scale model – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1100: What it’s like to be alive

The ghosts of four people who died in 1841 have been haunting the great house of Collinwood. They represent teenagers Carrie Stokes and Tad Collins; Carrie and Tad’s governess, Daphne Harridge; and a sometime pirate captain known as Gerard Stiles. Three of these four have now assumed corporeal form. Tad and Hallie have taken possession of their lookalikes, David Collins and Hallie Stokes. They then performed a ceremony that caused Daphne to come back to life in a body of her own. We open with these three repeating the ceremony in order to conjure Gerard back into existence as a living being.

When Carrie and Tad performed the ceremony the first time, they did not know whether they would raise Daphne or Gerard. That episode ended with a knock at the door, leaving us to wonder along with them who would come. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said it would be funny if it were someone else. She suggested the writers might take a page from Let’s Make a Deal and have Tad and Carrie find a donkey behind Door Number Three.

Today, the ceremony again ends with a rapping on the door. But it is not Gerard. It isn’t a donkey, either. It is Willie Loomis, servant to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. John Karlen always finds a way to bring out humor in his characters’ predicaments, and the rough-hewn Willie does deflate the grandiosity of Carrie, Tad, and Daphne’s meddling in God’s realm.

Scrambling to cover up the signs of the ceremony before he has to open the door to Willie, Tad calls out “We were sleeping! (pause) I was sleeping!” David Henesy plays this absolutely straight, so that we can see it dawning on Tad that he and Carrie aren’t supposed to be sleeping together. Karlen wasn’t the only actor who knew how to find the laughs hidden in his lines.

Daphne hides. Tad opens the door. Willie sees the pentagram on the floor with the candles at its points and says he recognizes it as a device of black magic. He forestalls the teens’ attempt to pretend to be Hallie and David by calling Tad by name. Tad then turns to Carrie and makes fun of Willie’s twentieth century vocabulary in an attempt to intimidate him by a display of social superiority. This collapses immediately, and Willie says that Tad and Carrie have to come with him because he is bigger than they are.

Willie detains Carrie and Tad in the drawing room, waiting for Barnabas to come back. He has to leave them when he hears Maggie Evans, governess to the late David and Hallie, coming downstairs. Maggie is the victim of a vampire, and Willie is part of the crew that is keeping her from going off to get her blood sucked.

Willie rushes to the foyer and asks Maggie why housekeeper Mrs Johnson isn’t keeping her in her room. Maggie does not respond. The true answer would be that Clarice Blackburn has a writing job on another soap now and isn’t available to play the part, so they leave Mrs Johnson’s absence unexplained.

While Willie gets Maggie back to her room, Tad and Carrie listen to the dogs howling outside. Carrie says she has never heard howling like that before, and Tad contradicts her. He says that if she searches her memory, she will find that they heard just that sound in their own time. He gives a somber look, as if he knows what the howling means. The show has been making it clear that we will be going back in time to 1840 sooner or later. These lines of Tad’s tell us that we will find a vampire in operation when we get there.

In Maggie’s bedroom, Willie explains that Hallie and David have been possessed by Carrie and Tad. Maggie has seen enough in her time at Collinwood that she finds this instantly credible. She blames herself, saying that if she were not ill she would have been able to prevent the possession. Willie asks what she could have done, and she cannot think of anything. He presses her to tell him who the vampire is. She claims he cannot understand what she is going through. He cannot tell her that he himself was once the victim of a vampire, since that vampire was Barnabas and the show will implode if Maggie is ever told about that. So they are left at a stalemate.

Meanwhile, Daphne takes shelter in a deserted mansion once known as Rose Cottage. Gerard confronts her there. He is cranky about still being dead. She tells him it’s no one’s fault that the ceremony didn’t work. They will reenact it tonight, when the stars are back in the right alignment. She also tells him that they don’t need Tad and Carrie to accomplish their goal. This line is unfortunate- to the extent that the story has generated suspense, it has involved us wondering how Carrie and Tad are involved in whatever it is Gerard wants to do. When we hear they aren’t involved at all, it lets the air out of an already badly under-inflated set of tires.

Gerard vanishes from Daphne’s presence and materializes in a mysterious chamber known as The Playroom. The Playroom intermittently appears in a little-used part of the great house, behind a door that usually opens on a linen closet. There is a dollhouse in The Playroom that is a scale model of Rose Cottage and that is, in some supernatural sense, identical to it. Gerard sets fire to the room in the dollhouse that corresponds to the room in Rose Cottage where Daphne is. He uses his finger to hold closed the door corresponding to the one from which she could escape a fire in the room.

Gerard holds the door shut. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Daphne finds that the room she is in is engulfed in flames and she cannot open the door. Apparently Gerard has decided that if Daphne is going to tell him they don’t need Tad and Carrie, he doesn’t need Daphne, either. Daphne, being as she is played by Kate Jackson, is impossible not to care about, so this cliffhanger does make us want to come back Monday and see her escape. But since it implies that none of the relationships among the ghosts means anything, and since we’ve already seen that none of the living characters can mount an effective resistance to the ghosts, it also brings us to the conclusion that the whole Re-Haunting of Collinwood story is at a dead end.

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 603: Almost on the point of believing it

Today is devoted to non-supernatural stories. More precisely, we should call them post-supernatural, because they show people dealing with the aftermath of spells and curses.

The episode consists largely of solo performances. As troubled matriarch Liz, Joan Bennett has two scenes in which she is alone with her own voice in a recorded monologue. Dark Shadows has long used these monologues when characters were alone on screen and their faces would silently show how they felt about the thoughts their voices expressed on the soundtrack, but recently it has been experimenting with new ways of deploying them. For example, #581 marked the first time this device was used to share the thoughts a character was having in the middle of a conversation. Today Liz has a remarkably intense debate with her own recorded voice, first in her bedroom, later in an old graveyard.

Some time ago, wicked witch Angelique cast a spell causing Liz to be obsessed with death. Since then, Angelique lost her power and died. But Liz had been the victim of similar spells before, and is prone to depression in any case, as witness the fact that she once holed up in her house for eighteen years. So even if the spell broke when Angelique was de-witched, it makes sense Liz would continue to suffer the psychological damage it inflicted on her.

Between Liz’ two solo scenes, her brother Roger knocks on her bedroom door, This scene lasts less than a minute, but Louis Edmonds shows us a variety of emotions as he talks to Liz through the door, then opens it and finds she is not there. His discovery that he was giving a soliloquy when he thought he was having a conversation makes for a different kind of solo scene.

The other post-supernatural story concerns well-meaning governess Vicki and her ex-fiancé, an unpleasant man named Peter who insists on being called Jeff. Angelique became a vampire after her most recent death, and for a time she took Peter/ Jeff as her victim. The effects of the vampire’s bite made it impossible for Peter/ Jeff to sustain his relationship with Vicki. Peter/ Jeff has been freed from Angelique’s influence, and even his memory of the experience has been erased. Today he comes to ask Vicki to take him back. But he can explain nothing to her about what happened to him. Vicki is frustrated with Peter/ Jeff. Feeling that he does not trust her enough to tell her what happened, Vicki rejects Peter/ Jeff’s attempt at reconciliation. Alexandra Moltke Isles plays Vicki’s frustration with great force. Considering that her scene partner is the lamentable Roger Davis, this, too, qualifies as a solo performance.

Dark Shadows never had more than three credited writers producing scripts at a time. Often it had only two, and there were stretches when a single writer would have to crank out a script every day for weeks. Since they worked under those conditions, the writers’ methods would often be made obvious. So, Art Wallace, who was credited as the writer of the first 40 episodes, started by crafting the structure of an episode, and fitted incidents and information into that structure as time permitted. Ron Sproat, another very prolific contributor, also put structure first, sometimes resulting in a slow-paced script. Today’s author, Gordon Russell, seems to have taken the opposite approach, cramming each script with action and letting the material shake itself out as best it could. So there is some interesting stuff in this one that doesn’t really connect to anything.

For example, we open today with Liz contemplating an architects’ model of a mausoleum. It really is a lovely little thing.

We have a scene where Vicki is horrified by the idea of the mausoleum. Liz insists Vicki be her voice after her death and stand up to her family for her, seeing to it that she is buried in the mausoleum as she wishes. The show hinted very heavily for a long time that Vicki is Liz’ unacknowledged daughter, but they dropped that a long time ago. As it stands, Vicki is a member of the household staff. As such, she would put herself in an awkward position were she to oppose the family’s wishes after Liz’ death.

Roger enters, demands that Liz forget about everything related to death, and smashes the model. That’s all very dramatic, but it doesn’t make any sense. Though he might well be distressed at Liz’ fixation on the idea that she will soon be buried alive, everyone dies eventually, and rich people often build elaborate mausoleums. Roger’s assertion that the architects must think they are humoring an insane woman and the villagers are all laughing at her is just as nonsensical as his domineering attitude is unconnected to his character as it has been developed up to this point. All of it is entirely irrelevant to the progress of the story.

After that, Liz leaves the room, and Roger talks to Vicki for a bit. He says that Liz’ trouble seemed to start when he married a woman named Cassandra. Unknown to him, Cassandra was actually Angelique in a wig. He tells Vicki “We’ve never been very lucky in love, you and I, have we?,” and edges closer to her. This may come as a bit of a jolt to longtime viewers. In the early days of Dark Shadows, there were a few hints that Vicki and Roger, who are after all modeled on Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, might strike up a romance. Since they are both single, all of a sudden it seems possible they might get together after all.

Later, Roger and Peter/ Jeff are outdoors looking for Liz. Each of them shines his flashlight directly into the camera. This is a Dark Shadows trademark. Sometimes it is clearly accidental; Peter/ Jeff does it once, briefly, and that may be an accident. But Roger does it twice, and each time the camera lingers on it. The first time comes as we cut from Liz in the graveyard to Roger and Peter/ Jeff, the second time as we dissolve from them back to Liz.

Peter/ Jeff accidentally shines his flashlight directly into the camera

Dissolve to Liz from a second closeup on Roger’s flashlight

Liz is at the grave of Peter Bradford, which is to say Peter/ Jeff. He died in the 1790s and returned from the dead in March, a fact which is obvious to the audience and to Vicki but which he persistently denies. These denials are pointless and dull, but are the closest thing Peter/ Jeff has to a personality, so we can’t very well blame him for sticking to them. Peter/ Jeff finds Liz at his grave; she recognizes him as the dead man and faints. He carries her home. If there is any significance to any of this, it is apparently none of the audience’s business. The script certainly isn’t going to show us what it is.