quentin collins – Page 4 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 875: Barnabas, Quentin, and the difficulty of being oneself

This is the first episode credited to Peter Miner as line producer. Dark Shadows was being taped way out of sequence at this period, so Robert Costello’s name will appear in the credits several more times in the next few weeks. The role of the line producers is one of the most under-discussed aspects of the show’s history; writer Ron Sproat, for example, was in a 1985 festival appearance unable to remember ever receiving any input from Costello. So far as he could recall, the writers interacted exclusively with executive producer Dan Curtis.

Even if Sproat’s memory were accurate, I suspect that much of Curtis’ own time working on the show was spent in meetings with Costello. He was there from the beginning, and was around throughout the long periods when Curtis was away in London and other places working on other projects. When the show makes deep cuts into its early stages of development, referring to story points that played out long before any of the current staff of writers came aboard, I always suspect it was Costello who suggested the idea. Now that he is leaving, we will see if those references become rarer. If they don’t, maybe it is Curtis’ own memory that has been at work. On the other hand, even if they do dry up it may just be that they had run out of things to say about those old themes. Whatever happens, Costello had a hard job and clearly did it better than almost anyone else could have, it’s sad to see him go.

Today’s story is about the results of a spell that 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi cast a few weeks ago. Petofi forcibly swapped bodies with handsome young Quentin Collins. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

Yesterday, maidservant Beth Chavez found out about the body swap. In love with Quentin and terrified of Petofi, she was horrified by it. Today, she searches desperately for someone she can trust, and makes the singularly unfortunate choice of weak-willed schoolteacher turned unscrupulous adventurer Tim Shaw. She goes to Tim’s hotel room, tells him the story, and asks for help. Uncharacteristically, he does not look for a way to sell the information Beth gives him. He simply goes to Q-Petofi, whom he believes to be Quentin, in what can only be a sincere effort to do the right thing. He brings Q-Petofi back to his room, where Beth is waiting. She soon manages to escape, and Q-Petofi chases her.

For his part, P-Quentin made a happy discovery yesterday and the day before. When Petofi executed the body swap, he took his powers with him into Quentin’s form. But now P-Quentin finds that the powers have returned to Petofi’s own rightful body, which is to say to him. After consulting with his friend and distant cousin, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, P-Quentin decides to will himself back into his own body.

This works. Quentin awakes as himself, in the woods on Widows’ Hill. He finds Beth at the summit of the hill, near the cliff from which so many people have leapt or fallen to their deaths. She thinks he is Petofi, and flees to the edge while he tries to reassure her of his true identity. The closing cliffhanger leaves her inches from death.

A few years ago, I posted a fanfic idea in the comments on Danny Horn’s post about this episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day. I still like it:

This is one of the episodes that could have been novelized by “Marilyn” Ross under the title “Barnabas, Quentin, and the Dumbest Possible Plan.” Rather than will himself into his own body right away, thus returning Petofi to his body and for all they know to his full powers, a character with brains might have tried swapping places with someone relatively harmless. Beth would seem to be the obvious person. If she comes to in Petofi’s body, Beth would seem to be the person most likely to accept the situation and least likely to use the powers of Petofi to destroy Our Heroes. Playing Quentin may have been just the challenge Terry Crawford really needed to show off her acting talents, and I’m sure Thayer David would have done wonders as Beth.

Quentin/ Beth/ Petofi could have been the first in a whole series of body swaps. Some of those swaps could have led to villains getting their comeuppance, helping to clear the decks for the end of the 1897 segment. So, while inhabiting the body of a villain, Quentin tries to do something heroic, winds up in mortal peril, and at the last second snaps back to his previous host, just in time for the villain to be the one who dies.

Comment posted 6 December 2020 on Danny Horn, “Episode 875: Switchback,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 8 June 2016.

Fans if the original Star Trek will recognize the source of my inspiration. The episode titled “Return to Tomorrow” features a malevolent alien squatting in Mr Spock’s body. Spock hides his consciousness in the brain of Nurse Christine Chapel, whom the alien once controlled, as Petofi once controlled Beth, and who has a crush on Spock as Beth does on Quentin. And Spock and Nurse Chapel, as a composite being, deliver the fatal blow that kills the alien.

Episode 874: Makes a girl feel creepy

Ever since its first time-travel storyline, when it spent November 1967 through March 1969 visiting the 1790s, Dark Shadows has been committed to treating its cast as a repertory theater company. Now, we are coming to the end of the 35th week of an arc set in 1897, and most of the actors are not only playing characters unique to that year but are playing two characters at once. So David Selby joined the cast as rakish libertine Quentin Collins, and Thayer David, who has played several parts on the show, had been playing sorcerer Count Petofi. But a few weeks ago Petofi cast a spell to trade bodies with Quentin. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

In #819, Petofi found uptight minister’s daughter Charity Trask to be an irritant, and so he erased her personality. He replaced it with that of late Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye, whom Charity had never met. Pansy has been residing in Charity’s body ever since. Charity had run out of story, and Pansy is a lot of fun, so it would be a pure loss if this transformation were reversed.

Pansy Faye, occupying the former body of Charity Trask.

In #844, a young American woman named Kitty Soames arrived at the great house of Collinwood. Kitty is the dowager countess of Hampshire. The late Earl was a friend of Quentin’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward, and because of his involvement with Petofi he died penniless. Kitty is hoping to marry Edward and rescue her financial position. Since Edward is also penniless and looking for a way out of his troubles, we might look forward to a comedy resolution where each finds out about the other’s poverty on their wedding day.

But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards. From the day of her arrival, Kitty has been having psychotic episodes. These are triggered by the irruption into her consciousness of the mind of the late Josette DuPrés. In the 1790s, Josette was engaged to marry Barnabas Collins. A wicked witch sabotaged their engagement, turned Barnabas into a vampire, and drove Josette to kill herself. Barnabas became obsessed with recreating Josette; in 1967, when the show was set in contemporary times, he tried to achieve this by abducting women and torturing them. Now Barnabas has traveled back in time to 1897, and he is apparently not being evil when he urges Kitty to allow Josette to take over as her primary consciousness.

Barnabas and Kitty, under Josette’s watchful eyes.

Petofi’s magical powers are concentrated in his right hand, and he took them with him when he moved into Quentin’s body. Today we see that he is losing these powers. Q-Petofi confronts Barnabas, who is for the time being free of the effects of the vampire curse. Q-Petofi announces he will restore those effects and touches Barnabas’ forehead with his right hand. When nothing happens, Barnabas taunts him. Later, Q-Petofi confronts Pansy, who has figured out about the body swap. He announces he will turn her back into Charity. He touches her with his right hand, and again nothing happens. She complains that he makes her feel creepy acting like that. The scene between Q-Petofi and Pansy really is hilarious.

For her part, Kitty/ Josette has gone to P-Quentin, whom she believes to be Petofi. She insists he touch her with his magic hand and clear up her identity crisis; unable to convince her he has no powers, he plays along. To his amazement and delight, it works. She realizes she is both Kitty and Josette, and he realizes that he now has Petofi’s powers.

Kitty/ Josette goes to her room in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Josette has communicated with the living through her portrait since its first appearance in #70; longtime viewers will remember a one-sided conversation strange and troubled boy David Collins had with it in #102. Kitty hears the portrait talking to her, urging her to become Josette, assuring her they will be happy once they meld into a symbiont. Barnabas shows up, and Kitty/ Josette has a candid and endearing conversation with him. She realizes the whole truth about him; she knows everything Josette knows. She cannot decide what she ought to do.

Episode 873: Charming and exquisitely dangerous

In October 1897, sorcerer Count Petofi has used his magical powers to swap bodies with Quentin Collins. I refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

We open with Q-Petofi meditating on a lineup of I Ching wands. He goes into a trance which unlocks a cosmic force that transports him to the great house of Collinwood in 1969. He wanders into the drawing room, finds a newspaper dated 28 October of that year, and starts exulting. Maggie Evans, governess in the great house in the late 60s, hears him and comes downstairs.

As the segment of Dark Shadows set in 1897 winds down, we’ve been thinking of ways they might have moved forward. Some of the possibilities involve splitting the week between episodes set in 1897 and others set in 1969. Maggie has been on the show from episode #1, and has been central to several of the storylines that take place in contemporary dress. The last of these stories before the move to 1897 centered on Quentin’s malevolent ghost haunting Collinwood and making it impossible for anyone to live there. In the course of that, he appeared to Maggie several times. In #682, Maggie had a dream in which Quentin’s ghost strangled her to death. Though the events we have seen in 1897 have changed the future, we saw in #839 that the 1960s characters remember Quentin’s haunting. So when Maggie is on her way to meet someone who is to all outward appearances Quentin, we have a hint that a story might be brewing in which Q-Petofi finds himself carrying the can for all of the horrors Quentin’s ghost wrought between December 1968 and September 1969.

Alas, it is not to be. By the time Maggie reaches the drawing room, Q-Petofi has vanished. A few moments after he left 1897, maidservant Beth scattered the wands and brought him back. He is furious when he comes to, and she explains that she had to do it. The magical portrait that keeps Quentin, and presumably also Q-Petofi, from becoming a werewolf is not in the suitcase Q-Petofi gave her earlier in the evening to bury. Q-Petofi has been in possession of Quentin’s body and of his portrait for weeks, and he has vast powers of sorcery, so you’d think he would have hidden the portrait long before. His magic powers would seem to give him the ability to do anything at all to hide it. My favorite idea is that he would impose onto Quentin’s portrait an exact copy of the portrait that hangs above the mantel in the drawing room of the great house and hang it in its place, so that it would be hidden in plain sight for years to come.

Besides, if Q-Petofi was going to bury the portrait surely he would at least have put it in something airtight and made of metal, not a wooden suitcase that doesn’t close all the way and that will likely rot to dust in a year or two. Apparently he isn’t as big on long-term plans as he led us to believe when he claimed he was working on a design to become the ruler of the cosmos.

Q-Petofi orders Beth to bring Pansy Faye, a deceased Cockney showgirl/ mentalist who has for some time been inhabiting the body once occupied by the stunningly dreary Charity Trask, to Quentin’s room at Collinwood. He demands information which she refuses to give. She storms out.

Pansy has a dream in which she and Quentin dance in the drawing room of Collinwood while a specially recorded version of her song, I Wanna Dance for You, featuring the voices of Nancy Barrett and David Selby, plays in the background. Colors flare on the screen while we hear them sing. Miss Barrett was an excellent singer, Mr Selby an adequate one. He does speak a few of his lines, which damages the rhythm of the song, and the flaring colors often obscure the actors completely. Mr Selby and Miss Barrett are so lovable that we very much want to overlook these flaws in the number’s conception.

The dream ends with Quentin turning into Petofi and laughing evilly at Pansy. She awakes in horror. She has known for some days that Q-Petofi isn’t Quentin, and she knows enough about Petofi that it is strange she hasn’t already figured out that he is the one hiding inside his body. But when she sits up with a gasp, we know that she has finally put it all together.

Time-traveler Barnabas Collins, a recovering vampire, meets Q-Petofi in the drawing room at Collinwood. Q-Petofi is convinced that Barnabas stole the portrait of Quentin, and is very aggressive about pressing his suspicions. Barnabas has been playing dumb ever since his vampirism went into remission, but after a couple of minutes of Q-Petofi’s hectoring he addresses him as “Count Petofi.” When Barnabas cannot tell him what he wants to hear, Q-Petofi declares that he will restore the vampire curse to its full potency. He touches Barnabas’ forehead with the right hand in which his powers are concentrated. Barnabas squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, then opens them with a look of triumph. He asks Q-Petofi what has become of his powers.

The rest of the episode revolves around yet another possessed person. Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, is also Josette DuPrés, who plunged to her death from the cliff at Widow’s Hill 101 years before. Barnabas was supposed to marry Josette at one point, and he has been obsessed with recreating her ever since.

In May and June of 1967, when the show was set in the present, Barnabas abducted Maggie and tried to brainwash her into becoming Josette. In those days, the show was ambiguous about why Barnabas picked Maggie. Strange and troubled boy David Collins was an intimate friend of Josette’s ghost, and when he saw Maggie in Josette’s dress in #240 and #241, he thought she was Josette, looking just as she always did. Indeed, Miss Scott had played the ghost a few times, always behind a veil. When Barnabas was about to give up on Maggie in #260 he very earnestly told her “But you are Josette!” Yet after Maggie escaped, he picked another girl and planned to repeat the experiment with her, explaining to his sorely-bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #274 that all you have to do is “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure, and a new personality is created.”

But when the show made its first trip back in time, visiting the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968, Kathryn Leigh Scott played Josette. That was a bold move. Longtime viewers were left with the uncomfortable feeling that Barnabas may have had a point when he devised the horrifying program of torture that made the show so terribly bleak for several weeks. When we see Miss Scott playing Kitty, who really is Josette and really does have to accept that fact, longtime viewers can only squirm as they remember Barnabas shoving Maggie into his old coffin and later walking down the long gray corridors of his basement on his way to the prison cell where he was going to murder her. We’ve since come to know Barnabas as an endearingly ineffectual comic villain, but it is a stretch to remind us of him as he was in those grim days and ask us to concede that he was in any sense right.

Kitty confronts Barnabas at Collinwood and accuses him of orchestrating her Josettifying psychosis. He denies that he is responsible, and claims to know that Josette’s spirit lives in her and that she ought to yield to it. When she asks how he knows, he makes up a story about being a boy in England, falling in love with a portrait of Josette, and reading her diaries. She is unconvinced.

Later, Josette goes to P-Quentin in Petofi’s old squat, the abandoned mill on the North Road. She believes he is Petofi, and asks him to use his power to resolve her identity crisis. He tries to explain that he only looks like Petofi, and has none of his power, but she refuses to believe him. Having nothing to lose, he decides to play along. He tells the right hand to tell Kitty the truth about herself, and touches her forehead. She suddenly realizes that she is both Josette and Kitty. P-Quentin just as suddenly realizes that Petofi’s power has returned to the body in which he is now an unwilling tenant.

Kitty/ Josette keeps telling P-Quentin that she remembers what he was able to do with his right hand when he was staying with her and her late husband in England a few years before. This is a pretty bad continuity error. For eight weeks from #778, the most dynamic story on the show centered on the fact that Petofi’s hand was cut off in 1797 and kept in a box by a Romani tribe for the hundred years since, until broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi stole it in an attempt to lift the werewolf curse from Quentin. It was only in #815, in August, that Petofi reattached his hand and with it regained the bulk of his power. Granted, #815 is eleven and a half weeks ago, but the show now takes so little time to onboard new viewers by recapping that the writers are clearly counting on the audience to have a great deal of information about the story so far in their heads. As such, it is very surprising that they would break from established continuity on such a major point of the recent months.

Episode 872: Favors for enemies

At the beginning of March 1969, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins meditated on some I Ching wands and found himself transported back in time to 1897. Ever since, Dark Shadows has been a costume drama set in that year. For the first several months of the 1897 arc, there were multiple intertwined storylines, each involving several characters, threatening to negate the version of the Collins family we see in the parts of the show set in the 1960s, and requiring a lot of intricate action to unravel.

Now, the original stories are all resolved. Most of the things keeping us from returning to a contemporary setting qualify as fairly minor loose ends- we can see that Judith Collins will get rid of her evil husband Gregory Trask one way or another, and we can see that Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, will realize she is really the reincarnation of Barnabas’ lost love Josette and will then become unavailable to him. Both of these could be wrapped up in the same episode, and the fates of the other characters don’t need any further explanation. The one exception is the story about sorcerer Count Petofi and rakish Quentin Collins. Petofi has used his magic powers to swap bodies with Quentin. I refer to the villainous Petofi who has hijacked Quentin’s body as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin trapped in Petofi’s aging form as P-Quentin.

Now, Q-Petofi has found out that meditating on the right lineup of I Ching wands releases powers that can transport a person to a different period of history, and he makes arrangements for a departure to 1969. Barnabas tries to stop him, but at the end of the episode we see him standing in the drawing room of Collinwood in that year.

Q-Petofi in 1969. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episodes like this present a challenge to someone blogging about the 1897 segment of Dark Shadows. It’s taken up with intricate plot mechanics that depend on story points that would sound ridiculous if you explained them to someone who hasn’t been watching for the last few months, and as Danny Horn explains in his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, many of the scenes don’t make logical sense if you stop and think about them. But it is well-paced, the dialogue is good, the through-line of Q-Petofi’s busyness and Barnabas’ scheming is effectively realized, Nancy Barrett has some charming scenes as Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye, and the image of Q-Petofi in 1969 is a strong ending. So it really is a half hour well spent, but if you aren’t going to watch it you will just have to take my word for that.

The drawing room figures in five scenes set in 1897 before it appears in its 1969 configuration. Since the show was done live-to-tape, the stage hands had to change the furniture gradually in between those scenes. Danny lists the changes we can see:

The drawing room set changes from the 1897 set to the 1969 set over the course of the episode, but the change actually happens in stages rather than all at once. The couch and chairs are replaced while they’re still doing 1897 scenes, and then the lamps, telephone and desk are changed for the final scene.

There are six scenes set in the drawing room, but in some of them, you only see a small part of the set, so it’s hard to say exactly when the switches are made. But here’s what you can see:

Act 1, Tate tells Pansy that he’s seen the future: She’s sitting on a red couch. There are red padded chairs facing the couch. Various round lamps around the room, old telephone on the credenza. Act 2 picks up with Tate and Pansy again, no visible change to the set dressing.

Act 3, Barnabas tells Pansy a secret: They huddle in a corner of the drawing room, where you can’t see much. It’s all shot by one camera.

Act 3, Petofi and Pansy drink champagne: The couch has changed from the 1897 red couch to a green 1969 model. We still see the round lamps and the old telephone.

Act 3, Barnabas finds Pansy’s drunk the rest of the champagne: There are now green chairs facing the green couch. There’s also a sideboard with a clock and a green shaded lamp.

Act 3 finish, Petofi enters the 1969 drawing room: All of the lamps have been changed to modern style, and the old telephone has become a modern telephone. The green chairs are facing the green couch. The sideboard has been replaced with a desk, holding some books, a lamp, and the newspaper.

Danny Horn, “Episode 872: Tick Tock,” posted 4 June 2016 on Dark Shadows Every Day.

There is one important set decoration they left in its 1897 position. In the 1960s, a portrait of Jeremiah Collins hangs above the mantel; in 1897, a portrait identified in #3 as that of Isaac Collins hangs there. Isaac is still in place when Q-Petofi enters the 1969 drawing room.

Episode 869: The man who walks in the day

In October 1897, the hypocritical Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask is married to the vastly wealthy Judith Collins, owner of the estate of Collinwood and of the Collins family businesses. For more than thirteen weeks, everything seemed to be going Trask’s way. He had gaslighted Judith into a mental hospital and had almost free rein over all of her assets. In her absence, he invited the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris to stay in the great house on the estate, and set out to seduce her.

Piece by piece, Trask’s little corner of paradise fell apart. First, 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi orchestrated a series of events that led Trask to sign a confession to the murder of his first wife, and no matter how many times he destroyed the confession new copies of it kept materializing. Then Petofi erased the personality of Trask’s daughter and enforcer Charity, replacing it with that of late Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye. Later, Amanda fell in love with Judith’s brother Quentin, told Trask off, and wound up leaving for New York by herself. Now, Judith has returned from the mental hospital, all sane and deeply suspicious.

The front door of the great house is Trask’s enemy today. No sooner does he enter it than he finds Pansy in the foyer, singing her song. He demands she stop and tells her he is her father. She laughs at this claim, and reminisces about the late Bertie Faye. Trask goes into the drawing room, and to his horror sees a large oil painting of Amanda on an easel. We saw Pansy setting it up earlier in the episode, and saw her buy it a few days ago. But Trask didn’t see those things, and when she tells him she doesn’t know anything about it, he seems to accept her denials. She exits upstairs.

The front door opens again, and Judith’s brother Edward enters with two other men. One appears to be Quentin, but is in fact Petofi in possession of Quentin’s body. The other appears to be time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins.

Trask and Edward both believe that Petofi is Quentin; since he is played by David Selby, I call him Q-Petofi. The man who appears to be Barnabas is very weak. He says that his name is indeed Barnabas Collins, but that he is not the vampire. He claims to have arrived from England, to have been attacked by a vampire who looked just like him, and to have little memory of what happened after.

In #845, Pansy went into a cave and found a coffin containing what appeared to be Barnabas. She drove a stake through his heart. When Edward and Q-Petofi met this weak Barnabas yesterday in the doctor’s office, they were skeptical of his story. They took him to the cave, opened the coffin, and saw the body Pansy had staked inside, the stake still lodged in its heart. Since they could see the two of them side by side, Edward could only conclude that the weak man is different from the vampire, and that his story is therefore true. Q-Petofi, well aware of the many magical and science-fictional entities in Barnabas’ orbit, is not at all convinced.

Trask sees the weak Barnabas and is enraged that Edward and Q-Petofi have brought the vampire back from the dead. While Q-Petofi takes the weak Barnabas upstairs to a bedroom, Edward tries to reason with Trask. This is seldom a fruitful exercise. When Edward finally points out that it is broad daylight and the weak Barnabas is alive and moving, Trask is left speechless.

Alone with the weak Barnabas, Q-Petofi tries to trick him into believing that he is Quentin and that he can trust him. When Q-Petofi goes on about all the secrets that Barnabas and Quentin have shared, the weak Barnabas responds only with bewilderment.

Q-Petofi goes back to the cave and sets the coffin on fire, acting on the hypothesis that the destruction of the staked Barnabas will have some kind of effect on the weak Barnabas. We cut back to Collinwood and see that it has none. Trask lets himself into the bedroom. After some small talk, he thrusts a large wooden cross at the weak Barnabas’ face and stands silently for a moment. The weak Barnabas looks up from his bed and asks if Trask is all right. He hurriedly says that he only brought the cross to help him pray for his recovery. The weak Barnabas observes that this is very kind, and closes his eyes while Trask kneels beside the bed.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that not only the actor Jerry Lacy, but the character Gregory Trask, seems to enjoy himself very much when there is something to be righteously indignant about. Not only does Trask have a whole set of self-aggrandizing mannerisms and techniques for silencing everyone else when he is furious, but as a con man an atmosphere of crisis provides him with an opportunity to think on his feet and devise new schemes for bilking people out of whatever they have that he wants. Mr Lacy’s joy in performance runs throughout the whole episode, but Trask’s goes through wild fluctuations, peaking each time he thinks he has found a new way to present himself as the champion of The Almighty and plummeting each time his understanding of the situation is deflated. In his first several appearances, Trask was so overwhelmingly evil and so frequently successful that he was hard to watch. When we see him repeatedly brought up short in an episode like this, all of the discomfort of those early days pays off.

In the drawing room, Edward tells Pansy that there is a sick man in a bed upstairs who looks like the vampire Barnabas and is named Barnabas Collins, but is not the man she staked. She is horrified at the thought. Barnabas was indirectly responsible for the death of Pansy as a physical being, and later murdered her fiancé, the childlike Carl Collins. He also took Charity as one of his victims for a time. Besides, in her manner of dress, quantity of makeup, working-class accent, and brashly friendly manner Pansy is the representative of all the “girls at the docks” upon whom Barnabas has fed down the centuries. So no one has more reason to fear Barnabas than does Pansy in the form of Charity. Edward reassures her as best he can, then goes up to look in on the patient.

Pansy absorbs the news that another Barnabas Collins is in the house.

The scene between Pansy and Edward will remind longtime viewers of the characters the same actors played between November 1967 and
March 1968, when Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s. Nancy Barrett was fluttery heiress Millicent Collins, while Louis Edmonds was haughty overlord Joshua Collins. In #450, Millicent had discovered the horrible truth about Barnabas and it had proven to be too much for her rather fragile grip on sanity. She decided that the vampire was not her cousin, but an impostor, and she told Joshua that it was wrong of him to have “That man who says he is Barnabas” in the house.

Not only is Pansy’s horror at the thought of a man who says that he is Barnabas staying at Collinwood reminiscent of Millicent, but her relationship to Charity also reflects the development of Millicent throughout the 1790s segment. Millicent’s transformation from a lighter-than-air comedy character to a darkly mad victim, first of her wicked husband Nathan, then of Barnabas, marked the transition to the climactic phase of the 1790s segment. Charity’s replacement by Pansy in #819 came at a time when the show was flashing many signals that the 1897 segment was nearing its end. Those signals may well have reflected an earlier plan, but 1897 was such a hit that they kept passing by the off-ramps back to the 1960s and restarting the uncertain and frightening journey into the past. Now it seems they really are getting ready to move on, and Pansy’s prominence reminds us of just how radically different a place Collinwood is now than it was when we arrived in this period in #701, at the beginning of March.

Pansy is still quaking at the thought of another Barnabas Collins when Q-Petofi enters and closes the doors of the drawing room behind him. Pansy hasn’t quite figured out his true identity, but she knows that he is not really Quentin, and that he does not mean her well. She is terrified and says she will scream unless he opens the doors.

Regular viewers have reason to believe Pansy will do more than scream. In #829, she tried to stab Quentin. And those who have been with the show for a long time will remember what happened in #204, broadcast and set in April 1967. Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, another Nancy Barrett character, found herself in the drawing room with dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. When Willie closed the doors and refused to open them, Carolyn didn’t bother screaming- she pulled a loaded gun on him.

Q-Petofi has magical powers that neither Quentin nor Willie could match, so he is not in mortal jeopardy as they would be were they to put themselves in his position. But he has created a volatile situation, and unless he resolves it within a few seconds he is likely to find himself with a huge mess on his hands. Rather than falling back on his occult talents, Q-Petofi takes a page from Quentin’s book and charms Pansy into cooperating. He tells her that he is as frightened of Barnabas as she is. That intrigues her sufficiently that she starts listening to him. He tells her that only she can discern whether the man in the sick bed upstairs is what he claims to be. A moment later, Q-Petofi has persuaded Pansy to go with him to see the weak Barnabas. The episode ends with Pansy looking at the weak Barnabas lying in bed, her eyes widening in a strong but unspecified reaction. We will have to wait until tomorrow to find out whether she is terrified at the sight of her nemesis or amazed to see an innocent man wearing the hated face.

Episode 867: The name of your beloved

The dramatic date is October 1897. Sorcerer Count Petofi is using the body of Quentin Collins as a disguise. While he is doing this, I call him Q-Petofi.

Q-Petofi has stripped witch Angelique of her powers and confined her in the cave where the chained coffin of vampire Barnabas Collins is kept. In #845, we saw Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye open this coffin and drive a stake. Now, Angelique starts banging away at the lock on the chains with a rock. When Q-Petofi’s servant Aristide comes to investigate the noise, Angelique talks about pulling the stake out of Barnabas’ heart so that he will rise again. Aristide dismisses this idea.

Longtime viewers won’t be so sure that pulling the stake out will not bring Barnabas back. In #630, broadcast and set in November 1968, warlock Nicholas Blair pulled a stake from the heart of vampire Tom Jennings and put him back into operation. That came to mind in #846 when Quentin’s brother, stuffy but lovable Edward Collins, learned that Pansy had staked Barnabas and decreed, not that Barnabas’ body be taken out into the sunlight and allowed to disintegrate, but that the coffin be chained and the cave sealed up.

Presenting the stake in the vampire’s heart as an on/ off switch lets a lot of the suspense out of the show, and it feels like a cheat. But however bad the idea is, apparently it was not original to Dark Shadows. Two frequent commenters bring this out under Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day. “Courtley Manor” (also an FotB here) writes:

Well, in some vampire legends the stake through the heart (or often the stomach or solar plexus) served a two-fold purpose. Believing a corpse was bloated due to ingestion of blood (which we now know is rather caused by gases produced by microscopic organisms during decomposition), the vampire slayer would deprive the bloodsucker of its recent meal and also the ability to consume more blood by, in effect, bursting it like a balloon. Also, the stake pinned the nightwalker to the earth or coffin so it couldn’t roam about anymore. Dan Curtis and/or the writers may have been drawing on these older legends, and figured that removing the stake could conceivably allow the vampire to heal from its wound and rise again.

Comment left 9 March 2021 by “Courtley Manor” on Danny Horn, “Episode 867: Nothing Up My Sleeve,” 26 May 2016, at Dark Shadows Every Day.

“Goddess of Transitory” added this remark to “Courtley Manor’s”:

John Carradine played exactly this in the old film House of Dracula–he starts out as a skeleton in a coffin with a stake in its rib cage as part of a sideshow but when the stake is removed, he’s back–cape, hat, and bat transforming powers intact.

Comment left 12 April 2021 by “Goddess of Transitory” on Danny Horn, “Episode 867: Nothing Up My Sleeve,” 26 May 2016, at Dark Shadows Every Day.

Meanwhile, back at the great house of Collinwood, Q-Petofi is passing as Quentin. Edward is fretting that his girlfriend Kitty Soames is missing. Kitty, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, has been having psychotic episodes ever since she arrived at Collinwood in #844. Unknown to Edward, these are the result of the spirit of the late Josette Collins taking possession of her. Q-Petofi found Kitty in Josette’s room at the Old House on the estate earlier, and lost track of her when she ran out into the woods.

Kitty/ Josette comes wandering into the drawing room. She claims to have seen Barnabas in the woods. When she says where in the woods she saw him, Q-Petofi says “Near the cave!” Edward wants to go to the cave to see if Barnabas is still in his coffin. Q-Petofi, not wanting Edward to walk in on Angelique and Aristide, volunteers to go. When Edward says he thinks he ought to handle the matter himself, Q-Petofi causes Kitty/ Josette to feel a chill. She asks Edward to stay with her, and he agrees to let Quentin go.

Q-Petofi finds Aristide holding a gun on Angelique. Aristide tells him what has been going on, and they open the coffin. They find Barnabas still inside. We see him there, the stake still in his chest.

Hello, Barney, well, hello, Barney! It’s so nice to have you back where you belong.

This is the first time we have seen Jonathan Frid since #845. He’s been in Chicago doing a play. Clearly Dan Curtis isn’t going to pay his fee just to have him lie in the coffin and breathe rapidly while the others talk about how dead he is, so we know that Barnabas is back.

Q-Petofi says that he will come back later and that he and Aristide will destroy the coffin and the body. To keep Angelique from making any more trouble, he casts a spell and surrounds her with magical flames.

While Q-Petofi is back at Collinwood reassuring Edward and Kitty/ Josette that Barnabas is dead, Angelique offers to tell Aristide secrets that no mortal man knows if he will release her from the magic flames. Aristide has no supernatural powers or occult knowledge; he is just a lummox whom Q-Petofi employs because he likes his looks and finds his sadism useful when he wants someone tortured to death. But somehow Aristide is able to stop the flames. Before Angelique can start talking, he pulls a knife on her and tells her that he doesn’t want her secrets- he just wants to kill her. Aristide has a special knife that he makes a fetish of. He calls it “The Dancing Girl.” Except when he calls it “The Dancing Lady.” At any rate, this isn’t it.

Aristide is inefficient about taking the knife out of its hiding place. He gives Angelique time to run out of the cave. He runs after her, and she hits him in the head with a rock, knocking him out. When he comes to, Aristide sees a man standing over him, asking for help. It is Barnabas.

Episode 866: Some various phases of change

It is 20 October 1897. Angelique, immortal witch and time-traveler, has discovered that her sometime fiancé, Quentin Collins, is not himself. He is 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi, and Petofi is him, having used his magic powers to force Quentin to trade bodies with him. I will refer to the villainous Petofi who looks like Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the forlorn Quentin who looks like Petofi as P-Quentin.

Yesterday, Q-Petofi caught Angelique trying to help P-Quentin. He attacked her, and we open today in a cave where he has imprisoned her. He tells her he has stripped her of her powers. He demands she tell him what she and time-traveling mad scientist Julia Hoffman have been doing. Regular viewers know that Julia is gone, having vanished from 1897 and returned to the 1960s in #858. That Q-Petofi does not know this is one of the few signs we have had recently that he has limitations.

Q-Petofi leaves Angelique in the cave with a chained coffin. He tells her that it is the one in which her ex-husband, vampire Barnabas Collins, was staked (#845.) She looks at the coffin and gives a little soliloquy about how she needs Barnabas, but he cannot help her.

Q-Petofi is not the only resident of the great house of Collinwood who is not the person he seems to be. Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager countess of Hampshire, came to Collinwood intending to get Quentin’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward Collins to marry her by concealing some key facts about her financial status. But the very day she arrived, in #844, Kitty found that she was the one most gravely deprived of information about herself. As soon as she saw the portrait of Barnabas that hangs by the front door in the foyer, she became possessed by the spirit of Barnabas’ lost love Josette.

Kitty’s episodes of Josettification have continued. Today’s begins with another look at the portrait and a longing sigh. As sight of the chained coffin sets off Angelique’s yearning for Barnabas, so the portrait is the visual cue that triggers Josette to come to the surface of Kitty’s mind. By the end of the episode, she will be in Josette’s bedroom at the Old House on the estate, telling an unseen person that she is waiting for him.

Kitty is still herself most of the time. And we can assume that sooner or later, Petofi will be defeated and Quentin will return to his right body. But a third resident of the great house has made a permanent and irreversible change of spirit. Her body is that of Charity Trask, whose father, the odious Gregory Trask, is married to Quentin and Edward’s sister Judith. But in #819, Petofi annihilated Charity’s personality and replaced it with that of Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl/ mentalist who came to Collinwood in #771 and was killed that very night, without ever having met Charity.

Angelique and Kitty/ Josette yearn for Barnabas’ return. Increasingly, the audience does too- there doesn’t seem to be anywhere the story can go until he comes back. That sets them and us against Pansy. She doesn’t share our concern for narrative progression- she is such a daffy invention she can amuse us all by herself. And she knows that Barnabas was a vampire, who preyed on Charity and was ultimately, if indirectly, responsible for Pansy’s death. Indeed, it was she who drove the stake in #845. So Barnabas is absolutely the last person Pansy wants to see again. But now someone else has emerged in next to last place.

On Friday, Pansy looked at Q-Petofi and realized that he was not Quentin. She confronted him with questions that Quentin could answer but he couldn’t, exposing him to Angelique as an impostor. When Pansy shut herself in her room, Q-Petofi went upstairs and through her door threatened that if she didn’t keep quiet “her days [would be] numbered.” Now, she has passed a note to Edward reporting on the incident. Edward and Q-Petofi meet with Pansy in her room. She tells Edward about the visions and sensings that led her to conclude that the man with him is not really Quentin. Edward thinks Pansy is just a delusion Charity is having, and so cannot ascribe much evidentiary value to these experiences. Q-Petofi claims that when he said “her days are numbered” he meant that her days as a resident of the house were numbered if she went on saying bizarre things about him. Edward asks Pansy if she might be mistaken in her interpretation of her psychic data. She says she never has been before, but allows, in a very reasonable tone, that it is possible she could be this time.

Pansy is, at the moment, the only person who could possibly be an ally for P-Quentin in his attempt to return to his own body. She does not seem to be a match for Q-Petofi’s magical powers, and so others would have to be recruited to help in the fight. But if she is now as unsure as it seems, P-Quentin doesn’t even have a place to start.

When Kitty/ Josette is in the room at the Old House, she looks at the portrait of Josette and sees that it is signed and dated. We’ve seen the portrait many times since its first appearance in #70, and it has never before borne either a signature or a date. The signature is “Coswell,” which is as good as any.

The date on the portrait is 1797, which is rather less good. In #402, set early in January 1796, we saw the portrait delivered to the Old House. Moreover, it was in #425, set in February 1796, that Josette flung herself to her death from the top of Widows’ Hill. So if this portrait is a replacement for the original, it was painted at a time when the subject was unavailable for further sittings.

Moreover, Kitty misstates the current date as 1797 in a letter to her mother, which is supposed to be a sign of her Josettification. Viewers who remember the 1790s flashback will just be puzzled by this, while those who do not are unlikely to see much significance in the date at all. It is hard to see why they’ve decided to retcon this particular point.

Episode 865: The mind and the body

In October of 1897, the estate of Collinwood is the property of Judith Collins Trask. If Judith were to list the people resident in the great house on the estate, she would include two who are only apparently there. Contrary to Judith’s beliefs, neither her brother Quentin nor her step-daughter Charity is in fact on the premises.

In #819, 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi erased Charity’s personality and replaced it with that of the late Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl and “mentalist” who was engaged to Judith’s brother Carl at the time of her death in #771. When they were both alive, Charity and Pansy never met, and they were polar opposites in every way. Now that Pansy lives again in the person of Charity, she not only retains all of the memories and habits she had before her death, but the phony psychic act she used to do has been replaced by a true second sight.

In #854 through #856, Petofi cast another, still more complicated spell. He switched bodies with Quentin. Now Quentin is shambling about in the aged and feeble form of Petofi, while Petofi is reveling in Quentin’s youth and vigor. During the body swap, I shall refer to the Petofi who appears to be Quentin as Q-Petofi, and to the Quentin who appears to be Petofi as P-Quentin.

We open today in the foyer of Collinwood. Pansy has been bickering with a houseguest named Angelique. Pansy wants to marry Quentin, and was irked when he became engaged to Angelique. Now the engagement is off, a fact which Pansy has been annoying Angelique by gloating about. Q-Petofi enters, and Angelique gives him a peck on the cheek. He exits, and Angelique sees that Pansy looks alarmed. Before Angelique can take satisfaction in having silenced her, Pansy declares “It ain’t him! It ain’t Quentin!”

Angelique has noticed that her onetime fiancé has been very different these last weeks, which was why she called off their engagement. So when Pansy tells her about her visions and sensings, she listens. Q-Petofi returns, and Pansy asks him to answer a series of questions to which she and Quentin would know the answer. He responds with bluster about not taking her orders. Pansy says that he doesn’t know the answers because he isn’t Quentin; Angelique suggests he just give the answers to quiet Pansy down. Pansy storms out, and Angelique tells him he handled the situation very badly. She says he oughtn’t have let himself become angry with a mentally ill person; we can see that she means more than that, and so can Q-Petofi.

Pansy’s vision gave Angelique all the information she needed to find P-Quentin. She calls on him, and he tells her everything. She agrees to take him with her on an errand she must run. Before they can go, Q-Petofi enters. He tells Angelique that she has made a grave error. If she had married him, she could have enjoyed both the mind of Petofi and the body of Quentin Collins. But instead, she has become his enemy. P-Quentin toddles off and sits in the corner, looking down helplessly.

Q-Petofi summons his servant Aristide, who threatens her with a torch. Angelique is a witch and has great powers, but we saw in #665 that she can be defeated by fire. So she cannot focus her energies on holding Q-Petofi at bay. He touches her with his right hand, where his magic powers are concentrated. She cries out and collapses.

Angelique had seemed to be P-Quentin’s last best hope to be restored to his own body. His first ally, time-traveling mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, vanished in front of him, returning to the 1960s mere moments after she realized what had happened to him. His second ally was his old friend and fellow Satanist, lawyer Evan Hanley. Evan attempted to invoke Satan to intervene and return Quentin and Petofi to their original bodies, but no help was forthcoming from the old fellow and Q-Petofi punished Evan for the attempt by enslaving him. Another of Quentin’s ex-fiancées, maidservant Beth Chavez, probably knows what has happened and would certainly like to help him. But Beth is terrified of Petofi and without resources to use against him, and there would be nothing to stop him from killing her if she made herself inconvenient to him in any way. So P-Quentin’s only potential ally at the moment is Pansy, and it is hard to see what power she might have that would be formidable to Q-Petofi. It has not even been proven that Pansy has the capacity to dance Q-Petofi’s cares away, let alone overcome his sorcery. The future looks grim indeed for P-Quentin.

Episode 863: Homecomings

In episodes #853-#856, Sorcerer Count Petofi (Thayer David) used his powers to force the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins (David Selby) to trade bodies with him. Ever since, Quentin (Thayer David) has been trying to persuade someone to believe his story about Petofi (David Selby.) For the duration of the switch, I shall refer to Thayer David’s version of Quentin as P-Quentin, and David Selby’s version of Petofi as Q-Petofi.

Yesterday, P-Quentin persuaded his old friend and fellow Satanist, Evan Hanley, of what had happened. Evan agreed to conduct a ceremony to call upon their dark lord and ask for the transfer to be broken. They trick Q-Petofi into coming to Evan’s house and knock him out with chloroform. Then Evan begins an odd incantation:

Oh, Lucifer…

Great God of man and beast, look upon us with favor. Help us correct this evil which has been done in defiance of you.

Renew our bondage as your servants. Grant us the power we need this night, and we will be yours for eternity.

For Baal, who guides your mind.

For Beelzebub, who rules your spirit.

The robber of a soul must not be spared. The robbed must be avenged.

I exorcise thee.

Oh, impure spirit, who is the mind of the enemy, by the holy rite of Hecate, I conjure thee that thou do immediately hear and obey my command. Leave this man’s body, that he may return… Oh, yes, spirits of invisibility, I conjure and constrain thee herewith to consecrate this ceremony. So that surely and without trickery, thou may return each, to the body of [its] origin.

So be it.

Oh, Lucifer, so be it.

So be it…

I charge thee. I conjure thee. I command thee. Answer my demand.

Depart from these alien bodies and return to those from whence you came.

Depart.

So be it.

So be it.

So be it.

Oh, Lucifer, we give thee thanks.

Evan and P-Quentin seem to have the wrong guy. Whatever Satan’s powers may be, undoing evil, restoring property to its rightful owners, and enforcing justice are not exactly among the old fellow’s core competencies. Of course the ceremony fails. Q-Petofi wakes up from the chloroform, tells Evan he has made the greatest and last mistake of his life, and puts the zap on his brain. The next we see him, Evan is digging a grave, refusing P-Quentin’s offer to help him, and listening to Q-Petofi announce that he is about to be buried alive.

Q-Petofi’s announcement is the closing cliffhanger, suggesting that Evan has a somewhat longer life expectancy than we might have imagined when the ceremony fell apart. But once in a while cliffhangers really are resolved with the death of the character who is in peril, and that would seem to be a possibility in this case. Yesterday was Evan’s first appearance after an absence of more than eleven weeks, and he is not associated with any major loose ends in the plot. His alliance with the odious Gregory Trask, husband of Judith Collins Trask, may have given him a foothold now that Judith is back from her own long absence and is looking on Trask with suspicion, but yesterday he seemed to back off from siding with Trask in whatever fight might be coming up. So if the makers of the show are thinking it’s time for Q-Petofi to confirm his credentials as a major villain by killing a familiar character, Evan would be the obvious choice.

Judith confronts Trask today. He lies to her to cover up his misdeeds during the more than thirteen weeks she was confined to a mental hospital. She does not contradict all of his lies, and invites him to embrace her. He seems to think he has regained his control over her, but she tells him two things that make him uncomfortable. First, she says that she has persuaded his daughter to leave her apartment in the village and move back into the great house of Collinwood. When he protests that “She is not my daughter!,” Judith calmly replies that she is, closing the subject and leaving him looking like a petulant child. She also says that she hopes he has not bought or sold any stocks in her name lately, since she has revoked his power of attorney over her holdings. Again, he can say nothing in response.

Judith’s brother, the stuffy but lovable Edward, does not hear the details of this conversation. After Judith leaves the drawing room, Edward enters and tells Trask that he has won again. Trask perks up at this, and becomes his usual overbearing self. But he is just as quickly deflated when Edward tells him that he is looking into what he has been doing for the last thirteen weeks, and that when he finds out he will make a full report to Judith.

When Dark Shadows first became a costume drama set in 1897, Edward assumed he was to inherit the estate of Collinwood and all the family’s businesses. He was haughty and commanding, and Judith was a fragile spinster. But then their grandmother died, and the will left everything to Judith. She fell victim to Trask’s machinations and married him; he gaslighted her into the madhouse. Now that she has come home, Judith has found a new strength, sufficient to hold her own in the household if not to uphold justice and right on the scale which her position in the community would seem to demand. Edward’s dependent financial position, coupled with the many supernatural horrors he has witnessed, have gradually reduced him to a childlike state. In their scenes today, we see that the two of them have come to embody that signature dynamic of Dark Shadows, the relationship between Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother.

Episode 862: Reexamine your loyalties

Know Yourself

In yesterday’s episode, Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, found a note on the dresser in the room where she has been staying in the great house of Collinwood. It read “Know yourself, be who you must be.” The dramatic date is 1897, 1504 years after the Delphic oracle went out of business, so it is unlikely that its management sent the message as a translation of and commentary on their motto γνῶθι σεαυτόν.* It was also 83 years before the US Army adopted the slogan “Be all you can be,” so we can rule out the idea that a recruiting sergeant was trying to get Kitty to enlist. The US Army didn’t even accept countesses in those days, not even if, like Kitty, they originally came from Pennsylvania and are now in Maine.

Ever since she arrived at Collinwood in #844, the ghost of the gracious Josette has been taking possession of Kitty from time to time. The note prompts another spell of Josettification. Kitty puts on Josette’s wedding dress and wraps a red cloak around it. She mutters that “He is waiting for me,” not specifying who “he” is. She goes to the top of Widows’ Hill, the precipice from which Josette flung herself to her death a century before.

Josette was married to Jeremiah Collins. Jeremiah’s ghost appears to Kitty/ Josette. He urges her to leave Collinwood at once, lest “he” kill her. By this time the possession has worn off, and Kitty has no more idea who Jeremiah means by “he” than anyone overhearing her earlier would have known who Kitty/ Josette meant when she said that “he” was waiting for her.

Be on Guard Against Your Enemies**

Jeremiah vanishes, and Kitty is joined by a man she believes to be Count Petofi, the sorcerer who drove her husband to suicide. She fears Petofi and hates him, and is unhappy to find herself standing next to him at the top of a cliff, especially when she is in a confused frame of mind.

In fact, the man is not Petofi. Two weeks ago, Petofi used magic to force the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins to change bodies with him. Now Petofi occupies Quentin’s strong young form, while Quentin is trapped in Petofi’s aging and feeble one. While this predicament lasts, I refer to Quentin as played by Thayer David as P-Quentin, and Petofi as played by David Selby as Q-Petofi.

P-Quentin tells Kitty that he saw Jeremiah’s ghost and assures her he did not cause it to appear. He tells her he is going to Collinwood, and firmly recommends she accompany him. She waits a moment, but seeing no alternative, she goes his way.

Do Not Fight an Absent Foe***

When P-Quentin first found himself estranged from his own body and encased in Petofi’s, he was too stunned to show much tactical sense. He went around blurting out what had happened, earning nothing but a reputation as a lunatic. Now he has learned to let people believe he is Petofi and to conduct himself as befits that role. So yesterday, he found that his sister, Judith Collins Trask, had returned to the house after a long absence. She had not met Petofi, so he introduced himself to her by that name and used his memories of their childhood to befriend her.

Back at Collinwood, P-Quentin enters the drawing room and tells Judith that Kitty is resting comfortably upstairs. Judith is impressed with his thoughtfulness, and leaves him alone in the drawing room while she goes to Kitty’s room. He sees that she is preparing a note for her attorney, Evan Hanley. It occurs to him that Evan can be of use to him, and he sets out for his house.

Give the Advice the Time Calls For ****

P-Quentin knocks on Evan’s door. Evan never met Petofi, and does not recognize him. He and Quentin were for a long time close friends and fellow Satanists, and when he identifies himself as Quentin he does not gain credence. He pushes his way in, and eventually persuades Evan to take him seriously. Evan agrees to go to Collinwood and see if the man who appears to be Quentin knows him, and, if he does not do so, to trick him into participating in a ceremony to reverse the body-swap.

Judith comes. While P-Quentin hides on the terrace, she tells Evan that she wants to revoke the power of attorney she granted to her husband, the odious Gregory Trask, while she was away. Evan makes excuses, but she insists, and he agrees to follow her directions. She exits.

P-Quentin returns, and tells him that if he has involved himself with Trask’s evil schemes, it is time for him to disentangle himself from them.

Act Like a Stranger, If You Are One*****

Back at Collinwood, Q-Petofi opens the drawing room door and sees Judith. Petofi never met Judith, and Quentin has not seen her since she left more than thirteen weeks ago. Not knowing who she is, Q-Petofi simply apologizes, says he didn’t know anyone was in there, and leaves. Thinking he is her brother, Judith is of course indignant.

Judith goes to the foyer and says she expected a warmer greeting. Not having the faintest idea who she is, the best Q-Petofi can manage is “Welcome to Collinwood.” When she protests that even their rather distant brother-sister relationship entitles her to expect better than that, the light comes to him and he calls her by name. This does not appease her.

There is a knock at the front door. Judith is enraged to see Q-Petofi standing still, and orders him to answer it. He does, and lets Evan in. When he does not speak to his old friend, Judith demands to know if he doesn’t recognize Evan either. Q-Petofi pretends to know him, and is powerless to do anything but agree when Evan asks him if he remembers the meeting at his house tonight.

Q-Petofi had been cruising along unchallenged so far. How could he not, when the secret he is concealing is so bizarre? But his interaction with Judith, though it has not exposed his identity, has antagonized someone whose support would be useful to him, and now Evan knows that P-Quentin was telling him the truth.

Know Your Chance ******

Q-Petofi shows up at Evan’s. After some verbal jousting, Evan tells Q-Petofi to take a seat with his back to the room. He says that he has been chosen to preside over the festivities. P-Quentin sneaks up and chloroforms him. Evan says that he doesn’t know how long the chloroform will last, so they must proceed with the ceremony at once.

Honor Good Men *******

When Jeremiah’s ghost fades away, we see Timothy Gordon for the last time. Gordon was a frequent stand-in and background player starting in July 1966. His right hand, which he extends to Kitty in the screenshot above, was the hand that shot out of the coffin Willie Loomis was trying to plunder in #210. In mischievous moments, I think that makes him “Barnabas Collins #1,” in imdb terms. Then again, Jonathan Frid had posed for the face of the portrait of Barnabas some weeks before, and producer Robert Costello modeled for the portrait’s body before that. Many of his fellow extras went on to big careers, but Gordon’s turn as Jeremiah’s ghost made him the only performer to graduate from background player to credited member of the main cast of Dark Shadows. So I think of him as their representative.

*Greek for “Know yourself,” one of 150 maxims inscribed in the walls at the oracle. Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnōthi seauton) was one of two inscribed at the entrance, the other being Μηδεν ἄγαν (mēden agan,) “nothing in excess.” The maxims are preserved in a book by a fifth century CE author named Stobaeus; many of them appear on stones that archaeologists have found at Delphi. There’s a handy list of them on Wikipedia, pairing the Greek with some more or less OK translations. The eighth maxim on Stobaeus’ list is Σαυτον ἴσθι (sauton isthi,) “Be who you are,” which sounds a bit like the second half of the note on Kitty’s dresser.

**Stobaeus’ twenty-ninth maxim is Ἐχθρους ἀμύνου (ekhthrous amynou,) “Be on guard against your enemies.”

***Stobaeus’ 125th maxim is Ἀπόντι μὴ μάχου (aponti mē makhou,) “Do not wage a battle against one who is absent.”

****Stobaeus’ 103rd maxim is Βουλεύου χρόνῳ (bouleuou kronoi,) “Give the advice right for the time.”

*****Stobaeus’ twelfth maxim is Ξένος ὢν ἴσθι (xenos ōn isthi,) which we would translate word for word as “Stranger being, be.” The idiom plays on two senses of the verb εἰμί- the participle ὢν means “If you in fact are,” while the imperative ἴσθι is “assume the character of.” It is the same kind of play on words that you see in the word “like” in the English sentence “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.”

******Stobaeus’ tenth maxim is Καιρον γνῶθι (kairon gnōthi,) “Know the proper time.”

*******Stobaeus’ sixty fifth maxim is Ἀγαθους τίμα (agathous tima,) “Give honors to the good.”