sebastian shaw – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1108: The Nicest Girl in Town

In episode #1 of Dark Shadows, first broadcast 27 June 1966, Victoria Winters came to the great house of Collinwood to serve as governess to strange and troubled boy David Collins. On her way, Vicki stopped at the Collinsport Inn and had a meal at the diner there. Her waitress was Maggie Evans, a young woman with short blonde hair whom the original story bible identified as “everybody’s pal and nobody’s friend.” Maggie opened their conversation by telling Vicki that she was a “jerk- J-E-R-K” for going to live at Collinwood. Maggie told Vicki that the great house would turn her long black hair gray in two months. When Vicki said she would go there anyway, Maggie offered her a “piece of apple pie on the house- and I won’t take no for an answer.”

Maggie lays it on the line for the new jerk.

Maggie was the chief representative of Collinsport’s working class in the show’s first months. The diner was a meeting place for a variety of characters, so we saw her wait on all sorts of people. She shared her home, “The Evans Cottage,” with her father, drunken sad-sack Sam Evans. Sam’s career as an artist was ruined when he took a bribe from high-born ne-er-do-well Roger Collins and allowed his one-time friend, Burke Devlin, to go to prison alone for a crime of which Roger was also guilty. Sam’s misery and Maggie’s Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACoA, they call it) mannerisms, such as laughing awkwardly whenever she begins to speak, attest to the dire consequences for the whole town of what goes on in the big house on the hill. As Maggie and Sam’s territory, the cottage was a space where Burke, who left prison and came back to Collinsport as a corporate raider, could talk about his plans to wrench control of the cannery and fishing fleet from the feudal-minded Collinses and bring the area into the age of capitalism.

From #12, Maggie at home with Sam. At that point, Sam was played (very badly) by Mark Allen.

They eased up on the “everybody’s pal and nobody’s friend” business pretty quickly. Maggie’s short blonde hair was a wig seen for the last time in #12; from #20 on, she has Miss Scott’s long brown hair. When Miss Scott’s real hair came out, her real personality started to peek through as well. While Maggie could still make a caustic remark or a tactless one as occasion demanded, the signs were already there of her final form, The Nicest Girl in Town.

In #63, Maggie made her first visit to Collinwood. She had made a vow never to set foot in the great house, and was ill at ease when she broke it. With a great show of courage she stood up to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. She told Liz that she believed that her family had information about what had gone wrong in her father’s life, and she wanted answers.

Maggie admits to Liz that she had to screw up her courage to come to Collinwood.

The supernatural was represented in the first months of Dark Shadows primarily by people using the word “ghost” as a metaphor when talking to Vicki, prompting her to reply “Surely you don’t believe in ghosts!?” They would then respond that they damn well did believe in them, and that if she went on living at Collinwood it wouldn’t be long before she believed in them, too. The first unequivocal sign the audience had of supernatural activity came in #70, when the ghost of the gracious Josette Collins emanated from her portrait above the mantel of the Old House at Collinwood, walked outside, and danced among the columns. The figure of Josette was none other than Kathryn Leigh Scott, who volunteered for the task when the original plan to achieve the effect without a performer fell apart.

Miss Scott reprised the role of Josette’s ghost in #126, wearing a heavy veil over her face. We hear her voice, with a French accent of sorts, telling Vicki not to be afraid even though a madman has tied her up and is on his way with an ax to cut her head off. Josette then leads the other ghosts of Collinwood in killing the madman before he can harm Vicki.

With that, Miss Scott became the first member of the cast to play multiple roles on Dark Shadows. For anyone who happened to recognize her voice in #126 and notice that she was in the credits, even though Maggie was not in the episode, the wised-up waitress and the ghost of Josette would have made an interesting pair. All we knew about Josette at that point was that her maiden name was LaFreniere, that she came to Collinwood in 1830 and married Jeremiah Collins, that she died by jumping off the cliff at Widows’ Hill, and that her ghost could be seen and heard around the estate. For all we knew, the LaFrenieres may have been a humble Franco-American family whom Jeremiah’s haughty relatives snubbed. She may have grown up in a house like The Evans Cottage, and her death might have been the outcome of a class conflict. Later, Josette’s family name would be retconned to DuPrés, her time of arrival to 1795, and she would be presented as a French aristocrat who was the daughter of one of the richest sugar planters on the island of Martinique, a description met in our universe by Joséphine de Beauharnais, wife and empress to Napoleon I.

In the first months of the show, Liz’ daughter Carolyn was dating hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. Carolyn and Joe were bored to tears with each other, and only kept going out because Liz thought they should. Joe and Carolyn finally broke up in #84, and he started dating Maggie by #129. Maggie and Joe were happy together, and soon planned to get married once Joe had saved up the money to go into business for himself with a boat and crew of his own. Their cheerful repartee was more agreeable to watch than were the many many scenes of Carolyn and Joe staring silently at each other, but it did not generate any story. It would be helpful that Joe and Maggie each had someone to talk to if they got involved in the plot in any way, but there were long stretches when we did not see either of them.

Maggie invites Joe to stay for a nightcap after a date in #129.

From December 1966 to March 1967, Dark Shadows was dominated by the story of undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Maggie was very far from the center of the action during that period. Laura’s story gathered up the loose ends of all the ongoing stories, including “The Revenge of Burke Devlin” and the significance it gave to Sam’s alcoholism. That would clear the decks for the transformation of the show from a Gothic romance with occasional nods to the uncanny to a full-blown supernatural thriller.

After Laura went up in smoke in #192, Sam wrestled with the idea of admitting Burke that he had taken a bribe from Roger to stay silent in his case. Maggie had a tearful scene in #199 when Sam told her the truth. She urged him to make a clean breast of it. Even if he went to prison, he would be better off in prison than he has been these last ten years. In #200 and #201, Burke heard Sam’s confession and Roger’s, and decided to peace out. The Revenge of Burke Devlin never was a very exciting storyline, and it was apt that Burke himself eventually gave up on it.

In April 1967, Laura was succeeded as the show’s supernatural Big Bad by vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas met Maggie in #221, and shortly after added her blood to his diet. She went through a period bedridden in her room at The Evans Cottage, helplessly weak during the day and aggressively determined to deliver herself to Barnabas at night. Eventually he took her to his home, the Old House, where he set about erasing her personality and replacing it with that of Josette.

Barnabas with the partially Josettified Maggie in #241.

Despite Miss Scott’s appearances as the ghost of Josette in #70 and #126, the show had always associated Josette primarily with Vicki up to that point. At times it seemed Barnabas believed Maggie really was Josette come back to life; he certainly expressed himself with conviction in #260, when he sat with Maggie in the prison cell in his basement to which he had confined her after she started trying to resist him and said “But you are Josette!” And David, who had been very chummy with the ghost of Josette, saw Maggie in the dress in #240 and #241 and took her for Josette, remarking that her face looked exactly the same as it always had. In those moments, the show was nodding to the 1932 film The Mummy, in which Boris Karloff plays the undead Imhotep, who recognizes in Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johanns) the reincarnation of his lost love Ankh-Esen-Amun (also Zita Johanns.)

At other times, it seems that any pretty girl will do for arnabas’ fiendish plan. So in #274, after Maggie escaped and he decided to repeat the experiment with Vicki as the subject, Barnabas tells his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis that if you “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure… a new personality is created.”

While Barnabas was holding Maggie in his basement cell, the ghost of his little sister Sarah showed up and befriended Maggie. It was she who helped Maggie escape. Sarah’s appearances turned out to be at least as big a turning point in Dark Shadows’ development as anything else that had happened up to that point, since it showed that the beings who lurked in the supernatural back-world behind the show’s action are starting to emerge into the foreground. Eventually, they will come on in force.

Maggie was sent off to a psychiatric facility called Windcliff after her ordeal as Barnabas’ prisoner. She had lost much of her memory and regressed to an almost nonverbal state. Her doctor, Julia Hoffman, probed into her mind, and soon learned the truth. Julia then went to Collinwood, where it turned out that her true loyalty was not to Maggie at all. She had been working on a cure for vampirism, and wanted to attach herself to Barnabas. When Sarah magically released Maggie from Windcliff and led her back to Collinsport, Julia betrayed her patient completely by using her powers of hypnosis to erase her memory and protect her abuser.

In November 1967, the supernatural back-world switched places with the naturalistic fore-world when Vicki traveled back in time to 1795. There, she met Josette, played by Miss Scott. That casting confirmed that Maggie really was the reincarnation of Josette, as Helen Grosvenor really was the reincarnation of Ankh-Esen-Amun. Those who remember how bleak the show was in May and June of 1967 when Maggie was in Barnabas’ basement can’t help but squirm at the thought that his attempt to torture her into expressing Josette’s personality was motivated by anything other than his utter loathsomeness, yet here the show is telling us that, however unsound his methods may have been, he had a point.

Josette’s first appearance as a living being, in #370.

When the show returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, it was a Monster Mash with a cast drawn from the whole back-catalogue of Universal Studios horror pictures from the 1930s. Wicked witch Angelique struck Sam blind; later, he befriended Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Not knowing his own strength, Adam would accidentally kill Sam. The story moved so fast in those days that Maggie didn’t have much time to mourn her father.

Angelique defied her master, suave warlock Nicholas Blair. To punish her, Nicholas turned Angelique into a vampire. Angelique took Joe as a victim, wrecking his relationship with Maggie. In #599, Maggie had recovered her memory of her own time as Barnabas’ victim, and she saw Angelique biting Joe. She pleaded with Joe to run away with her, urging upon him the hope that there was still time for them to escape. Then, Nicholas got hold of them. He erased Maggie’s memory again, leaving her cheerful and Joe beyond help.

Shortly thereafter, Nicholas and Maggie went on some dates. Nicholas had plans for Adam that required a woman to risk her life. In #633/634, Maggie accompanied Nicholas to the basement of the Old House, where he was forcing Julia and Barnabas to do his bidding. Maggie calmly and cheerfully volunteered to serve the function Nicholas had in mind for her. She looked around the basement and mentioned that she had spent a great deal of time there, indicating a knowledge of everything that had happened to her in that place before. When Nicholas threatens to kill both Adam and Barnabas if he does not get his way, Julia tells Maggie to stop him. Maggie blandly asks why she should. Her willingness to risk her life seems to be the measure, not of her resignation to her fate, but of an indifference to human life so total as to include her own life. Maggie was under a spell then, and when Nicholas’ plans failed she became her usual self again. But in that scene, we catch the only glimpse we will ever get of Evil Maggie. It is thrilling.

Maggie working with Nicholas in #633/634.

Not long after Nicholas’ defeat, Vicki disappeared. Maggie took her place as the new governess at Collinwood just in time for a story that calls for a new governess, an adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. Unlike the famously unreliable narrator of that novella, Maggie is not an overpowering presence who would obviously a danger to the children in her charge even if she were right about the ghosts. Instead, she is a squish, a completely ineffective teacher whom David and his live-in playmate Amy Jennings easily wrap around their fingers.

That’s a long way from the hard-boiled dame in the short blonde wig. Nor is it what we would have expected of the plucky heroine who fought her way back from dependence on the vampire’s bite to escape Barnabas in June 1968. It works in the story, though, and we’ve all known people who are tough and efficient in one situation but who go to pieces in a different kind of situation. And if we remember #63, we know that even when she was at her most hard-bitten Maggie couldn’t keep from trembling at the thought of Collinwood, so longtime viewers can believe that Maggie would be unable to bring herself to discipline David, who is after all one of Liz’ principal heirs.

The “Haunting of Collinwood” segment ended with another trip back in time, in this case to 1897. In that period, Miss Scott played Rachel Drummond, a neurotic intellectual hired to act as governess to children Jamison and Nora Collins. Rachel had spent the first twenty-odd years of her life under the thumbs of the horrendous Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask and his equally unspeakable family, wife Minerva and daughter Charity. The show gave Miss Scott enough to work with that we could see why Rachel kept going back to the Trasks and submitting to further abuse from them.

Miss Scott’s performance as Rachel was a finely observed and persuasively realized study of the psychology of dependence, which is probably why the fans all hate it so much. Dark Shadows was such a slam-bang adventure show at that point that Rachel seemed to have wandered in from the Strindberg play in the theater down the street. But so far as I’m concerned, she anchors the whole 1897 segment. Every story in it depends on our dread of the Trasks. They are the villains in the part that is concerned with the danger that they will take control of Collinwood. The Collinses are such a mess that the Trasks have to be something special to make us see them as a step down. The other parts of the segment require that we enjoy watching or even root for villains who are so wicked that we might be expected to want them to be stopped immediately. It is because they are a relief from the Trasks that we can find sympathy for werewolf Quentin Collins, can be amused by sorcerer Count Petofi, and can be glad that Angelique makes friends with Julia and Barnabas. Rachel’s torment shows us just how much is at stake in the battle against the Trasks and makes those reactions possible.

Rachel died halfway into 1897. After a bit, Miss Scott returned to the cast as Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager Countess of Hampshire. Kitty schemes to marry stuffy Edward Collins for his money, while he wants to marry her for her money. As it happens, they don’t have a cent between them. This farcical situation is executed with charm and wit, and as Kitty Miss Scott proved that she could play a character who is not The Nicest Girl in Town.

Kitty’s story came to a bizarre end. It turned out that she really was the reincarnation of Josette, that Josette’s personality was lurking in her subconscious, and that she wanted to trade places with her and live again. Barnabas was all for this, and he and Kitty vanished from 1897 into Josette’s portrait. They came out in 1796, where Kitty was indeed an inchoate memory somewhere in the depths of Josette’s mind. Barnabas tried to prevent Josette dying, but succeeded only in diverting her from her leap off the cliff to a fatal dose of poison. Poison was a suitable way to end that story, since it left a bitter taste in the audience’s mouths.

When the show was back in a contemporary setting in February 1970, Josette’s ghost appeared one last time. In #948, she told Barnabas that it was over between them, and that he should get a new girlfriend. In March, it looked like he and Maggie were becoming an item. She was certainly interested in him. In #973, she asks the newlywed Carolyn how married life is treating her, and mentions that she has a dinner date with Barnabas. When Carolyn responds that “Oh, maybe you and Barnabas…,” with the implied conclusion “will get married soon, Maggie doesn’t contradict her. It is unclear how Barnabas can take Maggie to dinner- she doesn’t know that he’s a vampire, and if she looks up from her salad to see him munching on one of the girls at the docks she will probably catch on. But for a couple of weeks they are getting remarkably cozy.

In #980, Barnabas traveled to an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” In Parallel Time, Maggie’s counterpart is married to Quentin’s. Parallel Quentin is an abusive jerk, and he and Maggie Collins never have a single happy day together. This Maggie stands up for herself in #985. In one of the very best scenes Miss Scott ever played on Dark Shadows, she objects that Quentin insists on talking to her “like a child, and I am not a child, and I refuse to be treated like a child.” She walks out of the house and does not return until #1016.

Maggie Collins refuses to be treated like a child.

The six weeks of Maggie’s absence were the six weeks Miss Scott was in Tarrytown, New York for principal photography on the feature film House of Dark Shadows, in which she played the lead. When we see Maggie again, she is in her sister’s apartment in New York writing a letter to Quentin saying that it is time to formally end their marriage. She crumples that letter up before the phone rings and she learns that Quentin is gravely ill. Whether she would have written another draft making the same point, we never find out.

Maggie goes back to Collinwood, where Quentin dishes out more of the same stuff. This time she does allow herself to be treated like a child. It is a demoralizing thing to see. We don’t get enough of Maggie Collins’ backstory to give Miss Scott room to etch a portrait of the psychology of defeat like that which made Rachel such a triumph for her. Worst of all, Quentin is not in the position of the Trasks- we aren’t supposed to hate him. On the contrary, we can get invested in the story only to the extent that we like him. Seeing how he treats Maggie, that extent is zero.

In July 1970, Barnabas returned to the original continuity. After a few days we saw that Maggie was distraught that he wasn’t coming around anymore. Other characters tried to explain that he and Julia had learned of a terrible menace facing Collinwood and were busy trying to fight it, and they did eventually enlist Maggie in their efforts. But she is still disappointed that her romance with him has fizzled. Considering that Barnabas’ attempted Josettification of Maggie was the story that first made Dark Shadows a hit, and that it is retold in House of Dark Shadows, you don’t have to be a longtime fan for this attitude to make you queasy.

For the last couple of weeks, Maggie has been the victim of a vampire other than Barnabas. This turns out to be Roxanne Drew, counterpart of a woman Barnabas fell in love with in Parallel Time. Barnabas has taken male victims before, but this is the first time a female vampire has taken a female victim. They never showed Barnabas biting Willie or the luckless Dirk Wilkins, while they often lingered over him biting female victims and Angelique, in her vampire phase, biting male ones. The ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices was vigilantly on guard against any exploration of homoerotic imagery. We never see Roxanne bite Maggie, though the final image of #1104 does show Maggie with a startlingly raw look of longing as she approaches a veiled Roxanne.

We see Maggie for the last time today. She is in a car, being driven back to Windcliff by strangely dressed man Sebastian Shaw. Some speculate that this ending was a private joke on the part of executive producer Dan Curtis, who thought that Miss Scott was crazy to want to leave the show and move to Paris with her husband, photographer Ben Martin.

Be that as it may, it is a nice touch that the final reference to Windcliff should be in connection with Maggie, for whom it was invented in the first place. Her stay there brought Julia onto the show, and Julia, for all her villainy, has for some time been the chief protagonist and audience identification character. Sending her there also leaves open the widest range of options for ways to bring her back. Maybe she will still be a patient there, as she was when she played a mad scene in #265 that was the single most frightening moment in all of Dark Shadows. Or maybe she will return to Collinwood, or maybe she will become a monster, or maybe something else will happen. Anything is possible.

Except that nothing is possible. The ratings are going down, Curtis and the writers are exhausted, and the public has moved on from the mood that made Dark Shadows one of the big fads of the late 1960s. The loss of Miss Scott, a performer who gave the show so much of its heart, is a nail in a coffin that was almost fully built already. House of Dark Shadows is in the theaters, and it is a big enough hit that MGM will greenlight another film in the franchise. But the series is on a one-way road to cancellation. In April 1971, Mrs Ben Martin will pick up an American paper from a newsstand in Paris and be astonished to read that Dark Shadows has broadcast its final episode.

In the years since, Miss Scott has been perhaps the most assiduous member of the original cast at keeping the fandom alive. No one has attended more of the conventions; she presided over the last two, held this year. Her publishing firm, Pomegranate Press, has put out many Dark Shadows-themed books, some of which she herself wrote. She, along with Jonathan Frid, David Selby, and Lara Parker, had a cameo in Tim Burton’s 2012 Dark Shadows film. She took roles in many of the audio drama continuations of the show produced by Big Finish, and she is the voice performer for the audiobooks of “Marilyn Ross'” Dark Shadows novels. If Dark Shadows was a projection of the personality of Dan Curtis while he was alive, in the last twenty years Kathryn Leigh Scott has been the first lady of the world of Dark Shadows, and has done more than anyone else to set the cheerful, welcoming tone of its fandom.

Episode 1107: Bury me not

A lot happens in this one, and all the actors do a good job. Even so, it feels very slow. None of the incidents seems to connect with any of the others.

Ill-dressed man Sebastian Shaw lets himself into the secret room where vampire Barnabas Collins keeps a coffin. It is not the coffin where Barnabas spends his days, but is the resting place of another vampire. Its occupant is Roxanne Drew, whom Barnabas loves and Sebastian hates. Sebastian opens the coffin, pulls a pistol, and aims it at Roxanne. He is about to fire when another figure appears in the corner of the room. Regular viewers recognize this figure as the ghost of pirate Gerard Stiles. Sebastian does not know that Gerard is a ghost. He fires two shots at him, of course without effect.

Barnabas enters. He disarms Sebastian, who tells him he was going to destroy Roxanne but that a man stopped him. Barnabas recognizes his description of Gerard. Sebastian shows Barnabas the bite marks on his neck, and explains he was under Roxanne’s power until recently. She lost her control of him when she began feeding on governess Maggie Evans. Longtime viewers have often wondered why Barnabas didn’t build an army by biting everyone who got in his way and turning them into his blood slaves; this is the first explicit statement on the show that a vampire risks losing control over one victim by taking another. We’ve seen examples of Barnabas’ power weakening when he takes an additional victim, but this has been far from consistent.

Sebastian shouts so loudly the microphone distorts his voice in a way we’ve never heard before on the show. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas asks if Roxanne ever mentioned the name Gerard Stiles. Sebastian says that he believes she did, but that he can’t remember in what connection it came up. We’ve had a few hints recently that Roxanne has some kind of association with Gerard and the other ghosts who are taking over the great house of Collinwood. This doesn’t give any substance to these hints, but it does confirm that the writers plan to keep dropping them.

Upstairs, Barnabas visits the other undead female he is keeping in his house, former ghost Daphne Harridge. He questions Daphne, who confirms that there was a girl named Roxanne Drew around Collinwood when she and Gerard were alive in 1840. She doesn’t remember much about Roxanne, but does recall that there was some drastic change in her that got people talking in that year. The show is obviously preparing for a trip back in time to 1840, so with this we learn that Roxanne will figure in that segment and that we will see how she became a vampire.

Another rehumanized ghost, Quentin Collins, enters. Barnabas orders Daphne to leave with Quentin, going far away from Collinwood before Gerard can get at her. Quentin tells Daphne to take Barnabas’ orders. When she protests, he says “Daphhh-neee” in a slow, condescending voice. David Selby started doing this in March to July 1970, when Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe and he played a different Quentin Collins, one who was married to Maggie’s counterpart. That Quentin was an insufferable jerk who often scolded Maggie with a slow, condescending “Maaaa-ggie.” Hearing him say Daphne’s name in that tonal format this time, I finally realized what it reminded me of. Ted Knight, as pompous newsman Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore show, would often pronounce the two-syllable names of people he was addressing using the same intonation. All of a sudden I could hear Quentin telling “Murrr-ray!” he shouldn’t put such complicated words in the copy he writes, or “Georrr-gette” not to be so independent. When I mentioned the resonance to my wife, Mrs Acilius, she laughed and said she couldn’t believed she hadn’t noticed it herself.

Barnabas leaves Daphne alone with Quentin. They toast their future life. Daphne abruptly collapses, and Quentin clutches his stomach. Gerard appears, and Quentin asks him why he has poisoned them. Quentin is an expert on ghosts who poison the living. In #677, he was himself a ghost, and he put strychnine in a drink his great-grandson Chris Jennings took. Barnabas’ buddy, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, saved Chris then. Now, Julia is with Barnabas when he returns to the room. Daphne is on the floor, unconscious but still alive. Quentin is nowhere to be seen.

Barnabas goes to the great house, searching for Quentin. He finds heiress Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes, playing a mad scene. Nancy Barrett and Jonathan Frid make Carolyn and Barnabas sound like Ophelia and Claudius in Act 4, Scene 5 of Hamlet, for a little while anyway. When Barnabas tells Carolyn that they must stop what is happening, she replies “I cannot stop anything. Whatever gave you the impression that I could?” It really is lovely.

Barnabas goes back to his house. Julia has treated Daphne, who is resting comfortably, aside from glycerin tears streaking her face at several angles, none of them convincing. Carolyn enters and demands to be left alone with Daphne. Julia and Barnabas know that Carolyn is intermittently possessed by a ghost known as Leticia, who is somehow associated with Gerard and Daphne, and are therefore reluctant to comply with this demand. But they apparently don’t think they have much to lose, so they go along with it.

Carolyn/ Leticia gives Daphne a dress. It is the dress she wore when she was a ghost. Daphne cries out to Gerard, asking if the time has really come. She then goes and hides in the closet. There was a lot of dull business with clothes when Quentin was a ghost, late in 1968, and they recycled that early in the current haunting, five weeks ago. This moment is easier to take, both because it is mercifully brief and because the dress is clearly legible as a sign of imminent story progression in the form of Daphne’s next death.

Quentin and Gerard are in a graveyard. Quentin has recovered from the poisoning sufficiently to smile lovingly at Gerard and say that he can’t imagine why he ever thought he was his enemy. He examines the tombstones in the fenced-off part of the graveyard and reminisces about the men buried under them, men who were underlings of Gerard’s in 1840. Since Quentin is only 100 years old, he is puzzled that he has memories from 130 years ago, but when he takes another look at Gerard’s smiling face his anxiety dissipates. He looks at a blank tombstone and puzzles as to why it is blank. At Gerard’s bidding, he digs up the grave and opens the coffin. He is delighted to realize that it was meant for Quentin Collins, and that the time has come for him to get into it. He briefly resists the idea of burying himself alive, but then looks at Gerard, says “You are Death. Whatever made me think I could run away from you?,” and complies. We end with Gerard putting the dirt back on top of the grave, Quentin securely inhumed.

Longtime viewers know that Quentin is alive because of a magical portrait that immunized him against aging, lycanthropy, and injury. So we are left wondering whether he is also covered for asphyxiation. If he is, Gerard is going to be pretty embarrassed when Quentin makes his way out of the ground.

Episode 1106: The girl Barnabas thinks he loves

Julia Hoffman and Willie Loomis have gone to an old crypt and opened a coffin in which a vampire rests by day. They have come at the bidding of another vampire, Barnabas Collins, who wants them to destroy his colleague. Willie is ready with the stake and hammer, but Julia calls stop. She recognizes the ghoul in the box as Roxanne Drew, whom she identifies as “The girl Barnabas thinks he loves.”

Willie used to be Barnabas’ blood thrall; for some reason he now considers him a friend, and is voluntarily helping him and Julia in their efforts to combat the new vampire and a separate supernatural menace represented by a number of ghosts, some of whom have taken corporeal form. He hesitates to drive a stake through the heart of what appears to be a lovely young woman, but knows that doing so is the only way to save the life of Roxanne’s victim, governess Maggie Evans.

Julia has long since implicated herself so deeply in Barnabas’ many crimes that she has no hope of a future that does not center on him. She would like to carry on some kind of romance with him, a reasonable enough choice given that she cannot have one with anyone else, and has fallen in love with him after a fashion. Barnabas does not recognize the nature of their entanglement, and he refuses to reciprocate Julia’s desires in this matter. It must be galling to her that he has chosen Roxanne as his current infatuation, not least because she looks so much like her to be the daughter she never had. But her devotion to Barnabas is so extreme that Julia says that Willie and their friend, Quentin Collins, must carry the coffin to Barnabas’ house with Roxanne in it and allow Barnabas to decide what to do when he rises.

Julia goes to Barnabas’ house and finds Sebastian Shaw lurking in the parlor. She is startled to see him. He asks if he has committed a crime. Presumably he has, since he has no legal right to be there and no one is available who could have let him in, but Julia would rather ask him questions than scold him for trespass and unlawful entry. Sebastian is Roxanne’s closest known associate, and when they discovered that she was the vampire Julia and Willie were puzzled that he was not guarding her. For his part, Sebastian is interested in Maggie, and has come to Barnabas’ place to talk with Julia, who is Maggie’s doctor. He asks for permission to sit with Maggie, and Julia says that Maggie is too ill for visitors. Neither of them gets much satisfaction from the conversation.

Sebastian goes to the crypt and is surprised to find that the coffin is gone. He notices the hammer and stake on the floor, unused. Meanwhile, back at Barnabas’ house, Willie tells Julia that they left the hammer and stake in the crypt. Inexplicably, she orders him to go get them lest Sebastian find them. They aren’t monogrammed or anything- there’s nothing about them that could tell Sebastian who had been in the crypt. The most they can do is reveal to him that Roxanne has not been destroyed, but if he is under her power he knows that already. When Willie comes, of course Sebastian sees him and realizes that Roxanne must be in Barnabas’ house.

Barnabas rises. He is distraught to learn that Roxanne shares his affliction. At his command, Willie opens the coffin. Roxanne tries to bite everyone. Julia holds her back with a cross, and they re-close the coffin.

Julia holds Roxanne at bay. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Willie and Julia leave. Roxanne is kept immobile by a cross on her chest. The coffin is hidden behind a bookcase in the parlor. Barnabas stands over the coffin and makes a speech, then leaves Roxanne alone in the house. The front door is, as always, unlocked.

Sebastian had let himself in after Julia and Willie left. He sees Barnabas come out of the chamber behind the bookcase, then lets himself into that chamber. He opens the coffin. Surprisingly, he does not let Roxanne go- he aims a pistol at her. Presumably it is loaded with silver bullets that will destroy her. It’s been clear all along that Sebastian hates Roxanne, but also clear that she controls him, so we have assumed he is her blood thrall and is powerless to act against her. Perhaps this is not so!

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 1090: All we can do is maintain vigilance

Julia Hoffman enters the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood and sees her best friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, embracing governess Maggie Evans and staring hungrily at Maggie’s neck. She interrupts with news that she just had an ugly scene with one of Maggie’s charges, teenager David Collins. Julia suggests Maggie go to talk with David, and she immediately does so.

Julia scolds Barnabas for almost biting Maggie. He denies he was about to do that. She reminds him of the lengths he went to a few months ago to resist the temptation to bite Maggie. She does not mention that Maggie was his victim three years ago, in May and June of 1967, an event that has repeatedly been wiped from Maggie’s memory, though not from anyone else’s. Barnabas insists that he is in complete control of himself, and that Maggie is in no danger from him. Julia looks at him skeptically, as well she might. He sounds like every addict who is ten minutes away from a relapse.

Later, Barnabas and Julia are back in the drawing room. Barnabas is all huffy because Maggie went on a date with astrologer Sebastian Shaw. Julia asks why that bothers him. He says that Sebastian is either a charlatan or something worse. Coming from a vampire, this note of prim disapproval is pretty rich, and Julia does nothing to hide her sardonic amusement at his discomfiture.

Julia is darkly amused at Barnabas’ sputtering over Maggie’s date with Sebastian. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia is so deeply involved with Barnabas that she has no hope of making a life that does not include him, and she long ago decided to make the best of this situation by falling in love with him. Barnabas initially responded to this attitude by cruelly taunting her, but now tends to respond to her unrequited feelings with tact and, at times, a measure of compassion. That tact and compassion do not go so far as to keep him from telling her about the other women he is chasing and expecting her to help him catch up to them, but sometimes, he speaks softly and gives her a hug. For Barnabas, that’s an enormous act of kindness.

For a long time, Barnabas was hung up on Maggie, and early in 1970 it looked like she was about to reciprocate his interest. Julia meekly stayed out of their way at that time. Then Barnabas went on a cosmic journey through an alternate universe and into the far-off future year of 1995. Julia accompanied him on that journey. While in the alternate universe, he fell in love with a girl named Roxanne, who looked like she could be Julia’s daughter. When he and Julia returned to 1970, Barnabas spent some of his time trying to prevent the disaster he and Julia learned was coming when they were in 1995 and the rest mooning about his lost Roxanne. That left him no time to reconnect with Maggie. Then, he met Roxanne’s Doppelgänger who is native to the main universe, and he was back in love.

This Roxanne apparently lives with Sebastian, much to Barnabas’ dismay. So whatever his past attachment to Maggie, the fact that Sebastian is available for Maggie to date suggests Barnabas might have a shot with Roxanne. Part of Julia’s grim amusement may come from watching Barnabas’ total inability to be rational enough to see this as a bright side.

Maggie comes back to the great house having had a fine time with Sebastian. She talks with Julia and Barnabas about David and her other charge, Hallie Stokes. She agrees that they seem already to be under the influence of the evil spirits whom Barnabas and Julia saw in the wreckage of the great house when they were in 1995, and laments her inability to get through to them. Barnabas says he will go home; Maggie offers to walk with him partway, since she wants some fresh air.

We cut to Sebastian and Roxanne’s place. Roxanne knows all about Sebastian’s date with Maggie. She mentions that she saw them at the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn. That will interest longtime viewers- the diner, as it is often called, was a major set in the first 41 weeks of the show, when Maggie worked there. It has been seen so rarely since then that we can never be sure it still exists. Sebastian wonders how Roxanne knows so much, and she placidly tells him she has her ways. He leaves the room, and she gives a mischievous smile, as if she has thought of another opportunity to use her ways to secure her interests.

Julia sees Maggie when she returns to the great house. Julia tells Maggie that she has been gone for an hour and asks what kept her so long. Maggie collapses, and Julia sees bite marks gaping on her neck.

At one point they cut from the clock in the foyer at the great house to Julia. They do a matrix wipe, in which the picture dissolves into squares and then the next picture assembles from those squares. It’s the first time they have used this effect, and it is not at all clear what point it is supposed to make. Also, both shots are loaded with lots of little visual details, so that laying one on top of the other produces an ugly, confusing image.

Matrix wipe. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 1088: Why do I have to see Collinwood again?

Julia Hoffman and her friend Barnabas Collins have seen the future. They know that before 1970 is out, a mysterious disaster will leave the great house of Collinwood in ruins, inhabited only by ghosts. In the course of the disaster, teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes will die, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard will vanish, and the rakish Quentin Collins will go insane.

Liz has forbidden Julia from telling Hallie and David what she knows. The ghosts have stepped in and asserted an influence over David and Hallie, preventing them from telling Julia or anyone else what they know. One of the ghosts has taken Quentin into her power, preventing him from doing anything to move the story forward. Astrologer/ psychic Sebastian Shaw knows that a disaster is in store, but he is under the influence of a woman named Roxanne Drew, who wants him to string Liz along with happy talk until they can bilk her of a lot more money.

Today Sebastian has a vision while he is alone with Liz. He describes a room and tells her she must not enter it. He then rushes out. When Liz repeats Sebastian’s description to Quentin and Julia, they recognize the room as one they had been in earlier. Julia wants to go there at once, but Quentin points out that if Sebastian’s words are of value that is what they ought not to do. Julia agrees with this. Liz says that she can’t very well accept being told not to go into a room in her own house. Julia and Quentin take a very stern tone with her, speaking to her as if she were a naughty child.

Liz is too well-bred to point out that both of them live in her house as her guests, but she does object and does go to the room. All Sebastian told her about the room was that it had been out of use for a long time, the walls are green, and there is a small figurine in it of a woman bending over a child. All Quentin and Julia told her was that they had been there. Yet she goes directly there. In the room, she encounters the ghost of the malign Gerard Stiles.

Liz senses Gerard’s presence. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Liz had called Sebastian to Collinwood because the horoscope he prepared for her predicted that on this night an enemy would become a friend. We know enough about Gerard to be sure that his “friendship” means only his control. So if the prediction means anything, it can only be that Liz will cease to be a potential adversary to Gerard and will fall under his control. That, in turn, means that she, too, will be sidelined into a refusal to communicate, becoming yet another brake on a story that has been going nowhere for weeks.

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.

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?