the back room of the house, where Jabe is in the squamous, rugose, and paleogean form of the true Leviathan. She is terrified by the sight. Jabe resumes his human shape. He and Julia go back to the living room, where he confides in her that he doesn’t want to take his Leviathan form ever again. He wants to renounce his powers and become human. He knows that Julia is giving Barnabas treatments to put his vampirism into remission, and that she succeeded with such treatments when Barnabas was under a different vampire curse in 1968. He asks her to help him rid himself of his Leviathan side. She is unsure she will be able to do so, but can’t resist the challenge. By the end of the scene, she is figuring out what tests she will have to run to diagnose the biochemical basis of Jabe’s condition.

Christopher Pennock really was a fine actor, and he is outstanding in this scene. He sounds like a deeply lonely, helplessly confused young boy who can’t figure out how to overcome the consequences of his own abuse of the people around him. Jabe’s request for Julia’s help and his agreement to lay off Barnabas as the price for it doesn’t fit with the orders he gave the zombies yesterday, the actions he takes later today, or anything else in the Leviathan story, and is a sign that the plot is falling apart faster than the writers can patch it up. But he and Hall are so splendid in showing Jabe’s neediness and Julia’s response to it that it doesn’t matter.

Meanwhile, Sky is at the great house of Collinwood, looking for Jabe’s foster mother-turned-makeout partner Megan Todd (it was 1970, everyone took Freud very seriously.) He meets Roger and Quentin there. They hold him at sword point until he tells them where Julia is and how to get past the zombies. To the extent that there is a reason for Sky to be on the show, it is to illustrate how total the control is the Leviathans have over the minds of the people they have co-opted, so when he gives in so quickly to Quentin’s threat to give him a scar (not even to kill him, just to compromise his potential as a model for deodorant ads) he dissolves the last prospect that the Leviathans themselves will be a danger we can care about.

Quentin goes off to rescue Julia, and Roger assumes responsibility for holding the sword. He is momentarily distracted when he sees Megan in the window, and Sky takes advantage, disarming Roger and running out of the house. Outside, he meets Megan and tells her that Jabe is upset with her for some reason. She asks if he is afraid of her. He is puzzled by the question, and tells her she is very beautiful. She invites him to look at her. As he does, she opens her mouth, revealing vampire’s fangs. She bites him.

Megan finds breakfast. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin arrives at Jabe’s house. Jabe is surprised to see him, but not surprised Sky was too chicken to keep any of his secrets. He orders the zombies to seize Quentin. The tall, portly, shaven headed zombie, who wears a mustache that keeps him from being mistaken for Tor Johnson in Plan 9 from Outer Space, slaps Quentin in the face a single time. With this, Quentin instantly loses consciousness. Yesterday, other zombies slapped Julia and Roger in the face, each a single time, and each of them instantly lost consciousness as well. Great ones with slaps, the zombies.

Jabe instructs the zombies to stuff Quentin into a coffin that is about three feet too short for him, and then has them carry it all the way to the cemetery. He has them bury Quentin in a grave that one of them had recently vacated. I suppose real-estate flipping has been interesting to TV viewers for longer than I had thought.

There is a famous goof in today’s episode. When Quentin grabs the sword out of its display on the wall of the Collinwood drawing room*, the lamp underneath it falls off the table and smashes on the floor. You know this wasn’t supposed to happen because it takes place out of frame and you can hear the stagehands sweeping the floor while Sky is pinned to the wall. Also, Dan Curtis was way too tight with a buck to break a lamp for the sake of a scene that’s mainly about a character as minor as Sky Rumson. It’s a shame they couldn’t have pulled the camera back and shown the lamp shattering, it would have been perfectly suited to the moment. And if they had to sweep up the wreckage right then, well, it would have been hilarious if housekeeper Mrs Johnson had come in with her broom and dustpan, taken care of the mess, and left without a word about what Quentin and Roger were doing to Sky.

A fine lamp about to meet its doom. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

*Something he first did in #703, when he and Barnabas first met. He knocked a lamp over then, too.

Episode 962: So many ways to lose people

The chief villain on Dark Shadows at the moment is a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time who has decided the only shape he is interested in assuming is that of a tall young man. When he first appeared in this form, the monster asked people to “Call me Jabe.” Jabe is supposed to seize control of the Earth and eradicate the human race, but he couldn’t even get people to comply with this simple request. He’s been answering to “Jeb” for weeks now.

Several of Jabe’s followers, people who were completely down with the part about exterminating all humans, have found that his personality is just too much to put up with. Some of these are trying to destroy him. One of Jabe’s followers-turned-aspiring-assassins is a crazed sadist known only as Bruno. Yesterday, Bruno trapped Jabe with a werewolf, a creature to whom Jabe is vulnerable. Jabe escapes from the werewolf and confronts Bruno about his attempt to murder him.

Jabe is unconvinced by Bruno’s paper-thin excuses, but is shocked when Bruno tells him that Megan Todd, who was once Jabe’s foster mother and his most devoted follower, has been bitten by vampire Barnabas Collins and is now helping Barnabas in his own battle against Jabe. When Jabe finds a sleeping Megan calling out for Barnabas to summon her and sees the bite marks on her neck, he blames himself. Barnabas, too, used to be one of Jabe’s followers, and when he turned against him Jabe made him a vampire. He refuses to let Bruno kill Megan, and instead puts him in charge of keeping her away from Barnabas.

Jabe puts Bruno in charge of Megan. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Regular viewers would likely not have been surprised that Jabe survived yesterday’s closing cliffhanger- once he is gone, the current story will end, and they don’t yet have anything ready to go when that happens. But we would have expected Jabe to kill Bruno. That he not only does not do this, but keeps him around, shows just how precarious Jabe’s position has become. He is surrounded by enemies, many of whom know all of his secrets, and several of whom have supernatural powers. His grip on his few remaining allies is uncertain, and he does not seem to have the tactical sense to use his own powers effectively. So the writers have to slow the story way down to keep from running out of road.

Meanwhile, the werewolf is prowling through the woods. He meets his great-grandfather, Quentin Collins. It was a curse Quentin brought on himself that made him and his male descendants werewolves. The same magic spell that put Quentin’s own lycanthropy into remission immunized him against aging. The werewolf recognizes Quentin as one of his own kind and won’t attack him. When the sun comes up, the werewolf collapses and reverts to the form of Chris Jennings, who resembles his great-grandfather in that each of them is twenty-nine years old.

Quentin tells Chris that he wants to help him; Chris says that he ought to, since it’s his fault that he’s a werewolf. Quentin doesn’t have anything to say to that, nor is he willing to give Chris the help he asks for, which is immediate death. He asks Chris what he remembers; he says that the night before, Bruno was holding him prisoner, aided by the reanimated corpse of Sheriff Davenport. Chris wonders if he killed Bruno.

Quentin and Chris go to the old crypt where Bruno and Zombie Davenport had kept Chris. They find the shredded remains of Davenport’s defiled corpse, but no trace of Bruno. Quentin tells Chris that he didn’t kill any living person, that he only returned to death something that had already died, and rightly so. He advises Chris to avoid zombies from now on. When we heard Quentin offer this great-grandfatherly guidance, Mrs Acilius laughed out loud- what does Quentin think, that Chris spends his nights hanging out at the zombie bar?

It turns out Chris will have more trouble following great-granddad’s counsel than he might have thought. At the end, Jabe stands in a cemetery, by a row of four fresh graves of men each of whom died in his thirties, and prays to the “god of the Underworld” to raise them so that he can use them to kill five other people and send their souls his way forever. Whichever god he reaches apparently likes the terms of this deal, because a hand pops up through the dirt.

This post is something of a private milestone for me. I was inspired to blog about Dark Shadows by Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day. As the title would suggest, Danny’s original idea was to post about an episode a day, but as he went his posts got to be more and more ambitious and less and less frequent. He posted a review of #1170 in October 2019, then gave up altogether for several months, not posting again until July 2020. Danny started with #210; since the makers of the show skipped some episode numbers, #1170 was the 946th episode he had covered. I started at the beginning, so #962 is my 947th episode.

My project is in no way comparable to Danny’s. I have his blog to consult, as well as other fine sites, especially John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die, while he was usually the first to review the episodes he dealt with. And my posts are nothing like as ambitious as were his. So, if I have only a few stray remarks to make about an episode, I just make those remarks and call it a day. In that situation, Danny would write a detailed review of a novel or a board game or something else related to the show, or analyze an historical event connected with it, or compose a stunning prose poem, then append his remarks about the episode as a postscript. But modest as my aims are, I’m still haunted by the fear that I’ll run out of steam, so it’s reassuring to me that I’ve maintained daily posting beyond the point at which he took his long hiatus.

I have my eye on a couple of upcoming Danny-derived benchmarks. He posted about a total of 1018 episodes; I’ll reach that number with #1033 on 10 June. And of course #1170 itself has a cursed aura, I’ll be glad to get beyond that. Once I do, I’ll probably be counting down by percentages until I reach the end of the series with #1245 in April 2027.

After April 2027, I plan to review the feature film Night of Dark Shadows* in a post to go up on the 56th anniversary of its release, 3 August 2027, and Tim Burton’s 2012 film Dark Shadows at some point thereafter. I’m leaning towards reviewing the series that aired on NBC in primetime in 1991 and the pilot that Dan Curtis shot for the WB network in 2004. If I do write about those things, the posts will go up sometime after the one about Night of Dark Shadows and before the one about the Tim Burton movie. I probably won’t cover any of the novels or comic books or newspaper strips or other spinoffs. I did review Dan Curtis’ TV movie of Frankenstein on a preemption day in 2024, and if I review any of his other standalone adaptations of material that Dark Shadows mined it will be on upcoming preemption days, not as posts that appear after I’ve finished the original series.

*House of Dark Shadows was released 28 October 1970, while the show was still on. My post about it should go live on 28 October 2026, the same day as the one about #1132.

Episode 958: A house of lies

The residents of the estate of Collinwood are divided. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, her nephew David Collins, and their distant cousin, eleven year old Amy Jennings, have been brought under the power of the Leviathan People, an unseen race of Elder Gods who mean to retake the Earth from humankind. Liz has invited the harbinger of the Leviathans, a shape-shifting monster who in his human form is a young man who once revealed he wanted to be known as Jabe, to live in the carriage house on the estate. Jabe’s onetime foster mother Megan Todd is living as Liz’ guest in the main house.

The main house is also home to mad scientist Julia Hoffman and governess Maggie Evans, who have ranged themselves against the Leviathans. Yesterday Jabe was about to kill Maggie when he saw something outside Collinwood’s Tower Room that scared him off. Wanting to know what it was Jabe was afraid of, Julia went to the scene to investigate, and found Jabe lurking there. Before he could attack her, the mysterious presence returned, and Jabe ran off. Today, we see the presence- it is a dark shadow. It makes perfect sense that a reminder of which show he is on would terrify Jabe. The writers keep painting his character into a corner so that he won’t be able to continue once the current storyline ends.

Julia sees a dark shadow. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The shadow appears to be that of a slim man wearing a comically oversized hat and a cape. The only character who dressed that way was painter Charles Delaware Tate. Tate was killed by a werewolf in #922. It seems unlikely that Tate’s ghost would haunt Jabe, since werewolves and Leviathans are each other’s implacable enemies. Granted, the Leviathans are also hostile to humans, but Tate was always something of a post-humanist himself. For a while he had magical powers that he used to blur the boundary between humans and their portraits, and in his later years he tried to replace himself with a robot. Besides, Tate was always such a jerk to every individual person he met that it is difficult to imagine him taking much trouble to defend humanity in the mass.

Jabe has murdered three people so far. He raised one of these, Sheriff Davenport, from the dead. He made Davenport into a peculiarly garrulous zombie and forced him to do his bidding. I don’t know of any stories where the same person manifests after death as both a zombie and a ghost, but then I’m no expert on tales of the supernatural. So I guess the shade could be Davenport’s.

Jabe also murdered Paul Stoddard, Liz’ ex-husband and father of her daughter Carolyn. Last week Jabe was afraid Paul’s ghost would come after him, so he dug his body up and burned it. Today we hear that the village of Collinsport is buzzing with talk about the fact that Paul’s body went missing. So Paul is a possibility. The third victim, Maine state police investigator Lawrence Guthrie, was a one-time character. It would seem a bit late to start developing him now.

At the end of the episode, the ghost appears to David in the form of a man hanging from the ceiling. We get a clear look at the ghost’s trouser legs and boots. This rules out, not only Davenport, Paul, and Guthrie, but almost all characters from the parts of Dark Shadows set in contemporary times. The only women who have worn trousers were Carolyn, in a couple of 1966 episodes, and Megan. Both of them are still alive. The only man who wore boots was motorcycle enthusiast Buzz, who dated Carolyn for a little while in 1967. Those longtime viewers who remember Buzz might be amused if it were to turn out that he was the Leviathans’ mightiest foe.

“If you FEEL it… Sit it!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This episode also features Roger Collins, who is Liz’ brother and David’s father. Roger meets his distant cousin Quentin Collins. From December 1968 to September 1969, Quentin was a ghost who haunted Collinwood, rendering the place uninhabitable and killing David. There was a time travel story going on for most of that period, and in September 1897 events played out differently than they had the first time through. The result of that difference was that Quentin did not die. The haunting broke and David came back to life on the anniversary of the change. Some magic spells cast on him have kept Quentin alive and apparently twenty nine years old ever since, but the haunting still happened and Roger’s memory of it gives him a shock when he sees the living Quentin. He quickly composes himself; he has already heard of Quentin’s claim to be his own great-grandson, and accepts it cheerfully.

Amy is Quentin’s actual great-granddaughter, and she is not so easily persuaded. Both as a living being in the 1890s and as a ghost in the 1960s, Quentin was obsessed with a phonograph recording of a sickly little waltz and inflicted endless replays of it on the residents of Collinwood. While Quentin and Roger are chatting in the drawing room, she starts playing the waltz. Amy asks Quentin if he likes it. He zones out, and after a long interval declares that he likes it very much. She says she is going to play it again, and Roger forbids her.

Amy says she doesn’t have anything to do. Roger puts his hand on her shoulder, tells her that the house is full of good books, and marches her off to find one. I had remembered this scene with David as the one Roger takes to the library, and moreover had remembered it as their last scene together. When the show started, Roger was a villain and David was a budding psychopath, so it would have been touching to end their story on this note of loving paternal firmness.

Later, Amy goes upstairs to David’s room. David has for several weeks been using a wheelchair because of a broken leg, but it hasn’t occurred to anyone to move him to one of the vacant rooms on the first floor. She tells him about Quentin, and he tells her to get the sacred book of the Leviathan people from its hiding place on the top shelf of his bookcase. They search the book for guidance. Just as they find something promising, they feel a ghostly chill. The book flies off David’s desk and bursts into flames. The ghost has done its work; David observes that “The chill is gone.”

David keeps ordering Amy around the whole time they are on together. This is quite a change from the beginning of Amy’s time on the show, in the early days of Quentin’s haunting, when they bickered like an old married couple and took turns being the one in charge. Since then, Amy has been in steep decline, absent from the cast and unmentioned for months at a time. Indeed, today is the last episode in which Denise Nickerson will appear only as Amy Jennings. Amy will make two brief appearances in upcoming episodes where Nickerson plays another character, but this is the end of the road for her as a significant presence on the show. She started so strong and Nickerson was so talented that it is very sad to see her go like this. The chill is gone, baby.

Roger doesn’t know about the Leviathans, but he has caught on that something very strange is going on. He goes to the Old House on the estate, home to his distant cousin Barnabas Collins. He finds Quentin there. Quentin tells him Barnabas is not in. Roger tells Quentin about the strange goings-on, and Quentin says that he can explain them. He warns Roger that the knowledge he is about to impart to him will put him in deadly jeopardy.

Once Roger has heard the story, he says he wants to take David and flee. Quentin tells him this will not work- the Leviathans will kill both of them if they try it. All they can do is fight them. Roger is unconvinced of their chances, but does not have a better idea.

Roger was one of the last characters to hold out against the evidence that the show had become a supernatural thriller. Even after he was forced to accept that he was up against uncanny forces of evil, he would snap back to “Surely there is a logical explanation!” mode the minute the danger had passed. That changed when Quentin’s ghost forced the family out of the main house in #694. When he accepts Quentin’s story today, we can see that it will no longer be Roger’s function to slow the story down. That is good news and bad news- Dark Shadows long had too many speed bumps, and like all of Louis Edmonds’ characters, Roger is too delightful to be related to such a lowly rank. But not since he ceased to be a villain in #201 have the writers come up with anything else for him to do. We may be losing Roger altogether before much longer.

Episode 955: What I was and what I always shall be

What a First-Time Viewer Might See

A woman is in a bedroom, packing a bag. A man bursts in with a flaming torch. She exclaims:

Sky, what are you doing?

SKY: I wanted it to work out. I really wanted you to be with me, and I’m sorry you can’t. Goodbye Angelique.

Sky then charges at Angelique with the torch, and we break for the opening title. When we return, Angelique is dodging the flames and they are quarreling. She takes a statuette and tightens a cloth around its neck. Sky begins choking. Angelique orders him to put the torch in the fireplace. He does. She continues tightening the cloth, and he collapses. The actions combine with the eerie music on the soundtrack to tell us that Angelique is casting a spell on Sky. Angelique kneels over Sky and talks about how their marriage was all wrong from the beginning. She takes on a calm tone while allowing that they are equally at fault really; “We both kept from each other our darkest secrets.” She tells Sky she really did love him and wishes it could have worked out between them. All the while she delivers this speech in her mature, thoughtful voice, she is pulling the cloth ever tighter, apparently strangling Sky to death.

We cut to a terrace, where a sinister looking man is silently calling for someone named Maggie to come to him. A young woman comes and tells the sinister looking man she felt she had to come to that spot. She is Maggie, and she calls him Barnabas. She says he doesn’t look like himself, and asks if he has been ill. He is distressed at her questions. She says that sometimes he seems very warm, and other times it seems she doesn’t know him at all. He gives her a ring, and tells her it is very dear to him and a token of their deep friendship. They embrace. He looks at her neck and opens his mouth. His canines are unusually long. A young man calls out a sharp “Excuse me!”

The young man marches up, addresses Maggie as “Miss Evans,” and apologizes for interrupting the moment. He insists on talking with Barnabas alone. When Maggie Evans has left them, the young man sternly observes that “I don’t have to ask what would have happened if I hadn’t arrived when I did.” He tells Barnabas that he must stay away from Maggie, because “In your present state you can only hurt her, you know that.” He says that it is almost sunup. Because someone named “Julia” has been unable to locate someone named “Willie,” he will accompany Barnabas home and will spend the day there.

We cut to the young man dozing in a chair. He is awakened by a knock at the door. He answers it, and finds Angelique. He reacts to the sight of her with shock. She greets him with “Well, don’t just stand there, Quentin. Kiss me.” After a commercial break, she repeats the command. Quentin gives a tiny smooch to a spot of air a few inches in front of Angelique’s lips, prompting her to remark that “You never meant it before, but you used to do a lot better than that.”

Angelique tells Quentin that since they last saw each other, “We’re both a great deal older, and I hope one of us at least is wiser.” Neither of them looks to be much more than 30, so one might assume that by “a great deal older” she means that they are in very different stages of life than they were in the few years of their separation. Quentin tells Angelique that “Barnabas said you hadn’t grown any older, and he was right.” She responds that he also looks exactly the same as when last they met. Since we saw in the first scene that Angelique has the power to cast magic spells, this exchange raises the possibility that they may be much older than they look.

Quentin wonders why Angelique has come back. She says “Oh, Quentin, don’t look so apprehensive. Actually, I came here hoping that I’d be able to see Barnabas, that I’d be in time, but obviously, I’m not.” Quentin guardedly asks “What do you mean obviously?” She says that she knows what has happened. Barnabas went to her house the previous evening and told her that her husband had betrayed him to someone called “Jeb Hawkes.”

Quentin is startled to hear this about Sky. Angelique explains. “Barnabas has told you all about the Leviathans, hasn’t he?… Sky was one of them, before I met him. I left him tonight and I’m never going back to him.” Whatever the Leviathans are, it seems genuinely to sadden Quentin that Angelique found out she had unknowingly married one. He asks if there is anything he can do to help her.

Angelique tells him there is nothing he can do. She goes on to explain: “The truth is my interest in you in the past was never more than a device intended to upset Barnabas. I was very good at devices, always have been. Perhaps, in spite of my feelings for Sky, Barnabas has always been my one true love.” Since Quentin was so unhappy to see Angelique and she told him that his kisses were never sincere, it is not too surprising that this confession does not seem to wound his ego in any way. He tells her that he is sorry it is too late for her to see Barnabas, and he sounds like he means it. He is quick to agree when she says she wants to spend the day in the house, and he suggests she take a nap in an upstairs bedroom.

Angelique says that “It feels good to be back in this house.” She reminisces about a time when she lived there and was happy. She says “I’ll sleep in Ang-… I’ll sleep in Josette’s room.” It sounds like the name she checked herself partway through saying was her own. Since she did live there, it would make sense that there would be a room that others would call “Angelique’s room,” but she does not refer to herself in the third person at any other point in the episode, so we are left wondering if the actress just slipped.

The next scene takes place in the same room. Again Quentin is by himself, this time reading the newspaper. Again he is disturbed by a knock on the front door. He gets up, mutters “All right,” and opens it. To our surprise, he finds Sky. It had looked like Angelique killed Sky in the first act, but here he is, without so much as a frog in his throat to show that he was strangled nearly to death this morning.

Sky tells Quentin that he believes his wife is in the house, and asks if he may come in. Quentin says that he would of course let him in if his wife were there, and before he can deny that she is, Angelique comes downstairs. Quentin asks Angelique if she wants him to stay; she says he can go.

Sky tells Angelique that he has spent the day with someone named “Nicholas Blair.” This Nicholas told him all of Angelique’s secrets. Angelique says Nicholas would have done better to tell Sky about her “before you almost got yourself killed.” Sky ignores this and says that things haven’t really changed between them- he still loves her. She points out that just a few hours ago, she had to choke him out to stop him killing her, not a common event in happy marriages. He says that Nicholas has agreed to let them live together if “you become one of us.” Evidently Nicholas, too, is a “Leviathan,” and is inviting Angelique to become one. She rejects this, saying that she wants nothing to do with Nicholas or the Leviathans and would be interested in Sky only if he broke free of them. They part.

Barnabas enters, a tense expression on his face. He tells Angelique that Quentin told him she was there. Angelique praises Quentin for his kindness and understanding and tells Barnabas that he was right about everything. Calling herself a fool, she says that what has happened to him is her fault. She thought she could trust Sky with Barnabas’ secret, and it was Sky’s betrayal that brought his current misfortune upon Barnabas.

Barnabas relaxes, and tells Angelique that she didn’t hurt him deliberately. She concedes this point, but says that she did do so “the first time.” He says that was long ago and is best forgotten. She embraces him, then says that it is “ironic, how it happened in the same identical way.” The more she talks about whatever it is she is referring to, the more visibly uncomfortable Barnabas grows. Finally she says that maybe this means that “we could become closer friends than we were before… Perhaps it means that we can start again. Start at the beginning as we did the first time.” That’s too much for him, and he turns away from her. She keeps going on about how they are “both outcasts,” and he looks like he wants to run screaming into the night.

She mentions Nicholas, and suddenly Barnabas’ eyes are fixed on her again. She hadn’t known he hadn’t known Nicholas was involved. He declares that he must tell Maggie that Nicholas has returned, because when Nicholas was around before he tried to kill Maggie. Barnabas tells Angelique to wait for him, and rushes out to tell Maggie about the new danger she is in. Angelique gives snippy responses to each mention of Maggie’s name, and looks jealous when Barnabas leaves.

Back on the terrace, Barnabas tells Maggie about Nicholas in a quiet, urgent voice. She assures him she knows how to take care of herself. He tells her that “you mean far too much to me” for him to be happy when she is in the kind of danger Nicholas represents. We see Angelique eavesdropping from the shadows, fuming.

In the next scene, Angelique is still on the terrace, still eavesdropping, but Maggie is inside the house with Quentin. They address each other as “Miss Evans” and “Mr Collins.” Quentin Collins is urging Maggie to stay away from Barnabas “for your own good and for his.” He tells her that “the people he was involved with” are “out to kill him,” and that “if they know you are seeing him, they may do it through you,” by using her as the bait for a trap. Maggie will not agree to stop seeing Barnabas.

At this confirmation that Maggie and Barnabas have been “seeing each other,” Angelique turns to the camera. “You asked if there was any way you could help me, Quentin. Well, there is. Only, you’ll never be aware of it. I am what I was and what I shall always be. I call upon the powers of darkness to help me once again. Make a flame where there was no flame before and let that flame transmit the power of love to those who look into it.” The fireplace in the room where Maggie and Quentin are talking to each other flares up and they look into it. Angelique does some more spellcasting, and all of a sudden Maggie and Quentin are calling each other by their first names, embracing, and talking about their mad love for each other. They look at their hands and notice each of them now sports a trident-shaped symbol that had not been there before.

What a Longtime Viewer Might See

Barnabas’ trouble, unspecified in today’s dialogue, is that the Leviathans have turned him back into what he was from the 1790s until March 1968, a vampire. Barnabas was one of the pop culture crazes of the 1960s, and Dark Shadows was known to millions who never saw a second of the show as the soap opera with a vampire. So even first time viewers were unlikely to need an explanation. But not mentioning it will bring fond memories back for some longtime fans, since Barnabas had been on the show for 40 weeks before the word “vampire” was uttered.

Maggie is the governess to the children at the great house of Collinwood. In 1967, Barnabas abducted her, tortured her, and tried to erase her personality and replace it with that of his lost love Josette. Her memory of that experience has been wiped several times, once by Nicholas, and now she thinks Barnabas is just peachy. They’ve been getting very cozy for the last several weeks. The ring that he gives her today is Josette’s.

Maggie wearing Josette’s ring. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Considering their past, it’s pretty weird Barnabas has a shot with Maggie, but it wouldn’t be any less weird if Angelique had a shot with Barnabas. Not only did she kill him and raise him from the dead as a vampire, she was also responsible for the deaths of the people he cared most about, including Josette, his mother, and his little sister. Her approach to him today reminds us that they have so much in common that it often seems as if Barnabas were not only cursed by Angelique, but possessed by her.

Maggie’s predecessor as governess was the well-meaning Victoria Winters. Vicki was Dark Shadows‘ original audience identification character, and drove most of the action in the 42 weeks before Barnabas debuted in April 1967. When Barnabas replaced Vicki as the show’s big attraction, she kept putting herself in situations where it would be difficult for him not to bite her. It was as if Vicki knew that she was a character on a show of which Barnabas was the star, and she was working to establish herself in the A story. The terrace set made its first appearance in one of those situations, in #299. Vicki hugs Barnabas and moves her neck as close as she can get it to his fangs, before a friend shows up and interrupts him, pushing Vicki back out of the plot. Quentin’s interruption brings that scene back to the minds of those who saw that episode.

Angelique and Quentin got to know each other when Barnabas had traveled back in time to 1897 and the show was, for eight months in 1969, a costume drama set in that year. By the end of that period, she was as monomaniacally fixated on Quentin as she had previously been on Barnabas. She didn’t even care that Barnabas was off chasing another woman. So we might wonder if she is putting on a brave face when she tells Quentin that she merely used him as a means of getting Barnabas’ attention.

From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. That segment introduced Angelique as the witch who first made Barnabas a vampire. The spell she casts on Maggie and Quentin today is identical to one she cast on Josette and Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah in 1795, right down to the tridents on their hands. Since Maggie and Josette are both played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, the connection will be hard for longtime viewers to miss.

First time viewers might be puzzled by Maggie and Quentin’s protestations that their attraction to one another does not make sense. Even if Maggie has been “seeing” Barnabas, she and Quentin are such a gorgeous pair of young people that it would be weird if they didn’t get together sooner or later. But those who saw #691 will remember that at that point, Quentin was a ghost who tried to strangle Maggie. During the 1897 storyline, history was changed so that Quentin didn’t die, but after the manner of time on Dark Shadows that difference only took effect on the anniversary of the event. The haunting still took place, and Maggie and the others affected by it remember vividly what Quentin’s ghost did.

Episode 951: Do something with the body

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has fallen afoul of a shape-shifting monster from beyond time and space who once hoped people would call him “Jabe.” The monster, who has settled for the name “Jeb,” turns Barnabas back into what he was from the 1790s until 1968, a vampire.

Re-vamped, Barnabas suddenly gets a lot of gray in his hair and a much darker complexion. Makeup artist Vince Loscalzo deserves a lot of credit for these bits of color, they are placed perfectly to emphasize the look of anguish as Barnabas realizes what has happened to him and struggles to resist his urges. The actors’ faces were the medium of Loscalzo’s art, and he outdid himself with these complements to Jonathan Frid’s face.

People talk endlessly about the heroic makeup work Dick Smith did with Jonathan Frid one week in October 1967 and again on a feature film, but Vince Loscalzo did great stuff like this day in and day out for years. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We see Barnabas sitting at a table in The Blue Whale, the tavern in the village of Collinsport. He is the only patron in the room. He has a glass of reddish liquid in front of him, and the bartender is moving around the room. The bartender looks at Barnabas, as if to ask, “How do you like your glass of AB negative, Mr Collins?” But he turns away and moves on.

A young woman enters. Barnabas invites her to join him at his table. He sees that she is wearing a pendant that identifies her as a member of the secret cult that serves Jabe and other creatures who intend to seize control of the Earth, supplanting humankind. Barnabas introduces himself, and says that he was the one who made it possible for Jabe to come to life. This is true, but it is also true that he has become disaffected from the cult. Even after Jabe turned him back into a vampire, Barnabas is still determined to thwart it.

The young woman introduces herself as Nelle Gunston, who was recruited into the cult while living a dreary life with her parents in Virginia. Nelle tells Barnabas that everything has changed for her since she joined the cult. She says that she will gladly do anything she can to advance its objectives, including murder. They have this conversation in nice loud voices while the bartender is nearby.

Barnabas’ friends, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and recovering werewolf Quentin Collins, enter. He introduces them to Nelle, then explains to them that he and Nelle have a private matter to discuss. Quentin and Julia go to the bar, where Quentin orders brandies. They talk about Nelle’s pendant and their fear that Barnabas is falling back under the power of the cult while the bartender is in their space serving them drinks. Evidently they’ve learned to rely on his discretion. They are still deep in conversation when Barnabas leaves with Nelle.

Barnabas takes Nelle back to his place on the pretext that Jabe will meet them there. She asks him why it is so dark in there; he asks her how she got into the cult. She catches on that Jabe is not coming and that Barnabas is not loyal to him. She draws a knife and is about to stab Barnabas when he bares his fangs to her.

Quentin and Julia let themselves into Barnabas’ house. They find Nelle dead on the floor and Barnabas wallowing in self-pity next to her. Julia takes a second look at Nelle and sees the puncture wounds on her neck. She tells Barnabas she will renew the treatments that first put his vampirism into remission two years before; he says there is something else he has to do first. After he rushes out, Quentin and Julia talk about how they will hide Nelle’s body.

Nelle was the perfect victim for Barnabas- no one in town knew her, no one expected her to come, no one will notice she is missing. And he is determined to weaken the cult, so reducing its numbers by one fits his goals.

Barnabas goes to the antique shop in the village. Jabe is in an upstairs room; Barnabas is convinced that Jabe can assume his true form and lay it down only in that room. We saw him do that in a house on an island many miles away in #946, and he told Barnabas that he had done so in #947, but apparently that doesn’t count, somehow. Jabe is far more powerful in his true form than he is when he is man-shaped, but he cannot mingle with humans in that form. So Barnabas believes that he will limit Jabe’s options if he destroys the room. He pours gasoline all around the first floor of the shop and sets a match to it.

Nelle is played by Elizabeth Eis, in her first appearance on Dark Shadows. They say that the first thing actors have to do to work effectively is to pay attention to each other. Eis shows how far this can take you. She listens ravenously to everything Frid says and never takes her eyes off him. The script doesn’t give her a huge amount to work with, but simply by giving her scene partner her total attention she creates a sensational performance. The producers noticed; she will be back later this year in two quite different roles.

This episode is the last time we see either the Blue Whale or Bob O’Connell as the Bartender. The Blue Whale was an important part of the show from its debut in June 1966 until the first costume drama insert began in November 1967. O’Connell appeared as the Bartender in 60 episodes (three of them as other bartenders in other periods of history) and had speaking parts in 6. It’s too bad he doesn’t get to say anything today, but at least he is in the closing credits.

Hail and farewell to Bob the Bartender, the jukebox, and the tavern. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 950: Barnabas, Quentin, and the Small Wooden Box

The Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods, are planning to retake the Earth from humankind. Step one in their plan was to bring old world gentleman Barnabas Collins under their sway and make him the leader of a secret cult headquartered in the village of Collinsport, Maine. Step two was to bring a shape-shifting monster from beyond time and space to life and put him up in a room above an antique shop in the village. Step three is to get heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, Barnabas’ distant cousin, to pair up with the monster and turn into a creature like him.

The monster usually takes the form of a young man. When he first appeared in this guise, he said he wanted to be called “Jabe” For all his powers and his willingness to kill, he can’t persuade anyone to use that name, so he answers to “Jeb.” Jabe has somehow succeeded in charming Carolyn, but his personality drove Barnabas away from the cult. Determined to prevent Jabe from having his way with Carolyn, Barnabas has enlisted another distant cousin, Quentin Collins, among his allies in this battle.

For the last few days, Barnabas has been telling Quentin and his other comrades that their only resource against the Leviathans is that Jabe and his loyalists still trust him. Today Jabe comes to the great house of Collinwood and has an argument with Barnabas and Quentin. Jabe accuses Barnabas of disloyalty, and Barnabas immediately declares that he never believed in the Leviathan cause and will do everything in his power to defeat it.

Barnabas intends to launch his attack by using two objects with great cultic significance to the Leviathans. One is a small wooden box that is kept in Jabe’s room. The other is a large stone altar in the woods on the grounds of Collinwood that only people associated with the Leviathan cult can see. With Quentin’s help, he steals the box. He forbids Quentin to accompany him to the altar. He sets the box on the altar and raises his cane to smash it. Suddenly the box opens, and he freezes. A bat comes flying out.

In the 1790s, Barnabas was cursed to become a vampire. He remained in that horrid condition until two mad scientists worked together to free him of the effects of the curse in 1968. Jabe has decided to make him a vampire again. He put the bat in the box, and it bites Barnabas, renewing the curse.

The bat was about the size of a real bat when Jabe put it in the box. Even at that, it must have been a pretty tight fit for the little fellow. But when it bites Barnabas, it is as big as a California condor.

The world’s largest bat take a bite out of ol’ Barney. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Jabe calls Carolyn “honey” in their scene together. We’ve heard many endearments, most often “dear” and “darling,” but never before “honey,” not so far as I can recall. It makes Jabe seem a bit more up to date than the other characters.

Episode 949: Not that Quentin Collins

Ten year old Amy Jennings is at home in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Evidently she’s in a literal mood- she’s in the drawing room, so she’s drawing. Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard sees Amy’s work and asks why she is doing it. Amy says she thinks the design is “pretty”; Carolyn replies that “pretty” is the last thing she would call it. That may seem rather rude, but as Amy hasn’t been seen since #912 I suppose she’ll take what she can get.

The design is one which on Dark Shadows is called simply a Naga. It is the secret emblem of a secret cult serving the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods. Secret cultist Megan Todd wears the Naga on a large pendant around her neck; Megan’s husband, secret cultist Philip, wears it on a shining ring; Carolyn’s mother, secret cultist Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, wears it as an oversized broach. Amy herself is a secret member of the secret cult, but she hasn’t yet acquired any conspicuous jewelry emblazoned with the secret symbol, leaving her to do her own artwork. Carolyn wonders aloud why so many people are so preoccupied with the design.

Quentin Collins enters. Amy is terrified. Starting in December 1968, Quentin’s ghost haunted Collinwood. By March, the house was uninhabitable and strange and troubled boy David Collins was near death. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins tried some mumbo-jumbo in hopes of communicating with Quentin; he came unstuck in time and found himself in the year 1897, where he remained for eight months. While Barnabas was flailing about in the late Victorian era, time continued to pass in 1969, and Quentin’s obsession of David finally killed him in September. But a sequence of events with which Barnabas had a tenuous connection changed the circumstances on the night in September 1897 when Quentin originally died, causing him to survive. That night, as it happened, was exactly 72 years before David’s death. On Dark Shadows, anniversaries have the power that laws of nature have in our world, so that caused the haunting to break and David to come back to life. Due to a series of spells cast on him during Barnabas’ sojourn in the past, Quentin is still alive and still apparently in his late twenties in 1970. But the haunting still happened between December 1968 and September 1969, and everyone who lived through it still remembers it.

Quentin has introduced himself to Carolyn as his own great-grandson. Since Carolyn never actually saw his ghost, she is willing to accept this. But Amy had more dealings with the ghost than anyone but David, and it is obvious to her that they are one and the same. She clings to Carolyn.

Amy knows a Quentin when she sees one. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn laughs at Amy’s fear and tells her that this Quentin is not the ghost, but is “a cousin of ours.” This is intriguing to regular viewers. It was during the 1897 segment that the audience learned that Quentin was the great-grandfather of Amy and her brother Chris, and just a few weeks ago that Chris learned about that relationship. It is through their descent from Quentin that Amy and Chris are cousins to Carolyn. So if Amy knows she is a Collins, she must have been told that the ghost that tormented her and David was that of her great-grandfather. A scene in which someone gave her that information might have been a good use of Denise Nickerson’s considerable acting talent, but they didn’t bother to produce one.

Quentin tells Carolyn to leave him alone with Amy. Still chuckling, she complies. Once they are alone in the drawing room, Quentin kneels and touches Amy’s face, assuring her that he is “not that Quentin Collins.” David Selby brought immense charm to the role of Quentin, so this scene isn’t as revolting as it might have been, but it is still pretty bad, and we can’t be surprised that Amy is not satisfied.

Amy goes to the village of Collinsport to seek guidance from her spiritual advisor. He is a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time who usually takes the form of a very tall young man. When he first assumed that form, he invited people to “Call me Jabe,” but no one did. They call him “Jeb” instead, and he answers to it.

Jabe lives in a room above Megan and Philip’s antique shop, and when Amy enters the shop she finds him looking after the place. Apparently shape-shifting monsters from beyond space and time aren’t above doing a little work in retail now and then. She tells Jabe about her encounter with Quentin, and then tells him about a dream she had. In the dream, she went into the long-disused room where she and David first met Quentin. Quentin’s theme song, a sickly little waltz, was playing; she exclaims “It was terrible!” Longtime viewers know the feeling. The tune played incessantly during the “Haunting of Collinwood” period, and when they went back to 1897 characters kept complaining to the living Quentin that he was making them miserable by playing it on his phonograph all the time.

In the dream, Quentin appeared to Amy wearing the nineteenth century clothing and the angry scowl that he wore when he was a ghost. But when he was a ghost, he never spoke words the audience could hear. The only exception was a dream sequence in #767, when Quentin’s ghost spoke to David. That was also the only other dream sequence to be presented as this one is, in flashback as the dreamer is recounting it after the fact. That sequence marked a watershed, the first attempt to explain how Quentin the cranky ghost emerged from Quentin the charming scoundrel we had got to know in the 1897 segment.

This episode, also, has to do with the relationship between these two iterations of Quentin. Amy tells Jabe that Quentin’s ghost in the dream warned her against him by name, and says that she is therefore convinced that the living man she met in the drawing room today is in some way identical to the ghost who haunted the house for those ten months. Amy’s dream marks the final appearance of Quentin’s ghost, but we can see the ghost will not be forgotten.

A state police investigator named Lawrence Guthrie is in town looking into two murders Jabe has committed, those of Carolyn’s father Paul and of a law enforcement officer whose gravestone revealed that his given name was “Sheriff Davenport” (we never learn what Mr Davenport’s title was.) Jabe orders Philip to kill Guthrie. Philip calls Guthrie and asks him to come to the antique shop when Jabe will be out. Once Guthrie is there, Philip tells him that the upstairs room where Jabe stays is an important part of the story of the murders. He shows Guthrie into the room. He stays outside, and locks Guthrie in. Guthrie encounters Jabe there in his true form; Jabe kills him. This is quite effectively handled. My wife, Mrs Acilius, was completely caught off guard by the killing. She believed Philip really was trying to break free of the Leviathan cult, and wondered what Guthrie was supposed to find in the room.

Neither Jabe nor Philip is an especially well-developed character, but Christopher Bernau and Christopher Pennock were both fine actors, and they play off each other very well today. It is a tribute to their performances that Guthrie’s death scene comes as a surprise.

At the end, Quentin is at Collinwood trying to tell Carolyn that it was Jabe who killed her father and Mr S. Davenport. Inexplicably, Carolyn is interested in dating Jabe, and is unwilling to listen to this. Jabe bursts in and announces that there has been another murder, that the murderer is in custody, and that he has confessed to it and to the killings of Paul and Sheriff. That murderer, Jabe says, is Philip. That’s another surprise- after the murder of Guthrie, Jabe did tell Philip that he had another task to perform, and once we hear that he has confessed to the killings it makes perfect sense that that would have been what Jabe meant. But I don’t think anyone could have predicted it. It makes for a strong ending.

Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day is a lovely little bit of fanfic proceeding from the assumption that Lawrence Guthrie is the brother of Dr Peter Guthrie, the parapsychologist whom undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins killed in March 1967.

The closing credits again misspell writer Violet Welles’ name as “Wells.” They started doing that last week, around the same time the misspelling of wardrobe house Ohrbach’s as “Orhbach’s,” a frequent goof in the show’s first year, reappeared after a long absence.

Episode 941: Barnabas, Quentin, and the Stopped Clock

Yesterday and today, a clock stopped at 8:00 featured prominently in shots when it was pivotal to the story that it was not 8:00. The clock is part of the merchandise in an antique shop, so it is understandable it does not run, but it is rather odd to see someone telling people that he didn’t wait for 8:00 when a clock face displaying that time looms over his shoulder. Today, it is important that a scene in the shop is taking place after 10:00. We open that scene with a view of a different clock, one that reads 10:20, but before long the stopped clock is back in full view.

At the great house of Collinwood, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is rushing to the front door. Governess Maggie Evans asks him where he is going. He says that he is going to the village of Collinsport. She says she is going there as well and that she will ride in with him. He says that he can’t take her. He refuses to explain why. The other day, Maggie and Barnabas held hands and leaned in close to each other, talking softly about how important their friendship was. This sudden refusal to communicate pulls Maggie up short. She demands to know whether Barnabas trusts her. He says he does. She marches up to him and orders him to “Prove it!” The tight aspect ratio of old time TV combines with director Henry Kaplan’s habit of putting the actors as close to the camera as he can get them to make it seem, in the moment, that the feelings Maggie expects Barnabas to prove are of an erotic nature.

Hubba-hubba. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie has been the governess at Collinwood for over a year now. Her predecessor, the well-meaning Vicki Winters, was written out of the show for a number of reasons, not least their inability to figure out an intelligible relationship between her and Barnabas. There was a long period when Vicki the character seemed to know that she was on a show starring Barnabas and she kept trying to involve herself in his storyline, even inviting herself to spend the night at his house. In theory, Barnabas was in love with Vicki and yearned for her, but no matter how flagrantly she threw herself at him he never did anything about it. Eventually they paired her off with an intolerable jerk, and the two of them disappeared into a rift in the space-time continuum.

Vicki never did take quite as direct an approach with Barnabas as Maggie does today. No matter how deeply Vicki drove the ball into his court, she always counted on him to show at least a little initiative. Maggie knows better than to rely on Barnabas, and she corners him into agreeing to see her and give some kind of explanation when he is done with the mission he is concealing from her, at 10:00 sharp.

Fans often fret about the “Vickification” Maggie undergoes while she is serving as governess. When it became clear that Vicki wasn’t going to matter to Barnabas, she couldn’t be allowed to affect the A story in any way. To keep her on the sidelines, she was written as an ever greater ninny.

Maggie is pretty bad at her job- she’s a squish when the children don’t want to do their lessons, which is every time we’ve seen her with them. But she’s still good with grownups, she’s smart, and she’s emphatically sexy. So she isn’t going to go down into irrelevance without a fight.

Maggie isn’t the only character insisting on her place in the story. A few weeks ago, it seemed that matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard would be a part of the main plot for the first time in ages when she was inducted into a secret cult serving a mysterious race of Elder Gods who are trying to regain control of the Earth. But she has drifted back to the sidelines, and has yet to meet the cult’s leader in his current form.

Barnabas was Liz’ preceptor in the cult, and she is indignant with him for the decline in her part:

Liz: Barnabas, I must speak to you.

Barnabas: Not now, Elizabeth.

Liz: Have I done something wrong? Just tell me that.

Barnabas: No, nothing at all.

Liz: I’ve tried to follow the rules, as many as I know. You yourself can testify to my faithfulness. But David sees our leader, you’ve seen him.

Barnabas: Jabez?

Liz: Is that what he calls himself now? Well, no matter what name, he’s the same boy who used to play here. Surely he must remember me with some affection.

Barnabas: He is only recently matured enough to appear to us.

Liz: Why have I been ignored? Barnabas? You haven’t answered my question.

Barnabas: You’ll meet him soon enough but now is not the time.

Liz: Does the book specify when I am to meet him? Is that why you’re against it now?

During the show’s costume drama segments, Joan Bennett got to play dynamic roles, but she has been excluded from the action in the contemporary parts for so long that she has a tremendous amount of passion to bring to this scene. It is great to see her cut loose for once.