In October 1897, sorcerer Count Petofi has hijacked the body of Quentin Collins and banished Quentin to his own aging form. I call the villainous Petofi played by David Selby Q-Petofi, and the forlorn Quentin played by Thayer David P-Quentin.
P-QuentinQ-Petofi
Today, wicked witch Angelique explains to P-Quentin how she and mad scientist Julia Hoffman cured time-traveler Barnabas Collins of vampirism, created a Doppelgänger of Barnabas, and used that Doppelgänger to persuade Quentin’s family in the great house of Collinwood that Barnabas never really was a vampire. Later, artist Charles Delaware Tate mistakes P-Quentin for Petofi, and tries to kill him. Q-Petofi then enters and takes control of Tate, using him for a project of his own.
Petofi stripped Angelique of her powers in #865, and deprived Tate of his ability to paint in #851. Angelique has been such an important part of the show for so long that regular viewers are confident she will be back eventually, but the 1897 segment seems to be lurching towards its close, and after her last exit there was no urgent reason in the story for her to come back. It’s good to see that she is still part of this arc.
Tate’s continued presence is rather less good news. Like all characters played by Roger Davis, he has an obnoxious personality and a grating voice, with a disturbing habit of invading his scene partners’ personal space. Today, he keeps grabbing at Q-Petofi’s coat while Q-Petofi bats him away; this is so irritating that it is unclear whether the line “You’ve got trouble with your hands” was scripted for Q-Petofi or ad libbed by David Selby.
For the last couple of weeks, we have had grounds for hope that Tate would just go away. When he sold the portrait of the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris in #864, he lost his last connection to an ongoing plot point. We saw in that same scene that he had a lot of paintings he could sell for high prices if he took them back to New York or another major city. We also know that he has no friends or potential sources of income in the small town of Collinsport. So evidently he is just sticking around to punish the audience for watching the show.
Rakish libertine Quentin Collins races to the train station to meet his fiancée, the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris. He thinks he sees her, but it is actually another young woman wearing a remarkably similar outfit. She tells him the train to New York City left a few minutes ago; Quentin knows Amanda was on it, and that she thinks his absence means that their relationship is over. The young woman was quite miffed when Quentin first approached her, but by the time he offers his second apology her look has gone from indignant to concerned to yearning. The guy’s got game, you have to grant him that.
It’s been less than a minute since he made a bad first impression on her, and she’s ready to run off with him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Quentin was detained by a fistfight with a repulsive little man called Charles Delaware Tate. Tate is an artist whose works sometimes have magical powers. His portrait of Quentin, for example, keeps Quentin from turning into a werewolf and ensures him against physical harm. Since Tate is obsessed with Amanda, he stole the portrait from Quentin when he learned Amanda was planning to leave with him. Quentin dared not leave without it, and went to Tate’s studio to demand its return. He very satisfyingly beat Tate senseless, but he did not find the portrait, and now he fears he has lost Amanda forever.
We cut to Tate’s studio. Tate is lying on the floor where he fell when Quentin finished hitting him. Unfortunately, he gets up. Sorcerer Count Petofi, who granted Tate the power to make magical artworks some years ago, enters. He tells Tate that it was stupid to steal Quentin’s portrait. Tate pretends not to know what Petofi is talking about, irritating him and us. Petofi says that he will have to be punished. After he forces Tate to draw a sketch of a pretty woman, he squeezes his wrists, helps himself to Quentin’s portrait, and says what sounds very much like a final goodbye. He exits, and Tate sits down with his pad and pencil. He discovers that he is no longer able to draw, not even a straight line.
These days, Dark Shadows is a costume drama set in 1897. Most of the time between 1966 and 1968, it took place in a contemporary setting. In those days, the set now used as Tate’s studio was the Evans cottage, home to artist Sam Evans, a drunken sad sack, and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. In December of 1966 and January of 1967, the ghost of the gracious Josette compelled Sam to paint alarming images of Laura Murdoch Collins.
It turned out Josette was doing this because she knew the characters were not all that bright and she had to literally paint them a picture to explain that Laura was an undead fire witch bent on incinerating her young son David. Laura tried to thwart Josette’s plan by harming Sam. In #146, Laura caused a fire at the Evans cottage that burned Sam’s hands, temporarily depriving him of the ability to paint. Petofi’s disabling of Tate on the same set will bring this incident back to longtime viewers. Especially so, since Josette is in the air at this point in the show. In #844, a character named Kitty joined the cast. She keeps having mental flashbacks to things only Josette would remember, and Josette’s music box appeared on Kitty’s table at a time when Josette’s ghost seemed to be the likeliest agency to have put it there. Perhaps she will insert herself into Tate’s story for some reason.
When we were watching the scene between Tate and Petofi, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that she very much wished someone else were playing Tate. Violet Welles’ script gives whoever is playing Tate a lot of opportunity to show what he can do in that scene. Roger Davis is a highly trained actor who has a long list of stage and screen credits, but he is almost always very unpleasant to watch on Dark Shadows, and he wastes the potentially fascinating dialogue Welles gave him. When Mr Davis is particularly trying, I usually try to make the scenes bearable by imagining what Frederic Forrest, who was a featured background player in #137, would have done in his place. But the echo of the story about Sam makes me wonder what David Ford would have done as Tate. Ford was in his forties, smallish and pudgy, so a David Ford Tate could not believably have had a fistfight with a character played by the very tall and fit 28 year old David Selby. But he might have been a subtle enough villain that such an exchange would not have been called for. Moreover, the incestuous undertone of Tate’s desire for Amanda, who is the product of one of his magical paintings and therefore a kind of daughter to him, would have been all the more disturbing had Tate been played by the man we knew as Maggie’s father in the 1960s and, when the show was set in the 1790s, as Josette’s.
Back home at the great house of Collinwood, Quentin receives a visit from Tim Shaw, Amanda’s ex and a would-be sleazy operator. He demands Tim tell him what he knows about Amanda’s life in New York before they came to Collinwood. Tim declares he will tell him nothing, to which Quentin responds by choking him and flinging him to the floor. Tim then burbles out everything he knows, which turns out to be nothing of the slightest use. Quentin picks Tim up and throws him out the front door in the most humiliating possible way. We cheer this on almost as joyously as we cheered Quentin’s beating of Tate Friday, but for the opposite reason. Mr Davis is a genuinely disagreeable person who ruins episode after episode, and it was him we were angry with. We chanted at the screen, not “Quen-tin! Quen-tin! Quen-tin!,” but “Da-vid! Da-vid! Da-vid!” hoping Mr Selby would pay him back for all his on-screen assaults on the women and children in the cast. But Don Briscoe was as nice a guy as Tim has become despicable, and he and Mr Selby enjoyed working together. You can see Briscoe’s joy in performance in the way he holds on to a little yellow piece of paper representing a note from Amanda all through the beating Quentin administers. Even the shot of Quentin shoving Tim out with his buttocks prominent is the product of Briscoe’s enthusiastic use of his body to demonstrate Tim’s total defeat.
Quentin’s other fiancée, wicked witch Angelique, comes downstairs to ask what the ruckus was about. Quentin makes up a transparent lie about having a financial interest in some firm in Boston, and says that he and Tim were quarreling about the details of it. Angelique lets him go on with this for a while and to say that he is leaving for Boston, then insists that they set a date for their wedding. He begs off, claiming not to know how long he will be away.
Petofi enters, and tells Angelique about Quentin’s plan to go to New York and look for Amanda. He also tells her that they now have a common cause, and proposes an alliance. Each of them is so powerful, and so evil, that this is a sobering prospect.
When Quentin returns to the foyer, it is his turn to be alone with Petofi. Quentin knows that Petofi gave Tate both the power to create the portrait that freed him of his curse and the commission to do so, and that he is therefore beholden to Petofi for his continued humanity. Part of his motivation for fleeing to New York with Amanda was his hope that he could escape the slavery Petofi has imposed on him as the price of that benefice. When Petofi tells Quentin he has come to see him before he goes, Quentin is momentarily stunned, and then makes a brave little noise to the effect that Petofi can’t stop him. Petofi assures him that he does not want to stop him. It doesn’t matter in the least to him where Quentin is- he can control him from anywhere.
Petofi calls on Tim at his room in the inn. He deepens Tim’s misery by pretending he doesn’t believe what Tim told him about Tate’s magical powers. As he leaves, he takes a brooch that belonged to Amanda.
Quentin is at the train station. Angelique appears there, and tells him not to go. He says that he doesn’t care if she kills him. It will be consolation enough to have died walking away from her. She says that she will not harm him in any way. This causes him to open his eyes wide in terror as it dawns on him what she means. She produces Amanda’s brooch and a doll. She positions the pin of the brooch over the doll’s chest and says that no matter where Amanda is, she will die a horrible death when the pin impales the doll.
Closing Miscellany
The actress who plays the young woman Quentin meets at the train station is billed in the credits as “Amy Yaekerson,” the only person known to Google ever to be called “Yaekerson” and known only for this appearance. But in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, a commenter known as “miles” pointed out that there are lots of people named “Yakerson.” He went on to identify an Amy Yakerson born in New York City on 1 April 1946, and to find a 1966 notice of a play featuring an actress of that name and probably of that age in the New York Daily News. I followed that up with some Googling of my own; the only Amy Yakerson I can find who is online today was born in Connecticut in 1954, so I don’t know where Amy Yakerson, star of stage and screen, is now.
We saw some of Sam’s paintings in Tate’s studio Friday and today, twenty-some years before Sam was born. Tate hides the portrait of Quentin behind one of Sam’s seascapes, and Sam’s portrait of Maggie’s mother is on the floor next to him when we see him lying there in the aftermath of the fight. John and Christine Scoleri have the details in their post about Friday’s episode at Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The year is 1897, and the mythological world described by the ancient Greeks seems very far away. The story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who loved a statue he had made depicting an imaginary woman so intensely that it came to life, answered to the name “Galatea,” and returned his affections, is no exception to that feeling of distance. But here is the lovely Amanda Harris, who used to wonder why she had total amnesia, but now knows that the reason she cannot remember anything prior to two years ago is that she didn’t exist before then. She popped into being when a painter named Charles Delaware Tate made a portrait of his ideal woman.
Tate told her about this and told her that he loved her, but Amanda, unlike Galatea, has no desire for her creator. Perhaps this is because his personality is absolutely intolerable, a common attribute of characters played by Roger Davis. Nor is she interested in Tim Shaw, who brought her to Collinsport to take part in a scam he wanted to run on his old enemies and abandoned her in Tate’s house once he learned of Tate’s powers and thought he saw a way to make more money than his original plan was likely to yield. Instead, she is in love with rakish libertine Quentin Collins. Quentin has asked Amanda to run away with him and get married, and she agrees.
Quentin is trying to control Amanda too, but at least he isn’t a total jerk about it like those other two guys. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Tim and Tate take turns intruding into Amanda’s room and telling her ugly things. Tate snarls at her that she belongs to him because he created her. This claim of ownership would be nasty however it was made, but Mr Davis’ gratingly unpleasant voice makes it truly nauseating to hear. Tim tells her that she isn’t really human, because if she is like another person Tate created she might die if someone shoots her. By that standard humans are extremely rare, but Tim goes on to explain that the man Tate created and then gunned down in cold blood while Tim watched vanished into thin air as soon as he died. So what he means is that Amanda will never be a corpse. In the context of Dark Shadows, a show that is so largely about the reanimation of the dead, this actually makes sense.
Quentin was cursed to be a werewolf, but was freed of the effects of that curse when Tate painted his portrait. When the Moon is full nowadays, the portrait changes, while Quentin himself stays the same. To extort Quentin into leaving Amanda to him, Tate steals the portrait. He tells himself that, if need be, he will destroy the portrait. If Quentin and Amanda stick with their plan of running as far away as possible very soon, they will know nothing about what Tate has done until the night of the next full Moon, when Quentin will turn into the werewolf, kill Amanda, and wake up covered in her blood. I suppose that would meet Tate’s objective of punishing Quentin, but it doesn’t fit very well with his professed belief that he loves Amanda.
This night in 1897, Beth Chavez has lost both her job as a maid in the great house on the estate of Collinwood and her hopes of marrying rakish libertine Quentin Collins. She goes to the lair of sorcerer Count Petofi and volunteers to work for him. Petofi makes it clear that the position Beth is applying for is that of slave. She accepts without hesitation, and he has her do some mumbo-jumbo on his behalf.
This story point would make sense if Beth were a deeply dependent person who couldn’t imagine life without Quentin or her old job. But we’ve known Beth for months and months, and this is the first we’ve heard that she is like that. Terrayne Crawford’s acting ability was limited to embodying one feeling at a time, and in no scene was she assigned to demonstrate “corrosive sense of personal incompleteness.” So we know she is hung up on Quentin and we know she likes her job, but we also know that as one event follows another she responds with the emotion we would expect a level-headed person to have. Even when she got carried away the other day and tried to shoot Quentin, it didn’t seem to be a sign of mental breakdown. After Petofi showed up and stopped her, he pointed out that the way Quentin treats women, it is a marvel that none of them had tried to kill him before. If anything, her attempt on Quentin’s life suggested Beth has enough strength of character to leave Collinsport and make a fresh start.
Tate and the Creatures
For much of 1968, when Dark Shadows was in a contemporary setting, Roger Davis played a man named Peter Bradford who very loudly insisted that everyone call him Jeff Clark. Peter/ Jeff had no memory of his life more than a year or two before the present. Well-meaning governess Vicki knew that Peter/ Jeff had lived in the 1790s, and his shouting about his preferred name often came in response to Vicki’s attempts to tell him what she knew. Peter/ Jeff was convinced that if there were something supernatural about him, he would be incapable of loving anyone or of being loved.
Peter/ Jeff spent most of 1968 entangled with the story of Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Peter/ Jeff had assisted mad scientist Eric Lang in digging up the corpses from which Lang assembled Adam’s body. After Lang’s death, another mad scientist, Julia Hoffman, completed his work, attaching the body of recovering vampire Barnabas Collins to the body to provide the “life force.”
Mad scientists and vampires are two metaphors for extreme selfishness, so it was no surprise that Julia and Barnabas were the worst parents the newborn Adam could possibly have had. Within an hour of Adam’s awakening, Barnabas had loaded a gun and was on his way to kill him. When he relented from that plan, he and Julia took Adam to the prison cell in the basement of Barnabas’ house, where they locked his ankle in a fetter chained to the wall. They kept him within the blank walls of that cell for weeks on end, giving him nothing to play with, nothing to learn from, and nothing soft to touch. Nor did they ever allow him human contact for more than a few minutes at a time. They delegated Adam’s feeding to Barnabas’ servant Willie, who taunted him cruelly. Unsurprisingly, when Adam escaped from the cell he was rough with everyone he met, and when he found someone he liked he abducted her and found a place to lock her up. That was the only form of human interaction the big guy had ever known.
Now, the show is set in 1897, and Mr Davis plays artist Charles Delaware Tate. Tate combines the most disagreeable elements of all the characters involved in the story of Adam. Like Lang and Julia, he has the power to bring people to life without the usual processes of reproduction and growth. In his case, he simply draws or paints someone, and they pop into existence. He did that two years ago, in 1895, with a beautiful young woman he had imagined. He made a sketch and then a painting, and suddenly there she was, walking along a sidewalk in New York City. She took the name Amanda Harris, and has recently made her way to Collinsport.
Tate wasn’t there to see Amanda’s instantiation. But he recognized her when he did see her, and he has since drawn some inanimate objects that he saw come into being. So he figured out what Amanda’s origin must have been, and he has been shouting at her about it for a while. As Peter/ Jeff did not want to believe Vicki when she told him he was not native to the twentieth century, so Amanda does not want to believe Tate when he tells her that she came into being in the way that, in Greek myth, Pygmalion brought the lovely Galatea to life. But yesterday Amanda went to Tate’s studio, and he drew an imaginary man. That man appeared while Amanda watched.
We open today in Tate’s studio. Amanda is gone, and Tate is screaming at the man and declaring that he will kill him. The man is just standing there- he is fully grown, apparently in his mid-twenties, but in reality he is only a few minutes old. He doesn’t seem to be able to talk. He reacts to Tate’s extreme hostility with bafflement.
Tate rips up the drawing, and is disappointed the man does not die. A knock comes at the door. He shoves the man in the closet and locks him in there. Within moments, he reenacts Barnabas’ attempt to shoot Adam and his confinement of Adam to the cell. Tate had not been written as especially evil before this, but now he takes his place among Dark Shadows‘ cruelest villains. We may wonder if the character would have been developed differently had he not been played by the bombastic Mr Davis. Perhaps if the writers had been scripting a role for a more pleasant actor, they could have let Tate be a relatively nice guy.
Tate opens the door. Amanda is there, standing behind her traveling companion and sometime partner-in-crime, adventurer Tim Shaw. Amanda has told Tim what Tate did, and Tim demands to see the man. Tim sees the closet doorknob turning, and insists Tate unlock it. Tate at first denies that he has a key, but Tim pulls a gun and forces him to comply. In his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn has a funny bit about this moment:
Now, if life was like a Tex Avery cartoon, and I think we can all agree that it should be, then Tate’s next move would be to grab his sketchpad and draw an even bigger gun. Then Tim would reach into his pocket and pull out a machine gun, and Tate would draw a rocket launcher, and we could go back and forth like that until somebody pushes down on a plunger detonator, and there’s an explosion that cracks the Earth in two. That would be a good scene.
Danny Horn, “Episode 843: I Can Make You a Man,” posted to Dark Shadows Every Day, 19 March 2016.
As it is, Tate just hands over the key. Tim unlocks the door, finds the man, and loses all interest in Amanda. He tells Tate that he is sure he will take good care of Amanda as he leaves with the man.
Tate shouts at Amanda and grabs various parts of her body, adjusting their position as if she were an action figure. He’s hollering something about love when she pulls away from him and declares that, as an unnatural creature, she can neither love nor be loved. Again, longtime viewers remember Mr Davis as Peter/ Jeff, yelling the same sentiment. But Amanda goes further than Peter/ Jeff ever did with the affable Vicki. She says that can hate, and that she hates him very cordially indeed.
In his hotel room, Tim is trying to coax the man Tate created into speaking. The man tries to make a sound, but fails. Tate himself comes barging in. He has a gun, and points it at the camera. He announces that the man will never speak, because he is going to murder him forthwith.
In the comments section of Danny’s post, I left a long comment which is I suppose a first draft of this post. You can read it there.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has traveled back in time to the year 1897 to help her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins. Julia has fallen into the clutches of sorcerer Count Petofi and is bound and gagged in Petofi’s lair. A loaded revolver is tied to the doorknob, rigged to fire a round through her heart when the door opens.
Barnabas has learned where Julia is, but not about the death-trap in which she is ensconced. He storms into the building, turns the doorknob, and thereby discharges the gun. He sees Julia slumped over in her chair, and shouts at Petofi’s henchman that he will kill him. He then goes to Julia and finds that she is alive. There is a bullet-hole through the back of her chair, but she herself is unharmed.
Julia declares that there is only one explanation for this phenomenon that makes sense. Considering the kinds of stories that play out on Dark Shadows, we would think that an explanation that makes sense would be the one we could discard immediately, but Julia plows ahead. When she traveled back in time, only her “astral body” made the trip. Her physical body is still in 1969. For his part, Barnabas had a body in 1897, trapped in a sealed coffin. That body is hosting his personality, which is why he is subject to physical injury. But Julia is in no danger. When she later says that she can disregard Petofi’s threats, Barnabas says that if he finds out the truth, Petofi will just find another way to immobilize her, so she has to lie low.
Petofi is so powerful that Barnabas does not believe that he and Julia can fight him by themselves. So he tells Julia to summon wicked witch Angelique. Barnabas and Angelique have been enemies for centuries, but he thinks they have a common cause now. Angelique is determined to marry his cousin Quentin, whom he has befriended and Petofi has enslaved. So Barnabas expects she will agree to help fight Petofi.
Angelique does come in response to Julia’s message. She remembers Julia from time she herself spent in the 1960s, and is shocked to find her in 1897. Julia refuses to explain how she made her way back in time. She says that if Angelique can come to 1897 from 1968, she oughtn’t to be surprised she has come there from 1969. Angelique responds that Julia is not like herself and Barnabas. “I’m human,” says Julia. Since she is separated from her proper body, she isn’t fully human, not at the moment, but she still takes evident satisfaction in applying the label to herself. This marks a contrast with Angelique, who was offended earlier in the episode when Petofi laughed and taunted her for being “so human.” Julia and Angelique then snipe at each other about their respective relationships to Barnabas.
Julia says that it is essential Barnabas should “complete his mission” and solve the problems they were facing in 1969. Angelique responds that he will never be able to do that, because he has changed history too much in the time he has spent in 1897. This remark is intriguing for regular viewers. Barnabas’ six months of bungling around, picking fights, and committing murders must have had major consequences for what came after. That gives the show two ways forward. When Barnabas and Julia go back to a contemporary setting, they might meet an entirely different cast of characters and have to find a place for themselves in an alternate universe. Or they might do what they did when the show’s first time-travel story ended in March 1968, and dramatize the force of the Collins family’s propensity for denial. The head of the family in the 1790s decided to compel everyone in and around the village of Collinsport to pretend that none of the events we had seen had ever taken place, and when the costume drama segment ended we found that he had made that pretense stick ever since.
After Julia points out that it is to her advantage to emancipate Quentin from his bondage to Petofi, Angelique agrees to help. She still will not answer Julia’s questions. After she leaves the room, Julia looks in the mirror, sees an image of Angelique, and says that now she understands what she is going to do and believes it will work. That puts her one up on the audience.
The scene pairs Julia and Angelique as two women whose lives have been shaped by their pursuit of Barnabas. Their bickering makes this similarity explicit. When Julia looks in the mirror and sees Angelique, they put very heavy emphasis on the similarity. In a brilliant, but now inaccessible, post on the great Collinsport Historical Society,* Wallace McBride wrote that “On Dark Shadows, your reflection always tells the truth.” He demonstrated that on the show, reflections are very strongly coded as true, so much so that they must be making a serious statement when they give us an image like this one. They are committing to the idea that Julia is, in some important way, the same as Angelique.
There are also a couple of scenes featuring the repulsive Roger Davis as artist Charles Delaware Tate. Mr Davis is especially hard to take in a scene with Donna McKechnie as the mysterious Amanda Harris. Miss McKechnie had already done outstanding work on Broadway as a singer and dancer by this time, but she felt herself to be a beginner as an actress, and she could not conceal her discomfort when Mr Davis shouted his lines. The 4:3 aspect ratio of old-time American television meant that the performers spent much of their time only a few inches from each other, and when Mr Davis yells in Miss McKechnie’s ear, she winces. He clutches at her arm, and she recoils; before she can relax from that invasion of her space, he slams down on a table, making a loud noise and causing her to jump.
Mr Davis’ incessant shouting will bring back memories for viewers who have been with the show from the beginning. The scene takes place on a set which is known in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s as the Evans Cottage. The Evans Cottage was home to drunken sad-sack Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Sam, like Tate, was an artist, and the artworks scattered around the set in the 1897 segment remind us of the cottage’s iconography.
The first seven times we saw Sam, between #5 and #22, he was played by an actor called Mark Allen. Like Mr Davis, Allen had considerable training as an actor and a long resume of stage and screen appearances. Also like him, he is just terrible. Mr Davis did have extensive skills and could on occasion give nuanced performances, though he rarely chose to do so. He much preferred spending his time roughing up the women and children in the cast.
But Allen never once did a good job of acting. In each of his episodes, he either shouted every line with the same ear-splitting bellow, or whined every line in the same putrid snivel. Allen didn’t assault his scene partners on camera, as Mr Davis routinely did, though Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played Maggie, has made it clear that she did not feel safe in scenes where they embraced. Moreover, in some corners of fandom there are persistent rumors about abusive behavior off-camera that led to Allen’s dismissal. People claim to have heard remarks cast members and others associated with the show let drop at Dark Shadows conventions over the years, and from those remarks they come to some alarming conclusions about what Allen did behind the scenes. Who knows if those conclusions are correct, or if the people who report the remarks even heard them clearly, but Allen was so unpleasant as a screen presence that it is tempting to believe the worst about him.
The point of Tate’s scene with Amanda is that she does not want to believe that she is an artificial being who came to life when he painted a portrait that looked like her. Tate’s success as an artist is the result of magic powers Petofi gave him; he just recently learned that he can make things pop into existence by drawing or painting them. To convince Amanda that he has this power, Tate sketches an imaginary man. She screams, and we see her looking at the man who has come into being.
This seems like a bad choice on Tate’s part. Why not draw an inanimate object instead? If he’d drawn a hat or a gold bar or a gemstone, he could just have given it to Amanda with his compliments. But now he has a 25 year old man whom he is obligated to help make his way in the world. If an inanimate object wasn’t a striking enough image to send the episode out with a dash of spectacle, then Tate could have created a farm animal, such as a donkey or a goat. If Amanda didn’t want such an animal, Tate could just shoo it outside and be confident someone would claim it- Collinsport is supposed to be a tiny town in the middle of a rural area, after all. But for all the irresponsible behavior we’ve come to accept from characters on Dark Shadows, we are not going to be able simply to forget about this human being. They are going to have to do something to account for him.
*A site which has now been taken over by a “crypto-based casino” outfit! You’d be safer at Collinwood.
Artist Charles Delaware Tate goes to the great house of Collinwood, where he interrupts a passionate kiss between handsome rake Quentin Collins and mystery woman Amanda Harris. Quentin is getting pretty serious about Amanda. That is to say, one of his two fiancées tried to kill him the other day, so that engagement is off, leaving him with some free time.
Tate has been commissioned to paint a portrait of Amanda, and he leverages that fact to bully Quentin into leaving him alone with her. Tate goes on a lunatic rant, claiming that he caused Amanda to exist by painting a picture of her two and a half years before, in the spring of 1895. As returning viewers know, this happens to be true, but it sounds preposterous and Tate has no way of getting past Amanda’s instant rejection of it. He doesn’t help his cause when he keeps pawing at her and shouting in her face.
Unclear how much of the reaction is Amanda thinking Tate is a crazy man and how much of it is Donna McKechnie shocked that Roger Davis is groping her breasts on camera. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Amanda runs out of the room. She passes Quentin on the staircase. He asks what Tate did to her; she refuses to talk about it and keeps running. Quentin confronts Tate, who tells him that he will know all about it soon enough, since he, like Tate, is now under the thumb of sorcerer Count Petofi.
Petofi is staying in an abandoned mill nearby. This was originally a hiding place, but virtually everyone on the show has visited him there by now. He may as well move someplace more comfortable. We saw in #813 that the Collinsport Inn already houses the restaurant which was often featured in the first year of the show, when it was set in contemporary times; if he stayed there, at least he’d be able to get something to eat.
Tate calls on Petofi at the old mill. He tests him, and finds that even though Petofi gave him his skills as an artist he does not realize that he conjured up Amanda and that he can do the same with inanimate objects. Regular viewers have already heard Petofi admit to his henchman Aristide that he does not fully understand his own magical powers, and we have seen him attempt tricks that have not worked very well. So, while Petofi is mighty indeed, his powers have some very definite limits. Perhaps Tate will draw Petofi helpless before one of his enemies.
The enemies Petofi most fears are the Rroma people, to whom he always refers as “Gypsies.” He narrowly escaped death at the hands of Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana in #827 and #828. King Johnny had caught up to Petofi and was about to use his sacred scimitar on him when Aristide threw a knife and got him in the back. With his dying breath, King Johnny told Petofi that another Rroma would be along soon.
Petofi thinks he has hit upon the perfect means of escaping from the Rroma. He has learned that vampire Barnabas Collins traveled to 1897 from the year 1969, and now Barnabas’ friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, has followed him. Petofi is convinced Barnabas must have known what he was doing, and that he must have a means of returning to the future. But regular viewers know that Barnabas never knows what he is doing. He stumbled into the past while trying to do something else, and hasn’t the faintest clue how to get back to the 1960s. He has told Petofi as much, and Petofi flatly refused to believe him.
Petofi has Julia in custody. He forces her to tell him that she and Barnabas both traveled back in time using the I Ching. Barnabas cast a particular hexagram, meditated on it, and found himself in 1897. The wands were still in place some time later, and Julia meditated on them with the same result.
Petofi goes to Collinwood and visits Quentin in his room. He knows that Quentin has a set of I Ching wands, the very set Barnabas and Julia used to make their journeys, and he wants to borrow them on the assumption that while meditating on them he will be able to will himself into the 1960s.
Quentin is unhappy to see Petofi. As Tate said, Quentin is under Petofi’s control. Petofi forced him to reveal Barnabas’ hiding place; that’s how he was able to abduct Julia. Quentin rails against the injustice of all this, and declares that he won’t do any more favors for Petofi. But Petofi tells him that he is his slave now. Petofi gloats that while Quentin hasn’t always been a slave, he himself has always been a master. Quentin winds up telling him where the wands are.
Back in the old mill, Julia gives Petofi some pointers about the I Ching. She reads from the Book of Changes, and when she gets to a part that makes it clear it is not a tool that can be used to gain control of anything, he angrily orders her to stop. He casts the wands, meditates on them, and his “astral body” passes through a door. The door leads to a chamber where he sees a hand raising the scimitar King Johnny had wielded.
In Dark Shadows #1, set in 1966, two people came to Collinsport, Maine. They were the well-meaning Vicki Winters and dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Vicki had taken a job as the governess in the great house of Collinwood, hoping that she would find the answers to questions she had about her own mysterious origins. Those questions had left her feeling that she knew nothing about herself.
Burke was a working class boy from Collinsport who had gone to New York City five years before, fresh out of prison and penniless. By 1966 he was a corporate raider, a millionaire many times over. He came back to his hometown because he wanted revenge on high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, who used Burke’s car to kill someone while Burke was passed out drunk in the backseat, then persuaded the court that Burke was solely responsible for the homicide. Burke and Vicki ultimately became a couple, but for some months Burke strung Roger’s niece Carolyn along and used her to cause trouble for the Collinses.
Now the show is set in 1897, and Burke and Vicki are both long gone. Carolyn and Roger are waiting for us when the show returns to contemporary dress, and the actors who play them are in the cast in other roles. But we’ve been reminded of Burke recently. Tim Shaw is a working class boy from Collinsport who, after spending time as a teacher at a miserable boarding school run by the evil Rev’d Gregory Trask, was chosen by Trask to take the fall for the murder of his wife, Minerva Trask. As Burke was physically present but mentally compromised at the killing for which he went to prison, so Tim was present at the killing of Minerva, but not in his right mind. The show is about the supernatural now, so it was a magic spell, not booze, that kept Tim from knowing what was going on when he poisoned Minerva. And the pace is too fast for arrests and trials, so Trask’s plan went wrong and he had to tell the police Tim wasn’t guilty after all. So Tim went straight to New York, and just a few weeks later came back to Collinsport, very rich and out for revenge.
Like Burke, Tim arrives in Collinsport with a woman. Unlike Vicki, Amanda Harris knew Tim before they got on the train. But we learn today that Amanda, like Vicki, is tormented by her ignorance of her own background. Again, the starker palette in which the show draws its stories at this period means that instead of not knowing who her birth parents were, Amanda has no memories at all prior to two years ago.
Amanda first appeared as a hardboiled operator who was attached, not to Tim, but to his money, and who gave him expert assistance in the con game he was running on Trask. As Tim was an elaboration on Don Briscoe’s W. C. Fields’ imitation, Amanda was a nod to Mae West. But the show has decided to make Amanda a long-term addition to the cast, and they already have an all-villain cast. So they soften Amanda’s edges. We see her packing her bags and telling Tim she is going to leave because he doesn’t really care about her and she can’t stand what she is doing with Trask. When she complains that Tim is just using her, she echoes speeches Carolyn made after her bitter realization about Burke’s true intentions. Now that her relationship to Tim mirrors both Vicki and Carolyn’s relationships to Burke, Amanda can inherit the goodwill longtime viewers have towards both of those characters.
To Have Something I Can Believe In
Tim’s sudden wealth came from his possession of a magical object, The Hand of Count Petofi. When Amanda first heard of the Hand, she asked if it was a piece of jewelry or some other kind of artifact. It did not occur to her that it was literally the severed hand of a Hungarian nobleman. This gruesome thing had been cut a century before, in 1797, by nine Rroma men, and had ever since been in the custody of the leader of their tribe.
In #778, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi returned to her home in the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. She had gone to Boston, where King Johnny Romana, possessor of the Hand, was staying with his caravan. She had pleaded with King Johnny to help her remove a curse she had placed that made rakish libertine Quentin Collins and all his male descendants into werewolves. Magda had not known when she placed the curse that Quentin was the father of her sister Jenny’s children. She hoped that King Johnny would take pity on the Rroma children and use the Hand to end the curse. When he did not, she stole it, intending to use its powers herself. Magda soon found that the Hand did no one’s bidding. It helped some people, hurt others, and was stolen by each of a long series of scheming characters.
After Tim brought the Hand back to Collinsport, it was stolen again. This time, the thief turned out to be none other than Count Petofi himself, 150 years old and on the point of death. Once he had the Hand back, it reattached itself to his wrist and he regained his health.
Petofi has some sort of plans for Quentin. He has retained one of his minions, nationally renowned artist Charles Delaware Tate, to paint a portrait of Quentin. That project is finished, but Tate is still living in a cottage he has rented in Collinsport. Today Petofi visits Tate there.
Petofi finds Tate sketching an imaginary woman, one he has been obsessively drawing and painting for about two years. Petofi sets himself up as Tate’s analyst. “Only little boys invent ideal women,” says he. He has a plan to relieve Tate’s childish fixation. It is another project. If Tate had seen A Chorus Line, he might appreciate Petofi’s theory of work as therapy, as explained in the lyric “Give me a job and you instantly get me involved, if you give me a job then the rest of the crap will get solved.” But that show won’t premiere for another 78 years, so Tate resists.
It doesn’t help that the job Petofi has in mind involves another severed hand. The Rroma are on their way, and they want the Hand back. Petofi, whose magical powers were formidable even when he was one-handed, is much mightier now, but the thought of the Rroma agitates him violently. Evidently they know about some weakness of his that enables them to defeat him. King Johnny and his men don’t know that Petofi is in Collinsport. He has cast a spell to silence Magda, but they won’t leave the area without the Hand. Several people know about Petofi and have no reason to protect him. If the Rroma start asking questions, it won’t be long before they close in. So Petofi has exhumed a recently deceased local man, cut off his right hand, and brought it to Tate for detailing.
Tate owes his talents, and his life, to Petofi, so the outcome of their meeting is never really in doubt. His next encounter does involve a surprise. Amanda comes to Petofi’s hiding place, sent by Tim, and asks for his help. Petofi tells Amanda that Tim has a poor strategic sense. Indeed, Petofi has already told Tim that, lovely as Amanda is, he has no use for her at the present time. But when he sees her face to face, Petofi recognizes her as the imaginary woman in Tate’s pictures.
Returning viewers already know that Tate’s portrait of Quentin takes on the features of a wolf when the Moon is full, so it is no surprise that his works, like several other portraits we have seen on Dark Shadows, have magical powers. When we learn that Tate first painted Amanda two years ago and she has no history prior to that time, we figure out that he inadvertently used those powers to conjure her into being.
Tate is played by Roger Davis, an unpleasant man who figured as Vicki’s love interest in her last, woefully ill-conceived storyline. In that arc, made and set in 1968, Mr Davis’ part was variously known as Peter Bradford and Jeff Clark. He had amnesia, and Vicki kept trying to help him recover memories which would prove to him that he has no roots in the 1960s, but that he is an uncanny being who was brought to life by an adventure she had outside the bounds of space and time. Once we recognize what they are suggesting about Amanda’s origin, longtime viewers might expect an inversion of that story, with Mr Davis playing the person trying to persuade his lover that he accidentally created her by a magical process he himself did not understand.
Somebody to Dance For
While all of this action is taking place downstream of Count Petofi, the person who set in motion the events that first brought Petofi to town is in big trouble. Magda comes home to find King Johnny himself waiting for her. He menaces her, calls her names, and twice hits her in the face very hard.
Ever since Violet Welles joined the writing staff, men have been slapping women quite a bit on Dark Shadows. Welles was by far the best writer of dialogue on the show, but I for one could do without the slapping. Fortunately King Johnny is played by Paul Michael, a well-trained actor; no matter how brutally King Johnny abuses Magda, Grayson Hall is in no danger. One could never say the same of Mr Davis’ screen partners.
King Johnny tells Magda that he will take her back to his caravan in Boston to stand trial for the death of Julianka, a Rroma maiden whom he sent to kill her some weeks ago. Since Magda cannot say Petofi’s name, she cannot tell King Johnny that it was he who killed Julianka. Magda is terrified of the trial, and King Johnny tells her that there is a way she can avoid it. If she does not give him the Hand, he will slit her throat immediately.
King Johnny searches the house, and does not find the Hand. He is about to carry out his promise to kill Magda when he sees the wooden box in which the Hand was long kept lying on the floor. He opens it. What he sees inside resembles the Hand closely enough to convince him, and keep Magda alive for another day. Clever as she has been so far, we may wonder how many days are left for her. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around to throw Magda a rope to grab onto.
From #1 to #274, each episode of Dark Shadows began with a voiceover narration by Alexandra Moltke Isles, usually in character as well-meaning governess Vicki. This identified Vicki with our point of view and suggested that she would sooner or later learn everything we knew.
Jonathan Frid joined the cast as vampire Barnabas Collins in #211, and quickly became the show’s great breakout star. If the upright Vicki found out what we knew about Barnabas, one of them would have to be destroyed. Vicki was the favorite of longtime viewers and Barnabas was attracting new ones, so that was out of the question. Therefore, other members of the cast started taking turns reading the voiceovers, and doing so not as their characters, but in the role of External Narrator.
Today marks the first time Frid himself reads the narration. His training first in Canada, then at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and later at Yale School of Drama prepared Frid well in the art of dramatic reading, and in later years he would concentrate on that aspect of his craft. Several of his colleagues are his equals in these voiceovers- I would particularly mention Kathryn Leigh Scott, whose conception of The Narrator is always arresting, and Thayer David, who could consistently achieve the most difficult of all effects in voice acting, a perfectly simple reading. So I can’t say I wish Frid had done all of them, but he is always good, and today’s performance is among his most gorgeous.
The action opens on a set known to longtime viewers as the Evans cottage, where from 1966 to 1968 artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie served as Dark Shadows‘ principal representatives of the working class of the village of Collinsport. In those days, it was on this set that we saw how the misdeeds of the ancient and esteemed Collins family had consequences that spilled out of the estate of Collinwood and warped the lives of people trying to make a more or less honest living nearby.
Now the dramatic date is 1897, and Sam hasn’t been born yet. But the cottage is already an artist’s studio. It is temporarily occupied by the nationally famous Charles Delaware Tate, who is painting a portrait of rakish libertine Quentin Collins at the behest of evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Charity Trask, a resident of the great house of Collinwood, is visiting Tate in the cottage when she sees the face in the portrait change from that of Quentin. It takes on a great deal of fur and long fangs, and reminds Charity of a wolf.
By the time Tate looks at the painting again, it has resumed its normal appearance. He tells Charity that the transformation must have been in her imagination. She is willing to consider the possibility, but we know better. Quentin is a werewolf, a condition Petofi knows how to cure. Portraits on Dark Shadows have had supernatural qualities at least since #70, including portraits we saw Sam execute on this set in 1966, 1967, and 1968, and the show has borrowed from The Picture of Dorian Gray before. Moreover, Tate’s reaction to Charity is one of barely controlled panic. Nancy Barrett has to ramp up Charity’s own emotional distress to the limit to make it plausible she would not notice Tate’s extreme agitation. Perhaps if Tate were played by a better actor than the ever-disappointing Roger Davis, his response might have been ambiguous enough that Miss Barrett could keep the tone a bit lower, but his unequivocal display of alarm leaves her nowhere to go but over the top.
Mr Davis was under no obligation to play the scene transparently, since Tate later goes to Petofi’s henchman Aristide and lays out in so many words his precise relationship to Petofi’s operations and his knowledge of them. Tate’s career is his reward for selling his soul to Petofi, and he has already experienced great sorrow as a result of that bargain. Tate knows that the portrait changed to reflect the full Moon’s influence on Quentin and that Petofi is currently in possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins. Aristide tells us that Petofi’s own body is in suspended animation while he acts through Jamison. He also says that it was in 1797 that Petofi’s right hand was cut off, and that if he does not reclaim the hand in a few weeks, by the date of the one hundredth anniversary of the amputation, he will die and so will Tate.
Jamison/ Petofi is in the prison cell in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas has traveled back in time from the 1960s with some vaguely good intentions and is hanging around 1897 causing one disaster after another. Now, he is doing battle with Petofi and has locked him, in the form of Jamison, in the cell. Barnabas’ reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, guards Jamison/ Petofi during the day. Early in the episode, Jamison/ Petofi calls Magda and pleads with her to release him. He tells her that he is “just a little boy” and that she is a “rather heartless creature.” She says she wishes he were a little boy again, but that she isn’t stupid and he won’t fool her. Indeed, the phrase “rather heartless creature” and Jamison/ Petofi’s manner in delivering it sound so much like Thayer David as Petofi that they hardly count as an attempt to deceive Magda.
Later, Jamison/ Petofi casts a spell to summon Aristide, then calls to Magda again. When Magda arrives, Jamison/ Petofi gives himself a better script than the one from which he had acted in his previous scene with her. He pretends not to remember how he got into the cell and to be shocked that Magda knows he is there. Perhaps the utter transparency of his earlier pleadings was an attempt to get Magda to underestimate his abilities as a trickster.
In #803, we saw that when Petofi took possession of him Jamison’s right hand disappeared from his wrist, matching Petofi’s own mutilated condition. When Jamison/ Petofi feigns the amnesia that might come upon recovery from possession, we might therefore expect Magda to demand that he remove his gloves to prove that he is himself again. But he plays the part of Jamison so convincingly that we are not really surprised he does fool Magda. She goes into the cell, embraces Jamison/ Petofi, and he kisses her on the cheek. It is this kiss that spreads his magical power, and she realizes too late that she has been had.
Aristide arrives a moment later, and Jamison/ Petofi calls his portrayal of an innocent boy “an award-winning performance.” Indeed, if there had been daytime Emmys in 1969, David Henesy might have won one for his portrayal of Thayer David playing Petofi playing Jamison.
Aristide wants to kill Magda; Jamison/ Petofi forbids this. Under his power, she announces that she is responsible for all the evil that has happened in 1897. She was responsible for releasing Barnabas and therefore for all the murders and other harm he has done; she made Quentin a werewolf, and is to blame for his killings in his lupine form and for the curse his descendants will inherit; she stole Petofi’s severed hand and is at fault for the deaths of Rroma maiden Julianka and of her own husband Sandor that resulted from the hand’s presence. She even takes the blame for Quentin’s murder of her sister Jenny, the act for which the werewolf curse was meant as vengeance. Magda says she must be punished. Jamison/ Petofi tells her that he is not interested in punishing her. He has another use in mind for Magda She will lead him and Aristide to Barnabas’ coffin today, and they will destroy him.
Longtime viewers will perk up twice when Aristide says that Petofi lost his hand in 1797 and that he has exactly one hundred years to recover it. From December 1966 to March 1967, Dark Shadows’ first supernatural menace was undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who at intervals of exactly one hundred years incinerated herself and a young son of hers, who was always named David, in an unholy ceremony that renewed her existence, but not that of the Davids. Since the usual laws of nature don’t apply, the show needs some other causal mechanism to create suspense, and anniversaries will do as well as anything else. Another iteration of Laura was on earlier in the 1897 segment. It was fun to see her again, but they could shoehorn her into that year only by retconning away the one hundred year pattern in her immolations. It’s reassuring in a way to see that Petofi is bringing centenaries back.
The date 1797 is also significant. It was in 1796 that Barnabas died and became a vampire. We flashed back to that period for the show’s first costume drama segment in November 1967 to March 1968, and Barnabas went back to 1796 for a week in January 1969. So we may go back again some day, and if Petofi was alive and in his prime in 1797, we might run into him there.
Barnabas and Petofi are not the only characters from the 1790s who might be on the minds of attentive longtime viewers. Barnabas’ little sister Sarah died in 1796, and as a ghost was an extremely important part of the show from June to November 1967. We’ve been getting reminders of Sarah for the last several days. In #792 wicked witch Angelique produced a toy soldier of Barnabas’ that Sarah gave to strange and troubled boy David in #331. In #805, Charity found Sarah’s recorder, a prop that often served as Sarah’s calling card in 1967, and talked about learning to play it. And today, we see a portrait standing on the floor of the Evans cottage, a set which Sarah visited in #260, depicting a girl wearing a bonnet very much like the one Sarah wore as a ghost in 1967 and a pink dress just like the one she wore when we saw her as a living being in the flashback to the 1790s.
Portrait at the cottage.
I wonder if, when they were making up the flimsies for this part of the show, they had thought of reintroducing Sarah. That would have required a recasting of the part- Sharon Smyth was noticeably older when we saw Sarah die in January 1968 than she was when Sarah was a ghost in June 1967, and by now we would wonder what she has been eating in the afterlife that has made her get so much taller. Besides, Miss Smyth* had stopped acting by this point.
The process of planning the stories was in two stages, a rough sketching of themes six months in advance, and a capsule of each episode written thirteen weeks ahead of time. There was a lot of flexibility when it came to putting those plans into effect. Some stories that were supposed to end within thirteen weeks were extended over years, while others that were expected to be a big deal petered out before they got going. In an interview preserved by Danny Horn at his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, writer Violet Welles said that many of the moments on the show that made the least sense were those written when the plans hadn’t worked out: “toward the end of the cycle, you’d have characters who were really not a lot of interest who had to play scenes with other characters who really didn’t have a lot of interest, dealing with things that basically didn’t concern them. Those were hard to write.”
This episode was taped on 25 July 1969; thirteen weeks before that was 21 May. Six months before was 25 January. By 25 January, Denise Nickerson had been on the show for two months as Amy Jennings. Nickerson was actually born on 1 April 1957, but they several times say that Amy is nine years old. When the show goes to 1897, Nickerson plays Nora Collins, who is also nine. On 19 May, Nickerson taped #761, the last episode she would appear in until #782. She is currently in the middle of a second long absence from 1897, unseen between #783 and #812. Her characters were so important in the months leading up to the 1897 segment and she played them so well that we wonder what they were thinking leaving her in the background so long.
Maybe they were thinking of bringing her back as Sarah. Nickerson didn’t look all that much like Sharon Smyth, and was a far more accomplished young actress than was Miss Smyth, but she did have brown hair, and the show prioritized hair color above all else in recasting parts. For example, two actresses followed Mrs Isles in the role of Vicki, neither of whom had much in common with her either in acting style or in looks, but who both had black hair. So perhaps there was a time when they intended to travel between 1897 and the 1790s and to meet Sarah, played by Denise Nickerson. If Nickerson were still alive, perhaps someone would ask her if she posed for the portrait that is standing on the floor of the Evans cottage today.
*She’s been using her married name for decades now, but when talking about her as a child it’s pretty weird to refer to her as “Mrs Lentz.” Since I use surnames for people associated with the making of the show and attach courtesy titles to surnames of living people, I have to call her “Miss Smyth.”
The evil Count Petofi, a 150 year old sorcerer, has taken possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins and is wreaking havoc in the great house of Collinwood. Due to Petofi’s spells, Jamison’s father Edward thinks he is a valet recently separated from the service of the Earl of Hampshire. Edward’s brother Quentin tries to explain to him what is actually going on, but Edward merely concludes that he is Quentin’s valet now. When Quentin follows the Collinses’ long-established protocol for dealing with mentally ill family members and locks Edward in the tower room, Edward bangs on the door and protests that he won’t be able to do his job if he is locked up. “And I will do it!” he vows.
Charity Trask, disastrously uptight step-daughter of Quentin and Edward’s sister Judith, falls under Petofi’s influence and is possessed by the spirit of Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye. Pansy was on the show briefly in June. The childlike Carl Collins, brother to Judith, Edward, and Quentin, was engaged to marry Pansy before she was killed by vampire Dirk Wilkins. Pansy and Charity never met; when Carl asked Charity if she had seen Pansy, the scene was staged to make it seem absurd that the two women could exist in the same universe. Now, they exist in the same body.
If Petofi has caused startling changes in Jamison, Edward, and Charity, the change in Quentin is perhaps the most jarring of all. He has been a ghost, a homicidal maniac, a Satanist, a zombie, and a werewolf, but always and everywhere a source of total chaos, who destroys all recognized order and is perfectly at home in the midst of sheer madness. Today, Quentin keeps making earnest attempts to restore everyone to their right minds and reestablish the proper and respectable relations within the household.
First time viewers will immediately catch on that the preteen David Henesy is not the actor who would usually play a 150 year old Hungarian nobleman, and when Nancy Barrett suddenly takes on an East London accent and enters wearing a garish costume and doing a dance with lot of hip shaking and pelvic thrusts, they will know that Charity is turning into someone else. The dialogue in the scenes involving Edward explains what is happening to him. They may not know that Quentin is not supposed to be the defender of the status quo. That information is supplied in two scenes. Charity/ Pansy receives a psychic message from the world beyond telling her that Quentin was involved in the murder of Carl, and she announces this information. Also, Quentin calls for help, and the helper who materializes is his distant cousin, Barnabas Collins the vampire.
At the end of the episode, Barnabas lays hold of Jamison/ Petofi and drags him into the secret passage leading from the drawing room to the west wing. It is usually bad news when a vampire abducts a child and shoves him into a dark space, but David Henesy brings such joy to the role of Jamison/ Petofi that we can hardly doubt that what comes next will be equally fun to watch.
Meanwhile, a painter named Charles Delaware Tate has presented himself. Tate’s first appearance will cause a sinking sensation in longtime viewers; he is played by Roger Davis, a terrible actor who delivers much of his dialogue by shouting while clenching the sphincter muscles in his buttocks, and who routinely assaults the women and children in the cast while on camera. We may have hoped we had seen the last of Mr Davis when his most recent character, Dirk, was destroyed shortly after murdering Pansy. But evidently Pansy’s return in the form of another actress has come at the price of Mr Davis’ return in the guise of another character.
For much of 1968, Mr Davis played a man known variously as Peter Bradford and Jeff Clark. His approach to characterization consisted of shouting “My name is Jeff Clark!” When this technique was played out, he took to shouting “My name is Peter Bradford!” He doesn’t shout today, mercifully. But he does say the name “Charles Delaware Tate” quite a few times.
Today’s story about Tate is potentially interesting. Jamison/ Petofi finds him when he answers the front door. Tate asks to see Jamison Collins; Jamison/ Petofi confirms that despite his appearance, he is indeed the person Tate has come to see. Tate accepts this with a blandness that suggests that he knows he is dealing with a magical personage.
Jamison/ Petofi gives Tate a photograph of Quentin and says that he wants a portrait of him. When Quentin comes to the drawing room and finds Tate sketching, he asks who he is. Again, Quentin adopts a stern tone which suits someone defending the sanctity of private property against an unknown intruder. Tate introduces himself and shows him a handwritten letter which Quentin instantly accepts as the product of his grandmother Edith. He tells Tate that Edith has been dead for some time and that he is not interested in a portrait of himself. Tate says that he has already accepted the commission and the money that Edith sent with it, and so he will rent lodgings in the village of Collinsport and finish the job regardless. Quentin does what viewers have hoped everyone who shared a scene with one of Mr Davis’ characters would do, and throws him out.
The forged letter is a fascinating touch for returning viewers. Petofi made himself welcome as a guest at Collinwood by showing Edward forged papers creating the impression that he shared Edward’s friendship with the Earl of Hampshire. That he has also created papers that Quentin immediately accepts as coming from Edith, who died long before Petofi had any reason to come to Collinwood, suggests that his powers of forgery are very extensive indeed.
Tate not only seems to know that Petofi has magical powers; he also shows an acquaintance with Petofi’s henchman Aristide.* When Tate mentions Aristide, he calls him “Aristeedy,” a sort of pet name with a diminutive suffix. This is probably just a blooper on the part of Mr Davis, but since Petofi is continually telling Aristide how lovely he is and how he is more attractive when he doesn’t speak, it does remind us of the gay subtext that runs through their scenes together. We might suspect that Petofi and Aristide’s sexuality is in one way or another one of the reasons they are connected to Tate.
The script opens all of these questions about Tate. Had he been played by an actor who was capable of depicting depth and highlighting ambiguity, it could have been a lot of fun to speculate about just what their answers might be. In #137, future movie star Frederic Forrest was a featured extra on the dance floor at The Blue Whale tavern; it’s easy to suppose he would have taken a speaking part. So when the show puts Mr Davis in front of us, I like to make the time a little more tolerable by imagining what Forrest might have brought to the role of Tate.
*His name is spelled “Aristede” in the closing credits, but it was “Aristide” in the original scripts.
Tim Shaw, uptight teacher turned victim of brainwashing turned fugitive murder suspect, makes his way into an abandoned root cellar. He finds a coffin there. Naturally, he opens the coffin. That’s what everyone does on Dark Shadows when they find a coffin where one shouldn’t be. You meet the most interesting people that way.
Tim finds that the coffin is empty, and goes into a dark corner to hide. Someone comes to the door, and Tim gets up to greet whoever it might be. He hasn’t been a fugitive very long, and hasn’t quite perfected all the skills that the status calls for.
Tim sees Dirk Wilkins, a dimwitted servant of the ancient and esteemed Collins family who has been missing for several days. Tim calls out “Dirk!” This is the first time we learn the two men know each other. They are unlikely to have been friends. Tim rarely left the school where he worked. The school has been housed in a building on the Collins family’s estate for several weeks, so it makes sense that he and Dirk would have met, but Dirk has been unpleasant to everyone we have seen him with, including his employers and pretty girls he wants to attract. It is hard to imagine the painfully shy Tim befriending him.
Dirk turns out to be a vampire, and he bites Tim. We then cut back to the school. The headmaster, the overwhelmingly evil Gregory Trask, is browbeating Tim’s fellow teacher and onetime girlfriend, neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond. Returning viewers will recall that Trask has made flagrant passes at Rachel, and also know that Trask conspired with a local Satanist to cast a spell on Tim which caused him to kill Trask’s wife Minerva. Trask is pretending to be upset about Minerva’s murder and to believe that Rachel plotted with Tim to commit it. He tells Rachel that if she does not leave the school, he will accept that she is innocent. She goes to her room, distraught. Later in the episode, Trask will telephone his co-conspirator, gloating that the authorities are on their side.
Spinster Judith Collins, sole proprietor of all her family’s great wealth, shows up to offer her condolences to Trask. They find that Rachel is gone, and he tells her that she must have gone with Tim. Trask realizes that Tim and Rachel have no money, and wonders if there is anyone who might give them enough to allow them to flee the state. Judith says that her distant cousin Barnabas Collins, who is currently staying at the Old House on the estate, is very fond of Rachel and that he might give them some money. She says that she will get in her carriage and go to the Old House before Rachel can get there. She will tell Barnabas about the murder and about Tim and Rachel’s involvement in it, thereby ensuring that he will not give them any money.
Judith knocks on the front door of the Old House and gets no answer. She enters, and finds the house empty. She is still in the front parlor when Dirk enters. She chastises him for staying on her property after she dismissed him, and tells him she will call the police if he is not gone within 24 hours. He walks towards her, backing her against the wall and ignoring her demands that he let her leave. He says that he is no longer her servant, but that she will soon be his. He bites her.
Judith was right when she told Trask that Rachel would go to the Old House. Rachel does go there. She peeks in the window, sees Judith sitting in a chair, and scurries off. This is rather an odd moment- Judith told Trask just a few minutes before that she would go to the Old House in her carriage. It seems unlikely that she drove her own carriage and there is no driver waiting outside, but even if if she did the carriage must still be sitting there in full view. How did Rachel fail to notice it?
Trask comes to the Old House and tells Judith he wanted to offer her his support in her conversation with Barnabas. Trask knows how fond Barnabas is of Rachel, and may well suppose that he would want more details about Minerva’s death than Judith could offer before he agreed to regard Rachel as a criminal. Judith says Dirk’s name when Trask enters, and when Trask notices the bleeding wounds on her neck he quickly realizes that Dirk inflicted them.
We cut back to the root cellar, which we see Rachel entering. She sees the coffin, and of course opens it. That’s just good manners. She turns, and sees Dirk in the entryway.
In his post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn transcribes a conversation among Roger Davis, Jerry Lacy, and director Lela Swift captured on video when the three were on a panel at a convention:
Roger Davis: I do remember being very excited when I got to be a vampire on the show, so excited, and the first person that I got to bite was Joan Bennett, and I was so enthusiastic and excited I knocked her over — flat on her back!
Jerry Lacy: I remember when you did it, it was rehearsal in the morning.
Roger: Was it?
Jerry: Yeah. You grabbed her, and you bit her, and then you just threw her. And she was already sixty years old then.
Lela Swift: Then we had to pick Joan up and put her together again.
Danny Horn, “Episode 774: What’s Up, Dirk,” posted at Dark Shadows Every Day, 21 November 2015.
To which my comment is, fuck that guy. I don’t make a habit of swearing, but there are not enough curse words in the language to express my reaction to Mr Davis chortling through his reminiscences of physically abusing his female scene partners. He can fuck off straight to hell.
This story gives an extra dimension to the scene between Judith and Trask in the Old House. Mr Lacy plays Trask’s relentless evil so effectively that he is difficult to watch; my wife, Mrs Acilius, refuses to watch his episodes this time through the series. It usually makes a viewer’s skin crawl to see Trask posing as a representative of something good. But knowing that behind Trask in the position of standing by Judith after she had been attacked by Dirk was Jerry Lacy standing by Joan Bennett after she had been attacked by Roger Davis, our response is much more complex. After all the times we might have wondered how anyone could fail to see through Trask’s blatant hypocrisy, this time enough of the thoroughly decent humanity of Jerry Lacy peeks through that we can understand why Judith has been so supportive of Trask.
The cast went into makeup after the morning rehearsal. From the looks of Dirk’s fake mustache and artificial pallor, makeup artist Vincent LoScalzo must not have brought his usual enthusiasm to his work when Mr Davis sat in his chair. The mustache in particular is so crudely affixed that it looks like Mr Davis might have done his own makeup today.
Dark Shadows Commentary 