I first started watching Dark Shadows in the 1990s, when what was then The Sci Fi Channel was showing it Monday through Friday at 10:00 and 10:30 AM. I got into the habit of daily viewing when they were showing episodes from the summer of 1967, when the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins was occasionally dropping in on strange and troubled boy David Collins. Sarah’s brother, vampire Barnabas, was thinking he might want to kill David, and David’s aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, was a blocking figure who refused to engage with any evidence that anything unusual was going on.
In those days, it appeared that if Barnabas got his way the estate of Collinwood would be peopled only by the unquiet spirits of the dead. I imagined how that might have played out, if the show were not an open-ended serial but were allowed to come to an end. I pictured the great house in ruins. Well-meaning governess Victoria Winters and her boyfriend, hopeless schlub Burke Devlin, would venture into the wreckage. Vicki and Burke would dodge phantoms and demons and make their way into the drawing room. There, they would find Liz sitting serenely while leathery-winged fiends flutter about her head. Vicki would plead with Liz to escape with them. Liz would only smile at her and say that nothing is wrong, nothing at all. Seeing that Liz had taken her commitment to denial as a way of life to its ultimate extreme, Vicki and Burke would have no alternative but to leave without her.
The makers of the show have acknowledged that Barnabas’ plan would have left Collinwood entirely uninhabitable. They did that in the feature film House of Dark Shadows, which replays the story that led to the summer of 1967 and takes it to that conclusion. And they are doing it again now.
Vicki has long since left the show, replaced as the audience point of view character by mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Julia tried to cure Barnabas of his vampirism in 1967; in 1968, she completed a procedure devised by a fellow mad scientist that did put the symptoms of his curse into abeyance. Barnabas has since bungled his way into another vampire curse, but his connection to Julia still makes it possible for him to be a permanent part of the cast of characters and, on balance, a defender of the status quo, which in a genre where the most important thing is that there is still a story left to tell in the next episode is the closest thing there is to a hero. As such, he is the successor to Burke, who was supposed to be a dashing action hero when Dark Shadows started.
In July 1970, Barnabas and Julia came unstuck in time and found themselves in the far-off future year 1995. There, the great house of Collinwood was in ruins, its residents either dead, missing, or insane as the result of a mysterious disaster that took place before 1970 was out. The estate was dominated by malevolent ghosts, and the people of the village of Collinsport dared not even speak of the place, let alone visit it. Since Julia and Barnabas returned to 1970 in #1071, they have been trying to figure out what the disaster will be and to prevent it.
At first, Liz was somewhat sympathetic to Barnabas and Julia’s efforts, as befits the several times in 1969 and early 1970 we saw her admit that uncanny events were taking place around her. But her old commitment to denial came back to the surface when she forbade Julia and Barnabas to talk with David or teenage houseguest Hallie Stokes about what they had seen in 1995, even though Hallie and David are clearly central to the upcoming disaster. Because they cannot talk with the teens, Barnabas and Julia have not been able to do anything to prevent the ghosts from encroaching on them and taking an ever stronger position in the house.
In #1088, Liz finally realized what was going on and ran to find Julia, crying that they would have to get David and Hallie out of the house before the ghosts got hold of them. But it was too late. She found herself looking into the face of the haunting, an evil spirit known as Gerard. By the time Julia caught up to her in #1089, Liz was entirely under the power of Gerard, and placidly refused to accept that anything out of the ordinary was going on.
Hints have been mounting that the disaster will occur soon. Today, Julia and Barnabas tell Liz that it is urgent Hallie and David be taken from the house at once. Liz refuses, telling them that when the night ends with no further disturbances they will have to admit that all of their fears are simply a “ridiculous fantasy.”
For their part, David and Hallie have been spending a lot of time the last few weeks sitting around moaning about how helpless they are. That does not make for gripping television, even when they look at a dollhouse and say they think the ghosts have been playing with the dolls when they weren’t looking. David gets an idea. The dolls in the ghosts’ dollhouse have connections with particular people around the estate, so if he and Hallie make a doll of Barnabas, perhaps that will cause Barnabas to be aware of what the ghosts are doing.
Hallie asks David why he wants to alert Barnabas in particular. He says that if anyone can fight Gerard and the other ghosts, it will be Barnabas, because “He’s… different.” In the summer and fall of 1967, David was the one person at Collinwood who was on track to figure out Barnabas’ secret, leading the show into a blind alley from which it escaped by going back in time to the year 1795. When they returned from that first costume drama insert in March 1968, David was for some reason no longer a threat to Barnabas. But he was still conscious about his distant cousin in ways his Aunt Liz would never countenance. So in #660, David told his friend Amy Jennings that “Barnabas knows a lot of things that he doesn’t tell anybody.”
The doll is not particularly realistic; the spirit world doesn’t require very high production values, and Hallie and David are under severe time constraints. So their Barnabas doll is adorably crude. I’m thinking of making it my PFP, replacing the tailor’s dummy known as “Mr Juggins” that I’ve been using since David and Amy showed him to Liz in #681.
Looks more like Jonathan Frid than does the Barnabas from the Gold Key comics. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Regular viewers know that David’s instincts are sound. Barnabas and Julia confronted Gerard in the room where the dollhouse is in #1070. Gerard was powerless against Barnabas. Something might have come of that, but Gerard then turned his attention to Julia, causing her to become very ill and forcing them to retreat. After they have put the doll in the dollhouse, David and Hallie leave the room for a little while. When they return, the Barnabas doll has been thrown from the dollhouse and destroyed, suggesting that Gerard did indeed see a danger in its presence.
Finally, Julia and Barnabas manage to corner Liz and force her to let them take Hallie and David away. After they leave her, Liz shuts herself up in the drawing room and apologizes to the unseen Gerard. She says she could not think of any way to resist them further.
This admission of defeat is the next to last time we will see Liz. She will appear again in one scene twenty and a half weeks from now, in #1198, in which she will simply serve to confirm that things are back to normal. Moreover, that version of Liz appears in a Collinwood where none of the events we have seen over the last several months has taken place; we have no idea what her character development has been. This is the final appearance of the person we have been watching since episode #1.
When Dark Shadows began, Joan Bennett was its biggest ratings draw and Liz was the most powerful character. Her function as Keeper of the Secrets set her on the path that would lead her towards extreme denialism and away from any active role on the story, but along the way Bennett used her great talents to give the show’s foundations their basic outline. For example, in the relationship between Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, Bennett and Louis Edmonds pioneered the dynamic of Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother, the same dynamic that makes Barnabas and Julia so much fun to watch and that turned Quentin Collins into a breakout hit in 1969 when we saw him with his Bossy Big Sister, Judith (also played by Joan Bennett.) In her other roles, Bennett will continue to be indispensable to the show, but those of us who started with #1 will never stop wishing the writers had found more to do with the character of Liz.
Quentin Collins comes to the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood to deliver some bad news to his distant cousin, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. He was peering into the room in the east wing of the house through which an alternate universe is occasionally visible. He saw the room as it is in that other timeline, engulfed in smoke and occupied by a young woman calling the name “Barnabas.” Since Liz and Quentin’s distant cousin, Barnabas Collins, and Barnabas’ dear friend Julia Hoffman crossed over into the alternate universe some time ago and the aperture in the east wing is the only place where transits between the universes are known to be possible, Quentin proclaims to Liz that the “only conclusion” one can reach is that “we shall never see them again!” No sooner has he got those words out than the drawing room doors open to reveal Julia and Barnabas standing side by side, smiling happily, and saying “Elizabeth! Quentin! We’ve returned!”
One might think this would cure Quentin of the idea that he knows what the “only conclusion” is at which one might reasonably arrive, but no such luck. He tells Barnabas and Julia that today’s date is 3 August 1970. They say that was the date when they left the other universe, and that they then spent over a week in the year 1995, when they saw a bleak and horrifying future that resulted from a disaster that will occur later in 1970 unless they can somehow prevent it. Quentin says their experience in the future must have been an hallucination, because they can’t have come back to 3 August in one year from any date other than 3 August in another year. Julia and Barnabas share detailed recollections of their experience in the future, and have already met a living person in 1970 whom they saw for the first time as a ghost in 1995, but this argument shakes their confidence.
Quentin’s claim, nonsensical as it is to new viewers, actually does fit in with a notion the show has been developing since it first committed to being a supernatural thriller in late 1966 and early 1967. Since the laws of nature that science studies do not apply, they have to find other predictive models that will make it possible to build suspense. So they had well-meaning governess Victoria Winters figure out that women named Laura Murdoch incinerated their young sons named David at intervals of “exactly one hundred years!!!,” and therefore that Laura Murdoch Collins would soon present a mortal danger to her young son David Collins.
From that point on, the power of anniversaries has been a tremendously potent force in the metaphysics of Dark Shadows. Barnabas traveled back to the 1790s in #661 by going to a grave on the anniversary of its occupant’s death and shouting at the deceased for a while (shouting is also a potent metaphysical force.) Quentin himself first joined the cast of characters as the malevolent ghost of a man who died in 1897 and in 1968 and 1969 returned to haunt Collinwood, kill several people, and drive the survivors from the house. Barnabas traveled back to 1897 and bungled around until someone else changed history to prevent Quentin dying or even aging. On the anniversary of that change, the haunting broke, just in time to allow David to return from the dead. But when Quentin showed up as a living being late in 1969, everyone who had lived through the ten months of the haunting remembered it. So apparently the reality of Dark Shadows is a composite of all the various, mutually inconsistent timelines, and the consequences of the actions not taken are just as real as are those of the ones taken. The power of anniversaries is the thread that binds these unmatched events into a cosmic crazy quilt.
As the aperture between universes was a door to a room in the east wing, so the aperture from 1995 to 1970 was a door inside a room in the west wing. Barnabas and Julia were trapped in a mysterious playroom there when the ghost of a blonde teenager known to them as Carrie appeared, beckoned to them, and walked through the wall. A moment later, a door materialized in the spot through which Carrie had exited. Julia and Barnabas went through the door and found themselves on a staircase. They followed the staircase to another door. It was the door through which they had entered the playroom, but the corridor outside was in good repair, not in ruins as it was in 1995. They saw a girl there who appeared to be Carrie, though she was wearing different clothes, was alive, and demanded to know who they were.
Barnabas and Julia gave the girl their thanks for her help, and she repeated that she had no idea who they were or what they were talking about. She said that she was not named Carrie, but Hallie, Hallie Stokes, niece of Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes. She told them Liz was in the drawing room, Liz’ brother Roger was in Europe, and the year was 1970.
Later, Julia questions Hallie about some names and phrases she heard in 1995. Grayson Hall delivers all of these questions as if she were playing a Gestapo interrogator in a very bad World War Two movie. Even when Hallie says it is her bedtime, Hall enunciates the lines “All right, Hallie. Good night” while standing rigidly still and peering at the girl from under a single ruffled eyelid, as if the next words were going to be “Dream uff ze Fazzerlahnt, und uff ze famlee you shtill haff zere!”
Hallie is terrified of Julia, a perfectly natural reaction which Grayson Hall seems to think she needed to explain by turning into a villain from Hogan’s Heroes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The script calls for Hallie to hear something sinister in Julia’s voice, and Hall was an extraordinarily accomplished actress who should easily have been able to make us understand why a friendly series of questions might sound that way to a nervous person. This exaggerated performance cannot be explained as an ordinary failure. She also failed atypically last week when required to show that Julia was secretly under the control of the evil spirit. There was zero subtlety in her performance, leaving it inexplicable that Barnabas didn’t instantly catch on. Those episodes, like this one, were directed by Henry Kaplan, a hack. Kaplan’s idea of working with actors involved poking them with a stick and tying them up with gaffer tape. Hall’s misfires may not have been a protest against Kaplan’s brutishness and incompetence, but he certainly did not do anything to help her correct them.
When Julia and Barnabas left for the alternate universe, Quentin was still living somewhere in the village of Collinsport; it was implied Julia was paying his rent. At some point since, he has relocated to the great house. We see today that he has moved back into his old room. This is as hilarious for longtime viewers as was the instant refutation of Quentin’s claim that the only logical conclusion from the available facts is that they will never see Barnabas and Julia again. During the 1968-1969 “Haunting of Collinwood” segment, Quentin’s room served the same function the mysterious playroom served in the excursion to 1995 and in this incipient Re-Haunting of Collinwood. It was a place known at first only to the children, who visited it, fell under the power of the ghosts of its former occupants, and thereby became the instruments of general destruction. But he’s even brought his old stuff with him, including his haunted phonograph.
When we got to know Quentin as a living being during the eight months the show was set primarily in 1897, we saw that he had the same vices and the same appeal Roger had when he was introduced as a villain at the beginning of the series. Roger was eventually nerfed into a harmless snob who made sarcastic remarks and sipped brandy, and then reinvented again as an upright family man. Throughout those personality shifts, Roger continued to be one of the “Logical Explanation People.” No matter what he saw or experienced, he would reject any supernatural account and insist “There must be a logical explanation!” Quentin has followed Roger’s character progression to the point where he, a former student of black magic who conjured up demons from a fireplace, who turned into a zombie the first time he died and into a werewolf after he was resurrected, who died again and became a ghost, whose second death was then averted when he became half of a magical dyad including an enchanted oil painting, and who is now a hundred years old even though to all outward appearances he is about 30, is insisting that There Must Be a Logical Explanation.
As if that were not enough, when we see Quentin in his room he is wearing a dressing gown, an article of attire Roger favored in his first months on the show. Roger drifted to the margins of the action as he lost his capacity for villainy; he made his final appearance in #979. The show has had so much difficulty figuring out what to do with Quentin since it returned from 1897 that we may well fear he is headed for the same fate, and these resonances do nothing to assuage that fear.
Hallie comes in to see Quentin. She asks if Barnabas and Julia are good people. He hesitates to answer. He knows that Barnabas is a vampire and Julia is a mad scientist. Nonetheless, they are his friends, and he believes that they are motivated by a sincere desire to prevent the disasters they think they have foreseen. So he might answer truthfully by saying that they are locked in a three-way tie with him for the title of Most Dangerous Person You Have Ever Met, but that he likes them, and so long as Barnabas doesn’t start looking at her neck and Julia doesn’t try to strap her to a table and hook her up to an apparatus including Tesla coils she will probably survive her encounter with them. But he’s more interested in reassuring her than he is in adhering to strict literal accuracy, and so he says “Now look, now you listen to me. Barnabas and Julia are very fine people, and you don’t have to be afraid of them or of anything else. Now you believe that.” None of the other actors is having a good day at the office with this episode, but David Selby is on top form, and he delivers this little speech with a note of urgency that makes him sound like he is telling the truth, but with a panicked flicker in his eyes that makes it clear he is desperate for Hallie to accept a lie that might keep Julia and Barnabas from murdering her.
Hallie tells Quentin that she saw Barnabas and Julia emerge from a door in the west wing. He calls Barnabas to his room and tells him that since the aperture to the other universe is in the east wing, that causes Quentin to think there might be something to their story after all. Barnabas leads him to the door, and says that the playroom was behind it in 1995. Quentin says that there is no playroom there and never has been. Barnabas himself knew that full well when first he opened the door and saw the room in 1995, but for some reason is shocked today when sees that it is a linen closet. Quentin says that there cannot possibly ever be a playroom there, since the other wall is to the outside. Evidently it is perfectly in order for an entire alternate universe to intermittently fit into a room in the east wing, but the west wing doesn’t swing that way.
In his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn complains about Kathleen Cody’s performance as Hallie, claiming that she renders the next several weeks of the show unwatchable. I agree that in adopting a constant tone of freaked-out disbelief, Miss Cody made an acting choice that left her nowhere to go. If you’re already at the limit of the amount of bizarreness you can accept in your life, that’s it for you as a character on Dark Shadows.
I can see why Miss Cody thought that was the only way to go, though. This is her first substantive appearance on the show, and Quentin warns Barnabas not to tell anything disturbing to Hallie, because “She’s a very sensitive child… She frightens quite easily.” Everything else in the script reinforces the idea that Hallie is on the brink of a panic attack, so that’s how she plays it today. That’s the angle subsequent scripts are going to stick with, so I can see that Miss Cody felt she had no choice but to stay in the corner she had painted herself into.
When actors find themselves in a jam like that, a director might be expected to offer some kind of helpful guidance. That wasn’t going to happen with Henry Kaplan at the helm, and even principal director Lela Swift, an outstanding visual artist, was not an enthusiastic director of actors. John Karlen said that the only direction Lela Swift ever gave him was the single word “Go!” So once an actor took a wrong turn on Dark Shadows, they could find themselves trapped in a dead end. Many of the cast members who joined the show without much experience have spoken with gratitude about guidance they received from their veteran cast-mates; Karlen, Joan Bennett, Jonathan Frid, Clarice Blackburn, and Humbert Allen Astredo are most often mentioned as gifted teachers of acting. The only director any of the actors mentioned as a source of productive suggestions was John Sedwick, who left the show in June 1968. So unless Miss Cody could get some help from one of her cast-mates, it was very likely that her initial mistakes would doom her whole performance.
Late in 1968, the ghost of Quentin Collins began haunting the great house on the estate of Collinwood. The ghost gradually waxed more powerful and more malevolent, killing some people and tormenting others. By March of 1969, the great house had become altogether uninhabitable. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, trying to contact Quentin, traveled back in time to 1897, when Quentin was a living being. During the eight months the show was set in that year, we got to know a Quentin who was selfish, cowardly, untrustworthy, cruel, and supremely charming. Barnabas’ interventions changed history. In the revised timeline, Quentin did not become a malevolent ghost. He didn’t even die. A spell was cast on him that immunized him against aging, so that when the show returned to a contemporary setting in November 1969 he was alive, well, and to all appearances 28 years old.
In 1969 and 1970, Quentin still had all the lovableness that came from being played by David Selby. But the writers were stumped when it came time to give Quentin something to do. They kept him in a holding pattern for a month or so with a case of amnesia, and used him and one of his girlfriends to tell a version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. When Barnabas and his best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, were doing battle with an unseen race of monsters from beyond space and time, they occasionally turned to Quentin for help. When Barnabas’ old nemesis, wicked witch Angelique, grew jealous of his interest in governess Maggie Evans, she cast a spell to cause Quentin and Maggie to conceive a wild passion for each other, something which came and went and which Barnabas never noticed. None of that activity made an impression on the audience or gave the character room to grow.
The evil but irresistible Quentin of 1897 had a great deal in common with high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, who was in 1966 the show’s first true villain. As played by Louis Edmonds, Roger was so much fun to watch that it was soon out of the question to follow the original plan and kill him off when his crimes were exposed, so they nerfed him. Roger turned into a sarcastic but harmless snob. When in November 1967 the show went back in time to 1795, Edmonds played haughty overlord Joshua Collins, a man as strong as Roger was weak. In a tragic turn Aristotle would have admired, it was Joshua’s virtues that led to disaster for himself and everyone he loved. In the 1897 segment, Edmonds played the stuffy but lovable Edward Collins, who had many faults but was devoted to his family and committed to doing the honorable thing. Under the influence of these roles, Roger himself had by the time the show was done with him transformed into an upright family man.
The makers of the show have apparently decided that if traveling in time and casting Edmonds in other roles could change Roger so profoundly, finding a setting where they can present us with a different version of Quentin might be a path to reinvigorating that character. To that end, they have traveled, not backward in time, but sideways in time. We are now in a different universe than the one where the first 196 weeks of the show took place. The show insists on calling this universe “Parallel Time.”
Here, Quentin is the master of Collinwood and Maggie is his wife. This Quentin is something his counterpart never was, an authority figure. But authority does not come naturally to him, as it did to Joshua and Edward. He holds onto it in his relationship with Maggie by treating her as a child, with the result that their marriage is all but dead. He ignores his son Daniel, caves in to the servants when they stand their ground against him, and throws tantrums and runs away when he encounters serious opposition. In those moments he reminds us of the cowardice Quentin showed in 1897. On occasion, however, he has shown physical courage, as when he stood up to an evil man called John Yaeger. As Joshua suffered from the overgrowth of his virtues, so Quentin’s better deeds seem to be the accidental byproduct of his vices. What we have seen in Parallel Time makes it easy to imagine that when we get back to the main continuity, we will see Quentin as a sometime action hero who must at all costs be kept from taking charge of anything. Had the segment caught on as 1795 and 1897 did and been expanded beyond the bounds originally planned for it, who knows what other paths it might have opened for the character.
Angelique was Quentin’s first wife, who was murdered nine months ago but has risen from the dead, assumed the identity of her identical twin sister Alexis, and set about taking revenge on her killer. She doesn’t know who that was, though for now she is operating on the assumption it was Quentin.
Roger and the matronly Elizabeth Collins Stoddard are Quentin’s siblings. While in the main continuity Liz kept her share of the inheritance as Roger was squandering his, here she entrusted her money to Roger, so that they are both penniless dependents on Quentin.
Barnabas and Julia have crossed over from the main continuity. Barnabas is pretending to be a long-lost cousin of the Collinses, while Julia is impersonating her own counterpart. That other Julia Hoffman was the housekeeper at Collinwood and Angelique’s most fanatical devotee until Julia showed up, beat her to death, and stole her French maid outfit.
At this point, Quentin is on the run from the law, suspected of the murder of sleazy musician Bruno Hess. He was choking Bruno shortly before his death, but is in a sense innocent of the crime, since it was a spell Angelique cast that completed the fatal strangulation. Liz’ daughter Carolyn is in mourning for her husband Will, who found himself caught between Angelique’s magical powers and Barnabas’ and could do nothing but fling himself to his death from a high window. Yesterday Carolyn announced that she knew and could prove who had killed Angelique. She went to the room on top of the tower attached to the great house. A man entered. She greeted him. He drew a knife and she screamed.
Today, Roger tells Liz and Julia that he heard Carolyn’s scream, ran to the tower room, and found her stabbed to death. Presumably the same man killed her who killed Angelique. The three current suspects are Roger himself, Quentin, and butler Mr Trask.
Yesterday’s episode hinted heavily that Trask was the culprit, and Liz says that he has been missing since Carolyn was killed. We had not seen or heard of Trask in more than eight weeks, and in none of the handful of episodes in which he appeared before that hiatus was it suggested he might have killed Angelique. If it does turn out that the butler did it, therefore, it would be obvious that the show had originally planned to pin the crime on a major character and chickened out at the last minute. We do see a man lurking about today who might be Trask and almost certainly is the mysterious and terrible “Claude North” whom we have heard about recently; if Trask and North are one and the same, that might lead somewhere, but it would hardly be a logical culmination of what we have seen so far.
The whole point of the “Parallel Time” segment is to reconceive Quentin. Making him the killer of Angelique might fit with that. The Quentin of the main continuity murdered his wife Jenny in 1897,* and Angelique is much less sympathetic than Jenny was. Quentin does not have to be admirable, or even defensible. He just has to be attractive. If they can find a way to occasionally make his vices into motives for good deeds, all the better. But Carolyn’s counterpart in the main continuity has been a central figure on the show since the first week, and like all characters played by Nancy Barrett she is a fan favorite. If this Quentin deliberately kills Carolyn, especially by hacking her to bits with a kitchen knife, it is hard to see how the Quentin of the main continuity will benefit. It is true the present Quentin is such a gloomy sourpuss and such a miserable failure as a husband to Maggie that he has already alienated the audience, so they might have decided they had nothing to lose by turning him into Jack the Ripper.
That leaves Roger. He has been painted in the colors of his counterpart as he was in 1966, making him a possible murderer. Even at his coldest, the Roger of the main continuity was close to Carolyn, whom he called “Kitten.” But when we first saw the characters from the current universe in #975, they were hostile and impatient with each other, and Roger took a menacing tone with his niece. The only person for whom this iteration of Roger has any affection is Angelique, and all of that flows to a version of her that exists only in his imagination. Roger seems to be describing himself in both universes when he tells Liz that “The sum total of my life seems to be that I can never help anyone.” So we can certainly believe he killed both Angelique and Carolyn, and that he might kill again.
Liz and Roger’s counterparts have been on the fringes of the action in the main continuity for years, and today we see that this Liz and Roger are also excluded from much that is happening. They visit the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town scouting out potential resting places for Carolyn. Unknown to them, there is a hidden chamber in the back of this mausoleum, and Claude North is lurking there, a dagger in his hand, while they chat in the publicly visible part. They then go to Carolyn’s home, the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, to look for anything she might have written that would give a clue as to who killed her. Unknown to them, Julia is in the basement of the house, conducting a mad science procedure to weaken Angelique by reviving a woman named Roxanne on whose “life force” she is feeding. One wonders where else they will stop on their way home, and of what other uncanny doings they will be oblivious while there.
We hear Julia’s thoughts as she is preparing to revive Roxanne. She tells herself that this is the procedure that brought Adam and Eve to life. She is not thinking of some obscure midrash about the book of Genesis, but about two Frankenstein’s monsters she loosed upon the world in 1968.
*Jenny must have been in someone’s mind when they were making this episode. We catch a glimpse of a gravestone in her name during a cemetery scene:
Most of this one is taken up watching people argue with each other about whether they should hold a séance. This puts longtime viewers on familiar ground. We’ve seen fourteen séances on Dark Shadows over the years, and have heard about others. Many of those we’ve seen have been preceded by the sort of wrangling we see today. The most spectacular case was #365. That installment was structured just like this one, one quarrel after another about the idea of the séance, then in the final scene the séance is held and comes to a shock ending.
Episode 365 came at the end of a period when the show was as slow-paced as it ever would be, and when such story elements as they had were all coming to an end. The episode was surprisingly fast-moving and exciting, mostly due to the visual artistry of director Lela Swift. Not only did Swift use a visual strategy that told more of a story than you might have thought was available had you read the script, but her skillful blocking and fluid use of the camera allowed the actors to project a great deal of energy. The shock ending, which the ABC network had spoiled with a series of promos but which I don’t think anyone could have seen coming otherwise, was the show’s first trip back in time. At the climax of the séance, well-meaning governess Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself transported to the year 1795.
Now, Vicki is long gone and mostly forgotten. The show has traveled in time again, not backward but sideways. We are in an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” In this continuity, counterparts of familiar characters have different personalities and are arranged in different relationships than are the people we know.
The episode is much less effective than was #365, not so much from the absence of Vicki or the presence of any of the new characters, but because the director’s chair is occupied by the hapless Henry Kaplan. Kaplan stood at the opposite extreme from Swift. His idea of a well-composed sequence of images was one closeup after another, punctuated by extreme closeups showing us what an actor’s ear looked like when she was speaking a crucial line of dialogue. He takes the trouble to set up some two-shots and even three-shots today, but they put the actors in such cramped little frames that they don’t dare move without a furtive glance at the camera.
The master of the great house of Collinwood is drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins. His penniless siblings and permanent houseguests Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and Roger Collins have just come home from a trip out of town to find family friend Sabrina Stuart in the drawing room, demanding that they hold the séance that Quentin’s wife Angelique ordained for this night. They are shocked, because the night on which Angelique said there would be a séance fell six months before. Sabrina is having some kind of fit that causes her to be unalterably certain that this night is that one.
Angelique died of a stroke at that séance, and Liz and Roger are horrified at the idea of reenacting it. Sabrina’s fiancé, mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, says that she went through a traumatic experience the night before, when a strange man forced his way into her room and terrorized her. He then reports a conversation with a psychiatrist who suggests humoring Sabrina and holding another séance. Cyrus brings Bruno Hess, musician, lover of Angelique, and all-around sleaze to join in the reenactment.
While Roger and Liz were away, Angelique’s identical twin sister, Alexis Stokes, came to stay at Collinwood. Quentin neglected to inform even the people who were in the house at the time that this had happened, setting Alexis up for one terribly awkward encounter after another with people who thought she was her sister returned from the grave. Quentin and Alexis also got alarmingly cozy with each other, prompting his new wife, the former Maggie Evans, to walk out on him after barely a week in residence at Collinwood. So it is no surprise that he didn’t bother to telephone Liz and Roger and let them know they would see Angelique’s identical twin sister when they came home.
Roger is standing in Angelique’s old bedroom, holding a one-sided conversation with her portrait. We know that he is in the habit of doing this; it was what he was doing when first we saw him in #975. Quentin probably knows about it too, since several other people in the house have the same habit and even those who don’t spend a surprisingly large amount of time going in and out of Angelique’s room. Roger turns around and sees Alexis. Believing her to be Angelique redivivus, he nearly faints. She gives him her hand to assure him she is not a ghost, and he will later introduce her to Liz as Angelique’s sister.
Roger’s counterpart in the main continuity was Dark Shadows‘ first Big Bad, a charming, dissolute, narcissistic, cowardly, lecherous wastrel. That Roger Collins was supposed to be killed off when Vicki exposed his crimes, but Louis Edmonds made him such a joy to watch that this was out of the question. Dark Shadows had not yet figured out that a villain could be a permanent part of the cast, so when they decided to keep Roger around they nerfed him into a basically harmless supporting character. He developed gradually from the functional sociopath who in #68 coldly manipulated his own nine year old son David into a murder attempt on Vicki to the stoutly virtuous family man who made his final exit in #979 with a fatherly hand on David’s shoulder.
The Quentin of the main continuity made his debut in #646 as a ghost bent on annihilating all of his surviving relatives. From #701 to #884, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897, when we met Quentin as a living being. In those days, he was very much what Roger had been in 1966, only younger, sexier, and on a show that isn’t afraid to keep villains around indefinitely. He became a huge breakout hit, and a magic spell was cast that kept him from dying or aging. So when the show returned to contemporary dress at the end of 1969, Quentin was there, alive and intact.
Upon his arrival in 1969, Quentin found himself in the same position Roger had occupied two and a half years before. Everyone wanted him to be a big part of the show, but there was nothing for him to do. Unlike Roger, he was free to be evil, but also unlike him he had no connections to anyone who had anything he wanted to take. In some ways, Quentin is in an even worse position than Roger was. Even in his lovable gay uncle phase, Roger could admit to his sister Liz in #273 that he would have blackmailed her if he had had the chance, an admission that Quentin merrily echoed in #702 when he laughed at his sister Judith’s attempt to buy him off with $1500, boasting that he could blow through that much in a single night, even in a sleepy little place like Collinsport, and that he would shamelessly come back for more. He has no one to do anything like that with now.
Quentin can charm his way to an easy living. In December 1969, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and Broadway star Olivia Corey fought over which of them would get to pay Quentin’s hotel bill, a conflict that was motivated by some story points but that is the sort of thing that might happen to a man who looks like a young David Selby. On a fast-paced supernatural thriller, you have to be something a lot juicier than a mercenary Kept Man to count for much as a villain. No one in the Nixon era owes Quentin anything, so he can’t exploit anyone the way he did Judith and the rest of his immediate family. He has fallen into service as henchman to Julia and her best friend, his distant cousin vampire Barnabas Collins, but something big is going to have to change to find him another place at the center of the action.
Since that is the same problem that cost them Roger, it makes since that in this mirror universe Quentin’s counterpart and Roger’s are revisiting some stages of the development of the Roger from the main continuity. When Parallel Roger first appeared in #975 and #976, he seemed to be, if not the utterly depraved villain of the early days, at least the spineless, snobby, but amusingly sarcastic figure he was through most of 1967. Today he seems to be closer to the responsible family man he dead-ended into being.
This Roger is the first to articulate the reasons why it is inadvisable to reenact a ceremony that cost a life the last time it was attempted. Roger’s position recalls his role in #170, when he was the principal opponent of the first séance shown on Dark Shadows. In that, he was the unwitting stooge of his estranged wife, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, but the objections he came up with were all about the importance of social respectability and of refraining from doing the thing which is not done, fitting into the image of him as a shallow and unimaginative person. The fact of Angelique’s death gives his objections today a firmer footing and presents him as a representative of sober good sense, but does not make him seem any more dynamic than his counterpart in the main continuity did in #170.
Quentin learns of the proposed séance when Cyrus and Bruno enter the house. He is angry at the sight of Bruno, and reminds him he is not welcome there. Cyrus explains that Bruno is needed for the séance. This increases Quentin’s anger, and he tells Cyrus and Bruno to “go to another house and work your black magic, boys.” They insist on staying, and suggest that Alexis sit in Angelique’s place. After all, Bruno says, why shouldn’t she see exactly how her sister died, from her sister’s point of view. At this Quentin’s anger turns to total rage, and he has to be restrained from attacking Bruno physically. Alexis wants to hold the séance, though, and Quentin gives in. He refuses to participate, but allows the others to gather in the drawing room.
Roger was never given to violence that required his direct personal involvement. Quentin’s reaction to Cyrus and Bruno’s awful idea suggests that the writers are trying to find a way forward for his character. The well-justified repugnance he feels for Bruno, the grotesquely morbid nature of the proposed reenactment, and the breathtakingly irresponsible suggestion that Alexis do the very thing it killed her sister to do, all call for a forceful response. His lunge at Bruno is manful in the best sense, and leads us to wonder if they might try to develop Quentin’s vices into the basis of some kind of heroic action.
When he scornfully tells Bruno and Cyrus to go somewhere else with their “black magic, boys,” it is clear that the writers are thinking in terms of what is possible for Quentin. In 1897, the original Quentin and his fellow Satanist Evan Hanley would hang out in the cottage on the estate corresponding to the one where Bruno lives in this timeline and do all sorts of ill-intended mumbo-jumbo. They could easily have been called “The Black Magic Boys.” That Quentin stood at the opposite pole from this one. Perhaps as the story progresses, we will see these contraries fuse into something more sustainable.
Although we are in “Parallel Time,” a development like that might have good effects on the Quentin of the main continuity as well. Roger’s character changed massively after the flashbacks to 1795 and 1897, merging with the deeply flawed, yet sturdily upright family men whom Edmonds played in those periods. So if they can build a version of Quentin in this universe who is still narcissistic but also capable of saving the day, that might point the way to transforming the Quentin in the established “time-band” into a character who can carry the show as he did for so many months in 1969.
The séance goes forward. Cyrus conducts, and Sabrina goes into the trance. She shouts the word “murder” over and again, and breaks the circle of fingers to point at Alexis. Alexis passes out. That’s the closing cliffhanger. We can be sure Alexis is not dead- it wouldn’t leave the story anywhere to go. Besides, they commissioned a gorgeous full-sized portrait of Lara Parker as Angelique for this storyline. That thing must have cost at least $5000, maybe twice that, and they will never be able to use it again after they go back to the main continuity. There’s no way they are going to blow that much money on a set decoration unless they are planning to feature it in another couple of months of episodes.
Suave warlock Nicholas Blair first joined the cast of characters in June 1968, posing as the brother of Cassandra, wife of Roger Collins. Since Cassandra was an alias that 200 year old wicked witch Angelique was using, we knew right away this could not be so. Nicholas asserted himself as Angelique’s boss, faced down the ghost of the fanatical Reverend Trask, and kept saying that he had a plan that was far more important than Angelique’s petty little scheme to establish herself in the great house of Collinwood and turn Roger’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins back into a vampire. As played by Humbert Allen Astredo, Nicholas kept us believing for weeks that we would be in awe once we heard his plan.
Eventually, Nicholas stumbled upon the fact that Barnabas’ best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, had constructed a Frankenstein’s monster in the course of a project to keep his vampirism in remission. From that point on, Nicholas declared that his plan was to force Julia to make a female Frankenstein’s monster, to mate the already existing monster to her, and thereby to breed a new race of people loyal only to his master, Satan. He’d been on the show so long at that point that his sudden parachuting into the Frankenstein story only revealed that up to that point, all his talk about his grand design had been empty boasting.
Moreover, Nicholas’ plan for the patchwork people did not make sense in the context of the show. In a novel or movie like Rosemary’s Baby, the audience sees the heroine raped with the acquiescence of her husband, and our horror at that crime gives force to the premise that she will bear Satan’s only begotten son, who, in an inversion of the Christian story, will transform the whole world by the very fact of his birth. Stealing fresh corpses, chopping them up, and stitching them together isn’t the same horror as rape, but it is a pretty disgusting way to spend an evening, so I suppose that will get you off to some kind of start. But if your show is on the air for half an hour a day across the board Monday through Friday, your audience has time to sit with Nicholas’ scheme and think through all of the practicalities it implies. The new race is going to take many years to grow and multiply and overtake H. Sap., even if its members all have Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome. What are we all supposed to do in the interim, watch the Frankenbabies through nanny cams? It isn’t an idea for series television.
Nicholas not only saddled himself with a plan that obviously wasn’t going to work, he didn’t deliver on his claim to be a surpassingly talented sorcerer. In #528, Angelique asked him to slip a potion to one of her adversaries. He complained that “I am much too talented to spend my time drugging drinks,” but he complied with the request. Not only did that turn out to be a waste of time, later he would on his own initiative drug a couple of other people’s drinks, again without the results he wanted.
Eventually, Nicholas fell in love with Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. That amused Angelique, who taunted him with all the times when he had sneered at her for the humanity she showed in her emotional attachment to Barnabas. As Nicholas grew fonder of Maggie, his powers became less reliable, and his involvement with the main plot became more tenuous. No longer able to make Angelique obey him, Nicholas was reduced to using unsightly ex-convict Harry Johnson as his henchman. By the time the Frankenstein project collapsed and Satan called Nicholas back to Hell, not even Astredo’s considerable acting talent could make us take him seriously.
Nicholas returned in February 1970, just over five weeks ago. At that point the show was mainly concerned with an attempt the writers were making to take some material from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft and make a story out of them. The Leviathan People are Elder Gods who want to reconquer the Earth and destroy humankind. Their harbinger was a shape-shifting monster who had taken the form of a tall young man and invited people to call him Jabe. Jabe was supposed to join with Roger’s niece Carolyn to produce a new race of people.
The Lovecraft material never came together, and by the middle of February the makers of the show were scrambling to find a new direction. Nicholas appears to have been a last-minute replacement for a different sort of villain who was supposed to take over as the chief menace in the second half of the segment. Now they have thrown out that second half and are trying to get to something else before the ratings drop any further. So they brought back an already established character and plugged him into the scenes originally meant to be played by the one they never got around to introducing.
Bringing Nicholas in to the Leviathan arc makes it hard for longtime viewers to ignore the similarities between the Leviathans’ plan to breed a new race and his 1968 plan for the patchwork people, including the shared weakness that if either plan were successful, it wouldn’t leave you anything to put on a daytime soap. Also, Nicholas explicitly acknowledges that he has already failed in one such project, lampshading the problem but not alleviating it. He also keeps bringing up his “Master,” who is clearly still Satan. No other character in the Leviathan arc makes reference to any themes derived from Christianity- everyone else is living in the determinedly non-Christian world of Lovecraft’s imagination. So he seems out of place from the beginning.
The Leviathans’ plan was already nearing collapse when Nicholas showed up. Every time Jabe has used his powers, the results have backfired on him. His personality has alienated all of his allies. And now he doesn’t even want to be a shape-shifting monster anymore- he fell in love with Carolyn, and just wanted to take her on dates and then marry her. Nicholas is supposed to be the trouble-shooter who will turn this troubled operation around, but nothing about him inspires confidence that he is the right person for that job.
Since Nicholas arrived, things have gone downhill for the Leviathan cause even faster than they had been before. In #966, Nicholas watched in horror as Jabe smashed the box from which he originally emanated, causing all of the Leviathans’ other visible belongings to vanish. Nicholas then declared that everything was over, and that the time of the Leviathans was no more. But they still didn’t have another story ready to go, so he and Jabe have continued to hang around. Nicholas still has one follower, Angelique’s estranged husband Sky Rumson, but since there is no reason for Sky to be on the show either, that isn’t much of a basis for Nicholas’ continued presence. On his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn called Nicholas a “failure demon”; all in all, that would seem an apt classification.
Today, Jabe turns up at Nicholas’ place. Nicholas knows that Angelique cursed Jabe to be plagued by a mysterious shadow not his own that follows him and drives him mad. This much is borrowed from George MacDonald’s 1858 novel Phantastes, but unlike the Reverend MacDonald’s allegory of sin and anxiety this shadow is a physical weapon that will kill Jabe when it grows strong enough. Jabe asked Nicholas to use his powers to lift Angelique’s spell the other day, but Nicholas refused, even though he claimed that he could and he acknowledged that it would have been to his advantage to do so. The opening voiceover today reminds us that Nicholas knows all about the shadow.
Now, Jabe is telling Nicholas that he was wrong to turn against him, wrong to smash the box, wrong to give up his destiny of leading the Leviathans to global dominion. Nicholas dwells on his exhaustive knowledge of the shadow and tells Jabe he can take the shadow from him and set it on Angelique. He begins to hypnotize Jabe. When he seems to have Jabe in a trance, he tells him he does not give second chances, and that he is going to kill him and Carolyn. Jabe suddenly produces the paper cutout Angelique used to place the shadow curse on him and places it on Nicholas’ jacket. He then runs out of the room. The shadow appears and envelopes Nicholas, who collapses. Even though he knew in advance exactly what was going on, Nicholas still could not avoid death as the result of getting slapped on the chest with a piece of construction paper. He dies as he lived, a failure demon to the end.
Sky enters. Jabe returns, and Sky tells him Nicholas is dead. Sky whines that because Nicholas was not human, his death will not be the end of him and Jabe will not get away with killing him. Geoffrey Scott’s appallingly bad acting reinforces the image of Nicholas as a colossal loser- if this was the only ally he had left at the end, he must have been an even more hopeless stumblebum than we had thought. Jabe exits. A moment later, Nicholas’ ghost appears to Sky and tells him to kill Jabe.
Jabe goes back to the great house of Collinwood to tell Carolyn that he is rid of the shadow. They are married now, but have spent very little time together because the shadow has kept chasing Jabe off. She is puzzled by the whole thing, in part because Jabe refuses to tell her anything about his situation, and is unenthusiastic about Jabe’s renewed insistence that they go away immediately. She agrees to leave with him in the morning.
Carolyn goes upstairs. In the drawing room, Jabe hears Nicholas’ voice telling him that he will never escape. Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David Collins, enters; Jabe tells him that he and Carolyn are going on a trip tonight.
Jabe sent Carolyn upstairs with orders to pack and tell her mother they were leaving, but it would seem she has not complied. She is snoozing in a chair in her room. She has a dream. It begins with Nicholas’ voice rasping at her that it will all end at Widows’ Hill. She then sees Jabe and Sky, lit in groovy psychedelic colors, arguing about Nicholas and fighting near the precipice. Sky throws Jabe over the edge.
Carolyn awakens, calls for Jabe, and rushes out. On her way she tells David that she is going to Widows’ Hill. A moment later Jabe comes along, and David relays this information to him.
Carolyn gets to the top of Widows’ Hill, where Sky is waiting for her. He tells her that the dream Nicholas sent her stopped short of its end, because he did not want her to see her own death. He grabs her by the throat.
Meanwhile, in another universe…
While Jabe, Nicholas, and Carolyn are cleaning up the messes the Leviathan segment left behind, Roger is busy getting the new storyline off the ground. There is a room in the long disused east wing of the great house in which an alternate universe is occasionally visible. Roger goes there, and sees the counterparts of Carolyn and David. They are talking about the boy’s parents, whom Roger ascertains to be, not himself and undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch, but the counterparts of his distant cousin Quentin Collins and of Angelique. Everyone else we have seen in “Parallel Time” has the same first name as their counterpart in the main continuity, but David’s is named “Daniel.”
Roger never found out who Cassandra really was, so it is a puzzle for longtime viewers how he knows Angelique’s name. Carolyn and her mother met her under that name at the house she and Sky shared, but somehow did not recognize her as Cassandra. She visited them at Collinwood after her marriage to Sky broke up, but did not see Roger there.
Arrivals and Departures
This is the first time we see this Daniel Collins, but not the first time we are exposed to his name. The closing credits for #958 billed David Henesy not as David Collins, the role he played that day, but as Daniel Collins. I don’t know whether they had already decided that would be his name in Parallel Time and the person making up the credit roll got confused about it, or if the writers thought the goof was funny and gave the character the name as an inside joke.
Also, Mr Henesy played a character named Daniel Collins in February and March 1968, when the show was set in the year 1796. Since they have established that the two universes diverged during that Daniel’s lifetime, he may be this Daniel’s namesake. There is another connection, an accidental one I’m sure but an accident with a bit of an eldritch quality to it. In #350, three weeks before the 1790s segment began and more than sixteen weeks before Daniel made his first appearance, a slip of Nancy Barrett’s tongue left Carolyn referring to David as “Daniel.” It’s odd that the two Daniels were both heralded by these small inadvertences.
This episode marks, not only the final appearance of Nicholas, but also that of Roger. Louis Edmonds will play Roger’s counterpart in the Parallel Time segment, and as these episodes are being taped he is playing still another iteration of Roger on the feature film House of Dark Shadows. He will also be back in another role later on. But all the character development Roger has gone through since we first saw him in episode 1 is at an end.
Monday’s episode gave Roger his real sendoff, and my post about it summed up his history. I will just mention here that when I first saw Dark Shadows, Roger was something of a puzzle to me. That was the 1990s, when I saw it on what was then The SciFi Channel. The first episode I saw was #193, featuring art dealer Portia Fitzsimmons, but I didn’t have a chance to watch it at all regularly until a month or so after that, when Barnabas had already joined the cast. By that point Roger was already very much confined to the margins.
Curious as to when the dazzling Mrs Fitzsimmons would return, I looked online and found what is now the Dark Shadows wiki. I was disappointed to find that she was a one-off character. I also found that her function was to bring to a head a major story centering on Roger. I then looked through the episode summaries of the first weeks of the show. Those were quite terse and indigestible, meant to remind people who had seen the episodes of points they had forgotten. But one thing I did gather from them was that Roger had been a major character when the show started, indeed its chief villain. I couldn’t imagine the sardonic but lovable Roger of 1967 and 1968 in that capacity, and when I finally saw those episodes many years later I was thrilled by Edmonds’ performance.
One of the strongest themes of Roger’s character in his early days as a villain was his open hatred of David. It is nice for longtime viewers that he makes his final exit with an affectionate fatherly hand on David’s shoulder.
An information management day. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has told his distant cousin, Roger Collins, about a parallel universe that is occasionally visible in a room in the long disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood. Today, Roger tells his sister Elizabeth about the room. Liz owns the house. We might wonder if she will have questions about what effect the presence of a spare universe on the premises will have on her property taxes.
Roger talks about the phenomenon while standing in the room with permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. He is incredulous when he notices that Julia is not listening to him. She cannot tell him what has distracted her. Unknown to Roger and Liz, Barnabas is a vampire. Julia has devised a treatment that is supposed to put this curse in remission, but it is not working at all. She has given him the last of the injections, and the only difference in Barnabas is that he is getting sick and feeling an unusually intense bloodlust.
Caretaker Chris Jennings, another distant cousin, comes stumbling home to his cottage on the grounds of the estate. He finds his girlfriend and ex-fiancée Sabrina Stuart waiting for him. Chris is another patient Julia has been unable to help. He is a werewolf. There was a full moon last night. Sabrina tells Chris he killed a man named Bruno. Chris is distressed that he killed anyone, but Sabrina points out that Bruno knew of his secret and was trying to use him to kill others. He was holding her and a man named Rumson prisoner, and when the police searched Bruno’s premises after his death they found Sabrina and Rumson imprisoned there. Sabrina keeps telling Chris she wants to marry him. Most of the time they will live ordinary lives, but one night out of 28 she will just have to lock him up in a special cell. Chris won’t hear of this.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, is a great one for love stories and an admirer of actress Lisa Blake Richards. Chris and Sabrina have run out of road on Dark Shadows, and are obviously going to be written out soon. Mrs Acilius wishes they could ride off into the sunset accompanied by the sound of wedding bells. So when Chris refused to marry Sabrina, she exclaimed “Stupid man!” I pointed out something Chris knows but does not mention to Sabrina, that his curse is hereditary. Any male descendants he has will also be werewolves. Mrs A conceded that this does complicate matters.
Roger saw Chris at Bruno’s place when he rescued him and Carolyn shortly before moonrise last night. Chris was at that time in the throes that precede his transformation. Chris ran off before Roger or Carolyn could see what became of him. Roger comes to the cottage to check on him.
Chris is in the back changing out of his bloody clothes, so Sabrina answers the door. She tells Roger that Chris is there and that she was with him all night, watching over him because he was ill. After what he saw of Chris at Bruno’s, Roger has no doubt that Chris needed a nurse, and he tells Sabrina that he is glad he had such a charming one. The audience can understand that Sabrina wants to conceal Chris’ lycanthropy from Roger, but surely it cannot be wise for her to claim that she was in the cottage overnight. Not only are her true whereabouts known to everyone who was in or around the police station the night before, but since Roger was the one who found Bruno’s body and he found it on the grounds of Collinwood, even police as inept as the ones in Collinsport are likely to follow up with him. Besides, her imprisonment with Rumson is a sensational story, of interest to the press. Maybe we will move on to the next phase of the show before the facts come to light, but Sabrina can’t know that.
Sabrina is determined to persuade Chris to resume their engagement. She goes to the one person whose opinion Chris seems to respect, Barnabas. When she knocks on his door, Barnabas hides behind a partition. When Sabrina first arrived, she had seen Barnabas through the window of his front parlor, so she lets herself in. He finally gives up on hiding and pleads with her to leave. She ignores what he is saying and keeps talking. She plows ahead with her idea about how Barnabas can help her and Chris become a happy married couple. Barnabas struggles to resist his urge for blood, but cannot. He bites Sabrina, much to her surprise. Miss Richards’ understated exclamation of “Barnabas!” when he shows his fangs and goes for her neck is very nicely done, it really sounds like a woman puzzled that a trusted friend is violating her personal space.
Sabrina staggers back to Chris’ cottage. She collapses in his chair, and he sees the puncture wounds on her neck. They are much bigger than the marks we’ve seen on Barnabas’ previous victims. I suppose he really was a lot hungrier than usual. Chris doesn’t know that Barnabas is a vampire, and the cliffhanger leaves us wondering whether he can avoid finding out.
Probably the most memorable shot in the episode is a very impressive bit of videotape editing. Roger and Barnabas are standing at the door to the Parallel Time room, watching Roger’s counterpart interact with Liz’ and Chris’. Parallel Roger walks toward the door. He exits the room, not into the space Roger and Barnabas occupy, but into the hallway as it exists in Parallel Time. He vanishes from their view, and the effect also winks out in the room, leaving Roger and Barnabas looking into the bare, dark chamber it is in the house they know.
When Dark Shadows began, its most dangerous villain was high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Since the plan was to kill Roger off after his crimes were exposed, writer Art Wallace and actor Louis Edmonds were free to present him as gruesomely as they pleased. That turned out to be so much fun for all concerned that it soon became impossible to imagine the show without Roger, and the plan changed.
Once Roger was established as a permanent part of the ensemble, they toned his wickedness down. He still did and said awful things, but they would pull him back whenever he might risk alienating the audience. So, he at first openly expressed his hatred for his young son, strange and troubled boy David, and in #68 and #83 coldly exploited David’s mental health problems to manipulate him into trying to murder well-meaning governess Vicki. But when David got Vicki into a situation that might actually have resulted in her death, Roger rescued her. When Roger’s estranged wife Laura showed up and wanted to take David away with her, Roger was so delighted at the prospect of getting rid of the boy that he willfully ignored one sign after another that something was seriously wrong with Laura. But when Vicki finally proved to him that Laura was an undead fire witch who intended to incinerate David, Roger joined in the effort to save him, and was so shaken by the experience that he would never again be overtly hostile to David.
Nor was his attitude towards David the only sign of Roger’s pathological lack of family feeling. He had squandered his inheritance, selling his half of the family business to finance his extravagant lifestyle. His sister, reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, went deep into debt buying back what Roger had sold. When Roger ran out of money, Liz took him and David in at the great house of Collinwood. When in #41 Liz reproved Roger for the difficult position she had put him in, he proudly declared that he had “enjoyed” his inheritance, and twitted her for her dreary ways. Liz gave Roger a job in the business, but the only time we saw him visiting his office he answered his phone and told the caller that what he was asking was someone else’s job. When in #273 Roger found that seagoing con man Jason McGuire had tricked Liz into believing that she had a terrible secret that she could keep only by surrendering her whole fortune to him in blackmail payments, he admitted to his sister that if she had confided her troubles in him, he would probably have done the same thing.
When vampire Barnabas Collins succeeded Laura as Dark Shadows‘ supernatural Big Bad, Roger was pushed to the margins of the story. From that time on, he had two things to contribute. The first were sarcastic remarks, many of them very funny, that established him as the show’s sardonic gay uncle. The second, which gave him what little function he retained in the plot, were ostentatious refusals to believe the evidence piling up on all sides that the family was beset by a procession of bloodthirsty monsters. Since several other characters, Liz among them, also refused to face these facts, the show could go long periods of time without featuring Roger at all.
In November 1967, Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. From then until March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in that period. The segment was a hit in the ratings, and a triumph for Louis Edmonds, who was cast as haughty overlord Joshua Collins. Joshua was the opposite of Roger- as protective of the family’s position as Roger was careless of it, as committed to making money as Roger was thoughtless in spending it, as courageous in the face of physical danger as Roger was cowardly. The 1790s segment became The Tragedy of Joshua Collins, as we saw how Joshua’s best qualities led him to create the dark and twisted world in which his descendants would grow up to be weak, selfish men like Roger.
When the show came back from the 1790s, Roger was obsessed with a portrait painted in those days. The portrait’s subject was Angelique, the wicked witch who precipitated the disasters that annihilated Joshua’s family. Before long, Angelique herself returned, wearing a wig, using a false name, and married to Roger. The spell Angelique cast to win Roger occasionally caused him to think he was Joshua, and by the time that story ended Roger had become, if not the imperious tycoon Joshua was, certainly a hard-working, conscientious family man. He still had a languid manner and a way with a quip, but was otherwise unrecognizable as the show’s original Man You Love to Hate.
Evil spirits drove the Collinses out of the great house of Collinwood in #694. That episode marked the end of Roger’s function as one of the “There must be a logical explanation!” people. He was the last member of the family to insist that everyone else was being silly, but when he finally accepted the reality of the situation and was on his way out of the house, he turned to declare to the ghosts that the living would be back to reclaim what was rightfully theirs. From that moment on, Roger was no longer a narrative brake pad.
For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was set in 1897. In that year, we got to know Quentin Collins, who as a ghost would be chiefly responsible for the haunting that had driven the Collinses out of Collinwood. We saw that the living Quentin was a charming rogue, a spendthrift who cheerfully tells his sober-minded sister Judith that he can waste money faster than she can give it to him, inclined to violence when it serves his purposes and quick to run away when he is in danger of being called to account for his crimes. In short, he is what Roger originally was, only played by a younger, sexier actor, and with an unlimited future on a show that has discovered the characters won’t alienate the audience by being evil, only by being dull.
In the 1897 segment, Edmonds played Quentin’s brother Edward, who was not dull, but not evil either. Edward was stuffy and hypocritical. He was occasionally cruel, sometimes because of greed, sometimes because of prejudice, and sometimes because he flew into a panic in the face of an unexpected danger. But he was sincerely devoted to his children, and he had a sense of decency that would assert itself even after he had done awful things. For all his faults, Edward was ultimately one of the most lovable characters Dark Shadows ever created. If 1795 was The Tragedy of Joshua Collins, 1897 was largely the Comedy of Edward.
After 1897, Dark Shadows spent several months bogged down in an attempt to make a story out of some themes drawn from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. Roger showed up in this part of the show just a few times. Quentin, brought into contemporary dress intact due to his great popularity in the 1897 segment, told Roger what was going on in #958. Rather than scoff as he would have in 1967 or 1968, Roger accepted Quentin’s account at once and helped him in the battle. Roger had by that point turned into Edward. His habit of denial was gone, and with it all of his languor and most of his wit.
Now the show is clearing out the last villains left over from the Lovecraft project and launching a story about a parallel universe that is occasionally visible through a doorway in the long-disused east wing of the great house. Roger is active in both of these plots today.
Even when he was a villain who cared nothing for his son, his sister, his family name, or Collinsport Enterprises, Roger very much enjoyed the company of his niece, Carolyn Collins Stoddard. On Friday, he was hugging Carolyn while she wept about the difficulties she was having in her new marriage; he called her “Kitten,” a term of endearment he has used with her since #4. In those early days, the show was heavy with hints that Roger and Carolyn’s relationship verged on incest. She often answered to “Kitten” in the moments when those hints were most insistent. But there was nothing unwholesome about Roger’s embrace of Carolyn on Friday, and he is irreproachably fatherly in his attitude towards her today.
At rise, Carolyn is in a trap. A man named Bruno, one of the leftover villains introduced while the show was dealing with the Lovecraft-derived material, has tricked her into entering a room where he has already imprisoned her old friend Chris Jennings. Bruno locked the door, and Carolyn saw that Chris was on the floor, writhing in pain. She asks him what is wrong, he won’t answer. Carolyn doesn’t know it, but Chris is a werewolf. The moon is rising, and his pains are the first stage of his transformation.
Bruno’s master wants Carolyn’s husband dead, and has decided that if the werewolf kills Carolyn he will lose the will to live. Since it would have been at least as easy to get the husband into the room as it was to get Carolyn there, and since one of the main things they have told us about the husband is that he is vulnerable to werewolf attacks, this scheme is unnecessarily complicated, marked for the audience as likely to fail. Indeed, since Bruno, his master, and Carolyn’s husband are all short-timers who don’t really need to be on the show anymore, while Carolyn has been a core member of the cast since #2, we can be quite sure it will fail, and if we have spent time over the weekend wondering about the cliffhanger, we’ve spent it wondering what will save Carolyn.
What saves Carolyn turns out to be well-timed intervention by her Uncle Roger. Roger was worried that she wouldn’t tell him why she was crying about her marriage, and followed her to Bruno’s place. He saw her enter, and after a few minutes let himself in. He confronted Bruno in his parlor, heard Carolyn and Chris in the back room, and found that the door to the back room was locked. When Bruno told him the door would stay locked, Roger hit him on the head with a candlestick, knocking him out. He took Bruno’s key, unlocked the door, and freed Carolyn. While Roger telephoned Collinwood to ask for permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, Chris jumped out of the back room’s window. Roger then decided that he and Carolyn should go home.
It may strike first-time viewers as odd that Roger calls Julia and not the police. Established fans will be unsurprised, knowing that the Collinsport Sheriff’s office is one of the world’s most useless organizations and that Julia is a mad scientist whose powers know few limits. Still, once Roger gets Carolyn home he does tell her they should call the sheriff. She refuses, and also forbids him to tell her mother Liz anything about what has happened.
Roger finds Liz moping in the drawing room. He strikes up a conversation about Carolyn’s troubles. He says that he and Liz both made unhappy marriages, and that it is disappointing to see that the next generation seems determined to repeat their mistakes. He says that he wishes Carolyn would confide in one of them. Liz says that all she knows is that someone or something is threatening Carolyn’s husband, and that she refuses to discuss it. The camera pulls back, and we see that Carolyn is right there. Director Henry Kaplan was pretty bad at moving the actors around and even worse at figuring out where to point the camera, but he deserves credit for this shot. When we suddenly see Carolyn standing there, we realize that Roger and Liz are so deep in their worries that they are oblivious to their surroundings.
Carolyn insists on going to the carriage house on the grounds of the estate to see her husband. Since Bruno is at large, Roger objects. He can’t mention Bruno in front of Liz, since Carolyn has decreed that her mother must not be told what happened earlier in the evening, so he is powerless to stop her going.
Bruno does catch up with Carolyn, and he tells her he is going to kill her. Before he can do so, the werewolf springs out, pushes Carolyn aside, and slashes Bruno. She goes home and tells Roger and Liz what happened. From Carolyn’s description, Liz recognizes the werewolf as the same creature they encountered in late 1968 and early 1969, and Roger rushes out.
Roger finds Bruno on the ground. He tells Bruno he will call a doctor. Bruno says it’s too late. He says a few words (“animal… not an animal…”) and loses consciousness.
Back in the great house, Roger says that the police are searching the grounds for the werewolf. He says it’s terrible that Carolyn should have met with such an incident on top of what has already happened to her. Liz asks what he means, and Carolyn glares at him, appalled at his indiscretion. He stammers out something about how she’s having marital problems, then announces he has to go because he promised to do something for Barnabas.
Roger and Liz never have figured out that Barnabas is a vampire, and though Carolyn was briefly his blood thrall she’s forgotten all about it. So far as the Collinses are concerned, their distant cousin Barnabas is just a night person. Several times now, Barnabas has looked into a room in the east wing and has seen, not the dark space, bare floor, and sparsely decorated walls that are there in his universe, but an alternative version of the room, brightly lit, fully furnished, and heavily decorated. He has seen people with the same looks, voices, and names as people he knows, but with different personalities and relationships. He has reported this to Julia and her friend, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, who have explained to him the many-worlds hypothesis.
On Friday, Barnabas told Roger about the room and about Julia and Stokes’ theory. The Roger of 1967 and 1968 would have jeered at Barnabas before he had spoken five words, but in 1970 he believed him readily enough. Barnabas expressed surprise at Roger’s openness to his outlandish account, and Roger acknowledges that “a year ago” he would have dismissed it. It was thirteen months ago that Roger turned and told the ghosts that the living would someday reconquer the great house; when he says “a year ago,” perhaps Roger is rounding down. Roger agreed then to come back and check the room.
When Barnabas showed Roger the room on Friday, it was bare. When Roger goes there himself today, he finds that the parallel universe is there. He cannot pass the invisible barrier in the doorway to enter it, nor can he communicate with the people there, but he can see them and hear them.
The first resident of the parallel universe Roger sees is Bruno’s counterpart. Astonished, he exclaims “I just saw him die!” Parallel Bruno is looking at the portrait of Parallel Angelique that dominates the room and telling it that the music he wrote for her will make her immortal. Roger does not appear to recognize the portrait’s resemblance to his second wife, much less to remember that he himself used to carry on similarly one-sided conversations with her eighteenth century portrait.
Parallel Liz enters and demands to know what Parallel Bruno is doing in the room. He says he belongs there. She tells him he is the only one who thinks so. She tells him that the master of the house, who is Quentin’s counterpart, will be coming home soon, and that he will never tolerate Bruno’s presence. Bruno says that he has heard that Quentin has remarried. When Liz says this is so, Bruno declares that Angelique will never allow another woman in the house. Liz is exasperated that people keep talking about Angelique as if she were still alive. Bruno exits.
Stunned by what he has seen, Roger looks away for a moment. He thinks of going to fetch Barnabas. His attention returns when he hears a conversation between Liz’ counterpart and his own.
Barnabas saw Parallel Roger on Friday; he was talking to the portrait in a way that suggested an obsession not so different from the one which the eighteenth century portrait had inspired in the Roger we knew. Today, Parallel Roger talks to Parallel Liz about Parallel Bruno in an airy, superior manner quite out of keeping with what we have had from our Roger today, but which sounds exactly like him as he was in 1967 and 1968.
PARALLEL ROGER: Was that Bruno, the terrible-tempered boy wonder I saw just now?
PARALLEL LIZ: Yes, he’s come back.
PARALLEL ROGER: Back to compose more of his morbid music and bore us with his tiresome memories of her? Well… It’ll be worth seeing the look on Quentin’s face when he finds out, won’t it?
Alliterative series such as “terrible-tempered” and “more morbid music” were characteristic of the old Roger’s verbal cleverness, as sarcastic expressions like “boy wonder” and complaints of boredom were typical of his habit of advertising his contempt for everyone and everything. Even Parallel Roger’s closing hope of “seeing the look on Quentin’s face,” as opposed to any thought of action he might himself take, is of a piece with the old Roger’s cowardice and laziness. Our Roger is horrified by the sight of his double.
Evidently the makers of the show have decided that Roger’s development has brought him to a dead end, and they are going to use the journey into “Parallel Time” to reintroduce the original villain. That Parallel Roger shares a scene with Parallel Liz suggests that we will again see the dynamic that their counterparts in the main “time-band” pioneered on the show, the conflict between Bratty Little Brother and Bossy Big Sister. This type of conflict is still one of Dark Shadows‘ signature elements, represented most prominently by Barnabas and Julia. The 1897 segment benefited from a similar conflict between Quentin and Judith; the 1795 segment lacked such a conflict, and in its absence they had to lean pretty hard on stories that put individual characters into isolation from the rest of the cast, burning them up one by one. Perhaps they plan to use the old standoff between Bratty Roger and Bossy Liz to keep the Parallel Time story spinning if the overall narrative hits some rough patches.
This episode marks the final appearance of the main “time-band” version of Bruno; the werewolf really did kill him. It is also the last time we will see the werewolf. Alex Stevens was billed as “Stunt Coordinator” when he played the werewolf. He will stay with the show as a stuntman, but won’t get his name in the credits again.
Roger Collins is up late. He heads for bed, and finds his distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, in the house. Barnabas apologizes for prowling about at such a late hour, and offers an explanation. He was in the long-disused east wing, where he found a room that contains a parallel universe.
Barnabas takes Roger to the room, which is vacant. He tells him that the parallel universe is visible only occasionally, and that even when it can be seen there is an invisible barrier that keeps him from entering or communicating with the people he sees there. Roger asks Barnabas if he has ever seen the phenomenon during the day. He says he has not. Roger says he will come back himself in the morning and investigate. Roger goes back to the main part of the house, and Barnabas heads for an exit that is closer to his own house.
Before Barnabas gets very far, he hears Roger’s voice. It is coming from the room, which has changed. He sees Roger’s counterpart sipping wine and talking to the portrait that hangs there.
The portrait depicts the counterpart of Barnabas’ ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique. In #464, Roger became obsessed with an eighteenth century portrait of Angelique herself. When he stared at the portrait, his personality collapsed into that of haughty overlord Joshua Collins, who lived in the days when the portrait was painted. Shortly afterward, Angelique showed up, wearing a wig and using a false name. Roger married her.
The portrait that holds Parallel Roger’s attention shows Parallel Angelique in contemporary guise. He talks to the portrait, not about a distant past which an ancestor of his might have known, but about the days when he and Parallel Angelique used to meet here, in her room. He says that people thought he was in love with her, but that he wasn’t. He was fascinated by her, but not in love. He says that he has never cared for the wine he is drinking, but that he still buys it, because it was her favorite.
The counterpart of Roger’s niece Carolyn enters. We saw the Roger and Carolyn we have known since the first week of the series earlier in the episode. They were embracing while she cried on his shoulder about some problems she is having in the B story. He called her “Kitten,” a term of endearment he has used for her since #4. That was typical of their interactions. But Parallel Carolyn has little use for her uncle. She snaps at him about talking to himself, he snaps at her about being in the room, and they snap at each other about Parallel Angelique. Parallel Carolyn says she would like to make Parallel Angelique “whirl in her grave,” at which Parallel Roger contemptuously declares Carolyn could never accomplish such a thing.
Even in death, Parallel Angelique dominates Parallel Roger and Parallel Carolyn. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Parallel Carolyn mentions that she is married to the counterpart of Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis. Barnabas has seen this other William H. Loomis, and knows that unlike Willie he is an educated man, the author of several books. He is still unable to think of him as anything other than the man he knows, however, and is shocked at the idea that any iteration of Carolyn would marry him.
When Barnabas saw him, Parallel William was wearing pricey clothes and affecting a sophisticated manner, and Barnabas learned that three of his books were bestselling novels that had been made into feature films. But we find out in this scene that the Loomises are now short of funds. Parallel Carolyn is searching for a book that Parallel William wrote and from which he has the opportunity to make a few hundred more dollars by making an abridgment for a magazine. Parallel Roger mocks his niece for scrounging for money; she remarks that their cousin Quentin is not so generous with her as he is with him. This confirms what has been suggested in previous glimpses of the Parallel Time room, that Parallel Quentin is the Master of Collinwood in its universe.
The doors close. When Barnabas opens then again, the room is vacant. He is deeply frustrated that he cannot see more of what happens there. We can understand. We, too, want to watch Dark Shadows, and are disappointed when it isn’t on.
Occasions when we might expect to see Dark Shadows but don’t include most of this episode. The Parallel Time story is just getting started, and it needs a lot of actors who are away doing principal photography for the feature House of Dark Shadows. So we spend the bulk of today on what took up all of yesterday’s episode, a lot of back and forth among characters who aren’t really on the show anymore. They are left over from a couple of exhausted storylines.
A man named Bruno, a remnant of the show’s attempt to tell a story about some events that belong in the tales of H. P. Lovecraft, is holding two prisoners. The prisoners are Chris Jennings and his fiancée, Sabrina Stuart. Chris is a werewolf. He and Sabrina are left over from a story told at the end of 1968 and beginning of 1969, and in the last few months there was a lackadaisical attempt to tie them in with the Lovecraft material. Bruno is hoping to trap Carolyn with Chris when Chris transforms, so that he will kill her. His motivation for this is an overly elaborate plan that no one who has seen the show expects to work, so even though the episode ends with Chris and Carolyn locked up together while the full moon rises it doesn’t leave us in much suspense. I suppose it is a step up from yesterday’s closing cliffhanger, in which Chris found a stooge named Sky Rumson in Bruno’s closet, strung up by his wrists, bleeding and begging for help. That made so little impact it isn’t even mentioned today. For all we know Chris just closed the closet door and let Sky have his privacy.
Vampire Barnabas Collins inadvertently killed his victim Megan Todd the other night, turning her into a creature like himself. Now his chief enabler, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, is browbeating his ex-blood thrall Willie Loomis into destroying Megan. Willie is horrified by the prospect of driving a stake through a woman’s heart, and Julia gives him a pep talk. She says that staking Megan is the only way to free her of the curse and to free her blood thrall, Barnabas’ distant cousin Roger Collins, from bondage. But it is necessary to finish Megan off “most of all, for Barnabas.”
The premise of Willie’s character at this point in Dark Shadows is that he regards Barnabas as a dear friend and valued patron. When Willie first knew Barnabas, from April to September 1967, Barnabas drank his blood, beat him savagely when he defied his fiendish commands, and framed him for his crimes. Barnabas had Julia fetch Willie back from the mental hospital she controls in May 1968, so he could use him to steal bodies to use in making a Frankenstein’s monster. Barnabas’ vampirism was in remission at that time, so he did not have any supernatural control over Willie. Willie’s attitude towards Barnabas then was rather insouciant, so he and Julia kept threatening to send him back to the ward for the criminally insane unless he obeyed them. Barnabas only seemed happy during this time once. That came in #560, when he saw the agony Willie went through when he persuaded him that it would be his fault if the monster murdered Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. I suppose people do rewrite their own pasts to make them bearable, so it is understandable that Willie has chosen to believe that his abuser was really his best buddy. Still, it does seem a bit much for Julia to tell Willie that he should destroy Megan “most of all, for Barnabas.”
Julia accompanies Willie to Megan’s hiding place in the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood. Willie breaks down outside the room where Roger is guarding her coffin, and Julia has to give him another motivational speech. She tells him he “mustn’t think of Megan as a person,” but as “a creature, an evil thing,” and besides that “You must help her to rest” and that staking is “the best thing for her.” While Willie struggles to hold back his tears, she warns him against waking Roger. By the time they enter the room, Roger is awake. He fights Willie and Julia to protect Megan, and Willie defeats him only by breaking a bottle over the back of his head.
Julia and Willie take Roger out of the room. Julia tends to Roger while we hear Megan’s screams. Once the staking is complete, Roger comes to, with no recollection of how he got to the east wing or what Megan did to him. This recovery tells us Megan is destroyed.
Later, Barnabas will tell Willie to bury Megan and all her belongings in a hole in the ground somewhere out in the woods. This shows longtime viewers that Barnabas has improved his post-murder game considerably. The first time he forced Willie into helping him cover up a killing came in #276. Barnabas had strangled Willie’s sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire. He had Willie help him bury Jason in the secret room in the old Collins family mausoleum, which would eventually cease to be much of a secret and which several people could connect with Barnabas. He also neglected to do anything about Jason’s belongings. Everyone thought Jason was leaving town and was glad to see him go, so there was no investigation. But in #277, Roger mentioned to his sister, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, that all of Jason’s stuff was still in the room he had been occupying at Collinwood. He told Liz that even Jason’s razor was still there. It was strictly a matter of luck that no one asked any questions about Jason- had they done so, Barnabas would have been in trouble almost immediately.
This episode marks, not only the end of Megan’s career as a vampire, but Marie Wallace’s final appearance on Dark Shadows. Miss Wallace was one of the most exuberant practitioners of the Dark Shadows house style of acting, a hyper-vehement manner of performance previously unknown in the history of the dramatic arts. It can take a bit of getting used to. But once Megan became a vampire, she suddenly became quiet and subtle, almost understated. Miss Wallace explains that by saying that the dentures they gave her to wear as fangs didn’t stay in her mouth very well, so she had to go small to keep them from flying across the room. As a result, her last few episodes are a revelation. The first time we watched the show I was impatient with Miss Wallace’s ultra-intense technique; I can appreciate it now, but her miniaturizing approach to Vampire Megan is so very effective that I wish we could have seen a couple hundred more episodes of her doing that kind of thing.
Miss Wallace tells the story of the day they shot this episode. She got a telephone call from her agent that they wanted her for a part on a soap called Somerset. She was thrilled, since there was no new part planned for her after Megan’s demise. From the few surviving bits of video showing her on Somerset, it doesn’t look like she decided to become a miniaturist.
In With the New
Megan is left over from an exhausted story. The new one is starting in another room in the east wing. The Collinses cram all of the deserted rooms in their buildings full of stuff- vases, paintings, books, furniture of all sorts. This room outdoes all the rest, and contains a whole parallel universe.
Barnabas has been peeping in on the doings in the parallel universe room for couple of days, but there is an invisible barrier which prevents him entering it or communicating with the people he sees and hears there. At the opening today, he sees Julia’s counterpart and Liz’ continuing a quarrel they had been having when he observed them before; at the close, he sees Willie’s counterpart and Julia’s having a similar quarrel.
Parallel Julia wears a maid’s uniform, but is full of commands for Parallel Liz and Parallel Willie. Parallel Liz’ response to her commands shows that she is not the mistress of the house, and cannot control Parallel Julia. Parallel Willie wears an ascot and a smoking jacket, and regards Parallel Julia with amused contempt.
Parallel Willie finds a book in the room that he wanted; Parallel Julia takes it from him, and tosses it into the hallway. The book passes through the barrier, and lands at Barnabas’ feet. The doors to the room close. Barnabas opens them again, and finds that the room is empty, devoid of the people, furnishings, and lights that had been visible there a moment before. Carrying the book, he goes in.
The title and author of the book stun him. It is titled The Life and Death of Barnabas Collins; its author is William Hollingshead Loomis.
In #326, Willie had been shot by the police, who blamed him for some of Barnabas’ crimes. Barnabas grew anxious as the hours passed and Willie failed to die. He complained to Julia of Willie’s “leech-like persistence” in remaining alive. Julia tried to reassure Barnabas that Willie was unlikely to survive much longer, and in response he raged that Willie might just as easily recover from his wounds and “write his memoirs!”
That line found an echo in #464, when we learned that Barnabas’ eighteenth century servant Ben Stokes had indeed written a memoir, though the extant manuscript was missing some parts about Barnabas. In #756, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins heard that Ben had secrets about Barnabas which he “took to his grave,” so she dug the grave up and, by golly, there were the missing passages explaining that Barnabas was a vampire. Now the same line is going to give rise to another William Loomis, one who has written a book about his world’s counterpart of Barnabas.
Yesterday, Barnabas Collins went to the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood to search for the coffin that vampire Megan Todd occupies during the day. Barnabas is himself the vampire who ended Megan’s human life, passing his curse along to her. When his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, makes a characteristic remark and tells him “you must not feel personally about Megan Todd,” Barnabas asks “How can I feel any other way?” Most of Barnabas’ feelings, in this or any other matter, consist of pity for himself, but there is a trace of sympathy for Megan in there someplace, probably.
Now, Barnabas has taken Julia to a spot that he happened upon while looking for Megan. While Julia was in the carriage house on the estate with matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Barnabas saw two women who looked and sounded exactly like them in a brightly lit, fully furnished, heavily decorated room behind a pair of doors in the otherwise dark and empty east wing. Julia’s double was wearing a French maid outfit and giving orders to Liz’, which is probably someone’s fetish but which is totally out of character for the women Barnabas knows.
In #351, Barnabas was without a blood-thrall. Julia offered to guard his coffin during the day. They were not really friends at that point, and he reacted to her offer warily. Among his objections was that it was not suitable for her, as a medical doctor, to fill such a position. She assured him that she was not volunteering “to be your maid.” Longtime viewers might remember that line when they see Parallel Julia in her livery.
There was an invisible barrier in the doorway that Barnabas could not cross, and he was unable to attract the attention of the women who were so near to him, even when he shouted what he supposed to be their names. The doors closed, and when they opened again the barrier was gone, but so were the doubles of Julia and Liz, along with all the furnishings and lights that had surrounded them.
Thinking of what Barnabas has told her about the room, Julia hesitates to enter it with him. She dismisses her concern as “silly.” Regular viewers will perk up at this- labeling a fear as “silly” is the surest way of marking it as the basis of an upcoming major story point. Once inside the bare room, Julia starts thinking out loud:
JULIA: I was at Eliot Stokes’ house one night, oh, last spring. We were having a brandy after dinner and he started talking about time… He was complaining that we all simply accept it. We don’t have much choice, I thought.
But Eliot had been reading a theory. It sounded insane to me. A theory of parallel time… we live on this universe in 1970, right? We accept the fact that our time is the only time that we can truly know. Suppose time is like a road and parallel to it there’s another road. On one we live the lives we know, but on the other road our lives are different because we’re in a different time-band* and we’ve made different choices. For example, in that other band of time I could’ve made a different choice when I was at college. Instead of being a doctor I could’ve married and had children.
Barnabas, you don’t actually think through some warp in the time band that you have actually seen us living other lives?
BARNABAS: I don’t know, there’s got to be a more rational explanation.
JULIA: Must there?
So, now we know that we are about to launch a new kind of time travel story. The show has taken us back in time for long costume drama inserts, most notably from November 1967 to March 1968 when it was set in the 1790s and from March to November 1969 when it was set in 1897. Now they are going to travel sideways in time, and take us to a parallel universe where Julia is a maid and Liz is not the lady of the house.
At the end of the episode, Barnabas sees the room change again. Parallel Time Liz and Parallel Time Julia uncover a portrait that hangs there, the portrait of a woman whom PT Liz insists is dead and PT Julia insists is still the rightful mistress of the room. Barnabas recognizes the subject as the Parallel Time counterpart of his ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique.
With this, the behavior of PT Liz and PT Julia falls into place. We’re about to see a story derived from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. PT Julia is Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper maniacally devoted to Rebecca, the late wife of Maxim de Winter. PT Angelique is the one whose death and continued ownership of the room have been a point of contention between PT Julia and PT Liz. We’ve seen a photograph of Parallel Time counterparts of Barnabas’ distant cousin Quentin Collins and strange and troubled boy David Collins, signed “Your loving husband, Quentin.” PT Quentin is the one whom we have heard Liz say is returning with a new wife. In the main “time-band,” Quentin is a penniless rogue with a long supernatural backstory, but his counterpart is the master of Collinwood, and Liz ranks somewhere below the uniformed domestics in the household hierarchy. The David we know is the son of Liz’ brother Roger and a blonde fire witch named Laura Murdoch, but evidently his Parallel Time counterpart is the son of the counterparts of Quentin and Angelique. We have had no indication of who Quentin’s new wife is to be.
This is not the first reference to Rebecca on the show. When Clarice Blackburn joined the cast as housekeeper Mrs Johnson in September 1966, she was supposed to model the character on Mrs Danvers. Mrs Johnson came to Collinwood as a spy for Collins family nemesis Burke Devlin, driven by her certainty that Roger was responsible for the death of her beloved former employer Bill Malloy. Bill, like Rebecca, had drowned under suspicious circumstances, though he didn’t have much else in common with her. By the time the “Death of Bill Malloy” story played out, Mrs Johnson had taken on a new function as an inveterate gossip who made narrative progression possible by blabbing everything she knew to everyone she met. Blackburn’s outstanding talents made her a significant part of the show for quite some time; it’s a shame she isn’t going to be part of the upcoming segment.
Rebecca was not the only Du Maurier novel to inspire a story on Dark Shadows. Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis first freed Barnabas to prey upon the living after David and Mrs Johnson told him the plot of Du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek and claimed that it happened to one of the Collins ancestors. Searching for the treasure the pirate gave to the lady, Willie stumbled upon Barnabas’ coffin. He opened it, earning a bite that made him the vampire’s slave.
Willie’s mistake was that he did not know what kind of show he was on. When Dark Shadows began, executive producer Dan Curtis and ABC vice president for daytime programming Leonard Goldberg** meant for it to be the television equivalent of the “Gothic romance” novels that were so popular in those days. Du Maurier’s novels were among the cornerstones of the Gothic romance genre, and if it were still that kind of show in April 1967 Willie would have been on solid ground in his expectation that there might be a lot of jewels hidden in an unmarked coffin in the old mausoleum. But when Laura was on the show from December 1966 to March 1967, her story subsumed all the major plot threads into a tale of the supernatural. Willie and his sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, were on the show as in-betweeners to sweep up the last non-paranormal odds and ends and help introduce the next uncanny menace.
Now, the show is heading in the opposite direction, and Willie is back to help take us there. In Parallel Time, Dark Shadows will finally do the Daphne Du Maurier adaptation that didn’t work out in the Bill Malloy story and that was never meant to work out for Willie. But Megan has to be destroyed before Barnabas can decamp for Parallel Time, and he and Julia order Willie to destroy her.
It was not a foregone conclusion that Julia and Barnabas would want to stake Megan. At the moment, Julia is giving Barnabas injections meant to relieve him of the effects of the vampire curse. Similar injections had worked in 1968 and again during the 1897 segment. Julia shows Barnabas the cross she wears to ward Megan off, and he does not recoil from it. That suggests the injections are having some effect on him, even though he keeps complaining that they aren’t doing anything to curb his bloodlust. When Julia and Barnabas find Megan in the east wing, she refuses the injections. When they find that she is feeding on Roger, they conclude that she cannot be allowed to see another night.
Willie is horrified by the command to drive a stake through Megan’s heart. He protests that he doesn’t even know her. As Barnabas and Julia tell him of the nightmare that awaits everyone if he doesn’t do as they say, he starts to talk about his fiancée Roxanne and the secrets he has been keeping from her. He worries about the image she will have of him if she finds out that he is the former blood-thrall of one vampire and the destroyer of another. “I mean, she’s gonna be thinkin’ I’m weird or somethin’!” I suppose that would be an occupational hazard for blood-thralls.
Willie is worried Roxanne might get the wrong idea about him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
There is an odd moment when Julia is asking Liz about the east wing. Liz tells her that Roger knows more about the legends of the house than she does. When Julia was first on the show, she was posing as an historian looking into the old families of New England. In those days, Liz mentioned that Roger knew far less about the Collins past than she did, which fit with the original keynote of Roger’s character, an extreme lack of family feeling. But by this point, Roger has merged with the roles Louis Edmonds played in the 1790s and 1897 segments, both of whom were dedicated to the honor of the Collins name.
*The first appearance of this bit of Collinsport English.
**Not to be confused with his then-boss, network president Leonard Goldenson.
