One night in 1797, nine Rroma men trapped the sorcerer Count Petofi in the forest of Ojden and cut off his right hand. With it, the count lost most of his magical powers. Sometime after, Petofi learned that he could live for exactly one hundred years without his hand. If he was reunited with it in that time, he would become immortal; if he was not, he would die.
Now, it is 1897, and the hundred years are almost up. Petofi has vacated his body and has for some weeks been operating in the person of twelve year old Jamison Collins. He has regained the hand, but as Petofi is dying, so is Jamison. Jamison/ Petofi collapses in the woods carrying the hand back to the place where his servant Aristide is waiting with Petofi’s own body. Jamison/ Petofi passes out shortly after Jamison’s uncle, the rakish Quentin Collins, catches up to him. Quentin carries Jamison/ Petofi and the hand to the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, where he confers with his distant cousin, Barnabas Collins the vampire.
Quentin and Barnabas decide that if Petofi dies, Jamison will die as well. Therefore they have no choice but to take the hand to Aristide. Barnabas does get Aristide to promise that once Petofi has the hand, he will use his powers to cure Quentin’s werewolf curse, but no one seems to regard Aristide’s word as valuable. Barnabas makes a menacing move towards Aristide; Aristide wards him off with a cross. Aristide puts the hand on Petofi’s chest, says some magic words, and waits a little over an hour. During this time, he needles Barnabas by offering him tea, which he must know is not part of a vampire’s diet. Then Petofi comes out of his room, laughing his evil laugh and showing off his reattached hand.
“At last my arm is complete again!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die. (Caption by Stephen Sondheim.)
In #767, Jamison had a dream in which Quentin told him that his doom was sealed when the one person he truly loved turned against him. It was already clear at that point that this person was Jamison, but today Quentin tells Jamison in so many words that he is the only person he ever really loved. So we can take this as an announcement that the climactic crisis of the part of Dark Shadows set in 1897 is approaching.
In #797, the ghost of Rroma maiden Julianka appeared and placed a curse on her fellow grievous ethnic stereotype, Magda Rákóczi. Julianka blamed Magda for her death, and decreed that everyone Magda loved would die. Today, Magda is trying to prevent Julianka’s curse from taking the life of her desperately ill infant niece Lenore, daughter of her late sister Jenny. Magda goes to Lenore’s crib in company with Lenore’s father, Quentin Collins. Magda and Quentin try to conjure up Julianka’s ghost to plead for Lenore’s life, but instead they get the ghost of another Rroma woman- Jenny.
Jenny assumes physical form. She picks up Lenore and sings the lullaby “All the Pretty Little Horses.” We’ve heard Jenny sing this almost every time she has been on the show. It appears to be the only song she knows. For his part, Quentin has a phonograph and only one record, which he plays obsessively over and over. When they lived together, their home must have been a pretty grim place, playlist-wise.
Jenny lifts Lenore’s illness, and says that if Quentin looks into his heart he will know what he must do to ensure that Lenore has a bright future. She vanishes, and Quentin mutters dismissively at the idea that his heart will be a source of useful information.
Later, Quentin will have a dream while sleeping in the drawing room at the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Jenny visits and tells him that he must have nothing to do with Lenore and that she must grow up far from Collinwood. So far, dream sequences on Dark Shadows have always represented visits from the supernatural, but this one might be an exception. Jenny did say that the information Quentin needed to help Lenore was already in his heart. He is clearly not the stuff of which good fathers are made, and as Jenny explicitly says in the dream no one has ever been happy at Collinwood. So the advice she gives does seem to be correct. Perhaps this is just Quentin’s own knowledge taking a shape he can recognize.
Quentin goes on dreaming that his brother Edward is choking him. He wakes up to find that Edward is in fact choking him. This might seem like a prophetic dream, but it too might just be a natural expression of Quentin’s own unprocessed knowledge. Edward, because of a magic spell not directly connected with today’s events, is under the mistaken impression that he is a valet formerly in the service of the Earl of Hampshire. Quentin has followed the Collinses’ long-established protocol for dealing with mentally ill family members, and locked Edward up in the room on top of the tower in the great house. He knows this makes Edward miserable, and it is reasonable to suppose that he would expect Edward to express anger about it. Strangulation is Quentin’s own preferred method of expressing anger, especially towards members of his immediate family, so it can’t have been hard for him to see that coming.
Edward’s motivation is not as simple as Quentin’s would be if their positions were reversed. The evil Gregory Trask has been visiting Edward in the tower room, and has told him that Quentin is determined to keep him imprisoned in that room forever. He asks him to kill Quentin. Edward apparently has decided to comply.
Earlier in the episode, Edward had been more punctilious about cooperating with Trask. Trask presented him with a document to sign, promising that by signing it he would secure his freedom. Edward read the document, even after Trask very loudly insisted that it was unnecessary to do so. When Edward saw that it involved making Trask guardian of his son, Edward protested that he had no son. Trask said that this did not matter, but Edward would not be moved. Edward later tells Quentin about this encounter.
The tower room is a re-dress of the set used as the bedroom of strange and troubled boy David Collins in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. Today it includes the bed from that set, and we see Edward trying to sleep in it. This is a powerful image for longtime viewers. Louis Edmonds plays Edward in this costume drama segment and David’s father Roger in contemporary dress. Edward is the father of Jamison, who like David Collins is played by David Henesy. Not only has the spell robbed Edward of the memory of Jamison and of his role as a father, it has reduced him to curling up in a bed made for a boy rather than a man.
Roger was, for the first year of Dark Shadows, a spectacularly bad father. He openly hated David and exploited David’s miseries to try to manipulate him into doing his own criminal dirty work. He was indifferent to the family’s name and the fate of its businesses, would go to any lengths to hide from the consequences of his actions, had killed someone, and was an alcoholic. Edward shares none of these shortcomings. On the contrary, he goes to the opposite extreme. He is as brave as Roger is cowardly and tenderly loves his children, Jamison and Nora. But he is also stuffy, name-proud, and money-grubbing. The contrast with Roger shows these failings, not simply as negatives, but as the overgrowth of the virtues that separate Edward from Roger. Though Louis Edmonds and Jerry Lacy are such accomplished comic actors that Edward’s scenes with Trask are funny enough to be worthy of a staging of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, Edward’s loss of his identity as father of Jamison and Nora is a genuine tragedy.
Quentin is fond of Jamison, and once he learns that his children exist he seems to wish them well. Nonetheless, he shares most of the other vices of early Roger. As Edward shows us what Roger might have been had he had stronger moral fiber, Quentin is Roger with his vices magnified by black magic. When Jenny tells Quentin that he must not raise Lenore, longtime viewers remember Roger as he was when first we knew him, and remember how grim David’s future seemed at that time. It was only after well-meaning governess Vicki became the chief adult influence in his life that we could have hopes for David. So we cannot doubt that Jenny is right.
This is the last of 21 episodes of Dark Shadows directed by executive producer Dan Curtis. When Curtis first took the helm in #457, he had no experience as a director, and it showed. But he learned very quickly. This one looks great and the scenes play very smoothly. He would later direct the feature films House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows, as well as six episodes of the 1991 prime time revival of Dark Shadows and many other productions.
Charity Trask is in the drawing room of the great house on the estate of Collinwood trying to call the police when her abusive step-uncle, Quentin Collins, comes out of a secret panel and takes the telephone from her. He tells her that there is no longer any point in telling the police about Tessie, the injured woman upstairs. Tessie won’t be telling them anything. She has died. Apparently the sheriff of Collinsport is the same in 1897 as are his counterparts in other periods when Dark Shadows has been set- if you’re already dead, it’s too late for them to take an interest in you.
Charity says that Quentin killed Tessie. Charity knows that Quentin is a werewolf. He locks the door to the room and asks “Are you afraid to be locked in alone with a beast, a murderer, a creature of the supernatural?” This would seem to be rather an odd question, especially since he spent yesterday’s whole episode threatening to kill her.
Charity says that her father, Gregory Trask, will see to it that Quentin is brought to justice. Quentin takes a paper from his pocket and shows it to Charity. It is a confession to the murder of Charity’s mother, signed by her father. Charity claims that it was fabricated by Satan, which is what her father told her when she first saw it, and that Trask repeatedly tried to destroy it. This only convinces Quentin that the confession is true. He says that if either Charity or her father tells the police about him, he will hand over the paper. He adds “Now, Charity, I may hang for murder, but your father will be dancing at the end of a rope, too.”
Dark Shadows is set in the state of Maine, which in our universe abolished capital punishment in 1887. That used to be true in the show’s universe, as well. In #101, broadcast and set in November 1966, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins told his son, strange and troubled boy David, that “They don’t hang people anymore. Not in this state, anyway.” But by the time the show left the 1960s for its first costume drama segment a year later, characters were already afraid of being sentenced to death. The morbid fascination of the gallows is so much of a piece with the show’s exaggerated melodrama that there must be a death penalty, no matter when or where the action is supposed to be taking place.
Quentin tells Charity that there is a chance- a small chance, he concedes- that he will be cured of lycanthropy before the next full Moon, so that she need not feel that she is an accessory to murder if she doesn’t turn him in right away. Miserable, frightened, and confused, she takes this seriously enough that she remains quiet at least through this episode.
We cut to a hiding place where a man known as Aristide is looking at himself in a mirror and primping his hair, moving his fingers through it with an exaggerated daintiness. We pan to broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi , who impatiently asks “Did you send for me so there would be two of us to admire you?” Aristide has some business to discuss relating to plot points not directly involved in this episode, and he and Magda trade menacing insinuations about the danger each faces from the various supernatural forces at work in the area. Magda says that what the ziganophobic Aristide calls her “Gypsy cunning” will protect her, and Aristide says that an amulet he wears around his neck will protect him.
Magda replies “All right, we’ve both got something to protect us. I go now,” and starts to leave. Aristide stops her, and says that she must recover the severed hand of Count Petofi. She says that a man named Tim Shaw stole the hand and ran off with it, and she has no way of knowing where Tim is. Aristide says she must find out and bring it soon, “before time runs out.” She asks “Before time runs out for who? You mean when Petofi comes back!” In fact, Aristide means more than that- his master, 150 year old sorcerer Count Petofi, will die in a matter of days unless he is reunited with the hand that was cut from his right arm a century before, in 1797. If he does recover the hand in time, he will become immortal. Magda fears Petofi and hates him, and would doubtless make any sacrifice to keep the hand away from him if she knew these were the stakes. So Aristide is mortified that he let slip the phrase “before time runs out,” and is anxious to avoid saying anything else.
Back at Collinwood, Quentin confers with a Mrs Fillmore. Mrs Fillmore has been looking after the twin children Quentin’s wife Jenny bore him after he left her and before he murdered her. This is the first time we have seen Mrs Fillmore. It is also the first confirmation we have had that Quentin has seen Mrs Fillmore. He didn’t know about the twins until #798, when the boy twin was already dead as the result of a curse that a woman named Julianka placed on Magda, who is Jenny’s sister. Now Mrs Fillmore tells Quentin that the girl is suffering the same symptoms the boy showed before he died, and that the doctor is at a loss what to do for her. Quentin says he will look for someone who might be able to help, and they both exit.
Charity is alone in the drawing room, making an earnest effort to get drunk. Magda enters and expresses surprise that the unbendingly prudish Charity has been drinking. Charity replies that she merely ate some chocolates that were filled with brandy. At the sight of an empty snifter, she says that after eating the chocolates she poured herself a small brandy. She then picks up and drinks another, regular-sized brandy. Charity starts talking about how terrible life at Collinwood is. Magda mentions Tim Shaw, who was once Charity’s fiancé and who was framed for her mother’s murder. Charity wonders if Magda can use the Tarot cards to find Tim and bring him back. She asks if Tim will have to tell the truth if he comes back, and Magda assures her that he will. Magda may assume that the truth Charity wants is about the end of her relationship with Tim; she does not know that Charity is desperate to revert to believing that Tim, not her father, murdered her mother.
Magda asks Charity to tell her as much as she can about Tim. Charity says that when Tim was a boy, his closest friend was named Stephen Simmons, and that “He and Stephen Simmons used to always say they would go to San Francisco when they grew up.” Magda asks where Stephen Simmons is now, and Charity says she thinks he lives in Worcester, Massachusetts. She goes to her bedroom to look for a Christmas card Stephen sent her last year, hoping it may have his current address.
Quentin returns and finds Magda. He asks Magda how she knew about his daughter. She asks what he means. When Quentin tells her that the girl is suffering the same symptoms that her brother showed immediately before his death, they rack their brains to come up with a potential defense against Julianka’s curse. Magda remembers Aristide’s amulet. It is capable of warding off vampires and witches- perhaps it will defend against Julianka as well. Magda tells Quentin where Aristide is hiding, and he decides to go to Aristide and rob him of the amulet.
Aristide is asleep when Quentin arrives. He awakens before Quentin can take the amulet, and declares “This pendant protects me from witches, warlocks, and unnatural spirits.” Quentin asks “How does it do against flesh and blood, Aristide?” Aristide draws a curvy piece of wood with no sharp edges and replies “For flesh and blood, I have The Dancing Lady.” The piece of wood is supposed to be a knife. When Aristide first displayed it in #792, he called it “The Dancing Girl.” Perhaps this is a case of Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome, and in a couple of weeks it will be The Dancing Dowager, then The Dancing Crone. At any rate, Quentin replies “Then let her dance, Aristide, let her dance.” Quentin wins the subsequent fistfight. He knocks Aristide senseless, then takes the amulet from him.
Quentin and Magda go to Mrs Fillmore’s house, the first time we have seen this set. Appropriately for a member of the Collins family, the baby sleeps in a cradle shaped like a coffin.
Quentin talks with Mrs Fillmore about little “Lenore,” a name we have not heard before today. The only other girl of Lenore’s generation in the Collins family is the daughter of Quentin’s brother Edward, and she is named Nora. Since the name “Lenore” became popular outside Greece because speakers of English and French thought it was an alternative form of “Nora,” that would suggest rather a limited imagination regarding girl’s names on the part of whoever chose them.
But it is appropriate that Quentin and Edward have children with similar names. They are two variations on Dark Shadows’ first archvillain, Roger, whose evil largely expressed itself in his amazingly bad parenting of David. Edward’s attentive and caring interactions with Nora and her brother Jamison show that he is a less villainous Roger, while Quentin’s frequent assaults on his adult family members are among the evidence that he is an even worse version of the same character. Jamison is the only child we have seen Quentin interact with, and he is fond of him. But while we were still in the 1960s, Quentin’s ghost was possessing and killing the children at Collinwood, and in #710, only two weeks into the 1897 flashback, he and his fellow Satanist Evan Hanley used Jamison as a “sacrificial lamb” in a ritual meant to exploit his innocence for their own sinister purposes. Clearly, Quentin is no more to be trusted with the care of a child than was the early Roger.
Quentin asks Mrs Fillmore to leave him and Magda alone with Lenore. They apply the amulet, and it does not seem to work. Magda tries to raise the spirit of Julianka. After some pleadings and whatnot, there is thunder, wind, and other signs of ghostly presence. Magda cries out in hope that Julianka has come with pity. A figure materializes and says “Not with pity, Magda.” But the figure is not Julianka. It is Jenny.
In #804, we saw a photograph of Jenny in Quentin’s room. It was a full length picture in a period-appropriate costume, not just Marie Wallace’s professional headshot, raising a hope that we would see Miss Wallace again before too long. But after a week and a half, those hopes had begun to fade. Perhaps they took the picture months ago and never got around to using it when Jenny was on the show. If they had done that, they wouldn’t be above sticking in a scene of Quentin looking at the picture and discussing it with his distant cousin Barnabas the vampire so that they could get their money’s worth out of it. When Miss Wallace does in fact return, the show sends us out on a high note.
Charity Trask finds Quentin Collins unconscious and disheveled in the woods. She kneels beside him in a show of concern, then notices a woman on the ground near him. The woman’s face is covered with what on a black and white television look like slash marks and her clothing is badly torn. She regains consciousness just long enough to say Quentin’s name. Charity notices that Quentin is holding a scrap of cloth that matches the woman’s dress, and realizes that he is the werewolf who has been terrorizing the area.
Quentin comes to, and Charity tells him they must get help for the injured woman. Quentin’s response is to threaten to kill Charity if she says anything to anyone about what she has seen. He says that he will look after the woman, and repeats his death threats to Charity.
Charity goes home to the great house of Collinwood, where her father, the overbearingly evil Gregory Trask, orders her to marry Quentin by the end of the week. She is horrified and tells him she will not. She cannot explain why. Before Gregory can corner Charity and force her to give him information, twelve year old Jamison Collins enters. Jamison reports seeing the injured woman in the woods, and says that Gregory must go to her at once if she is to survive. Gregory dismisses this as a “tall tale” and says he will not be distracted from punishing Jamison for his long unexplained absence from the house. Charity, on the point of sobbing, urges Trask to take Jamison seriously, and he reluctantly goes to see if there really is a woman in the woods.
We know more than do Charity or Trask. We saw Jamison meet Quentin in the woods next to the woman’s body, and talk to him in an amiable and condescending tone about the possibility of turning this unfortunate incident to their mutual advantage. He also makes it clear that, despite his appearance, he is not simply Jamison. He is a sorcerer named Count Petofi, in possession of Jamison and acting through his body. When Charity asks Jamison/ Petofi if the woman was alone when he found her, he replies that of course she was. Smiling, he asks who she thought he might have seen. Terribly agitated, she soon excuses herself and goes into the foyer. Jamison/ Petofi looks directly into the camera and smiles. David Henesy was the first actor on Dark Shadows to use this technique, back in 1966 when he was playing strange and troubled boy David Collins. He’s been doing it a lot lately, and is still very good at using it to unsettle the audience.
He looks young for 150, but he’s grown quite a bit since 1966. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Quentin comes down the staircase, wearing a tidy new suit. Charity is shocked that he did nothing to help the injured woman; he resumes his menacing tone and demands to know whether she kept her side of the bargain. He eventually deduces that she did not tell what she saw, and allows her to go upstairs to her bedroom. Quentin is usually charming, often funny, and occasionally aligned with good against evil, but even before he became a monster he was established as a homicidal maniac. When we first met Quentin, he was a ghost haunting Collinwood in the late 1960s and he kept killing people there. The first week of our trip back in time to 1897, we saw him trying to strangle his grandmother in her bed. And his sister-in-law turned him into a werewolf as revenge after he murdered his wife Jenny. Since we are focused on the horror of Charity’s situation as her father is pressuring her to marry Quentin, of course his bloodthirstiness is the aspect of his personality we see most clearly today.
Trask returns, carrying the injured woman. Quentin asks if she was conscious. Trask says she is not conscious. Quentin specifies that he wants to know if she has been conscious at any point while with Trask. This arouses Trask’s suspicions; Quentin protests that it is information he will need when he telephones the doctor. Trask says that she was not, and carries her upstairs.
Quentin goes to the drawing room. Jamison/ Petofi is there, and has some business to discuss. Quentin is too unsettled by the fact of the possession to talk candidly. Jamison/ Petofi decides to humor him. “I’ll become that beautiful child you so want to see… Can we play a game, Uncle Quentin?” Quentin is stunned by Jamison/ Petofi’s sudden change of tone and bearing. It is indeed impressive to see David Henesy drop his mimicry of Thayer David as Petofi and resume his usual approach to the role of Jamison. We’d forgotten just how deeply he had come to inhabit that imitation.
Jamison/ Petofi declares that they will have a treasure hunt. He gives Quentin a series of clues in the form of cryptic rhymes. Quentin is completely stumped by all of them. Finally Jamison/ Petofi just points at the desk drawer he wants Quentin to open and tells him there is a document in it that he can use against Trask. Quentin opens the drawer and pulls out heap after heap of paper, then declares “There’s no paper here!”
Quentin is not especially brainy; much of his appeal comes from the joy David Selby, Ph.D., took in playing a character who at no point says or does anything to demonstrate intellectual prowess. But we are not supposed to believe that he is stupid, at least not so stupid that it is plausible that “There’s no paper here!” was the scripted line. Maybe it was a blooper for “There’s no paper like that here!” or “There’s no paper here I haven’t seen before!” or something like that.
A document bearing a wax seal and a couple of signatures materializes on top of the papers Quentin has pulled out of the desk. He reads it, and sees that it is a full confession to the murder of Trask’s first wife, signed by Trask and lawyer Evan Hanley. All Jamison/ Petofi has to say is “It can be very useful, can’t it? Especially since it’s true… Aren’t games fun, Uncle Quentin?” and Quentin catches on that the document gives him power he can use against Trask.
Meanwhile, the injured woman has briefly regained consciousness in the upstairs bedroom where Trask and Charity are attending her. She spoke Quentin’s name, and Trask sent Charity to fetch him. Trask confronts Quentin about this. Quentin says that the woman’s name is Tessie, that he talked to her a couple of times when they ran into each other at the Blue Whale tavern, and that he knows nothing more about her. He admits he didn’t call the police after he called the doctor; he claims he simply forgot, in the confusion of the moment. Trask says that he will go and make the call. In an accusing tone, he asks “Most unfortunate, isn’t it, that you were the one who forgot?” He leaves Quentin alone with Tessie.
Tessie regains consciousness, looks at Quentin, and reacts with dismay. He tells her he didn’t mean to do it. She moans and dies. As she flops over, her right breast comes perilously close to springing out of her décolletage. When he realizes she has died, Quentin says “Tessie!” with a note of exasperation, as if she’s always doing inconvenient things like that. Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud.
Downstairs, we see that Trask did not call the police after all. Charity is doing it from the telephone in the drawing room. Quentin enters through the secret panel behind her. We first saw him use this panel in #685, when it was 1969 and he was a silent but peculiarly corporeal ghost. He let himself into the drawing room and strangled silversmith Ezra Braithwaite, played by Abe Vigoda. A bit of an eldritch moment that the killer of Tessie is also the killer of a character played by the actor who would go on to play Tessio in the 1972 film The Godfather.
In Vigoda’s last scene in that movie, Tessio and Corleone Family consigliere Tom Hagen are at pains to assure each other that Tessio’s impending murder and the events that led up to it were strictly business, and that Tessio and his murderers still have the warmest regards for each other. Quentin’s attempt to deny his guilt to Tessie is of that same sort- he didn’t have any hostility towards her, his nature as a werewolf simply required that he kill the nearest person.
By contrast, Quentin’s interaction with Charity is intensely personal and intensely unpleasant. He takes the telephone out of her hand, something that men often do to women on Dark Shadows when they are trapping them, and moves deep into her personal space as he demands to know why she would want to call the police. She tells him her father ordered her to make the call; he says that Tessie will tell the police nothing now, because she is dead. Charity shouts that he killed Tessie, and that she will tell everything.
Danny Horn devotes much of his post about the episode at his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day to the absurdity of Quentin making a date with Tessie on a night when the Moon was full. In a comment, I pointed out that we have no reason to think he did make a date with her:
I don’t think it’s so hard to explain why Tessie was in the woods at dawn, though it does require a little fanfic.
Charity was in Quentin’s room in 806, inviting him to go for a walk on the beach when he’s busy getting drunk and listening to the same dreary little waltz over and over. To get Tessie into the woods, all we have to do is assume that shortly after that scene Quentin ran out of booze before he was drunk enough to stop caring about the upcoming full moon. Not wanting to deal with the Trasks, he didn’t go to the mansion’s liquor pantry, but staggered down to the Blue Whale.
There, Quentin met Tessie. She was upset with him for missing several dates in the last few days. He can’t very well explain what he’s been doing lately, and his refusal to answer Tessie’s questions angers her. She’s about to give Quentin a piece of her mind when he realizes that it will be dark soon, and rushes from the bar.
Now Tessie is really furious. She follows Quentin to the estate. Once there, she sees him change into the werewolf, and hides in terror for most of the night. Shortly before dawn, she thinks he is gone and leaves her hiding place. The werewolf appears and slashes away at her for a few minutes before changing back into human form and collapsing beside her.
And that’s when Charity finally takes her walk, and finds out.
Comment left 17 November 2020 by “Acilius” on Danny Horn, “Episode 808: Twice Burned,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 18 January 2016
Tessie is played by Deborah Loomis, and is the earliest screen credit on her IMDb page. Her next role listed there was in Hercules in New York, a 1970 film which also featured fellow Dark Shadows day player Erica Fitz Mears, who appeared in #594 and #595 as Leona Eltridge. Neither Miss Loomis nor Mrs Mears stuck with acting after the middle of the 1970s, but the two top billed members of the cast worked steadily for some years after. The first name in the credits was comedian Arnold Stang, who was best known at the time for a series of TV commercials for window screens ending with the tag “Arnold Stang says don’t get stung!” Second billed was Arnold Strong, a bodybuilder from Austria making his acting debut. Under his birth name of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arnold Strong would go on to roles in several later films. I know of no evidence he ever auditioned for a part on Dark Shadows.
Sorceror Count Petofi has taken possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins. He has also cast a spell on broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, compelling her to lead him and his henchman Aristide to the hiding place of vampire Barnabas Collins.
Jamison/ Petofi and Aristide are ready to drive a stake through Barnabas’ heart. They open his coffin and find that he is away from home today. Magda does not know where his other hiding place is. Jamison/ Petofi becomes intrigued with Barnabas and decides to search through Magda’s home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, for papers that might give him information about Barnabas.
He and Aristide find a book published in 1965. Since the dramatic date is currently 1897, this seems to be a matter of some interest. Jamison/ Petofi calls for Magda, who tells him that Barnabas told her that the book had been brought back in time from the 1960s by “a girl named Vicki.” Barnabas’ utterance of the name “Vicki” in #797 was the first reference to well-meaning governess Victoria Winters in the 1897 segment, and this is the second. Vicki was the main character of the show for its first year, and remained in the cast for over a year after that. That the name “Vicki” would be heard only in rare and trivial echoes is not something longtime viewers would likely have predicted before she was written out of the show last year.
Magda goes on to explain that Barnabas himself traveled back in time from 1969. She has a vague idea that he was trying to save a dying child, and hasn’t the faintest clue how he made this remarkable journey. Jamison/ Petofi says that they will get the rest of the story from Barnabas himself. He also says that if he can travel in time, he will be able to live forever, a proposition which would seem to require further explanation.
Jamison/ Petofi is satisfied Magda is telling them everything she knows, but Aristide keeps making threats. The most intriguing refers to something Petofi might do to her: “You’ve heard of his powers. Hasn’t anyone in your tribe ever told you about the mysterious shadow he can cast? The shadow that isn’t your own that follows you?” Writer Sam Hall was probably familiar with a novel called Phantastes by George MacDonald, a bestseller of the nineteenth century that was influential among English fantasy writers of the first half of the twentieth century. It tells of a character named Anodos, who is tormented by a malicious shadow that moves by itself and won’t leave him alone. So perhaps Hall is planning to mine MacDonald’s works for an upcoming story.
Meanwhile, in the great house on the estate, Charity Trask has a dream. She sees Jamison/ Petofi with a portrait of rakish libertine Quentin Collins. The portrait is identical to the one she saw turn into a picture of a werewolf the night before, and she asks Jamison/ Petofi if he saw the same thing. He laughs, then tells her Quentin is a lost soul.
Quentin shows up. Charity’s father, the evil Gregory Trask, has directed her to marry Quentin, and she has set out to comply with this command. Quentin has never shown the slightest interest in her in their time awake together, and he isn’t much friendlier in this dream. He asks her to do something to lighten his mood. “Can’t you be happy? Can’t you be gay? Don’t you want to make me happy?” We’ve never seen her happy; as Gregory’s daughter, it’s hard to see how she could be. She has probably never tried to be gay, either, but it would have to be better than marrying Quentin. She does try to make him happy by imitating Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye, whom she never met or saw or heard, but whose spirit has been possessing her off and on for several days now. She sings Pansy’s theme song and does the highly suggestive dance that goes with it, only to find that Quentin has vanished.
Charity turns and finds Quentin embracing and kissing another girl. They are laughing. Quentin tells Charity that, as she can see, she has succeeded in cheering him up, and therefore she should run along. He and the girl then disappear and Magda enters. Magda tells Charity that she should forget Quentin, because he has a terrible secret. She leaves, and Quentin and the other woman reappear, still laughing at Charity.
Charity decides to ask Magda to explain the dream. Before she reaches the Old House, she finds Quentin and the girl from the dream lying on the ground in the woods. Quentin’s clothing is torn and he is unconscious, but he does not appear to be injured. The girl’s face is covered with what in black and white look like slash marks, but in color are obviously purple makeup. She opens her eyes and gasps Quentin’s name. Whether she was calling for Quentin because he was with her when they were attacked or crying out because he is the one who attacked her would not be clear to first time viewers, though returning viewers know that Quentin is a werewolf and will assume he was the attacker.
The evil Count Petofi, a 150 year old sorcerer, has taken possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins and is wreaking havoc in the great house of Collinwood. Due to Petofi’s spells, Jamison’s father Edward thinks he is a valet recently separated from the service of the Earl of Hampshire. Edward’s brother Quentin tries to explain to him what is actually going on, but Edward merely concludes that he is Quentin’s valet now. When Quentin follows the Collinses’ long-established protocol for dealing with mentally ill family members and locks Edward in the tower room, Edward bangs on the door and protests that he won’t be able to do his job if he is locked up. “And I will do it!” he vows.
Charity Trask, disastrously uptight step-daughter of Quentin and Edward’s sister Judith, falls under Petofi’s influence and is possessed by the spirit of Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye. Pansy was on the show briefly in June. The childlike Carl Collins, brother to Judith, Edward, and Quentin, was engaged to marry Pansy before she was killed by vampire Dirk Wilkins. Pansy and Charity never met; when Carl asked Charity if she had seen Pansy, the scene was staged to make it seem absurd that the two women could exist in the same universe. Now, they exist in the same body.
If Petofi has caused startling changes in Jamison, Edward, and Charity, the change in Quentin is perhaps the most jarring of all. He has been a ghost, a homicidal maniac, a Satanist, a zombie, and a werewolf, but always and everywhere a source of total chaos, who destroys all recognized order and is perfectly at home in the midst of sheer madness. Today, Quentin keeps making earnest attempts to restore everyone to their right minds and reestablish the proper and respectable relations within the household.
First time viewers will immediately catch on that the preteen David Henesy is not the actor who would usually play a 150 year old Hungarian nobleman, and when Nancy Barrett suddenly takes on an East London accent and enters wearing a garish costume and doing a dance with lot of hip shaking and pelvic thrusts, they will know that Charity is turning into someone else. The dialogue in the scenes involving Edward explains what is happening to him. They may not know that Quentin is not supposed to be the defender of the status quo. That information is supplied in two scenes. Charity/ Pansy receives a psychic message from the world beyond telling her that Quentin was involved in the murder of Carl, and she announces this information. Also, Quentin calls for help, and the helper who materializes is his distant cousin, Barnabas Collins the vampire.
At the end of the episode, Barnabas lays hold of Jamison/ Petofi and drags him into the secret passage leading from the drawing room to the west wing. It is usually bad news when a vampire abducts a child and shoves him into a dark space, but David Henesy brings such joy to the role of Jamison/ Petofi that we can hardly doubt that what comes next will be equally fun to watch.
Meanwhile, a painter named Charles Delaware Tate has presented himself. Tate’s first appearance will cause a sinking sensation in longtime viewers; he is played by Roger Davis, a terrible actor who delivers much of his dialogue by shouting while clenching the sphincter muscles in his buttocks, and who routinely assaults the women and children in the cast while on camera. We may have hoped we had seen the last of Mr Davis when his most recent character, Dirk, was destroyed shortly after murdering Pansy. But evidently Pansy’s return in the form of another actress has come at the price of Mr Davis’ return in the guise of another character.
For much of 1968, Mr Davis played a man known variously as Peter Bradford and Jeff Clark. His approach to characterization consisted of shouting “My name is Jeff Clark!” When this technique was played out, he took to shouting “My name is Peter Bradford!” He doesn’t shout today, mercifully. But he does say the name “Charles Delaware Tate” quite a few times.
Today’s story about Tate is potentially interesting. Jamison/ Petofi finds him when he answers the front door. Tate asks to see Jamison Collins; Jamison/ Petofi confirms that despite his appearance, he is indeed the person Tate has come to see. Tate accepts this with a blandness that suggests that he knows he is dealing with a magical personage.
Jamison/ Petofi gives Tate a photograph of Quentin and says that he wants a portrait of him. When Quentin comes to the drawing room and finds Tate sketching, he asks who he is. Again, Quentin adopts a stern tone which suits someone defending the sanctity of private property against an unknown intruder. Tate introduces himself and shows him a handwritten letter which Quentin instantly accepts as the product of his grandmother Edith. He tells Tate that Edith has been dead for some time and that he is not interested in a portrait of himself. Tate says that he has already accepted the commission and the money that Edith sent with it, and so he will rent lodgings in the village of Collinsport and finish the job regardless. Quentin does what viewers have hoped everyone who shared a scene with one of Mr Davis’ characters would do, and throws him out.
The forged letter is a fascinating touch for returning viewers. Petofi made himself welcome as a guest at Collinwood by showing Edward forged papers creating the impression that he shared Edward’s friendship with the Earl of Hampshire. That he has also created papers that Quentin immediately accepts as coming from Edith, who died long before Petofi had any reason to come to Collinwood, suggests that his powers of forgery are very extensive indeed.
Tate not only seems to know that Petofi has magical powers; he also shows an acquaintance with Petofi’s henchman Aristide.* When Tate mentions Aristide, he calls him “Aristeedy,” a sort of pet name with a diminutive suffix. This is probably just a blooper on the part of Mr Davis, but since Petofi is continually telling Aristide how lovely he is and how he is more attractive when he doesn’t speak, it does remind us of the gay subtext that runs through their scenes together. We might suspect that Petofi and Aristide’s sexuality is in one way or another one of the reasons they are connected to Tate.
The script opens all of these questions about Tate. Had he been played by an actor who was capable of depicting depth and highlighting ambiguity, it could have been a lot of fun to speculate about just what their answers might be. In #137, future movie star Frederic Forrest was a featured extra on the dance floor at The Blue Whale tavern; it’s easy to suppose he would have taken a speaking part. So when the show puts Mr Davis in front of us, I like to make the time a little more tolerable by imagining what Forrest might have brought to the role of Tate.
*His name is spelled “Aristede” in the closing credits, but it was “Aristide” in the original scripts.
The spirit of evil sorcerer Count Petofi has taken possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins, much to everyone’s consternation. David Henesy spends most of the episode mimicking Thayer David’s Petofi, with hilarious results.
Jamison/ Petofi sipping a glass of “mineral water… for the digestion.” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
We see Jamison’s favorite uncle, Quentin the Satanist, trying to cast a spell to break Petofi’s possession of Jamison. As he always does when he is calling on the dark powers of the unseen realms, Quentin gets very fervent. We pan to Jamison/ Petofi, standing next to Quentin in a state of utter boredom, asking if Quentin will bring him a glass of mineral water once he’s “finished with all the mumbo-jumbo.”
Twice, Jamison/ Petofi pretends he is not possessed, but is his usual preteen self. He does this in order to trick people into letting him kiss them, which is how Petofi’s power spreads to them. This gives Mr Henesy the challenge of showing how Thayer David would play Petofi playing Jamison. That’s the sort of thing an actor needs a director’s help to pull off. Unfortunately, the woeful Henry Kaplan was at the helm today, so we discover that Petofi’s imitation of Jamison sounds exactly like the original, who is in turn uncannily like Jamison’s grandson David Collins and his great-great-grandfather Daniel Collins, who are also played by Mr Henesy.
Those whom Jamison/ Petofi kisses reveal their “true selves.” So maidservant Beth reveals that she was under the power of Jamison’s distant cousin, vampire Barnabas Collins. When Jamison’s father Edward passes this word along to Quentin, Quentin tells him is going to confront Barnabas. Edward has been hunting Barnabas, and by saying this Quentin implies that he knows where Barnabas is and that he has been helping to hide him. For some reason, Edward only smiles in response to this revelation.
Petofi wears a prosthesis in place of his right hand; Edward finds that Jamison’s right hand has also been replaced with a prosthesis. After this horrifying discovery, Jamison/ Petofi kisses Edward. Quentin returns shortly after, and finds that Edward does not recognize him or know the name of the house. Edward identifies himself as a newcomer to the area, and says that he would be glad of any work the family might hire him to do. Evidently his “true self” is a guy who needs a job. Since he has not inherited any assets or accumulated enough to live on, I don’t suppose we can disagree with whatever force it was that declared this to be Edward’s reality.
In the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi accuses a man who calls himself Victor Fenn Gibbon of being Count Petofi, a sorcerer who, a hundred years before, was cured of lycanthropy at the price of his right hand and most of his magical powers. Fenn Gibbon denies the charge, and fills the awkward silence with a story that Petofi’s saddest morning came when he awoke to find that his pet unicorn was dead, killed by the wolf. Also in the room is the desperately handsome Quentin Collins, who is himself a werewolf. Quentin says that after they return to human form, werewolves do not remember what they did the night before. Since Fenn Gibbon’s story reveals his knowledge of that fact, Quentin takes it as confirmation that he is indeed Petofi.
Petofi’s severed hand is still in existence, and still carries with it great power. Magda stole the hand from Romani tribal leader/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana several weeks ago in hopes that she could use it to lift the werewolf curse from Quentin. Since then it has been stolen by one person after another, none of whom has much benefited from it. Now schoolteacher-turned-adventurer Tim Shaw has taken the hand and skipped town. Petofi threatens to use his remaining powers to harm Quentin and Magda unless they find the hand and return it to him by morning; they have to admit they have no idea where it is.
At the end of the episode, we are in the great house on the estate. Petofi makes a series of ominous remarks to Magda and Quentin as he takes his suitcase and goes out the front door. Quentin’s twelve year old nephew Jamison appears at the top of the staircase. He is speaking in a raspy voice, continually suppressing a chuckle at his own witty remarks, and squinting by tightening his eyelids in the middle. He addresses Quentin as “Mr Collins,” says he is not in the habit of being interrupted, and walks downstairs with a slow gait, raising himself slightly from the hips as he comes to each step. We recognize an imitation of Petofi, and Magda declares that the boy is possessed.
Regular viewers will be intrigued to see Jamison as a medium for Petofi. Jamison is played by David Henesy, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s plays strange and troubled boy David Collins. In #186, David Collins participated in a séance during which he channeled the spirit of David Radcliffe, a boy who was burned alive by his mother in March 1867, exactly one hundred years before. In December 1968, David Collins was intermittently possessed by the ghosts of Quentin and Jamison, and when Quentin was temporarily dead and his body was a zombie in April 1969 Quentin possessed Jamison. So by this time Mr Henesy has substantial experience playing a boy who is being used as the vehicle for another spirit.
Mr Henesy is also deeply familiar with the style and manner of Thayer David, who plays Petofi. Thayer David’s first role on the show was crazed handyman Matthew Morgan, who had many scenes with David Collins, and his second was much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes, who when the show was set in the 1790s shared screen time with Mr Henesy’s character Daniel Collins. Thayer David’s third role, Ben’s descendant and occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes, crosses paths with David Collins only occasionally, but he was on so much that all Mr Henesy would have to do to keep up his status as an expert on Thayer David would be to watch the show on his days off. So it is exciting to see what Mr Henesy’s interpretation of Thayer David’s Petofi will be.
David Collins is always on the minds of longtime fans when Mr Henesy appears, and is especially so today. Magda has a crystal ball into which she occasionally peers; she gets melodramatically frustrated with it shortly before we cut to Jamison and Petofi today. This ball originally belonged to David Collins. He received it as a gift from dashing action hero Burke Devlin in #48, and thereafter used it several times to get information to advance the plot and to establish himself as a link between the visible action of the show and the supernatural forces which at that point lurked in an unseen back-world. Magda’s failed attempt at scrying today may seem like a throwaway to relatively recent fans, but when those who have been with the show from the beginning see the ball and then see Jamison so shortly afterward, they will know that something spooky is coming.
Thayer David might never have been cast on Dark Shadows if he had acted under the name he was given at birth. He was originally called David Thayer Hersey. It’s hard to imagine a producer adding David Thayer Hersey to the cast of a show that had already for eight weeks featured David Thomas Henesy.
When broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi learned that her sister Jenny had been murdered, she placed a curse on the murderer, Jenny’s husband Quentin Collins. The curse makes Quentin and his male descendants werewolves. In #763, Magda learned that Jenny had given birth to Quentin’s twin children, and ever since she has been trying desperately to lift the curse. It was only this week Quentin found out about the children, after another witch’s curse had already claimed the life of the boy twin. Now he and Magda are debating what risks they should take in their further efforts to save Quentin and any descendants his infant daughter may have.
In #778, Magda returned to her home in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. She had gone to Boston because she had heard that a Rroma group was in the area and that an old woman who knew how to cure werewolves might be among them. The woman wasn’t there, so Magda did the next best thing. She infiltrated the private quarters of a tribal leader/ organized crime boss known as King Johnny Romana and stole his prized possession. This is a severed hand in a wooden box. It is known as “The Hand of Count Petofi,” after a Hungarian nobleman from whom it was detached over hundred years before, and it has magic powers.
Neither Magda nor anyone she knows has the slightest idea how to control the hand. It has not cured Quentin, briefly disfigured him and his sometime friend Evan Hanley, led to the death of a young woman named Julianka, has been stolen by one person after another, and must soon bring an emissary of King Johnny tasked with Magda’s murder. Moreover, two mysterious and unsavory men known as Aristide and Victor Fenn Gibbon have come to town intent on stealing the hand; at Fenn Gibbon’s bidding, Aristide tortured Quentin and tried to kill him last week, and now he is trying to lure him into a deal.
Magda tells Quentin he is a fool to do business with Aristide and Fenn Gibbon, but Quentin says they have nothing to lose. Aristide implied that Fenn Gibbon can lift the curse; no one else can. They find Fenn Gibbon and Aristide ransacking the Old House. Magda recognizes a design on one of Fenn Gibbon’s buttons. Fenn Gibbon and Quentin struggle, and Fenn Gibbon loses a prosthetic right hand. We have known all along that he was not using his right name, and Magda tells us who he really is. He is Count Petofi himself, still alive more than a century after his mutilation, come to reclaim the hand and all its powers.
Quentin seizes, not the Hand of Count Petofi, but the Hand of Mr Fenn Gibbon. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Magda and Quentin don’t actually have the hand or know where it is. It has been stolen yet again. This time it is in the possession of Tim Shaw, schoolteacher turned junior executive for the Collins family enterprises. Tim took the hand from the Old House when Magda was out. He takes it to Evan today. Evan is terrified of the hand. Tim threatens him with it. Evan tells Tim what he knows about the hand, and also confesses that he and the evil Gregory Trask brainwashed Tim some time ago and used him to murder Trask’s wife Minerva.
When Evan and Trask decided to use Tim for their evil scheme, he was an innocent. The audience may have known that Tim had the same last name as Raymond Shaw, the main character in The Manchurian Candidate, but nothing else about him suggested he was likely to be of use to sinister figures like Evan and Trask. With his theft of the hand and his interrogation of Evan, we see that Tim has lost his innocence. The stuffy and repressed pedagogue whom we first met was a better fit for Don Briscoe’s heavily interiorized acting style than were the parts he played when the show was set in 1968 and 1969, accursed brothers Tom and Chris Jennings. Briscoe often seemed to be at sea as a vampire or a werewolf, but when he has to show a tortured soul peeking out from inside a three-piece suit he does an expert job. Now that Tim is capable of driving the story, we have a chance to see what Briscoe can do with a starring role crafted for his particular strengths as an actor.
Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi is in her home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. She takes a hatchet and chops a plastic model of a severed hand into two plastic models, each representing half of a severed hand. She then throws a handkerchief into the fireplace, all the while declaring that no further trouble will come from the hand. Later, she goes to the great house on the estate and tells handsome libertine Quentin Collins about this; to her surprise, he responds by flying into a rage and choking her.
Quentin’s rage abates when a huge image of the hand materializes in the room and floats towards Magda’s rear end. After she goes home, it materializes again and again drifts towards the same destination. With that, she runs outside.
Meanwhile, some activity is going on at The Blue Whale tavern. One man asks another for information about Quentin. The inquirer is named Aristide; the other, Tim Shaw. Tim identifies himself as an employee of the Collins family. Tim tells Aristide that all he knows about Quentin is that he is an arrogant jerk and that the only reason his family lets him live in their mansion is that their grandmother’s will requires them to. Aristide says that he already knew those things, and he asks Tim to carry a message to Quentin.
Tim is in the foyer of the great house while Magda and Quentin are in the drawing room. He eavesdrops on their conversation about the hand. He overhears them saying that the hand is magical, that properly used its powers are limitless, and that it is in a box at Magda’s. After the hand’s second attempt to grope Magda’s buttocks drives her from her house, Tim sneaks in, finds the hand, and tells it that it is just what he needs.
The message Tim brought from Aristide invited Quentin to meet at The Blue Whale. Quentin goes and brings up something that happened a few days ago, when Aristide tied him to a table and tried to kill him. Aristide agrees that this was not a good plan. Aristide says that Quentin can be “cured”; returning viewers know that Quentin is a werewolf, and that it is for this condition that he wants a cure. Aristide admits that he does not know what the cure is; Quentin says that if he had claimed he did know, he would have killed him. But he says that someone else does know. Quentin learned yesterday that Aristide is in the service of a man whom he knows as Victor Fenn Gibbon; evidently Aristide was not aware Quentin had picked up on that, because he is alarmed when Quentin drops Fenn Gibbon’s name. Nonetheless, Quentin does agree to meet Aristide again, and to give him proof that he has the magical hand. Once he has been cured, Quentin will surrender the hand to him.
Before Magda entered the drawing room at the great house, Quentin had been talking with Miss Charity Trask, his sister’s new stepdaughter. Returning viewers know that Charity’s father, the evil Gregory Trask, has decided she ought to marry Quentin. This scene is the first time we see Charity trying to follow this plan. She mentions that Quentin is a widower. It has not been clear to us whether this is generally known. His wife Jenny was hidden away the year before, after he left her, and she was buried very quickly after he murdered her in #748. For all we know, Charity may not know that Jenny is dead, or even that she ever existed. Quentin’s siblings have been holding information about Jenny very tightly; it was just yesterday that Quentin learned Jenny bore twins while he was away. At the same time, he learned that one of those twins has died. He tells Charity that he is a father, and she is confused.
I don’t suppose any of this sounds very exciting, but it is a remarkably fast half-hour. The script is crisp and rapid; even viewers who haven’t missed an episode and know all the background will appreciate the air of mystery that arises from leaving so much unsaid and unexplained. And the actors are uniformly excellent. I can imagine a first-time viewer seeing this one and making a note to watch again tomorrow.
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