Tag: rose cottage

Episode 1096: Goodbye, David. Goodbye, Hallie.

Dark Shadows began in June 1966, when well-meaning governess Victoria Winters was on her way to the great house of Collinwood to take charge of the education of strange and troubled boy David Collins. David’s aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, had written to Vicki to offer her the job; his father, Liz’ brother Roger Collins, was opposed to Vicki’s hiring. Roger’s opposition rose from mild disapproval to paranoid fervor when he learned that his arch-nemesis, Burke Devlin, rode into the village of Collinsport on the same train as Vicki.

In the months that followed, the only story that consistently worked was Vicki’s attempt to build a friendship with David in spite of his vicious and at times murderous hostility towards her. Later, David met Burke, and the two of them quickly bonded over their shared hatred of Roger. For his part, Roger was haunted by the thought that Burke was David’s biological father, a thought which Liz forbade him to express.

For a long time, David continued to be the pivot on which the story turned. Crazed handyman Matthew Morgan abducted Vicki and tried to kill her; that crisis reached its emotional peak when David found Vicki bound and gagged in Matthew’s hiding place and refused to rescue her. David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, came back to claim him, which would have meant his death. That arc ended when David ran from the fishing shack Laura had set ablaze and flung himself into Vicki’s arms. With that, he chose Vicki and life over Laura and death, appointing Vicki as his new mother. That marked the conclusion, not only of the David and Vicki story, but of Dark Shadows 1.0.

As the show reinvented itself, David remained the key to the action. The two long costume drama inserts that established Dark Shadows as, first and foremost, a show about time travel, the trip to the 1790s that lasted from November 1967 to March 1968 and the trip to 1897 that ran from March to November 1969, were both prompted by attempts to protect David from a looming supernatural menace. Though he was not an active participant in either of those stories, it was his peril that triggered them, and attempts to protect him and his analogues in previous generations of the Collins family that set the boundaries of the possible action.

As of this episode, all of the characters mentioned above are off the show. Vicki made her final appearance in #665*; Matthew made his in #123; Laura in #191**; Burke in #344; Roger, in #979***. Liz made her last substantive appearance on Friday; she will have one brief scene in #1198, simply to mark the end of a storyline. David leaves the show today.

In the early parts of today’s episode, David and his fellow teenager, houseguest Hallie Stokes, are being led through the woods by the unspeaking ghosts of two people who died in 1841. David’s psychopomp is the late Gerard Stiles, who was apparently a pirate when he was alive but has become a landlubber in death. Hallie’s is the late Daphne Harridge, who was once the governess at the great house. Daphne’s charges were Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes. Hallie and David have spent vast amounts of time moaning about how the ghosts of Carrie and Tad are going to take possession of their bodies and erase them from existence. Much of this moaning has taken place in a mysterious room which they call “The Playroom.” The Playroom intermittently exists in a obscure corner of the great house. When it materializes, it can be found behind a door that at other times opens onto a linen closet. Gerard, Daphne, Tad, and Carrie have free rein in The Playroom.

There is a dollhouse in The Playroom that the ghosts like to play with when David and Hallie aren’t looking. This dollhouse is a scale model of Rose Cottage, a mansion which stood somewhere near Collinwood in 1840. It is in some supernatural sense identical with that mansion. In #1082 and again in #1093, it was made clear to Hallie and David that they are fated to become dolls confined to this dollhouse, and that any living that is left for their bodies to do will be done by Carrie and Tad.

Daphne and Gerard take Hallie and David to a full-sized version of Rose Cottage that stands in the woods. It is unclear whether this mansion is visible all the time, or if it comes and goes as does The Playroom. The latter would seem more likely, since it is such a big place it is hard to imagine it would have escaped the notice of the people who have heard the expression “Rose Cottage” and have recently been trying to figure out which of the big houses in the area was around in 1840 and could have been known by that name in that year.

Gerard gets David to Rose Cottage while Daphne and Hallie are still making their way through the woods. David takes a nap in the corridor outside the upstairs parlor where the dolls are kept. He has another dream like the one he and Hallie both had in #1082, in which they are in the upstairs parlor. Daphne is in his dream. She smiles. Her smile is more unsettling than Gerard’s sneer. David wakes up and finds that Daphne is there, with Hallie.

David says they must resist; Hallie says it is too late. Then there is a commercial break. When we come back, they are in the upstairs parlor. Hallie notices the dolls are gone. David says they are no longer needed. Hallie says they must resist; David says it is too late. David Henesy manages to make David Collins’ part in these two scenes work. In the corridor, David is conflicted, trying to sound brave as he says the words about resisting but looking helpless as his eyes turn to the ghosts. In the parlor, he is simply defeated. His performance sketches a clear line between these two emotional states.

Kathleen Cody is less successful as Hallie. She seems to have come to terms with the reality while in the corridor. In the parlor, she flips back into Hallie’s usual mode, maximum possible tension. It doesn’t help that her dialogue is a bunch of questions about why they can’t resist. In context, those questions are just nonsense, and Hallie’s abrupt switch from quiet resignation to extreme plangency is inexplicable. My wife, Mrs Acilius, asked if they were trying to make us root for the ghosts who promise to shut Hallie up.

This story is the second time Dark Shadows has adapted Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. The first time through, in late 1968 and early 1969, David and his friend Amy Jennings took turns in the role of Child Who Enforces the Will of the Ghosts and Child Who Resists the Will of the Ghosts. That got to be frustrating, but at least they waited until the episode was over to switch roles. Switching them during a commercial break is just a slap in the face of the audience. Miss Cody’s decision to play Hallie at such a high level of agitation so much of the time was a costly mistake, but no performer could really have saved the part.

The ghosts indicate that David and Hallie are to take their seats at the table where the dolls usually sit. When they do so, we jump to a somewhat lower camera angle. This cut does indeed make it look like Hallie and David are small figures inside a small space. Henry Kaplan directed this episode. I usually have a lot of complaints about Kaplan. His preferred visual strategy was to cut from a closeup of one face to a closeup of another face to an extreme closeup that shows at most part of a face. But this shot achieves a subtle effect, and that effect tells the whole story. I can’t suppress a suspicion that Lela Swift stepped in and set the shot up for Kaplan, but even if she did he deserves credit for not fouling it up.

Carrie and Tad come into view. Carrie superimposes herself on Hallie’s body, Tad superimposes himself on David’s, and both ghosts fade out. As they do, we hear Tad say “Goodbye, David,” and Carrie say “Goodbye, Hallie.” We will see Carrie and Tad in the persons of Hallie and David for some time, but will never see either David or Hallie again.

Final farewell. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I remembered this closing image vividly from our previous watch-through of the series. I misremembered the lines, though. I recalled David and Hallie saying goodbye to each other, not the ghosts saying goodbye to the teenagers as they took possession of them. I think it is better the way it is. We are supposed to be horrified at Carrie and Tad’s thoughtless cruelty as they annihilate Hallie and David, and denying them even the opportunity to bid each other farewell serves that purpose. Unsatisfactory as are the rest of the episode and indeed the rest of the David and Hallie story, this closing shot is highly effective.

*Alexandra Moltke Isles last played the character in #627. Two other actresses succeeded Mrs Isles in the role.

**Another iteration of the character appeared in 20 episodes between #729 and #760.

***Another version of the character appeared in 17 episodes between #975 and #1055.

Episode 1095: Elizabeth Collins Stoddard

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.

Liz, defeated. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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.

Episode 1093: It’s just gonna happen anyway

In July, vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman came unstuck in time and found themselves in the far-off future year 1995. Julia and Barnabas found that the great house of Collinwood had been in ruins ever since some mysterious disaster took place on an unspecified night in 1970. Some residents of the great house went missing that night, others died, and two of them, Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes and Quentin Collins, went insane. The mad Carolyn of 1995 apparently knew that Barnabas was a vampire; she had known that for a while in 1967, when she was his victim, but appeared to have forgotten it when he was relieved of the effects of his curse for a while starting in March 1968. Towards the end of Barnabas and Julia’s time in 1995, Carolyn left a note for them, consisting of six cryptic phrases, shortly before the ghosts who rule Collinwood killed her. They decided the phrases were clues to the disaster, and ever since returning to 1970 have been trying without success to use them to figure out what is going on.

One thing that is clear is that the disaster will involve the deaths of teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins and the merger of their ghosts with the ghosts of their lookalikes from the year 1840, Carrie Stokes and Tad Collins. David and Hallie are aware of this and spend all their time moaning about how helpless they are to do anything about it. Their headquarters for this operation is a room that intermittently materializes behind a door that usually leads to a linen closet. The room is much too large to fit into the space the linen closet occupies, is stocked with high-end antique toys, and is frequented by the ghosts. Hallie and David call it “The Playroom.” In 1995, Julia and Barnabas found that The Playroom was in existence all the time and that anyone could enter it, but until today only David, Hallie, and the ghosts have been able to go there. Everyone else just sees the linen closet when they open the door.

Hallie and David are in The Playroom, bummed out because Carrie has revealed to them that they are fated to become dolls in the dollhouse that is there. This was previously revealed to them in #1082, but Dark Shadows has been losing teenage viewers lately, so perhaps David and Hallie weren’t watching that day. A miniature carousel starts turning and playing music; David is influenced by the music, and says that perhaps their future in the dollhouse won’t be so bad.

Meanwhile, Carolyn is in the corridor outside The Playroom. We see her after the camera pans out from a closeup of the stained glass work above the door that sometimes opens on The Playroom. We notice that it depicts roses. The dollhouse is a scale model of a house that was known as Rose Cottage in 1840, and is in some sense identical to that house. One of the clues Carolyn left in 1995 was “The night Rose Cottage was destroyed,” which has led Barnabas and Julia to ask everyone if they’ve ever heard of Rose Cottage and to work feverishly to try to locate it. You might think they would remember the roses above the door to The Playroom and to think of the toys they saw there in 1995, but no such luck.

Carolyn hears the carousel’s music and wonders where it is coming from. She opens the door to The Playroom. She still hears the music, but sees only the linen closet. It is a haunting moment. We know that she is glimpsing an aperture between her world and another, but nothing she can see could lead her to conclude that anything at all extraordinary is happening. It might leave us wondering what it would be like if we were in the presence of some utterly bizarre phenomenon- would we notice?

Carolyn returns to the corridor. Her back is turned when David opens the door. We see The Playroom behind him. We wonder if Carolyn would be able to see it if she were facing the right way. David closes the door silently. Carolyn turns and is startled to see him. He says he is looking for Hallie. Carolyn asks him about the music; he claims he cannot hear it. He suggests someone may have left a radio playing in another part of the house.

The sequence reminded me of the 2017 season of Twin Peaks, as does the whole idea of The Playroom. As Agent Cooper disappeared into the mysterious, intermittently existent Red Room and the Black Lodge beyond, so the ghosts threaten to absorb the living characters into the mysterious, intermittently visible Playroom and the ruinous world of 1995 beyond. As Deputy Hawk once caught a glimpse of the curtains of the Red Room in the clouds above the spot deep in the woods where the worlds sometimes open onto each other, a glimpse so brief and vague that someone unfamiliar with the legends of the Black Lodge would likely either ignore it completely or assume it was a reflection of the clouds from some water on the ground, so the music from the miniature carousel gives Carolyn a glimpse so subtle and vague that anyone who had not been briefed by Julia and Barnabas would immediately accept David’s idea that it is just a radio. I doubt that this part of the show had a direct influence on Twin Peaks– more likely, the shared imagery is just the logical endpoint of a sense that there is more to the world than we can readily perceive with commonplace fears of being trapped in unfamiliar places. But I do think the two shows can shed light on each other.

Under the influence of the ghosts, Hallie and David make a doll with bright yellow hair and put it in the dollhouse. It represents someone named “Leticia” who will join them when they are living in the dollhouse. Since the only blonde character on the show other than Hallie is Carolyn, we have to assume that a ghost named Leticia has the same designs on Carolyn that Carrie has on Hallie and Tad has on David.

In 1995, Carolyn had not disappeared into the dollhouse, but was living in a shack by Finley’s Cove. She even went in and out of The Playroom from time to time, interacting with Tad and Carrie. This is the first indication we’ve had that the ghosts’ will is not entirely ineluctable. There may be nothing the characters can do to keep a disaster from occurring, but perhaps there is some hope that we might see them do something to shape the particulars of the disaster that will befall them.

Carolyn is busy looking after David and Hallie’s governess, Maggie Evans. Maggie is ill, having been bitten by a vampire. When he found out about this, Barnabas was surprised to learn he isn’t the only vampire in town, and he and Julia have been trying to figure out who has been feeding on Maggie. Carolyn and Maggie talk about the previous vampire attacks. There is an electric moment when each of them looks like she is trying very hard to remember something that is hidden way down in the recesses of her mind. Several times in 1968, Nancy Barrett played Carolyn as if she remembered a lot more about Barnabas than he knew. The script didn’t give her any support in that, and she eventually had to give it up. Maggie was Barnabas’ victim in May and June of 1967; that experience has been wiped from her memory several times, and we may wonder if it will emerge one more time. In light of what we saw about Carolyn’s knowledge in 1995 and the similarity of what Maggie is going through now to what she went through in 1967, this moment is highly effective.

Miss Barrett also manages to get a laugh from regular viewers today. She has a scene with Christopher Pennock as astrologer Sebastian Shaw. Pennock also played Carolyn’s late husband Jabe (alias “Jeb”) Hawkes. The two characters are supposed to resemble each other strongly, and for a while Carolyn hoped Sebastian would turn out to be Jabe. But she’s given up on that, and Sebastian wants to date Maggie.

Sebastian comes to Collinwood. Carolyn tells him Maggie is very sick and cannot receive visitors. Sebastian wants to see her anyway. Carolyn tells him that is impossible. He becomes angry and declares that she will see him sooner or later, no matter what! Sebastian storms out of the house, and Carolyn watches him go with a sad little smile. Sebastian is violent, irrational, controlling, and childish, just like Jabe. Her look shows us how much she misses those things about him.

Aww, what a wonderful dangerously unstable man-child he is!

Carolyn can’t get the tune the little carousel plays out of her head. She goes back to the door and opens it. Now, it opens on The Playroom. The circle the ghosts have drawn around Hallie and David now encloses her as well. We can start to see how she might have known enough to leave the clues she left in 1995 for Barnabas and Julia.

The vampire story is new and has some promise, but the haunting has been going in a tight little circle for five weeks, with no progress in sight. The miniature carousel is all-too-apt a symbol of that. Even the opening voiceover seems to acknowledge that the show is in a rut. It breaks off in mid-sentence. We hear Kathryn Leigh Scott telling us that David and Hallie have discovered “a secret world- a world populated by the dead. And this night, they learn…” That’s it, the audio stops abruptly at that point. What do David and Hallie learn? What does it matter, whatever it is can’t possibly affect the story in any way.

Episode 1092: Visitors only stay for a week

Governess Maggie Evans has been bitten by a vampire other than Barnabas Collins. Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are stymied in their efforts to find out who this other vampire is. They decide not to take Maggie to the hospital, since they don’t want to answer any questions. Instead, Julia goes to some unspecified location in the village of Collinsport to get several units of blood to transfuse into Maggie. I’m sure a no-questions-asked blood bank would be a highly profitable enterprise in Collinsport.

I wonder if Julia had to go in the blood store to get that bag, or if they have a drive-through. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, Maggie’s charges, gloomy teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes, are sitting around in a space that intermittently materializes in a location usually occupied by a linen closet. It is stocked with fancy antique toys, frequented by ghosts, and called “The Playroom.” The ghosts don’t take visible form today, but Hallie and David notice that they keep playing with a dollhouse in The Playroom.

The dollhouse is a scale model of a mansion known as Rose Cottage that stood somewhere in the Collinsport area in 1840, when the ghosts were living beings, and is in some supernatural sense identical with that mansion. The ghosts are big fans of scale models. Some time ago they gave David a scale model of a ship that one of them sailed when he was alive. Today, David and Hallie see that the ghosts have added a tiny model of the same ship, reduced in size so that it is in the same proportion to the dolls in the dollhouse as the original model was to the residents of the great house of Colllinwood. Hallie says that if they go to David’s room, they will find that the model is gone from there, because it has been transformed into this minuscule thing.

The Java Queen II. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

At the end of the episode, Hallie and David hear one of the ghosts telling them to look into the dollhouse and learn their fate. They comply, and see themselves in place of the dolls. David and Hallie have spent all day sitting around doing nothing, and when they look into the future they see that they are still sitting around doing nothing. Evidently the greatest horror the writers can imagine is that the show will go on as it has been lately. I have to admit they have a point!

Ultimate fate. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 1084: A living man no bigger than a doll

Julia Hoffman and her friend Barnabas Collins recently returned to 1970 after a cosmic journey that ended with two weeks in 1995. In that far-off future year, they found the great house of Collinwood in ruins and everyone who had lived there either dead, missing, or hopelessly insane. This was the result of a mysterious disaster that occurred before 1970 was out. Since they returned, they have been trying to find out what this disaster will be and to prevent it.

Julia’s friend Timothy Eliot Stokes tells her she and Barnabas have accomplished nothing since they came back to 1970. He says that the time has come to enlist the aid of a strangely dressed man named Sebastian Shaw. Sebastian has psychic powers, and may be able to use them to figure out what’s going on.

Sebastian comes to the great house. Julia tells him of her experience in the future. He has a vision which he says he cannot interpret. It is presented to us in an unfocused shot, so that we can believe Sebastian does not know what he is seeing. But we recognize it. It is The Playroom, a room that intermittently exists behind a door in a little-used part of the great house. Most of the time that door opens on a linen closet, but teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins have found that occasionally the same door admits them to a much larger space stocked with antique toys and ruled by the ghosts of several people who died in 1841. Julia knows The Playroom well; she and Barnabas visited it several times in 1995, and met the same ghosts there who are now taking control of David and Hallie. Julia and Barnabas also went to The Playroom in 1995 with two living people, Carolyn Fredericks (née Carolyn Collins Stoddard) and the Sheriff of Collinsport. But in 1970, only the linen closet has so far been visible to anyone other than Hallie, David, or the ghosts.

After Sebastian has his vision, Stokes and Julia decide to bring David and Hallie to him. Stokes goes upstairs to fetch them, and Julia goes to get some tea. When she returns to the drawing room, Julia finds Sebastian at the piano. He is playing the melody that often sounds in The Playroom, and that Julia heard echoing through the house in 1995. She asks him where he heard it. When he says he was just making it up as he went along, she flatly declares that he is lying. He must have heard it in his vision, because it is the very tune that is associated with the phenomenon they are investigating. He will not admit to this, and she will not soften her tone. On the contrary, she says that she had suspected that he was a fraud, but that she now believes he is something far worse- a man with genuine psychic gifts who uses them dishonestly. We learned yesterday that this is precisely what Sebastian is, but Julia can hardly expect him to agree with her. He says that he is being insulted, and leaves the house before Hallie and David can get downstairs.

Julia has been given to counterproductively harsh behavior of this sort since returning to 1970. Perhaps this is the consequence of a trauma she suffered in 1995, when a blatantly evil ghost known as Gerard Stiles took possession of her. Or perhaps it is the influence of someone she encountered on the first leg of her journey, when she was in an alternate universe. There, she met her own Doppelgänger. She greeted this other Julia Hoffman by beating her to death, stealing her clothes, and assuming her identity. A deed like that might leave a mark on its doer. Besides, that other Hoffman was herself inclined to be tactless, so perhaps Julia picked that habit up in the course of her imposture.

Unknown to Julia and Stokes, David and Hallie are busy in The Playroom today. Yesterday they learned that the ghosts plan to reduce them to the status of the dolls that are in a dollhouse there. In particular, the ghost of a teenage boy named Tad wants to take possession of David, and that of a teenage girl named Carrie wants to take possession of Hallie. Tad and Carrie will then live their lives while David and Hallie are in storage as inanimate things in a miniature case. Hallie and David took the dolls to the fireplace in the drawing room and burned them there, hoping this would break the power of the ghosts. Once they had seen the flames consume the dolls, they returned to The Playroom, hoping to find that it had vanished and the linen closet had resumed its place. To their dismay, they found that The Playroom was still there and the dolls had reappeared in their places in the dollhouse.

While David and Hallie are processing this fact, they see lights come on inside the dollhouse. The dollhouse has no electricity, so this puzzles them. David looks inside the dollhouse and sees a man in it. He is the size of the dolls, but is moving around as if he is alive. By the time Hallie comes around to look, the tiny man has vanished. She believes that David saw him, though.

David then tells Hallie that they ought to write up everything that has happened to them since they first encountered The Playroom. When Hallie asks what good that would do, David says it is the only way people will know what happened to them after they are gone.

They go to David’s room and write the whole story in a notebook. When Stokes comes to get them, they hide the notebook. They return to the room after Sebastian’s abrupt departure, and find that the notebook is gone.

Hallie and David decide that one of the ghosts must have taken the notebook. They go to The Playroom to look for it. They open the door, and see Carrie and Tad reading the notebook.

David and Hallie see Carrie and Tad. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David’s vision of a little man moving around inside the dollhouse now reminds me of the moment in part 6 of the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks when a tiny version of the supernatural figure known as “Mike” appears to the near-catatonic Special Agent Dale Cooper and urges him to “Wake up! Wake up! Don’t die! Don’t die!” “Mike” is a resident of The Red Room, a space that is as mysterious in its nature and as intermittent in its presence as is The Playroom. We can assume that the tiny man David sees is Gerard, whose plans for him are just the opposite of “Mike’s” wish that Cooper should regain his true identity and once more function as an action hero.

At the time, the idea of living figures small enough to make their homes in a dollhouse and of people from the outside world shrunken and enclosed with them might have reminded viewers of the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “Miniature,” featuring the young Robert Duvall as a lonely man who encounters such a situation. “Mike” himself is a reference to 1960s cult television; he is a mysterious one-armed man who sometimes goes by the name Philip Gerard, evoking the two antagonists Dr Richard Kimble faced on The Fugitive. So it is not unlikely that “Miniature” was a common source for that installment of Twin Peaks and this installment of Dark Shadows. It isn’t even impossible that David Lynch or Mark Frost saw this episode of Dark Shadows and were on some level influenced by it as they wrote the script for Twin Peaks, though of course that would be a far less probable source than The Twilight Zone, which has long been one of the most heavily rerun of all TV shows.

At any rate, I think the similarity is intriguing even beyond the question of influences and sources. A soundstage looks a lot like a dollhouse, and when a drama isn’t connecting with the audience the actors may as well be dolls the director is playing a private game with. So the premise of characters ending up in a dollhouse plays to a fear that must prey on the minds of the writers.

Moreover, all three of these shows share a theme of stunted sexual development. Robert Duvall’s character in “Miniature” is a solitary man who cannot achieve any form of intimacy with another person. The stupefied Agent Cooper lives with a woman who has mistaken him for her husband and enjoys sex with her, but that is strictly a matter of mechanics. He has no idea what is going on during their encounters.

For their part, David and Hallie seem to be developing on the usual timetable. Certainly the dialogue between them when they were first introduced acknowledged that they were old enough to be interested in each other sexually, though David made it very clear to Hallie that she was not the partner he would choose. But Tad and Carrie seem to be quite alarmingly immature. Tad first possessed David in #1081, on Monday. That day, Hallie found David in The Playroom. Speaking as Tad, David took her to be Carrie. Tad was shocked by Hallie’s 1970 clothing and advised her to take it off immediately. It doesn’t seem to occur to Tad that there is anything untoward about demanding Carrie disrobe in front of him. Tad also said that he would be sad when he was too old to play with the toys in The Playroom. But he is very obviously much too old to be enthusiastic about a rocking horse, a dollhouse, a miniature carousel, and a bunch of stuffed animals. So his and Carrie’s attachment to those things shows that even when they were alive they were relics of a dead past. They never grew up, and their ghosts are determined to freeze Hallie and David in place, immobilized and on display in a small, unchanging world.

Danny Horn’s post under the title Episode 1084 on his great Dark Shadows Every Day doesn’t have all that much to do with the episode, but it is a magnificent production in its own right. Its subtitle is “100 Things That I Would Like David and Hallie to See When They Open the Playroom Door, in No Particular Order.” The 100 things he lists range from chuckleworthy to hilarious. Best of all, it ends with a video the post inspired Cody Schell to put together with alternate endings for the episode.

Episode 1082: I haven’t been wrong very often when it comes to judgment of people

Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman have returned to 1970 from a cosmic journey that took them first to a parallel universe, then to the future year 1995. In the parallel universe, they met a comatose woman named Roxanne Drew. Barnabas was immediately smitten with Roxanne, and was still attracted to her even after she gained the ability to open her eyes and move around. By the time she was able to speak, he was in love. Roxanne couldn’t come along when they left her universe, and he’s been down in the dumps about that. Barnabas could always go to the hospital and look for another comatose woman, but I suppose that might not be quite the same, somehow.

Now, Barnabas has met Roxanne’s counterpart in his own universe. She is attached to astrologer Sebastian Shaw, whom Barnabas had been pestering for reasons having to do with the efforts he and Julia have been making to prevent a mysterious disaster they learned about during their stay in 1995. Sebastian was so fed up with Barnabas that he walked out of his own living room, leaving Barnabas alone there. Then the door opened, and a Roxanne Drew entered, carrying a brown paper grocery bag. Barnabas greeted her by name, to her puzzlement.

When Barnabas explains that he knew another Roxanne Drew who looked exactly like her “in another time,” Roxanne assumes he means many years ago. He allows her to proceed under this assumption, which does seem less likely to prompt a call to the police than introducing yourself to a stranger with a story about how you’ve been traveling between parallel universes and back and forth in time. Roxanne comes out with a theory that two people with the same name born on the same day in different parts of the USA might become “astral twins” and look just alike. This idea may not be less plausible than what Julia and Barnabas have actually done, but it does seem considerably less likely to be useful in making up interesting stories. So it comes as a great relief when Roxanne stops talking about it.

Barnabas asks Roxanne to meet him for dinner at 10 PM. This is an odd invitation, since Barnabas is a vampire. Where is he going to take her, the blood bank? She hesitates, but at length agrees to meet him “there.” They haven’t named a place.

Later, Roxanne calls the great house of Collinwood. Julia answers. Roxanne identifies herself, and Julia reacts with amazement. Roxanne says she must be thinking of “that other Roxanne Drew.” She says that she won’t be able to meet Barnabas for dinner “there” after all.

Barnabas enters. He is excited to tell Julia about Roxanne. She tells him she already knows about her, and gives him Roxanne’s message. Julia reminds him that some people in the parallel universe were radically different from their counterparts in this universe, giving herself and her counterpart as an example. Barnabas refuses to admit that this Roxanne Drew is not the same person as the one whose immobility and silence so charmed him in the other continuity. Julia keeps warning him, and he declares that “I haven’t been wrong very often when it comes to judgment of people.” This remark will astound regular viewers. Barnabas is a worse judge of character than any figure in all human history. I myself can’t claim to be all that perspicacious, but neither I nor anyone else I know has ever misjudged a person so desperately we were turned into vampires as a result. That has happened to Barnabas twice. Julia is so stunned by Barnabas’ bizarre remark that all she can do is humor him and say that she agrees with his assessment of himself.

Barnabas goes back to Sebastian’s apartment and speaks to Roxanne. She says he must not have received her message. He says he did, but asks to come in anyway. She allows it, and he gets strangely aggressive with his insistence that they will eventually go out together. He’s usually a lot more pleasant with people, unless he’s been feeding on their blood or threatening to kill them. He wants to charm Roxanne, so we may wonder why he gets in her face, adopts a sullen tone, and vows that she will someday date him. The other Roxanne had an obnoxious ex-boyfriend named Claude North. In his sulky and petulant refusal to take no for an answer, or even for an indication that he has to change tactics, Barnabas sounds a lot like Claude.

Meanwhile, Julia has been trying to find out which house in the area was known as “Rose Cottage” in 1840. During their sojourn in 1995, she and Barnabas received some cryptic clues about the disaster that will befall the great house of Collinwood and everyone in it later in 1970, one of which was the phrase “the night Rose Cottage was destroyed.” Also during that trip they saw the ghosts of some people who lived in 1840, and since returning have found a document from that year that mentions a house called Rose Cottage, but does not say which house it was.

Teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins had died in the version of 1995 Barnabas and Julia visited. They saw ghosts who looked just like them, but were in fact those of figures from 1840 named Carrie and Tad. Julia suspects that David and Hallie are withholding information from her about paranormal occurrences in the house, as she and Barnabas are withholding information from them. Rather than leveling with Hallie and David about what they learned in 1995 and asking them to reciprocate, Julia has decided to be as inexplicably harsh and aggressive with Hallie as Barnabas is with Roxanne.

Hallie finds Julia going through some old tax records today. When Julia says that she is trying to figure out what house in the area used to be known as “Rose Cottage,” Hallie mentions that Julia had previously asked her if she’d ever heard of such a place. Julia takes that remark as an opportunity to fix Hallie with an unwavering stare and drill her with question after question. During this bizarre interrogation, the ghost of Tad and Carrie’s governess Daphne Harridge appears to Hallie, reminding her not to answer. Julia loses interest in Hallie and turns back to the tax records. Hallie excuses herself and follows Daphne out of the room.

David has a dream in which he finds Hallie in an unfamiliar corridor. He asks her where they are. She says they are in Rose Cottage. She tells him to follow her to a birthday party. He is unhappy that he has not brought a present; she laughs a little at this. They go into a small room and see two dummies sitting opposite each other at a table. Hallie says that they will sit in the other two places at the table. There are placecards identifying them as Carrie and Tad. They sit down, and Daphne’s gigantic face appears at the window. Daphne has been silent in all her appearances so far. She breaks her silence in this dream, laughing maniacally at the sight of David and Hallie sitting with the dummies.

Happy Dappy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David wakes up. He goes to a little-used part of the house. He finds Hallie in front of a door behind which there is usually a linen closet. Sometimes, however, the space transforms into a larger room stocked with antique toys. Hallie and David refer to that room as “The Playroom.” They have seen Daphne there several times and have sensed the presence of another, more blatantly hostile spirit, one which Julia and Barnabas came to know in 1995 as Gerard Stiles. Hallie asks David why he has joined her. He tells her about his dream. It turns out she had the same dream. They resign themselves to entering The Playroom. Inside, they see a dollhouse that has previously been set up with its facade towards them is now set on a lower table with its interior on display. There is a room that looks just like the one in their dream, complete with dolls sitting at the table.

Barnabas and Julia visited The Playroom several times in the future, and the dollhouse was there then. It always seemed likely that the dollhouse was a model of Rose Cottage. Now, it is confirmed that it is not merely a model of it, but is in some sense identical with it. Perhaps it is a ghostly survival of a house that no longer exists, or perhaps it is a mystical reflection of a haunted house that stands somewhere else in the area. One way or another, it seems that Hallie and David are fated to lose their independent existence and become inert playthings confined to an inaccessible space.

David, Hallie, Daphne, and Gerard are part of a recycled story. In late 1968 and early 1969, Dark Shadows adapted Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw with David and his friend Amy in the roles of the children Miles and Flora and the ghosts of Quentin Collins and Beth Chavez as the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. The whole point of the novella is that it is an open question whether the ghosts are real and the new governess is heroically trying to save the children from them or the ghosts are figments of the imagination of the governess, a crazy woman who is a mortal threat to her charges. Benjamin Britten’s opera preserves that ambiguity to some extent, but screen adaptations tend to come down firmly in favor of the ghosts being real. The first “Haunting of Collinwood” left no room for doubt on that score, and the current Re-Haunting of Collinwood is just as emphatic.

The ghosts of Quentin and Beth were silent when we first saw them in 1968, as Daphne’s ghost has been silent until she laughs maniacally today. They made their first appearance in #646, but neither of them made a sound until Quentin laughed maniacally in #689. Gerard has yet to make himself heard, though actor James Storm read the opening voiceover narration in #1066.