the playroom – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1119: Where the Devil is everybody.

Ben Stokes

From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that period, we learned how scion Barnabas Collins first became the vampire we had met in April 1967, and more importantly learned that he could be interesting even if he were not a vampire.

We also met much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes. Ben was played by Thayer David, who first joined the cast of Dark Shadows in 1966 as crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. Matthew was so maniacally devoted to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard that he inadvertently killed a friend of hers whom he imagined to be her enemy and was about to deliberately murder another of her favorite people, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, when the ghosts who haunt the estate of Collinwood emerged from the background and did him in. When we met Ben, he was as open-hearted and kindly as Matthew was dark and twisted.

Barnabas was the one member of the Collins family who took a liking to Ben. He taught Ben to read. Later, Barnabas would press his father, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, to free Ben from his indenture. When Barnabas became a vampire, Ben repaid his kindness by protecting him and abetting his crimes. Eventually, Ben’s devotion to “Mistah Bah-nah-bahs” led him to recreate the very crimes that triggered Matthew’s destruction, killing a man in the course of a struggle and murdering a woman in cold blood. We saw that he and Matthew were two versions of the same character. Ben became what Matthew was after a few months in the shadow of the Collins family curse. Matthew had spent his entire life in the shadow of that curse, and so he was doomed from the beginning.

Barnabas brought the vampire curse on himself when he met the gracious Josette, jumped to the conclusion that she could never love him, and consoled himself in a brief affair with her aunt’s maid Angelique. Unknown to Barnabas, Angelique had a talent for witchcraft. When it turned out that Josette did love Barnabas and agreed to marry him, Barnabas cast Angelique aside. Humiliated and enraged, Angelique used her powers of witchcraft to make him into a ghoul and sentence him to exist forever without love. The vampire curse was dramatically satisfying, because Barnabas had been so selfish that it was fitting he should be reduced to a metaphor for extreme selfishness. And Angelique’s declaration that anyone who loved him would die gave an extra pathos to his underestimate of his own lovableness.

As his involvement with Angelique led to Barnabas’ destruction, so Ben’s involvement with her blighted his life. He met Angelique in #372, and thought she was making a sexual overture to him. Without further ado, he walked up to her and took her in his arms. She gave him something to drink first, which made him the victim of a spell that subjected him to her will. As Angelique’s slave, he did harm to Barnabas and others whom he loved, filling him with anguish and self-loathing. Ben did not share Barnabas’ selfishness, so there would have been little point in making him a vampire. But his desperate response to Barnabas’ kindnesses suggests that he, too, believes himself to be unlovable.

Now, the show has traveled back in time again. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman, Barnabas’ devoted friend in 1970, escaped a disaster in that year by passing through a time warp that took her to 1840, when the seeds of the disaster were planted. Barnabas used some mumbo-jumbo to project his 1970 personality into his body as it was in 1840 and joined her there. The two of them needed help establishing themselves in the Collinwood of that period. They found that Ben was living there and that he was still devoted to Barnabas. Ben was very old, but also amazingly resourceful. He was able to provide Julia with contemporary clothing and a set of luggage that she seemed to have left at the Collinsport Inn, and to substantiate the story that Barnabas and Julia were the son and daughter of the original Barnabas Collins. Now they are securely ensconced in the bosom of the Collins family. At the rate Ben has enabled them to go, Julia and Barnabas should be able to solve all the problems they face in another week or two.

Of course, it cannot be so. Ben sees that Desmond Collins, a cousin of the Collinses who live in the great house, has brought a severed head back from a trip to the southeastern coast of China. Ben recognizes this loathsome thing as an object that was mentioned in connection with a series of murders many years before. He has gone to Desmond’s home, a mansion known as Rose Cottage, and left a book with a chapter about the murders and a note urging him to destroy the head. He also spent some time looking at the head and telling it he was going to see to it that it was destroyed. That turns out to have been unwise; when Ben is walking home through the woods, the head appears to him and he cries out in distress. The next morning, Ben’s corpse is found. It looks as if he tried to cut his own head off.

The Happy Couple

In March 1969, Barnabas began the longest of all Dark Shadows’ excursions backward in time when he went to the year 1897. When he arrived at Collinwood, the matriarch of the house was dying. She was Edith Collins, nonagenarian widow of Gabriel Collins. On her deathbed, Edith reminisced about the difficult relationship she and her darling Gabriel had with Gabriel’s father, Daniel Collins, master of Collinwood. At the time, that startled longtime viewers. We had seen Daniel as a twelve year old boy in the 1790s segment, and he seemed pleasant enough. But if we were to believe that he was the man his daughter-in-law remembered decades after his death, he grew up to be bitter and estranged from his own nearest kin.

We have met the adult Daniel, and he is indeed a difficult sort. He is confined to the tower room in the great house because of his unfortunate tendency to mistake women for his late wife and to try to kill them as he killed her. He also has dementia, so that people have to keep telling him which members of the family are dead and what year it is. In fairness to Daniel, these points are extremely difficult for anyone to keep track of on Dark Shadows. We’ve also heard that Daniel has a heart condition that medical science as of 1840 is powerless to do anything about.

We have met Gabriel, too. He uses a manual wheelchair to get around; apparently he is quite skilled with it, since he keeps appearing in rooms on every floor of the house without any apparent assistance getting up and down stairs. He is a vicious bully, a characteristic Edith did not bring up in her deathbed reminiscences.

Today, we meet the young Edith. She is played by Terrayne Crawford, who in the 1897 segment played lady’s maid Beth Chavez. We haven’t seen her on the show since Beth’s final appearance in #880, though she did have a small part in the feature film House of Dark Shadows which was in theaters at this time.

Unlike the dying Edith of 1897, this version of the character despises Gabriel. There is an amusing idea in there. Perhaps in the 57 years between what we see today and what we saw then, Edith talked herself into believing that she and Gabriel had a lovely marriage and that only Daniel’s hostility gave them trouble.

If that was an idea they were planning to develop, they probably should not have given the part of Edith to Miss Crawford. She seems to be a very nice person, but she had severe limitations as an actress. All of the roles in the 1897 segment included dialogue which called for the depiction of multiple layers of feeling at once, and Miss Crawford was alone among the cast in failing to meet this challenge even a single time. So when Beth tells a devastatingly handsome married man that she doesn’t want him to make passes at her, that’s all there is to it- she simply does not want that, and he simply is a jerk for continuing to do it. We can see no conflict within her to set up a story in the course of which she will stop resisting his charms and begin an affair with him.

Eventually they started writing Beth as a one-dimensional character. That allowed Beth to be part of the story, but they did have to sacrifice some themes they had apparently meant to develop. So in her first appearance, Beth reacted with alarm when a Romani character dropped a hint that she was going to reveal to the Collinses that Beth was Romani, too. That fit with Beth’s origin as a servant who had come to Collinwood in the train of Jenny Collins, who was herself secretly Romani. But delivering on it would have required Beth to have more complicated feelings than Miss Crawford could be relied on to portray, so that was laid quietly to one side.

Showing the audience that Edith is the sort of person who will, in her own mind, eventually retcon her crappy marriage into a great but haunted romance would place even greater demands on a performer than would showing that Beth is hiding the facts about her ethnic background. But as we see her today, Miss Crawford seems to have become an even worse actress than she was playing Beth a year ago. She keeps changing her tone of voice in the middle of her lines for no apparent reason, making us wonder if she is trying to suppress the hiccups. That isn’t because she is tense- on the contrary, she is relaxed and comfortable, with a big grin on her face, an inexplicable affect when every conversation Edith has consists of everyone reviling and threatening everyone else.

Gabriel is in a good mood despite Edith’s loathing for him. He is blackmailing the evil Gerard Stiles into murdering Samantha Drew Collins, widow of his brother Quentin Collins. This will leave Daniel with no choice but to leave the Collins fortune to Gabriel. Samantha has no suspicion that anything like this is going on, but she does know that Gabriel hates her and cordially returns his hatred.

Gerard has told Gabriel that he will give Samantha a poison that will cause her to have a fatal stroke while he and she are in the village and Gabriel is at home, so that she will die in front of witnesses and no one will suspect him even if it is discovered that the stroke was artificially induced.

Gerard comes back to Collinwood. Gabriel menacingly says that “If you tell me anything went wrong…” Gerard replies that nothing went wrong. It is done. Delighted, Gabriel asks for all the details. Gerard says that he and Samantha made a stop at the police station to arrange for Ben’s body to be released for burial. Gabriel asks if it happened at the police station. Gerard says no, then goes on to say that they went from there to the bank. Gabriel asks if it happened at the bank. Gerard says no. He then says that they went to the courthouse. Gabriel is thrilled at the idea that it happened at the courthouse, and Gerard confirms that it did happen at the courthouse.

Gabriel asks where the body is now. Before Gerard can answer, the front door opens and the body comes walking in. What happened at the courthouse was not Samantha’s death. It was Gerard and Samantha’s wedding. Gabriel is dumbfounded.

Gabriel absorbs the news of the wedding. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When he first joined the show in January 1970, Christopher Pennock had some troubles with line delivery that limited him almost as badly as Miss Crawford’s weaknesses limited her. But he has grown by leaps and bounds over the last ten months, and he really breaks through as Gabriel. The three “It happened in the–” questions and his responses to the answers they elicit are pattern from a bit that was old when Gallagher and Shean did it in vaudeville in 1910, but he and James Storm execute it so well that it feels fresh today. The expression on his face when he learns that Samantha has married Gerard is just exquisite.

The measure of Pennock’s success came earlier in the episode, when Samantha slapped Gabriel in the face. Virginia Vestoff is likable enough that her characters can get away with almost anything, but not even she could sell an audience on an able-bodied person who physically assaults a wheelchair user. But Pennock has established Gabriel as such an utter louse that we can see Samantha’s point.

Also in this episode, Samantha clears the toys out of a space known as “The Playroom.” It is explicitly acknowledged that her son Tad had outgrown the toys in it long before, a point the fans like to make whenever The Playroom is mentioned. Samantha has set aside her earlier resolution to leave the room unchanged to honor Tad, who was washed away in a storm at sea and is presumed dead, along with his father Quentin. She has decided the time has come to move on from the past.

The time warp that brought Julia to 1840 was localized in The Playroom, so we wonder what clearing it out will do to the prospects for a return trip. Also, The Playroom occasionally popped into being, complete with Tad’s old toys, in 1970 and in 1995, due to the influence of a bunch of ghosts of people from this period. So while first-time viewers will not likely find any significance in Samantha’s redecoration project, returning viewers may have many questions about it.

Episode 1110: A room filled with toys

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has escaped from a band of zombies who were wrecking the great house of Collinwood. From her perspective, it is a few moments after she saw her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, wrestling with the zombies and urging her to save herself by walking down a mysterious staircase. But she soon discovers that she has left the year 1970 and made her way to 1840, when both the zombies and the ghosts who have triggered their destructive actions were living human beings.

Julia enters the staircase from a playroom that is only intermittently present in 1970 and walks down its two flights. She exits into the same playroom, which is a normal presence in 1840. We saw this same distortion of space in #1070 and #1071, when Julia and Barnabas used the staircase to escape from the far-off future year of 1995 and return to 1970. It was an effective way of expressing the magical nature of the staircase and the playroom then, and is still effective the second time.

When they opened the playroom door on their return to 1970, Barnabas and Julia saw a girl in the corridor. That girl appeared to be a ghost named Carrie whom they had met in 1995, but turned out to be a living girl named Hallie Stokes who had moved into Collinwood while they were away on their bizarre cosmic journey. Now, Julia opens the door and sees the living Carrie in the same corridor.

Hallie was the niece of occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes and therefore a descendant of much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes, whom we got to know from November 1967 to March 1968, when the show was set in the 1790s. We learn today that Carrie is Ben’s granddaughter, and that he and she are staying in the great house as the guests of Daniel Collins.

We saw Daniel in the 1790s segment. He was played then by David Henesy, who was eleven years old at the time. Mr Henesy looked a lot older in September 1970 than he had three years before, and he was an accomplished young actor. But it would likely have been beyond even his abilities to play a character well into middle age, so when we see Daniel from the knees down later in the episode we can be fairly sure he will turn out to be someone else.

Julia sees a confrontation between Carrie and a tall young man in a wheelchair. The man turns out to be Daniel’s son Gabriel. He insists Carrie open the door to her grandfather’s bedroom and push him in. Carrie objects, and Gabriel sneers that she is not to tell a Collins what to do at Collinwood. He berates her, saying that while others may indulge her because they are impressed by her good looks he sees only her impudence. She capitulates to his demands.

In the room, Gabriel turns his abusiveness against Ben. He orders Ben to break some bad news to Daniel. Word has come that Daniel’s son Quentin and Quentin’s son Tad have been lost at sea. Ben protests that Daniel is in no condition to receive such news. Gabriel digresses and says that he cannot make his own living; Ben tells him that many men in worse condition than he is have done, which only makes him angrier than he was to start with. Gabriel regrets his inability to stand up and strangle Ben. We can see that he’s a true Collins; they are a strangley bunch. He then says that he is now likely to become Daniel’s heir, and threatens to evict Ben and Carrie from Collinwood when he does. He menaces Ben with the prospect that he will use his position to make Carrie’s life difficult if he does not obey him now. Ben gives in.

Gabriel bullies Ben. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Ben returns to his room he finds Quentin’s wife, Samantha Drew Collins, waiting for him there. He tells her that the news did not prompt Daniel to change his will. She is still in line to inherit the estate when Daniel dies.

Samantha goes to the drawing room, where she finds Gabriel playing a one-handed game of chess. She is smugly pleased with his dismayed reaction to the news that Daniel has not changed his will. She exits and later returns with word that Daniel has escaped from the tower room. The Collinses have always made a practice of keeping mentally ill family members in that room, and Samantha and Gabriel are so frightened by his escape that we can assume Daniel’s illness disposes him to violence.

Julia emerges from the shadows in Ben’s room. Ben is alarmed to see her, and horrified when she identifies herself a friend of Barnabas’. She claims that she is not a monster, which is a defensible claim, given a very narrow definition of “monster.” When she tells him about traveling back in time from a future period when Barnabas is free to prey upon the living and she is his best friend, he says that she is mad. She denies being mad, which is what a person would do when they are as far from sanity as she is. Ben is leery, but agrees to help her. He escorts her back to the playroom and tells her to stay there until morning. Of course she leaves the room very shortly thereafter, and as soon as she enters the corridor Daniel grabs her by the throat.

The drawing room is downstairs; Ben’s room and the playroom are upstairs. No one seems to be helping Gabriel get from one floor to another, and there is no sign of any ramp or other contrivance that would make it possible for wheelchair users to get themselves from one floor of the house to another without help. Odd as this is, it is not a first on Dark Shadows. In January and February 1970, strange and troubled boy David Collins used a wheelchair in a few episodes because David Henesy had actually suffered a leg injury. David kept going up and down stairs by himself, without explanation of how such a thing was possible. I suppose they got few enough letters complaining about the illogic of that movement that they decide they could get away with it again.

Carrie has three scenes. In addition to her encounter with Gabriel, she talks with Samantha in the playroom and with her grandfather in his room. As Hallie, Kathleen Cody was in a state of maximum nervous tension from the start, so that she had nowhere to go in response to anything that might happen. As Carrie’s ghost, she often swung to the opposite extreme, being so blandly cheerful that she made no impression at all. She did put in a few good performances in the 1970 segment, however, and she is quite good as Carrie today.

Samantha is played by Virginia Vestoff, making her Dark Shadows debut. Vestoff was a distinguished performer who is now remembered chiefly for her role as Abigail Adams in the original Broadway cast of 1776 and of the 1972 film based on that musical. The Broadway cast also included several other Dark Shadows alums- David Ford (Sam Evans #2, Andre DuPres) as John Hancock, Emory Bass (Mr Best) as James Wilson, Daniel F. Keyes (The Cemetery Caretaker) as Josiah Bartlett, and Peter Lombard (Oberon) as a stage manager and understudy for the roles of Stephen Hopkins and Thomas Jefferson. All of those, aside from Lombard, also appeared in the film. Vestoff died of cancer in 1983, aged 42, a major loss to the world of the theater.

A great deal of emphasis is placed today on Samantha’s maiden name, Drew. We have in the last few months met two characters named Roxanne Drew; we can take it that Samantha will turn out to be related to one of those in some way.

Longtime viewers, learning that Daniel and Ben are in the 1840 story, will readjust their expectations. Most of what we saw in the ten weeks leading up to this uncertain and frightening journey into the past was recycled from a story that ran from December 1968 to March 1969 and culminated in a trip to the year 1897. So we may have come in thinking there would be a retelling of 1897. But seeing Ben and Daniel, we have the prospect of a sequel to the 1790s segment. That does sound like a fresher idea.

The episode is certainly structured very differently than were the first episodes of either the 1790s segment or the 1897 segment. Those featured a relatively wide variety of brightly lit sets full of busy people, getting us off to a fast start in a new world. Today most of the action takes place in the playroom, Ben’s room, and the corridor between them, with a couple of brief glimpses of the drawing room. We keep cutting to Julia standing very still behind one partition or another as she eavesdrops on the dialogue. We are operating within a very small space, but hearing about people who are far outside that space and whom we are confident we will meet soon. So rather than leading with the equivalent of a panorama of our new surroundings, they are opening the space up for us a little bit at a time. That makes it easier to keep the action moving rapidly and clearly, and also leaves us wanting more.

Episode 1095: Elizabeth Collins Stoddard

I first started watching Dark Shadows in the 1990s, when what was then The Sci Fi Channel was showing it Monday through Friday at 10:00 and 10:30 AM. I got into the habit of daily viewing when they were showing episodes from the summer of 1967, when the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins was occasionally dropping in on strange and troubled boy David Collins. Sarah’s brother, vampire Barnabas, was thinking he might want to kill David, and David’s aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, was a blocking figure who refused to engage with any evidence that anything unusual was going on.

In those days, it appeared that if Barnabas got his way the estate of Collinwood would be peopled only by the unquiet spirits of the dead. I imagined how that might have played out, if the show were not an open-ended serial but were allowed to come to an end. I pictured the great house in ruins. Well-meaning governess Victoria Winters and her boyfriend, hopeless schlub Burke Devlin, would venture into the wreckage. Vicki and Burke would dodge phantoms and demons and make their way into the drawing room. There, they would find Liz sitting serenely while leathery-winged fiends flutter about her head. Vicki would plead with Liz to escape with them. Liz would only smile at her and say that nothing is wrong, nothing at all. Seeing that Liz had taken her commitment to denial as a way of life to its ultimate extreme, Vicki and Burke would have no alternative but to leave without her.

The makers of the show have acknowledged that Barnabas’ plan would have left Collinwood entirely uninhabitable. They did that in the feature film House of Dark Shadows, which replays the story that led to the summer of 1967 and takes it to that conclusion. And they are doing it again now.

Vicki has long since left the show, replaced as the audience point of view character by mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Julia tried to cure Barnabas of his vampirism in 1967; in 1968, she completed a procedure devised by a fellow mad scientist that did put the symptoms of his curse into abeyance. Barnabas has since bungled his way into another vampire curse, but his connection to Julia still makes it possible for him to be a permanent part of the cast of characters and, on balance, a defender of the status quo, which in a genre where the most important thing is that there is still a story left to tell in the next episode is the closest thing there is to a hero. As such, he is the successor to Burke, who was supposed to be a dashing action hero when Dark Shadows started.

In July 1970, Barnabas and Julia came unstuck in time and found themselves in the far-off future year 1995. There, the great house of Collinwood was in ruins, its residents either dead, missing, or insane as the result of a mysterious disaster that took place before 1970 was out. The estate was dominated by malevolent ghosts, and the people of the village of Collinsport dared not even speak of the place, let alone visit it. Since Julia and Barnabas returned to 1970 in #1071, they have been trying to figure out what the disaster will be and to prevent it.

At first, Liz was somewhat sympathetic to Barnabas and Julia’s efforts, as befits the several times in 1969 and early 1970 we saw her admit that uncanny events were taking place around her. But her old commitment to denial came back to the surface when she forbade Julia and Barnabas to talk with David or teenage houseguest Hallie Stokes about what they had seen in 1995, even though Hallie and David are clearly central to the upcoming disaster. Because they cannot talk with the teens, Barnabas and Julia have not been able to do anything to prevent the ghosts from encroaching on them and taking an ever stronger position in the house.

In #1088, Liz finally realized what was going on and ran to find Julia, crying that they would have to get David and Hallie out of the house before the ghosts got hold of them. But it was too late. She found herself looking into the face of the haunting, an evil spirit known as Gerard. By the time Julia caught up to her in #1089, Liz was entirely under the power of Gerard, and placidly refused to accept that anything out of the ordinary was going on.

Hints have been mounting that the disaster will occur soon. Today, Julia and Barnabas tell Liz that it is urgent Hallie and David be taken from the house at once. Liz refuses, telling them that when the night ends with no further disturbances they will have to admit that all of their fears are simply a “ridiculous fantasy.”

For their part, David and Hallie have been spending a lot of time the last few weeks sitting around moaning about how helpless they are. That does not make for gripping television, even when they look at a dollhouse and say they think the ghosts have been playing with the dolls when they weren’t looking. David gets an idea. The dolls in the ghosts’ dollhouse have connections with particular people around the estate, so if he and Hallie make a doll of Barnabas, perhaps that will cause Barnabas to be aware of what the ghosts are doing.

Hallie asks David why he wants to alert Barnabas in particular. He says that if anyone can fight Gerard and the other ghosts, it will be Barnabas, because “He’s… different.” In the summer and fall of 1967, David was the one person at Collinwood who was on track to figure out Barnabas’ secret, leading the show into a blind alley from which it escaped by going back in time to the year 1795. When they returned from that first costume drama insert in March 1968, David was for some reason no longer a threat to Barnabas. But he was still conscious about his distant cousin in ways his Aunt Liz would never countenance. So in #660, David told his friend Amy Jennings that “Barnabas knows a lot of things that he doesn’t tell anybody.”

The doll is not particularly realistic; the spirit world doesn’t require very high production values, and Hallie and David are under severe time constraints. So their Barnabas doll is adorably crude. I’m thinking of making it my PFP, replacing the tailor’s dummy known as “Mr Juggins” that I’ve been using since David and Amy showed him to Liz in #681.

Looks more like Jonathan Frid than does the Barnabas from the Gold Key comics. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Regular viewers know that David’s instincts are sound. Barnabas and Julia confronted Gerard in the room where the dollhouse is in #1070. Gerard was powerless against Barnabas. Something might have come of that, but Gerard then turned his attention to Julia, causing her to become very ill and forcing them to retreat. After they have put the doll in the dollhouse, David and Hallie leave the room for a little while. When they return, the Barnabas doll has been thrown from the dollhouse and destroyed, suggesting that Gerard did indeed see a danger in its presence.

Finally, Julia and Barnabas manage to corner Liz and force her to let them take Hallie and David away. After they leave her, Liz shuts herself up in the drawing room and apologizes to the unseen Gerard. She says she could not think of any way to resist them further.

Liz, defeated. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This admission of defeat is the next to last time we will see Liz. She will appear again in one scene twenty and a half weeks from now, in #1198, in which she will simply serve to confirm that things are back to normal. Moreover, that version of Liz appears in a Collinwood where none of the events we have seen over the last several months has taken place; we have no idea what her character development has been. This is the final appearance of the person we have been watching since episode #1.

When Dark Shadows began, Joan Bennett was its biggest ratings draw and Liz was the most powerful character. Her function as Keeper of the Secrets set her on the path that would lead her towards extreme denialism and away from any active role on the story, but along the way Bennett used her great talents to give the show’s foundations their basic outline. For example, in the relationship between Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, Bennett and Louis Edmonds pioneered the dynamic of Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother, the same dynamic that makes Barnabas and Julia so much fun to watch and that turned Quentin Collins into a breakout hit in 1969 when we saw him with his Bossy Big Sister, Judith (also played by Joan Bennett.) In her other roles, Bennett will continue to be indispensable to the show, but those of us who started with #1 will never stop wishing the writers had found more to do with the character of Liz.

Episode 1093: It’s just gonna happen anyway

In July, vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman came unstuck in time and found themselves in the far-off future year 1995. Julia and Barnabas found that the great house of Collinwood had been in ruins ever since some mysterious disaster took place on an unspecified night in 1970. Some residents of the great house went missing that night, others died, and two of them, Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes and Quentin Collins, went insane. The mad Carolyn of 1995 apparently knew that Barnabas was a vampire; she had known that for a while in 1967, when she was his victim, but appeared to have forgotten it when he was relieved of the effects of his curse for a while starting in March 1968. Towards the end of Barnabas and Julia’s time in 1995, Carolyn left a note for them, consisting of six cryptic phrases, shortly before the ghosts who rule Collinwood killed her. They decided the phrases were clues to the disaster, and ever since returning to 1970 have been trying without success to use them to figure out what is going on.

One thing that is clear is that the disaster will involve the deaths of teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins and the merger of their ghosts with the ghosts of their lookalikes from the year 1840, Carrie Stokes and Tad Collins. David and Hallie are aware of this and spend all their time moaning about how helpless they are to do anything about it. Their headquarters for this operation is a room that intermittently materializes behind a door that usually leads to a linen closet. The room is much too large to fit into the space the linen closet occupies, is stocked with high-end antique toys, and is frequented by the ghosts. Hallie and David call it “The Playroom.” In 1995, Julia and Barnabas found that The Playroom was in existence all the time and that anyone could enter it, but until today only David, Hallie, and the ghosts have been able to go there. Everyone else just sees the linen closet when they open the door.

Hallie and David are in The Playroom, bummed out because Carrie has revealed to them that they are fated to become dolls in the dollhouse that is there. This was previously revealed to them in #1082, but Dark Shadows has been losing teenage viewers lately, so perhaps David and Hallie weren’t watching that day. A miniature carousel starts turning and playing music; David is influenced by the music, and says that perhaps their future in the dollhouse won’t be so bad.

Meanwhile, Carolyn is in the corridor outside The Playroom. We see her after the camera pans out from a closeup of the stained glass work above the door that sometimes opens on The Playroom. We notice that it depicts roses. The dollhouse is a scale model of a house that was known as Rose Cottage in 1840, and is in some sense identical to that house. One of the clues Carolyn left in 1995 was “The night Rose Cottage was destroyed,” which has led Barnabas and Julia to ask everyone if they’ve ever heard of Rose Cottage and to work feverishly to try to locate it. You might think they would remember the roses above the door to The Playroom and to think of the toys they saw there in 1995, but no such luck.

Carolyn hears the carousel’s music and wonders where it is coming from. She opens the door to The Playroom. She still hears the music, but sees only the linen closet. It is a haunting moment. We know that she is glimpsing an aperture between her world and another, but nothing she can see could lead her to conclude that anything at all extraordinary is happening. It might leave us wondering what it would be like if we were in the presence of some utterly bizarre phenomenon- would we notice?

Carolyn returns to the corridor. Her back is turned when David opens the door. We see The Playroom behind him. We wonder if Carolyn would be able to see it if she were facing the right way. David closes the door silently. Carolyn turns and is startled to see him. He says he is looking for Hallie. Carolyn asks him about the music; he claims he cannot hear it. He suggests someone may have left a radio playing in another part of the house.

The sequence reminded me of the 2017 season of Twin Peaks, as does the whole idea of The Playroom. As Agent Cooper disappeared into the mysterious, intermittently existent Red Room and the Black Lodge beyond, so the ghosts threaten to absorb the living characters into the mysterious, intermittently visible Playroom and the ruinous world of 1995 beyond. As Deputy Hawk once caught a glimpse of the curtains of the Red Room in the clouds above the spot deep in the woods where the worlds sometimes open onto each other, a glimpse so brief and vague that someone unfamiliar with the legends of the Black Lodge would likely either ignore it completely or assume it was a reflection of the clouds from some water on the ground, so the music from the miniature carousel gives Carolyn a glimpse so subtle and vague that anyone who had not been briefed by Julia and Barnabas would immediately accept David’s idea that it is just a radio. I doubt that this part of the show had a direct influence on Twin Peaks– more likely, the shared imagery is just the logical endpoint of a sense that there is more to the world than we can readily perceive with commonplace fears of being trapped in unfamiliar places. But I do think the two shows can shed light on each other.

Under the influence of the ghosts, Hallie and David make a doll with bright yellow hair and put it in the dollhouse. It represents someone named “Leticia” who will join them when they are living in the dollhouse. Since the only blonde character on the show other than Hallie is Carolyn, we have to assume that a ghost named Leticia has the same designs on Carolyn that Carrie has on Hallie and Tad has on David.

In 1995, Carolyn had not disappeared into the dollhouse, but was living in a shack by Finley’s Cove. She even went in and out of The Playroom from time to time, interacting with Tad and Carrie. This is the first indication we’ve had that the ghosts’ will is not entirely ineluctable. There may be nothing the characters can do to keep a disaster from occurring, but perhaps there is some hope that we might see them do something to shape the particulars of the disaster that will befall them.

Carolyn is busy looking after David and Hallie’s governess, Maggie Evans. Maggie is ill, having been bitten by a vampire. When he found out about this, Barnabas was surprised to learn he isn’t the only vampire in town, and he and Julia have been trying to figure out who has been feeding on Maggie. Carolyn and Maggie talk about the previous vampire attacks. There is an electric moment when each of them looks like she is trying very hard to remember something that is hidden way down in the recesses of her mind. Several times in 1968, Nancy Barrett played Carolyn as if she remembered a lot more about Barnabas than he knew. The script didn’t give her any support in that, and she eventually had to give it up. Maggie was Barnabas’ victim in May and June of 1967; that experience has been wiped from her memory several times, and we may wonder if it will emerge one more time. In light of what we saw about Carolyn’s knowledge in 1995 and the similarity of what Maggie is going through now to what she went through in 1967, this moment is highly effective.

Miss Barrett also manages to get a laugh from regular viewers today. She has a scene with Christopher Pennock as astrologer Sebastian Shaw. Pennock also played Carolyn’s late husband Jabe (alias “Jeb”) Hawkes. The two characters are supposed to resemble each other strongly, and for a while Carolyn hoped Sebastian would turn out to be Jabe. But she’s given up on that, and Sebastian wants to date Maggie.

Sebastian comes to Collinwood. Carolyn tells him Maggie is very sick and cannot receive visitors. Sebastian wants to see her anyway. Carolyn tells him that is impossible. He becomes angry and declares that she will see him sooner or later, no matter what! Sebastian storms out of the house, and Carolyn watches him go with a sad little smile. Sebastian is violent, irrational, controlling, and childish, just like Jabe. Her look shows us how much she misses those things about him.

Aww, what a wonderful dangerously unstable man-child he is!

Carolyn can’t get the tune the little carousel plays out of her head. She goes back to the door and opens it. Now, it opens on The Playroom. The circle the ghosts have drawn around Hallie and David now encloses her as well. We can start to see how she might have known enough to leave the clues she left in 1995 for Barnabas and Julia.

The vampire story is new and has some promise, but the haunting has been going in a tight little circle for five weeks, with no progress in sight. The miniature carousel is all-too-apt a symbol of that. Even the opening voiceover seems to acknowledge that the show is in a rut. It breaks off in mid-sentence. We hear Kathryn Leigh Scott telling us that David and Hallie have discovered “a secret world- a world populated by the dead. And this night, they learn…” That’s it, the audio stops abruptly at that point. What do David and Hallie learn? What does it matter, whatever it is can’t possibly affect the story in any way.

Episode 1092: Visitors only stay for a week

Governess Maggie Evans has been bitten by a vampire other than Barnabas Collins. Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are stymied in their efforts to find out who this other vampire is. They decide not to take Maggie to the hospital, since they don’t want to answer any questions. Instead, Julia goes to some unspecified location in the village of Collinsport to get several units of blood to transfuse into Maggie. I’m sure a no-questions-asked blood bank would be a highly profitable enterprise in Collinsport.

I wonder if Julia had to go in the blood store to get that bag, or if they have a drive-through. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, Maggie’s charges, gloomy teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes, are sitting around in a space that intermittently materializes in a location usually occupied by a linen closet. It is stocked with fancy antique toys, frequented by ghosts, and called “The Playroom.” The ghosts don’t take visible form today, but Hallie and David notice that they keep playing with a dollhouse in The Playroom.

The dollhouse is a scale model of a mansion known as Rose Cottage that stood somewhere in the Collinsport area in 1840, when the ghosts were living beings, and is in some supernatural sense identical with that mansion. The ghosts are big fans of scale models. Some time ago they gave David a scale model of a ship that one of them sailed when he was alive. Today, David and Hallie see that the ghosts have added a tiny model of the same ship, reduced in size so that it is in the same proportion to the dolls in the dollhouse as the original model was to the residents of the great house of Colllinwood. Hallie says that if they go to David’s room, they will find that the model is gone from there, because it has been transformed into this minuscule thing.

The Java Queen II. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

At the end of the episode, Hallie and David hear one of the ghosts telling them to look into the dollhouse and learn their fate. They comply, and see themselves in place of the dolls. David and Hallie have spent all day sitting around doing nothing, and when they look into the future they see that they are still sitting around doing nothing. Evidently the greatest horror the writers can imagine is that the show will go on as it has been lately. I have to admit they have a point!

Ultimate fate. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 1085: What’s happened to my freedom?

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

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

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

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

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

Plan. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 1084: A living man no bigger than a doll

Julia Hoffman and her friend Barnabas Collins recently returned to 1970 after a cosmic journey that ended with two weeks in 1995. In that far-off future year, they found the great house of Collinwood in ruins and everyone who had lived there either dead, missing, or hopelessly insane. This was the result of a mysterious disaster that occurred before 1970 was out. Since they returned, they have been trying to find out what this disaster will be and to prevent it.

Julia’s friend Timothy Eliot Stokes tells her she and Barnabas have accomplished nothing since they came back to 1970. He says that the time has come to enlist the aid of a strangely dressed man named Sebastian Shaw. Sebastian has psychic powers, and may be able to use them to figure out what’s going on.

Sebastian comes to the great house. Julia tells him of her experience in the future. He has a vision which he says he cannot interpret. It is presented to us in an unfocused shot, so that we can believe Sebastian does not know what he is seeing. But we recognize it. It is The Playroom, a room that intermittently exists behind a door in a little-used part of the great house. Most of the time that door opens on a linen closet, but teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins have found that occasionally the same door admits them to a much larger space stocked with antique toys and ruled by the ghosts of several people who died in 1841. Julia knows The Playroom well; she and Barnabas visited it several times in 1995, and met the same ghosts there who are now taking control of David and Hallie. Julia and Barnabas also went to The Playroom in 1995 with two living people, Carolyn Fredericks (née Carolyn Collins Stoddard) and the Sheriff of Collinsport. But in 1970, only the linen closet has so far been visible to anyone other than Hallie, David, or the ghosts.

After Sebastian has his vision, Stokes and Julia decide to bring David and Hallie to him. Stokes goes upstairs to fetch them, and Julia goes to get some tea. When she returns to the drawing room, Julia finds Sebastian at the piano. He is playing the melody that often sounds in The Playroom, and that Julia heard echoing through the house in 1995. She asks him where he heard it. When he says he was just making it up as he went along, she flatly declares that he is lying. He must have heard it in his vision, because it is the very tune that is associated with the phenomenon they are investigating. He will not admit to this, and she will not soften her tone. On the contrary, she says that she had suspected that he was a fraud, but that she now believes he is something far worse- a man with genuine psychic gifts who uses them dishonestly. We learned yesterday that this is precisely what Sebastian is, but Julia can hardly expect him to agree with her. He says that he is being insulted, and leaves the house before Hallie and David can get downstairs.

Julia has been given to counterproductively harsh behavior of this sort since returning to 1970. Perhaps this is the consequence of a trauma she suffered in 1995, when a blatantly evil ghost known as Gerard Stiles took possession of her. Or perhaps it is the influence of someone she encountered on the first leg of her journey, when she was in an alternate universe. There, she met her own Doppelgänger. She greeted this other Julia Hoffman by beating her to death, stealing her clothes, and assuming her identity. A deed like that might leave a mark on its doer. Besides, that other Hoffman was herself inclined to be tactless, so perhaps Julia picked that habit up in the course of her imposture.

Unknown to Julia and Stokes, David and Hallie are busy in The Playroom today. Yesterday they learned that the ghosts plan to reduce them to the status of the dolls that are in a dollhouse there. In particular, the ghost of a teenage boy named Tad wants to take possession of David, and that of a teenage girl named Carrie wants to take possession of Hallie. Tad and Carrie will then live their lives while David and Hallie are in storage as inanimate things in a miniature case. Hallie and David took the dolls to the fireplace in the drawing room and burned them there, hoping this would break the power of the ghosts. Once they had seen the flames consume the dolls, they returned to The Playroom, hoping to find that it had vanished and the linen closet had resumed its place. To their dismay, they found that The Playroom was still there and the dolls had reappeared in their places in the dollhouse.

While David and Hallie are processing this fact, they see lights come on inside the dollhouse. The dollhouse has no electricity, so this puzzles them. David looks inside the dollhouse and sees a man in it. He is the size of the dolls, but is moving around as if he is alive. By the time Hallie comes around to look, the tiny man has vanished. She believes that David saw him, though.

David then tells Hallie that they ought to write up everything that has happened to them since they first encountered The Playroom. When Hallie asks what good that would do, David says it is the only way people will know what happened to them after they are gone.

They go to David’s room and write the whole story in a notebook. When Stokes comes to get them, they hide the notebook. They return to the room after Sebastian’s abrupt departure, and find that the notebook is gone.

Hallie and David decide that one of the ghosts must have taken the notebook. They go to The Playroom to look for it. They open the door, and see Carrie and Tad reading the notebook.

David and Hallie see Carrie and Tad. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David’s vision of a little man moving around inside the dollhouse now reminds me of the moment in part 6 of the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks when a tiny version of the supernatural figure known as “Mike” appears to the near-catatonic Special Agent Dale Cooper and urges him to “Wake up! Wake up! Don’t die! Don’t die!” “Mike” is a resident of The Red Room, a space that is as mysterious in its nature and as intermittent in its presence as is The Playroom. We can assume that the tiny man David sees is Gerard, whose plans for him are just the opposite of “Mike’s” wish that Cooper should regain his true identity and once more function as an action hero.

At the time, the idea of living figures small enough to make their homes in a dollhouse and of people from the outside world shrunken and enclosed with them might have reminded viewers of the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “Miniature,” featuring the young Robert Duvall as a lonely man who encounters such a situation. “Mike” himself is a reference to 1960s cult television; he is a mysterious one-armed man who sometimes goes by the name Philip Gerard, evoking the two antagonists Dr Richard Kimble faced on The Fugitive. So it is not unlikely that “Miniature” was a common source for that installment of Twin Peaks and this installment of Dark Shadows. It isn’t even impossible that David Lynch or Mark Frost saw this episode of Dark Shadows and were on some level influenced by it as they wrote the script for Twin Peaks, though of course that would be a far less probable source than The Twilight Zone, which has long been one of the most heavily rerun of all TV shows.

At any rate, I think the similarity is intriguing even beyond the question of influences and sources. A soundstage looks a lot like a dollhouse, and when a drama isn’t connecting with the audience the actors may as well be dolls the director is playing a private game with. So the premise of characters ending up in a dollhouse plays to a fear that must prey on the minds of the writers.

Moreover, all three of these shows share a theme of stunted sexual development. Robert Duvall’s character in “Miniature” is a solitary man who cannot achieve any form of intimacy with another person. The stupefied Agent Cooper lives with a woman who has mistaken him for her husband and enjoys sex with her, but that is strictly a matter of mechanics. He has no idea what is going on during their encounters.

For their part, David and Hallie seem to be developing on the usual timetable. Certainly the dialogue between them when they were first introduced acknowledged that they were old enough to be interested in each other sexually, though David made it very clear to Hallie that she was not the partner he would choose. But Tad and Carrie seem to be quite alarmingly immature. Tad first possessed David in #1081, on Monday. That day, Hallie found David in The Playroom. Speaking as Tad, David took her to be Carrie. Tad was shocked by Hallie’s 1970 clothing and advised her to take it off immediately. It doesn’t seem to occur to Tad that there is anything untoward about demanding Carrie disrobe in front of him. Tad also said that he would be sad when he was too old to play with the toys in The Playroom. But he is very obviously much too old to be enthusiastic about a rocking horse, a dollhouse, a miniature carousel, and a bunch of stuffed animals. So his and Carrie’s attachment to those things shows that even when they were alive they were relics of a dead past. They never grew up, and their ghosts are determined to freeze Hallie and David in place, immobilized and on display in a small, unchanging world.

Danny Horn’s post under the title Episode 1084 on his great Dark Shadows Every Day doesn’t have all that much to do with the episode, but it is a magnificent production in its own right. Its subtitle is “100 Things That I Would Like David and Hallie to See When They Open the Playroom Door, in No Particular Order.” The 100 things he lists range from chuckleworthy to hilarious. Best of all, it ends with a video the post inspired Cody Schell to put together with alternate endings for the episode.

Episode 1082: I haven’t been wrong very often when it comes to judgment of people

Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman have returned to 1970 from a cosmic journey that took them first to a parallel universe, then to the future year 1995. In the parallel universe, they met a comatose woman named Roxanne Drew. Barnabas was immediately smitten with Roxanne, and was still attracted to her even after she gained the ability to open her eyes and move around. By the time she was able to speak, he was in love. Roxanne couldn’t come along when they left her universe, and he’s been down in the dumps about that. Barnabas could always go to the hospital and look for another comatose woman, but I suppose that might not be quite the same, somehow.

Now, Barnabas has met Roxanne’s counterpart in his own universe. She is attached to astrologer Sebastian Shaw, whom Barnabas had been pestering for reasons having to do with the efforts he and Julia have been making to prevent a mysterious disaster they learned about during their stay in 1995. Sebastian was so fed up with Barnabas that he walked out of his own living room, leaving Barnabas alone there. Then the door opened, and a Roxanne Drew entered, carrying a brown paper grocery bag. Barnabas greeted her by name, to her puzzlement.

When Barnabas explains that he knew another Roxanne Drew who looked exactly like her “in another time,” Roxanne assumes he means many years ago. He allows her to proceed under this assumption, which does seem less likely to prompt a call to the police than introducing yourself to a stranger with a story about how you’ve been traveling between parallel universes and back and forth in time. Roxanne comes out with a theory that two people with the same name born on the same day in different parts of the USA might become “astral twins” and look just alike. This idea may not be less plausible than what Julia and Barnabas have actually done, but it does seem considerably less likely to be useful in making up interesting stories. So it comes as a great relief when Roxanne stops talking about it.

Barnabas asks Roxanne to meet him for dinner at 10 PM. This is an odd invitation, since Barnabas is a vampire. Where is he going to take her, the blood bank? She hesitates, but at length agrees to meet him “there.” They haven’t named a place.

Later, Roxanne calls the great house of Collinwood. Julia answers. Roxanne identifies herself, and Julia reacts with amazement. Roxanne says she must be thinking of “that other Roxanne Drew.” She says that she won’t be able to meet Barnabas for dinner “there” after all.

Barnabas enters. He is excited to tell Julia about Roxanne. She tells him she already knows about her, and gives him Roxanne’s message. Julia reminds him that some people in the parallel universe were radically different from their counterparts in this universe, giving herself and her counterpart as an example. Barnabas refuses to admit that this Roxanne Drew is not the same person as the one whose immobility and silence so charmed him in the other continuity. Julia keeps warning him, and he declares that “I haven’t been wrong very often when it comes to judgment of people.” This remark will astound regular viewers. Barnabas is a worse judge of character than any figure in all human history. I myself can’t claim to be all that perspicacious, but neither I nor anyone else I know has ever misjudged a person so desperately we were turned into vampires as a result. That has happened to Barnabas twice. Julia is so stunned by Barnabas’ bizarre remark that all she can do is humor him and say that she agrees with his assessment of himself.

Barnabas goes back to Sebastian’s apartment and speaks to Roxanne. She says he must not have received her message. He says he did, but asks to come in anyway. She allows it, and he gets strangely aggressive with his insistence that they will eventually go out together. He’s usually a lot more pleasant with people, unless he’s been feeding on their blood or threatening to kill them. He wants to charm Roxanne, so we may wonder why he gets in her face, adopts a sullen tone, and vows that she will someday date him. The other Roxanne had an obnoxious ex-boyfriend named Claude North. In his sulky and petulant refusal to take no for an answer, or even for an indication that he has to change tactics, Barnabas sounds a lot like Claude.

Meanwhile, Julia has been trying to find out which house in the area was known as “Rose Cottage” in 1840. During their sojourn in 1995, she and Barnabas received some cryptic clues about the disaster that will befall the great house of Collinwood and everyone in it later in 1970, one of which was the phrase “the night Rose Cottage was destroyed.” Also during that trip they saw the ghosts of some people who lived in 1840, and since returning have found a document from that year that mentions a house called Rose Cottage, but does not say which house it was.

Teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins had died in the version of 1995 Barnabas and Julia visited. They saw ghosts who looked just like them, but were in fact those of figures from 1840 named Carrie and Tad. Julia suspects that David and Hallie are withholding information from her about paranormal occurrences in the house, as she and Barnabas are withholding information from them. Rather than leveling with Hallie and David about what they learned in 1995 and asking them to reciprocate, Julia has decided to be as inexplicably harsh and aggressive with Hallie as Barnabas is with Roxanne.

Hallie finds Julia going through some old tax records today. When Julia says that she is trying to figure out what house in the area used to be known as “Rose Cottage,” Hallie mentions that Julia had previously asked her if she’d ever heard of such a place. Julia takes that remark as an opportunity to fix Hallie with an unwavering stare and drill her with question after question. During this bizarre interrogation, the ghost of Tad and Carrie’s governess Daphne Harridge appears to Hallie, reminding her not to answer. Julia loses interest in Hallie and turns back to the tax records. Hallie excuses herself and follows Daphne out of the room.

David has a dream in which he finds Hallie in an unfamiliar corridor. He asks her where they are. She says they are in Rose Cottage. She tells him to follow her to a birthday party. He is unhappy that he has not brought a present; she laughs a little at this. They go into a small room and see two dummies sitting opposite each other at a table. Hallie says that they will sit in the other two places at the table. There are placecards identifying them as Carrie and Tad. They sit down, and Daphne’s gigantic face appears at the window. Daphne has been silent in all her appearances so far. She breaks her silence in this dream, laughing maniacally at the sight of David and Hallie sitting with the dummies.

Happy Dappy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David wakes up. He goes to a little-used part of the house. He finds Hallie in front of a door behind which there is usually a linen closet. Sometimes, however, the space transforms into a larger room stocked with antique toys. Hallie and David refer to that room as “The Playroom.” They have seen Daphne there several times and have sensed the presence of another, more blatantly hostile spirit, one which Julia and Barnabas came to know in 1995 as Gerard Stiles. Hallie asks David why he has joined her. He tells her about his dream. It turns out she had the same dream. They resign themselves to entering The Playroom. Inside, they see a dollhouse that has previously been set up with its facade towards them is now set on a lower table with its interior on display. There is a room that looks just like the one in their dream, complete with dolls sitting at the table.

Barnabas and Julia visited The Playroom several times in the future, and the dollhouse was there then. It always seemed likely that the dollhouse was a model of Rose Cottage. Now, it is confirmed that it is not merely a model of it, but is in some sense identical with it. Perhaps it is a ghostly survival of a house that no longer exists, or perhaps it is a mystical reflection of a haunted house that stands somewhere else in the area. One way or another, it seems that Hallie and David are fated to lose their independent existence and become inert playthings confined to an inaccessible space.

David, Hallie, Daphne, and Gerard are part of a recycled story. In late 1968 and early 1969, Dark Shadows adapted Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw with David and his friend Amy in the roles of the children Miles and Flora and the ghosts of Quentin Collins and Beth Chavez as the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. The whole point of the novella is that it is an open question whether the ghosts are real and the new governess is heroically trying to save the children from them or the ghosts are figments of the imagination of the governess, a crazy woman who is a mortal threat to her charges. Benjamin Britten’s opera preserves that ambiguity to some extent, but screen adaptations tend to come down firmly in favor of the ghosts being real. The first “Haunting of Collinwood” left no room for doubt on that score, and the current Re-Haunting of Collinwood is just as emphatic.

The ghosts of Quentin and Beth were silent when we first saw them in 1968, as Daphne’s ghost has been silent until she laughs maniacally today. They made their first appearance in #646, but neither of them made a sound until Quentin laughed maniacally in #689. Gerard has yet to make himself heard, though actor James Storm read the opening voiceover narration in #1066.

Episode 1080: It’s going to be uneventful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 1076: The addition of the letter O

Grouchy New England teen David Collins and his live-in girlfriend Hallie Stokes go to a playroom for small children that intermittently manifests itself in a space otherwise occupied by a linen closet in the west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Hallie is possessed by the spirit of a girl named Carrie, who died in 1841. David hasn’t caught on that Hallie isn’t herself, and in his exasperation he asks her to “stop acting like the world’s number-one weirdo.” Carrie is puzzled by the word “weirdo.” She recognizes it as a derivative of “weird,” but claims that “the addition of the letter O makes it completely incomprehensible.” Evidently Carrie wasn’t all that quick on the uptake. If someone called me a “peculiar-Z,” I might not know why the letter Z was added, but it would be perfectly clear to me what they were saying. Historians of American English often say that the 1830s and 1840s were the single busiest period for the invention of new slang terms the USA has ever seen, so that if Carrie were as stumped by the “O” on “weirdo” as she claims to be, she would likely have been unable to conduct a conversation with many of her contemporaries.

David’s realistic 1970 dialogue and Carrie’s antiquated verbiage bounce off each other to produce some intentional comedy; my wife, Mrs Acilius, thought the scene was really funny. It is certainly more appealing than the rest of the episode, which is yet another series of events that take place only because the characters cannot bring themselves to tell each other what’s going on. Because the ghosts won’t let them, yes yes yes, we’ve been through all that many times before. The fansites seem bored enough by the whole thing that one of biggest points of discussion is whether it is reasonable to say that, because a bit of Grayson Hall’s slip is visible under her skirt at one point, we can say that we see her “underwear.” I guess the slip is “underwear” in the sense that she is wearing it under something else, and it probably wasn’t supposed to be visible, but you’d have to be a very specific kind of person to get excited about it.

Hall plays Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia is a psychiatrist, among other things. She tells Quentin Collins that the ghost of Daphne Harridge, a governess who like her charge Carrie died in 1841, fills the room with the scent of lilacs when she is near. Quentin is so obviously lying when he tells Julia that he has not smelled that scent that we are probably supposed to assume that Julia is onto him.