real world history – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1130: A better place to imagine than to live in

Dark Shadows featured several long costume drama segments depicting stories of time travel. From November 1967 to March 1968, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters bumbled around in the years 1795 and 1796, convincing the people of Collinsport that they should hang her. Meanwhile, we learned how old world gentleman Barnabas Collins first became a vampire.

From March to November 1969, Barnabas was the one making poor decisions in an era not his own when he found himself in the year 1897. Those eight months were by most measures the show’s most successful period. From March to July 1970, the show traveled sideways in time to an alternate universe where Barnabas and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, meddled in the problems of the family who lived on that version of the estate of Collinwood. The show insisted on calling that alternate universe “Parallel Time.”

Now, Julia and Barnabas have made their way to the year 1840. They know that something or other happened in that year that would lead to the destruction of the great house of Collinwood and its residents in 1970. They have no very clear idea what that fateful event was, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the writers don’t have any good ideas about it either.

While Barnabas, Julia, and the writers cast about in the darkness, we keep meeting characters who remind us of earlier phases of the show. Early on, we met Ben Stokes and Daniel Collins, two people left over from the 1790s segment. Ben helped Julia and Barnabas establish themselves with the current crop of Collinses by corroborating their story that they were cousins from England (or Philadelphia, whichever.) Daniel, who was a boy in the 1790s and is now the master of Collinwood, greeted them warmly and invited Barnabas to stay in the Old House at Collinwood as long as he liked. The presence of Daniel and Ben not only helped graft Barnabas and Julia onto the new stories, but also told longtime viewers that the 1840 segment will be a sequel to the 1790s segment.

We also see mergers of characters from the 1897 segment with those from Parallel Time. For example, charming rogue Quentin Collins became a huge breakout star in 1897; in Parallel Time, Quentin’s counterpart was the grumpy and irascible master of Collinwood. In 1840, Quentin is Daniel’s older son and sole heir, in charge of the house due to his father’s many problems. He is again grumpy and irascible, again in a loveless marriage. But like the 1897 Quentin, he is fascinated by the occult and creates trouble by his reckless involvement with it. Quentin’s best friend and fellow occultist is his cousin Desmond Collins, played by John Karlen. Desmond shares the irresponsibility of Karlen’s 1897 character, inveterate prankster Carl Collins. But Desmond has none of the extreme childlike quality that it made seem Carl had a cognitive impairment of some sort. He has the manner and bearing of Karlen’s Parallel Time character, drunken novelist Will Loomis.

Will was married to Carolyn Collins Stoddard, played by Nancy Barrett. In 1897, Miss Barrett played a villain named Charity Trask who fell afoul of evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Petofi erased Charity’s personality and replaced it with that of Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye. Carl had brought Pansy to Collinwood as his fiancée. Pansy was killed before she ever met Charity, who never had any use for Carl. Carl himself was killed before Petofi took Charity’s body away from her and gave it to Pansy. Miss Barrett’s acting style is to throw herself completely into each of her roles, so we quickly accepted her as Pansy. But when we heard Miss Barrett’s Pansy pine for her poor lost Carl, we were reminded that Petofi had murdered Charity and reanimated her form with Pansy’s mind.

In 1840, Miss Barrett is Leticia Faye, who is barely distinguishable from Pansy. She was brought to Collinwood by the evil Gerard Stiles to play some part in his never-explained scheme to cheat the Collilnses out of their money. When we first saw her, Leticia confronted Gerard over her suspicions that if he ever did get his hands on any of the Collins money, she wouldn’t see any of it. Then Gerard humiliated her by marrying Quentin’s widow Samantha, which promptly redounded to his own humiliation when Quentin turned up alive and well. Leticia confronted him again, brandishing her own pain and mocking his in what sounded very much like the sorts of things Carolyn used to say to Will. Now, Leticia has set her cap for Desmond, but also become involved in his occult mischief.

Most of the action in the 1790s was driven by wicked witch Angelique. A maniacal villain then, Angelique appeared in 1897 and became a multilayered personality. Angelique rejoined the cast of characters at the end of yesterday’s episode. We saw her enter the hidden chamber where Barnabas’ chained coffin was kept from the 1790s on and discover that it was no longer there.

Angelique’s counterpart in Parallel Time had a sidekick, a housekeeper modeled on Mrs Danvers from Rebecca who was herself Julia’s Doppelgänger. We didn’t get to see a great deal of that relationship, since Grayson Hall was off for principal photography for the feature film House of Dark Shadows during most of the first half of the Parallel Time segment. Today, we see that we will be getting another look at how Angelique handles a sidekick. Angelique Model 1840 has a servant, a man named Laszlo Ferrari.

Laszlo’s appearance evokes the 1897 segment. He is played by Michael Stroka, wearing the astrakhan hat that he wore when we first saw him as Aristide, servant of Count Petofi. His attitude towards Angelique is very much like Aristide’s towards Petofi, asking a question in a vaguely belligerent tone, occasionally making a show of defiance, and quickly collapsing into cringing obedience. So he asks Angelique why they keep coming to the tomb every year, and why she isn’t as happy as she usually is when she emerges from the secret room. She snaps at him in response, saying that she would have expected him to stop asking her questions by now, since she has never yet given him any answers. She orders him to go to the great house at Collinwood and find out if a man named Barnabas Collins has been around recently. Reluctant to go, he asks who Barnabas is. She says he is the only man she ever loved. He says “Other than me, of course!” and she agrees in a sarcastic tone. It’s all in very joking, but he scurries away to obey her. All that is missing is him addressing her as “Excellency!” and her remarking on his good looks, and we’d be right back with Aristide and Petofi.

At Collinwood, Laszlo meets Quentin’s younger brother, Gabriel Collins. Gabriel is amused by Laszlo’s attempt to persuade him that he can see into the future, and tells him that the pressing need is for someone who can see into the present. There is a headless body wandering the estate killing people, and if Laszlo can tell them how to put a stop to that he’ll be onto something. Barnabas shows up and scowls at Laszlo, who leaves.

Barnabas doesn’t like the looks of Laszlo. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, we learn that Leticia knows a great deal about the headless body. It used to be attached to a severed head that Desmond brought back from Macau as a gift for Quentin. That separates Desmond from Carl, who brought Pansy back from Atlantic City to be his own bride. Leticia is now keeping the head in her own room, and is acting under its influence.

The head and body are those of warlock Judah Zachery, executed in 1692. The head has turned up occasionally in the years since, each time figuring in a series of brutal murders. Apparently the situation will get even worse if the head can be reattached to the body. This also harks back to Petofi, whose hand had been cut from his wrist in the 1790s and had carried on its own career of malignity in the years before Petofi stuck it back onto the end of his arm in 1897. Since Angelique joined forces with Barnabas and Julia to fight Petofi then, showing a new and extremely engaging side of her character, longtime viewers may hope that she and Laszlo will be part of an alliance with our protagonists against Judah Zachery in this period.

Laszlo’s name evokes the movie Casablanca, in which the most morally upright character is French Résistance leader Victor Laszlo while the most morally debased character is crime boss Signor Ferrari. We can imagine Jerry Lacy breaking his character as overbearing undertaker Lamar Trask, putting on his celebrated Humphrey Bogart imitation, and saying of Angelique that “Of all the temporal anomalies in all the multiverse, she had to walk into mine.”

The Petofi/ Aristide relationship was based on one memorialized in another Humphrey Bogart film, Gutman and Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon. As Sydney Greenstreet played Ferrari in Casablanca, so he played Gutman in The Maltese Falcon. It may have been a bit on-the-nose to cast portly gentleman Thayer David as an analogue of Greenstreet, a criticism which cannot be leveled at the choice of the svelte and dazzling Lara Parker. In another departure from the Petofi/ Aristide model, Laszlo is a member of the Romani or Sinti people, the ethnicities often slurred as “Gypsies.” Petofi was vulnerable to certain Romani, and was deathly afraid of all of them.

Aristide was a lot of fun. Stroka came back in 1970 as two characters very like Aristide, first in the original continuity as a hitman known only as Bruno, then in Parallel Time as failed composer Bruno Hess, a member of a little cult that had grown up around that universe’s version of Angelique. The two Brunos were so similar to each other and to Aristide that regular viewers might be disappointed to see Stroka working the old stand one more time.

The essence of Aristide and the Brunos was an insecurity that rode very close to the surface of the character. Each man sneers as he asserts himself against his victims or puffs himself up as he attempts to assert himself against his superiors, then dissolves immediately into frantic backpedaling when he encounters opposition. Stroka made as much as anyone could of those parts, and I had hoped to see him in a role where the insecurity lies deeper in the character’s personality. I wanted to see him as an authority figure whose pompous self-satisfaction can withstand a fair amount of battering and whose eventual defeats prompt a more complex response from him than Aristide/ Bruno’s hectic flailing.

The two characters we have seen who meet that description were Joshua Collins in the 1790s segment and Edward Collins in the 1897 segment, both played brilliantly by Louis Edmonds. In 1840, Edmonds plays Daniel, who is the legal owner of the Collins fortune but whose mental and physical infirmities keep him from exercising much authority. In #1074 and #1076, an ancestor called Abner Collins was associated with the events of 1840; I wish that Barnabas and Julia had found that Abner, rather than Quentin, was Daniel’s eldest son and was in charge of Collinwood and the businesses. Quentin would then be free to be the insouciant wastrel who was such a hit in 1897, rather than a retread of the foul-tempered sourpuss who was a consistent downer in Parallel Time.

As Abner, Stroka could have taken advantage of his striking facial resemblance to William F. Buckley, Junior, making clever-sounding but specious arguments in defense of the family’s most objectionable business practices, littering his speech with seldom-heard polysyllabic words and, when he makes what he believes to be a persuasive argument, leaning way back in his chair and fluttering his eyelids. Buckley was a prominent figure nationally and especially in NYC in 1970. He had been hosting a nationally syndicated television show ever since his unsuccessful bid for mayor of New York in 1965, and in 1970 his brother James would defeat the Democratic and Republican nominees to be elected to the US Senate from New York as the candidate of the Buckley family’s Conservative Party. A spoof of him would therefore be something that grownups in the audience would likely find amusing, and that the New York based makers of the show would surely have enjoyed creating.

In the early days of the show, the most prominent supernatural presences were the ghosts of The Widows, women who flung themselves to their deaths after their husbands were lost at sea due to the inhumane practices of the Collins whaling fleet. The story of The Widows came forward as the first explanation of the origin of the Collins family curse. The whaling industry in New England was approaching its zenith in 1840; it was in the following decades that it finally surpassed cod fishing in the region’s economy. It would close the loop on that early story to present Abner as the man who ensured that the Collinses would be enormously rich for a long time to come by switching the focus of the fleet from a mature market to a rapidly growing one, but who also ensured that they would be the object of undying wrath among many in Collinsport by switching from a decentralized business in which many men had a realistic chance of becoming independent operators to a capital-intensive one in which a handful of magnates control everyone else’s destiny. Abner could become callous to conditions on the whaling ships, because he would see the men as easily replaceable parts of a single machine, not as professionals who had to use their judgment to track down the fish and who might at any time strike out on their own as his colleagues or competitors.

The switch from cod fishing to whaling and its consequences for the life of the village would hark back not only to The Widows, but also to the business stories incorporated in the early storyline of “The Revenge of Burke Devlin.” The theme of those stories was that the Collinses had trapped the people of Collinsport in a situation where the only way for an ambitious young man to improve his lot in life was to leave town. If the 1840 story went on long enough, they might have been able to explore that theme in some depth. Not only would that have appealed to the taste for social and political relevance that was so much in the air in the early 1970s, but by depicting Collinsport as a place full of people who are involved in the story it would also relieve the claustrophobia that stems from the all-Collins episodes that come up so often in the later phases of the show.

Episode 1128: Children’s songs

Six months ago, in the spring of 1840, Samantha Drew Collins learned that her husband Quentin Collins and their young son Tad had been swept off the deck of a ship during a storm at sea. The bearer of this distressing news, Quentin’s friend Gerard Stiles, reported that he tried to rescue Quentin and Tad, but could not. He could only surmise that they had died. A week and a half ago, Samantha married Gerard, only for Quentin to show up that very night, alive and well and reporting that Tad would be along soon. Quentin said that Samantha would have to choose which husband to keep, and that he would abide by her decision.

Today, Samantha chooses Gerard. This is devastating to him, since he was marrying Samantha for her money and now that Quentin is back she won’t have any. But he has to keep pretending he loves her, since admitting the truth would destroy his reputation and burn whatever bridges he still has with people on and around the estate of Collinwood. Quentin has made it clear he does not love Samantha and is sincere when he says he is willing to let her go. He also still regards Gerard as a friend, and is so rich and powerful that even a much better man than Gerard would think long and hard before forfeiting his friendship.

Samantha meets Quentin in their bedroom and tells him of her choice. She brings up his past infidelity and says that she was grateful to him for his candor about it, even though she refused to agree to a divorce when he asked for one a few years ago. He says he will talk to the lawyers about making everything official. He says there doesn’t seem to be anything more to say. She agrees with that. She says she will just take Tad and go.

At this, Quentin’s mood switches abruptly from vague glumness to white-hot rage. Most viewers will have expected that. The oh-so-mature, oh-so-civilized conversation between a divorcing couple has long been a standard scene in domestic melodramas, and it usually is a setup for a sudden explosion of crude and childish anger. Quentin tells Samantha that Tad must stay at Collinwood because he is his son. Samantha replies that Tad is not Quentin’s son. Quentin becomes even angrier, seizing Samantha by the arm, swinging her around to face him, and demanding to know who the other man is. Samantha refuses to give a name, but insists that Tad “is not a Collins!” Quentin vows that Samantha will never see Tad again, and says that he will kill her if she ever tells Tad that he is not his father.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, marveled at the weirdness of Samantha’s thinking in this scene, and I’ve noticed much of the commentary about the episode online focuses on it as a moment when the audience permanently loses interest in Samantha. For example, in a 2021 comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, “Goddess of Transitory” wrote:

And every time they try to give [Samantha] a new layer or motivation it’s both enraging and silly. Like when she honestly thinks Quentin, in 1840, is going to allow her to take Tad, his only son whom he nursed through shipwreck, Brazilian wretchedness and Boston off with her and Gerard, not a penny between them and head full of delusions? She has absolutely not been played as that kind of “totally unaware of social mores” character up until this point. She would be a divorced woman who ran off with her lover. No court or husband in the land is going to go sure, take Tad!

But let’s say, for whatever reason, she did think so. Quentin’s allowing her to choose for herself has made her think he’s on the same page about their stale, passionless marriage [and honestly, if you can go passionless around Quentin? you have a lot of problems, straight up] and will be glad to see the back of her, so this actually comes as a shock. What does she do?

She yells “TAD’S NOT YOUR SON!” in his face! In what universe, no matter how cracked across and mad, would she think that would get Quentin to go well, in that case, happy trails? Who on this planet is so unaware of all human behavior and motivation that they think telling someone the boy he has raised from infancy isn’t his is going to make him more receptive to her suit?

It really doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. The mere choice to do that renders Samantha totally unbelievable, and therefore unsympathetic.

Comment left 8 September 2021 by “Goddess of Transitory” on “Episode 1128: As Rome Burns,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 25 February 2018.

The scene is interesting in the context of the show’s overall development. When Dark Shadows debuted in June 1966, its slow pace, vague stories, and reliance on the star power of Joan Bennett made it most appealing to an older audience. When it became a supernatural thriller with action moving at a breakneck speed, it picked up an audience of very young people.

Aside from occasional experiments with more adult themes, most notably at the beginning of the “Leviathan” segment late in 1969, Dark Shadows has been very much a kids’ show for years now. It is stripped across the week during the daytime, but often has only formal similarities to soap operas aimed at housewives and retirees. The triangle between Quentin, Samantha, and Gerard is a step back in the direction of that genre and an older audience. Not only is the triangle itself the typical soap opera situation, but in this one neither man actually wants the woman and it is only through a visible effort of self-deception that she has managed to convince herself that one of them does. Not many elementary school students are likely to be curious as to how people could get themselves into that position or what would come of it.

As “Goddess of Transitory” points out , it makes no difference to Samantha’s goals whether her claim that Tad is not Quentin’s son is true. Simply by saying it she has set back her cause enormously. It would be in her interest to persuade Quentin to listen to her sympathetically, and making this claim ensures that he will never do that again. It would be in her interest to gain the sympathy of the legal authorities and of the general public, and if she says that she had sex with some other man early in her marriage she will forfeit any share she might have of that. In our universe, the penalty for adultery in Maine in 1840 was a fine of up to $1000 and a term of imprisonment up to five years. While the laws in the world where Dark Shadows takes place may not have been the same, the mores and customs there seem to be similar enough that a woman would not do herself any favors by telling the story Samantha has presented to Quentin.

For the purposes of the drama, though, the plausibility of the story does matter. If we believe that Samantha is telling the truth, we expect this other man to show up and become part of the story. If we believe she is not, then she is acting just from an impulse to hurt Quentin, heedless of the fact that she will hurt herself much more substantially. As Quentin’s threats sound like things a small child might say while throwing a tantrum, so Samantha’s denial of Quentin’s paternity suggests the desperation of an equally young child in the same situation.

The last time the show dealt with a paternity question was in 1966 and 1967, when it took place in a contemporary setting. High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins suspected that his enemy, Burke Devlin, was the biological father of David, the young son his estranged wife Laura bore early in their marriage. Roger hated both Burke and David enough that he almost hoped this was true, and Burke and David both openly hoped it was true. Laura came back to Collinsport late in 1966, and Burke kept trying to get her to say that David was his son. Laura wasn’t interested in David’s paternity, or in the conflict between Roger and Burke. She was an undead fire witch whose plans had nothing to do with romantic entanglements or family quarrels or business rivalries. By the time she went up in smoke, Laura’s storyline had gathered up all of the open narrative threads and carried Dark Shadows out of the category of conventional soap forever.

Since the show started traveling back in time, we have seen that some of the doubling of roles is supposed to indicate that the characters look like each other. During parts of the show set in 1995 and 1970, Tad’s ghost was mistaken for David, so regular viewers know that they look very much alike. And David is descended, not from Tad, but from a Collins cousin of his. Moreover, David Henesy played not only Tad and David, but also the twelve year old Daniel Collins during the segment set in the 1790s. Daniel is 57 years old now, the father of Quentin, and he is played by Louis Edmonds, who played Roger. So longtime viewers know that Samantha is lying when she says that Tad “is not a Collins.” If Quentin is not Tad’s biological father, a close relative of his must be.

When Samantha realizes Quentin will not consent to her leaving with Tad, she calls on a servant named Hortense. When we see Hortense, she is wearing a plain black dress with a lace decoration below the neck and carrying a tray with food, so we assume that she is a maid.

When Samantha addresses her by name, returning viewers will be confused. We heard a few weeks ago that there is a governess at Collinwood named Hortense. That was puzzling in itself, since Tad had been missing and presumed dead for six months at that point and the only especially young person in the house was Carrie Stokes, teenage granddaughter of a houseguest. Rich as the Collinses are, it is a bit much to keep a governess on staff just in case people want to bring their kids for a stay. However few their charges may be, governesses generally don’t wear maid outfits or bring meals on trays, so we might think this is a different Hortense.

Samantha takes Hortense aside and tells her to pack Tad’s bags. She will be taking him away tonight. While they are talking, Quentin’s brother Gabriel is eavesdropping at the door. Characters eavesdrop at the drawing room door all the time, but it is after all a childish thing to do. As a wheelchair user, Gabriel has to lean far forward to get his ear into position, making him look small and emphasizing his childishness. There are no adults at Collinwood at all, only children of various sizes.

Gabriel goes upstairs to Quentin’s room. How he gets himself from one floor of the house to another is never explained. He tells Quentin what’s going on. Quentin comes to the head of the stairs just in time to catch Hortense putting Tad’s bags inside the front door. He demands to know what she is doing. She stammers out a story about going up to check on Tad’s schoolwork, showing that she is after all the governess. Quentin tells her he knows what she is really up to, and fires her on the spot.

Hortense goes out and walks through the woods, apparently on the way to report to Samantha. She encounters a headless body. It kills her.

Virginia Vestoff’s performance as Samantha elevates this episode. She consistently finds a posture which it would be natural for Samantha to adopt and holds it very still, so that any movement she does make attracts our attention. Even while speaking, she moves only her eyes, and those not so as to break eye contact with her scene partners. When she looks from one side of the other person’s eye to another, the reflections of the studio lights flash in her eyes so that it looks like lightning is coming from her. Her deliberate use of her voice, intoning each line with care, contrasts with the rashness of Samantha’s behavior and leaves us wondering if she might somehow succeed in her ridiculous plans. I agree with “Goddess of Transitory” that as written, Samantha’s part in this episode should be fatal to our interest in the character. But Vestoff manages to keep it alive to fight another day.

Episode 1122: The drama will begin to unfold

A disaster destroyed the great house of Collinwood and everyone in it in 1970. The ghosts of some people who were alive in 1840 were part of this disaster. Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have traveled back in time in hopes of preventing the disaster.

One of the ghosts was that of governess Daphne Harridge. When Julia and Barnabas first arrived in 1840, they were bewildered to find that no one at Collinwood had heard of Daphne. Now, Barnabas has found Daphne skulking about in the woods on the grounds of the estate. He confronts her, and demands she answer a series of questions. Desmond Collins, a cousin of the Collinses who live in the great house, shows up just in time to hear Barnabas threatening to force Daphne to tell him what he wants to know. Desmond asks why he would do that, and Barnabas has no choice but to back down. Desmond and Daphne walk away together.

Barnabas has a habit of introducing himself to his adversaries by declaring that he has come to fight them. He did that when he met the evil Gerard Stiles, whose ghost he saw as the face of the disaster in 1970. But the living Gerard has no idea who Barnabas is. For all Barnabas knows, it might be possible for him to get close enough to Gerard to pick up a great deal of information from him that he can use to reshape the future. Daphne doesn’t recognize him either, but when in the twentieth century he and Julia interacted with her ghost and with a resurrected version of her, Daphne was often helpful to them. Barnabas’ aggressive manner in this scene blows any chance he may have had to build the same kind of relationship in this period. Even worse, when Desmond walks in on the encounter what he sees confirms the suspicions he has already expressed, costing Barnabas another possible ally.

My frustration with Barnabas’ part in this scene drove me to fanfic a few years ago. In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, I wrote:

One of my pet peeves is Barnabas’ habit of introducing himself to people as their enemy. He does it with Daphne in this episode, and he did it with Gerard last week. Not only is it irritatingly stupid, but it creates a pacing problem. They establish the enmity right away, then they have nothing to do while we sit around for weeks and weeks waiting for a confrontation. If he’d made an effort to charm Gerard, we could watch that effort crumble, and the last part of its collapse could coincide with their showdown.

The scene where Barnabas meets Daphne calls out for a different sort of fix. Everyone watching the show knows that Barnabas is a vampire, and everyone who saw the cliffhanger at the end of #1121 knows that Daphne is going to be important. So have him do a “Look into my eyes!” bit. Then we are in suspense- will he get useful information? Will he bite her? They show us Desmond approaching, and the suspense shifts- will Desmond catch them in a compromising situation? If he does, will Barnabas kill him? Even if the scene ends up doing as little to advance the plot as the scene they shot in fact does, the result would be an exciting sequence that promises big developments later on.

Comment by “Acilius,” 10 February 2021, on “Episode 1121: The Lost World,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 31 January 2018

In the great house, Julia is having a conversation with Gabriel Collins. She has told the family that she is a medical doctor. Nine more years will pass before Elizabeth Blackwell is admitted to that profession in 1849, making Julia the first woman to practice medicine in the United States. Extraordinary as her claim to be a doctor is, everyone accepts it equably enough. Gabriel says that one of these days Julia will have to see if she can do anything about his legs, which haven’t been able to bear his weight since an accident he had when he was a child. He starts to explain what his brother Quentin did to cause that accident. He is chattering away happily when he suddenly falls silent and drops his teacup. He is stunned to see Quentin entering the room.

Gabriel had thought Quentin was dead. Everyone thought that until a day or two ago, when Quentin returned after an absence of six months. He explained that while it is true that he and his son Tad were washed off the deck of a ship in a storm, they survived and made their way through South America by a highly circuitous route. Julia knows this, and greets Quentin calmly. But no one bothered to tell Gabriel. If that were not enough to tell us where Gabriel ranks in the hierarchy at Collinwood, it is made abundantly clear after Julia excuses herself and leaves the brothers to talk. Quentin says that he always felt guilty about his part in Gabriel’s injury, which is why he has put up with him so much longer than anyone else. But now, even he has had enough of Gabriel’s intolerable personality.

We see Daphne and Desmond sharing one of two circular tables covered with checkered cloths in front of a fireplace. On the wall above the fireplace is a metallic decoration in the shape of an eagle. In the foreground is a bar with a rack of drinking glasses. Longtime viewers know that the tavern in Collinsport was in the eighteenth and nineteenth century known as The Eagle, and that its tables were covered with checkered cloths even in the 1790s.

Daphne was prominent in the twentieth century segments that led us to 1840, while Desmond was never mentioned. His very existence seems to be omitted from the documents that Barnabas and Julia examined when they were trying to figure out what happened in 1840. So it is clear to us that he doesn’t have a shot with Daphne, but not to him. He’s dialed the charm up to 11, or would have if he weren’t such a grouchy New Englander that the most charming manner he can produce rises to about 4. She won’t answer any of his questions, but finally agrees not to check out of the Collinsport Inn and leave town until tomorrow.

Desmond goes home to a mansion known as Rose Cottage. He has brought a curio from his recent trip to southeastern China, intending it as a gift for Quentin. It is a human head in a glass box. When his mother reacted to the sight of this blasphemous thing with horror, Desmond told her that he was sure it was “a carving of some sort,” not an actual body part, and asserted that there was nothing frightening about it. He has since had second thoughts, though the head keeps waiting for Desmond to look away before it opens its eyes.

Quentin turns up and tells Desmond that he has come for the present he had told him he has for him. Desmond has changed his mind about giving the head to Quentin, so he has to scramble to come up with another present. Finally, he tells Quentin that the present is a couple of books about the occult. Quentin is delighted with them. He says he has been eager to get back into the study of “the lost world that we can’t understand, or even see.” He sits down and starts reading them right there, and Desmond suggests that it is time to go. Quentin is disappointed to have to wait to get home to read the books, but goes anyway.

Barnabas shows up and pesters Desmond about Daphne. Desmond is unimpressed with Barnabas, but does tell him that, contrary to the promise she made at the Eagle, Daphne has checked out of the inn and left no forwarding address. He shoos Barnabas away.

Back at Collinwood, Julia and Barnabas are in the drawing room. The doors to the rest of the house are wide open as they declaim loudly about how they are pretending to be people they are not and dare trust no one with their terrible secrets. Fortunately for them, the only person who overhears them is Daphne, who is sneaking into the house to leave a note in the foyer for Quentin.

Back at Rose Cottage, Desmond is yelling at the head. An image of the head is superimposed over him, and he shows signs of distress. We saw aged retainer Ben Stokes have a similar reaction the other day when the image of the head was superimposed on him; Ben died as a result. Desmond hears a voice telling him that he will follow its commands. We are to take it that he is now possessed by the head.

Episode 1000: All people have a reason for their fears

Trask the butler is surprised to see young Amy Collins in the great house of Collinwood. Amy’s cousin Quentin, the master of Collinwood, sent her to stay in the Old House on the estate, home to Will and Carolyn Loomis. The visibly uncomfortable Trask tells Amy she is not supposed to come back until Quentin sends for her. Amy says that she can’t stand it at the Loomises. Trask snaps at her for making life more complicated “at a time like this.” Amy asks what’s so unusual about this time, and Trask claims that he just means that he has been working hard. After an awkward silence, Amy asks if there has been any news about someone called Dameon Edwards. At Edwards’ name, Trask flies out of control. He grabs Amy by the shoulders, leans down so that his nose is in her face, and shouts that she has seen Edwards again. Terrified, she says she hasn’t. He shakes her and shouts louder, she freezes tighter and tighter. It’s getting pretty disturbing when the front door opens. Quentin enters, with two other adults, and demands to know what Trask thinks he’s doing.

Jerry Lacy and Denise Nickerson do a great job in this scene, which comes as no surprise to longtime viewers. For much of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897. In that segment, Nickerson and Mr Lacy played Nora Collins and the evil Gregory Trask. They were terrific together then, as they are today.

Gregory was cruel to children, including Nora. Gregory’s goal was to take control of Collinwood and all its residents, and for a time he seemed to be succeeding. As such, Gregory’s abuse of Nora left us feeling helpless. This Trask is not in control of anything, least of all himself. We don’t know exactly what secret he is frantically trying to keep in connection with Edwards, but we know he believes that it might be exposed at any moment and that when it is he will be ruined. He is acting from panic. Outrageous as Trask’s attack on Amy is, we can see that it is not likely to be repeated and it does not fill us with despair.

Quentin takes Amy to the drawing room and talks with her privately. She is absorbed in her dislike of the Loomises’ house. She says she has a feeling that something terrible is happening there, but she can’t give any reason why she should feel that way. She says that Will spends all of his time writing a new book. This surprises Quentin, who says that Will hasn’t written a word in five years. Amy says that he is busy now, and mentions that she stole a couple of pages from his wastebasket. Quentin asks if she still has them. She hands them over, and he reads them avidly.

Quentin is so enthusiastic about joining Amy in spying on Will’s new project that he forgets all about Trask. Amy seems to have forgotten him as well. When Quentin walked in and found Trask getting rough with her, it looked like he was going to dismiss him on the spot, but now it seems Trask will keep his job for a while longer.

The two who entered with Quentin were Cyrus Longworth and Alexis Stokes. Alexis is the identical twin sister of Quentin’s late wife, Angelique. Cyrus was a friend of Angelique’s, and is a fool. He is a scientist by occupation, and unknown to any of the other characters in today’s episode has been taking a potion of his own devising to turn himself into a hairier and more openly sadistic version of himself. That Jekyll and Hyde potion was the end product of an idea he got from Angelique. Cyrus tells Alexis today that Angelique was his teacher in matters of the occult, with which he is fascinated.

Quentin, Cyrus, and Alexis have returned from Angelique’s tomb. Alexis went there to try to prevent the men from unsealing the tomb and opening the coffin. They were so caught up in the idea that she was really Angelique come back to life that there was no point in her trying to talk sense to them. When they had done their work, they were astounded to find, not only that Angelique’s body was where it was supposed to be, but that it was perfectly preserved six months after her death. Quentin twice asked Cyrus how that could be, first appealing to his expertise as a scientist, then to his studies in occult lore, and each time Cyrus responded with a declaration that what they were seeing could not possibly exist.

The men are now convinced that Alexis is not Angelique, and they tell Trask this. He never thought she was, and is entirely absorbed in his fears about Dameon Edwards. All he says in reply is that he believes there is an evil presence in the house.

Quentin and Cyrus want to cremate Angelique’s body. They announced this plan while they were still in the tomb, prompting Alexis to remind them that her sister’s will specified that she be buried and to threaten to take them to court if they go against Angelique’s wishes.

Cyrus talks with Alexis in Angelique’s old bedroom, telling her that the body’s extraordinarily uncorrupted state has persuaded him that Angelique survives in some uncanny way. He urges her to let the body be destroyed. She continues to demur.

Cyrus says that when she was alive, Angelique had a “rapport with the unnatural” that inclines him to believe she might come “back from the death.” These awkward phrases were probably just line bobbles by Christopher Pennock, but they suit Cyrus well. He’s supposed to be an intellectual who spends little time talking to anyone, and such people do indeed tend to stumble over their words.

Later, Alexis summons Trask. She asks him to drive her to the cemetery and to keep their trip there a secret from Quentin. He acquiesces.

At the mausoleum, Trask is worried about an impending storm. He says he will go back to the car to get an umbrella, but Alexis tells him to forget about that. He is simply to wait for her in the car. She plans to spend only ten minutes with her sister’s remains.

Alexis looks in the coffin and talks to Angelique. She has bad news for her:

I don’t know what your secret was, Angelique, or why you still look as you did in life. I only know that it is wrong. It goes against the natural order of things. I don’t want to do what I have to do now. Quentin and Cyrus are right. Your body must be destroyed.

Distraught, Alexis puts her hand on Angelique’s shoulder, touching her sister one last time. We cut to a closeup of Angelique lying in her coffin. Her eyes pop open, and her lips curl into a smile. For a half a second, these motions look like they might be mechanical reflexes taking place within a dead body as it begins to decompose. But then she speaks: “My dear Alexis, you were always so right. Someone must be destroyed, but it won’t be me. It will be you.”

The show has kept us in suspense for three weeks as to whether Alexis was Angelique. Now, they’ve settled that question, and we know who Alexis is. Unfortunately for her, it seems we just have time to say goodbye.

In our world, bodies do sometimes turn up long after death showing no visible signs of decay. There were several vampire panics in Europe in the early modern era when exhumed corpses were found still looking fresh after months in the grave. Cyrus does not know of any such events in his world’s history, so he and Quentin have to come up with the idea of a panicked response on their own.

It has also been traditional in many branches of Christianity to regard a long-uncorrupted corpse as a count in favor of putting the person on the calendar of saints. Dostoevsky was hugely fashionable in the USA in the Cold War years of the 1950s and 1960s, and it is probable that the writing staff had at least a nodding acquaintance with The Brothers Karamazov. One of the central episodes of that novel comes when the admirers of the godly Father Zosima insist on leaving his body unburied for a long period, certain that it will remain uncorrupt and prove that the anniversary of his passing should be kept as a feast day. To their horror, his remains rot in the usual way. We’ve only been in this particular universe for four weeks, and the only indication we have so far had that Christianity even exists here came early on, when Will used the sign of the cross to immobilize and trap a vampire. So it is no surprise that Quentin, Cyrus, and Alexis never consider that the perfect preservation of Angelique’s body might suggest that she has taken a place among the saints.

Episode 952: Every inhuman creature has one vulnerability

We are in the fourteenth week of a story about the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who are planning to retake the Earth from humankind. At first, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins was a zealous acolyte of the Leviathans and the faithful leader of a cult devoted to their service. The first chapter of the story came to an end when a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time, the harbinger of the Leviathans’ return, ordered Barnabas to kill his best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Barnabas refused that order and became disaffected from the cult, held in line only by the Leviathans’ threats.

The shape-shifting monster has grown, and now spends most of his time as a young man whom everyone calls Jeb, despite his initial request to be called Jabe. Barnabas learned the other day that some of the threats the Leviathans had been making were empty, and so tried to smash a small wooden box that is important to them. Jabe stopped him, and punished the attempt by turning Barnabas back into what he was from the 1790s until 1968, a vampire.

Jabe’s home is a room above an antique shop owned by cultists Megan and Philip Todd. There is a lot of talk about this room as the only place where Jabe can change form. This is confusing to regular viewers. We saw him change from boy to girl while visiting the great house of Collinwood in #909, and in #946 and #947 he changed from his true, non-human, form into Jabe while at a house on an island many miles from the village of Collinsport. Today, Barnabas burns the antique shop down in order to destroy the room; Jabe says that he left the room through the window when the fire started, and changed from his true form into his human shape while outside. I keep trying to give them the benefit of the doubt about this, but at this point the whole theme of the “Chosen Room” falls apart completely.

Nonetheless, the antique shop sets and the troubled relationship between Philip and Megan have been signatures of the Leviathan story so far. Now the shop is gone, and Megan is gleeful that Philip is in jail, having confessed to three murders Jabe committed and unlikely ever to live with her again. So we can say that chapter two of the Leviathan story is over.

Barnabas’ re-vamping marks a transition in more than this storyline. He is the central character of the show and its main attraction; whether or not he is a vampire determines a great deal about what kind of show it is. You could periodize the show into segments depending on whether he is a vampire or not. I’ll risk a spoiler and tell you we have now begun a long segment of Barnabas-as-vampire.

Barnabas goes to the jail and has a conference with Philip. Jabe overtaxed Philip’s allegiance to the Leviathans, as he overtaxed Barnabas’. Philip has confessed to Jabe’s murders only because he loves Megan, believes she still loves him, and fears that if he does not do what Jabe commands he will kill Megan. Barnabas tells him that in fact Megan no longer cares about him at all, but is entirely devoted to Jabe.

In the real world, the state of Maine did away with capital punishment in 1887, a fact which applied to the universe of Dark Shadows in 1966. In #101, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins disappointed his son, strange and troubled boy David, by mentioning it. But the prospect of a gallows is more melodramatic than is that of any prison sentence, however long, and so Philip announces that he is going to be hanged for Jabe’s murders.

Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, owner of the great estate of Collinwood and of the businesses that employ most of the people in and around the village of Collinsport, is a devoted member of the Leviathan cult. Liz gives Jabe the carriage house on the estate to live in, telling him its back room will be suited to take the place of the now-destroyed Chosen Room. He tells her that Barnabas has betrayed the cult, but that she need not act against him yet. The carriage house was mentioned a few times in 1969, when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897 and the Collinses were still traveling by carriage. I believe this is our first confirmation that the carriage house still exists in the twentieth century.

Megan comes to visit Jabe at the carriage house. She is exultant that Philip is in jail. Jabe tells her he has no intention of resuming his true form; she is appalled. The plan has been that he will take Liz’ daughter Carolyn as his bride, and that she will then turn into the same kind of being he is. If he is going to be humanoid all the time, then he will just be taking Carolyn out on dates. Megan says that this was not the point. Jabe dismisses her objections, and tells her that their own relationship is different now than it was when he was first taking shape and she and Philip were his foster parents. He pulls her close to him and gives her a passionate kiss.

Oedipal kiss. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Jabe spent several weeks in the form of a succession of children. The children showed violent hostility towards Philip and remarkably little sense of boundaries in their relationship with Megan; the reference to the Freudian Oedipus complex was not subtle then, and the kiss he gives to Megan while he is setting Philip up for a judicial murder makes the connection explicit.

Episode 826: King Johnny’s court

Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana puts broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi on trial in the secret room of the old Collins family mausoleum. Evidently King Johnny has considerable magic powers; he conjures up the ghosts of several notorious murderers to serve as the jury. He also brings in the ghost of Magda’s husband to serve as the one witness for the defense.

The scenario is a remake of The Devil and Daniel Webster, a play that debuted at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1939. But the makers of Dark Shadows were likely thinking of a more recent Broadway production as well. From November 1964 to June 1965, a musical with a book by Ernest Kinoy and music by Walter Marks ran first at the Shubert Theatre, then at the Lunt-Fontanne, for a total of 232 Broadway performances. Its title is one of King Johnny’s favorite words- Bajour.

King Johnny keeps complaining that Magda tried to “pull the bajour on me!,” by which he means that she gave him one thing disguised as another. In the show, based on Joseph Mitchell’s stories of life among Rroma in the New York metropolitan area, bajour refers simply to a confidence trick with a big payoff for its perpetrators. The cast, saddled with a bunch of instantly forgettable songs, sings as joyously as it can about how the Rroma, to whom they of course refer as “gypsies,”* love nothing more than cheating lonely old women out of their life savings. This uninhibited celebration of racism reported losses of nearly a million dollars, more than twice the total amount of money invested in it. Perhaps the fictional Rroma weren’t the only ones who enjoyed running a good scam. Perhaps, too, Mel Brooks’ 1967 film The Producers wasn’t entirely a work of fiction.

The cast of Bajour does not appear to have overlapped with that of any episode of Dark Shadows. The closest link I can find to the cast at this period of the show is Michael Bennett, who danced in Bajour and later married Donna McKechnie. Many very distinguished performers appeared in Bajour, but I’m not tempted to do any imaginary recasting. I’m sure Chita Rivera and Herschel Bernardi were wonderful as leads Anyanka and Cockeye Johnny Dembo, but they couldn’t have outdone Grayson Hall and Thayer David as Magda and Sandor. Herbert Edelman was good in everything, and I’m sure his turn as “The King of Newark” was no exception, but no one could have done more than Paul Michael does to make the cartoonish role of King Johnny watchable. Paul Sorvino had a great career, and even has a screen credit in common with Henry Judd Baker- they both appeared in the disastrous 1980 film Cruising. I’m sure Sorvino would have been interesting as a replacement for Baker as Istvan, the mute Black Rroma, but that part is all about physical presence, and as was the case with Baker’s part in Cruising he is effective in a way that Sorvino could not have matched. Nancy Dussault is another performer who never lets an audience down, but Diana Davila’s approach to the character of Rroma maiden Julianka was so cleverly conceived that I couldn’t bear to think of anyone else taking the part.

While I’m on the topic of the Rroma, I want to bring up an oddity about my favorite Dark Shadows blog, Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day. When he was writing about these episodes, Danny often stopped to ridicule the idea of a Rroma tribe living in New England in 1897. Danny works for the Wikimedia Foundation; you’d think he’d be in the habit of checking Wikipedia, where the article “Romani People in the United States” would tell him that, while Rroma have been migrating to North America continually since 1498, the majority of the ancestors of the million or so Americans who now identify as Rroma came in the late nineteenth century. The new arrivals tended to take some time to assimilate to the ways of the USA; the article is, as of this writing, illustrated with a photo of a Rroma caravan near Portland, Oregon, in 1905:

Rroma caravan near Portland, Oregon, in 1905. Photograph by the Portland Oregonian, found on Wikipedia.

Most Romani-Americans are totally assimilated nowadays, so much so that many people in the USA don’t realize that there actually is such an ethnic group. But there are still Romani heritage festivals in many cities, and the last traditional caravans were still traveling the Great Plains as late as the 1940s. And in Maine in 1897, Romani caravans were a frequent sight, one that indeed aroused exactly the sort of zyganophobic** reactions Magda and Sandor encountered from virtually everyone in their first days on the show.

Even Istvan isn’t as hard to explain as Danny seems to think. In the early days of European settlement, Rroma were often brought across the Atlantic as slaves; that was the case for the people on Christopher Columbus’ third voyage in 1498. Some intermarried with enslaved people of African extraction. There are still Afro-Romani communities in Louisiana and Cuba.

I started writing about Dark Shadows in the comment sections on Danny’s blog. He made a great display of ignoring the first 42 weeks of the show, and consistently made the harshest possible judgments of the acting of Alexandra Moltke Isles, who played well-meaning governess Vicki. That created a space for me to point out when the show was harking back to its early days, and to defend Mrs Isles. I would be remiss in a post like this if I did not mention that Mrs Isles made a documentary feature in 2003 called Porraimos: Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust. I’ve never been able to get hold of a copy of the film, but the New York Times liked it when it was shown on PBS.

*Rroma sometimes call themselves Gypsies, but you can’t assume they’ll like it if an outsider uses that word.

**Zyganophobia- racism against Rroma.

Episode 798: A gift from the unicorn

In the first few decades of commercial television, ambitious shows tended to imitate live theater; since, they’ve tended to imitate feature films. Today’s episode is one of Dark Shadows’ stagiest, and it is a strong one.

The rakish Quentin Collins has lost his hopes of being cured of werewolf-ism, and is moping in the gazebo on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood. He is staring at a revolver, trying to talk himself into committing suicide. He hears two men approaching, and takes cover in some nearby bushes. The men are known to Quentin by the names “Aristide” and “Victor Fenn Gibbon.”* The set is so small that the actors are only a few feet away from each other, but we are supposed to believe that Quentin can’t quite hear what Aristide and Fenn Gibbon are saying. So when the camera is placed at Quentin’s point of view, Michael Stroka and Thayer David vigorously mime the act of talking.

Quentin listens in from a great distance. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin sees Fenn Gibbon slap Aristide’s face. Aristide responds, not with violence of his own, but with a continuation of the talking he had been doing before, showing Quentin that Fenn Gibbon is Aristide’s boss. The other day, Aristide tied Quentin to a table and tried to kill him by reenacting Poe’s “Pit and the Pendulum,” so this tells Quentin that Fenn Gibbon is his deadly enemy.

We hear some of Aristide and Fenn Gibbon’s dialogue. Fenn Gibbon and Aristide are based on Gutman and Wilmer from The Maltese Falcon. In their previous appearances, Aristide has been eager to connect with every attractive young woman he sees, suggesting that we would not see the strong suggestions of a sexual relationship that come with Gutman and Wilmer both in Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel and the 1941 film. But today, Aristide’s unshocked reaction to Fenn Gibbon’s slap shows that he is accustomed to robust forms of physical contact with him, and when Fenn Gibbon tells Aristide that “I’m aware of your charms, my dear Aristide, but I know only too well conversation is not among them,” we can see that there is going to be a substantial gay subtext.

Fenn Gibbon is one of two roles Thayer David plays today. He appears in the opening teaser as broad ethnic stereotype Sandor Rákóczi, husband of the even more offensively conceived Magda. Yesterday, Magda was placed under a curse. At that time, the curse was that everyone who loved Magda would die, but today it is that everyone she loves will die. When Magda talks about the curse with visiting vampire Barnabas Collins, he says that he is under the same curse, which is exactly true- in #705, he was told that everyone who loved him would die, and from the next episode on it was said that everyone he loved would die. Whichever way the curse is put, one would expect it to strike terror in Magda’s heart regarding Sandor. They are a happily married couple, the only one we ever see on Dark Shadows, and so one would expect him to be the first victim of the curse.

The curse was supposed to start when Magda heard three knocks on the front door of her home, the Old House at Collinwood. She hears the knocks, opens the door, and sees Sandor. She immediately falls into the same pattern she exhibits every time she sees Sandor, accusing him of infidelity, accusing him of coming back to her only because he has run out of money, telling him not to bother to lie to her, and generally having a wonderful time. But he is standing rigidly still, his eyes are glazed over, and he can speak only a few words, none of them the usual insults they exchange. He falls dead, a knife in his back. Barnabas touches his body, and says that it is cold, as if he had been dead a long time.

Later, Magda goes to Mrs Fillmore, a woman in the village of Collinsport. Quentin’s late wife Jenny was Magda’s sister. Unknown to Quentin, Jenny gave birth to twins after he left her, and his brother Edward decreed that the twins would be raised by Mrs Fillmore. Magda has never seen the twins, but she loves them nevertheless- the boy twin, anyway; she tells Barnabas that “Gypsies do not prize girls.” When she comes back to the Old House, Magda tells Barnabas and Quentin that the boy twin is dead. Mrs Fillmore said he was perfectly healthy that evening, then she heard a mysterious scream from the children’s bedroom and she found him dead in his crib. His body was cold, as if he had been dead a long time. Quentin is numb, bewildered to learn that he was a father and simultaneously to learn that he has outlived his son.

There have been other episodes in which an actor played one character as a living being and another as a ghost. There have also been episodes that jumped between two periods in history, and in those there were actors who played one character in one time frame and a different one in the other. Thayer David’s doubling as Sandor and as Fenn Gibbon makes this the first episode in which the same actor plays two living beings contemporary with each other in the same episode.

Sandor’s death and Fenn Gibbon’s ascent to prominence mark a transition in the show. They are in the middle of a bloodbath, killing off a great many of the characters who have defined the first twenty weeks of the 1897 flashback. Previously, that has meant they were getting ready to reset the show and go back to contemporary dress. But 1897 has been such a hit that a transition need not mean a return to the 1960s. There is still enough going on in this period that they can introduce a bunch of new characters, develop some new stories, and get a new phase of Dark Shadows started right here in the late Victorian era. Who knows- if they play their cards right, this period might be the new home base for the show, and the 1960s might be an afterthought.

The contemporary world does make one appearance today. Before their encounter at the gazebo, Fenn Gibbon meets Quentin in the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood. Quentin is studying the Moon. The two of them have a little exchange about Quentin’s fascination with the Moon; considering that this episode aired a few hours after Apollo 11 lifted off on the journey that would put the first crew on the Moon, that fascination must have been pretty widely shared by the original audience.

*In this episode, everyone says “Fenn Gibbons,” which we have heard before. But the credits read “Fenn Gibbon,” so I’m sticking with that version.

Episode 666: Barnabas isn’t like anyone else

Thayer David joined the cast of Dark Shadows in August 1966, taking over the role of moody handyman Matthew Morgan from George Mitchell starting with #38. In that first episode, Matthew brawled in a barroom and left dashing action hero Burke Devlin gasping. The main storyline of the next few months was the investigation into the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy; it turned out Matthew had unintentionally killed Bill when they got into a fight and Matthew didn’t know his own strength.

Those two events explain the recast. George Mitchell was a slender little man whose white hair and craggy face made him look older than his 61 years. He was a fine actor, but no one would have believed that he could win a fight with Burke or that he was so strong that he would accidentally kill Bill. David was Mitchell’s equal in acting ability, but more importantly was a burly fellow in his late 30s.

Today, we hark back to David’s original function on the show. The setting is the year 1796; vampire Barnabas Collins has traveled back from the 1960s to rescue his fellow time traveler, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, from death by hanging. David plays another servant. As Matthew was fanatically loyal to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, so Ben Stokes is utterly devoted to Barnabas. Ben finds roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes and visiting Countess Natalie DuPrés about to drive a stake through Barnabas’ heart. Ben demands they stop; Nathan aims his pistol in Ben’s direction and squeezes the trigger. The gun misfires. Ben reflexively clutches at his chest, but finding he is not hurt he advances on Nathan. They fight. As Matthew was so strong he could not fight Bill without accidentally killing him, so Ben accidentally kills Nathan. Ben then tells the countess he doesn’t want to hurt her and that she will be all right if she stays put until he can figure out what to do; she is unable to assure him she will do so, and in his attempt to restrain her he inadvertently kills her, too.

Barnabas had originally lived in the eighteenth century. He passed from that time into the 1960s because he was chained in his coffin in 1796 and discovered in 1967 by would-be grave-robber Willie Loomis. Now, he has rescued Victoria, and he is eager to go back to 1969, when he is free of the effects of the vampire curse. He traveled back by standing in an old graveyard and calling to the spirit of Vicki’s boyfriend, an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff, to pull him into the past. He went to the same graveyard yesterday and tried the same trick in reverse. Peter/ Jeff isn’t in 1969, so he calls instead to his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. That didn’t work, so he decided to have Ben chain him in the coffin and take the long way back.

Barnabas is unhappy to wake up this evening. He leaves his crypt to find Ben using a shovel to pat down some earth nearby. He asks why Ben did not chain the coffin as he was instructed. Ben tells him about Nathan and the countess; evidently he is only now finishing their shallow graves. Ben has never murdered anyone before, so he asks Barnabas’ expert opinion about the next steps. Barnabas tells him to get rid of the countess’ things and to tell whoever asks that she left for Paris.

The reference to Paris is a bit unexpected to longtime viewers. When the countess first appeared in #368/369, she said that she chose to live on the island of Martinique because metropolitan France had become a republic. She and her servant Angelique came to Collinwood along with the countess’ brother André DuPrés and André’s daughter Josette, who was at that time engaged to marry the still-human Barnabas. André is identified as the owner of a sugar plantation on Martinique.

In 1796, France was of course still a republic. But the Terror had ended shortly after the execution of Robespierre in the summer of 1794. Among the beneficiaries were the real-world counterparts of the DuPrés family, the vaguely aristocratic owners of a sugar plantation on Martinique. Their name was Tascher; the daughter of the family was named, not Josette, but Josephine, the widow of the Vicomte de Beauharnais. Josephine was imprisoned in Paris during the Terror, but she was freed, reunited with her son, and restored to her property by June 1795. In May of 1796, Josephine would marry an up-and-coming artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. It would indeed be plausible that the countess would want to go back to Paris and take the opportunity to reestablish a life there.

After the story of Matthew Morgan and the consequences of the death of Bill Malloy ended in December 1966, Dark Shadows was for 13 weeks dominated by the battle between undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins and the forces of good, led by Victoria with assistance from the ghost of Josette. Laura was the show’s first supernatural menace.

The ghost of Josette had been introduced in #70 as the tutelary spirit of the long-deserted Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Matthew held Victoria prisoner in the Old House late in 1966, and in #126 he decided to kill her. Josette led the other ghosts out of the supernatural back-world that exists somewhere behind the action to save Victoria by scaring Matthew to death. During the Laura story, Josette’s ghost was deeply involved in the action, literally painting a picture to explain to the characters what was going on.

Prompted by Josette’s ghost, Victoria figured out that Laura was going to burn her son, strange and troubled boy David Collins, to death on the anniversary of similar immolations. This would turn out to be a key turn in Dark Shadows’ world-building. When you are telling stories about supernatural beings, you can’t rely on the laws of nature or logic to shape the audience’s expectations. You need to give them some other mechanism of cause and effect if you are going to create suspense. So from that point on, the show would use anniversaries as causal forces. “It happened exactly one hundred years ago tomorrow night!” means it will happen again then.

That was the basis of Barnabas’ trip to 1796 and of his hope to return by standing on the same spot. Tombstones indicating that Victoria and Peter/ Jeff had been hanged materialized at times related to the anniversaries of those events, and Barnabas must leave 1969 at a certain point to arrive at a certain point in 1796. Eight o’clock on a given night in 1796 corresponds to eight o’clock on a given night in 1969, and those are the times when Barnabas and Julia go to the graveyard from which he vanished and call out to each other.

Even though the conjoined eight o’clocks don’t facilitate Barnabas’ return trip, the structure of today’s episode plays on the same idea of intercutting timelines. We alternate between scenes of Barnabas and Ben in 1796, and of Julia and Willie in 1969. Barnabas bit Willie and enslaved him when he opened his coffin; by the time Barnabas was cured of the effects of the vampire curse, Willie had let go of any hard feelings about that. Barnabas has made the Old House his home, and Willie voluntarily lives there as his servant. Julia has been a permanent guest in the great house on the estate since 1967, but now is apparently staying at Barnabas’.

Julia is determined that Barnabas will return by rematerializing on the spot from which he vanished, and she keeps going back there. Willie doesn’t believe this will happen, but in a long interior monologue comes up with the idea that he might reappear in his old coffin. In her turn, Julia dismisses that idea. They quarrel about these competing absurdities, and Willie decides to put his hypothesis to the test. He goes to the old mausoleum to check on the coffin, and finds it empty. He returns to the house to report this to Julia.

Julia decides it’s time to sleep, so she goes upstairs- apparently to her own bedroom. Seconds later, a ghost appears to Willie. He recognizes it as Josette. She vanishes, and he calls Julia. When Julia comes he tells her that Josette had never appeared to either of them unless Barnabas was in danger. As far as I can recall the audience has never known Josette to appear to Willie or Julia at all, and Barnabas is always in danger, so that remark is a bit of a mystery to longtime viewers.

In the days leading up to Willie’s discovery of Barnabas in April 1967, he, and he alone, heard a heartbeat coming from the eighteenth century portrait of Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house. While he is talking with Julia, Willie turns to the portrait of Barnabas that artist Sam Evans painted in May 1967 and hears the heartbeat again. Julia cannot hear the heartbeat. Willie combines the sound of the heartbeat with the sight of Josette and concludes that Barnabas has returned and the old coffin is no longer empty. We cut to the hidden room in the mausoleum. Chains materialize around the coffin, and we see Barnabas inside it, struggling to escape.

Willie realizes what’s going on and tells Julia about it. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We may wonder if Barnabas has been struggling that way every night since he was chained there in his attempt to return to the 1960s. That would be 173 years, added to the 171 years the first time. It would seem that 344 years confined to a box would make Barnabas even screwier than he is. In a much later episode, we will see Barnabas released after a long entombment and he will be surprised that more than one day has passed. The 2012 film adaptation of Dark Shadows includes a humorous scene based on the idea that time does not pass for Barnabas while he is chained in his coffin. But when he was first released in April 1967, there were indications that he had undergone a nightly torment through the centuries, and the closing image of Barnabas in the box today echoes those indications.

Nathan’s death marks the final appearance of actor Joel Crothers, who has been one of Dark Shadows’ most valuable cast members since his debut in #3, when he played hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. We said goodbye to Joe last week; it was nice to have another glimpse of Crothers in his villainous role before he left for the last time.

Episode 54: A proper charge

At the end of yesterday’s episode, dour caretaker Matthew admitted to reclusive matriarch Liz that he had found a drowned man on the beach, that the man was missing plant manager Bill Malloy, and that he had pushed the body out to sea and watched it float away. Liz then called the sheriff.

As today’s episode opens, Liz’ ne-er-do-well brother Roger doesn’t know about Matthew’s confession. We see him in his office, countermanding orders Bill Malloy had given and acting like he has Malloy’s job. On his blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning, Marc Masse interprets this as an indication of guilty knowledge on Roger’s part:

Roger has evidently just implemented a new system that has effectively replaced Bill Malloy’s previous methods for operations at the plant. This indicates that Roger knows for certain that Malloy will not be returning as plant manager, which enshrouds him with an additional layer of suspicion given how as of the close of episode 53 only two people knew for certain that Bill Malloy was in fact dead: Matthew Morgan and Elizabeth Stoddard, and as of today’s episode the sheriff. Roger will be informed of Malloy’s demise later on that day when his sister calls him away from the office to have him return to Collinwood, and Roger will feign surprise upon hearing the news, but it’s evident from his phone conversation above that he was somehow already aware of Malloy’s fate.

That’s a possible interpretation, and I certainly thought of it the first time I saw the episode. On the other hand, Malloy has been missing for more than a day, and was last seen drinking in a bar. So even if he were to walk in the door in prime physical condition at this very moment, he would be in a poor position to defend himself in workplace politics. Roger could easily claim that he was simply moving to fill a vacuum. The show is keeping Roger viable as a suspect, but is not committing itself to the idea that he is the guilty party.

Whatever Roger knows about the situation, dashing action hero Burke knows less. But Burke seems to think of himself as very knowledgeable. He storms into Roger’s office and confronts him with the fact that Malloy was trying to prove that Roger, not Burke, was responsible for the killing that sent Burke to prison years before. Burke makes many accusations against Roger, some of which the audience knows to be true, but none of which he is yet in a position to prove.

The scenes in Roger’s office are intercut with scenes in the drawing room in the mansion at Collinwood. There, the sheriff is talking with Liz and Matthew about Matthew’s confession. Matthew asks the sheriff if he will be arrested now. To which the sheriff replies, “I can’t think of a proper charge.” He jokes about “burial without a license,” then goes on to warn Matthew that he has laid himself open to suspicion.

This is a moment when you can tell you’re watching a show made in 1966. Seven years later, coverage of investigations into the Watergate affair would give the American public an intensive eighteen-month tutorial in criminal law concerning obstruction of justice and related offenses. Ever since that time, residents of the USA have known that you are risking jail any time you make things difficult for the police. Prior to that, however, this was not well-known even among lawyers who practiced in areas other than criminal law.

Watergate itself illustrated this. Several of the major figures in that matter were lawyers, and many of them, including Richard Nixon himself, genuinely did not know that it was an offense for a person who had not been involved in a crime to cover that crime up. You can hear Nixon on the White House tapes telling his legal aide John Dean that because Dean didn’t know about the Watergate burglary in advance, the things Dean had done to hinder the investigation of the burglary can’t possibly put him in danger of prosecution. In his memoirs, Dean admits his own ignorance of the relevant law, confessing that he first read the federal statutes on obstruction of justice not when he was in law school, not when he was studying for the bar, not when he was a staffer for a commission tasked with rewriting the federal criminal code, but in his office at the White House, after he’d been running the Watergate cover-up for nine months. He reports in that same book that several other White House staffers who were lawyers shared his ignorance. Many of them would go on to confirm this aspect of his account.

In light of the legal education that Watergate provided the people of the USA, the sheriff sounds like an idiot. That same education ruined other old shows. Perry Mason, for example- ridiculous as it is that every episode ends with the guilty party jumping up in court and shouting “I did it!,” if you’re into the story you feel enough poetic justice in those endings that they don’t really bother you. But Mason himself can hardly make it through five minutes without committing every crime with which Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean would be charged and a few more besides. Perry Mason broadcast its final episode in May of 1966, so that show, not the Watergate news, was the law school the original audience had attended.

Miscellaneous:

The episode opens with footage of Louis Edmonds walking around outdoors on a waterfront. They play some nice sound effects of sea-birds over it.

The sheriff we see in this episode is Sheriff Patterson, the first of that name. He is played by Dana Elcar, a fine actor who would be ubiquitous on American television and cinema screens in the 1980s. If we’re heading into a major story arc dominated by a mystery story, it’s a relief to know that the policeman role will be in such trustworthy hands. The part will be re-cast many times in the years to come, and never again as well. Then again, none of the subsequent Sheriffs Patterson will be as important as is this first.

Since there is a good deal of overlap between fans of Star Trek and fans of Dark Shadows, I might mention that this was the episode that aired on the day Star Trek premiered.

There was a great deal of Anglophilia involved in the making of Dark Shadows: the mid-Atlantic accents, the plots lifted from English literature, etc. So it may not be a coincidence that a dark-haired, small-chinned matriarch named Elizabeth presides over the family at the center of it. Indeed, Joan Bennett looked enough like the northern European royals that when they wanted to cast an actress who resembled her closely enough to set the audience wondering how their characters were related, they settled on the daughter of a Danish count. So I might also mention that I am writing this on the day Britain’s Elizabeth II died.

There are two big flubs. At one point when they’re about to cut from the drawing room back to the office, we hear a loud noise and some garbled voices in the background. My wife, Mrs Acilius, wondered if this was Josette Collins trying to make herself heard.

At the very end of the episode, as announcer Bob Lloyd is intoning “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis production,” a figure walks in front of the camera. You can just see the top of his head. The Dark Shadows wiki refers to the figure as “a crew member.” Marc Masse says it’s probably Mitch Ryan. John and Christine Scoleri speculate on their blog Dark Shadows Before I Die that it might be Dan Curtis himself. To me it looks like more the hairdo Thayer David is wearing as Matthew Morgan than like either Ryan’s hairdo as Burke or Dan Curtis’ hair- there seems to be some grey in it, and it looks to be more matted than either wavy or curly.