The police are looking into the murder of Angelique Stokes Collins. Angelique has risen from the grave and is available to assist with the investigation, though Inspector Hamilton, like most of the other people in the village of Collinsport and on the estate of Collinwood, thinks she is her identical twin sister Alexis.
Hamilton is impatient with everyone, a bad quality in an investigator. So when he accuses “Alexis” of helping Angelique’s widower Quentin to burn Angelique’s body in order to cover up evidence that Quentin murdered her, she responds with a more or less true account of what happened, omitting only that it was Alexis’ body Quentin burned. Hamilton cuts her off in mid-sentence, proclaiming that he won’t listen to any more of it.
Hamilton was once a close friend of Julia Hoffman, the housekeeper at the great house on the estate and Angelique’s most fanatical devotee. What neither he nor Angelique knows is that Hoffman is dead. Her Doppelgänger has come from an alternate universe, killed her, and assumed her identity. This other Julia Hoffman is working in concert with another interloper from the same universe, vampire Barnabas Collins, to defeat Angelique and end her presence among the living.
Hamilton questions Julia about the night of Angelique’s death. That was many months ago and Hoffman was not present at the scene, so Julia is able to fake her way through the questioning without major slips. But when Hamilton starts talking about old times, Julia is at a total loss. Hamilton mentions to “Alexis” that she does not seem like the Julia Hoffman he knows. Since Angelique has begun to notice differences in Julia’s behavior from what she would expect of Hoffman, this indiscreet remark represents a considerable danger to her.
At the Old House on the estate, Hamilton questions Carolyn Loomis. Carolyn’s husband was caught between Angelique’s powers and Barnabas’ the other day, and all he could do to resolve the strain was to fling himself to his death from a high window. Carolyn is hugely drunk. She raves at Hamilton that “Collinwood is not exactly a picture book house by the sea. There’s a skeleton in every closet, and there are a lot of closets, baby! Let me put it this way, Inspector- Collinwood is a nice place to visit, but you would not want to live there.” He seems to regard this as the sort of unseemly thing it is best to pass over in silence.
There are several strong hints today, as there have been over the last couple of weeks, that Carolyn’s uncle Roger Collins murdered Angelique. They can drop as many hints to that effect as they like, and longtime viewers will still be surprised if it turns out to be true. For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in the universe from which Julia and Barnabas came. Roger’s counterpart there was indeed a potentially deadly villain in the first months of the show, but he was eventually nerfed. By the time we decamped for this continuity, it had been more than three years since he was a menace to anyone. They’ve been painting this character in the colors of the 1966 Roger, and his languidly sarcastic manner combines with his relationship to the portrait of Angelique to remind us of Waldo Lydecker in the 1944 film Laura. But we saw so much of Roger the harmless gay uncle in 1967 and Roger the conscientious family man in 1968 and 1969 that it is still hard to imagine that he will turn out actually to be a killer.
The show was done live to tape for years, and even after post-production editing became an important part of it they were slow to credit the videotape editors. They’ve been making up for that lately, though. Today they credit their fourth pair of editors, Alex Moskovic and Rene Labat. Still other teams will be named in the weeks ahead, but Moskovic and Labat are the last ones I will mention here, unless there is something special about the cutting of a given episode.
Dark Shadows Commentary 