quentin collins – Page 6 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 851: Common cause

Rakish libertine Quentin Collins races to the train station to meet his fiancée, the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris. He thinks he sees her, but it is actually another young woman wearing a remarkably similar outfit. She tells him the train to New York City left a few minutes ago; Quentin knows Amanda was on it, and that she thinks his absence means that their relationship is over. The young woman was quite miffed when Quentin first approached her, but by the time he offers his second apology her look has gone from indignant to concerned to yearning. The guy’s got game, you have to grant him that.

It’s been less than a minute since he made a bad first impression on her, and she’s ready to run off with him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin was detained by a fistfight with a repulsive little man called Charles Delaware Tate. Tate is an artist whose works sometimes have magical powers. His portrait of Quentin, for example, keeps Quentin from turning into a werewolf and ensures him against physical harm. Since Tate is obsessed with Amanda, he stole the portrait from Quentin when he learned Amanda was planning to leave with him. Quentin dared not leave without it, and went to Tate’s studio to demand its return. He very satisfyingly beat Tate senseless, but he did not find the portrait, and now he fears he has lost Amanda forever.

We cut to Tate’s studio. Tate is lying on the floor where he fell when Quentin finished hitting him. Unfortunately, he gets up. Sorcerer Count Petofi, who granted Tate the power to make magical artworks some years ago, enters. He tells Tate that it was stupid to steal Quentin’s portrait. Tate pretends not to know what Petofi is talking about, irritating him and us. Petofi says that he will have to be punished. After he forces Tate to draw a sketch of a pretty woman, he squeezes his wrists, helps himself to Quentin’s portrait, and says what sounds very much like a final goodbye. He exits, and Tate sits down with his pad and pencil. He discovers that he is no longer able to draw, not even a straight line.

These days, Dark Shadows is a costume drama set in 1897. Most of the time between 1966 and 1968, it took place in a contemporary setting. In those days, the set now used as Tate’s studio was the Evans cottage, home to artist Sam Evans, a drunken sad sack, and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. In December of 1966 and January of 1967, the ghost of the gracious Josette compelled Sam to paint alarming images of Laura Murdoch Collins.

It turned out Josette was doing this because she knew the characters were not all that bright and she had to literally paint them a picture to explain that Laura was an undead fire witch bent on incinerating her young son David. Laura tried to thwart Josette’s plan by harming Sam. In #146, Laura caused a fire at the Evans cottage that burned Sam’s hands, temporarily depriving him of the ability to paint. Petofi’s disabling of Tate on the same set will bring this incident back to longtime viewers. Especially so, since Josette is in the air at this point in the show. In #844, a character named Kitty joined the cast. She keeps having mental flashbacks to things only Josette would remember, and Josette’s music box appeared on Kitty’s table at a time when Josette’s ghost seemed to be the likeliest agency to have put it there. Perhaps she will insert herself into Tate’s story for some reason.

When we were watching the scene between Tate and Petofi, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that she very much wished someone else were playing Tate. Violet Welles’ script gives whoever is playing Tate a lot of opportunity to show what he can do in that scene. Roger Davis is a highly trained actor who has a long list of stage and screen credits, but he is almost always very unpleasant to watch on Dark Shadows, and he wastes the potentially fascinating dialogue Welles gave him. When Mr Davis is particularly trying, I usually try to make the scenes bearable by imagining what Frederic Forrest, who was a featured background player in #137, would have done in his place. But the echo of the story about Sam makes me wonder what David Ford would have done as Tate. Ford was in his forties, smallish and pudgy, so a David Ford Tate could not believably have had a fistfight with a character played by the very tall and fit 28 year old David Selby. But he might have been a subtle enough villain that such an exchange would not have been called for. Moreover, the incestuous undertone of Tate’s desire for Amanda, who is the product of one of his magical paintings and therefore a kind of daughter to him, would have been all the more disturbing had Tate been played by the man we knew as Maggie’s father in the 1960s and, when the show was set in the 1790s, as Josette’s.

Back home at the great house of Collinwood, Quentin receives a visit from Tim Shaw, Amanda’s ex and a would-be sleazy operator. He demands Tim tell him what he knows about Amanda’s life in New York before they came to Collinwood. Tim declares he will tell him nothing, to which Quentin responds by choking him and flinging him to the floor. Tim then burbles out everything he knows, which turns out to be nothing of the slightest use. Quentin picks Tim up and throws him out the front door in the most humiliating possible way. We cheer this on almost as joyously as we cheered Quentin’s beating of Tate Friday, but for the opposite reason. Mr Davis is a genuinely disagreeable person who ruins episode after episode, and it was him we were angry with. We chanted at the screen, not “Quen-tin! Quen-tin! Quen-tin!,” but “Da-vid! Da-vid! Da-vid!” hoping Mr Selby would pay him back for all his on-screen assaults on the women and children in the cast. But Don Briscoe was as nice a guy as Tim has become despicable, and he and Mr Selby enjoyed working together. You can see Briscoe’s joy in performance in the way he holds on to a little yellow piece of paper representing a note from Amanda all through the beating Quentin administers. Even the shot of Quentin shoving Tim out with his buttocks prominent is the product of Briscoe’s enthusiastic use of his body to demonstrate Tim’s total defeat.

Quentin throws Tim’s sorry ass out the door. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin’s other fiancée, wicked witch Angelique, comes downstairs to ask what the ruckus was about. Quentin makes up a transparent lie about having a financial interest in some firm in Boston, and says that he and Tim were quarreling about the details of it. Angelique lets him go on with this for a while and to say that he is leaving for Boston, then insists that they set a date for their wedding. He begs off, claiming not to know how long he will be away.

Petofi enters, and tells Angelique about Quentin’s plan to go to New York and look for Amanda. He also tells her that they now have a common cause, and proposes an alliance. Each of them is so powerful, and so evil, that this is a sobering prospect.

When Quentin returns to the foyer, it is his turn to be alone with Petofi. Quentin knows that Petofi gave Tate both the power to create the portrait that freed him of his curse and the commission to do so, and that he is therefore beholden to Petofi for his continued humanity. Part of his motivation for fleeing to New York with Amanda was his hope that he could escape the slavery Petofi has imposed on him as the price of that benefice. When Petofi tells Quentin he has come to see him before he goes, Quentin is momentarily stunned, and then makes a brave little noise to the effect that Petofi can’t stop him. Petofi assures him that he does not want to stop him. It doesn’t matter in the least to him where Quentin is- he can control him from anywhere.

Petofi calls on Tim at his room in the inn. He deepens Tim’s misery by pretending he doesn’t believe what Tim told him about Tate’s magical powers. As he leaves, he takes a brooch that belonged to Amanda.

Quentin is at the train station. Angelique appears there, and tells him not to go. He says that he doesn’t care if she kills him. It will be consolation enough to have died walking away from her. She says that she will not harm him in any way. This causes him to open his eyes wide in terror as it dawns on him what she means. She produces Amanda’s brooch and a doll. She positions the pin of the brooch over the doll’s chest and says that no matter where Amanda is, she will die a horrible death when the pin impales the doll.

Closing Miscellany

The actress who plays the young woman Quentin meets at the train station is billed in the credits as “Amy Yaekerson,” the only person known to Google ever to be called “Yaekerson” and known only for this appearance. But in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, a commenter known as “miles” pointed out that there are lots of people named “Yakerson.” He went on to identify an Amy Yakerson born in New York City on 1 April 1946, and to find a 1966 notice of a play featuring an actress of that name and probably of that age in the New York Daily News. I followed that up with some Googling of my own; the only Amy Yakerson I can find who is online today was born in Connecticut in 1954, so I don’t know where Amy Yakerson, star of stage and screen, is now.

We saw some of Sam’s paintings in Tate’s studio Friday and today, twenty-some years before Sam was born. Tate hides the portrait of Quentin behind one of Sam’s seascapes, and Sam’s portrait of Maggie’s mother is on the floor next to him when we see him lying there in the aftermath of the fight. John and Christine Scoleri have the details in their post about Friday’s episode at Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 850: That’s your train, lady

In June 1966, Dark Shadows opened with a train carrying well-meaning governess Victoria Winters and dashing action hero Burke Devlin from New York City to Collinsport, Maine. Vicki and Burke first met at the train station in Collinsport. When she found that no one was waiting to take her to the great house of Collinwood, Burke volunteered to drive her there. We haven’t seen the train station since, and all subsequent references to mass transit to and from Collinsport in the 1960s have been about buses. That is to some extent an adjustment to real-world history. In our universe, passenger train service to central Maine had already stopped by 1966.

Now, the show is set in 1897. Devastatingly handsome reprobate Quentin Collins has talked the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris into joining him on the 6 PM train from Collinsport to NYC. Amanda and Quentin will remind viewers who have been with the show from the beginning of Vicki and Burke. Quentin is no hero, but he serves the plot function Burke did in those early days, antagonizing all the authority figures and fascinating all the women and children. Amanda takes part in some sleazy schemes, while Vicki was eventually forced to be an impossibly stainless model of virtue. But as Vicki was on a quest to learn the truth about her biological parents and felt she could know nothing about herself until she found out who they were, Amanda is tormented that she has no memories and no information about herself dating beyond two years into the past. And as in the first week Vicki was a savvy New York street kid who could keep smiling while she fended off the indecent advances of the lecherous Roger Collins, so Amanda sees right through the equally lecherous but toweringly hypocritical Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask.

Quentin and Amanda agree to meet at the train station. Amanda has to hide from Trask and from a repulsive little man named Charles Delaware Tate, and so she will spend the afternoon in a vacant house on Pine Road where a friend of Quentin’s is squatting. Quentin will settle his affairs at Collinwood. When they made this plan, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that Dark Shadows has so consistently shown that when its characters leave separately they do not meet each other at their intended destination that it would be a surprise if they get on the train together. Indeed, from the time Amanda leaves Collinwood the suspense is not about whether their reunion will be thwarted, but how.

Tate steals a portrait of Quentin. He knows that the portrait has magical powers and is of the utmost importance to Quentin. Quentin discovers that the portrait is missing. He writes a note saying that he may not be able to get to the train station by 6 PM and asks his nine year old niece, Nora Collins, to take it to Amanda at the house on Pine Road. Nora agrees to do so.

Quentin goes to Tate’s and demands he give the portrait back. They get into a fistfight. Quentin knocks Tate out and searches the house.

Trask catches Nora on her way to the house on Pine Road. He forces her to give him the note. He reads it, and goes to the house himself. He and Amanda have a confrontation. She tells Trask that she first approached him as part of a con game she was ashamed to take part in, but when she saw him leering at her she decided that he deserved to be cheated. He furiously denies being a lecher and she calls him a liar. Trask can intimidate most people into silence, so much so that his scenes are often suffocating to watch, and it is glorious to see Amanda dump the whole truth on him and not back down.

Trask does get in one more lie. He claims that he just saw Quentin getting ready to go out on a date with his other fiancée, Angelique. Amanda doesn’t believe him but she does know about Angelique. She also told Quentin that she wasn’t convinced she was right for him, and that if he didn’t show up she would understand that he had decided they didn’t have a future together after all. So when at the conclusion the conductor sees Amanda standing on the platform by herself and tells her that it’s time to get on the train, we are to assume that she thinks it is over between her and Quentin.

All aboard. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 849: You wouldn’t expect me to forget a vampire

Once upon a time, an American girl named Kitty moved to England, where she joined the household of the Earl of Hampshire as a governess. The Earl married her, and she became his Countess. Now it is 1897. The Earl is dead, driven to suicide by sorcerer Count Petofi. Kitty has returned to America, without the stepchildren who were once her charges and with so little money that she writes a letter apologizing to her mother that she cannot pay the train fare from Maine to her home in Pennsylvania. She is staying in the great house on the estate of Collinwood, home to her late husband’s friend Edward Collins. Her hope is that Edward will marry her and allow her to go on living in the style to which she has grown accustomed.

Her hopes would seem to be well-founded. Edward was so devoted to the late Earl that for a time he was under the delusion that he was his valet, and he is smitten with Kitty. But there are several flies in the ointment. For one thing, regular viewers know that Edward is in fact penniless. His sister Judith inherited the whole of their grandmother’s estate. He lives in Judith’s house as a guest and works in her business as her employee, and while she is in the mental hospital he must take orders from her husband, the odious Gregory Trask.

Second, Petofi is in the area. It was he who cast the spell that prompted Edward to reveal his true self-image as the Earl’s manservant, and he has evil plans for many of the people with whom Kitty must deal. She met Petofi at Collinwood the day she arrived there, but has kept her acquaintance with him secret from Edward and everyone else.

Third, vampire Barnabas Collins saw Kitty and believed she was his lost love Josette come back to life. Shortly after, she had a psychological break suggesting he was right. A music box that Barnabas has given to several women whom he wanted to turn into Josette appeared in Kitty’s room the other day, after a woman who used to be Trask’s daughter Charity but has now been transformed into Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye had warned her it was a sign of great danger.

It seems unlikely Barnabas put the music box on Kitty’s table. For one thing, Charity/ Pansy had staked him shortly before, so that he is apparently hors de combat. Further, it was placed there during the daylight hours, when he is always out of operation. Also, it appeared while Kitty was sitting a few feet away, and she did not see anyone else in the room. Petofi stripped Barnabas of his power to materialize and dematerialize at will some time ago, so he would not have been able to manage that trick. The explanation that will occur to longtime viewers is that Josette’s ghost did it. She was very active at Collinwood before Barnabas made his first entrance in April 1967, when the show took place in a contemporary setting. Perhaps she is active in 1897, as well.

Kitty doesn’t know about any of that, so she assumes that Petofi is responsible. She marches over to Petofi’s residence, an abandoned mill. Originally this was a hideout, but by now most of the principal cast have visited him there at least once, so she could have stopped just about anyone on the street and asked for directions. She accuses him of having Charity/ Pansy give her a chilling warning about a particular music box, and of then causing that music box to appear in her room. He has no idea what she is talking about. She produces the music box and they play it. She then has another mental flash onto images of Barnabas. Petofi finds all of this most interesting, and walks Kitty back to Collinwood.

There, Kitty finds the devastatingly handsome reprobate Quentin Collins moping over a glass of liquor. She asks him if she has him to thank for the music box. He is shocked to see it. He says that it looks just like one that belonged to a distant relative of his, but that he doesn’t believe it can be the same one. She asks if the relative is Barnabas Collins, and he is shocked again. He asks how she knows that name. In response, Kitty introduces Quentin to the concept of “learning”: “I collect information, Mr. Collins, and I remember what I hear… I listen when people speak.” Quentin reacts as if it is the first time anyone has described these activities to him, which, considering the world he lives in, is not so unlikely.

Back in his squat, Petofi sees his servant Aristide for the first time in several days. Aristide went absent without leave when Barnabas threatened to kill him, and has come back now that he has heard Barnabas has been safely disposed of. Petofi is irked, not only at Aristide’s unauthorized departure, but even more at his failure to carry out the task he had entrusted to him. They had captured Julia Hoffman, MD, Barnabas’ friend, who followed him after he traveled back in time from 1969 to 1897. Petofi wanted to know how they managed this journey, and was convinced Julia was withholding the information he needed. Aristide rigged up a death trap that Barnabas triggered when he came to Julia’s rescue. Aristide did not stay to make sure it actually killed her.

Aristide shows Petofi that the gun he pointed at Julia’s heart did fire a bullet through the back of the chair to which he tied her. One would think that even a sorcerer, seeing that bullet hole, would conclude that Julia got out of the ropes while Aristide wasn’t looking. But instead he looks with a wild surmise and goes to Julia’s hiding place, in the old rectory on Pine Road.

Before Petofi enters, we see Julia holding a hypodermic and preparing an injection. She hides the needle when she hears the knock on the door. Julia had been giving Barnabas a series of shots meant to put his vampirism into remission. That she is still preparing the shots suggests to regular viewers that Barnabas’ staking was a trick of some kind, and that he is still in operation somewhere.

There are rules of etiquette in the universe of Dark Shadows that people follow no matter how absurd it is to do so. Julia lets Petofi into the room, even though he has tried to kill her. One cannot refuse admittance to anyone who knocks! She accepts a snifter of brandy from him and drinks it. One cannot refuse to share liquor with anyone who offers it!

As it happens, Petofi has put cyanide in the brandy. Enough cyanide, he says, to kill ten women. When he tells Julia this, she briefly tries to pretend that she is ill, then gives up. He declares that she cannot die. She admits that this is true. He figures out that only her “astral body” is in 1897, while her physical person remained in 1969. She confirms this.

Julia tries to make Petofi think he has succeeded by faking the symptoms of cyanide poisoning. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later, Petofi concludes that if he is to go to 1969, he will need to have a physical body there. Barnabas the vampire originally died in the 1790s and was in 1897 a body sealed in a coffin, so when he traveled back in time he could animate that body and be subject to all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Petofi decides that the body he wants is the best-looking available male one, which is Quentin’s. We have seen that Petofi can vacate his own body and take possession of another’s, as when in #801 he took up residence in twelve year old Jamison Collins. He has also, for reasons of his own, granted Quentin eternal youth. So it now seems logical to him that he should compel Quentin to make the exchange.

Of late, the editors of the Dark Shadows Wiki have taken to having discussions with each other in comments placed in parentheses and italicized. I couldn’t resist adding a comment myself to a discussion attached to the entry for this episode. My contribution is the fourth of the four below:

In 807, Aristede tells Charles Delaware Tate that if Petofi got his hand back, he would be able to live forever. As Petofi got his hand back, he must have a body in the future, so why would he need Quentin’s?

(Who would you rather look like?)

(Isn’t the point of the body-switch to evade the gypsies?)

(Yes, that is the point of the body-switch — but surely he only needs to switch bodies? If he can switch bodies now, and become unrecognisable, why does he need to go to the future as well?)

(Petofi says that he has many ambitious plans. If he carries them out, they may attract widespread attention. The Rroma have been keeping track of him for a long time, and may become suspicious if a known associate of Petofi’s starts doing all sorts of spectacular things.)

I expect this whole discussion to be deleted soon- it isn’t really in keeping with the purpose of the site, which is just to serve as ready reference for basic facts about each episode. But it does address a theme that often comes up in online discussions of this storyline, so I wanted to preserve it here.

Episode 848: You have no mortality

The year is 1897, and the mythological world described by the ancient Greeks seems very far away. The story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who loved a statue he had made depicting an imaginary woman so intensely that it came to life, answered to the name “Galatea,” and returned his affections, is no exception to that feeling of distance. But here is the lovely Amanda Harris, who used to wonder why she had total amnesia, but now knows that the reason she cannot remember anything prior to two years ago is that she didn’t exist before then. She popped into being when a painter named Charles Delaware Tate made a portrait of his ideal woman.

Tate told her about this and told her that he loved her, but Amanda, unlike Galatea, has no desire for her creator. Perhaps this is because his personality is absolutely intolerable, a common attribute of characters played by Roger Davis. Nor is she interested in Tim Shaw, who brought her to Collinsport to take part in a scam he wanted to run on his old enemies and abandoned her in Tate’s house once he learned of Tate’s powers and thought he saw a way to make more money than his original plan was likely to yield. Instead, she is in love with rakish libertine Quentin Collins. Quentin has asked Amanda to run away with him and get married, and she agrees.

Quentin is trying to control Amanda too, but at least he isn’t a total jerk about it like those other two guys. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Tim and Tate take turns intruding into Amanda’s room and telling her ugly things. Tate snarls at her that she belongs to him because he created her. This claim of ownership would be nasty however it was made, but Mr Davis’ gratingly unpleasant voice makes it truly nauseating to hear. Tim tells her that she isn’t really human, because if she is like another person Tate created she might die if someone shoots her. By that standard humans are extremely rare, but Tim goes on to explain that the man Tate created and then gunned down in cold blood while Tim watched vanished into thin air as soon as he died. So what he means is that Amanda will never be a corpse. In the context of Dark Shadows, a show that is so largely about the reanimation of the dead, this actually makes sense.

Quentin was cursed to be a werewolf, but was freed of the effects of that curse when Tate painted his portrait. When the Moon is full nowadays, the portrait changes, while Quentin himself stays the same. To extort Quentin into leaving Amanda to him, Tate steals the portrait. He tells himself that, if need be, he will destroy the portrait. If Quentin and Amanda stick with their plan of running as far away as possible very soon, they will know nothing about what Tate has done until the night of the next full Moon, when Quentin will turn into the werewolf, kill Amanda, and wake up covered in her blood. I suppose that would meet Tate’s objective of punishing Quentin, but it doesn’t fit very well with his professed belief that he loves Amanda.

Episode 845: Dance your cares away

Julia Hoffman is miserable. She has followed her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, and traveled back in time to the year 1897 on a mission to prevent terrible things that were happening in 1969. She has managed to come up with a treatment that is similar to one that briefly cured Barnabas of vampirism in March and April 1968, and is giving him regular injections in the course of that treatment. She is in hiding with him in an abandoned building, and has survived kidnapping and attempted murder. And what is her reward for all that? He is back on the same bullshit he was involved in when she first learned of his existence in 1967. He has met a girl and made up his mind to throw away all of their plans in an effort to convince her that she is the reincarnation of his lost love Josette. It’s no wonder Julia is so furious with him that she looks like she is the one with fangs.

Making matters worse, this time it seems Barnabas might be on to something. He pays a visit to his distant cousin, Quentin Collins, and asks who the girl is. Quentin says that she is Kitty Soames, widow of the late Earl of Hampshire, returned to her native USA after her husband’s death. When Barnabas starts in with his lunacy about Josette, Quentin becomes excited. He tells him that Kitty looked at the spot where his portrait hung until he was exposed as a vampire and asked what had become of it. When Quentin asked how she knew about that, since she had never been to the house before, she laughed and said that of course she knew the portrait, of course she was familiar with Barnabas. After a few seconds, she said she knew nothing of any portrait or of anyone named Barnabas.

Barnabas takes this as proof positive that Kitty is Josette returned to life, and that her memories of the 1790s are coming back to her. He asks Quentin to meet him at his hiding place so that they can arrange for him to meet her. He tells him where the hiding place is. Quentin agrees. Barnabas gives Quentin an enigmatic look before he exits.

Quentin is miserable. He is under the power of sorcerer Count Petofi, who has ordered him to kill Barnabas. Now that he knows where Barnabas keeps his coffin, there is nothing to stop him obeying. He will have to go there at dawn and stake his friend.

Barnabas has confronted Quentin about his subjection to Petofi, whom he knows to be his deadly foe. He has several times shown his distrust of Quentin. So people who started watching the show in the last year or so will be puzzled when he tells Quentin where to find him when he is helpless. Those who have been in the audience longer know that Barnabas not only has a habit of telling his enemies exactly what they need to know, but that he also loses all semblance of rationality where Josette is concerned. It is all too believable that he may have done this. Still, there is that look back at Quentin, suggesting that Barnabas knows that he is giving information to his enemies.

Quentin is in the drawing room of the great house, waiting for the dawn to bring with it his obligation to kill his friend. A woman who used to be Miss Charity Trask enters. Petofi erased Charity’s personality some time ago. Her body is now home to Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl, mentalist, and onetime fiancée of Quentin’s late brother, inveterate prankster Carl Collins.

Pansy is miserable. Pansy is cross that Quentin did not go to see her perform at the Blue Whale, a local tavern where she is doing her old act. But what really has her down is that it is exactly three months since Barnabas murdered Carl, and she is the only one who seems to remember him. When Kitty and Quentin spoke of Carl yesterday, they were the first characters other than Pansy to mention his name since the immediate aftermath of his death. She is irritated with Quentin for getting drunk, angry that Barnabas is still at large, and sorrowful that while the dawn means a new day for most, for people like her and Quentin it just means reliving the same day time and again. Quentin perks up when Pansy lists the many good reasons why someone ought to kill Barnabas, and for a moment it seems like he is going to tell her where he is and invite her to do it. She recognizes this, and keeps asking questions after he stops himself. The whole scene is beautiful from beginning to end, one of the highlights of the series. If they had had Daytime Emmys in 1969, it is the tape they should have sent to the voters to get the acting awards for Nancy Barrett and David Selby.

Dawn comes, and Quentin does go to the cave where Barnabas’ coffin is. He has a stake and mallet with him. He opens the coffin, sees Barnabas, places the stake over his heart, and raises the mallet. That’s as far as he can go. He throws the weapons aside and leaves the cave, vowing that if Barnabas can face whatever he has faced, he too can face his own destiny.

Shortly after, we hear footsteps. Pansy enters. She sees the coffin and opens it. She finds the mallet and stake. She drives the stake into Barnabas’ chest. Blood spurts out around the wound and out of his mouth. It would seem that Barnabas Collins is no more.

Quentin is a villain, but he is charming, and at this point David Selby is a breakout star to rival Jonathan Frid as Barnabas. Earlier, it had seemed Pansy might kill Quentin, and many fans hated her for that. No one seriously expected her to kill Barnabas, since he was a pop culture phenomenon familiar even to people who never saw the show. To this day, Dark Shadows is known (to those who know it at all) as “the vampire soap opera from the 1960s.” So having her kill Barnabas is certainly a twist worthy of ending a week.

Episode 840: A man who has betrayed a friend

Artist Charles Delaware Tate goes to the great house of Collinwood, where he interrupts a passionate kiss between handsome rake Quentin Collins and mystery woman Amanda Harris. Quentin is getting pretty serious about Amanda. That is to say, one of his two fiancées tried to kill him the other day, so that engagement is off, leaving him with some free time.

Tate has been commissioned to paint a portrait of Amanda, and he leverages that fact to bully Quentin into leaving him alone with her. Tate goes on a lunatic rant, claiming that he caused Amanda to exist by painting a picture of her two and a half years before, in the spring of 1895. As returning viewers know, this happens to be true, but it sounds preposterous and Tate has no way of getting past Amanda’s instant rejection of it. He doesn’t help his cause when he keeps pawing at her and shouting in her face.

Unclear how much of the reaction is Amanda thinking Tate is a crazy man and how much of it is Donna McKechnie shocked that Roger Davis is groping her breasts on camera. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Amanda runs out of the room. She passes Quentin on the staircase. He asks what Tate did to her; she refuses to talk about it and keeps running. Quentin confronts Tate, who tells him that he will know all about it soon enough, since he, like Tate, is now under the thumb of sorcerer Count Petofi.

Petofi is staying in an abandoned mill nearby. This was originally a hiding place, but virtually everyone on the show has visited him there by now. He may as well move someplace more comfortable. We saw in #813 that the Collinsport Inn already houses the restaurant which was often featured in the first year of the show, when it was set in contemporary times; if he stayed there, at least he’d be able to get something to eat.

Tate calls on Petofi at the old mill. He tests him, and finds that even though Petofi gave him his skills as an artist he does not realize that he conjured up Amanda and that he can do the same with inanimate objects. Regular viewers have already heard Petofi admit to his henchman Aristide that he does not fully understand his own magical powers, and we have seen him attempt tricks that have not worked very well. So, while Petofi is mighty indeed, his powers have some very definite limits. Perhaps Tate will draw Petofi helpless before one of his enemies.

The enemies Petofi most fears are the Rroma people, to whom he always refers as “Gypsies.” He narrowly escaped death at the hands of Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana in #827 and #828. King Johnny had caught up to Petofi and was about to use his sacred scimitar on him when Aristide threw a knife and got him in the back. With his dying breath, King Johnny told Petofi that another Rroma would be along soon.

Petofi thinks he has hit upon the perfect means of escaping from the Rroma. He has learned that vampire Barnabas Collins traveled to 1897 from the year 1969, and now Barnabas’ friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, has followed him. Petofi is convinced Barnabas must have known what he was doing, and that he must have a means of returning to the future. But regular viewers know that Barnabas never knows what he is doing. He stumbled into the past while trying to do something else, and hasn’t the faintest clue how to get back to the 1960s. He has told Petofi as much, and Petofi flatly refused to believe him.

Petofi has Julia in custody. He forces her to tell him that she and Barnabas both traveled back in time using the I Ching. Barnabas cast a particular hexagram, meditated on it, and found himself in 1897. The wands were still in place some time later, and Julia meditated on them with the same result.

Petofi goes to Collinwood and visits Quentin in his room. He knows that Quentin has a set of I Ching wands, the very set Barnabas and Julia used to make their journeys, and he wants to borrow them on the assumption that while meditating on them he will be able to will himself into the 1960s.

Quentin is unhappy to see Petofi. As Tate said, Quentin is under Petofi’s control. Petofi forced him to reveal Barnabas’ hiding place; that’s how he was able to abduct Julia. Quentin rails against the injustice of all this, and declares that he won’t do any more favors for Petofi. But Petofi tells him that he is his slave now. Petofi gloats that while Quentin hasn’t always been a slave, he himself has always been a master. Quentin winds up telling him where the wands are.

Back in the old mill, Julia gives Petofi some pointers about the I Ching. She reads from the Book of Changes, and when she gets to a part that makes it clear it is not a tool that can be used to gain control of anything, he angrily orders her to stop. He casts the wands, meditates on them, and his “astral body” passes through a door. The door leads to a chamber where he sees a hand raising the scimitar King Johnny had wielded.

Episode 839: Second chance

Twenty-eight weeks ago, the ghost of Quentin Collins had made life intolerable on the great estate of Collinwood. Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, in an attempt to contact Quentin and persuade him to make peace before his haunting killed his twelve year old great-great-nephew David Collins, accidentally traveled back in time to 1897, where he met and befriended the living Quentin.

In that time, he learned that Quentin was a werewolf. In 1969, Barnabas and his friend Julia Hoffman, MD, had been trying to cure a man named Chris Jennings of lycanthropy. Now, Barnabas has figured out that Chris inherited his curse from Quentin, whose infant daughter Lenore will grow up to be Chris’ grandmother.

Julia herself has now traveled back in time. The journey left her dazed and, astonishing to behold, unable to speak. Today, Barnabas and Quentin at her bedside in the hiding place Barnabas has found, and she started talking. She has a vision of 1969. She sees David lying dead and his father Roger mourning him. Suddenly David comes back to life and announces that Quentin’s ghost and that of maidservant Beth are no longer haunting the house. When Julia regains her senses, she tells Barnabas that this means that they should both go back to 1969- their mission in the past is complete.

Barnabas declares that they cannot leave, because Chris is still a werewolf. He doesn’t actually know this. Chris wasn’t in Julia’s vision. His transformations became more frequent and longer lasting as Quentin’s ghost gained power; when Quentin achieved total control over the great house at Collinwood, Chris took on wolf form permanently. For all Barnabas knows, the end of Quentin’s obsession of Collinwood might mean Chris’ return to normal. He also knows that Quentin himself remained human the last time the Moon was full, suggesting that something has happened to the curse. Perhaps if they return to their own time, he and Julia will find that Chris is not a werewolf and never was one.

Barnabas tells Julia that, while she and a fellow mad scientist had managed to free him of the effects of vampirism in the 1960s, he is fully subject to them in 1897. Moreover, everyone knows that he is a vampire, and he is being hunted. And there is an evil sorcerer in the area, Count Petofi, who is closely connected with Quentin and who has malign intentions towards Barnabas. Julia points out that all of these are reasons to return to 1969 at once.

Barnabas demands that Julia develop a treatment that will once more put his vampirism into remission. Julia calls this impossible. The drugs and devices she used to accomplish this in the 1960s have not yet been invented, and even in that time she was just barely able to make the treatments work. In the story we actually saw in 1968, treatments of the kind Julia is talking about worked only for a little while, and the lasting cure came only when Barnabas was hooked up to a Frankenstein’s monster. There clearly is no time to create an abomination of that kind.

But there is no reasoning with Barnabas. Julia concedes this- “I always lose with you, don’t I?” She agrees to stay and to do her best.

Barnabas suspects that Quentin is working for Petofi. This is true. Not only did Petofi save Quentin’s life yesterday, but he also arranged the painting of a portrait which, like the one in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, changes while Quentin remains the same. When Quentin realizes that Petofi has the power to make him human or return him to lycanthropy, he caves in to his demand that he act as his spy in his dealings with Barnabas.

Julia has managed to concoct an injection for Barnabas and is planning to give him another when he insists on rushing out. She says this will ruin the treatment; he says he will be back before dawn.

Julia gives Barnabas a shot. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas goes to see Quentin. He finds the portrait, puts two and two together, and confronts Quentin about his relationship with Petofi. Quentin lies, and Barnabas goes back to the hiding place. It has been ransacked, and Julia is gone.

Episode 838: Your part in this drama is finished

In #836, the ghost of maidservant Beth Chavez appeared to Julia Hoffman in the year 1969. Beth told Julia what happened on the night in 1897 when she shot the rakish Quentin Collins to death.

Regular viewers would have recognized the events Beth described as different from what would have happened when Quentin originally died in 1897. For the last 28 weeks, the show has been set in that year because Julia’s friend, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, accidentally traveled back in time while trying to figure out why Quentin had become a ghost bringing death and misery to everyone on the estate of Collinwood. In 1897, Barnabas met the living Quentin and befriended him, but also changed the history of the period substantially. So a wicked witch named Angelique, who was not at Collinwood the first time through 1897, is there on this iteration of events. Beth’s night took the turn that would lead her to shoot Quentin when Angelique told her that her engagement to Quentin was off and that Angelique would be marrying Quentin instead.

After Beth told her what happened in the latest version of 1897, Julia herself traveled back in time, determined to rescue both Quentin and Barnabas. Once she got to her destination, she was too dazed to speak. But Quentin found a letter in her pocket that Barnabas had written, and it led him to Barnabas. Barnabas was able to tell Quentin that he was fated to be killed tonight, after his nephew Jamison rejected him. He had no more to tell him, nor could he restore Julia’s ability to speak.

We open today with Quentin holed up in his room, waiting for midnight to come and go. Sorcerer Count Petofi knocks on his door; Quentin jumps to the conclusion that it is Petofi who will kill him. In fact, Petofi has learned of Quentin’s current fate, and offers to help save him. Quentin has ample reason to distrust Petofi, and refuses the offer.

Jamison then knocks. Quentin lets him in; the two have a happy talk about how much they enjoy each other’s company, and Quentin decides he won’t stay in his room after all. This leads directly to the reenactment of the scenes Beth had described, including Beth’s conversation with Angelique, Jamison’s discovery of Beth in the act of attempting suicide, Jamison’s consequent rejection of Quentin, and Beth’s pointing a loaded pistol at Quentin while she declares that she has decided to kill him.

Quentin’s time in his room shows that his behavior afterward is the direct result, not only of Barnabas’ intervention, but of Julia’s as well. So what we are seeing today is not what happened the first time through 1897 or the second, but is yet a third version of events. It does end quite differently- Petofi turns up in the nick of time and prevents Beth from shooting Quentin. The whole basis of the fantasy of going back in time to change events is the experience of rewriting stories, of what fandoms call “retroactive continuity” (“retcons” for short.) In the contrast between the two versions of the night of 10 September 1897 that Dark Shadows shows us, and in the contrast between each of those and the original events that we never saw, the story merges into the process of writing the scripts, and the characters explicitly create their own retcons.

Petofi tells Beth that she ought to leave Collinwood at once and go as far away as possible, because “Your part in this drama is ended.” The incorporation of retcons as an overt story element shows that metatheatricality can be fun, but I have to say it was pretty cold of Dan Curtis to delegate the job of firing actress Terrayne Crawford to the character Petofi.

Count Petofi tells Terrayne Crawford she won’t be getting another contract.

Petofi then goes to Quentin’s room and tells him the price for his services- Quentin must betray Barnabas. Quentin resists this demand until Petofi shows what else he has already done for him. Petofi commissioned a portrait of Quentin. Quentin saw the portrait the other night when there was a full Moon, and he was horrified by what he saw. The portrait bore, not his usual features, but those of a wolf. Since Quentin is a werewolf, he thought the portrait was a cruel reminder of his curse. But when Petofi bids him look at the portrait again tonight, Quentin sees his accustomed face. Petofi explains that the reason Quentin remained human that previous night was that the portrait changed, and that as long as the portrait remains intact Quentin will be free of the effects of the curse. Quentin’s blissful reaction to that news suggests that Petofi was right to tell him that he belonged to him now and would be able to refuse him nothing.

Sadly, this episode marks the last appearance of the character Jamison Collins. David Henesy plays the same scenes with the same dialogue he had on Monday, but he did a great job then and does an equally great one today. He’ll be back tomorrow for a brief appearance as his 1960s character, David Collins, then will be absent from the cast for almost 11 weeks. We’ll miss him while he is away.

Episode 836: The grownup world

It is 8 September 1969, and the ghost of Quentin Collins has rendered the great house of Collinwood uninhabitable. The family, including permanent house guest Julia Hoffman, have been staying at the Old House on the estate while recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is on a trip back in time to 1897, when Quentin was killed and the trouble started. But Julia has received a letter Barnabas wrote to her in September 1897 indicating that, as of that date, his mission was about to end in total failure, and so she decides to take matters into her own hands. First, she must learn exactly how and when Quentin died.

Julia goes to the great house and follows the sound of Quentin’s theme song to the tower room. There, she finds the ghost of maidservant Beth, who was one of Quentin’s many lovers. When Beth is in a shadowy corner, she puts on a ghostly voice and tells Julia that her name would mean nothing to her. As soon as she comes into the light, Julia says that they’ve met several times, and soon she is calling her by name. Along with the fact that, as Beth, Terrayne Crawford is just standing there in the same light as Grayson Hall, with no practical effect whatsoever to suggest ghostliness, this deflates whatever feeling we are supposed to have that we are witnessing an encounter with the supernatural.

Julia insists Beth tell her how Quentin died. When the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah Collins was on the show from June to November 1967, she would often insist on the Ghost Rules and vanish if people put direct questions to her. But Beth just wanders around a little, moans to Quentin that she has no choice but to tell Julia what she wants to know, and starts dishing. Again, they aren’t making ghosts like they used to.

Beth tells Julia that on 10 September 1897, she found out Quentin was going to marry a woman named Angelique. Quentin did not tell her this news himself; he left it to Angelique to do so, making the blow fall all the more heavily. This will remind longtime viewers of #392, when Barnabas could not bring himself to tell his ex-fiancée Josette that he was engaged to Angelique, leaving Angelique to tell Josette herself in #393. Josette waited until #425 to leap to her death from the cliff at Widows’ Hill, but things move faster now. Beth went straight from her conversation with Angelique to her room, where she had a bottle labeled “Poison.”

Sensible shopper that she is, Beth buys her poison in the Generic section of the murder weapon store. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Before she could do away with herself, Beth was interrupted by a knock on the door from twelve year old Jamison Collins. Jamison came in to show her a puzzle he had solved, then saw the bottle. He demanded to know what was going on, and she admitted that she was planning to kill herself because Quentin was going to marry Angelique. He stopped her doing that, but after he left to confront Quentin she took a loaded revolver out of her dresser.

Jamison found Quentin in the drawing room, in Angelique’s arms. Angelique at first dismissed Jamison, saying that his uncle was too busy to speak with him, but Jamison held his ground and insisted on seeing Quentin alone. Quentin obliged, but would answer Jamison’s questions only with airy assertions that he is too young to understand the situation. Jamison is so composed and forceful, and Quentin’s behavior is so flagrantly irresponsible, that we might expect Jamison to ask to be spared lectures on maturity from a man so much more childish than he. Instead, Jamison simply becomes angry and tells Quentin that after what he has done to Beth, he wants nothing more to do with him.

In #767, Jamison had a dream in which Quentin’s ghost said that his death was preceded by three events. The first two events happened shortly after. The third event was that Jamison rejected him. This has now happened, and in the dream Quentin said that once that took place “There was almost no time left for Quentin Collins.” Indeed, shortly after Jamison stalks off Beth shows up with her revolver and shoots Quentin. He staggers from the drawing room and goes upstairs. Since the staircase is made of eleven steps and is eight feet tall, that’s some pretty fancy staggering for a man who has just taken a round to the midsection. Quentin keeps staggering all the way to the tower room, where Beth shoots him a few more times.

We cut back to 1969, where Beth tells Julia she killed herself the day after she killed Quentin. She doesn’t seem to be done talking when Julia excuses herself. Say what you will about Sarah, she always left them wanting more.

Julia finds twelve year old David Collins, Jamison’s grandson, in the drawing room with Quentin’s ghost. Since Barnabas took us back in time with him in #701, we’ve got to know the living Quentin quite well, and he is a charming rascal who has very little in common with the silent, family-annihilating ghost we saw late in 1968. Beth’s story does very little to explain how the one turned into the other. The ghost has been draining the life from David; Julia orders David to come away from him, and he does. David lies down on the couch, and Julia examines him. She finds that he is weak, but resting comfortably.

Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes enters. Quentin’s ghost has vanished. Stokes calls Julia by her first name, something he had not done prior to this episode, and asks after David. She at first says he will be all right, then checks on him again. She cannot find a pulse, and declares him dead. Julia has performed wonders in her work as a medical doctor, but her death pronouncements are so often wrong that this does not give much grounds for alarm. However, we then hear Quentin’s voice laughing maniacally, darkening David’s prospects.

Terrayne Crawford seems to be such a nice person that it distresses me to point out that she was not a very good actress. But in this one, Beth’s lack of supernatural quality and Julia’s bland reaction to her make it seem like writer Gordon Russell and director Lela Swift were conspiring to vent their exasperation with Miss Crawford’s limits. She can play one emotion at a time, so that when Beth is shocked to learn that Quentin is going to marry someone else she is only and entirely Shocked. When Beth is suicidal, she is only and entirely Sad; when she decides to take Quentin’s life instead of her own, she is only and entirely Gleeful; when she tells Julia that her vengeance did not relieve her sorrow over Quentin, we can see that’s true, because she is only and entirely Sorrowful. The result is like looking at a series of wood block cuts illustrating various emotions. It’s all very clear and quite vivid, but there’s no sense of development from one scene to the next. Had Miss Crawford been able to lay one emotion over another and play two or more of them at a time, the grin on Beth’s face when she kills Quentin would have shown us that all the layers of complexity of feeling had finally been stripped away and only hatred was left. That would have been a tremendous climax for the character. But since there was never any such complexity to start with, it’s just another block cut.

Often when I see disappointing performances on Dark Shadows, I think of other actors in the cast and try to imagine what they would have done with the part. Gail Strickland, like Miss Crawford, is a tall, thin woman whose chin juts out on a horizontal line, and she was on the show as doomed schoolteacher Dorcas Trilling for a couple of episodes in May. Dorcas’ role would have been well within Miss Crawford’s competence, and in her long and distinguished career Miss Strickland proved she could do just about anything. So on a day like this, I envision a different, much more nuanced Beth. The episode in my imagination is really stellar, I wish you could see it.

Today, David Henesy plays both his 1897 character Jamison Collins and his 1960s character David Collins. He is not credited for either of those roles, but for Daniel Collins, whom he played when the show was set in the 1790s back in late 1967 and early 1968.

Episode 833: We don’t have any secrets in Collinwood

There once was a woman named Miss Charity Trask. Charity was desperate to please her father, the hypocritical and overwhelmingly evil Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask. She faced the world as Trask’s enforcer, and was herself so fiercely repressed that she drained the joy out of every group she joined.

There is no longer such a person as Miss Charity Trask. Sorcerer Count Petofi caused the spirit of the late Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl and fake psychic, to take up residence in Charity’s body. Charity/ Pansy still lives in the great house of Collinwood, of which Trask has established himself as master, but since her only functioning mind is that of the deceased Pansy, she doesn’t understand why people insist on livenaming her.

Charity/ Pansy enters the drawing room and finds Amanda Harris. Amanda greets her as “Miss Trask,” alienating her at once. Charity/ Pansy demands to know what Amanda is doing at Collinwood. Amanda says that she lives there as Trask’s guest. Charity/ Pansy calls for Trask. She leans out the door of the drawing room and in the loudest, harshest voice Nancy Barrett could manage shouts “Hey, Trask! Trask!” It takes Trask a moment to answer, perhaps because Jerry Lacy had the same trouble we had while watching and couldn’t stop laughing. It is one of the top ten intentional comedy moments in the series, maybe top five.

Charity/ Pansy can see that Trask has designs on Amanda, as can everyone else. But she doesn’t care about that. She is convinced Amanda has come to the house to seduce rakish libertine Quentin Collins, whom she herself is determined to marry.

Amanda had no such plans when she first came to the house, but she meets Quentin today, and a few minutes later they are locked in a passionate kiss. Trask surprises them, and declares that he will protect Amanda from her weaknesses.

For his part, Quentin is busy trying to figure out what is happening to him. He is a werewolf, and there is a full Moon tonight, yet he did not transform. He finds a portrait in his room. It bears a plate with his name and the current year- “Quentin Collins, 1897.” But it depicts him as he is when he is in his lupine form. He knows that it is the work of artist Charles Delaware Tate, and goes to confront Tate in his studio in the nearby village of Collinsport.

Quentin handles Tate roughly and demands to know why he painted a wolf on the canvas with his nameplate. Tate says that Charity saw the painting and thought it looked like a wolf, but that when he looked at it himself he saw only Quentin’s face. Quentin takes Tate to his room and shows him the painting; Tate is shocked to see that it is, indeed, the wolf.

Tate gets another shock before he leaves the house. He meets Amanda, and Trask asks him to paint her portrait. Tate has never seen Amanda before, but he has painted her many times. Returning viewers know that Tate’s painting abilities are a gift from Petofi, and that with them comes the power to conjure into existence that which he paints. Amanda is Tate’s creation.

Tate doesn’t want to accept this fact, and so he flees the house. He rushes back to his studio, and tries to take his mind off what is happening by sketching a still life. He adds an imaginary vase to the arrangement of fruit on the table before him. To his dismay, the vase materializes.

Tate painted Amanda into existence two years prior, and has been working steadily as a visual artist since. So you might wonder why he is only now noticing that things pop into being when he draws or paints them.

One possible explanation that comes to mind is about Petofi, the source of Tate’s abilities. Petofi’s right hand was cut off a hundred years ago, in 1797, and most of his power went with it. He was just recently reunited with the Hand. It once more grows from his wrist, and he is restored to his former might. Perhaps when Petofi first gave Tate his abilities, he could give him just enough to create Amanda and a great deal of commercial success. But now he is stronger, and perhaps Tate is stronger too. Petofi had better hope Tate doesn’t think of painting a picture of an avenger putting him to death for the many crimes he has committed against the Rroma people.