Tag: tad collins

Episode 1127: Dear Tad, you’re going to have two fathers now

Quentin Collins, sole heir to the Collins family fortune, took his young son Tad with him and sailed away on a cruise meant to take them and Quentin’s friend Gerard Stiles around the world. He left his wife Samantha, Tad’s mother, behind in the great house at Collinwood.

Six months ago, in the spring of 1840, Gerard came to the great house with sad news. Quentin and Tad had been washed overboard off the coast of Brazil. He had tried to save them, but could not. They must be presumed dead. To the dismay of Quentin’s younger brother Gabriel, his father Daniel decided not to change his will when told of Quentin’s death. Samantha remains as sole heiress of all Daniel’s vast holdings.

Gerard was invited to stay in the great house as a guest, and did so. In #1119, Samantha decided that her period of mourning had gone on long enough and married Gerard. In #1120, Gabriel found that not even this had moved Daniel to change his will in favor of him and his children. On the contrary, Daniel says that he ought to adopt Gerard, who is the son he should have had. It seemed that all the Collins wealth was fated to pass from the family with Daniel.

Before Samantha and Gerard had been married a whole day, Quentin turned up, alive and well and reporting that Tad would be along as soon as he recuperated from a mild fever. They had spent the last six months as penniless tramps making their way through South America on foot. It quickly emerged that Quentin had no particular feeling for Samantha; he regarded the Enoch Ardenesque situation as a comedy. He invited Samantha to choose between him and Gerard. If she chose to resume their life together, he would endeavor to make a go of it. If she preferred to start fresh with Gerard, there would be no hard feelings.

Samantha is having trouble deciding. Today, Gabriel taunts her, imagining how she broke the news to Tad: “Dear Tad, there is something I must tell you. You’re going to have two fathers now.” In fact, this doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. Quentin and Samantha cannot be bothered even to pretend they love each other, and whatever Gerard may feel for Samantha pales by comparison to his yearning to live at Collinwood and enjoy the family’s riches. If all had gone according to Quentin’s original plan, he and Tad would probably still be living with Gerard on board ship at this time, with Samantha just an increasingly distant memory. And despite the awkward situation in which they find themselves, Quentin still regards Gerard as a friend. His memories of their time together before the accident at sea must be very warm indeed to prompt that attitude.

I now pronounce you… Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The whole situation will remind longtime viewers of the conflict between high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins and dashing action hero Burke Devlin that ran through the first 40 weeks of the show, when it was set in 1966. Burke and Roger fought over many things, not least their past involvements with Laura Murdoch Collins, David’s mother and Roger’s estranged wife. Each man suspected that Burke was David’s true father. Roger and Burke noisily hated each other, but as Louis Edmonds and Mitch Ryan played them they seemed to have some very complicated feelings for each other that came from places other than wounded pride or class conflict or jealousy about Laura. When Laura joined the cast of characters, Diana Millay joined Ryan and Edmonds in making it crystal clear that Burke and Roger had always been more focused on each other than either was on her. In #139, they fought in front of Laura and forgot she was in the room. She rolled her eyes, telling the audience that it was the same as it ever was.

Laura turned out to be an undead fire witch come to immolate David in order to perpetuate her own supernatural existence. When that dawned on Roger and Burke, they set their hostility aside and worked together to protect David. In #187, the two of them took their places beside David’s bed and gave him some important news. They looked so natural together that it was as if they had been raising David together all of his life. Up to that point Roger had been unnervingly cold and evil, remarkably cruel to David and potentially deadly to well-meaning governess Vicki. After we see him and Burke co-parent David so tenderly, Roger is never a villain again.

Tad is no likelier than David was to end up with two dads. Long before the show traveled back in time to 1840, we saw that Gerard’s ghost was the face of a disaster that reduced Collinwood to ruins in 1970 and was still taking the lives of those who dared venture there in 1995. We learned from other ghosts of those who had been on the estate in 1840 that Gerard murdered several people, Quentin and Tad among them. If history is to unfold again as it did that first time, Gerard will have to change. We have seen that he is greedy, dishonest, and cruel, but he hasn’t shown any enthusiasm for murder. And Quentin’s continued friendliness towards him suffices to show that he has a more agreeable side.

When the present-day characters were researching the Collinwood of 1840, they were surprised to find that there had been a man named Quentin Collins there at that time. They could find no reference to Tad or Samantha, and the only evidence of Gerard was his tombstone. So a resolution that leaves Quentin and Gerard living together happily ever after, but the rest of the family so scandalized by them that Daniel writes them out of history and leaves his estate to Gabriel and Gabriel’s children, would prevent the disaster while leaving in place a timeline in which the characters we know could be born and live the lives we have seen. I can imagine a story in which Gerard committed the murders only because he fell under the power of an evil spirit that promised to cure him of his same-sex desires. The disaster could then be prevented when he and Quentin decide to throw the conventional morals of the nineteenth century aside and commit themselves to each other.

Episode 1109: It’s the same as it was in the future

The ghost of Gerard Stiles kills Daphne Harridge, Tad Collins, and Carrie Stokes. It was his idea to bring these three back to life in recent weeks after he murdered them the first time, in 1841. Daphne regained a body of her own, while Carrie and Tad took possession of the bodies of Hallie Stokes and David Collins. Now all of them are dead again, David and Hallie into the bargain. What the point was of any of that, none can say.

Gerard waves a green polyester flag from the window of the room on top of the tower at the great house of Collinwood, prompting zombies to rise from the dead and wreck the house. The shots of the earth heaving as the zombies rise from their graves were anticipated when David waved the flag in #1089, when a monster masquerading as a man named Jabez Hawkes raised some zombies in #963, and when wicked witch Angelique raised Jeremiah Collins from the dead as a zombie in #392/393. For that matter, the whole graveyard scene was anticipated in the 1959 feature film Plan 9 from Outer Space, and actor Chuck Morgan, who also played one of Jabe’s zombies, even looks like Tor Johnson.

Laugh if you must, but he’s leading a group of six who will demolish an incomprehensibly large haunted house in a single night. That’s more than you’ve done.

The Destruction of Collinwood will leave most of the Collins family dead, missing, or hopelessly insane. That was prophesied when vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman traveled to the far-off future year 1995 in #1061-1070. It also echoes a line with which heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard greeted well-meaning governess Victoria Winters in #2, “Welcome to the House of Usher.”

Julia escapes from the zombies and finds herself in 1840. She has to leave Barnabas behind in 1970, where he is busy wrestling with some of the zombies. Each of Dark Shadows‘ major costume drama segments has begun with a character from the contemporary setting alone in an unfamiliar past. Victoria served this function in the first costume drama segment, when the show went to the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968; Barnabas did it in March 1969, when the show started an eight months tour in the year 1897. Now it is Julia’s turn. She eventually joined Barnabas in 1897; we may wonder whether Barnabas, or perhaps someone else, will manage to find their way to her from 1970.

Episode 1103: Must things always happen the way they happened the first time?

Three ghosts who have been hanging around the great house of Collinwood for the last several weeks have assumed corporeal form. Teenagers Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes have taken possession of the bodies of David Collins and Hallie Stokes. Once embodied, Carrie and Tad cast a spell that brought their governess, Daphne Harridge, back to life in a body of her own.

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman confronts Daphne and demands she help David and Hallie resume their place among the living. Daphne angrily refuses. “I’m not going to let you destroy Tad and Carrie to bring David and Hallie back!” Carrie and Tad were already destroyed, when they died in 1841; it was Daphne who robbed Hallie and David of their rightful place among the living when she helped Carrie and Tad possess them. That possession is a murder, and one of the victims of that murder, David, has been a central character since the show’s first week in 1966, and the show has often been driven by our concern for his well-being. Daphne’s protest, voiced in a righteous tone that makes it clear David and Hallie mean nothing at all to her, marks Daphne as a villain whose motivations are entirely hostile to everything we could care about. But Daphne is, among other things, Kate Jackson. As such, it is impossible for an audience not to fall in love with her. Though Daphne’s presence in the story can lead to nothing but disaster for the human characters, we cannot want her to go away.

Among Julia’s many powers is mastery of a preternatural form of hypnosis that enables her to mold people’s memories as easily as a potter can shape clay. Until today, we have seen her use this power only on humans. But Daphne is human now, at least technically, so Julia gives it a shot. She takes out her magical medallion and shows it to Daphne. Once Daphne is in a trance, Julia asks her questions. They are not questions about Daphne’s memories of the past, but about events that will take place in the future. Somehow Daphne knows the answers to those. They suggest that the final catastrophe is very near at hand.

Julia introduces our new friend Daphne to our old friend, the magical medallion. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carrie and Tad have been inmates at Windcliff, a psychiatric facility Julia controls. Daphne had reached them there, driven in a car by charming rogue Quentin Collins. When Windcliff was first introduced in the summer of 1967, it was made explicit that it was located a hundred miles north of Collinwood. It lay far enough away that Julia could be sure no one on the estate or in the village of Collinsport would recognize her face or name when she showed up in town in #284. It was an unmistakable sign of supernatural agency when Maggie Evans was able to make it from Windcliff to Collinsport on foot in a single night in #295. And after hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell was sent to Windcliff in #658, everyone seemed to forget all about him, as they had forgotten about sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis after he was set there in #329. The place was the functional equivalent of the far side of the moon.

Today, Tad and Carrie escape from Windcliff and Tad remarks that Collinwood is “only a few miles” away. This is quite a severe retcon. It does strip away the sense that Windcliff is a safe place where the characters can take refuge from the impending catastrophe, raising the stakes and heightening the tension. But it also leaves us wondering why they don’t just go someplace else further away. The Collinses are supposed to be terribly rich, so there’s nothing stopping them from buying a place in California or Hawai’i or Bugtussle, Oklahoma and moving there while the ghosts have their way at Collinwood.

Episode 1102: Can one more thing happen?

There are two storylines running on Dark Shadows at the moment. The A story began as an adaptation of Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw. Since they already adapted The Turn of the Screw as a Dark Shadows storyline in late 1968 and early 1969, it was rather grim for longtime viewers to see the same thing coming up again, but they’ve taken a fresh angle on it these last couple of weeks. The Miss Jessel equivalent, late governess Daphne Harridge, has taken the form of a living woman. That the living woman is the young Kate Jackson means that the audience instantly falls in love with her, which is very helpful since she is on a lot and the scripts do not give her an intelligible motivation for any two actions.

The characters corresponding to children Miles and Flora are teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes. The ghosts of Daphne’s charges Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes have taken over the bodies of David and Hallie. Daphne, Carrie, and Tad keep trying to perform a magic spell that will give corporeal form to the fourth ghost, Peter Quint equivalent Gerard Stiles. Gerard is even more blatantly evil than are the other three, and they keep getting interrupted before they can turn him into a real boy. Today, Carrie and Tad are inmates at Windcliff, a psychiatric facility under the control of mad scientist/ heroine Julia Hoffman, and at the end of the episode Julia catches Daphne in Tad’s room, making another attempt to get through the spell.

Julia catches Daphne with Tad in his room at Windcliff. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The interiors of Windcliff look very much like an old mansion, prompting many commenters to say that the production staff had mounted so many scenes in the great house of Collinwood that they have forgotten how to depict any other kind of setting. But when we first saw Windcliff in #265, there was an exterior shot that made it look very much like a big old house that had been converted to use as a public facility. There’s no reason why the patients’ rooms shouldn’t still have looked like bedrooms.

Windcliff.

The B story is also heating up. There is a vampire prowling around the estate of Collinwood, and it isn’t Julia’s buddy Barnabas Collins. This new vampire has been feeding on Hallie and David’s governess Maggie Evans, and Maggie is so low on blood she may die if she is bitten again. Julia was guarding Maggie in the opening reprise of yesterday’s close, when the vampire appeared in the room, caused Julia to fall asleep, and drew Maggie out of bed. Today, charming rogue Quentin Collins enters in the nick of time to prevent Maggie being bitten again.

Quentin is distressed he did not get a good look at the vampire and still does not know who it is. They’ve made a big enough deal about the vampire’s identity that it must be someone we have already met, and we could see that the vampire is shorter than Maggie, which rules out all of the men in the cast. The only female character we haven’t seen in the daytime is the mysterious Roxanne Drew, so regular viewers don’t have a long list of suspects to work with.

One puzzle that hasn’t been solved is why Maggie is not at Windcliff. Windcliff was introduced as the place she was kept when she escaped from Barnabas after a time as his victim. Barnabas believed she was dead at that time, but as a vampire he had difficulty traveling any distance from Collinwood and he did show a tendency to lose interest in people who went away for any period of time. So if the new vampire operates along the same lines now that Barnabas did then, it would seem much wiser to send Maggie to Windcliff than to keep her in the great house.

This is the last of 63 episodes credited to writer Joe Caldwell. Caldwell made uncredited contributions to the show for some time before his name first appeared onscreen in #245. He specialized in intimate character studies; the slow pace of the show in 1967 gave him an opportunity to write many episodes of that type, all of them among the highlights of a very uneven period. He left in October 1967, and returned in 1970 when Violet Welles left the writing staff.

Even though very little really happened in the early part of the Re-Haunting of Collinwood segment, the show was so busy spinning in its tight little circles that it left Caldwell no opportunity to write the sorts of finely crafted miniatures in which he excelled. As a result, his second tour of duty on Dark Shadows does not include many memorable scripts. He will not be replaced, leaving Gordon Russell and Sam Hall as the only two credited writers for the remainder of the series. Others continued to make uncredited contributions from time to time, and in Welles’ case some of those contributions are instantly recognizable. But for the most part, it’s just those two guys locked in a room with executive producer Dan Curtis from now on.

Episode 1100: What it’s like to be alive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 1099: A governess that was here once

For several months starting in late 1968, Dark Shadows did an adaptation of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. This segment is often called “The Haunting of Collinwood.” For the last six weeks, they’ve been doing a second adaptation of that same novella. I call the current segment “The Re-Haunting of Collinwood.”

So far, the remake has been so close to the original that it is little more than a test of the patience of longtime viewers. The last few days, they’ve been deviating a bit. So the ghosts of teenagers Tad and Carrie have erased the personalities of their lookalikes, David Collins and Hallie Stokes, and are now operating as living beings in their bodies. That didn’t quite happen in 1968 and 1969, when David and his friend Amy Jennings were beset by ghosts who were excited by their resemblance to their late ancestors Jamison and Nora Collins.

Carrie and Tad have cast a spell that has conjured up their old governess, Daphne Harridge, as a living woman. Amy and David never even tried to bring lady’s maid Beth Chavez back to life. She remained an unspeaking ghost until the show went back in time to 1897 and we met her in her proper lifetime. Today, Daphne orders Tad and Carrie to go through the same spellcasting procedure to bring the other ghost, the evil Gerard Stiles, back to life. Again, David and Amy did not try to bring Quentin Collins back to life. He is alive today only because he was immunized against death and aging in the 1897 segment, since he was such a hit with the audience.

Summoning Gerard. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Yesterday, David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins questioned Carrie and Tad and revealed their true identities. Neither of them was able to name the parents of the person they were possessing. Tad was also unable to name David’s former governess Victoria Winters. Through the show’s first year, Vicki was the chief protagonist and main audience identification character. She was written out in 1968, and Barnabas’ question was the first reference to her in months. She comes up again today. Carrie brings some contemporary clothes for Daphne to wear. She explains to Tad that “They belong to a governess that was here once… Her name was Victoria or something.” She says that the current governess told Hallie that Victoria left the clothes behind, but did not explain why.

Two consecutive episodes alluding to Vicki will be enough to get longtime viewers wondering if we will see her again. They had run out of things for Vicki to do in the story long before she left the show, and there is no clear opening for her now. When Carrie calls attention to the fact that there is a mystery around the circumstances of Vicki’s departure, she reminds us that that Vicki disappeared into a time warp. Since The Re-Haunting of Collinwood seems to be heading into a trip back through time to the year 1840, that might lead us to hope that what we find in that year will have something to do with Vicki. Then again, if all the ghosts are going to turn into living people, maybe they will be able to cancel their reservations for the journey to the past and stay in contemporary dress. Perhaps in that case, Vicki will find her way back as well. We might imagine that we will find tomorrow that they have failed to bring Gerard to life, but have conjured up Vicki instead. Maybe the summoning procedure only brings up governesses with long black hair.

Daphne is played by Kate Jackson, in her first screen role. Miss Jackson would go on to star in primetime series such as The Rookies, Charlie’s Angels, and Scarecrow and Mrs King.

Episode 1098: Who was your governess before Maggie? Tell me her name.

Barnabas Collins leaves people who appear to be his distant cousins Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes and David Collins, as well as Carolyn and David’s houseguest Hallie Stokes, in David’s bedroom. Barnabas is still within earshot when these three address each other as “Leticia,” “Tad,” and “Carrie.” He rushes back into the room, looks at those who might be taken for Hallie and David, and declares “You are both possessed!” He ignores the fact that the same evidence indicates that Carolyn is also possessed.

Initially, Tad and Carrie pretend they were only using those names as part of a game. Barnabas says that in that case, he will play, too. He asks Tad to name David’s mother. He cannot. He then asks who his previous governess was. He can’t answer that, either. He asks Carrie why Hallie lives in the great house of Collinwood. She says that it is because there was an accident. Barnabas confirms that is so, and that the accident involved her parents. He asks her what their names were. She cannot answer. He presses on when they object. Finally, Carrie calls out to Daphne, a ghost whom she and Tad had previously denied ever having heard of, to come and help them. Shocked, Tad looks at her and calls her Carrie. The cat is out of the bag.

Longtime viewers will be thrilled by Barnabas’ questions. Not only is it a refreshing change to see him demonstrating presence of mind and moving quickly to advance the story, but the references to David’s mother and to his previous governess bring up characters who used to be very important to the show and who have been absent from the story and unmentioned for a long time. Real heads know who those women were, Tad and Carrie are exposed as noobs.

Throughout this interrogation, Carolyn/ Leticia was standing still, watching placidly while Carrie and Tad got flustered and blew their cover. Barnabas asks what the ghosts of Daphne and of someone named Gerard want. At that, Carolyn/ Leticia breaks her silence. Smiling, she says that Tad and Carrie do not yet know the answer to that themselves. Neither does she, come to that. She wafts away, leaving everyone reeling.

Yesterday, Tad told Carrie that if they let on who they really were, they would be defeated at once. It was not at all clear then what anyone could do to bring that about. Tad tells Barnabas that he and Carrie are here to stay, and that there is nothing he can do to stop them. This seems to be true.

Carrie distressed, Tad defiant. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

After Barnabas leaves Carrie and Tad alone in David’s room, they wonder what happened to Hallie and David. They say that they liked them, and that they hope nothing bad happened to them. Carrie asks Tad if he thinks David and Hallie are dead. He says he doesn’t think so, but he sounds very doubtful. Carrie asks where they are. He says they aren’t anyplace. While he and Carrie are using their bodies, Hallie and David “don’t exist.” It may seem obvious that ceasing to exist qualifies as something bad happening to a person, but ever since Epicurus in the fourth century BCE that has been an open question among philosophers. So maybe nothing bad did happen to David and Hallie. Certainly nothing at all will happen to them ever again.

Though Carrie and Tad have entirely erased Hallie and David, Carolyn persists. Leticia sets out to tell Quentin Collins something. By the time she gets to Quentin’s room, Carolyn has reemerged and is unsure what she is doing there. Quentin is drunk, which is not unusual. He is under Daphne’s power and has been unable to do anything to prevent Tad and Carrie from taking over David and Hallie’s bodies. Carolyn became clairvoyant when Leticia moved in with her, and can tell Quentin is feeling guilty about something. He denies everything.

There’s a lot of spellcasting today. Quentin tries to break free of Daphne by setting fire to her handkerchief. This fails immediately. Carrie and Tad try to raise one of the ghosts from the dead. They hope they will get Daphne, because they are afraid of Gerard, but they have no way of knowing which one it will be. The episode ends with a knock at the door. We will have to wait until tomorrow to find out whether that will be Daphne, Gerard, or the man from the gas company come to read the meter.

Episode 1097: In a different life

In July 1970, Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman came unstuck in time and spent two weeks in the far-off future year 1995. They found that the great house of Collinwood was in ruins, its residents either dead, missing, or insane as the result of a mysterious disaster that took place before 1970 was out. Since returning to their own period, they have been making fruitless efforts to learn what is happening and prevent the disaster.

Today, we see Julia sitting on the couch in the drawing room, reading a book and picking her teeth. Barnabas is pacing nearby. I am not making this up, the ABC network actually broadcast this on national television.

This thrilling scene follows an exchange in which Barnabas and Julia talk about a place called Rose Cottage that they heard about in 1995 and have been trying to find for the last six weeks. Julia tells Barnabas that it has just occurred to her that the place may not be known as Rose Cottage now. Barnabas does not understand what she means. Julia tries to explain that it might be possible for people to use one name for a house at one time and a different name for the same house at a different time. Barnabas has difficulty with this concept. Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid, highly trained and much-honored actors, play this exchange with great emotional tumult, focusing our attention on the precise level of cognitive ability it suggests the characters have.

Just as we are thinking that the show has finally come to a dead halt, Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes enters. Julia and Barnabas notice that Carolyn seems to be in a good mood, to which they make it their business to put an immediate stop. They say Carolyn must not have heard about the latest crisis concerning teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins:

JULIA: Carolyn, how are you feeling?

CAROLYN: Quite well, thank you. But both of you look so terribly distressed. Whatever’s the matter?

BARNABAS: Well, hasn’t anyone told you?

CAROLYN: Told me what?

BARNABAS: Well, the children are missing.

CAROLYN: Oh, that. Yes, I know.

JULIA: Well, aren’t you the least bit concerned about it?

CAROLYN: No.

JULIA: Why, Carolyn? Why aren’t you concerned? Carolyn, do you know something about David and Hallie you’re not telling us?

CAROLYN: Perhaps.

JULIA: Well, you must tell us. Do you know where they are?

CAROLYN: They’re gone. David and Hallie are gone.

BARNABAS: We told you that!

JULIA: Carolyn, we believe they’re in some terrible danger, the children.

CAROLYN: The children, in danger? No, no, that’s not true.

JULIA: How do you know it’s not true?

CAROLYN: Because I know the children are alive and well.

JULIA: If you know that much, then you must know where they are.

CAROLYN: No, that’s all I can tell you. They’re alive and well. Now, you must excuse me, I’m really very tired. (Exit)

BARNABAS (watching Carolyn go): Do you think she knows what she’s talking about?

JULIA (wonderingly): I have no idea.

They say that if a performer is really present in a scene, there is always a chance that when you throw the light on them something wonderful will happen. What Nancy Barrett does here is as pure an example of this I could hope to find. Carolyn’s blissed-out insouciance is so great to watch that it redeems everything that went before. I wonder if Frid and Hall’s ferocious overplaying was deliberate, meant to give the sharpest possible contrast to what they knew Miss Barrett was about to do.

Later, Barnabas encounters Carolyn in the little-used west wing of the great house:

BARNABAS: Carolyn, what are you doing up here?

CAROLYN: What, I just went to get something from my room.

BARNABAS: Your room?

CAROLYN: Yes, just down the hall.

BARNABAS: But your room isn’t up here in the west wing, it’s downstairs in the house proper.

CAROLYN (laughing): Don’t be absurd. You know perfectly well I’ve always lived in the west wing. I do think it the most enchanting part of the house.

BARNABAS: Carolyn?

CAROLYN: May I ask why you keep calling me that?

BARNABAS: Because it’s your name.

CAROLYN (laughing): You know very well my name is Leticia, and I live in that room just down the hall.

BARNABAS: Leticia?

CAROLYN: Of course.

BARNABAS: Well, Leticia, perhaps you can tell me where the children are. Can you do that?

CAROLYN: What an odd question.

BARNABAS: What’s odd about it?

CAROLYN: Do you realize how late it is? Where else would the children be but in bed? You are a strange one! (exits, laughing.)

In 1995, Barnabas and Julia found that Hallie and David had died in 1970, and that ghosts which looked like them were in fact the ghosts of teenagers named Carrie and Tad who died in 1841. So when they find that David and Hallie are not in the house, they fly into a panic. In that same year, they found that Carolyn was alive, and that she had gone insane in 1970. So far as they could tell, Carolyn believing herself to be someone named Leticia who lived in the west wing of Collinwood was no part of the disaster. So they stay focused on Hallie and David, and let Carolyn/ Leticia go her own way.

Barnabas takes “Leticia’s” suggestion and goes into David’s bedroom. There, he finds the young fellow asleep in bed. Later, Julia has gone to Hallie’s room and found her bed also occupied. Julia woke her and herded her into David’s room, where Barnabas confronts both teens. They claim that they ran away from home because all the talk about ghosts and whatnot had unsettled them, and that they came back because they realized they were being silly. Barnabas mentions the names of some of the ghosts; they claim never to have heard those names. Barnabas is startled by this denial. Returning viewers know that Julia has mentioned the names to David and Hallie, and it is likely she told Barnabas she had done so. They are trying to play dumb, but in fact reveal that something is very wrong.

Carolyn enters. Barnabas leaves her alone with the teenagers. He is still just outside the door when he hears the three of them bid each other goodnight. Carolyn calls them Carrie and Tad; they call her Leticia. Barnabas bursts back in and declares “You are both possessed!” All three of them are possessed, but what he saw in 1995 leads him to disregard Carolyn’s possession and to focus on David and Hallie’s.

Early in the episode, we saw what it means when Carolyn says “David and Hallie are gone.” They no longer exist. Their bodies are now the vessels through which Tad and Carrie have resumed living. Carrie and Tad talked about the importance of keeping up the appearance of being Hallie and David; Tad said that one slip would be enough to expose them, and then “the game will be over.” We might wonder how. What can the living characters do to defeat the ghosts, if they know what the ghosts are doing? Nothing we’ve seen in the last six weeks suggests an answer to that question. For all we can tell, Julia, Barnabas, and the rest of them are so completely helpless that the ghosts may as well throw all discretion aside and operate openly.

Episode 1086: Their ridiculous prophecies

Teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes are intermittently subject to possession by the ghosts of Tad Collins and Carrie Stokes. They fear that the ghosts will soon take them over permanently, erasing their own personalities once and for all. We have seen the future, and know that unless something changes not only will the bodies of Hallie and David become vessels for Carrie and Tad, but those bodies will die and the ghosts will haunt the uninhabitable ruins of the great house of Collinwood for years to come.

Previously, Tad and Carrie had been unaware of David and Hallie. When one of them was possessed, the ghost would not know whom the other meant when addressing them by the name of the living person. But yesterday Carrie and Tad simultaneously took possession of Hallie and David, and they talked to each other about how much they liked them and how puzzled they were that they were afraid of them. They went to the ghost of their governess, Daphne Harridge, and asked her if she knew why David and Hallie were afraid of them. For a moment we might have hoped that communication would take place and the story of the haunting would finally pick up steam, but that hope was dashed when Daphne responded to Tad and Carrie with silence. Daphne had been silent in her interactions with the living characters until Hallie and David heard her laugh in a dream they both had in #1082. It’s depressing that she can’t talk even to her fellow ghosts.

Any hopes we may have had for Hallie or Carrie also suffered yesterday from Kathleen Cody’s poor performance. Miss Cody gets a lot of hate from fandom, much of it unfair. She is good sometimes. But called upon to draw a bright line between the frightened Hallie and the cheerful Carrie, she went way overboard in both parts. The excessively ebullient Carrie is easy to ignore, while the heavily distraught Hallie is tiresome in the extreme. Even the usually reliable David Henesy occasionally got caught up in Miss Cody’s hamminess and overplayed David Collins. He pulled himself back each time, but it is hard to look forward to heaven knows how much more of this story when that keeps happening.

Today we get another David and Hallie/ Tad and Carrie episode, and it is little better than yesterday’s. Miss Cody is even more monotonous than she was yesterday. Mr Henesy does keep from following her into the dead end where she is stuck, and he manages to introduce a touch of comedy. The ghosts lock David in his room with Hallie, and his response is go directly to the window, open it, and climb out. His room appears to be on the third floor of the house and to overlook a cliff, but if that’s the only alternative to spending an hour locked up with Hallie I don’t think anyone can blame him.

David climbs out the window to get the hell away from Hallie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The highlight comes when David sees his distant cousin, Quentin Collins, standing by the brandy decanter. David has overheard Quentin muttering about a mysterious stranger and has questions:

David: Who are you talking to?

Quentin (drunk): The dregs, David…the dregs of this glass. That’s where all the answers are.

David: I thought you said something about a stranger.

Quentin: Oh, well, I’m in immediate danger of becoming a stranger to my glass, but that can be easily remedied. Yes, it can be. [Pours drink.] Ah ha ha…friends again.

Quentin was a malevolent ghost when we first got to know him, late in 1968. We then traveled back in time to 1897, where we met him as a living being. He was an utterly irresponsible rascal, selfish, cruel, cowardly, and shameless, and everyone who saw him fell in love with him at once. His death was prevented, he was immunized against aging, and when the show returned to contemporary dress there he was, none the worse for his 100 years. But they couldn’t find much of a place for him in the story. He may not be making many things happen these days, but in this exchange we find that he is still an alcoholic. As long as he has that going for him, he will always be the Quentin we can’t get enough of.

Episode 1085: What’s happened to my freedom?

If you’re telling a fictional story and your audience is with you, they will treat whatever you don’t explain as something that does not need to be explained. So if the story takes place in and around a village on the Atlantic coast about 50 miles from Bangor, Maine, you don’t need to explain why Bar Harbor doesn’t exist in the world you are describing. They will take it for granted that your village is on that spot instead.

When you introduce fantastic elements and don’t explain them, you have “fantasy fiction.” That’s the category Dark Shadows has belonged to since undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins joined the cast of characters late in 1966 and her arc absorbed all of the unresolved narrative threads that were still generating interest. So in March 1970, it turned out that an alternate universe could sometimes be glimpsed in a room in the long-disused east wing of the great house of Collinwood, and that people who entered the room at the right time could cross over into that universe. The aperture between the universes was not induced by any process, either natural or artificial; it was just there, and it was marked by an ordinary door. The handful of throwaway lines we heard about the many-worlds hypothesis were not explanatory in any way; they were simply a description of one way the show might use the alternate universe to develop characters. Because the practicalities were not explained, we accepted them as something that needed no explanation.

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and her friend, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, crossed over into the other universe. They escaped from it in July, while the alternate version of Collinwood was on fire. Evidently the flames disturbed the aperture, because they found themselves, not in the summer of 1970, but in 1995. In that far-off future year, Collinwood was in ruins and everyone who had lived there was either dead, missing, or insane. Julia and Barnabas learned that this sad state of affairs resulted from a mysterious disaster that took place at some point in 1970. They had gathered only a little information as to what this disaster might have been when they had to flee for their lives. A ghost led them to a magic doorway behind which a staircase appeared. They followed this staircase to another doorway. They passed through that, and found themselves back in the Collinwood of their own native universe in 1970, sometime before the disaster is due to strike.

Passing from 1995 to 1970 by means of a stairway is as fantastic as passing from one universe to another by means of a door, but it was not explained, and has barely been mentioned these last three weeks as Julia, Barnabas, and those they have told of their experiences have been trying to figure out what the disaster is going to be and how they might prevent it. So we have accepted it as readily as we accepted the “Parallel Time room.”

That changes today. Julia knows that the ghosts represent people who lived in 1840, and has started looking for information about the staircase in documents from that year. Quentin Collins has been giving her a hand with this project. She finds a plan for a “Proposed Stairway into Time” signed by another Quentin Collins and dated 1840.

Plan. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The ghost of governess Daphne Harridge seemed friendly to Julia and Barnabas in 1995, but in 1970 she has ensorcelled Quentin and kept him from being as helpful to Julia as he might. Today, Daphne oversees the destruction of a notebook in which teens David Collins and Hallie Stokes have written an account of their experiences with her and the other ghosts. But later it seems Daphne might be coming back around. She gives Quentin another journal, which he hands over to Julia. In it, Julia finds that Quentin’s namesake from 1840 had written about the thoughts that led him to design his “Proposed Stairway into Time”:

There is no such thing as time. There’s only space, physical space, and it is space that measures the distance between those points which we, in our ignorance and folly, insist are points in time. All time is one point, one moment. It is ever existent and it is ever accessible, and it is physical space that can be used to make all time easily accessible.

This describes the show’s method of jumping backward, forward, and sideways in time accurately enough. They cut from a set in one part of the studio to a set in another, and in so doing they have defeated chronology. Since Julia has found the note as part of an investigation that has kept her busy for so long, we are led to expect that we will be hearing more of this kind of talk, perhaps arranged in a pattern that will create the impression that we are being presented with an explanation of something.

Dark Shadows has been desperately short of story since Julia and Barnabas returned to 1970, and spinning out explanations is one way of introducing new story points. When these explanations resemble theories that researchers are actually using to look into natural phenomena, they turn fantastic fiction into science fiction. At no point has Dark Shadows come anywhere near this genre, and it does not seem like the “Proposed Stairway into Time” will lead them there. But who knows. Before Laura came on the show, it was a Gothic romance that included hints that ghosts and other unearthly forces were at work in an uncanny back-world behind the action. If Laura could transform it from that into the supernatural thriller it has been ever since, perhaps Quentin’s namesake from 1840 will be able to transform it into a science-fiction show.

If they are going to take that route, a time-travel gimmick would seem to be the logical way to merge onto it. Ghosts and vampires and zombies and other revenants, like time travel and alternate universes, are ways of making believe that options which events have foreclosed are still at least partly open to us. So if we say that the 1840 Quentin built a time machine, we can subsume more or less everything else we have seen under the idea that he created a rupture in space-time through which all of the other weird phenomena have been cascading.