Tag: sebastian shaw

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 1083: The grifters

Elizabeth Collins Stoddard called on astrologer Sebastian Shaw in #1073 and commissioned him to do her horoscope for the rest of the year. Contrary to the dire warnings Liz had received from her distant cousin Barnabas Collins and her permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, Sebastian’s horoscope predicted that nothing of the slightest interest would happen at the great house of Collinwood for the rest of the year 1970. So far as Liz can tell, this has held true.

Longtime viewers know that denial, the psychological defense mechanism, is the keynote of Liz’ character. Evidently this information is also available to Sebastian and his associate Roxanne Drew. Liz’ friend Timothy Eliot Stokes visits Sebastian today, and Sebastian has a vision of the two teenagers who reside at Collinwood as they will be at some point in the near future. He tells Stokes that he sees the two of them are asleep. But after Stokes leaves, he tells Roxanne that in fact they were not asleep, but dead. He wants to go to Collinwood and tell Liz the truth, but Roxanne forbids him, saying that doing so will jeopardize their relationship with Liz, the richest sucker they’ve ever had on the line.

Roxanne makes it clear that neither Sebastian nor the story is going anywhere. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In these scenes, we learn that Roxanne is evil and that she has control over Sebastian. We also get the idea that her plans are probably short-term. She must expect to have completed fleecing Liz and skipped town before the disaster occurs. Otherwise, even if Liz survives they’ll be losing her as a client when she discovers that Sebastian’s predictions were wrong.

Anyone could tell Liz what she wants to hear, but since Sebastian really can see into the future, using him as a lie-teller seems like a sheer failure of imagination on Roxanne’s part. That’s only one of several problems with the writing of these episodes. The show is heading for a trip back in time, which requires designing sets, making costumes, planning out new stories with new characters, casting parts, etc. As day follows day and we keep finding ourselves back where we started, it seems that they are just stalling while all that work is being done. I suppose if Sebastian were to make full use of his gifts, he might make the story move fast enough that they would run out of road before they are ready to move on.

If Sebastian were simply a fraud, he might be able to spin things out as the makers of the show need. But the only person we have seen who pretended to have supernatural gifts was Miss Pansy Faye in #771. For some time Pansy had been making a living by faking contact with the spirit world. But once she found herself in the ghost-packed environs of Collinwood, Pansy actually served as a medium for communication with that other world, much to her surprise. So a fraudulent Sebastian would just encourage longtime viewers to get their hopes up for a similarly clever resolution. By the time all the contracts were signed, sets prepared, and wardrobe fitted, we’d be the ones feeling cheated.

Episode 1080: It’s going to be uneventful

Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, studying a horoscope that astrologer Sebastian Shaw prepared for her. Liz’ daughter Carolyn asks what the horoscope says will happen today. Liz responds that it predicts the day will pass without incident. She adds that the horoscope has made the same prediction about each of the last several days, and that it has been right so far. The audience can agree with Liz’ assessment of the last several episodes, though we might wonder at what the makers of the show were thinking when they chose to make this explicit.

Carolyn is struck by the fact that Sebastian looks just like her late husband Jabe, whom she and others insisted on calling Jeb. So much so, in fact, that they are played by the same actor. Jabe died some time ago, and Sebastian has already denied that he rose from the grave. But two years ago Carolyn’s friend Vicki met her own late fiancé, an unpleasant man called Peter, after he had come back to life. Vicki found that Peter had lost his memory, refused to believe anything he told her about their past, and wanted to be known as Jeff. After several tedious months Peter/ Jeff admitted his true identity and he and Vicki went away and stopped bothering us. So Carolyn has grounds for hoping that the astrologer is not merely Sebastian, but will turn out to be Seb/ Jeb. We are forcefully reminded of Peter/ Jeff when Carolyn picks up the telephone to call Sebastian. She is standing next to a sculpture of a horse. The camera zooms in on that part of a horse which Peter/ Jeff brought to mind every time we saw him.

Memories of Peter/ Jeff.

When Carolyn makes the call, she says “I’d like to speak with Sebastian Shaw, please.” When Liz commissioned her horoscope, she went to Sebastian’s apartment, which was clearly his only premises. He is a prickly sort, unlikely to let a visitor answer his telephone for him, so this line suggests that someone else has regular access to Sebastian’s place. Nothing we have seen so far has given us a hint who this might be.

Sebastian is alone when Carolyn calls on him. She asks him where he is from. He says that he is from New York City, then asks why she is so inquisitive. Liz told him that he looks remarkably like Jeb, so Carolyn could easily answer that she wonders if he might be related to him. That would put him on the defensive if he withheld the basic facts about himself. But Carolyn simply says that she was idly curious, giving him an opportunity to shut her down immediately. Longtime viewers know that Jeb was originally a formless monster from beyond space and time and therefore had no relatives in the usual sense. But Carolyn doesn’t know that, and even if she did she would have no reason to suspect that Sebastian knew it.

Meanwhile, teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes are falling under the influence of some ghosts who resemble them as strongly as Seb resembles Jeb. Longtime viewers may not believe that this contradicts Sebastian’s prediction that nothing noteworthy would happen, since it is a rehash of a story we saw eighteen months ago, when David and his friend Amy fell under the influence of some other ghosts and, as in that story, they keep going in circles as to how they feel about it and what they should do.

In the course of The Re-Haunting of Collinwood, a mysterious room sometimes materializes in a disused part of the great house. Hallie goes to that room today. She sees David wearing clothes from the 1840s and making vigorous use of a rocking horse. She talks to him, but he does not respond to her at all. She gets steadily more upset. She turns and leaves the room, exclaiming “All right then!” as she does so. In the hallway outside, she then sees David, wearing his usual clothes and smiling at her. She gasps in amazement.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, said that this closing could have been a lot more effective had Kathleen Cody read a single line differently. Hallie’s mounting agitation as the person whom she believes to be David so totally ignores her is fine, but if at the end of it she had just relaxed a little and said “All right then” in a quiet voice, she would have had somewhere to go when Hallie sees David in the hallway. As it is, she is already at maximum tension, so her gasp adds nothing to the scene.

The mysterious room is stocked with toys and known as “The Playroom.” The fans often complain that the toys are meant for kids much younger than Hallie and David. When David Henesy joined the cast of Dark Shadows in 1966, he was nine and could pass for six; by this point he is about to turn fourteen and could pass for sixteen. Miss Cody is at this point about to turn sixteen, and looks about that age. It is not likely that a person their age would take much interest in a rocking horse, or a miniature carousel, or a stuffed animal. But as Mrs Acilius points out, that is as it should be. We are not supposed to like this situation. It is unsettling that teenagers would become fascinated with those things, and that is the point. The ghosts were the ages David and Hallie are now when they died, and evidently they were hung up on the toys in The Playroom; that suggests that they represent some kind of arrested development, that even when they were alive they were stuck in the past. If Hallie and David are going to have a future, they will have to break free of the ghosts and everything they stand for.

Episode 1074: Talking doesn’t help

For the first six months of Dark Shadows, reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard kept the story from moving by refusing to tell anyone what she knew about the major storylines. With the introduction of undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins in #123, the show became a supernatural thriller. The characters driving the new storylines took care to exclude Liz from the action by never letting her find out what was going on.

Now, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have returned to 1970 after a visit to 1995. They have told Liz and others what they saw in that future year, warning that a terrible disaster is impending that will destroy the great house of Collinwood and everyone in it. Julia and Barnabas are not sure just what will happen or when, but they know it will occur before the year is out and that it will center on teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes.

The adults have decided to keep the relevant information from Hallie and David themselves. That’s the whole problem today- a series of uncanny events occur that David and Hallie would recognize as signs of the disaster and about which they would be able at least to sound the alarm had they been given the relevant information. Since they have been kept in the dark, they are helpless and the events are pointless.

Not only are the characters not learning from each other, Liz and David have forgotten a great deal that they used to know. From the first week of the show, David was on intimate terms with the ghosts of Collinwood. But today he mentions to Hallie that when he saw a ghost he was not afraid, and he cannot understand why he wasn’t afraid. Liz’ daughter Carolyn mentions that she found Hallie wearing an antique dress. Liz responds that putting on an antique dress can hardly precipitate the kind of disaster Barnabas is talking about. Yet precisely the kind of disaster Barnabas is talking about already befell Collinwood in March 1969, and the first step towards it came when David and his friend Amy Jennings played dress-up, wearing antique clothes under the influence of the malign ghost who would eventually drive everyone out of the great house.

At moments, the script seems to acknowledge that the whole episode is a waste of time. Liz asks Carolyn if she believes in astrology. Carolyn says she doesn’t believe in anything, so she might as well pay attention to her horoscope. It’s no more meaningless than anything else.

The opening scene, in which David and Hallie spend what seems like an hour hanging around the gazebo and talking about the fact that she doesn’t remember putting on her dress, is particularly bad. I’m reluctant to complain about any of the actors, since the conditions under which they had to work were extremely difficult. I’m especially reluctant to single out performers like Kathleen Cody, who gets a lot of negative comment from fandom. But she is very bad in this scene, just terrible, loud and fake and hard to put up with. Not that I can see what anyone could have done to make the scene interesting, but the situation is so slight it cannot for one moment bear the emotional load Miss Cody piles on it.

There are a few moments of unintentional comedy today revolving around wardrobe. David wears a sweater over a sports shirt and a pair of trousers with the belt fastened somewhere above his navel. David Henesy is in his late 60s now; he still isn’t old enough to wear that outfit. But combined with David’s grouchy attitude, the costume makes him seem like some old guy from New England.

Why don’t nobody know how to make clam chowdah no more? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Chris Pennock shows up as astrologer Sebastian Shaw. Sebastian’s costume was bizarre even by the very generous standards of 1970. John and Christine Scoleri labeled some of its more unusual features in their post about it at Dark Shadows Before I Die:

I mean really. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The utter preposterousness of Sebastian’s getup goes some way towards relieving another bad taste in the mouths of longtime viewers. Pennock also played Carolyn’s late husband Jabe, whom everyone insisted on calling Jeb. When Carolyn first sees Sebastian, she is shocked at the resemblance. The show first went all-in on its repertory approach to casting in November 1967, when well-meaning governess Vicki traveled back in time to the 1790s. She found that the characters she met in that epoch were played by actors she knew from the first 73 weeks of the show, and tried everyone’s patience by telling them about their previous parts. That unbelievably stupid habit marred the 1790s segment and utterly destroyed the audience’s interest in Vicki. Carolyn’s recognition that Pennock was Jeb before he was Seb brings that unpleasant memory back, and any distraction from it is welcome.

At one point Liz finds David standing over Hallie while she is in bed in the small hours of the morning. Liz demands to know what he’s doing there, and is particularly indignant that he is “still dressed.” Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud at that. It’s better he should be naked?

Episode 1073: I don’t have to imagine things

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and his friend, Dr Julia Hoffman, MD, have returned to 1970 after an inexplicable journey through time. During a sojourn in 1995, they learned that a mysterious disaster is about to befall the great house of Collinwood. They have told several people about this disaster and withheld the information from several others.

Among those Julia and Barnabas have told is matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. We see Liz in the drawing room discussing the matter with governess Maggie Evans. Maggie is hurt that Barnabas hasn’t seen her since he returned. When Barnabas departed, there was a story brewing about a possible romance between him and Maggie; we might have thought the show would have forgotten this narrative thread, and some fans would prefer it had done so. But evidently it isn’t quite gone yet.

Among those Barnabas and Julia have not told is grouchy New England teen David Collins. David enters the room as Liz and Maggie are talking about the idea that something might happen. He says that something is happening, all right. Liz asks what it is and he says he will tell them what he knows if they tell him what they know. Liz huffily declares that the matter at hand has to do with a theory he could not possibly understand, and that she knows he could not understand it because she doesn’t understand it, either. Unimpressed by this logic, David stands his ground. He says it’s time they stop treating him like he is four and a half years old. Liz tells him that if he knows something they ought to know, he should tell them about it. How he is supposed to know what they ought to know when they won’t tell him anything is unclear. The exchange ends in a stalemate.

Julia and Barnabas have also tried to keep the relevant information from the other teen in the house, Hallie Stokes. Hallie eavesdropped on a conversation yesterday and picked up some ominous-sounding remarks with no context. David had a dream that night in which he saw Hallie wearing an old-fashioned long orange dress with puffy sleeves. Later, the same dress materialized on Hallie’s bed.

What neither Hallie nor David knew was that Barnabas and Julia saw that dress in 1995. The girl wearing it looked exactly like Hallie, but was named Carrie. She danced a minuet at the gazebo on the grounds of Collinwood with a boy who looked exactly like David but was named Tad.

When Hallie sees the dress at the beginning of today’s episode, she wonders how it got there. Maggie knocks on the door and Hallie hides it under her bedclothes. After Maggie goes, Hallie wonders why she didn’t just ask her about it. Longtime viewers have seen enough supernatural storylines start on Dark Shadows to know that a compulsion to withhold information is often the first step towards doom. It is frustrating that Liz, who has been central to the show since episode 1 premiered on 27 June 1966, hasn’t learned that lesson yet and applied it to her dealings with David.

David goes to Hallie’s room and tells her about his dream. She says that lots of boys dream about her; he says that unlike the others, he tried to go back to sleep afterward. David doesn’t specify what the other boys are doing with the image of Hallie in the middle of the night, but he lets her draw the conclusion that she isn’t up to his standards in that wise. When he tells her about the dress, she freaks out and accuses him of playing tricks on her. He doesn’t know what she’s talking about and doesn’t care enough about her to stick around until she clarifies it. He grumbles that he’ll never understand women and stalks off.

Later, David gets a note telling him to go to the gazebo at midnight. He sees Hallie emerge from the bushes, wearing the dress. He suddenly realizes that she is not Hallie at all. Carrie has made her appearance.

Carrie and David by the armillary sphere. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The gazebo set is decorated with an armillary sphere that is prominently featured today. From the first appearance of this doodad in #737, we might have wondered if the show was going to incorporate astrology into its stories. Two of the cryptic phrases Julia and Barnabas collected as clues during their visit to 1995 were “the night of the sun and the moon” and “the unfinished horoscope,” indicating that the time is coming for this to occur.

Liz is in a strange quiet mood today; Joan Bennett plays her very deep. She speaks softly, rarely makes eye contact, and often gives little signs of deep, somber thought. She mutters to Maggie that no one can know the future, “unless…” When Maggie asks unless what, she refuses to answer.

Liz telephones a man named Sebastian Shaw, who is wearing a piece of clothing that was ridiculous even by the standards of 1970. Actor Chris Pennock would later say that he retained absolutely no memory of ever having played a character named Sebastian; if I had worn that garment on national television, I think I would have blocked out the recollection as well.

Sebastian gets very prickly when people do not accept him as a serious professional. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Sebastian is an astrologer. He agrees to cast a full horoscope for the rest of 1970 for Liz. Since Barnabas and Julia told Liz that an unfinished horoscope is one of the signs that doom is near, it would seem rather bold of her to start an astrologer casting an elaborate chart.

Episode 1090: Today’s Ten Things That Make No Sense

Sebastian Shaw’s terrible clothes, Julia Hoffman’s ridiculous bossiness, and Barnabas Collins’ apparent sincerity. 

Episode 1090: Today’s Ten Things That Make No Sense