Evil wizard Tim Stokes combined medicine with black magic to connect his late daughter Angelique with a woman named Roxanne. The connection drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. This rendered Roxanne comatose and allowed Angelique to move among the living so long as Roxanne neither dies nor gets even a tiny bit better.
Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are interlopers from another dimension. They know what Stokes has done and want to defeat Angelique. They made off with Roxanne and were keeping her in the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, planning to use some mad science equipment to revive her. Roxanne did perk up after the first treatment, and Barnabas took her on a date to his favorite place, the old cemetery north of town, where she showed some signs of recognizing her surroundings.
Yesterday, Stokes went to the Old House to search for Roxanne while Barnabas was out. When Barnabas got home, Roxanne was nowhere to be found. We learn today that Stokes does not have her. He turns to a man named Claude North for help in finding her. Yesterday he told Angelique that he was most reluctant to contact North; only after an incantation calling upon all the spiritual forces of darkness fails to solve their problem does he consider turning to him. He told Angelique that North was no ordinary man, and he is evidently more unpleasant to deal with than are Satan and his minions. But he answers when Stokes picks up the telephone and calls him.
Barnabas is also familiar with “Claude North” as the name of someone linked to Roxanne. He found a drawing of her signed by North in the secret chamber in the back room of the mausoleum in the cemetery. He goes back to the cemetery twice tonight. The first time, he goes into the secret chamber and finds evidence that a man with the initials “CN” has been staying there. He takes this as confirmation that it is Claude North’s roost. It does not seem likely that it is North’s only residence, since there is no sign of a telephone there. Stokes is spying on Barnabas while he does this. He is disturbed that Barnabas knows about the secret chamber, and wonders if he has been keeping Roxanne there.
Barnabas goes back to the Old House and finds Stokes talking with the lady of the house, Carolyn Loomis. Angelique killed Carolyn’s husband Will the other day because he would not reveal Barnabas’ secret, and Carolyn has been drinking steadily ever since. Barnabas tells Stokes that since he has extended his condolences to Carolyn, he can leave now. Stokes takes his time about going. He says that Will thought that Barnabas might have a girl someplace. “Is he right, Mr Collins? Do you have a girl someplace?” Thayer David delivers this line with an urgency that elevates it from mildly clever to almost brilliant. Jonathan Frid responds with a slow burn that brings the exchange to perfection. Barnabas knows that Stokes neither has Roxanne nor knows that he does not have her, but he also knows that Stokes, as a native of this universe, is likelier to find her than he is.
“Do you have a girl someplace?” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Barnabas goes back to the cemetery and finds Roxanne there. She is kneeling at a gravestone. It marks the grave of Claude North, who lived from 1814 to 1866.
In his own world, Barnabas was trapped in the counterpart of the secret chamber in the mausoleum for 171 years. So regular viewers think of that chamber as a place for vampires. North’s tombstone suggests that he might be such a creature.
Moreover, the drawing of Roxanne evokes Charles Delaware Tate, an artist who was a character on the show in 1969. Tate had the magical power to bring people to life by drawing them. He became obsessed with a woman he created in that way. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, Tate’s erotic preoccupation with a product of his own imagination is as much a metaphor for extreme selfishness as is the vampire. So if the answer to the question of Roxanne’s origin is that she sprang into being as the result of North’s drawing of her, it would only be appropriate if North were also a vampire.
There is a scene in the room on top of the tower at the great house of Collinwood. Carolyn goes there and looks at the window from which Will fell to his death. To her surprise, sourpuss Quentin Collins enters the room. Quentin is a fugitive from justice, having assaulted a policeman and fled from jail because he was under arrest for murder. He makes menacing remarks demanding her silence; she’s so drunk that it doesn’t seem likely she will remember he was there. In the other continuity, the Collinses had a habit of using the tower room, which is entirely enclosed in windows that can be seen from every part of the estate, as a hiding place; we can see that their counterparts here maintain the same self-defeating tradition.
Writer Gordon Russell takes bits of old episodes and mixes them as if he were rotating a kaleidoscope. There is a plot involved also, but the screen iconography is the main thing.
The show has been operating on the principle of the kaleidoscope for some time. They’ve traveled back in time repeatedly. Now they have traveled sideways in time and taken us to an alternate universe, which they insist on calling “Parallel Time.” Each of these segments represents a turn of the kaleidoscope, rearranging the actors, sets, musical cues, curse stories, imaginary geography of the estate of Collinwood and village of Collinsport, and other elements to create new patterns that shed unexpected light on familiar material.
Evil wizard Tim Stokes has used a combination of black magic and medical science to establish a remote connection between a woman named Roxanne and his late daughter, Angelique Stokes Collins. This connection drains the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique, reanimating her and leaving Roxanne comatose. To sustain this circumstance, Roxanne must remain in precisely her current condition. If she dies, all of her “life force” will vanish, returning Angelique to the tomb. Whenever she recovers even a tiny bit of her lost strength, Angelique collapses, possibly to die.
Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are visiting from the main continuity, and they are determined to stop Angelique’s evil plans. They have learned what Stokes has done, and have taken Roxanne into their own custody. As we open, Julia has just given up on an attempt to revive Roxanne and gone back to the great house at Collinwood, where she is impersonating her own Doppelgänger, the housekeeper. This woman, also named Julia Hoffman, was Angelique’s most fanatical devotee until Julia killed her, stole her French maid outfit, and assumed her identity.
Alone with Roxanne in the secret room behind the bookcase in the front parlor of the Old House on the grounds of the estate, Barnabas gives a soliloquy about his feelings for her. She opens her eyes and sits up.
In the spring of 1968, Julia took charge of an experimental procedure another mad scientist had devised to free Barnabas of his vampirism. The core of this procedure was the creation of a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam. In #490, Julia ran the apparatus and was disappointed when Adam seemed still to be inanimate. She and Barnabas left the lab, and Adam came to life. Her disappointment and departure are repeated in this scene, though Barnabas is there to see Roxanne open her eyes.
When Roxanne comes to, we cut to the great house and see Angelique collapse. She crawls around on the floor, trying to make her way to a telephone. This action is shown in quick cuts, but not quite quick enough. It is so much the sort of melodramatic business that was overdone in movies in the 1940s and 1950s and parodied in sketches on The Carol Burnett Show in the 1960s and 1970s that it raises a bad laugh.
Barnabas takes Roxanne out of the secret room, to the parlor. He finds that she cannot speak. He shows her a drawing of her that he found in another secret room, the chamber in the back of the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town. It is signed “Claude North.” Roxanne reacts to the drawing with delight and to the name “Claude North” with dismay.
In the summer of 1969, the show was set in the year 1897. One of the characters we got to know in that year was the mysterious Amanda Harris. It turned out that Amanda had popped into existence when an artist thought her up and made a sketch of her. This artist, a repellent little man named Charles Delaware Tate, had no idea he was endowed with the power to bring his fancies to life by drawing them until he met Amanda, at which point he developed an exceedingly unpleasant obsession with her.
Roxanne’s origins are at this point as unknown to us as Amanda’s were when we first got to know her. So the drawing will suggest to longtime viewers that “Claude North” will turn out to be this universe’s version of Tate. When Stokes tells Angelique that he might be able to bring Roxanne back by contacting North, the thought of having further dealings with the man is abhorrent to him. Like Roxanne’s own display of distaste at North’s name, that fits with the idea that he might be a version of the loathsome Tate.
In the great house, Maggie Collins, current wife of Angelique’s widower Quentin, finds Angelique crawling on the floor and picks up the telephone to call the doctor. Angelique says that she needs her father, not the doctor, puzzling Maggie. While they contact Stokes, Barnabas takes Roxanne to the mausoleum and shows her the secret room in an attempt to restore her memory and her power of speech.
In #283, the original continuity’s version of Maggie was a mental patient at Windcliff, a private hospital Julia controls. She had succumbed to amnesia, reverted to early childhood, and become largely nonverbal after an ordeal as Barnabas’ victim. In that episode, Julia took Maggie on a trip to the mausoleum, where Barnabas had tortured her, in an attempt to restore her memory and power of speech. Now, the relatively benevolent Barnabas is taking Roxanne to this universe’s version of the same location in the same hope.
Stokes attends to Angelique in her room. He gives her some medicine to keep her alive until they can find Roxanne. He warns her that if Roxanne manages to speak, her first word will send Angelique back to the grave. He performs an incantation to summon the spiritual forces of darkness to come to their aid. When Mrs Acilius and I were watching this on Amazon Prime, Stokes’ incantation was interrupted by an ad for Chipotle. I’d always thought calling on the Devil and his minions was likelier to bring Taco Bell upon you, but I don’t suppose Chipotle is all that different.
During the 1897 segment, we saw a new version of a character from an earlier phase of the show, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. That iteration of Laura was a heat vampire who drained the warmth from the living to remain animated. They’ve given the current version of Angelique the same condition, though we haven’t seen it lately. In #737, Laura was in a bad way. She lay in bed and her thrall Dirk Wilkins cozied up to her in the most sex-like interaction we had seen on the show up to that point (or up to this point, come to that.) Angelique’s bedroom is laid out the same way today as Laura’s was then, and as Dirk was on Laura’s right, Stokes is on her right. Earlier episodes made it clear that there was something deeply weird about the relationship between Stokes and Angelique. In the contrast between this scene and the one between Laura and Dirk, longtime viewers can see that Angelique and Stokes’ particular weirdness does not involve incest per se. Rather, it is their shared dedication to evil for its own sake that warps everything between them.
Back in the Old House, Barnabas puts Roxanne to bed on her table in the secret room. He goes into the parlor. A car pulls up. It is Carolyn Loomis, wife of his late blood thrall Will Loomis. Carolyn chatters happily about some shopping she did and asks for Will. Barnabas realizes she does not know that Will has died. He breaks the news to her. He says that Angelique killed him, which is part of the truth. Carolyn says it is because of Barnabas that Will was killed, which is the other part of the truth. Barnabas seems to have a whole speech prepared about how he will avenge Will’s death by defeating Angelique, but Carolyn keeps interrupting to ask who will avenge it by defeating him
Elsewhere in the 1897 segment, Barnabas’ enemies had killed his blood thrall Sandor Rákóczi. In #798, Sandor’s wife Magda blamed Barnabas for her husband’s death. She told him she would avenge Sandor by killing him. She then despaired of that and offered herself to him as his next victim. Barnabas grandly replied, “No, Magda, you will not kill me, and I will not harm you. We will grieve together.” Carolyn does not allow Barnabas to speak so loftily.
Carolyn goes to the great house. She is just about to reveal Barnabas’ secret to Maggie when Barnabas himself shows up. While he defuses the situation, Stokes realizes that the Old House is vacant. He slips out to search for Roxanne there. When Barnabas returns, Roxanne is nowhere to be found.
It may seem unlikely that the show will resolve this cliffhanger in the obvious way, by showing us that Stokes took Roxanne from the secret room. They usually go for surprise. Nonetheless, longtime viewers will be inclined to expect this to happen, even though it is so on-the-nose. This room was first seen in #113, when crazed handyman Matthew Morgan opened it as a dungeon for well-meaning governess Victoria Winters. Not even Vicki’s charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins, knew of the room’s existence, and David knew the Old House better than any other character on the show at that point. The room is therefore uniquely Matthew’s territory.
Like Matthew, Stokes is played by Thayer David. Stokes’s ancestor was eighteenth century indentured servant Ben Stokes, whose counterpart we saw in the 1790s segment as a commentary on Matthew, an example of the good and sane man Matthew might have been had he not grown up in the shadow of the ancient curses of Collinwood. Once those curses had been in operation for a little while, Ben started turning into Matthew. As Matthew inadvertently killed a man because of his unbounded devotion to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Ben inadvertently killed a man because of his unbounded devotion to Barnabas. As Matthew set out to cover up his accidental homicide by killing Vicki, who was played by an actress whose father was a Danish count, so Ben deliberately committed a murder to cover up his own accidental killing, and his victim was a lady with the title “Countess.” As a descendant of Ben and therefore a reflection of Matthew, it is a matter of course that Stokes knows about the room. Barnabas’ decision to hide Roxanne in the room is just one more case of a severe misreading of Dark Shadows by someone who didn’t watch the 1966 episodes.
Vampire Barnabas Collins discovers that the woman introduced to him as Alexis Stokes, identical twin sister of the late Angelique Stokes Collins, is in fact Angelique herself risen from the grave. He confronts Angelique, and the two find themselves at a stalemate. Angelique calls her stepfather, Tim Stokes, tells him who she really is, and enlists his help against Barnabas. Angelique’s widower, drunken sourpuss Quentin Collins, comes home to the great house on the estate of Collinwood and refuses to have an adult conversation with his current wife, the former Maggie Evans, about his temper tantrums and other bad habits that are ruining their marriage.
Meanwhile, mad scientist Cyrus Longworth, who has been conducting a Jekyll and Hyde experiment on himself, transforms into his Hyde form in front of his fiancée Sabrina Stuart. She tries to reason with him, and he responds with a lot of sneering and threats. Cyrus sneaks into the great house and lets himself into the master bedroom while Maggie is asleep there. He tricked Maggie into meeting him on the waterfront last week, and tried to rape her there. Apparently he has decided to make another attempt.
Writer Joe Caldwell takes a surprising approach to tying this big bundle of disparate content together. In each encounter, he has the characters talk about the way they are looking at each other. This sounds extremely unpromising, like a recipe for the dullest possible essay about literary theory, but when they put the script on its legs it works well enough.
Barnabas learns Angelique’s secret by going to her old bedroom in the east wing of the great house and staring really hard at the eyes in the portrait of Angelique that hangs there. “Alexis” comes running in, wailing that he is staring into her eyes and it burns. Barnabas goggles at her and she admits to being Angelique come back to life. He refuses to explain his powers of remote viewing.
Angelique telephones Stokes, who was named in #981 as her father but whom we see for the first time today. He thinks she is Alexis. He wearily tells her there is no point in the two of them having a conversation. She tells him she has something to tell him about Angelique, and he comes right over.
In her room, Angelique identifies herself to Stokes. He is overjoyed that the twin he liked is alive. She tells him that when she rose from the grave, she drained the warmth from Alexis’ body, killing her. Stokes frowns and says he didn’t want Alexis to die. He seems genuinely sad for a period. I timed this period; it lasts precisely four seconds. That season of mourning complete, Stokes and Angelique are again beaming and laughing and moving about in a circular pattern that looks very much like a dance around the May pole.
This scene includes some deeply puzzling information. Stokes says that he was stepfather to Alexis and Angelique. The other day, Angelique told Barnabas that her family’s burial grounds is the final resting place of her namesake, a woman named Angelique who came to Collinwood in the late eighteenth century as a domestic, and that another servant at Collinwood in those days, Ben Stokes, was her several times great-grandfather in the male line. Perhaps Angelique’s remarks about Ben and her namesake are being retconned away, but there doesn’t seem to be any point in doing so.
For its first 196 weeks, Dark Shadows was set in an alternate universe. The show insists on calling the current continuity “Parallel Time.” Stokes’ counterpart in the other universe, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, is a descendant of his version of Ben, though that Ben never married his coeval Angelique. Professor Stokes is an expert on the occult and a good guy, and it was he who first explained the theory of “Parallel Time” when characters started catching glimpses of it through a warp in Angelique’s bedroom here. Now the same warp is making the original continuity visible to the current characters, and it falls to Tim Stokes to explain the same theory to his (step)daughter. The Parallel Time phenomenon, like Barnabas’ remote viewing of Angelique through her portrait, is a case of one-way visibility. When the warp occurs, people can see into the other universe, but the people they are watching are not aware of them.
Shortly before dawn, Stokes lets himself into the Old House on the estate, where Barnabas is staying. Barnabas sees Stokes in the parlor. Barnabas asks Stokes who he is and what he is doing alone in someone else’s house at such an unusual hour. Stokes responds to these questions as he sees fit, then asks if he and Barnabas have met before. He characterizes Barnabas’ look upon seeing him as one of recognition. Barnabas replies that on the contrary, it was the shock of non-recognition. One does not expect to see a stranger in such circumstances. This little conversation about the act of seeing turns out to be the main part of the scene.
Quentin shows up in the master bedroom and stares at Maggie while she sleeps. She wakes up and is relieved to see that he is back. Then they have their frustrating little conversation. Maggie may as well have kept sleeping; at least Quentin wasn’t making things between them worse when she didn’t know he was there.
After he attacked Maggie on the docks, Cyrus threw away the potion that turns him into his Mr Hyde form, which he calls “John Yaeger.” He does not have the means to make more of it, since he murdered the chemist who alone was able to supply one of the key ingredients. He uses the same potion to re-Jekyllize himself, and since he had already transformed spontaneously once before it seems pretty reckless to throw it out. Sabrina is with Cyrus in his laboratory when the transformation happens again. She is horrified to discover that Yaeger, whom she has met and has reason to hate, is in fact Cyrus in disguise.
In the other universe, Sabrina’s counterpart was engaged to another murderous shape-shifter, a werewolf named Chris Jennings. When the other Sabrina saw Chris change into his lupine form, her hair turned white and she lost the power of speech for several years. This Sabrina is more resilient, and she tries to reason with Cyrus. He keeps telling her how dumb she is, then leaves. At the end, we see him standing where Quentin had stood earlier, at the foot of Maggie’s bed, watching while she sleeps. We hear his internal monologue as he tells himself “Now, John Yaeger, now!”
This episode was made not long after the feature film House of Dark Shadows finished principal photography. The very large number of story points crammed into its 22 minutes may show the influence of that production. It wouldn’t be unusual to see this much action in two reels of a theatrical release, but it is far more than we are accustomed to seeing at 4 PM on weekdays.
There are a number of buildings on the estate of Collinwood. There is the Old House, a big mansion where the Collinses lived until the 1790s, and the great house, an even bigger mansion where they have lived since. These days, the Old House is home to hard-drinking writer William H. Loomis and his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Sometimes the place is called “Loomis House” in recognition of its inhabitants. We learn today that the Loomises have a servant. His name is Wilfred Block, but everyone knows him as Fred.
Fred hears some noise coming from the attic. He goes up there and finds two kids who belong at the great house. They are Amy Collins and her cousin, Daniel Collins. Amy is out cold, and Fred asks Daniel what he did to her. Daniel claims to be innocent. He says that Amy just looked at a portrait and fainted. That’s the sort of thing the Collinses do all the time, so Fred accepts it. He carries Amy back to the great house. Daniel follows.
There, Daniel tells his father, Quentin Collins, the same story he told Fred. Fred tells Quentin that he couldn’t get any answers out of Amy. She just kept repeating the words “chained” and “trapped.” Quentin thanks Fred.
On his way out, Fred sees a woman whom he greets as “Miss Alexis.” He tells Alexis that he misses her visits to the Loomis House. She walks up very close to him and says she is feeling cold. He says he knows what to do about that, and hugs her. She holds the embrace for quite a while. He says he’s wanted to do that ever since he first saw her. She tells him to kiss her. Before he can comply, they hear Quentin coming. They separate and look nonchalant. Quentin is surprised Fred is still there. Fred hastens out.
Later, Alexis’ aunt, Hannah Stokes, would go to Fred at the Loomis House and ask him to come to her place, telling him Alexis wanted to see him there. That scene took place out of our view. The next time we do see Fred, Hannah is leading him into her parlor. Fred tells Alexis that he’d been planning to see her at Collinwood, but she says it is better at Hannah’s. Hannah leaves them alone together. They embrace, and Fred kisses Alexis. He feels cold. She tells him he will go on feeling cold, but bids him embrace her again. He does. He collapses.
Hannah was close to one of her nieces, Quentin’s late wife Angelique Stokes Collins. But she never got along with Angelique’s identical twin sister Alexis. Angelique had shared Hannah’s interest in the occult, and had been her pupil in that area, while Alexis scorned such matters. Alexis came to stay at Collinwood four and a half weeks ago, and spoke to Hannah only once during that time, when Hannah invited herself to the great house. That was a tense meeting which ended with Alexis all but ordering Hannah to go.
Hannah is taken aback today when she answers her door. She sees Alexis. She makes sarcastic remarks about Alexis, which do not deter her visitor from entering. The visitor asks Hannah to tell her fortune. Hannah resists, but the visitor keeps telling her it is something she wants very much. Hannah starts laying out the Tarot, but the first two cards disturb her so deeply she stops and cannot be persuaded to resume. She tells her visitor that they mean that she has no future. The visitor responds with a placid look and an insistence that Hannah read her palm. Hannah does not want to see the same message there, but the visitor will not be denied. When she looks at her palm, Hannah has a realization. “You are not Alexis! You are Angelique!”
Hannah is horrified that Angelique has returned from the dead. She does not want to know how it was done. Angelique seems eager to tell her everything; if Hannah were willing to listen, she might even volunteer that she murdered Alexis by draining the warmth from her body to heat her own undead frame. Angelique asks Hannah to bring her up to date on some things that happened while Alexis was at Collinwood and she was in the tomb. She then explains that her own death was also a murder, and that she wants to avenge it, though she does not yet know who the murderer was. She also has plans for Quentin, though she does not make it clear at this time what those are. She tells Hannah to bring Fred to her so that she can drain the warmth from him. Hannah protests, but Angelique tells her she has no choice. If she does not deliver Fred to her, she will haunt Hannah as long as Hannah lives.
After Fred collapses, Angelique calls her aunt back to the parlor. She tells her that she is all right now. Hannah finds that Fred is dead. Angelique agrees that he is, and repeats that she is warm again. She goes on: “That’s the way it must be now. This is the way I will live now. And when Quentin comes to join me, he will live this way, too. For eternity.” Evidently she is now a vampire, only instead of blood she drains heat from her victims. Also, she will be killing someone every 24 hours. Collinsport has been established as a very small town, so if she and Quentin are both going to be keeping up that pace it’s hard to see how it can last even for a year, let alone for eternity.
Quentin Collins
Quentin does not suspect that Angelique has risen from the dead, killed her sister, and taken her place. He has problems of his own. At the beginning of today’s episode, he is standing at the door to Angelique’s old bedroom in the east wing of Collinwood, where Alexis stayed during her visit and which Angelique now occupies again under Alexis’ name. He is looking into the room, but does not see it. Instead, he sees an entirely different space. Unlike Angelique’s richly decorated room, it is bare and dark.
Quentin sees two children in the room. They look and sound exactly like Daniel and Amy, though they are wearing clothing he does not recognize. He calls the names Daniel and Amy, but even though they are just a few feet away from him they do not seem to hear him or to be aware of his presence. An invisible barrier of some kind keeps him from entering the room.
Though the children cannot hear Quentin, he can hear what they are saying. The boy says that according to his father, “Dr Hoffman” said that “Barnabas got caught” in the room. The girl is alarmed and says that she does not want to get caught. She does not want to be in the room at all, but would rather be asleep in bed.
Quentin keeps calling the names Daniel and Amy. After a moment, he hears Daniel’s voice coming from somewhere other than the room. He turns, and sees Daniel and Amy standing behind him in the hallway. They don’t know what he is talking about when he asks them if they have been in the room, and he doesn’t know how to explain what he saw.
The Hoffman likeliest to come to Quentin’s mind is Julia Hoffman, Angelique’s fanatically devoted servant, who is the housekeeper at the great house of Collinwood and is certainly not a doctor. The only Barnabas he can think of is Barnabas Collins, an ancestor who died in 1830 and who was the subject of a biography Will Loomis wrote five years ago. Amy has told him that Will has started another book about that Barnabas. Quentin read Will’s original book, and was puzzled as to what could possibly be left to be said about its subject. So the conversation he has overheard makes no more sense to him than does the setting in which it took place.
Quentin shoos the children away and goes into the room. It is furnished as it always is. Angelique, whom he believes to be Alexis, is lounging in the middle of it. He tries to explain the phenomenon to her, and she does not take him at all seriously. He tells her enough that she should know that if it was an hallucination, it was a remarkably involved one, the sort that occurs only to people with grave mental illnesses. Even so, she could not be less interested in it. She wants to know what Quentin is doing to investigate her murder. He says that he doesn’t believe Angelique was murdered, to which she replies that he is a fool. This conversation does not have an obvious track forward, and Quentin quickly excuses himself.
Barnabas Collins
Barnabas Collins went to the island of Martinique in the 1790s on a business trip for his father’s shipping concern. While there, he met two lovely young women. One was Josette DuPrés, daughter of the richest sugar planter on the island. He was captivated by Josette, but did not believe she could love him. Josette’s aunt, the exiled Countess DuPrés, had brought a lady’s maid with her when she escaped from the French Revolution. This maid, named Angelique, was quite as beautiful as Josette, and made it clear that she was available to Barnabas. He consoled the sadness that he felt when he supposed Josette to be unreachable in a light-hearted love affair with Angelique. When it turned out that Josette was not unreachable at all, he forgot about Angelique and turned to her. Soon, he and Josette were engaged to be married.
When Josette and her father came to Collinwood for the wedding in 1795, the countess and Angelique came along. Angelique was sure that Barnabas was marrying Josette only to conceal his true intention, which was to keep her as his real partner. When she discovered that this was not the case, Angelique vowed to do something about it. She had learned black magic, and was ready to wreak a terrible vengeance.
Angelique managed to end Barnabas’ engagement to Josette, and had caused many disasters by the time Barnabas agreed to marry her. Before long, he discovered that she was a witch. He made several farcically inept attempts to kill her. When he shot her with a gun, she thought he had succeeded. As she lay bleeding, Angelique cursed Barnabas to become a vampire. It turned out her wounds were only superficial, but the curse was not. Barnabas was eventually trapped and chained in his coffin until 1967, when he was accidentally freed once more to prey upon the living.
That Barnabas Collins was not the one Will wrote his 1965 book about, and that Angelique is not the one who has returned from her coffin to stay in Quentin’s house. They were residents of a parallel universe. It was in their universe that the first 196 weeks of Dark Shadows took place. There, the east wing of Collinwood has long been vacant and disused. Barnabas happened to be there when the bare dark room Quentin sees today was replaced by Angelique’s room from this universe. He and several other residents of the original continuity saw the phenomenon a number of times over the next few days.
Barnabas became preoccupied with the forlorn hope that if he could enter the other “time-band,” he might be freed of the vampire curse and become human again. His closest friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD, tried to dissuade him from this plan, but he was nothing daunted. Barnabas finally did manage to find a way through the barrier.
Once in “Parallel Time,” Barnabas’ hopes were instantly disappointed. He was still a vampire. The first person he met was Carolyn Stoddard Loomis. He bit her and made her his thrall. Will found out about this very shortly after, and trapped Barnabas in a chained coffin. He is using him as a source of material for a new book.
The children Quentin saw talking about Barnabas were not Daniel and Amy Collins, but David Collins and Amy Jennings from the main continuity. They don’t know that Barnabas is a vampire; so far as they are concerned, he is their kindly cousin from England, an old world gentleman with some eccentric habits.
Amy Collins
Amy had stayed with the Loomises for a few days recently when there was some trouble in the great house. She took Daniel to their attic because she wanted him to join her in her favorite pastime while she was there, going through the trunks. Daniel declares that only girls would be interested in an activity like that. Amy doesn’t refute his claim when she says that the trunks have all sorts of interesting old stuff in them, such as dolls.
Daniel asks Amy about the basement of the Loomis House. She tells him that Will has the only key, and that he refuses to let even Carolyn go down there. We know that the basement is where Will keeps Barnabas’ coffin. Daniel says that there is a tunnel that leads from the beach right into the basement, and that he likes to play there. He says that it has been sealed up lately, but suggests Amy come with him to unseal it and explore. She says “Not at night,” and turns away. He calls her a scared-y-cat. Longtime viewers know that the same tunnel exists in the main continuity and that it has been a hugely important part of the story more than once, and will wonder if they can again match the excitement associated with it in those past episodes.
Amy tells Daniel that there is a sword somewhere in the attic, a real one. This does not exactly thrill Daniel, but at least he asks if it is a saber or a fencing foil, which is more than he had to offer in response to the prospect of digging up some antique dolls. He goes to look for the sword behind some paintings. When he turns up the portrait of Barnabas Collins, he hears a heartbeat. Longtime viewers will remember that characters have several times heard a heartbeat when looking at the portrait of Barnabas in the main continuity, and that this means that Barnabas is going to be on the show before much longer. Amy can’t hear the heartbeat, but she does have a strong reaction. It is at this point that she faints and the ill-fated Fred enters.
Regular viewers know that Amy’s muttering of the words “chained” and “trapped” mean that she has a mystical perception of Barnabas’ situation. But Quentin doesn’t have the slightest idea what to make of it. Amy comes to in the drawing room and tells Quentin that when she saw the eyes in the portrait of Barnabas, she realized he needed help. Quentin says that Barnabas has been dead for a very long time.* Amy says she knows, and leaves it at that.
Ben Stokes
In the 1790s, the Barnabas of the main continuity befriended much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes. Barnabas’ father, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, made Ben’s life miserable. Barnabas took pity on Ben, teaching him to read and write and standing up for him when he was wrongly accused of misconduct. In return, Ben gave Barnabas his absolute loyalty.
When Angelique came to Collinwood in 1795 and hatched her evil schemes, she decided she needed a henchman. She chose Ben. She pretended to find Ben attractive. He matter-of-factly walked up to her and took hold of her, as if women who look like movie stars come on to indentured servants every day. She soon used his excitement to cast her spell on him. He found himself helping Angelique to do great harm to Barnabas and everyone he cared about, grieving him very deeply.
Eventually, Ben broke free of Angelique. He went on to be freed from his indenture and to have children. One of his descendants is Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, an expert on the occult and a frequent ally of Barnabas and Dr Hoffman.
Fred’s response to Angelique today reminds us of Ben so long ago. Once Ben gathered that Angelique was propositioning him, he didn’t see any need to talk at all. They both had work to get back to, so he was ready to get down to business straightaway. But Fred keeps telling Angelique how beautiful she is and how he always hoped something would develop between them. His dialogue and Edmund Hashim’s delivery of it are as realistic and unadorned as Angelique’s lines and Lara Parker’s style are florid and over the top. The contrast is deliberate, as the contrast between the monosyllabic working-class “Fred” and the ornate and ethereal “Angelique” is deliberate. Just as Ben did not know what kind of world he had stumbled into when he reached for the original Angelique, Fred has no idea that he lives in a place where beings such as this Angelique can exist.
When Barnabas first came to this universe, Carolyn Loomis told him that Angelique and Alexis were the daughters of “Tim Stokes,” the counterpart of his old acquaintance Timothy Eliot Stokes. We have yet to see Tim Stokes, but we can be sure he will played by Thayer David. We know what Thayer David looks like. Alexandra Moltke Isles, who was in 333 episodes as well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, dated critic John Simon in the 1970s. Simon was a college classmate of Thayer David, and told her that in their day David was “the handsomest man at Harvard.” When I mention that to my wife, Mrs Acilius, she says that those must have been rough days for Harvard. David may have been better looking before he put on weight, but he never bore anything that could be mistaken for a family resemblance to the dazzling Lara Parker.
Longtime viewers, thinking back to what we saw when the show was set in 1795, might have an idea. Will’s book proves that the timelines diverged in the 1790s, when the Barnabas of the current timeline left Angelique alone and had a happy marriage with Josette. Perhaps in that continuity Ben really did pair off with Angelique. If so, Angelique and Alexis might be their descendants. They were lucky to inherit all of the genes governing their appearance from her.
The thought of the counterparts of Ben and Angelique as the forebears of the Stokes family in the current continuity might shed some light on its members. We’ve heard not only that Hannah and Alexis had no use for each other, but that Alexis and her father have not spoken for a long time. Like Hannah, Tim shared Angelique’s interest in the occult and doted on Angelique, while scorning Alexis. The new Angelique certainly qualifies as the Evil Twin, and is very much a continuation of the Angelique we already know from the main continuity. From what we know about them, Hannah and Tim seem to be the sort of people Angelique would naturally turn to for help in her deadly doings.
As for Alexis, she seems to have set her cap for Quentin, and succeeded in driving Quentin’s current wife Maggie out of Collinwood when she caught Alexis and Quentin in rather a compromising position. Alexis kept saying it would be easier for the new Mrs Collins to come home if she were to leave, but she never did leave. On a conventional soap, Alexis would have the makings of a Vixen, but it takes more than husband-stealing to join the ranks of the villains on Dark Shadows. Alexis would seem to take more after Ben, who had been indentured because he was a thief and was bewitched by Angelique because he disregarded sexual morality. She may have those sorts of flaws, but compared to the evils around her they seem like minor foibles indeed.
Edmund Hashim
Fred is played by character actor Edmund Hashim, making his only appearance on Dark Shadows. Hashim does a fine job. Fred had to be played with strict naturalism, so that the only resource Hashim could draw on to hold anyone’s attention against the flamboyant Parker was skilled and truthful acting. He pulls it off. It’s a shame we won’t see him again. He died in 1974 at the age of 41, one of the first cast members to pass away. The only ones who predeceased him were Fred Stewart (1970, aged 64,) House Jameson (1971, aged 68) George Mitchell (1972, aged 66) and Patrick McVey (1973, aged 63.)
*In fact, he says that Barnabas has been dead for “over 200 years.” It’s 1970, as the wardrobe makes unmistakably clear, and they have explicitly said that the Barnabas Quentin has heard of died in 1830. So he’s bad at math.
In episodes #853-#856, Sorcerer Count Petofi (Thayer David) used his powers to force the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins (David Selby) to trade bodies with him. Ever since, Quentin (Thayer David) has been trying to persuade someone to believe his story about Petofi (David Selby.) For the duration of the switch, I shall refer to Thayer David’s version of Quentin as P-Quentin, and David Selby’s version of Petofi as Q-Petofi.
P-QuentinQ-Petofi
Yesterday, P-Quentin persuaded his old friend and fellow Satanist, Evan Hanley, of what had happened. Evan agreed to conduct a ceremony to call upon their dark lord and ask for the transfer to be broken. They trick Q-Petofi into coming to Evan’s house and knock him out with chloroform. Then Evan begins an odd incantation:
Oh, Lucifer…
Great God of man and beast, look upon us with favor. Help us correct this evil which has been done in defiance of you.
Renew our bondage as your servants. Grant us the power we need this night, and we will be yours for eternity.
For Baal, who guides your mind.
For Beelzebub, who rules your spirit.
The robber of a soul must not be spared. The robbed must be avenged.
I exorcise thee.
Oh, impure spirit, who is the mind of the enemy, by the holy rite of Hecate, I conjure thee that thou do immediately hear and obey my command. Leave this man’s body, that he may return… Oh, yes, spirits of invisibility, I conjure and constrain thee herewith to consecrate this ceremony. So that surely and without trickery, thou may return each, to the body of [its] origin.
So be it.
Oh, Lucifer, so be it.
So be it…
I charge thee. I conjure thee. I command thee. Answer my demand.
Depart from these alien bodies and return to those from whence you came.
Depart.
So be it.
So be it.
So be it.
Oh, Lucifer, we give thee thanks.
Evan and P-Quentin seem to have the wrong guy. Whatever Satan’s powers may be, undoing evil, restoring property to its rightful owners, and enforcing justice are not exactly among the old fellow’s core competencies. Of course the ceremony fails. Q-Petofi wakes up from the chloroform, tells Evan he has made the greatest and last mistake of his life, and puts the zap on his brain. The next we see him, Evan is digging a grave, refusing P-Quentin’s offer to help him, and listening to Q-Petofi announce that he is about to be buried alive.
Q-Petofi’s announcement is the closing cliffhanger, suggesting that Evan has a somewhat longer life expectancy than we might have imagined when the ceremony fell apart. But once in a while cliffhangers really are resolved with the death of the character who is in peril, and that would seem to be a possibility in this case. Yesterday was Evan’s first appearance after an absence of more than eleven weeks, and he is not associated with any major loose ends in the plot. His alliance with the odious Gregory Trask, husband of Judith Collins Trask, may have given him a foothold now that Judith is back from her own long absence and is looking on Trask with suspicion, but yesterday he seemed to back off from siding with Trask in whatever fight might be coming up. So if the makers of the show are thinking it’s time for Q-Petofi to confirm his credentials as a major villain by killing a familiar character, Evan would be the obvious choice.
Judith confronts Trask today. He lies to her to cover up his misdeeds during the more than thirteen weeks she was confined to a mental hospital. She does not contradict all of his lies, and invites him to embrace her. He seems to think he has regained his control over her, but she tells him two things that make him uncomfortable. First, she says that she has persuaded his daughter to leave her apartment in the village and move back into the great house of Collinwood. When he protests that “She is not my daughter!,” Judith calmly replies that she is, closing the subject and leaving him looking like a petulant child. She also says that she hopes he has not bought or sold any stocks in her name lately, since she has revoked his power of attorney over her holdings. Again, he can say nothing in response.
Judith’s brother, the stuffy but lovable Edward, does not hear the details of this conversation. After Judith leaves the drawing room, Edward enters and tells Trask that he has won again. Trask perks up at this, and becomes his usual overbearing self. But he is just as quickly deflated when Edward tells him that he is looking into what he has been doing for the last thirteen weeks, and that when he finds out he will make a full report to Judith.
When Dark Shadows first became a costume drama set in 1897, Edward assumed he was to inherit the estate of Collinwood and all the family’s businesses. He was haughty and commanding, and Judith was a fragile spinster. But then their grandmother died, and the will left everything to Judith. She fell victim to Trask’s machinations and married him; he gaslighted her into the madhouse. Now that she has come home, Judith has found a new strength, sufficient to hold her own in the household if not to uphold justice and right on the scale which her position in the community would seem to demand. Edward’s dependent financial position, coupled with the many supernatural horrors he has witnessed, have gradually reduced him to a childlike state. In their scenes today, we see that the two of them have come to embody that signature dynamic of Dark Shadows, the relationship between Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother.
Sorcerer Count Petofi is wearing the body of rakish libertine Quentin Collins as a disguise, while Quentin is trapped in Petofi’s own aging and pudgy form. I will call the villainous Petofi played by David Selby Q-Petofi, and the forlorn Quentin as played by Thayer David P-Quentin.
Q-PetofiP-Quentin
We open with Q-Petofi at the front door of the great house of Collinwood. Yesterday we saw P-Quentin on the same spot, and heard David Selby’s voice articulating the miserable thoughts that showed on Thayer David’s face. Today the roles are reversed, and we see Mr Selby looking exultant while the voice of Thayer David talks about the glories of his situation.
We see that Q-Petofi is accompanied by his henchman, Aristide. He dismisses Aristide’s fear that he will somehow reveal his true identity to the occupants of the great house. He twits Aristide for a little while, pretending that he will use him as a guinea pig in a dangerous experiment he has planned for later in the evening, then sends him off to find someone else to serve that purpose.
Q-Petofi walks in on an argument in the drawing room between stuffy Edward Collins and the overbearing Gregory Trask. Trask is in charge of the house while his wife, Edward’s sister Judith, is in a mental hospital. Trask is going over the household accounts and complaining that Edward is spending too much on his houseguest, Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire. Edward asks Q-Petofi to explain Collinwood’s tradition of hospitality to Trask, setting Trask off with a rant about Quentin’s relationship with Trask’s own former houseguest, the lovely and mysterious Amanda Harris. Q-Petofi’s indifference to the whole discussion strikes both Trask and Edward as odd, but it really is quite typical of the old Quentin.
After Trask exits, Edward tells Q-Petofi that he thinks he can subdue Trask by marrying Kitty. He says that it takes money to run Collinwood, and the late Earl’s estate gives Kitty ownership of half the county of Hampshire. Returning viewers know that the Earl died bankrupt, and so far from owning great swathes of southern England Kitty doesn’t even have train fare to get from Collinwood in central Maine to her mother’s house in Pennsylvania. So we have confirmation that Kitty has been less than fully honest with Edward. On the other hand, Kitty is under the impression that Edward is rich, while in fact their grandmother left every penny to Judith. So neither is leveling with the other about their financial status. Q-Petofi knows all of this, but it has nothing to do with his plans, and so he struggles to feign interest.
For his part, P-Quentin is sitting in the caretaker’s cottage on the estate. It seems right to longtime viewers that a character played by Thayer David should seek refuge here. When we first saw the cottage, it belonged to handyman Matthew Morgan, who was at that time played by George Mitchell. In #38, Mitchell was replaced in the part of Matthew by Thayer David, in the first of the many roles he would play on Dark Shadows. When Matthew had to leave the cottage for the last time in #112, his whole world fell apart. So when Aristide comes in and brutally evicts him, we can feel the full weight of the disaster that has befallen P-Quentin.
With nowhere else to go, P-Quentin returns to the great house. Once again it is Thayer David’s turn to look soulfully at the camera while David Selby’s voice speaks desperate words in voiceover. He tells himself that his brother Edward will have to believe him when he tells him the truth.
As it happens, Edward likes Petofi and is glad when he believes he is receiving a visit from him. Based on Edward’s earlier remarks about Collinwood’s tradition of hospitality, we could be quite sure that if P-Quentin presented himself as Petofi, Edward would be glad to offer him a place to stay. But P-Quentin plunges right in and tries to tell Edward the whole story. Of course Edward is not convinced. He treats it as a joke in questionable taste, and offers P-Quentin a brandy. When P-Quentin tells him to forget the brandy, he says that if he really were Quentin, he would never forget the brandy.
P-Quentin insists on going ahead with the lunatic tale, and keeps clutching at Edward’s arm. Edward finds the whole experience revolting, and firmly escorts him to the door. If it has occurred to P-Quentin to tell Edward any of the little stories of childhood that only he and Edward would know, it is too late now to do so. Edward orders P-Quentin to stop talking and go home. Little does he know that P-Quentin has no home to go to.
At the waterfront, the fog machine is working overtime, and so is one of the locals. In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, user “Goddess of Transitory” remarks:
I was remarking to my husband about the really remarkable size and relative wealth of the hooker population of Collinsport. They may hang at the docks (makes sense in a port town–you troll for lonely sailors) but they all have really nice clothes and jewelry and no matter how many of them Barnabas et al. tear through, there’s always more.
Makes you wonder what modern day Collinsport’s main economic generator really is…
Comment by “Goddess of Transitory,” left 7 April 2021 on Danny Horn, “Episode 857: All of Him,” 5 May 2016, Dark Shadows Every Day.
We find today’s well-bathed, well-coiffed, well-made-up young woman of professionally agreeable disposition drinking from a flask. Aristide emerges from the fog and takes the flask from her. When she protests, he says that if she follows him, she will be drinking champagne, and her protests subside. Her name is Wanda Paisley.
Aristide takes Wanda to the cottage, where Q-Petofi is waiting. Wanda is quite pleased at the prospect of sharing her favors with two handsome young men at once, but less pleased when Q-Petofi says that before the festivities get underway she will have to throw some I Ching wands and meditate on them. He assures her that she will be well paid for whatever services she may render, and asks her to agree that this is what really matters. Wanda’s agreement is not forthcoming. When Q-Petofi keeps yammering on about the wands and the hexagrams and the trance and the doors, it dawns on Wanda that this evening is not going to be what she signed up for, and she gets up to leave. Aristide grabs her, and Q-Petofi uses his magical powers to coerce her into cooperating.
Wanda casts the wands and meditates on them. She has a vision of a skeleton with big plastic eyeballs reaching its arm bones out to her. She screams. Where she had been sitting is another skeleton with big plastic eyeballs, this one also wearing a dress and a wig. Q-Petofi tells Aristide that “beyond the door anything is possible.”
Her turn as Wanda today marks Karen Lynn’s only appearance on Dark Shadows. She’s very good, it’s a shame they couldn’t find more for her. Her only other screen credit is a 1963 feature called The Orgy at Lil’s, which an IMDb reviewer says made history as “the first roughie.” I don’t know what a “roughie” is, and based on the description of The Orgy at Lil’s I rather doubt that my education in cinematic history would be significantly deepened by finding out. At any rate, it sounds like Miss Lynn was well-prepared to portray Wanda’s enthusiastic response when Q-Petofi first joined her and Aristide.
I made a contribution of my own to the comment thread on Danny’s post:
This has to be the archetypal Dark Shadows episode. It has Jerry Lacy modeling the style of acting he and Lara Parker invented for the show, Louis Edmonds being sarcastic, a squabble about control of Collinwood, people drinking brandy, a prostitute picked up on the docks while the [fog] machine runs, several kinds of supernatural mumbo-jumbo presented as if we will of course understand them, a dream sequence, and a skeleton in a wig. The next episode opens with a grave-digging scene, which is pretty nearly the only thing missing from this one.
Comment left by “Acilius,” 3 December 2020, on Danny Horn, “Episode 857: All of Him,” 5 May 2016, Dark Shadows Every Day.
It’s true no actors blow their lines, none of the boom mic shadows obstruct our view of anything crucial, and there is only one audible cough from a crew member, so it is an unusual episode in some ways. But I could have mentioned another very typical thing- a practical effect they try for the first time. I believe the split screen shot of Q-Petofi in the drawing room and P-Quentin at the cottage is the first time the show has used this device. It doesn’t work very well, but they were always pushing to do something new:
Evil sorcerer Count Petofi has cast a spell causing his mind to take over the body of rakish Quentin Collins, while Quentin is confined to Petofi’s own body. So David Selby begins playing a youthful and handsome Petofi, while Thayer David plays an aging and pudgy Quentin.
In their post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri use a wide variety of expressions to refer to the characters Thayer David and David Selby play today. I will just call Thayer David’s character P-Quentin and David Selby’s Q-Petofi.
P-QuentinQ-Petofi
Both of those actors give superb performances today; David Selby makes Q-Petofi’s preening arrogance suitably repellent, while the 42 year old Thayer David shows us P-Quentin reduced to the total helplessness of a despised man in extreme old age. There is a scene that Mrs Acilius and I found particularly hard to watch when Q-Petofi’s henchman Aristide takes the thick glasses without which P-Quentin is effectively blind and holds them away from him.
Q-Petofi and Aristide’s gleeful cruelty to P-Quentin make us wonder how the count and his henchman feel about the body they are looking at. The show’s earlier body swap story, in which vampire Barnabas Collins had hoped to die and come back to life in the form of Frankenstein’s monster Adam, led Adam to ask Barnabas in #587 “How could you hate yourself so much that you wanted to change your body?” We hadn’t known that that the count hated himself at all until we saw this scene, but he must have done to take such delight in tormenting P-Quentin, and Aristide’s revelry shows that he, too, harbors more hostility to his master than he ever dared expose.
P-Quentin staggers away from the lair of Q-Petofi and Aristide and meets broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi in the woods. He tries to explain his true identity to Magda, who has experience with magic and has for some time now been his ally. But Magda’s fear of the count keeps her from listening to the far-fetched tale, and she rushes off.
P-Quentin makes his way to the door of his home, the great house of Collinwood. He stands there, and we hear his thoughts, in David Selby’s voice. He tells himself he cannot go in, because no one there would believe him if he told them who he was. He slinks off to the caretaker’s cottage, where he meets maidservant Beth, who is his sometime fiancée. He tries to tell her the story, but she too is terrified of the count. When Q-Petofi shows up, she leaves with him.
Magda is a wonderful character, and what we have seen has given us every reason to hope she will be a substantial part of the show for a while yet. Unfortunately, this is her final on-screen appearance. We will hear her voice once more, six weeks from now. The show has always been visually ambitious, and lately they’ve managed to pull some neat tricks with videotape that led me to hope we would see at least one scene in which Grayson Hall appears opposite herself as both Magda and time-traveling physician Julia Hoffman. When Hall appeared in the 1970 film End of the Road, she said that it was a relief from playing Julia, to whom she apparently referred as “that tight-ass doctor.” Magda is earthy enough that it would have been fun to see how Hall would have used her to demonstrate the same attitude towards Julia, even if she had to stick to words approved by the ABC network’s Standards and Practices office, and Julia’s reaction to Magda would doubtless have been just as much fun.
Barnabas Collins went into a trance at the end of February 1969 and came to in March 1897, a time when he was a vampire. Barnabas took the audience with him, so that Dark Shadows has been a costume drama set in 1897 ever since. We’ve had a few glimpses of 1969- we can see that time is passing there, that twelve year old David Collins has been saved from death, that the ghosts of rakish libertine Quentin Collins and maidservant Beth Chavez have stopped haunting the great house of Collinwood, and that Barnabas’ physical body has vanished, leaving him no avenue of return to the 1960s. We’ve also had indications at several points that the show was about to put the 1897 segment into its climactic crisis, each of which was followed by a restart of that segment. Some of those false signs probably reflected long-range plans that were abandoned when they saw how popular 1897 was.
Now, they are in a position when they can go back to 1969 whenever they wish. There are only a few unresolved story points in 1897. Most of those can be wrapped up quickly, and the rest can be forgotten. If they wanted to, they could write a single slam-bang episode in which the evil Gregory Trask is forced to accept the annulment of his marriage to Judith Collins and to relinquish control of Collinwood, the family is persuaded that Barnabas never really was a vampire after all, and Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, turns into Barnabas’ lost love Josette and finds a way to leave him that will make him even more miserable than he already is. Sorcerer Count Petofi might be left watching helplessly as Barnabas, his friend Julia Hoffman, and the living Quentin all escape into the future. We could then assume that the rest of the characters just toddled off and led quiet lives.
They could equally well take another tack on their way back to contemporary dress. Barnabas and Julia came to 1897 separately; there is no reason why they, or any other characters, should have to go to 1969 together. Today, Petofi is performing some kind of mumbo-jumbo that is supposed to lead to a body swap that will cause him to trade forms with Quentin. After that, he is confident he will travel to 1969 and be safe from his foes, the Rroma people. He seems to be succeeding. So perhaps a Petofi who looks and sounds like Quentin will appear in 1969, in a Collinwood based on the events that have taken place so far in 1897.
In that pocket universe, Collinwood would be known as Traskwood. Its owner in 1969 would be Trask’s son by a subsequent marriage. Call him Gregory, Junior. It would be unclear at first what happened to Judith and to her presumptive heir, her twelve year old nephew Jamison. The revelation of their fates could set us up for some big twists and the introduction of new characters with familiar faces.
Since Gregory, Junior would be in his sixties, he could have a couple of adult children who would carry on some story points. Gregory III could be played by Jerry Lacy without old age makeup, and could be a morally ambiguous character who might emerge as a protagonist and would certainly become prominent in the pages of the fan magazines. None of the Trasks would have any legal obligation to let Quentin stay in any of their houses or to work for any of their businesses, nor would any surviving Collinses. Moreover, everyone in the area would know full well that there used to be a vampire on the estate named Barnabas Collins, and no one would ever have heard of Julia.
If the show goes that direction, we could spend half of each week with Petofi-as-Quentin while he makes a place for himself in that pocket universe version of 1969, while we would spend the other half with Barnabas and perhaps Julia back in 1897, where they are in an uneasy alliance with wicked witch Angelique as they try to set history right. Kitty’s Josettification would threaten to destroy this alliance, since Barnabas is obsessed with his love for Josette and Angelique is equally obsessed with her hatred for her.
The body-swap theme of today’s episode, along with the emphasis on the procedure Petofi is following, will remind longtime viewers of The Experiment, a theme that ran from April to May 1968. Barnabas and Julia built a Frankenstein’s monster with the intention of killing Barnabas and bringing him to life again in the new body. Some viewers may have wondered if Jonathan Frid was actually going to leave the show, and if the actor playing the monster was going to take over the role of Barnabas.
This time a larger fraction of the viewers are likely to think the transfer might work, since it would not require a popular star to leave the show. On the contrary, casting David Selby as Petofi in an altered twentieth century would give him the chance to wear up-to-date clothing, have magical powers, inflict cruel punishments on people who get in his way, run con games, hint at an ambiguous sexual orientation, and generally have a wonderful time. Since Mr Selby had by this point become the pin-up of a huge percentage of America’s teenaged and preteen girls, that sounds like a recipe for sky-high ratings. Meanwhile, casting Thayer David as a Quentin estranged from his body and his social environment would present an expert character actor with a challenge worthy of his skills.
It might sound like it would be too confusing to intercut between a parallel version of 1969 and a continuation of 1897, but the show will try almost exactly the same tactic a couple of years from now, as they set up for the storyline that carries the series through its final nine weeks. That closing bit is not widely regarded as one of the better phases of Dark Shadows, but the intercutting timelines that lead to it are an intriguing gambit. Maybe the idea for it came when they were trying to figure out how to get from 1897 back to 1969, in which case it is possible that the scenario I have outlined above may be very much like what the writers had in mind at some point in the development of the story.
Corridors of Trial and Error
We do get a few hints today about what we might see in the 1897 half of the show if it does split. Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi shows up for the first time since #834, before Julia came to 1897. We had begun to fear we wouldn’t see her again. It’s good to have her back, but since Magda is also played by Grayson Hall, it raises the possibility that Julia might go away for a long time. Maybe the action will be split between 1897 and 1969 for some months, and during those months Julia will be in 1969, running her hospital, entirely unaware that there ever was a Barnabas Collins.
Beth is a servant of Petofi’s now, and she spends the episode bickering with her colleague Aristide. It turns out that she still has feelings for Quentin. At the end, she runs out of Petofi’s lair to try to help Quentin. This suggests that Beth’s conflicted loyalties will be a source of drama. Aristide shouts after her not to go, then says that “You’ll ruin everything.” He delivers this line in such a mild tone that the resulting laugh must have been intentional. This raises the possibility of Aristide emerging as a source of laughs. In the hands of actor Michael Stroka, that is a distinct possibility.
Quentin rambles into the Blue Whale, the tavern in the village of Collinsport. It’s after hours, and the only person in the barroom to tell him to stop knocking on the door is cabaret performer Pansy Faye, whose body Quentin first met when it was occupied by Trask’s daughter Charity. He still calls her Charity, which she overlooks because she has the hots for him. Pansy lets Quentin in, and invites him to her place.
Charity lived at Collinwood with her father, and after Pansy took over she stayed on there for some time. The other day she talked about wanting to leave Collinwood and go “home,” but it was not at all clear what that meant. Her invitation to Quentin is the first time she explicitly says that she has her own apartment now. Perhaps, if we stay in 1897, we will see that apartment. Maybe when Thayer David takes over the part of Quentin, Pansy’s psychic gifts will enable her to recognize who he really is, and she will take him in. In those days, of course, a man and a woman would have to get married to rent a lodging, so presumably that would have involved a wedding. Since Quentin would appear to be Petofi, Pansy would thereby become a countess, Kitty’s equal in rank. It already makes Kitty exceedingly uncomfortable to be around Pansy, so that would be an occasion for a great deal of comedy. Moreover, any viewer who saw that both women had the same title and both were involved in supernatural changes of personality would be convinced that the writers had planned that phase of their story all along.
Pansy goes into her act. She sings her song; Quentin is seized with a fit of brio. He gives a little speech addressed to the absent bartender, picks Pansy up, spins her around, kisses her passionately, then sits down at the piano and bangs out the tune of her song. She admires his piano playing and he says that he used to be able to play quite well, before “they” came. Then he suddenly sinks back into his previous depression. He denies that he ever played the piano in his life. We know that it was Petofi who had that moment of brightness, and that Petofi’s mood darkened when he remembered the Rroma who cut his hand off 100 years before. Quentin has no recollection of anything his body does or says when Petofi is using it.
A piano is prominently featured in the drawing room at Collinwood in the 1960s- perhaps there will also be one there when the estate is renamed Traskwood, and when Petofi, as played by David Selby, wangles an invitation to the great house, he will play it. That might set us up for a moment when Quentin returns to his proper body, tries to explain what has happened, and finds that his inability to play the piano marks him as an impostor. You could build a lot of story on that- you might make it look for a while like Quentin could find a home in the Traskwood universe, then show that no, the people back in 1897 have to reset the past before anything can work again.
Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana puts broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi on trial in the secret room of the old Collins family mausoleum. Evidently King Johnny has considerable magic powers; he conjures up the ghosts of several notorious murderers to serve as the jury. He also brings in the ghost of Magda’s husband to serve as the one witness for the defense.
The scenario is a remake of The Devil and Daniel Webster, a play that debuted at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1939. But the makers of Dark Shadows were likely thinking of a more recent Broadway production as well. From November 1964 to June 1965, a musical with a book by Ernest Kinoy and music by Walter Marks ran first at the Shubert Theatre, then at the Lunt-Fontanne, for a total of 232 Broadway performances. Its title is one of King Johnny’s favorite words- Bajour.
King Johnny keeps complaining that Magda tried to “pull the bajour on me!,” by which he means that she gave him one thing disguised as another. In the show, based on Joseph Mitchell’s stories of life among Rroma in the New York metropolitan area, bajour refers simply to a confidence trick with a big payoff for its perpetrators. The cast, saddled with a bunch of instantly forgettable songs, sings as joyously as it can about how the Rroma, to whom they of course refer as “gypsies,”* love nothing more than cheating lonely old women out of their life savings. This uninhibited celebration of racism reported losses of nearly a million dollars, more than twice the total amount of money invested in it. Perhaps the fictional Rroma weren’t the only ones who enjoyed running a good scam. Perhaps, too, Mel Brooks’ 1967 film The Producers wasn’t entirely a work of fiction.
The cast of Bajour does not appear to have overlapped with that of any episode of Dark Shadows. The closest link I can find to the cast at this period of the show is Michael Bennett, who danced in Bajour and later married Donna McKechnie. Many very distinguished performers appeared in Bajour, but I’m not tempted to do any imaginary recasting. I’m sure Chita Rivera and Herschel Bernardi were wonderful as leads Anyanka and Cockeye Johnny Dembo, but they couldn’t have outdone Grayson Hall and Thayer David as Magda and Sandor. Herbert Edelman was good in everything, and I’m sure his turn as “The King of Newark” was no exception, but no one could have done more than Paul Michael does to make the cartoonish role of King Johnny watchable. Paul Sorvino had a great career, and even has a screen credit in common with Henry Judd Baker- they both appeared in the disastrous 1980 film Cruising. I’m sure Sorvino would have been interesting as a replacement for Baker as Istvan, the mute Black Rroma, but that part is all about physical presence, and as was the case with Baker’s part in Cruising he is effective in a way that Sorvino could not have matched. Nancy Dussault is another performer who never lets an audience down, but Diana Davila’s approach to the character of Rroma maiden Julianka was so cleverly conceived that I couldn’t bear to think of anyone else taking the part.
While I’m on the topic of the Rroma, I want to bring up an oddity about my favorite Dark Shadows blog, Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day. When he was writing about these episodes, Danny often stopped to ridicule the idea of a Rroma tribe living in New England in 1897. Danny works for the Wikimedia Foundation; you’d think he’d be in the habit of checking Wikipedia, where the article “Romani People in the United States” would tell him that, while Rroma have been migrating to North America continually since 1498, the majority of the ancestors of the million or so Americans who now identify as Rroma came in the late nineteenth century. The new arrivals tended to take some time to assimilate to the ways of the USA; the article is, as of this writing, illustrated with a photo of a Rroma caravan near Portland, Oregon, in 1905:
Rroma caravan near Portland, Oregon, in 1905. Photograph by the Portland Oregonian, found on Wikipedia.
Most Romani-Americans are totally assimilated nowadays, so much so that many people in the USA don’t realize that there actually is such an ethnic group. But there are still Romani heritage festivals in many cities, and the last traditional caravans were still traveling the Great Plains as late as the 1940s. And in Maine in 1897, Romani caravans were a frequent sight, one that indeed aroused exactly the sort of zyganophobic** reactions Magda and Sandor encountered from virtually everyone in their first days on the show.
Even Istvan isn’t as hard to explain as Danny seems to think. In the early days of European settlement, Rroma were often brought across the Atlantic as slaves; that was the case for the people on Christopher Columbus’ third voyage in 1498. Some intermarried with enslaved people of African extraction. There are still Afro-Romani communities in Louisiana and Cuba.
I started writing about Dark Shadows in the comment sections on Danny’s blog. He made a great display of ignoring the first 42 weeks of the show, and consistently made the harshest possible judgments of the acting of Alexandra Moltke Isles, who played well-meaning governess Vicki. That created a space for me to point out when the show was harking back to its early days, and to defend Mrs Isles. I would be remiss in a post like this if I did not mention that Mrs Isles made a documentary feature in 2003 called Porraimos: Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust. I’ve never been able to get hold of a copy of the film, but the New York Times liked it when it was shown on PBS.
*Rroma sometimes call themselves Gypsies, but you can’t assume they’ll like it if an outsider uses that word.
From #1 to #274, each episode of Dark Shadows began with a voiceover narration by Alexandra Moltke Isles, usually in character as well-meaning governess Vicki. This identified Vicki with our point of view and suggested that she would sooner or later learn everything we knew.
Jonathan Frid joined the cast as vampire Barnabas Collins in #211, and quickly became the show’s great breakout star. If the upright Vicki found out what we knew about Barnabas, one of them would have to be destroyed. Vicki was the favorite of longtime viewers and Barnabas was attracting new ones, so that was out of the question. Therefore, other members of the cast started taking turns reading the voiceovers, and doing so not as their characters, but in the role of External Narrator.
Today marks the first time Frid himself reads the narration. His training first in Canada, then at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and later at Yale School of Drama prepared Frid well in the art of dramatic reading, and in later years he would concentrate on that aspect of his craft. Several of his colleagues are his equals in these voiceovers- I would particularly mention Kathryn Leigh Scott, whose conception of The Narrator is always arresting, and Thayer David, who could consistently achieve the most difficult of all effects in voice acting, a perfectly simple reading. So I can’t say I wish Frid had done all of them, but he is always good, and today’s performance is among his most gorgeous.
The action opens on a set known to longtime viewers as the Evans cottage, where from 1966 to 1968 artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie served as Dark Shadows‘ principal representatives of the working class of the village of Collinsport. In those days, it was on this set that we saw how the misdeeds of the ancient and esteemed Collins family had consequences that spilled out of the estate of Collinwood and warped the lives of people trying to make a more or less honest living nearby.
Now the dramatic date is 1897, and Sam hasn’t been born yet. But the cottage is already an artist’s studio. It is temporarily occupied by the nationally famous Charles Delaware Tate, who is painting a portrait of rakish libertine Quentin Collins at the behest of evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Charity Trask, a resident of the great house of Collinwood, is visiting Tate in the cottage when she sees the face in the portrait change from that of Quentin. It takes on a great deal of fur and long fangs, and reminds Charity of a wolf.
By the time Tate looks at the painting again, it has resumed its normal appearance. He tells Charity that the transformation must have been in her imagination. She is willing to consider the possibility, but we know better. Quentin is a werewolf, a condition Petofi knows how to cure. Portraits on Dark Shadows have had supernatural qualities at least since #70, including portraits we saw Sam execute on this set in 1966, 1967, and 1968, and the show has borrowed from The Picture of Dorian Gray before. Moreover, Tate’s reaction to Charity is one of barely controlled panic. Nancy Barrett has to ramp up Charity’s own emotional distress to the limit to make it plausible she would not notice Tate’s extreme agitation. Perhaps if Tate were played by a better actor than the ever-disappointing Roger Davis, his response might have been ambiguous enough that Miss Barrett could keep the tone a bit lower, but his unequivocal display of alarm leaves her nowhere to go but over the top.
Mr Davis was under no obligation to play the scene transparently, since Tate later goes to Petofi’s henchman Aristide and lays out in so many words his precise relationship to Petofi’s operations and his knowledge of them. Tate’s career is his reward for selling his soul to Petofi, and he has already experienced great sorrow as a result of that bargain. Tate knows that the portrait changed to reflect the full Moon’s influence on Quentin and that Petofi is currently in possession of twelve year old Jamison Collins. Aristide tells us that Petofi’s own body is in suspended animation while he acts through Jamison. He also says that it was in 1797 that Petofi’s right hand was cut off, and that if he does not reclaim the hand in a few weeks, by the date of the one hundredth anniversary of the amputation, he will die and so will Tate.
Jamison/ Petofi is in the prison cell in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas has traveled back in time from the 1960s with some vaguely good intentions and is hanging around 1897 causing one disaster after another. Now, he is doing battle with Petofi and has locked him, in the form of Jamison, in the cell. Barnabas’ reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, guards Jamison/ Petofi during the day. Early in the episode, Jamison/ Petofi calls Magda and pleads with her to release him. He tells her that he is “just a little boy” and that she is a “rather heartless creature.” She says she wishes he were a little boy again, but that she isn’t stupid and he won’t fool her. Indeed, the phrase “rather heartless creature” and Jamison/ Petofi’s manner in delivering it sound so much like Thayer David as Petofi that they hardly count as an attempt to deceive Magda.
Later, Jamison/ Petofi casts a spell to summon Aristide, then calls to Magda again. When Magda arrives, Jamison/ Petofi gives himself a better script than the one from which he had acted in his previous scene with her. He pretends not to remember how he got into the cell and to be shocked that Magda knows he is there. Perhaps the utter transparency of his earlier pleadings was an attempt to get Magda to underestimate his abilities as a trickster.
In #803, we saw that when Petofi took possession of him Jamison’s right hand disappeared from his wrist, matching Petofi’s own mutilated condition. When Jamison/ Petofi feigns the amnesia that might come upon recovery from possession, we might therefore expect Magda to demand that he remove his gloves to prove that he is himself again. But he plays the part of Jamison so convincingly that we are not really surprised he does fool Magda. She goes into the cell, embraces Jamison/ Petofi, and he kisses her on the cheek. It is this kiss that spreads his magical power, and she realizes too late that she has been had.
Aristide arrives a moment later, and Jamison/ Petofi calls his portrayal of an innocent boy “an award-winning performance.” Indeed, if there had been daytime Emmys in 1969, David Henesy might have won one for his portrayal of Thayer David playing Petofi playing Jamison.
Aristide wants to kill Magda; Jamison/ Petofi forbids this. Under his power, she announces that she is responsible for all the evil that has happened in 1897. She was responsible for releasing Barnabas and therefore for all the murders and other harm he has done; she made Quentin a werewolf, and is to blame for his killings in his lupine form and for the curse his descendants will inherit; she stole Petofi’s severed hand and is at fault for the deaths of Rroma maiden Julianka and of her own husband Sandor that resulted from the hand’s presence. She even takes the blame for Quentin’s murder of her sister Jenny, the act for which the werewolf curse was meant as vengeance. Magda says she must be punished. Jamison/ Petofi tells her that he is not interested in punishing her. He has another use in mind for Magda She will lead him and Aristide to Barnabas’ coffin today, and they will destroy him.
Longtime viewers will perk up twice when Aristide says that Petofi lost his hand in 1797 and that he has exactly one hundred years to recover it. From December 1966 to March 1967, Dark Shadows’ first supernatural menace was undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who at intervals of exactly one hundred years incinerated herself and a young son of hers, who was always named David, in an unholy ceremony that renewed her existence, but not that of the Davids. Since the usual laws of nature don’t apply, the show needs some other causal mechanism to create suspense, and anniversaries will do as well as anything else. Another iteration of Laura was on earlier in the 1897 segment. It was fun to see her again, but they could shoehorn her into that year only by retconning away the one hundred year pattern in her immolations. It’s reassuring in a way to see that Petofi is bringing centenaries back.
The date 1797 is also significant. It was in 1796 that Barnabas died and became a vampire. We flashed back to that period for the show’s first costume drama segment in November 1967 to March 1968, and Barnabas went back to 1796 for a week in January 1969. So we may go back again some day, and if Petofi was alive and in his prime in 1797, we might run into him there.
Barnabas and Petofi are not the only characters from the 1790s who might be on the minds of attentive longtime viewers. Barnabas’ little sister Sarah died in 1796, and as a ghost was an extremely important part of the show from June to November 1967. We’ve been getting reminders of Sarah for the last several days. In #792 wicked witch Angelique produced a toy soldier of Barnabas’ that Sarah gave to strange and troubled boy David in #331. In #805, Charity found Sarah’s recorder, a prop that often served as Sarah’s calling card in 1967, and talked about learning to play it. And today, we see a portrait standing on the floor of the Evans cottage, a set which Sarah visited in #260, depicting a girl wearing a bonnet very much like the one Sarah wore as a ghost in 1967 and a pink dress just like the one she wore when we saw her as a living being in the flashback to the 1790s.
Portrait at the cottage.
I wonder if, when they were making up the flimsies for this part of the show, they had thought of reintroducing Sarah. That would have required a recasting of the part- Sharon Smyth was noticeably older when we saw Sarah die in January 1968 than she was when Sarah was a ghost in June 1967, and by now we would wonder what she has been eating in the afterlife that has made her get so much taller. Besides, Miss Smyth* had stopped acting by this point.
The process of planning the stories was in two stages, a rough sketching of themes six months in advance, and a capsule of each episode written thirteen weeks ahead of time. There was a lot of flexibility when it came to putting those plans into effect. Some stories that were supposed to end within thirteen weeks were extended over years, while others that were expected to be a big deal petered out before they got going. In an interview preserved by Danny Horn at his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, writer Violet Welles said that many of the moments on the show that made the least sense were those written when the plans hadn’t worked out: “toward the end of the cycle, you’d have characters who were really not a lot of interest who had to play scenes with other characters who really didn’t have a lot of interest, dealing with things that basically didn’t concern them. Those were hard to write.”
This episode was taped on 25 July 1969; thirteen weeks before that was 21 May. Six months before was 25 January. By 25 January, Denise Nickerson had been on the show for two months as Amy Jennings. Nickerson was actually born on 1 April 1957, but they several times say that Amy is nine years old. When the show goes to 1897, Nickerson plays Nora Collins, who is also nine. On 19 May, Nickerson taped #761, the last episode she would appear in until #782. She is currently in the middle of a second long absence from 1897, unseen between #783 and #812. Her characters were so important in the months leading up to the 1897 segment and she played them so well that we wonder what they were thinking leaving her in the background so long.
Maybe they were thinking of bringing her back as Sarah. Nickerson didn’t look all that much like Sharon Smyth, and was a far more accomplished young actress than was Miss Smyth, but she did have brown hair, and the show prioritized hair color above all else in recasting parts. For example, two actresses followed Mrs Isles in the role of Vicki, neither of whom had much in common with her either in acting style or in looks, but who both had black hair. So perhaps there was a time when they intended to travel between 1897 and the 1790s and to meet Sarah, played by Denise Nickerson. If Nickerson were still alive, perhaps someone would ask her if she posed for the portrait that is standing on the floor of the Evans cottage today.
*She’s been using her married name for decades now, but when talking about her as a child it’s pretty weird to refer to her as “Mrs Lentz.” Since I use surnames for people associated with the making of the show and attach courtesy titles to surnames of living people, I have to call her “Miss Smyth.”
Dark Shadows Commentary 
