Tag: quentin collins

Episode 779: Our cousin, who always appears at dusk

Vampire Barnabas Collins has stashed his coffin in its old hiding place, the hidden chamber inside the mausoleum where his parents and sister are buried. As dawn approaches, he tells his reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, that this is the last day he will have to leave the coffin there. The suspicions that had recently surrounded him have cleared, and he will move the coffin back to the basement of Magda’s home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, when he next arises.

The graveyard is immersed in a heavy fog. As Barnabas approaches the mausoleum, a familiar voice calls to him. His old nemesis and ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique, implores him to come with her and leave the year 1897. She warns him that he must return to 1969 now, or it will be too late. Barnabas tells Angelique that he has not accomplished the goals for which he came to the past, and that he will not leave until he has done so.

Longtime viewers may be puzzled when Angelique tells Barnabas that she has helped him before. In #757, Angelique did prevent her fellow undead blonde fire witch, Laura Murdoch Collins, from staking Barnabas, but that did not seem to be intended as a service to Barnabas. Rather, it recalled #417, in which Angelique prevented Barnabas’ friend Ben Stokes from staking him and freeing him of the effects of the vampire curse she had placed upon him. She told Ben that she wanted Barnabas to suffer forever, and nothing she says to Laura indicates that she has changed. Indeed, the only time she ever seemed to act out of goodwill towards Barnabas was in #410, when Barnabas was about to rise as a vampire for the first time and she, regretting the curse, tried to stake him herself. Perhaps there is a retcon coming up, in which it will be made possible for Barnabas and Angelique to join forces against some new enemy.

It certainly seems that the show is about to take a new turn of some kind. The major storylines with which the 1897 segment began are all approaching their natural conclusions, and a number of major characters have already been killed off. Longtime viewers will recognize an acknowledgement of these facts, not only in Angelique’s explicit statement that the proper time for Barnabas’ stay in the late nineteenth century is almost up, but also in the doings of another character in the graveyard.

Inveterate prankster Carl Collins suspects Barnabas of being a vampire, and in a dream visitation his late fiancée Pansy directed his attention to the mausoleum. Lurking outside it, he sees Barnabas open the secret panel and go into the chamber where the coffin is kept. Carl declares that “We’ll get him tonight! We’ll get cousin Barnabas… TONIGHT!”

Carl is played by John Karlen, who first appeared on Dark Shadows as the luckless Willie Loomis. It was Willie who, in a misbegotten attempt at jewel theft, inadvertently freed Barnabas to prey upon the living in #210. In consequence, Barnabas bit Willie and enslaved him. When Willie first served him, Barnabas would control him not only by the usual vampiric practices of blood-drinking and telepathic summoning, but also by frequent heavy beatings with his cane. Later, Willie would come to feel that Barnabas was his friend; it was never clear that Barnabas reciprocated this feeling.

Carl first met Barnabas in #706. He introduced himself by holding a gun to Barnabas’ head and threatening to shoot him if he did not admit that his story of being a long-lost cousin from England was a lie. The gun turned out to be loaded with a flag labeled “FIB,” and the whole thing was Carl’s idea of a joke. Barnabas’ icy response, starting with his incredulous tone while asking if “YOU are a COLLINS?,” set the tone for all of his subsequent dealings with Carl, in which his attitude ranged from undisguised contempt to barely disguised contempt. Yet Carl remained convinced that he and Barnabas were going to be great friends, and he even asked Barnabas to be the best man at his wedding to Pansy. Carl is much more enthusiastic about his supposed friendship with Barnabas than Willie is about his, and Barnabas is far more open about his hostility towards him, making the Carl/ Barnabas relationship a spoof of the Willie/ Barnabas one.

Ever since Pansy’s death, Carl’s thoughts about Barnabas have taken a darker cast. When we see him in the mausoleum, watching the panel open, we know that his plan to “get cousin Barnabas” will take him into the chamber where Willie forever lost his freedom. We know, too, that Willie’s misfortune revolutionized the show; when it puts this actor on this set, Dark Shadows is promising to make major changes.

We cut to the drawing room of the great house on the estate. Rakishly handsome Quentin Collins is talking with Magda. As Angelique cursed Barnabas to be a vampire, so Magda cursed Quentin to be a werewolf. Angelique placed her curse because she was upset that Barnabas did not love her and was under the impression she was about to die. Magda placed hers because Quentin had married and then murdered her sister Jenny. Magda did not know then that Jenny had borne twins to Quentin, a son and a daughter. Since the curse is hereditary, Magda has been trying desperately to reverse it ever since she learned of the children’s existence.

The children are still secret from Quentin, and so he does not understand why Magda is trying to help him. When he demands she tell him, she says “I. Did. Not. KNOWWW!” in exactly the same intonation she had used when she first heard about the children in #763. First time viewers don’t know any more than Quentin does what she is talking about- the children are not mentioned today. Magda makes up an obvious lie, saying that she hadn’t known how much Jenny loved him. That isn’t meant to fool the audience, and doesn’t fool Quentin. But when Carl enters, Quentin drops the subject and leaves new viewers in suspense about what Magda now knows that they do not.

Carl knows that Magda lives with Barnabas, and refuses to talk in front of her. She teasingly asks “Mr Carl” if he “don’t like me any more,” and walks out with a bold stride, suggesting that Carl may at some point have shown signs of liking her rather too avidly for her husband’s comfort. Once she is gone, Carl tells Quentin that there is a vampire in their midst. Quentin dismisses this out of hand, telling him that their brother Edward staked a vampire named Dirk and told him about it in vast and gory detail. Carl asks who made Dirk a vampire; Quentin says that it was Laura. No, says Carl, Barnabas made Dirk a vampire, and Barnabas is a vampire himself.

Quentin begins to laugh, but within seconds realizes that there is a great deal of evidence in plain sight to support Carl’s assertion. He agrees to go with Carl to the mausoleum, but we hear his thoughts as he reflects that Barnabas’ efforts to help him are the only hope he has of release from the werewolf curse.

In the mausoleum, Carl wonders aloud where Barnabas came from. Quentin supposes that he was there all along. Carl is horrified at the thought that he is “the real Barnabas- our ancestor! Oh God, that makes it worse!” Quentin orders Carl to open the panel, and Carl obeys. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, John Karlen once again plays the servant’s role.

In the hidden chamber, the brothers open the coffin, finding the diurnally deceased Barnabas. Quentin tells Carl to hand over the gun he has brought; Carl obeys. Quentin asks Carl if he knows how to get out of the chamber. When Carl says that he does not, Quentin turns the gun on him and forces him to stay. Quentin shuts his brother up in the chamber with the vampire.

Quentin consigns Carl to death by vampire. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In #384, set in the 1790s, Barnabas shot and killed his uncle Jeremiah. Barnabas and Jeremiah were about the same age, and had been very close; they were often compared to brothers. Barnabas was not yet under a curse when he committed that fratricide; it was an act entirely of his own will. Angelique was also partly responsible; she had cast spells on Jeremiah and on Barnabas’ fiancée Josette, causing them to conceive a mad passion for each other and to run off and get married. Enraged, Barnabas broke from the customs of New England and challenged Jeremiah to a duel. Consumed with guilt, Jeremiah deloped and let Barnabas kill him.

Barnabas’ killing of Jeremiah was murder under the laws which prevailed at the time in Maine, which was until 1821 part of Massachusetts. Indeed, Massachusetts’ anti-dueling act of 1730 provided that anyone who had either been killed in a duel or been put to death for winning a duel would “be given an unchristian burial at a gallows or crossroads, with a stake driven through their body.” Since the audience knows that Barnabas is fated to become a vampire, there is a chilling irony in seeing him volunteer for a staked burial.

Dark as was the shadow the duel cast over the subsequent history of the Collinses, at least Barnabas’ act showed a kind of twisted courage. But when Quentin uses Barnabas as a weapon to kill his brother, he is acting from the most abject cowardice. In the century that they have been subject to black magic, the Collinses have sunk from tragic grandeur to infantile squalor.

Quentin goes to the Old House and tells Magda what he has done. Magda is horrified at another murder. “No! Too many people are suspicious now. We’ve got to stop it or we’ll all be found out!” Since Magda is not a member of the Collins family, she is often the straight man reacting to revelations of their misdeeds and monstrosities. And since she is played by the charismatic Grayson Hall, the audience tends to adopt her point of view. So it is easy for us to forget that she is a functional sociopath. Despite all the killings we know to have resulted from her actions, it is still startling that Magda’s only objection to Quentin’s attempt to murder his brother is that she is afraid of getting caught.

We cut to another scene on the same set. Magda has summoned Angelique to the front parlor of the Old House. She asks Angelique to erase Carl’s memory so that Barnabas will not choose to kill him. Angelique taunts Magda as an “amateur” in the occult arts, and declares that she is done helping Barnabas. Magda says that she has read the Tarot, and that the cards tell her that Angelique loves Barnabas. She renews her plea to prevent the killing of Carl, but Angelique will not yield.

The reference to the Tarot rings a bell for longtime viewers. In the 1790s segment, Hall played the Countess DuPrés, Josette’s aunt. Angelique was introduced in that segment; she was the countess’ maidservant, and appeared to be a beginner in witchcraft. The countess was oblivious to Angelique’s sideline, and in #393 declared her to be an uninteresting woman whom she had known ever since she was an uninteresting child. The countess spent most of her time in the front parlor of the Old House reading the Tarot. That Angelique speaks so haughtily to the Tarot reader and “amateur” witch Magda on the same set highlights the reversal of roles in this segment.

Meanwhile, Carl searches the hidden chamber for a way to escape. He finds that one of the stones in the steps slides and reveals a lever. He turns the lever, opening the panel. He runs out and vows to destroy Barnabas, in the process almost knocking over a large tombstone that wobbles as if it were made of Styrofoam.

In episodes #310-315, made and set in 1967, strange and troubled boy David Collins was trapped in the hidden chamber for a whole week. He never did find the release lever- the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah finally took pity on him, materializing and showing it to him. The show avoids the implication that David is drastically dumber than his great-great uncle Carl by showing that the stone concealing the lever is already slightly ajar.

Episode 766: The weeping Dorcas

Vampire Barnabas Collins happens upon his unwilling sidekick, ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, after she has fired a silver bullet at his distant cousin, werewolf Quentin Collins. He sternly forbids her to finish Quentin off, and for some reason she decides he is right.

Back in human form, Quentin is haunted by the ghost of Dorcas Trilling, a woman he killed in his first night as a werewolf. He has been telling himself that the evil deeds of the werewolf are not his own responsibilities, but that “he” is the culprit. That comforts him, but Dorcas isn’t having it. So he instantly collapses into, “All right, I did, but I couldn’t help it!” That doesn’t go over any better.

Unfortunately, this is Gail Strickland’s final appearance on Dark Shadows. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas and Quentin have a confrontation. Barnabas tells Quentin that he knows his secret and says that he wants only to help him; Quentin angrily responds that he cannot trust Barnabas, who refuses to tell him anything about himself. He does ask Barnabas to kill him if it is the only way to keep him from turning into the werewolf again, so I suppose that is a step towards friendship.

Episode 763: An afternoon of cards, a night of murder

Schoolteacher Tim Shaw was introduced in #731. The name “Shaw” is common enough that few viewers are likely to have found any significance in it at the time. It is true that Dark Shadows is at this point a costume drama set in 1897 and that George Bernard Shaw was coming into his own as a playwright in that year. The show was written, acted, and directed largely by theater people, and is so self-consciously stagy that it is possible there might be a reference of some kind to Bernard Shaw in a character’s name. But there doesn’t seem to be anything especially Shavian about Tim.

Today we learn the reason Tim was called Shaw. Satanist Evan Hanley gives Tim a potion that robs him of his will. He holds up a deck of playing cards and tells him that when he sees the Queen of Spades he will know it is time for him to murder someone. In Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, soldier Raymond Shaw was brainwashed into becoming an assassin when he saw the Queen of Hearts; in the John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film based on the novel, Raymond’s trigger was the Queen of Diamonds.

Frankenheimer’s film is one of the supreme examples of a movie that shouldn’t have worked, but did. No part of the plot stands up to rational analysis for one second, but when the tale is told through stark black and white imagery that puts us deep in the world of a nightmare it is spellbinding. Unfortunately, the irrationality of the plan the villains carry out and of the other characters’ responses to their evil deeds in The Manchurian Candidate are on full display in this homage, without the paranoid verve that makes the movie compelling. All by itself the potion puts Tim so deep in Evan’s power that he gladly goes to witch Magda Rákóczi to buy poison and insists she sell it to him even after she has pointed out that it is useful for nothing but murder. It doesn’t seem there is anything left for the card to add to the control Evan has over him.

It gets worse. Evan is acting as the agent of the evil Rev’d Gregory Trask. Trask is unhappily married to a woman named Minerva, and is blackmailing Evan into sending an assassin to kill her. When Evan shows Tim the card today, he confirms that the intended victim is a woman. But why not have him kill Trask? As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, if Trask dies, Evan will be free of the threat of blackmail. So if he is prepared to be a party to murder, you’d think he would forget Minerva and commit the crime he has a motive to commit.

The highlight of today’s episode doesn’t have anything to do with Evan, Tim, Minerva, or Trask. It is a scene between Magda and sometime maidservant Beth.

Beth has come to the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood to plead with Magda to lift a curse she has placed on Beth’s boyfriend, rakish Quentin Collins. Quentin murdered his estranged wife, Magda’s sister Jenny, and as revenge Magda turned him into a werewolf. Magda is unimpressed with anything Beth says until she tells her that in spite of everything, she will marry Quentin and go away with him. Magda marvels at this and asks Beth if she will really go through with it knowing that any son Quentin might have will suffer from the same curse. Shocked, Beth asks Magda if she means what she has said, and she repeats that Quentin’s son will also be a werewolf. Beth replies that in that case, Magda has laid a curse upon her own kin.

Magda dismisses this, saying that Jenny had no children by Quentin. Beth says she is wrong, that Jenny bore twins, a boy and a girl. Beth lays the story out systematically, and it dawns on Magda that she is telling the truth. Magda calls out to Jenny’s spirit and begs forgiveness, saying she did not know. Beth says that it is time to lift the curse, and Magda tells her to get a pentagram and make sure the boy wears it all the days of his life. Beth has her own moment of horrified realization. “And… you can’t end it? Can you?”

Beth realizes Magda does not know how to undo the curse.

Terrayne Crawford had some weaknesses as an actress that severely undercut her in her first weeks as Beth. But this scene is right in her wheelhouse. She is flawless as she portrays Beth’s progression from weepy begging to methodical explanation to utter shock. And Grayson Hall of course brings great power and vivid color to Magda.

We’ve been waiting for this scene since #642, months before Magda first appeared in #701, let alone before she placed the curse on Quentin in #750. In that episode, back in December 1968, the show took place in a contemporary setting. The characters had noticed some strange goings-on, and held a séance as part of their inquiry. The spirit they reached was Magda, who spoke regretfully of “my currrrse!” It’s taken more than 24 weeks, but Magda has finally learned what she already knew when we first heard from her.

Episode 762: You called the Devil, and you got me

In December 1967, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that month it introduced the Rev’d Mr Trask, a witch-hunter from Salem, Massachusetts, came to central Maine* to drive witchcraft out of the village of Collinsport and off the estate of Collinwood. Trask was bad at this job; wicked witch Angelique easily deceived him into blaming well-meaning governess Victoria Winters for her own crimes, leading to Vicki’s hanging and exacerbating the consequences of Angelique’s evil spells.

Now the show has relocated to the year 1897, and a descendant of Trask is among the villains. He is the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask, and he runs a boarding school along lines dictated by his own sadistic delight in punishing innocent children.

Fans often say that while the original Trask** was a sincere believer who did harm because of his fanaticism, Gregory is a hypocrite who uses a pretense of religion to enable his perversions and his greed. I think the truth is more complicated, and more interesting, than this. In #441, the original Trask found the strangled body of a professionally agreeable lady named Maude Browning in his bed; it had been placed there to frame him for Maude’s murder. Trask’s principles, were he to follow them, would seem to imply that he should go directly to the authorities. If the worst happened and they hanged him, to the extent that he was targeted because of his Christian witness his death would win for him an everlasting crown of martyrdom. But fear got the better of Trask. He enlisted a man named Nathan Forbes to help him hide Maude’s remains, and went on from there to expand his conspiracy to suborn Nathan’s perjured testimony against Vicki. Considering the emphasis the Reformed movement put on the Ten Commandments, Trask could not have been unaware of the sinfulness of bearing false witness against a neighbor.

I think Trask’s fanaticism led him to overestimate the importance of the success of his mission in this world. It is not enough that he will be vindicated in the courts of God; God must be vindicated through Trask’s success in the courts of Massachusetts. Thus it is his very sincerity that turns Trask into a hypocrite. Eric Hoffer’s book The True Believer was one of the most influential publications of the 1960s; Trask, the fanatic-turned-hypocrite, could easily have found a home in its pages.

Gregory Trask is certainly a hypocrite. Today we hear Gregory’s wife Minerva talk about women he has dallied with over the years. Gregory comes upon Satanists Quentin Collins and Evan Hanley in the act of summoning the Devil; Gregory’s response is to blackmail Evan into using his command of the black arts to cast a spell to brainwash hapless schoolteacher Tim Shaw into murdering Minerva. We have seen in previous episodes that Gregory has plans for spinster Judith Collins and her enormous fortune; Minerva’s death, if it can be arranged just so, will leave him well-positioned to marry Judith and become the Master of Collinwood.

Trask tells Evan the price of his silence. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

As his ancestor’s very sincerity turned him into a hypocrite, so Gregory’s hypocrisy occasionally turns him into a sincere believer in his own powers, if not exactly in God. We saw in #735 that Gregory does not take the same pleasure in reading the Bible that he does in leafing through his “Punishment Book,” a ledger which evidently details his abuse of the children attending his school. But he does read it and quote it, and when in #726 he encountered a case of possession, he immediately and with untroubled self-assurance set to work performing an exorcism. The possession was real, and so far as Gregory could tell his exorcism was successful. He reacted to that apparent success with a serenity that betrayed no suggestion that he had ever doubted that he was the right person to cast out the spiritual forces of darkness.

As the original Trask was a stranger to the routine play-acting that makes ordinary social life bearable and therefore gave himself permission to become a party to the most horrendous deceptions, so Gregory wears his mask so tightly that his face grows to fit it. Dark Shadows was often very self-conscious about showing characters who were acting; its greatest success, vampire Barnabas Collins, won over the audience when they saw him trying desperately hard to play the role of a living man native to the twentieth century. In the Trasks, we see men who do not know that they are acting and therefore cannot manage the effect that the parts they play in everyday life have on their personalities.

Gregory does have a tight mental focus on his projects. When he goes to Evan with his blackmail demands, Evan has learned of his eye for the ladies, and is hoping to use that information to lower his price. So his opening gambit is to describe himself as a man who drifts from one idea to another as other men drift from one woman to another. Three times he says the word “woman,” in each case as the last word of a sentence, in each case about twice as loudly as the words before it. Gregory is unimpressed, and Evan realizes he doesn’t have anything definite to use against Gregory. He crumbles and agrees to Gregory’s extreme demand.

Gregory’s academic standards seem considerably less exacting than are his expectations of his co-conspirators. He mentions to Tim today that when he was a young teacher, the first class he ever taught was in elementary Latin. He challenges Tim to translate the words amo, amas, amat; Tim wearily replies “I love, you love, he loves.” “Very good!” exclaims Gregory. Traditionally the first words students learned on the first day of Latin class were amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant– I love, you love, s/he loves, we love, you (plural) love, they love. “Very good!” would seem to be an outrageously inflated appraisal to apply to someone who has merely recognized the first three of those six words.

Gregory sends Tim to Evan’s house to read a Latin document that has some bearing on a legal matter that has come up in Evan’s work as an attorney. As it happens, I went to graduate school in ancient Greek and Latin at the University of Texas at Austin, and local attorneys would sometimes call our department asking for someone to help them translate Latin they had found in old Spanish legal documents. They would usually refer those calls to the ablest Latinists among us, since the legal Latin used in the Spanish Empire in the days it ruled Texas was rather a specialized form of the language. Tim can virtually speed-read Evan’s document, suggesting that “amo, amas, amat” was not a particularly stringent test of his abilities.

*Maine was part of Massachusetts until 1821.

**Who is never given a first name. One of the Big Finish audio dramas refers to him as “Vilorus Trask” and actor Jerry Lacy once said he thought his name should have been “Orville.” Neither of those sounds like a very plausible name for a junior-grade Puritan divine of the late eighteenth century. So we are left calling him “the original Trask.” My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that this seems to suggest that Gregory should be “the extra-crispy Trask.” Maybe he will die by fire, as others have done.

Episode 761: This is no time to try to understand anything!

In November 1968, the production staff of Dark Shadows was planning to introduce the Devil as a character. But a lot of fundamentalist Protestants and traditionalist Roman Catholics were making noise just then about the ungodly nature of network TV programming in general and of Dark Shadows in particular, so they decided to scale him back a little. In the scripts for #628 and #629, he was called “Balberith,” and in the credits he was listed as “Diabolos.” In The Dark Shadows Companion, writer Sam Hall is quoted as saying “We demoted him from the Devil to a devil, just one of Hell’s Associate Vice Presidents in Charge of Witchcraft.”

By the spring of 1969, the show had been a hit for quite a while, and the ratings were still climbing. So they could get away with things that had been off limits before. When vampire Barnabas Collins joined the cast in April 1967, ABC’s office of Standards and Practices decreed that he would have to bite his blood thrall, the luckless Willie Loomis, on the wrist rather than the neck, hoping that would keep the viewers from seeing anything homoerotic in their relationship. But when Barnabas traveled back in time to 1897 in #701, he immediately bit a man named Sandor Rákóczi on the neck, and yesterday we saw that he had bitten dimwitted servant Dirk Wilkins, again on the neck.

In this episode, a knock comes at the door while lawyer/ warlock Evan Hanley is asleep. Evan finds his friend and fellow Satanist Quentin Collins, profoundly drunk and asking for help. Quentin has been turned into a werewolf, and tomorrow night there will be another full moon. He pleads with Evan to help release him from the curse.

Evan says that he has no powers. In the course of his conversation with Quentin, it comes up that Evan is adept in black magic, and that the two of them have together managed to raise demonic spirits. So Evan suggests Quentin come back the next day for a ceremony in which they will summon “The supreme power of the underworld.” Quentin asks if Evan is referring to the Devil, and Evan affirms that he is. In the subsequent rite, Evan uses not only the word “Devil,” but says and repeats the name “Satan… Satan!”

Even Diabolos, whom I think of less as an Associate Vice President of Hell than as an assistant regional manager for upper New England in the black magic division of some company to which the Devil has outsourced some of his less urgent terrestrial operations, was irked when witches expected him to come to them. Their summoning ceremonies ended with them finding themselves in his office, which appeared to be located in space he had rented in a corner of Barnabas’ basement. So regular viewers will be skeptical of the closing cliffhanger, when a shadowed figure appears in the window at the climax of the ceremony meant to summon Old Scratch himself.

Mysterious stranger. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, gives another reason to doubt that the figure really will turn out to be Satan. The most potent villains on Dark Shadows have all been female. The first supernatural menace was undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who joined the show in December 1966 and transformed it from a more or less conventional soap into a thriller about the spiritual forces of darkness.

Barnabas came in Laura’s wake and brought a new audience, but the show was as slow-paced in his first months as it had been before Laura came. It was only when Barnabas teamed up with mad scientist Julia Hoffman in #291 that the plot started to move at a speed that could hold the attention of the preteen viewers Barnabas attracted.

From November 1967 to March 1968, the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s. We saw then that Barnabas became a vampire because of a curse placed on him by wicked witch Angelique. Angelique’s manic behavior kept the 1790s segment moving at breakneck speed, and the show never really slowed down again thereafter.

Late in 1968, we met the all-destroying ghost of Quentin Collins and the terrible werewolf Chris Jennings. Barnabas came to 1897 as a result of his efforts to find out what was behind these two menaces. What we have found is that they are both the products of a curse placed by another female character, Sandor’s wife, the charmingly amoral Magda.

Angelique herself has come to 1897 to plague Barnabas. Laura was present at the great estate of Collinwood in that year as well. Last week was devoted to a battle between Angelique and Laura, representing a contest between two versions of Dark Shadows. It was a foregone conclusion that Angelique would win that battle- no one believes we are going back to the sedate, atmospheric, tantalizingly spooky show that ran early in 1967. But the two women were far more compelling adversaries than were any two men who have squared off against each other on the show. If you put Satan on stage, you can’t very well top him with a bigger Big Bad, so once we see that the figure in the French windows is male, we can’t really believe that Evan and Quentin’s visitor is the one they have invited.

Episode 758: Strangled on her stories

Undead blonde fire witches Laura and Angelique are trying to destroy each other, using Laura’s son Jamison and Jamison’s uncle Quentin as their cat’s paws. At the beginning of the episode, it looks like the spell Angelique and Quentin are casting is about to incinerate Laura; at the end, it looks like the spell Laura is casting is incinerating Angelique. In between, Quentin’s sister Judith notices that something is wrong with Jamison, and suspects that whatever Quentin and Angelique are up to is the cause.

Quentin and Laura get all religioused-up asking the gods of ancient Egypt to help them against Laura. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Laura is just about out of story, so we can see that she will be leaving the show soon. She has important relationships to all the characters on the show right now, so her departure will kick this segment of Dark Shadows, a costume drama set in the year 1897, into a new phase. Today’s episode is too deeply involved with the back and forth in the battle of the witches to give much indication as to what that next phase will be, but Judith’s perceptiveness suggests that whatever it is will keep up the rapid pace set in the first twelve weeks of the flashback, unencumbered by characters who slow things down by refusing to face facts.

Longtime viewers will be intrigued by variations on some familiar themes. Angelique orders Quentin to bring her a mirror and then leave the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. Obviously she is going to use it to cast a spell that will protect her from Laura, but she refuses to tell Quentin the particulars. We know well how powerful reflections are in the universe of Dark Shadows; Wallace McBride of the Collinsport Historical Society made some very penetrating observations about how that motif was already in place in episode #1 in his 18 April 2020 post on that treasured, but now only intermittently available, site.

Later, Laura is in the drawing room at the great house on the estate about to tell Judith the secret of the mysterious Barnabas Collins, but Angelique enters, makes googly eyes at Laura, and thereby robs her of the power to speak. When the show had its first séance in #170 and #171, it was held in this room and another iteration of Laura was in attendance. It was that Laura who looked at the medium with bulging eyes when she began to speak, and that medium struggled to speak just as Laura does now. So today we see the tables turned on Laura.

Quentin and Angelique are alone for a moment in the foyer of the great house. He backs her against the portrait of Barnabas that hangs there and asks why she prefers Barnabas to him. That is a question that will have occurred to the audience. The two of them look great together and have a lot of fun together, while Barnabas hates Angelique. All she does is kill his family and friends to punish him for refusing to love her. She brushes Quentin off and orders him to go back to the Old House.

In the final scene, Quentin returns to the Old House and is baffled to find that Angelique not only got there before him, but that she has had time to play a long game of solitaire since returning from the great house. She dismisses his questions and tells him that she wants him to be with her when “it happens.” Before he can find the words to ask what she is expecting, she bursts into flames.

It seems that Angelique is in two places at once. More precisely, it seems that there are two of her, one that Quentin left in the great house, and another who was in the Old House all along waiting to be incinerated by Laura’s spells. Presumably the one in the Old House is a Doppelgänger that Angelique used the mirror to create. Nowadays, the idea of a home-made Doppelgänger fabricated to serve a specific purpose will remind many people of the 2017 season of Twin Peaks, with its concept of a “tulpa.” The Buddhist concept of the tulpa was indeed in circulation in the USA in the 1960s; Annie Besant had introduced it to the Theosophist movement, which had many followers in the Midwest, where writer Sam Hall was born. But Besant and her fans seem to have used the word in a sense closer to its original, in which people attaining Buddha-hood have the power to send copies of themselves back into the world to teach others pursuing enlightenment. Later heirs of Theosophy have tried to develop a non-Buddhist meaning for the word tulpa, but using it to refer to a lookalike that some practitioner of black magic can whip up to do a job appears to be the intellectual property of Lynch/ Frost Productions.

Be that as it may, we have seen ever since Laura was first on the show from December 1966 to March 1967 that each of the supernatural beings on Dark Shadows is a complex of related but independent phenomena, some of which may work at cross-purposes with each other. Angelique in particular seems to create another version of herself and send it out into the world each time she casts a spell. Since others of Angelique’s creatures have gone on to defy her, even trying to kill her, it must have come as a relief to know that this time the Doppelgänger would be going up in flames by nightfall.

Episode 757: All of them witches

Undead blonde fire witch Laura is in the act of driving a stake into the heart of vampire Barnabas when she is interrupted by another undead blonde fire witch, Angelique. Angelique announces that she will always be there to thwart any attempt to stake Barnabas, which rather tends to deflate the suspense inherent in having a protagonist who is a vampire. The two of them exchange threats, and Laura finds that she can hold Angelique at bay by generating the right kind of fire.

Laura leaves Barnabas’ house. His unwilling sidekick, thoroughly human witch Magda, sees her and asks what she was doing there. Laura does not answer, but Angelique enters and tells her. Angelique says that Barnabas would doubtless wreak a terrible vengeance if he found out what had happened while Magda was away. Angelique orders Magda to go to the great house of Collinwood and fetch a fourth witch, black magic enthusiast Quentin. Magda complies reluctantly.

Quentin is falling down drunk, which is not unusual. He has a better excuse than he typically does, however, since he just found out that Magda turned him into a werewolf. He is furious to see her. He says that no matter what she thinks, he will not “lie down and die!” This elicits a laugh from Magda, who points out that he can barely stand up. She tells him that Angelique has ordered him to come to Barnabas’ house, and that he cannot oppose her.

In the house, Angelique tells Quentin he must help her defend Barnabas from Laura. Quentin moans that he is in no condition to help anyone, which only makes Angelique impatient. Unlike her and Magda, Quentin does not know that Barnabas is a vampire, so Angelique keeps reminding herself to say that Barnabas has gone away for the day and that Laura will be a threat to him when he comes back tonight. Quentin tells Angelique about a trinket Laura received from some of the gods of ancient Egypt that keeps her alive, and she sends Magda to steal it from her.

Magda goes to Laura’s cottage. Magda tells Laura that she has more reason to hate Barnabas than she does, since Barnabas enslaved her husband Sandor. She wants Barnabas to be destroyed, but if Laura tells the authorities about him Sandor, too, will be killed. The dramatic date is 1897, and the state of Maine abolished the death penalty in 1887, so Magda is afraid of an extrajudicial killing rather than an execution for complicity in Barnabas’ murders.

Laura tells her that it is necessary to expose Barnabas if he is to be destroyed, but Magda tells her of another way. She says that vampires can be killed by silver bullets through the heart. Laura goes to get money for Magda to buy silver and have it made into bullets. While she is out of the room, Magda steals the trinket. It seems that Magda has given herself a chance to get rid of both Laura and Barnabas.

Once Angelique has the trinket, she tells Quentin that he will have to perform a ceremony using his copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. He is still heavily hungover and balks at the orders, but she gives him no choice. Once he starts his incantation, he breaks into a big smile, clasps the book to his chest, and preaches the phrases like a megachurch pastor when the collection plates are circulating. We cut to Angelique. Her expression is so admiring it is hard to tell whether the reaction is the character’s or the actress’. Angelique does some mumbo-jumbo with objects in the fireplace.

In her cottage, Laura struggles. She looks frantically for the trinket, then prays to Amun-Ra. The final shot of her is filtered to distort her image. It turns her eyes into little black coals, which is an effective visual metaphor.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Laura has been important in the history of the show and is key to this little period of the plot, but it is fairly clear that she is a short-timer now. All she cares about is taking her children away and burning them to death so that she can renew her own existence, and she keeps saying she is on a tight deadline for that project. We can be sure she won’t succeed, and even if she does she will be off the show. So she really could die, making the cliffhanger more suspenseful than usual.

Soaps classically divided the days of the week so that very little happened on Tuesday or Wednesday, Thursdays were devoted to plot mechanics setting up a big development, Fridays would show that big development and end with a memorable cliffhanger, and Mondays would resolve the cliffhanger and give a lot of recap to bring new viewers up to speed. Dark Shadows never followed this formula. These last three episodes are a case in point. #755 was all about Laura trying and failing to figure out whether Barnabas was a vampire. That was a mid-week throwaway if ever there was one, but it aired on a Friday. Yesterday she got confirmation that he was, and we ended with a fine cliffhanger with her holding the stake and mallet beside Barnabas’ open coffin. That aired on Monday, but was a perfect Thursday scene-setter. Today, a Tuesday, we have a whiz-bang battle of the witches, with new alignments and new dangers, a great Friday climax with a cliffhanger fitting for the end of any week.

Violet Welles was far and away the best writer of dialogue on Dark Shadows, and today’s script is so full of gems that even the plot summary on the Dark Shadows wiki is full of quotes. I can hardly blame the editor for that deviation from the usual format, there is so much good stuff I would have been tempted to transcribe the entire script if someone else had not already done so.

Episode 755: So many strange habits

Every character we see today is a trespasser at the great estate of Collinwood. Libertine Quentin Collins was banished from Collinwood the year before by his grandmother Edith, but came back shortly before Edith died and left the estate to his sister Judith. He then accepted $10,000 from Judith on condition that he would leave, but he did not keep his end of the bargain. Judith is too afraid of scandal to take Quentin to court for an eviction order, so he’s still living in his old room.

Judith fired maidservant Beth Chavez the other day. Beth never did leave, and now the family has given up and started giving her orders again.

Quentin and Judith’s distant cousin Barnabas was ordered to leave Collinwood forever by his father Joshua. That took place almost a hundred years before. Barnabas then became a vampire. Now he’s back, masquerading as his own imaginary great-grandson.

Quentin and Judith’s brother Edward is estranged from his wife Laura. Quentin and Laura had an affair, and she followed Quentin to Egypt upon his banishment. When she came back to Collinwood several weeks ago, Edward ordered her to leave. She threatened to make a scandal, and he caved in, agreeing to let her stay in the groundskeeper’s cottage on the property. Today she is in the great house, and Beth tells her that she has orders from Judith and Edward that she is to see to it that she leaves the house and does not come back. They quarrel, and Beth leaves her in the drawing room. Later, Laura comes back to the house and demands Beth let her back in the drawing room, and for some reason Beth feels she must comply.

The only person we see who has a legitimate reason to be in the great house is servant Dirk Wilkins. Dirk has been bewitched by Laura and now is her cat’s paw. She orders him to let himself into the Old House on the estate, where Barnabas is staying, and to steal any papers that might shed light on Barnabas. Dirk and Laura certainly know that neither Judith nor Barnabas would want them to do this, so Dirk winds up not only as a trespasser in that house, but as a burglar there.

The end of the episode takes us to an old graveyard for an even more egregious example of trespass. Dirk found an old document written by the late Ben Stokes confirming that Barnabas has a secret, but ending with Ben’s vow to take that secret “to the grave.” Laura takes this expression literally, and orders Dirk to dig up Ben’s grave. Sure enough, they find more papers hidden in the coffin.

Here it is, the secret he took to the grave! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Diana Millay was a fine actress, capable of subtle psychological drama and unsurpassed at dry comedy. But her delivery of today’s opening voiceover is stunningly bad. Between her first tour of duty as Laura in December 1966-March 1967 and her current run, Dark Shadows changed from a Gothic drama aimed at adults to a supernatural thriller popular among preteens. This left little room for what she did best. She may well have been frustrated by the new situation. If so, that frustration might show in her decision to deliver the summary of the plot so far as if she were a nursery school teacher reading to a group of groggy three year olds.

Episode 752: Matters other than the law

Libertine Quentin Collins murdered his wife Jenny the other day, shortly after he learned that she was the sister of broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi. Since Quentin is convinced that Magda has magical powers, this would seem to suggest a low degree of impulse control on his part.

Magda did place a curse on Quentin, and she refuses to tell him what it is. Last night he doubled over in pain, lost consciousness, and disappeared from the great house on the estate of Collinwood. This morning he has shown up in the foyer, flat on his back, his clothing in shreds and blood all over him. His girlfriend, Jenny’s former maid Beth, found him and helped him to his room. Neither of them can figure out what happened to him overnight.

Meanwhile, Collins family attorney Evan Hanley has come to meet with Quentin’s sister Judith, who owns the estate and the Collins family’s businesses. Judith is enraged that Quentin took $10,000 from her in return for signing an agreement to leave the house and never come back, but has refused either to leave or to return the money. Evan assures Judith he will take care of the matter at once. While he is still in the drawing room, Judith answers the telephone. She learns that a young woman named Dorcas Trilling was brutally killed on the estate the night before, her body ripped apart as if by a wild animal of some kind.

Unknown to Judith, Evan and Quentin are members of a Satanist coven. Evan does call on Quentin and Beth in Quentin’s room, and he does deliver Judith’s message. He and Quentin both ask Beth to leave so they can discuss another matter. At first she resists, but finally she does go. Quentin tells him what happened the night before and that he believes Magda has cursed him. Evan sees the bloody clothing in a pile on the floor, and his face shows a grim surmise. Nonetheless, he does not tell Quentin about Dorcas.

Quentin asks Evan to help him with Magda. Evan says that he will do so, but cautions Quentin that his help will come at a very high price. Quentin asks what happened to their friendship. Evan tells him that “There is no such thing as a friend” and laughs. That must come as quite a nasty shock to Quentin. You spend time with a fellow conjuring up demons, forging wills, and working together to impoverish half your family and kill the other half, and you think you mean something to each other. But no, it just isn’t that way with Evan.

Evan calls on Magda at the Old House on the estate. Magda is coy and does not tell him anything he does not already know, but he does notice that she is wearing a pendant in the form of a pentagram. She says it is just a bit of Romani jewelry, worth only a few cents. He offers her a hundred dollars for it. She refuses, saying that it was a gift from her late mother, and offers to show him other pieces of the same type. Evan tells her that he knows the pentagram can protect against many supernatural menaces, and asks which one she is guarding against at the moment. She keeps mum.

Back in Quentin’s room, Evan chalks a pentagram all over his rug. He tells Quentin and Beth that at nightfall, they must set two black candles burning, one in each of two points of the pentagram, and Quentin must take up a position in the center of the pentagram. He must not move from this spot until daybreak.

The year is 1897, and the first vacuum cleaner wasn’t invented until 1901. It’s going to be quite a job to clean that rug. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin is having an anxiety attack, and refuses to cooperate with Evan’s plan. This is consistent with his character as we have seen it so far. In #710, he and Evan summoned a creature to rise from Hell and smite one of their enemies, and when a form actually started to take shape, he panicked and tried to run away. Quentin is obsessed with black magic and the occult, but when it turns out there is something to all of his spells and incantations, he cannot bring himself to face the reality of it.

Quentin declares that he wants a plan that “makes sense.” He then says they have to kill Magda. Evan replies that that is the worst thing they could possibly do. If they kill Magda, there will never be any way to lift the curse.

Later that night, Beth and Quentin are still in the room. The pains come on Quentin again. She hurriedly picks up the chalk and redraws the parts pentagram that Quentin had smudged, then sets a chair in the middle. She tries to get Quentin into that chair, but he is unable to get himself onto the seat. She turns to look for the black candles, then hears snarling and growling. She turns to the spot off camera where Quentin is, and reacts with horror. We know that Quentin is a werewolf; now she knows it, too. As the closing credits roll, it does not seem likely that she will have much chance to make use of that knowledge.

Episode 751: Your most concerned friend

Libertine Quentin Collins presents himself as maidservant Beth Chavez’ great love. He wants her to run away with him and make a new life together, and to do so right now, before the curse he brought upon himself by murdering his wife in front of Beth kicks in. She is inclined to go along with him, but he collapses in agony before they can leave her room.

Teacher Dorcas Trilling presents herself as the most faithful devotee of the Rev’d Gregory Trask, keeper of a brutal dungeon for children disguised as a boarding school called Worthington Hall. Dorcas asks Trask why he keeps her disobedient colleague Rachel Drummond on the faculty. Trask tells Dorcas that he thinks of Rachel as a thorn in his flesh. She stirs up his basest impulses. Regular viewers know how true this is- in their scenes together, Trask has not only extorted Rachel to come to work for him, but has repeatedly made it clear that he wants to force her into a sexual relationship as well. But the base impulse he admits to in his conversation with Dorcas is anger at Rachel’s wickedness. He says that he keeps her around as a way of building his resistance to the sin of wrath. Dorcas takes the bait, and declares that it makes her admire Trask all the more.

Dorcas looks at Trask with love in her eyes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Rachel presents herself as the protector of twelve year old Jamison Collins, heir presumptive to spinster Judith Collins as the owner of the great estate of Collinwood and the Collins family’s business enterprises. She slips out of Worthington Hall, which is currently operating from a house on the estate, in order to tell Judith that Trask has falsely accused Jamison of academic misconduct and is refusing to feed him until he confesses. As it happens, Trask confirmed to Dorcas that this is true, and said that by forcing Jamison to confess to something he did not do he will teach him humility. Dorcas is so far gone that this admission of loathsome injustice adds further to her admiration for Trask.

Beth presents herself as Quentin’s representative in a telephone call to the doctor. When she finds that the doctor is out, she urges his assistant to call back as soon as possible. She is about to go back to check on Quentin when Rachel comes to the great house looking for Judith or for Jamison’s father Edward. Beth tells her that they are out, and that there is an extreme emergency in progress. Rachel accompanies her to the room. They find that it is in a shambles and Quentin is gone. They return to the foyer, where the telephone rings. Beth is disappointed it is not the doctor. It is Trask, and he asks to speak to Rachel. Beth hands her the telephone.

Trask presents himself to Rachel as her “most concerned friend.” He also reminds her of his threat to frame her on charges of theft and murder, and demands she return to the school at once. As she has done before, she crumbles and rushes off. Beth watches her go with puzzlement, as others have done on those previous occasions.

Dorcas presents herself as a spy and enforcer for Trask. After Trask tells Rachel he has docked her a week’s pay for trying to feed Jamison against his orders, Rachel catches Dorcas listening at the door. Rachel leaves the room after their confrontation. We see Dorcas alone for a moment, then hear a window breaking and see her horrified reaction. We hear growling and snarling. Rachel comes in, Trask follows, and they see Dorcas’ mangled corpse. Returning viewers know that Quentin’s curse is that he has become a werewolf. Dorcas is his first victim.

Dorcas is played by Gail Strickland, who went on to have a huge career on TV in the 1970s and 1980s. Miss Strickland is a fine actress, and it is a terrible shame she wasn’t on the show more. Terrayne Crawford, who plays Beth, is good today, but she could really only project one emotion at a time. That is a grave weakness in this part of Dark Shadows, when most characters have complex motivations in almost every scene. In Miss Strickland’s hands, several scenes that were flat and tedious due to Miss Crawford’s literalist acting style would have been exciting and nuanced. Beth was originally seen as a ghost who did not speak but made an impression by her stark yet lovely features. Miss Strickland’s looks could have that effect as well as did Miss Crawford’s. Indeed, I suspect she must have attracted the producers’ attention when they were deciding between the two of them for the role of Beth.

As of this writing, every member of today’s cast is still alive. When you’re watching a show and posting about it on the 56th anniversary of its original airdate, that’s an unusual thing to see. I believe it is the first such episode we have come upon.