We are in the fourteenth week of a story about the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who are planning to retake the Earth from humankind. At first, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins was a zealous acolyte of the Leviathans and the faithful leader of a cult devoted to their service. The first chapter of the story came to an end when a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time, the harbinger of the Leviathans’ return, ordered Barnabas to kill his best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Barnabas refused that order and became disaffected from the cult, held in line only by the Leviathans’ threats.
The shape-shifting monster has grown, and now spends most of his time as a young man whom everyone calls Jeb, despite his initial request to be called Jabe. Barnabas learned the other day that some of the threats the Leviathans had been making were empty, and so tried to smash a small wooden box that is important to them. Jabe stopped him, and punished the attempt by turning Barnabas back into what he was from the 1790s until 1968, a vampire.
Jabe’s home is a room above an antique shop owned by cultists Megan and Philip Todd. There is a lot of talk about this room as the only place where Jabe can change form. This is confusing to regular viewers. We saw him change from boy to girl while visiting the great house of Collinwood in #909, and in #946 and #947 he changed from his true, non-human, form into Jabe while at a house on an island many miles from the village of Collinsport. Today, Barnabas burns the antique shop down in order to destroy the room; Jabe says that he left the room through the window when the fire started, and changed from his true form into his human shape while outside. I keep trying to give them the benefit of the doubt about this, but at this point the whole theme of the “Chosen Room” falls apart completely.
Nonetheless, the antique shop sets and the troubled relationship between Philip and Megan have been signatures of the Leviathan story so far. Now the shop is gone, and Megan is gleeful that Philip is in jail, having confessed to three murders Jabe committed and unlikely ever to live with her again. So we can say that chapter two of the Leviathan story is over.
Barnabas’ re-vamping marks a transition in more than this storyline. He is the central character of the show and its main attraction; whether or not he is a vampire determines a great deal about what kind of show it is. You could periodize the show into segments depending on whether he is a vampire or not. I’ll risk a spoiler and tell you we have now begun a long segment of Barnabas-as-vampire.
Barnabas goes to the jail and has a conference with Philip. Jabe overtaxed Philip’s allegiance to the Leviathans, as he overtaxed Barnabas’. Philip has confessed to Jabe’s murders only because he loves Megan, believes she still loves him, and fears that if he does not do what Jabe commands he will kill Megan. Barnabas tells him that in fact Megan no longer cares about him at all, but is entirely devoted to Jabe.
In the real world, the state of Maine did away with capital punishment in 1887, a fact which applied to the universe of Dark Shadows in 1966. In #101, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins disappointed his son, strange and troubled boy David, by mentioning it. But the prospect of a gallows is more melodramatic than is that of any prison sentence, however long, and so Philip announces that he is going to be hanged for Jabe’s murders.
Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, owner of the great estate of Collinwood and of the businesses that employ most of the people in and around the village of Collinsport, is a devoted member of the Leviathan cult. Liz gives Jabe the carriage house on the estate to live in, telling him its back room will be suited to take the place of the now-destroyed Chosen Room. He tells her that Barnabas has betrayed the cult, but that she need not act against him yet. The carriage house was mentioned a few times in 1969, when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897 and the Collinses were still traveling by carriage. I believe this is our first confirmation that the carriage house still exists in the twentieth century.
Megan comes to visit Jabe at the carriage house. She is exultant that Philip is in jail. Jabe tells her he has no intention of resuming his true form; she is appalled. The plan has been that he will take Liz’ daughter Carolyn as his bride, and that she will then turn into the same kind of being he is. If he is going to be humanoid all the time, then he will just be taking Carolyn out on dates. Megan says that this was not the point. Jabe dismisses her objections, and tells her that their own relationship is different now than it was when he was first taking shape and she and Philip were his foster parents. He pulls her close to him and gives her a passionate kiss.
Jabe spent several weeks in the form of a succession of children. The children showed violent hostility towards Philip and remarkably little sense of boundaries in their relationship with Megan; the reference to the Freudian Oedipus complex was not subtle then, and the kiss he gives to Megan while he is setting Philip up for a judicial murder makes the connection explicit.
The Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods, are planning to retake the Earth from humankind. Step one in their plan was to bring old world gentleman Barnabas Collins under their sway and make him the leader of a secret cult headquartered in the village of Collinsport, Maine. Step two was to bring a shape-shifting monster from beyond time and space to life and put him up in a room above an antique shop in the village. Step three is to get heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, Barnabas’ distant cousin, to pair up with the monster and turn into a creature like him.
The monster usually takes the form of a young man. When he first appeared in this guise, he said he wanted to be called “Jabe” For all his powers and his willingness to kill, he can’t persuade anyone to use that name, so he answers to “Jeb.” Jabe has somehow succeeded in charming Carolyn, but his personality drove Barnabas away from the cult. Determined to prevent Jabe from having his way with Carolyn, Barnabas has enlisted another distant cousin, Quentin Collins, among his allies in this battle.
For the last few days, Barnabas has been telling Quentin and his other comrades that their only resource against the Leviathans is that Jabe and his loyalists still trust him. Today Jabe comes to the great house of Collinwood and has an argument with Barnabas and Quentin. Jabe accuses Barnabas of disloyalty, and Barnabas immediately declares that he never believed in the Leviathan cause and will do everything in his power to defeat it.
Barnabas intends to launch his attack by using two objects with great cultic significance to the Leviathans. One is a small wooden box that is kept in Jabe’s room. The other is a large stone altar in the woods on the grounds of Collinwood that only people associated with the Leviathan cult can see. With Quentin’s help, he steals the box. He forbids Quentin to accompany him to the altar. He sets the box on the altar and raises his cane to smash it. Suddenly the box opens, and he freezes. A bat comes flying out.
In the 1790s, Barnabas was cursed to become a vampire. He remained in that horrid condition until two mad scientists worked together to free him of the effects of the curse in 1968. Jabe has decided to make him a vampire again. He put the bat in the box, and it bites Barnabas, renewing the curse.
The bat was about the size of a real bat when Jabe put it in the box. Even at that, it must have been a pretty tight fit for the little fellow. But when it bites Barnabas, it is as big as a California condor.
Jabe calls Carolyn “honey” in their scene together. We’ve heard many endearments, most often “dear” and “darling,” but never before “honey,” not so far as I can recall. It makes Jabe seem a bit more up to date than the other characters.
The first ghost we saw on Dark Shadows was that of the gracious Josette Collins, who came down from her portrait and danced around the outside of the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood in #70. We had first heard of Josette in #5, when drunken sad sack Sam Evans told well-meaning governess Vicki Winters about her, and she had been mentioned many times in the first fourteen weeks. From #70 until #191, Josette’s ghost became a steadily bigger part of the story. She rallied the other ghosts of Collinwood to rescue Vicki from crazed handyman Matthew in #126, and from that point until #191 guided Vicki in her battle with undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. By the end of the Laura story, Josette was firmly established as the chief figure in the show’s supernatural back-world, a world which the action is continually tugging into view.
Vampire Barnabas Collins succeeded Laura as the show’s supernatural Big Bad. Josette was well-suited to do battle with the distant and indefinable Laura, but was too wispy to be very effective against the more dynamic Barnabas. In #212, Barnabas addressed Josette through her portrait in the Old House, which we had seen strange and troubled boy David Collins use to carry on conversations with her in #102 and #162. Barnabas spoke to Josette then as if she were his grandmother, who had sided with his father against him in a fateful conflict, and told her he was kicking her out of the house. Over the next few weeks, there were several episodes when David lamented Josette’s absence from the Old House, suggesting that Barnabas had succeeded in banishing her.
As it became clear Barnabas was a hit and would be kept on the show for a while, they decided to connect him to Josette. So they borrowed the story of the 1932 film The Mummy. As Boris Karloff’s undead Imhotep decided that Helen Grosvenor was the reincarnation of his lost love Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun, so Barnabas decided that Josette, retconned as his lost love, had been reincarnated as Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) daughter of Sam. As Imhotep abducted Helen and tried to turn her into Ankh-Esen-Amun, so Barnabas abducted Maggie and tortured her in an attempt to erase her personality and upload Josette’s in its place.
In the movie, Helen and Ankh-Esen-Amun were both played by Zita Johann. The original viewers wouldn’t have known it, but Miss Scott, wearing a veil, played the ghost of Josette in #70 and voiced Josette’s lines to Vicki in #126. In the scenes during the Laura story when we caught glimpses of Josette’s face, the ghost was played by frequent stand-in Rosemary McNamara, who looked enough like Miss Scott that viewers may have wondered if she was playing the role. So the idea of a connection between Maggie and Josette had been rattling around the writers’ room for a while. In #240, David saw Maggie wandering around Barnabas’ house. She was wearing Josette’s dress but no veil, in a daze and answering to Josette’s name. Afterward, David said that he had seen Josette and that she looked exactly the same as she did when he had seen her as a ghost. That confirmed that Maggie was at least a Josette lookalike, if not her reincarnation.
Maggie eventually escaped from Barnabas. Her psychiatrist, Julia Hoffman, saw in Barnabas her chance to make a career as a mad scientist, and so she sold Maggie out, using her magical power of hypnosis to delete her memory of what Barnabas did to her and leave her with a feeling of goodwill towards Barnabas. By that time, Barnabas had turned his attentions to Vicki, toying with the idea of Josettifying her. Josette’s ghost made it clear to him that she would try to stop any such effort when she spoke through Vicki at a séance in #280 and 281; after that, Barnabas gave her portrait another talking-to, telling her that she was lost to him forever and must let him live in the present. It sounded like he was going to stop trying to turn girls into Josette, but he kept pushing Josette’s hypnotic music box on Vicki, so if that’s what he meant he didn’t stick with it.
In November 1967, Vicki went back in time to the days when Barnabas and Josette were living human beings. From then until March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. Miss Scott was cast as the living Josette, completing the parallel with the flashbacks to ancient Egypt in The Mummy and suggesting that Barnabas, though he was appallingly cruel and thoroughly crazy, was onto something when he told Maggie she was Josette.
The whole idea of supernaturalism is that what appears to be powerless is in fact most powerful and vice versa, so having been powerful as a ghost, Josette has to be at least somewhat understated as a living being. Making matters worse for her, the 1790s segment moved at a breakneck speed, piling one bizarre disaster on top of another, so that there was no time to develop the kind of subtle strength a lady of her sort might be expected to have or to give us much of a look at Josette and Barnabas as a loving couple before everything went horribly wrong for them. She winds up as a pleasant but ineffectual person. The 1790s period was the show’s first great triumph, but it did knock Josette out of the spotlight permanently.
A couple of weeks after Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission and he tried to function as a good guy. His bumbling attempts at heroism generated as much trouble for everyone as had his villainy. Julia had made herself a permanent houseguest at Collinwood, and she was the one who was busiest with the work of containing his damage. Throughout the part of the show made and set in 1968, Josette was all but forgotten.
Early in 1969, Barnabas came unstuck in time and found himself in 1897, once more subject to the vampire curse. During his eight months in that period, he met two more characters played by Miss Scott. Each of them led him into a fresh bout of Josettery. He gave the music box to neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond; after her death, he met Kitty Soames, dowager countess of Hampshire, who despite her title was a young woman from Pennsylvania. The music box showed up in Kitty’s room at a time when Barnabas could not possibly have been around, and it became clear that this time, it was Josette herself who was trying to take possession of Kitty.
In #884, airing in November 1969, Kitty was assumed bodily into Josette’s portrait. Barnabas saw this happen. He then returned to the 1790s, to the night when Josette originally flung herself to her death from the cliff at Widows’ Hill rather than let Barnabas turn her into a vampire. Josette had only the vaguest memory of 1897 or of Kitty; as far as she is concerned, she was living through this night for the first time, and was experiencing time in the usual linear fashion.
Barnabas tried to prevent Josette’s suicide, but succeeded only in changing the method she used to do herself in. By the time he returned to the twentieth century, he had fallen under the sway of the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who are trying to retake the Earth from humankind. For a time he led a cult that served them in this goal, but eventually became disaffected. He hesitates to take any very definite action against the Leviathans, because they told him they were “holding Josette prisoner in the past” and that they would inflict on her a more horrible death than either of those she has already died if he defied them in any way.
Vicki was written out of the show in 1968, and Maggie succeeded her as governess to the children at Collinwood. The Leviathans have sent a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time as the harbinger of their conquest. The monster usually takes the form of a young man who initially asked people to call him “Jabe,” but whom everyone instead calls “Jeb.” Jabe is always obnoxious and often homicidal, and has alienated many people from the Leviathans, including Barnabas. He abducted Maggie and thought he had brainwashed her into joining the cult; once he let her go, she made an alliance with Barnabas and Julia to fight the Leviathans.
Barnabas is convinced Jabe is about to do something especially horrible, and so he wants to open the battle. But his concern for Josette is still holding him back. He and Julia talk about this. It dawns on them that the Leviathans may have been lying, and that they may not have the power to make Josette re-die. The only way they can be sure is to ask Josette, so they decide to hold a séance. They enlist Maggie to be the third member of the circle.
The typical Dark Shadows séance involves three roles- the convener, who gives detailed instructions and barks about the importance of following them, even if everyone in the room has attended multiple séances already; the medium, who goes into the trance and channels the voice from the realm of the dead; and the objector, who tries to interrupt and is sternly hushed by the convener. Recent séances have omitted the objector; today, Julia keeps up a running commentary from the time Barnabas starts the incantations until Maggie goes into the trance, but she doesn’t object and Barnabas doesn’t hush her.
Through Maggie, Josette says she had a hard time getting to the séance, but that it had nothing to do with the Leviathans. She says she doesn’t even know the Leviathans. Barnabas doesn’t believe her, and she says that if he wants proof he should come to her grave.
He does. The tinkling tune of the music box plays on the soundtrack; Barnabas does not mention the original signature of Josette’s presence, the scent of jasmine. Her ghost manifests before him:
THE GHOST OF JOSETTE: It is I. And I will tell you what you must know, now and forever. You asked me if the Leviathans held me prisoner. They do not. But you hold me, just as I hold you with my love. But now the time has come for us both to go free.
BARNABAS: I cannot be free without you.
GHOST: But you must. For I belong to the past. For you there is a future with someone else.
BARNABAS: But I don’t want anyone else.
GHOST: Then you must be lonely, for you cannot have me. But you will find someone else. I know it. And when you do, give her this. The ring that you gave to me, give to her, whoever she may be. This ring is a sign of your freedom and of mine. (Returns her engagement ring to him and vanishes.)
This is Josette’s final appearance on Dark Shadows, not counting a parallel universe version of Josette who will feature in the last weeks of the show, played by another actress. As for the “someone else,” it would be logical for Barnabas to get with Julia, since the two of them are so deeply complicit in each other’s crimes that neither of them will ever be able to make a life with anyone else. But there have been some hints lately that romance might be budding between Barnabas and Maggie, and if that’s going to happen they are going to have to keep us from thinking very clearly about Josette and Barnabas’ attempts to recreate her. We might suppose that her farewell is meant to clear the path for such a development.
There’s also some business about the Leviathan story. In the opening reprise, Jabe catches a bat, which he plans to use to turn Barnabas back into a vampire.
After Barnabas gets the green light from Josette, he meets with Philip Todd, another person whom Jabe has driven out of the Leviathan cult. Philip tells Barnabas how much he hates Jabe and agrees to steal the Leviathan box, an object which does not play music but which is a lot more effective at controlling the minds of people who open it than was that box of Josette’s. At the end of the episode, Jabe catches Philip with the box.
A commenter on Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day who identifies herself as “Melissa”* wrote this lyric about Jabe in twocomments about the post covering today’s episode:
Come and listen to my story ’bout s man named Jeb, Poor Leviathan, barely kept his evil web. Then, one day, he and Barney had a spat, And out from the cage came a rubberized bat. (Vampire bat, that is: Nylon string, Terror teeth.)
Next thing you know,ol’ Jeb has got a girl. Cult folk said, “Jeb, come and rule the world!” They said, “In the attic is the place you want to be,” So they threw themselves a seance and they called on J.D.C. (Josette Collins, that is. Swimming fail. Newly scarred.)
Comments left 31 October 2016 by “Melissa” on Danny Horn “Episode 948: War Games,” posted 30 October 2016 at Dark Shadows Every Day.
I’m singing that aloud right now. I realize you might be reading this years after I wrote it, but believe me, I’m singing it right now.
Maggie Evans, governess in the great house on the estate of Collinwood, is being held prisoner in a big mausoleum somewhere. Her captor appears to be a young man, but is actually a monster from beyond space and time. He is associated with the Leviathan People, a race of Elder Gods who are planning to take the earth away from humankind with the aid of some people whom they control and whom they have formed into a cult. The cultists call the monster Jeb, even though when we first saw him he said he wanted to be called Jabe.
Jabe orders Maggie to open a wooden box and look inside. He makes it clear to her that she is supposed to be under his control after she has done this, so she plays along. He lets her go, with orders that she is to spy on old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, a leader of the cult who has become disaffected from it and is working against Jabe.
Back in the great house, Maggie tells Barnabas what happened. Barnabas’ best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, enters; he tells Julia that Maggie is their new ally in the fight against the Leviathans. When Barnabas was still loyal to the Leviathans, he tried to absorb Julia into the cult. That effort failed, and Barnabas explained that “certain people” were immune from absorption because of their “genetic structure.” Since Julia is the only Jewish character on the show, this sounded jarringly like a claim that the Leviathans were a restricted club. Evidently Maggie is now among those “certain people.” Since Maggie has a Welsh name and is played by a Minnesota-born actress of Scandinavian descent, that retroactively takes some of the anti-Semitic edge off Barnabas’ earlier remark for viewers who remember that episode (unless she converted.)
Maggie had taken an apologetic tone when she told Julia she wanted to be alone with Barnabas; Julia is very circumspect when she comes in at the end of their conversation. For a long time now, the show has been working on the idea that Julia wants a romantic relationship with Barnabas and is sad that he does not share her desire; for the last couple of weeks, they have been hinting that Barnabas and Maggie are getting pretty cozy. Regular viewers will be interested to see Grayson Hall playing Julia being a good sport about losing Barnabas to Maggie, and Kathryn Leigh Scott playing Maggie wishing she didn’t have to hurt her friend’s feelings.
We learned yesterday that Jabe is vulnerable to werewolves. As luck would have it, there is a werewolf at large in the Collinsport area. He is Chris Jennings, and Barnabas and Julia have been trying to cure him of the effects of his curse. He had been spending the nights of the full moon in a cell at Windcliff, a mental hospital Julia is in charge of, but last month came back to the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of Collinwood. He couldn’t stand being cooped up, and chose to go back to his old practice of killing someone at random every month.
Julia and Barnabas don’t know that Chris is a weapon they can use against Jabe, and they want him to go back to Windcliff. The moon will be full tonight, so they are particularly anxious. But his onetime fiancée, Sabrina Stuart, has a different idea. She has been in contact with an expert on lycanthropy, and he has shipped her the only surviving specimen of the Moon Poppy. She brings the potted plant to Chris and tells him that the flower will open when the moon starts to rise. If he eats it while it is blooming, he will be cured. Otherwise, he will lose his chance- the plant will be dead before morning.
Chris’ transformation begins with moonrise, and once he has become the wolf he has no will of his own. When Barnabas stops by to take him to Windcliff, he points this out to Chris. But Chris is determined to try Sabrina’s cure. He is like every addict who talks himself into believing that this time, it will be different. Of course his determination fails him at the last moment, and by the time he can reach for the opening flower, it is a hairy paw, not a hand, that stretches towards it.
The flower cure and Chris the unlikable protagonist are both borrowings from the 1941 film The Wolf Man. Jabe lives in an antique shop; there’s an antique shop in that movie, too. There were some hints early on that werewolves were a threat to the Leviathans; evidently they had planned to bring these two stories together all along.
Closing Miscellany
Sometimes the closing credits are on cards, one after another; other times, they are on a continuous roll. Through the first year of the show, when they were on a roll costume supplier Ohrbach’s would be misspelled “Orhbach’s.” We haven’t seen that misspelling for a long time, but it’s back today. It will keep cropping up for the rest of the series.
Barnabas and Julia find a fake letter from Maggie saying that she’s been away visiting her Aunt Louise in Quebec. This is the first time we’ve heard of any members of Maggie’s family other than her late parents. Since the letter is a phony meant to cover up her abduction and neither Julia nor Barnabas seems to have heard of Louise before, it is possible there is no such person. Still, Maggie has been a major character since the first episode, so it does get longtime viewers thinking about how little we know about her background.
This is only marginally relevant to the episode, but I can’t resist bringing it up. The other day, a Twitter user named Zach Wilson (whose bio describes him as “watcher of TV, all of it, one episode at a time”) posted an image of pages of TV Guide from 22 April 1966 with the question “What would you watch?” An Educational TV station in whatever market it was running a WGBH-Boston produced telecast of the Boston Theater Company’s production of Gertrude Stein’s “Yes is for a Very Young Man,” starring Lisa Blake Richards. The Harvard Crimson had reviewed the stage production in November 1965; they said that “the play was lousy,” but they praised the cast for making the most of a bad script, singling out Miss Richards for the “outstanding job” she did “with a whining, pathetic character.” Sabrina isn’t exactly Lady MacBeth, either, and Miss Richards had her work cut out for her finding a way to make us want to see more of her.
The current A story revolves around a race of Elder Gods called the Leviathan People. The Leviathans have taken over the minds of several characters and formed them into a cult devoted to advancing their plan to return to Earth and supplant humankind. As part of this plan, a monster has taken up residence in the room above the antique shop in the village of Collinsport. The monster’s true form is bizarre, terrifying, and unseen. It can assume other forms, and as it was growing it went through the shapes of a series of children. Now its human guise is that of a man in his twenties who, when first we saw him, invited people to “Call me Jabe.”
Jabe is a blowhard, impatient, petulant, and unreflective. He is keen to take heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard as his bride and make her into the same kind of monster he is. Carolyn’s distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, was the Leviathans’ first choice as leader of the cult, and has now become disaffected from it. Working with another distant cousin, the perennially youthful Quentin Collins, Barnabas has for the moment put a stop to Jabe’s plans for Carolyn. Jabe has killed a couple of people, including Carolyn’s father Paul Stoddard and Sheriff Davenport, and plans to kill many more. He is fairly sure that Barnabas is working against him, but is afraid that if he strikes out at Barnabas his own superiors among the Leviathans will punish him. Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and her cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, are devoted members of the cult, as is Quentin’s great-granddaughter Amy Jennings, but none of them knows about Jabe’s plans for Carolyn.
When Jabe appeared to be a thirteen year old boy named Michael, he spent a substantial amount of time bullying David. He has continued this in his adult form, breaking David’s leg for no reason to which the audience was made privy. David’s governess, Maggie Evans, saw Michael’s mistreatment of David and tried to stop it, and in response he locked her up and tried to kill her. No one has told Maggie that Michael and Jabe are the same person, but she does know that that Jabe is at fault for David’s injury. She has also, in the last several days, seemed to be getting very cozy with Barnabas. Jabe has abducted Maggie and has her locked up in a big mausoleum someplace.
Meet Bruno
Jabe is in the antique shop when a man wearing a fur coat enters. Regular viewers recognize the actor as Michael Stroka. For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897, and Stroka played the sadistic Aristide, henchman to sorcerer Count Petofi. Petofi was a witty and whimsical villain, and Aristide spent a great deal of time as his straight man. Aristide also gave Stroka opportunities to show off his own formidable gift for deadpan comedy.
The fur coat is so specific to 1970 that the sight of Stroka wearing it means that the show has very literally returned to “contemporary dress.” His character introduces himself to Jabe as Bruno, and says that he will help him in any way. Bruno shows considerable knowledge of the story so far; the other cultists didn’t come with that knowledge, leading us to wonder whether he is one of them or is some kind of supernatural being. As the episode goes on, we see that Bruno shares Aristide’s fascination with knives and his glee in threatening to kill and disfigure pretty girls, and is also about as ineffective when he sets about doing Jeb’s dirty work as Aristide was when he tried to do Petofi’s. So however he came to know what he knows, it seems safe to dismiss the idea that he is anything other than what Aristide was.
David and Barnabas
At the great house of Collinwood, David enters by means of wheelchair. He and Barnabas talk about Maggie’s unexplained absence. They consider the possibility that Jabe might be responsible for it.
Just the other day, adult characters not in on the secret of the Leviathan cult mentioned that David did not seem like “the same little boy” he had been. He isn’t a little boy at all- he’s thirteen. Barnabas talks to him in this scene as one adult to another. After all these years, it’s refreshing to see a sign that David might eventually be allowed to grow up.
Maggie’s First Tormenter
Maggie awakens to find herself in a mausoleum. Before she can make her way to the door, the late Sheriff Davenport enters. Jabe has raised him from the dead and made him his slave. Your typical zombie is an inarticulate sort, who, if moved to speech at all, might emit a faint groan of “Brai-i-i-ins.” Davenport is an exception to this norm. He is positively chatty. He talks about how uncomfortable his grave was, about his sympathy for Maggie, and even starts in with a story about his wife. The guy just won’t shut up.
David and Jabe
David goes to the antique shop. How he got himself from Collinwood to the village in a manual wheelchair designed for use in a hospital is not explained. He tells Jabe about his conversation with Barnabas, including the part where Barnabas told him to study the holy book of the Leviathans and look for information about Jabe’s weaknesses. He says that he found a passage saying that Jabe is vulnerable to werewolves. He didn’t tell Barnabas about this, but came straight to the shop. Jabe is terrified by the mention of werewolves, and relieved David didn’t talk to Barnabas. He tells him not to trust Barnabas.
There is a werewolf on the show, Amy’s brother Chris Jennings, who inherited the curse from their great-grandfather Quentin. Quentin’s own lycanthropy was put into abeyance by the same magic spell that immunized him against aging. We haven’t seen Chris for about a month, when there was a full moon and he killed a character left over from an exhausted storyline. There were some hints early in the current story that Chris represented a threat to the Leviathans, and this is now confirmed.
Maggie’s Second Tormenter
Bruno shows up in the crypt where the late Sheriff Davenport is haranguing Maggie. He sends Davenport to guard the door. Maggie asks Bruno if he is dead, too. He assures her he isn’t, and is very unpleasant to her. Aristide was a lot of fun when he had someone to play off of, but where Petofi was sprightly, Jeb is monotonous. While Aristide would set his sights on victims who gave him more resistance than he bargained for, Maggie’s situation makes her tense and unwilling to volunteer anything. Maggie holds her ground and refuses to answer any of Bruno’s questions, so that he cannot afford to murder her as he had intended to do. That’s logical behavior on her part and a happy ending for the audience, but it does keep Bruno from doing anything to make us want to see him again.
Bruno meets David
Bruno goes to the antique shop. Jeb introduces him to David. He pushes David out of the shop with a brisk movement that is Stroka’s first opportunity to get a laugh as Bruno. He reports his failure to Jabe, who is too afraid of werewolves to rage at him as he has raged at everyone else who has told him things he didn’t want to hear.
Maggie’s Third Tormenter
Jabe goes to the crypt and sends Sheriff Davenport back out. He confronts Maggie, who tells him she recognizes him as “Michael grown up,” using the exact phrase David had used with Barnabas earlier. He tells her she will be all right if she opens a wooden box he has brought with him and looks in it. Returning viewers know that this is “the Leviathan Box,” and that it was by opening it and looking inside that Amy came under the power of the cult.
In #891, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins gave a present to antique shop owners Megan and Philip Todd. It was a wooden box. When the Todds opened the box, it made a whistling sound. By #893, the whistling sound had taken the form of a newborn baby whom Megan introduced to heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard under the name “Joseph.” In #905, Joseph had taken the shape of an eight year old boy, and was going by “Alexander.” In #909, Alexander briefly shape-shifted. He kept his apparent age and mass, but his body became that of a girl. In particular, s/he was for an hour or two a perfect double of Carolyn as she was at eight. In that shape, s/he tormented Carolyn’s father Paul, who had been absent throughout Carolyn’s childhood. In #913/914, Alexander gave way to a thirteen year old who insisted on being called “Michael.”
Clearly, none of these children is really human. They are manifestations of a supernatural force known as “the Leviathans.” The Leviathans operate through a secret cult that is gradually taking over people in and around the estate of Collinwood and the nearby village of Collinsport. Barnabas, the Todds, Carolyn’s mother Liz, and her cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, are among the members of the cult. Paul is one of its enemies, and others are coming into their sights.
As he was when he was Alexander, Michael is a bully, monotonous in his hostility and demands for obedience. Philip has had about enough of this. He spanks Michael today, and tells Megan that it is time they think about quitting the Leviathan cult. Megan is appalled by Philip’s apostasy. She and Michael talk alone. He caresses her face, exciting a physical response from her. She then agrees that Philip should be got rid of, and picks up a gun.
We have seen Barnabas caress the faces of people whom he wanted to bring under the control of the Leviathans, so the makers of the show could tell the ABC network’s Standards and Practices Office that Michael was doing a magic trick when he did that to Megan. But in a period when Sigmund Freud was the among most cited nonfiction authors in the English-speaking world, few adults in the audience could have failed to notice the erotic charge in the contact between Michael and his (foster) mother as they plot the murder of his (foster) father.
Freud has turned up on the show before. In September 1968, Carolyn hid Frankenstein’s monster Adam in a room in the dusty and long-disused west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Adam spent most of his time alone, with little to do but read. When Carolyn brought him a meal there in #577, Adam was disappointed she was not prepared to discuss Freud’s works with him. She mentioned that she was dealing with some family troubles, at which Adam invited her to sit down and to “Tell me about your mother.”
Adam is long gone, but we see today that the west wing is still dusty. Maggie, David’s governess, fell afoul of Michael yesterday and is wandering around there, hopelessly lost. For some time, Adam held Maggie’s predecessor Vicki prisoner in his room; evidently writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell see some kind of connection between Freudian psychoanalysis and governesses stuck in the west wing.
Like Adam, Michael came into being otherwise than by sexual reproduction, and the arrangement of his anatomy is the result of a series of conscious acts of will. Also like Adam, he has an intense crush on Carolyn, one which does not exclude violence. In #549, Adam attempted to rape Carolyn. In #919/920/921, Michael introduced himself to Carolyn by creeping up behind her and putting his hands over her eyes; moments later, he was yelling at her and demanding “How dare you” when she would not go along with an idea of his. Since Carolyn is virtually the same height as Michael, his disregard of her personal space and his unrestrained bullying come off not only as bratty, but as rape-adjacent.
Furthermore, Marie Wallace, who plays Megan, first joined the show as patchwork woman Eve, Adam’s intended spouse. Megan’s desperate indulgence towards Michael puts her at the opposite extreme from Eve’s total rejection of Adam, but it is equally inflexible, and when she takes up her gun today it seems likely to lead to an equally disastrous ending. Whatever point Hall and Russell were making by associating Adam with Freud is apparently in their minds again when Michael and Megan play out their little Oedipal dance.
Closing Miscellany
When Maggie is first trapped in the west wing, she reaches up to bang on the closed panel. When her shoulders rise, the high hem of the outfit Junior Sophisticates provided Kathryn Leigh Scott exposes parts of her that performers on daytime television in the USA in 1970 did not customarily display.
Yesterday and today, David and Michael play a game they call “Wall Street.” They use Monopoly money and a playing surface which, when Michael overturns it today, proves to be a checkerboard with a backgammon board on the reverse. A board game called The World of Wall Street really was around in those days; it was produced in 1969 by Hasbro and NBC. The dialogue David and Michael exchange during the game sounds like things you might say while playing it. Perhaps the script called for the boys to play that game, but ABC vetoed it since the rival NBC network’s logo appeared prominently on the box.
Six weeks ago, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins was absorbed into a group serving supernatural beings known as the Leviathans. Also in the group is matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Barnabas and Liz are worried that mad scientist Julia Hoffman, Barnabas’ sometime best friend and Liz’ permanent houseguest, is catching on to the truth about their group. They decide Julia must be absorbed into it.
Barnabas finds Julia on a couch in the drawing room, reading a book about lycanthropy. He strikes up a conversation about Chris Jennings, a young man who suffers from that condition. Julia replies bitterly that she still cares about Chris, unlike Barnabas. He tells her that he does care, and they quarrel a bit. He then strokes Julia’s cheek. He did the same thing with Chris’ little sister Amy in #912, at which point Amy fell asleep. Shortly after Amy woke up, she had become part of the Leviathan group. Julia gets a headache and goes to her room, where she does fall asleep.
We didn’t see a dream sequence when Amy fell asleep, but do see one for Julia today. The visuals alternate between two stock clips of lightning flashes as we hear Jonathan Frid give a dramatic reading of some portentous nonsense, then give way to Julia finding Barnabas in the drawing room inviting her to open a wooden box. We saw a dream of Liz’ in #904; she woke from it already transformed into a faithful devotee of the Leviathans. But when Julia wakes up, she just has a worse headache.
They’ve shown us this clip more times than I can count…… but I don’t think we’ve seen this one before. It’s fascinating to me, like an image David Lynch would have used in Eraserhead or the third season of Twin Peaks.
Julia goes downstairs and find Liz holding the box from her dream. She is urging her to open it. Julia is confused by the situation. A knock comes at the door, and she rushes to answer it. It is Chris, saying that it is time for Julia to drive him to the institution where he is locked up on nights of the full moon. Julia calls back to Liz that she will be back later in the evening.
Barnabas enters and says that Julia will never be absorbed into the cult. If she were suited for absorption, the knock at the door would not have distracted her. He explains that “There are certain people, Elizabeth, whom we are not able to absorb. It has to do with their genetic structure. And Julia Hoffman is one of them.” As a former vampire who is now leading a cult that is trying to bring a race of Elder Gods back into the world where they will destroy and replace humankind, Barnabas is supposed to be strange and unnerving, but hearing him talk about “certain people” and their “genetic structure” is off-putting in a whole other way. Why not just say that she’s Jewish, we know you mean that she’s Jewish.
Barnabas then tells Liz that it is now up to her to handle Julia. So far as we know, Liz does not have any special powers like those Barnabas uses when he fondles people’s faces. Liz doesn’t even know what the cult is all about- today, she asks Barnabas what the goal is they are working for, and he tells her he isn’t at liberty to say. So when Barnabas tells her to deal with Julia, we can only remember the last time we saw Joan Bennett playing a character under the control of an uncanny force, when Judith Collins shot and killed neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond on the orders of vampire Dirk Wilkins in #776.
In #915, one Leviathan ordered Barnabas to kill Julia. When he refused, another caused him to have nightmares, then told him it was OK to leave Julia alive if he could find another way to keep her under control. That episode was written hurriedly and rushed into production at the last minute, three full weeks after this one was in the can, in response to complaints from fans dissatisfied with the Leviathan story in general and Barnabas’ coldness to Julia in particular. It’s anybody’s guess what they were originally planning to do with #915, but today’s episode makes it clear that it did not include the reset of Barnabas’ character that we saw yesterday. He is still leading the Leviathans, and when he delegates the problem to Liz murdering Julia is pretty obviously the likeliest solution.
Not a Portrait of Quentin Collins
Julia’s plan for Chris is to persuade an artist named Charles Delaware Tate to paint a portrait of him. Tate painted a portrait of Chris’ great-grandfather, Quentin Collins, in 1897. That portrait had magical powers. Once it was painted, Quentin’s own werewolf curse went into abeyance. It was the portrait that transformed on nights of the full moon, while Quentin himself remained human. Indeed, the portrait also caused Quentin to remain young and healthy. He returned to Collinsport a couple of weeks ago, and though he is 99 years old he still looks just like he did when he was 28. In #913/ 914, Julia found that Tate, also, is alive, and still looks like he did in 1897.
Quentin and Tate are not the only emigrés from 1897 currently sheltering in Collinsport. Another of Tate’s magical portraits, a concept piece depicting his ideal woman, caused its subject to pop into existence. In 1897, she went by the name Amanda Harris, met Quentin, and fell in love with him. She, too, is unchanged in 1969, though she now calls herself Olivia Corey.
Amanda/ Olivia and Julia are both hunting for paintings by Tate, and met each other through that pursuit. They have also met Quentin, and vied with each other to decide which would be the one to keep him. He has amnesia and knows only that he was carrying papers identifying him as Grant Douglas. He is open to the idea that this is not his real name, but he finds Julia’s attempt to convince him that he is a 99 year old man ludicrous and is frustrated with Amanda/ Olivia’s unwillingness to tell him when and where they first met.
Amanda/ Olivia comes back to her suite at the Collinsport Inn and finds Quentin there, swilling her booze and enormously drunk. He tells her that he finds his room depressing, because it doesn’t have a bar. He says he can’t stand not knowing who he is. She points out that he has taken this in his stride up to now, and asks why today is different. He says he doesn’t know why it is different, but it very much is. When the show was a costume drama set in 1897 and we saw Amanda, she did not know about Quentin’s lycanthropy, and now that she calls herself Olivia she still does not think of the full moon when she sees him in anguish.
Later, Julia shows up at Amanda/ Olivia’s door. She has brought one of Tate’s portraits of Amanda Harris. Amanda/ Olivia staggers back at the sight of it. She composes herself and says that it is of no interest to her, since she already has several of Tate’s paintings of her “grandmother.” Julia tells Amanda/ Olivia that the real reason she is not interested in it is that it is not a portrait of Quentin Collins. She replies that Julia is the one who is fascinated by Quentin, not she. Julia says that she wants to show the portrait to Quentin. Amanda/ Olivia does not bother pretending that his name is “Grant Douglas” or that it might be something other than “Quentin Collins”; she simply tells Julia that he is in his room sleeping off an alcoholic binge. Julia adopts her most unmistakably Mad Scientist manner when she responds “Then this is definitely the right time to see him!” She marches out, and Amanda/ Olivia follows her.
Julia had told Chris that if Quentin’s portrait has been destroyed, his lycanthropy will be back in force. If that is so, she wants to be with him when he transforms. This was a doubly confusing thing to say. First, if the portrait had been destroyed, Quentin would not only be a werewolf, he would also look his age. She therefore knows it is not so. Second, she does not have anything with her to protect her against werewolves. If she is with Quentin when he transforms, he will kill her immediately.
When Julia and Amanda/ Olivia let themselves into Quentin’s room, they find that it is a shambles and he is gone. As a closing cliffhanger, this is supposed to leave us with the fear that a werewolf is stalking Collinsport. But since we know what the portrait does for Quentin, it only leaves us wondering if Amanda/ Olivia will have to pay an extra housekeeping charge because he trashed the room she was renting for him.
When Julia met Tate in #913/914, she could not get him to engage her in any kind of conversation, much less agree to paint a portrait of Chris. She did not mention Amanda/ Olivia. Since Tate was maniacally obsessed with Amanda in 1897, Julia should have known that her acquaintance with her was the strongest card she had to play. So when she goes to Amanda/ Olivia’s suite today, returning viewers were hoping that she was going to propose they team up to persuade Tate to paint Chris. Perhaps that will still happen. If it does, it might be a lot more interesting than is the revelation that Quentin doesn’t keep his hotel room clean.
In #701, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins traveled in time from 1969 to 1897. For the next eight months, ending in #884, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in that year. On his way back to a contemporary setting, Barnabas took a detour to the 1790s, when he was a vampire. Before he left the 1790s, he was abducted by and absorbed into a cult that serves supernatural beings known as the Leviathans. At their behest, he took a small wooden box with him to November, 1969, and functioned as one of the leaders of the Leviathan cult in that period.
The first six weeks of the Leviathan story has had its strengths. Ever since Barnabas was first cured of vampirism in March 1969, he has been under the impression that he was a good guy and has been doing battle with various supernatural menaces. He was hopelessly inept at this, and created as much work for the other characters by his attempts at virtue as he formerly did in his unyielding evil. That has made him a tremendously productive member of the cast, but it does leave him with a tendency to seem harmless, even when he is trying to murder his way out of a problem. But Barnabas the Leviathan chief has been ice-cold and formidably efficient. Even though not much has yet been done to hurt anyone, seeing him in this mode adds a note of terror to the proceedings.
Moreover, the Leviathans have voided Barnabas’ friendship with mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Since the relationship between the two of them has been the heart of the show for over two years now, from the hostility of their early days to the close bond they formed in the summer of 1968, this reinvigorates the action. It is as interesting to see them fight with each other as it is to see them collaborate against a common foe, and their hate scenes gain an extra depth because we keep wondering about their eventual reconciliation. If they play their cards right, they should be able to keep this up for months.
Today, it all falls apart. Barnabas has drawn a huge following of very young fans who run home from elementary school to watch the show. The 1897 segment was a triumph in large part because it had a core of stories that could hold the attention of adults while also appealing to the preteen demographic. But the Leviathan arc has so far had little to offer anyone but grownups. Apparently the kids were writing angry letters, because this episode, rushed into production at the last minute and bearing signs of haste in every shot, turns Barnabas back into the would-be hero who was such a klutz that he couldn’t even stay in the right century.
The creature who emerged from the box Barnabas brought from the past now appears to be a 13 year old boy and answers to the name Michael. In the opening scene, Michael orders Barnabas to kill Julia. Barnabas declares that he will not, and goes home. There, he tells his troubles to the box, then falls asleep in his chair.
A hooded figure appears to him. This hooded figure says that he is a Leviathan, and tells Barnabas he must comply with Michael’s commands. The Leviathan is not named in the dialogue and there are no actors’ credits at the end, but reference works based on the original paperwork call him Adlar.
Adlar sets out to explain Barnabas’ position, much as Marley’s ghost did to Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The shortened production schedule shows in inconsistencies that litter Adlar’s speeches. At one point he says that the Leviathans needed Barnabas to transport the box from the eighteenth century to the twentieth; at another, he claims that they are holding his lost love Josette prisoner in the eighteenth century and will inflict a new, far more horrible death on her than the one she died the last time Barnabas was in the 1790s, a threat they will be able to carry out only if they have their own means of traveling back and forth through the years. Barnabas doesn’t pick up on this or any of Adlar’s other inconsistencies; perhaps he is too distracted by the many jump cuts that make this episode look like the videotape was edited with a rusty butter knife.
Adlar threatens to make Barnabas a vampire again, then disappears. He does not tell him that he will be visited by three spirits, one representing his past, another his present, and the third the future he is risking by his present course of action, but this is in fact what happens. Barnabas goes outside, and sees a bat. It was a bat whom he first saw on this very spot who initially made him a vampire. Barnabas rushes inside, looks in the mirror, and does not see a reflection. He thinks of his mouth, and feels fangs growing there.
Next comes Megan Todd, a Leviathan cultist who with her husband Philip is fostering Michael in their home. Barnabas cannot take his eyes off Megan’s long white neck. Megan keeps telling Barnabas that he is the only one she can confide in about her concerns with the progress of the Leviathan plan; he keeps demanding ever more stridently that she leave at once. His bloodlust may explain why he doesn’t notice the continuity problem in the scene. They’ve made the point time and again that it is only while Barnabas is giving orders to her and Philip that Megan remembers that he is their leader. At other times, she thinks he is an outsider. But Megan is the only one who can tell Barnabas a story of family life in any way paralleling that which the Ghost of Christmas Present brings to Scrooge’s attention at the Cratchit house. Continuity has to go if the episode is going to fit into the form of A Christmas Carol.
Suddenly, Barnabas finds himself in an alley by the waterfront. A sign behind him says that he is next to the Greenfield Inn; we saw this sign in #439, set in the year 1796. Evidently the Greenfield Inn is a long-established, though not very reputable, place of lodging.
A woman approaches him. She is very aggressive about insisting he take her with him wherever he is going. He is reluctant at first, urging her to seek friends at the Blue Whale tavern, but she won’t take no for an answer. All of a sudden, he brightens and looks at her with desire. She says she is afraid of him. He asks if she wants to go, and she screws up her courage to declare that she will stay with him. He bares his fangs and attacks. The rough videotape editing adds to the violence of the scene. There is no sensuous bite, only a flash as he lunges at her and then is standing up again, protesting that he didn’t want to do it. When the camera zooms in on the bleeding marks on her neck, it is surprising to see that he didn’t rip her throat out altogether.
We cut back to Barnabas’ house. He is dozing in his chair, and the woman, displaying vampire fangs of her own, walks in through the front door. She approaches Barnabas. He awakens, and is horrified. Adlar tells Barnabas that “she is not up to your usual standards.” She’s standing right there, that’s pretty tactless. Also, she is future four-time Academy Award nominee Marsha Mason. The only other Oscar nominee Barnabas bit was Grayson Hall as Josette’s aunt, the Countess DuPrés, in #886. Hall was only nominated once, so if anything this woman is a step up for him.
Adlar makes the woman disappear, and shows Barnabas that he is not really a vampire again. With that, we see that she is a shade of a future that may come to be, not one that is already ordained. Adlar also tells Barnabas that it is not now necessary to kill Julia. But he does say that Barnabas will have to do something to ensure Julia’s silence, or else Josette will suffer. Barnabas hangs his head and says to the mirror that he has no choice to obey.
Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is sitting at a table in the Blue Whale, a tavern. A man who refused to give his name when she caught him trespassing on her property invites himself to sit down with her. She objects to this. He identifies himself as her father, the long-missing Paul Stoddard. She objects far more strenuously to that. Not only did Paul leave the family when Carolyn was an infant, he and his friend Jason McGuire faked his death. Jason convinced Carolyn’s mother, Liz, that she had killed Paul and he had buried the corpse in the basement. In response, Liz immured herself in the house for nineteen years. Only after Jason came back and was blackmailing Liz into marrying him did the truth come out and Liz break free of her reclusive ways.
Paul tells Carolyn that he didn’t know Jason told Liz that she had killed him. Longtime viewers may suspect this is a lie, not least because Paul and Jason are both played by Dennis Patrick. Nonetheless, Carolyn falls for it. Soon she is agreeing to sound Liz out to see how she might react were she to hear that Paul had returned. He walks her home to the great house on the estate of Collinwood. He can’t go in, but gives her a goodnight kiss on the forehead.
Carolyn’s young cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, sees Paul kissing her. When she goes inside, he asks who her new boyfriend is. Carolyn is vexed. She refuses to tell David anything, and sends him to bed.
Carolyn’s friend Philip Todd comes to the door. He tells her that he and his wife Megan want Carolyn to work at their antique shop in the village. It may seem rather odd for the keeper of a little shop to go to a vast mansion and ask the daughter of its proprietor to take a job as his assistant, but Carolyn loves the shop and was volunteering there yesterday. She agrees happily, and mentions that a man might be leaving messages for her there.
In the shop the next morning, Carolyn sees that Megan has a baby. Megan says it is her sister’s son. Carolyn asks his name. Megan thinks for quite a while before coming up with “Joseph!”
Carolyn is alone in the shop when David comes in with his friend and fellow resident of Collinwood, Amy Jennings. We haven’t seen Amy since #835; that in turn was her first appearance since #700. For eight months, from #701 to #884, Dark Shadows was set in the year 1897, with only a few brief glimpses of the 1960s. In the 1897 segment, Denise Nickerson played Nora Collins, whose own final appearance was in #859. Both Nora and Amy had long absences from the cast, and were usually unmentioned while they were away. So we’ve been afraid that we wouldn’t see Amy or any other Nickerson character again. It’s good to have her back. She even pulls her signature move and gives a meaningful look directly into the camera at one point.
A Nickerson special.
Amy and David see a doll that longtime viewers will recognize as Samantha, favorite plaything of the late Sarah Collins both when we saw her as a living being in the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968 and before that, when she was a ghost haunting Collinwood and its environs in 1967. There are also a couple of toy soldiers from “The Regiment,” which Sarah’s brother Barnabas played with when he was a young boy and which Sarah gave to people in 1967 as protection against Barnabas, who was at that time a vampire. Barnabas did sell a bunch of things to Megan and Philip the other day, but neither Samantha nor the members of The Regiment were in Barnabas’ possession when last we saw them. Presumably the camera lingers on the toys, not because we are supposed to know how Philip and Megan got them, but because we are supposed to be pleased with ourselves for recognizing them.
Paul comes into the shop. David recognizes him as the man he saw kissing Carolyn. Carolyn addresses Paul as “Mr Prescott,” sends him into a back room, and hustles the children out of the shop. She tells Paul who David is, and explains that he saw them together, complicating their plans.
When Carolyn was minding the shop yesterday, her friend Maggie noticed an old book on a table. Neither of them knew what it was, but viewers knew it was an object of great importance to a cult into which Philip and Megan have been inducted. It seemed inexplicable that they would leave it on a table in their shop, as if it were for sale. We get a hint today as to what they may have been thinking. In his room at Collinwood, David shows Amy that he has stolen the book. She asks why he would want it. He explains that Carolyn said that if they damaged anything in the shop, his father, Roger, would have to pay for it, and he creased a page in the book. David’s fear that his father would punish him drove several stories in the early months of the show. Roger has mellowed enormously since then, but evidently David is still so afraid of him that he will make a bad situation worse rather than face his wrath.
Indeed, many major storylines have begun with David. The 1897 flashback started because Barnabas was trying to keep a ghost from killing David, as the 1790s segment started when David’s governess Vicki participated in a séance meant to solve a mystery concerning him. For that matter, the whole show started when Vicki was summoned to Collinwood to take charge of David’s education. David doesn’t always have a lot to do in the stories, and when they are over it is often as not forgotten that he was in peril when they began. But he is so often the catalyst that we can suppose that David was supposed to find the book so that the current story could move into its major phase.
If that was the intention, Megan and Philip didn’t know about it. When they discover that the book is gone from the shop, they fly into a panic and declare that whoever took it must be killed. It may turn out that the mysterious forces behind the cult want David to become involved and that they created a situation in which he would find the book and take it with him, but if so, those forces are operating outside the cognizance of anyone in today’s episode.
Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has given a present to antique shop owners Megan and Philip Todd. It is a wooden box. This box has a strange effect on the Todds, filling them with a mixture of irresistible fascination and nameless dread.
When the Todds go to open the box, it makes a whistling noise. They find a book inside it. The book is noticeably larger than the box. It is written in a script they do not recognize. There is also a scroll. That is in English, but may as well not be- neither Philip nor Megan can understand it, though Megan does say that she feels as if she almost can.
Later, Megan has a dream. It is the sort of dream people had in the first year of the show, before there were special effects. Like the dreams in ancient Greek literature, it takes the form of someone standing by the bed and making a speech. The speaker is Barnabas, and he tells Megan to empty the bedroom of furniture, board up its windows, and let no outsiders enter it. She calls him “master,” and he tells her she will not recognize him as such when she is awake. When she does wake up, she finds that Philip is already following the instructions, and realizes they had the same dream.
Downstairs, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is minding the antique shop. She receives a telephone call from someone wanting to buy a cradle that is on the shop floor. At the end of the call, we hear Carolyn’s thoughts as she congratulates herself on making a sale. She is shocked when Megan comes down and tells her the cradle is not for sale. Philip comes afterward, and with a blank expression on his face carries the cradle upstairs. Carolyn is left to call the buyer back and apologize.
Philip and Megan set the cradle in the special room. They are apparently in awe. They look like any new parents stunned by the fact that they have brought a new life into the world, but the cradle is empty. After they leave the room, it starts rocking by itself.
The cradle is an interesting choice of prop. It was important early in 1969 in the “Haunting of Collinwood” story, when it was associated with the ghosts and rocked by itself. We then saw it a couple of months later in the 1897 flashback, when we learned why it was haunted. Those stories have been resolved in such a way that it won’t occur to us that the consequences of the same tragic events are animating it this time. The cradle seems to have become a generic symbol of spookiness. Considering that its back is coffin-shaped, that’s an understandable association.
Meanwhile, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has come into the shop. Maggie is the governess in Carolyn’s home, the great house on the estate of Collinwood, and they are friends. Maggie notices the sacred book on a table and asks Carolyn what it is. Carolyn doesn’t know anything about it. Why the Todds would leave such a thing on a table in their shop, a placement that implies it is for sale, is not explained.
Maggie tries on a feather boa. Like the cradle, this prop was significant in the 1897 segment. In that part of the show, Nancy Barrett, who plays Carolyn, was introduced as a woman named Charity Trask. Charity’s body was eventually taken over by late Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Pansy Faye. She wore the boa to indicate that she was Pansy. We last saw Charity/ Pansy, boa and all, in #883, and heard her voice in #887, so when we see it in the shop regular viewers will have fresh memories of her. We may well hope Carolyn will put it on and start singing Pansy’s song. But Maggie is the only one who is interested in the boa, and she doesn’t seem possessed at all. She wants to buy it, but Megan comes in and prevents her doing even that. She declares she is going to be closing the shop early.
Maggie leans very heavily on Carolyn to join her for a drink at the local tavern, The Blue Whale. Even after she drags Carolyn there, Maggie keeps pressuring her to stay for another drink. This is not at all typical of Maggie. When we find out her reason, it turns out to be even less characteristic. A mysterious gray-haired man who has been lurking around Collinwood lately wants to sit with Carolyn. When he comes to the table, Maggie gets up and leaves Carolyn alone with him. She has a self-satisfied smirk on her face as she does so, not a look we have ever seen her give before.
The man introduces himself to Carolyn as Paul Stoddard, her father. Paul abandoned the family when Carolyn was an infant, in the process faking his own death and prompting Carolyn’s mother Liz to believe that she had killed him. That belief led Liz to confine herself in her home for nineteen years, terrified that she would be caught. So it is simply inexplicable that Maggie would think Carolyn would be happy about having this bomb dropped on her.
Paul’s introduction of himself to Carolyn is the first time he is identified in a scene, but it is not the first time viewers have been told who he is. His name appeared in the closing credits for #887 and #891, ruining the surprise that is supposed to give a punch to the ending of today’s episode.
Dark Shadows Commentary 